Shining Dodecahedron

Moving

2005-12-11T22:30:00.000-08:00

Just in case anyone finds this blog and wonders what I'm up to: I've moved my game discussion over to LiveJournal. Please give my journal a visit (http://www.livejournal.com/users/jayloomis/.
I made this move because I was not happy with the amount of interactivity available here (which is to say, very little). I hope that, in the new format, those few who find their way to my humble blog will be able to better converse with me about things.
See you around!

[Plotlines] Currency Schmurrency

2005-09-07T15:43:00.000-07:00

I don't yet have a name for my plotline-driven game that I started talking about yesterday--so I'll continue to call it Plotlines until a better name rises to the surface.

So you need currency for these things:

Investing in your own plotlines (though maybe this just happens when you need it to--more on this later)
Investing in situations. So this means you are saying that not only will there be a situation in the future but that it matters to you as a player enough that you want control over it. So if we were playing Star Wars (original trilogy, thanks very much) and I was playing Luke, pretty early on I would write on a 3x5 card (confront Vader) and then I'd start investing in that situation like nobody's business. Then, when I actually get to the duel at the end of episode 5, I have extra resources to help out during that scene.
Giving to other players when they do something cool
Getting from the GM as a reward for playing along on his plotlines

And maybe more stuff as well.

So I'm not sure that all of these things are the same currency (though I tend to think that it is). And I have no resolution mechanic, so I can't start figuring out how it all works quite yet.

Much to think on.

Plotlines

2005-09-06T23:51:00.000-07:00

So my first real adventure using the modified True20 rules (I call it True18 because I use the 3d6 instead of 1d20 variant found in Unearthed Arcana) was a bust. The players have assured me that they enjoyed themselves despite the failure of the session but it was bad. What was bad, you ask? Well I almost inadvertently killed them. But what's worse is that they were almost killed by an encounter that didn't mean anything.

This got me to thinking, as I often do, about the need for a system that explicitly states (and supports mechanically) how important a given encounter is to the players of the characters involved.

My stumbling block is two-fold:

I want a game where the GM has the ability to create a general plot into which the character plots fit, and where players are rewarded for playing along and linking their stories with those of the other players and those created by the GM.
I want to support campaigns of unspecified length. That is, I don't want to copy the Primetime Adventures way of things where a season is a set length and you plot out screen presence ahead of time--I want to keep things more flexible than that

Long story short, I'm inspired to create a realatively simple, plotline driven fantasy RPG. It's in the early planning stages at the moment but here's where I'm going with it:

Players (including the GM) can create and track plotlines. A plotline is a track on a play sheet that has space for marking progress and some place for writing description. Each plotline roughly follows the Freytag model (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement). I have added a "seed" stage at the beginning.

So you can start a plotline for your character whenever you want by putting a check in the seed area of a new line. The seed can be very vague ("something about betrayal"), something quite specific ("Travel to the great city to find my father"), or anything in between. By specifying a seed, you are letting the GM and other players know that you have this idea you want to play with and you are potentially opening that idea up to them. You can then add checks to the plotline (starting in the exposition area) whenever you have a conflict that relates to the plot. You need at least one check in one area before you can put one in the next (i.e. you need one conflict in exposition before you can start rising action and so forth) but other than that you are essentially free to have as many or few checks as you like.

Each check on a plotline represents the potential difficulty and risk that the plotline represents. So the more you build up a story arc, the more dangerous it is for your character.

The GM also has plotlines that apply to the overarching story. The GM and players are rewarded for linking plotlines together, though I'm not totally sure how yet.

There is some currency that gets passed around. Players can get it from the GM by buying into his plotlines, that much I know. It can be used to strengthen the odds in a conflict, among other things.

That's all I have the energy to write about tonight. Next time I'll talk about investing in scenes.

Fantasy Wargaming

2005-08-26T21:40:00.000-07:00

I was at Half Price Books tonight after dinner and I picked up a little casebound digest-sized book called Fantasy Wargaming published in 1981. At first glance (all it took for me to buy it) it looked like a reference book for roleplayers. It has lots of information about medieval Europe and a chapter about GMing. What I didn't realize until I got home is that it is a complete (according to the authors) RPG.

It's a real gem. A reaction to D&D (the author says that D&D is "in many ways...unsatisfactory") with great emphasis on in-game causality and historical authenticity. Yes, historical authenticity. Here's a quote from the Explanation of characteristics section:

Players wishing to play a female character must unfortunately take the penalties of a patriarchal society. Make the following adjustments to diced characteristics: physique and endurance -3, charisma -2, social class -3, bravery -2, greed/selfishness/lust -3. They will be excluded from combat, from all parts of the Church save the nunnery, and expected in most cases to adopt a domestic position as wife, housekeeper and servant. These factors are invariable.

Doesn't that sound like a blast?

Seriously, anybody out there complaining about how lame D20 is, take a look at some of the older games like this one. It'll blow your mind.

I'm going to have fun reading through this beast!

What is a setting?

2005-08-26T09:13:00.000-07:00

The Forge's Provisional Glossary says of Setting:

Elements described about a fictitious game world including period, locations, cultures, historical events, and characters, usually at a large scale relative to the presence of the player-characters. A Component of Exploration.

I am not going to dispute that at all. In the context of Exploration, that definition is absolutely correct.
However, for today (and future discussion about the topic) I mean setting in the sense of guidance for play within a particular setting.
The way I see it, a setting has the following purposes:

Provide boundaries for character creation (what races, roles, etc. are appropriate? What abilities are available, encouraged, or forbidden?)
Provide in-game social context (e.g. the Empire is bad, the rebellion is good, the force is mysterious and powerful)
Assist in guiding expectations (e.g. no giant robots will show up in Middle Earth)
Provide a shared point of reference for players

Obviously there is some overlap. Am I missing anything? Is there some other important function of pre-exploratory setting?
Anyway, I'll take a close look at each of these purposes in upcoming posts.

A bit about setting

2005-08-25T20:05:00.000-07:00

I used to really enjoy my roleplaying. Back in the late eighties and early nineties, when games were a bit different. For a while I thought that it was the systems that I missed. Then I tried playing in the Hero System again and it kind of hurt. No, it wasn't the systems I missed--it was the settings.

When I was a free-wheeling RPG geek in high school I never (and I mean *never*) used an established setting. If I used a module (and this was extra-rare) I adapted it to fit my own setting. So when I (or someone in my group) wanted to run a new game, a campaign write-up was created. This was usually a document ranging from 1 to 10 pages in length that described the set-up for the game in terms of uber-plot and provided house rule and character limitation information (I was playing GURPS and Hero, so you needed to know how many points and what was and wasn't allowed).

