Can you create suspense via mechanics?

[chance.thirteen]

The topic of suspense came up in another thread, and to avoid derailing the topic I will attempt to open it here.

A little reading on suspense as an audience experience suggested the following:
Audience needs sympathy with the characters
The consequences must be significant
There was a suggestion that it enhances the experiences if the audience knows more than the characters do about the situation

There was also discussion of probability of success related to the feelings of suspense:
Good outcome is very low - you are hoping against the odds
Good outcome is very high - yet we are watching, so perhaps there is somethig in the works to foul it up
Good outcome is 50/50 - literally we can't figure out which way it will go, most uncertain

I believe that all of that is decent information to think about in game player from a purely number crunching game system to a game depending purely on discussion without elements like dice or stats. It helps you set up something that will feel right.

My question is can a more mechanical approach enhace the experience at all? If so, how? What part of the players minds is it aiming at?

The first approach I ever saw to this was in Masterbook/TORG. Players always have a hand of cards from a game deck where each cards has values that cover action order, random modifiers to given action type to encourage variable tactics, and a Sequence mechanics with letters A-E. If there was a sort of race against time, the players had to draw and play in order the A-B-C and so on sequence in a certain amount of time.

For a game not using the deck, I could see you stating that you have N number of action counts (be those rounds with a set time, or more abstracted actionr resolutions) to succeed at whatever.

Another approach is to use a deck of cards, or dice, and say that each round of resolution a card will be played or a die will be rolled, and when it surpasses a given total, the end resolution has happened.

So for instance, if my players are trying to get to the escape flitters on a dirigible that is going up in flames, every round they navigate the smoke filled corridors and fight the nefarious Men in Brown Bowlers a card is laid down. Probably face up. And using the typical Blackjack values,  the players see when the card is a low or high value, but they don't know what the total I am looking for is.

Same idea, but you roll a die.

I personally am attracted to the idea that you lay out the cards, like ten, and flip them as action proceeds. Why? because I am phobic of the feeling that I personally will have to decide that they have failed miserably. Or that i let them get away with it. Or that they will feel that I let them get away with it.

Mind I am fine with a system that lets the players use up some reource they have to remove a card or gain extra time, or even to convert a failed effort into a marginal success, just as long as there is a cost that could have been avoided if they had had better luck or had better skills or better decisions.

Are there other ways? Anyone have any experience with this sort of situation, and does it work to make the players feel more involved? Is it based on bad assumptions about how suspense works, or can work?







Since I am starting up my Victorian Adventure game

[Egonblaidd]

What came to my mind upon reading the title of the thread are extended resolution tests.  Say two characters are in a conflict of some sort.  Ten resolution tests will be made, but only the winner of the final test wins the conflict.  This way there is a certain amount of suspense right up to the last moment.  Say each test has a 50-50 chance of being won by a single character, but the winner gets a +20 on their next test, making it a 70-50, or 58.3-42.6.  A win increases the chance that the next test will be won, increasing the likelihood that that character will have the bonus for the last test, and therefore the greater chance of winning.  But one loss and the odds have completely reversed.  Who will win in the end?  Even with the bonus, victory is not certain.  Thus there is a certain level of suspense right up until the numbers for the final test are known.  If the stakes are very high then the suspense increases dramatically.  With this sort of thing it is important to avoid the "death spiral" effect.  If you can tell who is going to win after the first three tests, then there is no point in doing the rest and the suspense is killed, hence why I said that each success only applied a bonus to the next test, rather than all subsequent tests.

I'm sure there are a number of ways to create suspense via mechanical means.  This is just one way that came to mind.  A more general way, and probably similar to some of the things you mentioned, is to let the situation depend on some random generation method (like dice or cards).  Say the players draw a Noise card, that indicates that they heard a noise somewhere nearby.  They have to decide whether they want to Encounter the cause of the noise or play an Evade card to avoid it.  If they Evade then they can investigate the noise (giving them a bonus if it is hostile) or ignore it and continue.  No one has an Evade card so they roll the dice and consult a table: the noise was a savage band of orcs!  You can create a similar level of suspense by inventing such a situation, but I'd imagine the effects are somewhat different between knowing that the GM is controlling every thing and knowing that nothing has been decided and the GM (if there is one) is waiting to see what happens just as much as you are.  In this case I'd say part of the GM's responsibilities would be to come up with new charts so that the group doesn't encounter the same thing time after time until it gets old.  In fact, this is giving me an idea for a game system.  Hmm.  The cards would have to be somewhat generic or else certain combinations just wouldn't make sense.  For example, a Cave In card would only make sense when the party is inside a cave, or at least some kind of building or someplace where there is a roof above them to fall down.

