11.05.09

Types and Breaks

Posted in Gameplay at 10:37 pm by Christian

Just a quick little thought that’s been on my mind.  I’ve been going over Jonathan Walton’s gamma draft of Geiger Counter on Google Wave, and the character creation part stuck with me for a while.  I think there’s an opportunity in that game and in ones similar to it to make neat characters with just a very simple technique.

See, Geiger Counter asks you to make characters according to archetypes.  That fits with the horror movie inspiration.  I think that what sets good characters apart from bad characters, in horror flicks and other B-movies, is that there’s something about them that breaks the archetype.  So you have enough of a template to immediately recognize the character and know what their part is (which is good for horror movies), but you also get treated to at least some variation from the cliche.

In a game sense, you could quickly make up a character’s personality (or role, or whatever) by picking Type and Break.  So you’d have Type: Librarian, Break: Boxing Aficionado.  Or Type: Hardened Cop, Break: Crossdresser (sound familiar?).  Or Type: Prissy Princess, Break: Grease Monkey.

I think gender and other role reversals provided easy breaks here in the past. Type: Asskicker, Break: Female was popular there for a while (see James Cameron’s work), until it became its own type (Female Asskicker).  And then you’ve got to find a new break.

What do you think?  Have any favorite type/break combos, new or from movies?

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09.16.09

Taboos and Tension

Posted in Game Design, Gameplay at 4:49 pm by Christian

There’s something I would really love to talk about more (and definitely hear other people’s thoughts about) in regards to roleplaying games, which is how to set up a group of main characters that produce really intense and interesting interactions when you play them with each other.  This is more important for interaction games than for resolution games, but really, it can apply to both depending on your focus.

Recently, I talked to Jake about his experience playing Ribbon Drive.  His group did not get the same kind of experience out of it that I did and was somewhat underwhelmed.  Similarly, we reminisced about our Contenders game way back when, which had great moments for Matt and myself but often left Jake’s and Nick’s characters a bit out in the cold.  I’ll come back to these games in a minute.

First, let me start with this thought: the way to make the most out of games where the interaction between the main characters is the focus of the story lies in taboos and tension.  Often taboos create tension, but tension can also be the result of strong feelings that are unrelated to taboos.  (So maybe I’m mainly talking about tension, with taboos as a subset of origins? Possibly.)

Plenty of dramatic stories revolve around taboos.  The characters are faced with them and tempted to break them.  Will they?  What does it take for them to do it?  What’s going to happen if they do?  There’s a lot of tension that results from these questions, both externally and within the character’s heads.

Think about your typical adventuring party.  You’ve got a bunch of warriors going out to fight monsters or what have you.  That’s pretty standard stuff and can be fun in itself.  But what if two of the adventurers, who have spouses waiting for them at home, develop a crush on each other during their journey?  After all, they’re fighting side by side, they understand each other, they save each other’s lives.  A longing develops.  The reason this is interesting is because of the taboo of adultery.  Not just as an abstract concept, but as something that, if transgressed, will have a powerful impact on the characters involved (including the ones waiting back home).  Suddenly the interactions between them are going to be laden with tension.  Is either one of them going to decide to make a move or talk about their feelings?  Are they going to have little touches and then pull back?  What happens if they give in?  What happens if they don’t?  All the while, they’re each struggling internally with their feelings as well.

What if the taboo relates to status/class (most regency stories) or family feuds (Romeo and Juliet)?  In our current Primetime Adventures game, David’s character Kyle–the son of an offworld mine owner–has a secret crush on the son of the CEO of the corporation trying to take control over the mining business.  There’s plenty of tense interaction to be had between the two, but also between Kyle and his dad, Kyle and his girlfriend, and other characters.

Taboos don’t have to be romantic or sexual in nature, either.  They can relate to traditions, gender or class roles, political ethics, and so on.  Take a look at Dogs in the Vineyard and its ladder of sin.  It’s all about breaking taboos.  The tension in the game then results from the main characters being faced with people who were simply human, and how they deal with them.

Back to the games from earlier.  In our Ribbon Drive game, we set up a situation in which all of our characters had a great deal of potential tension with each other.  Three of us were children from different mothers to the same father, one was the father’s brother, and one was his ex-student (and secret admirer).  One of the sons felt abandoned, one never knew his father, and the daughter took care of him in his dying days.  Of course we would have tension; our father was a man who had transgressed taboos in many ways (abandoning families, having affairs, etc.) and our characters had different opinions on that.  At the same time, we were all family, but we didn’t know what that meant.  There were very strong feelings involved all around.  Our result?  Powerful interactions.

