player-directed exploration of GM-created world

[dindenver]

Hi!
  If I may respectfully suggest, check out my game.
http://www.lulu.com/items/volume_12/201000/201024/4/preview/Legends_of_Lanasia_RPG_Beta.pdf
  The default model is a GM-driven setup. But there is a mechanic called Destiny that allows players the ability to inject their own interesting sub-plots into the game. And the earn those points by advancing the plots the GM think are interesting.If you think exploring is important, put together a sub-quest to explore something. The idea is you use Destiny points to get what you want from the game (you can trade in Destiny points for loot, new story elements or plot twists).

  Other games that allow this sort of thing, of course, Donjon. And I think that Keys bring a lot to the table in TSoY. DitV too (Home of the "Say yes or roll the dice" rule). I really think in terms of GM prep, Player involvement and Genre simulation, DitV is tops. The gaff is, the mechanics in DitV only work when the PCs are the types of characters that have an inflexible personality and that they are willing to die for what they believe in. I don't think it is tied to that setting, Like it would work for Jedi, but not for a dungeon crawl for instance.

  I hope these ideas help. Good luck man!

[Alfryd]

@ contracycle

I have previously had some thoughts in this direction, like getting rid of XP and handing out rewards directly.  So instead of "adventuring" for experience, you instead choose a mission or whatever that will result in increasing an attribute, or raising some skills...  But integrating these sorts of character-specific constructions with multiple characters seems tricky.

If you're going with a sim game, I always thought raising skills/attributes on the basis of useful practice seemed logical.  If you use your pick locks skill, pick locks gets better.  If you use acumen to call a bluff, your acumen improves, etc.

You could choose to see it as, you are totally free to get yourself sent to prison.  Anyway its not an unsolvable problem; if you set it up right you could stage a breakout or rescue before they even arrive at the slammer.

Yes, but the point is the players are pretty clearly not free to spend the next session exploring the rich tradition of cobble-making that caught their eye en route to the gulag.  Sure, there are certainly ways to get around the problem, even without standing trial or being incarcerated, but you can't just perform a thematic u-turn and ignore the problem entirely.  No matter how much the players may feel differently.
The larger point being that, in a cohesive, believable world-setting, the players actions may have equal but opposite reactions which come back to bite them in the ass.  With great freedom comes great responsibility.

All this said players can often enjoy the sense of impending doom or tight deadlines and work themselves into a fever pitch as a result.  The question is not really whether it can be done, but whether the game can be stand being put on hiatus while you figure out how to do it.

Well, since you, the GM, sent the guards along to arrest them in the first place, presumably you can anticipate the possibility of an escape attempt, and rough up some appropriate 40-word knock-on scenes accordingly, before the 200-word arrest is ever staged.

What you have to worry about is the players striking off in a completely unanticipated direction.  Which is what David mentioned as the weakness of pre-scripted campaigns.  I agree, but as far as I see it, there are two solutions- either minimise the degree to which players can stray (by either imposing mechanical/role-play barriers, or trying to widen your catchment of possibilities using incremental detail or scene re-use,) OR be prepared to make things up on the fly.  A lot.

@ masqueradeball

So, prep is necessary for texture and consequences?  ...As far as color and texture go, prep can add to these things, but if handle clumsily (over prep) it can actually hinder there delivery.

I don't disagree on any particular point.

[masqueradeball]

Why does causality have to dictate the way time is spent in play? Like say, with the players getting into trouble but not wanting to a jail scenario. Why not just say: OK, so you got arrested and all and in the night you escaped, now, back to that cobble-making. Perhaps the reason is because there's a feeling that real world time and in-game time must be connected? Maybe, its because its takes away the GM's power of in game herding?
What I mean by that is say the PC's start killing folks right and left and you say to yourself, as the GM, that this is breaking you sense of realism or compromises your view of the SIS or whatever, so as a technique to diminish this behavior you punish it in a way that doesn't have to be un-fun for the players, but gets the point across, the cops come and try to lock them up. To drive this message home, you'd then make the players expend real world time and in game resources to get out of the problem they put themselves in to, perhaps enough of each that they conclude, I don't want to kill folks no more.
Or maybe, its a different reason? Can you clear up why these things should correlate, because I think I have some solutions in terms of possible game mechanics, but only if I understand where your coming from with:

That all sounds well and good, but consider a situation where the players have, for instance, been arrested for slaughtering some guardsmen in the middle of a large city 2 sessions ago.  And then the players indicate that they have no interest in following a 'standing trial or being locked up' scenario during the next session.  It seems to me that you can have a rational, consequential world here, or freedom for the players, but not both.

