Hey Vincent Baker ! I just got the hard copy of Unframed and have been lovingly imbibing its pages along with some Bruchladdie Peat Project.
I gotta say, your essay is sublime. Its wonderful when you can ‘get inside’ one of your favourite designers headspace for a while. This struck me the most, even after playing almost exclusively PbtA games for the last few years:
Take a few minutes to think about how the world is, how things work, and what people are like, in principle, in the abstract. You’ve probably been doing this already, by gut, as you’ve been imagining the game and getting excited to play. It won’t hurt to make it explicit.
Cultivate principles and contradictions as a way of thinking of things. Find the principles underlying the characters in the books you read, the setting design in the movies you watch, even the real-world physical principles that underlie the weather and the social principles that underlie the communities around you. Find the contradictions that make one character stand out from others, that motivate a character to act against her allies or herself. Notice to yourself the contradictions in your friends and in your own experience.
When you improvise a place with inbuilt contradictions, you do more than give it character and detail. You give the players something to fix on, hook into, bounce off of, talk about. They can use it to position their characters and set them up for action.
Gold, solid gold. I thank you for opening my brain to your maelstrom yet again!