Scenes and nuggets - the DGP way

Anyone remember the DGP "nuggets" system? It was back when GDW had handed over most of the development of their Traveller game to Joe Fugate and crew of DGP. They had been thinking on adventure design a bit. The result was that they designed adventures in the format of "nuggest", which were self contained scenes. I wrote about them once before in relation to campaign play of Battletech. Now I'm thinking of them again, for organizing your scenario in a more general sense.

Each nugget had some thing that would happen, some NPC you could talk to and a place to visit. The new thing was that DGP had sorted these in order, and told you which nugget had to go after the other. It was kind of like the solos, where you had forks in the road where you had to choose were to take the plot. I always thought these nuggets were a sweet idea, but I also never felt they worked as promised.

In Trail of Cthulhu the authors write about how to structure your adventure along a "spine" and then have branches off that tree. Core clues, those that are crucial for the mystery, are forming the spine of the adventure. I have not yet played much ToC, so I have no  solid opinion on how well that works. It doesn't read like it would work that well, but maybe it just puts into words what we have been doing all along. The thing is, this is what the nuggets DGP used reminds me of. I guess nobody is surprised that this idea was old.


Now I feel like pulling out some of those old Traveller books and taking a look at them with ToC in the back of my mind. For those who are interested in adventure design, it might be something worth studying. Identifying where you have choke points is very crucial if you want to make sure you don't limit your players, and maybe structuring your scenario in nuggets like that is a good way to find out the logical structure of your design? If you do that, you can then design where to break up the rails, and where to leave them in. I for one am going to take a look at those old nuggets again.

How to write adventures - stringing scenes together

I've posted before on my thoughts about scenes as the currency of gaming. This post is about how to use them to best effect. I'm not claiming to tell how it is, this are my thought right now, and will probably change.

Having scenes thought out, I think it's quite tempting to decide from the start which of your darlings you want to use, and what's going to happen. Especially the latter is tempting. If you "figure out" that they players will do B after doing A, you can be pretty sure that they will want to do C instead and will violently protest about that B you dangle in front of them. Don't do that. I at way to got at doing just that. So, how do you do?

I've tested out a few ways myself, and read about what others have done. I think that there are a few way to do scene based design without laying down the tracks. I think the best way is to have one opening scene, one scene with some kind of conclusion to the main conflict and in between you have the other scenes. If you introduce a threat in scene one, and put in some things that leads up to the conclusion or what brings the conflict to a head you can kind of have your cake, and eat it too. Say you have a bad guy planning to do a bad thing at a specific place at a specific time. Then it's fairly obvious which the concluding scene will be, and if the first scene is designed to involve the players you probably have your adventure right there. You could probably run that after just thinking about the supporting cast and some key locations, and after putting some stats to that you could improvise the rest.

My latest game, which we cancelled due to scheduling problems, was supposed to be some attempt in this vein. I had a starting scene introducing the action, and when a key event happened a NPC would show up, kill another NPC and then I'd let the law descend and see which way the player character jumped based on whom they had befriended before the murder. That way I hoped to tell a story, while giving the players the ability to steer most of the action. Key for me here would be that even if the players did nothing, I could make sure something happened, and if they did take the plot and run with it, I could just throw in that smoking gun and go along with the ride.

Wish me luck herding the cats back together and we might see if it worked!

Emergent Story - in multiple ways

I was listening to an episode of the The Walking Eye podcast recently. It sometimes has moments of pure brilliance, and I was hoping to catch some of those. Someone mentioned some "Forgespeak", which made me want to write this post. I've tried three times to make this to the point and less rambling. God knows if I succeeded!

Have you heard the phrases Story Before/Story Now/Story After? That was the "Forgespeak" which I triggered on. Basically, those words are all about how and when the "story" appear in the game. Naturally there are strong opinions attached to all those positions. I will just pontificate on the idea of story and when it happens, kind of with those positions as a starting point. We are talking rpg theory here, so nobody just blogs. We pontificate.

It's interesting how "story" became such a loaded term. Personally I blame the metaplot heavy days when White Wolfe reigned. Others were also quite into it, but it seems like the WoD gamers adapted it fully. The Story Before concept relates to that, with the GM showing up with a story in her head before even the game starts. I have actually played in a few con games like that, and they were not all bad. But, more often than not, I don't enjoy that.

