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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Hi – do you have an example picture of one of your situation maps? I followed the link to your s-map instructions post, but there doesn’t seem to be a live picture link in there.
Hi! Argh, still tracking down broken image links from my initial import off Google Plus. Here’s a series I doodled up from when I was running Scum & Villainy: https://photos.app.goo.gl/ce2JSgnTWQ9xp3ie8
Rach Shelkey and Rich Rogers of the podcast +1 Forward interviewed me about Prep 2.0. We went all over the place but I think it was a pretty fun ep! Hope you enjoy it, and consider backing their Patreon.
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Hey Paul,
Heard you on the +1 Podcast today and found your take on Clocks fascinating. My best distillation of the mechanic is the following: clocks are abstract trackers of progress. they can represent obstacles, enemies, steps, tug of wars, or any number of things [needed to complete the mission.]
Though I think that might bound the usage to the immediate, rather than the front-orbiting pressure you allude to when talking about Apocalypse World.
With regards to your term Trindie and the greater design trends of the last five years – I think the further abstraction time into montage and ramification is a space where a lot of designers will be playing more and more with. There seems to be a fun give and take in looking at the before and after, and there’s really no inherent granularity within the framework of “You do it, but with a complication.”
Our latest game, Time Force, plays a lot in this space (and with Clocks) under a FITD framework. I wrote about what we learned making the game on the Gauntlet Forums:
https://forums.gauntlet-rpg.com/t/time-force-save-the-world-change-the-past/5448/2
Hope you’ll check it out and let me know what you think!
Cheers,
Ray
Ooh is it a time travel game? My favorite genre!
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!
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One thing this pandemic year is teaching me is the pleasure and necessity of longer-term play. Because the quality of roleplaying has, in my experience, been diminished – playing via video is both lo-fi and exhausting – I try to make up for it with quantity.
We’re several months into an Impulse Drive campaign with my local friends. The players are anywhere from five to 30 minutes away, but a couple of us have health issues that make isolation serious business. We’re also in Arizona, which is one of the currently worst-hit states. I have no idea how long I’m going to be running my “local game” in this delocalized way. If we’d been running Impulse Drive in person, though, I’d have wrapped it up weeks ago.
This flavor of space adventure is such that the characters spend a chunk of time in one place, doing jobs, meeting NPCs, getting a little embedded into local events, and then move on. Each setting (a planet, usually) is like a mini-campaign, three to five sessions long. Then things get awful or complicated or otherwise irreconcilable, and they just hop into their ship and move on to the next place. Structurally, it’s making the task of slowly spooling out a long-term campaign tolerable.
That’s a good thing, because I lost my long-term play skills at some point.
Here’s some stuff I’ve had to (re)learn lately about keeping our online game up and running.
Factions
Probably the most useful decision I made early for keeping the game rolling is structural: much of the action is driven by the interplay of factions in the game. I’m not sure how I’d keep a small, personal story interesting for months on end, but the way our ID game is set up, there are organized groups of various scales, from one planet to the whole sector, all pursuing their own goals. The setting feels organic and evolving.
My schemes!
I set up this game with the help of the factions system in Stars Without Number and have grown it by hand since then. Leaving behind the formal SWN system, which involves managing stats and economies for each faction and some lonely-fun play time between sessions for the GM to roll dice, has meant less interesting uncertainty. It’s less of a sandbox, which I found necessary because like most PbtA games, Impulse Drive is focused on character-driven action. Staying focused on the characters is also my personal preference.
There’s a fine and entirely achievable balance, I think, between maintaining a sandbox setting and meaningful character drama within that setting. I’ve been figuring out how to make that work for years.
The Power of Forgetting
One of my favorite release-valves for prepping over a long stretch of gaming is that players just don’t remember stuff. So I’ll check in now and again, mostly at the end of a session. I will ask: so what are your intentions next session? If it’s a party/crew/gang type of game, that’s a chance for them to settle out a plan. If it’s more relationship or melodrama based, I treat the conversation as something of a “next week, on this show…” TV-type teaser. In either case, it becomes apparent what folks aren’t really keying into. Sometimes the players just kind of give up on even major events. That’s awesome. Let them.
Just keep playing, just keep playing, just keep…oh hi! What were we doing?
