The Black Campbell

John Fredericks was making some interesting comments on game continuity over at Gnome Stew, and it spurred a few responses from me, including on one the efficacy and issues of “troupe-style play” As to continuity, however, I have to say: I’m for it.

There are several levels of continuity he addresses, but I think we can ignore a few of the bullet points he uses, and frame this in terms of televisions or novel series. Additionally, however, I want to add the notion of “canon” — that the continuity is also tied to the internal logic and rules of the genre or setting.

Strong Continuity

The game university has an internal logic and history that affects, and is affected by, the actions of the characters. Things that happen are important and can/will be used against you in a future game.

Modern television series tend to follow this model these days, sometimes to abstraction. The characters’ action don’t just impact the universe around them, but drive the personal relationships between the characters. Friendships can be broken, alliances shift, goals change. There is usually some kind of central goal, villain, or motif to be served. There’s a “story arc” that can be a season long (Dr. Who, for instance), or series long (Battlestar Galactica.)

This requires a lot of mental lifting by the GM and the players. Note-taking and record keeping can be a full-time job. In this sort of continuity, I think it’s important to have NPCs changing along with the PCs. Their stats should evolve, if it’s a system with aspects or traits or weaknesses, these should change over time, just as with the players’ characters.

This has been the sort of game I’ve run for quite some time, and I agree with Fredericks that this is the sort of universe most players are interested in — something long-term than allows them to explore a character and feel that they have achieved something.

Ret-continuity

You see this in a lot of modern TV, as well, in shows that were meant to have some kind of central theme or mystery that the writers and executive producers — well — didn’t really have a clue what it was going to be. Shows like X-Files, or Lost are prime examples of this: there’s a conspiracy or mystery, and the characters are working toward figuring it out, but since the writers don’t really know what the hell they’re doing from one season to the net, they have to scramble to put a coherent arc together through seemingly (or obviously) contradictory elements.

I had to do  bit of this with my Battlestar Galactica campaign, which had a few points where I veered in different directions. I had a fairly solid idea of the campaign endpoint, so I was able to tap some of the elements into place, and fortunately (unlike TV) you can go back and rewatch a session to see if all the “facts” are the same as they were three years earlier. You can often get around this bad hand-waving, counting on the players’ faulty memories, or creating some kind of “your perception of the incident was not completely accurate” type out (see Rashamon…different people see an event differently.)

Honestly — this is probably the closest you’ll get to the “strong continuity”.

Loose Continuity

Like ’70s and ’80s TV, the characters tend to be static, or change in personality as the story suits. It’s episodic and each episode is unlikely to be linked; it’s almost like each episode is a reboot of the last episode. Set The A Team, or Starsky & Hutch, or TJ Hooker. Hell, see the original Star Trek…there’s no “canon”, no real continuity beyond the characters and the general flavor of the show. Maybe a character was too good to die in your pilot session, and like Hill Street Blues (which was an early “strong continuity” show) you bring those guys back and just ignore they were shot to death in a stairwell. Certain things that happen might matter — that love interest might be lost to the character, then show up conveniently to cause trouble; the big bad guy might return, or one of his kids; something that happened in “season 1” might suddenly become important for a storyline in “season 4″…but doesn’t really change anything outside of that episode or two.

Yeah, character C disappeared for two sessions of our dungeon crawl (including a bit fight), but he was just off having a pee. Or was there but for some reason never did anything. Doesn’t matter, he didn’t get XPs.

NPCs don’t change. They are there for comedic or supportive effect, or local color. Hell, they might not even have a name. Taking notes on what happened is optional (but the loot is not!) You might be able to ret-con a story arc into the game near the end for a satisfying denouement — all these things were actually under the control of the nameless bartender you guys all liked!

No Continuity

This might be the schtick of the game itself. No matter what you do, you reset to the state of the universe prior to the adventure. Your dungeon crawl? No effect on anything but your character level and stuff. That crime you solved? Hell, maybe the same bad guy is still around; he has a great lawyer. You died? When did that happen?

A campaign like this could be played for laughs, like Paranoia, or it could be — cunningly — the actual metaplot of your campaign. Maybe, all your disconnected adventures were happening while you were in suspended animation on a long space voyage, or holodeck adventures, or some kind of prison you are trapped in.

