Orthogonal Preparation

[TonyLB]

So I love the town creation setup in Dogs in the Vineyard, because it lets me know exactly what to do while preparing.  It's a structure for preparation.  That rocks.

And I love the free mixture of people's ideas that fuels play in games like Primetime Adventures, Capes and Universalis.  Its a structure for combining and integrating spontaneous creativity from different people.  That rocks.

You see where I'm going here, yes?  These two great tastes should taste great together.  Two (or more) people should be able to independently prepare material (preferably even with structures to help them) and then reliably be able to combine that material during the game in order to fuel great play.  I'm going to dub this Orthogonal Preparation because I'm a math-junky.  Orthogonal vectors are vectors at right angles... like "up/down" and "back/forward."  They can be combined to create a far wider variety of interesting things than either one of them can represent on their own.  And, because they're orthogonal, you can always decompose any result uniquely into the elements that created it:  the dynamics happening in the up/down vector still make sense looked at only in the up/down plane.  They also make sense when you look at the two-dimensional up+front/back+down system as a whole.

So, there are lots of conceivabe ways that this orthogonal breakdown could be achieved.  I'll sketch out one, just to (hopefully) help us all make sure we're all on the same page.

• Player A is given responsibility for preparing an external threat that a desert village is facing.  He uses some point-buy mechanic that tells him what sorts of monsters and demons he can create.
• Player B is given responsibility for preparing the troubles of the village itself.  He uses the DitV town creation mechanic
• In play, the ability to respond to the external threat is complicated by the troubles of the village.  The ability to solve the troubles of the village is complicated by the pressures of the external threat.

I think that Player A and Player B (above) could operate nearly, or even totally, independently in their game preparation.  I think, also, that they would then naturally end up sharing out the "GM-duty" of playing the things that they'd created.  After all, they have to add their information into the SIS through play, and nobody but them knows what information that is.  So they're going to play the characters needed to get that information in.

Indeed, I will point out that this already happens in virtually every roleplaying game.  A GM creates the external situation.  Players each prepare information and plot-threads (with varying degrees of skill and structure) about their characters.  These are then put together, with the players playing the things necessary for then to add their preparation into the SIS (i.e. their characters) and the GM playing the things necessary for him to add his preparation into the SIS (i.e. everything else).  So the idea of orthogonal preparation is not really new.  But it's often hidden by assumptions about why preparation and creative duties are parcelled out as they are, and by not recognizing some types of prep-work (i.e. making a character) for what they are.

The trick on orthogonal prep is that there is a limit to how much you can prepare, before you're reducing the ability to combine elements on the fly.  I discussed this in a bit more detail in a PtA Actual Play thread.  Basically, if you prepare a story that is self-contained then its very integrity makes it a bar against being combined with other thoughts (either prepared or spontaneous).

Is this a general phenomenon of which The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast is one specific example?  Basically, if the GM has prepared a complete story, and the players want to contribute spontaneous material then the integrity of the story is a bar against combining it with that new material.

So, how do we go about making structures that will limit people enough without limiting them too much?  Is the PtA standard of consensual prep (where the preparation is done on separate issues, but with a huge amount of communication and cross-talk between the people actually doing the prep) the only way?  Or are there other options?

[Josh Roby]

A very cool idea, Tony.  Historically I've GMed a great deal because I like doing these bits -- but then I met other "players" who liked doing this just as much as I did, which meant we were in a quandary as to who "got" to GM and get to do all the interesting prep work.  Creating a structure that allowed multiple players to do prep work and then juxtapose them would be great.

First off, I'm doing something sort of like that in FLFS, where creating elements of play (characters, sets, props) can be delegated by the GM to the players.  So the GM can ask Player A, "Hey, we need a French captain of a rival ship.  Write up the guy and his ship and a little backstory."  Because there are formal links from player goals to character stats to story conflicts to story elements, the French captain's relevance to the characters' stories should be assured.  However, this "structure" relies on the GM to do the delegation work -- I figure some players will want to help with prep and others will be completely disinterested, and I the game designer can't predict how that will fall out.  Leaving it up to GM management sounds, though, like it's at cross purposes to what you're asking about.  You seem to be looking for a game where the base assumption is that all players will be involved in that creation -- that's the point.