From what Jake said, I didn’t get the feeling that his group set up their road trip participants with enough tension.  They all had a reason to be where they were, but their interactions weren’t charged enough either with taboos or with tense emotions.  The road trip movies I remember most are those where you have sexual tension and taboos (Y Tu Mama Tambien), family tension (Little Miss Sunshine), and similar potential between the characters that are locked together in the car for a long, long trip.  If they all get along or don’t have any taboos between them, the trip will just be pleasant.  Which is fine for real life, but boring for stories

In our Contenders game, Matt and my character were linked together via my character’s sister, whom his character was trying to court.  That created powerful emotions in my character (rage and jealousy, mostly), which led to plenty of tension and conflicts.  We played off each other a lot in that way.  But Jake’s and Nick’s characters had no such link to us or each other.  We were all boxers, we fought in the ring, but we didn’t have much tension between us other than some competition for the boxing title.

So it seems to me that many games that rely on character interaction as a driving force for the story can be hit or miss because they don’t automatically produce tense and taboo-laden relationships during the setup phase.  There’s nothing in Contenders that made Matt and I connect our characters the way we did.  Compare this to Dogs in the Vineyard once more, where the town creation mechanics ensure that taboos will be broken and people will be tense toward the Dogs when they ride into town.  I think this is one reason why Dogs is such a successful game: it has a strong setup that reliably produces tense character interaction potential.

What do you all think?

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07.27.09

Interaction Games

Posted in Game Design, Gameplay at 6:41 pm by Christian

Here’s something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. Playing Ribbon Drive just reinforced this.  Breaking the Ice might fall into this as well, but Lisa and I have only made characters so far, not yet played it.

As many of you know, I have a strong background in online “freeform” roleplaying. It works based on total character ownership, that is, you get to decide everything about your own character, including how other characters and their actions (including attacks) affect your character. While there’s a lot of difficulty associated with this–namely that conflicts between characters can be quite frustrating–it’s got a focus that I haven’t seen much in tabletop roleplaying, and that’s character interaction.

See, in those games, my fellow players and I would spend hours upon hours with nothing but two or three characters in a scene, bouncing off each other. Over time, the characters develop relationships with each other, and the interactions become more complex. Again, this can lead to frustration when you try to resolve a conflict between those characters and there’s no mechanism in place.  But that problem mostly occurs when you play with people you don’t know well and don’t have a shared vision with (which is not uncommon in public freeform fora, where in my most active days you’d find several hundred players in the same place, all somehow interacting with each other’s characters).

Compare and contrast those interaction games with resolution games, where the focus is on resolving actions of or conflicts between characters. Most tabletop roleplaying games are resolution games with a strong focus on the mechanics that resolve tasks or conflicts.

For a long time after my ten-year-plus freeform experience, I longed for resolution games.  I wanted things to move forward, actions to be resolved, conflicts to actually play out and end one way or another. I’ve played many awesome games recently where I got just that: a lot of events resolved in a short period of time. Whether it’s In A Wicked Age, D&D 4e, Sorcerer, or Beast Hunters, the game mechanics focus on and promote that sort of resolution play.

Recently, however, I’ve been missing the interaction focus. My mostly-regular group and myself have been playing our second series with Primetime Adventures.  PTA is definitely one of my all-time favorite games.  The advice in the game, however, is in line with other resolution games: try to have lots of conflicts to resolve.  In fact, there’s supposed to be a conflict in every scene.

Our PTA game this time revolves around a family with all of its issues. The father, the main NPC, owns a mining company on a planetoid.  The oldest son, Matthew’s character Saul, sides with the miners and promotes labor rights. The youngest son, David’s character Kyle, has a crush on the son of the corporate overlord who wants to control all of the mining activities, and Kyle rebels against his dad as well by signing up with the military. Natalie, my character, is devastated with grief over the death of the oldest Sanduski child, Sarah, who used to hold the family together.

Some of the very best scenes we’ve had have not been about resolving anything. They’ve been about the way these characters interact. We can have a conversation that’s not conflictual at all, but emotionally touching. We can have fights that don’t really get resolved, because it doesn’t matter who wins–it matters what they say to each other and how they feel about it.