After I left home and went to the Air Force, my gaming changed a bit. It was the early nineties and RPGs were morphing into thick tomes of fiction with some rules thrown in. I started to look at all of the detailed setting information published by the game designers with excitement. I mean, here was a wealth of detail and I didn't have to do any work for it. Joy!

After a while, I got into published setting material. But I found that, when I started a game, nobody else had read the books. So I had to start explaining the setting to people (I thought). I got to the point where I thought everyone needed a firm grounding in the campaign setting before we played. In practice, as I'm sure you can imagine, this blew for me. People want to play the game, not read books. I got frustrated.

Now I'm back to where I started, and more. I want to play with loosely defined setting. During play, the group as a whole can focus the lens on anything that is interesting to them. Whole aspects of the setting can be completely ignored and, since nobody has done a lot of work or research, nobody is pissed at its absence.

The problem with detailed published settings is that players invest in them. They buy books, they read the books, they play the tie-in card games. Then they form expectations. Those expectations are rarely even close to the same as the expectations that another player in the group formed about the exact same stuff. No matter how you slice it, someone isn't happy.

I want to talk about how to make a good setting. But what do you folks reading want to focus on? Do you have strong opinions about what a setting should or should not be? Have others gone through a similar arc of loose through detailed back to loose settings? Has anyone gotten really into a detailed setting and had luck making it work with your group?

Ahoy Mateys!

2005-08-25T16:32:00.000-07:00

A while back I talked a little about my designs in progress. Apart from needing to get off my ass and get Gallant out the door imperfect as it is, I've been really dragging my feet about my as-yet-unnamed pirate game. When I started work on it I wanted it to be silly movie pirates--kind of a Yellowbeard the RPG. Then I thought it would be really cool to have it be serious--all about desperation on the high seas. Then I thought action/adventure but not too silly. Lots of round and round.

Well, today's big announcement is my commitment to publish not one, not two, but eight pirate games in a single volume. I'll call it Pieces of Eight, and it will contain games satisfying all of my previous pirate game itches and more.

Here's something cooler. Challenge me! I only have ideas in my head for maybe four of the eight. Let me know in this thread what you'd like to see me cover. What do pirates mean to you? I'd like to cover different styles of play and satisfy different creative agendas in the book, so throw me whatever crazy design curveballs you can come up with.

Poll Time! Your best games

2005-08-10T09:27:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I posted because I've been busy working on and playtesting Gallant. I'll be posting some specifics here soon. In the meantime, here's a little question to chew on:

Think back to your most enjoyable gaming. Really think about what made it enjoyable for you. Was it the system? The GM? The other players? The setting? The plot?

Now check your work. Think about your least enjoyable gaming. What made it bad for you? Was the thing you identified as good from the previous question missing from the bad sessions?

Essentially, think about what your "secret ingredient" for good gaming is.

Then discuss.

I'll start.

My secret ingredient is engagement. Not the same thing as immersion, if we could agree on a definition for that one (which we probably can't). By engagement I mean that all the players are engaged in what's going on in the shared imaginary space. There isn't a lot of table talk (at least not talk unrelated to the game). People are all paying attention, making suggestions, and obviously interested in the proceedings.
It may sound simple, but it takes a special mix of good GMing, good playing, and a system that is either engaging by itself or at least does not bog play down with handling time.

The Games In Between

2005-07-13T10:43:00.000-07:00

I have been a largely passive observer of the indie-RPG revolution for several reasons. One reason is the reactionary nature of much of the movement. That is, lots of people get into RPG theory and indie-games because they are unhappy with their current gaming experiences. They use theory (not always consciously) to lash out at the games that have let them down. Now, before you get all pissy with me, I'm not here to insult anyone. I have often been a reactionary myself, complaining about systems that don't work very well for me (e.g. D20). Anyway, one of the results of the dynamics that go into RPG theory and the resulting indie-games is a kind of extremism. Either your game is cutting edge and new , or it's the same old shit repackaged. Not everyone gets to this point, mind you, but I have heard it a lot.

I've played a number of the cutting-edge indie games with varying levels of success. I'd like to play more, but those that I have played lead me to believe that both traditional and radical designs have their place. So my concern is this: if all the designers that are paying attention to theory and giving serious thought to role-playing are hell-bent on making a game that fixes everything and exists on the very cutting edge, then who will help to bridge the gap? Where will the games be that are mindful of theory but build upon the firm foundations of RPGs as we know them today?

All of this is just to say that while a game needs to be different to set itself apart from the rest, it needn't be as different as you might think. Look at Burning Wheel and Dogs in the Vineyard. Both are games that are highly respected by indie-folks with some cross-over into more traditional gamers. Both present some new ideas while keeping much of the foundation of traditional role-playing intact. Dogs is perhaps a little hard for players to grasp at first, but it has a GM who sets up the situation and players the NPCs, it has players who each control one character apiece, it has enough elements of traditional RPGs to be palatable and accessible to old gamers (who, like old dogs aren't so good at new tricks).

Find the games in between. Use them to get your friends thinking about new ways of role-playing that will be more fun for everyone. Dispel some of the myths of role-playing.

Being a Good Player

2005-07-05T09:04:00.000-07:00

Lots of RPG rule books and gamers on the street have heaps and heaps of advice for game masters, but there is relatively little advice and instruction available for players. It seems like the basic RPG text says to stay in character and be a good sport and not get in the way of the GM's story too much (it may not say that last part outright, but it is heartily implied in many games).

Anyway, it's about time that players had some rules to live by. I've got a few. Read and comment on them and then tell me yours, if you have any (and I know you do).

Get involved. Don't sit back and ride along with what everyone else is doing. Take part. Give suggestions. Role-playing is so much more fun if everyone is contributing
Play your character's story, not just your character. It isn't always about the method acting "what's my motivation" stuff. Sometimes the game is much more fun if you think about what your character's story arc should be like and then play toward that. Remember that real people in the real world often do things for which there is no logical explanation. Humans are random and chaotic, so should your character be.
Invest in the whole game. If you are watching a movie, you don't just pay attention to the parts with your favorite character in them do you? Well then why shouldn't you pay attention to other player's scenes in the game? Not only that but take part. Add details. Offer suggestions.
Be honest. If the game rocks, say so. If it sucks, communicate with the group to let them know what could be done better to make you have fun.
Don't be a prick. Everything that you do in the game should be designed to provide fun to everyone at the table. If you aren't happy, don't act out. Don't throw tantrums. And for the love of Pete, don't get all passive agressive and try to sabotage the game. If you do, every person at the table has the karmic right to beat your ass with heavy, pointed objects.

Ripping Off Budget/Fan Mail from PTA

2005-06-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

I was doing some work on Gallant last night and I started to tackle Plot Points (or Story Points?), which are my player resource for affecting the story. After a quick review of the PTA rules for Budget/Fan Mail, I couldn't think of a better way to set things up.

