Go to Part 1

Up until this point, a lot of this blather about “game structures” may have sounded like it was something that only game designers need to waste their time with.

But, to the contrary, game structures represent the primary and most important tool in the GM’s toolbox. The more game structures a GM has mastered, the easier they will find it to prep and run their scenarios. The fewer game structures a GM knows, the more limited their scenarios and the more difficult their prep becomes.

(The argument can also be made that, fundamentally, all GMs need to act like game designers: An RPG without a scenario is like Monopoly without a board. Or, to put it another way, if Monopoly were packaged like a typical RPG it would come with rules for moving your pawns and buying properties, but it would expect the group to design its own boards. Scenario design is game design.)

To demonstrate what I mean about using scenario structures as tools, let’s take the example of a fairly straightforward adventure concept:

The PCs have been tasked with accompanying a clerk who has been charged with acting as the proxy for the Duchess of Canterlocke to bid for a dilapidated estate standing opposite the Dweredell Gardens. The PCs are to protect him while finding out more about the other parties interested in the estate and the suspected cult activity surrounding the estate.

Fifteen years ago, my mastery of game structures was limited. I basically had two of them: Dungeoncrawling and linear railroading. Faced with this concept for an adventure scenario, I would have been forced to resort to the linear railroad: A pre-programmed sequence of scenes that the PCs would experience. (To my fictionally retroactive credit, I would have probably tried to make those scenes as flexible as possible because I wasn’t actually a fan of railroading. But I would have been fighting my prep structure, and that usually means a lot more prep.

In a similar fashion, you can see how the lack of a game structure for wilderness adventures has resulted in most modern adventure modules presenting overland travel as a linear sequence of pre-programmed encounters:

But today, with a wider array of game structures at my fingertips, I find it relatively trivial to break this scenario concept down in a way that’s easier to prep, easier to run, and offers the players a much greater freedom in how they want to approach the scenario.

(1) “The PCs are to protect him…” I’m assuming this means that there will actually be something to protect him from. To prep this, I draw up a list of threats (i.e., the attacks that will be directed his way). These might be triggered by location (“when he reaches Water Street, the assassins strike”), but just putting them on a timeline will probably work, too.

(2) “To bid for a dilapidated estate…” When I prep a large social or business gathering, I prep two tracks: First, I prep a roleplaying profile for each significant participant. Second, I prep a list of significant events.

Sometimes the significant events are on a timetable. Sometimes they’re keyed to particular NPCs or locations. Sometimes they’re just a list of conversation topics that are popular at the party. (Ultimately, it’s whatever makes sense and is most useful to me. More details here.)

(3) “… a dilapidated estate standing opposite the Dweredell Gardens.” Here we come to a key question: Is the estate something that the PCs are supposed to explore room-by-room (like a haunted house)? Or will we just be just be treating it as a backdrop for the auction? The former gets prepped (and run) as a dungeoncrawl. The latter gets prepped with a few brief descriptions and maybe a generic floorplan if I think it’ll be important for some reason.

It might also be both: The mansion itself might just be a backdrop for the auction; but the family crypts under the mansion might shift us into a ‘crawl. Or maybe the mansion is treated as a backdrop during the auction and then we approach it as a ‘crawl during the night when all the ghosts from the Well of Souls come out.

(4) “The suspected cult activity around the estate.” Like most mystery structures, I’m going to default to node-based scenario design to break it down into easy-to-manage and easy-to-design chunks. To launch players into the node structure, I’ll liberally seed clues in the threats in #1, the NPCs in #2, and the rooms in #3 (if I went for a crawl-based structure there). A sample node list might look something like this:

• Cultist Assassination Team
• Shrine of the Black God
• Temple of the One-Eyed Priest
• Councilor Jaffar (Secret Cultist)

The assassination team is a proactive node that attacks the clerk the PCs are guarding. One of the assassins has a distinctive tattoo (asking around town indicates people have seen people with similar tattoos hanging around the Shrine of the Black God). Questioning any of the assassins will reveal they were sent from the Temple of the One-Eyed Priest. Maybe one of them has a note signed by Jaffar telling him to kill one of their fellow assassins once the job has been completed.