That’s not to say that the PTA rules haven’t helped the game. They’ve helped immensely. See, the Screen Presence of a character tells you how many cards they get to draw in a conflict. But more importantly, for us, they indicate which character is in the spotlight for a given session, and which characters should play supporting roles to address the spotlighted character’s Issue. The setup of a TV drama, the connections and edges, all of those mechanics help our game, even when they’re not used for resolution. So PTA supports interaction games very well, as long as you don’t push for conflict all the time.

Ribbon Drive, a game by Joe McDonald that I played at Go Play NW and wrote about here a few posts back, is completely an interaction game. It has no conflict resolution rules. Two characters have a conflict, or a character attempts a task? There is no mechanic in the game to tell you how that turns out. While there are Obstacles that may come up and that characters can overcome with traits, they’re far from a real resolution mechanic.  Ribbon Drive is just different.  As I said, it’s all about the interaction of the characters. Their traits and their futures, along with the musical inspiration and the crucible of the characters being stuck on a road trip together, are perfect for promoting character interactions. We had a fist fight between two characters in our game, and we had no mechanic to tell us who won. But that didn’t matter; it mattered that they both showed that they had their dad’s anger in them, that they were interacting the same way even though they tried so hard to be different. We just cut the scene in the middle of the fight, then showed them both the next morning with marks on them. Was any conflict resolved? Not really.

Joe calls what Ribbon Drive does “character resolution.” And in the end, that’s true–your characters either embrace the futures that they thought they had when they started on the trip, or they abandon them. Something is resolved. But that resolution does not come from a mechanic (and I think this might be a key difference to Breaking the Ice, but again, I’ll have to play it first). You don’t roll to overcome your grief. You interact. And Ribbon Drive is a prime example of a game that facilitates something I’ve been missing for a while.

You’ll notice how this ties in with my most recent design, Within Our Eyes, if you go back and read those posts about it. Same thing: it’s all about the interaction, not the resolution.

I, for one, hope we’re going to see more interaction games in the future.

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07.01.09

[Ribbon Drive] Death of an Artist

Posted in Gameplay at 10:32 pm by Christian

So… Ribbon Drive. The most emotionally touching con gaming experience I’ve ever had. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, given my previous experience with Joe’s Perfect.

I’ve played with Joe several times before, consider him a friend, and have a good baseline of trust with him. I’d played with Julian and Jonathan the night before, in a game of Julian’s design (“Storyjamming”) where he specifically had differently-colored chips to indicate how vulnerable you as a player want to be at a given time in play, so I felt that they were aware of the possible impacts of emotional play, which was good. It was the first time playing with Shaun, but he seemed like a cool guy (which it turned out he was). So overall, I felt like I could take some risks in that group.

For those of you who haven’t heard about it, Ribbon Drive is Joe McDonald’s game of musically-inspired road trips. If possible, players create mix tapes/CDs/playlists with a theme of their choosing, though in the con environment we picked from what Joe had on hand. The first mix we picked, randomly, was called “The Good That Won’t Come Out.”

Next, the players listen to the first song (without talking) and read its lyrics, then create the road trip situation from that. Our song was Blue Ridge Mountains by Fleet Foxes, and after tossing around several ideas, we decided that our characters were headed for the funeral of Caspian Godat, an abstract artist who used to be full of life and charm and passion, but who also fathered several children with different women and didn’t stick around. (Quote from one of the characters later in the game: “He started a lot of projects he never finished: my family, and yours, and yours…”)

Our characters were to be based at least in some ways directly on the second song, to which we all again listened silently. It was Westfall by Okkervil River. Now, wow. A song about murder and the banality of evil, about a guy who seems completely normal, but just “happens” to kill some random girl (“It was so easy to kill her, I just wanted to kill her again.”). Somewhat hard for me to listen to, as someone who’s unusually sensitive to stories about these kinds of things (I always choke up when reading news stories about bad things that happen to good people, especially children), but there it was. Given my level of trust with the group, I decided to take a risk and embrace my discomfort: Sophia, my character, was the youngest child of Caspian whose mother was murdered 20 years ago, when Sophia was 4.  When Caspian slid into dementia in the last 6 years of his life, Sophia took care of him, because she was the only one left.  Sophia was currently enrolled in nursing school.

Characters have a couple of traits and two futures that, in the course of the game, they may either embrace or reject. Sophia’s traits were “I take pictures for solace” (some of dad’s artistic talent), “I can see through their skin” (quote from Westfall), and… something less important, I guess, because I can’t remember. Her futures: “I will never go home again” and “I will never have Faith.”

