As our step-by-step exploration of the Storyjammers’ Journey continues, we get to the heart and soul of storyjamming, the activity that we want to get immersed in, the jam itself. Storyjamming has little to do with making up stories. In fact, most of its best techniques aim specifically to stop you from making up a story. It has to do with exploring the story already there. It has to do with hunting down a story that already exists.
Links
- Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk
- A thread on Story Games about investigative games (kind of old now)
- The Way of the Human Being, by Calvin Luther Martin
- Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs, by Rane Willerslev
Over in Jason’s “[D&D 4E] Fun with Elminster’s Ecologies” thread on story-games, he mentions this:
‘So, I made little cards for her, with the various bits of flora and fauna, so she can just pull one out and work it into her description. We get the color, we spice it up by having it come from someone other than me all the time, and she really gets to come off as the person with the incredible knowledge of nature, which just doesn’t happen when the GM says, “You know that…” and proceeds to say what you know. It just doesn’t work the same as when the player gets to say it.’
I found the “it just doesn’t work the same” part an interesting counterpoint to the discussion of investigative games in this episode and whether there’s a difference between creating a solution and discovering the pre-existing solution. It seemed to me that you guys were a little quick to gloss over that difference and jumped right to advocating for the “storyjamming” playstyle.
Wait, you make up a story for your investigative games? Cause as a GM, I never did. Why should I? I chuck a tidbit at the players and let them run with it. What they do has a direct impact on where the story goes because I never wrote anything.
Again, going to have to go off of my Shadowrun experiences, I walk in with an objective. Get this item. Make this happen. Something. A one liner. Just about everything else is made on the fly depending on what the players do/say/act. And, since it’s the players that are making it up, the occasional plot hole is usually filled in by them and their imagination. No GM prodding required.
Give it, the better part of it is the players never know that I’ve got nothing and they’re the real pilots here. I’m just an interface to the world they created, adding some nuggets and twists as ambition permits.
And Good old Ganakagok… The game I learned that one should never under any circumstances be a hero of the people. Just sayin’.
Not sure I really catch your meaning here, Dan. To my mind, it seems like the same point: it’s more interesting to have the color and the details coming from all around the table, rather than just one person–even if some players need a list to take items from in order to do that!
I can’t really speak much for my detractors, but I’d guess that they’d consider that as inauthentic as collaborative investigations. You’re not “really” solving the mystery, since the GM is making up the facts as he goes along.
Are you able to keep up with your own story that way? One of the really great elements of a mystery is how convoluted, complex plots come together in the end. It seems like trying to spin that kind of complexity on the fly could get you into trouble. As I’ve said elsewhere, a good collaborative group can check for consistencies and plot holes much more effectively than single person who has to keep it all straight. How convoluted do your mysteries get that way?
Jason, my point is that there is a qualitatively different experience between suggesting a solution and finding THE solution. The parallel I was trying to point out is that there is a qualitatively different experience between actually knowing “facts” about the world (even via cards) and bringing them up at appropriate times and the GM telling me, “as you know, Dan, blah blah blah”. Your reply suggests that the only difference is the quantity of narrators, but I don’t think that’s right. Would the experience have changed if you gave those cards to another non-GM player besides your wife, so he could tell her what her character knew?
Oh, I see. Well, yes, I’d agree, it’s different, though my point wasn’t just so much that it’s different as that I think it’s better. You’re right, having another player telling you what you know would feel about as lame as the GM telling you what you know. To really feel like you are this great, awesome character who knows all this stuff, it really needs to be you who says it, not someone else telling you what you know.
Though, that seems to reinforce my point about investigation games, no? If I’m this incredible detective, then I should be the one who gets to point out the clue that everybody else missed, right? Think about trying to turn the TV show Monk into an RPG. The cool thing about playing Monk is when you get to point out some tiny detail that everybody else missed that pulls everything together. I would think that getting to describe that detail would be a lot better an experience than the GM telling me what detail I found, don’t you?
As for making clues up along the way, how is that different from any story out there? If you are reading a mystery novel, the author makes up evidence as the story progresses. In my brain, this is no different.
And it’s not like I’d have to. The players are throwing out what they think is happening and what they think is happening next. I loved every minute of it, because they were telling me lovely plot points for later. And if they weren’t doing that, there were always plenty of groups that easily ‘fit’ into the shenanigans.
As for the ‘Were you able to keep up with my own story’ point, no. I never had a story to keep up with. Again, it’s the players for whatever reason verbally saying what they thought was happening that led the story. It never got convoluted, because they were the ones keeping track. All you have to do is keep notes on what they’re thinking and you’re golden. By the time a few games are done, and they’ve messed with some small time things, you begin to tie up the threads and plot points to culminate in a big reveal at the end based on all the stuff that was happening. It worked stunningly well for the couple of times I’ve run that type of game.
This method only works if you have a couple of games to play with. A one shot? Not so much. It’s too rushed for my tastes. I like the players to establish themselves, their beliefs, and their thoughts about what is going on before I start pulling the strings to make them start questioning what they believe is happening, and after a poke or two, they write the rest.
“To really feel like you are this great, awesome character who knows all this stuff, it really needs to be you who says it, not someone else telling you what you know.”
