Obsessed with Freeforms

Steve Hatherley

Introduction

Obsessed with Freeforms is right. I cannot remember what possessed me to start thinking that I could write a column on freeforms, but something did. (Too much spare time might have had something to do with it...)

I’ve always loved opinion columns, and I’ve harboured a secret desire to write my own monthly column. So this was it.

The first few columns were actually published in Games Games Games. When that stopped (I think it folded – or I just moved on) then I adapted some of the later columns into other articles.

Obsessed with Freeforms

We didn’t plan to write a Western freeform. Not at first - the plan was to work on a Renaissance game and then work on the Western afterwards. But frankly, the Western is going to be the easier of the two to write - simply because there is all that great source material out there. Not only is the Renaissance game harder to write, but it will be trickier to sell as well.  And if we make a hash of it, we’ll have a hard time of persuading people to come to our Western game.  But if we get a good, solid game done first, it should be easier to sell the Renaissance game. Hence the Western.

Our plan is therefore to write a freeform for about 60 players, to be held over a weekend. That’s about 20 hours of playing time split into five sessions. Friday night, Saturday morning, afternoon and evening, and Sunday morning. That works out at 1200 man-hours of entertainment, or over 7 man-weeks!

You may be wondering what a freeform is. Freeforms also go by the name of “live-action roleplaying” or “interactive literature” or “theatre-style gaming”.  I don’t really like any of those terms, I like “freeform” which was (I believe) coined in Australia and has an appropriately nebulous sound to it. Briefly then, a freeform is a game running for a set period of time (an afternoon or a weekend) in which up to 80 players are involved. Each player is given a character with detailed background, goals and abilities - and off they go. Freeforms are great for creating political games, or games set in communities. They’re less good where you’re trying to do “normal” adventure-type things.

You might also be wondering why I’m writing this right now (while I should be working on the game). Well, there are several reasons. The first (and the one I’d tell anyone I was trying to impress) is that this is free publicity. If I’m writing a game I want people to play in it! Second (and this is probably the most honest answer) I like the sound of my own voice. I also find that when I’m involved in a creative project, I become much more productive overall. This is an outlet for some of that excess creative energy. Third, after the last freeform I was involved in, the writing team considered penning an article or two on “how we wrote a freeform”. It never happened, partly because we had forgotten how the game progressed. It would have been useful to have a diary or journal chronicling the creation of our game.

So that’s what this is. We have (at best) a little under a year until our Western freeform is played out, and we’ve a heap of work to do. And I plan to run this column alongside it. (And if it all goes horribly wrong, well, here’s where you’ll hear about it first.)

We have a working title for our game - “Maverick’s Tombstone.” These two films are our “prime sources.” Most of the players will be involved in plots from one of these two films - whether it’s just entering the poker contest (which is all we’re really taking from Maverick) or becoming involved in the politics surrounding Tombstone.
Using these movies gives us some great “headline” characters - Maverick, Wyatt Earp, and Doc Holliday. (Unfortunately they’re all male characters - we’ll have to work on the women.) Headline characters are those people that automatically come to mind when you think of a film or genre. In Casablanca, it’s Rick and Ilsa. D’Artagnon, Aramis, Porthos and Athos in The Three Musketeers. Macbeth, Romeo (and more) in a game about Shakespeare. 

Headline characters aren’t the stars of a freeform - they’re merely the characters that the players will have heard about before playing the game. They aren’t more pivotal or powerful, they’re just better known - and they provide an instant point of reference.

As a writer, headline characters can be a bit of a problem. In the movies, the characters are often a little too shallow. After all, they only have to do their stuff for a couple of hours at most. For a freeform, particularly a weekend-long game, you need to make sure everyone has plenty to do. That usually means plots. Lots of them. The trick is to add those plots to the headline characters in such a way that it doesn’t change them beyond all recognition. This becomes important at casting (a topic I’ll look at in more detail later) because when someone says “I want to play Wyatt Earp” they may be upset if you’ve turned him into the corrupt stooge of the local rustler-boss and not the tough hero they were expecting.

But that’s getting ahead of the game - we’re a little way off writing characters yet.
We had our first meeting at the beginning of April, where we brainstormed plots and watched the core movies. We’re now in the first stages of writing: research research research.

We’ve been dipping into Western movies and lore. As we watch the films we’ve been writing brief descriptions and noting any characters or situations we might want to use. We won’t use them all, but we’ll be recycling ideas wholesale where we find them. We’ve also been tinkering with mechanics. If nothing else we need ways to make gunfights and bar room brawls fun, but safe. Poker’s also going to be a problem, but as I’m close to my self-imposed 1000 word limit, I’ll leave that for next time.

This first appeared in Games Games Games #144, June 2000.

The Group with No Name

How hard can it be to choose a name? Not a name for our western freeform, but a name for the seven of us, the writing team. We’ve had ideas aplenty including several promising ones: Messing with History, The Collective, Malice Aforethought. But none of them have really clicked, so we’re currently nameless. As soon as I know I’ll let you know.

