AbdulAlhazred said:
Now, what agendas do hypothetical players of these 'characters' have? Well, at the point where those things happen, that's fairly obvious. What was Pippin's motivation when he hooked up with Frodo on his way to Took Land? We don't know, maybe just to find out how a foolish young man would mature in the face of danger.
In the first sentence you say it's it's fairly obvious what the agenda is, and in the third you contradict yourself and say you don't know.
There's no contradiction. [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] says that the agenda is fairly obvious
at the point where those things happen, and the thing he mentioned in relation to Pippin was choosing between fealty to Denethor and love of Faramir. What he says we don't know is Pippin's dramatic need at the start of the story. That choice happens very close to its end.
It's not uncommon, especially in multi-character fiction, for one protagonists dramatic need to emerge only later on in the story.
And the point I'm making is that none of that requires Story Now. All of it can and is easily done with my playstyle.
<snip>
The third sentence is correct, because you don't know and it isn't at all obvious. However, since that event (and all the other character growth and challenges) are part and parcel to my style of play, I don't need to invent hypothetical agendas to have it fit my playstyle.
And here is the real contradiction: because your playstyle
can't easily "do it all". You can't have character growth without character dramatic needs, because it's in the nature of such growth to relate in some fashion to those needs.
And frankly I doubt very much that your actual play delivers dramatic arcs even remotely comparable to JRRT. I'm happy to read your actual play reports that contradict my doubt, but to date you've not pointed me to them. I'll point to
three of my own actual play reports to illustrate what I regard as examples of story that have occurred
during actual play as a direct result of the GM framing scenes that (to borrow some terminology from
Eero Tuovinen) provoke choices because they are thematically salient moments. There are links in those reports that will take you to others if you're interested.
AbdulAlhazred]<snip summary of Pippin and Merrry's moments of truth in LotR>
This is not random stuff!
None of it has any obvious Story Now goals that are plastered on the character, except for the quest to destroy the ring and becoming king. You have to rationalize that such goals were written down and then apply them, when there is no evidence of such goals existing.
I take it that you're not a literary critic in your day job!
As AbdulAlhzared said, it's obvious to any reader of LotR that JRRT didn't just write down some random stuff. AbdulAlhzared's point, in referring to the two hobbits as "the least developed characters, besides Legolas", is that
even these least developed characters have significant dramatic arcs established for them by the author. (He is right to say that Legolas really doesn't. Nor does Butterburr.)
If you can't appreciate fairly obvious dramatic arcs in a fairly straightforward fantasy story, that does help explain why you're not interested in "story now" RPGing. Suffice it to say that most people don't regard it as "rationalising" to notice that Pippin and Merry have character-defining moments in the third volume of LotR. And the point of "story now" RPGing - as
Eero Tuovinen tells us in the context of the "standard narrativistic model" - is to allow the player of a character to "let the other players know in certain terms what the character thinks and wants", which will be facilitated by the GM framing scenes that are "interesting situation(s) in relation to the premise of the setting or the character." These will include "complications" (eg the man to whom you swore fealty, because his sone died saving you from orcs is now threatening to burn alive his other son, whom you love) and thereby "provoke thematic moments (defined in narrativistic theory as moments of in-character action that carry weight as commentary on the game’s premise)" (eg you choose love over fealty, and so disobey a direct order from your commander).
To quote Ron Edwards, who writes the following under the heading
"ouija-board roleplaying":
How do Ouija boards work? People sit around a board with letters and numbers on it, all touching a legged planchette that can slide around on the board. They pretend that spectral forces are moving the planchette around to spell messages. What's happening is that, at any given moment, someone is guiding the planchette, and the point is to make sure that the planchette always appears to everyone else to be moving under its own power.
Taking this idea to role-playing, the deluded notion is that Simulationist play will yield Story Now play without any specific attention on anyone's part to do so. The primary issue is to maintain the facade that "No one guides the planchette!" The participants must be devoted to the notion that stories don't need authors; they emerge from some ineffable confluence of Exploration per se. . . .
My call is, you get what you play for. Can you address Premise this way? Sure, on the monkeys-might-fly-out-my-butt principle. But the key to un-premeditated artistry of this sort (cutup fiction, splatter painting, cinema verite) is to know what to throw out, and role-playing does not include that option, at least not very easily. Participants in Ouija-board play do so through selective remembering. I have observed many such role-players to refer to hours of unequivocally bored and contentious play as "awesome!" given a week or two for mental editing.
You assert that you can achieve significant dramatic arcs by way of GM-driven RPGing that nevertheless relentlessly prioritises exploration of the setting by treating "the gameworld" as something "neutral" that constrains action resolution and creates its own demands (eg the table can't just go to where the action is). For the reasons that Edwards gives, I don't think this can be done. You yourself said that to achieve the Moria sequence in play you would have to edit out all the stuff that isn't relevant to the story. Now you are saying that you can't even
recognise the obvious story trajectory of the two non-ringbearing hobbits in LotR.
As I already asked in this post, where are the actual play reports?
