This post has been sitting unfinished in the drafts folder for years, waiting for a breakthrough to finish it. You are that breakthrough.

You know that overused moment in film and television where someone levels a gun on someone else and issues an ultimatum? “Do what I say or I pull the trigger,” she says. “Talk or die,” goes the gunman. That sort of thing?

Does that decision arise in your roleplaying-game play? How about the variation where two serious people brandishing guns face off at gunpoint? How does your campaign (not necessarily your game mechanics) handle that?

This is fun stuff. It’s about designing a situation and not an outcome. It’s a pared down, high-stakes decision point. Would your character rather die than do this thing?

One important feature of this situation is clear: this is not a part of combat. This may be a statement, by the players or their characters, that they want to resolve the situation, that they want the stakes to be high (or are at least willing to accept high stakes), and that they want a single dramatic choice to reign, rather than a chaotic battle.

It is a pretty clear decision point, and potentially a classic impasse. One participant says “Do X or die” and the other says “Do Y or die.” It’s a dilemma.

Except, of course, the actual circumstance is often much more complicated, and that complication is essential to making the decision interesting. An actual “Do X or die” situation is simple and tense, but can be terribly un-fun—the target’s decision may hardly be decision at all. Is “take this forced action or stop playing” a good dramatic choice? No. So, “Do X or die” is actually “Do X or accept a risk of death,” which is more interesting, but also muddier, more complicated, and less predictable.

That muddy, complicated, unpredictable option might be more interesting, but those factors may also make it less desirable for the gunman, who must find the option more interesting than (and at least as easy to understand as) regular combat, or else the gunman’s player is unlikely to exercise that option.

Have you ever seen this next thing happen? A player says “I’ll go for his gun!” and then, when confronted with the grappling rules, says “Nevermind, I’ll just cooperate.” I have.

The reasons for beginning a standoff, as a player, must include simplicity, I think. Standoffs are staples of thrillers because they are bold, clear dramatizations. One or more characters demand, and one or more characters make defining choices. Simple, effective. If the setup and outcomes of this act are complex in gameplay terms, they are unlikely to be attempted much, if at all. That’s good if you’re trying to avoid them, but less good if you want your campaign to include these moments. (Whether you just like them or you’re trying to include them are touchstones of the genre or for some other reason is, for now, a separate issue.)

When I’ve done this, it’s with the understanding that a level gunshot to the head is not combat. Such a weapon is unlikely to deal 1d8+Dex damage, or whatever, and is more likely to propel the plot forward at muzzle velocity. Either someone ends up dead, and we deal with the consequences, or someone ends up an unlikely survivor (perhaps in a bloody chop-shop or underground hospital or remote monastic sanctuary) and the story is loaded up with revised or renewed stakes and motives.

A couple of other particular, iconic, and dramatic outcomes spring to mind:

• One participant relents and puts down his gun, as instructed. On film, almost never does the remaining gunman then fire anyway. (If he did, he’s a villain.) This is practically a rule—but should it actually be a rule in play? This is, essentially, a decision to forgo combat, at least for now.
• Both participants choose to abandon the standoff and enter combat as usual. (See Face/Off: ”Plan B. Let’s just kill each other.”) This may be an attempt to settle things through dialogue followed by a revelation that neither side is willing to die, right then, to settle things. So we settle it not just with dice but with a sequence of tactical decisions and randomization, possibly with escape hatches and lots of new inputs to consider.
• Everyone shoots, (almost?) everyone dies. Call this the Reservoir Dogs outcome.

How have you handled it? What game has mechanics for this that you’ve appreciated, hacked, or paid homage to?

I’ve wanted to do this but never have. Have you done it?

The idea is simple, the execution complex. For each major chapter in your RPG campaign, you use a different game to resolve the action. You hack and modify the games you want to use like crazy, some more than others. What starts as an investigation lead by various governments in a weary, war-torn metropolis leads to the highest tier of society (Cold City). There, in glorious and lavish penthouse ballrooms untouched by the war below, the glitterati dance and drink and dare each other  (via The Dance and the Dawn) to determine who gets whom. That leads to a Fiasco involving miserable spouses, true love, stolen diamonds, and broken hearts that return us to the lowest levels of the city.

