Background Check
I’m in the habit of reading myself to sleep, usually old RPG rules and supplements. I don’t have many new ones: product lines are much reduced in both scale and number from the heyday of the early ‘90s, and what remains is almost entirely d20, which I detest, and White Wolf, which has become redundant. So I stick to well-thumbed material. I worried once that I might cycle through too fast, to the point where I was re-reading material every couple months, but that isn’t the case; with age, the time between getting into bed and turning out the light has become so short, and my memory sufficiently un-steel-traplike that I can safely flip through bedtime material I haven’t perused in years.
Anyway. I’m currently rereading the original Torg manual, an old West End Games mashup of various genres into one setting, where raiders from alternate realities show up and try to conquer earth for its mystical possibility energy. The US is overrun by a dinosaur universe where miracles work but guns and automobiles don’t, while France is conquered by a cyberpunk pope, and Indonesia becomes the province of Victorian horrors and Victorian-style imperialism, to name a few invaders. It’s an intriguing setting, although one that would require a lot of time to pull off successfully; I’m rooting around for inspiration, trying to come up with a way to use the cool parts in some future campaign without committing to something my friends and I could never finish.
Running Torg has long been a fantasy for me (unlikely ever to be fulfilled), so the bedtime reading is a trip down memory lane. West End, which once gave us Paranoia, as well as the d6 version of Star Wars much superior to the d20 version now on the shelves, was perhaps the best of the RPG companies with great vision and lousy business sense, and that vision was utterly, unflinchingly devoted to popcorn-crunching movie fun. They pissed away a lot of money on movie licenses nobody wanted. (Does anyone remember the Tank Girl RPG? Hell, does anyone remember the movie? Didn’t think so.) They thought a lot about how to bring the action of movies to the table, and employed intriguing ideas to do it. The action deck, for example, was a set of cards designed to reward exciting but tactically inferior actions, and to throw the advantage back and forth in a way common to action movies and uncommon in by-the-numbers RPG fights. They wrote a lot of good popcorn-crunching adventures. They also wrote a lot of bad adventures that were supposed to be mysteries, or subtle political dances, but somehow turned into action scenes anyway, with a lot of broad hints and melodramatic villains, because their desire to get past all that roleplaying to the “good stuff” of car chases and gunfights got the better of them—an attitude that eventually took over Torg, too, turning whole universes into self-parodies. They wrote a lot of terrific advice for novice GMs on how to bring excitement and pacing to an RPG session; Star Wars remains a signal effort in newbie pointers. Unfortunately, that advice also tended very strongly to subvert some equally important lessons for good GMing.
I refer particularly to West End’s limitless fascination with the narrative technique called in media res, literally “in the middle of things,” in which a story starts after the action is already underway, kicking off with a gripping scene, then filling in the narrative later through flashbacks or exposition. The original Star Wars movie uses this technique, with stormtroopers shooting their way aboard a space vessel to recapture plans to the “death star;” only later is the nature of the death star, along with its significance in a larger galactic civil war, made clear. West End loved in media res absolutely to death; I’ve seen half a dozen products where it is embraced as the single, best way to run an adventure.
Poppycock. I tried it a couple times, and it didn’t work, for one very good reason. In a novel or movie script, the characters behave consistently with the as-yet-unspecified background. It’s easy for them to do so, because the person who controls their behavior—the writer—is also the person in charge of creating that background; he already knows what’s going on, even if the audience doesn’t. In an RPG, the protagonists are in the hands of the players, who are also the audience to whom the background is to be revealed. The guy in charge of the background, the GM, doesn’t have direct control over the PCs; if he did, it would defeat the whole purpose of telling the story as a game in the first place, with various players controlling various characters and surprising one another with their actions. As a result, the players don’t simply jump into the action; they ask a lot of questions instead. What’s my motivation in this scene? Would my character consider shooting at a space frigate a reasonable action, or is it insanely dangerous? Should I be slaughtering these mooks, or would that kind of bloodlust be decidedly unheroic? Wait, why am I in this war again?
Mostly, it’s natural player self-interest. They don’t want to do something they’ll suffer for later, and figure their chances are better if they stop the action and pester the GM with a lot of questions to feel out the best (safest) course of action. Partly, it’s natural caution towards creating inconsistencies of character or plot: “my character would never have done X if he’d known Y.” Either way, my players have never, ever wanted anything to do with West End’s favorite narrative technique, and when I forced them to live with it, the results were dismal.
I retain a warm spot in my heart for West End. I love them to death for their enthusiasm, for their inventive if clumsy mechanisms, and for their efforts to cast an ever-wider net to draw in players who would never consider playing that D&D game they remember hearing something about. But moderation in all things: not every action movie technique is appropriate to an RPG. In media res belongs only in a very few, very carefully selected RPG adventures.
Postscript to “New York International Children’s Film Festival”:
The festival is over, the awards given, and the NYICFF is now free to put several 2008 entries on the site. I particularly recommend “X,” “Mind the Gap,” and “Zhiharka.” Happily, the short we most enjoyed—“Crankballs”—is also up; sadly, it doesn’t survive the translation to tiny screen very well. Its humor depends on the suddenly manic crankball transformed by a bit of floating happiness looking disturbing and menacing. It certainly was on the big screen, but less so when it’s the size of a quarter on my monitor.