Something that has been bothering me is the GM's ability to throw whatever he wants at the characters in the game. Player empowerment is all well and good, but if the GM still has the ability to set up whatever situations he wants, he can still railroad the game. Needing to spend a GM resource to bring in adversity seems like the ideal solution.

Does anyone have good or bad experiences with this aspect of PTA? I still haven't had the opportunity to play it, so I'm operating on assumptions gained by reading the rules.

Does anyone have other ideas about how to set up a system of GM resources? Examples from other games?

Character Context Again

2005-06-15T09:32:00.000-07:00

OK, so nobody is playing along with my little exercise, so I'll have to pontificate after all. :-(

When you play a character, you need cues to tell you how that person would act in the situations that arise in the shared imagined space (SIS). Those cues are character context. Character context (CC) can be direct or indirect.

Direct CC is a line between the imagined character and you, the player. If you're playing Champions and you have a psychological limitation like "Afraid of Heights", you have a some direct CC. That is, without reference to system, setting, or color, you know how to have your character act if the situation involves being in a high place.

Indirect CC is a line from system, setting, or (rarely?) color through character to you, the player. This is where character stats come in. The numbers may primarily be for use with the techniques of play, but they also tell you things about your character that can translate into contributions to the SIS.

Here's an example. Last week I was running a playtest session of Gallant with my regular group. We were using pregenerated characters. The heroes get to a point where they need to break into a chateau. They decide that the thing to do is climb into a window on the second floor. Mike (one of the players) decides that Henry's character should do it, because he has a higher Bravado score. Bravado indicates, among other things, the hero's willingness to charge ahead into dangerous situations. This decision was made based on character traits implied by the numbers on the character sheet. Indirect character context all over.

You Don't Have to Change the World

2005-06-13T19:06:00.000-07:00

Ben at This is My Blog (see the link to your left) brought my attention to this post at YUDHISHTHIRA'S DICE. It touches on some of what I have been thinking myself in the past months.

When I started reading the Forge and thinking hard about theory it consumed me. It was great that I was thinking about the hobby in new ways, but it also hurt my designs. I have focused for so long on trying to do something cutting-edge that I forgot about how much I like some traditional RPG techniques. So I'm going back to my older designs for Gallant and actually writing stuff instead of worrying about staying on top of theory and making it happen.

I think we can all learn a lesson from Luke Crane's The Burning Wheel Fantasy Role-playing System. At its core, Burning Wheel is a fairly traditional FRPG. It innovates in a few solid ways, but stays pretty true to its roots. It doesn't try to rock your world with new ways of role-playing so much as it tries to make the way you already role-play better (or at least refreshingly different). Then he made the revised edition and added more innovation after the core of the system had been tested and played by real gamers. The craft is there.

What I'm saying is, don't sneer at the games that are out there just because they're "old school". If you are moved to make a game, make it now. Don't try to change the world of role-playing all in one go. Write your game. Get it out to players. Then make your next game, or your next version. But whatever you do, don't let a flood of theory stop you from designing the game you want to play now.

At least that's what I'm doing.

An Exercise in Character Context

2005-06-13T14:03:00.000-07:00

The biggest, most important type of context for most RPGs is character context. This is provided by resources that tell you things about your character--things that help you decide how to play her in the game.

Instead of me pontificating, take a look at the following table. It contains the ability scores for three D&D characters. Just the numbers. The exercise is this: tell us what you can and can't tell about these three characters with the information provided. I assume that you are all at least somewhat familiar with D&D in one form or another, but even better if you are not! Look at the numbers assigned to the names for each character and think about what they tell you.

Ability	Character 1	Character 2	Character 3
Strength	18	8	12
Dexterity	12	16	10
Constitution	16	10	12
Intelligence	10	14	12
Wisdom	7	10	17
Charisma	10	14	13

Now discuss!

Starting to Talk About Context

2005-06-06T10:58:00.000-07:00

I've been promising an essay about context, as I define it pertaining to RPGs. It's turning out to be a really big topic. So, instead of writing a huge manifesto, I'm going to break it into chunks. I think that will help in getting feedback and opinions, too. Here's the first bit:

What is Context?
Context, as I am defining it in terms of role-playing games, is something that helps a player contribute to the collaborative story being told. Context is like a handle to a tool that the player uses to play the game. In recent weeks, it is becoming clear to me that things that provide context can also be called player resources, and that may be a better term in the long run.

To understand where I am coming from here, you need to understand the concept of exploration as defined in the Forge's Provisional Glossary. If you aren't familiar, go do some research there until you've got it. It's one of the easier and less contentious parts of the Big Model, so don't be intimidated.

A player resource can be anything that helps with imagination. It can be something written down on a character sheet, a rule in a book, the way the resolution mechanics interact, a story that is or is not directly related to the game, a movie, another game, anything. For my purposes, let's keep our discussion of player resources to things that are known and predictable to a published game. That is, I'm talking about player resources that are under your control as a game designer.

A player resource can provide context to exploration. Context might be thought of as a compass, which gives direction and aids in exploration--it's not a map: you still need to fill in the creative details, but it helps you do so productively. Any given resource can contribute to none, some, or all of the elements of exploration (character, setting, situation, system, and color). Forthcoming posts will deal with the various types of context that can be provided.

My hope for this discussion is that we will gain a better understanding of how the rules and books we write as game designers help (or don't help) people contribute to the game. And more importantly, what types of things we can write to provide specific types of context.

For this post's comments, please limit yourself to discussion about my definition of context and player resources. We'll get into the nitty gritty soon enough.

Getting on the Same Page

2005-06-02T22:19:00.000-07:00

My last few posts have been supplemented by comments and clarifications, and people still don't seem to be getting what I'm saying. That probably means that I'm not saying it very well. This post is about where I'm coming from, so as to avoid any confusion.

The following items encapsulate my current thinking:

Role-playing is hard. Even though we all have storytelling capacity within us, society does not generally prepare people for cooperative storytelling. It's a skill we have to learn.

Most published games do a pretty poor job of helping people learn the skills needed to tell stories together.

Any resource that helps players tell stories together is a good thing. This can include mechanics, advice, setting material, illustrations, and more. If it helps you tell your own story it is good.

Some games overdo some elements that might normally be helpful in a way that stops encouraging players to tell their own stories. Most often, in my experience, this involves very prescriptive metaplot which makes the players' stories irrelevant next to those of the star characters of the published setting. This phenomenon involves a threshold between useful and restrictive that is a personal setting for each player. There is no hard and fast rule about where the line lies.

Does anyone disagree with any of those four statements?

The more complicated issues, like "core stories", come down to personal reactions about where helpful starts and stops. I don't expect that any reasonably sized group of gamers would ever be able to agree completely about them.

Core Stories (I'd Call 'Em Formulas)

2005-06-02T10:54:00.000-07:00

John Kim pointed to this post on Mike Mearls' LiveJournal in a response yesterday. Go take a look, it's interesting.