Or what about a military campaign that plays out over a century, beginning with complex machinations and paranoia (via Burning Empires) before progressing to the madness of an all-consuming galaxy-wide war (via 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars) and finally culminating in the least likely soldiers fighting in the bombed-out remains of the last human city (via Grey Ranks).

A great many of these games don’t let many characters out intact, so the traditional notion of following a core cast of PCs on a long literal or figurative journey might not work out. Rather, it might be necessary to tie individual games together with a few standout characters—who are playable only in certain chapters, maybe—or narrative connective tissue like monologues, flashbacks, or just a recurring theme or motif that brings together what would otherwise be a loose anthology.

My gut says this idea would require a lot of cooperation, maybe to the point of demanding certain metagaming choices be made during play, but I think the unique satisfaction from pulling it off would be worth it for the group that finds this compelling. Remember, the game that covers the next chapter wouldn’t have to be preordained. It might be that whoever gets the happiest result of the Fiasco story gets to decide what the next chapter is about, for example, so this wouldn’t have to be a strictly planned experience.

What games might you connect into a campaign if you could?

Gamemastery NPC Illustration by Tyler Walpole (© Paizo)

I laid out seven cards I’d selected from Paizo’s GameMastery deck, Urban NPCs, in a row at the middle of the table, where both of my regular players could see them.

Without any preview or overview, I tasked my players with answering the questions below. (I actually even changed the order of the questions at the last minute as I rethought the questions I was hoping would arise during the process.) We shifted the cards around the table to indicate different answers and create a quick sort of infographic describing the NPCs’ relationships with the PCs—allies were pushed above the baseline, enemies below it, dead characters were flipped over, etc.

This is part of my Dragon Age RPG (#DARPG) playtest campaign, where I try out not only new AGE System mechanics for the Dragon Age world but experiment with different techniques and styles of play. I do this all the time, in almost everything I run. From week to week I might riff on questions of pacing, timing, narrative authority, unreliable narration, and all sorts of other tricks, to give individual adventures distinctive feelings. For this particular Dragon Age campaign, we’ve been keeping separate character sheets for the characters at three different levels (3rd, 5th, and 7th now) and flashing back and forth between levels to tell nested and interwoven stories. (I’ll write more about that next.)

Because we’ve been playing the characters across multiple levels simultaneously, these relationships work a little differently than they might in another campaign. Thus we can introduce a character at an earlier point of the story knowing—all of us together—that he or she will end up feeling a certain way about the PCs later on in the story. That adds a dramatic bit of foreshadowing as well as a bit of narrative structure to climb on like a jungle gym.

We can even hop over the actual incidents that changed the characters’ relationships, since there’s little suspense there, and decide what happened in the intervening levels through alluding dialogue (“I can’t forgive you for leaving me on that island.”) or out-of-character exposition (“Remember, now that you’re not romantically involved anymore, he probably doesn’t want to see you.”). If we do choose to play out the actual scenes where relationships dissolve, solidify, or otherwise change, we may do it without engaging the dice because there won’t be questions of success or failure in involved—we’ll be dramatizing a process for which we already know the result. That can be a fun play space, too, including plenty of opportunities to riff on the facts and introduce meaningful surprises while respecting what’s come before (for us, the players) and what we know is to come (for the characters).

Here are the tasks in the order we did them:

1. Two of these characters are enemies or rivals by 7th level. No matter how you feel about them, they are opposed to you now. Pick them now.
2. Two of these characters are allies or cohorts. No matter how your dynamic starts, they are friends or allies now. Pick them now.
3. One of these characters is alive at 5th level but dead by the time you’re 7th level. Pick that character now.
4. One of these characters has a romantic dynamic with one of you—it might be mutual, it might be a love triangle, it might a one-sided infatuation. Pick that character now.
5. You are indebted to one of these characters. You might owe money, service, or your life or freedom. Pick that character now.
6. One of these characters has information or an object you want. Pick that character now.

