Orthogonal Preparation

[Sydney Freedberg]

P.P.S. to clarify and expand: In Dogs in the Vineyard, you can count on the players' Dogs investigating and judging the GM's town; in Polaris, you can count on one player's Knight (i.e. Heart) struggling with the opposing player's Demons (i.e. Mistaken); in My Life with Master, you can count on the Master being able to threaten the Minions' Connections, and being able to exploit the exceptions to the Minions' Less-than-Human and More-than-Human clauses for that matter, and on the Minions trying to defy the Master. Is part of the solution giving each party something they care about that's under threat?

[TonyLB]

Is part of the solution giving each party something they care about that's under threat?

Executive summary:  Care?  Yes.  Threat?  Not necessarily.

Sydney, correct me if I'm wrong:  You're talking about honing the character so that they provide a good way to interact with plot elements offered by other people (or, conversely, to hone the plot elements so that they're a better way of interacting with the existing characters ... really you align them both with each other).  I'm going to unapologetically put forth a few theses on the subject:  anyone (not just Sydney) tell me how you disagree with or elaborate upon a thesis and we'll have a discussion.  In other words, these are meant to be knocked down, if you can knock 'em down.

Thesis 1:  Providing interleaving threats is a trick that has an obvious (and false) reason for working:  people think that players get interested because their character is under threat.  To which, poppycock.  I've had characters threatened horribly on numerous occasions, and not cared a whit.  The true reason it works (when it works) is subtler, having everything to do with the players and little if anything to do with the characters:  In order to threaten something the player cares about you must do two things.  First, you must understand what the player cares about and contribute something regarding it, and second you must provide them a nice wide open path to contribute right back at you. 

You do part of the work, but explicitly leave a lot of the work for the other player to contribute.  It's like pausing during a conversation, to hear what the other person has to say in response.  Just plain politeness, but it's amazing how far that goes toward creating a structure for dialogue.  I see a lot of dysfunctional RPG play as people trying to constantly "talk" without ever choosing to be silent and listen ... or as talking about a subject that their conversation partner clearly cares very little about, and then being surprised that the conversation doesn't take off. 

"Did you know that the NTSC standard permits not thirty frames a second, but actually sixty half-frames, interlaced on the screen to provide a stronger illusion of motion?  What do you think of that?"
>crickets chirping<

The strict limits that you gave examples of help provide exactly that level of pseudo-conversation flow:  they remind you how much of the conversation is your responsibility, and how much of the conversation is going to be taken up by the other player.  I think, however, that they also say "You have to care about something in this vein, or this conversation won't happen."  It's hard to imagine how you'd structure the flow without that, which may be why a lot of Indie games have a tight focus.  If I don't care about moral judgment then I simply don't play Dogs, the same way I wouldn't go to a sports bar to have a conversation if I didn't enjoy sports.

Thesis 2:  Threat is a common tool of communication in RPGs, but the concept has to be pretty severely bent and stretched before it covers all the ways that you can provide players with strong tools for this kind of back and forth.

Example:  Jessica loves Theo.  She needs him to recognize and appreciate her ... perhaps she even needs him to love her in return, in order for her to be happy.  She has not yet communicated that so firmly that Theo could not deny knowing it.  He knows it, of course, but he doesn't have to admit that he knows it.  He even loves her ... but he doesn't want to be duty-bound to love her.  Jessica tries to unburden herself to him, and Theo artfully dodges out of the whole conversation.  Perhaps he's a hard-boiled detective, and a gang-lord has his office strafed with tommy-guns.  Lucky Theo!

You can describe that in terms of things the character cares about being in danger.  Jessica's sense of well-being in threatened by Theo's inability to commit.  Theo's sense of ... what? ... freedom, is threatened by her wanting to further the relationship.  But it's awfully unwieldy verbiage.  I have to come to it wanting to see it as a threat, before I can make those concepts fit.

Yes, one player can offer something they hold dear, and the other can offer a threat, and they can combine the two.  I think that is a rocking good interaction.  A person could build a whole game (or, indeed, generation after generation of games) that only supported that interaction.  But you can also open it up to other types of interaction.  One player can offer a desire, and the other can offer a fear, and they can combine the two.  One person can offer a question, and the other can offer an answer, and they can figure out how that answer can be relevant to that question.  I think (though I don't have enough experience with such games to be certain) that in both of those cases, it is essential that the players care about what they are offering.  But it is not essential that there be a threat to destroy what they care about.  There just has to be something happening.  Things can change in ways other than simply being invalidated, and I think we'll still care about the changes if we care about the subject.


