Rock Scissors Blog

Whither the PDA D&D?

2009-01-28T10:13:00.000-08:00

[This post was originally made on August 23rd, 2002 on the "Writing On Your Palm" blog. WoYP has since been repurposed as Jeff Kirvin's own personal blog, and the archives have vanished—however, I was able to retrieve this from the blogger.com composer. In some ways, it's still as true today for the iPhone as it was back then for the PDA.]

Amid the explosion of fiction, nonfiction, reference, religious, and textbook e-books that have been appearing on palmtops over the last few years, one category of books seems to be conspicuously absent: the roleplaying game. I don't mean the computer roleplaying games like Neverwinter Nights or Diablo, but the books that preceded them: games of social interaction that are played with pencil and paper and dice and, most importantly, imagination.

Although some companies have been releasing electronic versions of their roleplaying game books, none of these have been what I think of as "e-books" in the fullest sense of the word. Either they are desktop applications with the text of a book inside (as with the recent Vampire: Revised CD-ROM), or else they are Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files—suitable for printing but not really for reading on-screen—or for putting on a PDA.

At first look, roleplaying games might not even seem ideally suited to palmtop use. Number-intensive games such as Dungeons & Dragons often contain wide or tall charts, which could not be displayed on most PDAs' screens without scrolling or panning. Moreover, gamemasters often flip back and forth through their paper books faster than they could jump to sections on even the handiest PDA.

However, a roleplaying game e-book would not have to replace its paper version to be useful. Gamers are accustomed to using roleplaying aids, such as quick reference cards or screens, in addition to their physical books. An e-book, with its search feature, could serve as a sort of "ultimate reference card". For instance, if a gamer needs to know how many hit points a Gelatinous Cube has, entering "gelat" in a search box will probably find the information at least as quickly as thumbing through the Monster Manual to the "G" section—especially when it turns out that Gelatinous Cubes are actually filed under "O" for "Ooze".

Players who game at someone else's house might find an e-book a useful pocket reference, trading less convenience in flipping pages for more convenience in not having to carry full-sized books around. Likewise, people who play in LARP (Live Action Roleplaying) games usually have to do without any reference books at all—just imagine trying to run around in the character of a vampire or werewolf while carrying several pounds of paper! But an e-book takes up very little extra weight or space, especially if one is already carrying a PDA for use in task resolution.

And, of course, a poor substitute for a paper book still is a substitute, and better than no book at all. With game books and a die-rolling program on his PDA, a few pieces of paper, and willing players, a talented gamemaster could run a game literally anywhere, at any time.

A roleplaying game PDA e-book would share with the Acrobat e-book the lower fixed costs of production—no setting up and running printing presses necessary, but just creating a formatted electronic file and setting it up for download. The price could be set a few bucks lower than the physical book, to reflect that cost decrease and lure more people into buying it.

So why hasn't anybody tried a more portable roleplaying e-book yet?

The reasons are a little complicated.

To begin with, roleplaying is no longer the fad market it was in the early to mid 1980s. There are still a few publishers (such as Wizards of the Coast, Palladium, and White Wolf) who can move vast quantities, but for most presses, a book is considered quite successful if it sells even 1,000-2,000 copies.

Due to economies of scale, books produced at this lower volume cost more to print, and have to be more expensive to buy, than equivalent-sized mass-market books. These books often have a very thin margin of profit, shaved as close as the publisher can make it and still hope to stay in business. (This is also why some RPG books are published only as PDFs—they cost much less and are less risky to publish than a paper book that might not even sell out its first print run. It is largely assumed that the buyer will be printing it out and binding it himself; thus a PDF is not so much an e-book as it is the "ghost" of a printed book that the purchaser will then provide with a body.)

However, among some gamers there is a perception that these high prices are gouging on the part of greedy publishers. Some of these even proclaim loudly via newsgroups and bulletin boards that if games are going to cost so much, they'd rather download them from KaZaa or get copies from their friends than pay for them.

In a market as small as roleplaying games', losing even a handful of sales to unauthorized copying can make the difference between black or red ink, and there is a fear that some of the complainers will be hostile enough to start passing around copies simply for the heck of it. The game publishers with whom I have spoken recognize that printed pages can be illicitly scanned whether the book is also published electronically or not, but at the same time do not want to make it any easier for malfeasants by publishing in HTML or some other unencrypted form. With the market for full-fledged gaming e-books as yet untested, it seems like too much of a risk to release them without adequate protection.

An outside observer might look at the success Baen has had boosting print sales with its unencrypted Free Library and Webscriptions e-books, and prognosticate that gaming companies could do the same thing and reap the same benefits. Yet, the RPG publishing industry is very different from the mass-market publishing industry.

As mentioned before, individual sales are very important in keeping RPG publishers afloat, and they cannot risk anything that might jeopardize even a few. In contrast, the much-larger fiction publishing companies can afford to chance losing some here and there. Heck, most large publishing companies can actually afford to recall and destroy copies of their books that did not sell! You'd never see a gaming publisher do that.

Furthermore, novelists—and especially the kind of science-fiction/fantasy novelists who write for Baen—have many enthusiastic fans, most of whom would never dream of doing anything to hurt the objects of their affection. (Quite a few Baen fans will conscientiously buy print copies of anything they get free, and some will even buy extra e-copies when the free e-books are sold for money elsewhere, such as through Fictionwise!) But gaming companies enjoy a strange kind of love-hate relationship with their customers, some of whom will openly declare their love for the game yet turn right around and Gnutella it because they think the price is too high.

One gaming company actually did try an open-format release. The now-defunct FASA bundled its first-edition Earthdawn game onto an HTML CD-ROM, and gave it away free in collectible-card-game magazines. (And, thanks to iSilo, I have it on my Cli—'s memory card even now.) It was hoped that this release would spark more interest in Earthdawn, which was not selling as well as FASA's other lines. Although Earthdawn did experience a spike in sales, the effect was only temporary. FASA later sold the line to another company.

Is it likely we will ever see roleplaying game e-books on our Palms or PocketPCs? Perhaps. As more and more people in the main gaming demographic (college students and older) acquire PDAs and start using them for other things related to roleplaying, perhaps the demand will make itself known. There is a way that publishers could provide PDA-compatible e-books and not risk their content falling into the wrong hands: by using a secured PDA format, with Digital Rights Management (DRM) built in.

There are several secure PDA e-book formats, but I feel the best is Palm Digital Media (formerly Peanut Press)'s Palm Reader. PDM's markup language provides emphasis (such as italics or bold), formatting, odd ASCII characters, tables of contents, and limited image display—and also includes unobtrusive yet effective DRM. Each Palm book is locked to its purchaser's credit card number—a key he will probably not want to give out to other people.

Palm Reader has versions for PalmOS and Windows CE PDAs, as well as Windows and Macintosh desktops. There is no limit on the number of copies a user can have active; the e-book could serve as his desktop reference at home, and be used remotely on his PDA or tablet PC.

It seems possible that a PDA roleplaying game e-book might lead to more sales of both the e-book and the "tree-book": people who already have the paper book might want a convenient reference version for the Palm, and people who try a less expensive e-copy on the Palm might decide they like it enough to buy the paper version, too. It might also bring in e-book site customers who have never been exposed to roleplaying games before.

Of course, it is also possible I might have my head in the clouds and there would be almost no demand at all. I don't think so, but it is possible. But even so, it does not seem like much of a risk to try—it would still be more economical to format an e-book that doesn't sell than to print a book that doesn't sell.

2005-04-26T06:22:00.000-07:00

I'm stuck at the crossroads of two somewhat mutually exclusive sets of ideals in the midst of a conversion project. I think I may be painted into a corner.

The project is adapting Dave Van Domelan's Toolkit system based RoboMACs setting to D20 Future. For those of you not familiar, Toolkit is a system descended from the Last print incarnation Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer's Freestyle Roleplay system. It's about a half rung up the crunch ladder from systems like OTE. You can minmax to some degree, but it's pretty well pointless. After all, we're talking about a game with two range bands; "In Range", "Out of Range."

The conversion itself isn't so much the issue - it's a neat setting and we believe that many will pick it up for a few idea thefts and more neato mecha, but it runs into a few design issues when thrust up against the Mecha rules in D20 Future. The Mecha Crusade rules are very much of the Gundam vein. Mecha are semi-rare, very large machines with componants that are so terribly large that very few special systems - like life support - can actually be built into the machine. A Mecha the size of a city block can't carry much more than a modern conventional air superiority fighter. As such, the design process is geared towards a very short equipment list for the Mecha/Pilot to use. RoboMACs Mecha are far more in the Macross vien, rather like modern fighting craft ( be it tank or jet or chopper ) along with transformation systems and the like along with a smattering of clunkier style hardsuits. The big bads, being AI, have similar technology without that pesky need to breathe and such.

As you can see, these aren't precisely compatible. Of course, that's nothing a few rules modifications couldn't fix.

Or "Why not use MechaMorphosis?" Well, for one, I don't have it and can't seem to find it locally. I'm not entirely sure it would be worth chasing down without knowing what's OGL and what's not. And based on the preview it appears to suit my needs even less than the Mecha Crusade rules, as it seems to treat the giant transforming robots as a race and assign them role based classes. Not really a bad system for a living robots system, but not really gonna do so well for the side with the squishy pilots in RoboMACs. I really don't think it would do to have two systems in play. One for the big bad sentient Robos and one for the Piloted craft of the "Good Guys."

There's also Guardians of Order's D20 mecha, but it strikes me as far too much crunch work to get the mecha going. And I have to question if its market penetration is deep enough that much benefit would be gained from using its rules rather than something hand-rolled or extended from D20 Future.

Then along comes a fascinating suggestion. One I'm surprised I didn't think of as its my default choice when it comes to what rules subset should I use for this project. Mutants and Masterminds.

How does everyone else solve this type of quandry? Or am I overthinking a simple situation.

Street Performers, Bowls, Plants...and the Gaming Industry?

2004-09-01T19:31:00.000-07:00

Nobody seems to say anything on this blog anymore; I gather that they've all given it up and moved on to another one. Anyway, this blog seemed lonely...and I've written a very long chunk of prose with an interesting idea about things gaming writers might consider doing. And there do still seem to be people reading this, at least via LJ's RSS feed. So what the heck, I'm crossposting this from my essay journal to see if any gaming folks left reading find it interesting.

Today, someone on the Ebook Community mailing list was asking about publishing ebooks in serial format, with a possible view toward subscription down the road. It's an interesting idea, and it could work—in theory. Certainly there have been plenty of serial writing projects on the Internet; I've belonged to some of them myself.

Probably the most successful was the Superguy listserv, a humorous superhero fiction mailing list which at its height had hundreds of subscribers and dozens of episodic posts every month. The complete archives are still available to be searched and read via links on that site, by the way, and it's well worth the time. There's a lot of drek in there, but there's certainly enough good stuff to throw Sturgeon's Law off a bit. It's mostly dead now, alas; I wish I knew what could be done to make it live again. I've halfway considered plugging it in Google AdWords just to see if it picks up any interest.

There were other such groups, too—most notably alt.pub.dragons-inn, alt.pub.havens-rest, alt.comics.lnh, etc.—but if I dwell on past glories, I'll never get to the point I want to make here, and I've got a ways to go yet. The point is the feasibility of serial publishing for money, not just for love, and I have a couple of examples to cover.

Almost exactly four years ago, back in late 2000, I happened to be hanging around SF writer Elizabeth Moon's SFFnet newsgroup at the point she and a few other SFF regulars got all-over excited about the Street Performer Protocol. The Street Performer Protocol, which I shall henceforth call SPP to save on some typing, was proposed in a white paper by John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier as an alternative means of content financing in the Internet age—sort of a modern-day version of the old Renaissance system of patronage.

The theory went that since, thanks to computers and the Internet, a completed work can be passed around ad infinitum without the author ever being compensated for his work, the author should endeavor to set a goal for how much money he wants to make out of the work—and then make that amount of money out of it before it is made available in its entirety. Anything he happened to make out of it after that would be a pleasant bonus.

The idea was that an author would create a complete work—be it a novel, a record album, a TV series, whatever. He would put the work in escrow with some reliable agency, or at least have such an agency certify that it was complete (so he wouldn't be selling a work that might never be delivered). Then he would chop that work into X+1 pieces, post the first piece to the Internet (or make it available by whatever means; the Internet is simply the most convenient), and set out a "hat" with the proviso, "Pay me whatever you want; when I get (1/X * my goal) amount of money, I'll post the next piece." Some people would chip in, others would not; either way, each piece that's released has been paid for, so it's free for anyone. And then the next bit would be paid for and released, and the next, and so on, until the last piece is published. Then, once it's all published, anyone can do whatever they want with it, because the author has already made the money he set out to make. (The white paper suggests putting the work in the public domain; a Creative Commons license would probably be more realistic today.) It gets a little more complicated than that, but follow the above link to find out more.

Getting back to Elizabeth Moon, she and others were quite enthusiastic about the idea of serial tip-jar publishing; Moon had some story notes that she'd never gotten around to publishing, nor did she think they were publishable by normal methods. So they set up the Storyteller's Bowl based on SPP principles. It was a very nice-looking website, with clean, professional design, a little illustration of a Middle-Eastern storyteller with carpet and bowl, a FAQ, and a set of writer's guidelines. "Only professional writers with a track record are eligible at this time," they said. One imagines Mrs. Moon delivering this line in stern tones, perhaps peering over the rim of half-moon spectacles as she speaks. (I have no idea if she actually owns half-moon spectacles, but she probably should.)

However, was is the operative word. As you can see by looking at the archive.org listing, it was only ever updated once—and if you go to storytellersbowl.com now, you'll just find a placeholder. After gamely hanging around unwanted for several years, its registration has finally expired. The storytellers' enthusiasm didn't last long enough to put out the bowl.

Why? I asked that question back in 2001, on the Storyteller's Bowl SFF newsgroup. There were several obvious reasons, of course: people got too busy, nobody wanted to be the first to bell the cat...but probably the biggest one was, as author Lawrence Watt-Evans put it,

Stephen King's The Plant sort of undercut the idea — it got all this hype, and then he DIDN'T FINISH IT, which has not been good for the consumer confidence factor.

Ah, yes, The Plant—Stephen King's brainstorm after his short story "Riding the Bullet" did so well as an ebook. The fly in the ointment was that King was too used to thinking in terms of paper books and just couldn't seem to get his head around the differences. This led to problems.

Back in December of 2002, I wrote an email message to the Ebook Community neatly summarizing those problems in response to someone else's inquiry. It went like this:

Oh, god. The Plant. Don't get me started.

Stephen King couldn't have made his project more ridiculous if he'd been intentionally trying to give ebooks a high-profile failure to make up for the success of "Riding the Bullet". The Plant expressly ignored several key ways ebooks differ from treebooks, for no other real reason than King thought they should work that way.

Download of different formats of the same chapter was counted as separate, different downloads and expected to be compensated as such. What?! A download is not a non-renewable resource...and if someone downloaded one format and just did the conversion himself (as he is entitled to by fair use), he'd have the same result and save his money. King compared the practice of multiple download to saying "Since I have the hardcover, you should give me the paperback free." That was totally missing the point.

"Success," and thus continuation of the project was based on what percentage of the downloads people paid for. This set an impossibly high goal, and it's not any wonder that sooner or later he failed to meet it. What should have been done was set a specific numerical or monetary goal, not unlike the Street Performer Protocol, and continue once that was met.

By tying "success" to percentage of download paid for, King also set it up so that anyone with a grudge against him or his readers could ensure that the project was not "successful," simply by writing a script to download the episodes a zillion times without paying for them. That's why on-line polls are so mistrusted—they're so easy to rig. Any script kiddie could have done the same thing with King.

In the end, the percentage of paid downloads fell below King's "success" bar, and he called the project a "failure" and terminated it unfinished—thus putting a black mark on the face of epubbing that may take a while to clean off. But even so, it's worth noting King took in hundreds of thousands of dollars for only writing half a book. Maybe that's not much by the standards of a megasuccess like King, but most other authors would have been dancing in the streets if one of their books made them even one hundred grand.

And so King shelved the book, and it cast a pall over the entire ebook industry. If such a famous author couldn't "successfully" sell a serial ebook, then the market must just not be "ready" yet. ($463,832 profit. I wish I could "fail" like that!) It was not the only reason the Storyteller's Bowl remained empty, but it was probably the biggest one.

Now it's four years later, and ironicly, it's turning out that flat-out giving one's works away for free on the Internet is usually a sure-fire way to sell more of them in print. You don't have to look far for examples: Baen, Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, and countless others are slinging ebooks every which way and selling print versions hand over fist. Forget selling on the installment plan, give it away and you'll sell even more.

This points out the fact that the SPP plan still has a few problems, even putting aside the shameful example of The Plant. Here are the ones that I see.

Writers (and other artists) don't want to limit their profit. Now, granted, most books these days sell fairly poorly; it's the rare writer indeed who can make his living entirely from the pen. But still, writers and artists don't want to think, "I can get this much...and that's it." They want to think about multiple printings, reprint rights down the road, and so on and so forth. (Heck, that's why our copyright is now umpteen zillion years long—all the big corporations saying, "Oh, please, won't someone think of the artists?") Creative types want to earn as much as they can, and continue earning it for as long as they can. (And really, don't we all?) And this leads into...

Free works better. Much as we e-nthusiasts would like to think otherwise, most people just don't want ebooks yet—or at least, they don't want to pay money for them. Certainly they don't want to pay hardcover prices for them. And yet, they'll certainly take them when they come free—and if they like them enough, they'll buy them in print, and more by the same author. As mentioned above, this has been shown multiple times; some Baen authors like Mercedes Lackey have even seen a notable increase in their non-Baen sales after giving away books free. Why, then, would we want to sell something they don't want, and sell it in pieces to boot? And this, in turn, leads to the realization that...