I’m shocked to realize that I have a hard time remembering the other characters’ names.  We didn’t use them much, because for a lot of the time we were more acting directly through dialogue rather than narrating, and when I was narrating, I’d usually use “you” instead of the character’s name. It felt more personal that way.

Let’s see. Joe’s character was an artist who had studied under Caspian decades ago. He also was the only non-family member. There’s more to him, but I’ll save that for later. Then there was Julian, who played the oldest son, who carried a lot of anger with him (and had his father’s tendency for passionate outbursts). He had deep emotions but trouble talking about them.  One of his futures was something like “My life will always be unjust and miserable.” Yeah, anger. Jonathan played Barry, Caspian’s younger brother, who had fond childhood memories of him–this later caused him to clash with the abandoned sons. And Shaun played another son who’d never even met Caspian, and whose future was “I’ll find out who this man was.” I think he rejected that one toward the end of the game. His main trait was “Commensurate Fuckup”, which just about summed him up. The character had that vibe of being happy-go-lucky and careless to avoid really dealing with anything.

Now, after setup, players take turns framing scenes after listening to the first bit of a song from the mix. The song’s mood, then, mainly inspires what kind of scene we’ll play next. Players are encouraged to bring out their traits and start addressing their futures to either embrace or reject them later.

I felt that our game played out like an art house indie movie. We were a bunch of emotionally troubled people, all linked through Caspian, captives in the crucible of the car.  Everyone was initially caught up with their own troubles, which led to some interesting clashes. For example, the other characters didn’t understand that Sophia took frequent breaks on the road to take pictures to distract herself from her loss and to delay the inevitable funeral and thereby the decision point of where to go from there, so they were quite annoyed with her. We soon started to have deeper conversations, all colored by our character’s relationship to Caspian, about religion and art and, most strikingly, parenthood and family. The characters had a huge debate about whether or not people, when they become parents, suddenly must devote their whole lives to their children. Sophia thought that was too much to ask, and some resentment came out that she was stuck with taking care of Caspian for so long. Basically, due to Caspian’s dementia, it was like she’d had a child at 18 that she had to take care of because there was no one else, and that was just thrust upon her.

The two sons soon butted heads, with Julian’s rage burning hotter because Shaun appeared to be so nonchalant about the whole thing. Shaun was trying to figure out who Caspian had been, as the accounts of a genius artist and inspiring professor, absentee dad, and older brother who took Barry fishing when they were young just seemed too incoherent in his head.  Ultimately, at the cottages where Barry and Caspian had spent many summers of their youth, the two sons ended up in a fist fight (proving that they both had their dad’s outbursts), while I finally allowed myself to cry on Joe’s shoulder (unaware of the fight going on outside).

The next morning, Julian tried to leave Shaun behind, but we persuaded him otherwise. Shaun was too cocky about that, resulting in more clashes. It was really amazing to see the characters just bounce off each other like that, and I think we all were immersed into the whole thing at least to a certain degree. I surely felt some of Sophia’s sorrow, but also how she worked through it. She figured out that being a family was a choice, and that we didn’t have to repeat Caspian’s. We could break free from his shadow. (So I abandoned “I will never go home again”. Also, a bit later, she made peace with the fact that she wouldn’t have faith; one can have a meaningful life and connections even without that.) I think it helped that we were on our second mix by that time, themed “What Keeps Mankind Alive.”

We had another rough scene where, finally arriving at the town where the funeral would be, Joe explained that Caspian’s painting on display from 20 years ago was the last one he did from his heart, and that it was about suicide. Julian exploded at him, especially when Joe said that after that, the other paintings were all about mortgages (i.e., he painted to support his numerous children financially, even if he couldn’t be there for them emotionally or even just physically present).

At the funeral, Sophia was to give the eulogy. At this point, I felt like she had grown up a lot through the course of the road trip, and I’d learned a few things with her along the way. She began to talk about Caspian, and about how none of us knew all of him. You can never know a person fully, she said, but we can all share and get a better picture of him who touched all of our lives. But Julian jumped up and said, “The only thing we all have in common is that he abandoned us.” His outburst got worse from there, until Julian stormed off and drove away. Joe left as well (each one abandoning “I will learn to forgive him/love him again”).

