It's not Jackanory

The T-Shirted Historian is right. Roleplaying is interesting when it allows events to take their own shape. If it's just going to be a story told to you by a GM then why bother even rolling the dice? There are other media that do that kind of storytelling better.

Professor Barker used to say there were no NPCs on Tekumel. Most narrative systems lean right other in the other direction, privileging player-characters to the extent of having them the only ones to roll for actions. In that kind of game, the PCs are intended to be the stars of their own show and the NPCs merely extras. 

We've talked about this before and everyone will (quite rightly) make their own choice. And most players now do seem to favour the tell-us-a-story form of roleplaying; I can't even find a group these days that's interested in my and the Historian's preferred style. (Told you I'm Biffen, not Milvain.)

But it goes beyond roleplaying styles. Consider the ambush scene in a movie. The first bullet misses one of the characters (probably just after he's made some comedic quip) and our heroes all dive for cover. That's The A-Team or a tongue-in-cheek knockabout action flick starring The Rock. If the bullet hits then we're watching a grittier movie entirely. Carpenter or Scorsese or Boorman, maybe, if the character survives. If he's maimed or killed then we could be watching something really uncompromising.

What about if the player-characters' enemy makes the roll, sets up an effective ambush, and then scores a nasty hit on one of the PCs? Well, too bad. They knew they were walking into danger, right? A character could get shot at any point during any firefight, so why should the opening salvo be any different? 

The point is that the story isn't what the GM decided it should be before the game starts. The story is what actually falls out when those intentions meet dice rolls and player choices. The death of Joe Lynch, a long-running character in our Iron Men campaign, came about because of a really bad roll during what should have been a routine skirmish against a small group of petty brigands. It was pure dumb luck -- and led to one of the most memorable games in that campaign. If the GM had come up with a get-out-of-Sheol-free card, in the moment we might all have been relieved (especially Tim Savin, who played Joe) but we'd have been cheated out of something great.

However, it's crucial that players have been given the choice to opt in to a disinterested game universe. When I am playing I insist on dice rolls that affect me being out in the open so that the GM can’t fudge it and let me survive a bad roll. However, when I'm running the game I probably wouldn’t let an opening shot from a sniper kill a player. So really it’s a case of personally wanting no favours or second chances, yet I will give them to players if I think the roll is too unfair. Any player who says they want the dice roll out in the open earns my respect; the rest can keep their plot armour.

You get the same kind of choices in prose fiction. Some people lap up cosy murders. (No other appalling crime is ever cosy; just murder.) Others prefer the darker writers, like Ian Rankin or Georges Simenon, who are less likely to hold a nannying protective hand over their characters. Or you might turn to In Cold Blood or You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life (You Are Raoul Moat) if you appreciate that real life (or unsentimental roleplaying) throws up far more interesting and varied stories than authored fiction ever can.

As the author Joyce Carol Oates puts it:

“My belief is that art should not be comforting. For comfort we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”

Recommended reading

• Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon
• The Snow was Dirty (different translation)
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• The Devil's Lieutenant by Maria Fagyas
• The Glass Pearls by Emeric Pressburger

Oh, and as Columbo used to say: just one more thing. Whenever I write a post like this, someone will pop up and complain that I'm being dogmatic, and that they like escapist roleplaying with a GM who's out to tell them a story they'll like. Well, I already said that everyone will and should make their own choice. Blog posts are opinion pieces, not diktats. If you want your roleplaying games to be the equivalent of mass entertainment then perhaps you'll opt for the cosy option. If you think of roleplaying as an art form, you might demand more of it. Your call. (And yes, all that should go without saying, but I've been doing this blog for over a decade now and I've learned that some people just can't manage to parse a half-dozen paragraphs.)

Why do roleplaying games need a genre?

