The Myth of the Fragmentary Story, Part 2: The Deep Blue Sea
Is anarchy the alternative to order? If we reject, implicitly, explicitly, accidentally, the imposition of either source of structure, what will actually happen at the table? If we are not playing Iconic characters, or if we are not engaging in a formulaic story, is there not a risk of becoming lost in the sea of non-genre melodrama, flailing about just hoping something interesting happens essentially by accident? That is the alternative that we fear. I’m sure I’m not alone in having played (and run) well-intentioned games that simply went nowhere because they lacked either an initiating spark or a collective capacity for finding a story.
Some early, delicate stage in a new non-structured game the Myth of the Fragmentary Story is part of a delicate meta-game negotiation, a buried conversation that’s as complicated as any human relationship based on the wants and needs of a half-dozen people trying to exist in harmony. The negotiation is this: What do we care about? Why? What is going to affect the things we care about and how? What do we want? How will we achieve it? What resources can we draw on for any or all of those?My least-successful campaigns have all failed to answer the most basic question that is inherently answered by a genre structure: What is the game about?
Crucially, we must recognise that whether we have a unified or disparate scenario, a failure to find story is collective. It cannot practically be the case that only one player succeeds and all the rest fail - and that includes the so-called “Storyteller” who manages the world the others play in. Everyone, or at least a critical majority, must all succeed together. To an extent, the group story paradigm discussed earlier allows a single point of failure to exist, where disengagement with “the story” is automatically catastrophic. The most hardy and adaptable games may survive a complete realignment in the middle of the action, but my experience suggests that most strongly shared narrative spaces cannot substantially alter the inherent momentum of the collective around the table. What inevitably gets sacrificed in this grind is any hint of individuality that cannot be fully integrated or sublimated into the main story.
By far the easiest way to fail collectively when stepping back from genre forms is to simply fail to generate a spark of action. This has been my experience with quite a few collective world-building game starting points now. The bitterest versions for me are Dresden Files and Smallville, because I have had the most fun using their world-creation tools initially. Somehow these games have kicked out starting arrangements which neither fully commit to truly individual stories, nor impose an overall story on the group collectively. Most often what seems to happen is that you end up with a disparate collage of ideas, where each individual has decided deliberately not to impose themselves on the group, and so each inert story element added in the creation process adds up to an overall inertia. Fragmentation allows the failure to occur, but it remains collective in a sense, a failure rooted in what you might think of as politeness.
This politeness effectively means hiding your own story needs and often it means not committing yourself to others’ needs as an alternative either; it is a problem exacerbated by our habit of trying to separate in-game and out-of-game knowledge in case some kind of cross-contamination ruins everything. Not making explicit your needs virtually guarantees that they won’t be observed and fulfilled, not paying attention to the equally not-explicit needs of others guarantees you won’t be part of fulfilling them for others. That, or any significant fraction of that, is a recipe for failure. The rule of all story is to show, rather than tell, but I think in RPGs the surest thing is to do both. Without exposition, it’s altogether possible that your first story salvo will be missed or misconstrued. There’s a host of tips’n’tricks for ameliorating that possibility that would fill an essay by themselves, all rendered redundant by being honest at the table about what you’re after, rather than making your fellows play an elaborate guessing game while you simultaneously play a guessing game yourself about others’ intentions. The shortest answer is to be as clear as possible in how you frame your wants.
Parenthetically, I think this is a lesson that also applies to what I’ve been calling the group story paradigm. I’ve seen games with a solid story chassis go wrong because the GM failed to really outline what they were after in a game, forcing players to play the guessing game about where their interests should lie. More problematically, I’ve seen more than a few players effectively “act out” by disrupting the game when they’re not interested in the central storyline and the response has almost universally been for the GM to crack down in some way, rather than risk altering their precious pre-scripted story to meet the players half way.
The risk you take in openly declaring your thirst for blood/romance/heists is a bit more complex. In part, it risks turning a negotiation into a demand. Perhaps the least satisfying experience I’ve ever had as a player came from a frustrated call from me to the GM for him to hit some, any, of my character’s designed-in story points; it was a FATE game, so they were literally written down in the form of my character’s Aspects. He rolled the story points I’d suggested out like clockwork with such naked efficiency that the game felt more like masochism than drama. Sometimes what you want changes, but having made one aspect of it explicit, it becomes set in stone. There are two obvious points to note. The first is, you don’t always get what you want, and not getting what you want is a real part of any collaborative experience because when you are prepared to meet others half way, you usually get something better. The second is, there’s nothing preventing you from simply re-expositing. Change is not only inevitable, but desirable, and as your needs and wants change you can change what you communicate to the group.
