random average

Have Games, Will Travel -- Go to #73. Play it. Skip to 11 minutes in and listen to him talking about Wilderness of Mirrors.

"This game fixes every problem I've ever had with the spy genre."

His description of how the 'mission prep' works in Wilderness of Mirrors, versus how "planning" works in other spy games makes me laugh in regret over Spycraft's system, and hungry for the awesome way it works in WoM. It's HOT.

I want this thing so bad, and it's just not available yet. :(

Posted by Doyce at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Okay, I'm just brainstorming here, and I more than welcome input and thoughts.

I got Dogs a couple years back -- one of the first couple conflict-resolution-level games that I really tried running with my home group (I think maybe InSpectres was before that) -- we didn't get very far at the time, for a number of reasons. Since then, I've run two Sorcerer campaigns, two HQ games, a couple TSoY one-shots. Last week, we returned to DitV, same characters, possessing (a) more general group familiarity with dirty-hippe narr/Conflict Resolution games and (b) better GM understanding of the Dogs rules.

The original take on the conflict rules (two years back) were that the dice were sort of 'in the way' of every single pose or statement made in a conflict, but the new take is something like this:

The dice mechanic is conflict-based, not task-based, but unlike some others we’ve been doing, there’s plenty of RP and “posing” during the conflicts to make it not feel too dice-driven or “everything depends on this one roll” kind of thing.

Now, this perception that something like HQ or Sorcerer or Galactic is essentially 'roleplay the scene to conflict, then one die (or clump of dice) gets rolled and the results dictate the resolution of conflict' is, at least in part a failing of the GM, in my opinion -- in some cases (the first Sorcerer game, and grokking the Galactic rules), we are or have been in the past very 'jerky' in our transitions from the three 'phases' of Roleplay, Engage Conflict System, Do End Narration.

So the simple solution, already undertaken by me, is to make those transitions more organic and natural. Great, but that's not my point here.

What I want to look at is how to borrow some of the good in DitV and use it in games like HQ or Galactic.

So, what is that good? Well, DitV uses a big old Dice Pool system, but it does two things that take this:

1. RP
2. Roll big ol' Dice Pool
3. Narrate Outcome

... and breaks it out into much more easily digestible bits: slicing that Conflict Resolution roll (and that big pile of dice) into smaller sections that are (a) more easily digestible and (b) rid you of the feeling that it all comes down to one roll, even though it really does: the difference between HQ/Galactic and Dogs is that in the former you figure out all your dice/augments in one clump of activity and then roll, while in the latter you spread the total pool accumulation/distribution over multiple steps, interspersed with Narration and roleplay.

So, how does it manage that, and what can we steal?

First thing: The Raise/See, See/Raise system means you deal with the big pile o' dice in discrete chunks.

This is cool, but doesn't (only IMO, and please enlighten me if you disagree) port into HQ very well -- there really IS just one final roll here. In Galactic, there IS some portability of this idea, if we decide to spend a few seconds narrating how/why each "pair" of opposing dice either win, lose, or tie. That's pretty self-explanatory, so I'm not going into that in more depth here.

Second thing: Escalation of the conflict to include other Stats, plus the narration that allows you to include new Trait dice in the conflict. This goes like so:

1. Narrate your Raise/See.
2. Roll the new dice you're getting because of the Narration.
3. THEN put forward the dice for your Raise/See, possibly using some of the dice you just rolled, or not.

Now this seems like something that ties back into HQ or Galactic pretty well.

In HeroQuest, this would entail essentially 'slicing' the simple conflict into:

1. RP to conflict. Everyone indicates what their intent/goal is in the conflict.
2. Name base trait for conflict.
3. Those involved take turns narrating either...
-- 3a. Inclusion of several passive-augment traits.
-- 3b. Inclusion of a single variable augment trait, and roll for that augment.
4. Repeat 3 until everyone's happy.
5. Roll the final conflict resolution TNs. Spend HP as normal, etc.
6. Narrate outcome.

In Galactic:

1. RP to conflict. Everyone indicates what their intent/goal is in the conflict.
2. Name base Archetype for conflict.
3. Those involved take turns narrating in...
-- 3a. Inclusion of relevant personality traits, OR
-- 3b. The contribution of a Crew member, OR
-- 3c. The contribution from Gear, OR
-- 3d. The contribution from Ship dice.
-- 3e. (GM only): circumstances associated with spending Hazard to add dice to the Conflict.
4. Repeat 3 until everyone's happy.
5. Roll for conflict resolution.
6. Additional 'take turns' narration to activate rerolls, sacrifice red shirts, and bring in additional achetypes, per the standard rules.
7. High dice narrates final outcome.

I think... provisionally... that this would

1. Break down the Conflict Resolution into the kind of scene where it's clear exactly why the relevant 'bonus stuff' is involved.
2. Reduce the 'augment bloat' that seems to come up fairly often in some HQ games, to judge from people's posts on the subject (when someone just keeps adding stuff until they've literally exhausted the sheet -- more common in HQ, certainly).
3. Add interest, and hopefully reduce that feeling that 'it all comes down to one roll.'

I realize that this strays into the kind of detail one usually sees in Extended Conflicts in HQ, but I don't know if that's a bad thing, IF the players feel like everything is just being 'lumped' into a single CR roll, taking everyone too far out of the headspace of the scene.

Thoughts?

Posted by Doyce at 2:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Bully Pulpit's Spreadshirt Store, with a number of fun Pemberton Panthercat shirts, and some fun "MURUB" (Copulate with this person!) Shab al-Hiri Roach shirts. I'm personally very interested in the brown Panthercats shirt, but the Green ring-tee is cool, also.

I asked Jason, and he said he had to take the pink girls MURUB shirt with the sparkly-paint Roach logo down for the time being, because they're having trouble with the sparkle-ink.

This makes me sad: I mean, who doesn't need more shirts with sparkle ink on them?

Posted by Doyce at 1:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Saturday, we picked up our Roach game again, and got quite a bit further through the razing of Pemberton University.

A Word on Our Playing Speed:
I've commented before on the fact that, unless I set up a game with none of the kids around offering up distractions, we just don't get as much done as we would otherwise. For instance, I've run John Harpers "Freebooters" TSoY scenario twice, and in one case (no kids around) I finished the whole thing up in about four hours -- in the other (kids around) we took about 5 or 6 hours to get about two-thirds of the way through.

Now, while I might like to set up a regular game that's ostensibly kid-free, I shouldn't like to let people think that I'm particularly frustrated by this -- we have kids, we love our kids being around, and that's just one of the downsides of the unquestionable good.

Or, as De commented near the end of the evening, "We could be playing through this faster than we are, but how we're doing it really suits us."

Well said. We had a lot of fun setting up the minutia and particulars of each scene during the events, with everyone jumping in and contributing additional NPCs and material.

To review:

* Doyce, as Douglas Dean ("Double D") Blackburn, Asst. Prof of Poetry and Theatre Arts, into sports and debauchery.
* De, as "Kitty", a hard of hearing full professor of Chemistry, into cruelty and deceit.
* Lee, as "Penny", I think... damn I had a problem remembering his name Asst. Prof. of Art, also into cruelty and deceit.
* Margie, as "Benny", I think... Asst Prof of Geology, into Gossip and... Something.
* Dave as "Pansy", Full Professor of Botany, into Wit and young fresh men. err... Freshmen. Right.

I'm using the nicknames everyone had rather than their full names because I flat out don't remember them -- we used the nicknames almost exclusively during the game.

So, with our first Event done already, we started up with the WINE AND CHEESE SOCIAL.

De started this scene off with Kitty trying to poison me with a two-stage chemical compound delivered via both the wine and the cheese -- the wine I'd been drinking got shuffled around to someone else, however (killing a busboy in the process), I doubled my meager reputation in the process, and resolved to get Double D's debauchery bonus in every scene of the Event.

PANSY: Double-D is in his cups.
GROUP: *groans*

((Dave was in top form for horrible puns this game.))

The second scene was Lee's, taking place at the Social itself, and involved disgracing me in front of the Chancellor by getting a coed (Regina Sutton, actually) to seduce me...

Double D: (meta-narrative) Ah, heterosexuality: my one weak spot.
PANSY: Pervert.

...then he'd lead the Chancellor to our location and expose me flagrante delicto with a student. Before we rolled, I added that the reason why I was celebrating had to do with being given Tenure (played the card I'd drawn for that Event) and made a Full Professor.

((In retrospect, I'm not sure if a card like that can be played when you want during the event, or if it's immediately in effect, but I played as an Asst. Prof. the first Scene, then Tenured up to get the full Professor benefit in the attack on my academic standing.))

