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The Game Story Series, Part Three: Up A Tree

Part One: The Plan | Part Two: Central Conflicts | Part Three: Up A Tree | Part Four: Verisimilitude | Part Five: Meaningful Choice

When we first meet John McClane in Die Hard, which I will probably always reference as Plato’s Ideal Action Movie Story, he is a cop. But, critically, an off-duty cop. He is a cop, because that helps us believe he can do the inhuman stuff he does in the movie (verisimilitude, stay tuned) but he is off duty for a more important reason. The same reason Deckard is a retired Blade Runner.

If he were on duty, if he were on patrol like the twinkie-eating cop who responds to his call later, he would be obligated to act. And that creates a barrier between us and him. We are not like police officers, we are not bound to act.

Steven Spielberg said that he made Richard Dreyfuss’ character in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind a telephone repairman because he felt earlier drafts, which had the main character as a cop or a firefighter, would not resonate with people. We do not think of cops and fireman as normal people, Spielberg said. Because, and I think Spielberg knows this, they are obligated to help. They see a problem and try to stop it. They are active, not reactive.

The modern action hero is reactive. Not active. A famous director who’s name I forget but who I think was German, once said “my job as a storyteller is to chase the characters up a tree, then figure out a way for them to get down.” And so we come to part three of the Game Story series.

There are lots of tools at your disposal when you sit down to craft the story for your game. An outline can be useful, I can’t imagine working without one, but while an outline is useful for a video game, which has a static story, it’s not super useful for an RPG campaign, which has a dynamic story.

It is at this point that I must define my terms. We often refer to linear and non-linear stories, but while this is useful when describing different flavors of video game, it ill-fits the job of talking about all game story, whether video game or RPG Campaign. Therefore I have spent some time in my garage and hastily crafted two neologisms that, if the butterfly joints hold, may serve for the duration of the discussion. A static story is one that must play out the way the author intended. You and I may both play Mass Effect and we may both have different experiences, but neither of us,narratively, are capable of taking the story somewhere Bioware didn’t intend. I can’t decide I don’t care about becoming a Spectre, I’d rather be…a janitor.

Whereas in an RPG game, at any given moment, the story can go completely off the rails. A player may decide to change or retire his character. I once ran a campaign where the PCs were prisoners of war, behind enemy lines. Once they escaped, I gave them a map of the local area and said “where would you like to go?” I had no idea what they might choose. There were at least seven options and as the campaign played out, and they were free to invent their own options. They did some crazy shit I could never have planned. That’s a dynamic story. No one knows where the story is going to go.

AS I WAS SAYING, you have a lot of tools. Outlines: good for video games, less suited to RPG campaigns. The Three Act Model is also useful…as is the Five Act model, which most hour-long TV dramas use. But almost wholly unsuited for an RPG story since no one knows which act you’re in at any given time or how many acts there will be.

It was this, the act-model method of analyzing film, that our Dimly Remembered, Possibly German Director was commenting on, dismissively, when he said his stories consisted of Getting The Heroes Up A Tree and then Finding A Way For Them To Get Down. Once again, we veer perilously close to Aria -levels of egregious capitalization.

Implicit in this series is the notion that your game is essentially an Action Game, with an Action-movie story, and here my bias may be showing, since that’s what I know. Mercenaries 2 wasn’t going to be a Planetary Romance no matter how much I Junta‘d my superiors. And for action movies, we need to chase the heroes up a tree.

The moment John McClane is chased up a tree comes shortly after he discovers the benefits of making fists with his toes, and the “terrorists” begin shooting up the Nakatomi building. He’s barefoot, critical later in the movie, but not germane to my point, and must react. Why? Is it because he is a cop? Well, certainly he would have done something out of sheer duty, but his real motivation is that his wife is one of the hostages.

If you remember, John tries to save his wife without actually having to fight anyone. He pulls the fire alarm and for a moment, hopes that the fire department will discover what’s going on. But Hans sends one of The Germans to investigate and John is forced to act. Even then he tries to do so without killing anyone. He tries to knock the blonde German dude out, but in the end, has no choice, and must kill the guy.

That’s the tipping-point that transforms McClane into the action hero. He is personally motivated; his wife is in jeopardy, and he is furthermore pushed to the point where he has no choice but to act. He is now Up A Tree and the rest of the movie is John McClane trying to get down.

I’ll give you another great example and only because it’s the DVD that’s sitting here next to my keyboard. 3 Days Of The Condor, great little movie. Yes, it offends by piling implausibility upon implausibility, starting with Robert Redford as a bookish CIA analyst and throwing in Faye Dunaway on top of that. Redford is already WAY too good looking to be a nerd, and Dunaway is impossibly hot for a random person he kidnaps. But otherwise it’s very fine.