The potentially bigger problem, particularly with a non-genre paradigm is that you might not actually know what you want. I rarely arrive at a game with a check-list of things I want to see, because a big part of playing is in order to find out what‘s going to happen, even if that’s within a well-defined story-field (i.e. even when you “know what the game’s about”, you don’t necessarily know what’s actually going to happen). Some of the best and most satisfying experiences I’ve had at the table are when another player appears to read my mind, before I know myself what I’m thinking. It’s a hard road of getting to know people really well, and of not being afraid to trust them to do what’s best, not necessarily what you wanted in advance. We’ve all got those peculiar friends and have played with those peculiarly talented people who can fake it, who elevate any RPG from a sociable night out into tangible drama.
The successful strategy for counteracting the sensation of being lost or aimless is two-fold. The first part should be reasonably obvious by now - pick a direction and go for it, and tell everyone at the table that you’re doing it. This is a narrative version of either Newton’s second law or the second law of Thermodynamics. Every action you take has, or should have, a reaction. That is the very essence of storytelling of any kind. There are no stories about characters sitting at home doing nothing. Even in Seinfeld, the characters are perpetually in motion. If anything, Jerry and friends have an over-active engagement in the world around them. These actions and reactions all add together to form greater complexity, becoming open systems in which new possibilities are perpetually being created, rather than slowly winding down into the simplest low-energy state available (i.e. stories are non-entropic if you want them to be). Storytelling in a way is finding patterns in the shifting and moving of different elements, and to an extent the more elements in some kind of motion, the easier it is to pick out a solution.
The second part is to take equally seriously the energy of your cohorts. To a large extent, everyone’s in the same situation and they will be equally trying to find a story that compels them. If you and they are in separate story silos, with no obvious connection, that simply means that inside the fiction the characters are not connected. At the level of the play-group, however, everyone is still in the same environment and experiencing the same story milieu. This automatically makes the overall narrative into more of a true ensemble, and there are plenty of examples of absolutely compelling ensemble dramas to view alongside the more straightforward hero-protagonist model. The most popular at the moment is Game of Thrones, which I have yet to hear anyone describe as a fragmentary story. We all accept that while many characters have no direct and specific connection, they are all integral in the holistic picture of the world.
This requires a different discipline from the unitary adventurer split into 5 bodies that is the staple of the adventure or mission game, my “group story paradigm”. As noted, the practical time-split across characters in that paradigm means that in truth you each have an equal share of the spotlight time, which you retain in a more separate story silo. What needs to be jettisoned to make this connection is the traditional character/player divide, which in the Old School meant strictly acting on in-character knowledge only, in an arbitrary way unknown in other dramatic forms. Think about any narrative where a character has made a coincident decision - what is that other than their player reacting to a meta-game cue to link up stories, even if just for a moment.
Paradoxically, the benefit that accrues from a whole group of characters all actively pursuing story possibilities is a far greater story density and complexity than you get when all the characters are perfectly aligned inside, say, a mission-based paradigm. What you get, in effect, is every player contributing story elements and pursuing a story agenda. That increase in, if you like, raw story material, gives everyone at the table more flexibility and allows a much more comprehensive story field. This also distributes and shares the responsibility for generating story, meaning that the incidence of observer characters decreases. It has the real potential to increase engagement. Rather than fragmenting the story, it really expands it, densifies it and makes it more robust.
If we require a collective success for the group-story paradigm, in a so-called fragmentary story, then in the so-called fragmented story, we require only individual successes which can coalesce to form a larger complex (or complexes).
There are plenty of fictional examples available, but the most recent that I’ve been enjoying is Justified. There are essentially 3 main protagonists in Justified, with a small slate of secondary protagonists with various levels of importance - Raylan, Boyd, and Ava. At different times across the show these characters’ stories intersect and interact with staple secondary characters like Wynne and Dewey Crowe. The characters all share a basic story context - the season-arc nemesis - but surrounding and interpenetrating that shared element are their individual stories and tribulations. Often their stories intersect indirectly, as Raylan does something which interferes with Boyd’s plans, or Ava takes an action which requires a follow-up from Boyd. We end up with something approaching a true multi-faceted drama that is fascinating from each perspective. Reimagining the show following exclusively Raylan or Boyd or Ava would be to imagine a much poorer story field.