Result, a win for Double-D, and I got narrative. (It seems as though the winner will ALWAYS get narrative in the Roach.) Hearing the approach of the Chancellor, I scrambled out of the cloak room, giving Regina time to get dressed, and approached the chancellor to tell him about this fantastic plan I (as the new Professor of the Theatre Department) had to make the Pemberton Follies of 1919 the most memorable ever, and it all centered on the star of the show... the star I'd just found... the most popular coed on campus... (throws open cloak room door) Regina Sutton!

The Chancellor is much impressed.

Now... I was already pretty much the target du jour for this Event, but two wins in a row against the 'feature' players pretty much ensured that everyone was gunning for Double D, and making Regina the star of the Follies virtually guaranteed her horrific death.

... which came around on MY scene for that event, where an impromptu post-Social "follies try-out" at the Rowing Team's boathouse turned into a massive wine-soaked orgy, with Regina as the 'star'.

(To the tune of "Down on the Board Walk")

Down at the boat house.
You've got a "C"
Go down on a professor
And you'll get a "B"
Down at the boat house.
We'll be having fun
Down at the boat house.
Sex with everyone

Down at the boat house.
You can swallow the coach
Down at the boat house.
You can swallow a roach
Down at the boat house.
Boat house!

((And don't blame ME for the lyrics -- I had nothing to do with them, aside from providing the Scene's inspiration.))

I lost this one big-time, and Margie's sabotage of the boat house itself caused the whole structure to slide into the lake.

(Regina Sutton regrettably died in this scene -- she couldn't swim free, as she'd been voluntarily tied spread-eagle to a couple of oars at the time of the boathouse collapse.)

THE FOLLIES

The Follies Event opened with the open-casket memorial service for Regina Sutton, featuring a number of huge bouquets provided by the Botany department, a painting of the coed done by Lee's Art department Asst. Professor (and containing a number of hidden Sumerian glyphs designed to raise the dead), and opening with an Eulogy by Double D, urging everyone to make the Follies as memorable as Regina would have wanted.

DOYCE: So, Double-D is supporting the Follies.
DAVE: The Follies Brassiere

Right. I don't remember if I won that opening thing at all. I know Dave's ploy with the Flowers didn't work very well at all (he had influenza and was urged to leave the memorial service), and in the process of a couple other scenes Regina Sutton was reanimated as zombie in the middle of the service (by Lee, who voluntarily Roached during this Event to get access to the delicious d12s, because he was tired of getting badly beaten in every single conflict), and indicated her murder as Margie's character.

DE: The Follies are yours! I'm going to ruin your Follies! With Zombies!

((Yeah, Double D was getting hammered by most of the Faculty by this point. :) ))

I think we killed every single Pembertonian who was supposed to appear in the Follies event.

The Reverend burned to death in the middle of an exorcism attempt again Regina when a huge floral arrangement caught fire during the memorial service.

The Dean of Students -- was eaten by the zombie cast of the entirely ruined Pemberton follies, during the show.

I ended the Event in a full body cast (having been beaten senseless by the zombified cast of the show) and entirely out of Reputation.

DOYCE: I rolled well! I just couldn't beat the Roach...

THE HOMECOMING GAME
Not a TON happened in this Event -- I don't think everyone even chose to use their Scenes. The group did immediately decide that Regina still had to be the Homecoming Queen, despite being a reanimated Zombie.

"It's amazing what a little make-up can do..."
"A little rouge..."
"A little kohl..."
"A little formaldehyde..."

At the beginning of this event, Lee drew an auto-roach card and used it to de-Roach -- narrating that watching me beaten within and inch of my life during the Follies 'filled him up' as far as cruelty went... he was in effect totally satiated, and lost his interest in Cruelty.

Suuuure. Right. He then turned around and tried to take advantage of Double D in the hospital, angling for a little late-night buggery. I was, however, able to win that particular conflict.

DOYCE: Always a bridesmaid, old bean...
LEE: ...never the anal rapist.

And that was about all that happened in that Event, that I recall. Except that Margie won a hotly contested bid to disgrace and de-fund the Football Team by turning almost the whole team into Zombies and then revealing them as such after we trounced the Miskatonic Cephalopods... sort of the necromantic equivalent of a steroids abuse scandal.

Does it seem like I'm talking about Double D a lot? Well, he was my character, so I did tend to see the whole thing through his eyes... plus, since everyone was BEATING THE LIVING HELL OUT OF ME -- things DID tend to focus a bit on him at times.

FACULTY SENATE
I was auto-Roached at the start of this Event (I figure one of them took him over while he was in traction in the hospital), and narrated my return to mobility by walking into the Faculty Senate meeting and hotly denouncing the ploy to move funding from Sports into nothing but Academics.

DOYCE: My laughter goes just a little too long, like someone who had been excessively beaten with human limbs wielded by the walking dead.

Ironic, that.

I think we won that, based mostly on the support of one of the (few) surviving Pembertonians, who stately quite cynically that Sports = Happy Alumni = Funding.

I'm not entirely sure what else went on during this event, except for a three-way battle for possession of Regina Sutton's still-animated head (Kitty wanted her as a lab assistant, Pansy wanted her for... I'm not sure what, and I was still convinced I could use her as a star in some major theatrical production). I had a lot of fun narrating this closing scene, describing it as a period-accurate silent picture, complete with hammering piano soundtrack and a Keystone-cops-style chase around the campus, with Regina's head changing hands a half-dozen times.

[ed.: Oh, yeah... Lee's character got some Rouch Trade from the captain of the football team, Bantam Whaley... almost forgot about that. :)]

By this point, it was getting late, so we decided that we'd wrap up the last Event in a few weeks, coupled with making up characters for 'whatever's next'

So at the end of our second session, and five events in, four of the five characters are Roached (Lee auto-Roached in the Scene right after he de-Roached), and only little Professor Pansy is still free-willed. He's got about 1 reputation, and I think Margie's leading the Roached group with something like 10 or 12.

DOYCE: (roach voice) "Drive your enemies before you..."
DAVE: (ooc) "... and hear the lamentation of their women..."
DE: (cutting back to her scene, in character) "You bitch!"

----

All in all, this was a really fun time -- the Roach as been a bit of a departure for our group -- we tend to play either 'trad' RPG stuff or 'trad' card/board games, but don't really play many games that bridge the gap between the two (such as Munchausen or Once Upon a Time or the like). The one exception to this has been InSpectres, which plays quite a bit like the Roach in some ways (my impression), being very driven by individual narration and with a set end-game sort of thing going on. InSpectres is, in fact, probably the first of the stronger 'story/narration vs. straight roleplay' focused narr-rpgs of which we're seeing and planning to play more (PTA springs to mind).

We're having a good time, and I didn't detect any reluctance to come back a third time and wrap the whole thing up -- our play speed (4 Events (roughly 16 scenes) in about five hours, with 5 players and a break for supper) isn't blazing fast, it's not at all bad, and we're all focused, with a minimum of digression from play (and that within the very set period of 'super time', when narrating Roach scenes would have probably put us off our meals :) -- something that's remarkable in it's own right. Good stuff!

Posted by Doyce at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Okay, so... it's been two years since I got Dogs. More than that; I had one of the first pre-Gen Con copies of DitV and I loved it. My enthusiasm for promoting the game to the folks I play with was pretty high, and we even got some characters made, back in October of 2004, and put them through their initiations before it got too late to continue on to the first town. The response was... mixed -- "cool setting, cool characters... but man... it feels like the dice get in the way of every single line I want to say when we're RPing."

And ... after that, what happened? Nothing.

See, November rolled around a week later -- I was GMing two 'regular' games and secretly participating in my third NaNoWriMo... I was putting down stone tiles in my kitchen and bathroom (which I'd never done before), the holidays were on the way, and on November 28th, I found out my daughter was nine short months away from needing a bedroom. In short, we never got back to the game.

Hell, I really didn't get back to any game for well OVER a year... damn near two.

So, fast forward to a couple months ago. Things have quieted down a bit -- a lot of different things are going on in my life now, but it feels like there's a rhythm... like I've got a system that works, and that wouldn't be shattered by some gaming, and whether or not I love gaming, I for damn sure hate sitting around with nothing to do, so...

So there's been a lot of talk about some games, and of course I start pushing all the dirty-hippie games on my shelf, start up a short-lived HQ game, and head back over to the Forge for probably the first time in six months and start reading.

... and read.

... and read.

And there's so much that's out that's new and good. And old and good... and oh my word, there so much I want to play.

And I start talking about all this on my blog, and Dave sort of picks up the vibe some and allows that yeah, he'd both like to play some of this stuff, and y'know, he'd like to GM some too, maybe. Heck, he's always loved Dogs in the Vineyard, and we never got to play it... maybe he should run it.

And I say "You should!"

And then I say "But... y'know... before that... I could finish running the story for those guys we all made up.

And I read the new DitV book again.

And I read the old characters again.

