Contingency Envelopes

Contingency envelopes have been a staple of freeforms ever since I started playing them.

If you're unfamiliar with them, they consist of an envelope (or folded sheet of paper) with an instruction for when to open the envelope. It will typically be something like "Open this if you see item 56". If you see item 56, then you open the envelope and hopefully learn something that will help your game.

And I usually like contingency envelopes - particularly when I learn something new, or something that's timed. But poorly designed contingency envelopes offer nothing new, and there's an argument that you don't even need them.

The main advantage that contingency envelopes bring is that they drip feed information into a game without requiring significant GM involvement (which can be a scarce resource). But they also have their downsides.

Shogun

Recently I played in Shogun, a weekend long freeform (larp) for 70 or so players organised by uk-freeforms. Shogun was epic, expansive and filled with all the glorious goodness we hope for in a weekend larp and I wrote about it recently.

I played Kinyu, the cold moneylender. I wasn't evil, but I only had my own interests at heart.

And, along with pretty much everyone else, I had some contingency envelopes.

Failsafes

One was a timed envelope, for me to open during a particular event. This revealed the identity of a particular character who was important to me but who was in disguise at the start of the game. It was a failsafe to make sure that I actually met this character. (It's entirely possible in a game the size of Shogun for characters to never interact - there were lots of people I never spoke to in game.)

I have no problem with that kind of envelope, although unfortunately the way the contingency was labelled (linking it to a theatrical event) telegraphed who that character actually was.

In hindsight I think it would have been better if it had simply said "If you do not know who Yamamoto is by 11am Saturday, open this envelope."

Item (or person) 79

My other contingency said "Open this envelope if you see Item 79"

Inside, was a detailed description of an item, and what was special about it that my character would know but others wouldn't.

A quick aside: in freeforms it is usual to have an item card representing items (which could be a ship, a sextant, a gun, some wood, a tattoo - pretty much anything you can imagine really) rather than a prop. This helps distinguishes those items that are key to plots from costume props or scenery.

By the end of the game I hadn't seen item 79, so I opened the envelope - at which point I realised that I HAD seen it. At least, I'd seen the prop - but because its item card had been mislaid, I didn't know that it was the item that would have triggered that knowledge. (And that's a shame, because it would have created some plot for me.)

If the envelope had said "Open this envelope if you see Item 79 (a sextant)" then I would have kept my eye out for a sextant and if I'd seen one I'd have thought to have find out exactly what Item number it was. It's much easier for me to remember a thing than a number. (It wasn't a sextant, by the way.)

Similarly, some characters had contingencies that said "Open this envelope if you see person 237". Again, I suspect it would have helped to know if person 237 was a merchant, or a samurai, or a foreigner.

High Trust Option

A high-trust option would be to eliminate contingency envelopes completely. I could imagine my character sheet saying:

"Yamamoto starts the game as Akira. If Yamamoto has not introduced himself to you, we trust you to find a dramatically appropriate time to recognise him after 11am Saturday morning."

In fact, because I had worked out who was playing this character before the game started, this is exactly what happened (although Akira approached me first). In hindsight, though, I would rather have had the surprise.

"If you see an old battered sextant (item 33), you recognise it as originally belonging to Blackbeard."

This would have worked out just fine for me - I have no problem ignoring knowledge that I know but my character doesn't, and it means that I would have been drawn to check out any sextants just in case.

(Interestingly, I made a similar point in my reflection of Once Upon A Time in Tombstone.)

Being a high trust player

While I think we can improve the design of contingency envelopes, perhaps we don't have to go that far. Perhaps I just need to be a high-trust player.

After all, I could just open all my contingency envelopes before the game starts. Nobody can stop me, and I know I wouldn't abuse that information. It might even improve my game - I'd probably try and steer things and put myself in plot's way (much easier to do when you can see it coming).

In hindsight, I wish I'd done that in Shogun: I had guessed one envelope, and not opening the other meant I missed out on something that might have dragged me into a new plot.

Key takeaways

So my key takeaways from all this are:

• Think about whether you really need a contingency at all. Can you trust the player not to abuse that information instead?
• Be careful not to telegraph the envelope’s contents in advance.
• When looking for an item/person number, give players a clue as to what they are looking for.

Second Watch

If I sound like I'm going into this in a bit more detail than it really warrants, you might be right. But part of that is that I'm currently working on Second Watch, a game I co-wrote last year at Peaky that we're preparing for publication.

Second Watch is a suspense-horror game set on a spaceship - inspired by movies such as Alien and Event Horizon. Figuring out what's going on is part of the game.

In an ideal world you'd play Second Watch in a completely immersive environment and a team of GMs. But it's not an ideal world and so we need Second Watch to be runnable with just two GMs (possibly just one - although that might be asking a bit much).

As the game involves visiting different parts of the spaceship, and doing tasks that have set results, we're using contingency envelopes to drip feed the information (and to free up the GMs for their other duties).

Here's the sort of contingency envelopes we’re using:

• Medical tests: the crew start the game coming out of cryosleep, and one of the tasks the ship’s doctor has to do is undertake a medical examination of everyone to make sure they’re okay. It’s a bit of roleplaying for them, and there may be clues (and red herrings) in the test results. The subject of the examination starts with the contingency, and then gives it to the doctor during the examination.
• Systems checks: The crew has some systems checks to do to make sure the ship is still working fine. Rather than create a queue at the GM desk for resolving this, we’re doing it with contingency envelopes.
• Experiments: While the crew are checking systems, the scientists are checking their experiments. There may be clues there…

Some of the contingencies are purely down to pacing. If we just put the information on the character sheet, the game is likely to move faster than we would like - we’re aiming for a slow build up of suspense, and hopefully the contingency envelopes will help us do that.

And while we’ll review them in light of the takeaways above, I suspect we’ll keep most of them.

Open this if you’ve reached the bottom of this post

So while for most freeforms I would advocate sticking to my three key takeaways, obviously there are times when you should ignore them.

Like all good rules, the trick is to know when to break them.