At the Intersection of Skilled Play, System Intricacy, Prep, and Story Now

[Ovinomancer]

It's also a game with a fixed start and fixed end which nonetheless produces nothing but 'story now' play driven by the premises introduced by the players into the situation.

If this is true, then we have to accept Fiasco as a Story Now game. I strongly contend it is not. For one, consensus conflict resolution doesn't support story now play. I have other points, but this one is sufficient on it's own.

 

[chaochou]

If this is true, then we have to accept Fiasco as a Story Now game.

I don't know who you mean by we. I don't have a problem with Fiasco as a story now game. My games of Fiasco have certainly addressed premise through character driven decisions made by the players. Why haven't yours?

Nor do I accept at face value, nor on the basis of experience, that consensus conflict resolution doesn't support story now play, especially in GM-less games.

Really, I don't see any of your post as sufficient to demonstrate anything. There's a lot of assertion.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I don't know who you mean by we. I don't have a problem with Fiasco as a story now game. My games of Fiasco have certainly addressed premise through character driven decisions made by the players. Why haven't yours?

Nor do I accept at face value, nor on the basis of experience, that consensus conflict resolution doesn't support story now play, especially in GM-less games.

Really, I don't see any of your post as sufficient to demonstrate anything. There's a lot of assertion.

Okay, let's unpack consensus resolution. In Story Now, one of the key tenets is that play cannot be about what's best for the story, but instead about advocating for the PCs and seeing how that works out. With system resolution methods, there's never any pressure on resolution to find an outcome that is best for the story -- the resolution method doesn't integrate anything like that in its process.

But, with consensus resolution, you have to find agreement on resolution with the other players. This introduces all kinds of additional pressures into resolution that push away from advocating for the PCs. I cannot insist on my advocating for my PC as hard as I can if I also have the responsibility to compromise with other players' advocating for their PC to ensure that the play continues. Doing this means that you must sacrifice advocation for PC at least some to advocation for the better story. Consensus conflict resolution directly competes with the idea of pushing for your PC has hard as you can.

So, I can pay Fiasco or Montsegur 1244 entirely to collaborate with the other players to tell the best story we can and in doing so I do not break any rule or principle or agenda of the game. If I do try to play with full throated advocating for my PC -- to drive hard and find out who this PC really is -- I will have to constantly compromise this to achieve consensus with other players when conflicts arise.

 

[chaochou]

Okay, let's unpack consensus resolution. In Story Now, one of the key tenets is that play cannot be about what's best for the story, but instead about advocating for the PCs and seeing how that works out.

I'm sorry, this isn't analysis grounded in actual play. I don't know why it matters to you to have these presciptive definitions for things.

Firstly, no - there's no such tenet. My group frequently plays Apocalypse World and one way I get the players to take insane risks and do ridiculous dramatic stuff is to remind them that the audience wants to see that stuff. Don't turtle, if you're gonna do it, do it. That can be totally viewed through the lens of 'creating the best story' - but it's still the character being played totally hardball.

I've seen - and done - the same in the Fiasco; played characters with an insane recklessness - not to advocate for them except in the sense that we're going to see something crash and burn.

And in Fiasco you don't get a say in how your scene turns out. So there is nothing to do but to play hard - irrespective of whether that is into your sense of character, or into your sense of drama, or both.

This is all Story Now play. In the moment, based on thematic concerns, unscripted, happening now.

I'm really only interested in actual play examples from here on in. I don't think the white room theorising is doing any work.

Tell me about the times you played Fiasco.

 

[Fenris-77]

This whole notion is also complicated by instances like My PC is alone in a room facing danger - at that point the PC and their actions are co-located with 'the story', at least temporarily, and advocating for the PC is at the same time (usually) making positive contributions to the overall story (because those two things are inextricably intertwined, or at least significantly mutually informative, not entirely separate as some people seem to think).

 

[GrahamWills]

I've never really felt that advocating only for your character is ever going to work out well except when you have a very homogenous group -- one for which advocating for your character will always also further the story and fit within the genre and themes established (and yes, I'm deliberately using 'the story' here).

I get the impression that the constraints that Ron Edwards puts on games to be Story Now are assuming a group of people who have already agreed on the genre and themes (what Edwards terms 'the story') and so saying "ignore them when you make decisions" is really saying "don't consciously think about them because you're already doing that".

The only way Story Now can work as stated is if you are running a game that has no genre, theme or anything shared up front. Since the premise is that the theme and genre get created purely by character advocacy, it's just not possible to say "let's play a 4-color superhero game using a Story Now approach" as the constraints on being 4-color must be maintained by considering the story, and a character who decides that what is best for their character is to torture clues out of innocents is going to break the genre.

