Abby's Place

tolkien and class politics

2012-02-01T08:24:00.000-08:00

[inspired by a Michael Moorcock essay on the success of the nursery-rhyme motif in the fantasy genre, found here]

Orcs are the working class. The Tory vision of the working class, at any rate.

While hobbits and Men and Elves and Dwarves all come from storied ancestry and can recount the names of their forefathers and the grand halls (or grand burrows) from which they hailed, Orcs have no fathers. Orcs have few names, and of course the Black Tongue is nasty, brutish, full of short, sharp sounds.

Orcs toil; we never see the Free Peoples toiling, except for a bit of farming now and again.

Orcs build. Orcs make engines that spurt flame; Orcs raze whole forests and dig deep, disgusting pits where they breed! Orcs, ironically, are the only race of Middle Earth whose breeding habits are put (mostly) on display; they are the only race that is growing, that is rising, that is gaining in strength. All around them are declining princes and listless civilizations. The Orcs have plenty of room to expand, and their industrial masters are happy to oblige.

Now, on the one hand there are a great many literary devices wrapped up in Orcs that make them easy to dislike, especially in the films: they're smelly, slimy, cannibalistic, unpredictably violent, and vaguely simian. Tolkien, at once, rolls dark skin, primate features, and spontaneous generation (they apparently "grow" in pits and come forth fully muscled and fully grown) into an altogether unpleasing whole.

At the same time, many fans of the trilogy find a certain pleasure in Orcs: they are dangerous, they are serious, they wear the coolest/scariest outfits, and they hang out with Wizards who do more than light fireworks and talk to bugs.

But again, Orcs are Tolkien's very Tory image of the working class. They're a dark-skinned, foreign-tongued horde of builders and soldiers and ruiners who eat anything and everything, are a threat to all (even themselves), and, most tellingly, are constantly under the yoke of powerful, singular demagogue intellectuals who dwell in not-quite-literal Ivory Towers.

Compare that to the Istari, who are angels in the shape of old men (a creative choice I can't recall seeing anywhere else but in It's a Wonderful Life). One Istari in particular is deeply fascinated by the middle-class, status-obsessed Hobbits of the Shire, and seems to like nothing better than spending time in their twee, half-size pavilions and houses and so forth.

The Orcs come to despoil the natural world, and cannot stop themselves. Their actions are not truly their own; truly, Tolkien's chief Enemy is the future, industrialization, science; Orcs, not being exactly scientists (beyond an offhand comment that they "made many clever things, but no beautiful ones"), are nonetheless the Industrial Army, ready and willing to build, destroy, and kill in the name of hated Progress.

While pretty much every major character among the Free Peoples is the descendant of some king, the Orcs, as I said, breed in holes in the earth. Ironically, Tolkien has painted us a world where dark-skinned, violent humanoids would probably be called Mudbloods if the opportunity came up, and in which the Wizards must save us all from the dangerous, disgusting creatures of the earth that seemingly live only to breed and to build. Old men in hats will save us from those dirty workers, wot wot?

Apocalypse World, session 9ish::

2012-01-24T08:26:00.001-08:00

so Diamond the Chopper leads his gang and his friends to the city of Bluesquare, to confront his employer, the warlord Havok.
and by confront i mean kill. there's a big old battle in and around the town hospital - - we see some fancy gunplay, diversions, and decoy tricks from Rue the Gunlugger. Diamond drives his gunjeep right into the hospital lobby, and runs dudes over like Brock Samson.
Boo the Brainer (former Angel) uses a six-gun and a little psychic force to corner Havok in the darkened upper level of the hospital, where zhe shoots him and his bodyguards dead.
it doesn't really sink in until they're burning the corpses of Havok's crew that anyone thinks to ask, "So, did we kill Havok back there, or what?"

i laugh (they've been hunting this guy for like 6 sessions, and then he dies almost off-camera) and nod my head.

somewhere in there, Diamond opens his brain to the weird to find out how the good townspeople are holding up after all the carnage, and he rolls like a 3. he pops, taking 1-harm (ap psychic silent). he becomes semi-vegetative for a little while, very suggestible but generally calm and mindless for about 30 minutes or so.
around that point, what's left of his gang appoints itself a new leader named Clarion (sarcastic blond dude). the gang goes home to Adobe.

anyway, it's a few days later and Diamond is living down in the city instead of up in the fortress. and he's ok with that. returning late one night, the gate-guards pretend not to recognize him, and he doesn't get mad. an anthropologist in a scramblesuit (he is known as a Shifter) comes by to interview him about, you know, stuff.

Diamond's player, Biff, has taken upon himself to become a sort of commie paladin - - he never starts a fight, he set up communal medicine and food supplies in Adobe, and he ruthlessly crushes saboteurs and opportunists. now that he isn't in charge, he's trying to fill out every last improvement slot in his playbook before he's forced to retire, and he plans to watch the new boss (that Clarion guy) like a hawk until then.

2011-12-02T23:08:00.000-08:00

i'm so excited about our apocalypse world game!

- Diamond, the Chopper, just picked the advance "get a holding (detail) and wealth", meaning that sleepy, spy-ridden Adobe Town is gonna become a bustling city soon, and that's the coolest!

- Biff, owner of Diamond, is gonna take over as MC sometime soon. I get to be a player soon! yayyyy

I need to decide between:

Battlebabe

Driver

Hocus

Not sure which I want. Maybe make a sample pc of each and see what the haps.

- Vega, the Operator, has joined our ranks. She's an ex-Hardholder hoping to get back at her former lieutenant, the infamous Lord Havok.

more to come! this game rocks :)

Re: Callan, snakes and ladders

2011-12-01T13:09:00.000-08:00

I assumed that Ron meant something like, "following the carrot of reward [in whatever game he was talking about; i forget] does not actually incentivize exploring the game further."

In Chronica Feudalis (a historical-medieval adventure game that stole Aspects from the FATE system), there are only two sources of currency or character improvement. One of them involves Aspects: if you let your character's Aspects be turned against him/her, you get a reward which can only be spent to activate OTHER Aspects, yours or that of the scene (like weather and stuff) or that of other characters.

So, it's basically a zero-sum game for the players: every time they let themselves be kicked around a bit, they can do the exact same thing to someone else. It's all very GM-led (the GM has infinite Aspect tokens), and this isn't to say it's not fun, but you don't really change or develop from this - you're just poking and prodding at what's in front of you. Pure Exploration of character and situation, no inherent moral or ethical dimension at all (so no "native" support for Narrativism), and honestly the fact that the GM has infinite Aspect-tokens (or whatever they're called) means that there's no way in hell this game is "battle-tested" as a good supporter for Gamist play, as GM/player competition is hopelessly one-sided -- the GM can spam your Aspect: Self-Defeating til the cows come home.

So - second reward system: skill training. This one is actually a very different sort of Simulationist logic - - while Aspects are actually a pretty neat way to chew the scenery and Explore being a medieval person, skill training relies on the logic of "game-system-as-physics" - that is, the idea that the rules must accurately reflect the way cognitive, physical, and institutional processes *actually function* inside the game-world.

Going off to a trainer does fuck-all to add to your Exploration of being a medieval person other than to give you ... Exploration of what it's like to go to school as a medieval person. Given that there is very little focus as to what one "does" in Chronica Feudalis, I suppose a game that centered around training facilities, or at least featured them meaningfully, could play to the game's apparent natural points of focus. But this is meeting a good-but-uninformed design a good deal more than halfway :)

[EDIT: my bad! Turns out I had only read the advancement rules about halfway through. Here's how it works:

1- you train with a mentor or by yourself, turning one of your skills into an "in-training" skill.

2- you go out and use that skill in a scene "where something is at stake" (quoth the rules)

3- either make a skill check for that skill, or make a skill check of your trainer's skill - - ChronFeud skills use a die-step system, so your skill's rating is in the form of a d-whatever. Thus, improving a d6-rated Swordsmanship skill would require a 6 or higher on whatever skill check you use, so training with a.. trainer who is better than you would make more sense than training alone, especially when you get to higher levels of ability.

4- once you successfully improve a skill thus, it is no longer "in training" until you do this all over again

I admit, that actually makes some good sense, from the perspective of a Sim-style "game-rules-as-game-physics" approach.]

At this moment, it seems that I have a much better idea of what Reward Systems are: they are the system's internal structures that encourage you to play the game a certain way (design intent made manifest). If you want to play the game a different way, it usually goes one of two ways:

1- the game fights you, actively hampering your ability to play the game you were "hoping for". Such games cannot be Drifted without extensive reworking of existing rules. White Wolf games come to mind; I'm no fan of the Humanity system, the Paradox system, any of it, because it doesn't do what it's trying to do in a way that actually helps me explore the themes I see lying dormant in that content. Sorcerer does Humanity better by a country mile than Vampire could ever hope for.

2- the game just lies there, forcing you to bring your Creative Agenda with you in a suitcase, so to speak - that is, the rules are open or sparse enough (in terms of what CA you were hoping to engage in) that you can work entirely on the level of the fiction to make things happen. That is, in the case of ChronFeud and Narrativism, if you write up a few leading questions for PC creation in order to tease out a Kicker or two and some intra-party juiciness, you can use these answers (much as Apocalypse World does) to "kick off" play in the right direction for what you want. AW, however, does it a fair sight better in that it combines the leading questions with a LOT of tools for the MC to keep things moving. Without those tools (present in the system or present in the group's skillset), there may be a fair bit of difficulty keeping things going once the initial "steam" of those Leading Questions runs out.

[EDIT: despite my corrections above, I stand by this second point, here. The only thing that the training system adds to the game is a sense of explicit, in-fiction cause and effect for improving your character's abilities. Many, many other games get by just fine without approaching char-improvement in this way, even games that are "fiction-first" like Apocalypse World.

I think a group's time and energy are better spent paying such close attention to the consequences of their actions with regard to the fiction and its internal "logic"; I know that this attitude reflects my own play priorities, though, and if you like this sort of thing, go for it, but I will politely decline any invitation to join in ^__^]

Reward systems - are we getting anywhere, or..?

2011-11-27T21:44:00.000-08:00

Thinking about this thread at the Forge, which mentioned RPG "reward systems".

I think a reward system could be a "hamster wheel" if the way to earn gimmes and Currency doesn't actually encourage people to engage in the point of the game, nor encourage them to "drive towards" it. Basically, your Exploration of the game system should promote the Exploration of "what play is all about" (be that competing for glory in Agon, or wading through moral quandaries in Dogs, or making tough choices in ApocaWorld) by-way-of Exploring character, setting, and situation.

For instance, some games have it so that the rules for advancement (a common avenue for Exploring the game system) are detached from the "presumed" content of the game - - maybe you MUST seek out a trainer in order to improve your abilities, but the majority of the game is dungeon-crawling, far from the academies and gymnasia (where the trainers are), then people have to go outside the normal fictional "play space" in order to "earn" the encouragement to buy into the activities of the game.

"Gold=xp" editions of D&D have a pretty clear, intentional reward cycle, especially if you can't level up until you leave the dungeon: you need to explore "efficiently" and try to use all your cleverness and care to maximize your gold-haul and minimize your exposure to danger. Dungeon crawling, using gold=xp/exit-to-levelup, is different than dungeon crawling that's defined as kill=xp/levelup-down-here. Not better or worse, but one is more of a puzzle game with a combat element and the other is more like a combat game with a puzzle element.

Specific reward systems do more than just encourage Creative Agenda; they also encourage a particular taste or style of play. Each reward system has its own particular take on elements like competition, exploration, and theme, serving as different varieties of play of a particular sort.

In D&D0e, the emphasis is on coordination, detail-inspection, and careful rationing of resources. We could say 0e rewards Attention to Detail.

In Agon, the emphasis is on inter-player competition, individual acts of heroism, and exciting, bombastic command of resources. We could say Agon rewards Chutzpah.

These are related types of gaming, but they are nonetheless distinctive enough (due to their respective systems and the style thereof) as to make playing them each a very different experience.

Polaris vs. Dogs in the Vineyard is good, too - - in both games, your character is powerful and in a position of authority. But the crushing weight of world's end (in Polaris) means that, logically, to advance your character is to hasten the apocalypse - - you have to lose Zeal and gain Weariness to get better on your dice rolls. Each advancement pushes you closer to the end of the game. You can avoid this by being "weaker-willed" against the Demons - - be more agreeable with your Mistaken, more willing to compromise and let things go, and you will last longer. But you will also be giving the Demons more of a foothold in your world. Fighting your battles is the only way to prove your worth, but fighting ALL battles only hastens your inevitable doom. Sort of a gloomy, Ragnarok take themes of fate and destiny.

Meanwhile, in Dogs, your character is always right. People may disagree and try to block the execution of your judgment, but you know they're just demons or idolators. The big question that helps to twist this theme is: how far will you/must you go to get your way? You have to be very tactical when crushing heresy, all the while wondering if you really deserve the authority given to you - - sometimes your judgments ruin lives unfairly. It's much like running an actual religious institution: handling dissent and disagreement proportionately, deciding how many administrative resources to dedicate to handling a problem, and of course wondering all the while whether any of it is worth it, ultimately.

Huh.

settlers UNLEASHED!

2011-11-19T21:39:00.001-08:00

Biff and I started joking around about capitalism during a game of Settlers tonight, and after the game we hashed out some ideas about how to play as the humble peasants of Catan instead of their lords and masters.

- Each player keeps track of two hands of cards: their own and their king's hand. A player can only use resources from their own hand, not from their king's hand. The game itself plays the role of the kings.
- Each turn, each city OR settlement in your color produces one resource-unit from each adjacent hex.
- Next, roll the dice, as usual. Whatever number is rolled, hexes that would normally produce will instead "eat" one resource of the appropriate type from your hand - this resource goes into your king's hand. Call this "tithing". Cities, though, eat two resources of each type from your hand.
- If you roll a 7, you can place the Robber on any hex you like; any player with a city or settlement bordering that hex takes one random resource from their king's hand and puts it in your hand.
- Each turn, check your king's hand to see if it can afford to buy any development cards. Buy all the development cards you can afford (using the king's hand only!) and play them as soon as possible (your next turn, I think). Lumber and bricks just sit in the king's hand (you must trade them with the bank or any available harbors, in order to collect as much wool, ore, and grain as possible - for development cards!)
- Development cards that award resources are instead tithed by that player to his or her king's hand. Those that award victory points work normally.
- When Knight cards are played, they are placed under the Robber's new location; this hex now produces nothing, but demands tithes when its number is rolled, and upon Robber-placement, a random resource is taken from an adjacent player's own hand and put into your king's hand. When the Robber changes locations again, such Knight cards return to the corresponding King's hand.

Not sure how victory points factor in or how I'd want them to be different. What I'm going for is some kind of end-goal of turning a city into a "free republic" a la the Italian Renaissance.
Help me develop this :)

Sunny the RPG

2011-11-17T19:28:00.000-08:00

Been thinking about It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and how to realize it as an RPG.

Some elements:

- the gang tries to come up with a plan or scheme, usually in order to get one over on somebody. Let's call this The Plan.

- each member of the gang will attempt to push the scheme in a direction that benefits them most, even at the expense of their friends. Let's call this Taking Advantage.

- getting one over on a friend or someone else seems to give the gang more control over further events: once they've demonstrated their (temporary) superiority to someone else, they tend to keep having success with their endeavors for a while (til random chance smashes it all to pieces in some absurd or contrived way... say, this DOES sound like an RPG!). Let's call this Value - you have to demonstrate it. Value is a currency for getting your way more effectively.

- it does seem, though, that someone with Value can use it for others, if they wish. I see absolutely no reason to stop players from doing this; clearly it's exactly what was going on with the Denim Chicken.

- Of course, if the Plan starts having setbacks, you can always Take Advantage of a fellow gang member in order to regain Value, and drive the Plan back in the direction you want.

Hm. I'm guessing that Keys would be an excellent way to represent the different characters - each of them is about projecting a certain desired persona, and in turn having short-lived moments of fallibility or selflessness for comedic or dramatic effect (usually just comedic, like in Mac's Project Badass tapes).

I think this basic idea could be ported over to other "Cast of Bastards" style shows - as in, a comedic ensemble cast whose members are antagonistic towards each other, yet affiliated with each other in some fashion. In Sunny, the affiliation is that they run a bar together; in Arrested Development, the affiliation is familial.

Goals would probably be a useful device for establishing the interests of protagonists - goals could be short-term and temporary, or long-term and earnest, ranging from the Sunny gang's fleeting financial investments, to Tobias's Queen Mary, to, I dunno, Bender's commitment to boozing and whoring at any chance (though Futurama falls more into the category of pratfall comedy/comedy of errors, with only one Bastard among the protagonists [hint: he was built in Mexico]).

There might be Talents also, which are both the problem-solving appoach a character takes AND things that a character could spend Value on to achieve success. So... Mac could pummel someone, whereas Dennis is more of a scheming, cackling manipulator; Charlie is better at getting into weird, cramped spaces, while Dee is pretty good at fast-talking people.

You can go outside your archetype (and use other people's Talents) by spending Value. If you describe yourself using someone else's Talent without spending Value, they might get a bonus against you - - George Sr. is pretty much a master of teaching people lessons, and usually gets the final word in these sorts of situations.

Hm. Giving this serious consideration...

What Story Now play looks like

2011-11-13T20:05:00.000-08:00

So I feel like play-style is a pretty stable thing; I, for one, will pick a relationship, goal, or situation in play and charge at it, hands outstretched, in order to get a good grip and squeeze drama out of it.

Relationship? No one can tell this person what to do but me! This way, interacting with him/her will be charged with potential conflict.

Actual play example: [game: Storming the Wizard's Tower][my character: a fisherman, father to a (secretly) pregnant shepherdess] The blacksmith's apprentice is my daughter's best friend. She knows about the pregnancy, and (out of character) says as much aloud.

Best part? I made a Charged Conversations roll, then asked, "Is my daughter actually pregnant? Is that the truth?" GM thinks about how to respond (since I was asking about something a player said, not a character. Yes, quibbling is a big part of what RPGs are about ^__^), and then says, "Yes. She is." I really liked knowing something as a player, but not as a character, and having the dramatic irony give off an awesome vibe.

Situation? I will seek the origin of the curse upon your house, and later we will ret-con that I actually placed the curse, myself! Hahaha! Now, there is another twist in the emerging situation, and it pits us against each other in a bad-blood way. Cool!

Actual play example: [game: Polaris][my character: a Knight of the Stars who is a skilled male midwife; tasked with concealing the deformed byblows of another noble house] The women of the House of Corvus, it is whispered, give birth sometimes to reptilian monsters that do not live beyond birth. It's my job to dispose of them discreetly. Then, one day, when I'm burying one in the courtyard, I discover a lizard-figurine buried in the dirt that's just stinking with dark magic. (I enter this element into the story because it seems like a fun answer to, "Why is House Corvus cursed?")

The sages inspect the thing, and determine that it is, indeed, the source of the curse. Another of the Knights (a fellow player), cynically suspecting treachery on my part, narrates, "Sir Fornax moved the curse-lizard from the courtyard of his own House into ours. He means to push his own line's barrenness onto the Corvus clan!" Ha, well, I didn't challenge this assertion using any Key Phrases, and decided it was just too awesome a twist to turn down.

Goal? I will pick the worst (best?) possible moment for my quest to conflict with yours, so as to achieve delicious drama.

Actual play example: [game: Exalted][my character: an Abyssal (a champion of death) who truly believes in the purifying power of Oblivion] My master, a Deathlord, is uninterested in anything but his own consolidation of power. When this means fighting other Abyssals instead of banding together to spread our dark power, I rebel, flee the Deathlords, and throw myself on the mercy of the Solars (champions of the sun, my people's implacable foes) rather than serve a lord without integrity.

Note - Exalted lacked any direct means via the rules (explanatory text about background and setting is not "rules" in the normal sense) for me to address theme in the way that I wished. On the other hand, if goals/relationships are not tied closely to the game system in some way (explicitly, or emergent in play), it can be tough to find your "way in" to that. My character was pretty crappy with the dice rolls in this last example, so really the only recourse I had was in my allegiances, not my actions, in play. I wasn't blocked from exploring Theme all on my own, but it would have been a lot more satisfying if character creation had gotten other players thinking in this direction, too.

Bottom line: rules can't stop you from playing as you wish, but if you follow them, they sure can help with a particular style. You can tell pretty quickly (during character creation, maybe; definitely in play) whether the game is working with you or against you. Is the game too creatively demanding for your tastes? Does it get lost in the "fluff" instead of who wins and who loses? Is it too creatively constraining? Lots of things can go wrong; playing a game that seems to "get" your style is an extra-awesome experience.

tales of Apocalypse World: Red Front

2011-11-04T20:36:00.000-07:00

I used to think that a couple of my AW players were being really passive in our game, but I was reading this thread about passive players, and it occurred to me:

- my players seek to avoid conflict, yeah, but they're doing it because it's true to their characters. It's kind of impressive: the tunnel-rat Gunlugger only leaves his hidey-hole if anyone bothers him, and if they do, he shoots them dead with his 4-harm high-powered rifle. The Angel, who wears a scramble suit and does hir doctor's rounds for the town every single morning, wants absolutely no trouble or discord with anyone, ever. Zhe makes no enemies, holds no grudges...

In short, they're both a real test of my ability to tease out scarcities that matter (so there's conflict), but it could be a lot worse: they could decide that I'm trying to give them "cues", and then they would try to follow them.

It actually came up kind of directly, the other night: Rue the Gunlugger's player, John, joked that obviously Boo the Angel should follow the biker gang to the local warlord's citadel, because, "It's the RPG thing to do, right? Go check out the big city, you know, explore a little?" Still, he did mean it in jest, and when Boo's player, Valery, just laughed and carried on trying to avoid any conflict with the townspeople, it was clear that she felt no such pressure, or at least was resolute enough to ignore it.

I love playing with people who don't have mainstream-RPG baggage ^___^

The Istari are some kind of angel-wizard light beings who like to smoke up

2011-10-31T13:52:00.000-07:00

This is a taste of what I'm working on. Can you tell I just re-read the Hobbit?

That book was largely impenetrable to my 12-year-old brain, but my 28-year-old brain has fallen head over heels in love.

[AW] Adobe Town, session 3 highlights

2011-09-25T18:59:00.000-07:00

Highlights from tonight:

1- Diamond the Chopper, plus most of his gang, bring a shipment of salvaged steel parts to the stronghold of his master, Havoc.

They enter the gates, set aside their weapons, and bring the shipment to the ... garage. Havoc has claimed, and kept up, a McMansion circa 1995, complete with two-car garage, linoleum flooring, and Redskins commemorative plates on the mantle.

So, a bunch of hard-bitten, neofeudal bikers, chilling at a couple of card tables, checking out the particle-board cabinetry and chintzy wallpaper. Loving it.

2- So, three farmers from the Mudflats creep up into the huge concrete drainage pipe where Rue the Gunlugger sleeps. They want revenge after he pointed a gun in their mate's face the other night, over a matter of someone treading barefoot on a misplaced hypo.

Rue wakes up in their grip, gets his machete free of its sheath, and kills the first of them. The others scream and run, and he picks them off with his rifle.

More farmers come to investigate, as does Diamond and his gang. There's a bit of a standoff, but as soon as the village elder Do gets a good look at the bodies, he screams and cries for vengeance. One of the farmers, a fellow named Rum, breaks and runs, while the rest charge the bikers with staves and scythes in hand.

Diamond's gun is knocked away, but he grabs a club from a farmer, and starts giving as good as he gets. Rue lets off a couple rounds to scare the lot of them, and the elder gets them to back down in the face of overwhelming arms.

Boo the Angel pops in to tend to the dead, and manages to bring one of them back to life and health. While the cowed farmers are carrying their friend home, Rum (remember him?) comes running back with a six-gun in hand. Diamond grabs iron and tells him not to shoot, "What's done is done. You've no quarrel with us now."

Rum shoots anyway, and notches Diamond's armor. The Chopper shoots back and blows off the man's shootin' hand, which sets the crowd on him all over again until the elder Do clubs two men with his staff and screams, "No more blood, you fools!"

Boo goes and sees to Rum's bloody stump, and a second, final truce is reached, at last. Phew!

Ode to an Apocalypse World NPC

2011-09-21T17:47:00.000-07:00

To Mimi.

Mimi, you crazy, crusty-haired junkie. You threatener of men's balls, you dropper of needles where others will step on them, barefoot.

I love you, dude. Don't change.

Love, your MC

2011-09-15T05:40:00.000-07:00

I would recommend that, if you play Hot Guys Making Out, the uke or receptive role should not be taken up by someone who is uncomfortable with male homosexuality.

Just. Saying.

You'd think this kind of thing would be obvious. -__-;;

2011-09-14T14:27:00.000-07:00

This. The CAs' whole purpose is to help you see, not the diversity of your own play, but the diversity of possible play, including, most importantly, play that makes you go "ugh,so not a fan." Or, "but ... how is that even fun?" Or, "sure, but that's not roleplaying."

Thanks to Vincent for reminding me why Creative Agenda is really not a big goddamn deal. In hindsight, the wild, poisonous, contentious, sometimes productive debates about CA/GNS, sweeping the 'nets every once in a while, are basically an argument about whether or not there are different ways to role play, and to enjoy role playing.

It's super important that one take the time to play lots and lots of different games, figure out what we like (a broad or narrow range, whatevs), and then play those games.

I have played a lot of boring games, a few games I hated, and an increasing number of games I love. CA is one way* of talking about how they differ; it happens to be very difficult to explain in the abstract, not so hard to grok once you've played games that support very different Agendas.

So, I intensely dislike Exalted-the-game, even if I'm a bit of a fanboy for Exalted-the-setting. I absolutely adore Apocalypse World and Kagematsu and Polaris; I'm pretty sold on My Life With Master and Dogs in the Vineyard. Sorcerer is neat, Swords & Wizardry is a lot of fun, and A Penny For My Thoughts is a good time.

I'm the most interested in games that draw a lot of their structure and concepts from the way that narratives work (the precise medium being imitated is irrelevant). Games that are all about problem-solving, detailed questions, planning, etc. (dungeon crawls, f'rex!) are fun too. Overall, I most-highly value games that are focused, that have a highly intentional design ethos, and that push me into an emotional space that I'd have a hard time recreating on my own. Seriously, I've cried during sessions of Polaris and MLWM, and AW has gotten me misty-eyed a number of times. I love that kind of stuff.

Basically, it all comes back to actual play. Play games, find out what you like, what you love, and what you hate, and keep up with the good stuff! Life is too short to play games that aren't any fun.

Reflections on the One Ring RPG

2011-09-03T07:09:00.001-07:00

Thanks to the .pdf being so readily available, The One Ring RPG already has dozens of pages of comments in forums like Story Games and rpg.net, so there's already a lot out there to look at.

I've gotten hold of the .pdf myself (and will, yeah, most likely buy the boxed set), and I have to say, I'm really excited about this game!

A few comments and quibbles:

- yes, there is a passing similarity to Mouse Guard, but not a strong one.

- yes, the formatting is such that particular rules can be a little tricky to find at times, but if you read it from beginning to end you'll find everything; some things just aren't repeated like they should be, or are first mentioned in odd places and then never mentioned again (like what the Feat die and Success dice look like..)

- I have been underlining all kinds of things, just to overcome the semi-weird formatting; things that look important but aren't flagged and bolded have been underlined or circled in black pen (thanks, b/w printout!)

- you roll a d12, the Feat die, every time you roll the dice. If it comes up an 11, it's the Eye of Sauron, which negatively affects the result. If it comes up 12, it's the Rune of Gandalf, which has a positive effect. Kind of wonky that they went with 11 instead of, you know, 1, but whatever. Strictly speaking (I need to investigate this), it could be that the Eye still counts as an 11 but also creates bad or weird side effects. Still, kind of odd.

Straight-up cool stuff:

- adventures occur at the rate of one per year, followed by a recovery period called the Fellowship Phase in which you manage your reputation, your wealth, and your spiritual health (by shedding Shadow points); this phase lasts between a week and a season, and "caps" the adventure.

For context, the journey from the Shire to Rivendell could be considered one adventure, since they take their sweet time healing Frodo, something on the order of weeks!

The journey to Mount Doom, come to think of it, would be one enormous adventure from there on out, since the poor hobbitses never really get a break after that. Maybe I'm just recalling the movie version of events, though. Merry and Pippin catch a bit of a break when they encounter the Ents and get a chance to rest up at the Enthall, though.

- corruption! Okay, so I'm not quite sold yet on the cool-factor of gaining Shadow points from traveling through tainted lands, but experiencing anguish and doing horrid things to others both seem like legit sources of Shadow points. The latter, especially, is reminiscent of Polaris and its Experience Tests.

- to remove Shadow taint from yourself, you must make a Craft test or a Song test. Yep, just like in Earthdawn, making beautiful things is how you free yourself from the taint of evil. Cool! (okay, okay, in Earthdawn, strictly speaking, making beautiful things is how you prove that you are free of evil's icy grip, rather than how you remove yourself from it. Close enough ^__^)

- the game is set about five years before "the shadow returns to Mirkwood". Given the time-frame mentioned above, that means you've got about five adventures ahead of you before the War of the Ring's first blow will be struck (that is, the ringwraiths capturing and torturing Gollum, and finding out where the One Ring is). Naturally, that means the players have five game-years to walk into the Shire and encounter Bilbo Baggins and, who knows, maybe hear a little tale about his magic ring...

