Levels of Story and Extended Conflicts (while stirring polenta)

Premise: I’ve been thinking for a while about indefinite nesting of storytelling elements – that there’s a natural but hypothetically unnecessary division into Story, Situation, Scene, Conflict, Task.

What I’m thinking is based on the Heroquest style Conflict resolution: if something is worth playing out, break it down. Except where Heroquest (and really, too many game to name) limit that to combat – or in other words, sub-Scene level events, what I’m considering is the same idea writ large.

Quick treatment: game begins with a story proposal. Players have characters and all that, and somebody (the GM?) says “Okay: here’s the rough sketch for the story.” And the requirement is that the proposal be framed as a conflict of some kind. Very high level, ideally around a theme, but a conflict.

Now, the group as a whole decides somehow whether to let this go – that they’re willing to let things run their course, (in other words “not interested,” or better still “lets do what happens if we pass on this”), or that they’ll resolve the whole Event with a single roll, or they want to break the event down in to Sub-Events.

Sub-Events get treated the same way – but they ultimately have to resolve the Super-Event. In other words, the group produces Sub-Events until they wrap up Event that spawned them. But each Sub-Event can be broken down further and further.

There’s a certain amount of stuff to be answered on this. Like how does non-Conflict stuff fit in. If we need an Event of “and they travel to Europe” what do we do with that? And how do we encourage little diversions and amplifications of themes and motifs and whatnot?

That’s for thinking on.