RPG Narrative Velocity

This post is born from both observation and conversations. The observations come from watching games being streamed and seeing how slow their games progress through whatever story is in play. The conversations come from observations others have made of how fast our gaming group style of play tears through the story.

I’ve chosen to call this narrative velocity, purely because I wanted a way to refer to it without typing out a sentence each time.

So, what contributes to having a high narrative velocity?

What We’ve Discussed Before…

You don’t need to read either of the posts below to read this one. This post is focused on in session elements that increase narrative velocity the two posts referred to below are about different topics that are tangential.

We’ve discussed Executing A Short Campaign before. That blog post was focused on overall approaches that result in short campaigns that aren’t just a long one hacked to pieces. All these factors contribute to our narrative velocity as that velocity helps with short campaigns! I didn’t want to repeat them here, but you can find them in the post and listed out below.

Really Use Homo Fictitious • Maximise Session Zero • No Myth of Reality • Everyone Is A Writer Who Edits • Play With Narrative Structures • Reduce The Lore Porn • Condense The Level Ranges • Saga-Based Storytelling

While this is a bit more meta and even more tangential it’s worth checking out the post about High Performing Gaming Groups as some of these factors definitely increase our narrative velocity.

Only Three Types of Scene

I’m going to suggest that the scenes at your gaming table fall into three types. I’m doing that because I believe it’s true and because the nature of these scenes and their interaction with other elements are fundamentally what increases narrative velocity.

The three types are:

Conflict Scenes. These are the scenes where the really interesting things happen. The conflict may be action. It may be social. It may be a physical conflict or it may be about ideas. The key thing is the conflict takes place so things can progress or in the better conflict scenes to find out what happens next. They are the deciding scenes. The ones you want to get to with minimum friction. Change happens. Things move forward. Go big.

Transition Scenes. These are the scenes that get you from A to B, where A and B are almost always one conflict scene to another conflict scene. These scenes should be interesting, exciting, potentially character illuminating. They should not be a chore, a drag, overly difficult or leave anyone at the table totally confused about what their next options are. At times the options are another transition scene, but you don’t want these daisy-chained together like some epic World of Warcraft quest chain. You want to get to conflict scenes.

Exploration Scenes. Now, these are interesting, because some people think they don’t exist, usually collapsing them into things you can do in a transition scene, or they say something like ‘you might also do some free role-playing’. I believe they’re important to recognize as a distinct thing. The reason for which we’ll come to later. Exploration scenes aren’t overly concerned with conflict. They aren’t concerned with getting from A to B. They are just scenes that explore something whether it be introducing setting concepts or two characters exploring what they know about each other or commenting on events. They may also be more directly influenced by conflict scenes, say a character helping another deal with the outcome.

The Reality of the Types

As indicated, these scene types can collapse into each other, but it doesn’t mean they’re not useful as a model. Dramas often collapse exploration scenes into conflict scenes, Star Wars is a good example. Similarly, you might be rolling to hack a vast network in a transition scene but choose then to explore one of the character’s losses in the last conflict scene while doing it.

You can see, even in these two examples, how it’s easy to not have exploration scenes as a recognised thing but merged into others.

Where Does The Role-Playing Happen?

All the time. The scene types don’t really dictate where role-playing happens. It could be argued exploration scenes open themselves to being pure role-playing with no other agenda, but opportunities to grow, highlight and engage with other characters can happen at any time even during a conflict or a frantic, fast-paced transition scene.

Occasionally, you can encounter philosophies that separate role-playing from the ‘getting down to business’ as it’s ‘unrealistic’ that professional people would intersect ‘getting it done’ with drama. Well, that may be true in real life with real people but your character isn’t a real person they’re a member of Homo Fictitious so the normal rules don’t apply.

This brings us to the fact narrative velocity increases substantially if you operate, make decisions and rule within the fiction.

Fiction First Is Important

A key contributor to narrative velocity is working the game at the narrative level, the fictional level. This can be because you are playing a fiction first game (say Fate or Cortext Prime, there are others) or purely because you resolve things at that level even when the game doesn’t necessarily advocate it. It’s important because fiction first kills procrastination and in doing so acts as a natural shortcut mechanism to what’s important.

When watching some role-playing sessions, as we have the benefit of doing so now due to streaming, total procrastination is often the main killer of narrative velocity. You’ll see players procrastinating over what to do next or, the truly surprising one, knowing what they need to do next but introducing their own blockers to doing it and procrastinating over those.

