Shining · Dodecahedron

Here's the idea: I have learned a lot about role-playing games in the past five years since stumbling onto the Forge and, with it, the indie-game revolution. There's a lot of stuff I don't know still, of course. But I'd like to start getting my thoughts about RPGs in order. What I'm going to do is post a series of entries entitled "The thing about [some RPG thing]". In each I will chat about my views on what's good and (perhaps more often) bad about some RPG concept of topic. I was going to call this "What sucks about [some RPG thing]" but that sounded too negative. I'll probably still talk a lot about what sucks, so fair warning.

So...

The thing about role-playing is that it isn't just a type of game, it's a social phenomenon that all too often gets ugly. There's the part where you play your game and (you hope) have fun. That part is fine. Like any other hobby, reading books for example, you do the thing because it's fun and it enriches you in some way.

But then there's the lame part. I can only speculate that it comes from the all too common overlapping of gaming group and outcast support group. This is the part where you don't want to be honest with the folks at the table. The social dynamic of so many gaming groups is whacked.

Let's take a scenario. You get out a board game and have some friends over. You play a game, Settlers of Catan for example. When you finish, you might very well have a little chat about how it went. One friend says it was the best game in a long time (this friend probably won). Another says that it was lame because he got screwed by the dice the whole night and couldn't do anything. Then maybe you chat about how the dice mechanics are designed and (if you're a game geek like me) maybe you suggest a house rule that addresses the issue. Perhaps one of your friends tells you that he doesn't really like the game and would prefer that you not play it in the future. Now, there may be some reluctance to be open and honest about how things went based on social dynamics of the group, but on average, folks have no reason not to talk about it.

Now take the same scenario but substitute an RPG. On average, from my experience and from what anecdotal evidence I have from other gamers, you get much less willingness to talk about how it went. So a lot of this reluctance probably arises from the fact that for 95+% of the RPGs out there, how the game went has as much to do with the GM's performance as with the game rules as written (and don't think that isn't going to get its own post). But there is definitely something more there. Your gaming group is (or at least has been historically) the place where you will be accepted for who you are. These are the guys you can make annoying references to Monty Python and the Holy Grail with guilt-free. These are your people. You can't ask them to change because that would mean that they might ask you to change. So you play sucky games over and over without saying anything until, like so many, you just stop playing RPGs at all.

And that's what sucks about RPGs. It sucks doubly because of the potential greatness of RPGs that it craps all over.

I recently started playing in a D&D game for the first time in a while. I have a natural disinclination there -- I don't really like D&D. However, I have found myself thinking about what D&D is (and what it has been over the years) and I've come to the conclusion that it has very strong roots.

D&D, especially in the early days, was very clear about what it was. It was a game about overcoming a series of tactical obstacles by making clever use of limited resources. When you succeeded you were granted incremental improvements to your character that provided more resources for use in future challenges.

In the context of the original object of the game, the mechanics are almost brilliant. Nearly everything about the system was tailored to support the goals of play.

Jenifer and I went to see Proof perfomed by the Tacoma Actors Guild this afternoon. It's the last day of the show, so a review wouldn't help anybody, even if anybody was listening. Regardless, I will say that it was a fair production (my opinion being somewhat colored by the fact that the play isn't really my kind of thing).

TAG didn't impress me as far as their professionalism in the business sense. When I ordered the tickets online it told me we were booked in the center section, but our tickets were actually for the extreme left. The ticket taker at the door didn't know what I was talking about when I asked where Will Call was. When we did find the Will Call / Ticket Window is was abandoned with all of the will call tickets out in plain sight where anybody could have reached through the slot and taken them. There was no soap in the dispensers in the restroom. Lots of little things that didn't make me happy. As usual for live teater, we were one of four or five couples in a nearly full house under fifty years old.

However, it is good for me to go to these passable yet not stellar plays as I get back into theater. It helps me to remember that my standards are incredibly high and that you can get audiences without perfection.

