The Relationship-crawl: Part 1, In search of a citycrawl

I recently read an interesting blog series about city-crawls and why they don't really work.

The basic argument, as I understand it, is that cities are rarely suitable for spatial exploration mechanics. As cities are generally safe, and the activities that take place there are typically supplemental to the more exciting activities of delving dungeons and exploring wildernesses, it's just not generally desirable to employ a procedure for walking two blocks and hooking a left down an alley to be assailed by thugs on your way to buy extra rope.

This argument really piqued my interest and got me thinking though: if a city is not suitable for exploring in terms of it's spatial qualities, might there be some other sense in which a city can be generically "crawled"? Can you crawl a settlement in a less physical sense? 

The epiphany: can you crawl a social network?

And would that even be fun?

Crawling through graphs

I have to take a moment to reinforce the basic intuition behind this idea: "crawling" is a description of moving through a graph, and...

A dungeon is certainly a graph. 

The hallways are edges, and the rooms are nodes. Generally, rooms are where the action is at, and where you concentrate your interesting content, and halls are connections between each of these content-locations. (Though it doesn't have to be this way...)

In a dungeon, you "crawl" by moving from your current room (the current "node") through one of the available connections (doors and halls) to another room, where you then engage with whatever features that room holds. This activity is fundamentally exploratory: you don't know what you'll find deeper in the dungeon until you move through the graph and face the challenges. The "fun" is in discovering new things and overcoming obstacles on the way there.

A wilderness map is also a graph.

This is abundantly obvious in the case of pointcrawls--which are very explicitly graphs--but still pretty apparent in a hex grid: each cell is a node, and it is connected to the six cells adjacent.

The exact same principles as the dungeoncrawl apply: you interact with content at the node or cell, and you move to adjacent nodes or cells through the available connections.

A social network is a graph, too.

Individual NPCs can readily be thought of as nodes. Their relationships to people they know are connections. The "content" in this case is both the unique personalities and the functional game-utility that each NPC has to offer--their resources and information. Unlike dungeons and wildernesses, this graph is not spatial, it's conceptual, but that doesn't mean it isn't amenable to exploration of a kind.

Defining the relationship-crawl

(Or the "socialcrawl" if you find relationship-crawl to be tedious and painfully irregular.)

As Knight at the Opera pointed out, it may not actually be interesting or fruitful to crawl a city spatially. (I won't rehash their arguments any further; go give it a read.) But, depending on the inclinations of your table, I think a case can be made for crawling a social network.

First, let's imagine the shape and function of this graph, and compare it to the more familiar shape of a dungeon. A social network is like a dungeon in that:

• it is made up of many "nodes", each presenting their own aesthetics/set-dressing (the personalities of the NPCs) and obstacles (the personal problems, inter-personal conflicts, and openness of the NPCs)
• each node has one or more connections to other nodes which can be discovered and explored (in the case of the social network, familiar relationships with other NPCs)
• not all nodes are immediately accessible; you may have to "traverse" the graph by making intermediate contacts (how is this guy connected to Kevin Bacon?)
• some paths in a dungeon may be locked behind certain keys; social connections may likewise be "locked" by the nature of the relationships at play (e.g. two individuals have fallen out, and so the social connection is revealing, but does not actually open the way for a meeting), or by trust-building exercises (e.g. the NPC won't introduce you to their faction contact until you prove your trustworthiness first)
• "discoveries" in one part of a social network can open the way to navigation of other parts of a social network (e.g. one NPC might have some useful gossip about another NPC that makes it easier to ply them for what you want)
• some paths in the network may be hidden; an NPC might have a useful contact that they will not volunteer to you, but which may be discovered by other means, or which they might reveal to one who has gained their trust

And how is a social network unlike a dungeon? Consider:

• there may be far more "entrances" to the network than a typical dungeon; many NPCs may be "accessible" in some form the moment you walk into town, for example
• there is seldom any need to "re-trace" your steps in a social network: once you know someone, you know them, and may therefore no longer have any need to move "through" the person who first introduced you
• the types of encounters, challenges, and rewards are generally different from that of a dungeon, at a fundamental level
• a social network is more fluid than the typical dungeon. This has two ramifications: first, a social network can be built up entirely as needed, adding new connections as players "delve" more deeply (where a dungeon often requires some special justification for doing the same); second, a social network can readily change, with new connections being forged, or old connections being broken or soured (where, again, only a certain kind of dungeon can do such a thing)

I find all of that very interesting! There is clearly some similar DNA to work with here, but also, my intuition says that the differences are not dead-ends--this concept is ripe for play. 

