One of the most overlooked aspects in the design and play of traditional roleplaying games is the underlying game structure. Or, to put it another way, there are two questions which every game designer and GM must ask themselves:
(1) What do the characters do?
(2) How do the players do it?
These questions might seem deceptively simple, but the answers are complex. And getting the right answers is absolutely critical to having a successful gaming session.
Some of you may already be challenging this. “How difficult can it be? The players tell me what their characters are doing and then we resolve it. What could be easier?”
To demonstrate the oversight taking place here, let me give you a quick example of play:
Player: I want to explore the dungeon.
GM: Okay, make a Dungeoneering check.
Player: I succeed.
GM: Okay, you kill a tribe of goblins and emerge with 546 gp in loot.
Is there anything wrong with that? Not necessarily. But it’s certainly a very different game structure than the traditional D&D dungeoncrawl.
And, of course, that example already assumes that the PCs are fantasy heroes who do things like dungeoncrawling. Given the exact same setting and the exact same game system, they could just as easily be monarchs, dragons, farmers, magical researchers, planar travelers, gods, military masterminds, or any of a dozen other things for whom these dungeoncrawling game structures are irrelevant.
BOARD AND CARD GAMES
The reason game structures become an issue for us is because roleplaying games are functionally open-ended: There is an expectation (and a reasonable one) that the players should be able to say “I want my character to do X” and then we’ll be able to figure out if (a) they’re successful and (b) what happens as a result.
Traditional board and card games don’t run into this problem because their game structure is rigidly defined and limited by the rules: Each time you take a turn in Monopoly or Chess or Arkham Horror there is a precisely defined sequence of actions for you to take. The complexity of this structure can vary quite a bit – in Candyland you simply follow the instructions in order; in Twilight Imperium your decisions would require an incredibly complicated flowchart to model – but the structure is invariable and comprehensive.
Or, to put it another way, boardgames and card games always have an answer to the questions of “What should I be doing now?” and “What happens next?”
ROLEPLAYING GAMES
Consider a hypothetical scenario in which you drop a group of PCs onto a random street corner. Now, take the same group of PCs and drop them into a random room in a dungeon. Why does one group say “I head through the north door” while the other says “I go looking for the local police station”? Why doesn’t the guy in the dungeon say “I go looking for the treasure” and the guy on the street corner say “I take the street on the left”?
Partly, of course, this is a matter of each group of characters having a different set of immediate goals. But it has a lot more to do with habits that have been casually engrained into us through years of playing RPGs.
Another example: Consider the difference between playing D&D and playing the Wrath of Ashardalon boardgame. Both feature similar mechanics, similar settings, and similar character goals. Why is my D&D group likely to spend time examining the walls and investigating arcane circles while my Wrath of Ashardalon group isn’t? Because the game structure is different.
In addition, as our example of dungeon vs. urban scenarios suggests, roleplaying games will often switch game structures. By contrast, computer games usually don’t swap game structures, choosing instead to unify their gameplay: In Elder Scrolls you use the same interface and commands whether you’re exploring a dungeon, traveling through the wilderness, or shopping in town.
On the other hand, games like Final Fantasy VII give you an overland map for travel. And Elder Scrolls V introduced a “fast travel” system that also changes that structure. Meanwhile, at the other extreme, the engine for the original Bard’s Tale was so limited that the town of Skara Brae was a murderville in which citizens attacked like monsters and the gameplay was almost completely indistinguishable from the dungeon at even the micro-level.
In a similar fashion, when I was twelve years old, I tried to run my earliest wilderness adventures as if they were dungeoncrawls: “Okay, you see some trees. What do you do?” “We go north.” “Okay, you go about a hundred feet. There are still trees. What do you do now?”
Use the wrong game structure and you can end up with a really lousy game.
GAME STRUCTURES
Part 2: Game Structure Basics
Part 3: Dungeoncrawl
Part 4: Combat
Part 5: Mysteries
Part 6: Hexcrawls
Part 7: Playing With Hexcrawls
Part 8: The Importance of Clean Procedures
Part 9: Archaic Game Structures
Part 10: Incomplete Game Structures
Part 11: Complete Game Structures
Part 12: Using Scenario Structures
Part 13: Custom Structures
Part 14: Scenario Structures for Between the Stars
Part 15: Generic Scenario Structures
Part 16: Player Known and Unknown Scenario Structures
Game Structure: Party Planning
Game Structure: Thinking About Urbancrawls
Game Structure: Tactical Hacking
I don’t know where this is going, but I llike how it’s starting out. I love investigating the the roots of the system to see what is a fit and why. Eagerly awaiting part 2.
