I’ve long been a proponent of at-the-table relationship maps, and of setting them up with everyone’s participation at that table. It started as a thing at my home tabletop games, but I’ve been doing them at conventions for years as well.
Why oh why should you bother? I’m glad you asked. Here’s my case:
* Visual information is the strongest information (until I can come up with an r-map method that uses smell instead of eyeballs, then game on)
* It is a living document, easily changed and grown as the game proceeds.
* It is a central and theatrical process, which draws everyone’s attention to the table during creation and play. This last one I cannot emphasize enough.
This photo is from my Space Wurm vs Moonicorn one-shot I ran at NewMexicon for Joe Beason, Tomer Gurantz, Patrick Riegert and Brendan Conway last weekend. It’s a good example because I use a lot of different methods at once on this one. The game also works especially well for relationship mapping; I’ll talk at the end about games that don’t really do great with an r-map.
0) I either use my roll of butcher paper at home or, if I’m on the road, an easel pad. This one in particular is:
I also use a plain black Sharpie, not a ball-point or skinny felt-tip. At home, I’ve got a full-spectrum Sharpie set and I’ll use 2-3 colors. But not more! 3’s really the max IME.
1) I started with the most important character at the table, which in this case is Space Wurm (played by Patrick). That’s an artifact of the game’s structure! Not all games will have stars.
Character nodes get three things in my method:
- A circle shape around them
- A gender (including modifications for genderfluid, transgressing, or neutral options)
- Their age
Updated 7/11/20: I’ve been asked a couple times about why I specifically call out gender and age. Here are my thoughts on that:
- These are my bare minimum notations, and I’m not excluding other notes. But these two things have proven to be universally interesting across all games that benefit from a relationship map.
- Gender performance and expectation is always present on the map from personal experience. Most trad players in my very long history of gaming are dudes and characterize only dudes. Leaving gender out was weird and unignorable the way the absence of children is once it caught my attention. So it’s a visual cue to myself and to the players that NPCs aren’t just an endless stream of peers.
- Age is there because it carries social power dynamic assumptions that I find interesting across most games and situations.
Because a primary goal of this is to notate relationships, I then am careful to leave a lot of room between future circles.
2) I arrange all the other character circles around the r-map, but within the central say…half of the sheet. So! That means leaving about 1/4 of the sheet as a margin around the cluster of central PC circles. Everyone gets name, age, gender, maybe other notes as needed.
3) Specific to SW v M but a general Best Practice idea: I then add notes about factions or faction-analogues in that 1/4-sheet margin. I will note here that I’m now also narrating everything I’m doing. I don’t just write “Interstellar Transport,” I’m saying out loud “okay! Interstellar Transport is one of Space Wurm’s elements that he can control. Let’s talk about the elements and how much control…” and so on. It’s a chance to repeat rulesy things that I think will be important, whether it’s a con one-shot or a home game with old-timers.
Narrate narrate narrate. This is the central theatrical act that keeps everyone focused on the sheet of paper.
4) Now we start drawing lines between everything. In SW v M, everyone is connected to one of the factions/fronts so that kind of takes care of itself. But really the mission-critical bit here is to start asking for actual context. In PbtA style games that’ll be where we talk out Bonds, Hx, Strings, whatever. In Burning Wheel it might be Beliefs and Instincts. In Sig it might be the faction/community/career connections. If you’re doing this in a game that doesn’t have any explicitly mechanized connections, narrate through them anyway here: how did you meet? What’s your current relationship like?
Write a summary of the relationship along the line and draw an arrow to indicate asymmetry. Asymmetrical relationships are best in every game I can think of! Nothing is more tedious to me than “we’re each other’s best friends.” Blaaaah.
5) I will also notate game-specific things with their own shape on the sheet. In this game, there are groups (like the “Engineering Guild” and “Blood Cult” diamonds in the lower right corner) and there are planets (the circles with rings around them). They need to be different and quickly noted as such!
6) When I start adding NPCs, I usually make them rectangles. I screwed that up a little here because I was moving fast and I was tired, but they’re definitely different-looking than the PCs. They also get age and gender notes.
7) Once we’ve knocked out the mechanically important connections between PCs, NPCs, groups, fronts, and locations, I’ll then do another pass to draw connections that are merely implied by the stuff so far. This is a good place to use another Sharpie color.
Depending on the game, there might be a lot of implied relationships! So for example, Sagas of the Icelanders is all about families, right? When I ran it at Dreamation 2016, Mikael Andersson started doodling up a more traditional family tree to uncover the connections, and it was totally vital to help us remember oh yes, if I have an uncle and we’re cousins, then I guess that uncle is your dad! and other obvious-after-the-fact relationships. SWvM doesn’t need that so I don’t really bother.
Original map during setup. 
Reorganization based on active game elements. 
I decided to put planets in the center, separate from the narrative elements. 
Added PCs (red boxes) based on the element with which they’re associated. 
Aaaand here’s everything else!
8) Once the game is up and running, don’t be shy about adding new things to the r-map. Absolute worst case scenario, you draw a fresh one for your next session.
As characters die, X them out, big and bold. As we learn more about setting details (planets and fronts here), continue adding notes to them. As new NPCs get revealed, add them to the sheet and immediately start drawing connections to what’s already on the sheet.
And talk. Keep talking. Every time your pen touches the sheet, say out loud what’s happening. Engage a couple senses and everyone will (mostly) stay on the same page.
Disclaimer: There are players for whom this method totally does not work. I don’t know how to adapt it so it will. But I listen and check in once in a while to make sure we haven’t left anyone behind.
Conclusions
To recap: use a bold marker on a big sheet that everyone can see, narrate as you go, use different shapes for different entities, add synopses each time you draw a line, and check in regularly to make sure everyone knows what you’re doing.
Don’t Bother With This If…
I’ve run into some games where this method either doesn’t make sense, or is actively detrimental.
* Road trip games. I thought about setting one up for The One Ring when we were playing that, but it doesn’t really make sense there. The only continuous relationships are those between the Fellowship members, and they may go many sessions between locations. In my head, I have tiny r-maps for each town, with a single circle for “the Fellowship” and that town’s NPCs around it. It just doesn’t make sense given the additional load of maintaining a useful r-map.
* Tactical/mission games. Moooostly I don’t bother. I did one for The Sprawl, which is heavily mission-oriented, and it felt like more trouble than it was worth. But it did give me a place to add NPCs as they’re created by that game’s rules. So, maybe? Ehh. Ditto Blades in the Dark, although in that case I might do it specifically because it might take the players’ minds off the mission and help them think more about the larger context of their lives.
Aaaand I think that’s it. AMA.
Share this:
Discover more from The Indie Game Reading Club
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Hey indie gamers! Everyone holding on? Feeling re-protagonized? Let us continue.
Peeps, I fucking love relationship maps. Love. Them. I’ve loved them since, uh….maybe the Operation Sprechenhaltenstelle module for Top Secret a thousand years ago.
I love them because of what they represent: a situation in tension, rather than a plot waiting to spool out. It’s something that, frankly, indie design has succeeded at most in moving the overall state of the art forward in game design.
Rolling out a giant piece of butcher paper and just scrawling out endless interconnected circles, awesome. It’s theatrical, it’s visual, it’s tactile. Not everyone hooks into what I’m drawing out, though! I was totally taken aback when Mikael Andersson stopped and completely rewrote a relationship map I was doing for a Sagas of the Icelanders game because a family tree made more sense to him. And he was right: we discovered some missing familial connections that the r-map had kind of elided (missing necessary offscreen aunts and uncles IIRC).
I think nobody will be surprised to hear that Urban Shadows wins my award for “most elaborate relationship map.” The thing is packed with moves that, left unchecked, will keep fractally generating situation until you choke on it. They’re good tools that are easy to misuse; there are definitely best practices (just like Belief writing in Burning Wheel, aspect design in Fate, and so on).
