My Exploding Head

Done Here

2006-07-27T12:47:00.000-07:00

Ok, I like the whole WordPress thing, so I'm taking my show over there. Maybe I'll try to bring some of this stuff over there, maybe not. I'm lazy and I do so like the idea of a 'fresh start.'

Complexity and Type

2006-07-25T13:03:00.000-07:00

Most of my typological reflections are rooted directly in Carl Jung's discussion of type even though I have made free use of the MBTI shorthand. I finally decided I ought to look a little more closely at the MBTI discussions proper, and realized I had developed a way of framing it in opposition to it. My typology works according to triangulation and developed in close proximity to my own self-reflection and on reflections about my wife. MBTI developed with the explicit assumption that your inferior function is always the opposite of your dominant function.

But what I am almost 100% sure about is that this picture is wrong, that the structure presumed by the MBTI is not necessarily the case. I am sure that it described some people, that it accurately captures one possible set of relations. However, I am also sure that it is not the only way in which these functions can develop.

June Singer, in Boundaries of the Soul, talks about how she felt typology stymied rather than facilitated her analysis--that, despite being a 'Thinker' she had a robust Feeling function. This doesn't make sense in the standard MBTI structure, we would have to say that if she does have a strong Feeling function, she cannot be a Thinker. My model does not require this--instead, you get a primary function which may develop through its auxiliary function into one of two distinct styles. In the standard situation, the person develops in the standard Dyadic fashion. However, there is another option--in which the person develops their 'contrary' function by way of their of auxiliary, allowing it to serve as a messenger between the two.

Which all goes to question the validity of the MBTI questionnaire, requiring that most typing properly belongs to an analytic-personal encounter, where the individual's life history is discussed and not reduced to a battery of yes/no, maye so questions.

And, yes, this is a bit outside the scope of what I usually post here. Since it did emerge from this discussion, it feels right, though.

Immersion Pie

2006-07-25T05:50:00.000-07:00

So I reflected about all this typology stuff and how it related to immersion, then I put it on the back burner to let it stew for a while. Here are the results.

There is a diagram that I have in my head that I can’t easily translate into words. It’s a pie chart that gets divided in four ways, one slice for each function (N, F, S, T). Now, these functions can overlap and often express themselves in another four-way division of the circle (NF, NT, ST, SF). Each way of slicing the pie has a style of immersion associated with it and a set of techniques that facilitate it. The more blended the individual’s faculties, the more their immersion is described by one of NF, NT, etc. cuts. The more the individual’s immersion depends on a single function, the more it is described by the N, F, etc. cuts. A single person may have multiple immersion styles.

Below, I go into a brief description of each style. I hope to develop an extended discussion of each in the future, focusing on techniques that may enhance their particular brand of immersion.

Hypothesis: opposing functions / function pairings produce contrary immersion styles. Engaging in one tends to obscure engaging in the opposing style. Each immersion style may provide a degree of ‘interference’ to other immersion styles. So, we move from interference to outright opposition as we move around the circle. This hypothesis is not settled and its accuracy does not impact the descriptions that follow, but has the potential to amplify it.

The Two Models

(Single Function)

N immersion (“Let me Imagine”): An N gamer needs to have the space to imagine the game as it unfolds. This is an internal process, one that requires they have time to ‘process’ their experience in the game into speculation and fantasy.

F immersion (“Let Me Feel”): An F gamer needs to have a game that allows them to invest emotionally in the world, their fellow players, and the NPC’s that populate the world. Those investments need to feed directly into the game itself.

S immersion (“Make Me See”): An S gamer needs a thickly imagined world, one with sights and sounds, textures and flavors. When they examine an object more closely, that object needs to become more particular.

T immersion (“Make Me Reason”): A T gamer needs a game that they can explore conceptually. The world needs to seem rational, well-ordered, and provide puzzle-like challenges that they can solve through the application of logic. Most often, the complexity of an rpg system attracts these players, leading them to approach the game primarily as a rules system to be exploited.

(Dual Function)

NF immersion (“Inspire Me”): An NF gamer needs a game that helps them experience new emotions, intense emotions. They enjoy a game that lets them play characters that embody affective states, characters whose affections border on the spiritual. The state itself, sometimes more so than the event that initiates it, becomes primary.

NT immersion (“Let Me Figure Out the Rules”): An NT gamer sees the game as the application of a series of rules, the complexity emerging from their intersection. They have the most fun parsing out these intersections and learning how to manipulate them to their benefit.

ST immersion (“Let Me Work the Levers”): An ST gamer, like the NT gamer, sees the game as an application of rules. However, for them, the rules are less abstract, more concrete. They enjoy puzzles with clear solutions, combat challenges that require them to think tactically, with a concrete number of units and positions involved.

SF immersion (“Put Me in the Picture”): An SF gamer, like an NF gamer, needs a game that helps them experience strong emotions. Unlike the NF, though, they prefer visceral emotions firmly rooted to the particular events of the game. Whereas an NF’s emotions and behavior borders on the symbolic, the SF prefers visceral emotion. They dwell upon the details of the experience—-the crunch of the troll’s bones, the princess’ chaste kiss, and so on.

I can’t help myself from thinking about how a game like D&D looks through this lens. The settings tend to be very SF and NF with their sweeping conflicts and colorful backdrop, but play tends to favor NT and ST. It is NT to the extent that the progression and development of a character over the course of a game is a rules-driven process, one that favors someone who enjoys working through those rules and finding optimizing combinations. It is ST to the extent that a standard module focuses on tactical level combat and puzzles with well-defined solutions.

A standard module definitely throws a sop to the SF player with its gray box of descriptive text which allows a player to situate their character. But it doesn’t do much more than that since the ‘real’ information ends up being tactical and rules driven. The NF player most often has to struggle along, finding investment where they can. Frequently, the sort of investments they desire are only gestured to in a standard module—-simple hooks to draw the players in but which remain behind the scenes.

I suspect a lot of mainstream games follow this pattern-—they appeal to a lot of SF / NF players in terms of their presentation, but frequently favor NT / ST players in practice. SF / NF players are more likely to get more freeform almost by necessity.

Intuitive (N) Immersion Styles?

2006-07-17T10:32:00.000-07:00

So I have been talking to Thomas Robertson a bit about immersion. It's been very productive (for me, at least) since it helps me start to track the differences between things that fall under the large umbrella term of 'immersion.' It has also given me more fuel to hammer out this typology binge I'm on. Over at his blog, I looked at what he described as immersing in chess and thought that I might call it a 'T' immersion. He countered that the F comes in for him during roleplaying sessions in which the same style of immersion occurred.

And, very interesting indeed, he noted that some of that affect occurred after the fact, as he thought through the game. Some of this comes under the 'oh, so that's why Bob [my character] did that! Because he was angry at the princess and wanted to punish her for shaming him.' When I spoke to him, he emphasized that dimension again--namely, that he thinks (at least some forms of) immersion depend upon this after-the-fact reflection to support them. The more I think about that, the more I think he is really onto something.

I erred in calling the experience he discussed 'T'--pretty clearly, because it does involve F in its roleplaying incarnation. Which makes me think that what we are really looking at is an 'N' immersion, one driven by a certain receptiveness to the 'scene' in which the immersion occurs, where the response is not thought through but neither is it random. The processing seems to be going on behind the scenes of his 'conscious' mind, so what he does is just let that process keep going, let it dictate what actions he takes. This necessarily involves some application of learned patterns, but as he rightly points out most people can access behavioral patterns in this way simply because they have lived with people all their lives. Something very close to or identical to schema.

So, at least as he describes it, we have both an NT immersion (chess) and an NF immersion (roleplaying). This matches nicely with what Jung says about how N-dominated activity: it tends to 'see' symbols in place of emotions, even when they are feeling them. This helps get at why the after-the-fact reflection is important--the N experience requires that the person 'unearth' the feeling beneath the experience, give it both reason and voice, in order for it to take on a new layer of substantiality. I suspect (and I think this may be one of the things Thomas was getting at) that this new substantiality also feeds forward, making the player feel more invested in the next session, allowing the player to 'trust' their intuition more.

Now this sort of immersion does not demand that the player 'feel' their character or get involved in any 'trance' state, although it is possible that someone who works with trance states might be well-suited to accessing that intuitive level quickly (a crossover skill). The deep immersion in which a player feels like they are 'channeling' their character is still an NF experience, but one in which the emphasis rests on the F rather than on the N. That sort of play will be less suited to switching out to rules discussions, to carrying on side discussions during play, and so on, because they need to 'get into the character' and those things force them to 'get out of character.' Same motorcycle, but a lot depends on which faculty is driving and which one gets the sidecar. For shorthand, I'll bold and italicize the primary function in a pairing. NF would thus be N with an F in the sidecar.

This tickles me to no end--it reveals a great deal of subtlety in the typological approach and starts to point out ways in which the approach can assist players. Clearly, someone who is playing in a NF mode can work well with someone in an NF mode as long as they know not to drop in and out of the scene too quickly. Similarly an NF can support an NF's play by their intensity so long as they don't demand that they share that intensity, as long as they appreciate that there is a seriousness behind the NF's coolness.

D&D Break: Character Paths

2006-07-15T11:24:00.000-07:00

We interrupt the regularly scheduled post for the brief contemplation of an idea that I would love to see appear in D&D 4.0. First, take a look at this discussion Mike Mearls has about the rust monster and then the discussion it kicks off over at EN World.

There is one point in particular that Mike Mearls raises which is important to look at--namely that 3.0 did something interesting in relation to older editions of the game. It consciously incorporated magic items into the mechanics, assuming a certain steady accumulation of them over the course of the game. However, it did not seriously re-evaluate traditional spells and monsters that destroyed them. So, the ability to remove magic items remained in play even as those magic items became more a part of the character's effectiveness in the game. Someone alludes to the Mordenkainen's Disjunction spell--that is perhaps the biggest case in point. At the level at which it appears, the items it can destroy are the most difficult to replace. It can be worse than a TPK in terms of its capacity to grind the fun out of a game.

Which brings me to something I really liked in the 3.5 Book of Exalted Deeds: the vow of poverty. It allowed a player to do away with all the annoyance of depending on magic items without losing their ability to impact the game. There was still plenty of book keeping, to be sure, which could be finessed out of it, but it is still awfully cool.

I would love to see more things like the vow of poverty in 4.0; call them character paths--character choices the player could make which would have regular narrative consequences but would allow them to avoid *having* to get bigger and bigger magic items. Admittedly, this would not be easy. It would get boring if all of them involved giving up wealth in search of some nobler goal. There are ways around that, though.

For one, don't make the character paths as powerful as the vow of poverty. Assume that the character who takes one will get powers that replace certain sorts of magic items without stacking.

Two, give the path a meaty roleplaying angle. The characters following them should be required to engage in certain sorts of actions that can provide the DM with play hooks. Don't think of these as constraints but as opportunities. Taking a path tells the DM that you want to engage in a certain kind of game and allows the DM to generate hooks and plots in which players will want their character involved.

Create paths like the "path of no magic" that require the character to never use magic items in return for DR/non-magical attacks, bonuses to saves against spells and supernatural abilities, and some ability to overcome different sorts of magical defenses. Let them get faster stat boosts because they must rely so closely on their own abilities.

Think about the "path of the crafter" who can spend a replenishable craft pool to make non-magical items function as if they had magical bonuses or dealt certain types of damage. This could be permanent or temporary, with temporary modifications only temporarily depleting their craft pool. To rebuild their craft pool after making permanent modifications, they would need to spend a certain amount of time studying other well-crafted items--the perfect reason for them to go adventuring. Deny them access to item creation feats, too, since that distracts them from their 'true' calling.

Typing play styles?

2006-07-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

Ok, I'm citing myself from over here in order to start thinking about play styles and types. One thing to think about: it is difficult to type the people playing, but easier to type the particular functions being engaged by the activity. The crossover of faculty being engaged and individual involved is complex, likely to involve surprising permutations.

Immersion is the engagement with the game in such a way that your awareness of things unrelated to it becomes peripheral. It is a subtype of flow experience particular to roleplaying endeavors (broadly construed). It is engaged and requires effort. The effort feels 'easy' for some because of their previous habits and because of the powerful rewards they receive for engaging in it. It can happen in a number of different ways, each defined by the locus of their attention within the game.

Most broadly, immersion is an F-driven game style. Even when centered upon the setting, it requires that the setting be charged with emotion. A setting that was hyper-realistic, deploying complex physics and psychological models, will not easily invoke immersion. Flow might occur for some people who can get into that sort of stuff, but the flow will be located at the level of the concepts, not the world.

Point 1: Any flow at the gaming table is not de facto immersion. That most sorts of immersion engage the feeling function and so most deeply resonate with F types. This isn't to say T-types can't immerse--they have a feeling function, too. If they do immerse, I suspect it tells us something about how they relate to their feeling function.

("This how I am, how I act") Immersion in character situates the attention in the midst of the character's situation, enabling the player to respond in a way that feels like it is 'true to the character,' often in a way that surprises the player.

Ok, this is a very F-driven activity, too. I suspect you'll find a surprising divide in how this immersion develops, though, with sensation and intuition both finding their peculiar expression. The sensation-driven immersion will have more 'common sense' responses to what they encounter. They will 'get into it' but experience it very much as they would experience the 'real world.' Their immersion will tend toward the gritty.

The intuition-driven immersion will respond more, well, intuitively. Their character will respond with powerful symbolic actions, often pushing the drama in the direction of allegory, where the meaning may not yet be established, but get developed in play.