[contracycle]

So, prep is necessary for texture and consequences? Well, I think I have to disagree.

So you disagree.  So what?  I fail to see why you feel a need to butt in and assert this point of view.  The thread is explicitly aimed, and explicitly labelled, as attempting to discuss a form of play that is clearly different from yours.  Why do you care?

Maybe, its because its takes away the GM's power of in game herding?

And at this point you go from expressing a point of view to simply being insulting.  I suggest if you have nothing useful to contribute that you simply ignore this thread.

[contracycle]

If you're going with a sim game, I always thought raising skills/attributes on the basis of useful practice seemed logical.  If you use your pick locks skill, pick locks gets better.  If you use acumen to call a bluff, your acumen improves, etc.

Call of Cthulhu, and some others I believe, operate in this manner.  It's ok, but effectively disallows any use of character progression as a consciously chosen reward, and thus does not help us to poll players or gain their consent for a particular bit of topical exploration.

Yes, but the point is the players are pretty clearly not free to spend the next session exploring the rich tradition of cobble-making that caught their eye en route to the gulag.  Sure, there are certainly ways to get around the problem, even without standing trial or being incarcerated, but you can't just perform a thematic u-turn and ignore the problem entirely.  No matter how much the players may feel differently.

Well I'm not sure the players in such a game WOULD feel differently.  Such a thematic U-turn would it seem to me be a fairly severe violation of causality and internal consistency and thus be unsatisfying.  Noticing a thing that you would like to explore at some point does not necessarily imply that it would be best to do so immediately and at the cost of causality and consistency.  I'm not militantly against that sot of approach however and open to suggestions.

Well, since you, the GM, sent the guards along to arrest them in the first place, presumably you can anticipate the possibility of an escape attempt, and rough up some appropriate 40-word knock-on scenes accordingly, before the 200-word arrest is ever staged.

Yes, but in a manner analogous to the PvP/debuffs thread, if that happens early in a session, and requires a suspension of play while this gets negotiated or figured out, you may be introducing a a cure that is worse than the disease.

There are other sorts of holes you can fall into.  An example is the difficulty I have had using snipers in Cyberpunk or modern games.  A good sniper could be a kilometer away and just won't miss; as a result, without some pre-engineering, the danger is that the internal logic requires a PC be insta-gibbed before they are even aware of the danger.  My standard fix for this problem is to ensure that there is an NPC available to take the bullet instead; this does not invalidate the effectiveness of snipers, but givers the PC's the opportunity to respond and take cover before they are themselves exposed to risk.  So yes, if I can anticipate these things, I can take steps to ensure they are not problematic; if they arise in play, unexpectedly, of which getting arrested is a good example, I may not have such a fix in place.

Being able to prepare such things would indeed be aided by obtaining players conscious buy-in, or responding to explicit requests to go in a certain direction for reasons of their own interests.

[Raymond Caleatry]

I am currently running two games, one is a standard hack and slash D&D game, the other a shadowrun game. 

In the D&D the players are generally led by the nose from encounter to encounter, and this is pretty standard because the effort involved with constructing an encounter that is "just right" for the party is a time consuming process, even if you have been doing it for a long time.  And d&d is essentially a table top board game anyway.

My shadow run game is completely different.  Even though the system is crunchy as hell, i tend to make the game more freeform, with there being a less emphirsis on combat.  Due to the nature of the setting, the players can basically do anything they want, and so to keep this level of freedom, i plan in a completely different way, with most of the game being made up on the spot.

I split my prep into two main sections

• I have long term goals/story elements.  End points that i want the players to get to eventually, but how is upto them.
• I have powerblocks - essentially people who have their own agendas and that the players may run into.  These consist of the name of the organisation and a few of their goals, and their releationship with other powerblocks.

Basically i give the players a goal and then just react as they bump into all the powerblocks, which i use to nudge them towards the resolution of each story element.

Advantages

• Very little prep needed.
• Players essentially control all short term game elements to give a real sandbox feel.

Disadvantages

• Have to be good at making stuff up!!
• Combat, when it happens is annoying.  As the system doesn't really support making up encounters on the spot.  So most of the enemies are "Generic Mook No X" in terms of stats. Additionally, the combat system is crunchy and so tends to bring the game to a halt, when instead the players should havethe complete opposite fealing as the leap into combat addrenaline pumping.
• Players tend to like to bugger off in different directions as they all have different aims/goals, and although a GM could force them to stay together, in a truly free setting, why couldn't they split up, with the specialist doing different things.  This is a problem for a combat system which takes a long time, because combat with 1 player means that the rest can be removed from the gaming process for a long period of time.

