I know I haven’t been doing much around these parts lately. The number of readers I have is disheartening. Back when RPG Theory Review was a constant source of notoriety, it was much easier to keep up.

Lately, in a mixed blessing, I’ve been following the Chatty DM. He has created an enviable presence rather quickly. Inspired by him, I have joined the RPG Blogging Network. I hope I can contribute constructively!

I realize, by not blogging about Dungeons & Dragons I am limiting my exposure. Further, I know that my theory entries and Scattershot entries of extremely low interest most everywhere. But I am doing some really good work on actually playing these games. I find it a bit hard to keep at it when keep realizing ideas that I put forth (and in better, more useful terms).

More worrisome, Amagi Games has also created an excellent tool for me to write Scattershot with…that pretty much stands on its own. The only difference is my ultimate goal is to write Scattershot for your mom to understand, not just gamers. Well…someday.

On the up side, I still seem to be the only one teaching how to gamemaster without plotting. So I have that. Yay me!

F

I haven’t given up on the internet (yet). But something I’ve been working on needed a lot of polish.

It’s close to a first draft, so I can show it to you now.

This is the ‘how to play’ for Scattershot. There are no rules, no terminology, just pure ‘how to’. I’m not going to working on it full tilt for a while, but as soon as I noodle with it, I’ll put a link on it to the new draft.

In the mean time, it is likely I’m going to attack the mechanics again. Time for all the ‘play translated as mechanics’ to go. Out with the terminology. It needs to be leaner, clearer and make better use of experience dice and milieu sheets.

The ultimate goal for these documents is to get them down to four pages laid up. I want to be able to hand these out at convention so people can play immediately. I’ve created sets of genre-specific mechanics in the past, but those can’t fly anymore. Ideally (on the web), you could download this as a pdf, a four-page pdf of the core mechanics and another of the mechanics for your genre and play right off of that.

I hope.

Fang

This was originally supposed to be a simple concept I idealized to help people discuss ‘what goes on’ during role-playing game play. Really. I named it to identify it with role-playing gaming and mathematics. (Gaming is shared; gaming is imaginary; what takes place in gaming can be identified as a possibility space.) I did not name it descriptively.

A lot of people misunderstood the simple underlying concept and did many strange (to me) things. Some adopted it and equated it to their personal work. Some used it as a title for their own concepts. Most attempted to use its wording to define it concretely. I’m sad about this and I feel like I should apologize for the trouble I’ve caused.

But it ain’t my fault.

Let’s tie this up all at once. Point your links right here; this is the definitive article from the one who coined the idea. Back in the day, I developed the idea of SIS as a way to explain that “if it ain’t be said; it don’t exist” was one idea at the very core of all role-playing gaming.

As for the SIS, it comes out like this: Shared Imaginary Space is what has happened in play so far. Sounds simple, right? The problem is that some people interpreted that to mean it was the info-dump site for all game content. Now I don’t know about your imagination, but mine can only handle so much. So it should be simple to note that SIS is constantly leaking info, a lot of info! What does that say about what remains? Well, first of all, the SIS is much easier to see in hindsight. Also, as the constantly evolving ‘space’ it is, it can’t be counted on for detail and any integrity it appears to have is a productive fantasy of its contributors.

Another problem that comes up is partial, withheld or influential materials and how they relate to the SIS. It’s funny how people get things into their heads about how some things affect other things…and how they must name them. All of these things, partially shared stuff, secrets kept from play and materials which influence play without entering it don’t have anything to do with SIS.

That’s right, nothing at all.

All of these things affect the players. A player’s suspicions are not a part of the SIS; they are a part of how the player thinks about the SIS. The byproduct of this is spotlighting how each player has a personal context with which they interpret the SIS. There are as many contexts as there are players; enumerating them likewise has nothing to do with the SIS. (Examples? The player who ‘thinks in character’ has the character’s point of view as a context. Think gaming is storytelling? Protagonists, antagonists, theme, message and so forth are your context. They are not a part of the SIS.)

