The greatest gaming lab ever created is the Las Vegas casino industry. That lab’s most significant finding is that humans crave two things in games: pattern completion and intermittent rewards. I’ve been thinking lately about how my favorite games leverage both of those monkey-level impulses. In particular, I’ve been thinking about how the very best games provide many different ways to achieve both.
Probably my favorite-favorite bit of running a PbtA style game is the little biochemical hit (dopamine? serotonin?) my brain gets at the intersection of pattern completion and intermittent reward. Many, many PbtA games set up a few different kinds of incomplete patterns just on the GMing side: rules that fire when a trope is triggered, genre-appropriate GM moves, fronts you’ve created yourself just waiting to tick down. I think those things all feed into my feeling that PbtA style games are the apex tabletop technology for genre emulation games, which is both a strength and a broadly unacknowledged/unrecognized shortcoming.
The bit where that pattern completion comes full circle for me and delivers the Vegas-style hit is the intermittent reward of a player’s missed roll. Whenever I think to myself, man, this sequence was just magical!, it’s those two things coming together, from different angles, and making the outcome feel both organic and fated.
Story time!
In our ongoing Urban Shadows game, a couple sessions ago ended with a horrific running gun battle in downtown Miami, as a player manipulated a caravan of cartel thugs into a showdown with the city’s SWAT team. The lead-up barely matters: a cool let it out move here, a cashed-in debt there, two snowballs colliding, boom a hail of bullets and blood. Dead cartel goons and a major NPC that had been a thorn in everyone’s side, done and done. Yay!
Of course this being Urban Shadows, this isn’t necessarily the end. My prep between sessions led me to doodle down a new threat: what if that NPC is now a ghost? OOOH. I did up a quick clock to spool out what his vengeance from beyond the grave might look like. Then I filed it away.
The following session played out in the aftermath of this godawful event. Huge media coverage, all the mortals of the city are up in arms at this audacious violence, something must be done, good good, yes. My supernatural scumbags are back to living their shitty lives in the shadows. Worst off is the Vamp, who got caught in that hail of bullets and ended up with a permanent scar (lost a stat rather than straight-up dying). He’s prowling the streets in search of a meal, fucks up a simple feeding, and resorts to seeking out an NPC to square away a more-certain victim. He cashes in a debt with that NPC and persuades him to point out his least-valued goon. The Vamp has irresistible, which turns misses into soft hits with the addition that you “attract the attention of a rival or an enemy.” Because he’s been on the fail-train all night long, he misses and gets that. I file away the “attract the attention…” bit for later in the scene. Because I can feel the first tickles of pattern completion at the back of my brain. Something buried in my prep.
So there’s this great procedural pattern on the Vamp’s playbook that gets invoked every time we see feeding on-screen. It’s actually a two-parter. First, there’s the eternal hunger move, which is terrific: unless you roll a 10+, shit always goes sideways when you feed. Maybe the Vamp won’t care! Like, your victim might die unless you go out of your way to keep them alive. The other half of this is the Vamp’s corruption move, which ticks a Corruption every time you feed on an unwilling victim. Combined with the Vamp’s various incentives to prey on need, the whole playbook is a really unpleasant meditation on consent.
Yeah, well. The Vamp just straight misses eternal hunger. This is one of the few moves with some specificity around missing: “on a miss, something goes terribly wrong.” That’s different than baseline missing! I’ve been hammering home with my players that missing usually just means the GM gets to make a move. So misses that specify badness? That’s special.
I swing back to that “attention of a rival or enemy” bit. I close the loop on my prep and, badabing, his victim has been possessed by that godawful cartel NPC everyone thought was dead. Pattern: completed. And I chose that moment to complete it because I got the intermittent reward of a player’s miss. If someone was running an MRI on me at that moment, I’d be lit up just like I’d pulled three cherries on a slot machine.
Straight PbtA doctrine gives the GM lots of leeway for when and how to make moves. It looks constrained and formalistic but the “golden opportunity” and “when they expect you to say something” codicils makes these game act like any other conventional RPG. But there’s that extra psychic juice built into the intermittency of missed rolls, I think. It’s like permission to make a harder move. It’s a miss that everyone’s already acculturated to receive as a failure even after repeatedly training players otherwise. I know I definitely shrug and blame the dice for bad shit, even thought I could have inflicted that bad shit all along.
The Big Picture
I think where games work or don’t work for me is in how much they push the patterns/rewards buttons. Burning Wheel is all about both of those things: BITs and tests both set up patterns just waiting to be completed; rolling dice is the obvious intermittent reward, but it gains extra oomph both from gambling away your artha and in feeding back into the advancement cycle (itself yet another pattern to complete).
There are lots of procedural patterns to complete in Forbidden Lands but it’s missing a meaningful holding environment, which is any game’s primo A-1 pattern. There weren’t enough other patterns to complete (cool ability combos earned via advancement being the big D&D-style pattern) to hold anyone’s interest. Pushing, one of the Mutant engine’s killer apps, is a terrific intermittent reward though. Maybe it was that the stakes were too low because our particular group likes patterns in the fiction more than patterns on the character sheet.
Or sometimes we just can’t sense any patterns at all. The playbook moves in The Veil are designed to be open to many fictional interpretations, for example. But they are so devoid of guidance that we couldn’t complete any patterns with them. The moves didn’t “feel like” scenes from the movies or books or comics we were carrying around in our heads. But I know these games have their fans, which tells me they’re bringing their own patterns to those moves better than we could. Can’t win ’em all.
None of this is intended as scaffolding for some grand theory on game play or design. I do find it helpful in my own head, though, to spot the patterns my brain craves, to spot the patterns my players are craving (and are oblivious to), and to pay attention to the intermittent rewards being generated by the game and the vibe that comes with them. The intermittent rewards in a freeform game like Montsegur 1244, for example, arise from the inputs thrown your way by the other players, and those carry just as much psychic juice as rolling snake-eyes or a natural 20. And some players absolutely cannot perceive patterns in the fiction. Or in the rules. Or at the table, where we are all repeating patterns for comfort or pleasure: not just who handles what functions, but all the other rituals we enact to draw the magic circle around the table.
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This is a followup to the first post in this thread of ideas.
To recap for the tl;dr crowd: alongside fictional, social and mechanical (!) position(ing), I proposed that players have an internal emotional play-state I’m calling psychic positioning.
(Ground rules: THIS IS NOT AN INVITATION TO START A DEFINITION WAR. Nor is it an invitation to “helpfully” reframe the entire conversation into your preferred model. Neither of those things will advance this conversation. Don’t be That Person.)
One thing that’s been rolling around in my head is that, particularly in games I’ve played that are designed to fiddle with your psychic position, the position I experience inevitably is negative: sadness, despair, frustration, anger. I can’t imagine I’m alone in thinking, when I read a phrase like “hit them in the feels,” feels is code for this position. I have to think this is related to the (gross and mischaracterizing) phrase “misery tourism,” yeah?
I have nothing, like, at all, against giving voice and freedom to these emotions through play. A good table can be a safe place to let that happen. Rather than, say, a random triggery event as you’re going through your day and are suddenly reminded of the death of a relative, or a difficult breakup, or an ugly disagreement, or some childhood trauma.
But it’s also got me thinking: what would it take, procedurally or mechanically, that is, within the design of the experience itself, to psychically position players toward positive emotions? Glee, happiness, love, satisfaction.
I do think that these psychic positions get achieved, but interestingly they’re not in the modes of play I prefer. Pattern completion can invoke a sense of satisfaction, for example. We get a little dopamine hit from intermittent rewards, which is the entire basis of the gambling industry. We also see these things in the traddiest of trad games: leveling up lets you pursue an optimal character build, and that shit is satisfying. I think that satisfaction can be frustrated by nu-wave Story Now type designs that trade in optimization for interesting new fictional opportunities. Like, a new move in Apocalypse World doesn’t necessarily make you badder-assed.
I feel like in some ways, it’s almost scary to allow a positive psychic position to take hold. Because then it’s something that can be taken away. Easy “feels.” Is it a cop-out? “Good drama?” I dunno. It’s probably a thing that happens throughout creative media, but somehow it feels more dangerous (to me) in our creative media, because in certain modes of play we’re invited to assume the identity who will experience those feels.
My Golden Cobra submission this year, May-December-May, was built mostly around a gamified version of “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This“, mostly as a thought experiment along these lines. It’s a much, much harder target to achieve than it may seem! And I take it Here Is My Power Button aims for that as well…but apparently leverages the positive bond the players build into the deep sads at the end. I’ve only read recounts of this (via Joe Beason’s ridiculously great writeup of his experience, might have been a private share) so I may be getting that wrong.
Anyway, just thinking about this. Wondering if it’s a cop-out that we can, fairly trivially, achieve the sads and mostly work toward achieving the happies just to have them cut out from under us.
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I’ve always had a bit of a hard time getting PbtA games. I’ve played in a few and like them, but I didn’t get them. At the same time I adore Burning Wheel. The heft of it is something I like, but I never quite got what I loved about it. I think I might now, for both.