Hence i propose that to make a system that works better for a player controlled game, i would want a system where the creation of interesting combats (Not a walk over but also will not kill the party) is a simple process that takes little time.  And that the combat system is a fast process, so that combats with inderviduals can be done without the entire party present.

Ray

[David Berg]

Contracycle and Nolan, please do not continue your personal disagreement here.  For what little my opinion is worth, it seems like Nolan had an honest misunderstanding based on the meandering nature of this thread.

The meandering is my fault for being wishy-washy on the "brainstorm solutions, guys!" front.  That wasn't my initial intent with this thread, but I didn't wanna shut anybody up once it started.  So, I'm going to now suggest that anyone who wants to contribute suggestions please keep in mind the following:

• By "player directed exploration" I mean on some meaningful scale, but not necessarily at every moment of play.  Here's an example: the GM prepares restrictive adventure scenarios, within which there's an obvious trail to be followed; the players pick which scenarios to play.  I am fine with a structure that doesn't work if the players are dicks.  If you tell the GM you wanna explore thing X, and then instantly drop thing X to chase squirrels, you are a dick. 
  
  
• By "GM-created world" I mean a world that is not in any way, at any time, created or co-created by the players.  You control your character's actions, you pick (e.g.) some adventure scenarios to play, that's it.  Resolution is determined by "what would happen" according to gameworld logic, and not by made-up fun stakes a la many of the Nar games that have been mentioned.

More than brainstorms, though, I am looking for any success stories of doing this exact thing.

Dave M., I dunno if your game actually meets these criteria, but I will happily check it out regardless, just for potential inspiration.  I have read TSoY and am reading Dogs now in hopes that town creation will provide me some useful tools.  I remain interested in exploring whether relationship maps might expedite GM scenario prep.

[Anders Larsen]

Cool!  Did your own group just come up with the idea to do it that way, or was there some game text that helped?

What I do is really something I have pulled together from a lot of different games and from stuff I have read on various forums. You may want to look at "I a Wicket Age" which is the game that come closest; but I do not think it do exactly what it is you want.


Just to give you an idea of how you can easily build an situation around a suggested setting-element, I will try to give short guide to how I do it.

As setting-element I will use the example you gave: "What I really want to know is what the tattoos on that big Orc did.  Were they what made him so strong?  Could we copy them and be super-strong too?"

First I try to identify various story elements I can work with. Here are roughly the questions I ask myself to do this:

1) What is the object of the goal?

This is simply what the characters are after, in this case it is the magical tattoos.

2) What is it that the character have to do to archive the goal

When the characters want to explore something, there is normally some condition which has to be fulfilled before the characters are satisfied. It is a very good idea to identify this because when this goal is archived the characters will move on to something different. In this example the characters want to learn to use the magical tattoos themselves.

3) Who will direct oppose the characters in their strive for the goal?

Before there is any excitement there have to be an enemy. In this example it is the Orcs who are the direct enemies, because they do not want to give their secrets away to humans.

4) Define a third party who have a perpendicular interest in the goal?

This one is a bit harder to explain. The thing is that a situation with only two parties, going against each other head on, is not very interesting, so you will need a third party that can complicate the situation. in this example it could be a nearby church who view the Orc tattoo power as the work of demons, and so, will not only try to take it away from the Orcs, but will also try to prevent the characters from getting hold of it.


This is basically what is needed, but it is always nice to have some extra material. Here are some ideas for that:

* An innocent party.

Have some innocent people caught up in the conflict, can be a very good way to raise the stakes. Maybe there is a nearby village which had had an semi-friendly relationship with the Orc, but after the church have initiated the conflict against the Orc, the people of the village is now mistrusted by both parties.

* A mysterious/unknown factor.

Have a mysterious person, or some mysterious people around who have some interest in the situation, but who's motive can not easily be determined. This could be a powerful wizard who is acting strangely lately, but no one knows what he is up to.


The next step is to identify NPCs. There should probably be two or three per group:

Orcs - The chief, the shaman, a young warrior.
Church - The head priest, a machinery employed by the church
The village - This depends on who the character normally want to interact with when they enter a village.
And then there is the powerful wizard.


The next step is to make the relationship map. This is done by drawing some circles on a paper which represents the different fraction and the important NPCs. Then you can make arrows between these circles that indicate interests. For example, there will be a circle for the Orcs and a circle for the church. An arrow from the church to the Orcs could then indicate the church's interest in destroying the Orc magical secret.

