Workshop: Story, Story, Story

Thanks to all the participants! It was a three-hour beast of content and I appreciate everyone’s willingness to dive in.

This post is our space to follow up and discuss the workshop, primarily among you.

The recording will soon be available to all participants as well as the slides and handouts (edited: it is now available – RE) I’m sure, however, that you’re reasonably fired up from the session and ready to bring up any number of things to develop. Sharing relevant experiences is a great way to start.

Please be careful to start topics with a new comment, using the big box at the bottom of the post, and to stay within a topic by replying directly to the lead comment, not the new comment box. If this is confusing for you, ask me for help via Discord.

For others, the workshop recording, materials, and the slides may be purchased here. (patrons, you have received a Patreon post with a discount code). Then you’re welcome to join the discussion. For people who haven’t seen it, I ask that you read here if you’d like, but please don’t comment.

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

  1. There was a lot of great information packed into those three hours! Itโ€™s hard to pick just one or two things to focus on, but hereโ€™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 canโ€™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 Iโ€™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 Heroโ€™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?

    Hereโ€™s why Iโ€™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 thereโ€™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 โ€œthey have to fail 3 timesโ€ 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 heโ€™d heard of a magical cave in the nearby mountain where they might find something useful. Now thereโ€™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 didnโ€™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 thatโ€™s just one example of an embarrassingly large number of similar ones, and itโ€™s what motivated the question.

    • 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, hereโ€™s my basic view about all of those โ€œthings,โ€ three-act, Harmon, whatever.

      The first level is descriptive, and in many cases, thatโ€™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. Itโ€™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 doesnโ€™t matter what order one receives the storyโ€™s parts in, because the reader or viewer is totally capable of putting them in their fictional order โ€ฆ but upon applying that diagram as a tool, itโ€™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, itโ€™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. Itโ€™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 donโ€™t really feel like it. With the important clarifier that โ€œthe jobโ€ is very much someone elseโ€™s priority, and often includes the contradiction that they donโ€™t care a bit about whatโ€™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 โ€ฆ and in the context of consumerism, to fake-please in ways I wonโ€™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 weโ€™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 ๐Ÿฅฐ

    • 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, Iโ€™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 โ€œangles of inputโ€ 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. Itโ€™s not โ€œnothing,โ€ as it cannot happen unless we want to do it, and it indeed can be appreciated as an accomplishment โ€“ but itโ€™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, โ€œplaying on purpose.โ€ 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 โ€œwhy we playโ€ 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.

  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!

    • 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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