("This is how things are, how they happen") Immersion in the setting is centered about a scene and involves a vivid sense of the world in which the action occurs. I suspect a narrating GM in this mode and player immersed in their character can really feed off each other to produce strongly charged games. I suspect this looks and feels differently than two people immersed in character together.

I suspect you'll find two sorts of this immersion here as well. The first, sensation driven, provides a world that is full of sights, sounds, textures. The second, on the other hand, will be tighter, more imagistic. For those with some facility in both functions (that would be the 'P' types out there), I suspect they might mix in a little bit of both. They will have rich worlds with special 'charged' places that elicit more intuitive interpretations.

Point 2: Those familiar with lit crit will recognize that I am pointing out how S-immersion is metanymic, moving from object to object within the world, weaving a skin for it while N-immersion is metaphoric, sinking into certain images and exploring their capacity for meaning.

It is possible to move between these two different types of immersion, that a single person can support their own immersion by alternately visualizing the scene and then putting their character firmly within it. Or, alternately, get into a character and articulate a scene in which they 'belong.'

The movement between the two creates a middle space, a point at which the person is neither firmly in scene nor in character, a zone where some people lodge themselves and engage in clarifying both without breaking immersion. Especially for these people, immersion establishes a harmony between inner world and outer world, such that the character distills the world in their action and the world develops that action through its response.

I suspect you'll find this habit *most* among those with a strong N function. That middle place is ripe with possibility, with where the scene might go, what choice the character might take. I suspect the more S-driven the immersion, the more uncomfortable they will find that middle place which is neither the facts of the world or the responses of their character. They want the details, not the possible variation of them.

J v. P

2006-07-08T08:06:00.000-07:00

A better way to understand the Judging v. Perceiving distinction that doesn't bring up Jung's rational v. irrational talk:

The dominant function of the J individual is their judging function, a function that makes judgments on things based upon its relation to a standard. A Thinker (T) uses concepts and ideas to make these determinations while a Feeler (F) uses their emotions, their affective reactions, to make these determinations. As Jung himself makes very clear, a Feeler uses plenty of ideas, it's just that those ideas are first and foremost 'containers' for their emotions whereas the Thinker relates to the ideas more directly as ideas.

The dominant function of a P individual is their perceiving function, a function primarily oriented towards experience 'itself' rather than determinations of it. An Intuitive (I) relates to the possibilities of experience, the directions it could go, the things it could mean. A Sensate (S), on the hand, focuses on the actuality of what is presented to them, the facts of the situation rather than the directions it might take. Perceiving functions 'frame' the objects experienced while judging functions make selections based on that framing.

This is why we always have both a judging and a perceiving function. Someone with a judging function tends to experience the categories they use to select objects more directly than than the object themselves. So a Judging Feeler might relate first to 'Goodness' than to the particular person in whom that goodness is found (which isn't to say they don't appreciate individuals). A Perceiving Sensate, on the other hand, relates first to the details, the concrete presence of the person rather than to any value attached to them. Again, unless the individual is strikingly underdeveloped, they are always doing both. The J/P distinction just tells us where they are most likely to go *first*. More later on how to make this connect to gaming...

I type myself

2006-07-07T10:21:00.000-07:00

In true IF fashion, I managed to sidetrack myself from discussion my own type as it relates to playing a game. Here is the skinny version:

Type: INFJ

What sort of characters do I usually play? ENFJ.

Clearly, I'm not stretching any inferior function muscles when I play a character but just playing someone like me but actually directed to a big old world rather than their little ol' self. Oftentimes, I play religious characters--clerics in D&D, but more broadly priests and devotees of all kinds. Way back when I played a lot of TORG, it was a pattern that my gaming group picked up on and starting joking with me about--literally every other character I played was a priest, oftentimes a Catholic one. And tons of my characters died because they relentlessly pursued their goals in spite of strategic concerns to the contrary.

My second favorite type is less fanatic but more social--using that intuitive feeling to talk and wheedle their way around. They are, perhaps, more P than my usual ones, more driven by the lure of the new, the mysterious, than by hard and fast principles, but they are no less NF.

I'm less sure how to type the games I play, but I can say with some comfort that games I run take on an NT flavor--i.e. the more I have to enter into an extroverted role, the more my extroverted functions come into play. I run games in which the players move through a world of ideas made concrete, given form and shape. Now, I lace that with these emotional cues, trying to lure players into interacting with those ideas in an emotional as well as rational way, but that isn't what I'm best at.

Gaming like an introvert?

2006-07-07T08:07:00.000-07:00

These are just a few hypotheses of what might turn up in a closer typological examination of how psychological types relate to gaming:

1. Gaming with your inferior and auxiliary function will show up most commonly when you are an extrovert. Introverts already use their dominant function to mediate their interior content and will more easily slip into playing their introverted dominant function and its auxiliary to interact with the imaginary world. I suspect this will be doubly the case when that introverted function includes intuition as a dominant or auxiliary mode.

Which is to say that what goes in a gaming session might be experienced as the projection of inner contents for many people. For an extrovert this might feel like moving into foreign territory, while many introverts will leap upon it as a means of expressing what they otherwise keep inside.

2. We will encounter particular sorts of dissatisfaction with games that partially reflect the type of play the player is trying to engage in. I bet a lot of gamers are strong in the Thinking department and were able to engage with complicated games like D&D through the puzzle-y, mathematic-strategic elements. They feel 'good' about it because their strong functions get reinforced in play. Moreover, when they are interested in roleplaying more directly, the mechanics get in the way of that because it engages their *dominant* function, which makes it harder for them to exercise other functions. Their strong T tendency shouts down other faculties.

3. Rules lawyers might be most common among disgruntled, disengaged T types. When a T player goes bad, they go bad in a rules-lawyer fit of calvinballing--they use their dominant function to beat down disagreement, their inferior feeling getting activated in its least healthy form, as an oversensitive personalization of disagreement.

More Gaming with Carl

2006-07-06T12:15:00.000-07:00

A few less coherent musings on the question of typology and gaming:

How easy is it to actually play an introverted character? I suspect that a lot of Extroverts and Introverts alike play characters that are extroverted. The drama of the game sort of assumes that. An introverted character is a bit like how Plato envisions the good man's actions being acted on stage--they're boring because neither *does* much. The action goes on 'inside' the character where no one but the player has access. Gaming allows some introverts to stage their internal action through the 'extroverted' character.

Which makes me think that it is always good to clarify the extrovert/introvert distinction. Like the J/P division, the two are often confused with their most common expression rather than properly identified with their essential features. Introversion and extroversion are all about how an individual cathects--a fancy term for what sort of objects they invest with value and meaning. An extrovert invests actual things in the world with this energy, identifying people, objects, movements, and so on as their primary medium for experience. Introverts, on the other hand, invest their own internal experience with that energy. Quite literally, an extrovert directs themselves most naturally to the 'world out there' while the introvert attends first to the the 'world in here.'

Either one may be more or less social, more or less eager to interact with people. It's just that extroverts are more likely to interact with people since introverts often (again, not always, not necessarily) experience constant interaction as a distraction from their inner life.

Both, of course, can experience the 'other world.' It's dull and insipid pap which identifies an extrovert as having no inner life and an introvert as having no outer (or 'real') life. Often, though, they come to these by way their primary mode. An extrovert experiences their inner life in the 'world out there' while the introvert tends to incorporate the 'world out there' into the 'world in here.' An introvert often feels the need to reflect on what happens to them before they feel like it has 'really' happened--they need time to work the experiences into their inner life.

Which is why an introverted character is just less workable for most people--that delay, that processing, doesn't get portrayed well in an rpg. Whether this is a necessary occurrence or just an incidental one which a future rpg might solve, I don't know. I feel a bit like I am handwaving here--pointing, gesturing towards this relation I can't quite articulate fully.

I wonder if the difficulty Brand noted about authoring a character may be related to this--namely, that certain sorts of introverts have a 'natural' facility for projecting this internal development onto the screen of a character, whereas a certain sort of extrovert feels more comfortable projecting that onto a scene, something that more closely 'resembles' (yes, grasping at terminological straws) their native soil of the 'world out there.'

Gaming with Carl

2006-07-06T10:35:00.000-07:00

I saw this post over at Brand Robins' blog which really got me thinking about typology and gaming. I spent quite a bit of time reading Jung and Jungians in my formative intellectual development--he fills the role that Freud does for a lot of cultural studies types. So reading this brought a whole network of concepts to the surface of my consciousness. It sort of feels like Leviathan just reared its head out of the waters.

Naturally, like any good Jungian dilettante, I spent many an hour reading through the typology discussions and taking tests to figure out what slot I belonged. Fun times, fun times. Which brings me to the MBTI. In taking the test, I was always solidly INF, with the P and the J coming in pretty darn close. Usually, I just called it INFP and moved on--I seemed more like a take it as you go sort, not one of those uptight J types. But I'm really and INFJ--and not because of some repressed urge to be chill when I am not, but because the whole P-J distinction is misconstrued. Probably at the level of the test questions, definitely in the way it gets popularized.

P and J refers to which mode plays the dominant role in your psyche--the 'irrational' (P) or 'rational' (J). Don't get caught up on the whole rational discussion--Jung uses the terms in a quirky way that don't have the connotations we tend to ascribe them. Irrational faculties (Sensation and Intuition) do not have objects per se, they are process centered, taking objects but more interested in the process that brings them up than the actual things. Rational faculties (Thinking and Feeling) center upon objects--namely, ideas and feelings. 'P' people tend to be more 'laid' back because they are not preoccupied with particular things, more by their own experience, the 'vibe' produced by their interaction with things. They are sort of 'oceanic' in temperament. This, however, does not equal laid back, only tends towards it. Just as judges, being preoccupied with particular things, tend to be more categorical, but categorical tendencies do not themselves mean anal-retentive behavior.

So, with an INFJ, you would say that I am an Introverted Feeler. What gives with the N (intuition)? Since we cannot get through life just doing one thing, we develop an auxiliary mode through which we interact with the broader scope of the world. The auxiliary function cannot be the same type as our dominant because they are mutually exclusive. This doesn't necessarily mean that they are opposed, but just that they can't be exercised at the same time. At some point in time, Intuition became that for me. I interact with this passionate interest in the possibilities of ideas, of what things might be.

The cool thing is that we can access the inferior function (the function that can't be exercised simultaneously with the dominant function) through the auxiliary function. In fact, the auxiliary function tends to, in the healthier, well-adjusted person, enter into a compensatory relation with the dominant function. I not only have introverted feeling, but, by way of intuition, developed an extroverted thinking. The healthy introvert can actually look like a different sort of extrovert. Most people meeting me do not pick up on the F, but on the T--because I have developed an extroverted thinking to better shield, and occasionally give voice to, my introverted feeling. And I use that ET to alternately express my intense, sometimes vague feeling, and stab people who try to scratch my soft, F underbelly. Although, in true F fashion, I'm lousy at the stabbing and so it can look a bit clumsy.

What about poor sensation? Well, that may not be terribly important here--but let's just say that the least used is also the access point to the more transcendental experiences. If we make ourselves whole through the auxiliary's mediation of the inferior, we find the hole to the universe through the function we use least. Needless to say, that's a real hard step to take and I won't even pretend to be close to it. We transcend ourselves through the least of our functions--hence it is called the 'transcendent function.'

To Gaming! Jung thought that one of the ways we approach the inferior function is through fantasy and dream. It strikes me that roleplaying might be a particular expression of this process, a guided one which Jung himself might have been able to sanction for therapeutic purposes. So, I'm curious if we can identify a particular type of gamer who seeks just this compensation through roleplaying. While I would not want to universalize this claim in any way, I bet a number of gamers sense this latent therapeutic potential and take on persona (player characters) that they sense (on some level) will help them work those auxiliary-inferior connections.

I also wonder if there is another gamer who seeks something even more profound, who struggles to develop that transcendent function.

If such a gamer exists, I bet that many of them become dissatisfied with mainstream rpg's, get frustrated with the possibilities they sense but cannot realize. Am I one of those gamers? This is long enough, so I'll save that for another day.

Back at the keyboard...

2006-06-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

So it has been quite some time without a post here. That has everything to do with Story Games. There, unlike my blog, I get the sort of immediate plug in to a conversation that I enjoy. I can't be as narcissistic and self-indulgent over there, true enough, but it's a small price to pay. That being said, I'm not done with this blog yet. I want to continue to use it to develop my ideas, sort of talk to myself (but in semi-public--like a crazy person).

So what is on my mind, gamewise?

1. cooperation--after the conclusion of my campaign, my group has been playing with cooperative DM'ing. We worked together to establish the setting (developing color, city, magic level, all that) and then actually designed the party as a team. Each of us takes a session, runs it as we wish, then we level up the characters and move on to the next DM. The sessions have all been fun, with a snag here and there. One of the players had never DM'ed before, so it was great to see her take to it easily. Now, if I can just get us to sit around the table and really get a good, gritty discussion going about DM'ing as a craft, I'll be overjoyed.

2. revision--I am finally coming close to getting a full draft of a game done. It's a crazy modification of the 'Odd20' rules I developed, without a shred of the D20 mechanic. I have wandered through a couple different efforts at color for it, but have finally settled on one I quite like: archetypal powers finding their way around a dreamer's psyche. I'm calling it 3am, after the Fitzgerald quote about it always being 3 in the morning "in the long dark night of the soul." It features a mobile narrator role and encourages (with bonus dice) players to develop the issue that preoccupies the sleep of the dreamer. I'm honestly thinking I might throw it up on the Forge for soem criticism, especially if I can get my group to do a little playtesting.