When you have done this you will have a web of interests (just be careful not to have too many - it will then just get confusing). This will give you a good overview of the situation, and if something happen in one place it is normally easy to see who have interests in this and how they will react.


The last point is to decide how the game should start. For this example a good place could be that the PCs come to the village and someone approaches them and ask them to help. And from there you can just let things happen.


Ok, this has been a very sketchy explanation, but it will take a while longer to explain everything fully. But even though this may not be exactly what you are going for, I hope it can give you some ideas.

- Anders

[dindenver]

Hi!
  I think ditv is your ticket. And before you ask. No, I am, not one of those crazy ditv fanboys that thinks it solves everything, lol
  I have played and GMd several sessions of ditv and for my money, it is probably the best balance of letting the players do what they want (the ditv version of rule 0 is advice to the GM of "Say yes or roll the dice" meaning if there is not a force in the town actively resisting the Dogs efforts, then whatever they want to narrate happens and your job is to have the world react realistically).
  GM prep is reduced to looking at the chain of sin and figuring out where your town is on the escalating ladder and why. That is such a vital ingredient to playing the world, that almost no other prep is needed. I have seen some GMs make/re-use wild west maps or find photos of desert landscapes/old towns. But its not necessary for GM prep.
  The game does put a sort of mini-cap on the exploration in the sense that the little ladder of sin is supposed to escalate the longer the Dogs spend in town. So if you were dead set on exploring you would almost always have to face full on demon possession in every town as the town slowly slid deeper into demonic influence as you were exploring the town. And that is not necessarily a bad thing, just might make the town finales a little boring.
  I would say definitely find a group and play some ditv, especially if you can find a GM who has played before. You will be pleasantly surprised.
  Anyways, good luck on your quest man!

[pells]

Hi David !!! Sorry to jump in so late, but I hope I can provide some insight. If I get you right, your concerns are exactly one of those I had (or having, depends on the point of view) for Avalanche (not yet published).

But first, a simple question : are you looking at some way to come with a mechanic to reinforce your goal or are we talking here about a way to, let's say, write or structure, a scenario ?

I'll just a give you an overview ; I'll let you see if you want to investigate more ...

What I'm proposing is a way to structure pre written plots from a high level point of view : the exact structure can be found here.
Now, this structure is generic and can be used for any kind of narrative use (ie it might be used for other purposes than rpg). And what does this structure allows : to manage multi plots, using a calendar based structure (as opposed to chapters based).
How does this work ? A little bit as the "plot points" (but I use a web instead) mentionned by Alfryd and a little bit like the multiple scenarios (the "menu") mentionned by contracycle. Except that all those scenarios occur at the same time. So that :

A constrained ability to point the camera is really just freedom of sequence -- i.e. in what order do we play through the scenarios?  This is, IMO, not all that meaningful a contribution.

In what order ? The calendar one !!!

That said, what type of game can this generate ?
- The "scenario" is not about the PCs (they are never mentionned), so, as there is no predefined role for them ; this is truly player directed.
- As "events" happen into the world, indepedant of the PCs, there is a sim feeling to the game ; not the system, but about a living world.
- PCs decide what plots/sub plots they want to explore. As the scenario is very high level, players and DM complete the "holes" as they see fit.
- Bottom line, in my opinion, this really, but really changes my approach toward pre written scenarios (and even rpg in general). The game turns out to be about the PCs' place into the world. Which is what I'm looking for in a game. For more on this, I invite you to read this article.
@ masqueradeball : I've had this conversation about the necessity of prewritten plots so many times ... But I need one (from an existential point of view, see the article above).

So, that comes to some kind of "modular" writing, which means, a lot of work. But, I think it would fit a product very well. And note that since it is not about the system, it can't be called nar or sim, as CA is system related.
Also note that this type of writing allows a very, but very fast DM's prep.
Finally, feel free to use any of my theory if this can help you.

[Alfryd]

@ masqueradeball

Why does causality have to dictate the way time is spent in play? Like say, with the players getting into trouble but not wanting to a jail scenario. Why not just say: OK, so you got arrested and all and in the night you escaped, now, back to that cobble-making.

Because then, the world, the setting, the texture and flavour of the place, are, as I mentioned before, all relegated to window dressing.  It's just another form of railroading, only in favour of the players and against the GM.  It strains suspension of disbelief and it's grossly unfair to the person who invests the effort in the content- the GM has no incentive to construct a believable and internally consistent world if the players can (effectively) ignore it's rules whenever they find them even slightly inconvenient.  This also goes against the grain of a Sim game (one of David's objectives), where there are mechanical chains of cause and effect in action.

