The Plan
The Five Pillars of Game Story, Part One. I mean, Pillar One. Whatever.
Part One: The Plan | Part Two: The Central Conflict | Part Three: Up A Tree | Part Four: Verisimilitude | Part Five: Meaningful Choice
There’s a moment, you’ll see it in the trailers, where Agent Phillip Joyce, the head of the Allied Coalition operating in Venezuela (and the fact that the ‘Allied Coalition’ is secretly led by a CIA agent should only be taken as commentary on American Foreign Policy if…you know…you’re paying attention) turns to the Mercenary, the main character of Mercenaries 2, and says;
“Alright, dammit! It’s yours. But you’ve got to get him. Solano’s going to win! I can’t act. You’ve got to get him!”
He says this because I wanted to reinforce to the player that Solano, the bad guy, WOULD win. His plan works. Thanks to a deal with the North Koreans, obliquely referred to in a brief cutscene, he has at least one nuke. He…convinces the Americans and the Chinese that he’ll use it, and both nations decide that a land war in Venezuela over oil is one thing, but a full-blown nuclear conflict is a different issue. Solano successfully uses The Nuclear Option, and America and China decide to pull out.
This could happen. It’s not likely, don’t get me wrong. Mercenaries 2 is not predictive. It’s not a simulation. But this is precisely the same tactic the North Koreans tried out. Iran may be toying with the idea. You’re a small nation, and you want to dominate your Local Area. A nuke can do that for you.
Things in Mercs2 do not play out the way Solano wants, thanks to the actions of the hero. But those actions would be far less meaningful if there wasn’t the concrete understanding that something specific would have happened otherwise. That “something specific” is the villain’s plan.
It’s easy, when designing the story for your game, whether it be a video game or tonight’s RPG session, to obsess over things like the villain’s motivation. Why is he doing what he’s doing? And certainly that can pay off, don’t mistake my meaning. I’ve chosen these specific elements of a good story only because they happen to the be ones I find most impact the player, and prepare you best to handle the differences between static and dynamic stories. Certainly you could pick a different 4. Or n.
The villain’s plan is a pillar of game story because it creates a False Backbone. The False Backbone is critical to Interactive and Dynamic Storytelling because it tells you what would have happened had the player not intervened. I came dangerously close in that previous sentence to including Aria-levels of Abusive Capitalization. Down that road, madness lies.
In a normal story, it’s nice to have this idea worked out. Hans Gruber almost stole billions from the Nakatomi Building. If it wasn’t for John McClain, he would have succeeded. We, the audience, know what would have happened in Die Hard if John McClain never showed up. And that’s nice. But Star Wars doesn’t suffer because I have no idea what Darth Vader would have been doing had it not been for Luke and Leia. He’s still an iconic villain. It’s merely nice for the audience to believe Gruber is smart and almost got away with it. It’s nice for the same reasons in video games and RPGs, but it’s critical in video games and RPGs because your audience can walk around the world and monkey with things! In both video games and RPG sessions, the players have to understand the story from inside it. And that is a challenge no movie or book has ever had.
The solution to that challenge is the False Backbone. It’s the template from which you will diverge. Without it, you’re extemporizing everything, and that can’t last. Eventually the players will detect that you’re making it all up as you go along, and you lose verisimilitude.
Books and movies are static. Video games are Interactive. RPGs are Dynamic. The story in books and movies cannot change. Nothing ever happens that the author does not permit. Whereas in video games you still have an author, there’s still authorial control, but the player is free to walk around, explore, try out different stuff. This is Interactive. RPGs however, are Dynamic . Players can literally affect change no one had ever planed on. Like language itself, the players and the GM together can, in any given moment, create a “sentence” in their story which had never been said before, and which no one planned on.
Your facility in creating new story sentences, to extend the metaphor to an absurd degree, is greatly aided if you know the False Backbone of your story. With the “what would have happened” in your head, any new element is merely a branch off that. The Villain’s Plan, the False Backbone of your story becomes the tool you use to figure out what happens when the players start monkeying with things. Since the player in a video game can only monkey with things in the manner you allow, all this discussion happens during development. In an RPG, the monkeying comes during play. In both cases, you the GM or you the Story Editor need to know “how do I react to the player’s actions?” Really you’re asking how does the villain, how does the world react? Arriving at that answer is made easier if you know The Plan. “If the hero monkeys with this, then the Villain will have to do this.” Sometimes the answers aren’t easy, but the starting point for the discussion is always the villain’s plan.
In Mercenaries 2, if the Hero hadn’t acted at the end of Act One, Solano, the bad guy, would have taken over Venezuala and made deals with both America and China so as to exploit the greed of both. That was his Plan, and it was a good one.
But the Hero acts, and sabotages Solano’s operation. The oil stops flowing. What happens next? Well, without the ability to sell the oil to both countries, both countries invade to get the oil themselves. That’s sensible. It’s the logical result of the Hero interfering with The Plan. You’ve got three major character/factions: Solano, America, and China, and they’re all acting in a manner that’s entirely comprehensible and believable and transparent to the player. This is the ultimate goal.
Once the two Superpowers invade, Solano goes into hiding. He was already negotiating with the North Koreans in anticipation of something like this happening, we learn. Once he has his nuke, he’s able to force the two Superpowers out. This is his new Plan and, again, it would have worked. Were it not for the hero.
