The Kenku Structure

Rereading some stuff from The Alexandrian blog and listening to Chris McDowell's podcasts has got me reflecting on my experiences both as a GM and as a player surrounding information, and techniques and structures it supports. In an rpg, information is kind of everything, but this goes double for mysteries. And I feel like mystery scenarios get abused, because of the idea that you can tightly control the information granted the players, and therefore control their activities - basically, if your railroad contains some unknown elements, you can slap the label "mystery" on it to make it kosher.

If you couldn't already tell, I'll be putting my Golden Rule ("Ye shall not get yourself Wound Up") under considerable stress here - hear it creak and strain with the pressure!

[A note: I've updated this from its original version, stripping out a lot of useless asides (yes, there were even more originally!), and intend to post a follow up to these ideas as and when. Until then, enjoy!]

🕸

Here's a principle I live by when I GM - the Info Principle: Not knowing something is not fun gameplay.

This goes hand in hand with the Discovery Principle: Discovery is fun gameplay; only keep secret that which is designed to be discovered.

This is important when thinking about gameplay generally, but especially when thinking about mysteries. See, a lot of GMs get mysteries wrong - they don't understand how they work. And, as I'll explain in a bit, they misapply the concept to cover stuff up. The main misunderstanding is thinking that not knowing something is fun for the players. At best, not knowing something can enable fun for the players, but only where the fun being enabled comes in the form of discovering the information.

In a mystery, everything is designed to be discovered. That doesn't mean the players have to discover everything by the end of the game - they could fail to solve the mystery, for one thing, and that's perfectly fine. What it means is the there's no piece of information that the GM is hiding from the players where the GM hasn't thought about how the players could discover it, and made sure that there is a way (probably a few, if the mystery is well designed). This almost looks like a truism, but it's important to observe that the focus of play is on discovering the information, not withholding it. It's also informative to think of the structure of the scenario itself as the main piece of info to be discovered.

A mystery works similarly to a dungeon. Alright, I know everyone always says "X scenario structure works just like a dungeon." But I have a specific point here.

A mystery works similarly to a dungeon, in that it involves navigating a series of scenes that are interlinked in a web, and even more specifically, in that the goal of the scenario is primarily to gain an understanding of the overall structure of the web - how the scenes all stand in relation to one another. In a dungeon, these scenes are individual rooms, while in a mystery they're investigation scenes - in a dungeon, the relations between scenes are topological, while in a mystery they're largely inferential, i.e.: they're clues that point to where you can find more information, which will connect you to more scenes. Solving the mystery means figuring out how all these clues, and thus all these scenes, are interrelated.

This is what I mean when I say that the structure of the scenario itself - the specific way all these scenes relate to one another - is the key piece of information the GM is withholding from the players. And this is why it's important to think of the fun of the game as residing in slowly uncovering this overall layout, like slowly exploring the layout of a dungeon, rather than in simply having the solution withheld. Because the concept of a mystery as simply any scenario structure in which the links between scenes are obfuscated can be used as a fig leaf to cover up the sin of - fear its name - the Railroad.

🕸

Lets talk about Kenku. Justin Alexander coined a useful phrase: The Kenku Problem. The Kenku Problem is - and I'm simplifying here - when the individual objectives in a scenario don't actually matter, because the scenario's designer isn't concerned with what those objectives are so much as with making the players move between them. In essence, the Kenku Problem treats the PCs' objectives like a waypoint marker in a videogame; it doesn't matter what it points to, the point is they're telling you to go there.

Obviously, the Kenku Problem is largely a symptom of railroading. If the designer has prepped the next scene at location A, they don't want to risk the PCs coming up with an alternative plan to achieve their goal that takes them to B instead. Hence the designer doesn't give the PCs meaningful goals that make any sense, because these could potentially be multiply realisable. It's fundamentally a way of designing from the scene outwards; you start with the scene that you want to happen, and then work out how to get the PCs there. And, obviously, stringing together a load of scenes that you want to happen regardless of what the players or their characters might actually want is building a railroad. Let's call this type of railroad the Kenku Structure: A railroad where the reasons for seeking out or activating scenes are designed not to matter, because proper reasons might give the players cause to exercise agency over which scenes get activated.

An interesting symptom of the Kenku Structure that I've noticed is what I call the Bass Ackwards Scene: The scene the characters couldn't possibly have a good reason to pursue/be in unless they were already privy to information that only gets revealed in the scene. This is a sort of Catch 22 that gets played out at the table: The PCs wouldn't know to activate the scene unless they'd experienced it already, but the players sense the GM pointing them in that direction, so that's what they do. The movie Serenity has a really good example of this in my opinion: It makes no sense for the crew to try so hard to get to the planet Miranda unless they already knew the revelation that waited for them there, and how important it was. And they didn't - the writers knew, but the characters didn't.