- the text is chock full of little story-gamey gems that demand a close-read. Yes, this game is in the Trad Games tradition (in that Trad rather than Indie is where the creators have been hanging out, where they got their experience and inspiration, etc.), but it's got neat little things in it like:

"the player shall declare the intended result of his action. On a success, he narrates what occurs," [paraphrased from the text]

and

"When a player selects the skill he will roll to complete an action, and when he describes the action itself, the other players shall have veto power over these decisions for the sake of logic and theme. If the players cannot resolve the issue, the Loremaster [GM] shall make a ruling." [paraphrased from the text]

To be fair, there are also depressing little tidbits like,

"...nothing ruins a good session of play as [much as] a player questioning the Loremaster's knowledge of the source material" p. 7, Loremaster's Book

and

"Before the game begins, the Loremaster should have at least a generic idea of how the plot of the adventure should unfold.... The Loremaster needs to have an idea of when [the events of the plot] will happen." p. 13, Loremaster's Book

So, yeah, you get some of the standard stuff about "The GM makes the plot, and the players are its main characters", (Google the "Provisional Glossary" and search for the phrase "Impossible Thing Before Breakfast" for more context).

To be fair, if the LM cannot "barf forth Tolkien-style apocalyptica" to the players' satisfaction (lil Apocalypse World reference, there), then the LM probably shouldn't be LMing. It's kind of neat that the rules explicitly state that the person best qualified to LM is whoever knows the most about Tolkien in the group, so at least they offer a method of handling this head-on. ^__^

Secondly, there is absolutely nothing wrong with pre-game prep. What I find objectionable is outcome prep, rather than simply content prep. Any veteran GM will tell you they've written up all sorts of amazing things on their lonesome before a session, only to never quite get a chance to use them in play. Understandably, the outcome/content distinction is not made explicit here.

Additionally, there are really neat little rays of light poking out, indicating that the designers were of two minds about player autonomy, which is cool:

"The last thing a Loremaster should do is to restrict his players ... in order to make them conform to his idea of how the game should progress. Players must feel that their characters can attempt any action, no matter how limited the chances of a successful outcome." p. 7, Loremaster's Book

Additionally, along the same lines:

"Managing the game system properly is absolutely vital for the creation of a truly cooperative role-playing experience....nothing is more destructive to a player's suspension of disbelief and immersion in the game than the feeling that his [hero's] fate is being dictated by the Loremaster's choices and not his own." p. 17, Loremaster's Book

Really! How cool is this?

Following up is this:

"... the rules are not the province of the Loremaster alone, but are an invaluable resource to be shared with all participants." p. 18, Loremaster's Book [emphasis mine]

Basically, you have what appears to be, and seems to be largely received by players as, an ordinary adventure-journey game that, thematically, takes D&D full circle into explicitly Tolkien-themed waters. But, clearly, there are elements of player empowerment, and a few gems here and there in the Corruption rules, that demonstrate it can be something more or different or stranger than that.

I didn't even mention character creation stuff, or Encounters!

To sum up the cool bits super-quick-like, there are several opportunities to plug your character concept into a larger context: many of the Backgrounds you can choose from (which actually determine more about your character than the character-class-equivalent, "callings") explicitly mention family members, social status, and community ties, right there in black and white. Lovely!

Now, of course, connecting your character's odd, unpleasant, or strange Background to, well, the rest of the game... the trick is to take it with you! That's going to take the GM's assistance. For example - Tookish hobbits are not trusted, considered wild, unpredictable, and adventurous. So - should the GM simply have a few NPCs mutter about your Tookish features, clucking their tongues?

No way! See, the biggest mood-killer for building Theme and whatnot, I think, is obsessively making the game about the traveling. The Journey mechanics really don't need to be front-and-center; they aren't even that complicated, so you could use kind of like a complicated AW custom move to further stress the scarcity and danger of Middle-Earth.

Additionally, Encounters are reserved for dealing with single or grouped (friendly or neutral) NPCs that you meet on your travels; the GM reserves judgment for deciding what constitutes an Encounter, but it puts a bit of emphasis on making such things significant in some way. The part I find the most compelling is this: all PCs have virtues (valour and wisdom), and NPCs look at one or the other virtue to decide how well they regard you.

The value of the chosen virtue dictates how many failed dice rolls the party can make during the Encounter before the NPCs decide they've had enough of your bungling. Things like racial prejudice (yep! In the rules!) and your characters' social standing (especially with the culture the NPC(s) belong(s) to) all affect how many of your failures they will endure. If you reach their Tolerance (that's the game term, yes), they will basically decide they aren't interested in listening to or dealing with you further - - what that means in detail is rooted in the direction the fiction is taking.

It's like taking the old-timey D&D reaction roll and expanding its scope to include a whole scene, rather than just a random little die roll at the moment of encounter.

Lots of cool stuff. I'm working on getting a campaign going. We'll see what comes of it!

swords & wizardry, player input

2011-05-28T07:55:00.001-07:00

Ye gods, that took me back.
It occurs to me that in games with a very heavy GM presence in the decision-making process (GM-as-final-arbiter, for example), those occasions in which players DO make creative choices are moments to be treated with something almost like solemnity.

Those moments tend to take the form of decisions made by the adventuring party or whatever, such as: which path should we take? Should we finish off this adversary who begged for mercy? Et cetera.
The issue presents itself as, essentially: "I have hardly any say in what's going on in this tale. Please respect my wish to let the ogre-mage live, as that is an expression of what little autonomy and control I have here."

It's kind of an uncomfortable feeling. I would likely quite enjoy switching over to Dungeon World, as suggested by a player, but we shall see.
This may also be a product of playing S&W with folks who usually do not partake of games of that type, but I don't usually play such games either! And everyone at the table was itching to push things in a more modern, story-gamey direction, even the D&D veteran.
That is totes fine! I've definitely seen what we can do with the system, and I have to admit that I'd probably love designing Dungeon World adventures instead.
I have some reading to do.

I will add that I have been genuinely respecting all dice rolls (no fudging!) and respecting player decisions as much as possible. I did kind of nerf a boss by not playing him as hard as I could (I really need to stop being afraid of PC-deaths), but that was my only self-criticism afterwards.

the void, actual play, and getting it wrong (or right)

2011-05-27T07:29:00.001-07:00

Yeah, that Dwarf Fortress hack of Polaris? I may post about that someday. Maybe.

At the moment, I have a thought: when someone asks you "What's your game about?" they're really asking (or you should really be thinking) "What happens in play, independent of/because of the rules?" Sometimes you will answer the first question one way, and the second question in a very different way. And, of course, sometimes the game ends up focusing on different things for different people.

For example - Kagematsu. The author tells you, quite explicitly, that it was a game written to capture that feeling of petty competition between women over relationships, and the way that women are often socialized to be pointlessly judgmental of one another.
When I played it, it was a game about flirtation, awkwardness, and sexuality. Gender entered into it, sure, but not much - the deference and awkward pauses had as much to do with status differences as they did with feudal Japanese gender roles.

This also ties into what the "fruitful void" is all about - you cannot see what a game is really, truly about until you have played it. Even then, some games require at least a couple of sessions before all their different things can display themselves.

Kind of like how after a few Advances, your Apocalypse World character is just no longer likely to fail at things s/he's good at, anymore, meaning that hard choices are not presented to you as often anymore.

So - the point is this: why not try starting out with what kind of play experience you're envisioning? This can be tough, and pretty abstract, but at least at some point in the process, you're going to need to know/decide/imagine what play itself should look like. This goes far beyond the genre, the setting, mechanical ideas, even player roles. What kind of stuff happens in play? What are we doing? Build from there.

Camp Nerdly, May 2011

2011-05-21T17:53:00.000-07:00

I played three games today: My Life With Master, D&D Basic Set ('79), and Polaris.
Now, on to details.

MLWM was setting-hacked, set in 1960s rural Washington State with a very Manson Family vibe. We had some great scenes, and folks were really good at characterization (a creepy big brute with a van, a guy who could only speak if he was waxing intellectual, my Patty Hearst impersonator...); our GM was also excellent - he put on black leather gloves during the Master scenes, and was really intimidating and creepy. It's clear to me now that MLWM is a kinky game.

The downside was a combo of two factors: first, it's not a game that involves the whole table very readily. Secondly, FIVE players were at the table - that's a lot of segmented play, i.e. five separate mission scenes and five separate Overture scenes every time we go around the table. I was thinking that my idea, Gang War, would benefit from some of the procedures used to portray the Master, but play would need to be a lot more open/less structured to work for stories about desperate people joining gangs to survive.

D&D Basic involved the famous Keep on the Borderlands adventure. It was pretty amazing - almost indistinguishable from Swords & Wizardry: very freeform, very deadly combat. The fighter and the dwarf were killed after charging at some spear-goblins, my thief ran away, and the DM ruled that there was 3 weeks of downtime in the fiction while the other players rolled up a couple of elves.
The DM then employed an interesting house rule: he briefly narrated what my thief, Otto Lampblack, had been up to in that time, and then granted me a level. Dunno if that was something he'd devised ahead of time, but after that, the rule was - if some PCs die and the survivors have to retreat, cue downtime and a level-up.

We briefly discussed how level 3 is about the point where a lot of things start to bloom for your character (and I think someone else said this online somewhere, recently) - - abilities that cue to your level relative to monsters begin to matter more, the infamous start-with-1-hp is no longer an issue, and characters begin to differentiate a lot more.
This all makes me want to start a campaign all the more.

More on Polaris soon.

How Mysteries are Solved in a Dramatic Fashion

2011-05-20T22:59:00.000-07:00

The following is especially true of supernatural or suspense tales.

Scenario A, "The cost of knowledge" - A scholarly, curious, or wise character encounters new information that pushes open the mystery a little bit further. That character is then antagonized in some way, as dramatic "payment" for advancing the plot in this way.

All good drama needs to be consistently dramatic, and a scene wherein a character is just finding out stuff could be pretty boring. To liven things up, the acquisition of information comes at a cost, either during the acquisition or immediately after.

During the acquisition: (Jurassic Park) "My god, those velociraptors are trying to break into this computer lab! I have to hurry!" The cost is that there's a risk to the attempt itself - Lex (the young girl) has to turn the compound's electronic locking mechanism on NOW, or she'll be killed by the 'raptors. If she fails, she'll either die or have to abandon the computer terminal, and both those options guarantee an escalation in drama.
If she succeeds (which she does), she provides some payoff and relief for the characters - the electronic locks activate, and now they have a safe base from which they can start regaining control over the crisis.

Immediately after: (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) "He chose... poorly." [the Nazi archaeologist promptly dies and turns to dust] The cost comes from the discovery itself - Donovan (the main bad guy) identifies the wrong cup as the Holy Grail, and dies for it. If he had been right after all, the conflict would escalate, as the Nazis (or at leastone Nazi) would have access to the Grail. Overall, a ratcheting up of tension for Indy.
Because Donovan actually failed, the Nazis became less of a threat overall, but the chance of Indy choosing the wrong grail would increase the immediate tension and conflict in the situation. Long term gain, short term loss.

Scenario B, "Surprise!" - The info-gathering character (the "informer" from now on) discovers something important and we are immediately shown that the new info is true. Both the audience and the character(s) find out something at the same time. The cost of the information is that there's no time to use it.

This comes (mainly) in one of two ways: either 1) the "informer" announces the info and someone in that same scene (the "informer" or someone else) is immediately affected by the truth of this new info, or 2) the "informer" announces the info and the scene cuts to another character being affected by the new info.

Scenario C, "Chekhov's Gun" - the information-gathering character makes a revelation that does not immediately create tension - instead, the tension comes from the information being ignored or disbelieved.
In the case of Chekhov's Gun, information is simply established as fodder for a later scene - the gun is on the mantle in the den, we (the audience) know that now, and thus any later scene in the den could involve the gun in some way.

So, when actual information is relayed in this way, the audience is given information that is not demonstrably true through what's happening in the plot. For instance, a horror-movie character will earnestly tell his friends that the noises in the woods are werewolves, and you gotta help me, man!!

In Scenario C, he is regarded as crazy, and ensuing scenes that do not feature werewolves possess a tension based on the absence of those creatures. Every scene that does not have werewolves in it, after we've been told that there ARE werewolves in the forest, demands an answer: Are there werewolves or not? The tension should build from scene to scene, until finally the "crazy" character is either proved wrong or proved right.

If the audience is told the information at point A, and the protagonist finds out at point B, the plot in between must create tension via the period of ignorance (on the part of the protagonist) in order to keep things interesting. Every time someone or something references the protagonist's ignorance is an opportunity for pathos, tension, or a joke.

So.
A & B are situations in which time is a very small factor.
C is when it is a larger factor - you establish information for future use.
A & B are what I'm interested in - the act of searching for information "buys" the information and makes it true. It happens right away.

OSRAW! Fight that troll, Willow!

2011-05-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

Had a good conversation, post-game, last night with George. He's critical of Dungeon World, feels like it's not quite there (or maybe he'd be more strident about it than that!), and one of his particular criticisms was an issue of scale:

In a game of Dungeon World we played at a Jeff-con, the party's bard managed to use a move, Fascinate, to bewitch a frog-god and convince it to follow him to the ocean, where he would threaten to force the god into the sea and kill him (amphibians breathe through their skin; the GM ruled that gods are no exception here) unless the frogman armies left the city alone.

So, from a D&D/OSR perspective, the idea of threatening an amphibian enemy with salt water is pretty badass. Everyone at the table agreed it was a really cool plan, and the GM ruled accordingly.

The other side of the OSR viewpoint could be/would be, however: how the heck did a level 2 bard manage to use his magic on a frog god, just like that? I mean, whatever, but the status of god would matter more than the status of frog, just like how some kinds of undead are harder to repel than others.
Even if it'd be amazing to see the party cleric repel a nasty mummy-king right into a bonfire and watch him light up like a thing on fire, there's still that part of the fiction that says, "Yeah, but, isn't this adversary pretty powerful? Couldn't his incredible evilness deflect the power of this dime-store holy symbol?"

That gets me thinking about the role of levels in Dungeon World - pretty much any charm-related/mind control spell in any incarnation of D&D is going to address the monster's level or hit dice. Player-characters get stronger based on level, not just in terms of benefits like attack bonus and hit points, but intrinsically - the saving throw rolls get better over time 'cause of some inherent excellence that develops with leveling up.

In Apocalypse World, advances can sharpen or broaden a character, and they eventually lead to a character retiring from play. You can't get more than 10 advances before you MUST take the advance, "Retire your character (to safety), and create a new character to play."

Dungeon World has rules for going up to level 10, and it has some moves that don't scale at all to level (such as Fascinate). I think that a direction should be chosen - are levels going to matter a lot more, or are we going to use them only for the vibe they give? I think either option would be cool, but at this point it feels like one of those is not happening. I wasn't particularly bothered by it in play, but it's an interesting notion: there are certain things that low-level characters can do just as well as high-level characters. That definitely grinds against the spirit of D&D. If I have to gain 10xCurrent Level experience points to ding, it'd be nice if it counted for a bit more.

I think the scaling issue could be fixed just by including info about levels, for monsters or for PCs, in a lot more moves.
On the other hand, what if "level" is just a misnomer, just a colorful term, and leveling up is really about gaining more abilities, not necessarily more powerful ones. But, in DW, that does depend on the class: any of a bard's moves can be bought any time you level up, whereas the cleric has some moves for levels 2-5 and some for 6-10.

At the same time, this is all entertaining a particular argument. How I really feel is that it's way too hard to level up in D&D, given the benefits that affords you, and especially when compared to AW.
It might make more sense to flatten the xp requirements for leveling, just making it 10xp/level, or some other flat but high-enough amount that it doesn't happen too fast but you do get to do it often enough that it feels actually possible.
Pre-3rd edition D&D is clearly a game about having almost nothing to work with and getting through a tough spot regardless. The level-up rules are a carrot for extended play, but really, I've never actually played in a D&D game long enough to go up a level. Especially in its OSR incarnations, D&D play seems to mainly be about having the pluck, courage, and sheer good fortune to make it through some really tough scrapes intact.

I don't know if a game like AW, with all kinds of ways to improve your character and to show off your powers, is really suited to capture this particular form of D&D. I think that a sweet fantasy adventure game is perfect for AW, but more for capturing what folks like me wanted D&D to be (a way to live out 80's fantasy flicks and Dragonlance novels), not what it actually was.

My recommendations: flatten the xp advancement, put in stuff about retiring your character, put in stuff about the intended scope or length of a campaign (somewhere between a 2-hour epic and a season's worth of TV), make dungeons a part of play and not the point of play (think Moria in LotR, rather than the module adventures of yore), and dispense with the whole monster-level-thing.
If we change up monsters like that, then various benefits of leveling wouldn't make sense anymore: HP gains, bonuses to the attack roll, or really any improvement that doesn't come from stat gains or new moves.

The other road (keep levels and the design ethos they bring to the table) is totally fine, of course, but I think DW is currently in a sort of middle ground where neither approach is really being explored enough. I think DW is an awesome project, and I want to give it another shot before I put any work into making OSRAW (Old School Revolution - Apocalypse World).

sim: what it is, what it isn't

2011-05-07T22:03:00.000-07:00

Any ideas about what sort of difference there could be in Conflict Rez as it applies to Story Now vs. Right to Dream?

I'm not sure this even applies! I think the "site" at which Creative Agenda occurs is far broader than Conflict Rez. "Resolution" here is shorthand for player-driven resolution, but that's no reflection on CA.
You know what? I don't buy that it's possible to have Sim that's all about faithfully portraying a genre. I mean, I have never encountered Ron's fabled Sim game where the GM protects the genre from outside influence.
Maybe that is a literal statement - maybe I haven't encountered such a thing, but it's out there anyway. It sounds like the mechanics are protecting the genre in Pendragon, for example (but the GM isn't doing it) - being a Romantic knight is about grappling with the tug between virtue and ignobleness (if that's a word...), and so in Pendragon your virtue-themed stats mean you're pinging back and forth between them the whole time. You aren't allowed to simply be a knight, and explore what that means for yourself.

Of course, when I say "allowed", others might say "abandoned"! The things that make a knight into the "time bomb" Ron Edwards talked about somewhere - Story Now requires characters that have been "wound up" and have plot waiting to unfold, but it also, equally, requires procedures and mechanics that allow players to drive play forward with their choices.
But honestly, I don't know if I've come across his alleged "pastiche-play". I think V:tM is about being a vampire and stuff, but the mechanics don't empower the player to engage in the struggle of it all. When you lose Humanity points, it's totally a GM-centered thing. In Sorcerer, you agree to burn them. The difference is the procedural text, I think - - there really needs to be an understanding (on someone's part, if not everyone's) that the point of play is to hand the players morally and emotionally complex situations and give them the wheel. The first bit (complex situations) is procedural play, what the GM/GM-role is for. The second bit (the wheel) is the mechanics, what the player-role is for. The mechanics help them drive around in the emotional/moral complexity; whatever other dangers or strife are thrown in there too, they exist to draw out the emoraltional (ha) stuff.
(forgive me while I go on about the general idea of CAs for a bit...)
Gamist play is very similar, with a crucial difference - the point of play is to hand the players dangerous or unsafe situations, and empower them to decide what to do about them. There can be licentious, disturbing, or harrying material in there for flavor, but it's not the point.
It would seem that Sim play can have any kind of content it pleases, but most Sim-ish gamers I've met aren't interested in taking the wheel. They like being thrown into morally harrying situations, maybe, but they don't seem interested in getting there on their own. This isn't an attempt to impugn their play style. But what I've seen seems to be "Hey, GM! Put me in some interesting situations, wouldja?" (as opposed to "Let me do it!") And that mentality seems to dovetail with some concern for how things are supposed to operate, in terms of game physics, genre expectations, etc.

I was thinking about those scenes in movies where the hero has to choose between two people who are about to die. In movies where the hero chooses, the character would end up in that situation as a result of their own actions. In movies where the hero ends up escaping the choice, the character ends up in the situation because of others' actions.
Take Batman Forever, if you will - in that scene where Nicole Kidman and Robin are both about to fall into respective death-pits, Batman refuses the choice and saves them both. If the point of the film were about the pain of deciding between love and friendship, he would have made an actual choice; failing to do so would have made the film fall flat, unless a Cunning Twist is employed.
Like, if a film is about a guy who has a male best friend and a girlfriend, and he and his best friend end up falling in love, that might seem like not choosing at all, but really he has determined that Love Is Friendship.
On the other hand, if the movie was about the difficulty (not pain) of choosing between love and friendship, then we're watching Saving Silverman - the choice is resolved by a) Silverman finding a new, less objectionable love interest and b) one of his closest (and most jealous) friends finding that what was missing from his own life was (gay) love. The movie is more about what a pain in the ass it is to juggle close friendships and a romantic life, rather than about the pain of choosing and then living with that choice.
It seems to me that Nar play is about choices and living with them, whereas Sim play is more like "slice of life" fiction - the point is to portray, or explore, a "correct" vision of a particular lifestyle, world, or whatever.

I think it's probably impossible to use truly thematic Conflict Resolution in a Sim game. If play focuses on exploring dramatic themes and gives the players the power to make meaningful decisions about them, that's Nar play, straight up. If either element goes away - thematic content (i.e. it's emotional, it's ethical, it's about choices) or strong player input, it changes.
You take away the thematic *oomph*, but not the input, and you have Gamist play. It can still pluck your heart strings, but the mechanics and procedures aren't going to help you do it. If you play a heist game and it's all about the cool plan and what could go wrong, it's Gamist.
You take away the input, but not the oomph, and you have Sim play that's focused on emotionally engaging the players. Horror games are definitely molded from this clay pretty often - in V:tM, in my opinion, the Storyteller is supposed to make the players confront how ugly and creepy vampires are, but he's showing it to them - they poke at it and turn it over a bit, and look it up and down, but ultimately the Storyteller brings it mechanically/procedurally, by enforcing Humanity checks.

If you take away both, you might end up with upbeat, Illusionist adventure games, or, basically, various relatively low-emotional-risk iterations of Sim. I think. Certainly, no-oomph/no-input is the kind of Sim I grew up on.

Okay, so I guess Conflict Resolution does sound like foreign territory, from a Sim perspective. I dunno, though - CR has been painted as the difference between merely performing a task and making the effect of that performance stick. The sticky widget seems to be how we define making it stick - do we do the thing from a mechanical perspective so that we can beat a dude, or do we do the thing so we can handle a relationship?

That is, are we engaging the mechanics to gain meaningful authority over the outcome of a conflict? If yes, then it is Conflict Resolution. If we are engaging the mechanics but don't gain meaningful authority over it (that is, if the authority stays where it would otherwise lie), then it is Task Resolution.

On one level, CR is where tasks are nested - you must achieve your goals through tasks in order to ground your play in the fiction, lest you get the equivalent of:

Checkmate: Whenever you get into a fight, roll +sharp. On a hit, win the fight.

TR, on the other hand, is the opposite of "tap A to win the game" - - you can only do the component tasks, and you never get the narrative weight to say "Yep, this solved it." You are asked to handle individual bits of the fiction, but they never become the whole until someone (likely the GM) touches them - they remain the "sum of the parts" only.
Gamist play would be totally ruined by TR - if your actions don't meaningfully settle the matter (there are rubrics for determining this in a successfully Gamist design), then you've been hosed by the GM.
In Story Now play, TR totally can't happen - if your actions don't matter, how the heck are you going to address Premise?

Going back to Story Now vs. RtD: I played AW last night, and it's weird how the procedures do a lot of the heavy lifting in that they push the players into making choices about stuff they care about. They don't push them so much as help them along - the MC's various moves basically help to raise the stakes or take a loose thread and tug on it. Ultimately it's the players who are pushing things forward; the MC just helps them maintain their forward velocity.

I don't know how much more I can say about RtD play; I feel like I can only define it by what is lacking from Story Now play, rather than "positively" defining it as something unto itself.

Been too long!

2011-01-01T23:58:00.001-08:00

It's been about five weeks since I updated.
That's a little too long for my liking.

Anyway, I'm working on some ideas for the Ronnies, and I'm just going to post the first draft of the introductory text for now. Here goes!

The War of the Sheaves

a game of war, matriarchy, and caste

It's been one hundred years, or five generations, since the war, whichever is longer. It's been hundreds of harvests since then, to be sure.

Why the war happened doesn't matter all that much; it may to you, but that's your own affair. What matters to the both of us is what came next: Durum, a city, a frail old lord's domain, came crashing down. First, the men all went to war, to swell the Emperor's armies.

The women and children were left behind with a few old soldiers, the elders, and the lord himself. They were used to hard and thankless work, those women and children, but the war only worsened their toil: much of cloth they sewed and grain they grew went to men, like always, but now the men weren't even around to take it! It was taken, stolen, more like, by men from the White City, faraway men who took the fruits of their labors away, for strangers to use.

No one knew, or no one would say, when the men would be coming home. True, not every single man had left old Durum, but nearly all the husbands and fathers and brothers and uncles were gone, gone like ghosts, down the slopes and into the valley and out of sight like the moon when it's set. Those women who knew their letters did write for those who didn't, and when the White City men came next, for more cloth and more grain, they had a whole bushel of notes and letters and things for those men to take to the men who had gone.

Not a woman among them ever did learn what became of those letters.

The men from the White City, though, they came back – time and again, they were back, regular as harvest-time, ready with wagons for clothing and grain. Yes, they remembered the letters; no, they didn't know if the men had gotten them. Every time they came, some wife or daughter would ask, and every time their answer was the same. And the women would sigh and huddle together to watch the wagons vanish down into the valley with the sun as it set.

That is, of course, until they time when they didn't.

It might have been because the harvest was so small; it might have been that someone thought to herself, My son is never coming back. Or maybe she had thought of her husband.

Whatever was in her mind on that day, the men from the White City, they were loading up their wagons and crossing names off a scroll with the Emperor's face on it in wax. This woman, this wife or mother (but probably both), she asked him, “Did you ever deliver them letters?”

And the White City man (he was new), he said, “What letters?”

And the woman, she took up a stone and she killed him dead, like thunder.

And all the women, they ran up, yelling and screaming like the horses of Gods, and they all took stones and they threw them, hard as nails, and the White City men, they screamed too, and fell, and bled and died.

When it all settled down, the women started thinking what they'd done, and they were all afraid. They fretted and wept and tugged on their braids, so afraid that the White City would know, that word would get out and they'd be dead.

That's when one of them said, “Now we have to kill the old lord, stop word getting out.”

And so they did. They did it with their stones and hands and sickles and ropes, things in the ground or out of the ground, and when it was done, they stood together in the field by the keep and felt their fear go out of them. It went into the sky and into the ground and the water and stones, but it was gone from them, and when they wept, it was for the husbands and sons they would never see again, not for themselves.

That's when Durum became what it is, now.

Anyway, my basic game idea is kind of a fusion of Polaris and Solar System mechanics - Keys are prominently featured, and group- or faction-level development, conflict, and interaction is going to be handled through a bargaining system that employs key phrases.
It started out as a game to cover the austerity protests in Greece, France, and Britain, but I decided it might be more immediately accessible as a game if I explored a currently-shelved idea of mine for a beleaguered, matriarchal mountain culture resisting the dregs of a broken empire. Yep.

[edit]Here's that link I promised! 1000 Monkeys, 1000 Typewriters is offering free hosting for the Ronnies. Thanks, 1KM1KT!

ah, well

2010-11-26T10:04:00.000-08:00

I just asked my folks if they'd try a game of Fiasco with me. I figured this could be an easy-ish sell: it's quick (2 hours or less), it's simple (even by normie standards), and it's based in heist-movies-gone-awry.

They turned me down, sadly.

But their objections were interesting: my dad said, "Thanks for offering, but you don't just play those things once." To which I replied, aha, Fiasco is a one-shot game! He gave a murmur of approval, but did not change his answer. I will follow up with him - his "real" reason may be something like "I'm not interested in that activity for any length of time", or he may change his mind at some point.
My mom, in response to hearing how long the game could take, said, "A couple of hours? That's like playing a game of Risk!" To which I replied, "No, really, I mean two hours. Literally a couple." That did not change her opinion of the idea.

Conclusion: something absurdly quick and one-shot, like Happy Birthday Robot, might be in order if I ask them again at some point.

Happy *grumble grumble* Thanksgiving. I feel like kind of a tool for taking their rejection a little personally - but it's one of those awkward situations wherein someone gives a misinformed reason to not want to do something, but may also have no particular interest in doing it, even if the confusion is cleared up. We'll see.

edit: Christ, but I have no interest in doing the whole "no, really, it's fun" routine. I don't think I'm going to do that anymore; it depresses me and usually doesn't work. Blech.

Poor Cedric Diggory!

2010-11-14T16:39:00.001-08:00

Watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on TV, I hatched upon a design theme I would include if I got to work on an HP game.

