Elements

Periodically in conversations with Rebecca I find myself in an argument about narrative games versus free-form games. Inevitably I come down on the side of narration, because I like to tell stories and consider myself the one telling the story, with players as participants in my story.

I’m always left unsatisfied by these conversations, though, because I don’t see myself as an authoritarian GM. I don’t railroad players, and I spend a lot of time building games so the players have many different options. My FRCS game, Frosthold, was entirely shaped by the players; the whole tone and direction of the game was decided by the players, and I mostly just riffed off their decisions to put together a coherent narrative.

I don’t want to rehash my arguments for narrative control in games, but my dissatisfaction with the possible options in the argument (authoritarian vs. freeform and all points in between) reminded me of something. This morning I realized what I’d been thinking of: the World’s Smallest Political Quiz, which advocates replacing the simplistic Right/Left single-axis political descriptor with a more complex two-axis political descriptor. Discovering the WSPQ was a nice revelation to me, way back when; it explained my vague dislike for being classified as either a liberal or a conservative, and seemed to better map to my perceptions of political beliefs.

And so it is with gaming. In thinking about a two axis model on my way to work this morning, I came up with a model which I believe better maps to my perceptions about gaming styles, and seems to better model the kinds of gamers I know.

The first axis could be called ‘Simulation versus Story’, or ‘World versus Plot’, or ‘Narrative versus Freeform’. It describes the kind of game being played. Is the game an open world with many places to explore, no imposed meta-plot, and a limitless number of options for the players? Or is the game a tightly-constructed story with waypoints the players must reach, and a buildup to an inevitable climax? Or is the game somewhere between these extremes, with multiple plotted paths, or a plot that exists only as far ahead as the GM can predict the players’ interests? Some questions I thought of to try to plot a game on this axis:

* How far in advance does the GM know the outcome of a session?
* If the GM writes an encounter, does that encounter always happen?
* Is there a main villain, and does he continue to plague the characters through the whole game?
* Do the players often go in unexpected directions? (and the corrolary: Does the GM permit it?)
* Does the GM mostly write setting material, or mostly write specific sessions?

The second axis is ‘GM versus Player’. I think of it as the ‘centralization’ axis. Where does the control of the narrative lie? I’m not going to take up Bryant’s question regarding the narrative control of the rules themselves, though. I propose that the rules are a constant, and the degree to which the rules are enforced is just part of the general category ‘rules’. This axis, then, describes who does the storytelling. Does the GM present all the narration, and the players control only their responses to the world as presented? Or do the players freely improvise using the GM as a jumping-off point to tell their own stories? Or is the game somewhere between, with players taking charge of their corners of the world, but the GM providing the framework to tie it all together? Some questions I thought of to try to plot a game on this axis:

* Are the players encouraged to describe things unrelated to their immediate actions?
* Does the game offer mechanical rewards for clever descriptions?
* Does the GM construct the characters’ backgrounds, or do the players have total freedom to write their own backgrounds?
* Does the game share GM responsibilities among multiple people?
* Is the setting fixed or mutable? That is, can players decide what’s beyond the mountains to fit their own interests?

(Obviously, these are not all the questions you could ask to plot games along these axes, and they’re probably not even the best possible questions.)

Thinking about my gaming style in this way, I believe I am strongly on the GM side of the Control axis, and somewhere in the middle of the Narration axis. That is, I tend to want to control my worlds, and do not surrender them to players, but I want the players to be mostly free actors in my worlds. I do construct plot, but it’s more of a roadmap than a railway line. I know that I’d like the players to go from point A to point B or perhaps C, but I don’t know how they’ll get there, and I’m willing to let them drive down back roads and end up at point D.

This makes me more comfortable with thinking about other game styles; for instance (and she can correct me if I’m wrong), I believe Rebecca prefers games that are towards the Freeform side of the Narration axis, and more strongly (possibly very strongly) on the Player side of the Control axis.

Some other examples I thought of:

* Strong Narration, Strong GM: Your basic railroad. Not necessarily bad; dungeons are typically here on the axis, and tournament games. Good for puzzle-solving game styles.
* Strong Narration, Strong Player: Collaborative storytelling where players get their own piece of the setting to talk about. I think Ars Magica’s troupe-style games, run as they are designed to be, fall here.
* Strong World, Strong GM: World-sim games where the GM has a big ol’ binder of world details at hand, so that wherever the characters end up, there’s something interesting for them to do.
* Strong World, Strong Player: Total free-form storytelling in the style of Nobilis, where any player can construct world details on the fly to fit his or her preferred playstyle, and invite other players to explore those world details. The ‘game’ is more of a meeting-point for different ideas about world, setting, and character.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 18th, 2005 at 11:35 am and is filed under Roleplaying Games, Game Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.