Show008: Interview with Ron Edwards
This is the last of the Forge Midwest interviews. Soon we’ll be back to listening to my short podcasts featuring only my nasal vocal tones, in stereo! Until then enjoy this interview with Ron Edwards. It’s the longest yet, and the only one where I didn’t get completely through my pitiful list of questions. We talk about White Wolf games and their effect on roleplayers looking for a specific type of game experience, the vision for the Forge, Ash Cans, and doing conventions differently.
12:35 pm on May 17th, 2007
Clyde, I LOVE that you leave in the podcast things like Ron going to get a paper, etc. I couldn’t figure out why I loved it until now. It’s because I feel like I’m right there, listening to a real conversation. I hope that doesn’t change!
8:23 pm on May 18th, 2007
Clyde,
I’ve really been grooving on these shows, and I think this is the best yet. I made some comments on it over on my own show (Have Games, Will Travel) which will hopefully drive some traffic your way. Keep up the good work.
–Paul
3:11 pm on May 19th, 2007
Loved the interview! Thank you so much for recording and sharing this, and thanks to Ron for participating.
I used to be a notorious Story After gamer, just horrible. I couldn’t see story if it happened right before my eyes, but I pussled shit together afterwords in endless Story Hour posts. Ugh…
Ron’s Sorcerer, and lots of story gaming has actually made me appreciate other media more as well. I totally get much more out of movies and TV shows now than I did in the past.
Thanks,
Yoki
5:30 pm on May 19th, 2007
Hi Chris and Paul,
Thanks a lot for the positive comments. I’ll lining up more interviews for Origins, I enjoyed making these interviews quite a bit also.
Hi Yoki,
Can you talk more about your experience? Are you evidence of Ron’s claims? I’m still giving thought to whether I accept Ron’s claims.
1:41 am on May 23rd, 2007
Great interview. You let the subject speak. Something many so-called professionals could learn.
9:05 am on May 25th, 2007
I agree with walkerp. It was a great interview.
Also, the Vampire group Ron described WAS my Vampire group for way too many years. I don’t remember the thing fondly. It seem some of the guys on the group could now fit the “Brain Damage” tag. The rest of us, gladly, survived.
12:41 pm on May 25th, 2007
Hi Walkerp and Rene ,
Thanks for the positive comments.
Rene, could you talk more about your group? I’m curious about the stated goals you had when you sat down at the table and how story was created, etc? Also can you tell me how you made the acute E’s? I can’t seem to duplicate it to type your name properly.
7:28 am on May 27th, 2007
Clyde, I get the thing about the é’s a lot lately. I live in Mexico, so my keyboard is international, and I can easily type ö, è, î and the like. If you’re dead set on using accents, you can insert them using the Character Map that should be somewhere under Accesories> System Tools, assuming you’re using Windows. Anyway, there’s no problem at all with spelling my name wrong.
Assuming you speak Spanish, you could read all about my former gaming group here:
http://againstshadow.blogspot.com/2007/05/memorias-de-un-jugador-de-rol.html
Since I guess you don’t speak Spanish, I’ll try to address your questions as briefly as possible:
Back in 1995, we were in high school, and me and my friend Agoran already had a lot of FRPGs sessions in our past. Our first game was MERP, and then we moved to AD&D 2E. A group of seniors invited us to play this ‘cool new game’, which turned out to be VtM.
Two years later, Agoran formed a group of what would be called Vampire: The Masacre-aid. They were trying to play VtM without a rulebook, to hilarious consequences. After a brief foray with Werewolf, I ‘staged a coup’. I bought the VtM rulebook, read it, and decided to play the game ‘right’.
So, the goals were never clearly stated, but now that I understand what ‘Story Now!’ means, that was it. I was the Storyteller for the group, and we were supposed to create this High Literature thing while playing vampire. RPing became a dead serious endeavor. And I forced it on everyone else.
Our first tries were relatively successful, but not enough. I tried several approaches. First, I scripted adventures like AD&D dungeons, but that wasn’t working. Then we went deep into immersive play, but that wasn’t working either. Next, I created a city or two, gave every NPC motives and weaknesses, and left the players to their own devices. That did not work, either. In hindsight, I think the players had no idea of what they should do with their ‘freedom’.
And it was ‘freedom’, since I enforced the Golden Rule with an iron fist, just the way Ron described. Our session went just like Ron described, actually. We became insular, but also slightly famous. ‘Rene’s a great Storyteller, he makes the best stories’, and things like that.
I can tell you know players were frustrated, a lot, because they had no impact over the plot. They used to gather together after the game, talking about how they could outsmart me. Also, they cheated a lot. I noticed, and cheated back. If one of them suddenly gained a generation dot, I had an even older Vampire show up and beat the crap out of him. Things like that.
