Prompted by my earlier BSG musings and by John’s very neat schematic over at The Mighty Atom, I’m thinking about game structure, and pondering how I would implement a sort of ‘guidance system’ to a game design to forward engaging play.

I totally abdicated all responsibility in this area for Full Light, Full Steam, telling the GM to prepare a (very specifically constructed) situation without a predetermined resolution and then having the players toss narration rights back and forth via the resolution system. This creates a rather freewheeling group storytelling experience with people butting in and jostling and adding stuff and that sort of thing. As the resolution system is heavily weighted toward characterization, the end product that it guides ends up being about that characterization. That’s one way of approaching game structure; now I want to investigate others.

Underpinnings

The core of any game experience is the situation. A dungeon with riches to gain. An evil dictator about to do something nasty. A pair of potential lovers discovering if they will become actual lovers. A town in crisis. Practitioners of the colorful, meaningful, traditional ways threatened by the weight of the grey tide of the modern world. This is what the game is “about.”

The structure of the game experience is made up of scenes. Coming into port at Victoria Station. Confronting the eldritch necromancer. The dinner date on the wharf. Scrambling down the cliffside to the wrecked airplane below. This is the fictional content of the game, and the stuff you’ll relate when you tell your friends about that great session you had last night.

If the situation is what the game is about and scenes are the game’s content, then it’s pretty clear that some scenes relate to the situation — rescuing the informant before he sinks to the bottom of the river — and some scenes do not — talking with the guard at the gates of the Swiss embassy as World War Three is brewing*. I’m going to call this relevancy — if a scene is relevant, it relates to the situation; if a scene is irrelevant, it doesn’t.

Generally speaking, you want to avoid irrelevant scenes. We get into them for a variety of reasons, some of them puerile (the scene where you travel down the road, rolling to see how much distance you cover each day, when time isn’t an issue in any significant way, but you do it because that’s “what’s next”). Other reasons that these happen aren’t so overlookable. If one player is really pushing this scene where she talks to the Swiss guard, despite the fact that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the situation, consider this a giant red flag that she’s not very interested in said situation. Chances are, this scene isn’t very engaging for everyone else at the table, but it may be engaging for her, because her interests are not well-represented in the situation as presently constructed. This is a good time to refocus the premise, update the situation to include what she’s interested in, and make her actions relevant rather than a “waste of time.”

Relevant scenes are preferable since, assuming the situation engages all players, scenes which relate to that situation will inherit that engagement and have all the players interested and plugged in to what’s happening. A well-constructed scene will goad the players to reveal the situation and work towards an address of the situation, which might even resolve the situation.

Especially in the beginning scenes of a situation, the players must determine what the situation even is. This is the process of revealing the situation. While most traditional games frame this as ‘investigation’ or ‘discovery’ as the GM dictates information to the inquiring non-GM players, in reality this is a process of all the players saying stuff and agreeing with it, whatever their authority distribution may be. Even in the most tightly-controlled game, the non-GM players can cause the situation to be revealed in ways contrary to the GM’s plans — who hasn’t taken a liking to the character who was supposed to be the irredeemable badguy? In any case, the revealed situation will present the players with a number of conflicts (composed of a character, a desire, and an obstacle) which engage the characters in such a way that they cannot be ignored.

After most or all of the situation and its conflicts are revealed, the players tend to want to do something about it. This takes us into the realm of the address, which calls upon the player to act or speak on the situation. Players go from input-mode to output-mode. An address is an attempt to actively change the situation, usually by fictional means. It can take the form of out-and-out action that changes the status of elements involved in the situation (cut off the sorcerer’s head!) or it can be made of “mere” words, which change the relationships of the elements involved in the situation (go ahead and kill yourselves, I’m not involved in your bloodfeud). The best addresses are ones which will change the situation regardless of character “success” — this is where good stakes come into the picture, and an attempt to infiltrate the Holy City will either result in the characters in the Holy City in secret or in the Holy City in chains.

Now, a situation can’t last forever. Eventually, the elements of the situation are changed so much or the relationships of those elements are changed so much that the situation no longer bears any conflicts, and the situation is resolved. The lich king is dead, so can no longer oppress your countrymen. The spaceship is repaired, so the passengers are safe. The clans are still at war, but the characters have left the homelands to found their own colony. The determination of when a situation has been changed so much that it is resolved can be handled a number of ways, from fiat to communal agreement to something as banal as scoring enough points. The mechanics are irrelevant; what matters is that the determination is based on the changes brought about by the players’ addresses.

For ongoing play, a situation’s resolution results in the creation of a new situation. I’ll hit up that topic in a later article, as it’s positively massive.

