I want to focus my posts on situation play for the moment, especially with an eye towards being better at it, and this is my attempt to clarify what it means.
Trying to internalize the various discussions, interactions and courses from AdeptPlay, I’ve decided last year to consciously change the way I view and play, with an aim toward improving general skills required for roleplaying. This game happened online between David, Laura, my old friend Nassim and me.
I struggled a lot, previous years, with “prep” as a pre-play consideration, meaning producing a set of actionable material during play. My 2020 post “the paralyzing swamp of Sorcerous prep” is the baseline benchmark to evaluation of the evaluation of my own practice. In terms of learning process, this would be “where am I” at the beginning of my conscious engagement into getting better at playing at all in 2020. This post shows how much I worried about having “good prep”, in the sense of having a perfect material to bring in play.
Good play material for readiness in play is not a problem in itself, as shown in the Barbarian Psychedelic Cosmic Cataclysmic D&D 4e posts, to take only one of many examples on the website.
Last year, I took at the heart the fact that an overtly investment in the preparation of pre-play material was obscuring my need to improve my ability to play situationally.
I’ve started gming a game of Blade of the Iron Throne with absolute minimal prep material: I took the simple and sketchy Sword & Sorcery backdrop suggested in the book, Xoth (map here), suggested a region where the character would be (the city-states of the Susrah region), and selected map for two cities there: Belthaar and Ghezath, with a few notes from limited information in the book: who are the kings in the region, and what they are up too. The information in the book are really just actionable content that can be activated or ignored.
I’ve read the assets and passions of the characters and thought a bit about that, but did not write or settle any decision about where or what were the fictional elements (NPC, locations) written in the passion. I used an approached shown by Ron in the The Pool game, especially the galactic peace one, “I’ll set a scene, and you will tell me if I should include anything from your assets or passions”.
My approach was the following, and it’s still part of my process of learning from the principles described in Sorcerer, applied to actual play.
A strong realization I had internalize is that the first session doesn’t have to be “perfect”, and it’s totally ok for it to be something like a “starter”s session. My previous conviction was that “you need to come with perfect prepared material to the first session to be good”. It’s not true, pre-play prep (which include character creation and GM material) is provisional. This prep is provisional, and the first session may clarify things that need clarification, in situ. My “paralyzing swamp” post shows how I was trying to get everything perfect before play instead of having just enough material to kick in and make.
For this first session, I came purposely unprepared because I wanted to focus on my capacity to play situationally instead of the quality of my pre-play prep. In that first session, I asked the character where they were and what they were doing, and they answered by looking at their sheets, especially their passions attributes.
Nassim’s character, Zéphyr, is a Kuthan Half-Breed (an almost mythical culture) with a strong consciousness of his divine heritage. He situated his character in a trade scene inside a voluptuous palace in the city of Ghazor, but not his own palace. I designated that it was the Prince’s palace, that the scene was happening during a religious feast, and a few exchanges determined the object of the deal as being a crown made with the skull of an ancestor, with a local general from one of the city states in war wanting to buy it back from the original owners who killed that ancestor.
My idea was to put the character into a scene that fit their passions and concept (by asking the players what they were doing), then deal with the consequences through skill rolls. In this case, Nassim stated that he had prepared the deals for a few days to know more about the buyer, which was resolved through an information gathering roll, then the negotiation itself was solved through a … negotiation roll.
Zephyr has two relevant passions here: “Be filthy rich” (which I thought the deal was about), and “Having a Bastard son with every queen I know”. Due to the success of the information gathering roll, I had to provide information about the buyer, and I decided to make a connection with the neighbor city Belthaar, which is said to be in war with another neighbor city, Ghezath. I described the buyer as one of the general of the city of Belthaar, heir to a long legacy of military key officers for the city and key asset in the current war with Ghezath. As Nassim succeeded at his negotiation roll, I asked him what he wanted from the deal, and he answered “an access to the royal court of Belthaar”, suddenly invested in his mating passion. The deal was done.