I suspect that deeper inspection would confirm that dissatisfcation with the frequency, predictability, scale, and nature of intermittent rewards is a HUGE part of what makes some games work or not with specific groups.
One of the things that bugged me (and a lot of other, I gather) about SotC-era Fate, for example, is the fact that the rewards were pinging at a really good rate, and were very predictable, but the rewards themselves weren’t very good. Like playing the penny slots, I guess. Meanwhile, over many years and iterations of D&D, you can see that the uniformity crowd has won out, with the idea of “you will level up every X sessions, regardless of what level you are at” growing a lot of traction.
This is also why I burned out on MMOs in a big way: the first handful of levels go by so fast that they might as well be flat, and then after a while (around level 40 in WoW, back when I played) the reward valve gets pinched so tight that I completely lose interest.
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com
Do you hate prepping your RPGs? I do. Well…I thought I did.
Because I have many decades of play in me, I considered prep a necessary evil. Prep is necessary so you don’t have to improvise at the table. Prep as a preventive measure. It was so deeply embedded, so baked into the activity, that I never really stopped to think about the questions this begs. Specifically: what’s the role of the GM? If I’m there to deliver an exciting storyline, then hell no I can’t improvise around that. Just making shit up on the spot, ye gawds, what if I TPK everyone by mistake? What if I forget to hit an important narrative mark? What will the players think?
Spending so much creative time in a defensive crouch put me in an awful, adversarial head space.
Sandbox-style play was an evolution, I have to think both for practical and play-style reasons: put a dragon in this cave if there would be a dragon there. It’s not your job to protect the characters from their choices. If there’s a real threat of failure, your players will feel more satisfied with their victories than if you’ve curated the difficulty to their abilities. Sure, okay.
Sandbox prep begs the same question: what’s the role of the GM? I think if you’re doing a sandbox, the GM is expected to be an impartial referee, yeah? Don’t pull any punches, be true to the reality of the challenges, evaluate reasonable solutions.
Skip ahead some years. Now we have games with yet another expected GM role.
A big swath of storygames are designed, either implicitly or explicitly, around the idea that I first saw in Apocalypse World: play to find out. Beautiful, short, crisp, easy to understand. Don’t force the characters to follow a plot, don’t preplan, let the GM be surprised alongside the players. What’s gonna happen? Dunno, let’s play to find out. The facilitator will have to make stuff up as we go.
Many storygames of the past decade are built with tools to help GMs improvise during play. Some take the dice out of the GM’s hands, requiring them to make calls about how the fiction changes based on character actions. Over in the OSR side of things, procedural tools generate content on the spot as needed. I’d imagine there’s a general assumption of sandbox-style play here, too, which takes the load off the GM to balance threats against the PCs. And then in the trindie space, you’ve got games that combine both: be okay with letting events spool out organically, and here are some procedural tricks you can use to generate content on the fly.
I still hate prep to this day. But the prep I hate? It’s the defensive kind. It’s thinking through likely outcomes, coming up with “balanced” fights, anything appearing at the intersection of math and tactics.
But what if I told you that, rather than prepping to avoid having to improvise, you can prep specifically for improvisation?
Fertilizing the Fields
When I want to run an improvisational game, either because the game requires it (PbtA) or because I just don’t have the bandwidth for conventional prep in a more conventional game, I want to make sure I’ve made my, dunno…psychic play space as fertile as possible.
Acceptable Tonal Range
I know folks play music, look at Pinterest boards, engage in all kinds of other creative media to get their juices going. Me too! I think it’s the process of curating that stuff that matters more than actually listening, looking, reading. It’s establishing a vibe.
For me, vibe comes into play when I’m thinking about acceptable tonal ranges. If I want a kinetic, high-energy action game then I’ll curate my music to that. If I want to aim for melancholy, I’ll find a sad indie folk-rock list on Spotify. But that’s all in service to implant that acceptable tonal range in my mind and my heart, so my improvisation in-the-moment serves that plan.
Understand The Rules of Genre
Different than consuming for vibe, I’ll try and track down the media that exemplifies the genre in which we’re playing. Because it bores me to tears, I mostly avoid “genre fiction” when I’m reading for pleasure. You know, the stuff that shows up free on your Kindle. But it’s excellent research when you need to sharpen your understanding of the genre in question.
For good or ill, I have found many improvisation-focused games lean hard on a shared understanding of genre, specific media touch points, and trope rules. I, personally, do not love how reliant on tropes — verging on cliche — some folks are when they play and GM. I’ll go so far as to say I personally hate treating RPGs as other-media emulators, but that’s a deep rabbit hole and I’m not feeling salty on that point today. (Maybe I’ll write more about it in the future.) But when everyone accepts a baseline of genre rules, they’re sure easy to improvise inside.
I’m certain most “naturally improv-talented” GMs got that way by being very well versed in genre. They can tap into tropes quickly. They think in terms of genre. The naturally satisfying outcomes of pattern-completion are easy when everyone knows the pattern you’re going for.
Right Tools For the Job
Not every game is well suited for improvised play. Many mainstream storygame-type RPGs are, like PbtA and Forged in the Dark type games. But even if you’re playing a trad or trindie game you can do some prep in advance to make improvising within them easier.
Know the Incentives
Big one for me: do you understand your game’s economic cycles? Do you understand the incentives at work? If I’m getting ready to run a game for the first time, I’ll do up a cheat sheet of the rules (if it’s the kind of game that didn’t come with play references) to teach myself how it works. But I’ll also sketch out the economic cycles at work. How do characters advance? How do you earn in-play currencies? What play cycles repeat themselves and how do those cycles restart?
Knowing a game’s incentive schemes usually clues me in to what players will chase. That’s a huge leg up when you’re prepping to improvise. Within a session or two, I’ll also have a better idea of what other play elements are incentivizing each player. Some players value scene-chewing spotlight time more than advancement. Others might really love helping another PC be amazing.
Situational Clocks
This is a PbtA-specific bit of advice but I think you can broadly apply it. Bear with me a minute.
I have found, quite often, that PbtA prep instructions are pretty half-assed. I’ve met so many designers who proudly declare that they run “improv heavy” games, and don’t need to prep. And it shows in their games. Since they don’t believe in prep, designers will drop “something” into a rules text because it “should” be in there – Apocalypse World, after all, has it – and not because it’s useful. The great offender here is half-assed Clock ripoffs.
Bad Clock prep is listing things that will happen as a Clock (fuse, storm, front, etc.) ticks down. I find this stiff and weird to fit into an organic game. I’ve done these Clocks and I usually end up ignoring the work I put into them. The situation on the ground doesn’t reflect the list of events I came up with weeks or months ago.
Good Clock prep is thinking through changes to the situation.
“The Honey Crips Gang burns down Dremmer’s hardhold” is a specific event. The fiction may or may not reflect a context in which burning down a hardhold makes sense. So I might instead write it: “Dremmer loses control of his hardhold to a rival gang.” It’s broader but also much easier to drive toward. Dremmer might lose control in any number of ways! Any number of rival gangs may be the cause! But the important thing is that, at that point in the clock, knowing that NPC stands to lose control of something valuable is a change in situation.
Pulling back from PbtA games, I’d say you can put Clock-like tools into play in any game. But focus instead on shifts in situation, not specific events. Imagine what play looks like when that situation comes to pass. I find that enormously easier than trying to shoehorn a burned-down house into the story.
Why, Not What
I feel like one place inexperienced-with-improv GMs stumble is not knowing the difference between an obstacle and a situation.
Dungeons? Those are maps full of obstacles. Monsters, obstacles. NPCs you need to beat by any means? Obstacles. Traps? Environmental hazards? Curses? All obstacles. Obstacles are so deeply baked into conventional roleplaying that I think many (most?) experienced players evaluate their play experience purely in their ability to overcome obstacles.
Situations, on the other hand, are organic within the fiction. They’re the context leading to the obstacles. Depending on the game, you can disregard situation. You don’t give a shit why this dungeon is full of treasure, right? I mean, unless knowing gives you a leg up in overcoming its obstacles.
Situations are unresolved points of tension. They’re unexploded bombs, tightened springs, whatever metaphor you’d like. They’re also, in my mind, constantly in motion. As situations resolve, they also lead to new situations. If it doesn’t, it wasn’t a situation.
Keep situations at the forefront of your play and your prep. The moment you’ve stopped thinking about context, you’ve started thinking about obstacles.
Situation Maps Once Again
One technique for understanding your game’s situation I’ve talked about before is the situation map. The very short version of this is:
Very clearly map out relationships between characters and organizations (follow that link, it’s good stuff), and
Labeling situations that are currently in play among those relationships. Put them in view so the players can see them too. Trusting your players to put that knowledge to good use is always more important than springing a big reveal on them, in my experience.
R-map + situations = situation map.
Armchair Psychology
Another why-not-what aspect of prepping to improvise is to have a very firm grasp of your game-fiction’s underlying motivations and pressures at work. What motivates an NPC? What goals does an organization actually have? What diegetic incentives are these things chasing? You can improvise action once you’ve got a firm grasp of the whys of your world. Always, always be thinking about the in-fiction logic of why things work the way they do.
