A multi-way conversation between roleplaying game authors and developers. Occasionally useful.

 
Iron Developer and a New Games Competition
posted by Doc Blue at 9:49 AM

Folks, http://www.irondeveloper.net is active.

What is Iron Developer, you ask? Check the site for details, but it is a special event which I started at Origins last year in which would be RPG designers crank out their best efforts in one hour.

Why do I mention it here? Because I am seriously considering hosting an on-line competition, ala the New Style Games suggestion posted early in the history of this Blog. IMHO, Iron Developer is the perfect place to host such a contest and I am more than happy to work with my team to make it happen.

Though I am asking for your thoughts, this is mostly an announcement for you notification....

"Chairman Blue"

 
Being a Radio man in a Television world.
posted by E. Burns at 10:10 PM

Radio men understand.

Back in the dawn of broadcast media, the world was based on radio. Powerful towers broadcasting signals that people received at home. They painted pictures with words, producing new and exciting worlds for the listening audience, who collaborated through imagination. News, entertainment, music, talk, quiz shows, radio dramas, educational programming -- you name it, it appeared on the radio. I love the old radio shows. One of my favorites is the Lux Radio Theater which took a movie in current release -- current release -- brought the original stars back to the stage, and had them perform an abridged version of the movie over the radio. I listened to The Maltese Falcon with Bogie and the rest, compressed down into a half hour, one summer working Renn Festivals during the early nineties. It was on a radio station that specialized in old time radio shows during the evening, which is the only way I ever knew about it.

Those days, of course, are dead. Television came in and wiped them clean. The remains of that world are found on 'morning zoo radio' involving shocking talk, news mcnuggets and nothing of the art of radio, and National Public Radio -- the last bastion of Radio as it was, with thought provoking shows in many genres and styles, listened to by a tiny, tiny percentage of the people watching television with glazed looks on their faces. And you're wondering why I'm bringing it up on an RPG discussion list.

Well, look at the online world of 1989. It was entirely text based. Downloading graphics involved hours and Kermit or ZModem. Stories were the entertainment in this world, and commercial concerns were minimal. But then came the web, with graphics and sound and movement, ultimately, and the textual online world was driven back to the fringes.

And then look at what they call 'pen and paper' roleplaying these days. You'll recognize it as what we used to call roleplaying. Today, it's being pushed to the side by the double sided assault of online role playing and computer 'RPGs' that have little or no active role playing but lots of watching and button pushing and listening to full motion videos and stories and voice actresses....

We're the radio men, it seems to me. And television is driving our audience away to an inferior product in many ways, that loses all the things that makes our hobby special but assumes the superficial trappings in its stead. And there is no stopping this process. History seems to prove that.

The question is... is there any way to develop a 'National Public Radio' for role playing and RPG innovation? Is there a way to create a bastion of 'pen and paper' that at the least maintains its audience, bringing in the new at least as fast as we lose the old?

I'm curious what people think.

 
The Other Intentional Fallacy
posted by Bruce Baugh at 7:11 PM

In literary criticism, the intentional fallacy is the belief that the author's intent is normative when it comes to interpreting a work. The idea is that authors do things they weren't consciously planning and which are nonetheles part of the work. I've been thinking about something else that could also be called the intentional fallacy: the belief that works - in this case, roleplaying games - emerge out of a well-crafted plan. In the words of the sage, "I wish."

Take what will be a fairly important bit of new mechanics in the Gamma World Player's Handbook: the presentation of a simple network that lets players and GMs trace the effects of individuals' and factions' actions on the overall well-being of a community. The social model exists as it does now because...well, in the beginning I had four authors scheduled for the GW PHB. Various of them became unavailable because of schedule conflicts and other such matters. One of them, Patrick O'Duffy, suggested a friend of his, Geoff Skellams. Now, I knew of Geoff from his work on Demonground, a fine webzine for modern-day horror games, but we'd never really interacted. So we had one of those sound-each-other-out exchanges of e-mail, found each other satisfactory, and he signed on. I told him about my desire to stat up communities as a sort of special character, and he responded with his thought about statting environmental challenges as characters. Then we had a delay at the end of the year while management reviewed my series bible and plans, and Geoff brought up the concept of cognitive maps, from the field of neural networking, which he's studied academically. The more he explained, the more I liked it, and now he's off working on some templates for general use.

