Game Design as Player Best Practices

Something I’ve noticed from talking a ton over the past few weeks about Band-Aids & Bullet Holes (still on Kickstarter until Friday of the week this publishes) is that so much of the game’s design stems from me observing my own play in any game, thinking about what leads to the kind of play I enjoy, and then incorporating that as rules and procedures into Band-Aids & Bullet Holes.

For example: I like scenes with strong, clear conflicts between characters, especially when those conflicts are between player characters. I’ve learned a lot about how to make those scenes good by playing a lot, and BABH’s rules push you to establish exactly this kind of scene.

This probably isn’t that surprising in retrospect, but it’s had the side effect of me returning to the game with an eye for this and discovering all kinds of mechanics in play that I think can be distilled down to techniques, advice, and best practices one might take to another game if you want to play the kind of “prestige TV drama” kind of games that I tend to enjoy. I think that’s neat! Today I want to talk about a few of these techniques both because I think they’re useful and because I want to demonstrate how you can look for this stuff in your own work as a way of reflecting on what player techniques work for you.

Framing and Cutting for Juicy Scenes

Let’s start with the example I already gave: what makes a good scene?

In Band-Aids & Bullet Holes, a good scene means conflict between characters. I don’t think this is an essential requirement (see this excellent post from Vincent Baker on a model of character relating not built on conflict, or go play an hour of Fall of Magic or City of Winter). But for many games, conflict is an easy way into the juice.

In BABH, every scene begins with you saying who’s driving the scene, what they want, and who they want it from. This naturally gives you momentum: the driver has a clearly stated goal and a way to pursue it (talk to the other person mentioned).

Sometimes this leads to scenes where the driver walks in, shouts “who killed my dad??”, and their scene partner replies “John killed your dad.” The driver immediately gets what they want. This can feel like a letdown, but I’ve found instead treating it like a sign that this didn’t really need to be a scene in the first place is more effective. Another technique from BABH, this time for cutting scenes: the rule is that when the driver gets what they want (or definitively does not), the scene is over. Not a bad rule of thumb.

Now when I sit down now to run Apocalypse World, I often think in these same terms: who’s driving the scene, what do they want, and who do they want it from? Dingo runs up to Cheem and warns him that Cheem’s kid CT is up on the guard tower again waving a sniper rifle around: Dingo wants Cheem to go reign his kid in. If Cheem is like “oh shit” and runs off, great. Now we have a new scene: Cheem and CT. If he’s instead like “isn’t it Halter’s job to deal with problems like that?” then either this scene keeps going, or Dingo gives up and goes to Halter. Regardless, I’m keeping these couple open questions (driver, scene partner, who wants what) in mind. As long as they’re all filled, we’ve got a stew going. When one’s not, it’s time to move on.

Concepting Memorable NPCs

Characters in BABH are defined by calling cards: character traits you write directly onto a playing card and then play War with. “Erratic flamethrower.” “Punchable face.” “The stench of cigarettes.” “Flirty banter.” Characters come with two of these, then you invent a third to round them out.

I’ve found writing 2-3 calling cards for every character I introduce in whatever GMed game I’m running to be extremely helpful. It can be a large cognitive load (I have something like 30-40 named NPCs in 14 sessions of my ongoing Apocalypse World game), so maybe not everyone gets them, but when I remember to give the important people a few stand-out memorable details like this? Juice. It’s just good.

But characters in BABH aren’t just defined by calling cards. Their artwork and name also go a long way. It’s not easy to give every character art in person, but online you can whip up a google slides page and pull reference images for important characters.

Beyond that, BABH characters are also strongly defined by their relationships. It’s not just “Barf the loser who smells like cigarettes,” it’s “Barf, my deadbeat old mentor.” Putting people into context is so helpful for remembering them, making them stand out, and giving them something they might want when they end up in the driver’s seat of a scene.

The thing across all of these is specificity. Too much and the character’s hard to remember or takes up too much space. But 1-2 strong details, like a calling card and a memorable portrait stolen from the internet? Just enough to make them sticky and give them something to want.

Stumped on what to do in your game? It’s old advice, but you can just ask other people at the table for ideas.

In BABH I push this far with character nonmonogamy: everyone shares all the characters and takes turns playing as them. I think this proves just how far you can take this old advice: you can hand your whole-ass PC over to someone else and it’ll probably go fine. Might even go better than fine! There’s plenty of reasons not to, but this advice has treated me so well over the years and I want to underline it: trust the rest of the table to have good ideas!

The GM as a Supporting Role

In BABH you always have a character in the driver’s seat and a character who’s the driver’s “accomplice,” i.e. someone the driver wants something from. Any players not portraying the driver or accomplice become the city, a kind of Greek chorus / co-GM role.

The city is always positioned in my favorite place to be when I’m the GM: in the peanut gallery watching on. There is nothing I love more when running Apocalypse World or whatever than when two PCs are facing off and I get to just watch. I want every scene to be like the diner scene in Heat, DeNiro and Pacino facing off, and that’s what it feels like when two PCs go up against each other or even just come together to circle up and make a plan. In BABH, because there are always two characters facing off, the city is by definition always positioned like this.

This doesn’t mean there’s nothing for the city to do! They can poke at the current protagonists, they can chime in with a distant police siren or the thundering rain hammering against the windows. Even just watching as a rapt audience gives a charge to the scene that wouldn’t be there with just two people playing pretend.

Ben Robbins wrote this article last year about getting stuck in a Star Pattern conversation. Basically this is when the GM is having a bunch of one on one conversations with players and the players never talk to each other. If Ben’s post awakened me to the nature of a problem I wasn’t aware of, reflecting on why I like BABH scenes has shown me the positive example of what I want instead.

There’s advice in Apocalypse World about this around creating PC-NPC-PC triangles. When you get relationship triangles like that, one of the things you can do is have an NPC come to one PC with bad news they need to deliver to another PC. Love that. Any technique like that where I can set up a scene where two PCs are talking and I can sit back? I feel like that’s my whole job in basically any GMed game now.

Reincorporation

In BABH, you get all those character calling cards set up, and then they come up again and again. When someone gets the instinct to describe a detail about what Barf is up to, they look at his Bloody Knuckles and his Stench of Cigarettes and they pick one to riff on. This makes these calling cards important, iconic. They take on more emotional and narrative weight every time they come up again.

It’s the simple magic of reincorporation. It’s a callback. This is basic improv and narrative stuff put into action, and of course it works for any game.

Another way to do reincorporation: here’s a system-less procedure for “World Anchors” from Ty over at Mindstorm. I like this thing. It basically tells you to make a random table of concepts, anything from specific people to abstract ideas. Any time you need to invent a bit of fiction, roll or choose off the table to inspire you. Pretty soon the same ideas show up over and over in various remixes, and the world feels connected and cohesive because of that reincorporation.

But you don’t need a specific procedure to do this. You can just remember: if you’re stuck, bring something back. Make things rhyme. It’ll feel good.

In Conclusion

I like these techniques! They’ve worked well for me and the kind of play I like. If you’re a designer, I bet it’d be interesting to look at your own work and analyze it for these kinds of tips and best practices. How do you like to play?