Ladino's Rogue Thoughts

Game Structures and the Lack Thereof, Part 1

Intro: an empirical experience in that lacking game structures can be bad

Here’s a real life example of what can happen when a group doesn’t have a scenario structure to deal with a complex fictional situation. I once played in a D&D game where our characters inadvertently caused a tsunami that destroyed a significant portion of a port town. We were on a ship and landed close to the town right in the aftermath of the wave – in that situation, we, as players, quickly decided among ourselves that we should go to the town right away and try to do some search-and-rescue operations to save as many townsfolk as we could.

The GM, however, pretty much vetoed this decision and said we should just go to our headquarters instead, stating that there was nothing we could really do to help.

Now, there are a lot of reasons he decided to do this bit of very blatant railroading, but one of them is, undoubtedly, that he simply had no structure to resolve our intent to save people in the town. He had no tools to decide what actions we could attempt, how successful our efforts could be, what risks we might face doing this, what the consequences of this decision might be – so he simply cut that interaction off to not have to deal with it. As another blogger put it: “the availability of game structures subconsciously shapes the way we play the game”. Implicit in that assertion is the following one, which I’ll say explicitly: the unavailability of game structures also shapes the way we play.

The GM’s reaction of shutting us down is an extreme example of the game floundering due to the lack of a structure for this situation. But it is worth noting that this isn’t just a failure of the GM: we as players also didn’t have a structure to know what actions we could or should propose to play out the search and rescue scenario.

Some of the players were thinking in terms of what skills or attributes in our character sheets might be used to abstract several hours worth of generic rescue operations, not bothering with what the specifics might entail. Others were proposing that X character might be good at digging people out of rubble, while Y character should be healing injuries. One was even a trained fireman in real life, so he was thinking in terms of setting up logistics and triage centers – expecting to be able to leverage his real-life knowledge to the game unconstrained from any mechanics. We all knew the overall purpose we wanted to tackle (rescue people), but had different ideas about if and how we should break that intent apart into smaller action chunks, and what those chunks should be.

No structure for dealing with this meant no guidance on how much fictional time our proposed actions should cover, or on how to reconcile and feed different kinds of proposed actions into each other and keep track of their impact on the overall situation. Even if the GM hadn’t steered us away from this impromptu scenario, we still would have needed to come to a consensus on the table for how to deal with the scenario. This wouldn’t necessarily have been a bad thing, and it wouldn’t necessarily lead to a poor game experience (though it could, if we couldn’t come to an agreement, or if we came to an agreement that was a compromise that left everyone dissatisfied).

But if we already had a structure in place – a defined way to deal with this kind of fictional scenario – we would at least have been on the same page from the start. (Of course, any given structure might not fit our needs for the scenario, in which case following it blindly might make the session worse than exploring the situation without structure would – bad game structures are a thing, after all).

So, today, let’s focus a bit on what we do when we don’t have a structure to use for a given scenario.

Do we even need game structures?

We should recognize, first of all, that very often – most of the time, perhaps – we don’t bother with structures to play RPGs. It is possible, perhaps even desirable, to just let the conversation follow the immediate fiction and the fiction follow the immediate conversation when playing the game, with no overarching model of the situation dictating how we resolve it.

If we’re seriously considering what game structures are in RPGs, then, we have to consider what their value is when not having them at all is a viable alternative. Valinard’s Tower offers an excellent answer to this question:

In my previous post I talked about nested loops giving structure to the game, creating a series of interrelated contexts within which the players' decisions have meaning and consequences.
[...]
Structure makes the game easier to run and more fun to play. It gives the players more understanding, and therefore more control over the world. [Structure vs Resolution — Valinard's Tower]

That is, having a model (or, in Valinard’s understanding, a series of connected gameplay loops) made to describe and run a particular situation often makes it easier to give all players (GM included, in my view) more agency in engaging with them. Specifically, structure provides everyone with a shared understanding and a set of expectations on what is most relevant to adjudicate a given situation and how the PCs’ actions are likely to affect it.

Knowing from the outset the key factors about a fictional circumstance also helps everyone keep them in mind as it dynamically evolves and changes during play. This makes it less likely that the table will forget about an important background element, something that is easy to do in the middle of an extended and excited conversation. A structure also creates a shared vocabulary that makes communication flow more smoothly and defines what are reasonable expectations in the moment to moment decisions. It also helps establish more consistent (even if still randomly determined or individually adjudicated) outcomes to similar situations, allowing players to better anticipate what the consequences of their choices are likely going to be.

For instance, breaking up the chaos of combat into turns makes it more manageable, and makes it clearer for everyone how much each participant can accomplish at a time. Writing down aspects of the dungeon in advance lets the GM run it more impartially, holding themself to what’s written down to avoid making things easier or harder on the players on the fly depending on their mood.

These benefits may not manifest equally, or at all, for every style of play, but the fact that they unequivocally exist for some groups suffices to establish that structures can improve the quality of a game beyond what could be achieved only through the “disorganized”, baseline patterns of conversation the group defaults to when running the game.