3. d20 boredom--I'm having a ball with the cooperative game, but am growing increasingly tired of the D20 frame. We all know it, so that is cool, but I just feel like we oculd do a little more, develop a little more story with a different mechanic. Maybe I'll see if I can lure them with TSOY. I'm jonesing for some variations...maybe we could try the same campaign just different mechanics. That could show up the differences pretty starkly. Honestly, I want to see if we can develop the cooperation more fully, integrate it even more into the session and I suspect some other games might do that better.

Table Talk

2006-05-23T13:40:00.000-07:00

Partially in response to the push-pull discussion, I have been rethinking the common gamer trope of banning table talk. It has its place but gets overstated pretty frequently. What exactly are we trying to do with the ban? What else are we losing with it?

The bans occur most frequently around combat and social exchanges and center upon both 'staying in character' and trying to play a somewhat 'realistic' combat where the flow of information ought to be limited. There is some value in that attitude--it's a pragmatic means of keeping the game on track and not letting all manner of extra-gaming stuff leak into the session, detracting from its energy. It has a ritual component--a gesture that says that what goes on in the gaming session deserves to be taken on its own terms, that it should be protected from excessive contamination.

However, it also inhibits communication about the game as it is being played at the moment. It doesn't allow a player to flag some aspect of the game that is bothering them. In the worst situations, it allows a minor miscommunication to blossom into a full blown interpersonal conflict. If the player could just say "Hey, wait one sec, let me just say that I am worried about..." the problem would be resolved quickly but instead the player just gets to say a few terse things 'in character' (often thinly veiled outof character comments) that other players can overlook as being character rather than player issues. When that snowballs, boom.

How cool would it be to start seeing the ban on tabletalk replaced a more subtle account of why you want to avoid a lot of non-game chatter 'inside' the game while highlighting places where out-of-character discussion breaks about the progress of the game or a ruling can be productive. I don't mean that every rules question should become an extended discussion in-game, only that we should be able to distinguish ooc game discussions that are productive from those that are not.

Push - Pull (Go Look at this!)

2006-05-17T08:16:00.000-07:00

This is beautiful and smart. It, more than anything else, captures what drew me toward the Indie gaming community--the idea that a game could not only be about these characters, but about the cooperation between all the game's participants to develop this cool story. There are so many mechanics built to support the push and now we are beginning to consider how to build in the pull to the mechanics, too, rather than letting that just be something that 'happens.'

It also encapsulates why I have been disappointed with certain kinds of rules hacking that I have been doing in my game. Many of my initial tweaks were done with the hope that the players would take them up as an immensely cooperative venture, as a cue to engage in some serious pull exchanges. Yet, in those early cases, I did not provide any mechanical support for that effort. Only more recently have I found little tricks that elicit solicitation and not just assertion.

I mentioned that my group plays deities and I really wanted to provide them an opportunity to create a world. Unfortunately, I did that by giving each player cards which they could use to insert an element into the world--they just needed a little cooperation from their fellows to get the 'votes' to push it through. This essentially meant that each player carved out a niche of pushes rooted in trades for supporting another player's push. The result was hodge-podge and lacked the coherence for which I had hoped. This is definitely not my players' fault--the rules I gave them did not support the supportive, co-creative process I envisioned.

My second effort pleased me much more--not a full blown world creation, but local world modification. The players can play tokens to introduce small elements associated with the story or appeal to the 'thematic oppositions' of the setting to create more enduring features. Since players get tokens when another player plays off their idea, it encourages the player to establish elements that 'pull' other players in. I have only play-tested this a little, but the immediate results were far more satisfying.

It is probably no accident that I came up with this sort of mechanic after reviewing Mo's game (Crime and Punishment) for Game Chef--it wasn't a deliberate steal (ooh, I like this, let me take it over here), but I definitely grokked Mo's pull-ish mechanic and saw in it a better actualization of something I had been striving toward.

Endings

2006-05-16T13:30:00.000-07:00

I have been awfully busy with Story Games and my own work the last few weeks and so I have been absent for some time. It is a very pleasing rhythm--out into the community and hopefully back to the blog to develop some of the ideas fostered by the forum. But that is for another post.

I am drawing to a close a campaign that has lasted more than 4 years--that has passed through several DM's hands, which began with a humble band of performers and concludes with deities. The scope, in retrospect, is truly epic. While I will miss the campaign, I can't help but feel proud of the fact that I will draw it to a natural conclusion rather than let it slowly wither from lack of inspiration and drive.

At this point in the campaign, the players are literally the deities of a remote cosmology. While not full-fledged gods in the Deities & Demigods sense, they possess the salient abilities and many immunites of godhood. So, for a change, I let them visit the old D&D cosmology (the city of Union) as regular epic characters. They got the chance to bum around in epic taverns, take epic commissions to strange places. It was a fun little aside before drawing it all to a close. In the midst of that, though, I caught a glimmer of a possible story arc that won't be but could have been.

In the midst of their travels through the D&D cosmology, they caught a glimpse of Demagorgon's tower. They had run into him before, glancingly, and so had plenty of reason to be interested in this. I, as DM, saw in the tower a rich puzzle box of traps, puzzles, and bizarre social encounters--sort of a Planescape Gormenghast meets Cube. That intertwining double-helix rising from the muck has become an image of untapped possibility.

And it's a good thing that it remains untapped. It means that my players and I leave the world with a halo of imagination still remaining to it. It passes into our collective gaming pasts as a not-yet-finished dream--something that can fuel our future games. We can go out and remember the things that weren't completed and try to express their completion in a other ways, without thereby exhausting it.

Am I being a little too melancholy and romantic? Perhaps--but I want to remember that tower and the strange world that calls to me through it.

[Broken] Why narrative over dice?

2006-04-28T09:54:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I have talked a little about the tectonic shift that has occurred in the Broken projects as I labored to bring the concept and mechanics more in line with each other. I just want to make an observation about why a more straight-out narrative structure works for the game.

Two comments stuck with me from the Game Chef reviewers. The first was that you should never design a game around the presupposition that you can't trust your players. This motivated my first big revision (namely, throwing out the powers list in favor of a player-driven creation on the fly). It has also motivated my move away from dice altogether--trust that your players will play the game as you describe it and you don't need the dice to regulate them.*

Another reviewer observed that the mechanics were far too weak to support the sort of play promised in the premise. The Broken can break the laws of the universe and the game just didn't show that. Especially in the version submitted to Game Chef, it had a cheesy point system better suited to (and clearly based on) a Storyteller game. How to resolve this? Well, first off, strip away the restrictions placed on the characters by the dice.

The most obvious route seemed to be taking the dice out altogether. I imagine other routes could have done the job--like having players roll *lots* of dice, but most entail building in limits to the players use of those dice that didn't suit the freedom of their characters. Pure narrative lets them deploy their power 'raw.' Instead, I'll build in a bidding system that uses stones (from the Law), nails (from the steel driver), brief legal excerpts (from the lawyer), and character fetish features to determine whether a given player's push can alter the narrative direction of the destined bounder.

The visual depletion of resources also suits the sensibility of the game--a visceral struggle with the universe as opposed to a mathematical equation. It also allows the players to attempt to 'break' each other--deplete their resources so that they cannot oppose the direction they give the story (and how cool would it be for the Broken to 'wear down' the Law itself?).

*Note: This does not mean that any use of dice reflects a distrust of the players. There are plenty of reasons to use dice beyond control. It just turns out that the dice weren't doing much but limiting players in Broken.

Origins and Trajectory of RPG

2006-04-26T09:21:00.000-07:00

Folks should definitely take a look at this article by Ron Edwards on the emergence of the hobby and D&D's relationship to it. I am not always a fan of his work but this is a smart piece with meaningful implications for our hobby if we take it seriously.

One: RPG's emerged from a complex network that pre-existed D&D. D&D's success depended on that pre-existent network and would not have been successful without it. Like a fire that burns through the root system of a forest to erupt elsewhere, D&D spread through that pre-existent network. An obvious reason for this is simply the excitement people had to see their (private) hobby find a commercial expression and the hope that this expression would give them a common language with which they could converse with others.

Two: There are always dangers with a common language. It's easier to invest it with authority than the minor languages and, once so invested, it can be used as a weapon to silence other voices.

Three: There is also an opportunity with a common language. D&D exploited real networks and gave them the tools to interact with each other even further. I wonder if the modern diversity of RPG's would have been possible had not some major force (like TSR, if not actually TSR) hadn't woven together some of those networks.

Four (a reorientation modeled on 1-3): Do not strive to determine the one path towards RPG bliss. Beyond realizing that people have different sorts of fun, we can realize that it's good to cultivate others in their pursuit of 'different' fun. Keep in touch with the diversity and not just the component that appeals to you--even if you don't accept the principles underlying the 'other' brands of fun, that fun may produce material that can be used in having 'your' brand of fun.

Games minus the Dice

2006-04-23T19:26:00.000-07:00

Broken has been a good lesson in design. In the process of trying to make the game mechanics better suit the premise, I have worked through several ideas, each seemingly better than the last. My most recent idea is extraordinarily obvious, yet I didn't think about it--games don't require randomizers to be games.

Think chess, think checkers, think go, think tic tac toe, think hangman. None of those games have any sort of dice or related randomizing device. The game's pleasure, its uncertainty, derives from the other player or players involved.

So, don't make Broken with a randomizer as its engine. Breaking from the standard model of games, don't even set determinate success and failure conditions. Cut the play time down to two hours, one session. The goal of play is to develop the story, with the players moving round robin through the different roles (say, a switch every half hour). The 'goal' of the game is simple: develop the story in an interesting direction given the constraints of the role (steel driver, lawyer, Law, or destined bounder) you currently occupy.

The Law gets the most narrative input, but since the roles rotate, everyone should get a chance in the hotseat. Retain the props (the nails, the stones, the scraps of paper, the strange character records). More to follow.

Setting

2006-04-20T19:01:00.000-07:00

I have been having quite a bit of fun over at Story Games--recently discussing how to strip down a setting to its productive elements. There are several reasons this appeals to me. For one, the more I DM, the less willing I am to spend too much time fleshing out dungeons, towns, and challenges. I want to provide the players with the maximum opportunity to move through the world as they want, rather than have me tell them where to go. This naturally lends itself to improv and the idea of a 'setting factory' lays out some of the underlying elements of good improvisation--not randomness, but the capacity to play the variations of a theme.

For two, it opens the door to a more cooperative game, one in which the players begin to take some responsibility for the setting. You give them the theme and give them resources that they can use to invoke these themes to create setting elements on the spot. If the players don't want to take that responsibility, nothing changes. If they do, it expands upon the 'give the players opportunities' goal--if they want to go someplace cool, they tell you where they want to go.

The idea of key oppositions works well and appeals to my intuitive structuralism. You start a game with three or four oppositions that define the game, provide some correspondence between them, and then provide the players with tokens. They spend a token, invoke an opposition or two, and briefly describe the setting element they are introducing.

Build in a reward system. Each time a player contributes an element that furthers game play in an in interesting (yes, vague) way, they receive more tokens. Some of these should be special, allowing them to expand on their creation roles. They create a number of setting specific encounter zones, eventually acquiring tokens that can be used to introduce setting specific rewards. So they move up from 'shelter for those seeking justice' to finding a 'sword of the just.'

I do like ideas that are not yet embedded in the mechanics of a game--they seem more mobile, easier to plug into a game that is already in play, easier to incorporate into a new game.

[Broken] Development

2006-04-16T16:30:00.000-07:00

Ok, so the entry itself suffered from lackluster rules. The concept still holds my attention, largely for its vivid backdrop. The question thus becomes how to alter the system and bring it in line with the concept.

But I don't think that is quite right. The more I look at it, the more I try to modify the underlying system for balance and functionality, the less satisfied I am with the results. The setting establishes that the characters have been torn violently from the restraints that bind everyone else--and I am still using dice and tics on a sheet of paper to describe them?!? It makes play a matter of math and I just don't want that.

From my design notebook:

What you need to play:
Nails (Some Bent, Some Straight)
Old Can of Folgers (preferably still coated in a fine sheet of old coffee grounds)
Several Lengths of Wire
Law-related Lit (you should be ready to tear it to bits and collage)
Screwdriver
Marbles
Old, Blank Sheets of Paper

Don't have these? Can't find'em? Improvise.
It's cool--the rules want you to, just don't let the Law find out. Or
roll on down to your local dry goods store and stock-up.

How do I see this playing out? First, no character sheets. Instead, you get character fetishes. The steel driver assembles a little doll using the wire to connect three metal objects together. They can enhance their ability to manipulate play by appealing to the objects composing their fetish. The lawyer cuts up the law text (it could be pictures of police officers, a book of laws, an article, whatever) and collages them on an index card, using the content to power their actions in the game.

The destined bounder is built up in the first session of play--one of the sheets of paper is torn into roughly twelve fragments. Each fragment contains a character important to the bounder's life. The Broken manipulate these characters to alter the path of the destined.

During play, the twelve fragments are arranged in a roughly circular pattern around a center that represents the destined bounder. Some should be closer, representing their importance to the bounder, others should be further away. There are three levels of closeness--intimate, close, distant. On top of this, there are extreme cases where the connections can disappear--death and incorporation. Incorporated characters are always dead, but not vice versa. An incorporated character can be manipulated to more directly influence the bounder. Here there is a psychoanalytic notion of melancholy--x is dead, but in death become a super-ego ideal.

