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December 11, 2003
Campaign Preparation
During one of my frequent delves into the wilds of RPG.net, I came across this thread by Ralph Mazza, which probably deserves a post to itself. However, I'm posting about this great nugget I found inside the thread. In 2001, Ron Edwards volunteered to demonstrate how he sets up for the first session of a Sorcerer campaign and documented the entire process in loving detail.
It's commonplace for an RPG to contain a section on how to GM, and they often include an example of play. Sometimes, they talk about how to prep an adventure. I don't think I've ever seen an actual example of how to prep a campaign, including character generation. Bonus points: this one is real people actually interacting, instead of a somewhat strained fictional version of a game.
The first post sets up the ground rules. The second post is character generation. The third post is where it starts to get really fun, as Ron provides his uncensored thoughts on the characters and his prep for the first game. Finally, the last post is possibilities for the first session.
Some interesting take-aways, for me: Ron's discussion of the purpose of the first session. It's trust-building, not plot-building. His decision to insert a point at which all the NPCs are likely to change their attitudes, as a tool to encourage PC interaction. Lots of really excellent discussion on scene-framing.
Is this sort of thing useful to others?
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Comments
Hell yeah. Those "Art-Deco Melodrama" threads are among the best pieces of game advice I've ever read anywhere from any source. They should almost be required reading for anyone who wants more player-driven campaigns - and also for anyone who thinks The Forge is all about theory without immediate, make-your-game-better, practical application.
The followup reading to those threads would be the frequent later threads in the Adept Press forum where people who haven't tried the techniques there raise all sorts of hypothetical pitfalls and objections to the method - fears of game balance, or not having enough to do, or it not being "fun" for the GM... Ron & Co's response is usually, in one form or another, "just try it and see what happens." Three times out of four, the original author comes back at the end of their thread to report that all those hypothetical problems melted away in actual play.
Posted by: Rob at Dec 11, 2003 9:19:08 AM
This was the comment I found most resonant.
And that sure illustrates something to me. Why are you concerning yourself with the CHARACTERS' reason to do anything? I can give a fat rat's ass for character motivations; those are a matter of player creativity and authorship. My task is to interest, even fascinate, the PLAYERS. Again and again, people keep repeating "have to hook the player and the character" (it's going on even now in another forum), and I keep smiling to myself and shaking my head slightly. Character motivations are the most debased, useless elements of play from a GM's perspective. Once the players are genuinely interested in ANYONE'S situation in play, then they will move to put their characters into some aspect of that situation.
I've never codified it to that extent, but that's always been my feeling as well; that as a GM it's my job to engage the player, not the character. Characters will, eventually, do as they're told if the player cares about what's going on.
Posted by: Patrick O'Duffy at Dec 11, 2003 3:53:33 PM
These threads were really useful to me in halping to clarify my thinking.
I've had Sorcerer for a while now, but I've always been a little thrown by the terminology Ron uses. Seeing it in actual use makes it clearer that the concepts are pretty similar to stuff I've been exposed to in improv, but (of course) better adapted to the nature of RPGs.
And I finally get what the Relationship Map is for; it is supposed to focus you on giving the NPCs motivations rather than plots. I've noticed for a while that the standard RPG Game Plot is "villians have evil plan, heroes foil them", which reduces the PCs to fairly indistinguishable roles. Even though they are in theory the centre of the universe, you could swap out the characters, replace them with someone else, and still have things work out pretty much the same.
Shifting the game over to a more goal-driven basis (what I think Ron calls the Situation) allows the PCs more freedom to act, but doesn't necessarily entirely solve the problem. I'd pretty much got that far in my D&D game, where the PCs have managed to totally FUBAR the badguys without actually killing them off, and now everyone is desperately trying to improvise a response to a pretty bad situation. This is good, and all involved are enjoying it, but what I can now see needs doing is that I have to help the PCs get a little ahead of the game and develop things so that there are multiple possible solutions to their problems, each of which has good and bad points, and really let them choose what to do.
That's much easier said than done. Must think about this for a while.