The Monday before last my regular gaming group did some testing of Chanson de Gestes as it existed then. It was a bit muddled, until I realized the most important thing (which holds true for Dog in the Vineyard as well, because CDG got its basic conflict resolution philosophy from Dogs): when you are describing your action, you have nearly total narrative authority. What you say has weight in the ongoing narrative in a way that most systems basically never give a player. And when you aren't used to that, it's kind of hard to do.

We only got there toward the end of the session, but as soon as we did, things picked up right away. The trick is to know what is off limits. Which boils down to anything that would ensure or prohibit anybody's stakes. Everything else is on the table. When nameless mooks are in your way, you can narrate your way through them without batting an eye. You can pull any crazy maneuver you want and describe it in loving detail. As long as you don't mess with the stakes or make anyone call BS, what you say has immediate unquestioned authority in the shared imagined space.

If you've spent any time playing Dogs, this is all old hat. I only played it briefly before ripping off some of its ideas and it's still sinking in for me. Every player contributes to the story with basically equal weight. The GM is dead, long live the GM!

I'm way stoked for tomorrow's game with the updated mechanics!

Inspiration comes when you least expect it. Around Christmas time I started planning a fantasy game for my regular group. I toyed with Burning Wheel, Hero System 5th, and others with little satisfaction (my initial notes say "Fantasy Hero Campaign" on them). Then I decided I would, "just adapt Dogs in the Vineyard". Famous last words.

So now, even though my mind wasn't even close to in the right mode at the start of the year, I have a largely complete system on my hands. I am calling it Chanson de Gestes (Song of Deeds). It's about chivalric heroes fighting the leftovers of the dark ages. It still resembles Dogs, in that conflict has that same, brilliant, back and forth narrative authority that makes dogs so cool. Each day the specific resemblances gets hazier and hazier.

I hope to post more about it soon.

So, being bad at maintaining a journal was an understatement. No suprose really.

It's been a year of getting back in touch with my theatrical past. Plus some small movement on the roleplaying front. More later.

I have a lot of design ideas in the fire. I talked about some of them on my Blogger site last year. Despite a lot of "cutting edge" design ideas, I keep coming back to Gallant, my game of swashbuckling adventure. This is a game that I started designing before having any exposure to the wealth of new RPG theory on the Web.

Gallant is far from perfect, so I have pushed it to the background multiple times over the past few years. But I am coming to realize that there is no such thing as perfect. I need to get a game out there, published and played, and then move on to the next one, whichever that turns out to be. It's very hard to get that point across to myself, though--particularly when people are saying new and provocative things about RPG design all the time out here in the geekoshpere.

Anyway, I'm back to focusing my development time on Gallant. And I'm starting to feel very serous about getting the damned thing done.

Apart from playing RPGs, I am a fan of board games. If you don't know, it's an awesome time to be a board game fan. For the last ten years and more, America has been on the receiving end of a huge wave of German games. These games are clever, well-designed games that play relatively quickly. They are, by and large, a delight.

But there has been a catch. Most of the German games are under-themed. That is, the thing that game purports to be about is just pasted on to clever mechanics. If you want a game about the civilization of ancient Egypt, you might take a really clever auction system and paste an Egyptian dynastic theme onto it (and you'd have Ra, which is a great game, but under-themed).

Americans have, historically, been quite good at coming up with simulation style games. Games that start with theme and then have mechanics forced onto the theme. This results in games that are rich and flavorful, but take a lot of time and effort to play. A good example is I.C.E's Fellowship of the Ring, which I love the idea of, but have never played all the way through (please don't correct me if this game was designed by, say, Englishmen--it fits the American game style well enough for my point).

Now we are in exciting times. The German games have made their way into the minds of American developers. The result is a slow but steady increase in the number of games that merge the two styles into something extremely cool: well-themed, engaging games that have clever and efficient rules. I don't think we have even scratched the surface of the potential of this new hybrid. But games like Twilight Imperium 3rd edition are on the front of the wave. And I, for one, am stoked.