And I find the first town I wrote up, as an experiment of transferring a relationship map from one source into a totally different genre, and I saw how it could be better...

And I get really excited.

And Friday, 23 months after we made up the characters, we played the first town. Virtue.

Here's what happened.

-----

First off, it wasn't like we could just jump into the first town and hope for the best. One of the best things about the game's design is every player gets a solo introduction to the game system during character generation, but we'd already done that with these three guys, and I didn't want to revisit that for the same characters -- seemed anticlimactic.

However, I had an out. Jackie had played with "Kitten" when I ran The Princes' Kingdom for her, and she'd liked the system pretty well, so I asked her if she was interested in playing Dogs. Her approach to new games has changed a lot in the last 10 years -- it used to be very much about 'I know what I like, and I don't want to play something that isn't on that list' -- and it's shifted to 'I'll pretty much try anything, if the players are cool.'

And of course the players are cool, so I set it up so that Jackie made up her character and goes through initiation while everyone's watching -- everyone thereby getting reintroduced to the methods of creation, the philosophies behind Traits vs. Relationships, and the mechanics of a conflict. This, I think, worked very well.

Now, let me sum up the first three Dogs in brief:

Destiny was raised by her father. Her mother was Faithful, he married into the Faith and they traveled back to Bridal Falls, but Mom died on the way, and Dad finished the move anyway, deciding to raise his daughter as her Mother would have wanted, despite the fact that Mom's family pretty much disapproved of him entirely and practically disowned Destiny. Background: Complicated History

Susannah was born in a pretty rough town; a mix of Faithful and sinnin' mining folk that was nearly wiped out by bandits when Susannah was pretty young. She was sent off to be raised by her extremely judgmental Aunt and Uncle who couldn't really wait to be rid of her... think the Dursley's, as puritans. Again, Complicated History.

Eli was an outlaw who'd never done right. He was shot up bad in a no-honor-among-thieves situation, and found and nursed back to health by a blind old Faithful woman. Inspired, he rode to Bridal Falls and rashly offered to be a Dog, and was accepted. Background: Strong History.

Right... so... no one's like... a 'normal' member of the Faith, right? No one's coming from an actually healthy place. :) I'm not surprised, I'm just sayin'.

So... right. Jackie's chargen goes down the path less traveled: Abigail is from a Strong Community: big family (8 brothers), loving parents, and although she's a bit of a tomboy (with traits like "my brother's taught me to shoot" and "I was born to ride") she's also a sharp witted, traditional girl (Knows Scripture Really Well: 1d4) who wouldn't have even been a Dog if things had gone differently ("Item: My late fiancé's engagement ring: 2d6").

Her Initiation goal (which evolved from a lot of at the table kibitzing and contribution, something I was encouraging) was "I hope I made a female friend at Temple." Awesome. I described Jezebel, a very quiet, anti-social girl who came from a town that, 10 years ago, had been burned straight to the ground by a group of Dogs for sins utterly beyond redemption. Jez survived was now at temple herself to become a Dog. (And apologies: I'm almost SURE I read about the Jezebel character in someone's AP report -- a character someone made up, but damned if I can find it now -- she made a great cameo here!) Abigail found herself instantly drawn to the girl, and wanted to make a connection with her.

How'd it go?

Opening bid: Abigail slips a note to Jez while they're in class, while one of the Boys is reading from the Book of Life. The note is a scripture quote, intended to be funny, and is something like "The work of Men flies to the heavens like sparks..." [there was more too it, but I don't remember it -- search for 'sparks' in Proverbs and you'll find it, probably].

Jackie raises as well as she can, and I Turn the blow. "Jez stands up in the middle of class, so violently that her chair tips over, then rushes out of the room in tears... you realize, too late, that a quote about the works of mean going up in sparks and flame is the wrong way to introduce yourself to the girl who saw her whole town get burned to the ground..."

And everyone at the table *groaned* in appreciation at the unexpected narration. That's how it went. Everyone was in, right then.

The initiation went very well -- we shifted forward in time repeatedly, we showed that you could escalate from talking to physical (Jezebel shoved Abigail into a mud puddle -- Abigail got back up and gave her a hug before Jez kicked her and ran off) and then let things drop back down to talking, which was very valuable -- escalation is something that folks tend upon first read to think of as a one-way street.

Jackie pulled in just about every trait she had to win Jezebel over (Strong Community folks have a ROUGH time in initiations, because most of their dice are in Relationships), including adding Jezebel as a Relationship and pulling out her dead Fiancé's engagement ring for the final conflict-closing, 2-point raise. Excellent start to the game.

From there we went to Virtue...

Downside was, it was almost eight PM by the time we were ready to start the Town itself, and we have kids to get to bed at a reasonable time. Ahh well.

-----

I start off by mentioning that the first town on the (long) ride out from Bridal Falls has kin in it -- Destiny's cousin is the Steward, the Cooper's are a good sized family that Abigail's related too, and while Susannah doesn't have any kin in town, Br. Jacob, a retired dog who lives in the area, used to ride with her Great Uncle Isaac.

Eli will probably only have Kin in town on very rare occasions, but when he does, it's going to be pretty explosive.

So... the Dogs ride into town and some young men are lounging alongside the street. One of them greets them... then cracks the young men up by cracking wise about their coats. Susannah was... speechless... Abigail player was already thinking "Can we... shoot them for that?"

Then there's the carpenter's business, with a nice-looking young man stretched out in a casket and the carpenter carving at the lid of the casket to get the Tree of Life off the top...

... and the Dogs are wondering just how damn long it's been since a Dog's been through town.

The sheriff comes hustling up, chuckling nervously and explaining there's been a bit of a dust-up -- that dead fella got in a disagreement with one of the Cooper men, but it was self-defense on Cyrus' part...

"Shall I take you down to the Stewards?"

"I think that'd be best."

Eli is thinking that this town looks... really damn familiar to him, in all the wrong ways.

The Dogs dismount outside the Stewards as a flustered, red-faced shopkeep is coming out the front door, still haranguing the Steward over his shoulder.

"Dammit, Virgil, you're the man in charge! Don't talk to me about any of that other nonsense! I promised my sister I'd look after her boy when he got out here, and three days later he's in a pine box! I mean god-dammit, Virgil! You've got to keep those Cooper's in on a damn leash! Do your job, man!"

And he storms off without so much as a glance at the Dogs, who are flabbergasted (several having gotten more of an education in swearing in that one sentence than they'd had in the last five years previous).

This is getting long, so I'll summarize. The Dogs get a low down on the history of Virtue and the 'minor, entirely minor' problems going on -- girls that won't listen to viable courtships, and folks are always kind of upset with one another, but nothing too bad -- it's not like he can fix the half of town that isn't Faithful, after all...

The Dogs mmhmm and mention that since two of them will be staying with Jacob (according to Virgil -- he's made up a room for Destiny, and Abigail will probably be sleeping out at the Cooper ranch), they'd like to meet him. Virgil and Phineas escort the Dogs out to Jacob's, encountering Thaddeus leaving the house, upset and inconsolable, presumably at the death of his cousin. He doesn't stop to talk with the Dogs either... like father like son, I suppose.

((Nice bit here: I explain that Phineas' mom died when he was really young, and the players jump in with "have her die in childbirth -- "that way it happened during all the troubles in town, 20 years ago." I jumped on that immediately as frickin' brilliant.))

Jacob invites them in, tells Virgil they need some time for "Dogs business" and shoos him and his son on home. Once they're gone he relaxes and tells the Dogs they can have a seat and take a load off -- he knows how hard it can be to have everyone watching you all the time.

The Dogs get another angle on everything that's going on from Jacob, and Abigail pushes this into a conflict to get him to tell them where Virgil's failing -- they can tell he's defending him too much. Everyone jumps in on this and I don't even get to let Jacob raise once -- I had to see four 11 or 12 point bids first, and I'm out of dice by the time it's my turn. Jacob allows that Virgil is letting some of his duties to the community slip in order to get Phineas in Constance's good graces in the way of courtship.

It's ten by this point, because we've had lots of open RP where they ask questions I WANT them to know (and, despite that, have to fight the ingrained GMing urge to hide "or they'll find out what's going on" -- MAN that's hardwired into EVERYTHING!), and we decide to call it a night. Everyone seems ready to play, and pretty much everyone had something they want to do or someone they know they need to talk to:

* Destiny wants to see the women's side of what's gone on.
* Abigail 'knows' "cousin Constance is going to be my problem."
* Eli walks with the tread of a doomed man, already expecting that the Stewards at Temple sent him with these young ladies because they knew they'd need a blunt instrument -- he's hearing about the Coopers and his expression just gets more and more resigned.
* Susannah... hmm... I don't know. :)

THOUGHTS:
Man, working up a town and getting the NPCs down in your head is just amazing in play. From the moment folks hit town, I never looked at my notes, not once. I kept confusing the names of the Steward and the owner of the General Store, but that's a mental flub -- I'm rubbish with names -- and only cosmetically important. I *never* confused who anyone was or what they WANTED. All this is, really, is a soft-pitch, hand-holding version of the instructions in Sorcerer for doing relationship-maps, but you know what? Sometimes it's nice to have your hand held; it's comforting and warm and cozy and ... this is taking me to a place I don't need to be with Vincent, so I'll stop -- but I've been happy with Relationship maps in the past and this one just jumped off the page and took over.

