Yudhishthira’s Dice

Recently I’ve been talking about freeform play in various and sundry places. I’ve also been talking about the construction of story and emotional play in RPGs, and the various ways in which we do them. As part of those discussions I looked at how I set up and structure conflicts as an ongoing part of a game that I am running, and tried to break it down into a procedural format.

The result was something of a step by step that I do when making conflicts part of a story in an RPG. Much of this stuff is not surprising, as its stuff many of us do. Its also not something that should be read as a hard and fast rule, as much of it was intuitive and all of it is always subject to the mode of the game, the mood at the table, and the specific things I want from a scene. It also is not a check list for running every style of game. (Duh!)

For the general type of emo-porn-metal game that I usually run, this is a basic checklist of what I do to run a conflict:

1. Have an idea of a meta-level conflict or situation. This is the big conflict of the game, story arc, novel, or season. From a Buffy Big-Bad to passing final judgment on the humanity of your own character in Dogs, this is the thing that you know you’re going to get to eventually, but aren’t going to get to immediately.

Some games have systems to do this. Burning Empires, for example, specifically sets up the Human vs. Alien arcs, and breaks them down into segments. You know that the issue is going to get dealt with, and you even know the general pacing of how its going to go.

Other games do this on a more moderate level. Trollbabe, for example, has stakes and consequences for any given story, giving something that gives a coherent focus to the whole story across multiple smaller conflicts. It also has the overall but subtle arc of troll vs. human, and the very real possibility that if you play a long enough game you will end up deciding the fate of one or both races.

The real point here is to have a chronic level issue, problem, or focus that keeps the game together as we in play focus heavily on the moment to moment acute conflicts. Most conflicts in a larger narrative scale don’t resolve instantly, and so having an idea of a large level conflict based on the situation is an important place to start.

In recent games the meta level conflicts I’ve done have been: Expose the conspiracy of serpents while figuring out who you want to be with; find your place in the life you lost and figure out if you really want to kill the mirror or yourself; stop the Titans from taking over the world; face the end of the glory of the Caliphate; rearrange the metaphysical nature of the world so that women have equal rights with men; and decide which of the perverted cults is going to become the new True Church.

2. Set the Stage and Foreshadow: From the earliest moment in the game there should be something that gives a general, lose finger pointing at the moon idea of the big threat of the game. This can be anything from the way that a Dog’s initiation conflict gets you to start thinking about who your character is and how they deal with violence to having your village raided by outriders of the orc army that is going to crush all human civilization. The point is that very early on you establish that there is something going on in the background, an arc that you’ll deal with over time, but without making that arc the main focus of conflict right now.

Its worth noting that in games where groups create situations, rather than just the GM creating it, a lot of the foreshadowing starts during the set up of the game. For some groups that out of fiction knowledge is enough. I find that I like to have an early scene in the game to bring it on stage, however. I like everyone knowing about the situation OOC, but until there is something that happens in the fiction, on screen, or however else you want to put it, its ephemeral and unreal. I have to put it on stage before I care about it.

In an Unknown Armies game I’ve been running for a long time, the very first scene of the game set this up (along with some other plot issues). The game was about Flying Women and feminism, and in the first scene of the game we have a professor lecturing the class and the female PC sitting with her lab partner male NPC. When the PC answers questions the professor ignores her, and then praises the male lab partner when he repeats the exact same answers. Whatever the PC does about the professor is fine, because the point is that there is a bigger problem than this jerk, and that problem is going to be an ongoing issue.

3. Show why the issues matter. This is where we start to put a human face and emotional investment into the issues of the game. Its the point at which we see that the princess actually loves the knight, acted out on stage before us. This is where we’re going to learn not just about why we care in general, but why we actually emotionally start investing into characters. (This often goes hand in hand with foreshadowing, but can be played separately so I’m going to list it separately.)

This is where scenes that don’t necessarily have conflicts at all, or only have soft conflicts, are important. There don’t have to be no conflicts at all, but they shouldn’t be about the most important thing, they should be about establishing details and furthering the demonstration of what is at stake.

For example, in the Thou Art But a Warrior playtest I played with Anna, we knew going in that the meta conflict of the game was the fall of the Caliphate. (That’s what the game was about.) We also knew that the Emir’s daughter was going to be at the heart of the conflict, both for being a princess and for being a named character on multiple PC’s sheets. So the very first scene we did I asked for Anna and Kitt to give us a scene in which we see the love between the princess and the brave knight, and then swept my asshole knight and the evil Imam into the scene on the heals of it. So now we’ve got a finger pointing towards the love, lust, jealousy, and betrayal at the heart of the court that is going to be part of the fall. We also have the main characters on stage, and have actually seen them being in love and being jerks, rather than just knowing that they are because we set them up to be.

Yes, this does number 2 and 3 at the same time. Yay us! In the Unknown Armies game I mentioned above, I was actually a little weak here. It wasn’t until much later in the game that the importance of women being overlooked in class came more directly on stage. We foreshadowed the ongoing conflict well, but we didn’t do the greatest job in that scene of showing why it mattered, or why we should deeply care. Luckily we got into that pretty quickly there after.

4. Introduce an acute conflict. Now that we’ve got characters on stage, have some idea of why we should give a crap about them, and know the general direction that things are going to be heading in the game, we can start making the character’s lives hard. This is where we start to push, to block, to make things hard, to make the characters fight and adventure and reveal themselves.

The first time you do this, this should be a pretty modest conflict. You’re not going to get the final moral statement of a Dog’s career in the first conflict, nor are you going to defeat Chronos in your first fight. This conflict is the one that is going to act as a the baseline from which other conflicts can build, the conflict from which you can say “yes, but what about now?” in future conflicts. So make it fun and make it count, but don’t blow it all first thing out the door.