But because the tools are easy to misuse, we ended up with a ridiculous and unusable map after just four sessions. Four sessions! I think we focused on about a third of the generated content, with the rest of it feeling either wasted or looming. When I run that game again, I’ll definitely have a better idea of when to say enough is enough.
The presence or absence of a functional r-map is, for me, the quickest shorthand for whether the game we’re going to play is situation-driven or plot-driven. I don’t have a relationship map for our The One Ring game because we’re following The Darkening of Mirkwood. An r-map not only is unnecessary, it’d probably screw up the campaign’s progress.
Awesome tech. Great power, great responsibility, etc.
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!
Share this:
Facebook
Reddit
Twitter
Tumblr
Pinterest
Email
Like this:
Like Loading…
Related
As someone new to this but who’s seen Paul use it for multiple games and systems, it works exceptionally well. (And Paul is a great facilitator) I was consistently impressed. I’ll be adopting this system for my games — especially PbtA games.
I did an R-Map for The Sprawl to make sure I could keep track of PC relationships to Corps and Corp relationships to each other. It probably wasn’t necessary for the short-term game I ran, but I found that there were lots of little emergent elements, especially as the players tarted creating contacts and then tying their contacts back to specific Corps and specific events.
Would you do this for Tales from the Loop? Should I?
Oh, wait — you don’t have your copy yet.
ZING!
Seriously, TftL has you create relationships as part of chargen, but play involves a lot of mystery-solving. Does that warrant an R-Map? Or does that count as mission-focused play?
(Disclosure: I’m not sure I’ve ever used an R-Map for anything other than a BW one-shot.)
Mark Delsing you injure me, good sir. Also I do have it!
I did an r-map for Mutant: Year Zero because the ark politics are so acrimonious and fluid. I don’t know that there’s an equivalent in Tales from the Loop, is there? It might be useful to add some context between the adults in the setting, though, and that might be fruitful.
I guess I’d need more context, and I haven’t read that far yet. If there are more meaningful NPCs, factions and/or settings than just the PCs and their little cohort, the answer is probably yes.
Paul Beakley TftL players create relationships for the Kids to each other and to NPCs, some of whom may be integral to the mystery, others who may be their Anchors, i.e., people they go to for “healing” and guidance. Inter-Kid relationships may also be asymmetrical.
Then for sure yes.
I’ll second what Patrick Riegert said, but with less experience, since I only sat in on the one SWvM game (where this image was from).
I’m a fairly visual learner, and this helped me remember key facts. Honestly, I rarely looked at the paper once it was written out, but it was essential the few times I needed to refer to it (and I’m guessing helps eliminate many of those “who is that guy, again?” type questions from the players). Also, just seeing it laid out spatially helps me internalize many of the relationships and components in the game.
I think this is KEY: “It is a central and theatrical process, which draws everyone’s attention to the table during creation and play. This last one I cannot emphasize enough.” I’m probably going to use it for this, almost as much as the rest!
I’ve been doing this in Roll20 for Urban Shadows. I actually use the same circles for PCs and rectangles for NPCs thing. I try to toss some defining trait on there for each NPC.
It’s great to see a procedure for the infamous Beakley R-maps. Also thanks for a link to the sketch pad since that gives me a good idea of dimensions.
I have two long running campaign games that could maybe benefit from this. There is a Godbound campaign where the PC’s get their own faction at level 2, and the PC-NPC triangles start to get a bit much fairly quickly. Be nice to point to have a visual aid to explain the status quo.
The other campaign is one for the Sprawl, which has gotten fairly complicated. Between shell companies being fronts for other megacorps and PCs having the +owned / hunted tag with megacorps… That one might be really big and probably digital. We’re operating in the roll20 virtual table top, where I’ve been running to space/clutter problems. Between the corp clocks, a city map, PC directives and now an R-map i’ll probably have to find some sort of solution. (multiple pages that we’ll have to flip between maybe…)
I suspect my methods are mostly useful in an analog play space. You kids and your Roll20s and digital whiteboards and whatnot!
My r-maps are best experienced by the light of a fire pit flickering against the walls of our cave.
Aaron Berger oh would you mind sharing a screenshot of Roll20 for that? i’d like to see it.
Also, I saw a BitD setup where they went way vertical with it, so you could sort of scroll through the stuff as you went.
Paul Beakley . . . and yawped from the rooftops over the caterwauling of primordial wolves.
I’ve seen several very sick BitD set ups on roll20. My only concern would be for load times. I”m not sure how roll20 does under the weight of 20 high fidelity jpgs. But yeah I’ll post updates and questions as I encounter them. The vertical slide is a good idea.
I’ll work on a digital fire pit so as to properly project our imaginary digital shadows.
Need to look at this in more depth later.
.
Paul Beakley What is the complaint you hear when you encounter poeple for whom the R-map doesn’t work out? Trouble following along, unengaged by the visual/auditory? I guess i’m looking for common complaints that might let me know this isn’t the process for someone.
Can we also talk more about implied connections and why you might do them in another color? I get the family tree example but trying to think of examples outside of that and I’m stumbling. What would implied connections look like in say Mutant Year: Zero and setting up the ark?
.
Aaron Berger Don’t get too focused on the r-map as an end-state; it’s all about the formulation and creation of relations/interactions. It’s certainly nice to have as a reference after the fact, but it earns its keep during the generation itself.
Aaron Berger some folks can’t follow the process, or have trouble reading what I’ve written, or can’t really evaluate the connections. Like…it’s just scribbles. I’m sure the running commentary can be a problem as well, if they’re focusing hard on their character sheet.
Implied connections: different color only to point out which ones have mechanical oomph. In MYZ, that might be the Elder’s Chronicler or a Boss’ Enforcer. I’m also super into having typical normal human connections, right? So lovers, spouses, children (not in MYZ), friends.
Dude. This is super helpful. I am so going to use this. (Maybe even in a SWvM oneshot!)
.
/sub
You can add my name to the list of folks who have experienced Paul’s Rmap-ing and deeply appreciates it. It’s a fantastic way to sit down at a table and have everyone work on the game /together/.
I’d like to highlight a favorite aspect of mine: All the exploratory questions. As Paul’s talking and writing through the Rmap process, what he’s writing out includes the take aways from the maaaannny questions put to the table at large and the individual players.
It’s collaborative, encourages player curiosity, and actively invites (expects) players to have input and opinions. Paul is notably well practiced, and I loved observing as he elicited what players were stoked about via this process.
Andi Carrison oh that’s interesting! I guess I do that, just didn’t notice or realize. But now that you’re saying it, yeah, I can totally see that that’s part of the process. I know that if something occurs to me during a PbtA type setup (bonds, hx, strings, etc) I’ll follow up with clarifying/sharpening questions.
I probably need to put a camera on myself (ugh) to really catch everything that happens at some point.
Paul Beakley You’re so deeply in the middle of Doing The Thing when you’re leading an Rmap-ing, it’s no surprise that there is an aspect or two that you’re still bringing into the full light of day.
In particular with Asking Questions, I have a hunch that it’s a behavior or responsibility that is assumed to be part of the larger role of a skillful game facilitator/GM/MC/etc. Thus Asking Questions is a behavior that we assume will be included in the Rmap-ing process because it’s being lead by the game facilitator (and they’re responsible for Asking Questions).
Cameras can be useful! To be sure, it may be a bit spooky to consider. You’re a great speaker and you can always experiment with some low-bid opportunities to see what you can glean from the material.
I second the PaulCam™.
I love r-maps too! And I love them even more with pictures. For online games we often use Google Draw, and update the map in real time (example from a Dungeon World hack in its early stages: https://docs.google.com/open?id=1kVqtmahtex3eiUhvaKG4eLiROP4AVGy3bW1RUacZpp0).
