The 20' By 20' Room

A Brief Comment About Race Metaphors in RPGs

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on October 26, 2006 at 03:25 PM

I've started playing in a Shadowrun game run by one of my friends, and it is good.

There is one really icky-creepy thing we've found in the setting, though. So, the Shadowrun setting uses orks as a stand-in for blacks, so that you can put a little distance from real life when you make stories about racism. By itself, this is a fine idea -- that's basically one of the motors that makes Star Trek go. Unfortunately, this idea goes really haywire when you look at the mechanics for orks. Ork characters take penalties to their intelligence, give birth in litters, and so on, straightforwardly reifiying racist stereotypes about black people.

Ick.

I don't have much more to say, except "don't do this."

EDIT: I guess I do have one more thing to say -- read the comments! They are a graphic illustration of how the responses to a post can be miles better than the initial post. Awesome job, folks!

Push Vol. I is out!

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on July 29, 2006 at 04:11 PM

Inexplicably, our own Jonathan Walton has forgotten to announce here that Volume I of Push is now available for sale. Push is a journal of roleplaying criticism he edits, in the style of the long-ago Interactive Fantasy. And not only does it have lots of intelligent criticism from smart people, it also has two complete experimental roleplaying games!

Analyzing Process

Posted by Jere on May 21, 2006 at 09:53 PM

Rob has been toying with my throughts about process design of a game. He's got some fascinating stuff that I recommend folks take a look at.

Continue reading "Analyzing Process"

Summative Evaluation

Posted by Jere on May 5, 2006 at 08:43 PM

Many gamers believe they understand their gaming processes, well until a problem that occurs that causes stress in their game, maybe even for it to fly apart. However, a continual evaluative process, often called summative evaluation can really help out a game. I’m currently going through this process for Tantaene Animis Caelestibus Irae, and I’ll be honest, it is not easy. Here are some of my lessons learned so far.

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Formative Evaluation of Mechanics

Posted by Jere on May 2, 2006 at 12:04 PM

Neel had asked what sort of formative evaluation I recommend for mechanics. Here’s the process I tend to try to follow.

Continue reading "Formative Evaluation of Mechanics"

Thoughts on Mechanics

Posted by Jere on April 21, 2006 at 09:49 AM

Continuing my gaming as process series of threads today I’m going to discuss mechanics.

Continue reading "Thoughts on Mechanics"

Recruiting Gamers

Posted by Jere on April 14, 2006 at 01:11 PM

Recruiting gamers is something that we spend a lot of time discussing. If you want to run a game you need folks to be interested and motivated in joining. Like everyone I’ve tried just about everything, some of it has worked and some hasn’t. In this post I’m going to discuss what I think is happening when I go out recruiting.

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Evaluating Play formatively

Posted by Jere on April 11, 2006 at 12:42 PM

In Game Design as Process I presented a process flow that had a lot of dotted lines from play abck to the earlier design steps. I strongly believe there are a variety of ways that play chanegs the campaign as you go. I have a lot of fuzzy ideas in my mind about theory, but I think I'll start talking about one of the tools I've found useful.

Continue reading "Evaluating Play formatively"

More about Nine Worlds

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on April 10, 2006 at 07:32 PM

This is a report about our latest session of Nine Worlds.

Continue reading "More about Nine Worlds"

Game design as Process

Posted by Jere on April 10, 2006 at 03:36 PM

Perhaps the most critical event in playing a game is identifying the goals of the game. If done improperly, even elegant mechanics or fully realized characters may not serve the group’s or the player’s real needs. Without accurate goals the mechanics chosen or designed run the risk of offering solutions for which needs do not really exist. There are many ways to identify these goals; I’m just going to discuss the method I use.

Continue reading "Game design as Process"

Fictions of Every Stripe

Posted by Jim Henley on February 19, 2006 at 08:25 PM

Rob Donoghue is my god:

People invest in fictions of every stripe, whether it's character identification, a narrative or a political process. That one's pretty much a baseline, and if someone wants to say "This fake thing you care about is less valid than this fake thing I care about" well, that's just asking for trouble. So questions of mental masturbation are just nothing I can ever take that seriously. I have already bought into the value of play, and things build from there.

UPDATE 2/22/06: I discover it's crucial to point out that the word "fun" nowhere appears in the quoted passage. That's important. Please carry on.

Continue reading "Fictions of Every Stripe"

Art? Sure, But What KIND?

Posted by Jim Henley on February 19, 2006 at 04:04 PM

In a fascinating thread about "Amber" as a system over on Adam Dray's blog, I decided my own tentative answer to the "is game design an art or not?" question - the real question is, what kind of art. I'd say, It's like architecture more than, say, painting. Architecture is an esthetic endeavor, but it's also a technical one. There are facts of the matter, often reducible to numbers. When Frank Lloyd Wright was building Fallingwater, it wasn't just a question of whether it would be "beautiful"; it was a question whether the thing would stand up. Edgar Kaufmann, Sr., Wright's friend and patron, feared that the architects untried system of cantilevering plain wouldn't work. (It did.)

Similarly, it's possible for a game design to be objectively "non-functional." The text may promise heroic action, but the mechanics make the predominant play experience the failure to perform even simple tasks. And so on.

But past the level of basic function, we're in the realm of esthetics, aka taste. Is Fallingwater beautiful? I think so. Some might find it too solid and dark, too much like huddling under an overhang. Would you want to live there? Answers will vary. Similarly with games. Dungeons & Dragons 3.x seems to "work." Do you want to do what it helps you do? Maybe you do. I don't, quite.

Game design is the building: play is the lives we live in it.

That's my story for today anyway.

Continue reading "Art? Sure, But What KIND?"

The Court of the Empress: Playtest Report

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on February 12, 2006 at 11:15 PM

Last night we were missing one of Nine Worlds players, so we playtested The Court of the Empress.

Short version: The sucker works, pretty much exactly the way I hoped it would.

Longer version:

We ran the game three times, with three different players playing the Empress. Each game ran for three rounds, with three (one time, four) players playing courtiers.

At the start of the session, I wrote all of the key phrases on a blackboard, so that we could easily have them all in one place. This was Alex's idea, and it was very good.

The first time through, I played the Empress, and the other three players played the courtiers. We were feeling our way a little, and I deliberately limited myself to one death per cycle (the minimum pace) to ensure that I could hit all of the mechanical bits. Laura joined for the last round of my my turn playing the Empress. I asked the players what their favorite play was, and Alex managed a fantastic save against Laura after she totally proved he was unfit to live -- he pointed out that her condemnation of him revealed a familiarity with a banned play (which had gotten Nick's courtier killed).

