RPG Waypoints

The Secret Lair Episode 29: Storygaming

I’m proud to share this link because, well … I’m going to urge you to follow the link and read what Kris Johnson writes because he explains it in that distinctive K.J. way that I dearly miss.

For my part, suffice to say I went to Cleveland, got kidnapped by the Overlords of the Secret Lair, and this link will take you to the recording of their interrogation of me, wherin I go way past name/rank/serial number and spill all sorts of  passionate thoughts on my experiences in the tabletop roleplaying hobby over the past couple of years, drop all sorts of names, push all kinds of buttons, and throw down some “this is how I see it, your mileage may vary”  proclamations about why I love to play dirty hippie story games.

And the other thing about this historic event is that after recording over 40 episodes of a podcast together, this is the FIRST time that Chris Miller, Kris Johnson, and I have ever recorded a show while actually sitting around a real table, face-to-face.

BOO-YAH!

Wherin Joel Shempert’s OP and Jason Godesky’s first comment both grab me by the throat and remind me of the one truly authentic throughline in my life: I believe I’m called to explore and share stories and make myths in community with others. I’ve done it through acting, preaching, writing, podcasting, and roleplaying, but I’ve always done it – and in whatever form, to whatever level of competence, it is the one thing I know I’m wired to do. This post from Story by the Throat is a waypoint for me because it very nicely touches on – and stirs up – my feelings.

Making it Ourselves « Story by the Throat!

As a footnote, here’s an interesting issue that I’m still pondering – I agree with Joel that true art almost never authentically happens by committee – but committee is not the same thing as community, right? That’s my feeling, but it might take some time for me to work through how to articulate the difference. I think it has a lot to do with the difference between what many people think “Story Now” means in roleplaying – i.e. making decisions based upon what works best for ‘the story’ – and what I believe it actually means – organically exploring the premise in the moment, making choices, and letting the results spring forth as they will to guide the shared fiction at the table.

I think that the points Jason raises in his comment speak to that fairly well – but I love that he stresses that his intent is to add to Joel’s original idea, not to counter it.

No doubt I’ll have to revisit all this soon.

Note: edited for clarity a few hours after originally published

The timing of Joe McDonald’s post about music and the questions it asks could not be more perfect for me. (And of course everything is all about me – hah!) Seriously, though – right when I’m in the midst of grappling with how various types of music invoke my creative expression, along comes this:

This Particular Darkness « Buried Without Ceremony.

You might think I tend to draw from the same few wells far too often when I share cool stuff that I’ve encountered, but if it moves me or makes me think or reaches down and grabs me by the scruff of the soul, then that’s what I wanna share and it kinda makes sense that a writer capable of doing that once will probably be able to repeat the feat every so often. These days, Joe McDonald is doing just that for me. He’s a reliable feat-repeater.

Not only does his post add some flavor into my recent thought about music in Vegas After Midnight, but it goes beyond that to make me think more about my music preferences in general.

I’m going to admit something that might slightly soil my self-advertised misfit cred. When I was a tween and teen back in Michigan in the 80s, my musical tastes were dominated by pop-radio rock (Prince, Duran Duran, Hall & Oates, Journey, etc.) and certain types of “classic” rock (The Beatles, Elvis, Queen, etc).  I used to shy away from punk and hard/metal rock. Too subversive, too much the music of the kids in my school who were stoners and rebels. True, I secretly wanted to BE a rebel, but in my school all the rebels were pot-smoking pill-popping drunkards who were nowhere near as cool and compelling as Judd Nelson’s character in The Breakfast Club or Robin Johnson’s character in Times Square.

So as it turned out, my teenage rebel phase didn’t actually emerge until I was in my late 20s and I started hearing the music of the misfit teens and art-class rebels who were regulars in the theatre groups I was part of and the teen residential-treatment home I worked at. They listened to lots of grunge, punk, neo-punk, proto-emo, etc. and when I heard it it clicked with me in ways that it never did when I was younger.

So now, I tend to listen to some pretty edgy stuff, some emo, angry, hard stuff, both modern and classic. And I’m much more appreciative of the subversive elements of the stuff I used to listen to but didn’t recognize as subversive.

