Models of Adventure Structure

[Andrew Morris]

Games like Universalis, Capes, and Prime Time Adventures (I don't know anything about Soap or Pantheon) could be categorized as "morphic," for lack of a better term. The adventure structure would be defined simply by its own changeable nature, rather than the communal nature of the game. I have a distaste for defining something by the lack of the definitional characteristic, but that's just me.

I don't see InSpectres or Breaking the Ice fitting into this potential category, though. While they may be communally created, they do have their own structures.

[Albert of Feh]

Hm, actually, I'm going to retract my 'communal' idea. If these categories are defined as being agnostic with regards to who's actually introducing the relevant aspects of the scenario structure (which seems to be the case, except for Illusionism and Branching), then many of the games named fit in.

InSpectres fits fairly well into Trailblazing.

Universalis could be any of them, depending on what the group does; I could see a Trailblazing detective story a la InSpectres, an RMap scenario (acting like Legends of Alyria and building the cast before most of direct play starts), or even a location crawl where the location is either defined like the RMap I mentioned or just grown organically as things go along (which would remind me somewhat of Donjon too).

Pantheon's scenaros are pretty straight RMap.

Prime Time Adventures is another one that seems like it could be flexible, even on an episode-by-episode basis, though I can't see it supporting Location Crawl or Timetabling very well.

I don't know enough about Capes to comment.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Maybe Capes is just everyone sitting around and trying to come up with good Bangs to throw at each other? That's not just a function of the distributed GM powers, but also of the the incentive system: Generally, you get more reward for either winning or losing a hard-fought conflict than you do for winning something no other player cared to contest.

If anyone is passionate to dissect Capes in particular, though, we should probably start another thread instead of further hijacking John's.

[Sean]

This is a great summary, John.

I will say that one thing that attracted me to the Forge was that my friend Del was using the relationship map technique by 1985 at the latest, and I never understood what he was doing until he got here. I have an old adventure (which I ran an updated version of two years ago for one of my DitV players) he wrote that counts as evidence, I suppose. I never understood completely what he was doing until I got here. He used to give me character sheets with lists of important NPCs, which I was then supposed to play as his GM. I wish we'd published and thought harder about some of this stuff at the time, given the excitement that similar ideas are generating here now so much later.

I think in general it's going to be hard to peg the absolute origin of a technique outside of published texts, because there was just so much innovation already in the seventies and early eighties (bad rules-texts helped) that people dealt with in their home games in a variety of idiosyncratic ways.