The 20' By 20' Room

Edge Cases Versus Vast Territories

Posted by Jim Henley on August 31, 2006 at 10:32 PM

Immersion discussion is back, which means bad-tempered reactions to immersion are back too.

I think one of the structural problems with character-immersion discussion is that one of the easiest ways to explain the phenomenon is to give an example of a time when, in the player's subjective experience, the character stubbornly bucked "the party" or The Plot or whatever, because it's the kind of thing that throws the features of character immersion into sharp relief. But it's only one tiny part of the internal experience of the immersive player and one end of the range of relationships immersively-played PCs have with other PCs and the GM's world.

I consider myself only a fitfully immersive player, but some of my clearest "immersion moments" pointed my character in the direction of greater harmony with the play group as a whole. In Mike's great "Loose Ends" Amber campaign, I first recognized myself as "immersed" when, in mid-IC conversation with another PC, I experienced a powerful, subjective realization that "my" war with another player-character was pointless and stupid and we really ought to find some way to negotiate its end. And this was an Amber game!

My other most immersive character experience was in Nate's Over the Edge campaign of last year. In that game, first, "my" "realization" that Mo Cleveland had to leave Al Amarja and return to the National Football League was immersive. I felt it welling from within as a complete surprise. As in that Amber campaign from years before, it was the emergent outcome of in-game events that weren't remotely conceived as decision points or conflicts or whatever's cool this month.

Even though we had planned for the campaign to end within a month, I worried OOCly that the timing of Mo's decision would leave him undramatically spinning his wheels for a couple of sessions. Then immersion came to the rescue! Using my fevered brain as his tool, Mo suddenly conceived an intense ethical involvement in a caper the other two PCs had gotten up to in Mo's absence. Suddenly my PC was plugged right back into "the party." (Is it a Party if there are three of you, and all three PCs are so dumb they make the cast of Boogie Nights look like a Mensa meeting?)

None of which is to say that immersive players don't sometimes find themselves in play groups that aren't suited to constructive immersive play, or that some players don't use "immersion" as an excuse for destructive behavior. Just as some players use the sanctity of the Party as cover for their social domination of the rest of the group, some GMs use the same concept as cover for their god complexes and some whole groups reify "the Party" collectively because they're needy and it makes a nice simulacrim of a community. There are all kinds of paths to roleplaying dysfunction. There's no reason to be defensive about healthy versions of any way to play.

The Proof is in the Prince!

Posted by Jim Henley on August 31, 2006 at 09:49 PM

More real roleplaying with real children. I'm getting to this later than I thought I would so I will recount the details as best I can.

Continue reading "The Proof is in the Prince!"

Lexicon Continues To Make a Ruckus

Posted by Rob on August 29, 2006 at 08:00 AM

Yoinked directly from Allan Varney's PARANOIA XP blog, because I'm lazy like that:

A PARANOIA writer who writes under the name "WJ Maguffin" (hi, Bill!) and runs the fan site FriendComputer.net ... has undertaken another project, a Lexicon game called "Ruckusball Explained."

Lexicon, designed by Neel Krishnaswami, is a roleplaying game where players use a Wiki to collaboratively create and embroider entries on some fictitious subject. (If you followed the development of the current  PARANOIA edition, you'll recall I ran a Lexicon game set in Alpha Complex, the Toothpaste Disaster.) WJ has adapted Neel's Lexicon rules to a competitive version he calls Smacktalk. Each turn, one player gets voted off the island, and the last survivor writes an entry explaining the sad fates that befell all his competitors.

And Ruckusball? "In this game, players take on the role of retired, famous veterans of an imaginary sport called ruckusball," WJ explains. "The rules, history, and traditions of ruckusball have never been written down before, so these ruckusball champions are asked to delve deep into their memories and write down those rules and whatnot. The players will be creating the rules, history, and traditions of ruckusball as they go along."

Plans for the Next Session

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on August 28, 2006 at 11:26 AM

We've been playing a lot of Dogs in the Vineyard recently, and it's been good. (In fact, the last session we had our first unambiguously no-fooling happy ending.)  Then, this morning on rpg.net, I saw a thread about whether all games can start in media res. The thread is kind of a hairball, but I started thinking about whether it's possible to run DitV this way. At first, I thought, "Nah, the players need to learn the town before they can pass judgement", but then I realized I was wrong. So the next town is going to start with the players standing in the town square, with people on their knees pleading for their lives, and then we're going to run backwards to the moment when they ride into town.

