Structure for a Working Game
Learning about game structures was like a magic trick for my little software-addled brain, and I’ve been disappointed by the fact that people seem more interested in tuning the same handful of structures rather than looking to invent novel ones. While reading about them recently it occurred to me that I’ve tried to run two different games which would benefit from a similar structure.
The first was attempting to run a FATE one-shot of the old /tg/ Night Shift setting, and the other was an attempt at an FKR styled game based off a visit to a lighthouse and the vague idea of The Lighthouse, a movie I have not seen. The former game was almost a decade ago at this point so the details have mostly been forgotten, but the premise of Night Shift is that you’re working the titular shift at a gas station and supernatural or weird things happen night after night. The latter game was lowkey just me getting really into doing research on lighthouses and then trying to inhabit that space in a simulationist way. It was run as an attempt to get back into running things by limiting my prep time, so my players came in blind. They weren’t super into the simulationy side of what I was doing, but we did have some fun with it even if the majority of the action came in the form of a player getting bored enough to shoot a fellow lighthouse keeper. Which I kind of consider a win, to be honest.
So what kind of structure would benefit these games? What stands out to me is that both of these settings have a focus on time and labor. Both games feature characters who are working a job and have various tasks and responsibilities to perform. These tasks are not particularly interesting. Restocking convenience store shelves, whitewashing the outside of a lighthouse. I imagine these tasks will be named and described, but not played through in any real detail. They are better elided. If the tasks themselves are fairly meaningless to the characters then what’s important is that they have to be performed at all, so there needs to be consequences for not doing them. In both of the examples there are authorities who will eventually become aware the tasks are not done, but the consequences of not performing each specific task should also be considered.
Without any further additions optimal play would just be performing the tasks, which is boring from pretty much every angle. Clearly we need to add some complications. The first thing that comes to mind is to add opportunity costs. There should be other things the players and characters would rather be doing, or things that are otherwise more rewarding. It’s really easy to establish the cost of other actions in terms of time, so that will be the primary resource at play. This is where we can start to hook in other structures and use the structure as a foundation for others. If we wanted to run a mystery, for instance, it’s trivial to have the investigation take time away from running the store or lighthouse or what have you.
I do also think resources other than time can be used to great effect here. Based on my retail experience, a Boredom meter would work well for Night Shift while the lighthouse game already had a Stress meter I would tick up. (The mechanic was a reveal and got a visceral reaction out of the players I’m still quite proud of). The important thing is that these meters add a cost to carrying out the job the characters are “supposed” to be doing which the players will have to manage.
Circling back to opportunity costs, another form is the order the tasks will be done in. If there is more work assigned than can actually be performed the players will have to make decisions about which tasks to prioritize. This only works if there are meaningful tradeoffs between avoiding tasks. The sweet spot is probably setting things up so the characters can just barely get the tasks done if they don’t screw around in order to get the sweet sweet tension of whether or not they can pull it off along with everything else they want to do. Having more immediate consequences, or risk of consequences, for not doing a task also makes task ordering matter. For example if you have two time sensitive tasks and can only do one, it’s now a question of the consequences of failing to do either task. Another idea might be to have a task which takes valuable time to do and which isn’t immediately important but which has a small chance of causing a much bigger problem which is rolled at fixed intervals.
The second form of decision making we can add to the tasks is worker placement. Something I happened to fall into for the lighthouse game was starting each game day asking who was cooking breakfast, then having the players divvy up their tasks at the breakfast table. As the game was mostly improvised that decision didn’t actually matter for most tasks, but the question of who was staying up all night to man the lighthouse was significant as I had made that give a significant Stress hit. So having different tasks produce different effects on the characters is one way to make decision assignments meaningful. The temptation arises to leverage skill systems to make some characters better at some tasks, but I want to stress that it’s important that characters have a baseline competence at their tasks and that skill rolls should not be required to complete them under normal circumstances. Binary success and failure, or even trinary success-at-a-cost are not useful when considering a character weeding the lighthouse garden or doing inventory as skill checks are meant to resolve risky situations and the cost here is in time and other resources. This is obviously not a hard and fast rule, but I think tasks which require skill rolls are best used as a deviation from the norm.
Where I think a skill system does shine is when things deviate from the norm. What task a character is assigned to will determine where they are when notable events happen, as well as who is at hand to deal with problems (or opportunities) that arise with the task. This is where we break out into whatever other tools or game structures suit the situation. For example in the Night Shift game we could have a customer get upset with the cashier and could handle it with a scene or ellide it with a die roll as we wish. I do think it’s important multiple different things can go wrong with tasks in order to prevent trivial solutions to the worker placement where one character is always assigned the same tasks they’re optimal. And this is important even in settings like Night Shift where the characters have more strict roles in the fiction, as this can incentivise players to pull someone else with a more useful skillset into the situation… and away from whatever task they should have been doing.
After fleshing out the decisionmaking around tasks we can treat them like a baseline to deviate from. It’s probably not a coincidence that both of the games I’m using as case studies focused on the mundane punctuated with the supernatural. The tasks were cyclical and repetitive but broken up by more interesting events that were more the highlight of the game. This does have the potential to lead to reactive play, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we can counter that by giving the players goals which they have to pursue outside and between the daily cycle of tasks. Mysteries are a really good fit for this. Show the players something weird, and make exploring it cost them time while they slowly unravel things. The key is that it’s something they have to actively look into. I also think there’s a lot of potential in exploring inter-character relationships in this mode of play. Players do tend to devise their own goals in time, but giving them something to pursue initially gets the game off the ground.
So what would we need to prepare for this sort of game? The obvious first thing is a list of tasks, and as discussed there would be some necessary game design to make the decisions around them meaningful. The second thing would be a detailed description of the location the characters are performing their tasks. Both of my example games were focused around a single place, which naturally feeds into the tasks as the better you understand the location the more detail you can fold into the tasks. For Night Shift I would also want to describe things like the store’s stock. The third thing would be the breaks from the cycle, whether intrusions from the outside world or problems arising during tasks. This could be organized as some combination of a schedule of events or a series of random encounters. For the lighthouse game having a weather system would be meaningful for many tasks, as well as knowing when ships are going to pass by. For Night Shift I would want to prepare a big table of random NPCs, both weird and mundane. The last thing to prepare would be whatever meta structure you want to run on top of or alongside this - your mystery or your campaign arc or whatever which is outside the scope of this post.
With that I think I’ve provided a pretty solid outline of a structure and highlighted the ways to make it compelling. I’ll have more thoughts on this in the future and would like to produce a more complete writeup of the procedure for an actual game.