There’s a power in leveraging players’ natural inclination to forget about stuff. This helps you stay focused on the threads that actually interest the players, rather than forcing your agenda/storyline/beats down their throat. I am grateful for my one player who takes copious notes, but as a practical matter, I’m always happy to let things drop.
The other power of forgetting is that you don’t have to let things drop forever. One of my favorite things is reincorporating material from many sessions ago. Not too many! Maybe 3-4 sessions if we’re playing weekly. I’ll look through my notes, see a “put on hold” note on some dangling thread, and then pull that thread back into focus. Occasionally I’ll run into blank stares if everyone had just kind of edited the thread out of their mental journals. But mostly it’s a source of new energy, because I can take whatever thread they decided to forget about and go in some wild new direction. Useful!
Discovery vs Novelty
One factor that has made me prematurely quit/drop games in the past is the novelty of a new system. My dumb simian brain loves shiny new things, but it’s also necessary for this blog. Those shiny new things might be a whole new system, but they can also be new moves or abilities that open up a character’s play in an interesting new way. Unfortunately, Impulse Drive has a pretty short list of advances per playbook. Once you’ve upgraded your stats (boring) and bought up all your gear slots (boring!), there just aren’t that many moves. There’s a list at the back of the book of optional any-playbook advances as well. But our short-ish sessions combined with session-based advancement (at the end of every session, get an XP for each of several things on a list) meant everyone reached the end of advancement. Weird place to be.
Oh look.
Since we’re dug deep into this game, I’m trying to retrain my monkey brain to crave narrative discovery instead: new settings, new plot twists, actual character development and not just expansion. This is, of course, some of the very oldest-school style of gaming. Traveller never even had advancement, other than buying better ships and gear. That was it. Plain old playing-to-find-out was so fundamental that realizing I craved character advancement for my novelty hit was unsettling. When did this happen? How did this happen?
Sweeping pronouncements like PbtA has trained a generation of gamers to ignore narrative in favor of advancement are a room-temperature take at best. I mean, good grief, that’s kind of core to plain old D&D, yeah? New feats and spells and unlocked abilities. I think it’s the other kind of games, the kind where you play (only) to find out what happens next, that have fallen out of focus. Fate, of course, has been banging this drum a very long time. Lack of advancement, for good or ill, is one of the things that turned me off from Fate. Maybe it’s time to revisit.
Is character advancement the low-value sugar hit of gaming? Insert your favorite True Scotsman argument here. Just saying: if your game advances characters every session and sessions are over quick, you might ramp everyone up faster than you expected. Be ready for the sugar hits to stop.
It Might Just Last Longer Anyway
One thing I’ve noticed about playing online is that our sessions run shorter than they did when we were live (about 4 hours, both at home and at con tables). We don’t get as much done, don’t cover as much ground. I have to think that – given folks keep coming back! – the brevity of sessions is playing a big factor in how our season is lasting so long. I think our focused play time is around 2.5 hours, with some advancement paperwork and checking in on plans at the end.
I’ve been wondering if it’s not that our online sessions are so (too) short, it’s that our live sessions are so long. Are we tiring ourselves out? I feel like there are depths of characterization that are hard to get at when you’re sprinting through a shorter playtime, but that may be rationalization. At this point, I’m happy to give up those depths in return for the ongoing layering we’re getting from playing so many more sessions.
How do you keep yourself and your players interested in a game? Hit me up in comments!
Quantity Has a Quality All Its Own – Joseph Stalin, maybe (probably not)
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Here’s what I’ve been reading this month. These are (relatively) short reviews! Ideally I’ll run these at some point in the future. Are you interested in seeing a deeper dive about any of these? Let me know in the comments.
Electric Bastionland
PDF is available at DriveThruRPG
Hardcover is available at bastionlandpress.com
Electric Bastionland
Chris McDowall’s Electric Bastionland arrived on Kickstarter with lots of hype from folks whose opinions I respect. It’s based on Into the Odd, one of many OSR games/frameworks, and I like to keep up with what’s going on in OSR-land, so I backed it. The author does a really nice job of laying out the game’s goal at the end of the book: “Electric Bastionland was written to be a roleplaying game that anyone could play.” Having gone through the whole thing a few times now, I think that goal is aspirational at best. Besides, literally every RPG is an RPG that anyone can play (other than the actually broken ones).
The book, as a product, is notable in a few ways: minimalist text (nearly every procedure and subtopic is broken down into bullet points), generous spreads, and starkly evocative art. It looks and reads differently than anything else on my shelf.
