Storytelling theory question

[kilroy]

So, almost every story with any dramatic traction revolves around some character doing something that's against their best interests. This is extremely difficult to arrange in roleplaying situations-- people are extremely protective of their characters and are generally there because they want to "win." They don't react well to bad things happening to their characters and they don't usually choose to do it on their own.

There are ways to try and get around this. Classics include:
Withholding Information: The GM stacks the deck so that the character & player don't know enough to make the best decision. It's true to life, but players hate it; part of the draw of the game is that it's "fair" and their decisions matter, and this damages that illusion.

Gordian Knot: Give them a situation that can be solved, but not cleanly. They get to retain their sense of agency, you get a strong negative consequence to build some drama from. You also run the risk of them coming up with some creative and valid solution where they get to win free and clear. Players get rapidly disenchanted if you use too many of these.

Unintended Consequences: Take a good thing and make it bad by adding context. In its favor, this method doesn't require the players to do anything additional-- the GM can invent whatever circumstances are necessary to make the victory Pyrrhic. On the other hand, if you do this often or with a heavy hand, you're poisoning the well by essentially ruining fairly-won player victories.

Falling Masonry: Bad stuff just happens to characters through no fault of their own. This method is by far the easiest to implement for the GM, but can offend the players' sense of justice and fair play and doesn't have the same emotional resonance that actual mistakes do.

All of these methods are essentially storytelling sleight-of-hand, though-- they're attempts to get something into the story that the players don't want there. The real and more pressing question is how do you get players to want to make dramatic mistakes? Can that even be done in a roleplaying game?

Any thoughts?

Comments

[owlectomy]

As a player... sometimes I want to do this, if I see the opportunity for it. "Given what I've already set up about my character, this is the only thing I would do, and I trust the GM to get me into interesting trouble as a result" has to be the starting point for that. Once I ended up pregnant -- which, alas, is boring rather than interesting trouble!

[kilroy]

Hmmm. It's important that you mention that. Wanting to make the truer decision for your character rather than the better one is really the only motivation I've ever seen for this behavior.

Of course, it takes a certain kind of player to construct and develop a character that way in the first place.

[cereta]

Wanting to make the truer decision for your character rather than the better one is really the only motivation I've ever seen for this behavior.

That's always the key, I think. It's not even so much bad decision as a decision that's not in the character's best interest at that moment. I mean, we all do things that aren't in our best interest, whether we do so because it's the moral thing to do, because we're afraid of some potential consequence, or because we're tempted by a potential reward. In a heroic game/with heroic characters, it's often the first motivation: what D&D player hasn't waded into a fight that was at the very least dangerous if not nearly unwinnable because that What Heroes Do? In other situations, with less noble characters, it's usually, "well, crap, I know this won't end well, but my character can't resist easy gold, so..."

I think ideally it works both ways: players have to trust that the GM isn't actively trying to screw them and thus will make it possible to work through the consequences, and the GM has to trust the the players will play their characters like people and not tokens on a board.

[kilroy]

Yeah. Trust is a necessary prerequisite to this kind of storytelling, and that's hard. It's all social skills, and the rulebook doesn't help you with that.

[brigid]

When I don't feel engaged with a story line, I start having my characters take more chances/more risks just to see what happens, to push boundaries.

I've had GMs not respond to that at all, and smooth things over. Which is disappointing sometimes, and other times leads me to push even more and do basically ridiculous stuff. I mean, if there are no consequences to my actions, I can do ANYTHING, right?

[kilroy]

Consequences: there need to be some. Good and bad. Otherwise you don't have a story, you have a series of YouTube videos.

[kayote]

I must be strange. I tended to put my characters in awful positions. I don't know about "bad decisions" so much as "usually willing for falling masonry to hit" though I prefer to be somewhat involved in picking the masonry if there's going to be a bunch of it. (Also, given my histories, couldn't it tie in somewhere?)

I also try to decide what the character would do and not what OOC makes the most sense. Which is very frustrating if the rest of the group isn't in a similar mindset. I can't say I always manage this, but I try. It's more fun than playing myself.

This does go all out the window if the game appears to be nothing more than a contest between the GM and the players, or if the GM has just made the world too nasty. If I'm afraid of walking around any corner because masonry is likely to strike me dead, having tried the last three corners and failed through no involvement of mine, I'm not walking around the corner. I don't care if my character is brash--after several incidents of That Scary, That Random, and finding my character to be That Ineffective at doing anything, then I get paranoid and frustrated. I don't enjoy it. I don't enjoy the structure that leads to it either. If the game is a contest with survival as the goal, then I play a character sheet instead of a character.

I'd prefer to participate in a story, though.

[kilroy]

You really are strange, and in a very good way. Making decisions based on OOC perspective is so much more common-- especially, as you say, in games where the point is to survive.

Goes up to the "trust" comment earlier, I think. Not even about trusting that you'll live or win, just that the GM understands and will respect what you want to do with the character.