Ladino's Rogue Thoughts

Archetypal Situations as a GM Exercise

Scipio202 posted this interesting idea about having GMing exercises as something we might want to engage with as a way of honing our game-running skills. I myself had been thinking about something akin to this, an idea related to my current obsession interest in scenario structures as a framework for presenting interesting decision points to players.

So, here is my suggestion for a GM Exercise.

You come up with an archetypal situation that may or may not happen normally in your games, and you take some time to think on how you'd run that situation.

You ask yourself broadly “How would me and my table deal with this situation?”

You drill down on that question by posing several other questions:

You’d also ask more questions that are specific to the situation that is being examined. It is a lot of questions - if you've got the time and inclination, you can give thoughtful answer to every one in turn. If you're short on time, just let your mind race through a few possible answers for each one. The most important question is the first one: is this situation something you might want to see happen in your games? If not, you now know not to feature it, and you can pretty much skip the rest of the exercise for that situation.

This will make more sense if we have an example, so let’s try it right now, how about it?

GM Exercise: Speeches at the Senate

Here’s the situation:

Two competing (groups of) speakers plead before a Senate, each urging the senators to vote for one of two opposing actions in response to a crisis.

Now we start asking ourselves some questions:

Here's my answers to this exercise

The game I'm most likely to run in the near future is Blades in the Dark (classic, not '68), so let's use that as the basis.

Is this an interesting situation for Blades? Yeah, I certainly think so - I can easily envision a crew trying to swing a vote in favor of some action that will be profitable for them! But the PC's in Blades aren't likely going to be the senators - or whatever the Duskwall equivalent ends up being. Depending on how they're positioned, they might be able to make their argument to a "senate" directly, but most likely they'd have to be operating from behind the curtains. It'd probably be easy to get the PCs involved in such a situation, too - giving them the news about the upcoming vote and making obvious the ways it would impact their operations might be all it takes.

I'd need to establish the specifics of what the two opposing sides in the vote are to really decide what kinds of arguments would be more or less effective in the senate. But because Blades has a whole lot of factions and mechanics for dealing with them, I'd certainly pick two or three to have their interests represented in the senate. In my reading of Duskwall, no one is going to be seriously trying to advance "public interests" or anything like it (though they might smokescreen their actual interests behind such an argument), so the effectiveness of any attempt at persuasion hinges on being convincingly in each individual voter's best interest. Of course, intimidation, blackmail, bribery, seduction or magical means of bending people's wills are expected and probably very effective tools in the players arsenal as well - I'd probably give them a couple hooks for those avenues, but mostly trust them to find their own.

Setting up a situation where players know of 5 or so critical "swing voters", where they need to convince 3 or more to have things go their way, seems like a good way to go. The specifics of how voting is done wouldn't be a point of consideration for me, unless players started talking about cheating the procedure instead of having to play the social game of convincing senators. The only detail worth of note I'd try to establish is how long the PCs have to maneuver before the vote is held - that would be crucial piece of information for the players to know what kinds of social engineering plans are feasible or not.

That’s the exercise. Or one version of it. Despite the situations being archetypal, we can come up with an infinity of them. They can have more detail or less detail, be more or less specific. We can talk about a generic “race” situation, or we can talk about a “cross-country race” or an “illegal race through busy streets”.

Observations on this exercise

Some observations on how I see this tool being best used:

First and foremost - I believe the exercise will be at its most useful if it is employed contextually, i.e. you should consider whether to and how to run a situation in the context of a specific campaign/session/game you intend to run. Doesn’t mean you can’t use it in a generic, abstract way - I myself, being quite deprived of current games, don’t have much context to apply them to right now - but if you’ve already got a setting, a system, a campaign and specific players and their characters in mind, it is all the more easy to decide whether any given situation is worth considering, and in what terms.

That said, the focus of this exercise should be on archetypal situations that aren’t already extensively covered by the core gameplay loops of the systems (and houserules) we typically run, since those are more likely to have well-established answers already. Like so many of the GMing Exercises Scipio202 collated, the point also wouldn’t be to find the answer but to practice finding multiple answers to the question. It is, after all, an exercise, not an investigation: the point is to practice, not to discover.

To be more specific, the point of the exercise, in my mind, would be twofold:

  1. The point is to expand our thinking on what kinds of situations we can cover during our games;
  2. The point is to evaluate what kinds of situations we want to feature as part of our games.

If you always like running the same kind of game, maybe you’ll find you have a strong preference on how to handle an archetypal situation in general. But still it is important to recognize that, if you ever decide to run a different kind of game, your answer on how to handle a specific situation might change. Maybe you have an entire procedural mini-game you like to run to resolve attempts at inciting rebellions in your pseudo-medieval-fantasy dungeoncrawler of choice, but would it really transplant neatly to a cyberpunk game, or a superhero game? The answer might be yes, but it is certainly not trivially yes, so don’t take the fact that you did the exercise once for the “inciting rebellions” archetypal situation as meaning you’ve solved “inciting rebellions” in RPGs.

I mentioned that it is my thinking around scenario structures that made me think of this possible GM exercise, but it is not a given that finding or creating a structure is the correct solution to explore the situation with. It might be that often the best thing to do with a given situation is to not have it in our games at all: it might not fit the genres we're going for, it might be too difficult to organically put the players in that situation, etc.

I also think this can be more than a GM exercise, and have additional applications. For instance, you can interrogate these archetypal situations from the perspective of a game system - one you are making or picking to run a game with. You look at the situation and the system and ask what tools the system is or isn’t giving you to deal with it, what affordances it is or isn’t giving player characters to deal with it, whether the setting seems to assume such a thing might happen at all or not. You might also interrogate these situations from the perspective of “adventure design” - again, either an existing one or one you’re making from scratch. Does it involve a given archetypal situation? If so, how does it expect the GM to run it, and the players to engage with it?

From here, we should build a comprehensive list of archetypal situations to have as a basis for more specific instances of this exercise. Dwiz had this great list of situations on his post on Skill Challenges (which I’ve fortunately copied down for nerdy RPG blogging reasons):

These are all a great starting point for this “archetypal situations” exercise. Maybe I will practice doing some short blog posts with more archetypal situations and the questions I think they raise over the coming week? Time will tell.

For now, that’s all I have: a GM exercise format, with an example you might want to practice with, if you feel like it.

#GM exercise #prep #tools