0. Have a session just for creating the characters and the campaign.

Get together just to talk about what you will be wanting from the game before you run it. Create characters, create everything. Just spend time talking about what you’re doing without hurrying to play on the same evening you’re planning. It will be worth it to a) take the time to plan properly and b) have that time between character creation and the first game.

1. Speak your mind and hear what they’re saying

The first rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. But when it comes to tabletop gaming, being honest about your vision and communicating it to the players, doesn’t necessarily hurt. At base level this is stuff like saying “I’m running a scifi campaign so no elves”. But being specific about what you’re thinking of and why is a great way to go about. Even if you go down to gritty details with “well, I’m thinking that in this game you’ll start off as the trusted men of the king, but somewhere, maybe about halfway through the campaign you will betray him or he will betray you and you’ll end up on the opposite sides. And the end will be focused on that” it won’t hurt. Just as long as if you leave enough space for people to maneuver in. Knowing the road that will be ahead will prepare everyone for the journey, even if it means giving up some of the twists. If the players know that it will eventually be a game about a zombie apocalypse, they’ll know to set up relationships with NPCs in ways that are fruitful for the sudden but inevitable twist in the genre.

And as well as you being honest with them, you should be open to their suggestions and ideas – let them bring to the table what they think is cool and support that. Let the players share with you what they would like from the game and work towards a consensus that you can all sign on. If there are some parts of your game that you absolutely want to have in it, tell that to them. But give them the same right – if one of them is adamant on having some medical drama in your zombie game, let him. It’s not that much to ask, is it?

We did this. My original vision was a game set in the present about criminals with cool cars and motorbikes running away from something. It ended up being set in the 80s (the era wasn’t crucial to my vision) and the players being less criminals and more just people ending up in the bad situation. But it was still about running away in cool cars. The reason for all this is that because we’re talking about a few sessions, each being only a couple of hours of gaming, there is just no time to include everything. If everyone knows what’s up, everyone can play along.

And of course, when starting the game you won’t know everything. But tell them what you know and let them tell you what you want, and then start running the game like you were originally talking.

The idea of being open about the game was first introduced to me by the Jeep guys, so credit for this goes there.

2. Set a theme and a mood

Sort of related to the previous one as this is things that you should really talk about openly. One of the first things I said about the game was that “this game will be about running away and freedom” – it’s a simple enough concept that translates well to different sort of things, offering something to focus on without limiting things too much. Sure, it means this won’t be the game where the focus will on a happy, ever-lasting marriage. (Unless you’re running away from something and ending up there in the end). When running a focused game, having a strong central theme to work with is quite important and enjoyable.

And again, bouncing the ball back to the players, “How will your character fit in this theme? How will he explore it?” And we end up with three interesting stories that are different. We have an undercover cop stuck between the two worlds, constricted by both, a woman in a loveless marriage with a cartel sub-boss and a guy who is just doing what people expect without really knowing what he wants to do. From there it’s easy to move forward.

Then there’s another important question: Mood. Are we talking Film Noir? Romantic Comedy? Also a lot of related questions arise from thinking about what the game should feel like… What’s the level of violence/sexuality people are comfortable with? How gritty should it be? How realistic? Are we talking about a Hollywood action movie when it comes to a gunfight or more what would happen if you drew a gun in downtown L.A.? Will everything feel desperate or is there hope? Is the metal in the world more chrome or rust? Again, it’s a good thing for everyone to know what sort of a thing they’re playing.

Think theme and mood were first introduced to me in White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade. Even if I never used them to good effect when playing that game. To be honest, that’s one game that is full of great ideas that no-one ever used.

3. Set the pace and keep running

This is something I learned from Primetime Adventures and have been using for a good while with success every time. Know beforehand how many games you will be playing and where the focus of each game session will be.

For this game it meant that one of the questions we answered on our character creation session was “how many games will we be playing this thing for?” My suggestion was really either seven or five. With three players, seven sessions would have meant four that were focused on the “plot” and three that were spotlight sessions (will get back on that in a moment), with five, it meant two plot, three spotlights. We went for the latter option, with the plot games serving as “bookends”, being the first and the last game, and each of the middle three would be focusing on one of the characters.

