Support for GMs looking to Plan Right?
Vincent Baker recently shared an annecdote about how designers from different corners of RPG-land publicly advocated against GMs planning outcomes in their games.
Commenter CC (I don't know his name) replied with an excellent example of a planned outcome that paid off, with the PCs deceived a second time by their hated arch-nemesis.
Here's my ( Read more... )
Commenter CC (I don't know his name) replied with an excellent example of a planned outcome that paid off, with the PCs deceived a second time by their hated arch-nemesis.
Here's my ( Read more... )
If that model of why people are playing is true, I feel like there are some people who really are not “playing to find out what happens”, not just by habit, but because building story arcs or special moments interests them.
They should probably be told (if anyone knows how to do it well enough to tell them) “here are ways to manipulate your player’s characters better” and “here are ways to insure you and them are on the same page about where the game should be going”.
Or “why not get the other players involved in planning too?”.
This feels like at least two kinds of "plan right". Do you abandon immersion and go for combined story telling, or do you make it so that the players who work without immersion cover for those who do?
For other players, who are playing for the unknown, they should be told ways to focus the scope on what they want to explore, prepare stuff to work from without stomping over their own interesting conundrums, and given various tools to do that nicely. For them explicit arc planning/choice funnelling probably is a stupid idea, and they'll want to find alternatives.
Loads of indie games take that "scope narrowing" out of the hands of the GM and put it in the rules, trying to build a starting situation that is self contained, a setting that flags up new and interesting perspectives and precludes cliched responces, or building the basics of an arc into the natural behaviour of play. Currency loops can be a form of automated planning, as can certain "reward systems".
In these cases the broader arc is not the main thing, it's cool and all, but better to just automate it and focus creative energies on the new stuff.
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Sure, there can definitely be different types of planning (good, bad, none) by different players in one game. I didn't even intend to address players' plans for their characters here -- that's a whole new interesting topic!
I think you make some good points about the various reasons someone (a GM, for this example) might want to plan. Authorship, emulation, immersion -- for pretty much any goal someone might bring to an RPG table, there's some appeal in having control over what you get along that vector.
I suspect it's accurate to say that, though most players of games want some types of outcomes left to chance (e.g., whether that character pulls off that tricky badass feat), most players of RPGs also come in with other outcomes they don't want left to chance (e.g., I'm immersed, this game is recognizable as Star Wars, etc.).
That said, I think we do in fact have game designs that offer players and GMs guarantees of the types of outcome they'll get (immersive, Star Wars-y, etc.). We just don't have designs for elegantly guaranteeing specific outcomes (like "arch-nemesis stabs PCs in the back").
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And I think that's ok going in because the creative activity isn't there. You know as GM going into a game that the game will gaurantee x, and you're off doing something different.
Like D&D 4e at it's most combatty handles monster creation and level appropriateness, and leaves spatial stuff and tactics to you.
And I wonder whether any system that encourages planning has to do the same kind of step back:
It would set up the potential to fix certain kinds of outcomes, but leave the last steps of wrestling to the GM or player, so that they actually have something to do.
Like if you look at universalis, that provides a system to mandate certain things will happen, and to set up the game world with clues to your idea, and then fight off people prematurely triggering your arc etc.
I reckon with the right mindset going in, and careful use of gimmics so that you don't mess up the structure, you can run highly plotted stories in universalis. And that has that kind of "wrestling with unexpected hitches to produce a story", but whoever wins, you still get one!
But if you make a system that always leads to specific outcomes, doesn't that mean that the game will always leads to backstabbings etc? That people will only choose to play that game if they want to get backstabbed halfway through the game?
There's a whole knot of things here, and I'm trying to avoid the problem of giving a cook an automatic food-producing machine rather than a better kitchen, so that those people who don't just want food, but want to make food, still get to do it.
But of course, microwave ready meals are the best thing ever when you're starving hungry, and if you can find a way to auto-produce stories that are really good then some people will be totally happy with that.
