The rock of dramatic potential

It is a fact that some roleplaying games get into the meat of the story faster than others. One way to do this is to have a clear mission which is the focus of play, like “raid this dungeon” or “investigate this murder”. But what about the more character/relationship driven side of play? What is the difference between a game that cuts straight to interesting, meaningful drama, compared to one that takes ages to get going, whose relationships are lifeless or where the drama is just sound and fury, signifying nothing?

This isn’t just a theoretical question. I’ve lost count of the number of games that have handed me (through character/ world building at the start of the game) a bunch of interesting characters and intriguing relationships, but where I and the other players were at a loss where to start with bringing them to a head. The result, too often, is unsatisfying early scenes where we skirt the drama, or charge headlong at it, emotionally flailing at each other, but without any real sense of meaning.

I think of interesting RPG drama as like a rock that you must get rolling. The rock must have the heft created by meaning, but it also must have momentum so that interesting scenes can happen. To get the rock moving, you must roll it up the hill of dramatic potential, before it can roll down that hill, generating interesting drama in its wake. Games vary wildly in how big a rock they give you, but also in how much work they do to roll the rock up the hill.

Metaphors are all very well, but what does this mean in practice? Let’s take an example of a potential PC romance. A classic game like D&D wouldn’t bother to give any help making such a romance happen; it’s entirely in the player’s hands to do that. They might decide to introduce some romantic interaction but it might feel forced, or require quite a bit of work to get it going or make it feel significant.

Indie games might more typically help set up some potential, by asking you relationship questions like “which other PC do you have a crush on” or even “which other PC are you in love with”. This, then, is the rock: pre-generated emotional weight. It means weaving into your character’s backstory (even if only implied backstory) a sense that they have been interested in this other character for a while. It gives them an automatic reason to pursue a romance, and makes any resulting scenes more significant for them.

But it’s still pretty boring, as it stands. Even having established that one character (let’s call them Romeo) is in love with another (let’s call them Juliet), we don’t have a particularly dramatic relationship. One person being attracted to another, even in love with them, does not make for drama. Romeo may ask Juliet to dance with him, or suchlike, and she is left to either respond positively or negatively. Perhaps they’ll even hop into bed straight away. Which is fine, but not terribly dramatic or meaningful, because we have no real sense of their emotional context beyond “he’s in love with her”.

It’s actually pretty hard to get started on a conversation with your crush, as Peter could tell you.

For drama, there must be this emotional texture and, ideally, interesting complications. Consider these alternative starting relationships: Romeo is in love with Juliet, and Juliet is in love with Romeo, but they belong to warring factions who will never accept their love. Or: Romeo is in love with Juliet, but Juliet cannot forgive Romeo for killing her best friend. Or: Romeo is still in love with Juliet, after their marriage ended in acrimony.

These wrinkles add colour and meaning to a bland relationship, and they set up interesting stuff to happen in play. The warring factions are going to get up in Romeo and Juliet’s face and force them to work to have their romance happen. Or, Romeo is going to have to work to get Juliet to even consider him, and whether she says yes or no it will be freighted with meaning for them both. Or, their every action will be loaded with the regret and longing of their broken relationship and the question of whether it can ever be revived.

Good stuff. This has made the rock heftier, because it’s made the relationship more interesting and dramatically meaningful. Anything that happens to that relationship in future will be more significant because of the work put in to define and complicate the relationship.

But it still takes work to roll the rock up the hill. Some of the above starting relationships have more dramatic potential than others. What this amounts to is, to what extent is the relationship in a stable equilibrium where there’s no real reason to expect interesting stuff to happen, and to what extent is the relationship close to an interesting turning point or crisis that will throw it into motion. If Juliet hates Romeo’s guts because he killed her best friend, that is very interesting but seems like a brick wall in Romeo’s path. It’s hard to know how he even gets started romancing her, because the obvious answer to any move he might make is “get lost, friend-killer”. The relationship is stagnant, immobile. One of the people playing these characters is going to have to work (probably a lot of work) to get their character into a position where that can change.

Did you just kill my best friend? Get lost, friend-killer!