And so forth.

BREAKING THAT DOWN

The first thing is the scenario hook: The Duchess of Canterlocke wants to hire the PCs to guard a clerk for her.

That hook is connected to a simple timeline structure: The clerk needs to head to the estate at Time A; assassination attempts will be made at times B and D; the open house and auction will begin at time C.

That timeline has additional triggers in it: Clues on the assassins will trigger the node-based investigation. Escorting the clerk to inspect the house will trigger the ‘crawl of the house. Escorting the clerk to the auction will trigger the social-based party structure.

The ‘crawl of the house will probably include triggers for combat (undead in the crypts below the house or whatever). The party structure will contain additional clues triggering the node-based investigation. And the node-based investigation will lead to both the Shrine of the Black God and the Temple of the One-Eyed Priest, which are probably both prepped as dungeoncrawls, too.

USING THE RIGHT TOOLS

Like most projects, once you have the right tools, it’s just a matter of identifying the right tool for the job and then using it.

For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that we instead used all the wrong tools:

(1) We try to prep escorting the clerk across Dweredell as a ‘crawl: That means prepping every street with a keyed encounter so that the PCs will encounter content no matter which streets they decide to walk down. (Result: Way too much prep, a lot of decisions that aren’t of particular importance to the immediate goals of the PCs, and probably some severe pacing problems.)

(2) We prep the crypts under the house as a timeline of undead-themed encounters: After 5 minutes of explortation we trigger encounter 1; after 10 minutes of exploration we trigger encounter 2; and so forth. (Result: The only meaningful input the players have here is to say “we keep exploring”. Our impulse is probably to at least improvise a map as they explore, but of course that just moves us back towards the dungeoncrawl structure that we’re specifically eschewing for the purpose of this broken example.)

(3) Instead of prepping auction bidders for roleplaying, we instead give ‘em combat stats and roll for initiative whenever the PCs want to talk to them.

And so forth.

Use the proper structures and the prep will be easy and naturally allow your players to make meaningful and relevant decisions. Use the wrong structures (either by mistake or because you don’t know the right structures to use) and your prep will be difficult and your players will struggle to make the choices they want to make.

But what if the right game structure doesn’t exist?

Go to Part 13: Custom Structures

Tagline: This is the book which accompanies quite a few games – the odds and ends which got excised from the primary rulebook, padded out with a handful of NPCs.

In the few short years since its creation and demise at the hands of poor business acumen Feng Shui has established itself as one of the classics of the industry. Unfortunately it was marred by a mixed bag of supplements – some were very good, but others were drawn from the bottom of barrel. Back for Seconds is, in my opinion, the worst of the lot.

To understand the atrocity which this product is you have to understand from whence it was conceived: First, when Robin D. Laws finished the core rulebook some of the material he produced had to be excised due to space considerations – the in-depth description of Operation Killdeer and also several of the character creation Types. Second, the setting for Feng Shui was loosely based on the elements found in the collectible card game Shadowfist — included in the Shadowfist game were several cards detailing specific characters and some cards detailing feng shui sites.

Welcome to Back for Seconds, a bastard child of supplement creation. With a foundational structure of the dozen pages or so of Laws material which didn’t make the final cut of the rulebook, Jose Garcia (the “executive producer” of the Feng Shui line of products) hired a hodgepodge of creators to write out the characters and locations from the Shadowfist cardgame. John Tynes (the product’s “developer”) describes the result best in his introduction as “Central Casting” – but I can’t say I’m impressed with the results.

(None of this, by the way, should be taken as a condemnation of the creative personnel involved in this project.—with names like Bruce Baugh, Greg Stolze, and John Tynes working on it there’s no way you could sanely say this was true. But the product was conceived as a hodgepodge and the result is precisely that: A hodgepodge of questionable usefulness.)

