Jamjars (not the kind with jam inside)
Jan. 20th, 2011 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccastareyesSo, done some thinky meta on roleplaying games. I don't know where to post this, since ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
roleplayers comes off as devoted a lot more towards tabletop RPGs (run online or in real life), rather than freeform collaborative writing ones. So it gets dumped here until I decide what to do with it.
Okay, so let me talk a bit about online collab-writing RPGs, usually the ones played on LJ. Specifically the 'pan-fandom' kind, where folks pretend to be Batman and Captain Kirk (and some include 'my D&D character' and 'this person from my novel-in-progress' or 'I made this one up'). Which requires some logic loops because why a modern day costumed vigilante and a starship captain from The Future are together in the same setting is a bit questionable[1].
One solution is to just declare 'write a new backstory so that your characters was born in the setting, while making it as close to their existing backstory as possible'. Which is a kind of fun challenge in figuring out what's important and what isn't[2], but begs the question about why you're playing in a pan-fandom sometimes. Or why the pan-fandom won't just accept original characters (and some do).
There's also 'dressing room' RPGs, which are usually informal games where characters can just show up and the reasons aren't widely circulated. And I've seen plots run in them -- we've got a good crowd of FMA cast and their friends in![[insanejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/ij-community.gif)
the_nexus_rpg. But it's usually more using the platform of the game to gather PCs then running plots off elsewhere.
The other popular solution is to declare a jamjar RPG. Jamjar because it's like you built a terrarium in a jamjar -- a little closed ecosystem, with the characters as the bugs. So the premise becomes 'your PCs have been trapped here for some reason', though some games (likesabra_la_tau) allow for the 'your PC decided to come here for a reason').
Now, it seems like there's two factors in the plots of your average jamjar -- the involvement of the mods, and the involvement of the players. You need a minimum level of both -- no mods, and some of the more active players might step up to run plots in a modly way or the game will die; no players and the mods get sick of shouting into the void.
Your stereotypical tabletop game seems to emphasize active mods as the driving force. The PCs are expected to be a group that works easily together, so PC vs. PC conflict is a minimum, and more focus is either on PC vs. NPC or PC vs. environment. Depending on the group, either the mod (DM) arranges most of the conflict ('go storm the castle of the evil king') or the PCs are more self-motivated ('my character wants to be king, so can you write up the stats for the castle of the evil king so we can storm it?'). But either way, the mod puts in a lot of work to manage conflict.
A one-on-one/small freeform RPG is the opposite. Because of the size of the group, a mod isn't needed and often (at least in the times I've played with others), everyone handles NPC duties and doing things like running plots.
(Aside: maybe 'mod' and 'player' aren't the right words. 'Setting plots' and 'character plots' might be better, or 'external' versus 'internal'. Basically the difference between A and B go to defeat villain X, and A goes to defeat B.)
Now, your average Livejournal RPG sort of needs mods after it exceeds the 'small group' point. Especially if the players don't know each other outside of the game or the game is openly taking players. But the mods need not be active in the game if the players keep the plot ball rolling. On the other hand, I've never been in a game I personally have found fun without setting-wide plots. Maybe because I'm not good at getting involved in character-focused plots. (I mean, I see these 'living in NYC' and 'living in small town America' or 'high school RPG!' ads, and I have no interest in playing in them because I like my interpersonal drama mixed with something.)
But, some of the problems with it is part of the premise of the jamjar game. Okay, so you're brought to Jamjar Island. Most people are like 'hell, no' and try to leave. Which... well, probably will fail by the nature of the setting, but might give hints as to 'win conditions' when you can leave, assuming either active mods playing the NPC/phenomenon that has trapped you here, or them laying it out in the premise. So, next step (probably going on with the first) is to do survival-type things, like 'find food and shelter'. Which... well, I don't find these exciting in the abstract, even if I spend all my time on Facebook games doing resource management. You can start to get conflict, but it's generally interpersonal, unless someone plays a character who is both self-motivated and has a motivation that will bring him or her into conflict with at least one other person.