Every second they were in a scene, no matter what any of the PCs said, or asked, or wanted out of them, or did, I knew without a pause for thought how they'd respond, how they'd angle their answers, and what they'd say to go after what they wanted.

No note-checking, just channeling the characters -- they meant I could give the players body language, tweaks of voice that gave things away... facial expressions... eye movements... they didn't miss a THING, and best of all, I was able to continually give them things to chew on. Very very happy about that.

Dave mentioned that the town was over-jammed with stuff going on. The funny thing is, I'm about one whole family and one major plot point short of the 'recommended starting town' that Vincent and many others have recommended in the past.

The wording of Dave's aforementioned comment makes me think that my source of inspiration for Virtue is worn a little too openly on the sleeve. Ahh well.

-----

And allow me to crow for a second and say I was really happy with how the GMing went. Basically, between character generation and that initiation I was able to introduce a lot of the nuances of basic DitV play that I'd been absorbing from the two years of posting on the Forge forums, and it emerged naturally during conversation and play -- it was *easy*, come to that, and it felt like I'd internalized everything I'd been soaking up on DitV for ages, and had explained it dozens of times before. It was smooth.

Also, since buying DitV, I'd run two Heroquest games of varying lengths, two Sorcerer campaigns, a couple TSoY one shots, and various other bits of narr-goodness -- coming back to DitV with that experience let me emphasize the stuff that I knew the players really jonesed on in the past, and that play experience made the whole DitV system seem like a much less jarring gaming experience than it had the first time we'd tried it.

A follow up comment from Dave was the most informative, regarding play:

The dice mechanic is conflict-based, not task-based, but unlike some others we’ve been doing, there’s plenty of RP and “posing” during the conflicts to make it not feel too dice-driven or “everything depends on this one roll” kind of thing. Good stuff.

I compare that to the first impressions from two years back and I'm really really happy.

(Aside: I think it's funny/cool that people think of Dogs as being 'less dice' than Sorcerer -- you're likely rolling about 9 dice on a conflict in Sorcerer, maybe a few more during mid-resolution. With Dogs, you're starting off with a couple stats worth of dice to roll -- maybe about 7d6, and then move to more Traits... maybe another Stat... some items... If you have less than about 12 dice rolled in even a pretty simple "just talking" solo-conflict in Dogs, it's unusual... I think the different is that you're only dealing with a few of those dice at a time, and dealing with each of those discreet sets of dice is also dealing with the whole Conflict in a smaller slice, instead of all at once... almost task-resolution, dare I say. It is, in a nutshell, a really elegant system.)

Posted by Doyce at 2:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

PodCast: Sons of Kryos (note: this is a sound file)

Good stuff in this broadcast:
* What to do when not everyone can make it -- have an emergency 'spare tire' game ready to go, and what games are good for that kind of play. I totally agree with the games they listed as well -- except for Contenders, I own every single one. Really want to run Mountain Witch.
* Character Control
* The Myth of the GM social caste

Posted by Doyce at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ron talks with Levi about his new system, The Exchange (which sounds cool, though maybe not as cool as The Cog War, a diceless thing that sounds very very cool and is apparently almost ready for distribution.

I particularly like this bit of history on reward systems in games.

Quick conceptual point: reward and resolution

In most games before the mid-1990s, character improvement was the main perceived reward. It occurred in units of one or more sessions (often more), and only between rather than during sessions. A number of house-rules, starting 'way back when, used the points of character-improvement as dice-modifiers, usually re-rolls or take-backs, although this didn't show up in official game texts for a long time.

In other words, a reward mechanic limited to character improvement and only taking place between sessions (sometimes many sessions) wasn't enough to satisfy the needs of a reward system, in a lot of cases. People sometimes wanted a reward mechanic that affected how play itself was conducted. Later, interestingly, character improvement became an important part of play as well (I don't know what game was first; one mid-1990s example is Morpheus, and a later one is Obsidian). At this late date, it seems to me that mechanics like Luck/Unluck in Champions or Good Stuff/Bad Stuff in Amber were kind of transitional between a D&D model and a (for example) Shadow of Yesterday one, where reward/improvement is continuous and ongoing.

To put all this into a nutshell, one trend about reward mechanics is that they moved from fixed-effect, between-play, relatively rare events into constant, during-play, manipulable-effect events, and as such, highly integrated with specific moments of resolution, not just reward. I'm not saying this trend started with bad and ended up with good. I'm saying that now, the whole spectrum of reward-to-resolution is available to be tailored for a particular game.

I think one of the reasons that TSoY actually jolts folks is because of that 'in game' reward system, ticking away -- it's really not something folks are used to. By comparison, TSoY runs this different than any other 'indie' narr game:

* Sorcerer's system of stat-improvement is very much 'over multiple sessions' in the traditional vein
* PTA has no means of character improvement, and Fan Mail, which IS the main reward in the game, feels more like an ergonomic 'dice sharing' system than "XP".
* Dogs in the Vineyard comes closest to that middle-of-the-game model, with Fallout Experience (very probably) accruing after every conflict, but that's a bit different than TSoY as well -- DitV has dice rolls that tell you 'okay, you can have XP now,' thus absolving the player of the 'guilt' of enjoying it when they get rewarded -- the dice told them to, after all. In TSoY, you have to actively reach out and claim the points you earn for the things you're doing, and people shy away from that, conditioned for years by the gamer attitude that wanting XP and improvement is somehow juvenile. TSoY vets call it "Key Guilt."

Eh. Tangent -- at any rate, it's shaping up to be another interesting conversation between Ron and Levi, and less Socratic than the first one.

Posted by Doyce at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Be gentle it's my 1st time-or what to watch out for during the first game of Dogs in the Vineyard

I'm running Dogs tonight, the poster child game for the 'make up the NPCs and just play the hell out of them and let things go how they go' method that I've spoken up time and time again here.

I am reading posts along the lines of the one above like it's Scripture and I just found out the Apocalypse is on hand.

*happy nerves*

Posted by Doyce at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Via Story Games:

I really loved Blood Bowl. I loved the idea. I loved all the little asides in the books, the pictures, the gags, the teams and races, imagining this absurd game of fantasy football. The Star Player (yellow) and Companion (red) are still sitting on my shelf, and the game itself is buried somewhere along with some painted miniatures. I used to be dreaming up teams, matches, whole seasons. There were a couple of problems, though:

1) There were never enough players available for running a whole league or something, and it took loooong.
2) There was never enough money to buy all those minis and seldom the skill and leisure to paint them.
3) The actual game wasn’t that much fun since the rules were kind of imbalanced and, well, crappy.

For 13 long years, I didn’t think a lot about Blood Bowl. I loved the game it could have been, not the game it was. And then I learned, only now, that it has become that game.

FUMBBL :: Online Blood Bowl League

((Like I need more ways to waste time, but MAN...))

Posted by Doyce at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Story Games for Everybody - Go with what you know. My comments therein:

... it's a different kind of strength you're bringing as the 'subject matter expert' on a fictional setting -- not necessarily less or more, but different -- Jason's pulling up real-world experience as knowledge... if I'm running something in my 'Duchy of Caer Maighdean', I'm making stuff up.

Now, I might be able to tell you about all of the Duchess's family members, and that she goes armed and armored most places, and how her family is as much or more descended from the local northern barbarian tribes than from the conquering nobility of the south, and how that ties in with the ancient tombs-beneath-the-cemetery near the capitol city and the former ruling family tinged with ogre blood and alliances with dark sorcery, but it... well, it's fiction.

If the Duchess's hair falls a certain way, and she uses a particular facial expression when she's thinking, and turns her wine glass between her fingers just so... that's a mesh of my real-life experience, retasked for the purpose.

There's... cold hard facts... and those moments of verisimilitude that they create... I dunno -- I'm not sure those are moments you can wholly achieve without at least a few 'real' elements woven into the fiction.

You create from what you know, y'know?

I think creating something new out of 'real' bits you know is one of the coolest things creators do, really -- contructing a very real-feeling place that simply doesn't exist anywhere but in the fiction.

