You've given me a new perspective on the Rocky training montage - which I guess is one of the most unalloyed win spaces in cinematic history, since we know it prefigures an understood conflict, rather than (as in capers/sprees) that moment when it all goes wrong.
Excellent post and analysis. Players really like to occupy the Win Space, with minimal amounts of time spent in the Loss Space. (I have seen excessive amounts of time spent in Loss Space dynamite campaigns that appeared to have excellent potential.)
In the Groundhog Day example, we also see that Murray's character isn't able to escape his situation - if the arrow's moving upward, it's doing so against a downdraft and not getting very far. That sequence explores the premise, sure, but it also establishes the way the character is trapped and gets across not just his efforts to escape... but the fact that his will is broken and he sort of gives up trying.
For sure there's measurable conflict in these encounters, but they're also episodes that illustrate, usually standing for something larger. Parker's training stands in for a lot of other training; the Ghostbuster's first case stands in for many cases. It's not just exploring the premise, it's representing the premise so that we can better appreciate the departure from the characters's (often new) norm throughout the second act.
If Ghostbusters were a TV show, we could've spent a couple of episodes on that time exploring the premise, just to set up more Gozer action in the last two or three episodes. But that's not just exploring
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In my Changeling: the lost game, I think we spent the first four sessions just establishing what "Normal" felt like for the motley to allow them to establish patterns, cooking habits, meal schedules and all those points of mundanity that when something bad happen, get shook up and get disrupted.
It's an important thing to do, for sure. I think my last D&D campaign(s) suffered a bit from not having a good baseline for normalcy for the characters, even if it was just established in dialogue or a single encounter. It's one thing to plunge the characters into weirdness early on, but it's quite another to do it without some understanding of what's normal - even if normal for the PCs is as weird as faerie huntsmen and bloody dungeons.
Actually, I'm beginning to wonder if this is a common downfall of many established campaign structures for roleplaying games; a lack of normalcy. A lot of adventures go straight into "Here's a mysterious map to a magical treasure." We're told that the heroes are "adventurers" in a non-descript sense, but we don't really know what that means. It becomes difficult to know when the events of the story have gone past what is normal for "adventurers" in the setting. Do these people regularly save the world from terrible danger, or is this something out of the ordinary
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The other thing that we see in the later two examples is an establishment of the rules of the setting (The Matrix also offers a good example of this). While providing some fun, these scenes establish what the hero can and cannot do according to the rules of the setting, thus providing a context for the hero to later dramatically transcend those rules (i.e. don't cross the streams).
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For sure there's measurable conflict in these encounters, but they're also episodes that illustrate, usually standing for something larger. Parker's training stands in for a lot of other training; the Ghostbuster's first case stands in for many cases. It's not just exploring the premise, it's representing the premise so that we can better appreciate the departure from the characters's (often new) norm throughout the second act.
If Ghostbusters were a TV show, we could've spent a couple of episodes on that time exploring the premise, just to set up more Gozer action in the last two or three episodes. But that's not just exploring ( ... )
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