The second run was with Alex. He has a tendency to undercut himself in conversation, so he had to stretch himself a bit in order to be properly imperious and demanding. And he did get better as we played more rounds. He was also responsible for my funniest death; I played a strongman visiting the court, and I tried to impress him by lifting men on my shoulders. He ordered imperial guardsmen leap onto my back until I couldn't bear any more weight, and then had me killed for lying when I boasted I could bear the whole court on my shoulders. My gasping, gurgling death was a hit.

There was another neat round when Alex started executing courtiers for saying inadvertently sexist things. Laura then picked up on it, and they had a wonderful back-and-forth before Alex had her PC executed too. I was very happy to see that come up, because I made the Empress female and the courtiers male on purpose. Basically, the setting evokes a decadent, antique past, and that makes it really easy and tempting for your narration -- which has to fit that flavor -- to fall into using sexist tropes. That is likely to piss off the Empress, who then kills your character. So the courtier players are put just a little more off-balance.

Alex thought that he thought that the point total for a successful favor might be a bit too high. I don't know if I agree, but there's surely no harm in knocking the reward down to 4.

On the last run, Laura ran. She was a wicked awesome Empress; she was heartless, fickle and unpredictable, and gleefully killed off her courtiers -- her first act was to kill us all on the first round, just to let us know she meant business. At the same time, she still showed off enough consistency that you were sure that if you hit just the right mix of mature self-respect and sycophantic flattery you could live. I died immediately in the first round, lasted a second cycle into the second ("that makes sense, but I just don't like you!"), and just barely won the third -- in the last one, she demanded that I convince her why she shouldn't reward me in order to receive a reward, which is just a wonderfully cruel demand. I was successful, so she decided that I receive nothing!

Nick also had a hilarious run as the representative of the island nation of Canada, which he reported had been defeated by the Imperial Armada in under two minutes of battle. He had all of the players cracking up, including both Canadians at the table.

Each a round of play tended to take somewhere between five and fifteen minutes of play, with 3 or 4 players. Laura observed that the rounds took longer each time through each time, because the players got noticeably better at figuring out what kinds of sycophantic flattery worked.

We did have a rules mix-up in the last round of play. Laura couldn't decide whether to kill my character or Alex's, and had us compete. She had forgotten she could kill us both, and the competition between Alex and me meant that Nick didn't get to talk as much. Moral: turn taking works, and messing with it can sideline a player for too long. Another thing I liked was the rule against table talk during a round. This had two big benefits. First, the rounds went by much more quickly, and second, the fact that one person had the stage at a time meant that they could go further without interruption, which meant that they were usually much funnier.

The whole thing -- 3 Empresses running 3 rounds each -- took two and a half hours, with around 90 minutes spent actually in the round structure. The rest of it was spent in table talk and general social chatg works, and messing with it can sideline a player for too long. Another thing I liked was the rule against table talk during a round. This had two big benefits. First, the rounds went by much more quickly, and second, the fact that one person had the stage at a time meant that they could go further without interruption, which meant that they were usually much funnier.

The whole thing -- 3 Empresses running 3 rounds each -- took two and a half hours, with around 90 minutes spent actually in the round structure. The rest of it was spent in table talk and general social chat.

Myers, Briggs and Gygax

Posted by Jim Henley on December 3, 2005 at 10:44 PM

Brand Robins has a superb blog entry applying Myers-Briggs typology to gaming. His crucial innovation is to find the all-important "interface level" between the personality type of the player and the personality type of the character - the personality type the player brings to bear on the game itself. It immediately struck me as relevant to the discussions among Ginger, Neel, me and others here about "develop-in-play" and "aerobic narrativism" - and even formal mechanics versus informal social "system." A few comment threads ago I said that to me, formal mechanical "support" for character personality development seemed like a very "left-brained approach to right-brained phenomena," and Brand's schema formalizes that intuition, and the gestating distinction between "aerobic" and "anaerobic" gaming.

Anyone who reads this blog knows I: don't shy from judgment; and, I have no feelings. So I'd be a TJ in life. I'll own that. But if you type my approach to gaming, it will come out differently. Brand explains how that could be. I think a lot of our recent comment threads here have amounted to gamer-*SFPs trying to explain their values to *NTJs. See Brand's Pressure and Flow distinctions. I think the "S" and "P" are the crucial markers of aerobic roleplay, narrativist or otherwise.

UPDATE TO ADD: What this means is that very formal, very frontloaded, tightly targetted designs work very well for the sorts of people they work for, and not so much for the sorts of people for whom they don't. And informal, emergent informal play works very well for the sorts of people it works for, and poorly for the sorts of people for whom it doesn't. This seems banal, and I suppose if everybody really internalized the different people like different kinds of gaming principle it would be.

Developing Stories Through Play

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on November 28, 2005 at 11:00 PM

In that giant comment thread down below, Landon Darkwood writes:

Here's the reason why I'm so curious about the kind of mostly-DIP Narrativism Ginger's talking about - it strikes me that in order for it to work, lots of things have to happen purely by instinct or "feel" with little real grounding in procedural technique. The GM of such a game has to "just know" what kinds of decisions are going to be considered low-pressure for those characters from the perspective of Premise, because I'm assuming that the initial content of a game like this has something slightly more engaging than roleplaying their trips to the supermarket. The player has to "just get" those initial decisions as existing more for discovery than for Premise-addressing. The GM has to "just know" when a character is ripe for a hard thematic decision and push. All participants have to deal with what happens when the characters reach that state of "ripeness" at different times.

It's actually fairly straightforward to run these games, and you don't need to "just know" anything, any more than is normal in playing an RPG.

The best way I know to describe how to do this comes from Keith Johnstone's guide to storytelling in his book Impro. His model of stories is incredibly simple, consisting of exactly two pieces: breaking routines and reincorporation. (ObPlug: Pete Darby's Daedalus article on Johnstone.)

A moment of dramatic action in a story happens when some routine of action or pre-existing equilibrium gets broken. Hamlet opens with Hamlet in a pattern of brooding and grieving, which gets disrupted when the old king's ghost shows up and demands that his son take vengeance for his murder. Boom! A familiar situation is destabilized and thrown into chaos. Each time you break a routine, you raise the level of dramatic tension because something that shouldn't have happened, did happen, and the consequences of that are going to be unexpected and interesting. Now, you keep going, and soon you find yourself in a new routine -- a new equilibrium -- which you can break again. Keep doing this and you keep raising the level of dramatic tension.