Nobilis Hack: March for Alexander

Posted by peaseblossom on August 23, 2006 at 04:50 PM

Jere and I have been working on a Nobilis hack for his game concept (expanded here) of an army sent East by Alexander on an expedition into the unknown.  The basic format of the characters (four attributes with which the character performs miracles) will stay the same, but the names and functions of some of the attributes have changed, and the power levels have dropped.

Comments and suggestions would definitely be appreciated.

Continue reading "Nobilis Hack: March for Alexander"

GenCon Review: Agon

Posted by JonathanWalton on August 15, 2006 at 11:46 AM

So I wanna seriously review all the games I played and demo'd at GenCon, giving not just heaps of praise but also real criticism and suggestions (which hopefully will be of use to someone) as well as thoughts on recent developments in design and play. I was gonna do this on my own blog, but thought that this might be a better place, so others could offer thoughts as well. If other people want to review some of the other games before I get to them, that would be awesome.

First up, John Harper's Agon, which does everything I was planning (and failing) to do with Argonauts in a concise and clear way and then kicks it up a few notches to create something new and exciting. The book continues to surprise me as I delve into the text more. It's also hella fun to play.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term "agon" (Greek: αγών), like I was, Wikipedia informs us that it is "the ancient Greek word meaning contest or challenge" as well as in Greek comedy "a formal debate which takes place between two characters, usually with the chorus acting as the judge."

In the game, you take on the roles of ancient Greek heroes of legend, charged by the gods to perform difficult and sometimes contradictory tasks.

The basic resolution system is to roll a character's Name die (which measures their fame/power) and Ability die (from a list of various abilities) vs. either the GMs dice (which I'll discuss in a minute) or the dice rolled by another player.  In any die-rolling situation, the highest single number wins, though rolling the highest possible number on a die (a 4 on d4, 6 on d6, etc.) allows you to "explode" it up, adding a re-roll to the original value.

Mortal characters start with d6 Name, while demigods (the children of Olympians) start with d8. The size of your Name die increases as you gain more Fate, a seperate "damage" track that indicates how far your character is from their ultimate, tragic end. So demigods may start out stronger, but they burn out like rockstars. Characters gain Fate after finishing a mission, but can also gain a point to block all damage from an attack, staving off death but moving closer to their DOOM!

One of the most valuable things about Agon is how it brings the Player-versus-Player aspects of Robin Laws fantastic and understudied Rune roleplaying game to the indie community. Though Agon doesn't adopt the rotating-GM system advocated in Rune (though, thinking about it, this would be an easy option for John to mention in the text), it does have the same kind of point-based challenge creation system, whereby the GM is given limited resources to construct enemies and other obstacles for the players to fight/face. This even applies to the dice that the GM rolls in simple resolution.  The base GM die roll is 2d6, but more resource points can be spent to raise the difficulty.

The GM is actively encouraged to try to frustrate and harm the characters to the best of her ability.  But her limited resources keep this from being abusive and, besides, the characters can also take more points of Fate to stave off death (in fact, when I told John that some of the characters in our game had to accumulate some Fate during combat, John said: "Good, that means you're doing something right"). Interestingly, the GM also gains more resource points when the characters rest and rejuvenate, leading to some slight tactical choices in that regard ("Do we fight the monster now or try to heal first?").

Like another of this year's indie games, Tim Koppang's Hero's Banner, Agon is set up to be a "generational" game. Since characters are liable to meet their DOOM! after a handful of session, especially if the GM presses them hard (which seems to be what John intends), players are encouraged to create new characters once their old ones die and recieve half of their completed Quests in free dice during character creation. I'm not sure what this means for long-term Agon play, in which subsequent characters will get increasingly powerful, and whether the challange building system is currently set up to compensate for this, but I like the continuity across various characters (something that I also really excited about seeing in Shreyas Sampat's Torchbearer, once he finishes it).