[Callan S.]

I think suspence is often invoked in movies or TV by something morally reprehensible potentially happening (or atleast what most people would generally find horrible). A recent example I can think of was in the comedy 'Lead Baloon', where the old ladies cat is in the garage (where the guy was supposed to have searched) under the car, and he gets in. They kept cutting back and forth from him fussing with car stuff/getting ready to the the cat staying very, very still right next to a car wheel. It was rather effective, let me tell you!

BUT perhaps the shocking thing with roleplay is - well, with TV, I don't know which way the writers going to go. Not fully. But in roleplay, were the writers - we know which way were gunna go. No suspence, unless...

We use dice to determine it (or roll to determine who narrates it alone, which runs off the same suspense as not knowing the writer from above)

But that means the cat can really die. Just crushed to death - not in some grand drama, but as a stumbling accident. A nice little cat just dies - no saving moment. Nothing. The really horrible can happen in roleplay.

So you can't just have suspence in roleplay just for a bit of a thrill - there will ALWAYS be a genuine moral threat involved. Play cannot be safe and harmoginised. Do you want a game which does not play it safe?

That is if moral danger is needed for suspence. Might be wrong but I can't really think of any other ways.

[soundmasterj]

I will post some personal experiences, a research review and my design related thoughts here when I find the time to. I think this is a fruitful topic.

[chance.thirteen]

Thanks for the replies, and I look forward to hearing more.

One thought I had is that maybe there is more application to this sort of mechanically enhaced suspsnes than the obvious countdown types of scenes. I would lvoeto have players setting their stakes, and investing more and more effort into something, but with some mechanism hidding the final results, or even the full value of how well they are doing at the moment. IF that enhanced player involvement and suspense. At some point it has to move off into how the setting reacts to their actions, but I wonder how far you could take it.

A simple example would be meeting with many groups in a political situation, and accumulating points with the groups towards supporting your goal, but those points eventual value is uncertain. Again you might say each point is d10 votes, or what have you. You just know how many dice you have gained not the final results of said dice. And you could place secondary actions into setting minimums on some dice, similar to the special dice in ORE.

I am thinking that while I truly am attracted to very atomic procedural type play, in the end I want something that is building towards a large scale of resolution than some small task provides.

[dindenver]

Chance,
 I have been thinking about it and my own play. And it SEEMS to me like, if the stakes of the roll are important to the player, there will naturally be suspense, but if the stakes are not there, there is no suspense.
  Like, if your character is walking down a path and the GM calls for  a perception/awareness roll. There is no suspense. Because between the 2-5 people in your group, someone will make the roll. It doesn't matter if you, personally, make the roll. As long as someone in the group does.
  But, I noticed when I did negotiated Stakes in TSOY, there was a lot of suspense on each roll, because I dialed the stakes of losing into what was important to the character and player.
  For instance, there was a character that had Key of the Guardian and the teenager they were watching over was being a jerk. And I had a character try and kidnap her. One of the group members says, "I rescue her!" So, I made the stakes of failure be, "If you fail, you rescue her, but your bodyguard dies." One of the players piped in, "Shouldn't the stakes be, that she gets kidnapped?" I replied, "No, because you guys want her out of the picture."
  Then everyone leaned in to see the roll because they cared about the stakes.

  I think this illustrates my point, but I dunno. I never really push mystery or suspense too hard. And that usually makes for a good game, because I am not trying too hard.

[Paul T]

Check out Dread!

http://www.tiltingatwindmills.net/dread/index.html

Also, Callan's observation of how suspense is often created by having a bad outcome or danger visible to the audience, but not to the protagonist--that's interesting.

That would be hard to recreate in an RPG. Has anyone/any game done this successfully? How?

[Callan S.]

Oops, I forgot about that! I meant it as an example even for when protagonists know a morally horrible situation is at stake. The same issues apply. I didn't mean to go into some complicated audience knows/PC's don't thing, even though that's a fruitful vein to follow as well. The base of either still requires the morally horrible. And as I noted, in movies/TV the author can never intend the kitten to die, and yet there is still suspence. But in roleplay, with dice, there has to be the genuine chance of it to generate suspence. You can't have safe entertainment like with TV/movies.

[Vulpinoid]

Also, Callan's observation of how suspense is often created by having a bad outcome or danger visible to the audience, but not to the protagonist--that's interesting.

That would be hard to recreate in an RPG. Has anyone/any game done this successfully? How?

