Structure and Old School Gaming

My friends over at Scratch Factory have offered up a very nice post on episodic versus serial structure and how they can be used in one’s game. As you can see from the comments, I’ve gotten into a bit of discussion with them. I don’t disagree with them, really; I am just trying to work out the relationship between their narrative ideas and my own developing old-school sensibilities.

My initial reaction to the post was a general wariness that other narrative structures have only limited use in a game that tries to cultivate an old school feel. This is due to two key old-school features: emergent story and randomness.

Emergent story means the games overall story emerges out of the transactions of the PC’s with the world. It’s not planned in advance by the DM. Thus, there’s no meta-plot the PC’s must follow. There may be cultists trying to bring back the evil OverGod to reign destruction on the world. The PC’s may have even seen hints of such activity. But that’s not what the campaign is about. The PC’s don’t have to stop them. If the evil OverGod doesn’t come back, then someone else stopped them (with the accompanying loot and accolades). This makes it difficult to achieve a true serial structure, as such a structure demands meta-plot.

Randomness, in terms of encounters, treasure, and even PC death, seems to be another key feature of old-school gaming. Sure, some things are decided in advance, but letting the dice decide is also important to the general feel of an old-school game. There’s a continuum here, too. I’m still trying to figure out how much randomness my players and I are comfortable with in my game (that’s probably a different post). But the presence of a high degree of randomness would seem to get in the way of a lot of imposed narrative structure, since such structure depends on certain events happening at certain times in the session for maximum dramatic effect and good pacing. I’m not opposed to good pacing or drama; I’m just trying to figure out how they are compatible with key old-school elements.

These two factors complicate the ideas of serial and episodic structure and their presence in old-school games. They bring up general questions about the relationship between how other mediums structure themselves (TV, in this case) and how RPG’s structure themselves. Big thanks to the Scratch Factory guys for prompting these thoughts.

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