Roleplaying games are a relatively new medium. And like most fresh-faced mediums, this means that a lot of advice given for creating and using the medium is being borrowed from existing mediums. It also means that most of this advice is wrong because the similarities between the old and new mediums is usually a lot more superficial than it may initially appear. (For example, it took decades before screenplays fully stopped mimicking theatrical scripts.)

At the moment, the subject of pacing in RPGs is a good example of this. A lot of the GMing advice you’ll find for pacing right now revolves around borrowing terms and concepts directly from film or television. Like a screenplay written using the techniques for live theater, some of this stuff works, but a lot of it doesn’t because film pacing is primarily about controlling the presentation of predetermined action and RPGs don’t (or at least arguably shouldn’t) have predetermined action.

(If you want an extreme example of this, consider Christopher Nolan’s Memento: The pacing of that film is entirely based on the careful presentation of information known to the writer / filmmaker. I can certainly imagine mimicking a Memento-like experience in an RPG, but the techniques you’d use to achieve it would be radically different from those Nolan used in the creation, filming, and editing of Memento.)

Understanding film pacing (as opposed to theatrical pacing) requires one to understand one of the fundamental principles of film as a medium: The ability to cut the film and splice it together.

Similarly, understanding pacing for an RPG requires one to understand the fundamental principle of the RPG medium: The conversation of meaningful choices.

THE CONVERSATION OF MEANINGFUL CHOICES

As I’ve said in the past, a roleplaying game is self-evidently about playing a role. Playing a role is about making choices as if you were the character. And those choices are made as part of a conversation.

As D. Vincent Baker said in Apocalypse World:

Roleplaying is a conversation. You and the other players go back and forth, talking about these fictional characters in their fictional circumstances doing whatever it is that they do. Like any conversation, you take turns, but it’s not like taking turns, right? Sometimes you talk over each other, interrupt, build on each others’ ideas, monopolize. All fine.

Or, to put it another way, the fundamental interaction of an RPG can be boiled down to:

GM: What do you want to do?

Player: I want to do X.

GM: When you try to do that, this happens. What do you want to do?

In actual practice, of course, the GM’s question is often implied, the conversation isn’t tidy, multiple players are involved, the rules can reshape the structure of the conversation, and so forth. But that’s the heart and core of everything that happens in a roleplaying game: The GM presents a situation; the players respond to that situation by making a choice; the GM adjudicates the outcome of that choice (and thus presents a new situation to which the players respond).

Regardless of how you try to fancy that interaction up, it’s fundamentally a loop. And the GM’s ability to control pacing sits specifically at the moment of his response (“when you try to do that, this happens”).

EMPTY TIME

Although the art of pacing in a roleplaying game is unique compared to other mediums, in practice it can be remarkably simple. The GM must identify and then eliminate, conflate, or (in advanced techniques) manipulate what I’m going to refer to as empty time: The gap between one set of meaningful decisions and the next meaningful choice.

Or, to put it another way, you want to skip over the “boring bits” where nothing is happening. And the trick to doing that is moving the players efficiently to the next moment in which they can make an interesting and meaningful choice without taking away such choices by skipping over them.

I find it most convenient to think of the treatment of empty time as a continuum. At one end of this continuum, for example, you have gameplay like that found in a pure, old school dungeoncrawl: Essentially no time is skipped and every action is catalogued because the density of meaningful decisions is incredibly high. (In by-the-book OD&D, for example, a wandering monster check is made every single turn. Because of this, even if you ignore the high density of geographically-significant navigation decisions being made, the decision to take or not take a single action remains incredibly significant.)

This, by the way, is another reason why dungeoncrawls are such an effective scenario structure for new GMs: They basically eliminate any need for the GM to think about pacing. It’s an entire body of techniques that the GM can simply ignore while running the dungeoncrawl with confidence.

Once a GM leaves the dungeon, however, they’ll quickly realize that this technique doesn’t work. For example, imagine we were playing a game of Vampire: The Masquerade and I decided to handle the process of leaving my house and driving downtown like this:

GM: What do you want to do?

Player: I want to head downtown.

GM: How are you getting there?

Player: I’ll drive my car.

GM: Okay, you pull your car out of the garage and start driving down the alley. Do you want to turn left or right at the end of the alley?

Player: Left.

GM: Okay, you go half a block down to 10^th Street. Which way do you want to go?

Player: Straight.

GM: Okay, you go another block down to Elliot. Which way do you want to go?

Player: Straight.

GM: Okay, you go another block down to Chicago Avenue. There’s a stoplight. It’s red. What do you want to do?

Player: I’ll wait for the light to turn green and then turn right.

That’s self-evidently moronic. None of those decisions are meaningful. Nobody is having fun. And that’s how we end up with interactions that look like this:

GM: You’re at the city gate. What do you want to do?

