Folks Just Don't Get Cities
The blogs are talking about city adventures.
Last week saw the conclusion of a much-anticipated series. No, no, not the second season of Severance. I am talking about Knight at the Opera’s series of posts on running games in cities! If you are unfamiliar with Knight at the Opera’s game, they often have long, discursive posts on a topic. This time, he dribbled his wisdom into daily spurts. In case you missed it, I’ve collected these spurts so they can be unleashed at once as a proper deluge. Rather than summarize each section (which would be a disservice to both you and the posts themselves!), I’ve included a tasty snippet from each, hoping to whet your appetite to go read the whole thing (each post is actually quite short by Knight at the Opera standards)
Urban Gameplay Part 1: the Search for the Holy Grail (is futile)
“One of the reasons a single true ‘city procedure’ isn't going to work is because it's based on a faulty premise.
“Look, I love procedures. I never shut up about them. So whenever someone asks, ‘how am I supposed to handle XYZ gameplay?’ then people like me usually assume the answer is to apply a procedure to it somehow. In particular, the logic of this situation usually goes something like, ‘we've long relied on a procedure for dungeons and a procedure for the wilderness, so surely it only makes sense to also include a procedure for settlements (being the third major environment that the players find themselves in).’
“But there's the problem: procedures don't map onto environments very well. They map onto activities.
…
“Cities are the same way. You say you want to ‘solve’ cities by finally making the one, true city procedure. But I ask you: what would we build this procedure to do? Yes, we know it's for "gameplay taking place in cities." But what kind of gameplay? Shopping? Investigating? Heists? Rooftop chases? These are all different activities with different relevant factors, and trying to consolidate all of them under one master procedure is not only difficult, it wouldn't even make much sense.”
Urban Gameplay Part 2: Crawling (is not the answer)
“Forcing players to make choices one street at a time is monotonous and asinine. City streets and intersections, tending to be more uniform than dungeon corridors and rooms, almost never present a meaningful choice to be made. ‘We walk two blocks south, turn east and walk one block, cross the street, turn south and walk three blocks...’
“Pretending that settlements are functionally the same as dungeons and forcing your players to ‘crawl’ through them accordingly is overkill. What do you gain by forcing the players to specify the exact route they take through the city? What do you lose by handwaving it? Even if you don't have a map and you've never been in this city before in your life, you can always just ask locals, follow road signs, and make enough inferences based on your surroundings in order to reliably get anywhere you want to ‘just by the mere intention.’
“So yes, I advise you to accept statements from the players like, ‘with the info we get from the detective, we head to the murder victim's house to talk to his wife,’ or, like, "If there's an apothecary in town, I'd like to go to it," and not expect anything further of the player. You don't ask, ‘okay, how do you get to the murder victim's house?’ because that's not really reasonable. What are they supposed to say? Would an answer to that question really make a difference at all?”
Urban Gameplay Part 3: Maps (usually aren't useful)
“This is not to say that you shouldn't ever have a map for your settlements. They do still have value, just not in the way you probably expect.
“I'm a big advocate for handouts, especially visual handouts. I love me some picture book design. Because even when the gameplay doesn't demand visual perception (e.g. spatial reasoning, spotting details, recognizing and reading patterns, etc.), pictures are still a great way to feed the players' brains. If it's pretty and evocative, it can instill a sense of place and even inspire ideas for the heroes.
…
“When you communicate the city's points of interest to your players, you could recite them aloud, but that would kinda suck. You could hand them a list, and that would be fine. But if you handed them a simple picture, where each item is scattered around and there's a little drawing of brick walls and a river running through, that would be just a little bit better. It's still functionally the same as the list, for the most part, but it adds that extra dash of tangibility that may engage the players more successfully. It's especially useful if you follow my advice from Part 2 about splitting your settlement up into districts.”
Urban Gameplay Part 4: Megacities (aren't always the answer)
“In a way, we might consider Bastion to be like a ‘mythic city,’ in the same way that the original dungeons were a ‘mythic underworld.’
“For one thing, the city is ridiculously big, implied to be so large and complicated and zany that the players can discover a new borough every week and still have endlessly more left to find. In fact, they likely won't even return to those previous ones, either. The city is ever-changing!
“Because it's huge and industrialized, we can justify having novel transit methods (unlike in a medieval city, where the size of the settlement will never be large enough to warrant anything other than basic roads). And because it shares similar pressures to a dungeon or the wilderness, we can justify actually crawling it and implementing random encounters as a way to create danger.
“Maybe most importantly of all, it's a city worth forcing the players to ‘discover’ every destination one at a time because the destinations are always bananas. There are no generic locations. There's nothing you can just ‘assume’ will be in this place. It's 100% weird hidden gems.”
