"Game structures" in scenario prep

[James_Nostack]

I'm a year late to Justin Alexander's excellent discussion of game structures.  It's a whole bunch of bite-sized posts.  The take-away is that one really way to suck at RPG design is to whip up a bunch of nifty sub-systems, but never explain to players (or the poor GM) how an adventure actually, y'know, happens.

Here's a couple of really good approaches to this problem, games that get it right:

* Dungeons & Dragons, Basic Rules (edited by Tom Moldvay circa 1980).  Procedures to generate a dungeon prior to play.  Procedures for players to explore the dungeon.  (Rudimentary) Procedures for the players to interact with sentient creatures in the dungeon via reaction rolls.  Procedure to handle combat if the reaction goes badly.  Procedures to reward the players for success in combat or acquiring treasure.  Return to explore dungeon subroutine as needed. 

* Dogs in the Vineyard (by Vincent Baker, 2004?).  In light of the players' characters, devise a town according to very programmatic instructions that will be "charged" for one or more players.  Confront players with a problem in this town.  My recollection is that players request scenes to investigate and resolve the problem.  This may lead to conflict with the people involved.  The conflict stuff plays out, and the other people connected to the town's problem will react or over-react to the players' involvement, potentially leading to more conflicts with the players.  If not, return to the players-request-scenes-to-investigate-stuff subroutine.  (This procedure seems to be a highly specialized version of what's going on in Sorcerer, Trollbabe, and any number of other Forge-inspired games.)

* Mouse Guard (by Luke Crane, 2008).  Look over the players' character sheets, and imagine a mission that contains two "charged" obstacles.  Assign the mission, and then frame the scene to the first obstacle.  Players propose solution, resolve the obstacle one way or another (possibly leading to loss of resources, or a brand-new obstacle growing out of a failed attempt).  Frame to the second obstacle if possible and repeat.  Afterward, players frame scenes according to a budget accumulated in play to do role-playing or to resolve loose ends from the mission using a variation on the regular resolution rules. 

* S/lay w/ Me (by Ron Edwards, 2010?).  Make a protagonist, a setting, a goal, a monster, and a lover.  Through alternating statements - which are not of the "player proposes/GM disposes" variety - the goal is brought into play, leading to a conflict with the monster.  Eventually this conflict resolves, and depending on points accumulated we find out what happens to the characters involved.

But there are also a whole ton of games that communicate their structure of play very, very badly--if they make any effort at all.  Some examples from my own experience:
* Marvel Super Heroes (by Jeff Grubb, 1984-86)
* Alternity (by Slavicsek & Baker, 1996)
* Zero (by Lester Smith, 1997)
* Vampire: the Requiem (by Justin Achili & Co., 2004)

It's not that these are bad games, or that you can't have fun with them.  It's that they really don't give you much of goddamn anything useful in terms of scenario-design, which I think is the crucial aspect of game design because otherwise you don't have fuckin' game getting played. 

I'm going to pick Alternity for a minute because that's a game I struggled long and hard with, back in the day. 

Alternity was a science-fiction game from TSR that came out in the mid-90's.  Despite being ostensibly generic, there was a lot of attention given to designing starships (the starship combat rules, however, are abysmal) and solar systems.  There are very detailed rules for coping with extra-terrestrial environmental conditions.  There's a checklist for designing aliens, and alien cultures.  (Both could have used some more mechanical "teeth" but whatever).  There are 109 separate skills, each with its own little rule-snippet.  There's some talk about framing and ending scenes, but nothing about what makes a good scene, or how scenes should flow into each other, or any damn thing.

What Alternity really presents is a hex-crawl type of deal, possibly according to a particular mission or self-chosen goal.  Players travel in their spaceship, encounter a solar system, possibly with extra-terrestrial environments, possibly with alien life & cultures.  Dealing with these guys triggers "social scenes" or possibly "combat scenes" which in turn rely on the various rule-snippets relating to the particular skills involved.  There might even be a "challenge scene" in the form of a puzzle, scientific inquiry, or whatever, which is handled in much the same way.  Upon resolution, jump back to the exploring the solar system; once the solar system is done, go to the next one.

This is all hindsight, piecing together what's in the rule books with prior- and later-established techniques.  In actual play, I ended up veering toward a Mouse Guard type of structure: players had something they needed to do, ran into trouble along the way, how they chose to deal with that trouble (and whether they failed or succeeded) would have further ramifications, and in between there was some free-play where players pursued loose ends or did some characterization stuff.  I don't know any good structures for caper games or mystery-solving games, but possibly Alternity works in those frameworks too.

Right now I've just started to run a Vampire: the Requiem game, and it's kind of amazing how unhelpful the book is about what a session of play is supposed to look like.  I'm bringing a Dogs in the Vineyard/Sorcerer structure to it, because that looks like it's best suited to what I see as the thematic questions of the game, but it's going to be interesting to see how that works out.

[James_Nostack]

This game of Zero never found a quorum of interested players, but the thread shows some of these issues as I was trying to get it off the ground.

edited to fix link format - RE

[Tom]

I couldn't agree more. This is why I dedicated a whole chapter to mission structure in the upcoming [explorers]. Time and time again I was frustrated by a new game not actually telling you how to run a game session. For games outside the usual, that is very important.

To a point I did have the same problem with Sorcerer, I must admit. Any system that is very generic and leaves a lot to the players will have this problem. And still, as the Universalis rules show, you can still come up with examples of play if you really want to.

Part of the problem, I think, is that it is very hard to put yourself into the shoes of someone new to something that you know very well.