Thanks to Ethan Parker and the Gamer’s Haven podcast, those of you who missed the Hamlet’s Hit Points seminar at Gen Con can now catch it in handy audio form. Grab it via iTunes or directly from the Gamer’s Haven site.
The reasons we as roleplayers we tend to take inspiration from procedural narratives over dramatic ones are various. The one I’d like to look at today is clarity of goals. When the protagonist of a procedural, often an iconic hero, sets out to solve a problem, she pursues a clear, concrete goal. She wants to identify the murderer, stop the doomsday bomb, or lay the ghosts to rest. The audience wants her to succeed. The goals pursued by dramatic characters are emotional in nature and lack concrete end points. In many cases, they’re also split. The character pursues one conscious goal, but the audience fears its accomplishment. Instead the audience hopes for a shift in understanding that will bring the protagonist true success or happiness—or at least stave off disaster. This pattern holds in stories featuring troubled, wounded, or self-destructive protagonists. They either spiral into a climactic, cathartic disaster, or undergo a final epiphany that changes their goal to the ones we in the audience have been rooting for all along. The cathartic disaster may bring anagnorisis, an epiphany that comes too late to change anything. In certain ironic endings, the hero succeeds at the goal we wanted him to fail at, and learns nothing. In the case of an anti-hero, we may ambivalently follow the action as we hope for the protagonist’s destruction, and the restoration of order it will bring. Examples: Spiral into disaster: Othello Because roleplayers experience plot events as simultaneously creators and audience, that sort of split between character intention and audience desire is hard to maintain. We may see it surface in a few odd cases. The PC may freak out and attack his fellow party members, because it seems emotionally logical to play it that way, even though the player wants the others to subdue him before he kills someone.
Final epiphany: A Christmas Carol
Anagnorisis: Oedipus Rex
Ironic anti-anagnorisis: Taxi Driver
Both of the Iron Man movies show the structural flaws typical of the progression of a comic book movie series. In neither case does it matter. The first film never fully integrates its origin story and its villain story. Iron Man 2 crams in too many new characters. This tends to happen when the studio exerts pressure to fill up the marquee with new actors, and to increase toy sales. Instead of two storylines jostling one another for screen time, we have three or four. Like its predecessor, Iron Man 2 follows the rules of the iconic hero, but in a loosey-goosey way. Its structure doesn’t pursue a single, propulsive narrative, because it’s a banter movie. Its pleasure arises from the witty, off-beat verbal riffing, as deployed by an expert cast. Jon Favreau’s Iron Man series is really a return to the mode of his early films Swingers (which he wrote) and Made, with explosions and CGI robots. In a standard action movie, you keep the hero aware of the threat posed by the villain at all times. Here Justin Theroux’s script makes sure that Tony thinks Vanko/Whiplash is dead for most of the movie. This enables him to pursue his goal as protagonist, to reverse his palladium poisoning. Even this goal is achieved alone in a lab. This leaves plenty of screen time for banter and charm. Even the scenes between the primary and secondary villain are banter scenes. Structure isn’t an end in itself. It’s a safety net, an assurance that a story will smoothly build toward a satisfying conclusion. When you loosen your attention to structure to give breathing room to individual scenes, allowing for tangents along the way, each of those scenes has to crackle. Attempts at this light, jokey tone fall flat more often than not, because the crackle never materializes. Not so here; Favreau and his cast do more with verbal rhythm than his legion of animators achieve with the set piece armored action sequences.
If you map out all of the up and down beats of a story, you tend to get a curve that bends gently downward, and then pops up a bit at the end. Hamlet, as you’ll recall, did just that. As you’ll see when Hamlet’s’ Hit Points comes out at Gen Con, the predominantly dramatic Casblanca follows much the same pattern. Dr. No’s curve is even flatter, with bump in the middle, as befits its more escapist tone. An interesting question I haven’t looked at in great detail yet is the curve of the horror story. My guess is that many of them still vary the up and down beats as the tension arising from the threat facing the protagonists is built up and then released. Alien certainly works this way, giving Ripley a series of small victories as the creature chews through the rest of the crew and finally comes to her. The underrated recent horror flick The Ruins plays it another way. Once the first world hubris of its pretty young protagonists leads to their entrapment in a site of ancient menace, they never catch a break. There are momentary respites, but no victories. If you were to map out its beat structure, you’d see downward arrows mixed with lateral ones. I admired its commitment to the slow, grinding destruction of its main cast, but wonder if the refusal to provide contrasting upbeats has withheld from it the popularity it deserves. Not having mapped The Ruins I reckon that any given section of it, once the characters get to the pyramid, looks something like this:
The two mood beats, gratifications and bringdowns, can land in the roleplaying story form just as they do in films or written fiction. Often however the unique qualities of the roleplaying form change the way they appear. Gratification beats might be analogous to the moments when the GM tosses in a scene to satisfy the desires of a restless player. You give the guy who likes to fight a gratuitous scrap with kobolds after spending a bunch of time on plot and investigation. The player who likes to chew the fat at length with minor characters gets in some chatting time with the local sword vendor. For the player who digs cultural exploration, you might throw in a chance to poke around in the local temple and witness a colorful ritual. However, there’s an uncertainty principle at play here. In an improvised story that unfolds as a collaborative first draft, it’s not necessarily clear what the structural significance of any given beat will turn out to be. Mood beats, more than the others, are defined in the negative—they change the mood without impacting the overall story. As GMs we might introduce elements thinking that we’re merely temporizing to keep everybody happy, but then find a way to retroactively weave the kobold fight, the sword vendor’s gossip and the local ritual together. In effect what you think of at the time as a gratification beat becomes a pipe beat, retroactively. Likewise with elements either introduced by or built upon by the players. Extra-narrative moments that change the mood in the room might also be considered our unique form of gratification (or bringdown.) The out-of-character joke during a tense moment fulfills the same emotional purpose as the moment in a horror film where the hero suddenly staggers past a scene of touching normalcy. On the bringdown side, a moment of real-life tension between players generally proves more upsetting than anything that might happen in the storyline. You might introduce an element out of left field in an attempt to change the mood in the room. In character as a PC, you might focus the attention of clashing players back on the game. As a GM you might throw in some comedy relief, or zip ahead to a fight or other sequence requiring teamwork. As roleplayers are both artists and audience, they may be switching back and forth fluidly between these roles, changing the mood as they go. The attentive player or GM takes the collective mood into account when deciding what story moments they want to work toward.
The beat analysis system as we’ve explored it so far zeroes in on story moments to see how they affect our hopes and fears for our protagonists as they pursue their objectives. When they progress toward their goals, the story delivers an up beat, and we feel elation or relief. When they stumble or when the odds seem to stack against them, the story registers a down beat; our anxiety increases. But what about beats that change our moods without directly altering the hero’s progress toward his goal. These are mood beats. Used very sparingly, they can modulate our emotional engagement. Creators who rely on them too heavily risk disengaging us from the narrative thread. There are two types of mood beats, one for each emotional direction—up and down.
Next week, we’ll look at mood beats as they apply to roleplaying.
Negative moments untethered to the main narrative are bringdowns. This may be a moment of pathetic fallacy, in which the hero’s environment reinforces and comments on his unfortunate situation. Stock bringdowns include the moment when the hero gets splashed by a passing truck after being dumped by his girlfriend. Moments of creepy atmosphere in horror stories might also function as bringdowns.
Before moving on to other beat types, I should circle back to a point I glided past earlier. In talking about pipe beats—information beats that lay surreptitious groundwork for later surprise reveals—we looked at the roleplaying format’s ability to build on stray details with reveals that look like they were planned all along. I should have noted that, when intentionally trying to slip in info to pay off later, GMs (or players, for that matter), can use the same technique employed by writers in other story forms. That would be misdirection. Pipe is typically disguised by appearing in a scene that fulfills some other purpose. To illustrate, let’s look at a couple of contrasting examples from Avatar. A strong example of a pipe beat occurs when Jake blunders into an encounter with a herd of hammerheadosauruses, and then with a steroidpanther, er, thanator. This sets up the moment at the end when Pandora’s earth goddess sends in animal reinforcements to help our heroes battle the American military industrial complex. The setup successfully disguises itself by filling other purposes. It acts as a set of procedural beats with a classic down-up-down pattern. First Jake is endangered by the hammerheads—we fear for him, making this a downward suspense moment. Suddenly, they rear back—good for him, earning an up note. Then we discover that they’re really retreating from the thanator, who is even scarier than they are. Another down beat. The scene also establishes a character point, reinforcing our early perception of Jake as a reckless loose cannon. So we aren’t also looking for it to also be showing us something we need to know later. On the other hand, the scene where Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) explains the giant pterodactyl skeleton to Jake sticks out like a sore thumb, because it’s not doing anything other than providing information. As she explains that only five na’vi have ever ridden one of these creatures, there’s nothing else to focus on but this exposition, so it’s easy to predict that at a crucial point in the movie Jake will make himself the sixth rider.
Newly announced studies cast doubt on the idea that nightmares serve as outlets to vent our anxieties. Instead they show that subjects display heightened anxiety after waking from disturbing dreams. This certainly squares with my own experience of being emotionally shaken after a particularly distressing nightmare. The anxiety processing hypothesis proceeds from the assumption that there must be some evolutionary advantage to nightmares. Another explanation would be that they’re an unpleasant side effect of another advantageous adaptation. In his book The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness Some adherents of the jumbled images model argue that it blows out of the water the technique of dream analysis as practiced by Freud and Jung. Sounds like an overreach to me. Jung famously stated that an unexamined dream was like an unopened letter from the subconscious. Although not all of our dreams are necessarily meaningful on a literal level, the choices our brains make in weaving stories out of the image flood might be revelatory of our concerns, moods, and personalities. Certainly being trained, as one would while undergoing psychoanalysis, to find profound personal metaphors in dreams, would focus one’s pattern-making in that direction. With a powerful narrative, you can change the world. You can found, spread, or alter a religious tradition. You can impel others to fall in line with your political agenda. At the deepest levels, even in slumber, we are storymakers.