In actual practice, I deviated from this a bit. Since we had a couple of characters get multiple answers, I assigned the sixth answer to one of the remaining, unselected characters, just to diversify.

Once that was done, I revealed a final wrinkle:

• Two of these characters are turncoats. They may not be what they appear for long. They may turn against you or switch to your side.

Dragon Age Set 1 from Green Ronin Publishing

Which two characters? I predetermined that before I dealt out the seven cards and started the players’ selection process. The turncoats may not live long enough for their embedded loyalties to be revealed, they may be driven into corners or welcomed into the fold through actual play before they can change their stripes—the players still have the power to act on those characters, in other words—but the two characters I preselected have built-in goals and loyalties that go into the mix along with the players’ choices. The rest of the NPCs I put on the table get characterized now, between sessions, to fit the decisions the players made about them.

We then worked together to stat up one of those two cohorts as a companion warrior (a tank, in this case) to help the PCs in forthcoming battles.

Notice that, to start, the players have very little information to go on. They’re choosing their enemies and allies based on the most superficial features. Still, they had enough information to go on to make some surprising and provocative decisions. Both of the PCs are Dragon Age elves (one’s a city elf, one’s Dalish), with subplots about fighting for elf rights in a human-dominated world, yet they chose the only elf in the lineup to be an enemy. It surprised and enticed me as much as it did them, I think. As they moved the cards around on the table, though, interesting combinations of answers emerged and they naturally made choices that they wanted to play out or deal with the fallout from later. They didn’t shy away from drama. They created rich situations that they wanted to know more about and also wanted to play with.

The NPCs are toys, like building blocks, which the players used to build a playground.

In case you’re curious, my players ended up pairing off some of the choices in really compelling ways. They are indebted to a dead dwarf and have a romantic entanglement with one of their enemies. So we have two sources of inspiration and action awaiting us: we can dramatize the circumstances by which predetermined facts come about and we can play to find out how these circumstances get more complicated (or maybe even resolved).

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Chicago, Illinois (© Will Hindmarch)

Each roleplaying game is a city.

This is what I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been turning over definitions of roleplaying games and story games in my head, these past few days. RPGs and cities are two of my favorite things to read about and explore. I love them for their emergent beauty and their complex identities. They are things made up of multitudes.

An RPG, like a city, has many inhabitants who may love the place for disparate reasons, see it different ways, live very different lives amid the same avenues and structures. We may not travel the city in the same way, we may be visitors or residents, we may support different teams or be regulars at different pubs—we may even think the other is not getting the proper local experience. Yet we are neighbors.

Each game has its own character and history and internal geography. We can say that your hometown and my hometown both have grids or boulevards or grand plazas and that helps us understand each other but it doesn’t attempt to wrap up the whole city, to contain it, bottle it up, or define it. We can say that one city has a lot of beautiful bridges and another has cultivated a dazzling skyline and appreciate both for their own charms without damning the other by comparison. We can prize one city’s grand plaza without reaching the conclusion that cities lacking identical plazas are “broken.”

Cities may have common climates, similar architecture, interwoven histories, while at the same time being too complex and too full of myriad tales, intersecting stories, moving individuals and unmeasured networks to be easily appreciated through summary. The planner who lays out the park can’t know how many couples will propose marriage inside it and how many will break up on its benches. Your London is a city of first loves, awkward kisses, and blurry first dates. Mine is a honeymoon spot, that place where I saw the big dog trapped at the bottom of tube escalators, where I ate a sandwich in the rain outside the Tate.

We don’t actually attend places, we inhabit places and times together. Our experiences—happy or sad, precious or common—may be statistically uncommon but no less genuine. I’ve been robbed in San Francisco and that does not make it a city of thieves and nor does that get me my stuff back.

Roleplaying games are likewise vast and experiential and emergent and poorly rendered through categorical descriptors. We talk about cities by sharing details, by offering advice, by giving directions that may not be the only ways to reach favorite spots. We can report on population density or elevation or annual rainfall and get one sense of a city but that is not the same as meeting people from that place and that is not the same as going there.