Obviously, the only way that situation could last was by not talking about it, which we never did. Why? Call it a combination of ‘the GM is God’ and pure social intimidation from my side to keep them in line. A lot of people tried to get away from the group, but the rest coerced them back.
Then we settled on playing the published adventures, the Giovanni and Transylvania Chronicles. That’s where disaster ensued. Players became more and more frustrated. On one memorable occasion, one of them tried to embrace Dracula, ‘just to change history’, and it was total fallout. No one else thought it would be a cool idea. ‘Meta-gaming’ was absolutely prohibited.
We had a lot of interpersonal issues that were never discussed, but that were forced upon play, backstabbing in real life was followed by backstabbing in the game, and so on. We had a complete fallout when were trying to play through the ‘End Times’.
How could I think that metaplot and ‘story now’ could come together? Right now, I have no idea. Those of us that gave RPGing a break survived, though I only came back to the hobby a year ago, to discover it was completely changed.
However, two particular guys couldn’t make it. One of them became completely insular and paranoid, the other became a racist and sexist %&$&â€. Both of them can’t get story, just the way Ron described, and both are obsessed about ‘finishing the game’.
Let me throw in also a thing I’m remembering right now:
Between chronicles, Agoran prepared a game of 7th Sea. It was the best fun we had in years. If we said we wanted to go pirating, Agoran would send us pirating; if we wanted to hunt Moby Dick, he would give us Moby Dick. If we wanted a huge naval battle… well, you get the idea. The thing was, the game was short lived. Everyone mocked A. beyond his back because he was not a good GM. Why? Because he wasn’t creating a story for us: we made it for him, instead. We mocked him because every single time we defeated his villains with ease. And we wanted real storytelling, so we wanted to play Vampire again.
I hope that answers your questions. I would be more than glad to talk about it further if you want me too.
Cheers,
1:56 pm on May 31st, 2007
Hi Rene,
I see. I was trying to get the letters right with html. I don’t normally use windows, so I’ll have to figure it out in the future.
You’re right I don’t read Spanish, and I only speak enough to speak like a baby, or start a fight. I have spent a bit of my free time having google translate the pages and reading those. I think I’m in part three. Several times I’ve come across the words Comic Castle. Is that a proper name? Comic Castle in San Diego was the first place I bought roleplaying games with my own money when I was 13.
6:37 am on June 1st, 2007
I hope Google Translate is kind on you. If it’s not, I hope you can get a good grasp of the way the group behaved form my reply above. I try to rember it fondly, but really it was bad bad gaming.
Comic Castle is THE Mexican store to go for roleplaying, wargaming and comic book needs. It has branches in all the important cities in the country, and has the best distribution. Sometimes we get the goods even before they are officially released on the US.
7:38 pm on June 1st, 2007
Hello, Clyde, and thanks for a great interview and a great podcast.
Man, this interview has kicked the crap out of me and led me on quite a journey, which I’ve summed up here:
http://dmperez.com/2007/06/01/story-now-an-odyssey/
Thanks for that, though. And thanks for a good show as well.
You really should join us at the RPG Podcasters group. Email me about it.
8:21 pm on June 4th, 2007
Good interview. I got the link to it on RPG.net.
I recall the Brain Damage thread. I was one of those people who came in. I thought he was speaking allegorically – I was wrong (as was pointed out in that thread). It took me a while but I really do understand Ron’s points and agree with them.
But…
The learning curve to “get” them is very steep and I expect most people don’t try (at least a lot of people at RPG.net don’t).
I will try to summarise the talking points as I heard them: Pre-Vampire games were all over the map. Without realizing it they supported all manner of play. Vampire promised real high art story telling but the rules didn’t support this. The GM either controlled the story or players looked back on games and imagined they had told a story afterward. The players were not in charge during the game. If people there to pick up girls, run combats or get into emersive play they were not hurt by White Wolf. Those who wanted story now were frustrated. If they chucked the game and left, they were not hurt but if they stayed and tried to make it work they developed learned helplessness (brain damage). For may tastes this is an overstated case but I don’t dispute learned helplessness.
I really appreciate Ron’s work on the forge – making a place to encourage new game designers – more than debates on theory. I think you got to that part of his work a lot more in the second half of the interview.
Good work! I’ll book mark your site and look for future interviews.
Chris Engle
BTW the talk about Indie RPG cons reminded me of miniatures game conventions. Miniatures have not been the center of the hobby since the early 70’s (if they even were then) so they have gone the route you and Ron are talking about for decades. There is a thriving sub-industrial minis game market that does just what you describe. You should check out HMGS (Historical Miniatures Gaming Society). There are probably good things to learn from their experiences.