Basically, it's: relationships are a lot of work, sometimes awfully so, but if you can get it, love is very much worth it. In magical terms, it lets you break the rules once in a while. Neat! Dark wizards, naturally, are folks who have no more love in their lives, or who forsake love at just the wrong moment for the sake of ambition. Thus, they have to become extra-ruthless and clever with their magic (and with other things) in order to compensate.

Alternately, I would be quite intrigued by a game of My Life With Master, hacked to use HP as the setting and premise, wherein the protagonists are all Dark wizards serving You-Know-Who. The identity of the Master should be obvious ^_^

[Chronica Feudalis] Not what I expected

2010-11-07T20:00:00.000-08:00

Today I had an adventure in close-reading, and I think I've learned some important things in the past couple of days about how games work.

I used to flip straight to the "standard task resolution" rules in a new game book, trying to get a sense of the very core of a system right away. For some reason, my high school and college days were a time when knowing this solitary thing, and nothing else, was quite important.

Of course, there are lots of games out there that would be much poorer for it if they were stripped down to only the basic "mechanic" - imagine Polaris without Zeal and Weariness, for instance, using only the Key Phrases all the time without any kind of superstructure "around" them to elaborate them and provide the downward arc for Heart characters. Kind of sucks away half the game and forces the players to just kind of grope in the direction of that sort of play, doesn't it?

Segueing... playing Chronica Feudalis tonight with Chad, a college friend, was good and surprising. I prepped about as much as I needed to, with a little cheat sheet and a good online dice rolling program. I could definitely use a physical copy of the book, but not so much so that I'd buy one just yet; I'd hold out for a campaign or something, or just beg someone to print out the .pdf. Yes, perhaps that makes me a terrible person, but... okay, I have no justification other than poverty, and when my promotion goes through in January, I'll no longer have that excuse.

Anyway, that stuff about Polaris above connects strongly to my initial bafflement at Chronica - the basic resolution seems really, really straightforward and flat until you start learning more about Aspects - freeform traits with mechanical weight that you can switch on and off. Aspects make all sorts of things about *every* character come to life - tonight's best one was definitely "My son is a sodomite", which my lone player inflicted on an archbishop's assistant to blackmail him. Very nice.

Another thing that's changed about how I read is how I sense things like GM/player agency, and how a very close reading of procedural text is key to minimizing unintentional hand-wavey play. This edition of the game (the first edition, I reckon) is a little vague in places, but it's pretty awesome how it throws Aspects all over the place, giving and demanding Ardor (metagame points that manipulate Aspects). If you let the GM tell you one thing that one of your Aspects makes you do, and you do it, you get Ardor. If some equipment you're carrying interferes with a task, you get Ardor. Basically, if you surrender a little authority, or make your life a little harder, you get more narrative pull.
It's interesting, though - the exact procedural text falls on one side of causality: certain things that make sense in the fiction are going to trigger an Aspect being Endured, but the player decides whether or not to have an Aspect Compelled (eliciting a particular, unwanted behavior).

You can spend Ardor to introduce Aspects on other characters, temporarily turn off one of your negative Aspects, or resist the causality of your equipment thwarting your efforts - your heavy armor will surely count against you when diving in to save the duchess, unless you spend some Ardor to ignore its weight.

Our session tonight was one scene: Chad's priest, a bastard son of the duke, forced into the cloth to keep him out of the line of succession, learns that the King of France will be coming through the city (Troyes at Champagne, in France) and supping with the duke and the archbishop. The priest espies the archbishop's assistant at midday Mass, and confronts him afterward with (true) rumors that the man's son is a sodomite.
We used the social conflict rules - the "Parley" - and Father Luc threatened to release his list of suspected sexual degenerates to the wider Church - risking a general inquiry in northern France - unless the assistant could promise that he'd
get the archbishop to look into a supposed (fictitious) heresy brewing in the nearby countryside. Details were fuzzy, of course, but the assistant agreed, belatedly remembering that the imminent Royal Feast would then divide His Grace the Archbishop's attentions. [I made the assistant an Agent, a level two (of three) opponent, only to realize how much tougher this made him as an adversary than a Simple, or level one foe. A level one opponent might have broken too easily, though, and we were constrained by time, so I simply had the assistant back down more readily than he really had to, which fit the severity of the threat against him.]

Father Luc, naturally, offered to represent the Archbishop at the feast. If the offer were rejected, he'd be forced to sit at a lower table, away from the duke and Luc's noble half-brothers, and stew in the shame of his low birth. But if the Archbishop goes for it, and agrees to have the bastard priest sit at the high table in his stead, then Luc could rub it in his father's face!
Of course, there are a few pieces to this plot, and only the first has been laid, thus far. I'm pretty excited about where this will go, and I'm going to read up on some rpg.net actual play reports that suddenly got a lot more interesting to me ^_^

Last thing: we used gchat, wikipedia, random.org's dice roller, and .pdf's of the game. Hurrah for 21st century gaming! Incidentally, I rolled actual, meatspace dice, out of an old, repurposed bag of Royal Salute whiskey. Good times.

lair of the cyclops, first test run

2010-10-28T21:42:00.001-07:00

I got to try out my Swords & Wizardry adventure tonight. It went awesome!
Also, this:

We had a whopping FIVE players to start; this whittled down to four when one guy lost interest as the equipment list came out (I swear, equipping a PC is like a minigame in its own right).

We almost lost another over a rules dispute (someone basically wasn't listening when I called a house rule to a vote - - I had the players arrive at consensus over each house rule I wanted to use - - and he literally did not understand what we had agreed to, and got for-real upset when the confusion arose). I was nicer and more conciliatory than I should have been.

The house rule was: spend 10 min./spell level of a spell you wish to memorize, and you may memorize it right then and there. However, you're still constrained by the number of spells you may have at the ready at any particular time. The idea was to focus the constraint of resources to the bounds of a particular encounter, not a particular day of game time. On reflection, one of two things could happen instead: a) if time is a resource, it needs to matter consistently, and b) maybe just allow this with information spells/I chose to employ this idea BECAUSE of information spells.

Anyway. It was super-awesome: my notes were in pretty good order, the rules definitely had just the right level of complexity (on the low side, with lots of wiggle room), and I got to see what it's like to have PCs be a hair's breadth from death.
I fudged one thing, one time: I made a fall cause d3 damage, not d6, since a pit trap I'd placed ended up affecting three players at once! Oh nose!
This is why we ask what the marching order is, though ^__^ Next time, no fudging: I will let that character die, and have the player roll up someone new and see where it goes.

The players were pretty ingenious, asking good questions and giving me good chances to flesh out details that I hadn't really considered (but were totally the right kind of details that matter just enough as Color that it's worth thinking them up).
Also: I had a great time being a very neutral Referee, callin' it like I see 'em and being consistent and fair. Fun stuff!

The mini-con where I'm running this again is on the 6th - next Saturday! Holy crap! I may end up just taking a day trip to DE instead of a whole weekend, for my brudder's birthday. Whoo!

[dwarf fortress] on patience

2010-10-20T15:15:00.001-07:00

~~Just so you know, when you're cooking up a new world in Dwarf Fortress, and it takes a while loading terrain, towns, peoples, etc., LET IT FINISH.~~
I just tried playing adventure mode after only giving the game 400 or so out of 1000 years of "prelude" to build a world, and all the sites where towns should be were completely empty. Kind of a "coming soon - Hill Valley" time travel moment.
Weird.
edit: Okay, what was actually going on was as follows - the current ("DF2010") version of the game basically has Adventure mode on hiatus - it's supposed to be basically content-free until a (soon) future release.
Sigh, good to know (thanks, Bay12games.com forums!). I woulda been wandering that desert forever!

agency, hobbyism, and Participationism

2010-10-16T18:57:00.000-07:00

I was checking out a Forge thread tonight; in this thread, Callan and I were asking somewhat-leading questions to suss out the thread author's interests, preferences, CA leanings, etc.

I think what we found was a fan of Participationism. Straight up, yo. Seriously - this person explicitly said that an RPG consists of a GM running a game as a way of somehow augmenting the process of telling a story they wanted to tell. I have to ask - what's the point of using a game system as part of that process?

My guess is that RPGs were what got this dude into group storytelling (or, maybe, group get-together-it's-GM-story-time, to be more direct), and now there's some desire to tell the story with a few little number-thingies draped around the story for, to paraphrase him, the sake of keeping track of how probable different details are. As in, players ultimately do the thing the GM is leading them off to do, maybe with a little improvisation in the moment, such that the GM-preferred outcome doesn't change.

I have to admit, writing that out, that it's not clear whether this is the kind of activity that he enjoys, or if it's simply what he expects/believes it to be. I remember, when I only knew of Illusionist and Participationist play, I longed for more player agency - character abilities like fortune telling or wish-granting or similar seemed really important to be, as a way of getting around the wall of GM authority, such that what I say would automatically matter, without being peer-reviewed and peer-approved by the GM.

I swear, explicit player authority, subject only to overwhelming disinterest or dislike by the overall table, was my golden grail in high school. I longed for something like that, something that would let me express my ideas and make them stick to the fiction.

Some part of me wants to say "If you enjoy this play, that's fine!" But I really don't understand why it's fun - I really enjoy being told a good story, but if I have to take the time to build an avatar through which I experience the story, I would like some significant input. I don't even enjoy video games with a "plot"; some explication or sense-info is fine (like old roguelike "level feelings"; Google it) to add a tone or feeling to a section of the game. But it's like beating up enough bad guys to be rewarded with the next scene in a play.

Unless the play is really good, mind you - I do like hearing stories, as I said, but only if they're good ones.

I dunno - I guess my point is that *because* it's a game, I want to be directly involved. If I'm watching Wallace Shawn share an anecdote on stage, I wouldn't try to interrupt and contribute my own plot twists and details. But if you say "hey, why don't we do this thing together; it's fun", then I'm going to want to move my race car around the board, thank you. And I want where I land to change what's going on.

I think that Participationism is mostly a hobbyist's approach to play, rather than something that newbs are really craving. It's idiosyncratic, endemic of poorly written how-to-play texts (and poor GM sections, especially those that lack good examples of play) and the muuuuuch more isolated conditions that gamers faced in the days before widespread internet use. As in, D&D didn't explain very well how it was really supposed to work, and whatever wording was in the text gave a lot of people some bad ideas about how to play.

I'm not saying *incorrect* ideas, mind you, because I have no idea how Gygax or Arneson or any of those guys played, or how they wanted us to play, or anything. But I think a lot of people learned to play in this silly fashion, thanks to a combination of unclear text and a narrow social context - one that praised/praises agreement and consensus - we developed a hobby that's rife with this type of play.

My point is that it doesn't have to look like this; most people in the hobby have never been exposed to true player agency. When they experience it, I think most people appreciate and like it.

How to Host a Dungeon (ap post)

2010-10-03T21:47:00.000-07:00

There's a great source of lonely fun out there that, like traditional sources of lonely fun (i.e. preparing a dungeon for play), will enable yet more gaming in its wake:

Here's a rundown of what happened in my 2nd game, in which I finally realized how adventurers work.

The dwarves of Enog Rinmol made it a few turns, carving out a small but sturdy little settlement under the earth and making money with a gold mine (literally). Sadly, they struck a cavern containing a deadly microbe, some kind of plague, and wiped them all out immediately. Sigh. That happened in my first game, too.

Anyway, a magma pipe formed deep, deep down, sending up a volcano (and thus an awesome, convenient ingress to the dungeon once it cooled).
Humans settled the nearby Overworld, their farmlands soon quilting the nearby countryside. A tribe of fungaliths (??) showed up in higher caverns, and began exploring nearby tunnels, only to encounter a human city, wipe it out, and die off in the process.
A settlement of earth-men (?) claimed new chambers hollowed out in the side of the now-dormant magma pipe, just off the dead dwarves' gold vein. They fought off numerous incursions from green slimes, wandering evil wizards, and other critters, managing to stay strong enough to hold off an encroaching dragon from the deep.

Giant ants actually drove the dragon from its lair, to my surprise. They showed up in the old dwarf-hold, and kept it at bay until adventurers could show up and wipe *them* out. Eventually, for want of monsters in the dungeon, some undead warriors appeared in a cavern off an underground river. They were soon cannibalized by a vampire who floated in off of said river (a custom monster! Shyeah!), who was in turn wiped out when the Thought Lords (psychic slave-masters) showed up.

Here's where things stand: a crew of adventurers, battle-scarred but staggering under their pile of loot, is encamped at the foot of the dead volcano. The fungalith caverns stand empty, whatever strange things they called wealth sitting right where they left them.
The earth-men are weakened, but wealthy. Again, I have to wonder what they would consider treasure.
I forgot to mention the kobolds - they settled into the tomb where the undead warriors dwelt, and now hold their treasures as their own. The Thought Lords are hiding out within the depths of their vaults, having taken heavy losses from the vampire.
The dwarf-hold stands utterly empty, though little of the gold vein has been tapped.
Adventure!

[dwarf fortress] Zed the Unmerciful

2010-09-26T23:04:00.000-07:00

The title refers to me.
I tried using screw pumps tonight - basically an Archimedes screw, for the curious. I placed one at the bank of a river and tried to see what it would look like to turn it on, powering it by hand.
This last detail was the problem. The loyal dwarf workman turning the handle got the pump working, all right, promptly sweeping himself into the river.
He drowned in minutes.
Silly me, I forgot to tell them to stop using the pump - and thus, two more hapless dwarves came down, one at a time, to try and operate the thing. They, too, drowned almost immediately.
Now that I've shut off the damned thing, I'm going to try powering it with a nice water wheel or something. Sheesh.

0e D&D has those little details...

2010-09-22T23:55:00.000-07:00

Just lookin' at the Swords and Wizardry text, and I noticed that the ability score descriptions don't actually reference the "meaning" of the scores, only their mechanical effect. "Strength" does not measure your character's power, it "gives your character bonuses when attacking with a ... melee weapon." Very straightforward, almost jarringly so.
The best of these has got to be Wisdom:
Wisdom is the Prime Attribute for Cleric characters, and any character with a Wisdom score of 13 or higher gains a 5%
bonus to all experience point awards. If a Cleric has a
Wisdom score of 15 or greater, he gains an additional
first level spell.
Note the utter lack of reference to the fiction. Wisdom serves literally no other purpose than to, potentially, give you a bonus to experience and Cleric spell-casting. I cut my RPing teeth on much more complicated tables for ability scores - anyone else remember 18/01-00? If you rolled an 18, you got to roll on an additional chart to see what kind of 18 Strength you had - it's basically a minigame. That, and, who knows why, the 2nd edition design team decided to make 18 and 19 Strength very, very different values - they were preserving the might and majesty of rolling an 18, I guess?
Speaking of minigames - the whole 0e ability score thing is really six short games that give your character little party favors for winning - the physical stats grant bonuses that seem so triflin' that it draws the power of a good Int or Cha roll into question - you mean to tell me that +1hp/level is as much of an accomplishment (more or less) as knowing four languages? If you're a magic-user, the access to 7 out of 9 magic levels is pretty rad, too.
Maybe since every character has a score in all six abilities, they're just being granted a "suite" of different perks, a sort of grab bag with categories or something. I dunno.
Tomorrow I may sketch out some ideas for Level Three of The Lair of the Cyclops - it's technically the fourth area from the start of the dungeon, but I read a thing, and decided to hold off on Level Four encounters for now.

As it stands, the XP to be gained in these four areas gets you most of the way through the 3rd character level (jeeeeez, is that ever an overused term, with multiple, distinct meanings ^_^;;), unless of course you're a bad-ass Cleric with +15% XP - - Clerics already advance in level about 25% faster than Fighting Men, and 40% faster than Magic Users, so the extra bonus is just crazy - you can level up your Cleric twice(!) as fast as a Magic User if you rolled good Wisdom and Charisma (and the MU didn't). Is that why they're considered the most powerful class in the default S&W game? 'cause they get to access their higher-level content so much more quickly?
Honestly, I think it brings us back to being a polyglot (high Intelligence) vs. getting a single extra hit point every level - you have to claw and scrape for every little extra bit of help on dice rolling, but if you're clever you can possess advantages far beyond those of mere combat perks. Maybe? I don't know - it seems like Magic User is an "advanced" class - they rely the most on careful rationing of resources, but those resources can result most readily in "crazy shit happens" - consider how easily a lowly Hireling could reason out a mundane equivalent of a Fireball spell, and how hard it would be for a Magic User to reach the fifth level. So, you need to be super-careful with what you've got, but in exchange, you don't have to think as hard to get it to do what you want. Maybe?

It's late, and I'm trying to delve into the design ethos of the game. It's kind of interesting to ponder the role of "talking through" challenges - certainly, MU's have to think things through when it comes to combat situations, but they may have some spell on hand that's perfect for a puzzle or other non-combat encounter. The notion of being that careful both in and out of combat seems like a natural space for the Thief role to fill, but to properly do that, you'd need a character with very little explicit in-game resources of any sort. That would be a true "master class" for 0e - you literally have only your wits with which to win the day. (for that matter, the Fool archetype might very well make more sense here than that of the Thief, just to highlight the character's lack of special tricks or tools at hand)

This makes Clerics kind of the un-thinking-man's character - you have healing spells and attack-magic, you can turn undead, you can fight pretty well well... you've got it all!

It's pretty odd, in this light, that Thieves, who could be the aforementioned "master class", have so many weird little tricks in dungeon-crawl games (they do lots of damage with Backstab, they can circumvent drawn-out puzzles with Pick Lock and Disarm Trap...), and the nature OF some of those tricks seems to center around obscure or unusual situational rulings in-game:

"Well, instead of talking about tumblers clicking, or the shape of the key-head, let's just say that *your* dude can roll dice to open the door. Well, instead of pouring sand in a bag to get the idol's counterweight just right, let's just say your dude rolls dice to bypass the giant-boulder trap." This rambling thought-train stems largely from the enthusiastic suggestions of the "Quick Primer for Old School Gaming", most especially the "sixth Zen moment", that is to say,

This is a game about exploration, not combat.

Even when you're in combat, the point is to turn every possible, literally conceivable, advantage to your own ends, meaning that combat is just another puzzle. Your character's magical or martial powers act as a golf handicap or a buffer against having to use pure reason and description to get every little thing you want. This ties in to the "second Zen moment", or,

Player skill, not character abilities.

I was going to say that there is no [Forge alert!] "Conflict Resolution" in 0e, but that'd be incorrect - the conflicts you're tackling really are composed entirely of their component tasks. That's why you can't fudge *how* you do the thing you're doing; you get to fudge the How in games when the What (are you trying to accomplish) is more important. All we have here is the How - the game is all about encouraging and rewarding skillful players. On some level, the degree of seamlessness between What and How is pretty much complete, such that the rule book doesn't really cover anything else.
Hell, the bit about p.c. alignment is pretty sparse - to the point where they're basically saying, "Okay, this particular 0e game was actually published in the 21st century, long after other games had started using alignment. We don't really care one way or another, and there is absolutely no game effect for choosing whatever you want [for your p.c., that is. Protection from Evil is a 1st-level spell*]. But, hey, if the little bit of color it adds is important to you..." I have to respect the designers' complete apathy to the notion of Telling a Story, or The World Making Sense, in the face of Beating the Game.

*one last thing: I read the spell description, and it actually protects against "enchanted monsters", including both demons and the generally neutral-seeming elementals. Also curious: the Cleric can make this spell last for twice as long as the Magic User can. That feels like plain old niche protection; [Forge term] "Color" be damned!

Well, ahem

2010-09-20T22:00:00.000-07:00

I have been convinced that I have misjudged Luke Crane's game designs.
I have been sold on trying out Mouse Guard.

Basically, the concept of Beliefs finally clicked for me - I was reading a Narrativism explano-thread over at Giant in the Playground (because, apparently, I am still a wee bit obsessed with definitions and Forge wonkery), and then I read a review of Mouse Guard at a site called... ew... Gnome Stew.

They started talking about how Beliefs are part of MG, and it dawned on me that, yes, a character's Belief(s) could really be like their own personal Premise - something to hang their moral choices on, with a little structural presence additionally. Cool!

Now, one might fairly ask, "Do you *really* only get excited about a game if it supports Narrativist play?" Well, what gets me down is a game that's Incoherent; I think the past few months have shown me that all CA's, when supported effectively, can be just as enjoyable for me as good ol' Story Now.

To be fair, my yearning for Gamism is fairly limited, and extends to mostly D&D-esque fare. The thought of playing a comic that I didn't find hugely enjoyable, in a style that doesn't usually grab my attention, didn't sound very interesting. I guess if you could fix one of those things I'd be sold on it.
Speaking of, anyone ever play the Slaine d20 RPG? Ha, just kidding - no way, man. No goddamned way. Ick. I love(d) the comic, yeah, but I think there are some pretty sharp limits to what kind of system, overall (wish I had a link to someone I once read who claimed d20 wasn't really a complete game system) I would wade through for preferred content.
Naturally, writing the preceding paragraph has convinced me that I must write the actually-good Slaine RPG. Sigh. Just got back to writing my novel, too...

/out

Game Chef 2010 Submission Post

2010-09-19T11:22:00.001-07:00

This here link is my submission for Game Chef 2010.

It's called The Doldrums, a game of caste warfare, alliances, and lonely heroes. Check it out! For 3+ players; one or more mancala sets required for play.

quick reality check

2010-09-18T07:51:00.000-07:00

How can I ever give anybody crap, even inside my head, for pursuing something that "won't make them a living"?

I design role-playing games for fun. Who am I to judge? Yeesh.

Rolling to hit vs. Memory Lane

2010-09-18T07:31:00.000-07:00

I was just thinking about the time I gave D&D4 (Eberron) a not-so-charitable shot. The GM was very big on her Overarching Plot, see, and wanted to just kind of bring us up to speed during the first session.
I was unaware of this/didn't care to cooperate.
In my introductory scene as a priest of the hearth-goddess, I nearly got into a screaming match with some lord over the ethics of my assigned quest. This was not because the GM was playing him in any particular manner; I was trying to get an angle going for what my character was like, and "religious fanatic" seemed a good one.
Wouldn't you know, the GM was downright puzzled at my overacting. I had assumed that if I was placed in a scene, I was free to do as I pleased in it, provided I didn't just wander away (which would, legitimately, be kind of unfair). But it felt like I was supposed to just keep hitting the "A" button, as it were, to scroll through the NPC's dialogue.
Not down for that.
Second occasion of my ridiculousness: the War-forged member of the party gets some guff from a city guard. I ask him his superior's name, and he gives it, but the guide leading us around the city informs me immediately that "That's just how things are in this town."
I shoot back, "I am a man of the gods! I cannot stand by and allow such petty outrages!" (or some such high-flown diction)
He shakes his head at my naivete. I, the player, grind my teeth a little at being stone-walled... again.
Anyway, I ended up going a little crazy later on in the session while some of the other players (5 of us, altogether, I think) have a very extended conversation about... stuff.

I told the GM afterwards that this wasn't the game for me. Her response was a polite version of "no kidding." I had wanted to give it a try, and I accept that D&D4 can be a very different experience than this (whether it's to or not to my liking is unknown, yet).
But, looking at various story-games threads about Apocalypse World, about sandbox games, basically about very character-centered, player-choice-matters games, makes me wonder what I could have been thinking to try something a bit more 1990 (i.e. the middle wave of AD&D, where GMs stopped practicing Old School Zen and started all that stuff that Ron gets anger-y about), knowing my own proclivities for Maximum Protagonism!

Anyway. Let this be a lesson: never play in a game just to be polite if you suspect you'll really hate it. Even if you might be pleasantly surprised, being pleasantly disappointed is just too much of a waste of not just your time, but the group's.

/out

Game Chef 2010

2010-09-15T19:56:00.001-07:00

Hey all,
I'm in the midst of working on a caste-warfare/Greek theater game called The Doldrums. It's for Game Chef.
Also: I'm on a design team (basically we cheer each other on and offer criticism) for Game Chef 2010. We have a team logo/image! It is so rad.
Above is my cover image for the game. Woo!

I didn't know the SLA had a Yukon chapter..

2010-06-14T07:10:00.001-07:00

The excitement of reading the following snippet of chat is one big reason why I love sharing RPGs with new people:

Rebecca: oh man! so could we maybe work together to come up with a rpg sometime? i have a couple random ideas percolating but it'd be fun to get yer thoughts and stuff

10:09 AM me: dude write 'em down

i absolutely want to hear your thoughts

can i quote what you just said on my blag, btw? :)

Rebecca: cool!

This chat came on the heels of me and B playing some Fiasco the other night; as soon as we'd finished, pretty much, B told me she had some ideas for a game design of her own. I swear, RPGs just do this to people, and it's awesome.
Onto the game: a couple of adult siblings return to their childhood home, a science station in northern Canada. They find a body with an old friend's photo nail-gunned to the chest, and proceed to get into all sorts of acid-dropping, cult-following, full-auto gunfire kind of fun.
Things were a little slow at first, as B got a sense of what the game expected of her, so to speak. She relied a lot on describing the internal state of characters in her control, and we definitely (in general) had a somewhat fast and loose "ownership" of various characters.
Given that there were only two players, sometimes it got a little funky deciding who would play whom. Overall, though, we made it work.

The setup was something she really, really enjoyed (as did I), and I think that's wicked-cool: I love me some randomized plot-seed generation!
The game definitely suffered a little for our paucity of players in that the dice system didn't *quite* work as planned - during the Tilt, you're going to appoint only two players to share elements for the big twist, pretty much guaranteed. Only two. So, naturally, the giving-away-dice rule for Act One was a little meaningless, in our situation. Still, as a learning game, it was fine.

Speaking of which, I pulled two little tweaks (quite transparently, to my credit) to make things easier, especially at first - we rolled to see who would go first, and then I suggested, when the dice went B's way, that she be the one to *choose* who went first. She chose me, iirc ^_^ Secondly, I would often ask her whether she'd rather Establish or Resolve the scene when it was my turn (partly, admittedly, because I was cool with whatever and I didn't often have huge scene ideas between scenes, only during them).

Overall, I think the game would benefit (for me) by playing it with the recommended 3+ people, just to see how that'd go. Also, Fiasco's in-scene mechanics are very hand-wavey; dice-rolling and number-counting definitely bracket the Acts, and we have a Tilt and an Aftermath in there, too, but, man, mid-scene, it's kind of weird when violence happens and nobody has any mechanical way of saying how it's going to go down.

The setup system is so friggin' cool, though, that I think a little early-00's style "story-vision" (i.e. "like, man, we don't want our system to get in the way of your ideas!") in the design is tolerable :)

Now we're onto discussing her idea for a game about patients in a medical facility who are trying to escape. An idea for a skill/trait: I Feel Fine, used to pass for a normie when needed and, maybe, to resist the staffers' attempts to administer treatment. It's very avant garde and intriguing in its subject matter; go Becca! ^_^

Friendship!

2010-06-12T08:42:00.000-07:00

So - I've been thinking a lot about using a mancala board as the main tool for a resolution mechanic; it occurs to me that there's an additional idea I had that might be good to throw in on top.
Basically, you have Friends.
Well, let's back up. As our good friend Sheikh recommended here, you have skill levels in the mancala resolution -game thing. Sooo here's how we frame them: each character has a set of things they're good at OR resources they alone (or alone-ish) can exploit.

There are three types of characters: the Main (the star!), Cotagonists (co-stars/first among equals), and the Omnes (everybody else). If you have a Main, a clear outlier (in importance) among the characters (someone like Elric, Dr. House, or Dexter [from Dexter, natch]), then that character gets three skills/assets, with ratings of 6 and 1. If you have Cotagonists, they have skill ratings of 4, 3, and 1.
Omnes have pretty much one rating for everything they do, based on their importance in the story/to their protagonistic nemesis. That rating can be anywhere between 1 and 6, with 6 being reserved for the central antagonist in the story. Alternately, obstacles or other not-person barriers to the players could be rated accordingly - the Sea of Swords ( a vast swath of rock formations, zero water, and maybe bandits) merits a 4 if it's a grand but not final obstacle to getting deeper into the Southlands. I dunno.

So. You pick your assets, and now we make Friendships a little more clear. Friendships have two steps in 'em - two times you can take advantage of this relationship before that person wants nothing to do with you. Theoretically, a given Friend could be a group of people instead.
The point of Friendships, beyond the social assets they provide (i.e it's good to be cozy with some people), is that they provide assets you don't have. This is super-important - in conflict, retreat is (nearly) always an option, so if you hit a wall, you can go back and find someone to help you. If you use a Friend's asset in place of your own on the mancala board, reduce your connection to that Friend by one step.
If you reduce your connection to zero steps, that relationship is either over or on hiatus - that Friend doesn't want to have anything to do with you or refuses to help you. You can get back in their good graces again, though - with Laurels! A Laurel is any sort of favor, gift, honor, or what have you that the Friend would actually appreciate, as defined by whoever's playing that Friend. One Laurel restores one step.

I advise that player to push for all they can get from the situation, but what they demand must be something the other player is capable of giving. I see no problem at all with demanding something the supplicant can't currently give - that'd be the beginning of a quest, I suppose!

