bruceb

I've been listening to podcasts all evening, and something came into focus for me.

It'd be silly to say that I'm not interested in rpg design. Obviously I am - sometimes I have useful things to contribute to design discussion, and other times I enjoy watching it flow by even when I don't have anything to add. But fundamentally, it's not where my heart is. What makes me most excited, what draws out (I think) my best writing and developing, is game use: taking the rules and setting and writing about using them in different ways to get different feels.

My dream gaming job would perhaps be getting paid to take other people's games and write the equivalent of strategy guides for them. I'm just really not a very good rules designer. I can muddle by when I need to, but it doesn't give me as much satisfaction as exposition that may or may not add any new mechanics but focuses on the stuff as is, clarifying options, laying out examples, and like that. That's what makes me happiest.

It's kind of a neglected aspect of gaming writing these days. There's very little "big picture" writing going on; the big companies tend to do modular stuff and not step back much to look at the integration of pieces, and the indie community's mostly concerned with short-run games. (And the emerging interest in longer campaigns leads to discussion that mostly recapitulates things I read in the '80s and '90s. It's nice to see folks reinvent the wheel and be happy with their mobility, but there's not much of interest for me in it. There's a lot of good campaign advice in many flavors in older games.)

New Horizons is an unusual opportunity—in effect, the cumulative history of pulp gaming acts as a sort of meta-game line, given the extent to our games lend themselves to crossing over and hybridizing. It's one of the strongest such conceptual units larger than a game line in the field. (In fact, are there many others? Supers games are very different from each other. There's some horror crossover, I guess. Much else? This might be a good subject for a separate post, along with "Why do I end paragraph after paragraph in parentheticals?")

But I'm thinking that maybe when it's done, I'd like to look for some others, because this is my thing.

Flawless victory for dadiceguy, after years of trying. :) When I take a break from Spirit of the Century, I'm going to run some Fading Suns.

I assembled the New Horizons writing schedule with a space in it to play something else for a while as the first draft goes on, because I know this about myself: there's a point where I get sick of it all and need a change of pace or I go berserk and/or burn out. In a low-keyed kind of way, I'm pondering now what I'd like it to be, so that when the time comes, I get to spend it playing rather than deciding and then just getting started as the window of opportunity closes.

Self-awareness: Ask for it by name! :)

Following a link from xomec, I went browsing around RPG Net a little, and saw several mentions of folks who've played extended campaigns from just the core rulebook. It occurs to me that I've never really done that. I tend to think in terms of making good use of all the cool supplements...and then the campaign plan sprawls...and I get tangled up and overloaded...and it kind of doesn't happen.

So maybe I want to try the challenge of a one-book short campaign. Pick one of the core rulebooks I like and leave anything not in it up to the mutual invention of the players and myself. Mage Revised, Dark Ages: Vampire, Vampire: The Requiem, Wraith: The Great War, Hunter: The Vigil, Fading Suns, Shadowrun...some interesting possibilities.

I'm continuing to think about what I'd like to run when I take a SotC break, and also what might work for the occasional pick-up game just because. I'm writing this up as a contender.

The PCs are a Masquerade breach clean-up team. Five PCs, one for each clan and one for each covenant. (I would do up some pregens for pick-up purposes.) Each of them has gotten into some trouble with the city's authorities, not quite severe enough to warrant immediate destruction, but they're all very much on probation. If they do a good job at this task, they'll earn their way back into favor.

jackslack suggested this excellent enhancement: You can also have hella fun by opening the scenario by giving the crazy mystic a card saying, "At the end of my introduction, you are going to inform the Prince that he will have a Masquerade breach in ten minutes." Who can argue with that?

Me: Leverage After Dark. 
Sean: was thinking Vampire: The Mission Impossible.
Me: *nod* Po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to.

The caper angle allows for plenty of fun, and the facts of clean-up duty mean opportunity to look into all kinds of slices through the routine unlife of the city, from comedy to tragedy. So it'd be an excuse to use all that neat Damnation City stuff (and Immortal Sinners, and...) in bite-sized chunks.

I recently encountered the suggestion of just tossing out the whole damn combat system and doing it with regular opposed skill checks, assessing impairments based on outcomes. That would work well for me; I'd rather put the detail into stealth and the like.

The thought of all this amuses me greatly.

I finally got around to watching Leverage and found myself more squarely targeted as You Are Our Audience than in a long time. Well, I am, and it worked. :)

I got this thought...

Instead of dungeon fantasy, caper fantasy. The PCs' world got taken over by Evil Overlord X. They meet up in one of the vast prisons used to keep the neighbors down, and escape. From there it's a series of increasingly challenging heists and capers, until the Big Job that pulls the props out from under X and lets him get his well-deserved fall.

