I’m doing my usual thing and considering what I may run next as part of my tabletop role-playing endeavours. As usual, I’m taking what some people would consider too long about it. I am considering ideas around Cortext Prime, Forged in the Dark (Scum & Villainy) and Powered by the Apocalypse (Monster of the Week).
It was when considering how I’d break down Monster of the Week that I got thinking about how great the latter half of the 90’s was for TV shows and how the narrative constructs or tropes used in those shows are great for role-playing sessions.
These are some of those ideas and if nothing else I got to watch some great TV!
The importance of why
A common thread through all these ideas is they present methods to get to the why. The human story. We’ve discussed this before in the importance of why. The story isn’t about what, that’s primarily the plot and can be flexible to the point it’s playing to find out.
The story is the ‘human’ why.
All these methods primarily exist not to do something, neat, funny and different, albeit that can be part of the experience, but to give different ways to probe, question and incisively get to the always important why.
That’s what makes them great.
The Narrative Tropes
The narrative tropes we’re going to hit are listed below so you can jump around: –
- Character constructs
- Episode constructs
I figure this helps with the length. Check out a few then come back and check out more if you’re strapped for time.
The body swap
The consciousness and memories of two characters swap bodies forcing them to experience the life, circumstances and challenges of the other or a single character’s consciousness inhabits his body at a different phase in their life allowing them to make profound discoveries.
You can see this concept in Big, Freaky Friday, 17 Again and Face/Off. TV shows like Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds have done it as well. What’s interesting to note from these examples is they all choose to address different things.
If a character’s body swaps consciousness with themselves the only real option is for the consciousness to shift along the axis of time. This is essentially what Big (young to old) and 17 Again (old to young) do. You’d only want to do this if there was something interesting character growth to mine. As an example, if a character is dealing with the issue of age and fading legacy maybe they do body swap their older mind into their younger self for a fresh perspective.
A true body swap is interesting because it forces the character to learn from the perspective of another. The question then is does a character swap with an NPC or do two player characters swap bodies?
If two player characters swap bodies there can be some laughs inherent in it, but I would not play it for laughs. The two characters should be forced into circumstances that drive change in themselves. We did this in our Star Trek Adventures game, and while some of it was humorous as the two characters were very different, the gold of the exchange was one character discovering the subterfuge of another and the other experiencing how the other was seen as one of the few Orions in Starfleet. It was brilliant.
The advantage of doing it with an NPC is that the character could be anything, including an enemy. One of the best examples of this was when Buffy and Faith swapped bodies in the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer episodes This Year’s Girl and Who Are You? It was excellently done. How Faith realises slowly she hates herself as she experiences how Buffy is seen by those around her is genius.
You don’t have to physically swap bodies as with advanced technology just looking like someone else is effectively the same thing as body swapping. This is the central conceit of Face/Off with the hero having to become the villain and getting locked into a running, hi-octane conflict with his arch-enemy who has done the reverse. In many ways, Face/Off also exemplifies Evil Twin dynamic.
Star Trek has numerous episodes throughout its run where characters are genetically altered to look like other people sometimes causing them to question their very self-identity. In the Deep Space Nine episode Second Skin we start in medias res and have the character question whether her alternate identity is actually her real one!
Breaking Bad
A normally good character breaks bad for a short period having a dramatic impact on their own life and those around them no doubt leaving lasting impacts.
The quintessential example of this is, of course, the TV series Breaking Bad which constructs a whole series out of a mild-mannered school teacher becoming a drug baron initially out of desperation and then vanity, ego and avarice.
That’s hard to pull off unless the premise of your whole campaign is based on exploring that possibility or if you’re playing something like Blades in the Dark when the right decision might never be clear – but even then to truly break bad the character’s decision would need to be a step up above a shade of grey in order for the fellow characters or those who surround them to recognise a barrier has been crossed.