And I’d suggest that the subjective feeling of NOT knowing something is a prerequisite for experiencing “discovery” or “solving”, and my subjective feeling of “not knowing” is undercut if I believe that whatever I say will be true. If I propose a solution for a mystery and it’s accepted because it’s cool rather than because it is validated against something that feels like an objective standard then I’ll feel a degree of artificiality or hollowness.
And let me say I’m not an expert in investigative games as either player, GM, or designer. I understand (and to some extent agree with) your POV that, as a Monk-like character, you ought to be able to “notice” clues that others don’t. I’m not sure exactly how I’d solve that if I were trying to create an investigative game (although thinking about it has given me some really interesting ideas I want to ponder). Maybe there’s a difference between “clues” and “solutions”? Maybe not all clues are created equal?
@Dustin: It sounds like we might be in violent agreement. It sounds like you’re suggesting much the same process, but simply placing the burden on the GM to handle it that way, rather than devising a system to run the game that way. By “keeping up with the story,” I don’t necessarily mean “keeping up with the story you had in mind,” so much as “keeping up with the story at the table.” It seems to me that one of the really defining aspects of a great investigation game is that it’s a very complex story that ends with a very elegant solution. Which is probably one of the hardest things to improv on- the fly. Coming up with more and more complications on the fly is easy, but then you’ve got to keep up with this increasingly convoluted plot, and in the end, come up with something that simply and elegantly ties it all together. Which seems like a tall order for any single person to pull off.
If you put it on the group, though, you’ll have a very satisfying ending. Not in an objective sense, but one satisfying to all the people in the room—which is all that ever really matters, isn’t it? As a GM, I might introduce a solution that I consider very simple, elegant and satisfying. But another player, who’s focused on some different aspects entirely from the ones that I focused on, might find it deeply unsatisfying, because it doesn’t address the aspects he focused on quite so well. If you come to a conclusion collaboratively, then you’re going to get the most satisfying conclusion for everyone, because it’s come from everyone, so it address all the things that the people there are worried about. Someone else hearing about it might feel as unsatisfied as that other player did when the GM came up with it, but who cares about him? He isn’t playing!
@Dan: Ah, I think I see what you’re saying. Do you consider the roll of the dice an objective standard? Say you introduce a clue, but we’ll end up rolling to see if it’s true or not. Or maybe you find a clue, and your interpretation of it is either on or off based on your die roll? So, I can say, “I found a bloody footprint!” And I say that the footprint proves that the killer was a man. I roll dice, and maybe I’m right, so we’re closer to the killer because now we know that he was a man. But maybe I’m wrong, in which case the clue is open to re-interpretation. Maybe the footprint isn’t the killer’s. Maybe it shows us that there was a witness. If I were designing this game, I’d leave that roll for later on, so you can build up a case based on one clue, and have that moment of reversal when you realize you misinterpreted it.
When I consider the times when I’ve experienced that thrill of discovery in a game, it hasn’t had anything to do with who’s introducing the clues, it’s had to do with when I saw a pattern that made all the clues fit together. I think that’s the real heart and soul you want to get at in a good investigation game. Though, at least half the time, I’ve had those moments ruined, because I’d come up with a different solution than the one the GM had imagined, so I’d go from one of the most sublime moments in gaming to one of the most frustrating in a few seconds.
“Do you consider the roll of the dice an objective standard?”
I think it would still have an element of hollowness to it. As I said, though, I haven’t played many investigative games so I can’t speak from a lot of personal experience.
“When I consider the times when I’ve experienced that thrill of discovery in a game, it hasn’t had anything to do with who’s introducing the clues, it’s had to do with when I saw a pattern that made all the clues fit together.”
I’m not trying to argue that “who describes the clues” is the heart and soul of investigative games. I was trying to give you an example that demonstrated that there is more subtlety to experiencing a game than just the single dimension of “amount of collaboration = goodness of game” that I think you veer toward.
“Though, at least half the time, I’ve had those moments ruined, because I’d come up with a different solution than the one the GM had imagined, so I’d go from one of the most sublime moments in gaming to one of the most frustrating in a few seconds.”
How would you compare this with an “I didn’t kill the goblin with my Sword of Awesome? This game sucks!” experience? I get what you are saying, but I also think that the possibility of being wrong with your theories is an important part feeling good about your theory being right. This might also be a preference issue. I’m not interested in 3:16 because my reaction to the “you roll dice to see HOW MANY YOU KILL!” thing is to think “so killing them is essentially meaningless color?” rather than “this will let my character be a total badass!”
I see what you’re saying, and I agree; there is something important about possibly being wrong. It’s not a solution being wrong that bothers me if I find some clue that breaks my theory; it’s being wrong when my theory fits the facts just as well as (and sometimes, better than) the theory that the GM imagined. After all, as I mentioned in my reply to Dustin, when you ask a single individual to keep track of everything, it’s easy to miss things or forget things, or simply not to focus on one clue as much as someone else does, and you run into plot holes. The GM’s solution might not even always fit the clues that he’s introduced. My theory might fit the facts better than his “real” solution. It’s the arbitrariness of it that’s so disappointing.
Well, I enjoyed the episode. As a relative newcommer to the RPG hobby (I played 20 years ago, but so much has changed since then), I really like all the controversy & the feeling that there’s this incredible new thing which has nothing to do with computer games & everything to do with people sitting together around a campfire & telling great stories, cooperatively rather than just one person narrating everything like a book.
Thanks, Aaron. Glad you enjoyed it. I felt much the same way when I first heard about these new kinds of games!