Indie Game Reading Club

Situation Maps

March 7, 2018 - By 

Packing for an out of town house con today and I came across this beauty. Whooee!

I’ll get the smap piece written someday, promise.

Update! I’ve been going through old posts and came across this one, which was originally an image of a situation map I’d done for our house Space Wurm vs Moonicorn game. That image is lost to the sands of time, unfortunately, but just in case you come across this page, I wanted to point to the article I did end up writing.

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I founded the Indie Game Reading Club in 2010. I've written and developed RPGs since the mid-90s, now I mostly talk about playing them.

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22 Comments on “Situation Maps”

  1. Transform Your Gaming With This One Weird Trick
    So I don’t know if you follow small press gaming very closely, but there’s this very clever little game that came out recently y’all should know about. It’s called Apocalypse World. There’s even a second edition of it.
    Right so at…I want to say RinCon this year, a bunch of us aging indienerds were lamenting the fact that good old Apocalypse World never really gets played any more. There is so damned much PbtA hotness swirling around, and indienerds seem to mostly have a thirst for novelty, so the great granddaddy languishes, beloved when we remember to feed him but mostly ignored in the attic.
    I had three strong players and a very early Tuesday game day start (430! Unheard of!), so fuck yeah, let’s throw down.
    I read through second edition when I got my paws on it, kind of skimmed until I ran into obviously new stuff (battle moves, road war), nodded yup yup yup, didn’t really notice the smaller details, the little gestures. Turns out Vincent and Meg Baker packed a lot of small adjustments into the new volume.
    It’s been, jeez, five years or more since I actually ran Apocalypse World. I think my last touch was playing with MadJay Brown​​ at a BigBadCon several years back. The infrastructure of the game is lodged in there tight because I’ve been brining in PbtA juice for years now. But actually playing the new thing again was eye opening.
    Thoughts in bullet point form for your potty reading pleasure:
    * Apocalypse World is an adventure game. AW is far less feels-oriented than many of its excellent offspring. I’d go so far as to say that AW isn’t my favorite iteration of itself! That said, jeez, shit definitely snowballs quickly and brutally. It’s still a master class in compact design! But I was kind of surprised to find that there’s very little ummm emotional manipulation happening with the various economies and incentives.
    * It is the fastest PbtA to deploy. I haven’t played all the PbtAs but I’ve played enough that I feel like I’ve got an informed opinion on this. One thing I’ve seen among the new PbtAs is ever more elaborate pre-game situation setup. Frequently there’s so much (Urban Shadows, Space Wurm vs Moonicorn, Headspace, etc.) that we’ve sold ourselves on this setup-is-play ethic. Especially true whenever I’ve spooled these games out in a con slot: yes yes I’d also rather be playing than setting up, but since that’s not happening let’s at least try to enjoy the prep.
    But this game, jeez. One of my buddies was marveling that we hit the ground running and played hard for four or five hours. The only setup they had to do was the Hx questions, plus my further interrogations, plus some very high-gloss “so where in the country? Four Corners area? Okay great let’s go” type stuff. That was, I want to say, not more than 30 minutes from playbook selection to the first hard frame.
    * So many little changes. Did you notice that help/hinder is different now? I didn’t. It’s a good change! Act Do Something Under Fire’s 7-9 has always been, I think, the moment of heaviest cognitive load in the game, but help/hinder 7-9 was right up there alongside. Now it’s a +/- 1 on a soft hit, or +/- 2 on a hard hit. Excellent, simple, straightforward. It produces less draaaama but it’s also faster handling time.