I make it sound logical and sensible. I hope it sounds logical and sensible. But we only arrived at this basic story after 18 months of work. We did not start with the plan, and extrapolate outward. We began with certain key scenes we needed. We needed the Allies and China to invade. We wanted a big set-piece confrontation on a massive oil rig. We were working backward. The way we knew we had something that worked was when it began to function as a False Backbone. We knew Solano’s plan was a good one because it allowed us to do all the things we wanted to do. I kept coming up with plans until I found one that fit.
You’re going to do the same thing, whether on a video game or in an RPG. You have certain key points you wish to hit. Confrontation, revelations, set piece battles, whatever. They’re your big moments and they’re the thing that drives you forward as a creative person. They inspire you. And if you’re a bad storyteller you hang on to those moments even after it’s become obvious they’re not serving your game. This is not the place for an essay on Railroading, you understand the principle. But these are the moments that the villain’s Plan has to cause. You’re going to go off the rails, things won’t happen as planned, no plan survives contact with the enemy. But the S.U.V. of your story will be driving off an existing road and that makes your journey much shorter.
This wasn’t something I learned working on Mercs2. It was something I learned through 20 years of GMing RPGs. I knew the bad guy’s plan was critical because it’s the first place you go once the players start running around changing things. With a Plan, and the False Backbone it creates, all you have to do is figure out “how would the bad guy react to this?” This is much simpler than making up something from whole cloth.
In my D&D campaign, the bad guy is The Black Acolyte. I know his Plan. I know what would happen if the players never acted. He’d win. It’s up to them to stop him. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail. And I never know from one moment to the next which this specific confrontation will be. Dynamic, remember? Changing on a moment-to-moment basis. But I never have much work to do to deal with the change, because I’m starting from a known path: the False Backbone.
The story that would have been.
End of Line
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January 17th, 2008 at 7:04 am
The False Backbone is a terrific mental tool to have for reference, like a T-square for open game design. By making player deviation a standard part of gameplay, you’re at least being realistic, right? It’s essentially art of what I’m doing in Tomorrow War, in which the game’s established meta-story/future-history is what happens if the PCs don’t take actions to change the future.
At the same time, I think RPGs need a core story if they’re going to succeed at capturing imaginations and maintaining an ongoing base of play. In D&D, the core story is “venture into a dungeon, fight monsters, escape with treasure.” In Shadowrun, it’s “venture into a corporate building, survive a ruined plan of attack, escape with loot.” In Call of Cthulhu, it’s “venture into mundane location made crazy by cthonic forces, escape alive or save the world.” (We could debate the specifics.)
Video games, by being able to control player deviation, have it easy, from my perspective. RPG game rules do the same (no fighter is going to be killed by a weapon that deals 1d4 damage, and that restricts player freedom in a way) but routinely get chewed out because they are not “realistic.” As if the actual purpose of an RPG’s rules was to provide a dice-based alternate physics model for an entire universe. Meanwhile, in the first Splinter Cell, Sam Fisher could legally kill but had never heard of a knife.
Anyway.
January 17th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Knives are so passé.
I don’t think of “explore the dungeon” as the story of D&D, I think of that more of one scene. Implicit here is that we’re talking about a campaign, or at best adventure, which may have a dungeon in it.
Probably my thinking on this changed around the time my friend Jim, an Ur-GM, said “the challenge isn’t the Dungeon. The challenge is what happens afterwards when the Bad Guy learns about what the Heroes took out of the Dungeon.”
That’s when I started thinking in terms of Bad Guys and what they want and how they act. It made my game, at least, much more interesting. Knowing the bad guy’s plan wasn’t the end, it was just the beginning.
Framing the dungeon in the larger setting is, I think, something everyone goes through and mirrors the development of D&D itself. Many old D&D modules began with the heroes standing outside the dungeon. Hah!
Something I didn’t bring up, because I didn’t want to sabotage my own post, is that this assumes you HAVE a Bad Guy. In general I think that if you don’t have a bad guy, you should go get one. But certainly you can have good stories without them. Even a Cthulhu game usually has someone, some person, trying to do summon or learn about something that Man Was Not Meant To Know.
January 18th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
“But Star Wars doesn’t suffer because I have no idea what Darth Vader would have been doing had it not been for Luke and Leia.”
That’s because Vader’s actually an antagonist, in the Aristotelean sense. He doesn’t have a plan himself, but he’s an obstacle to the hero’s plan. The villain as an agent of the status quo is not something you see in very many games, for reasons that have been explored in greater detail elsewhere, I’m sure.
January 26th, 2008 at 1:57 am
I’m curious as to why the term that is used is called a false backbone. To me, it seems that the Bad Guy Plan isn’t what actually is holding the meta-plot together and turning it into a story. Could you elaborate?
joe
January 26th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
The story is “what happens.” The False Backbone is what *would* have happened, had the Heroes not interfered. It’s “false” because it was never intended to happen. Whatever else happens, you know the villain’s plan won’t go off without a hitch, because the heroes will act.
There’s a great quote in someone’s sig on RPG.net; “As a GM, I show up at the table and try to destroy the world. It’s up to the players to stop me.”
That GM doesn’t come to the table with a plan for how tonight’s story is going to play out. He doesn’t know how tonight’s story is going to play out. He only knows what the bad guys are going to do. Their plan. He has figured out that IF the heroes don’t stop him, THEN these things will happen. He knows a story, but he presumes that through the heroes’ interference, it will not be the story.
Because he knows the fake story, the story that would have played out had the heroes not stopped him, when the heroes act he’s got a template from which to react. It’s much easier to figure out “what happens next,” arguably our hardest job as storytellers, if you know what was supposed to happen, and why.