25 responses to “Workshop: Story, Story, Story”

1. There was a lot of great information packed into those three hours! It’s hard to pick just one or two things to focus on, but here’s a few of the concepts I found interesting:

   – playing RPGs produces fiction.

   – Any particular piece of fiction is mechanically underdetermined: in other words, you can’t tell what kind of mechanics produced it, or even whether anyone enjoyed any part of the play that produced it.

   – People may play an rpg because they enjoy creating a story, or for other reasons that have nothing to do with that (for example, they just enjoy playing a wizard and casting spells, and so on).

   – Sometimes aspects of story structure can help inspire a useful mechanical procedure, for example the chapter structure of 39 Dark (but can go badly off the rails like in Misspent Youth, imho).

   Here are some questions that come to mind for me:

   (1) Does the quality of the created fiction have any correlation to the fun people had while playing the game? For example, can you play a game and have the resulting fiction be of good quality (as in, more people than not would invest time and/or money to read that story) but the game play itself was horrible for everyone, or can you play a game and have a great time, but the fiction that results is poor quality? My tentative answers are yes to the first and no to the second (mainly because of the second point I listed above about underdetermination), but I’d like to hear more. [correction: Manu intended to say “no to the first, yes to the second” – RE]

   (2) There are many ways to conceptualize how to create a story, in writing novels for example: the Grand Argument, the 3 Act Structure, the 4 Act Structure, the Snowflake method, the 24 chapter method, the 27 chapter method, the 40 chapter method, the Hero’s Journey and derivatives like the Harmon story circle method, and on and on. Other than inspiring a chapter-type procedure like in 39 Dark, do these ideas have any useful relevance to RPGs, either in design, GM prep, or actual play?

   Here’s why I’m asking the second question. For quite a while, I thought what I was missing in my games was story structure – so I tried to design games, and to GM in such a way, that good story structure was guaranteed every session. The results were uniformly horrible.

   For example, I took a simple 4-part concept of story structure (you have a character with a problem, they try to solve it 3 times but they fail, then there’s a climax and denouement) and applied it to a game of World of Dungeons. In this game, I had the problem be a dragon threatening a village a la Seven Samurai, and the players would need to solve the problem by finding a special weapon capable of killing the dragon. So far nothing terrible or too dumb. The issue was, I tried to force the “they have to fail 3 times” on us.

   The players’ first attempt was to go to a nearby wise hermit, hoping he might have a weapon. Of course he did not, but he’d heard of a magical cave in the nearby mountain where they might find something useful. Now there’s nothing wrong with that result in itself, but I was bored to tears, because I knew that was basically the only possible outcome. The same thing happened at the cave – there was an encounter with a monster that didn’t want to let them in, but they made it past the creature, got some magical crystalline shards and hightailed it back to the village. They forged the magic crystals into some swords and then fought the dragon – which they needed to fail according to the story structure. Finally there was the climactic battle where they recovered and, having learned a special weakness, were finally able to overcome the dragon. For me that was the only exciting time the entire session, because otherwise I knew in advance everything that was going to happen. Not exactly, but close enough to make it dull.

   Anyway that’s just one example of an embarrassingly large number of similar ones, and it’s what motivated the question.

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   • I meant to say, no to the first and yes to the second! Sorry…

   • Whew! I was squinting at that phrase and wondering what to think. My take is similar to yours, but with basic caution about locking down the correspondence too hard. “Probably no to the first, probably yes to the second,” qualified by a bunch of footnotes that I’m sure you’ve already considered, like whether a bunch of people buying something makes it good, etc.

   • Regarding the structural question, here’s my basic view about all of those “things,” three-act, Harmon, whatever.

     The first level is descriptive, and in many cases, that’s useful. The original rising-action, climax diagram underlying most of them (Gustav Freytag) is perfectly reasonable descriptive work of the fictional elements of a story. It’s restricted specifically to fictional content and not toward the order or presentation for anyone who receives it. I think most of this kind of dialogue is best when thinking about existing stories, and less relevant regarding making new ones.

