Was in the middle of a draft of a big gaming-n-improv post the other week and had to save it in the middle, and never got back to LJ. So, just to keep my hand in, random stuff:

1. Just in case leighleighla didn't see the story, an astronomer in England announced a real discovery (a plasma jet from a supernova) via Doctor Who fanfic on her blog. Readers seem to be giving the story high marks as Ten-era fic in its own right.

2. Had a fun lunch with dherblay Friday afternoon in Columbia, MD. He was on his way to perform at the Baltimore Improv Festival, while I was off to the first annual "Comedy Improv Throwdown" in Harrisburg with my own class/troupe. I had a ton of fun. We hadn't met in person before and it was great having a serious improv conversation with somebody whose background and experiences are completely different from my own.

3. So, in Harrisburg, we did not win or even get out of the first round. But, we got respectable scores from the judges. More importantly, it felt good. We held the audience's attention and gave each other what we needed as a cast. The latter excites me tremendously.

The Friday group had our fourth Qin: The Warring States session tonight, which involved taking down the evil lord of one town over and his External Alchemist henchman, then putting a likely local in charge of redistributing all the evil lord's goods among the townspeople to help restore the Mandate of Heaven to the town. When it hit me, I said:

"Okay, we just killed the sorcerer, chose a new steward and laid out the doctrine. This has been a pretty successful Dogs in the Vineyard session."

Then we went back and drove off the ghost ("demon") who had been plaguing ("possessing") our host.

For the record, I'm the only one in the Friday group who has played DitV.

Via Tyler Cowern, Galen Strawson's "Against Narrativity." It's about cognition and ethics, not RPGs, but it has relevance to a lost current in RPG theory/advocacy discourse. Back before Forge theory collapsed the rgfa distinction between Dramatism and Simulationism, and for years took the former as the whole of the latter, and before critics of Forge theory took to saying that, "Of course all games are about stories," there was a strongly anti-narrative school among gaming communities. These people didn't seek to replicate genre tropes or nudge gaming systems into producing more shapely accounts of motivated action. They despised genre tropes as lies and distrusted shapeliness. Presented with superhero comics or epic fantasy, they asked, not "How can I replicate the forms of this material" or "How can I replicate the questions this genre puts to human nature" but "What would happen if people 'really' got superpowers?" And, "What would it be like if magic really worked?" For such folks, RPGs offered an escape from narrative conventions, not a method of participating in them. These people saw Star Wars and were offended at poor Stormtrooper marksmanship. Gaming was a chance to separate ideas that excited them - space travel! superspeed! dragons! - from the lies with which storytellers adulterated them.

As to story itself, I'm reading The Improv Handbook by Salinsky and Frances-White. While they come strongly out of the British tradition and my schooling is almost wholly in the American one, I'm getting an awful lot out of it, including a bunch of gaming-related thoughts. (I tend to find British-school - i.e. descended from Johnstone - improv theory more directly relevant to RPG play than American-school improv theory. That said, there's an awful lot of commonality; you can easily overstate the differences.)

The authors tackle "What is a story anyway?" because they pretty much have to, and their answer really stops me in my tracks:

"A changes B."

I think that's pretty darn good. (Yes, they deal with apparent exceptions like James Bond and similar serial heroes. No, I'm not interested in elaborating on that part now.) Let me amend that somewhat. Frost argued that "Everything written is as good as it is dramatic." I always thought that was brilliantly true, but it does leave "dramatic" tantalizingly undefined. You could easily convince me that "A changes B" is the best way to characterize drama as opposed to story. Either way, I think it may be a more fruitful paradigm than Egri's "Premise" as adapted to gaming by Ron Edwards et al.

The concept of "Premise" often - usually - feels dry and overthought to me. In 9th-grade English, we spent pretty much the whole year reading short stories and writing essays whose topic sentence was "The theme of the story comma TITLE GOES HERE comma is PROPOSITION VERY MUCH LIKE AN EGRI PREMISE," followed by three or so supporting paragraphs and a conclusion. The thing is, after 9th-grade English, we never did that again. There was just so much more to literature than an abstractable theme, particularly a theme that amounts to a moral, which is the form that Edwards-inflected Egri premises can tend to take. I think this might be a reason that Vincent has tended to prefer talking about "testing a character's passions" rather than "addressing a premise," or even "making a thematic statement." (See, for instance.)

We might agree that "A Piece of Steak" really does express the theme that "youth and vitality inevitably defeat age and cunning." But it seems beside the point to claim that London thinks that punk kids should or shouldn't whip up on the geezers: they just do, in London's telling.

And the notion that all authors do or can usefully start from a conscious, generalized "Premise" which they then elaborate through action in order to arrive at a theme (answered premise), just strikes me as false to fact, not just from first-hand experience but from the accounts of writers and other narrative artists. "I wanted to poison a monk," Umberto Eco said, by way of explaining how he came to write The Name of the Rose. Why should I disbelieve him?