In contrast, if Romeo and Juliet are already in love, and there’s already a war between their factions, then that is close to crisis point. You can immediately see the possibilities for scenes that will pit their love against political reality. All we need do is have their midnight tryst witnessed by a faction member, and we are straight into crisis. Or perhaps we can have a close faction ally of one character kill a close faction ally of the other, to throw the relationship into conflict and emotional confusion. Here, the rock has been rolled nearly to the top of the hill, and it takes only a little more work to push it into action.

We can get the rock even closer to the top of the hill, very easily. Put simply, we can decide at the start of play that a crisis or turning point-inducing event has already happened. So for a starting relationship: Romeo and Juliet are in love with each other, but Romeo just killed Juliet’s best friend. Our game will start with Romeo having to decide how to break this news to Juliet or perhaps to try and conceal it from her. That’s an instant scene starter and, no matter what Romeo does, a drama-generator. The rock has practically started to roll already.

We could have started from cold (as in the D&D example above) and got into the above very dramatic situation in play, and there is a good argument that getting into stuff in play is more interesting than just defining it up front. But doing so entails a lot of work, during which no drama to speak of is happening, and with the risk that we’ll never get there. After all, good authors sometimes struggle to create engaging, meaningful drama between characters. It isn’t actually easy. Instead of taking that risk, we can kickstart the drama, propelling us towards exciting in-game decisions that lead to more drama, if work has been done to put the characters at some kind of inflection point at the start of play.

We can do the same thing but with a slightly less immediate “must address this NOW” feel by putting the crisis-inducing event further into the past. Like this: Romeo and Juliet are in love with each other, but Juliet doesn’t know that Romeo was the one who killed her best friend. Which other character knows about it? This approach puts the rock of dramatic potential at the top of the hill, but stationary. It only takes a nudge to throw it into motion: the character who knows Romeo did the deed tells Juliet. But that nudge can be held back and delivered right at the most exciting moment, when it will cause maximum emotional chaos.

Creating dramatic potential and putting things close to (or preferably at) an inflection point is particularly important for one-shot play. If you want character relationships to be front and centre in a one-shot, they simply must be made complicated and pushed to an inflection point, so that meaningful drama can happen in the session. Campaigns also benefit from this because it gets things going right away and enables the relationship to further develop rather than struggling to get going in the first place.

So, whether you’re a game designer or a GM or player, you can help to get drama going in your games early by:

  • creating emotionally charged relationships at the start;
  • complicating them; and
  • putting them at or near an inflection point as play starts.

These simple steps will virtually guarantee exciting emotional drama right from the word go, and make you wonder why you ever settled for questions like “who do you have a crush on?”

PBTA – Moves overload

Part of the job of a game designer is to consider the level of cognitive burden and handling time required to run a game, and pitch that at a level which works for the intended audience. I have been noticing recently how that counts in spades for PBTA.

The player-facing side of most PBTA games consists of a series of Moves, each of which has some sort of fictional trigger, and then mechanical steps you execute whenever that trigger occurs, which in turn feed back into the fiction. It’s the first of these – the fictional trigger – that makes cognitive burden a particular challenge for the PBTA designer.

The reason is that, because each Move has a fictional trigger, and because that fictional trigger is (typically) a fairly specific circumstance occurring, you have to constantly scan the fiction as it develops to check if that trigger has happened. Most PBTA games take as fundamental “to do it, you have to do it” and “if you do it, you do it” which is PBTA-speak for “if the fictional thing happens, the Move is triggered” (and vice versa, though I’m less interested in that here). This means you can’t just wait for someone to decide they want to use a particular Move and call it out – their actions in the fiction may mandate that Move.

Take a typical example from Night Witches “when you act up (by acting like a hooligan, by acting like a lady, by acting like a natural born soviet airwoman). This Move requires you to notice when someone is acting outside their normal social boundaries, and then decide whether that acting out fits with either of the three categories (if not, it doesn’t trigger the Move). So it’s a fairly complex, nuanced decision you have to take. You could miss a moment where the Move should have triggered, if you don’t pay attention.

All of this is therefore inherently cognitively burdensome, and the designer must therefore consider in each case whether that level of burden is worth the benefits delivered. Sometimes a complex, nuanced Move is worth it, sometimes it’s better to go for something simpler than might not be as precise.