Canon — or “That Wasn’t in the Show!”

As to “canon” — that word every GM should fear when you are running a licensed universe like Star Trek or Dr. Who — setting ground rules is essential the higher up this scale of continuity you go. When I ran Star Trek, I had a trekkie in the group (it was why I wound up running it.) I was not. So to cover my ass on continuity, we agreed that game continuity trumped the show. Certain things weren’t going to happen. Voyager, for one..

When I ran The Babylon Project in the late ’90s, however, I parked the campaign on the edge of the show’s events so that we could play our own game, but dip our toe into the Babylon 5 continuity as we needed. It worked very well. We ignored certain things from Stargate SG-1 when I ran a short game and kept the good stuff.

Ignore it when it suits the game, don’t when it enhances the game. Your game is a reboot. Go easy on the lens flare.

I was reading an article on another site that was talking about continuity (more on that in another post) and how tight continuity campaigns could be derailed by scheduling issues. As readers of the blog have seen, my group has been beset by scheduling issues this year, and I’ve been something of a whiny bitch about it.

It got me thinking suddenly — we had similar issues with the long-running Battlestar Galactica campaign, lost players and gained them…why wasn’t this as much of a perceived issue before? Then it hit me: for the Hollow Earth Expedition game, the players only have one character.

To be able to explore other areas of the Galactica universe, all the players had two to three characters, each in their own circle of the rag-tag fleet. (In the abortive campaign prior to that, each had a fleet and a survivor on Caprica character…for the same reason.) One of the benefits of this “troupe-style play”, is that if a character isn’t present, they could easily be handwaved away as “on administrative duties”, or “somewhere on leave in the  fleet”, or I could concentrate on characters and situations that didn’t require all of the players to be present. I had an out.

File under “Duh!”

So how do you use this style of play, and what are the up and downsides? Let’s start with the downsides:

First, it shifts the focus away from one single character the player has. In the Battlestar Galactica campaign, for instance, one of the players was playing the Vice President of the Colonies. While this allowed the player to have high-level influence in the policies of the fleet his other characters did not, he wasn’t a combat guy. He didn’t investigate crimes or fly vipers. That mean he got a lot less time and focus as the other characters — a cop and a viper pilot — and wasn’t of as much interest to the player or the GM. But he was a great trapdoor to play when the other players weren’t present.

A codicil to that — the players may also take an interest in a different character than you anticipated, and push the plot or focus of the campaign in a different direction than the GM expected. This can be frustrating for the GM. If he ignores the B-string character, this can be frustrating for the player.

Secondly, if the various characters eventually have to interact, it can be problematic (or funny) to watch a player trying to effectively roleplay a scene between two of his personas. It can work, trust me, if you have a good player, and it can be a blast, even for the players on the sidelines for the scene; it can also be awkward as hell. We even had one player’s characters have to fight each other.

Third, you still have to explain away why the B characters aren’t wandering the dungeon with you. This is probably not as much an issue in a game that doesn’t have the players in a fixed location or vocation with each other, but if you’re on a dungeon crawl, or traveling as a tight group, B might suddenly be of use.

So now the upsides:

The GM and players can branch out and explore the world around them. An example: if the group were playing the Avengers in a superhero game and someone was Spiderman, you could focus on his crime-fighting in NYC, if there were key players missing that week. Or instead of world-shaking efforts, a few of the team might decide to aid another player in a side quest — finding a friend’s murderer, or looking for a shawarma restaurant.

Secondly, the players can switch it up from time to time and play something different to bust the group out of a rut. Maybe you’ve gotten a bit tired with your 12th level paladin, and playing that 4th level rogue sounds like fun that week… Maybe you can switch up genres a bit: maybe instead of playing a cargo ship crew running around the ‘Verse avoiding the Alliance, you are focused on helping a B-story character clear a neighborhood of a gang that has moved in on a neighborhood by the docks. It lets you get the characters out of their comfort zones — crap, my bad-ass fighter needs to schmooze with the upper crust as a date or escort for the team’s wizard at a Magician’s Guild meeting. Maybe the paladin suddenly has to engage in protecting a thief, engaged in a questionable side heist for a good cause (he hopes!)

Third, you can manage no shows much easier by swapping the stories you pursue with side quests.

But, as always, I could be full of crap…