Every time you do this after the first, you should be thinking about the other conflicts in the game, the direction of the meta issues, and if you need to repeat a past conflict with more intensity, or start a whole new kind of conflict to test a different issue or have a different kind of coolness.

Examples from games I’ve done recently include: Having hell hounds, which looked like big dogs at first, attack the characters; making a group of Dogs decide whether or not they were going to cut a hanging girl down; having the hot-headed swashbuckler get in a fight when he’s outnumbered; bringing the mayor home to find her drunken husband embarrassing her in front of important political guests; and about a million more. This level, alone, is really easy. I’m sure you can all think of 1 billion examples.

5. Complicate the conflict. (Optional, but usually recommended). Just when it looks like the conflict is going to be easy, add a twist in. Maybe the conflict is about more than it looked like at first. Maybe it turns out the guy you were sent to kill is an old friend, or maybe he’s a crazy 13th level Knight of the Purple Dragon, or maybe you fall down and drop your sword, or whatever. It works especially well if you can make the twist be something in thematic keeping with the overall meta issues, or with a previous or future conflict (more foreshadowing).

A lot of games with good mechanical systems will get the mechanics to do a lot of this for you — Trollbabe conflict resolution and re-rolls, special templates or powers in D&D, critical fumble tables in Rolemaster. All of these exist to give the conflict something more than you expected, or harder than you expected, that happens and suddenly things are moving in real time.

Note that sometimes its enough to let a simple acute conflict resolve. When it feels like its enough, then skip this step.

6. Resolve the acute conflict. Figure out what happens, here and now. If you’ve got conflict resolution rules use em, if not, do your thing. This step is probably worth a flowchart of its own, and really it is here that many, many games “conflict resolution” lives. Some games (Trollbabe, Beast Hunters, maybe Afraid) combine this and the above step, some don’t. Some games don’t have a conflict resolution at all, but have a system of some sort that lets the players figure out who lives, who dies, and who cares. However, this is the level that most RPGers already know pretty damn well how to do, so I’m going to leave it at that.

7. Show what the conflict has changed, in human terms. After big tense conflicts this is the place where we have a softer scene. Much like the scenes way up in scene 3, this is where we’re going to deal with the human, emotional levels where the characters live. We know who won and who lost and how hurt they got, what the fallout was. But how is that going to hit the rest of the people on stage? Will the princess still love the knight after he was felled from his horse? What does it mean if our Dog just ran from her first conflict and doesn’t think she’s worthy of being a Dog anymore?

In some games you can have a whole chain of conflicts before you get to this point. For example, in Dogs in the Vineyard you might have a conflict, a follow up, and a follow up to that before you get to a break in the constant shooting in the face. That’s fine, as that’s just cycling through steps 4-6 a couple of times before you get here and this is what happens when the whole chain reaction cycle of current moment current level conflicts is finished. This scene will probably happen eventually, however, as without it there is real risk of the story being full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Some examples of this from games I’ve played is: Having the Steward come talk to the Dog about why she ran away; getting the PC to talk to a shrink about the gunfight she was just in and why she shot her professor in the face (”because it was where his mouth was” she answers); having the princess left alone in the room with the man she loved to deal with each other now that she’s seen him murder someone; and blocking out a scene where the PC sat amid the wreckage of his life and wrote a song about how all the sex means nothing when you’re left alone with broken bottles and blood stains at the end of it all.

8. Follow up, follow through, and expand. We’re going to head back to step 4 soon, but we’re also going to do a little bit more than just start a new conflict. We’re going to place that conflict into the context of what has gone before and where we want to head. What I do here is start to develop a cycle of conflict, to deal with things on the same level of the old acute conflict but exploring outwards, into new territory.

This can be new thematic territory or it can be literally new territory as the world is revealed. Either way, this is a step more than just cycling back to 4 to do an immediate follow up conflict, but a little bit less then pushing the whole game to a new higher level of conflict like we’re going to do in step 9. What I’m really doing here is making sure this current plateau is sufficiently alive, sufficiently fleshed out before I go on to bigger and meaner things. You aren’t there yet, but you’re setting up to be and letting the players all get the sense of anticipation about what is going to come next.

There is a way that I often think about this when doing games based around theme rather than challenge or verisimilitude, that Mo calls the thematic tension cycle. It works constantly in the background of all steps of the process, but tends to come most to my attention at this step. So its right here that I’ll break it down, despite the fact that its happening all over the place.

• Thematic Declaration: This is what we did back in steps 1 to 4 the first time around. The PC make their initial stand, they’ve shown the first signs of what they believe. If any character hasn’t done this, they need a conflict or median scene where they get a chance to do so. So I’ll cycle back to 3 to 7 until everyone has made their declaration, shown what their character believes, stands for, or pursues.
• Thematic Reinforcement: This is when you reinforce that a character or scene or issue really is dedicated to a certain stance, theme, or goal. This is where you fight the titan spawn again to show that you’re dedicated to the war, or swear an oath to stop the orc invasion you’d already fought against by accident, or fight for another woman’s rights like you just fought for your own.
• Thematic Support: This is the kind of scene where a player’s choices get rewarded, reinforced, or highlighted by the world for the choices they’ve made. Their protagonist role gets underlined. This is where the whole village starts to come together because of your leadership against the orcs, or where a woman you used to help learn to read is now going to get her high school diploma, or where Zeus gives you the Aegis for your fight against the hellhounds. These types of scenes tend to go well into the humanizing scenes from step 7, but can be the seeds of new conflicts pretty easily.
• Thematic Opposition: Here you start to challenge the nature of the stances that characters have taken, to make issues problematic, to introduce conflicts that show the motivations (and possibly even nobility) of the enemy or the corruption of the ally. This, in a real way, is the “okay, so you fought for it then when it was easy, but what about now when its all getting hazy and the lines aren’t so clear anymore?” scene. It also often makes a good place to bridge to step 9 and some escalation, but it can happen just as well without. Some examples include: Facing the orc shaman who tells you that your people drove them out of their lands with great slaughter two hundred years ago; finding out that the man you’re after for killing a woman had good reason to kill her; finding out you could overthrow Zeus and replace him as a god yourself.

