R-maps as tools for players

[beingfrank]

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this question, but it seemed the best fit.  It can always be moved if I'm wrong.  I'm pretty new so I still haven't got the hang of exactly what goes where.

I'd like to get people's views on the utility of r-maps for players, particularly for character creation.  I admit I haven't read everything on the subject (alas for real life demands) but what I have read seems to focus on r-maps as used by GMs in building stories and plots tied to the PCs.  This seems a good and fine use.  But I'm in the process of creating a character for a game, as a player, and my automatic approach has been to ask myself 'who are the people around my character that he cares about, for good or ill?' and start drawing up a basic r-map of the character, what backstory of his I've worked out, and his current situation at his entry to the game.

Now, I know that the Forge mainly focuses on GMly concerns, but I'm interested in other people's views on r-maps as a tool for players.  As I understand it, giving certain tools to GMs facilitates games with certain modes of play.  Can the same tools be given to players?  What effects would they have?  Should players be given different tools?

I know this is a big fat open question, but I'm interesting in narrowing it down further.  It makes intuitive sense to me that if certain processes of game design can lead to various outcomes in the game, then certain process of character design should have a similar effect.  Has this been discussed in the past, and I've just missed it?

[clehrich]

Oh, I'm totally in favor of this.  In particular, I'd like to see the players develop their r-maps in a loose fashion, then get together and see how much they can make their loose r-maps into one complicated one.  That is, David has a "hated father," while Phil has a "worrying son."  Okay, so make Phil David's father and compress from there.

The more tightly wound the characters, the more intense certain kinds of play are.  Think about a decent soap: if everyone is involved with and/or related to everyone else, then every plot is interesting and important to everyone else.

Chris Lehrich

[Trevis Martin]

A lot of the R maps I've been running with lately involve mostliy NPC's created by the players during discussion and creation and a very few of my own.  I've used R-maps drawn from novels but with six people coming up with like 5 - 6 npc's a piece I find  adding in additional rmaps though beyond a few characters.

I've been very determined to try a version of Legends of Alyria's Storymapping.  Doing that first, maybe even using Universalis like token mechanics and creating the back stuff with the players and then letting them choose from the roles created.  That sounds pretty neat.

regards,

Trevis

[John Burdick]

When thinking about connections between my character and others, I'm a little afraid of taking on a chore. I think restricting the question to a map could help establish boundaries on how much work is the complete task.

John

[beingfrank]

When thinking about connections between my character and others, I'm a little afraid of taking on a chore. I think restricting the question to a map could help establish boundaries on how much work is the complete task.

John

Sure.  I didn't intend my question to imply extra work for players.  I was trying to frame the discussion more generally to see what implications for theory there were in an attempt to fit the discussion to the forum.

But I'm happy to talk about specific examples, or just one example, if that works for others.

[M. J. Young]

Although I've not yet played Sorcerer, I have played Legends of Alyria, and I think it's a mistake to characterize Relationship/Story Maps as "used by GMs in building stories and plots tied to the PCs."

In Alyria specifically, the roll of the referee (referred to as Narrator) is rather limited and said to be optional. The creation of the Story Map is an exercise undertaken by the players cooperatively so that the players cooperatively can create situations on which to build stories and plots. If you mean that such maps are a referee's tool, they aren't really.

On the other hand, if you're asking whether it is useful for players to have systemetized or ordered methods of defining relationships between their characters and other characters in the game, I think that such structures can be useful for a great variety of play objectives.

I recall a decade or so back playing in a game in which I was the party leader and a number of the players were not friends of mine, and admittedly I found some of them annoying as people. That was my problem. However, I also found that many players played characters who were annoying to my character--they acted in ways that he would have found irresponsible and inappropriate. As party leader, my character had to make decisions about who should have responsibility within the party; as player, I felt it necessary to base those decisions on my character's relationship with the other characters, and not on my relationship with the other players.

