(At this point, this game is a broken rip-off, but I thought I'd get it out there. I have to playtest, but my suspicion is that I've seriously overdesigned here and that there's not much room for actually playing anything.)
Street Level
Street Level is a game about people who put on super-hero costumes and go out and try to protect their communities from various dangers. It is inspired by:
-the "street level" characters from 1970s/1980s Marvel Comics: Moon Knight, Daredevil, Punisher, Shang Chi, Iron Fist, Power Man, and Ghost Rider.
-"indie" takes on the same concept: Mike Baron's Badger, Tim Vigil's Grips, and, more recently, Millar/Romita's Kick-Ass.
-various games by Vincent Baker and Ron Edwards (especially Poison'd and Sorcerer and what people have said about Apocalypse World on sites like Story Games). Anyway, you should play/read/buy their games if you haven't already.
-that thing Tom Spurgeon says about his favorite super-hero being Wildcat because his super power is riding around on a motorcycle and beating people up.
The game is agnostic towards actual super-powers. They can exist in the game or not, but if they do you should keep the scale and scope focused on street level action.
Things characters can do:
Your character is going to be GREAT at one of these things, GOOD at two of these things, OK at four of these things, and SHIT at one of these things:
-finding shit out
-acting normal
-sneaking around
-running after shit*
-telling people what's what
-doing violence
-running away from shit*
-taking a beating
-keeping your shit together
*even though the two kinds of running are separate on the list, they get the same rating and count as one "slot" for these purposes
Gimmicks:
Every character gets to start with two Gimmicks. A Gimmick can be:
-a weapon
-a power
-a fighting style
-some kind of equipment
-some kind of personal edge
-etc.
A Gimmick has two pieces:
-a rating
-scope
All Gimmicks start at rating 1. This means when they're in play they add 1 to your die roll.
All Gimmicks start with the scope of one area of activity. This means their bonus can only be used for that area of activity.
Once you've given your character two Gimmicks, you can "bump" one of them by increasing the rating to 2 or giving it an extra area of activity to cover (i.e. increasing its scope).
You can gain another bump by adding a Drawback to the Gimmick:
-easily lost (GM can make losing this a consequence of mixed success)
-awkward (-1 to some other area of activity when it's in use)
-immobile
-large (can't be brought into buildings, etc.)
Here are some example Gimmicks:
body armor (+2 to taking a beating, Awkward: -1 to running after/away)
kung-fu (+1 to doing violence, +1 to taking a beating)
home computer with internet access (+3 to figuring shit out, Immobile)
hot rod (+ 2 to running away/after, Large)
bad-ass stare (+2 to saying what's what, Awkward: -1 to acting normal)
mutant mind blast (+1 to doing violence, +1 to saying what's what)
Obsessions:
You can choose to start with an Obsession or not. If you do, name the target of the Obsession and give it a rating of 1. Obsessions can give you a bonus dice or penalty dice if they come into play. If the GM thinks that your Obsession would help the action your character is taking, the rating of the Obsession turns into bonus dice. If he thinks it would get in the way of the action your character is taking, the Obsession rating turns into penalty dice.
"Civilians":
If your "acting normal" is Great, make up 3 regular people characters who are in your character's life in some way. If it's Good, make up 2. If it's OK, make up 1.
The Set-Up:
Players need to fill in these details:
-how does the character live day-to-day?
Actions & Consequences:
Once you've all established a baseline for how the character is going about his business, you can start into Free Play. This works just like regular role-playing.
Whenever the character is doing (or having something done to him) that falls under one of the areas of activity, he has to roll dice. Roll 4 dice is he's GREAT, 3 if GOOD, 2 if OK, and 1 if SHIT. No matter what, though, you'll only add up the 3 highest dice. In general, if you roll 10 +, you succeed easily and probably get some bonus to carry over to related activities. If you roll 6-9, you have a partial success or a success with consequences. Usually, you'll have a choice between a few different consequences. If you roll 1-5, you fail and set up yourself for worse stuff in the future.
A key concept:
-the upper hand: your character will generally start every situation with the upper hand. As long as the character has the upper hand, he can take initiative and basically take any action that makes sense. Also, on a 6-9, the player gets to make the choice of the consequence that goes along with the success. If a character loses the upper hand, actions are limited to those that are in arenas of activity below the last one that applied (see the character creation list). That means, if you just tried to tell someone what's what and lost the upper hand, you can't get out of it by acting normal (acting normal comes before telling someone what's what). Your only options would be: doing violence, running away, taking a beating, or keeping your shit together. (The exact choice of which, of course, will depend on what is actually being done.) Also, when you roll a 6-9 and you don't have the upper hand, the GM gets to choose whatever the worst option is at the moment.
You can lose the upper hand through:
-taking too many injuries
-rolling a 1-5
-if it makes sense to everyone that the character wouldn't have the upper hand
You can gain back the upper hand by rolling 10+.
Arenas of Activity:
At some point, you'll want some crime fighting to happen. If the character has a specific goal in mind, he can try to figure shit out. Otherwise, he can go "on patrol".
-figuring shit out:
10+: You get a lot of info on the target. You get a general sense of his traits. You also get a One Use Gimmick with a rating of 2 and a scope of 1 or a rating of 1 and a scope of 3. You keep the upper hand and have a lot of leeway in terms of setting up any confrontation.
6-9: You get some info on the target - choose one:
-One Use Gimmick of rating 1 and scope 1 AND Heat goes up by 2
-Heat goes up by 1
-need for caution: -1 to next roll against target
1-5: You don't find anything out that's useful PLUS something bad happens. Maybe someone found out you were looking. Heat goes up by 2 and you start against the target without the upper hand and -2 to your next roll against the target.
If your character goes on patrol, the GM rolls randomly for what he runs into. You get a -1 on your first roll in these circumstances representing a total lack of preparation.
Sometimes your character will want to try to get something done in the real world and/or pretend he really isn't the kind of person who would do something crazy like dressing up in underwear and running around beating people up.
-acting normal:
10+: You pull it off and pass yourself off as normal. You can take advantage of the services of a hospital, convince the police you're innocent (as long as you aren't caught red handed), convince the guy that you were following that you're harmless and it was just a coincidence that you're staying on the same hotel floor as he is, etc.
6-9: You pull it off, some suspicion remains - choose one:
- -1 to next roll involving these people
- heat goes up by 1
1-5: They can tell you're not normal. Services denied, cops called, impersonation of a sane person FAILED. Heat goes up by 2.
Sometimes your character will want to sneak around.
-sneaking around:
10+: You remain completely undetected. You get a +1 to your next roll if it follows from the sneaking.
6-9: Success with consequences - choose one:
-undetected but blocked - abort or roll again at -1
-some suspicions raised: -1 to next roll against target
1-5: You're busted. -1 to next roll against target, add one to Heat.
Sometimes your character will want to chase someone or something down.
-running after shit:
10+: You catch whatever you were running after.
6-9: You catch whatever you were running after, but there's a consequence - choose one:
-you take an Injury
-you cause a lot of commotion, add 2 to Heat
-you lose the guy, but have an idea where to look - +1 to a figuring shit out follow-up
1-5: You fail, plus all that running caused a commotion. Add one to Heat.
Sometimes your character will want to get his way through force of personality and/or logical argument:
-telling people what's what:
10+: The audience is convinced, cowed, crazed as appropriate. Get a One Use Gimmick of rating 2 and Scope 1 or Rating 1, Scope 3.
6-9: Success with consequences - choose one:
-you got them part of the way: abort or roll again at -1
-One Use Gimmick of rating 1, scope 1, but using it generates 2 Heat
1-5: Unconvinced, uncowed, uncrazed. -1 to next roll against target.
Sometimes you want to hurt someone. After a given exchange of violence is over, heat always goes up by 1.
-doing violence:
10+: Do 2 Injuries to the Target and a +1 to the next roll against it OR 1 Injury and a +2 to next roll.
6-9: Mixed success - choose one:
-trade up to 2 Injuries with target
-gain some advantage: no injuries but +1 to next roll
1-5: Ineffective! -1 to next roll.
Sometimes you want to run away. Use the running after shit rules, but replace "catch up" with "get away".
Sometimes you have to take a beating.
-taking a beating:
10+: No pain. +1 to next roll.
6-9: Doing ok - choose one:
-take 2 Injuries, but regain upper hand (if you don't have it)
-grit your teeth: 1 Injury, but +1 to next roll
-scarred: take a rating away from acting normal
-permanent hurt: take a rating away from running
1-5: Hurting - 2 Injuries. -1 to next roll.
Sometimes a minor world that breaks apart needs to fall together again.
-keeping your shit together:
10+: You pull it together. +2 to next roll and ignore any injury penalties.
6-9: Pulled together with consequences - choose one:
-pull it together, but still off-balance - -1 to next roll and regain upper hand if you didn't have it
-pull it together, but still off-balance, - -1 to next roll, but ignore injury penalties
-pulled together, with scars - add a new obsession
-pulled together, with scars - take a rating away from acting normal
1-5: Broken! You're incapacitated or otherwise ineffective due to mental and emotional strain. Take a rating away from acting normal and figuring shit out. Add an Obsession or increase an Obsession (up to a max of 3).
Heat:
Your Heat rating represents how much attention you've drawn to yourself from criminals and law enforcement alike. Heat affects:
-the kinds of criminals you run into on patrol
-the amount of police effort directed at you
-the ease with which you can get away with shady stuff in your community
Heat:
1-6: Bubbling under - no problems
7-12: Some concern - detective assigned to the case
13-18: Wider concern - task force assigned to the case, -1 to rolls that might be affected by heightened state of alarm (figuring shit out, sneaking around, etc.) Crooks put out a bounty.
19-24: Secret ID discovered - penalty die to all acting normally rolls. No access to home base. Bounty goes up: attracts out-of-town talent.
25+: City-wide emergency: curfew, lock down, etc. Everyone versus the hero.
Laying low:
You can try to Lay Low. Just say what you're doing instead of fighting crime. For each week you lay low:
-take one off of heat
-return a bad guy to the bad guy list
-take a -1 penalty to your next roll (for being out of practice)
Injuries:
When you delivery an Injury, it gets marked off the rating of the target. When their rating is zero, they've been defeated.
When you take an Injury:
Mark it off under the appropriate column: Fists, Sticks, Knives, Guns.