They literally whataboutism their next action, even when they chose it!

I’m not saying some thinking about what to do next is bad, but procrastinating over it to the point anything of value stops is. Especially if the natural way to fill that clarity vacuum at your table is desperate hijinks, incompetency porn and bad humour.

These things are the main breaks on narrative velocity.

Consequences Not Details

Consequences are more important than details. It’s not important how long it takes to travel from location A to location B all that is really important is whether you get there in time. It’s not important how the McGuffin device works in any real sense only that X happens if the character succeeds or Y happens if they don’t. Quite often it’s not important when something is going to happen based on real-world extrapolations of distance and time just that it will happen on dramatic time. I’m not saying details aren’t important, but they are substantially less important than the consequences.

When you’re resolving the fiction the consequences are what’s important. You only need just enough detail.

This speeds things up immensely as all the ‘sweating of the details’ goes away at every level. A thousand and one questions about travel details and timings? Gone. All the self-sabotaging minutia that some groups introduce don’t matter – the fiction is to confront the CEO of the evil organisation so he’s in his office when they infiltrate the building or in the limousine when they intercept it because that is what is decided to do next.

You don’t have to micro-research it all and worry about every, single thing that could go wrong.

This fits into what we’ve established around scenes as the details tend to come in during transition scenes and the consequences come during the conflict scenes.

Homo Fictitious Is Important

Recognising that your characters aren’t normal people increased narrative velocity. This is not the same as being powerful. They are Homo Fictitious in that they have a story to resolve and they are present as the antagonists in the story not just bystanders, the characters themselves are pro-active and so are the players. This manifests in various ways.

Players are proactive. Yes, I am afraid a high degree of narrative velocity is almost predicated on players being pro-active. It isn’t absolutely necessary but the velocity does not feel half as exciting or engaging if the pro-active vacuum has to be filled by someone else and the only other someone else is the GM. If your players are pro-active they are cooking glorious meals, if they’re not you’re feeding them instead. It can work that way, how is maybe too much for this post, but it’s certainly more exciting when the players are going for it.

Characters are competent. The characters have the ability and skills to get to the next conflict scene. They are Homo Fictitious so in the context of the story they are competent. Remember, even the accountant who uncovered a conspiracy or the cleaner who saw a murder have abilities in the context of the story by virtue of them being in it. If they don’t they shouldn’t be in that story and are just tourists. This means how to get to the next interesting bit can happen in various ways.

Character knowledge is key. Discussions around ‘knowledge’ are often concerned with player knowledge being used. I think the bigger discussion is how character knowledge is used. Protagonists in stories have abilities that solve problems – primarily by giving them the ability to transition to the next conflict scene. This is why in a fiction first approach solving problems through the character sheet is not a problem, as the characters route everyone to the next problem where players make big choices.

Characters solve problems. Players make decisions.

The characters aren’t tourists. The characters haven’t rocked up as tourists to experience a theme park story – they are the protagonists so every story is their story, not someone else’s. Yes, non-player characters may have important parts to play, but they only really exist to reflect on the antagonists and their story. There is no main storyline and side-quests in this sense. It’s all the main story.

This all comes together to create the biggest contribution to a high narrative velocity, but for that we have to discuss why, how and what.

Why, How And What

By this point you may have worked out what contributes to narrative velocity: –

• Keep transition scenes as fictionless as possible
• Don’t go small on the conflict scenes, go big

This all comes down to what priorities you give to why, what and how.

Frictionless Transition Scenes

When it comes to transition scenes why is more important than what and how. The simple reason for this is you might find the players often decide what and how – they certainly decide how a lot.

Say the players in a Werewolf campaign need to descend into the underworld (what) to rescue a soul (why) but how do they access the underworld (how)? You can have a few ideas, but the chances are a proactive player with a competent character may well just author a scene to visit a spiritual Sphynx in a pyramid and demand answers from it. Transition scene instantly provided.

In a game of cinematic spies the agents need access to a virus cure which is in a secure building, numerous players decide how by using numerous skills they may even decide a lot of the what by saying how they are going to infiltrate the building. Done, cut to the conflict scene of infiltrating the building and the clash with the antagonists.

The knack of keeping transition scenes frictionless and having enough ‘proactive energy’ combines to create rocket fuel for narrative velocity.

