The Matrix Method

[Jason Newquist]

I'd like to talk about a character/setting creation system that my local gaming group has been using for about, oh, 5 or 6 years now.  I've intended to write this post for quite a while, so there's necessarily some length to it.  :-)

We lamely call this thing "the matrix method."   Guy named Jeff Campbell came up with the idea for a freeform sci-fi game he ran in 2000.  The Forge's own James Holloway, who has played in a few of Jeff's games, has seen it in use, too.

Anyway, this group here in Silicon Valley has used it for many/most of the games we've all played together in that time -- from freeform sci-fi and horror to Cthulhu and DeltaGreen to D&D and, most recently, Ars Magica.  The Ars Magica example is what I'll use as my running example.  If you've never played -- please forgive me the parochialism.

If you can stomach the long post, I'd like to hear your thoughts!

* * *

Here's how it works.

I decided to offer to run an Ars Magica game.  Not the smartest thing to do, since I'm certain that I'll want to retrofit the hell out of the system.  Anyway, so all I know is that we'll be playing Ars Magica.  I spend an hour or two talking with the group, explaining the game, and some of its ample jargon.  After a while, I produce a pad of paper and write down a list of things that we need to decide tonight.

FOCUS OF THE GAME

ENVIRONS OF THE COVENANT

COVENANT STRENGTHS

COVENANT PROBLEMS

MAGUS'S ROLE IN THE COVENANT

MAGUS HOUSE

COMPANION ARCHETYPE

So, here's 4 pieces of paper.  On each paper, I write down a list of things which fit.  For example:

FOCUS OF THE GAME
* Exploration of strange places
* High Adventure
* Political Machinations of the Order of Hermes
* Romance
* Massive Mundane Wars and Conflicts
* Mystery and Investigation
* The Secret History of the Order of Hermes

Or this:

COMPANION ARCHETYPE
* Young savant
* Monk
* Varangian Guard
* Treasure Hunter
* Rogue who knows everyone
* Knight Errant
* Nobleman
* Female Scholar

Ok, so now I've got a bunch of pieces of paper.  Each one has a category and some choices listed on them.  I passed them around the table, so everyone could add their ideas to the cards -- and familiarize themselves with whatall is going to be chosen.   This created a bunch of creative discussion.  Lots of "what if..." stuff.  Great.  We're now getting into gear.

I now randomly assign each paper to a person.  At this point, everyone reveals what they have, and we decide as a group which questions to answer first.  We decide to go from large setting questions first to specific character questions last.  Cool, makes sense.

The person who has the paper is the "king of the card" -- and they get to make the decision for that card.  One of the players, Jamie, pulled "FOCUS OF THE GAME", and we wanted to make this choice first.  So he's the King of the Card.  Per our custom, he read the card aloud, and the various options, and we launched into a discussion.   When he heard enough, he decided to make more than one choice.  Cool!  He selected:

1. Exploration
2. Large-scale Wars
3. Mystery and Investigation

This immediately spurred some discussion from the group.  Exploration!  Maybe the covenant is within proximity to the ruins of a large city?  What happened to the city -- that could be the chief mystery of the game.  And Large-Scale wars... well, they said, maybe if the game is sufficiently Eastern -- like, in Russia? -- we could have Mongols.  Or Viking invasions.  Or even the Norman invasion of England.

This naturally fed into the second card: "ENVIRONS OF THE COVENANT".  We had a bunch of ideas here, but the King of the Card -- Jeff -- riffed on an image that he had, of a city that was folded in on itself.  Rockets!  Discussion now turned to where the covenant might be located.  "Far north" was a phrase that people kept throwing out.  And on an icy coast.  More than that, they left up to me to decide.  Fair enough.

Scott's card was next: COVENANT STRENGTHS.  I translated a list of Boons from the 5th edition book, and some of us added more.  Scott asked, "How many can I choose?"  My answer was immediate: "Ars Magica likes balances.  So you can pick as many strengths as you like -- but Josh, when his card comes up, will have to pick the same number of problems."  That got a few smiles.

More discussion, more choices -- and a real picture of the covenant began to emerge... here's a place, a whole city, where strange and magical things are found -- and often sold for both magical and mundane value.  A Winter covenant is here, in the dead of winter.

And Josh, on his turn, added something else into the mix -- a Rival Covenant is one of the problems.  Awesome.

Finally, we turned from setting to character.  My favorite matrix card of all -- one which I've lobbied to use every time we use this method -- is ROLE IN GROUP.  This assumes the characters are a social group, and lists what your character's social role in the group is.  We've found this provides a lot of roleplaying torque right off the bat.  Even of the groups evolve over time, that's great.

ROLE IN GROUP
* Leader
* Usurper
* Scapegoat
* Wise One
* Cheerleader
* Loose Cannon
* Face
* Glue
* Rabblerouser
* Peacemaker

For character cards, the King of the Card assigns each character one item from the list.  In most games I've been in, we've had someone start off as the Leader.  And in cases where we've had both a Leader and a Usurper, the dynamic between those two characters has often been electric.  But in this case, neither was chosen!  The closest thing to a leader was "Glue".

Now, I'd like to pause, here.  These character matrix cards are a terrific way to give your friends permission to play against type.  And that's what we saw, here.

Josh is a player who likes to do his own thing.  He was given "Glue."  His character is the glue that binds the group together.  And Scott - his own personality is very Peacemaker... he likes to work through building consensus.  Scott was given "Rabblerouser."  And on it goes.  Fun!