(I'll have some kind of chart here: 1st level of wounds is a -1 to roll, second level is one penalty die, and third level is 2 penalty dice. Fists and Sticks go through all three levels, but any knife/gun injury puts you at the second level of injury at least.)
[So - the injury record for your character will look like: four columns up top - Fists, Sticks, Knives, Guns. Three rows down - -1, 1 Die, 2 Dice. The number indicates the how many injuries you can take before that level is "filled" up and you move onto the next penalty level. When a column is filled up, you shift to the right and start taking injuries in that column. When you get to the end you are dying, but I don't have any particular rules for dying yet.
F S K G
-1 3 2 - -
1 Die 3 2 3 2
2 Dice 3 2 3 2
Right now the game is, somewhat purposefully, a huge death spiral. I'm working on some kind of advancement mechanic to slightly balance that.]
Healing:
Only the highest penalty in each category matters for Healing purposes.
If your character does nothing but rests, he can make a taking a beating roll to heal Fist and Stick penalties:
10+: All Fist penalties healed, Stick penalties drop to the next lowest level
6-9: Fist penalties drop to next lowest level, Stick column loses one Injury
1-5: It gets worse: nothing happens, and -1 to subsequent healing rolls
Healing from knives or guns is different: you have to either figure shit out (i.e. first aid, find a back alley doctor) or act normal (to get a regular doctor, hospital to help you) first. Then you get to make a taking a beating roll (at -1 if you're not at a legit hospital):
10+: One level of penalties is healed after a week of rest.
6-9: A week of rest gives you:
-get rid of one injury
1-5: It gets worse: nothing happens, and -2 to subsequent healing rolls
Stuff that could happen:
-investigate
-find random crimes
-beat up bad guys
-question bad guys
-spy on bad guys
-help people with problems
The Bad Guy List:
Heat 1-6:
1 - vandal (1)
2 - brawler (1)
3 - domestic disturbers (1)
4 - prostitute (1)
5 - mugger (1)
6 - car thief (1)
Heat 7-12:
1 - burglar (1, 1T)
2 - prostitute (1, 1T)
3 - mugger (1, 1T)
4 - car thief (1, 1T)
5 - drug dealer (2)
6 - bodega robber (2, 1T)
Heat 13-18:
1 - rapist (2)
2 - burglar (2, 1T)
3 - drug dealer (2, 1T)
4 - car jacker (2, 1T)
5 - pimp (2, 2T)
6 - mobster (2, 1T)
Heat 19-24:
1 - drug dealer (2, 2T)
2 - bodega robber (2, 2T)
2 - rapist (2, 1T)
3 - car jacker (2, 2T)
4 - pimp (2, 3T)
5 - heister (2, 2T)
6 - mobster (2, 2T)
Heat 25+:
1 - heister (3, 3T)
2 - arsonist (2, 1T)
3 - drug dealer (2, 3T)
4 - out-of-town talent (3, 2T)
5 - mobster (3, 1T)
6 - mobster (3, 2T)
Kingpin - mobster (3, 3T)
How the list works:
The goal is to get rid of the head mobster. You have to work your way up the ladder, though. Rules: you can only figure stuff out about bad guys in your heat level or lower OR about bad guys of the same type of one you've already dealt with (although this requires figuring stuff out, sneaking around, and/or telling them what's what). You can only roll randomly (on patrol) in the current heat level. Once a target has been chosen, the GM needs to give that Bad Guy a name and choose traits (if necessary). From then on, that Bad Guy slot is filled up and if a random roll hits it again, it bumps up to the next level.
Bad Guy Traits:
Bad Guys have a rating and one or more traits.
The rating is how many Injuries it takes to subdue them (if you choose to go the violence route) and the penalty/bonus associated with their traits.
-tough (need weapons to injure)
-speedy (-1 against running)
-determined (-1 against telling what's what, taking a beating)
-knife fighter (injure with knives, -1 to doing violence)
-well-armed (injure with guns)
-gang (-1 against doing violence, running away, +1 against sneaking, figuring shit out)
-mobbed up (draws attention of mobsters, corrupt cops - cannot be arrested, talked out of, etc. - must be killed to be permanently removed from list)
-hard to kill (takes double injuries to kill)
-out for justice (-1 against telling what's what, doing violence)
-under siege (-1 against figuring shit out, sneaking around, telling what's what, +1 against running away)
Defeating Bad Guys:
"Defeating" here might mean beating up or killing, but it might also mean scaring straight or "turning" someone (i.e., into an informant). When you defeat a bad guy you get an XP for each point of rating and each trait.
You can spend XP as follows:
-a +1 to a single roll costs 2 XP (you can spend it after the roll) (you can only get a single +1 per roll by spending XP, but this +1 stacks with +1s from other sources)
-you can add a rating point to a gimmick for 3 XP
-you can add scope to a gimmick for 3 XP
-you can buy a new gimmick for 6 XP (note: this new gimmick can start with a drawback)
-you can increase one of your areas of activity by one level for 10 XPs
Showing posts with label rpgs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rpgs. Show all posts
Monday, April 26, 2010
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Dave Arneson Memorial Gameday in NYC
More information here:
I'll be running an Old-School D&D-style dungeon crawl:
Last month Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and the originator of the first fantasy campaign, passed away. On Saturday, May 9th the Complete Strategist will host an afternoon of gaming as a tribute to his memory. Dave's work has inspired three decades of roleplaying, from the original D&D to its 4th Edition, and from noon until 5 pm, we'll play games using both of these rules systems as well as some created just for the occasion. The common denominators will be fun, imagination, and heroic adventure!
I'll be running an Old-School D&D-style dungeon crawl:
- Game Name: The Fane of St. Toad
- Run By: Jon Hastings
- Maximum Players: 8
- Brief Blurb: We're going to try to answer the question of what kind of person would trek across a dismal swamp to loot an abandoned temple that was once dedicated to the worship of a sanity-shattering Toad god from beyond the stars. The Fane of St. Toad is a scenario written by Michael Curtis for the "Original Edition" of D&D. We'll be using the three "Little Brown Books" along with Supplement II: Blackmoor ('natch) (but no experience with that or any other particular version of D&D is necessary).
- Recommended For: Brave souls interested in dungeon crawling, problem solving, and traditional, non-nerfed adventure gaming.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
My Sword and Planet Hack for Spirit of the Century
I'm starting to write up some house rules for my Spirit of the Century-derived, FATE-based Sword & Planet role-playing game scenarios.
Until I sat down to do this, I really didn't realize how hard writing good, clear rules can be. I salute the Evil Hat guys and beg forgiveness for the clumsiness that follows. This is a rough, rough draft - I've written it up quickly to get something out there. At this point, a lot of it will only make sense in the context of SotC and FATE.
Inspirational Fiction:
Flash Gordon - the Alex Raymond comic strip, 'natch - of course, but filtered through the kind of sensibility that Grant Morrison brings to his super-hero projects. Also: Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure stories.
Inspirational Games:
I started with Spirit of the Century but found that though it did what I wanted, it also did some other stuff that I didn't necessarily want and was getting in the way. Luckily, the genius of the guys at Evil Hat is that SotC and it's underlying FATE system are endlessly and easily tweakable. Abilities are a Sorcerer-inspired paring-down of Skills from SotC. Descriptors are also adapted from Sorcerer. The "Brutal" Conflict rules are taken from The Shadow of Yesterday/Solar System's Bringing Down the Pain. "Primed Aspects" are from a Story Games thread started by Paul Tevis.
Part 1 - Characters:
There are two major (mechanical) pieces to characters creation.
(1) Setting Abilities
(2) Choosing Aspects
(1) Setting Abilities:
A Character has three Abilities - Body, Will, Skill. Set one at +3, one at +2, and one at +1.
(2) Choosing Aspects:
A Character has room for 10 Aspects, but will probably start play with 6 or 7, leaving the other slots available to be chosen during play. Here are the guidelines for choosing Aspects:
-choose 2 Aspects based on and/or related to the Character's cultural origins. For the purposes of Sword & Planet gaming, there are three Cultures: Earthling, Alien - Primitive, and Alien - Decadent. These Aspects can answer a question like "Where did I come from?"
-choose 2 Aspects based on and/or related to the Character's profession/job/etc. Answering questions like "What do I do?" and "How do I do it?"
-If you haven't already written an Aspect that does this: (a) write an Aspect that acts as a descriptor to your Body ability, (b) write an Aspect that acts as a descriptor to your Will ability, (c) write an Aspect that acts as a descriptor to your Skill ability.
-Fill in a few more Aspects so you have around 6 or 7. Leave a few blanks to be filled in during play.
Special Effects:
You can choose to give your character a Special Effect. This is optional. In general, characters should be assumed to be (more-or-less) human, with normal capabilities within the limits of their culture and profession. A Special Effect gives them access to additional powers and capabilities, but also acts as a narrative constraint. In practice, this means that while characters with a Special Effect can do something out of the ordinary, they are subject to be limited by circumstances. A Special Effect must be directly linked to an Aspect that deals with it.
In my game, here are some examples:
Some characters are Dragon Riders. This Special Effect means that they can ride on the dragon (taking advantage of its flying ability) and they can use the Dragon's breath weapon to attack foes from a distance. And Consequences caused by a dragon's attack are likely to be pretty severe!
However, this leads to some limitations: dragons are big, they can't always be with their riders. A rider apart from their dragon might susceptible to being Stuck with an Aspect like: "No confidence when alone".
Some characters are initiates into the alchemical secrets of various desert powders. This allows them to act on characters in a variety of ways: Sticking them with Aspects like "Drugged and dazed" or "In love with the next person she sees..." But the limitation is that it requires time to gather the materials and create these concoctions.
Part 2 - Aspects:
See here for the SotC overview.
If you Invoke/Tag you have to say how that looks in the fiction. As a corollary, you can only Invoke/Tag if doing so would make sense in the fiction.
Invoking - after a roll, spend a Fate point to Invoke one of your Aspects. Invoking allows you to re-roll or add a +2 to the final roll. Mark that you have used the Aspect.
Tagging - after a roll, spend a Fate point to Tag an Aspect that is not on your sheet (i.e. an NPC Aspect or a Setting/Scene Aspect). Tagging an Aspect allows you to re-roll or add a +2 to the final roll. Fate points spent on Tagging go into the Pot. If you are Tagging an Aspect on an NPC or the Setting/Scene mark that you have Tagged it. (You do not mark another PC's Aspect when tagging).
