I talked at the beginning of this week about the importance of parameters, particularly for GMs, in helping people get things plotted. The parameter issue is something I run into a lot of the time, as both GM and player (and sometimes as designer as well); people will provide an open space in a narrative, just open enough to come across like there are expectations in filling it but not quite closed enough to have some sort of specifications for what goes in there beyond “It’ll help if I like it”. So what sorts of parameters can one provide for an empty space in a narrative for someone else to fill?
- Results of a situation. In blank situations in which the empty space and parameters are given to the players, this is the most common sort of parameter used. If the characters are already built, for instance, you might have a GM do an in medias res scene-setting and expect the players to figure out how it came to that (one of mine once began a game by telling the group they were all in a Heavenly barfight crouched behind the bar, and how the silly thing had started was as up to them as what they were going to do now). Or you might have a GM who gives “I need people of the sort who would be in this situation, and how they got there”, and then gets a flood of wrongful accusations and con men and the occasional cat burglar who actually returns the books he borrows.
- Beginnings of a situation. The prior type ended a situation and let those responsible come up with how they got into it; this one creates the beginning of a situation and lets someone else provide the ending. Round-robin storytelling falls into this pattern a lot of the time, for better or for worse; so does your average game session.
- Aspects. This is the “Iron Chef” of open-ended situation parameters; all that matters is that whatever’s created show one of the aspects involved. The writer might remember this most as one of those assignments from school (whether creative writing class or the year’s state test) that involved creating a story out of a picture or featuring an element. For the gamer, it might be designing a character around a mechanic or two; for the GM, it might be designing a challenge to take advantage of one or more PCs’ mechanics.
- Limits. With these parameters, there are points outside of which one just plain can’t travel. They might not seem quite as helpful as the other sorts of parameters, since they’re more constricting than inspiring, but eliminating options can make deciding which options to use a bit less daunting of a task. And sometimes, subverting limitations can provide inspiration in its own right. For instance, when I was in my senior year of college, I took beginning creative writing class in which we were not allowed, under any circumstance whatsoever, to write science fiction or fantasy (I later learned that the prof had been burned by people who tried to convince her that the standards should be lower for genre fiction and didn’t want to deal with it). So what did I do? I tried to write as close to fantasy as I could get without actually writing the stuff—a piece featuring writer’s block in writing a fantasy story; another, inspired by Calvin and Hobbes, with a boy convinced he was a changeling from another world; a very vague is-it-or-isn’t-it possible ghost story.
So if you’re trying to help a player narrow down her possible backstories, inspire a GM who can’t figure out what to do with your empty space, help a fellow designer figure out what not to do with an upcoming encounter, or in any way give another person a better chance at filling an open bit of narrative that you created, think about applying a couple of these parameters.