Consumers want convenience and conformity. Getting people to try something new and different is hard. Getting people to try something new and different and hard to understand is even harder than that. Can you imagine the puzzled looks on peoples' faces? "You want me to pay for something that isn't even available yet. And you don't even have a set price? My ever getting to see it at all depends on other schmucks chipping in? Are you crazy or something?" Also, the people who read Baen snippets (preview fragments of the first 25% of a novel that the authors throw out before Webscriptions is ready) and Webscriptions (which publishes new books divided into three monthly chunks) notwithstanding, I think most people would prefer to be able to read the whole work at once and not have to wait on an update schedule—especially if the update schedule is irregular and may not even happen at all if not enough people chip in.

That being said, I actually do think there is a place for the SPP in modern-day publishing—just not in fiction publishing. The SPP has to be applied to a medium where authors are more realistic (or pessimistic), there's a reason to buy e- instead of tree-books, and consumers are accustomed to buying piecemeal.

As you may already have guessed, I'm talking about the modern roleplaying game market. Let me hit those problems again and show why I think that in the RPG market they might be opportunities.

Gaming writers are used to limited earnings. It's sad to say, but it's true; in the game industry, five cents per word is considered to be good money if you can get it. Multiple printings? Reprints? In today's RPG hobby, depleted as it has been by loss of interest, game consoles, collectible card games, massively multiplayer games, any or all of the above (take your pick), a title that sells even one or two thousand copies is considered to be a smash hit. I suspect that the SPP could offer at least some gaming writers a chance to earn more than they would ordinarily make, not less. Especially considering that...

Many RPG sourcebooks are now published as PDF-only. In an industry where a "best-seller" only sells a couple of thousand copies, sales of the "mid-list" will barely cover the costs of even a tiny print run—and increasingly, they may not even cover that. If the theoretical ideal of print-on-demand were available, it would be the best way to market these low-volume books—but it isn't, so PDF is the next best thing. A PDF displaces the printing costs onto the buyer, so the seller has to sell fewer e-copies to break even on publishing costs. In some cases, renowned gaming writers may even sell PDFs directly to the gaming public without ever seeing a publisher at all (other than the website that sells the PDFs). Needless to say, these aren't typically given away free, since if they were then there wouldn't be anything left to sell. And gamers are used to buying stuff published in PDF form, since they're just going to print it out anyway. And they're also used to the way that...

RPGs are published piecemeal anyway. How many books make up D&D 3(.5th)rd Edition's core rules? Three—player's handbook, DM's guide, monster manual. You don't need all of them to play the game (especially if someone else is game-mastering), but they each provide content that expands upon and works with the ones that came before. And they were originally published a month or so apart, so for the first couple months, anyone who actually wanted to play would be making do with only part of it. And how many books were in the old White Wolf World of Darkness line? How many GURPS books were there? And right when gamers finally have all of them, out pops a new edition and they have to buy even more! While there have been games that were complete in and of themselves (White Wolf's Adventure! comes to mind), they're much more the exception than the rule. And even games that have been beautifully complete (Champions 4th ed. and Nobilis 2nd ed. for example) have had supplements published. Gamers are used to buying things in pieces.

It would be interesting if some gaming writer were to try this, as an experiment. Write a game, or a sourcebook, or what-have-you. Put a Creative Commons and/or OGL license on it, but keep it as close to public domain as you're comfortable with. (Perhaps one of the licenses that allows unlimited noncommercial use, since that would allow eventual complete publication elsewhere on the rare off-chance that someone might be interested.)

Break it into a few chunks, post the first chunk, then put out a tip jar (the new DropCash fundraising system from PayPal seems like it would be ideal, as it gives would-be donors graphic representation of how close they are to goal) and declare you'll post the next when you hit a certain goal. (Be sure and set a realistic goal—but then, gaming writers tend to be well aware of how many copies and how much they make per book, so should be able to come up with a good estimate.) It would probably be best to make sure that each segment is at least useful on its own, so people don't feel gypped at having to wait for something else to come out to make it useful. A good possibility would be a sourcebook for a pre-existing system such as D20 or World of Darkness; each chunk could cover a different region of a particular world, city, what-have-you.

And then...wait and see how quickly it earns its way to the goal. When it does reach the goal, leave everything available and the tip jar out; the work has earned out and now it's free. Anything that folks want to kick in afterward (and they will kick in, as more of them find and make use of the content) is gravy.

Will it work? I don't know, but I'd like to think so. It seems likely to me that it would, as long as the goals were realistic and the writing good. Granted, I've never written any gaming material myself, just hung out with folks who have, so I'm not exactly an expert in the field. Still, I'm positive it would have a better chance than Stephen King's bass-ackward The Plant plan—and just look how successful that was.

Shortcomings of D20 as a CRPG

2004-04-12T22:15:00.000-07:00

Found via a writeup on Slashdot, here is a fellow on Kuro5hin writing a fairly in-depth analysis of the problems inherent in converting the pencil-and-paper D20 RPG to a computer RPG, Temple of Elemental Evil. The fellow has a few interesting and possibly controversial opinions on what RPGs, both traditional and computer, should be, but it's still an interesting comparison of how the differences in paradigm affect the translation of one to the other.

Attracting Women Gamers

2004-01-12T02:52:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting article on female computer gamers and what attracts them, which could just as easily apply to RPG design:

Don Hopkins' RadiOMatic BlogUTron: From Barbie to Mortal Combat

I think the point about the gender balance at the development stage is an interesting one.

Where Do Gamers Come From?

2003-11-25T10:40:00.000-08:00

And why aren't there more of them? And how can we change that? I consider the angles at 20' by 20' Room.

Follow-Up

2003-11-06T05:21:00.000-08:00

Polytropos reacts to the Kim essay and provides a handy reference to RPG theory essays by Ed Heil. The best way to read the Heil pieces is in order using the links in the Polytropos item.

Weekly Reader

2003-11-04T19:26:00.000-08:00

RPG theory luminary John H. Kim has a new essay, "Story and Narrative Paradigms in Role-Playing Games." I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but given that Kim was a major contributor to the original r.g.f.a "threefold" game theory, I'm confident in bringing it to people's attention.

The Beginning of Wisdom is Knowing What the Hell to Call Things

2003-10-26T02:19:00.000-08:00

or

"Your player is a thing with the ability to do something we call 'that'."

I'm poking at a little setting that's vaguely like a freaked-out Changeling crossed with (I'm told, having never been able to find a copy of it) Kult with the express goal of handling supernatural creatures as presented in movies such as The Ring and Bless the Child. There's an overarching cosmology that I'm fleshing out and definining, since I've been working on it in odd moments for about a week, but I've hit a snag you've all probably guessed by now:

What do I call these things and the things they do?

This is an occasional problem for me, as I come up with throw-away setting concepts on a regular basis, and presumably it's an challenge in general for game designers. While I like to use straightforward terms for basic game mechanics ("traits" or "ratings" for abilities you measure, "powers" for wild things characters can do, etc), I tend to agonize over names of those traits and powers. I want something clear, yet fresh and evocative. This goes double for anything that should be an IC term.

<whine>And sometimes, it's hard.</whine>

Anyone here have trouble with this? :)

Game WISH #69

2003-10-20T18:19:00.000-07:00

I thought it would be neighborly if some of us sometimes participated in Ginger Stampley's weekly Game WISH topics. This week:

Recommend three non-RPG games for RPGers. Why do you recommend these three?

(WISH courtesy Olof Dahl's Too Many Parentheses.)

I'm tempted to give two answers: three games that are good for RPGers because they're as much like RPGs as possible, and three games that are good for RPGers because they're so different from RPGs. But that would be awfully ambitious, so I'll stick to three games total.

Lunch Money. When our ftf group was playing Amber, this terrific (non-collectible) card game from Atlas whiled away much downtime for the players outside the spotlight. The conceit is that you're a child on a playground, and the cards (with blurry black & white images that are meant to be disturbing, I think) represent offensive and defensive maneuvers you can pull. Why It's Good for RPGers. 1. Games are pretty fast. 2. If you can learn that you need to discard most of any hand without any defenses in it, who knows what else you can learn? 3. The Humiliation card: this is a powerful attack that comes with a catch - when you play it, you have to declare some inventive way that you are not just whomping your opponent but embarrassing him. RP groups that are interested in encouraging more player improv may find it easier with a few Humiliations under their belts.

Once Upon a Time. Yeah, this is: a) another Atlas card game and b) freaking obvious, BUT - in addition to the fact that it can be a lot of fun to play, and the cards are pretty, and it too loosens up the improv muscles, it also may have an, as it were, negative use: as often as not it illuminates the distance between what comes out of playing it and a real story. When I last played it with two friends, we felt that about two of our hands the entire evening attained something of the shapeliness of a real fairytale.

Basketball. Exercise is good for you and basketball is fun. Start with H-O-R-S-E if you want to work into it slowly.

Releasing OGL

2003-10-17T07:10:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure most of us have, by now, toyed, on some level with OGL derived material whether printed, released, or hidden in the bowels of the file system. And like all of us (I assume,) I've found many of the constraints of putting together a system that is still very clearly D20 or a derivative thereof irritating.

I have this wacked out desire in my head right now to take all the different left field ideas I've had for different pieces of D20 extensions and putas many of them as are appropriately compatible with each other together in a releaseable system, probably just to get the urge dealt with. I'm unsure. If I just take these chargen changes and those combat changes, and so on, you end up with a game that is nearly unrecognizeable. I will admit to leaving classes in in most cases because I feel they are most the recognizable structure after attributes to a non-tabletop gamer.

Am I mad or have others had similar thoughts?

The World of Gaming Weblogs

2003-10-13T20:05:00.000-07:00

There are a bunch of them, some even busier than Rock Scissors Blog! Ginger Stampley of Perverse Access Memory runs the Game WISH quasi-ring (Weekly Idea Sharing Hegemony). Game WISH topics are generally grounded in experience, and favor praxis over theory.

SkySeaStone.Net has become the home of several game-oriented blogs. As the name suggests, many of the bloggers come from the Amber community.

Population: One runs the Monday Mashups, a weekly "You got peanut butter in my chocolate" exercise devoted to combining two distinct ideas into one campaign premise.

It Slices! It Dices! is Meera Barry's gaming weblog.

The above is a very partial list. Among other things, the Forge is down tonight or I could include the blog and livejournal URLs of several of its habitues. I'll keep looking and readers are invited to add links to the comments section.

Where Do I Put My Stones

2003-10-09T17:44:00.000-07:00

Three of my favorite recent RPGs are resource-based diceless games (Nobilis, MURPG and WYRD), and the pure resource-based design is still quite new. The hybrid Universalis is an important example too. It seems reasonable to assume that a design technique so new has plenty of unexplored possibilities yet. Some suggestions, wishes and prejudices follow:

1. The partly-true knock on the Marvel Universe RPG is that the characters who dominate are the ones with the largest energy pool. So, how about a game where the resource quantity is fixed and identical for each player? Every player gets six or ten chips to apportion among his options every resolution phase. (You can complicate it with bonus stone, sacrifice and reserve provisions as you like.) The stones add or multiply character-sheet scores to produce a resolution value.

2. Another knock on MURPG - it's hard for the GM to manage the stones of many characters. (This one is also partially true.) So how about a system where the players allocate chips, but NPCs are always represented by fixed quantities. (I think the diceful Whispering Vault works this way, yes?)

3. I personally prefer to minimize mechanic-speak during play. I'm not even wild about having to say, "I'm spending two MPs on that" in Nobilis. Instead of a game with separate declaration-allocation-resolution steps, I'd like to try one that employs

a) character sheets that function as visible aids, with "allocation areas" big enough to be seen by everyone around a kitchen table (yeah, I like smaller gaming groups too);

b) resources you allocate to the big, visible boxes;

c) play that proceeds via exchanges, where allocation happens simultaneously with declaration/roleplay. IOW, say I have "Social Skills" and my character is trying to talk an NPC into something. The familiar options are

i. Have the conversation. Resolve by GM fiat or GM-player consensus without reference to dice or coins/stones/chips.
ii. Have the conversation. GM calls for die roll or allocation. GM awards or withholds penalties or bonuses based on how the conversation is going, but the fortune/expenditure determines the outcome.
iii. Declare that we're about to have the conversation. Roll dice or spend resources to determine the outcome. Play out the conversation to the outcome determined by the roll/expense.
iv. Declare that we're about to have the conversation. Roll dice or spend resources to determine the outcome. Skip over the rest and go kill something.

Me, I like the seamless flow of i, but can appreciate the usefulness of having an "objective" resolution aid a la the other stages. But I don't like the interruptions. With physical resources and an appropriately designed "visual aid" character sheet, I could have the best of both worlds - I start talking in-character. As I talk in character, I push my chips into the "pot" (e.g. the appropriate box on my character sheet). The GM or other player responds in-character, and likewise pushes her chips out. We can all see how the situation lies. (There can be bonus/penalty stones awarded this way too.) If I'm still losing, I can push more stones out, subject to availability, or I can fold. The GM/other appropriate players have the same option.

(One of the great things about a resource-based system is that chips/stones/coins can be a useful clue stick with which to "educate" the GM - that is, how big or small you spend can provide her feedback on how important a given outcome is to you, the player. My friend and gaming buddy Bill once suggested a minimalist system: characters get scores; play proceeds in largely systemless fashion. Every player also gets a red "flag" like the ones NFL coaches throw to challenge a referee's ruling. And they use it for the same purpose - if a player feels he's been shafted, he throws the flag. The GM pauses and reconsiders. She may not actually change her mind, but she tries to clear her mind and calmly review the decision she just made, newly aware of how strongly the player views the immediate situation.)

I realize none of the above are designs in themselves, just suggestions for designs. No doubt other people can come up with possibilities I haven't thought of yet.

Template Change Impending

2003-10-03T10:29:00.000-07:00

I got around to re-reading Jim Henley's comments on Blogger templates, and decided that he's right after all. Sometime soon there will be a change of template to include a column width that takes more account of the limits of the human eye to track and understand wide wide text. This won't affect content, just presentation. Anyone familiar with the new Blogger templates is welcome to propagandize.

Toward a New Grand Theory . . .

2003-09-30T19:49:00.000-07:00

I suggested a couple of years ago on the Forge that the way to build a Theory of Roleplaying Gameplay was to start from the premise that, before you have anything else, you have a bunch of guys (and too infrequently, gals), talking to each other. Gaming preference is expressed by how you choose to restrict the conversation. I called the default "Dude stance" (to go with the widely-recognized Actor and Author et al). Dude stance doesn't even necessarily disappear - you can see its outline when the GM favors her boyfriend or avoids killing someone's paladin because everyone knows the player just lost her job, so why pile on? Both examples are presumptively dysfunctional, and the first interesting thing about Dude stance is that it seems like it must always be so - especially if what makes a conversation a roleplaying game is a restriction on what is to be discussed and how.

And yet - there was a time when it was universally acknowledged that making use of metagame knowledge was "bad roleplaying." Then people began designing entire games based on using metagame knowledge. By that point, it became clear that the use of metagame knowledge, and the type and degree of same, was a matter of preference rather than divine law. So, two issues to be explored when I get around to it - RPG style as "Dude-minus," and "Dude stance: what is it good for?"

Thinking Inside The Box

2003-09-30T06:57:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about a post elseblog by our blogmaster. He talked a little about what was positive in the gaming experience and that got me to musing on what was missing from my gaming today that I enjoyed way back when. The answer was simple:

Boxes filled with cool stuff.

Let me explain. On my honeymoon, I found myself wondering up a street in a small Devon town with my wife. We stumbled across one of those all-purpose geek shops that thrive in such rural environments, and I ducked inside. I was looking for copies of my own works, of course, so I could boast and feel self-important. My wife is wise to my ways, and headed off to a charity shop nearby instead. I found some of my books inside (in the sale) as well as a copy of the Hero Wars boxed set (also in a sale). Giving all due thought to the wedding costs, the fact I was now supporting my wife and the need to be a responsible adult, I whipped out my credit card and bought it. Then I bought my wife a skirt in the charity shop, because I was feeling guilty.

Sat on the steam train back to our cottage (yeah, it was that sort of honeymoon) I eagerly opened up my box and got all excited by the dice and books and maps and booklets inside. Damn, but this was cool. All of a sudden I was that 10-year old who got his hands on a copy of Runequest 2nd back in the early 80s and got over-excited by all the cool stuff in the box. Back then, I took this precious thing to my brother, who got excited by all the cool stuff in the box. We showed it to our friends, who also got excited by it all. That summer, six of us, 50% male, 50% female roleplayed for all we were worth. It was, well, cool.

The roleplay business has long shifted into an essentially book-publishing model. Boxed games are rare to the point of non-existence. I suspect that the industry's recruitment problems stems from that fact to some degree. It was easy for us as kids to make the transition from the traditional kids boardgames we played as kids to roleplaying because the form of the product was similar, even if the content was very different. I love the graphic design of modern books, from the glorious Exalted fat splats to the innovative Nobilis, but they don't generate in me the same childish excitement that copy of Hero Quest did. If the industry wants to grow, and bring in those younger gamers once more, we need to bring back that excitement.

So in this age of hardback books and PDF publishing let me put in a plea for big boxes full of cool stuff. Yeah.

Permission to Roleplay, Sir!