I do think, though, that you need to make sure that there is a systemic link between player goals and the created elements of play.  That is, the things that the players want to see has to show up in the other players' work.  This can range from the very broad (I want to confront a challenge and find a clever way to resolve it) to the very specific (I want to portray the difficulties of being a woman of color in the 1920s jazz scene).  If I want these things, and you're providing the prep work, you need to be creating those challenges that can be cleverly confronted or breaking out the rum runners and bass players.  Placing this orthogonal prep work into a game with specific and relatively narrow scope (see DitV, Polaris) can cut down this issue a little, since that unifying principle will squeeze those created elements closer together, but even that limited scope won't do all the work.  There needs to be something that forces the created elements to work together.

A good question to ask is "What, exactly, are the players preparing?"  Are they simply creating antagonists and hex maps?  Are they constructing relationship maps?  Are they outlining plotlines?  If the players are just creating the "pieces" -- the NPCs, maybe some generic threats and traps, enemy strongholds, that sort of thing -- the ease of threading them together is pretty easy.  Essentially, the players independently create the characters and then collaborative weave them together in a relationship map.  I suppose the players could independently create entire relationship maps, but they'd have to have some level of "plug and play" capability, which is hard to finagle.

In fact I might posit that the individual story elements can all be prepared away from the table, it's just the context that the elements are in that require coordination.  That coordination can be collaborative (all the players) or authoritative (the GM), and can work before (This is what we're going to create) or after (Now let's put these together) the creation process.  If you're trying to put the emphasis of the game on the collaborative creation, then I'd think the best route for coordination would be collaborative and 'after' creation, with perhaps some guiding principles decided on at the 'before' stage.

To illustrate: in the 'before' stage, each player chooses one keyword that they want to play about.  It can be "challenge" or "politics" or "homosexuality", whatever.  Then each player goes away and creates three characters, one set, and a couple props -- each one of these elements must incorporate two or more of the other players' keywords.  Then the players come back to the table and show off what they've created, and they make some connections between the elements -- this guy is this other guy's brother, who owns this shop, where they sell that book.  Then players pick up characters, frame a scene, and go.  Looking a little forward into the "real" play, each one of the prepared elements might be imbued with some game currency "oomph", further ensuring that they get utilized.

Christ, I do run on. =P

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Hey, Tony, this is how Shock: works. Check it out over at the glyphpress forum.

[TonyLB]

Glyph-Joshua:  I'm not really seeing that.  I see the notion of "cross-product X with Y" very clearly, but I don't see it being applied in the same way I'm talking about.

Particularly, I don't see any discussion (yet) about how people prepare for the game, and how multiple players interact.  But maybe I just missed finding it, and you can direct me more specifically.

JBR-Joshua:  I agree that the question of "What are the players preparing?" is key.  You point out, in practical "happening right now" terms a lot of the questions that are (to my mind) very useful:  How do spheres are influence get separated?  Who parcels them out?  What happens at the borders?

What I'm not sure I understand is your implied (but not stated) dichotomy between creating the "pieces" (your term for NPCs, locations, other portions of the SIS) and creating the relations between those pieces.  It sounds, to me, like you've already answered a pretty fundamental question, which is "What story elements are suitable for being prepared, and which ones arise only in play?"  If NPCs and such are "pieces" (i.e. static) and relationships and situation are dynamic then it seems like you're saying that NPCs, locations and history are uniquely suited to be prepared before the game, whereas the connections between those elements are uniquely suited to be developed during the game.

I think that the relations can be viewed as pieces in turn ... it's the topologist in me.  Player A can prepare Vicky Vaughn, rude high school socialite, and then Player B can create an antagonism between Vicky and Jessica (Character B) during play.  OR, Player A can prepare the notion of an antagonist for Jessica, and Player B can assign Vicky Vaughn to that position during play.

In the first case, you would know "Vicky is a twit... Jessica lost the field hockey game, so how about if Vicky taunts her for it, which will create some antagonism?"  In the second case, you would know "Jessica lost the field hockey game, and she has an antagonist, who will clearly want to taunt her about it ... how about if Vicky takes that role, which indicates pretty strongly that she's a twit?"

The notion that you create a set of characters, and Situation evolves from them in play is traditional.  People are quite accustomed to it.  I don't think it's the only way to go, though.  You could, just as easily, create a Situation (with numbers and rules and all that) and then have Characters evolve to fit the situation in play.  That still lets you do orthogonal preparation, it just puts the dividing lines in entirely different places.  Like, one person (for a Buffyesque game) could prepare the idea behind the Big Bad of the Week, one person could prepare a social situation that the gang is dealing with in their daily lives, and then you'd combine them, bringing in or creating NPCs as the situation called for.  Does that make sense, or am I babbling?

