How to Run a Game (Part 14) - Vignettes
When it comes to games, this is a pretty personal one. I don't know how other people run games these days, because it's been a while since I've played in a game run by someone else, and even longer since I've talked game design (and game running) with other folks... but here's a technique I've developed that helps me run semi-structured games that are resilient to players who desperately try to go off the rails.
It goes back to a group of gamers on the Sydney game conventions circuit back in the 1990s. It was a team that ran under the name of "Demolition". These guys were hated by organised and structured GMs. They would deliberately push the envelope, and derail their sessions by trying to direct stories in ways that the writer of the convention module hadn't intended.
My easy answer at the time was to not have rails that could be derailed.
This led to years of running freeform styled games where anything goes, that was basically the late 90s and early 2000s. However, the issue started to arise where my games drifted and lost focus. My players still seemed to be having fun, and I still had groups of players who wanted me to run games for them based on the energy and intensity of the sessions, and general word of mouth through certain gaming communities, but it felt like there was something missing. I was running games that players were enjoying, because they could make decisions to control the destiny of play, but it felt like there was no real focus.
If I look at the three way tension again, I had seen the idea of Mr. X's games (in the second post of this series), where it was basically the Narrator pulling on one side of the tension, while the rules pulled in the other direction, and the players basically had no agency at all. At this stage of my game running, I had the players pulling at one side of the tension, and the rules pulling at the other side, and I had no real agency... I was just facilitating a smoother flow between the players and rules.
It worked.
It worked well.
But I wasn't feeling it, and it was burning me out because I wasn't having as much fun. Over time, I think some of my players had started to see this too. It was all smoke and mirrors, and people were starting to see behind the curtain.
I don't specifically remember the moment when I came up with the idea for vignettes, but I started adding them into a few of my sessions as an experiment in the early 2000s as an element of my gaming toolkit.
The basic idea is simple. A vignette is a fragment of a scene designed to push a story in a direction regardless of which way it might currently be heading. So, even though I'm letting the players make most of the decisions in guiding the story, a vignette gives a nudge in a specific direction toward something that might be more in keeping with the genre of the setting, or might connect existing choices into a larger overall narrative structure.
A vignette can be applied anywhere, and anytime. It might even get recycled with a different skin in various campaigns. I pull ideas from pop culture references, movies, songs, current world events, anything everything, it really doesn't matter, because if players get the references then they feel like they're "in on the joke" and it helps to work as a shorthand to get players thoughts on track with regard to the story I'd like to try and tell.
Each vignette is just a temporary tug on the narrative, playing on specific elements of the character concepts that have been revealed so far. If players get hooked on the bait, then I'll know what sorts of vignettes might be effective in future, if they ignore the bait, then I'll try something different next time.
An example might be to have the characters encounter a specific situation common to the genre... they might be seeing a homeless person attacked by some thugs, a book filled with arcane writings, evidence of a murder scene, a wild animal racing across the scene, a vigorous discussion between two side characters about issues that might be happening elsewhere in the setting.
Each of these helps to set up the idea of a deeper richer world than the immediate story that the characters are involved in. From a Gamist perspective, this really doens't play too much of a role. From a Simulationist it helps in a number of ways, by pulling the stories back with elements that you'd expect to see in the genre and setting being modelled. From a Narrativist perspective it's a bit more interesting. Each vignette may be used to provide choices to the characters... arguably these could be considered a bit like cut scenes in a computer game... you do your wandering around and fighting things, then once a trigger point is activated, the previously defined scene takes over for a short period.
I guess in some ways this is also like random encounter tables, but rather than having every scene being a fight scene, and rather than it being completely random, these events push the story in specific predetermined ways, while allowing players to make whatever choices they want along the way. Traditional game modules have events take place at specific locations and drive the action from one set piece to another, but by making the set pieces a bit more loose, and allowing vignettes to change their locations, or change the characters involved in them, the vignettes don't rely on players making certain decisions for their characters. Regardless of what they may do during the course of play, a team like Demolition will still run into the story beats and will still progress through a narrative.
In the diagram above of the "Path of Clouds" it basically shows a simple path that could be followed through the story, and no matter what choices the players make they basically go through the predetermined story, even though they feel like their making their own choices all the way through. Back in the Forge days, this was basically described as a form of "illusionism"...but this term, like so many other terms from those days was debated quite a bit. Some claim that illusionism is when a narrator has a completely laid out storyline, and just makes it look like the players have a choice in the ongoing story. I guess that in some cases vignettes can look that way, especially if they follow the linear path depicted, but I try t make sure there is enough room between the vignettes for characters to breathe and for players to make meaningful decisions along the way. I never have a strict progression of scenes that lead from one to the next, and I might have twenty possible vignettes ready to go in a session only meant to last five scenes. The actual vignettes I use will be determined by players choices and narrative requirements. Some might accelerate the story if things are starting to stagnate, some might slow things down if the pace isn't allowing characters to develop adequately, others might redirect the story toward (or away from) specific narrative elements that might twist the game.
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