David plays Widow, a financially broken but very competent con artist/assassin. Looking at his passion “Rob the Rich”, we stated that his character as disguised with the dancers and David wanted her to spot some rich aristocrat to seduce and rob. I described one of them, he made his seducing roll, succeeded, and was suddenly in physical action in the bedroom, killing the poor guy in the middle of the mating process. Widow was looking for some luxurious object and I describe something that just pop in my mind – instead of giving the traditional hidden box of gold and inspired by my recent re-reading of the Conan and Kane novels, I described a very rare and weird orb of Amber looking like a dragon eye.
Finally, Laura described her character (an incredibly powerful Necromancer, called a Mysteriarch in that game) being in another part of the palace, doing omen reading to some aristocratic woman. The Omen Reading roll succeeded, and I described flashes of Widow’s Murder – deciding on the spot that it was the woman’s brother who has just been killed. After that, Laura’s character, Nuit, wanted to create some undead slaves for her schemes, and chose to go to the murdered aristocrat’s family crypt to raise him and a few of his ancestors.
I think we have great example of reincorporation and agency in that game:
- David makes Widow kill a noble and steal an ancient gem in his room
- I use the outcome of Widow’s murder as content to provide for Laura’s Omen Reading
- Laura makes Nuit raise an undead slave but chooses the noble murdered by Widow
- David then makes Widow go to see Zéphyr (who is a renown “weird and luxurious and sorcerous” collector and trader) to sell/know about the gem he stole
- Etc.
Let’s not confuse my improvisation creation of situational content as situational play. I don’t think it matters that I improvised the buyer as a Belthaar general or that I had it prepared.
My point here is that asking the players to frame part of the first scene themselves, which they did based on their passions, and then dealing with skill rolls was actually enough to have something to play, to situate them in some social, cultural and physical space. I purposely started play with just my few bullet point notes from the book backdrop about that region and nothing more, to not be distracted and focus on situation play. I tried to focus my responses with what we had in play instead of looking at some prep material I would have fixed in my head or notes previously.
That first session kicked in a lot of ideas and content. Instead of coming with my prepared notes, I used to see the direction I would need to then prep something related to the outcomes and choices made by everyone during that session.
After that, I knew that:
- I needed some backstory and NPC about the noble’s family. I mean, their crypt have been violated and the bodies of their loved one stolen.
- I needed some idea of who are in the royal court of Belthaar and what his happening them, leading me to create a mini relationship map, centered around the queen (her lovers, her relationship to the king, etc).
This is the mindset I’m trying to keep to get better at situational play as a GM. At this point, I think I would learn more from just being a player – without the creative tasks about backstory that a GM needs to do.
A game of Sorcerer set in the French War of Religions, in the region that I personally know very well, is starting, and I will definitely focus on improving those skills.
I’m open to discussion about any related topic in this post, especially situation play, what is it, how to do it, how to be better at it.
4 responses to “From textual prep to situational play”
I’m going to take some sections of your post out of sequence, which I hope will not damage your points and will allow me to make mine effectively.
That’s good. The misconception is that perfect preparation = perfect play, which of course is GM-centric perfect presentation, with subtopics of having ever-so fascinating content to reveal and being ever-so “ready for whatever they do,” itself predicated on the idea that players ruin things. All of this is best abandoned.
Well, that’s fine … but I see you saying it without much about doing it. All your examples are highly focused on the improvisation, and in fact, it looks like you’re rolling dice into the void, then treating Zephyr’s success as “name your prize,” or Widow’s successes as “ooh, let’s shoehorn in some backstory.” i.e., retconning backstory + situation. It’s what I’m trying to teach people not to do when playing The Pool.
At worst, you are misreading my term “anything,” which means “elements from my preparation and understanding which are necessarily invoked by what you’re doing” to be “I’ll make up whatever suits your needs or seems awesome.”
If you look at the notes I provided in my post about that game, you’ll see brief but precise, content-heavy write-ups for each alien species at the conference, as well as maps for several buildings and their functions, as well as the external surface in case anyone went outside. That’s a lot. Also, since these notes were for my use only, they should also be understood to be even more content-heavy than they look, often shorthand for things I had “written” just as solidly in my head. It was in fact all “written where and what” – the very thing you abandoned.