It would probably work as a level 1-20 campaign in True20 (thanks to show creator John Rogers for mentioning that if he were to run Leverage, it'd be one of his choices; I wouldn't have thought of it on my own). But it might also be good with something looser like Wilderness of Mirrors.

For it to work best, I think the setting should be familiar, even if it's got cool exotic touches. It's very important that the players agree on what kinds of things they can expect to pull off. In fact it'd probably be smartest to use an existing, well-supported setting: the Forgotten Realms, perhaps, or Ravenloft. (I thought of Dark Suns, but that's probably a bit too harsh for it to work. But maybe I'm wrong!) Masamune Shirow commented once on balancing foreground and background for best dramatic contrast, so that the beautiful utopia of Appleseed gets gritty dark conspiratorial drama, while the wretched dystopic chaos of Dominion Tank Police gets fluffy carrying-on. Same kind of thing here: when the fantasy world has well-defined, familiar vibes, then there's greater scope for useful inventive lunacy from the characters and players.

Dungeon encounters would still happen, it's just that there'd be the stronger focus on getting the specific McGuffin, bit of information, or whatever, with lots of content avoidance going and coming.

I'm unlikely to have time to run this, so if anyone wants to take it and do something, by all means, feel free.

I've been re-reading All Flesh Must Be Eaten and am reminded that the thing I really love about it is the large pools of points for measuring health and energy, which let players and GM measure small effects - getting winded from running up some flights of stairs, getting bruised, and so on.

I wonder about building a system around that. Tasks are measured in terms of how much wear and tear they impose. Preparation of different sorts reduces it in different contexts: you can have an aptitude for something, or training in it, or resources for it, and each of those could give a different kind of break. (I'd like them to.) You can push the effort at the cost of harm to yourself and what you're drawing on to make it happen, whether that's loss of confidence, stress-borne muddle and confusion, or damage to tools (including relationships with people helping you).

The trick would be to keep the definitions of areas of competence broad.

I really like the ambience of D&D 4th edition, as I've mentioned previously. And of course I very much like the FATE system. So it's Reese's time.

At-will powers can be aspects, and per-encounter and daily powers can be stunts.

I think that a suitably tinkered skill list would pretty well cover the rest.

What I don't have is a really good sense of what level equivalent a stock SotC character would likely be. Anyone with more experience want to weigh in?

This week I've read some absolutely fascinating discussions about portrayals of race and the experiences of people of different racial backgrounds in science fiction and fantasy, and been thinking about them a lot. (It's worth noting that my current daily schedule blocks out time each day to write something completely unrelated to Spirit of the Century, to keep myself out of monomania. Speculative fiction of some sort is what I write, it seems, so I tend to watch discussions about the art and craft of science fiction, fantasy, and horror more closely than others.) I've also been going through my old bookmarks and shoveling them into Evernote and DEVONthink, and from time to time getting curious and following current discussions on the history of Soviet computing, or scientific imaging and the problems of funding without losing control to commercial interests, or whatever.

Apart from a handful of dedicated champions of white supremacy, the only stuff that really got under my skin was on gaming forums.

Now, of course, a huge factor in that is simply that I'm closer to it. I have a history of getting wounded and frustrated in gaming talk that I just don't when it comes to other subjects...because I haven't been so much involved in the others. If I had put the time I did with gaming into anything else, I'm sure I'd feel exactly the same way about it, or so similar that the differences wouldn't matter at all in the big picture.

But irritation is still irritation, and I'm trying to follow the advice I give out to friends about reducing avoidable complications, given the reality of living in a time with so many unavoidable ones.

So I've gone ahead and signed out of the gaming forums I still read, and added a biweekly reminder to myself to think about whether I feel like signing back in.

I find at this point that there are specific individuals out there who really enrich my thoughts about gaming, and I'm reading them: Jim Henley, Fred Hicks, Rob Donoghue, Ryan Macklin, folks like that. I know that I'll miss some good things by tuning out forums where they post lengthy and/or polished pieces. But one always misses something. If ramping down my irritation level leads to better thought about my own game, then I come out ahead. And this is explicitly not a permanent commitment on my part, but a thing to do for a while and evaluate.

I'm reposting this from Cultures of Play because it is of such obvious importance that it deserves a wider audience.

At first, rob_donoghue made an excellent argument that challenge is necessary for good scenes. I countered with recollections of scenes in which just being whatever was paramount, exercising one's abilities and dealing with one's environment in an unhurried, unthreatening kind of way. Others put in their two bits, and after some very fruitful exchanges, Rob revised to suggest that what's necessary for a good scene is some element of uncertainty. I think this is very likely true for the purposes of good storytelling, but that some of what we or at least I like in gaming isn't concerned with storytelling - not necessarily hostile to it, but concerned with something else. In this case, the experience of being this character in this moment. (Rob has a good argument that this is an important part of good storytelling, and I agree, but I also think that it serves a distinctive role in gaming.)

