GM as God 4 . . . ish: More on the Land of Miracles
As I said in the last part of this leg of GM as God, settings are bullshit. There are no vampires and elves. Even in grounded settings, real human beings are interested in a whole bunch of ordinary things I doubt you have any interest in playing.
I don’t just mean the love and friendship themes groups often have trouble getting comfortable with (though to be clear, I’m not excluding them – these are huge). I’m talking about times when what you eat or the particulars of going to the bathroom temporarily consume you. I may sound picky here, but the combined effect boots you out of any pretence of simulation (which is why the identification of “simulation” in RPG theory never worked to begin with, and is still treated as a dust heap for things people have trouble with).
RPG settings can’t provide a simulation of what an authentic narrative would be like in a speculative world, but that doesn’t mean they can’t feel authentic. Suspension of disbelief enters the picture here, because despite everything I’ve said, the players need to be able to commit to sincere participation. It’s your job to work with your resources and the game’s, producing an end result your friends can jump into with gusto.
The two basic ways to do this are by either changing the setting (and sometimes the rules, where players believe they represent game “reality” – they don’t, but this semiotic shorthand is pervasive and often even useful) or by identifying implausible points, explaining why they exist and moving on. Aeternal Legends features the latter method in action, as we explained that the supernatural is hidden but pervasive just because that’s really cool.
(Let’s be clear, however, that players are expected to make a good faith commitment to getting into the game. You don’t have to constantly appease unreasonable players.)
Beyond suspension of disbelief, authenticity comes from setting up the rules as a point of tension against traditional narrative structures. We all know how traditional stories work because we’ve been educated to anticipate their structures. We expect writers to build stories with a certain rhythm and economy. Instead of looking at a rules set’s defiance of these as a flaw, we should see it as an opportunity – the opportunity that makes tabletop RPGs worth playing.
It’s not easy. It means that sometimes a failure is just a failure. It means that sometimes an NPC upstages the PCs. Looking at these events as RPG failure modes is a huge mistake, but an understandable one, because these are hard situations. They represent an encounter with the kind of anti-story situations that appear in real life. It’s the GM’s responsibility to help players make the most out of these difficult but powerful creative opportunities.
Emphasize that player characters are important because they get the most attention, not because of some in-world power play. There was an RPGNet thread recently where folks complained about Divis Mal being central to Aberrant. This is only true if the GM goes on an on about Divis Mal as if he’s being played at the table. It doesn’t matter if they don’t beat the bad guy or if anything procedurally interesting happens. The characters sitting and chatting is inherently more important than what some NPC is doing, no matter how impressive it is. Instead of using in-world events as a crutch to demonstrate to players that you like them and are interested in their characters, get genuinely interested. Use your omniscience to ask probing questions and help them apply the results to their portrayals.
It’s like being in love. You don’t make artificial demonstrations every day, but you’re interested. No word is wasted, even when the talk isn’t about poetry or storming the castle.
I strongly disagree. First of all, the reason many story structures work is because they feel right – authentic – to the audience.
Secondly, although structures can be both powerful and artificial, they are fundamentally just structures. The content of the story is where authenticity lies. The structure of the typical American sitcom is extremely artificial, even stylized, but people react as if it were authentic, “real”, because they are able to identify with the characters and the situation. The structure is a way of delivering the content.
In addition, I question the idea that RPGs spend a lot of time on structural questions. The only game I can think of that really has a strong structural component is With Great Power. Most RPGs have no structure to their narrative at all. Even the ridiculously oversimplified and tautological “opening -> problem -> twist -> climax -> resolution” structure is not even mentioned in many games.
Third, I question the justification for anti-story outcomes as being true to real life. As you say at the top of the article, it’s not real life. Real life isn’t like that.
All that said, I think you’re quite on the mark in that a lot of roleplayers (GMs and players included) are a bit too concerned that a particular anti-story outcome will ruin the tale. One reason people turn to RPGs instead of to TV or film is because they want to shake things up a bit. In this respect, a single instance of a NPC upstaging a PC or a blithering failure when the story structure would anticipate a success is really just more grist for the mill, a “plot twist” that is really nothing of the kind, but feels surprising and fresh.
I think your thought on attention ought be expanded a bit. One reason RPGers reach for story structure is that during the nothing’s-happening part of games, the GM is often not paying much attention, and is making that clear to the players. If they go the wrong way at the junction and walk away from the dragon and/or the dungeon, and you give them a lot of ‘nothing’s happening’ stuff, it doesn’t really encourage them to go back and go the way you want, it encourages them to pack up their stuff and end the game.
Story structures seem to work for us because we’re told this is how story structures work. Aristotle said so! They don’t work the same way in other cultures, and they’re transforming within our own. Even our analysis of stories is damaged by cultural mores. For a gaming example of this take a look at Robin Laws’ deconstruction of Hamlet, which shows that by certain criteria Hamlet doesn’t really follow it — and that’s the play folks have pointed to as Shakespeare touching the universal.
But despite this strong bias, they still don’t work to convey a sense of authenticity (not total authenticity, which is why there’s no going to the bathroom in character outside of Nordic LARP). Using rules and character decisions as a stressor/challenge to a structure a GM sets up (which will tend to hit story marks) is extraordinarily effective and is why RPGs are worth doing. Otherwise, just collaborate on a novel or play instead of doing a halfassed job with some gimmicks at a convention.