Lessons of a Neverending Game

[droog]

James, I've had a go at answering your question, but I realise that I'm a bit unclear about what you mean. Could you break it down a bit for me? Maybe with an example of your own?

[droog]

I'd be interested if anyone has any actual experiences trying to run Pendragon Pass, as a sort of bridging game between dramatic games (social interaction, emphasis on relationships) and tactical games (skills focus, combat) in Glorantha.  Droog, what did you find were the shortcomings of Pendragon in trying to run a game in Glorantha for your group?

Going back to this:

I did a few things with PD. I seem to remember doing some experimental conversion around 1989, when I had the PD 1st ed. rules and the edition of Tales of the Reaching Moon in which 'Pendragon Pass' appears. I got PD 4th ed. in '92 or so and ran a bunch of it, including a full-scale PDP game that went about 20 sessions (very testosterone-filled game with up to eight guys playing at any one time, including Brett and Simon).

About '99/00, a bit before getting HW, I ran a few sessions of The Game using the PDP stats. It didn't seem to do quite what I was looking for. It worked well enough for the other game, which we started from scratch, but it felt too restricted and stylised for this one (e.g. in the way Traits and Passions operate).

On the other hand, PD did many other things in essentially the same way as RQ (e.g. skills), and converting didn't seem worth the bother. It needed a more radical overhaul, but I had no real concept of what that might be.

(I missed a few key games like Over the Edge, and maybe Feng Shui, that might have helped. I was in a Chaosium ghetto throughout the '90s, and missed all the trends including the White Wolf phenomenon and 2nd ed. AD&D.)

[James_Nostack]

James, I've had a go at answering your question, but I realise that I'm a bit unclear about what you mean. Could you break it down a bit for me? Maybe with an example of your own?

Sure.  What I meant was, "Okay, what's an 'adventure' or 'unit of story' look like?  What input does the GM expect to receive from the players?  What input do the players expect to receive from the GM?"  And here, I'm not just talking about in-game content, but also social cues and stuff like that.

A few examples from my own gaming career:

1.  I'm currently playing in a PBeM traditional game which has kind of an X-Files vibe.  We're investigators chasing down paranormal critters.  The GM, through NPC's, hands us a mission; we equip, muster out, and explore the environment hunting for clues, usually with a lot of IC discussion about stuff that is colorful but ultimately irrelevant.  The GM provides exceptionally detailed and evocative descriptions of small towns in the American Rockies.

Then we completely fail to notice clues.  The GM throws a crisis at us, which we don't understand, and we fail to communicate properly, and we run around like crazy people in a sensory deprivation tank (mainly because of the delays of PBEM: we no longer remember what's in the environment).  The GM then dampens the crisis, and we regroup, assess, and engage in resource management (again, like crazy people because we don't remember what's in our inventory).  Eventually we decide to take some stupid risks, and when the risks are big enough the GM throws the climax at us, where we don't know what we're supposed to do or nothin'.

2.  I ran a sci-fi game for several years on IRC.  For a while, I kind of had the players in a "story corral"--I gave them missions, they tried to perform them, and if it looked like they were going to fail too spectacularly, I'd nudge them out of it until they succeeded, usually in an unobtrusive way.  I provided a goal, the players provided tactics, but the ultimate outcome and the effect on the setting at large was still in my hands, guided to produce a "fun story", based on cues from the players about what they'd like to see.

3.  Then, after encountering the Forge, I switched up.  No more missions: you guys know the world by now, what do you want to accomplish?  And establishing outcome-boundaries before the rolls, so that no matter what happened, we were cool with the effect it would have.  Ultimately, after the players had managed to wage a war on two fronts simultaneously, we sat back and had a Yalta Conference, IC, about the destiny of mankind in the solar system.

[droog]

Okay – I get you now.

The early games set the tone. The characters were all mercenaries in the employ of an exiled nobleman clearing his new territory. So a unit of adventure would involve being given a mission by the chief of mercs (go clear out the duck bandits), discussion about the world (why are so many ducks bandits?), exploration (the ducks' hideout is in this marshy area that holds other critters), and a main combat, usually with some tactical twist (fighting ducks from a boat).

We tended to play in a very leisurely way, with twelve-hour sessions being common.

After that, the game shifted to Pavis, a nearby city on the edge of an enormous ruined city (=huge dungeon bash). We'd alternate between expeditions into the ruins and just messing around in the city, having parties and drinking at the tavern. Generally, the impetus to doing anything came from the players during this period. I concentrated on portraying the setting and reacting to what the players initiated.

The climax of that period was running through 'The Cradle', an epic combat scenario, which took four sessions (@ 40 hours?) including an almost mandatory wander-round-and-look-at-the-wonders session. The epitome of RQ2 adventure writing.

After that, we had a period where the characters wandered around and I tried to keep up. My ideal was to know the area so completely that wherever the characters went I would be ready. There was a lot of improvised, off-the-cuff play during this period, punctuated by the occasional mission or dungeon (often me using published material for a breathing space).