It occurred to me that there was a passage in Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi that bears on my thinking. Here it is:

The drill was in the Washington Artillery building. In this building we saw many interesting relics of the war. Also a fine oil-painting representing Stonewall Jackson's last interview with General Lee. Both men are on horseback. Jackson has just ridden up, and is accosting Lee. The picture is very valuable, on account of the portraits, which are authentic. But, like many another historical picture, it means nothing without its label. And one label will fit it as well as another--

First Interview between Lee and Jackson.

Last Interview between Lee and Jackson.

Jackson Introducing Himself to Lee.

Jackson Accepting Lee's Invitation to Dinner.

Jackson Declining Lee's Invitation to Dinner--with Thanks.

Jackson Apologizing for a Heavy Defeat.

Jackson Reporting a Great Victory.

Jackson Asking Lee for a Match.

It tells one story, and a sufficient one; for it says quite plainly and satisfactorily, 'Here are Lee and Jackson together.' The artist would have made it tell that this is Lee and Jackson's last interview if he could have done it. But he couldn't, for there wasn't any way to do it. A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture. In Rome, people with fine sympathetic natures stand up and weep in front of the celebrated 'Beatrice Cenci the Day before her Execution.' It shows what a label can do. If they did not know the picture, they would inspect it unmoved, and say, 'Young girl with hay fever; young girl with her head in a bag.'

There are lots of times when what I want is Hereareleeandjacksontogetherist gaming. And times when, if I'm really hooked into some part of the character and situation, so that I don't really actually need to know what all is going on, that I'm up for Younggirlwithherheadinabagist gaming.

I've been converting some WoD manuscripts for reading on my handheld—specifically with Instapaper since it handles relatively long documents smoothly. I make the manuscript into very simple HTML, load it up, save it with Instapaper, and then have it to download on the iPod Touch. I suppose I could take a fresh look at some of these in Stanza, too.

My point here, and I do have one, is that in reading the results I'm freshly confirmed in one of my long-standing suspicions: gaming books' layout could be very different without sacrificing much at all in the way of utility.

Consider this, at the tail end of the numbers for a sample character:

Light Pistol: damage 2 (L), size 1, range 20/40/80, clip 17+1, 7 dice

In most game books—like the World of Darkness book that one comes from—that would be presented in a table, and available online in a PDF, which then wouldn't redraw well on an iPhone/iPod (or presumably any other handheld). And yet that listing works just fine without a bunch of tab stops.

Something similar is true of sidebars. Now, I like writing them myself, and I think that used carefully, they can enhance the usefulness of a book in conventional 8x11 size. But they can also be vessels into which one pours sloppy thinking about the organization and flow of the text. I find that I can simply insert the overwhelming majority of sidebars right into the nearby main text and get something that works just fine.

I was a premature anti-fascist e-book enthusiast when I first started thinking about this stuff: a significant gaming population with Palm devices willing and wanting to use them for gaming things other than dice rolling never emerged. But the iPhone market is orders of magnitude greater, and given its superior display and other advantages, people are using it for reading as well as dice rolling and such. I think that whoever first starts routinely putting out material that's a lot more mobile-friendly than the typical PDF is likely to win some lasting audience.

While I'm still creatively slumped from cold and crud, I may try this with something I can publicly distribute that's of a hefty size, like Asia Ascendant, so that I can share the results more fully. Ripping off my publishers just to illustrate would be, well, not so good.

Today I went ahead a bit a bullet: I've put both my D&D games on hiatus, and well reappraise things on or around the Ides of March. I want to make them work, but after two solid months of it not happening, I think that the stress of trying and failing every week is much worse than the disappointment of waiting in hopes of a break.

I may well try some experiments in very-low-mechanics non-real-time play, but that's to decide some other time. For now, assimilating this (and the WoW-related changes I wrote about for Shift-T) will be some days' work.

*clears throat discreetly*

Hey, I've got stuff! On sale!! Right now!!!

Characters By Level, my first piece for Adamant Entertainment's Venture 4th line, is up for sale right now at the Adamant store, right there in that link. This is my guide to quickly generating characters, PC or NPC, of any level from 1-30 for 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons. So you D&D players, you go buy that while I work on some rosters of different classes and traps, level 1-30, okay?

I want to make it clear that my "Stakes and Disbelief" post is not intended as an attack on Paul, or the idea of stakes setting, or any of the games he discusses in his "Stakes and Sticks" podcast. Indeed, just the opposite: today I put some thoughts into words and then online print that I have never successfully articulated even to myself, and I did it because of Paul's excellent comments. I learned things from what he said, and then learned some more in bringing my own thoughts out, and I like that very, very much.