The better model is to have a character break bad for a specific scene, sequence of scenes or a session. This is often transitioned via a moment of great loss often combined with a feeling of unfairness triggering the character to reach for something they wouldn’t normally consider. If we use Willow as an example in Buffy: The Vampire Slayer she goes bad in the episodes Villains, Two to Go and Grave due to a combination of loss, addiction and the perennial issue of believing she can before asking if she should.
Individual scenes work as well, in our Werewolf: Accelerated game one of the characters broke bad due to his demon axe during a descent into the underworld which had dramatic impacts including the death of a colleague at the base of the underworld. It was a major touchpoint in the campaign.
The power of the breaking bad trope is it’s often the one with a lot more inherent spin-off issues that characters have to deal with because the character who breaks bad does bad stuff during that time which have a wide footprint.
This is one area where the system you’re using can really help, Fate is a good example. In the above Willow example, the player character would have undoubtedly changed her Aspects over the course of the season and massively compelled the key one towards the end of the season. In the Werewolf: Accelerated example that’s what literally happened. It was an Aspect compel after a build-up via depleting a track.
The Alternate Self
A character meets their alternate self. This alternate self forces the character to question themselves, drive change and reconsider future actions.
The alternate self can be encountered in numerous ways. It could be a literal version of the character from the future like what happened to Captain Pike in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode A Quality of Mercy. It could be someone who is the result of an accident like Riker and Boimler’s alternate selves in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Lower Decks respectively. A central theme in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is Strange’s reflection on who he is when he sees the road a number of his alternate selves have gone down.
The alternate self doesn’t have to be a literal alternate they can be an alternate in the sense of analogy or theme. As an example, Buffy has encountered two different alternative slayers who could do her job with different results. They’ve allowed her to explore how she related to her job and what it means as well as even consider retiring.
The alternate self is more subtle than the evil twin as it suggests less of a full conflict and allows for a range of issues to be explored. The character and their alternate self don’t even have to be in conflict. When Riker faces his alternate self in Second Changes it causes both characters to question their life choices. Primary Riker starts to question whether he’s lost something as his alternate self comes from a version of himself some years ago which he appreciates and feels he might have lost.
The alternate self can also be interesting in how they impact other characters? These differences may make them attractive to other characters? Their philosophy may mean they screw around with friends of the true self character?
The alternate self should be constructed to trigger those burning questions of introspection and change and potentially shift the relationship dynamics across the characters.
The evil twin
A character comes face-to-face with their evil twin. This causes an intense conflict all the more complicated by the fact the character recognises some of themselves in their nemesis.
Literally, everyone can have an evil twin.
We exist in a world where even the artificially intelligent car KITT had his evil twin KARR on Knight Rider. They even doubled down and gave Michael Knight an evil twin Garthe Knight. You could tell because he had a moustache and little goatee and he has a truck built with the same indestructible tech as KITT. It’s worth noting Garthe isn’t a ‘twin’ at all (Michael’s new ‘face’ was based on Garthe’s), so it goes to show how the evil twin and the alternate self inter-relate.
Star Trek also straddles the line between evil twin and alternate self when they do the mirror universe episodes. . Similarly, Faith in Buffy: The Vampire Slayer goes from serving as an alternate self, to an evil twin who takes part in a body swap and back to an alternate self in her lifetime on the show. It sounds terrible written down but it was brilliantly executed.
The strength of the evil twin is the full-on conflict. It’s not usually subtle and the person just has to be stopped. The weakness of it is it takes some deft navigation for it not to be hokey, you want it to be a bit more like Faith and Buffy than Michael and Garthe Knight. To truly hate and despise and want to stop the evil twin the character should see something of themselves in the character but maxed out on the evil twin. If the character is egotistical then the evil twin has experienced events that ramp their ego to the max and its part of why they are evil.
The Frenemy
A relationship with another character which is an enemy who is a friend who is an enemy or subtly both at once.
Doesn’t everyone have a frenemy these days? It certainly seems the accessory of choice in many modern animated shows.