I think the thing I like about these 'story games' is that they make me think about the stucture and nature of "Story" in general and specifically in ways I can apply to my writing as well, far more so than playing four years of a d20 campaign ever will. I wrote an email to mtfierce last night about making up a relationship map that drives conflict and then turned around, fingers flying, and pounded out a page of notes on Spindle and pushing things harder in that story. It's good stuff.

Posted by Doyce at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Story Games for Everybody - Conflict of Interest Hack for Shab Al-Hiri Roach.

Is it really a rules hack when the guy that wrote the game says "I like your way better?"

For what it's worth, we've been playing pretty much the way Iago mentioned near the bottom of the thread: "I will frame a scene that specifically screws with THAT PLAYER'S GUY, RIGHT THERE," and thus I will have opposition. Alternately, make yourself such a juicy target that everyone will aim conflicts at you. :)

Posted by Doyce at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Paul Tevis, of Have Games, Will Travel, reviews 1001 Nights and Mortal Coil. Good, informative stuff.

Posted by Doyce at 1:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I first read the phrase in Nobilis, but this quote from Mike Holmes breaks it down the best for me:

"...there is one and only one requirement to being able to have a good social contract for play, and that's an understanding that every player has a right to speak about what they do or do not like as players."

We've been talking a lot more about what we like and what we don't like in games -- I think that's a really valuable thing to do, and to keep doing.

One thing I remember from one discussion was about the fact that a particular player liked games where folks were working together, or where you didn't have to worry about the other characters suddenly turning on you.

... and I really have to remember to ask that player about The Shab al-Hiri Roach, because they're playing it and, as near as I can tell, enjoying it. I'm curious how it manages to slip by that dislike, because I think that's what's happening -- it's not that the dislike is GONE -- it just doesn't really APPLY in that case.

Hmm.

Posted by Doyce at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Most folks have been mentioning this for a year, but I'm just getting caught up: Five Geek Social Fallacies

Geek Social Fallacy #2: Friends Accept Me As I Am

The origins of GSF2 are closely allied to the origins of GSF1. After being victimized by social exclusion, many geeks experience their "tribe" as a non-judgmental haven where they can take refuge from the cruel world outside.

This seems straightforward and reasonable. It's important for people to have a space where they feel safe and accepted. Ideally, everyone's social group would be a safe haven. When people who rely too heavily upon that refuge feel insecure in that haven, however, a commendable ideal mutates into its pathological form, GSF2.

Carriers of GSF2 believe that since a friend accepts them as they are, anyone who criticizes them is not their friend. Thus, they can't take criticism from friends -- criticism is experienced as a treacherous betrayal of the friendship, no matter how inappropriate the criticized behavior may be.

There isn't one of the five GSFs listed that I haven't witnessed any number of times. It's not a 'nice' list, but it's not wrong.

Posted by Doyce at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Comments should remember who you are now.

Subscriptions to individual comments MIGHT be working -- it's sort of hard for me to tell. :P

Posted by Doyce at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Saturday the 9th I rode down to Lee and De's new place about an hour and a half away with Dave and Margie in tow. I've been trying to get our gaming quotient up a bit, and I walked in the door with five games prepped (in the sense that I had sufficient supplies to run each of them) -- Jungle Speed (which I dropped on the table with a sticky note that read 'not optional'), PTA, Shadow of Yesterday, Mortal Coil, and the Shab al-Hiri Roach. I just pulled every game out and set them out on the table to see what folks were interested in. I was pretty much open to anything, but if I was going to lay odds, I'd have guessed that we'd end up playing a one-shot of the Roach and that De would want to borrow Mortal Coil and angle for an ongoing game of same.

I would have been right.

So, after general visiting and getting the two young girls running around, I pulled out Jungle Speed and we played a round of that just to get the friendly-animosity flowing, and then got into starting the Roach game up.

Wait, what's the Roach? Lemme quote:

The Shab-al-Hiri Roach is a dark comedy of manners, lampooning academia and asking players to answer a difficult question - are you willing to swallow a soul-eating telepathic insect bent on destroying human civilization?

No?

Even if it will get you tenure?

It's... Lovecraft meets the Marx Brothers. It's... 1919 academia ("Go, Pemberton Panthercats! Beat those 'pods!"), doing horrible things to each other in the quest for petty power, and THEN you add an ancient telepathic Sumerian God/Bug with 4000 unhatched young to the mix... it's just pretty damn fun.

Okay, back to prep. This was kind of a challenge, because I'd literally gotten the game the night before, read it once that morning, printed out character sheets and cheat sheets, and jumped into Dave and Margie's car for the ride down. And *I* was the "expert" on the game.

We started in and Lee asked, "So... what are we ... doing? Like... what's the point of the whole thing?"

That's when I realized I needed to be answer guy. I think I managed a fairly good job of that, explaining the breakdown of play. I'm going to be summarizing, because I don't have the rules OR character sheets with me, but this is who we ended up with on the Faculty of Pemberton U.

* De played... A female full professor of Chemistry whose Enthusiasms were... deceit and... something like sadism or the like. I don't recall her 'real' name, but her nickname was Kitty, and I remember that she had a litany of ailments -- hard of hearing, etc. etc.

* Dave played... in his words, "a marvelously decadent Botany professor nicknamed Pansy whose raison d’etre is seduction of undergrads (and not the co-eds) and backstabbing (figuratively, to date) his fellow academics." It's very against type for Dave in some ways, and watching him pull it off flawlessly was a delight.

* Margie played... an assistant? No, a full professor of Geology. Can't remember what his name is, or his enthusiasms. :( Hmm. Help?

* Lee played secretly hermaphroditic assistant professor in the Art Department. His Enthusiasms were, unsurprisingly, identical to De's. :)

* I was playing Douglas Dean (Double-D) Blackburn, assistant professor of Poetry and Theatre Arts, the Faculty Advisor for the rowing team whose enthusiasms were Debauchery (he's a bit of an opiate and alcohol user) and ... something with athletics? Sports? Something like that.

Right. We got the characters set up, drew the card that would give us a possible 'cool move' (or horrible unwilling possession by a Shab al-Hiri Roach that had gotten loose on campus) for the first Event in the Fall Semester, and set to work.

I sort of bit the bullet on the first Event of the Semester (Welcoming the Students to Campus) and volunteered to narrate the first Scene. At that point, no one else really had a solid idea of what that even meant, and I figured that leading by example would encourage at least one other person toward an idea for a following scene. Honestly, I didn't really have much in the way of solid ideas yet either, so I basically cribbed from the examples in the game text.

To whit: my character started out with a hate-on for Lee's character (who had screwed the Theatre Department out of funding for the upcoming year... quite literally, in fact). I knew that Lee's guy was rampantly bi-sexual (the hermaphrodite thing hadn't come up yet), and that Dave's botanist was into the Lads, so I introduced a Scene where the guy-who-calls-the-strokes-on-the-rowing-team (I think he's the coxman? Funny if so.) stormed into the lobby before the welcoming ceremony would begin and accused both Lee and Dave's guys, in front of the Chancellor of the College, of taking lascivious advantage of him during his Freshman year. My goal was to discredit the both of them (Dave was pretty much just a target of opportunity that I was pulling into the fray in the hopes of attracting Margie to my banner, but no dice on that front). I staged it the way I did to demonstrate how things would be laid out, how you'd call in other player's characters, how to involve the Pembertonian NPCs by handing them off to other players, and that I didn't even have to be IN the scene to be the mover and shaker behind it -- the narration indicated that I'd managed to work the poor kid into a froth over his former ... ahem... mentors, and then aimed him at them for maximum damage.

Sides were chosen, dice were tossed, and I was destroyed by combined weight of three other players' dice, losing all my starting Reputation (which I'd bet all in, again as a demonstration of how that worked.)

Price of being the teacher, I guess.

This scene took a LONG time to play out, as everyone tried to figure out how MY reputation was even on line in this, when to bring in enthusiasms and how, yadda yadda.

In the end, Dave had high-dice for narration and brilliantly demonstrated how I could have my Reputation at risk in a scene like that -- the student, after fleeing the lobby in tearful shame in the face of the calmly snide expressions of those within, ran to Double-D's house and, finding no one there, scrawled a note reading "You've ruined me!" and blew his brains out my front porch. The Scandal was tremendous.

First death: in the first scene, to Dave. Nice.

I THINK the next scene was actually BEFORE my scene, chronologically, and involved Dave's attempts to woo, backstage, before the Ceremony, a new 'student teacher' for the Semester... or something. I believe he was thwarted by De and Margie, and I just stayed out of it. :)

After that, we cut to the after-party for the Faculty, where Margie was trying to get De's character --

GOSSIP -- one of Margie's Geologist-character's enthusiasms was GOSSIP -- MAN that was annoying! :)

-- to Dance. This was when Margie revealed to me that she'd been Roached with her first card draw and was playing to her Roach-born command. "Dance in joy." or something like that. I ended up falling on Margie's side in this conflict, trying to get ol' Kitty to loosen up, and got a bit of Reputation back from that (good thing, too, since that student was messing up my front door at that exact moment.)

