The point of the campaign is exploring the issues surrounding terrorism - both moral and ethical.
<snip>
The actual terrorist act is mostly irrelavent in this style of play. Determining the plan of action, carrying it out, that sort of thing, is pretty much incidental. You cannot explore the theme of terrorism without a terrorist act occurring, much like you cannot have a murder mystery without someone stopping breathing at some point in the narrative.
So, issues like the police searching for the PC's, being shot while trying to escape custody, that sort of thing, aren't really moving towards the point of the game.
Very good stuff.
That sounds an awful lot like 1) you really are exploring the PC's morality if you're looking into what drives the character
Without more information, it's hard to tell - so at a minimum, not necessarily.
For example, in The Human Factor Graham Greene explores the morality of the protagonist, but that is not the point of the story - it's not primarily a character study. The exploration of the morality of the protagonist is a means to an authorial end, of generating a certain sort of reflection on political commitment and political hope.
Another example might be American Psycho - I've not read the book, only seen the movie, but while the work is primarily in the form of a character study, that isn't what it's about - or, rather, by engaging in a study of
this particular character, more general thematic concerns are brought into play.
I assume that this is the sort of thing that Hussar is envisaging in his terrorism game.
More generally - exploration is not at odds with thematic play - and some sort of exploration of the shared imaginative space is central to RPGing - but the question is whether exploration is an end in itself.
In the paladin example, if you're playing in an events based campaign where believability is the primary concern, then the demon should just eat the paladin. That's probably the most likely outcome.
I just wanted to point out here (and I'm not disagreeing with anything you've said, just making a more general point about this style of RPGing) that I still, as GM, came up with a rationale for the demon to walk away - namely, that it had become bored toying with a paladin who didn't fight back.
This is why I think that language like "preserving ingame believability" or "the players just being able to chang things to suit their PCs on a whim" are not very helpful. The gameworld - which, to work, has to be believable according to whatever constraints the participants share - is the medium through which play is taking place. It's about what the GM (and players) have principal regard to in establishing and responding to the ingame situation.
Two concluding thoughts on this point.
First, most people are pretty forgiving of unlikelihoods and contrivances occurring in other fictions - what are the odds that Gandalf breaks free of Saruman just in time to save Frodo at the river crossing? not to mention LotR being, among other things, one big retcon of The Hobbit - and I don't see why it
has to be any different for an RPG.
Second, most RPG worlds are utterly absurd when considered from the point of view of history or sociology. But people forgive them because either (i) they're ignorant of history and sociology, or (ii) they've become accustomed to certain genre conventions. Both sorts of accommodation strategies can also be pursued in preserving verisimilitude in a theme-focused game.
What theme do you think was being explored by the dwarf player. Sure, he's bringing his backstory into the game (with your help) in an interesting way. But, what theme is in play here?
Revenge (mostly of the nerdish variety!). And the related theme of how a lowly person, having now acquired power and status, should respond to those who used to be on top. There are even echoes of the X-Men "protecting a world that hates and fears them" - another related theme - especially once the dwarf PC has his newfound underlings with him in the subsequent fight.
In his
discussion of narrativist play, Ron Edwards says:
Story Now requires that at least one engaging issue or problematic feature of human existence be addressed in the process of role-playing. "Address" means:
*Establishing the issue's Explorative expressions in the game-world, "fixing" them into imaginary place.
*Developing the issue as a source of continued conflict, perhaps changing any number of things about it, such as which side is being taken by a given character, or providing more depth to why the antagonistic side of the issue exists at all.
*Resolving the issue through the decisions of the players of the protagonists, as well as various features and constraints of the circumstances. . .
How is this done, actually, in play? It relies on the concept of something called Premise and its relationship to an emergent theme.
I already snuck Premise past you: it's that "problematic issue" I mentioned. . .
A protagonist is not "some guy," but rather "the guy who thinks THIS, and does something accordingly when he encounters adversity." Stories are not created by running some kind of linear-cause program, but rather are brutally judgmental statements upon the THIS, as an idea or a way of being. That judgment is enacted or exemplified in the resolution of the conflict, and a conviction that is proved to us [by the author], constitutes theme. Even if we (the audience) disagree with it, we at least must have been moved to do so at an emotional level.
Narrativist role-playing is defined by the people involved placing their direct creative attention toward Premise and toward birthing its child, theme. It sounds simple, and in many ways it is. The real variable is the emotional connection that everyone at the table makes when a player-character does something. If that emotional connection is identifiable as a Premise, and if that connection is nurtured and developed through the real-people interactions, then Narrativist play is under way. . .
The key to Narrativist Premises is that they are moral or ethical questions that engage the players' interest. The "answer" to this Premise (Theme) is produced via play and the decisions of the participants, not by pre-planning. . .
That bit about moral and ethical content is merely one of those personalized clincher-phrasings that some people find helpful. It helps to distinguish a Premise from "my guy fought a dragon, so that's a conflict, so that's a Premise" thinking. However, if these terms bug you, then say, "problematic human issue" instead. . .
