December 16, 2006
Detective Game Sketch
Inspired by a post of Plume's over on rpg.net, I wrote down a game sketch for detective roleplaying I've been thinking about for a while. It's a sketch, because it's not finished, but I think most of the essential features are clear (at least to me). So I figured I might as well post it.
For me, the difference between a detective story and a mystery story is that in the first the detective doesn't have to solve the mystery. A detective is about a person, who has the obligation to render justice when in a situation where they will have no ultimate access to the "real" truth. They have to do their human best, with fallible perceptions and limited powers.
So the idea is to build the game around a single detective player, and have several NPC/GM players. The GMs work out a messy crime, figuring out who perpetrated it, who the victims were, who benefits from silence, who doesn't, who hates and who loves who, and giving each of the characters both reasons to use the detective and reasons to conceal (part of?) the truth from him or her. Then, in play, the detective gets called in, and has to a) figure out what's going on, and b) figure out who to punish and who to protect. Each of the main NPCs gets a different player, and in any given scene some subset of the NPCs will be there and everyone will be at cross-purposes to each other.
Most of play is just questioning, along with offered bribes, threats, seductions, and all the usual noir stuff. That's all pure roleplay. Violence is handled along the model of a first-person detective story -- the rules ensure that whenever it breaks out, the detective will never be killed, even though none of the characters should act like they know that. Non interpersonal investigation stuff is handled basically by just telling the detective player what he or she learns, with mechanics (maybe just a skill roll) determining only a) how long it takes, and b) whether any of the NPCs learns of the detective's curiousity.
Finally, the last rule is that the NPC players can never tell the PC's player if he or she was right, or what the real backstory was. This way you get an ending, but no definite closure.
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September 14, 2006
Snakes on the Plains
(Crossposted to my LiveJournal, comments welcome either place.)
I can't tell you how long I've been waiting for Lions on the Precipice, Jonathan Walton's notional Dogs in the Vineyard expansion. I'm still waiting, but in the meantime, this emo snippet of alterna-reverse Dogs occurred to me. I started out by thinking about that gloriously stupid bit of early D&D laser-sharking, the Anti-Paladin. Then I found myself actually sympathizing with these guys. (Oh, but if you've heard me mumbling about my "Dogs heartbreaker" lately, this isn't it.)
A Land of Thorns and Vice
The shopkeeper from Back East? He ain't perfect, but at least he don't put on airs like he's never done no wrong.
The Town Steward lives in the bottle and dreams about girls below marrying age. Sister Fidelia wishes her husband were Steward, and pride bakes her dry heart like the summer sun. And Brother Virgil has kilt his shrewish wife a dozen times in his head. Is he righteous just because he's too cowardly to go through with it?
Watch how the townsfolk bow and scrape for a couple of green pups in colored coats. Watch the old sodbusters fall all over themselves to get one of God's Watchdogs to their dinner table, or into their daughter's beds. And why? Because they're scared of the night and the big old sky. And they're so grateful--pathetically grateful--for somebody else to take responsibility, to solve their problems for them, to tell them what to do. How much of being godly is just fear of getting caught? How can they call themselves the Faithful unless their faith's been put to the test? Brother and Sister Serpent, that's where you come in.
Continue reading "Snakes on the Plains"
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May 08, 2006
Prometheus == teh pwn0rrxd
Saturday, we played Nine Worlds again. The highlight of the session is probably when Hypatia pit her magic against Prometheus's, and beat him, on live television broadcast across the Nine Worlds. She resolved her Muse to humiliate Prometheus, and now has the muse "Escape from Earth before Prometheus kills her." :) An archon with all of his or her muses active is crazy powerful -- Prometheus drew 22 cards in that conflict, and used trump, and Hypatia still won.
Nick posted recently about underdog stories, where the PCs suffer reversals before prevailing. I think the GMing lesson for me is to be unafraid of making grossly powerful NPCs in 9W, because the players can 1) lose, 2) pick up Muses and then 3) win. A really sneaky trick is to make the NPC's Muses goals that are shorter-term than the PCs', so that after step 1 the NPCs hand sizes shrink.
Another neat mechanical trick I learned Saturday is that you can use Stasis locks to stretch out conflicts. Our engineer was ambushed by Tisiphone, an archon working for Hades, and infected with a scarab that would keep him alive and report his location back to her. I decided that this would be a stasis lock on his Arete, and when the other PCs tried to remove it, it turned out that destroying the lock took several rounds of conflict.
