[NWOD][VtR] New Game - New Possibilities - New Questions!
Frank Tarcikowski:
Hi Reithan,
Like Eero, I think you might be doing a bit too much. The number of important, well prepared NPCs should not be overwhelming because otherwise you’ll be struggling to keep track of what’s going on with all of them once the players go wild. Also, in my experience, there will be some emergent NPCs as well that you did not prepare in great detail before the beginning of the campaign but that get focussed on in play so you start developing them. So, even for campaign-style play, I would say that ten important, well-prepared NPCs is the maximum to start with, and six may actually be better. But that’s also a question of preference.
Speaking of fractions, I’ll say that three fractions is usually a very good number. Four or five may still be okay but if you’ve got various fractions of vampires, mages, and mortals, that’ll also get over your head if you try to address all of them in play. My advice would be to leave the mages completely out of it. They may be somewhere, doing something, but I would not have that affect the player characters at least for the first five sessions or so. And whether the mages turn up after that is something you totally do not have to plan now.
With regard to “preparing a plot”, I think Ron will be back to explain the ways in which it doesn’t work, so I’ll leave that to him and talk a bit about how I have found it to work well.
My approach is to first prepare a backstory, like Eero explained, and from there, prepare a plot with all the NPCs and fractions and interesting events but without the PCs. And then you hook the PCs into the plot. This is totally crucial. You need a very good plot hook that is plausible and draws the PCs into the plot. So the plot affects the PCs. Maybe the first couple of “scripted” events will take place just like you prepared them, because the PCs did not care to do anything about them yet, or because they are happening somewhat our of reach and only the repercussions affect the PCs. But the longer you play, the more the PCs will engage with the plot to the point where they may turn it upside down.
In this style of play the GM is more proactive, with a stronger influence to content, but not outcomes. Compare e.g. Sorcerer and Dogs in the Vineyard. Sorcerer starts with a player authored kicker. Dogs in the Vineyard start with a GM authored town. The “what would happen if the Dogs never came” part is what I called plot above. That’s easy. Much more attention gets dedicated to what I call plot hook above: The whole concept of the PCs’ job as Dogs. The “what do the NPCs want the Dogs to do”. The relationships, especially the idea of having relatives of one or more Dogs living in the town. That’s how you drive home your plot: You hook the PCs into it and then you see where they take it.
Do expect some personal sub-plots to emerge from PC actions if you have players who are used to playing proactively. Roll with it, don’t block it, just have your “main plot” go on when the time is right, and if you can, make the two interact.
Furthermore, in your case, you’ll probably have some historical events and persons that even upon reflection and serious consideration you just don’t want the players to mess around with. The easiest way to deal with this is to put them in the background, to have them happen “out of reach” of the PCs and not be part of your plot. A more ambitios way would be to offer a deal to the players that these historical facts will somehow be an outcome of play, and then work together to make it happen. From what you have written about your group in this thread, I would rather suggest the first alternative (no offence meant).
- Frank
Ron Edwards:
Hi Reithan,
I apologize for the lateness of the reply. Not only did some life-things hit, but I became very distracted by Markus' thread about traits and some associated discussions.
I've given some serious thought to your questions, though, and to what I understand of your situation. There are social aspects to your play-group that may not work out, but you seem to be aware of them despite a little textual waffling, and all I can say is that we'll see what happens. I'll concentrate instead on the practical side.
The screwdown
This isn't an official jargon term, but I've been using it in my head for about a year now. It refers to techniques everyone uses at the table after a given scenario has generated enough events and information for characters (PC and NPC) to start acting extremely assertively - but particularly in the absence of a planned ending, or even of a planned sequence of scenes and events. Play literally begins only with components of potential conflicts. It's become a strong component of playing with a Narrativist agenda, far more so than anyone anticipated back when we discussed GNS daily.
The thing is, I think this is more what you want, and it's also what I can give numerous examples for. However, clearly it's not what everyone else in your group wants, and quite likely they do not believe it can happen. So it's not what I recommend for you. I'll soon be posting in another thread, "Sand Box" Adventures, in which those techniques have specifically been requested and where I will provide concrete advice.
Participationism
This is technically a subset of Simulationist play, or more accurately, it's a way to generate and enjoy stories while maintaining a Simulationist agenda. For it to work, you must stay flexible as a GM and stay away from railroading. This is tricky because you do, in fact, often have to make decisions for the player-characters very much as if you were the player, and you are indeed imposing a well-set prepared concept of where the story "goes." It's fairly subtle, using techniques like these:
1) Start new scenes with the characters in them, such that they must have decided to be there in the "unknown space" between this scene and the last.
2) Provide solid information from NPCs as if the player-characters' presence alone were enough to get that information. Even an NPC who is totally isolated and wants to be totally left alone is either impressed, moved, or cowed enough by the player-character to give up what he or she knows. Don't make conflicts out of such scenes. It's your job to keep such NPCs interesting and emotionally moving to the players during these scenes.
3) Use failed conflicts as a primary opportunity - the characters do not get what they want, but they get something else useful and interesting. It's your job here to make sure you don't simply fall back on cliches, as in losing a fight, but somehow grabbing an item that reveals where the NPC is going next.