And who are “we”? Good question. In alphabetical order: Dave Fletcher, Steve Hatherley, Heidi Kaye, Jane Mitton, Tony Mitton, Andy Smith and Paul Snow. Take a bow, folks.

That’s the introductions done with, I was going to talk about poker.
As part of the freeform we want our own version of the All-Rivers Draw Poker Championship that appears in the film Maverick. A championship attracting our top gamblers and a variety of unsavoury characters.

If this were a normal roleplaying game, poker would just be whatever mechanic was appropriate for that system. Roll 3D6, if you roll less than 8 you’ve made it to the final. Or whatever. Freeforms don’t really work like that, however. For a start, the other gamblers aren’t faceless npcs played by a neutral GM, they’re flesh and blood players with as much right to be in the final as you have.

In addition, poker itself is fun. As part of our first piece of research, Tony taught those of us who didn’t know how to play poker. It’s a great way to while away a few hours - and played in character it should be great. Luckily, time isn’t a big issue - we’re designing a 20 hour game and we should have room for three rounds of poker, each lasting an hour. (And that’s just the championship - we’re hoping other games will happen as and when.)

So we’re going to have players physically play poker. The big question is - what do we do about Maverick? Maverick’s a skilled poker player. He knows how to read people’s “tells” and he knows how to play the odds. That’s great if you can already play poker - but what if you can’t? Should we ban people who can’t play poker from being cast as gamblers, or should we somehow try to give gamblers an edge?

The discussion bounced around for a while (one of the problems of designing by committee is actually reaching a decision on anything) and the plan is to tinker with the poker mechanics. I know, I know - we should be shot for even suggesting such a heresy, but we’d rather have a fun game than an entirely accurate one. Certainly, if I was playing this game I’d love to play Maverick, even though my poker skills are desperately poor.

The other problem with “real” poker is that the hands are usually pretty dull. Often the best hand is a pair. In movies, poker is anything but dull. And as our freeform is a cinematic game, we want cinematic poker.

Which brings me to how we’re going to fiddle with poker. First, we need to make sure that everyone who wants to take part in the championship can actually play the game. We could just put some poker rules in the main rules book, but I wouldn’t want to rely on that - I know just how often I read the rules prior to starting a new freeform, which isn’t very often. The best way to learn poker is actually to play. So while we’ll put some pointers towards suitable resources for learning poker prior to the freeform, we’ll also have a couple of the GMs dedicated to nothing but teaching players how to play poker on the Friday night.

Knowing how to play poker is the first step. We’re using ability cards to actually tweak poker to provide the effects we want. I could write an entire column on ability cards (and I probably will), but in brief, abilities are skills and tricks that your character can do. They’re sort of like skills in a tabletop game, but they are usually more offbeat and they’re often limited to a few uses only. Here’s an ability from Cruel Hoax’s fine 1940s freeform Cafe Casablanca: “Derring Do. A preposterous plan that would never work, except in the movies, will work for you so long as it is daring and dynamic. Tear up when used.”

A good way of thinking about ability cards is that they represent a critical success - just when you need it. (You even know in advance when you’re going to be successful - handy, eh?) Ability cards have a mixed reputation in freeform circles - some people like them, some people don’t. I think they’re great - and they’re particularly great at bringing out aspects of your character that might not be so easy to roleplay. Such as being skilled (or just plain lucky) at gambling, for example.

As far as poker goes, ability cards allow us to be quite subtle. Some of the things you can do with ability cards:

We can mix and match these abilities, and also change the frequency at which they may be used to provide a real mix of poker abilities. We should be able to give everyone a poker ability of some sort.

That’s if it survives testing, of course.

This first appeared in Games Games Games #145, July 2000.

Short Stories 2000

GNER were kind to me in June of this year, providing a late train from London for a change. That meant I didn’t have to think about accommodation in London (never cheap) in order to join the fun at this year’s Short Stories freeform day. (I can’t bring myself to call it by its full title: “Furrytales: Short Stories”.) It’s sometimes a pain living in Leeds, but only sometimes.

There were three four-hour games on offer – Shady Pines, All at Sea and In Stitches. I can’t comment on Shady Pines as I was playing in In Stitches at the time, but if it was as good as the other two it was pretty damn good indeed.
All at Sea was set at the outbreak of the First World War, aboard a neutral American liner in the middle of the Atlantic. In Stitches, on the other hand, was set in a hospital in the North. (Shady Pines was, I gather, set at a Texas barbeque.)
The two games brought two points which bear closer inspection - both towards the end of the game. The first is game-wrap.

Your typical game wrap (particularly for a short game) consists of everyone sitting around giving a brief description of what they did during the game. With the emphasis, where possible, on “brief.”

And I can’t stand them.

I can’t stand them in the same way that I find myself bored to death by gaming anecdotes. I really, really don’t want to hear how your fifteenth level fighter single-handedly slew a thousand orcs and saved a kingdom. You honestly don’t want to know how much I don’t want to hear that. It’s your story. Your game. I’ve got my own, thanks.