I mean, consider a case where the players decide they want to go raid the headquarters of a necromantic cult in the forbidden city's sewers.  The combat goes badly, partly through bad luck, partly through incompetence, and they're at the cultists' mercy- but the GM decides, reasonably enough, that instead of being killed, the players have been captured alive for later sacrifice.

Player 1:  Ah, that sounds kinda boring.  I want to explore the underground river we saw on the way in instead.
Player 2:  Yeah, I mean... do we even have ranks in escape Artist?  I vote for the river.
Player 3:  Wasn't there that big, carved door on the second left turning before we ran into the Shoggoth.  Remember?  I bet that was, like a treasure hold, or something...
GM:  Ah- Fuck it- NO.  You have been captured by cultists and are about to be sacrificed to appease the appetites of their ravening corpse god.  There is no plausible in-game mechanism by which your characters could explore the river or come to the door without handling this problem first.  So you are going to sit your asses down and DEAL WITH THE ISSUE.

Being arrested and potentially imprisoned is a major event that threatens the PCs' welfare, careers and life goals in a significant fashion, and can't be handled trivially.  So that is something you need to play through.

@ contracycle

Well I'm not sure the players in such a game WOULD feel differently.  Such a thematic U-turn would it seem to me be a fairly severe violation of causality and internal consistency and thus be unsatisfying.

I would certainly think so, but David has made it quite clear that the players have, supposedly, absolute authority to dictate what the next session should be about.  They might simply wish to abnegate their responsibilities and take the cheap option of avoiding dealing with anything they consider unpleasant.  I don't think what the players want to explore is at all relevant in situations where their characters simply don't have the option available.

Yes, but in a manner analogous to the PvP/debuffs thread, if that happens early in a session, and requires a suspension of play while this gets negotiated or figured out, you may be introducing a a cure that is worse than the disease.

I believe the method that David suggested was that new material would be prepped between sessions.  Since you have a good deal of control over when the arrest is staged, all you need to do is introduce the guards toward the end of a given session.  Your players can then discuss how they intend to handle the problem, and you flesh out the scenario between then and Friday.  Again, changes that you introduce are not the problem here.

I can take steps to ensure they are not problematic; if they arise in play, unexpectedly, of which getting arrested is a good example, I may not have such a fix in place.

What, exactly, is so unexpected about the players being arrested for slaughtering guards, two sessions ago?  Is this not ample time to set the wheels in motion?
If you're talking about instant consequences to the player's actions- such as sawing off the branch you're sitting on- well, yes, that can be difficult to prepare for.  But it's also an inherent danger of any Sim game, and frankly, if they knew snipers wouldbe involved, your players may be getting exactly what they deserve.

I would say, however, that players should always have 'fair warning' of consequences to their actions.  If you slaughter guards in town, it's reasonable to expect that you can be arrested for it, particularly if there were witnesses.  In contrast, being arrested for a crime a given PC committed seven years ago in a different kingdom (that no-one knows about,) is probably not something the GM can fairly introduce.

@ David Berg

Here's an example: the GM prepares restrictive adventure scenarios, within which there's an obvious trail to be followed; the players pick which scenarios to play.  I am fine with a structure that doesn't work if the players are dicks.  If you tell the GM you wanna explore thing X, and then instantly drop thing X to chase squirrels, you are a dick.

The players aren't neccesarily dicks if they decided to slaughter guardsmen in town- maybe the guards were drunk and rowdy, and opted to pick a fight, or were molesting innocents, (a la The Big Fat Kill from Sin City.)  But that's beside the point- the players should know that killing guards raises a Complication that will come back to haunt them if they're not careful.  That limits their choices.
A good example of this sort of thing is when Mal Reynolds incurs Adelai Niska's wrath in Firefly after returning the stolen drugs in the train job.  Mal also has to step twice as hard to avoid Alliance patrols once he takes the Tams (as wanted fugitives) under his wing.  Restrictions on available freedoms aren't neccesarily a drag to play- they provide challenges and recurrent plot hooks that generate tension and foster drama.  But it does mean that, on occasion, the GM has to put his foot down.

[contracycle]

More than brainstorms, though, I am looking for any success stories of doing this exact thing.

I'm not sure we are going to have too much luck looking for success stories as such, because it seems to me this is a new approach.  Early D&D-type play was simply rigid; there was the literal dungeon which controlled movement and you pretty much progressed from encounter to encounter reacting as each event occurred.  Subsequent developments in driving toward something more than random exploration produced the idea of the overarching story line, introducing the 3-act play structure and so on, all of which produced the GM-controlled pseudo-story that Narr is a reaction against, and which isn't very satisfying for sim play either.  So I am not sure there is any precedent at all for anything much like your proposal.