His argument is that a role-playing game should have a predictable formula that describes what in instance of play is like. For example, he quotes Ryan Dancey's core story of D&D:

"A party of adventurers assemble to seek fame and fortune. They leave civilization for a location of extreme danger. They fight monsters and overcome obstacles and acquire new abilities and items of power. Afterwards they return to civilization and sell the phat loot. Next week, they do it all over again."

I'm not sure that I agree. I don't dispute that having a core story for your game helps people understand what they're supposed to be doing in the SIS. What I don't like is the idea that this is mandatory. Maybe it's just me being stubborn and resistant. What do you folks think? Can you give examples of games that don't have a core story that you have enjoyed with your group?

Embarrassed by Gaming?

2005-06-01T11:43:00.000-07:00

Marc Mielke says

I refuse to discuss RPGs with non-gamers, and get very embarrassed and upset when others do around me. When asked, I've learned to be very evasive about what I do on weekends.

So what's up with this? I'm sometimes embarrassed about my hobby of choice too. What about the rest of you? What makes you so?

Like Stradivarius

2005-05-30T00:38:00.000-07:00

It think it was Ron Edwards that started the analogy of role-playing to musical jam session. It’s not a perfect analogy (none of them are), but thinking about it can help us learn to be better game designers.

When musicians get together and jam, they have a few things: an instrument (voice counts, of course), skill with the instrument, understanding of the part that the instrument plays in the style of music being created. That is to say that musicians who seriously jam are prepared for the experience. Even then, being as prepared as they can be, a really good jam session is hard work for all involved.

Now look at role-playing. The majority of the role-playing rules written assume that the players come together prepared, as if it were a jam session. But people are very ill prepared for roleplaying. No one has taught players the correct method for contributing to a collaborative story. No one has told them what their parts are. No one has taught them to trust their secret, creative selves to others. No, the opposites of these things are true. Our society (I speak for Americans here, but I’m guessing for most others as well) beats the creative urge out of kids by the time they get to high school. Kids who tell stories are geeky or nerdy and condemned to a life of ridicule. Even those that manage to keep in touch with the creative forces within are taught to keep it to themselves. They’re trained to trust no one with their ideas and vision. We also teach our children to be competitive. To strive for dominance. To collaborate only as far as it gets them ahead.

The current state of the role-playing industry is essentially telling a group of average folks to have a jam session without any instruments or instruction.

So what do game designers do to help? Generally, they provide lots of information about the one thing that players don’t need help with: imagined people and places. Instead of giving people tools and instruction to help them make stories together, they give them homework. They vent their frustrated novelist urges into encyclopedic sourcebooks and charge people through the nose for them. Those untrained jamming musicians without instruments? We’ve just told them that they have to make do without, and that they can only “jam” to a single tune.

In short, designers of games are going about the process all wrong. If we want players to jam, to improvise using their own creativity, we need to show them how to imagine with a group of other creators. We need to teach them how to share the limelight. We need to teach them what to contribute and when. We need the rules we write to be the like their instruments: that make clear their parts and enable creativity to flow.

My suggestion is that we should change the way we think about rules. If something is in the game that doesn’t help players jam, it doesn’t belong. Don't try to tell people what to imagine. Tell them how to imagine better together, no matter what the subject. Give them a well crafted instrument and the training to use it and they'll make the music all on their own.

Game-chef Status, Plus a Disclaimer

2005-05-24T23:56:00.000-07:00

So here we are not quite halfway through this year's Iron Game Chef competition. I am not so pleased to report that I have bitten off more than I can chew. I'm down a design road that requires me to come up with dozens of cards (many of them octagonal) before Sunday night. Oh, yeah, and I'm sick too. Things don't look good for Invincible Armada. Maybe the Spaniards are going to win this time.

Anyway, I'm working away on that, and chomping at the bit to get back to Gallant. That's why my presence here is diminished this week. And Vincent's site seems to be down, which is sad. I've pretty much stopped trying to wade through all of the posts at the Forge and just read his blog instead.

So this is funny. In a fit of head cold induced surfing, I visited Cumberland Games just now. It's a fun little site with some true gems. One gem is Pokethulu. A game that features shining dodecahedra in which the monsters are captured. So I'd like to point out, for the record, that the name of my blog has nothing to do with Pokethulu. I came up with the name as a result of a lifelong unhealthy fascination with the dodecahedron, specificly in the form of the seldom-used twelve-sided die. I do, however, wholeheartedly recommend Pokethulu to any and all who would read it (heck, maybe even play it--I never have, but the system looks functional to me). Besides, it's free. And check out the rest of the site while you're there.

Star Wars and the Macbeth Principle

2005-05-19T14:32:00.000-07:00

I hate Macbeth. I view it as a steaming turd in the flower bed of Shakespeare. Why? Because it is a story of the tragic fall of a character that we have no reason to like in the first place. In the second scene we are told that Macbeth is a great guy, but from the moment he walks on stage he behaves like a prick who is easily bullied by his evil wife.

The Star Wars prequel trilogy has the same flaw. We are supposed to care about Anakin. I know this not because Episodes I & II set him up as a great guy, but because in Episode IV, Obi Wan told us that he was a great guy. In Episode I he is an annoying little kid. In Episode II he is a whiny teenager. In Episode III (don't worry, no big spoilers--as if you don't know how it turns out anyway) Lucas tries to give us the impression of a decent guy in the first half. He does an OK job, but it isn't enough. Ask anybody: people like Anakin a lot more as Vader as they ever do as himself.

What does all of this have to do with gaming? Well, it teaches us a valuable lesson about constructing stories. You can't get powerful thematic situation about a character that nobody cares about. Now I know that not everyone is looking for thematic situations in play (thematic in the Ron Edwards sense). But it's really a good idea for all stories.

When you start to tell a story, there are people who are the protagonists. You have to establish those people as protagonists in the first act of the story. If you skip this step, no one will care what happens to them. This is part of the problem with having players come up with in-depth backgrounds for their characters: all the cool protagonism is bottled up where on only the player and GM can see it. And such background often fails to align with the SIS of the game.

I think this is why things like Kickers in Sorcerer are such a boon. They make players start their characters in a time of action and decision. A character in flux has a greater chance of proving himself a protagonist than a static character with lots of past behind him.

Anyway, I wouldn't call Episode III a steaming turd. But I wouldn't give it any great praise either. Go see it or not, but learn what you can from the failure of Eps. I-III compared to IV-VI.

More thoughts on granularity

2005-05-18T10:12:00.000-07:00

I think part of why my post on granularity didn't click with folks was that I was mixing apples and oranges.

The way I see it now, the granularity I was talking about is really made up of two mostly independent things:

Character Definition Mechanics - which can be rated on a scale from very general to very detailed.