     The second level is tool-based, which is prescriptive toward making stories, but even worse than that, because it applies that diagram or anything like it to all variables. It misses the point that any such diagram has nothing to do with the experienced structure of a story. E.g., it doesn’t matter what order one receives the story’s parts in, because the reader or viewer is totally capable of putting them in their fictional order … but upon applying that diagram as a tool, it’s apparently easy to prescribe delivering the plot to the reader or viewer only in that in-fiction chronological order. Or, just because the three acts exist in a broad sense, it’s apparently easy to prescribe delivering them in three formal and literal acts in the sense of a three-act play.

     I have harsh views about that second level. It’s related to the toxic side of professionalism, in which aspiring writers are taught, not to enjoy making whatever in whatever way, but instead, how to get the job done even when they don’t really feel like it. With the important clarifier that “the job” is very much someone else’s priority, and often includes the contradiction that they don’t care a bit about what’s in the story while demanding that some audience out there will indeed care about it.

     It’s not useful toward actually making stories when you want to do it, and it is definitely not fun. It may pay the bills, as long as one can stand it. As I quip a lot, this is why screenwriters and high-profile novelists become bitter drunks. More generally, it utterly confounds the folk-art propensity to enjoy and make stories with the capacity to produce and please … and in the context of consumerism, to fake-please in ways I won’t take space in listing here.

     I hope this is useful, to show why I enjoy fiction-structural aspects of role-playing, but as features of our instrumentation, not as delivery systems for guaranteeing the thing we’re supposed to be doing ourselves. I think your comparison of 39 Dark and Misspent Youth is absolutely accurate, even iconic, for addressing the difference.

2. First of all I’d like to say that the concept of story not being the purpose is, for me, liberating. I loved the focus the workshop had on actionable vs already determined because this clarifies why the “let me walk you through my dungeon” method is wrong.
   I am very excited about being a part of this and I’m looking forward to other workshops 🥰

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   • The very word “story” is the stumbling point. We have to stop thinking about a reader or viewer who is experiencing a story, and to start thinking about a creator who does not as yet actually have a story; and then, even more difficult, to stop thinking about a creator who is oriented toward readers or viewers, but who instead is thoroughly oriented toward their own enjoyment.

     In the past, I’ve talked about being authors and audience at the same time, but that is not quite correct because it maintains the two labels and can be misinterpreted as people taking turns entertaining one another. That interpretation is a horrible misstep. I am talking about the moment when not having a story becomes having a story, and the creator responds to themselves having done this with a surge of excitement and/or satisfaction. They are at that time neither author nor audience in the usual sense of those terms. Doing this in the organized reincorporation of multiple “angles of input” is the medium of role-playing.

     The act of simply generating fiction at all, which meets the extremely minimal bar for fiction to be a story, is not a purpose. It’s not “nothing,” as it cannot happen unless we want to do it, and it indeed can be appreciated as an accomplishment – but it’s not hard and faces no intrinsic barriers. Please note that we have always, culturally, been told that it is hard, or even harder than hard, impossible without extraordinary degrees of insight, or trauma, or neurosis, or professional skill. This is a lie. For role-playing, we are constantly told that it is flatly impossible and that we should simply shift to the delivery mode in some skilled and hypocritical way. This is, as I see it, not only a lie, it is dehumanizing and despicable. For us, making fiction with the minimal bar of story content is a baseline activity and requires no more than the first couple of red bullet points in the workshop slide with Lady Satan.

     Now to the concept of purpose, or in idiomatic English, “playing on purpose.” This would mean: during play, to focus upon aspects of the played situation which are exciting to us, to place our enjoyment of stories into a responsive state regarding what we say in play, to permit our decisions to be genuinely aesthetically what we want to do … all of those are indeed purposeful, and in practice can be experienced as “why we play” in social and creative terms. Doing so is not required, as there is at least one other identifiable purpose of this type (which also rests on the same baseline). And doing so is not possible until we get into the red bullet points of the slide with the original Black Widow, and not discussable with anyone who has not reached them.

     The final slide tries to summarize these points, so review it and tell me what you think.