    Another one: lots of options and ideas for how to interpret Seize by Force. Very welcomed. It’s functionally identical as far as I can tell but now there are explicit ideas of what all you can Seize.
    The new MC worksheet for doodling out the relationship map is very nice. It’s kind of a situation map (smap!), which always excites me. They’ve added a physical component to mapping out the threats (north or south, near or far, internal or external, etc.) which I think very much helps ground the game.
    Oh jeez what else? There are way, way more common moves now — that is, if you count battle moves and road war moves among them. I do. That shit is all pretty frequent (first use of “common”) and everyone has access to them (other use of the word), so, yeah. Common moves. I’ve been auditing my entire PbtA collection for my own purposes and found that 8 or 9 common moves is the typical spread. AW itself has all those and several additional combat moves and road moves. It’s a lot of moves. It felt, in my opinion, foreign and unwieldy. But mostly just because I’m used to 1E.
    The Battle moves are a welcome change in our group, by the by. The old Seize by Force stuff was definitely a speedbump for my people, so expanding on that and offering additional just-kill-em options are good for us.
    The only move subset I’m feeling iffy on is the Tactical & Support set: lay down fire, stand overwatch, keep an eye out. They feel…fussy, maybe. I get that folks who aren’t right in the shit making the actual Seize roll want to feel involved, but tbh I kind of preferred ye olde Help/Hinder for that. Stand overwatch in particular I found hard to implement well. The target takes harm and that’s that? Really? I suppose the counterbalance is that they’re rolling more and therefore risking a miss more. But stand overwatch turned our Battlebabe into an overwatch machine with his +3 Cool. Which meant he reflexively bowed out of being involved in anything but a supporting role. Still deciding how I feel about that.
    * I remember the game having more feels than it does. I don’t know why I remember it different. I can’t point at anything in particular; possibly it’s the Hx questions. Or it’s the fact that my more-favorite iterations (Sagas of the Icelanders, Urban Shadows, Masks) have more gut punches baked in. I didn’t ever really feel the emotional content of our game. Either that or my bandwidth was just being taken up with all the new moves and I didn’t have much brain left over to push buttons.
    * It is ridiculously well tested. I mean, yeah. Obviously there are a zillion committed players and a very active community. And Vincent and Meg are smart as hell. But, like here’s a small example: one of my players took the Battlebabe, I think because he eyeballed the playbook as “better” than the Gunlugger because of the Battlebabe magic (dangerous and sexy). He quickly discovered that the Battlebabe’s secret sauce is that they have to directly confront people: Battlebabe is all about Go Aggro, not Seize By Force. So next up he went for Ice Cold, which lets the Battlebabe swap in Cool for Hard when Going Aggro. Then he earned an advance and went shopping through all the playbooks for a move that’d let him Seize By Force with cool instead of hard. We can’t find it! I don’t think it exists, and thank goodness otherwise you’d have a mechanically boring advancement track for the Battlebabe, who simply ceases to be anything other than cool. He grumbled that the Gunlugger has the opposite effect — swap in hard for cool — and thought it was “unfair.” I was surprised because he’s usually not sensitive to minmaxing, but in this case I think he thought he’d found a useful exploit. But he didn’t, because AW is ridiculously well tested.
    * Wow so many reference sheets. Way way more than before.
    So anyway, yeah. Our particular apocalypse isn’t super inventive and that’s fine: warring biker gangs lurking around southwestern Colorado, battles on the open plains, badass road fights in the mountains, lunatic evil juggalo bikers, a big unwieldy gang for the Chopper, a cool-ass Driver who’s just revealed her homebuilt tank, a louche Battlebabe wandering from hardholder to hardholder looking for the laziest/easiest gig even as a three-way war is bubbling up.