I try not to do the anecdote thing myself, although I do occasionally find myself in a spot of anecdote retaliation when faced with someone who won’t take the hint. I hate myself afterwards, naturally.

And so while game wraps might be great way for the GMs to find out what actually went on in their game (they are, strangely enough, the last people to know), I hate them – because it’s usually anecdote after anecdote. Ugh ugh ugh.

Of course, for a 60 player game like our Western freeform there’s no way we can do that kind of wrap – phew. We shall probably just do a simple question and answer session and save the anecdotes for the mingling and socialising afterwards.

I’m also hoping we can do something rather cool for the game-wrap, but I don’t want to give too much away right now. You’re just going to have to trust me.
The other point that caught my attention during In Stitches. Now, don’t get me wrong - this is a great game and I thoroughly recommend it. But I didn’t like the ending.

All freeforms have to come to an end, and it’s best to have your narrative climax at the end. For example, in Midsummer Mischief (our PG Wodehouse freeform) we ended with the Midsummer Fete. Cafe Casablanca ended with the last flight out of Casablanca.

In Stitches ended with the end of the world.

Well, not quite the end of the world, but the game closed with the hospital quarantined by the army and the SAS knocking down the door. (Or something like that - the details escape me.)

I found that to be a rather bitter ending. I had just had a great game and had achieved most of my goals so I felt I had achieved “victory” (as much as victory is ever achieved in these games). Then that was taken away from me by, if I understood it, the end of the world.

Now, as it happens, I have nothing against an end of the world ending to the game. If it works, fine. But, and this is the problem I had with In Stitches, if you’re going to end the world, you need to make sure that everyone is aware of what’s going on. You need to paint the fact that the end of the world is nigh in big red letters five feet tall so that the players can group together to save the world. Because, frankly, saving the world has to be a better climax than ending it.

That way, if the end of the world does happen, at least you can say you were warned. As far as In Stitches went, I knew nothing until it was too late.

As I mentioned above, I had a great time with the game. I just felt let-down by the ending.

It does, however, raise an important point. What on earth are we going to do for a climax for our Western? The obvious answer is, of course, the “showdown.” All westerns have showdowns, that moment when the god guys finally triumph over the bad guys. But how is that going to work for us? Are those playing “bad guys” going to be happy if we stack the cards against them so that we get a traditional western ending? Are the good guys going to be happy if we don’t?

I’m not quite sure where we’re going with this yet. Sure, there will be personal showdowns as various enemies finally face each other. But do we try and arrange a final set-piece of some sort? And if we do, what sort of set piece should it be? A large gunfight would be traditional, but personally I’d prefer to end on something more positive and upbeat. I just wish I could figure out what it should be.

The good news is that we won’t be ending the world. Of that I’m certain.

This first appeared in Games Games Games #146, August 2000.

The Usual Suspects

I find it easier to write plots when I have some idea of who’s going to be in the game. Yes, you can write a plot saying “Mr X has run Mr Y’s family off their land and now Miss Z (Y’s daughter) wants revenge,” but somehow I find it easier if I can put the names in. Fortunately the rest of the freeform-writing group feels similarly, which is why the next stage is to prepare our cast.

(Of course, by calling this the “next stage” I’m suggesting that we have finished the first - research. As if. But we could spend years watching old westerns while pretending to be researching, and we need to get a move on.)

Our target number of players is about 60, with a male:female ratio of 2:1 (which is based on recent freeforms). A significant number of these need to be “headline” characters and instantly recognisable to most players. I’m not expecting that to be a problem as long as we have at least one Clint Eastwood and John Wayne character.

To get things started, we first decided on the types, or categories, of characters we wanted. We knew that the game was set in Tombstone, and the film of the same name gave us several categories straight away:

Some characters fit in more than one category. Take Wyatt Earp, for instance. Is he a lawman (as a deputy), townsfolk (business partner in The Oriental saloon), or just a visitor? Ultimately it doesn’t matter – the categories aren’t that fixed. They are just a way of us to think about the cast list. There will be plenty of overlap I’m sure.

There are other categories of course - notably the gunfighters without which we couldn’t really have a western game.

As we watched the movies we added the characters to the various categories. So from Once Upon A Time In The West, for example, we have Harmonica the gunfighter, Morton the railroad baron (a visitor), Cheyenne the outlaw, Jill McBain the towns-person (or arguably a visitor) and the psychopathic Frank – a gunfighter.
It is quickly apparent how similar many of the stock western characters are. The main characters in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly are Blondie, Angel Eyes and Tuco. As far as character is concerned, Harmonica is Blondie, Frank is Angel Eyes and Cheyenne is Tuco. We can use these similarities to our advantage and, say, give Blondie’s plot (which frankly isn’t much) without much rewriting to Harmonica (who doesn’t have much either).

