I’ve been reading Hamlet’s Hit Points (HHP) by Robin D. Laws (available here) recently and thought it might be interesting to try to use the concept of dramatic hope/fear beats at the table. If you haven’t read it, the basic idea is that stories consist of beats of various kinds that move to audience toward hope that the hero will succeed or fear that they will fail.
To do that I drew the chart to the right and used the chips to keep track of whether we were going down towards fear or up towards hope. For our game hope was positive/solving the mystery fear was negative/scary/deepening the mystery. HHP talks about Dramatic beats, Procedural beats, Gratification beats and a variety of other situations that can result in a move toward hope or fear. This system doesn’t distinguish between the various kinds of beats, just whether the story was moving up or down. Any movement up, moved all of the chip to the center line and one chip up to hope, and the reverse happened for movement toward fear. A rule of thumb from Hamlet was Shakespeare never had more than three beats in either direction in a row, while Dr. No had as many as five or more. As a GM, I could look at the status and say, it might be a good time for an up or down beat now, depending on where we were.
This done, we sat down to play game of Trail of Cthulhu using a home made investigation. We play over Skype, we’ve been doing that for about 4 years now, so the issues of Skype are familiar to us. Particularly the issues of not playing with even video, it’s just audio.
In practice I found two interesting things and underlined a truth that I have known for a while. First thing I found was that my sense of how things were going tracked pretty closely with where the chips told me it was. If I felt the mood was dark and worried, I’d see that we were 3 or more chips in the Fear. If we were joking and light hearted, sure enough we’d be more than 2 chips in the Hope. I was probably less careful about tracking up beats.
The second thing I found was that the players had more control over the progression than I imagined. In HHP, gratification beats are generally followed by a free floating up arrow. Which is great for movies, plays and literature, but in games, every participant has the opportunity to make a joke at any time which lightens the mood and clearly works to reverse direction on the chart toward Hope. I found that my players would routinely make a joke after 4-5 down beats, which effectively allowed me as GM to not worry about providing a break in the tension, the players would do that themselves. Alternately, you could look at it as robbing the GM of the ability to control the tension. As we got closer to solving the mystery, the up beats came fast and furious. It will be interesting to see how the chart works during an action scene.
The truth that was underlined by considering the flow of the story as procedural beats was that I don’t know enough about what makes a compelling story as I should. I feel that If I knew the structure of a story I would be better able to use where we were in manipulating the tension and story. I feel like this is an area that I need to learn more about to improve my games.
(Thumbs Up graphic from Gameplaywright available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License)