“What I really aim at is an absolute realism in the sphere of the ignobly decent. The field, as I understand it, is a new one; I don’t know any writer who has treated ordinary vulgar life with fidelity and seriousness. Zola writes deliberate tragedies; his vilest figures become heroic from the place they fill in a strongly imagined drama. I want to deal with the essentially unheroic, with the day-to-day life of that vast majority of people who are at the mercy of paltry circumstance. Dickens understood the possibility of such work, but his tendency to melodrama on the one hand, and his humour on the other, prevented him from thinking of it. An instance, now. As I came along by Regent’s Park half an hour ago a man and a girl were walking close in front of me, love-making; I passed them slowly and heard a good deal of their talk—it was part of the situation that they should pay no heed to a stranger’s proximity. Now, such a love-scene as that has absolutely never been written down; it was entirely decent, yet vulgar to the nth power. Dickens would have made it ludicrous—a gross injustice. Other men who deal with low-class life would perhaps have preferred idealising it—an absurdity. For my own part, I am going to reproduce it verbatim, without one single impertinent suggestion of any point of view save that of honest reporting.”

That’s Harold Biffen, one of the characters in George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street, expressing his ideal of a style of fiction that asymptotically approaches reality. This seems to echo the thoughts of a rather more successful real-life writer, namely William Wordsworth, who argued (almost a century before Gissing's book) that "the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants" and went on to deplore readers' "craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies." And that was before Twitter.

H P Lovecraft, who endured a hardly easier existence than Harold Biffen’s, expressed a similar idea when he set out a manifesto defying the dominance of genre in science fiction:

“We must select only such characters […] as would naturally be involved in the events to be depicted, and they must behave exactly as real persons would behave if confronted with the given marvels. The tone of the whole thing must be realism, not romance.”

That right there is pretty much what I want my upcoming Jewelspider RPG to be: fantasy, but not of the fantasy genre. Nowadays roleplaying frequently embraces genre, and it’s fashionable for referees to talk about the game in terms of act breaks and inciting incidents. But I’m with Biffen and Lovecraft. Genre means incorporating familiar elements in familiar patterns, which is fine if you prefer fictional narratives to the kind that real life throws out. What I want my roleplaying games to do on the other hand is to evoke “real” settings. What happens there, even if the setting is fantasy, happens as it does in life, not fitting itself to tropes and story formulae, but simply as the result of colliding goals, characters’ actions and reactions, and a bit of pure chance.

This goal came into focus for me the other day while watching Chloé Zhao’s movie Nomadland. Most of the participants really are nomads. You can hear the difference from actors reading lines. When these people talk about their life experiences, their loves, and those they’ve lost, it rings true. As the review on RogerEbert.com put it:

"Filmmakers and artists in general have a tendency to judge their characters. Here’s the good guy, here’s the bad guy. Here’s the problem that needs to be solved for the leading man or lady to be happy by the end of the movie or damned because of their bad behaviour. There’s a much lesser version of the true story of Nomadland […] that does all of this, melodramatizing Fern’s story into one of redemption."

That was the point of a lot of classic early-‘70s movies, to throw away the nursery book of arcs and tropes to find a more truthful way of depicting human drama. For example, listen to this podcast in which Rebecca O’Brien explains what appeals to her about Coppola’s The Conversation and how the movie “sets itself up almost as if it is reality; the story is told without any adornment.”

This might just be one of those ideas whose time has come, because as I was writing this post the SF author and critic Damien Walter published a piece about the need for science fiction to escape genre.

I'm not going to tell you how to run your games. If you want to use Jewelspider for comedy or high fantasy or grimdark takes on Legend, or if you dig good vs evil romps and the panto ethics of alignment, go right ahead. But I have to settle on a tone for how I describe the world of Legend in the rulebook, and an ethic that will inform the scenarios I’m writing for it, and my Dogme 95 is to not to assume any genre or even a sense of a storyteller. The setting is the medieval world as people at the time imagined it to be. There is no agency that will intervene to ensure you have a satisfying arc. Stuff will happen, fair and unfair. In my gaming philosophy that’s how to get a really immersive experience. By stepping away from conscious storytelling and throwing off the shackles of genre, we'll have games that give us "the freedom and space to hear things".