For a lot of gamers, “roleplaying game” is synonymous with open-endedness, a developing experience that can go on and on indefinitely, accreting details and significance and personal resonance. While the open-ended nature of roleplaying games does have some distinct advantages, especially in terms of investment and immersion, those advantages come at a cost. Somebody has to keep the flywheel moving, and that is not always the easiest thing to accomplish.

Here’s the thing: the basic function of roleplaying is to create fictional problems and resolve them. That description conflates a lot of different things, though. For instance, the GM usually creates the problem outside of roleplay and the players resolve the problem through in-character action. If we phrase the description in exacting language, we get something like “players create a conflict-riddled situation and reveal it in play, then address the situation in order to eventually resolve its conflicts.”

In a closed-ended game, this is relatively simple to accomplish. The game consists of three phases: revealing the situation, addressing the situation, and resolving its conflicts. When most or all of the conflicts are resolved, the game is over. This is how most prose fiction and film works. This is how every middle schooler is taught how stories work. We are all pretty familiar with this structure.

The Problem of Continuous Play

However, in an open-ended game with an expectation of continuous play, this becomes problematic. On the one hand, continuous play might try and spread those three phases across its infinite length, resulting in lots and lots of revealing of information and maybe a little addressing the situation, but never any resolution of the conflicts. This is the classic “never-ending campaign” where the player characters are continually chasing after some Big Bad that they never quite catch or subdue. This can be incredibly frustrating, and delayed gratification can only string the players along so far before the game collapses. On the other side of the picture are games in which the player characters are pitted against some conflict or adversary or similar, triumph over their obstacles, win the day… and then wonder what to do next.

In order to play, we need conflicts to resolve. If we don’t resolve the conflicts in front of us, we get bored. If we run out of conflicts, we get bored. Obviously, we need to make conflicts a renewable resource, so that while we resolve existing conflicts, we replace them with new conflicts. This sounds easy, and in some cases it actually is; however, there are pitfalls.

The Pitfalls

When we start off a new game, we have the advantage of a clean slate on which to build the situation and its conflicts, and we create most if not all of the significant details of the game out of thin air. When we start playing, the revelation of the situation is also the revelation of the conflicts embedded in that situation. For instance, in the scene introducing the noble house of Capulet, we are also introduced to the plans to marry Juliet to the Prince. Everything proceeds with a certain amount of elegance.

However, when we are introducing new conflicts to an established situation, we do not enjoy the same advantages as before. If we want to create new knots of characters, desires, and obstacles — also known as conflicts — we must either add new elements to the situation or create new relationships between established elements in the situation. The additions to the situation that we prepare must be things that we can reveal through roleplay while remaining true to the continuity of previously established facts. We can’t start off a scene and say, “Okay, remember the Capulets? Yeah, they’re totally space aliens now.” Wedging in new elements and relationships without trampling the continuity of prior play is the first potential pitfall in creating new conflicts.

In addition to the basic continuity of established fictional “facts” there is the continuity of the narrative, in which the players have worked to acheive successes great and small in the face of adversity. It is just as much or even more of a breach in continuity to negate prior victories by slapping in a replacement conflict that is the same thing as before with a new coat of paint. This is the second pitfall: “Took out the zombies beseiging the castle? Well now the Black Lich has ogres who are… beseiging the castle!” In many ways, the parts of the situation which have been resolved through player action are the most sacrosanct. The players have invested in these elements through roleplay, and negating the weight of prior player actions is directly threatening that player investment. New conflicts must be different: they must threaten different character desires with different obstacles. If the players take out the zombies, the Black Lich can send in a covey of vampire “diplomats” who try to seduce the Queen. The playing field is different, and the players won’t feel cheated out of their victory.

One rich method of introducing new conflicts is by exploiting the fallout of prior player addresses. For example, in the first session of a game our hearty adventurers set off to save the kidnapped princess from a neighboring tribe of orcs. In the course of the game, we slaughter every last able-bodied orc warrior and run off with the princess. In the next session of the game, we might be faced with an army of angry orc wives who are descending on the kingdom to avenge their fallen husbands. This often creates conflicts which players are automatically invested in as an organic continuation of their prior actions, and that’s great.

