I was thinking about narrative Hunt structure all weekend (albeit in the framework of the Prisoner, rather than PKD).
The first observation: the "fake theme" that has shown up in the past few Hunts (but not this year's) is an elementary example of this. Team has a notion of the story. They solve puzzles. Suddenly, having solved a puzzle, the reward is information which transforms the story! The *narrative* has taken a sharp left, but the players don't miss it because the *game mechanics* are behaving in the ordinary way (you solve the puzzles, and get rewarded).
My next step would be to set up conflict between the two levels. Have a dark, scary storyline which the players are *ambivalent* about taking part in -- but they have no choice; solving the puzzles takes you through the storyline, and the Hunt is about solving puzzles. (In my Prisoner motif, this might be a storyline about betrayal, or collusion with the authorities. You are the bad guys! Solve puzzles to defeat the good guys!)
Beyond that it gets trickier. You'd like to add narrative choices to the game, but you don't want a situation like "Do you want to do X or Y?" where plot path X has different puzzles from path Y. That's a waste of puzzle-writing time.
You also want the narrative choices to have important outcomes -- not just changing the flavor text -- but you *don't* want a team to be eliminated from the Hunt just because they made the wrong story choice. (You don't want teams to be eliminated at all, really.) Similarly, inter-team rivalry is great, but how do you make it significant without causing a team to get screwed because some other team decided to screw them?
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Date: 2006-01-18 11:44 pm (UTC)The first observation: the "fake theme" that has shown up in the past few Hunts (but not this year's) is an elementary example of this. Team has a notion of the story. They solve puzzles. Suddenly, having solved a puzzle, the reward is information which transforms the story! The *narrative* has taken a sharp left, but the players don't miss it because the *game mechanics* are behaving in the ordinary way (you solve the puzzles, and get rewarded).
My next step would be to set up conflict between the two levels. Have a dark, scary storyline which the players are *ambivalent* about taking part in -- but they have no choice; solving the puzzles takes you through the storyline, and the Hunt is about solving puzzles. (In my Prisoner motif, this might be a storyline about betrayal, or collusion with the authorities. You are the bad guys! Solve puzzles to defeat the good guys!)
Beyond that it gets trickier. You'd like to add narrative choices to the game, but you don't want a situation like "Do you want to do X or Y?" where plot path X has different puzzles from path Y. That's a waste of puzzle-writing time.
You also want the narrative choices to have important outcomes -- not just changing the flavor text -- but you *don't* want a team to be eliminated from the Hunt just because they made the wrong story choice. (You don't want teams to be eliminated at all, really.) Similarly, inter-team rivalry is great, but how do you make it significant without causing a team to get screwed because some other team decided to screw them?