Which has its own problems. Let's say I decide to play Dante from Fullmetal Alchemist. I state that her goals as an immortal and amoral alchemist are to get someone to make her a Philosopher's Stone and to find a nice body to hop to when her old one wears out, in addition to making herself comfortable and not letting on that she's doing this. Now, this motivates plot, as Dante has to gather influence and information, which is good, but once she tries something, a lot of the heroic PCs are going to be pissed at her...
... and then I have to decide if I want to drop her and let them kill her, or engineer a remarkable escape, which gets repetitive. I mean, think of how many times you watched old 80s cartoons and wondered why the heroes didn't ever seem to eliminate the villains? So dropping her might be preferred...
...but then you have to go through the fuss of finding and applying for another character. And what if you like playing Dante? Not everyone can (or wants to) purposefully kill a character, and one doesn't have the dice to enforce this decision.
NPCs might be preferred, but that puts the plot onus on a handful of people rather than on the game itself, which can lead to a lot of work. As much as I might likesabra_la_tau, I know the mods work their tails off and their fingers to the bone to handle the plot in that game, while drafting out as much of the minor things as they can. You also have the problem of managing a large game-wide plot. I know Sabra's mods have capped the character base because any more and things get unwieldy. digital_dive had this problem, and it often meant that it felt like you had to be in one of the in-game organizations even for world-wide plots that should have affected everyone.
So, it is kind of a mix, with the desired goal of making sure no one burned out. But part of it would be helped if you add in setting seeds for conflict between PCs. Like, for example,![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
entanglement_rp, is nominally about a conflict between a Brave Resistance and the Fay'lia (aliens out to control the Multiverse). Besides that some of the PCs aren't nice people at all (we have Darth Vader and two Goa'uld System Lords), some of them are secretly spies. Which makes me wonder, what if the premise deliberately set characters against each other?
sabra_la_tau does this a bit. The basic premise of the game is that "you all wake up in a cave system run by mysterious gods to play in team games that might range from Apples to Apples to 'last one not-dead wins'". With pain and suffering caused in games, and some of the gods out to keep inter-team conflict high, inter-team grudges can form, though it depends a lot on the characters. (For example, some characters basically assumed everyone was out to get their team, while one of mine didn't develop a grudge against anyone[3] when he discovered the hard way that another team had a member who needed to eat sentient flesh.)
kannagara_rpg could be like this, since part of the premise is 'the war between the gods', but right now, that conflict is only hinted at and the two sides are seen as 'those assholes that brought us here and spy on our dreams' and 'those assholes that occasionally invade the realm with monsters and make everyone's lives hell until the other assholes kick them out'.
It's kind of a nice element, as it gives characters some kind of motivation besides rage against the gods (or whatever brought them there) and/or the few NPC or PC villains that folks feel like playing. (Also is good at breaking up 'cast cliquishness' -- the fact that people playing characters from the same show tend to play together, and it's hard for a character from an obscure canon to break in.)
I think about these things, since someday I might try to start my own RPG again. Even though I make a terrible mod. But I like analyzing things.
--
[1] Then again, this is Star Trek and the DC universe. If Peter David can get a Star Trek/X-Men crossover book/comic book published -- which I swear totally exists only for the joke about how Jean-Luc Picard and Charles Xavier look astonishingly alike (this was even written pre-movie, so it wasn't a 'lol, actors' joke) -- then it shouldn't be too hard. Maybe 'Azumanga Daqioh' and 'A Song of Ice and Fire' would be better choices here.
[2] Funnily enough, someone posted a blurb onroleplayers about Flux, an RPG game where every so often, the GM hands out new character sheets in a new system and setting, designed to fit the concept of your character, mostly, but not be identical -- then all the PCs remember jumping worlds with everyone around them they know, but the NPCs all act like they've been here all their lives. So you go from playing a paladin in D&D to a Solar Exalted... who can still cast Cure Light Wounds and summon a mount on occasion. Which strikes me as fun, but I have enough problems getting a tabletop group together in the first place.
