4-Block Game Analysis
Here’s a method I came up with for analyzing role-playing games and for designing them. I started thinking about successful narrativist designs and what they have in common. In particular, tend to foster play that has a lot of momentum: the action is driven forward without needing a lot of "kick-starts" to get out of a rut.
I identified four components that seem critical to generating this momentum. Each component is necessary in some form, but may be handled in many different ways. Here is a break-down of two successful narrative RPGs, Dogs in the Vineyard and Sorcerer. (Apologies to both authors if I have misunderstood or neglected some aspect of their game. Corrections would be welcome.)
Game | Premise (entry-point) | Complications | Method to force change | Consequences of using force ——-|———————————-|———————-|————————————|—————————————-| Sorcerer | What do you want? How far will you go to get it? | Your source of power has a mind of its own. | Use demon’s power: do something terrible | Humanity check DitV | Judge these people | Everyone wants you to do something different | Escalate | Fallout
The table may be self-evident, but I’ll explain each "block" a little.
- Premise is the basic set-up of the game: the entry-point for all subsequent action and player buy-in (and is usually a good one-line pitch for the game).
- Complications are things that come up and get in your way, and make the situation non-straightforward. They’re not the sole source of conflict in the game but are among the most powerful sources. Complications are also fundamental to every session of play, not occasional, as other sources of conflict may be.
- "Methods to force change" describes the tools PCs have to overcome those complications. They certainly have other tools too, but these are their most powerful and interesting.
- The methods of forcing change are often a last resort (at least in theory) because of the terrible consequences of using them.
Good Components
Certainly, a good narativist game would seem to need each of these components. (Or maybe not, but let’s presume so for a moment.) But making good components, that interact with one another, and just generally work, is another story. Looking at Sorcerer, Dogs, and other games, I noticed several qualities their components seemed to share, and which might thus be important.
Complications should be about people. They don’t arise from the rocks or the trees, weapons or anything else. They’re about intelligent entities with emotions and desires (Sorcerer’s demons are thus very much included).
Methods for forcing change must consist of actions within the fiction to be interesting. Pure “meta” mechanisms don’t cut it. Methods can be “formal” and unique in their function—in which case they must be invoked specially in play—or may consist of particular applications of general rules like conflict resolution, in which case they need not be announced in play. Sorcerer has “informal” methods for forcing change: they consist of doing something terrible through demons. This is part of play in general but done more intensely. DitV, on the other hand, formally identifies escalation and in order to (potentially) force change, players must invoke it during a conflict.
Methods for forcing change must connect to complications and consequences. A formally defined method will generally also have a strong, formal connection to complications: in DitV, escalating gives you more dice with which to win the conflict. If the method is informal, then its complication-connection is weaker and less concrete; it is a feature of whatever general rules it uses. In Sorcerer, doing something terrible helps PCs win only because of the natural logic of those actions: intense, violent acts tends to be effective acts. Without this kind of supporting logic, there is no connection. (And the more intuitive and inevitable the logic, the stronger the connection.)
The connection between methods and consequences probably has to be a formal, mechanistic one. That is, methods must somehow be consciously identified in order for consequences to be invoked. It might be possible for the connection to arise naturally from general rules or logic though.
Methods may be formally identified when invoking consequences even when they methods are not formally identified for the purpose of dealing with complications. This "dissonance" can create a less absolute path from complication to method to consequence. The prime example of this is Sorcerer, where a humanity check is called for by the GM. This check can be done for actions that don’t qualify as “methods” here and, at the same time, not every method will necessarily involve a humanity check. This seems to work fine for Sorcerer.
Using 4-Block
My analysis of other games using the four components will probably continue. There are many more games to look at, and I hope to see further patterns and similarities. Certainly, this model is not the end-all, be-all of anything; it’s just one way of examining certain aspects of RPGs—exclusively narrativist RPGs at that. (I’m open to parts of it being changed to made more general. Perhaps it’ll even prove to be totally wrong.)
For the time being though, I’m using 4-Block to analyse my own works in progress. It’s definitely helped me think about what elements I need to introduce and what kind of connections I need to create. At least for me, thinking about how to generate momentum is hard. So this helps organize the process a little. Below is 4-Block summary of Utopia (later renamed Last Bastion).
Game | Premise (entry-point) | Complications | Method to force change | Consequences of using force ——-|———————————-|———————-|————————————|—————————————-| Utopia | What aspects of civilization are worth saving? | People inside and out want different things for the society. | Sacrifice something else (value, safety, personal trait) | Lose personal or societal values
Hopefully I’ll have more to say on using 4-Block in the future. In the mean time, I hope it’s useful or at least interesting to other designers.