(I do not know for sure, but suspect these might have parallels in other creative agendas — for example the occasional “gimme” conflict in a gamist game where the point is not a huge test, but to demonstrate how bad ass the character is. I’m sure you can figure out your own things here.)

Anyway, by looking at what kinds of thematic scenes I’ve already done at the current level of intensity and past levels of intensity, I know the basic kinds of things I want to provoke from more scenes. And if I think that enough has been done at this level, then we move on to step 9.

9. Escalate and Intensify. This is the point at which you start stepping up the conflict on the road towards that meta-level situation you started out with way back at step 1. Where you’ve been fighting hell hounds you’re now starting to face off with demi-gods, where you’ve been fighting orc bands with your village you’re now fighting companies with your own troops, where you’ve been having to question your love of the princess you now have to decide to save her or save your mother, and where you’ve been judging sinners you now have to judge another Dog.

Make the new conflict escalate or progress from the old. This can be a harder challenge (gamist), a deeper creation of world (sim), or the “yes, but what about now” (nar) or just “well you’ve fought an imp, but can you fight a full demon” type of bigger (gonzo) — but it should push forward and be a “bigger” conflict than the one before it. It can also be a “move the story forward” type of conflict, where now that the local boss is gone the characters have a chance to learn about the regional level boss, or whatever.

In general I like to go back to step 3 at this point, and show why the escalation matters. After that when I hit 4 again, I’m going back deeper, nastier, and wider in scale, scope, or human trauma. Many games have this type of thing preset to some level. Like in D&D we all know that when you hit level 15 or so you’re suddenly facing the kinds of things that would have been a total party kill at level 10; or in Trollbabe when you move the conflict from Group to Kingdom you know the size and scale of your next adventure is going to be huge. Games like Dogs do this when each town pushes your issues a little harder than the last town, which is less hard coded but just as effective*.

10. Bring it on home. Eventually as you hit step 9 again and again and get a little bigger and badder every time, you’re going to end up at a level where your conflicts are synonymous with the meta conflict you started out with in step 1. Once that happens you’ve hit endgame. Pull out the stops, drive everything and every lose end towards Apocalypse, and bring the story arc to a close with a purgation of terror and sympathy.

Then if you want to play with the same characters or the same setting again, cool. You’ve told one full long arc story (like a novel or a season of a TV show, probably) filled with shorter chapters. You can walk away now, or go back and start at step 1 again. In the new novel, or new season, everyone is going to have new thematic stances and new meta level conflicts. But this time you’ll have an even deeper understanding of the characters, so rock out.

And there you have it. Noting new or revolutionary, just a step by step breakdown of what is in practice a far more organic process. I do find, however, that having broken it down for myself this way has been helpful, as it lets me be a little more mindful of what I’m doing, to ask myself questions such as “should I be escalating now, or doing some reinforcement?” and such. Even if this method doesn’t work for you, I think taking some time to figure out how it is that your brain organizes story and narrative development is worth it. The unexamined game, as they say, is not worth playing.

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*Its worth noting that I don’t do all of these in all games as well. In Dogs I usually don’t foreshadow as much (or at all) because the players are more in control of the pacing. However, even then I will push for stakes that replicate some element of this flow chart — like if it is the Dog’s first interaction with a given character I will usually drive for small stakes around the line of “get X to feel Y” or “get X to confess Y” or something like that. This does the same thing, in practice, as step 2 and 3 — it shows the building relationship between the characters, gives a greater context for how they fit together and what both have at stake in regards to each other and the town, and gives more meaning and context to the bigger conflicts to come. The rest of the cycle works slightly differently, but in a pretty similar order, just by following the rules of Dogs.

I wrote this for Church and State, and then used parts of it for commentary in PUSH: New Thinking About Roleplaying. Since then I’ve had several querries and comments about it, so I thought I’d put the whole thing up. Maybe the “Gaming Dummy” will become a regularly monthly column — I could easily see various articles on history, rhetoric, religion, and such being useful to folks and I do know plenty of otherwise useless trivia.

Anyway, Marxism for Gaming Dummies:

A lot of us Swine are a trash talking college boys whove gotten more education than was good for us, and promptly started spouting things about how the “dominant hegemony imposes consumer fetishes through the pseudo-individualism of post-modernist para-texts.” Now that’s all well and good for people who spent too much time in culture theory classes sucking up to the teacher, but for those who want to make their NPCs speak intelligently without having to take a class on Neo-Marxism, this section presents a few names and terms that you can drop into their dialogue to give it that authentic pseudo-intellectual stink. By dropping the following names and terms into his ranting, you can make your players think you too are one of the Marxist l33t.

Cultural Determination: The basis of many Marxist arguments is that there is no inherent human nature. Rather man creates the world he lives in, and that world in turn shapes the nature of man. So if we create a society based on greed, then people will be greedy. But if we can break the vicious circle and make a culture based on cooperation, then people will become cooperative.

Marx: The grandfather of Marxist theory (bet you couldn’t guess), Marx argued that our culture is driven by greed and the desire for material wealth and that the dominant society makes an ideology to legitimate their domination. In other words, everyone wants lots of stuff, just for themselves, and the rich make up rules that let them have the most stuff.

Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: The iron fist is the obvious methods of physical control — the police, military, and the courts. The velvet glove is the more subtle methods of mind control — such as media, education, and the church. Althusser is the name most associated with the use of this term.