Ah, but "A changes B." That's not overthought or didactic or calling for elaborate pre-planning. And it's "procedural rather than directive." At any moment we can ask whether B is being changed by A or not.

And maybe best of all for my purposes, it even sidesteps the whole matter of conflict. I used to interpret "dramatic" in the Frost quote, for instance, as about the centrality of conflict. But what I have experienced first-hand doing improv and seen watching others do it is that there's a whole lot of very interesting "A changes B" action that is not most usefully thought of as "conflict" per se. Right now I'm even inclined to argue that "conflict" is a specifically Western flattening of the concept of change through interpersonal interaction. It's not that there's no conflict qua conflict. But there is, in story and drama, so much more than just conflict.

"A changes B" is pointing me, very hazily, past a dissatisfaction I've had with "conflict resolution" as a mechanical paradigm. It has felt to me for some time as a flattening or outright falsification of the texture of a whole range of things we want to make gameable. For instance, there's a lot to like about the beta of Danger Patrol, but I just hate the fact that you "fight clues" the same way you fight real opponents in an action scene. That seems like a huge waste of opportunity for variety in the play experience. And yes, at a certain level,

* We are in a scene where I am attempting to help you overcome your shyness

and

* We are in a scene where I am trying to blow up your laboratory

can each be treated as a "conflict" and subject to the same resolution form.

1. 'This is a conflict of my "Persuade" skill versus your "Shyness" trait. I roll my three Persuade dice. You roll your two Shyness dice.' 2. 'This is a conflict of my "Sapper" ability versus your "Mastermind" advantage. I roll my three Sapper dice. You roll your two Mastermind dice.'

But it's only one way to do it, and it's a way I'm sick of. It feels distorting. It feels like missing the point. It feels like a lie. Very specifically, it obliterates the distinction between you and I working together to overcome a condition and you and I going hammer and tongs at opposed aims.

A very interesting step in the direction of what I want is in Diaspora. While they give the subsystem the unfortunate name of "Social Combat," it's actually at least a tentative break with the "conflict" paradigm. Its use of (conceptual) maps gives players a chance to make "I help you overcome your shyness" and "I convince the Senate to vote down your amendment" and "I humiliate you in a private corner of the garden party" all play differently from each other. I don't think it's the last word in getting beyond the conflict paradigm, and it's certainly not the last word in "A changes B," but it's an exciting first word.

To the possible dismay of certain "Docnards" of my acquaintance, I've begun re-watching the Eccleston season of Nu Who. (This included watching the one where Gwen blows up for the first time, as I missed it contemporaneously.) I'm through Ep Five now, the conclusion of the Slitheen two-parter. Some thoughts:

1. Yeah, the quality of the stories is a little uneven. Like, my fond memories of the very first episode didn't completely survive contact with the second viewing. It's got some very nice parts, but they also rush some of the human decisions, and the choreography of the climax is almost shockingly dull: you might as well watch early episodes of Heroes again, the staging of the action is so bland.

2. That said, there are truly wonderful bits as early as the second episode - genuine personal tenderness mixed with delightful invention. And that poor Pig!

3. Jackie is a much more sympathetic, textured character, even early on, than I recollected. She's already a better person in the first five episodes than Donna's mother ever gets to become. I'm wondering now if the Wedding Episode will prove to be the one that reduces Jackie to a stupid shrew for a time, rather than the ones before that.

4. Wow, Nine could be an asshole! His version of Timelord Superiority Complex had a sarcastic edge to it that X's didn't. He's not just a dick, by any means. His joys are huge and his generoisities unstinting. And I particularly appreciate the character in light of leighleighla's long-ago (cripes, it really was) LJ essay about post-traumatic stress disorder being the defining issue for the Doctor in that season. But he's callous enough early on, to Jacks and Mickey especially, that you have to think a little less of Rose for choosing to accompany him.

Still, I love watching Eccleston, and yeah, he'll always be my First Doctor.

5. Relatedly, and returning to gaming: DWAITAS stresses the "All Life is Precious, Give Peace a Chance" ethos of the Tennant Years, because DWAITAS is, in the core book, All Ten, All the Time. But as I had forgotten, Nine could be pretty bloodthirsty! Not just with Dalek's either. I mean, yeah, he doesn't set out to kill the Nestene Consciousness, he tries to help the Gelth and he offers to let the Slitheen family leave the Earth unharmed. But he also helps blow up the Gelth, calls in a freaking airstrike on the Slitheen and, really shockingly, in effect executes Lady Cassandra without trial. You don't even need Davros around to argue that the Doctor keeps his own hands clean by having people around to do the dirty work for him: Nine doesn't need proxies. This of course ties into Leigh's point, discussed above: Nine has only just been a soldier in a cataclysmic war. And Eccleston can do deeper, more full-bodied anger (and menace) than Tennant can. It's a good example of the creators playing to the different actors' strengths.