Player: We go to the Tavern of the Lonely Wench.

GM: Okay. As you walk through the doors of the Lonely Wench…

Whoa. What just happened? We skipped over a whole bunch of stuff and – BAM! – we’ve suddenly framed a new scene at the tavern.

INTENTIONS vs. INTERRUPTIONS / OBSTACLES

We’re going to be taking a closer look at what it means to frame a scene later, but first I want to focus on how the new scene was selected. We’ve moved slightly up the scene-framing continuum here by skipping to the intention: The players said they wanted to achieve something and the GM skipped to the moment at which they’d achieved it.

If you’re the GM, this basically involves asking yourself two questions: What is the current intention of the PCs? And does anything interrupt that intention?

In this example, identifying the intention is really easy: The player told you, point-blank, what they wanted to achieve. Interruptions (which you can also think of as obstacles standing between the PCs and their desired outcome) could take any number of forms: Do they get ambushed by assassins? Or run into an old friend? Or have an opportunity to pick a rich nobleman’s pocket? Or spot a rare tome of lore at bargain basement prices?

In determining these interruptions and obstacles, we begin to see the motivations and techniques of the GM coming into play: Does the interruption happen because you’re using a random table of simulated events? Because you need to key the next plot arc? Because the next event on your prepared timeline is due to occur? Because you have a creative whim? Because you want to activate a tag on one of your PCs?

So, to sum up:

1. Identify the intention
2. Choose obstacles
3. Skip to the next meaningful choice

In the Art of Rulings I wrote that, “When in doubt, look for the meaningful choice.” And the same principle applies here.

As we continue moving up the continuum of scene-framing, what basically happens is that the threshold of interest required to frame the next beat is cranked up. For example, if we nudge it up just a tick:

GM: You’re at the city gate. What do you want to do?

Player: We go looking for a tavern.

GM: Okay, you’re in the Tavern of the Lonely Wench.

Spot the difference? The GM decided that the choice of which tavern the PCs wanted to go to was irrelevant, so he skipped it, picked the tavern for them, and started the next scene. If he’d decided not to frame the scene quite so hard, he could have asked, “You want an upscale joint or a downscale joint?” Or offered them a selection of different taverns and allowed them to choose. (Or both.)

(And, conversely, by asking those questions, the GM is basically saying, “Either you or I or both of us care about whether the tavern is upscale or downscale.” Either because that choice tells us something interesting about the characters; or changes the amount of gold they will spend; or determines the likely encounters they’ll have there; or makes it easier to spot the spies tailing them; or any number of other possibilities.)

The harder the frame, the higher the level of interest needs to be before we stop fast-forwarding (and the more decisions get skipped). For example, maybe the GM decides that the tavern is completely boring and instead we get:

GM: You’re at the city gate.

Player: We go looking for a tavern.

GM: You party long and hard into the night, so you’re still a little hung-over the next morning when you’re shopping for supplies at Dink’s store and spot a shoplifter slipping a gold watch into his pocket.

And we can keep cranking:

Player: Okay, we’re done at the dungeon. Let’s head back to town.

GM: It’s two weeks later and you’re shopping for supplies in Dink’s store. You spot a shoplifter slipping a gold watch into his pocket. You shout, “STOP THIEF!” and he starts running for the door. What do you do?

The more you crank it up – the harder you frame the scene – the more latitude the GM has for expressing their creative agenda and the larger their influence over the course of the game becomes. This is because the decision to skip “empty time” is hiding a railroad… it’s just that you’re “railroading” past decisions that everyone at the table agrees are irrelevant.

The risk, of course, is that you skip past a decision that is important to someone at the table. The Smallville RPG, which advocates for strong and aggressive scene-framing, offers this advice:

If, despite your best efforts, you skip a little too far ahead and a player says, “But I wanted to—“ just hand him a Plot Point. Tell him to spend it on revealing his planned preparations in the middle of the scene. With luck, he’ll surprise the rest of the table with an unforeseen turn of events.

This sort of solution is not unusual. In fact, the more you crank it up, the more typical it becomes for the game or the GM to start introducing more STG / narrative control mechanics and techniques: The GM is taking so much control away from the players that it becomes necessary to compensate by giving them back control in other ways.

Of course, in actual practice GMs will vary the pace of their scene-framing considerably depending on context and circumstance. But basically “skip the boring stuff and get to the next meaningful choice” is all you really need to know about pacing in an RPG.

The difficult part, of course, is putting that simple maxim into effective practice.

