Storyboard: You guys must be the party

A couple of weeks back, I wrote an article about dealing with a major ongoing storyline in an MMO. For those of you who neither read the article nor can spare the time to click the link and read it now: It talked about the problems presented by having a storyline and offered a few different solutions for handling such inconsistencies. Of course, as I noted, very few of these problems apply to open-world sandbox games that have no sort of ongoing developer-run story for you to stumble around.

No, those games have issues entirely their own, starting with the very nature of player-run stories.

A completely player-driven story has the advantage of not having several issues that can crop up when dealing with an ongoing in-game story, but it also still has some serious problems. There are still issues that you're going to have to have answers for when you're in a game that lets you craft the world to match your whims, and unfortunately the methods for doing so aren't quite as straightforward as the methods for dealing with an in-game storyline.

The inclusion problem

My freshman year of high school was in a new place, and I had the misfortune of knowing absolutely no one. Being a naturally geeky and socially awkward sort anyway, I found this problematic. I thought I had found a safe haven, however, when I learned that the school's chess club was basically just a front for a general gaming club, and wonder of wonders I was joining at just the right time to get in on the ground floor of the group's next D&D campaign. I was a little surprised that I was the only freshman joining and everyone else was a senior or junior, but I wasn't bothered by being a bit younger.

What I was bothered by shortly thereafter was the fact that I was painfully the new guy.

Everyone in the group had shared in-jokes, shared rules about how roleplaying games were supposed to work, and by and large an understanding with one another. They understood the right sort of characters to create for the campaign that was being run, they understood when someone was joking and when someone was really angry, they knew one another in the way that you can know one another only by roleplaying together for years. And I was not a part of that group. I quietly begged off after a few sessions and was never invited back, even though everyone in the group was still friendly to me at school.

This wasn't a group going out of its way to ostracize me; the members welcomed me with open arms. But in a tight-knit group of roleplayers, there's a certain degree of insularity that resists the addition of a new member. Within the group, events will be referred to in a familiar fashion with no explanation, leaving newer members with the sense that all of the cool stuff has already happened. If you come in after a certain point, you're always going to be aware that you aren't part of the real group; you're just an extra.

Unfortunately, you can't really mitigate this in an online environment because the best way to handle it offline is to just bring in multiple new people at once and split up the group a little bit (half new players, half old, for instance) so that everyone mingles. When a new player joins your guild, he or she is irrevocably stuck in the middle of a story in progress. And you have to make it accessible and interesting without removing all of the worthwhile storytelling that you've been doing for the past however many years.

With an in-game story, everyone's experienced the same events. With a purely player-generated story, all of the cool stuff already happened, and it's not going on repeat.

The ouroboros issue

Players run into a very simple problem given enough freedom: They can start to run out of antagonists. Not villains; villains are easy to create, and depending on the nature of a player-generated story, frequently said villain could be back with the group in a few weeks. But you can run out of antagonists by running out of things to actually threaten anyone with.

Stories thrive on conflict, and conflict is only interesting when it keeps changing. When Mark and Erin spend months in an on-again off-again relationship, it can make for interesting storytelling until they finally break up or get together for good. But if they start doing it again in a few months, it's much less interesting; and if they've done it five times already, there's no real conflict. There's a thing happening that happens with surprising regularity, and it's wholly uninteresting because it's paired with a foregone conclusion.

Every story you tell is a story you can't tell again without some fundamental shift. There is a limited number of stories that can be told with a fixed number of variables.

Designers, of course, can add new areas to the game, new antagonists, new threats and problems and conflict. Players really can't; they can explore the dangers offered by the world, but they can't add new ones, even in a player-run game. And propping up a villain runs into the superhero problem -- each successive villain needs to be more dangerous than the previous villain or they're essentially not worth your time. Crafting an endless series of cardboard enemies isn't engaging storytelling, and it will result in players getting bored and heading off to greener pastures.

Counterweights and why they help

The odd thing about player characters and players is that there's a fundamental disconnect in your motivations. Player characters want the world around them to be stable, calm, and generally safe. Players, on the other hand, want their characters to be thrown into all sorts of dangerous situations on a regular basis.

With an external force providing some story, the player characters can never really change certain things. No matter how many times your group beats back the Horde, there will still be Horde forces to send against you. It means that there's no real way to resolve that conflict by your lonesome. In a purely player-generated story, however, you can solve these problems, sometimes permanently. And while your character would be happy with that outcome, you can quickly find out that it's not really what you wanted.

With an external force driving a story and events, the world is bigger than you. You can affect it but not dictate all the terms. Absolute power is rather stifling.

None of these problems is unique to freeform games, naturally. But they take center stage when you don't have an ongoing story in the background... whereas if you do have a story going on in the background, then you have to run into all of the issues that were discussed a couple of columns back. There's really no "better" or "worse" medium for storytelling, just one set of problems versus another.

As always, thoughts are welcome in the comments below or via mail to eliot@massively.com. Next week, I think I'm just going to bring everything to an end. Or at least talk about doing so, same thing.

Every Friday, Eliot Lefebvre fills a column up with excellent advice on investing money, writing award-winning novels, and being elected to public office. Then he removes all of that, and you're left with Storyboard, which focuses on roleplaying in MMOs. It won't help you get elected, but it will help you pretend you did.