So far in our discussion of information beats in RPGs we’ve looked at them as being introduced into play by GMs. But if stories are about their protagonists, and protagonists in roleplaying are controlled by players, we should also be thinking about ways for players to use questions, reveals and pipe beats to help shape the collective narrative. In source fiction, viewpoint characters reveal things about themselves all the time. This tends to happen early in a narrative—the opening season of a TV series, the first act of a movie, the opening chapters of a novel. Traditionally in roleplaying games the players may tell us something about their characters before the action begins. They may be relying on detailed narratives they’ve created ahead of time, or winging it. If you start looking at your character as a vehicle to introduce elements into a story, you can continue to engage the GM and other players with information beats, just as the GM engages the group. By breaking info about your character into beats and doling it out over time, you’ll have a greater impact than the traditional start-of-play spiel. You might decide that your character harbors a series of secrets. These are probably known to the character but might not be. You can then look for ways first of all to tease these secrets, engaging the curiosity of the GM and other players. Once they’re engaged, you can find moments to slowly answer the questions you’ve planted. For greater impact, slip in clues to a bigger secret as pipe, then show how they all fit together at a dramatically appropriate moment. Take the typical ex-ninja on the run from her ninja clan. You could plant a question beat in the first session by depicting your character as jumpy and concerned about pursuit. When asked, you might say that you’ve got some old enemies after you, but clam up when pressed for details. Later you mutter darkly about your dangerous family. Now the players are putting these clues together and through their interactions are giving them power in the narrative. Your talk of enemies, they reckoned, added to your references to family implies that they’re the ones chasing you. Once you’ve come clean to them about running from a ninja clan, you might then drop another hint, suggesting that you were more than just an ordinary member of the clan, but that an oath prevents you from saying more. This might invest the players in creating a situation allowing you to reveal this latest secret without breaking your oath. When they answer this question, point them to another, just as the GM is probably doing with other elements of her series. All without having to resort to any overt player-control system hardwired into the rules.
Roleplaying game sessions unfold as a series of questions and answers ping-ponging back and forth between GM and players. The basic nature of the form, as I’ve mentioned before, solves many of the problems of exposition that bedevil writers of drama or fiction. So when we look at the parceling of information into questions, answers and pipe beats, we’re looking at something the form already does well. Still, there are some insights from thinking about exposition beats that can help us to improve our games. Information, we’ve seen, is more satisfying when it comes as the answer to a question already posed. This suggests that we should, when rattling off info about our settings, take care to leave the spaces for players to formulate their questions. It’s too easy, especially when playing in an exotic and extremely detailed world, to fall into the trap of extemporaneously paraphrasing vast swathes of setting material. Better to isolate the very few initial details about the locale and culture that will be relevant in the next few scenes. Tease them with the basics, get them wondering about mysteries, and let them find the answers as they go along. This lets them interact sooner with the world you’re so invested in. Let them discover it themselves, through action, rather than hearing about it in mini-lecture form. A problem jokingly mentioned by several commenters last week was the difficulty of hiding pipe beats so that players don’t cotton onto them right away. Again here’s where the nature of RPGs comes to the rescue. Rather than seeding a secret clue and hoping to reveal it in a surprising way, you can look for seeming throwaway references whose significance you can build on in the course of the story. RPG stories generate loose ends. Find a way to unexpectedly tie them together and you’ll look like a genius—when really you’re just paying attention and fitting the pieces together as you go along. Writers in other forms enjoy the luxury of writing key scenes first and going back to tuck in the clues later. We on the other hand get a wide variety of elements to build on and seem clever simply by opportunistically choosing one that fits the moment at hand. Then there’s the converse problem of getting them to notice any of the information they’re supposed to be looking for. If players can’t find what seems like obvious facts, there’s either an interface error or they’re not interested in the questions you’re leading them to. As GMs we know the answer to the mystery at hand and may find it painfully simple. The players aren’t necessarily processing every detail, or picturing the situation as you are. Their discussions with one another add more red herrings to the story than you’re likely to see in a book or TV episode. Your challenge is often not to mystify but to clarify. Players who regularly fail to investigate or figure out anything are demonstrating a disinterest in digging up the facts they need to orient themselves in your story. Here you need to not so much communicate the mystery more clearly, as to radically edit it so they can get on with what really interests them, whether it’s fighting, interaction, exploration or fill in the blank. Whatever the issue, most informational road blocks in roleplaying sessions can be solved by breaking the exposition down into discrete, bite-sized chunks. This way the basic facts will be easily remembered and pieced together. Better yet, let the players lead you through the story by pursuing the answers to questions they formulate. When a scene flounders, ask yourself: what’s the question here? By answering this question for yourself, you can begin to answer it for your players.
