in another forum, I started a discussion about GMless role-playing (defined loosely to include any shared or rotating GM duties.) I started the thread mainly because it was obvious from other comments that most of the people there had a very firm belief that all role-playing games had a single player who held a specific role, the "GM", which had strong control of the world, story, and rules. my purpose was purely informative: my post covered historical examples of GMless role-play as well as techniques of getting GMless play to work.

none of that is relevant here, of course, because we've all seen GMless games and know the various techniques. however, while discussing history and defining the term "auteur GM" (GM as creator of story -- in other words, any Illusionist or Participatory technique,) I contrasted the technique with the original approach of the dungeon crawl. I think something like this has already been mentioned on the Forge, but here is how I phrased it in the thread:

the GM's duties in this style of play is to "set up the board"; there is no GM "story", although there may be a backstory explaining how the setting came to be the way it is, or NPCs may have plans and goals rather than merely waiting around for the PCs to mug them. the story is really up to the players, not the GM.

Yeah, the only difference in much Narrativist or Gamist GMing is what sort of obstacles one places in front of the characters. Are they meant for the players to overcome, and prove their play prowess? Or are they meant to be points at which the character has to make decisions, thus creating story? Otherwise there are definite potential similarities.

This is all very problematic, however:

does anyone have any thoughts on how to approach the abstracted map concept, or on other ways to adapt the concept to new modes of play? maybe divide the types of story into Event, Place, Idea, and Character stories, with each having its own subtypes of maps and its own typical map entries?

Hey John:

I'm thinking, from what you're saying, that it'd be kind of cool to play a gamist game with a relationship map, or even combine a dungeon crawl with one. The kobolds in area 5 are trying to take over the bugbears' lair, but the bugbears bought a magic item from the evil priests in area 11 in exchange for some labor digging up the idol in area 15. One of the priests has been approached by a kobold, and ...

That would make for a pretty cool crawl, I think.

-Matt

Hi there,

I'd like to note that yet again, people are mixing up "relationship map" with "back-story" and "what NPCs all think of one another."

The latter two things are wonderful in any role-playing game. The former thing is a fine way to make the latter two much more intense in terms of real-person emotions and judgments.

I guess there's no point in outlining it any further.

Best,
Ron

Well, Ron might not feel like outlining it further, but I will!

A "relationship map" as the term is used in Sorcerer involves only certain kinds of relationships -- namely, kinship and current or past sex/love relationships.

So, rather than things like "the kobolds are trying to take over the bugbears' lair", a relationship map has things like "the chieftains of the two orc tribes are brothers" or "the evil priest is in love with the maiden."

"Kinship map" might be a better way to think of it. What generates interesting bits is the way other relationships and actions cross it. Why are the two brothers leading competing orc tribes, instead of working together? How will the evil priest reconcile his duty to the dark gods with his love?

That's what a Sorcerer relationship map is about -- how people are related in the basic ways of love and family, and then how that interacts with the circumstances they're in.

--Travis

Hi there,

A little private messaging just went on ...

Matt, he goes:

I'd like to note that yet again, people are mixing up "relationship map" with "back-story" and "what NPCs all think of one another."

Well, by people presumably you mean me. I bought the book where you explain what it is, and apparently I still don't get it. Can you explain why a RM isn't back story + opinions? What else is it?

No, "people" isn't just you. This is a widespread thing.

A relationship map, by definition, uses kin-relations and sexual contact for its primary links among people. These links may or may not be lines of "travel" for PCs to follow. They definitely don't include how a character feels or thinks about other characters. The whole point is that the lines can never go away. Even if character X now hates character Y with all his heart, even though in the previous session he loved her, the line is still the line it was.

Here's one variant that I think is relevant to your point. Seth ben-Ezra introduces the notion of "storymap" in Legends of Alyria, which is best described as a relationship map with a ton of context, priorities, and events. People pick characters from the storymap to play. It's a very effective convention or one-shot method of prepping, but it's an application of relationship mapping, and in my view, a fairly limiting one.

Another variant, which I think is the kind of "social map" you're describing, I think, is indeed very much like a dungeon. You'll find them in GURPS Goblins and also implied in a lot of 90s scenarios and rulebooks. These are also very useful play devices, but may or may not have relationship map elements (and those elements may or may not be interesting or relevant).

People have been using my term "relationship map" for both of these devices for a while, and it seems very hard for them to see why they're getting off the rails.

I've been deciding how I want to participate in the thread, but the main thing for me now is to say that you *are* discussing something important, but it's not relationship mapping. Do you think it would help for me to lay out the ideas like I did above, and then we can get to talking about the good stuff you've brought up?

Okay, if I'm understanding right, your meaning for RM is something permanent and unremoveable, as in "he will always be my brother, though I despise him so."

