The Forge Archives

Well, given the problems with my Serenwyn campaign, I decided to post the following to my players, whcih I thought could be an interesting case study for re-negotiating a social contract to enable, well, actual, real play on a weekly basis.

The background: I have two players, Jan and Jenny, long time friends & gaming buddies of mine, co-habitees with each other, so we've got a very nicely cozy vibe going. They cycle over to mine, a distance of about 3 miles, each Tuesday, with Jan coming straight from work, getting here about 7.30, 8 ish. I've agreed to feed them (hey it's my house, they haven't had a chance to eat, and even a short trip like that can get unfriendly in winter... and I only get in from work about 6.45 myself). So, on a good night, with a following wind, we're looking at 8.30 kick off to gaming, with last orders around 11, 11.30. Shorter than any of us would like, but it's the only night we could all make, and that damn real life keeps getting in the way (incidentally, I have to be up for work around 6 the next morning, and remember the players have to cycle home, so later finishes aren't an option).

So short time, cozy surroundings... some of you know what's coming, right?

"So... I haven't had time to prep, the kids didn't get to sleep till gone nine... soddit, who's for a game of LotR instead?"

Like I said, we're cozy and comfortable, we like seeing each other anyway...

And every Wednesday, while I'm putting the bins out, I'm cursing myself.

So (over a game of LotR, natch) it was agreed that This Game Needs A Kick Up The Arse.

Hence the following... which, btw, I'm posting here rather than the HQ forum, as most points are non-HQ specific. It's ended up more a manifesto than anything else, but I'm happy with that.

Oh, Danu & Mayara are, respectively, Jan & Jenny's characters.

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Posted to Serenwyn game discussion list

(to any third party observers... "distractions" have led to very little actual play in the campaign, so this is by the way of pro-actively setting up a social contract to get things moving).

Well, first off, I'm stealing ideas left right & center from the Forge, mostly from Ron Edwards.

What I think we need is the ability to get things of to a screeching start each week... right after food is finished, we HAVE to be able to crack on.

Before I start wibbling on, a little bit of terminology...

SCENE FRAMING is pretty self explanatory: how each scene is started and finished. AGGRESSIVE SCENE FRAMING is what I think we need during the general run of play. As an example, LotR was very passively framed in the books. Tolkien wanted to show all the details of the journey, how they travelled, what trees were around, how they got from THIS moor to THESE hills to THAT mountain. When the fellowship breaks, we essentially gert, as far as possible, Aragorn's story, then Merry & Pippin, then Frodo, diving The Two Towers into pretty much three chunks of story that don't switch between them. Peter Jacksons films are somewhat more agressively framed; sure, there's loving panning shots, but anything that doesn't advance the story (/stories) is cut, or summarised, or communicated via background detail for the interested student. Also, the narrative, as dictated by modern cinematic convention, cuts away as a crisis is reached, to show how another thread is resolving the crisis we left it on earlier.

Or, compare (novels only) LotR to Julian May's Many Coloured Land (which uses such aggressive framing that sometimes major battle set pieces are skipped, presumably becuase they didn't include anything interesting about the protagonists / antagonists), or Asimov's earlier Foundation novels (which use the most aggressive framing I've seen in writing... missing out decades, if not centuries of time BETWEEN TWO SCENES WITH THE SAME CHARACTERS, iirc).

In RPG play, scene framing is useful for "cutting out the guff." Remember we were talking last night about Bruce Baugh's problems with Call of Cthulhu, especially as goes the investigation bit? That it boils down to "Roll your investigation: if you muff it, THE WORLD DIES SCREAMING!!!" Now with scene framing, you can, if you want, assume that the roll will be made, and, as GM, just give the clue as the start of a new scene.

(Another change to playing style that mediates the muffed investigation problem is "cinematically" assuming that the investigation roll doesn't represent WHETHER you find the clue, but HOW LONG it takes, the roll dictating how the following scene is framed (compare "Okay, this sounds VERY familiar. After a couple of minutes page flipping through the Codex of Slag Blah, you find this passage..." with "Okay, you turn your library inside out, even call in a few favours from scholars you'd sworn you'd never turn to. After a couple of days, a contact in Cairo translates the glyphs as a reference to the Codex of Slag Blah.... which was the first book you'd turned to.") Also note that I've got absolutely no objection to it being the player, rather than the GM, who decides & narrates the outcome of any roll. I'm reserving the right of "final cut" but don't intend to use it much.)

Obviously, badly used framing can rob players of power, control, protagonism, whatever you want to call it ("Okay, you remember last week you two were being faced down by a single trollkin with a cough and pronounced limp? So, when he's beaten you unconcious and tied you up, he drags you across Snakepipe Hollow to face Cragspider..."). But I'm proposing that you two police me on it responsibly: the model I'm looking is to get as quickly to a decision / action point for at least one of you, generate a result, deal with it and try to get to the next point. If the characters are split, the ideal structure, is open scene, move scene to crisis point, cut to other character, attempt to get THEM to a crisis point, cut to first character, take decision, deal with consequences and ideally start build to new crisis point, cut to second character…

Essentially, this is a long winded way of saying that I intend to try to use Scene Framing to move from  one interesting, important decision by the players to another as efficiently as possible. I'm cool with you guys calling "CUT" on a scene too: especially cool uses of this will lead to extra cookies, gold stars, ticks and Hero Points.