At conventions I bring lots of headshots I find interesting, and pick from them and glue them onto the map (example from a Drama System game, Colony Wars: https://mechanteanemone.wordpress.com/2013/10/09/colony-wars-relationship-map/).
In continuing tabletop series, players bring a picture of their choice.
Oh, and I love to beautify r-maps after the game:
https://plus.google.com/photos/…
I recently played While the World Ends, which actually uses an r-map/geographical map hybrid for play. That was quite interesting! Adding relationships to the map is part of the strategy (which you need to win).
When we play online, we’ve had pretty good experiences with shared Google docs, which we update as we play. It’s not perfect but it works.
docs.google.com – While the World Ends, Map
Packing for an out of town house con today and I came across this beauty. Whooee!
I’ll get the smap piece written someday, promise.
Update! I’ve been going through old posts and came across this one, which was originally an image of a situation map I’d done for our house Space Wurm vs Moonicorn game. That image is lost to the sands of time, unfortunately, but just in case you come across this page, I wanted to point to the article I did end up writing.
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!
Share this:
Facebook
Reddit
Twitter
Tumblr
Pinterest
Email
Like this:
Like Loading…
Related
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com
I posted the 2014 edition of my ongoing “Best of the Twenty-Teens” series recently. In it, I called 2014 “The Year of the Trindie,” which got me thinking about what trindie even means. There’s quite a lot in that space as I conceive it: conventional (“trad”) power and resolution arrangements paired with unconventional (“indie” aka storygame) solutions to long-standing problems. Or sometimes just nifty new tech.
It’s tempting to go looking for bright lines between categories of design and play. If you’ve been reading my blog at all you know I’m not here for that. I’m not going to define one game as “trad” and another as “trindie,” good grief. I’m also not particularly coming from “here’s a trad game with indie tech” angle, nor “here’s a storygame that plays pretty trad.” The cross-pollination is the point, not who came first and who deserves which bit of credit.
I’m unable to provide a perfect and uncontroversial history of these trends and designs. Sharing, stealing, and parallel development make it nearly impossible to know when an idea first appeared, or first appeared in a way anyone cared about.
In short, please read charitably and ask questions in the comments if you have ‘em.
That said: Here are some of my favorite things I’ve found in games I call trindie. If you find them, you might be playing a trindie game!
The Rules Get In The Way
I’ve used the phrase intentional design before and maybe it’s worth unpacking a bit more. This is the general trend I’m talking about: rules that purposefully create specific play experiences, and not just default to a “players try to beat the GM’s obstacles with a combination of capability and luck” frame. If you’re the sort of GM who prefers to present their story their way, new-school rules feel like they get in the way.
Personally? I love rules that get in the way. Rules can surprise me when I’m facilitating, which is both an exciting creative challenge and alleviates most prep. I’ve never had a good head for prepping with interesting combat or obstacles in mind, so those rules that are “in the way?” I’d rather put my creativity toward things other than balancing fights.
Intentional design shows up all over the place now and for various reasons: genre emulation, or strong emotional response, or enforcing tempo. Redistributing creative responsibilities in surprising ways. Gosh, even just to de-prioritize violence as the main way to get what we want.
GM Doesn’t Roll
The first game I ran into where only the players rolled was Apocalypse World. That does some interesting stuff, largely in that it leaves results in the hands of the GM, along with some guidelines (GM moves and principles). I don’t include Amber, Theatrix or Everway here because those games are entirely diceless. Fully diceless play accomplishes something different than GM-doesn’t-roll: the players generate external uncertainty and often make choices based on their rolls.
GM-doesn’t-roll today shows up in Monte Cook Games‘ Cypher system (Numenera, The Strange, No Thank You, Evil!) and Cypher-adjacent games like Invisible Sun. It’s also how all the Forged in the Dark games I’ve seen thus far handle things: the GM’s adjudication is constrained by the position and effect the player negotiated.
The cross-pollination works both ways! Under Hollow Hills, Meg and Vincent Baker’s work-in-progress about carnival performers in fairyland and solidly in the storygame end of the PbtA pool, hands the GM (the Mistress of Ceremonies, tweaking the MC role in Apocalypse World) the opportunity to roll dice for NPCs making common plays (“moves” in UHH’s frame). Storygames sometimes get re-tradded.
The Say Yes/Declare Intent/Let It Ride Triangle
One of my favorite bits of design I first saw come together in Burning Wheel was a three-fer:
Roll the Dice or Say Yes: frequently flipped (“say yes, or roll the dice”), but the idea is mostly the same. That is, only introduce uncertainty when uncertainty is interesting. It’s a reminder that the GM can and should say yes to everything except the most pivotal rolls. To use discretion rather than calling for rolls all over the place.Declare Intent: this bit requires the player transparently explain their goal to the GM. The action your character takes matters in terms of consequences, but intent and action are formally separate things. This bypasses lots of miscommunications, and helps the GM shape the final resolution.Let it Ride: You roll once and whatever happens, happens. No rerolling until the situation changes.
These three small bits came together in a way that transformed our very trad table: Transparently explain what you want to accomplish, the GM decides whether to just say yes to that or make you roll, and if you roll, it’s one roll and then it’s over until something changes. Together, those three rules stripped out tons of arguing and dumb, pointless rolling and rerolling, and made each time we touched the dice matter.
The Triangle shows up again in both Mutant Year Zero and The One Ring. The Triangle is a fundamentally different way of engaging with the rules than “when it’s your turn, declare your character’s action and roll to see if you succeed.”
The Triangle is part of a larger trend: explicit rules about when to roll. Many, many games never define when you’re supposed to roll (outside of combat). If you do a thing, you roll, right? Or whatever other culture you grew up with. It’s a direct refutation of “we played all session and never even rolled.”
Democratized Fictional Authority
“The GM runs the world” has been such an assumed structural requirement of ttrpgs that anything else was very nearly unthinkable for decades. Decades! What would keep the players from cheating? Who will think of the children?
It turns out the children are just fine, and distrusting your players is only elemental when competition to overcome obstacles is the core play experience.
Burning Wheel is the first game that comes to mind where declaring facts about the setting can be a player thing. Skills called wises let the player declare a fact, the GM determines how narrow, rare or otherwise difficult that declaration should be, and you roll to see if the character was right or not.
Player authority over the fiction shows up in quite a few places now. A recent one that comes to mind is the Loremaster role in Band of Blades, in which the player is responsible for inventing the history of the Legion and calls upon it now and again. The Loremaster also frames camp scenes, which is the open roleplay portion of the game.
Interlocking Economic Cycles
Many trindie games have experimented with incentives other than bildungsroman character advancement, where the players chase experience points or their equivalent and enjoy a steady progression in effectiveness in power. My favorite early exposure to this was how Burning Wheel offered several different economies (Artha) to incentivize players to engage with their Beliefs and Instincts, but engaging with those thing didn’t directly advance you. Instead, you had to use the skills you wanted to advance (not a new idea), with Artha being how you avoided catastrophic failure when you used them. To advance your skills, you must engage with obstacles that were mathematically impossible to succeed at without Artha.
My latest favorite indirect-advancement thing was, believe it or not, Godbound. Not only do you earn XPs in the usual way, but you also have to spend Dominion (your divine energy) changing the world. Succeeding isn’t enough, you have to go be godly as well.
Narrative Playbooks
Not only awesome at driving, but also holding lovers at arm’s length.
An interesting thing happened when Apocalypse World introduced the world to playbooks. They looked an awful lot like plain old “classes,” but played in a much more narratively intentional way. The Driver, for example, isn’t just skilled at driving The Last of the Interceptors across the wasteland, they were also emo loners. That is a result of the Driver’s moves, which had nothing to do with professional capacity and everything to do with the Driver’s narrative role in a well-known postapocalypse franchise.
