An adventure is a journey into the
unknown, an enterprise with all manner of risk and no guarantee of
reward. It is life played out on the stage of uncertainty.
Yet,
in gaming, the definition of “adventure” is often “the scripted plot
used by a Game Master to manage the story of a role-playing game.” Following a script or being managed may not sound very adventurous, but long-time RPG
fans will quickly reply that the RPG is an adventure for the players because they do not
know what is going to happen next.
But the GM knows. Does that still make it an adventure?
The
posing of such a question is in no way an attack on the beloved
traditions of the RPG. It’s merely a thoughtful consideration of the
intersection of the art of the game, the spirit of the game, and the
spirit of adventure. In the early stages of designing World vs. Hero,
I wondered if the thrill of adventure could be heightened by imposing
uncertainty upon the role of the GM, or if that uncertainty would make
the game impractical. For my guiding inspiration during the research
into this possibility, I turned to the essay “Das Abenteuer” by German
sociologist Georg Simmel. It’s one of my favorite works from a dynamic writer
who presaged structuralism and
captured ideas like no one else before him.
Simmel
wrote that what we call “adventure” must be an experience markedly
different in its relation to our real lives. In fact, it must be a
“dropping out of the continuity of life” entirely.
"Wholeness
of life," after all, refers to the fact that a consistent process runs
through the individual components of life, however crassly and
irreconcilably distinct they may be. What we call an adventure stands in
contrast to that interlocking of life-links, to that feeling that those
countercurrents, turnings, and knots still, after all, spin forth a
continuous thread. An adventure is certainly a part of our existence,
directly contiguous with other parts which precede and follow it; at the
same time, however, in its deeper meaning, it occurs outside the usual
continuity of this life. So,
how does this relate to RPGs? It could be argued that
the Game Master’s planned story – though still a mystery to the players
– constitutes a persistence of the “continuity of life” that must be
dropped in order for players to feel the truest sense of adventure, to
feel to the greatest degree that nothing is assured.
Of
course, a game is just a game, and RPGs are just stories being
experienced in the virtual sense, not in the players’ real lives.
However, a story-game shaped by the GM and molded around the players is
an art form in itself, and Simmel believed that the experience of art is
an adventure a well.
For
the essence of a work of art is, after all, that it cuts out a piece of
the endlessly continuous sequences of perceived experience, detaching
it from all connections with one side or the other, giving it a
self-sufficient form as though defined and held together by an inner
core. A part of existence, interwoven with uninterruptedness of that
existence, yet nevertheless felt as a whole, as an integrated unit -
this is the form common to both the work of art and the adventure.
Indeed, it is an attribute of this form to make us feel that in both the
work of art and the adventure the whole of life is somehow comprehended
and consummated - and this irrespective of the particular theme either
of them may have. To
remove “a piece of the endlessly continuous sequences of perceived
experience” from the game that I was designing, I changed the Game
Master into the World Player and took away a lot of that participant’s
power. Even the designation "World Player" eliminated the perception of a GM’s dominance over the story. In World vs. Hero,
neither player can be certain of the turns the story will take, and
that intensifies tension, suspense, and adventure, especially for the
Hero Player who knows all too well that a plan does not exist through
which his or her heroes can emerge victorious. For
the adventure does not consist in a substance which is won or lost,
enjoyed or endured: to all this we have access in other forms of life as
well. Rather, it is the radicalness through which it becomes
perceptible as a life tension, as the rubato of the life process,
independent of its materials and their differences - the quantity of
these tensions becoming great enough to tear life, beyond those
materials, completely out of itself: this is what transforms mere
experience into adventure. But
the World Player still needed to get the adventure started. In early
development, I knew that the World Player would determine the locations
and possible conflicts in a manner that would make a game of World vs. Hero
very quick and easy to prepare, but it took a while to get the start-up
of that adventure just right. The World Player had to suggest an
adventure without actually crafting one in its entirety. In that way,
the World Player would be subject to the wildness of possibilities that
is the truest essence of the adventure experience – and that wildness
would consequently make the Hero Player feel that his or her heroes were
indeed playing on the stage of uncertainty.
Success finally came in the form of the Adventure Premise, an extremely
simple concept and one that maintained the design objective of the World
Player’s quick and easy set-up. It functions in the same manner as a
movie teaser or the blurb inside of a novel dust jacket – to stimulate
the imagination with a myriad of possibilities, not just one. The
Adventure Premise becomes the context of heroic actions and world
reprisals, and, as it is a “premise” and not a “plan,” the Hero Player
knows that the assurance of anything just does not exist.My own personal formula for an Adventure Premise in World vs. Hero consists of- one to four statements describing some perceived conflict(s);
- implicit or explicit personal connections to one or more heroes within those statements;
- a provocative final question.
The inspiration for that formula comes from some wonderful prior experiences. I have been fortunate enough to have played in a few traditional RPG campaigns with Game Masters who shared my love of "real" adventure. In those games, we players were always tense and unsure of what to do because we knew our GM was equally unsure about what was going to happen next. Those GMs worked from a simple premise rather than a detailed plot, and they opened up our imaginations because they themselves were open to an infinite amount of possibilities.
A GM confident in his or her spontaneous creativity and eager to embrace the unknown is the very conduit to adventure itself.
- JF |
