I've been looking for a structural model of the RPG game again. Note, the actual game played at the table, not the rules text or anything else. So I mean something much more like "scenario" or "module" etc. I want to ask what people think of this way of looking at such a game.

It's unremarkable that we establish a Situation which is mostly "dramatically promising". It contains some sort of crisis or horror or problem with which we expect the player characters to engage.

I propose that the situation should be considered to possess, quite apart from the specific detail of which it is comprised, a number of Tensions. I'm not sure there's a pre-existing dramatic term for what I am going to describe, though. Anyway, these Tensions are roughly speaking the general case of which the specific conditions are expressions.

So for example, we have a fairly stock story of a bad king on the throne and a good king who has been disposessed. Normally the players will be aides to the good king running about in the woods and conspiring to restore him to the throne, or something along those lines. Our Tensions would be something like: might makes right, legal inheritance, symbolic/mystic authority of kingship.

I suggest a "story" (in the most vulgar sense of the term) is a number of scenes that 'address'/discuss/examine these Tensions. The ACTION of the game then moves from Tension-issue to Tension-issue heading towards the climax.

digression: I came to this though while considering "virtuality" play and its associated problems. It seems to me that one of the problems with this sort of play is ithe frequency with which it becomes trapped in strict continuous time, a problem I have commented on before. Now I have come to think that this occurs because the characters are in a scene, whether they know it or not, and they cannot "move on" from this scene because nobody knows what its there for and thus how to bring it to closure. Continuous time is a sort of RPG limbo. This idea hopes to provide some context for the scene and its purpose and thus to allow it to be resolved.

I further propose that a given scene can only deal with one Tension at a time. I'm not sure that this is a hard rule but I'm going to assume it is for the present. The purpose of a scene then is to ARTICULATE the situation in terms of one of the Tensions, and to allow the characters to make some decision about these issues.

So in our deposed king scenario, we might have a stock scene in which the good guys ambush some of the bad kings men. This would be a scene based on the Tension: might makes right. It is an opportunity for the players to discuss/exemplify their opinion on this tension, and simultaneously to pursue character-based agendas.

Now at this point I would like to respond to a possible counterpoint: isn;t this a rfeturn to the domination of Plot? Well yes and no - yes inasmuch as this is an attempt toward a kind of 'structured plotting', but no becuase we are NO mandating outcomes or results, only opportunities.

Are they not Bangs then? Well no - because Bangs are based on character issues and concerns, are designed to hook the players, while these Tensions arise from Setting and are actually designed to hook the characters. Bangs and the Tension-incidents can co-exist or occur simultaneously; what the tension-incidents aim to provide is the substrate of which the Action of the piece is comprised.

In the 3-act play model, the Action serves to raise tension towards the climax. I propose that these Tension-incidents should be seen as and termed Provocations. They are moments of play in which the GM presents exposition of setting and situation such that both the detail and the significance of these events is shown. And once this job is done, the scene is resolved, and play can move on to the next scene. These, then, are purposeful scenes, and hopefully resolve the neverending scene problem that I see occurring in continuous time play.

Having proposed both Tensions and Provocations, it should be possible to organise them structurally. Tensions have a dynamic that corresponds to the dynamic of rising action. Only one scene can be executed at the table at once, and therefore Provocations must occur in sequence one after the other. In which case, a GAME can be displayed as matrix of Tensions against Time enumerated through the incidence of Provocations.

I made a crude diagram to display this but cannot show it. I hope this should be somewhat clear but if it is not I can go further in describing what this matrix would look like. Lets imagine Tensions appearing as columns, containing directional arrows pointing downwards. Scenes comprise the rows, with the first scene (scene 0) at the top and the last (scene n) at the bottom. There can only be a single Provocation in a given line, and it must fall in a column indicating a Tension.

With such a structured design, deliberate planning becomes possible, I hope. Potentially we can determine: a specific number of scenes, a specific sequence of scenes, a correlation of scenes with issues/tensions, and even the ability to allocate scenes to acts. Also, this kind of stylised and explicit structure would go a long way toward the idea proposed elsewhere that all players might benefit from some overview of "what we are here to do" and "where we are going". Rather like a play, in which you might be told up front "what the story is about", you would likely start such a game by discussing/choosing the climax to which you wish to work toward through the resolution of Provocations. Some sort of system might be developed to allow/require players to select what provocations and what tensions they wish to deal with in what order.