A couple of years of this exhausted me. Like you, I was responding to player cues about what they wanted to see, but at the same time I was pushing for greater integration into the setting. I was out of enthusiasm for the 'wandering adventurers' model, though the players seemed to be enjoying themselves. I wanted to root the game somewhere and explore an area in depth.

Eventually (c.1989), in a fit of pique and a straight-up railroad, I had the characters captured and enslaved as gladiators. We had a couple of years of irregular arena combat, which were kind of fun. I guess we all understood that it was a stopgap, but nobody really knew what to do about it.

Even then, the character play went on. We played some very amusing scenes around the gladiator pits. Here's a weird thing: in a way we got to know the characters better, because they'd been stripped to their core. And I got to know that even enslaving the characters and taking their stuff had not broken the core players' commitment to the game.

[screen_monkey]

This is very interesting to me, the railroad at the end of the campaign.  My own feeling is that campaigns really need an 'arc', much like a TV series, and without it things tend to drift and become diffuse.  I found Hackmaster was more immune to this than most games, frankly because it has an inbuilt game - amass power, experience and wealth.  Much like a pinball machine.

I imagine Runequest has a similar 'munchkin' factor, but I'm thinking about direction now my players have left the Dukes employ in my own game.  How do you prevent diffusion and boredom?  I guess there are three ways;
1) Railroad.  for example, caught by slavers and forced into an arena.
2) Embroiled in a larger struggle by bonds of kinship, religion and oaths.  The Hero Wars are beginning!   Stop that dungeon crawl and choose sides...
3) A series of tactical mini-campaigns.  So from Borderlands to Griffin Mountain, to the next set of tactical adventures.  I suppose like running CoC with the same set of characters going through Shadows of Yog sothoth, then Masks of Nyarlathotep, then etc etc

I suppose a fourth option is let the characters choose goals, and then throw bangs at them and let them drive the plot.

[droog]

Russ, I have a few observations on the points you raise, but first:

THE LITTLE THINGS: EPHEMERA

Narration: Generally, we've always shared the narration around a bit, including a limited authority for the players to create setting elements and author their character development. None of us have ever been hung up on whether things are narrated IC or OOC; normally somebody would just cue it by starting to talk in character (or not) and somebody else would follow (or not).

With the shift to HQ I've been pushing more director stance on the players, and they've responded very positively. It's pretty much just turning up what we've always done.

Screen time: Who gets how much time has always been largely up to me to police (and for individual players to push). I've developed reasonable skills in my own versions of Ron's crosses and weaves, but there's always room for improvement.

The rules: After a few years of RQ we didn't need to refer to the rules in play that much, and our search time was pretty minimal. Handling time is also minimal in RQ, except when it comes to combat. Switching to HQ has made everything run even more smoothly, and much less tedious for me.

On the other hand, there's always something to reference regarding the setting, and that can always turn into a lengthy chewing the fat of Gloranthan lore. And that hasn't really changed with the system conversion. If there's one thing I'd like to break, in these days of shorter sessions and fuller lives, it's that. It may, however, be a terminal condition.

That's all I can think of to note about the ephemeral aspects of our play, without going into ridiculous detail. Questions?

What I'm going to do to wrap this up (possibly after dealing with questions) is make some observations on the group's creative agenda as I see it, and how that has shifted over time. In the course of that I'm going to revisit James' question and write about how the game went after the gladiator period, which is tied up with Russ's musings about direction. So –

NEXT: THE SPIKE

[screen_monkey]

<leans forward onto edge of seat, expectantly>

[droog]

THE SPIKE: NAILING IT ALL TOGETHER

Gloranthan myth has it that the world was once held together by the Spike, an immense mountain that had been hammered down through the layers of sky and earth and underworld by Acos, god of Law.. According to the Big Model diagram, creative agenda is conceived as a spike that pierces through and holds together the layers of interaction that make up a roleplaying game.

So in order clearly to see what the spike of our play looked like, I'm going to summarise the layers of the game up to about '89-90; since in many ways the enslavement railroad signals a seismic shift, or at least the premonition of one. Up to that point, I'd characterise our play as follows:

Social contract: high level of familiarity and tolerance; large amounts of free time; compatible wants (fiddle with system, explore world, become somebody); strong direction from central players.

Exploration: leisurely, whimsical, detailed; equal importance given to system and setting, and their relationship; strong yet ambiguous textual authority; GM as librarian and interpreter.

Techniques: create characters strongly circumscribed by setting; filter imagined space through GM's vision; social approval and authority based on knowledge of Glorantha and fitness of character.

Ephemera: take it easy; lots of visuals; breaks in play for world-briefing etc; waver between ignoring system and strong engagement (combat, magic); secret (arbitrary) GM fudging to save characters.


All I have to do is dream?
The thing I see that runs through it all is getting away; creating, maintaining and sharing our imagined world; making it real enough that we knew that world and those characters like our own selves, maybe better.

Which is, of course, in Big Model terms, a Simulationist agenda. It's about being there. And we were all down with that.