4:51 pm on September 26th, 2007
Hi Daniel,
What are you having trouble with?
Edit Oct03: Daniel if you do come back, I put you back into the unapproved file. For some reason your post had hit my spam catcher, but I wasn’t sure it was spam. I approved it to see if you responded, but since you haven’t yet I closed the door, so I wouldn’t have a spam problem crop up when I wasn’t looking. If you are a real person, I’d love to help you, just make another comment and I can reapprove you.
4:25 pm on October 20th, 2007
Obviously I’m coming to this late…I don’t usually have time to keep up with all of the podcasts I enjoy, but I had a chance to advance somewhat through your shows. I really enjoy the podcast, for what its worth.
I have to say, though, that this interview bothered me. Maybe I’m one of these brain damaged people, since I’ve played a lot of White Wolf, but I honestly had no idea what your guest thought he was talking about. He seemed to be referring to experiences and problems that I’ve never experienced. I have to preface this, I suppose, by saying that I came into White Wolf games around 2nd or 3rd edition for most of the games, so maybe 1st edition was incredibly bad.
In brief, he came off as incredibly condescending. It seemed like an accute case of “bad wrong fun” accusations that, as I said, have nothing to do with my experience of WW. I though that talking about WW gamers as “brain damaged” was absurd hyperbole and entirely unnecessary at best.
Perhaps I was also biased by having just listened to the interview with Luke Crane. The difference was extreme.
It seems that from the comments, other listeners were jiving with this interview, and there’s no reason not to interview the guy in the future if another interesting topic comes up. I’m pretty sure I’ll pass, though. I honestly didn’t finish listening to the podcast after I was a little more than halfway through – I got sort of sick of it, and just skipped on to the next episode, so I might have missed gems that came out later on.
Again, as I said, this could just be the brain damage talking.
6:52 pm on October 20th, 2007
Hi Doug,
Thanks for listening, it sounds like you have to go out of your way to do so. It makes me glad that you feel it’s worth the effort.
So your comments are not unusual, I’ve gotten about half and half, positive and critical of this show. You are definitely not alone though. Many folks aren’t as polite as you have been either. Ron doesn’t need me to defend him, but let me break his message down a bit.
I asked the question about brain damage, because I’ve met Ron, and he is a fairly genial fellow. It seemed out of sorts. I also didn’t understand quite what he was saying. After this interview here is my summation of his argument.
In the early nineties, there were some teenage folks who bought into White Wolf’s claim that it was a storytelling system. They tried really hard to use the system to create high literary stories. They wanted “story now.” The game however doesn’t really create stories, it’s an example of what I called in an early show of game physics. The rules are about modeling the Storyteller universe not about telling stories. If there is a story it’s brought through some kind of social system. I’m not sure W.W. is to blame for this, that was pretty much how RPG’s worked across the board. What W.W. did do differently is make the claim that their system was about stories. I think this is all pretty solid and am in total agreement with Ron at this point.
Stepping back to the teenage kids. The important part of his argument is on the teenage part. The people he is saying this happened to were still in the formative years of the creation of their personality. At least the largest portion of it, you could argue that our personality is always under some change. Anyway… What he says is that they tried really hard to make the storytelling work, and when they didn’t they assumed they were doing something wrong. They were also strongly motivated as they were grasping on to the game as part of teenage identity politics. I.E. they were or wanted to be Goth. These two things caused them to try harder because they really wanted to succeed. The only way they could get story out of this system of game physics was for someone to force it on the game through social maneuvering. The idea is that the other participants learned to be passive, so they could get “story,” and in doing so they lost the ability to identify the internal elements of a story, and could only identify the exterior genre elements.
I’m unsure about this second part of the argument. I have met and played a couple games with folks who were the right age of what Ron is talking about and their playstyle was strange in a way that’s hard for me to identify. I hadn’t experienced it in my previous 12 or so years roleplaying, before the first edition time period. Also I have met intelligent people who have self-identified themselves with Ron’s argument. For myself, I have filed it under interesting, but I don’t feel I have quite enough evidence to buy in. Enough that it makes me wonder, but not to break my normal skepticism.
Anyway, he’s talking about a very small subset of W.W. players which people normally lose in the reaction of hearing the words brain damaged.
If you still find it frustrating, or don’t agree, it’s cool. I think you’ll find that everything after Show008 up to Show022 is controversy free, but I can’t make any guarantee’s after that, since I haven’t released that stuff yet.
9:20 am on November 18th, 2007
Clyde,
Thanks for taking the time to make the long reply. As you can see from the frequency of my comments, time is something I wish I had more of.