If I had not been delayed by bad health, if Patrick had not been delayed by complications on his end, if management had not paused over the holidays, if Geoff had not taken a flier on an idea that many developers would have dismissed...the social rules in Gamma World would have come out quite different. And just about every element is like that. Some things may come out just the way I'd planned...but then I'm an oddball anyway, and any of the other developers who might have gotten the job would have put their own spin on things. All of which is to say merely that contigency is king in game design.

Now to figure out how to tell the public that.

 
No, No, He's Resting
posted by Bruce Baugh at 7:10 AM

I have been horribly busy with a flurry of development work lately. It's settling down, and I expect to have some posts soon reflecting on lessons learning during this bout of getting Gamma World supplements scheduled.

 
"Get Out of Jail Free"
posted by Chris Meadows at 5:24 PM

In the old boardgame Monopoly, one of the most sought-after Chance cards is the "Get Out of Jail Free" card...if you get sent to jail, this card lets you "break the rules" (even though it is, itself, part of the rules) and escape from the jail space without paying the bail money. (Of course, in real life there are times when one needs something a little stronger.)

This brings to mind an interesting trend I've seen in roleplaying games recently: the inclusion of rules that also allow players to "break the rules."

I first noticed it in Feng Shui, and its "luck" points. For each point a player put into the "Luck" ability of his character, he could add an extra positive die onto his task resolution roll result...converting a success into an even bigger success, or rescuing success from failure. It was also suggested that, for the sake of interesting stunts, characters should feel free to make small changes to reality, assumptions based on the nature of the places the action was happening. Not to say "is there a chandelier I can swing on," but rather just to assume there was and run with it.

The next place I saw it was in Adventure! with Inspiration points, which could be used to power characters' special abilities, to add more dice to the number that are to be rolled (thus increasing the potential number of successes)...or to do "Dramatic Editing," which is to say, _buying_ a small change to reality so that a failure becomes an opportunity for a success. (I've heard that Theatrix also had some kind of mechanism similar to this, but since I've never seen that game, I wouldn't know.)

And then, in Spycraft and D20 Modern, there is a mechanic similar to Feng Shui's Luck, called "Action Dice". A player gets a certain number of "action points" per level, and for each point he can roll a die (or dice, depending on level) to add onto a task resolution roll...again making the success greater or saving it from being failure. A player may choose to add this action die after he's seen what the roll is, but before the DM has told him if it was a success or failure. (This mechanic is so recent that D&D3 didn't have it; perhaps this is one of the reasons they're coming out with a revised edition soon.)

I may may have missed some older games (or some current games) with similar mechanics, but I think it's interesting that so many of them are happening all at once now. Each of those mechanics is like that "Get Out of Jail Free" card—it gives the player the power to override the rules (or even the gamemaster) in some minor way. Even though the gamemaster is still in charge of interpreting the rules, and the dice will still give arbitrary results, it at least gives the player the feeling that the game is less arbitrary and that he can "beat the dice" and get away with something that he otherwise couldn't.

Why has this trend come about, I wonder? Is it more than just gamers getting fed up with bad rolls?

 
Thoughts about why we need game systems
posted by Chris Meadows at 2:27 PM

There are many roleplaying game systems available, ranging from quite simple (diceless systems such as Nobilis, or simple diced systems such as FUDGE or Feng Shui) to incredibly complex (Fringeworthy comes to mind, as does Hero System). There is an incredible diversity of game systems.

It occurs to me to wonder, why do we need them? I ask not in a "hey, let's throw out all these crufty rule things and go with ANARCHY, baby!" sense, but as a topic for discussion.