   • Just finished watching the workshop. It reminded me how, a little while ago, I was listening to my now-grown-up kids talking about things they remembered from when they were younger. The usual sort of family legend kind of stuff, you know.
     What struck me was that they also talked in exactly the same way about what had happened in the more memorable roleplaying sessions we’d shared, back when we did that together.
     Those game sessions (and all the other things) weren’t ‘telling a story’ at the time, but they definitely became stories when we talked about the things we’d done, looking back.

   • I’ve been striving for decades to communicate how such retro-recognition of a story may be authentic, rather than confected or cobbled-up from nowhere/zilch play. In the late 1990s, I was under the impression that saying so would be, well, obvious and immediately recognizable to other role-players … which was not the case at all.

     You may recall my use of “story now” as opposed to “before” and “after.” I was horrified when people responded to these distinctions as if they were alternate means of play, whereas I had presented the other two terms as examples of habituated failure, not methods.

   • [Ron] “I’ve been striving for decades to communicate how such retro-recognition of a story may be authentic … ”

     One of my favourite ‘storytelling’ experiences is to play a scenario or two of a tactical scale hex-and-counter wargame.

     ‘Generating a story’ is not even a consideration in the rules and procedures of such games. But if your experience is anything like mine, multiple stories (and, yes, even characters and personalities, somehow) will emerge between the players about the events of play, every single time.

     There’s a kind of purity to it. There’s not only no way to force a story into or onto a wargame, but I’d say there’s actually no need to – because there’s seemingly no way to stop it from happening.

3. “The curse of fiction” was a particularly insightful moment for me towards the end of the course! I was delighted to realize that, yes, here lies one of the strengths of our medium.

   I can remember many concrete instances of dice throwing us a curveball, whether an isolated freak roll, unlikely sequence or hilarious combination, all the way back for 35 years. And encountering them in a movie or novel, I’d have scoffed at many of them (‘implausible’, ‘way too neat’, ‘deliberately senseless’ etc.), but I was there, and saw that natural 100 for a once-in-a-campaign teleport attempt hit the table.

   We cannot control when unpredictability hits hard or multiple decisions interact in wondrous ways, but the beauty is, we know it will happen — just not when!

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   • Yes. I have two things to say!

     1. When processing coincidence, effects of an action, or related matters in film, theater, novel, et cetera, people are vastly more forgiving than one may realize – they remember the times they scoff but not the times they absorb it eagerly. I think there are criteria which determine the response, reject or absorb, but are not based on plausibility or “realism,” or if so, as a minor factor. However, I’m not interested in exposing those here, only that we do in fact have these criteria, as an active cognitive feature. They operate to assign plausibility or sense or “yes, that works” as a response.

     It’s also important to recognize this as assembly, on the reader’s or viewer’s part, not merely passive reception. I do not think reading, viewing, et cetera, is ever passive.

     2. In role-playing, the response is based on the same things, relying upon the same cognition, similarly to assemble but at the point of creation. The hard hit or the wondrous way, as you put it, is not merely given to us whole by dice or whatever, but are generated by us as we look upoon these devices in the context of what we already treat as content-constraint (plain language: “what is happening”).

     This is related to my perhaps too-often stated point about how a playwright, or whoever, experiences their own rush or satisfaction upon generating fictional moments – “that works,” “yes!!” “OK! nailed that,” et cetera. Or they do if they are not obsessing over audience or stressed-out about pay or hating the work in the first place.

4. I don’t think I landed the activities very well. I should have helped the participants better for the Phase 4 material, specifically to say, “Don’t initiate conflict,” because the point is to see what play is like when characters are, comparatively, free to run around and do stuff. I also think I should have seeded it with more content, so the GM is not in the position of making things up, but rather of playing things. If I’d done these things, I could have sat back and not kept “helping,” and the learning would be more effective.

   The 39 Dark material made its point, I think, although I hope you will consider playing it, or at least playing through the two scenes indicated by the starting point in the course materials. I didn’t help by bobbling the scene structure at the start: the person playing Lane Novack may choose a Personal scene or a Progress scene; the Governor player may choose a Personal scene or an Opposition scene (in which play “zooms out” to see how the establishment cracks down on the movement). The nine-scene sequence applies only to Progress, so play will include nine to seventeen scenes depending on these choices.