I've sort of done this with The Eighth Sea, in two distinct ways. It was a deliberate part of the design process and on a number of occasions, it has hit the mark. One of the methods occurs during character generation, a second method occurs during the course of every game.

For the character generation method...the process of which is described in Ron's Colour First thread.

Being based on the Chinese variant of the card game of 21; players are drawing the cards and often don't know whether to draw that extra card and get closer to the 21, or play the safer route and possibly have a less beneficial character history. As a system it's about halfway between point buy and simply rolling random dice, but the player feels a lot more responsible when things go wrong (they can't just "blame the dice/cards" because it was their own choice to take things further).

During the course of play, the concept of building suspense works in a very different manner. It's a lot closer to the notion of suspense in the eyes of the audience when it isn't necessarily visible to the characters.

Difficulty	Clubs	Hearts	Spades	Diamonds	Tension
0000XXX					13 (King)
00000XX					12 (Queen)
00000XX					11 (Jack)
000XX					10
000XX					9
0000X					8
0000X	*	*	*	*	7
0000X					6
00X					5
00X					4
000					3
000					2
0					1 (Ace)

(in the first colum of the table, the number of 0s or Xs indicates a number of cards drawn, while the Xs are automatically trumped..see below)

First a little background...The basic mechanism behind task difficulty in the game follows a chart called the "Tension Board", there is no GM fiat for assigning difficulties, everything is taken care of by the board and everything is in plain view of the players. Tasks are assigned into four general types matching the four suits of cards, players draw a number of cards based on their innate potential within a category and try to find high cards and those that cards that match the suit (skills allow a player to trump cards to an appropriate suit for the task at hand). The difficulty for the task is defined by a row on the tension board, indicating a number of cards drawn and a number of cards automatically trumped.

High card wins, but if there's a trump card present (meaning it's of the right suit for the task) it wins...if there are trump cards on each side, then high trump card wins.

The whole game is basically GM-less, but there is a dominant player called the "Captain" who gains more influence over the course of the story than the other players. The captain accepts a potential reward for the mission about to be undertaken, and this defines the starting difficulty for the game (as indicated by the row of asterisks (*) in the table above). The reason the tension board gets it's name is the fact that every success earned on a task pushes the difficulty markers up into harder territory, while a failure brings the tension down a notch. This is explained in the narrative by saying that a successful crew draws the attention of their enemies (who will mount more resistance against them), while a crew that keeps getting failures will be deemed incompetent and less worthy of their enemies attention. If a player has two or more cards higher than the cards revealed  for the task's difficulty, the marker is pushed up two or more spaces respectively. Only the marker associated with the task engaged is modified in this manner.

Players often need to consider whether it is worth using their most valuable skills, especially if they've been succeeding continually using these skills through the course of the game. It actually regulates the difficulties nicely.

That's the basics..."a little bit of tension, but not really dramatic suspense" I hear you say.

That's where the high levels come in.

If the tension marker ever reaches the face cards, a new element is introduced into the story. The element is linked to the suit which has been pushed into the danger zone and this new element is NEVER good. Physical dangers might arise because characters have been fighting too much and causing too much of a ruckus, the whole town erupts into a riot...spiritual dangers might arise because too many characters have been tapping their psychic potential and have ripped open a tear in the fabric of space and time. Characters don't know that these evens are about to occur, but I guess they'd have general bad feeling in the backs of their minds. Players know that something is about to turn nasty in the story if they accumulate one more success. Even if the player gets their success, the new problems don't manifest immediately, but they make some kind of influence on the way game mechanics play out for the remainder of the story.

I've seen players deliberately avoid using their favoured attributes and skills in situations just to prevent the chance of doing too well and causing problems for everyone in later scenes. I've also seen players deliberately use their worst combination of skills and abilities in an attempt to fail a scene to release some of the tension in a situation.

It makes for some interesting dilemmas, because the characters will want to succeed as much as possible to accomplish their mission (or pull off their zany scheme), but the players will want a modicum of balance between success and failure to avoid the potential dangers that lie around every corner.

The other advantage of this system is that everyone is involved in the suspense, it's not something that a GM controls fully or something that completely relies on random chance. The stakes are present for the whole crew.

Just some ideas...

V

[soundmasterj]

To answer the topic,

Can you create suspense via mechanics

,
Yes We Can

Most of what I will say has already been said, but I will phrase it different and highlight the key concepts. And I bring with me: Science!

