Pacing Back and Forth

Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: what innovation could RPG groups gain the most benefit from?

This is a pretty big question, so the prompt includes a further clarification: whether it is technological, related to game mechanics, or to social dynamics, what could best help improve the play experience?

More and more often in the past five years or so, I've seen narrative mechanics taking a central role in games. Now that's not to say that game mechanics haven't always directed the kinds of stories that could be told. Usually it's done implicitly, by what kinds of classes and subsystems are included--for instance D&D in its various forms is pretty focused on swords & sorcery adventures with action-oriented danger and combat. The stories emerge out of players following the through-line of "I think this is what my character would do". But there can be mechanics operating at a different layer, outside of the story. These are explicit subsystems built into the game that directly influence the direction of the narrative.

One tactic is to make character motivations have mechanical effects. Even original D&D did this, with DMs awarding XP for good roleplaying, or paladins and clerics losing abilities for behaving against their alignment. Games like Burning Wheel make motivations a core part of gameplay, turning "I think this is what my character would do" into an explicit mechanic to drive decisions. Similarly, characters in Fate have aspects, and not only can players make decisions in line with their aspects to get bonuses to their rolls, the GM also makes decisions based on character aspects to drive the plot.

The plot can also be influenced by narrative mechanics outside of character motivations: consider the example of fate points or bennies.  Players get a limited amount of tokens, and can spend them to make changes to the story, like in Savage Worlds or Mutants & Masterminds. The GM can award tokens to players, for good roleplaying or reaching key moments. Fate takes this a step further, turning it into an economy where narrative control is constantly traded back and forth between GM and players. The decisions aren't just about "I think this is what my character would do" anymore; now there's also "I think this is where the story would go".

I'm not sure we could really call these "innovations", as it's clear they're well-established and varied in style across different game systems. So let's narrow in on one narrative mechanic that I think is yet to be fully explored: pacing.

One of the problems I have consistently had as a GM is moving the story along without simply railroading the players (and I doubt I'm alone in that). The PCs flounder in a scene, a battle takes overly long, random wilderness encounters seem unrelated and uninteresting... part of this for sure is avoided by good session prep and PCs who have clear goals--by having direction. However, how do you decide when to end a scene, or whether or not to skip over some travel or downtime, or even which PCs to focus on? How do you decide when the monsters attack, or if the villain uses the device? These are decisions about the -pacing- of the story, and most of the time it just comes down to the intuition of the GM (with some player input) about when to move things along.

Just like the other narrative mechanics above, pacing has always been there, implicit in the rules. D&D had random generation tables for encounters and stocking dungeons which set up how often certain types of events would occur in the stories generated by playing D&D. Justin Alexander has written about the pacing inherent in dungeon-crawling over at The Alexandrian, and a great series on pacing in general. It has rock-solid advice for how to structure scenes in your games to keep things moving, and can really help you develop your intuition about when to end a scene or what sorts of events to focus on.

So, the innovation: we can make explicit narrative mechanics for pacing as well. My favourite example is the concept of Fronts, in games derived from D Vincent Baker 's Apocalypse World. Fronts are a way for the GM to keep track of the big dangers in their game and ensure that they're all moving forward.  Each front is a threat or potential threat to the PCs and their world. The GM develops a track of events on each front: things that will happen if the PCs don't intervene. Throughout the game, the GM can move a front along its track, mechanically, in response to things the PCs do and by using their own GM moves. It keeps the game focused around specific dangerous situations that are moved along directly in response to the PCs actions!

Pacing is a tricky thing to get right, and having an explicit mechanic to structure it is a powerful tool we can use in our games. I feel like this is just the beginning, and I'm looking forward to seeing how designers play with pacing mechanics now that the box has been opened.