There probably is a case for giving people a foolproof plan to implement, and they just pick which plan they want for the situation, like a big box of plot twists and story-trope machines to plug into their game.
Is that more what you were going for?
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I want a game that elegantly* guarantees whatever outcomes the GM wants to guarantee.
..within limits, of course. The GM should be helped or forced to choose wisely in this regard.
*"elegantly" is the hard part! we already have the rest
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Now I've mentioned them I really like the idea of plan fragments; imagine that instead of having an "adventure path" or module that people got sold, they instead were given an interesting encounter style and all the scaffolding it needs so you can run the game towards it. In other words you'd have a checklist of things to leave outside of player power in each of the scenes leading up to the particular one, what sort of minimum state the players should be in by the point of the encounter and suggestions of how to fit that in to different scenes or deal with minor failures/deviations. They'd also have forshadowing examples, so you could add litle bits of the future event to the current situation.
Basically the plan fragments being small enough would allow you to build your own plan from them, and the more you used, the more tightly constrained previous scenes would be!
On the broader stuff, I'd like to see people analyse what the tradeoffs are in that kind of "planner-GM and blindfolded PCs" play; restricting player character power in these areas allows you to make these kinds of outcome assured, but means you cannot build challenges involving x, vs "players playing their characters along certain lines can lead to this, but also that". Etc.
There's some facinating room to explore, and see where a GM actually has "room to breathe" to react to players and what she can do with that, assuming only that prep that is shared is set in stone.
But I think trying to make systems for the GM to produce any arbitrary outcome is insanely ambitious. I think we're more likely to get progress either by slowly colonising the possibility space of robust plans, or by getting games like universalis and finding better stratergies for them. Or in other words, you get games that can do 3 things totally reliably, or games where you are slowly more reliable at doing anything!
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Also, by saying "any arbitrary outcome" you're making it even harder. Tackling a finite scope of outcomes is fine (see "within limits" above).
Separately, the goals you mention for the Plan Fragments sound great, but I have no idea how what you're describing would achieve them.
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Because with indie games there is scope for playtesting; you know off the bat that in every one of 60 games you'll want event x to occur, or you'll want players to be able to explore theme y, or you'll want this pattern of causality or that relationship between players.
That's only part of the game, but you are saying as a designer "I want the GM/players to be able to do x".
Whereas there are people all over the place who really do expect the GM to be given a set of random plot pieces and experience parameters and make them work, first time!
GMs will say things like "ask me what you want to do and I'll try to find a way to make it happen".
Helping GMs in that situation is a higher order problem; they are effectively having to design a game on the fly!
Giving them an arbitrary system to start them off may not help, if the system doesn't match the kinds of problems they are likely to be facing etc etc.
Loads of GMs of that style would be better off swapping systems throughout the game; sometimes you roll social damage, sometimes you roll saves for your relationships, sometimes you roll for whether you succeed at climbing a clocktower, sometimes you have to match cards to evade the people pursuing you.
When I start to contemplate GMing a game in that way the possibilities are mind blowing!
Of course GMs can always say no.
They can specify what they think they're going to be able to handle; limit the ways that players interact with the world, the powers of their characters, the resolution mechanics and game world verbs available, set out game world parameters etc.
They can say that certain character types will not fit, or that certain goals are out of type for this kind of game etc.
But that in itself is no negligible task, how do you distinguish in advance how player goals are going to interact? What you'll be able to handle?
Most people develop a feel for "I can see that working", or "I've no idea how that could work". Or you can see how someone else's game works and try it out.
My feeling is that we're
reasonably good at sharing resolution systems with each other,
ok at sharing ways to slowly shift gameplay recursively (reward cycles, bangs, fronts, propagating changes through relationships, all that jazz),
but not so good at sharing "I wanted them to get to the temple before nightfall so I could describe the light of the sunset on it's mirrored surfaces, so I realised I needed to reduce the difficulty of this travel challenge".