Now, if you just keep breaking the routines that get successively established, sooner or later you're going to build up a ludicrous pile of messiness, like in the later seasons of The X-Files. This brings us to the other technique, reincorporation. Breaking routines creates dramatic tension, and you can resolve that tension when you take hold of some stuff you've created before, and aren't currently using, and put it back into play to resolve the current disruption. This links what's happening now with what happened before, which creates the unity of action which causes dramatic closure. And when everything used so far has been used up in re-establishing disrupted routines or creating new ones, you've finished the story.

Think of this as kind of an empirical application of Chekhov's rule: if you improvise a gun in the first scene, hold off on firing it until a) it's no longer in the forefront of anyone's imagination, and b) it solves a problem that is in the forefront. Then everyone will go a-ha! and the narrative will seem far more organic and planned than it "really" is.

I think that KJ actually cheats just a little; there are actually three techniques the players need to do. The third thing is establishing routines, so that they can get broken later. And like everything else, you can improvise this, too -- just keep doing the "same" things. And when it comes time to break a routine, you can even look back at what you've done and retroactively identify what the sameness you're disrupting is.

This very neatly describes Jim's experience with Mo. He started with a character who had taken a dramatic action: leaving the NFL to find himself on Al Amarja. Then, stuff happened. This stuff wasn't directly pointed at Mo's dramatic necessities, but that's okay -- it was establishing a routine, each bit of which was presumably saying something like "Mo messes with occult weirdos". And then, when Jim has Mo talk to the girl and articulate to himself that all the magicians he's dealt with claim special knowledge but still act exactly like the same old self-interested blowhards and posers he's found everywhere else, Jim realizes he's done two very important things. First, the routine of seeking after transcendence has been disrupted by that realization, and second, because he re-incorporates all the magic with the idea that none of it fundamentally matters, Mo's story is done -- he doesn't care about any of the magic whatsits anymore, and the rest of the action is denouement.

Observe that you don't need to know what the premise is ahead of time, as long as the structure and the pacing of the action is good. The routine-breaking/reincorporation rhythym gives you a heartbeat or  to your play, which is fun on its own, and actually creates lots more "stuff" than you can possibly ever hope to use up and bring closure to. But when you find your premise, you realize what stuff is and isn't important, and then you can take action which brings closure to everything important. This ties in to the idea of story-as-picaresque: lots of stuff happens, and the story is learning to see what is and isn't important, and doing something about it.

When Ginger, Jim or Bruce say they want to start the game off slowly, and wanting to spend some discovering the characters and the setting, what I read them as saying is that they want to establish some routines and give them some substance and heft through play before they start breaking them. That's a completely reasonable thing to want: it won't seem amazing to give a hobbit the One Ring unless you've already established that they're a race of three-foot tall Chestertonian Little Englanders.

Seven and Seven (And Seven? And . . . ?)

Posted by Jim Henley on November 24, 2005 at 02:33 PM

In comments downblog, endless font of material Mr. Bruce Baugh directs us to the classic psychology paper, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information, by George A. Miller. My suspicion is that the terra incongita for game design to map comes toward the end:

It is a little dramatic to watch a person get 40 binary digits in a row and then repeat them back without error. However, if you think of this merely as [p. 95] a mnemonic trick for extending the memory span, you will miss the more important point that is implicit in nearly all such mnemonic devices. The point is that recoding is an extremely powerful weapon for increasing the amount of information that we can deal with. In one form or another we use recoding constantly in our daily behavior . . .

The inaccuracy of the testimony of eyewitnesses is well known in legal psychology, but the distortions of testimony are not random - they follow naturally from the particular recoding that the witness used, and the particular recoding he used depends upon his whole life history. Our language is tremendously useful for repackaging material into a few chunks rich in information.

Recoding allows people to increase the absolute amount of information they can "apprehend" and communicate. Earlier in the paper, Miller shows that increasing the dimensionality of information increases the number of bits that one can usefully transmit/recall, though not as much as one would expect a priori. Bruce referenced a couple of games that put about seven "things" on a character sheet - Over the Edge and Everway - but the article implies that games can successfully create more information about a character IF players can recode that info into sensible chunks.

Classic D&D, frex, has six attributes, a class and a level. That's 8 things, but at least three dimensions. Classic D&D further encodes information such as Armor Class, Bonus-to-Hit, weapon name and damage, saving throws etc. D&D3.x layers on feats and skills. There are equipment lists. It's all too much for me, personally - when I think of dungeoneering-type play I look longingly at Castles & Crusades or the Fantasy Trip - and from what I can tell D&D is a game nobody can play without constant reference to a character sheet. (Contrariwise, when I was playing Amber I realized at one point that I had gone 18 months without looking at mine. I had my four attributes and couple of powers in my memory, and that was all I needed.) But one has to figure D&D players are recoding enough information to have a gestalt sense of their PCs.

It's been a long time since I looked at Hero, but I'm familiar with the claims of its champions (as it were) that once you get through chargen it's smooth enough to play, and I wonder if what they mean is that all the info recodes into few enough secondary attributes and powers that one gets a usable gestalt.

My personal prejudices are that I'd prefer any game I play not have more than about a dozen "chunks" (in Miller's term) for me to keep track of, and that I prize character chunk-optimization over completeness in a resolution system. IOW, if I have to keep track of three more things to get your idea of a more accurate combat system, or more layered social resolution system, no thanks.

This must be highly variable. But I wonder if there are classes of recoding styles that go hand in hand with certain play preferences. If so, designers could plan for optimal recoding by their optimal audience. This probably happens informally anyway. Is it possible to make it more of a science?

To the Land of Sudden Metaphors

Posted by Jim Henley on November 23, 2005 at 10:48 AM

Reading Mr Baugh's comment below

Sometimes I've done well starting with the shock, but usually I do better with that foundation unless the character is by design generic or archetypal in some key ways.

in the context of the last couple days' discussion on immersion, DIP, kickers, bangs and frontloading, and suddenly I'm thinking:

Aerobic gaming vs. anaerobic gaming. Athletic metaphors may be a hard sell in gamer culture but, hm.

Agency: A Brief Sketch

Posted by JonathanWalton on October 19, 2005 at 09:58 PM

Here’s my first significant attempt at an idea that’s been bothering me for quite a while now.  I’ve been frustrated by designers’ attempts to hide the secrets of how best to play their games from readers, forcing people to stumble upon the intended methods during actual play, if they discover them at all.