So I did this term paper on suspense once and read a lot of stuff. I think it's pretty helpfull.
Sadly, most of the stuff I read was in german or in old books, but one of the better (if technical) articles on the psychology of suspense (I learned that the lit crit guys are mostly clueless and certainly useless) is this one:
Jose & Brewer 1984, Development of Story Liking: Character Identification, Suspense, and Outcome Resolution.
I've uploaded it here:
http://b4.s3.p.quickshareit.com/files/brewerjoseetal198409e8a.pdf
Call me if you can't get it there and I'll have it uploaded somewhere else.

Researchers Brewer, Vorderer, Zillmann and a few others made up this idea that for a story to be suspensefull, one needs 2 things:

1. A certain order of informing the reader
2. Certain elements the reader is informed about

1. Information structure.
Contrast suspense with curiosity and surprise.
Surprise: X happens,  Y happens. The story tells X first, then immediately Y.
("Clara kissed Bob. Suddenly, Gorillas!")
Curiosity: X happens, Y happens. The story tells Y, only hinting at or later telling about X.
("Bob had died. Peeled bananas everywhere. Clara was in shock.")
Suspense: X happens, Y happens. The story tells X, but postpones telling Y by inserting retarding elements.
("Clara trembled. Would the huge gorilla kill her, too? Elswhere, Mary wondered what her sister Clara was up to. …")

So suspense structure is informing chronologically, but postponing conclusion.

2. Story Elements
The basic idea (this is my own understanding of the literature; the original researchers use different terms) is that

• Characterisation make us care for a character, Character Valence
• Evens affecting a valued character make us care for the resolution of the scene, Resolution Valence
• Retardation of a valued Resolution makes for Suspense
• Suspense makes for a Good Evening

I could do example for this, like … we don't care much for a really dangerous event, thousands dying of hunger in africa, and we certainly don't feel suspense; we care immensly when even minor things affecting us happen because we value the character us ourselves very much; and if anybody wants me to elaborate on one of these points, I'd gladly do.
But it is actually really simple. Suspense emerges when a threat to a person we value is percepted and it's resultion postponed.
This is a really suspenseful video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg8MqjoFvy4
And I found it highly valuable to analyse it from the current perspective. When does the suspense reach it's highest point etc.

So we need to get the basic elements and the basic order done.
First, order/information structure. Vincent makes a good post here:
http://www.lumpley.com/hardcore.html#5 , saying that we needn't be uncertain about what happens in the end, but only how much it costs to get there. Like, we KNOW middle earth will be saved. But we don't know how much beauty will be lost to get Sauron beaten. What I take from this that we don't have to worry about the order of events much. When playing RPGs, we usually don't know what exactly will happen, even the hardest railroader doesn't. This is enough uncertainity in my opinion. The unique situation RPGs are in is that we just don't know what the other guys will do, so there is always some element of uncertainity. We don't know what exactly will happen, we never do. So we have to get the other elements of story right; we have to make sure that we actually care for the resolution.

But first, I want to talk about two dichotomies here: story now/story later and FitM/FatE.
First, story now and story later. Do we want PLAY to be suspenseful; this is easy. Yatzhee is suspenseful play. The character I value is myself, X is me rolling the dice, Y is the result. We can easily achieve this in a RPG context. Just make high rolls good and have players roll dice. This isn't story suspense, or, rather, the story that is suspenseful is our lives, the players story, not the fictional story of the game.
Or do we want the resulting stories to be suspenseful? This has a tendency for railroading I feel. This is story later suspense.
Or, and this is the El Dorado of suspenseful Narrativist play I feel - do we want to feel the suspense of a suspenseful story as we are creating it? This is what I actually care about.

FitM/FatE: I think making the dice result the suspenseful element is neither hard nor actually interesting. FatE does it like this. We say (X) what will happen when we roll this or that, we roll and read of the result (Y). Yeah, so what. It's not the story that is suspenseful, it is the dice.
I don't think this kind of suspense is BAD or even unimportant for RPGs. It just isn't anything special to RPGs and I find it to be rather uninteresting.
Now, FitM. We decide what's at stake (X; the threat is made explicit). We roll dice, and the dice rolling isn't that suspenseful in itself because, well, it's dice. What we care for are fictional people. We start telling the story based on how we use the dice. Now we're on the edge of the seat again. This is what I care about.