I use the spotlight system without a shame these days in pretty much most of the mini-campaigns I run, be they D&D or freeform. Quickly summarized it means that you, as a player, get one game session in the campaign where it is all about your character and his central issue. It will pretty much be the focal point of his story. Everyone knows who is on the spotlight, and for that session will be playing to enforce that part of the story. It does not mean that if it’s not your spotlight, you won’t get screen time. Just that the focus will be on the question of the spotlight. “Am I a good cop or a bad cop?”, for example.

In the game I’m running we’re using a three-tiered spotlight system. Each player has one game where their character is at priority (rating 3), the spotlight game. They also have two games where their plot is at “secondary” level (rating 2), and two where their character’s issues is put on a back burner (rating 1).

This translates to an individual pace for each of the stories of the game. A pattern of “2 1 1 2 3″ for example means that the character’s issue will be there at the beginning, then go on hibernation for a couple of games and then make its way back into the last game, climaxing in the very last one. “1 2 3 2 1″ on the other hand means something that will be directly in focus on the 3rd game, but will be set up during the previous one, and the fallout from the climax will be seen in the fourth. And so on.

In one game session one player might have a game with a rating of 3, one with rating of 2 and one with a 1, which means that the first player will be on the focus, but the issues of the second player’s character should show through a bit. Bit of foreshadowing or something. And the third player will play his character maybe as a foil or to support some decisions or make the choices tougher for the other two. Whatever suits the story.

The players know when their issues are on the focus, so they don’t have to worry about not getting their say in the matters. Everyone has their moment to shine and everyone knows what to support and which questions to raise when needed.

…

Looks like I will have to write a second blog post somewhere in the near future about the actual things we do in the game that work, this one is quite long on its own with just the preliminary stuff in.

A very descriptive quote. It creates vague notions of how it might have happened, what did happen and leaves us curious, and shocked. Evoking empathy and mystery. Very standard event in entertainment industry, yet handled in so many different ways. Most of the time, it emotionally impacts us when we are passive in front of television and let it all wash over us, allowing ourselves to be smothered with scripted-to-detail flow of it.

How on earth do you communicate the emotional magnitudes of such event to a player who sits comfortable on a sofa with a piece of knobby plastic in his hands? Throw blood on screen? Meh. Five-eyed tentacle monsters the size of skyscrapers? Bah. Basic videogame tropes, and they have lost much of their impact. Only games that manage to pull a good left hook on the player are those with something new and plenty of borrowed. Dunno about blue, we really don’t have to go to color grading here.

Do you do it by player character narrative? A voice of the character you’re playing? But it doesn’t sound like you! Are you audience or player character or something in between? It’s a detachment from gameplay in itself. Basic narrative voice? Basic, works, but has to be played beforehand really really well so it won’t become one of those annoying gameplay breaks. You know them, I know you do. Most of the time we get to see a fancy CG clip with near-Hollywood production values. How does that work, then?

“Ah damn you, stupid cutscene,” *clickclickclick* “AND WHY CAN’T I SKIP THE DAMNED arfg meh” *foreheadslap* and off you go, distracting yourself by clicking around a random pornsite in teh intarwebs, ruining your life forever, cocaine, etc.

Developers poured sweat, blood, money, tears, long hours, lost marriages, haggard faces and years worth of therapy sessions to those cutscene / narrative break moments and what do you do? You throw a tantrum, you selfish prick. Have you no heart or sensibility to those starving and homeless? No, wait — it’s not your fault! My apologies. I should have added narrative design to the list of good sacrificial traits us developers have, but then I wouldn’t be writing yet another blogpost that stinks of a bitter lemon a very fat and unpleasant tourist has sat on for hours.

Exhibit B:

Developer conclave, the masters with tallest chairlegs, sits silent under a pendulum axe that swings nigh-on their worried brows.

Lords of their realm are not pleased with their latest offering, the majestic tour de force through worlds imagined by their masterminds, and they have summoned a wrath on their homes. A Mandatum carved in black obelisk has been tossed amids the conclave, and lest they follow it, they will be banished from their realm.

Their gods are gods of coins, and coins they need to create worlds, and worlds they need to create to summon more coins for their gods. Vicious circles surround them, and the Mandatum has words that glow red:

“Sequel must be made, and Sequel must replenish the faith of all who follows us; Sequel will set us up as lords of imagination, and this world will follow us to those we create. Sequel must have thriceworth explosions, ten sacks more guns, and in hearts, it must taste bitter and sorrowful, yet caring and full of springtime hope”

Conclave has banished the scary-speaking and shallow designers, for they were aliens to them. They have new ones, young and snappy and filled to brim with new ideas, yet new ideas worry conclave, who already shit worry-shaped bricks out beneath their lizardly tails.