The World is Not Enough

Most games explain setting and system, character creation and combat, and then end with a statement along the lines of “Now you’re ready to play!  Have fun!”  At this point, new players, who lack experience in how begin play, reasonably ask, “That’s great, but where do we start?”  The options are too numerous, obscuring a good choice.  This often happens with more experienced players as well, especially when encountering a new game with unusual requirements or one that encourages a style of play that is unfamiliar.  The empty optimism of most game texts, proclaiming “the possibilities are endless” and “you are limited only by your imagination,” is rather unhelpful in this regard.

What you need is not empty encouragement but concrete knowledge.  Traditionally, this knowledge was all learned by trial-and-error or passed along by experienced players.  This method of transmission is semi-functional for relatively common games like Dungeons & Dragons, Vampire, and even GURPS, where you can expect the existing player base to have a hand in teaching the next generation.  But, when this doesn’t happen, it is quite likely that different groups will play the same game in categorically different ways, ways that go quite beyond the amount of divergence normally encountered.  Ron Edwards and several others have written about how various “versions” of Dungeons and Dragons developed in the 70’s when isolated groups did their best to figure out how to play, using an often vague and incomplete set of guidelines. 

While this may have done a great deal to encourage the development of game design (individual groups filling out the rules with their own creations) and give players a sense of personalized ownership over the game, this tradition of incompleteness and customization, which is very much alive and well in current roleplaying design, doesn’t help people learn how to play.  The game text covers preparing for play quite thoroughly, and, consequently, there are many roleplayers who spend a large part of their time preparing for play that never happens.  The texts assume (intentionally or not) that preparing for play is all you really need to do.  Learning how to play, then, is the task of experience (trial-and-error) or instruction (experienced players).

However, it seems to me that the lack of player agency is not helpful to independent roleplaying games and, in the long run, not good for mainstream roleplaying either. 

Indie games, with their limited player base, should not rely on experienced players teaching the inexperienced how to play.  You might think this is obvious, but the easy access of the Internet is a new threat.  If I have a question about Dogs in the Vineyard or My Life with Master, I just have to send an email to Vincent Baker or Paul Czege or post a message on a prominent bulletin board.  Experience will come to my aid.  This can lead (not that I’m accusing Vincent or Paul of this, necessarily) to laziness in design and writing.  When a wealth of experience and additional information is readily available online, the amount of information that a game text has to explain is minimized.  This should not, however, become a crutch for designers.  Games that require additional explanation and searching online have given themselves higher requirements for play, additional barriers that keep them from being enjoyed “out of the box,” and that may limit their audience and the amount of play they see.

Secondly, trial-and-error is not a friend to indie games.  My initial experiences with a whole host of indie games (including Continuum, Nobilis, Universalis, My Life with Master, Dogs in the Vineyard, Primetime Adventures, and Polaris) were filled with double helpings of my own mistakes and those of my fellow players, sometimes because I had ignored certain rules or guidelines (not the game’s responsibility), but also sometimes because I simply wasn’t told how to play.  In most indie games, players cannot simply rely on the instincts that they’ve honed through years of roleplaying.  Often, these instincts will be totally inappropriate for the new style of play the game seeks to create.  Mistakes, then, can be unusually prominent and harmful to enjoyable play.  Many of the mistakes I made during early play of the games above resulted in play being suspended, unenjoyable, or just significantly less fun.

Agency

I’d like to talk about agency, an idea I first encountered in contemporary Native American Studies, when scholars began to speak of changing the way Native Americans were written about in history books, seeing their annihilation not as something inevitable and tragic, but a complex series of millions upon millions of choices made by Native Americans, Euro-Americans, and African-Americans.

Now, it may seem that players already have the power of choice.  Roleplaying offers infinite freedom to create whatever your mind can concoct, but freedom and true agency are two different things.

Agency, in this context, is the ability to play a game intentionally, efficiently, and with significance.  Don’t think of these as new jargon (God forbid!) but as an application of the words’ existing meanings to games.  This is description, not an attempt to be definitive.

1) Intentionality is knowing your options, weighing them, and then making a choice.
2) Efficiency is making the best use of the resources you have to achieve your goals.
3) Significance is being able to influence the current situation and create real change, within the context of other people’s choices.

Players are unable to play intentionally when they do not have enough information to make a decision, when they are not aware of all options, or when they are not allowed to make a choice.  I can think of many situations where this happens, especially when only some of the players are familiar with the published roleplaying texts that the game is supposedly based on.  You hear such players say “Can I do X?” a lot or hear more experienced players telling less experienced ones how best to handle certain situations.  Which leads us to…

Players are unable to play efficiently when they don’t know how best to maximize their potential to achieve their goals.  Consider the process of character creation, which, in my Rifts fanboy days (and I gather the situation is similar in D&D), required a fair bit of “secret knowledge” in order to create a competent character who was likely to survive a typical adventure and not embarrass the player who created them.  In Rifts, if you didn’t take critical skills like “Stealth” or be sure to upgrade to “Hand to Hand: Martial Arts,” you would only regret it later on.  Combat or social tactics work similarly, even when players are familiar with the rules.  Obviously experience helps tremendously, but a large part of it is simply knowing how to play your cards, so to speak, having some idea of what you should be doing in order to achieve X.

Players actions lack significance when they don’t seem to make a difference in the direction of the game, whether because the other players reject their suggestions, or because they are accepted, glossed over and never become a central part of what play is about.  It’s okay to play Robin to someone else’s Batman, as long as Robin matters to the story.  If game play could more or less occur exactly the same with or without your participation, you’re lacking in significance.  This last component of agency is traditionally not something that game designers have really worried over, leaving it up to the players to make sure that everyone manages to have some say in things.  However, it is a growing area of design interest (see Dogs in the Vineyard, Primetime Adventures, Polaris, etc.)

The Point

This is obviously just a brief sketch of a concern of mine, but the point is that it’s not bad to let people know what they should be doing in order to achieve effective play.  These are not some design secrets that you need to horde like the recipe for Secret Sauce. You don’t have to make them stumble around in the dark and figure it out on their own. 

And telling people, “Do whatever you want!” is (almost always) extremely unhelpful.  Too many choices is no choice at all.

Borgstrom: Structure and Meaning in RPG Design

Posted by JonathanWalton on October 18, 2005 at 02:09 PM

Rebecca Borgstrom, hero of my heart, has written a fascinating dissection of her work on Exalted: The Fair Folk that attempts to say some pretty spiffy things about roleplaying. Anybody who gives a flying fig should read it (HERE) and give her brilliant comments and suggestions (HERE), because that would be beautiful and delicious. Thank you.

