Okay, let's talk about the mechanical part of this game idea.
I started thinking about CYBERSOUL as an Apocalypse World hack early on, likely because I've been reading a lot of AW hacks. The World of Our Desires is an Unknown Armies hack that I have a lot of love for, and I've been thinking of it as one of the next games I run. (I'll tell you more about that soon enough.) TWOOD was on my mind, as was a recent session of Dungeon World where the die-rolling mechanic spiralled the story in very unexpected directions -- that was definitely something I wanted for my own game. A way to make choices lead to meaty consequences that the GM would not have direct control over.
I've also been re-reading John Wick's excellent Houses of the Blooded, and his introductory section where he answers Jared Sorenson's "three questions" of game design struck me at a useful moment. I started to consider how I would answer the questions for my game.
'What is your game about?' I decided, after ruminating over this question for a while, that the key issue that the game would focus on was poverty. Race was also an important thing, but maybe not the main thing. This was going to be a game about how fragile the lives of the poor are, and how much of a struggle it is to escape.
'How is your game about that?' This was a little trickier, but I eventually came around to the idea that the playbooks for the characters would each represent an "issue" associated with poverty. This is kind of a weird inversion of the way some AW playbooks work, but I think it's consistent with stuff like TWOOD and Monsterhearts. Yes, playbooks in those games feature skills and Kewl Powerz, but they also talk about an issue -- they're more "What's your deal?" than "How are you awesome?" As I said, I'm not a fan of the "competence porn" version of cyberpunk where the players are rockstars with guns shooting their way through corporate strongholds, so an approach that concentrated on vulnerability suits me right down to the ground.
The playbooks will be about characters who are struggling with things like mental illness, having family dependants, being a war veteran, having limited education, stuff like that.
Another important theme in the game, perhaps important enough to serve as another necessary answer to the first two questions, is Community. (And this is where race comes into the game as a significant issue.) Part of game creation in CYBERSOUL will be collectively creating a small community where the player characters live their lives of high tech desperation. It might be an old warehouse in an industrial zone reclaimed by squatters, or a flotilla of barges and rafts tied up at an abandoned pier, or a stack of cargo containers welded together, connected by ladders and walkways, or an underground warren beneath the city streets. Like a hold in AW, the Community forms the center of the characters' world. It gives them friends and allies, rivals, neighbours, people and places they can care about and want to protect.
The Community will be developed as a cultural place, whether it is representative of a single culture or a vast crazy quilt of different backgrounds. What clothes do people wear in the Community? What music do they listen to? What does the food smell like? All these sensory details bring the place to life and make it specific and vivid.
The Community, like an AW hold, will have resources and things (maybe a lot of things) that are scarce. And of course, there will always be people willing to take away the few things that the Community has. Some of them will be street gangs in the typical Cyberpunk RPG style, and some of them will be other Communities of desperate people. Of course, it would all be a lot easier if you signed your life away to the corporate zaibatsu and lived a life of plenty in the arcologies, wouldn't it? Sure it would. But forget about it. You'll never live the soft life inside one of those fortified tower blocks/shopping plazas. They already got robots to clean their floors.
Another gameplay element I want very much to include is a way to model a classic Cyberpunk "mission" in a way that isn't about cash. Each of the playbooks will have a list of things that are precious to them, as a required choice at character creation. It will be an implicit part of taking on a mission -- committing a crime -- that player characters will need to risk one of the things that they hold most precious in the world. Like that DW session I mentioned, a bad roll could have some serious consequences for the player characters in CYBERSOUL.
A game about poverty? Where the things you love are constantly in danger? Will anyone really want to play this game? I keep asking myself that question.
But I want to play it. And that's probably where every game designer starts.
Footnote: Jared's third question - 'What player behaviours does your game reward or punish?' - is one I'm still answering, although some of the answers are implicit in the above text. Clearly, I want to make crime and violence risky business, and encourage the community building aspects of gameplay. Since there is still an aspect of "punk" here, I think if I can encourage the arc of gameplay to lead players toward the fact that, despite the risks, power (either the corporations or the Police, who will loom large as a threat) must be opposed, I will have done things right.
Tuesday, 6 January 2015
Saturday, 3 January 2015
Design Journal: CYBERSOUL (Part One)
So let me tell you about the new game idea I've been turning over in my brain for the past few weeks. I hinted at it in one of my 2014 year-end posts, but for those of you who missed that, it boils down to the following phrase:
Cyberpunk + Motown.
Here's a little Aretha Franklin to listen to while I elaborate on that a bit.
Cyberpunk is a genre that came of age just as I was really starting to explore different roleplaying genres for the first time, in high school. A friend snapped up a copy of the big black 1st edition box of Cyberpunk: The Roleplaying Game of the Dark Future from Toronto's famed Silver Snail comic book store, during a class trip to the ROM. Soon, we were cruising the streets of Night City wearing mirrorshades and as much body armour as we could carry. Good times, although my modern gaming groups wouldn't have much patience for a system that was so lethal to player characters.
Mike Pondsmith's game led me to read all the William Gibson I could get my hands on, and Walter Jon Williams's HARDWIRED, and a bunch of Bruce Sterling stories. Of course, cyberpunk was thoroughly passe as a genre when I got to my university undergraduate writing workshops, but that didn't stop me from writing stories and a screenplay in the genre. It spoke to me, even if the rest of the S-F reading world had mostly moved on.
Too many years later, it still speaks to me. But the conversations we're having these days are a little different.