I wanted to make that clear because, to take it mildly, I do have have a history of bad relationships with some part of the Forge-initiated design and play scene. But this isn't that. This is one person interested in multiplying occasions of good play getting help from another, even though in some ways our styles and style-shaping experiences are very different. Good stuff. I'm better off, and hope that Paul is at least no worse off. :)

As the music line indicates, I've been catching up on podcast listening, and as usual, getting thoughts I'm glad to have had that the creators probably didn't intend. In this case it's about stake-setting and related stuff in conflict resolution - that is, systems where you identify overall goals to be heading toward, as opposed to focusing on the resolution of individual tasks. Paul Tevis' very clear, very interesting exposition finally led to me gasping what it is that bothers me about stake setting.

I don't believe in stakes.

( Read more... )

Afterthought: For me, stakes are a genre convention.

Here be incomplete and evolving thoughts about support for largely freeform collaborative storytelling.

( Enclosed, one (1) set of thoughts )

Next post in this line, specific props for World of Darkness-style fate-touched outsiders.

Here's my work so far on stuff I've been yammering about in Twitter and elsewhere for a day or two: Driven: Simple Rules For Online Roleplay.

It's not done, but I felt like I was at a good pausing point. The major thing to come is likely to be some kits describing how to do World of Darkness milieus I like with this approach.

I ran session 5 of my Tuesday D&D campaign tonight, and it was very satisfactory indeed. And I realized that what we're doing isn't what I intended to do, exactly...

I started with plans for an epic adventure. The players got involved and I shifted to epic adventure with lots of room for character humor - this crew plays off each other as well as any I've ever been in. But tonight it struck me in full force: this is in fact an ensemble comedy campaign, with an epic adventure backdrop. I provide the characters with foils and opportunities for action, and then I feed them straight lines and they take care of the rest.

It wouldn't be entirely appropriate to rewrite the campaign as a Maid RPG campaign. But it's not entirely dissimilar, either.

Which works for me.

This struck me yesterday while reflecting on comments from people like mearls and rob_donoghue about encounter design for D&D 4th edition:

Include at least one movable, usable object per PC in each encounter.

It could be a table, a chair, a brazier, a bookcase, an orrery, whatever. Just make it something the PCs can pick up, shove around, or otherwise manipulate. And, perhaps, that their enemies can too.

We had our second session at last, and all I can do is quote....

DM: Jervis, this little bridge you're on crosses a pit of lava. The pyramids are about ten feet high, the bridge rising to five feet above the level of the surrounding floor.

DM: And you see what was moving at the far end of the room!

Jervis: Whoa!

DM: Two giant mechanical eyeballs, constructed of many tiny metal balls and irregular pieces whirling through the air.

Jervis: "Giant floating eyes, guys! Giant eyes!"

Darlass: "Really? Do they look dangerous?"

Jervis: "They look like giant floating eyeballs!"

Aron Mot: "Are they ...looking at you?"

Jervis: "There's two of them over here! It's pretty awesome!"

Jervis: (( Are they? ))

DM: They are, in fact. The myriad pieces making up lids lifted and settled, revealing five-foot spheres in the colors shown, which do turn to look at you.

Jervis: "Yeah, they're looking at me! It's pretty but also I might die!"

{later}

Jervis: Booming blade on the eye adjacent to me, Aegis of Shielding on the other one.

* jeff rolls: 1d20+7 => 10 + 7 = 17

Jervis: That's vs. AC
DM: That's a hit. Remind me of the effects.

Jervis: WOO LIGHTNING POWER!

Jervis: 1d8+5 damage on hit and 1d6+2 thunder damage if target moves away from me on next action)

DM: Oh, nice!

* jeff rolls: 1d8+5 => 4 + 5 = 9

Jervis: And if the other one attacks someone who isn't me, it's at -2 to hit and -7 to damage.

DM: The eye explodes as a coherent unit, pieces falling to the ground...and swarming at you. (Hey, Brendan Fraser's been here before.)

{Jervis' pog for MapTool is a picture of Brendan Fraser.}

Jervis: "HEY GUYS PIECES OF EYE ARE EATING ME!"

Jervis: "JUST A HEADS-UP!"

DM: (*laugh out loud*)

Darlass: "AS A SUGGESTION, MAYBE YOU SHOULD HOLD BACK ON ATTACKING THE GIANT FLOATING METAL THINGS"

Jervis: "IT WAS LOOKING AT ME WITH ITS... SELF"

Aron Mot: "And here I was going to say, 'Try not to make the eyes angry. They're just looking at you, after all.'" he says half to himself...

Darlass: "REMIND ME NOT TO STARE AT YOU"

{And that's how the game went. I had a great time.}

Another good session, from my point of view. The set piece this time was a trap encounter, a freshly abandoned dig site operated by malevolent NPCs now on the run, loaded up with all kinds of goodies. There was very little actual injury, but (from my point of view, at least) a high level of suspense, and I liked that a lot.

More later. :)