But, the other cases of emerging story is more interesting. I'm not entirely sure why the Story After case are considered a sign of "dysfunctional play", but I'll roll with it and consider some cases of emerging stories.

I like to play games where actions of the players affect the world, and small pebbles tossed in the pond by the GM creates big ripples, just because one player or so decides to surf the waves created. That is one quite fun type of emergent story. On the other hand, being thrust into a situation where you have knobs to twiddle and dials to turn is also fun. It seems like some people only likes stories to emerge when they step outside the game system. Others seem to think real story only emerges when the knobs of the game mechanics drives that action. I'm kind of amazed that those two positions are sometimes defended so strongly against each other, when they in my mind is quite similar.

Famously, some people have claimed that the fact that D&D have most detailed rules for combat does not mean the game is about combat, quite the contrary! In that case, story emerges when the rules are not involved.

Other games have rules for social combat, or some kind of game currency you can use in interpersonal interactions, or maybe a set up where the setting and the roles of the characters are creating conflicts to be resolved by the players. I'm actually not sure why especially this latter kind of game so often are scorned by people interested in gaming they "old ways". Sometimes I think it's just a case of narrow vision, thinking D&D is the end all, be all of gaming. At other times it might be that stubborn resistance against "having anyone tell me what my character likes or not". While I can understand the idea of that argument, most people I've encountered arguing like that have also been close minded individuals who came across as jerks in general. Maybe that have coloured my opinion of that argument.

How about this situation? Your character is fighting lizardmen, and overwhelmed decides that as the last man standing, discretion is the better part of valour. From now on that player might decides to always have his character scowl and mutter when lizardmen show up as antagonists. Maybe the character even develops a slight phobia of lizards. That is all emergent story for that character, totally without being based on any rules forcing that to happen.

Compare that to some hippie game where the dungeon crawl is about the mental degeneration of those who crawl underground. Maybe in that game you have a psychological profile, and as you fail some game checks and the numbers decrease, your character get afflicted by some predetermined effect. This is also emergent story for that character. But, in this case it's mandated by the rules.

I personally think the latter way has one advantage. When those knobs and dials are in place, things will happen. If I have to hope for some lucky combination of situation, character and place it will be harder for me as a player to make that happen. It's basically a tool to make it likelier to happen. I think that sometimes the Story Now people have taken that position to be better, since you have tools. I know for a fact that even if I buy a really fancy hammer and saw, I still wont turn into a great carpenter. On the other hand, I still like to have great tools around. Tools I don't have can't help, or hinder. I think that is why I like those games which include more than basic combat, and leaves the rest to the group.

That being said, one thing I really don't get is why so many hippie game designers think that emotional relationships are the only good source of conflict and drama? Do we have to turn all our games into sappy soaps in order to have engaging games? I don't think so. It makes me think of a game I was once in, where we played in a setting developed by our GM. He is a great world builder so just the glimpses we had gotten of the bigger world made me want to go out and explore all that! Imagine my despair when it turned out that we had all been grounded in the village, banned from leaving and exploring the woods and wilds around. This was supposed to be a social game, using the rules for the Buffy RPG. Buffy happens to be a TV series I despise as a sappy soap. Maybe I came to the game from a wrong angle, but it sure didn't work for me.

What I wanted to say with that paragraph was just that the environment can be just a rich source of emerging story as people can. Sometimes I think the dungeon dwellers and the hippie gamers both wants emergent story, but forgets that point, in different ways. Both exploration of time and space as well as interpersonal relationships can create story. Having tools for that in the game system makes for great games when you uses them to hot rod one killer story, or for shiny gears that can lie dormant but admired as decoration as you blaze through the emergent story on wheels you just imagined into being all by yourself without tools.

Yeah, there you have me, creating some group hug of a messy metaphor. Whatever. Here, take a cloth and wipe of some of that grease and oil and go out and game. However.

How to write adventures - I keep talking about scene based design

I'm continuing my thinking on adventure design, and have now come to how I've planned out my Savage Worlds scenarios. Since I've heard so much about how great this game is for cons, I designed scenarios from that. I've listened to how people often use a scene based design to fit in the time constraints, and that fit me perfectly.

So, I wanted to do something with a lot of feel of the X-files. Since I started from that, it was very natural for me to think of a scene that introduce the mystery and then play the intro and then introduce the characters. Since I was not writing a TV-show, I did think up the first part, but we started play when the players entered the plot.