Primed Aspects (PCs only):
If you Invoke an Aspect three times in one session it is "Primed". At that point, you can no longer Invoke that Aspect (although it can still be Tagged by other characters). However, you can choose to Burn that Aspect if you desire. A Burn is like a super compel: you get three Fate points, but you have to change that Aspect into something else. The new Aspect starts with no marks (fully unprimed).
Invoking/Tagging Sequence:
Invokes/Tags are not declared until after the initial roll. At that point, the current loser gets to say whether or not they want to spend a Fate point to alter their roll. (In the case of ties, the character with the lower Ability in conflict goes first. If this ties, the character with the least number of Fate points goes). They can choose to re-roll or gain a +2 bonus. If they do so, they have to say which Aspect they are Invoking/Tagging and what that would look like. Once they commit, they can't take it back. The other player gets a chance to respond with an Invocation/Tag of their own. This goes back and forth until one player or the other gives up or runs out of Fate points. For a given character, all re-rolls have to come before any +2 bonuses. (I.e. once you choose to take your +2 you have to let your dice stand).
Sticking - Certain kinds of successes allow you to Stick a New Aspect on the Setting/Scene or a Character. Whenever you Stick an Aspect you get a free Tag on that Aspect. "Stuck" Aspects can be Fragile (they go away after that Free tag), Sticky (they stay around for you or anyone else to use until they go away because of shifting circumstances and/or the Scene ends, or Session (they stay for the rest of the Session).
Part 3 - Conflicts:
Simple Conflicts:
For the most, only roll dice when there is a conflict of interest between two characters.
Players should state their intent. (This is a Free and Clear phase).
The higher roll is the Winning roll.
Check for Invocation/Tags.
Determine the final outcome: High Roll - Low Roll = Effect.
Any Effect of 1 or more is a success (i.e. the winner gets their intent).
In addition:
An Effect of 1 allows you to Stick a Fragile Aspect on the immediate Setting/Scene.
An Effect of 2 allows you to Stick a Sticky Aspect on the immediate Setting/Scene.
An Effect of 3+ allows you to Stick a Session Aspect on the immediate Setting/Scene.
You can only Stick an Aspect on another character through a Brutal Conflict.
Linked Conflicts:
Sometimes a conflict will lead to a natural follow-up conflict. In this case, use the success of the first conflict to Stick a temporary Aspect somewhere. This Aspect, like any Stuck Aspect, is eligible for a free Tag. The narrational trick is to make this Stuck Aspect relate to the follow-up conflict.
Helping:
One character will make the roll. Use their ability. Other characters may help. They do this by spending Fate points to Invoke or Tag Aspects just like the acting character. They should decalre they are helping before the roll, but if they didn't roll their own dice in the current conflict and it makes sense that they could "jump in" partway through, they can decide to help at any point afterwards. (Any Invocation/Tagging for re-rolls must happen before any +2 bonuses are taken by the side).
Assessments:
An Assessment is a special kind of Conflict where you try to uncover the Hidden Aspects of an NPC or the Setting/Scene. Vs. an NPC this is usually a Will vs. Will roll, but Skill could be substituted depending on the circumstances (i.e., using a police interrogation technique). Vs. the Setting/Scene you will usually be rolling Skill vs. an unmodified roll. If you lose vs. the NPC, the NPC gains a Free Tag on one of your Aspects in any follow up conflict. If you lose vs. the Setting/Scene, you gain a Fragile Temporary Aspect relating to somehow misreading the lay of the land/mood of the crowd/etc.
Declarations:
A Declaration is a special kind of conflict where you can Stick a new fact onto the Setting/Scene. This is usually a Skill vs. an unmodified roll. The "color" of the Declaration (i.e. what it looks like in the fiction) should be based around an area of expertise that makes sense in terms of the character's concept. The level of the Stuck Aspect is based on the Effect earned in the roll. The PC gets a free Tag (just like with any other Stuck Aspect). If the PC loses, they receive a Fragile Consequence that doesn't count against their limit. A Declaration cannot change the backstory or a character's history: it has to be something that applies to the unfolding situation.
Brutal Conflicts:
If you want to take a named character out of the game or if you want to Stick an Aspect on a PC or NPC you need to do so through a Brutal Conflict.
Brutal Conflict works in rounds.
Free & Clear - determine who is opposing whom and whether actions are parallel or perpendicular.
If you are just defending you get a +2 bonus and get the possibility of generating Spin.
Parallel Success = deliver harm equal to your Success level
Perpendicular Success = deliver harm equal to the difference of Success levels
Harm above the max leads to Consequences. Consequences are a special kind of Stuck Aspect.
Maneuvers = instead of doing harm, Stick an Aspect to the Setting/Scene as per the normal conflict rules
Part 4 - Fate Point Economy:
PCs start with 10 fate Points.
VIP NPCs start with 5.
Major NPCs start with 3.
Minor NPCs start with 1.
When PCs or NPCs Invoke the Fate Point is simply spent.
When PCs get Tagged they take the Fate Point used in the Tag.
When PCs Tag NPCs or the Setting/Scene they put the Fate Point in the Pot.
The GM has an unlimited number of Fate Points to use for Compels.
The Pot:
After the game, look at the Fate Points in the Pot. The group spends these points to add Aspects permanently to the Setting/Scene and/or to NPCs.
A totally new Aspect costs 3 points.
Making a Sticky Aspect permanent costs 2 points.
Making a Session Aspect permanent costs 1 point.
Making an NPC Consequence permanent costs 3 points.
Promoting an NPC from Minor to Major costs 1 point.
Promoting an NPC from Major to VIP costs 2 points.
Part 5 - NPCs and Setting:
NPC Notes:
VIP NPCs are created more or less like PCs. Major NPCs have one Ability at +2 and another at +1. Minor NPCs have one ability at +1.
VIP NPCs should have 5 or 6 Aspects. 3 must be Open and the others should be Hidden. Think of the Open Aspects as part of their description when introducing the character. (Two of the three Open Aspects might map onto the NPC's Culture/Profession).
Major NPCs should have 3 or 4 Aspects. 2 Must be Open and the others can be Hidden.
Minor NPCs should have one or two Aspects, both in the Open.
Setting/Scene Notes:
Follow the same breakdown for Setting/Scenes - they are either VIP, Major, or Minor, with the same number of Aspects and the same breakdown of Open/Hidden.
Still needed: Character Sheets, NPC sheets, Setting/Scene sheets, better names for a lot of this stuff (i.e. Stuck Aspects, abilities), more info on Compels, more info on scene framing, etc., etc.
Until I sat down to do this, I really didn't realize how hard writing good, clear rules can be. I salute the Evil Hat guys and beg forgiveness for the clumsiness that follows. This is a rough, rough draft - I've written it up quickly to get something out there. At this point, a lot of it will only make sense in the context of SotC and FATE.
Inspirational Fiction:
Flash Gordon - the Alex Raymond comic strip, 'natch - of course, but filtered through the kind of sensibility that Grant Morrison brings to his super-hero projects. Also: Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure stories.
Inspirational Games:
I started with Spirit of the Century but found that though it did what I wanted, it also did some other stuff that I didn't necessarily want and was getting in the way. Luckily, the genius of the guys at Evil Hat is that SotC and it's underlying FATE system are endlessly and easily tweakable. Abilities are a Sorcerer-inspired paring-down of Skills from SotC. Descriptors are also adapted from Sorcerer. The "Brutal" Conflict rules are taken from The Shadow of Yesterday/Solar System's Bringing Down the Pain. "Primed Aspects" are from a Story Games thread started by Paul Tevis.
Part 1 - Characters:
There are two major (mechanical) pieces to characters creation.
(1) Setting Abilities
(2) Choosing Aspects
(1) Setting Abilities:
A Character has three Abilities - Body, Will, Skill. Set one at +3, one at +2, and one at +1.
(2) Choosing Aspects:
A Character has room for 10 Aspects, but will probably start play with 6 or 7, leaving the other slots available to be chosen during play. Here are the guidelines for choosing Aspects:
-choose 2 Aspects based on and/or related to the Character's cultural origins. For the purposes of Sword & Planet gaming, there are three Cultures: Earthling, Alien - Primitive, and Alien - Decadent. These Aspects can answer a question like "Where did I come from?"
-choose 2 Aspects based on and/or related to the Character's profession/job/etc. Answering questions like "What do I do?" and "How do I do it?"
-If you haven't already written an Aspect that does this: (a) write an Aspect that acts as a descriptor to your Body ability, (b) write an Aspect that acts as a descriptor to your Will ability, (c) write an Aspect that acts as a descriptor to your Skill ability.
-Fill in a few more Aspects so you have around 6 or 7. Leave a few blanks to be filled in during play.
Special Effects:
You can choose to give your character a Special Effect. This is optional. In general, characters should be assumed to be (more-or-less) human, with normal capabilities within the limits of their culture and profession. A Special Effect gives them access to additional powers and capabilities, but also acts as a narrative constraint. In practice, this means that while characters with a Special Effect can do something out of the ordinary, they are subject to be limited by circumstances. A Special Effect must be directly linked to an Aspect that deals with it.
In my game, here are some examples:
Some characters are Dragon Riders. This Special Effect means that they can ride on the dragon (taking advantage of its flying ability) and they can use the Dragon's breath weapon to attack foes from a distance. And Consequences caused by a dragon's attack are likely to be pretty severe!
However, this leads to some limitations: dragons are big, they can't always be with their riders. A rider apart from their dragon might susceptible to being Stuck with an Aspect like: "No confidence when alone".
Some characters are initiates into the alchemical secrets of various desert powders. This allows them to act on characters in a variety of ways: Sticking them with Aspects like "Drugged and dazed" or "In love with the next person she sees..." But the limitation is that it requires time to gather the materials and create these concoctions.
Part 2 - Aspects:
See here for the SotC overview.
If you Invoke/Tag you have to say how that looks in the fiction. As a corollary, you can only Invoke/Tag if doing so would make sense in the fiction.
Invoking - after a roll, spend a Fate point to Invoke one of your Aspects. Invoking allows you to re-roll or add a +2 to the final roll. Mark that you have used the Aspect.
Tagging - after a roll, spend a Fate point to Tag an Aspect that is not on your sheet (i.e. an NPC Aspect or a Setting/Scene Aspect). Tagging an Aspect allows you to re-roll or add a +2 to the final roll. Fate points spent on Tagging go into the Pot. If you are Tagging an Aspect on an NPC or the Setting/Scene mark that you have Tagged it. (You do not mark another PC's Aspect when tagging).