There is a second result of recognizing player-context; you must realize the content of the SIS cannot be specific. Now that’s a hard concept to explain so bear with me. When I say ‘red’, I can guess what you might think of. When I say ‘red’ to someone who’s blind from birth, I can’t even guess. But the idea of ‘red’ is still there. If I have a game with a ‘wedding’ in it, several things come up. For example, if one player’s POV is a local Sheriff, his context will lead him to see the wedding as power-play, rearranging or reinforcing the status quo; the attendees are notable simply for the fact that they chose to come. In the context of the traveling entertainers, the wedding is a money maker and they have to identify who to play up to (for tips). From the bridegroom’s context, this is a life-changing event determining much of his future. See how all the contexts require wildly different interpretation of the exact same SIS? Well, what this means is that the SIS isn’t made up of ‘facts’ and details; it happens to be all concepts and shorthand, everything needed to contextually interpret it and nothing more. Why not more?

Because of the information-leaking I discussed above.

Now another thing a lot of people get caught up in is the idea that only one individual at a time is privileged to contribute to the SIS. By now you should see a number of problems with that. Since any information shared may, or may not, find a permanent home in the SIS, you can’t say who has privilege or not; in fact, you have to realize that since all of it will be (re)interpreted according to individual player context at some later point, the originator isn’t really in ‘control’ of the information contribution at any point. No authority, no privilege and not even say over how people will take it.

A lot of role-playing game design theory goes into working out difficulties people have contributing to the SIS. Often this involves controlling who is talking, how things are said, how they must be interpreted and how to manage (mis)communication during play. The problem is that, as you can see, none of this has any actual bearing on the SIS. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that many of these issues, no matter how codified in the game text, are still solved entirely by the players being people interacting with people. Any argument cannot be solved by rules, it always gets solved by people. (And I think that might be the right place to put it.)

When you reach this point, it probably starts to look like SIS isn’t involved in play any more than a source of information for the ritual bricolage that makes up play. If you view role-playing game design theory from the perspective of the participants, this will be true. It is pretty much a useless concept.

But if you look at gaming with the SIS as the focal point, you will see a whole different dimension of gaming.

For me, this began as trying to look at role-playing gaming from the perspective of improving play, of focusing on play as a center of interest, and growing new ideas out of that. I realized immediately that player-perspective design practically fetishizes communication; sooner or later all the complications and challenges will seem to come from how people share information. I also realized that the very idea of shared fiction was lost in the inaccuracies of language and the idea of ‘getting everyone on the same page’ slowly becomes more and more impossible, the higher the fidelity.

I could see that many people actually create internal narratives about play. They interpret the SIS by their own context, focusing on what they like and discarding anything else as irrelevant. In this way, you can look at role-playing gaming as a group of separate, yet similar, narratives going on simultaneously, involving a certain amount of interplay with shared concepts and shorthand. I found that the idea that the SIS has be crystallized and ‘forced’ on all players can only seem to become harder and harder to maintain. For me, using the player-perspective focus for design leads to self-fulfilling problems over communications and rights to the perfected shared narrative.

When you leave all communication issues to social or people-solutions; when you abandon the idea of a detailed shared narrative; when you avoid focusing on the illusion of authority and embrace player-context-based interpretation of on-going play, you reach the place I’m exploring. You can see the interplay of personalities and how they interplay with the game texts (or rather, are informed by those texts). Indirectly, the game system will inform the SIS via the way it influences the players who play it. What this means is that cheating (not following the rules) does not affect the SIS, but is really a social issue to be decided by the group dynamic. (The same goes for fudging.)

Now, one of the advanced concepts that comes up here is the idea of evolution within the SIS. The SIS is not a history of play; it is a bases of individual interpretations of what is actively going on in play. This means that it evolves even as it leaks out all the unimportant detail. How it evolves is something I strongly believe needs to be addressed both directly and indirectly by a game’s text (and yet rarely is).

Another advanced concept that I should mention is the sheer plasticity of play. Since nothing merely intended for play is considered a part of the SIS, you can see the beginnings of ‘agile gamemastering’. (Something I will detail in a later article.) This means that no matter how much preparation, no matter how many maps are in use, no matter how important a detail is on a character write-up, it all can disappear in the instant that play invalidates it. This also means that anything, and I mean truly anything, can be invented the second before it is spoken. In ways, this invalidates the traditional concept of preparation. What it doesn’t do is say that improvisation is the only possible way to play, just that preparation needs to take this plasticity into account.