So, I have spoken (and at more length than I'm accustomed to).  Let me now extend a warm, welcoming, deliberate silence into which I hope others will in turn speak.

[TonyPace]

TonyLB: I agree with both of your theses, but I worry that conflicts of interest that do not involve direct threats are not grabby enough for a large plurality of players out in the field. I think that without explicit shared understanding, players would see these elements as subplot in the comic book sense rather than the main story. But I'm ready to be proven wrong.

I definitely agree that focusing on what players care about rather than simply threatening thier characters is very important.

Sydney: I may have misled you when I suggested that Vincent's Ars Magica game is an inspiration for me, because I think that the original campaign that stemmed that post was all about testing characters, threatening them in various ways that the players care about to make them shine. And as it was expressed, our setup wasn't so much about characters at all, but rather tense situations. The bit about undefined character generation hints at it: in our case, despite some pressure from me, it was never agreed on that characters need to have defined points of caring at all (Touchstones and Mirrors in Vincent's example). This, above all else is what worries me. I think it will work well with the player who was driving this solution, but perhaps less well with the others.

I think the underlying mechanism of Dogs town creation is that Responsibility (Stewardship) + Sin -> Judgement. Since all Dogs have shared responsibility, their individual motivations can be subsumed into their perceptions of how sins should be judged. The job of the town creation rules is to create a richly layered texture of sin expressed through setting, characters and implied situations for the players to dig into.

Sydney, your list of threats built into various games is very useful. It makes me think that to build a structure for intense stories to hang off of, you need to either consider individual player motivations one by one or create a shared structure of group motivations. And the latter is definitely easier, especially if you want to encourage party hydra play to maximize interaction and screen time.

In my example, I think the obvious grabby element is poverty. I propose the basic formula is that Poverty + Exploitation -> LifeStruggle.  The question is how to create an escalation of exploitation that forms definite situations and characters with implied setting.

I think that the coordination and reuse of characters and elements will hapen largely on it's own if we can informally structure the generation of situations that will hit squarely on a central issue that we have agreed (as players) we all find to be meaningful. On a meta level, I think we will continue to use Universalis as a shared and appreciated negotiation mechanism.

You all have a lot more experience with this sort of shared storytelling than I do, though. Is this a pipe dream?

[Sydney Freedberg]

Pondering now, but two immediate reactions:

1) Going beyond threats as the sole concept? Excellent. MlwM and DiTV do provide opportunities for the Minions to defy & escape and the Dogs to redeem & set right, not just threats; Tony's campaign seems headed in that direction.

2) "Waiting for an answer" -- I believe Ron Edwards has argued that if you have really detailed characters and really detailed settings, there's no where to go (i.e. White Wolf Storyteller). That finally gells for me. Perhaps what's crucial, for a given game, is not only knowing what to say and where to fill in; it's equally important to know where to be silent and what to leave blank: The empty spaces need to be precisely positioned to draw play in.

[Josh Roby]

Yes, Tony, I wholly agree on both your points.  What you want to substitute for threat (or upgrade from threat) is properly Conflict, but that's problematic since some people have incorporated that literary term into their game designs, and we have "conflict resolution" and the like, which is using the term in a parallel but not quite exactly the same way as in literary studies.  In all truth, that's one of the reasons it took me so long to grok conflict resolution: I kept going, "But that's not conflict!"

Conflict properly has two parts: (a) what somebody wants, and (b) an obstacle preventing them from getting it.  That (b) is often mistaken or simplified into Threat: I (a) love my sister but (b) the evil Doctor Psycho is threatening her life.  That's conflict, but it's a rather reductive conflict.  Another conflict constructed by other means might be: I (a) value human rights and the glorification of human potential, but (b) my life of exploring my own potential makes extensive use of resources which are created by denigrating the human rights of people on the other side of the planet.  As soon as somebody creates the Peace Corps RPG, I guess I can address that conflict.

