Embrace the fuzzy
In the High Medieval Age precise maps simply did not exist. Even in the Reinannsence, maps were a secret of state, and an expensive one. The average guy, when travelling, just followed the road and asked the locals as he went. Why then, on medieval games, the typical adventurers have better knowledge of the world than the entire colleges of Oxford?
Can you tell me what’s in the drawers of your neighbours? Or even yours: down to the last item?
How come, then, we see many gamemasters worry when they haven’t made up the stats of every dweller of their world. Or who spend hours trying to anticipate even the weirdest action their players could think of? Like if it were possible, to begin with.
The dungeon model
Old School games used to pitch a few characters exploring a dungeon, killing the monsters and grabbing the treasure. Simple and straighforward, the adventure designer, often a fourteen years old, torn off a few pages from a squared notebook, and drawed a plan of about two dozen rooms and the interconnecting corridors. He added a few traps, a couple of puzzles, some treasures and monsters and a big bad guy, and that was that.
Our enterprising and imaginative teen gamemaster has the help of a few random tables like random treasure or wandering monsters.
Then, when his friends began playing our 14 y/o gamemasters knew they would do something funny. No worries, he was prepared for it. His imagination was quick to meet any challenge, because he had a strong framework for a work. If it everything failed he could make use of all he had learned reading The Lords of the Rings or Narnia.
The Scene model
This is the one I have chosen for my own game. You could see it as a dungeon of shorts, only that scenes take the place of rooms. When I follow the scene model I do not need to worry or care about the whole game world; but just these hot spots and then only to as far as it’s rellevant to the adventure.
When the players do something unexpected, I can react pretty much the same than my dungeon master counter does. I draw from the treasury of my historical knowledge, the fiction I have read or watched and the campaign we are playing to respond.
One tool I love to use is the Mythic Game Master Emulator. It is a sort of role-playing oracle built with a couple of tables and few dice rolls which supercharge your subsconscious.
With Newsies & Bootblacks I have not gone that far and ambitious; Mythic GME is cheap and good enough for me to endorse it, but I will be providing a rumor system that could match some of that spirit. When you are stuck, and can’t make up your mind about some aspect of the game world, just treat it as if it were a rumor. Then rate your rumor from A (almost certain) to E (the stuff of high fantasy) and roll a die. If you reach such target number then the rumor is true, at least partially, if not it’s false.
Enough for now. I will be speaking more about the Scene Model soon enough, and providing an example mini-game to play Charles Dyckens’ Oliver Twist, with ultra simple rules, which will be perfectly playable.
As long as you embrace the fuzzy.