Insofar as it is a hodgepodge, Back for the Seconds is probably the best product of this variety I have yet encountered. The NPCs are generally engaging and interesting (even if they are largely based on one sentence “catch-phrases” from the Shadowfist cards). The types which were cut from the main rulebook provide valuable options to the character creation system. The locations are interesting, if of limited versatility. But the overall product can’t overcome the basic flaw of its conceptual base. It simply fails, in my opinion, to be a valuable sourcebook. About the only thing which would make this worth your money would be the Robin D. Laws material (which is why this receives a 3 and not a 2 rating in substance), otherwise you’d be just as well off spending your money on renting a few Hong Kong action flicks and ripping them off. You’d have more fun.

Style: 3
Substance: 3

Writers: Bruce Baugh, Dave van Domelen, David Eber, Jose Garcia, Steven Kenson, Bob Kruger, Robin D. Laws, Andy Lucas, John Tynes, Greg Stolze
Publisher: Daedalus Entertainment, Inc.
Price: $14.00
Page Count: 78
ISBN: 1-888335-02-5

Originally Posted: 1999/04/13

Feng Shui was one of two games that got me back into roleplaying games. In the mid-’90s I had drifted away from roleplaying games: I had lost my regular groups, other interests were beginning to consume my time, and I had also lost easy access to the online communities that had seen me through previous dry spells. But in the summer of ’97, I was living in Mankato, MN with my dad.

About midway through the summer, I read a blurb in the Comic Buyer’s Guide talking about TSR, Inc. being essentially bankrupt… Wait. What?!  (I guess that explains why I haven’t seen an issue of Dragon Magazine in months.) In an effort to figure out what was going on, I ended up figuring out how I could access some of my old haunts on Usenet and Fidonet. The result was that I got plugged back into gaming news.

I don’t remember now whether it was Feng Shui or Heavy Gear that intrigued me enough that I looked up a local hobby store and biked across town to check it out. This little hobby store only had 3 shelves of incredibly unorganized RPG material, but by some miracle they had these games: One I had come looking for; the other captivated me. I ended up buying both and spent most of the rest of the summer biking back for more.

(And it was an incredibly exhausting bike trip: Mankato is built around and over a cliff facing a river. My dad’s apartment building was located, almost improbably, halfway up this cliff: So no matter where I went, I was either biking up the cliff to get there or up the cliff to get home.)

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Go to Part 1

Now that we’ve discussed incomplete game structures, let me go fully the wrong way about it and explain what I mean by a “complete game structure”.

Most importantly, what I do not mean by a complete game structure is that the players will never be able to take actions outside the structure. As I’ve been saying all along, roleplaying games are functionally open-ended: Unlike a boardgame or card game, players are always free to propose whatever course of action strikes their fancy.

Instead, what we’re talking about is a structure which can theoretically provide a complete experience. If the players choose to stick to a complete game structure, that structure will never deliver the game to a place where no structure exists.

Practical experience at the game table plays a role here, and I’m also expecting a dose of common sense: It’s possible to argue that Traveller presents a “complete game structure” as long as the PCs never leave their ships. But, of course, that’s not what actually happens at the game table, is it? What happens in actual practice is that the Traveller scenario structure delivers a ship to a starport, the PCs get off their ship, and… the scenario structure has delivered them to an unstructured place.

In practice, complete game structures require vertically integrated structures and closed resolution loops. They will also usually feature complete transitions from macro-level to micro-level game structures.

For example, consider the basic mystery scenario structure: You start in a location and you search for clues. The clues take you to another location, where you search for clues (which will, of course, take you to another location).

That’s a closed resolution loop: You can follow that structure forever.