Mutant: Year Zero meets this approach halfway, with classes that tell you what you’re good at but also gives you special abilities and advancement triggers that are tied into characterization. And not just “good roleplaying,” which honestly is the weakest punt in all of gaming. The One Ring hides this inside your “calling,” which looks diegetic (you’re a wanderer or a monster slayer or a treasure hunter) but is really a narrative declaration.
Relationship Maps/The Death of the Party
R-maps! Oh how I love thee. Many games now include a “I know X character because…” element, sometimes building connections between PCs and sometimes invoking an implied web of NPCs.
Yessssss
This wouldn’t have ever been a thing without holding environments where exploring interpersonal relationships was the core play experience. When you’re playing a unified party, relationships might evolve organically but if they don’t, nothing is lost. None of the narrative was expected to come from PCs squabbling or being friends or fucking (or, ideally, all of those).
Driving a stake through the heart of party-centered play has been one of the most refreshing things in trindie games for me. Your various ghosts and ghouls and vamps in Urban Shadows might occasionally join forces to face a common enemy, but just as often they’re dealing with each other’s daily lives. The magical weirdos of Invisible Sun are just living their lives and maybe helping each other out. The gangs, crews, and families pursuing a common enterprise in Forged in the Dark games look like a party on the surface, but they’ve got their own relationships and goals as well.
No doubt, though: unified party play is easier! Ongoing play about interpersonal relationships takes more work. The players need to not only engage with the premise, but a willingness to start trouble for themselves and others in pursuit of their needs.
Phases of Play
Conventional RPGs usually have detailed, interesting rules for combat, and then rules for everything else. You might cast a spell here and there, maybe have a special rule for dealing with sneaking or traps or whatever. Mostly pacing is left to the discretion of the GM, who would either play out the lives of the characters in detail, or if they were very adventurous and daring jump events ahead to the next conflict. I think of pacing as a point of distinctiveness between traditional GMs.
There have been games around for quite a while that helped create, even mandated, a particular mechanized pace. The earliest one I can think of is the passing of the years in King Arthur Pendragon: each winter, the GM rolls on a series of tables that inject a bunch of interesting new fictional development. It’s a completely different set of rules than the rest of the game. There may have been other games that provided this sort of set-aside mode of play but darned if I can remember any of ‘em.
The first storygame I personally ran into with distinct phases of play was Jason Morningstar’s Night Witches: you played the lives of WW2 Soviet airwomen during their days using one set of moves, then switched to a different set of moves as they went on raids at night. They were practically two different games, each informing the events of the other.
Mutant: Year Zero does the phases-of-play thing by dividing play into events in the Ark, and events in the Zone. They both use identical systems, but they’re both framed in very different ways. When you’re in the Ark, the action is usually driven by the relationship map, or by existential crises facing the mutants…that can only be addressed by sending expeditions out into the Zone. Once you’re in the Zone, the GM has tools to procedurally generate the wild and random things the mutants might find out there. The feel of the game is quite different at that point, switching to a grindy survival game. The shift in style and tempo is signaled on their return by dealing with the Rot they’ve accumulated out there now that they’rehome.
The One Ring breaks down all play into journeying, combat, or encounters. That’s it. There are no other kinds of play time. Each one has its own subset of rules that sit atop the general conflict and advancement stuff. There’s even a nod back to KAP, the Fellowship phase, where the characters explicitly stop adventuring, rest and recuperate somewhere safe, and advance the clock and the fiction a bit.
Forged in the Dark games like Blades in the Dark or Copperhead County thus far have a clear split between being on and off the job: the downtime phase. The job tempo is set by an engagement roll that drops you right into the action, and the job is over when it’s over. Then the characters deal with the fallout of their actions, get paid, manage the growth of their gang, take on personal projects. If there’s going to be any “open roleplay,” away from the pressure cooker of being on the job, this is when it happens.
Grinds
Another case of cross-pollination: when Torchbearer designers Thor Olavsrud and Luke Crane tore into B/X D&D, they rediscovered the mechanical grind of surviving a dungeon delve: light, food, water, rest and carrying capacity. These existed to create verisimilitude, but that verisimilitude created a diegetic sense of urgency. If you need to kick the players in the ass to take action, mechanical urgency is a good way to do it.
This is one of those places where old methods, I think, got a modern reframe. I suspect the old realists felt like the grind was oppressive and an impediment to beating the dungeon. I know I spent a lot of years playing D&D and just not caring what my carrying capacity was, or whether we had enough torches packed. Hauling around lamps is not heroism! Somehow, decades later, we’ve unearthed this idea as fun and motivating. Winning might be fun, but have you tried not losing?
(If that last line makes your skin crawl, you probably aren’t a trindie fan.)
Now you’ve got the constant threat of your lenders coming after you if you miss a payment on your ship in Edge of the Empire, the careful balance of food and time necessary to keep the Legion moving ahead of the zombies in Band of Blades, trying to stay hopeful enough to outrun the Shadow in The One Ring.
Embedded Campaign
One more: the game that’s designed with a campaign already baked. When was the first one? Polaris, maybe? The Mountain Witch? The idea here is that the game isn’t designed to be a toolbox for open-ended campaign play, but focused on a particular narrative arc.
My current best-in-class in the game-as-campaign category is the Eden storyline that comes with Mutant: Year Zero. Through a combination of card draws, map prep, and procedural generation, the mutants’ search for Eden gets delivered piecemeal to the players. You can totally just bump around in the Zone indefinitely when you play MYZ, but its highest and best application is watching the campaign play itself out without having to do anything specific. Other Year Zero Engine games have attempted something similar, but MYZ is still the best in my book.
Band of Blades is another game wrapping an integral campaign: the Legion is falling back toward its headquarters at Skydagger Keep, while The Cinder King and his endless zombie hordes implacably march across the world. It’s grim and dark, and very tightly structured. The Legion proceeds from location to location on a map, engaging with missions along the way. You can play, dunno, Legion adventures outside of this I guess, but most of the interesting gameplay becomes irrelevant.
Last Thoughts
I could keep going with the innovations that have happened in storygaming that found their way into mainstream, conventional ttrpgs. I left a bunch out because the piece was getting long – the rise of minigames, mechanized flags, an appreciation for fictional positioning as its own goal – when I realized that hardly any part of mainstream gaming remains untouched. Games are good and they’re constantly evolving to be even better. Even the folks who proudly declare themselves part of a renaissance of the old school are creating some genuinely creative, weird, new stuff. What a time to be gaming.
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!Share this:FacebookRedditTwitterTumblrPinterestEmailLike this:Like Loading…
Related
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.
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!
Share this:
Facebook
Reddit
Twitter
Tumblr
Pinterest
Email
Like this:
Like Loading…
Related
Prior to the stay-at-home orders of the past couple months, I had never played a tabletop RPG online. I blame a combination of fear and snobbery: I already hated seeing myself on screen and hearing myself on podcast recordings, and I didn’t want to have to adapt my beautiful and perfect skillset (ha). It always seemed like a compromise, something almost as good but not the real thing. Non-alcoholic beer, sexting, the Lord of the Rings movies.
Well, given a lockdown of uncertain duration, I had to either get off my ass and learn things or set gaming aside for a few months. So I got off my ass.
I’ve been running Adrian Thoen’s Impulse Drive online for my regular in-person Tuesday game group for a couple months now, and I’ve learned a lot. We have a long way to go and so much more to learn – I’m constantly bugging Gauntlet superstar Rich Rogers for advice – but I’ve picked some stuff up. If you’re facing a similar plight (or want to know more about Impulse Drive!), read on.