2003-09-28T09:59:00.000-07:00

Seems appropriate for an inaugural post somehow:

I'm increasingly intrigued by games that reverse the old order of description and resolution. By which I mean, the procedure we're used to is broadly like that of the Marvel Universe RPG the group I'm in currently uses. In MURPG, you declare what you want to do, allocate stones to the various actions and then, by comparison with the other players/GM's stone allocations, determine how well you did. During the declaration is your time for "good roleplaying" - if your tactics are especially clever, your description sufficiently entertaining or your intentions consistent with the tropes of the genre, you get situational modifiers - free stones that improve your success chances. Similar rewards feature in many diced games - from result bonuses in fixed die-quantity games to extra dice in games that use a pool. The underlying principle is the same: your clever description earns you (a greater chance of) success.

It turns out that this is not the only way to do it. Some new games essentially reverse the procedure. Take Nine Worlds by Matt "Dust Devils" Snyder, now in a playtest version. In Nine Worlds, your PC has three levels of traits (Virtues, Urges, Muses). At the onset of a conflict, you choose, in a very general way, which Virtue you wish to govern the conflict and which Muses are implicated. That determines the number of cards you draw. (The suits tie to Urges.) You compare "hands" among participants; the winner(s) then get, within certain limits, to narrate what their victories mean. That is, your success earns you your right to clever description.

It's the difference between

Player: I try to shoot the gun out of his hand before he can kill my girlfriend, then leap across and kick him in the head.
GM: Okay, that's a trick shot so it's minus-two. [Checks results.] You succeed. Your arrow spangs off the barrel of his pistol and it flies out of his hand. [Checks results.] Your sudden leap closes the distance while he's still flailing futilely after his lost gun. Your foot catches him just below the jaw, and his head snaps back as he falls. He's stunned for the rest of the round and has no action. (I gave you a coolness bonus that offset the two-action penalty.)

and

GM: [Checks result.] You win this round, pretty handily too.
Player: Okay, I shoot the gun out of his hand before he can kill my girlfriend. My arrow spangs off the barrel of his pistol and it flies out of his hand. This leaves him flailing after it for just a split-second - the split second it takes me to leap on him. My foot catches him just below the jaw, snapping his head back as a falls. He looks stunned.

The two big differences here are the order of (real-world) events and the reversal of polarity. In "trad mode," the player proposes, but the GM (and system) disposes. In "alt mode," the player gets to do much of the disposing too.

I suppose you can look at the difference two ways, and which way you choose will say a lot about your preferences as a gamer.

Bright side: "Alt mode" is a license to be cool. In trad mode, you can attempt cool, but your fancy descriptions and clever strategems are only subjunctively cool until the GM/resolution system confirms it by returning a success. (The difference between the two systems is also the difference between "Player: I do all this cool stuff. GM: Awfully complicated. You're at -3 and . . . you fail." and "GM: You win this round. Player: I do all this cool stuff.") Even many "swashbuckling" games include default penalties for trick shots, multiple actions and daring maneuvers. The incentive can be for the player to keep it safe/simple. It can be like applying for a job.

Dark side: "Alt mode" is a license to be cool if you succeed. Failure "outlaws roleplaying." If I have a great maneuver in mind, or a clever quip, a fabulous description or a cunning plan that cannot fail, I ought to be able to throw it out there - that way I earn my success with my efforts. If I only get to be cool when the dice/cards/stones let me, then I'm going to get awfully frustrated.

I can see both sides. But I'm also sure that both approaches are viable, for all that one is a lot more established than the other. Interestingly, one complaint you can't level against "alt mode" that has frequently been aimed at "story-oriented" RPG developments: "It's not really a game." Because the various alt-mode games (Nine Worlds is only one of them) definitely depend on chance or resource management - entirely "gamey" tropes, that is.

On shifting away from d20 to OGL

2003-09-28T05:44:00.000-07:00

With the recent decision to change the d20 license, limiting on the basis of content and instituting the capacity for review of third party products for suitability, Wizards of the Coast has begun the slow (but some have always claimed inevitable) process of poisoning the d20 well. As more and more companies approach the revised d20 License rules with trepidation, more and more products are now being prepared and released without the d20 logo under the far more lenient (and irrevocable) OGL that covers the rules itself.

Naturally, the 3.0 and 3.5 SRD's (as well as the d20 Modern flavor of the SRD) are listed as open content these days, and more than one group has begun work on their own, in-house version of an SRD. One thing that the major SRDs don't contain, however, are character generation and experience application rules. There's a good reasons for this -- the d20 license prohibits such rules from any d20 product, and the original, traditional rules for chargen and chardevelopment aren't open game content to begin with. However, as products continue the process of stepping away from d20, the drivers to avoid chargen are diminishing. (And certain games and game lines, including S&S's "Everquest" and Green Ronin's Mutants and Masterminds among others, already include chargen and experience rules and act as complete standalone products, of course.)

I propose the metausefulness of standardized, open rules for character generation and development, to be released under the OGL, published to such OGL-centered sites as the Open Gaming Foundation and spread throughout the community. In fact, I propose a product listing as many different character generation and development systems as possible -- something available for PDF purchase or Print-on-Demand, containing nothing but rules for creating characters and helping them grow. I have been working on a goals based character advancement system myself, and have played around with alternate chargen rules. I know I'm not the only one. The questions now are threefold:

1. What necessary components would need to be part of each character generation and character advancement system to be 'certified' as workable with the 3.5/3.5 Modern SRDs?

2. What pitfalls would need to be avoided to ensure Wizards of the Coast can't sue such a product for everything it's worth?

3. How universal would each system need to be? Would it be better to include many different idiosyncratic systems, best suited for very specific styles of game, or emphasize general systems that could slide into place of the AD&D or D20 Modern rules with minimal fuss.

Comments?

Out of the Graves, Into the Weblogs?

2003-09-27T20:37:00.000-07:00

Man, we're moribund. I've extended invites to some new folks. Existing people with posting rights, consider yourselves shamed a bit into traffic. :)

Thoughtcheck: Timelines, Metaplots, and Such.

2003-08-16T00:16:00.000-07:00

This blogpost comes from a discussion I've been having about my most recent Campaign in a Box column, "Planet Intoxica, Jewel of the Terran Hegemony" (available for perusal to Pyramid subscribers here.

(Oh, and Pyramid subscribers -- let me know if I've misrepresented the discussion, please. I'm trying to keep this as unbiased as possible, despite being rather peeved at the tone of the thread.)

I'm talking about an element of this particular column -- and its precursor in the same setting -- called the Signature Story Arc (SSA). From the column text:

"A Signature Story Arc (SSA) is a timeline for what happens if PCs don't get involved. An SSA can serve as a skeleton to create adventures -- even whole campaigns -- around, with various subplots and side-adventures weaving in and out. It can be altered, edited, speeded up, slowed down, or utterly warped to serve the current campaign.

"An SSA is not intended as a way to railroad PCs. The real fun is to see how the PCs' actions disrupt and change 'what would have normally happened,' and follow up on the ramifications of those PC-inspired changes.

"The following Episodes detail: 1) what will happen without PC involvement and 2) opportunities for PC involvement at that point. GM-only information appears in [square brackets]; and a section on SSA Advice is offered below the Episode descriptions. "

I then utilize the core plot of Romeo & Juliet as the Episodes of this SSA, with relevant NPCs. The SSA Advice section mentioned above also includes several "this is just a skeleton that will change just as soon as your PCs get involved" notes.

However, according to at least one respondant, an SSA is apparently just as bad as any abusive metaplot you would care to name.

Here's part of one of my first attempts to elucidate where I was coming from and what I wanted to do on the Pyramid boards:

"Okay, here's the point I want to make: Timelines.

"The intent of SSAs is that of a timeline -- that is, stuff continues to happen if the PCs don't get involved. The first memory I have of seeing this was in an issue of Dragon, in a Top Secret adventure called "Wacko World," where NPC terrorists kidnap an NPC Princess Di sorta person. If the PC spies fart around, the Princess gets captured, right on schedule.

"The addition I've made to the timeline concept is adding opposed NPCs into the mix. So, now in addition to the terrorists and Princess DI, you have Maxwell Smart of CONTROL and Siegfried of KAOS mucking about.

"If the PCs continue to fart around, Max and Siggy each have a chance of winning. The whole story *can* play out as an episode of Get Smart if the PCs don't get involved. It's running as a background process, if you like.

"The world continues to spin, the clock continues to tick, even if the PCs aren't paying attention to the plot. I think this adds to a living, breathing setting. [EDIT -- I'd change "adds" to "helps create" at this later time. -- CU]

"Now, if the PCs get involved, the timeline is shattered. This is a good thing. This is what's supposed* to happen in a game. This is the John McClane monkeywrench in Gruber's plot. Your PCs are Bruce Willis, but hopefully with more hair and a good pair of shoes. (However, if McClane decided to play solitare on his wife's computer instead of ducking into the HVAC system, Gurber's plan would have played out without a hitch.)

"Once the PCs get involved and perturbed the plot, NPCs will try to stick to their plans as much as possible, and if unable to do that, then as their goals and personalities dictate. That's why I flesh the NPCs out so thoroughly.

[snip column-specific example]

"That's my intent and desire for the SSAs -- they're the master plan. It's the PCs who have to get all Die Hard. Yippie-eye-oh-ki-ay, [CENSORED].

"Again, IMAO."

And the discussion continues, with the poster arguing that the SSA puts too much spotlight time on NPCs. My starting assumption is that the spotlight's on the PCs -- period -- and the SSA is what's happening around them on the darkened stage. I spent time detailing that so the director (GM) can understand the blocking and business that's going on, so that he can better react when the PCs move, the spotlight moves along with them, and suddenly shadowed actions come into view. The SSA only enters the spotlight when the PCs choose to look or must look at what's going on around them.

Yet, I'm still being told that I'm not giving PCs their due, and that's because NPCs have goals and take actions of their own, as far as I can tell.

Here's where I need a thoughtcheck: Am I off-base? Have I committed a game-design-crime, or have I just explained the concept poorly (i.e., not PC-focused enough)? How do you incorporate absolute timelines (rather than relative ones) in a game without de-protagonizing the PCs?

Thanks!

Measuring Success in Gaming: A Harrumph

2003-08-13T02:22:00.000-07:00

I seldom use the word "meme", since I regard it suspiciously as one of those metaphors whose users tend to forget that it is a metaphor rather than a literal truth. But in the case of the phenomenon I want to harrumph about here, it's suitable. One could practically work up standard epidemiological analysis of the idea.

In recent months I've seen a meme make the rounds, to the effect that the companies commonly thought of as successful - like Wizards of the Coast and White Wolf - aren't really successful, because they're only succeeding at selling to distributors. What matters to anyone not in the business is end sales to customers, and the allegedly successful companies aren't actually reaching them.

This is garbage, and I'm going to vent for a moment about it.

Now, I do agree that if we're concerned about gaming the thing people do as opposed to gaming the way some people make a buck and otherwise promote their work to others, then it's action on the customer's end that counts. And I do agree that there are products which appeal significantly more to distributors and retailers than to customers, and products which are kinda pushed on distributors and retailers, and that both of these kinds of things end up lying around unsold.

But.

This meme shows up in service of the idea that the public doesn't actually want dynamic settings or support of the character group resource book type. (I'm really trying to give up the term "metaplot" as simply not useful, and "splat" is pretty abused these days too.) That is, however much a publisher says that the Ultimate Something line or the Year Of A Thing Happening series sells, this is out of tune with the general trend of real gamers' concerns. Very often the people making the argument can say quite truthfully they know few if any gamers who like such things, too, and if they're active customers at their local store - or retailers themselves, for that matter - they may well be able to cite a population of customers who share the same general view.

But.

There is one really clear-cut case to my knowledge of a publisher forcing stuff on distributors and retailers in circumstances where it would have been genuine economic folly for them to decline. That was Wizards of the Coast, with Everway. WotC sold the Magic: The Gathering supplement of the time in mixed palettes. That is, you couldn't just order so many boxes of M:TG cards. If you wanted those boxes, you'd get them bundled with so many boxes of Everway, too. Since Magic was at the time very hot business indeed, distributors and retailers put up with it. The market was flooded with Everway. Enough copies actually sold to customers that the game would have been a moderate success in other circumstances, but WotC printed and pushed far more copies than could ever plausibly sell, which is why even now, much of a decade later, you find unopened copies of the game on eBay for $5 (or less). The supply is so great that nothing more makes economic sense, and won't for years to come. There may never be a small enough supply of available copies for a second edition to be economically feasible.

Notice how different this case is from the norm in gaming, however. Over-production does happen in gaming, and there are books that move in disappointingly small numbers (at least, disappointing from the publisher's point of view), but that sort of thoroughly destroyed market is really rare. You can't pop around to an online store or auction shop or go to a convention and find vast quantities of most releases in intact never-used condition for way below their suggested real prices. Opportunities of that sort are pretty much always local - the result of a particular retailer or distributor having goofed. Broader-scale goofs do happen, as witness inventory-reduction sales and the like, but they're on a different scale than than the Everway calamity.

Nor is it true that layoffs, line cancellations, and the like actually mean a company is in trouble. I'm not going to take up gaming cases here because they're contentious. Instead I'm going to point out that it's Business 101 common knowledge that a firm may have good solid sales and good overall return on investment and yet be in trouble thanks to out-of-control costs. This is why businesses do things like lay off employees, and reorganize, and decide not to subsidize losing or relatively unprofitable lines with income from more profitable ones. (Oh, okay, one gaming example here: the company publishing Arcane, a British gaming magazine, cancelled it because it was profitable but nowhere near as profitable as computer and other sorts of magazines. So the same expenditures could make them more dough applied elsewhere.) Gaming companies being the seldom-brilliantly-run operations they are, this sort of thing is generally handled badly - WotC and WW both bungled layoffs several times in the '90s, from my point of view - but the underlying rationale for it is universal and sound.

This meme of secret game company failure almost always goes along with praise for some company which is a secret success, and it's usually Chaosium. This is also garbage. Chaosium has made some of the finest games ever (and it's employed at least two of my very good friends over the years). It's also been repeatedly out of bankruptcy, and has the dubious distinction of being one of the very few game companies that professional writers' associations like the Science Fiction Writers of America and Horror Writers Association are likely to say "Beware!" about. They've stiffed too many authors, and repeatedly run up to the brink of legal action instigated by grievance committees trying to get their constituents any pay at all. Chaosium's games are evidently more talked about than actually, you know, bought. Less dramatic but related problems are true of the other companies I've seen cited as secret or denied successes - they tend not to be so prone to the brink as Chaosium, but they're really for true not out there dominating hearts and minds in gamerdom at large.

If the arguments of folks who prefer different approaches to design stayed on the level of aesthetic, philosophical, and artistic discussion, I wouldn't be harrumphing this way. I can live with the reality that people as smart and creative as I am want their games made very differently, and indeed I think I benefit by living in the midst of a creative population doing all kinds of stuff. (Nor would it be wise to assume that my own personal gaming hews precisely to what I regard as sound for publishing reasons.) But our hobby has too long and deep a tradition of self-delusion. I don't think it wise to encourage belief in Nixonian Silent Majorities and other such hypothetical entities. Overall, the sales to distributors and retailers reported in various venues actually do correspond with moderate accuracy to sales to customers. The exceptions stand out. It's not perfect, but then no branch of publishing enjoys that. (Cf. Baen Books and the Gingrich/Forstchen novel 1945 for a close example. Stuff like that shows up.)

The next step in this memetic progression is to claim something like "there's no real evidence that any game with a metaplot and an open-ended line of splatbooks and such supplements has ever made money in the long run". Pfeah. See above. If the strategy really didn't work, then you'd see the collapse at places like White Wolf and Palladium very prominently. All lines' sales sink over time. They just do. But you don't see these companies plummeting out of sight any more rapidly than companies with other strategies. Nor do you see WotC hastening to dump its productive lines (in both gaming and fiction) like Forgotten Realms, or deciding that, nah, there's no point in more Dragonlance material despite some sales trouble with the last iteration.

It's likely true that this approach to game development is not uniquely successful. But to claim that it is not successful is to make a claim in either not readily excusable ignorance (if you're going to pronounce on the economics, check your data) or willful delusion (the fact that you hate something doesn't make it unprofitable, alas; cf. the work of Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner, and others on the profitability of slavery despite its great wickedness, to go out toward a much clearer-cut case than a style of game development you'd prefer not to see). Woogy as the gaming marketplace is, it's not that woogy, and the folks who say they're selling several thousand this and thirty thousand that are really honestly reaching more customers than the people selling five hundred this and fifty that. If there's room for other strategies of design and publishing to make it as big as the ones currently doing well, and there may well be, it will be a matter of "also this" rather than "this instead of that pernicious lie".

Just 'cause I shared what led to this.

2003-08-04T17:58:00.000-07:00

After some further thought and consideration, and some input from some helpful individuals regarding Golden Age heroics and M&M mechanics (particularly Extra Effort and Hero Points), I have decided to investigate the level of interest in my throwing my hat into the Supers GMing arena once more.

What does this mean to you? I want to know if you are interested in such a game as I describe below. If there is enough interest, I will formalize things a bit. Don't worry about scheduling, etc., just yet, I will address that a bit lower on in this post, I'm just looking for "that sounds cool" (or "nots" if you are so inclined.

==================

The year is 1938. The Great War has come and gone, but it's repercussions are still being felt. While the pulps are filled with the likes of Doc Savage and the Shadow, the real world is lacking in larger than life heroes. That is, until now.... From the far reaches of the Earth (and space) they come, super-powered individuals willing to fight for what's right. For the depths of the shadows and the deep they come, mysterious and cloaked defenders of the downtrodden. Created by science, magic, or sheer willpower they come, brightly colored avengers of crime and villiany.

