Future Proof Games

We're posting a series of supplementary materials for Rosette Diceless that go into more detail than was appropriate for the main book. Our most recent piece, "Alternate Play Structures," explores options for structuring narration in a looser and more collaborative way than the Conflict system described in the book.

The article presents two structures: Best of Three, where competitions between characters are the result of three Contests of escalating creativity; and Round Robin, where players take turns framing a scenario and each character is highlighted in how they deal with it.

For example, your characters could be exploring a series of trap-filled catacombs. Each player would describe a fiendish booby-trapped room: maybe a spike-laden floor with an obscure safe path or a precarious catwalk menaced by swinging blades. For each room, the other players would describe how their characters get through it: one might pick their way through the obstacles as intended, while another might use their parkour skills to bypass the danger entirely.

These structures came out of our own playtesting. In fact, both Best of Three and Round Robin arose from the same session, which we called a "beach episode," where our sci-fi characters spent time on a resort planet on a week when no one had narrated story prepared.

To read the rest, see "Alternate Play Structures" on the Rosette site.