A Way to Pace a Narrative Game
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
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.