The premise of Electric Bastionland is that the characters came from failed careers, now belong to a party that owes someone a lot of money, and regularly get leads on heist-able treasure somewhere in or around a surreal city called The Bastion. The debt is specifically $10,000, which implies to me that you’re meant to play until it’s paid off. The someone is determined by the youngest player’s career.
The majority of content in the book is career spreads, and setting emerges from which careers (there are 100!) are in play. There are rough aesthetic guidelines for the various established locations of the game – the Bastion (a vast, ever-changing surreal city – I couldn’t help but think of Invisible Sun here, all the way down to the 1920s aesthetic), Deep Country (everything outside the Bastion, representing backwards-thinking communities), and The Underground (a meta-location filled with intelligent machines that connects the Bastion to everywhere else, including Deep Country and The Living Stars above).
My tl;dr is that Electric Bastionland is 90% aesthetic guidelines, 5% thematic guidelines, and maybe 5% (or less) rules. There are evocative bullet-lists for each major setting, and there are strong implications of how your Bastion looks based on the characters in play. A Bastion in a game with a Science Mystic, Masked Horrorist (wut), Tuk-Tuk Driver, and Traveling Show-Person is going to look much different than a game with a Disinherited Socialite, Lone Stargazer, an Underground Weirdo (how do you fail at your Underground Weirdo career?), and a Canal Nomad. If the creative challenge of making those things make sense against a (mostly) blank slate sounds like your jam, you will love this.
As far as structured play and play advice goes, I feel like there’s just not that much there there. This is probably my own preference for other schools of indie gameplay and design talking, I’ll cop to that. But I feel like Chris’ minimalist approach is too minimal for folks who aren’t already steeped in play, and in particular in OSR play. He nicely restates some big OSR play advice ideas: talking is better than rolling dice, keep asking questions, sneaking is better than fighting. But that advice is rooted in an even larger assumption: play is about characters overcoming obstacles in an environment created by contextualizing weird aesthetic inputs.
Is that model the most welcoming for folks who have never played anything before? Is an indebted Tuk-Tuk driver more accessible than an armed wanderer looking for trouble? Normally I wouldn’t even bother asking that question, but it’s a core goal of Electric Bastionland. I mean, it might be! Whatever additional social context exists among the characters, or the characters’ connection with wider society is entirely up to the taste of the players but gets no mention in the book. This is a game about obstacles, not situations. Other than the core situation of owing someone a lot of money.
There’s other rip-roaring rhetoric baked in, like “rules are false idols” and “this book is designed for the game table, not the library.” To his credit, Chris puts his money where his mouth is: the barely-there rules are easy to ignore so, yeah, you can’t go looking to them for answers. The big spreads and bullet points really are a nice way to take in lots of ideas quickly. Other rhetorical claims are harder for me to see in the game text: make the players feel welcome, break the barriers that stop you from having fun at the table, your table should be warm and inviting. All worthy goals, for sure, but nothing about the game itself gets me there.
Are “make impactful choices” and “be nice to each other” useful advice? It makes me wonder who needs this advice. Who isn’t making impactful choices? Who isn’t being nice to each other?
Liminal
PDF available at DriveThruRPG
Hardback available at Modiphius
Liminal
Paul Mitchener’s Liminal slid under my radar when it first showed up. In fact I had backed it on Kickstarter and, to my shame, un-backed. But I’ve got a retail copy in my hands now.
Liminal is about folks caught between the mundane and magical worlds in the United Kingdom. It’s not a universal modern fantasy game like Urban Shadows; the game is specifically a love letter to England that is diverse, proud, and loves its wholesome baking shows. It’s more Dr. Who than Danny Boyle in tone.
The holding environment of the game is the Crew, to which the characters all belong regardless of their background. Deciding on the Crew’s goal is part of the setup, and there’s not a pick-list to choose from. Instead, there’s some general guidance, things like being supernatural investigators, or fighting a shared enemy (there are many factions already baked into the setting), or working with a faction as a deniable asset. The Crew then takes on cases, which are all what you might imagine: investigations, helping folks, righting wrongs, cool supernatural special ops. Crew-making is its own minigame before the game starts.
The rules bit of the game is pretty trad with some trindie bits: skill tests against challenge levels with a chance at critical success or failure. That’s fine, functional, unremarkable. Happily he’s included specific rules about failure! I cannot fathom why failure rules continue to be special and nice, and not just an expected part of success/failure based game design.