[P.S. Jonathan "I'm Gonna Publish Soon, Promise" Walton and Clinton "I Built the Forge" Nixon are now going to be bringing the pain from North Kacka-Lacky straight to y'all here at 20x20. Be afraid.]

John Kirk's Design Patterns of Successful Roleplaying Games

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on September 30, 2005 at 08:32 PM

John Kirk has written a book, Design Patterns of Successful Roleplaying Games, in which he tries to catalogue successful game mechanics, why they work, and when (and when not) to use them. Design patterns are a communication tool from software development -- the idea is that successful projects will tend to have recurring patterns, and that by naming and describing them and the situations that call for their use, we can make it easier to turn tacit, experiential knowledge into a teachable skill.

This is not a review of the book, since I've just started reading it. I'll post that in the comment section, and I encourage everyone else to post their thoughts their as well.

Heroquest and beyond

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on September 18, 2005 at 11:33 PM

This post is a reaction to one tiny part of a post by Matt Snyder (read the whole thing for its own sake -- I'm going off on a tangent).

Continue reading "Heroquest and beyond"

In Soviet Russia, the game plays you

Posted by Jere on July 21, 2005 at 11:04 AM

This a guest post from Peaseblossom.

I mentioned in Ginger Stampley’s thread (Playing to a Different Drummer) that I wanted to see more discussion about gm/play styles and why and how and under what circumstances they work. I thought I’d put my money where my mouth is and get one started.

Continue reading "In Soviet Russia, the game plays you"

Playing to a Different Drummer

Posted by Ginger Stampley on July 20, 2005 at 11:00 AM

Everybody who reads the Forge has probably already looked at these two threads: [In Nomine] Trailblazing ain't so much fun after bass playing and Discussion with my GMing Mentor. They're particularly good, even for those not immersed in Forgespeak (the terms in the title of the first article come from this article in Places to Go, People to Be).

These two threads have been particularly interesting to me in light of things happening in House of Cards over the last year. That's about the length of time I've been exposed to heavy Forgespeak, mostly because of Dogs in the Vineyard, which I've been watching since Vincent was just developing it in his journal. I've pushed back a lot of responsibility on my players, and watched some of them take to it like ducks to water, while others have made it clear they prefer the GMs to take a stronger hand in leading their plots.

As people have commented in the threads, the two kinds of players exercise different GM muscles. I'm enjoying GMing for both groups. By Forge/indie standards, I'm sure I use too much control with the bass-playing group, but you have to keep close to the beat with a large crowd. That's one reason you need small groups (compared to, say, D&D, which works well with a lot of players for tactical reasons) for a lot of indie games: the smaller groups make it possible to add a lot without somebody having to do a lot of refereeing of creative input.

I Have Wrongbadfun Playing Amber. Ask Me How!

Posted by Ginger Stampley on July 13, 2005 at 08:57 AM

I've been mulling this post of Vincent's on setting and source material as it fits Amber for some long time now. There are a lot of things I could say about House of Cards, my own PBeM, and how it criticizes certain aspects of Zelazny's writing. But I came to a conclusion this morning about our Amber: in some ways, it's less of a critical approach to Zelazny than it is a critical approach to the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game and the approach of some parts of the "Amber gaming community" to how you should play Amber.

Continue reading "I Have Wrongbadfun Playing Amber. Ask Me How!"

The Value of Verisimilitude

Posted by Ginger Stampley on May 11, 2005 at 09:45 AM

I've run across a couple of situations recently in various games, including my own PBeM, where it seems like people were unhappy because something happened in a way they didn't expect. What it seemed to boil down to was "I didn't understand [the world] worked that way" with the implication that either the GM should let the player roll the action back or that the world should be changed. The former course of action doesn't interest me as a matter of theory. But the argument that the world should be changed absolutely does.

Continue reading "The Value of Verisimilitude"

Running Regular-Folks Games

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on May 1, 2005 at 12:44 PM

So, in the comments to Matt's post on "ordinary" characters", there was a thread where Andy talked about his weekend, and Matt replied:

And avoiding a dinner party! Ooh, social conflict!

In my judgement, this is not just wrong, but the single most deadly fallacy -- call it the naturalism fallacy -- upon which many a "regular folks" game has foundered.

Continue reading "Running Regular-Folks Games"

Dungeon Majesty: PTA Postmortem, Part I

Posted by Bryant on March 29, 2005 at 03:43 PM

Hey, we finished our Primetime Adventures campaign! It was an interesting experience, both because it was the most meta campaign I've ever played and because the system was so novel.

I have, oh, a whole passle of things to contemplate about the game. I dunno how many of them will make decent posts. (No, the answer is not "none," you there in the back. Hush now.) The thing that really hit me about halfway through, though, was a relevation about the whole "Primetime Adventures makes better friends" claim. I was skeptical about that one. I'd like to deskeptic.

The thing is, there's some powerful operant conditioning going on here. It goes like this: when a player does something that the other players like, their character becomes more effective. And not just a little more effective; fan mail dice are vital to winning conflicts. Please other players: become more effective. Mmm, good.

It's also the case that it's easy to like the guy across the table who just gave you something. Roleplaying sessions in general don't have that kind of quick positive feedback mechanism. So the positive feelings go both ways.

This is all probably pretty obvious, but I hadn't seen it spelled out; people tend to talk about PTA as if it were some sort of magical elixir. It's not; it's just got a good mechanic for bringing people together. Clever stuff.

Now, the interesting question for me: how to apply this to other games? I'm sorely tempted to put a fan mail pool in place for my D20 games, but I'm not sure a) how important it is to limit the fan mail pool size and b) how I'd limit it in D20.

Moving to an Open List

Posted by Ginger Stampley on March 16, 2005 at 11:33 AM

I do a lot of play-by-email gaming, mostly set in the Amber universe, which is well-adapted to large-scale, rules-light gaming. One of the many choices that a GM makes when setting up a PBeM is whether to play by private mail, where each player only receives a copy of her own turns, or whether to play on an open list, where all the players can read all the turns. Recently, two games I play in have switched from private mail to open lists: one last December, when it rebooted after a hiatus, and one a few weeks ago, after more than eight years as a private mail game.

In the seven or eight years I've been playing email games, I've developed a strong preference for open-list games. To me, they feel more like face-to-face games, where all the players see most of what happens. There's also activity: with one GM and lots of players, if there's not a firm schedule, it sometimes seems like nothing is going on. If there's a list, at least you can see the other players posting, and you have an idea of when the GM posts. I also like the community feel of a list: people chatter and get to know each other, which is nice come convention season or when ten of your closest gamer buddies decide to go camping. And it's both faster and easier on the GM when the players arrange for their PCs to get together rather than having to filter everything through one person.