Culture Industry: This theory says that mass-media (movies, radio, television) are all part of the velvet glove, which make the masses (that’s us) stay happy, sappy, and pliable while bilking us of all our money. So every time you go to the movies The Man programs you, makes sure you stay happy and in control, and takes your money at the same time. This to leads pseudo-individualism, which is what happens when people start defining themselves by the mass market. So if you think you’ve got a real personality because you like Eminem and not The Backstreet Boys, then you’re really just a pseudo-individual. Adorno is the name to toss when talking this talk.

Hegemony: The process of control and education that makes people see the current power structure as not only right, but as a matter of common sense. So people not only think that Bill Gates really deserves to have 32 billion dollars, but that there is no other possible way the world could work if people couldn’t get that rich. Gramsci is the name that you must drop to give this word some theoretical respectability.

Structuration: Theory that the repeated acts of individuals are what create social structure, and that social structure then reinforces the acts of individuals. This stance also says individuals can make a change simply by not repeating the actions that shape society. So if you want to change the world, you start by changing yourself and your relation to the culture around you and it will inevitably lead to social change. Giddens, who isn’t really a Marxist, is the big name behind this little theory.

I’ve always been a big one for soundtracks in game. The addition of music adds another level of sense and verisimilitude that is most helpful to my gaming. However, it also took me a long time to work out the way I wanted to use soundtracks and to make them actually work in game. My early attempts were often rough, overly controlled, required constant fidgeting, and often ended up distracting from the game as much as they helped. The magic combination to make it work consisted of the following:

1) Player generated songlists. In early attempts I picked and arranged all the songs myself. That worked really well for me, but less well for the game. Now days, at the very least, I have each player select two to three themesongs or highlight tracks for their character. These will then form the core of the soundtrack, and everything else will be built thematically off of them. The cool thing about it is that this can help generate investment and interest in the game and each other’s characters before play even starts, and keeps a background audio-cue for each of the characters “things” in the air around the table.

2) The right technology. Early attempts at soundtracks were done with cassets or audio-CDs in a single disk player. This resulted in lots of shuffling. Attempts to run it off of a computer were more successful, but often lead to to much fiddling, and/or computer shit getting in the way. These days I use burned MP3 CDs, which can hold hours upon hours of song (so you’ll never run out and never have to repeat the same hour of music in an endless cycle), and run it from a DVD player with a nice remote that lets me shuffle through without having to fiddle.

3) Correct Organization. These days I break down the very, very long playlists into folders. How I organize the folders depends on the game, but the general breakdown is “core songs” and then a few theme folders (”friendship” or “the violence that men do”) and then some more generic folders (”easy listening” and “sad”). That way when I hit a scene with a particular mood or theme I can easily flip to the folder and pick a good start up song (usually as part of scene framing), and then let the rest play without worrying about “Highway to Hell” coming up during the touching Romantic break up.

4) Volume control. Too much noise and you can’t hear each other speak, too little and you can’t hear the sound. Finding the right level (which I can now do without looking at the stereo) is a real trick, and really important. Having a surround sound system helped with this one — as there are speakers at all points of the room, and so the sound level can be individually customized to each person. The old days of one speaker blasting from one corner of the room were tougher.

5) Work it in with scene framing. I talked about this a little above, but these days I always think up a song as I’m framing a scene, and put it on to reinforce the scene’s start up. Games with longer scenes with less direction are harder to soundtrack, but any game done in a TV or movie style is pretty easy to work with. Similarly, while people are doing game stuff — figuring stats, rolling dice, whatever — I’ll often have a moment to flip to a new track, as I tend to be the fastest of the fast about that.

6) Breadth of Choice. These days I listen to a lot more music than I used to. I listen to movie and TV soundtracks, street stuff that I buy from guys dealing on the subway platform, random stuff from pandora.com, and music recommended by friends that might not be my normal playlist type material to see what catches a specific mood, tone, or feeling. Having something other than Rage Against the Machine and the Violent Femmes is very helpful to rounding out your soundtrack.

So there it is, no big tricks, but things that have turned soundtracks from an occasional and sometimes annoying trick into an easy, fun part of my games.

Today I’ve got very little worth posting. I’m working on Tribe 8 TSOY and an Exalted Hack, but neither is going to be done in one day, and I don’t want to post them in parts. That’s cheating, and not the good kind. So, I thought up two tiny little tricks that I use for verisimilitude in games that some people might get millage out of.

The first is simple: I title every episode or story arc of a game. Especially any game that’s set up like a graphic novel or tv-show. Doing this helps give a focus and an idea of whats going down with the session/story. It helps me generate bangs and come up with cool ideas as I change the title in and out of what I’m dreaming about. And when I tell the players the title of the episode it helps set the stage and communicate a lot of what I’m going for with the game.

Most of the time we end up retitling the episode in retrospect, to fit more with what happened then with what we thought might happen. That’s fun too, and gives a one line record of the history of the game just by looking at the titles we ended up with.

The second is a trick I use for any game that has multiple cultures, deep backgrounds of history, or a multicultural slant, and is just about as simple. Before the game starts, when the group is doing world generation to whatever degree of specificness we’re going to do, we set touchstone languages and naming conventions for each group or language in the game. We then use those conventions to come up with names, ranks, words, titles, and whatever. Often these are based on real world examples, but it works just as well to make up your own (brief, hopefully) rules.

For example, in the Exalted game we last set up, in a lost land deep in the south, we decided that all our Old Realm would be based on Sanskrit, our High Realm on Middle Persian, our Low Realm on Urdu, and the Flametongue on Arabic. We then hit Wikipedia and the Onomastikon and named and titled our characters, setting, and important NPCs.

Not only does doing this give folks from each culture and saying from each language the ring of authenticity, over the course of the game you find yourself getting a sense of the conventions you’ve set, and that lets you instantly communicate a lot of information in a subtle way. You know instantly, for example, what it means when your new servant calls you Raja instead of Badshah.

So there you go, two small tricks that have given me a lot of use in game.

