We had a game fly off into the abyss last night. We were playtesting 7dRPG's "Classic Fantasy" rule set, and the sesion before had concluded a storyline where George escapes from an evil kingdom which basically enslaved the player's group and forced them to do their dungeoning for them. Really fun stuff, the escape was classic, evasion, sneaking around town, and getting the heck out of Dodge. Well, last night's session picked up right after the party escaped the final checkpoint, and arrived in the new lands. And then....
Nothing.
The game fell off into the abyss. It felt like trying to continue a story off in the blank pages beyond "the end" in a novel. Yes, I had done a little prep work, but I knew of the place they were going to, I had a rough idea of the map, some general ideas of the difficulties of getting there, along with some adventure hooks they could pick up. But the overwhelming feeling of 'you've escaped, now what?' hit the both of us, and there was no compelling reason to play. You've won, you've escaped, you did it - roll credits and play the cool music.
Now if the story was like some of our earlier play thoughs, it would have been different. In earlier games, we had larger meta-games we ran on top of the rules, where how you ran your group of adventurers mattered, and you actually had to go out and recruit to meet your party's needs. This game was purely story, and once that was accomplished, anything else felt like it couldn't compare. We thought we were setting up a larger system to play something beyond the roles, but in the end, it didn't work out, and we ended up completing a one-shot.
Did we have support for the larger meta-game? To be honest, no, we didn't. We envisioned the captured players to be a part of a Game of Thrones sort of conflict, with noble houses, lands under siege, infighting with royals and villains, and all sorts of other cool stuff going on. We don't have the meta-game rules for that sort of conflict, and honestly, this sort of thing seems better suited for a dedicated world-book where you can take the time, design a world around it, and do it right.
It is an interesting problem, and one with our background of SBRPG, one we are better suited at to solve. Many pen-and-paper games are happy with providing a set of generic dungeon or conflict resolution rules, and it typically takes them 600+ pages to get that done. Yes, we did that as well with SBRPG1, a RPG the size of a phone-book.
The new thinking is a thin-and-light game 'client' and then support the game with dedicated world-books that have larger meta-games to play with the rules. Manage a kingdom, play a private eye, be a space merchant - the world-books are the place this happens and where the meta-game is laid out. SBRPG's meta-game was the faction system, and this is a core piece of the base game we want to preserve and enhance. However, the world-specific meta-games is where the fun and addiction happens; and with a referee involved, things become unpredictable and insanely fun.
Many pen-and-paper games fall off the abyss because they don't do anything beyond just 'replay a story' like a DVD player. Try and go outside that box, or off of that DVD, and the referee has to start improvising more and more. Pretty soon, you run out of improvisation, especially if your source material was limited. If you have rich source material, such as the entire Star Wars galaxy, you can possibly never run out of improvisational material (Hollywood does not apply to this, they reboot far too frequently). Start with just an idea, such as 'escape from the evil kingdom' and you will run out quickly. Hence the abyss.
What do you do when your game goes into the abyss? You re-tool, figure out 'what is this game about?' and focus the game back onto the core idea. For ours, it was escaped nobles and the revenge upon the bad guys. We will probably have to shelve this game and get back to it when we have a world-book and meta-game to support this. Otherwise, it will be 100% improvised content, with no real 'game' behind the action to say 'what comes next?' Of course, the referee is always there to say 'what happens next' but the referee shouldn't have to do everything - there needs to be that game behind the game that makes things interesting, that surprises even the referee, and that players can become good at and focus on, no matter what is happening on the roleplaying side of things at the moment.
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