In this way, the Kenku Structure actually relies a lot on self-railroading, since it relies on the players figuring out where the GM wants them to go, even where that doesn't make sense for the characters, and then dropping the reason for going there once they're there, since the reason was really only an excuse to get them to the scene (see the related issue: Abused Gamer Syndrome). A clue, then, that you're trapped in a Kenku Structure is if the PCs struggle to articulate why they're doing a certain thing, or what they hope to achieve in the coming scene and how. If asking these sorts of questions in character appears disruptive to the game, you might also be caught in a Kenku Structure.

Can you see how limited information begins to tie into this? In a non-railroad situation, the game is about being set a problem and figuring out how to solve it, with PCs setting up their own scenes accordingly. This obviously doesn't fly with a railroad, so figuring out how to solve the problem can't be the focus of the game. But what, then, is the focus of the game? Well, there's a scenario structure where the gameplay doesn't reside in player-mandated scenes to set up a solution, but instead resides in players finding out which scene follows from which: The mystery.

In a Kenku Structure, finding out where the GM wants you to go next gets passed off as gameplay. Links between scenes are mandated by the GM, but are obfuscated; the GM knows where they want you to go next, but conceals where that is, or what's actually there. The game then becomes about unearthing where the next waypoint is. The thought is that being in the dark about where to go for the next scene, and only revealing that at the end of the current scene, prevents the appearance of there being a set path - if the players don't know where they're going, or even why they're here, until they're told, then they won't feel strapped to one set path, because they're always uncertain about where it leads.

This is, of course, ridiculous.

This motivation behind the Kenku Structure doesn't account for the loss of player agency that a railroad entails; the players may not be able to predict exactly what's coming up next, but they don't feel they have a hand in causing it - this is the main casualty of railroading. Plus, players' perception of railroading is diachronic, meaning it happens over time, not all at once. Revealing only one section of the railroad at a time doesn't get rid of the sensation that one's been travelling a pre-set path, unless the players are literally only engaging with one scene at a time, and blanking any overall picture. At the point where your players display that level of passivity, enough to make the Kenku Structure and its obfuscation actually effective, you have bigger problems to worry about than game structure (which is saying something).

More than that, this is abusing the concept of a scenario based around discovery. This is why I was very clear above about how slowly uncovering the overall structure of the mystery scenario was the sense in which discovery made that sort of game fun. In the Kenku Structure, there's no question of discovering the scenario's structure, because there is no real structure to discover - it's a straight line. Instead, it relies on simply obscuring individual links between scenes. In a mystery scenario, working these out is padding; the better a mystery is, the more you can just give this info to the players and let them cut straight to the fun of trying to put it together to form an overall picture. This accords with the Info Principle; having players in the dark about the clues can make space for fun scenes as they try to obtain them, but it isn't in itself the fun of the scenario. Everything has to come back to the mystery to which that activity is, at best, a footnote.

In the Kenku Structure, this padding - ferreting out the clue to the next scene, then discarding the current scene and moving on - is all there is. A mystery scenario, similarly to a dungeon, actually relies on the players' ability to determine their own pathway through the scenario structure, and thus dictate how they build up their own overarching picture. And the Kenku Structure, obviously, can't allow for that, firstly because it's linear, and secondly because the links between scenes aren't designed to make rational sense, just to move the players along.

You wouldn't say a dungeon scenario revolved around discovery because it consisted of ten rooms in a straight line, but where each doorway to the next room was concealed. What you'd say was that it missed the point both of a dungeon and of how secret doors work in such a scenario, and possibly of the word 'discovery' also. The same goes for mysteries; the discovery at their heart relies on having a non-linear structure to navigate and explore, and obfuscating connections doesn't create that, it just creates padding.

To sum up then, the Kenku Structure finds itself devoid of actual gameplay, since there's nothing for the PCs to do except trot to the next waypoint. So it tries to draft in fun gameplay from discovery-based scenarios like mysteries. However, this is to misunderstand how these scenario structures work, and to misinterpret the fun of discovery as the non-fun of obfuscation.

🕸

I've already strayed a little close to the edge here with my golden rule: Don't write to get yourself wound up, write about stuff because it's interesting. Railroading is a topic that always gets me frustrated, but it's always interesting to think about how scenario structures can malfunction, and the railroad is the granddaddy of malfunctioning scenarios structures. I'm inclined to agree with Justin Alexander that we've reached a point in gaming culture where the introductory scenario we ask new GMs to run is no longer the freeform adventure location based around discovery, such as a dungeon, but rather the linear railroad based around following the GM's plot. I see the Kenku Structure as an attempt to actually provide gameplay when this is the only paradigm you know, and the only scenario structure you feel equipped to run. It's far too tempting to try to get into this here, so I'll leave off now, and leave the discussion of exactly what motivates a GM adopting the Kenku structure until a future post. Until then, stay happy and healthy.