[Emily Care]

Hey Tony,

That completely makes sense to me.  Whatever gets done in any given game can be done by any single person or a subset of them as is determined by the rules at hand. We're just in a place right now where mostly we've got lots of examples of authoritative distributions.  But, we're in the middle of an explosion of different types.   Yay!

I tend to break it down by the elements of exploration:  character, setting, situation, color, system.  Each person can have say on any of these things, or not. Or can have say in a variety of ways. Frex, Dogs is authoritative wrt setting and situation, the GM says what's so.  But it's radically collaborative wrt system:  the players get much more input on resolution & in general on determining what happens than in your trad game.  However, it may be an aspect of input about character that puts Dogs most off the rails:  the fact that what your character does has meaningful ramifications about the world, outside of "does the goal get accomplished".  Instead the players are given positive ability to make statements about what is just or what is justice that make statements about the setting & world, and about real world relations. 

From my perspective as a collab. game designer, the biggest challenges are not in the parceling out--though that is definitely informed by lots of free-form extremely collaborative play, so that looks like the easy part to me--but is the orchestrating the collaborative creativity to have a dynamic flow (ie to provide adversity) and to foster communication between the players (ie to set up appropriate permissions & expectations).  Those, in my experience, are the super challenging bits.  However, talking about how to parcel up all the other myriad tasks (world creation, scene framing, situation framing etc) is as fun as it gets, too, in my book.

Hope that applies!

best,
Emily 

[Josh Roby]

Hey, Tony.

To some extent, yeah, I was showing my bias or at least still mentally stuck in the FLFS section that I was writing the other day that has the players creating the pieces.  This isn't the only way, but it is the way that is currently at the forefront of my mind.  That said...

I'm certain you can make the pieces and then connect them in play, as I suggested before.  I've also gone the route where you create your character (or whatever) with 'hooks' to it like "has an antagonist", "cares for a dependant", or "answers to an authority" and then assign those hooks to other bits and pieces in play.  But I can't see how you can effectively assign those relationships and make those connections before play.  In a lot of ways, that is play.

Making the situation first is totally viable and I get where you're going.  I mean, I've done it myself when I was the sole GM, looking at the player characters, seeing what conflicts I could introduce, then thinking, "I need an antagonist here, a resource here, an obstacle here."  Then I'd fill them in with existing elements or create new ones to fit the bill.  I can see as you suggest a systemic creation of that relationship map, and then parcelling out creating the pieces to the players -- that'd be awesome.

Emily --
I both agree and disagree with your last paragraph, there.  Yes, it's easy to arbitrarily parcel out bits and pieces to the players, but that distribution may or may not be effective, as you say.  But it's that distribution that will in the end foster the flow, the communication, and the conflict.  The distribution must have well-defined guidelines that all but force the results to fall into a playable construct of conflict/flow/oomph/whatever.  I have a feeling I'm not making much sense.

Example: I'll continue on with Buffy.  The ruleset gives us a skeleton: you must have a Big Bad, a social dilemma, and a victim.  If we then part ways and I make the Big Bad, you make the social dilemma, and Tony makes the victim, when we come back they may not connect in any meaningful way.  My Big Bad is a chinese dragon, your social dilemma is the Sadie Hawkins dance, and Tony's victim is... god, I don't know, a hasidic jew.  Of course we're all thinking of ways to connect these disparate elements now, but it would be far more straightforward if the conflicts and relationships were also defined by the ruleset or determined by the players before we left the table.  Instead of "Big Bad, Social Dilemma, Victim" we could get "Big Bad that is a supernatural exagerration of the social dilemma, which specifically concerns the victim."  We could chat before separating, decide that (for instance) the social dilemma is the Sadie Hawkins dance, there's a jewish girl who's anxious about asking the boy of her dreams, and a dragon who offers to fill her with courage in exchange for doing it some favors.  Then we can go away, create the specifics, and come back with some good, coordinated material.

Now it's my turn to ask: am I making any sense?

[Sydney Freedberg]

This is fascinating stuff. A stray thought: fan mail in advance.

For example:

I'm a player and I want to my character to face sword-wielding robot ninja monkeys, by Jove, so at the start of collaborative situation-building I slap my 10 Resource Chips on the table and say, "these all go to whoever can promise me monkeys! Monkeys!" And Tony and Joshua and Emily look at each other around the table, and Emily says "oh God, not the monkey thing again," and Tony says "Dude, I'm sick of GMing stuff, I just want to play my protagonist this time," and Joshua says "Dude! Monkeys!"