Cyberpunk was a big thing in the roleplaying world, in the late eighties and nineties. It still is, although the eponymous game that started it all didn't do so well in its third edition and its pointy-eared cousin Shadowrun has altered itself several times to keep up with advances in technology in the modern world. Clunky wired cyberdecks and public dataterms and huge cellphones no longer seem so futuristic, to most gamers, they seem quaint and old-fashioned. The dark future is now something almost retro. (Funny, considering how much of this stuff was about the technology, that the social stuff about the rise of corporate power/income inequality, rising poverty, and the collapse of national governments all seems so prescient these days.)
And that's kind of where I come back into this.
Being a genre that I once had a lot of love for, of course I was destined to return to cyberpunk one day with fresh eyes, remembering the good times past and wondering if there was still some juice there for new games. I ran a successful Shadowrun game a couple years ago called DISAVOWED that tried to play to some of the things that I like about the genre and my current gaming sensibilities. But ultimately, it was still a game that ended up being about the thing I like least about cyberpunk stories and games: high-tech mercenaries fighting evil corporations.
In my mind, that was always the least interesting part of the genre, not that I'm a person who doesn't enjoy a little shoot-em-up-bang-bang with my gaming. The stuff that I always dug the most was the more ground-level stuff. I like cyberpunk stories about blue-collar (or no-collar) slobs that live in coffin motels or teeming, claustrophobic slums where they have to scrabble for every meal. Those characters have real problems, fragile lives that could easily be snatched away by the powers that be, and they have skills that might make them risk their little piece of the world for a chance at the brass ring, the big payoff.
In other words, I like my cyberpunk with an emphasis on the punk. Most of the stories and the vast majority of the games haven't done anything like that, and the same is true of most other genres that end in -punk. Where's the anger? Where's the need to create social change? Punk and poverty go hand in hand. Gimme that any day over leather clad rock-star assassins and glammed-up hackers running high-stakes heists. I want stories with high personal stakes and a real sense of desperation.
And one other thing. I was disappointed, leafing through the 2nd edition Cyberpunk rulebook recently, to see how few of the characters illustrated in the book looked like anything other than a white guy/woman with slick hair. Although the character generation tables include a background table that's very likely to make you something other than a white dude from the suburbs, there were a disproportionate number of white people (though with 80's Asian-style glamour) in the illustrations. I will make no comment on the fact that the only person who seemed to be of African heritage, on page 211, seems to be rocking a Night City version of a pimp outfit. I'm certain this is not a deliberate thing, as "Maximum Mike" Pondsmith is the first African-American game designer I was aware of in the hobby.
Still, troubling. So more representation of people of colour would be nice.
I don't know what made me make the mental connection between cyberpunk and Motown, since the original has always been jacked into glam, metal, and electronica like Front 242 in the minds of a lot of people. But somehow that idea stuck with me.
A Night City with a Motown soundtrack. Something about that just seems right to me. Maybe it's the fact that a lot of our world seems to be reliving the turmoil of the Civil Rights era all over again, lately, or maybe it's a way of mentally reframing the "retro" elements of classic cyberpunk with music that also hearkens back to another era. Maybe it's the fact that Motown and other soul music of the era speaks to me of poverty and struggle, fierce pride in the face of a society that tries to push you aside and stamp you down, and yearning for something better -- an end to heartache, a taste of justice.
Cybersoul.
Next, I'll talk about the things I want to see in the game, and some ideas I'm toying with for the mechanical part of Cybersoul -- an Apocalypse Engine hack.
Cyberpunk + Motown.
Here's a little Aretha Franklin to listen to while I elaborate on that a bit.
Cyberpunk is a genre that came of age just as I was really starting to explore different roleplaying genres for the first time, in high school. A friend snapped up a copy of the big black 1st edition box of Cyberpunk: The Roleplaying Game of the Dark Future from Toronto's famed Silver Snail comic book store, during a class trip to the ROM. Soon, we were cruising the streets of Night City wearing mirrorshades and as much body armour as we could carry. Good times, although my modern gaming groups wouldn't have much patience for a system that was so lethal to player characters.
Mike Pondsmith's game led me to read all the William Gibson I could get my hands on, and Walter Jon Williams's HARDWIRED, and a bunch of Bruce Sterling stories. Of course, cyberpunk was thoroughly passe as a genre when I got to my university undergraduate writing workshops, but that didn't stop me from writing stories and a screenplay in the genre. It spoke to me, even if the rest of the S-F reading world had mostly moved on.
Too many years later, it still speaks to me. But the conversations we're having these days are a little different.
Cyberpunk was a big thing in the roleplaying world, in the late eighties and nineties. It still is, although the eponymous game that started it all didn't do so well in its third edition and its pointy-eared cousin Shadowrun has altered itself several times to keep up with advances in technology in the modern world. Clunky wired cyberdecks and public dataterms and huge cellphones no longer seem so futuristic, to most gamers, they seem quaint and old-fashioned. The dark future is now something almost retro. (Funny, considering how much of this stuff was about the technology, that the social stuff about the rise of corporate power/income inequality, rising poverty, and the collapse of national governments all seems so prescient these days.)
And that's kind of where I come back into this.
Being a genre that I once had a lot of love for, of course I was destined to return to cyberpunk one day with fresh eyes, remembering the good times past and wondering if there was still some juice there for new games. I ran a successful Shadowrun game a couple years ago called DISAVOWED that tried to play to some of the things that I like about the genre and my current gaming sensibilities. But ultimately, it was still a game that ended up being about the thing I like least about cyberpunk stories and games: high-tech mercenaries fighting evil corporations.