The biggest problem that comes up when using a SIS focus for role-playing game design is dealing with what to do when individual people begin to believe that they can or should ‘own’ the SIS. Even when this is reduced to only having certain goals for what everyone else takes away from the SIS, it is still highly problematic. I can’t really say anything about these kinds of problems as I’ve been learning more about what SIS theory in conversations with my peers. (Join now! Just add a comment below.) So most of this is new to me (even though I unconsciously ‘knew’ it before).

Fang Langford

Inspire the Unplanned
For those of you who think this sounds like ‘plan the unplanned’, have I got a deal for you! If you keep in mind a few basic ingredients, and your games will be smoother, looser and more driven by what the player personae do. It really breaks down to a few elements: the Hypethral¹ Platform, the game’s substance and its motif (and, well…maybe a running gag or two).

Hypethral Platform

This is basically where the fun’s at. It’s the unwritten, unlimited part of play. It’s hard to see at first, because few games express what it is explicitly (and because there are few to no guidelines covering it), but you can find it if you know how to look. Read the game through and listen for what it expects you to be playing; look for the gist of play. Reflect on the mechanics you also read, except look for what they don’t quite cover. There’s your basic platform! For example, if the game gives a lot of combat rules, you have to expect a lot of combat, but does it give rules for who the good guys and who the bad guys are? If every character described seems shady, then you can bet that a large part of the platform is about these shades of grey.

This platform is where you should pull your intriguing bits out of; it’s where you confront the players, rather than the characters. (House rules can be easily used to change where this is in an existing game.) This is the meat of the game and the best thing you can do is put the players right at a crossroads and force them to make (painful) decisions, thus especially ‘meaningful’ decisions. And you’ll have no rules that cover it.

Sometimes it’s quite hard to figure this one out, so don’t worry if you can’t ‘get it’ on the first try. You might try imagining climactic scenes; now ask yourself, what was decided that made it cool? I don’t mean, ‘who won’; I mean what did the player have to do to make whatever the rules said (he won) into teh awesome? Y’know, it wasn’t Luke overcoming Vader; it was the son versus the father (or in other words, the platform was about Jedi succession – you know Jedi vs. Jedi?). There aren’t any rules in any of the Star Wars games regarding how to handle the Jedi hierarchy, yet everyone wants to play one. Thus, no rules but it is focused on, so that is your platform. (Talk about giving Luke’s player a tough decision, good vs. father.)

Did You See It?

Remember when you read the game for the gist of it? The ‘substance’ I mentioned, the second-most important thing to know in order to gamemaster, is the way things get done in the game. All the things the rules and mechanics talk about are where this is at. Lotsa combat? You’re running an action / adventure game. Detailed class rules? You run the clash between classes². Exhaustive powers lists? Players will have to solve their problems with great force!

Yet there’s more to it than that. Consider what all the rules cover in terms of the overall game; This is the ‘how’ in what gets done. Cyberpunk is all about guns and computers; if you need something done, you will use guns and computers to do it. Chassis & Crossbows has lots of car-to-car combat rules and guess what? If you want something, you jump in your car and go get it (but expect trouble along the way). The way your game will work is players solving the problems you pulled off the hypethral platform using the substance of the rules given. When you stray from that, you’re on your own, vaguely playing the game you bought. (But, just like house rules, you can definitely have fun with that too!)

Forget Everything I Just Said

Doesn’t that just drive you crazy when you hear that? Well, in a way, it’s true. You see, all of the above should grow to be completely unconscious habit or ritual on your part. If you find that you are frequently thinking about the platform for material or the substance for the ‘feel’ of the game, you’re still running like a brand new gamemaster. I know; we are all new two or three times. Once you get it down, the knack of confronting the players on the platform and drowning everything in the evocative substance ‘river’, then the real ‘art’ of gamemastering begins. (And, of course, on a bad day, you’ll still know what to do too.)

