Freeform gaming?

[Thornir Alekeg]

The campaign in heavy in exploration, problem-solving and NPC interaction, and light on combat.

The PC:s are an elven princess and a fairy from the Magic Kingdom, who have found themselves employed as maids in modern Anime Japan.

Right now my party's theater group has been kidnapped by captain Nemo, and forced to drive electrical steam-punk worker mechas at the bottom of a deep sea trench, where he is excavating the ancient city of Mu. What he does not yet know, is that the players have managed to interface with the city's holistic crystal-driven virtual reality system...

Previously they've managed to foil the takeover of the Japanese gods' and spirits' favourite bath house (see "Spirited Away") by cthuluid tentacular horrors from beyond space and time, and return it to the nine-tailed kitsune who was the rightful owner, as well as solve a kidnapping case involving yakuza mermaids and travel 15 year into the future to save the city from invading transdimensional frogs with rayguns, etc.. etc...

So that's what you get when you order your pizza with the "special" mushrooms...

The main thing about a freeform game is that it requires the buy-in of everyone involved and a good amount of trust between them. One person taking the game off the rails can result in things spiraling out of control.

 

[Gilladian]

A bunch of gaming friends and I used to play this game when we were in the car or otherwise unable to play a full-blown pen and paper game.

Characters were generated with 3 "traits" which were usually a single word - things like "gymnastics" or "weaponsmith". You also chose a race or physical description for your PC. Then you chose 2 or 3 talents, which were like traits, but narrower and less flexible in their application - they might be "bareback rider" or "talks to cats".

Each character also selected an "anything item". This was some prop which the character was allowed to use during the game as a magical, incredibly versatile tool. For example, an anything umbrella served as a sunshade, parachute, coracle, tent, and other similar uses over time.

The only dice rolling involved was "roll-offs" vs the DM on a D20. Each time you wanted to accomplish something, you rolled the d20. If you could apply a trait to the roll, you got a +3 bonus. A talent added +2. Higher roll got to determine the outcome of the roll-off.

In this game we took turns being the "Narrator", and delighted in seeing what twisted situations we could put the rest of the group in. We often used fairytale motifs; I distinctly remember an old lady in a shoe, and a wolf with a red cape (poor riding hood!), etc...

It worked very well, but did require quite a bit of trust to play well. We must have played it, off and on, for about 2 years.

 

[Mallus]

Quite a lot of my last two D&D campaigns (3e & 4e) were played free-form. Whole sessions could go by without the rules being consulted.

Though rules-free sessions were often followed by ones dominated by single set-piece fight scenes, where there was plenty of rules consultation.

 

[Umbran]

Quite a lot of my last two D&D campaigns (3e & 4e) were played free-form. Whole sessions could go by without the rules being consulted.

Though rules-free sessions were often followed by ones dominated by single set-piece fight scenes, where there was plenty of rules consultation.

My current Deadlands game is running much in that mode - one or two sessions of talk and investigation, where there's maybe the occasional skill-check but not much else, followed by a session where the bubblegum hits the fan and the PCs fight for their lives.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

The five play by e-mail games that I've played in have all been free form. The characters have stats and skills and generally the GM makes a judgment call on whether your character can do it or not, with "What would make for the most interesting situation?" thrown in.

They have been some of the best roleplaying experience I've been a part of. In face-to-face games one of my friends always wants to be the guy who is awesome in combat and does tons of damage. But in those freeform PBEMs he comes with a deeper character and really get into the roleplaying aspect like I've never seen him do at the table. It was a direct result of the free form nature of the game.

There are quite simple criteria that need to be satisfied to make a game session good (and it crashes violently when they are not):
1. All players, including the GM, trust eachother.
2. All players know and agree about the setting and genre they want to play in.
3. There is no direct opposition between PCs.
4. Players aim for either immersion or story; direct challenges have to be secondary.

Great suggestions--especially points 1 and 4. In our games #3 isn't a criteria because (due to the nature of playing by e-mail) the PCs aren't part of the same party and are sometimes have opposing goals. But it still links to your #1. The PCs can be opposed but the players still have to trust each other and remember that everyone is there to tell an interesting collaborative story.

 

[howandwhy99]

Freeform gaming is a postmodern game design term. It really depends upon what you mean by freeform to answer the question. Is it a few people sitting down to express themselves without any agreements (rules) between them on how to do so? Or is it a pattern finding game with a code behind a screen (a la Mastermind) where the players take turn based attempts to crack the code?

In postmodern thought both of those activities are the same. Both are storytelling (story defined as "stuff happening"). In modernist thought the second activity is pattern finding where the intent of the players is to use memory and insight to uncover the repeated pattern. Pattern here is defined as "a repetition" and in a language game it is a semantic repetition. Story is defined as "a sequence of events" or a sequential pattern.

Both are improvised by people and both result in a a story. The twist is whether or not a participant believes repetition is ever possible, even pragmatically. The freeform storygame is a group of people collaboratively expressing themselves without any prior social agreements on how to do so. The other, may or may not be, a memory test enabled by one person who constructs a code prior to play and repeats it endlessly with the others taking guess attempts to demonstrate recognition of such.

This second method seems almost entirely non-freeform as it presupposes an underlying structure to the pattern giver. As a cooperative simulation with the "rules" (code) hidden behind a screen it works in two different ways. One as a computer game with the programmers coding learned as play progresses. The other is as a tabletop reality puzzle game, a sort of situational puzzle with multiple puzzle solvers. That means it includes an "Irrelevant, so Yes" rule the computer cannot. This allows an unknowing programming of the code, which afterward cannot be contradicted. Instead of a constriction to what a computer can do, it enables autonomy for the players within a shared vocabulary.


I think gaming may be thought of as a series of faiths and which one each person chooses to agree with.

In Tic-Tac-Toe a naive realist might believe he can always win so long as he goes first, starts in the corner, and continues to outflank the other player.

A critical realist might believe the game can be solved as it includes a finite number of game states. Once both players solve the game, yet continue to play to the winning objective it simply becomes an endless boredom of tie games.

A postmodernist might believe the game, like it's underlying math, is a fiction, therefore it does not exist anywhere even in the brain and should not be considered as real. One cannot win or lose nor preconceive an endgame objective as the repetition of imagining such in one's mind and reaching that gamestate on paper is an impossibility. So each player is telling a story and electing one player as the winner because they like his or her expression subjectively more.

It is the postmodern turn. Where a modernist sees patterns as real and everything a pattern, a postmodernist would see reality as a choice and no patterns ever happening.


So don't use any rules to tell your story or pick up a cooperative world simulation game to hide behind a screen. It's your choice.

 

[Rel]

Couple games that I've played recently seem like they might be up the alley you're looking into:

Fiasco - This is strictly a one-shot game but it is very fun. As mentioned above, it is GM-less but it's very liberating to play because there is absolutely zero prep. Everything about the game is generated at the table. It manages to be cooperative and competitive at the same time while being just a ton of fun.

Old School Hack is a nod to older games like Basic D&D. It has rules but not a lot of them. The combat moves very fast and there is a lot of creative input by the players in the form of spending Awesome Points to generate items or NPC's within the game world. It is VERY easy to adjudicate if you're decent at coming up with stuff on the fly. And the way that bad guys are built lets you generate and endless variety of enemies using a very small number of variables.