Play to find out

I don't know what Blorb stands for (if anything) but it's the name of a set of refereeing principles for roleplaying that you can read here. The essence of the thing is not to prepare a plot but just to define NPCs' stats and motivations and events that will happen unless the player-characters do something, and then let the story emerge in play. You know, the way life works.

In a nutshell:

• Blorb is a preparation-focused playstyle, and prep is central, but never prepare plot.
• Do prepare entities. Places, enemies, friends, items, rewards. 
• What happens should be emergent, not prewritten. Events should be things that might happen (from mechanics, dice rolls etc), not always will happen, or, worse, that the DM could decide to have happen.

If you like concepts like act breaks, character arcs, flashbacks, plot twists, and all that Save the Cat/TV Tropes palaver then Blorb is not for you. And I would add that if you do like all that stuff then you should be writing a novel or screenplay instead of running a roleplaying game, because you're missing 90% of what makes roleplaying a unique medium.

The ever-excellent Good Friends of Jackson Elias have a inspiring episode about reactive off-the-cuff GMing right here. I particularly like the description of a roleplaying scenario as "the negative space of a story" -- not that the best campaigns need anything you could call scenarios, mind. Anyway, come back tomorrow for a look at one way to weave stories out of games.

GM in your pocket

When Jamie and I were trying to convince the Eidos execs to fund development of the Fabled Lands MMO way back in the late '90s, one of the features we talked up was a storytelling AI:

"The GamesMaster AI will have a library of partially scripted adventures and story elements that it can bring in to liven things up whenever your character is having too easy a ride. These adventures are templates with slots to accommodate friends and enemies you've picked up in the course of your travels.

"For example: you take a bounty hunter's job and go hunting bandits. You round up most of the horde but the leader, Black Nat Varley, escapes. Later, while implementing a random attempt on your life, the AI fills in the assassin's identity as being Black Nat. If Nat survives your second encounter, he'll eventually show up in another encounter and so on. (Maybe NPC adversaries who survive more than three encounters are classed as "dear foes" and have their own level increases tied to yours so as to always give you a good battle.) 

"And the GamesMaster AI will also take account of your character class, deity, etc, when introducing new missions and encounters. It can also randomly generate adventure locations as needed, spicing things up by adding special elements so that they never seem just random. This means that every campaign will be unique."

We looked at Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale for patterns the GamesMaster AI could draw on. The idea was that it would throw in plot twists and tropes, applying them with common sense. So having a storm at sea might be an interesting random event when you were setting out on a quest, but if you'd completed an adventure and were sailing home to deliver the princess back to her father (or vice versa) then it would realize that a potential shipwreck would just be an irritating distraction.

Fast-forward 25 years and the AI is nearly there. Game developer Hidden Door is working on a platform that effectively creates gamebook-style text adventures on the fly. So when I was talking a little while back about AI-generated covers for Fabled Lands books, I might have been a little too unimaginative. Pretty soon you could have endless open-world adventures whenever you want them, right there on your phone. Not just text, either. This is the current state of play with text-to-video: 

This entire movie was generated by AI. Every single pixel you see here is fake 🤯

RIP Hollywood ⚰️pic.twitter.com/VlIIv8zb5g

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) April 28, 2023

By the end of the year, who knows where we'll have got to. Nick Henfrey and I are using AI artwork for our boardgame A Thunder of Dragons (details on the Flat Earths gaming blog) and maybe by the time we've finished that it'll be time to think about a videogame.