Understanding this article may hinge on your having read that series. I can't be sure, as I wrote both, and so both make perfect sense to me.
Reading it back, there's a bit of a gap - I discuss what games to play, how many games to play, how to rationalize whether you've got the time, and even how to deliver your story, but never what types of stories to write.
The difficulty inherent to that question is that it's formed in the negative; there's an assumption that of the body of possible narratives, not all are well suited to a wargaming event.
What follows could not possibly be an account of "the only way to do it", but it is a way to get a good product without much work.
So, without further ado, on the off chance you're having difficulty or feel like you need some guidance, here is my advice for writing narratives for wargaming events.
Returning Base Assumptions
I have a strong belief that a narrative wargaming event is best structured as a sort of club-sandwich of narrative and gaming.
Were one to cut into that sandwich, what you'd see are three layers of story, and three layers of gaming, alternating such that you start with a little story, and end with a game that wraps everything up.
This is mostly a matter of practicality; in a more traditional and intimate narrative wargaming setup - one with only one table and a gaggle of friends slouched around it - a dedicated Game Master can adorn every turn and player-action with significance, but at a larger event the organizer can only be so many places at once.
Returning to our club-sandwich, three is not the only number of 'layers' it can have, but it is what I would consider to be the minimum, as it allows for an initial state, rising action, and a climax. Given the time-suck that wargames represent, doing more than that minimum is probably going to be a special case.
Most people will likely be burned out after three repetitions of basically any game, back to back.
Handling Interactivity
The original Mass Effect trilogy is loved for a lot of things, but the mapping and conclusion of its interconnected narrative is not one of them.
Despite that, I think it makes a good template for how to structure narrative wargaming events by reflecting both on its successes and its failures.
The short version, for those too young, too old, or too cool to have played any of the games, is this: Mass Effect was a trilogy of video games published over a period of five years from 2007 to 2012 which claimed nearly from its outset that it would have a story spanning all three games.(1)
This was achieved in a clever way - each game had a branching story which ended at a singular nexus point where player choices would determine the rough shape of the outcome, and the consequences would flow into the next game.
As we will discuss, it is the translation of those consequences between games where Mass Effect ultimately fell flat.
Designers of wargame event narratives have a similar challenge - by dint of the way almost all games are designed, wargames included, there is a base assumption critical to balance that each game be its own environment, more or less independent of other iterations of the game.
Each game has to be able to function, mechanically, as something of a blank slate.
That's not to say you can't have asymmetric, narratively driven modifications taking place, but as Mass Effect demonstrates, the variety of combinations of those factors becomes unwieldy quite quickly, both from a standpoint of mechanical balance and from the realization of narrative consequences.
The dissatisfaction with the ending of the Mass Effect trilogy was nearly universal on release of the third game, and most people irked by the shitty conclusion to such an epic story would probably agree that the designer's solution - to simply not pay off many narrative threads meaningfully - was not the correct one.
It's unlikely that this was always the plan, but it's something of a practical inevitability - by the end you can feel the narrative ripping at the seams. Three games of story was just too much to juggle at once: the efflorescent variety of input combinations in a narrative that long became unmanageable, and the solution of just ignoring certain combinations didn't work.
There were just too many choices, and with each player making only one set, paying them all off satisfactorily was just never going to be practical or sensible.
Rather than ignore the complexities presented by an ongoing narrative, we must employ a bit of clever legerdemain and truncate those branches before they become relevant.
Stories and Spaces
Narratives take place in spaces - even those which do not, take place in an un-space which is mutually exclusive with real spaces in a space-like way.
Movement through space is often used to truncate portions of a narrative, as absent some kind of transcendental alteration to "the way things are", consequences tend to be localized at some scale.
For example, very few things that have ever happened on Earth have an impact on anything that has happened on the Moon, and the running battles between your various gut flora have very little bearing on those totally similar struggles in the guts of the king of Bhutan.
In both cases, that discontinuity is not necessarily total, or permanent; in a story, whether and when consequences move between places is totally up to the person holding the pen.
As designers we control the flow of consequences between places, because those places do not actually exist. Artfully managing that is critical to building interactive narratives which offer choice in the immediate present, but permit the abandonment of consequences as-needed.
The narrative of Mass Effect fails as a design because it offers too much freedom, and can't pay it off; there's often no diegetic reason you can't go back to places you went previously and see the effects of some of your actions.
You have a spaceship, but most of the places you've been in prior games just ain't on the list of stops. It was too burdensome to update every location from each prior game, so they just didn't include them.
What can be learned from this is that real freedom of movement can backfire quickly and in a big way in any long form interactive narrative, as it requires you to account for various acts of retreat and retrieval which are sensible, prudent, useful, and can totally undermine threats and dilemmas that you may wish to present.
Like with anything, people will be mindful of what choices they are not allowed to make, so it is not enough that we simply disallow backtracking or open wandering which would undermine the gravity and momentum of the story - we must make it unthinkable.
This can be achieved rather trivially by making your wargaming event's narrative about, at least in part, movement through space: running from something, rushing towards something, climbing, descending, escaping, or exploring.
Interactive narratives are imbued with a great deal of momentum if "back" is a direction you cannot go, either because it is implicitly the direction which ends the narrative, or because what is behind you spells utter doom.
Where to Start and Stop
After lunch, not before, was likely the better time to write this article, but as I'm hungry we'll return to our long abandoned club-sandwich.
