I'm thinking about narrative structure in RPGs, and how to make it simpler for folks to run long-term RPGs without handing them something like a dungeon. Something accessible for both players and GM, with a fantasy layer because apparently that's somehow easy.
I'm also thinking about if Jason's game Apportionment needs an R-map and rules.
I'm trying real hard not to rip off the work of other people while using it as a building blocks.
Ole Peder Giæver oh sure, and I can do that. You can do that. I want to bake enough into the GM-side rules so that it becomes easier. Something beyond the Agenda / Principles / Moves of AW, but starting with those.
Hey William Nichols would you like to see the very rough playtest version of the rules for Shtetl World? I'd be interested in your comments. Currently it's all about the beginning of the First Act, I only have the lineaments of the 2nd & 3rd Acts sketched in. The game takes a lot from Monsterhearts -- it has social (reputation) and emotional (joy) as well as physical (health) "hit points", which grow out of MH's Strings and Darkest Self mechanics, and the Act structure is like a beefed-up version of MH's Season Moves.
If you like, I can share the doc with you at callmewilliam@gm?
Subbing because I'd love to talk rpg thoughts. Bear in mind that I haven't played any rpg's this millenium, but maybe that gives me a fresh outside perspective...
It does! I'm right now thinking about the narrative structure of long-form RPGs. Basically, what does a dozen or two dozen session of Vampire or DnD or Apocalypse World look like? How much variance is there? Is there something coherently similar between each that could be pulled out?
I don't think I've ever played a game like Vampire, and I'm not even sure I've ever played a campaign of DnD that long (when I was playing regularly, it was a weekly thing, and we tended to rotate things around).
So it's kind of hard for me to wrap my mind around something like that. It's a huge investment in time.
As you know, William Nichols, I tend to run public games with rotating casts. Lately I have been pondering on narrative structure too, but from a different angle: how do I make a campaign that new players can drop in & out of, yet returning players can come back to and still have that traditional sense of progression and development?
I don't mean to hijack or anything; I just like throwing something out there other than ".".
I miss long-form games. I grew up on epic, decades-long (literally, in our-world time) RPG campaigns that never ended. The structure of my life as a grownup (and maybe the structure of my attention?) makes those harder to organize.
I have a method for D&D where I'll ask new players questions about their character's background/personality, then level them up when they give answers. That allows me to quickly get new players to level 4 or 5 and have a character they've "grown into," and the thought and work on those details just replaces the adventures the returning players went on. That works really well with D&D, but I haven't tried it yet with many other games.
Isaac Kuo Kinda, yeah. Do 3 hours every two weeks for a year, and that's two dozen session.
Benjamin Rosenbaum Me, too. There's a lot of, say, D&D that I find boring: the 30 minutes of fun crammed into four hours problem. The problem is identifying the dull parts without getting rid of the good parts. I'm trying something, but i don't know if it'll work. I kinda want to playtest it to find out.
Edd Gibbs So, you get everyone to about the same level and go from there. Yeah, I've seen similar ways to do D&D. I think in an AW hack, you could sub people in or out pretty easily without giving free advances, because there's so much less differentiation with advances.
I discarded D&D in 1981 with high 12-year-old dudgeon and still am able to channel my 12-year-old snotty hipster rant about its limitations (alignments! classes! levels!) at the least provocation; I was generally a Chaosium (RQ, CofC) kid... as time went on, a mostly systemless/heavily drifted Chaosium at that.
Adam Dray Cool! Right now, I'm wondering if more structure than pbta can be baked into a pbta game without ruining it. I've got in mind a 3-part narrative structure, ending with defeating (or losing against) some terrible menace. The way I'm thinking right now, the PCs make a bunch of world-building decisions, including which aspect of society (basically, which front) is corrupted by the menace.
This has the growing scope that I want, without near as much increase in personal power as you see in D&D and clones.
I think it works, and think it'll be ready for a limited review process by trusted people. Maybe. Unless I decide I've stolen way to much from The Watch and scrap it all.
Benjamin Rosenbaum I got draw back in maybe 10 years ago, for a four year long game. I almost gave up RPGs, and then found Fiasco. And then AW, and all was right in my world.
Right now, I adore playbooks because I want to minimize the work that players and GMs need to do. People are busy, and to honor that I'd rather hand the players a two page worksheet than just about anything else. And using XP as a carrot to encourage PC action.
Sometimes, that looks a lot like classes and alignment. If you give out XP for in-character sex, then the PCs will have in-character sex. If you give out XP for murdering monsters and walking from town to town, you've encouraged murderhobo activities. That's where I am now; design the XP mechanics so that PCs will be rewarded for the behaviors you want to see.