De had some kind of scene in the Chancellor's office the next day... something about 'where did your student assistant for the summer go? He's missing." and he revealing to the players that he'd been annoying and not-too-competent and she'd left him in a lime-pit in Greece during a summer field trip. I think she won that one pretty handily, as SHE was also Roached and playing to her master's command (which I can't remember).

Finally, Lee jumped us back in time to just after the dancing scene with Margie, out in the garden, trying to seduce Double-D -- whom he was quite fond of (and no, he didn't have the MURUB command -- he was just playing his 'normal' non-Roached hedonist artist.) I managed to avoid this with the help of fellow-jock Bantam Whaley, who drifted by, interrupting Lee's guy taking advantage of DD's drunken stupor, and suggested he and I go looking for coeds "because there's a lot of fruits around here."

Word, Bantam. Word.

Thus went the events surrounding the start of Fall Semester. It took us a long long time to get going, so that was the only Event we got through, but we're playing this Saturday again, and things should move along quite a bit faster, now that everyone has a handle on the rules -- Margie fairly cackled with glee at Scene ideas for the next event, the Wine and Cheese Social, and I confess I've got a few ideas for my dissolute actor/athlete... his may be a tragic tale of Woe. :)

Also, I've commenced Wiki-worship of the Roach here.

Posted by Doyce at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Denver Session 2: short on scenes, long on RP, fun, and future promise.

Kate can attest: I came off this session engergized -- wired to the point of being nearly intelligible. :) Little Chatty Kathy, that's me.

Posted by Doyce at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Well of Urd: Technique: Jared's Rule of Three

If you have the opportunity to describe something, give it one to three short, succinct details that make it stand out. Use the technique for characters, locations, objects, or anything else that you want to introduce into the narrative fiction that you and your friends are creating.

I'll point out, as Rob D does in the comments to that post, that Roger Zelazny's been quoted a couple times as ascribing to this method of conveying character in his books, and Zelazny does nothing better than introducing characters in one or two sentences that jump off the page and slap you in the face so you remember them.

Hell, this isn't good advice for gaming, this is good advice for creation of story in general -- while I'm tweaking up Hidden Things with some recent input, I think I might boil down some of the characters when they're introduced and see what happens. A little voice in my head is telling me that most of my characters are introduced with about three details already. I hope that's true.

I overdetailed Rowena Gower in my Galactic game yesterday... not a lot, but a bit. (Not counting all the ecological evangelizing she did, just facts about her.) Hmm.

Anyway. Really really good rule.

Posted by Doyce at 2:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Every time I give up on Capes and say "You know what? I just don't know if it's something I'll enjoy very much," someone goes and posts some Actual Play that's just... good.

Not just good story, but something that makes the game itself sound fun and playable and... oh yeah, fun.

Dammit.

Posted by Doyce at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Another quote from the Fruitful Void thread, and this one is awesome.

Both Narrativism and Gamism strike me as "dilemma" play: if there's an obvious best answer (morally, for Narrativism; tactically, for Gamism), play dies; the enjoyment is in making difficult choices among equally valid but imperfect options. A Gamist design or scenario that had (explicit or implicit) a single optimal strategy [Doyce: I'm going to mention, as an example, CoH's design-flaw of 95% of all character 'need' the Stamina power pool" as a crappy example] would be the equivalent of a Narrativist game where the designer or GM had already answered the Premise: The only role for the players is to discover the "lesson" and bow down before its wondrousness.

"The enjoyment is in making difficult choices among equally valid but imperfect options."

Give me a game system that facilitates my ability to do that both tactically AND for the 'story', and I am one satisfied guy.*

Dogs does this whole-enchilada thing. Sorcerer does this. I think TSoY does this, but I need to play it more to say.

D20 totally does this for the tactical aspect of it.

* Give it to me in real life, and I bitch and moan, of course. :P :)

Posted by Doyce at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

anyway: The Fruitful Void in Game Design

A game design must demand that its human audience reach into it to put it right. A game design must be already tumbling down a hill. How can I make these metaphors into practical design advice?

Let me talk about Forge Lingo for a second. One of the main, most-often-referenced reasons it's support with the fervor that it is on the Forge and related sites is simply because all those talky talkers had to have a common language so they could spend time talking about what they were trying to do with thier games without arguing about what to call "that thing where we play for a little bit, then roll, then play through the conclusion" ("Fortune in the Middle: all agreed say Aye? Right, moving on.")

That's a good reason. I agree with it.

There are certain indie game guys I like a little more than others. Vincent is one of em, and at least in part because he doesn't use the jargon. Yes, maybe when he's talking directly to a Forge-grognard and he knows that that's going to be the best language to help them understand what he's saying, but when he's writing to anyone? When he's writing to anyone, he writes to EVERYONE. To whit:

Everybody who's talking about the "SIS" needs to say what you really mean instead, please. I've hated the term "SIS" since its inception and I don't think you're all using it consistently.

There will be no arguments here about the term or its definition. Just stop using it; construct your posts without it.

Construct your posts without it = say what you really mean, and do so clearly.

So if you have an aversion to Forge-speak: this discussion about the Fruitful Void in Games on his site is cool, and it's not too jargony, and it's interesting. (It's also over: having taken place almost a year ago, but it's damned interesting.)

Posted by Doyce at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

TonyLB starts a conversation about the Social Footprint inherent in various game and non-game activities -- the potential time required to get ready for an activity and then actually do it... including the 'follow-on' time required for a continuing activity, like an RPG campaign.

Telling quote here, relevant to the massive dearth of FtF RPG activity around the Casa in the last year and change:

I think when you consider a computer game like World of Warcraft [doyce: insert obvious CoH comparison here], which, technically, has a very small social footprint (sit down, log on, play for half an hour, log off), you can see why it is gobbling up a lot of traditional roleplayers, as traditional rpgs have a very sizeable social footprint, especially if you're the GM.

Now, purposely-addictive gameplay aside, this is a really great point: one of the best things ABOUT CoH play for me (still true), is that if I have an urge to game on a random Tuesday evening, I can log in, start a mission, beat up some bad guys, finish the mission, and log out... and during that time there is (or was -- not so true now) a fairly good chance that I'd be able to chat with a fellow player I knew, and socialize.

That's fucking hard to compete against in the real world, where even with a lot of players around, it's hard to just call someone up and say 'let's do something', without warning, and having something to play that's actually FUN with just you and one other guy. Yes, watch a movie, or tv-on-dvd or something, but that's passive. Even quick-and-fast Jungle Speed really needs about 4 people, preferably more...

I'm betting that's why Cataan works so well out in NYC -- "I'm bored, let's do something," and with three people, you can, and still sort of get your Escapism on.

So the question:

How do you combat that? We mostly have disposable incomes -- do we purposefully go out and acquire games like Bang and Cataan and Memoir '44 and Battlelore in order to have that kind of "small Social Footprint, but appealing" stuff at the ready? I think maybe we (and by 'we' I mean 'me') do.

And yes, I know we (and by 'we', I mean 'Dave and Margie') have a lot of party games, but when you're in the mood to Smash Evil, Turbo Cranium just doesn't get it done -- it doesn't even sound attractive. Thus the question.

Posted by Doyce at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

"Every game works better when the players trust each other enough to fully get into collaborative retelling of the world. Especially golf."

Heh.

Posted by Doyce at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm just saying... I know how those people who restore historical buildings feel.

Except... more blind.

Posted by Doyce at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Yeah, I'm fiddling with the design. I don't intend to stay with what's up here right now, but I wante to change what I had, cuz I was sick of it, and picked something bland so I'd be motivated to update it soon.

Posted by Doyce at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Well of Urd: Technique: The Importance of the Words Previously, Meanwhile and Later

I'm hoping that this post will become the first in a series of irregular short features on relatively simple, painless techniques we can use to introduce more color to our gaming.

I hope so too.

Posted by Doyce at 9:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Okay, I can't leave this alone yet, so... check it.

Let's say we want to chart coherently Narrativist games on an x-y axis.

I'm going to arbitrarily make the x-axis the "RPG-ish" axis, and the y-axis the "Story-gamey" axis.

And the scale is... well, because of what I could think of (or crib) for criteria -- 0 to 7 on both axis. You have seven criteria you check off for each axis, and that equates directly to the 'score' for that axis.