Posted by: Kevin Brennan at Dec 12, 2003 11:30:33 AM
Actually, that's not what the Sorcerer and Soul relationship map helped me figure out; the whole make-sure-the-NPCs-need-the-PCs thing was something I had figured out (through bitter trial and error). It was Ron Edward's insistence that the lines on the relationship map reflect solely sexual and blood ties that helped me understand why I can't ever figure out detective novels: I never focus great attention to those relationships, in fiction or in real life.
So to grab people who are not on the same end of the bell curve as me, I started to consciously use those ties and was surprised to discover how well it works in terms of player response. It's bizarre, but it seems to work empirically. That's the problem with Nobilis, as contrasted with Amber: there is a much weaker notion of family built in to the setting, so it's easy for me to forget to include that stuff.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Dec 12, 2003 4:26:41 PM
Well, I was most of the way there myself, to be honest. For me, it was one of those instances where somebody explains something you mostly-but-not-quite understood and it suddenly becomes possible to think about it analytically.
For instance, while the current game I'm running does very much allow the PCs to affect events in a non-scripted fashion, it was still pretty much structured around "stop the big evil plot" until quite recently (in the last few sessions, the PCs managed to derail the big evil plot, but the villians are still on the loose and improvising a new one, while the PCs are starting to be in a position to push their own agenda on the world).
Similarly, a number of characters have backstory that has been incorporated into the game so that they have a personal stake in events, but what I didn't do was make much use of that backstory in the first few sessions, so the initial start fo the game was a bit contrived.
Bangs are something I've been using all the way along, I just didn't call them anything in particular.
However, the idea of just using the relationship map to indicate sexual or blood ties seems difficult to me, although I will have to give it a shot. In my current game it would fail miserably to capture the relationships between most of the characters. But I think Sorcerer tends to focus on shorter campaigns rather than multi-year sprawling epics and the relationship map might work better there.
Posted by: Kevin Brennan at Dec 15, 2003 10:34:18 AM
Relationship maps really need to be fluid. You build them based on the eneds o a specific campaign/episode/what-have-you. I personally tend to have 3 or 4 different types of Relationship maps for any given game.
Posted by: Jere at Dec 15, 2003 1:09:25 PM
IIRC, in the Sorcerer's Soul Ron explicitly cautions against trying to stick all of the important relationships into the relationship map. Only stick irrevocable blood and sex ties into the map. Transient social relationships (like who the Prince of the City is) don't go on the relationship map. Those can and will change during play.
The idea, as far as I can make it out, is that people have their eyes subconsciously open for kin relationships, and their presence boosts the intensity of other conflicts in the game. Eg, in The Empire Strikes Back, Vader's attempt to seduce Luke to the dark side has its impact magnified when he reveals himself to be Luke's father.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Dec 15, 2003 3:28:24 PM
If you do it properly relationship maps, even of love/hate, are going to always be changing. Thats what modern software is good for.
And different styles of games have different needs. Limiting yourself to one type of map is like limiting yourself to one type of NPC. Or saying you will only play games that invovle minatures. Relationship maps are tools and should be used in as many ways as works in a given situation. Nt developed around a hypothesis that doesn't work for all types of gaming and all types of sitautions.
For example a collaboration map is often times a whole lot more valuable to track the NPCs through the world in an espionage game or any game heavy in intrigue.
Posted by: Jere at Dec 15, 2003 3:52:23 PM
Oh, I completely agree that we want many kinds of relationships in a game. But no single prep tool can be all things at once, and I appreciate the sharp focus of SS's relationship maps.
Speaking of focused tools, I should probably buckle down and write up my article on using causal influence diagrams in games. Getting that into a playtest-worthy state would be a good thing, because they can potentially make answering the question "Can the players make meaningful choices in this scenario?" into a matter of staring at a diagram.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Dec 15, 2003 6:06:01 PM
Yes, you should buckle down and write that article. Or post it here. ;-)
Posted by: Kevin Brennan at Dec 16, 2003 10:50:17 AM
Speaking of relationship maps, check out this Post article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3075-2003Dec15.html
Posted by: Jim Henley at Dec 16, 2003 11:38:38 AM
I don't get it.
Posted by: Jere at Dec 16, 2003 1:34:51 PM
Doesn't it look as if the Army essentially built a relationship map for the "Get Saddam!" (RPG) campaign? Look at what goes into their table, even - ties of blood and sex.
Posted by: Jim Henley at Dec 16, 2003 1:54:52 PM