The address of conflict could be considered a sort of final (c), provided by the players (in non-railroady/illusionist/participationist games).  This is what 'actual play' is usually about, with the (a) and (b) being consigned to prep-work done by the GM.  I'm sure we can disengage (b) from the GM and have the players create this stuff on their own, but I'm not sure we can really take (a) away from the table.  Perhaps it's possible for players to dictate to other players what their characters care about, but I don't expect that this would create very entertaining play.  After all, lots of Forge games are partially a reaction to the GM determining (a) for the players.

In order to ensure that we have that conflict in our games, we need encode both (a) and (b) into the game in a systemic and productive fashion.  One approach is to have the players pony up and say "I care about this" (or "My character cares about this") and then have a systemic way to build the game around those cares.  A lot of Forge games do this one way or the other.  Another approach is for the players to create a frame that defines what they care about, which is I think what Tony Pace's cyberpunk structure attempts to do (love to hear if it works!).  Both of these can fall under "Orthogonal Preparation" -- but it starts with that (a) being decided or declared; it needs some input from other players before the rest of orthogonal creation begins.  I don't see any way of ensuring that the pieces interact with eachother save communicating those points of connection or their common themes ahead of time.

[TonyLB]

I'm not sure we can really take (a) away from the table.  Perhaps it's possible for players to dictate to other players what their characters care about, but I don't expect that this would create very entertaining play.  After all, lots of Forge games are partially a reaction to the GM determining (a) for the players.

Nice thesis!  I'm going to have a go at debating it, and we'll see what comes of the discussion.

So, at a minimum, I think you can have other people do the prep-work for player goals for other players.  If you're worried about player free will, you can make that less of an issue by saying that the goals are available but not compelled.  Players can choose among the available goals to choose what they want to pursue, or something like that.

Say, for instance, you have a rules system where, to get any rewards, you need to achieve a mechanical Goal while overcoming a mechanical Difficulty.

Player A is running Selena, a pretty girl in high school who is in total denial about the fact that she's manifesting psychic powers.  She creates a goal for other players:  "Get Selena to go with you to the Spring Formal."  She prepares this by creating NPCs for (say) the arrogant hotty boy that Selena actually wants to go with, and her protective older sister (who will kick your ASS if you try to ask her sister out, punk!)  She prepares a Difficulty for herself:  "Psychic powers start getting more violently uncontrolled," and prepares several problematic mechanical things ("Something explodes," "Shadows moving on their own," etc.)

Player B is running Derrick, a boyish military specialist who has been sent from Agency X to infiltrate the high school and keep Selena from being kidnapped by the Shadow Bureau.  He creates a goal for others "Become wildly popular," and preps Tabitha, a haughty socialite who opposes "social climbers."  He creates a difficulty for himself:  "Knows absolutely nothing about high school"

Player C is running Brad, a nebbishy every-kid who is just trying to survive high school.  He creates a goal for others "Get your parent's permission to drive the family vehicle."  He creates a difficulty for himself:  "Brent the jock has chosen me as his victim."

Now, each player needs to choose a goal to pursue, then hand their difficulty sheet to the person running that Goal.  Possible combinations:

• Selena wants to get to drive the Miata, but the stress of using her learners permit is driving her unconscious powers into overdrive, which makes it really hard for any outing not to become a disaster.  Derrick and Brad both want to ask Selena to the dance, but are held back by their individual difficulties.
• Brad's wants to drive "Old Yeller," most hideous of all family vehicles, but his father doesn't think anyone who gets bullied so terribly has the maturity to drive a car.  Derrick, meanwhile, is trying to convince Agency Command to give him access to the Omega Drone, a stealthed mecha that he feels he needs in order to ward off the attacks by the Shadow Bureau's android army.  Agency Command feels that he has abandoned the mission statement of being a subtle infiltrating force rather than try to learn about high school, and orders him to help Selena in her attempts to climb the high school social ladder without having her psychic powers screw the pooch.  If he doesn't, he doesn't get the keys to the Omega Droid.
• etc., etc.

Obviously, that's more of a gedankenexperiment than a complete system.  But even with just a few choices (two goals by two other players) you can see how the combinations mount.  Would it really be that hard to make this work, with a more well thought out system?