The obvious answer is, of course, so that game sessions don't turn into a game of cops-and-robbers where we can say, "I got you!" "No, I got you!" at each other all day. Rules provide a way to adjucate who "got" who, rather than taking each other's word for it (since each person is naturally inclined to want to "win" an encounter). Whether that adjucation is based on a randomizer or on a third party comparing ability scores, it has some sort of objective basis outside the conflict.

People who have sufficient maturity and trust in each other can leave all rules aside...even the relatively loose strictures of ranked ability imposed by a simple system like Nobilis. I participate in roleplay on a small private chatserver frequented by a group of close friends (including at least one other member of this blog). This server sort of evolved naturally out of a bunch of like-minded people getting together and talking, but has grown over the years into a forum for a sort of textual improv theater.

There are no restrictions on character power level; characters are angels, demons, gods, demigods, personifications of mystic forces, superheroes, and ordinary people—whoever the person playing them finds interesting. There is no specific gamemaster, either, though people take turns setting up and running "plots," which are adventures that might be called "campaigns" in a more structured game setting. "Task resolution" is as simple as figuring out what the character (or characters) ought to be able to do, and whether the task is larger or smaller than that limit. It's sort of like Nobilis with less system, or perhaps De Profundis would be more apt comparison—we don't even have character sheets; just internal knowledge of what our characters can do.

The key to making this work is that we trust each other. If my friend thinks a certain task is outside of my character's limits, then I take his word for it, and the same in reverse. In a way, it gets to the very heart of roleplay in the dictionary sense: "to act out."

It seems to me that a lot of the reason for having rules is to let people who trust each other less (at least as far as understanding the abilities and limitations of characters goes—I'm not going to play with someone I expect to stab me in the back, rules or no rules) find a common ground on which to play.

With that in mind, it would seem that we would really only need one or two sets of simple rules, like FUDGE, which could be adapted to all sorts of situations enough to let people agree on who has the ability to do what. But this gets into matters of individual taste...some people prefer simple, low-granularity rules; others want something that can let them determine effects that come a lot closer to reality as they see it. Interestingly enough, degree of complication does not necessarily map directly to degree of realism.

Some rule systems seem to be better suited for specific genres...even rule systems that try to be generic. Can there ever be a true "generic" system? I suspect that there is an inverse relationship between degree of complication and degree of generalism. Because all the genres are so different, effects that work one way in one place will not work the same way someplace else...so to simulate all genres with less work, you need to have more latitude to adapt the effects as necessary.

I probably haven't said anything new to most people here, but I hope I've at least said it in an interesting way.

 
What People Game For
posted by Bruce Baugh at 8:11 AM

Since I've recently been running more games than I've been able to for a couple of years, I've been thinking freshly about the question of what leaves gamers happy. This is a practical question: given that every game has some ups and some downs, what kinds of ups seriously outweigh the down?

Pause for a tangential comment: one of the things we don't talk about much in public about the art of game design is that most gaming is at best mediocre. Whatever they're playing, most people run shallow, unnuanced, straightforward adventures befalling characters who have a strong element of cliche and stereotype in their nature and presentation. The thing is, a lot of gamers are having fun, too. Those of us who wish to drive up the tone of gaming a bit need to make sure to explain how the rest connects to the basics and to emphasize the element of enjoyment, because the audience of grimness-loving masochists just isn't big enough to sustain all the games with artistic ambition. We need advice that decays gracefully down to where most folks are, offering little steps as well as big ones.

Okay back at my original topic. I have this working theory. A lot of gamers - it should be unnecessary to add "not all, because everything is someone's most favorite, someone's least favorite, and someone's irrelevancy", but I'll do it for clarity's sake - game for the Neat Moments. That is, if you give them some specific moments where they get to do the things they like best, whether it's cool combat or particularly dramatic exposition or the chance to use a secret power or whatever, they'll happily put up with a bunch of draggy, unengaging stuff. Great scenes trump bad acts, to use the theatrical categories that White Wolf applies to its adventures. Whereas if the session includes no glaring defects - defined here again in terms of what the players find cool and fun - but lacks any sterling moments, it'll seem overall less satisfactory.

