What makes a fit character for (a roleplaying) game? The Four Cs.

Connected: The character has relationships (positive and negative) with other significant characters in the situation.

Committed: The character has a stake in the outcome of the situation, and will stay to see it through.

Capable: The character has the capacity to affect change in the situation by taking decisive action.

Conflicted: The character has beliefs and goals that are in conflict. They must make choices about which are more important, and which must be abandoned or changed.

via John Harper @ The Mighty Atom.

And of course I submit Lady Blackbird as an excellent example of this in practice.  I’d rather play a 12-page game that sets up the Four Cs perfectly than play a 300-page game that doesn’t.

But after reading something recently from John Harper’s blog The Mighty Atom, I feel like it might be important to clarify what I think I mean when I talk about this “story” stuff. Here’s the gist of John’s post:

I want to take the phrase “It would make a better story if…” out behind the woodshed and shoot it. At least its use during play, anyway. During post-game debriefing it has its place. But too much story-planning during actual play just annoys the crap out of me. Who’s definition of “better story” are we supposed to be using, anyway? And are we really going to hash that all out in the moment, while someone is holding dice in their hand?

Overt, explicit story-planning during play is like having an editor watching over your shoulder while you compose your novel. It kills the creative process with over-analysis and robs roleplaying of one of its core features: unplanned, dynamic, creative collaboration that can take any final shape. “Good stories” be damned.

via The Mighty Atom.

Would it surprise you to learn that I pretty much agree with John? Because I do.

To a certain extent I also agree with what Eero said in the Story-Games thread that inspired John to write his post – especially after Eero’s comment was expanded and clarified later in that thread. I think I’m more willing to engage in a certain degree of story-thinking during actual play than Eero and John have expressed, but nevertheless I think my ideal sweet-spot is closer to what they (especially John) are describing than most people might think.

I’m noticing this could easily turn into a big long uber-post and I don’t want to go there. So I’m going to try to focus on clarifying what I think I’m focused when I use the word “story” in relation to roleplaying games, at least in this entry. Discussion and feedback might take us further in the future, but for now … let’s narrow the focus.

When I think of “story” during a roleplaying session, I’m not thinking (consciously) about mythic structure or the process of plotting or even about whether, after all is said and done, the end result of the ongoing fiction will be considered an appropriately formed story. As Eero wrote, if I want to do that I’ll actually write a story.

No, what I am into is dancing along the connected threads between characters, situations, conflicts, and choices. And for the most part I like to dance in-character, or at least in what the theory wonks like to call “actor stance”. In fact, I have the most fun when everyone at the table including myself spends the majority of time in actor stance.

But I’ve also learned that, for me at least, the time spent in actor stance is generally much more fruitful if I spend little bits of time during the game in a more objective frame, like a director or author, just to take a quick objective glance at what is happening and make some player choices (instead of character choices) about what might be interesting to do next. I think I should bear my share of the load to help make the in-game fiction more fun for everyone. I generall like it when everyone else at the table does, too. But also, the more often that distancing-from-character objective moments occur, the more risk there is that I’ll start to feel too distant, too process-driven, too much analytical thinking and not enough instinctive doing, so to speak. And in that sense what John wrote is dead-on. It sucks to make the focus of the night all about making sure that a legitimate “story” in the technical sense emerges. I cherish “unplanned, dynamic, creative collaboration” quite a lot, and I don’t want to squash that in game by trying to plan or analyze beyond what is absolutely appropriate to keep things from spinning off into meaningless useless chaos.

No doubt I’m going to want to explore more of this topic in the future, because I’m probably muddying more issues than I’m clarifying. And there are other facets of this I might want to bring in from other helpful sources (“Fruitful Void“, anyone?) But I think I should stop here for now in case anyone wants to discuss. Or rest eyes. Or use the restroom.

One last thing – if you want a really good example of the sort of ratio of stances that I think hit my sweet spot, listen to the last few episodes of our Star Wars PTA session from GenCon ’08 on the Canon Puncture actual play feed. Seriously. Because that’s the best example of a bunch of guys doing some big-time unplanned, dynamic, collaborative fiction with lots of in-character oomph and just the right amount of story-awareness to frame scenes into a cohesive but still dynamically compelling narrative. And even now, none of us knows how the “story” is going to end up, and we won’t know until the last scene of the last session is done.

And I LOVE that feeling.