Rewards in a relationship-crawl

Ultimately, what we're looking for here is a game procedure; something to structure play in this area, and lead to interesting challenges and rewards. In this post, I'm going to focus on identifying potential candidates in these areas (and leave the laying down of any actual procedures for a Part 2).

Let's start by considering rewards: the utility that NPCs in town can offer players.

First, there are the obvious, up-front things: the innkeeper can give you a place to stay, and the shopkeeper can sell you things. All of that is usually given by default, and probably ought to be so. And, if your game is entirely focused on getting back to the dungeon as quickly as possible, and hand-waving away the rest of the world, this is probably sufficient. 

But, if you're interested in the sort of endless, living sandboxes that folks like us dream about, I think we can go further. Consider the following  additional "resources" that NPCs can represent:

• Rumors. Broadly, this is just any kind of information about what's going on in this area. To keep it distinct from subsequent resources, let's cap it at generic, base-level awareness of things to do in the vicinity of the settlement (e.g. "people have been disappearing on the road to Strudelsberg"). Rumors reward engagement with further leads and affordances for gameplay.
• Quests. There are a couple ways to look at this: either this is the "main hook" in this area (or something like it), and this NPC is "the quest giver", or--my preference--in a more side-quest sense like that of a videogame, this NPC needs something and the only way to get it is by leaving the safety of the town and delving a dungeon or exploring a wilderness (e.g. "I'm looking for some rare lizard-gizzards to make my grandma's famous pie"). Conventionally, the reward for a quest is some money or something, but for the purposes of a relationship-crawl, a more suitable reward for this sense of "quest" might be the increased trust of the NPC, and greater access to their help or other contacts (e.g. perhaps an NPC is not willing to introduce you to more interesting individuals unless you scratch their back a bit first.)
  I particularly like this lens because it creates the opportunity for secondary goals in a local wilderness or dungeon: we might be here looking for a McGuffin, or to solve a local problem, but while we're here let's not forget to collect some rare lizard-gizzards.
  Quests reward players with additional goals, and increased access to the personal resources of an NPC.
• Factions. This NPC is either a member of a local faction, or in some way associated with them. Perhaps the Faction is difficult to find, requiring someone to set up a meeting, or perhaps they are simply mistrustful, and you'll need someone to vouch for you if you want to make any headway. Faction contacts reward players with greater influence in the region, and the resources of the faction.
• Lore. Distinct from rumors, I view this as the specific kinds of information that provides an advantage. (e.g. we're about to enter a local dungeon, and this NPC has an idea of the sort of threat we'll face, or even a way to directly mitigate that threat). Lore rewards players with alternative strategies for overcoming regional challenges.
• Gossip. In the context of the relationship-crawl, this is any useful information about the social network itself. Gossip rewards players with alternative strategies for navigating the social-network itself.
• Assistance. This is a little more half-baked, but I imagine that some NPCs are in a position to give special help. Either they have useful, unusual tools available to them, or will provide special services (or hey, discounts!) to skillful players. If nothing else, it's neat if every service-oriented NPC has a free-tier of service they offer to everyone, and a premium-friends-and-family-discount for the special folks that have wiggled their way into their good graces.
• Training. Another possible avenue is that this NPC possesses certain skills, and can teach those skills to your players. Training rewards players with enhanced capabilities and differentiating characteristics that make them more unique.

Obviously these categories are a little amorphous at the edges, and can readily bleed into each other. An NPC might offer many of these things at once; their information might count as "lore" and "rumors"; they might offer some of these things freely, and others only when trust is gained, but I think we can agree: these are gameable features. They lead to, and enhance, the patterns of play we are already familiar with.

Challenges in a relationship-crawl

So what are the "challenges" that will make this hypothetical procedure interesting and not just a tedious barrier between us and what we want? The worst thing we can come up with is a flavorless game of bait-and-switch, with constant refrains of "sorry Mario, your princess is in another castle!".