Mixed Prep
It’s likely that, unless you’re playing a game that is entirely improvised, you’ll need to do a little of both kinds of prep. Stats for obstacles, knowing what drives your world, a clear understanding of tropes, and a clearly expressed acceptable tonal range.
I like finding a happy medium in trindie-type games where, if you need stats (because it’s the kind of game where GM assets have math), there’s a nice list of small/medium/large versions of expected obstacles: certain kinds of NPC (soldier, merchant, families), or monsters, or whatever. Burning Wheel, I think, does 1d/2d/3d NPCs, where literally everything they’ll ever roll is one, two or three dice, with an extra die for the thing they’re supposed to be good at at the GM’s discretion. This requires the GM and players have a fundamentally non-adversarial relationship, though. If you can just pull a number out of your ass, and it’s an absurdly large “I win!” value, you’ve just told the players you’re more interested in beating them than in collaborating to create a believable situation. But that’s not always on the GM, and some players will still find themselves craving adversity.
As a practical matter, unless you’re running a game purpose-built to be improvised, expect to do some of the old-fashioned prep. But do it in broad strokes, not specific, technical “builds.”
Okay But Why?
If you made it this far you might be asking yourself, why prep for improv when the best part of improv is not having to prep? I have thoughts!
Is the lack of prep really the best part of improv? There are other benefits, too: discovering your visceral creativity when you’re not overthinking it, being able to adapt to the tempo and temperature of the table, stumbling into surprising outcomes along with the players.
Prepped improv feels different than unprepped improv, in my experience. Unprepped improvisation I think is more sensitive to the unfettered table energy that can build up to the point of being manic energy. Maybe this is just me, but when I’m totally running a game off the cuff, it’s so easy to drive for more and more and MOAR excitement. And…maybe that’s not the best thing for your game. Particularly if you’re running a long series, which brings me to…
You can build toward longer play when you take control of your tempo. I suspect one secret to long-form play, which I have found frequently difficult in storygames, is that it requires discipline. If you ramp up every session to a point of manic energy, how long can you keep that up? If you hold some energy in reserve and get very intentional about tone and pacing, you may find the game wants to run longer.
Finally and not trivially, it’s a form of lonely fun that still provides dividends. Maybe you end up with an elaborate situation map instead of an elaborate village/dungeon/planet map, but it’s still nice to be able to revisit your game between sessions.
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My home group finished our season of Impulse Drive this week. We played it entirely via Zoom, character keepers in Google Sheets, rollforyour.party for dice, and Pinterest. It was my first successful run at playing a tabletop RPG online. I learned a lot about online play, and I’m looking forward to the next online experience. I can safely say I’m over my online play fears.
Click here to read the first half of my deep dive into Impulse Drive. I describe the meat and potatoes of how the game works there. These are my closing thoughts and I make several references back to it. Go refresh, I’ll wait here.
Good? Let’s do it.
The Pleasure of a Formal Finale
Bringing our game to a satisfying end reminded me that we frequently don’t do that. Far more often I just give up on a game, get distracted by something shiny, give in to impatience. Bad habit. I’ve shut down many games that needed to push past a hump.
I’m not sure what the inflection point is. For us it was around 10 sessions. Everyone was fluent with the system (even the little-used moves), their character options, and understood my interpretation and style of using the rules. Everyone’s storylines had momentum, so players could express their characters in more subtle and less urgent ways. We understood the setting better, including its underlying metaphysics. Every interpersonal connection had solidified – the pilot and the bounty hunter’s shared interest in professionalism, the pilot’s fear of the weird alien AI’s judgement, the mystic’s connection with the AI over their outsider-ness, and so on.
Arrrrgh!
A satisfying finale is, I think, satisfying because it’s your last chance to complete patterns. But to make the finale grand, you need to be willing and able to imply very large patterns leading up to it. The pattern-completion of each move playing out is a tiny little hit of happiness, but closing out the accretion of 40-50 hours of bits? Oh boy, it’s the final jigsaw puzzle piece being dropped into place. Actual, physical relief.
One thing that makes Impulse Drive play out one (and only one) campaign/season is that each playbook’s Calamity list includes a move that will take your character out of play, one way or another. It’s a neat, variable alternative to “retire in peace.” Two of our characters, the bounty hunter and the mystic, got to end the game with them. The bounty hunter faced off against the recurring villain with one final “only one of us walks away from this” move…and against all odds, missed. Astonishing. He rolled against his best stat – +3 – and missed. It was perfect. Meanwhile, the mystic had to burn through so much Stress to survive during the grand showdown that he picked up two Calamities, which allowed him to narrate taking over his mystic order and his sister becoming an estranged apostate of the same order. Marvelous.
It’s a Crew Game, but #notallcrews
“Space adventure” is a sprawling genre, particularly in the scamp freighter vein. We had chosen the smuggler ship playbook, which is baseline Impulse Drive. While fun-loving troublemakers are easy to understand, though, I think Impulse Drive forgets the genre also centers on frequent low-level conflict among the crew: Mal and Inara’s on-again-off-again relationship, Luke convincing Han to rescue a rich girl, everyone versus everyone every episode of Farscape. Sometimes everyone’s on the same page – particularly when they’re on mission – and sometimes they’re not.
The greatest ship crew ever conceived. I will not be taking questions at this time.
PbtA type games, especially when they’re close to Apocalypse World’s baseline, are tricky to maneuver through when it comes to PvP type conflict. All my players are experienced with Burning Wheel, and BW is our gold standard for fair-but-tough PvP play. The Duel of Wits system lets the players mechanize and resolve their arguments without any GM input. Impulse Drive doesn’t offer that. The PvP advice in every PbtA game I’ve ever run, including ID, is simple: follow the fiction. But in terms of gameplay affordances, it’s easy to push against that.
Like straight AW, there are essentially two mechanized social interaction sequences: intimidation and manipulation. Intimidation is in the Go Aggro vein: make a real threat and asking the target to force your hand or submit. Manipulation requires you have something on offer in return for agreement. Those choices are fine when it comes to pushing against NPCs. They’re less good against another player, because they both demand the target give up agency. There’s no counter-offer in the intimidate, and there’s no enforcement in the manipulate. Manipulate, in fact, is purposefully quite weak: the stick is that a PC must roll to get out from under it. The carrot half – XP if you do what I say – becomes non-incentivizing for reasons I cover below.
I mean, this is just how these games work without a ton of PvP infrastructure, like you find in Monsterhearts. What Impulse Drive is quite good at, though, is mechanically reinforcing a functional team. For example, you can support each other with a great move called “Lean on Me,” which covers both direct support and emotional comfort. It’s my current favorite version of helping rules, mostly due to the move being tied into the Stress rules. Not only can you provide help toward succeeding at the roll, you can also help them recover from Stress while you do it. Very neat. There are other examples of group decision type moves throughout the game as well.
Let us contemplate the fruit-filled gap.
On the other hand, leaving that gap in place is itself a design decision. If you’re not willing to actually harm someone, and you have nothing specific to offer, what does that leave the players? I know my BW-head players want a system cudgel, and not having one reflexively bugs them. But either the game goes on, or they dig in their heels and the game stops. This is also a legitimate outcome.
Story time!
We had an excellent moment in the game, near the end, where two characters had been acting like they were on the same page but were definitely not. Tons of marvelous dramatic irony, and the players reveled in it. But when the secret agent receives orders to get the mystic out of the way so the agent’s master can do a thing, the agent drugged the mystic and flew him out of the current system. The mystic eventually woke up, liberated himself, armed up, and got ready to murder the agent. Wow! But after some mystical psychic probing, he discovered the agent was following outside orders and would never physically harm anyone on the crew. That prompted a frustrating discussion.
The mystic wasn’t willing to blow away the agent, so no Intimidate. So instead he promised to mind his own business if only the agent would fly back – it’s the only thing he had to offer. He rolled Manipulate, but the agent got out from under it by succeeding at the Keep Your Cool roll. I think it cost a Stress, but whatever. So the players were left without a clear mechanical way forward. Interesting! I could have stepped in and offered something, but the real-world social pressure of both of them knowing the cost of digging in their heels meant they worked it out on their own.
Sometimes no system is itself the system. Sometimes frustration is okay.
The Long Game
As I suspected the last time I wrote about Impulse Drive, the playbooks are set up to play through one season of a TV show. It was a show with lots of little subplots, of course. Think Agents of SHIELD: three big acts within a larger arc. But the short list of advancements (you only buy from your own playbook, unlike Apocalypse World), the rapid pace of session-based advancement when sessions are short, and the list of Calamities you’ll eventually run out of all add up to a system-mandated endgame.
Would the game be improved with a … holy hand grenade? It wouldn’t not be improved.
To my mind, that’s a good thing. Because advancement is tied to missed rolls (Dungeon World style) and you use your Hooks to invoke more frequent misses and there are end of session questions, the shorter the session the faster the advancement. Everyone in our game of 12 sessions (or so, I lost count) advanced all five stats, bought all their playbook advances except each book’s “grenade” move – for real, every playbook has a special use of grenades, of all things – and most of their loadout slots. They did that a couple sessions short of burning through all their Calamities.