Redford works with a bunch of 20-somethings in a New York City brownstone, wherein they read books. They read every book published, looking for special code words that might indicate the author of the book is sending messages to the KGB. They are not spies, they are not agents.

Redford’s character is very smart, kinda anti-establishment, and goes out for lunch one day. When he returns only a few minutes later, everyone is dead. And presumably whoever killed everyone in the building is now after him as well. THAT is chasing your hero up a tree!

He stumbles out into the street, suddenly terrified of everyone he sees, suspecting everyone, fearing for his life. He runs into a phone booth (this was 30 years ago, you understand) and calls the CIA. “This is Condor,” he says, taking a while to remember his probably never-before-used code name. “Everyone in the section is dead! I want to come in.” Shortly thereafter, he realizes he cannot trust his superiors. Cannot trust anyone, and must survive on his wits for the next three days. Classic.

A common mistake among GMs, at least a mistake I made commonly as a GM, is to set the PCs free upon the world and let them come up with their own motivations. I thought this empowered them. I thought this was forward-thinking, liberal…democratic.

It’s crap. We need boundaries in order to understand our options. Players want the illusion of freedom, but before they can appreciate it, they need to be forced into action. It’s all very well and good to ask the players what they want to do, but the players need a framework to understand their options. When you chase them up a tree, when you force them to react to you, you can thereafter give them a variety of options and they now have a framework for understanding the meaning of their options.

It’s easy to create a great situation full of detail and expect your players to move within it and engage with it until a central tension arises form their actions, but I believe this places too much of a burden on the players. Players don’t want to figure out what the problem is or may be, they want you to tell them, and then they figure out the solution. They want you to chase them up a tree, so they can figure out how to get down. A director or writer in movies has to do both jobs, you only have to do the first part. The players listen to you for the first part, the Inciting Incident as they say in drama. Once you’ve got them up a tree, you listen to them. Evaluate their solutions, and run with the one that sound best.

It’s equally easy to say “this guy comes up to you and asks you to recover an artifact.” Ok, simple. Players like to know when the adventure has shown up. But again, this makes them active and eventually they’ll start questioning their own motives.

One problem we struggled with for a long time on Mercenaries 2 and probably never really nailed, was how to chase the hero up a tree. Many people on the team thought that having someone put a one-hundred million dollar bounty on the bad guy was enough. There was no need for, no benefit in, meeting the bad guy beforehand. No point in establishing a personal motivation. Mercenaries, in the real world, work for cash and that’s enough.

It’s enough if all you’re interested in is providing the players with some flavor to go along with the giant toy you’ve made that lets them rampage through Venezuela playing with the Havok physics engine. But if you want to give them context for their actions, so they’ll play for more than a couple of hours, feel like they got their $75 worth, you need a story. A story that provides context for their actions. The action is still the star of the show, but the story gives it meaning.

For our story, an Action story, we needed to chase the hero up a tree. We got about 3/4 of the way there, I think. The bad guy tries to kill the hero and doesn’t pay him. The hero vows revenge. That’s not bad, but we could have done better. There were a couple of drafts of our story where the hero’s partner is killed. Those were better I think. Maybe only a little better, but the point is there.

My most recent D&D campaign lasted for a couple of years, but never really took off with the players. We didn’t play often enough, and my job (and the sheer amount of prep time D&D3.x requires) made it difficult for me to provide the level of detail necessary to make the setting feel real. Stay tuned for part four in this series.

About one quarter of the way through, I was lamenting to my friend, fellow GM, and player in the game, Jim, that the players weren’t engaged. He said “you gotta fuck ‘em somehow. Push their characters, force them into action. Take something away they care about.” He was right. The party was based in the absurdly small town of Tane and the players felt like they knew some of the characters. This was their home base, they were safe here, adventure came to them. People literally asked them to do things for them. They were essentially like cops, acting out of duty, or the mercenaries acting out of faceless greed.

Thanks to Jim, I knew what I had to do. I bought the Red Hand of Doom adventure from WotC and halfway through it, while the heroes are off adventuring, the army of bad guys sacks Tane. Razes it, and literally salts the earth. When the players return, everyone they know is dead. Their safety is taken away, they find themselves behind enemy lines and they are now hunted. Like Robert Redford in 3 Days of the Condor.

Now the players were up a tree, they were personally motivated, and were free to react. I frankly could have done a better job with follow-up, I ran the adventure in a too linear fashion, didn’t give the players the chance to make their own decisions, but it’s my hope that D&D4 will require less prep time, and those of us with, like, jobs and shit will be able to run a better game with less prep work. Give the players the opportunity to make meaningful choices.

End of Line

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