thread: 2005-11-14 : Long and Short
On 2005-11-15, Kip Manley wrote:
Hmm. Long and short. —Maybe little and big, instead? (Not so loaded as you might be thinking. Or rather, loaded in another way.)
Some empiricals: it's an Ars Magica spinoff. Campaigns are anchored by covenants, of which we've seen four in play. When we began in the summer of 1991, the game-year was 420; it's now 425. (Don't goggle your eyes yet. There were some long fallow periods in there.) —The progression-in-time isn't so smooth as that, though: one took place in 420 - 422 or so; two took or are taking or wioll having taken place "now," only one of 'em is the game we're playing at the moment, and the other was a campaign that ended, what, two years ago? And one was an attempt to do an historical covenant, but really none of this is either here or there.
What's important: since we started taking (extensiveish) session notes while playing, back on 16 January this year, we've played 18 sessions. The first two of this run were list-making, anchor-setting, kick-ideas-around sessions with little to no actual play; then there's a run of 15 sessions, from 13 February to 30 October, that cover 4 "major" plots (the Salmon Festival; the Day of Passion; the capture and execution of the Monkeys; the visit of the Manu Tenereans—though these are all highly interrelated, I'm making arbitrary distinctions, and Charles for one would probably disagree with number and break-points), and cover (counts) 11 days of game time.
The most recent session, last night, we had another list-making, anchor-setting, kick-ideas-around run. It aimed at skipping almost three months ahead, to move us from high summer to deep autumn, but we seem to have managed "skipping" only about a month before dipping back into "play."
(Skip and play are very bad words for the distinction that needs to be drawn, because skip is where we hard-core pull out and set up the fruits of creative unfocus that then let us go play.)
Other differences, or rather the big one: there's a very comprehensive structure for the magi of this Order. Basically, we know a little bit about every single mage, thanks to some heroic labor and a love of genealogies on the part of someone who isn't currently playing. —So anyone can "create" an important node with confidence, and see how it relates to other important nodes, without worrying overly about assumption clashes. (We play, quite literally, with a net.)
Talk of escalating conflict from peonic to world-shattering doesn't resonate with me. Ars Magica already has a built-in no, not mechanism, but metaphor for dousing flames and lighting new ones: your magi go into Twilight as they get older and more powerful, guttering out before they can shake foundation stones; apprentices graduate to magehood, and you get to yank the rug out from under yourself all over again. Soap operas or comic books—persistant fictional worlds. —Stories end all the time, sure, but the world just keeps on going. Done with this bit, here? That person, yonder? Pick up someone else. Move over there. Keep going. (Comics being rather apt, actually: the platonic ideal, or one of the glimpses of a platonic ideal that we've bandied about, hearkens back to the short-run Champions campaigns run by a friend back in college, which had overlapping casts of characters: a natural thing to do with superheroes, sure, but the sense that even though Story Y ended with Campaign Y, Character Y is still in the world, leading their life, and we can check up on 'em if we like, that's heady world-building stuff.)
I know I'm not using jargon to transfer currency from one point of significance to the next, but my purpose in these sorts of things is rarely to speak with clarity. And for all I know I'm rehashing age-old discussions without realizing it; me = noob. But if I were to try to itemize the tools we have that lets us do the long-term voodoo we do, I'd list, what?
- A strong explicit framework for creating the nodes that are our ostensible focus in play (the magi), giving everyone a solid floor for collaborative creation;
- A loose grasp of Everything Else, allowing us to hold on lightly and give everyone room for coming up with stuff collaboratively;
- An implicit trust in and knowledge of each other on the part of most of the players, with, yes, the unwritten dysfunctionality that that implies;
- A love of the quotidian and a patience that perhaps borders on the pathological but nonetheless keeps us from eating up the world in a gulp.
Thinking of a story's longevity as one might think of a character under pressure? An interesting approach, but I'd balk at ever attempting to systematize it thusly. And I can't emphasize the third point in that list above enough: everything else stems from the fact that a great many of us have been playing together for a very long time (then, we've got two brand new players who aren't having problems adjusting, as far as I know, but then, again, the water's already there for them to swim in, so). I guess one of the things you get by playing a game for such a long time is the sort of game you can play for such a long time.
I dunno. Use short games as pilots? Test each other, build a core group that can dig in once it knows it wants to dig in? (There's nothing wrong with not digging in, of course. It's not the only end; I don't even think it's much of an end at all.) Only I was suggesting little and big, instead of long and short. Except thinking about it, the games we've played just seem big; really, they've all been very, very little. Elias, the mage I was playing in the very first game almost 15 years ago, just finished writing his first book; he's been a mage for five years all this time, and he's still hissing like Keanu Reeves in Much Ado. Not static, no, there's been growth, but it's slow and little. And it's a hoot and a half knowing he's out there somewhere, but I've moved on to other things, so I'll visit from time to time, but I'm not moving there again.
So. Powerful? Yes, but not every single night. Fulfilling? Well, hell, we're all very much still here; we came back, many of us, who went away.
Good things? Bad things? To be actively sought and built?
This makes ecb go "yay! more about your freeform's system!"
This is what I want. : ) Time for me to write up my observations.