Our game shifted from lots of advancement-incentivized missing via Hooks, to all the stats improving, to everyone growing beyond advancement as an incentive and just killing it with boosted stats and no more Hooks. Which, you know, awesome. Love me some good competency porn. But since the Space Master (GM/MC) makes moves in the usual PbtA ways, I found myself grabbing more “when they expect you to say something” opportunities and making harder missed-roll SM moves because they were so rare. Giving up on advancement also meant the players spent less time thinking about and updating their Hooks at the end. If they had engineered better hooks I would not have minded a slower, longer focus. Ours didn’t, not really, and once hooks stopped mattering for advancement the players didn’t care about them.
The Work:Fun Ratio
It used to be fashionable in indie circles to loudly, angrily declare: “If the game doesn’t work, play a different game.” I think that has led to weird design choices, over-explaining rules, perfectionism and general paralysis among designers. It’s also led to much better, tighter, more focused design – even in mainstream games. Trade-offs! But as a culture-of-play value? I propose a different formulation: “If the game is too much work to make fun, find a game with a better work:fun ratio.”
Impulse Drive is an imperfect game. Its Apocalypse/Dungeon World origins are readily obvious if you’ve played either game. The new bits, like Calamities, stand out as novel. The bits of design tech from other games like Blades in the Dark (Stress, scene-scaled clocks) are also easy to suss out if you’ve played those games. In other words, the more different games you’ve played, the better you understand what Impulse Drive is trying to get at. You may need to help get it there sometimes.
The work:fun ratio to make Impulse Drive not just playable but fun is quite low, particularly if you’re experienced in the PbtA space. I would not suggest Impulse Drive as anyone’s first PbtA game, but third or fourth? It’s very easy to bridge over the game’s rough bits.
Parting Thoughts
In the end, I really enjoyed this campaign. I learned a ton about related subjects as well:
Character-driven PbtA play doesn’t really interface well with Stars Without Number style sandbox setup. Still a useful tool! But I learned a lot about both PbtA and sandboxes by trying to combine them.
Fruitful voids are still a thing, and I need to give the players space to navigate them (even if they’re frustrated with fumbling around).
It takes time for folks to get comfortable with a game’s systems, characters, and setting and situation. It’s almost always worth it.
There are notable technical upsides to online play, particularly the utility of a shared character keeper and the ability share screen media. I’m never giving up on live table play but I’m proceeding with online play with more confidence.
Clear endings are powerful enough that they’re worth intentionally pursuing.
Next up: still deciding! I’m leaning toward Imp of the Perverse. Which happens to be just $20 for the very beautiful book right now, by the way.
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We started playing Nathan Paoletta’s Imp of the Perverse last week. It’s a funky, specific horror game that evokes Edgar Allan Poe vibes in 1830s-1850s Jacksonian America. Playing the first session reminded me about how hard I find conflict resolution games. Imp of the Perverse is squarely in that camp of design.
Conflict resolution is where the entirety of a “conflict” gets resolved at once, typically a single roll/draw/pull/moment of fortune. The relative inverse is action or skill based resolution, where each resolution re-positions objective elements of the fiction (somebody is hurt, a spell is cast, you jump over a hole) but doesn’t address the “conflict.” It’s a deep rabbit hole, and folks have argued (stridently!) about what “a conflict” is. There are lots of specific ways games go about resolving a conflict. The interesting/aggravating commonality is how resolution always revolves around the table arriving at a common understanding of the “conflict.”
Conflict resolution is indie-style roleplaying on hard mode.
Why It’s Hard
I’ve played conflict resolution games on and off ever since the first ones showed up, games like Dust Devils, Sufficiently Advanced, and more modern designs like Goblinville, The Clay That Woke and Primetime Adventures. Old or new, they feel hard to me in related ways: you need to think critically and abstractly about every scene, you need to carefully frame scenes based on that evaluation, you have to know when to engage the system, everyone has to be on board with the difference between authoring and advocating, and everyone has to be transparent. And all this happens with very few check-ins from, or with, the system itself.
Any one of these elements feels like it requires advanced, 400-level experience just to execute, much less to make fun. So let’s unpack them all and see if the work:fun ratio makes conflict resolution worth it.
Abstract Critical Thinking
Actually a pretty good breakdown!
This is the hard one, and it’s been hard ever since the earliest days of indie design: what is the salient point being argued over in this moment of play? Roleplaying is a conversation, and disagreements are where the conversation gets interesting. Sometimes those disagreements are around the details of a shared understanding of the game state, which is easy. We all agree the Stormtroopers got the jump on us, but do we get away? But sometimes players disagree about the premise of the conversation itself.
The game design may or may not have a specific idea of what “conflict” means for itself. Is “conflict resolution” just large-scale abstract action resolution? Totally fair and reasonable interpretation! A game might totally view many small moments as adding up to “a conflict.” In those games, the GM needs to apply critical thinking to the question of how much can one resolve in a single moment. The game might have guidelines to how much one can resolve, but I’ve never seen a system put hard limits on that. There’s always the need for authoritative human evaluation, which is laborious relative to, say, players reaching for abilities to resolve actions, or moves to resolve fictional triggers.
Another necessary critical thinking skill is being sensitive to the “about-ness” of the scene. Why is this scene happening? What’s at stake? A scene might be happening because prior fiction mandates it, or because the players are excited by the implied uncertainty of it, or because someone wants to make an aesthetic or ethical statement. And each of those scene types need a different evaluation of their about-ness.
I don’t have a good formula for any of this. But I know that, when I’m playing a game with conflict resolution and/or “very abstract resolution,” I need to spend a lot of juice thinking about every scene’s about-ness, so I know how to guide the players toward a common understanding.
Scene Setting as Sales Pitch
What will it take for you to buy that this scene’s actually about the romantic tension between …
The next step to applying one’s critical thinking to the about-ness at stake is that the GM needs to set really clear scenes. And this needs to happen not only because everyone’s at the table/Zoom meeting/chat and are eager for things to happen, but because scene-setting is the GM’s primary sales tool.
When the GM has a clear sense of the themes, disagreements, metaphors, or stakes, the way they explain their sense is via how they set a scene. In a lot of cases the GM might not know what’s at stake, and has to work it out as a scene plays out. Also legit. But the scene as a facilitator (or fellow player, in a GM-less conflict-resolution game like Durance) initially framed it is still preparing the eventual sales pitch. Call it marketing if you want: you’re creating a fertile field for future sales.
This is all pretty instinctual, I fear. I’m just highlighting the fact that if you want to bring players onto the same page in a conflict resolution game, it starts with how you set scenes.
When To Pull The Trigger
I mean, who doesn’t?
There’s always a tricky balance to strike when you’re playing a conflict resolution game: how long do we keep talking, and when is it time to stop and resolve the conflict?
This bit is especially hard on me, personally, because I greatly prefer to keep the action grounded in the fiction. I prefer to keep players in-character than let them slide into a planning fugue. I actively dislike the tendency for argumentative/competitive players to avoid engaging with the system (i.e. uncertainty) by sidestepping it in the just-talking step.
Old-style conflict resolution games like Dust Devils (second edition came out in 2006) typically included a whole essay about what “conflict” entailed in this specific game. Dust Devil’s very short version is: “Conflict is any point in the game where at least two players (and usually more!) have different ideas about ‘what happens next’ in the story.” As a practical matter, though, there was always a lot of talk leading up to that moment. To be clear: Dust Devils is one of my favorite-favorite indie RPGs! But nailing down exactly when to stop talking and start drawing cards is a skill I needed to learn.
Sometimes conflict resolution-type games, like Imp of the Perverse and The Clay That Woke, provide the trigger. But they’re still quite abstract relative to the precision of a PbtA style fictional trigger.
Imp first says “Whenever your protagonist takes risky action or engages in struggle,” and later “When your protagonist imposes their will upon the world.” But then there’s an admonition to not roll merely when an outcome is uncertain. So when do you roll? It’s up to the GM, ultimately, to decide what risky entails. And if they’ve sold the scene correctly, there should be something clearly at risk in a scene. It’s pretty good, and more explicit than many “to resolve a conflict…” type language in older games.
Clay is a bit more specific, calling out four “inflections:” dangerous situations, violent conflicts with beasts or NPCs, unnatural encounters, and interpersonal disagreements with NPCs. Cool, pretty specific, but there are still several paragraphs further clarifying when and how to engage the game’s resolution system (a chit-draw, set-building minigame called the Krater of Lots), with the most actionable-yet-subjective advice being “You know you’re using it too soon if your situations don’t feel dramatic.” So, really, hit an inflection and wait within that moment for it to become dramatic. Fair, but subjective.
Player Authorship vs Principled Character Advocacy
Will is my fursona.
Because of the necessary abstract thinking needed for the GM and players to engage with conflict resolution (and/or “very abstract resolution”), I’m always sensitive to the players being pulled in different creative directions. On the one hand, the abstraction can help you shape scenes in a very authorial way: this scene is about the two brothers’ longstanding rivalry coming to a head, this scene is about whether the Bandit King drives the old regime out of the castle, this scene is about the impact of a long journey on the fellowship. Conflict resolution is a great way to give players a lot of authority over a scene, in no small part because there aren’t so many smaller moments that may derail their vision for the scene.