Each time the Broken wants to manipulate the bounder, they drop a nail in the center of the circle after establshing what they want the bounder to do. The point of the nail indicates the character the Broken must cause harm to and the blunt side indicates the character the Broken must assist in order to achieve their own goals. The degree to which they carry this assistance and harm indicates how powerfully they can direct the bounder.

Power comes at a cost--you can break the Law, but it has consequences. Everything is connected and only through those connections can the Broken act.

More later.

[Hex] Stakes, Take 1

2006-04-10T20:36:00.000-07:00

Okay, last post I mentioned that the notion of a witch trial seemed like one possible direction to develop. I've changed my mind--I think it's the direction to develop.

Every game of Hex should end with a witch trial, a trial prepared by the actions taken by the players up to that point. Players should be able to up the stakes in a way that makes the trial happen sooner rather than later, but happen it must. Players play knowing that there will be an accounting. Once the trial begins, the mechanics should shift--the dogears should acquire a new purpose and the medicine sack should be a dangerous thing, evidence that the player is a bad witch who needs to be burned.

There shouldn't be a bad witch designated when the game starts. Play should determine who is the bad witch, sometimes forcing a player character into the role. I want to capture the vibe of the historical witch trials, where someone might deny their evil deeds to the end while another might 'convert' to their persecuter's view and accept their misdeeds.

Player characters willing to admit to evil deeds should get bonuses to accusing others based on how foul their admissions are. They should also find it progressively more difficult to avoid a death sentence.

I don't want the death of a player's character to end their involvement--I want them to be able to vindicate their falsely accused character post mortem or use their acknowledged guilt to up the ante. Player characters who throw accusations around wildly should lose credibility, have more difficulty bringing new accusations and find it more likely that their old accusations will come to naught.

Toss out the GM. Provide a role of the 'Powers-that-Be' (the inquisition, church elders, the court) that begins play with a weak role but grows more powerful as play progresses, more powerful as the trials approach.

[Hex] Game Premise

2006-04-05T13:47:00.000-07:00

Ok, I am on full brain dump mode. Lots of ideas have been stewing in my head as of late and I just haven't had the time to get them all out. Anway, I have this idea for a roleplaying game that I want to design. Life is busy right now, so I don't know how quickly real design will happen, but I the concept seems tres cool.

Game Name: Hex

The players take the role of benandante (or 'good witches') who ferret out the influence of maladante (or 'evil witches'). The game would have a GM whose job it would be to establish the different symptoms that the players must discover and cure in order to identify the maladante. Each game would take place in a small village but could be expanded so that players could roam from village to village. The exact nature of these villages should be up to each group to determine, but my image of them is very much medieval European or Early American.

I don't imagine the goal to be the death of the maladante, only their identification and neutralization. The confrontation is 'metaphysical-spiritual' not between bodies and fists.

The game should be diceless. The primary means of conflict resolution will be a deck of colors, each card indicating one color to be intensified and one color to me diluted. I am still not sure how often a card should be flipped, but the players should have some ability to influence it by framing their actions in certain ways.

The color talk refers to the character sheet--each one should be a dutch-style hex sign. At character creation, each player chooses three colors that reflects the unique strengths of their benandante. They then color in their hex sign with crayons of that color, choosing one color as their primary color. They would color the border of their hex sign to indicate this. Perhaps the hex sign's designs would also have mechanical impact, making it easier or more difficult to do certain things.

Each player would have two sorts of cards--'dogears' and 'remedies.' 'Dogears' are quotes from real 'good witch' texts (Bible, Long Lost Friend)--i.e. pages that their characters have dog eared for ready use--to use them players would have to read them aloud. 'Remedies' are natural herbs, minerals, etc. that the benadante has in their medicine sack. I see dogears being something a player could accumulate whereas remedies must be discarded after use. Each would have certain mechanical effects--some should alter the flow of the scene while others just further intensify a color that a player uses.

Conflict resolution looks something like this:

1. Select one of your colors and use it to frame an action.
2. GM determines color of opposing force.
3. Player modifies intensity/frame with cards
4. GM and player consult a color wheel. If colors involved in conflict are directly opposite each other on the color wheel, then the one with the highest intensity 'wins' and cancels out its rival. If the colors are not opposite, then the color is 'modified'--moves closer to the color used to frame the action. The final color determines the 'tone' or 'theme' of the result.

The GM will play the maladante who should also have access to herbs and dogears, but from different sources. The number they possess will partially determine how dangerous the maladante is.

In short, I want a game that captures the feel of 'real world' accounts of witchcraft without much of the historical baggage (or math).

I have vaguely considered including some mechanic that would involve a failure condition--namely, the inability to identify the real bad witch results in a witch trial hysteria. Perhaps the witch trial would be the only condition in which player death could occur...although part of me just wants to leave the trial out and let the game stick with the core benadante-maladante conflict.

Why gaming isn't abuse

2006-04-05T12:44:00.000-07:00

A strange trend has developed (thanks, in part, to Ron Edwards) in which the roleplaying advice offered in many mainstream rpg's is being equated with abuse, or at least with tacitly encouraging it. My problem with all of this language is it entirely ignores what characterizes real abuse. If it were merely terminological (they mean x by abuse but I mean y), I wouldn't be so bothered by the discussion. However, they use their sloppy notion of abuse to bring in a whole cartload of psychiatric terms that their use does not justify.

Abuse, in its strictest, social impairing, brain altering form involves one individual (abuser) inflicting harm on another individual (abused), from which the abused cannot easily extricate themselves. In this situation, the abused tends to develop what is called learned helplessness. Because the abuser prevents the victim from leaving the scene of the abuse, the abused comes to accept the abuse as normal.

Ron Edwards makes a big deal of the fact that abuse victims have difficulty telling stories and proceeds to compare this to problems that gamers he has encountered have with telling stories. There is real debate as to why this occurs among victims of abuse--one option may have nothing to do with their capacity to tell stories, but with the difficulty abused people have to perform any behavior. Those who suffer too much punishment tend to act less, following a pretty basic animal instinct--"maybe if I'm quiet, if I don't do anything, the bad person will ignore me." In other words, they don't tell stories well because they are afraid of getting nailed for speaking out (either physically or verbally, it doesn't much matter in this case).

Now, I don't know any game where abuse of this order occurs or any game which offers advice that would lead to that sort of abuse. You can get up from a game, you can walk out the door. You can look at the GM and tell them that you are uncomfortable with the current direction of the game, that you cannot, will not continue to play if it continues. I don't know of a game that tells the GM to lock the door so players can't leave or tie them to their chairs so they have to listen to their abuse. I don't know of any game that includes a list of cunning tricks for convincing a player that they are dependent upon the GM for their self-esteem. Abuse doesn't have to be physical, but there must be a real coercive force--a boss who can fire you and take your money away or some such thing.

Do I think that Ron Edwards is just smoking crack? Actually, I don't. I do think that games like Vampire appeal to troubled and abused people. Sometimes, these people will recreate abusive situations because they understand those best. But the rules don't cause that--if you have known victims of abuse or been one yourself, you know how easy it can be to forget that someone who acts like an abuser may not actually have any power over you (at least not any that you have not given them).

Ron Edwards overlooks how these games can provide these people with the safe space in which they feel free to tell their stories without threat of retribution. I have met people for whom roleplaying served a therapeutic purpose, that it allowed them to find a voice they had thought lost. Will they admit that it wasn't always easy? Of course, but it's never easy. The idea that the GM is told to manipulate the rules to abuse players is silly. No game does that--quite the opposite, they say to abuse the rules when the rules aren't contributing to the fun. Honestly, I see the 'never fudge ever' rule as more insensitive and injurious than the suggestion to 'keep things fun and ignore the occasional bad roll when it is more enjoyable for the game.'

Imagine this situation: you are GM-ing a game with a new roleplayer, one you know to have some abuse issues, who tends to identify strongly with their character. If you make a roll that would result in their PC's death would you think it abusive to fudge that roll and just have him knocked out and captured? What if it were in a really silly, low threat scene? I would fudge that die and I would argue that any sane GM should agree with me on that. That is far more the 'spirit' of the advice found in mainstream rpg's than this ridiculous abuse talk.

System is good, paying attention to the system is good. But you can be sticklers for the system (even good systems) in ways that are cruel, too. I have seen GM's be sticklers to get back at players more than I have seen them fudge the system to get back at a player. That doesn't mean the system is abusive, it just means that, in the end, playing a game involves some common sense and being able to idenify an a-hole when you see one.

Old School

2006-04-05T12:13:00.000-07:00

I recently picked up a copy of the old AD&D Players Option: Skills and Powers and you know what--there were some darn cool ideas in there. At its heart lies the effort to make character classes and races more modular, easier to tailor to different sorts of settings. In retrospect, I may prefer the simplicity of that to the direction customizability went in 3.0 and 3.5 D&D--namely, prestige classes.

This interests me because I used to go around thinking that we (myself and the gaming community as a whole) had moved beyond the 'rudimentary' efforts of AD&D. I came back to 3.0 with the notion that they had really fixed the game and freed it from its archaic clumsiness. In short, I accepted a very simple idea of what it meant for a game to evolve. I treated the evolution to be one directional, with all the bad things in the past and the good things in the present and future.

This is not the case. Evolution is a question of suitability and suitability always presumes an implicit 'suited to.' Old school AD&D is suited to do certain things well, certain other things not so well. The same can be said for any game--the old games I grew up with are not archaic, the new ones aren't 'high tech.' What has changed is not the inherent quality of the games but the expectations that I have for the game. The one good thing about us (as gamers) today is that we (as a community) have become more self-reflective about the relationship between expectation and rules. We appreciate that different rules better suit different premises and audiences.

Unfortunately, we now have a tendency to see products of a less self-reflective moment in our history as less valuable. We forget that many of those pioneers we disregard as 'grognards' are and were no less reflective. They struggles with premise and rules, experimenting with home brews and alternative mechanics. They may have been less theoried than ourselves, but they shared a commitment to rules that worked for their aims.

More importantly, though, we forget that self-reflectiveness is no guarantee of quality. It gives us a false sense of awareness and makes it easier for us to ignore biases that fall outside our well-crafted terms. We can be far worse than any of the grognards because we *believe* that we understand how things actually work.

Randomizers

2006-03-30T08:49:00.000-08:00

My slow progress towards independent game design began with randomizers, namely the question as to how important the die use for task resolution is to the system. Naturally, since I play mostly 3.5 D&D, the first place I considered this was with that system. I have been looking over the Castles and Crusades game recently and this has brought this all to mind again.

Players of D&D should be familiar with the basics of the system in shaping play. At low levels, there are plenty of things that you can do well (especially skills) but also a whole lot of things that are difficult and chancy. When you only have a Fortitude save of +4, even a DC 12 Fortitude saves makes your heart race. As you progress, the things you can do well increase incrementally until you can easily and fairly safely take on armies of monsters that would have slaughtered you singly at first level. However, there remains a set of monsters whose challenge rating hovers right around your ECL that continue to pose a challenge. Even though your Fortitude save may now be a +14, the DC you are rolling against is a 26 or a 30--when you use a d20, that still leaves plenty of room for failure.

Why is this? Stated simply, it is because the folks at Wizards of the Coast put a lot of effort into retaining game balance. They stat monsters so that those at each challenge level require rolls that a player can't always make. This doesn't occur just with saves, of course. It also occurs with Armor Class (which zooms higher as players acquire better attack bonuses with experience and cool weapons), hit points, spell resistance, trap difficulty, and so on. When the good folks at WotC make a mistake, it shows up in play quickly--especially at high levels, where a slight miscalibration means a challenging obstacle becomes easy or impossible.

Why do I say 'slight miscalibration?' Well, it comes down to that randomizer. Because we are always rolling a d20, the probabilities of what you roll remain the same even as your abilities increase. If you underscore a DC by 5, that means a player who needs to roll a 10 or higher for their character to succeed now only needs to roll a 5 or higher. That has a profound impact on how players experience the game.

The biggest difference between the 3.0 and 3.5 rules rests on this issue of calibration--3.5 is much better calibrated. As I may or may not have mentioned, I currently run an epic level campaign in D&D. Epic rules were not thoroughly recalibrated, which leads to some strange situations--most often the case where a monster totally trumps one or two player characters abilities. I have picked up some basic monster nerfing strategies that ameliorate some of this, but that took some work (and included some serious buffing of the party).

There is a subsequent problem, though. Epic monsters are less calibrated than non-epic monsters. I suspect part of this rests in how tough it is to playtest them--it takes a long time to put together an epic level party and an even longer time to really figure out the best way to use them. The lack of calibration, however, means that there is a growing opportunity for a 'warm-up' monster to just trample the party. I have gotten much better at spotting these, but one still sneaks up on me every once in a while.

It also makes really high level play very tough--the monsters seem to increase in difficulty on a pretty even curve when the players do not do so. Epic magic items, for example, max out at bonuses well beneath those required to allow epic PC's to meet really high level challenges. My answer to this has been to give the players divinity--the divine rank mechanics are actually more expandable than those for epic play. I have had to make them weak gods, nerfing some things like immunities, lest they simply become immune to all the cool attacks high level monsters have.

The long and the short of this rambling? Here are three things:

1. Please, Mr. and Ms. WotC, update the epic rules, maybe even tweaking the d20 system to make epic play more easily scalable. This wouldn't have to apply to pre-epic D&D, just epic play.