Now, the single product which I have been best able to translate into actual play was the Hardwired supplement for CP2020, which I have mentioned before.  What struck me about this is that it does use something like the 3 act play structure, and does have a distinct and fixed direction of progress, and did not really permit much player deviation from the path, but it also was very elegantly put together.  Thus, in act 1, the PC's acquire the mcguffin (a flask of weaponised polio) and find themselves hunted, in act 2 they are offered an out, as long as they agree to do a favour for some Russian mobsters involving a casino scam, and in act three they get the mcguffin back and get to use it against the people who were hunting them, thus neatly solving the initial problem.

What I liked about this was the way it worked easily, because the links between each step were quite organic and natural.  It was not nearly as restricted and controlled as old school dungeon crawls, and allowed a lot of freedom of movement in within each act, which in turn allowed the GM and players to play freely within some fairly large bounds.  For example, the only limit on act 1 was that there was no way off the island on which they were located until they made contact with the Russian mobsters who had the facility to get them off.  It was not simply do X then Y then Z at the GM's behest, and we had a lot of fun playing with the paranoia of the hunt, the frustration of finding their efforts to escape limited and blocked, and stoking up the sense of threat and danger.  Amid that activity, I was able to take advantage of what they were doing and seek a way to point these toward the Russian mobsters, so that when the contact was finally made it did not feel heavy handed, but seemed to emerge seamlessly and organically from their own efforts.  And they were, indeed, relieved and grateful to have finally found an escape route.

Another element is that although the 3 acts were explicitly linked in fixed ways, there was a significant topical dog-leg in the middle that supported the illusion of naturally emergent events.  It was not just one big problem that they had to keep hacking away at, the mcguffin was taken off their hands in act 2 and played no part in that action.  However, the mcguffin returned to haunt them in act 3, which served to link all the acts into a thematic whole; the players were at first horrified to see the damn thing again after going to so much trouble to dispose of it ("what the FUCK is that doing here" were their exact words), but of course this time the situation was substantially different and they got to see it and treat it as a resource rather than a burden.  So one might say, they were able to explore the mcguffin from a different angle, or in a different light.

Obviously, this is not the kind of player-directed exploration you are looking for, but may offer some useful approaches to working with fixed paths, and successfully concealing those paths so that the sensation of being dragged by the nose is trivial or non-existent.  Having those established links in fact substantially liberated me from worrying about what kind of decisions the players were making, and trying to direct or control those decisions all the time; I only had to successfully hit one point that linked each act to the next.  Stuff spontaneously created in each act had little to no impact on the next act, because the transitions in time and place were quite significant, and so the amount of causality I felt obliged to track was also reduced.  I did have to do some improvisation in terms of "managing" the direction of play, but that was not improvisation of setting detail as such, the creation of new facts; that stuff was all pre-established (by novels rather than RPG text as such in this case) and my efforts were directed toward presenting them and bringing them into play.

So, while not quite what you are proposing, thats the nearest I have to a success story of GM-directed play, and which also broke out of 'follow-the-tunnel-to-the-next-encounter'.

[David Berg]

Sebastien,
I read your website.  I would love to play in your game, but I would hate to prep it!  As you said, prep results from this might make a good product.  I definitely dig the idea of having stuff occur in the world that the PCs are in; a dynamic sandbox is obviously "realer" than one that just sits around waiting for PCs to traverse it.  In terms of chronology, I think what I aspire to to achieve is that the GM preps only what he needs, but some of those needs are filled by world events that occur at relevant times.  Alas, I don't have a more specific plan than that just yet.

I am curious: how do you refer to your planned events during play?  Is it like, "Okay, the PCs went to sleep.  Cross off February 10th on the calendar.  Ah, I see on the calendar that February 11th contains a blizzard!"?

Dave M.,
I can't see using DitV's resolution rules, as players get to narrate things other than just "my character tries to do X", and in-gameworld success is based on things other than in-gameworld causality (e.g. player story interests as represented by dice).

As for town creation and escalation, I don't want to hard-code a predictable "this will get worse" into my game scenarios, but some sort of "this scenario is in a certain state, and that state has the potential for change" sounds useful.  I think I'll build myself a DitV town...