I actually listened to most of the episode again, and I understand it a little more, I just don’t really identify with it. It could be that I don’t have a deep understanding of what “story now” means in the semi-technical way it seems to be used. I mean, I’ve felt like I was participating in a story, and helping to shape it with the others involved, while playing WW games.
The system doesn’t really codify what the books sell, I actually agree there. I just think thats the case with pretty much every game I’ve ever read or played – they all make their own large claims of epic adventure and sweeping story, but no matter what, you need good players who are highly invested to even get close to that kind of experience.
I mean, AD&D made pretty grandiose claims that it never lived up to (Gygax’s introductions were hilarious, even to an 11yr old), so it doesn’t really surprise me when a game says “This game will shatter your mind and change you forever with its power!” and it turns out to be merely enjoyable. I also didn’t start playing WW games until almost a decade after Vampire first came out, so its possible that first and second edition were a lot worse. But, like I said, I’d put disappointed as the strongest response to WW’s failure to produce story now. I think if there is any damage being done, it’d be hard to blame it on a game. If Vampire the Masquerade is going to damage you, you’re on shaky ground as it is.
Everyone’s heard crazy stories about unbalanced players, especially of VtM, but I usually regarded these stories as equivalent of Mazes and Monsters’ take on D&D players. Maybe I just got lucky or something, who knows? I’ve just been in all of these games with pretty well-balanced people, without the dynamics that Ron was talking about. It sounds like he had some sort of awful experience with WW players. What I took from this is ultimately “Apparently Ron hates White Wolf” and no more than that.
Anyway, I’m just avoiding work I should be doing.
Your show is awesome. I think its great that these people I’ve never met provide me with information and entertainment for free, putting in all of this work…in a closet
. I really know I’m listening to someone else who does this gaming thing just for the love of it, and its great to hear.
12:33 pm on November 18th, 2007
Hey Doug,
Yes. Vampire especially the LARP part has caused me to meet some very interesting characters. I’d put it on par to some of the interesting folks I’ve met through Hardcore/Punk.
Don’t worry about the sporadic replies. Likely myself, you, and Google are the only ones reading way down here. That’s deliberate on my part, if you come here you are mainly engaging me in a conversation, versus say a forum which is a place for people to hang out, talk to each other, or at each other more often, and requires mothering.
So let’s see if I can impart story now. There is mainly two types of story that we have in roleplaying games with a story. Story before and Story now.
Story before is where the Gamemaster dreams things up, and spends hours creating things, and may even have ideas how the campaign will end, up to the notable personalities and their positions on the magic ritual that must be stopped or the world will end. And surprise surprise, your brother who has been helping you get here has actually been a cultist all along. They need your pure soul you see so he’s been helping keep it that way.
There’s two ways this can play out. One way is the players ignore all this and derail “the plot.” The GM will either adapt and keep “the plot” without the players knowing, use that Gamemasters always right thing to force the players to do “the plot,” toss away their work salvaging what they can, and go with it, or maybe even punish players with bolts from the blue, falling rocks, or undefeatable NPC.
The second way this can play out is something called functionalism where the players will politely take the hooks the Gamemaster puts in and play their role as willing participants to seeing the GM’s story. I like to think of this as the players responding as character to the GM’s input. I think quite a few people play this second way. I also think this is where a lot of people get confused about what story now is. Folks playing in this manner do have story, and they are involved in it, but mainly it’s the Gamemaster who is bringing it, and they are responding to it while behaving in an understood manner, i.e. as heroes.
There’s a third way this can play out. I know I said there were only two ways but I lied. You can take the people from both of these different types of groups and mix them together. I’ll leave that one for your imagination.
Story now is different. When I set down to run a game in a story now type of game. I the gamemaster, have as little idea where the story is going to go as the players. The story is created at the table. The only thing I know is the initial situation and after that the story could go anywhere. This is how I basically ran “traditional” games.
10:12 am on November 29th, 2007
Got it. I see why system would be crucial to story now, and also how White Wolf doesn’t do story now at all. I mean, it would be possible, and I’ve seen it happen (where players and ST are collaborating on what happens at the table pretty evenly) but when it does, you’re not really doing WW anymore, you’re doing something else. You’ve definitely put the books aside, as it were.
On another topic, I talked about your Show 15 on my blog just now – positively and appreciatively. If you check out the mention, the readership of my blog will be about the same as for this comment – you, me and Google.
3:08 am on November 30th, 2007
Heh. Google already pointed me to your blog post. I’m glad you liked the episode with Thor. I think it’s the one I’ve learned the most from in an academic way.