Video – RPG Scenario Design

Hi everyone and welcome to this video about role-playing game scenario design. Now you might wonder: why are we watching a video about how to design? Well, we know many of you are already designing games, or are interested in designing your own games. And if you take the full extension, you will also get to design a short scenario in the facilitation module. So we wanted to give you a little extra on how you can do this and how we will work with that in ROCKET. And since designing can be quite hard and time-consuming, we wanted to give you a bit of a template or some kind of format that you can actually use. So this format is created to design scenarios around conflict transformation, but since a lot of role-playing games often involve some type of conflict, it can also be adapted and used for other content. So let’s get going. The first slide here, we have shown you before, but I want to show it again, because it is important for the design process, and it’s always good with some repetition.

When designing your game, you should think about what is the desired impact or goal. All design components of the game should consider the desired impact or goal. The components that run counter to the desired impact or goal should be removed or reframed. Impacts will likely extend beyond your initial expectations or goals, and embrace that and go with the sometimes slightly chaotic nature of the form. That is important to have with you. And this is also, because it can be a bit chaotic, why we do playtests. But before we get to any of that, let’s just take a look at the format. So, first you will have the title of your scenario. And then all of them are built in the same way. So you have person A that is frustrated with person B due to their behavior or a situation involving them. We then also have person C that is a bystander or is there to support A or B. Person A is confronting person B. Then we have person D, who starts the scene and then leaves. And then we have a short little starting line of some sort. So person A is upset about a situation involving person B in some way. Sometimes, person B are directly responsible, but other times they just happen to be the person delivering the information or handling the situation. Person C is optional. Person C is a third party who is either supporting person A or B, like a friend or a parent, or they might be neutral, like a colleague who just happened to overhear the exchange. And the scene should never focus on person C. The reason we have a person C is because this allows more people to be part of the scene, which gives students more chances to play. But it is not necessary. But while we tell participants that observation is also potent, which it is, ideally, we want to give as many students as possible an embodied experience of actually playing. So having a person C is really helpful to get more students to play. It might also be a slightly lower threshold to play person C, and then the next time you might want to try to play one or the others. And person D who is the one who starts the scene and then leaves is always played by the facilitator. And then as soon as person D has left the scene, the facilitator would go back to focus on facilitating the scene and helping out. Let’s apply this with an example. Here, I came up with the scenario “Why wasn’t I chosen?” So here we then have staff member A, that gets passed over for a leadership position in their area of the college. Staff member A has been informally serving in this position already for over two years. Staff member A now have decided to confront the person who makes this decision, which is the supervisor B. And then we have the administrative assistant, which is C, that is taking notes at the meeting, being the neutral part. And then we have the student worker D, who is the facilitator, who will start the scene by saying: “You may meet with the supervisor now”, and that’s where the scene starts.

There are many different types of scenes, and we find it helpful to have some kind of core conflicts that then can be adapted for other scenarios with different characters of different settings. So you have something to go by. Some examples of core conflicts can be: Issues with group dynamics. So that would be, for example, being late, ghosting, and not contributing to work. It could be issues with power. So feeling overpowered, cut out of decision making, unfairly treated, talked over, and so on. It could be issues with rejection, so feeling overlooked or ignored, or once ideas being removed or not considered, or having one’s culture critiqued. We have issues with demands on time. We have issues with different belief systems. And issues with different needs, which we have talked a bit about before. For example, if one person needs to be social where another person needs to get work done alone. So being social, Goffman talked about it as having a positive face, while needing to sit on your own and focus would be more of an autonomous face, that you need to be in at the moment.

Then I want to talk a bit about framing again. We have touched on it before, so I’m not going to go super deep into it. When running a scenario, you have the before, the during, and the after. And before, you preferably have some type of workshop where you get to know the character or get into character. Maybe you create relations and such things. And as you saw in the short little video we did, there we use the hot seat. I recommend this as a first one to try out, it’s really good to get to know the character. So you have one person who is in the hot seat, and then the others will ask questions to that character, and the player then has to answer as their character. It’s a way to get to know them. So it could be, you could ask them things like: “what are your favorite flavor of ice cream?”, which is definitely not something that is like written in the character, but it helps you flesh it out. But you, preferably, also want to have questions that relate somehow to what you’re going to work with. So maybe: “How did you sleep last night?”, “Were you nervous for this meeting?”, “How does it feel for you knowing that you will have to go into this meeting?”, so something that connects to it. Then you also need to have safety parts. We will have another video talking about safety, in the facilitation part, but we always work with that. So you have things that go throughout the whole thing, for example, being able to step out. But we also have the in-game techniques such as “pause”, which you also saw us use before.

And then, after, we have the debrief, where we have the emotional, the intellectual, and the educational debrief. So an example could be: “How did it feel to play the confrontation?”, then we’re in feelings. And then to get some kind of intellectual question, “How are situations like this handled in your workplace?”. And then, to get the educational one that connects specifically to the scenario: “What conflict transformation techniques would be useful in a situation like this?”. Then we also have some of the integration practices, which I have also mentioned before, to make you bring it back to your daily life and take it out. It could be that you get to do journaling about how you think you would react in a situation like this in your daily life, and what you would find helpful to handle a situation like that.  When we’re talking about debrief, I would say there are some great tools to help participants reflect on the experience, and one of them is to give them prompts that they get to finish to help them formulate their thoughts. So I have actually made a list here for you with prompts that I find helpful to use in these situations. So here you have: I didn’t understand… I noticed… I wonder if… I got reminded about… I think that… I got surprised that… I would like to know… I would like to understand… I’ve used this a lot, I think it’s very helpful. Hopefully you might find them helpful also.

Now let’s talk a little bit about the conflict resolution scenario format and the design that you will get to try out if you take the whole extension and the facilitation part. There, you will get to actually design scenarios by yourself. What is important here is that the scenarios are very basic and short. We are talking maximum minutes total, and that includes workshop and debrief, so the full framing. And the idea here, specifically for these that are designed for conflict transformation, is to give the players an experience of elevated conflict somatically in their body. Because the skills are harder to use while you are in conflict, we want to do that at a low scale level. And the improvisational nature of the scenes provides insight into what motivations and challenges people actually might have in these conflict situations, which is why we’re working with them.

Finally, I also want to give you a few tips and tricks that are good to think about when you design. First, avoid putting in excessive detail. Leaner is better, because it’s less cognitive load, it’s less to try to remember. Let the players fill it out. This also goes for the player. So if your players, for example, want to elaborate on their take on their character, ask them to keep it short and let them know that they will get to do that later. This is, for example, why the hot seat is very good, because then they get to elaborate, but you can steer it a bit. Okay, thank you so much for listening, and I hope you found this helpful to be able to design scenarios going forward.