Anyone else want to chime in?

 
The Street Performer's Protocol And The Storyteller's Bowl
posted by Bruce Baugh at 5:43 PM

I have to say that I am stunned and delighted at the response to the Asia Ascendant pages. We're going to get past a thousand unique visitors today. Now, I realize that not all of these folks would have paid anything at all for the thing, but if even half paid something in the $5-7 range after looking at some preview pages, that would make it right about as profitable for the writers as doing something for publication by the game companies we usually write for. (The requirements of art, layout, hosting, and the like would add to this, of course.) I am therefore inclined to take down and dust off some concepts I've discussed with some of the folks here in years past. Presented for your consideration, a scheme for alternative funding of games.

The title, by the way, refers to a concept promulgated by cryptographers Bruce Schneier and John Kelsey in this paper and an application of it to fiction that never ended up going anywhere.

What I'm thinking of for gaming is about this...

An author or authors presents the outline of a game project, laying out its expected length and content. The outlines I write for game books for White Wolf run a few thousand words, and describe the tone of the project, important considerations, contigency plans, and things like that; those would all be appropriate for a "Gamer's Bowl" presentation. The outline includes the costs of the project - writing, editing, illustration, and presentation.

People can then make contributions big or small. We first discussed this back before PayPal, and these days I'd point at it for simplicity's sake. When the payments total the costs of a step, the creators go ahead and take that step. If the total never reaches, say, the costs of suitable graphic design but does cover writing and editing, then the end result is a manuscript something like the Asia Ascendant one. Otherwise it's a complete product ready for market.

The result is then available online freely for all. It is not released into the public domain - creators retain their copyrights. It's just that anyone can now download the finished book and use it. Everyone who contributed more than some threshold amount (a few bucks, probably) gets listed in the acknowledgements as a patron, and we would want to design a snazzy little logo for people to use on web pages and such proclaiming their patronage. People who contribut more than some higher threshold amount get a copy of the book printed and bound by some print-on-demand or short-run facility; others can choose to buy a copy of the book in that format for the cost of having it made and shipped. Money donated in excess of the costs of creation is distributed to the creators as tips and/or held in reserve for future expenses.

There are some obvious potential pitfalls here. The money needs handling by someone who's trustworthy and competent. If the donations never reach the amount necessary for writing and editing, then at some point people should get a refund. The same is true if after, say, a year the creators working on a given step cannot make satisfactory progress. (That happens. We suffer personal tragedies and sometimes just plain writer's block and its equivalent.) Payment should probably happen upon completion of a step; it's just that the creators know the money's there for it when they go to work. I know that if I do this for anything substantial, I'm going to want a darned good advisor.

The level of interest in Asia Ascendant and the continuing small-scale but significant success of online distribution of roleplaying games makes me think that the market is ready for this kind of thing, and I'm feeling inclined to write up a couple of proposals for small ventures I could handle as a one-man operation to test the waters. What do others think of it all?

 
Back To The Oars, Slaves
posted by Bruce Baugh at 8:20 AM

C'mon, someone's got to have some weirdness to dump on the nice folks....

 
Total Self-Aggrandizement: Asia Ascendant
posted by Bruce Baugh at 11:17 PM

As some of you know, I was the last developer on White Wolf's Trinity line. One book was already written and developed but had received no production attention (editing, layout, or illustration) when the line was cancelled. It's sat on my hard drive ever since. Well, thanks in part to an encouraging example from Steve Kenson, authors James Maliszewski and John Snead and I decided to dust the thing off. This is, as it stands, an unofficial supplement, reflecting our personal senses of what's appropriate for Trinity, how to resolve some of the plot threads left dangling, and like that.

You can find it at http://www.baugh.info/asas/index.html - right now there's HTML available, and our friend Jess Heinig is working on a PDF conversion that I'll post when it's ready.

