A thing I’ve slowly been embracing the past couple years is running my games like each session is a self-enclosed event…and then having faith that there will be material for another one, and another, for as long as we want.
Usually it works great! And why wouldn’t it? It’s how a lot of good television happens. It’s how most good movies happen. But it’s also contrary to a lot of, I think, traditional thinking about how a series of RPG sessions “should” work — long buildups, maybe blow-by-blow scenes (i.e. a camera that follows the characters around without breaks), continuity. Oh, continuity. I can draw an unbroken line on the traditional thinking through novels (where chapters really aren’t free-standing creations) back to dungeons (which might be so large that you need several sessions to fight/beat them, and there’s really isn’t narrative continuity so much as persistent game-states regarding supplies, health and time).
And no doubt the traditional approach has produced literally decades of highly rewarding and functional play. But I want to talk about this other approach now.
So for me, running a single session like it was a one-shot (but not a Blood Opera, more on that in a minute) looks like this:
* There’s very little time spent on inconsequential scenes. My working definition of “inconsequential” is that nothing actually happens or changes at the character level. So like…walking and talking scenes. Shopping. Slice of life stuff (although, wow, these can be super effective especially in a one-shot, but they need to be carefully applied).
So maybe I’m better off saying “most scenes are very consequential.”
* Scenes are more self-contained and framed as their own beat, rather than as necessarily continuing unbroken from a previous scene or leading into another. Lots of “later, you find yourselves at the edge of town” type transitions.
* On the GM side, I’m not keeping my powder dry. When it’s time to frame up a new scene, I’m looking for the very highest stakes right now, and not spending any energy on careful buildups, foreshadowing, or other novelistic techniques.
* The situation/relationship map — I always run with one! LMK if you want to see photos — are tight as hell, with lots of arrows pointed back inward and very few new situations/relationships really being added. (NB Urban Shadows foils this for me via its Faction moves, and I’m having to be very careful to aim stuff like Hit the Streets back into existing relationships, rather than allowing the map to fractal out.)
* Lots of reincorporation. The first hour is when I arm everyone with Chekhov’s Gun(s). The last hour is when everyone’s Gun gets fired. Waste as little first-act material as possible.
* Aim for resolution of the big questions, but let new questions get asked. New questions are totally okay in a one-shot! And I think a lot of people feel like actual convention-style one-shots need to wrap everything up in a bow. But you don’t. That’s why giving players a chance to describe the aftermath of a con one-shot is such an effective technique: everyone gets to feel like it got wrapped up in a bow. But at the table, that’s where your session-to-session continuity comes from. Answer old questions, ask new ones.
Now, regarding wrapping everything up in a bow…one thing I’ve seen at many convention one-shot events is the powerful urge to turn the session into a Blood Opera: an orgy of violence, probably some PvP action, last character standing “wins.” Sometimes the game itself facilitates this idea that the very highest stakes are life-and-death — I can’t tell you how many Burning Wheel one-shots I’ve run have ended as Blood Operas, for example, because at every step of the game the narrative pushes players toward ultimately resorting to violence. It gets the blood pumping for sure! And it’s tricky to walk that back and set, you know, different expectations.
So, anyway. Obviously you can’t run your ongoing story arc one-shot-ish session as a Blood Opera, unless everyone’s on board with creating new characters and constantly reinventing the relationship/situation map. But for me, this is where the real work comes in: if life-and-death aren’t the ultimate stakes, what else matters? What are the Really Big Questions that need to be answered this session (up to but not necessarily requiring a life-or-death battle)?
I think it’s an interesting creative exercise, a useful constraint. In fact I’m finding it so useful that I’m feeling like ye olde Blood Opera is kind of a lazy cop-out. I’ve run plenty of non-operatic one-shots at conventions, had the players do their “so how does this all turn out for your character?” talk, and felt like it was a really satisfying experience.
Just leave off that last talk and pow, you’ve got your next session.
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Oh no…Paul is flirting with becoming a dirty hippie gamer…
Et tu, Beakley? Et tu?
Leaving a note to myself here to talk about life-and-death and saving-the-world as stakes, and how my tastes run away from them.
Kit La Touche Yes please!
I love this concept, and feel like it’s a great approach for the kind of infrequent gaming I tend to do these days. I.e., my “regular” in-person group manages to meet only a few times a year these days, so making sure stuff happens when we do meet makes perfect sense.
Oh that’s a really good point, Mark. Adult schedules, boo.
For a few years I ran one-shot/campaign at cons. The adventures wrapped up but the story continued.
My brain is so warped by running so much WWWRPG that this is the only way I’ve run games for, like, years now.
