Just A Dude Playing Another Dude Playing Some Other Dude
[ roleplaying games ][ rpgs | stories | techniques ]
[ March 5th, 2009 ]
[ by: Alvan ]
So, second season of Moving Wallpaper has started and with it, thoughts of play-within-a-play type of storytelling. There are a wonderful lot of takes on this, varying from Shakespeare to Tropic Thunder, from Simpsons to Slumdog Millionaire. It increases the complexity of the story somewhat, but with that complexity comes the freedom of exploring things from a different view.
If I had to make a guess, I’d say the most typical story-within-a-story in role-playing games is the exposition story. While they’re not really independent stories, they still fit the profile enough to be mentioned. The more common type is when the Game Master tells the players a story of what has happened before, through the tales of a non-player character. This is, for example, used to frame the quest the characters will set on. Sort of a mission briefing, one might say. The mirrored version of this is the player-character-back-story-revealed, where the player tells the dark history of his character to the rest of the characters (and thus the players). This is most common in games where the players keep their character histories secret from the rest of the group (because of some creative GM agenda, usually). Usually it is done at a moment of dramatic revelation, even Now, usually both of these are quite short “stories”, more valued by the amount of information it reveals than any artistic merits.
Another quite common thing that gets done in RPGs is things like book-within-a-game or play-withing-a-game. Sadly, these are again more likely to be just brief references to what happens “The story on the stage is a doomed love story.” Period. That’s it. “The book tells the tragic history of the castle’s owner’s cat and how it died by eating a poisoned mouse.” Period. Maybe if someone asks a question about it, there is some more details revealed, like “The cat was brown” or “There is some singing in the play”, but more likely than not, it’s just a few or two to provide a backdrop, not really a story. Sometimes they get interwoven with the story if the GM can be evocative enough, GM bouncing the stage action with combat action, for example. But these are very rare situations.
And frankly, it’s usually just great that they’re not explored in more depth than the very surface. While every GM dreams of a game that is a story told by his great imagination and every player wishes their character could be on the center stage all the time, the time it takes to monologue out a proper story is pretty long. And in a game that’s supposed to be interactive fiction, there just isn’t room for that sort of stuff. Also, neither is fully a story-within-a-story, by the standards usually presented.
xkcd's take on this
While playing a game where players are playing people who are playing a role-playing game might be quite interesting (for example, having players play player stereotypes playing a game could provide an interesting commentary on your gaming culture, or at least your view of how you see typical gaming), it might be surprisingly hard not letting the game slide into a friendly parody as you’re bound to be comment on what you’re doing while playing a guy doing the same thing. And parody tends to distract. But things like playing a game where the players are playing characters who are, for example actors, trying to get a play working, could work a bit better, as the play-withing-the-game comments on things that happen on the game (actor) level.
But, coming a full circle back to the Moving Wallpaper thing, the best experience so-far has been on our BtVS-RPG (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) campaign “Apocalypse, Cleveland”, where the game worked on the level of the production crew and then on the actual game/series level. Looking back, I would have wanted to work on that aspect a bit more in the game. There were production meetings pre-game where things got discussed and the audience’s opinions (decided by random dice rolls) and the creative crew’s responses to that explored. There were also some meta-level things planned, like falling out between actors and surprise pregnancies. Sadly, the game ended when the main character’s player left for Sweden and we (read: me) didn’t feel like going the X-Files last seasons route or recast the character, even if that could have been fruitful, viewed from hindsight. This is one of the things I probably miss most about Primetime Adventures RPG – some sort of commentary on how creating that perfect television series isn’t as easy as it might sound, how there are many things that need to be considered beyond the basic story.
But what else could be done as a story within a story, or at least with the lesser techniques present there. Flashbacks have been mentioned and of course lead to flash-forwards. But how about alternate scenarios. Short glimpses of how things could have ended if they had made another choice. Maybe the next time the characters participate in the wedding of a group of NPCs, you give each player a written role in the “main cast” of the wedding, and have a look at how the oh-so-beautiful wedding isn’t really all that beautiful at all. Or the next time the military commanders do another decision that the players find stupid, you have the players fill in for the roles of the generals, maybe even change the outcome from what you had planned. Or if you had last left one of the characters reading a pirate-love-story comic on a street corner, you spend the beginning of the next game playing out that romance, have players create the main characters for it and let the chips fall as they may. Maybe even have some other player GM the game about the pirates and you play there with the rest.
Including the players somehow where normally there is just a moment of stopping and the GM explaining things. That’s where the beauty might be found.
As a quick dodge at the end, from the computer games point of view, I just have to mention a couple of things currently happening in the game world – the Shakespeare plays on Second Life, where people are using their avatars to bring plays to life. While technically it might be more easily compared to puppet shows or something like that, the way the avatars that people are playing differ from who they are in real life makes me want to give out a shout to them at this point. The second thing is the City of Heroes Mission Architect that’s coming up in a few weeks time, where players are allowed to create their own content to the game, that also might result in some “people role-playing heroes in a virtual world, creating stories for a virtual realm inside the game” action. The closed beta is already on its way and some lucky people could be already doing it as the rest of us are just blogging about it.
I’ll leave spikey to expand on the topic of “why on earth do games rely on cutscenes to convey stories” when he gets back online and writing. I know he has much more to say about it than I do.
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Tags: rpgs, stories, techniques