Urban Gameplay Part 5: Breaking Ground (without breaking your back)
“As I've said before, the social landscape matters even more than the physical landscape. See the works of Amanda P to learn more about this (and maybe perhaps my own post). Before simply cooking up a bunch of quirky characters though, I'd start by thinking bigger.
“Major communities, subcultures, ethnic groups, political movements, and so on. Can the people of this settlement be divided into major categories somehow? Even if it's just ‘east sider’ and ‘west sider,’ that has way more potential than you'd think. They could be hierarchical, lateral, qualitative, quantitative, you name it. Taking the time to decide on this first will make it way easier to both generate NPCs as well as the plots that arise from interacting with them.
“Additionally, you should have factions, not just individual NPCs. You probably already know this, but it's worth writing it down here. Having a handful of factions is better than just having a bunch of miscellaneous NPCs because they drive conflict and adventure just by their basic existence. They're motivated, they have lots resources, and they pretty much always have reasons to get involved with the party (e.g. hire the PCs for quests, recruit the PCs as members, be targeted by the PCs, etc.). If you make an enemy of an individual, you can just kill them and it's over. But if you make an enemy of a faction, you now have an ongoing problem, and defeating them probably requires attacking them systematically.”
Urban Gameplay Part 6: Concrete Jungle Gyms
“Because of both the availability and density of settlement information before the players, handouts of some kind are promoted from ‘a nice little way to enhance the experience’ to ‘a practical necessity.’ I'm not asking you to break out the arts and crafts supplies. Mostly this is just a matter of writing things down.
“Don't attempt to conduct shopping verbally. Hand your players a list of items with prices. Don't list off the settlement's major sites verbally. Either write them down and hand over the list, or, better yet, give them a simple map with some labeled dots on it. Also, give them a list of generic locations they can simply assume will always be available in nearly any settlement. Don't list off the factions verbally. Hand your players a chart with a single-sentence description of each one and some arrows indicating their relationships. If you're going to use a job board, then maybe just hand them a job board.
“You can also give incomplete versions of these things, where players have to fill in the blanks themselves. Tell them that the map of major sites is incomplete, and they may discover more major sites the longer they stay in town. Give them the chart of factions but make them figure out the relationships themselves.”
Urban Gameplay Bibliography
This one I will summarize, as it is a collection of systems, adventures, blog posts and other links that influenced Knight at the Opera’s thoughts on city adventures. Among them, of course, my own adventure (Barkeep on the Borderlands) but another post I’d like to highlight is the excellent The Village of Fishtown blogpost from Swamp of Monsters. Suspiciously absent from the list? Knight at the Opera’s own A Thorough Look at Urban Gameplay in D&D from just 4 years prior! I, for one, won’t stand for Knight at the Opera’s attempt to erase from the annuls of history the excellent work that has been posted at… Knight at the Opera.
I sometimes pretend my own view toward urban adventuring is akin to that advice from the original West Marches series from ars ludi:
“the adventure is in the wilderness, not the town — As per the discussion of NPCs above, be careful not to change the focus to urban adventure instead of exploration. You can have as many NPCs as you want in town, but remember it’s not about them. Once players start talking to town NPCs, they will have a perverse desire to stay in town and look for adventure there. “Town game” was a dirty word in West Marches. Town is not a source of info. You find things by exploring, not sitting in town — someone who explores should know more about what is out there than someone in town.”
However, that is a total lie. After all, I wrote an adventure (the aforementioned Barkeep on the Borderlands) that takes place entirely in a city and have ran a few urban campaigns (one was a police procedural style game in a medieval city plagued by unsolved murders, another was a campaign where the focus was on gaining political power over a major city, eventually leading to a citywide revolution).
Around the Blogosphere
Knight at the Opera isn’t the only one thinking about urban adventure. Behold, a number of recent posts from other bloggers that are all, more or less, related to providing advice for adventuring within so-called civilization:
Among Cats and Books describes how to prep and run Sandbox Settlements.
Behind the Helm began their own series on Building Cities as Adventure Locations.
A Billiam Banock for Every System released some Spark Tables for Cities as a follow-up to their fix for city adventures.
Blog of Forlorn Encystment was a few months early to the party with their post On Settlements.
Box Full of Boxes devised A Merchant Generator.
The Foot of Blue Mountain described A City Called Hell.
HAEC ASTRA VERA asked “What's The Deal With This Town?” and provided 100 possible answers.
Pathika wrote about the minimum you need for Creating Your Own Adventurer City.
Revivify Games provided a high quality map of Urik, City of Lions, a Dark Sun city-state.
Ruprecht’s RPG Blog already did their own roundup of blogposts on this post (who do you think you are?! Me?! Or am I you?).
Vaults of Vaarn previewed some Vaarnish Settlements.