We mostly left it at that, except with some epilogues: Julian drove our road trip car off a cliff soon thereafter (committing suicide), and Sophia stopped going to nursing school after realizing that she’d been pushed into it by taking care of Caspian.

Now, one more thing, and I’m not sure yet how I feel about this. At the funeral, Joe revealed that his character was the one who’d killed Sophia’s mother 20 years ago, out of jealousy. I had completely forgotten that part of his character soon after the game began; either I didn’t catch it when he first said it, or I just got too deeply into Sophia to remember. So I realized at the funeral that the man who had done this to her was also the man who’d comforted her and helped her overcome her grief, and that happened naturally from us playing our characters, not from deliberately steering it in any way. So, I’m not sure what to make of that yet. Part of me feels bad about that, like it’s some kind of cruel joke on Sophia. Part of me thinks it might say something connected to the part about not knowing people fully, ever, or about getting over the past, or about making choices. In any case, I guess it fits with the art house style we had going. I could see this happen in that kind of movie.

So, we agreed that, while a lot of the characters were in a hole, there was a sense of hope. One can, with the right choices, make their way out. Some manage, some don’t, and that’s part of life. Family is what we make of it.

Alright, that turned out longer than planned.  I really want to talk about the fact that, after the setup, we only ever used the resolution mechanic once, but I’ll do that in another post.

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04.25.09

[What Are The Odds] The Probability of Events

Posted in Game Design, Gameplay at 9:43 am by Christian

(Continuation from the WATO posts below)

A six-sided die has six possible outcomes, each of which has a probability of 1/6. In order to determine the probability of an event, simply add together the probabilities of the outcomes that constitute the event.

For example, if you want to determine the probability of rolling an odd number on a D6, you add the probability of each odd-numbered outcome together. In this case, you have three odd-numbered outcomes (1, 3, 5). Adding their probabilities results in a probability of 1/2 for this event (1/6 + 1/6 + 1/6 = 3/6 or 1/2).

You can also calculate in percent, if you find this to be easier or more meaningful to you. In that case, each outcome of the D6 has a probability of 16.67% (you can figure this out by dividing 100% by 6). Adding three outcomes together results in a probability of 50%. Of course, 50% is equal to 1/2 of 100%, which shows that both ways of expressing probabilities are the same. However, percentages need to be rounded and can therefore lead to slightly false results. Three times 16.67% actually results in 50.01%, but that is only an artifact of the initial rounding to two digits behind the period when dividing 100% by 6.

As another example, you may want to find out your odds of rolling at least a 16 on a D20. Each outcome (i.e., specific number) on the D20 has a probability of 1/20, or 5% (no rounding needed in this case). There are five numbers on the die that are at least 16: 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20. Five times 1/20 equals 5/20 or 1/4. Similarly, five times 5% equals 25% (which is 1/4 of 100%). As a result, you have a chance of 1/4 or 25% of rolling at least a 16 on a D20.

So far, calculating the probability of events has been quite easy. But it gets a little more tricky when we consider multiple dice, something that is a part of most gaming systems.

Multiple Dice Events

Unless you roll two D10 to achieve a percentile outcome, gaming systems usually add the numbers of multiple die rolls together for a sum result. 2D6-based systems are quite prevalent in strategy and role-playing games. The sum of such a roll is the event that we are concerned with in this section. Each possible outcome of such a roll is a combination of the two (or more) dice. The most important point to keep in mind is that an outcome of 1+6 is different from an outcome of 6+1. It matters that the resulting sum of 7 (with 2D6) is achieved in two different ways, depending on whether the first or the second die rolled the 1. Both of these are different outcomes, and each of them adds a possibility to the event of 7.

In order to figure out the amount of possible outcomes, one has to multiply the number of outcomes of each die with the others. For example, 2D6 has 36 possible outcomes, because each die can show 6 different numbers (and 6×6 = 36). We can display this through what I call mapping of the outcomes. In this example, the list of possible outcomes would be mapped out as follows:

Each of these outcomes has a probability of 1/36.

Now, in order to find out what the probability for a certain event is, we need to figure out how many of the above-listed outcomes produce the event. Rolling a sum of 12 with 2D6, for example, can only be achieved through the outcome 6+6. Therefore, the chance of a sum result of 12 with 2D6 is 1/36, or 2.78%.

An event of a sum of 7, however, is produced by 6 different outcomes: 1+6, 2+5, 3+4, 4+3, 5+2 and 6+1. Therefore, the odds of a result of 7 with 2D6 added together is 6/36, which is the same as 1/6 or 16.67%.