But there are some people who don't care for the open-list format in both games, and have been passively (or not so passively) resisting it. I've been trying to figure out why.

Continue reading "Moving to an Open List"

RPG.Net Thread of the Week: Fudging Rolls

Posted by Bryant on March 14, 2005 at 07:45 AM

Hunter Simon starts out with:

Here's something that's always bugged me. It's an age-old tradition for the GM to roll dice in secret and to occasionally ignore the dice if it suits the story/campaign/whatever. Yet if players *know* that the GM may fudge the occasional roll, they'll always be wondering if he's fudging rolls every time he rolls (especially if the roll is an important one). Thus, there is no trust between players and GM; the players wonder if the GM is simply randomly chucking dice and making up results and the GM wonders if the players believe him when he rolls then announces the result.

Last several sessions I've run, all of my rolls have been out in the open. All of them. Even rolls that reveal too much (i.e. rolls for monsters sneaking up, etc.). I'd rather have players put up the firewall than roll in secret anymore. The result? Our game has been better. Much more tense, more gripping...more like a *game*, and less like amateur theater hour with token dice-tossing. And the power of GM (myself) has been *reduced*, cuz now the dice rule, baby. No more players thinking, "Hell, we'll go for it. It's not like he'll let us die or anything..."

Thoughts?

And then five pages of reasonable discussion broke out. RPG.Net has developed this really keen tendency to mock the idea that there's wrong fun (badwrongfun), which tends to damp out flame wars.

Me, I think that Hunter vastly underestimates the ability of the human being to ignore facts; for some people, the illusion of "fair play" is more important than the actuality. It's a perfectly legitimate technique for elevating story over mechanics. Won't work for everyone, of course.

Forge Thread of the Week: Bricolage Applied

Posted by Ginger Stampley on February 27, 2005 at 01:19 PM

For people interested in gaming theory from a social science perspective, this Forge thread in which Chris Lehrich applies the concept of bricolage to RPGs is a real treat. As someone who has played in long-term RPGs, which where folks on the thread point out a lot of bricolage goes on, I read a lot that rang true to me; when I discussed it with my husband, I was able to point out actual play examples of the kinds of things Chris was talking about from our own PBeM campaign, House of Cards.

Sometimes Michael and I have looked at comments people have made about House of Cards and said to each other: "s/he doesn't get it." What the commenter didn't get was probably the bricolage.

Call for Papers

Posted by Bryant on February 22, 2005 at 07:17 AM

Ben Aldred and Bryn Neuenschwander are soliciting papers for an academic volume on role-playing games.

The purpose of the volume is to lay the foundation for future analysis of role-playing games. Papers may be from any discipline (anthropology, folklore, sociology, literary criticism, popular culture etc.) and any theoretical framework, but should be analytical, rather than descriptive or "how-to" essays. The volume will be organized into four broad sections:

GROUNDWORK
This opening section will include material basic to the ongoing study of role-playing games. Examples: a history of the genre's development. The relationship of RPGs to similar activities such as collectible card games, video games, improvisational theatre, historical re-enactment, dinner murder mysteries, etc. A descriptive typology of games. A critical overview of current RPG theory, and what theoretical frameworks from other disciplines might be of relevance.

RPGS AS NARRATIVE
The articles in this section will address the narrative aspects of RPGs. Examples: the mechanics by which RPG narrative are created. Analysis of the kinds of narrative structure seen in games. Comparison of pre-written, published scenarios to individual scenarios. Comparison of one-shot games to ongoing campaigns. Character background narratives and their relationship to the ongoing narrative of the game.

RPGS AS GAME
This section will examine RPGs as a game-playing activity. Examples: comparative analysis of systems and how they function in play. Statistical analyses of probability in RPGs. House rules and other modifications of system. Player strategies for overcoming challenges. In-group player dynamics (inter-PC conflict, power gamers, etc).

COMMUNITY
The final section of the book will step beyond the immediate matter of the games themselves to the social context in which they are produced, distributed, and played. Examples: demographics of the gamer community. Player identification as members of that community. Conventions. Authorial response to player reaction (playtest groups, revised editions, etc). "Independent" games versus corporations. The economic environment of games.

PROPOSALS ARE DUE NO LATER THAN MAY 1ST, 2005. All proposals should contain the following: a brief description of the topic and tentative conclusions; a sample bibliography and/or description of fieldwork methods; an estimated word-count; and a short biography listing your relevant experience and academic or professional credentials. Proposals and questions regarding this project should be sent to (bneuensc AT indiana DOT edu) and (baldred AT indiana DOT edu), within the body of the message ONLY (no attachments).

Comedy is Easy, PTA is Hard

Posted by Rob on February 3, 2005 at 05:41 PM

As some of you know, I’m running a game of Primetime Adventures called Dungeon Majesty. We’re three “episodes” (game sessions) in to what will be a six episode “season,” and we’ll be playing again next week. So I’m doing some thinking about what has been, from my point of view, a terrific and funny and interesting game.

PTA is the much-talked about, much-praised game where you create an episodic television series. The premise of our particular game, which I think I’ve made a point of not committing to print or screen before this very moment, is that some amalgam of the hip “new school” screenwriters and directors—people like Paul Thomas Anderson (note his initials!), Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, David O. Russell—produced a six episode TV series about an oddly mixed group of unhappy people who come together every week to play a classic dungeon-crawly role-playing game called Dungeon Majesty. So it’s a real game about a fake TV series about a fake game, named after a real TV series about a different real game. Still with me?

Continue reading "Comedy is Easy, PTA is Hard"

How RPG Rules Work

Posted by Vincent Baker on January 19, 2005 at 05:33 PM

This is description, not prescription.

The way I figure it, an RPG's rules coordinate three things:

The fictional things and events and stuff in the game. The interactions of the players themselves. Dice, numbers, words, maps - real-world tokens, things, props, representations. Emily calls 'em "cues" and I think that's just right.

If you can pick it up and hand it to another player, or change it with a pencil and eraser, it's a real-world cue. If it exists only in our heads and our conversation, it's in-game.

Continue reading "How RPG Rules Work"

Narrative Control

Posted by Bryant on January 13, 2005 at 03:00 PM

First off, a basic principle: narrative control comes from consensus of the players. This is probably just an application of the Lumpley Principle. It is not an instantaneous action which is subsequently fixed in stone; it's a constant process. There can be and often is fluctuation in the amount of control during the course of play. Sometimes we notice it, and sometimes we don't.