Anders,
Yeah, not exactly what I'm going for, but it does give me some ideas!  Thank you for the level of detail.  Your points 1, 2, and 3 are basically the Rewards (fulfilled goal), Avenues (general approaches to achieve goal) and Assets (specific means to achieve goal), and Threats (obstacles to goal) that I'm already using. 

The perpendicular interest is something I hadn't thought about.  Looking at your examples, I actually think "perpendicular interest" breaks down into a conditional help/hinder relationship with the PCs.  So we have three different conditions:

• a) PCs fighting Orcs, or b) having beaten Orcs, PCs taking their magic - Church helps (a), hinders (b)
  
  
• a) PCs hold clear upperhand and can annihilate Orcs vs b) PCs and Orcs are evenly matched, promising a long bloodbath with innocents caught in the crossfire - local peasants ignore PCs in case (a), hinder in case (b)
  
  
• a) PCs learn interesting things, or b) having learned, PCs try to use knowledge for personal gain - wizard might hinder (a) if he likes keeping secrets, but help (b) if PCs' powers will aid his own

Does this strike you as an accurate summary of the value of these "perpendicular" interests?  If so, I think my advice to GMs might actually begin with "think about some conditions where Threats and Assets enter and leave the PCs' path".  The 3 (a) vs (b) examples I listed above are, respectively, Asset->Threat, neutral->Threat, Threat->Asset.

As for a situation where you weigh getting what you want vs innocent lives, I don't really want to give players any disincentives to pursue their goals.

2 or 3 NPCs per Interest sounds like a decent rule of thumb.

As for the relationship map, I guess that's an answer in the affirmative to my earlier question, "Do they work for things other than individuals?"  In this case, we have relationships between the Interests that may become Threats or Assets.  I'm not sure which would be more efficient, a web-like map, or a list of conditions.  I should probably try both.

Contracycle,
Very interesting.  Act 1 sounds like the players were put in a flexible situation (survive being hunted, using whatever means occur to you!) within a closed situation (get off the island by finding the one way off!).  This exact set-up worked well in my Rat Island game.

I think maybe the key here is that the flexible situation needs to be interesting enough that the closed situation isn't resented.  I mean, I've had plenty of games where failure to get off the island would have frustrated the players, and finding the way off would have met with, "About fuckin' time."

Huh.  I wonder whether this is an actionable breakthrough, or just, "Well, duh, but pulling it off is hard."  Speaking of pulling it off:

we had a lot of fun playing with the paranoia of the hunt . . . Amid that activity, I was able to take advantage of what they were doing and seek a way to point these toward the Russian mobsters, so that when the contact was finally made it did not feel heavy handed, but seemed to emerge seamlessly and organically from their own efforts

Do remember your methods for this?

I am assuming that, if you had done a worse job at this, the game would have been much less successful.

Another element is that although the 3 acts were explicitly linked in fixed ways, there was a significant topical dog-leg in the middle that supported the illusion of naturally emergent events.  It was not just one big problem that they had to keep hacking away at, the mcguffin was taken off their hands in act 2 and played no part in that action.  However, the mcguffin returned to haunt them in act 3, which served to link all the acts into a thematic whole

Was this three sessions of play, or one?

I have an idea that basically gurantees every five or so scenarios will add up to more than the sum of their parts.  "Ah!  We learned in Mission 5 that the potion of visions from Mission 1 will allow us to see the door that the key from Mission 2 fits!"  That kind of thing.  Not quite as tidy as what you describe... but it might hit the same virtue, which I think is cumulative progress over continued play...?

Having those established links in fact substantially liberated me from worrying about what kind of decisions the players were making, and trying to direct or control those decisions all the time; I only had to successfully hit one point that linked each act to the next.

It sounds like, as GM, you mainly worried about the closed scenarios, and just enjoyed letting the players choose within the flexible scenarios.  My hurdle for this as a GM is always arbitration -- if the players come up with a plan to scam the casino at blackjack, what's the security like around the blackjack table?  Where are the cards stored?  When I adlib answers to those kinds of questions, garbage pours out.  I mean, I hear your point about the casino never appearing again later, so standards can be relaxed -- but, the place still needs to function while the PCs are in the process of hacking it.  Thus, I'd want to prep the casino -- not every last inch of it, but all the ways that the players might try to rob it.

Did the mod (or novels) prep the casino for you?  Are you just really good at logical ad-lib?  Did your players not care about plausibility?  Or is there some other explanation for your group's success?

[Alfryd]

@ contracycle

So you disagree.  So what?  I fail to see why you feel a need to butt in and assert this point of view.  The thread is explicitly aimed, and explicitly labelled, as attempting to discuss a form of play that is clearly different from yours.  Why do you care?

masqueradeball's point seems perfectly valid, if only from a supplementary standpoint.  Prep was not explicitly mentioned in David's initial post.  I think.