Resolution Mechanics - which can be rated on a scale from very centralized to very granular

But this line of reason leads me to think that a game really has a separate scale for each of the five elements of exploration, as defined by Ron and the Forge crew. However, this spills over into my forthcoming context essay, so I won't go into it in detail now.

"...Doth not the appetite alter?

2005-05-17T23:59:00.000-07:00

A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age" - Much Ado About Nothing II iii

So I was sitting at the table this evening playing in the current Star Hero / Ninja Hero game when I realized that all of the specific combat stuff (autofire rules, martial maneuvers, the state of endurance after waking up from knockout, on so on and on) seemed tedious to me. At first I tried to blame this on the 5th edition rules. But while the new rules did add some complexity to the combat, the system has not changed that much in the last twenty years. The thing that's changed is me.

When I was younger, I got a real kick out of knowing all of the crunchy details of the system. Looking stuff up in the book, talking about the rules during play, all that stuff was a big part of the game and I enjoyed it. Partly I enjoyed it because the game made sense to me on a "realism" (albeit cinematic realism) level. Partly just because being an expert at the system was cool--not real cool, geek cool.

Now I get my geek coolness from other sources--I take my flintlock pistol down to the range and make question-inducing puffs of smoke and fire, for instance. When I sit down at the table to role-play now, I just want to tell a story and I don't want to have to look a bunch of crap up to keep the game moving.

The bummer part is that I feel like a betrayer. The Hero System was loyal to me for so many years. How could I abandon it? It's like that friend that most people have. The one who was a real pal in high school but grew into kind of an annoying prick. You don't really like the guy anymore, but you can't tell him to stop talking to you, because you have history.

Also it makes me sad because I haven't yet found a game that meets my current needs. I'm writing some, of course, but that's hard work. My preferences aren't being met by the new wave of indie games, which mostly either embrace the things that I don't like about old-school games or reject the old ways to the point of turning me off completely.

I can't be the only one, can I? Has anyone else felt this pain? What did you do to make it better? Did you just make your own games, like I'm trying to?

Rules Granularity = Creativity Vacuum?

2005-05-16T10:13:00.000-07:00

Some games have very broad and general rules. Others have very granular rules--by which I mean that there are specific little rules for lots of different things. This applies also (and maybe particularly) to character definition, i.e. what's written on the character sheet.

The level of granularity that you prefer is a matter of personal choice, and isn't the only factor determining whether you like a game (not by a long shot). However, I think that the extremes of the spectrum can be bad.

Overly granular rules systems can, in my experience, kill creativity. How? Well, if there is a specific rule or character element that is defined for a particular action and your character doesn't qualify, you can take the action. Also, if lots of specific rules exist in a system and you don't see the one for what you want to do, you might be discouraged from trying.

Overly general rules systems can stymie creativity too. If the rules or character elements are very generic, you may find yourself struggling to decide what to do. I've often had players get stuck when the rules say to pick any descriptor for something. The players want a list or something to help get the creativity going.

So a game must have rules and character elements that are specific enough to spark the creativity of the players without being so narrow that they stifle it. There is actually a fairly wide range of possible rules systems in this range. The preference of the designer should dictate where in that range a given system falls.

I'm designing games

2005-05-16T00:16:00.000-07:00

So I'm working on some games of my own--did I mention?

Anyway, because my Web Fu isn't very strong and my laziness is, I'll be using this blog to talk about my game designs as they happen instead of putting discussion boards on my basically non-existent site (www.coxcombgames.com).

Anyone and everyone is welcome to comment on things I put here. If you're here just to talk games in general, that's cool too. To help you filter what to read, I will tag my design-specific posts with the name of the game in square brackets--Forge style.

Here's a list of the things that are brewing, in brief. In case you're interested:

Gallant is my game of swashbuckling adventure. It's at the top of the queue right now, and is receiving the most attention from me.
Musha Shugyo is my game of wandering ronin in quasi-Japan. It's all about choosing what to risk to get things done, and focuses on walking the path of honor when that path is fraught with peril.
I have this pirate game in the back of my head that has no name yet. It has no centralized GM and may or may not focus on desperation on the high seas. It's the one I'm most excited about, but also the one that is the hardest for me to make progress on.

There are others floating in my brain. But I won't worry about them until they rear up and demand attention.

Anyway, just thought you should know.

Skill-based systems gone bad

2005-05-13T10:39:00.000-07:00

As with many things, skill-based RPGs began with the best of intentions. I wasn't there when they started, but I imagine it happening as a reaction to class-based systems. In old-school class-based RPGs, there were an awful lot of things left unsaid about a character, mechanically speaking. The race/class combo pretty much dictated only combat efficacy and, to a lesser extent, dungeon-delving skills. Anything else that you wanted your character to be able to do was up to you and GM to work out.

Lots of solutions came about to fix this problem, culminating in the ultimate skill-based system, GURPS, where fighting skills and other skills exist on equal footing. So what's wrong with this approach? Well, nothing, at first. The problem is that, whenever there is doubt about what skill should be used for an action in the vast majority of skill-based systems, the answer is to create a new skill. Skill inflation causes problems on multiple levels.

Here's an example. D&D 3e boiled skills down to a fairly manageable list, but it made skill points into a very precious commodity: they are received in very limited quantities for most classes, and the whole cross-class skills thing makes them even more scarce. This isn't so bad if you assume that a given character only needs a few key skills to supplement her class abilities and feats. But when you set people loose with the OGL, they start making skills up for every damn thing. When I played in an Oriental Adventures game (using the Rokugan setting) I was appalled to find that they added Tea Ceremony, and GO to the list as skills. Yes, in real life these things are skills that take a significant time-investment to be good at, but in the game, they are on a totally different scope than being able to persuade people or take their stuff.

When you create a character in a system like that, you end up in a crunch. You don't want to short the skills that you know will be important to your role in the game, but you want to have all the skills that fill out your character concept.
The Hero System tries to fix this by making "background" skills less expensive to get than skills that are more effective in the core of play. But then they fall into traps just like anybody else. For example, if you want to be a black belt in a particular martial art, the Ultimate Martial Artists advises you to buy a knowledge skill that applies to the art, and potentially a separate professional skill to be an instructor, and buy a perk called "black belt".

Part of the problem here is that designers are trying to design systems that model reality. They think that ff something is hard to do in real life, it should be hard to have your character be able to do in the game. This is the biggest red herring of character design systems. I have never seen a game that models reality even slightly accurately. And I don't think I'd like a system that succeeded in doing so. The trick with a game is not to seriously trigger a "bogus" response from players. Any amount of unrealistic stuff is fine up to the point where the players don't buy it anymore.