So Josh takes the 10 Resource Chips, which he then promptly spends, point-buy style, to create an army of sword-wielding robot ninja monkeys to throw at me in the session. (Does Josh control the monkeys in play? Not necessarily). And if I really, really like his monkeys, maybe I even give him a tip with more resources: "Yay! Those monkeys rocked! Here's two more Resource Chips so you can bring them back in the next scene!"

And maybe Meg's all, "Dammit, Josh, here's three Resource Chips to not bring them back, spend them on a lovecrossed couple of wizards instead, okay?"

You could do the same thing with roles/relationships as well. I imagine Luke Skywalker's player sitting at the table for session after session with a pile of chips he's placed on a card marked "tell me something surprising about my father," and nobody takes it until.... well, you get the idea.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

That's a pretty neat idea, Sydney. Make a way to spend those chips, and you've got a game.

... uh, also, I have to be able to make a profit on the chips, because presumably they're the same chips for my own character's actions.

There was a system a little like this that I called "bribery" in an old game design of mine. The example I gave was, "I will give you these six chips to use my character if you discover and free my character from the dungeon while you're taking over the castle." You can, of course, give those chips for anything. "I'll give you these six chips to have an army of robot ninja monkeys!" works just as well.

... and hey, what makes you think I like monkeys so much?

[Sydney Freedberg]

You'd also want mechanisms for refunds ("Uh, dude, I paid you for monkeys, those were gibbons!") and royalties ("those monkeys you created, can I use them?" "Sure! Just 1 chip") and other parts of the incentive system. The difference from fan mail in Prime Time Adventures or story tokens in Capes is you're giving the other players power to do a specific thing in the future, rather than rewarding them for doing cool things in the past by giving them power to do anything at all in the future; that might or might not be a weakness.

I'm imagining a Capes-like snowdrift of scribbled-upon 3"x5" index cards, each of them representing a character, situation, relationship, or event that hasn't yet happened, with resource chips piled on each.

... and hey, what makes you think I like monkeys so much?

Ha! I wasn't even thinking about it with my conscious mind -- I just grabbed names off people's handles, and since your sig with your real name didn't display in the "top summary," I'd forgotten we had two Joshuas. You've clearly planted a powerful monkey meme in my subconscious.

[Emily Care]

Yes, it's easy to arbitrarily parcel out bits and pieces to the players, but that distribution may or may not be effective, as you say.  But it's that distribution that will in the end foster the flow, the communication, and the conflict.  The distribution must have well-defined guidelines that all but force the results to fall into a playable construct of conflict/flow/oomph/whatever.

 
Totally. How you coordinate the creative contributions matters greatly on what kind of flow & oomph the story has.  The visions must be wed somehow, PtA's Pitch Session does this brilliantly. Brainstorming & cooperative creation work really well to bring peoples' ideas into  line.  Creative constraints (ie setting, situation) seem like the best way to go if you really want people to be able to independently arrive at ideas that will then dovetail.  In my designs, I've been working with strong situation framing (a la MLwM) to allow everyone to relax about that aspect of the game: you can be sure there will be conflict & dynamic situation, now go about making other stuff up to fit with that structure.

So, to go back to Tony's original examples--the town creation rules are exactly that: a structure that allows the potentially independently created components of Dogs and Town to fit together.  Something that struck me about Dogs recently is that you really don't have to fit the Dog's issues to the town:  the towns may but need not be constructed to highlight the Dogs' lives, instead the Towns are a question formulated that each player will answer differently depending on the issues they are bringing to bear with their Dog. 

Does that get at your idea at all, Tony?

best,
Em

[TonyLB]

Emily:  Certainly with regards to the DitV town creation rules, yes:  That structure does something I haven't yet clearly identified which creates towns that combine reliably with any Dog.  It's worth noting that the Dogs themselves are pretty constrained and structured themselves, by dint of being Dogs.  The same towns wouldn't have a good reaction with (say) your average D&D party.

Sydney:  I like the general idea of bribing people to combine with the ideas of others.  I'm doing some combining of my own, but the results are going to be specific enough that they'll end up in a Misery Bubblegum design thread, rather than this more general RPG Theory thread.  That'll happen when I get the time (hopefully this evening) to write up a new PDF of rules.  Far from ignoring the idea, I'm silent because I'm integrating and adapting it.

[Emily Care]

Tony:  Oh, duh on me. Of course, the thing is that a Dog is fitted to a town by its very nature. We can feel like we have to work real hard to make it fit, when in fact, Vincent went & did all the hard work for us.  The power of the dog over the town & the calls made upon them by the townsfolk are the hooks. 

