Structure Your Fun

Is it necessary for RPG scenarios and adventures to have a pre-established structure?  And more importantly, how does having a structure help a GM both read and run a game?,

 

Scenarios with a compartmentalised structure are - in my opinion - much easier to read, assess, compare and then run.  When looking for a scenario to run a short notice, my preference is to skim through the pages – looking for what seem like great scenes, then backtracking to check that the detail of how the scenes link seems to be coherent and workable for my players.  Then I skip to the end and check the finale, to see if it seems suitably memorable and pitched appropriately.  Passing those tests, I then read the scenario and make notes about how I’ll run it.  When the text runs together this assessment is much harder, and I need to make many more notes in order to run the game.

When I created EPOCH I set a set structure for scenarios - this was a layout that I felt had a dual purpose, both to provide a coherent story, while providing a clear vision for how the game would unfold, and to be usable when facilitating the game - allowing GMs to access information with ease.  This structure was based entirely on my own preferences, although I assumed the utility would be apparent to all.

 

I was wrong.  When I worked with other authors, I found that few of them submitted scenarios in any form that resembled the structure I had established for EPOCH scenarios.  Indeed most were in sharp contrast the rigorous divisions I had established.  

 

But what about other games?  Here are some examples from scenario collections, selected at random from my bookshelf.

 

Example 1: Call of Cthulhu (Terrors From Beyond)

In the past I have found scenarios for Call of Cthulhu to be a leading benchmark of quality in scenario structure.  They (almost uniformly) follow a similar structure, setting out a Keeper Background (which usually serves as a background and synopsis) followed by a section on 'Involving the Investigators' or 'Investigator background' which establishes the role of the characters in the scenario. Statistics for NPCs and monsters are usually found in the back (although sometimes on the body of the text as well).  This is pretty good, but the coherence and layout of the main body of each scenario can vary greatly.

 

Example 2: Trail of Cthulhu (Out of Space)

Expands a little on the traditional CoC format by including sections titled  'Hook' (how the characters are involved) 'The Awful/Horrible Truth' basically the same as a Keeper background section, then 'The Spine' (a paragraph by paragraph summary of the scenario scenes) then some variance between scenarios but generally a section titled 'Scenes' which contains the bulk of the scenario.  I think the addition of 'The Spine' is a significant improvement on the CoC formula.

 

Example 3: The Laundry (Black Bag Jobs)

No real coherent uniformity beyond a 'Mission overview' section which is usually a page or two into the scenario text, following a discussion of background elements.  Player handouts are at the end of each scenario. Thankfully most of the paragraphs are small and easy to digest.

 

Example 4: Rogue Trader (Edge of the Abyss)

No coherent uniformity beyond an appendix containing adversary statistics at the end of the book.  Ironically scenario two in the collection systematically establishes the setting, objectives and rewards for a series of encounters the characters can have providing a small oasis of order (and I found this was one of the easiest sections to facilitate when I actually ran this game). 

 

Example 5: Paranoia XP (Crash Priority)

No coherent uniformity although most scenarios have a 'Mission overview' section somewhere close to the beginning. 

 

My conclusion: few RPGs I examined imposed a systematic and consistent structure on scenarios written for their games.  I think this makes it more difficult for GMs to rapidly assess information and use it in gameplay, and increases the variance of the experience for players.  The ability of the GM to remember, prepare or bookmark key sections becomes much more significant and it is more likely that key details of the scenario are omitted, or changed on the fly by the GM.

Kapcon 23 - Part Two

I arrived on Sunday morning ready for day 2 of Kapcon, refreshed and ready for more!

Round 5: Silent Night
The Kapcon organisers had scheduled me to run a session of EPOCH in Round 5 on Sunday morning using the blurb for Road Trip, but when the players arrived I found that one of them had played in Road Trip during round 1 on Saturday, so I hastily suggested we play Silent Night instead.

As Silent Night is a Christmas scenario I suggested it might be nice for the characters to

play a family group.  In short order the characters created a memorable, if highly dysfunctional, modern family.  Conflicts swiftly resolved around Frank (played by Tigger), owner of an organic food store, who had recently married Molly (played by Sam). 