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P.S. You are all cowards too. Chickening out of doing the sex and love survey. Feh upon you.

Valentines day, and everyone in North America is thinking about love and sex despite the fact that its colder than frigid hells outside. As I’m a pathetically brainwashed member of my culture, the day makes me think all sorts of thoughts about love and sex; and as I’m a total geek job, some of those turn to RPGing.

But rather than post my meandering speculations, I thought I’d turn it over to y’all for a bit. If you wouldn’t mind, I would love some answers to the following questions:

1) Do love/romance/sex (any or all, be specific) happen in your games? With what regularity?

2) Do they happen on screen or off? Does it depend on the graphicness?

3) What is the best experience you’ve ever had with this type of thing in game?

4) The worst?

5) What techniques does your group have to deal with this? Lines? Veils? Bluebooking? No One Gets Hurt?

6a) If you don’t have much love/sex in your games, what would it take to make you comfortable having it?

6b) If you have love/sex in all your games, would you be happy playing in a game in which the subject never came up at all?

7) Do you think the composition of your group has anything to do with your answers? What about the medium in which you play? The rules set you play with?

Answers please, even if short! I’ll post my own answers in the comments.

Troy recently started a Story Games thread about awesome-o-fying polytheism in RPGs, and its well worth checking out. One of the things this thread got me thinking was about the structuralistic model that RPGs usually use to model religions, and the way that makes RPG religions have very little resemblance to real life religions or belief structures.

To decode that: what I’m saying is that in most RPG religions we get these shell-like structures of belief that are very codified and specific, treating the religion, its gods and beliefs as a structural thing rather than a collection of doctrines, beliefs, cultural mores, and most importantly of all — individuals. There are ever so many reasons for this, from the Victorian and early modern structuralist and world religion models of religious studies, to the scientific and semi-rationalist viewpoint used to explain religion in most RPGs. However, I think the biggest reason for it in our field is that this structuralist view point makes it easy to understand the world in large-scale terms from a top-down, outside perspective. It’s easy to make a world where there are guys A and they believe 1, and guys B who believe 2. It’s easy to read about and see the overall structure of such a world as well. And since we often approach RPGs through a created setting (because even historical games have a created setting) we think of religion in the terms of that large-scale creation.

There are, however, a few games that have done things in a different way. HeroQuest/Glorantha leaps immediately to mind as a game in which, while there are “shell layers” on top, once you get into the setting all the rationalistic external structures turn out to be far more complex, contradictory, and relativistic than they do in most RPG settings. There are two clear reasons for this: one, that’s what Greg wanted the world to be, and two, lots of the world was created through play or the focus of a few characters rather than top down as one unified monolith of setting. Because of that Glorantha has a far murkier relationship to pantheons and polytheism — even a Lunar might have a spirit bracelet that isn’t part of the Lunar religion, and who knows whose gods are going to be on top of the spirit world today?

The problem that a lot of folks have with this kind of world is that it feels messy and hard to quantify. If people are believing this and that, when the other folks believe that and thus, and the gods are beings that you can go visit, but your perceptions of them may or may not be subjective — how the hell do you get a grip on what the world looks and feels like? Glorantha at least has its different worlds of magic to give some order to it, but if you’re trying to build a game based on the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East, how the hell are you going to quantify and structuralize those beliefs without choking them? And if you don’t structuralize, how do you get the world across to players in a way usable in game?

The answer that came to mind today, and I’m sure its just one possible answer, is that you don’t really try to understand the whole world as one big monolith from an exterior POV. You approach it from inside, in terms of “what does this guy want and believe.” This guy can be your PC, an important NPC that you’re building a plot or R-Map around, or even the charismatic prophet of the religion. You take it as a world that no one knows the truth about, and in which the various agendas of cultural background, wealth and poverty, personal need and ambition, tradition and reverence, all influence each and every person on what they personally believe.

Thus rather than saying, “Zoroastrians believe in Ahura Mazda, and he is Zoroastrian therefore he worships Ahura Mazda and none other” you say, “This guy is a born Magi, and wants to get a place in court. His arch rival is a Babylonian priest, and so he wants to demonize other gods in order to secure his own position.” Give everyone else in the court reasons to believe one, both, or neither of the priests, and let the action start.

Even if you’re at a higher level, of really interacting with the gods, all you have to do is assume a little subjecitivism and you can still make this kind of thing work. Moses may have spoken to God directly, but every religion, group of belief, and many individuals all believe different things about Moses, have different recordings of his words, and so on. Hell, even Moses himself occasionally had problems figuring out exactly what God wanted. Through a glass darkly and all that. And thats in a paradigm with one God. Sometimes, except when it isn’t.

The short of it: focusing on what individuals in the game want rather than trying to make the world as a whole make sense from an external POV is a good way to build an awesome, personally relevant, and awesome polytheistic world. And that should work even when “this guys” happens to be one of the gods.

Good description adds a lot to RPGs. While not everyone needs good descriptions of people, places, or actions to make their RPing experience, for a lot of us good, dynamic narration adds color that is almost necessary to getting what we want. The thing about description is that getting it right can be brutally hard, especially when you’re trying to generate it on the fly. There have been several articles with various advice and craft bits written about the subject, including things like the famous Rule of Three and having tags for characters and scenes ready to go.

Those techniques are all good things, and worth reading about, but today I’m going to give some advice on the area by talking about using the conventions, language, and genre marks of other mediums to help give focus to description and narration in RPGs.

One of the problems that I see a lot of folks struggling to come up with description at the table having is that they don’t have a media focus to hang their description about. I mean, they may have character attributes, tags, and rules of three — and those always help — but when it comes time to put those things in motion there is often a lot of stuttering as we try to get our cool cliffhanging moment to come off just so. Very often this is because while the person knows what they are trying to describe, they get caught by not have definite and clear ideas of how they should describe it. How to get the momentum of a warrior leaping at another with sword drawn across quickly and powerfully? How to set up your description so that it shows only the most important elements, while not conjuring a poorly drawn sketch in the middle of a white room? And maybe most importantly, what recurring tropes can you use to make a virtual visual language that others at the table will understand?

