Mythic storytelling

[RangerWickett]

Thanks for the comments so far.

Turjan pointed out that D&D is not structured to work like other forms of storytelling. You don't just have your monomyth; you have a bunch of characters jockeying for attention, occasionally running off and doing things completely unrelated to the 'main story.'

And that's fine. 'Mythic' does not mean 'epic.' When I think of a mythic game, I think of a game where the setting makes you believe that magic is real, that things work a certain way because they're the best explanation you can come up with for the mysteries of life. You don't know why witches work in groups of three; they just do.

Any other commments?

 

[Insight]

A fundamental problem with the Monomyth and RPGs is that the Monomyth is very much based on one hero's journey, whereas your typical RPG game features 4-6 heroes. The Monomyth is a poor choice when designing a story depending on how closely you want to follow the structure. That's not to say you absolutely can't use the Monomyth with your game, but you need to do two things:

1) Allow for multiple characters/heroes and

2) Allow for deviance from the plot

The Monomyth drives a plot to the point that your players might think you are railroading them. In fact, the Monomyth is very railroady (is that a word?), and probably (as written) does not make for a good gaming experience. While the Monomyth is great as a foundation for writing stories, I think most of us realize that writing stories and the process for creating good gaming experiences are not one and the same. Stories do not need to allow for changes in the plot, while a good game most certainly need to provide for variance.

 

[RangerWickett]

Is there a 'polymyth,' then? A story that describes the classic ascension of a group of characters from an ununified band of callow youths to a fiercely loyal and powerfully skilled party of heroes?

There are tons of examples. Why hasn't that lazy bum Campbell written "Four Heroes with Four Thousand Faces" as a sequel? Doesn't he know he needs to do a trilogy?

 

[fusangite]

If you can wade through Lehrich's incredibly dense terminology, I think you guys might find this http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=13560.0 Forge thread applicable to this discussion.

 

[MonsterMash]

Some might not approve of it as real art, but of the three media I like to entertain in -- the other two being prose fiction and comics -- I believe the third, roleplaying games, are the most experimental and interesting, because of their interactivity. The drawback is that you can't really make tons of money telling stories through roleplaying, because at best you'll have maybe ten players, and trust me, your friends aren't going to pay to listen to you tell them stories.

But roleplaying is wonderful because it lets you shape the story much more organically than if you crafted a novel whole cloth. It has randomness, a life of its own. One day I would love to write a scholarly book on the artform of roleplaying. Like poetry, there are many, many forms, and the structure and subject matter of roleplaying games has, to my knowledge, never really been discussed academically.

One big difference to me between roleplaying and fiction or comics is that IMO stories arise out of the roleplaying sessions rather than stories being told in the sessions - don't want to get back into that after those long threads that came up before though. And as always YMMV.

Today, though, my interest is in myths. I'm writing a 70-page rulebook on new magic rules that hopefully will lend themselves more to the style of magic seen in myths and folk tales, and less to that seen in, well, D&D. But I don't want to just have rough mechanical elements; I want to at least dip into a discussion of what myth means, how you can use myths in your game, and how inspirations from real world myths can be fit together in a lovely post-modernist narrative.

I've done research, and I've got a list of two dozen really common elements of myth. What I'm curious about is how to present that to gamers so that if they want to play a game grounded heavily in Incan myths, they know how much they have to learn about Incan myths for the game to really feel Incan.

With the new magic rules are they part of EoMR or compatible or based on yet another approach?

To really feel part of a culture it would require more than just knowing the myths, it would also be a case of understanding the daily life of that culture and its history as well.

 

[RangerWickett]

The magic rules basically use EOM as a baseline for pricing magical spells, but use a skills and feats system designed for D20 Modern. I intend to then reconvert it to D&D afterward.