Meanwhile, back at Jam Pony…

I've been watching Dark Angel, a television series about Max, a genetically engineered soldier on the run in post-nuclear pulse Seattle. One of the interesting aspects of the show is that nearly every episode, there's a sub-plot involving Max's friends at Jam Pony, the bicycle courier service she works for. Sometimes, the sub-plot doesn't involve Max at all, and the sub-plot thread never crosses the main plot. But it adds a sense of reality, the feeling that there's a real world around Max and her action-hero life. When Max does interact with her friends, we see them as more than two-dimensional cut-outs who only exist to interact with Max. The supporting characters clearly have lives of their own and it makes the whole more believable.

I've been thinking about this from a gaming perspective. One of the tools often used in telling stories is the third-person point-of-view. In fact, many "how to write fiction" books recommend this PoV for beginning writers, because it makes it easier to tell the story when you aren't restricted to the PoV of just the main character. Without the third-person PoV in Dark Angel, they couldn't show all the little sub-plots that lend verisimilitude to the show. Or the villain doing his dastardly thing at the beginning so the viewer understands what's going on.

This approach is used very rarely in gaming. When most roleplaying scenarios rely on investigation or discovery as a primary driver of the plot, there's good reason not to show scenes that will give away information the PCs are trying to discover, unless you don't mind the players knowing information their characters don't. (I do. Even if the players are good at firewalling non-character information, I don't like to burden them with knowing something and not being able to have their character act on it.) But there are still other areas, like these sub-plots of minor characters, that the players don't get to see.

Theatrix is the only game I know of that addresses using a third-person PoV. It explicitly encourages cut-scenes and sub-plots involving characters that aren't the PCs. Usually, the NPCs are assigned to players for the duration of the scene so the players don't have to sit and watch the GM talk to himself for twenty minutes.

Theatrix goes as far as to promote foreshadowing with scenes involving the main plot. For instance, two players might be given characters with instructions to play out the exchange of money between an assassin and his employer, with just enough information to play the scene, but no reveal anything important. So the players will know an assassin has been hired, and that this is going to be important to the plot, but they won't know who did the hiring or who the target is.

Theatrix is based heavily on television and film, and strongly integrates the "foreshadowing through cut-scene" element. But I find there's a lot of resistance to this. The one time my group tried this, the players found it awkward… though that's expected when trying anything new. I'm wondering how much of the resistance toward the idea comes from the idea that the player is telling his character's story, and when asked to tell someone else's story, it's a deviation from what he's in the game for.

I think doing the Dark Angel style of developing minor characters might be useful. More useful than foreshadowing the main plot, because the player can actually know the character and play the role every time the minor character comes up. No information really needs to be hidden from the players. I'm not sure if it'd go over any better… it'd be a story within a story, and while it's good pacing for television, it might kill the pacing of a roleplaying game. And it could interfere with players who are trying to get into their character and don't want to be distracted by changing their frame of mind. (Funny that, for all of Theatrix' high-brow roleplaying direction, it seems to assume that players can drop in and out of various characters without any trouble.)

I'm not sure I'll do anything with this, but it seems like there might be something here that could be useful. If it could add depth to the world and give the PCs more connections to it (by involving PCs in the sub-plots), that would be a good deal. I'm just not sure if the pros outweigh the cons.