Earlier, we talked about the smooth transition from dungeoncrawling to combat in D&D: You’re in a dungeon room, you pick an exit, and you go to another dungeon room (there’s your closed resolution loop). But in that room are a bunch of monsters, so you switch to the combat system (which is another closed resolution loop) until you defeat the monsters. Once the combat is finished, you swap back to the dungeoncrawl structure, pick an exit, and go to the next room (which might also have monsters in it, in which case you swap back into combat).

That’s a vertically integrated structure: The dungeoncrawl structure provides a specific trigger (“there are monsters here”) which transitions you into the combat structure; and the combat structure provides a specific trigger (“all the monsters are dead and the room is empty of interest”) which transitions you back into the dungeoncrawl structure.

(As a thought experiment, imagine that you were using a dungeoncrawl structure but you had no combat system. Can you see what happens when the dungeoncrawl delivers you to a room full of orcs? The structure is incomplete. Now, imagine that you’re using a dungeoncrawl structure but instead of a combat system the rules had a well-developed mechanical structure for resolving riddle contests. That’s a very different dungeon, isn’t it?)

It’s also possible to extend the chain of macro-level to micro-level transitions. An easy demonstration of this is a hex keyed with a dungeon complex: The hexcrawl structure triggers the discovery of the dungeon; entering the dungeon transitions you to the dungeoncrawl structure; and meeting some monsters in the dungeon transitions you to the combat structure.

I occasionally think of this as an inverted pyramid, but it’s not necessarily a tidy one. (For example, hex keys can also easily trigger you straight into combat.)

FEATURES OF A COMPLETE GAME STRUCTURE

Let’s take a moment to look at the basic features a complete game structure requires. By matter of necessity, these will be somewhat preliminary conclusions: There aren’t many complete game structures in roleplaying games, so the body of data is sparse.

First, each part of the game structure requires a clear and specific trigger. (For example, combat is triggered when someone wants to make an attack and initiative is rolled.) Vertically integrating your structure requires that the macro-structure will deliver the triggers necessary for the micro-structures. (For example, the dungeoncrawl structure delivers the trigger for combat when you enter a room filled with hostile monsters.)

Second, you need a default scenario hook. This is actually just the trigger for the macro-structure which contains the micro-structures and it doesn’t need to be terribly complex: For example, the default scenario hook for a dungeoncrawl is “the dungeon entrance is in front of you”.

Third, you need a default goal. This is what motivates the players to engage the scenario hook. For example, the PCs go into the dungeon (i.e., accept the hook presented by the dungeon entrance) because they want to find treasure.

(It should be noted that the default scenario hook and goal are often the first things to get swapped out when you’re adapting a game structure into actual play. For example, the PCs might be going into this dungeon – which is actually a fortress – because their friend has been kidnapped by the slavers inside.)

Fourth, you need a default action: Picking an exit in the dungeoncrawl; picking a direction in a hexcrawl; looking for clues in a mystery; attacking an enemy during combat; etc.

Fifth, taking the default action should return you (either directly or after a sequence of actions) to a point where you can take that default action again. This is the point where you close the resolution loop and complete the game structure.

EFFECTIVE GAME STRUCTURES

There are also a few things which aren’t necessarily required for a complete game structure, but which are probably a good idea.

First, the structure should be flexible. Flexibility for the players means the ability to make choices which are not constrained by the structure. Flexibility for the GM means the ability to include a broad and creative array of content into the “containers” of the structure.

(These constitute the “structure, not a straitjacket” and “flexibility within the form” principles we talked about before.)

Second, the default action should usually allow the players to make meaningful decisions. Roleplaying games are primarily about making choices and structures which don’t allow for those choices to be made will, in my opinion, struggle. Furthermore, a structure which doesn’t include points at which players are free to make decisions is probably going to strongly inhibit their opportunities to make choices which are not constrained by the structure (see above).

