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Layers of Play

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As I get back into my hobby I find myself in that position of remembering how easy things used to feel and how hard-earned they are now. One example of that I want to explore in this article is this idea I'm terming, "Layers of Play."

At it's heart this idea is about incorporating more layers of detail, choice, and interest to all aspects of play. This, of course, depends on the game system, style, players, and referee.

A Room

I want to start with a simple example to highlight what I'm driving at. Let's talk about a room in a dungeon.

Starting off, the base layer would be: Monsters or obvious treasure

This leaves a dungeon feeling empty, but playable. It is also where we all start. So we begin to add layers.

Layers we begin to add are:

You get the idea. Each layer we add makes the game feel more rich. This same idea applies to other core aspects of a game.

NPC

NPCs are my weakness. So much so I wrote about it in Love, Hate, and NPCs. I want to list layers of an NPC so that you can get a sense of the idea of layers at play.

Lets move on to towns and cities.

Towns

Towns are easy to treat as abstract locations where parties shop, recover, and gather quests, but again we can add more layers.

More!

Hexes

Magical Items

Henchmen/NPCs

Creatures

Religions

Groups/Gangs/Factions/Peoples

Encounters

One Bite at a Time

There are always more aspects of a game you can take this approach to.

The idea is, though, that we can add layers and layers of play to our games.

Here's the challenge though, its a question of preparation and improvisation.

Game prep is something most folks want to reduce to the least amount of time. The trick is to balance layers and prep work. I want to also separate two types of prep.

Before the Table and at the Table

Two types of prep are before the table and at the table. They're very different and I think make a big difference in your ability to reduce prep but expand your layering.

Before the table prep is all the work you do in advance of the game. You can spend this time creating NPCs with all the layers, dungeons with all the layers, etc. This all leads to a very well described game. This would be typical of dungeon preparation where you usually have a dungeon prepared prior to the players encountering it. You don't have to do this, but I think it works out that most people can't improvise a dungeon very successfully.

At the table prep is a variation of before the table prep. The premise is that most of the layers make the game interesting but are optional. So, you spend your time preparing what is truly essential to the game, and build tools to make your time at the table better. The most common example are tables and prepared dungeons.

At the table prep lets you quickly create an NPC at the table that has the right mixture of layers without preparing in advance. You can quickly roll up an NPC with as many of these layers as you need to keep the game flowing, and those tables will provide high-reuse throughout your game.

Stretch Into More Layers

The point of this article isn't to point out anything new about layers itself or that you can specialize your prep to help you with it. The point of this article is to point out that every one of us has a sweet spot of layers we consider in our games. There are other layers that aren't obvious to us, are hard to prep, and hard to include.

I think an interesting exercise (and the reason for this article), is to list the layers you can, so you can pick the ones to stretch yourself by incorporating next time you play.