The Adventures of Heisenberg’s Cat
The player characters arrive at the crossroads of dead Rome beyond the Vale of the Azure Sun. Behind one of the doors is the land of Barcelas. A tyrant is rising to crush the land beneath his spider minions. His armies are at the gates of Hamokera. If the player characters enter this land, they will turn the tide against this villain. If the player characters don’t enter the land… what? the tyrant takes over? Who cares? No one ever saw, no one will see it. If they arrive at Hamokera later, the plot’s not going to be “a tyrant attempts to take over the world”. It will be “the player characters try to overthrow the evil tyrant”, or “the player characters try to evade the evil tyrant as they continue their mission”, or whatever the player characters try to do.
The plot is what the characters see and interact with, and no more. If you start making the plot be what you know rather than what they do, you’re writing a novel. You don’t need the players for that. Plot is a word used to describe stories and narratives. If the players don’t get caught up on them, they’re not plot points.
So if they ignore the massing army and go west to find their fortune, does that mean the army takes over their hometown? Sure, why not? But that’s not part of the plot. The plot doesn’t start until the player characters decide to do something about it, to take notice in some way. If they do decide to get involved later, then the plot would be something like “hometown sons do well abroad, return to save hometown”.
You can argue about whether plot is more important than character in fiction; but there is no argument in a game such as Gods & Monsters that has definite player characters. In a novel, the author makes the plot. In Gods & Monsters, player characters are the narrative, and the plot is whatever they follow.
To the extent that games like these have plots, the plot doesn’t start until the players are involved. Everything before that is just backstory. Not even backstory, just potential backstory—like the cat whose death Schrödinger tried to pin on Heisenberg, it’s neither there nor not there until the player characters take an interest.
- March 12, 2011: Spilling sand in the sandbox: tying up loose ends
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“Bwian” commented on The Adventures of Heisenberg’s Cat:
The PCs are the centre of the universe! Yay!
I agree with this very strongly. The game can’t help being what the participants together make it. This includes the players—therefore their characters actions are key—as well as the GM—whose input is also key, in a different way. The whole enterprise works better if the GM responds to what the players have their characters do. But also in reverse—it helps if the players take account of what the GM just introduced when deciding what their characters do.
The other side of this is that if what the GM is trying to do is make the world seem ‘world like’ to the players, then using 1) ‘secret plans’ (or introducing pre-planned situations, if you prefer) can be helpful sometimes; and 2) as you so remarked, the situation when the players return to the city better be different than it was when they left. This tends to introduce a need for the GM to silently ‘keep track’ of what is ‘happening’ off-screen. That can be at a small scale (what are the orcs in the other rooms doing while the PCs batter down the door), or on a large scale (so what happened to that city, after the PCs left?).
As a GM I often end up with a lot of loose-ends dangling that require a lot of work (or brain-space) on my part to maintain consistency. Any ideas about how to make this less work to handle, while building/ unfolding a sand-box style environment?
First, I really don’t “silently keep track of what is happening off-screen” once the characters leave the area. What “the area” is will depend on what the adventure was, but if it’s not going to affect them, they’re out of the area. At that point, I don’t bother with what’s happening in that area. I tried to find a picture of Harold and the Purple Crayon for the article, because that’s pretty much the way I treat the game: it follows the player characters.
I really did mean it when I said “the plot doesn’t start until the players are involved” and “everything before that is just… potential backstory.” Of course I do keep notes when something occurs to me about a place they might go, or if something interesting occurs to me about a place they’ve already been. But that’s all they are until the player characters actually go there—scattered notes.
I also write a short summary after each session. If the players return to an area, I go back over these summaries and extrapolate what’s happened since. And if I need to introduce something new later, I’ll do a search for something similar in their previous adventures. This allows me to tie in any old incidents they’ve forgotten about with new incidents they’re meeting—i.e., potentially tie up loose threads.
This way, when they suddenly take an interest in the world tree, the adventure will include the druid they just met two adventures ago. Their current adventure didn’t originally include her, and she was just a throwaway character in the old adventure. But now they’re biting on the world tree myths they’ve been hearing? No problem, I’ll pull in the fatherless young druid they rescued earlier.
- Engines of Our Ingenuity: Schrödinger’s Cat: John H. Lienhard
- “Today, Schrödinger’s Cat changes our view of science. The University of Houston’s College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.”
- How do I help my players not get caught up on smaller plot points?
- “Not sure how best to phrase the title (edits welcome). I just finished having a conversation with one of my players, and was led to a question I'm not sure I know how to answer.”
- Plot (narrative)
- “Plot is a literary term for the events a story comprises, particularly as they relate to one another in a pattern, a sequence, through cause and effect, or by coincidence.”
- The Vale of the Azure Sun
- There are things in this world that defy all logic. Places that no door enters and no road goes, where the maps exist only in the minds of madmen.
More storytelling
- Cinematic roleplaying is an oxymoron
- Cinematic roleplaying always seems to be about reducing player choice. This is a direct result of trying to emulate an entertainment style that by necessity must elevate the director’s choice above character development. Even the best movies require the director to curtail the world in which the action and dialogue takes place.
- Say yes or use the magic 8-ball
- Is “Say yes or roll the dice” something that works in Gods & Monsters? Outlook not so good.
- Spilling sand in the sandbox: tying up loose ends
- How do you maintain consistency in a “plot” that is not under your control?
- We are walking narratives
- Some quick notes about my “gaming is not storytelling” article before I forget about them.
Update: an anonymous commenter wrote:
I note this because (a) I enjoy the term “half-quibbled”, and (b) I had not yet clarified the indeterminate nature of the cat’s ownership in the final paragraph when they wrote that.