When Time is a wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey ball.
Lately, I've played in several campaigns, and the occasional one-off, that took a very loose approach to narrative structure. Some of this has manifested in multiple characters per player, or the casual assignment of NPCs to players to run for a session, but it also shows up in making the campaign timeline do loops and bows and strange wiggly bits designed to do players' heads in.
So we get flashbacks that establish more of a character's background, or provide more clues or evidence of the Bad Guys (TM) antisocial activities. Or we get cutscenes that show what someone else, like perhaps the Bad Guy, is doing, sometimes as a prologue to the story proper or spliced into the main narrative. One of the things that helps this approach work is a certain flexibility and ambiguity to story elements on the part of both GM and players - it's hard to run a heavily planned game when the outcome of a flashback session could wipe out the initial conditions of several months of roleplaying (the cry of "Damn you for having script immunity!" is a particularly pleasing one to hear, mind), and there are limits to a Tunnel of Fun's ability to force the story back onto its tracks. I've also heard of a roleplaying variant of Memento which took the exact opposite approach, with no ability to deviate from the preordained storyline. Sadly I didn't get a chance to play in that game, so don't know how it turned out. About the biggest risk I've seen so far is one also shared by a multiple character campaign, which is that sometime's it's hard to remember who knows what, when.
Whatever the case, playing fun and games with the timeline can bring a lot of richness into a campaign, as it provides alternate viewpoints to what's going on and allows players to build layers of meaning into their characters that weren't necessarily apparent at the beginning of the story. It's also not a new approach - several friends of my ex-defacto-stepdad's have several times regaled me with the story of a campaign he ran about 20 years ago in which the players split up and he ran the two groups on different nights of the week. One group heard an awesome story about a couple of people who fell off a colosseum and lived, and worked out from the description that it was probably their mates. It was two weeks later that the other group had a run of bizarre dice rolls that culminated in falling off the colosseum and living. Nobody knows if this was planned or luck, and my ex-defacto-stepdad just ain't telling.
So we get flashbacks that establish more of a character's background, or provide more clues or evidence of the Bad Guys (TM) antisocial activities. Or we get cutscenes that show what someone else, like perhaps the Bad Guy, is doing, sometimes as a prologue to the story proper or spliced into the main narrative. One of the things that helps this approach work is a certain flexibility and ambiguity to story elements on the part of both GM and players - it's hard to run a heavily planned game when the outcome of a flashback session could wipe out the initial conditions of several months of roleplaying (the cry of "Damn you for having script immunity!" is a particularly pleasing one to hear, mind), and there are limits to a Tunnel of Fun's ability to force the story back onto its tracks. I've also heard of a roleplaying variant of Memento which took the exact opposite approach, with no ability to deviate from the preordained storyline. Sadly I didn't get a chance to play in that game, so don't know how it turned out. About the biggest risk I've seen so far is one also shared by a multiple character campaign, which is that sometime's it's hard to remember who knows what, when.
Whatever the case, playing fun and games with the timeline can bring a lot of richness into a campaign, as it provides alternate viewpoints to what's going on and allows players to build layers of meaning into their characters that weren't necessarily apparent at the beginning of the story. It's also not a new approach - several friends of my ex-defacto-stepdad's have several times regaled me with the story of a campaign he ran about 20 years ago in which the players split up and he ran the two groups on different nights of the week. One group heard an awesome story about a couple of people who fell off a colosseum and lived, and worked out from the description that it was probably their mates. It was two weeks later that the other group had a run of bizarre dice rolls that culminated in falling off the colosseum and living. Nobody knows if this was planned or luck, and my ex-defacto-stepdad just ain't telling.