Unfortunately, Frank’s enthusiasm for healthy living wasn’t shared by the family and both his daughter Evie (played by Maggie) and step-son Darrian (played by Nicholas) thought Frank disingenuous.  This was exacerbated by Frank's insistence they use their 'Journey Journals' and formal family meetings to resolve conflict.  The inter-family conflict was so intense that nobody had much time for family-friend, poor asthmatic Victor (played by Nick C) who had been sent away for a Christmas break because his mother was dying of cancer.

My favourite scene in this game was when the family decided to ram a police barricade.  As bullets flew all around them, teenage Darrian who had been arguing with Frank for the whole scenario wrapped his arms around his step-father and shielded his body from harm, whispering a plea for Frank to look after his mother.

Round 6: Quintessence
You may recall that I had previously registered to play Incident at Talos in round 6. However, the GM facilitating that game was away and the game had been cancelled.  Casting around for another option in the break between rounds, there were few games with any player spaces to pick from, and none that appealed to me. 

I also saw that Home Front, Andy’s EPOCH scenario of Dad’s Army meets the Twilight Zone, did not have enough sign-ups and had also been cancelled.  But during the break I observed several people approach the desk and asked if they could play Home Front.  The organisers had cancelled the game, and were not accepting sign-ups for it, so as a work-around they suggested that it be offered in the Games on Demand room.

I was pretty keen to help people play some EPOCH if they wanted to, and Andrew agreed to pitch the game in G.O.D. to see if there was any interest.  I volunteered to play in order to help with the numbers, and we were able to round up 4 others, including the venerable Sophie.  As both Sophie and I had played Home Front, Andy offered Quintessence (published in Frontier of Fear), his sci-fi scenario about corporate marines intercepting a spaceship that has been missing for 100 years.

Having both playtested and edited this scenario, I was fairly familiar with the plot, so I determined to create a character that would take no part in leading the action or in making any decisions.  I had been dealt the cards War Scarred, Cautious and the traits of Idealistic and Romantic.  So I created Neil, a marine who had suffered hideous injuries when he accidentally dropped a grenade amongst his fellow marines, killing several of them.  Clearly traumatised by this error, Neil lacked confidence and was extremely accident prone, to the point where he was almost a liability to the other marines.  This allowed the other characters to unite in their disdain of Neil’s professional abilities, while ensuring that he was not consulted on major decisions, which fulfilled my objectives in not spoiling the scenario.

Sophie had established during the initial scenes that her character was a doctor, and that her father was a General.  I decided it would be neat to use this detail as part of Neil’s story, so over several tension phases I used flashbacks to show how Neil had been imprisoned following his grenade accident, and then been summoned by the general and ordered to protect his daughter and follow her like a shadow.  In preparing for the mission, Neil had been given to the General’s files concerning his daughter and watched hours of home movies until he had fallen in love with the General's daughter, although this was a secret he hadn’t revealed (I had noted it on my secret card at the beginning of the game). 

In the tense scenes of the final climax, I revealed that the General had turned Neil into a human bomb, placing explosives in his cybernetic replacement organs which were detonated when his daughters life was in jeopardy.  I was, however, denied an attempt to actually play a second Hero card, as Neil was Zeroed, and thus eliminated without further heroism.

I enjoyed the game and I think Quintessence generated some really interesting characters, whose end scenes were poignant.

Prize Giving
Before the main Kapcon prize giving I gave out a couple of EPOCH awards [you can read the details here] to recognise some of the excellent character play over the weekend, and thank everyone who had played in an EPOCH scenario.

Reflections
Reflecting on the weekend; player numbers in each round seemed to be considerably more volatile than in past years.  My evidence for this is limited to the games for which I collected stats (the EPOCH scenarios of which 2 were cancelled due to lack of numbers and 2 were run at short notice – several ran with just 4 players, but the majority had 5 or 6 players). This effect may be due to an over-saturation of EPOCH, or it may have been a more ‘con-wide phenomenon.  In either event, it’s unlikely I will be offering EPOCH to the same extent in the future.

No mention was made of Con-fusion or Day of Games one-day-conventions, leading me to conclude that the NZ tabletop convention calendar has shrunk as the LARP calendar has expanded.

