Procedural (Action) Scenes

I got really hung up on procedural scenes the first few times through Hillfolk, as they don’t seem connected to the rest of the game at all. It’s like this whole completely different and disconnected system from the rest of the game (which, rightly, has it’s focus on the Drama scenes). Not a huge critique here, I love Drama System, but it just felt a little *too* disconnected and I wanted to see if I could work on it to make the game a little more to my liking with Oppian Wives.

Malandros, an awesome game which is built atop the Drama System SRD has it’s own way of tying the Procedural scene to the Drama scene – when skills are used, they need to be ‘recharged’ as part of a Drama scene – I really like this!

Drawing on PbtA

Now this is where I draw on the Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) framework – I think procedural scenes need to be the result of a distinct player action – to quote ‘to do the thing, you have to do the thing’. The amazing Malandros RPG took the Drama System in the right direction by doing this.

In terms of calling scenes, a passive approach in some RPGs might be to say ‘I’d like a scene where Quintus convinces the plebians to stop their violent protests’ – and sure it works, and we go into that scene, decide who else is there, and resolve it. But I much prefer someone to be proactive in the narrative – ‘Quintus is fronting the crowd, with Aurelius (another Agent owned by a different woman, who has been determined to be part of this by virtue of how we’ve set up our Milieu) by his side, he’s trying to talk them down, with Aurelius occasionally interjecting as well as running crowd control’.

The first approach says ‘there is a scene’ and then we scramble to fill it, while the second approach is the natural flow on effect from the narrative – a bit like triggering a move in a PbtA game. It happens because it has come up in the natural flow of the conversation. It feels better to me.

Linking to the Core Loop

In an earlier post, I’ve called out how the core gameplay ‘loop’ must be reinforcing and engage people with the fun and behaviours we want out of the game.

We now have this situation where people can ‘call’ a scene (either Drama or Action) in response to the ongoing conversation at the table – the Milieu, and that this then leads into the mechanical bits of each scene. How do we get these scenes to link and reinforce each other? That’s where the Drama Tokens come into play as well.

In Drama System, you gain drama tokens in select ways by running Drama scenes – most notably by granting the emotional request of another player. This still holds true in Oppian Wives, but I’ve swapped the ‘Drama Token’ to a ‘Drama Card’ – a standard playing card from a deck of 52. I did this because the Procedural (action) scenes are resolved with cards in Drama System – and that gives me an avenue to link one thing to the other – reinforcing my core loop. I have this idea that cards earned as drama tokens form a ‘hand’ which can be played during the Procedural (Action) scenes if needed.

Playing an Action Scene (using Agents)

One of the big constraints I had with designing Oppian Wives is that the women themselves would have no ability to directly confront the social and political problems they faced and would need to employ men in roles of agency– see my earlier log entry about agency challenges in politics.

So, we ‘call a scene’ in the way we trigger moves with PbtA – almost entirely freeform as part of the ‘conversation’ we’ll figure that we need to take action. Then, when we are in an action scene, this is described in terms of how our agents act on our behalf – which might mean they succeed or fail, but always we are going to play to find out and then update the Milieu in the aftermath.

Agents and their Abilities

I broke down the types of agents our women might have in Rome and came up with the list of reasonably common Roman occupations, and then began work on a skill list. The idea is to modify the Procedural Scene rules of Drama System to make it slightly more PbtA like, allowing these skills to shine and to interact with the card mechanics earned through Drama scenes and played in the Procedural scene.

Each type of Agent will have one ‘Great’ skill and two ‘Good’ skills out of 8 to choose from – as per below, this means that they will often be trying to match Suit or Colour of the target card, but if they are really desperate they will need to meet the card value instead.

A New Procedural Scene Mechanism

To build up the procedural scene mechanisms in the way I wanted to incorporate the ‘Drama Tokens’ (now cards from a deck) I started with the base Drama System method. It was a simple task to then incorporate ‘cards from the hand’ into this, allowing people with a lot of built up Drama Tokens to have more chance in the procedural scene.

After that, I tested a couple of skill mechanisms and built a matrix to ensure 1) that I had not put too much emphasis on any one skill, and 2) that the skills and their domains/abilities/descriptions don’t conflict or overlap too much.

This is where I got to.