The first scene would utilize the outcome of the background scene as its "bang". So I imagined a miner in this small community being attacked by his whole kennel of dogs, and how his fiance would see it and panic. That was what had just happened. Then I planned on putting the PCs in that small mining town, fill it with NPCs and build scenes from character interaction and some"plot based" scenes that would exhibit more of the strangeness that was the basis for the hounds attacking the miner.

The main plot was that the miners had dug deep into the Appalachians in West Virginia, and uncovered Cthonians. They reacted by psionic mind controls and called in their minions. I planned to have some weird things happening, like the MIB show up and discourage the PCs from snooping, and finally have the fiance disappear only to call someones phone and lure them out into the wilds at night. I had decided that after fooling around like that, I would end it with a scene where the PCs found them somehow confronting "aliens" in a strong light and finally finding themselves with redacted memories in their car out on the highway.

So, how did it go, and how did I used the scene based design?

Well, I started with the players taking control. They came to the town, and started talking to people. I decided to take a cue from Vincent Baker's advice in Dogs in the Vineyard, and started to give away as much as possible from all the NPCs. Vincent is wise, for without that they would have stumbled!

Talking to the NPCs, the characters were set in a location, some people were there and that was often the extent of my scene framing. I did not include any "bangs" or any destabilizing events into those interpersonal interactions.

In between those I dropped some small bombs in the shape of scenes with not only location and people, but also destabilizing events. It turned out that those scenes which all had things happening they had to react to did work really well. I totally failed to make one of them a chase scene with the Savage Worlds chase rules, but that was only me at odds with that rules set, and I've posted about that in other posts.

Worth noting here is that I did not introduce any shakeups in the "interview" scenes we had. Maybe I should have, because I sometimes felt that all those individuals with cool stories to tell had to walk up to the player characters more often than being sought out. It might be something that is dependent on how proactive your players are, but I did take that with me to my next attempt. It was my greatest lesson from this kind of adventure design.

Then there was that about how to string scenes together. In this scenario, which I called "Deep Calls to Deep", the players had the choice of going where they wanted and talking to whomever they choose. That kind of made it very natural for me to toss in my bombs after they had learned stuff which would make the next thing happening feel more cool. It made for a fairly natural flow, I would think.

All in all I think it went well, and as far as I understood from the after game chat I had nailed the X-Files feel. Nobody ever got any hint it was a Cthulhuoid menace.

But, what could I make different, and better, the next time? I will talk a bit about stringing scenes together next time.

How to write adventures - I keep talking about location based design

So, what were my experiences from Location Based Design for my adventure?

I had decided to play a game of Mutant, one of the earliest games I ever played for any extended time. It's a BRP game, which really looks a lot like Gamma World. Mutated anthropomorphic animals for the win! Thanks to those qualities I could inject lot of humour and jokes about contemporary events.

The backstory say that some kind of catastrophe occurred, and humankind escaped into subterranean bunkers, and only ventured outside when long time had passed. Knowledge of the old times have faded, and now mutants of all kinds roamed the lands. I decided to make the PCs all be part of a secret project to develop psychic powers, and they had all been put to cryogenic sleep. Now they wake up, with hazy memories and can explore the setting with no preconceived ideas, as they knew as much as their characters did.

 My location was a small village, with a sawmill powered by an artifact from the Old Days. The village was basically ruled and run by the robber baron that owned the artifact. I made up a few enemies of his, some shops and people in the village and let the players loose.

Like I wrote about yesterday I had the map, the location in question. The threat I envisioned was the tension in the village between the rich ruler and his "subjects". In order to make it something the players could not just ignore I also invented an NPC with a personal vendetta against the baron, and a timeline for how it would play out.

So, how did it work?

The biggest problem I think was related to the reasons for the PCs to be there. They woke up, and some mutated badgers brought them to the baron and the basically followed along. While they did walk around a bit, they never did take strong action for or against any of the sides in the village. I think I learned that the threat has to be immediate, and personal. If you have very pro-active players they might make things up for themselves, but I think having a clear, threat, is a good idea. It's first now when I look back at it and try to formulate what the components were that I settled on that term.

