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Archive for January, 2024

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The Meandering Spotlight Vicious Cycle

January 29, 2024

Quinn Murphy had an excellent podcast on downtime on the Infectious Enthusiasm cast. It got me to thinking about a thing I’ve seen happen a lot with traditional RPGs and how it can really hamper a campaign.

Good intentions and the road to hell

Let’s start with some simple motivations that make it happen, then I’ll define it.

  1. The GM wants to make the world seem real/plausible, and fill in detail where players ask for it.
  2. The Players want to explore the world/setting, and are looking for opportunity, danger, or information about it.

Ok, these are easy enough to understand, right? Pretty common motivations for many games.

Meandering Spotlight

Now here’s a thing that comes out of it; Meandering Spotlight. One or more characters go to do something that is perfunctory or a quick chore (“buy a new sword”) and the GM sets a scene. Maybe the GM sets the scene because they want to get a chance to add some personality to the blacksmith. Maybe they want to describe the town a bit more. Maybe it’s because it’s ingrained as a habit that the way things happen in game, are characters playing out events, therefore there MUST be a scene.

Ok, now the players are in a scene in a smith shop, and talking to characters. Clearly there has to be more to learn/to than “here’s 10 gold give me a sword” so they start looking around, asking questions. If this were a videogame, this is looking around a room, examining the decorations, talking with the NPC, checking if there’s anything neat hidden in the environmental storytelling. ”If there’s anything to interact with, it MUST be important” is a bit of it too.

…and the vicious cycle

The GM is happy to oblige and starts filling in details, since the players are interested. The players see there are details, must be more to learn, keep going. The GM sees the players are asking for more details, better fill it in, keep it interesting. The players see the GM keeps going, must be more to learn, better ask more…

40 minutes have gone by. For what should have been a brief scene, or maybe not a scene at all. 

You have a Meandering Spotlight Vicious Cycle.

Now… buying a sword is an easy example, but this happens when players send characters to go for rumors, or try to dig up info in a group, and things where… the focus moves and time gets eaten up in interactions quite tertiary to the point of why everyone got together to spend 2-3 hours to play a game.

Back to downtime turns

One thing that the formalization of very gamey “turns” does is that you can basically shuffle chores or book keeping or similar things to a brief set of choices, dice rolls or whatever and avoid the meandering spotlight completely. If everyone knows this is how it works, you can keep more playtime on whatever the focus of the game actually was intended.

Cutting it short

The other trick is to simply cut it short by stepping out of the moment of the scene:

  • “You get the tools and equipment. They’re solid build but nothing fancy.”
  • “After a night of talking it up with the crowd at the bar, you find two leads on the case…”
  • “The Mayor seems busy but did schedule you an appointment with an investigator”

And follow up with “Was there anything else you were looking to get/learn from this?” and either give it to them for free or make it a roll or something. (“Was the Mayor hiding something?” “Make a Investigation roll. …ok, you made it, he’s not hiding anything for the case you’re working on but he probably thinks you’re lying and might be the Feds.”)

I don’t have a full solution to the issue, since I think what happens is that people are having a great time in the moment, and it slides to “ok but not great” with everyone involved thinking this is “leading somewhere” and misreading the cues.

However, identifying the issue is the first point to stopping it from eating up all your time in play.

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Trapped in (building) dungeons

January 26, 2024

As I start running my second year (!) of Errant, and prepping up a whole new region and set of dungeons, I can say that repetition in a process will absolutely help you find your pain points.

So… a bit of history, first. When I was playing a lot of dungeoncrawlers, back in the day, we were playing in person and I was using a vinyl dry erase mat, so mostly once I scrawled something in my note book, it was literally 1-2 minutes to put it on the mat for play. Fast forward to (still many years ago), I was using programs like Dungeon Painter Studio to make custom maps, however it was really time consuming. So, for Errant, I moved over to just using pre-rendered maps, and that worked pretty ok, except now instead of having to custom make maps, I’d spend a LOT of time trying to find maps that fit the campaign needs. …oof.