Luckily for us, creating strong women characters hasn’t been too much of a problem. We’re looking for about 20 female roles and we obviously want to avoid the obvious and fill Tombstone with saloon-girls (although there will be one or two). Instead, history has smiled on us and there are a bunch of interesting “real” women we can use – Calamity Jane, Annie Oakley, Belle Star. They’ll help to bolster the list of strong women characters that appear in the films.

Between history and over a dozen films we have our 60 characters – and more should we need them.

I’m not going to reveal which characters we’re using and which ones we’re not - but that’s mainly because we don’t really know yet. Sure, we’ve allocated a bunch - but it’s early days yet and some roles have yet to be cast. We’ve not found a mayor we like, for instance. (Sure, there are films with mayors but so far none we’ve really liked.)

We have also assigned hats of various shades representing where they stand on the “good-bad” scale. Good characters have white hats (obviously) while real villains have black hats. Then there are those in between, for which we have varying shades of grey. This helps us to ensure that there is some balance between the  characters and make sure that there aren’t too many white hats or black hats.

We may end up using hat colour as the basis for a mechanic in the game itself, but at the moment it’s just a writing tool. So far it has already identified that we don’t have any black-hatted women. As some of the best schemers and evil-doers that I’ve met are women, we have a bit of work to do there.

Apart from some minor tinkering, we have a cast list. I’m guessing that about 10% will change significantly as the game develops.

We’re still continuing the research and noting of names and roles, of course. This helps us with additional background for existing characters and provides us with material for any minor walk-on roles we may need.

But most importantly, now that we have a character list, we can start writing plots with a little more bite to them. And that’s what we’re doing next.

This first appeared in Games Games Games #147, September 2000.

Silverado

After much debate and soul-searching, we have finally agreed on a name for our writing group: Aces and Eights. (This abbreviates a little unfortunately to A&E, but you can’t have everything.) Aces and eights is known in gambling circles as “Dead Man’s Hand” - the poker hand Wild Bill Hickock was holding when he was shot dead. So it’s kind of apt.

It’s also vague enough that we won’t have to change it for when we write other freeforms. I certainly don’t fancy going through all this naming rigmarole again.
We also have a name for the game itself: Once Upon a Time in Tombstone. “Once Upon a Time” evokes memories of Once Upon a Time in the West, and the fact that this game is fictional. More importantly, it feels right - a good title is important.

We’re now starting to write plot. By “plot” I mean stuff to do. Macguffins for players to chase, secrets for them to keep and trouble for them to land in. Freeforms usually have a much greater plot density (of this sort) than other forms of roleplaying. This can lead to slightly unrealistic situations with a crisis every hour and skeletons popping out of closets at odd intervals, but that all adds to the fun. And besides, we don’t play these games for realism.

Having stuff to do keeps everyone busy - and busy people are usually enjoying themselves. (Bad freeforms are often accused of not providing enough to do - we’re planning on that not being a fault of ours.)

We are, naturally, robbing westerns for plot and stuff to do. But what makes a good source for us - what are we looking for? Let’s take a couple of westerns as examples.

The Magnificent Seven is a good example of a “normal” roleplaying adventure. I’ve used it as the basis for more than one session. The “players” are hired to protect some defenceless villagers from evil bandits. Much action and gunfighting ensues, with the players hopefully victorious.

The heroes in The Magnificent Seven are unconnected other than in their mission. They appear to know of each other, but other than that they know nobody else in the film. They are ciphers - no background, no history, nothing. Similarly, your average player characters has little in the way of background either.
As a roleplaying source, The Magnificent Seven is undemanding of its players’ backgrounds - which is ideal for most “normal” roleplaying games.

Silverado is a different animal. The three main characters have backgrounds and histories that link them together in a common cause.

First there’s Emmet, visiting his sister in Silverado. He’s just served a jail sentence for killing old man Mackendrick, but Mackendrick Jnr wants him dead. Then we have Paden who travels with Emmet to Silverado. There he meets Sheriff Cobb, an old riding partner, and Cobb is in Mackendrick Jnr’ s pocket. Meanwhile, Mal is returning to his folk’s farm only to discover that Mackendrick has run them off their land. (Spot the link?)

Running Silverado as a normal roleplaying game isn’t easy. For a start, it requires the player characters all to have interlinked histories and backgrounds. It’s rare enough for player characters to have backgrounds at all, let alone backgrounds that neatly link together. That’s a big difference from The Magnificent Seven, where anyone can turn up.

A freeform, on the other hand, has no such problem with Silverado. The characters in a freeform are written in advance and are tailored to the game. And unlike normal roleplaying games, freeform characters rarely trouble themselves with skills and attributes - most of the character sheet is background and little else. So there’s opportunity to include all the contacts and history that make Emmet, Paden and Mal interesting characters.

Which brings me to plot and stuff to do. Basically, all that The Magnificent Seven gives us is recruiting gunfighters, training peasants and then killing bandits. I don’t think we could get much more out of it than that.