Life is a one shot, man…
This idea seems to be a natural extention of the ‘no prep’ style of GMing in many games. It’s just letting go of a bit more of your investment in particular outcomes.
I can see this as an argument for more prep, depending on the game. Gotta make this session count!
This is all I do, since maybe 2006.
Sorry it took me longer.
It isn’t the only way to play! But it is definitely how I play, that’s all.
Save for later.
Side thought: I feel like this is actually kind of a hard aesthetic to apply to some games that are built to be run episodically. Like uh…Circle of Hands. Each session is one mission or visit or whatever, and it’s already set up to be one-shotty, but it’s also missing the bit where new questions get asked. It asks a few questions in the beginning of the session and then sets out to get ’em answered right here.
And yes yes, I’m a decade behind the hipsters as usual. Shoulders of giants and all that. I just won’t ever be able to claw my way to the front of the wave.
Mark Delsing that is true. It all depends.
Mark Delsing So prep, yeah. I mean I think you and Larry Spiel are actually right at the same time! Depending on what you mean by “prep.”
Building my Fronts in Urban Shadows, definitely prep. But it’s a one-time deal, and it sets up enough material for the 8-10 sessions I intend to get out of it. No way no how am I diving back in to do anything else except maybe set up some custom moves.
I don’t know that I would run…scratch that, I would not run a tactics-heavy, mathy game in this fashion. I also super-hate games that require that approach to play. So I guess the question answers itself.
I’m also thinking in terms of ephemera, like handouts, minis, or other aids/tchotchkes a given game might require. Just the idea of not approaching any aspect of the session in a half-assed way.
Sure, some games are so prep-intensive already that this approach may simply be unfeasible, but I think the attitude is still worthy in those cases.
Plus for using “tchotchkes” in a sentence.
Interesting to consider that Circle of Hands totally failed for us. Hmm.
Funny, I’m writing supplementary playtest material this morning and thinking about how rarely our games explain how to manage real world time constraint and squeeze the most fun into the least time. You’re right that there is a lot to apply to both convention play and campaigns.
As I said on the other post, this is a thing I do, and a thing that several of my friends have started doing as well, and a lot of it is based on the reality of adult living.
Argh, hit post before I was ready.
I wanted to also say that although this might not actually be “news”, it’s still a really important and valuable observation. It’s the sort of statement that, when adequately supported by a game’s text and mechanisms, can relieve a lot of the pressure that new GMs feel, or revitalize groups who are tired of or don’t gel with the “long game” style.
Even as a basic teaching tool, learning how to introduce and reintegrate in a single session lays the foundation for that same behaviour on the “campaign scale” in such a way as to benefit even groups who do tend to build big in that way.
Okay so for the folks who are old hands at this approach: Can you help fill out techniques I didn’t mention (and therefore probably don’t know about)?
Ironically, the one thing you said you don’t want to do — the aftermath chat — is a thing I do, though in a punctuated form.
I ask everybody “what do you want to see more of? what’s the most important thing to your character that happened in this session? what did you do or see someone else do that you particularly liked?” I find by getting my players to clarify their focus, to explicitly state what the highlights are, it helps me figure out what I should focus on when we next hit the table. If everyone liked a particular NPC, then when I need someone, I aim for them. If people like big action pieces, then I use my moves to aim for more of those.
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Pluses to all of this. Hope to see more games that provide guidelines on how to do this. Mission structure games like Night Witches, Mouse Guard, and 3:16 definitely make the not-crazy one shot a lot more accessible. Maybe that one TV game, too, by that one guy.
Hopefully more and more games will include really good “how to make this session satisfying even if it’s the first time you’ve ever played it” advice/tips/procedures.
Paul Beakley
* No inconsequential scenes. (I call this “editing”, as in you can edit your scenes to eliminate the inconsequential stuff)
* Scenes are more self-contained and framed as their own beat (Aggressive scene framing)
* High stakes right now. (Yep)
* The situation/relationship map (Yep, or an actual map, or whatever – physical, tactile aids for memory)
* Lots of reincorporation. (Yep, and you can train yourself to note good stuff to bring back as it occurs, or generate it deliberately)
* Answer old questions, ask new ones. (I need to think about this more, because I don’t think in these terms but probably do it)
* Blood opera is a lazy but satisfying default. (This is more an “always be closing” attitude – things need to wrap up in a satisfying way so pay attention and build toward that.)
Here is me talking about this stuff a little:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rf00B_NFFQ2fqGEwdUtxqxnPmOf3vFSvxaCHs_i5PeY/edit?usp=sharing
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cZ6iMHNwixJIu1vd87tASe7sv-lCCFphxoW9uRWOtNk/edit?usp=sharing
Morningstar, have you ended up with a “gaming in real time” player at your table? Or anyone for that matter. Did you just accept that it was a clash of agendas, or did you come up with an effective solution?