Now on to the fun stuff. Some of it is fairly basic but I want to lay out my assumptions.

Continue reading "Narrative Control"

Getting Granular

Posted by Bryant on December 30, 2004 at 05:07 PM

Note: split into two parts because I accidentally posted half of it yesterday before the other half was done. Alas, it's the less interesting half we get today. On the bright side, I figured out more about the other half in the shower this morning, so it's gonna be a better post in the long run.

Or: a feeble attempt to explain where I'm coming from with my fondness for finely grained systems.  This used to be a bigger essay about D&D as resource management and so on and so forth, but that was just getting in the way so I trimmed it down. The first thing I want to talk about falls nicely into place as an answer to Matt's question:

Is Task Resolution meaningful toward resource management in a way that Conflict Resolution is not? I'm asking earnestly; I don't know the answer. I will say that I designed Nine Worlds as a resource management game with a Conflict Resolution mechanic. I did that intentionally to, um, "attract gamers" in a way that my more straightforward Narrativist game did not (Dust Devils). Jury's still out on whether that worked, alas!

Continue reading "Getting Granular"

RPG.net Thread of the Week: How Much Time?

Posted by Bryant on December 23, 2004 at 12:49 PM

IMAGinES wants to know how much time we spend prepping for games. Since he references this blog, I can't resist linking to him.

Meanwhile, Vincent is thinking about the Forge's body of work. He's wrong about task resolution, because task resolution is a tool for making resource management meaningful, and resource management is a tool for generating decision points, but that's a side note which I only threw in here to guarantee comments on this post. (I do have a longer post on that subject marinating, even though Ben and Tom said a lot of it in the comments to Vincent's post.)

Man, I almost got totally sidetracked. What I really wanted to mention about Vincent's post is the essential problem, which is "talking about roleplaying is hard work." We talk a lot in gaming about getting new people involved, and we want to think it's simple, because if it's complex, it's hard to get new people involved. IMAGinES's post is another view on the problem. The Prime Time Adventures game I'm in right now is giving me another view on it; it's a great game, and it's been serious work wrapping my mind around the different paradigms it brings to the table. It takes effort to figure out how to play it well; I wasn't able to just pick it up and go.

Stop and turn around. Do we expect hobbies to be easy? Everyone knows that playing Magic at a competitive level is pretty tough and time-consuming. Fly-fishing is hard. Target shooting is hard. Beadwork is hard.

But I'm wrong. Playing Magic badly, fishing badly, target shooting badly, and beadworking clumsily -- those are pretty easy. And they're a necessary and accepted pre-condition. You gotta do it badly before you can do it well. There's no expectation that a newbie to those hobbies will do well.

Maybe we should be spending less time trying to turn neophyte gamers into great gamers. Maybe that's not realistic. Maybe we should be turning them on with whatever dysfunctional habits happen to attract people.

Or maybe not. I'm just hijacking my own post, here; go read IMAGinES' thread and respond to it, cause it's an interesting question and I want to see what other gamers do.

Wrap Up of a Game

Posted by Jere on December 17, 2004 at 05:08 PM

Age of Paranoia, the game I have been running since April, is getting ready to wrap up and I’ve been spending some time alone, and with the players, considering its strengths and weaknesses.

Continue reading "Wrap Up of a Game"

Unfiction

Posted by Rob on December 2, 2004 at 11:06 AM

Unfiction is an extensive site devoted to "immersive fiction" or "alternate reality gaming," which is a relatively new mutation of our hobby in which people follow a trail of puzzles and clues through web pages, emails, movie posters, newspaper classifieds, and so on, and periodically get cryptic emails or threatening "in character" phone calls. I believe players work communally, sharing their discoveries through email and online forums, though I imagine there's a competitive element as everyone races to solve the puzzles and find the next clue. There's a brief history of the hobby on the site, a blog, discussion forums, and descriptions of many of the bigger games.

Has anyone around here played in, or followed along with, any of these games? Anyone have any insights or thoughts to share?

One thing I find fascinating about the phenomena is its relationship to advertising. The biggest and most influential immersive games were and are marketing projects for movies or video games. The hobby is also called "beasting," after "The Beast," a game launched as part of the marketing for the Spielberg movie AI and set in the AI "universe." (Nice that something cool came out of that train wreck.) In a sense the whole game is an ad campaign. Or is it? If an ad campaign is so obscure and hidden that only a handful of web-savvy people even know about it, is it advertising at all? It might be more accurate to describe the games as passenger fictions or parasites (without the negative connotations) that find niches inside the larger media spaces created by things like AI or Alias.

I can't decide if I find the symbiotic relationship of the games to advertising exciting, disturbing, neither, or both. We're discovering new ways to live and play in a highly mediated, advertising saturated environment, I guess. RPGs are exciting stuff. Don't let anyone tell you differently.

Tangent: Not quite the same thing, but obviously a forerunner, is the hobby of "interactive fiction"--those text-based adventure games in the model of Zork. Once commercial products, most interactive fiction is now written by hobbyists using simple IF programming languages, and like tabletop gaming, they've gone well beyond mazes of twisty passages. I believe we've posted links to IF before at 20x20, but anyway, the winners for the 2004 Interactive Fiction competition have now been announced. You can get all the entrants, and the interpreter software needed to run them, from their download page.

Beyond Role and Play

Posted by Bryant on November 26, 2004 at 05:06 PM

A while back, Sandy Antunes posted a column on a Finnish book about roleplaying, Beyond Role and Play. I've been yearning to read the book ever since. Today, while poking around a web page about the Turku School of Roleplaying (warning: manifesto guaranteed to annoy the kind of people who are annoyed by deliberately self-righteous manifestos), I discovered that the entire book wound up on the Web. Happy day!

Replacing the GM

Posted by Ginger Stampley on November 4, 2004 at 12:49 PM

I'm in a play-by-post bulletin board game, and I enjoy occasionally skimming the other games on the board to see what other people are doing. One of the games on the board lost its GM recently.

The GM had run the game as sort of a freeform experiment in Narrativist Amber, and felt it had lost its way. He threw up his hands and then washed them of the whole thing. But a number of the players weren't so ready to give up, and actively recruited for another GM. They found one, and she's going to let the remaining players wind down or summarize their existing game threads before launching them into a plot based on her own ideas and incorporating the existing characters and setting.

I'm fascinated by this process in terms of the player community's feelings of ownership of the game and the negotiations with the prospective new GM. Even though the new GM has a plot, and the game will therefore work out to be more GM-directed than it was before, it seems to me that the players will (visibly) have a lot of power in ways they don't (visibly) have it in many other groups.