In my mind, that was always the least interesting part of the genre, not that I'm a person who doesn't enjoy a little shoot-em-up-bang-bang with my gaming. The stuff that I always dug the most was the more ground-level stuff. I like cyberpunk stories about blue-collar (or no-collar) slobs that live in coffin motels or teeming, claustrophobic slums where they have to scrabble for every meal. Those characters have real problems, fragile lives that could easily be snatched away by the powers that be, and they have skills that might make them risk their little piece of the world for a chance at the brass ring, the big payoff.
In other words, I like my cyberpunk with an emphasis on the punk. Most of the stories and the vast majority of the games haven't done anything like that, and the same is true of most other genres that end in -punk. Where's the anger? Where's the need to create social change? Punk and poverty go hand in hand. Gimme that any day over leather clad rock-star assassins and glammed-up hackers running high-stakes heists. I want stories with high personal stakes and a real sense of desperation.
And one other thing. I was disappointed, leafing through the 2nd edition Cyberpunk rulebook recently, to see how few of the characters illustrated in the book looked like anything other than a white guy/woman with slick hair. Although the character generation tables include a background table that's very likely to make you something other than a white dude from the suburbs, there were a disproportionate number of white people (though with 80's Asian-style glamour) in the illustrations. I will make no comment on the fact that the only person who seemed to be of African heritage, on page 211, seems to be rocking a Night City version of a pimp outfit. I'm certain this is not a deliberate thing, as "Maximum Mike" Pondsmith is the first African-American game designer I was aware of in the hobby.
Still, troubling. So more representation of people of colour would be nice.
I don't know what made me make the mental connection between cyberpunk and Motown, since the original has always been jacked into glam, metal, and electronica like Front 242 in the minds of a lot of people. But somehow that idea stuck with me.
A Night City with a Motown soundtrack. Something about that just seems right to me. Maybe it's the fact that a lot of our world seems to be reliving the turmoil of the Civil Rights era all over again, lately, or maybe it's a way of mentally reframing the "retro" elements of classic cyberpunk with music that also hearkens back to another era. Maybe it's the fact that Motown and other soul music of the era speaks to me of poverty and struggle, fierce pride in the face of a society that tries to push you aside and stamp you down, and yearning for something better -- an end to heartache, a taste of justice.
Cybersoul.
Next, I'll talk about the things I want to see in the game, and some ideas I'm toying with for the mechanical part of Cybersoul -- an Apocalypse Engine hack.
Monday, 22 December 2014
HTHD Year in Review (Part Two)
I realized, a few hours after posting the first part of my year-end wrap up that I made a very important omission from my list! So I'll start with that, before jumping into the Great Moments At Our Table 2014:
Great Fate Game of 2014 -- No, Wait -- GREATEST THING EVER: ATOMIC ROBO
I honestly don't know how I missed it. I pretty much love everything Fate, but Atomic Robo really hit the sweet spot for me. It's not only a great new Fate variant that serves its source material (which I also unabashedly love) well, it's got a lot of cracking good, useful material for those of us who've been lurking around the Evil Hatverse for a while. It's the best looking book Evil Hat has done so far, and that's really saying something after the Dresden Files books and the crisp, clean look of the Fate Core material. It does a better job of explaining Fate than anything else I've ever seen, using bits of AR comic as though they were a game in progress. It would also be at the top of my list as a replacement for my beloved (but dated) SPIRIT OF THE CENTURY -- this version of Fate is just about perfect for pulpy adventure. Honourable mention to JADEPUNK, which was maybe the biggest surprise of the year in the Fate world -- a tasty new FAE variant that perfectly models the kind of world you played through in Bioware's classic CRPG Jade Empire.
'Second Verse, Definitely Not The Same As The First' Campaign of the Year: 'ROUND MIDNIGHT
The follow up to Megan's game where Jazz era Chicago collided with the world of the faeries wrapped up after a nine-ish episode run. I'm not sure she was 100% happy with it, but for those of us on the playing side it was a satisfying affair. I got to take my magic trumpet man Silk in an entirely new direction, with a real substantial change as the game went on, and played some very exciting scenes against Amanda's changeling character Joy.
Dave Palpatine Award for Outstanding Achievement in Villainy: BILLY SATURDAY
Oily Southern charm that can pivot into vile racism at the drop of a hat. That's the villain of SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA in a nutshell, a nice little old man who just wants to help people realize their dreams. And imprison their souls. And isn't adverse to maybe arranging a few deaths to hurt those who don't follow his orders.
You Can't Always Get What You Want Award: LOST PINES
I still haven't written a full-length treatment of the game yet, but we playtested my long-gestating homage to Twin Peaks this year. Mostly the feedback was good, which didn't surprise me because it was aimed squarely at our group play style. Interestingly, there were always at least a couple of players who didn't like the idea that it's designed to be played up to a cliffhanger which is unresolved. People were quite cranky on that point. But I'm okay with making a few people unhappy with an aesthetic choice -- if you're not making anyone upset with you, you're probably not doing anything new. We'll see if I can make them angry with the new game I'm noodling away on, but I'll tell you more about that in the new year. Until then, I'll leave you with this: it's a Motown cyberpunk game. How's that for a cliffhanger?
How You Like The Taste of that Irony Award: VANGUARD
The only thing I told my online group I didn't want for my online "superhero" game Vanguard was urban fantasy. What did I get? A game full of monsters and ghosts and wizards. Ah well, shows you what the GM knows. We did have fun with it.
Fan-Favourite NPC of the Year: DORIS FROM ONTARIO
There have been a lot of NPCs populating the world of my pulp epic SEVEN STARS OF ATLANTIS, but none have inspired quite so much delight as Doris, a woman travelling from Hong Kong with her father that the PCs encountered while fleeing the sinister Dr. Song. She assured our blue-haired reporter Teddy that he was "very famous in Ontario", and insisted on showing him all of her clippings. This escalated to Su Li attempting to poison the wholesome small town girl, only to accidentally give the entire ship a painful case of diarrhea.