Two steps forward
Well, now I’m using Watabou’s Dungeon Generator, and there’s a lot of great things here; it makes the right size dungeons for what I want (often the 15-20 room amount), and the maps are very clean and readable, one of the key aspects I look for. I generate a bunch of maps, download maybe 1/3rd or 1/4th of them that look good, and then use them later. But it hasn’t felt like it’s going that much faster…

One step backward
I found myself writing more description in the dungeon keys… because… when you use a prerendered map with illustrations of the furniture and coloring, anyone can look at a map and tell “oh that’s a library” “that’s a crypt”, “that’s an area in poor repair”, but if you have a black and white sketch of boxes and halls, you don’t know one room from the other; a lot more has to be described because it’s not visibly marked.

Ah.

Prep vs. play ratio
Now, don’t get me wrong; the prior year did give me a lot of experience in things that worked very well. I made some random roll inspiration charts (“NPC look, personality, goals”, “What kind of trouble has this village seen recently?”) that make it a breeze in play to improvise a lot. I can come up with custom monsters in 10 minutes, no problem.

And pretty much anything that needs a description, I can go with 2-3 sentences/bullet points and I’m good to go.

The thing is, if you write 2-3 sentences for a town, you get a lot more play and replay out of that prep than you do if you’re writing 2-3 sentences for each room or area in a dungeon AND trying to make sure they make sense with each other and have something interesting going on.

My goals form the trap
When I run dungeoncrawl games, I have a couple of things I just refuse to budge on. I want a unique setting and unique monsters; that means a lot of modules/pregen material isn’t simply “plug and play” for me. The second thing is I want it to be plausible, to have a sense of logical causality to it, so that players can make educated guesses and form reasonable plans of action. (which means, I have to think about things and make sure they fit together as well).  This means a pure random generator isn’t going to work either.

What’s my workaround?
…damn fuck if I know. Right now my only hope is that since some of the dungeons are thematically related, I can copy some of the descriptive aspects or at least be quickly inspired for the others. 

Anyway, the one thing I do have to look forward to is that once the prep for the region is done, I can basically spend the next year or more as the players run through the area, and mostly generating small stuff on the fly with the roll charts I’ve got.

This could also just be the fact that I’m jamming together 6 dungeons at once that makes this feel so much, and not actually that much “worse” in reality. 

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Unified, Expanding, and Divergent Resolution Mechanics

January 17, 2024

There’s basically 3 broad routes you can take in designing your general game resolution mechanics. They have their different strengths, but knowing what they’re good for is part of design. These also tie into a lot of player preference in terms of what systems they like vs. dislike.

Unified Mechanics
These really became the hotness in the late 80s and 90s. Choose one type of mechanic, then all of your conflicts resolve using the same rules. It’s easier to learn, however, the pitfall is that all conflicts can feel alike in terms of pacing, pressure and choices. A lot of times unified mechanics depend heavily on the group’s ability to recognize how to insert aspects/modifiers or set stakes such that different activities actually “feel” different.

The best example I point to is Primetime Adventures which gets around several issues that most unified mechanics games suffer. First, you only declare a conflict when it’s important to the story at hand; which means sometimes we skip going through the process if we all understand this is basically a montage or interstitial scene, and in other times, even a small task might hold a lot of narrative weight. Second, it makes use of Flag mechanics and pacing through it’s Spotlight rules that make it easy to direct play. Finally, because narration gets traded around, you don’t have things feel “the same” because technically anyone might get the narration rights and change the direction of play.

Expanding Mechanics

Expanding mechanics take an existing subsystem and make a parallel version for a different situation. They’re similar enough that you’re not learning something completely new, but you also have some specific bits for different situations.

PbtA Moves are this sort of thing in action, where most Moves are similar in structure of how you carry out the procedure, but the choices in outcomes they offer, might be drastically different for different situations. Burning Wheel family of games does this same thing with their combat system and social systems being mirrors of each other so that if you’re familiar with one, the other is not a big jump to learn.