But there’s something to be said for the immediacy and investment of advocating for What Your Character Wants. Or if you’re feeling iffy about the player/character split, What You Want For Your Character. It’s exciting and competitive and sometimes it just feels good to embody a character’s drives. It can also feel good in a pattern-completion way to watch a well-designed character’s needs play out in the fiction.
I’ve found those two impulses frequently hard to reconcile: player-as-author and player-as-advocate. If you’re constantly authoring scenes with an eye toward advocacy, are you really making an interesting story? Is “interesting” even on the agenda?
Radical Transparency
Last bit, mostly an issue for trad/conventional players being introduced to conflict resolution or “storygames” in general: if you’re going to even begin the conversation about the about-ness of a scene, what you or your character want out of it, everyone needs to be very transparent. No playing close to the vest, no trying to outsmart each other. It’s a very collaborative play style, in contrast with an adversarial-GM play style and adjunct at best to an impartial-GM play style. Old habits can be really hard to break, is all I’m saying.
System As A Validation Tool
Game design in a nutshell
My theory about players interacting with systems: Each interaction is a validation for the player that they’re on the right track, that they’re adding something tone-/canon-allowable, that they’re reinforcing and meaningfully enlarging the table’s common understanding of the fiction. It can be reassuring to do a small thing, earn a small currency perhaps, or see a small shift in the fiction. It can feel less fraught to make some progress toward your goals, action by action, than have everything ride on a single moment of uncertainty. When a player resists engaging with a conflict resolution system, their desire for system-validating moments is something I feel out.
Three Conflict Resolution Tips
These are all pretty old conversations if you’ve been in storygaming spaces for a while. But if you haven’t, here’s some advice:
Have a firm sense of what meaningful conflicts look like in this genre, setting or situation. Meaningful, in this case, being “the fiction takes an assertive new direction.” Sometimes your instinct about meaningful conflict disagrees with when the game tells you to resolve: this is the designer’s opinion, their take on the subject matter. Followup: frame scenes really hard, ideally with more than one player character, with a conflict-rich situation already in mind. Don’t preprogram the conflict! But think about situations that can (probably) only be resolved by eventually going to the game’s system. Many conflict resolution games have external economies that rely on engaging the system at some point, so you can’t bop along freeforming forever.
Say yes an awful lot more than you’re accustomed to. Conflict resolution games are, I think, very freeform most of the time. That means the players need a clear sense of their own agency most of the time, because there’s no validation of their choices coming back to them (see above). The only way I’ve come up with, as a GM, is to say yes a lot. It also means gently, conversationally redirecting if a player suggests something that’s off-tone or violates what I feel like is the shared understanding of the game state. There’s still a need for facts to become part of the game’s permanent record even when we’re not invoking the system. And everyone needs to agree that the fiction can be positioned outside of the system.
Be uncomfortably up-front about what’s at stake, win or lose, in this conflict. Well, I mean: maybe you won’t personally be uncomfortable with that level of transparency. But if this is a new thing for you, expect discomfort. Talk about not only what Your Character or The Situation stands to gain, but describe your own understanding of what Your Character or The Situation stands to lose. Make sure both sides of that equation feel equitable to both parties.
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Part 1 of ? In the Cultivating A Storytelling Mindset series
Last month, guest writer Paul Mitchener talked about how to use history in fruitful, productive and most importantly non-harmful ways in your roleplaying. One thing that jumped out at me from that piece is that I’m definitely more interested in exploring interesting, difficult tension in my games. History is a great source of inspiration for interesting tension because humans are messy and capable of twisting ourselves into moral pretzels. It also clarified for me that without the context leading to that interesting tension, we’re left with aesthetics and mood boards.
Interesting Tension
It’s true tho. One of the reasons many storygames fixate on negative emotions!
What I mean by interesting tension is a set of contexts that complicate otherwise easy decisions. Off the top of my head, here are some examples of what I think of interesting tensions:
The overlapping demands and constraints of class and gender that conspire to keep lovers apart in Regency era games like Good Society. Rich and poor alike face an uphill battle when they love outside their classes. Men are expected to be the instigator in romance, and resort to violence (perhaps physical but maybe also social) in competition for a woman’s hand; women are expected to seek financial security for their extended family, but are also – in the rules of the genre – prone to pursuing true love and happiness. Internal tensions, external tensions, it’s great stuff. I love, love Regency romance fiction. I love it because it’s so fraught.
Another example:
Your nation is competing with other states to colonize and exploit lands they’ve recently discovered. Back home, those nations are in varying states of internal unrest or outright war, so the colonization is a proxy for all that. It’s one kind of game if you’re just going to play out a string of battles against, dunno, the primitive hordes that threaten all the colonists. It’s another game entirely when you stop treating them like faceless obstacles and start treating them like conflicted, complex communities. Now you’re facing an insurgency, working out delicate temporary alliances, recruiting collaborators, falling in love with your alleged enemies, questioning conflicting and contradictory orders from remote masters. That one where you go beat on the primitives, ehhh and yikes. That second one is full of interesting tension with tons of context. I love decolonized frontier games because they’re so fraught. The fraught-ness is the point.
Hint: it wasn’t awesome because of the giant gun and crazy cars.
What tensions do you find interesting? Look at the fiction you like to consume: I’ll bet it’s not a string of interesting fight scenes, right? I know I get bored out of my tears when a movie or show features contextless violence (off the top of my head: Into the Badlands did this to me — it might’ve gotten more interesting later but the first episodes chased me off). But raise the stakes and now the story is so much more interesting.
Identify Internal and External Contexts
While the specific tension points are where we want to end up, let’s start by thinking through the context that causes that tension. This is good to do if you’re starting with an established setting, premise or historical context.
Internal context is limited to the character’s makeup. That might be deeply held religious values, internalized cultural constraints, needs, wants, vows, loyalty, past history.
External context arises from setting materials. That might be class, race, culture, externally enforced religious or cultural values, or external time pressures (impending natural disasters, ecological collapse, arrival of an enemy force). Personally? I prefer making the external context internal. Don’t let the characters just be cutouts for larger sociopolitical factors.
Once you’ve thought through your internal and external contexts, you can start poking at pairings and see where you say “Oh, that’d be interesting to explore.” So from the short lists above, we could poke at:
Principled faith values, versus a classes that treats faith as frivolous or dumb.
Indoctrination into a warrior caste that simply cannot ignore insults, versus a tradition of tribes that exchange insults as a way of testing one another’s mettle.
Two races that believe the other is an implacable enemy, versus your character’s love for a member of the other race.
The coming meteor that’s going to cause unspeakable destruction, versus a character’s vow to his family to carry a parent’s ashes to a distant traditional burial site.
My membership in a wizard’s covenant, versus your membership in the church that’s committed to snuffing out wizardry. And we’re siblings.
Some folks may read these as no-win situations, but that’s thinking about play with a win/lose mindset. In a storytelling mindset, this is the good stuff. This is where everyone gets to make a statement about their character’s values. The point isn’t to win, it’s to ask interesting questions and produce interesting answers.
The goal here is exploration. You absolutely, positively cannot answer these questions for the players! And players cannot ask the GM what the “right answer” is. Whatever answer they provide, it has to mean something. It has to change the game in an irrevocable way.
Another red flag: If you find the players trying to Batman their way through situations (i.e. both save the bus full of civilians about the plunge off the bridge and keep the bank from exploding, whatever), they’re trying to win the situation. Totally coming from the wrong place. I can’t even say “make it literally impossible,” because that won’t address the player’s understanding of the point of play at this particular table. Batmanning might be totally suitable in some games, and it’s a creative tactical challenge. I’ve had this happen at tables and the only way I’ve ever been able to address it is to the player: make an assertive, irrevocable statement, and I promise I’ll honor your statement and show how it’s changed the world.
Reverse Engineering
You can reverse-engineer this process as well: think about the interesting questions, then take it a step back and ask why a question is interesting.
Here’s what I mean by reverse-engineering. Let’s say I want to explore loyalty as a theme. I start by asking stuff about loyalty: Who’s worthy of your loyalty? What would it take to become disloyal? What benefits are there to loyalty, even in the face of uncertainty? Lots of places to go.
I’d start by thinking through context that would lead to these questions being asked in an organic way. What’s great about the nation/caste/society/guild/whatever to which a player might pledge or feel loyalty? And then, what’s terrible about them? What other groups might compete for your loyalty? And what’s great and terrible about them? Internally, what values might a character have that were already in conflict with loyalty to an external body? Is there a faith in conflict with a nation’s goals? Are there family ties that can be fruitfully threatened by conflicting needs?
The questions aren’t nearly as interesting as the context in which they’ll be asked. Work on the context, and you’ll also find new questions getting asked you never even thought about.
Avoid Easy Answers (Except When You Need One)
Oscar knew the score.