Primed Aspects (PCs only):
If you Invoke an Aspect three times in one session it is "Primed". At that point, you can no longer Invoke that Aspect (although it can still be Tagged by other characters). However, you can choose to Burn that Aspect if you desire. A Burn is like a super compel: you get three Fate points, but you have to change that Aspect into something else. The new Aspect starts with no marks (fully unprimed).
Invoking/Tagging Sequence:
Invokes/Tags are not declared until after the initial roll. At that point, the current loser gets to say whether or not they want to spend a Fate point to alter their roll. (In the case of ties, the character with the lower Ability in conflict goes first. If this ties, the character with the least number of Fate points goes). They can choose to re-roll or gain a +2 bonus. If they do so, they have to say which Aspect they are Invoking/Tagging and what that would look like. Once they commit, they can't take it back. The other player gets a chance to respond with an Invocation/Tag of their own. This goes back and forth until one player or the other gives up or runs out of Fate points. For a given character, all re-rolls have to come before any +2 bonuses. (I.e. once you choose to take your +2 you have to let your dice stand).
Sticking - Certain kinds of successes allow you to Stick a New Aspect on the Setting/Scene or a Character. Whenever you Stick an Aspect you get a free Tag on that Aspect. "Stuck" Aspects can be Fragile (they go away after that Free tag), Sticky (they stay around for you or anyone else to use until they go away because of shifting circumstances and/or the Scene ends, or Session (they stay for the rest of the Session).
Part 3 - Conflicts:
Simple Conflicts:
For the most, only roll dice when there is a conflict of interest between two characters.
Players should state their intent. (This is a Free and Clear phase).
The higher roll is the Winning roll.
Check for Invocation/Tags.
Determine the final outcome: High Roll - Low Roll = Effect.
Any Effect of 1 or more is a success (i.e. the winner gets their intent).
In addition:
An Effect of 1 allows you to Stick a Fragile Aspect on the immediate Setting/Scene.
An Effect of 2 allows you to Stick a Sticky Aspect on the immediate Setting/Scene.
An Effect of 3+ allows you to Stick a Session Aspect on the immediate Setting/Scene.
You can only Stick an Aspect on another character through a Brutal Conflict.
Linked Conflicts:
Sometimes a conflict will lead to a natural follow-up conflict. In this case, use the success of the first conflict to Stick a temporary Aspect somewhere. This Aspect, like any Stuck Aspect, is eligible for a free Tag. The narrational trick is to make this Stuck Aspect relate to the follow-up conflict.
Helping:
One character will make the roll. Use their ability. Other characters may help. They do this by spending Fate points to Invoke or Tag Aspects just like the acting character. They should decalre they are helping before the roll, but if they didn't roll their own dice in the current conflict and it makes sense that they could "jump in" partway through, they can decide to help at any point afterwards. (Any Invocation/Tagging for re-rolls must happen before any +2 bonuses are taken by the side).
Assessments:
An Assessment is a special kind of Conflict where you try to uncover the Hidden Aspects of an NPC or the Setting/Scene. Vs. an NPC this is usually a Will vs. Will roll, but Skill could be substituted depending on the circumstances (i.e., using a police interrogation technique). Vs. the Setting/Scene you will usually be rolling Skill vs. an unmodified roll. If you lose vs. the NPC, the NPC gains a Free Tag on one of your Aspects in any follow up conflict. If you lose vs. the Setting/Scene, you gain a Fragile Temporary Aspect relating to somehow misreading the lay of the land/mood of the crowd/etc.
Declarations:
A Declaration is a special kind of conflict where you can Stick a new fact onto the Setting/Scene. This is usually a Skill vs. an unmodified roll. The "color" of the Declaration (i.e. what it looks like in the fiction) should be based around an area of expertise that makes sense in terms of the character's concept. The level of the Stuck Aspect is based on the Effect earned in the roll. The PC gets a free Tag (just like with any other Stuck Aspect). If the PC loses, they receive a Fragile Consequence that doesn't count against their limit. A Declaration cannot change the backstory or a character's history: it has to be something that applies to the unfolding situation.
Brutal Conflicts:
If you want to take a named character out of the game or if you want to Stick an Aspect on a PC or NPC you need to do so through a Brutal Conflict.
Brutal Conflict works in rounds.
Free & Clear - determine who is opposing whom and whether actions are parallel or perpendicular.
If you are just defending you get a +2 bonus and get the possibility of generating Spin.
Parallel Success = deliver harm equal to your Success level
Perpendicular Success = deliver harm equal to the difference of Success levels
Harm above the max leads to Consequences. Consequences are a special kind of Stuck Aspect.
Maneuvers = instead of doing harm, Stick an Aspect to the Setting/Scene as per the normal conflict rules
Part 4 - Fate Point Economy:
PCs start with 10 fate Points.
VIP NPCs start with 5.
Major NPCs start with 3.
Minor NPCs start with 1.
When PCs or NPCs Invoke the Fate Point is simply spent.
When PCs get Tagged they take the Fate Point used in the Tag.
When PCs Tag NPCs or the Setting/Scene they put the Fate Point in the Pot.
The GM has an unlimited number of Fate Points to use for Compels.
The Pot:
After the game, look at the Fate Points in the Pot. The group spends these points to add Aspects permanently to the Setting/Scene and/or to NPCs.
A totally new Aspect costs 3 points.
Making a Sticky Aspect permanent costs 2 points.
Making a Session Aspect permanent costs 1 point.
Making an NPC Consequence permanent costs 3 points.
Promoting an NPC from Minor to Major costs 1 point.
Promoting an NPC from Major to VIP costs 2 points.
Part 5 - NPCs and Setting:
NPC Notes:
VIP NPCs are created more or less like PCs. Major NPCs have one Ability at +2 and another at +1. Minor NPCs have one ability at +1.
VIP NPCs should have 5 or 6 Aspects. 3 must be Open and the others should be Hidden. Think of the Open Aspects as part of their description when introducing the character. (Two of the three Open Aspects might map onto the NPC's Culture/Profession).
Major NPCs should have 3 or 4 Aspects. 2 Must be Open and the others can be Hidden.
Minor NPCs should have one or two Aspects, both in the Open.
Setting/Scene Notes:
Follow the same breakdown for Setting/Scenes - they are either VIP, Major, or Minor, with the same number of Aspects and the same breakdown of Open/Hidden.
Still needed: Character Sheets, NPC sheets, Setting/Scene sheets, better names for a lot of this stuff (i.e. Stuck Aspects, abilities), more info on Compels, more info on scene framing, etc., etc.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Ten RPGs I'd Like to Be Playing...
I'm having lots of fun playing in some Old School D&D games and running a few sessions of Spirit of the Century (Flash Gordon-flavored), but here are a few more games I'd like to add to the rotation...
1. The Burning Wheel - One of my all-time favorites! I don't get to play it nearly enough as I'd like.
2. Sorcerer - Ditto!
3. Agon - I've wanted to play this for a while now - the competitive aspect is really appealing.
4. 3:16 - I feel guilty that I haven't played this yet.
5. Spione - Not really an RPG, but close enough for the purposes of this blog post. I haven't played this since it was actually published (and the playtest version I used has been changed significantly, I believe).
6. D&D: Carcosa - I'm not quite sure what I would do with this - probably try to run the introductory adventure in the new issue of Fight On!
7. In a Wicked Age - This looks very, very neat, and its quick start/no prep nature makes it more attractive an option than most of the other games on this list.
8. Some Jeepform stuff - This is probably the "least likely to be actually played" of all the entries on the list, but I'm really interested in giving this a try.
9. Dirty Secrets - I love, love, love crime fiction, and this game actually looks like it delivers.
10. D&D 4th Edition - I go back and forth on this: right now though it is very tempting!
1. The Burning Wheel - One of my all-time favorites! I don't get to play it nearly enough as I'd like.
2. Sorcerer - Ditto!
3. Agon - I've wanted to play this for a while now - the competitive aspect is really appealing.
4. 3:16 - I feel guilty that I haven't played this yet.
5. Spione - Not really an RPG, but close enough for the purposes of this blog post. I haven't played this since it was actually published (and the playtest version I used has been changed significantly, I believe).
6. D&D: Carcosa - I'm not quite sure what I would do with this - probably try to run the introductory adventure in the new issue of Fight On!
7. In a Wicked Age - This looks very, very neat, and its quick start/no prep nature makes it more attractive an option than most of the other games on this list.
8. Some Jeepform stuff - This is probably the "least likely to be actually played" of all the entries on the list, but I'm really interested in giving this a try.
9. Dirty Secrets - I love, love, love crime fiction, and this game actually looks like it delivers.
10. D&D 4th Edition - I go back and forth on this: right now though it is very tempting!
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Game Chat: Can we turn it down a little?
I really dig the enthusiasm a lot of story-gamers bring to the hobby. Like, for instance, the Durham 3: their energy and excitement for gaming is inspiring!
But I think there's a weird tendency among a lot of people involved in internet story-game communities/fora to overvalue "the awesome". (Nathan Paoletta talked about something similar a while back, but my take is slightly different).
What do I mean?
Well, I think that the idea that "Creativity = Going Big" gets a little bit too much play.
I think I understand the origins of this trend: for years, lots of RPGs worked on a model that should be familiar to World of Warcraft players. You start with a basic, lowly peon, who is kind of generic, and then have to grind your way to the top and pay a price for customization. You had to earn the right to be awesome!
A lot of groups saw their games end prematurely with the awesomeness still off in the future, so it makes sense that one of the assumptions about how RPGs should work that has been challenged recently is the one about having to earn awesomeness. So, there's a tendency to push for awesomeness right now.
I'm cool with that! I think that having to earn awesomeness tends to make for an unfun play experience, because most groups aren't really playing their games long enough to reliably achieve that awesomeness. "Awesome Now" is necessary in order to get rid of the lingering spectre of "Awesome Later".
But...
Sometimes when I'm reading through threads at places like Story-Games I find the constant boosting of "Awesome Now" just a little bit over the top. I completely sympathize with the intent, but, in practice, it tends to push this idea that the best gaming is gaming "turned up to 11". By which I mean: it isn't enough just to have a character who's struggling with family issues - your character needs to be Oedipus.