Ok, next. The elements of story.
1. We need character valence. The research makes a big fuss about characters being liked because they are 1. like us, 2. morally right or wrong. If we want to have valued characters, we need to make them somewhat like the reader; and we have to make sure that it is bad people getting away or good people suffering harm.
The unique situation of RPGs is that the characters are OURS. We do value them because we create them.
What we need to make sure, I feel, is that we have CHARACTERS. We need depth. A deep character is one we can care for. If our character is just a number machine with a name stolen from a Salvatore novel, well, there is not much character to care for, it's the paper we care for because it is our papers and our number crunching. So, we need deep characters.
But this isn't only our characters. The "NPCs" are potentially valuable, too.
So we should have rules in place to ensure deep, interesting, valuable characters; our own and others. Flags are usefull here; we set flags to make other players know what we would probably care for. I think that rules for setting flags are useful for suspense.

2. We need threatening situations for resolution valence. We NEED bad things happening to our guys. This is old news for Forgies: remember the Czege principle.
A perfect example of a suspenseful event is Sorcerors Kickers imho. They are a situation with no turning back. There is some uncertainity in the kicker, but also, and this is more important in my opinion, a high degree of CERTAINITY: something WILL happen.
Well, Kickers are the reference implementation in my opinion. I think that rules for ensuring that events making a negative result for a valued character plausible are useful for suspense. Have rules that, as often as needed, make clear that soon, something will have happened, and it might be that it was something bad happening to somebody we care for.
Escalation in DitV might be a good example for this. When we escalate, we know that something bad will happen. This is highly suspenseful.
We need rules for real threats. An orc is not a threat. Yeah, not only because how "easy" he is. Supplements are sold because of this slight missunderstanding: if an orc is not a threat, a 14headed hydra surely is! But she is not. She is XP on legs. A threat is something actually affecting a character.

Ok, more examples.
I started my game before I knew most of this, but surprisingly, I still got many things right. One example of actual play that was highly suspenseful:
My knight meets a witch. This potion, she says, can cure your sick wife. But you will need to follow me into the woods, she says.
We roll dice. I roll badly. I decide to sacrifice my personal safety so at least I get the potion. I have another player narrate. I know what will happen in the end: the witch will hurt me somehow. I will survive. I will get the potion.
I am on the edge of the seat again when she starts narrating how the witch loosens my knights armor even though I know this.

I might layout how I adressed the abovementioned points in my game or I might elaborate how sorceror does it later on. But this post is long enough for now. Basically, read the article I linked and integrate it in a FitM game is my message

[FredGarber]

I'm getting the sense that in games where a lot of things are resolved by a Fortune Roll, the very act of rolling dice (or playing cards, RPS, etc) adds tension.
The hard part is that it's hard to suprise the player(s) responsible for the plot. 
In more GM-centered games, for example, the GM always knows what NPC is betraying the PCs, because that's a scheduled event.  In less GM centric games, it's even harder to suprise people.

I would suggest some sort of Mechanic where a Player pays some sort of resource, and other players can determine how that resource might be used. 

Now, imagine a Betrayal pool.  If it's on the PC's side, the PCs are betrayed.  If it's on the GM's side, the GM gets betrayed.  And unavoidable actions (like any combat skill check?) flips the side back and forth.

For example, 'Alex' gets 3 points, and puts it into the GM's Betrayal pool.  He's hoping to burn that pool and have an NPC betray the emeny at some time later.  But 'Betty' uses her 'Double Damage' power to get through a current conflict.  That flips the pool over to the Player's side, and the GM can now burn those points instead of Alex.  Alex needs to hope that the GM uses a power to hurt Betty that flips the Betrayal pool, or that he can figure out a way to flip it himself.

Alex feels suspense, because when he paid into the pool, he didn't know if he was making a good decision or not.  Betty has risked the Pool to end the conflict quicker, so she feels suspense, as she is risking the group's potential betrayal.  The GM doesn't know who is going to betray whom, so SHE feels suspense.

A downside is that when someone actual burns those points, someone else ends up being betrayed.  In a GM-centric game like DnD, the plot may not be that flexible. But in a game like DitV, it might!

-Maybe something like that?

[soundmasterj]

Oh, I got more. A lot more, but this I want to get off my chest now.
http://www.springerlink.com/index/9t518024t8427m33.pdf
This is an article about a chomputer program for suspense story making.
Not quite as fascinating as it sounds, but still a nice read.

Another thing I find to be highly interesting: Oral Narrative Traditions.
Before we focused our "literature" on, well, writing, we told stories. This was actually a lot more similar to RPGs than I first thought. The narrator typically worked of a framework that was known to everybody. Like, the room told the narrator to, again, tell the story of how Gilgamesh fought Enkidu. Everybody knows how the story ends, and still, the suspense is deep. Becuase they knew who won, but not how. This was the narrators job to make up.
This is really similar to some FitM conflict resolution rules (say, otherkind).