If your impulse, either as a GM or player, is to look for easy answers, to avoid fraught, interesting tension, my advice is to push back on that to start. Or lean all the way into it, but do it in an intentional way. Tell the GM: “Okay, my commander just blindly hates the orcs. Can’t abide them, won’t negotiate, scorched earth. Let God sort ‘em out.” Now that commander has herself become a new source of interesting tension. How does an implacable personality get along in this world?
My personal aesthetic is to caution against GMs ever letting the game get away with easy answers. There are no unbreakable social rules, there are simply rules that nobody has yet broken. There are no faceless hordes that are just fine to murder off, there are societies with their own interests and internal conflicts. There can even be potentially lethal consequences – that’s the highest stakes, right? The punishment for treason might very well be death. Is it still worth it to question your orders, or your faith?
But also: not every game needs to address every potentially fraught tension. Not all tensions are interesting to everyone, and this is where intentionality on the players’ side is a skill worth cultivating — both for the players to develop, but for the GM to recognize. I may find class, society and gender all super interesting in a Regency game, but I’ve also played Good Society at a hardcore-queer table where the gender stuff was just off the table. Not even a thing. It worked okay, and we leaned harder into social tensions to make up for it: tension between circles of friends, family and religious groups. It wasn’t the ideal experience for me in that moment, but good grief, everything is negotiable.
Each easy answer turns down or off a whole set of potentially interesting tensions. That’s the cost. The cost might very well be worth paying, particularly if a topic is behind a line or veil, or has been X-carded, or is, for whatever reason, just not where folks want to go. Sometimes discomfort is okay too. I’m not smart or arrogant enough to tell you when to push through discomfort in the hopes of finding something interesting on the other side.
Coping Strategies
One neat strategy is to dress up difficult context, to provide some distance from the subject matter. You don’t want to hit the men/women gender line so hard but you still like the idea of conflicting interpersonal constraints. Maybe it’s caste, or age, or profession that separates folks, and keeps the players from seeking easy answers. It’s an interesting critical thinking challenge, isn’t it? What are gender roles? Is it really all just performative tradition? And so on.
Moving an historical game into a fantasy or sci-fi setting is another go-to, but it’s also easy to trip over or edit out the parts that made the history problematic. Moving your Old West game into a space frontier, Firefly style, is great for recontextualizing North/South antebellum tensions, and doing interesting things with culture and community. But if you’ve simply removed the Native American component, well…you’ve just re-colonized your Old West game and given it blasters. Firefly was iffy on this point because the Reavers were a mindless, faceless, implacably violent enemy (yikes), later revealed in Serenity to be victims of science gone wrong (total erasure, double yikes). Is erasure better than othering? That’s a game of racism bingo I really don’t want to play.
Move Past Aesthetic Boards
Having worked in the past on aesthetics-intensive properties (Mutant Chronicles 2nd edition, Deadlands, others), I’m intensely, acutely aware of the costs of reducing setting and character to aesthetic boards. This is also why I squirm when I read the phrase “rule of cool.” Slapping together decontextualized cool shit means asking nothing but easy questions and demanding nothing more than easy answers. Make your setting easy enough, and your game is reduced to high-fives about each other’s coolness. Which, whatever, do what you want at your table, I’m not your dad. And under many circumstances, I like celebrating each other’s aesthetic contributions. Cool moments are awesome.
I guess coolness, for me, is more than cool imagery. It’s discovering surprising, satisfying answers to difficult questions…and seeing what new questions get asked as a result. The point of tension is to release it, to complete the pattern, and create new unresolved tensions waiting to reveal undiscovered patterns.
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We’re a couple actual-play sessions into Shattered City, UFO Press’ latest Legacy–derived game, and it’s delivering an interesting experience. Rather than blow-by-blow whaddaydo whaddayado play, each session is a vignette. There’s a clear opening with an explicit situation, a nice little arc with miss-generated complications, and closure at the end of the session. They feel like very satisfying little one-shots happening within the much (!) larger context of the world-building bits.
Playing Shattered City kind of feels like watching a series like Tales From The Loop. There are small interactions between major characters, but big situational jumps between episodes. I gotta say, that’s doing a lot to keep me from feeling itchy and burned out! Rather than having to constantly shovel coal into the engine of The Campaign, we can just play a vignette and have it be satisfying.
Story Time!
Our first session was about an agent of the Crystal Crowned (the ageless vampire/elf/alien faction that had ruled the city and now holes up in The Last Redoubt, their
goth nightclubspooky haunted castle) tasked with taking out a big titan stomping around the countryside terrorizing a crossroads community. I was worried that our first play session took us directly out of the city setting, but it turned out great. There was some travel and exploration, hungry soldiers who had deserted and were terrorizing the inn at the crossroads, and a non-violent resolution to the titan problem — the Agent is a Warlock, and one of their main deals is being able to negotiate with giant monsters. Cool! It was also our kick-the-tires session and we went out of our way to try all the basic moves. Normally that’d mean kind of a bad/dull session but honestly, it was nice. Because it was a vignette.Totally normal plant people, not at all upsetting.
Our second session jumped to a prophet of the Verdant Priesthood, a society of tree people, who had foreseen the fruits of a great alliance between the city’s rebel underground and a cult of scumbag foreign occultists. The PC attached to the rebels is also a sibling of the prophet (the tree people are made, not born, and the process is intensely alienating in a city overrun by human-only bigots), so there was some terrific family drama baked in. And again, the vignette thing worked great: get into some trouble with the bigots, stumble into a crisis with the leader of the foreign occultists, have a heartfelt negotiation, done and done.
A Different Facilitator Mode
The vignette thing is a nice change of pace, I gotta say. It feels good to aim for a satisfying ending, if not actual closure. It feels good to not have to hustle for hooks and leads and ooh what if?! bits as I facilitate. In fact I hadn’t really realized how different my GMing headspace is when I’m in spool-out mode versus wrap-up mode. Rather than looking for ever-escalating snowballs (you know, typical PbtA), I’m on the lookout for smaller close-able loops. And sure enough, the sessions don’t end with everything on fire and everyone screaming.
Documentary footage of me GMing Apocalypse World
I think vignette play also leads to overall lower intensity. Which, you know, it’s a trade-off. I loved the big payoffs at the end of our Impulse Drive campaign. They were hard-earned. But the campaign ended when it needed to end, too, because I just couldn’t maintain that level of heat. The interest in Shattered City, I think, is in moving back and forth between the game’s big-picture tools — practically speaking, it’s a nearly-GMless game, but that fact is hidden behind the players’ faction moves — and these closed moments. It’s less intense but maybe more sustainable. Guess we’ll see!
Vignette as a Distinct Play Mode
Settling into our game’s tempo has me thinking vignette play is distinct enough to deserve further investigation. I think the demands and expectations of a vignette are their own mode, like how dungeon delves and hex-crawls are their own modes. A vignette to my mind is also distinct from a conventional one-shot because a vignette, by definition, is part of something bigger than itself. Practically speaking, a vignette might be similar to mission-based play, but only if the mission is clearly part of a larger, evolving arc.
Off the top of my head, a good vignette needs:
A concise, well understood kickoff situation. Unless you just want to have the characters riff Clerks-style, you need to nail down why the characters are together and what they’re facing. But depending on the players and the game, maybe you could just riff. I think it would be hard to nail my last point in this list: making the vignette matter to the larger work.A clear shift in focus and setting from previous sessions. I feel like the shift is an important element to the vignette, because it illustrates how this moment stands apart.A good shared understanding of the overall game/setting/arc so that players have several choices of vignette. Sure, the GM can just frame one up. But I feel like players making that choice gives them more vision and buy-in for how it’s going to play out. They can go into the vignette with a better intuitive sense of the underlying pattern that will be completed.A facilitator emphasis on small, closeable loops rather than constant escalation. (PbtA games, in particular, can easily fall prey to ever-wilder outcomes through to the end of the session.)Accepting that the vignette may be a lower-intensity experience. The payoff is in character revelations and closure, not the cliffhanger.Ways to tie the events of the vignette into the big picture. The vignette needs to matter in some way, even if it’s just to build out the setting.
And a few things I think a vignette is not:
It isn’t a play-the-day type thing, where every session covers every moment of everyone’s life. Hitting a satisfying conclusion means being disciplined and intentional about framing scenes. I think you can do this quietly but it may require a firmer facilitator hand on the tiller than you’re accustomed to.The players can’t wait for the GM to hand them shit to solve. Players need to be proactive within the session for a vignette to come together.Tightly integrated into, and contingent upon, outside events. If you’ve got some way to convey a big picture – the faction turn in Stars Without Number or the Family Phase in Legacy – then you set your vignette within that big picture and have it be meaningful and resonant. This is distinct from a session kickoff that picks up hot on the heels of the previous session, or is otherwise part of a continuous whole. It can be discontinuous.A cliffhanger. The session needs to stand on its own and feel conclusive.
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Part 3 of ? in the Cultivating a Storytelling Mindset series
The hardest thing I ever ask of a player is to decide what they’re going to care about.
Some games tell you what to care about, right? You’re dungeon delvers, so you’re supposed to care about the treasure. Advancement is a strongly implied goal as well. But there are also games that don’t tell you what to care about. Why is deciding what to care about such a challenging lift?