As someone who is designing an RPG system, this is very relevant to my interests. It’s very, Very, VERY hard to balance all of the many factors that go into a comprehensive experience, especially when those factors are poorly-defined. What is gameplay balance, really? What does that mean? How does it affect the players? Will the players care? What do the players want from the game as a whole? How can the rules facilitate their goals? How can they hinder them? At what point is hindrance a bad thing? Every question begs an answer, & every answer begets more questions, like a hydra made of math. So, yeah, I’m curious to see where this is going.
Also, the forest game made me laugh, because that’s what I did in my first urban adventure:
“You’re at an intersection, what do you do?”
“Well, I go west.”
“Okay, you’re at another intersection, 1d12 blocks west.”
“Hmmm…”
“Hmmm…”
“…”
“Yeah, let’s do this another way. Roll a Wisdom check.”
“Deal.”
My first above ground adventure was also very similar: a hex map with random encounter areas marked and even treasure chests just laying around waiting for the party to stumble on. Basically, a dungeon without walls.
Ha. This last bit reminds me fondly of the old “Eye of the Beholder” video games. I believe it was part 3 that starts out above ground, but it’s really just a dungeon with trees for walls.
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Is there a ‘true’ hexcrawl for a solo player?
In other words, I don’t want to make a pre-made map. I want to roll up a map as I travel, not knowing what lies ahead.
What do I do for that?
Thanks
[…] gets really repetitive after a while, since it revolves a LOT around fighting. If you have read the Alexandrian’s great essay about game structures, you can see how it would be an issue (and maybe, unlike me, you can see how to fix it). This might […]
> In other words, I don’t want to make a pre-made map. I want to roll up a map as I travel, not knowing what lies ahead.
If you’ve got the 1E AD&D DMG, there are random wilderness generations tables in the appendices to go with the random dungeon generation tables. Or I’m sure there are similar generators on the web. I’d be surprised if someone hadn’t built a web implementation of Gygax’s generator, actually.
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Why does one group say “I head through the north door” while the other says “I go looking for the local police station”?”
Doesn’t this emerge from the setting? You want a series of interesting decisions. In a dungeon, every step is potentially dangerous or revealing and hence interesting. In a city, you normally reach any destination without incident.
[…] is an excellent series of articles on the Alexandrian on structure (/ procedure) in RPGs. This one in particular might give an idea of the […]
I read and re-read your articles, because they are so dense with ideas and meaning that I can’t always absorb it all at once. For my own convenience, I am compiling your game structure articles into one document (and also a separate document for all of your Hexcrawl articles because there was too much to stuff into the already-huge game structure one). It’s for my own benefit, so I don’t have to click back and forth or have a ton of tabs open at one time. But if you think a compilation like this might be helpful for your other readers, let me know. I’m a technical writer and editor by trade, so document design and cleanup is what I do for a living. You can email me if you want to discuss it, or DM me on Twitter (@RadGamerMom1). Your work is really great, and I can’t wait to see more of it.
[…] insightful GMing advice. It’s got the best role playing theory on the net, and his series on Game Structures fundamentally changed the way I think about and run […]
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I’m preparing to GM a game about a bunch of homunculi serving a single creator, and I thought it would be fun to create a side system to track who is the master’s favorite, with some roleplaying benefits like access to items slightly rarer than normal and being able to have quality time (and ask questions to his broad knowledge) with the powerful guy.
Within a minute I realized it could be used to many other things: The teacher’s/senpai’s favorite for an animesque game, the favored general who gets more supplies in a war campaign, the favorite noble or servant in a court, the favorite vampire spawn of a vampire lord, et cetera. It’s a fun way to get some friendly (or not so friendly, depending on context) rivalry going on between PCs.
No idea how to do this beyond adding/subtracting numbers for what they do, though, which seems to me so… Boring? It’s already what XP is for, in a sense;
Might be worth checking out Paul Czege’s MY LIFE WITH MASTER game for inspiration.
Abel@20, it sounds like you might want to draw a distinction between points for pursuing their *own* goals (xp) vs their *master’s* goals (favour)? And master’s favour can be more capricious, possibly. Like, every so often everybody rolls a die to subtract a random amount of favour, just because they happen to be in the room when he spills soup on his favorite shirt.