I've hit a wall.

I'm toying with a new concept that involves a game centered around a focal character. For the purposes of this post, I'll call the character the "hero", even though they'll more likely be a "film-noir style anti-hero thrust into events beyond their control".

The basic idea is that every player has the chance to become the "hero" for the session, everyone bids for the chance. The highest bid wins, and for every token used in the bid there is a higher potential reward (and conversely a higher risk involved).

The "hero" then plays through a number of scenes drawing on the other characters as allies to overcome the situation they have been thrown into.

Theres more to it than this, but for the moment I'm stuck on the concept of what scenes could be encountered by the hero.

Scene Types
Combat Scene
In which the hero must fight their opponent to gain story advantage

Intrigue Scene
In which the hero must use their wits and social skills to gain story advantage

Chase Scene
In which the hero must evade their opponent to gain story advantage

Investigation Scene
In which the hero must uncover clues to gain story advantage

Turmoil Scene
In which the hero must face one of their own fears or weaknesses to gain story advantage

Self-Discovery Scene
In which the hero must discover a new aspect of themself to gain story advantage

Montage Scene
In which the hero undergoes a rapid training session to gain story advantage

Flashback Scene
In which the hero reflects on their past to gain story advantage

Atmospheric Scene
In which the hero learns about the world around them to gain story advantage

Revelation Scene
In which the hero gains story advantage from piecing together the clues so far

Recruitment Scene
In which the hero gathers allies to gain story advantage

So my questions are...

Do you think any of these scene types are just doubling up on the same concept?

What other types of scenes would more fully round out the options?

The genre setting of the game is "Steam-Noir". What would steampunk have evolved into with the next generation of protagonists? Think Casablanca or Maltese Falcon with clockwork contraptions.

V

Another type of 'revelation" where you put all the pieces together convincingly for an audience. Expose something for what it is (or what you want people to believe it is). Though this may be more of a payoff based on the pattern in other scenes.

You might consider how any of the scene types could apply to another character, eg revealing something about that characters past via a flashback, or having them come to a realization about the main character or the plot line.

Hi Michael

I'm a bit at a loss to help you here, considering that I don't have a good grasp of what kind of stories your game is supposed to yield. However, I do have a feeling that you're basing your scene types too much on manners of action, rather than on the scene's role in the over-arching structure of the story.
Consider My Life with Master: Command scenes, Mission scenes, Overtures and the Horror Revealed. (One might add the End-game scene(s) and Epilogues.) A lot of your scenes could be either one of those.
Similar thoughts if we take a look at Dirty Secrets: Investigation, Violence, Revelation and Reflection.

Thanks for that, I was starting to worry that my question was either too obscure or too daunting...

My original intention had been that only the main protagonist of the story evolves in relation to the events happening around them. This led me to only construct scenes based around them.

I think I was so focused on this concept that I'd forgotten the other characters. Having scenes that share the load between a few PCs adds a lot more diversity.

To reveal a bit more about my intentions with this game...

At the start of each game, everyone bids in a blind auction to become the dominant protagonist for the current tale. With each bid goes a story: the more you bid, the higher the risks, but the bigger the payoff. The player who paid most becomes the dominant character, the player who bid second most has their story acted out.

In this way, players want to bid high, to become the dominant protagonist and gain any possible advantages, but the other players don't want someone to bid high without going through a good story to get those benefits. If everyone bids low, then a low powered story will develop with low rewards and minimal risks. If everyone bids high, then there's a good chance the protagonist will die, but if they survive there will be a great reward in store for them. If one person bids high, while others bid low, then this player will easily become the protagonist and will gain good rewards in an easy story (and people will learn their lesson not to allow this sort of thing to happen again). If one person bids low while everyone else bids high, they are simply out of the running and will neither be the protagonist not the person responsible for this session's story.

