The Camera Always Lies, Part 3: The Tyranny of Truth-Making
Many years ago, a friend of mine was once asked by a friend in common what RPGs were. He said “well, a bunch of people sit around a table and roll funny dice, and whoever rolls a one, they’re dead.” He wasn’t wrong.
My argument in part two is really as follows: Firstly, that when we’re roleplaying, we’re doing three things at once - playing a game, creating a story and also simulating a reality where our avatar moves around and does thing. Secondly, that because we give supremacy to the last one, the other two aren’t very good.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a bit of fun in the game of most RPGs, but it’s mostly to be had in min-maxing. Then there’s the activity of “making up stuff from prompts” which is also a kind of game and a good one, but when we talk about the gaming part of RPGs we don’t usually mean that, we mean the “skirmish level wargame” thingy. And that? That’s okay. But I think it’s worth noting that computer RPGs often do that better. Gloomhaven does that better. It’s about as much of a game as a game of craps - you roll and try not to roll snake eyes. It’s not much of a game. But I also think it’s worth noting too that it can’t do it much better, or - as proved by 4e - it takes away too much from the simulation.
Similarly, we know from the long history of TTRPGs that narrative mechanics are generally only accepted grudgingly, and slowly. I know gamers to this day who complain about how in the roman RPG Fulminata, your social rank determined initiative. We have slowly come around to what Wushu invented - the idea that it doesn’t matter what the fiction says, the game is only over when the hitpoints of the story run down - but even that is very contentious. Blades in the Dark‘s Fiction First principle is angrily against such things (although maybe not - it’s not really clear what that means). We’ve realized that for the most part, virtue and flaw mechanics are dumb because it means you get more combat points to spend if you hog the spotlight with your narrative baggage. The GM has to give you another scene about your nightmares AND you get more points to spend on gun skills? Not fair.
The RPG industry famously has very little memory: the reason fantasy heartbreakers exist is because so many people start with D&D and then inevitably hit a wall of “wait, we can do better”. They even come to this realization if they’re the Critical Role guys! But the consequence is we’re almost always stuck in 1976, design-wise, still learning the same lessons, generation after generation. But I think despite this, we are creeping forward as I say. We’re getting people to move away from flaw points. To accept Drama Points or GM fiat for narrative flair. To be okay with someone getting to go first because they have Impulsive Hothead as a narrative principle, not because they have a high dexterity. But I still think we’re trapped in the tyranny of truth-making that comes from simulation.
Back in Part One, I mentioned the vibes vs plot debate, which was primarily set off by the fantastic Partick H. Willems, who shot to youtube fame with his amazing X-Men by Wes Anderson video. He kicked off that discussion with this video which starts by explaining that plot isn’t what films are made of, despite our obsession with plot. There’s a key example of this at the 32 minute mark, from the 2006 Miami Vice film . Willems explains that the scene we’re about to see has the following plot: the two leads coerce their informant to set up a meet and greet with the cartel. In the actual scene, Crocket (Colin Farrell) breaks away from the conversation and stares out over the ocean, as if imagining an escape. This is important. Regardless of Willem’s ideas about vibe movies, this is about motif, and theme, and character. The opening act of the film has an informant trying to leave Miami and save his girlfriend; when he discovers his girlfriend has been killed the informant commits suicide. Later, Crocket seduces the wife of the cartel leader and talks about running away with her, but they both fear it is too dangerous. Crocket’s partner, Tubbs has a romantic interest who is terribly injured. Crocket wants to preserve the woman he has fallen for she is a criminal and he is also lying to her about being a cop. The film is about how being cast into the battle between vice cops and drug dealers, the lead characters compromise their true desires and may be trapped.
The point of all this is that in most TTRPGs, if you were playing out the scene where Crocket and Tubbs get the informant to set up a meeting, you would focus on plot. You’d roll Negotiate and see if you did well or not, and that would determine how the scene played out. You would not have Crocket’s player roll his Need To Escape. You wouldn’t activate Lonely Stare. You wouldn’t even check a table for The Ocean Is The Stand-In For Freedom.
There are exceptions. Again, I’m not the only person talking about this. Smallville understood this. Robin Laws got into this with Hillfolk, GUMSHOE and Hamlet’s Hitpoints. As Laws has it, there are procedural scenes, where the plot is interacted with and moved forward, and character scenes, which have characters develop and engage in conflict. Smallville, famously, was originally written with plot-moving mechanics in it, but then they course-corrected through playtesting. In that game, Superman never ever punches Lex Luthor with his fists. He rolls his JUSTICE plus his relationship to LOIS to decide if he will save the world or his girlfriend.
But this kind of thing is still rare as hen’s teeth and I’ll argue that one reason it is so is because, just like we’ve got poor game mechanics for the sake of simulation, we’ve got poor narrative mechanics for the sake of simulation. Because simulation is obsessed with “what is true”, we can’t get away from plot. Again, as I said in Part 2, this doesn’t make the standard RPG model bad. It just means there’s other things we can do.