Now, there were plenty of times when I did have to make things up in the moment or between sessions, but please consider the logic involved: given what is known and more, what is held by me to be established and fundamental. The new material is always a subroutine in an existing framework. That’s the skill you should be developing, which may be applied either for a lot of things (given minimal content preparation) or a few things (given extensive content preparation) … in other words, merely stripping down content preparation so you or anyone must make up a lot of things in play is not actually the skill itself.
To be fair, I do this a lot! But note what isn’t improvised, e.g. the Pool game, the Harnmaster sessions you’ll see in an upcoming post, and even in extreme cases like the RuneQuest game, in which I had about two basic metaphysical concepts and a few gods’ names in the first session which ultimately became a full Cults of Prax equivalent.
I totally get you about jettisoning the need to be perfect and to recognize a first session as merely a beginning. That’s great as a goal. But going strictly and critical about what you’re writing, you are definitely confounding how much (and how provisional) content with how it is to be played. Preparation may well be extensive and non-provisional, in fact, it is often necessary as such. That’s not the problem. The problem is the perfect as envisioned as an embedded feature due to preparation. Your solution seems to me misdirected at quantity and raises risks of its own.
That’s sound, but it has nothing to do with making things up vs. knowing them before play.
This is perilously close to intuitive continuity, which is the big risk that you personally will run whenever you focus on “prepare less” in terms of raw quantitative content.
Again, “play situationally” seems here to be synonymous with improvised to fit, especially backstory and situation hiding inside narration authority, which at best is merely agility and often grades into people-pleasing
I see that the concepts are still tangled up for you. “I tried to focus my responses with what we had in play” is exactly the right approach … but it applies even if you have plenty of prepared material. Merely reducing that preparation’s quantity is not enough. We should be focusing on preparation which is concrete and perhaps extensive, and which you will honor, but which is not programmatic in terms of “getting there” or especially what is “supposed to happen” or what they are “supposed to realize.”
If you don’t work on that, then all you will achieve is the same aesthetic and anxiety trap you were in previously, merely transposed into the session rather than beforehand. If I’m correctly remembering Manu’s comments during the recent workshop, I think he currently understands this point in detail and is working through its applications in play.
I also want to clarify that opening up situational shifts (framing scenes) to player input is entirely another issue. This is a common procedure or at least it used to be; although I codified it as rules in Trollbabe, I did so in some bemusement that what I’d thought was ordinary practice had apparently died in the subculture during the 1990s. Again, the question is not how we arrive at the location and immediate circumstances of play, at any point, but what we do inside them, based on what information, and based on what occurs.
These thought-processes and actual play-and-consequence activity are what we should be talking about. Can you see that it has literally nothing to do with the extent of established pre-play content? There is something else about your habits of preparation which is the problem to train away from.
Thank you for the time and energy invested in this extensive reply. I was worried, when I finished my post, that my examples poorly illustrated my statement, which is confirmed by your answer. I realized I was giving many examples of improvised content when it was not really the focus of our game, or my post. I wish I did a better job (and I’m not deluding myself) but I wanted to kick that conversation in, and I think it went really better than what it appears.
I hope my answers will not sound like retroactive justifications and that they help me sharply and reflectively analyze our practice as a group, taking your comments as an opportunity for clarification.
Framing the first scenes.
I, at least in my mind, did not misunderstood the “anything” as “anything that suits your needs or awesomeness”. The way I framed the first scene was inspired by the Fantasy for real convention game. In fact, it’s by watching that video that I realized that I could start an Iron Throne game without needing lots of content. My basic backstory was the following Belthaar, Ghezath and Zaol are in war. The king of Belthaar captured the princeling of the queen of Ghezath. The city of Ghazor is an asset that can tip the war in favor of one side, but its political weddings led its king to keep neutral for the moment. The king of Belthaar is currently negotiating with Zaol’s priests to sell them the princeling, and everyone know that they sacrifice children to their god. So, the Queen of Ghezath will badly want to save him or negotiate his release. This is all from the book. After watching the Fantasy for Real game, I reviewed the skill descriptions of Blade of the Iron Throne and found out that similar rules could be activated. So, giving that context, I asked the character what they were doing, then see with culture or etiquette rolls, or any other kind of relevant skill, how they would be fitting in the social context of the scene.