The common set-up of the frenemy is to also make them romantic or eluded to romantic partners. You can see this play out between Batman and Catwoman, Buffy and Angel and Adora and Catra (She-Ra and the Princess of Power). The simples reason for this it ups the intensity of the relationship.
The purpose of the frenemy is to challenge the principles and moral grounding of the character. What will they do in support of their frenemy? What will the frenemy manage to occasionally manipulate them into? What excuses will they constantly make for the frenemy? It’s important when doing this to balance the relationship out and have the frenemy really deliver on their friendship as well.
I’m a bit of a fan of frenemy’s and I’ve probably done it a few times. In a campaign that brought the gaming group together way back when Dungeons & Dragons 3E was launched my character had a frenemy. My Dresden Accelerated character also had a frenemy in the form of the monster hunter that trained her. So, I can be quite taken with that are they going to cut each other’s throat or embrace sort of dynamic and how those relationships pan out.
The major strength of the frenemy is the very nature of it suggests a shifting relationship and set of dynamics so it can naturally fall into being a much longer game than some of the other ideas presented here.
24 hours previous
The characters find themselves embroiled in a tense situation but before it’s resolved or just as it’s resolved and leads to something more dramatic the screen goes black as says X hours earlier. The events are played out knowing the endpoint.
You see this happening a lot in cinematic espionage shows, the excellent show Alias did it a number of times even on its award-winning pilot (still worth watching and it’s on Disney+).
This can’t be done? Yeah, I know, go back far enough and I’d not have accepted it works or trusted the players at the table to navigate to the endpoint. It does take trust that the table will get there. It does mean being willing to accept player authoring on a big scale. And accepting that knowing the ending as that authoring happens has powerful results.
It creates a strange situation when you do this as it’s as freeing as it is restrictive knowing what you’re working towards as you can just go for it. It’s also an exciting intellectual exercise across the table to author and pass the baton in a way that gets to the endpoint.
Ultimately, knowing the endpoint tends to result in less caution and the players using more of the dramatic buttons to navigate towards the goal. It sort of creates a bit of the ‘all bets are off’ feeling of a one-shot with it very much not being a one-shot.
The fourth wall
The characters find they are given permission to break the fourth wall and speak to the camera. The goal is to allow the characters to speak about things directly, thoughtfully and honestly which may not be afforded normally.
We’ve used breaking the fourth wall to cover a number of things, but breaking the fourth wall is certainly something that exists on a spectrum and we’re going to use it to cover them all. You may regard some as technically not breaking the fourth wall, but it’s easier to cover them here.
The hard fourth wall move can be seen in Fleabag and as we’ve recently seen in the latest Marvel show She-Hulk. The characters literally talk to the camera as if they know the audience is there and they are talking to the audience acknowledging the narrative that is being told. This is a unique set-up but it doesn’t have to be set up in advance. You just need ‘an audience’ and a ‘special situation’.
In our Buffy: The Vampire Slayer game we had an episode where the characters were subject to one of their adventures being the feature event of a demonic TV show with a varied demonic audience cheering success and failure. As the adventure unfolded we could speak to that audience or we got subject to inserts from the show where it was expected, which happened after key events. It did serve to expose character issues, dynamics and internal thoughts that would have been harder to surface another way.
Softer fourth wall breaking can be brought into being via reality TV or documentary-style talking heads. It’s also much more flexible to introduce. You could literally go Cops style and have an actual film crew following the characters, there is even a whole role-playing game based on this called Inspectres. You could also use interviews like in reality shows like Drive to Survive and Below Deck, which have the principles interviewed after the fact but show the scenes in the timeline of the actual events.
This would be a great thing to do in a Forged in the Dark game, you could imagine the characters being interviewed by authorities or a faction after a job but the scenes are flash-forwards rather than flashbacks (you could even give stress back each time it happens). When something critical happens flash-forward to the interview question about the event. When a soft-hearted character doesn’t set off the bomb, it cuts to the interview where someone asks so, why didn’t you set off the bomb? The player then gets to play out why as their character. It’s probably best in these scenarios that the set-up allows for truthful answers only unless lying to themselves can work effectively as character growth.