An adventuring party in d&d is fitted to a dungeon. Well, there may be levels of effectiveness & difficulty that need to be matched by the gm, but the skills fit the deed.   

--Em

[TonyPace]

This is an Actual Play issue for me. After much negotiation, our group has arrived at something of a consensus for our new long-term play campaign. Out intention is to arrive at something like Vincent's Ars Magica game - a minimum of explicit system, round table GMed. We plan to focus on mean streets cyberpunk, with stories focused on character and situation over setting.

To arrive at our agreed constraints we used Universalis as a brainstorming and conflict resolution mechanism. In the end, we agreed that:

• GMing is on a per session basis. At the end of every session, dice are rolled, with a 50% chance of GMing duties remaining in the same hands for the next session. Otherwise, they are randomly assigned. No allowances are to be made for position in an ongoing story. The next guy takes the reins and that's it.
  


• Strong scene framing rights for the GM. The specific example used during our negotiation was of an absentee player's character's life used as the stakes for a session. The goal of play is to save your buddy's life, he's been shot in the leg real bad and you don't have the money to take him to a doctor. You've got two hours to raise the cash or get it done by other means - or else he bleeds to death.
  


• The characters must remain poor and hungry. If they become wealthy, they must lose that wealth.
  


• Characters are entirely mortal. They are in no way protected by a PC halo.
  


• Hands off other GM's NPCs, unless the players drive the conflict. If the PCs go to the street ripper seeking help and end up shooting him, that's OK, but you can't use him as a primary antagonist.
  


• No blocking other GM's contributions. If one GM suggests that MegaCorp, Inc. is using street urchins as incubators for their new biomodifications, only to rip the body parts out later, then when you are GM you cannot revel that MegaCorp's involvement is a red herring, and the real villian is OtherCorp GMbh. You could use MegaCorp or the urchins as a plot element in your story.
  


• Setting is intentionally left vague and is meant to be unveiled through play. As a start, there is a city at the base of a corporate arcology.
  


• Supernatural elements must be kept covert: nothing that be shown on the evening news can be introduced into play.
  


• System is limited to opposed dice rolls and general description level skills.Beyond that it is subject to GM fiat. In our example play, the GM hid his rolls from us.
  


• Characters can be made with any appropriate system you choose. Advancement is through new skills only, the general mechanism is meant to be through demonstrated use and failure (BRP was mentioned as a model here)

Do you think this is a functional model for this sort of play? What further issues do you think we will need to hash out?

[Sydney Freedberg]

A really detailed analysis of your campaign's framework would probably derail this thread, but briefly:

No, I don't think those rules do what Tony's talking about. Notice they're mostly "Thou Shalt Not," rather than "Thou Shalt": In other words, they tell the participants what NOT to do so they don't derail other people's ideas, but they don't tell they what they SHOULD do in order to intersect interestingly with others' ideas. In military jargon, this is mere "deconfliction" (I charge here, you bomb there, don't bomb me by accident) as opposed to "jointness" (I charge here while you bomb the same place to soften it up); in geometry, this is parallel, not orthogonal.

So far the framework simply encourages people to get out of each other's way. If you want them to get into each other's way in a defined and fruitful fashion, you might need a rule like
- "create one thing your character needs/is addicted to, then create one source for another PC's need/addiction that wants something problematic in return" (like the classic cyberpunk streetdoc going "sure, I'll get you those experimental anti-cancer meds, you just have to do one thing for me..."); or
- "create the neighborhood/arcology sector/junkyard your character lives in, and then create one gang/corporation/horde of mutant rats that threatens the next character's neighborhood" ("I wuz comin' home from a run, just wantin' to crash, but then the little kidz who live under the stairs said they seen the glowin' eyes again...")
- "define a crucial skill/piece of cyberware/whatever that's your character's crucial edge, and then create the teacher/cyberdoc/whatever who gave another character their edge in the past and now wants/needs/demands something in return." ("Long ago, I taught you the way of the gun.... Now, my aging hands shake too hard to defend my family...You are my only hope...")

[Sydney Freedberg]

P.S.: If you're a fan of Vincent Baker's Ars game, you may recognize this as a variant of the concept of "underwriting" another person's character -- which is "'code for 'trying to break her in public.'" It's also akin to the role of Connections in My Life With Master, or the Mistaken-Heart dynamic in Polaris.

The wider question, to everyone, being: if these examples are all indeed to some degree "orthogonal," what makes them work? Strictly defined limits seem to be a common factor.