To be honest, I think it’s not sufficient for the game. Next time, I would start with a bit more of indications, such as a list of relevant fictional elements (that cult, that city, that NPC) and maybe even an event of the backstory (this is currently happening), to give players “bits” from where they can develop their passions, so they’re not totally out of the blue.
“Include anything from your assets or passions.”
We have 4 characters in play, and it happens they all have 3-4 assets (poor or good) each. That’s 12-16 assets at the table. I decided that I didn’t have to check the list of assets each time and that players could bring me the information of the relevant ones that I should include in the scene. 3 of the characters has a Legendary Beauty asset, one of them as a good asset, and the two other as bad ones. I made a few mistakes, especially in the last session: forgetting to take Widow’s Legendary Beauty poor asset during an important interaction with a NPC or forgetting that Nuit’s Legendary Beauty poor asset was hidden by a successful disguise roll and making NPC acting by taking this into account. For instance, Nuit’s first scene was her, looking for her family (one of her passions), at the royal court of Ghazor. I framed the scene, describing the Prince, the feasts, the nobility, the religions ritual honoring a city god. I asked Laura to make an etiquette roll to see how she would fit there and that decides the baseline of the npc’s reaction towards her. The “anything” I had in mind is typically things like the Legendary Beauty poor assets: “if I’m forgetting something and you think it should apply, tell me, because I don’t have the list of all the assets and elements from the passions”. Taking the galactic pool game as an example was maybe not the best example, I was pointing at that moment where you frame a very clear and prepared situation, while asking the player “if there’s something from your description that I should include in the scene, tell me”.
Backstory and situation.
The lesson in The Pool of not confounding them was the first hard lesson I learned when I played it for the first time ten years ago. I think I just miscommunicated here, but I’ll scrutinize this variable for the next session. I did not really create any backstory during the game here, the session was short, and I wanted to use it to get a sense of what the character were, and what they were up to, by directly putting them in a situation instead of asking loads of question prior to play. What I did here is improvise something that seems logical to be there (a luxurious object to be sold) and that I could think about later.
Intuitive continuity. I was thinking about that during play with an eye toward preventing it. The way I think avoided it was simply to stop the game when I realized that I needed more material to play. We only played one scene by player character and that was enough for me to tell “Hey, I know what I need to do now, but I don’t want to improvise.” Widow’s gem is an example: I had no idea what to do with it, so I stopped there, and worked on it between session. Or maybe there’s still something I need to self-reflect more?
Preparing between session.
This was my real goal, and although I can point to some mistakes from the last 4 sessions, I actually think it work pretty well, more than functionally. I had those three first scenes with the characters having done things. My prep after that first session was absolutely extensive. Relationship map for the cities that I knew the character would go, active NPCs with goals and a small list of bangs including elements that appeared in the first session (actually, building from them, such as: what is that gem, who wants it, why, and two or three bangs related to that). I’ve cited two points in my posts, but I could enumerate 5 or 6 of them. Maps of potential locations where the characters could go according to what happened (they didn’t!), and statblocks of NPC.
Reincoporation. The list I provided were really the things I wanted to discuss. I realized, by playing with Laura, that she was doing this a lot. Choosing the murdered noble as a vessel for necromancy really hit me on that (who knows why), that made me “see”, retroactively then proactively, all those instances.
Pre-play prep.
I wanted to refrain myself to post about prep itself because I want to focus on situational play – like I did with The Clay that Woke. But I guess I’ll engage in conversations about prep to dissect it more clearly and pinpoints way to do it better. I learned a lot by mistakes and corrections with Paul’s game. I can’t do it with this game now because the game is still ongoing, but I’ll definitely try to nail this better.
Also, I would love to see David and Ross comment here giving their own perspective on my account.
Finally, Alan contacted me to discuss this topic and his own improvements and insights during the last two years of play, and I suggested a video conversation next week. Expect a recording in the comments here.