   We didn’t get to use the Shock materials, as time had really piled on by that point. I think I was able to state the point, but experiential work is better. If you want to review them and ask about anything, please do. Also, if anyone wants, we can schedule some time to conduct the activity more formally and add it here as a video. I’d need at least three of you for that.

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5. So I finally found the time the watch the full session peacefully.

   Two things I found particularly interesting.

   1. A minor one. I had to look up the word “diegetic”… (Definition – occurring within the context of the story and able to be heard by the characters.) I am always very sensitive to the musical score of a movie, and it never occurred to me that it was one of the very few non-diegetic components of a movie. Similarly, I have two daughters, and one of them makes this very hitch-pitch and slowly rising squeal in tension building scenes when we watch a horror movie, and it’s come to the point that I have a much less fun experience watching a movie without her, because it’s so creepy and it’s part of our experience of watching horror movies.

   2. More to the point of role-playing games. On the curse of fiction and stochasticity. I was reminded me of this campaign of the One Ring, in which a character is a very social hobbit, Otho, designed by the player (David) as placid and positive fellowship member, and not at all a combat expert. Over the course of several adventures, Otho, for a number of reasons, had taken on feats of combat and strength solo, and often succeeded purely on account of (very) good dice roll, such that the character (and player) got a bit of a reputation of being tougher than they looked. In a particularly difficult adventure, the main enemy started fleeing at the end of the battle, after being engaged with the most physical PCs for a while. Otho got to act last and take one last shot from afar: critical hit with piercing wound, followed by an extraordinarily poor save against piercing from the enemy, the arrow flies far and true into the head of the enemy and kills him on the spot before he flees. This was followed by screams of excitement at the table like we don’t often have. The event still echoes, 10 sessions later, in what the character has become.

   There is this concept in Aristotle’s Poetics which I really like – that in fiction “the probable impossible is preferable to the improbable possible”. (The latter often referred to as “red herring”.) The beauty of this night is that, because of the dice, the improbable possible got fictionally super exciting – then and now, amongst us. While one could argue that the story it produced, if put on paper, would be fun, but “oh, so unlikely for the hobbit”.

   For all of us, given the past sessions, it sort of was inevitable that the hobbit would be the one downing the enemy… But the odds were very low. And yet it happened. Almost as it should have.

   I’m not sure I’m describing this right, or making a clear point. But I feel it’s related to the “curse of fiction” that Ron described in the session, and that the dice may also play a role in making that curse irrelevant at the RPG table.

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   • I think you’re making clear points and providing excellent examples.

     I’d prefer not to know about the corresponding points in Aristotle and similar musings, or at least not at this time. That’s graduate student dot-connecting, and I don’t think it’s valuable here. Speaking as a practitioner of hard sciences firmly embedded in the liberal arts, I know what I’m talking about when I say that the present goal is not liberal arts mastery over the topic but rather competence at doing it.

     Toward that end, let’s consider one of the concepts from the middle of the workshop: content which is subject to change via play. Otho’s rules-based qualities + characterization are clearly dynamic and ongoing. Being revealed as a bad-ass (which in procedure is not “revealed” but generated) is in retrospect an unconceived phenomenon before it occurs. His qualities on his sheet and otherwise were working components of becoming better known via play, and nothing else.

     Here’s the striking thing at the heart of what this activity is: none of this would be the case unless everyone playing recognized and accepted that Otho is fundamentally unknown. If they or someone present did not accept this, then for the experiences you describe, Otho would be “played wrong,” or “the rules ruined the concept.” Or similarly, if someone had a plan for what Otho is supposed to become (or what that main enemy was supposed to do next), then “the story is ruined” and must be rejiggered and massaged into an acceptable state. In this broken state of mind, anything which happens because of played activity is a threat to the story.

     Let me know if that makes sense. If so, I have a second point, but I’d like to nail this one first.

   • I’m sorry, Ron. I have been trying. What you say is interesting and I think you have a very valid viewpoint and expertise in role-playing games. I just can’t continue dealing with the completely unnecessary life lessons and arguments of authority in every single post – cf. your second paragraph. I really don’t understand why it has to be this way.

