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.

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?"

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.

Catching up...

I've been catching up with the comments both here and elsewhere, so I've got nothing much else to post for today.

A quick rundown though:

Played Sorcerer (in the Dictionary of Mu setting) last week. It was good to finally get gaming again.

And the games continued this weekend: I ran a session of Dogs in the Vineyard for the first time. Some rough patches and a few lessons learned, but, overall, a good and entertaining experience. The game is set up so that it's pretty easy to run: I could have done a little bit more in the way of preparation (we were using scrap paper instead of nicely photocopied/laser-printed character sheets, for example), but I don't think the game suffered much. Only problem: we didn't quite get to finish the story (we moved a bit more slowly than I anticipated).

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:

1. As I've already suggested, it's a useful way to approach designing a story-making game.


2. 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.