Story v. Story: FIGHT!

The least successful game I've run was probably Acid Nights, a Mage game about a young group living in Buffalo, NY. The game ran for about 25 sessions all told, broken in the middle by a 6-week holiday overseas.

The game never really managed to launch into anything much, which at the time seemed utterly bizarre, because all kinds of exciting things were happening in the game world at large. There were a number of things which any PC could have latched onto, from the Vampiric power struggle, to the presence in the city of a completely mad Obrimos who saw himself as God's tool for punishing the wicked. The PCs interacted with these events: they were forced to by the exigencies of their lives. But they never really took the leap into full involvement.

It was always a puzzlement to me, because the reputation and calibre of the group was very high. I won't lie: I have had better groups, but this one was certainly capable of a lot more drama than they actually had. It wasn't until running session 4 of my current game Dirty London, that I realized what had been going on.

The players all designed almost ordinary every-day characters who happened to be mages. They didn't create mages in the midst of having to also deal with their regular lives. The analogy here would be an x-men style super-hero game where the characters are periodically persecuted by people, but are otherwise happy to live out their ordinary lives. Xavier's X-men aren't differentiated from the mass of humanity solely by their powers, but by their willingness, nay, need, to use those powers on the wider stage.

The obvious point to make at this stage is that this is the opposite "problem" to your standard D&D fantasy quest. My experience with an awful lot of gaming is that characters deal with extra-normal stuff at the expense of having a normal life: I played my halfling psychopath Petal for nearly a full year of weekly adventures without one scene unrelated to destroying the tendrils of the Ooze god... a fun filled year, but not one I think on much.

So I theorize that there are basically two story urges that compete for time in most games. The Domestic, and the Adventure. Looking at Acid Nights in this light, it's more apparent that one of the major flaws was my disinterest in the domestic, compared to the players.

I have in previous times, thought of this as a character v. story conflict, but the revelation I had the other night is that in fact, what I had thought of as "character" on many previous occasions was in real terms just as much a story, just about something I hadn't expected to see. It's like picking up Jodi Picoult when you expected to pick up Stephen King: naturally you're confused at the end as to where the supernatural element was. Both have a story, one is just domestic in scale.

Thinking about this as a story focus, but a different kind of story, fills in a lot of blanks for me. It's allowed me to fill in some blanks in previous games: what worked and why. The prime example was Dale's WFRP game, which had a reasonably healthy dose of both kinds of story. There were little character scenes, relationships unrelated to adventuring, and a sense that the characters had more to them than simple adventuring automatons.

The game which it mostly helps explain though was Lace and Steel; a game I seem to still post about obsessively some 3 years on! My discussions with others have me very squarely painted on the "story" side of the character v. story divide; to which I've always responded: But what about Lace and Steel? A game without much of a story, but with great character moments. The insight is that all the ball planning and dinner outings, were stories, just not the kind I'd been used to.

Is there more we can extract from this?

The last thought along these lines which occurs is how you could divide up these kinds of stories. How can you recognize which is which? The best guideline I've got is that some stories, largely adventures, are most clearly about the character altering the world; other stories are about the world altering the characters.

I like this because it puts the emphasis on the outcomes, rather than the process. Often the process can be a bit deceptive. The best example I've been able to come up with is Back to the Future. At the end of the first movie, we think that the point has been to change the world: Marty's 1980s is different at the end than the beginning. But by the end of movie 3, all the important matters are returned to their original state, but the personality of Marty has undergone a change: he can walk away from being called a chicken. I think perhaps that's why the BTF trilogy stands up so well to poking at its gigantic plot holes: because the story we really care about doesn't have any.

This tidies, to my own satisfaction, my difficulties in a couple of recent convention games that have been very enjoyable, but squirmed away from my complete understanding. Principally Death on the Streets and Shelter Me. DotS is very much an adventure in overall construction, but I constructed the character hooks and details with an eye to having the characters' exposed and experience change. When writing it, it all seemed to mesh, but I see now that while the gross mechanisms of plot were all sufficient, I was pushing this way then that at the two kinds of outcome I discuss. Conversely, Shelter Me was intensively focused on character, with an unfortunate ending focused on defeating an external enemy as an expression of inner growth... which in the conception above is are orthogonal things.

I am presently writing the climactic end for my Noirish Dirty London: the "truth" revealed, the uncertainties resolved, fates determined. The game has vacillated between being about the mystery and being about the characters in a way that had quite eluded my exact understanding, but hopefully now I can see more clearly how to wrap things up satisfactorily.