During the flow of play, characters may face story scenes which get them closer to their objectives. Or they may face build-up scenes (I'm trying to think of a better name for this). If the player chooses to have their character face a build-up scene, then they are randomly given a scene by a tarot draw. If they can make this scene work for them, they'll gain an advantage (equivalent to +2), otherwise they'll suffer a penalty (equivalent to -1). [ie. if a player wins and loses an equal number of scene's they'll still be making ground in the story, a player basically needs to accumulate as many points as they originally bid to complete the story].

Hence my question for the types of scenes. I'm looking for tableaux and mini-scenarios that can be used to further a story by any means, each capable of giving some type of advantage and some type of disadvantage.

I'm still working on numbers and mechanics behind the storytelling system, but that's the basic idea.

V

Mike,
  Two that seem to be missing are Establishing Scene (this establishes facts, locations, people present, etc) and Exposition Scene (This explains why the various plots exist or how they intersect).
  And, while at first blush, these seem unnecessary or intrinsically part of the scene framing procedure it might be smart to take a second and think about their place in your game. Maybe if you game is going to have a GM, the GM might frame the scene with a short establishing shot and the Spotlight character's player might start with an Exposition scene to make sure wwe know what the scene is about.
  I think that many games inspired by improv theater  struggle because they, by design, skip these two scene types and force player with weak/no improv skills to sink or swim.
  Just a suggestion, I hope it helps with your design.

Dave,

You're absolutely right. I've been playing with an improv crowd for so long that this just didn't register.

As for the GM or GMless aspect. That's something that I'm really in a dilemma about. I'm trying to develop a few games at the moment that totally decentralise the GM role in different ways, but I keep coming back to the old GM/Player paradigm (and that just seems a cop out when going for experimental methods of play).

At this stage, I'm looking at having a starting GM, but this player can then pass off the GM duties (either by simply working around the table, or via some other method that I'm still trying to concoct). On the basis of what has been described so far, the initial GM would be the player who bid second highest on their attempt to become the dominant player. This is the player whose story is chosen as the obstacle for the primary protagonist to face, so they'd have the best idea about how to set up a bit of backstory.

It's a good point to make the Establishing scene the first scene of the story, and then to include exposition scenes in the regular roster of possibilities. After all scenes like this can be used to help tie errant storylines back into the main flow of the game.

My ultimate goal here would be to develop 14 types of scene, to correspond to the 14 ranks of cards in a Tarot deck. Players may choose to push their agenda toward the story conclusion, or may gather resources/information/allies/etc. before pushing along thee story in a later scene. Players attempting to gather resources would face scene types that are drawn randomly through the course of the game. With Minor arcana providing scenes corresponding to their relevant rank, while Major arcana don't give the player a chance to catch their breath , they simply have to face the next part of the story and now have this aspect of the story flavoured by the symbolism of the arcana chosen.

It's getting pretty dense, but it's all designed to tie into a coherent whole about occult steampunk conspiracies. So I guess dense and heavy play is a part of genre.

V 

Mike,
  Alex Cherry came up with a good way to decentralize the GM role. His uses tokens as scene altering currency and the player with the most tokens at the beginning of the scene is the GM and the one with the least tokens at the beginning of the scene is the Spotlight character (or vice versa, all of a sudden I can't remember). And, the way the currency is used in game, it almost guarantees that you won't have the same GM/Spotlight character two scenes in a row (I think each happened once out of like 20 scenes we did).
  If your game uses any kind of meta-currency, it might be worth your time to think about a mechanic like this.
  If you don't know him, I will see if I can link his playtest document and you can check it out. It was a public playtest doc the last time we spoke.

That method sounds like it's worth investigating.

It sounds like it could be close to the mechanic I used for the Eighth Sea (so my core playtest group will have a bit of an understanding of how it plays out), but there's a new fundamental dynamic regarding the allocation of GM responsibilities.

I hope it's still publicly available, otherwise I'm going to have to beg and double-talk my way to a copy...

V

Mike,
  This is the old link I had:
http://www.twistedconfessions.com/confessional/index.php?n=Ensemble.HomePage
  Alex was pretty good about keeping it up to date, so I am confident that it is the latest version.