Oh, what the heck -- one more product:
Gaming Thing Most Likely To Suck My Wallet Dry: FATE DICE
Seriously, Evil Hat -- give a brother a break. These things are like beautiful gaming crack. And, like Pokemon, you gotta have 'em all.
Great Fate Game of 2014 -- No, Wait -- GREATEST THING EVER: ATOMIC ROBO
I honestly don't know how I missed it. I pretty much love everything Fate, but Atomic Robo really hit the sweet spot for me. It's not only a great new Fate variant that serves its source material (which I also unabashedly love) well, it's got a lot of cracking good, useful material for those of us who've been lurking around the Evil Hatverse for a while. It's the best looking book Evil Hat has done so far, and that's really saying something after the Dresden Files books and the crisp, clean look of the Fate Core material. It does a better job of explaining Fate than anything else I've ever seen, using bits of AR comic as though they were a game in progress. It would also be at the top of my list as a replacement for my beloved (but dated) SPIRIT OF THE CENTURY -- this version of Fate is just about perfect for pulpy adventure. Honourable mention to JADEPUNK, which was maybe the biggest surprise of the year in the Fate world -- a tasty new FAE variant that perfectly models the kind of world you played through in Bioware's classic CRPG Jade Empire.
'Second Verse, Definitely Not The Same As The First' Campaign of the Year: 'ROUND MIDNIGHT
The follow up to Megan's game where Jazz era Chicago collided with the world of the faeries wrapped up after a nine-ish episode run. I'm not sure she was 100% happy with it, but for those of us on the playing side it was a satisfying affair. I got to take my magic trumpet man Silk in an entirely new direction, with a real substantial change as the game went on, and played some very exciting scenes against Amanda's changeling character Joy.
Dave Palpatine Award for Outstanding Achievement in Villainy: BILLY SATURDAY
Oily Southern charm that can pivot into vile racism at the drop of a hat. That's the villain of SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA in a nutshell, a nice little old man who just wants to help people realize their dreams. And imprison their souls. And isn't adverse to maybe arranging a few deaths to hurt those who don't follow his orders.
You Can't Always Get What You Want Award: LOST PINES
I still haven't written a full-length treatment of the game yet, but we playtested my long-gestating homage to Twin Peaks this year. Mostly the feedback was good, which didn't surprise me because it was aimed squarely at our group play style. Interestingly, there were always at least a couple of players who didn't like the idea that it's designed to be played up to a cliffhanger which is unresolved. People were quite cranky on that point. But I'm okay with making a few people unhappy with an aesthetic choice -- if you're not making anyone upset with you, you're probably not doing anything new. We'll see if I can make them angry with the new game I'm noodling away on, but I'll tell you more about that in the new year. Until then, I'll leave you with this: it's a Motown cyberpunk game. How's that for a cliffhanger?
How You Like The Taste of that Irony Award: VANGUARD
The only thing I told my online group I didn't want for my online "superhero" game Vanguard was urban fantasy. What did I get? A game full of monsters and ghosts and wizards. Ah well, shows you what the GM knows. We did have fun with it.
Fan-Favourite NPC of the Year: DORIS FROM ONTARIO
There have been a lot of NPCs populating the world of my pulp epic SEVEN STARS OF ATLANTIS, but none have inspired quite so much delight as Doris, a woman travelling from Hong Kong with her father that the PCs encountered while fleeing the sinister Dr. Song. She assured our blue-haired reporter Teddy that he was "very famous in Ontario", and insisted on showing him all of her clippings. This escalated to Su Li attempting to poison the wholesome small town girl, only to accidentally give the entire ship a painful case of diarrhea.
Oh, what the heck -- one more product:
Gaming Thing Most Likely To Suck My Wallet Dry: FATE DICE
Seriously, Evil Hat -- give a brother a break. These things are like beautiful gaming crack. And, like Pokemon, you gotta have 'em all.
Sunday, 21 December 2014
HTHD Year in Review (Part One)
Has it been twelve months already? Hard to believe, what with the sporadic posts and all, but here we are again at the end of the year reflecting on the gaming that's happened in between.
Most Game-Able Movie of 2014 - GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY
Here was a movie that practically everyone with any sense at all loved, because it did one thing better than just about any genre movie in recent memory: it was flat-out FUN. This is something that HTHD gamers need to be reminded of, from time to time -- although we like our Serious Fun that involves tough emotional decisions and pain, sometimes it's just what the doctor ordered to embrace the fun. I've been running a Fate Accelerated game using this as inspiration, and it's been just as delightfully goofy as I hoped.
Shiny New Game We're Digging The Heck Out Of - DUNGEON WORLD
Speaking of fun, here's an Apocalypse World variant that packs pretty much everything I remember loving about classic D&D into the most efficient package possible. Like most *World games, where it really comes to life is in the unexpected turns the narrative takes based on the dice. I've been running this lately for my online game, and I recently came to the virtual "table" with about ten minutes of material, figuring my players would lead the way for the rest. And so they did, leading to an entirely satisfying (and tense!) gaming experience based entirely on *World's "something always happens" rolling mechanic.
Oddest Gaming Confection of the Year: GOLDEN SKY STORIES
As a palate cleanser after a number of fairly heavy games, this was just the thing -- a Japanese game that's about shape-changing animals helping people. No conflict, no fighting. Just friendship and kindness and a pastoral rural setting. We were less enthusiastic about the system (I would probably use a variation of either Token Effort, from Greg Stolze's great IN SPAAAACE! comedy space opera, or else the venerable but delightful TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE), but the overall gaming experience was good. A lovely reminder that games can also be satisfying when they are about the "softer" kinds of stories and emotions. More games could explore this territory. And should.