X-Axis: Protagonist-based
[ ] Strong person-to-character ownership
[ ] In-game currency tends to be character-specific
[ ] Story structure is largely focused through character POV.
[ ] Play structure tends toward scene/conflict
[ ] Use of task-resolution, or conflict resolution can 'break down' into higher-detail mode
[ ] Adversity mostly provided by one person (GM)
[ ] Limited narration distribution

Y-Axis: Story-based
[ ] Character ownership varies
[ ] In-game currency tends to be whole-group or player-specific
[ ] Story structure is largely focused at narrator-level POV.
[ ] Play structure tends towards "turns"
[ ] Conflict-resolution-based system.
[ ] Adversity-creation is distributed across participants.
[ ] Automatically distributed narration

As an example...

....I'll do TSoY, since most folks know it.

TSoY

X-Axis: Protagonist-based
[X] Strong person-to-character ownership
[X] In-game currency tends to be character-specific
[X] Story structure is largely focused through character POV.
[X] Play structure tends toward scene/conflict
[X] Use of task-resolution, or conflict resolution can 'break down' into higher-detail mode
[X] Adversity mostly provided by one person (GM)
[ ] Limited narration distribution

Y-Axis: Story-based
[ ] Character ownership varies
[X] In-game currency tends to be whole-group or player-specific
[ ] Story structure is largely focused at narrator-level POV.
[ ] Play structure tends towards "turns"
[X] Conflict-resolution-based system.
[ ] Adversity-creation is distributed across participants.
[X] Automatically distributed narration (refreshment scenes)

Hmm. Okay, that's maybe a bad example. Looking at Mortal Coil:

Mortal Coil

X-Axis: Protagonist-based
[X] Strong person-to-character ownership
[X] In-game currency tends to be character-specific (for some tokens)
[X] Story structure is focused through character POV.
[X] Play structure tends toward scene/conflict
[X] Use of task-resolution, or conflict resolution can 'break down' into higher-detail mode
[X] Adversity mostly provided by one person (GM)
[X] Limited and/or Specific narration distribution

Y-Axis: Story-based
[ ] Character ownership varies
[X] In-game currency tends to be whole-group or player-specific (for some tokens)
[X] Story structure is focused at narrator-level POV. (For theme document additions.)
[ ] Play structure tends towards "turns"
[X] Conflict-resolution-based system. (For theme document addtions.)
[X] Adversity-creation is distributed across participants. (For theme document additions.)
[X] Automatically distributed narration (For theme document additions... maybe.)

And you'll see apparently contradictory things checked in there, because in some parts of the game, certain things are true, and in others, different things are.

And its squishy, a bit, in it's definitions.

Anyway, just me thinking on the screen. Input welcome, stonings artfully dodged.

((Staving off a tangent: Don't tell me you can put most of DnD on the x-axis. I know that, except for the fact that the x-axis is 'elements that are used specifically to create thematic story', and as we've said, DnD doesn't have that Goal, so it can't be charted on this thing. It would get all those checkboxes checked for a chart where the x-axis is 'uses these elements to create tactically-challenging play.'))

Posted by Doyce at 1:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Space Rat, Nathan Russell - 24 Hour RPG - 2005

Pwned.

Coming soon to a convention near me...

Posted by Doyce at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You know... all this searching for common language in terms of game-stuff made me realize something else.

I might never play another Amber game the rest of my life, but (at least here, with the people I'm likely to be talking about this stuff with) the Amber setting and NPCs provides an excellent 'common language' for example situations of play. :)

Posted by Doyce at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Over in the chocolate/peanut butter post, MT said:

I keep thinking that there are challenges that were made by players (character background, character choices in-game), challenges built by GMs (modules and scenarios, world events), and challenges agreed to by the group as a whole (well, more results-oriented "group agrees that that's the evolution/eventuality). (And maybe system challenges: random encounters?)

I'm going to challenge the term 'challenge' as it's used in this paragraph. I think 'conflicts' or 'potential conflicts' might be clearer and speak more to what each participant is bringing to the table. Example: "I hate Corwin" is a potential conflict introduced by character background. So is "I love Deirdre."

Now, in that example above, the best GM-conflict that I can quickly think of is this: "Dierdre wants you to help Corwin" -- and I'm shameless -- I would totally hit that sucker like a kid getting to ring the dinner bell. It's not a module or scenario or a world event, but a crisis-point, packed with significance: no matter what the player chooses to do, including nothing, says something very significant about that character, and expands out like a pebble-ripple to color the tone of the whole game. I think that making up good Bangs is really all the prep you need to do for a lot of character-oriented games.₂ They are of much less use in games like Capes, or they look very different.

Now, you can take this further -- you might ask all the players to tie themselves into three NPCs from a pre-set list, giving them a relationship to them where something important is at risk; you might ask each player for a 'super-bang' of their own devising -- something that happens at the beginning of play that takes 'the way things are' and makes it impossible to simple 'continue as i have been' -- there's lots of ways to get the players to give you more player-authored conflicts or potential conflicts. ₃

I think that's a different (if related by marriage) issue. You talk about rewards. I see you looking at how human intervention (GM/PC) connects to game structure (rule-set, etc.) and the resulting rewards. Are you looking mostly at in-game rewards, or does story=reward? (Or both? Or neither?)

Both. Definitely both, especially for these types of games that we're discussing.₁

I'm just going to make this whole initial post an exercise in ripping off Sorcerer ideas for Amber, aren't I?

What you might do in Amber is require a player-authored Kicker and give that player a "spend" aftere they resolve that Kicker in play -- usually, resolving it means the end to that character's current 'arc', and that makes a good point to reassess and reevaluate (and spend points! Woo!) Then they write up a new Kicker for the next session, and play continues.₄

The out of game reward requires a little meta-talk about what the theme is going to be in the game. "Family Loyalty" or "The Worth of a Promise" or "Paying Your Debts" or something. (I'd give you an example from one of my Amber games, but I really can't -- I don't think we had one.) Once that's done, and the GM is constructing Bangs that (a) hit those 'flags' the players built into their characters and (b) echo back into the agreed-on theme, you get that non-mechanical "dude, cool" moments out of play that equates to a non-game reward.

Footnotes below (so that I can pretend this post isn't as long as it really is).

2 - In narr-jargon terms, that crisis point is a 'bang'. It's a decision point that the character can't ignore (or where ignoring is a choice they can make that means something), where the decision says something about the character that maybe we didn't know before. In prep for most of my games, I come up with about three Bangs for each character, and the resulting events/actions/conflicts that involve or stem from those Bangs will easily fill a game session -- I don't do any kind of prep beyond that, and reminding myself to have NO SOLUTION OR PREDICTIONS OF THEIR CHOICES IN MIND.

3 - Entirely stolen from the Sorcerer concept of Kickers. Kickers and Bangs are probably the most-cribbed parts of the Sorcerer RPG.

4 - Or they switch to a new guy or something. Whatever.

Posted by Doyce at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

So... driving home after the Shab al-Hiri Roach game (which I still haven't written about. :P), I had this simple thought: "there are indie-hippie-narr games that are more like traditional RPGs, and others that are much more 'story-games', and I really should be paying attention to which way a new game leans, so I can set expectations with people when I pitch one."

And I posted my thoughts on that, and ... yeah.

We wandered all over the map in that thread -- different agendas that different RPGs have, blah blah blah -- much more than I'd intended, but all really, I think, very cool and very useful and an excellent kind of common language or points of reference for talking about this stuff.

And best of all, I think it's something that we developed ourselves (though tinted somewhat with the theory crap I've read before), and therefore just that much more relevant and valuable.

Good stuff. Really glad it happened.

Now then...

Let's play some damn GAMES! :)

Posted by Doyce at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

me: hi :)
    sorry,
    writing big comments.

Kate: i saw some of 'em.
    My eyes glazed over...
    :)

me: Yep.
    Half of it is figuring out what I think, honestly.

Kate: but i think you're a genius!

me: "He has to be smart -- everything he says bores me to tears!"

Kate: heh

me: It all boils down to this: I want to be able to tell folks about a game in a way that doesn't leave them expecting something they don't get.

Kate: which is a good reason to sort all this out

me: "It's a fucking cool ass Roleplaying game." means something so very different to each person that hears it.
    Me, versus you, versus Jay, versus Keeley, versus Margie, versus Dave... all very different images just popped into our heads.
    So better language needs to be used, so I dont' have the worst possible thing happen: someone I care about comes away from the table disappointed and/or frustrated.

Kate: how noble!

me: Nope! :)
    I like being able to brag that I ran a kick ass game.
    I can't do that if someone's pouty. :)
    It's really all about me

Kate: I see...

Posted by Doyce at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Awhile back, I posted a question up to the story games site, esentially asking seriously, how many sessions have your TSoY games run? Parenthetical to that, but more interesting in the long run, was the question of 'how many advances per session were your players earning?

The results of that were really interesting, and ranged from "something like 60 advances (bought with 5 xp each) in 8 sessions" to "20 advances, total, over 30 sessions" -- the gist of the whole thing being "your group is going to normalize toward what's most comfortable for them."