We’re playing Shattered City, a PbtA game derived from Legacy that doesn’t specifically tell players what to care about, so I can’t stop thinking about this subject. It’s a game design challenge but it’s also a creative, social and emotional challenge for the players. Burning Wheel covered this ground, and workshopping Beliefs and Instincts is a notoriously difficult process. In Legacy games, which feature big shifts in time and an explicit split between big-picture events and small-picture character vignettes, there are no specific economies driving choices other than the ones you choose, I think it’s even harder.
And what does “interesting” even mean? Is it interesting to the player, to the GM, to the other players? To your blog readers? To your Twitch audience?
How does this continue to be so hard?
Such a mystery. Or you could help the players figure it out for themselves.
Where To Look
Sometimes, system provides the player benchmarks and validation. You want to advance, so do the things that earn you advancement. You will grind out food, rest and light, so do things to maximize them.
Other times, the game’s premise provides an answer: you’re a secret society of monster hunters, you crew a tramp freighter, you’re a criminal gang. The shared goals in these games are of course entirely embedded in the game’s fiction: monster hunters hunt monsters, tramp freighters take jobs, criminal gangs claw their way into being bigger and badder. Shared goals are great! But those are all extrinsic goals. They’re not the character’s goals.
Meanwhile, we’ve provided players almost no training at all in developing their own intrinsic goals. Decades of shitty GMing have provided plenty of negative reinforcement though, mostly by ignoring what players tell us. It’s too hard to integrate their backstory. I forgot that NPC you took an interest in. Our session time is so consumed by the job/mission/dungeon that there’s no time left for the characters. You can’t wander off the rails.
I’ve talked on and off for a while about the concept of “holding environment.” To recap, it’s the premise of your game that gives the characters reasons to spend time together, particularly in scenes. And those premises can be all over the place: for emotional support reasons (personal relationships in a closed environment, like the settlements of Sagas of the Icelanders), for tactical reasons (party builds in D&D), for professional reasons (a ship crew like in Scum and Villainy), even for meta-play reasons like “because we all agreed to show up on Saturday afternoons for five hours.” But those are all related to the larger social dynamic of all the players at the table.
I suppose it’s not unreasonable that a player might pick any of these things as their intrinsic goal: what I want to do is support someone else’s effort. But I don’t think that’s sustainable or scalable. What happens when the whole party exists to support…the whole party? Or crew or whatever. At some point, if you’re playing a game where the emergent fiction is the goal, someone needs to care about something.
The secret is that not caring protects you from being hurt. Not to get all armchair therapist here, but identifying what players fear will hurt them is most of the exercise.
Why Should You Care?
Deciding what in the fiction to care about makes some assumptions. The big assumption is that “the fiction” matters, changes, and is part of your overall enjoyment of the medium. And different RPGs care about “the fiction” in very different, incompatible ways. A dungeon delving game puts a lot more emphasis on the tactical fiction than, say, a ships-crew game that emphasizes the fiction around tramp freighter logistics. Or a feels-heavy game that emphasizes emotional context way above tactics or logistics. Or a political maneuvering game that emphasizes social context.
Some games are written in a relatively fiction-agnostic way. Personally I think that’s usually not intentional: the designer(s) just didn’t think about what aspect of “the fiction” they wanted their game to address or facilitate most clearly. But that incoherence can be intentional. You can get a lot of good play even while the players don’t settle into a gestalt.
Because I can’t stop thinking about this topic, I’m starting to think “give me easy things to care about” is something I desperately want and need in a game. “Don’t punish me for the things I end up caring about” is a close second.
Okay I totally lied. Let’s get all armchair therapist!
Get Out Of Your Own Way
I think the difficulty comes down to fear.
Fear of being judged for having a bad idea. Easy and shitty to be judgy about other players’ contributions: it’s dumb or hackneyed or predictable.
Fear of tripping over the GM’s authority or credibility, their prep or plans.
Fear or uncertainty around fitting your idea into established fiction, or external canon (the Star Wars problem, if you haven’t bought into making a canon-rich setting your own).
Uncertainty about how your authority interfaces with other players’, including the GM. What happens if I want to care about something that contradicts what someone else wants to care about? Will the system let me fight that out, or do I need to talk it out? Is that going to be okay or weird or what?
A general lack of player credibility, that the table won’t buy your idea but they might buy the same idea if it came from a higher-credibility player. (How do you build credibility? Glad you asked.)
Not wanting to rock the boat if the table’s goals don’t match yours. Everyone else is there to beat a dungeon, but while you’re exploring your thief’s morality, that’s interfering with your thief’s tactical efficiency. That’s not what the other players signed up for. I’ve done this, and had it happen, and it sucks.
But what if I choose wrong?!
Okay, So How Do I Choose?
Sometimes it takes time to settle into the game’s table vibe and established fiction. It’s hard to decide what to care about when nobody else has decided what they care about (including the GM!). Someone has to go in the water first and prove it’s warm, or at least swimmable. That’s usually one of the unspoken responsibilities of facilitation: clearly signaling where it’s safe to put your attention.
You feel that stutter-step tempo during scene framing in GMless games. This can be a tough exercise, particularly if you’ve never done it before and especially if you’ve never GMed or facilitated before. If you’re doing a scene with another player, you both fumble around until you settle on a premise for the scene you can agree to and find interesting. I’m not sure how you speed up that process other than through practice and saying “yes” a whole lot when the other side offers a scene up.
But that’s just related to making the game proceed, and doesn’t have anything to do with deciding what to care about inside your own head. I’m thinking about how I go about settling on a vibe or characterization or whatever, in these set-your-own-scene games. It’s so hard because I’m asking myself what I can care about for the next four hours. And sure enough, I still face all the fears I list above: does this fit with everyone else’s investment? Will I be judged favorably for it? Is it “clever” (ugh)? Does my characterization fit with the premise or setting or genre?
I’ve been playing these kinds of games for a decade and I’ve never really dialed it in. But I’ve also mostly GMed conventionally structured RPGs for four decades, which has given me plenty of training in being comfortable asserting anything.
Okay, finally the useful part.
Subjects To Care About
Again, I’m assuming you’re playing a game where the fiction matters, where players need to pick something to care about otherwise the game won’t go. The set of games that requires this is quite small. Similarly, the set of games that actively reject or ignore this is also quite small. The vast majority of games, either tabletop or larp, work best when the players settle on some set of things. And the table, ideally, supports your choices.
Goals: Personally I think this is a pretty shallow take on “the fiction,” but sure. Let’s assume your character is consumed with the burning desire to do well at their…thing, their job, whatever it is. This is an easy fallback to competency-porn type play: characters who are good at their job, enjoy being good at their job, and look great doing it. There’s no need to justify your character’s goal, just pick something, anything (but please, please pick something in the fiction, not “I want to unlock this ability”). Goals are a terrific jumping-off point to decide that you care about what may have led to this goal.
Logistics: This is, to my mind, a logical extension of investing in goal-oriented fiction. Now you’re caring about how to get the rest of the players as deep into the dungeon as they can get, or fly their ship as far and as safely as possible, all the support stuff that happens in a game. I mean, it’s a thing and you could pick it to care about. Folks who love to be supportive frequently fixate on a game’s logistical concerns (and are frequently frustrated when games simply don’t have them, eg no tracking ship fuel or maintenance schedules, don’t really care about food, rest and healing times, and so on).
Emotions: What does my character feel about things? Are those feelings a rational product of their setting and situation? I talk about this bit a lot in the previous Cultivating a Storytelling Mindset. In short: your character’s emotional state can be literally anything, rational or not. Your goal is to be true to it, explore it, see where their hopes and fears and desires take them.
Relationships: How does your character fit into their larger social context? What friends, families, rivals and enemies are around them? This means choosing to care about your character’s relationships and treating them as real, rather than as (merely) useful or obstacles. This is often ultimately goal-driven, but it doesn’t have to be.
Setting: Tricky one! I feel like choosing to care about “the setting” is some alchemy of social concerns, taking an interest in big sweeping events, and fidelity to genre expectations.
Fidelity: Does the game feel like the genre you’re modeling? How do my decisions advance that feeling? This level of caring feels really meta to me, like, it’s more concerned with “correct” authorship than with interesting or provocative authorship. But genre is a good way to ensure everyone’s on the same page, right? If we’re hunting vampires, it’s practical and useful to invest in your depiction of vampire hunting: describing badass mission prep, complaining about being too old for this shit, relating stories about how vampires ate your family.
Yeah don’t do this.
Just Pick Something. Anything. Many Anythings, Even
The reason this is in my Cultivating a Storytelling Mindset series is that choosing what to care about ultimately means engaging in proactive play. Invested play. Thinking more about what you want your play experience to be and taking measures to ensure you get it. It’s a refutation of play where you simply react to what the GM throws at you in the most tactically efficient way possible. That’s a whole category of play – arguably the biggest! – but it’s not storytelling-mindset play.