[3] Well, there was the time that someone killed several of his partner team's members as a test of whether or not the gods would intervene. But he didn't find that one out until after this guy nearly got him killed trying to nuke the gods with magic.
roleplayers comes off as devoted a lot more towards tabletop RPGs (run online or in real life), rather than freeform collaborative writing ones. So it gets dumped here until I decide what to do with it. Okay, so let me talk a bit about online collab-writing RPGs, usually the ones played on LJ. Specifically the 'pan-fandom' kind, where folks pretend to be Batman and Captain Kirk (and some include 'my D&D character' and 'this person from my novel-in-progress' or 'I made this one up'). Which requires some logic loops because why a modern day costumed vigilante and a starship captain from The Future are together in the same setting is a bit questionable[1].
One solution is to just declare 'write a new backstory so that your characters was born in the setting, while making it as close to their existing backstory as possible'. Which is a kind of fun challenge in figuring out what's important and what isn't[2], but begs the question about why you're playing in a pan-fandom sometimes. Or why the pan-fandom won't just accept original characters (and some do).
There's also 'dressing room' RPGs, which are usually informal games where characters can just show up and the reasons aren't widely circulated. And I've seen plots run in them -- we've got a good crowd of FMA cast and their friends in
the_nexus_rpg. But it's usually more using the platform of the game to gather PCs then running plots off elsewhere. The other popular solution is to declare a jamjar RPG. Jamjar because it's like you built a terrarium in a jamjar -- a little closed ecosystem, with the characters as the bugs. So the premise becomes 'your PCs have been trapped here for some reason', though some games (like
sabra_la_tau) allow for the 'your PC decided to come here for a reason'). Now, it seems like there's two factors in the plots of your average jamjar -- the involvement of the mods, and the involvement of the players. You need a minimum level of both -- no mods, and some of the more active players might step up to run plots in a modly way or the game will die; no players and the mods get sick of shouting into the void.
Your stereotypical tabletop game seems to emphasize active mods as the driving force. The PCs are expected to be a group that works easily together, so PC vs. PC conflict is a minimum, and more focus is either on PC vs. NPC or PC vs. environment. Depending on the group, either the mod (DM) arranges most of the conflict ('go storm the castle of the evil king') or the PCs are more self-motivated ('my character wants to be king, so can you write up the stats for the castle of the evil king so we can storm it?'). But either way, the mod puts in a lot of work to manage conflict.
A one-on-one/small freeform RPG is the opposite. Because of the size of the group, a mod isn't needed and often (at least in the times I've played with others), everyone handles NPC duties and doing things like running plots.
(Aside: maybe 'mod' and 'player' aren't the right words. 'Setting plots' and 'character plots' might be better, or 'external' versus 'internal'. Basically the difference between A and B go to defeat villain X, and A goes to defeat B.)
Now, your average Livejournal RPG sort of needs mods after it exceeds the 'small group' point. Especially if the players don't know each other outside of the game or the game is openly taking players. But the mods need not be active in the game if the players keep the plot ball rolling. On the other hand, I've never been in a game I personally have found fun without setting-wide plots. Maybe because I'm not good at getting involved in character-focused plots. (I mean, I see these 'living in NYC' and 'living in small town America' or 'high school RPG!' ads, and I have no interest in playing in them because I like my interpersonal drama mixed with something.)
But, some of the problems with it is part of the premise of the jamjar game. Okay, so you're brought to Jamjar Island. Most people are like 'hell, no' and try to leave. Which... well, probably will fail by the nature of the setting, but might give hints as to 'win conditions' when you can leave, assuming either active mods playing the NPC/phenomenon that has trapped you here, or them laying it out in the premise. So, next step (probably going on with the first) is to do survival-type things, like 'find food and shelter'. Which... well, I don't find these exciting in the abstract, even if I spend all my time on Facebook games doing resource management. You can start to get conflict, but it's generally interpersonal, unless someone plays a character who is both self-motivated and has a motivation that will bring him or her into conflict with at least one other person.