Of course, it’s not just the complexity of individual triggers (though that is a factor), it’s the sheer combined weight of all the triggers that have to be considered. You could write a PBTA game with 100 basic Moves, but nobody could play it; they’d constantly fail to notice when they were triggering Moves, even if they were fairly simple.

This leads me to some critique of PBTA games I’ve played recently. They’re games I like and have enjoyed, and which are pretty popular, so hopefully it’s clear that I’m not going for a take-down of anyone’s game here. I’m using them as examples of an issue which needn’t be fatal to a game, but which I find difficult in play.

The first example is Sagas of the Icelanders, a game which attempts to emulate the eponymous stories of the early Icelandic settlers. In doing so, it imposes some quite restrictive roles on the characters, specifically relating to their gender. If you play a man, your Moves are focused on physical feats and (rather more complex) defending your honour and attacking the honour and dignity of other men. If you play a woman, your Moves are focused on influencing other characters (particularly, but not exclusively, men) through reason, emotion and sexual attraction. (The way this is set up creates a focus on male characters that is interesting but not the focus of my critique.)

Whenever a character takes action in Sagas, like every PBTA game, you have to mentally compare what they did to the Moves to see if one was triggered. Of course, you first have to focus on the correct set of gendered Moves, since actions that would trigger a Move for a man won’t necessarily do so for a woman, and vice versa. So gender introduces an element of complexity up-front. But – particularly for women – the specific triggers are quite nuanced. You can raise your voice and talk sense, but only to player characters. You can goad to action, but only aimed at a man. And because of the very specific and culturally relevant triggers, many things that intuitively feel like Moves aren’t. All of which is fine, but kind of hard work to parse in play.

Next example is Urban Shadows. Urban Shadows has Moves which are somewhat more intuitive (for me) than the likes of Sagas, which is a plus. Many of the Moves only trigger in fairly well-defined contexts (more on this in a moment). However, it has a lot of Moves. The Urban Shadows Basic Moves sheet has 15 Moves on it, not counting the rules on advancement. That is a lot of mental checks to go through every time someone does something! It’s a lot of possible mechanical triggers to remember, full stop. [Edit: discussion elsewhere has reminded me that the theoretical limit of human short-term memory is seven items, plus or minus two.] On top of that, there are four different triggers for advancement, and a trigger for corruption, that you have to keep an eye on. Again, this is fine, but kind of hard work.

So what can you do about this, if you’re designing a game? Well, the obvious stuff is:

– Keep your Moves simple, with straightforward, intuitive triggers that don’t require a lot of thought to judge.

– Try to keep your Moves list as short as you can. This in turn means…

– …focus on the Moves that really matter for the game you’re trying to write. Don’t waste your players’ mental space with Moves that aren’t all that important – PBTA lets the players and MC negotiate the fiction pretty well even if a Move isn’t triggered.

Another trick is to try and group your Moves by the context in which they occur. Apocalypse World, for instance, has Battle Moves. Including them roughly doubles the number of Moves in the game, taking it from a pretty simple half-a-dozen Moves up to more like a dozen. But you only have to think about the Battle Moves if you’re in battle. If nobody has any weapons out, you needn’t waste any brain space thinking about them. Similarly, Night Witches divides its Moves into day and night Moves, and in almost all cases you therefore only have to think about half the potential Moves at any given moment.

You might think that the Sagas approach is kind of like grouping Moves by context. Well… I don’t know what to tell you. That’s not how I experience it. Two characters are having a conversation, one of them starts to talk sense, and then I realise that person is a man, so the “talk sense” Move doesn’t apply. That small mental effort, repeated several times a session, is burdensome in a way that “am I in a battle right now” isn’t.

None of this is to say that you can’t write a game with complex, nuanced Moves. With lots of Moves. With Moves that only apply in specific circumstances that require a bit of thought to judge. All of this is permissible, and can be good design. But it is a cost that you are making your players pay to play your game. Make sure you’ve chosen punchy Moves that deliver something worthwhile, so that it’s a cost they’ll be glad they paid.