2. Castles and Crusades is a cool game, deliberately building in level limits that accord with the 'limits' of the randomizer. The rules book has more editorial problems than I can easily count, but its core idea still shines through the morass, sparkling like a diamond in the mud. I think it should get more attention and heartily encourage people to go take a look (or wait for the revised edition in the hopes that the editorial apparatus now suits the worth of the mechanic). Regardless, the first edition has cool art--I'm a fan of this Peter Bradley fellow.

3. I can easily see myself doing more stuff with indie games because, to use that lingo, system really does matter. No system can do everything, nor should it make that its aim.

GNS Considered

2006-03-23T06:33:00.000-08:00

I'm taking a little break from my current Game Chef addiction to chat about the humor article in this month's Dragon--'The Ecology of the Adventurer.' Ok, actually I'm just going to talk about it for a second before using it to jump into an extended consideration of GNS that it made me consider. Still--it's hilarious and I adore the way they describe each gaming style as if it were descriptive of the character and not the player. Yarr, here be intellectualizing.

Now, it is no surprise to anyone who has been reading this (are there people who do?) that I have tis craft hobby horse, and that much of that centers on the difference between concept and medium, with the question of how the two inform each other rather than just dictating to each other. So, there seems a way to apply this to the whole GNS talk (which I am always tempted to use with scare quotes, but I'll take it 'seriously' for this entry at least). When this happens, you get a historical and crafty perspective on the genre.

To start: Roleplaying seems to have its roots in a simulationist mindset. It is not news that the first rpg's were essentially 'first person shooter' versions of tabletop wargames. People like Gygax & Arneson got curious about shifting the focus of wargaming away from units to individuals and started to add some fantasy dressing. Right away, simulationist--how do you represent a sword's damage or how armor protects someone? Many rpg's that followed were just as simulationist, but took as their point of departure that D&D didn't get the simulation 'right'--think Traveller or The Morrow Project.

Unless you start doing fullscale, hardcore re-enactments, any simulation will have to be based on rules meant to extract the 'key' features of 'real' life. In these elisions lie the space for other simulationists to make 'better' models--notice how bogged down sim games can get with charts, math, and so on. The extraction also makes the gamist possible--unlike the laws of Newtonian physics which have to get back to the 'actual' behavior being described, game rules tend to be adopted and used without the constant harkening back to 'reality.' These sorts of rules relate more to each other than to the reality they first simmed, so they become susceptible to people who 'play the rules' rather than the simulation.

An example of the conflict between the two: I gamed with a guy who had spent some time in the military--while in the service, he played a lot of Twilight 2000. During a session, a player wants his character to jump a trench wearing a heavy pack. The GM says he can't and the player complains that the rules say he can. The GM's answer? He pulls together a real pack and asks the player to leap a certain distance with a running start. The GM said, in short, this game is a simulation--let's test this rule. If it doesn't work, we toss it. The ultimate proposition for a simulationist.

Now, narrativism comes a little later, when gamers realize that they are telling stories and that there all these cool tools for telling stories to be found in literature and cinema. This attitude isn't absent in the early rpg's, but it is superceded by the simulationist urges. I'll argue that the simulationist perspective includes a latent narrativism--they want the sim to be right, because they want to believe it, because the want the story to possess a certain 'force.' It is just that, for them, a cool story is also a realistic story.

What happens with games like those produced by White Wolf? They suggest that we can believe a lot more than is possible, that we can use the tools of literature and cinema to expand upon our repertoire. Again, this isn't exactly new--after all, fireballs? But the new breed stretched that even further. Thus we find a cogent appreciation for scene breaks, for climactic encounters as opposed to realistic ones, and so on. It is unfortunate that the community of gamers can be so clique driven--so we end up with Storyteller getting labeled 'touchy feely' crap by the old schoolers while the new schoolers start calling the old schoolers immature and socially challenged.

Ironically, the gamist perspective comes into its own just after the hey day of storytelling--3.0 D&D breaks with many of the sim conventions in order to introduce a game that is more playable, a game whose rules are easier and more enjoyable to use. Now, this gets done under the auspices of a certain kind of sim-narrativist attitude: too many rules about 'realism' spoil the game, make it difficult to get in character, make it difficult to believe. A really unbelievable but easily applied dynamic turns up to seem more 'real' sometimes than a detailed mechanic that accurately captures the 'reality' of a situation. This isn't unsurprising, really--look at hardcore physics texts, do you see falling rocks, orbits, or (what is really there) strange symbols, diagrams, and formula?

[Broken] Power 19

2006-03-20T18:35:00.000-08:00

I admire the Power 19 questionnaire an awful lot, so I thought it would be fun to run through my Game Chef entry using this tool.

1.) What is your game about?

Individuals who discover that an inhuman force guides every even that occurs. The discovery frees them from the force's control and gives them an opportunity to change its actions. Think Quantum Leap in a claustrophobic, mechanistic world.

2.) What do the characters do?

The characters manipulate the inhuman force that permeates the world, trying to improve the world or make it worse. There actions determine whether they ascend to a higher level of awareness or descend into a paranoid nightmare. Each character has a distinctive way of interacting with the setting based upon choices made in character creation--some control the environment through forged metal, some direct the actions of those humans still ruled over by the law, and others interact through an artificial 'persona' they present to the world.

3.) What do the players (including the GM if there is one) do?

The players and GM (called a judge) cooperate to create a cast of characters with a shared past and then determine the direction the game will take. Once the set-up is complete, the judge guides the players through the settings they worked on. The players 'make cases' for what their characters can and can't do and assist characters with whom they have connections.

4.) How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?

The setting is largely evocative, meant to supply the players and judges with fuel to create the settings in which the game will take place.

5.) How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about?

Character creation focuses on determining what tools each character has to influence events in the game and on establishing how they are related to each other. Since each character has only limited resources in each session, the connections provide the mechanical means through which characters can share resources during the game.

6.) What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward?

The game rewards cooperation between players and judge. Play should be most enjoyable when players enter each situation and try to figure out the story behind the scene in which they find themselves.

7.) How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game?

Cooperation allows players to stretch their resources and exert greater influence over the scene. Each session also has 'refresh' conditions which allows characters to recharge their resources when they put together more of the story.

8.) How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?

During play, most of the responsibility rests on the judge. However, every game of Broken begins with the judge and players working together to determine the sorts of places and challenges will be featured.

9.) What does your game do to command the players' attention, engagement, and participation?

First, it asks that they take part in the campaign world's creation--they create the stories that connect their characters and work with the judge to create the places that each session features. Second, the characters interact with their world only through the mediation of special powers, encouraging the players to think laterally. Third, each session begins with the players being thrown into the middle of a situation and having to make sense of it as quickly as possible.

10.) What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?

The center of the game involves players 'making a case' for what their characters can do. A player makes a case to the judge for what they are capable of doing, their intentions for doing so, and how difficult it will be. The judge clarifies that and the player rolls. The degree of success determines how well the character manages to realize their intentions.

11.) How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?

Each character has 'connections' to other characters that allow them to cooperate and achieve more success with their actions. Each player has only limited resources, so they must cooperate if they are to successfully navigate challenges. The whole notion of 'making a case' plays up that the characters are working to change a system of laws--the characters, unlike the other people of te world, can 'appeal' the law but cannot simply escape it.

12.) Do characters in your game advance? If so, how?

The game is meant to be played in four sessions--at the end of the game, players either ascend, descend, or stagnate. Besides those conclusion conditions, there is no advancement.

13.) How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?

The absence of character advancement in play makes it more playable in a short period of time. The conclusion advancement or descent keeps the players focused on the story elements and cooperating to achieve positive end conditions.

14.) What sort of effect do you want your game to produce for the players?

The players should become engaged in the brief scene with which they are confronted and do their best to make sense of them.

15.) What areas of your game receive extra attention and color? Why?

Currently, the game dwells on explaining how to encourage player and judge cooperation during character and setting creation---the set-up playing an essential role in the play of the game. The resolution system is fairly slim and simple, meant to move quickly and allow each session to dwell on play rather than mechanics.

16.) Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Why?

Three things: the way in which the game setting with its inhuman Law is mimicked in the mechanical element of 'making a case'; the way in which character design centers on creating connections between players and using those to determine cooperation opportunities; the cooperative creation of the setting so that players and judge are on the same page during game play.

17.) Where does your game take the players that other games can’t, don’t, or won’t?

It takes the players to a confusing world where they are challenged to do good in a world they do not entirely understand.

18.) What are your publishing goals for your game?

display on the web.

19.) Who is your target audience?

Story-centered gamers who want to experiment with a more decentered gaming approach without abandoning the 'standard' GM-player structure. People who like supernatural settings.

Fun with Game Chef [Broken Teaser]

2006-03-18T20:20:00.000-08:00

I just discovered Game Chef this week and quickly found myself huddled over my computer trying to throw something together. The final result was Broken. I'll post more of the game soon, but I am pleased with its introduction (It isn't perfect, but I think the quality to speed ratio is pretty good):

There are two sorts of people: those who are ignorant of the Law and those who
have been broken by it.

There is a cold, inhuman order to the world. It orders man and machine, life and matter, according to its sublime and alien rationality. It has no name but the Law. Those who know nothing of it live in blissful submission to its machinations, playing their part and fading away. For while The Law is not kind, nor is it deliberately cruel. But there are those who have been cursed by a glimpse into that cold order and they have been broken by it—their knowledge expels them from the Law’s order. They are freed from the limits of their body, their personality, the very physical laws that order the world.

That freedom is terrible and empty. The broken have only choice to guide them. They can choose the path of Law, slowly stripping away their dependence on mere matter to manipulate the raw causal force that flows through the world. They can choose the path of steel, interacting with the world through the forged tools of man. Or they can choose the middle way, the path of humanity, seeking to employ the forces of steel and law in a delicate mimicry of their old life.

Breaks are mysterious occurrences. They always occur in a setting where rules have been invoked or broken and they always involve more than one person. As soon as the individual is broken, they become aware of the action of the Law around them, aware of the sensitive points through which it may be manipulated. In that near instantaneous moment, they must choose their path or have it chosen for them.

All those who are broken together are trapped on a single fault line and are carried along as it expands. The fault line extends in fit and starts, forcing the broken to leap ahead in time and sideways in space. Most broken call these sudden shifts ‘jags’ and live under the threat that they may be torn from their surroundings at any moment.

The Cast of Characters
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

There are two sorts of characters in Broken: bounders (those guided by the Law) and broken (those freed from the Law’s control). The broken must choose whether they will use law, persona, or steel to live. The forces of law and steel must be equally represented in every group of broken. In any group of broken with more than two individuals, there must also be at least one member that chooses the path of humanity, of living through a persona. Those who choose first thus have some power over those who choose after them.

The broken can interact with each other normally through touch, voice, and sight, but they can only interact with the bounded world through their chosen path.

Breaking at the Joints
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.
T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

The fault line carries the broken through a series of scenes where the Law’s action is most centered. Each scene is connected to the first in some way, although the connection may not be obvious. Their actions have a profound impact on the course of the Law—like the proverbial butterfly whose fluttering wings result in a hurricane, the broken’s actions have profound consequences which they may not be able to grasp in their entirety.

Guiding the Stream
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things
T. S. Eliot, Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Each broken character has a distinctive way with which they can interact with their surroundings. Those who have chosen the path of steel can only guide the bounded world through the use of forged metal, preferably steel. They may pick up any bounded material composed of forged metal and use it as if they were entirely corporeal. They pass through all other bounded objects (even people) as if they were ghosts.

Those who choose the path of law gain access to the causal energy that flows through the bounded world. They may choose to use this connection to make some event more likely to happen or to directly take control of a sentient bounded creature for a few brief moments. They are entirely unable to interact with the bounded world except through these mean.

Those who have chosen the path of humanity can interact with the normal world. The moment a broken chooses the path of humanity, they acquire a metal ‘skeleton.’ Nearby metal bends and twists, melts and reforms, and the broken’s persona is infused into it. They appear to others as they were before they were broken but bounded find their presence slightly unnerving. Other broken see them as they are—a jagged collection of metal bent to human proportions, sizzling with consciousness. Those on the path of humanity can influence events more subtly than most since they, more than any other broken, may directly converse with the bounded.

What the Links Compose
In my beginning is my end…
In my end is my beginning
T. S. Eliot, East Coker

There are three possible conclusions to the game: transformation, stagnation, or collapse. If the players manage to alter the chain of events so that something positive arises for the bounded involved, they have achieved transformation. They become more independent of the Law and better able to see its patterns. If they bring about a negative change, they bring about a collapse. The broken become less able to see the patterns of the Law. Their ability to impact the Law deteriorates into random variation. If they neither improve nor worsen the situation of the bounded, they enter stagnation. They continue to jag, although often the time between increases and the connections between the events more subtle. These broken often become lost on the fault line, condemned to an eternity of change.

Terminology and Design

2006-03-14T19:23:00.000-08:00

I have always been ambivalent about the Forge. While I admire its aims (namely educating game designers and fostering experimentation with game mechanics), I have mixed feelings about how deeply they articulate their core terms. When you begin to read through Ron Edwards' discourses on GNS, vanilla-pervy distinctions, and so on, you find a degree of detail that seems less about facilitating game design than commenting upon it.

I'm probably a little more sensitive to this than some folks--I have spent a good deal of time reading modern-postmodern theory, a good deal of it with references to literature. It possesses a wide variety of terms, fine-grained and detailed. Unfortunately, it's complex enough that few writers can easily use it to create work. By the time you run your creative ideas through the complexities of the commentary, they come out all jumbled or overstandardized. Derrida has a nice essay ("Force and Signification" in Writing & Difference) on this--commentary attends to structure, but the force of a work of literature does not reside in that structure.