Vincent Baker says on this post:

Never, ever [design a mechanic] as a model of reality...
...Unless it's the central, thematically charged reality your game is to comment on. Like, Sorcerer's demon rules are a model of the reality of abusive relationships. Dogs in the Vineyard's town creation rules are a model of the reality of communities in breakdown.

I would add that if you want to simulate some reality with your rules, simulate the fictional reality of the genre of your game. But whatever you do, don't ever assume that the right way to model a skill system is to systematically catagorize the whole range of human skill and ability into a huge list. It will break your game. Guaranteed

How characters are conceived

2005-05-12T23:54:00.000-07:00

Judd said:

Generally, the GM says, "Here is the game's concept."
The player says, "Here's what I'd like to play."
And then you are off to the races, seeing what is important in the character's back story, what kind of characters they create, their angle on the original idea."

This brings up a great point: how do players arrive at characters to play? And more importantly, how do systems make the process easy or hard?

My current game is a hybrid space opera/wuxia game played in the Hero System. Lyle, the GM put forth this idea for a gameto us, told us how many points to use and cut us loose. We ended up with three characters, each from a different genre: Mike made a pilot/gambler who fits the mold of heroic-human-level space opera characters. Henry made a Kung Fu fighter on the level of Bruce Lee--touch human guy with some exrtaordinary fighting. I made a full-on wuxia character inspired by House of Flying Daggers. Mike had trouble thinking what to do with all of his points. Henry's character eased in right at the limit. I was scrounging for points. We all understood the game to be different and made characters at different power levels as a result. The Hero System leaves all of the character scoping and details up to the GM and players to work out. And it often doesn't work. It's an extreme case because the system allows for so much diversity of character.

The opposite extreme is something like White Wolf's World of Darkness. Your choices in making a character are extremely limited depending on the game that the group chooses. If the GM wants to play a Werewolf game, players have a very narrow scope of characters to choose from.

I used to think that the WoD way was bad and the Hero way was good. But I've come to appreciate that sometimes having a lot of choices as a player is a bad thing. A coherent game needs direction, and limiting the types of characters that can participate in the story is a decent way to get some. Not the only way by any meansm but a good way.

Look at something like Dogs in the Vineyard. On the surface its a game with a very limited range of characters, but the diversity of individual dogs seems quite wide. Sure, they're all dogs, but they can have a variety of backgrounds, motivations, levels of faith, on and on.

Sometimes limiting the scope of players leads to unhappy gamers. Particuarly if the GM doesn't tell the players before hand that he has something specific in mind for the gameand the characters that they come up with don't fit his vision. Much badness to be had there.

Are there other techniques that folks have experienced that games use to guide the selection of characters? Is this something that you feel works better when provided by the game or when it's worked out between the GM and players?

It's all about character

2005-05-12T13:33:00.000-07:00

For me anyway. While we're waiting for me to finish my essay about context, I'm going to delve into characters a bit.

I should preface all of this by saying that I understand some folks don't think that an RPG needs to revolve around characters. All I can say is: sure, but it does for me. Your mileage may vary.

In my mind, the charcter is the input device that players use to play the game. It's the joystick of tabletop RPGs. Games can, of course, give the player resources and techniques for affecting the SIS that are not directly related to the character. But I think it's much better that everything is filtered through the character.

Anyway, I've got some thoughts brewing for a few posts about characters, but please post your thoughts about characters in RPGs as comments on this post. I would like to get a real discussion going.

A Look at Powergaming

2005-05-11T12:12:00.000-07:00

Only once has anyone called me a powergamer to my face. And I took it badly. It's a term generally considered to be insulting in gaming circles--but it's also a term that is ill defined and essentially meaningless.

Most folks think that a powergamer is someone who maximizes his character to optimize in-game (usually combat) effectiveness. But does anyone think about the reason for the optimization?

In traditional RPGs, the player has only one way to affect the game--through his character. So a player that wants to be able to direct some events during play (particularly if the GM is adversarial) has no recourse but to craft his character to be effective in the areas that he wants to have a say in. If we're talking about a game like D&D, where there is a very real risk of random charcter death, it only follows that players will want to bullet-proof their characters.

Sure, there are probably players who want to maximize their characters so that they can disrupt the game, but I don't thik this is the common case. I think most folks are like me: they've had the rules or the GM burn them in the past and so they insulate themselves by carefully deciding what's important for the character an fortifying it accordingly. It is the games and bad GMs that have taught people that this is needed--that they are powerless to control events without some mechanical advantage.

Take a game like Dogs in the Vineyard, where things are mechanically important because you, the player, decide that they are, and there isn't any need for powergaming. Get into something even more kooky like Capes, and you'd be hard pressed to powergame even if you really wanted to.

And anyway, most of the folks who complain about powergamers are GMs who are upset because a player made his character in a way that interferes with the preordained plot that he (the GM) has been working up for months.

Bottom line: give players the power to affect the story in meaningful ways and the issue of powergaming becomes immaterial.

You Have the Floor

2005-05-11T10:40:00.000-07:00

At the urging of Vincent (click Lumpley Games in the link list), here is an open forum. If you'd like to talk about a specific topic, put a comment on this post. I'll start posts about specific topics that grab me.

Go nuts!

What an RPG Needs

2005-05-03T09:54:00.000-07:00

Before I get into the various aspects of role-playing systems, it is best to start by talking about what a system is for.

My baseline assumption for this discussion is that role-playing is a social activity and that, at the end of the day, all "rules" used by a particular group are defined (usually implicitly) by the group as a whole. What I mean is that role-playing is done in the context of a social arrangement that may not be explicitly defined, but that can be described by all participants even if each description is different.

That sounds confusing, so lets have an example. Fred, Bob, Jim, and Julie agree to get together and play some D&D. All of the players have experience with role-playing, though not with each other. If you asked each player, "How does one participate in a role-playing game?", each has a different answer, but does have an answer (and most likely thinks that his/her version is the definitive one). Fred thinks that being creative and coming up with compelling drama is what the game is about and that you do that best by having a GM who creates vivid plotlines with lots of interpersonal tension. To Bob, role-playing is lighthearted social time where players crack jokes both in and out of character and generally have fun. Jim sees the game as a collaborative effort where each player contributes not only to his own character's story, but to the game in general. To Jim, the GM is there to keep things fair and to play the adversaries, but not to push a set plot or agenda--the GM should be reactive and in tune with the players' creativity. Julie has found that the best games involve serious mechanical challenges that the player overcome by using the abilities of their characters in the most clever ways possible--she wants to be challenged. [For those of you familiar with the Big Model of the Forge, take note that these example opinions are not meant to have any direct relationship to the creative agendas.]

