More thoughts about that “Quests” RPG
Well, a few days ago somebody wrote this:
And since then I haven’t been able to test it, not even in my head. I still want to do that “imagined playtest.”
However, I’ve been mulling over a few things about this game. Let me put two of them here, mostly so as not to forget them.
Narration and the GM
The design notes above finish with my realization that I managed to write 11 minutes of text (according to Medium’s heuristics) while ignoring a very important question for a narrative game: how is the game narrated?
As you might not know, I’m currently very interested in shared narration, GMless games. This would be my usual design goal. But, for some reason, I think this idea here would benefit a lot more from the centralized, productively adversarial, creatively instigative role of the GM.
For if the characters (and players) are going to adventure together, in a shared narration game, where would the tension lie?
Let’s say players create quests for themselves. They could, of course, play along, try to be impartial about it, but, in the end, it is simply more interesting to let tension build from the traditional structure in which GM opposes (not, in this case, as in tries to beat) the players.
But I still want this game to have shared player narration. So. What do I do? What would the GM do in this game, exactly?
Let’s see:
- Describe initial situations and circumstances;
- Adjudicate whether a quest can be used automatically to overcome a challenge (or if it needs a stretch);
- Assign quests to the party’s characters.
Apparently I’m interested in a discreet, non narrative GM role. The GM’s influence in this game would be indirect: as she or he assign quests and see how players narrate their characters overcoming these challenges.
(Note: I’m considering using cards so that players could push narrating players to use certain narrative elements in their narratives, to spice things up… I’m going to toss this notion around in my head some more, and if it ever gets anywhere, I’ll let you folks know.)
More About Quests and Challenges
I’m also a little bit worried about how quest creation was described in my initial design notes. Quests felt like predetermined sets of challenges. Won’t players will feel robbed of their agency when embarking on these?
Maybe challenges need to be created dynamically, in response to the character’s actions, and strategies. When creating a quest, the GM (now I can write that a GM writes the quests. How freeing!) should, clearly, plan ahead on which obstacles the characters could face. However, predetermined dependencies between challenges won’t work. That’s too static. Quests need to be more flexible than this.
So challenges are never created beforehand. Deal?
Of course, in certain cases, a rigid structure for quests still makes sense (like in a quest where a character needs to find three different ingredients for a magic potion). This will probably happen whenever the challenges are all parallel to each other (they don’t depend on each other) and they have been laid out explicitly in the fiction.
Things are shaping up. See you guys next time, hopefully with more than just ramblings. Hopefully.