You, as the player(s), will play the world's first super heroes. There are no super villains - yet - but there is plenty of villainy to fight. And where there are super-powered good guys, their super-powered nemeses can't be far behind....

Your characters will also start in the world's first supers comic books. Your exploits will be gathered and retold by eager young comic book artists and writers. Publishing companies will be looking for the rights to your adventures.

What I want: I want to go back to the beginning of comics, to see how things would evolved if we had been creating the heroes. I want (intially) heroes reminiscent of the first heroes - drawn in broad strokes. Big bold heroes or mysterious crusaders of the justice. I'm not partiularly interested in heroes that will dicker with publisher for money for their stories. You are about being heroes, not being rich. The comic book writer who tags along on your adventures is your little buddy, someone to be protected.

I want the potential to watch characters and the world evolve over the decades. If it feels appropriate, time will be somewhat accelerated. Or, after the gold age heroes are well-established, additional stories will be told with their 'descendents'.

I want flexibility. Both in terms of characters and in terms of play groups. Part of the early comics was about seeing what worked, what sold. Characters can change powers, players can change characters, teamups can change. I don't want to be trapped into needing all the players every week.

Optimally, I would like to play face-to-face. Optimally, I would like to play about once a week to once every two weeks. I am flexible on both of these. On-line play is certainly an option. And while, I don't want to go more than once a week, less regular is okay. Also, I'm am willing, even interested, in running for multiple individuals or groups in the same world (different comic books) as long as the total time commitment doesn't go above about one game a week. Play-by-email/play-by-forum is a possibility, convince me.

===================

So there are my thoughts. What do you say, is there any interest?

On Supers Gaming....

2003-07-28T06:07:00.000-07:00

A reprint from my Live Journal, as it seemed potentially relevant:

So, in the past few weeks, I've been getting a hankering to play/run a Comic Book and/or Supers game - and/or write some form of fiction around the genre.

This is not particularly new. I'm a big fan of the whole pulp heroes through comic books supers genre family. It's one of the few things I consistent enjoy reading the history of or watching shows about. I'm fairly certain supers are a big part of the reason I'm into gaming. I'm sure my love of bigger than life heroes says something deep and psychological about me, but I don't plan to get into that right now. ;)

But, the question is, what triggered this latest round of "Ooo Supers games"? A number of things. A shared world forum based RPG site, based on a web-comic. A History of Super Heroes documentary on television. The purchase of the new Marvel comics RPG and the award-winning Mutants and Masterminds. The need to go through my comic collect to trim it down. The gift of the second Challenge of the Super Friends DVD and a Super Friends TPB. I really love this stuff.

Both Marvel and M&M look like great, if very different games. Both are well presented with glossy pages and great comic booky illustrations. Marvel is a diceless game. I think they made a lot of good design decisions to 'simulate' comic book action. Diceless allows characters to choose to be successful when they wish to be (within reason). They break time into panels and pages, something I had been pondering myself. Advancement is defined in a literary way and not just in terms of numbers. And character design is free-from and consistant, and again, encourages verbal description. Probably one of the best representations of the modern comic book in game form.

M&M, on the other hand, I think provides more flexibility in terms of the types of sub-genres that can be used. It is much more number crunchy and represents, IMO, one of the best interpretation of the d20 system since the OGL idea came into existance. It is a 'traditional' RPG in the sense that die rolls resolve all the actions, but the designers stream-lined everything (AFAICT) to a single d20 roll for anything (YAY! something else I had been pondering). I'm struggling a bit with char gen - in particular - getting the template characters to come out to the proper amount of points, but overall, a very well designed system. I'm really torn between buying their campaign book and just diving into my own supers reality. M&M seems like it would do a good job with silver age heroes on forward.

I do have one outstanding question. Can either game to Golden Age heroes? If not, is there a game that can? Or, at the very least, what properties would such a game need to have? It seems that Golden Age heroes were much more mutable than more modern characters. They seem to have the knack to have exactly the power they needed, some of which stick, others of which go away. (I think particularly of the original Blue Beetle and the original Green Lantern as I type this.) Has anyone had any thoughts on this?

Which brings me full circle. I'm really tempted to run a supers game of some sort. Or to write some supers fiction. Or both. I'm inclined to start in 1938, where the PCs are the original super beings whose exploits are chronicled in comic books for throngs of adoring readers. I will probably put together a more formal proposal later, but does anyone have any feelings about this?

============================================

A side thought: I should put together my thoughts on Iron Developer from Origins.

2003-07-16T10:57:00.000-07:00

This isn't really a developer's-notes kind of piece so much as a bit of personal reflection. Be prepared for a bunch of autobiographical rambling.

I discovered Gamma World early in 1981, when a friend ran a campaign of it for a while. He got the adventure "Legion of Gold" somewhere along the way and folded it in, with limited success. I have very few memories of how the campaign actually went, since memory disruption was a component of my years of particularly severe auto-immune reactions, and I'm reconstructing when it must have been by reflecting on surrounding circumstances. Based on how other of our games went, I feel pretty confident guessing that it was fun but too often argumentative.

Let's talk about 1981.

I was 15 - my birthday's in October - and living in Pasadena, California. Dad was an engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratories, designing and implementing ranging systems for the Deep Space Network of tracking stations. Mom was a housewife. I'm the third of four brothers. The older ones had moved out, leaving my younger brother and me still at home. (Digressive note: I seem to be a bit of a demographic oddity here. Most of my classmates and peers have been either the oldest child or the next-oldest. Having brothers or sisters a full decade older than us seems rare for this cohort.)

I happen to have here the 1981 version of LA radio station KROQ's top 106.7 of the year countdown. (They were at FM 106.7.) The musical sun rose and set on KROQ, as far as I was concerned, so this is pretty reflective of what I was listening to on the radio.Here's the top of the list:

"Mental Hopscotch", MIssing Persons

"Ant Music", Adam and the Ants

"We've Got the Beat", Go-Go's

"It's My Party", Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin

"Johnny Are You Queer?", Josie Cotton

"On the Outside", Oingo Boingo

"Start Me Up", Rolling Stones

"Never Say Never", Romeo Void

"We Want the Airwaves", Ramones

"I'm With the Guys", Penetrators

(The overall top 40 for 1981 leads off with "Betty Davis Eyes", "Endless Love", "Lady", "Starting Over", and "Jessie's Girl", just for comparison.) My album purchases that year included old Yes and new Devo. I was sooo sick of Van Halen - Pasadena boys and therefore wildly overplayed, and just plain annoying to me.

The top-grossing movies in the US were, in order, Raiders of the Lost Ark, On Golden Pond, Porky's, Arthur, Stripes, The Cannonball Run, Quest For Fire, For Your Eyes Only, Chariots of Fire, and The Four Seasons. Chariots of Fire, Henry Fonda, and Katherine Hepburn won Academy awards. The top TV shows were Dallas (in its third season), The Dukes of Hazzard (ditto), 60 Minutes (in its thirteen season), MASH (ninth season), The Love Boat (fourth season), The Jeffersons (seventh season), Alice (fifth season), House Calls (second season), Three's Company (fifth season), and Little House on the Prairie (sixth season).

Hugo awards went to Joan Vinge's The Snow Queen, Gordon Dickson's "Lost Dorsai" and "The Cloak and the Staff", and Clifford Simak's "Grotto of the Dancing Dear". Nebulas went to Gene Wolfe's The Claw of the Conciliator, Poul Anderson's "The Saturn Game", Michael Bishop's "The Quickening", and Lisa Tuttle's "The Bone Flute". I felt very bitter toward Anderson, one of my sf idols, for a story that seemed to me to pander toward all the anti-gaming cliches about the dangers of immersive fantasy.

The IBM PC came out in 1981, but nobody I knew had one. I learned word processing with WordStar on a KayPro Dad sometimes brought home from work. One of my older brothers got a used Osbourne, though he never used it all that much. Apple IIs were pretty common among my friends' families. Just one had a Compuserve account. The rest of us envied his father's willingness to pay the charges. Pocket calculators were fairly common in our crowd; slide rules were thoroughly denigrated. The cool kids had programmable calculators, some with the whole rules of Metagaming microgames entered in.

Ronald Reagan was president, and it seemed to pretty much everyone I knew of who gave any thought to politics that nuclear war was inevitable within a very few years. The Polish labor union Solidarity was making some headlines; so were civil wars in Latin America that messed up the lives of friends' relatives. It was blindingly obvious that the Soviet Union wasn't just going to get wished away, and this business of constant brush war made a lot of vintage dystopian fiction look very plausible.

One Voyager had encountered Saturn before we started play - the data from that also contributed to Anderson's story - and the other would before my next birthday. The Space Shuttle was just getting to its first orbital flights. Those of us biased toward the JPL side of things felt that it was a design farrago that would never work as planned, but hoped we might be wrong.

Now it's 2003. I'll be 38 in a couple of months. I got seriously sick for the first time with these interlocking immune and metabolic problems the summer after I discovered Gamma World, and it looks like I'll be this way until gene therapy or something comparable comes along.

I didn't recall all that information up above out of my head. I looked it up. The laptop I'm writing this on has more power in it than all the computational facilities at Caltech back then, and can play back digital audio files at higher resolution than any but the highest-end recording studios could have handled assuming they had digital gear. But I'm also connected to a world network of millions of machines, with access to trillions and trillions of bytes of information of all kinds, accessible so fast that I seldom have time to go fix a snack or whatever before the answer's waiting for me. And this computer can do that and let me write in this text editor and maintain real-time conversations with friends from Australia to Mexico to England, many of whom I've never met in person, and a lot more. I could play back a movie, too, with very little performance hit. Many of my friends have more powerful connections than that, and many have high-speed connections.

I refreshed my memory of the contents of "Legion of Gold" by looking at a PDF of it. I bought that file from a commercial vendor, exchanging credit card information for a document that may never exist in tangible form unless I print out. I had utterly forgotten the Bill Willingham cover, but the Gygaxian prose is everything I was expecting it to be.

Dad's retired. JPL is still there, though like the rest of NASA it's had some rocky years. The Space Shuttle is a farrago that should be retired pronto. The Soviet Union is gone away. So are most of the regimes that were fighting those wars in Latin America; the battle lines have changed. My music purchases this year have included Finnish pop, new Kansas, and classical guitar performances. And I have about 90 of the songs on the KROQ playlist for 1981 here in digital format on my computer, thanks to the conversion and transfer efforts of others.

Today's handhelds with wireless connections pretty much are the personal data pads of Asimov's Foundation stories. The patenting of organisms is a matter of debating what to do about already-existent strains. Mammals are being cloned. The world's governments blew it when it came to space, but the network of networks supports efforts by private groups to do something with the rest of the universe.

We are already living in an era that could make a lot of the stuff found in early editions of Gamma World that isn't outright physically impossible. We are immersed in a world reminiscent of vintage John Brunner and Philip K. Dick. Google tells me that the guy who led me from wargaming through The Fantasy Trip to D&D is now a big name in the wearable-computers field. The guy with the envied Compuserve account did his English graduate studies with a recurring emphasis on themes of cyborging. I'm here doing this. Someone born the year we played Gamma World is now a legal adult.

From my point of view, there was never a question of just updating Gamma World mechanics. For the game to be anything I would consider worth investing time and effort in, it was also necessary to do things to the setting. Fortunately for me, that's what White Wolf wanted, too. So my authors and I built a future that reflects the experience of the last couple of decades, in various ways. Discovery runs amok. Old fears die, but some come back. People remain people even as their whole system of relationships and lifestyles changes. The boundaries of the apparently possible move, in here and out there.

If the game works, it will convey some of the vertiginous realization I've been hoping to create in you with this post. This is familiar, that's weird, and then things realign. Stuff thought forgotten turns up to matter. Unexpected approaches turn traditional log-jams into minor nuisances, and then major new complications arise. The world is busily being made by people who don't know you, but at the same time, you have an opportunity to make it as well.

The 2003 Origins Awards

2003-06-27T21:01:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year again. Ogre Cave is on top of things with an on-the-spot report. For those who need a refresher, the list of nominees remains on Gaming Report.

Once again, it's a travesty, though there's nothing quite as egregious as either HackMaster's win last year or the omission of Nobilis from the ballot this year. I'm not competent to discuss a lot of the categories, and the last thing we need is more holding forth in ignorance. I'll confine myself to the material I do have personal and professional opinions about.

Best Roleplaying Game: Lord of the Rings beats out Buffy, d20 Call of Cthulhu, Mutants & Masterminds, and Silver Age Sentinels. Now, none of these strikes me as a bad game. They were all done by people who like what they're doing, are aware of what's going on around them, and take pride in crafting intelligent and useful work. So that's an improvement. But honestly, of these five, LOTR is the last I'd have picked. Buffy and Mutants & Masterminds are significantly more innovative in mechanics, d20 CoC is a beautiful update of a now-past-its-prime classic and has some of the best GMing advice ever, and Silver Age Sentinels pushed on the Tri-Stat system with glorious design and a profoundly knowledgeable love of the Silver Age. It sounds like LOTR works - friends of mine are having fun with it - but it does least that makes me sit up and drool. And it remains grotesque that by far the most innovative game of last year - playable and beautiful and altogether neat - wasn't on the list. I must make sure there's something out this year to get Nobilis considered via a supplement.

Best Roleplaying Adventure: City of the Spider Queen beats out Barsaive In Chaos, Orbital Decay, a humorous piece from Dork Tower, and two Avalanche adventures. Now, in the first place, the presence of two Avalanche adventures is pretty pathetic. City of the Spider Queen earns its win, as far as I'm concerned - the advance on the practical issues confronting the GM is really outstanding, down to primary and contingency tactics, fallbacks, ways of responding to unforeseen developments, and a lot else. And, y'know, it's got hot dark chicks and their spiders, so what's to complain about, he said, sounding not at all like the fanboy he is. There were just so many deserving candidates that should have gotten consideration, from the campaign seed/adventures in All Flesh Must Be Eaten supplements to d20 work from Sword & Sorcery Studios, Green Ronin, Atlas, and countless others. City is great work, and deserved better circumstances.

Best Roleplaying Supplement: Celtic Age from Avalanche beats out the big Freeport book from Green Ronin, the Kingdom of Kalamar Player's Guide, Nyambe, and another bit of dry-as-dust historical drek from Avalanche. This one's really pathetic. Nyambe is one of the really ground-breaking supplements of recent memory, and is not just a good idea but wonderfully executed. Even the Kalamar book, while tedious to my taste, is done with care and intelligence - if what you're looking for is the ambience of an atlas and encyclopedia mixed in with detached tone and game mechanics, it's a great pick. The Freeport book is darned cool, and would be higher on my list in any year without Nyambe. Any of those three would have been worthy winners. But yeesh. Exalted deserved some attention here, just for starters. There was first-rate work in the World of Darkness, for Unknown Armies, for d20 lines like Spycraft and Legend of Five Rings...for a lot. I could stock this list over and over again without feeling the need to start nominating Avalanche books, let alone letting them win.

So it's another year of awards which sometimes make sense but are overall just too unreliable and indulgent to their administrators to be worth the attention of the public at large.

Some Thoughts About Story

2003-04-05T22:20:00.000-08:00

This is, as is often the case, inspired by some exchanges elsewhere - in this case, the RPG Theory forum at the Forge. I don't want to distort other's argument by misrepresentation, so I'll say that if you're curious about some strongly contrary views to what follows, check 'em out for yourself.

Ever since several games of the late '80s and early '90s made an issue of it, there's been a fair amount of talk in gaming circles about where the "story" is in gaming - what it is, how you make it, what you give up to do this, and so on. At one extreme there are the folks who emphatically deny that there is anything story-like at all about their games. Events unfold, tactics are applied to situation, and there may be an after-action report, but emphatically lacks any quality one might think of as literary. At another, there's the school that says that story is the only crucial thing, and which in extreme cases actively encouraged the GM to override players' preferences to whatever degree is necessary to make a fully constructed literary structure happen in play. (This is often attributed to Vampire, but in fact Vampire 1st edition clearly and strongly stated that preparations should yield to player invention and desire. The worst case I've seen with my own eyes was the GMing advice in Amber.)

Lately I've been thinking that "story" may be most productively treated as something outside the game as such. In play, things happen. A player or GM introduces an element into the scene, others respond to it, the mechanics governing the resolution of efforts apply, and then everyone deals with the updated situation. (More on the matter of response and mechanics in a bit.) This collection of inventions, introductions, responses, and resolutions is the raw material of the story of the game. The story itself actually happens in the minds of participants, then and later. As with both real life and entertainment of many sorts, you select and arrange the parts that interest you and give lower priority to the rest. Dull stuff just fades; depending on what sort of person you are, annoyances may as well, or they may loom large. Interesting bits loom large and get loving detail, and perhaps embellishment. The stuff in play is a pool of data, from which you extract information that adds up to the story you want to tell yourself or someone else.

I distinguished in the preceding paragraph between the intention of a participant to have their character do something (or to have some other part of the environment under their control ditto) and outcome of the intent. The evolving theory/theories at the Forge place a lot of weight on the matter of control, and set up a necessary tension between player control and the ability of the GM to maintain a planned narrative. The same thought occurs in other efforts at building a general theory of gaming. I've never been entirely persuaded by this, but only recently figured out that this is why. Apart from powers of outright fiat, all attempts to do things in the game are mediated by mechanics. There is a force outside the intention of the player or GM which modifies the attempt, and which limits the extent to which the desires of a participant are feasible at all.

