I tend to think that rpg taxonomies are usually based more
on vibes than concrete details so I decided to try something different, and the result is this post.
Types of GM Materials: A List
When you run an rpg as the Game Master (or whatever you call it), you have a bunch of materials you use, right? The stuff that comes with the game, or in a module, or you have to make it yourself. I mean the GM materials that are separate from the rules for resolving actions. So, one list (the one I’m writing here) separates that stuff into five categories: a pre-designed map, a pre-designed world, a linear storyline, a pre-designed relationship matrix, and materials for improvisation.
1. The Pre-Designed Map
In the original rpg, this was a map of the dungeon, or more specifically, the dungeons below Castle Blackmoor. Overland exploration maps followed soon after and nowadays you can buy all sorts of maps of varying weirdness for your friends to explore via fictional little guys.
When the pre-designed map is the central element of the game you are playing, you can roll up a new character in the first 5 minutes because nobody cares who this person actually is, but if the GM (or DM) doesn’t bring a map that has all the necessary details on it already, there’s no game. That’s not really what most players want from an rpg though. Most people want rpgs to be more about their characters.
2. The Pre-Designed World
Of course, some people aren’t satisfied with just a dungeon map. They want to design an entire world for their players to wander around in. I’ve included this here as a separate section because this is more than just a map, but really this part of the essay is mostly an aside. Creating your own secondary world takes an amazing amount of work and is only entertaining for a minority of rpg players, because even though you get a much larger map to explore, the game is still about the GM’s setting, more than it is about your Original Characters (do not steal).
3. The Linear Storyline
Call it the Dragonlance Effect if you want to, but the most obvious way to run your players through an adventure, where one nail-biting situation leads logically to the next, is to write a linear (or mostly linear) set of scenes and then play through them. People derisively call this railroading but it’s also the main model for modern D&D and the adventure modules of most trad games, from Vampire to Shadowrun. Take a string of set piece combat encounters broken up by some non-combat stuff that leads you to the next one in line and you have a basic recipe for an episode of cinematic adventure.
That’s all pretty obvious I think. But there’s a similar evolution of sandbox to storyline in mystery games that’s worth looking at.
4. R-Maps and the Evolution of Mystery Games
While some early Call of Cthulhu adventures are pretty explicitly dungeoncrawls, many of the better adventures take the sandbox approach and apply it to a relationship matrix instead of geography. This isn’t the explicit r-maps popularized by Vampire, I’ll get to those later. What I mean here is that the relationships between the clues form connections that map out a kind of pointcrawl, which players explore in a way similar to a dungeon. Any location can be like a room, but instead of doors you have clues, and instead of delving deeper and deeper into the dungeon’s geography, you dive deeper into the mystery (which is always a one-way trip).
Is there a snappier name for this out there? Like somebody
calling it the Mystery Matrix or the Web of Clues or something? Probably,
people love jargon, even when it’s less than useful. And giving this a name and describing it thoroughly would probably be pretty useful for many people.
An example mystery scenario:
There’s a break-in at the museum. A pagan idol has been stolen, and weird slime was left behind. Questioning witnesses reveals that the museum was burgled by men driving the kind of truck that is common in the nearby countryside. Researching the slime leads to reports of a slime cult in the countryside. Researching the idol leads to an old book in the library that claims the idol can summon an evil god, and a librarian who says Old Man Moldy, who lives on a remote farm in the countryside, was researching that same book only a few months back. Investigating the countryside leads to Old Man Moldy’s farm, where the slime cult is using the stolen idol to summon an evil god.
In this example scenario, each line of inquiry leads back to the same instigating event. If it were an actual adventure module, there would be enough clues scattered around so that the players wouldn’t have to find them all in order to end up at the barn with the slime cult’s god.
However, this is still a lot of work. Not as much as making your own pre-designed world, but it’s still not really worth it to write three different lines of inquiry if your players only go down one (unless maybe you plan to publish it or run it at various conventions). It’s easier to just write one line of inquiry and run the players through it: the slime is what leads to the countryside where the slime cult has the stolen idol. This of course leads to the problem where the players don’t find the one clue they need to progress along the storyline, which in turn leads to the Gumshoe solution (popularized by games like Trail of Cthulhu and Night’s Black Agents) where they always get that clue. And so the linear storyline structure stays useful.
These materials are also useful in combination, of course. For example, the overall structure of Impossible Landscapes is a linear storyline, but each of the actual investigations is a sandbox clue-matrix.
Okay, moving on to the last one.
5. Materials for Improvisation
Let’s maybe not leave the mystery genre just yet, because there’s more evolution in technique that can lead us into this section. While the Gumshoe games provide one solution for running a mystery without having to do too much work, still other solutions are possible. In Brindlewood Bay (and other Gauntlet rpgs), the scenarios come with pre-designed clues, but instead of a solution, there’s rules allowing the players to improvise their own solution to the mystery.
One could also do the opposite, and write a game where each scenario provides the source of the mystery and its instigating event, along with guidelines to help the GM improvise clues based on where and who the players investigate. Haven’t seen that become a central rule in an rpg yet, but it’s how I prefer to run mysteries myself.
Even though I’ve put them all in one section in this essay, there’s a vast range of different materials meant to help GMs improvise:
· Random tables is what most people think of immediately.
· The relationship maps from Vampire setting books. After the PCs interact with somebody, consult their connections on the r-maps to see how other NPCs might react.
· Mechanics for faction play, like those in Worlds Without Number and Blades in the Dark.
· Also from Blades in the Dark is the cycle of play, which goes from score to payoff to downtime and back to score, so you always know what you’re supposed to be doing next.
· Beats in the Heart rpg, where you request specific situations and the GM tries to present you with them at some point in a later session. These become an arsenal of cues for you to draw upon in play.
· Even detailed NPCs are meant to aid improvisation, since their interactions with the PCs aren’t scripted.
You can probably think of more. Improv aids can do lots of things, but if you want an rpg that makes the player’s characters more important than the GM’s pre-designed maps and storylines, this is the stuff you need.
One Possible Conclusion
While rpgs are often categorized by vibes, I think that the GM materials an rpg provides are a major factor in producing those vibes.
Consider for example these three rpgs: Blades in the Dark, Fiasco, and Shadowrun.
Unlike the other two games, Fiasco is GM-less and doesn’t have rules for resolving character actions, and yet according to most people it goes in the same “storygames” category as Blades, while Shadowrun is “trad.” This has always seemed kind of ludicrous to me, because Blades in the Dark and Shadowrun are obviously the same kind of “outlaw party of PCs doing missions against the GM’s antagonists” rpg, which Fiasco is not. But it makes a kind of sense if you consider that Blades and Fiasco both prioritize materials for improvisation a lot more than Shadowrun does. From this perspective, what the players and their characters do is less of a factor in classification than what materials the GM is given.
Anyway, another conclusion is that I was thinking about the actual materials a GM uses when running an rpg, and I've never seen anybody list out the differences like this. It seemed like it would be useful to me so I did it myself.