This week Justin and I are talking about timelines in games (flashbacks and flash forwards) and out (campaign length, how to end games, etc).

Hosts: Sean Nittner and Justin Evans

Length: 28:26

[00:27] Intro to the show. Talking about timelines in game and out.
[00:49] Telling stories about our characters.
[01:50] One way to tell stories in game is to use flash backs or flash forwards
[2:00] Justin pains me with a discussion of Lost
[03:10] Talking about timelines on two levels.

Flashing back and flashing forward

[03:30] We display our ignorance to games who incorporate time manipulation in their games.
[03:58] A LARP that flashed back and flashed forward throughout.  They worked from the far future and past closer to the present.
[06:15] This allows you to start on a very dramatic note.  Starting with tension in the present by using Flashbacks to explain how you got there.
[06:52] Flashbacks are very useful for fleshing out the backstory.
[07:14] Starting with a normal scene and flashing back (or forward) to a very tense one.
[08:06] Allows the group to ask a really specific question about the characters or the story.
[08:52] Potential pitfall of a flashback:  Plot immunity.   Opportunity to create relationships or beliefs.
[10:13] Flash forwards can tell us what scene we should be building towards.
[11:28] Potential pitfalls of flash forward: Players working against the story you are presenting.
[11:56] Something that you want to look to your group for buy in.

Structure of games

[13:02] Asking the question. How long to I want this game to run?  How should it end?
[13:29] An awkward Highlander reference.
[14:22] Prime Time Adventures uses a 5 or 9 episode season.  This works really well with the spotlight dynamic.
[15:24] Some games don’t pace the number of game sessions but they do work strongly towards and end game.
[15:54] The Shadow of Yesterday: Transcendence – Your character is written out of the story.
[16:35] Burning Wheel: Emotional Attributes force characters to leave the world in different ways.
[17:39] Dust Devils uses  harm  to push towards “The End”.
[18:29] My Life with Master constantly pushes towards the end of the game (and consequently the end of the characters).
[20:32] Creating a good end game… we don’t want to let the fun end.
[22:27] Taking away the sting of games ending.  Talking about the game afterwards.
[24:00] Building in time to debrief games at the end.
[25:10] Most LARPS end with all the players sharing their plotlines with each other.
[25:39] End long running games with a discussion of what the group will do next.  Removes some of the fear of the “cool” part ending.
[27:28] Ending this podcast with an assurance that there will be more cool ones to come, and you can remove the sting by coming to the forums.

Direct Download: NC_Episode_031.mp3

Hi, Sean, Justin. You were saying near the start that you couldn't think of any games that incorporate flashbacks mechanically. I haven't played it, but I downloaded the free PDF of "3:16 - Carnage amongst the stars", and it has a flashback mechanism for conflict resolution which apparently survived into the commercial version.

WRT incorporating flashbacks into specific games (rather than them being integrated into the mechanics), I've played in two games in particular that used flashbacks very effectively. One was a con game called "Persons Unknown", a three-session[1] Call of Cthulhu game where we started the first session as amnesiacs in an asylum, and we had to figure out who we were and what had happened, and the session ended when we escaped the asylum and finally made it back to where we'd been found wandering crazy, where our memories came crashing back. In the second session we played the flashback of what had led us to being in the asylum, and the third session was trying to deal with it more successfully this time.

The other one was not a con game, but was again a modern urban fantasy game (in Fate). It starting in media res with us fighting something big and supernatural in an old people's home with, again, our memories being screwed with, and each time one of us succeeded in throwing off our lethargy and acting against the thing, we regained some of our memories and played out flash-backs of how we'd got there and what was going on. Turned out that the thing fed on memories, which was why it resided in the old people's home (resulting in that institution having record levels of dementia), and why we had no idea what we were doing at the start of the session, where it had managed to king-hit us.

They were a couple of the most memorable and awesome games I've played :)

[1] All the con sessions I've been to in Oz are only three hours long. You said your cons usually have six hour sessions? That would be glorious :)

Posted By: RobRendell Hi, Sean, Justin. You were saying near the start that you couldn't think of any games that incorporate flashbacks mechanically. I haven't played it, but I downloaded the free PDF of "3:16 - Carnage amongst the stars", and it has a flashback mechanism for conflict resolution which apparently survived into the commercial version.

Heh, yeah, we realized after the fact that there are quite a few games that use flashbacks, we just haven't played any of them. :)

I'm really glad to hear that games with flashbacks, specifically using the trope of memory loss have worked so well. Paul Tevis' new game "A Penny for my Thoughts" is pretty much based solely on the concept of people in an institution trying to remember, and maybe not liking what they saw.

Posted By: RobRendell[1] All the con sessions I've been to in Oz are only three hours long. You said your cons usually have six hour sessions? That would be glorious :)

Yeah, it seems that CA Bay Area cons tend to have longer games than the rest of the world. When I first started attending all the games I got into were 8 hour games. Now my preference has moved more toward 4 and 6 hours but , but it's still nice to have have that flexibility as a GM. As far as I can tell, 4 hours is about the cap for most other cons. I'm not sure why we're different, that's just been my experience.

Another game with a narrative structure built in, in a rather subtle way, is Polaris: the game creates a Tragedy, the story of a small group of knights of the stars. They all start gallant and full of youthful energy, but as they face the horrors of the demons, the indifference of the people and other pains they become weary veterans, up until they betray the People and become demons themselves, or die. Or, the world ends.

And all that is woven in the mechanics: Zeal is a value on the charsheet going down with Experience (a game mechanic), until it becomes Weariness. At Weariness 4 (or 5, I can't remember now) the knight becomes a demon of the Mistaken. But up until then he's become more and more powerful, capable of greater deeds.

Also, until a knight becomes a veteran he cannot die: horrible things can happen to him and people he cares about, but he's safe with respect of being written out of the story. When he IS a veteran then only HIS player (his Heart) can ask for his death using a mechanic of the game... and his antagonist player (his Mistaken... think GM, more or less) can oppose him, saving him to force maybe a much less honorable death, or worse. In the same vein at that point the Mistaken can now ask for the end of the world (as people know it).

So you know the story will be a tragedy, and that it will have a definite end. Also, you can see when the end is coming close, and you can push towards an ending, but you never have the complete certainty about the end-time beforehand (because of how the experience mechanics work).

Pretty clever stuff.
I encourage anyone interested and maybe a bit "scared" but how strange Polaris sounds to listen to Paul Tevis' AP of a complete game/campaign: it not only made me understand the game, but it made me fall in love with it.

http://www.havegameswilltravel.net/index.php?post_id=42877

his site seems to have some problem at the moment, though.

Yup, he got attacked by some malicious javascript comment: fixed now.