The First Time Is (Never) Magical
I’m grateful I started playing online with a game I had less investment in. Our first go was The Nightmares Underneath, an interesting OSR/PbtA hybrid fantasy game from Space Wurm vs Moonicorn designer Johnstone Metzger. I like his aesthetic! And I’ve had good luck with a couple OSR and OSR-adjacent games in the past, specifically Kevin Crawford’s Godbound and Stars Without Number. Heck, I even occasionally run a B/X game for my daughter.
Well, The Nightmares Underneath didn’t work out for us. It’s got a lot of weird bespoke systems, but more importantly I was also learning my way around Zoom and staring at myself on camera and juggling shared screens. But it was a chance for me and my players, only one of whom had ever played online before, to figure stuff out. It lasted a session but the experience was invaluable.
Here’s what I’ve put together so far.
Character Keepers
I had no idea what a Character Keeper was until Rogers introduced me to the Gauntlet’s vast library. The very short version: they’re shared Google Sheet documents to track character data. That’s it. But spreadsheets are a whole realm of document I know next to nothing about. I had no idea they could be so pretty! And functional, holy cow. There are some character keepers – like the one we’re using for Impulse Drive – that do so much behind-the-scenes math and interactivity they’re practically apps.
One of about a dozen tabs with everything we could ever need to run our game.
The longer version is that character keepers have evolved into campaign managers, with tabs for every kind of data you could imagine: NPCs, locations, timelines, whatever. My players have enjoyed having everything at their fingertips – and each other’s character data specifically – that we’re thinking about how to replicate this at the table. I don’t love screens at the table but it’s something I might go for.
One fact my total reliance on the character keeper has highlighted is that I need to be mindful of the range of players’ setups at home. I have three screens (ridiculous, I know) and a rocket-fast gigabit connection, but I’ve also got players on laptops with sketchy wifi. So I’m trying hard to keep things simple on their end, no matter how elaborate my setup is here.
…But Also Paper
I tried following the advice of my gaming bestie Mad Jay Brown, who uses Trello to manage his various online campaigns, specifically Into The Mad Lands. He’s a (literal) pro at this! But he’s also accustomed to using Trello for project management in his non-gaming life. His brain works in a Trello-compatible way. Mine does not.
I still use a notepad and paper to track stuff in the game. On occasion I move my notes to a shared Google Docs file. Different games might need different management tools, so I’m still on the lookout for one that might work for me. Paper and pencil is a tough form factor to beat, though.
Zoom (Or Something Like It)
I know the pandemic has shoved several videoconferencing platforms into the mainstream, but Zoom is the platform I settled on. Why Zoom? Mostly because people I know and respect with tons of online play experience are happy with it.
I’ve been using Zoom for a couple months now and it’s good. The company had some squicky privacy policies they were forced to address early because of the explosion of civilian videoconferencing, but the audio and video have been bulletproof.
I also love the shared whiteboard functionality of Zoom. There are lots of similar free-standing solutions out there – Jamboard, Kumo, Padlet, Miro – but I like that it’s already right there, ready to be used. I purchased an inexpensive drawing tablet so I can doodle more naturally. Excellent tool when I need it. It’s a fairly robust drawing program (freehand, shapes, text, colors, pen widths and colors, all that) that exports a .png when you close. You can even run multiple whiteboard pages at once. If I could share and import whiteboards from previous sessions it would be ideal. Maybe it can, and I haven’t figured out how yet.
Sharing Screens
The Abyss! Aieee!
Besides the whiteboard/drawing tablet thing, I’ve fallen in love with sharing visual aids. I’ve got a Pinterest board where I dump inspirational images, for one. There’s a move in Impulse Drive called “Into the Abyss” that’s very similar to “Open Your Brain” from Apocalypse World, for example, and every time a player invokes it I share this marvelously spooky animation while the move plays out. I also have carefully “cast” dozens of NPCs, which helps me characterize. I share images to set the mood for locations, to show off alien artifacts, kind of everything I think might come up in a session. I haven’t tried sharing audio files yet, and it seems like more trouble than it’s worth, but I might!
I lost the theatrics of drawing a big sprawling relationship map but image-sharing has mostly made up for it.
Shared Dice
This one’s a matter of taste: As a practical matter, I know many experienced online gamers prefer to just let players roll dice at home. I really like the theatrics and tension of everyone watching dice roll, though! So we’ve been using Shane Liebling‘s rollforyour.party, a free and very handy site that generates a unique URL each time you open it. Share that URL with your players and boom, you’ve got shared dice. No clatter or animation, but I still like to see the results.
Shorter, More Structured Sessions
The big surprise for me was how exhausting videoconferencing is. I’ve never had to do it professionally. My wife does, and she has to take big breaks after her hour-long slogs. Well, our first and only session of The Nightmares Underneath was a full four hours! A combination of excitement that we were actually doing the thing, and getting to see all my friends again for the first time in a couple weeks, made me drag it out too long. Bad idea. I also forgot to account for potty breaks.
Combined with struggles with an unfamiliar system, I just felt wrecked and frustrated afterward. One of my players, who spends many hours a day on Zoom professionally, asked that we back it down to three hours with a bio-break around the halfway point.
The shorter session has been really good for play quality, I think. I start the meeting 30 minutes early so folks can log in when they want and shoot the shit. Then it’s time to focus on play. I have the clock in my face at all times, so I can adjust the tempo and scene-setting more carefully. I don’t let scenes run too long, while also making the scene (hopefully) more specific and framed: here’s where you are, here’s what’s going on, who’s there, who’s joining you? When we’re at a live table, I often let scenes meander and breathe a bit. Mostly that’s good, and we don’t notice because it’s not exhausting. They might get bored, but that’s a different issue.
Clearer Social Signals
The other skill I had to learn fast was clarifying who I’m talking to at all times. Literally everyone on the screen is seeing the same thing when I talk, right? They can’t tell who I’m looking at. I’m embarrassed to say how many times this came up: I’m looking right at Jason but somehow everyone thinks I’m talking to them. Dumb!
There’s so much missing bandwidth when you’re online, right? No meaningful body language. No directing my voice and face toward specific players. The very slight delay between video and audio throws me off all the time. It’s hard to feel the table, you know? So we’ve all learned to be much more explicit. This also has highlighted an ongoing issue at my table, where one player character will zip off to do something on their own, and neither I nor the other players will think to contrive a reason for other PCs to be there. Because I’m already having to direct my cues toward specific players, it seems a lot easier to remember to ask who else is there, if anyone wants to tag along, and so on.
Next week, I’ll go into depth about Impulse Drive and how it’s working out as our first successful online campaign.
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!
Share this:
Facebook
Reddit
Twitter
Tumblr
Pinterest
Email
Like this:
Like Loading…
Related
My recent interview on the +1 Forward podcast has drawn a lot of new attention to my Prep 2.0 essay, which in turn brought a whole new audience to my Paul’s R-Map Method essay. The import tool I used to pull in my Plus content stripped most images from my posts! I’ve gotten several email requests for me to provide images to the R-Map piece. This was a great opportunity to update and annotate with tons of photos!
So this week, rather than a new essay, I invite you to check out the updated post. Enjoy!
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!Share this:FacebookRedditTwitterTumblrPinterestEmailLike this:Like Loading…
Related
We wrapped up a short run at Nathan Paoletta’s Imp of the Perverse this week. Strap on the air tanks and headlamps, we’re taking a deep dive.
Quick Overview
Imp of the Perverse is a horror game set in the early America of Edgar Allan Poe. It’s called “Jacksonian” but most of the period (1830-1850) takes place after Andrew Jackson’s presidency. The Poe bit provides the supernatural and tonal flavor of the game, and the Jacksonian bit provides the actual horror of this stretch of American history. The more you know this history, the more rewarding, but Paoletta provides a ton of excellent essays both about tone and aesthetics (the Poe) and the history (the Jackson).