We were a highly cohesive group with a coherent agenda, playing a suitable game, and that, presumably, is why the game has such a lengthy history (I used to like to think it was me). Nobody ever saw a good reason to end it. It was all going just as it should.

But you know, Ron Edwards asks at the end of Simulationism: The Right to Dream whether it is enough to continue to focus on exploration as an end in itself. For me, that was starting to be a big question by the end of the '80s. I was very bored, and I couldn't really see my way forward. It seemed to me that we had these great colourful characters that deserved something...better...somehow.

I thought to achieve this by tying the characters down somehow – I wanted to be able to use family ties, loyalties etc to create scenarios that would better emulate myth and legend (and lots of Gloranthan material). But to force that on them felt wrong. I think the capture and enslavement was basically a stall on my part, and maybe even an attempt to end the game.

(I probably would have done better at this point to have a frank conversation with the whole group outlining my concerns and frustrations – hints didn't work. I guess I felt that what I was saying was that I didn't find the same things fun any more, and that felt insulting, and so I didn't want to say it.)

[droog]

I'll always be dreaming my dreams with you
There were several reasons why the game picked up again in '91:

• I started a new course at university, and immediately got involved with a new woman.
• Brett got back together with Allison, after a checqered past stretching back to 1985. He brought her along to the game.
• Simon began playing regularly again.
• Colin and Glenn began playing

So there was a big sense of optimism and rebirth in the air. The characters escaped in what amounted to a burst of improvisational fiat, and made their way to where I had planned. It was the nearby homeland of Allison's (pregen) character; they got involved there with a great war against the forces of Chaos (I built this campaign from the sidebars in Cults of Terror).

This was me going back to what I knew: interesting tactical situations alternated with character scenes. The power level was considerably higher than the early days, and there were lots of freaky Chaotic effects to play with, so we had fun with it for a while. Nevertheless, the same problems remained for me: the lives of the characters, given the possible opposition, were entirely in my hands, and combat at this level was often very tedious. The final battle of the campaign was both boring and hollow, as I essentially determined the outcome and couldn't bring myself to throw the most horrific Chaos monsters at the characters.

Meanwhile, I'd prepared the next area of the game, which I disingenuously introduced by giving the players a lovingly hand-drawn map. I wonder how many GMs have simply taken a punt like this on the good will of their players? I knew, and they knew (and I knew that they knew, and they knew that I knew), that a map I'd spent countless hours on meant 'Go Here'.

So they did: they roistered around for a while, discovered they were the toughest guys in the area, and took a town. Whereupon they finally became what I'd wanted for years – a settled group with local ties. We entered a period of high-level planning and character play around the town, with very few dice hitting the table. Tristam created a local character. Simon created several. We used rules from a board game to fight an important battle. We discussed economics, production and cultural drift.

There's a story by Ursula Le Guin called 'Vaster than Empires and More Slow'. That's how our game felt at times. I tried to plug in an 'adventure' every now and then to up the adrenaline level, but they felt just that: plugged in. They were sidesteps from the main direction of the game.

Again, a lot rested on me, as we'd gone beyond what the RQ rules were useful for. By about '95 I was exhausted. I was, in a sense, redesigning the game for every single session. I knew I needed a change of system and approach, but couldn't conceive of what that might be. I began running Pendragon instead, with only very rare visits to the old game.

Then in '99 I moved East, and an era came to an end. But in 2000, Brett gave me a copy of Hero Wars and a new era was launched; because that eventually led me here. And the discussions here have given me so many ideas for how to push the game forward that I'm sure we'll be playing it for years to come.

I'm not sure yet whether it'll shake out to being high-exploration narrativism, or sim with some excursions into narr, or that elusive beast, the hybrid, or just plain incoherent, but I'll be sure to keep reporting on it



So there you go. With twenty years behind me, I could waffle on about this game all day, but I've tried to be reasonably concise. If anybody wants to comment or ask questions while we grab a cup of coffee, please feel free.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jeff,

As an enjoyer of Glorantha since age 15, I'm just shaking my head in apprecation. Imagine if you'd never got around to playing much RuneQuest and instead went nuts with Champions in 1985, and that'd be me.

All of the stuff I'd like to say is merely revealing trivia - as far as analysis and using the model is concerned, all I can say is "yes." I mean, I wasn't there, so that's not to confirm or to rubber-stamp anything you're saying happened, but rather to say, "I get it, what you're saying is making sense to me."

Best, Ron

[droog]

Cheers, Ron. I'd be interested in knowing what you mean by 'revealing trivia'. Do you mean you have something to ask, or do you mean you think you see something I may be unaware of?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jeff,

What I mean by "revealing trivia" is that if I tried to comment on your posts, all you would get is a bunch of unimportant crap about me. My comments would be trivial (to you or anyone else) and they'd be revealing (about me), which is its own form of trivia.

My main point is that your own commentary and presentation is making all the real points and working very well, and that my input isn't important.

Best, Ron