Hey - I like playing in "turned up to 11" games. I'm playing in one now! Judd Karlman's Dictionary of Mu might be my favorite "turned up to 11" fantasy settings ever: it's a mix of Robert E. Howard, Edward Rice Burroughs's Martian stories, Dune, and the Bible, tied together with an aesthetic that (to me) feels like it was derived from the cover art of 1970s Heavy Metal albums. The character I'm playing in a current game is the half-alien master of a Demonic gladiatorial arena. His first scene involved stopping a slave revolt led by a four-armed albino ape-man. And his storyline has been a bit more subdued than that of his fellow player characters! (James, our GM, has a great play write-up, here).
It is, indeed, an awesome game.
And one of the games I'm preparing right now is a pulp sci-fi adventure using Spirit of the Century, which is definitely another "turned up to 11"-style game.
But...
It seems to me that the constant praise of the awesome tends to overwhelm the idea that more restrained story-gaming can be satisfying, too. In fact, the best story-game experience I've had over the last year - a game of Breaking the Ice that I played with a friend - was of the muted/restrained/matter-of-fact variety. This game was set just after WWII: it involved a returning vet courting a young woman who had lost her fiance early in the war and had spent the war years alone. It was a pretty quiet game: there were no big scenes, no crazy reversals, no convoluted family trees. Just two damaged people trying to connect with each other. It was a very enjoyable game, a moving story, and a meaningful experience. But it wasn't "awesome".
Part of the problem is a cultural one: we're used to hype, to bigger-is-better, so that's what we emphasize when we write about our games. But, as Scott points out in his comments on this post, we often get a sense of the possibilities of good gameplay from reading other groups' play accounts. In this spirit, and so this isn't just me being negative, I'm going to finally write up that BTI game and post it at the Forge.
But I think there's a weird tendency among a lot of people involved in internet story-game communities/fora to overvalue "the awesome". (Nathan Paoletta talked about something similar a while back, but my take is slightly different).
What do I mean?
Well, I think that the idea that "Creativity = Going Big" gets a little bit too much play.
I think I understand the origins of this trend: for years, lots of RPGs worked on a model that should be familiar to World of Warcraft players. You start with a basic, lowly peon, who is kind of generic, and then have to grind your way to the top and pay a price for customization. You had to earn the right to be awesome!
A lot of groups saw their games end prematurely with the awesomeness still off in the future, so it makes sense that one of the assumptions about how RPGs should work that has been challenged recently is the one about having to earn awesomeness. So, there's a tendency to push for awesomeness right now.
I'm cool with that! I think that having to earn awesomeness tends to make for an unfun play experience, because most groups aren't really playing their games long enough to reliably achieve that awesomeness. "Awesome Now" is necessary in order to get rid of the lingering spectre of "Awesome Later".
But...
Sometimes when I'm reading through threads at places like Story-Games I find the constant boosting of "Awesome Now" just a little bit over the top. I completely sympathize with the intent, but, in practice, it tends to push this idea that the best gaming is gaming "turned up to 11". By which I mean: it isn't enough just to have a character who's struggling with family issues - your character needs to be Oedipus.
Hey - I like playing in "turned up to 11" games. I'm playing in one now! Judd Karlman's Dictionary of Mu might be my favorite "turned up to 11" fantasy settings ever: it's a mix of Robert E. Howard, Edward Rice Burroughs's Martian stories, Dune, and the Bible, tied together with an aesthetic that (to me) feels like it was derived from the cover art of 1970s Heavy Metal albums. The character I'm playing in a current game is the half-alien master of a Demonic gladiatorial arena. His first scene involved stopping a slave revolt led by a four-armed albino ape-man. And his storyline has been a bit more subdued than that of his fellow player characters! (James, our GM, has a great play write-up, here).
It is, indeed, an awesome game.
And one of the games I'm preparing right now is a pulp sci-fi adventure using Spirit of the Century, which is definitely another "turned up to 11"-style game.
But...
It seems to me that the constant praise of the awesome tends to overwhelm the idea that more restrained story-gaming can be satisfying, too. In fact, the best story-game experience I've had over the last year - a game of Breaking the Ice that I played with a friend - was of the muted/restrained/matter-of-fact variety. This game was set just after WWII: it involved a returning vet courting a young woman who had lost her fiance early in the war and had spent the war years alone. It was a pretty quiet game: there were no big scenes, no crazy reversals, no convoluted family trees. Just two damaged people trying to connect with each other. It was a very enjoyable game, a moving story, and a meaningful experience. But it wasn't "awesome".
Part of the problem is a cultural one: we're used to hype, to bigger-is-better, so that's what we emphasize when we write about our games. But, as Scott points out in his comments on this post, we often get a sense of the possibilities of good gameplay from reading other groups' play accounts. In this spirit, and so this isn't just me being negative, I'm going to finally write up that BTI game and post it at the Forge.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Game Chat: Procedures, Part II
A follow-up to this post inspired by Scott's comments - thanks Scott!
Here's something else about games with clear procedures in the text vs. games that assume you'll have your own set of procedures.
Games with clear procedures:
different games with different procedures lead to different play experiences
A corollary (I found is out the hard way): with games that have clearly laid out procedures, it doesn't always work to mix 'n' match. That is, Trollbabe (1) breaks down responsibility over the various scales of game play in a certain way and (2) makes sure that its mechanics "fit" within this set procedure, but the way Trollbabe does (1) might not work for a game with a different set of mechanics: they won't fit.
Example: I tried to port the Trollbabe Stakes/Consequences scenario creation procedure to a game of The Shadow of Yesterday and the result was a game that fizzled. Trollbabe has a great set of procedures for setting up games of Trollbabe, with all that entails in terms of setting, characters, and system. The Shadow of Yesterday requires different scenario prep procedures - ones that are tied more directly into the characters, their cultural backgrounds, and their keys.
Games where you use your own set of procedures:
different games with the same procedures lead to the same (or very similar) play experiences
When playing AD&D 2nd ed. back in the early 1990s, as a group, we stumbled upon procedures for making the game work for us. Like: as GM I'd have responsibility for framing scenes, creating adversity, moving things along; players had responsibility for playing their characters (of course), but also creating subplots and pushing the action forward. Once we settled into these procedures, the game worked and we had fun, but two problems spring to mind: (1) it took some time of us fumbling around, (2) because these were emergent, unarticulated procedures there was always the looming danger of social grief caused by stepping over the invisible lines (for instance, when I would make a decision that screwed up a player's idea for their subplot), and (3) as our ad-hoc procedures developed we started ignoring/altering part of the game's rules that didn't really fit (i.e., we started drifting the game).
Now, issue (1) wasn't really a big deal at the time (because we had lots of it), but, nowadays, I prefer less stumbling. Issue (2) might always be a problem in any kind of social activity, but having something explicitly laid out means it's easier to avoid "grief landmines". Issue (3) isn't really a problem (especially if you're always playing with the same group of people), but...
Later, after we had wrapped up the AD&D 2nd ed. game, we started playing Amber DRPG and we brought the same procedures we had developed playing AD&D with us. We started playign Amber by trying to fit it into how we already played. It turned out this worked really well, but it also meant that we ended up ignoring lots of the Amber DRPG rules, right from the beginning.
Hey - the posts by Ron Edwards in this thread go into a lot more detail about some of these issues and brings up another good "question I want the game to answer": "What is the relationship between the group of players and the group of characters?"
Here's something else about games with clear procedures in the text vs. games that assume you'll have your own set of procedures.
Games with clear procedures:
different games with different procedures lead to different play experiences
A corollary (I found is out the hard way): with games that have clearly laid out procedures, it doesn't always work to mix 'n' match. That is, Trollbabe (1) breaks down responsibility over the various scales of game play in a certain way and (2) makes sure that its mechanics "fit" within this set procedure, but the way Trollbabe does (1) might not work for a game with a different set of mechanics: they won't fit.
Example: I tried to port the Trollbabe Stakes/Consequences scenario creation procedure to a game of The Shadow of Yesterday and the result was a game that fizzled. Trollbabe has a great set of procedures for setting up games of Trollbabe, with all that entails in terms of setting, characters, and system. The Shadow of Yesterday requires different scenario prep procedures - ones that are tied more directly into the characters, their cultural backgrounds, and their keys.
Games where you use your own set of procedures:
different games with the same procedures lead to the same (or very similar) play experiences
When playing AD&D 2nd ed. back in the early 1990s, as a group, we stumbled upon procedures for making the game work for us. Like: as GM I'd have responsibility for framing scenes, creating adversity, moving things along; players had responsibility for playing their characters (of course), but also creating subplots and pushing the action forward. Once we settled into these procedures, the game worked and we had fun, but two problems spring to mind: (1) it took some time of us fumbling around, (2) because these were emergent, unarticulated procedures there was always the looming danger of social grief caused by stepping over the invisible lines (for instance, when I would make a decision that screwed up a player's idea for their subplot), and (3) as our ad-hoc procedures developed we started ignoring/altering part of the game's rules that didn't really fit (i.e., we started drifting the game).
Now, issue (1) wasn't really a big deal at the time (because we had lots of it), but, nowadays, I prefer less stumbling. Issue (2) might always be a problem in any kind of social activity, but having something explicitly laid out means it's easier to avoid "grief landmines". Issue (3) isn't really a problem (especially if you're always playing with the same group of people), but...
Later, after we had wrapped up the AD&D 2nd ed. game, we started playing Amber DRPG and we brought the same procedures we had developed playing AD&D with us. We started playign Amber by trying to fit it into how we already played. It turned out this worked really well, but it also meant that we ended up ignoring lots of the Amber DRPG rules, right from the beginning.
Hey - the posts by Ron Edwards in this thread go into a lot more detail about some of these issues and brings up another good "question I want the game to answer": "What is the relationship between the group of players and the group of characters?"
Monday, June 11, 2007
Game Chat: Procedures
Inspired by a conversation with my friend James at Recess...
I consider this an essential feature of any role-playing game text - if it doesn't have it, I'm not too interested in trying it out and I definitely don't want to spend money on it:
Clear delineation of the procedures of play.
I don't care what the game does - like, maybe it turns out I won't like what the game does: regardless, I'm perfectly happy to find that out if the text is clear about what I'm supposed to be doing to make it work.
I want to know what I'm supposed to be doing at each "scale" the game operates on. That is, what does the game look like and what are we supposed to be doing...
...moment-to-moment?
...scene-to-scene?
...session-to-session?
...as a whole?
It should answer questions like...
...how do we move from scene-to-scene?
...how do we know when to roll dice/draw cards/make use of mechanics?
...what parts of the big picture do we need to keep track of?