Whenever the rules apply, there is no unmediated force of will active in the game. Assuming that the GM applies any mechanics to, for instance, NPCs' ability to search, evade, fight, and the like, to factors like weather and so on, this is true of the GM's plans just as much as it is of the wishes of any other player. The GM's preparations are in this sense not qualitatively different from whatever schemes players come up with before and during play - more elaborate, perhaps, but likewise subject to mediation through mechanics. And stats for NPC, environmental, and other factors constitute limits of their own for this purpose. Rather than adjudicating on the fly, you get bright lines of possibility and impossibility, but the basic principle is the same. Not everything you might wish for can happen, and some things you don't expect are pretty well guaranteed to happen. This is entirely as true of games which remove randomizers and spread around the power to make authoritative declarations as it of games with a strong element of randomness and which concentrate authoritative power in the GM's hands.

So a few terms for a new taxonomy.

An event in play is the combination of a participant's desire to have somthing happen and the mechanics applied to it to determine the extent to which that desire becomes achieved.

Plans include all the schemes that participants make: the in-character desires of PCs and NPCs to make things happen, the timeline a GM might prepare of what NPCs will do in the absence of PC intervention, and the like. All of these are subject to mechanics of some sort when they actually lead to events in play.

Mechanics contribute two crucial factors: expectation and surprise. The definition of what characters and outside forces can do lets participants build up a sense of what's reasonable to expect - what's likely, what's possible, the tradeoffs of risk and reward, and so on. I'm going to get a little hyperbolic and say that this amounts to sanity for the participants; total chaos would make any expectations irrelevant and consistency impossible. Games differ in how much and what sort of variation they like and what overall scale of power is available to characters and their world. They also differ in what sort of variation applies to character efforts: whether there's a consistent minimum and/or maximum result possible, how much things vary from the average result, how much outside forces can modify the return on a character's exertions, and so on. But all roleplaying games allow for things to gum up the works in translating character desire into action.

The experience of play, from the point of view of any given participant, is what you have in mind for your character plus all the stuff that happens to your character and everyone else. The observable experience of play for bystanders tosses out what's in your head, and just includes expressed desires and their resolution. After-the-fact observations might well include passed notes, whispers, and the like that folks didn't know about at the time, depending on how the game gets recorded.

The story is what part of the experience you invest with significance. No participant takes away precisely the same story, and the odds are good that you will change your own story of the game over time. No game can hand you a story, because no game lives in your head along with you. What a game may do is offer advice and mechanics which help you create more desires and outcomes of a sort you're interested in - goose the data pool, that is, so that you're more likely to have stuff you're interested in to tell a story about. But the events are not the story, nor are your plans the story.

2003 Origins Awards

2003-03-28T01:10:00.000-08:00

Friends, gather around, for I must rant. Our sermon text for today is the list of nominees for the 2003 Origins Awards.

Best Roleplaying Game: Nobilis 2nd edition is not on the list. As far as I'm concerned, this automatically disqualifies the awards from serious consideration. This is not really open to debate: Rebecca Borgstrom wrote and James Wallis presented a game that very materially advances the state of the art in both content and production. It may not be your cup of tea, but you cannot construct an argument against it being one of the five best games of last year that I will feel obliged to take seriously. Period.

I see also that the Hellboy RPG is not on the list. Now, here's a licensed game that lives up fully to the spirit of the original, including finally letting PCs play characters as powerful as the heroes in the original, and in which Jonathan Woodward and Phil Masters produced an elegantly slimmed-down and tuned rules set suited for the task, and which is attractively and usefully designed by Phil Reed. There's no excuse for it not being nominated. Likewise - though with less surprise - for beautiful small games like Dust Devils and Paladin.

Truthfully, it was a darned good year for original games. I don't think that the omission of, say, Godlike or Mechanical Dream or Star Children: Velvet Generation from the final five is as deep a travesty as the omission of Nobilis - this is the stuff of productive disagreement. I'm not sure I could pull out a list of five that I'd really want to live with. Top 10 would be easier for last year.

Best Roleplaying Supplement: Okay, we have two of Avalanche's books with cheesecake on the cover and contents which take away PC options on specious grounds of historicity, and a dry-as-dust Kalamar book. But there is no nod for Exalted: The Dragon-Blooded, or GURPS Horror 3rd edition, or GURPS Transhuman Space, or Dark Ages: Inquisitor, or Requiem for a God, or Sidewinder or Slaine (which I'd file as a supplement until and unless we get a special category for games which are almost but not quite complete, like d20 core books, the Exalted and Dark Ages hardcovers, and the like), or Spycraft, or Ultramodern Firearms or Victorian Age: Vampire, or even less significant but fun and well-constructed books like Enter the Zombie, let alone "indie" supplements like the great and growing library of supplements for Sorcerer. (My disagreements with Ron Edwards' taxonomy are many, but holy cow can the man put out good games himself, and inspire neat work out of others. He's earned the right to carry on in a way darned few of my colleagues have.)

It's good that Nyambe got nominated, and I think it's got a solid case for being the best supplement of the year. Freeport: City of Adventure is a worthy rival to the omitted books in the last paragraph. The Kenzer and Avalanche entries are not, and their presence is testimony to massive tunnel vision on the part of the award process. It was a year when as much significant and cool work went on in supplements as in core games, but you wouldn't know it from the Origins list. And for crying out loud, two Avalanche books?

Best Roleplaying Adventure: With all due respect to the Transhuman Space line, Orbital Decay is not that great - not top-five material. The absence of Nocturnum is the major disgrace to this category, I think, unless that's once again the presence of multiple Avalanche entries. The sample adventure in the Hellboy RPG was good. "Gentleman's Agreement" for Spycraft is really good. Tempest Feud and Banewarrens and probably a bunch of others I'm overlooking right now all have significant merits. Pfeah.

Best Graphic Design of a Book Format Product: At least Nobilis 2nd gets a nod here. Buffy and Mutants & Masterminds are both worthy candidates. But Kalamar rather than GURPS Alpha Centauri or Exalted: Dragon-Blooded or Ultramodern Firearms (man, it's hard to make a gun book engaging for the rest of us) or any Ultimate Fan Guide oe Engel or...? This is another travesty. (About the WizKids book I have no opinion, since I haven't seen it.)

Best Game Periodical: Demonground should be on this list.

Best Game Fiction Long Form: Yes, I'm arrogant enough to say that a volume of my Lasombra trilogy should be on the list.

What we have here, essentially, is a monument to a very niche of the gaming market. It doesn't just ignore the indie scene, it ignores big swaths of the "mainstream" print market to resolutely chase the fading memories of a gone time. This is the work of an audience afraid of the future and unprepared for it, who want nothing but what they've had before. I've really got to get my artistic-ambition awards up and running.

Games You May Have Missed

2003-03-22T13:27:00.000-08:00

The possibility of publishing one's game online via the World Wide Web has fueled a boom in small-press game design of a sort I haven't seen since mimeo went out of style in the early '80s. Much of this work isn't in the regular marketplace for the good and sufficient reason that it stinks. But there's also a lot of really interesting - and playable! - experimentation going on out there, with fresh fun thoughts about the roles of players and GMs, the nature of characters, the feasible foci for games and campaigns, and a lot else.

In the best do-it-yourself spirit, Andy Kitkowski has set up Indie RPG Awards - the website has an extensive list of nominees, many of which are free or have free previews. It's easy, when you're folks like me and my friends posting here, to feel that nobody else in game design or development really wants to try anything fresh. But it's not just us against the Philistines. Andy links to games of screwball comedy, fun riffs on dungeon crawling, horror, butt-kicking moral intrigue, and a lot more. Bruce-Bob says "Check it out!"

I'll be reviewing some of my personal faves later on. In the meantime, this is a site worth your attention. And those of you with some money to throw at it should consider donating to the award fund. It's not often you get so many opportunities for such direct action to promote good work.

Game mechanics thoughs.

2003-03-19T11:17:00.000-08:00

I see two contrasting uses for game mechanics in a story oriented game.

First of all, we have mechanics that we use to take care of business that we'd rather not roleplay our way through. The social and puzzle solving systems in a lot of games represent this kind of shorthand. They also prevent the bottlenecking problem we get when the GM has One True Answer in mind and the players come up with something clever, but wrong.

Then we have mechanics that we use to elaborate on the situation. We usually do this for combat or other actions that have a direct effect of the health and capabilities of the character.

Now, the latter mechanics (for combat and detail) are usually more rigid than the former. I'd like to see more action oriented systems that had a clear set of "dials" so that the mechanical detail matched the narrative detail we wanted to provide. I distrust genre emulation in this regard, because even though games are good at it, actual play groups are terrible at it -- and that's fine. Over time, play groups zip from comedy to tactical skirmishes to overwrought drama. They Play It Stupid, or just Different. I think a good game supports this fact.

On the other hand, more rigidity is a good thing, because it allows the play group to own the game, know what they are getting into, and gives the larger community something in common. If everyone's playing by different rules, they don't have much to talk about. If a game is built to be customized, what attraction can it generate as a thing in of itself?

I think these two conflicting factors are the cause of a lot of strife in fan communities. Game X doesn't support your group's current passion, but your mod of game Y is so idiosyncratic there's no reason to talk to anybody else about it.

Building vs. Razing

2003-03-14T11:25:00.000-08:00

(First off, thanks to Bruce for the invite.)

On another discussion board, I started discussing a business-themed RPG. I said something like, "What's the difference between seeing in-game a successful rollout of a new sneaker and the effects on the kingdom of eliminating the dragon who'd been terrorizing them?"

That's started a bit of controversy. Most folks seem highly resistant that there could be any fun in playing a character in an Romantic/Heroic Business Adventure Game (like Preston Tucker, the three women in 9-to-5, Tommy in TOMMY BOY, or any Horatio Alger rags-to-riches hero). Whatever.

This sparked an insight, which I'd like to share with you for evaluation:

Most mainstream games are about building/creating/improving, and most RPGs are about razing/destroying/eliminating.

A large proportion (maybe 1 in 5) of popular mainstream games -- like Monopoly or Life (or electronically, Sid Meier's Civilization or the Sims) -- include a substantial amount of resource-building in the course of the game in order to win.

In RPGs, for every "create a kingdom" type game, there are 10 "kill the dragon" ones. (The exception seems to be in the science fiction end of the genre, where playing a start-up adventure merchant crew seems to be okay... but working for a big corporation in the same capacity doesn't seem to be. And, by definition, it would seem few cyberpunk games really allow one to play a corporate functionary -- I guess that would eliminate the "punk" aspect of the genre.)

The most successful RPG of all time reflects "building" in its leveling mechanic, combined with the "razing" of numerous generic critters in numerous generic caves. The most popular second wave RPG, while having little building of the PC after chargen, has a tremendous amount of building potential designed into the social network that PCs operate in. Probably the most popular boardgame in the world involves creating a financial structure of money, deeds, and edifices, while destroying the structure of your rivals. Many popular computer games, while mostly about killing the enemy sprites, involve building your side up (from Bard's Tale to Warcraft, etc.) in order to kill them there sprites better. While "pure razing" games have their charms, the lion's share of mainstream appeal goes towards the games with a "building element." And this is why a "pure building" game like SimCity is fascinating, but ultimately a letdown as a game -- no real eliminating or competition. (I believe the creator calls it a "toy" rather than a "game.")

I think the focus of the RPG industry has shifted from mostly "building" to mostly "eliminating." The mainstream appeal of increasing in power and ability (and/or changing the game environment through building actions and processes) could be a factor in the huge boom in D&D3/d20 products (not disregarding familiarity, marketing, and branding, of course).

To go back to the Romantic Business Adventure Game, how about this one: "Mr. Spacely calls you into his office and says, 'Here's a 15 million space-credit budget and a staff of four. Sell Sprocket X. You have to make at least 30 million space-credits in profit in three years. Go forth.' What do you do?"

Am I the only person who does not find that a boring basis for an RPG campaign?

Let me know what you think.

CU

Can You Play It Stupid?

2003-03-12T19:09:00.000-08:00

Folks in da biz spend a fair amount of time groping for metrics by which to gauge the probable success of a new game. This is particularly true for those of us out trying innovative, artistic, and otherwise not-surefire things. Certainly I've been mulling it a lot lately, and it seems to me that a crucial question is this:

Can you play it stupid?

There are two components to the extent to which a game lends itself to success by this standard:

Does the game have an easily accessible summary, and does it connect to things gamers already know?

Can it support straight-up play in some variety of "see the monster, hit the monster" low-characterization, high-action campaigning?

Vampire: The Masquerade is a good example here. "You play vampires, there are different lineages with different powers, there's a secret society dominated by a couple of big sects; it's angst and moral struggle on the individual level, and Machiavelli and Le Carre on the social level." And the potential for thoughtless let's-whack-stuff is well enough known in gaming to have bred its own slang ("Vampions") and cliches (two silver katanas, one leather duster, a side order of mirrorshades, please). Exalted has this, too: it's a fantasy world where the PCs are the heirs to demigod power and must now deal with the world at large and with the empire whose leaders killed the Solar Exalted first time around and would love to do it again, and thanks to the charm system, everything characters might want to do can be vivid and cinematic as we use that term in gaming. Enduring successes like D&D and the Hero system likewise work if you know and like the cliches of their inspiration, and the tactical-wargame approach to organizing play time is demonstrably of interest to a lot of gamers.

Compare some of the fascinating failures in gaming, both setting ones like Tekumel and Jorune and mechanical ones like Space Opera. They lack that simple solid core on which you can hang embellishments. A world which doesn't remind most gamers of something they already know is, or at least can be, great to read about but is not one for which they can comfortably to the make-up-your-own-bits customization which is crucial to an engaging campaign. And while there's widespread gaming interest in more detailed tactical resolution than I care for myself, this isn't license for unbounded compexity - if players can't keep the gist of it in their heads, they won't keep messing with it.

There's a counsel in some portions of the game design community which says that you should therefore not try anything very interesting or exotic. I, on the other hand, note that it's possible to be very successful in a lot of media with quite detailed and innovative subjects - while the public at large will go see really dumb screwbll comedies and mindless amoral action films, they'll also go see Civil War epics, multiple long films about Middle Earth, foul-mouthed comedies of heterodox Roman Catholic theological speculation, and stories that combine action with thoughtful extrapolation and world-building. Likewise in comics: DC still sells a hundred thousand trade paperbacks of Sandman each year, a decade after the series ended, and that's as dense and mannered a work as you can reasonably ask for. It's just that each of these works also has something to offer the customer looking for a cool good time.

If it can play stupid, then your audience will sit still for art, philosophy, and a great deal else.

Martial Arts (possibly for d20?)

2003-03-07T04:40:00.000-08:00

[JackSlack, AKA Sean] Random RPG system thinking: Critical success means instant extra turn. Makes for quick, simple combat and multiple actions are done easily.
[Blue, AKA David Wendt] Very interesting. Though I think I would make 'critical successes' more common (or give ways to make them more common) than has been historically true for such a system.
[JackSlack] I just thought of it as a way to handle the problems. Among other things, you'd be able to come up with some neat martial arts characters. Give yourself a million bonus points in dodge, and you can counterattack like crazy.
[Blue] That would be very cool.
[JackSlack] By contrast, give yourself gazillion in attack, and you can keep attacking until they fall down and die. It could actually end up being that most fights resolve themselves in a 'single' action between true masters.
[Blue] Right. Or you can give yourself average attack and max out your damage. A "one hit wonder" so to speak. ;) That actually makes a lot of sense.
[JackSlack] A hard master vs. a hard master would be entirely about who strikes first, consistent with hard martial arts. A soft master vs. soft master would take forever to resolve. :) Again, makes sense more or less. And a hard vs. soft would be a matter of who makes the first mistep.
[Blue] It actually works very well for a martial-centered game. I like this idea ALOT. Kudos.
[JackSlack] When blogger comes back up, I'll throw that one to Rock Scissors Blog.
[Blue] Cool!

Reflections on Playtesting

2003-03-06T02:49:00.000-08:00

Like just about everything in gaming, playtesting is the subject of a lot of conventional wisdom I regard as doubtfully grounded, and a great deal of confusion. Since I'll be running another playtest in a few weeks, I thought I'd lay out my own principles. I should note that, yes, it's true that I'm fortunate to write for the #2 rpg company, since this gives me a larger probable audience than many of my colleagues get to enjoy. But it's also true that there is no White Wolf hive-mind at work, and that a lot of promising experiments end up tanking. I am not exempt, as writer or developer, from the need to juggle the competing interests of existing fans and potential new ones.

So.

Who is a new game for? The answer obviously depends in large measure on who you want it to be. John Nephew comes to mind as someone who's managed to carve out a viable and eminently successful place for himself with a steady-state approach. Apart from the Penumbra line, Atlas Games makes essentially no effort to attract new customers to its existing lines. Steve Jackson Games works similarly: while some projects (like the Hellboy RPG) aim at new customers, by and large, the audience for GURPS books is the population that's already buying them. Unfortunately, since folks at these two companies are most vocal in discussing playtest philosophy, the steady-state assumption dominates playtest discussion in ways I regard as undesirable.

I aim my games at people with an interest in the subject and a willingness to look at my treatment whether or not they like anything else that might be associated with it. This is something I think White Wolf has done right nearly all along, and which contributes significantly to its success. The first duty of a game is to be a good game for what it is, and compatibility with others is at best a secondary interest. WW got into creative trouble only when it had a collective bout of trying to put everything in the World of Darkness into too tight a creative framework; since returning to the philosophy that different games are at liberty to have wildly different perspectives, we've had a run of very interesting creative experiments, many of which have worked for the market as well.

