Mar 11 2008
Game Tempo: A Question of Pacing
The preference in the indie gaming community seems to be for play sessions that consist of a series of short, punchy scenes. Scenes are meant to be to the point, a goal which is often accomplished by having them revolve around a particular conflict. Such scenes are framed to drive conflict, and therefore drive the story; once a scene’s key conflict is resolved, it generally ends shortly thereafter.
This is fine, I guess. It works really well for games like Primetime Adventures. But it isn’t always what I want.
Done incorrectly it can cause a game to become choppy. There have been times around the table where I’ve felt that the scene was over just as I was really getting into character. I’m spoiled by boffer-LARPing I guess, where I have the opportunity to immerse myself in the persona of a particular character for whole days at a time.
Maybe I’m in the minority, but I actually enjoy roleplaying for it’s own sake. It’s good if a game can manage to stay on task, to prevent a session from being totally aimless. But one of the things I miss from my days in traditional gaming is the freedom to stretch my legs. I don’t necessarily want every scene to be long and discursive, but I think it would be good if that was at least supported.
My vision for my currently untitled Gnostic Allegory game, for example, is going to require scenes of exposition and also the joyful wankery that is in-character philosophical conversations. If it’s going to conform to my current vision, those things will be vital.
The trouble as I see it is this: I know that a system can support short, punchy and pointed scenes. I’ve seen some good examples of it, and have a fairly good grasp of several effective methods for pushing that type of play. But is there any way to push more rambling and digressive scenes using the system? Should that even be a design goal? Or will trying to create rules that do that just derail any game they’re part of?
I feel like you can achieve this rhythm with some pacing guides, if not outright mechanics. Imagine something like one of JW’s maps, or perhaps like PTA’s season chart, where you graph the plotlines of each character.
Let me extend that example. Our upcoming episodes are about some central thing (unmasking a hero known as The Poet). We each need a moment to describe our feelings about this guy and the issues he brings up before he is revealed. We fill out the PTA-style screen presence chart, and as we go through scenes, we progress through the chart (taking varying amounts of spotlight as we discuss The Poet). It’s understood we won’t start really revealing and resolving things about the Poet until we work our way through this chart. We’re committing to chilling out on conflicts and focusing on the overture, up until a certain point.
That’s interesting. My experience with Story Games has been very different. Social contracts are all well and good, but I’ve found that in the absence of concrete rules, all pre-game discussions and agreements can often go out the window without anyone quite meaning for them to. It happened when Jaywalt and Robert and I played Cold City, for example; we talked about what kind of game we wanted to have, beforehand, and then just had a totally different kind of game, instead. It wasn’t bad, per se, but we didn’t stick to what we laid out.
The idea of using a map I will admit is very intriguing. It was not in my head at all, but I kind of like it. The manipulation of physical objects and tokens is almost always a plus in my opinion; it would be interesting to combine the PTA screen presence chart and an abstract map of the story and tie some of the game mechanics tie into the progression of the PCs along it. Clearly further consideration is needed.