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

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!

Relationships

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.

Creative Agenda - sometimes it makes sense

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.

Story Games as a term; its relation to Creative Agenda

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.

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

[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

[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!

[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

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!