I have had great success in getting past this, and helping others get past it, by co-opting conventions for various other media in order to give a focus to the descriptions in an RPG. Before each game starts up I’ll say, “This game is a graphic novel” or “this game is a movie” or “this game is a western novel.” From then on in the game all the players focus their descriptions through the lens of that medium of presentation. The results are that people have a better, more tangible ability to focus the contents of their minds eye and to develop a shared language to convey the meaning behind the description by using tropes we all already know.

One of the most common methods of doing this is the movie, or cinematographic description. Lots of us already do this, I’m sure, it’s just a matter of how constantly and consciously we do it. In cinematographic description there is a lot of focus on what it would look like if the current action was in a movie. You talk about the camera, the angle of the shot, the close up and the zoom, and generally talk it up like you were a cinematographer shooting a film. Some examples of this from games I’ve played recently include:

The camera starts close in on Arjuna’s face, showing the blank anger building there, and then moves up in a crane shot, sweeping out over the surrounding street, showing the people scrambling back to their feet and emptying into every allyway and doorway in order to get out of the line of fire. The camera keeps pulling up until it shows Arjuna alone in the middle of an empty street, his only company being the bullet holes and burning trash spilled from the blown-over garbage can.

Or

Gyle steps up into center screen and starts to raise the Staff of the Deliberative above her head. Then there is a sudden cut-shot to a nearby grove, where the camera lingers for a second on the breeze blowing silent through peach trees. Suddenly a group of birds is startled from a branch, and then the background goes up in a giant flare that blinds the camera, sending everything white from the intensity of the light. The flare clears to show the birds falling to the ground, dead or blind, from the fury of the anima flare released over a mile away.

How technical you want to get depends a lot on your group. Primetime Adventures has an excellent section on cinematography and technical terms that really gives some excellent joint vocabulary for this sort of thing. Things like “rack focus” (having two elements in a shot, one in the background and one in the foreground, with one in focus until the camera shifts to the other during the scene) and “tracking shots” (where the camera follows one character as they move) can give some awesome tools. And because they are familiar tools to us from every TV show and movie we’ve ever watched, they also already have some implied meaning and joint understanding in our heads.

Another mode of description focus I’ve had a lot of luck with is the graphic novel or comic book setup. By using a series of static, iconic shots, packed together closely or loosely to show passage of time, and by referring to things like gutters, panel sizes, figure blur, sequential or parallel stills, and other comic book tricks you can quickly develop a vocabulary that helps center and focus description. It also has the advantage of drawing on a visual language that a lot of folks already understand. For example, again from AP:

In the first panel, a long thin one across the top of the page, there is a shot of DJ and Johnny sitting in the middle of a green park lawn, partly under the shade of an oak tree, with a blanket and basket full of food in between them. Then there are two shorter pannels underneath it of the sun overhead and birds flying by, then one of folks on bicycles riding past on a nearby path. Finally there is another long panel below those with DJ lying in Jonny’s arms on the now empty blanket with the shadow of the oak tree on the other side of them.

Neat how tightly that shows the passage of time, the idle afternoon picknick in the park, and the characters starting with some distance between them and getting closer until they’re back in each other’s arms and hearts in a pretty short bit of narration, isn’t it? I also liked:

The frame is set so that it only shows half of Janus’s face, with the heavy inked shading making him look tired and warn, and mostly obscured by shadows. He’s facing into the window, and his reflection looks back at him from the other side of the panel in highlights against the black background, like a negative of his actual face. The reflection is smirking at him, with teeth made of the lights of the city beyond.

Graphic novel focus also is helpful to people who can describe a single image well, but who have trouble describing the full range of motion, or get stuck on unimportant details trying to get to the important issue. I’ve had a lot of players who aren’t really into the violence in real life who used to have a hell of a time describing fight scenes because they’d get stuck on the details of how they got from dramatic moment to dramatic moment. But let them frame it as a panel, or series of panels, in which they only show the most important moments, and they’ll rush right into it.

Of course, that brevity is also a key feature of graphic novel focused description in an RPG. Getting to the point, making it in an iconic way, and then moving forward without delay are all key elements in graphic novels and comic books — you don’t mess about a lot with a thousand pictures of one thing. So when you have a group that wants to move and move quickly, while still having detail and focus to their description, this kind of focus can help a lot.

If you’re not a big graphic novel reader, and want to understand more about how this mode works, I highly recommend Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud. Getting my players to read that has lead to some phenomenal increase in communication through description at our table.

I’ve had others tell me that adopting a literary style for their description helps their group focus in similar ways to the recommendations I gave above. I have to admit that I’ve had good success with literary tropes in online games where everyone is typing their responses and has time to think about them. It allows for a depth and nuance that you just can’t get with the more compressed forms above. However, I haven’t had good luck with it around the table, as that type of composition requires a time and nuance that doesn’t do well with live improv nearly so well as with written communications. If anyone has any tricks to share about using the pacing and descriptive tropes of your favorite novels, however, I’d love to hear them.

Obviously different styles are going to work better for different groups. However, I’ve always found that focusing your description through a particular lens results in better, faster, tighter narration than if you try to narrate the whole of the naturalistic world of your creation.

The inemitable Levi Kornelsen has opened a new forum for the discussion of RPG craft and play, called GameCraft.

Normally I don’t post much about forums, due to my mixed relations with them. However I felt this one worth giving a shout out to due to its mission statement of being specifically focused on refining play. It’s not the place where you talk about theory, its not the place where you talk about Exalted canon NPCs, its the place where you talk about ways to make the actual games you actually play better.