Silverado provides a richer harvest. First there’s the Emmet-Mackendrick issue. Then there’s Mal’s revenge on Mackendrick for running his folks off his land. As for Paden, Cobb knows his weakness and keeps him from taking sides. And that’s before we start introducing settlers, Mal’s sister, Stella and Jake.

As Silverado’s plots arise mainly from character interaction, the players themselves will resolve Cobb’s and Paden’s differences. That’s great for us as it cuts down our involvement as GMs during the game itself. With something like 10 players for every GM, we need to make the plots as self-sustaining as possible.

And because we’re looking for as many GM-light, character-driven plots as we can find, Silverado is a more useful movie to us than The Magnificent Seven.

Sure, we’d be remiss not to take something from The Magnificent Seven, but we’ll probably use a little more from Silverado. Not too much - there are an awful lot of westerns out there. So if you’ve got a favourite western, chances are we’re going to use it. Somehow...

Rollercoasters

I don’t like appearing on panels. As much as I like the sound of my own opinion, I don’t really like sitting in front of an audience, delivering pearls of wisdom (or what passes for them, in my case). I don’t like doing it, and I’m not very good at it.
Unfortunately, at Convulsion 2000 in Leicester, I had to sit on the Freeforms panel. (I was in good company - Kevin Jacklin, Heidi Kaye, Carol Johnson and Brian Williams, experienced freeform authors all, were my co panel-ees. Luckily they sparkled so that I didn’t have to.)

As, ahem,  “seasoned freeform writers” we were there to answer all those niggling little queries that potential writers in the audience might have. Or, if not answer them fully, at least provide some entertaining stories of how we’d overcome particular problems.

The real aim of the panel was to get more freeforms written so that we could all spend more time playing and less time writing.

Unfortunately, it’s a rather depressing fact that writing a freeform takes an awful lot of work. Writing Midsummer Mischief, a four hour game for 25 players, took four of us two years to put together, from inception to premiere. (As for writing a weekend-long game for 60 people, I must be mad.)

There is, obviously, even more work in writing a big freeform. Midsummer Mischief (not a huge game by any standards) is a stack of paper an inch thick - and that’s in a 10 point font. An average character is 1200 words long. Combined with the various rules, background sheets, item and abilities cards, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Midsummer Mischief was 40,000 words long. (And I’m guessing that Once Upon A Time in Tombstone will be about four times that length!)

This is awfully depressing stuff. We talked about the amount of work that’s involved in a freeform, and the audience just looked depressed. This was hardly going to motivate anyone else to write us some new games to play in! 

(I should point out (as someone did) that freeforms don’t have to be that long. You can write a good freeform with many less words. But the freeforms I have enjoyed the most tend to be the wordy ones with ability cards and envelopes - and I’d rather write a game I know I’d enjoy. It seemed to work for us for Midsummer Mischief.)

So when describing the processes that go into writing a freeform, I decided to talk about rollercoasters.

See, while the writing itself can be pretty tedious, there are some big advantages to writing a freeform - and the social side is definitely one of the highlights.
When we meet up to discuss the Tombstone game, it means meeting up for a weekend. We’re scattered all over the country - which isn’t a great way to organise a writing team. But, we’re all keen to contribute the game and while it would be nice if we were all geographically convenient, at least we’ve formed the team.
So every now and again we meet up in Coventry to play poker and other games, eat pizza, drink beer and wine, watch movies and talk about Tombstone.
It’s a social event. We talk about a zillion other things - and we go on rollercoasters.

It was the slimmest of excuses – American Adventure is about 45 minutes drive from Coventry, and so we found ourselves doing some serious research watching the wild west show and buying sheriff's badges. And then we spent the rest of the day riding on all the rollercoasters. 

So while some of writing a freeform is hard work, much of it is just having a blast with some friends. If it was all hard work, we wouldn’t be doing it.

Unfortunately for us, the summer has interrupted our schedule. We had arranged to meet for a “creative weekend” in the beginning of July, but for one reason or anther, it had to be cancelled.

In theory, this shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter that we haven’t met for a weekend. We should be able to carry on writing as if nothing is different. We should be able to - but we aren’t. I know I’m not, and I’m pretty certain that nobody else is. And I’m more or less certain that’s because we haven’t had our regular social.
The Coventry weekends are more than just a social event. They are probably our main source of inspiration and motivation. Without the weekends we are just writers working alone. Sure, we have email, but it’s not the same as face to face contact. We need to bounce ideas off of each other, we need to talk them through.

Without the weekends, the drive to complete the freeform seems to be missing. It’s not just me - I’ve spoken to a couple of the others and they feel the same. We’re drifting.

And given that we want to get this game written as soon as possible, that’s a problem.

Perhaps what we’re really lacking is someone to crack the whip. I’m certainly trying to get the weekends reinstated as soon as possible (and I’d like to make them monthly if I have my way).

If the weekends resume, I don’t think we’ll need a whip-cracker for a while. The weekends themselves provide us with mini deadlines to be going on with. The problem is that if we miss one, then nothing happens until the next.