I will be watching this experiment with interest as the game reboots and goes on.

Player Taxonomies

Posted by Ginger Stampley on October 7, 2004 at 01:20 PM

Greg Costikyan has a summary (with web links) of the current state of analysis of player types. One of the interesting things he notes is that almost all the current data is anecdotal, and the one set that's not was developed by the most objective research methods.

I recently had an epiphany about a player of mine, in which it occurred to me that he was misinterpreting my signals as GM because he's looking for different things from play than I am. I posed it in terms of GNS theory and one of the people I talked to posed it back in terms of Robin Laws' archetypes. Both ways of reading the situation were valid, and either one helps me understand how to approach the player in question in ways that may appeal to him. So I'd say the competing systems of classification may all be useful; they may just be different toolsets to apply to the task of achieving more satisfying games.

Rules-Light vs. No Prep

Posted by Bryant on September 20, 2004 at 01:48 PM

I was chatting with Rob on Friday night, and he said something pretty interesting along the lines of "I don't like running games if I have to stat up a bunch of NPCs in advance." The tendency here is to say "Yeah, that's why rules-light games rock." Heck, it's why I like running Over the Edge -- I can make up an NPC in twenty seconds.

(On the other hand, sometimes you find rules-light in the oddest places. I can make up a D20 NPC in twenty seconds, as long as they aren't magical: "He has +3 to hit, 14 AC, and does 1d6+4 damage." It helps that I know the rules well enough to figure Dex and Str bonuses in my head, but that wasn't hard-won knowledge dredgred from the depths of a Gary Gygax manual.)

But I digress; what I really wanted to say is that the most important innovation in D&D 3.0 is the Challenge Rating in combination with the extensive library of monsters. Further, several dozen pages of the Dungeon Master's Guide are given over to a long long list of generic NPC stats which you can use whenever you need an NPC on a moment's notice. It's these elements which make it possible to run a relatively rules-heavy game with a minimum of preparation, even if you're pretty new to the system. See also these musings on a new campaign.

This technique -- taking a rules-heavy game and making it light on prep -- also means that D&D can support the other end of the prep spectrum; if you're a GM who likes doing a lot of prep work, there's plenty of room for that as well. It's a really interesting concept and I wouldn't mind seeing more games emulate it. Hero/Champions comes pretty close; it's no accident that Hero Games keeps producing books full of nothing but villains (not to mention a couple of books full of building blocks to make characters with). But the point value of a villain, as experienced Hero GMs know, is not a good measure of that villain's effectiveness. So it's not quite there, although it's close.

Has anyone I haven't thought of made the leap from just saying "well, it's a three HD monster" to "hm, let's set a real challenge rating and simplify preparation"?

Separating IC and OOC Knowledge

Posted by Ginger Stampley on September 12, 2004 at 10:31 AM

I run an open-list PBeM where most actions, even those other PCs are not privy to, are played out on a list. Only "secret" actions are handled by private mail with the GMs. It's very similar in effect to playing face-to-face in a room and passing notes or going outside to handle secret business, except that the other players can't see the extra interaction.

Recently I had a player ask me why his PC should research information that the player already knows and that's likely to come out in some form in the near future for his character. I came up with several reasons I thought were important, which I've listed behind the cut.

Continue reading "Separating IC and OOC Knowledge"

Story generation and narrative intelligence

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on August 15, 2004 at 05:28 PM

This isn't a fully formed post yet; it's more of a note to myself. I should look into AI research on story generation and narrative for ideas that can be ripped off for rpgs.

Plot control mechanics

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on August 10, 2004 at 04:26 PM

This is a response to Bruce Baugh's post on "Scene Framing" over on Gamethink.

Every time I've tried to run with a pool of points as a random plot editing tool, it's flopped. As nearly as I can tell, being able to make any change you like offers too little structure to properly spur the imagination. I think Bruce's idea of captions is extremely clever, and essential to making his idea work, but to explain why I'll relate some failures and successes I've had.

Continue reading "Plot control mechanics"

GMs and Underlying Social Contracts

Posted by Ginger Stampley on August 8, 2004 at 09:53 AM

I've been thinking about the role of the GM and the underlying group social contract, whether or not there's an explicit game contract.

Continue reading "GMs and Underlying Social Contracts"

My Life With Master: First Thoughts

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on August 7, 2004 at 11:45 AM

I've just started running Paul Czege's My Life with Master, and I wanted to jot down something that I really like about it already.

The structure of how to order and play out scenes is well-specified in the rules. This is good, for the obvious reason that it makes figuring out how to play easier, but also for a more subtle reason: namely, having a prescribed scene structure means that it gives me a space to practice some techniques I've been kicking around for a while. In particular, MLwM has a play structure in which each player gets a scene, in a round-robin fashion. This is good, because I've been meaning to try and increase the amount of NPC continuity in the games I run.

That is, I want the same NPCs to show up in different players' scenes, so as to increase the sense of space and continuity, and to make it easier for the players to focus on parallel plot threads. (A PC's love scene with an NPC can be interesting; a love scene in which the NPC lover is an another player's sibling or enemy can be magnetically compelling.) The format of MLwM means that I can try this out a dozen times in quick succession and actually get to practice this until I can do it naturally. Plus, part of character creation is the creation of NPCs called Connections, whom the players have created to be objects of PC affection -- so I know ahead of time which NPCs should be present to keep another player attracted.

Generalizing this so as to write mini-games to emphasize each technique in the bag of tricks is a good plan for the future, I think.

Variant Roleplaying

Posted by Bryant on June 23, 2004 at 11:45 AM

Steve D. says he doesn't play roleplaying games anymore. Recently, in fact, his games have become a sort of group script-writing session.

This strikes me as rather similar to the fanfic-birthed mailing list or Live Journal roleplaying communities, which are essentially freeform roleplay/story-writing venues. In traditional roleplaying, the GM creates NPCs and sets the parameters of the world. If you're roleplaying in settings drawn from pop culture, everyone knows what the NPCs and the world are like already. Thus, the Steve and his players have achieved auctorial freedom.

Adventure Axioms

Posted by Ginger Stampley on June 8, 2004 at 04:22 PM

I'm always looking for new schemes for analyzing and improving my GMing, so I was quite interested in this post on "adventure axioms", which I found while randomly journal-surfing. The scheme breaks down adventures into seven types (with an eighth type of "any combination of the above") based on action verbs.

Now I need to go analyze my campaign's current plotlines using this scheme and see whether I can break it.