One of the other major design innovations that John gives us is abstracted, symbolic miniatures combat (which, interestingly enough, is also a major feature of Kevin Allen Jr's Primitive). Extended contests ("bring down the pain") take place on an index-card divided vertically into 7 bars. Character and monster pieces are then arranged in various spaces and move around during the course of combat or another kind of extended contest (an atheletic event, a dance, social manuvering, warfare). Various weapons and abilities are best used at certain distances and, perhaps coolest of all, players are allowed to move the pieces of any player that rolls a lower "positioning" roll than they do. In our play, monsters that rolled poorly were regularly pushed around by the players to manuver them into vulnerable or less optimal positions. We thought that was pretty sweet.

One of the most inobvious mechanics is Glory, which characters gain by besting the GM's challenges. At first it seems like a simple experience system, where characters earn "advances" for every ten points of Glory they accumulate.  But players can also earn extra Glory for their characters by not just beating the GM's dice but rolling the highest of any hero in a particular task. This encourages inter-player competition and backstabbing while not explicitly setting this up with the kinds of trust mechanics that we see in Tim Kleinert's The Mountain Witch and Malcolm Craig's Cold City. Since the characters often serve different gods and the gods also want different things, this means that fights breaking out among the heroes should not be entirely uncommon.

Another neat mechanic is Oaths, which are debts other characters owe you which you can cash in to gain their aid. Characters trade Oaths before play begins, in a series of pre-game scenes reminiscent of Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard.  Oaths are also gained during play and characters can even be owed favors by the gods themselves.

There are plenty of other neat mechanics to talk about, but I wanna skip to what isn't entirely clear or precise in the current version of the game (we've already discussed most of this stuff with John Harper and he's currently considering ways to make the text more helpful in certain regards).

One of the biggest current issues is figuring out how to hurt monsters, which are invulnerable to non-magic weapons unless you've discovered their special weakness. Players can spend 5 resource points to make their weapons magical, but often only 1 or 2 heroes are likely to have enough resources left by the time they encounter the beastie, which makes the fight significantly less fun for the other players (who can aid in the battle in other ways, but aren't like to gain any Glory from it). Also, the text is pretty unclear about how to discover a creature's weakness and when you should try to do this. In our play, Thomas Robertson was expecting a kind of Shadow of the Colossus approach, where you learned a creature's weakness during combat, but that doesn't seem to necessarily be what the text intends. Some pacing guidelines, recommending that you initiate a kind of "discover/acquire the weakness" plot before the monster appears, would fix a lot of this.

Also, in our play, characters often wanted to put themselves into the gods' debt, Oath-wise, in order to gain their aid in the present. If the gods accept this bargain (and they are surely fickle and cruel, so no guarantee), there seems to be no method of recording that debt. I'm also not sure what that would mean mechanically, since the gods can already command the allegiance of heroes without needing to call in Oaths.

All in all, though, Agon was probably my favorite game of the con so far (though I haven't digested or played through all my other spoils yet) and John Harper is even more impressive for having completed the entire game in two months. Props to John for being a brilliant madman.  Oh yeah, and you can get the game for $20 from the man himself. Worth every penny.

The Adventures of Cheese and Rose

Posted by Jim Henley on August 14, 2006 at 11:47 PM

All you talk about is roleplaying with your kids, Jim!

Uh, yeah. And this is more of it.

I don't want the mashup and so-far fragmentary gender discussion (fragmentary on my part) to utterly dominate consideration of Clinton's cool new game for parents and kids. So this thread will be the actual-play-in-progress thread for our campaign.

Continue reading "The Adventures of Cheese and Rose"

Who Won the Indie RPG Awards?

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on August 14, 2006 at 04:13 PM

Just like the title says: can anyone who was at GenCon let us know who won?

EDIT: And we have an answer: the list of winners (thanks Troy!)

An Eminently Predictable Conversation

Posted by Jim Henley on August 13, 2006 at 10:23 PM

Held while making Princes' Kingdom characters with my kids tonight.

Father: Okay, the first thing we do is create the Prince you want to play.

Daughter: I want to play a Princess!

Father: In this game, boys and girls are both called "princes."

Daughter: I want to play a Princess!

Father: Okay.

Can't - Leave - Well Enough - ALONE!