It’s a noble goal, and I wish it well. Check it out, even if the other forums aren’t hitting your buttons this one may have a chance to give you something valuable.

While writing this article I realized I was going to have to split it into multiple parts: dealing with solo games and the ways they work differently than group games and dealing with ways to work through that, looking at no-GM head to head games, and dealing with how to mainstream RPGs, specifically solo RPGs. If I cross over in this post, I hope you can forgive me, I’m still working on sorting it out.

Anyway, at this point in my RPGing life I’ve logged a significant number of hours in solo-player RPGs, and I am going to focus on them in this game. GM-less head to head games such as the awesome Breaking the Ice and the very interesting Operation Foole will be in the next post (or the post after that, this is getting long).

These are some of the issues that I have noticed with playing solo games, how they differ from group games, the ways that traditional RPG structure fails to fully support and maximize the solo experience, and some ideas for ways to start fixing that. Some of what I say will be in the “yes, that’s fucking obvious” category. This is because I am trying to get as much possible out and said, so that real analysis and work can build up around it. When you’re making cake you get out all of your ingredients, even the obvious flour.

Competence Issues: When running a solo game with a traditional “PC adventure and struggle” setup, one must always be aware of the limitations of the single protagonist. In a typical group RPG there is often a wide variety of skills between the PCs. A lot of games even build heavily upon this by enforcing or encouraging niche protection: what one PC can do the others can’t, and so no one character can hope to do everything. You then toss lots of different challenges at them, allowing each character in turn to shine (or at least have a chance to). The problem with this is that when you play with a single character you don’t have that range of abilities, and so the “lots of different challenges” can become a death trap real quick.

There are several ways around this. Increasing PC competence so that they can be either a jack or master of all trades is a common suggestion. Downplaying challenges so that they are easier is another. Focusing the game specifically on the abilities the PC has is a third. Not making the game about adventure and meeting goal based challenges is the usual nar-based advice. And I’m going to add troupe character play to the list. (Feel free to chip in with any that I missed.)

The issue is that all of these changes come with baggage. First up, increasing PC competence often requires some changes to the character generation system of the game. When I ran 7th Sea in a solo game with my wife I quickly found that I had to alter not just the number of points given to make her character with, but the interaction of some of the mechanics in order to make a character that could deliver the play experience that she wanted. Elements of the game that work well for niche-protection play suddenly became a handicap and a burden, and had to be reworked or jettisoned. I was, obviously, able to do the work — but the whole “you can change it so its okay” isn’t good enough here. I don’t want to look at things you can make do with, I want to focus on ways to make things work well.

This type of character can work well for a lot of stories. Anything pulpy, for example, often works better with the single PC than the group, because most of the pulp heroes where one man shows and master of all trades bad asses on their own. Remember all the times that Conan relied upon his thief to sneak past the guards? No? Or when Batman had to get his tough friend to help him beat up some thugs because he was a brain who could invent but not fight? No? That’s because they didn’t. The problem, of course, is that you can’t just make a master of everything if you’re doing a game in which you don’t want pulp or superheroic PCs. The very real tension of the “little man using what he has to overcome the big challenge” can go out the window if what he has is everything.

Second, downplaying challenges, can be a horrid mistake in many circumstances. First off is the “missing the point” challenge type that a mere reduction of does not remove the fundamental problem with. In 99% of the group RPGs I have ever played, no matter how focus on politics and social interaction and whatever, there has been one member of the group who was at least competent with violence. Thus the old RPG standby of “two guys with guns coming through the door” will result in some boom boom, and one of the players can deal with it in the violent way. In a single player game, however, simply reducing it to one guy coming through the door may not be enough — if the one player has no violence ability then they have no violence ability. There is no one else to cover for them.

The other issue with downplaying challenges is that a lot of players can tell when they’re being soft-shoed, and they don’t like it. This is a particularly sim concern, I’m sure, but there you have it — they don’t like it when they’re coming in to face the biggest of big bads who is smart and tough and well connected and he only has one guard who is a fat middle-aged retired donught eating champion. Nothing kills the tension faster than challenges obvious scaled down to compensate for the fact that there is only one of you.

Which leads us to method number three: tailoring the challenges specifically to the character. This method actually has a lot of merit to it, and can make for very satisfying goal-based play as well as being a good method for focusing the themes in non-goal based play. A good GM can do a lot of work to make every adventure hit the character where they need to be hit, after all. The issue, of course, is how the game’s design makes this easier, better, and faster. More on that later. The problem with this style of play is that over the long term many people can get bored with constantly facing the same problems, and many GMs aren’t fully adept at coming up with new and interesting variations upon them. (24 season 4 was fun, but Jebus, how many times can we see the world threatened by nukes and Jack resisting torture?)

Moving away from goal based to thematic and character development play is another solid solution. Games like Sorcerer and Trollbabe can be quite good at solo gaming for just this reason – the focus is on the why of what characters do rather than on the what they can do. The issue here being that not everyone likes narrativist games, and even games like this can have some issues with their play structure when it comes to solo games. The relationship map, for example, needs to be tinkered with when everything is going to circle around one character rather than around a set of them. This requires a PC who either has more contacts, the ability to get into more shit and draw more people to them, or a slight but important restructuring of the assumptions of the relationship map to better focus it down onto the PC – making it combine with the “fit the challenge to the PC” above.

An idea I have been toying with in how to get around this in a different direction is to have troupe based play in which the player plays the whole troupe. Why limit it to a single character? (This can also work well if you want to add shifting GM duties into the mix, or no GM at all.) This can be anything from multiple full PCs played by one character, or shared with the GM, to a “followers and sidekicks” system like HeroQuest and Nobilis use, where there are multiple characters under the aegis of the protagonist character that get controlled by the player rather than the narrator. For players that like this it allows for all the nice parts of normal group gaming: mixed challenges, player controlled characters getting killed, different perspectives and abilities, and so on. The weakness that I foresee is the lack of single character focus of a full troupe game will put off those with immersivist tendencies, or could just be too many characters for one player to want to keep track of. Still, I think the HQ/Nobilis sub-PC system has much to recommend it. (And this is before we even get into the section where I talk about destroying traditional PC/GM relations.)