As this sophisticated of gamemaster, you begin communicating with the players on multiple levels. You get feedback not just by how cool they think things are, but also by how much they enjoy being put ‘on the spot’. You will learn to tell them what to pay attention to, not by you shoving it in their faces, but by your wrapping it in the motif. They will ‘get’ that when something is expressed deeply in the motif of the game, it’s significant; when something is expressed generically, they will learn to avoid it without thinking.

What the motif does is give you the recipe for making anything in play seem more stylish. Running a personal discussion in cyberpunk? Rather than face-to-face, it’s more in-genre if it takes place over VOIP or virtual reality with the attendant worry of the call being tapped. How well you attend the genre this way is up to you (right after being the choice of the players) and it’s very flexible. The biggest strength of tabletop gaming is that it’s all about the interactions between people. The way you differentiate between each game is how present the genre is.

This is not a technique for leading the players around by the nose; that’s just bad gamemastering. The motif lets you focus on the important elements of the scene in play in a genre-compelling way. Hmm…let me put it backwards, you’ll understand it better that way. When the players are chugging along and just happen to be grabbing every target steeped in motif, won’t their play be so much more about what makes this game cool? That’s why you lay it on when it’s important; it’s not to ‘tell’ players where to go. Think of it as a way to save effort working the game for them; if you motif everything, worthwhile or not, won’t it be a lot more work for nothing?

Now, because it comes from strutting the game’s stuff, there is another use for motif elements; they can set the mood or tension of a scene. Try it sometime; use the games motif to describe a thing or happening in your game, but choose your language in dark and rundown tones. This would be how you describe tech mods in cyberpunk in a back alley; you know, contrasting the polished chrome against the ancient, dirt-encrusted street, really sets the tone, doesn’t it? Now take things ‘upstairs’; express how ‘at home’ the tech mods look with all the apple-mac architecture and white surfaces of the upper class levels far about the streets of shanty town. Completely different tenor, yet describing the same thing steeped in specific motif. Not bad, huh?

Of course, there are also things you run that don’t matter, yet are steeped in motif. I tend to call these running gags. For example, if you have a trio of elementary-school-aged super-heroines; a good Running Gag would be ‘kid issues’ (like going to the doctor or taking baths). You can overtly make every session (or two) appear to be built around one of these running gags, but make sure you keep it mostly superficial (or the running gags will take over the motif changing the timbre of the game). There is nothing that says that ‘kid issues’ couldn’t be the hypethral platform, nor is there anything that says you should even have a running gag. Just sayin’.

All that should be pretty inspirational, right? Right?

Fang Langford

p.s. You can always take things to a higher metaphorical level than the hypethral platform. For example, in a superhero game, sure it’s about the struggle of good versus evil (and from the above, you may realize ‘the right thing’ and ‘personal sacrifice’ are high on the platform), but taken metaphorically, it becomes the conflict between good and evil within the self. While werewolves are a metaphor for the struggle between the conscience and the baser urges, it’s actually the superheroes that do a better job filling out the neo-Freudian pattern. The hero (like spider-powered guy) is the super-ego; the villain (like Octopus MD – eight legs, college grad, tech dependant – these guys could be twins!) is the id; and the secret identity (photo copy-boy) is then the ego, struggling to live up to everyone’s ideal of his super persona and to contain his personal villain (ever notice how personal all the villains are? Did penguin-guy ever go after the red/blue, super boy scout?), all while trying to maintain the semblance of a ‘real life’.

p.p.s. Some of you might be wondering how ‘story’ fits into all of this. If you want to run a game with an overriding theme, make that the thing behind all the elements on the hypethral platform; when you pull something off there, think about how it relates to your ‘story’ theme to orient how you drop it into play. If you want to run a ‘story-based’ game with an ascending tension ladder, culminating in a climax, use how you set up things in the motif to be suggestive of tension level; for the climax, simply keep an eye on what the players expect to be the final confrontation and then don’t disappoint them.

¹ Not that important of a word; it roughly means ‘the sky is the limit’.

² Prestige, interdependence and niche protection are all about class war.