Call of Cthulhu, and some others I believe, operate in this manner.  It's ok, but effectively disallows any use of character progression as a consciously chosen reward, and thus does not help us to poll players or gain their consent for a particular bit of topical exploration.

Why would using a given skill not be a conscious choice?
I'm not sure what you're looking for, exactly.  Are you saying that you want some method of determining plot direction based on what the character's (as opposed to the player's) goals and interests are?  Perhaps a list of Goals/Fears which offer mechanical rewards but limit the player's choices if they crop up?

So, while not quite what you are proposing, thats the nearest I have to a success story of GM-directed play, and which also broke out of 'follow-the-tunnel-to-the-next-encounter'.

That's a very interesting example.  I think it works well simply because the barriers on player action were plausible aspects of the gme world, rather than imposed by fiat.

@ Anders Larsen
I find your procedure to be interesting and well-structured, but a little flawed.

(1) ...This is simply what the characters are after, in this case it is the magical tattoos.

(2) ...In this example the characters want to learn to use the magical tattoos themselves.

3) Who will direct oppose the characters in their strive for the goal?

4) Define a third party who have a perpendicular interest in the goal?

Well, you can decide that these tattoos are magical, but that's an assumption not strictly justified by the description.

I believe this contradicts David's goal that the player's do not get to determine the content of the world.  If they want to explore the subject of orc tattoos, fine.  They don't get to dictate that orc tattoos are magical or can be copied by non-experts.  That would be the players writing the content.

I would amend this to saying 'what difficulty or obstacle will complicate attaining this goal?'  It might not always be a specific power bloc- they might simply have to decrypt some particularly obscure writings, etc.  This might be a long-term project stretching over several sessions with otherwise seperate combats/conflicts occuring in the foreground.

Often useful, certainly, but is it strictly neccesary?  Perhaps just the insertion of some larger plot hook, such as the 'innocent party', 'mysterious stranger', 'unknown factors' you mentioned beforehand?  Maybe we could put together a list?

The next step is to make the relationship map. This is done by drawing some circles on a paper which represents the different fraction and the important NPCs. Then you can make arrows between these circles that indicate interests. For example, there will be a circle for the Orcs and a circle for the church. An arrow from the church to the Orcs could then indicate the church's interest in destroying the Orc magical secret.

That's quite interesting, actually, since allying with one group would antagonise others.  You could use this to mechanically simulate constraints (i.e, being arrested if you antagonise the city watch/Adelai Niska faction) for the players.

@ pells

How does this work ? A little bit as the "plot points" (but I use a web instead) mentionned by Alfryd and a little bit like the multiple scenarios (the "menu") mentionned by contracycle. Except that all those scenarios occur at the same time.

That's an interesting notion, but I agree with David that I'm not certain how it could work out in practice.  Perhaps a small (but comprehensive) example or two on the prep involved would be useful?  I was hoping that the process of gradual refinement I mentioned would allow a compromise between flexibility and preperation.

@ David Berg
I don't disagree with your analysis on any particular point, but I would still like to know how to intend to deal with constraints on the players actions resulting from past behaviour.  Are there, or are there not occasions when the players are simply not free to explore as they like?

[David Berg]

Alfryd,
If I had a virtual world on my computer telling me what was around every corner, and all of it made sense and had a decent level of texture and richness, I would say, "Zero constraints!"  Failing that, I'd like to get the players to constrain themselves, by saying, "Here's what we wanna do," and accepting that it'll fuck things up (probably by halting play) if they change their minds. 

As for repercussions of previous actions in the medium- or long-term, it should usually be plausible for players to simply run away from those.  We do one mission over here and piss everyone off, but then we do another mission elsewhere, and it's all good.  On the other hand, if it's fun to have lingering animosities, by all means, use 'em. 

The only trouble-spot I see is immediate repercussions in the midst of a mission, i.e. we can't go into the Cave of Wonders cuz we just beat up the town guard and were thrown in jail.  It should be made clear to the players that if you do something to interfere with your own mission, yes indeed, your mission will be interfered with.  Randomly assaulting the town gaurd en route to the Cave of Wonders says to the GM, "We wanna play a jailbreak instead of a quest!"  Which qualifies as the players fucking things up by changing their minds.  On the other hand, if you assault the town guard because they (as controlled by the GM) provoked you, then the GM oughta have a fun jailbreak prepped, which gives the players info about the Cave of Wonders to boot.