And if nothing else, I want to make sure that we don’t lose sight of how much fun we should be having in writing our freeform.

Tinkering

We ran Midsummer Mischief, our PG Wodehouse freeform, for the second time at Convulsion 2000. While it was generally a great success, it wasn’t the complete and utter success that we had hoped for. A couple of the players didn’t have an entirely fabulous time with the game.

Unfortunately, that’s not that unusual. It’s a sad fact that, for whatever reason, one person can take a part and have the time of their life while another hates it completely. It might be poor casting, it might be bad luck - but sometimes it’s a badly-written character.

Obviously we didn’t deliberately write poor characters into Midsummer Mischief, but following the second run there appeared to be a problem with Popjoy. Now, this might have been a problem with casting or just bad luck. However, in Midsummer Mischief’s first run, it appears that Popjoy’s player also had a couple of problems with the character.

That made it two for two, and definitely worth a closer look. So with the criticisms in mind, we looked at Popjoy again in the harsh light of day - and sure enough, there were a couple of problems with him. It’s not that he was particularly bad, it’s that he was not good enough.

The main problem was that he was tied to two other characters too closely. If they didn’t interact with him properly (because they were doing other things) then there was a reasonable chance that his game would suffer as a result.

So we brainstormed and came up with a few fixes. We provided stronger links to other characters and plots so that he would have more to do and wasn’t so reliant on those two characters for a good time. Of course, we won’t find out if this worked until next time we run it.

(It was a lesson I think we’ve learnt and should serve us well for writing characters for Once Upon A Time In Tombstone. Make sure everyone has lots of links to other people so that if one flounders, their game isn’t ruined.)

However, once you start changing your freeform, where do you stop?

The great thing about freeforms is that they never play the way you expect. In fact, I’ve stopped “expecting” them to be played in any particular manner - it saves me from getting stressed because things aren’t going according to plan.

Similarly, players don’t always make use of everything in a game. Some details don’t get used, for whatever reason.

For example, being set in the world of PG Wodehouse, there are one or two impostors present in our game. And there are a number of impostor disguises available for those who might want them.

Now, in the first run almost nobody used the impostor disguises at all. We were slightly disappointed in this, and made a couple of very minor changes to encourage impostors where we could.

And in our second run, there were impostors all over the place. I think most of the disguises were used at one time or another.

Was the increase in impostor roles a result of our tinkering, or just a matter of different people doing different things with the game? I don’t know - I don’t think there’s any way to tell. And did the lack of impostors reduce the fun in the first game? Not at all - both games appeared to be a roaring success (despite the problems with Popjoy and a couple of the others).

So was there, therefore, any point to our tinkering?

There are still some aspects of the game that have never been explored. A couple of secrets still kept hidden, a couple of contingency envelopes that have never been used. Should we carry on tinkering to make sure these aspects come out in the game? Even if we do the tinkering, there’s no guarantee that the players will pick up on those secrets or open those envelopes anyway.

Ultimately, we’ve only run it twice. That’s not really enough to be able to tell if we have a problem or not. If I rolled a die twice in succession and both times it came up six, should I immediately conclude that there’s something wrong with it? Of course not. (Unfortunately re-rolling the die is a little easier than re-running Midsummer Mischief. I doubt we’ll ever run it enough times to get a statistically meaningful result.)

As you might be able to tell, this has been the topic of some discussion. One of the authors wants to make the changes. I don’t. I want to fix Popjoy (because that’s a real problem, something that needs to be fixed), but I don’t want to change something for the sake of changing it.

As far as I am concerned, there’s a point where you need to say “enough”. You’ll never write a perfect game - it doesn’t exist. It can’t exist - players will always mess up your grand designs, no matter what you write. So there’s a point where the tinkering has to stop. You have to accept that your game is as good as it’s ever going to be.

There’s also a point where tinkering won’t actually improve the game - only change it. You need to be able to say “Okay, I think that’s it. Let’s work on the next game.”

But recognising that point? And reaching some kind of consensus with your co-authors? As we’re finding out, that’s a different matter completely.

Brainstorms

When we wrote Midsummer Mischief (a four hour game for 25 players set in the world of PG Wodehouse) we asked a few experienced writers how they went about writing their freeforms. They explained that they started with a plot and wrote up the characters involved in that plot. Then they’d start on the next plot, and write up those characters, or add bits to the characters already written. Slowly, over a period of time, a freeform would take shape.

Because we’re good writers who do what we’re told, that’s the approach we took for Midsummer Mischief. In general it worked pretty well and I’m happy with the result.

While Once Upon A Time In Tombstone is a much larger game, I was expecting to pretty much take the same approach - write a plot (or two) and slowly start to complete the characters.

However, Tombstone hasn’t turned out that way. 

First we created our cast of characters - cowboys, lawmen, ranchers, locals and so on.

At about the same time, we started creating plots. And I expected to start writing characters shortly afterwards, but instead something else happened.