The D.B. Cooper Memorial 'One That Got Away' Award: APOCALYPSE WORLD
I was all set to run this as a follow up to GSS, but unfortunately that particular gaming group imploded before the first session. One day...! Honourable mention also to TRIBE 8, a game I've got a lot of love for, but one that I ultimately decided wouldn't be a good fit for the Saturday crew.
Not-Exactly-New Game I Dug The Hell Out Of: BLOWBACK
I'm a big fan of Burn Notice, the great rollicking spy-in-exile TV show that inspired Elizabeth Sampat to design this terrific espionage game. It captures the feel of the show better than almost any other genre adaptation I can think of, albeit with the numbers largely filed off here. She comes up with an elegant way to introduce the extended family characters that make Burn Notice so great (each player takes on a "main cast" character and a dependant character) and builds in elegant ways to place the supporting cast in peril and manage exciting spy derring-do. Great stuff.
Surprise! It's Awesome! Award: BASE RAIDERS
I've just recently been getting back into listening to a lot of podcasts, including RPPR (Role Playing Public Radio) and its sister podcast that focuses on Actual Play. That introduced me to Base Raiders, RPPR mainstay Ross Payton's game of superhero "dungeon delving". That high concept didn't really sell me initially, but when I learned the details -- this is set in a world where all the high-end superheroes and villains have vanished in some kind of cosmic Event (which would likely have 'Crisis' in the title, were it on the shelf at your local comic book store), leaving their secret bases full of weird Silver Age technology and magic secrets up for grabs. The more I thought about this, the more I loved it, and now it's something I'm thinking of pitching one of my groups in the new year. I'm picturing a game that's about low-rent crooks trying to make it big -- Tarantino-esque shenanigans in a world dripping with the trappings of comic books. Sounds like a winner to me.
Online Gaming Innovation of the Year: ROLL20 ADDS CHARACTER SHEETS
The Roll20 VTT continues to be a great way to play games online, and the addition of pre-generated character sheets -- which often look a lot like their tabletop counterparts, with dice rolling functionality added -- makes setting up a new game a whole lot easier. These guys continue to hit it out of the park with great new features.
Most Game-Able Movie of 2014 - GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY
Here was a movie that practically everyone with any sense at all loved, because it did one thing better than just about any genre movie in recent memory: it was flat-out FUN. This is something that HTHD gamers need to be reminded of, from time to time -- although we like our Serious Fun that involves tough emotional decisions and pain, sometimes it's just what the doctor ordered to embrace the fun. I've been running a Fate Accelerated game using this as inspiration, and it's been just as delightfully goofy as I hoped.
Shiny New Game We're Digging The Heck Out Of - DUNGEON WORLD
Speaking of fun, here's an Apocalypse World variant that packs pretty much everything I remember loving about classic D&D into the most efficient package possible. Like most *World games, where it really comes to life is in the unexpected turns the narrative takes based on the dice. I've been running this lately for my online game, and I recently came to the virtual "table" with about ten minutes of material, figuring my players would lead the way for the rest. And so they did, leading to an entirely satisfying (and tense!) gaming experience based entirely on *World's "something always happens" rolling mechanic.
Oddest Gaming Confection of the Year: GOLDEN SKY STORIES
As a palate cleanser after a number of fairly heavy games, this was just the thing -- a Japanese game that's about shape-changing animals helping people. No conflict, no fighting. Just friendship and kindness and a pastoral rural setting. We were less enthusiastic about the system (I would probably use a variation of either Token Effort, from Greg Stolze's great IN SPAAAACE! comedy space opera, or else the venerable but delightful TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE), but the overall gaming experience was good. A lovely reminder that games can also be satisfying when they are about the "softer" kinds of stories and emotions. More games could explore this territory. And should.
The D.B. Cooper Memorial 'One That Got Away' Award: APOCALYPSE WORLD
I was all set to run this as a follow up to GSS, but unfortunately that particular gaming group imploded before the first session. One day...! Honourable mention also to TRIBE 8, a game I've got a lot of love for, but one that I ultimately decided wouldn't be a good fit for the Saturday crew.
Not-Exactly-New Game I Dug The Hell Out Of: BLOWBACK
I'm a big fan of Burn Notice, the great rollicking spy-in-exile TV show that inspired Elizabeth Sampat to design this terrific espionage game. It captures the feel of the show better than almost any other genre adaptation I can think of, albeit with the numbers largely filed off here. She comes up with an elegant way to introduce the extended family characters that make Burn Notice so great (each player takes on a "main cast" character and a dependant character) and builds in elegant ways to place the supporting cast in peril and manage exciting spy derring-do. Great stuff.
Surprise! It's Awesome! Award: BASE RAIDERS
I've just recently been getting back into listening to a lot of podcasts, including RPPR (Role Playing Public Radio) and its sister podcast that focuses on Actual Play. That introduced me to Base Raiders, RPPR mainstay Ross Payton's game of superhero "dungeon delving". That high concept didn't really sell me initially, but when I learned the details -- this is set in a world where all the high-end superheroes and villains have vanished in some kind of cosmic Event (which would likely have 'Crisis' in the title, were it on the shelf at your local comic book store), leaving their secret bases full of weird Silver Age technology and magic secrets up for grabs. The more I thought about this, the more I loved it, and now it's something I'm thinking of pitching one of my groups in the new year. I'm picturing a game that's about low-rent crooks trying to make it big -- Tarantino-esque shenanigans in a world dripping with the trappings of comic books. Sounds like a winner to me.