However, no matter how “organic” this may seem, this is the end result of a conscious decision made by somebody, usually the Game Master. This often constitutes a judgement on the addresses of the players to the tune of, “Well, you should have thought about the poor orc wives and orc babies when you were merrily slaughtering everybody.” This is like the hopped-up version of negating player actions; this is invalidating them entirely. Not only is their prior success taken away, but their actions are twisted into making the situation even worse. You’re saying, “Remember when you rocked the world? Turns out you fucked up.” Not to be a big dirty hippy about it, but the game’s theme is created through the interaction of player addresses and the situation. Retroactively invalidating the players’ addresses of situation is a direct attack at the game’s theme.

This is the third, perhaps most dangerous pitfall to avoid, although I hasten to add that this does not mean that new conflicts should not arise out of prior addresses. That creates awesome investement. Care must be taken, however, to make sure that the new conflicts do not arise out of prior addresses in such a way that the prior addresses are invalidated. The orc wives can start lining the horizon as a looming threat, but which is more interesting: “you shouldn’t have killed all their husbands despite that’s how the fantasy genre works, and now you’re in trouble!” or “when you attacked the orc encampment, the women were out campaigning against the trolls to the south — turns out the females are meaner and more warlike than the males!”

To sum up: when we create new conflicts in an established situation, we need to (a) retain continuity of facts, (b) retain continuity of the narrative, and (c) retain continuity of theme. How to avoid these pitfalls? Here’s two broad solutions, cribbed from television and myth, respectively: the episodic solution and the epic solution.

The Episodic Solution

The episodic solution is to create new conflicts almost whole cloth. In many cases, this is explained as creating a new situation entirely, and transporting the player characters through space and time, into the “new” situation. However, as the player characters are part of any situation in play and the characters are already related through play to the elements of the prior situation, the truth of the matter is that this method is grafting a large chunk of new situation onto what has already been established. Even if the characters from last session will not make an appearance in this session, their influence and impact will be carried over through the vehicle of the characters.

In Dogs in the Vineyard the GM creates a new town for each session and the player characters travel to that town to interact with it. However, as the GM is creating the town based on the prior actions of the Dogs, and as the Dogs will be bringing in their memories, experiences, traits, and relationships from prior towns, all “new situations” are at least weakly connected to situations that have been revealed and addressed before.

Because each episode takes place in a different place and time, continuity of facts is easy — they’re not there to trample on. Since the player characters deal with entirely new conflicts unconnected to their prior exploits, continuity of the narrative is also pretty safe — and mostly in player hands, since the burden is on them to maintain their status as heroes, scoundrels, average joes, or whatever. Continuity of theme is perhaps the most vulnerable here, but only in the most abstract manner in that new conflicts may echo prior conflicts. And as a final safeguard, however the players address the new conflicts, the new and unconnected set of specifics allows enough deniability to say “this situation was different” (an ambiguity around which serial Dogs play is built).

The episodic solution is, by far, the easier of the two. It’s sort of plug-and-play situation. It also lends to episodic play, which allows the players a little more leeway in terms of scheduling and participation. Perhaps most importantly, it mimics the very familiar structure of television serials, providing a solid common foundation for the players’ creativity. While I won’t go so far as to say that this solution has been conquered and there is nothing more to develop, I’m pretty confident that we’ve got most of the basic structure and further development will be neat variations and filligrees. The real meat is in the epic.

The Epic Solution

The epic solution requires a hierarchy of conflicts, with one or more “epic” conflicts of grand scope as well as a number of more modest small-scale conflicts. Generally speaking the epic conflicts are composed of some or all of the smaller conflicts. The key here is that the small-scale conflicts are available for resolution in individual sessions, giving the players a sense of accomplishment, while still keeping the epic conflict looming over their heads so they retain a sense of purpose and the game can continue on.

Two quick examples of this in print: Exalted and Tribe 8. In both games you are facing complete and utter metaphysical destruction of the universe — how’s that for an epic conflict — as well as much smaller and more manageable conflicts that you can actually, you know, deal with at the gaming table. All of the support is for creating and resolving those smaller conflicts which form the bulk of play. Whether or not the designers actually expected the players to resolve the epic conflict and save the universe I will leave as an exercise for the reader. (Hint: see Design What Doesn’t Matter.)