Trinity was a learning experience. I think it's a darned good game, but those added few pages of "the story so far" in the softcover made a big difference, as does the freeform psi system. The game didn't initially get quite the creative distance from the WoD it needed. By the time we got to Adventure, it was clear that we had nothing to lose by being exuberantly this-thing-now and quite a bit to gain from it. Adventure sold very well by nearly anyone's standards, and emphatically wasn't a failure in economic terms, and obviously it enjoys a very high degree of player satisfaction and good word of mouth.

And we got that partly by our willingness in the creative process to tell some staunch advocates that they wouldn't be getting what they wanted.

To begin with, reading is not playtesting. Assertions by people I otherwise respect notwithstanding, reading a manuscript does not allow you to fully anticipate the experience of play. There are always surprises. The only - only - way to assess player and GM experience is to have people play and report. This is not to say that reader critiques have no value. They do. I rely on the comments of trusted friends in and out of the business a whole lot, and I think they improve the quality of my work significantly. But there is a qualitative gap between reading and playing, and I think it's a critical mistake to think of or describe reading-based critiques as playtesting.

Next, playtesting must include a mix of people already steeped in the lore of the game and publisher and people new to it, and when push comes to shove, the comments of the latter are more important. At least this is true whenever the game comes from a publisher with a known style and history. At a bare minimum, one can always default to doing more of the same and count on whatever constitutes a modest success for the company. Maybe better than that. But to reach a new audience, you need to find out what those folks actually like and don't.

Likewise, if the design goals include doing something new, then you have to be prepared to tell some existing customers that they won't necessarily be interested in this new thing. This is a very tricky matter in gaming, where a small fraction of the audience is very loud, and of that fraction a significant number of people are willing to carry on with obsessions that border on (if they do not cross into) the realm of the genuinely clinically disfunctional as well as socially disruptive. When you put out a new game and run into someone who lies about its contents in an effort to strike back at the company for something done fifteen years ago by someone who isn't at the company and may not be in the field at all anymore, you are not dealing with an essentially healthy audience. And I know that every developer and most authors reading this are nodding along, thinking of multiple examples of the sort of person I just described.

If you the reader have never encountered that sort of obsession, count yourself lucky. It is in any event part of the social context of presenting new games. A vocal portion of our audience wants nothing but more of the same, whether their preferred "same" is 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons, GURPS as of 1990, White Wolf as of 1994, or whatever. And if they are allowed significant input into the playtest process, they will bully down anyone who wants anything else, and if they don't get what they want, they will go off and malign the developer and publisher. It is better to act as gatekeeper and deny them entrance at the beginning, and let the preferences of existing customers be represented by people who are prepared to be more temperate about it.

Legacy is particularly tricky when it comes to something like Gamma World, which has a publishing history older than a fair chunk of the audience. There are people who've already taken the time to write to me and let me know that because it's D20 (D20 Modern, specfically, but who's counting?), our work must suck and they'll make sure to tell everyone so. Some of them haven't waited for anything so mundane as publication to provide evidence, either. Others think that we don't have to necessarily suck, but will if we make any changes to their pet subjects. Well, a lot of these people are in for disappointments, and I don't feel at all badly about it. My assignment is to make a Gamma World that works for active customers in 2003, and I'm doing it by incorporating the benefits of twenty years' more insights into science, adventure narrative, and game design. We're actually keeping more than I expected of the legacy, and that makes me happy, but I know at the outset that we can't satisfy some people and still have a commercially viable product of a sort to satisfy my artistic and artisan ambitions.

Nostalgia comes so easily to gamers - as it does to related sorts of fans, like sf fans busy being so nostalgia for the dreams of the future from half a century ago that they find nothing to regard with wonder or delight about the actual future they're living in. I like the past myself, but I also like to look at it with contemporary eyes, recognizing weaknesses and looking for improvements even in what I love. In this particular case, we've rather substantially reenvisioned the apocalypse in light of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and the notion of the Singularity, so that even when it leads back to some of the same end results, things take on different meaning because of their context. I am, in some ways, like Jorge Luis Borges' Pierre Menard, who in writing Don Quixote again created a work that means something unlike Cervantes' work of the same name and all the same words. My desired audience necessarily excludes those for whom this cannot be a licit aim.

Then there's the matter of who's accountable for what. My stance is simple and absolute: the authors must satisfy one (1) person, and that's the developer. It is not an author's job to cater to the preferences even of co-writers on the book - cooperation is good, but in the end, it's the developer's call what goes in the book and what doesn't. As developer, I deal with management concerns and other external factors, and act as gatekeeper. The writer gets the outline and any supplemental comments I have, and that's it. When playtest comes, the writer has absolutely no obligation whatsoever to pay attention to what players are saying; it should be the kind of experience that the writer wants to follow and take part in, but it's not part of the job description as I write it.

The writer's contracted for so many words at such a rate on this and that subject, nothing more. Playtesting is a part of development. Sometimes a writer may run a playtest, and even oversee the whole playtest for a book, and that's cool, but that's a matter of asking and accepting. Playtester comments should be addressed to the developer.

The format for playtester feedback matters, too. I've several times found myself in the position of having no good way in GURPS "playtests" to comment on the overall effect of a passage or chapter because their format calls for precise citations, fixed subject tags, and other measures which allow for lasering in on specific data...at the expense, I think, of an awareness of the work as an overall thing. The format is, to me, uncomfortably reminiscent of reading Mozilla bug reports, which ties in with Adam's jeremiad of a few days ago. I get better results, I think, by asking for playtesters to gather up all their initial read-through comments into a few long posts, to do likewise with all the weekly comments and questions during play, and so on. These long posts often lead, in my experience, to unexpected insights about the interplay between separate elements of the work, and seem to feed the sense of the book as a unified thing with constituent pieces rather than fundamentally distinct and discrete pieces assembled like a mosaic.

The looser approach to commenting also seems to encourage more attention to matters of prose, both connotation and denotation, and since I regard myself as an artist as well as a craftsman, that pleases me. I like getting discussion that includes literary as well as mathematical analysis, because both are important. In addition, I find that I get better results when I ask playtesters to report their experiences and suggest revisions. This opens up room for discussion. When playtesters start demanding things, then it's going to go downhill, because I don't much like to be dictated to by anyone who isn't signing my paychecks. (And even then, I really prefer bosses who engage in discussion as well as the emission of directives.) Identifying areas of concern is not the same either as asserting an objective state of brokenness or being entitled to require some specific alternative, and the more narrative approach to reporting seems to feed the kind of discussion I prefer.

I've never had all the time I would like with playtesting. I won't with Gamma World, either. But I believe that doing playtests the way I do them will give me back a work which better accomplishes the aims that my bosses and I have for it. It will, I hope, be fun for customers and players, and the more so because folks will have played it and worked with me to strengthen the fun and turn the not-fun into something better.

An Addendum

2003-03-06T02:28:00.000-08:00

I found this quote from Warren Ellis which I think makes an excellent postscript to my screed below. It's wrong, deeply, truly, badly wrong and, as an editor myself, I despise it.

It still made me laugh, though.

"Treat your editor like an appendix. If it starts giving you shit, have it removed with knives." - Warren Ellis

Biting The Hand That Feeds Me: Develop, don't debug, dammit

2003-03-04T04:43:00.000-08:00

It’s been a little quite around of here of late, so I’m going to take the opportunity to get a few things off my chest, in what I hope will be the first of a series of linked posts. Why “Biting the Hand The Hand That Feeds Me”? Well, because I’m directly attacking some of the sacred values of the industry that has consumed much of my free writing time in the last few years

Have you ever noticed just how many roleplayers, and roleplay writers, have day jobs in the IT industry? In many of the recent games I’ve run, virtually all my players have worked in that once-lauded and now struggling discipline. I’ve been on projects where a writer has moaned about suggested rewrites because she was too busy coding. It is my contention that this link has an adverse affect on game design and is one of the factors limiting the roleplay industry to its painfully tiny niche. I’ll be exploring the idea in a number of posts, but first of all I’d look at some of the ways that the IT mindset influences the way RPGs are written.

This relationship is particularly evident in the online gaming forums, to my mind. Posters on places like rpg.netand even the forums of the gaming companies like White Wolf and Steve Jackson Games. A large number of posters on those sites appear to be limited to binary thought processes: they talk in absolutes and can only dual positions of right and wrong. They struggle with the idea that two people can hold completely different opinions of a product or idea and both be correct, within their own frame of reference. This has been reflected in my discussions with friends in the IT industry as well, where heated discussions have devolved into debates about the context of the debate. What emerged was the revelation that I, an English Literature graduate and incorrigible Devil’s Advocate, make statements that I consider to be opinion and a starting point for debate, whereas they take it as a statement of an absolute fact, to be either accepted or destroyed. It’s an interesting distinction and one that can lead to headed debates, particularly after three pints and a whisky chaser.

To return to the industry itself, this link manifests itself in some interesting ways in the RPG industry. I’m sure most of the writers here have come across developers or editors who treat redlining drafts like they are debugging code. They focus on details, spelling errors and grammar, rather than looking at the general issues of the piece. Their work is essentially micro-managed rather than looking at the big picture. I’ve had to deal with nit-picking redlines which took longer to deal with than complete conceptual rewrites and yet created no substantive change to the content of the writing.

The application of grammatical rules in a particularly interesting manifestation of this computer industry mindset. Grammar is treated as an inflexible set of rules that must be applied to every sentence, paragraph and sub clause. This ignore two rather crucial points. First, most writers of any skill and talent break the “rules” of grammar repeatedly, for effect, pacing and tone. That’s natural and normal. Hell, I was encouraged to do it both at school and university and it’s an essential part of my day job as a section editor of a magazine. Not so in the RPG industry, though. Prepare for mocking and derision in your redlines and howls of protest from the fans should you choose to try something a little different. This leads directly into the second point, which is that the rules of English grammar are entirely arbitrary things which were created a few centuries ago to allow the teaching of English in schools in the same manner as Latin. This works for Latin, which is both a dead tongue and a language where precise grammar is necessary to construe meaning. It is far less necessary in English where meaning is derived from context and word order.

This is important, because by focusing on the nit-picking and not looking at the big picture you risk destroying what makes this RPG publishing business a worthwhile enterprise in the first place: the act of creation. This is an industry about the creation of stories, settings and fun. Sometimes people seem to forget that. Sure, we need good writing which is both enjoyable and easy to understand. The rules of grammar are one tool to help achieve this, but they are far from the only one.

I’m going to name check Mike Lee, who develops Demon: the Fallen for White Wolf, here. Mike is an absolute pleasure to work with because he does look at the big picture. He is a developer with more than one critical tool in his editing toolbox. He recently asked for substantial rewrites of a project because he wanted to change the narrative thrust of the piece. He also gave me general guidelines for rewriting the storyteller advice section. Sure, there was a significant amount of work to do between first and second drafts, but I enjoyed it. Really enjoyed it, in fact. Why? Well, because Mike had taken the time to discuss the changes he wanted and the reasons for them with me, and then take on board my suggestions. We had a discussion, in which I threw in extra ideas on top of his. I enjoyed the rewrite because I knew we were creating something substantially better on the original skeleton of my first draft, and because he trusted me to find my own grammatical errors and put them right in the second draft.

There are other developers in Mike’s mould, but not enough. Like I said, to many writers and developers treat RPG writing with exactly the same mindset that they would treat coding and the two are completely different disciplines. In any piece of writing the ideas and concepts within are the most important part of the endeavor, with the way they are expressed a very close second. Yet, precious few developers give guidance on writing style or concepts and very, very few reviewers comment of the quality of expression in a book, while they busy themselves nitpicking over every literal in the book. We have a team of half a dozen subeditors on the magazine, who are devoted to nothing but spotting errors, inaccuracies and passages which need clarification, and still errors slip through. How can a RPG company with a fraction of the resources expect to put out a literal-free book?

To the reviewers and players I say: “There will always be errors. Surely it’s better to see if that book inspires you rather than meets some mathematical standard of editorial accuracy”. To the designers of games I say: “Remember that language is a tool for conveying ideas. Its principal measure of success would be how well it does that task. The “rules” of grammar are only relevant where they work in service of that goal.”

Simply put, if you have to give a writer specific guidance on every single little error in a manuscript to get a clean second draft, why the hell are you employing that writer in the first place?

A Tribute?

2003-02-27T08:04:00.000-08:00

As many of you likely know, the death of Fred Rogers was announced today.

If you are like me, you grew up visiting Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and the Neighborhood of Makebelieve. Similarly, if you are like me, you owe your interest in role-playing games in some small part to the freedom and encouragement Mr. Rogers and his puppeteers gave us to imagine other places.

Thus this small post is a tribute to the man and the gift he gave us. I wish I had more to give, or had thought to send him a note of thanks while he was still with us.

Then again, perhaps I do have more to give. Surely, in some small way, the man can be immortalized in role-playing. It seems unlikely or unreasonable to be able to get a license to write the Neighborhood of Makebelieve RPG (and perhaps some would claim it unprofitable), but perhaps some similar homage could be written.

Do the assembled masses have any thoughts?

As always,
Doc Blue

A Manifesto Of Sorts

2003-02-19T13:52:00.000-08:00

There's a convoluted history behind this post, which appeared in the forums at RPG Net. Very briefly, last year the gaming industry's award for best new game of the year went to HackMaster, a game born in the comic strip Knights of the Dinner Table and constructed both as a joke and as a deliberate effort to turn the clock back to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition, which came out in 1977. Those of us who try to do new things are disgusted by this, and by what it says about the awards and their voting process. There's been, um, discussion of the matter recently. In the course of it, I decided that since I was quite deliberately insulting the taste of those who picked HackMaster as best game, I should also lay out a positive vision as an alternative.

The funny part of this for me is that between bouts of reading the net, I've been working on the outline for the first Gamma World supplement and discussing the first drafts of the core book. In both cases we're giving substantial attention to making the game mechanics and advice better support really obvious genre inspirations - Geoff Skellams is testing the community map system to make sure that it can do Mad Max, for instance. This "let's give the folks more opportunity game what they - and we! - like watching and reading" concern goes hand-in-hand with better evocation of motifs out of classical mythology, folklore, and literature...because I chose to, my bosses support me in it, and my writers are all keen on it. We fully accept the pop culture interests of our probable audience, and indeed we share them; you should see my video shelves, where the Russian art films and Chinese epics jostle for space with the horror films and the action/adventure blockbusters and the Muppet Show discs. It happens that the very innovations that let us make the game better resemble its inspirations in this regard also let it do so with regard to inspiration out of history, culture, and science.

As it says in my notes to writers, if the bear can't fire laser beams from its eyes, the game ain't done yet. The really fun part is making the game also not be done until you can re-fight Thermopylae, complete with Spartan badass attitude. Part of the challenge for my art and craft - and the art and craft of my creative crew - is to make it more fun, to take what might seem distant or uninteresting and make it immediate and exciting. We do not wish to settle for rehashing old ground; it is our aim to please ourselves and to please our customers with more gaming fun. In some ways the thing that most pisses me off about HackMaster and other completely derivative games is that they implicitly tell gamers that they ought to settle for no more fun than they're having now, or at least to wish and expecting nothing but incremental tweaks to the same stuff. Folks like Geoff Grabowski and Greg Stolze and Jeff Mackintosh and Justin Achilli and Deirdre Brooks and I are saying that you can and should want more, expect more, feel that you deserve to keep the fun you're having now but also to get more. More and more of what delights you in other media should become viable in your gaming. You are entitled to more than any of us has yet given you.

If any particular "you" happens not to want this particular new venture, that's cool. But for crying out loud, just because dogs will go for a second meal out of what they cough up because of a hairball, don't feel like you have to do the same. Don't toss away every single possibility for something keen and new to just one thing. There's a whole alphabet, not just one letter; a whole world full of languages, not just one. Learn new words and sentences and ways of expressing yourself - not to become someone else, but to more fully become what you already would like to be, and to discover how things you don't yet know about or haven't yet understood fit together with what you have now to enrich and strengthen the whole.

Yes, I craft entertainment. But entertainment is important. The demands of living a decent and humane existence are tough: it takes work to be a good child and parent, spouse and friend, employer and employee, neighbor and citizen. Life is seldom altogether delightful. Our entertainment time is our chance to renew our sense of enjoyment, and in gaming to do so with friends in a really pretty unique kind of way. Having as much fun as possible in gaming is, or can be, part of living life responsibly, recharging energy and enthusiasm ground down by duty and happenstance. Gaming seldom gives anyone new ideas, and indeed anyone who gets their ideas about life from gaming has some other problems. But good gaming can build us up in a bunch of ways, including the sense of rising to a challenge: "I wanted to do this, and I prepared for it, and I made it work. We did something cool together, and it happened because I made it." Those of us who create games are the collaborators-at-a-distance with all the folks reading and playing the games in their various and sundry ways. If I fail to pursue options for adventure, intrigue, drama, tragedy, and mystery just because they weren't done right or at all 20-odd years ago, I'm being an irresponsible steward of the money and time I'm asking you to invest in my products. You deserve more than rehash. Don't settle for it.

Iron Developer and a New Games Competition

2003-02-18T09:49:00.000-08:00

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.

2003-02-15T22:10:00.000-08:00

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

2003-02-12T19:11:00.000-08:00

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

2003-02-11T07:10:00.000-08:00

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"

2003-01-31T17:24:00.000-08:00

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

2003-01-28T14:27:00.000-08:00

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

2003-01-26T08:11:00.000-08:00

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

2003-01-24T17:43:00.000-08:00

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

2003-01-24T08:20:00.000-08:00

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

Total Self-Aggrandizement: Asia Ascendant

2003-01-22T23:17:00.000-08:00

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

2003-01-22T09:46:00.000-08:00

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

2003-01-21T01:38:00.000-08:00

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

2003-01-20T12:14:00.000-08:00

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

2003-01-20T06:13:00.000-08:00

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

2003-01-19T20:20:00.000-08:00

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

2003-01-19T11:44:00.000-08:00

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.