The question, then, becomes: “Which situations benefit most from having structures?”

Which scenarios do we want structures for?

As we’ve noted, we are, very often, able to play the game without resorting to any structure – that is to say, the circumstances we are dealing with in the game don’t seem to require any special consideration for running them. This is particularly true for situations that are very immediate or limited in their scope, risk, time and/or consequences.

Trying to climb over a fence generally isn’t a particularly involved process that requires keeping track of an evolving, persistent situation, for instance, so we expect a resolution mechanic or GM adjudication to easily cover all of the relevant factors. Trying to climb a mountain, on the other hand, is very much complex enough to benefit from a structure, since now it might be interesting to offer the players more decision points on how to accomplish this task, while tracking resources like food, rope, pythons, fatigue, psychological persistence, etc., or changing circumstances like the weather, the rarifying air, available paths, etc.

Note that we’re not saying that every complex scenario requires a structure. Depending on what the game’s focus is, a group might very reasonably decide to not have any structure for the “long climb” scenario, resolving it in much the same way they would a shorter one up a fence. The genre and affordances given to the PCs in the fiction also influence this decision: climbing a mountain is trivial for Supergirl, since she can simply fly to the top - no need for a structure there.

The overall point, though, is that a complex scenario – i.e. one that will demand more time, investment, focus and compounding effort for the involved characters to overcome – more easily invites a structure, since it benefits from having bespoke tools, techniques and procedures available to resolve it.

Dealing with structureless scenarios

When no-one feels like the fictional situation is sufficiently involved to require the extra oomph that a structure provides, the play conversation just proceeds as is usual for the table – this state of affairs isn’t what we’re talking about today.

When a scenario comes up that does seem like it could benefit from a structure, but the table or the system doesn’t have one that fits it, though, that’s when this weird uncertainty around how to resolve the situation comes up. This is what I’m identifying as a “structureless scenario” for the purposes of this discussion, and it is the different possible solutions to it I want to get to.

So I’ll present next a (most certainly non-exhaustive) list of possible ways a group can react when facing a structureless scenario. I’ll illustrate each one with responses to a hypothetical example, where the players are discussing a plan to enact a smear campaign against a local Baron in a town by spreading gossip around the taverns – certainly a complex scenario that could benefit from a structure that tracks evolving public opinion, or lists what resources the Baron has available to respond to it, etc.

Here’s are some possible GM responses to this situation:

“We aren’t going to play through a bunch of gossiping around for hours, are we? Let’s think of something else…”

“Ok, uhh… roll three Etiquette checks to see how it goes” or

"Let's make two rolls, where you succeed if you roll a 4 or higher. One roll to determine if people believe you or not, the other one for whether or not the Baron learns about your plan. You start with a d4 for each roll, but you can try to upgrade the each die to a d6 or better if you tell me what you're doing to improve your odds. Sound good?"

“Ok, you try to spread the rumors, but no one in this town really trusts you, so your words fall on deaf ears” or “The townsfolk quickly take to your made up stories, spreading them around, and in a couple of days there’s talk of rebellion”

“So you’re going around town spreading rumors; but shortly after you’ve entered the third tavern to do that, a bunch of the Baron’s soldiers corner you in it, coming at you with weapons drawn! Roll initiative!”

“Well, to do that, you need to gain the trust of the locals, avoid the attention of the Baron’s guards and spies, and maybe produce some false evidence to convince people”

“So you go to this tavern to start spreading the rumors… [an entire scene plays out, with perhaps a couple of game mechanics interspersed in the middle]. Alright, that went reasonably well - let’s say you do about the same thing in the next few taverns, so some of the Baron’s men will be defecting in the coming days.”

“Ok, so now you’ve hit enough of the social gathering spaces in town: some people believed you and are planning to protest in front of the Baron’s manor tomorrow.”;

GM: “The barkeep isn’t really buying your story, and is giving you a nasty look.”;
Player “I stab him!”;
GM: "[sighs] You stab him dead. The entire town turns against you, and you're now wanted for murder."

GM: “Ok, as you leave the tavern, you hear some people in there still discussing the rumors you spread in whispers. Where are you going next?”
Player: “Y’know, we should really investigate that crypt just outside the Baron’s manor, right?”
Other Players: “Yeah, I bet we can find a way to sneak into his manor from there!”

Despite the way it might come off as I’m writing down these options, I don’t really mean to make any one seem better or worse than any other. You might certainly look at these possibilities and quickly find that you have favorites, or ones you find completely baffling and abhorrent. But they all could be used in a game for good reason. (Even the ones that effectively just shut down the plan the players have come up with might be a fair choice if the players themselves are uninterested in actually playing out the intended action in detail.)

I want to talk about how we can maybe break down all of these different methods for dealing with a structureless scenario into a smaller, more manageable set of core techniques being used, so we can meaningfully discuss them. But this post is already plenty long and there’s much more to follow, so let’s take a break here and continue later in part 2.

#structure #theory #tools