The key thing is the player gets to talk about the sort of things they might more often talk about as the ‘player author’ but they get to do it in character. It usually has powerful results, especially if part of the set-up is the other characters get to see, hear or experience what is said.
The other life
The character gets to experience a whole other version of their life or a life that causes them to make profound choices about themselves.
The other life can feel like a body swap at times or might have elements of an alternate self but it remains very much its own thing namely because the ‘other life’ may not be related to the character at all other than thematically.
One of the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation is The Inner Light in which Captain Picard experiences someone’s memories as actual life. What’s important about the episode is the character lives a life that merges everything he aspires to be while allowing him to experience everything he sacrificed for it in his real life: family and children. It’s a complete soul-searching experience and a thing of beauty. Just imagine if one of your characters has regret issues and they get to experience what they missed in the other life?
What if the other life is so powerful that the character does not want to leave and her friends pull them out? This is the case in The Orville in the episode Twice in a Lifetime when a character gets thrown back in time and makes a life for himself. That life is so good, which he made because the years passed and he wasn’t rescued, he refused to leave. How that would resolve for a player’s character would have lasting implications. Would the player give it up? Would rules and regulations demand the other characters expatriate him? Would they wipe their memory only for him to remember what he’d lost sessions later?
The other life might not be enticing but a terrible scenario that might play out? In our Werewolf: Accelerated game one of the characters experienced what an apocalypse would look like if their pack failed. He learned something was wrong but all the other characters just thought it was real until persuaded there was a way to break it. The events left the character with a ‘Have Seen The Apocalypse’ Aspect which drove that character’s purpose and determination moving forward as only he remembered the experience.
The key thing is to construct the principles of the other life and the situation(s) within it to directly challenge the character’s beliefs, focus on themes they wanted to explore or provide the road not taken or the road that could result in order to really drive character change.
The musical episode
The story, session or episode adopts all the tropes of musical theatre or a broadway show and the characters actually express their thoughts and feelings through song.
The last one? Hoh boy.
This has become a bit of a thing in genre TV. The first time I remember seeing it was in Xena: Warrior Princess in the episode The Bitter Suite. They then did it in Buffy: The Vampire Slayer in the spectacular episode Once More, with Feeling and it got a bit more of the credit some years later. Obviously, due to the nature of Glee it was part of the show’s DNA.
Probably, a bit like me, the typical person reading this will be this will NEVER happen. As someone who avoids playing characters with performing skills, even a Bard character will never happen, never mind setting up some sort of situation where I have to actually sing.
Nope.
Surprisingly I know it has been done. It was done at a convention either by one of the gaming group or he was one of the players. Obviously, it was at a convention as this is where all this sort of crazy experimentation happens these days.
So it happened and with UK grognards I’d guess.
I think it would be hard to do. As the goal is to have the songs be the ultimate expression of the emotions and thoughts of the characters, they can’t just be random songs for laughs. So even discounting the musical ability of the players, it’d be challenging.
And, Finally…
Challenge the players to address, focus and drive change in their emotional why. The whole point of being a dramatic character is you have big questions you’re asking and you’re going to face challenges and internal change to find the answers. These constructs are ways to probe and prod the characters’ questions, thoughts and relationships in depth while also keeping things in character.
They can be used in most games, they just take slightly different shapes.
What a great article – especially as it reads like a potted highlight of our gaming years!
On the musical thing, I did run it (and play in it) but the participants were all lovely fluff indie kids – not Grogs in sight! hahaha
I honestly couldn’t remember if you’d run it or played in it. I just remember discussing it with respect, admiration and abject horror.
I just assumed it was at one of those cons were men and women of a certain refined gaming age all turn up.