Terminology And Mindset

2003-01-18T02:30:00.000-08:00

Since we've got some discussions going about implications, I thought I'd bring up a concern of mine about the use of computing-derived terminology in the tracking of drafts. It's very common, at least in the parts of the gaming business I brush up against, to have draft 1.3 and FAQ version 2.9 and so on. In idle moments I wonder whether a somewhat mechanistic terminology makes it that much easier to think of the work in mechanistic terms, even when it's intended to emphasize literary and narrative aspects.

Why I Feel Cheated by Rules Light Games

2003-01-17T18:18:00.000-08:00

I'm an odd sort when it comes to running and playing roleplaying games. As a GM, I tend to be fast and loose with a lot of rules. I am, by nature, an "impressionistic" Game Master who's more interested in speed of rule and fun than the persnickety details of combat, for example. As a player, I'm much the same way, although any persnickety details that aid my cause draw my attention like moth to a flame. In general, though, I prefer to avoid getting bogged down in the minutiae of rules. I'm just not constitutionally well suited to being a rules lawyer.

Given that, you'd think I'd prefer rules light games to rules heavy ones, but you'd be wrong. The reason is simple: too many rules light games leave so much to GM fiat that the illusion of impartiality -- and I admit it's an illusion -- would be gone. That's important to me and, I think, to my players. They trust my judgments and rulings most of the time, but occasionally I'll err and it's valuable to us to have a rule or rules system to refer to in such times. If the game lacks a way to adjudicate potentially contentious things, even in the name of rules economy or genre emulation, I feel cheated. As a writer, it's even more vital that I have these things. Otherwise, in my opinion, you've gone beyond the realm of a roleplaying game and you've got some sort of loosely structured storytelling. That's all well and good and many folks like that kind of thing, but it's not the way I play or the way most of my gaming group plays. We need something with more teeth, even if we'll ignore it half the time.

One of the things I so enjoy about the d20 system, which I've spent much of the last three years playing, writing, and taking apart for my own amusement, is that it's very structured but not choking with rules. Yes, there are a lot more rules in d20 than in most presently available game systems. Yet, those rules, in my experience, are pretty well related to one another. You can see the underlying logic to them. Balancing things isn't always obvious, but most of the time it is possible and fairly "scientifically," since there are plenty of examples of how to take a single rule and then apply it to many similar circumstances. I like that very much. I maps very nicely onto how I like to play and GM. And as a writer, it's an invaluable feature. If I were writing for a more rules light system, I'd probably have to offer heaps of advice and examples, which, again, is fine, but it's not especially efficient. Neither is it conducive to gaming sessions where players want to see evidence in black and white that their character has failed or suffered some calamity. I like my RPGs to be as much games as roleplaying experiences, which is why rules light approaches often leave me unhappy.

Anyone else feel this way or am I some Neanderthal?

New Style Games Revisited

2003-01-17T10:25:00.000-08:00

The following is from Andrew Plotkin, who ran afoul of the character limit in our comment code. I think it deserves posting, so here it is.

Think of these as magazine articles, not books. You write one, it goes out, people read it. The best ones get some money. After that it's in the archive for everyone to mull over. Puppetland isn't going to make money forever; I want something new to pay a couple bucks for.

I've been thinking about this overnight. Here is my screed.

You want to elicit a lot more New Style games? Hold an annual competition.

You've got an imprint name with some buzz; you have recognizable names. Put all the existing NS titles up on a web site, for free. Say, "This is what Greg Costikyan and Robin Laws and James Wallis are doing. This is what RPG gaming doesn't have. This is stuff you've never seen before."

Say "We want more of these."

Accept entries from the general public. Five to ten pages (whatever that is in word-count). Any style, any format, any experiment -- as long as it's a stand-alone idea. This is not a competition to write d20 modules. This is a competition to come up with something new.

Put all entries up on the web for free. Have a forum for everyone to yell at each other in. After a month, everyone votes -- anyone on the Net who wants to. Voting is for "the best entry". No list of categories ("sci-fi", "fantasy", "diceless", whatever) -- just "vote for the one you liked best". No prejudgement, no constraints.

Half of what you get will be garbage. Half of the rest will be garbage with a nifty idea buried inside. Some will be good, some will be brilliant. Leave it all on-line.

Take the top five. Print them in a cheapass book. Stick on an introduction by R. Sean Borgstrom. Sell it -- invent that indy market that people are always talking about. Pay the five winners shares of the royalties. It'll be peanuts, but that's okay. Let WOTC run the contests offering $100000 for something exactly like "Forgotten Realms". You're offering influence. The real bait is the opportunity to say "We're changing the way people think about RPGs. Serious gamers pay attention to this stuff. You've heard of some of us, and you're going to hear more of all of us."

Leave the entries on-line. The RPG Net community is not the RPG market. You're not destroying your sales market, you're attracting attention -- and writers who can do better. Would anybody have paid attention to De Profundis if it was a blog entry two years ago? Would anyone still be paying attention to it? Answer: yes, some of us would -- but tens of thousands of gamers wouldn't be leafing through in it stores and at cons. People reading this blog are the potential voters, not the potential buyers.

The last page of the book says, "Entries for next year's competition are now being accepted."

That is my rant. If you're familiar with the text adventure scene (probably you're not), you'll recognize the approximate format of the Annual IF Competition. You know what? It worked. 133 text adventures were released for free in 2002. And we don't offer publication; we don't offer royalties; we don't have anyone as well-known in the commercial computer game industry as Costikyan or Borgstrom is in the commercial RPG industry. Frankly, you RPG guys have a hell of a head start.

I like the way this man thinks...

Among my Hobby Horses

2003-01-16T22:25:00.000-08:00

Malcolm's discussion of dynamic feats raises an issue (tangentially, perhaps) that has often bothered me about game design. Specifically how the existence of skills, feats, and such contructs close off options in play. Back in the olden days, if I was playing D&D and I wanted to be a character who could track, I would tell the DM "I'm playing a Strider-like fighter, who's really good at following people." There were no rules for that, so the GM would often wing it. If I wanted to start a fire, or find food, or do just about anything, it was an option for me because there was nothing saying "You can't do this." That was how I, and the people I played with, tended to see things. It made Boot Hill, one of the more minimalist rules sets out there, extremely fun to play, for example.
I find, though, that skills and feats and such end up being less about enabling, and more about preventing. I don't have "Track" as a feat, so suddenly I can't be a good tracker. I didn't take Ride By Attack, so now I can't attack as I move the horse. I haven't invested in Search as a skill, so forget about finding any of the treasure anymore. Every time you add a skill, you remove some option for play from the characters. An extreme example of this, I think, is GURPS.
Which is one reason I admired Feng Shui as a system. It approached things from a minimalist perspective, and used generalist skills to encompass everything.
Has anyone else experienced the same feeling as they play a game? Where you say something like "We'll set up camp here." and it turns into three rolls against your Survival, Weather Sense and Concealment skills (two of which you didn't pick up and can only be used trained) and find yourself no longer in a nice tent, but facing death on the side of a mountain?

Notes toward a melodramatic game, 2

2003-01-16T22:18:00.000-08:00

In my first post on this subject, I outlined an approach to stats and dice mechanics. They accomplish something that seems to me crucial in the sort of video melo/drama I have in mind as inspiration: when push comes to shove, the crucial contest is really evenly matched. Aptitude and circumstances give one participant or another the advantage, of course, and a big part of the story is preparation for the crucial contest(s).

This leads to the next question: what's the opposition?

In the cases of soap opera, courtroom drama, and the like, it's pretty straightforward. The opposition is essentially always another person. Victory comes when the other person loses the will and/or ability to resist. These are obviously two distinct categories, and it suggests to me that I need two different sorts of impairment measure. (All of you out there saying "psychic Stun and psychic Body" can just shut up, too. :) ) I'd like to avoid calling the first Willpower, since fine games already use it, but that's what it is in some sense. The other is, depending on the circumstances, a matter of perception and access to resources. Hmm. Will damage is internal, Ability damage is external, or at least on the interface between self and world.

Geoff Skellams introduced me to the idea that you can stat up environmental challenges as if they were people. There are, I understand, some precedents in games hither and yon, but it was new to me and so I give him credit here. For criminal investigations (and scientific investigations, for that matter), you can envision the scene of investigation as a pseudo-person. It probably has little education, unless the perpetrator has set up defenses - this would be good for cyberspace security. It has more wisdom, in the sense of innate resistance to penetration and understanding. And if there are attractive nuisances and red herrings waiting to go off, those would be covered by charisma. Possibly there could be templates for different sorts of after-the-fact scenes, modified by how the perpetrator pulled off the deeds others investigate.

I've got a thought percolating around in my head about relationship charts and power modifiers, but it seems not to be coming out yet, so I'll just go ahead and post the above.

Taking Your Fan To Work Day

2003-01-16T09:31:00.000-08:00

Since we've got a pretty good crowd here, I thought it might be fun to open up a discussion question.

Most of us, I believe, dabbled in game design on some level long before we started writing professionally. What occupies your attention as a creator now that didn't seem so important to the amateur process, and what loomed large in amateur work that seems less significant now?

Dynamic Feats

2003-01-15T15:53:00.000-08:00

One of the (in my view, correct) criticism of D20 is that it doesn't give much mechanical weight to narration. If you give a PC a bennie for the player's description, you're stand the riks of overshadowing progression-granted benefits, like feats. If somebody describes a cool ride by attack, you can't give them a bonus without comparatively screwing that guy who went and bought, well, Ride By Attack.

Here's a rule I'm gonna use in conjunction with the next D20 game I run. It requires an action point system. You can either use Spycraft or D20 Modern, or staple either of their systems on. Point acquisition rates don't matter because everybody gets this bennie according to the AP system you use.

Here you go:

You can spend an AP to get a feat that you don't have for the minimum amount of time it takes to take advantage of it once, or for one full round, whichever is longer. You by them by spending one AP for each prerequisite along the feat "tree" as well as +1 AP to overcome an ability score requirement and +1 AP to overcome a level requirement for the final feat. Note that this does not override any rules on how many APs you can spend a round, so if you want to bust out with Whirlwind Attack, you're gonna spend a lot of time getting your fu on, spending an AP a round or something until you're ready to rock.

If you already have a feat along the tree, it costs less to buy single shot feats, sicne you don't have to "reach" as far with APs. Some feats don't make any sense to buy with this, so you don't buy 'em.

How does this fit in with narration? The GM gives PCs a 1-3 AP bonus when the player describes something fun. This is a "use it ot lose it" bonus that goes away after a day. PCs can bank a number of these equal to half their character level rounded up.

d20 "Modern"

2003-01-15T14:44:00.000-08:00

I am very hungry and tired. Bear that in mind.

Looking over d20 Modern and the d20 Modern SRD, I'm struck by the paradigm differences between straight d20 and d20 Modern. Of course, the seperation of profession from class is the primary among them, but there's a far looser look and feel to the rules.

Which brings up my idle thought: how effectively could d20 Modern's mechanics be used to build a truly different kind of d20 High Fantasy game? Would it work? Would it be worth it? What about Low Fantasy instead -- is this a potential "dark, character driven" cousin to normal D&D3e/d20 Fantasy games?

Other Types of Spell-casters

2003-01-15T13:06:00.000-08:00

A brief post to gauge interest and thoughts. (And I realize various people have released various books with variant spell-casters, this is more of an intellectual exercise, or something....)

I came home last night and searched my spare freezer (read: my garage) for the binder in which I put the copies of the Basic, Expert, Masters, etc., volumes of D&D that came out in the 80s. Alas, said binder either migrated to a box horribly mis-labeled _or_ got pitched in some move. The reason I sought it was to attempt convert or at least draw on the idea that specific races were equivalent to classes. (For those who don't recall, or have chosen to block it from their memory, in the earlier editions of D&D, back when AD&D was a separate game, elves and dwarves were classes just like clerics and thieves.) Since this diversion is, at least for now, derailed, I pondered alternate conversion activities. It was this pondering that lead to this post.

I am considering converting the styles of magic represented in other games to D20. In particular, the magic in Exalted and Ars Magica come to mind. Note, I don't want to recreate the character types in those games, just the essence of how magic works. In Exalted, one sort of gathers power in (potentially) extended castings to generate spell effects from one of three circles of magic. In Ars Magica, the general class of effect and the material affected go into determining how well a particular mage generates the magic. (Both over-simplified I know.) These are both, IMO, inherently different than how 'standard' D&D magic works. Not that it will bear overwhelming influence on whether or not I follow through on these conversions, but would anyone be interested in seeing the results my efforts in such a direction?

Notes Toward A Melodramatic Game

2003-01-15T12:14:00.000-08:00

James' post below motivated me to stir up thoughts I've had from time to time for a game designed to work more or less like TV drama and melodrama. Watching Twin Peaks season 1 DVDs has also contributed, just so that you're duly warned...

Characters have three attributes, perhaps Education, Wisdom, and Charisma. Each point of an attribute lets you buy a couple of points of skills. Some skills are linked to just one attribute, like academic specializations. Others can link to two or even three attributes; there are schooled cops and insightful cops and commanding cops, for instance. Liabilities work more or less like they do in Nobilis (which I'm sure surprises everyone who knows my work and tastes): each level of liability knocks down your character's functional rating in one or more relevant skills.

There are no physical attributes. The ability to perform well at physically demanding tasks is a skill, either associated with a profession (like cop) or standing on its own (like sports aptitude). Otherwise, how folks do in physical challenges is largely a matter of determination and heroic effort and like that.

Players resolve challenges with simple die rolls. You roll a die, whoever is handling the opposition rolls a die. If you win, your opponent suffers degraded ability, and when they lose the ability to resist, you win. If you lose, you suffer. If you tie, both of you suffer. Each point in a relevant attribute or skill gives you an action point, which you can use in one of two ways. You can spend it outright to guarantee a success, but then you won't get it back until one of your character's liabilities comes into play and you can earn it back, or you can roll it and hang onto it for reuse as often as may be.

Yes, there is a high degree of randomness in this. Assuming that each antagonist has some relevant competence, the initial margin of victory is small. I'm currently thinking that losing a round of an exchange removes dice from your pool to roll next round, but you can still choose to spend them - this allows pulling back from the brink of defeat, at the cost of later impairment. But I don't know for sure; more tweaking is obviously called for.

More will follow. I think that something publishable lurks in this. (And just as a reminder to the sort of person who tries to scavenge: copyright does apply to material published online. When in doubt, ask me or whoever's relevant in a given post, and you'll likely meet happy cooperation.)

Introduction

2003-01-15T12:10:00.000-08:00

I'm Jason Langlois, and I've been gaming since 1976. I've contributed to a few White Wolf books and have done a few things online that have been well received (Care and Handling of Mooks, The Iron Forge). I'm currently DMing D&D3e, and playing in a Lord of the Rings campaign, a Harn campaign, and a Call of Cthullu Campaign. On Saturdays, I play in an online D&D game, too. As well, I occasionally indulge in board games and wargames on Sundays, find time to play on the PS2, and hold down a full time job.

Yet Another Intro

2003-01-15T08:47:00.000-08:00

Hello there, all you readers in cyberspace land, surfing up the information superweb. My name's Adam Tinworth. I've contributed to a couple of dozen books from White Wolf and am thus unknown to the vast majority of the roleplaying world. I shall be here contributing ideas that should be roundly ignored by all sensible readers.

The Importance of Melodrama

2003-01-15T07:56:00.000-08:00

Someone needs to make a soap opera roleplaying game.

Well, not really. Doing so would probably be silly and even redundant, but there's a lot to be learned from soap operas. Most successful TV shows become soap operas after a while. That's just as true of genre television programs as it is of "mainstream" ones. Now, by "soap opera" all I mean is a story that makes heavy use of melodrama and takes an interest in the interpersonal lives of the characters involved. The best roleplaying campaigns I've ever run or played in did this. Instead of focusing solely on the characters' adventures narrowly defined, these campaigns also included lots of "adventures" that were, in fact, lengthy examinations of the characters' lives and loves, hopes and dreams -- and fears.

Now, I'm sure a lot of my fellow writers would claim that most RPGs today do this and that's true to an extent. Open up any Storyteller game and you're going to find yet another iteration of the perennial advice column for GMs. Having written a couple of these, I know they can be good and useful, but they're also somewhat limited by the exigencies of the setting to which they're attached. That means a lot of verbiage is taken up with showing the GM how to run a good Exalted or Fading Suns game (what its elements are, what its stories are like) rather than showing the GM how to run a good long-term campaign. Melodrama is the key in my view. The qualities that allow soap operas to continue and thrive after decades are exactly the things that all good RPGs need to last for more than a few months.

The key is realizing that there is story potential in things that don't consist in bashing an orc to steal his treasure or battling the latest conspiracy of the Technocracy. Likewise, purely internal struggles -- such as the kind the form the centerpiece of most World of Darkness games -- aren't a solid basis for longevity either. They are certainly dramatically interesting and very rewarding if done well, but they're necessarily limited. What I'm looking for, I guess, is a stronger emphasis on building a "community" of NPCs that interact with the PCs in ways that aren't quantifiable by die rolls or Humanity ratings or whatever. I'd like to see games give GMs to the tools to build and nurture places where the players begin to care about all the petty human interactions that characterize soap operas and make them so alive and vital to those that enjoy them.