The language is period-stylized, which was a slog when I was making sense of the systems. A modern game-reader might look for investigation but here we get ratiocination. You might expect a section called advancement but you get ontogenesis instead. Player characters are Protagonists, the GM role is called the Editor.
The Protagonists are such because they each exhibit a perversity, another old-timey word. It doesn’t mean, you know, being pervy. It’s a behavior the player feels is unseemly in excess. In our game, our Protagonists’ perversities were entitlement, morbidity, melancholy and meddling. Normal human stuff, but your Imp – a literal, personal supernatural presence – eggs you on to overindulge in those things. Those perversities also provide the Protagonists their Greatest Strength, the positive version of their perversity. So the entitled perversity is also an expeditious mind, the melancholic perversity provides poetic insight, and so on.
The Protagonists’ Imps can provide strength and knowledge, and later supernatural Edges. You might speak with the dead, or mesmerize the unwitting, maybe literally smell deceit. There’s no, like, magic or spells or anything. It’s not Call of Cthulhu in any way.
The game is about what happens to the Protagonists as they investigate and eventually defeat monsters. In this setting, monsters arise from perversities given too much sway. They started as people, alive or dead (“beyond the Shroud,” an anachronistic idea for the early 1800s but rationalized by the massive upheavals and brutalities of post-Jacksonian America) or even returned from beyond the Shroud. Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.
Imp isn’t really about that investigation, though. The Protagonists will always succeed. The more interesting emotional and thematic experience of the game is tied into what these investigations cost the Protagonists. They may find themselves slipping ever-closer to themselves becoming a monster, or shedding their Imp entirely and returning to mundane human life. Characters use up their resources faster than they can refresh them, further driving them toward their eventual monstrosity. The slope is so slippery that it’s nearly impossible to stop once you’ve started, but the promise of redemption is always there.
This is a game squarely in the storygame mold of indie gaming. Characters are measured by personality traits rather than professional capacities, most of the game plays out as a talky-talky freeform, and you only roll dice to resolve conflicts, not actions or skills.
Protagonist Setup
You use a questionnaire to create each Protagonist, Mouse Guard style. The questions are flavorful and interesting, and provide your various starting values as well as a list of relationships. Relationships are important and embed you into your community. Just add up the values, invent a few NPCs, maybe pick a supernatural Edge if you decide this isn’t your first brush with monsters.
You end up with a colorful, not especially deep, biography of your Protagonist’s implied past. The game-mechanical values can help guide play but since you arrive at them via questionnaire, I didn’t feel like the players were especially invested in playing toward them. I suspect if you know how the game works, you play toward your qualities so it makes organic sense to use them when it’s time to roll.
Monster Setup
The meat of the game is prepping the monster. It’s a big GM-facing job with lots of secret stuff you prepare in advance to unleash on the players later.
Setting up the monster was harder than I expected. You start by picking a perversity, just like for a Protagonist. But then you extrapolate way, way out from there.
There are a slew of example monsters in the book, which is a good way to go if you’re just going to dip your toes in. For example, there’s a reporter whose thirst for investigation and nosiness has led her to become a manipulative blackmailer. That’s an example of a living person whose Imp has turned them into a monster. But you can also go past the Shroud and select a monstrous spirit (a ghost that saps your self-worth, for example), or even returned from beyond the Shroud, a physical, supernatural entity (a dead philosopher obsessed with decay). In any case, the monsters are people. Ultimately, the monsters are us.
I found the monster-creation process super interesting and indirect. The process extracts a thematically interesting monster with clear through-lines back to the core “why is this a monster?” decisions. After picking a perversity, you think about the web of characters surrounding the monster — not just its targets, but folks with an interest in serving and protecting it. By the book, you actually do this before you make characters. The important bit here is establishing the monster’s status quo, the bad stuff it does without the Protagonists interfering. The next thing you do is think through how and where it operates at the start of play, as well as a couple steps ahead (its Escalations) in terms of its area (the physical or social circles it attacks), its horror (the supernatural stuff it does) and its emanation (terrible things NPCs are compelled to do because of the monster’s influence). This is all in service to having solid, consistent answers at hand when the Protagonists start observing the monstrosity and asking questions.
I say indirect because once you’ve gone through its web of NPCs and Escalations, transferring all that to the official worksheet is not a clear 1:1 process. You have to look at your answers and once again reframe and reinterpret what you’ve come up with to fit the worksheet. And then you’re done.
During my prep, I ended up with two relationship maps: One representing the community as the characters understand it, with their relationships and interconnections. The other is monster-centric, with the bad thing in the center and all the other stuff re-arrayed around it. You don’t need to maintain two r-maps, but I always like to present an r-map as a table centerpiece, something for the players to look at. Since we were playing online, I used Miro and shared a link. Then I kept the monster-centric version private, on a piece of paper.
Starting the Chapter
Imp offers only a weak holding environment for the Protagonists. While the purpose of the Protagonists is quite clear – defeat a string of monsters – the rationale for them to work and spend time together is only as strong as the players make it. There is one tool that helps: every PC “admires” another PC, and gets a free (ie not-at-risk) black die in their Exertion pool whenever a scene involves them. If I were playing with system expertise I’d contrive any reason at all to drag my admired PC into scenes with me. Every die counts! But at our table that just wasn’t part of their calculus. I assume they didn’t really sense how the economy of play would end up wrecking their characters’ abilities.
Without the players contriving reasons to have their admired Protagonists with them, the Editor is responsible for scene-framing. It can be a heavy lift! One pressure I felt against forcing Protagonists together early was that engaging the system pours on the gas: Anxiety skyrockets, investigating becomes too expensive, and the monster’s Escalations start showing up before I had even put its initial effects into play.
What Play Looks Like
Imp is a low-contact game. The majority of play time is pure freeform, with nobody engaging the system. But once you do start engaging, the game accelerates fast. I didn’t realize just how fast events would escalate in the game and was caught by surprise.
Players have only four mechanical affordances available to them. They can spend their Empathy to either make realizations about the monster or create new Relationships (which in turn can become additional black dice). They can spend their resources, community standing or their reasoning for Ratiocination (buy ever-more-expensive answers to things they’re investigating). And when a Protagonist does something involving deadly force, meaningful risk, or any use of their supernatural Edges, they make an Exertion roll. And that’s it, as far as the Protagonists go: connecting with the monster, investigating, doing meaningfully risky stuff.
The fourth system is aimed at other Protagonists. Each player has a pool of red Weirding dice. When it’s another player’s turn, you can speak in the voice of their Imp and negotiate a deal to give them one of your Weirding dice. This reminds me a lot of the Shadow role from White Wolf’s Wraith: a fun, scary, possibly boundary-violating chance to be the bad guy.
Ratiocination (the investigation aspect) is quite good: each Protagonist has a budget for asking questions, which get more expensive as Anxiety increases. There’s an incentive to ask early and often, but it’s hard for the players to even know what to ask about before Anxiety has made the questions unaffordable. But even after the questions become too expensive for you to answer, they can always get an answer straight from their Imp…at the cost of one red check. Those checks become important during Ontogenesis, the character-changing phase that comes after the monster is defeated.
Exertion is conflict resolution but for only very specific conflicts: when lethal force is involved, when they’re using their supernatural Edges, or when they’re doing something meaningfully risky. You assemble a pool of black dice from your relevant Qualities, Relationships and your Greatest Strength, all of which will be reduced by one unless you spend successes to protect them after the roll. You also get a red die if the conflict reflects your Perversity, and another if you accept one from another player speaking to you in the voice of your Imp. The GM can also swap your black dice for red dice, which is a bastard move that drives the characters toward becoming monsters.