Two more things about Laurels - first, you can determine what's "fitting" in one of three ways: the supplicant may decide privately what he's going to give the Friend, and maybe give it unasked as well, in play; both parties may discuss, out of character, what would be appropriate, and run a scene wherein the giving occurs, if necessary; OR the Friend may announce, in play, what his/her desire or demand might be.
So - talk about it out of character, or one party springs it on another. Or talk about it in-character, I guess, but only if it's interesting.
Second thing: new or brief Friendships - if you can only make contact with a stranger, or someone who will only interact with you for a short time (someone you meet on the road, or suchlike), then you and the player of the Omnes can discuss what you might need to give this person to get them to do you a favor. Once you've gained, and used up, one step with this person, it's likely that the relationship, such as it is, will dissolve on the spot, but it may be that the Omnes character is well-liked by the group, and either sticks around or returns sometime later in some form.
So. That, combined with a mancala-based resolution mechanic, and I think we have a game starting to form. :)

from the BAD IDEAS thread...

2010-06-09T22:02:00.000-07:00

at story-games.com/praxis - - an awesome thread, if ever I've seen one. Basically, what is your crazy or absurd or "stupid" idea for a game? There are some gems here.

A game that incorporates mancala into its conflict rules.
Scoring goals gets you closer to your objectives in the scene and capturing enemy stones trips up your opposition from reaching theirs. Getting extra turns means either you get to build on your success OR you just take an extra turn on the board!
It occurs to me that one of two things should happen when a given game of mancala is over - either the conflict has been settled between the two characters in question, or the story itself is over. Ooh! Because the mancala round ends, the *current* conflict is over. The next time you start a round, it coincides with a new conflict starting for your character. If you resolve the main conflict of the story and you're in the middle of a round, that conflict is resolved as part of a denouement or is continued in the next tale.

Oh, man. I have got to think up answers for things like "number of goals scored" or "number of stones captured". Woot.
[... goes to get a mancala board]

Quick update - new games and new players

2010-05-30T20:45:00.001-07:00

Once some actual scenes get underway, I'll have something more substantial to share.
For now - - the Dwarf Fortress character creation session was a success; we'll have an explorer, a disgraced military officer, and a heartbroken poet all trying to run a settlement in the middle of the jungle. We'll see how it rolls!

Secondly, B and I made characters - and a situation - for Fiasco. We used the On the Ice playset; we have a couple of siblings, children of scientists, who have returned to ice station McMurdo (purpose unknown yet), only to discover a body in a hunter's shed. Polaroids have been nail-gunned(!) to the dead man's chest, and there's a note, in Sharpie: "Your move". The Polaroids depict the deputy director of the station talking to someone - since the kiddos (now adults) don't really recognize anybody who's around the station these days, they aren't sure what the hell's going on. First session to follow soon!

CV - RPG style

2010-05-25T22:19:00.000-07:00

I need to take a moment and write down designs I have in progress, designs I've given up on, and ones I've more or less completed (late-beta constitutes "completed" for this list's purposes).

La Familia (mostly finished Otherkind-dice game of factional rivalries and Clan Treasures)

Dwarf Fortress (homebrew game of overwrought, dwarfy passions unfolding underground; based lovingly on the game of the same name; still a WIP, but with recent progress)

Tell That to an Angry Mob (horror/weird fantasy monster game about loyalty and love and being an outsider; still a rough sketch)

Mask of the Emperor (dead, and scavenged for ideas; my samurai game of reputation)

Giants in the Thicket (a fun little WIP about villagers working out their differences so they can all slay a giant together)

Leviathan (new! a murder mystery game with Polaris key phrases and a deck of cards; it gets a little political and a lot sneaky)

The Hellenes (Mask-inspired Greek gods-and-heroes game, with some informative holes in the rules. Dead, but scavenged well for ideas)

Potter's Tale (early-college crack at game design; experimented with two sharply different fantasy worlds side-by-side, one animal and one human)

If you have any questions or ponderings about any of these, let me know and I'll happily share what I got in greater depth. The purpose of this list is to make me feel a little better about getting stuck on projects, and of course there's my fruitless compare-self-to-Vincent-Baker issue that I'm working through, too ^_^

Ah, sigh.

Ice Station Nerdly, Theory, Etc. [3 of 3]

2010-05-22T22:30:00.000-07:00

Finally, we get to Radiant. As I'd guessed, this game is definitely inspired by Apocalypse World - the rules summary, which is nice and short, has a series of headings that basically go "To do X, roll Y, then spend your successes on Table Z." AW has a bunch of these, called maneuvers, and so does Storming the Wizard's Tower.
It's hard to guess why people compare it to AW more readily, given that a) Radiant doesn't divide any of its maneuvers by character class and b) Storming pretty much has the same thing going on - though stuff like "to read a situation" or "to show someone up" are more in AW's format, whereas Storming divides these things into broader classes like "Controlling Others" and "Charged Conversations". Fundamentally, the mechanics do not differ very much, although Radiant has you rolling great handfuls of dice instead of a simple 2d6, AW-style.

Anyway - - this game is, to put it one way, an attempt to play Exalted with rules that are actually good. The basic Exalted book is required as a reference for play, as it contains all the setting information and the list of Charms (magic powers, akin to spells) that PCs get. The skill system is interesting in that a regular-use word like Lore refers to solving problems by knowing more than someone else does.
The GM had prepared some pre-made characters for us, along with the scenario he was going to run, which made things a little easier to get started - - digging through our sole copy of the Exalted core book to pick Charms would have been kind of a pain. That's the only detail of character creation that's very time-consuming, though - like in Storming, you establish things like A Friend and An Ancestor, as well as original categories like I Love, I Regret, and I Fear I Will. These things help to color play, and maybe introduce NPCs, but they're mainly a characterization tool rather than a mechanical implement.
I'm still wrapping my head around the conflict system, but essentially you look up a relevant maneuver, roll, and spend your successes on the chart. If it's a competitive action, especially combat or some such, things are a little different - combat tends to involve spending successes to knock points off your opponent's skills, like in Donjon. Reduce someone's relevant skill to zero, and they start losing Essence points instead. Your Essence drops to zero and you, officially "enter a coma", but we took that to mean, generally, that you'd be totally useless and incapacitated for the purpose of the conflict rather than comatose per se.
We never actually engaged the Health Points system, which sounds like a much tougher route anyway - you get to add your Essence score to your pool when you roll to defend yourself from attack, so your opponent has to be substantially more powerful than you (Solars get three Essence, compared to everyone else's two) in order to actually wound you. Given that skill damage is more immediately useful, I can only guess that you go after someone's Health Points when you really, really have to make sure they die.
Another neat, funky thing you can do, either offensively or defensively, is shift the conflict. You can roll the skill+attribute you want to force someone to confront you in a particular way. There's an element called Mobility that I'm not quite clear on yet, but it seemed to play out like this: you have to roll skill+attribute to begin a conflict with someone, and if you succeed you get both the terms of the conflict as you like them (Martial arts! Arguing! Archery! Or whatever!) and you start the process of wearing down their relevant skill points.
If you fail this initial roll, I think they can break off from the conflict and keep their distance from you, keeping their lovely skill points intact. I'm having no luck locating a .pdf of the game, but a story-games.com search will probably produce results when I can get around to it.

Overall, it was a surprisingly flowy, abstract take on a very flexible, action-packed game. The conflict system is fueled powerfully by four factors: creative description, teamwork, and birthrights and charms (cool items and cool powers, respectively). There's a table of bonuses awarded on the character sheet - those factors are the Y-axis and standard/environmental/impressive make up the X-axis.
A good description gives you one extra die to roll; if you work a pre-determined element of your surroundings into your description usefully, that's worth a total of two extra dice. If your description, more or less, impresses everyone at the table, you get three extra dice AND a point of willpower, which can be spent to a) give you one more success or b) if you're defending, knock out all your opponent's successes. Yes, several willpower-bidding wars happened during play; it was great! Given that willpower is required to power Sorcery (very powerful Charm-like stuff, basically), our sole sorcerer in the party had to be very cautious with her willpower, and worked hard to earn it.
If you throw yourself into making really awesome descriptions, you'll have a powerful defensive/middling offensive resource to wield. You can gain willpower from combining Teamwork with Environmental, though, which is nice.
Charms give an absurd amount of extra dice - four for a decent Description, then 8 for Environmental and 12(!) for Impressive. However, Solars have to worry about their auras revealing their nature, the more Charms and Sorcery they use, so lots of sneakiness was called for. Still, we were able to do lots of cool stuff both with and without Charms, so we didn't feel stuck.
I really don't have any complaints at all about this game, aside from the somewhat tricky nature of Shifts in Conflict. That, and a bit of unclarity around how Willpower may be used. Aside from that, it's a solid challenge game with an enormous amount of color and spunk just flowing off of it - good times! It really redeems the Exalted setting and puts it toward some good use.

Ice Station Nerdly, Theory, Etc. [2 of 3]

2010-05-22T22:23:00.000-07:00

Best Friends was kind of strange - it seemed to have the least amount of "game" to interact with, at least the way it played out. The regular game involves a bunch of teenage girls who are frenemies, and a GM concocts a scenario or set of situations (not exactly sure) that could push the girls to compete with one another. We played "Gay Hairdressers Edition", though, meaning that our characters were twentysomething gay male cosmetologists on a reality TV show akin to Top Chef, etc., with elimination challenges and a big, final prize of 10,000 dollars and a salon of one's own.
Character creation was a lot of fun - you have Pretty, Cool, Smart, Tough, and Rich for your stats, but you don't get to determine them yourself. Instead, you go down a list and decide which other player you hate "because he's Prettier than me", "Cooler than me", etc.
Next, you go around the room and ask each person what they put (if you have 6 players, it adds up quite evenly; fewer means you have some repeats, which works). For each person who decided they hate you 'cause you're prettier than they, you get a point in Pretty. And so on, through the five stats.
My character, a Russian gay guy in the US on a student visa, had 4 points in Cool (a "gargantuan" amount of coolness) and 2 in Smart ("significant" smarts), but 0 points in everything else. 0 means I'm completely useless in that respect - my looks, my athletic ability, and my finances will never be of any help to me.
Actual play is divided into a) the GM announcing a premise for the current scenario and then b) going around the room and asking folks what they'll be doing for it. In our case, each scenario involved trying to accomplish a goal AND trying to shoot down as many other players' attempts at same - you start with three chips, and if you want to stop someone from succeeding automatically, you spend a chip (which you then give to the person you marked as [blank]er than you, whatever the relevant stat is). If your victim would really rather succeed, he has to spend a chip in response.
The way it plays out is this: people who have the highest stats in something do best when that stat is used a lot in play - if Tough is important, whoever's Toughest at the table will be getting chips a lot. If you play to your own strengths, that's a safe move, too - provided you're the best at something, there'll be lots of times when someone has to hand you a chip to try to make you lose! Each time you get your way, either because you went unchallenged or you spent a chip in response, you get a victory point. Those add up at the end to determine who got their way the most frequently, and was thus the overall winner.

The game was a lot of laughs, but overall I felt like the flow of play was quite choppy, and many times players felt very on-the-spot to devise their latest revenge plot; a simple who's-ready show of hands might have worked better than going around the circle every time. This game is very high on reversals, betrayals, and alliances, but/and it's kind of easy to get lost in the immediate screw-your-frenemy hijinks and forget where the overall victory tally stands. Still, our GM was good to point out the current totals on occasion, which helped us maintain more solid priorities. Also, in the late game, we started coming up with ideas that amused one another enough that the final round was largely conflict-free; there's definitely an element in the game whereby you could drop the direct competition, but/and if you do that enough there's no clear winner, if you don't like that sort of thing ^_^

So yes, the game is straight-up competition and challenge, but there's enough wiggle-room for going between cut-throat and kind play styles that alliances and cease-fires are actually pretty meaningful - two characters hooked up towards the end of the game and had a sexy non-aggression pact, and despite my efforts to turn them against one another! Definite, pure-and-simple Gamism, with a fun and super-easy premise/setting to serve as the backdrop. The specificity of the premise is so non-essential that we came up with some bizarre alternatives - Best Friends: Senate Subcommittee and Best Friends: College of Cardinals! Surely, other alts besides Gay Hairdressers could work too, and without hindering the fundamental Challenge goal of the game.
I think it could use some tweaks to smooth out the rounds of play, but a group that's really rolling creatively could take the game as-is and run with it.

Next: Radiant! And maybe some theory stuff, too.

Ice Station Nerdly, Theory, Etc. [1 of 3]

2010-05-22T21:47:00.000-07:00

I played Radiant and Best Friends today, as well as Jungle Adventure. All of these happened at Ice Station Nerdly, which was a rousing success! Not as many people as I'd seen before, but every game I played in was pretty full.

First, reviews of the games I played!
In no particular order - - Jungle Adventure is basically a text-based adventure game, with command line, realized in a tabletop game. The GM is the Parser, or the entity that receives carefully phrased commands from the player(s) and declares the effects of those commands in rote fashion.
Seriously - for each of the limited options available in a given locale in the scenario, there is a specific response the Parser is required to give. For example, in the Native Village, if you interact with the Witch Doctor in a way not covered by the options, the Parser reads you the line "The Witch Doctor glares at you." Every time, actually - our Parser got to the point where he started saying only the relevant verb - "glare" - to save time.
This was pretty much a straight-up puzzle game, though pre-knowledge of that style of computer game made adapting to the format a lot easier - one of our players was less of a computer person, perhaps, and would phrase things in a way that wasn't specific enough for the Parser's instructions.
After a while, though, the puzzles became a little frustrating - did we need to wear the necklace in location X to cause something to happen, or did we just need to have it in hand at that point? Fortunately, the joy of getting a new and different response from the Parser in a familiar "screen", such as "The Witch Doctor crouches to the ground and draws a map in the dirt!", instead of glaring at us again, made the head-scratching worth it. It's a bit of a language game, in a way, in that you have to use the correct verbs to entice the Parser into cooperating most readily. Also, you can save your game, and whenever you're killed (or if you win, presumably), you receive a point rating from 1-100, based on how much of the game you successfully discovered.
I think this is the first pure Sim game I've ever played - Exploration is definitely the biggest, most central point of it all, as there's really no competition to speak of and the story, as befits the source material, is completely fixed and handed out in tiny, semi-autonomous chunks. Yes, the game is quite challenging, but there's hardly anything that directly serves as an in-game indicator of progress or success - - you don't find out your point score til you win or die, so the point system seems to be a friendly pat on the back, after the fact, for your uncovering cool stuff.

Next: Best Friends, Gay Hairdressers Edition!

A Return

2010-05-22T06:46:00.001-07:00

I'm going to Ice Station Nerdly today - a mini-con in the DC area thrown by folks from story-games.com.
It's been a while since I've done any roleplaying stuff, and I'm pretty excited.
In Session 1, I'm playing what appears to be a hack of Apocalypse World - it's called Radiant and it's an homage/reimagining of Exalted, but with a very different set of rules.
In Session 2, I'm playing a setting hack of the game Best Friends - the basic game is all about a bunch of women who are "friends" who find any excuse to quarrel. This version is called Gay Hairdressers Edition, and you can infer what that means! ^_^

I'm intrigued by the ramifications of playing two different hacked games today - this thread at story-games (somewhere in there...) addresses the issue of Drift, and a couple of different opinions flowed out of that - - 1) any change, to setting or mechanics, meaningfully affects System and play. The given example was making dwarves lose their beards. 2) non-mechanical changes certainly change the play experience, but only setting stuff that's directly connected to mechanics actually change System meaningfully.

The second opinion is mine, by the way. There was some discussion about being cautious when Drifting to avoid unintentional bad effects, and the standard "Forgies hate Drifting!" argument, which was silly and irritating. Drifting is fine; you just gotta know that's what you're doing, that the changes are meaningful, to the point where Forge Actual Play posters are strongly encouraged to be up-front about any changes they've made to the game, so as to make discussion as informed for all as possible.

One thing that's been annoying about discussing Big Model/GNS at story-games is that people who dislike it as a framework of analysis feel quite strongly about disproving its validity. I ask you, has the internet ever convinced anyone of anything? Of course it has, but angry, ad-hominem-laden forum arguments are hardly a bastion of idea exchange.

It occurs to me that debating the basic validity of the Big Model isn't something I'm interested in at all; just give me my fellow Forgies and we can have susbstantive debates within a shared framework, thank you very much. Ah, well.

Relationships

2010-05-16T19:00:00.000-07:00

Over at the ol' Story-Games, there's been a flutter of threads about GNS stuff. The link right there goes to a discussion about whether or not Simulationism exists - a chat had many, many times before, for sure.

In any case, the poster JD Corley asked me to clearly define Narrativism against Sim, and, well, I decided something.

Ever notice how many games with strong Narr cred are all about relationships? At least, to me they are. Consider Hero Quest - your character's stats are basically all the strengths of his various ties to culture, spirituality, and family and friends (and enemies). Consider Polaris - your character sheet is literally a relationship web with some Themes (potentially more relationships!) surrounding it.

I think I'm onto something - maybe games that fail to quantify relationships at all are the ones that fall flat, story-wise. Games like D&D and the World of Darkness bunch all have character creation systems that focus only on the individual character (ok, ok, Backgrounds move beyond that a bit, but they're pretty simplistic and non-specific when they DO refer to things like allies and contacts, AND they give almost zero structure on determining the nature of said relationships. Anyway...) and not on how said character is part of a larger world.

I absolutely, 100% think that's why Questing Beast didn't work for me - it doesn't bog you down with too many rules to follow, but the ones it does have are too general - they don't give you much direction for character creation, and the stuff on resolution of conflict only exists to establish authority/credibility for description, nothing else.

Marxism and RPG Design

2010-05-16T07:59:00.001-07:00

So - most of us have read The Jungle. We know it contributed to the creation of the FDA and some major regulation of the meat industry.
But Sinclair didn't write it for that explicit purpose. He considered that a victory, I'm sure, but when he wrote it, he was trying to convert people to socialism.
Now, I'm a Marxist-Leninist (and we can talk about that, if you want). I have a particular outlook on how societies function, how groups and individuals do act, and are capable of acting, etc. In that vein, I'm intrigued by the prospect of writing books and RPGs that make use of Marxist ideas, but I don't want to be an Upton Sinclair - I don't want to try that hard to "convert" anybody.

One might then ask why I'd be doing it at all, if I didn't want that; the point is, I guess, I don't want to get emotionally fixated on that as a goal, and I don't want to write a screed that fails to be enjoyable/entertaining on its own merits.

That being said, I came across Spectre of the Beast - a game of civilizations undergoing sweeping changes. It seems pretty interesting - you use innovation, community, and idealism as cultural forces at your command, while you try to keep Hope high and avoid succumbing to the Beast (violence, really).
This isn't a complaint, per se, but it's a game that follows the perspective of Great Men and Women, and it's those folks who have the power to shape their cultures. Again, not a huge emotional investment in rebuking that analysis, but as a Marxist, it got me thinking about that Giants idea I had - one in which a whole community has to settle its differences and band together to defeat a common threat.

I see Giants in the Thicket as a potential, friendly response to Spectre - "like, man, those Great Men in History just push the last stone that starts the avalanche. It's not all about them, maaaan!" Something like that.

That's the goal I'm setting out for myself, but first I'm going to play Spectre with some friends and see what we think. It looks neat! ^_^ That'll be my first RPing in forever, too, although I'm playing Best Friends next Saturday at a local con (Ice Station Nerdly), and apparently it's "Gay Hairdressers Edition". How exciting!

new games! plus different gaming styles, expectations, etc.

2010-02-01T18:57:00.001-08:00

I just had a bit of a gaming bender - four days of intermittent MMOs, RPGs, and TCGs! All that was missing was a board game, but the mood didn't strike ^_^

First things first: new things. I played Warhammer Online finally, and it was substantially better than other MMO's I'd played before. Mainly the interface was cleaner, the graphics a bit clearer and with a nicer art style, and a few small improvements have been made, which I don't feel like going into. I will mention Public Quests and Open Parties - the former are quests you can pick up simply by being in the area of the map where the quest is happening, and you can see NPC drama between characters unfold (like Lord of the Rings Online has, but it's not instanced), and you get a timer to let you know how long it'll be til the whole thing resets, once it's ended. Everyone who contributes to completing the PQ's objectives gets a crack at *something* - no Ninja-style theft of loot to worry about! If you contribute, you get a personal bag of loot (a choose-one scenario, there)!

Open Parties are a little similar - you can search for a group of players to join up with in the area, if it looks like they're on the same quest, but the unique thing here is that you can just join the party, *snap* like that - in time to help random strangers kill a bad guy you've been questing for. It means less work for players, less time spent bargaining with strangers just to get help with a stupid quest, and so on. I approve!

Also, okay - gear is way prettier in this game than I'm used to, in that you actually look cool fairly early on. It's Warhammer, so it's over the top, but not action-figure-goofy like in Warcraft. Very nice.

One more thing about that - it's hard to explain, but item crafting is a highly customizable process that's easy to pick up; it also has a really, really snazzy interface. I have a Chaos character who's a Butcher/Apothecary, meaning I can loot animals for special items that I can then turn into potions and salves and things. The creation process and the interface for it really make it amazing - try it!

Lastly, they have a "free forever" trial - you can't play past level 10, can't do auction-house stuff, and a couple of other things, but you can do PQs, crafting, parties, etc., AND you can have a full allotment of characters (10 per server, an unknown max), AND these trial characters never go away. Ever! Yeah!

Okay, that's enough about that. Super exciting game, though.

Mooooooving on.

We played La Familia this weekend; it was set in Ankh-Morpork, of Discworld series fame, and it did not disappoint ^_^

Also - we picked up the weird-old-west card game, Doomtown (defunct since 2000, sadly) - it's funky, it uses a poker hand to resolve who goes first and who wins in combat, and you've got all kinds of crazy stuff going on - cowboys, bandits, Indians, shamans, dark wizards, walking dead, mad scientists, corrupt businessmen, radioactive coal called Ghost Rock, pirates along the quake-shattered coast of California (which is now known as the Great Maze), and so on! It's great fun.

As far as play styles are concerned, expectations, etc., my friends and I had some good talks about winning, losing, whether/when that's fun, and how to find the right type of game to accommodate everybody's interests, comfort level, and such. It seems that immersive, collaborative gaming that doesn't focus on cutthroat conflict or high-stakes challenge is the best fit; sounds good to me! We actually had a much more extensive chat than this, which included ideas for hacking Settlers of Catan into a discovery-style game with a map that's revealed over time, in-character dialogue, and lots of negotiation as to what's REALLY going on with the Robber :)

More to come!

On game design theory and its applications

2010-01-24T06:55:00.000-08:00

As you can certainly tell from past posts of mine (check posts marked "creative agenda" if you don't believe me), I'm not one to shy away from Forge-style theorizing. Over time, and especially in the past year or two, I've had a wonderful opportunity - meeting up with a lot of folks from Story-Games has given me the chance to seek out all these cool indie RPGs I'd heard so much about.
When I finally got to play Polaris, for instance, it was a little bit like a rite of passage. Though, I have to admit, it was a lot more inspiring to put together La Familia and, somehow, have it work even better than I'd imagined.
So yeah - I've gotten to see the concrete results of what some would call theory-wank. I've definitely met my fair share of folks who don't much care for the deep end of RPG theory/design, and usually that's a-okay.
I say "usually" because I've definitely gone through a period wherein I've proselytized on behalf of story-games in general, and Narrativism-supportive games in particular. When this proselytizing has worked, so much the better, and my excellent! recent game of Polaris shows that pretty well.
But when big-time RPers haven't been interested in what I'm pushing, I've come to realize that there's a sort of fault-line between us. Nothing personal or ideological creates this divide; it's not as big or as complicated as that. Plain and simple: I had bad experience X, they had bad experience Y, and while X led me to seek out a fundamentally new way to RP, Y simply led other folks to seek out new people with whom they could play.

Let me unpack that a little: for me, the biggest bad experience I had in RPing was, bluntly, a big difference in priorities at the gaming table. I can even point to the precise moment when this started to really gel for me as something I needed to address; it was after a couple of years of lurching around at the Forge, where I had yet to really grok anything about the Big Model, but I was very eager to try out all these cool new games I saw - the subject matter, the creator-owned nature of the games, the collaborative process of design via the forums - - it was all pretty great.

But - my precise moment. I was playing a game of Exalted, and I was running an Abyssal, essentially a sworn soldier of darkness who drinks blood to gain power and wants to unleash oblivion upon the world of the living. Fun stuff! I didn't just want the cool powers available to him; I was also really interested in his story - why he was a death-knight, what he thought of oblivion, his dark masters the Neverborn (shudder), etc.
I'll spare you a lot of the details, but he eventually realized that he really, truly believed in total, worldwide destruction, you know, as a good thing, and quite sincerely at that. His dark masters, however, were content to jockey for power between one another, fighting each other as much as they fought their sworn enemies, the Solars (sun-themed heroes). So, over the course of the game, I explored the relationship between my character, other Abyssals, the Neverborn, etc., trying to drum up fellow "true believes" to the cause.
It didn't go well, but at least one of the other player-characters was also an Abyssal, and so we schemed and argued together about the point of unleashing destruction.
At the end of the game, we all confronted a Big Bad of some kind, possibly a servant of the Neverborn, a rogue Neverborn, something like that. There were some Solars fighting the creature, too, and I decided the best possible way to finish my character's story was to try and join the side of the Solars, begging their forgiveness and wanting fervently to have comrades who were just as true-blue as me.
They were very, very hesitant to accept me, what with our races' vendetta and all, not to mention the battle going on, but hey, they didn't kill me! That was the last session for the campaign, as well, and I felt, at long last, like I really got to tell a story! with a game, instead of being actively thwarted from doing so. Sure, the game mechanics got in the way (whiffing sucks! I advise all game designers against it), and only one of the six people playing with me actually showed any interest in what I was doing (they were content to be "run through" the scenario in a very traditional way).
Realizing I was out of step with the group wasn't new; realizing what it was that made me out of step was a bolt of light in my eyes!
Since then, I've gobbled up every Story Now game I can get my hands on, and I've even made forays into Gamist play, as well.
But, like I said, I've noticed that some people just aren't as excited about trying new ways of gaming as I am, and sometimes folks who *are* that excited don't have any desire to elaborate on it in the kind of language that I do.
Which is, you know, okay and all, and I'm definitely thankful to be around more people these days who like indie games.
It's a little weird to also note how quickly the *application* of theory, or at least the observation of Forge theory put to practical use (i.e. a game design, and then the playing of said game), makes all the verbosity of forum theorizing kind of melt away - I can much more intuitively guess at what Creative Agenda(s) a given game system supports best, as we play, which I've mentioned before (in the context of how simple CA really is, once you see it in action). Other concepts, like Fortune in the Middle, turn out to be equally simple in application - it's as simple as "can I affect the final result after we roll the dice, or do I need to put all my Boost Power in *before* I roll?"
And yet, naturally those little tweaks can make a huge difference. Fortune at the End does not do well with a Story Now agenda, as it really saps player agency away (in my opinion). If Fortune happens, and then we can tweak it, even if said tweaking is limited and finite, it at least gives us one more meaningful choice to make, as players. [lol i totally meant fitm WITH TEETH]
I was playing Last Night on Earth, uh, last night - it's a zombie apocalypse board game. There's a touch of Fortune in the Middle in there, as it happens - when you're inside a building, you can either move or search (as opposed to just moving, if you're outside), and searching gives you a one-card draw from the Hero Deck (Human Deck? I forget). The FitM part is there because you roll the d6 to see how far you can move, and then you get to decide whether to take that move OR search. It's nifty!
Heck, come to think of it, Step On Up play is all about meaningful choices, too - they're just more strategic or tactical instead of thematic. So yeah, FatE (ha, irony) has been a procedural default for some decades now, in most games I've encountered, but when you make that tiny tweak (courtesy of theorizing Forgies, thank you verra much! ^_^), things begin to flower, as Mao would put it.
Anyway - I've learned that RP theory has undoubted practical applications (duh! Actual Play!), but not everybody wants to see under the hood, or think about how to build a better car, when they like their driving experience just fine, so far.
End.

graph paper, ahoy!

2010-01-18T09:55:00.000-08:00

Man, designing dungeons is hard!
Nevertheless, level one of The Lair of the Cyclops is complete!

Starting to like this idea of "Old School"

2010-01-17T23:37:00.000-08:00

This is a pretty interesting (free!) resource: the quick primer to old-school gaming! It contains a few tips on how to compare and contrast (in the author's view) the different mentalities behind older (read: D&D circa 1979) and newer (read: anything you can buy at Borders) RPGs.

Incidentally, it's tied in to the Swords&Wizardry rules set. I'm tired and it's a little hard to explain (the word "Zen" gets used a few times), so I leave you to this sweet, free download.

0e D&D

2010-01-16T09:57:00.000-08:00

Here's something I'm obsessing over, of late: Swords and Wizardry, the open-gaming-license version of "original" Dungeons and Dragons!