In a nutshell, the Epic Solution protects the continuity of facts by continually elaborating what has already been established, filling in details between the stuff that’s already been revealed. It maintains continuity of narrative by using character actions in the small-scale conflicts to build towards the epic conflicts. It preserves continuity of theme by directing all addresses towards a unified eventual goal (or tight cluster of goals).

The episodic solution is the easy and straightforward one; this method has to stoop to a couple tricks and stratagems to pull off what it’s after. The obvious and bone-headed way to go about this is to map out the epic conflict and all its subsidary conflicts before beginning play, and this is almost doomed to failure. Player addresses will twist the subsidary conflicts in unforeseen ways and player preferences and expectations will bring some conflicts to the fore when they were “supposed” to remain in the background. Worst of all, players will end up fabricating their own conflicts which just throws the entire master plan out the window. We’ve seen a lot of flailing about in GM Advice and the like on how to manage the chaos introduced so you can remain true to the plan, which has led to a lot of rebelling from the very idea that epic conflicts can even be implemented in games. However, both the arguments for GM illusionism and the rebelling from epic conflicts must be understood as reactions to the boneheaded way of exercising the epic solution. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Instead of mapping out the entire beast ahead of time, not all of the conflicts need be determined before play. It is possible to introduce new small-scale conflicts into the fabric of an established situation dominated by epic conflicts, and even to tie those small-scale conflicts into the epic conflict in a meaningful way. The trickiest part of the epic solution is to do so in a way that the new conflicts were “always there” and retroactively part of the epic conflict.

The key is relatively simple: keep an open mind and allow each new small-scale conflict to at least partially redefine the epic conflict. In technical terms, the small-scale conflicts reveal new information about the epic-scale conflict — and you do not know what they will reveal until you play. While you might define the epic conflicts in broad strokes at the beginning, the epic conflict begins with little to no details. Each session as you resolve one of the small-scale conflicts you (the characters, the players, even the GM) learn something new about the master plan. To put it bluntly: you create the specifics of the epic conflict through play, not before play.

So you might start with an epic conflict like “The criminal mastermind known only as the Ringleader is trying to take over San Angeles!” Then in the session where you subvert his plan to infiltrate the sewers under the bank, you learn that the plan has something to do with money; in the session where you defeat his lieutenant, you learn that the Ringleader is operating out of a submarine out in the bay; in the session where you prevent him from kidnapping the entire guest list at a charity ball, you find out that he’s got his eye on the lovely Miss Clara Oakenfeld. And so on. Eventually you might get to the point where you have “learned” that the Ringleader is in fact Clara’s long-lost husband, horribly disfigured in a nautical accident but intent on reclaiming his place among the city’s elites and… you get the picture.

I said this method is taken from myth — specifically, this is taken from the means by which myths were passed along and developed over time. The big, epic-scale conflict was usually already known; Hercules had to prove his divinity in order to be admitted into Olympus. Everybody knew those. But if you can imagine a storyteller — either a professional actor or priestess or just some old guy by a fire — telling the story and trying to entertain the audience, that’s when the details get filled in, and filled in to whatever purpose the storyteller happens to have at the time of the telling. “Hercules had to prove himself,” one tells the story, and the next one tells the story, “He had to perform labors to prove himself,” and another guy who tells the story to the next town says, “He had to perform labors to prove himself, like cleaning out a stable that was bigger and stinkier than yours right here!” Then somebody else throws in a jealous Hera, and somebody else makes him visit Gibraltar, and on and on it goes. While we don’t get benefits of the iterative retelling format (quick, somebody design a game on that premise!), we can still build our big conflicts with blocks made out of small conflicts — whether or not we know what shape the big conflict will turn out to be.

I said the other one was from television, but I lied; this solution is, too. This is how they develop seasons of shows like Buffy, Alias, and Stargate (even Friends). At the outset of each show, nobody was thinking Spike would sacrifice himself to defeat the First Evil, that Sydney was actually working for whatever evil intelligence agency she was a sleeper agent for, or that Baal would help SG-1 defeat the Replicators. The eventual epic conflict was shaped by the smaller-scale conflicts, and the smaller-scale conflicts got their direction, weight, and significance from the (as yet undefined) epic conflict that they supported. In the end, you build an epic just like you eat an elephant: one bite at a time.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 11:20 pm and is filed under RPG Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.