Thank you!

- Ryan

Yeah, in my mind Fate is totally an adventure game with this neat story toy to play with.

- Ryan

I’m not sure how to help. Could you unpack the disconnect some?

- Ryan

(odd, I guess this really didn’t post the first time)

Totally, though I’ll have to be brief at the moment, as it’s a busy day.

This thought is something I’ve grown into over the last couple years, but it was playing games like Fiasco (and, really, every BPG game I’ve played) or Primetime Adventures that finally brought this home.

Now, stories are (partially) about successes and failures, so I’m not saying there’s a void of them in a story game. But they are not the primary drivers of play. The pacing of the story is.

PTA is my go-to for this. When I run PTA, we know how long the game’s going to be and the end result: a show (or when I run it at cons, a movie). When I do a three-act movie, which is three times around the table with everyone contributing a scene, we have a sense of what’s too soon or too late — we’re pacing ourselves (weakly-modeled pacing) and using the structure of the game to guide that.

And given scene-based resolution, it’s not strictly about competence but about an interesting question or fork in the road.

Fiasco is similar, only due to the black & white dice economy the number of times people get their way in the first half of the game define how the second half is going to fall out. I’ve seen that in a number of games I’ve played, which has made me think about pacing systems that rely on economy in addition to our general sense of a narrative. (In Fiasco’s case, the advice to remember you’re playing a Coen Brothers’ flick.)

Furthermore, I have seen games of those fall apart because we did not fill in the weak modeling with strong senses of idea. My first attempt at running PTA was like this — we made an awesome pitch for a cross between Starship Troopers and Band of Brothers called FALL, a pseudo-historical miniseries about an elite group of spaceborne soldiers landing on a planet and aiding in the war to reclaim…well, you know, it’s D-Day but in space.

But we didn’t put a stronger sense of pacing and narrative sensibilities in, so the game became a string of conflict encounters. It was actually a pretty shitty way to introduce some friends to PTA.

I don’t know if this is what you’re looking for, Judd. Let me know if it’s not.

- Ryan

Could you give more examples of this theory that are based in play?