Narrativism and Direction
Playing Timothy Kleinert’s The Mountain Witch recently has made me think about Narrativist-supporting designs, including my own. I enjoyed playing tMW a lot, but there were several intertwined issues that initially created barriers to really getting into it, all relating to player power and direction.
First, the limits around what a player can introduce into the game, compared to what a GM can introduce, were kind of blurry. It took quite a while to get a feel for what was appropriate…and maybe we only really grokked it in the last chapter.
This was compounded by matters of secrecy. As a player, part of my job was to interweave my Dark Fate with the other characters. This is challenging in tMW because (1) I don’t know very much about the other characters for certain, (2) I myself am trying to maintain an air of secrecy—both because I don’t want to tip my hand, and to give myself wiggle room—and (3) I certainly don’t know what the other characters’ Dark Fates are, which may put a spanner in anything I concoct. All this uncertainty, mixed with a general desire not to step on another player’s creative toes, created near paralysis early on, in terms of inventing real connections between the Ronin.
The final hang-up was conflict resolution: mostly its open-endedness but also the difficulty of interpreting mixed results. The open-endedness was the biggest problem, for players and GM alike, I think. We all had in our minds the notion of “Story Now”: that we should be aiming, in the end, to create something cool. But that kind of notion isn’t sufficient advice for making individual decisions. As a stated goal, it’s a big step up from “we play to have fun,” but still too vague. We were often left floundering for a good conflict narration—though issues of player power complicated this as well.
I should reemphasize that none of these problems were deal-breakers, and all became less serious as we played more and felt out the situation. And while I would love to see a later version of the Mountain Witch address some of them, they’re also not in any way unique to that game. On the contrary, the reason I’ve spent some time thinking about these issues is that I now see them more clearly in some of my own designs. Thus, they’ve become things I want to address, or avoid, in future work. To lay it out clearly, here are the thing’s I’m now aiming for:
- Give more advice in conflict resolution. A blank narrative check won’t in any way guarantee interesting resolutions to conflict. Something more concrete has to be there for players to build off of.
- Address issues of secrecy, mostly by avoiding them in the first place. That is, players don’t keep secrets, even when characters do. I realize that this is not a universally desirable design element, but it’s one I want to play with, and make work.
- Reduce the creative barriers that prevent a player from working with a character who isn’t exclusively his. In other words, do away with sole creative ownership, and maybe do away with singular one-character-one-player relationships in general. Ars Magicka’s troupe style play is a step in the right direction.
- Have clear guidelines on who has the ultimate authority on introducing different elements into the fiction, when, and how. At the same time, mix this authority up between players so there is a constant interaction of ideas, which are forced to intermix. Merely encouraging “out of character discussion” isn’t always enough to get truly collaborative input.
I intend to play with these goals in the near future, at least in one major design. I agree with Ron Edwards when he says design journals are often harmful to the work, so I won’t discuss my current big project yet—not until things have settled down more—but I may discuss some of the elements in more detail later, or offer up some game fragments as musings.