The point is that everyone comes to the game with their own preconceived notions about what a game is supposed to be like. And, odds are, they wouldn't agree about these notions if they were to actually talk about them, which they won't because each one assumes that everybody knows how you do it. If you are keeping score, what I'm talking about is what Ron Edwards at al at the Forge calls Social Contract, but in the example I'm using it's a broken social contract. Within the social structure of the gaming group is set of things that are The Official Rules of the game. Some will argue that you don't need any rules to role-play, you just trust each other and come up with collaborative fiction. This discussion isn't for those folks. If you can make the idealistic, no rules required RPG work, more power to you. The rest of us need rules.

So bearing in mind that the rules live inside an existing dynamic social arrangement, what purpose do they serve? What do they need in order to work? The answers to these two questions (from my point of view) make up the rest of this article.

The rules guide play. That is over simple, but it's the root answer. The baseline purpose of rule is to tell the players (including the GM) how the game is played: When this thing happens, this player gets to describe this other thing. When this thing happens, roll dice and engage the mechanics to determine the resolution. The GM describes everything that isn't a player action. All the prescriptive rules in a role-playing book tell the players how the game works. The problem is that many games start by assuming that you know how an RPG works, so they don't tell you. Worse yet are the games that assume that you will be able to figure out how the game was designed to be played without it being clearly and explicitly described.

Rules also provide context. There is context between the character and the setting, between the player and the system, between the character and color, and more--all in the rules of the game. This is a subtle variation on prescribing how you play the game. The rules give guidance, often implicitly, about how to role-play a character, or how to describe an even in the game.

So what do RPG rules need to be complete and useful? This question can't be objectively answered, but I'll put out my take on it. Rules must:

Provide a method for defining characters that the players use
Provide a method for adjudicating actions and interactions in the imaginary continuity of the game (i.e. I want to accomplish this thing, so I need engage these rules in this way)
Define which player has authority in given situations (e.g. the GM has complete authority over in-game events that do not directly relate to any PCs)
Have clear goals for play and follow through on them

Rules might (and in some cases should):

Define rewards for play in keeping with the goals of the game (e.g. Experience points for overcoming challenges in game)
Establish color and tone for the stories told using them

There are probably more, but this is enough to be getting on with. Next up: some thoughts about common system approaches that are flawed (IMHO).

Investment (No not the Stock Market)

2005-04-20T14:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a talked a little bit about investment and I think its worth looking at a little deeper. How do you make sure that everyone cares about something in the game?

Players are relatively easy. Each one needs to find something about his character that means something to him. Easier said than done, of course. Sometimes you can find something to invest in your character from the start. Other times you have to find it in play. This is also a dangerous proposition because it's easy to over-invest during charcter creation and come up with things that just don't work in play.
How does the GM help? Well, paying attention to how the player reacts to things in play is the first step. Find what gets the player excited and give him some more of it. Be tuned in to the investments that the players are making and don't ignore or step on them.

The GM is harder in terms of investing. The GM (at least in traditional games) spends a lot of time thinking about the game and planning for things. It is easy to invest in a clever scenario that does not take the actual players and their characters into account. This is the path to railroading. If the GM invests in outcomes of situations that should not be decided without actual play, then any investment that the players have can be negated. This ends up being fun for nobody.

It is safer for a GM to invest in particular NPCs. Having a star villain, or an amusing contact can be a great way for the GM to invest in the story without deciding how the story will end before it starts. Again, care must be taken to avoid taking the spotlight off of the PCs.

As I said yesterday, it becomes lots harder for the GM to invest in the game in a meaningful way in games where the players have more control built in. In these cases, choosing characters to play that are engaging and fun as the GM is, I think, essential.

Ten Years of Terror

2005-04-19T13:55:00.000-07:00

This is off-topic, but today is the 10th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. I bring it up because I was in OCK that day, going about my business as usual. I was in the Air Force at the time, and I remember that, at first, we heard that there had been an explosion of unknown origin downtown. They thought it was a gas leak or something. But really, who would imagine that someone would do something like that?

Shock is an amazing thing. In the days that followed, I didn't react in a strong way. I didn't really absorb the situation until quite a while later. A friend of mine went down to the blast site the first day to help out, even after having been told not to. He showed up in his BDUs as if he were a military person who was suppsed to be there and they put him to work. He went into the fragile shell of the federal building and helped the firemen and other emergency crews fish bodies from the wreckage. That was how he dealt with it: he faced it head-on. People like me never really dealt with it at all. I still can't conceive of someone planning and executing that kind of attack. Lashing out at the government by killing innocent people. I don't get it.

I won't be so naive as to say that that day changed to world or anything, but it serves as a symptom of our problems in my opinion. Where does all the hatred come from? How do we stop it? I have no idea myself, but I don't think that it's a coincidence that this country at this time is producing so much hate. I wish more people would think about what they are doing and how it affects others. I wish that people would look at the OKC bombing as an invitation to change for the better. But then, I wish a lot of things.

Player Empowerment

2005-04-19T12:27:00.000-07:00

This is the biggest problem for me in playing, running, and designing RPGs: how do you empower players to contribute to the story while still having a GM to hold the plot together as a cohesive story?

I don't have an answer. At least, not in a mechanical, here's the rules to use kind of way. When a game works for me, it is because the GM (whether me or someone else) is taking great care to find out what the player wants for his character and from the game at large and then responds by providing opportunities for the fulfillment of those desires in play. Traditionally, this is hard, because there are certain assumptions that are made in traditional RPG culture that get in the way:

The players should know no more than their characters do
The players should never come right out and say what they want to happen
The GM is "God" and should never be questioned
The GM has a story to tell, and the players should not get in the way

When operating under the social constraints of traditional RPGs, a GM has to bend over backward to give the players what they want. He basically has to be a mind-reader.

Then there's the impossible thing before breakfast, as it is called by the folks at the Forge. TITBB is the notion, often perpetuated in traditional games, that the GM is the primary author of the overall story that is the game, and that each player controls his character's individual story. The problem being, of course, that these two things cannot both be true. Either the GM creates the story and the players are more or less along for the ride, or the GM reacts to the players' wishes and overrides his plot as needed.

There seem to be a couple of ways that folks are trying to solve this problem in recent games.

The first, typified by Ron Edwards' Sorcerer, is to require the player to introduce a conflict as part of his character. The kicker, as Sorcerer calls it, is an open plot that the chraracter has just begun as play begins. The GM is then required to deal with the kicker in play, tying the player's idea into the story at large.

The second, advocated by Vincent Baker, is to limit the scope of the GM's job to providing adversity. The idea being that the GM comes up with situations without forming any opinions about how they should turn out. When he gets the situation to a point where the players can't ignore it, he lets them loose to deal with it however they like.

I haven't really done the first one. Though it is an extension of how many disadvantages were ideally used in the Hero System and other games of its type. I think it is a good start, but still requires the GM to be vigilant in order to not railroad the players into doing what he wants.