So why are boardgames getting this revitalization when RPGs advance at a snail's pace? Lots of reasons, I'm sure. But here's one that disturbs me: I never hear a board game player say, "Whoa, this isn't a board game! I'm just going to play risk." Something to think about.

Lately I find myself watching a lot of movies adapted from Jane Austen novels. Go ahead and snicker if you want to. There's something about Jane Austen that is very important to roleplaying, and it's the same thing that draws me to movie adaptations.

I have stressed the importance of getting to the issues that really matter in your roleplaying. To refresh, the idea is that what really matters is something about the characters involved. We are people, so what matters is people. With Austen, the stuff that matters is basically all there is to the story. There are no layers of machismo hiding the human emotions of the characters. We (the audience) are right there with the characters without emotional buffers. This makes the protagonists very easy to care about.

So what am I saying? Is it that we should all start playing Pride and Prejudice the RPG? No. But being mindful of what's important and focusing on that without getting distracted by the other stuff is definitely the way to go.

And before anyone gets all defensive about how what's important to them is different from what's important to me: you're right. If what's important to you is making tactical decisions that outshine your fellows, any Jane Austen game would be excruciating. I'm not really talking to you folks anyway--not because I think you are playing wrong or anything, but because I can't relate.

I'm serious. If I could play in a game that produced fiction half as fun as Casanova I would consider myself lucky.

Ignore the critics. Get your significant other and go watch.

If, like me, you are a regular reader of Vincent Baker's anyway, you'll already be familiar with this entry about character ownership. I have a standard response to Vincent's more radical ideas. It goes something like this: first I'm outraged at his audacity, next I start to process it in an effort to disprove it, next he restates it in the comments in a way that is less provocative and makes more sense, finally I come around to his POV and wonder how I could ever have thought otherwise.

Anyway, I was thinking about this in contrast with some things I wrote on the old version of the blog about investment. In brief, you have to invest in something intellectually or emotionally in the game or it won't be fun and you won't be fun to play with. But I'm now realizing that you can take investment way too far. Here's how: as a GM, if you invest too much in the plots and stories that you plan, you end up shutting down ideas and input from the players. That one was easy, here's another though: if you, as a player, invest too much in your character, you end up limiting its potential and locking the others out of the character's story.

If you're a roleplayer of any experience, you can probably complete the sentence: "Roleplaying is...". At the very least you can point out to others when something isn't roleplaying. I do it occasionally (less than I used to). People around me do it. I read it on the Web. I've never been involved with a hobby as prone to sudden, strong opinions with little or no basis. It sucks. When we do it we hurt our hobby.

If you've read any of my posts here or on my older blogspot blog, you know that I have taken an interest in the goings on at The Forge. I stumbled across the site a little over three years ago and it opened my eyes to the diversity of our hobby. I'm not a regular contributor, because I'm too lazy to keep up with all of the posts--and because the core folks there had figured out their stories before I showed up. Even so, I have a lot of respect for the thinking and the games that have come out of that site. Anyway, I mention this because many of the games born of Forge-theory are not considered roleplaying games by plenty of folks. Meaning that they don't follow the basic D&D adventure structure. They often don't have a centralized GM and some of them don't use randomization for resolving things in the game.

We, as gamers, establish our comfort zones and then mock that which falls outside of them. It probably has to do with the insecurity that is so common among the people who get into the hobby. I don't really care where it comes from. My point is that we need to be more open. If a game comes out that you think is strange, you don't have to play. But you shouldn't mock it either. If you look at the very small amount of real progress in RPG rules from the dawn of D&D 'till now, you'll notice that the way we play hasn't really been evolving very much with the big publishers. At the same time, the hobby tends to lose people pretty much as fast as it gains them. And the people who stopped playing because the traditional games weren't fun for them anymore are many. Those observations are what started Ron and co. on the crazy Forge adventure to begin with.

I'm ranting and rambling. I'm going to write up a post about what I've learned from the Forge. Thinking about that led me to this rant. The point is simple. Keep an open mind. Try new games. Try not to dismiss things that are new as "not roleplaying". Help the hobby grow.