Related to this are BANGS; now, we're getting into areas covered in detail in Ron's Sorcerer and Sorcerer & Sword, neither of which I own (shame on me!), so I'm picking them up from common Forge reference… You know the old advice (which I've seen attributed to Raymond Chandler & Dashiel Hammet, so it's probably by neither of these), that whenever the story flags, get a couple of guys to bust through the door with machine guns? That's your classic bang. A kick up the arse call to the characters who HAVE to react to it somehow. Thinking about bangs has made me realise that rephrasing one of my adventure as a pocket full of bangs, rather than a timeline or coherent plot, or even the old plot web / flow chart, make it able to be written and not stalled halfway through… because, if it's completely written, what the feck is the point of you guys playing it? I can tell you the damn plot over a game of LotR… which it would surely resemble (the Knizia LotR game being a challenge to perfect your strategy to complete the paths before The Plot finishes).

(The big, metaplot bang for HeroQuest is the Hero Wars… "the old world is over…" If you like, that forms the first part of the premise of a HQ campaign, and the players (including the GM) get to pick the second part. Out of interest, what would Danu & Rostandi's response to that be? Let's create a new and better one? Let's help it go? Let's bring it back? Good riddance? It's time to get the party started? But if we hum real hard and pretend it isn't going, it can't hurt us? Let's ride this one out and see what happens?)

So the plan is for each session to start with a bang, with minimum establishing pre-amble on the night, aggressively frame to keep the spotlight on your guys, and chuck in more bangs to keep up the momentum if it starts to flag… again, and I'm sounding like a stuck record here, if you're at the table thinking "wouldn't it be fun if…?", pipe up! What's to lose?

To minimize pre-amble at the table, what I'm planning is to put out a teaser for each session, probably around noon on Monday, just after first reminder (which will now be my reminder to write the ferking thing…) Is it cool with you guys if I can use your characters in these "pre-credits sequences"? Obviously, when it comes to your characters actions, YOU have final cut, but to give you an example from session one of how the teaser could go…

"It's a mild morning in sea season, so of course, it's raining across the clan tula. Mayara's got the fire going well, Danu and Rostandi are checking their traps close to the home stead when the alarm call goes up from the West… the patrol have found raiders!

"Rostandi leaps through the undergrowth in a straight line for the source of the call, with Danu nimbly hacking his way behind. Back on the stead, Mayara hefts her hammer… well, it's not like there's anything melting in the crucible yet, and there's more fun ways of warming up than beating metal…

"Danu pushes through the bushes beside the main West track, to be pulled up short by Rostandi landing in front of him. He can hear shout and the clash of metal ahead. Rostandi sniffs "Black Oaks. I can tell their soggy river stink even if they come round the wrong side of the tula." He raises an eybrow. "Are we sneaking and sticking or charging & clawing?"

"Just at that moment, Mayara charges along the main track accompanied by the rest of the Fyrd…"

Is that okay or too much?

Now, what could help me are a couple of things…. One, is having a think, and filling out the goals field for Danu & Myara. Filling them a out a little more may help… Like I said last night, the key could be finding out the how, what and why of what makes them unique. Danu's nominally a hunter, but an initiate of Destor the adventurer; we've established he has an interest in, ah, /peripherally medicinal/ herbs, and a "finder of things", inside a clan renowned for, lets be honest, guerrilla warfare. How does that make the other hunters feel, or the chief, or the other Destor initiates? What does he want to be? Similarly, we know Myara may be the only (non-freeze) distiller in Dragon Pass… Why the heck would the chief let her off his stead! What drives Myara, did she choose or was she chosen, have the Serenwyn always had a distiller, is she the first? Is it a clan secret, or are there mythical / political / practical reasons to spread this knowledge?

In relation to Bangs, Ron introduces KICKERS… which is a player generated bang that's happened to the character just before play starts. Now, given that we've just gone through character creation without me mentioning this, played at least one session without kickers, and you're probably staring at me like I've gone completely crazy, it's an idea that's up in the air at the mo… but if, in between sessions, you get an idea for a "kickeresque" bang to start the next session, I'm all ears, and hang the hero point cost of resultant abilities, relationships, flaws, whatever…

One final "bit"… Jenny, are you okay with the game continuing without you when you're on placement? Once more, you get final cut, and given that Mayara looks more "stay on the stead" than Danu, we can move him away to keep her "ring fenced"… We could always play Mayara by e-mail or chatroom, in parallel with the live game, if that possible and agreeable to you.

And in conclusion, I would like to thank NCR for paying me while writing this…

Are you guys cool with this?