Expanding mechanics are a great choice if you’re thinking your game might need to constantly add material or special cases but you want it to share 80% of the structure so it’s not impossible for players to learn.

Divergent Mechanics

Divergent Mechanics are when you want something to work completely different than another subsystem because you want it to feel different in play. Generally most games can do with up to three core divergent mechanics (and maybe some expanded mechanics off the core set) before it starts to feel completely random and fiddly.

The game I think of doing this the best is Errant. Most of everything you do will be resolved either with combat rolls (just roll damage) or stat rolls (roll under stat, roll over difficulty), but it has a couple of fun subsystems for uncommon situations: you do a little guessing game for picking locks, and duelling has a little game using playing cards. These unique systems don’t happen all the time, but they feel special when they do because they have a completely different feel to how they work.

Nothing in this is particularly deep, but I have seen more than enough people get fixated on one type of mechanic and then wonder why either the system is “hard to learn” or “doesn’t have enough to it”. 

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Posted in design | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Unified, Expanding, and Divergent Resolution Mechanics

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Ensemble cast concept lists

January 10, 2024

Most campaigns conceptually are about the ensemble of the full set of PCs… but very games really consider what makes a good “cast” of characters as a group. Sure, you get stuff like classes – magic guy, sword guy, sneaky guy, but that’s not really personality, though many people fall into archetypes mostly because… so little tools and support is given on how the group can coordinate otherwise.

Assumptions in play

  • Medium or long term play to make it worth coordinating. (you could use this list to generate pregens for a one shot, but it doesn’t make sense to have players do all this for short play)
  • Defining the situation and social scene for your campaign, players make characters who fit within that as a group during a session 0, not random characters thrown together
  • In some fashion, culture, social standing, and setting matters enough that PCs and NPCs reactions and the way they treat each other is modified by this.
  • Players use the lists below and pick options to inspire their character concept; choosing different options that play off of each other.
  • Each player should just talk about the choices they’re thinking about and choosing. Bounce ideas.
  • This is not a comprehensive list, it’s an inspiration list to get people thinking in the right direction.

Social Standing
Please understand being “high” or “low” on the social hierarchy can be quite context specific for your campaign. ”High social hierarchy” might be rather modest in a larger sense; “The Matterfelds have the biggest house in town! It’s been there since the 1800s!”.

  • High in the social hierarchy, upon whom much expectations are placed
  • High in the social hierarchy with many enemies, rivals, and greedy allies
  • High in the social hierarchy, but given low expectations (“You’re the 4th son of the lord”)
  • An assistant to someone high in the social hierarchy
  • In a vital, respected, role, but also not a leader; demands come from above and below.
  • Low in the hierarchy, tolerated only because you have protection of someone higher
  • In a position of some authority, but under attack from below
  • Ousted from your position, now much lower in the hierarchy, perhaps despised
  • Of much talent and recent reputation; avenues for gaining a patron are open to you
  • A once respected position, now slipping in standing, despite all your efforts
  • Publicly a modest position, but you have angles and pull with a subset of people higher than you.
  • A known failure. You’ve fallen from whatever position you’ve previously held.
  • Low in hierarchy, and you’ve reached your tipping point for suffering exploitation & abuse.
  • King of the streets; you have the highest social position in a group at the bottom of the hierarchy.
  • Exceptional social position; despite a much lower social position, you are allowed to act freely with the leaders/rulers in specific ways that wouldn’t be allowed anyone else of your status (jesters, etc.)

Cultural Divide

It’s important to know if the campaign is going to be high or low on cultural conflict; a game about colonization and oppression is going to be one way, a game about light hearted adventure or an 80s movie kids portal fantasy is probably going to be another. If it’s low, you might skip this altogether, or if it’s not going to veer into harder territory, you might skip some of the options here.