Parts of this are relevant to things we've talked about here. John and James did some of the best worldbuilding I've ever seen, and that's not me boasting; they surprised and delighted me often. In Chapter 3 John did wonders of social extrapolation, with a China that is dense and weird and creepy and yet very interesting and quite plausible. And in Chapter 4 James wrote some gloriously concise, clear, useful rules for the mechanics of dealing with the civil service. These guys raised my expectations and desires for quality in this kind of venture, really.

 
RSS, I Think
posted by Bruce Baugh at 9:46 AM

Rock Scissors Blog is now available via RSS, or it is at the moment, via http://rockscissorsblog.blogspot.com/rockscissorsblog.xml . Now, the Blogger help pages say that it should be /rss/rockscissorsblog.xml , but this is what I get for now. If things shift, I'll announce.

Those of you who, like me, know little or nothing about the Rich Site Summary format can read a good introduction here.

 
Moulin Rouge, Anti-Naturalism, Puppetland and Victoriana
posted by Sean at 1:38 AM

Quite possibly my favorite film ever is Baz Lurhmann's "Moulin Rouge". This post may contain spoilers, so be warned. That said, they're not harsh, I assure you.

Watching it again, I was intrigued by the way characters are given properties and gifts, things they can just do that other people can't. And they're normal things, simply elevated to perfection. Christian can write, but no-one else is allowed to. When they try to write, they all produce hideous convolution, where Christian produces inspirational simplicity. Harold Ziddler and Satine are both permitted to lie, but no-one else can. When Christian tries, he stumbles and is unconvincing. But Ziddler can sell any lie, no matter how absurd. (See the Gothic Tower scene for proof.) The Duke, via his manservant Warner, can kill. No-one else can. But he can't for the life of him see through any lie. He exists to be fooled.

And so it occured to me that this very non-naturalistic style is perfectly reproduced with Puppetland's rules. In Puppetland, everyone has three things they can do, three things they can't do, and three things they are. No dice are used. You simply check the page. If mine says, "I can lie and fool people" then sure enough, I can lie and fool people. Vice versa, if I can't do something, then to do it even once requires me to take a 'wound', and wounds are never healed in Puppetland.

Which sets me thinking further: What other genres could you use this in? And the answer is: Anything Victorian. Using Emma as an example, Emma can lie. Emma can be very attractive. Emma cannot make a successful match. Emma is very stubborn. It is not hard at all to construct the sorts of protagonists you get in Victorian stories in this way, because they work in the same way Moulin Rouge does. Everyone has their ability, their hammer that they can use to push the story and the trademark that defines them as who they are.

 
Simple and Epic
posted by Malcolm at 12:14 PM

One thing that gets my goat about D20 is the way system trivia accretes at the top end of the scale. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially when considering the virtues of its default, skirmishy play style but at the same time it loads quite a bit of preparation onto the GM and players. I'm thinking of gods in particular, who require quite a bit of management to really represent the full extent of their qualities. Sure, you could probably scare the pants of the players without using half of the WotC rules, but for some reason that doesn't sit well with me, especially because of a principle (which is probably not original, though I've never heard it before) that I floated in the Mage Storytellers Handbook: "With all else equal, the PCs are better." In short, players simply have more time to manage their characters' capabilities than a GM who expends comparable effort on NPCs does.

So I'd like some way of managing high level play in a relatively crunchy system that keeps rules management (and the increasing disparity between player rules management and GM rules management) down to a minimum.

So here's a very rough idea:

1) Epic Thresholds

Nobilis has a nice, direct hierarchy that is pretty inspiring for my purposes. It lets you know what your PC can do with varying levels of effort and leads to the kind of mythic feel I want out of high powered play, a la chess games, riddle contests and Invincible Secret Sword techniques.

Applying this to D20, I'd probably start applying the first rank of uber-competence once characters are capable of achieving a 30 or so when they Take 10, then add another rank at 10 point increments.