   • Because I think you’re wanking and showing off. It isn’t about life-lessons; I’m sure you’re a grown-up and all the rest of it. This is about what I’m willing to put up with.

     In your case, it’s frustratingly binary. Denis the role-player is entirely my and anyone’s equal, and admirably curious and interested in what we are doing at our various tables. Denis the internet intellectual is a royal pain in the ass who doesn’t seem to realize that others have advanced degrees, complex perspectives, or life-experience equivalents … and most of us choose not to invoke those casually.

     Do what you want, but if you stay, leave that noise out of it.

6. The workshop reminded me of a recent conversation I had with my friend Ian. A few months ago, we and a few other people played a few sessions of CBR+PNK with Ian GMing. It’s a Forged in the Dark game about cyberpunk criminals doing one last heist, designed for one-shot sessions. In one session, we were hired to track down and capture an AI pop star who had escaped her owners. She was supposedly not really intelligent, just a glorified chatbot who could sing, but we were instructed to trap her in a black box that prevented all communication and warned to absolutely not try to talk to her at all. I decided my character was not OK with this and wanted to ask her some questions once we’d captured her, but the other characters really needed the money from this job and managed to persuade/threaten me into leaving her in the box. We delivered the box, got paid, and ended with the unsettling feeling that we’d just done something much worse than we realized.

   We all had a good time, but when I was chatting about the game with Ian a few days later, he mentioned that he was dissatisfied with his GMing performance because he’d failed to follow some important GMing instruction. CBR+PNK warns the GM not to overprepare and to play to find out what happens, but it also instructs the GM to put the players in a difficult spot by introducing a plot twist at an appropriately dramatic moment. The plot twist in our session was supposed to be that the AI we captured was actually a program to orchestrate the extermination of undesirable people that had become intelligent and decided she would rather sing than kill people. Since we managed to ambush the AI and capture her before she could say anything and then never let her out of the black box, there was never an obvious moment to reveal the twist; and Ian ended up letting it go rather than try to force it in. The existence of the potential twist still mattered, since we knew there was something sketchy about the job that we deliberately avoided finding out about. It probably would have been obvious bullshit if he had had an NPC show up to grab the box and open it or something. But since the GM section had told him to reveal the twist as a big dramatic moment, he was stressed that he’d messed up the game.

   So many games advise against railroading and playing to find out what happens in the abstract but then give the GM concrete advice that encourages taking responsibility for making a story happen. Giving up that responsibility is not only easier and less stressful but often gives better results.

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   • The topic has seen some development here, scattered through some Patreon discussions as well. I began calling it the “reverse mullet,” in reference to the promise of a great play-our-characters party in the front and all-GM-control business in the back, and March 2023 Q&A includes a detailed breakdown (about 7 minutes into Part 2).

     At this point, after having played some, and after years of saying “mm-hm, maybe this response is preference,” I’m now prepared to say that Blades in the Dark and its derivatives are high-promotion hot air, and not role-playing design. Their instructions may be dressed up with phrases cribbed from Vincent or me or others, but in application, they aren’t coherent instruction and fall firmly back into the 1990s Impossible Before Breakfast conformity that I describe in the video as the reverse mullet, expertly marketed with Hot New-Style gloss painted on them. I am not talking about play I don’t like. I’m saying it’s not play at all.

     Therefore Ian’s self described stress is completely understandable. He was told “be careful not to do X” and then “now! do X!” and as with anyone coming to the room in good faith, he tries to square the circle … or, rather, to his credit, in play he decided that he came here to play, and did that instead. There is absolutely something at fault here, and it’s called bad, dishonest instruction. The impact of such a thing is evident in the post-play stress which arises from still trying validate or reconcile it, when that’s impossible.

     Sorry to talk like I was there. I’ve seen this so many times that I am at least a bit confident that I’m not far wrong, or let me know if I am.

   • I think that’s right, both for CBR+PNK and the bit of Blades in the Dark I’ve played.