The second has real promise in that it trains the GM to not invest in specific outcomes of situations. The question is: what does he invest in? A good game, naturally, but I think there needs to be something more than that.

So the question remains open. What is the balance of power between the player having input and the GM getting satisfaction from his contribution? I know I'm not near the answer yet.

Of course, this is all ignoring games that have no GM, but I'll save that for another time.

A Bit About Toy Factor

2005-04-12T11:40:00.000-07:00

Someone on the Forge brought up the idea of "toy factor" (or words to that effect) a while ago. The idea is that, beyond supporting any creative agenda, an RPG can have aspects that are just fun to play with.

At the time, I took note of the concept and moved on, but I've been thinking about it this week and it makes total sense to me.

After my last game session wherein we made characters with which to playtest my upcoming game, Musha Shugyo, I suggested that someone else in the group might GM something so that I could get a chance to play. One of the guys brought up the possibility of a space opera game using the Hero System. I'm a Hero junkie of old, and was thrilled at the prospect. I dusted off my rulebook and started getting reacquainted.

Then I realized: I love the Hero System because making a character is challenging, stimulating, and fun. At least for me. Part of what I like about RPGs is coming up with a cool character and then making that character come alive with the game system. It's toy factor all over.

I'm sure that lots of folks find lots of different parts of systems engaging on a toy level. It's something to think about when analyzing the "why we play" of a group.

It's How You Play the Game

2005-04-03T22:06:00.000-07:00

I've had some mixed results when trying to play some of the recent wave of indie RPGs. I will talk about the games and what happened when I played them later on, but I want to start with a notion I have about how you play a game.

There's a cool little card game that you may know called Bang! It's silly and fun and evokes spaghetti westerns on purpose. It also serves as a great illustration about my whole deal regarding how you play a game.

There is minimal strategy in Bang! You get a role which dictate which other characters have to die in order for you to win. So you have to figure out who is who and who you want to shoot. But beyond that, you draw cards, then you use them to unleash mayhem on one and all. The game was designed to be played fast, loose, and without a lot of thinking about stuff.

So I played the game and loved it, and got a copy for myself. Then I brought it to a regular board gaming group that I had at the time. They didn't get it. These guys were all serious gamers who wanted to be able to make and execute a grand plan. They couldn't handle a game where each turn you take the cards you are given and use them as best you can as quickly as you can. They did not like the game.

Then I brought it to a family gathering, thinking that a light, quick game would be just the thing to play with my parents. Wrong again. My father, who is a long-time player of traditional card games, couldn't grasp the concept that you are not trying to collect anything or get rid of anything. He wanted to equate the game to Oh Hell, or at least to UNO. He didn't like the game.

I use this as an example, because it is a simple illustration of a common primciple. A designer makes certain assumptions when creating a game. He forms an idea in his head about how the players will behave during the game. These ideas might be based on his own play group, or they might be based on idealized thoughts of the perfect play group. The important thing is that the assumptions are there. And if the people playing the game don't conform to the assumptions, the game will not be fun--at least not fun in the way that it was designed to be.

Some (but still very few) games try to solve this problem by providing detailed examples of play, usually in the form of a transcript of a fictional game. This is an essetial part of writing good instructions for a game, and one for which I can find no excuse not to include. But the problem is that not all players read the rules. It's usually one person trying to tell the others how it's done.

Another problem (and one that unusual RPGs often have) is that the game is similar enough to some other game that the players are familiar with that they assume it plays the same. This is a killer. I have spent most of my gaming career assuming that every RPG was to be played exactly the same as every other and that rules sets just describe how the actions are resolved. It's very hard to teach old gamers new tricks (harder than dogs by a long shot in my experience). I have yet to discover a great way to teach experienced players to play a game the way you want them to. It's a topic that I'm sure I'll get much more into as time goes on.

What the heck is a game anyway?

2005-04-02T22:13:00.000-08:00

The Oxford English Dictionary has several definitions of use to us:

game, n.
1. Amusement, delight, fun, mirth, sport. Often in game and glee, game and play, joy and game; also game and solace. upon her game: in fun. no game =
‘no fun’. Obs. exc. dial.
...
3. a.
An amusement, diversion, pastime.
Also collect., play, diversion. at game: at play.
...
4. a. A diversion of the
nature of a contest, played according to rules,
and displaying in the result
the superiority either in skill, strength, or good
fortune of the winner or
winners. For round, square game, see ROUND, SQUARE. at game: at play.

The first definition is interesting in that it is the oldest (and is now considered obsolete). It and 3.a. both make a game sound like something that is devoted to fun. This makes sense because the root word (gamen or gaman) means joy or glee. Many of the problems that I have had with games in the past have to do with definition 4.a., which has become the standard usage of the term.

A game, as I see it, is a thing that one does with other people in order to have fun. In our screwed-up overly competitive, rat-race world, we have this idea that a game is something that you play to display superiority. But what about the rest of our lives that are crammed full of dominance establishing activities? Don't we deserve a break from that? Why should I take time out of my struggle to get ahead at work only to struggle to get the better of my friends?

Role-playing games, in many ways, seem to fit the bill for me. The point of an RPG doesn't have to be about being better than someone else. Role-playing can be about getting together with friends and creating something cool. When I was younger that worked well. I gamed. I had fun with others. No problems. So why doesn't that work so easily anymore?

The folks over that the Forge have established (in my mind convincingly) that role-playing can be "about" one or a combination of a few simple things. To me, it all comes down to what a game is. And I think that a game is any kind of structured social fun. For some people, what's fun is competing with others to establish superiority as described in the OED definition 4.a. above. Those folks structure their fun by making rules that establish a level playing field for everyone competing. This style of role-playing is pretty easy to do. It's the other folks that have more trouble.

Most of the people that I used to play games with can't even figure out what they like about the game, or what they used to do that was cool that they can't seem to do anymore. Without a better grasp of what your social fun looks like, it's damn hard to find or make rules that make it happen. I'll be talking about this a lot more in future posts. The Forge guys have made some real headway toward defining what makes the game fun for a variety of folks (though in a way, I'm not sure that they have it as nailed as they think they do). But the finding a way to determine where you and your fellow players fit into the scheme is less well established. And figuring out what to do about it seems to be entirely hit-or-miss at this point.

The Deal

2005-03-31T13:55:00.000-08:00

I'm mostly here to talk about role-playing games. Pen and paper, sit around a table or living room with your friends, full-on geekin' out role-playing games.
There has been a lot of movement in the realm of role-playing theory lately. Particularly at the Forge, people are talking about the hobby with more thought and scrutiny than ever before. I'm not here to affirm to refute the good work going on around the Web. I'm here to work my way through bad role-playing to good. I'll talk about theory, I'll talk about actually playing the games, and I'll ask a lot of questions. I hope that folks will help me answer the questions that I ask and will share their insights.
So that's the deal. Let's get going!