Inherent Tension

Expanded from my dice.camp thread:

Besides the cultural reasons, the fact that violence is employed in games has to do with the fact that it carries with it inherent tension, which is how I'm thinking about design a lot these days. Inherent tension means the very nature of the action your character takes carries with it significant and immediately recognizable risks.

A move that lets you research the lore of the world or location or person is useful for the player and the world, but it is not dramatic. This doesn't mean that the lore of the world is meaningless and ungameable, just that it is not going to drive the game forward on it's own. If, however, you need to speed-read an ancient scrolls to find the magic word that will stop the arcane death traps closing in on you, that carries with it inherent tension.

I've been moving in the post-apocalyptic design-space for this reason - it carries with it inherent tension. How do I survive? Any character need to answer that question, and thus part of "why is my character engaging in this world" is already answered. Anything in the game-world that can then be engaged with is then filtered through this inherent tension - dungeons contain various things needed for them to survive and thrive in a harsh environment, the mutated fish are eating all the algae needed to feed the nearby underwater domed city.

You'll notice that inherent tension usually means that the character succeeds, or they die. But that's not necessarily always the case - if you can't recover the food from the abandoned supermarket, you must find it elsewhere and take on more risk. In Eye of Poseidon, becoming unable to deal with the conflicts in the crew means there is a mutiny and players lose control of their immediate environment. Failing to subvert the tyrannical warlord means a thousand years of oppression.

This way of thinking helps your gaming become more driven and eventful, and means that the players are going to care about what happens. If your game, GMing style or even playing seems uneventful and dull, think about the various tensions that you can fill your design or sessions with.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Table-Centric Design

Recently, I've been questioning the primacy of "Design" within RPG products. There's a kind of determinism that is generally accepted among RPG folks that Design determines what Play looks like. Listening to some versions of what Game Design is, you'd get the sense that the job of a designer is to manipulate and mind-control the people who play it, and perhaps to teach lessons about some things. If they are correct, and game design truly is a form of Vault-Tec style behavioral control, we might have to ask ourselves if this is even desirable? I don't doubt that design to a certain extent shapes the behavioral patterns and the choices role-players make, but I find that designers more often than not overrate their own presence at the table in a rather self-aggrandizing way. There is a famous, perhaps dubious sentiment surrounding Vampire The Masquerade - that the games mechanics seemed so contrary to the intended playstyle of the game that it is a wonder a...
Read more

you can use dnd to play anything

for reasons yet unknown, I will not capitalize the first letter in any of these sentences, unless I want to. calm down. have a snack. call a friend. have you been on RPG social media for more than 3 hours? have you ever seen one of those hot-take thread wherein people list obvious truisms as if they were controversial? have you ever seen one of those people who will spend their days arguing against fictional people? then you've probably heard some version of the following: you don't HAVE to play dnd. there are OTHER games, that do what you want BETTER. they're not really wrong. there isn't a sentiment there that we can make any normative claim against. so what's the problem? it follows a narrative we've discussed previously - the design centric perspective . It's follies are as follows: 1. it gives us a value judgement that tells us that specifically curated, "optimized" experiences, that carries with it the intentions of its authors, ...
Read more

Addendum to "Table-Centric Design" - On Mattering

I am extremely pleased and humbled with how many people responded so charitably and kindly to the recent  Table-Centric Design , were I outlined some recent ways I've been thinking about design. I did however, make a tactically beneficial mistake of referencing the recently dug-up corpse known as   "system matters."  Tactically beneficial, because a lot of people responded to it, gave good feedback and better criticism, but a mistake since it might leave people with a distorted impression. This could have made the impression like I don't believe system matters, which is not true. It could also make the impression that I believe the tangential opinion - that system doesn't matter as much as people think it does. I also don't believe this. I am not trying to be obtuse, I swear. System does matter. If you've played games published by other people a lot, you just know it. The pain of a clunky rule that constantly needs to be looked up everytime it is trigg...
Read more