Turning a Work Into A Shoot[]
I've been watching a lot of wrestling lately. It's become a pretty strong kick.
I find pro wrestling to be in some ways a great analogue to freeform RP.
Wait, wait.
Come back, hear me out.
Pro wrestling is improvisation toward telling a story. It takes more than one person to do successfully.
When pro wrestling successfully works, two people improvise toward an expected goal of telling an interesting narrative. (Freeform doesn’t always keep this in mind, which I think I’ll cover at another time.) The two people (or three, or four, or six, or more) generally trust each other, despite any outward terms, and are at least on a professional level when offscreen (or out of character.) They may deliver “promos,” or speeches, designed to frame whatever it is they’re doing. Sometimes these promos use actual things people have done or reference personal issues. Because wrestling often blurs the real and the fake into a convincing tapestry, it often incorporates problems that either performer may have had in real life. The industry term for this is a “work.” All of it is designed to give you an impression based on what you see onscreen.
Then there’s the “shoot.” When things either go off-rails in a way that wasn’t intended, or when someone within the narrative begins to (out of character) take that narrative seriously, bad things happen.
In the 90s, there were two popular wrestlers in the World Wrestling Federation. Shawn Michaels, and Bret Hart. Bret and Shawn had a rivalry going on screen. Off screen, the two were on relatively good terms.
In the late 90s, Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels reached the apex of their feud. Onscreen, Bret’s more straight-laced personality clashed with Shawn’s free-spirited-ness. They began to duel verbally in their promos, giving the idea that they generally really hated each other, though at the time, they were still on professional terms. Without going into it too much, they occasionally referred to personal issues that fed into rumors that were either not true, or ended up being a bit more personal than the target of the mockery would have liked. Eventually, they gave up the pretense of having been faking the rivalry.
The work had turned into a shoot.
Bret Hart was about to leave for another wrestling promotion, World Championship Wrestling, in 1997. Bret was the on-screen champion of the WWF, and he was supposed to drop, or lose, this title, to someone else. The logical assumption would be that Shawn Michaels should win the title. But because they were no longer looking at this as the story it was, and had genuine issues with each other, Bret refused to drop that title to Shawn Michaels. Part of it was a communication issue--Bret’s last match was to be in his hometown of Montreal, where he was still popular (despite playing an on-screen US-hating villain at the time) and he didn’t want to lose it there. But a good chunk of it was that he didnt’ want to drop it to Shawn.
What ended up happening is what wrestling fans call “The Montreal Screwjob.” Faced with the possibility of Bret leaving the promotion with the championship to disrespect it in WCW (something another wrestler had already done,) WWF owner Vince McMahon orchestrated a situation in which he forced the belt off of Bret. Nobody was aware that this would happen, but it was a very controversial situation that saw Bret, in a very real bout of anger, punching his company’s owner’s lights out and trashing the set. It created a rift between him and both Michaels and McMahon for years that only really healed within recent time.
The point of that story, to me, is that there has to be a level of trust between everyone involved, that everyone is working toward a good story, and that any personal issues that arise are dealt with directly. It also means that one has to keep their personal feelings and that of their characters separate, and communicate to keep this goal intact.
When you don’t do this, you create situations where people begin to take their personal feelings into the game, and will start behaving in a way that isn’t constructive for anyone, and is more than likely not fun (It IS supposed to be fun for everyone, right?) for the people involved or the people watching. It drives players away. It creates rifts in what passes for a community. In my experience, there’s nothing worse in a roleplaying setting than people who actually have an issue with each other. When people start letting their feelings bleed into their character, it starts out of character conflicts.
Please, please communicate. Please think about the consequences of the actions being taken in-character and remember to keep it separate from what you think of the character or their player.
Don’t turn a work into a shoot. Try to remember to keep it fun for everybody, even if a challenge is needed.