Hi! I thought I’d start off my gamemaster tips with a few simple, but central, ideas.

Pacing, Pacing, Pacing
I’ve given this advice for years without complaint. This has got to be the most important thing a gamemaster does. In fact, by my experience, if you have players who’ll ‘do their own thing’, this is actually all you need to do (that and react to whatever the players throw at you.) There are two main reasons I put this at the top of my list. First of all, as players, the participants in your game keep rather close watch over their possessions (character, spotlight, niche, et cetera); they usually have problems with the conflict of interests (spotlight time vs. sharing). Worse, whether they know it or not, by this issue alone will they judge you (and rather harshly).

What do you do? I’m glad you asked!

Cut to the Chase
Dropping the players into the milieu and letting them figure things out on their own is usually a big waste of time, their time. What you want to do is cut out the fat, right up front. In fact, you should cut it so closely that you leave the beginning bleeding slightly. That means beginning with a player’s choice (player choice must always seem to have the biggest effect on play). For example, let’s say one of the players wants to use his streetwise roll to research something the players are on about. Do you a) run several street-side encounters checking each for info rolls (including running the failures), b) roll the dice and just tell them something (truth based on the die roll) or c) start the scene with them in the back room of a dive being browbeat by three heavies and a cardsharp who want to know how much the player knows and wants to use a little excessive force to remind them to stop asking too many questions?

I thought so.

To do this, you have to always imagine the worst. What’s the worst that can happen? Next you turn that into a complication on whatever the player(s) wants. How would that really stop them? (And not just a dead end; never, ever, use a ‘dead end’; use a complication.) Now, consider how well the player succeeded in their die roll; that’s right, imagine the worst and think about how the character would pull it out in the end (at that success rating). How well did they roll? Now start the scene at that exact point. Do they trick the supporting characters or how do they get out of it? (Leave the ‘how” up to them and just make them think on their feet.) That is how you ‘cut to the chase’ (sometimes literally).

Fill the ‘Gutters’ with Blood
Everyone knows there’s no more powerful pacing killer than a droning completist description. We also know that the imagination is a wonderful thing, a wonderful, horrible, terrifying thing. (Misuse it every chance you get! What else are gamemasters for?) In comics, the artist tells you a story; but unlike all other media, he often tells it to you with the parts you cannot see. For example, panel one: an image of a madman chasing a panicked victim with an axe. Panel two: a nightscape punctuated by a blood-curdling scream. Where did the axe fall? Did you see that what happened? No. But you ‘see’ it in your imagination. Like Scott McCloud would put it, you conspire with the killer where to plant the axe; you are as guilty of the murder as he is. This is referred to as filling the ‘gutters’ with blood. (The gutter is that blank space between comic panels.)

The same sort of thing happens just as well in gamemastering. If you describe the chase scene passing before the players’ characters’ eyes and then jump to a poetic description of the scream from ‘out of sight’, the players imaginations will go into overdrive. Even if you never describe the scene of the crime (and I strongly advise you not to, directly) they will have a very vivid picture of what happened in their minds. (If they go to where it happened, you won’t need to describe it; just describe the gut reaction the characters would have and their imaginations will do the rest.) So it goes; the best descriptions ever given by the gamemaster are made up of the things they don’t describe. (If you still need help with this one, shoot me an email or comment below.)

When All Else Fails, Run an Action Scene
What do you do when the players seem do everything they can to make things slow and boring (especially to the other players)? Your first line of defense: short circuit what they’re doing. For example, if they want to search, have them make just one roll for the whole room. Another example, if they want a survey of the haunted keep, ask them how they want the keep to be (a quick pass-fail decision later, it’s over). Second line of defense: close the scene and ‘cut to the chase’ for the next one. And if those aren’t workable, use the ultimate solution: turn it into an action scene!

Every role-playing game setting has what I would call, a ‘dynamic’ background¹. This means there’s always ‘something going on’ in the milieu. The reason this is important is it will be the single greatest source of action in your game. Are the players engaged in dull dialogue? Where did those ring-wraiths come from? Players musing over the ruins of a mall? When did those hunter/killer droids notice us? Players arguing about rebuilding a shotgun? When did those zombies break in that basement window?