The problem I’ve found with some of the plots is filling some of the roles. I haven’t known enough about some of the characters to be able to slot them into a plot well enough. So Tony suggested we go through the characters one by one to get a sense of who they were and what they were doing.

We thought it might take a couple of hours. Well, we spent about twenty minutes on the first character, and in doing so created a whole pile of background and other plots for him. As we discussed the character, Tony tapped away on his laptop, adding plot and background to the character database. Then we started on the next - and it took us another twenty minutes before we were finished. Four hours later and we had only done about twelve characters - but we had created so much new material that it was worth every minute. So we carried on, eventually stopping somewhere beyond midnight. And we weren't even halfway through.

It was ridiculously easy. We just sat around, throwing ideas into the air and choosing the ones we liked best. Occasionally we had to check our references (for a name, or a vague historical connection), but that was about it.

It was hard work. It was tiring. It made my brain ache. And the thought of spending another 12 or so hours before we finish is slightly daunting. But it was also a lot of fun and it was amazing how quickly the plots came together. It’s also amazing how strange some of them have become. I don’t think we’d ever have thought of a couple of the plots if we hadn’t all been brainstorming at the same time.

I’m also pretty sure it’s a great way to write a smaller freeform. I would like to have seen how Midsummer Mischief would have turned out if we’d taken that approach. (Instead we wrote most of it separately and only met on rare occasions.)

As well as the brainstorming sessions, we’re continuing to write other plots - and we’re not limiting ourselves to westerns. After all, The Magnificent Seven is merely Seven Samurai with spurs and six-guns. So we’ve been thinking about where else we can borrow plots from (you do end up with an awful lot of revenge plots if you stick to westerns, and we could end up with a mighty dull game if we don’t look elsewhere). Provided that you start thinking laterally, you can cram any movie into a western plot. Not convinced? Try these:

Are we seriously thinking of using these? Probably not - but it shows how we could adapt pretty much any plot should we put our mind to it.

So what happens next? Well, we haven’t finished going through the characters yet, and I’m sure there are all sorts of discrepancies that we’ve got to iron out first.

But the trick with this freeform appears to be to write the characters last. Get as much information about them as possible, tie them into plots, link them to allies and enemies, and only then we will start writing the characters.

Hardy’s First Rule

Seven or eight years ago I played in a live Vampire: the Masquerade game. This was about the time that the Minds Eye Theatre boxed set came out (complete with false teeth and fake blood) but the organisers weren’t bothering with those, they had some other rules figured out.

Unfortunately, and here I’m in danger of causing offence, the organisers were live-action gamers. The guys who like playing with rubber swords. The big problem I have with the larp community is their passion for detail. Sometimes they seem more interested in “realism” or “authenticity” than having a good time. Me, I’m prepared to use my imagination – after all, I’m a roleplayer.

As an example, at the Vampire game we were told that if we wanted to smoke or drink beer, we’d have to spend some of our character points on a special ability that let us smoke and drink beer. (Normal White Wolf vampires don’t smoke, eat or drink. Or so I’m told.) As the venue was a groovy “alternative” niteclub in Bradford, it was obvious that smoking and drinking beer was going to be an important part of the experience. So that meant that everyone would have to spend some of their character points on this particular ability - which just made the ability meaningless and effectively reduced everyone’s point total.

And I’m sure it’s admirable to want to play Vampire while it’s dark, what do you do in the summer when it doesn’t get dark until gone 10? Some people have to get up early and work for a living. How about we just pretend it’s dark? It’s not like we’re really vampires after all.

But if that was bad, I couldn’t believe their policy on guns.

“If you want to use a gun, you must have a blank-firing replica. A toy cap gun isn’t good enough.”  Yes, that’s right. These people were advocating running around with blank firing replicas. Perhaps I should give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they thought the guns would only be used inside (ignoring, for the sake of the argument, the serious risk to your hearing that a blank-firing gun can pose).  But the organisers were experienced live action gamers - they really should have remembered Hardy’s First Law of live-action gaming: “A gamer’s intelligence halves the moment they put on a costume. And it halves again as soon as they pick up a weapon.”

(Actually, I’m not sure who first said it, but I first heard it from Lynne Hardy so it’ll always be Hardy’s First Law to me.)

But they didn’t. They had a stupid rule about replica firearms instead.

And so the game started. The game itself was probably pretty lousy - I don’t know, I just chatted with people and had fun. There was some kind of plot, but I don’t remember what it was about.

I do remember that the game spilled out into the streets of Bradford. I do remember getting into a taxi and travelling to someone’s house to watch an interrogation. (I also remember that there were several sessions of this, but my memory is hazy and I can’t remember what happened and where.)

I think my most vivid memory is of finding a police van outside the club and an officer of the law talking to one of the organisers. I found out later that there had been five reported shootings in Bradford that night. (Hardy’s First Law indeed!) The Armed Response Squad had been called out and were parked around the corner.
“Your guns fire blanks,” the officer said. “Ours don’t.”

