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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