The next card was Hermetic house.  Now, this is normally a very important decision.  We decided that everyone should decide the House of the person on their left.  Some people let the person on their left choose freely, others made the choice flat-out, others gave the person on their left a choice of 2 or 3 houses.  We had a lot of talk about fitting Houses together with the previously assigned Role in Group.  For example:

"Oh, you're the Face.  Makes sense for you to be Bonisagus."
"Rabblerouser?  Tytalus!"

But sometimes, they didn't add up right away.  I think these choices are often the interesting because they imply a contradiction -- which is kindof realistic, isn't it?For example, the "Wise One" was given Verditius, and "The Fixer" was assigned Bjornaer.

The last matrix card assigned was my own.  "Parens" is Ars Magica jargon for the NPC wizard master of your wizard PC, when he was still an apprentice.

INFLUENCE OF PARENS
* Reversal of Roles - you had to care for your master
* Infamous Parens - your master has a famously bad reputation
* Absent Parens - you are self-taught and need to prove yourself
* Pressure of Prestige - how can you live up to your famed lineage?
* Rejection - your master doesn't think you're a real wizard, and wants you killed
* Abusive Parens - your cruel master taught you all too much...

And then we wrapped up.

As you can see, it's really not a proper character creation method -- more accurately, the method is simply a way to structure the "what kind of game do we want to play, and who wants to play what?" conversation -- which is a layer on top of character creation, kinda.

But the method has worked remarkably well, in my experience.  In this particular case, we spent a lot of cards on the setting -- and only a few on the characters.  Normally, this is reversed: we usually spend almost every card talking personality and relationships, and have only a couple on setting.

* * *

Where to go from here?

We've experimented with ways to make the matrix method create the fodder/content of a proper system.

For example, if you are assigned "ADVANTAGE: Wealthy" and "ROLE: Usurper" and "REGRET: I could have been a great baseball player". These properties could be written on cards and set in front of you, and played during each session of play - perhaps to confer narration rights?  Experimentation has been inconclusive on our part.  But, generally, I see no reason why the output of the matrix method oughtn't be used as the input to the real game.  Just like in any other character reaction sub-system...

Anyway, thanks for listening.

-Jason

[Andy Kitkowski]

Hey man, I really like what you've got going on here. It's like a system that fits like a glove over any game (but I think it's great for traditional RPGs) and gives folks a taste of fut fucking character-driven play and shared world creation.  It's a great litmus test to see if your group is up for such play.  I might have to borrow this for my Thursday group sometime.

I'm still a liiiiiiittle shaky on the flow.  Do you remember another example of using this Matrix?  I'm wondering if you could post one more example, broken into points?

If you polish it up, it might be worth it to throw it into a PDF and sell it for a buck.

-Andy

[James Holloway]

I was in the same group as Jason for the second and later implementations of this method. I'm planning on using a variation on it for my Arthurian supers game starting in a couple of weeks, so I'll try to post on it when I do.

For now, here's another example, from a game called "Ephemera."

The participants:

- me
- Jason
- Jeff, the GM
- Rich
- Scott
- Chuck

I'm probably misremembering the details of the cards; Jason, if you have the old table, you can correct me. But this is the general flow of the thing.

Jeff has a pack of cards. Each card says something like, for instance:

PROFESSION

- Doctor
- Park Ranger
- etc., etc. with one or two more options than characters

they're not all individual character traits. Another might say.

HOW DO ALL THE CHARACTERS KNOW ONE ANOTHER?

- Softball
- 4-H
- Church
- Volunteer Fire Dept.
- etc. etc.

So Jeff distributes these cards, more or less at random, to the players. Each of us now has one or two cards. We go around in a circle, and let's say it comes round to me. I've got, let's say, the "personal problems" card. I am the boss of this card -- I can assign a personal problem to whoever I like and they can't say boo. Or I can open the floor for discussion, or I can ask people to select the one they want, or whatever. However I do it -- and no two card guys need do it the same way -- each player is assigned a personal problem. Then we move on the next card and start assigning, I don't know, professions or whatever.

By the end of the process, we've decided some things that apply to all the characters, some things that apply to the game in general. Each player then completes character creation using these points as a framework -- but the ice is broken for collective character creation, if you see what I mean.

Now, I don't think Ephemera had overarching stuff like "focus of the game." That's Jason taking the ball and running with it.

Now, in Ephemera, these traits were actually used in the game. Each character had a little deck of cards, with a trait written on each card. Most of the traits were from character creation, but some were random and some were sneakily added by the GM between sessions. You would draw a hand from this deck, and then whenever you introduced one of the traits (or items, or events) in the deck into narration, you would put it on the table in front of you. Once you had three of these, you could collect a clue (which were in a huge pile of envelopes and packages in the center of the table). You picked whatever you felt like, and that was introduced into the game somehow, and play went on from there. But that's a method that's quite specific to Ephemera.

[timopod]

Neat idea, but I'd imaging that everyone at the table should agree ahead of time that this is how things work. I know in a group I use to play with this idea would not have worked because some players won't play a role assigned to them, or any role at all come to think of it. But still, this seems like a very good idea if you the G.M/D.M because it does most of the prep work for starting a campaign.

It seems to me that you are using popular archtypes, which is good, you can always say "yeah, like this guy from this movie/book".

[Andrew Morris]

Jason, that's a neat concept. I don't have anything to add past Andy's comments, so this is mostly a "hey, cool" post. I do have a question, though. Are you planning on publishing this in some form? I assume so, since this is in Indie Game Design. If you do, you might want to think about a new name, to avoid confusion. Chris Engle has been designing and selling his "Matrix Games" for like...ever.

[Jason Newquist]

Thanks for the responses and encouragement!  Packaging this up in a PDF is a grand idea.

And James nailed the flow, of course.

-Jason