There’s some hint that succeeding at Exertion means the player gets to narrate their own success, an old conflict-resolution thing I haven’t heard about in years. But only a hint! It’s not spelled out in the rulebook. There’s also some talk about additional successes being “better,” but if it’s on the player to narrate their own success, I’m not really sure how that works. But as a practical matter, nobody ever used extra successes for anything other than keeping their at-risk qualities/relationships/Strength.
Two dynamic values drive play: Lucidity, which represents your connection with your Imp and sets your target number (lower is better!), and Anxiety, which represents how bad things have gotten as the Protagonists battle the monster. Lucidity only goes down during the investigation, as players make Exertion rolls and want to generate more hits on their rolls. After a roll, each die equal or greater than your Lucidity is a “hit,” which you use to either succeed at Exertion or protect the qualities and relationships you put at risk to buy dice. You can then Embrace the Imp after a roll, lower Lucidity once, and count hits using your new, lower target number. Meanwhile, Anxiety only goes up, each time a Protagonist Embraces the Imp but also the first time they see the monster or its horrors, and the first time they face it directly. Each time Anxiety goes up, Ratiocination questions get more expensive and everyone (Editor included) gets an additional red Weirding die.
As the text makes clear, the point of Imp isn’t beating monsters. The Protagonists will beat the monsters every time. They literally can’t “lose” in that regard. The real game is managing your Lucidity, keeping it below 6 (at which point your freed of your Imp and go on to live your life) and above 1 (at which point you become the game’s next monster). That management mostly comes down to the checks you make along the way – black for your human-ness, red for your Imp-ness – and how quickly you use up your various stats.
Once the Protagonists defeat the monster, the game enters the Ontogenesis phase. Those red and black checks become pools of red and black dice, which the player rolls and tallies. Whichever color’s total is higher either lowers (red) or raises (black) Lucidity by one step. Then the players spend those checks on refreshing their various pools, maybe picking up a neat new supernatural power, or authoring new facts about the Shroud.
The system is an elaborate clockwork, and it can be hard to see how things will play out the first time.
Story Time!
I set our game in the Republic of Texas, 1840. Imp‘s default setting is either Poe’s Baltimore/Boston/some other East Coast city, or the plantation-era South, like Richmond or Charlotte. The pre-Old West western frontier fits into the game, but the vibe is quite different: big open spaces, long travel times between homesteads, and deep cultural divides. We chose San Antonio as the farthest-west frontier between American and Mexican societies. I have a personal fondness for the time and place, and fell down a research hole anyway to flesh it out for the players.
Our Protagonists were: a scion of a wealthy Irish empresario family, a former officer of the Mexican army, an escaped slave turned journalist from Back East, and a Methodist circuit rider arrived to convert the locals away from Mexico’s mandated Catholicism.
In terms of setup and then play, I should have more tightly entwined everyone’s relationships and NPC triangles, as well as the monster’s immediate connections. I had to weigh that against the time I wanted to take establishing the setting itself. The not-Old-West Republic of Texas was hugely fun to research but, I think, hard for the players to hook into. So I spent a lot of time trying to paint that picture when I should have been engaging them with the investigation.
Because of Imp’s weak holding environment, I had to work hard to contrive scenes for the Protagonists to show up together. The setting was novel, and I wanted enough one-on-one time with each character to get a sense of what their status quo looked like. That’s just good horror facilitation. But that takes time, and it leaves the other players with not much to do other than listen and enjoy. That’s a lot of freeform just-talking, at least at first, so the other players don’t even get a chance to speak in the voices of each other’s Imps and hand out Weirding dice. Later, when folks are making Exertion rolls with some frequency, that can happen much more. Unfortunately, at our table, it just … didn’t. I’m not sure why, but I speculate our online play environment makes it hard to telegraph when you might want to get impy.
We played two sessions. The first session was spending some time with each Protagonist to get a sense of their life in San Antonio. I ended that session with an inexplicable situation on an Irish homestead: a widow and her children barricaded inside their own home, every door and window sealed shut from the outside. The empresario and the circuit rider arrived to discover this weird scene, did some Ratiocination, and started feeling out what the heck was going on.
The second session, we engaged with the actual system quite a bit more. As the Protagonists spent time in the presence of the monster, they started spending Empathy to get solid answers about the monster’s about-ness. It was motived by the need to protect, interpreted protection as ownership, and eventually decided the only way to protect the things it “owned” was to destroy them with fire. The finale of the session featured all four Protagonists arrived at another homestead set ablaze by the monster. The Mexican army officer realized (via Empathy) the only fire that could have consumed an unsettled spirit was…the siege of the Alamo itself, a few years prior. And the officer had been tasked with burning the bodies of the Texian dead. Pretty great, very personal, grim! They defeated the monster when the Methodist priest consecrated the grounds of the Alamo where the Texian dead had been burned.
In retrospect, I really like the shape of the fiction that came out of the game. In practice, though, everyone had a heck of a time locking into how the systems worked, what they were capable of doing, and maintaining a clear player/character split. One big point of confusion was that there are lots of ways to “get answers” in a game that’s largely concerned with investigation. Ratiocination is the main way, but you can also use Empathy to understand the monster’s backstory, and several Edges are also good for getting information but require Exertion rolls to use. That all felt blurry on the player-facing side. What kind of information-gathering are we doing here?
Probably our greatest difficulty was Empathy use. The players can use it when in the presence of the monster or its horror, but I frequently had to say, non-diegetically, that yes this is a time you can use your Empathy. Or even recommend they do so. It produced good results but the players never felt comfortable invoking the system on their own. Now is a good time to get clues, now is a good time to use an Edge, now you’re going to need to Exert, now someone should offer the player a Weirding die.
We wrapped up the chapter so we could see the Ontogenesis cycle in play. Turns out Ontogenesis can knock a new character out of play immediately! I think this is because players weren’t cognizant of how the black/red checks would play out at the end of the chapter. In our game, the Methodist circuit rider mostly did black-check things and only called on his Imp once. But he was also a first-time monster hunter, and his Lucidity started at 5. He only had one red check but three or four black checks, so of course his Lucidity went up to 6, which freed the preacher from his meddlesome Imp. If I ran this again in long-form play, I would mention this early to the high-Lucidity folks so they could aim for extra red checks in play and keep their character in the game.
Last Thoughts
I really dig the aesthetics and themes of Imp of the Perverse. Love the period, even though I’m usually scared out of my gourd about getting historicity ”wrong” in play. I really like that you can dig into hard topics – slavery, racism, sexism, all the bad stuff – because of the period. Talking with my buddy Jay about how he’d run it during playtest, he name-checked The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I totally didn’t get that vibe, but I think I can see how one might end up in a more high-adventure mode evolving out of moody Poe-style psychological horror.
The clockwork of the game, with early Ratiocination leading to Empathy and eventually to Exertion and then Ontogenesis, is formally quite clever. I never had a player try to bypass the investigation by cashing in Empathy and just asking “how do we defeat this thing?” They did, in fact, eventually ask that. I think this process works so well because the players don’t know what they don’t know. In our game, I was even able to give the players that answer – find the remains of this damned soldier and consecrate it – but doing so wasn’t straightforward. The whole thing felt organic.
I found it hard to guess at what a good tempo might be. An entire session of establishing characters and setting was probably too much. Not responding more strongly to the players’ need to be in scenes together was a technique failure on my part, but I think not a universal one: some players just get more enjoyment out of listening and watching each other’s scenes for a while. I’m quite sure a second run at the game would go a lot better on that count, mostly through harder framing of characters together in scenes and tying the relationship maps together much tighter.
