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?

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

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

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?

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 

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?

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.

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?

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.

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

Joshua BishopRoby wrote: 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.

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.

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

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?

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...")

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.

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?

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

"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<

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!

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?

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.

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.

Joshua wrote: 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.

Example wrote: 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.

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?

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.

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