One story technique I've started to adopt all-out is to find a Greek myth that I like, take the characters and their relationships more or less unchanged, and put them into the game with their names intact. This way, I can signal the players about who's doing what and why without stopping the game.
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May 03, 2006
The Shadow of Yesterday, in Finnish
Clinton Nixon's fantasy rpg The Shadow of Yesterday is available in Finnish, thanks to a translation by Eero Tuovinen. I don't have much to add to this -- I'm posting this mainly because TSoY is a Creative Commons-licensed work, and the translation shows the sorts of good things that result from that.
Way to go, Clinton and Eero!
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April 28, 2006
A Nine Worlds rules mod
Here's a rules mod for Nine Worlds that I'd like to try out, once we sort out our social style issues. The idea is to give the points people win in conflicts some more concrete narrative effects.
We start with the backstory. The backstory is a collection of index cards, and on each card is a fictional element -- stuff like a person, place, thing, idea, or motif -- and a numerical rating from 1 to 3. During a conflict, any of the players can pull an entry out of the backstory, and put it on the table. They then add a number of cards to their hand equal to the element's rating. Multiple players may use the same entry; it's non-exclusive. If a player claims a piece of backstory and wins the conflict, their narration must use the fictional element on the index card for each entry.
When a player wins points in a conflict, they can use their points as usual, and they can also alter the backstory.
- With Cosmos points, they can create new entries, by writing down a new fictional element onto an index card and giving it a rating equal to the number of Cosmos points they spend on it.
- With Chaos points, a player can lower the rating of a backstory element, removing it entirely from the backstory if they lower the rating to zero.
- With Metamorphosis points, they can spend a number of points equal to an entry's current rating to alter its text.
- Finally, a player can use Stasis to place a lock on an entry, making it more difficult to modify with the other kinds of points. These locks function exactly like other Stasis locks.
Finally, when new Talismans are created, any entries of the backstory that overlap with it are removed.
The basic idea is that this lets the players create setting for the other players to use, and rewards them for using it. The backstory is explicitly shared, and by design is easy for anyone to modify.
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April 14, 2006
Future Not Quite Perfect
Ages ago, on a thread on rpg.net, I mentioned that I wanted to run a science fiction game, based on the idea that since 2005 is better to live in than 1905 is better to live in than 1805, it would be cool to have a future that's as much better to live in than the present than the present is better than the distant past (at least for a First Worlder).
This post elaborates on that idea, based on a scheme that occurred to me while reading Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers. The trouble with the setting in a lot SF rpgs is that it's political history -- wars and battles and large-scale social and economic trends -- when what you need to actually play a character is really a kind of social history -- what the culture is like at the level of individual interaction.
Now, The Three Musketeers is written with a strange mix of idealism and cyncism. The musketeers are a byword for romance and chivalry, but almost all of the action in the novel can be understood in terms of the characters seeking sex, money, status or violence in the basest, most elemental ways. It's the interplay of High Romance and primal self-interst that makes the novel compelling.
How to apply this to science fiction? Well, the idea is that the stuff we need to know to effectively make characters and conflicts are the basic ingredients of money, status, biological urges, and violence, and that the march of science has fundamentally changed all of them.
Continue reading "Future Not Quite Perfect"
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February 12, 2006
The Court of the Empress: Playtest Report
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.
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February 04, 2006
Prometheus stole my robot!
Our first session of Nine Worlds was today. As usual, the first session was a little slow, as we talked about the game, figured out character creation, and worked out how the conflict rules worked.
1. It's a surprising amount of work to come up with good Muses. We had to talk about it several times, and we ended up with the heuristic of asking each other, "Is there a way to end this conflict?" The title of this post comes from one of the player's Muses, which is to get back his robot (which Prometheus stole, of course). Naturally, one of the other players has a Muse to deliver the robot to Zeus, too.
2. The conflict rules look like they'll be more fun when the conflict is muddy, with multiple sides and everybody opposed to different people, than when you have an 1-on-1 conflict. This is because you are more likely to end up with lots of players narrating in a multiway scene, whereas in the other only one player narrates. Plus, the way it's easy for some people on a side to win, and others lose, is quite nice.