Premise must pose a question to the real people, creator and audience alike. The fictional character's belief in something like "Freedom is worth any price" is already an implicit question: "Is it really? Even when [insert Situation]?" Otherwise it will fail to engage anyone. . .
Given that theme arises during Narrativist play, what does it look like . . . ? This breaks down into three independent issues . . .
1. The potential for personal risk and disclosure among the real people involved. . . [Some] games are, for lack of a better word, "lighter" or perhaps more whimsical - they do raise issues and may include extreme content, but play-decisions tend to be less self-revealing. . .
2. The depth and profundity of the resulting themes. . .
3. The humorous content. . . Is the humor acting to bring participants' emotions closer to the Premise, or to distance them?
Edwards also cites Robin Laws in Over the Edge:
Instead, [the GM] should be seeking ways to challenge PCs, to use plot development to highlight aspects of their character, in hopes of being challenged in return. . . For years, role-players have been simulating fictional narratives the way wargamers recreate historical military engagements. They've been making spontaneous, democratized art for their own consumption, even if they haven't seen it in those terms. Making the artistry conscious is a liberating act, making it easier to emulate the classic tales that inspire us.
And he contrasts this sort of play with pastiche, by which he means simply exploring someone else's story:
What happens when you want a story but don't want to play with Story Now? Then the story becomes a feature of Exploration with the process of play being devoted to how to make it happen as expected. The participation of more than one person in the process is usually a matter of providing improvisational additions to be filtered through the primary story-person's judgment, or of providing extensive Color to the story. Under these circumstances, the typical result is pastiche: a story which recapitulates an already-existing story's theme, with many explicit references to that story.
I think that pastiche is the output of a lot of module play, and especially adventure path play. The basic outcome is known in advance ("Five heroes stopped Kyuss" or "Three heroes just managed to escape - or, perhaps, drew their last breath - in the jungle shrine of Tamoachan") with colour and (thematically) minor improvisations happening along the way. (The improvisations may be tactically very important - the fact that classic D&D tactics involve engaging the fiction directly in a way that 4e tactics don't is, in my view, one reason why those who are mostly used to simulationist or simulationist-heavy gamist play in D&D find it hard to find the roleplaying in 4e.)
I think Edwards is right to be wary about the phrase "moral or ethical", because this underdescribes the range of evaluative questions, or questions that have evaluative implications, that can be addressed. I think even "problematic human issue" is a bit narrow - nearly any question of human motivation or behaviour can be made the thematic subject of a fiction, given that for a human to act is for a human to implicitly express a valuation of the goal at which s/he aims. I think Edwards' points (1), (2) and (3) are better at signalling the open-ended scope of thematic play - if it can be engaged or expressed via fiction, then (in principle) it can be engaged or expressed via RPGing.
So to go back to my dwarf example: the question is, How should one act having once been law and now being high? Should one indulge former tormentors, or get back at them? (And if the latter, how hard?) What sort of responsibility does one now have for them? And is it relevant that, if such responsibilities existed, they shirked them in relation to you? The player, in the way he had his PC act, expressed some views on this. To which I, having set up the situation, then had to respond - like Laws says, set up scenes that challenge the PCs (and their players) and be challenged in return!
The issue of depth and humour also comes in here. For example, I could make things harder for the player of the dwarf by letting him find out that he and his family would have been killed back in Dwarfhome but for one of his tormentors stopping a particular goblin attack - ie by raising a doubt that the tormentors really did shirk their responsibilities. This would increase the depth - because responsibilities and loyalty are now being conceived not purely in terms of interpersonal relations, but other social consequences of one's actions. It would shift the tone from Hogan's Heroes, past The Great Escape, and somewhere closer to (although not at) Full Metal Jacket. It would also probably kill the humour. For this player, in this campaign, with this particular issue, I don't think that I'll do that. (Where I'm gradually building up to something a bit more serious for this player is with the relationship, in my campaign, between the minotarus and the dwarves - the dwarves were servants of the minotaurs, and much of the culture of which they're justly proud was learned from the minotaurs. Bits and pieces of this have come out, but I'm still working out how excalty I'll bring it to fruition - maybe some sort of conflict where authenticity to self or allies requires repudiating minotaur-dom, which is also to repudiate dwarfdom.)
So anyway, there's the premise(s). And there was an emotional engagement by the players at the table - not a very deep or self-revealing one, of course, given the fictional content.
Sorry for the too-long reply, but I really think that there is sometimes too much of a notion of narrativist or thematic play having to be highbrow or profound. This is no more true of RPGs than other fiction. In the cop show with romantic undertones genre, for example, I think Castle cleans the floor with Bones from the perspective of plotting, scripting
and a lively engagement with its thematic material. And Almodovar's films show that extremely deep material can be dealt with in a superficially light-hearted way involving absurd situations. Not that my game is in Almodovar's league - very occasionally it might produce fiction as good as Castle! (I think RPGs, as tolerable fiction, benefit hugely from the author=audience factor.)