It’s an interesting game! And such a pleasure to play something that isn’t sitting atop any of the big indiegame platforms. It’s not PbtA or FitD or Fate. It is very much a conflict resolution-style storygame with a clear lineage back to earlier storygames. It also has some of the features and problems of those earlier games, like the need for players to take an active interest in other characters’ efforts and the need for the GM to push them through the session rather than, say, having Moves pull you along.
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!
Share this:
Facebook
Reddit
Twitter
Tumblr
Pinterest
Email
Like this:
Like Loading…
Related
Now that most of my local players are fully vaccinated, we’re slowly dipping our toes back into in-person play. And it is so weird and fraught.
I can’t stop thinking about all the stuff I learned to make roleplaying happen during the pandemic: video play, character keepers, Miro, screen sharing, dice rollers. I’ve developed a ton of skills in the one type of play I swore I was gonna fight tooth and nail. And here I am, a more-than-competent (I think!) online roleplayer. Now I’m thinking about the stuff that’s better online than in-person, and how I might adapt those techniques to in-person play.
Side Chats and Shared Screens
Parallel communication channels are an affordance I didn’t know I’d enjoy. Chat windows, shared Pinterest board, fun tricks with screen-sharing and voice modulation software — all stuff that’ll be effectively impossible to recreate at a table. Online play requires a lot of different kinds of work, and sometimes GMing online feel more like producing a TV show than facilitating an intimate social experience. I like it so much, though, that I’m thinking about whether a cheap flatscreen in my gaming space and a tablet to sync with it would be good, or distracting. No idea, and too expensive to try as an experiment. I could always try with a tablet, I suppose.
I’ve always hated screens at the table, so it’ll be interesting to see how habitual/fidgety players are gonna be with their phones when we can see each other. I won’t be able to sneak a peek at Twitter any more but that’s for the best.
Character Keepers and other Shared Information
If there’s one killer app in online play for me, it’s character keepers: shared character sheets, typically organized and at least partially automated in Google Sheets. I love being able to see most or all of everyone’s mechanical stuff in one place. Besides character sheets, you can also list all of a game’s moves, or equipment lists, a tab of NPCs with pictures, playbooks…the sky’s the limit and folks are constantly expanding on the concept. I’ve talked about character keepers here before. Tough to replicate at a table without introducing a tablet or laptop to the table, and that’s not a vibe I’m eager to bring.
In a shallow way, character keepers serve a similar function to name tents at a table. For at least some of my online players, keepers have been a bit overwhelming for them and they’d rather just focus on their own stuff. I’ll experiment with larger name tents, I think, where we can all see more stuff I want everyone to be aware of at the table. You can only fit so much on an index card! And everyone’s eyes are getting older. Maybe a GM screen type thing but in reverse, with everyone’s stuff aimed outward at me (and their totally not cheaty rolls hidden from my view).
I used to always do up a short cheat sheet of any new game I was about to run, as a way to learn and solidify the system. Creating a character keeper serves a similar function in my brain, with the added challenge of information design: should I put the “important” stuff higher, and what’s “important” anyway? How do I group related details? What elements can I leave off the keeper? What can I automate and how does the math actually work? Can I pretty it up without making it distracting?
Another tool I’ve enjoyed is using Miro to manage my relationship maps in real time. I don’t use a template, just a blank screen, but the fact the software reroutes connecting lines and allows you to label those lines? Pretty great. If I were more facile with my iPad + Pencil setup, I could do some very neat theatrics with in-person relationship mapping on the tablet. Since theatrics are, in my opinion, more than half the point of the r-map this is probably an area worth practicing.
What I think I’ll miss is building new Pinterest boards for quick screen-sharing purposes. No reason I couldn’t put that on a tablet, and I’ve met several players at conventions who keep big pin boards full of character art. But every time I put more stuff on a screen, that’s more screen time at the table. My intuition says that’s Bad, Actually but that might not be true. Another experiment I suppose.
Convenience and Shorter Sessions
Zoom can be hard on your brain, eyes, and body. My normal in-person tempo has always been 4-hour sessions, which is easy to break up as folks get antsy or uncomfortable, need to pee, refresh drinks, all that. But there’s that focused thing that happens when you’re on screen, and four hours feels interminable. I settled on 3-ish hour sessions, and honestly they felt great. It also was a little easier to meta-prep enough stuff for three hours of focused play.
Shorter sessions, combined with no commute time, is gonna be hard to give up. I really liked being able to just turn everything off, brush my teeth, and go to bed. Very nice. Gonna have to see if my new 3-hour tempo sticks.
The other thing about the convenience of online play is that it was so easy to pull together games from the whole wide world of players. Heck, I even ran an online con for my Slack folks, and got to meet a ton of folks I would not have been able to, probably even if cons were still live.
Unlearning Hypervigilance
Live long enough and hopefully you learn that every positive character trait can also be negative. One of the things I’m “best” at is table management: I’m very sensitive to engagement, energy level, reactions to input. I’m a pleaser. I give until it hurts. And sometimes it does! Lord knows, I have frequently brought games to a close (probably) too soon because I took the temperature of the table and found it tepid.
Turns out that’s been a mistake.
My home group played several games during our lockdown: The Nightmares Underneath (our learning game, wrong choice for our group before we knew how to play online), Imp of the Perverse, Shattered City, and Vaesen. Shattered City lasted a ton of sessions, much longer than I expected — I wrote a big wrapup deep-dive of it, made possible only because we stuck it out for so long. I’m certain that playing Shattered City online, and maintaining the vast trove of documentation that comes with it, is why it lasted as long as it did.
The flipside is that I’m hypervigilant in person. The screen makes it so I can’t quite pick up the cues I normally would. As a result, I mother-hen everyone less than I would in person. Real talk though? Reducing my hypervigilance is a change I need to bring to the table. I need to learn to ignore non-urgent cues that might normally derail the game. Tough balance to reach. Safety awareness needs to stay, panicking when someone rolls their eyes at my cheesy description needs to go.
Another factor I’ve seen is that the players are less engaged, which is good when play gets contentious. I’ve seen many moments in play where something that might have triggered an in-person argument just fizzles out because negative vibes don’t transmit through a camera. The downside of course is that it’s been really hard for my players to engage with each other the way they will at a table. It often feels like most interactions are GM-to-player, because player-to-player is hard to signal. Players actually talking and signaling to each other is going to be nice to return to.
Still A Long Way To Go
As of May 2021, our local, specific pandemic situation is pretty good, not great: 30-some percent full immunizations, 5.5% positivity in our county this week and creeping back to “high.” At one point not too long ago, my county had the highest rate of infection in the world.
Not everyone in my group is immunized yet. Combined with differing personal values and health situations, there’s some weirdness around who gets included and excluded, who attends and whose attendance forces awkward choices. I’m not browbeating anyone, but even that lack of browbeating is weird! It’s weird all the way down.
On the technical side, having to learn my way around online play has made me acutely aware of focusing my techniques for in-person play. Building and testing a character keeper is a lot more work than typing up a cheat sheet, so that taught me to be more mindful about what players actually need in terms of documentation and information sharing. Managing real-time changes to relationship maps is super fun and flashy, but it’s also resulted in losing track of old relationships and situations, something paper is naturally better for. Online shared dice rollers are fun but I also learned you should just trust folks to report their own rolls. Mostly, here a year-and-some into my online play, I’ve learned to pare back as much as possible, and that paring differs by game and by players.
On the emotional side, I’ve learned I miss in-person conventions much more than I thought I would. Those are still a long ways off. Maybe 2022? Hopefully? I read recently that we’re probably not going to get to herd immunity in the US, and we’ll just end up with a manageable cold/flu/COVID season and boosters. It doesn’t have to be that way though. I hope more folks will take their responsibilities as seriously as their rights.
Liked it? Take a second to support The Indie Game Reading Club on Patreon!Share this:FacebookRedditTwitterTumblrPinterestEmailLike this:Like Loading…
Related