...how do we start a session of play?
...if there are different roles for the players (i.e. someone has to be "the Gamemaster"), what are the responsibilities associated with each role?
...what kind of preparation is necessary before starting?
...what kind of preparation is necessary in between sessions?
Most of the games I played and read back in the day, would end up clearly answering one or two of the questions, but would be vague about or oblivious to the other questions.
There's still a continuum here. Some examples:
Trollbabe, Dogs in the Vineyard (inspired by Trollbabe), Burning Empires, and Prime Time Adventures are all really clear: there's a section in each that lays out what you're meant to be doing at any given time; the different responsibilities for the GM and Players are clearly differentiated; there's a clear procedure for setting up the "scenario" for a session of play; there are clear rules for what to do in between sessions. There are still some holes (Dogs, for instance, doesn't tell you how you should start scenes), but, for the most part, these games have extremely clearly laid out procedures.
Note: this isn't a question about "lots of rules" or "a couple of rules" (i.e., "rules heavy" vs. "rules light"). Trollbabe has significantly fewer rules than Burning Empires, but it has an equally strong structure and equally clearly laid out procedures.
Some games do a good job answering a few of the questions, but are unhelpful about others. D&D 3rd edition is like this: on a moment-to-moment basis, things are pretty nicely laid out and there's a clear procedure for building encounters. But scene-to-scene or session-to-session, the procedures are extremely vague and "hand wave-y". You're supposed to "fill in the blanks", as it were, with your previous experience of playing RPGs.
Some games answer all the questions, but they aren't quite explicit about it or they purposefully leave certain parts of the procedure open to interpretation. Jared Sorenson's Lacuna is like this, as is, to a lesser degree, The Shadow of Yesterday.*
Anyway, that's the main thing I'm looking for now in RPGs: clear procedures. And, as a potential consumer, that's what I want to know about the game: does it have them? For instance, on this thread people are saying some nice things about Reign, but no one has said anything about how you're actually supposed to play. I mean, I'm assuming its supposed to work "like most other RPGs", which is kind of a bummer, because, IME, without clear procedures, actually attaining satisfying play is a pretty chancy proposition.
Hey - most of the games I play come out of the Forge (like Trollbabe) or were designed along some similar lines of thinking (Burning Wheel). The major thing that makes me like to play these games over "the games of my youth" (or the contemporary games that are following in that tradition) is that they have clear procedures! Now, it might be related that these games also tend to be "story-games" (i.e., mostly concerned with collaborative story-making), I don't know! What I do know is that I would gladly play a traditional-style RPG if it came with clear procedures for how it was supposed to work.**
*In TSOY there are procedures for moment-to-moment play and good advice about how to set up scenarios, but a lot of the answers to the other questions are "hidden" in the game's system of "Keys ". That is, once you figure out how to use Keys, the answers to the questions become apparent. I think TSOY is a really neat game, but after playing Trollbabe and Prime Time Adventures, it was a little frustrating to have to muddle through a session to figure this out.
**So, technically, because I've seen Burning Wheel, say, work, I could take some of the techniques from that game and apply them to a traditional game to get a complete, clear play experience. However, I guess I'd mostly prefer to play a game that was designed, from the ground up, with an overall procedure in mind.
Recess: Ronin & Zombies
I had a very good time at Recess over the weekend. I got a chance to play some Jungle Speed (just thinking about it makes my heart start beating faster) and I also played some role-playing games. First, I was in a session of The Mountain Witch and, later, I played in a neat parlor LARP* about the President and his Cabinet dealing with reports of an outbreak of zombie-ism in Georgia.
I've never really played in a LARP before. I have played some LARP-like games - like the Burning Wheel convention scenarios "Inheritance" and "The Gift" - and I've been in a few other convention games that were pretty close, but this was my first LARP-that-calls-itself-a-LARP.
So, I had a pretty good idea going in that LARPs weren't really ever going to be my thing, but I'm always interested in trying out new/different types of games. I'm glad I did - I certainly enjoyed myself and had fun - but I also decided that, really, LARPs aren't my thing.
Now, this is certainly personal preference talking (and I am drawing, of course, on my own experience), but here's why I'm jazzed about tabletop RPG play and not so much by LARP:
In The Mountain Witch game, we sat down at a table and created something together. There was incentive for us to share ideas and to shape the story together. It was a neat social experience, in as much as I got a chance to interact on a person-to-person level with folks who I had never met before that game.
But in the LARP, everyone was kind of stuck behind the character they were playing. As a social experience, it was a little weird and unsatisfying: all the interactions having to pass through the filter of "my character".** The only people I seemed able to connect with were the people I knew prior to playing in the LARP. Because I kind of knew them, it was easier to see the character choices they were making. That is, I could see how the character they were playing was different from them "in real life".
Does that make sense?
More directly: in the LARP, it felt like there was this barrier keeping people apart, while the tabletop game brought us together.
*LARP means Live Action Role Playing. The "Parlor" part just means that the action was all kept in one room: we weren't running around the woods swinging fake swords at each other.
**Sure, some people play tabletop RPGs this way, too, it's just that, with this kind of LARP, it's the only option.
I've never really played in a LARP before. I have played some LARP-like games - like the Burning Wheel convention scenarios "Inheritance" and "The Gift" - and I've been in a few other convention games that were pretty close, but this was my first LARP-that-calls-itself-a-LARP.
So, I had a pretty good idea going in that LARPs weren't really ever going to be my thing, but I'm always interested in trying out new/different types of games. I'm glad I did - I certainly enjoyed myself and had fun - but I also decided that, really, LARPs aren't my thing.
Now, this is certainly personal preference talking (and I am drawing, of course, on my own experience), but here's why I'm jazzed about tabletop RPG play and not so much by LARP:
In The Mountain Witch game, we sat down at a table and created something together. There was incentive for us to share ideas and to shape the story together. It was a neat social experience, in as much as I got a chance to interact on a person-to-person level with folks who I had never met before that game.
But in the LARP, everyone was kind of stuck behind the character they were playing. As a social experience, it was a little weird and unsatisfying: all the interactions having to pass through the filter of "my character".** The only people I seemed able to connect with were the people I knew prior to playing in the LARP. Because I kind of knew them, it was easier to see the character choices they were making. That is, I could see how the character they were playing was different from them "in real life".
Does that make sense?
More directly: in the LARP, it felt like there was this barrier keeping people apart, while the tabletop game brought us together.
*LARP means Live Action Role Playing. The "Parlor" part just means that the action was all kept in one room: we weren't running around the woods swinging fake swords at each other.
**Sure, some people play tabletop RPGs this way, too, it's just that, with this kind of LARP, it's the only option.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Insulting Your Customers
So, I'm listening to this gaming podcast where they're interviewing a guy who puts together a magazine for people who play D&D. Now the guy is basically doing his business spiel - buy the magazine for x, y, and z reasons - so I don't want to be too harsh, but my jaw dropped when he said (something like): "People who play the game really don't have many ideas, so it's good for them to have a magazine like ours to get good ideas from."
That's actually kind of a bad thing to say from a salesmanship perspective, IMO. I mean, "Our customers are kind of dull, so they need our product" just doesn't seem all that flattering.
This is especially weird since most of people who are drawn to RPGs probably really enjoy that they can be a good outlet for the creative impulse.
That's actually kind of a bad thing to say from a salesmanship perspective, IMO. I mean, "Our customers are kind of dull, so they need our product" just doesn't seem all that flattering.
This is especially weird since most of people who are drawn to RPGs probably really enjoy that they can be a good outlet for the creative impulse.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Wargaming Roots, Part I
Counter-factual history can be fun, but it can also be seductively misleading, especially when it comes to counter-factual history of arts and culture stuff. For instance, in her book Babel and Babylon, heavy-duty film scholar Miriam Hansen ponders what it might have been like if D.W. Griffith's Intolerance had been a hit with a general audience. Her argument goes that had there been a more positive response to the movie, Hollywood would have followed up with more movies that that used challenging and experimental narrative techniques, and, therefore, the "classical" Hollywood narrative cinema would never have established itself as what audiences expect from narrative cinema in general.
What's seductive in this argument is the idea of a mainstream, popular film culture that was as varied and experimental as, say, the movies of the French New Wave.
What's misleading is that it's exactly those challenging and experimental techniques that the popular audience rejected when it rejected Intolerance.
That is, the dominance of classical Hollywood narrative cinema isn't simply an accident of history: it emerges as the standard of what the popular audience expects from movies because it delivered what the popular audience wanted from movies.
(There's a more subtle argument possible here: that "the system" trained audiences to prefer classical Hollywood movies. I think there's definitely some merit to this idea: culture industry producers try to shape an audience for a product as well as shape a product for an audience. Still, it's important to keep in mind the preferences and desires of the actual people who make up the popular audience do play a part.)
What I really want to talk about, though, is the history of role-playing games.
I was listening to an interview with Jonathan Walton on the Voice of the Revolution podcast and he brought up the idea of role-playing and story games* that were designed as if this kind of game had not evolved out of wargaming. As an example, Jonathan brought up Moyra Turkington's idea for a game designed as if RPGs had emerged as an activity pursued by Victorian women writing letters to each other. That is, if there was a tradition of "letter writing games", where (I assume) women would collaborate on an improvised Clarissa-like novel by writing letters to each other "in character".
So, this kind of as if thinking is a pretty cool design tool, but I think it's also been responsible for some "seductively misleading" conclusions when applied to talking about RPGs and story-games more generally.
How exactly?
Well, it's like this: you start with a mash-up of what SCA-type guys were doing and what wargaming guys were doing and you get something that looks like the original Dungeons & Dragons game. Individual groups develop different playstyles, some of which place an emphasis on using the rules to structure collaborative storytelling. Over the years, new games emerge that attempt to support this playstyle more directly, but (and here's one of the Big Issues with RPGs) most of these new games still have vestigial evidence of their wargame ancestry. So, even though a lot of these games are saying that they are designed to support storytelling, they are still full of rules, procedures, assumptions from wargames that aren't merely extraneous but actively get in the way of attempts to use these games to create stories.
(Hey - this is all stuff I've cribbed from Ron Edwards's great essays, but if you've gotten to this point in the post, you probably already knew that!)
