Sharing from Story games. Musings on oracle mechanics.

Sharing from Story games. Musings on oracle mechanics.

Originally shared by Nick Carter

Working on consolidating/speeding up the "Oracle consultation" portions of creative processes. This has most impact on [multiplayer] gaming prep and [solo or multiplayer] in-game improv of narrative/NPC dialogue (plus: answering player questions regarding perception of environment; PC discovery of clues/synergistic dot connecting of same clues during investigation puzzles; partial villain reveals or villain scheme reveals: cooking up magic item details... The lists are endless, really) but can also be a large portion of player character creation, as with vision cards/accompanying questions in Everway or similar games.

At this point oracles are a huge part of my storytelling/gaming process. Another word for them might be "muses" but I enjoy the word "oracle" more.

I enjoy them so much, in fact, that I've accumulated a bit of a glut of these randomized wells of inspiration. Her are a few that I enjoy most: GM's Apprentice, Fate Deck, Rory's Story Cubes, Everway's Fortune Deck (and Vision cards for plot/character development), Storymatic.

Some of these provide very specific story elements to incorporate (or reinterpret) into your ongoing narrative and world creation/refinement, like various fields on GM's Apprentice cards or Storymatic prompts. Others are primarily symbolic and require a lot of deeper reading into based on assumptions and hunches about your setting/characters/events, like the Fortune Deck or Rory's.

There are even endless lists in lookup tables for obtaining specific kinds of inspiration/story elements that are really great. Several games and related products use these as their primary mechanisms: Fiasco has playset lists for determining the two-way relationships between each adjacent player at the table, and uses the tilt table similarly; Engine Publishing's first couple books are packed with awesome snack-size plot and character ideas to build into full meals for your campaign, and provide several paths to get there: genre-divided lists of plots/characters, lists of tags that have been applied throughout these primary lists as a means to regroup them, and across the bottom of pages throughout the book Masks is an ongoing list of names to choose from that works beautifully. The folks at Engine provide great depth of insight into both the construction/thought process behind how the lists were made and how to generate your own similarly unbiased lists, providing enough info to be useful and inspiring while still maintaining brevity enough to cruise through. Even better/possibly more useful: actionable ideas on how to best remix the ideas presented in the books. So useful and appreciated!

I also heavily lean on less specific oracles for resolution or answering questions from players or that I have myself. Many of these rules were defined as a means of bridging narrative and game rules in the first place: Mythic's plot thread/character lists, chaos factor and Fate Chart/modified scenes/random events; Fate Core or FAE have the fractal/fuzzy rolls/skills or approaches/Fate points; Cortex Plus accumulates stress as a growing pool of dice on an opponent that can be seized upon by other characters in a way that can feel less artificial/truer to real world experience than a dwindling, quantified health or hit point total; Primetime Adventures uses improv theater's most sacred go-to prompts: "yes/no but/and..." which prove easily as useful a tool while gaming/writing.

And I keep accumulating still more oracles in search of something new. I really don't need to. There's a vast trove of inspiration among my existing tools, requiring varying amounts of effort to incorporate into ongoing stories or as inspiration for new ones.

I'm going to draw another analogy here from creative oracles to sound synthesizers: there tends to be an immense collection of great-sounding presets ("patches ") on any newly-acquired synth, but among many synth enthusiasts using these factory patches unmodified is blasphemy, akin to "biting rhymes" or outright plagiarism, and so a desire to tweak or roll your own from scratch often dominates the thoughts of these people.

So once I have a new, streamlined process nailed down - from conceptualizing a campaign setting, central plot events and background ones, characterization of governments, societies and individuals... To individual chapter/session planning, to off-the-cuff scene building, arbitration of scene resolution (sometimes you just don't want/need to roll those dice!) and record keeping for both fiction and mechanical purposes - I will definitely be sharing/looking for feedback. I'm hoping I can bring something useful to others while speeding up and bringing clarity to my own solo gaming.

I may make mention of whatever [quite possibly syncretic] gaming rules I settle on, but the focus will be on fiction rather than gamism or simulation