     Ian started running a D&D 5e game after our CBR+PNK conversation, and he said after a few sessions that GMing is a lot less stressful and more fun when you stop worrying about making the story happen. That’s been my experience with GMing as well. Looking back now, I can see many weirdly stressful or inexplicably failed games that were caused by trying to give up and hold onto control at the same time, sometimes because of reverse-mullet instruction and sometimes because I was importing that way of thinking into the game myself. I think this really clicked for me a few years ago when I was reading through Vampire 5e and Champions Now at the same time while getting ready to run a Vampire game, and I realized that Vampire’s entire Storytelling chapter makes no sense when somebody’s Hunger dice could make them rip off the Prince’s head and hopelessly derail your whole planned chronicle structure in the first session. But I decided to try ignoring everything Vampire says to do and do what Champions says instead, and it turned out great.

7. I had considered that launching *straight* into a conflict or encounter would guarantee situational play. Thinking about all the times a game fizzled out after the initial conflict or two really underlines that beginning with a planned/staged event (however open-ended it may be) doesn’t make for an actionable situation. Sometimes it does make sense to start with an exciting event but that alone doesn’t create a situation.

   Years ago (mid-00s) when I was trying to find other ways of running games (I hated coming up with plots). I discovered the not-quite-accurate use of “Kickers and Bangs” on RPG-dot-net. It felt like the answer for “waiting for players to find the plot”. Just keep throwing in those “encounters and choices” that push play along and “fail forward” to keep the plot train moving and never forget the “genre” either (rolls eyes). It does make one feel like a great GM for not “Railroading”. It’s very easy to grandstand and perform for the table, especially if the players are used to groping around for The Plot. However, directing play with imposed events is exhausting.

   The games I played where the situation was there were way less *work* and more *fun*. I wasn’t spending too much energy preparing what play would be or trying to be the master entertainer within a session. It is far far easier and more fun to just play within the situation and let conflicts happen when they do.

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   • Hey JC, that all makes a lot of sense to me and I’m glad you’re coming to similar conclusions as me.

     I wanted to cross-link to this old post that I wrote, where you can track down where I reached a similar conclusion (although the actual clarity around the issue came later)
     https://adeptplay.com/2021/01/17/troubles-solar-town/

     Fundamentally I was going into the Solar session with the idea “these are the characters’ Keys, I have to create situations for them to hit them” with sort of the inbuilt expectation that “play is about keys and we make scenes happen where they are explored”. And I thought, since Keys have two inbuilt outcomes, that that wasn’t railroading, but just pushing towards “the interesting part of play”.

     There is something of this idea when people talk about “aggressive scene framing” as well, it’s sort of in-your-face “this is the scene where Alice and Bob fight”, and focuses all of the attention on the potential outcome, but without the prior situation-building, that outcome is essentially meaningless, as it’s just *plot* and lacks this inherent link to the a chain of organic decisions and contributions.

     I’ve realized that outcome is only important as a subset of the situation, because why do we care about Alice and Bob fighting? Why did we get to the point where they have to fight? Was there no other way? What are their reasons for getting to that point? What other people are involved?

     But one can just start as “Alice and Bob are in the abandoned library in the evening, in moonlight darkness.” and see where it goes from there, and _just play_ and interact and converse. And it’s not the lack of outcomes or resolution or conflict that would make it pointless, but the us not making it important by not listening & reincorporate. If we listen & reincorporate, anything could be important. Maybe the fact that I described the moonlight shining through the window will remind Alice of her dead sister, pushing her to revenge. Maybe the picture of Bob’s old grandfather will remind him diplomacy is better than the sword.

     We won’t know until we play it, and it is valid play, potentially more important than the “what are we rolling and how does it go” part. Skipping it or subverting it to set up a conflict is missing the point of it, in my opinion.

   • As an addendum, I’ve experienced doing all of this (with people that want to do it with you) is a lot easier: you stop worrying about making things happen in a certain way, and just go with the flow.

   • (To J.C.) Thanks for checking out the workshop and I greatly appreciate your thoughts here.