In the past 10 years or so, though, we've seen more games that are designed, top-to-bottom, to create story: games that have thrown out lots of the leftover rules and have broken free from their wargaming roots**. We now have games rules that explicitly, directly, and solely support the activity of creating a story through play. It's only natural for the people making, playing, and thinking about these games to say: "Hey, what if we never had to break free of those wargaming roots to begin with?" Which leads to the idea that because the activities of playing a game to create a story and playing a game to show off skillz (a la an analog version of World of Warcraft are so different from each other that it is "nothing more" than a historical accident that they were ever tied together.
Now, this line of thinking is seductive for a couple of reasons:
Now, I think this is a useful and necessary distinction to make for practical reasons. That is, I want to make sure I'm engaging in an activity where everyone is on the same page and, historically (both in terms of my personal history and the history of the hobby), this has been a big problem.
However...
When you're looking at the history of RPGs and story-games, I think it's probably a mistake to dismiss their evolution from wargames as an "accident of history". That is: there are actual reasons that story-games as we know them did evolve from wargames and not some other kind of activity, like, say, telling campfire stories.
From a logistical perspective, the proto-story-gamers were able to piggyback on wargaming's already-in-place social network. The APAs and gaming conventions allowed the necessary communication and cross-pollination to allow story-gaming to develop into more than just a local phenomenon. Beyond that, though, it's important to look at the values of the people making up that particular social network. But that's going to have to wait for my next post.
*I tend to think of most of the games I play as "story games" and not "role-playing games", but RPG, while not as accurate a term, is probably more generally understandable. I'm going to use both terms here and while I'm not going to use them interchangeably, if you're not an RPG-wonk, feel free to read them as if they were interchangeable.
**Vampire: The Masquerade is a the go-to example of a game that professes to be about making stories, but is burdened with all these rules and assumptions from wargaming (i.e, the initiative system, incentive to build characters for combat effectiveness, etc.) Prime Time Adventures is a good example of a game stripped of any remnants of "wargameyness": the rules focus on character issues, the story arc, and scene-framing.
What's seductive in this argument is the idea of a mainstream, popular film culture that was as varied and experimental as, say, the movies of the French New Wave.
What's misleading is that it's exactly those challenging and experimental techniques that the popular audience rejected when it rejected Intolerance.
That is, the dominance of classical Hollywood narrative cinema isn't simply an accident of history: it emerges as the standard of what the popular audience expects from movies because it delivered what the popular audience wanted from movies.
(There's a more subtle argument possible here: that "the system" trained audiences to prefer classical Hollywood movies. I think there's definitely some merit to this idea: culture industry producers try to shape an audience for a product as well as shape a product for an audience. Still, it's important to keep in mind the preferences and desires of the actual people who make up the popular audience do play a part.)
What I really want to talk about, though, is the history of role-playing games.
I was listening to an interview with Jonathan Walton on the Voice of the Revolution podcast and he brought up the idea of role-playing and story games* that were designed as if this kind of game had not evolved out of wargaming. As an example, Jonathan brought up Moyra Turkington's idea for a game designed as if RPGs had emerged as an activity pursued by Victorian women writing letters to each other. That is, if there was a tradition of "letter writing games", where (I assume) women would collaborate on an improvised Clarissa-like novel by writing letters to each other "in character".
So, this kind of as if thinking is a pretty cool design tool, but I think it's also been responsible for some "seductively misleading" conclusions when applied to talking about RPGs and story-games more generally.
How exactly?
Well, it's like this: you start with a mash-up of what SCA-type guys were doing and what wargaming guys were doing and you get something that looks like the original Dungeons & Dragons game. Individual groups develop different playstyles, some of which place an emphasis on using the rules to structure collaborative storytelling. Over the years, new games emerge that attempt to support this playstyle more directly, but (and here's one of the Big Issues with RPGs) most of these new games still have vestigial evidence of their wargame ancestry. So, even though a lot of these games are saying that they are designed to support storytelling, they are still full of rules, procedures, assumptions from wargames that aren't merely extraneous but actively get in the way of attempts to use these games to create stories.
(Hey - this is all stuff I've cribbed from Ron Edwards's great essays, but if you've gotten to this point in the post, you probably already knew that!)
In the past 10 years or so, though, we've seen more games that are designed, top-to-bottom, to create story: games that have thrown out lots of the leftover rules and have broken free from their wargaming roots**. We now have games rules that explicitly, directly, and solely support the activity of creating a story through play. It's only natural for the people making, playing, and thinking about these games to say: "Hey, what if we never had to break free of those wargaming roots to begin with?" Which leads to the idea that because the activities of playing a game to create a story and playing a game to show off skillz (a la an analog version of World of Warcraft are so different from each other that it is "nothing more" than a historical accident that they were ever tied together.
Now, this line of thinking is seductive for a couple of reasons:
- As I've already suggested, it's a useful way to approach designing a story-making game.
- It allows the folks who are primarily interested in playing story-making games to differentiate that activity from the other kinds of activities that get lumped under the heading of "playing RPGs". I.e., "What we're doing is different from what those guys are doing and its just one of those coincidences that these two different activities were ever intertwined."
Now, I think this is a useful and necessary distinction to make for practical reasons. That is, I want to make sure I'm engaging in an activity where everyone is on the same page and, historically (both in terms of my personal history and the history of the hobby), this has been a big problem.
However...
When you're looking at the history of RPGs and story-games, I think it's probably a mistake to dismiss their evolution from wargames as an "accident of history". That is: there are actual reasons that story-games as we know them did evolve from wargames and not some other kind of activity, like, say, telling campfire stories.
From a logistical perspective, the proto-story-gamers were able to piggyback on wargaming's already-in-place social network. The APAs and gaming conventions allowed the necessary communication and cross-pollination to allow story-gaming to develop into more than just a local phenomenon. Beyond that, though, it's important to look at the values of the people making up that particular social network. But that's going to have to wait for my next post.
*I tend to think of most of the games I play as "story games" and not "role-playing games", but RPG, while not as accurate a term, is probably more generally understandable. I'm going to use both terms here and while I'm not going to use them interchangeably, if you're not an RPG-wonk, feel free to read them as if they were interchangeable.
**Vampire: The Masquerade is a the go-to example of a game that professes to be about making stories, but is burdened with all these rules and assumptions from wargaming (i.e, the initiative system, incentive to build characters for combat effectiveness, etc.) Prime Time Adventures is a good example of a game stripped of any remnants of "wargameyness": the rules focus on character issues, the story arc, and scene-framing.
Wednesday, August 2, 2006
Feast or Famine
When it comes to playing RPGs its either feast or famine for me. I hadn't managed to get a game in for most of the summer, due to stuff like moving, vacation, going to a wedding, etc., and an attempt to follow up a pretty satisfying Sorcerer & Sword game with a run of With Great Power... kept hitting scheduling snags.
But then, in the last five days, I've played four different games: Shock: Social Science Fiction, 1001 Nights, The Princes Kingdom, and the much-delayed first With Great Power... session. My eventual goal is to play, consistently, at least one game a week, but I don't see that happening quite yet.
But then, in the last five days, I've played four different games: Shock: Social Science Fiction, 1001 Nights, The Princes Kingdom, and the much-delayed first With Great Power... session. My eventual goal is to play, consistently, at least one game a week, but I don't see that happening quite yet.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Roached!
When I got home last night, my copy of the brand new parlor/storytelling/role-playing game The Shab-al-Hiri Roach was waiting for me.
I'm pretty excited: I've played an earlier version of the game, but on first skim-through the finished product looks really great.
Why I like the game:
And now a geek confession: I was really, really, really psyched that I got a shout out in the acknowledgement section for my playtesting efforts. In reality, my contributions amounted nothing more than (a) playing the game a bunch of times and (b) telling the author that he shouldn't change anything. However, I think it is ridiculously cool that my name appears, at all, in such a terrific game.
(Oh, and here's a very nice post on the actual game. And here's a post about me actually playing the game).
I'm pretty excited: I've played an earlier version of the game, but on first skim-through the finished product looks really great.
Why I like the game:
1. The game works really well with folks who have never played this kind of thing before. It is a very easy game to get up and running. I would whole-heartedly recommend it to any fans of the horror genre in general and Lovecraft in particular.
2. The mix of Lovecraftian horror and academic satire is really its own thing. I mean, it kind of has a Re-animator vibe, but compared to most games of this type, it is an original work rather than an attempt to capture the feel of another piece of pop culture. (It is one of the only games I've ever played that I think could be adapted into a good movie, or, even better, a good off-Broadway musical).
3. It plays out in one sitting, like your standard board game or parlor game. This makes it the perfect game for playing on short notice.
4. It rewards players for coming up with really evil and nasty and funny ideas.
And now a geek confession: I was really, really, really psyched that I got a shout out in the acknowledgement section for my playtesting efforts. In reality, my contributions amounted nothing more than (a) playing the game a bunch of times and (b) telling the author that he shouldn't change anything. However, I think it is ridiculously cool that my name appears, at all, in such a terrific game.
(Oh, and here's a very nice post on the actual game. And here's a post about me actually playing the game).
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Games, Games, Games...
As I mentioned in my post on my most recent Top Ten Film List, the amount of movie-watching I've done has declined over the past year or so. There are a couple of reasons for this, but the main one is that I've really gotten back into playing tabletop RPGs. I'd also like to blame RPGs for my lack of new posts here over the last six months or so, but, to be fair, I stopped blogging before I really started gaming on a regular basis.
However, RPGs do help to scratch both my "movie watching/reading comic books/cultural consumption-in-general" itch and my "be creative" itch, with the added benefit of being a heck of a lot more social than watching DVDs or sitting in front of a computer screen waiting for inspiration.
I had wanted to get back into RPGing for a few years now, but it wasn't until the end of last summer that I made a real push: I rounded up a few friends who hadn't really played much before and got them to give it a try, I started participating at nerdnyc.com, and I tried out playing games over internet chat. As a result, I'm currently in a Heroquest game through the Gotham Gaming Guild and a weekly Burning Wheel game. And I'm going to be playing in a Sorceror game very soon. Not only that, I've gotten the chance to play in a lot of pick-up sessions (much Trollbabe and The Shab-al-Hiri Roach and some Dogs in the Vineyardand Polaris) and playtest some in-development games. (I've even started tinkering around with my own game designs).
What's cool is that all this RPGing isn't about nostalgia: I'm not reaching for the kind of fun I had with these games when I was in high school and college. Rather, I'm able to approach the experience with a greater sense of seriousness, and (paradoxically perhaps), a greater sense of enjoyment: gaming is much more fulfilling to me now than it has ever been. And this is probably a function of my being more comfortable and contented with my life in general, and having a better sense of what I really want to get out of the way I spend my leisure time.
