Scenario and setting design, with GM and players in mind

[pemerton]

In the moment, most of the time, it might not be. As a general underlying scene shift, however, it could be pretty big: the world isn't what the players/PCs thought it was.

What's the point of that? What does it bring to the RPGing experience?

GM solitaire play? Hardly.

How are the players involved in the revelation?

without GM secrets there can't be any big reveals

Yes there can.

 

[chaochou]

How can we design scenarios and settings to enable players to find the facts on the ground and to provide them with enough levers in the fiction to interact with? What sorts of scenario and setting will generate an internal causality that is meaningfully knowable and comprehensible?

What other general suggestions can be made?

I suggest that causal processes which a scenario assumes the players will be able to 'work out' have to be actually causal rather than arbitrary.

I see far too much arbitrariness in plot summaries in pre-written adventures. The enemy bad guy is the love child of a vampire and a succubus, but the vampire kept pigs and so his offspring are vulnerable to bacon: it pretends to be 'logic' but it's actually completely spurious.

 

[pemerton]

@chaochou

What do you see as supporting non-arbitrary causation? Real-world social and physical science? Well-established myths/tropes/fairy-tales that the players are known to have ready-to-hand?

Your post has reminded me of the two sessions I ran of The Green Knight RPG, one for old hands and one for very green newbies. In that system, to do well you have to interpret the moral stakes of the scenario and make the right calls (as determined in advance as part of scenario design): if you don't get it right, you accrue dishonour which ends up hosing you. The old hands were quickly able to interpret the scenes, conjecture what was at stake, and make choices that preserved honour and avoided dishonour. The newbies didn't pick up on the cues and tropes, made losing calls, and were crushed half-way through the scenario.

Those same newbies do fine at Agon, where the players get to decide how to interpret the will of the gods and make the right choices (it very slightly resembles DitV in that respect), and so aren't hostage to what can be - for them, given their (in)experience and knowledge-base - arbitrary connections between elements of the fiction.

 

[chaochou]

@chaochou

What do you see as supporting non-arbitrary causation? Real-world social and physical science? Well-established myths/tropes/fairy-tales that the players are known to have ready-to-hand?

I liked your examples of how understanding of the genre is important.

I'd say you need a shared understanding of real-world social and physical science, and a shared understanding of where those are going to be disregarded in favour of genre tropes. Plus a shared understanding of those tropes.

 

[chaochou]

I was running a game of Diaspora, which is hard sci-fi. Facing a tough decision, a player consciously decided to fire their rifle in a zero-gravity environment.

Even with a shared understanding that such an action is going to end up with a bullet going one direction and the character going the opposite direction, how far and how fast does the character move back? Even if you take earth-gravity data of the muzzle velocity and mass of the bullet as a starting point, how are you going to apply a force to the player? What if they said they are braced against a bulkhead? Is that going to cause them to spin? With what effect?

It was a tough game to run, simply because most sci-fi includes an 'artificial gravity' trope for convenience and it's extremely easy to fall back into without even noticing - and actually something of a pita to keep having to reimagine life on a spaceship in zero-G!

 

[Manbearcat]

When it comes to Setting/NPCs, I start from a position of what can/should I NOT do?

* What harms player relationship to the process of playing the game in question?

* What makes no internal causality sense?

* What makes no genre-logic sense?

* When is the juice (effort to prep) not with worth the squeeze (won’t see play or likely to not see play or likely to have little impact upon play)?

Once I know what is effectively a misplay, I can winnow results down to only what is useful. What is useful will intersect directly with the game in question:

* If the game has a focused premise, always keep that premise in mind (and not just symbolically…but in a way that has teeth as consequences and levers for players to pull) when ruminating upon potential conflict/threats/opportunities.

* If the game has thematic xp triggers or Rivals/Enemies, then think about the relevant PC thematic portfolio and how interesting framing or consequence outgrowth might enrich play by bringing the trigger or Enemy/Rival into a conflict. Enrich here doesn’t mean “consequence-free (even if color-rich) cosplay.” It means activating/engaging with that stuff in a way that provokes and brings a particular vitality to play (being challenging in some way including, or perhaps especially, if you can set two PC agendas at tension to find out how the players sort that out).

* If you need interconnectedness spatially or socially (ingress/egress or x/y/social coordinate connectors), have a map to refer to or jot down a Point Crawl (which can be used spatially or socially) and a few tags or phrase that functionally (for use in play) connects the points.

 

[pemerton]

If you need interconnectedness spatially or socially (ingress/egress or x/y/social coordinate connectors), have a map to refer to or jot down a Point Crawl (which can be used spatially or socially) and a few tags or phrase that functionally (for use in play) connects the points.

Explain further?

 

[Umbran]

Yes there can.

I dunno if I'd call it a "reveal" if it didn't exist before. Revealing is making visible a thing that existed but was concealed or occluded. If you are creating the thing, that's rather different. Still a cool experience, but different.

 

[Emirikol]

If any of you have played murder mystery dinner games, you will see that there are secrets given and gained in each round. This works for a while...

 

[Lanefan]

Two games I’ve GMed recently come to mind. In both Blades in the Dark and Spire the player characters play inhabitants of the city in which the game takes place. Neither is the “stranger in a strange land” trope that’s common to many RPGs.

So the way to handle this as the GM is to provide them with plenty of information. They live in the city, they should know things. They have connections, they’ve been places, they know who’s doing what in different parts of the city. The more you give this info freely, the more comfortable the players become with it, and they start suggesting ideas themselves, which is great.

Give them an abundance of information and resources to bring to bear. Friends and allies, people who can be bribed or leveraged.

In a game or campaign which all takes place in a single city this is great. Love it!

Not all - in fact I'd posit rather few - games/campaigns are like this, however. Many, following the LotR precedent, involve a fair amount of travel; and discovery of things as the PCs move from one locale to another. Few if any GMs will have several full nations detailed to the extent one can a single campaign-encompassing city.

These ideas have bled over into my other games, too, even more traditional ones like D&D. I’m very generous with details and I don’t gate anywhere near as much information behind rolls as I used to. I have secrets, sure, but they are there to be DISCOVERD by the players not REVEALED to them.

Im my view there's no difference between "discover" and "reveal" in this instance, assuming that the revealing of information naturally flows from the players/PCs' taking actions to gather it.