I can see its immediate application to scenarios that encourage narrativist situations, but there are a lot of cultural and genre-related assumptions in saying that blood and sex are the exclusive biggies. Why only those two? I'm kind of interested in the idea that the limiting factors of a RM might change depending on your game setting. If your setting is "Brave New World," what would replace them?

Oh, we've been over this ground a lot of times ... way back on GO, and lots in the Adept Press forum. In fact, Seth's storymap method literally emerged from those discussions.

Here's what you're missing: no one said anything about those lines of connection being the only things in the actual play and story.

there are a lot of cultural and genre-related assumptions in saying that blood and sex are the exclusive biggies

I disagree. Culture, genre, foreign, ancient vs. modern, whatever you want to point at, there they are.

Granted, if that's all we're talking about, you get a lot of "see Dick run" kind of stories. But as I keep saying, using a relationship map is a foundation, not a straitjacket. If you'd like to comment, as an author, on the importance of ties that are not based on, for instance, kinship, then it'd be important to have some kinship in there as a basis for the comment, wouldn't it?

They are the exclusive biggies in terms of what everything else is pulling apart or over-riding. Can you override kinship? Sure - but you can't do without it as an issue. The total absence of a family in a story automatically provides a comment on alienation; more commonly, the family is evident in dialogue, flashback, or any other sort of internal context even if they're not physically present.

Brave New World emphatically supports the notion that such connections are central, and that removing them creates a "thing" which, although it is two-legged and social, is not a human being. That's what the book is about.

All right, I think I see where it's going. So the "sex" relationship is really about intimacy or a desire for it. Ed and Gina hooked up, and she didn't think much of it, but Ed still wants Gina, and presto.

Am I getting it now?

Just as "kin" is a general term for parent, child, brother, sister, cousin, etc, "sex" is a general term for affair, marriage, one-night-stand, grope session, etc.

I do tend to avoid "wants to" in the sex category - that's a motive or desire, not an incontrovertible established sexual act.

However! As I've said many times ... once you set up the primary lines, other characters can then be hooked on by secondary ones, which are usually preambles to sex or obligations like jobs.

Ah, so by your RM thinking, the line between Lancelot and Gueneviere isn't really a primary line, so to speak, at the start of that story.

Ron Edwards wrote:
I'd like to note that yet again, people are mixing up "relationship map" with "back-story" and "what NPCs all think of one another."

ok, I crossposted, otherwise I might have added these comments to clear things up:

1. I do understand Ron's use of relationship map, although I tend to include economic and other relationships in the map -- perhaps mixing a little bit more backstory into the map than Ron would, but I see the important part of a relationship map being "if X sees Y or hears someone mention Y in conversation, has X had a relationship with Y before?" economic relationships aren't as intense as kinship and sex, but if you run into your ex-boss on the street, you will probably react.

2. you can add information to a relationship map, as Ron mentions. what you add depends on what you need.

I think that after the discussion Ron and I had (noted above), I understand the thinking behind it, but I'm not quite ready to agree that blood and sex are the tightest bonds.

But I think that's okay. What strikes me is that the scenario designer should decide what the "most important" elements are, and build from there. That may be in relation to the style of play desired, the genre expectations, or whatever.

Ron might disagree, but I ain't afraid o' him. *raises fistses, spits menacingly*

I think I'd have to say that relationship maps (or back-story maps, to keep it separate from Ron's definition) don't really equate to a dungeon crawl. In both cases, the GM is setting up the board, and in both cases, he doesn't really control how the players go about the mission.

However, I think the principle difference is the GM's intent for the story.

In a dungeon crawl, the GM doesn't tell you which room to go to first (or last), but the goal is assumed: kick down the door, kill monsters, take their stuff. Even in a more complex dungeon crawl, there's still the assumption that you're going somewhere to get something (or someone). Ultimately, either you get what's in the dungeon or you don't.

In a back-story crawl, there's no assumed goal. Presumably there's a conflict (otherwise it would make for a boring backstory), but it just provides a place for players to run around in. They might choose to resolve the conflicts - a choice that has to have at least three distinct courses and outcomes (favor side A, favor side B, find a compromise). But they might choose not to resolve the conflict, which is a fourth distinct option (with lots of variations). Mercenaries might benefit from exacerbating the conflict and then working for both sides at once.

I might be oversimplifying dungeon crawls... the few I experienced in the early 80's were bad enough to put me off RPGs for a couple of years.

Matt Wilson wrote: I'm thinking, from what you're saying, that it'd be kind of cool to play a gamist game with a relationship map, or even combine a dungeon crawl with one. The kobolds in area 5 are trying to take over the bugbears' lair, but the bugbears bought a magic item from the evil priests in area 11 in exchange for some labor digging up the idol in area 15. One of the priests has been approached by a kobold, and ...