However, RPGs do help to scratch both my "movie watching/reading comic books/cultural consumption-in-general" itch and my "be creative" itch, with the added benefit of being a heck of a lot more social than watching DVDs or sitting in front of a computer screen waiting for inspiration.
I had wanted to get back into RPGing for a few years now, but it wasn't until the end of last summer that I made a real push: I rounded up a few friends who hadn't really played much before and got them to give it a try, I started participating at nerdnyc.com, and I tried out playing games over internet chat. As a result, I'm currently in a Heroquest game through the Gotham Gaming Guild and a weekly Burning Wheel game. And I'm going to be playing in a Sorceror game very soon. Not only that, I've gotten the chance to play in a lot of pick-up sessions (much Trollbabe and The Shab-al-Hiri Roach and some Dogs in the Vineyardand Polaris) and playtest some in-development games. (I've even started tinkering around with my own game designs).
What's cool is that all this RPGing isn't about nostalgia: I'm not reaching for the kind of fun I had with these games when I was in high school and college. Rather, I'm able to approach the experience with a greater sense of seriousness, and (paradoxically perhaps), a greater sense of enjoyment: gaming is much more fulfilling to me now than it has ever been. And this is probably a function of my being more comfortable and contented with my life in general, and having a better sense of what I really want to get out of the way I spend my leisure time.
Thursday, March 2, 2006
A Fanboy's Gripes*
So, I'm going to be playing in a Burning Wheel game and I thought I was all ready to play when the GM pointed out that I had made a small but significant mistake in how I had built the character. And I'm pretty annoyed about it. It's my fault, in that I had the rules wrong (although, they weren't all that clear), but now I'm much less psyched about playing this character: it makes me want to go back and re-build him from scratch, even though there's really not enough time to do this now.
I completely understand the philosophy behind the Burning Wheel character generation rules (i.e., that it is built around constraints that help to put certain elements of the setting and situation into the foreground of conflicts), but knowing this doesn't really make having an idea get shot down any easier to take.
*My apologies to Jim Henley.
I completely understand the philosophy behind the Burning Wheel character generation rules (i.e., that it is built around constraints that help to put certain elements of the setting and situation into the foreground of conflicts), but knowing this doesn't really make having an idea get shot down any easier to take.
*My apologies to Jim Henley.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Gaming
I'm having a lot of fun getting back into playing tabletop RPGs. I'm also having a lot of fun reading a bunch of cool blogs about RPGs, like this one--Deep in the Game. There's lots of good theoretical stuff there for anyone interested in playing (or designing) games.
I want to respond here to Bankuei's most recent post, where he complains about RPGs that don't have any rules about how to actually play them. He talks about playing in a game that had incomplete rules and how he--at first--felt guilty for not adding in his own rules to make the game better. And then he realized:
"It's NEVER my fault if I'm following the rules..."
This really struck a chord with me.
Over the last few years, I started playing a lot of boardgames, because playing RPGs just got too frustrating. But because I am a nerd and a recovering graduate student, I wasn't content to, you know, just play boardgames, I had to keep up with all the internet chatter and boardgame design/theory stuff.
One thing I noticed almost immediately was a big philosophical split when it came to judging how well a game worked. (I'm generalizing here, but just barely).
On one side were the people who primarily played "German Games" (like Settlers of Catan). Their position was that if you play the game by the rules and the experience is generally fun-good-interesting, then the game is probably good. If fun-good-interesting stuff isn't happening, then the game is most likely bad, and you might as well just not play it.
On the other side were the people who primarily played "American Hobby Games" (like Axis & Allies, Age of Mythology, the Steve Jackson card games). Their position was that the players of a game should take it on themselves to try to turn any game into a fun-good-interesting experience, even if this meant adding tons of house rules or only playing the game in a very specific way (for example, "voluntarily" avoiding kinds of tactics that were known to break the game's victory conditions).
A lot of debates went like this:
Eurogamer: Game X is bad because the starting positions aren't balanced, the randomness destroys any sense of overall strategy, the middle part of the game drags on forever (even after you know exactly who is going to win), and the victory conditions are broken.
American Hobby Gamer: No, Game X is great. You're just playing it wrong.
EGer: But I'm playing it by the rules!
AHGer: Well, to play it right, you have to add these house rules my group came up with: we change the starting positions, substitute a deck of cards for the dice, and we don't let anyone win through points alone. Plus, we joke a lot at the table and do funny voices.
EGer: Ummm, okay. Well, wouldn't it make more sense to play one of the many games where the designer has, you know, actually solved all those problems before they published the game?
At this point the AHGer usually gets pretty defensive and starts attacking the EGer for being a game snob.
At least since Settlers of Catan, there's a tradition of strong, coherent Eurogames that are 100% playable out of the box, so Eurogamers see no need to expect anything less than a fully functional game.
American Hobby Gamers, however, grew up playing games like Axis & Allies, which almost requires house rules, so they have been conditioned not to expect anything more than a cool idea and a bunch of cool pieces. Whether or not the game works out-of-the-box isn't as important as whether or not they can cobble together something fun for their group from what's inside.
The thing is, these jury-rigged games are never as satisfying as actual, fully formed games--even if there is some sentimental attachment to their DIY-ness. Or rather, the only two reasons to choose to play a cobbled together, house rule-filled game rather than one of the many games that works really well without the players having to put in a few dozen hours of extra design work are (a) habit--this is what we've always done--and/or (b) enjoyment of the DIY process itself.
I have no real beef with folks to jury-riggers-out-of-habit, although I do think it's sort of strange that a lot of them seem to feel that this should be the normal way to approach games. That is, I think it should be normal to expect that if you're paying for a game it should work the way it is supposed to, and if it doesn't then the fault lies with the game itself (or its designer and/or publisher) and not with the players because they didn't put the time and effort into figuring out ways to fix it.
As for the DIYers, if you like Game X but want it to have Effect Y, why spend your time trying to change it when you could just make a game that aims at Effect Y? And again, I've found a lot of DIYers who feel that the DIY process is central to the gaming hobby. But it isn't, and this is, I think, a bad way to think about games. For example, we don't think this way about computer games: if I go on a computer game website and complain about a computer game being bad I might find people who disagree with me, but they are not likely to tell me that I should become a programmer and fix the things I don't like about it until it fits my preferences. They're much more likely to suggest a game that does fit what I'm looking for.
Which gets me back to Deep in the Game, which argues that, as gamers, we shouldn't settle for less than what we're looking for.
I want to respond here to Bankuei's most recent post, where he complains about RPGs that don't have any rules about how to actually play them. He talks about playing in a game that had incomplete rules and how he--at first--felt guilty for not adding in his own rules to make the game better. And then he realized:
"It's NEVER my fault if I'm following the rules..."
This really struck a chord with me.
Over the last few years, I started playing a lot of boardgames, because playing RPGs just got too frustrating. But because I am a nerd and a recovering graduate student, I wasn't content to, you know, just play boardgames, I had to keep up with all the internet chatter and boardgame design/theory stuff.
One thing I noticed almost immediately was a big philosophical split when it came to judging how well a game worked. (I'm generalizing here, but just barely).
On one side were the people who primarily played "German Games" (like Settlers of Catan). Their position was that if you play the game by the rules and the experience is generally fun-good-interesting, then the game is probably good. If fun-good-interesting stuff isn't happening, then the game is most likely bad, and you might as well just not play it.
On the other side were the people who primarily played "American Hobby Games" (like Axis & Allies, Age of Mythology, the Steve Jackson card games). Their position was that the players of a game should take it on themselves to try to turn any game into a fun-good-interesting experience, even if this meant adding tons of house rules or only playing the game in a very specific way (for example, "voluntarily" avoiding kinds of tactics that were known to break the game's victory conditions).
A lot of debates went like this:
Eurogamer: Game X is bad because the starting positions aren't balanced, the randomness destroys any sense of overall strategy, the middle part of the game drags on forever (even after you know exactly who is going to win), and the victory conditions are broken.
American Hobby Gamer: No, Game X is great. You're just playing it wrong.
EGer: But I'm playing it by the rules!
AHGer: Well, to play it right, you have to add these house rules my group came up with: we change the starting positions, substitute a deck of cards for the dice, and we don't let anyone win through points alone. Plus, we joke a lot at the table and do funny voices.
EGer: Ummm, okay. Well, wouldn't it make more sense to play one of the many games where the designer has, you know, actually solved all those problems before they published the game?
At this point the AHGer usually gets pretty defensive and starts attacking the EGer for being a game snob.
At least since Settlers of Catan, there's a tradition of strong, coherent Eurogames that are 100% playable out of the box, so Eurogamers see no need to expect anything less than a fully functional game.
American Hobby Gamers, however, grew up playing games like Axis & Allies, which almost requires house rules, so they have been conditioned not to expect anything more than a cool idea and a bunch of cool pieces. Whether or not the game works out-of-the-box isn't as important as whether or not they can cobble together something fun for their group from what's inside.
The thing is, these jury-rigged games are never as satisfying as actual, fully formed games--even if there is some sentimental attachment to their DIY-ness. Or rather, the only two reasons to choose to play a cobbled together, house rule-filled game rather than one of the many games that works really well without the players having to put in a few dozen hours of extra design work are (a) habit--this is what we've always done--and/or (b) enjoyment of the DIY process itself.
I have no real beef with folks to jury-riggers-out-of-habit, although I do think it's sort of strange that a lot of them seem to feel that this should be the normal way to approach games. That is, I think it should be normal to expect that if you're paying for a game it should work the way it is supposed to, and if it doesn't then the fault lies with the game itself (or its designer and/or publisher) and not with the players because they didn't put the time and effort into figuring out ways to fix it.
As for the DIYers, if you like Game X but want it to have Effect Y, why spend your time trying to change it when you could just make a game that aims at Effect Y? And again, I've found a lot of DIYers who feel that the DIY process is central to the gaming hobby. But it isn't, and this is, I think, a bad way to think about games. For example, we don't think this way about computer games: if I go on a computer game website and complain about a computer game being bad I might find people who disagree with me, but they are not likely to tell me that I should become a programmer and fix the things I don't like about it until it fits my preferences. They're much more likely to suggest a game that does fit what I'm looking for.
Which gets me back to Deep in the Game, which argues that, as gamers, we shouldn't settle for less than what we're looking for.
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