I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Recently, at the SXSW conference, Will Wright, creator of SimCity, the Sims, Fable (NOT FABLE! I loose my nerd liscence!), and a host of other fairly innovative games, talked about the tension between story and game. I thought it echoed very clearly the tightrope balance act between a story's railroad chain gang and a game's open-ended flatness done in most D&D games, and can probably reveal a few new ways to play the same old game.
The bulk of it is here, but I'll tease out some cool points for discussion below. I'll hide 'em behind a spoiler block so that you don't have to look at a HUGE first post if you just want to spout off your .02.
[sblock]
Very true. There's a lot of tight control in storytelling (especially cinematic storytelling). That's part of what makes it artistic, a vehicle to convey a certain meaning or vision. A story can only have that sort of artistic merit if it *is* controlled. The less control you have, the more varied the tone will be, and the less effective it will be at communicating your vision. Think of what happens when you, as a DM, design your world -- you're telling the players a story of their history and their past and their setting, and you have total control over that, your vision is delivered to them. Similarly, when a player designs a character, they're telling you what their history and past and such is. The "game" seems to take place when these creations, these little mini works of art, collide.
Likewise, in D&D: if you take control away from a player, they become railroaded. If you took control away from the DM, the world would become quite narrow, and would lack a true sense of independent existence.
The Resurrection Problem in a nutshell. It's quite flat if you get up and try again until you win, but it's also robbing the players of part of their freedom to play a game when you can't.
This seems *really* key to me. The game more directly acts on the players. You can feel pride over your accomplishments in a game; in a story, you can't feel pride. You can feel excitement over someone else's accomplishments, but you don't *own* the emotion. You can feel guilt in a game, in choosing to commit an action that makes you feel bad. You can't feel guilty in a movie -- it's someone else doing the action, and you're just watching it.
The Delightful Unexpected! You can't start a narrative without knowing where it's going to end (or at least knowing who the BBEG is), but you can't play a game with a pre-determined outcome and still feel like you've really got the freedom that a game allows.
This is a cool idea. "Gamelike movies" that challenge the audience to solve their puzzles blur the line. I'd assume "movielike games" that largely direct the player while allowing for a few key choices at important junctures (like many 1-player CRPGs) hit it on the other side. And the idea of skipping over the hard parts goes against the reward/punishment scheme of games, but embraces what D&D designers referred to as the nuclear waste zones of the rules that people avoid. People avoid using grapple rules because they're complicated -- we skip them. In D&D, we make up house rules.
...he goes to talk about Gated stories (do what you want, find the key, move on to the next part) and Branching stories (do what you want, it'll lead to the next part, but all this stuff I made is useless on the side). I find that I'm DMing a lot in the Gated story style, with minor points that Branch. My PC's do whatever they want in their playground, but talking to NPC X will get them closer to the nefarious plot. Branching seems to be what a lot of DM's do, a sort of "sandbox" approach where the PC's are plunked down in a setting, pick a path, and run with it. The problem with my approach is that it can lead to railroading. The problem with the other approach is that it can lead to a lot of wasted effort on nefarious plots that never get picked up on.
...and then he mentions this:
...which I'm not sure I totally wrap my head around yet. He says that it's like players building their stories from the building blocks of their world. Which would mean, as a DM, that you would only construct the world as the players requested it of you. You wouldn't create anything until the players hinted that they wanted it. You wouldn't make a setting for adventure, you'd have a party, say an elf warrior, a dwarf wizard, and a human rogue, and that party would inform your setting: it has elves, dwarves, and humans; warriors, wizards, and rogues.
Substitute "the masses" with "the PC's" here. The DM's participate in this too, creating their own bits and pieces and having PC's adhere to them.
Unintentional = The PC's latch onto a particular throwaway NPC, for instance. Or grow to love a particular item through sheer luck.
Subversive = The Ultimate Build, finding rules holes and exploits and running with them.
Expressive = how the PC's elaborate on their own characters. "This set of numbers has a world, a life, a personality beyond what he's doing here for this adventure."
Again, that idea to allow the PC's to construct the world they play in (of course, twisted through the DM/Computer's own imagination). Though this part is more relevant for Computer Games, and has been being done for years in D&D, the idea is that we see what the players want their character's story to be, and we play to that. The elf warrior says he's an outcast from a super-religious society, so he wants a glorious story of his struggle to prove himself right. The dwarf wizard is researching a great machine for destroying the goblins, so he wants a tale of discovery, of knowledge, and of secret (and dangerous) lore. The human rogue is just out for #1 and only wants to be the richest girl in the land, so she wants a story of derring-do, of fabulous wealth, and of getting in over her head (only to narrowly escape!)
The DM's job, then, becomes to weave these tales together into a setting and a story, rather than trying to fit these stories into his own prefab universe (or ignoring the stories altogether and making the party go his way or not providing enough hooks for these stories-to-be-told).
Again, he seems to be slightly preaching to the D&D-choir: we've been creating content since the 70s, and the better tools (rules) we have, the better our content. What hasn't been happening as much is the PC's creating the rules for the game, and the DM (or game system) simply being there as a way to weave it all together.
This pretty much states what I think a really really good game of D&D would achieve in the PC party: the entire world is there for your enjoyment. To project your characters onto.
It could also be what a rules system is like for an ideal TRPG: it's there for you to project your scenes onto.
There ya go. The Ideal D&D Game. An amplifier for imagination.
[/sblock]
To do a quick summary: Will Wright is kind of advocating what D&D does for groups (allows the players to project their imagination into the world and then to play around with it responding to what they want rather than confining them to a set pattern) to be done in computer games.