Online Gaming Innovation of the Year: ROLL20 ADDS CHARACTER SHEETS
The Roll20 VTT continues to be a great way to play games online, and the addition of pre-generated character sheets -- which often look a lot like their tabletop counterparts, with dice rolling functionality added -- makes setting up a new game a whole lot easier. These guys continue to hit it out of the park with great new features.
Thursday, 11 December 2014
Quick and Dirty: FateSystem
One of the coolest things Robin Laws did with his excellent, now award-winning, design for DramaSystem was to make the parts modular: if you don't like the "procedural" rules that he includes for doing things that aren't engaging in high-stakes drama -- and, with respect to Robin, I don't -- you don't need to use them. The rules for dramatic resolution work perfectly well as an overlay on your favourite set of RPG rules, and that's a big feature for me. If the purpose is to encourage people to try out playing in a style that includes more drama, why not allow them to do that with their favourite game system? How about a little drama with your Pathfinder, or Traveller...
...or Fate?
Anyone who's read this blog before or listened to the podcast I do with my friends knows that Fate is a favourite in these parts. It hits the sweet spot in terms of tight, flexible rules that aim for narrative collaboration and heroic action. Fate fits a lot of the games we play just like a glove.
In Fate as written, you use the same set of rules to model conflicts whether they are physical or social. Indeed, using the Fate "fractal" (or, if you prefer, the "Bronze rule") you can model any number of interactions in a game using the same basic rules. That's a lot of power.
I've used Fate to run full-on social combat before, playing out pivotal interactions in a way that was, I must admit, pretty satisfying. When we talk about social combat, we're usually talking about a conflict playing out between a player character and an NPC, and you could still do that if you want in a scene where you're playing out a high-stakes argument to change a character's mind. Well and good. The most important purpose of using the DramaSystem rules for dramatic conflicts alongside Fate would be to model interactions between two player characters, however. As I've said before, something we've found after years of HTHD play is that dramatic scenes tend to happen most often between two PCs. These are the foundational conflicts and deep interactions that form the basis for our play style, and the fact that players are at the center of that has everything to do with why it is so rewarding. Like the main cast of a television show, the player characters are the ones whose stories and relationships are the most important. That's as it should be.
The dramatic resolution rules in DramaSystem are so light as to be almost non-existent, and I feel like they'd do well in terms of running a game where you often want the rules to fade into the background. That's pretty much how it goes in an HTHD game. Most of the time, you want to concentrate on the people and their problems. When you need a little crunch, you can go to the full Fate system and roll some dice. And, unlike some story gamers, I still likes my dice.
If you were to do this, I'm picturing a Fate Accelerated variant that models jobs (much the way that Jadepunk does) so that it's clear those rules are there to handle procedural stuff specifically, not social interactions. Running something closer to Fate Core would require stripping out some of the social skills. I'm not sure off the top of my head what other implications that might have.
The only part of this that demands a little thought, or perhaps some experimentation, is whether the tokens you receive for agreeing to a petition in DramaSystem could be interchangeable with Fate points on the crunchier end of things. I suppose it comes down to how much you use the two systems. If they're well-balanced, with equal parts drama and action playing out, then you probably don't need to worry about drama tokens throwing the Fate point economy out of whack. Accepting a petition might effectively become a kind of "compel", for which you get rewarded with a point as usual. It might be easier to keep them as discrete units which do their own things, on the whole, but as my friend Rob has observed, there is a lobe of the human brain that likes things tidy, dammit, and do we really need to have two different point economies side by side instead of one?
Has anybody tried this?
Sunday, 30 November 2014
Rise to the Challenge
I was talking with friend recently, one who's often been part of the best games I've run / participated in over the past few years. She was grappling with something that I think a number of gamers struggle with from time to time, on both sides of the screen, feeling the lack of challenge in her gaming life.
We all fall into our comfortable little ruts in the hobby. As a GM, we pick a particular game, or a genre, or a style of play that suits us and our players, and we keep on keepin' on. As a player, it might be a focus on a particular type of character that we keep coming back to or playing different riffs on. For some people, that's all they want out of their gaming life: the same thing that's given them pleasure and escape for many years continuing in exactly the same manner, sometimes without even the intrusion of a new rules edition to rock the boat.
And there's zero wrong with that. Pepperoni pizza is like that: even if it's not spectacular, it's still pretty good. There are very few pieces of pepperoni pizza I've walked away from feeling disappointed or filled with malaise. And sometimes what you want is the old standby.
For those of us who try to push things, sometimes it's the opposite problem: obsession with novelty. You're always looking for the shiny new thing, the new rule set, the untapped genre or character concept, the twist that will give it extra zing like a splash of sriracha on your pepperoni slice. Novelty often ends up disappointing you in the end, because few games really deliver on the promise of a new experience that's fully satisfying. Often, they have a few good ideas that are fun for a while, then become small footnotes in the accumulation of a roleplaying style.
I'm talking about deeper challenges than this sort of thing, and real challenges involve a not-inconsiderable about of soul-searching.
For a player, you have to look at your previous characters and be able to critically assess them. Why were you attracted to that character type in the first place? How did it change over play? Is there something in particular that worked, or gave you particular pleasure/satisfaction in the development of that character? What didn't work, or what things were you trying for but didn't quite stick the landing? Was there something you wanted out of the character that you veered away from in play, either because you changed your characterization in play (perhaps only to fit the game as it evolved) or because you backed away from it?