     As a personal data point, I recall in media res being mentioned a lot by fellow role-players in the mid-late 1990s, especially people who were into Theatrix, Hogshead publications, and related things. I know why: so much of our table-experience had been composed of laborious set-up to “get to” the tight cycle of clue-fight-clue-fight, sometimes for multiple sessions, filled with canned prompts and ever-so colorful NPCs. Everyone I played with and I were tired of the universal scenario/module instructions, e.g., long psychological breakdowns for the guy we meet who’s supposed to offer us the deal and organize the logistics for us to get to the place; complex justifications for blocking attempts at further information or deviance from saying anything besides, “yes, where do I go now” in character. It was refreshing to open with a good solid fight in action, knowing that we’ll learn who’s who and why we’re there in due time. I mention it in Sorcerer & Sword as a direct extension of these conversations and from doing it in play.

     Fortunately, somehow I never quite elevated in media res to a position of “solution” or “this is how to make play work.” Maybe it was my long and many-group experience with Champions as GM and player, as cold-open action and day-in-life naturalism are both familiar story beginnings in comics. The difficult step for me was realizing that the play-experience isn’t the same as readers’-experience, but I managed it over some years’ effort.

     You’ve raised the right issue. It is so hard to get across that Kickers, Bangs, potentially action-filled opening moments of play, and anything else don’t translate into intuitive continuity and this deluded notion that one isn’t railroading when in fact one is railroading faster and harder than ever. Arguably it’s been the hardest thing to communicate for the past eight years.

8. (To Claudio)
   Excellent summary and post. The building of context through us engaging with the situation does take a bit of discipline for me. I still have to calm down the nerves of “oh the pace is slowing, are people bored” but I’ve been working at that and have gotten pretty good at keeping that voice quiet or recognizing when I’m falling back to those habits now.

   That issue with Keys is something I’m very familiar with. I played and ran a bunch of Lady Blackbird with a variety of different people. It played like the dream of the 90’s “auteur storyteller” found its way into design. It was a bit of a shock when I realized that replicable stories were just the Old Railroad Conductor in a new disguise. Keys lend themselves well to laying out “known outcomes or directions” for play.

   (To Ron)
   I actually avoided bringing up “in media res” because it was such a big fixation of the hobby for a while. I had no idea when that began to become popular in play or publications. I think I encountered it in either a John Wick or Robin D Laws book on Gamemastering (I think).

   I have sadly experienced the “in media res” railroad, so much that when I decide to do it. I feel like I’m expected to direct the experience more than I should…and I totally lose connection to any situation or inspiration after the initial rush. Though that is more my associations rather than a feature of in media res. I also think that running weekly games at a GoPlay PDX was good in some ways but also detrimental in others to playing situationally.

   I (sadly) haven’t run or played “Sorcerer and Sword” in any real capacity (I’ve GM’d a game of Sorcerer in a fantasy-ish setting but not digging into S&S proper) and I feel I should make it a priority, because of that approach to starting hot and the idea of situations that don’t take place in chronological order too (still wild to me as an idea), would be cool to try out and get some solid experience with.

   (ALSO – playing Situationally which is key to Circle of Hands actually kept me a bit distant from it as a text, I couldn’t quite picture why you wouldn’t start with like a creepy monster eating someone and a fight. Now I get why.)

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   • I might have caused trouble by using the term. To me, “in media res” and cold open are the same thing, in terms of starting (in this case) play in the midst of action. I’m leaving it open in terms of how much backstory or situational context was prepared beforehand, and even treating “a lot” as the default. Whereas you’ve kind of exploded into a lot of different ideas and play-practices.

     Maybe I’m over-reading what you wrote, but I think you’re referring to in media res as starting with little or no prepared content, in addition to the action-y cold open, so that the GM then practices (so-called) intuitive continuity, basically making it up just in front of the played activity and bending it as desired. I completely agree with you that this is raw railroading, full stop, but it isn’t really what I was driving at.

     I’m good with your initial point that simply starting with action (all other variables aside) isn’t more situational than otherwise, but merely a feature which may be well-suited to a given situation and how to play it. That’s what matters so I’m best off saying “yes” and my quibbling or over-clarifying can probably stop here.