Let me give you another example. I was playing The Score recently and we’d loaded an endangered tiger onto the boat we’d come to the island in. Then later, as we ran to escape, it turned out we’d been set up, and the drug dealers were already on the boat we were running too. They came out and held some of the crew at gunpoint. Then we turned over the last card and it activated my driving skills. I explained that when we had said we’d loaded the tigers onto the boat, the camera had just shown a boat’s interior: we were actually loading them onto the drug dealer’s boat! Which I was now driving, and smashing into our smaller one (with time for our crew to dive safely into the water). Again, this would be a difficult thing to do in your standard RPG because if you say “hey, GM, we load the tiger onto our boat”, that (usually) becomes true. You can add flashbacks, you can spend a Drama Point to make a boat show up, but usually - USUALLY - you can’t edit the past. Because that’s not what GNSMISHMASH is all about. If you can edit the past, simulation stops working. Players stop feeling like their actions have consequences. The tension in most RPGs comes from that simulation element: we did kill the goblin guard so nobody knows we’re coming. The GM cannot later say we did not kill the goblin guard. We rolled to hit and he died. We spent points on our stabbing skills and our move silently precisely SO we could kill the goblin guard. To change this would actually be unfair, because it would invalidate spending those points.
But story does not work like this. Story has no chronology. More importantly, the camera does not work like this. The camera always lies. Plot is a made-up thing experienced by the audience and only the audience. And the audience is always being lied to, because that’s how stories work; they present elements that the audience think are true things that the characters are doing as if those characters were real and time moved forward, but when we create stories, we present ideas. And so there is the issue: if we insist on serving the GNSMISHMASH of “this has become true”, we can be prevented in actually going where narrative mechanics can take us.
THAT SAID not everyone wants to go away into narrative mechanics. It can feel invalidating, like the example above. It can feel “weird”. For example, some players don’t like Brindlewood Bay‘s mechanic where the players just decide who is guilty of the crimes, even thought authors do this mid-book all the time: it can feel like the characters are just framing someone. In the GUMSHOE system seen in Trail of Cthulhu, you never fail investigation tests, because it’s pretty rare in CSI that the labs get lost or they just can’t figure out how the blood splatter fell, but when we ran that game the lack of the role made it feel like we weren’t “doing” anything in the scene. The simulation felt empty because there was nothing for our character to push against. We were also able to understand that when we “failed” at something in other games, it didn’t mean the characters were incompetent, it just meant the plot wasn’t in that position, or that scene wasn’t really a good one in the plot - we were already converting things to have more narrative meaning. And that is the beauty and the flaw of the GNSMISHMASH - because it is three goals glued together, it can lead to groups being terrible mismatched, but it also lets us shuffle these hobbies back and forth across each other, in a way where the friction makes things fun or funny, rather than hurting the game. Where the tension between the three goals becomes the spring in the trampoline of fun. The whole fun comes from the fact that the audience and the author are the same person, and if we go too far into author, we stop being audience.
But as an autistic person, I really struggle playing TTRPGs because I never know if I’m supposed to be writing a story or acting as a character or maximizing as a player, and the GM often refuses to tell me. And one of the reasons I burned myself out as a GM was because I shifted from running pre-written adventures (where there always was a simulation happening, a set truth for me to present) to doing more improv stuff, where the ability to both make anything I wanted be true AND present things however I wanted ended up with me just not knowing what to say. It’s great to have the combo. But I need clarity. And just as I really like how 4E opened up a whole new game of skirmish fun, I want to push this envelope into narrative much much further. I do want to roll for The Ocean Is a Metaphor for Freedom. And given how much people want to put RPGs on the stage, I think the world does too. Let’s see where we can go! But along the way yes, we might have to let go of “truth making” all the time. Funnily enough, what we find in The Score is people love to see it go. Because constantly worrying about what’s true makes them play defensively and get anxious all the time. We tend to say that creativity is the hard part of RPGs, but I think for most people, it’s actually way easier than figuring out what feat you should take.
And since the Actual Play movement is more and more focusing on story, it’s time to rethink what RPGs actually are. We didn’t call The Score an RPG because that name has too much baggage - not just all the math and the chunky books and such, but that fear of having to choose feats. And if D&D insists on squatting on that idea and ruining it for everyone, I’m going over here to do something else, like the RPG I just finished which does what is impossible with truth-making approaches: it runs in reverse.
(Although I’m not entirely giving up the GNSMISHMASH of course - I’m actually working on a traditional RPG right now as well.)
https://dconstructions.wordpress.com/2024/11/06/the-camera-always-lies-part-3-the-tyranny-of-truth-making/
http://dconstructions.wordpress.com/?p=4743