[Josh Roby]

Off the cuff, Tony, the first thing that makes your example possible is that the basic setting and genre already seem to be established: high school and 'teenager' crises.  Knowing that, the players can create the Spring Formal and Get the Keys goals as well as their personal difficulties because they have the context in which to place them.  The focus is narrow enough that any goal and any difficulty selected within it can be made to interact with eachother.  But who selects the focus?

I'd also hazard that the players will be choosing from the available goals on the basis of using minor conflicts to express their characters' greater conflicts.  Selena's conflict is her psychic powers; getting the Miata is merely a vehicle (heh) for expressing the psychic problem.  I think this would work, certainly; the mix-and-match thing provided by other players would continually prompt players to find new twists and turns for their characters.  I just don't see, however, that they will be letting the others decide what their character and story is 'really' about.  (In Interaction terms, they'd be using the conflict goals as fuel, perhaps as contextualization, but not as their Goal.)

...actually, I take that back.  Players like me and most of the folks on this forum will be picking vehicles for what they really want, because we're folks who have realized that getting what we want in a game is a simple matter of deciding what we want and then actually taking action to get it.  The great unwashed masses, however, who have yet to 'get' that simple axiom, who make characters and expect the GM to hand them a plot on a silver platter, will dig this.  Amusingly, this allows players to dodge responsibility for creating conflicts for their own characters while saddling them with the responsibility for creating conflicts for the others.  And I think most would prefer making generic conflicts than something specific for their character.  If they bring their characters and a conflict to the table, and have their choice of everybody else's conflicts, it gets their brains going and they start trying on those other conflicts, dressing-room style, and will probably find one (or more) that they like.  The process of picking the conflict will personalize it to their character almost automatically.  Beauty.

Now -- how do we make the other prep-work apply to the goals that have been selected by the characters?  I can see how Selena's hunk and older sister can play into her conflict rather easily, since her conflict is about (but not driven by) her character.  But who stats the Omega Drone, which only arises from the unpredictable juxtaposition of Derrick and the Car goal?

[TonyPace]

TonyLB:

I think a lot of players would have trouble with creating generic, adaptable goals with teeth and might either generate highly specific ones or vaguely meaningless ones. It could work if there were lots of handles in the setting for players to set goals around, which gets to what Joshua mentioned about the high school aspect of things being necessary to a set of goals that prevented the entire group of characters from splitting off on their own..

It also pretty inevitably spins into a lot of two player activity unless multiple players go for the same, nondivisible goal - and when they do, watch out! Suddenly that group monopolizes a lot of the screen time as they jockey for position with one another.

Just imagine a larger group where Player B-D opt to chase Tabitha, Player A opts to become popular, and Player E opts for the family car. Player E does very little, and interacts with noone but his own family, brought onto the spot prepless by Player C, while all the action goes on with Tabitha. Realistically, the best Player C could offer was to join his quest to Tabitha somehow, perhaps by suggesting that the sister demands that anyone who is going to date her sister needs to at least have a car, for God's sake. Anything else is pathetic. But this solution demands that Player C has the right to affect components of his own goal - which is problematic to say the least. And as a reward seeker, he might be unmotivated to do this uness he was somehow rewarded, since such a wrinkle in the story would reduce his own chances of success.

This could easily be self-reinforcing - particularly if Player E is already somewhat marginalized by the Social Contract. And you could see that there could be a cliquish aspect to the interplay between players A and B, because after all Player A has already 'chosen' Player B's story, and since Tabitha is simply an extension of player A... It's easy to imagine the additional tension if Player A is female.

Overall, I think there are a lot of Social Contract issues with this sort of play. Joshua thinks that players would choose goals based mostly on their character's traits. I suspect that they would usually choose goals based on the personal traits of the player who proposed them. Survivor-esque antics ensue.

Joshua: But the Omega Drone problem is a non-issue - it's bought with the points that Player B earned by succeeding at his goal! He stats it out, of course, probably with a lot of weaknesses he can buy off later.

[TonyLB]

This could easily be self-reinforcing - particularly if Player E is already somewhat marginalized by the Social Contract.

You say that like it's a bad thing.  If Player E is consistently not meshing with the rest of the group, doesn't it benefit everyone (including Player E) if he's voted off the island?

An absence of social reinforcement is better than dysfunctional social reinforcement.  But functional social reinforcement is better than none.