And if the character was a "type" that you come back to, again and again, why? I have a tendency to like playing both soulful tough guys and wily, philandering sneaks. I think the former is perhaps a wish-fulfillment version of myself -- everybody likes to imagine they're a classic movie hero like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood -- and the latter is a wish to be something opposite to myself. I think it's totally true that a lot of players gravitate toward certain kinds of characters to work out or explore something they can't in their day-to-day lives. If you're big and clumsy, like me, it's fun to wear the skin of someone who's small, graceful, and stylish. If you have no outlet for anger and outrage, it's fun to be someone who gets right in people's faces and lets them have it.
If you know why you're returning to the same well again and again, it's easier to know what you get out of that experience at the table and perhaps chart a different course with a new character. Maybe you figure out an angle on that "type" you've never played before, or deliberately take something opposite to your "usual" to get away from familiar things.
What were your best moments as a player? You know the ones, the character moments that still thrill you to think about them. The stories you tell again and again.
What moments fell flat?
Often, character emerges most tellingly in the deep interactions you have with other players. If you develop a character with another player in mind, as an important relationship with your character, you're going to have someone to play off of and apply pressure to you from different angles, or support you when you're backing away from the challenge that you set yourself. Open and frank conversations with your GM and the group early on can help with this too -- if the GM, in particular, knows what you're trying to get out of the game, they can provide the adversity and support you need directly.
The GM may be looking for different kinds of challenges. One might be simply trying to nail down a genre or style that they haven't been completely satisfied with in the past, or adding a new flourish to their toolbox such as more improv, more collaboration, less authorial control. Maybe you're trying to make the jump from drama-heavy tabletop to full-on freeform or LARP play. Or you might be dealing with a different challenge, such as integrating a new player into the group, or re-setting after a long break.
The process is much the same. You need to look at what you've been doing recently, and ask yourself honestly what it is you've done well, what you've done poorly or could improve at, and most of all why you run the games you do? Is there a particular kind of thrill that you get from running horror games, or tense crime dramas, or sexy romances? What are the rewards you get out of that, and is there another angle on it you haven't been able to explore? Is it played out? Is there another genre or ruleset that could help you develop some aspect of your play?
One angle of the GM challenging themselves is to ask the same kinds of questions about your players. Do you have ideas for new material that could push their game in useful ways? How will your new game satisfy their appetites as players, and how will it challenge their palates? Are there things that could improve the group as a whole, and give it new tools to work with, or is this game more about novelty and change for change's sake?
I think I'm pretty good at running games that have moments of high emotional intensity, whether that happens to be straight-up drama, high octane thrillers, or horror games. I'm most happy when my players are pushed right to the edge and can feel it crumbling underneath their feet. I could definitely do better at the mechanical parts of the gaming experience, and also at allowing my players greater latitude in pushing the game forward. Some of me will always be rooted in the "old school" way of thinking about games, where the GM is expected to entertain the players and bring a lot to the party in terms of prep and story. I have played long enough that I know the pleasures of arriving at the table with no idea what's going to happen, but I'm not convinced it's always the way to go.
What challenges have I got on my workbench? I'm interested in rehabilitating the idea of the comedy game, inasmuch as it's a genre that players seem to feel is slight or unrewarding. The current game idea I'm toying with is a bit of a Quentin Tarantino crime comedy set in the world of Ross Payton's Base Raiders. Silver Age superhero trappings meets colourful, possibly not that bright crooks engaged in high-stakes heists. I'd be borrowing broadly from both the trappings of the superhero genre and those of the Fiasco style crime-gone-horribly-awry. Marrying those two genres and finding both dramatic and comedic challenges for players is enough to keep my gears turning.
We all fall into our comfortable little ruts in the hobby. As a GM, we pick a particular game, or a genre, or a style of play that suits us and our players, and we keep on keepin' on. As a player, it might be a focus on a particular type of character that we keep coming back to or playing different riffs on. For some people, that's all they want out of their gaming life: the same thing that's given them pleasure and escape for many years continuing in exactly the same manner, sometimes without even the intrusion of a new rules edition to rock the boat.
And there's zero wrong with that. Pepperoni pizza is like that: even if it's not spectacular, it's still pretty good. There are very few pieces of pepperoni pizza I've walked away from feeling disappointed or filled with malaise. And sometimes what you want is the old standby.
For those of us who try to push things, sometimes it's the opposite problem: obsession with novelty. You're always looking for the shiny new thing, the new rule set, the untapped genre or character concept, the twist that will give it extra zing like a splash of sriracha on your pepperoni slice. Novelty often ends up disappointing you in the end, because few games really deliver on the promise of a new experience that's fully satisfying. Often, they have a few good ideas that are fun for a while, then become small footnotes in the accumulation of a roleplaying style.
I'm talking about deeper challenges than this sort of thing, and real challenges involve a not-inconsiderable about of soul-searching.
For a player, you have to look at your previous characters and be able to critically assess them. Why were you attracted to that character type in the first place? How did it change over play? Is there something in particular that worked, or gave you particular pleasure/satisfaction in the development of that character? What didn't work, or what things were you trying for but didn't quite stick the landing? Was there something you wanted out of the character that you veered away from in play, either because you changed your characterization in play (perhaps only to fit the game as it evolved) or because you backed away from it?
And if the character was a "type" that you come back to, again and again, why? I have a tendency to like playing both soulful tough guys and wily, philandering sneaks. I think the former is perhaps a wish-fulfillment version of myself -- everybody likes to imagine they're a classic movie hero like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood -- and the latter is a wish to be something opposite to myself. I think it's totally true that a lot of players gravitate toward certain kinds of characters to work out or explore something they can't in their day-to-day lives. If you're big and clumsy, like me, it's fun to wear the skin of someone who's small, graceful, and stylish. If you have no outlet for anger and outrage, it's fun to be someone who gets right in people's faces and lets them have it.