So Story Now is either only useful for one very specific form of untamed, un-genred game, or it only works if "the story" is an assumption that although players are not supposed to consider, they actually do.

 

[chaochou]

Since the premise is that the theme and genre get created purely by character advocacy, it's just not possible to say "let's play a 4-color superhero game using a Story Now approach"...

But that isn't, and hasn't ever been, the premise of Story Now. It's an utterly bizarre and random proposition.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I've never really felt that advocating only for your character is ever going to work out well except when you have a very homogenous group -- one for which advocating for your character will always also further the story and fit within the genre and themes established (and yes, I'm deliberately using 'the story' here).

I get the impression that the constraints that Ron Edwards puts on games to be Story Now are assuming a group of people who have already agreed on the genre and themes (what Edwards terms 'the story') and so saying "ignore them when you make decisions" is really saying "don't consciously think about them because you're already doing that".

The only way Story Now can work as stated is if you are running a game that has no genre, theme or anything shared up front. Since the premise is that the theme and genre get created purely by character advocacy, it's just not possible to say "let's play a 4-color superhero game using a Story Now approach" as the constraints on being 4-color must be maintained by considering the story, and a character who decides that what is best for their character is to torture clues out of innocents is going to break the genre.

So Story Now is either only useful for one very specific form of untamed, un-genred game, or it only works if "the story" is an assumption that although players are not supposed to consider, they actually do.

This is terribly confused in a way I'm not following. Are you saying any theme is a de facto story? I don't remotely agree.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I'm sorry, this isn't analysis grounded in actual play. I don't know why it matters to you to have these presciptive definitions for things.

Firstly, no - there's no such tenet. My group frequently plays Apocalypse World and one way I get the players to take insane risks and do ridiculous dramatic stuff is to remind them that the audience wants to see that stuff. Don't turtle, if you're gonna do it, do it. That can be totally viewed through the lens of 'creating the best story' - but it's still the character being played totally hardball.

I've seen - and done - the same in the Fiasco; played characters with an insane recklessness - not to advocate for them except in the sense that we're going to see something crash and burn.

And in Fiasco you don't get a say in how your scene turns out. So there is nothing to do but to play hard - irrespective of whether that is into your sense of character, or into your sense of drama, or both.

This is all Story Now play. In the moment, based on thematic concerns, unscripted, happening now.

I'm really only interested in actual play examples from here on in. I don't think the white room theorising is doing any work.

Tell me about the times you played Fiasco.

I'll reply later as I don't have time, but a quick preview is that you're providing examples of play that are to create better story and not advocate for the characters. And the demand for actual play seems weird, because that's just seeing up dueling anecdotes. Examples should be to illuminate arguments, not be the arguments.

 

[Manbearcat]

Regarding this most recent disposition change of the thread, I’m going to offer up something for folks interested in this segment of the discussion.

I had a fun and interesting conversation with some pals last night after running Stonetop for them.

I posed a hypothetical of a game about the world ending via asteroid/comet strike. It’s not about forestalling the apocalypse but rather it’s about how you spend your last days. Do you write a letter and speedily drive it across country to hand deliver to someone you secretly love or someone you need to make peace with? Do you plot and assassinate the murderer of a loved one? Do you plan and throw a massive party? Do you convince your loved ones to join you in ritual suicide and do the deed? Etc.

The game is about engaging with that premise, resolving it, and revealing these characters via scenes that accrue Despair, Meaning, and Connection. You create your opening character, you create a goal, your assign stats. Those stats and that goal are foundational to the resolution of your final scene. As you move through scenes toward the final scene of your character, these stats change as immediate fallout and upon reflection (Dogs in the Vineyard-ish).

The background of the apocalypse is constraining framing to generate and animate these characters; to provoke play. The antagonist here is not the impending apocalypse.The antagonist is “what will stop you, particularly internally (eg your Despair score exerting more influence than your Meaning and/or Connections score), from doing what you set out to do in the time you have.”

1) Is this a Story Now game because it fits all the parameters and confined and focused play space for premise/distillation of emergent theme/character is not anathema?

2) Is this not a Story Now game because the encoded constraints on premise disallow you from choose your antagonist as “The Impending Apocalypse” and allowing play to flow from that antagonist/goal? Put another way, if you could choose your antagonist as The Impending Apocalypse > create a scientist PC whose goal is to forestall the apocalypse > your scenes and derivative stats and “final showdown” would be anchored to that goal, then the game only now becomes Story Now?