Backstage - OOC Forums
General Discussion => The Speakeasy: OOG/Off-topic Discussion => Topic started by: KJLLV on 02 Feb 2011, 06:03
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An excellent article here (http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/01/21/storyboard-you-are-not-a-storyteller/) that sums much of my view. Ta to Elaron for picking it up.
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Very good read, thanks for pointing it out.
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This is a very good read and while he does make a very good point, there is something is he leaving out, no doubt for clarity's sake.
I am very new to rp, but I am very experienced at Improv. Those that are best at Improv are those that are best at collaborating. I agree with him because I believe an individual should not approach rp with a pre-set story as far as the future goes. I disagree with his title because what I find most promising or enticing about rp is the chance to create stories collaboratively, which means we are indeed story tellers.
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I don't entirely agree with the author's assertions that storytelling and roleplay are mutually exclusive. I think you can tell a story and keep it fresh and dynamic in a roleplay environment, and in the end have a tale that could have ended many different ways depending on how its participants reacted. Alternatively, an environment without a direction and ambiguous general goals leaves people lethargic.
A good example of this is the general rp populace in eve in various rp chat environments and even ingame. People generally shoot the shit, engage in idle conversation, and go about their business. Sansha Kuvakei suddenly returns from the dead with a quest for vengeance, and suddenly we have hundreds of people excited and ready with a sense of purpose. The plotline is linear, Sansha is probably going to do whatever he pleases regardless of player input, but people are genuinely excited just to have an opportunity to be apart of a story and something greater.
A story has given them this outlet, not the utopia of free-form roleplay. I, personally, have run several adventures on several characters throughout my tenure in eve, and I've experienced the excitement of being part of a larger story and not knowing where it might end. To simply exclude one from the other is, in my eyes, both tragic and needless. Why not take the best of both worlds and combine them?
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I agree Kaleigh though the situation you describe and the one he describes differs on a fundamental level. External input. In Improv you have the audience's suggestions as the input, in the case of the Sansha, you have CCP giving the extra input. In both cases the players are equal to each other. In the case the author describes, it is one individual moving on a predetermined path, regardless of outside inputs, even the actors in the scene. In Improv, this is death.
So, agreeing what the problem is, how do you fix it in an rp environment?
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Be flexible? ;)
In EVE, there's no audience, only actors. CCP and the world they created is and always has been a PLOT device, not the plot itself (some might argue otherwise). The Sansha plotline is not THE story, the story is how our characters react to it and build from that experience. The problem with a world of actors is that in order for constructive collaboration a mutual respect is required to entrust that the person is there for engaging interaction. The key is discovering WHAT engaging interaction means between the players.
I'm not exactly a hardcore EVE player anymore, but the channels I do see clearly look like they NEED a story to liven up the crowd. People milling about being snarky douchebags doesn't inspire me much, I'll say that! ^_^
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There are two core rules of improv that separate good improvisation (and, by extension, RP) from bad: always escalate, never block. When somebody has a story that they're railroading, and they respond to other players' input with "no", they're blocking. When people are all sitting in a bar just trading snark and nothing's happening, that's 'cause nobody's escalating. If you don't escalate AND you block, your RP will always be crap. You can have mediocre RP that doesn't go anywhere if nobody escalates, but to really create a collaborative story (and in my mind, that's what RP is for), escalation is just as important as flexibility.
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I would, here, separate plot devices and planned events from "a story". Kuvakei returning is not a story as such, it is an event or a plot device provided by CCP. They are not really using EVE to tell a story about his return as much as they are giving us an event and telling us to do whatever about it.
Good RP makes stories, sure, and it makes them collaboratively. But I see that story-making more kin to how life makes stories than how books do. That is, stories emerge from stuff that happens, as opposed to stuff happens for to complete a story. Not all RP leads to a story. Not all RP you think will lead to a story leads to a story. Not all RP you really really really WANNA to lead into a story will, either. And sometimes a story happens without you realizing it is going on.
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There are two core rules of improv that separate good improvisation (and, by extension, RP) from bad: always escalate, never block. When somebody has a story that they're railroading, and they respond to other players' input with "no", they're blocking. When people are all sitting in a bar just trading snark and nothing's happening, that's 'cause nobody's escalating. If you don't escalate AND you block, your RP will always be crap. You can have mediocre RP that doesn't go anywhere if nobody escalates, but to really create a collaborative story (and in my mind, that's what RP is for), escalation is just as important as flexibility.