This model does not require that the content of Provocation scenes be actually established ahead of time. It only mandates what is topical in the scene.

Any comments appreciated.

Does predicting the climax and progression of conflicts require that you know (at the beginning of the story) which Tensions will catch fire in the players imaginations and which will be duds? Or do you envision a way that this method can provide the flexibility for people to discover that through play?

TonyLB wrote: Does predicting the climax and progression of conflicts require that you know (at the beginning of the story) which Tensions will catch fire in the players imaginations and which will be duds? Or do you envision a way that this method can provide the flexibility for people to discover that through play?

Ah, you're talking about how to discover the player's opinions on what interests them at the beginning of the session, yes? If so then I didn't quite emphasize the particular question I'm asking.

Does this require that somebody at the table (GM or players) know which Tensions will catch fire in the players imaginations and which will be duds? Or do you envision a way that this method can provide the flexibility for a Tension to become important when the players only discover that it's important to them half-way through a session, and nobody knew it was going to catch their interest?

TonyLB wrote: Ah, you're talking about how to discover the player's opinions on what interests them at the beginning of the session, yes?

Does this require that somebody at the table (GM or players) know which Tensions will catch fire in the players imaginations and which will be duds?

Or do you envision a way that this method can provide the flexibility for a Tension to become important when the players only discover that it's important to them half-way through a session, and nobody knew it was going to catch their interest?

I have a question about this model: is it for the description of a game that's already been run (i.e. a way of analyzing a game's structure) or is it a way of constructing an adventure to run?

From the language used (the tensions hook the characters), I'd assume the latter.

My question: since no outcome is specified to the assault of the king's men, are there several rows of scenes that might or might not happen? (I.e. a dungeon and trial scene if the PC's lose the fight).

If the situation mutates enough that you don't have a scene prepared is it possible that you'll get scenes that don't address the Tension?

-Marco

I have a question about this model: is it for the description of a game that's already been run (i.e. a way of analyzing a game's structure) or is it a way of constructing an adventure to run?

My question: since no outcome is specified to the assault of the king's men, are there several rows of scenes that might or might not happen? (I.e. a dungeon and trial scene if the PC's lose the fight).

If the situation mutates enough that you don't have a scene prepared is it possible that you'll get scenes that don't address the Tension?

contracycle wrote:
The way I'm looking at it, the scenes are mandated. So even if an event occurred in the action that invalidated what might have been planned for a later scene, that does not alter the need for that later scene. Thats why this is not just establishing a scene and its content that must be run; the idea is to establish the TYPE of scene that must be run.

Marco wrote:
I'm still a little foggy. I'm getting that this is about the "Type" of scene (so we have a "make speech to people scene to try to get popular support"--yes?)

But if the charismatic guy is killed in Scene A, then he's not there for the speech and it's more likely to fail--but could there be a Scene D which is defined as "The PC's and villagers storm the keep?"

Addendum:

Another way of looking at the speech scene is something like this:
the purpose of the speech scene is to show the setting heading towards its crisis point - or at least that setting that is local to the characters.

The point of these provocations is to drive the action in escalating toward the climax; the scenes themselves are a means to an end.

Thus, the assasination of the would-be speaker may serve just as well to escalate these tensions as the inflammatory speech would itself have done. What it makes abundantly clear is that the respective factions are getting themselves into a bate.

And this raises one of the central aims of this proposed model: even if you had scheduled the speech as a scene, and then the characters come along and whack the speaker, you have some direction with which to improvise the remainder.

That is, you (the GM) would be aware of which tension the now-frustrated speech was to inflame, and can improvise a suitable response that also escalates that tension, so that the overall direction of the piece stays on track. Hopefully a rather similar but perhaps less overt influence will affect player decisions too.

IOW, by approaching the performance/delivery level organisation of RPG-in-practice, rather than trying to mandate plot content, I hope to enable the production games that are designable experiences without requiring railroading to be confident that the time and effort invested in preparation is not wasted.