So lots of talking about why things don’t work, with occasional pointers at where they do. Well, now, how do we chose which of these things we want for our game? The answer is focus. Figure out what, exactly, you want to do and which of the tools is going to get you there. If you’re looking for a wide-ranging pulp game with lots of variety and adventure (a Conan, for example) then you need a system that focuses on super-competent characters with lots of different skills. If you’re looking for a game where the big challenges are about whether your six year old can get his uncle to stop abusing him, then you need a system that focuses heavily upon the emotional vulnerabilities and strengths of the protagonist – to the point at which traditional RPG things like strength and intelligence are completely absent.

Any of the above methods can probably work, but you have to be sure you know what you are doing with them and build them direct into your game’s system.

Flow, Focus and Intensity Issues: When I play solo-player games I often find that the players have trouble with the constant attention and (from their POV) increased pressure and need for speed. In most group RPGs, even those in which the party stays together all the time, the focus will shift from one player to another as they step up to deal with their issue, be it a scene in which they are the specialist or just their turn in combat. In solo games there is no such downtime for the player to be able to sit back and figure out their next move. (This is probably particularly bad in my games, as I’m very fast at figuring out my stuff after years and years of GMing.)

As a result of this solo games tend to move faster, as there is no hesitation between characters, no character to character banter, and no one outside the two of you to talk about things, provide advice, and so on. This can lead to increased stress and tension (both the good kind and the bad) and so the flow of the game needs to be considered. Mechanisms that either hard-code break points, stress relievers, and the like or else deliberately play upon the constant movement and action of the solo game should be encouraged. In either case, a focus on shorter sessions of games would probably be a good thing to encourage. Get the game to hit it and quit it, rather than focusing on the traditional goal of the 8 hour session. 8 hours of solo play can be exhausting, and 4 hours is usually more than enough to cover the amount of story and “cool happenings” that would take a group game multiple 8 hour sessions to play out.

It has also been my experience that short-run games work better with solo-games. Even the long term campaigns I’ve played solo tend to get broken up into chunks. Because of that I’d suggest building games that use techniques to have a “beginning, middle, end” structure for a good chunk of solo games. It doesn’t have to be as hard-coded as “My Life With Master” or the like, and should probably allow for the possibility of multiple sequential “novels” – but something that gives the game some check and consistency to its flow is probably a good idea.

NPC Issues: Which moves us into the issue of NPCs. While often a smaller issue, my experience has been that solo players do not have the interest or focus to deal with as many NPCs as can get comfortably handled in a group game. In many group games NPCs often end up being unofficially classed towards one of the characters, and they deal with and remind the others about them. In a solo game you can’t do this, everyone comes back to one player. Even if you’re playing a troupe game with lots of characters you still have the fact that it’s one player dealing with all those NPCs.

My experience with this is that it is best to have a smaller number of NPCs who reoccur and who are played with more intensity than the average NPC. They should be almost quasi-PCs run by the GM with lots of personality and motivation and ability to hit the PC or help the PC on multiple levels. To many faces becomes drowning, but a few well defined faces stick well into a persons mind.

I feel that I’m coming up short in this area though, so let me hear what you guys have done/thought about this one.

The Hearing About Your Game Should Suck Issues: Now, to round the article out, I’m going to talk about something nice rather than something that sucks. One of the biggest strengths of solo-player RPGs (and no GM head-to-head RPGs) is that there is only one person playing with you. Only one person you need to communicate with, vibe off of, and deal with the idiosyncrasies of. With only two of you, who are able to communicate and (maybe) trust each other there should be more room to explore things that might not be comfortable in a group game. This can be romance and sex and violence and racism and any number of things, but it should be there – push the envelope of what you do, because you’ll never have a “group” you can vibe with as easily as you can vibe with a single person.

Of course, I noticed that in the post I made before this no one even touched the whole “solo games can lead to fucking!” point. Let me just say that I think this is a horrible mistake. People have been RPing in bed since Eve died her hair black and pretended to be her “evil sister” Lilith (some sexual RP that fucked up generations, let me tell you) and the fact that there have been only shamed faced stuttering such as “The Book of Erotic Fantasy” pointing the RPG hobby in that direction is pathetic. I’m a damn Mormon and I’m telling you people – leaving the sex and sexual aspects out of RPGing (OOC and ICly) is a mistake.

I know this is a point that can make people uncomfortable, so I’m going to move off it now and hit a related point. Read this post by Ron Edwards about his solo game of Runequest Slayers. See how he talks about a lot of things that would push a lot of people would get squirming around in game? How even in the thread itself there are things he can’t talk about as openly with the folks on the thread as he could with Jake? Especially in the reply “Unfortunately, “would” is a problematic concept. It’s very likely that I’m choosing my answers in order to convey an image that I’d prefer you to hold about me, rather than anything resembling reality.”

That is the kind of thing that solo gaming should focus on and push. It doesn’t always have to be nar based soul searching either. It could be that you’re gaming with the only other person in the world who still likes Robert Jordan novels, or that you’re the only two you know who really love a good dungeon bash with hard core gamism up and down in a city full of namby-Nar players. Whatever it is, however, solo games should encourage people to push it as hard as they can with another human being, to get the things out of game that you can’t get with a group because there is to much concern, focus, and direction going outwards.

Okay, that’s all that my brain is spitting out now. Please, add more!

Next Up: Head to Head GM-less games, breaking the traditional structures and assumptions of play for solo games.