Players Relation To Relationship Map

[jburneko]

So, I'm embarking on a bit of an experiment and I'm planning on running a one-shot using a relationship map as the basis for planning.  Since this is a one-shot, I plan to provide premade characters for the session that are already hooked into the story.

But here's a general question.  Soul suggests taking the relationship map from a complex detective novel to use as a spring board of ideas.  In a detective novel the detective is disjoint from the relationship map.  In some sense the protagonist is merely traversing the edges and vertices of the map an occasionally going back to make corrections.  When the whole map is revealed the story is over.

But this to me does not feel like the purpose of using a relationship map.  Otherwise you just end up with a mission style detective story (i.e the players are sent to investigate something or other).  It seems to me that the idea is to embed the players into map so that they are not merely investigating and traversing the edges and vertices but living as an active part of the map.

But if the relationship map technique is designed to avoid railroading, what happens when the player wanders away from the map and how do you introduce the map to the player in the first place?

If you don't do the Call of Cthulhu, "An old friend asks you for help" method and you don't ever say, "Well that's really irrelivant, don't go there."  Then how do you avoid having the relationship map rendered useless?

Just curious.

Jesse

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jesse,

Paul Czege put it best a while ago: the map is "grabby." The NPCs are so wrapped up in whatever is going on among them, that they cannot imagine that someone else (e.g. the detective in the source literature) is not working some angle as well. They RESPOND - they do something with, to, or in spite of the hero, who may even be bewildered at the attention.

It's totally different from the sleuth of the mystery genre. That character WANTS to solve a mystery/crime. In the literature I'm talking about, he or she becomes enmeshed in interactions with the people involved. Sometimes there's a pretty nice kid who's being victimized (the usual Ross MacDonald tactic), or a woman who's doing her best between a rock and a hard place (the Raymond Chandler tactic).

The trick in the RPG application of these ideas is to establish reactions among the players to the situation. That means they need information, and more than anything, they need NPCs who care greatly about their presence in the matter.

Do they have a "mission"? They might. In the detective genre, it often starts with a client in the office. This is just a method to get the PC bumping into NPCs who then care greatly about his presence (often jumping to conclusions about "what he knows" or "how he can be used"). It doesn't have to be a private eye and the introductory events do not have to be a case or client.

Or, they might not. It could be one of those funny coincidences, in which an NPC presses a cassette tape into the PC's hand moments before getting knifed in the street (trashy arty French movie reference, there).

But remember - it's up to the GM to make the map "grabby." The GM has to play the NPCs in a very reactive way, eager to include the PCs in their machinations, pleas for help, sexual shenanigans, and murderous efforts. The NPCs are NOT barriers! They are doors.

Best,
Ron

[jburneko]

On 2001-07-03 19:11, Ron Edwards wrote:

Paul Czege put it best a while ago: the map is "grabby." The NPCs are so wrapped up in whatever is going on among them, that they cannot imagine that someone else (e.g. the detective in the source literature) is not working some angle as well. They RESPOND - they do something with, to, or in spite of the hero, who may even be bewildered at the attention.

But remember - it's up to the GM to make the map "grabby." The GM has to play the NPCs in a very reactive way, eager to include the PCs in their machinations, pleas for help, sexual shenanigans, and murderous efforts. The NPCs are NOT barriers! They are doors.

Ah!  This would be the key I was missing.  I wasn't neccesarily thinking of the NPCs are barriers but rather that the NPCs view the PCs as barriers.  In the past I've always designed NPCs sort of like finite state machines.  I knew what they were like at one point in time and then they don't change or act until some trigger condition.  They players ask some obvious question or uncover a certain clue or so many days pass.

NPCs to me were largely databases of information.  Sometimes that information was inacurate if an NPC is lying.  So if anything all my NPCs were wishing that the players would GO AWAY because they were interfering with their plans.  I've always WANTED to try and have an NPC involve a PC in it's plans but the problem was that I did so much forward planning (i.e. events that HAD to happen in order for the story to work) I could never do that because I couldn't count on a PC reacting the way I wanted them to.

So basically if I had a relationship map type situation at all it would move in discrete ways prompted by preset ques encountered by the players.  The players themselves were always disjoint from the map and infact were viewed by the NPCs as an interference, all of them constantly wishing the PCs would go away so that they could go on with their schemes and plans in peace without getting 'caught,' so to speak.

You hit the nail on the head!  Thanks, this makes things a lot clearer.

Jesse

[james_west]

Jesse -

This is pretty much the way it works in reality, as well: almost any messy network of blood ties, sex, and violence you blunder into will have "sides" (sometimes shifting, and sometimes unclear who's on which side) which have existed for years, decades, generations even. From their point of view, the law's interest is ephemeral, their struggle with their kin is forever, so everybody's trying to make you sympathetic to their position.

This means that, so long as you keep in mind that people escalate the other side's crimes and omit or downplay their own in the retelling, you never really have a problem with people clamming up. Unfortunately, you're never quite sure to what extent. (My current case has an individual who's a violent paranoid schizophrenic, with, so far as I can tell, some sort of organic brain damage. My first instinct was to trust nothing he said ... but a lot of it is checking out.)

In other words, it ain't just a convenient fiction for writing noir. So long as you can tap into an existing rivalry, people really open up.

                    - James