It's a Gamist design, through and through; what's more, their design ethos is this - simple rules means something customizable and easy to pick up; it also makes referees more flexible and able to adjudicate on the spot, rather than being trapped by complex design.

I. Am. Fascinated.

Download the core rules (and a whole bunch of other cool stuff!) right here. It's all free!

Funny thing happened on my way to the Mistake...

2010-01-15T21:52:00.000-08:00

Three sessions in, my new Polaris campaign is complete. We had a lot of fun, banged out 14 great scenes, one Star Knight almost crossed over from Novice to Veteran (a male midwife with delusions of glory and grandeur, and a cruel streak a mile wide), and we left it at this:

- two Knights heading into the South to destroy a cursed, bronze artifact (only Southern forges could possibly melt it down!)
- the almost-Veteran riding out to the Mistake to fulfill a vision quest and significantly delay the inevitable (by finding a McGuffin, Sir Knight would make all demons there sterile for one year, and unable to attack the Remnants for just as long!)

Sounds pretty good to me! Yeah, we shared a feeling of "did we mess that up?", but we surpassed it by agreeing that we just didn't want to carry on any further. There was some concern, initially, that traveling South might go beyond the game's intended material; whether or not that's true, it's fair to say that the task of imagining the South was more than we were up for, and that sapped some of our interest.
Also, we poured so much emotion and creativity into those 14 scenes that we were kind of running on empty, by the end, not to mention that lots of Real Life stuff came up for us as a group, and we decided to have fun talks about our lives instead of playing a game.

We're all interested in starting a new game of *something* soon, once things settle down a bit in general. Any suggestions are appreciated! :)

Game Jamming

2010-01-10T21:02:00.000-08:00

Gabbie and I helped each other out today on our respective game designs. She gave me some wicked-good things to chew on for Giants in the Thicket, and she shared her ideas for a CCG-ish/boardgame-ish thing, Coat of Arms. It's neat.

More to come in this space when I ain't so tired.

Hiding in a thicket

2010-01-03T07:19:00.000-08:00

This post here, at story-games, gave me the urge to revisit an old idea I had about giants, and people hiding from giants in a thorny forest.
Granted, it's not the thread so much as it is my conjecture *in* the thread, haha, that leads me to think this thing. But still!
Here's a bit of what I have so far:

Giants are strong; Giants can beat anybody. The only thing they fear is the Forest.

The Forest is full of thorns; People can go there and hide there from the Giants, but while they're away the Giants can knock their houses down and wreck everything they've built.

The only time that People might capture a Giant is if they let one smash and crush all he likes, until he's too tired to go on, and then he Sleeps.

A Sleeping Giant can be tied up, or rolled away on logs, or even killed! If the People all work together, they can do it.

Sometimes, People will make deals with Giants: crush my neighbor's house, and I will give my sheep to you, to eat! Giants can take whatever they like that isn't alive, but they can never catch anybody who runs away and isn't cornered.

Giants are slow; the People can always get away from them. So can animals and other things. But the People cannot hurt a Waking Giant – they are just too strong!

Giants live in rivers, under lakes, inside mountains and hills, but they do not go in the Forest. Its angry thorns and awful nettles pierce their mottled hands and feet, and are so sharp and prickly that a Giant cannot kick down the trees of the Forest, for they are in too much pain to do anything but go away again to pick the thorns and sticks and nettles from their flesh.

Polaris rocks! [another AP thread, kinda]

2010-01-01T22:04:00.001-08:00

I promise that soon I'll give a scene-by-scene rundown of the Polaris game I started today; suffice it to say that this game can be bloody amazing!
We have half-giants, infanticide, the transference of family curses, and artifacts from the mysterious South (the whole world is south of Polaris, after all...), and my male midwife character lost a hand to a magic arrow, gaining a third eye of Starliiiight Powerrrr in its place!
This. Game. Rocks.
Since we're playing with 3 people, instead of the recommended 4, we had to mash the two "Moon" (supporting character/judge and arbitrator) roles together into one, meaning that, at times, it got a little confusing as to who should be doing what, and for whom.

Also - we learned a bit more, on the fly, how some key phrases work - the diff. between But Only If and And, Furthermore is apparently this: the former gives you access to the sweet shutdown phrase It Was Not Meant to Be, which requires both you and your opponent to take back your very last statements, respectively. Did not get that for the first six scenes, but once we got it, the reason to actually choose between BOI and AF finally clicked. Good thing!

It's possible, by the way, for Exhausting Themes (as in, the exhausting OF themes; the themes themselves do not tire us) to either be an easy or difficult thing - if your themes have a lot in common, you can do lots of the same kind of thing, but you get in hot water easily, whereas if your themes are all different from each other, you can do more, but maybe only once each. Good to know!

A-MAZING.

Polaris - AP Thread

2009-12-31T13:15:00.000-08:00

Hey, gang!
Connor, a friend of mine is visiting from San Francisco; he's in school out there, studying drama therapy. He's played WoW and other video games in the past, but I've never been able to persuade him to try a role-playing game before (and I hadn't tried asking in years...). Tonight, we couldn't find anything to do, and he didn't want to drive back to his parents' house just yet (around 7pm), so I suggested a board game.

He asked, "Is the board game going to involve a lot of thinking and strategy?" At which point, I doubled back from the game closet, sheepishly. I suggested playing an RPG instead, and, surprisingly, he assented!
I had been thinking of downloading a PDF of S/Lay w/Me, only to discover at the unstore that, hey, there is no PDF for sale yet! Oh, well - I'd bought a copy of Polaris this week, so I showed it to Connor and had him read that "As It Was" section about the king, queen, knights, etc., while I went and got dice, paper, pens, etc.
When I returned, he picked a name from the star-names list, and then we just kind of sat for a bit, while I asked him if, in all the ice and splendor and horror and demonic invasions going on, if he had any ideas for a character. Somewhere in there, I mentioned that Polaris is a tragedy, and all star-knights inevitably die, go mad, or join the demons. He scowled, conjectured on Ben Lehman's upbringing and emotional well-being, and then reminded me of his hesitation about playing. But, eventually, we extracted the following:

Sir Cetus
[all normal Aspects, plus...]
Blessing: Shield of Black Shiny Goodness (his name for it; he described a shield made of glittery obsidian)
Fate: Mensa - a character. No idea who this is, yet!
Ability: Attribute - Big (Cetus is an enormous individual - alternately described as being like a "huge ice-statue" and "big and hairy, like Thor")

New Moon character: Equuleus - a relative of Cetus's, a young boy. "The Chosen One"
Mistake character: High Priest Octans - a trouble-making prophet who declared Equuleus the "Chosen One", and who wants Sir Cetus to guard Equuleus on his way into the Mistake(!), where he claims the boy will somehow end the Mistaken demon-army altogether

Play: Connor was really nervous, but also interested in the game, so I tried to keep things as low-key as possible. Partly because he'd never RP'd before, and partly because there were only two of us playing, we divvied up the responsibilities of the Moons - anyone moving against the Heart would be played by me; anyone standing up for the Heart would be played by Connor; and anyone standing on the sidelines would be played by me (as generously and fairly as possible - no ruthlessness from such characters allowed!)

We cleared up how the Moon characters would be played (in truth, I didn't really explain the Moons, just those responsibilities), and then began.
And so it was...
Equuleus and Cetus were walking together on a rampart atop the Remnant, and Equuleus reveals that it was the High Priest who declared him the Chosen One (Connor had a good grumble about this - "How can he do that to a little boy?"), and that, as the One, he could pick anybody he liked to accompany him into the Mistake, to save the world. He naturally chooses Cetus ("You're the bravest, strongest warrior in the world!") and this led to our first conflict.

[Connor has done a lot of improv, so we started out just using the phrases "But Only If..." and "And Furthermore" to start. He quibbled a bit about using the exact phrases, but I told him it was important to keep the proper mood and tone, which was a good enough reason for him.]
Angry, Cetus sends the child to his room. [and furthermore! I add...] On the way to his room, Equuleus sneaks off instead and goes to tell the High Priest that Sir Cetus is a coward, and won't go with him to fulfill the High Priest's prophecy. [and furthermore! Connor adds...] The High Council calls Cetus in to explain himself. [Connor double-checked a couple of times if he could introduce new characters or not, but he took to "just say your intent; don't hedge" without me having to ever bring it up directly!] I agreed - And that was how it happened! Then we ended the scene, and took a break.

I told Connor that a break was just that - a solid break from the game completely, to talk about whatever. He went on a bit about feeling really resistant to being creative, how he felt like he was on the receiving end of the very techniques he's learning in school, and on three separate occasions tonight, he pantomimed feeling stuck in a box by the prospect of being creative for the game. He told me he was enjoying it, though, and he just had a lot of baggage to get over about performance and getting things right - I told him that whatever he comes up with will be totally cool as-is, and he resolved to keep that in mind.

We started up a second scene.
And so it was...
Sir Cetus stands before the High Council, accused of cowardice and thwarting the Chosen One's wishes. They beg an explanation, and he tells them that he's been to the Mistake before, as they know [I write this down, whispering "awesome!"], and it is no place for a boy, not even a Chosen One. They consider this, but High Priest Octans loses it and screams "This traitor should be thrown in prison!" [Connor replies, "What, like you threw my parents in prison?" He then explains that Cetus's parents went demon-mad and were locked away at the bottom of the Remnant for their own safety. Rad!]
[We start a conflict at this point:
Connor says: but only if... the High Priest has been wrong before about his prophecies.
I say, in turn: but only if... the High Council trusts him anyway.
Connor says: you ask far too much!... then continues to narrate]
Equuleus comes out of hiding and tells the Council they have no right to do this to his chosen guardian! [Connor exhausts his Theme of Fate, and I amend my statement] The High Priest demands, instead of arresting Sir Cetus that Sir Cetus show Equuleus his mad parents, in their cell - "The better to show the boy what he is protected from by the prophecy, from which others are not..." [Burn! Connor asks me if Cetus is now required to do this thing, if he has to, and I say no, but now the Council expects him to do so. He agrees.]

We ended the scene there. I'm noticing, looking back, that there was a slight rule-thing that we missed - "You ask far too much" applies to the previous statement made by one's opponent, whereas we used it for the statement that caused the conflict - i.e. Cetus is arrested. Since retroactively changing that would have meant erasing some cool stuff established about Octans and the Council, I'm okay with this.

At this point, we end the scene. We talk for a bit about things, Connor says he's really enjoying himself, though still nervous about performing well (he's a nervous guy by nature), and then I ask if he wants to play out the scene where his parents, Al Niyat and Alya, are introduced. Screaming, mad, padded-room parents? Fun! He says he's not up for another scene tonight, but he does have an idea about what happened to Cetus's parents - when Cetus went to the Mistake (the circumstances of which are unclear), he nearly died, and some kind of Council of Demons (he said it was a sort of counterpart to the High Council of the People) agreed to trade "one life for two minds" - his parents were driven insane by demon sorcery, and in exchange, the demon councilors spared Cetus and sent him home. Connor honed in on this a bit more - Cetus is not one for bravado or foolhardiness, because he's seen horrible things first-hand and doesn't care to inflict that on anyone else. AND! the High Priest had once told *Cetus* that he, too, could not be harmed by the Mistake, which we then concluded together made it possible that, should Equuleus enter the Mistake, some kind of price would be paid to see the boy safely out of there again, and Cetus did NOT want that to happen!

We chatted a bit about drama therapy, RPGs, improv, etc.; I mentioned that I'd heard a rumor that Polaris is a metaphorical examination of the strain of doing social work for a living, he guffawed and clucked his tongue at that, and then we agreed to play again! Yay! We will probably play again while he's still here in Virginia, if possible, and then figure out from there when we'll play once we're on the opposite ends of the country from one another. I'm very excited that he gave this a shot, and that he connected to it on a couple of levels (improv, therapy..)

So! More to follow, with any luck.
[Cross-posted at the Forge and story-games]

Quick update

2009-12-30T10:51:00.001-08:00

I owe one of my non-gamer coworkers a game of Shock: the next time we're able to hang out and do that. We have protagonists ready to go; next we'll have antagonists raring to go, too!

I bought a copy of Polaris as well, and I plan on getting two other people (prolly a couple of trad gamers; a couple of *certain* trad gamers, haha) to join me. Yessss!

Boys Don't Cry - the RPG

2009-12-30T10:13:00.000-08:00

Hey!

I think I may have found a way to use Otherkind dice to talk about oppression, social roles, and such.

It goes like this: the players devise a community, choose a group in that community that is oppressed, and then pick a trait/skill/way of getting things done that is forbidden to that group, but accessible by the dominant population. The oppressed group can certainly act in the manner outlined by the trait on its own group-members, but not on white people/in the presence of white people.

Let's say we devise a Colorado post-industrial town, choose Vietnamese immigrants as our oppressed group, and then decide that it's forbidden for Asian people in this town to be Confrontational - white folks can get up in people's faces whenever they deem it necessary, but the Vietnamese community here has learned to lie low and get what they want and need in other ways.

Next, we make characters: at least one (maybe only one?) player will control a character who is of the oppressed group. Any such protagonists are going to start the game with a 6 in the forbidden trait (high is bad). I have no idea what other traits there might be, but certainly gameplay is going to focus on the forbidden trait, so some designated opposition-player is going to try to maneuver you into situations in which the Forbidden Trait would be the simplest way to approach a problem.

Vietnamese characters in this town are going to avoid being directly confrontational with white folks, but they can confront other Asian characters all they want, provided no white people are present in the conflict (or maybe the scene, altogether?), as how "those people treat one another" is of little consequence if it's not making white folks upset.

Next, we have a Kicker - most people in the oppressed group lie low and don't make trouble, but the protagonist has done so at least once/is in the process of doing so *right now*. Example - you play a Vietnamese family man whose wife was killed in a hit-and-run (car only; not a drive-by or anything), and the local police are really dragging their asses on the case. You stop by the station one day to check on the investigation's progress, and you hit a wall - they're "really tired of you coming by so often; why don't you just let us work?" Annnd .... action!

So, the Forbidden Trait works like this - set your goal for the conflict in which you use this Trait. Then, for each point you have in the Trait, above 1, the whole table works to come up with one complication or escalation of the conflict - not necessarily something directly related to any actions taken *in* the situation so far, but definitely stuff that will change the landscape, so to speak.
Next, you roll d6's equal to your rating in it (it starts at 6, for oppressed-group-protagonists). For each 4-6 you get, you can make one thing (your goal, or a complication) go your way. Naturally, it's going to really suck having lots of dice to start, but I'm thinking that there's going to be a lot of push-back when you first start overtly resisting oppression. I haven't worked out a "clouds and dice" idea for how you can "buy down" the Forbidden Trait's rating (which means there's less fallout when you use it), but that's something to work on.

p.s. I think the number of protagonists is going to be fairly low, and having only one is going to be totally okay, as it means you can really sink your teeth into one person's take on the situation (kind of a one-player-and-many-gm's scenario).

a (real) storytelling game of (actual) personal horror

2009-12-22T01:00:00.001-08:00

I'm thinking of hacking Vampire: the Masquerade to make it more story-ful. I was inspired by the Background traits and a request from a blog-commenter over at Story By the Throat!, and realized how Background traits were the "way in" to making V:tM, and perhaps White Wolf games in general, *actually* deal with "personal horror".

What if, instead of coldly tactical names like Contacts and Allies, you had, respectively, much more emotionally relevant traits with names like "People Who Think I'm Human" and "Lovers and Close Friends"? Some traits could stay the same, like Status (which is inherently social), but most of them would need to change.

More examples - how about "Vampires I've Cowed Into Submission" for Influence, and "My Human Victims" for Herd? One more - "Purity of My Blood" for Generation: you're either too young to inherit so much power, or you've killed some very important people to get where you are, and either way, it'd make sense to develop a certain level of disconnect from the mud-blood monsters.

Anything, anything at all to make it easier for players to treat the subject matter more appropriately, and less like dark-clad superheroes! The way the rules are set up currently, it's all too easy for a player to be told by the GM and fellow players to act one way (as though he's playing a storytelling game focused on a personal brush with horror), and to be encouraged by the rules and mechanics to act another way entirely (as though he's playing Marvel Superheroes, but everyone has to be "dark and creepy" caped crusaders).

This is the sort of split mind that D&D has pushed onto people historically, although 4th Edition seems to have much more clarity of purpose, encouraging people to go ahead and min-max and have the most effective characters they can - they're going to need them! ^_^

I downloaded an odd little document - a list of each White Wolf game (Old World of Darkness) and all the background traits made available in that game, and finally, which book(s) each trait was mentioned in. Kind of a strange reference document.

Oh dang - Baron Von Vikingson

2009-12-20T22:39:00.001-08:00

So I was looking through old Forge posts I'd done, under a different handle, and I came across what looks like Baron Munchausen, sort of. Replace coins (or whatever) with Cleverness, and have the incredulity element focus instead on asking the other players to give your Thane better stats (so you can claim to have done mightier things than you really did, of course), and there you go!

I have yet to play the Baron, but having one active player and multiple GM-ish players sounds both very Polaris and kind of funky.

Check it out! I totally attempt to hijack this poor guy's thread. ^_^;; Fortunately, the OP liked my ideas...

p.s. I totally see a possible hack/way to break the game - if you share a scene in which your Thane outwits an opponent, and you ask for more Cleverness, do you get it? Hitting zero Cleverness means that your story is regarded as so absurd and unlikely that you're regarded as a fool, and the other Thanes go off to drink without you. Gaining more, then, would extend your time in the spotlight, but on the other hand, your "goal" is to be clever enough to finish your story, not to go on for ever and ever. Maybe you could pay Cleverness to other players in exchange for prompts or hints or ideas, kind of like A Penny For My Thoughts. Hmmmmm...

Finally! Progress on a Dwarf Fortress RPG

2009-12-19T10:52:00.000-08:00

I've taken a totally different direction with things - I'm not even going to get into the wonkiness that was my previous design idea.

Anyway, here's a sample example from the rough draft:

A quick example – you're playing a dwarf named Urist. His key phrases are “I left Mountainhome to strike the earth” and “What I do, I do for power”. You've been rolling terribly, though, and Urist hasn't contributed much to the Fortress; he's seen as pretty useless by his comrades. It's your turn to roll again, and your best skill is a 4 in Mining. You roll, and get two successes! You cheer, finally getting a chance to describe a cavern with actual features! You spend one to establish a cavern, and one to give it an ore vein.

But then another player clears his throat and says, “So your dwarf ...”. You wonder what he's up to. You give him the go-ahead, and he adds, “So your dwarf, Urist, finds a new cavern, but he doesn't notice the platinum vein it holds,” you groan, “until one of the other miners reports it to him.”

Curses! Urist won't get any credit for this discovery! Unless.... You announce Urist's options to the table: either he lets the other dwarf be lauded by the tinkers, when it should really be him instead, or he kills the miner, and takes what's rightly his.

You decide to take a new Desperation: “I am willing to kill those who get in my way.” Scowling, you bury your pick in his head, to the surprise of everyone present (they all get -1 Mood)¹. Rolling 2 Threaten,² you add +1 to the result, thanks to your new key phrase, and get one success. Turning to the huddled, terrified miners, you bark, “I'll kill the rest of you, too, if you don't do what I say. It was me who found the platinum, and one of you swung your pick without looking and killed him. Is that clear?”

Ah, how happy and fun! They dutifully stay silent on the matter, although the miner's friends are quite upset to hear of his untimely death. But the Fortress still gets the platinum, and another player, in awe of your cruelty, picks up the dice and makes a Tinkering check.

If, instead, you swallowed your pride and took a point of Anger, you could get one extra reroll the next time you're confronted by your Passion.

1You can off a nameless NPC dwarf as part of a Passion dilemma without even picking up the dice. Named NPCs must be killed the hard way -with Scene Skills.

2Assume these dwarfs have no Mood buffs to mess with your roll, in this example

So that's a little of what I have, so far. You basically portray the more deranged or obsessive members of your Fortress, contending with your darker urges while trying to keep the place running, and it's all in the shadow of an inevitable goblin invasion.

Losing is fun! ^_^

Freemarket, as seen by a socialist

2009-11-22T10:00:00.000-08:00

[Disclaimer: I do not like Luke Crane games. This one is no exception. I am going to try a little to be even-handed, but when stuff irks me, I am going to be a jerk about it. When stuff is cool, I will probably make back-handed compliments. That being said...]

So.

It's a Luke Crane game. That means we're not going to get along, pretty much guaranteed. Still, on a whim, when I went to Buddha's house last night and they said "Check this out" I said "Okay". We, ah, took about three hours to get through character creation; we didn't end up playing.

To be fair, the resolution mechanic doesn't seem so bad; you more or less pay attention to three main card colors (imagine dealing random Magic cards and only noting their color) and count some of them as points, and some of them as not-points. I can't exactly give you the precise mechanic, but suffice it to say it's a tiny bit like AP contests in Hero Wars - it might look intimidating from the rules text, but it's not probably so bad. "Probably" is necessary because I haven't played either, and don't want to, you know, lie to anybody.

I like the concept for the setting: you're on a space station with matter replicators, infinite cloning for all, every physical need is met, at least on a level of comfortable, if boring, subsistence... also, there is a social economy, as you may have heard. That's why it's called FreeMarket, by the way (also: jab knitting needles in my eyes - people on the station are known as Freemers. Get it? This is almost exactly like the nickname for those who frequent the authoritarian-rightwing site FreeRepublic - "Freepers". Blech) - it's called that because, um, well, okay, so there isn't really any good reason to call this high-tech, socialist utopia an ANYTHING market, but there you have it.

Anyway - so you're kind of on the Facebook Space Station - you get Flow, which is a combination of Diggs, Pokes, "You like this", etc. You lose Flow from Frownies, which means that, by the 52nd century, Facebook has finally devised a Dislike button. The Facebook comparison is not at all meant to be demeaning, by the way - I merely think it's apt, and the bright-and-bushy-tailed feel of the game text pushes me further in thinking so.

Strictly speaking, Flow is given to you by the Aggregate, aka the station CPU, as a reward for giving gifts, acting in concert to overcome challenges, and other things. Of course, being gamers, we spent a good bit of our time devising hypothetical scenarios in which we trick or otherwise game the Ag into Flowing us like whoa.

Speaking of terms that I tire of capitalizing, the skill list ("Experiences", for some reason) makes-a no sense. There are three different skills, that is, Experiences, that relate to social interaction (Shaping, Thin-Slicing, and Social Engineering; no, they don't mean what they sound like), skills that have nonsensical names, given their function (Mobbing is Modification Of Body-ing. Why not MODding? Search me!) and a few that I'm skeptical of, but I'm sure play would make it clear why there's a difference between them - using replicators is its own skill (Printing), separate from building things by hand (Cultivation) or retrofitting/reusing things to make new stuff (Recycling).

There are also MRCZ groups. The text mercifully recommends you pronounce this acronym as "mercy", with "mercies" as the plural. Catchy, and interesting. This is where some of the inspiration behind the game comes through a bit more - the text speaks of theoretical, anti-bureaucratic(I get it, and yet...) adhocracies, or groups that form ad hoc for a purpose and then disband when said purpose is completed. Given that there are arduous levels of MRCZ prestige to climb through, this actually sounds like the very opposite of anything temporary or ad hoc - where's the spontaneity? A barn-raising would be a more fitting adhocracy than these, well, WoW guilds the authors are describing.

Going back to the much-mused-over title of the game, I have this to say: it's a gift economy, in the sense that generosity, when it's received, is a source of social status. Flow is, chemically speaking, a byproduct of the social interaction, and not actually brought into the mix by any party involved; the Aggregate generates and distributes Flow. So - while there's certainly an economy taking place, it's not, you know, anything at all resembling a "market". It's really a "network". If this game is some attempt to realize a great big Objectivist impulse, then I'm going to go throw up red Kool-Aid on Luke's lawn in protest. But then again, maybe I won't - it's a lousy attempt at this. Why is everyone provided for? Why is there no cold and finite resource that rules all others?

This really should have been billed as Facebook: the RPG. And maybe there, it could have had terms that made some more sense, and less misplaced attitude. When you Poke someone, all it means... is that you Poked them.

Oh, and I can't make heads or tails of what the goddamned CA is. It's your Right to Dream about this really cool, crazy space station, presumably, since the relationship mechanics are about as deep as those on the for-real Facebook site (and that's a huge lynchpin for Story Now, to me), and there's way too much going on that isn't related to Stepping on Up (nor are there victory conditions, permanent death [mostly], end-game mechanics...) to count as that, either. There's this whole thing where death isn't really death unless your body is so totally fucked by horrible, multi-system destruction that they have to make a whole new clone. Even then, you're not really dead.

If I really wanted to play an MMO, or face off against the never-really-dying Saturday morning cartoon villain, then... nah. I wouldn't want to do either of those things. Not again, at any rate, as far as MMOs.

You know what? I take it back. This isn't Facebook. This is Second Life, converted to tabletop!

hero wars/heroquest thoughts and stuff

2009-11-03T21:01:00.000-08:00

So I've been eying my newly-acquired copy of Hero Wars, and thinking about a concept used in the game's Extended Contests (big, important conflicts use these, as opposed to a simple, single die roll): the concept of Action Points (now called Hero Points in the new edition).

So. Action Points.

Basically, these represent your overall mojo, combining ability, equipment, emotional investment in the conflict, positioning, tactics, allies(!), etc., all thrown together in a single numerical value. It's, overall, how well you're doing.
Here's the kicker: you don't lose until you are completely out of Action Points. And by "don't lose", I mean you basically don't suffer any just-you-personal consequences until this point is reached. Heck, you can even bet a few points to possibly gain a bunch back, and then you're still in it!
That bit about not losing? It means that, in a combat Extended Contest, you don't get wounded in any meaningful way (beyond a cut or a bruise) until you run out of APs. This is that kind of thing I was trying to achieve in Mask of the Emperor, the idea that you have to corner your opponent (verbally, physically, whatev) before landing a blow on them, as befits actual fighting between actual fighters.
[ready, go, tangent!] Even if you skewer a guy on your sword pretty quickly, there are probably a few shield-blocks, parries, dodges, and feints that happen first. If not, then the scenario would probably consist of your (apparently masterful) swordsman facing multiple foes, and stuff. The point is that I think it makes total sense to have some back and forth in a conflict before anything decisive happens.
Anyway.
APs.
So - you run out of APs, and THEN you get your hand severed, or the baroness throws her drink in your face, or whatever. As this Forge forum thread reminds us, you can get down to 1 AP and still pull off a win, and then keep your hand or your dignity intact.
I think that's pretty damn cool. One thing it doesn't do (potentially) is account for Pyrrhic victories, a la Otherkind. We shall see if that's the case, and if it matters, the effect that that has on things, etc.
I can see the logic behind it, though - both the Intact Skin approach (one guy wins and one guy loses, cut and dried) and the Mel Gibson approach (a la any movie he's ever been in where there is violence, and his character gets an ass-whupping even if he wins the day) have their merits. The former pushes for a vision of combat as either deadly OR merely "to the blood" - different rolls and results will of course dictate how that goes, and I betcha the Extended Contest result table has some kind of "you both suck" result. Alternately, in social conflict, the former approach would suggest a sort of "you end up looking awesome, handing someone's ass to them as well as looking good to passersby". This approach seems to suggest that once things start tipping in your favor, they keep going that way, OR you get a very clean reversal - again, you don't get chopped up until you totally, definitely lose, although you might take some light flesh wounds and your followers might all die (I'm thinking Braveheart, where Mel takes a couple arrows to the chest at Falkirk but then gets back up and rides after King Edward. 'cause, you know, whatever).

The latter approach suggests that combat is a bloody affair, and arguments make everyone involved look bad - in the case of violence, there's that old saw that people wear armor because you can't swordfight without getting chopped up once in a while. In the case of social conflict, it's possible that browbeating, haranguing, or otherwise nailing someone's verbal ass to the wall has lots of fallout and makes you look like a tool. This approach is one of "you have to give it to get it" - if you want something, you're going to have to crawl through crap to ensure that it's yours.

Oddly enough, both of these approaches expect and demand a lot of risk-taking: these aren't conservative strategies by any stretch. The former, in particular, could be very see-saw-y: win big or lose big! The latter, at least, lets you get mangled up a bit and maybe decide that you concede, after all, having reached your depth.
Things to think about and research, at any rate.
Oh, one last thought: the Otherkind mechanic exists to draw in more conflict like a fisherman's net, grabbing problems and pulling them towards the PCs. The Hero Whatever mechanics may or may not really do that, and seem a good deal more trad win/lose in that respect. They let you handle a conflict that arises, rather than find one for you. Maybe. We'll see.

My intention is to finish up Questing Beast soon (I'm done meandering...) and then get folks in the group to check out Hero Wars. Hotnessss! Character creation flowcharts await!

[Edit] Quick, last-last thought: Extended Contests and Otherkind do something similarly - in the Braveheart scene I mentioned, the EC is arguably resolving the entire battle! Let's go with that. The Scots get flanked by English reserves, the film personalizes this reversal through Willaim Wallace (his facial expressions, his arrow wounds), and then the battle's outcome is personified through William alone - he gets on his horse (while the Scots try to rally alongside their newfound Irish allies) and rides after King Edward, only to have the (surprise!) turncoat Robert the Bruce joust him right off his fucking horse. He lies there in the dirt; the contest is over.