What are the sorts of behaviors you have in mind? I'll admit that I've never been entranced by the notion of a long running campaign. I found fun from role playing, regardless of what's going on in "the story" (if any).
But even so, I do have a fascination with trying to design a computer game around ideas from Sid Meier's Pirates and Defender of the Crown. I like the idea of going around in a world and inhabiting it rather than just giving commands like in a 4X game.
We're talking mortality rates over 50% just to make a trading trip. Stuffing the ships with twice as much crew as what's required to operate it to compensate. We're talking gruesome gothic survival horror grist even without any pirates or trying to reach the South Pole. Just grinding the gears of global capitalism.
Yeah, it's funny that I love AW playbooks and xp-for-activities even though I hated D&D classes and alignments. There's a difference in stance and tone, though. I buy that the Battlebabe is the way they are because that's their character: the playbook is about who they are as a person, what turns them on, what they're good at, what they're drawn to. But "Thief" never felt the same way to me. The idea that if I'm a thief, and I spend the whole adventure stabbing people while the fighter picks his nose and occasionally stumbles onto some treasure, at the end we both "level up" and I get a lot better at picking locks and slightly better at fighting while he gets way better at fighting... that just annoyed the hell out of me.
William, I don’t think you have to worry about ripping people off. Ripping people off is central to this hobby and the scene you’re coming out of. Misspent Youth is ripping off a dozen different things or more and it’s regarded as an original system. As you work on it, it’ll become further and further from the original. And if it doesn’t, that’s almost certainly fine, too. Some very great game designers are hackers.
Also, as Shane notes, I love structure in games. I can’t stand games anymore that don’t tell you how the session is going to go very explicitly. Apocalypse World, as much as I love it, is un-MC-able for me, I think. At least, 1st edition. I also can’t handle games that don’t have an ending baked in to them. I get itchy and fearful it’ll never end or just peter out. Every game I’ve designed has session structure in it, I believe.
Isaac Kuo - So it's kind of hard for me to wrap my mind around something like that. It's a huge investment in time.
Epidiah Ravachol coined this term "Oppressive Social Footprint" to get at what you're talking about. He (and others) have been designing games to operate in the minimal-social-footprint model. I wish I could find his post on it because he had these lovely animal footprint diagrams that were really instructive too.
Also, I totally don't hate PbtA, and I'm going to doggedly defend that even though William was joking. I can't MC it (or haven't been able to so far), but I love playing it. I think it has a spotlight management problem too that the rules don't handle and they put that on the MC / GM / whatever. But that's also true of 90% of games.
Also I shouldn't get upset. William clearly wasn't talking about me. I don't know who Rob Bowl is, but I'm sure he's a good dude. Maybe that's why I was reacting.
Robert Bohl , as soon to be seen on tabletop, is a celebrity game designer who absolutely hates Apocalypse World and doesn't understand how it is a game.
For this, I've built a meta structure for between sessions. The game starts, first session, by paying to live and then straight into a mission. Maybe I should reverse that.
As for spotlight issues: Yeah. At least for combat and travelling minigames, the structure is such that everyone gets a single role. 2d6 + whatever, as per. And from there, the table discusses the outcomes. That's stolen from The Watch, as I thought it was absolutely brilliant. It puts some structure around combat, and makes sure everyone knows how they contribute.
Robert Bohl Quick point of clarification: Vincent Baker coined Oppressive Social Footprint. My contribution to that discussion was just making the chart that confused oppressive social footprints with awesome apex predators like wolves and bears.
I've got a possible game with a lot of these ideas baked right in. Comments are welcome, both positive and "You're a thief", but preferably constructive because come on.
What are you thinking about, Ole Peder Giæver ?
ReplyDeleteSuch as?
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking about narrative structure in RPGs, and how to make it simpler for folks to run long-term RPGs without handing them something like a dungeon. Something accessible for both players and GM, with a fantasy layer because apparently that's somehow easy.
ReplyDeleteI'm also thinking about if Jason's game Apportionment needs an R-map and rules.
I'm trying real hard not to rip off the work of other people while using it as a building blocks.
Ole Peder Giæver oh sure, and I can do that. You can do that. I want to bake enough into the GM-side rules so that it becomes easier. Something beyond the Agenda / Principles / Moves of AW, but starting with those.
ReplyDeleteI am wondering if Benjamin Rosenbaum has thoughts on long term narrative structure. His Shtetl World has different acts baked in.
ReplyDeleteThat'd be great to see / hear about!
ReplyDeleteHey William Nichols would you like to see the very rough playtest version of the rules for Shtetl World? I'd be interested in your comments. Currently it's all about the beginning of the First Act, I only have the lineaments of the 2nd & 3rd Acts sketched in. The game takes a lot from Monsterhearts -- it has social (reputation) and emotional (joy) as well as physical (health) "hit points", which grow out of MH's Strings and Darkest Self mechanics, and the Act structure is like a beefed-up version of MH's Season Moves.