I think we can contrast with other so-called ensemble shows, such as Firefly. The drama each week in that short-lived bit of genius was compelling and interesting and we all loved the characters, but the stories themselves were always actually quite simple, even one-dimensional. The completely integrated story of the group-as-a-group meant that even episodes where there was split action, the main momentum of all the characters’ actions shared a through-line.
I’ve played in several games now which used a truly multi-character story platform. The first was a Lace and Steel game, where each of the three original players ardently pursued our own story agendas, completely disconnected on a fine granular level. I was just as fascinated to see how Lady Kirkbolton’s courtship played out around her official duties as I was to see how my own character’s career as a cat burglar progressed in the decidedly un-equal-opportunity world of 17th century pseudo-Europe. Being fascinated by the other characters’ stories made the moments of true confluence really crackle with energy. When Sebastian and Esmeralda staged a rescue mission to an Island Fortress to rescue Lady Kirkbolton’s by-then fiancé, it was a story pay-off of epic proportions, far beyond any of the run-of-the-mill mission games I’d played routinely in that mode in the decades previous. While “our stories” were all fragmentary and isolated, even ostensibly secret, they were really different parts of a larger narrative. When the rescue mission was required, I as a player didn’t turn to Lady Kirkbolton’s player and say “I’m sorry, but my criminal side-jobs have never been previously shown in a scene with Lady Kirkbolton, so I can’t help”. I, and Sebastian’s player, just grabbed the opportunity to cross the streams for glorious effect.
The key to making these multi-faceted stories work is to see beyond the myth of the fragmentary story - to place the characters into a larger shared context, so that while the immediate action in any givens scene may be disconnected from the other characters, the consequences are shared. It requires too that everyone in the game take a real interest in the others in the game beyond the simple mechanics of complementary actions. That is another seeming paradox at the heart of a game with multiple viewpoints: it requires the players to be far less selfish than they can be when all they need to worry about is mission niche protection. As a component part of an adventuring ensemble we are intensively trained to ensure that whatever function we fulfil is needed, but in an ensemble multi-perspective story, that freedom is automatic and the real interest must necessarily be focused outward, on the strengths of others at the table.
Some early, delicate stage in a new non-structured game the Myth of the Fragmentary Story is part of a delicate meta-game negotiation, a buried conversation that’s as complicated as any human relationship based on the wants and needs of a half-dozen people trying to exist in harmony. The negotiation is this: What do we care about? Why? What is going to affect the things we care about and how? What do we want? How will we achieve it? What resources can we draw on for any or all of those?My least-successful campaigns have all failed to answer the most basic question that is inherently answered by a genre structure: What is the game about?
Crucially, we must recognise that whether we have a unified or disparate scenario, a failure to find story is collective. It cannot practically be the case that only one player succeeds and all the rest fail - and that includes the so-called “Storyteller” who manages the world the others play in. Everyone, or at least a critical majority, must all succeed together. To an extent, the group story paradigm discussed earlier allows a single point of failure to exist, where disengagement with “the story” is automatically catastrophic. The most hardy and adaptable games may survive a complete realignment in the middle of the action, but my experience suggests that most strongly shared narrative spaces cannot substantially alter the inherent momentum of the collective around the table. What inevitably gets sacrificed in this grind is any hint of individuality that cannot be fully integrated or sublimated into the main story.
By far the easiest way to fail collectively when stepping back from genre forms is to simply fail to generate a spark of action. This has been my experience with quite a few collective world-building game starting points now. The bitterest versions for me are Dresden Files and Smallville, because I have had the most fun using their world-creation tools initially. Somehow these games have kicked out starting arrangements which neither fully commit to truly individual stories, nor impose an overall story on the group collectively. Most often what seems to happen is that you end up with a disparate collage of ideas, where each individual has decided deliberately not to impose themselves on the group, and so each inert story element added in the creation process adds up to an overall inertia. Fragmentation allows the failure to occur, but it remains collective in a sense, a failure rooted in what you might think of as politeness.