I'm a Hero System player from way back. And a GURPS player as well. That school of RPG design had a prominent feature in it's use of character disadvantages. Mechanically speaking, the idea is to trade some options for how you play your character in for more points with which you can buy abilities. The intention is to encourage you, the player, to develop your character beyond the simple archetypes of whatever genre you were playing.

It's an interesting design choice. When coupled with detailed and number-intensive character creation systems such as Hero and GURPS it both encourages players to think about their characters in relation to the setting and the stories they want to tell and it encourages very careful balancing of cost versus gain when creating characters. In myself, and those I know who played those games, the system tended to produce a strange hybrid of story-conscious dramatist and min-maxing powergamer.

At heart, however, the idea of disadvantages is a positive step toward the type of player input that I have been talking about and that I aspire to. Think of this: you are making your character, Spider Man, in Champions. You take a disadvantage that says you have an elderly aunt who gets into trouble. The level at which you take that disadvantage tells the GM how often you want the story to involve your character's relationship with his aunt, and how useful you want her to be to him in general. You are very clearly creating an understanding between yourself and the GM on the metagame level.

It rarely worked that way in practice, though. My long experience showed that most players ended up using disadvantages as ways to get points and often hoped and prayed that the enemies that they chose for their characters never showed up to ruin the adventure. Likewise, most GMs seemed to pull out disadvantages far less than they ought by the rules--favoring instead to focus on the plot that they had come up with beforehand. That's not to say that people didn't use character disadvantages as tools with which to define play, but the combination of the mechanics with cost benefits hampered their usefulness as such.

A slightly better tool for getting the player's desires into the game came with 7th Sea many years later (perhaps earlier, but not in a game I've played). The concept of backgrounds in that game gives the player the option of investing in aspects of the character's past and then getting a reward when the background comes into play. So you pay for your messed-up backstory at character creation, but then reap rewards when it comes back to haunt the character during play. The brilliance of this is that players have invested, so thay have incentive to prod the GM into bringing their stuff into the game.

Even more interesting is the idea of Spiritual Attributes introduced in The Riddle of Steel. I haven't played this one yet, so I can't comment directly, but the idea is that things the player decides are important to his character have mechanical weight.

I'm still struggling with what I think is the best way to arrange the understanding between players about what is important and how to proceed with that knowledge into storytelling. But I do think analysis of some older ideas is well worth the time.

I had a party a week ago during which my friends and I played a couple of games of RoboRally. We played the relatively recent version published under the Avalon Hill brand (don't ask me why they thought that was a good association). Anyway, everybody had a great time with it, and the experience really brought a lot of my design theory thoughts into focus.

If you haven't played RoboRally, each turn you get a hand of cards, from which you must choose five commands to be executed by your robot in order. During each of five phases during the turn, all the players execute their next instruction simultaneously. On the surface, it sounds like a logic exercise: you program your robot properly and all goes well. But in reality, it is chaos. The choices of the other players can bump your robot around the board, putting it in the way of dangerous board elements, or even knocking it out of play altogether. Not to mention throwing all of your carefully laid plans out the window.

On the surface, it doesn't seem like a very good game. There is luck in which cards you are dealt. There is the randomization of what others choose to do. In short, it's reasonably hard to think and strategize your way to victory. But here's the thing: it's fun. Our second game lasted for a couple of hours easy (probably more--I wasn't paying attention) but everyone was enjoying themselves--even the people who were so far behind that they could never ever win.

There may be a big difference between how RoboRally was designed and what playing made me realize about design. But the important fact is that it manages to be a game that it is fun to lose--or rather, it is fun enough just to play, that you don't get caught up about winning. Let's take a brief tangent for a moment to look at another game. The Settlers of Catan is one of the most widely popular hobby games of the past twenty years. It's introduction to this country helped introduce the new wave of "German games" that have changes the way people think about board games. But it has a serious design flaw. It is possible (and even likely when playing with four players) that one or more players will be losing from early in the game, and will spend an hour or more being miserable while the game (and other players) screws them over. It is not fun to lose. In other respects, it is an excellent design. But it has a hearty potential to be a fun vacuum much of the time.