Now we take a step back. A relevant scene is one that “relates to” the situation. Between revealing, addressing, and resolving a situation, the common thread is changing the present understanding of the situation. If you want to go the extreme route (which I thoroughly endorse) and say that nothing exists in the game until it’s proposed and ratified by the players, then you can even say that each scene simply changes the situation. Contrariwise, an irrelevant scene is one that does not change the situation (this is also a better definition than above, which required the situation to already exist in order to be related to). What’s the difference between relevant and irrelevant scenes? If it was a movie, the irrelevant scenes are the ones that end up on the cutting room floor. In roleplaying, we don’t really have the luxury of editing stuff out, so we need to either avoid irrelevant scenes altogether or coopt them, turning them into relevant scenes.

Design

So remember back at the beginning of this article where I said I was thinking about design, and then I went off on theory for 1000 words? Yeah, welcome to my brain.

Basic Framework: Players frame scenes. In each scene, each player takes a couple turns narrating events (twice around the table, say). In the course of their narration, they must do one of: (a) introduce a new element (reveal), (b) forge a new relationship between existing elements (reveal), (c) change or characterize an existing element (address), or (d) change an existing relationship (address). Situation elements and their relationships will be written on 3×5 cards and laid out on the table. At the end of a scene, everyone votes whether the situation is resolved.

Push Currency: Along with the Basic Framework above, play starts with a pile of tokens in the middle of the table; if you reveal, you take a token, if you address, you give one token to any number of other players or back to the pot. Whoever among the players did not receive a token votes on whether the address is successful (changes what it is meant to) or not, and contributes to a brief bit of narration why or why not. Ties lose.

Pull Currency: Start with the Basic Framework but invert the token currency above. When you narrate, another player must approve and ratify your proposal; they take the tokens or spend them. Spent tokens are given to you or returned to the pot. If more than one player wants to ratify, whoever is willing to take the least or spend the most actually does so. Whoever foots the bill narrates the results of any address. Events you narrate occur whether or not you are ratified; ratification gives them an effect on the situation.

Yarn Relationships: Use Basic Framework, one of the currencies or neither. When you introduce a new element on a 3×5 card, use a hole punch to put holes on its four corners. When you forge a relationship, string a length of yarn through the holes punched in the cards you are relating. Of course, every card can then only have four relationships (or howevermany holes is ’standard’). For an additional layer of elaboration, make each punched hole represent a different ’socket’ for connections — heart connections, head connections, job connections, hate connections, whatever. Or have the color of the yarn represent the kind of relationship. Disturbingly, you could call a published form of this game “Stitch a Sitch.”

Incorporate Ownership: With any of the above, newly-introduced elements are “owned” by their creators, who are the only ones with the ability to characterize the element (relationships are still up in the air) and can veto narration that contradicts that characterization. Other players can bid tokens to buy owned elements from their owners (prior to, not instead of, narration).

West Wing Flavor: Basic Framework, Pull Currency, and Ownership rules. All characters start with two characteristics, Party and Job. All players must first introduce a primary character before they can narrate any other effects. Primary characters must work for the president (or be the president) in one way or the other, directly or indirectly; you cannot sell off your primary character unless you own another character who can fit the bill in a few rounds of narration. You keep your primary character from situation to situation.

Battlestar Galactica Flavor: Basic Framework with Push Currency, and start with everybody having a character on a 3×5 card in front of them. Only they may make that character act (but anyone can characterize), and all of their narration must somehow incorporate the character. Whenever a new element is introduced, the next player must forge a relationship for the new situation element (it would therefore be impossible to have situation elements unrelated to one or more characters). No matter which of the four options narration exercises, it must always increase pressure on one or more characters. Tokens for reveals and addresses always go to the owners of these characters. An episode consists of a set number of scenes. The situation is only resolved when you expend your last token to address, paying everyone at the table, and there are no more tokens in the central pool. Episodes end without resolution all the time — and get worse for the next episode.

You could add relatively arbitrary dice or card mechanics making the success (ratification) of any narration in doubt. I don’t, however, see how this adds anything terribly useful, and in fact could get in the way of the deep involvement with the situation that this attempts to foster.

While I can see how the game would work with just the Basic Framework and one Currency, I can’t think of a good, relatively well-known example without prominent characters like BSG and West Wing are push and pull examples. If I knew more about the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I might suggest that, as I suspect it fits the bill — something with lots of players without well-defined “sides”. If anybody more knowledgeable than me wants to do it up in comments, or post your own flavor of whatever stripe, I’d love to see it.

Now I want to play West Wing, though.

—
* If you read like I do, you’re thinking of ways in which talking with that Swiss guard could relate to a possible situation — maybe you need to guage the opinion of the everyday Swiss citizen for something. Assuming that the situation has already been determined, scenes can certainly be unrelated. That’s the simple answer. The more complex answer is that, if the situation has not been fully determined or if the player is empowered to do so, such a scene could be said to refocus the premise and introduce that swiss guard as a significant element of the game. (back to article)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 5:10 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.