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February 02, 2006
Nine Worlds Initial Impressions
Okay, I've been rereading Matt Snyder's game Nine Worlds in preparation for running a game of it. Here's my thoughts so far.
1. If the choice between siding with the gods and making your own way is to be compelling, then it seems clear that there should be upsides and downsides to both choices, so that the players have an interesting decision in weighing them and coming to a decision. So, the gods can't be completely useless amoral f-ckups (my usual style for the powers that be?) -- they have to be compelling enough that a PC can credibly find them sympathetic enough to join, but have enough sharp edges that they can credibly be repulsed. I'll probably try cast the Titans in the worse of two evils role, so that 'needs must' can be deployed as well, unless the players make them sympathetic or something.
2. Muses are the best experience point/luck point system yet designed. They look like they are as much better than Keys as Keys are better than their predecessors (Nobilis-style disads, which themselves were a big advance). The advice on good and bad Muses, in particular, is pure gold.
3. The shifting narration thing along with the (potentially) one-shot conflict resolution suggests that play will be kind of roller-coaster -- conflicts can come and go fast, unlike in Dogs, and the decision to put the narration burden solely on the hand winner means no one has tight control over anything. This is something I'm really looking forward to trying out in play.
(I just realized the one-phase/multi-phase split is a bit like Simple and Extended contests in HQ. Cool.)
4. The stat-manipulation thing with points and Urges leaves me a little cold. The one I'm most interested in is Stasis, simply because it's clearest how to use Stasis points to have a concrete, narrative, in-story effect. I've got some ideas for house rules on this point, but they'll keep until we get some real experience with the system as written.
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August 16, 2005
Legends of Alyria, the Blog
I just found out that Seth Ben-Ezra's game Legends of Alyria is online as a blog. You can read the rules (which are the posts), and comment on it. This is very neat experiment in presentation, and has rather dramatically increased the likelihood that I'm going to run it.
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June 06, 2005
Cyber-demon-goth-ninja-lasersharks, with katanas
That's basically the newest game I'm running. After Dogs in the Vineyard, the players asked for a game that was morally straightforward, and we came up with the idea of the World of K3wlness, which is a game inspired by movies like Underworld and The Crow -- it's superheroes in black trenchcoats and leather running around killing bad people.
The system is mostly Feng Shui, with a couple of tweaks. The one most worth mentioning is that I've ripped off Clinton Nixon's idea of Keys from his The Shadow of Yesterday rpg, and am using a variant of it as the experience/luck system. Triggering a Key nets a player a Fortune Die, and for each Fortune Die a player spends, they get an experience point. The first session is tonight, and I will report on how it goes....
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February 25, 2005
Feng Shui Noodling
I'm kicking around ways to adapt Feng Shui to a moralistic game set in the 1950s and centered around pro wrestling. I like the simplicity of Feng Shui and I think the action emphasis lends itself well to pro wrestling. However, I wanted to layer in a bit of personality mechanics without being overly hamhanded and without taking control of the PC away from the player.
Brief summary of Feng Shui mechanics: roll two six siders. One is the negative die and one is the positive die. Subtract the negative die from the positive die, and add the result to your skill. Compare the result to a target number. A fortune die is an extra positive die which gets added to the total.
So: I drop Fortune as an attribute. I add three tracks similar to Pendragon personality mechanics; the ends of each track are opposites. I'm currently thinking Control/Freedom, Peace/Violence, and Lies/Truth. Each track is six boxes long, which divides nicely into three boxes for each end. The default state is balance: no boxes checked off in either direction for any track. At character generation, for each track, you can check off as many boxes as you like in either (but not both) directions. So you could wind up with, say, one notch in Violence and two notches in Truth.
During a session, you can activate a notch by taking a penalty die during any roll in which the opposite of that notch would come into play. (Yes, I'm flailing for words to explain this.) Let's say you have those two notches in Truth; you could activate one of them by taking a penalty die while trying to lie to someone. A penalty die is just like a fortune die, but it gets subtracted from the total.
You can spend one activated notch in a track to get a fortune die on a roll -- again, if whatever you're doing matches the notch. You couldn't spend a Truth notch to get a fortune die while lying to a witness, for example.
The goal here is to provide an opportunity for a player to use his or her PC's personality to provide a mechanical advantage without sacrificing the player's control over the PC's personality. Nobody's ever forced to activate or use notches; it's up to the player whether or not the violent/truthful/whatever side comes out.