What I've learned: Is it possible to have a DM so good at doing this that he only responds to what the PC party asks of him? In other words, the DM doesn't create a world and allow the players to play in it: the players give the DM instructions on how to create the world, the DM runs them through his own ringer, and out pops the entirety of a D&D campaign.
The bulk of it is here, but I'll tease out some cool points for discussion below. I'll hide 'em behind a spoiler block so that you don't have to look at a HUGE first post if you just want to spout off your .02.
[sblock]
Will Wright said:
Very true. There's a lot of tight control in storytelling (especially cinematic storytelling). That's part of what makes it artistic, a vehicle to convey a certain meaning or vision. A story can only have that sort of artistic merit if it *is* controlled. The less control you have, the more varied the tone will be, and the less effective it will be at communicating your vision. Think of what happens when you, as a DM, design your world -- you're telling the players a story of their history and their past and their setting, and you have total control over that, your vision is delivered to them. Similarly, when a player designs a character, they're telling you what their history and past and such is. The "game" seems to take place when these creations, these little mini works of art, collide.
Likewise, in D&D: if you take control away from a player, they become railroaded. If you took control away from the DM, the world would become quite narrow, and would lack a true sense of independent existence.
The Resurrection Problem in a nutshell. It's quite flat if you get up and try again until you win, but it's also robbing the players of part of their freedom to play a game when you can't.
This seems *really* key to me. The game more directly acts on the players. You can feel pride over your accomplishments in a game; in a story, you can't feel pride. You can feel excitement over someone else's accomplishments, but you don't *own* the emotion. You can feel guilt in a game, in choosing to commit an action that makes you feel bad. You can't feel guilty in a movie -- it's someone else doing the action, and you're just watching it.
The Delightful Unexpected! You can't start a narrative without knowing where it's going to end (or at least knowing who the BBEG is), but you can't play a game with a pre-determined outcome and still feel like you've really got the freedom that a game allows.
This is a cool idea. "Gamelike movies" that challenge the audience to solve their puzzles blur the line. I'd assume "movielike games" that largely direct the player while allowing for a few key choices at important junctures (like many 1-player CRPGs) hit it on the other side. And the idea of skipping over the hard parts goes against the reward/punishment scheme of games, but embraces what D&D designers referred to as the nuclear waste zones of the rules that people avoid. People avoid using grapple rules because they're complicated -- we skip them. In D&D, we make up house rules.
...he goes to talk about Gated stories (do what you want, find the key, move on to the next part) and Branching stories (do what you want, it'll lead to the next part, but all this stuff I made is useless on the side). I find that I'm DMing a lot in the Gated story style, with minor points that Branch. My PC's do whatever they want in their playground, but talking to NPC X will get them closer to the nefarious plot. Branching seems to be what a lot of DM's do, a sort of "sandbox" approach where the PC's are plunked down in a setting, pick a path, and run with it. The problem with my approach is that it can lead to railroading. The problem with the other approach is that it can lead to a lot of wasted effort on nefarious plots that never get picked up on.
...and then he mentions this:
...which I'm not sure I totally wrap my head around yet. He says that it's like players building their stories from the building blocks of their world. Which would mean, as a DM, that you would only construct the world as the players requested it of you. You wouldn't create anything until the players hinted that they wanted it. You wouldn't make a setting for adventure, you'd have a party, say an elf warrior, a dwarf wizard, and a human rogue, and that party would inform your setting: it has elves, dwarves, and humans; warriors, wizards, and rogues.
Substitute "the masses" with "the PC's" here. The DM's participate in this too, creating their own bits and pieces and having PC's adhere to them.
Unintentional = The PC's latch onto a particular throwaway NPC, for instance. Or grow to love a particular item through sheer luck.
Subversive = The Ultimate Build, finding rules holes and exploits and running with them.
Expressive = how the PC's elaborate on their own characters. "This set of numbers has a world, a life, a personality beyond what he's doing here for this adventure."
Again, that idea to allow the PC's to construct the world they play in (of course, twisted through the DM/Computer's own imagination). Though this part is more relevant for Computer Games, and has been being done for years in D&D, the idea is that we see what the players want their character's story to be, and we play to that. The elf warrior says he's an outcast from a super-religious society, so he wants a glorious story of his struggle to prove himself right. The dwarf wizard is researching a great machine for destroying the goblins, so he wants a tale of discovery, of knowledge, and of secret (and dangerous) lore. The human rogue is just out for #1 and only wants to be the richest girl in the land, so she wants a story of derring-do, of fabulous wealth, and of getting in over her head (only to narrowly escape!)
The DM's job, then, becomes to weave these tales together into a setting and a story, rather than trying to fit these stories into his own prefab universe (or ignoring the stories altogether and making the party go his way or not providing enough hooks for these stories-to-be-told).
Again, he seems to be slightly preaching to the D&D-choir: we've been creating content since the 70s, and the better tools (rules) we have, the better our content. What hasn't been happening as much is the PC's creating the rules for the game, and the DM (or game system) simply being there as a way to weave it all together.
This pretty much states what I think a really really good game of D&D would achieve in the PC party: the entire world is there for your enjoyment. To project your characters onto.
It could also be what a rules system is like for an ideal TRPG: it's there for you to project your scenes onto.
There ya go. The Ideal D&D Game. An amplifier for imagination.
[/sblock]
To do a quick summary: Will Wright is kind of advocating what D&D does for groups (allows the players to project their imagination into the world and then to play around with it responding to what they want rather than confining them to a set pattern) to be done in computer games.
What I've learned: Is it possible to have a DM so good at doing this that he only responds to what the PC party asks of him? In other words, the DM doesn't create a world and allow the players to play in it: the players give the DM instructions on how to create the world, the DM runs them through his own ringer, and out pops the entirety of a D&D campaign.
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