Go Big Conflict Scenes

When you get to the conflict scenes don’t resolve a micro-step, resolve something big. You really only need about 3 and that includes the conclusion if each one resolves big. If the conflict isn’t resolving big it could be argued it’s more a transition scene.

Quite often transition scenes may have dice rolls in them that seem like conflicts but if they’re not resolving big and are just rolls to obtain information they’re just transition scenes. Conflict scenes should be when the characters face achieving their goal or significant change happens.

There is every chance you may not know what each of these conflict scenes are in advance in a game with proactive players and characters capable of enacting that at the rules level. This is a good thing.

In a mystery you may decide the secret boyfriend (why) has the lost secret diary (what) of the murdered girl and that they should go to the biker club outside town to find him (how), but it becomes clear one way or another the character with issues over religious faith believes the priest the girl went to for counselling and confessions (why), has the lost secret diary (what) and he wants to question him in the confessional booth (how).

If the player is really sold on that and it would really progress that protagonists story how really important is it the diary is with the secret boyfriend? Even if it is important, maybe the route to finding the secret boyfriend (how) becomes the priest.

Putting It all Together

When you put it all together let’s see what we have.

You have transition scenes that are exciting, but kinetic and relatively frictionless. You want the players to obtain how to get to the next conflict scene. Quite often players will make these transition scenes up based on who their characters are and what they are good at. Let them, you don’t want to add to the friction. You’ll soon find you can rock up to the table as a GM with only a vague sense of how the players might get to some conflict scenes you have as an idea because the players will find a way.

At this point, you’ve removed a layer of procrastination and confusion. This doesn’t matter as the focus should be on the conflict scenes where players make meaningful decisions.

When you get to conflict scenes they resolve big, they don’t resolve micro-steps. The super-spies get the virus. The werewolves rescue the soul but face collapsing the underworld. The investigators of the unknown find the book but the obsessed academic reads too far into the ancient text. Big choices, consequences and momentum in the fiction.

The characters. The protagonists. They’re not aliens to the story or tourists to someone else’s story. They ARE the story. While powers may shift, non-player characters may grow and change and antagonists will work against them but it is the protagonists story and how they change, grow and conclude their personal narratives within the larger events. This means all the story is the main story, there is no side-quests.

There is much less self-doubt and procrastination because you’re not expecting the players to be the experts their characters are and you’re resolving the fiction. This literally kills, procrastination. If a super-spy has a high infiltration skill and decides to infiltrate the building via the air vents in the roof that method works. As it doesn’t matter how just that antagonism rises to stop him in the conflict scene. Similarly, moving to consequences rather than needing to know all the details stops analysis paralysis. Killing procrastination and analysis paralysis increases narrative velocity.

This means things resolve at a pace, characters grow and change with momentum and the narrative velocity increases.

The Challenges Of High Narrative Velocity

Does this approach have any challenges? Let’s assume you want a good narrative to be an outcome for your game at the table because if you have other objectives you’ve probably not read this far. On that basis I think there are two challenges.

The first challenge is the velocity itself. Sometimes you can go so fast explorations scenes can be pushed out by the natural predilection to maintain the velocity and not slow down. As an example, we role-play all the time in terms of the full remit of what counts as role-playing: setting up whole scenes, describing how characters do stuff, interactions integrated within conflict and transition scenes the list goes on. What can sometimes get lost is just pausing and using exploration scenes just on their own to slow down, pause and take in the scenery and intimacy of the moment.

I’m not a big fan of the ‘our characters talked in the tavern for two whole sessions’ as the epitome of role-playing but sometimes slowing down is a good thing and just soaking it all in.

The second challenge is the foundation this is all built on. It’s certainly possible to adopt the approaches in this post as some games now advocate those exact approaches, some more implicit than others, but it’s worth pointing out we are a long-term gaming group of friends. We have a lot of trusts, understanding and known expectations within the group that in itself is probably a factor in playing like this and the narrative velocity. We have certain privileges and a network of factors not all groups have.

And, Finally…

It’s been interesting seeing streams and discussing how different groups run their games as it was always apparent we took a no fat approach to our experience at the table. What’s been interesting is a realisation how crazy our narrative velocity is.

It causes you to consider what happens at your table through comparison and I think, while we’ll never drop our approach, there is probably an appetite to purpoself notice and realise the moments when slowing down is good to get some better exploration scenes in. Sometimes characters just talking in an appropriately evocative environment is just good in and off itself.

Just not whole sessions of it.