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Matt Wilson sure, and the solution is the same as if I dropped into a group of people who liked to play that way – I’d adapt to their rhythm. Same thing, other direction. Everyone accommodates a little but mostly you learn how the social contract in your new crew works. I could see it being a big problem if it was split 50/50 for some reason.
Writing my notes for this article, I called out one of your (Paul’s) items as its own bullet point, even though it seemed to have been offered as a post hoc consideration:
Include Non-Combat Stakes: not all stakes should be simple kill-or-be-killed setups.
sub
I’d love to see a pic of one of those relationship maps.
I can make that happen, Stephen Crawford.
I’m also interested in techniques. I think ‘Roll the clock forward’ ought to be an explicit GM move as it’s so key to avoiding ‘playing out the day’. Elsewhere I heard truncating/eliding the end of the mission if it doesn’t end when the session does.
I am trying to emphasize closure at the end of a session, because the vagaries of adulthood often mean not everyone can make a session. Hard to be in the middle of last week’s cliffhanger mess without a key character.
* No end of session cliffhangers! Yes, good point Joe Beason!
Maybe emotional cliffhangers are okay, since you can swing back around to those. But yeah, like “and then ninjas descend!” is kind of impractical.
I feel like Metatopia will be a good time to talk about this. Mostly because Paul won’t be there.
(sub)
I tend to keep an eye on the time and when we’re getting closeish to end time, say something like “Ok, here’s the last scene I want to get to tonight and then we’re gonna wrap up, unless there’s anything we didn’t get to?” – this lets everyone set their expectations to wrap up the last bits cleanly, and is also a better moment than the very end to negotiate whether you want to spend time on something that you did, indeed, forget about now or wait until the next session, IME
And then you can do a post about the discussion, maybe in four or five years, right Brand Robins?
Brand Robins everyone at Metatopia has been doing this since 1894 or something.
Talking about this stuff always makes me want to go off on a diatribe about Bangs, from Sorcerer, and how fruitful they are. If I were to state it in the format of your principles, I guess it would be prepare what might happen, not what will happen. When you have a bandolier of possible conflict-rich Bangs, you can tailor the session on the fly to what your players are actually interested in, rather than plotting out what they might be interested in.
Interestingly, I’ve found Bangs explicitly not-useful in PbtA games. I’ll have to figure out why.
(whispers)
Fronts are bandoliers of Bangs, so you don’t need to do them twice
(evaporates into the sunset)
(So they are! Sort of!)
((Don’t you eschew Fronts when you play, Nathan?))
Here I always thought that Bangs are called “MC Moves” in PbtA games.
In AW proper it’s easier for me to use “traditional” R-Map + character-directed bangs, rather than formal fill-out-the-sheet Fronts, but they accomplish the same thing so I don’t know if “eschew” is the right word.
In WWWRPG, there are no Fronts, and playtesting revealed that there did need to be something to move play along when the characters let up for a moment, so I put lightly modified Bangs in. It’s called “putting things on deck” and you’re supposed to just make a list between sessions, b/c the context often changes so much in a single session of play that planning more than a session ahead is an exercise in futility (hence, why Fronts don’t work in that game).
From what I’m reading, Bangs sound like a) a possible MC Move, and b) pregenerated as opposed to improvised.
Also just plain old transparency about participant goals and desires, like “OK, tonight I really want to engineer a big car chase with you guys” from the GM or “I want the party to happen this session so I can do my weird thing on stage” from a player.
Michael Miller yes that too, kind of, which is what I was thinking about when I said they were not useful. I was thinking about the prep side of a Bang, which falls more under the aegis of Front prep (although Fronts aren’t exactly Bangs, either; I’d be happy to have that argument in a different thread though).
Having urgency emerge organically from the fiction at hand feels different to me than preparing to introduce urgency. That feels important but maybe I’m fooling myself.
As a practical matter I will sometimes file away hot ideas that occur to me when I’m thinking about what move I want to make. This idea doesn’t work right now but man…if it comes up I’m totally using it.
Devon Apple I’m not going to pick nits (okay, I am), but calling MC Moves “improvised” when there is a list of them published in the book seems really odd. Exactly the form they take depends on the context of the moment, yes. But the exact same thing is true for Bangs. Prepping a bandolier of Bangs before a session is like writing a list of MC Moves for your specific table.
Well…This isn’t actually a thread about PbtA. Maybe let’s redirect to more general techniques? (Me too! I’m the literal worst!)