I claim this is one of the basic forms of design for an adventure. Some call this fish tank or sandbox. I'd prefer to shine the light on the Location. Why? Because a sandbox is just a somewhat flat area, of a common material. I think a location based adventure has to be much more, and that's why I never have had much success with "sandboxes". A Location has to be strange, worth investigating and exploring and there has to be a clear threat looming large and personal. At least that's the theory.

Next up I'll take a closer look at the Scene Based Design.

How to write adventures - some attempts at consolidating ideas

I've listened to quite a few podcasts  where the topic have been how to write convention scenarios. That combined with my experiences running Savage Worlds and my post apocalyptic game have resulted in some conclusions. At least I think it's conclusions. But, naturally, I will probably keep thinking on the topic, and probably keep posting new ideas. Now I felt like summarizing somewhat.

I think I've found two ways to write adventures. There might be more ways, but these two have worked for me, and I felt like taking some note of what parts were needed for the machine to work.

First off, Location Based Design.

For this to work, you need two things.

1. A map
2. Threats

The first thing can be a dungeon map, or a map of a city, spaceport or whatnot. It should provide things to investigate, and things to uncover. The second thing can be monsters, traps and NPCs with nefarious plans.

The Location Based Design I think work best when the reason for being there is not based on the location. It should be something that the PCs take with them, a mission or a rumour. For the longevity of this type of design I think that is a key thing.

Secondly, Scene Based Design.

For this design to work, you need three things.

1. Where the scene is set.
2. Those who are present stated up, with intentions and motivations.
3. What just happened, the "bang".

In this case I think the reason for being there is different. Now it should be part of the location. Either it is the place, or the people there, that compels one or more characters to be there.

Naturally, to have more than a very short scenario you will need multiple scenes. The way you string them together can probably be a topic in of itself. I'll get back to it.

I will try to dive a bit deeper into how these two crystallized in my next post, and bring some examples. Anyone having experiences with those two sets of design frames are welcome to chime in. I hope I will better understand my own thinking, and know I have more to learn on the topic.

More loot!

I've got more loot!

Who does not want an intense roleplaying game, eh?

This is the annotated edition, where every other page is just commentary on the text on the other page. I've wanted this for some games. I mean, how often did you ask yourself "what were they thinking?".

Frankly, when I got it, I had forgotten I would also get all the supplements in a big fat book. Goodies.

I also like to say that Ron had been communicative, quick and delivered exactly what he promised without long delays. Listen and learn, people!

Playing Boot Hill again

The day before yesterday I once again played Boot Hill. It was a very old school experience. We had started an adventure, five years ago, and none of us remembered a thing. Our referee looked mystified at his notes while we players tried to decipher our scribblings on the character sheets. What were those abilities again? Finally we figured out what numbers meant we were good at shooting, and our referee rolled back time and we restarted the adventure.

You know how we all say over and over again that deadly systems often have very quick character generation systems? This is a game that should need a very, very quick character generation system! We sat in a cantina somewhere and in came some ruffians, and naturally a fight erupted. My character was a greenhorn and botched loading his musket, and was a sitting duck while the lead was heavy in the air. Finally I managed to get a shot off with my "appropriated" french revolver we had found on some guy during a big kerfuffle in Mexico City. Then a bullet struck my character in the head.

Luckily I survived, but did nothing more in the fight than turning over the table each time someone entered the room, to have some cover during the fight.

The system is really peculiar. You get increases in abilities, but you get bonuses at spaced out intervals. That is interesting, since you can get both the satisfaction of seeing the numbers increase, and the "stair" effect of a level based system. Also, you have stats for sight and hearing, gun accuracy and throwing accuracy. It's really a system where the stats play first fiddle, and the skills are something of an oddity tacked on.

From the reviews I've read, nobody seems to think very highly of the game and I agree that it lacks that something extra. Still, we had fun in a crazy way. My character has 100% speed, 06% in intelligence, 98% in sight and slightly bad of hearing. Naturally I just had to do whatever was the most stupid thing possible, while still trying to stay alive and instant hilarity is guaranteed. Extremes are always more fun when trying to roleplay.

Our GM have created a big pile of tables for weapons, extra rules, tabled and such from decades of playing the game. I'm trying to convince him to type it up for the world to see. Contrary to the deadliness correlation mentioned above, his variant is actually not that quick. But, thanks to all those tables you get to know what you did in the war, where your family is from and all that stuff. I love life path systems!