Since you asked for my perspective I’ll try and provide something. I can’t really comment on the first session of play as I didn’t join till later. At that point my character, Kurosh – an obese fallen noble, schemer, poet, poisoner and apparently envoy for hire, was dropped into the middle of what seemed like a much more fleshed out situation involving the cold war between city states turning hot and the toxic inter-court politics of one of those cities and with relatively little tying into my character’s passions. Which to be clear is fine with me, he’s got a nominal job to do, bringing a message from another city, and has somehow managed to cause and get into a load of trouble, and after a few sessions worth of events I’m ready to relace one of my passions with something in response. Probably something like “see the whole royal family of Ghezath impaled on the spikes outside their palace”; they deserve it.
Greg, it does seem a bit like in between sessions you developed this situation and have placed key IMPORTANT NPCs within it to engage the other characters, especially Nuit with her missing Father and The Widow with the sorcerer, to the extent that both characters ended up travelling from one city to another following these leads. Did this sort of abandon the organic situations you were trying to develop via the process you describe from the first session?
I also wonder if you are placing too much stress on the passions as GM tool? But I’m feeling that I haven’t as a player really got to grips with Passions either – most of mine aren’t quite working and I have been thinking of them as like Muses in NIne Worlds but I think they maybe work quite differently. Not sure that’s helping really.
Ross, I’m answering to this first :
You’re right. Between the first and the second session, I wrote a lot of material. I made a relationship map of the court in one city, and another one for the other court.
I also made decision of something that was going to happen and wrote a small backstory with an idea of things that had happened. I didn’t really had “important NPC” in mind, in terms of “this one is fictionally more important that this other one”. I created a backstory for the stolen gem with an idea of how this objectif is related to some NPC (who wants it and what they are going to do about it).
So when your character was introduced, I had at least a clear idea of the personality of the NPC in the scene. When you were introduced to the court, I asked you for an etiquette roll to see how much of the relationship map you would understand, and I looked at them to choose what character would “grab” you into his scheme (the Queen’s weird sister).
As I had more prepared material (in the sense of not working from the void) in the other city, I also asked an etiquette roll to Nassim to see how much of the relationship map he would get from this roll. When I say “how much of the relationship map”, I really mean of the various love/hate relationship between NPC presents in the scene through their behavior.
When you failed one of your roll, I just looked a the relationship map to decide what kind of bad consequence would happen, and as your roll concerned a social sphere, I choose one NPC with clear bad behavior to grab you into his schemes too. I may have chosen any other one but this one felt ok. I may have been too harsh in treating the consequence of that failure.
I’m also wondering if this style of play is really the best way to do with that game, which is presented to be very action-high-pace (gaining 2-3 passions points by session really means framing only dangerous scenes). I don’t think I can answer for now.
Second question:
In fact, I don’t really use them as a GM tool, at least in my mind. I just looked at them to see if I should include elements in the situation. For instance, my focus on royalty for those relationship map that I made is based on the fact that Nassim has a passion related to courting queens. I didn’t really tell to myself “let’s think about all the way to organize those lovely courts” or something like that but just, “ok, let’s put queens in the situation so I don’t have to fill voids at some point”. I didn’t do it systematically. For instance, you have a passion attribute with an abducted lover by merchants. I know this but I have not settle in my prep about where she is, where are the merchants, or any kind of backstory. I’m ready to put that in game and make a decision when it’s needed, but it’s not a source of thought or anxiety for me like “I should absolutely make something with that”. I’m sure I’ll find a way to situate in the actual situation when it’s needed, but it was not because you didn’t act toward that.
By contrast, I have a VERY CLEAR idea of what some NPC are doing off-scene and in between session I’m always trying to think “what did they do considering that the character have done that” (meaning also: what the characters didn’t do).
I’m drawing inspiration for how I did with the Cyberpunk game. I have NPC with goals, I try to make them grabby toward the player characters, I’m not really using the passion attributes as “framing device”. I’m treating the passions attributes as player devices, I don’t treat them as framing devices myself. At least, that’s how I THINK I’m doing, so if you see this differently, I’m really interested to discuss this previously to have your feedback on how I present things (instead of how I think I present them).
I’m still wondering if it’s the best approach for that specific game.