Does this make any sense?

What We're Playing

2003-01-14T16:25:00.000-08:00

I was chatting with a fellow game writer the other day and discovered that, even though he is employed by a particular game company as a line editor, he does not regularly play that company's game. To be fair, he said he wasn't playing very much with any regularity, but when he did play these days, he was playing a d20 game. That exchange is one I've had several times in recent months. Too often, I discover that game writers, designers, and developers don't actually play any RPGs on a regular basis, let alone the ones they're working on. Time being as limited as it is, that's somewhat understandable, but even so, it's disheartening to hear this sort of thing. It only reinforces my occasional belief that many roleplaying games are never played, but only read and obsessed over by fans.

D20 has changed this dynamic somewhat. I hear many stories of my fellow writers who are actually playing games again and with greater regularity. I know that, prior to the release of Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition, I hadn't been in a regular gaming group for years. That changed in the spring of 2000, when I wrangled an advance copy of the 3E rules. I started a D&D campaign that lasted for over two years. It eventually spawned a second campaign that, a year later, is still going on. I can name almost a dozen other colleagues who experienced a similar upsurge in their game playing with the release of 3E. Perhaps the individuals I know don't represent the majority of the industry, but it's an interesting data point nonetheless.

For myself, I can say that the appeal of d20 games is twofold. The first is familiarity. I already knew the basics of the system even before I got that advance copy. That familiarity in turn gave me (and my fellow players) the room to roleplay rather than argue over how to adjudicate this or that. At the same time, the second factor is the crunchiness -- the gamey-ness -- of d20. It's a fun system to toy with and rearrange. There's an underlying logic to it that appeals to rules tinkerers. Combats are also fun, because they include lots of nice little tactical details and give us all an excuse to use our miniatures that have been gathering dust for eons. The gratification of "leveling-up" is also easily overlooked. There's an enjoyment there that's missing from point based systems, I think. I know that I -- no hardcore gamer -- very much look forward to my half-elf cleric/monk gaining a new level in the D&D game I'm playing.

My experiences mirror those of others so far as I can tell. Far from being a bane, I think d20 has gotten people playing games again, which is quite an accomplishment. If it can bring in new players, I can't see how anyone can complain about that. Eventually, the newbies will move on, as I once did, to other games -- an outcome that serves everyone's interests.

Yet Another Intro

2003-01-14T14:45:00.001-08:00

Howdy. Rick Jones here. I've done a bit of freelancing here and there, mostly for Werewolf. I'm getting back into the swing of freelancing now that my son is old enough that I have a few hours in the week I can use for writing.

Alas, poor Hogshead... I picked his bones, Horatio

2003-01-14T14:45:00.000-08:00

With Hogshead Publishing deciding to close up shop at the head of their game, we're losing more than a cool company run by smart people you'd like to drink beer with. We're also losing New Style Games, and that's tragic. It really is.

New Style Games, if they had any common thread, were tiny little things -- 24 pages long, generally -- and cost a pittance. They were also, almost entirely, revolutionary additions to the Role Playing world. Between De Profundis and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen the very fabric of what we think of as a Role Playing Game has been unravelled, examined, considered, snipped up, crocheted into a new, more interesting design and used to hold plants up off the floor. Other New Style Games made us reexamine what we were actually doing when we were role playing. Violence: the roleplaying game of egregious and repulsive bloodshed was more than disgusting and savagely funny -- it was a deconstruction of Hack and Slash roleplaying that makes Munchkin look like a Saturday Night Live sketch. Pantheon is a thing of beauty, because of the way it makes you think about the stories you're telling (and is it me, or do Pantheon, De Profundis and the Baron all deserve the appelation "Storyteller system" much more than White Wolf's games, with no disrespect meant to them) and the process of editing it forces upon the storytellers.

But, I do not come here to praise New Style Games, but to exhume them. I think the loss of this outlet of simple, inexpensive, utterly revolutionary or even just fun pieces is an absolute tragedy, and further think it can't be allowed to pass. While New Style may be dead, the format of the books and (more importantly, perhaps) the standard of creativity within them should be preserved, and allowed to grow and flourish.

So, I pass it to you, my beloved cohorts. What "New Style" new games can you conceive of, and how can they be profitably published in today's marketplace? And do they have to have the genre-redefining nature of a De Profundis or Puppetland? Do they have to deconstruct their source as efficently as Violence? Do they have to be this bloody clever? Or is a good core idea for a game and an economy of words sufficient?

Thoughts?

2003-01-14T14:20:00.000-08:00

Wacky idea... conversations about fantasy races and agricultural development + working on a game featuring a race where nearly everyone has magic...

Oak trees are nigh impossible to domesticate because the genetics behind their production of tannin in the nuts is complex. That, combined with a long age and the propensity for squirrels to scatter the nuts all over, means that humans in our past simply looked for the random mutants and took those nuts.

Elves could do several things... one, get the squirrels to back off; two, live long enough to breed oak trees; three, in D&D at least, you could have a mage walk around casting Polymorph Any Object, turning 'oak trees making bitter nuts' to 'oak trees making nonbitter nuts.' Add 1000+ years of wandering through a forest, and you end up with a fantasy Johnny appleseed...

2003-01-14T12:22:00.000-08:00

Hey, Malcolm Sheppard here, aka eyebeams. Done some writing for Mage: The Ascension and Exalted. I'm tall, handsome and enjoy rules-light systems with low prep times by roaring fireplaces.

My big thing right now is something I like to call action/mechanic parity. Basically, a game system event should correspond to a single narrative blurt, more or less. For example, let's look at a World of Darkness fistfight. We have:

1) A roll to hit.
2) A roll to defend
3) A roll to inflict injury
4) A roll to resist injury.

All for the following blurts:

1) "I smack the jerk in the face?"
2) "I bob under Mr. Fancypants' fist!"
3) (GM) "Nice try . . . jerk! Get a broken nose for 3 health levels! Har har."

So to make it match up, you end up with the Aeonverse/Exalted solution of a soak rating. Me, I like to take it one further and get rid of the damage roll, since the GM's narrative contribution need a roll and there may be times when the GM is actually interfering with narrative play by interjecting the damage results.

The other side of the coin is that, in some games, you might need *more* rolls to get this parity. For example, D20's AC/Defense system is a static one, which means that there's no system backing for describing a parry. You could roll a D20 instead, but in some versions the AC system (which accounts for passive defense as well) doesn't necessarily make this make sense. IN SWD20 and Spycraft of course, the VP/WP divide lets you "sell" flesh wounds and near misses quite well.

There are plenty of games and situations where you don't want to follow this guideline, but I think that it sometimes makes a good, rough rule.

Introduction

2003-01-14T12:03:00.000-08:00

I'm Genevieve Cogman, username Maya or incandescens, and have only been doing "this" for a few years, as opposed to many of the veterans around. Done some stuff for In Nomine, Exalted, GURPS, and other bits. This looked far too interesting to miss.

Those introductions just keep on coming...

2003-01-14T11:16:00.000-08:00

I'm Dave Weinstein, and just to keep things interesting, I come from the electronic side of the gaming divide. More on other things later...

The Good Bits

2003-01-14T10:19:00.000-08:00

Recently I've been running a game for folks who aren't available in big swatches of time. We have two hours each week - maybe a little bit more some weeks, but not much. And it's got me thinking about the general issue of what gets time in play and what can be glossed over. I find that at this point I really like the compactness of it, and will be seizing the excuse to gloss over the routine in favor of what's exceptional and specific about the adventure at hand. The take-10 and take-20 rules in D&D 3rd edition caught me off-guard, but now I find myself applying them pretty widely. If the characters' basic, routine effort will generate a successful outcome, I'm inclined to give it to them. That way we can focus on what requires more consideration and effort.

Now I want to write an adventure module that folds this in as the default practice, darn it.

The Dogs of War

2003-01-14T09:40:00.001-08:00

One of the great ironies is that while roleplaying evolved out of wargaming, roleplaying has never really managed to produce a workable mass combat system. Wargame designers introduced the concept of "hero" units to their medieval simulations and it was only a small step from there to removing the heroes and focusing solely on them and their exploits. Why can't the process be reversed in some way? Why can't we add heroes back into wargaming to produce a satisfying simulation of a mass combat from a roleplaying perspective. I'm sure that, after seeing The Two Towers, every GM and his brother wants to run a big battle in their favorite fantasy RPG.

As things stand now, though, that's not easy. Most mass combat systems for RPGs boil down to one of two categories. The first is basically just a wargame. It uses very different rules and, if the player characters have any impact at all, they're re-imagined according to these new rules, so there's a disconnect between what they're like in the roleplaying portion of the game and in the mass combat portion. The second category is just an immense abstraction. Roll a couple of dice, compare it to some Battle skill or whatnot, and then determine who wins.

Neither of these categories is very enjoyable to me. Neither simulates much of anything. What I would like is something that allows PCs to enter a mass battle, whether as commanders or simple participants, and for it to feel like a grand melee. I don't want to use new rules. I don't want to resort to an elaborate wargame that bears no resemblance to the baseline rules. I'd like the PCs to matter and for there to be a possibility of their success or failure, above and beyond what happens to the force with which they're fighting. Is this too much to ask?

Introductions, redux, again.

2003-01-14T09:40:00.000-08:00

I hight Scott Taylor, known to all and sundry online these many years as izzylobo. I've been freelancing for over a decade now, starting with R.Talsorian's Cyberpunk, and most recently with a whole passle of work for Geoff Grabowski on Exalted.

And, well, that's me.

Introduction

2003-01-13T22:47:00.000-08:00

I'm Chris Meadows, though I'm usually known on the 'net by a handle relating to an old dubbed anime show. I haven't done much gaming writing (I think I may have about three paragraphs that will show up in the D20 RPG on the Hell's Faire disc due out in May) but I'm hoping to make a start...so that one day I, too, can enjoy a (small) cup of coffee with the realization, "My writing bought me this! Well...most of this, anyway." And the folks writing here are just plain interesting...hope I'll have something worthwhile to contribute.

2003-01-13T21:04:00.000-08:00

Forever Young, or Nearly So

The Problem: In the "generic D&D" setting premises, Elves and other long-lived races take roughly a century to mature enough to equal the abilities of a 15-year-old human. This really doesn't make sense from a semi-realistic viewpoint. After all, if one imagines paleolithic Elves, how do those toddlers survive a decade or two of, well, toddling?. If you assume they rocket to adolesence then slow down, then one must assume that young adult Elves are remarkably dumb.

The Solution: Posit a single, long-lived race. They mature very slowly, but learn at about the same speed as humans. Young children of this race, from the point of learning to walk to midway between birth and adolescence, are called Halflings. Older children, up until adolescence, are known as Gnomes. Adolescents of this kind are called Elves. And finally, the mature members of this race are the Dwarves.

Halflings are little savages. Literally. Lucky, durable, and clever, they explore and adventure fearlessly, following their whims to the ends of the earth, where they laugh and totter on the edge...or at least until it's time to find some lunch. They are Wild Boys and Girls, and it would be a miracle for any of them to reach the next stage of life - if they weren't so damned skillfull and clever.

Gnomes possess endless curiosity, but aren't so much restless wanderers as inquisitive tinkerers. It's less interesting to them to learn what's on the other side of that mountain range than it is to play with a strange mechanical lock from the humans who live over there. While significantly more sensible than Halflings due to decades of experience, the confidence of so many years and the growth of their intellectual and magical abilities tends to encourage unconcerned overconfidence as opposed to the rash bravado of their younger sElves. After a century or so, Gnomes start to find themsElves physically and mentally changing.

Elves have the benefits of youth without the drawback of being young. Beautiful, strong, and graceful, they devote their considerable talents towards the pursuits of the young adult: prestige, self-fulfillment, and (more often than not) each other. They are the prince and princesses of the earth in their own eyes - and admittedly, they often have the same stature in the eyes of the Younger Races and the Humans. Perhaps their greatest flaw is a combination of centuries of life combined with The Sheer Certainty That I Know Everything. They have vanishingly few responsibilities at this age, though as their fiery blood cools over the years, they start to seek the powers and duties of maturity.

Dwarves are stooped, squat, and crotchety, but they manage things. Important things, like civilizations and the mere fact of civilization. Wise, powerful, and endlessly aware of the truth of mortality even as their lives exceed a millenium, they hold the world together along the seams of its great mountain chains. They are the ones responsible for keeping the world safe from monumental threats arising from within it and the ravenous, gibbering things outside it. But for all their wisdom and competence, they, more than anyone else possibly can, know their own limitations and the heartbreaking truth that they mustn't try to protect the Younger Races from the dangers they must handle on their own. Otherwise, what sort of dwarves would manage the next eon?

This rough, terribly florid outline needs serious fleshing out...like what ages define which races. But both Will and I were bursting at the seams with ideas that flowed off of the initial idea. We'll probably come up with slightly different, but emminently usable variations on the premise. I thought at first that Humans might well be unnecessary in such a setting, but I now think they provide an interesting contrast with the first three "races".

For all their experience and ability, I don't see that anyone of the Long Race younger than an old elf or dwarf would bother with such boring trivialities as building civilization. Magical ability and decades or centuries of life make it awfully easy to focus on fun things instead of responsibilities. Halflings probably sleep outside, building crude shelters or delving into caves when the weather's nasty. Gnomes probably build their own little, eccentric homes for fun, if not magically fashion them. Elves conjure shelter when they wish it, creating pavilions of spidersilk with hordes of unseen/summoned/other servants if the urge to entertain strikes them. That sort of thing.

Comments welcome.

Allegedly witty, self-referential, stupid title.

2003-01-13T21:03:00.000-08:00

Sean Riley here. Freelance writer for White Wolf, strong proponent of getting weird with systems.

Lookin' forward to getting started.

Whistling in the Dark

2003-01-13T20:46:00.000-08:00

Hi there -- this is another introduction. I'm Eric Burns, which will cause no end of confusion with other Erics on this list. That's what I'm looking forward to. I have a pen-paper bio listing my work as well, and I'm just glad to be in the room with a cup of coffee, thanks.

Man with hole in pocket feel cocky all day

2003-01-13T20:42:00.000-08:00

What, introductions? Oh, God. I apologize in advance.

Hello. I am Mikko Rautalahti. I know you can't pronounce that, but it's okay, you will only spend an eternity in hell being introduced to an endless stream of dull scissors because of it. Apparently, I'm a writer. I'm not quite sure how that happened, but I suspect it has something to do with deciding to write for a living. In real life, I am slow, but clumsy.

On my free time, I meet many wonderful mammals.

mommy

mommy, it's very dark in here

Things To Do With D20

2003-01-13T19:32:00.000-08:00

I realized this evening that one can essentially reinvent the Storyteller system with some minor adjustments to the d20 rules.

First, toss out the raw trait scores and work directly with the bonuses. (I like this anyway because I like compact numbers.) Then you can use skill levels and trait bonus levels as the number of dice to roll, with difficulty varying based on DC. At this point you're most of the way to the look and feel of Storyteller, I think, with six traits rather than nine attributes.

2003-01-13T19:14:00.000-08:00

I guess it's my turn. I am David Wendt. I'm a Ph.D. statistician by day and a game philosopher by night. I've been know to freelance and you can see my gaming bibliography at Pen & Paper. I've got these ideas (some of which can be found here) and Mr. Baugh has been kind enough to given yet another place to share them. So, I am preparing to give you a glimpse into how my mind works....

Should be an interesting ride. Hold on and lets see how fast this merry-go-round can spin.

2003-01-13T19:04:00.000-08:00

Attack of the Introductions
Yet another minion, sloping misshapen toward... er, something.
I also have a page at Pen & Paper here, and have been working as a fulltime freelance writer since Jan 2002.
Always looking to bounce ideas and look for new roads in the gaming biz.

Enter Stage Left? Nah, they'll never expect me coming out of the trap door.

2003-01-13T19:01:00.000-08:00

I'm Eric Thompson, an occasional playtester and wannabe writer. You can see my "credits" in the former field inside a few books, most of which involved Bruce. Aside from being a sadly undergamed geek (we can't have Bruce monopolize the unfortunate double entendres), I'm going to see whether actually making myself write more often than once in a blue moon will let me develop some ability in it. It worked for programming, so we'll see. :)

Next.

2003-01-13T18:58:00.000-08:00

Hello, I'm one of Bruce's minions, James Maliszewski. I belong to that dubious class of person known as a freelance writer. Following my master's lead, I'll direct you toward my bibliography, as well as my personal website, which contains other bits of information about myself and my current activities. I suppose that I'm partially to blame for the existence of this blog, since Bruce and I discussed it a few weeks ago and now he's gone and made it a reality. Now, I guess I'll have to ensure that this place stays interesting. Stay tuned.

Introductions

2003-01-13T18:44:00.000-08:00

I'm your host, Bruce Baugh. I've been working full-time in gaming as a writer (and then writer, editor, and developer) since 1997. The neat folks at Pen & Paper have compiled a bibliography of my work, which you can see here. I am well-pleased with my work for White Wolf and others, but I'm also looking to poke at some frontiers on my own, and one of the reasons for setting up this blog is to make it easier for me to record ideas-in-progress.

2003-01-13T18:13:00.000-08:00

This is an experiment in mutual self-gratification.

No, wait, that sounds terrible.

This is an opportunity for a bunch of folks I've chatted with about gaming matters to continue the conversation in a slightly different medium. This way we get archives and the opportunity post files and like that. The rest of you are welcome to look over our collective shoulders and comment as the spirit moves you.

We'll do introductions shortly.