(As a counterexample, consider a hypothetical piratecrawl structure in which the players choose a direction to sail and then the GM randomly determines what type of ship they run into: This has a great deal of flexibility for the GM, since he’s basically free to include anything which fits into a ship-shaped container. But you’ll notice that the players’ decision of sailing direction is meaningless, which will result in less than satisfactory play.)

Third, assuming that we’re talking about RPGs and not STGs, the players’ decisions within the game structure should be associated and in-character.

(For pretty much all the same reasons that the mechanics of an RPG should be associated.)

Fourth, the reward structures of the game should probably be tied into the default actions and default goals of the game structure.

(The easy example here, as I’ve mentioned before, is D&D: The default dungeoncrawl / combat game structure rewards you with XP for the default action of fighting monsters and with GP (and XP) for the default goal of treasure-hunting.)

Fifth, the game structure should be fun. This, of course, can be a somewhat nebulous quality and will also vary from one group to the next. But the important point here is that a complete game structure will act as the foundation for your scenario or campaign: If that foundation is fun, then everything you and your players build on top of it will be fun. If it is simply workmanlike bookkeeping, on the other hand, you may still end up having fun if the stuff you build on top of it is awesome enough, but it’ll be less of a sure thing.

Sixth, the game structure should be easy to prep. Part of this is providing a clear structure for prep (and I think you’ll find that clearly defined game structures will simultaneously provide straight-forward guidance on what you need to prep). But it’s also about limiting the amount of prep necessary for play to begin. (If your structure requires the GM to prep 500 pages of material in order to use it, it’s not going to see a lot of use in the real world.) And all of this, of course, can be helped by giving the GM tools which assist with prep (like the old dungeon- and hex-stocking tables that used to be a mainstay of D&D).

I was also going to add “easy to run” to this list, but I suspect that this is a quality which actually arises naturally out of properly constructed game structures. But if you’re in need of a reminder, check out Part 8 of this series.

Go to Part 12: Using Scenario Structures

As a brief tangent to our discussion of game structures, how could we go about plugging the “hole” in Traveller’s scenario structure?

Since Traveller’s starmaps are hex-based, we could start by rifling through the pockets of the hexcrawl and snagging the concept of “when the PCs enter the hex, trigger the hex’s keyed content”. But what we’ll quickly realize is that there’s a reason Traveller doesn’t do this already: Planets are really, really big.

If we think of a dungeon room or a wilderness hex as a “container” which holds keyed content, it’s pretty easy to recognize that a planet-sized container completely dwarfs the scale of any single encounter or location. Take an encounter and stick it in a dungeon room; it fills the room. Take the same encounter and put it in a wilderness hex; it gets a little bit lonely but there’s still enough to quench our thirst. Stick it on a planet, on the other hand, and the glass still looks completely empty.

And this isn’t just a matter of aesthetics. It impacts the GM’s ability to logically transition the scene: If the PCs are traveling through a wilderness, it’s relatively easy to find a transition from the macro-level of wilderness travel to the micro-level of the keyed encounter. You just say something like, “As you pass through the forest, you see a bunch of orcs.” But this method doesn’t work quite as well if the PCs are approaching a planet.

Perhaps more importantly, this also affects the ability for players to make meaningful decisions within the context of the scenario structure. If the GM of a hexcrawl says, “You see a castle perched upon a rocky crag of blackened stone.” The players can say, “Okay, that looks scary. I think we’ll just skirt it as far to the west as possible.” And they can do that. But if they were to say, in this hypothetical game structure for spacecrawling, “Okay, I don’t want to deal with this settlement of murderous cannibals. Let’s lift-off and land somewhere else on the planet.” Suddenly they’ve exited the purview of the scenario structure.

One logical leap from this conclusion is that we simply need to key more content to the planet. Maybe, for example, we could just map the entire planet and key it as a hexcrawl: Thus, just like a hexcrawl contains dungeoncrawls, our spacecrawl would contain hexcrawls.

But hexmapping and keying an entire planet in any sort of meaningful or interesting detail? That’s an absurd amount of work. It’s obviously completely impractical.