Thus I set up a spreadsheet on which I recorded any event, any action, any conduct which would reasonably impact my character's opinion of any other character in the game, for better or worse, and I rated those events on an open-ended scale that tended to give +/-1 for most things but occasionally reached +/-5 for particularly outstanding or egregious actions. Thus when I wanted to know my character's view of his fellows without reference to my own prejudices toward the players, I had a current score that reflected his opinion, and I could make decisions based on that.

That's not necessarily the best approach for every game; it worked well for me as a player, but the referee hated it. (I've never really understood why. I think he wanted characters to emerge into greater protagonism based on player personality, and felt that by assigning leadership positions to characters who were more responsibile I was making the game dull. Then, he really liked to run games in which everyone's arrant nonsense was viable in play.) I prefer relationships in games to represent the realities of the characters, not the personalities of the players, and look for means to encourage that (my http://www.mjyoung.net/dungeon/leader.html">leadership system for OAD&D play is rather complex, but it achieves this well in that context in my experience). So I think that anything like a relationship map is useful if it enables players to see how their characters interact with the other characters in the game, and particularly with the other player characters.

It can also in that context defuse any hard feelings. After all, if it says on the agreed map that Bob's character and Margaret's character are bitter enemies, it is less likely that either player will have hard feelings about the way that plays out in the game.

--M. J. Young

[Trevis Martin]

I don't think I did characterize it that way M.J.   I haven't played Alyria yet, though I intend to at some point.  What interested me about what I read about it was  the communal creation of the storymap.  With the added option of afterwards choosing the people off the map who the player is interested in playing.  I don't think such maps are exclusivly a referee's tool, they are a play group tool, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise.

Now I don't use r-maps to 'build plot' so to speak, but I do use them as a basis for devising Bangs pitched out to the group.

I realize that my post above looked a bit incoherent, that's what comes from quick typing and no time to edit.  I've been  using relationship maps in several games now starting from when I played Sorcerer a while back.   I've found that since my group is relativly large (6 players) and they all enjoy coming up with NPC's enough to give me 4 to 6 NPC's each, I find that I don't have to add too many of my own NPC's into the mix.

regards

Trevis

[M. J. Young]

Sorry for the confusion, Trevis--I was inferring from Frank's post the suggestion that such maps were intended for referee use.

I admit I haven't read everything on the subject (alas for real life demands) but what I have read seems to focus on r-maps as used by GMs in building stories and plots tied to the PCs.

My post was to say that his perception (which he admits is limited) is mistaken, that such maps are already used as player tools, and effectively so, and that there are uses for mechanics similarly targeted at character relationships beyond the bounds of narrativist play.

I wasn't suggesting anything about your post.

--M. J. Young

[Trevis Martin]

Oh...whups...

Note to self, not everything is about you.  heh.

thanks M.J.

regards,

Trevis

[beingfrank]

Sorry for the confusion, Trevis--I was inferring from Frank's post the suggestion that such maps were intended for referee use.

Yup, that is how I had seen such maps.  I'm pleased that they're not just for referrees.  I hadn't come across Legends of Alyria before.  I see now that that does involve players using maps to create situations that interest them.

Obviously, their strength is going to be in using them cooperatively, but are there any examples of maps being used individually?  I'm thinking particularly of the instance where are new character joins a game.  There is an existing web of relationships and r-mapping would provide an instant way of linking that character and player into things, rather than just plonking both player and character into the middle of things with few established ties.  Hmm, I'm still not explaining this well.  I may need to think on it more.

On the other hand, if you're asking whether it is useful for players to have systemetized or ordered methods of defining relationships between their characters and other characters in the game, I think that such structures can be useful for a great variety of play objectives.

I wasn't, but I've done that too.  In my case it was not to inform myself, but to inform the GM.  I was (am still) playing a character who can be uncommunicative almost to the point of autism and who is really, really hard to read socially.  This makes the character very unpredictable for the GM (I know what she's going to do most of the time), so he got me to make up a spreadsheet of the major things she'd had emotional reactions to during each session and give each a rating of importance.  Then he could get a better idea of what she thought about various things.

Thanks for all the comments on this thread, it's really got my brain moving.

Oh, and I'm should have signed my posts, especially when I'm using an ambiguous screen name.

Claire Bickell