One thing I’ve enjoyed in my playing (and watching and reading) of various narrative-oriented games are the types of structures they provide to guide gameplay. My favorite realization of this may be Blades in the Dark, whether that takes the form of “hard” mechanics (stress, flashbacks, resistance, etc), “medium” rules (success with complications, things like tiers), or “soft” principles (encouraging the GM to invite players to paint scenes, for example). In that game, the way dice pools are assembled, complications narrated, and results resisted really do give a sense to the dice deciding or helping to decide where the narrative will go next, even after it explores paths that are ultimately not taken.
At times, however, the amount of structure can be overwhelming. The Between, by Jason Cordova, is a game I really wanted to like, having enjoyed playing a few one-shots its sister-game Brindlewood Bay. The main innovation in these games is that they are mystery games, but with the solution to the mystery being non-canonical, meaning that the players have to narrate found clues into a coherent story, and then roll the dice to see to what degree they are correct. It’s a brilliant ‘play to find out’ mechanic, especially when contrasted with mystery scenarios that either fall flat or involve railroading.
The Between is a game about Victorian monster hunters, inspired by the show Penny Dreadful. As a PBTA game, it nominally eschews the railroading tendencies of trad mystery games like Call of Cthulhu along the lines mentioned above. In its place, however, it provides extensive structures for (re)creating Penny Dreadful scenes and mysteries with your friends.
Intrigued by the premise, I bought and read the game before I had watched Penny Dreadful, and found that many parts of it simply did not make sense. For example the playbooks are extremely specific, with the players basically taking on the role of characters in the show, with some wiggle room of course. These aren’t “Victorian monster hunters,” these are the specific monster hunters we find in the show. Further, the game is very deliberately paced, with four phases each with its own procedure. Along the way, players roll dice, which essentially cues up prompts from the GM’s threat sheet or the players’ playbooks, which are then contextualized and somewhat elaborated upon. The GM, in providing opportunities, is continually putting narratively-impactful pieces in front of the players, leading to the inevitable acquisition of clues.
Moreover, the text of the game places extremely—and to my mind awkwardly—explicit constraints on players. For example, “the most important thing” tells us that
The hunters are intentionally occluded; the game is called The Between because we find these characters caught between a very dark, mysterious past and an equally dark, possibly tragic, future. We aim to explore these dark pasts, but only at the right time—dramatically-speaking—and only when the game’s rules tell us to.
As a player, you must always try to avoid speaking about your character’s past—in character or out of character—unless a specific mechanic in the game demands it. If a side character asks your character about their past, you must always demur or change the subject; if a player asks about your character’s past, you must remind them that you’re not allowed to say, but they are welcome to trigger The Vulnerable Move in order to get you to talk.
I don’t see how that is not a clear instance of a removal of player agency. Similarly, if the the PCs might defeat the main threat of the mystery…they…can’t? As in, they are simply not allowed
it does not matter if the hunters have the Threat cornered or otherwise are in a strong—even logical—position to defeat the Threat if an Opportunity to do so has not been unlocked by answering a Question; the Threat will always escape. It might seem weird or unrealistic for that to be the case, but The Between is a game and games have rules. Furthermore, the Threat can only be resolved in the manner indicated by the unlocked Opportunity.
Well, so much for fictional positioning!
The result of this amount of copious structure is a game that feels as on rails as any Call of Cthulhu game with a keeper scheming to hit the right narrative beats behind a dice-obscuring screen. Gameplay consists in following prompts provided on your sheet, with agency limited to lightly sketching scenes and characters around these specific prompts and within extensive constraints from the game. Thinking of it now, I did find Brindlewood Bay to be a bit like this, but the silly and cozy nature of the game made it playable nonetheless. For example, the “cut to commerical” in BB felt spontaneous and nostalgic whereas “the unscene” feels laborious.
Genre as Structured Play
That’s overly harsh criticism to make my point. I do wonder, however, at the work genre does for so many PBTA games. These games often try to create mechanics (through moves, etc) to help replicate a sometimes very specific genre drawn from some other media. The idea, as I understand it, is that if the game doesn’t have a mechanic to create a certain style of narrative, then it has no rules to do so and it won’t happen on its own. Thus games like Call of Cthulhu or Vampire the Masquerade might claim to be producing certain kinds of stories, but lack the means, besides mere aesthetics and tone, to actually create those stories.
Yet, I personally find narrative games, with all their mechanics, to still rely on knowledge of the ‘primary’ material in order to replicate them. As mentioned above, I struggled to understand The Between before watching Penny Dreadful. Similarly, I would direct players the appropriate touchstones before playing any other narrative game. The reason for this is that genres have their ‘invisible’ rules. Mechanics in a game might make those explicit, but any reader or viewer picks up on those rules implicitly. You already know what elements you have to include if you wanted to make a noir or horror film, as long as you are decently steeped in the genre. Similarly, you would know how to play with, subvert, or satirize the genre because of that knowledge (like, say, in the movie Scream).
It reminds me of the classic post about FKR:
“You play worlds, not rules. Have you read Brideshead Revisited? The Wizard of Earthsea? Foundation and Empire? Any captivating novel, regardless of timeframe, setting, or genre? Well now you can run a full FKR game based on that book. You don't need an RPG sourcebook because all books are now sourcebooks. All television shows are sourcebooks. All movies and songs and comics and memes and medical brochures are now sourcebooks.”
To extend the thought, one could ask, has your group seen Penny Dreadful? Are they familiar with Victorian gothic horror and pulp? Are they enthusiastic about these themes? Then I think they would know how to play a Penny Dreadful-style rpg with far less structure that we find in The Between. The game might make the logic and rules of genre explicit, but I don’t see how that is necessary to play within a genre. This is especially the case when the game itself does not quite make sense unless one is familiar with the genre!
Part of my general reaction here is that I find the criticism of trad games as ‘railroads’ to be somewhat in bad faith. Yes, overly strict GM-guided structure can be a problem in trad games. But overly prescriptive structured narrative games can also constrain participants, even when their stated goal, on balance, is to increase player agency.
That said, thinking about how to emulate a genre of fiction in a game does force us to break down that genre’s already-existing internal rules, as if we were writers and directors. We have to look critically at how these texts create and situate characters, move plots forward, and create emotions and meaning for readers/viewers. In that way, it can be a worthwhile endeavor, even if one finds the results to be overly baroque.
Your writing definitely speaks to the dissatisfaction I've experienced with a lot of the newer generation of story/narrative RPG systems I've been coming across lately. Designers of these more recent games seem to have an intense fixation of establishing a very specific experience that is really at odds with the joyful maxim of Apocalypse World: "play to find out what happens". I don't think this is necessarily a problem, games done in new styles presumably are just meeting some needs at the table that previously weren't met, and there's no one correct way for tabletop games to be run, etc., etc. but it definitely marks a departure of my interest if this is the direction these styles of games are going.