“How do you, young and snappy and filled to brim with ideas designer minds, would approach this quest? How, shall we reform our words, will you fulfill this bloody Mandatum we have received from the angry skies?”

The new designers, their hats full of their head, with their heads too big for their hats, reply:

“We shall rethink teh whole thought of moving pictures, teh very soundness of it. We will bring you a new prince of emotions, of new pedigree of teh empathy itself!”

The conclave, as if made of one mind and of one body, buries its many heads in its colourless hands, and shits some new bricks.

Designers scurry amidst the trained monkeys, peering over their hairy and scrawny shoulders, asking this and that. They are like mosquitos, sucking a drop of ideas from there, another from elsewhere, and so it goes. They look at the world monkeys are creating, on deeper level than mere head-lines and key-words and idea-boards.  They see the ethereal and surreal and unreal character take his babysteps, reaching out to his buddies amidst the ravages of war, in the torn land. They are empathic creatures, and they are moved.

“Something is here. Something wicked has cometh. Be still, my heart! What is it made of?”
“It is sad. No, it is hopeful, but has not found resolution yet. It is a story in itself. How do we tell teh story with no words like teh words we are written in?”

They confer. They look back at old moving pictures, and see how moving and marvellous they are. Yet, they were not of the same world, in the end – they were of another. Detached.

How to attach them? Something new is needed. Did they not have the world already, a beautiful world that interacts with you, a world that touches you back and reacts when you shoot at it? Their eyes opened up, and they sang a song.

Hi-ho, world is not of heartless  personae-less AI-animatronics;

Hi-ho, world creates the stories it weaves it leaves for us;

The AI-animatronics teh monkeys have bred are teh answer, thus;

[chorus] Me so horny, ahunka-hunka-hunka!

Wait, did I just wander towards context-sensitive AI and world and .. oh, drat. No, forget all that for now. I won’t go there, partly because I still like to entertain the idea of presenting you dear readers with gameplay blogread breaks that possibly annoy you to no end, and if you’re a game developer, you probably deserve it anyways.

So. Cutscenes?

On my part 1 of this probably neverending quest against wrongful cross-use of different storytelling media, I was rather annoyed at how media for passive audience gets treated in media for audience that dictates action and is hardly ever passive. Did I say cutscenes are inherently bad by nature if they are in games? Hell no. They can carry the story forwards, and if they are long and interesting enough, they do turn the player around into passive audience mode. It’s just the introduction and preparation and other cunning juggling of mindgames that gets forgotten, or gets acknowledged with “.. but it’s C priority, look at the schedule and just forget it already.”

Let’s juggle with some ideas. Let’s follow that white C priority rabbit down the hole nobody ever goes.

Traditionally, as mentioned before, cutscenes get slapped in where the transition from place / gameplay event / level to another occurs. It’s introductionary clip, a thematic booster or a plot forwarding device. Nothing wrong with that! It’s external stimulus within the game, as it comes automatically and with no player interaction required. One inherent problem might lay in the natural fact that it’s made to match the game world. It looks the same, it has the same colors and same art direction, even if it has higher production values and better looks than the game itself.

Scenario 1: Marshall Blueberry Got The Twitches

Player trots down an alleyway after clearing it free of giant cockroach combatant drones. It narrows down ahead, but we can see it opens up to a T junction alley between city blocks ahead. Right as the player is about to step to that crossing alley,

something loud and yellow and black and blue screams past his eyes, blurry and totally out of this world. Viewpoint suddenly shoots away, world on screen turns into caricature comic book representation of Your Mind On Cockroach Drugs, with more angles and corners than there can logically be, with colors dancing and the cockroach recon convoy passing our players location, who now is seen curled up in fetal position. We are watching him from high up, as if in astral experience. Loud cacophony fills our ears, wild vivid colors only drugged up demo coders can come up with fill our eyes, and with a quietness that comes so fast it sounds like a bang,

everything returns normal. Black frame or two on screen, regular colors of the world fill our view, everything is 90 degrees tilted. Your character is still on the ground, and you SO did not expect that moment. Oh, right, there was some gas tossed your way during the last skirmish..