We're not so good at communicating or systemising how to keep track of dependencies through time, and setting up current events to support later ones. Or what consequences to be aware of when doing this.
This is of course because of the emphasis on different kinds of play, and on player equality, reducing hidden information and all that.
Plan fragments are basically that, what you need to keep track of today to make what you've planned for tomorrow run smoothly.
My theory is that although a lot of experienced plan-first GMs do this, they internalise the dependencies, so that they only appear when someone tries to kill an npc they are going to need later, or they think things are taking too long etc.
My idea is to help GMs to put it on the paper in front of them, so that they can clear their heads a bit more, and also share the information with people in other games.
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Apologies about my style in these comments, trying to come up with an alternative to categorical statements like "don't plan" got me into too much of a dogmatic/systemising mode. Sometimes rewarding, but a little too much hard work!
Coming back down to earth, creating plan fragments is my idea for how to sort out the disconnect between the in-play and pre-play parts of planning:
Players tend to recognise planned play when it interferes with their freedom, but that can be a red herring, as GMs can be obstructive for lots of reasons.
GM's often see it totally differently, with planned play being about considering the future of where you want things to head, and the various lovely vistas/complex encounters you have in your head. That can be a total red herring, because you need to actually find ways to get the players there.
In the middle you've got something a management person said:
Planning is about what you have to do now to make the future you want happen.
To actually work off this insight, you can just (for example) write down each of the scenes you want to happen on A4 sheets, landscape, with a margin a fifth of the way in, and list on the left hand side of the sheet the things that need to have been set up for the things on the right hand to happen properly. Then when you lay all of these sheets down, you can sort of fan them out like playing cards with the current sheet for this scene/encounter at the front on the right, and all the constraints of future scenes beneath it and on the left.
With some experience to categorise those constraints, and graphic design tricks to make it clear, then you could always have in front of you information about what you need to do to make this scene work in the context of the larger game.
You could know when the player choices in the right hand side are liable to hit into the constraints on the left, and act to avoid this, and you could also look for potential points of conflict between the constraints for different future scenes.
The next kind of thing to have would be a goto set of advice for dealing with negotiating conflicts between constraints, and dealing with diversions, and you could write on the back of those scenes cards what sort of alternative scenes could replace them if they become invalidated before you can do them.
I'm thinking that as you start working with these sheets, you'd start shifting from "this specific npc must live" to "there must be a character that has this relationship to the player characters" and other forms of generalisation, with the old npc becoming separated out into a different pile, of NPCs particularly suited for various roles. Slowly taking the plan part and making it more abstract, while honing in on the actual details you want.
For preparation methods that don't follow the same kind of sequence different stuff may be required, but that can still be approached in a similar way; what must be achieved in order to set up this future set of events? What events or story elements move smoothly with this? Or even tend to help set it up? Etc.
Once you can keep track of the dependencies, I suspect planning becomes a lot easier, and hopefully when you have this kind of format, more experienced people than me can turn it into something foolproof, taking plan fragments and building tricks around them to make them work, or adjusting them to improve them etc.
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Just wanted to let you know this comment finally got through! Cool stuff. I'm busy now, but will respond soon.
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I've found it both difficult and boring to map out what needs to happen in order for the stuff I want to occur. I have friends who have taken this exact approach and most of the time it took them forever and didn't work. They avoided awkward railroading at the end... by doing awkward railroading at the beginning.
I think that, for the system you suggest to be fun and easy for GMs to use, the game itself would have to identify the dependencies. Like, I say, "dusk arrival" and then I consult a card or chart and quickly get some list of likely delays to avoid.
I do think that the planning a lot of GMs already do could be aided by a well-designed visual format. Honestly, I'd love to see something like that, and give it a spin. But ultimately I think it's the wrong direction. No reasonable amount of prep will ever obviate the need to occasionally assert "I need this to happen". And a game that needs to accommodate that anyway probably shouldn't focus on ways to avoid it.
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