Behind the Helm

Running Social Games

The adventures I run the most, and the ones I most enjoy playing in, are about interacting with people. My ideal session is filled with running around different places and dealing with all kinds of different people and groups with different needs, goals, capabilities, relationships, connections, hierarchies and networks.

Someone who’s in the way between you and what you want is the most OSR-style challenge that there can be: a person’s psychology can be as deeply ineffable, variable, and idiosyncratic as you like, and it can be infinitely expanded upon by connecting it with other people or factions within a setting. Putting the prize the players seek in the hands of someone who doesn’t want to give it away is one thing; giving that character henchmen to order around and bosses to obey is another thing (especially when those bosses are just as driven to their own goals), and inserting it into a web of alliances, enemyships, protections, and favours owed and accrued, all ripe for your players to abuse is yet another. Following these knotted trails of sociality, if GMed right, can be incredibly stimulating for the players, as they sleuth around detective-style putting all the pieces together: in uncovering these connections, they’ll make enemies who’d rather not be discovered, allies that want the same things as our protagonists, and resources that arouse the envy of others that might make use of them. In time, they’ll integrate themselves in the grand web of connections, and call the setting their own; and of course, put themselves in all kinds of dangerous/absurd/sticky situations as they snoop around.

The other big part of making games people-centered is, of course, drama. A person carries emotions and burdens just by existing, and it takes but a glimpse of someone’s internal life to see how their circumstances affect them in their psyche, and how their actions are driven in turn. If your games are about something, if they have themes that they discuss, be it friendship, solidarity in the face of danger, the horrors of warfare, resistance to oppression, or broad narrations of politics and authority, the most direct way to communicate that is to put those themes in a character. Let your players constantly observe what characters in your world live like, how what happens in the world affects them, how their lives, their concerns and their mentalities shift as their position in the net varies. What does the shopkeep think about the protection-money they pay to the mafia goon every week? Why does the priest in the country church spread heretical doctrine? Does the factory worker know he’s being exploited? Let the players ponder this, and as they play and explore within the setting, who knows! They might adopt the same mindsets themselves.

This philosophy of adventure design, despite being derived from games about human-like people in human-like societies, is not only applicable to these kinds of games. In truth, any setting where different actors maintain different-natured relationships with each other can be thought of in this light. Dungeons, for example, can thrive on ecosystems: creatures and underground populations may hunt each other, use one another for protection, be in symbiotic relationships, compete for territory, extract resources from one another, or any number of natural interactions. The same fight with the same ankheg becomes much more interesting when you realize that its presence is keeping the stirges from laying eggs where the frog-men raise their fish-cattle, which in turn eats the magic moss that turns to gold in sunlight.

Naturally, this kind of adventure carries with it an expectation: that the players will want to investigate and dive into the web of relations. Be sure to tell them it’s an option, and that that’s where the meat of the game lies, as clearly and plainly as possible. These principles are at the bottom of it all:

#theory