2) Epic Qualities/Feats as Descriptors

So once we get to that point, we homogenize feats (or replace them with an alternative doodad). Simply, what we to is link a feat to a descriptor. Every time we do this we allow a +10 Epic bonus. This catapults anybody who has a possible 30 into having an actual 30 (nifty power rank 1) with the D roll offering the possibility of rank 2 or 3 (or even 4 or infinity if we go for the different open ended/auto-bonus dice options).

We give some of these standard prerequisites ("finish the damn two weapon fighting tree"). Others can be purely story-based. No matter; the success level, being Epic, bleeds down into gormless sub epic play by being an absolute success at the die number in anything that PC attempts that falls under the descriptor, which is in tern encapsulated by what the character was capable of doing before getting godlike. The dude with Divine Double Saber had a chance of hitting everyone with all his iterative attacks+2 (for the 2 extra maxed 2wpn attacks), so when he attacks now, he just hits everybody with an AC of about 30+his roll or less, with just his single roll. We may require him to have Divine Critical to automatically hit with every single crit and Divine Damage to automatically max out base damage.

This reduces the number of die rolls to one, and, in the right combination, allows the player to just note her maximum damage and apply it. He cannot, however, exercise this against someone with a Divine Defense who gets a higher Epic threshold on the final roll (rather than just a better die roll). There are some problems with this (the gods make you roll more dice), but I think it makes some sense as a sketch.

This way, high powered play actually reduces mechanics over time. Not everyone will want it, but I'm interested in it. It's just a bit rough and largely derived from smarter predecessors.

 
More Thoughts on War
posted by James at 6:13 AM

In a previous post, I claimed there are two different approaches to adjudicating mass combats in RPGs. I think I spoke too hastily and left out a third approach. This approach is the one used in classic games like Bushido and Pendragon. Basically, the commanders of each force make opposed Battle (or whatever skill) tests, with the winner gaining a strategic advantage that passes on to the units in the mass combat. The battle is then fought on a unit level, with the commanders of the units doing the same sort of thing, although with more options, such as tactical maneuvers and so forth. This in turn generates further modifiers that pass down to the individual level, where warriors fight it out, probably using a random table to generate encounters (again, modified by the results higher up the chain).

The advantage of this approach is that PCs can be inserted anywhere, from the field commanders down to individual fighters. Likewise, the results of what happens at higher levels of command affect those beneath them. Thus, even the bravest and most puissant knight can be screwed over by an inept commander. My problems with this approach are twofold. First, it relies heavily on lots of tables and charts to cross-index things and determine results. That seems rather infelicitous and inefficient. Secondly, the modifiers don't go up the chain. If a unit does well, for example, I think its success should have repercussions for the field commander's next roll, since it gives him more options and increases the hand he has to play against his opposite number.

Since the D&D campaign I'm playing in is very likely to involve some massive Helm's Deep-style grand melees in the near future, I'm tempted to work up a test of this idea for d20. If it works, then I might actually have something usable for all those DMs out there looking to add mass combats to their campaigns without resorting to an abstract wargame that has little to do with the rules they're currently using.

 
Introduction
posted by Elizabeth at 8:20 PM

I'm E. Deirdre Brooks, contributing author to many WW and SSS products, co-author of one Feng Shui product, and currently developer of SSS' new upcoming Warcraft RPG.

 
Sneaking in late
posted by aJury at 11:44 AM

Haven't had much free time this week, so I'm behind. I'm Adam Jury, and currently I work for Guardians of Order as a graphics production assistant. I also bum around the Shadowrun side of FanPro as their webmaster for ShadowrunRPG.com, a gig which I picked up mostly due to my years of editing the Origins Award nominated Shadowrun Supplemental. Due to lack of time most of my personal projects are on the back-burner, but I hope to make the time to do more development work this year, perhaps around Sorcerer or any GOO products I can sneak my thoughts into.

I've been playing in a weekly [now twice-monthly] D&D3 game with James Maliszewski's group in Toronto since moving to Guelph in November.