Posted by Jim Henley on August 13, 2006 at 06:20 PM

So I'm sitting here with my copy of The Princes' Kingdom, Clinton R. Nixon's new kid-friendly roleplaying game, that I plucked from Clinton's own hands outside the dealer rooms at Gencon Indy Thursday morning. (The Henley Family was on its way from here to there and Indy was between those places; we had enough time to stop at the con but not enough time to attend.) I'll have more to say about the game as a game for kids&parents, and as a game for new gamers, later on. For now, I'm obsessing over an adult-oriented mashup. A couple of excerpts about and from the game first:

The Princes' Kingdom is a game in which you and your friends act out the adventures of children in faraway lands. These lands are all across an ancient ocean, and are all ruled by a wise king. You play the king's children, princes, sent out to explore the kingdom and help out the citizens. The kingdom is very large, made up of hundreds of islands, and so the king sends out his princes to survey it and find out what sort of problems people have across the lands, so that they may one day be wise rulers themselves.

Inside the game itself we learn that . . .

You grew up seeing your father each day. He wore a crown of shining gold, but he took that off when he played with you. He could be soft and caring, and he could wipe away your tears with his big golden beard when you fell and skinned your knee. He could be hard and stern when he caught you lying or doing something that hurt someone else. Most of all, he told you stories about being a boy and about being a king and how to do both.

Now he’s told you that you have to go be a leader. You have to travel throughout his kingdom and make sure that the people are doing well. You are his son, the prince, and it is up to you to know what the people need and make sure they get it. When you travel out in the world, you speak for the king! That’s a big responsibility.

All princes sent out into the world are between five and twelve
years old. When you turn thirteen, you go back to the king’s castle
and become an adult and help the king rule the land! Maybe you’ll
even be the new king!

So the princes go off and do the Dogs in the Vineyard thing, sailing from island to island instead of riding from town to town and putting things right. Until 13. Character death is theoretically possible, and you're told you can make a new prince if your last prince has had his thirteenth birthday, because, "The king has a lot of sons!"

Like I say, this is a game for parents to play with kids. It's not trying for realism or to tap the darker currents of princely ambition. But first I thought, "so who does get to take over when the old guy kicks?" and then I thought, "A couple of very simple changes will make those island encounters feel entirely different, no?" Like in Dogs, suppose all the Dogs knew that one day, exactly one of them would get to take over the Prophets and Ancients in Bridal Falls City. That's when I realized that Princes' Kingdom was just waiting to become a kickass "Lil' Amber" game! Just name the King with the big golden beard "Oberon." Slicing and dicing some sentences from the background chapters we get:

Princes in Shadow

You are a prince of Amber. You were raised in the royal court and had teachers from a young age. Many days, they took you out and taught you how to read and write and how to do math and read maps and ride horses. They probably taught you how to defend yourself in a fight. Most of all, they tried to teach you be a good leader, because someday, you [may] lead the kingdom.

Amber is the only real place, but your family rules Infinite Shadow, which spreads out as far as a person can see and farther! The king’s castle is on a large island in the middle of an even larger ocean. The closest and most important shadows are called the Golden Circle. There are people whose entire job is to run boats through the ocean to move goods and people along the shadow paths.

There is no telling what all lies out there in Shadow. It is grand and old, and legends abound. The sad part is that the Golden Circle is so big and spread out that sometimes problems exist that the king doesn’t know about. This is where you will do good work! Because the king can’t be everywhere, you get to go and solve problems where he cannot. He will not be able to come and save you, because it takes a long time to ply the Shadow paths.

All princes sent out into the world are between five and twelve years old.  When you turn thirteen, you go back to the king’s castle and become an  adult by walking the Pattern, the source of Amber's power and reality in Castle Amber's basement! Maybe you’ll even be the new king!

Or maybe one of your many siblings will . . .

The shadows ("Islands") should still be set up with genuine moral problems for the princes to solve. But each prince will also have an explicit if varying concern for how solving these problems advantages or disadvantages him in the eventual succession, even at ages five to twelve . . .

(I use "prince" advisedly. There are gender issues we need to talk about with this game when I do a proper review.)

Pocket Monster Summer Camp

Posted by Jim Henley on August 3, 2006 at 10:43 PM

I played a roleplaying game with my kids and it was awesome.

Continue reading "Pocket Monster Summer Camp"