Again, all of these are ways to "play the characters" in tandem with the players who allegedly "own" these characters. In Participationist play, this is a given, and in many ways it relies on open trust, not deception. They have to accept that their characters are being team-played, and to appreciate your commitment to the characters' status as protagonists. I think in your case, that they will, as long as you repay this trust and don't marginalize their characters or make the "plot-moves-along" events lame.
The key jargon term is Force, which is best understood as "use the Force, Luke," in this case. What I'm saying is that you are giving them very strong cues and even 'helping' the characters act on those cues, and the other people in the game are accepting your cues as valid. Force is anathema to the kind of play that uses the Screwdown, but its positive use is the essence of Participationist play.
Part of that positive use is that you have to acknowledge that sometimes, your cues are not convincing or exciting, and to accept that as part of what happens. You can re-group and go a different way, perhaps taking time to let the characters do only what the players want at the moment, but never, never arm-lock the players into accepting a cue they don't like.
Here's another jargon term: the Black Curtain, as in the famous scene in The Wizard of Oz. You really are a little man behind a curtain, in this prepped-plot-heavy kind of play. If you all know it's there and use it as a fruitful part of the fiction as it's created, that's Participationism. However, if you all try to pretend it's not there, and especially if as GM you keep insisting/pleading that it's not there and you're not behind it, then that's Illusionism. It rarely works for long despite frantic efforts by thousands of groups over the past three decades, and it's often characterized by players resisting their cues or rolling their eyes as they know they have to take them (up the ass) and like them.
Here's a useful thread from a couple of years ago: Is this Forcing?
As I see it, the key to big-picture success in Participationist play is for you to engage in an ongoing, session by session two-step of neither lagging nor arm-locking. By not lagging (holding back information, letting everyone mill around too long, not letting anything happen until they all hit Button X), things continue to happen. By not arm-locking, your use of Force stays in the Obi-Wan territory and out of the negative sense of arm-lock territory.
Finally (no pun intended), your job to recognize when it's time to hit the climactic moments. Perhaps one arrives before you planned it, perhaps due to an insight or very assertive move on a player's part. In that case, just do it and never mind your elaborate two-session long plan for how they were supposed to get there. Or perhaps they're pretty stuck, in which case you need to provide more Force (the good kind). Either way, never, never run lame-ass waiting around and maundering in anticipation of how good it's going to be later, which only you "know." This is a skill, because like the techniques I described above, it also relies on maintaining in-fiction logic. If every storyline is characterized by crappy no-clues and wandering about and fruitless fights, capped by a perfect clue on a silver platter and a classic fight scene, then it will all suck. Even if you move things along with Force, the climactic stuff must arise from what's been actually played, not from stuff you simply make up on your own.
I do not particularly enjoy Participationist play either as GM or player, on an absolutely personal-preference basis, and therefore I'm not the best person to give examples. It is a thoroughly functional form of play, however. Frank is skilled at it and I hope he will provide tons of good advice and examples.
Best, Ron
Frank Tarcikowski:
Quote
(…) all of these are ways to "play the characters" in tandem with the players who allegedly "own" these characters. In Participationist play, this is a given, and in many ways it relies on open trust, not deception. They have to accept that their characters are being team-played, and to appreciate your commitment to the characters' status as protagonists.
Nicely put! And also pretty damn important.
So, Reithan, your turn. Do you want to know about Participationism? It’s been a long while since I ran these kinds of games, but I used to be quite good at it and sure can offer what advice I have. Or does the Screwdown (he he) sound more like what you are after? Maybe with the addition of a GM-driven scenario like I described in my last post? Let us know what you think.
- Frank
Marshall Burns:
Hi Reithan,
I've got a thing to throw out there regarding using history in your prep. I've got this game-in-development called Witch Trails: the Invisible History of the American West that's about a secret, government funded militia (the Hex Rangers), armed with guns and folk magic, that fights heathen spirits, sorcerers, devils, abominations, and fearsome critters (that's a technical term) in the American wilds from about 1802 to 1908. I make a big deal about the "invisible history" idea, ramming it into my players' heads that this is not an "alternate history" in which the magic and demons and stuff were real. The idea is that this stuff really was real, and all the recorded history is true, but there was a part that they didn't tell us, that almost nobody even knew about even then, and that's where the magic and demons were. Therefore, any historical events that are relevant to a given session are set in stone; Jackson will win the Battle of New Orleans, the South will lose the Civil War, Sitting Bull will be murdered in his own home by federal agents, and so on.
When I'm prepping a scenario for this game, and I can't think of anything from whole cloth, I grab a book on US history, pick an interesting event, and think, "Okay, how were the demons and the Hex Rangers involved in this?" Sometimes it's tangential, sometimes it's pretty tightly related (Sitting Bull was a sorcerer, and his death was caused by the Hex Rangers, directly or indirectly).
What I'm saying is, I wouldn't try to take all the history, then add in vampires and mages that were unrelated to that history; I'd grab an event from the Crusades and say, "Okay, how were vampires involved in this event?"
(Oddly enough, Witch Trails is GMed by exactly the sort of techniques that Ron describes as Participationism. I had no idea there was a word for it.)
-Marshall
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