Monthly Archives: December 2010

The Second Adventure Triad

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Ok, to refresh, I posited that the three main models of adventure motivation are Procedural (sequence of scenes or reverts towards a dramatic or appropriate conclusion), Goal-driven (moderately open play with a goal providing overall direction) and Situational (Where the characters are put in a situation which will evolve based on their play).

I present these as a triad rather than a sequence because it is not hard for these to bleed into one another, and in reality, it is rare for a game to move purely to one of these points, and rarer still for it to stay there. Instead, actual play moved towards the spaces in between these points, and those can be described in broad terms.

Between Situation and Procedure, we have Exploration play, which it might more accurately call progression. The model is simple: When play begins, the players are in a particular place or state (such as the small town near the low level dungeon), and as the game progresses, the range of places available to to the players expands. This is probably most commonly seen in video games, but it’s also a common part of D&D and D&D style adventures. The 4e model of moving from the world to the inner planes and on to the outer plains is also a good example of this. The procedural element revolves around the progression from zone to zone, as it were, but it’s still largely situational because those “zones” are large may have a lot of scope for play within them.

The Quest is a combination of Procedure and Goal based play: it’s got a clear goal (the object of the quest) but there’s a chain of steps to go through to get to that point – to kill the dragon, you have to get the sword, to get the sword you have to find the tomb, to find the tomb you need to brave the archives and so on.

Finally, between Goal and Situation, you have Sandbox style play. There’s an ultimate objective in the form of the goal, but there’s no real limit on how the characters are going to proceed nor at what pace.

So, that puts us up to six models, but the important thing to note is that NONE of these models automatically translate into a good or bad game, nor even faintly trend that way. Each one of those models can be used to build a very good adventure or a truly abysmal one. I’m not just speaking in terms of personal taste – I mean really, genuinely terrible adventures.

That said, these models _can_ be useful when it comes time to talk with players about the game. If you can talk about the models directly then that’s probably easiest, but even if you don’t speak in explicit terms, it’s something to keep in mind as they talk about the sort of game they expect.

The Adventure Triad

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There was an interesting question put forward in the comments yesterday that got me thinking about the structure of adventures. I was talking about goal-based vs. procedural adventures, and a commenter asked what these categories are. I had never given it much thought, so I chewed on this a bit to try to figure out what categories there might be.

The thing that surprised me is that there were fewer than I expected. Sticking within the bounds of more normal adventures, which is to say I’m excluding meta-play adventures, where the player’s role is more akin to an author, and with those aside, there are three big categories – Situational, Procedural and Goal oriented. They’re not exclusive (more on that in a minute) but they have different priorities.

Situational play centers around characters inserted into an already-detailed situation, whether dynamic or static, and bouncing around within it, observing, interacting, and often changing the rest of the situation. The GM tends to do a fair amount of work up front, and then depend up skills of improvisation to keep the situation feeling realistic and compelling. A game like Amber, which revolves around the machination of an extended family is a good example of a situational game.

Procedural play is based on the the idea of sequential events, strung together to create a coherent chain of events (or, if you’re feeling risky… a story). The GM needs to do a fair amount of prep for this as well, but it’s more focused than that for situational play – if you imagine Situational design as a large box full of stuff, procedural play is a series of smaller boxes. It’s easier to come up with a procedural game, but the situational material is more reusable. Mysteries are great examples of this.

Goal oriented play is, as the name suggests, centered around a goal the players are looking to accomplish. The framework around the the goal might be loose or structured, but the goal is always the thing that drives play. Leverage is almost purely goal oriented – without a goal, the game doesn’t work well.

Knowing these approaches can help prevent confusion when you want to run a game, since these approaches also speak to player expectations. When a player anticipates a situation game, where he’s going to have a lot of freedom to wander towards whatever shiny object catches his attention, he’s going to get very frustrated if the GM is expecting procedural play.

Now, by themselves, these three elements create a a very limited picture of what’s really going on in play. While they are practical methods of play, very few games are going to be purely one thing or another. These ideas inform play, but you start seeing more interesting things in between them, where these ideas combine, and where this:

Starts to look more like this:

So what are those three new categories? Stay tuned!

Roads, Not Railroads

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Ken Hite recently ruffled a few feathers by declaring at a seminar that “Railroading is a pejorative term for a game in which something is accomplished.”

It’s an easy point to argue (as the nice people at rpg.net have demonstrated) but doing so rather misses the point. The purpose of a generalization like that is not to be true, but rather, to be useful. I have spent no small amount of time talking about how to avoid railroading in games, both as a GM and as an adventure designer, but there’s an important point that runs through all those warnings: there are very good reasons that people railroad.

Now, yes, there are also bad reasons. The nightmare scenario is the adventure which consists pretty much entirely of watching the GM do a puppet show of the story which is totally going to be the basis of that novel which is going to make him famous when he gets around to writing it. Nobody wants that, and when it’s the adventure designer who writes the puppet show, that’s even worse because it just encourages that sort of behavior.

There is also a somewhat more dull sort of railroading that occurs when the player’s stray from the GM’s notes. The classic example of this is the unfinished dungeon map, where the characters are steered away from the parts that haven’t been filled in yet. This example sticks in the mind because a lot of us have experience with it (from our own days of vast dungeons scratched out in pencil on graph paper) but I think it’s a less important one, if only because it’s a hallmark of inexperience, not a true technique. That is to say, more experienced GMs don’t have this problem because they have taught themselves how to wing it in those situations, or they have learned not to use incomplete dungeons.