Interestingly, every event higher or lower than 7 has one less outcome associated with it. This means that there are 5 outcomes each that produce a 6 (1+5, 2+4, 3+3, 4+2, 5+1) or an 8 (2+6, 3+5, 4+4, 5+3, 6+2), 4 outcomes each that produce a 5 (1+4, 2+3, 3+2, 4+1) or 9 (3+6, 4+5, 5+4, 6+3), 3 outcomes each that result in a 4 (1+3, 2+2, 3+1) or 10 (4+6, 5+5, 6+4), 2 outcomes each for a sum of 3 (1+2, 2+1) or 11 (5+6, 6+5) and one outcome each for a result of 2 (1+1) or 12 (6+6).

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06.29.08

[What Are The Odds] Outcome and Event

Posted in Game Design, Gameplay at 6:42 am by Christian

Single die rolls are quite easy to figure out. Rolling any particular number on a six-sided die has a chance of 1/6, or (rounded) 16.7%. Each number has the same chance of coming up. The same is true for any die – a D4 has a chance of 1/4 or 25% for each number, a D8 of 1/8 or 12.5%, a D10 of 1/10 or 10%, and a D20 of 1/20 or 5% for each number.

The difficult part starts when two dice are added together, or when modifiers and target numbers are brought into play. The reason for different probabilities for the result of a combined roll of multiple dice is that the result we see is the event (i.e., the sum), not the outcome (i.e., the specific combination of numbers rolled).

Determining the sum of two or more rolls requires us to add two or more dice together. For most numbers, there are several ways of achieving the same sum. For example, a 7 can be achieved by adding 1 and 6, 2 and 5, or 3 and 4.

What’s lying beneath the event of the sum, therefore, is a group of outcomes. The first die may show a 1, the second a 6. For our purposes here, we can express this outcome as 1+6. As I mentioned before, all possible outcomes of the combined roll have the exact same probability, so a 1+6 is as probable as a 1+1. The important part about this is realizing that 1+6 is a different outcome than 6+1, even though both show a 1 and a 6 and result in a sum of 7.

Think of yourself and a friend rolling a die each. Your goal is to come up with a sum of 7. When you roll your die, any number from 1 to 6 may come up. If it’s a 1, your friend has to roll a 6 to achieve the sum of 7. If it’s a 6, however, he has to roll a 1 for the same goal sum. Those are two different ways of achieving the same result, even though a 1 and a 6 are involved in both ways.

Next time we’ll start talking about specific ways to figure out probabilities for outcomes and events.

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06.22.08

What Are the Odds?

Posted in Game Design, Gameplay at 10:19 am by Christian

I always liked looking at probabilities; they can be like a puzzle or riddle, when you’re trying to figure out how they work out in relation to a particular mechanic.  So a couple of years ago, I started writing a little book on probabilities for gamers and game designers.  I never finished everything about it that I wanted to, but I’ve got a couple of sections in there that people might find useful.

I figure I might as well post them here, with a little cleaning up.  I’ll leave out the introduction and stuff because I’ll just assume, for the sake of this blog, that I don’t need to explain things like the xDy method of writing about specific numbers and types of dice

So, expect a couple of little posts about probabilities in the near future. I’ll try to ease up on my academic braindamage and make them sound more approachable this time around (unlike one or two of my essays below .

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05.18.08

Spontaneous Stories

Posted in Gameplay at 10:44 pm by Christian

The other night at the dinner table, Aidan (my four-year-old) decided that each of us should tell a story. When my turn came, I told the following.

Once upon a time, there were two mice. They went looking for cheese. They looked in the cupboard: no cheese. They looked in the oven: no cheese. They looked inside the TV: no cheese. (And so on.) Finally they were so hot that they decided to cool off in the fridge. And you know what they found there? Cheese!

To get this out of the way: repetition is a great tool for children’s stories, and he cracked up every time I said “no cheese.”

Now, to get to the point of this post: the story was completely spontaneous. But did you notice how it had a conclusion that was satisfying to the whole story? It worked out very well: the mice were searching in vain, but the act of searching made them hot, which led them to the place where they could fulfill their goal.

This post also is brought to you by my recent five-session game of Primetime Adventures, during which I played a whole “TV Story” season about mysterious events and dark conspiracies in the trenches of World War I. I’m not able to go into details here, but as a producer (GM) of the game I had no idea where the story was going, and I pulled a lot of things out of thin air as we went along. And yet the game had a very satisfying ending that pulled all of those initially random things together.