Increasingly Kapcon feels to me like 2 or 3 separate ‘cons held at the same venue (if you include Games on Demand) with some level of interaction, but not a lot.  This isn’t new – a similar thing used to happen with D&D and the Harn folk.  Now, as then, Kapcon organisers have made it clear that they are happy to let things evolve holistically, and often say that “people will vote with their feet”.

I agree that it is important to let people do the things that they enjoy most, but I also think that failing to take a more strategic or proactive perspective may also lead to unintended consequences which are extremely difficult to reverse.

However, I also accept that change is inevitable – Kapcon already bears little resemblance to what it was 10 years ago and it’s likely that in the future it will be greatly different to the current event.

Reports of Kapcon's Past
Kapcon 22 - Part One and Part Two
Kapcon 21 - Part One and Part Two
Kapcon 20 - Part One and Part Two

Kapcon 23 - Part One

This Kapcon I had coordinated with several other GMs to ensure that a game of EPOCH was offered in each round.  I liked the idea that players might be able to play EPOCH for the whole ‘con if they so desired, and I also thought it was a good chance to showcase the diversity of scenarios published over the last 12 months.

Family commitments meant that night games were out for me this year.  Accordingly I planned to run 3 sessions of EPOCH on Saturday and play 2 other games on Sunday.  At the time I registered few of the blurbs for games on offer captured my interest, but I pre-registered to play in 'Flyover Country' (a Laundry game) and 'Incident at Talos' (an Ashen Stars game) on the strength of their blurbs. 

However, as it turned out I was to have even more involvement in EPOCH than I planned…

Round 1: Road Trip
Road Trip is a favourite EPOCH scenario of mine because in the later phases, the threat to the characters is generated by the characters themselves which provides a neat pay-out for the work of establishing relationships and linked back-stories between the characters.

Road Trip focuses on a group of people who travel to an isolated cabin to spend some quality time together, and get a lot more than they bargained for.  The players created a group of school friends reunited after the graduation of one of their number.  A good and diverse range of characters were created, from high achievers and budding politicians, to jocks, activists and loners.

My favourite scene played out in the final phase.  Two of the characters were suspected of being infected by the horror and posing a threat to the world.  The others armed themselves and resolved to settle the matter once and for all.  They all drove out together into the wood at nightfall, but only two returned…

Round 2: Mass Destruction
Mass Destruction (published in War Stories) is both easy and tricky to facilitate.  The opening scenes place a fairly high descriptive load on the GM, but the setting and the role of the characters in that setting (reporters covering the 2003 invasion of Iraq) are familiar enough that there are usually strong characters created to experience the harrowing events.

In this run there were some memorable characters – Penny Prescott with Time Magazine (played by Hamish A.) had a terminal brain tumour and evoked plenty of audience sympathy with tearful conversations with her daughter living in the USA, while Lachlan Loader, blogger and founder of blog ‘Lock-n-Load’ (played by Ciaran) was unrelentingly patriotic, occasionally ridiculous, and ultimately heroic.

My favourite scene in this scenario featured the ruthless Edward Thompson of the BBC (played by Ruth) who had already used one of the characters as a human shield.  As the horror overwhelmed the military, desperate soldiers tried to climb into the helicopter the characters were escaping in, and Edward was pushing them off to ensure the helicopter got enough lift.  A few moments later the helicopter climbed into the sky, Edward tumbled out and plunged to his death – shoved out by one of the other characters.

Round 3: Red Gold
I was scheduled to run Shadows of Yesterday in round 3, but I was a little surprised to learn that there wasn’t enough interest to go ahead with the game.

As a result I was actually planning on heading home early when Igor confessed that he had to depart soon after the round 3 began and he was scheduled to run Red Gold with a full schedule of players.  I had edited Red Gold so I proposed that we co-run Red Gold.  Igor would do the initial description, opening scenes and run the first tension phase, and I’d take over and finish facilitating the game.

This actually worked fairly well, as Igor was able to return in time to facilitate the final tension phases and end scenes.  This was a fairly memorable game and many scenes were stolen by Mike Foster’s character Rhineheart, the body-builder with the Austrian accent and penchant for one-liners.

My favourite scene in this game occurred when Cyrus (played by Damon) revealed through a series of flashbacks that he had been a host for aliens all along, and killed his character in an attempt to pass the alien into the body of Todd (played by Theo).  In a final effort to deny the aliens a host, Todd shot himself in the head.

To be continued…