Which has its own problems. Let's say I decide to play Dante from Fullmetal Alchemist. I state that her goals as an immortal and amoral alchemist are to get someone to make her a Philosopher's Stone and to find a nice body to hop to when her old one wears out, in addition to making herself comfortable and not letting on that she's doing this. Now, this motivates plot, as Dante has to gather influence and information, which is good, but once she tries something, a lot of the heroic PCs are going to be pissed at her...
... and then I have to decide if I want to drop her and let them kill her, or engineer a remarkable escape, which gets repetitive. I mean, think of how many times you watched old 80s cartoons and wondered why the heroes didn't ever seem to eliminate the villains? So dropping her might be preferred...
...but then you have to go through the fuss of finding and applying for another character. And what if you like playing Dante? Not everyone can (or wants to) purposefully kill a character, and one doesn't have the dice to enforce this decision.
NPCs might be preferred, but that puts the plot onus on a handful of people rather than on the game itself, which can lead to a lot of work. As much as I might like
sabra_la_tau, I know the mods work their tails off and their fingers to the bone to handle the plot in that game, while drafting out as much of the minor things as they can. You also have the problem of managing a large game-wide plot. I know Sabra's mods have capped the character base because any more and things get unwieldy. digital_dive had this problem, and it often meant that it felt like you had to be in one of the in-game organizations even for world-wide plots that should have affected everyone.So, it is kind of a mix, with the desired goal of making sure no one burned out. But part of it would be helped if you add in setting seeds for conflict between PCs. Like, for example,
entanglement_rp, is nominally about a conflict between a Brave Resistance and the Fay'lia (aliens out to control the Multiverse). Besides that some of the PCs aren't nice people at all (we have Darth Vader and two Goa'uld System Lords), some of them are secretly spies. Which makes me wonder, what if the premise deliberately set characters against each other? sabra_la_tau does this a bit. The basic premise of the game is that "you all wake up in a cave system run by mysterious gods to play in team games that might range from Apples to Apples to 'last one not-dead wins'". With pain and suffering caused in games, and some of the gods out to keep inter-team conflict high, inter-team grudges can form, though it depends a lot on the characters. (For example, some characters basically assumed everyone was out to get their team, while one of mine didn't develop a grudge against anyone[3] when he discovered the hard way that another team had a member who needed to eat sentient flesh.) kannagara_rpg could be like this, since part of the premise is 'the war between the gods', but right now, that conflict is only hinted at and the two sides are seen as 'those assholes that brought us here and spy on our dreams' and 'those assholes that occasionally invade the realm with monsters and make everyone's lives hell until the other assholes kick them out'. It's kind of a nice element, as it gives characters some kind of motivation besides rage against the gods (or whatever brought them there) and/or the few NPC or PC villains that folks feel like playing. (Also is good at breaking up 'cast cliquishness' -- the fact that people playing characters from the same show tend to play together, and it's hard for a character from an obscure canon to break in.)
I think about these things, since someday I might try to start my own RPG again. Even though I make a terrible mod. But I like analyzing things.
--
[1] Then again, this is Star Trek and the DC universe. If Peter David can get a Star Trek/X-Men crossover book/comic book published -- which I swear totally exists only for the joke about how Jean-Luc Picard and Charles Xavier look astonishingly alike (this was even written pre-movie, so it wasn't a 'lol, actors' joke) -- then it shouldn't be too hard. Maybe 'Azumanga Daqioh' and 'A Song of Ice and Fire' would be better choices here.
[2] Funnily enough, someone posted a blurb on
roleplayers about Flux, an RPG game where every so often, the GM hands out new character sheets in a new system and setting, designed to fit the concept of your character, mostly, but not be identical -- then all the PCs remember jumping worlds with everyone around them they know, but the NPCs all act like they've been here all their lives. So you go from playing a paladin in D&D to a Solar Exalted... who can still cast Cure Light Wounds and summon a mount on occasion. Which strikes me as fun, but I have enough problems getting a tabletop group together in the first place. [3] Well, there was the time that someone killed several of his partner team's members as a test of whether or not the gods would intervene. But he didn't find that one out until after this guy nearly got him killed trying to nuke the gods with magic.