Being a supernatural game, there’s of course magic. The list is pretty much what you’d expect: blessings and curses, illusions, and so on. Spells spend a fungible resource called Will, which everyone has and can regain by engaging with their Drive. It’s a very straightforward cycle.
What stood out for me was the extensive, flavorful take on Spooky-But-Not-Miserable-England. There are lots of factions at work in the game, everything from rich-family wizard schools to secret police departments working the werewolf beat. Probably half the book is dedicated to setting ideas and locations and critters and flavor, flavor, flavor. And the character concepts are spot-on for that Dresden Files/Constantine/The Magicians vibe, with academic wizards and knights from secret ancient orders and mundane investigators who have seen too much.
It’s a modest, attractively produced game filled with charm and clear, directed play. You could certainly piece together something similar on your own, probably, using Fate or adapting Urban Shadows. The killer app, I think, is for the folks (like me!) who have tried and failed to wrestle this game together out of disparate bits of World of Darkness games. It’s all in one place, crew management and case creation and a dedicated, narrow focus on those thing.
Vaesen
PDF available at DriveThruRPG
Hardback available at Free League
Vaesen
Vaesen, Free League’s newest Year Zero Engine game, features a 19th century monster hunter society headquartered in Castle Gyllencreutz in Upsala, Sweden. The setting is historical-ish; they’re not picky about when during the 19th century you’re operating. It’s the horse-speed travel, no computers and phones, the lack of all modern conveniences that’s important.The castle bit of Vaesen follows Free League’s formula for your party’s shared enterprise/headquarters, much like the Ark in Mutant: Year Zero. As the monster-hunting society advances, you “discover” new elements of the creepy abandoned castle you’ve inherited: a hidden library filled with occult knowledge, a fish pond that calms you before you head out to investigate a mystery, a Difference Engine to help with the calculations to add new stuff to the castle.
The monsters you hunt in 19th century Sweden are fairy-tale themed, drawn from Johan Egerkrans‘ book Vaesen: Spirits and Monsters of Scandinavian Folklore. There’s a slight Cthulhu By Gaslight vibe to the cycle of play, with special fear rules and long-term damage to your mental well-being, but the threats aren’t cosmic or existential. It’s an angry farm fairy terrorizing the family that works the land, a witch no longer respected by the community she’s always served and protected, a bridge troll whose livelihood dried up when folks stopped crossing its bridge. The Vaesen are monstrous, but they always have a human-caused reason they’ve crossed over from fairy tale to menace.
Character creation looks like other Year Zero Engine games: pick an archetype, pick from a series of 3-bullet lists, define a relationship with the other player characters, done. The pick-lists are nifty! You choose a motivation (a roleplaying guideline), a trauma (helps color the world as weird and supernatural, the event that gave you “The Sight”), and a dark secret (which earns you XP if you engage with it, and gives the GM something to poke you with). You also start out with a memento, which helps you recover from conditions. It’s nice, compact, straightforward.
Instructions to create the mystery you’ll investigate are thorough and detailed, from the inciting incident that draws the society’s attention, to atmosphere-creating advice, to the step-by-step list of what will happen. The investigation is not on rails, not exactly; it’s more a rough to-do list to remember to receive the invitation, prepare for the journey, describe their arrival in this strange new place, and so on. The detail level here looks terrific, very helpful if you’ve never put together an investigation game. And tables, so many tables. You can procedurally generate nearly every aspect of the investigation if you enjoy the challenge of piecing that together.
Vaesen is a squarely trindie game. If you’ve played other Year Zero Engine games (Mutant, Coriolis, Tales from the Loop, etc., you’ll get the gist of how the game works here. It’s a simplified system, like Tales, with just one “kind” of die you’re rolling with an opportunity to reroll, if you’re willing to take a condition (physical or mental, depending on which stat you’re rolling against). It’s not risky, it’s costly, and recovering from Conditions is time-consuming but not difficult. I don’t have a sense of how disruptive a Condition actually is, but I assume it really only applies during the scene in which you’ve received the Condition. There’s a nifty bit where low-level injuries give you a defect (a small penalty with a description), while very high-level injuries will give you an insight (a significant bonus, should you survive). Otherwise? It’s party based play with a GM responsible for prepping an adventure and normal adjudication duties.
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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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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.
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