If all it takes to move through the network and get what we want is to talk to one person, and then another, and then another, we're in grave danger of simply wasting our players time on a series of bland social, unnecessary social encounters.

With that in mind, let me pause and make an opinionated assertion about how one might use a relationship-crawl: don't make this the main game. I'm not proposing that a relationship-crawl should fill a session in the same way a dungeoncrawl would--I think it's rare that a group will want to spend one or more sessions just chatting up NPCs, leveraging social connections... to meet more NPCs. (If that does sound fun to you, go crazy. I'm very happy for you!) As social-networks are not physical things like dungeons, you are not bound by them in the same you you are bound by a dungeon--once you enter a dungeon, you cannot leave except by passing through what has come before, and you cannot return and push forward without passing through what has already been discovered.

Rather, I think the proper role of a relationship-crawl is to supplement the usual gameplay loop--a kind of meta-game that you play between delves, as long as you're hanging around the same town for a while, to enhance your effectiveness, reveal new opportunities for play, and add an extra layer of richness to the local settlement and it's people.

Anyways, challenges. A few species of challenge come to mind:

• Negotiation. This is probably the only bit of social-interaction in these kinds of games that is well recognized in traditional play. The NPC has something you want, and they aren't giving it up for free. This is where bargaining and charisma checks and all of that kind of stuff can get involved. It's probably the definitive, atomic event within a relationship-network in the same way that combat is one of the basic events in a dungeoncrawl.
• Discovery. This is the basic addition of the relationship-crawl itself. As alluded to earlier, perhaps what we want is to make contact with a local faction or find that certain somebody who knows that certain something. Traditionally, that certain somebody may just be "the innkeeper", but I think it's far more authentic and at least moderately interesting if that person is not one of the entry-points of the network. Why would the innkeeper or the blacksmith be personally acquainted with the threats of the local dungeon? They're busy! They're probably a good place to start though. Finally, we may just want to find out what things these people know that we don't.
• Trust. This is where I think the potential of a relationship-crawl begins to shine. What if negotiating wasn't enough? What if bribery or charisma simply aren't going to cut it? How does one overcome this obstacle? Well, the structure of the relationship-crawl provides another avenue: where a simple bribe wasn't enough before, a referral from a trusted associate may be the key to progress. Granted, maybe that's too much of a "hard-lock"; I'm not necessarily suggesting that progress through the social-network should be gated behind a bunch of fetch quests. Instead, we might regard the aggregated trust of the network as a resource that bestows advantages. In other words, the trust of adjacent members of the community (by a general rise in your reputation, or because you were directly introduced by another member of the community, rather than approaching this NPC cold) is the factor that moves this challenge from "impossible" to "possible", or from "possible" to "no need to roll". That sort of thing.
  Of course, there's a flip side to this, too: negative interactions with NPCs may make future interactions with their acquaintances more difficult, turning a routine-stakes negotiation into a very difficult prospect instead.
• Navigation. This is going to be a bit abstract until I start fleshing out more relationship-crawl concepts in the next post, but I want to at least address the concept here because I think it's interesting: what if the obstacle in making progress with a specific NPC was who introduced you. In other words, you may be trying to get in cozy with X, and you know that you can make that contact via Y and Z, but you discover that Y is on bad terms with X. So, if you were to approach X with a metaphorical letter of recommendation from Y, that would actually hinder you in your objective. Instead, you need to make in's with Z who has a more friendly acquaintance with X. Does that make sense? We all know lots of people. We don't like them all.

Conclusion and next steps

So there you have it. It's more embryo-of-an-idea than fully-fleshed-out-idea, but I do think I'm on to something. To summarize:

• spatial city-crawls may be more tedious than they're worth
• an abstract relationship-crawl is "crawlable" in a similar sense
• there are many interesting rewards and challenges that could be embedded in a crawl of social relationships

I am also painfully aware that so far this concept is still quite abstract. To prove out the concept more, and help clarify some of the ideas I've brought up, I will therefore come back later with a part 2 to go over some of those details (alongside a first-draft method for generating a relationship-crawl just as you would a dungeon or pointcrawl).