trying to figure something out about games and stories
Can you help me figure out how to run a Barsoom game?
Here's the problem: people get all fired up watching adventure movies or reading books and then they want to play out those adventures in an RPG. Only the book/movie stories are carefully constructed to play out toward a conclusion and the heroes act the way they have to in order to make those conclusions happen and your players probably won't.
They won't fall in love with the princess or they won't think it unthinkable to leave the last soldier behind or they'll prefer to become mustard farmers or (most likely altogether) they'll do something stupid (while they're trying to be heroic? while they're running away? doesn't matter) and to maintain suspension of disbelief and investment in the Mighty Perils you'll have to kill them. And then it won't be the epic adventure you were hoping for.
OK, so far so familiar: I see 2 main camps around this issue:
1. imagine harder! Consult the players on what they want, set out Goals and Drives, accept that you're telling a story and that some challenges are going to be illusory, but enjoy the ride anyway and ham it up in the final scene.
2. die like a man! (live like a rat): Noble Goals are all very well but you probably won't survive to think of any, let alone realise them. Destiny and saviours are lies told by historians. Decide what you want and go after it, then do that again when that character fails. Accept that you're not emulating fiction except for setting details, but enjoy the challenges, which are real.
ERB's Barsoom stories are a prime example of a source that's hard to emulate. John Carter is a gol-danged hero, darnit, and Dejah Thoris is his motivation, and I just cannot imagine making that work around a gaming table. I say that at greater length here.
So. If you know how to reconcile these two approaches and deliver actual heroic mighty struggles with real challenges, then please tell me about it because what you have to say is better than what follows.
If you don't, here's a little insight I had - no doubt others (Bakhtin, for one) have had much better insights and/or said this better.
Carter's aims are always somewhat oblique to the path of events, and that’s critical for the writer, who can therefore keep those events parading past without them overwhelming the story. Because his goal is not to be king, ERB can make him a king without destroying/ending the story, and we get to enjoy him being king and all the finery and passing background, and then he’s off again being a pauper or a spy or just running really fast toward the goal which is always tantalizingly out of reach (DT). This structure is I think different both from the Luke type hero’s journey construction, which annoyed people so much in Dragonlance and later products, and from the Han Solo/Cugel type picaresque adventure structure, where our iconic hero encounters the situation of the week and opportunistically gains or loses from it.
Maybe the metaphor for this structure is either the chase or the waterfall (depending on the proportions of carrot and stick in play): in the chase, some desired object is getting away and you have to go after it, solve riddles, find it on maps, beat the nazis - you wrote about this recently, I guess. In the waterfall case you’re swimming against a current that wants to drag you to your doom (over the waterfall). The goal (dry land) may be nearby but it’s just out of reach. The water/current is various obstacles thrown into your path (the princess is kidnapped/an impostor/not where you thought she would be. Your allies need to you help them before they’ll help you or they have their own princess to rescue or the princess is infected with a disease you have to cure…). You can be knocked back by an obstacle or even, rarely, profit by it. A bad knock-back risks losing the goal altogether.
I could see running either a chase or a waterfall game - the former relies only on victory conditions and risks the players defining other objectives, the latter sets definite failure conditions: it’s more railroady but that might be fun, too - you’re not railroaded toward a goal exactly, but you are challenged to keep up.
I suspect the goal must be the same for all members of the party - and if it’s a good enough goal it could serve to recruit new party members to replace casualties (in which case the goal becomes the star of the game, which might be a problem in itself). I guess this is CoC’s structure within an adventure, although there it seems the metastructure is “things are OK, oh no this is wrong, restore the balance” (actually that's superhero stories: CoC has the meta-metastructure "everything you thought was OK and balanced is wrong").
Good goals for a party: Vikings came and stole all our DTs (sorry); find and repair the air engines or we’ll slowly suffocate; stop the Therns meddling and destroying us; overthrow the evil empire; clear dad’s name/prove your innocence.
No doubt this is all dead obvious. Reading back over it, I kinda think that's how everything's structured. Everything except just-started-up, first level DnD games, perhaps. Still, I wonder if in actual play it would allow us to have those epic adventures, rather than hardscrabble, gold-grubbing, Russian-roulette spelunking. Or if all bets are off the moment you get the allegiance of a big bunch of Tharks and whatever you thought you were doing before, now you're looting Helium.
Problems with this structure: 1. all such goals require backstory, which is railroady. You are saying "we will play this game which is about fixing the air engines." This will annoy a contingent of hardcore sandboxers (unless, perhaps, you say "do whatever you like, but be aware that the air is running out, the water is draining away, locusts got the crops and the Therns got your love interests... so whatever you want but you might want to focus on those things"). 2. whisking the end-goal out of reach will annoy your players unless it's done very cleverly or it's been foreshadowed to set expectations or there's a consolation prize. 3. goods piling up is anathema to capitalism: JC gets to handle aircraft and artillery and kingly authority and all kinds of goodies, but then he lets them go again for the next step. Your players will not want to let them go. Trust me. Which will complicate your later challenges and may lead to some kind of arms race.