ECs handle this by saying "hey, look at it go back and forth, with the English steadily widening the AP gap". Each reversal is exciting, and roleplayed to the hilt because we care, and when it's over, the Bruce helps William into the arms of an Irish rescuer; that's all post-EC developments. It's all important, yeah, but it's probably "off the map", i.e. it's devised by fiat, by on the spot creativity, without interacting with dice mechanics.

Otherkind dice handle things in general as jumping-off points for more and more conflict; it seems like conflicts are less officially "happening" and "not happening", given that, quite clearly, each roll of the dice can lead into more and more problems and complications. It's like the EC system says "ok, we're in conflict now", while O says "okay, roll. Okay, five more things go wrong. Okay.... roll again. Repeat."

The real difference might be that O sort of checks in with the players more often and says "ok, hey, here's some consequences. At least in terms of handling time (huge difference, no doubt), O gives us resolution pretty quickly. If what you're looking for is a lot of back and forth, then EC might be the way to go. If you're looking for really punchy, pithy moments that cause the plot to pivot, then O might do it.

O seems more suited for gunshots, sudden bursts of action that die down quickly, that sort of thing, the kinds of decisions one makes rashly and quickly regrets, whereas Hero Wars is pushing a sort of more nuanced, you've-got-time-to-think back and forth thing, like a fencing match.

Not that one or the other can run situations or scenarios that the other couldn't; I'll report back when I discover what's better at what!

[EDIT EDIT] Apparently in both Simple and Extended Contests, if both sides roll badly enough (technically, you roll against a Target # and THEN compare to your opponent), both sides can screw the pooch. So to speak.

La Familia - starting the first playtest campaign

2009-10-21T20:58:00.001-07:00

I might be running a playtest campaign of La Familia soon. As Anna pointed out in our first get-together tonight, LF could totally work as an early-19th-century Cosa Nostra game, set in Sicily.
But that's not the coolest part: a mob game set in Sicily in the 1920's, where Benito fucking Mussolini is the Tyrant (quick recap: the players play members of powerful families; the gm plays a central authority figure in society, called the Tyrant). It would be RAD to play Mussolini.
One of Anna's suggestions was to blur the distinction between the gm and the other players, such that it's not a really "gm'ed" game anymore. I think the easy way to do this is to call one player the Tyrant, give him the power to set Laws, and make his protagonist the Tyrant of the setting. Easy peasy. The word "gm" is incorrect, anyway - the only diff between the Tyrant and the other players is that the Tyrant creates Laws.
Given that you could basically run The Godfather using LF, Anna also pointed out that I should consider putting specific kinds of scenes into the rules - some kinds include Betrayal (maybe a scene in which a Grudge's rating is increased), Retribution (taking revenge for the increased Grudge), and Placation (smoothing over the source of the increased Grudge).
I'll give it some thought.

another quick one before bed

2009-09-21T21:28:00.000-07:00

Big lesson for the night: Story Now! games can learn a lot from other forms of story-media, like television.
Case in point: the premiere of House reminded me just how important scene-framing is, especially pretty aggressive scene-framing, to keep games interesting and fun. Lesson learned -> it's not about emulating other genres, it's about using the tools of other genres to have more fun doing RPGs.
I could have cut a LOT of travel sequences from Mask and made the game a lot cooler. For that matter, I think I should avoid the "see the world!" impulse in games unless it stays within the emotional framework of the story - it is HARD to evoke wonder and awe when describing physical or sensory experiences. No problem at all to get a bunch of oh, damn's from the group when describing an action, between people, but it's damn hard to evoke the English countryside and have that be, you know, fun.
I plan on being a lot more aggressive from now on with my scene-framing, as GM - I may start keeping tabs on the next Bang coming up in the story, just to keep myself from thrashing around in old-school, we-must-record-every-moment style crap.
Whew.

That inner voice

2009-09-19T19:04:00.000-07:00

I believe that both a prerequisite for, and goal of, good role playing is to encourage people to find their own creative voices.
That is all.

Derailed by Game Night

2009-09-19T14:12:00.001-07:00

So I checked out the weekly Thursday indie/small press game night in Falls Church, at the Compleat Strategist.

It was awesome.

I played Spirit of the Century - amazing! I don't have too much time to get into a whole thing about how it went, but to be fair, we didn't get much further than character creation before I had to jet. Still, the highly collaborative nature of character creation was some hot bees, lemme tell ya. Also, my character was based very heavily on the Kriegaffe from the Hellboy comics - imagine a steampunk cyborg ape, raised by Nazis. Good times.

I also just got Shock: Social Science Fiction (v. 1.2), which looks really exciting - the references to Children of Men (see it!) make it all the more interesting for, like Ron Edwards said, doing sci-fi where the fiction is really about something cool and meaningful (that's more or less what

he said).

Looking back at how Questing Beast went - the players came up with interesting characters, and we spent two hours with a Saxon raid on a village. I wasn't a huge fan of the highly individualized chargen, which sabotaged our brainstorming on how to include the characters in each others' sagas.

The very concept of parallel, individual sagas (Polaris does this too, though I haven't played it yet and can't materially claim that this is what it does in practice) feels like the antithesis of the "Guest Starring..." feature in SotC's chargen - you actually devise some adventure that your protagonist has already gone through, and you randomly determine another protagonist who "guest stars" in your tale. It's totally badass, and really draws the characters together (not to mention taking full advantage of the whole group's creativity; wha-chaa!)

We have another session tomorrow; I'll see what the group thinks of the game so far, how they rate it, likes and dislikes, etc., and then see how the session goes, if we end up doing it.

I say "if" because SotC really opened up my head and showed me cool new things you can do with an RPG to get that creativity pot bubbling; I may buy Dogs in the Vineyard soon to check out their sweet, awesome see-and-raise conflict resolution rules, which sound really neat.

Real games aren't finished til you play 'em flex

2009-09-10T08:15:00.000-07:00

Two friends are meeting up with me this Sunday to check out Questing Beast. I'm pretty excited, and I have some things I'm going to watch out for while we play:

- In QB, winning happens very "cleanly", as opposed to other games wherein victory can be achieved only with complications (Polaris, OtherKind, etc.): I shall see whether this feels too squeak-clean or not. The fact that winning on the dice establishes narrative control rather than simply the right to have one's will executed by the roll (i.e. you can narrate for a couple of paragraphs, introduce new props and characters[!], instead of being told 'you win!') definitely makes things a lot more interesting.
Maybe it'll have a "pass the conch" kind of feel.
- QB is definitely a game that has that "inner vortex" Vincent Baker has described. So much of the game that you play ends up deriving from each player's written Romance, which is where you derive your character's traits (this is the Pool system), so it's actually just fine that the resolution rules are so scanty - they aren't the only thing going on. We'll see how it feels to let that manifest, and I shall take notes accordingly.
- I'm really excited about devising an Accord (the kind of Arthurian setting we want) and the players writing up Romances for their characters. I'm also stoked about what sort of characters people will have - I'm imagining a badger squire and a fox lady-in-waiting, for some reason ^_^

Updates to follow, once we play!

A new stage of development as a designer

2009-09-06T23:44:00.000-07:00

I've talked to a Sacramento gaming buddy about this at some length.
I haven't RPed since my player, V, went back to Spain. It was a little demoralizing, frankly. After a lot of thought, I've decided that the Thing To Do is to play more games, get a better sense of what's out there, what I can learn, and THEN maybe (more like "probably", to be fair) climb back into the design saddle again.

I'm still amazed that Baron Munchausen, which appears to be "just storytelling" and lacking any tactical or detail-obsessive elements, actually is a very funky sort of tactical game (realllly stretching the term to its limit) and is, in fact, an explicitly competitive enterprise. Fascinating, captain.

I plan to try out The Questing Beast soon, though I admit I'm skeptical. Anthropomorphic Arthurian fantasy sounds pretty awesome, don't get me wrong; I'm just suffering from Real Game Psychosis, that disease that convinces you that new or different approaches to RPGs aren't "real games", especially if those games are "rules-lite" (in the conventional definition of such, i.e. short books). What makes me a little wonky from reading through TQB is that while the character-writing exercise is intensely, definitively thematic, the mechanics that you use to interact with your character's history (and the Motif points you derive from it) are so free and open as to be a little confusing.

Maybe it's because you get to focus on whatever aspect of Arthurian sagas you like; maybe it's that the setting is not the focus of the rules, but merely a gently attached situation to explore that could be replaced, if you like. Arguably, using the same mechanics, but dropping the bunny knights and the jackal Saxons, would make things feel totally different. The author points out that your character is your vessel through which you explore themes that you've decided on; the point of having a farmer-badger instead of a regular human is that it establishes the character more firmly as a symbol or a mask, instead of a "[pawn] on a board" as the rulebook tells it.

Everybody likes playing furries acting out a verison of King Arthur; we'll see how it goes. Zen is about direct experience, because theorizing is only a tiny fraction of living. So, we'll see ^_^

One last whack at Creative Agenda

2009-09-04T22:30:00.000-07:00

I picked up the Baron Munchausen RPG today, a strange, funky version of it that's more or less an in-character document - the titular character is the 'author' relating the rules and the text, with the meta-text element of him arguing with his 'off-camera' editor (as in, he relates his side of their ongoing disagreement in sort of real-time). Neat stuff ^_^

Anyway, it's been described by Ron Edwards, and by the guy who sold it to me, as "almost an RPG" - it's a lot (a LOT) like an idea I had about Vikings making boastful tales and then calling each other out on lies and getting points for it. That's also pretty much what happens in Baron too.

Anyway - so my realization is that any given game's support for CA is really quite simple, especially if it's fairly coherent. "Rules" in this context, by the way, means everything from mechanics to setting to, y'know, the basic reason why the game says you should play it.

Step On Up - the rules strongly support chances to show off how awesome and skillful you are, up to and including victory conditions. 4th ed. D&D definitely includes "minor-scale" win/loss situations where you get to show off what a tactical genius you are.

Right to Dream - the rules focus on supporting a certain kind of setting, premise, genre, etc. This could theoretically also include a game about a particular sort of character that you want to explore - the White Wolf games tend to focus on exploring a "lifestyle" of one sort or another.

Story Now - the rules focus on exploring a theme, philosophical premise/dilemma, something like that. This has generally been expressed so far as either an emotional (My Life With Master) or philosophical (Polaris) struggle - the struggle for freedom from the Doktor in the first one, and the struggle between integrity and self-preservation in the latter.

Anyway. Point is: CA is really pretty transparent to me now; good stuff.

Curse you, "balance"!

2009-06-22T17:51:00.001-07:00

The nebulous concept of "game balance" sometimes hamstrings me when I'm trying to run more player-empowered games. The bit about "you don't want to give out bonuses too freely..." is the cornerstone of this mindset, and makes me, and many other GMs, leery of making things "too easy", even when they aren't, and even when the point of things isn't the difficulty.
Discuss.

CA and me

2009-06-21T16:25:00.000-07:00

The obsessive quest for definition continues.
I've decided/realized that yes, it's absolutely, positively fine for a game that mainly supports one Creative Agenda can (probably will) have rules that are, or appear to be, related to another CA. It came to me as I was thinking about an example of a movie in which tactics and strategies of the characters are frequently relevant to the plot, but the movie's still "about" something else.
Last of the Mohicans comes to mind. So does Braveheart. Hell, only action movies can get away with lots of bloodshed and battle scenes without there being something "else" going on.

Silly of me to not see this, in hindsight. So - in Braveheart, we'll say the Premise is "We don't have to beat them; just fight them". Thus, rebellion is not so much about winning as it is about not giving up. The flip side of it is that the rebellion is an expression of this stubbornness, the desire to live with dignity; that's why we're fighting. At this point, it's quite similar to the RPG Orkworld - "humans have the numbers; dwarves have the [weapons?]; elves have the magic; all orcs have is courage, and that is enough". That's an excerpt from an old promo for the game. Whatta premise, eh?

Anyway - naturally, the Scots still want to win their battles, not just fight them. They devise tactics of all sorts, they fight their hearts out, and so on. Rules for combat, even fairly tactical combat, would not be terribly out of place here. But the fighting isn't the point; the point is the Scots have to prove to themselves that they have dignity, that they have ethnic pride, trying to recover that which the English took from them. I dunno; if you have other ideas, that's cool. I'm shooting from the hip, here. What you need *besides* combat rules is some kind of mechanic(s) that injects hope, courage, dignity, pride, or plain old grit into those mechanics; furthermore, this isn't just "flavor" - it has to be the thing that drives play. And it does - after getting their asses beaten at Falkirk, the Scots lose their champion. He goes off to get tortured and executed in London for being a traitor to the crown. Looks bad, eh? Well, Stephen the Irishman goes with Hamish to see their buddy off; following the emotional route of the film, it is because they do this, and arguably because he's betrayed by Robert the Bruce, that the Scots can finally win the day.

In some kinda game terms, it's arguable that our two brave fighters have just recharged their Pride pools, and can now bust out some serious victory in the final battle at Bannockburn. The film, through this lens, is not about the war alone - especially with the early establishment scenes showing the pathos and misery of the Scots, it's about the clans learning to hold their heads up high again.
Now, a game that covers only tactics and Pride would be pretty thin, and it wouldn't really offer much in the way of options for the players - you can fight, and you can gain Pride by suffering outrages at the hands of the English.
But if you put in some stuff about alliances between different factions (join the English and sell out; trust no one but your own clan and see how far it gets you), some meaty mechanics on how one goes about gaining Pride (and losing it), and so on, then you've got something. I suppose, in terms of mechanics, the focus must mirror the focus of a film - Braveheart's plot doesn't dwell exclusively on the battle scenes, but rather has a lot else in there about betrayal, loyalty, love, lust, family, obligation, and dignity. *These* are the things that you build the game around, and the battles, scraps, and rows could be "payoff" scenes - situations in which you fire off the shots you've loaded through non-battle "development" scenes.

Wow, that got out of hand really fast. I think I want to reboot Mask of the Emperor as, say, something like Caste Warfare: a Game of Rebellion. Neat! More to come.

The Hellenes - character creation

2009-06-16T23:34:00.000-07:00

Kickers are a wonderful, wonderful tool. We've finished character creation; we've chosen a more historical, somewhat less mythical flavor for the setting, and plan on taking a lot of liberties with history.
So: We have a Hero, Apollonia, daughter of Apollo and of a would-be sacrificial victim at Delphi. We also have "Aeneas", aka Alcyone, a runaway Spartan helot turned archer and hunter.
Apollonia was stationed outside of Helos, south of Sparta, with the Allied forces in reserve. Aeneas was finding food and staying hidden, a woman dressed as a man, knowing her parents had already been killed by the Persians. Her father had died on the battlefield at Thermopylae with his master; Aeneas didn't want that fate.
The war was going well for Greece: combined Athenian/Spartan armies, heading a coalition of Aegean city-states, drove the Persians out of Attica, forcing them east and south into the sea. When the Persians fled south, some of their crews landed at Lakedaemonia and raided Spartan towns and villages as they went.
One of these towns, Helos, was not too lucky: Apollonia, famed hero of Athens, was away in Sparta gathering supplies when the Persians attacked. As these men were disorganized and desperate, wanting to shame and hurt more than conquer, they only burned a few buildings and escaped with some of the women of the village. Some slaves, mostly (such as Aeneas' sister!) and the village headmaster's daughter. The headmaster tells it all to Apollonia, tearfully begging that she bring his daughter back safely.
Aeneas hears that his home village has been hit by raiders! Fearing the worst for his sister, his only living relation, he high-tails it for Helos. Never mind what she'd think of her cross-dressing sibling; never mind what Persians might do to a woman trying to pass as a soldier. They won't use Aeneas/Alcyone's sister as their plaything any longer!

Cool. We've got a 2-hour session ahead of us tomorrow night. Some establishment of premise is in order, and then on to business!

Thoughts - the Kickers worked beautifully to get us right where the action begins. Now we have all we need to get right into things tomorrow! Also, I think I have a better idea of the Premise now, which is, naturally, quite setting-driven: if the gods were listening, and took an interest in you, what would you do with that attention? Would you invite their aid, scorn their scrutiny, or do your best to keep your head down? Good stuff.

The Otherkind Challenge

2009-06-15T10:29:00.000-07:00

This post is as much about fleshing out my comprehension of the material as it is about sharing it with others.

Vincent Baker, like four years ago, came up with a generic version of the core mechanic for his 2002 design, Otherkind, which was a game about fairy-like creatures trying to flee the world of Man with as much Numina (mystic essence-stuff) on hand as possible. Their opposition: Men, with their Iron.
In the original design, (thanks, RPG.net!) you roll four dice whenever you attempt something. Then, you take the dice results and apply them to four categories:

Narration - does the GM or the player get to narrate?
Motion - did the character accomplish what he set out to do?
Life - did the character harm anyone in the process?
Safety - did the character get hurt in the process?

Only Life needs further explanation - it's anathema to the Otherkind to destroy life; Numina is the very essence, sort of the divine byproduct, of life, so of course causing death is super-bad for them, and makes them more like Iron (which is really bad!). I've been unable to find the original full entry on lumpley.org that explains all the rules, but this is what I can recall.

Anyway, here's the distilled essence of the game, usable as the core of any setting or whatever:

roll 3d6. After you've rolled them, assign one each to the three things.

Assign one of the dice to the accomplishment at stake:
1-2: the character does not accomplish it. The character punches him but doesn't get past him. Update the circumstances and roll another conflict, or go forward with the accomplishment totally unachieved.
3-4: the character makes progress toward the accomplishment, but doesn't achieve it outright. Update the circumstances and roll another conflict, or go forward with the accomplishment partly achieved.
5-6: the character accomplishes it!

Assign the two remaining dice to the two dangers:
1-3: the danger comes true.
4-6: the danger doesn't come true.
If the 1-2/3-4/5-6 scale works for the dangers too, feel free to use it.

So say I roll 1 3 4. How do I assign them? It depends on my priorities, of course. Maybe what matters most to me is Millicent's regard: I assign 4 to that danger, so it doesn't come true. Maybe what matters next is getting past the guy, who cares about a black eye: I assign 3 to getting past the guy, we'll roll again, but pow! he gave me a real shiner.

Say instead I roll 4 6 6. I do the butt dance of victory!

The system here isn't necessarily complete - as it stands, there is, obviously, no room for any traits specific to the character to directly affect the dice rolls. Traits might be relevant as hell for assisting assignment of dice, but they don't give pluses or minuses or allow rerolls or anything. Yet. Notice that you always succeed in the task - in true Firefly fashion, failure comes not from a lack of ability, but from complications that arise as a result of plowing on ahead.

This doesn't mean that people never fail at anything, ever. It means that the thing you've put your mind to is beyond the icy grip of failure; where it gets complicated is that what you were trying to do through the action might screw up (as simple as performing an amazing crack-shot ... on the wrong guy).

So. Easy way to make things more complicated: if you're attempting an action that your character is good at, that is really important to your character, etc., then you could get bonuses on the dice results. You'll notice that higher is always better (thanks, Vincent!), so this is an easy way to "break into" the mechanic and start messing around. You could instead add more dice and more complications - more things can go wrong, but you also have a bigger pool of dice to choose from to put things where you like.

Three things: 1) since you automatically succeed at the task itself, it's up to the Social Contract to enforce what sort of tasks you can attempt in the first place. 2) Any player should be allowed to take on more dice (and for each one, a complication/thing that could go wrong), gaining the benefits mentioned above. 3) Characters get some number of points to put into traits they possess; whenever you use one of your traits to perform a task, you can use all the points attached to it to change die results, 1 point per pip on the die. This represents the greater control in the overall situation that comes with mastery of a skill.

Lastly, I think I've changed my mind about the "lack of setting" presented by this system. You go to people, explain this system, and then ask them "so, what do you feel like playing?" If they're gamers, they'll come up with something. If anything, this could actually increase your odds of finding something folks like, or scratching an itch somebody has had lately - you guys just saw The Mummy again and want to do that, but nothing on your gaming shelf has that genre. Good stuff.

An important ending

2009-06-13T22:24:00.000-07:00

We finished the first-ever game of Mask of the Emperor tonight. Great ending: one of the PCs decided to adopt the baby they kidnapped - she's the future Empress, and they need to hide her for a few years.
Anyway, I segued right into character creation for The Hellenes, which I had already explained to them (and said again tonight) didn't have to mean a change in the setting. At that point, Katie, one of my players turned to me and said "I think I'm done with this character. I don't know what else to do with her."
This is one of the greatest things I'd ever heard - a situation in which a player had finished with a character, rather than having the game cut short, or the character never get really realized. We took the story all the way to the end, and that's only happened in two games I've ever run, and only in one game I've ever played in.

So - the conversation moved pretty quickly into talking about character ideas, expectations about setting (Mask is too "low-magic" for her), and so on. My other player, Victor, managed to work the battle of Thermopylae into his character concept: the slave of a Spartan warrior, who was at the battle, and... okay, that's actually it. But being at the battle is pretty cool. Also cool was a Hellenistic version of Mulan: a (non-Spartan) woman who passes as a man through cross-dressing and whatnot so she can be a warrior.
Katie's idea was looser: an Athena/Apollo-inspired artsy-warrior type. Character creation is tomorrow; we'll see where things go!

Hero Quest (the boardgame) and conflict resolution

2009-06-13T17:15:00.000-07:00

This relates to the previous post, and is an easy way to inject Conflict Resolution into pretty much anything, no matter how crunchy or tactical:

The players should make assertions, like in Polaris.
Don't say, "I search for traps."
Say, "I ensure there are no traps around."

In the former, you have the player fact-checking the scenery. Boring!
In the latter, you have the player declaring that there are no traps, or that he's found one, assuming he succeeds on the dice.
Don't hide it: give the PC the successes/target number he needs to beat, so you don't screw him around.
If he fails on the dice, he could miss something, especially if he fails really badly. Important: tell him if he fails. It's not a secret to the player, only the character.
What's at stake is that there could be a trap that might impede his progress. From there, if he finds or triggers a pit trap or a trick floor tile, then next you've got a dexterity check.

Go after what you want, and then see if the dice will back you up.

I can't wait to play, instead of run, a game with CR. Yee!

Transparency and RPGs

2009-06-13T16:29:00.000-07:00

I've been browsing a thread at story-games.com, and a college game of D&D 3.0 comes to mind.

I was playing a thief in a very brief (maybe 3 sessions?) adventure, and I think it was around the time I was checking the hallway for traps every five feet when I decided I was done with conventional Credibility.

In that story-games.com thread, they're talking about sharing information. But really, now, there IS no information, only what the GM is deciding from moment to moment! He might have taken notes and made preparations beforehand, but that's like saying a speech is set in stone (and cannot be changed, no way) just because you brought index cards.

It's a game - the contents are imaginary. If you like being surprised by hearing other people's ideas, with timing and pacing and whatnot, that's cool. That's totally cool. But sometimes I think trad gamers can get a little caught up in "what's really happening" and forget that, hey, we're all making this up as we go.

Honestly, the fixation stems from the amount of prep the GM (or whomever) puts in - you don't want to "break" or "interrupt" the thing being devised for your entertainment, so you sit and let it unfold. But it's a whole lot easier for everybody in the game (less work for the GM, more entertaining for the players, IMO) if credibility is shared.

All you need to do to change credibility is to give players the power to create plausible play elements. Conflict resolution is all you need: give players the real chance to decide what happens in the story, and their creative energy will explode! forth, saving all us Game Masters a ton of work. Setting stakes is where it's at.

As for the important, if redundant, issue brought up in the thread, that of respecting people's right to play as they please, absolutely! That's fine. All I ask is this - if you notice a frustration or discontentment with your RPing experiences, consider giving it a try.

Power 19 for the new version of Mask ("The Hellenes")

2009-06-08T02:49:00.000-07:00

Finally, a Power 19 that doesn't stump me! I know what I want to do with this design, and some new ideas and applications of ideas sprang directly from doing this exercise. Boo-yah!

Power 19 for The Hellenes

What is your game about?**

Ancient Greek-style heroes adventuring in the Aegean

2.) What do the characters do?**
Go on adventures, have family dramas, and cross paths with the gods.
3.) What do the players (including the GM if there is one) do?**
Each controls a single character permanently and, temporarily, any characters acting as proxy in a conflict for the protagonist generally under that player's control. The GM (the Chorus) controls everybody else – antagonists, allies, bystanders, and neutral parties
4.) How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
It's a great, big, familiar landscape to run around in and make huge choices about family, the gods, and fame
5.) How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about?
Arete choices determine what kinds of things you do to make an impact. Virtue choices determine what kind of person you are (or are perceived to be).
6.) What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary)?
Recklessness, non-strategic/emotional decisions and egotism (on the part of the characters) are rewarded. Players who refuse to take chances with their characters have a much harder time against real adversity. If you're willing to lose, you have a better chance of showing up your opponent, even if it means your own humiliation or death.
7.) How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game?
More dice are your reward, through Glory and Virtues. If you're overwhelmed or just don't want to let him get away with it, you can give your opponent more dice, knowing he'll get his once he's finished trouncing you. Heroes who refuse to give in to their massive egos lose Glory; other characters who refuse to take chances or be foolish once in a while will be outstripped by their reckless companions
8.) How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?
In addition to #3, everyone is entitled to introduce set details and props into the narration, but only the Chorus can introduce characters other than the protagonists. Meta-game chatter, especially suggestions, ideas, and questions, can come from anybody, and should be seriously considered as material by the Chorus. A good Chorus should listen to his players, maximizing the effects of their decisions (in good faith) and introducing plot elements to accommodate the players' clearly stated desires.
9.) What does your game do to command the players' attention, engagement, and participation? (i.e. What does the game do to make them care?)
You can always reach out and touch divinity for a little assistance. Hubris and Virtues give power, and both carry effects that change the situation in clear ways: Virtues make your name shine, while Hubris could very well be the death of you (or all you care for). Additionally, just as players are encouraged to be bold and reckless, the Chorus should have a “yes, and...” attitude whenever possible.
10.) What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?
Players roll dice pools; losing a round of dice knocks one die out of your pool, unless you're in a To the Death challenge. These dice are lost against that opponent until the situation improves, in some way, at which point the PC rallies and can try again.

Players can escalate the situation in a number of ways: Blood Challenges allow you to knock dice out of the opponent's pool semi-permanently (until healed, even if ), while To the Death challenges up the ante to the margin of success, instead of losing just one die at a time.

Hubris, Glory, Virtues, and Oaths all provide ways to gain more dice to use against your opponent;
11.) How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?
Once a situation starts to get away from a character, things are likely to stay that way – escalating the stakes to injury or death can help you trounce an opponent before he can get a lead on you, and calling on more dice can help you stay ahead or dig yourself out of a hole. These tactics always “fall forward” - whether you win or lose from using them, they carry effects with them that, well, “echo in eternity”, tying you back into the importance of your decisions and your situation.
12.) Do characters in your game advance? If so, how?
Virtues can be improved with use; spending Glory earned by using them will grant more Virtue dice. Arete can be improved the same way – if a skill contributes greatly towards saving the day or completing an important goal, you can earn Glory from the deed, which in turn can be spent to increase the rating of that form of Arete.
13.) How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
Advancement relates to what it is that your character is praised for – either skill or strength of character.
14.) What sort of product or effect do you want your game to produce in or for the players?
I want to really ramp up the ability to win, but at an ever-increasing future cost. I want people to feel like big damn heroes – powerful, wild, and a danger to themselves and others.
15.) What areas of your game receive extra attention and color? Why?
Hubris gets around – blasphemy, swearing oaths, and committing shameful deeds all force a connection between the character and his world, for good or ill. That's the core of this game.
16.) Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Why?
Oaths sound like a blast – you aren't allowed to fail, and you have to deal with the consequences for accepting so much help from Heaven!

Creative Agenda - sometimes it makes sense

2009-06-07T22:15:00.000-07:00

As I'm working on this re-up of Mask, I have once again had to realize that Story Now is much simpler, and easier to achieve, than I give myself credit for. Each time I go through this, I end up seeing things in a different way.
This time around, the realization has taken the form of: a set of rules is only a piece of realizing Story Now. It is only a vehicle that gets you to a place where you can get Story Now.
That covers the "am I designing it right?" bugaboo. Now for: am I playing it right?"

The answer is: if you have a Kicker and a deliberate, chosen "angle" on the Premise (whatever it may be; more on Premise below), then you're achieving Story Now. That's it. If you're shooting for something that addresses the theme(s) of the game/story/situation, you're doing it. That really is it.

If you're doing "pure Exploration", i.e. experiencing the game world for its own sake, that is The Dream, i.e. Simulationism. If you create, explore, and end specific storylines and plots specifically to check out what the setting can do, that's The Dream, right there.

Okay, Premise: this can be, and generally is, I think, as simple as "This is how things are. How do you feel about it?" It is most emphatically not "What are you going to do about it?" unless your feelings, your angle on the situation, are what spurs your actions.