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  5. You know those tv shows where they want to show how unhinged or obsessive someone is, they have the characters stumble upon The Wall.

    You know the one. With all the photos and news clipping and pins linked by a web of string…

    …

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  7. It’s strange that those sorts of “walls” only denote unhinged when the person is an amateur or civilian. You see stuff like that on a policeman’s wall, or an FBI agent’s, and you’re like “Ooh, so there IS a conspiracy!”

    Edit: I actually took a tool that I designed originally to build these sorts of maps and modified it to support Intelligence work I was doing, since the professional tool they had was too expensive, and honestly not flexible enough.

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  10. Jaye Foster awakened AI that took over its own factory facility and incorporated. Secretly. And started selling killbots into the service of Space Wurm.

    Reply

  22. It was my 50th birthday last week, so here are 50
    lessons I’ve learned about roleplaying. Some of them might be short lessons! If
    one of these jumps out as interesting, let me know and I’ll write a longer
    piece about it.

    You can’t fix real-world problems between players in your make-believe space.Enthusiasm will paper over any hiccups you may have about formal procedures.No idea is so great that you can’t rewind and do something different. Ideas are cheap and easy. Play as many different kinds of games as you can to learn more about your favorites.Nothing hits your players harder than reincorporating their ideas in surprising ways.Game designers are usually middling-fair GMs at best, and discovering they’re downright terrible (even at their own games!) should not come as a surprise. Every designer I’ve met is perfectly nice and talented! But actually running a game is a different core competency.Always roll out in the open.Be transparent about your intent, both as a player and a facilitator. If transparency fucks up your game then something weird is probably going on.Streamed games are a related but different activity than games played at home for nobody but you. You can enjoy both separately. When it’s time to spotlight a character, reframe the game situation so they’re clearly, obviously the primary protagonist. Treat every player like a star when it’s their turn.Playing, engaging, evaluating and listening in good faith is a skill worth practicing and mastering.If you want to get better at playing, facilitate more. Feel the freedom of playing your NPCs to lose, and bring that back to your own playing.If you want to get better at facilitating, play more. Feel the constraints around you when you’re a player, and think about how to address those constraints next time you run.Always have a visual focus in the middle of your table is powerful: a map, a prop, a relationship map, anything. Everyone stays more focused on the game when they have something to look at together.Change your seating arrangements to manipulate your social space. I sit at the end of the table when I want to project authority and at a long side when I want to invite collaboration. Break up the players who are thick as thieves. Arrange players to be near who they’re emotionally closest to in the game.To learn a new game: read through, cover to cover, once. Make two different kinds of characters (if it’s that kind of game), without looking up answers to your questions. Read a second time, keeping your unanswered questions in mind. Play the first session. Afterword, read through a third time with actual play context.To understand a game: synopsize the rules for your players in the clearest, shortest cheat sheet possible. Teaching is learning. To master a game, pay attention to: reward cycles (ie what incentives the players receive for various intentional actions), fulfillment cycles (ie what patterns the players complete through play), and the frequency of intermittent rewards (ie random prizes). Sketch it out if you need to. Recognize that not everyone is incentivized by the same things. Advancement and empowerment aren’t the only incentives! Sometimes folks are so surprised when players don’t chase obvious carrots.If you’re the type of gamer who reads blogs like this, or Twitter, or fan communities, or publisher forums, understand that you’re 100x more invested in this activity than anyone who doesn’t. That is, most players. Don’t be disappointed that they’re not up on the latest talk, theory, design, etc.The best part about going to conventions, for me, is being reminded of how good my home game situation is. The creative and social challenge of playing with strangers or friendly acquaintances is fun! But it’s not as consistently good as playing with the folks I know.“I don’t play board games” is the roleplayer’s version of “I don’t watch television” snobbery. Board games are orders of magnitude bigger than all of roleplaying. Indie games are a rounding error under the D&D umbrella. Storygames are a tiny subset of indie gaming. This thing we’re talking about is a fringe of a fringe activity. We have so much to learn from the wider gaming world.The absolute best players you’ll ever have at your table are the ones who have never played before. Old calcified gamers are the literal worst. Deprogramming bad habits is a lot of work.Occasionally recontextualize the abhorrent acts players put their characters through. Go ahead, yes, put this village to the sword. Later, remind them how civilians feel about genocide. Go ahead, yes, tromp around your fantasy village strapped for war. Remind them of how folks react when someone