Jason Morningstar Oh, yeah! That works really well. “Hey, team, remember last week when the Ghost of Hillcrest Manor told you that he was going to destroy your lives and you replied by saying you were going to burn his house down? We are totally having a scene where you are all trapped in the attic of the burning and collapsing manor tonight.”
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a session left on a cliffhanger ensures several players can’t make it next week…
Improvisation and making the agenda clear at the table definitely strike true with me. (That’s sometimes both clarifying this is more a narrative game than tactical one, say, and stating ‘hey, we’re totally having a scene about X tonight.)
That totally doesn’t work for me Adam D
If that happened at a table I was at, I might play along…especially if it was a convention game and everyone else was into it…
…but inside I’d be “then why the hell are we playing an RPG if what you really want is to story board some communal Fiction”.
I love storyboarding community fiction!
This is no different than playing D&D and knowing the format is “there will be some tedious shit and then a big fight”, and telling your players the fight will be with Mind Flayers.
TBH I probably wouldn’t use the technique, either. I can see why it might work, though!
There’s this one game where it’s actually part of the rules to say what’s going to happen next time.
I’m with Ralph.
Matt Wilson, heh, I’m assuming you’re talking about Primetime Adventures. I see one key difference between what Jason and Adam D are talking about and the “next week on…” mechanic. Maybe it’s just me, but it’s less explicit to just say “we see a shot of Jennifer ramming her car into another in a parking lot” than it would be to say “I’d like a scene with Jennifer that really shows how her lack of sleep is starting to affect her.” The former is more of a creative constraint, and very juicy and fun to work with. The latter, I’m kind of with Ralph on. Seems to deflate the upcoming scene for me. Different strokes obvs.
Jesse Coombs if you’re saying my idea is good and Jason’s is bad, you should talk more about that in a public post.
This is a public collection. Feel free to reshare as necessary. 🙂
Michael Miller totally not how I meant improvised – sorry for any confusion.
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Well, this thread got away from me, but I’ll try to make good on my note from earlier.
—
How do you generate investment in a story’s stakes quickly? Everyone lives in the world, right? Threaten the world! Everyone can go “Ooh, I live there! It’d be a real shame if that were destroyed!” and immediately be bought in, right?
OK, that’s too big? We need to go a bit smaller? OK. So, how about we introduce some characters, see, and tell the audience that they’re good people and then make it clear that they might die! No-one likes dying, that’ll do just fine.
—
It’s exhausting how often I feel I encounter things like that. I have no deep-seated objection to save-the-world or life-and-death as stakes, but when they’re used as shortcuts it usually shows. Turns out, it’s still work to make me care about a world or a character, and these kinds of stakes often correlate with stories that don’t seem to acknowledge or put in that work.
Also, when they’re the only stakes you see, it’s like eating nothing but, I dunno, grapes. Grapes aren’t bad, but they’re pretty boring. Sometimes, you have real grapes and they’re amazing, but most of the time you have stupid thin-skinned seedless grapes, and it’s just a hollow reminder of what grapes can be. I would rather eat delicious high-quality grapes sometimes, and other fruits and vegetables other times. Sometimes, I want to see stakes like “can these two people come to really understand each other?” or “will the cat make it home?” or whatever.
Can anyone here give some hints and tips on how to derail Blood Operas? Especially when dealing with players new to games that aren’t, for lack of a better term, traditional? Obviously find out what’s important to the PCs, but how can I prevent/dissuade players from constantly using brute force to conquer every scene/situation?
First, ask them. Say before the game, “I’m looking to avoid Blood Opera, is that cool? Can we do that?”
Second, reinforce that in the game with things like consequences. “If you shoot this guy, all hell will come down on you, in the form of X. You up for that?”
That’s my off-the-cuff answer.
Also: set out for small stakes. They’re not boring unless you treat them as boring.
There is a whole…i don’t know, class or category of modern games built on making character motivation central to play. They’re not about the party saving the world, but rather more personal (melo)drama.
How long are your sessions?
3-4 hours of actual play time.
3ish hours maps really well to convention one-shots for me. The games I run usually have about an hour of setup/situation/whatever ahead of actually playing.
THIS. There’s this little speech Jason gives with Archipelago about playing to 10, not 9.5 but a 10 that I’ve taken to heart and try to push in every game.
I’m starting a new go at Urban Shadows tonight for my wife and another couple and I’m so stoked. Out of my gourd excited. I’m aiming for a very modest three sessions — my wife has never actually played an ongoing game of anything — and cross my fingers that we can extend it from there.
I learned a lot about how to run the game the last time I ran it and I think that’ll help a lot. Things that jump out for me:
* Make sure every character is deeply entrenched and invested in their city. In our last game, every character was a newcomer to the city, fish out of water. Dumb. That strains/breaks so much about the game. So don’t do that.
