Ladino's Rogue Thoughts

Game Structures and the Lack Thereof, Part 2

Last time, I briefly covered what it means to come up against a structureless scenario, which situations actually count as being ‘structureless’ for this discussion and what can go wrong when we don’t have a way of dealing with them. I finished up by posting a (non-exhaustive) list of possible things a GM and their table might do when faced with that proposition. I’ll present the list again here for convenience (this time without the examples).

the GM decides that they’ve seen enough to rule on how successful the PCs were

one of the PCs does something that completely derails the intended action

everyone gets bored or confused and diverts away to doing something else anyway

Different as all these options may seem, I posit that some are more alike than others, and that by bundling certain responses together, we’ll get a little "taxonomy" (heavy quote marks here) of the main strategies people can use to deal with structureless scenarios. Let’s see what all of these different options boil down to when we abstract them a little bit and look at them through the lens of scenario structures.

Option 1 - Divert the fiction away from the scenario

Sometimes it might be easier to just not deal with the scenario at all. This is where the table agrees to move (or the GM railroads the players) away from the structureless scenario.

It is certainly possible for players (GM included) to be more excited about the idea of a thing than the actual doing of it. If it becomes apparent that the table would rather be doing something else when people start actually thinking about the nitty-gritty of the situation, or that the consequences of the scenario will most likely be unsatisfying for the table as whole, it is absolutely fair for people to agree that it is best to tackle things differently and not get mired in fictional minutia no one wants to deal with. Or, just as likely, one or more players who aren’t deeply engaged with the scenario might find a way to break the complex situation and forcibly push the game towards something else (which may or may not be a problem behavior – imagine the possibility that the whole table wanted to cut past the scenario for better pacing).

Also of note here: it has to be fine for a GM to fess up to the fact that they have no idea how to handle a thing and just ask the players to change direction towards something they’re more comfortable running. It’s definitely not ideal, and I think we all hope to be GMs who can bring any situation to life – but it has to be okay for GMs to fall short of any imagined ideal standard of play. And really, GMs should be encouraged to be open about it and be allowed to run the game to the limits of their capacity or their preferences.

I really can’t blame my former GM for skipping the search-and-rescue scenario I described in part 1: I, too, don’t know enough about how to establish a triage center after a natural catastrophe in order to adjudicate that shit complexly. So if it were just up to me to define the conditions of that test, the solution would be either “handwave it” or “ask players to please do something else”!

Of course, this option can feel very meta-gamey or artificial or just plain unsatisfying, and it curtails a one of the most touted strengths of RPGs as a medium: saying that “you can do anything in an TTRPG” will come across as disingenuous if later you have to wall players away from doing certain things. So we strive be able to follow the fiction we’re building together wherever it leads and have the place we end up in always be equipped with interesting decisions to make. Not easy to do, but there are ways to try to handle that!

Option 2 - Put the players in a familiar structure

We see that one of the options GMs have when dealing with a lack of structure is to just find a way to mix in a familiar structure to the scenario.

For instance: maybe you don’t know how to structure a search-and-rescue operation, but if you adjust the situation such that there is a big monster that is endangering any would-be rescuers, you can pivot the scenario so that overcoming a combat structure against the beast feels like a meaningful resolution to the scenario itself. Which is to say, a structure that the system is well-tailored to deal with is introduced as a means of padding, substituting or resolving the structureless scenario. Considered in the abstract, this might seem like a strange way of dealing with it, but there is a certain kind of logic behind letting the best supported activity in the game take center stage even when you wouldn’t normally expect it to.

Another option: maybe you don’t know how to structure a smear campaign against a public figure, but your system of choice has this handy little mechanical ‘button’ called “Deception”, so you have players roll that and decide what happens based on your best interpretation of the numbers the dice spit out. This is effectively eliding what could be a more involved scenario – one that hypothetically could have offered several decision points and opportunities for tactical thinking for the players – behind a general resolution mechanic.

Taken together, the core of these options is finding ways to bend or fastforward through the structureless scenario to make it fit the table’s (or system’s) normal gaming rhythm and common practices.

This can be a good and effective solution when the scenario being approached isn’t really what anyone showed up to play for. If no-one really wants to engage in a complex “minigame” of skewing public opinion, but rather just want the effects of the smear campaign to happen without having to worry about the whole logistics of it, then this option works wonders! It lets the table have the scenario be part of the narrative without interfering too much in the gameplay loop people are actually there for.

The drawback, of course, is that it flattens the scenario to fit the expected experience, effectively removing the aspects that make it unique, unusual or endowed with verissimilitude. This might be a significant problem if (some of) the players were excited to really get into the fictional situation that was presented, if they had specific strategies or cool moves they wanted to try that hinged on exploring the situation in detail, or even if they just wanted to frame scenes within that scenario as an opportunity to inhabit their character in that situation.