ReplyDeleteIf you like, I can share the doc with you at callmewilliam@gm?
heck yes!
ReplyDeleteSubbing because I'd love to talk rpg thoughts. Bear in mind that I haven't played any rpg's this millenium, but maybe that gives me a fresh outside perspective...
ReplyDeleteIt does! I'm right now thinking about the narrative structure of long-form RPGs. Basically, what does a dozen or two dozen session of Vampire or DnD or Apocalypse World look like? How much variance is there? Is there something coherently similar between each that could be pulled out?
ReplyDeleteI don't think I've ever played a game like Vampire, and I'm not even sure I've ever played a campaign of DnD that long (when I was playing regularly, it was a weekly thing, and we tended to rotate things around).
ReplyDeleteSo it's kind of hard for me to wrap my mind around something like that. It's a huge investment in time.
As you know, William Nichols, I tend to run public games with rotating casts. Lately I have been pondering on narrative structure too, but from a different angle: how do I make a campaign that new players can drop in & out of, yet returning players can come back to and still have that traditional sense of progression and development?
ReplyDeleteI don't mean to hijack or anything; I just like throwing something out there other than ".".
.
That's cool, Edd Gibbs . Do you have a thing you've found working?
ReplyDeleteI miss long-form games. I grew up on epic, decades-long (literally, in our-world time) RPG campaigns that never ended. The structure of my life as a grownup (and maybe the structure of my attention?) makes those harder to organize.
ReplyDeleteI have a method for D&D where I'll ask new players questions about their character's background/personality, then level them up when they give answers. That allows me to quickly get new players to level 4 or 5 and have a character they've "grown into," and the thought and work on those details just replaces the adventures the returning players went on. That works really well with D&D, but I haven't tried it yet with many other games.
ReplyDeleteIsaac Kuo Kinda, yeah. Do 3 hours every two weeks for a year, and that's two dozen session.
ReplyDeleteBenjamin Rosenbaum Me, too. There's a lot of, say, D&D that I find boring: the 30 minutes of fun crammed into four hours problem. The problem is identifying the dull parts without getting rid of the good parts. I'm trying something, but i don't know if it'll work. I kinda want to playtest it to find out.
Edd Gibbs So, you get everyone to about the same level and go from there. Yeah, I've seen similar ways to do D&D. I think in an AW hack, you could sub people in or out pretty easily without giving free advances, because there's so much less differentiation with advances.
Yes! let's talk.
ReplyDelete.
ReplyDeleteI discarded D&D in 1981 with high 12-year-old dudgeon and still am able to channel my 12-year-old snotty hipster rant about its limitations (alignments! classes! levels!) at the least provocation; I was generally a Chaosium (RQ, CofC) kid... as time went on, a mostly systemless/heavily drifted Chaosium at that.
ReplyDeleteAdam Dray Cool! Right now, I'm wondering if more structure than pbta can be baked into a pbta game without ruining it. I've got in mind a 3-part narrative structure, ending with defeating (or losing against) some terrible menace. The way I'm thinking right now, the PCs make a bunch of world-building decisions, including which aspect of society (basically, which front) is corrupted by the menace.
ReplyDeleteThis has the growing scope that I want, without near as much increase in personal power as you see in D&D and clones.
I think it works, and think it'll be ready for a limited review process by trusted people. Maybe. Unless I decide I've stolen way to much from The Watch and scrap it all.
Benjamin Rosenbaum I got draw back in maybe 10 years ago, for a four year long game. I almost gave up RPGs, and then found Fiasco. And then AW, and all was right in my world.
ReplyDeleteRight now, I adore playbooks because I want to minimize the work that players and GMs need to do. People are busy, and to honor that I'd rather hand the players a two page worksheet than just about anything else. And using XP as a carrot to encourage PC action.
Sometimes, that looks a lot like classes and alignment. If you give out XP for in-character sex, then the PCs will have in-character sex. If you give out XP for murdering monsters and walking from town to town, you've encouraged murderhobo activities. That's where I am now; design the XP mechanics so that PCs will be rewarded for the behaviors you want to see.
What are the sorts of behaviors you have in mind? I'll admit that I've never been entranced by the notion of a long running campaign. I found fun from role playing, regardless of what's going on in "the story" (if any).
ReplyDeleteBut even so, I do have a fascination with trying to design a computer game around ideas from Sid Meier's Pirates and Defender of the Crown. I like the idea of going around in a world and inhabiting it rather than just giving commands like in a 4X game.