Note the layers. See how they glisten. How the dew on the room temperature shaved turkey scintillates.
Perhaps you're hungry - hungry for narrative wargaming - and would like to build a sandwich of your own? Let's talk about how much to put in each layer, so you don't find yourself too stuffed for seconds.
There's a helpful quote attributed(2) to the American choreographer Bob Fosse, with regard to the structure of musical theater:
- "The time to sing is when your emotional level is just too high to speak anymore, and the time to dance is when your emotions are just too strong to only sing about how you feel"
With that in mind, we can start to make decisions about what goes into each of our delicious narrative layers.
If you're going to make a show where people are dancing, it helps to figure out why they're doing it, and then you can backfill the rest. The dancing is what people are there to see.
Start with the gameplay first, and identify what verbs the game you are designing your event for does well. This verb is to be the focus of your narrative. Often that is just "fighting and killing", but it can have more subtle shades in a lot of wargames.
Next, contrive a narrative in which those verbs are relevant in short bursts, punctuated by movement through space. Think about modes of movement, and a kind of pressure which can incite urgency. Think about where you're moving to, and why.
Finally, provide only the information which justifies those explosions of story-driven action, and let that dictate the realized shape of the narrative-as-text. That may seem obvious, but it bears repeating: when designing the narrative, only employ as much story as is required to justify the attendant gameplay.
If you take nothing else from this article, it should be that Bob Fosse would think all wargamers are dancers.
Write Your Stories Backwards
When I talk about stories I often use the analogy of a vector - a line with a set direction. Naturally that has a beginning, an end, and between the two there's a bit called "the middle".
Writing a story from the middle-out is a potential sign that you've picked the wrong thing to focus on; if the most interesting part is neither at the start nor the end, your story might have a weak hook, and a meandering third act.
Illustratively, there's also a term for when a story's conclusion is less interesting than the beats preceeding it - "anticlimax".
In order to ensure your story has strong rising action, the best thing to do is come up with the real "wow factor" and make sure that get's paid off at the end. This helps guarantee that no matter what else you add, things will end on a high note, and that you can bend the whole story to justifying that ending.
No matter how cool the premise, if you can't pay it off it's not worth pursuing.
Naturally, the best way to achieve this is to start with the end - that being the most important part, it can be easier to write with that as your foundation, rather than workshopping a cool opening premise that it may be difficult to pay off.
Don't feel too uncomfortable if your opening story-beat is a bit boring or under-written compared to the ending. That's both normal and good. As long as things get hotter with each act, you're on the right track.
Exempli Gratia - The Duke Must Die
As a final practicum of everything I've discussed, let's throw together the rough sketch of a narrative as a sort of stream-of-consciousness of my own process.
An idea which springs to mind as I'm writing this is one of players competing to assassinate a guy called Lucky Duke in his reinforced compound, "Luckyland".
Competing assassins were a common staple of mid-2000s action comedies, and I guess thinking so much about Mass Effect has sent my mind back to the 'aughties. Usually the cast's collective motivation is just that a big bounty has been put out, we'll just say it's a zillion dollars.
Even with just this initial concept we have a strong vector: everyone and their mother wants to get to Lucky Duke and split his wig or die trying. The story's simplicity is its strength. Only things which directly advance the goal of getting to Luckyland and killing Lucky Duke make sense, and we get to decide what that road looks like along the way.
If we take a step back, obviously we need a blocker to keep that from being the first and only fight, so we just assume that players can't just get to Luckyland from the outset.
Now, they must be able to somehow, otherwise we'd have no fun, so that means whatever wall Duke has up must have a door, and that door must have a key.
As we're clearly going to need NPC mechanics to handle 'Ol Duke in the final fight, we may as well get good use out of those by giving him a trio of shitass sons, in a trio of shitass locations which players can try to kidnap them from.
Let's say that Luckyland has biometric locks keyed to Lucky Duke and his idiot spawn. There's beat two: a fight to kidnap the lil Dukies. We can observe that with this beat our movement through space and therefore our momentum is maintained - once you have your hostage, there's no sense in sticking around. You're done where you are, and need to get to Luckyland.
For our inciting beat we could put up another wall between Luckyland and the rest of the world - one which is resolvable with ultraviolence - but for the moment I'm at a loss, and this is very much an exercise in adequacy, not excellence.
Let's stick with the simple motivation of money. For the first game we can have one player on the attack trying to collect a blood debt owed by the player on the defense.
At the conclusion we can have the party who opened the contract pull out, leaving both players in a bind - one with a debt, and the other with money they expected to come in, that didn't materialize. Suddenly somebody offers a bounty on Lucky Duke himself, and there's the payday.
And there we have it: three beats, some connective tissue, and the makings of a pretty decent little event. No fuss, no muss.
We get to meet all our players, kidnap some folks, and then take a shot at The Duke himself. There's never any going back, because there's nothing to go back to. There's just Lucky Duke, and a few dozen bullets with his name on them.
So that's it then. Practicum complete, article done.
Give it a try yourself and see how you do.
I for one can't wait to see what you write, hopefully I even get to play it some day!
Research Citations:
1.Xbox Magazine Issue 51, article "The Big Bang" by Francesca Reye, accessed via Archive.Gamehistory.Org
2.I swear to god I cannot figure out when Bob Fosse actually said this. Believe me, I tried. It's attributed to him all over the place, but without a specific citation.