* While I love the urgency and action of treating every session like a one-shot, that also leads me to making my moves maybe a little too hard for ongoing play. So I’m going in now with an eye toward throttling the pace a bit more rather than stomping the pedal every time.
* The game has a start-of-session move where you keep expanding the situation: each player calls out a faction for someone else, and that someone else dreams up a lead/rumor/situation about that faction. Great tool for a session or two, and not great beyond that. We ended up with a way way messy situation and, again, way too much urgency on too many fronts. So the game felt reactive (not terrible) with the characters constantly losing traction on their own start-of-game “things I care about” statements (sort of terrible).
I re-read through the entire text this week with the experience of having run the game. It’s really helpful! I’m not sure why I couldn’t hook into the examples the first time through but having some actual-play context was helpful to me.
One thing that jumped out, like screaming blazingly loud…actually it was two things. First thing was the statement/admonition that misses are not necessarily failures. I most definitely default to that mode: oh shit, time for me to make a move? Let’s step on the gas. Again with the constant driving urgency and chaos. Again, that’s “fun” but boy it’s hard to, you know, build toward things. (With the acknowledgement that “building toward things” is really iffy when you’re “playing to find out what happens.” It’s a built-in semi-contradiction of the game’s RAW procedures and best practices.)
Really embracing that misses =/= fails opened my head up to the possibilities of “say the consequences and ask”. I think I just kind of skip over that move whenever I run a PbtA game, even though it’s the logical result of misses not being failures. Maybe because it feels redundant with Act Under Fire 7-9? Probably.
Anyway! In Urban Shadows there’s, you know, a whole paragraph talking about ways to deal with offering consequences for success. The one that jumped out at me? Making Corruption the consequence. Presumably with fictional dressing to make it extra-awful. But boy howdy does that potentially open up the Corruption economy. It’s easy-ish to sidestep that economy if a player super-duper does not want to engage it, because the written triggers are explicit: your Corruption drama move, refusing a debt, all that. But lordy, adding Corruption as an option to literally every move in the game? And it shows up once, once in the text. And once in the long example. A tiny little dose of something awesome, as well as really important.
Funny the stuff you learn when you read.
Now my big worry/challenge is coming up with a city to play in. Nobody at the table has enough shared experience with cities other than Phoenix (or Dark Phoenix as we played in last campaign), so just picking a city or city archetype out of a hat is equally good/bad I guess for everyone. A big west coast metropolis would be fun, as would be a really old east coast city.
I may also pitch 750AD Toulouse and put my Werewolves in Aquitaine research to new/better use. Very very tempting, although “cities” were kind of small relative to modern cities — maybe the tens of thousands? But as I discovered in my research, just tons of cultural exchange and juicy intersectionalism.
I think Magpie will have some essays about playing in historical settings in Dark Streets but who else has hands-on experience with what may need to be tweaked? I know Brand Robins ran/is running something historical and French. Anyone else?
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Well, the second session went pretty well I think. This was the first time I tried extending the game beyond a one-shot, and it was so interesting to feel my way around that.
Aesthetically, my goal is to make each session feel like a one-shot. I’m going to run one session per season, I think, with a major arc and finale for each. I’ve talked about how to run sessions like one-shots before.
We were down a player (the Man) and up a player, who chose the Wanderer. I’ve never had a Wanderer in play, so it was fun to see that play out. The Wanderer’s schtick is that he brings a Secret into the game, and when he reveals it he gets +1 ongoing until it’s accomplished. That feels like a short-term thing; I assume Wanderers perhaps move on, or just die, or whatever. Ours revealed his Secret, which was that he came to the settlement area to bring the gods back into their lives, that the Goði was (perhaps!) a poor priest (he is).
The original, very messy map
The cleaned-up r-map
The reconfigured relationship map worked well to simplify presentation. It made it really easy to plop the Wanderer into the corner and just draw big red lines as he established relationships in play.
So since this was a second session, I immediately felt how claustrophobic the starting situation was. Folks changed one or two relationships, but not IMO enough to really have “a new situation.” So I sent the story out of the village, with the young seiðkona — the goði’s niece/maybe-daughter, who he believes is “touched by the gods” and kind of can’t take care of herself — kidnapped by Danelander bandits in the hills above the homesteads. I know fuckall about Danish banditry in 900AD so I had to wing a lot. At that point the game largely ran itself: lots of 6- rolls gave me plenty of breathing room to build out the situation and inflict a couple Grave Harms as PCs chased the bandits into the woods. I’m really digging how quick and brutal and tense the rolls are; thankfully, none of my players put up any fuss when they’d, you know, Tempt Fate by chasing armed assholes into an ambush.