Go to Part 2: Scene-Framing

THE ART OF PACING
Part 2: Scene-Framing
Part 3: Filling the Frame
Part 4: Closing the Frame
Part 5: Advanced Techniques
Part 6: More Advanced Techniques

SUPPLEMENTAL READING – THE ART OF PACING
Film Banging: The Avengers
Film Banging: Alien
Film Banging: The Matrix
The Art of Pacing: Prepping Bangs
The Art of Pacing: Running Awesome Scenes
The Art of Pacing: How NOT to Frame a Scene

In the Eclipse Phase setting, Artificial General Intelligences (AGIs) are the source of some deeply forged and bitterly raw prejudice: Their digital cousins the TITANs — seed AIs capable of recursive self-improvement — underwent a hard-takeoff singularity and shattered human civilization in a genocidal frenzy. The core rulebook states:

The vast majority of transhumanity blames the Fall on rogue seed AIs. As a result, any AIs that are not crippled or somehow limited from improving themselves — including the AGIs that were common and growing in number before the Fall — are completely illegal in many habitats or at least heavily regulated… Many transhumans consider AGIs and the TITANs that murdered their homeworld to be one and the same.

Since AGIs are also playable characters in Eclipse Phase, it can be vitally important to know where you can travel openly and where you need to fall back on smuggling and darkcasts if you’re going to go there at all. Unfortunately, this information is somewhat scattered and often unsatisfactory. (You have to reference various passages from the core rulebook, Sunward, and Rimward, and even then the information is frequently vague.) Reading between the lines and making a few inferences, however, we can draw up some general guidelines.

AGIs AND THE LAW

First, there’s a general spectrum that runs (from most severe limitations to least severe limitations): Jovian Republic, Lunar-Lagrange Alliance, Planetary Consortium, Morningstar Consortium, Titanian Commonwealth, and the Autonomist Alliance.

Within that spectrum, you can use these general guidelines:

Jovian Republic: AGIs are subject to summary erasure. Anyone creating, aiding, or abetting an AGI is subject to severe criminal penalties, including the possibility of execution for treason.

Lunar-Lagrange Alliance: AGIs are outlawed by most LLA communities; they will be banished or placed in cold storage depending on circumstance. Hypercorps or individuals creating AGIs are subject to heavy fines.

Planetary Consortium: Roughly 25% of Planetary Consortium polities ban AGIs completely (similar to the LLA). In other polities they are heavily regulated. AGIs are considered property by the Planetary Consortium and will never have citizenship rights. In addition to regulations by local polities, the Planetary Consortium as a whole has regulations governing the development and use of AGIs. Violations of these regulations are punished with heavy fines.

Morningstar Constellation: The Morningstar Constellation’s approach to AGIs is similar to the Planetary Consortium, but the regulatory oversight is significantly smaller and only 10% of Morningstar polities ban AGIs completely. (Very rare MC polities even grant AGIs citizenship, but citizenship in one Morningstar polity is no guarantee of your rights in another.)

Conservative Independents: This isn’t a specific political body, but a significant number of independent settlements (including some autonomist settlements) fall into this category. In these settlements, AGIs are considered full citizens but they sacrifice some of the normal rights of citizens. This most notably includes privacy: AGIs in these settlements will have their mesh access tightly monitored and their morphs/hardware specs routinely audited. They may even have to undergo mandatory and intensive monitoring of their minds in order to detect the hypothetical onset of a singularity event. It’s even possible that they could be legally forced to undergo psychosurgery in order to prevent it. AGIs visiting such settlements will also undergo such scans (and possibly surgery).

Titanian Commonwealth: AGIs are recognized as full citizens by the Commonwealth and even benefit under Titan’s “one body for every mind” policy. However, new AGIs can expect to undergo extensive monitoring and testing before achieving citizenship. (Optionally, a GM could easily decide that AGI citizens are still subject to heavy surveillance and sousveillance in Titan society.)

Autonomists: AGIs, infomorphs, synthmorphs, Factors, flats… Dude, we’re all sentients, right? Don’t bug them and they probably won’t bug you.

NOTES

Individual habitats, of course, can obviously vary from these generic baselines. (In the case of the PC and LLA, you could even use the listed percentiles to randomly determine a given habitat’s legal framework.) These should be considered tools, not straitjackets.

It should also be noted that the Morningstar Constellation’s attitude towards AGIs is, as far as I can tell, never explicitly spelled out in any of the Eclipse Phase sourcebooks. I’ve intuited the position described above based on specific adventure seeds and historical incidents in Morningstar habitats. Given this paucity of information, however, a GM could easily shift them even further from the Planetary Consortium. (Perhaps you could have them behave like the Conservative Independents I describe above?)

Tagline: Hogshead is quickly becoming one of those companies I continually look to because of their consistent high quality. Hogswash, their sorta annual “newsletter/fanzine/thing”, not only helps you to keep an eye on them, but also has some pretty solid material in it.