Maybe our next session will be sooner than another five years...

More experiences with Savage Worlds

Last night we finished up our latest mission in the Agents of Oblivion series of adventures we're playing. The team was this time lacking their hacking resource, so they had to rely more on fist fights, language skills and some sneaking.

This time we started with a mission briefing, and then spending resource points on equipment and funny gadgets. I think this part of the super spy genre worked quite fine this time. But, the more I play this game the more I start to feel the books are terribly organized. I created some cheat sheets for the different resource options, and I think they are the reason that part of the mission was fun. There are multiple editing errors in this part of the book, and I have compiled an errata list. Maybe I'll post my cheat sheets here, and send the errata to Reality Blurs.

During the mission briefing they got to hear that they would be going to Iraq, where some ancient artifacts stolen from the Baghdad museum during the invasion had surfaced once again. One was more mysterious than the others, namely a cuneiform tabled with a new story about Gilgamesh! They went to Baghdad, talked to lot of people, had a car chase and found and placed lots of bugs for surveillance. Information gathering galore. Finally they took a flight to Beirut, drove to Baalbek and their went shopping. The last scene was a big firefight between two groups of cultists, with the PCs in between.

One thing I noticed was that even when I made an effort to involve the game rules a bit more than before, benny usage still was an issue. During 2-3 hours you have to roll a lot of dice in order to spend your bennies, earn some more and get to spend some of those as well. First I forgot the give out any, when I did they still ended the session with quite a few left over.

Is this my final proof that whatever I might think of myself, I'm a guy who hand waves most of the rules? It doesn't seem like I can bring enough dice rolls to bear for those bennies to matter. Or is is Savage Worlds built so that the average session and amount of bennies match up at a longer sessions than mine?

Who knows? I will post some thought on scenario design as well in the (hopefully) near future.

Deserted Island experiment - Hunter: The Vigil

Sometimes I see...

monsters

...and they need to be hunted down...

If you were to take the new Hunter game to a deserted island, the first question if you can only take three books is, what's core? Is the WoD rules core and the Hunter book a supplement? If I choose to include the Hunter book itself as a core book, this is my list.

1. Mysterious Places -There are more interesting books in the new World of Darkness for doing things beyond the big lines like Vampire and Mage. I like that. This book is one of those I think you could use for many modern day games of creepy stories. The fact that it's name reminds me of the Ars Magica books Mythic Places doesn't hurt either. This is a book with some interesting locations, designed to be horrific, weird and creepy. I think they have succeeded quite well. All of them come with story suggestions and quite evocative descriptive text. I bet you could probably come up with this kind of stuff on your own, but I need to be kickstarted by a book like this.
2. D6 Adventure Locations - I'm unsure if that D6 is part of the title or just telling us it's part of a game line. I guess you've noticed that I branched out. This is not a White Wolf book. In this book you will find maps of airports, conference centres, hotels ans other everyday locations. Add to that a paragraph of items commonly found at such a location, and you have some excellent help to make a fight scene in one of these places be just a bit more interesting, with some parts of the interior decoration to throw around. But, even though this is a very hand book, it looks bad. There are lots of clip art in it, which looks cheap. Then there's the cover illustration which I hate. What the heck is that woman wearing? It's wet suit for diving? So why does it look so flimsy over her breasts, suddenly clinging closely to the shape of them? Why does it look like it's metal polished to a high sheen, or is it just that it looks like a bad Photoshop colouring? I guess you get the point.
3. Supressed Transmission - You know what this collection of articles is, right? I'll just summarize. Ken Hite. You need more? Ok, this is a book collecting Ken's columns from Pyramid Magazine (yet another game company, Steve Jackson Games). Here you can find lots of ideas for conspiracy and weirdness, which can conceal those you hunt, or give hints to where they have hidden throughout history. If nothing else, you'll have lots is fun reading and odd facts you can befuddle your players with, and amuse yourself with. There's even a second volume, but then this list would be too long.

As you can see my game of Hunter:The Vigil would encompass a lot. As far as I know there have not been much support material published for H:TV so why not look at other game lines for inspiration?

Would your list look different? Agree? Disagree? Feel free to say so.

For my next post in this series I'm tempted to try to limit D&D or Traveller down to three books. Can you do that to 35 years of supplements? Maybe.