Mikael Andersson will be thrilled to hear that I got to put his Fate bond advice to use! After the goði tries to accost the bandits and gets a blade in the gut for his troubles, he’s left alone with his injury, slowly dying, while others run back to the matriarch for help (she’s an old woman, it’s gonna take some time to get back out to where he’s fallen). So the goði is laying there contemplating the night sky and I ask him: “What do you wish the gods would do? If they were listening right now, what would be on your mind?” (That’s me spending the Fate’s bond with him). The player laughs because, oh yeah, he’s definitely been scheming. And he knows that this is no-bullshit straight talk between players. He sighs and says “I really wish Sola would just die, so I can get her land.” Sola is the widow of his older brother, whose death kicked off the first session. There’s been some maneuvering to get the goði and Sola together, but that’s not in his plan at all. So here he is, at death’s door, still scheming. Marvelous.
The Wanderer character is interesting. The player playing him frequently picks up outsider/outcast type characters so I was not at all surprised when he chose The Wanderer. I think he kind of had it in his head that he was above the man/woman move rules, but he’s so not. Maybe my favorite PC-PC scene was where his character needed to save the goði’s life by providing some measure of first aid and couldn’t arrange for that to happen in private. Medicine is woman’s work! So both he and the goði are shamed before pretty much all the settlers. That scene really set up the rest of the session.
So the goði and wanderer, largely reasserting their honor after the medical fiasco, bring the old huscarl along back into the woods to retrieve the witch. The game has no particular support for journeys or, you know, adventuring, which I think is very much to its benefit: it makes me continue focusing on relationships and honor, where the moves are.
The rescue is largely uneventful, with good rolls and lots of forwards being put toward their efforts. I actually liked that it played out this way, because it got them thinking and working together a little more mechanically: they figured out how to line up multiple bonuses and mark their relationships to advance and all that. “The gods have answered our prayers!” says the goði when things line up so well. “The gods answer all prayers, uncle,” says his niece. “Sometimes the answer is no.”
Everyone gets home intact and they throw a feast. To celebrate her return and to hopefully protect her darling oldest granddaughter from future troubles, the matriarch presents to her a gift of a beautiful knife, paid for out of more than half her stash of silver. The matriarch’s player wants a mark and an alliance (it’s one of the matriarch’s moves, I like it very much) and now she has a bond with the seiðkona girl. There are a couple other interactions, mostly Sola making her moves toward the goði — also part of behind-the-scenes scheming between the old matriarch of the house and Sola to hook her up with the oldest surviving son.
Later that night, in the wee hours, the goði’s niece wanders back into his house. She’s holding her grandmother’s beautiful knife and is covered in blood.
“Fura! What are you doing out so late?” her uncle asks. “What’s going on?”
“The gods answer all prayers, uncle,” the seiðkona, touched by the gods, answers. “Sometimes the answer is yes.“
I put an X through Sola’s box.
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Short Campaign Pacing: Paul Holds Court 1/3
Paul Taliesin asked me in a thread last week about how I went about wrapping up our latest Apocalypse World mini-campaign in a satisfying way. I meant to post sooner but I’ve been thinking about it a lot. To be honest, I’m not sure I can point at specific techniques!
It’s about running every session like a one-shot. I find AW and most PbtA games are especially good for this vibe: lots of internal conflict, not much structural prep to (even unconsciously) protect from disruption. Guess I’d start by just saying that: run every session like it was a one-shot, satisfying and whole unto itself.
Of course if you know it’s gonna go longer, you have additional tools at your disposal. Here’s what I came up with after noodling on it for a week:
* Apocalypse World RAW is really good for setup (create characters, set up Hx, follow them around their lives). I’ve expanded on that a little, mostly from experience: Hx questions always come with a little more context, and I draw out one of my big full-table relationship maps during character creation. The Hx context is how I fill the r-map out with more NPCs and implied near past events/near future urgencies. And that’s what turns my r-map into a situation map. (Oh god another smap tease, I need to get this written.)
* As NPCs get introduced, I start them as probable allies/friendlies, unless everyone knows there’s beef due to the Hx questions. I find it useful to imply a status quo early on, so when it comes falling down it feels catastrophic, and not just a continuation of life in chaos.
* The Maelstrom is my main tool for setting emotional hooks and really dredging around in the players’ psyches. This is purely a technique thing and I wish I could really lay out a point-by-point plan on how to work this well. Hm. One thing I’d do is look at something unstable on the smap connected to the character, and ask them opinions adjunct to the connection, rather than on-the-nose.