If you know why you're returning to the same well again and again, it's easier to know what you get out of that experience at the table and perhaps chart a different course with a new character. Maybe you figure out an angle on that "type" you've never played before, or deliberately take something opposite to your "usual" to get away from familiar things.
What were your best moments as a player? You know the ones, the character moments that still thrill you to think about them. The stories you tell again and again.
What moments fell flat?
Often, character emerges most tellingly in the deep interactions you have with other players. If you develop a character with another player in mind, as an important relationship with your character, you're going to have someone to play off of and apply pressure to you from different angles, or support you when you're backing away from the challenge that you set yourself. Open and frank conversations with your GM and the group early on can help with this too -- if the GM, in particular, knows what you're trying to get out of the game, they can provide the adversity and support you need directly.
The GM may be looking for different kinds of challenges. One might be simply trying to nail down a genre or style that they haven't been completely satisfied with in the past, or adding a new flourish to their toolbox such as more improv, more collaboration, less authorial control. Maybe you're trying to make the jump from drama-heavy tabletop to full-on freeform or LARP play. Or you might be dealing with a different challenge, such as integrating a new player into the group, or re-setting after a long break.
The process is much the same. You need to look at what you've been doing recently, and ask yourself honestly what it is you've done well, what you've done poorly or could improve at, and most of all why you run the games you do? Is there a particular kind of thrill that you get from running horror games, or tense crime dramas, or sexy romances? What are the rewards you get out of that, and is there another angle on it you haven't been able to explore? Is it played out? Is there another genre or ruleset that could help you develop some aspect of your play?
One angle of the GM challenging themselves is to ask the same kinds of questions about your players. Do you have ideas for new material that could push their game in useful ways? How will your new game satisfy their appetites as players, and how will it challenge their palates? Are there things that could improve the group as a whole, and give it new tools to work with, or is this game more about novelty and change for change's sake?
I think I'm pretty good at running games that have moments of high emotional intensity, whether that happens to be straight-up drama, high octane thrillers, or horror games. I'm most happy when my players are pushed right to the edge and can feel it crumbling underneath their feet. I could definitely do better at the mechanical parts of the gaming experience, and also at allowing my players greater latitude in pushing the game forward. Some of me will always be rooted in the "old school" way of thinking about games, where the GM is expected to entertain the players and bring a lot to the party in terms of prep and story. I have played long enough that I know the pleasures of arriving at the table with no idea what's going to happen, but I'm not convinced it's always the way to go.
What challenges have I got on my workbench? I'm interested in rehabilitating the idea of the comedy game, inasmuch as it's a genre that players seem to feel is slight or unrewarding. The current game idea I'm toying with is a bit of a Quentin Tarantino crime comedy set in the world of Ross Payton's Base Raiders. Silver Age superhero trappings meets colourful, possibly not that bright crooks engaged in high-stakes heists. I'd be borrowing broadly from both the trappings of the superhero genre and those of the Fiasco style crime-gone-horribly-awry. Marrying those two genres and finding both dramatic and comedic challenges for players is enough to keep my gears turning.
Wednesday, 19 November 2014
Quick and Dirty: Hacking Fate Accelerated
Getting back into running Fate Accelerated again has me thinking of other ways I could use this game system. The Approaches are a nice broad way of talking about ways that you can have characters take action, and a quick re-skin could give you an easy "in" to create themes for a particular setting.
On the bus, the other day, my brain was wandering around the idea of what it would look like for running a game focused on Game of Thrones-style court intrigue, treachery, and knives sticking out of people's backs.
The Approaches might look something like this:
Calculating (Careful)
Canny (Quick)
Cocky (Flashy)
Covert (Sneaky)
Cruel (Forceful)
Cunning (Clever)
Why all the 'C' words? No particular reason except that there are a lot of splendid ones.
I've also been toying lately with the idea of pre-defined Consequences along the line of Conditions (as they appear in the Fate Toolkit). In a game like the above, you might have social Conditions like Embarrassed, Humiliated, and Disgraced.
If we were to do away with the Stress track altogether, things could get ugly fast, with a Success with Style leading to immediate humiliation.
And if I wanted to make violence as dangerous as possible? Have physical conditions, but make them Wounded, Maimed, and Deceased.
Note: I'm trying a few different things to keep me writing in this space on a more regular basis. You may see more Quick and Dirty pieces like this, and maybe things like game reviews as well. Any ideas or requests are welcome.
On the bus, the other day, my brain was wandering around the idea of what it would look like for running a game focused on Game of Thrones-style court intrigue, treachery, and knives sticking out of people's backs.
The Approaches might look something like this:
Calculating (Careful)
Canny (Quick)
Cocky (Flashy)
Covert (Sneaky)
Cruel (Forceful)
Cunning (Clever)
Why all the 'C' words? No particular reason except that there are a lot of splendid ones.
I've also been toying lately with the idea of pre-defined Consequences along the line of Conditions (as they appear in the Fate Toolkit). In a game like the above, you might have social Conditions like Embarrassed, Humiliated, and Disgraced.
If we were to do away with the Stress track altogether, things could get ugly fast, with a Success with Style leading to immediate humiliation.
And if I wanted to make violence as dangerous as possible? Have physical conditions, but make them Wounded, Maimed, and Deceased.
Note: I'm trying a few different things to keep me writing in this space on a more regular basis. You may see more Quick and Dirty pieces like this, and maybe things like game reviews as well. Any ideas or requests are welcome.
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