Plot control mechanics

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on August 10, 2004 at 04:26 PM

This is a response to Bruce Baugh's post on "Scene Framing" over on Gamethink.

Every time I've tried to run with a pool of points as a random plot editing tool, it's flopped. As nearly as I can tell, being able to make any change you like offers too little structure to properly spur the imagination. I think Bruce's idea of captions is extremely clever, and essential to making his idea work, but to explain why I'll relate some failures and successes I've had.

In Leftover Dudes, I went through numerous iterations of plot point mechanics, none of which worked. The basic idea behind all of them was that a player could spend a point to reframe the conflict for a scene. So if a PC was in a swordfight with a cool goth vampire, her player could spend a point to turn it into a seduction sequence. The mechanical advantage was that you could change which traits were useful for the scene, and story-wise the player could decide how the story went. No one /ever/ spent these points, despite numerous exhortations.

Likewise, a Feng Shui game in which XPs were spent like Theatrix plot points saw very few people spend them. You could spend them to make really massive story alterations, and no one ever did. (I think I spent one, and I was the only one to ever do so.)

However, when I ran Theatrix proper, people spent them left and right, because Plot points were tied to Descriptors -- a player whose character had the Smith descriptor could spend a plot point to say something about smithing and just plain make it true. Likewise, a Feng Shui game in which we used Shadowfist cards like Storypath cards worked great -- Heroic Conversions and Tortured Memories and Shadowy Mentors all showed up all over the place.

The common thread is that when you restrict what the thing can do, people are more likely to use it. It's easier to say "Oh, this ability can be relevant now" when you have a mental slot to put it in. So for your scene creation rules, I think having the player come up with a caption is a really good idea. They look (from an unplaytested glance) like a powerful structuring device, while being less constraining than cards.

Another thing you might want to allow is to create set-up/pay-off plot mechanics. According to Keith Johnstone in Impro, one of the pleasures of narrative is reincorporation -- when a detail established earlier becomes relevant later. So mechanics might be invented to facilitate the Chekhov's gun effect.

For example, a player might spend a drama point to have the camera focus closely on the villain's ivory walking stick, and then she gets to write "ivory walking stick" on a card. Later, when her character is ambushed by the villain's agents in a dark alleyway, she can have his own agents pour out of the walls and surround and arrest the villains. She justifies the counter-ambush with a brief flashback sequence, in which the heroic G-man is walking through the streets, when he suddenly notices an ivory walking stick reflected in a storefront window. This uses some more drama points, and the card with "ivory walking stick" on it. More blatant edits of the plot might require more setup, so as to seem less contrived.

I don't know if this will work, but it's worth trying out.