I just saw Terminator: Salvation, and it is blissfully free of Premise. In the manner I generally associate with Disney movies, T:S has an extremely simple "lesson" tacked onto the action: "everybody gets/deserves a second chance." [note: this "lesson" is more a reflection on life voiced by the characters, more than something that ever, ever comes up in the plot in any way. In any way: dialogue is not plot, sayeth my old film teacher.] Honestly, the level of ... not badness, but rather straightforwardness here, it's almost like it's an art film that's come around to artiness the long way, 'round the back. The tableaux is explosions, machines, gunfire, and big, leather boots; we more or less see this over and over again, in differing scenarios and situations, with a plot to string it all together so thinly that it seems almost deliberately weak.

It's a bit like watching Secretary: the point is not to think about things so much as it is to look at things, to have a pleasing sensory experience, and enjoy doing that. This is a perfectly acceptable form of entertainment; let it not be called anything else/less. But it's not a "thinky" movie in the slightest; it doesn't ask us to ponder a situation, a moral dilemma or problem, whatsoever. It's not the subject matter that dictates thinky vs. looky; merely whether the characters are walking vessels of Exploration, or if they actually possess meaningful thoughts, feelings, contradictions, and struggles. I daresay that Secretary (or T:S, for that matter ^_^) could be the go-to film example of The Dream/Simulationism, just as I've pointed at The Dark Knight and said "Look! Story Now! On the big screen!"

Challenge/Gamism is probably not going to happen in a non-interactive medium, while I'm on the subject. But that's okay - most any board game, especially one of the less abstract ones like Hero Quest or something, is a sort of reference point for Gamism in another medium.

Oh, duh. On metagame mechanics [warning - vanity post]

2009-06-07T00:08:00.000-07:00

So. Instead of making up weird conditions for spending Honor and Infamy, I think I'll decouple their use entirely from context, given that they're already earned contextually.
I had some ideas for a mod for Mask, based on Exalted. One of the main add-ons involved revealing one's immortal nature at an inopportune time, in exchange for metagame reward (stat buffs, in this case).
What I'm going for is this: in addition to the Reputation Vote rules, you can gain Honor/Infamy whenever you're in Disguise and choose to reveal yourself for in-character, not metagame, reasons. Thus, if your character couldn't take another moment of hearing the guards besmirch his clan's honor, and blurts out who he really is when he really shouldn't, you've earned some immediate Reputation! Not sure if I still want to have a permanent Reputation stat, but I think I'm still just reeling from the fistfulls of dice that one of my players seems to always have on hand.
The solution there is probably just to reduce the number of stat points that characters get. Changing the stats and skills around, too, would also be good - I have a whole slew of ideas for a Greek-themed setting, something that I would feel a lot more comfortable running. That would necessitate changing the names of the Reputation traits, but meh.
Meh, I say!
Off I go! The Emperor is probably going to become the Persian Emperor, or something.
Annnnd before I go, it occurs to me that stuff like gods and monsters are way more important now. Hm. Hm, indeed.
Well, at least now I can have sailing as a skill. Exalted has it; why can't I?

My clan can beat up your clan!

2009-06-06T11:31:00.000-07:00

In practice, the Mask system feels a little thin: I've basically got a really simple dice pool mechanic and some metagame stuff that directly influences (and is directly influenced by) play. With that in mind, I've come up with a couple of ideas to change things.

1- Whenever a PC is in Disguise, the GM should ask the player, "Do you want to create a new identity altogether?" You pretty much have to do this if you interact with people while Disguised; the upshot is that you now can start building Reputation for this fake person, the ... downshot? ... is that you can only use the Reputation associated with your character's current identity, and, hey, wouldn't it be interesting if someone who knows you by one name and someone who knows you by the other happened to both meet you on the street one morning?
[The reason: if you don't have a Reputation to build, and no one knows who you are at all, the game kind of sputters along, listlessly.]
2- Replacing the Reputation vote, the GM simply collates a tally of each PC's Honorable and Infamous Audiences. He should always inform the player of this in some way, while it's happening, so as not to be sneaky; for that matter, he should keep a player abreast of the situation if it seems like things are going in an Infamous direction for your Honorable character this session!
[The reason: it's tedious to have the vote. I dunno how my playtesters feel about it, but I find it irksome.]
There are other things, some level of vague dissatisfaction with things, but I'm not sure what to do about that. It feels like far too many scenes are devoid of conflict, which begs the question: how often should this be happening, how can I steer things back towards a conflict of interests, etc.?
I feel like some sort of "My clan and your clan" mutual history chart might be helpful - something to stir the pot when dealing with someone from a clan that's not covered by the PCs' clans or their immediate allies/enemies. Something to work on.
Oh, god - for that matter, I really need to start applying the Experience and Development rules. Haven't touched 'em, yet. Tracking important failures is important.

On the subject of credibility and climbing checks

2009-06-05T09:01:00.000-07:00

I was just checking out Joe McDonald's blog (on hiatus for the time being) and there was a discussion about the concept "Yes, or roll the dice".
I'll let you read it for yourself to get the full scoop, but I wanted to put this out there: "Yes, or" is an assertion that the resolution mechanics should only be engaged when a) something significant happens b) that creates a conflict of interest between a player and one or more parties. You have to have A and B; we know from Conflict (not Task) Resolution that inanimate objects and such can, in this context, have "interests" that they defend.
Let's expand on that, though, as it's not really the mountain you want to climb that has a stake in this: it's the rest of the game group. You're rolling against the mountain, sure, not another PC or a GM character, but it's important to the group that Credibility be established and enforced here. This has always been the case; it's nothing new. But it's gone unsaid, and should be clearly stated. CR's little "rocks have feelings" clause is there to acknowledge that, if we frame conflict as a conflict of interests, then the interests are really between the acting player(s) and everyone else at the table, using the mountain as a pawn, a stand-in.

Story Games as a term; its relation to Creative Agenda

2009-05-30T10:20:00.002-07:00

Over at Story-Games.com, and a couple of other blogs, as of late, there has been some discussion about the term "story games". Honestly, this is a term I've not precisely heard before, but I can get the gist of what they mean. Narrativist/Story Now games come to mind.
Eero Tuovinen, writer of Game Design is about Structure, made some interesting comments at Story-Games.com on the subject of "making story" and playing an RPG:

I can't get really interested in conch-passing storytelling games either, the ones where I'm supposed to be responsible for creating a good story. As far as I'm concerned, I want the rules mechanics to take care of that part so I can focus on playing my character / throwing nasty stuff at the player characters or whatever other fun things there are in the game to be done. "Making a story" is not on my list of fun things for roleplaying simply because when I want to make a story, I write one.

Looking at TSoY in this context, though, the xp rules of the game work very well in giving me what I want: instead of me the player getting more control over the fiction the xp gives my character more control over his environment, his fate, his society, his friends and enemies - which in turn directly drives frozen conflicts of his life towards resolution now that he finally has the power to do something about it.

Something really, really important to take from this is that the Creative Agenda stems from the players themselves, not from the game or its rules. I feel like this is something that's been troubling me, distracting, even, when I'm working on game design - from a standard definition of Story Now, the rules are there to heighten the exploration of the Premise. A Story Now game gives the Premise, sets up some rules that allow Exploration, and then the players run around in that space.

I dunno where I'm going with this; I'm not quite sure what the phrase "story game" means to other people, given that I'm a Forgie and it doesn't come up at the Forge, like, ever. But the point of this post is a reminder - if it's protagonism and theme and such that you're after in play, rather than Being There, Stepping Up, or what have you, then grab a Story Now game and you'll put the right foot forward.

It may not need to be said, but it's possible that the misunderstanding here (Eero and others' reasonable misgivings aside), comes about because of what folks think a story is. Without rules that deliberately limit the mechanical focus to the Egri premise, the play group is at a disadvantage for achieving "story". More importantly, perhaps, the GM's role of managing and heightening tension cannot take on the focus needed for Premise without rules to support that.

Unless you put it out there that, say, the forces of good reputation and personal desire clash, and set up mechanics that make these things abstract in some way, you can't play Mask of the Emperor. Not really.

D.F., scene-creation, and other thoughts

2009-05-29T18:45:00.000-07:00

So here's what I'm thinking: the creation of each resource node, and new chamber in the Fortress, for that matter, is an opportunity for a scene. Using a node or a chamber is also a chance for a scene.
For that matter, friendly visits from merchants, immigrants, and invaders are always, guaranteed, instances for new scenes. As in, I'm thinking you have to have a scene here. Merchants can be instant conflict/interest - if you need something from them, to help a dwarf in a Strange Mood, they will take you to the cleaners over the necessary item. Or, they might try to take advantage of the ravages of the local clime: in a desert, wood and stone will be dear to purchase; on a muddy plain, maybe gems and ore are tough to come by. Ah, and let's not forget an easy way to stir the pot in the original game: low-balling a merchant to the point of causing insult.
Dwarves might have orders from the Crown; elves are pretty easily offended in general, and humans ... well, maybe they're likely to try and exploit your situation.
It occurs to me that, doing admin-type stuff for the Fortress, you could consider yourself to be in "Fortress Mode" (to go along with "Battle Mode" and one of the motifs of the computer game), and, ha, the times when you're actually running scenes should totally be called "Adventurer Mode".
For those who don't know what in gods' name I'm talking about - in the Dwarf Fortress computer game, there are three modes of play available from the title screen - Fortress, Adventurer, and Legend. Sadly, at this point Legend Mode is merely a sort of "read through the history of the game world" exercise, in which you have exhaustive lists of all the events the computer has "crunched" while putting together the randomly-generated world, based on a few specifications you've given. It might sound cool, but I don't think it is, in the current incarnation.
Anyway. I think declaring different modes would be cool, as things work pretty differently in Battle Mode, and differentiating Adventure vs. Fortress would be a good "background" bit of info to draw attention to scene-framing as a Technique of play.
What I'm curious about is what people would actually *do* in a game of DF. I'm trying to avoid the niggling little voice in my head that says "Story Now!" because, honestly, I don't think there's enough "meat" to what's happening in the game world to really find themes or a Premise or anything to really, um, work with. The game is about resource management and survival; not much explicit moral conflict. So, we'll see.
Kobolds would be fun - scrappy little thieves who are fairly easy to kill, but certainly liven things up. Goblin baby-snatchers are a good time, too.
You know what? This game totally needs a relationship web of some kind. Births, marriages, and friendships (as well as dwarves who just don't get along!) are all an important part of the original game - happy (or unhappy) dwarves will greatly affect life in the Fortress. For that matter, decorating and the creation of trinkets, furniture, and the like are all other contributing factors to dwarven un/happiness.

A Dwarf Fortress RPG (long)

2009-05-29T12:15:00.000-07:00

[cross-posted at the Forge in the First Thoughts section]

So, a couple of months ago I became obsessed with the Dwarf Fortress strategy/world-building game for a few weeks, and part of my obsession involved the very basics of an RPG based around it.
I've been messing around with these ideas again this week, and I wanted to post my thoughts here for consideration. For the unfamiliar, the point of this RPG idea is to explore the Dream of dwarves building a fortress, interacting with elves, humans, and goblins, going to war, scouring for resources, and so on.

DF is a bit of a tall order, in that it's incredibly detailed, single-player only, possessed of an almost inscrutable interface... did I mention how detailed it was? My initial concept centers around a few simple stats that get a lot of mileage and multiple, layered uses:

Beard - social standing among dwarves, a measure of how much clout you have; this extends to interactions with non-dwarves as needed (may be able to declare discovery of other settlements/civilizations, be they elves, goblins, humans, or other dwarves)
Metal - skill at crafts in general, and the creation of finished products, including complex mechanisms for traps and bridges and the like
Wood - exploration of the surface world, speed of movement in the wilderness, harvesting plant life in general (can declare discovery of natural features on the surface world, such as rivers, copses of trees, and so on)
Meat - hunting, fishing, and butchery
Stone - mining/digging, architecture, alcohol tolerance, movement speed underground, and exploration of the underground world (can declare discovery of natural features underground, such as rivers, veins of gems or metals, magma flows, etc.)

Those are the civilian uses of stats. There is also a "battle mode" into which any dwarf can enter, at which point all stats take on different meanings:

Beard - combat leadership, and how intimidating you are to your foes (since goblin invaders often run away when outmatched, I think Beard should be useful to scare away enemies, if you desire; also useful to rally and command dwarves)
Metal - a measure of how well-armed you are (probably relates to damage-dealing and damage-prevention; a dwarf going into Battle Mode must stop by the fortress armory to gather weaponry, or his Metal will be at 0 in combat; this is not always a bad thing)
Wood - ranged combat capability, dodging, and speed (out of Battle Mode, speed is mainly at issue to see how quickly unarmed dwarves can make it back to base, either to arm themselves or just to get to safety. In Battle Mode, Wood is your overall speed, both above and below ground)
Meat - your ability to get through/around an opponent's defenses; also a general measure of the fury of your attacks. Also, measures your capacity for the infamous Wrestling skill, which allows you to pin, disarm, and then torture enemies
Stone - your resistance to wounds, and possibly a measure of your defenses

In combat, you generally select two stats to roll together for each action (probably going to to a dice pool thing, since I like that, but it's up in the air for right now), and that reflects what you're up to: Metal+Meat is a standard attack, Stone+Metal is a standard defensive maneuver, etc. I am all about determining different combinations and figuring out what they would mean for the fight.

Greatness - in the original computer game, the sum total of all your material wealth, furnishings, etc., is collected into a rating of how awesome your fortress is. I want to have something like that here, but with a lot less granularity than a computer could support. This will hinge on two things: resources and fortress-building. Whenever a dwarf uses Wood or Stone to exploit a source of lumber, minerals, etc., it's assumed that those materials are added to the coffers of the fortress for a "base level" amount of Greatness points.
You'll need to break out a sheet of graph paper at this point - the players put their heads together and work on their fortress. I want to encourage actually drawing what it looks like, probably from a pure-vertical perspective; on another sheet of paper entirely, record the distance to various "discovered" resources and natural features. As the fortress grows and gets filled up with details (decoration, finished goods, a well-stocked armory, etc.), the dwarves essentially turn the base-level Greatness points of your acquired resources into high-Greatness weapons, trinkets, goods, and so on.
At this point, I have some vague ideas about a turn-based, "seasonal" time system, which would make the distance between resources and the fortress meaningful even during times of peace (in terms of how much you could collect, I suppose), and that, in turn, would give some structure to how quickly a fortress could accumulate Greatness.
Greatness isn't just-because; it's actually going to be used to determine how much attention your fortress gets from immigrant dwarfs, merchants of other races, and screaming hordes of goblin invaders. For now, I think a d100 system would make some sense, as far as establishing when these events happen (migration, trade, invasion) - you roll d100+Greatness and consult a chart to see whether you're hosting merchants, being attacked, or home to new immigrants. As in the original game, merchant visits occur in specific seasons, based on the race of the merchant (elves in spring, humans in summer, dwarves in autumn). Invasions can happen in any season, as can immigration; each season, then, you'd roll three times on the chart, to see if you get trade, migrants, or invaders. The exception is winter - no one comes to trade with you in winter!
I have absolutely no idea how trade should work, or even if some level of granularity even makes sense, here. It's probably sufficient just to have general resource pools with a rating attached to them; in that case, you could trade 1-for-1 of a useless or excess resource for something you do need.

Specific Resources - presumably, the exploration ability covered by Wood and Stone would be two-fold: successes would determine whether or not you find the thing at all, and some other way of reading the dice would determine how far away it is/how hard it is to get to. That second part is something I haven't quite figured out yet; maybe the number of dice that come up as failures could dictate how accessible the resource is, and yes, this means that the more skilled you are, the more likely you are to locate a resource that's far away. That makes sense to me - I want to limit the number of "nodes" for a particular resource you can find at a single time, giving more skilled dwarves greater access, but also limiting resources to one "node" per distance-rating. Common resources require a single success to find; more rarefied goods require more, while omnipresent goods require no successes at all (the distance is the only relevant factor, in that case). That being said...
Choice of "Map" - since selecting where to plant your fortress is so important to the original game, I figure a quick discussion of what's rare, what's common, and what's omnipresent is important before the game begins. A list of resources (wood, gems, ore, farmland, hunting grounds, etc.) and natural features (rivers, magma flows, hills, etc.) will be hashed out, in terms of modifiers to things - gems and ore are less common than stone and wood in general, but in drier or more mountainous climates, wood might be harder to find, and in flatter or sandier climes, stone and ore and gems will be harder to find. I imagine trade will become more relevant when certain resources are more precious, or even non-existent.
Of course, what DF adaptation would be complete without ... Strange Moods?
Haven't worked this out at all yet, but the basic idea is that a dwarf PC stands a chance of becoming an utter master at either Stone, Metal, or Wood, but could very well go insane/die/go on a killing spree if the requirements aren't met. The other upshot is that a treasure of great worth is created as a result of the Strange Mood, which would add a tidy sum of Greatness points to things. Those requirements could be easily met (materially) if the right kind of merchant were visiting that season, but if not, the Stone and Wood specialists would need to hurry up and find what the moody dwarf needs to ensure success. I think striking a balance between Greatness points consumed on the project vs. the difficulty of the dice challenge is important; if you can buy what you need from a merchant, it should really cost you, but the alternative is a roll of the dice. Something like that.
I realize that there's a certain board-game quality to all this, a certain lack of RP-style Exploration; at least it feels that way to me. I figure that the other half of the game, the part not directly covered by the rules, is the interaction of all the dwarves in the fortress a) with each other b) with the Royal Court that commissioned the expedition, and c) with other races.
Romance, jockeying for position, squabbling over the priorities of the fortress, not to mention good old fashioned grudges and bar-fights, are all important things to actually "do" as a dwarf - as much as I've outlined a bunch of mechanical thingies, but those are intended to be co-central or background elements, sharing or giving spotlight with/to the actual interactions between dwarves. Dwarf NPCs should be needy little bastards who take credit for others' discoveries, pick fights over imagined insults, cower and flee at the approach of invaders, and so on. I think the GM's role is to introduce complications whenever possible/enjoyable, holding the power to cause cave-ins, floods, breakups, etc. There should be space for stories or plots within the game - stuff that goes deeper and more detailed than the rules themselves would do alone - stuff like weird discoveries in the mines, agents of the Crown showing up with hidden agendas, things like that.

Authority, conflict, and D&D

2009-05-27T08:51:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, an old gaming buddy of mine named Marc, having listened to me at length about RPG theory, expressed an interest in playing D&D with me. I agreed, thinking it an opportunity to show, rather than tell, all the stuff I'd been talking about. Given that we're on opposite sides of the U.S., we resorted to playing over the phone.
A few ground rules: we used the Kicker technique, it would just be the two of us playing, we would use 3rd edition rules (sticking as close to play-as-written as possible), and there would be no GM, only two PCs.
That last bit was probably what got us in trouble, and what prompted me to think a lot about conflict, authority in the gaming group, and so on.
In the Mask playtesting campaign I've been running this year, I noticed that reliable sources of antagonism have given the game the fuel it needs to stay high-energy, to stay focused. Without dedicated antagonist characters, it's drifted into listless, low-key play that largely hinges on Exploration for its own sake.
This is essentially what happened in our D&D game, as you might expect. To start, we only had one Kicker, and it corresponded to his character, not mine. As a result, it was up to him, by and large, to drive play through decision-making. At least, it was supposed to be: I've managed to get pretty heavily into player-centered RPing, the sort of play where, as i stated above, it's up to the players to act as protagonists, making decisions that drive the plot along. Antagonism provides something for the PCs to push against, a sort of context for their actions. Without any kind of push-back against what they want to do, there's no tension; Lumpley has already explained the non-relationship between tension and winning the game here, so I will refer you to that link instead of elaborating here. But, on that note, antagonism isn't always personified. A target number to perform a task can be the "push-back" you need to give a little more shape to the story, but real-live enemies work better, and are much more interesting.
Anyway, we were going somewhere interesting, and I have to admit that Marc and I came up with some cool stuff (he's a nobleman's son who's given up his birthright for a career in music; I'm an elf-turned-mercenary who's hiding out from agents of my former king). The problem(s) were: inconsistent antagonism and very one-sided creativity. The two relate, of course; Marc, having had a bog-standard, GM-centered RPing career, kept looking to me to decide everything, but because I had a PC of my own, I had a conflict of interests to deal with. I could come up with where to go and what to do, and suggest new areas to Explore, but without anyone else dedicated to stopping me doing as I please, I hesitated constantly, afraid that I was "doing it wrong".
A big, big chunk of all this: creative authority went pretty much undiscussed, despite my efforts to the contrary. This happens a bit in my sessions of Mask, but because there's a fairly traditional, if player-centered, set of roles in place (the regular players mainly portray a single character each; the gm-player portrays nearly everybody else), I can always say, "Yeah, well, it IS up to you guys right now to decide what happens. It's right in the rules!"
Traditional roleplayers will want to push back against any attempts to empower them, of course; there's a vague, underlying notion that there is a "real" game world out there, but only the GM can see it, so he must relate it to the players in a manner of his choosing. Working with this false assumption, you have a range of benevolent-to-maniacal GMing styles, largely differing on the degree to which they a) share information with the players and b) manipulate player ignorance.
These may seem like the same thing, but they aren't. I daresay you could make a two-axis graph that has "level of information shared" and "level of manipulation" as the axes. Or, well, I suppose ignorance-manipulation is an inherently dysfunctional, Illusionist technique, as it's entirely predicated on the implicit assumption behind "sharing" information, i.e. that the GM is actually scrying the game world and revealing it, like the Oracle at Delphi, for the players. This isn't what's happening, and every opportunity you can take to show that the GM is making it up moment-to-moment (no matter how much prep is involved), the better it is for players, and the more likely they'll chime in and be creative along with you.

Okay, big money: this is all leading to a re-evaluation of the Wisdom stat in Mask: it occurs to me that there was something I was going for with it, a sort of "say, do I have any good dirt on this guy?" kind of resource that acted, a la Dune, like the slow knife to Wit's swift knife. To unpack that metaphor, think about it like this: in most games with physical stats, you have something like dexterity and something like strength. One is your finesse, and the other is raw power. That was my original, albeit vague, divisor for each "stat pair" (two social, two physical). In actual play, my "dexterity" stat, Self-Discipline, acts as a sort of social/physical hybrid for everything related to self-control (not responding to taunts; keeping your balance), Strength is purely physical, and Wit is purely social.
Given that, I'm free to experiment with Wisdom. Because Wisdom had no clear role, however, that left us with only three stats to go with the nine skills, and meant that sometimes stat-skill combos got shoehorned into uses that felt, at best, forced. Okay, okay: Wisdom's new function, which I've managed to implement successfully, is to create pure information about the Shared Imagined Space. While "I use my Strength+Banditry to torture him into talking" is certainly creating information about the SIS, it's doing it within the context of the stakes set for the dice roll.
To use the above example, a successful roll there would mean "I torture him, and he gives us the information we need". A failure would mean something akin to "He resists, or gives us bad information, or something else happens". Like usual. But if you used Wisdom instead (along with a skill, presumably), then success would mean "I introduce something relevant to the situation that is useful or interesting."
That was vague. What I mean is this: rather than asking the GM, a la Mother May I, if this or that fact is correct about the situation, you simply say, "This is true. Now, let's roll!" It's just like any other roll, in that respect: declare, roll, continue. But, instead of the stakes referring to actions and events, they refer to information about the events at hand. Because a standard stakes-setting roll works with what has already been established, but it's still so darn flexible, Wisdom actually doesn't/shouldn't come up all that often.
You can see I'm having a hard time defining this. Okay: if you, the GM, find yourself in a situation in which a player wants to find out information, ask/determine if they're looking for color or control. If it's color, you might as well agree to it. If the player is looking for control of the situation, and it hasn't been established that what they're asking is obvious, then the player should roll to make it true.
Hopefully that's clear, to you and to me.

Job rant[insert Marx-related pun here]

2009-04-11T12:02:00.000-07:00

[cross-posted at http://totallypinkrock.livejournal.com/199431.html]

My friend Geoffrey and I are going to start reading (in his case, re-reading) Marx's Capital together. I feel like there's a whole layer of theory and analysis that he's privy to that is beyond me, thus far, and it's beyond me because of a lack of reading.
I know I can grok this stuff, no problem; I just gotta educate meself!
It's going to be interesting going, to be sure; in terms of what their end-goals would actually look like, I'm firmly convinced that left-anarchists and anti-Stalinist socialists have far too much in common to be alienated on the "practical" level - i.e. both groups are probably going to be interested in workers' and residential cooperatives, in localized economies, rejection of the corporate/hierarchical business model, etc.

I don't want to be "counter-productive", but I get the feeling that it could be tricky to really incorporate right-anarchists/anarcho-capitalists into this model.Mainly, it reminds me of the character Mollie from Animal Farm - someone who is so keen on her current lifestyle and the particular comforts that go with it that she would abandon the cause altogether for the sake of them. I think it's the Mollies of the world that put a certain burden on the cooperative/local-economy movement to demonstrate that one can be reasonably just as comfortable in this kind of system as one can be under the national system, if not more so.

For an example of this, consider the extreme value placed on anything hand-made, made with traditonal methods, etc., in the market economy, especially in the United States. Since mechanization has taken over so much of production (nearly all of it, in the commerical sphere), the chance to buy an item that was hand-made or traditionally made is fairly rare, unless you dedicate yourself to finding it; the price for these items tends to be somewhat higher than their mass-produced equivalent.

In a cooperative/local economy, there can be an emphasis on, and certainly there is much more room for, the development of personal craft skills, trade skills, and survival skills; this means that you can make your own hand-made down-stuffed cotton pillow for quite cheap, rather than paying hand over fist to get one commercially. That, of course, is a big element (for me) of the cooperative/local movement - if you do things yourself and/or pool your efforts with a few friends, your buying power out among the capitalists increases dramatically! Division of labor is a very basic ingredient of a market economy; without it, the marketplace is winnowed down to divisions based on geographic availability of certain resources, and perhaps historical access to the skills needed to harvest them.
When there is no market exchange whatsoever, at least within a certain community, there is no longer an incentive to "stick with" a particular task or trade, as one may freely change tasks or duties without threatening one's "livelihood" - all members of a cooperative are permitted to take part in all tasks without "losing out" in any way; contrast this with the outright necessity of maintaining one's specialization in the market work-force, which demands that one choose a specialty and perpetuate it, so that future employers have proof that one's abilities are sufficiently profitable to merit hiring.
I look at my own job history in this regard, and it's amusing that it's taken me this long to find my way into a leadership position, but even more amusing that the commensurate benefits associated with leadership are so small. Given that I earn less than a dollar an hour more than the people I "manage", the only real benefit of my position is that I am assigned to clean the concession area less frequently than entry-level workers. Depending on what I'm assigned to on a given day, I still have to help clean this area (not fun, but not hard either), and when I'm not, I perform fairly easy tasks of inventory control.
It's strange - given how little name-recognition our theatre enjoys in Davis, it would be feasible to drop the name altogether, sever our ties with Corporate, and remain more or less equally profitable. Given that a large proportion of our income derives from hosting advertisements, rather than the labor we perform, it would be quite possible to cut costs and continue to find sufficient maintenance and support for our property without our corporate masters. We aren't particularly reliant upon them, except, perhaps, for the specific contracts with specific service-providers that we currently employ; local businesses still have access to armored cars, and internet service, and the like, don't they?
It's arguable that the money saved thanks to the size and pull of our corporation is substantial; to that, I say, where is this extra money going? A hierarchy demands more and more wealth to propogate itself, as it grows; basically, I don't disagree that the greater one's responsibilities, the greater compensation one could reasonably enjoy, to a point. If we were a single theatre, the responsibility would, at no point, be greater than that afforded our general manager; as such, on the single-store level, wage disparity is not so terribly huge, and could be shrunk somewhat for the sake of guaranteeing consistency in the workforce.
As for the easily-replaceable nature of our entry-level workers, I say that it really does waste several hours of wages *per worker* per week to use inexperienced workers instead of seasoned ones, even at fairly simple tasks. If a single-store theatre were to focus on creating the most experienced staff possible, the loss in replaceability and management impunity (that of hiring and firing) would be offset by the increase in the level of service provided to customers, and the much greater efficiency of work. The jobs we have there are temporary because we cannot live on the wages we earn; if we earned better wages, had some access to healthcare, etc., it would be very possible that people would be more content there, and stay. There's "no future" at this job for me because it will never pay me a living wage; I'm endlessly looking for other jobsand currently working two at once, which means I waste a lot of my time and energy outside of this job because this job pays so little.
It would do us all a lot of good to to become independent. The problem of doing this lawfully and contractually rests on the very facts that drive me to seek independence - i.e. the puny wages we command mean that purchasing the property from REG would take bloody forever, and that's exactly how they would want to keep things. Damn you, private property!

