Article 427 of alt.games.frp.live-action: Newsgroups: alt.games.frp.live-action Path: isc-newsserver!rit!rochester!udel!wupost!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!headwall.Stanford.EDU!nntp.Stanford.EDU!ayermish From: ayermish@leland.Stanford.EDU (Aimee Yermish) Subject: Re: LRP pacing. Message-ID: <1993Jun3.204405.1346@leland.Stanford.EDU> Sender: news@leland.Stanford.EDU (Mr News) Organization: Society for Interactive Literature West References: <1993Jun2.175526.27946@nlm.nih.gov> <1993Jun2.234602.10198@afterlife.ncsc.mil> Date: Thu, 3 Jun 93 20:44:05 GMT Lines: 139 Definitely, if the players are bored partway through the game, you don't have enough plot. The basic principle of game pacing that I use is that the players are always much smarter than you are. There are lots more of them, and they are much better motivated to move plots along than you are. Usually, when a game plods along too slowly, only to dissolve into a mad rush at the end, it's because the players have realized that they can easily put off resolving their plots until that point. It looks to the GM like the game is progressing too slowly, but in fact it is progressing too fast and needs to be slowed down. The players are too confident in their ability to handle the plots, and they are not afraid enough of their opposition. As Steve alluded to, you don't just need lots of interconnected plots, but you also need several different kinds of plots. Some plots in a game are designed to resolve earlier than others. If all of your plots can only resolve at the endgame, then players will be bored in the middle. Instead, you can make plots dependent on each other (for one to resolve, another one must have already done so), or just make plots of different resolution lengths (for instance, in Nexus/Rekon-1, the plague plot is designed to resolve midway through the game -- the plague gets bad and starts infecting everyone early in the midgame, and by the end of the midgame, that strong motivation has led people to band together and find a cure. By the end of the midgame, no one has the plague anymore, because they've dealt with it. Now they can get on to the business of stabbing each other in the back). Each character should get (or have easy access to, within the game vortex) some plots of each kind, so that they aren't waiting around (if they only have late-resolvers) or bored at endgame (if they only have early-resolvers). One poster (sorry, I don't recall names too well) suggested the use of random monsters and red herrings. I agree that those devices can slow the progression of a game, but I don't particularly like the other effects they have. Both of them are (by definition) unconnected with the real plots in the game, which means that they are wastes of the players' time -- they must waste resources (however one defines resources) to defeat/investigate these GM-controlled obstacles, leaving them less well prepared to handle the player-controlled obstacles (which are the fun ones), without getting much of value out of it. They don't learn more about what's going on. They don't interact constructively with other players. And worst, when they succeed in dealing with these obstacles, they find out that they have been tricked by the GMs into wasting their time and resources to no good end. That tends to annoy them, making them less enthusiastic about the game as a whole (if you run your games in an environment where there are other things competing for players' attention, you'll know how deadly that is), and more dangerously, makes them less likely to throw a lot of effort into the plots you really want them to throw their effort into. When they find out what's really going on in a real plot, they will wonder if it isn't just another stupid red herring, and they'll think twice before working very hard on it. One thing that we often put into our games to help in pacing, in conjunction with the layers of plots designed to resolve at different times, is preplanned public events that many players will find fun or interesting to show up to. For instance, in Dragon, there were several different trials scheduled for the weekend. Instead of letting them all happen at the endgame, we scheduled one of the big ones for early Saturday evening. If there are peace talks or their moral equivalent, we often print public hearings into the schedule -- players will come and air their in-character grievances. If there's an election plot, we schedule times when different groups will interview the candidates. Rule Psix (a game set at the Psionic Olympics) did a fantastic job of having "sports events" (team relay telepathy and the like) which were entertaining to watch as well as to participate in, spaced out over the weekend. And so forth -- find things that match with your game. We print a game schedule with GM-controlled things (the times when the control room is open, for instance) in italics, and player-controlled things (we always allow/encourage people to schedule more events or to adjust the times of the ones we've scheduled to better fit what they want) in regular type. Many people like to use heavy-handed GM-based controls in their games, slowing the progression of the game by slowing the influx of information, or by designing plots that by their nature cannot resolve too early. In some situations, preplanned events can work well, but in most, they are pretty obviously control points, and the players don't like being controlled. They figure that if you're controlling their progress now (usually getting in their way in some fashion) that you will control their progress later on the game (again getting in their way, or making things easier if they haven't tried hard enough). If a GM hands a player a message halfway through the game, the player figures the GM could have given him the info earlier, but didn't want to -- that sets the players against the GMs, which isn't much fun on either side. Players much prefer their free will. Of course, if you want to keep things hopping, you can design plots that have to be set in motion early in the game in order to take effect by the end. For instance, if your game takes place on a spaceship, and you write a terrorist group which wants to blow up life support and hold the whole game hostage, they can't do that right at endgame. It takes time for air to go bad, for water to run out. So they'd be told in their characters how far in advance they'd need to plant their bomb in order to have maximal bargaining power by the end. When the bomb goes off midway through the game, everyone in the game knows about it, and they can be given a reasonable prediction as to how long they have, and perhaps suggestions as to how they could repair the damage and/or track down the bombers. That adds goals partway through the game, in a way that is, to be sure, designed by the GMs (*everything* in the game is designed by GMs), but driven by the players. The terrorists might decide not to plant the bomb, or they might be unable to, and the game will go differently. There's not so much Fist of GM driving the action, and the players appreciate that. The most important thing is to make sure that any control you do exert over your game is subtle, so that the players can't really feel it. But there's a distinction here -- if you make the control points so secret that you couldn't tell the players about them after the game without retroactively ruining their enjoyment ("Oh, yeah, well, see, I figured around midday Saturday you'd come to me with a guess as to what the plague cure was, and I was going to define the plague cure as whatever your guess was, so you'd be certain to succeed"), you've got a problem. The players won't trust you with their free will any more after that -- they'll know the game was a cheat. We try very hard to make the smallest possible alterations in the game, in ways that the players feel that they have not been handed the answers. The most common control point I use is to suggest that two people talk to each other, without saying what I think they should say or whether they should believe what they hear. (usually, I'm aiming a lost player at an experienced one who is likely to make a point of including them) The key to pacing is to realize that players already know how to do it and already want to do it for you. The reason they're bored in the midgame is because they're ready for the endgame, but they don't want the game to climax too early. Left to their own devices, they will create the beginning, middle, and endgames for you, all by themselves. I've had occasion to run the same game in very different blocks of time (fivefold different, once!), and I can assure you that the players know how long the game is and will create the stages of the game without any help from you. --Aimee -- Aimee Yermish Society for Interactive Literature West ayermish@leland.stanford.edu 415-329-1984 (before 11pm Pacific time) Coming Thanksgiving weekend to Silicon, San Jose, CA