But the main reason good GMs railroad is, to come back to Ken, to make things happen. The railroad is the through-line of the adventure, the sequence of events that makes it all make sense. It’s not something every game needs to work – it can be equally effective (if more work) to craft a compelling, dynamic situation and insert the characters – but having a through-line helps insure a satisfying conclusion. This is especially true in adventures that have a clearly procedural bent, where the first action leads to the second action and so on (you see this a lot in police mysteries and revenge stories). For these games, that process is a bit of a necessity – skipping over bits tends to either be impossible (because key information is missing or because key steps are left undone – like missing a target or failing to get proper evidence for a conviction).

It’s easy to characterize that sort of game as railroading, but the reality is it’s just a good match for the game in question. The problem comes when that same model is misapplied, either to adventures where it’s a mismatch (such as objective based ones) or handled poorly.

For an objective based game (rescue the princess, steal the widget), players can easily get frustrated if there is only one path to the objective (especially if that path is kind of stupid). One of the joys of fiction and play is unexpected solutions to sticky problems, and given a clear goal, you can expect players to pursue those unexpected solutions with great vigor. Designing such a game with only one path to success invites frustration, especially if that path is easily circumvented (as in the case of an adventure where players can skip large parts of the middle by flying rather than walking).

That frustration tends to lead to the reason railroading is a pejorative – the bad GMing techniques that emerge when players go off the tracks. When players deviate from the script, the GM can choose to roll with it and see where it goes, but she might also choose to try to force the players back onto the right track by force and trickery. Maybe it’ll be subtle enough to feel organic, but it can escalate pretty easily. The GM’s gentle nudge fails, so it becomes a hint, which becomes a push, which becomes a blatant abuse of authority and things end up feeling crappy for everyone.[1]

Obviously, that’s something to avoid, but that’s not hard – it’s a failure of technique more than anything else. Realizing that you’re setting up a railroad for a situation that is a poor match can save you a ton of hassles down the line and by extension, recognizing the same in published games can save you similar hassles.

In the end, I would advise most GMs to think in terms of roads rather than railroads. Feel free to build in those plot threads and through-lines and have them go interesting places. You and your players will probably find it rewording, and if done well, your players will stick to the roads more often than not. But unlike railroads, there’s no disaster when someone swings off a road in an unexpected direction. The trip may be a bit bumpier, but that doesn’t mean it won’t go someplace cool.

1 – This can happen even when the GM doesn’t have a plot of through-line in mind, and is instead merely thrown off by the players circumventing his brilliant encounters. This is even more petty, and there tends to be a streak of vindictiveness to it as the GM seeks to punish the players for “outsmarting” him. This is not a technique, it’s just being a douche, but enough people have seen it in action that it’s left long scars across the hobby.

Hacking the Hacker

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People have been talking about ways to hack Leverage to play games of a similar style in different settings. There are a lot of possibilities for this – there are very few genres which can’t support a good caper (or at least a team of awesome folks executing on plans) so there’s a lot of potential different places to take it. This introduces a lot of questions for how to support these other genres, especially when they don’t quite match up with the roles of the core game.

Four of the roles are pretty portable – Hitter, Thief, Grifters and Masterminds are pretty universal. You might want to change the names for tone – Soldier, Burglar, Charmer and Leader – but the basic functionality is just about the same. The problem comes in the form of how you handle the Hacker.

Now, yes, some Hacker skills, such as forgery, are nicely portable, the thematic core of the role revolves around computers, networks and such fun things. That demands a fairly narrow band of time, either the reasonably recent past (say, post War Games) to the near future (think Cyberpunk) with brief side jaunts into alt-history where the goggles and gears annoy Charles Stross. So when you step outside of that sphere, what do you do with the hacker?

The first option is to see if there’s a setting equivalent for technology. This may take the form of magic, but only if the magic is fairly low key. For example, Scott Lynch’s Lies of Locke Lamora has magic, but it’s so powerful that making hacker into mage would be simply overwhelming. However, the setting has very interesting Alchemy, and that would probably be a much better match. It makes a good match for some of the sort of things the hacker does, especially producing gadgetry.

Similarly, you could easily enough use a kind of “low magic”[1] stand in for hacking (in my mind, I’m imagining Egg Chen from Big Trouble in Little China as an example of this). In some ways it’s an almost perfect match. You can produce little relics, scry for information and so on. This is just one way to handle magic in the Leverage system, but that’s a topic I’ll get into more some other time.

The other possible approach is to treat hacking as a signature of the genre. That is to say, hacking is a signifier for a certain time-range and style of play, and in other genres, the signifier might be something else. Consider, for example, the Pilot in a game based loosely off Firefly – it’s a role that is very important to that sort of group, and while it may not have any similarities to the hacker in terms of what the character _does_, but it’s similar in term of how it fits into the group. Of course, the one problem with using Pilot as an example is that you need to make sure that it comes up as often as the other roles do in play. Pilot tends to be a little bit rough in actual play because the ship just sort of goes most of the time.

This approach takes a little more work (especially because it means rewriting the talents rather than simply reskinning them) but it’s the sharp point for how to start making a more drastic change to the system to capture other genres and ideas. And that’s almost certainly where the path leads next.


1 – As contrasted with the Fireball tossing magic of the usual D&D mage.