Since I'm not thinking about this in terms of a lengthy campaign, I haven't developed rules for personality shifts. Thoughts on that are certainly welcome, though, as are general comments.
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November 29, 2004
Trollbabe Combat in Over the Edge
This is a somewhat baked idea, born from my desire to abstract combat a little bit without abstracting it "too much." I remembered, while cogitating upon this question, that I really enjoyed the way Trollbabe conflict worked out in practice. So I figured, hm, what if I snipped the stuff I liked out of Trollbabe and slapped it on top of Over the Edge? Since that's the system I was thinking about at the time.
Here's what I came up with. It'll help if you know a little Over the Edge but if you don't: roll somewhere between probably 2 to 5 six-siders, and total up the result. Compare to your opponent's roll. Highest roll wins. If you have a penalty die, roll an extra die and discard the highest die.
Continue reading "Trollbabe Combat in Over the Edge"
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November 08, 2004
Primetime Adventures: Solo Cast
Not that I've played Primetime Adventures yet, but since when did that stop gamers from making up weird rules modifications and so on? (Especially if you're a freelancer.)
So I was reading Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John stories again over the weekend. (Parenthetically: the Night Shade Books editions are superb and I recommend them to anyone who likes Wellman or Southern fantasy or good writing.) I think a Silver John television series would be great TV series that wouldn't get made in Hollywood. Which is, I think, part of what PTA is for.
But the thing about the Silver John stories is that they only have one recurring character, Silver John himself. You could add more supporting characters; however, this sort of undermines Silver John in that it's important that he's a loner. So how do you do a multi-player campaign?
Well, I noticed that certain character types do show up repeatedly. There's the beautiful innocent, the sinister preacher, the strapping young lover, and so on. So... what if you treated them as recurring themes, and players took on themes rather than characters? In this context, Screen Presence becomes a measure of how important a given theme is for that episode.
It's possible that this gives too much spotlight to the single central character. You could, maybe, remove that character as a PC altogether and have everyone play the themes. At this point you're halfway to Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Twilight Zone -- drop the central character and you've got an anthology series waiting to happen.
I have no idea if any of this would actually work. Let me know if you try it.
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September 22, 2004
Speaking of Quickstarts
My friend Meera Barry and her spouse, the Lintking, have revised their Quickstart Amber rules (PDF). If you've ever wondered what the ADRPG fuss was about, this is a good entree in 20 half-sized pages.Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (3)
July 27, 2004
The Matrix Game!
I just re-discovered the link to Chris Engle's matrix game. This is a very cool little game. I've used it once, to run a Mage one-shot in which mage magic was resolved using his matrix game rules. The explanation phase was the player describing the magical working in terms of his PC's paradigm, which was a nice way of harnessing the sort of intense philosophical geekery that Mage produces to actual benefit for the game.
EDIT: Here's a link to his design notes, as well. The whole site is worth exploring, even though it's somewhat confusingly laid out.
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June 06, 2004
The FBI FOIA Files
This story is roundabout, like all my stories, so just bear with me.
Various archives and for-pay genealogies sites finally, after two years of waiting, released their database indexes into the vast United States 1930s census. I am at least a 5th generation American – and, it looks, at least a 5th generation Detroiter -- through three of my four grandparents, and I can now search and find dozens of names that link me directly to my past. I find this all fascinating, and it renewed my interest in genealogy that was, for a small period of time, a Quixotic-like act of tilting at windmills.
An interesting factoid about my family was the discovery a few years ago that my great grandfather Vincent, his brother Paul, and possibly their father was tangentially affiliated with an ultra-violent mob-like Detroit group during Prohibition called the Purple Gang as rum runners over the Detroit River. So, proud to be descended from thugs and smugglers, I went looking into the Purple Gang. Since they were not as flashy as the gangs in New York or Chicago, the net has very little to offer in the way of information -- except for a 660+ PDF file on the FBI’s Freedom of Information Act archive. Unfortunately, the file starts in 1935, and concerns itself mostly with the gangland assassinations of the Purple Gang’s founders. Yet, I have spent almost a year fascinated with this strange file: memos from J. Edgar Hoover, newspaper clips from the now defunct Detroit Times, handwritten testimonies of witnesses, lists of their “businesses,” pictures of old Detroit – all very Sopranos-like.