Addendum 2:
The above is mostly a discussion of the rationale behind this matrix style visualisation. If that works for you (anyone), then I would hope that some applied insights can be drawn from this re-appraisal of the flow of action in RPG:

- timing becomes less nebulous and can be constructed in terms of provocations, allowing more deliberate "session sculpting"
- Tensions may likely be tied directly to character protagonism, and character design structured around expressing/personifying Tensions in the game
- potentially serve to coordinate split party play because of the greater clarity of the nature and purposes of scenes
- control character developement in terms of the characters relationships to said tensions, rather than merely as increasing ability, because now these Tensions are visible and enumerated components of play
- Establish a framework less conducive to habitual task resolution by bringing scene structure front and centre

Scenes could very well be a mechanism by which magic is carried out. Magic has traditionally been task-based because IMO the continuous time model requires inputs like range and area of effect in order to produce outputs. But a scene based system does not need anything like that at all - rather than having magic-as-tool, the exercise of magic may call for a particular scene, which can be exploited much more widely for dramatic effect than the necessarily mechanistic operation of System.

Rather than having a Charm Person spell that works for X duration, or a poewr that works for "the length of a scene" without clear direction of what constitutres a scene and how you know its ended, you would rather construct a scene in which the character was charming as hell, and it would not go on any longer than necessary, nor would an artifact of system mandate that the spell breaks mid conversation.

contracycle wrote: That is, you (the GM) would be aware of which tension the now-frustrated speech was to inflame, and can improvise a suitable response that also escalates that tension, so that the overall direction of the piece stays on track.

OK,

Let me take a stab at the diagram thing here, in an effort to understand. In your example, there is a bad king on the throne and a good king who has been disposessed. The PCs are aides to the good king running about in the woods and conspiring to restore him to the throne. The Tensions are:
1. might makes right
2. legal inheritance
3. symbolic/mystic authority of kingship

So we would then make a diagram of the scenes. With each scene, we would indicate which Tension it was Provocation for. (And you suggest it should be for only one Tension.) So at the start of the game, I might have a diagram like this:

                                  TENSION

         +-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+

         | might makes right | legal inheritance | authority of king |

         +-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+

Scene 1  |         |         |                   |                   |

         |         v         |                   |                   |

         +-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+

Scene 2  |                   |         |         |                   |

         |                   |         v         |                   |

         +-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+

Scene 3  |                   |                   |         |         |

         |                   |                   |         v         |

         +-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+

Scene 4  |         |         |                   |                   |

         |         v         |                   |                   |

         +-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+

Scene 5  |                   |                   |         |         |

         |                   |                   |         v         |

         +-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+

contracycle wrote: digression: I came to this though while considering "virtuality" play and its associated problems. It seems to me that one of the problems with this sort of play is the frequency with which it becomes trapped in strict continuous time, a problem I have commented on before. Now I have come to think that this occurs because the characters are in a scene, whether they know it or not, and they cannot "move on" from this scene because nobody knows what its there for and thus how to bring it to closure. Continuous time is a sort of RPG limbo. This idea hopes to provide some context for the scene and its purpose and thus to allow it to be resolved.

So we would then make a diagram of the scenes. With each scene, we would indicate which Tension it was Provocation for. (And you suggest it should be for only one Tension.) So at the start of the game, I might have a diagram like this:

So when I start the game, I know that I want Scene 1 to be a Provocation for "might makes right". No content or outcome is mandated, just what Tension should be topical in that scene. If this is the case, then I think that M.J.'s suggestion that this is Illusionist isn't really correct. On the other hand, it is still fairly restrictive. i.e. You know going into a scene that it has to provoke a particular Tension.

A question for contracycle: Is this matrix intended to be for the GM's eyes only, or is it something which the group knows about?

If this is what you are talking about, there is a creative difficulty, IMO. The group has to be able to, on command, come up with a scene that illustrates the Tension of "legal inheritance". That seems tough to me. I suspect that in practice a GM will have something more than just "provoke Legal Inheritance" prepared, because coming up with such a scene spontaneously is liable to stall play. On the other hand, the more you prepare particulars, the more this does become Illusionist (IMO).

contracycle wrote: Yes, Virtuality will not generally have 'jumps' in game-time where you have no idea what happened in between. But the equivalent in Virtuality is abstracted resolution. i.e. "You spend a week travelling and arrive at your destination". If the players aren't interested in the current action, they can resolve it at a higher level of abstraction.