Yet, cutscene it was. Thematic, maybe – or if the convoy had some wild caricatures of doomsday machines being transported, it could have been a plot forwarder as well. With good luck, it left the player eager to move along and figure out (allowed to figure out, really) what those drugged up, psychedelic hallucinations actually meant. And most importantly, it threw the player off the safe stand, reinvigorating him. It gave him something fresh to chew. It’s a game, you can go ahead and run with scissors at hand!

It doesn’t have to be the same static looking world you live in, you bitter monkeys.

Scenario 2: TVTropes edition!

Player trots down a grey alleyway after clearing it free .. you know. The same basic premise, right? Just as our hero is about to put his foot into the alleyway, we snag the viewpoint with a reflex snap towards right, where a BLOODY HUGE MASSIVE CRAB TANK AIEE–
(cue War Bonds Are Good For You -jingle and video reminder)
Hello folks, have you been feeling downwards lately? Have you not considered – or have you considered, but never dared to try the radio-activital water enhancer? With pellets of pure uranium carefully hand-casted into cement base, you only dip our Radium-O into your water tank and it will be filled with reinvigorating, life-energy boosting ATOMS OF THE FUTURE for you to drink! Available now from Lol-Mart!
(cue War Bonds Are Good For You -jingle and video reminder. “Returning to live action now!”)
–we snag the viewpoint with a reflex snap towards right, where a BLOODY HUGE MASSIVE CRAB TANK AIEE is shooting past your eyes and oh shit that’s big, those are hardened orbital bunker buster nukes on that platform, and oh wow I’ll just wait this one out, I know I’m gonna run into these baddies again–

And so on. Player is very, very used to all kinds of media. He watches television and movies. Television more than movies. He probably has watched television more than he has played games. He bloody well grew up with it. It was his nanny when he was a toddler. We took a step out of the box only to find old familiar things in new context, but somehow, as it was all so very familiar, it didn’t annoy .. And it was part of that world! Atomic age, with gigantic cockroaches with nukes that go to orbit. Cutscene itself did not serve gameplay function, other than slip a bookmark into the players memory about what he’s done and seen before. He’ll remember that moment, and that’s depth in itself, in a world filled with cliches seen bazillion times.

So maybe it wasn’t exactly out of the box. Maybe it was more like beating and kicking the box into different shape, but it doesn’t matter. Only as long as you can see the box, tiptoe around it, have some whacks at it and generally see ways to make things that go into the box and out again, you should be fine.

- If it’s a radically different cutscene, make it radically fast change because it’s not in balance with regular gameworld.

- If it looks like the ordinary gameworld, present it in much slower fashion as it’s heavily balanced. As mentioned, unbalanced you can whack into the weirdwoods as hard as you can, and it’ll be better for it.

Scenario 3: Daily grind

Our hero is about to embark on the crossing alley, and world pauses for split second. You hear DVD whirring to life. Screen comes back alive, but from a different viewpoint. There’s a big-ass tank-like monster with chipped armour, viewed from almost ground level to emphasize the big guns and bolts and stuff covering it. Lots of shiny bits, flares, DOF tricks with camera that shakes and rattles. A tank tread rolls menacingly towards the camera, which cuts to another angle right when the heavy metal descends on it. We’re shown the full size of convoy now, from aerial perspective. Sound is muffled, a cloud drifts under the camera to further emphasize scale. It’s all very movie-looking.
Cut back to player viewpoint, with player control. If he walks now, he’ll die under the machines. So he waits, watching. Pre-scripted convoy doesn’t care about him, its only function is to hint at future developments of this world war against bloody big insects with guns.

Sound familiar? I won’t even go there anymore, lest this blog gets banned from teh intarwebs for all the cursing.

Traditionally we suffer from too much safety, stay too sheltered and make familiar decisions. Things end up too “financially sound” and “marketable” and “it’s what others do so it’s what players want”. There’s no need to make the whole game artistically different and clever and celshaded whatnot with “unique art direction” with “extravagantly brave colours”. Just include the salt that goes on top of the same goo others are cooking. Little pinch is enough to remind people of the proper flavors.

There’s so much more to be said, regarding generally descriptive moments inserted in the middle of gameplay et cetera, but this is already bordering on too long post. I do smell the part 3 coming in nearish future, possibly with the notion of fading the cutscenes transparent to the player, or something. Until then, do leave comments if you have anything to add or argue.