Option 3 - Improvise through the scenario

This is the option I’m most interested in discussing: the table can find a way to run a complex scenario even without a specific recognizable structure for it. This is exemplified in my list in options such as “coming up with obstacles that need to be overcome in order to succeed” and “roleplaying one or more scenes to show how the players go about the effort”.

It is significant that, in these instances, the table isn’t trying to move away, cut short or circumvent the complexity of the scenario. They’re trying to keep track of it just on the basis of their best understanding (in intent, at least, since it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of the whole of the situation when you’re honing in on the specifics). But regardless, the scenario gets to be itself, not a broad abstraction that strips away all of the details and decisions that make it up, nor a hasty transition into something else more familiar.

Here’s the really juicy question for me, though: when we are improvising our way through structureless scenarios, are we really operating without any structure?

Like most everything we talk about when discussing intangibles such as structures, this will be a matter of how you conceptualize the existence and function of structures in the first place.

But I suggest that sometimes we deal with structureless scenarios effectively without structure, but sometimes our normal solutions for adjudicating complex scenarios on the fly are in fact a kind of structure! So let’s discuss two different ways of improvising a game through a structureless scenario.

Operating Without Structures

Yes, certainly there are times when we move through a structureless scenario without ever employing any structure for it. Imagine this way of handling the impromptu smear campaign scenario I've been using as an example:

The PCs go to a tavern to start spreading false rumors about the Baron. The GM obliges, cooks up a group of NPCs for them to talk to, they play out a scene of them coming up with ludicrous accusations.

In the middle of the scene, the GM has an NPC offhandedly agree with one of the things the players are coming up with, mentioning that the same thing happened to their cousin.

The players latch on to this, figuring that their accusations will be even easier to spread if it turns out they’re actually true.

The GM runs with it, and frames a scene of them talking to Mr. Cousin next, confirming some of the charges and adding other things.

The players succeed in talking Mr. Cousin into going with them to the next town over, to lodge a formal complaint against the Baron with the Order of the Bronze Scales, a faction they learned about a couple sessions ago.

The GM had never considered or planned for the Order to function as a judicial power, much less to have the authority to receive a complaint against the Baron, but why not have that actually be the case? They corroborate the players assumptions, adding a new truth to the fictional setting: the Order of the Bronze Scales are arbiters of justice who can launch investigations into the local nobility.

The PCs are now set to take Mr. Cousin to the next town to start a formal investigation, and the game has pivoted slightly to uncovering the actual crimes of the Baron - though this all still serves the interest of turning public opinion against him.

Nowhere in the middle of this series of events was the GM ever trying to make sense of the complex workings of a smear campaign, but they were never keeping the players from engaging with it either. The GM is updating their understanding of the public opinion about the Baron throughout all of these scenes, but only ever intuitively - so much so that they changed how people felt about the Baron not only in response to the players’ actions, but also to their own portrayal of the NPCs! They followed the improv wherever it seemed most interesting, opening up new avenues of engaging with the scenario, like having a previously established faction be capable of interfering in ways that hadn’t been considered by the GM at the start.

This, much like every other option mentioned so far, is an entirely reasonable way of handling the structureless scenario. But maybe, at some point, the world’s verisimilitude breaks for one player as they observe that the GM is ultimately just making shit up - which is strictly true, but the problem isn’t the making of shit up, but the lost suspension of disbelief. Somehow, in the midst of an entire game of making things up, this one sequence stands up like a sore thumb as more artificial than the rest. Maybe the GM is defaulting to same stock tropes in their improv, maybe they’re letting the players get away with too much by saying “yes” all the time… whatever it is, there’s something missing. A sense that there should be something a little more concrete for the players to struggle against… a little bit more structure, if you will.

Some of Our Improv is Structured, Though

One of the ways I commonly deal with a “structureless scenario” is to come up with a short list of immediate obstacles or objectives that need to be tackled to resolve it. It can be a bit hard to improvise these things on the fly at the table (and even harder to keep track of what I thought up if I end up forgetting to write it down, which happens a lot), but if I can muster it, the game usually snaps back into focus. If I picked good obstacles and tasks to put in front of the players, they should no longer be too uncertain about what they need to do next.

In a Blades’ one-shot I ran, the PCs were looking to get a first-class ticket to a train for a patron. They discovered who was the man in charge of issuing said tickets and, upon learning he was a regular at a particular casino, they came upon their plan: pose as debt-collectors from the gang that owned that particular gambling den and demand a forged ticket as a favor to “clear” his debt.

Great plan! But in Blades, for that to be the score (and it needed to be the score, since it would resolve the whole situation that was the premise of the one-shot), I wanted that exchange to be charged, tense and an opportunity for accumulating consequences and stress. So I have to find, in the middle of the session, the points of friction that will prevent me from just saying “Yeah, you talk him into giving you the tickets” with a single good action roll.

