Momentum

Originally published October 8th, 2014

According to my math, this is my 200th post for the No Ordinary Obsession! It seems appropriate for such a milestone to discuss a subject I feel is very important in a plotted game:

Momentum

By momentum, I mean the combination of pacing within a session and the movement of plot between sessions. This is the driving action that propels the player characters forward, motivates their actions, and maintains a steady tension throughout a campaign.

It is perhaps easiest to describe it by its absence. When you lack momentum in a game, player characters flail uselessly about, unable or uninterested in advancing the story. The players become listless and inattentive. Combats and other obstacles presented by the game master fall flat and enthusiasm in general wanes.

When you have momentum, you have motivated players. Storylines advance. People come to the game eager to push ahead to the next stage or level of the game. As part of a virtuous circle the GM becomes equally excited, plotting possible tangents and cool moments. Momentum is the energy and vitality of a game.

But to cultivate momentum you need to keep two things humming: the pacing of individual sessions and an advancing and dynamic plot. If you have one and not the other, your game might still work but could suffer in the long run.

Session Scale: Pacing

A need for pacing is easy to understand. If the pacing is too slow, the game feels loses excitement, the players' attention wanders, and people lose interest. If it is too fast, you end up glossing over interesting action and events become confused and rushed.

Varying the pacing is also important. A period of introspection or discussion after a series of high action scenes allows your players to make sense of what just happened and plan their next step. Breaking up a tense horror story with some calmer, more relaxed bits allows you to set your players up for further scares. Modulating your emotional highs and lows can improve your game in other genres as well. Robin Laws's book Hamlet’s Hitpoints talks about this extensively.

I think most of us have a good sense about managing a game's pacing. It is immediate and can often be gauged by just looking at your players. Are they attentive, waiting for the next scene? Then everything is good. Are they playing around with their phone or doodling on paper instead? Time to break out an attack by goons.

Without some fast paced scenes, some of the tension goes out of the game. While some people can and do enjoy a session of nothing more than roleplaying a night at Denny's, something like that should be the exception rather than the rule. Even in a purely socially focused session, you should be pushing the player characters in new directions, exploring their beliefs and setting up new conflicts. Challenges and obstacles make for a more engaging story.

Campaign Scale: Plot

Equally important in my mind is the plot. With good pacing you can run great one shots and fun sessions. But without a plot, a storyline that develops and escalates, a campaign goes stale.

For me, I want my games to emulate the movies and television. I find long running shows where nothing really changes (i.e. episodic sitcoms) get boring after a while. I love Castle but after you've seen one season, you've kind of watched them all. And even those shows include a slow burning overarching storyline. I want the games I play in and run to be more dynamic and changing.

There are many ways to deal with campaign level plot. You can do what TV does in shows like Castle or the X-files: monster/mystery or the week sessions interspaced with a larger season story. You can run something more tightly scripted where each session advances the overall storyline. You can run without a main plotline and instead focus on individual storylines, advancing one or more each session. You can even improvise your way through as long as you make sure existing issues escalate and develop.

That last idea is the crucial one. However you choose to handle the plot, it needs to be changing and evolving. If your heroes destroy the villain's doomsday device, that should set them back and force them to find a new (and more epic) way to accomplish their goals. They shouldn't just proceed as if the heroes had done nothing. They must feel like they are having an effect on the world for better or worse.

And just as you shouldn't ignore the impact of your player's actions, you shouldn't let their actions be free of fallout. Their choices will create new challenges for them to face. They killed the villain? What about his henchmen? Or those transmogrified monsters who used to be innocent people? What is going to keep the dungeon he built from being infested in the future? The PCs can also become victims of their own success. What do they do when the king offers them a job assassinating a foreign leader or rebel? Or when the people decided to put them in charge? And then blame them for everything that goes wrong?

An example from my own games was my Amber game Ruins of Amber. In line with the novels by Zelazny, I endeavored to end each session on a world-changing cliffhanger. Session 1 began with the end of the reality storm that ended the original Amber Chronicles and ended with the revelation that Amber had fallen into ruin. Soon they learn that a multitude of Shadow worlds are forming a ring about Amber and closing in. Benedict's older brothers are revealed to be alive. Strange photonegative people start popping up. Eric's ghost appears and verified as real. Gerard is revealed to be the menacing Minotaur that has threatened them for a half the game. Every session something strange and new appears and throws everything out of alignment.

Now it is not strictly necessary that the story continuously escalate, though if your game has any sort of leveling or experience mechanic, you will need to increase the threats if you want to keep an even challenge level. The overall stakes can rise and fall. The scope of the threats can vary as well. In one part of the story, the stakes might be the survival of a community. Later on you can revisit that but change the scope to that of a country or a family. Lesser threats can serve as breathing room between the more epic parts of the game.

So why should you bother about plot?

Because every game needs a sense of progress, that things change and if not get better at least become something new. If nothing changes in the world around the characters, if their actions have no effect, it causes the players to disengage from the world. Who cares about the monster of the week if there is just going to another community threatened the following week? If you save them this time it won't change anything in the long run.

Also familiarity breeds contempt. A dynamic story adds new things to the world and avoids the players getting complacent. With the plot pushing things forward, they know they can't wait for things to return to normal. If they don't act, things will never be the same again.

Dealing with Derailment and Pacing Slowdowns

So this leaves the question of how to deal with the case when things go off track. If it is a simple matter of lack of tension, you can always throw in a new combat encounter and work out why those ninjas attacked later. If things seem too tense, give the players a break either by providing them a refuge to regroup or time to prepare.

On the plot end, the important thing is to provide avenues for your players to progress. If your players don't see those avenues then you need to take a firm hand to point them out. Letting players spin their wheels is a mistake I see all too often in games of mystery or politics. The gamemaster takes a hands off approach and waits to see what happens. The players keep seeking that one vital clue or crucial ally to achieve their goal, never knowing if they already have it. Sessions pass with nothing being resolved.

If this happens, you need to do one of two things. Either have the correct path be pointed out to them in-game (either by an allied NPC or by an obvious clue) or you need to end the mystery or political scenario in a failure. In other words the killer gets away and the police close the case. If the PCs want to chase him down ask them how they would do it and if you think it could lead to an exciting scene then do that. Otherwise fast forward to "after six months chasing down the Hook Handed killer with nothing to show for it, you've been forced to take a new job to pay the bills..."

Mystery stories become less and less solvable with time. Politics do not stand still. Things change. Even a series long mystery should advance or evolve.