Russell Bailey's "Quick Primer on Middle School Gaming" touches on the "friendship & gaming" issue much discussed hereabouts a month ago. It's also a good-humored summa of high-WW-era gaming.

Friday group had a fun chargen session for Qin: The Warring States tonight. Qin seems like a fun game, though I'll be glad when we're through making characters because it's a fairly fiddly process, with different point-pools for attributes, skills, Qi tricks and outright magic for starting characters, and then, for the campaign-specific, a big pot of experience points to spend right afterward. I came to the session intending to build a disgraced and exiled village elder from a hill tribe, and instead ended up making a mystical Horseman - exiled from a hill tribe. The other three PCs are a Vagabond, a fighting Doctor, and a Warrior who has become a chef.

It was a generally fun time, with (fake American) Chinese food and free-ranging geekery. I kind of feel like the ice is broken between me and these guys now, which is comfortable and pleasant. We don't meet for three weeks because of schedule issues.

After we finish Qin, New-N's wife, whom I haven't yet met, wants to run Dresden Files RPG, using the Baltimore setting material. It will be her first time GMing, which is cool.

More gaming chronicles!

We finished Polaris tonight. Retrospectively, I think it was a mistake to put a hard stop on the campaign in advance for this week. Some stuff got rushed; other stuff went unrealized. I had as much to do with the decision to make tonight the end as anyone, though, so here's three fingers pointing back at me. Regardless of the rushing, N gave my demon-sword a completely surprising yet wonderfully apt voice, and I remain pretty pro-Polaris. I would play it again, given the option.

I've just about finished my read-through of the new Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space rpg. It's an odd mix of compelling and hot mess. I want to play it. And yet, it's one of those games where you have to tacitly or explicitly rewrite a swath of stuff. Like, OMG the difficulty table examples! And, man, the railroadiest GM text I've read in dog years. The sample adventures literally have the GM putting words in the characters' mouths. The paradigm seems to be video games where there's "play," and between "play" episodes, cut-scenes, where you watch "your" character say whatever she's been scripted to say.

Now, if I were a really good Forgie, I'd insist on playing the game exactly as it's written. But I'm a bad Forgie, so I'm gonna fuck with it first. I do like the general schema of attributes, skills and traits; and I like the NuVerse. And the turn sequence for extended conflicts - Talkers first,; then Runners; then Doers: and Fighters last - is sheer genius.

Friday's group makes characters for Qin: The Warring States this week. So once I wrap up the last of the Adventure Book for DW:AITAS, I'll start in on the Qin handouts - likely tomorrow night.

Finally watched the last of the David Tennant Doctor Who specials, which means when I work up the ambition I can now go back to any posts that immlass, hangingfire and leighleighla, among others may have written on the topic. Meanwile, some thoughts and questions from a mere Nuvian under the cut.

( Srsly, Spoilers! )

Interesting new lessons the last two weeks. Last week we began working on a more strictly theatrical skill than typical for us, which Gary called "Focus In, Focus Out." This is just alternating body orientation so that sometimes you and your partner look straight at each other, and others you both look directly out at the audience. Because so much of our education has been about pay attention to your partner, we have a tendency to scant basic stagecraft issues including angling ourselves to bring the audience into the picture. The extremely cool flipside of that, though, is that when we're in the focus-out parts of a scene (right now we're changing orientation when cued), we still feel this compelling pull in the direction of the other improviser, because of the bedrock emphasis on reactivity. It's almost like magic. Also, Gary had us concentrate on, when you're focused in, really really focus in. So it was also practice in intensifying our reactivity.

This week's new thing was practice taking command of a location. We did a bunch of short two-person scenes where Gary specifically asked the "audience" for locations where the actors would be uncomfortable and unfamiliar. We cycled through, among others, a wrought-iron plant; the cab of a combine harvester; "the better-mousetrap factory; an execution chamber; and the Large Hadron Collider.

This set of exercises involved Gary stopping us repeatedly and urging us to, like good thieves and spies, act like we belonged there: don't make tentative movements; don't take easy outs like "Ooh! Coffee break!" Own even the least familiar locale.

Two things occurred to me about this exercise: 1) It's an area where experienced RPGers should have a head start; 2) It's really "Yes, And" for the audience. If the audience suggests "the Moon" or "a biology lab" or "a pirate ship," vamoosing ASAP or diverting it into a could-be-happening-anywhere continuation is negating the people watching you as sure as telling your fellow actor they're lying or crazy or factually mistaken is negating them. Someone who suggests "the Moon" wants to see a scene (or play) on the fucking Moon.

A thing I love about the new Who RPG is the short skill list: a dozen skills that you can take "Areas of Expertise" on. An AoE gives you +2 on your roll when dealing with your specialty. If you have Science 4 with a Physics AoE, you add 6 to your roll when dealing with physics and 4 when dealing with any other scientific task. This strikes me as not just "close enough for gaming," but plausible besides. Michael Jordan wasn't a pro-caliber baseball player, but he was a hell of a lot better at it than you are.