Strangers Rough Draft: Why Story Games are Hard.

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

I’ve completed the first full draft of Strangers, my game about ensemble dramas.  In doing this, I’ve come to the conclusion that story games are difficult to write. 

Let me back up a step and define some things.  A story game is (by my definition) a role-playing game where the mechanics primarily directly address the narrative of the game. This can be contrasted to (the majority of) roleplaying games where the rules address the theme or setting directly.  In D&D, for example, the rules are primarily concerned with the interactions between the character and the fictional world.  There’s no ‘Fade to black, cut to an exterior of the baron’s castle’  rule in D&D.  Sure, that sort of thing can happen a given game, but if it does, it’s the bailiwick of the DM.

Story game rules directly address the narrative being spun by the game – Strangers, for example, is chock full of rules on framing scenes, generating motifs and themes for your characters, and narrative arcs.  There is a ‘fade to black’ mechanic, in other words.  All of the players are co-authoring the drama in a literal sense instead of a rhetorical one.

What makes this so much harder is that mechanics become semantically challenging – the interactions between the players, the game itself, and the interactions that take place inside the game between the components, are hard to get your brain around because they all deal with abstractions.  What does it MEAN when I move my play card in this fashion?  What does it mean when I take chips out of this stack?  What does this interaction translate to in dramatic terms?  Have I covered all the obvious possibilities?

A lot of RPGs cover a lot of ground with their rules, trying to encompass the play experience.  But when the rules, to some extent, define the play experience itself, this metadrama gets really hard to think about.  

I’ve done my best to try and capture it – I’m test-driving the rules this weekend to make sure the wheels don’t fall off before I send it to a few people to pick it apart.  Finding a setting has proved challenging as well – I wanted to move away from genres that would put me in a rut (no medical dramas, etc) – but at the same time, I didn’t want the interactions between the setting and the characters to overwhelm the interactions between characters – which is at the heart of the game itself.

I finally settled on a compromise of a Jericho-like premise; a sort of World Without Oil: The RPG.  It’s 2019, and the economy has collapsed once and for all.  Peak oil turned out to be in 2011, and with the global economy so stressed by the shenanigans of Wall Street, recession becomes depression and a worldwide sense of feudalism pervades – the global village is dead, to a great extent.  Cities in the US have been abandoned for the most part, but when the tide of humanity tried to disperse into the rural areas, they found their country cousins less than welcoming.  Subdivisions in the exurbs became refugee camps, with extended neofamilies taking over cul de sacs and parking lots being stripped for asphalt to burn as fuel.

It’s in this setting that the characters, living on the edge of a dead Chicago, try and make their way in the new world order.

Strangers: The relationship map as story machine.

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

In a recent post, I mentioned the two games that will (I hope) be accompanying me to GenCon: Strangers and After.  I’ve mentioned the former, but not the latter, so I thought I’d post about it.

The core idea that I’m exploring with Strangers is using a relationship map (a physical representation of the relationships between the characters laid out on the playing table) as a means for creating story: both for eliciting player involvement, and also player coercion - pushing the players to play out consequences to their actions.

The game itself is an emulator for ensemble dramas: ER, Dawson’s Creek, Grey’s Anatomy, and Smallville.  Characters are defined by two sets of conflicts that they are involved in: a personal conflict and an arc conflict that all of the characters share.  For example, in the first season of Grey’s Anatomy, the characters are all trying to balance their careers and their personal lives.  These are placed onto the character’s play card, and the cards are laid on the table with their sides touching, like so:

Here are three characters, with Character 1 having relationships with Characters 2 & 3.  The basis for Character 1′s relationship is Aspect A – conversely, Character 2 uses Aspect D.  During the course of the game, the characters’ relationships will ebb and flow, affecting (and being affected by) the underlying aspects.  At some turning point, Player 1 decides to change the aspect used in the relationship, and turns the card, like so:

Character 1′s relationship with Character 2 becomes based on Aspect C, and Character 1′s relationship with Character 3 is now Aspect A.  Not only does this affect the current scene between Characters 1 & 2, but it also forces the player to have a scene with Character 3 to establish the new dynamic there as well.

These sorts of changes cause an ebb and flow – between relationships and aspects within a character, and between the characters (and players) as well.  This emulates the give and take between the characters and how they let other aspects of the show weave themselves into the story.

* * * 

Before you think that this is all sugar and light, I’m having real difficulties with articulating how the game plays.  I know, on an intellectual level, how I want the game to play out – but during the course of writing the playtest docs, I’ve had a really hard time codifying it.

This is a break from how I usually work – working from the top down is usually not this difficult.  So Strangers is pushing me to use playstorming to work out the kinks.  Playstorming is basically the same as playtesting, but instead of setting all the rules at the outset, you start with the basic idea-shape of play, then add rules as you go.  

So this is very nebulous, but the idea seems very … fertile.  I think that I can push it a long way uphill in a short period of time – hence my interest in putting it ahead of other ideas for the Big Day.