Could you give me a bit more explanation on what you mean by "Escalation"? I'm not familiar with that term.
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Could you give me a bit more explanation on what you mean by "Escalation"? I'm not familiar with that term.
I'm going to assume stuff here from my (ancient and now probably arthritic) improv background and say it's another way to describe the "Yes, and..." principle of improvisational theatre. It's more than just "not blocking" or "that's nice, dear", it's continually bringing new things to the collaboration: plot direction, ideas, energy, improv.
I could do with some work on it myself, at the moment. I generated an RP character who isn't much into volunteering information, so I've set myself an extra challenge there.
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someone linked that in a channel somewhere a couple days ago. It's a good read.
I have ideas, like "today I will go to X, and see what happens".
but a lot of the time, nothing much does. Some "place" channels are a bit like that. Unless it's worked out beforehand, then there's no-one there to do stuff. And when stuff is going on, it can appear a closed circle.
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My story is about what happens when you take a young man with an unfulfilled heart and a troubled background and put him in the position he is now in. His story is influenced both by the fiction provided by CCP and interactions with other player-characters.
Unfortunately, a lot of Eve RP is trying to one up each other through projection of OOC egos throug apparent IC means.
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(http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/mm169/vieve_tisserand/novel.jpg)
Just throwing that out there.
(Not that the novel'd be one I'd attempt to get paid for or anything.)
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I've only come up with railroading in player RP'ing once and after a long and boring conversation, I realised that some people do like to have a predetermined idea of what should happen.
My partner calls it NPD, I call it bad RP.
I see the characters as the story tellers, not the player. We are only the mouth-piece of our make-believe identities after all.
When you're IC, you should always think "what would my character do in this situation?" and go on from there, never think "this isn't going to plan so I'll put the breaks on and demand things happen how I damned well wish them." The is bad RP whilst the former is good.
Maybe your character is a megalomanic narc that likes to get his/her own way, but there are other characters that can and will ruin plans.
Just remember: we're playing make-believe on internet spaceships, it's not real and just because your railroad was asploded by some free-thinking individual IC or OoC, it doesn't matter. Life goes on, pick up your character and dust them off. There are always idiots out there that love to be dictated to.
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Good read, although I disagree with his implications in some areas.
It definitely conflicts with my primary view that roleplaying is a cooperative story telling venture. I'll have to study it to see where it stacks up.
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I've only come up with railroading in player RP'ing once and after a long and boring conversation, I realised that some people do like to have a predetermined idea of what should happen.
My partner calls it NPD, I call it bad RP.
I agree with you in that my default mode of RP and what I enjoy most is not having an idea of where we'll end up to.
However, I'd have to say that not all RP where there is a desired outcome explicitly put out is bad. Sometimes you manage to play yourself into a corner and need to have something happen to get you out of it, and in those cases I think figuring out what would need to happen for your character or her situation to change in a way that made playing enjoyable again, and then purposefully playing towards that, is quite fine.
I strongly prefer people with such purposes to share them with me beforehand, though, and ask me to co-operate in steering the story, rather than hitting me on the head with rails.
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However, I'd have to say that not all RP where there is a desired outcome explicitly put out is bad. Sometimes you manage to play yourself into a corner and need to have something happen to get you out of it, and in those cases I think figuring out what would need to happen for your character or her situation to change in a way that made playing enjoyable again, and then purposefully playing towards that, is quite fine.
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Yes, but this was pure, unadulterated God-moding. It wasn't pretty and this certain vollspasti hit the break pretty hard and demanded we did what they wished.
I kinda wish I'd done what Dossie would've - what she was going to do - instead of caving. Live and learn.
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Yep, I've seen the bad sort too, and don't defend it at all. Wasn't pretty, either.
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...It definitely conflicts with my primary view that roleplaying is a cooperative story telling venture. I'll have to study it to see where it stacks up.
What I thought the author was trying to get across is that roleplaying is a cooperative story telling venture. When you roleplay, however, you are not a storyteller, and you cant direct "your story" in the direction you want it to take, especially in a MMO. Tabletop is another thing altogether.
If you want to write a story, write a story and post it on a fiction forum. Also, on another note, I think a lot of what some people try to accomplish though roleplaying would be best done as a piece of fiction.