So what did all of this teach me (or rather solidify from the mass of theory swirling in my brain)? I used to think about design as rules. Setting the procedures for how things work in the game. Defining the aspects of playing and winning. But design, I have learned, is much more than that. As a designer, you must consider the people who are playing. What situations does the game provide that are likely to be fun? What situations does it provide that are likely to suck? In short, how will your game affect the interations of the people sitting at the table and their enjoyment of the time they spend together?

It's blindingly obvious now that I can put it into words. But I think it will make my games much better.

I've been thinking about tension in RPGs more, and a big ol' light bulb went on for me: allocation and misallocation of tension is the source of my difficulty finding satisfying play. After a fair amount of dysfunctional play, I had decided that the problem was that players didn't have enough control over their characters in traditional RPGs. So my design ideas have been coming from the angle of giving the players more control while removing control from the GM. Now I understand why I haven't had much luck.

Story is what happens when a character is put under pressure. I had bad experiences where both seemed out of my control as a player, so my reaction was to take control of both. But when the player is in control of his character and has a firm grasp on the situation rudder, there is little or no tension--and if there is, it's about the wrong things.

Let's look for a moment at the typical traditional RPG setup. The player comes up with a character. The GM comes up with the story, maybe taking the characters into account, maybe not. The tension in the story only ever relates to the goals of the player if the GM is paying close attention and sees fit to weave those goals into the main story, or condescends to provide a sub-plot. The bulk of the tension is about things that the player may well care nothing about (do I kill the big bad monster? do I get heaps of gold?) It's totally hit or miss for engaging the players.

A game that properly applies tension mustn't follow this model at all. It must provide clear channels for the player to identify the things he cares about and then give the GM (or other players) tools to apply tension relating to those things.

Now, notice I haven't said anything about what those things that the player cares about are. That's because I can't know. That is, I think, the domain of the elusive creative agenda suggested by Ron Edwards on the Forge.

A player doesn't need firm control over the story, he needs the ability to identify what is important and some assurance that that thing (whatever it may be) becomes, at least in part, what the story is about. It may also be true that the player needs the ability to identify what the story isn't about. Though that's food for another thought.

This old post on the Forge (via Anyway) got me thinking about the need for tension in games. This is true of any game, I think, not just RPGs. There needs to be some obstacle between the player and his goals. If you played a game where exactly what you wanted to happen happened every time, you would get bored with it. It would be like doing a crossword puzzle a second time while the answers are fresh in your mind.

The variables are how much tension and from where. The source of tension is usually determined by (or implied by) the rules of the game. The amount of tension can be a function of the game or a function of the people playing in varying degrees.

Source of tension include self, other players, or chance.

Tension from self occurs when a player's ability to accomplish his goals is limited by his own ability. To achieve tension this way usually requires a constraint, like a time limit.

Tension from other players occurs when actions taken by one player directly affect the ability of another player to accomplish his goals of play.

Tension from chance occurs when a player's ability to accomplish his goals is limited by a random event, like a die roll.

You can, of course, combine these sources. For example, combat in D&D provides tension from all three: self in the form of the decision to use or not use limited resources at your disposal (spells, limited abilities, etc.) along with maneuver choices and whatnot; other players in the form of the GM and possibly other players; chance from the many die rolls.

Amount of tension is the trickier area, not because it's hard to quantify but because it is hard (and not traditionally done) to have real agreement on the level of tension. This is a big time social contract issue. And one that I hope to spend some more time on later.

Designers should think hard when making games about what types of tension they are facilitating and what that means to the dynamics of play. No tension == dull. But lots of tension poorly allocated can be worse.

This journal is a continuation of the somewhat spotty blogging I did on my blogspot blog earlier this year. I feel that the kind of interactive discussions I wanted all along are better served here. If you were gracious enough to read some of my ramblings over there, thank you! If you are new to my ramblings, welcome!

The point of this site is to talk about games. Mostly role-playing games. But games in general.