  • An epitome of the local culture. Whatever is the broad society tendencies, that’s you.
  • You want to advance the positive aspects of the local culture and leave behind the negative ones.
  • Deep into older, traditional practices of the local culture. Gets along well with the older folks.
  • Raised in a subdivision of the local culture, probably a mixture of it and the dominant one
  • Accepting and tolerant of many cultural practices and quick to learn basic cultural mores & practices
  • Raised in the local culture and then chose to integrate/adopt another culture.
  • Forced to hide your cultural identity due to persecution
  • Violently forced to adopt the local culture and disconnected from whatever you previously held
  • Contrarian – raised in this culture, yet you despise it. You see only the flaws and hypocrisy.
  • Holding values unlike the local culture, you get by with some friction, at least for now.
  • Operating mostly in the criminal subculture, you respect power, courage, and cunning outside norms
  • Raised sheltered and isolated; developed a simplified view of the world, likely dogmatic.

Expertise

“Expected role” is not the same as “class” if your game has that. For example, a royal guard, a mercenary for hire, and a pirate all are “warriors” but the expectations of what they’re supposed to do and how they go about it is very different. 

  • Good at the expected role, in the expected way. 
  • Good at their role, but in an unusual way; they utilize different skills & perspective to succeed.
  • Strong at the role, but with one significant flaw they must learn to overcome or at least work around.
  • Bad at their expected role, but very good at another role society doesn’t recognize for them.
  • Once well known and respected, but cast down from a failure or wrongdoing (real or perceived).
  • Moderately good at many things, but most importantly, is highly driven towards a goal.
  • Extremely good at a specific thing, which brings out many people who hope to exploit or use them.
  • Gained a reputation above their actual capacity and need to fake it until they can make it.
  • Absolute novice, who is desperate to learn. Probably from a couple of the other NPCs.
  • Old veteran who has lost some of their capacity, but is still formidable; pulled back into adventure.
  • A skill or ability that instantly raises questions/suspicions because there’s no reasonable way they should know it.

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Posted in Play Aids | Tagged , | Comments Off on Ensemble cast concept lists

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Subject vs. Experience

January 9, 2024

Right now there’s a ton of games getting published every month, which is dope as hell. 

However, it’s hard to sift through them because most focus on selling the subject matter, and tell you very little about the experience of playing the game. Let’s say I played the Silent Hill videogames, and I want more horror games like that. Simple enough, right?

Then someone gets me a Silent Hill themed Monopoly board game.

That’s the correct subject matter, but it’s definitely not matching on the experience, right?

Roleplaying games suffer this problem all the time. The classic mismatch people point to is games having stats for things that really shouldn’t have stats: “The eldritch god has a hitpoint total, therefore they can be fought and killed” “Yeah but if you didn’t give it a hitpoint total, how could you model it in the game? How could it show up?” “These things never get ‘fought’ in the stories, it shouldn’t even be a rule…”

Anyway, the specific experience people are looking for is the important part of the system, more than the subject matter. Running an RPG set in a specific battle in WW2 as an intense personal war drama, as a tactical war game, or as a grim simulator are all very different experiences even if it’s the same “events”.

It’s why a lot of games, built on the same chassis (one GM controls world, each player controls 1 character, simulate success/failure for each step) ends up giving similar experiences even if you’re supposedly working in different subject genres.

It’s why you can look through the years of posts here, and other places I’ve commented online, and why I often end up recommending off-subject systems for specific requests on how to run (x game). If you want a different experience, you need a different system, not just plugging in different keywords over what is the same structure, even if you paid $60 for a new book with new art.

When you’re making a game, or pitching it, or looking to play a new game; a good question to always ask is what PART of the subject is it you want to experience? What’s the interesting part, for this game specifically, you want it to deliver on? Are we actually counting how fast your superhero can run, or is it them having to emotionally juggle between their family distrusting them vs. letting their secret identity out? And then does the system do anything to encourage that happening?

Whether the game is very light, or has lots of stats on the subject, doesn’t matter if it’s not even chasing the same experience I’m looking for.

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