The Truth Found in Death: Scene Economy and Masochism

I am GMing a Power Rangers game for my friends. It’s been a great time, filled with a lot of camaraderie, heart, role playing… and barely any fighting??? The first two sessions were essentially the characters trying to figure out where they stood on things. Which isn’t bad (and was role played so well I didn’t care much at the time) but… an action RPG should have action! And adventure! Get to the point!

There is an irony in having Kull in the blog picture. If you know you’re hopefully laughing. If you don’t go listen to a Kull story. And then you’ll probably get it.

Point is: they didn’t have much mechanical support in just getting to the conflict. “But Nathan, you’re the GM, that’s your job! Don’t blame the game for what you’re supposed to be doing!” you’ll say. And that’s not wrong? I see where that criticism is coming from. 

But you know my first rule is GMing, at least at this point? Always let the player tie their own rope; only act when the players aren’t creating enough trouble on their own. The best GM is one who you barely notice because you were just… playing. I’ve got players who make great trouble, just not the type of trouble that requires combat. If the game stalled I would have thrown in a combat. And the game barely stalled.

Yes, my players are just that good. I’m extremely lucky!

But.

I think there’s a problem. The problem is that people get tired. Whenever I get to my RPG nights I'm tuckered out. My job's stressful and can really take it out of me. So when I get to game night? I don't really have a lot of chutzpah left. I want a good story but I don't necessarily want to hunt down my friends in a game to have good drama. Good drama involves suffering. Sorry folks, that's how it works. And you know what I  can't pull out of my tired soul as much anymore? Y'know, thanks to the two and a half intensive years of EMDR therapy, nights spent crying on the floor, and awful panic attacks?

Oh, right, suffering.

And I know for a fact that people, when tired, try to avoid suffering. It's rather difficult to go "Yay let's do suffering!" when you're not tired, as opposed to when you are. An adventure game requires suffering. If you want a good time the fictional pieces need to be in trouble. What makes it a game is that it isn't you. It's one thing if a game system does it, but when a game system isn't doing it... I don't think that's a good thing. Perseverating on how you're going to harm your fellow player's characters just doesn't strike me as a humane thing to do. The game producing those moments, giving everyone something to react against? Sure. That's fine, you didn't make it whole cloth, out of your own skull. You're playing a game to deal with a type of situation that you may need to experience, somehow.

But figuring out how to stress out your players over a long period of time?

No, I don't think that's the GM's business.

And here we come to the idea of scene economy: having a script that runs on in the background, telling the group "this is the type of scene you're doing right now". Before anyone balks, every single adventure plot is more or less the same structure, and that's okay. The point isn't the structure, but what happens within it. Obviously exceptions exist, and me referencing Kull earlier means I'm not only aware of them but am making the game specifically to make sure most of Kull's stories don't happen. Because, let's be blunt, a lot of Kull's stories are an almost excessive amount of world-building with very little adventure. The word navel-gazing comes to mind.

I wonder how many people I just lost by writing that.

Oh well.

Now, there's obviously various adventure stories with their own structures and whatnot, but I'm not aiming to do them all, I just want a framework that allows people to focus on their feats of awesomeness in the face of chaos and death, which is really the essence of a good adventure story anyways. We enjoy the guided tour up against the raging chaos and, provided we're given a genuine chance to see things in a visceral light and see actual triumph.

Fortunately this wheel has been crafted before: Misspent Youth. Robert Bohl's fantastic little RPG has a seven act structure that slots in perfectly with the ideas I've got for The Truth Found in Death. I'm not going to take it straight, because I've got some ideas that will work really nicely with these acts (and I've always found Misspent Youth's conflict mechanic too shallow for my tastes), but it's a great place to start. It gets you on the ground, forces everyone to focus on one big bad thing going on right now, and then weaves seven of these conflicts into a tightly focused narrative of pulse-pounding adventure. If we didn't want a story we could play Grand Theft Auto or whatever, but RPGs are inherently about narrative in a way most games are not. But there's nothing that says that any one person at the table really controls that narrative or its structure.

I think RPGs should allow you free play in the story you’re meant to tell, but really nothing else. This isn’t because I want to restrict players but because it’s hard to do an actual adventure correctly, given the breakneck pace and how tired people are before they play. Asking people to come to every session with their A Game is… not kind. A scene structure lets everyone lean on the mechanics and do what they came to do: kick ass, take names, and drink out of skulls.