The organisers were lucky to get away with a warning. They were just as lucky not to have someone seriously injured. The game collapsed in a heap of apathy shortly after that, which was probably for the best.

So that’s my live-action gaming horror story, and it’s relevant because we haven’t figured out how to deal with guns in Once Upon A Time In Tombstone.
We have three options.

Whatever we do we will not be permitting the players to bring their own guns. If we only allow the props we provide, then we have some control.

My personal favourite depends on what day of the week it is. The finger and thumb method is simple, easy, and completely safe. However, I’m sure we can come up with some interesting cardboard variations - different guns and so on. (I’m not a big fan of the toy cap guns, however.) But whatever happens, I can assure you that blank-firing replicas will not be permitted in Tombstone.

When Death’s Not Good Enough

Last time I talked about guns, and the problems that even fake guns have in the real world. This time I’m going to cover one of the problems that guns pose within the game itself.

If you give guns to your characters, then they will expect to use them. Hell, they’ll want to use them. If they’re like most gamers, they’ll be itching to blast away at the first thing that moves. And that means that other characters will be shot - and killed.

After all, what’s the point in giving characters guns if you don’t let them kill anyone. How much fun will the shootouts be if you can’t die? People need to be threatened in a game with guns - they need to be threatened with character death. And if nothing else, they need to die in a Western game. It’s part of the genre.
Which brings me to the problem: character death.

Character death causes a number of problems for players, directors - and writers. For everyone.

For a start, the threat of losing your character can have quite an effect on some players. For example, if someone is playing a desperado with a price on their head and every bounty hunter is gunning for them, don’t be too surprised if they never venture from the safety of their secret hideout. That’s unlikely to be much fun for them or for anyone else, but it’s probably more fun than being killed. At least they’re alive. At least they still have the character they started the game with, the one they did the research and hired a costume for. For some players, that’s important.

Roleplaying games don’t normally have “winners” and “losers”. It’s always been one of the great selling points about roleplaying - it’s not supposed to be competitive. Although freeforms are technically roleplaying games, they are unusual because they do provide a measure of success - goals. The more goals you achieve in a freeform, the more likely you are to regard yourself as successful - ie, you “won”.
You don’t tend to be given a goal that says “Stay alive until the end of the game”. But that’s mainly because it’s implicit. Very rarely does anyone play a character deliberately to kill them - and only then if they are written that way.

So if you are even slightly competitive, chances are that if your character dies, you would consider that you “lost” that freeform. For some people, that’s also important. (I have certainly found that the games I’ve enjoyed the most are usually the ones where I’ve stayed alive and achieved lots of goals - but then I know I’m competitive.)

Even if you don’t mind the fact that your character has died, it does introduce a couple of problems. First, there may be plot threads that have suddenly become derailed because a character has died. If the character has an important item, or secret knowledge, then that needs to somehow get back into circulation. Or the character may be instrumental in arranging a big scene with other players (a wedding, a showdown). Without them, the scene will fizzle and die - and that just creates a bunch of unhappy customers.

(Perhaps players with dead characters should be carefully debriefed before letting them loose with a new character. There’s no excuse for not checking the in-game implications of losing a character. That’s just bad game-management.)

Then there’s the replacement character. The player won’t know their new character as well as their old one, and it’s extremely unlikely that they will be as well integrated into the plots - after all, the stand-by character might not be used at all. Therefore the writers cannot give him or her anything unique.

Then there’s costuming - a player is not likely to be best pleased if they’ve dressed as Geronimo (their original character) but the only one left is General Custer.

And it’s not only character death that causes these problems. If a player drops out unexpectedly (for whatever reason) then the problems with plots becoming derailed still apply.

Similarly, when a player achieves his goals ahead of schedule, then there won’t be anything keeping him in the game. He’s effectively “died” - and it’s time for a new character. (And if you think that should please the competitive players, my own experience is that it isn’t so - I find it unsatisfying not to finish the game with the character I started.)

So as far as Tombstone goes, we have all these problems to consider. Several of us have had bad experiences with having our characters killed off or characters important to our plots leave the game or players dropping out . We are therefore looking to avoid these problems wherever we can. 

I’ve only mentioned the negative aspects of character death here. There are benefits - going out in a blaze of glory can be wonderful. Introducing replacement characters can breath a spark of life into some plots (and you may want to stagger the arrival of some characters anyway). But thanks to our personal experiences, we generally regard character death as a Bad Thing. 

And yet we have guns in our  Tombstone game.

What are we going to do about it? Well, we have a few ideas and I’ll tell you about them next time.

This article may be re-published as long the following paragraph is included at the end of the article and as long as you link to the URLs:

Article by Steve Hatherley. Steve is an active freeformer in the UK and has written a number of freeforms. For more information about UK freeforms, please visit uk-freeforms.wikidot.com. Steve is also a partner of Freeform Games LLP and has a website dedicated to freeform-style murder mystery games: http://www.great-murder-mystery-games.com