Commentary seems best suited to assisting production when its terms are simple and directly related to the medium of production. Ideas like 'gamist' and 'narrativist' are great in this regard. As shorthand generalizations they allow a designer to think about their work and how its components play into that. They are rules of thumb that allow them to quickly latch onto useful tools for developing their ideas. As objects of extended discussion, though, they become overly normative, telling people what they should and shouldn't do. Such prohibitions impede creation.

Slowly, though, my appreciation for the Forge is growing. While I don't necessarily enjoy all the nitpicks around the GNS break, I think the Power 19 questions are just shy of brilliant. They capture (without all the excess terminology) key elements of the creative process and help the designer to focus in on how to synch design goals with the mechanical elements of their game. It also serves to distribute a lot of solid information about the publication process and provides a generally supportive community. Who knows, I may just mosey on up and post something...

Maybe.

Dream Solutions

2006-03-14T19:10:00.000-08:00

A little while back, I toyed with some ideas that could improve the D20 industry. This is just a follow-up to that, a sort of marketing fantasy.

What if the big dog (Wizards of the Coast) could host a massive, iTunes-like, database that individuals could log into and buy pages of standard books? If they charged a fee to host other gaming companies's products, they would both benefit--Wizards would get an extra source of revenue and cements its position as the force behind the D20 mechanic; the little guys would get a lot more attenton, benefiting from the 'long tail' effects that Chris Anderson talks about (I first talked about that here).

Ah, I know I'm dreaming on this one. Still, wouldn't it be nice?

Shifting Trends

2006-03-12T19:24:00.000-08:00

3.5 did a number on the D20 industry, for obvious reasons. While Wizards of the Coast have the resources to deliver updates for all their old material, smaller publishers are left with out of date stock. Those who purchased material from them become a little gun shy, worried that a future edition of the game could make most of their material difficult to use. Small shifts in features like DR are not too difficult to modify on the fly, but major shifts in class abilities, saves, and spell descriptions are not.

It's not surprising, with rumors of 4.0 circulating, that we are beginning to see a shift in the industry standard for D20 publishing. Companies that jumped on the D20 train have begun to exploit the underlying OGL mechanics to produce house systems--systems they can control, systems that will not change underneath them. The economic shift may be precipitating a creative one. The creative shift has been brewing, but the economics has catalyzed it, spurred it.

Is this a sign of the industry's flagging strength? I think it may be quite the opposite. The diversification shows an increasing sensitivity to the expressive dimensions of the system, the range and scope of the worlds the system can support. The shared ancestry also makes it easier for players and DM's to share material, whether that be campaign settings, monsters, or npc's. It isn't always easy, but possible. Most of the variant systems even include conversion assistance for those who want to do this.

You hear stories about people who are excited by Eberron, but prefer using True20 or Castles and Crusades rules to play. You find players who like the core D&D rules, but import Iron Heroes classes or its scaled feat system. The diversity of OGL systems among publishers makes it easier for players and DM's to cross-breed them in practice. This is something we should appreciate--the multiplicity of publishers means a divergence between products, but their shared core makes it easier for us (as players and DM's) to homebrew the rules in our campaigns, to find just the right fit. The systems mingle in the 'depths' of our gaming practice, even though they cannot (should not) mingle at the heights.

Maelstrom Storytelling

2006-03-09T07:53:00.000-08:00

I'll admit, lately I haven't been very excited about a lot of standard 3.5 D&D supplements lately. I am in one of my game mechanics design/theory cycles and find myself looking for unusual systems, something I haven't seen or, if I have seen, something to which I haven't attended. Give me a few weeks and I'm sure to be back at the 3.5 watering hole (because it is good stuff), but for the moment I'm wandering.

And in my meandering, I came across a charming little game called Maelstrom Storytelling, from the now defunct Hubris Games. When I bought it at my local gaming store (Cerebral Hobbies), the owner asked me what possessed me to buy the game today. When I paused, he clarified--"This book has been on the shelf for four years. Why now?" Well, chalk it up to the designing bug.

A little googling has filled out the history behind the game and informed me of the publisher's demise. The game is very good as a whole, and subtly different from most of its published contemporaries. Superficially, it resembles the Storyteller rulebooks--the notion of a dice pool and the extended discussions of how to construct a story. The mechanics do some strikingly cool things, though (for Forge-heads, the game is 'narrativist' and comes with the Ron Edwards stamp of approval).

It provides a task resolution system that is immanently scalable--it uses a flexible unit called a scene and the resolution involves the entire party's resources, not just one character's. So, rather than having player 1 roll, then player 2, then player 3, all the players combine their rolls and add them to complete tasks. What's more, the players have some access to establishing the scene--they explain what they want to do, so providing the GM with the lineaments of scene production.

Maelstrom further enlivens the scenes with 'quick takes'--actions that individual players initiate and roll for on their own which directly impact the group roll. So in a jailbreak scene, one party member might make a 'quick take' to disable the alarm or knockout a guard before he can alert his friends.

Character generation is all about minimalism--nothing more than four stats, a few descriptors that distinguish the character, and some affinities (things like skills, cultural experience, magic, etc). The descriptors, like the scenes and quick takes, are fluid and flexible. They allow a player to be as vague or concrete as they wish and leave room for later clarification. The descriptors are important because they can be used ('burned') during a scene to add to the party's dice pool or to the pool of the player during a quick take. The way a player invokes them reveals how well linked character generation is to the game's narrative goals--the player explains why that descriptor should be allowed and explains how it manifests in the scene. So, you get player 1 taking a quick take to disable an alarm and burning their 'good with their hands' descriptor to bolster their chances because 'disabling the alarm requires a light touch and nimble fingers, something my character, who is good with his hands, excels at.'

I am growing very fond of the quick and dirty character generation and I particularly like the way in which Maelstrom's simplicity enables rather than limits the player. Unlike old school AD&D, where simplicity in generation came with generic characters, Maelstrom's simplicity facilitates increasing character specificity.

I have been toying with ways to strip down the d20 mechanics into a similarly 'simplistic specificity'...perhaps I'll try to post bits of that here (with an OGL label).

Three Cool Things about Eberron

2006-02-23T10:31:00.000-08:00

I have been hanging around Essential Eberron and it put me in mind to list a few reasons why I really think Eberron is just nifty cool.

1. Warforged: I remember when Eberron first came out, someone voiced their concerns about their practicality (Sean Reynolds, I think, although I am too lazy to go dig around to verify right now): they seem to cost so much more than a random schmoe with armor and a sword. But, really, they are so much more than a standard soldier that it seems silly not to build them. They don't eat or sleep--which means that units of them can move around without worrying about supply lines or being caught late at night when most of them are asleep. Still better, they are as smart as a person and so capable of executing complicated plans.

What does that mean? Well, imagine a small unit of warforged operating behind enemy lines. They don't need to risk drawing attention to themselves by raiding but can lay low (literally in the ground if they are patient enough) until they execute their plans. Then, just as quickly, go back underground. In larger units, they should be something terrible. Remember the old maxim that an army travels on its stomach? Not if it is a warforged army. Russians have acquired a great deal of grudging admiration for their 'barren ground' retreats that leave their enemies neither food nor shelter--such tactics would be much less effective if the invading force needed no food or water.

I like the way the warforged justify the length and brutality of the Great War, too--with soldiers like them (undead troops being similar in this regard), a war could reach new heights of ugliness.

2. Artificers and magewrights: Finally, a reason for all those magic items! One of the most difficult problems facing 3.5 has been the great number of magic items available to players despite the relative costliness (XP--arguably the most valuable commodity of all!) of producing them. I also just like that the artificer provides a 'standard' party with an alternative to the rogue. The artificer performs the basic function of the rogue (finding and disabling traps) without duplicating the rogue 'iconic' features (sneak attack, evasion, etc). In turn, it has a range of features that make it iconic in its own right--infusions, craft pool, etc. If a party had both a rogue and an artificer, they would still be different enough that each player would feel special (and think of how good they could be in teaming up to take care of traps!).

3. Changelings: They provide a wonderful example of how a simple mechanical element can really evoke a mood. Their trademark feature is essentially social and tells us right off that the setting will encourage more noncombat situations. A clever use of the ability should allow players to bypass more combats with roleplaying alone. The changeling can be lethal, of course, but will likely be most lethal when it can use its sneakiness to encourage their target to let their guard down before springing upon them.

On the Goodness of D20

2006-02-22T17:31:00.000-08:00

Friedrich Nietzsche, I believe in Human, All Too Human, distinguishes between two aspects of society. The one, the dimension we traditionally associate with 'society,' includes thing we associate with being a responsible adult: holding down a job, paying taxes, and other activities that make us a good citizens. The other aspect, though, is something quite different. It includes the experimental fringe of society, the places where rules are relaxed and new forms emerge. It is, in a word, counter-culture. Nietzsche clearly favors counter-culture, the fringe populated by his 'free spirits.' Still, he does not demean 'normal' culture. Quite the opposite, he suggests that both aspects are interdependent. The fringe exists onlye where there is a strong 'normal' culture to support, while the 'normal' culture depends upon the experimentalism of the fringe for its adaptability. Nietzsche's concern is largely intellectual--the fringe experiments with new ways of living, many of which are not actually livable or not livable in the current situation. The stable culture retains these experiments, and so can draw upon them when the situation does suit them.

More recently, Chris Anderson coined the notion of a 'long tailed' electronic marketplace. The basic idea is that an electronic marketplace the popular products can provide buyers with access to more arcane products--his example of beginning with a search for Britney Spears leading you to an obscure British ska band in only a few short clicks. The fringe and the mainstream become more closely linked, allowing the fringe to grow along with the mainstream. This is an economic concern, with how a producer can thrive in a market.

D20, as developed by WotC, serves as both an intellectual touchstone and economic access point for the fringe. Its economic success makes it recognizable, so that variations of it are more easily learned and played. In turn, as certain variations become popular, they are re-absorbed into official versions of d20. The publication of Unearthed Arcana, for example, providing d20 players with a plethora of variations, many of which appeared in non-standard products. In turn, the collection of those options made it easier for others to use those variations in new non-standard products. It is a productive cycle.

Ideally, per Nietzsche and Anderson, the fringe is most successful when it is experimenting and not simply duplicating the mainstream. Mere duplication does not get absorbed into the intellectual repertoire of the core, nor does it have much else to offer 'on the market.' It does best when it does differently, when it explores alternative applications of the mechanics, when it applies the rules to a new situation and modifies them accordingly.

Game design an art?

2006-02-18T16:04:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'm still thinking a lot about Scott McCloud's book, Understanding Comics. It is such a good introductory text that its insights apply well beyond the domain it discusses. He has this wonderful break down of the creative process (6 parts--they're all good, go read it for yourself) which can be summarized like this:

The creative process is an effort to make the medium of expression serve the intended expression of the creator. The two poles of creation end up being the surface (the appearance of a creative work) and the idea (what the creator tries to express through the appearance). Now, many times, the creator does not pose the question to herself or himself in this way. They see some final product whose appearance they admire and emulate it. This means that they may be using a style poorly suited to the ideas that they want to express or simply copying the style without really thinking about why they are doing so. This is clearly exacerbated by the praise heaped on certain styles of presentation--it makes it seem like the 'right' style rather than just a particular instance of a 'good' style.

Back to gaming. Consider game design not simply as mucking around with numbers and stories, but with expressing a world, a world to which you want the game to allow others access. This is a very creative process and raises the question of intent and medium even more dramatically that comics. If the mechanics of your game don't allow players to easily recreate the stories you envision for your world, something has gone wrong. The players will feel that there is a disconnect between roleplaying and rules even if they don't necessarily know it consciously. Their response to that feeling will vary. Many will zoom in on the mechanics and end up playing the game as a numbers game. Others will become frustrated as their roleplaying efforts are foiled by the mechanics meant to adjudicate them--they can become passive or subversive.

D20 is the reigning 'surface' in the gaming world at the moment and many products utilize the mechanic. It makes their product easier to market, but it does not necessarily serve the goals of their game. D20 is not a bad system--in fact, it is a very good one, one in which a lot of thought has been done on the question of how the system can best express the designers' intentions. It takes D&D to a whole new level. However, not all roleplaying worlds are best-suited by a system built for D&D. Some folks like to knock D&D, but I think that there is a bit more envy in that mockery than they admit.

But you know what I love about Wizards of the Coast? They made d20 open source, so that other people can play with their well-designed rules, stretch their application. Plenty of those efforts won't be profitable, but I think a lot of us don't play with the rules for profit. We play with the rules because we want to make them fit our own world. I, for one, am interested in really getting back to that creative impulse that got me started roleplaying--not making the coolest character ever, but showing my friends a cool world that they can share with me. I'm going to start with d20 because that is what my friends already know, but I want to see how far I can push the core system.

I have a lot more to say about creativity, but this is enough for one posting...

Memories of the Ol' Hobbying Hole

2006-02-09T13:49:00.000-08:00

I spent a few hours the other day flipping through my wife's copy of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. It's a good book and the fact that it uses the comic book medium to explain comic books is just smart. You not only learn about comics but see the concepts illustrated in the explanation itself (we call that 'performative' where I come from).

Now, there is a lot to be said about this book, but I want to zoom in on a particular observation--that one way to maximize the empathy we have for a character is to make the character's depiction as simple as possible. The fewer the details composing the character, the easier it is for us to put ourselves in their shoes, the more room we have to 'live' through that character. He cites a couple of major works like Tin Tin and Cerebrus that employ this technique, but you really don't have to go any further than the smiling and frowning bubbles that populate Zoloft commercials to appreciate his point. How difficult is it not to feel for the little buggers? I have talked a lot about my intellectual interest in gaming, but this reminds me of another very important aspect of it--all the imaginative pictures.