Example: our Battlebabe puts his babe-ness to use hustling crash spaces and food everywhere he goes. He has zero loyalty to anyone but himself. So he starts the game “attached” to the local hardholder, Hugo, as a sexy killbot who never gets off his ass and actually kills. So when things start to slide sideways, he finds it useful to seduce a member of the biker gang, and then almost immediately seduces another hardholder the next session, leaving the biker chick and other NPCs in his wake.
So the trail of broken hearts, that’s kind of a front, right? I don’t explicitly make it so, it’s just a human complication of the battlebabe bull-in-china-shopping his way through people’s lives.
At some point he Opens His Brain, can’t remember why. The Maelstrom wants to know how he’s gonna disentangle himself from Mice, the new hardholder he’s hooked up with. She’s been super nice and protective, so first I ask questions about how nice and protective she is toward him. Stuff like “When was the last time you felt as safe as you do with Mice, now?” It’s a way to hard-frame the player as well as the character, you know?
I think I’m not explaining this very well. What I’m getting at is the Maelstrom stuff is a way past the player’s defenses, which in this case is arms-length authorial play.
So later when he opens his brain again, the line of questioning is more like, “so you’re going to have to leave Mice eventually, right? I mean you never stick around. You think you can get away from her if she’s alive?” All this in service to creating emotional investment in that story aspect.
Why go through all this? Why all the unapologetic mind-fucking and gaslighting? So that, once the hooks are set, any given moment in that story element’s arc can be brought to a high-tension climax.
But this is all storygaming 101 stuff. Awareness of player investment and where those investments lie, turning the metronome a little higher on those things, all that. I’m just saying Open Your Brain is an astonishingly good tool to put toward that.
* Depend on the magic of 7-9s. They’re magic! If you’ve been building things up, your 7-9s are, IMO, where you can create well timed emotional climaxes. Because if it’s too soon, right? You can dial the “yes, buuuut” to just continue spooling out that thread OR you can cut the thread right there. I don’t use misses for that, although I do tend to feed misses right into my fronts’ clocks if we’re on a deadline.
* Oh yeah, build out your fronts after that first walking-around session. Give ’em all clocks. It’s good prep.
I started my game out knowing in advance it’d be a 5-6 session long game. My players knew it as well, and that helped shape their advancement chase. Knowing the game is gonna end fast, I think, put their minds more solidly on their advancement (highlighted stats) as well as more consequential advancement choices.
I’ve never directly heard this but a popular ghost story told at Apocalypse World camp is that Vincent or Meg or someone once said the game gets “good” at six sessions. My best guess is that refers to advancement tempo, which looks to be around once per session, and that the second advancement set is where you get the opportunity to retire in safety. Might be true, dunno, but in our game at least the ghost story came true: being able to make choices from that second set did alter the tone of the game quite a lot.
If I was going to deliberately plan a 3-shot — say, for a con or something, Fri/Sat/Sun slots — I would probably come to the table with a firm setting pitch, maybe three fronts already cooking, maybe even a check or two already on those clocks representing recent history. And I would, as GM, highlight “weird” no matter what anyone else wanted to highlight, and look for natural (seeming) opportunities for the characters to Open Their Brain. Sitting around wondering what to do next? Curious about what a Front is up to? Walking away mad at someone? The triggers for Open are defined by the GM and that’s some powerful black magic.
I might also hand out, say, two advances right out of the gate. That gets them closer to their second set, and I believe you can get them there if you’re super generous and not weird about your stat highlight choices. Let the battlebabe be cool, let the Savvyhead be sharp, etc. You’re really not gonna have the time to let the players settle into their roles such that other players might want to see other facets (the cool Brainer, the sharp Gunlugger).
This is all pretty meander-y, sorry. I really have been thinking about your question all week! And I can’t really point at any specific techniques beyond setting up interesting threads so they can be either extended or brought to a conclusion whenever you want.
Oh, last one. You probably already know it, don’t be insulted that I’m bringing it up: do the denouement thing at the end of your last session. Where did each character end up afterward? It’s a great post facto technique that creates a sense of closure in everyone, regardless of how up in the air things felt when you can to call it.
Next up: The Magic of 7-9
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Felt like talking about a thing. Class is in session.
Probably the broadest selection of tools in my facilitation shed all relate back to manipulating tempo at the table.
What even is “tempo,” you ask? That’s harder to define than I realized when I asked myself the question! I think it’s a combination of things:
Energy, like how engaged the players are with the thing they’re dealing with.
Urgency, which is different than energy because I’ve totally had high-urgency moments that were met with low energy (these choices don’t really even matter but I have to make one right now).
Scope, as in variety of decisions you might make in this moment. A very small scope might be a two-choice dilemma, yeah? “Save the child or kill the bad guy?” And a very large scope might be “are we mercenaries or do-gooders or what?”