Jumping to the action without closing the scene is the most effective (if not most clumsy) ways of salvaging both tension and pacing. As I’ll get into in a later tips article, to make play continuously engaging, you will have to constantly increase the tension level. (In other words, if tension stays the same, the players will become inured to it; if it falls, you’ve walked right into a disappointing anti-climax and are begging the players to go do something else.)

One of the toughest things to remember is that not all action is physical. I mean, sure a gunfight or a chase will definitely get their attention, but that isn’t all there is. Other direct forms include things like a romantic tiff, nearly getting noticed being up to something, familial confrontations or employment endangerments. Indirect methods offer even more alternatives; you can dial up the tension by reminding them of, or creating, a time limit (the classic race against time!), exposing a lucky break, revealing a new ‘wanted’ status, et cetera. The point is, if anyone looks bored, it’s time to kick it up a notch!

Fade to Black
Remember why I laid out how to ‘cut to the chase’? Perhaps the next most important aspect of scenes after how you start them is when you end them. Like I said before, since the players are paying more attention to ‘their stuff’, they can’t make the best choices on beginning or ending a scene. One thing I can guarantee is that if you trim all your scenes down to just the meat of teh awesome, your players will see nothing but how great of a gamemaster you are. The more blood you spill cutting short the ending of a scene the more frenzied your players will be for more (as if you ran a cliffhanger, if you didn’t).

Would you rather a) start a new scene only when it looks like no one has any ideas left for the current one; b) let the players poke around afterwards, looting the mooks and stealing everything not nailed down (talk about a buzz-kill) or c) end the scene just as the last body falls, with brass still tinkling on the ground, cross-fading to the next scene of player awesomeness?

I already know your answer to that one.

What about all those piddly details? Hey, it’s the players’ game; assume the best for them. If they ask for retroactive details, let them have them; it can’t harm what you’ve got cooking and might spice things up! If they keep it verisimilar or in-character-likely, no harm, no foul.

Here’s how it really works: as play progresses, you’ll be keeping track of what’s been done per the overall game; when you sense that something significant or memorable has happened, you start looking for an exit. Does this move the game, if not forward, in some significant direction? Look at everything past this point for the coolest thing to happen in this scene. Does this (what is happening right now) bring down teh awesome? And don’t forget, you can always make anything they do have ‘more awesomeness’ with your descriptions. Can I amplify this in some sneaky way?

Life Gets Complicated
The most important ingredient of any good scene is its complications; the scene has to resolve, start or escalate some complication that affects the game and the players. It doesn’t even have to be one that the players were after or one you have planned; as long as the complication goes away, rises up in their way or morphs into something worse, everything is good.

Complications are the language all gamemasters mush learn to speak, at least to themselves. The resolution of a complication must lead to one of three things; to a complication already ‘in play’, to an interruption or to a new one. Use common sense to make the connections. Well, on second thought, use stupid sense; make sure the connection is so obvious that only an idiot would miss it. (No matter what you do, the players will probably expect a trick; therefore you never need use one. But always try to avoid this sensation unless it increases tension.)

No doubt the players will succeed or fail at what they attempt, regardless of how that affects the complication. If they fail, it has to lead to another try, a different try or simply the response you could expect from the adversary². In their winning, you must reflect a pronounced affect on the world, usually the response you could expect for someone messing with the status quo. Finally, if it turns out a pyrrhic victory, the best thing you can do is create mystery and intrigue³ based on it.

Back to the Ending
In brief, here’s how you (know how to) end a scene: wait until something ‘happens’, find teh awesome and cut there. One of the best side effects is that it will leave them talking about the scene while you figure out how to ‘cut to the chase’ with the next one. Never forget to assume the best for anything regarding the players that doesn’t get played out.

I’d like to leave you with this; all this underscores something I’ll get to in another article: only keep track the complications!

Fang Langford

¹ I’ll discuss this in a later tips article.

² ‘He’ is an important complication thingie; I’ll definitely detail it in another article.

³ Another, crucial, gamemaster technique that I plan to devote an entire article to.