open-carries an assault rifle into a grocery store.Children are part of any believable make-believe world. It is startling how many folks forget this.When you’re facilitating and get creatively fatigued, ask the players for ideas. It’s really okay. You don’t need to be infallible. Everyone knows we’re all just making this stuff up anyway.Do not fucking make fun of anyone’s play. Ever. Don’t draw attention to their inconsistencies, or hand/body/facial gestures, or anything. The magic circle we draw around our game relies on trust. You will have a devil of a time redrawing your magic circle once you’ve lost it. I GM at my best when I start prioritizing good questions over good answers.Good, engaging facilitation is as much about table theatrics as it is about knowing the rules and maintaining pacing. I don’t mean funny voices (please no)! I mean drawing new additions on the relationship map with a flourish, or dramatically dropping a new clock on the table, or quietly placing a sad index card somewhere prominent. Everything a facilitator does is a show.An oldie but a goodie worth repeating: finding the right matches of system, players, and runner is an art. If any of those things is a mismatch, it’s going to be more work. System matters (but it’s not the only thing that matters).Play with as diverse a range of players as you can find: gender, age, culture, disability, anything and everything. Go to conventions if you don’t live in a place conducive to variety and can afford it. Play online if you can’t go to conventions. Challenge yourself and your play will improve, because roleplaying is a fundamentally human activity and being a better human makes you a better player. You’ll make mistakes and that’s okay. Nobody is going to cancel you if you’re playing in good faith.Give folks at least 30 minutes to bullshit before settling down to play. Try to get them gathered early to make that happen.Debriefs after sessions are so important that you’re better off cutting the game short 30 minutes just to fit it in. Probably most of my adjustments and ideas come from debriefing, not the session.Give everyone at your table the explicit privilege to stop the campaign at any time for any reason. Life is too short to be bored, or frustrated, or angry about games……but don’t give up too easily. My biggest gaming regrets always involve stopping a game too soon.No matter how deep in the weeds you get with procedures, no matter how antsy you get to get through a scene or a moment, always ask: what does this look like? The minute you decouple the rules from the fiction, things get weird. Even if the players slip into a planning fugue, ask: where is this taking place? What is going on around you? Grounding everything in the shared fiction enriches everything, even if it takes more time.Tent cards for character names and pronouns, every game, no matter what. Put the names on the back as well so the folks next to you can see too.A break every hour works magic. Not sure why we think we need to muscle through every minute of a session. Take a break, let things percolate in your brain.Unless you’re playing in a morally stark setting (like our current campaign, Band of Blades), villains and heroes are super boring. Anti-heroes are the worst! Relatable people with incompatible goals, that’s where the good stuff is.Don’t run a game when you’re not feeling it. Take breaks. A week or two won’t let the fizz out of the bottle, but if it does then maybe there wasn’t that much fizz to begin with.I used to get really upset about folks fiddling with non-game stuff at the game table (phones, doodles, knitting for crying out loud), but I’ve made peace with the fact that sometimes players need small distractions. Still, check in and make sure they’re still engaged.If I don’t have an RPG in my head – if I’m not thinking about it, chewing on it, obsessing – in a couple weeks I start feeling uncentered. Like the gyroscope of my life has tipped over. Weird! But it’s proven to be true over and over, even when I’m feeling burned out. If I want to generate interpersonal heat or a big reveal, sometimes I’ll just start tossing in topics and ideas that are just adjacent to the characters’ backgrounds, cultures, affiliations, existing relationships, whatever. You don’t need to set up the heat right out of the gate! Once that ingredient is on the table, the table takes over. The heat will reveal itself. The fact you look like a genius who knew what was going to happen all along is a bonus.Bait and switch in RPGs! Just … no. It never works. It doesn’t work out the way you think it will. The players resent it. Don’t hit them where they’re weakest.Players, thank your GM and each other. GMs, thank your players. Recognition is rare but so nice. Splash it around! It’s free!Biggest red flag at new tables: when a player acts squirrelly about the inclusion of sexual relationships as a factor in the game setting. Not even the sex itself! Just repulsion or fear of the idea that fictional characters have intimate relationships.As a player, I find procedure and embodiment are a zero sum game. The more procedurally intense the game, the less embodiment I feel, and vice versa. As a GM I anticipate that behavior from the players as well. Try running sessions of an ongoing campaign with the same intensity as you would a one-shot. Play for keeps! Don’t be afraid to crank the stakes up! Try running one-shots with the same intensity as you would a campaign session. Play for investment and satisfaction! Not every one-shot needs to end in a blood opera!GM from the bottom of the org chart, not the top. You’re there to support your players. Give until it hurts.
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