When I was wee gamer in a city far away, I spent a lot of time hanging around my favorite hobby shop (Titan Games & Comics) poring over games and it isn't the rules that I remember most clearly. It's all the illustrations (interior and exterior) and the suggestive taglines that accompanied them. I didn't buy games primarily for their rules, but for the hope that the rules would capture the magic created by the juxtaposition of text and word. They didn't even have to be well-drawn pictures and well-written text to capture my imagination. They touched on an amorphous reservoir of dreams, a mysterious place occupied by half-formed beings waiting for the right invitation to enter my conscious mind.

McCloud also made me consider something else--if you want a good roleplaying experience, one in which the players get in character, you probably shouldn't go overboard in getting them to describe their characters. The best characters to roleplay are probably iconic in one way or another, composed of a few basic characteristics that indicate something of their character--character description a la Charles Dickens, if you will. That leaves the player the most room to live in their character, to invest them with life. Too much description and backstory gives the player too much rope--they spend all their time trying to put all the pieces together and not living them. The intellectual exercise of that may be fun, too, but it is a different sort of fun than straight roleplaying. I suspect the same goes for plots and npc's on the DM's end. Use description to sketch a world, drawing in detail only where it gives the players more room to act, to extend their involvement in the world. Maybe just sketch out the basics and let the players actions determine what else gets fleshed out. This goes to the recent decisions by Wizards of the Coast to keep flavor text short.

Solutions for D20 Industry?

2006-02-02T10:55:00.000-08:00

Now, with that in mind, what are ways that publishers can ameliorate the negative impact of these trends?

(1) The gaming industry does not have the legal might to chase down file sharers and, moreover, doing so would alienate a broad portion of their customer base. So, rather than fighting the trend, they can join it. This means more than just producing PDF’s of their books—the file sharing gamer will still seek out a ‘free’ copy in favor of a costly copy. I have had ardent music file sharers admit that they no longer illegally download music because iTunes and similar providers have made it so easy to buy the music. They don’t have to look through endless lists of files for quality tracks (illegal file sharing) or buy a whole album in digital format. They just goes to a site like iTunes, finds the track they want, pay a small fee, and then have the songs they want.

This is the sort of victory that has little to do with legal action and everything to do with smart marketing. The roleplaying industry can do the same thing—offering portions of books in digital format for a much lower price. The material is already easily broken up into smaller pieces—prestige classes, magical items, descriptions of a particular region, etc. The DM who know that there is a really cool prestige class in Lords of Madness can simply buy it for a $1 or $2. If they want the ‘extended track,’ with historical backstory, they might pay a little extra for that. If a DM plans to set her campaign in a single region of a published setting, she may spend $20 or $30 dollars for all the published accounts of its history, geography, economy, etc. rather than having to buy five or six forty dollar books and sift through them. Don’t force content on them, let them tailor it to their needs.

(2) Create sourcebooks with this ‘plug and play’ mentality in mind. Mike Mearls has noted (August 9 & 13, 2005 entries of his blog) that many iconic D&D monsters did not catch on because of the elaborate backstory TSR provided, but because the monsters themselves were just so cool and suggestive. The details didn’t say too much, but allowed individual DM’s to tailor the creatures to their own game. I would suggest that much of the so-called ‘fluff v. crunch’ debate relates to exactly this point. Those who criticize ‘crunchers’ for being uncreative misunderstand them—most crunchers like bare bones material because it gives them more freedom to exercise their own creativity.

This goes back to the point about a lot of gamers being anti-establishment. They don’t want a lot of product, they want tools to produce their own product. Here I have to say that the WotC Design & Development column is a stroke of sheer brilliance—it provides exactly the sort of thing so many gamers want to see. Don’t give them a house, show them how to build it. Then show them that your material can be used to make a sturdy house.

(3) If you are going to give them a setting, don’t overdo it. Give them just enough to get going and let them run wild with it. The setting should be mechanically interesting, not just another set of clothes for the core system. Green Ronin’s Mutants & Masterminds and Blue Rose, as well as Malhavoc Press’s Arcana Evolved and Iron Heroes, do this admirably.

Green Ronin seems to have developed Blue Rose with this in mind. They wisely didn’t get caught up in the trap of sinking resources into the production of an endless line of supplements that, in the end, only make it less likely that someone will pick up the setting. The more books needed to get going, the less likely they will buy any one of them. If the product is solid then, despite the lament of gamers begging for ‘official support’ (see discussion of this here), the devotees of the game will provide the support it needs online. Which leads us to…

(4) Help the creative gamer find others of their ilk who will help them be creative. Provide forums (with designer participation) where they can discuss rules, variants, fixes, and tweaks. Malhavoc Press does a wonderful job with this, giving fans the chance to develop official content (see the Diamond Throne for Arcana Evolved and the Iron League for Iron Heroes).

Problems for D20 Industry

2006-01-31T21:48:00.000-08:00

A couple recent conversations have converged with my web browsing habits and set me thinking about the industry that supports the d20 system. The number of products for the system continues to grow but it is unclear if there is a market to sustain that growth. Major d20 publishers like Green Ronin have had significant problems making a profit despite the excellent workmanship of their products (see the company president’s January 9 letter). There are a few trends that I think contribute to this, each of which has had a largely negative impact on the industry but which could be tapped into positively.

(1) The sorts of gamers who play d20 are frequently creative and deeply invested in their own homebrew worlds. This seems one of the legacies of old school D&D which was setting-light but brought out the world-making bug in hundreds if not thousands of DM’s. A friend of mine observed that everyone he knew who played original D&D had their own world and its homebrew rules. There is more than a little grain of truth to this—many of the first generation gamers have volumes of yellowing college ruled notebooks filled with the history and monsters unique to ‘their’ world.

This means that there is a relatively small audience for setting-specific material. Most of that audience will dedicate itself to the well-supported settings like Forgotten Realms and Eberron. Most will stick to the core rules and stack their world atop it.

(2) Gamers are a tech savvy and anti-establishmentarian bunch. If they can get their material for free, they will. File sharing makes this a relatively easy task. I have met more than a few gamers who have a dozen or more PDF’s for books they never bought—not just books by big time publishers like Wizards of the Coast, but smaller operations as well. While they may not have downloaded the files themselves, they benefited from a friend who did and then burned them a copy. I have actually had a gamer (whom I did not know) try to discourage me from buying a supplement while I was in my local gaming store with the rationale that “you could just download it for free.” Confronted about how bad the behavior is for the hobby, he complained about how expensive a book is and how little of the material they actually need.

Settings that make me go hmm... (TORG 2)

2006-01-26T11:26:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in my last post that it would be interesting to think a little about the imaginative-conceptual cleverness that characterized TORG. There are a couple layers to this cleverness and not all of it rests simply with the creator of the setting. Just as a good roleplaying game is cooperative, a good reading of the roleplaying game involves the reader as much as the writer.

One of my favorite cosms was the Cyberpapacy. Simply put, the Cyberpapacy's 'theme' could be summed up as "Spanish Inquisition meets cyberpunk." It's a strange brew, juxtaposing two things we tend to think of as opposed to each other, namely faith and reason (here embodied in the technological advancements of cybernetics). That alone gives the image impact since we often like seeing opposites forced to reside together. We see this in movies all the time--a character who seems to embody virtue in public has a secret compulsion that they must hide, etc. While I cannot speak for the designers, I suspect that had a lot to do with both its creation and its subsequent use in TORG.

But this is where things get interesting. Even if that was the sole motivation for the setting's creation, there is more to the image than just that. If you 'buy' that the image is more than just striking then something else has happened. You are starting to imagine a world in which faith and 'rational' technological development are not mutually exclusive. The Cyberpapacy setting pushed this with suggested character templates for players that included devout 'cyberpriests' who opposed the corrupt machinations of their (false) pope (Yes indeed, no accident that the creators set the Cyberpapacy's home in Avignon). The game invited players to think about a mindset in which faith and rationalism are not opposed, but intertwined.

Now, step away from the game with that possibility in mind. You have the tools (whether you use them or not) to look out and see other non-confrontational ways in which technological 'rationalism' and faith interact. While the setting may have started as mere conceptual play, the imaginative engagement it fosters can go beyond 'mere' play. It turns out that the imaginary world of the game got something right--namely, that 'faith' and 'rational' technological development are not necessarily foes. They don't necessarily form a single cooperative entity, but that doesn't equate to opposition.

Where do I see this interaction in the real world? I'll start someplace obvious, an intersection of life and technology that helps fuel cyberpunk fantasy--life-support technology. Many (perhaps most) faithful people do not oppose the 'rational' science that produced life-support machines. Quite the contrary, they embrace it and make of the end-of-life issues surrounding it something that involves their faith directly. Technology doesn't counter their faith, but expands the world in which it operates, providing it with occasions for that faith's development and elaboration.

I don't want to get into the question of what the 'right' or 'wrong' attitude to take in those situations is. I merely want to point out that the fictional world created for a game can provide us with the tools to reconceive some very real features of our own world. The game does not solve any of the quandaries surrounding the real world issues, but helps us to 'see' them in a different light. At best, that 'seeing differently' enriches the discussion--allowing for the problem to be reorganized so as to make clear what is actually going on, rather than leaving the same tired and exhausted cliches to make sense of everything.

Better yet, because the contribution of the game is imaginative in a playful sense, we can walk away from it more easily. If the frame it provides isn't useful, we shrug our shoulders and use it only in the 'let's pretend' mode. The great thing about games is that they can 'just be a game,' just like a good story can 'just' be a story.

Now, the whole faith and reason aren't opposed bit isn't exactly rocket science. It has been said and done more coherently in other places and lived out by real people. The cool thing about the game is that it allows people who aren't necessarily part of that mindset to get a better understanding of it.

The Magic of the Clearance Shelf (TORG)

2006-01-23T20:53:00.000-08:00

I have the good luck to live near a hobby store that is clearing out decades of back stock. They are selling books and box sets at cut-rate prices ($1 to $3). Some of these, like Time Travellers, I only dimly remember from old Dragon magazines. All of the books and boxes have stickers declaring their status as 'last in stock' that encourage browsers to 'buy their copy today.' Those shelves of battered and near-forgotten books might as well be liquid nostalgia and I find myself perusing them often. One set of books in particular has caught my eye—the supplements for the Torg RPG.

For those of you who don’t know, Torg was one of the original truly multi-genre RPG’s. It didn’t just give you the mechanics for playing a number of different genres, but provided you with a world in which those genres could interact. And what a world! It was a near future version of our own world in which alien realities (called ‘cosms’) invaded Earth, forcing those they conquered to submit to new laws of existence. In one cosm, guns might not work while in another you would find cybernetic implants common. Later efforts like Rifts always seemed like a shallow copy of Torg to me. This is not to knock the Rifts system, but to express the formative place Torg has in my gaming unconscious. I don’t need to dwell on the history of the game, though. There are plenty of websites dedicated to it and West End Games continues to say (a decade after publishing its last product in the line) that it might bring the game back into circulation.

Torg made me appreciate the subtleties that go into constructing a world around a set of game mechanics. The heart of the game was alluringly simple, using only one sort of die and a quick resolution system, but each world book developed that simplicity in innovative directions. Even better, by making the setting the ‘near now’ of our own world, it made the game world seem much more real, much more intuitive.

I have purchased nearly a dozen of the old books at deliciously low clearance prices. Over a decade after I stopped playing the game, they still manage to impress. The invading cosms are not only well-developed and colorful worlds, but they are a matched to the area of Earth that they invade. Each is a fantastic doppelganger of that portion of the world. This makes each cosm accessible as an exaggeration of our own world, using our real-world expectations and stereotypes to deepen the believability of the alien cosm. England, arguably the cradle of modern fantasy, is invaded by a world of elves and dwarves, wizards and knights. Southeast Asia, the site of much real world imperialism, is subjected to a twisted Victorian realm filled with nightmare monsters.

The fictional notion of a ‘cosm’ allowed the game to do what so many good bits of fiction do. They told a story about a world that does not exist and yet which enlivens our own understanding of the real world. By making the stereotypes and expectations fictional, they help us appreciate the way in which our stereotypes and expectations are supported by stories that we tell ourselves and which are told to us. They also allow us to combine things in new ways so that we can see, through the lens of fiction, elements of our own world that previously went unnoticed for lack of a category through which to organize them. The fictional lens may not have been devised to point out those connections, but once we encounter them fictionally, we are able to understand them non-fictionally (with more or less modification).

I might just take some time to think through some of the old TORG cosms and explain in more detail what I mean--there is enough meat to sustain the body of such a discussion.

Learning to Read

2006-01-17T14:12:00.000-08:00

What is one virtue that gaming helped me develop? Strange though it may be, gaming fostered an appreciation for close and careful reading. I approached each game with a passionate interest in how it worked, how the different systems fed into each other and how the game could be played, but in most cases did not have anyone around me who could tell me how to play the game. This meant that I had to put it all together myself, bit by bit.

My first roleplaying experiences were with my older brother when I was barely five years old. He was nearly a decade older than me and regularly had friends over to play D&D in our basement. Soon enough, I began to pester him, begging to be included. Although the details are vague to me now, he indulged me by running me through solo adventures, no doubt with the understanding that I wouldn’t interrupt his gaming session with his friends. These little sessions left me hungry for more, so I spent lots of time thumbing through the pages of my brother’s D&D books, trying to figure out how it all worked for myself.