That might be it. Maybe. I may swing back around to this later.
As I sit here thinking about the ways I manipulate these elements – energy, urgency and scope – I realize I have a variety of tools I use to massage each of these things. But the meta-tool at the top of the pile is variety. That is, I want my tempo to vary, because when everything is urgent then nothing is urgent. I want the big, open spaces to feel different than the claustrophobic, intense moments.
So I want you to read these not as ways to amp these things up, but as tools to twiddle the dial anywhere from low to high.
Energy tools
I can hear you asking: If energy = engagement, why on earth would you want a low engagement? Well, to help aim the camera in a more subtle way. Setting the agenda for what’s important is the core of facilitation, IMO. But in my universe, that definitely is not limited to “the GM’s thing.”
Energy comes from:
Individual players, including the GM
Interaction between players
This is such a feel thing. I would say the most important tool here is to simply develop a sense of the energy at each of these levels: what is engaging the players? What interactions feel most energetic? What’s hot and what’s cold?
Now you don’t have to heat up the cold bits. It might be that the cooler table temps – a lead the GM throws out, a backstory thing, some unanswered question that cropped up – just isn’t catching anyone’s attention. If you keep hammering at it, well, I think that mostly doesn’t work. At worst, you end up with players digging their heels in to resist what feels like railroad tracks.
One technique I don’t recall hearing much about is deliberately cooling off hot stuff. Mostly you don’t want to do this BUT! But but but! It might be bad-problematic and you don’t have a safety tool in place. Or it’s headed down a track you, as facilitator, just don’t care about. It’s shitty to say “ehh nope.” But it might be okay to back down the excitement for wherever that trail may lead. The players’ agendas are important but don’t forget that you’re a player too.
It’s not a technique I’d use much myself, because I’m service-minded, but I know I’ve done this. It’s not illusionism, it’s more…sales. Like you’re upselling this other thing but part of that is down-selling the thing they’re paying attention to but you’ve only got so much time and energy in any given session.
Urgency tools
I tend to run balls-out when I facilitate and when I play. It’s literal urgency, faster talking and demanding answers and whaddayado whaddaya do? It’s also situational urgency, snowballing consequences, escalation, constant new badness on the horizon. I’m good at it and I’ve done it for a very long time.
I don’t know that balls-out is always the right answer, though. It’s exciting, especially from a one-shot perspective. And I’ve written at length about running campaign sessions like they’re one-shots. But just like how the best movies and books break up the tempo with quiet interludes, games need breaks too.
So probably the important tool here isn’t how to create urgency (although maybe that’s something you’ve not really thought much about), it’s dialing the urgency back. Some thoughts:
Introducing scenes where maybe nothing super consequential is going to happen. What’s life like on your ship? What does your daily religious practice look like? (I’m thinking about stuff like this because I’m thinking about Coriolis this week.)
Taking literal real-world breaks after high-intensity scenes
Setting scenes from the very beginning of the scene, starting with all the sensory stuff (what can you see? What can you hear? Who’s present?). Breaking up the play-the-day pace where everything flows into everything else.
Scope tools
Probably the important thing here is knowing when to pull the camera waaaay back. I feel like this naturally has a tempo-dropping quality to it, but maybe not if you show the players that they’re on the cusp of a campaign-shaping change in direction.
One of my favorite things: stopping the action, maybe not overtly, but just kind of blue-skying your way through the “oh wow what does this mean?” You don’t want to pre-decide stuff, but you know what? I think you probably end up doing that anyway. And that’s not bad! But it’s on the facilitator to know where to draw the line, like “okay cool, so you’ve decided to pack your bags and head across the ocean on the next boat? Should we start on the far shore, then?” It’s a big move but maybe you stop the players from the next steps they propose, like “and then we roll in, take over the thieves guild in the first city we get to and…” because that’s just too far ahead.
Brand Robins also mentioned recontextualizing in another thread. Super important, I think, because the facilitator always has a higher-level view of what’s going on than the players. It’s so easy to get sucked into personal survival and immediate success, and losing track of the more authorial stuff. I mean some players never shift out of author stance, I get it, but for the players who just kind of default back to being an actor (or being their character, whatever anyone wants to call that, we are not starting an immersion fight in this thread) I think a facilitator who can remind them of higher level stuff, like themes and arcs and even big-picture setting stuff, that’s useful.
Well, I feel like energy, urgency and scope worked out pretty well for this. I’m imagining a grid, right? Or maybe a three dimensional space, where you have things like “low energy/low urgency/small scope” as one space any given moment of play is in, and then “high energy/low urgency/small scope” and “low energy/high urgency/small scope” and so on and so on.
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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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