William Nichols Re: worldbuilding and tragedy - have you played with Questlandia yet? It kind of sounds like what you are talking about.
ReplyDeleteSummoning Robert Bohl because I know he has strong feelings about structure and frameworks in games (and the general lack thereof in pbta games).
Speaking of something inspired by Pirates, here's an example of the sort of thing I think could be gameable:
ReplyDeletehttps://aeon.co/essays/the-manila-galleons-that-oceaneered-for-plague-and-profit
We're talking mortality rates over 50% just to make a trading trip. Stuffing the ships with twice as much crew as what's required to operate it to compensate. We're talking gruesome gothic survival horror grist even without any pirates or trying to reach the South Pole. Just grinding the gears of global capitalism.
#RobBowlHatesPbtaAlmostAsMuchAsHashtags
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols I don't see why narrative structure imposed on top of PbtA structure would harm anything. Have you tried it yet?
ReplyDeleteHoping to do a first playtest of what I've written soon, Adam Dray .
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's funny that I love AW playbooks and xp-for-activities even though I hated D&D classes and alignments. There's a difference in stance and tone, though. I buy that the Battlebabe is the way they are because that's their character: the playbook is about who they are as a person, what turns them on, what they're good at, what they're drawn to. But "Thief" never felt the same way to me. The idea that if I'm a thief, and I spend the whole adventure stabbing people while the fighter picks his nose and occasionally stumbles onto some treasure, at the end we both "level up" and I get a lot better at picking locks and slightly better at fighting while he gets way better at fighting... that just annoyed the hell out of me.
ReplyDeleteThanks for plussing me in, Shane. Thoughts:
ReplyDeleteWilliam, I don’t think you have to worry about ripping people off. Ripping people off is central to this hobby and the scene you’re coming out of. Misspent Youth is ripping off a dozen different things or more and it’s regarded as an original system. As you work on it, it’ll become further and further from the original. And if it doesn’t, that’s almost certainly fine, too. Some very great game designers are hackers.
Also, as Shane notes, I love structure in games. I can’t stand games anymore that don’t tell you how the session is going to go very explicitly. Apocalypse World, as much as I love it, is un-MC-able for me, I think. At least, 1st edition. I also can’t handle games that don’t have an ending baked in to them. I get itchy and fearful it’ll never end or just peter out. Every game I’ve designed has session structure in it, I believe.
Isaac Kuo - So it's kind of hard for me to wrap my mind around something like that. It's a huge investment in time.
ReplyDeleteEpidiah Ravachol coined this term "Oppressive Social Footprint" to get at what you're talking about. He (and others) have been designing games to operate in the minimal-social-footprint model. I wish I could find his post on it because he had these lovely animal footprint diagrams that were really instructive too.
Also, I totally don't hate PbtA, and I'm going to doggedly defend that even though William was joking. I can't MC it (or haven't been able to so far), but I love playing it. I think it has a spotlight management problem too that the rules don't handle and they put that on the MC / GM / whatever. But that's also true of 90% of games.
ReplyDeleteAs is the lack of session structure.
Also I shouldn't get upset. William clearly wasn't talking about me. I don't know who Rob Bowl is, but I'm sure he's a good dude. Maybe that's why I was reacting.
ReplyDeleteRobert Bohl , as soon to be seen on tabletop, is a celebrity game designer who absolutely hates Apocalypse World and doesn't understand how it is a game.
ReplyDeleteFor this, I've built a meta structure for between sessions. The game starts, first session, by paying to live and then straight into a mission. Maybe I should reverse that.
As for spotlight issues: Yeah. At least for combat and travelling minigames, the structure is such that everyone gets a single role. 2d6 + whatever, as per. And from there, the table discusses the outcomes. That's stolen from The Watch, as I thought it was absolutely brilliant. It puts some structure around combat, and makes sure everyone knows how they contribute.
Robert Bohl Quick point of clarification: Vincent Baker coined Oppressive Social Footprint. My contribution to that discussion was just making the chart that confused oppressive social footprints with awesome apex predators like wolves and bears.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to see this chart, Epidiah Ravachol !
ReplyDeleteThanks for the correction.
ReplyDeleteIts interesting to combine multiple metrics into one, right. Social footprint is a good name for it: How much of your life is this going to take?
ReplyDeleteThere are some limitations and gaps, but that's true of any model. What's good about this, ultimately, is as a means of thinking about your games.
So ... I'm about four years behind. That sounds about right. :-)
Eeeeeew. Gaming is for nerds.
ReplyDeleteLet's move this to here: https://plus.google.com/+WilliamNichols/posts/CLiZFAZEARa
ReplyDeleteI've got a possible game with a lot of these ideas baked right in. Comments are welcome, both positive and "You're a thief", but preferably constructive because come on.