Which... all this debate about what's an RPG versus a story-game versus gamist, versus narrativist aside... is really the point.

Go. Play.

What your group likes and enjoys will, like a buried zombie that senses the tread of a hapless teenager nearby, rise to the top.

Posted by Doyce at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So... after playing the Shab all-Hiri Roach tonight (which was fun and a really good time for all) and discussing Capes in broad terms over the last couple days on my blog with the players in my group, I've figured out a significant distinction between different types of games that I think avoids some misconceptions and frustration when introducing or even just discussing a new game with folks.

Of the games I've been playing in the last, say... two to three years (not counting d20), there are essentially two types:

1. Roleplaying games that have a 'story, now' focus in them (frex: Sorcerer, HeroQuest, The Shadow of Yesterday, Dogs in the Vineyard). By that I mean, you have 'your guy', you play them, and story arises from the conflict and Crises of Choice with which they're faced.

2. Storytelling games, perhaps somewhat descendants of, say, Once Upon a Time or the Baron Munchausen game, that focus on telling a Story, with roleplay as a secondary element, usually as a delivery method of said story. (My Life with Master, Shock:, Bacchanal, Shab al-Hiri Roach, Capes).

It's not always clear-cut -- InSpectres is *probably* in category 2, but it's such a goofy romp thing -- I dunno, it's hard to say. Primetime Adventures I *think* is in category 1, but it explores the elements of Story so well, it's again hard to say. I think that certainly there's a WHOLE range of places a game can fall on a scale -- maybe with... say... Capes on one end and super-crunchy Burning Wheel on the other.

And also, with more comfort with a game like the Roach, perhaps the system goes away and the game moves to more RP focus -- that said, the Roach structure lends itself more to being aware of said structure... I mean, my perception of SaHR might change with familiarity, but... Capes? Capes isn't going to. It's *about* constructing a cool super-heroic story MUCH more than 'playing your guy', and I should add that it's GOOD at that, I think, but it's not the same thing as, say, Sorcerer.

At all.

Why does this matter?

Well... if I'm aware of that, and I analyze the game from that point of view when I'm first reading it and learning it, and then put that out there with people when I talk about it: "This is a story-telling game. We'll be doing some roleplaying, but the focus is sort of narrator-level, Baron Munchauseny story-telling with some RP" -- if that expectation is SET, you don't get as much potential frustration from someone who was looking for the cathartic release that comes from killing something and taking its stuff.

I mean, when you've got a guy in your group (or you ARE the guy in your group) who wants to play a super-hero guy, beat up some bad guys, maybe make a couple tough moral choices, but essentially play his guy and let the story flow from that... Capes will piss him off. I'm not picking on Capes. Capes is a good game, but it will not be what he was in the mood for -- what he wanted. It COULD be, on another day, or when expectations are clearly set ahead of time, but not if they aren't.

It's good to know what you're gonna get, and it's clear to me (now, finally) that it's not enough to say it's a 'hippie indie/Forge rpg'. There are layers. Nuances. Out and out significant and important differences.

Posted by Doyce at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (31)

Last night, I got to run The Princes' Kingdom for Katherine. I write about it over on the Forge in [TPK] First-time Princes' Kingdom, with a six-year-old!

So awesome.

I asked her if she had any traits that would help, and we went down the sheet:

"Would your... Swimming help?"
"Nnnooooooo...."

"Would your.... Karate help?"
"Nnnooooooo...."
"You could kick your teacher in the face."
"*giggles* Don't be silly, Uncle Doyce."

.. and so on.

I can't stop grinning.

Posted by Doyce at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Randy and I were talking last night, and I mentioned Capes -- parenthetically commenting that it and games like it (which is to say, games with more player authorial input like Amber, Nobilis, Sorcerer, Mortal Coil, TSoY, Galactic, Primetime Adventures, Shab all-Hiri Roach and even FATE, depending on how you run it) appealed to me was because it meant I got to use players' creativity more in the game or (with the full-on no-GM games like Capes or SaHRoach) I got to flat out be-a-player more.

His reply was "well, you don't like being a player anyway."

And... okay, yeah, I do GM a lot, and I'm bad at being a player, but neither of those things are because I don't LIKE being a player.

1. I like contributing bits of 'scene' at a director/author level to stuff that's going on. In most traditional games (with the exception of Amber/Nobilis and the like, and those are HARDly traditional RPGs, just old) that level of input ability is solely under the control of the GM. If I want to DO that, I have to GM. Period. I can look at Fate or Mortal Coil and say "hey, there are concrete mechanics in place in this otherwise pretty traditional game that give me the ability to do that kind of stuff EVEN WHEN I'M A PLAYER," and I get tingley in my naughty places.

1a. Giving players this ability scares the shit out of potential GMs that I could be playing with, and it shouldn't -- Amber players have been doing this for years.* Nobilis players have been doing it for (fewer years, but still) years. *I* have been GMing games where the players steer and/or change the story for well over a decade, with progressively more and more freedom to do this and overt acknowledgement that they're doing it, AND been successful at this, and I am NOT THAT FUCKING SMART. Other people than me can do it. Other people do it all the time.

1b. GMless gaming is such a bogeyman in RPG circles. Why? MOST GAMES in the world do NOT have a "Player Who Does Not Play, But Just Runs Stuff" -- games where all the players involved are responsible for understanding the basic rules of the game they're all playing and, through that understanding a strong social agreement, keeping everyone basically all playing within the same Shared Imaginary Space. It's not new. It's not even HARD.

2. I'm a bad player because I don't get much practice. See 1, above.

Now, I *have* played in some games where (a) i did a good job being a simple player (b) I (mostly) didn't do any scene imagery contributions (at least not official ones) and (c) I had a good time, consistently, and for long periods. Those are rare.

So... yeah. Partly, i want to run these dirty-hippie-indie games so that someone picks one up and says "hey, I wanna run this." That's not the only reason, because I *do* like GMing, but thats part of it. :)

Posted by Doyce at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

It occured to me a few days ago that I have very very few character City of Heroes or City of Villains that actually fit into the mold of a superhero comic book. Out of the (vast) stable of characters at my disposal, Hang Time, Strategist, and maybe Hyperthermian are the only characters I've got that could be dropped into a silver- or modern-age super hero comic with no one noticing. I think one of the reasons those three characters have gotten the lion's share of my play time and roleplay and fiction-creation (still true, even now when I've got a lot of other toons at high-ish levels) is BECAUSE they fit the genre the best.

No great revelation there, but I think it's interesting none the less.

I wonder if some of those other characters would be more compelling to me in the context of Paragon City if I tweaked their concepts a bit -- would ToonX be more playable for me if I altered him to the point where he'd be a good Teen Titan or Avengers fit?

Hmm.

Posted by Doyce at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I've been (slowly) reading and trying to parse Capes, from Muse of Fire Games. It's slow going.

... and then I actually went to the site and started going through the Flash Demo of the game. That's f'in slick, y'all -- even if you have no interest in a GM-less supers game, I recommend looking checking it out as (a) a wicked-cool game demo (b) some pretty neat mechanics (c) a wicked-cool g-- nevermind. Said that already.

Anyway. Pretty darn neat game.

Posted by Doyce at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Over here, one of the Jason's poses the question "What is your 'Thing'."

What he means is... well, he gives examples rather than spelling it out, but the sort of thing that you do with characters to sort of make them feel really comfortable to you.

And it's weird. I can think of the "thing" for like, everyone I game with. I couldn't really think of mine.

Like... okay:
Dave tends to gravitate toward support-role characters, generally. Bards. Medics. Fawning, enthusiastic, cat-girl rogues.
Margie likes to have the means to figure things out -- by that I mean, the means to acquire all the pieces of the puzzle -- or even just most of them -- she'll handle putting them togehter herself. :)
Jackie characters are totally secure in their convictions, which leads them into trouble when they encounter other views.
Randy likes to see the oncoming weather forecasts and get people organized in time to batten down all the hatches. (And he likes to be able to get around quickly.)
With Lee and De... I'm not sure I've played enough games with them to see patterns.

And I puzzled on mine a bit. In fiction, I explore (repeatedly) the cycle of mourning that surrounds traumatic loss, but I don't really think I do that with my roleplaying characters. Dunno. Maybe Jacob, at least originally.

Looking at patterns:
I play a lot of face-men types -- bards who focus on storytelling; rogues focusing on the con-men aspect coupled with some showy skills; the 'disguise/infiltration' expert in a spy game. Maybe that's my thing, but that feels more like a delivery system than the virus. Hmm.

Okay... taking it further...

I had to play a cleric in one game, so I made him the Boss (at least in his own mind) to give me a means to achieve the face-man fix. In the Champs game I played a long time, my horr