I got subscribed to Hogwash one day while I was perusing Hogshead’s website. It wasn’t particularly difficult – all I had to do was drop them an e-mail with my home address in it and, before I knew it, I had the current issue of Hogwash (#4) sitting in my mailbox. Hogwash, you see, is a “newsletter/fanzine/thing” for Hogshead – it’s self-promotional content is rather high, so its distributed freely.

So why am I reviewing a “newsletter/fanzine/thing”? Because, having read it, I want to encourage all of you to drop Hogshead a line and get subscribed to it. And why do I want you to do that? Basically two reasons.

First, Hogshead tosses interesting tidbits of free game-stuff into each issue (mini-modules, monster write-ups, etc.). This is the “substance” of the issue, and it’s quality makes it well worth the handful of minutes it will take you to read through it. Its more than worth the price (since there is no price).

Second, Hogshead is quickly setting itself up as one hell of a fine game company. It’s finally beginning to produce original material for their licensed Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying line of products (having gotten almost all of the original line back in print), and the stuff that’s coming out looks like its going to be absolutely fantastic. On top of that they’ve released The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (which I’ve reviewed elsewhere). In the near future they’ll be releasing Violence (by anonymous author who we all know) and Puppetland (by John Tynes), among other projects. Hogshead is hot, and Hogwash is an excellent way to keep an eye on the company.

Let’s take Hogwash 4 as an example. It was released in August 1998 (but I didn’t get it until just a couple of months ago, when I signed up). If you had gotten it in August 1998 you would have been treated to a sneak preview of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Marienburg: Sold Down the River, and the Enemy Within campaign.

The main substance of the issue is a mini-module for WFRP, Bad Tidings, set in Marienburg and written by James Wallis. For eight half-pages, James packs in a lot of plot and background (involving a murder mystery, a Chaos cult, and even a handful of interesting adventure seeds). Very nicely done, and well worth the absolute nothing you paid for it (since, even if you don’t like the world of WFRP, it’s easily adaptable to any fantasy campaign).

In addition an “exclusive interview” discussing The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (which is as cleverly done as the game itself), and a two page article explaining the changes which Hogshead will be making to the legendary Enemy Within campaign. Plus you get the “Not the WFRP FAQ” FAQ, and a rough pencil preview of the cover to Marienburg: Sold Down the River.

All in all, I strongly advise signing up for a free subscription.

Style: 3
Substance: 4

Author: James Wallis
Company/Publisher: Hogshead Publishing, Ltd.
Cost: Free!
Page count: 16
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 1999/07/26

I really miss Hogshead. They were daring and clever and James Wallis was always marvelously kind to me as both a reviewer and a freelancer. James’ is still around, of course. You can find his blog over here, and he continues to share marvelous games with us on an entirely-too-infrequent basis.

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

First things first, you need to click through this link to Goblin Punch and read the blog post there:

A Spell Called Catherine

Okay? Done? Good. Because this next bit isn’t going to make any sense unless you know what I’m talking about.

Let’s start with a random rules check: Summoning spells physically bring the creature or object from some other place, they don’t create them out of whole cloth.

I’m not sure if that simplifies the ethical implications of this concept or makes it much, much worse: Are these actually versions of Catherine from alternate dimensions? If so, does the Catherine of this dimension actually deserve any recompense for their labors of her other-dimensional “siblings”? They’re effectively immortal while here and if they’re actually returned to the same place and time as the one that they left, are they actually being exploited? What if people start disappearing from this dimension and it’s determined that it’s a result of people summoning them?

Not all of these issues actually require “Catherine” to show up in your setting: The summon monster spells already allow spellcasters to summon intelligent beings to come and do their bidding. There’s a really tremendous ethical mire lurking there. “Catherine” just brings it into sharper focus and puts it center stage.

And even if you’re not interested in the ethical conundrums presented by this particular “what if”, consider all the immediate fantasy plots that fall out of it: You’ve got wizards fighting to gain (or protect) arcane secrets. You’ve got the wizard’s guild encroaching on the whore business. You’ve got mobsters trying to get their hands on the spell (and wizards possibly trying to stop them because they’re uncomfortable with that sort of thing). You’ve got people obsessed with the summoned/created Catherines trying to stalk or kidnap the “real deal”.

If you can’t find at least a half dozen potential scenarios in all of that, then you’re not really trying.

(In a modern setting with magic I’m imagining a similar scenario also resulting in organ donor scams. The PCs get called in when recent transplant recipients start dropping dead because their new organs have vanished inside them. Although I suppose it doesn’t take much imagination to imagine angry diabolists hunting down an arcanist because their human sacrifice retroactively vanished and their demonic patron is unhappy about it.)

Inaki Lind posted a review of the Legends & Labyrinths: Black Book Beta at RPGNet awhile back. Check it out.

Of course, you can also download a PDF copy of the Black Book Beta itself now. That’s over here.