One of the (many) reasons I loved the sitcom How I Met Your Mother was its core reliance on one of my favourite narrative tools: the unreliable narrator.
The entire show, in a nutshell, was a selection of anecdotes that the character Ted was telling his two children in 2030 building up to the moment that he met their mother (the clue's in the title).
This gave the show the ability to take 'pauses' mid-episode, rewind time, tell stories multiple times from different viewpoints (through the filter of how they were relayed to Ted) and generally play around with the Truth of "what really happened".
It also allowed for stories-within-stories as characters, already in Ted's story of the week, then recounted their own (sometimes equally unreliable) accounts of something else that happened to them.
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| One of the other reasons I loved the show |
But could you simulate this in a roleplaying game?
Does it muck around too much with the unspoken social contract that everything the Games Master tells his players is fact (in some shape or form)?
Would just one of your players be your "Ted" (i.e. the character who has achieved his GOAL and is now telling the tale of HOW he achieved it)? Or could everyone in your game be a "Ted"?
I realise there are probably modern/indie story games that use a model, at least vaguely, resembling this story structure, but could it work in a more classical, old school-style game environment?
I'm guessing not for something like Call of Cthulhu or Dungeons & Dragons as success is never guaranteed, but there must be some systems - and genres - this would work with (most superhero games? Cinematic Unisystem?).
As ever I welcome your opinions and feedback.