One last thought - if we do a cost-benefit analysis of seasoned vs. inexperienced retail workers, then account for the commensurately higher wages the seasoned would command (both due to pitifully small Corporate "raises" and to a wage-increase from the cooperative reorganization of the business), it might seem that there is no greater profit to be made from holding onto experienced workers, as things "balance out". With that in mind, these workers are inarguably more efficient, which means that, given that entry-level workers are always supervised here, it would save everyone several hours of their time per week to use as they wish, if we put the kibbutz on keeping the experience level so low. Given that the more senior managers are salaried, not waged, it would do them no harm to spend fewer hours at work; if anything, this would probably draw down their time commitment to something more reasonable.

Sorcery and the Herald

2009-03-08T01:56:00.000-08:00

We had another quickie session tonight, lasting just over two hours. Pleasantly, its plot content very neatly filled what felt like a chapter in a story, and I decided to end the sesh when the players began to discuss how much down-time (on a scale of months, btw) should elapse before they get where they need to go next.
The herald and the outlaw traveled to the Asagiri province, south of where they were previously; there, they followed a series of contacts and clues in the local criminal underground, finally trekking up into the hills, on the trail of a sorcerer. Upon finding him, the outlaw begged that he sever the herald's psychic link to his master, and replace it with one between the two companions. The sorcerer did not reveal until later that only the Emperor Himself could possibly sunder a connection such as that, but he gladly created another over top of the first.
This briefly led to some semi-derailed play, as I suggested that an "open" connection between the herald and another meant that any injury and discomfort felt by one would be felt by the other; this led to immediate abuse, and I will need to put a ruling on that before next session, something to the effect of "Okay, if you die, that's a problem. Also, no fair hurting yourself and thus making the connection utterly useless."
I was tempted to lean on the authority of a dice-roll, but that got me thinking my trigger-happy player could just constantly roll that all the time, in annoying moments, to be disruptive, and that's a stupid thing to allow. If one gets killed, the other is in trouble, particularly if they were connected at the moment of death; I daresay that the connection laid by a mere conjurer would be far shallower than those laid on by the Emperor's own power, and there could be a bit of retcon in there as well, just to ensure that no annoying shenanigans ensue next time.
All in all, though, I continue to be delighted and amazed at my players' ability to keep the conflict between the PCs fresh and energetic, with only a trifling bit of help from me. I keep the larger forces arrayed against them in an interesting fashion, and they do the rest to keep each scene fun and even gripping!
They shaved off the herald's Hare Krishna top-knot, by the by, and haven't been letting him shave his scalp. It's been only a week, but his Noble House scalp-tattoo is now harder to see, and people take him for a fisherman or laborer of some kind. The fact that he still bows and scrapes and is just so polite to everyone has raised a few eyebrows, but without consequence for now.

One last thought: read Watchmen, then go see the movie. You won't be sorry.

A Song of Melting Ice and Guttering Fire

2009-03-06T18:16:00.001-08:00

It saddens me to see such a beautifully-illustrated product as this be party to such pedestrian design. Ho-hum, a hybrid CA. Ooh, metagame Currency! Ugh, a table for weapon rules. Blech, a separate section for combat rules. Blarrrrgh, two different resolution systems, one with target numbers and one without.

It's like someone found a really amazing artist to do the pikchurs, and then took every "Mike's Standard Rant" from the Forge forums and cobbled things together into one game. One thing that is pretty cool: the designers went halfsies on that whole "stats vs. skills" design aspect, such that there are no stats, only twenty or so Abilities that cover the combined ground of stats and skills (the ground they'd get in most games, anyway).

The art, which is awesome, reminds me of Richard Corben's work (Bloodstar was one of my favorites growing up) and that of David Petersen (of Mouse Guard fame), feels too good for this game. The game isn't some horrible creature; it's just so bog-standard (at least in the fast-play rules preview available at the Green Ronin site) that it feels like it doesn't deserve such evocative images.

The Game of Thrones series has super-strong themes, an intensely detailed setting (but the basic movers and shakers aren't hard to understand, thankfully), and characters that feel real and authentic. To have yet another crack at an RPG adaptation of the series be so ... typically mainstream makes me want to go and design my own version of it. I swear, though, this is yet another series where noble houses, respect, and reputation are all major-league forces, which means I don't need to make something out of a whole new cloth - some minor adaptation of Mask of the Emperor would suit the series quite well.

One major thing that'd need to happen, though, is rules for monsters. Well, maybe not new rules, per se, but certainly the injection of overtly supernatural beings, beyond what the Sorcery rules can accomplish. The monsters all still involve people, rather than just being flat, boring obstacles for the protagonists to overcome, so that's cool. I'm also wicked-excited about making the Black Brothers the new Heralds; they are so Aloof it's not even funny! I'd been considering taking the Monk role along with me when I adapted Mask to a Christian Medieval setting, and I think the vaguely-Catholic-Church nature of the Seven-faith in Westeros would work great for Monks. I'd need to swap out the Way, or something, but letting Black Brothers be the "fightin' Aloofs" instead of the Septons would at least maintain the fighter-y options for people wanting to play Aloof characters. Good times.

Edit: upon reading a bit more of the sample game, I noted that the full stats for the sample characters are incredibly brief, almost Mask-brief. This mitigates the game's other flaws somewhat, though its resoundingly incoherent CA (Gamist and Sim, back and forth!) still puts the nails in the coffin for me. Ah, well. Simple rules do not mean good rules, although they do help.

Proactive players

2009-03-06T02:59:00.000-08:00

This, this is exactly what happened in every session of Mask we've run so far, and it's been beautiful, just beautiful, to observe:

"One interesting observation is that when you flat out tell the players that there isn't really anything prepared and that you're basically winging it, then player paranoia goes WAY down and they become a lot more proactive. They stop asking a lot of repeative questions of NPCs and stop trying to turn over every minute rock and scavage for every detail known to man before deciding to take action. Basically, they stop trying to second guess the GM when they know there isn't anything to second guess." - from an Actual Play report involving Werewolf: the Apocalypse, by Jesse, aka jburneko, at the Forge.

People are basically considerate and thoughtful creatures, once their basic physical needs are met. Players never, ever want to risk "ruining" your carefully planned adventure, provided they think or know you've planned something. The exception is, of course, if they aren't enjoying what you've put together, but even then, I bet I could go back and interview old players and find out that those who didn't like what I was doingjust didn't want to say anything.
That's okay with me; I kind of freak out when people make their displeasure too plain (see: my Changeling posts on my Livejournal account). Finding a technique that puts the plans of the entire group the table is much more exciting! Huzzah.

Here's hoping we play on Saturday, as planned. I'm seeing Watchmen with friends on Friday night, and it had better not suck.

Thoughts on the Mouse Guard RPG and Luke Crane games in general

2009-03-02T18:03:00.000-08:00

[Fair warning: I've yet to play any Luke Crane RPGs; I've only read Burning Wheel and some of Mouse Guard, so what I have to say is highly speculative.]

For those of you not familiar with the comic book Mouse Guard, I highly recommend it for the aesthetic appeal alone. It's sentient, bipedal mice in a world without humans; they wear little cloaks and have weapons and castles and the like, and the titular organization's goal is to mind the roadways of their little world, thwarting predators and the like.
Sadly, as beautiful and clever as it is, I've yet to be engaged very much by the storyline. The conflicts the characters face are gorgeous and lush, yet somehow hollow and a tad forced. The lovingly rendered yet ex-nihilo legend of "Black Axe" (a traitorous villain with a titular weapon) seems tacked on, although David Petersen, the creator, spins the tale with all his artistic talents operating at full capacity.
This all being said, I was wondering if the RPG translation of the series would have potential for greater storytelling powers, but thus far I don't know what to think. In the RPG text itself, the designer (Luke Crane) puts it right out there as far as the point of play: the game-master throws challenges and obstacles at the players, and they play their Mouse Patrol the best they can to overcome them. That's a straight-up, definitive example of Gamism, right there.

I have never played an explicitly Gamist RPG; I've played a few games that were highly Sim, with lots of Gamist tactical content thrown in, but never anything that went right out and said, "This game is about winning and losing. The rules are here to determine when and how that happens." Kudos to Mr. Crane for clear Creative Agenda in his design this time around. I was inclined to agree with Ron Edwards about Burning Wheel, and without putting too many words in Edwards' mouth, the agreement runs toward the analysis of BW being "motorboat" Narrativism: design that almost nails Addressing Premise, but falls just short and instead roves off into highly Simulationist, High Concept play.

If you don't believe me, compare the section on Beliefs and Artha (make-yer-own-Premise Narrativism, which is unique, I believe) with the Lifepaths section of the Character Burner (such theme and panache in those different Race Chapters!). Artha and Beliefs encourage a sort of internal regulator for the character and the decisions the player makes, but as to what sort of story all this is for, Crane has left it up to play groups to determine. In the Character Burner, there's no question that he can beautifully portray something akin to a whole barrel of story seeds, even if the attached mechanics are based on "realism" more than player agency (in terms of helping to tell the story, not in terms of raw power).

My point? Well, I feel like this is Crane's take on almost-Nar-but-really-Gamism. That claim is quite a stretch, I admit, but here's one little tidbit from an RPG.net review that gave this idea a germ of life:
"The Nature rules deserve some special mention. All creatures in MG have a Nature specific to their species. Mouse Nature is used for Escaping, Climbing, Hiding, and Foraging. Nature can be called upon for these basic activities, but it can also be substituted for any other skill. Doing this, 'going against your Nature,' risks taxing your Nature, and there are risks to reducing it by too much, or for that matter, for raising it too high through advancement."
Does that not seem like a two-steps-removed crack at Premise to anyone else? It seems as though there is a line for PCs to walk with regard to acting "properly Mouse-like", but if I recall, this was something that wasn't really established in the comic. At least, not in Series 1: Fall 1152. This bit makes me think, "Mouse Nature... as opposed to what?" It's intriguing, and it makes me want to go back to the bookstore and find out the rest of that mechanic, to see what Crane is on about.

Wounds and injury in Narrativist game design

2009-03-01T15:16:00.000-08:00

[Cross-posted at the Forge under "First Thoughts".]
[Edit: I think I'm going to solve this "dilemma" by keeping the long healing times for physical injuries, but going ahead with the quicker, story-based recovery time for social wounds.]

So I've been playtesting my game for three sessions now, and in our most recent session, one of the PCs suffered a wound. In game terms, this means a loss of dice from the relevant dice pool (the stat and skill used get penalized til the wound heals). Also in game terms, players get to choose whether a particular conflict they engage in will have "you could get hurt, or even killed" at stake. Victor, the player whose PC took the wound, did this all quite deliberately - Kaizo the Herald, horrified that his master was disappointed in him for getting himself taken hostage by foes, attempted to cut his own throat on the knife held by his captor.
This was a great game moment - for once, a PC was engaging in self-destructive behavior because of a story-contribution from the player, not because of player-frustration, which had been my experience most of the time. It fit Kaizo and the concept of noble sacrifice so well, making it a great all-around moment for us.
We rolled to see if Kaizo could get his throat pierced by the knife, and the soldier holding him tried to keep his human bargaining chip from losing its value. He got a success - not an amazing one, but enough to tear himself up pretty good.
From there, I realized that my rules covered how to get wounded, but not how to recover - and now I find myself stuck on how PCs recover from social/emotional wounds as opposed to plain old physical injuries.
I came up with a completely ad-hoc table for physical recovery, one that returns a die worth of "healed" stats or skills to the PC when a certain amount of time elapses, based on the % of the total dice pool that each die represented. To whit: a dice pool of 5 would heal a single die about as quickly as a dice pool of 10 would heal two dice.
That being said: it occurred to me that, not wanting to go too terribly far into the realm of "realism", I wouldn't try to shoehorn psychological care into my Asiatic feudal fantasy setting; instead, I figured that a PC could heal a die of social/emotional damage from experiencing a really validating victory of some kind, particularly if it dealt with someone who had *done* the damage to the PC in the first place.

So! The point is this - I set things up so players could control, or at least influence, the stakes in a situation where they stood to get hurt, humiliated, or killed. The flip side is, well, in some cases they could take months to heal from wounds. Depending on how validating their lives are, social Wounds might not be quite so bad; but I don't want to downplay the impact of dangerous, violent conflict.

So far, it hasn't discouraged my players from using violence, when it fits the way they want the story to go - nobody has shrank away from the chance of losing dice and getting hurt, although this could be in part because I haven't really explained my tentative wound-recovery system yet. I think that letting players control the stakes, and making violence really count for something, will encourage a lot more chatty conflict than stabby conflict, which is what I want as a designer; it makes violence a last resort, like it generally is for us humans. But I don't want players to feel like they're laboring under a crappy, unforgiving system.

Thoughts?
- Abby

Mask of the Emperor - Mayhem and Torture!

2009-02-28T00:04:00.000-08:00

[Cross-posted at the Forge (http://www.indie-rpgs.com) under the handle "Abkajud". Before I begin, any terms you don't recognize, or find confusing, can be defined by asking me and/or going to http://indie-rpgs.com/_articles/glossary.html and searching for the term]

So I think I just had the best RPG session of my life. I was reading the infamous 2006 "brain damage" thread at the Forge today, at least the first three pages, and I was pondering some of Ron's ideas as I walked into this session, in particular thinking about how my players have some mild signs that they have been behavior-trained by mainstream RPGs. Thankfully, no question, these guys know how to build tension, know how to throw Bangs into the story (they've done this at least as often as I have, if not more!), and they are very, very good at being spontaneously creative.

First, some logistics and such: we played two half-sessions, one from 3-4:45 pm, and the other from about 8-10:45pm (just wrapped up, actually). My player Katie has a broken foot, so we played in her dorm. Between the sessions, I went to pick up my partner from work, had dinner with Victor and some other co-op folks, and then we came back for more! Victor is playing Kaizo, the Herald of House Minomoto (a psychic slave-servant for that family). Katie is playing Aiden, an Outcast-class pickpocket who ran away from her parents, Lord and Lady Mermens (rivals of the Minomotos) and ekes out a living with a traveling acting troupe.

A quick play-script (or whatever those are called):
The setting - an Asiatic feudal fantasy land, specifically in the heart of the Empire, just outside the capital city, at Lord Minomoto's fortress.
The action (session 3, the latest one, only) - Aiden, the thief, has gotten her actor friends into a world of trouble: when she stole the purse of Kaizo, the Herald, the actors were arrested while helping her get away clean. They ended up here in the fortress outside the city, and Aiden has come to grovel on their behalf. Kaizo, sensing an opportunity to make the most of the situation, offers to bring her on as an under-the-table agent of the Minomotos, with the promise that her labors would convince Lord Minomoto to free her friends. She went so far as to burn down a rival House's dye-shop for the lord's financial gain, in order to prove her enthusiasm.
But that didn't work - after laughing in her face about her predicament, his Lordship said he was going to let them all go free, but only after he'd branded each of her friends a thief, quite literally. Aiden took matters into her own hands: she convinced a couple of guards to help her, men who were disgusted with the punishment their lord had handed down, and they staged a prison break.
In the middle of branding the fourth (and last) of the actors, the jailer got a brazier of coals kicked in his face, and Aiden took a borrowed sword and cut on him til he backed away sobbing. She did the same to another guard, and then had her soldier-ally take Kaizo the Herald hostage; with that bargaining chip, she got the last of the guards to let the actors go, and they made for the main hall of the fortress. While they went, Kaizo used his powers to tell his lord and master what was happening, and Aiden had little warning of what was coming next.
Up there, Lord Minomoto and nine soldiers awaited them. He barked orders to surround them, so Aiden threatened to kill Kaizo if they were not set free. In response, Minomoto, sensing an impasse, harangued Kaizo for so shamefully allowing himself to be captured. Stricken with guilt, Kaizo threw himself on the knife of his captor, and everyone stared, horrified, while Minomoto screamed for a doctor.
When the doctor arrived, Aiden and the actors took him hostage too. Helpless, with his prized Herald bleeding from the throat, the lord let them all go. They stole horses and a wagon, and sped down the road towards the city.

Whew! This was the most intense, exhilarating session I've had since middle school, if not the best one ever! The system worked beautifully - combat was smooth and made sense, as did the wound system (Kaizo's The Way [martial arts] and Self-Discipline [self-control and dexterity) were damaged by his throat wound), and we got to use Interrupts so two combatants could tussle between more finessed fighting (Self-Discipline plus Banditry [dirty fighting, in this context]) and brutish hacking and slashing (Strength plus Banditry).

The best part of all of this - all three sessions we've had so far have been quite powerful, and it really feels like the mechanics (especially the Challenge system) add to the tension! The system inherently uses Conflict Rez and Fortune in the Middle (with teeth! You can spend temporary Infamy or Honor before or after your roll, PC's choice), and it's paid off amazingly - whether we have a foot-chase, or an argument, or even some sword-fighting, the system builds the tension really helps us to focus on what's at stake in the moment and in the scene. That simple, little phrase, "So what's at stake is...", has proven to be a Frankensteinian bolt of lighting into the heart of my game design.

Interaction around the table - Katie was a lot more talkative than Victor, no question. The only part of that that concerned me was that Victor wasn't talking a whole lot. In a couple of distracted, the-plot-is-paused moments, I asked him if he was enjoying himself, and if he knew that he (and Katie) are always free to challenge me, the ref, on things I say, and free to jump in or say "Well, I would like to..." whenever they want. He said he knew, and that I shouldn't worry; he was playing a more passive character, one who follows orders and generally talks things out (and Kaizo is always so proper and polite!), so this was all intentional. At other times, I checked in with both of them at once, to remind them (and myself) that I'm here to help keep conflict moving forward, but they drive it with their choices; they shouldn't look to me for cues or where to go next unless they literally ask "So what's happening?" Most of the time, though, I only had to remind them of their general options to cure any lag that started to develop.

Really aggressive scene-framing helped a ton, to the point where I was saying, "Okay, this scene is ending now, so we can go to...!", but with the understanding that Victor and Katie could always interject with "Wait, I want to go back and...". A couple of times, such as when Aiden (Katie) kicked a tripod full of hot coals in the jailer's face, or when Kaizo (Victor) hesitated before throwing himself on that knife, the player would pause first, thinking. I'd ask them what was wrong, and I'd get "Well, there's this thing I was thinking of trying." Each time, I encouraged them to explain it, reacted immediately with "That's so awesome! Go for it, please!", and then they did it. The climactic turning points (Aiden charging in, Kaizo almost killing himself) also got to incorporate the more dangerous resolution methods: the Blood Challenge (Aiden, vs. the prison guards) and the lethal To the Death! Challenge (since TtD! wounds are way bigger than Blood Challenge wounds, Victor said he would be willing to risk PC death to make the wound more dramatic).
I had a couple of moments in which I had an urge to do things a bit differently, and had to wrestle with myself a bit: once, I wanted to get the PCs' verbal sparring match (between one another) to incorporate a dice roll, as the social skill system is so fun, but since it was two players doing all the work, I figured we had all the Credibility we needed to make it work. The dice would have been extraneous, so we didn't use them.
But when there were arguments between a player and an NPC, we absolutely used the dice! Simple Challenges are a good, relatively pain-free way to have some back-and-forth in a social or physical challenge, without risking injury or death, but they still provide some rising tension and give a good payoff when one person says, "I give up," or "I relent" (if they're winning).
It was wonderful having players, who were used to mainstream games, take so readily and immediately to the Techniques I was employing here. It made me incredibly hopeful about the game (even more so, that is) and did a whole lot to help us find that pay-off we were looking for. Also: it was kind of odd to be wielding a Narrativist agenda (we explicitly discussed stuff like theme and Premise before and between sessions) and thinking "This is it?" Granted, whenever somebody said, "Wow, the dice rolling makes it better!" I knew intensely that this was how I could address Premise, how I could use Fortune, rather than Drama, to have an exciting story.
Fortune really was better than Drama, and I have a feeling that Karma might have been lacking something, too - all three of us imbue dice rolls with authority and Credibility, so to use them in the middle of verbally describing a conflict helped, as I said above, to jack up the adrenaline around the situation. In the past, when I've used pure Drama to resolve combat, it was kind of flat and uninspired. The same is true (times two!) for social conflict, which I've rarely seen done with much grace or excitement. Granted, most systems I've encountered that distinguished social and physical conflict don't even begin to break out of Task Resolution-style, um, resolution (I realize now that's partly where D&D players start having all those debates about what you can and cannot simulate in Fortune mechanics).
Only one real rule-change idea came up the entire session: previously, I had it so that when you spend temporary Honor, you get two dice to do something crazy, fucked up, or shocking. I won't go into why it made sense to spend Honor for that; suffice it to say that when Katie wanted to spend temporary Infamy (Honor's fucked-up evil twin) and I was trying to use the ass-backwards logic of the previous sentence to determine what that would "mean", I said (and wrote) "The hell with it! It's useless!"
So, now, spending Honor means embracing nobility, virtue, sacrifice, and so on, really living the imperial virtues; each point you spend merits two dice; you can choose to spend them before or after you roll. Spending Infamy means you do something fucked up, shocking, or just generally fearsome, and spending Infamy works the same otherwise as spending Honor.
Victor brought up a good question: he was concerned, I think, that spending Honor or Infamy points after rolling was too powerful, or gave an unfair advantage - why would anyone ever spend Honor/Infamy before they roll? Personally, I think it simply messed around with his notion of what a dice roll was supposed to resolve. Given that, I pointed out to him that if your opponent has such a big margin on you that those two (or whatever) potential successes wouldn't turn the tide, he decided that wasn't such a big deal. I feel like I didn't quite understand his question, though, but that's okay - I'm sure he'll read this and talk to me about it soon enough!
Somewhat sadly, we're going to have to slow down our every-other-day play schedule for a while, as Victor's girlfriend is coming here to California from Spain (he is also from Spain). She'll be staying with him, and he'll be hanging out with her a lot, but I convinced him that two-hour sessions (like the first two were, actually) would be fine for me and demonstrably fun for all three of us (Katie, not the girlfriend). I don't think his girlfriend is an RPer, and that's okay; we'll be nice and conscientious of why she's here and how far she came to be here, and it should all work out fine.
One last thing - the president of our student co-operative walked by Katie's window and saw us playing, and decided to come say hi. His second question (after, "Is this the game?") was "Where's the board?" We chuckled about that ^_^ Before he came around to the door and entered Katie's hall, we did a quick check-in, which Katie initiated: she wasn't okay with Chris observing us without any prior discussion. I worked that into our chat a couple of minutes after his arrival, explaining that I was very excited by the prospect of him joining us at some point, but as one of my players wanted to have prior notice first, we would talk about it and let him know before we played again.

Amazing. Damned amazing. Five stars.

Modding my game - or how I made White Wolf games more fun for me to play

2009-02-26T15:08:00.000-08:00

When Ron Edwards started adapting Sorcerer to give it new facets, to flesh out parts of it that needed a little lovin', I was amazed. Sorcerer itself isn't the most exciting game to me, and I think I'm not quite "there" as far as appreciating Sword 'n Sorcery fiction the way Ron does; but that isn't the point. The point is that it's way cool to see somebody take their idea and then say, "Oh, you know, it could also do this!"

Brilliant! [as a brief aside, I'll be updating the Rulebook posts in the next few days to reflect recent changes and new ideas]

So, the thing I keep turning over in my head is, well, now that I have Narrativism down cold, more or less, AND I have a game design that focuses heavily on encouraging Narrativist play, it's suddenly occurring to me that I could make Mask of the Emperor adaptations of mainstream RPGs. That's a really exciting prospect to me! These would not be commercially available, at least not for money, and depending on copyright laws, I might just keep them to myself or post them as Mere Conjecture on this blog if I couldn't print up something that had, say, White Wolf Co. material as its blatantly obvious inspiration.

What I've given more serious thought to, so far, is pretty much just Exalted. That was a game that seemed to promise a set of rules that'd make me feel like a mighty hero; instead, the labyrinthine system for kewl powerz and the Official Setting pustules all over the thing made me back away slowly, watching for sudden movements.
That being said, I think I'm going to plug in a few tweaks to MotE and make a version that incorporates Solars, Abyssals, Lunars, Dragon-Blooded, and Sidereals. Once I get my thoughts organized, I'll post that here. It shouldn't be too hard, given that a lot of elements of MotE (the Craft skill, in particular) were inspired by playing Exalted and wishing it could be something more.

Another setting idea that could/would work with these rules, with adaptations, is Tsarist (or Stalinist) Russia. The intense ideological litmus-testing there, combined with the fixation of both culture-eras on a powerful central figurehead, would make for a pretty sweet take on MotE, in my opinion.

Oh, and I am loving the hell out of the Prince of Nothing series, by R. Scott Bakker. They're awesome, 95% of the time, and I highly recommend those books. I'm 2/3 of the way through the 2nd installment, The Warrior Prophet. I mention this because, hey, they kick ass, and because I keep imagining the characters rolling for social conflict resolution; people jockey for position, they bicker, and it actually has an impact on the storyline! How cool is that? It could well be that I've read this sort of thing before, and only now do I have this lens of perspective that helps me focus in on it, but yeah - Prince of Nothing could make another sweet mod for MotE, although it'd require a lot more adaptation than either of the two ideas listed above. I think. Mainly, because it's a fantasy world with a very different situation than the implied default of MotE, I might have a tough time doing it. But the emphasis on reputation, credibility (especially for the Mandate! Wow!), and social conflict with teeth makes it ripe with possibility.

The irony of modding Bakker's work is that, so the story goes, he adapted the novels from a D&D campaign he took part in some years ago.

Thass all for now!

Mask of the Emperor - dice rolling and experience

2009-02-24T16:49:00.001-08:00

The "lose a roll to advance" idea below is something I haven't put into play yet, and for that matter, I have no idea if advancement is even going to be covered by the final rules. Most games have some kind of experience, or character advancement, and because that's been around for so long, some people expect it.

I ran a game of Changeling: the Lost that was intentionally only going to last about three months, and no more; one of my players complained once he realized that this was going to happen, and ended up quitting because the game wouldn't last as long as he would have wanted it to. In my defense, the game was going to end because I was moving across the country (Virginia to California), and I've internet play a total of twice, with poor results, so I decided I'd much rather end the game with a decisive, exciting finish, rather than end up with a weak echo of the awesome sessions we were having. I wanted it to end on a strong note, and we did, but I ended up losing a player in the process because character advancement (in terms of skills and the like) was not going to happen.

It's a nod to "realism", I think, one of the holy grails of Simulationist play. It doesn't have to be, of course, and in the below example, I'm attempting to encourage players to have "second act" big, fat failures on occasion, something they can rebound from and be all the more triumphant when they save the day. I suppose I don't want to be handing out more skill points every session, but in this post at the Forge, I'm considering bumping the size of the dice I use and putting in pluses and minuses to dice, which would increase the flexibility of PC options somewhat. I'll figure it out; we play again in 3 days.

And now, the last bit of the rulebook for Mask of the Emperor.

Dice Rolling 101
- Rule #1: never pick up the dice unless something interesting and/or important is at stake on this roll. It's not that MotE characters never trip, lace their boots wrong, or walk into doors, but it's not important enough to drag the dice mechanics into it. For that matter, remember: something has to be at stake in the roll. Even if something really interesting or important is happening, you don't have to roll for it if the whole group is cool with the outcome being assured. That's the point of dice: to settle these disputes over who shot first, so to speak.
- Rule #2: pick up the dice when a PC or NPC thinks aloud, "I really want to...". This is a cue for the g.m. and the players to encourage the person to do something about getting what they want. The expressed intent sets up the stakes: if you win the Challenge, you get what you (the player!) want, and if you lose it, something else, related, happens, not necessarily just the opposite.
- Rule #3: Fortune in the Middle. This is a technique in which you declare your intent, roll the dice, and then keep narrating, using the player/gm's intent and the dice result as guides to what happened. If the g.m. tends to be the one to pick up the tab here and say "So I think this happens...", that's cool, but it's equally cool for the players to say, "My Emperor, how about...?" Keep it open, let no idea go unheard.

Experience and Development
- You might find yourself in a situation in which the honorable thing to do is actually pretty stupid, given the practical considerations. You might think, "Why on earth am I doing this? Is this really worth another temporary Honor point?" Maybe, maybe not; but to tempt you into chancing it, I've devised an experience system.
- It's pretty straightforward: any time you do something ridiculous, dangerous (socially or physically), and in accordance with your deeply-held beliefs, and you lose, put a token or a chit or something next to the skill you used in that Challenge (or the stat, if you didn't have a skill in your dice pool). At the end of the session, bring up that little stunt you pulled associated with that stat or skill; if at least one other player or the g.m. gushes about how awesome that was, turn the chit into an extra die for that trait; limit this to only once in a while, but if you really can get people to be that amazed with you, why the Hell not? On the other hand, if you do something like this and you win, well, that's its own reward, isn't it?
- Breaking past the 5-point limit on stats and skills is quite difficult and rare, but not impossible. For one thing, your character is a major protagonist in this story, so why not take a shot, right? To temporarily exceed the 5-point limit on one of your traits, get a Sorcerer to channel a spell onto you. To permanently increase a trait past 5, it should probably be at 5 already, and then you'll need to consult a god, major spirit, or some such other entity and work out a bargain. This could very well become a character's story in its own right, if only for a while: hark to the tale of the skillful, humble sword-smith who yearned to be the very greatest in all the land, who bargained with a fiery god of metalworking for the power he sought! Good stuff.