For an imaginative child, those books might as well have been the Holy Grail or, perhaps more accurately, the Philosopher’s Stone. They promised the secrets of creation, the hidden rules according which fictional characters could be brought to life and set to action in a dynamic and action-packed world. Dice weren’t just dice, they were magical implements of that creation. The numbers they produced, in conjunction with the eldritch charts of the books, were full of meaning. A seven wasn’t just a five and two ones, but resulted a clumsy dwarf, no good for thievery but perhaps still redeemable as a fighter. I applied myself to the study of this magic with all due diligence.

Because gaming seemed so ‘mature,’ I never paused to consider that there might be any problems with the rules. The notion of game balance was a mystery to me and I approached each game with the assumption that it would work. Confronted with very complicated games, I would muddle through each mechanical subsystem until I found how they worked together and how they would be used in play. As I grew older, I developed an interest in why you would choose one mechanic over another and started to consider what mechanics were best for what sort of things. As an awkward twelve-year old with too much time on my hands, I began to develop my own roleplaying games.

Those early efforts have been lost, discarded over the course of several familial relocations. I can only imagine their simplicity and so am spared the genuine embarrassment of reviewing them. Still, I learned that there was something to be gained by submitting thoroughly to someone else’s work, to thinking my way through it rather than tossing it out when it didn’t immediately appeal to me. I learned and then figured out that I could actually do something with what I learned, that knowing how someone else did something could help me do something different from them. Without them being ‘wrong’ and me being ‘right,’ I could still take another path, one educated by the path they chose to take.

Of course, as a child and adolescent I did not think in these terms. What was actually going on was even more important—I taught myself a set of habits that carried well beyond the narrow constraints of roleplaying games. Roleplaying games helped make me an intellectual craftsman, capable of appreciating another’s ideas and willing to put together my own in response to them.

Cinematic Gaming

2006-01-14T16:55:00.000-08:00

I recently rediscovered my love for an old gaming system, one that doesn't really have much official support nowadays (although there is plenty of good fan support online), TORG. There is a lot to like about the game, but I think what I remember most fondly at the moment is it's cinematic style. The system had a fairly easy task resolution system, one that fed nicely into a quick combat resolution, but it also went further.

The game was designed so that the player characters were not just the heroes of the story, but its stars. There was a strong distinction between 'average' enemies and the 'big bad,' such that the average opponent (termed an 'ord,' short for 'ordinary') not only went down faster, but dealt less damage to the heroes. It allowed for the gamemaster to literally throw a dozen ninjas at a party and expect for the party to come through just a little bruised. But when the ninja master stepped out, he got all the advantages of the player characters. That allowed for the GM to control the pace of the adventure nicely, with mere minions serving as a warm-up for the climactic encounter with the major villain.

It is one thing that I noticed the Blue Rose / True20 system picks up on, too. It makes a firm distinction between characters with conviction (player characters and important non-player characters) and the rest of the population in the world. A character with conviction not only has access to points allowing them to perform spectacular feats, but has a greater number of injury categories than ordinary NPC's. So, again, the player character can wade through dozens of minions, knocking them out of combat as soon as they fail a single toughness save versus damage. When the real bad guy steps out, though, they are immediately aware of the difference--he or she will take several good hits without dropping.

What do both of these mechanics have in common? They make combat more dynamic, using the distinction between 'minions' and 'masters' to signal to the players how seriously they should be taking the encounter, to whom they should be paying attention. It makes combat much more 'role-play' rich, introducing a certain degree of 'texture' to each encounter. It also makes the players' characters the stars of the game, with the big bads clearly being their equal and opposite number, a 'worthy' foe.

Game Mechanics and a Sense of the World

2006-01-09T21:18:00.000-08:00

Writing the Blue Rose review made me consider some elements of standard 3.5 D&D. One of the things that has always been difficult about D&D is the way in which the mechanics that are used to adjudicate game play are also very non-intuitive. This creates something of a disconnect between the experience players get of the world in game play and the history of that world.

For example, most D&D settings assume a traditional notion of medieval warfare with certain fanastic flares. Heavily armored knights are the ideal unit, dominating the battlefield with the support of archers and infantry. Wizards are seen as pumped up archers, akin to modern day artillery while clerics are the perfect medics. And so on.

Yet consider the rules that ground D&D. A character with only a moderate level of combat experience (say 5th level) can withstand a good deal more physical abuse than an actual medieval individual, much of that damage having no direct impact on their ability to operate in combat. Whether a character has 4 hit points or 100, their ability to swing a sword is unimpeded. A squad of wizards or battle-ready sorcerers can wreak havoc on cavalry--area effect spells deal a great deal of damage, have Reflex saves (which heavy armor lowers), and effect several individuals at once. Consider, too, that a knight's hit points frequently outstrip his mount's, so an area effect spell that does not kill him will very likely leave him unhorsed.

This only scrapes the surface of the issue. A true D&D world would have a radically different history than our own--strategies that work in our world oftentimes being much less effective in D&D. Poison, assassination, and similar tactics are all much less reliable. Oddly enough, persuasion (i.e. Diplomacy skill checks) are much more effective (although this can easily be considered a loophole to be closed).

Settings like Forgotten Realms and Eberron make real efforts towards a world that functions according to the mechanical foundations of D&D, but they don't go very far beyond tweaking the window dressing. Something like Monte Cook's Ptolus setting sounds quite promising in this regard, but I only know of that tangentially. Ptolus, too, is a limited experiment done at the level of a city. I wonder what a fully integrated (mechanics and narrative, crunch and fluff if you prefer the common parlance) setting might look like. What sort of politics, what sort of history, would it have?

Blue Rose Review

2006-01-06T22:42:00.000-08:00

I purchased Blue Rose for its promise of a simplified D20 mechanic rather than for the setting itself. While I found the idea of a romantic fantasy game charming, I had no intention of running such a game. I was pleased by my first flip through the book’s pages, but not particularly impressed. I appreciated the use of the three stripped down class archetypes and the simplified skill system from Unearthed Arcana, but not bowled over. I had been toying with a very similar homebrew system and they didn’t seem to add all that much. My first glance at the adept left me cold—it seemed a sterile and weak compromise of 3.5’s rich magic system. As for combat, it struck me as simplistic and risked eliminating some of the interesting features of using the other polyhedral dice for damage determination.

When I saw the announcement in Dragon for the upcoming True20 setting release, though, I went back to Blue Rose. Once again, I went in with the mechanic’s eye, but emerged with a craftsman’s admiration. Not only did I like the book as a whole, but found that almost everything I disliked about it had resulted from a too cursory examination of the book. It is one of the most coherently envisioned and designed OGL products, period. The game mechanics, the campaign setting, and the art are all in harmony with each other. What seemed like artificial tweaking now struck me as insightful and innovative.

Let me start with the stated goal of the book to provide a system and a setting for playing “romantic fantasy” campaigns. Like many old school gamers, I scoffed at this goal at first. After all, what prevents you from doing exactly that with standard 3.5? In truth, nothing. However, while 3.5 does not prevent us from running a good romantic fantasy game, it does hinder it. 3.5 puts most of its effort into combat, a not-so-subtle cue to players and DM’s alike that this is what matters most. Doing damage, avoiding damage, and healing damage take up the lion’s share of the core books, whether they take the form of weapons, spells, armor, or turning. While the experience point system allows for non-combat experience, it clearly is not focused upon it. When we go to determine a creature’s challenge rating or a character’s effective character level, we have in mind their ability to deal, avoid, or heal damage more so than anything else.

Contrast this with Blue Rose. It has no experience point system aside from the narrator telling players when their characters have acquired enough experience to go up another level. Its combat system tosses out the entire hit point apparatus, making combat both more dangerous and faster paced with a saving throw based damage track. Not only does this mean that players are less likely to choose combat, but, even when they do, it means that they spend less time in combat. Progression through the damage track is also more controlled than hit point damage, making it more likely that a character will be disabled or knocked unconscious before being killed. Capture becomes a real option for both sides, adding layers of role-playing options to the game. At the same time, they do not do away with distinctions between weapons. Dice are not tallied for damage, but each weapon modifies the save to avoid damage dealt by it. For a game whose stated goal is to encourage more role-playing this is not just smart, its inspired.

On my first look, I had thought the three generic style classes were simply nice, nothing more than I had already come up with in my spare time. However, a second look threw this dismissive presumption straight out the window. They not only borrow the three generic classes from Unearthed Arcana but fuse them with a broadened feat selection that includes what were class features in 3.5. This means that a player can very quickly take that generic class and make it very specific and distinctive, possessing a combination of cool (and relatively balanced) abilities that the core system cannot. This does mean that some of those abilities are damped down, requiring multiple feats to acquire a power level found in the main game. Then again, the whole talk of ‘power level’ assumes a radically different frame of reference, one in which these characters primary goal would be to mow down monsters. In Blue Rose, the colorful dimension of the feat is retained without the specter of it being min-maxed into a power gaming arms race.
Oh, and the adept? Let me retract my criticism. I had not paid enough attention to the magic system. While it is clearly not on the same power level as 3.5’s (and by now I think you realize Blue Rose doesn’t care about that), it is flexible and simple. While there are a lot of options for each adept to choose between, most adepts need only know how a small subset of those options functions. Instead of having an ever-lengthening list of spells, the adept only has a few thematic styles that allow them to produce a series of related effects. Each such thematic arcanum often has a set of abilities that can be used by all familiar with the school, while the others must be learned on a case by case basis. The effects themselves are all done on the fly according to certain simple and largely thematic guidelines. This sort of magic seems far less scholastic and reflects, I think, more of what most fantasy stories (not just ‘romantic fantasy’) mean by magic anyway. It is less determinate and less powerful, but for all that more mysterious and subtle. It would be easier to play Gandalf, for example, using Blue Rose than in 3.5 rules.

Taken together, the mechanics of the system make for a surprisingly more realistic, or at least believable, world. Dungeons & Dragons has always been more like a video game than real life—with its tally of hit points, the magic items with their flamboyant effects, and amazing spells. In fact, it is probably fair to say that video games as we know them today owe much to old school D&D. As they have advanced, note too how those advancements have been adopted by their parent. The simplicity of Blue Rose has quite the opposite effect. It feels organic, so that challenges can be approached from many directions. Combat is once again fast-paced and dangerous, just like it is in reality. The most unbelievable element, magic, is also made more mild, so that it almost seems like it could exist.

Where the game diverges most from this ‘reality’ is in the introduction of Conviction—a pool characters can use to do cool things. But, this too, is perfectly suited to the world, allowing a character to push just a little harder than the average person, to do just a little more, without being incredibly different from them. It is a story element perfectly suited to a low-powered game world that still wants to distinguish heroes from everyone else. It provides a mechanic for the hero to falter, stumble, and nearly fail before digging deep in her soul for the energy to rally just one last time, to do one more good deed. It is a mechanic that feeds the drama of a scene.

In short, Blue Rose encourages the sort of gaming sessions that sound like good drafts of an interesting fantasy story rather than the play-by-play of your latest video game. The story holds your attention and leads to some lively action, but it is not about the action. Where the action happens it is more interesting by virtue of it being sustained by a story. When the heroes fight the trolls, they may really want to hold back, aware that they are helpless pawns in an evil wizards plot. Or, perhaps, they will charge in all the more selflessly because they threaten an NPC farmer dear to them.

Caveat: This isn’t a slam on 3.5. I run a 3.5 campaign at the moment, not a Blue Rose one. 3.5 and Blue Rose are very different, and I like what both of them do. I am just highlighting how Blue Rose is good and how it is good in a very different way than 3.5. I hope that we can appreciate True20 for its strengths and realize that it facilitates an exciting and different role-playing experience than 3.5 without ending up in the tired debate over which system is better. It really depends what you want to do with those systems—for a dynamic, role-playing heavy fantasy world, my money is on Blue Rose and True20.

2006-01-05T17:24:00.000-08:00

What am I up to here? There are at least a couple answers to that question. First, I am looking for a place where I can consider the mechanical underpinnings of one of my favorite hobbies, roleplaying games. I want to look at the systematic dimension of gaming and consider its effects on how the game is played. Second, I want a place where I can talk about my life as a gamer without just talking about roleplaying games. I want to consider gaming as an activity, its social dimensions, its influence on my imagination, the way in which it has shaped the person I have become.

This sounds a little corny, I know. I do not want this to be an ‘everything I ever needed to know, I learned from roleplaying games’ sort of thing. That seems too reductive. However, I have grown up with roleplaying games and they have played a role in my personal and intellectual growth. That is not to say that they are the source of my personality. They never ‘caused’ me to be a certain way. They fostered certain tendencies that I already possessed.

Both of these aims can be summarized like this: I want to talk about being a role player as a meaningful activity, worthy of being talked about. It isn’t rocket science, it isn’t brain surgery, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important or worthwhile. We can talk about reading books as having an inherent value, one that develops certain virtues, and I would like to talk about roleplaying games in the same way. I want to talk about them both as products of a craft and cultural objects received by an audience. Like any good discussion of reception and production, the two domains are not exclusive. You cannot talk about the production of a roleplaying game without considering the audience that will play the game, nor can you consider the reception without looking to the way in which the game was produced.

Over the course of this blog, I foresee two sorts of entries. The first involves a discussion of the mechanics of a particular roleplaying game and the way in which those mechanics relate to the play of the game. The second entry is more personal, quirkier, where I talk through what RPG's have meant to me. On occasion, there may even be a third sort of entry in which the two blend together.