That would make for a pretty cool crawl, I think.

I thought I would weigh in on this topic, since it relates to an important point for my current campaign. Unrelated to this thread, I've referred before to the family trees being my "dungeon map" for adventure. The majority of the action in my campaign has been maneuvering amongst the various principle families involved. Marriages have been important events, and all of the PCs have gotten married during the campaign (except Kjartan who is engaged to be married at the end of this summer).

You can check out the family trees at:
http://www.darkshire.org/~jhkim/rpg/vinland/campaign/

I'd say about a third to a half of all the names in the family trees have been notable characters in the game. For example, the characters were involved in a fight in the Tjaraholt hall where they killed two huscarls (fighting men). The weregeld (i.e. legal settlement for the killings) was negotiated by Vigfus the Proud and Tosti the Golden. Vigfus is the father of the PC Skallagrim's wife Borgny the Sharp-Tongued, and is the grandfather of the PC Kjartan's fiancee Thjohild. etc. etc.

I'm not sure I have a particular point here, except that the family trees have worked pretty well as a map for play for me.

Matt Wilson wrote: I think that after the discussion Ron and I had (noted above), I understand the thinking behind it, but I'm not quite ready to agree that blood and sex are the tightest bonds.

talysman wrote: so I guess the question is: does anyone have any thoughts on how to approach the abstracted map concept, or on other ways to adapt the concept to new modes of play? maybe divide the types of story into Event, Place, Idea, and Character stories, with each having its own subtypes of maps and its own typical map entries?

hi Emily! glad you have time to come back to the Forge.

Emily Care wrote:
Interesting. So you're basing the subdivisions of types of narratives on the kinds of objects/groups/entities that get mapped, yes? The map in a dungeon crawl functions to give descriptions of complications and obstacles (and rewards). That's basically what all these maps could do, but just contain different info, held in a configuration appropriate to the info. Am I getting your point?

Emily Care wrote:
It sounds like part of your point in bringing this up, John, was to facilitate non-trad narrative power distributions. All of these could help that process since each of them makes clear connections, resources and directions of energy/information flow. And they are all good tools for teasing out complications and consequences to help the plot flow.

The problem I have with the idea is that a traditional dungeon-crawl map is relatively easy to do, because everyone knows how rooms connect in reality, whereas the properties of a social network are far more elusive(*).

So verisimilitude is not that easy to achieve, too many connections and it will feel like an inbred mountaineer family (**), too few and it won't feel like a real community either.


(*) I would recommend reading Duncan Watt's "Small Words" for an idea of the constraints of real networks (but there's quite a bit of maths).

(**) just an example, folks -substitue islanders if you wish, as long as it is sufficiently creepy and lovecraftian .

I can speak to the social networks issue.

The basic principle of social network analysis is that social entities (individuals, groups, organizations, e.g.) can be treated as "nodes" connected by "links" or "ties" (communication, kinship, co-location, e.g.) representing (a) flows between pairs of nodes, e.g., who gets advice from whom, (b) social or other relations between pairs of nodes, e.g., who outranks whom, or (c) joint membership or participation in the same "event," e.g., who belongs to the same organization.

Representing nodes and ties as a graph allows the structure of the social network to be visualized; sociologists try to use these graphs to understand how the social network influences different social outcomes; e.g., in what kind of social networks are job seekers who are most successful at finding employment located?

Translating the logic of social networks to an rpg is not difficult conceptually. I once ran a pair of PCs through a D&D session where they attended a party and talked to people -- each NPC belonged to a different aristocratic family, and the outcome of each of the PC's "actions" (flirting, carousing, etc.) was affected by the relations among the houses. The PCs rather enjoyed it. I could have done more to take the network concept more seriously, though.

But the point I really wanted to make was that it would be possible to treat the social network as the "dungeon": you'd just have to define what the important connections were, and indicate how the PC's actions could change the strength of ties between the nodes -- and remember that the PCs would themselves be nodes in the social network, not "agents" traversing the network in the same way as adventurers exploring the dungeon!

Bill

Hello,

I agree with Bill. This is, in my view, the most common presentation of social-conflict role-playing. You can find it in several Over the Edge scenario supplements (e.g. With a Long Spoon), in GURPS Goblins, verbalized but not graphically depicted in the Tribe 8 core book, and implied by most of the games which provide "what each group thinks of the other" matrices, especially with a strong NPC list (e.g. L5R).

It is extremely similar to dungeon-construction, both in prep and play terms.

Best,
Ron

Bill explained the concept of social networks and it's application to rpg ably.
Here is a link to an introductory paper on the topic for further perusal.

--Emily Care

I hope it's not bad form to resurrect a dormant topic, but this paper is just out:

Why social networks are different from other types of networks
http://fr.arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0305612