And like I go into in some depth in the previous piece, stories are not games and games are not stories. Just because you’ve picked something to care about, that doesn’t mean you should expect your wishes to go unchallenged. In fact it’s now on the GM to specifically push you on the things you care about. And those challenges might not feel like how you imagined things going down. If you want your wishes to be all that matters, write a story. On the other hand, if you’ve picked something (anything! Many things!) and the GM, other players, and evolving events don’t take that into account, that’s worth talking about.
(Which is the next-hardest thing for players to do!)
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I was chatting with a friend the other day about how strict adherence to the rules-as-written (RAW) might be a male-socialized thing. Yes, this is typical game chat in my universe! I don’t want to speculate too deeply on that bit (yet). But it unlocked a whole other set of thoughts around the many utilities of rules, and how there are entire cultures and paradigms of play around the uses we have chosen.
So just for fun, setting aside tribal nonsense about storygames or OSR or indie or whatever else, here are some of my thoughts on the utility of rules* — that is, how we use rules, not why they exist or what their purpose “should” be. This is not a manifesto! It’s a way to think about what happens when you and I use rules for different, maybe incompatible, reasons.
* But wait, what do I mean by “rules?” I know you want to ask. Let’s say it’s any material where you might hear the phrase “rules as written” invoked. So: obviously the procedural stuff, but — for me at least — also in-fiction material that carries authoritative weight: known conflicts between factions, fictional social strata and who defers to whom, cultural or religious strictures, things like that. I suppose that could even extend to art but that feels theoretical.
Fairness
Disagreement resolution is the use that decades of trad RPGs assert, arguably the default utility. You know, the “roleplaying games are just like cops and robbers, but when one of you shoots the other and they say you missed!, that’s when the rules come into play.”
Which, sure. Generations of mediated make-believe rely on documented procedures to resolve disagreements. We can thank our wargaming roots for that.
I find that folks who use rules for disagreement resolution are looking for reasonable, bounded outcomes. Assuming you touch the system often enough to perceive patterns, the system is handing back a bell curve of outcomes, with occasional outliers. There’s a clear cap to how great your effort can be, and a clear floor to how bad failure might be. This utility says rules exist to provide a fair, level playing field.
Using the rules primarily to ensure fairness means fairness is the main pain point for you. I wouldn’t want to speculate as to why that would be! But that’s the utility most needed by these folks.
Learning
This is where we use rules* to help understand the subject matter of the game. It’s using rules to model and deconstruct: What are the key elements of a genre? How did these aspects of history affect each other? What’s the storytelling function of a common trope?
Rules can be a way to understand genre, history, setting. Lots of PbtA is designed around this: Impulse Drive deconstructs small-ship-crew sci-fi, Night Witches models the social pressures of being a Russian woman pilot in WW2, and so on. RPG rules are a legit way to understand how a genre “works,” or to explore the dynamics at play in history.
Rules that emulate authorial type decision-making invite us to model and deconstruct. So the strict scene economy of Burning Empires, for example, or the mission focus of Blades in the Dark with the deferral of “downtime” activities to a few quick rolls. These rules ask the player to engage with the subject matter as an author rather than as a participant. Authorship style rules aren’t necessary to the model-and-deconstruction utility! It’s just something I’ve seen a lot, and it’s a distinction of the RPG form.
Rather than focusing on outcomes (like resolution rules), players that want rules to model and teach focus on inputs. We look for interlocking abstract incentives: if I do X then I get Y which makes Z easier, which helps me understand why some historical event played out the way it did (for example), if we understand human behavior to be driven by incentives. But also, this explains why players are often not incentivized by the incentives a system offers them. They just don’t care about the model, they care about some other aspect of play (which may exist outside the rules altogether: see “facilitating experience” next!).
Modeling and deconstruction utility frequently look for the next step of the model, ie snowballs, moves that trigger moves, etc.It’s all about engagement that flows from system to system, each system describing an aspect of the subject matter.
Presentation, even, can help walk you through the model proposed by the designer. The campaign for Night Witches, for example, displays the clear march of events from base to base through time in the war. The game is teaching you, and it’s up to you to decide whether you want to be taught or not.
Facilitating Experience
And finally: this is where we want the rules* to facilitate an experience, to generate excitement, or an emotional state, or a creative challenge. When we use rules* to facilitate experience, we want surprising or perhaps even unwanted outcomes. To force discomfort as part of the experience. We want the game material itself to engage us and make our imaginations run wild.
I can think of quite a few experiences that rules can facilitate: emotional/internal experiences, tactical/achievement experiences, aesthetic pleasure in the form of big elaborate patterns to complete. And just a reminder: I’m talking why we engage with rules* here, not how. Rules + humans = actual play, right?
It is, in my experience, a very common point of displeasure for folks who want rules to provide bounded, reasonable outcomes when they run into rules designed to facilitate experience. See, for example, the old Murphy’s Rules comics that would pedantically make fun of rules that never intended to model reasonable outcomes. Those two uses for rules are so divergent as to be irreconcilable in a lot of cases. I’ve seen groups break down over it.
Other examples of using rules for engagement: glomming onto economic cycles that help the player empathize with decision cycles. That feeling of empathy is the experience! Related: engaging with abstract economies that model diegetic incentives, rather than incentives for non-diegetic stuff (mechanical advancement, success/failure, etc.) For example, Glory in King Arthur Pendragon: you can’t touch it in the fiction, it’s abstract, but it is the thing we’re told to pursue because it will grant us material benefits in our relationship with our Lord. In other words, not “diegetic incentives,” like money or magic items.
Another example: lists that seed your imagination. A list might also, or only, be educational. That’s gonna be in the eye of the beholder and all that. But think about the colorful random tables you see in lots of OSR stuff: zero shits are given about those results being reasonable. Unreasonable outcomes are the point.
There’s a good bit of crossover here, between experience facilitation and modeling/deconstruction. I know I drift back and forth a lot with my use of rules that do either of these things. Sometimes the model produces delight and challenge, and sometimes the model explains and teaches. Sometimes learning is itself delightful, right? So of course we do both all the time.
But sometimes the utility disagreement is more stark: players who don’t want to grind through a detailed simulation, like Book of the Manor for King Arthur Pendragon for example, because detailed manor management is just not an experience they want even while it models the complexity of the job. Or folks who are excited to move through the cards in For the Queen because answering questions is fun, but it isn’t really teaching them anything at all while other players want to slow down and chew on those answers.
A Few Takeaways
Obviously there are lots of crossovers between these approaches, both on the design side and the player-utility side. What’s the space between “model” and “deconstruction,” after all? Mostly a matter of editorial voice, I think: for the most part, I don’t gain any greater understanding of genre or history from physics-type modeling.
In my own game design efforts, I regularly screw up thinking about my rules. Reasonable outcomes might not engage and delight. Delightful experiences might not teach what I want. A cycle of play might be educational but both unreasonable and unfun. And of course my control-freak impulses are awful, since I can’t really control how any given player will engage the rules. You can drag a gamer to a lesson but you can’t make them learn.
As a practical matter, thinking about the utility of rules this way allows me to completely set aside whatever style of game I’m thinking about. There are OSR games that facilitate experiences well but do little to proceduralize disagreements. There are storygames that are smart and interesting deconstructions but don’t do much to facilitate a particular experience for me. Keepsake games, like A Field Guide to Memory? Almost entirely about producing an experience and nothing else.
Back to that chat I mentioned at the start, the thing about how playing by the rules seems male-coded? I can see the shape of that argument, viewed through this utilitarian lens, but I think it’s a sliding scale: expecting or demanding deferral to rules in a parliamentarian sense is just different than a kind of deist engagement with rules to show us how things work, or eager engagement with rules that help get us to a specific experience. Some of us want a referee making calls, some of us want a judge bound by the law, some of us want an event planner.
This also helps me, at least, drill down into why folks get so confrontational about games. Like, if you need a game to resolve disagreements, a thoughtful model of medieval life isn’t gonna help you much. But if you played Pendragon and really enjoyed how it helped you understand medieval life, playing a tactics-oriented fantasy game is gonna come up short for you. And so on.
Consider also: PbtA GMs/MCs who chafe at moves as a constraint (that is, rules that model) versus those who look to their moves for inspiration (that is, rules that delight). It doesn’t take but a small shift in perception and the whole “MC moves” thing changes from straightjacket to a fun bit of help. But if you use rules as a model — in the case of most PbtA, “how does this game model its genre?” — the list can feel like a validation gate. Am I making a move that’s in-genre? Am I playing it “right?” Honestly, no wonder folks bounce off this sometimes.
Another thought: there are tons of issues that come up when how we use rules conflicts with why rules were written that way. A gamer who’s looking forward to delight but is handed an elaborate fairness engine? Boring! A GM who’s excited to share their knowledge and has to work with a bunch of inspirational-but-goofy tables? Ugh! And so on. Pick any mismatch, you’ve probably seen it play out in the world.
What do you think? How are you using rules? How has that conflicted with others at the table?
PS: Yes, this does bear some surface similarities to Big Model/GNS talk. But trying to directly map agenda to utility (narrativism = model, etc.) is a category error for both. So try real hard not to do that, they’re different things.
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The other day someone in the IGRC Slack talked about getting (back) into roleplaying recently and landing in OSR territory. But now he wanted to…