HAILING FREQUENCIES OPEN

So maybe, instead of that, we let our logic take us the other way. Maybe we accept our limitations and implement a structure where each planet is keyed with a “hail”: When an intrepid band of interstellar scouts enters orbit, they’ll receive the hail.

This basically handles the problem of scale by embracing the old pulp SF trope of “every planet is a village”. The result is less Traveller: Firefly and more Traveller: Star Trek. But as long as the players are onboard with the fact that they have to either engage with Oxymyx and Krako or bypass the planet (i.e., they can’t just decide to head over to the other side of the planet and talk to a different set of gangsters), you’ll probably be in pretty good shape.

Unfortunately, the structure starts to breakdown once you’re dealing with civilized planets (instead of exploration). But, of course, this is also true for traditional hexcrawls (which provide no guidance for PCs once they pass through the gates of Greyhawk).

ABOARD THE KING ARTHUR

Unsurprisingly, I’m not the first person to start thinking this way about Traveller. Back in 1981, FASA produced Action Aboard: Adventures on the King Richard. In addition to detailing the ISCV King Richard and providing two sample adventures, this module included a dozen or so “Outline Adventures”, all of which constitute primitive scenario structures into which any number of specific scenarios could be poured. For example, the Hijack:

I. HIJACK

The forcible capture of the vessel and its contents may come from either inside or outside the ship.

A) Internal

A hijack from inside assumes that the hijackers and their equipment are all aboard at the beginning of the scenario.

1) Players as crew – the players may or may not be issued weapons from the ship’s locker, depending upon the level of surprise.

2) Players as passengers – The players will not be given weapons and, unless they have social standing A-F, they will be abandoned at any habitable planet (roll 1-4 on  one die) or shot, and/or dumped into a vacuum (roll 5 or 6 on one die). If they have high social ranking, they will be ransomed.

And so forth.

Primitive? Yes. Still incomplete? Sure. But you can see how this begins to provide a basic structure into which a few stats can be poured to give you something that can be used in play. In combination with the other “Outline Adventures”, Action Aboard begins to give you enough structure to run an entire campaign based around the voyages of the ISCV King Arthur.

Go to Part 1

Consider, for a moment, the explicit game structure presented in the original Traveller.

(1)   Create a subsector. For this, the game gives guidelines for creating a starmap; populating that starmap with planets; determining the population, law level, and technological level of those planets; determining travel zones and trade routes; and so forth.

(2)   Own a starship. The game offers several options by which the PCs can own, lease, or otherwise operate a starship.

(3)   Interstellar movement. Providing mechanics for determining how far and how fast PCs can move between planetary systems.

(4)   Trade and revenue. Finally, explicit guidelines on how revenue can be earned by carrying cargo, passengers, and the like.

When you boil it down, this is Firefly: The Roleplaying Game.

But what this scenario structure notably lacks is any support for play below the interplanetary level. Traveller recognizes this lack and works to patch the hole with the concept of the Patron:

The key to adventure in Traveller is the patron. When a band of adventurers meets an appropriate patron, they have a person who can give them direction in their activities, and who can reward them for success. The patron is the single most important NPC there can be. (Book 3: Worlds and Adventure)

Basically, the patron serves as a default method for delivering adventure seeds to the PCs. And Traveller integrates the patron into its larger game structure by triggering patrons through its random encounter system. (So, basically, every time the PCs fly into a starport there’s a chance they’ll be contacted by someone with a special job.)

Of course, this still leaves the vast gulf of what the game structure for the actual mission itself is. But it’s not as if Traveller is alone in having such gaps in its scenario structure. In fact, virtually all RPGs have such gaps. (And, at a micro-level, virtually all RPG mechanics constitute incomplete game structures, as our example of the Duchess of Canterlocke demonstrated.)