This politeness effectively means hiding your own story needs and often it means not committing yourself to others’ needs as an alternative either; it is a problem exacerbated by our habit of trying to separate in-game and out-of-game knowledge in case some kind of cross-contamination ruins everything. Not making explicit your needs virtually guarantees that they won’t be observed and fulfilled, not paying attention to the equally not-explicit needs of others guarantees you won’t be part of fulfilling them for others. That, or any significant fraction of that, is a recipe for failure. The rule of all story is to show, rather than tell, but I think in RPGs the surest thing is to do both. Without exposition, it’s altogether possible that your first story salvo will be missed or misconstrued. There’s a host of tips’n’tricks for ameliorating that possibility that would fill an essay by themselves, all rendered redundant by being honest at the table about what you’re after, rather than making your fellows play an elaborate guessing game while you simultaneously play a guessing game yourself about others’ intentions. The shortest answer is to be as clear as possible in how you frame your wants.
Parenthetically, I think this is a lesson that also applies to what I’ve been calling the group story paradigm. I’ve seen games with a solid story chassis go wrong because the GM failed to really outline what they were after in a game, forcing players to play the guessing game about where their interests should lie. More problematically, I’ve seen more than a few players effectively “act out” by disrupting the game when they’re not interested in the central storyline and the response has almost universally been for the GM to crack down in some way, rather than risk altering their precious pre-scripted story to meet the players half way.
The risk you take in openly declaring your thirst for blood/romance/heists is a bit more complex. In part, it risks turning a negotiation into a demand. Perhaps the least satisfying experience I’ve ever had as a player came from a frustrated call from me to the GM for him to hit some, any, of my character’s designed-in story points; it was a FATE game, so they were literally written down in the form of my character’s Aspects. He rolled the story points I’d suggested out like clockwork with such naked efficiency that the game felt more like masochism than drama. Sometimes what you want changes, but having made one aspect of it explicit, it becomes set in stone. There are two obvious points to note. The first is, you don’t always get what you want, and not getting what you want is a real part of any collaborative experience because when you are prepared to meet others half way, you usually get something better. The second is, there’s nothing preventing you from simply re-expositing. Change is not only inevitable, but desirable, and as your needs and wants change you can change what you communicate to the group.
The potentially bigger problem, particularly with a non-genre paradigm is that you might not actually know what you want. I rarely arrive at a game with a check-list of things I want to see, because a big part of playing is in order to find out what‘s going to happen, even if that’s within a well-defined story-field (i.e. even when you “know what the game’s about”, you don’t necessarily know what’s actually going to happen). Some of the best and most satisfying experiences I’ve had at the table are when another player appears to read my mind, before I know myself what I’m thinking. It’s a hard road of getting to know people really well, and of not being afraid to trust them to do what’s best, not necessarily what you wanted in advance. We’ve all got those peculiar friends and have played with those peculiarly talented people who can fake it, who elevate any RPG from a sociable night out into tangible drama.
The successful strategy for counteracting the sensation of being lost or aimless is two-fold. The first part should be reasonably obvious by now - pick a direction and go for it, and tell everyone at the table that you’re doing it. This is a narrative version of either Newton’s second law or the second law of Thermodynamics. Every action you take has, or should have, a reaction. That is the very essence of storytelling of any kind. There are no stories about characters sitting at home doing nothing. Even in Seinfeld, the characters are perpetually in motion. If anything, Jerry and friends have an over-active engagement in the world around them. These actions and reactions all add together to form greater complexity, becoming open systems in which new possibilities are perpetually being created, rather than slowly winding down into the simplest low-energy state available (i.e. stories are non-entropic if you want them to be). Storytelling in a way is finding patterns in the shifting and moving of different elements, and to an extent the more elements in some kind of motion, the easier it is to pick out a solution.
The second part is to take equally seriously the energy of your cohorts. To a large extent, everyone’s in the same situation and they will be equally trying to find a story that compels them. If you and they are in separate story silos, with no obvious connection, that simply means that inside the fiction the characters are not connected. At the level of the play-group, however, everyone is still in the same environment and experiencing the same story milieu. This automatically makes the overall narrative into more of a true ensemble, and there are plenty of examples of absolutely compelling ensemble dramas to view alongside the more straightforward hero-protagonist model. The most popular at the moment is Game of Thrones, which I have yet to hear anyone describe as a fragmentary story. We all accept that while many characters have no direct and specific connection, they are all integral in the holistic picture of the world.