The important ingredients to wrapping the story up neatly in both cases were:

• Active characters with a goal
• The pursuit of the goal and its consequences
• Things in the fiction that work a certain way
• An ending that ties these three together

Now, I didn’t know how it would end when I started it. The ending came to me as I was telling the story. I feel comfortable jumping into a story without knowing how it’ll end because I’ve figured out that more often than not, something will present itself as we go along. That notion not only comes from my roleplaying experience, but also from writing three NaNo novels and from telling Aidan stories every night. (NaNo is shorthand for the National Novel Writing Month, during which participants write 50,000 words in one month. Doing it spontaneously, without too much worry about planning or structure, is a liberating and very educational experience.)

Let’s talk about the individual pieces of the spontaneous story puzzle some more.

Active Characters with a Goal

In order for a story to happen, you need active characters. If everyone just sits around doing nothing, not much would happen. However, for a story to have focus, the main characters need to have one or more goals that they pursue. This creates a structure for the narrative and gives you ideas about what the characters could do next. That allows you to be spontaneous in the story you’re telling, because it always gives the characters something to do that’s meaningful.

In roleplaying games, characters usually have implicit goals (“adventuring”) or explicit ones (“Win back my lost empire”). I’m a big fan of explicit goals, and I think that every good story game should have instructions on how to come up with good goals that work for the characters within the confines of the game.

The Pursuit of the Goal and its Consequences

This is the heart of just about every story out there. The characters act, and consequences follow. Whether we’re talking about Othello and Iago, Aida and Radames, Spider-Man and the Green Goblin, or Eddard Stark and Cersei Lannister, the heart of a good (and dramatic) story revolves around the consequences of the main characters’ actions. The consequences impact and lead toward the conclusion of the story. If what the characters do has no impact on the ending, it’s going to be not very fulfilling (which is fine for stories that are about the futility of life, war, or whatnot).

The thing about spontaneous stories, whether told, written, or roleplayed, is that you can figure out the consequences as you go along. More often than not, something cool is going to pop up if you just let your characters act in pursuit of their goal.

Things in the Fiction that Work a Certain Way

Notice how it was important for the mice story that they were getting hot, and that the fridge would cool them off. That’s an example of a thing in the story that works a certain way, which drastically contributes to how the story is going.

There are plenty of other examples from all kinds of stories, and they’re not just limited to physical objects. They include social rituals and conventions (see many historical stories, especially “court intrigue” ones), laws of physics, laws of magic, and so on. When you have a unique “thing” in your story, it often pays off to explore its full implications during the course of your story–not as a replacement for active characters with goals, but in support of them (see Zelazny’s stories, for example, or most other great speculative fantasy, including science fiction).

The one roleplaying game that puts this story piece out there the most is definitely Shock: with its minutiae. Minutiae are exactly the things about the setting that influence events and support the story development without taking it over. Joshua obviously knows how stories work.

Tying It All Together

Once you’ve got all of the above in place, you’ll find a way to tie them together. When you’re roleplaying, that works best if every player on the table can contribute to this, whether directly in the game or through making suggestions to each other.

Part of that might require some thought. That’s not the same as a prepped or planned game, though: Primetime Adventures‘ “commercial break” feature works great here; you just decide to take a five minute break from the game, during which everyone can ponder a little what to do next and how to fit the pieces together. In between sessions, you can think about it all some more, if you’ve got a more complex and long-lasting game going. Again, that doesn’t mean planning out what happens: just think about possible connections, and then develop them in play as they come up.

Games That Support Spontaneous Stories

While you can do all of the above in almost every game using techniques (that is, the way you interact with the game and with each other), some games actually have mechanics that help you with it. I already mentioned Shock:, which does a great job of providing them (this includes minutiae, but also story goals). Sorcerer’s Kickers provide goals for the characters and force them to be active, while the NPCs and other things listed on the back of the character sheet provide “things” to interact with and areas of consequences. Contenders has built-in goals and consequences as well.

I’ve tried to set up Anima Prime in a way that specifically promotes this type of spontaneous playing as well, as I’ve talked about in the Spontaneous Play essay included with the game.

Overall, the message of this post is: If you set up your story with a few simple guidelines, you’ll be able to work it all out as you go along.

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