MECHANICS WITHOUT STRUCTURE

I’ve long maintained that RPGs naturally gravitate towards their mechanics. For example, when I added counter-intelligence mechanics to D&D, counter-intelligence suddenly became a significant part of my campaign. When I added usable encumbrance mechanics to my OD&D campaign, encumbrance-based gameplay immediately followed.

What’s even more true, however, is that RPG gameplay naturally gravitates towards structure. Because they’re open-ended, of course, RPGs are not bound to their structure (like a boardgame is) and good game structures in RPGs won’t act as straitjackets, but clear game structures nevertheless attract players and GMs alike.

Or, to put it another way: If you’re in a dungeon, at some point you’re almost certainly going to start dungeoncrawling.

An interesting corollary of this is that mechanics which aren’t (a) required by a well-defined game structure or (b) enhancing a well-defined game structure are often ignored.

As a result of this corollary, you’ll often find popular game systems ringed with a large number of rules which nobody uses. Many of these rules seem to accumulate from a vestigial urge for simulationism.

This is particularly true with specialized supplements. For example, the D20 market is crammed full with supplements that aimed to provide the “Definitive Guide to Ships”. The little simulationist urge says: “There are ships in fantasyland. So we must need rules for ships.”

But once you have them, what do you do with them?

A typical seafaring supplement, for example, usually included all kinds of rules for varying the speed at which a group traveled: The ship they’re using, wind speed, crew experience, navigation checks, weather conditions, tidal drifts, and so forth. But unless you’re using a scenario structure in which travel time matters – and in a modern era of railroaded scenarios, it generally doesn’t – all of these rules are pretty much irrelevant. Oh, having some guidelines for how long it takes to get from Point A to Point B is nice, but anything involving a lot of calculation which varies from one day to the next is basically useless chaff.

That’s how you get books full of feats that nobody takes, spells that are rarely cast, rules for ramming that nobody bothers with, and so forth. Without a supporting scenario structure, this stuff just flounders: It occasionally gets toyed with, but it rarely gets used.

But imagine for a moment that someone took the time to design a fully-integrated scenario structure for sea-based play that, for example, made playing a pirate or a privateer just as much fun as dungeoncrawling or solving mysteries. You could build entire campaigns around this structure, or just slot it in as appropriate. Maybe you could even go ahead and publish a full campaign that people can just pick up and play. Suddenly all those rules for handling crew morale and ship-to-ship combat are being used.

And if your new scenario structure were really successful, suddenly you’d have opened up a whole new market for support products.

THE VALUE OF PARTIAL STRUCTURES

The “gravitational effects” of clearly defined game structures may also help to explain why even partial scenario structures have often proved monstrously successful in the RPG industry.

For example, consider Shadowrun and Paranoia. Neither game features a comprehensive scenario structure, but they both have default methods for delivering scenario hooks which also tend to lend a common shape to their scenario concepts. And you can see evidence for the efficacy of these techniques in the number of “traitorous Mr. Johnson” stories you see from Shadowrun and the number of “briefing room horror stories” you see from Paranoia.

In fact, even partial scenario structures seem to be very effective at providing a commonality of experience which can draw a player base together into more meaningful communities. (This is particularly true for default scenario hooks.) Such communities provide a strong network effect which further strengthens the game.

This commonality of experience also makes it possible to produce supplements which target that common ground. 76 Patrons for Traveller or Mr. Johnson’s Little Black Book for Shadowrun are obvious examples given the context of our current discussion, but it’s particularly true when it comes to adventure modules: You can trivially produce an adventure module for D&D which could theoretically be plugged into 90% or more of the current campaigns being run in the system. On the other hand, it would be essentially impossible to produce a Heavy Gear module for which that would be true.

Of course, having a viable market for those kinds of adventure products makes it easier for a publisher to produce adventure products. And having adventure products available makes it easier for new GMs to start playing the game. Which further enhances the network externality of the game.

Go to Part 11: Complete Game Structures