So, when Joe poses his thoughts on the questions asked by punk genre, and he brings up the notion of raging against machines and fighting against oppressive institutions, and placing blame… I wonder.  Because I agree with him, but I’m not particularly involved in actually fighting or raging or rebelling any more than I used to be when I used to listen to processed pop music.

So my inner-rebel has always been sort of a wannabe. And I begin to realize that what I’m doing with VAM is to try to finally openly express – or at least grapple with – all the conflicting stuff I feel about the pros and cons of “fighting the status quo”. Because really, VAM is a game about waking up and doing something proactive in terms of raging against the dying of the light. It’s about not sleeping through the chaos in order to hide from it, but actually facing it down, shouting at it, and DOING something about it. I’ve always thought of VAM as my magnum opus, my statement. And it is. But I hafta admit, I’m not altogether sure, even at my age and “maturity”, whether the statement I’m claiming to espouse is entirely sincere, or if I just WISH I felt that way.

This bears more pondering. I’ll go listen to some Pink Floyd or Smashing Pumpkins and get back to you later.

Joe does it again with an excellent OP over at Buried Without Ceremony, this time exploring a couple of my front-burner play-preference issues like a flaming vorpal sword of awesome that slices right into my chest and tugs at my soul.

Plugging in Scenes and System via Buried Without Ceremony.

I love the concept of looking at play preferences in terms of sockets, which I first encountered by reading Mo Turkington’s blog and later scratched the surface of discussing with Rich and Chris on Canon Puncture #52. And scene framing is also a big subject of exploration for me, so Joe’s thoughts on how systems help us engage scenes through sockets is very useful to my musings on how to get more out of play and help my co-players get more out of play, too.

This is my favorite paragraph, because it clarifies so many things for me about how scene framing relates to “pushing conflict”:

It’s a common misconception that the way you do aggressive scene framing well is to frame to the moment of pregnant conflict, that you open with an opposed situation that must be diffused. I’m going to take a step back from this idea and offer a suggestion: scene framing should work to engage our sockets in a meaningful way, skipping that which doesn’t satisfy our engagement and energy. In other words, if we all have Conflict/Plot/Choice sockets, then and only then is it appropriate to frame to moments of intense conflict. If we all have Setting/Aesthetic sockets, then we should be framing with interesting and evocative images, and use scene framing to move us to those images. – Joe McDonald

I encourage you to go over to BWC and share your thoughts and ideas in the thread, and hopefully we can have a fruitful discussion that takes this topic to even more interesting levels.

Every once in awhile, someone shares something that makes me go “Wow, I feel almost exactly the same way as this person”, and it makes me feel connected in a rather satisfying way. Several times over the past year or so, ‘this person’ has been Rob Bohl. Here, on Story Games, Rob writes an OP that has me feeling quite connected in a satisfying way:

Story Games – Why I Don’t Like Board Games from Rob Bohl.

Joe McDonald has some very interesting things to say. His blog Buried Without Ceremony has quickly risen to the top of my must-read list. In this entry, he not only somehow captures much of the ennui I felt this year at GenCon, but also tosses in some compelling ideas about identity politics and inclusion/exclusion that really made me think, while at the same time driving home just why the annual congregation in Indy is such an upper – or downer – for me, depending on who’s there to hang out with.

I am play games. [SWTO] – from Buried Without Ceremony.*

*Note: [SWTO] is Joe’s tag for “Stories We Tell Ourselves”, his series of posts that explore aspects of our shared narrative/shared interpretation of the everyday world.

Paul Tevis has created a story-game, and it is finally published and in several peoples’ hands, and I want to give him a big WOOT for getting it done.

A Penny For My Thoughts »paultevis.com.

This game’s official launch is an odd kind of moment for me. I’m planning to buy it as soon as I can get the scratch to do so, and I want to play it. Actually, it’s more that I NEED to play it. You see, I’ve long thought of this game as a dragon that I need to slay. Although I am pretty sure I don’t feel quite that way anymore, Paul’s game has nevertheless had an unmistakable effect on my roleplay over the past two years.

I shall elaborate…

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