Some risks were fortunately baked into what the players were doing – if they got caught posing as members of a gang they don’t belong to in the middle of said gang’s territory, they’d be in a lotta trouble! But I still need the process of tricking the ticket-master to have some weight to it. Fortunately, I feel justified in ruling that a ticket-master in Doskvol isn’t going to be a push-over. I figure he’d be suspicious of their identities, given the fact they’re trying to collect the debt out of the casino. He’d also be wary of getting caught emitting a fraudulent ticket, since it could cost him his job. Finally, he’d always try to buy himself some extra time, saying he could pay the debt or deliver the ticket in a week.

So now I have this list of obstacles the PCs need to deal with to successfully intimidate the ticket-master:

It’s not much, but it was plenty enough to fill a simple score! And, to be honest, I don’t think I’d do anything much different than this even if I did have the time to prepare for this particular plan of theirs in advance.

So really, how are we to say that this “list of obstacles” approach here is not a scenario structure? It fills the same function and does so in about the same way: it gave me the tools needed to deliver a sequence of choices to the players that were sufficiently informed and contextually impactful (i.e. in compliance with that sweet ICI doctrine). I know that, while I'm playing this NPC, I need to be conveying this information to the players clearly, so they can understand what is keeping them from getting what they want and do something about it. While it is not quite as intentional and specific in its application as a proper scenario structure, the “list of obstacles” structure effectively allowed me to present the process of convincing a shrewd NPC into an involved challenge.

It bears saying that, as clean and considered as I may be making it seem in my account, this process of defining a structureless scenario through a short list of obstacles is in some ways more an instinct or habit I’ve formed in running the game rather than a fully conscious thought-process. In truth, some of the items on that list probably only became clear to me while we already deep in the roleplaying, and maybe I forgot to use some additional obstacles that occurred to me at the start of the score but slipped from my mind in the middle of it all. But the overall method of trying to keep track of a few specific problems that need addressing before the scenario is resolved remains as a relevant feature – crucially, it gives just enough consistency to the situation that I get to slip back into a more ‘neutral adjudicator’ GM-role. Armed with this list, I can stop thinking about how long and difficult I want the challenge to be, and instead focus on how effective the players' ideas would be in overcoming it.

The real crux of what I’m trying to point out here, though, is that this little technique can be deployed for all kinds of scenarios. Here’s what a list of tasks and obstacles could look like for the “smear campaign” scenario, for example:

Also, this “tasks and obstacles” format obviously isn’t the only way to go about quickly giving some structure to a structureless scenario. Blades in the Dark, in fact, suggests another tool for this purpose: clocks. One could just as easily set up a clock in place of a list of tasks and obstacles as a quick way of keeping tabs on the players’ progress through the scenario (though choosing one thing over the other leads to different experiences – a topic for another day).

This option and the one where we use some mechanic to resolve the scenario also blend into each other a bit. The more complex the mechanical framework being used to adjudicate the scenario, the more it works like a scenario structure, to the extent that it elides a bit less of the fiction and offers players more decision points on how to tackle the scenario. Consider Mindstormpress's Quick Stakes for Tense Situations framework, for instance - would you consider this a complex resolution mechanic, or a form of scenario structure? We can see that the difference between a single resolution mechanic and a full-blown tactical boardgame experience is one of scale, not of kind, after all.

So I think it is fair to consider some tools and techniques we reflexively employ to adjudicate structureless scenarios as generic scenario structures. Now it was the Alexandrian who originally identified this concept of generic scenario structure (that I know of), but he did so focusing on all of the limitations in their use. While I can agree with some of them, I also get the impression that a lot of his misgivings stem from the prevalence of D&D 4e’s use of Skill Challenges as the format du jour, and a more narrow view of what generic scenario structures are and what they can be.

I might write more about generic scenario structures someday – or at least provide some other examples of things that seem to qualify as such to me. But for today, I just wanted to propose that generic scenario structures can also come in the form of quick and intuitive solutions we as GMs sometimes develop to “pad out” structureless scenarios in order to make them more meaningful and complete in the table’s experience.

TL;DR

Most situations we play out in the fiction don’t really require a structure. But the more complex and difficult to track it is, the more using a structure for it becomes appropriate.

It happens that we sometimes stumble upon scenarios that we feel the need to have a structure for, but don’t. If that happens between sessions, we can just come up with a new structure for it. But when we need to deal with it mid-session, we as GMs have a few different options on what to do.

We can ask very nicely to pivot the game back towards fictional situations we are more comfortable running.

We can throw a more familiar structure into the mix, to either substitute for or elide the complex scenario completely.

We can just run the situation with no particular plan, doing our best to intuitively judge how the situation is progressing as we react to what the PCs are doing.

We can employ some handy and highly-abstractable tools and techniques that can effectively function as a simple structure, which are good enough to cover for it in a pinch. We can call these “generic scenario structures” if we want.

That’s it really. Did it really take me two gigantic posts just to say that? Oh well, next time I should hire an editor to cut out all the chaff in my writing (spoilers for the future: I won’t).

#structure #theory #tools