Reinventing Roleplaying

I've been doing this roleplaying game thing for quite a long while now. Those of you who have been reading my blogs about earlier posts know about the many epiphanies I've had, the many times my consciousness has expanded, the many times I've learned something entirely new, and seen this beautiful hobby in a new light.

Well, it's happened again. And it's happened through the medium of Big Eyes Small Mouth, which comes as somewhat of a surprise as I'm not that great an anime fan. I've ran anime-themed games before – Parallel Fandango, primarily, and I've participated in Aki, which had the same feeling. Yet, this particular Big Eyes Small Mouth game is truly something new, and it's new in a lot of ways.

For one, it's a lot more interactive than most other games I've ran. And no, I'm not making this up – the game really allows the players more freedom than many of my most sandboxy of sandboxes thus far, because the players are actively expanding on the story, during the game, outside the scope of their own characters. They're adding new countries and continents as needed, they're expanding on the history of the world and of the NPCs, and they're even adding new NPCs on the fly, mid-game. This is a very new experience for me, and rather challenging, but usually well worth the extra effort as it pretty much guarantees player involvement. I don't mean suggestions, either – I mean stuff like flat-out saying to an NPC “Of course, you have heard of the play involving star-crossed lovers, one from Britannia and one from Teutonia...” or in extreme cases like talking to an NPC that has never been mentioned before, but suddenly springs into existence because the player wanted it. I don't know why this hasn't resulted in any horrible trainwrecks – intuition suggests it rather should, and it probably will eventually – but it hasn't.

Second, which may seem counterintuitive given the above point, the game has taught me a lot about structure. If a game can be properly structured, it will almost automatically present a good narrative. This game follows a simple central metaplot that is advancing quite slowly, with one metaplot-related event occurring per session. The actual meat of the story is made up from NPC-driven subplots, though, chiefly fueled by the characters' interaction with them as the metaplot progresses. This gives the game a very TV-series feel, similar to Star Trek: Voyager, in which the ship's progress is combined with intra-crew conflict. This meshes well with the freedom, because the subplots are unimportant and can be cut short, added, or edited on the fly as needed, without impacting the metaplot. With such a structure, the story continues on ahead while simultaneously allowing the players to do pretty much whatever they want. As long as the story goals of the session are fulfilled, the story is still going somewhere despite very little time actually being devoted to it.

Third, there is the anime aspect. Anime, for all its other faults, does have one chief defining artistic quality which is hard to find elsewhere – its unique blend of comedy, drama, romance and tragedy, which allows for deeply serious stories about abuse and abandonment to run parallel with silly rom-com elements such as spilled love potions, misinterpreted flirting, and overacted reactions. Channeling this feeling in a roleplaying game is surprisingly easy, but it requires players to take a step back from their characters and switch between immersion and collective storytelling, as the players will often have their characters behave in obviously idiotic fashions for the sake of the story, but will have to immerse deeply in their character for the drama and tragedy elements to really hit home.

Overall, it's a new experience to me because it breaks the classical definition of role-playing game and starts to blur more into the territory of improvisational theater. It's almost entirely intrigue-driven, with perhaps 10-20 die rolls taking place during an entire session. The key, the thing that makes this sort of game unique, is – I think – the switch between immersion and storytelling on everyones' behalf. On the one hand, you want to think like your character. On the other hand, you want to consciously make sure that your character commits mistakes where appropriate, to drive the story onwards.

Even though I've been playing for over a decade, and I have played similar games as this before, I have to say that it's an entirely new experience – it's like the intrigue-driven plots of Aki meet the wild-card player-driven solutions of Mage: The Awakening, and fuse together into a coherent whole where players shape the world to fuel the intrigues surrounding them, yet are still beholden to a single, central story. If D&D-style RPGs are like water flowing through a pipe, and improvisational theater is like water flowing freely all over the floor, this style of play is more like water flowing in a stream on the floor – there aren't really any constraints on it, yet it keeps moving on ahead, and doesn't run out all over the place. It requires a lot of consensus between players and GM, obviously – if everyone isn't on the same page, you risk just winding up with a wet floor.

Of course, just because I've discovered a new way of playing doesn't mean it's the best way. It's not even necessarily better than more classical approaches. But it's something I've never done before, and I'm talking about it because, even after over ten years of doing this RPG thing, I keep getting surprised. It's stuff like this which makes me wanna never give up on gaming. Just when you think you've got it all figured out, that strange magic strikes again, and suddenly it's just like that first realization that hey, NPCs can have personalities, and that is awesome.