Successfully defining the word city (Oxford American tells me it means “a large town” or “an incorporated municipal center”) does so little to tell us what cities are actually like. If I say “Picture a city” and you picture Istanbul and I picture Tokyo we are both right. One is not more representative of the form than the other.

We can bullshit about populations and histories and skylines, we can defend our favorite city over beers, we can insist that New York is more quintessentially this and London is more iconically that, but none of those things takes us to the place and introduces us to the people and feeds us the food. Our citizenship can be long-standing and loyal, our dedication true, but none of that establishes our expertise over the form. Understanding the electrical grid of Miami doesn’t improve the plumbing in Cairo.

It seems to me that so many arguments about RPGs devolve into geographical trivia mistaken for indicators of quality. You say Chicago is a certain distance from Atlanta and I think it’s probably not that far. We could curse each other’s names over it yet, if we were together in person, chatting over drinks, I imagine we’d say something like, “Well, whatever, the point is, there’s this great bar I love in Little Five Points called the Porter, and if you get the chance, you should go there.”

Atlanta doesn’t become more Atlanta-like or “better” than Boston if we establish exactly how far either is from Tulsa. The yardage between burgs doesn’t tell us that much about the cities themselves. It doesn’t help us understand what a city is.

The metaphor’s imperfect. Of course it’s imperfect.

How far away is Apocalypse World or Night’s Black Agents? Depends where you’re standing.

Is your new game walkable? What do I care—I like cars, I like trains, and I’ve got time.

What’s the tallest building in Eclipse Phase? How high is Burning Wheel above sea level? Is that new Marvel RPG on the Gulf Stream? Did you know Mutants & Masterminds has more parks per capita than Technoir but that Technoir’s got citywide wifi? You know, D&D stands on the site of an ancient fort where many bloody battles were won.

Go to the places. See the sites. Come back and share your perspective, your photos, your stories. Love the cities you love. The cities stay cities, no matter what we say in this pub.

I love the question, “What is a roleplaying game?” I loathe the same question. We all contain multitudes.

Apparently, I’ve recently taken to talking about roleplaying games and story games with one of my weekly gaming groups in a particular way. What way? I don’t know, exactly. I was just blathering something about how I thought this or that was “more of a story game than an outright RPG” (sic) and one of my players—who has played a lot of RPGs and storytelling games but doesn’t participate in online debates about their territory and definitions and badges of honor—asked me to clarify. What did I mean by “story game,” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s a good question.” Do I even know? If I did, I don’t know now. If I do know now, I probably won’t know tomorrow.

Fortunately, Mike Sugarbaker approaches the question with more poise and smarts than I have, lately. Thanks to a thread on Story-Games, I found this post by Sugarbaker: “What is a roleplaying game?”

An excerpt:

What Gygax and Arneson did that made their game the hit it was, and the classic it remains, was to open the loop. They deliberately put a place in their rules for wandering out of the loop and making stuff up, and the stuff you made up could come back into the loop of the rules, and determine in part how the rules created new states and conditions.

(Sugarbaker’s post even cites our book, Hamlet’s Hit Points, by Robin D. Laws, which is a treat.)

Now, although I feel I do have a dog in the field, hunting for these elusive definitions, I have a lot of appreciation and sympathy for hunters in different fields. In that Story-Games thread, the terrific Jason Morningstar questions whether a label like story game informs a potential customer more than the word game alone. Good question. What does story game actually communicate—to the gamer, to the roleplayer, to the newcomer?

What do we gain by separating story game from roleplaying game? What do we get if we put one box inside the other? What do we gain by bottling the waters at all? Brace yourself: I don’t know. More to the point, I’m not sure anymore. The more I play, the more I want to relate to and talk about individual games and the less I want to imagine some kind of invisible armature on which they must hang.

I’m going to write more about this. I can hear it coming like a distant train. In the meantime, though: What do you think?