This requires a different discipline from the unitary adventurer split into 5 bodies that is the staple of the adventure or mission game, my “group story paradigm”. As noted, the practical time-split across characters in that paradigm means that in truth you each have an equal share of the spotlight time, which you retain in a more separate story silo. What needs to be jettisoned to make this connection is the traditional character/player divide, which in the Old School meant strictly acting on in-character knowledge only, in an arbitrary way unknown in other dramatic forms. Think about any narrative where a character has made a coincident decision - what is that other than their player reacting to a meta-game cue to link up stories, even if just for a moment.
Paradoxically, the benefit that accrues from a whole group of characters all actively pursuing story possibilities is a far greater story density and complexity than you get when all the characters are perfectly aligned inside, say, a mission-based paradigm. What you get, in effect, is every player contributing story elements and pursuing a story agenda. That increase in, if you like, raw story material, gives everyone at the table more flexibility and allows a much more comprehensive story field. This also distributes and shares the responsibility for generating story, meaning that the incidence of observer characters decreases. It has the real potential to increase engagement. Rather than fragmenting the story, it really expands it, densifies it and makes it more robust.
If we require a collective success for the group-story paradigm, in a so-called fragmentary story, then in the so-called fragmented story, we require only individual successes which can coalesce to form a larger complex (or complexes).
There are plenty of fictional examples available, but the most recent that I’ve been enjoying is Justified. There are essentially 3 main protagonists in Justified, with a small slate of secondary protagonists with various levels of importance - Raylan, Boyd, and Ava. At different times across the show these characters’ stories intersect and interact with staple secondary characters like Wynne and Dewey Crowe. The characters all share a basic story context - the season-arc nemesis - but surrounding and interpenetrating that shared element are their individual stories and tribulations. Often their stories intersect indirectly, as Raylan does something which interferes with Boyd’s plans, or Ava takes an action which requires a follow-up from Boyd. We end up with something approaching a true multi-faceted drama that is fascinating from each perspective. Reimagining the show following exclusively Raylan or Boyd or Ava would be to imagine a much poorer story field.
I think we can contrast with other so-called ensemble shows, such as Firefly. The drama each week in that short-lived bit of genius was compelling and interesting and we all loved the characters, but the stories themselves were always actually quite simple, even one-dimensional. The completely integrated story of the group-as-a-group meant that even episodes where there was split action, the main momentum of all the characters’ actions shared a through-line.
I’ve played in several games now which used a truly multi-character story platform. The first was a Lace and Steel game, where each of the three original players ardently pursued our own story agendas, completely disconnected on a fine granular level. I was just as fascinated to see how Lady Kirkbolton’s courtship played out around her official duties as I was to see how my own character’s career as a cat burglar progressed in the decidedly un-equal-opportunity world of 17th century pseudo-Europe. Being fascinated by the other characters’ stories made the moments of true confluence really crackle with energy. When Sebastian and Esmeralda staged a rescue mission to an Island Fortress to rescue Lady Kirkbolton’s by-then fiancé, it was a story pay-off of epic proportions, far beyond any of the run-of-the-mill mission games I’d played routinely in that mode in the decades previous. While “our stories” were all fragmentary and isolated, even ostensibly secret, they were really different parts of a larger narrative. When the rescue mission was required, I as a player didn’t turn to Lady Kirkbolton’s player and say “I’m sorry, but my criminal side-jobs have never been previously shown in a scene with Lady Kirkbolton, so I can’t help”. I, and Sebastian’s player, just grabbed the opportunity to cross the streams for glorious effect.
The key to making these multi-faceted stories work is to see beyond the myth of the fragmentary story - to place the characters into a larger shared context, so that while the immediate action in any givens scene may be disconnected from the other characters, the consequences are shared. It requires too that everyone in the game take a real interest in the others in the game beyond the simple mechanics of complementary actions. That is another seeming paradox at the heart of a game with multiple viewpoints: it requires the players to be far less selfish than they can be when all they need to worry about is mission niche protection. As a component part of an adventuring ensemble we are intensively trained to ensure that whatever function we fulfil is needed, but in an ensemble multi-perspective story, that freedom is automatic and the real interest must necessarily be focused outward, on the strengths of others at the table.