The 20' By 20' Room

Indie Press RevelATION

Posted by Jim Henley on November 20, 2006 at 08:17 PM

Holy Crap! Here's an excerpt from the e-mail confirmation for my recent IPR order:

iimhenley@gmail.com
	date			Nov 17, 2006 10:39 PM
	subject			Purchase Confirmation

Purchase Description Mortal Coil  (Quantity: 1) Breaking the Ice  (Quantity: 1) octaNe  (Quantity: 1)

See that date? That was this past Friday night. LATE Friday night.

The package was waiting for me when I got home from work TO-DAY.

That's better than "next business day" service. That's practically teleportation.

THAT Doesn't Happen Every Day

Posted by Jim Henley on October 28, 2006 at 01:58 PM

I just stumbled upon Malcolm Sheppard's blog, Shooting Dice, yesterday. I found it so compelling that between then and now I read

The whole.

Goddam.

Blog.

That has never happened to me before.

My Bruce Baugh's My D&D Year

Posted by Jim Henley on September 23, 2006 at 08:06 PM

One of the more enjoyable blogojournospheric endeavors to follow right now is Bruce Baugh's series, "My D&D Year," which as of today is up to 20 entries with approximately, one assumes, 360 or so pending. Bruce is using Rules Cyclopedia D&D, which can be had in PDF for a mere six bucks from RPGNow. He inspired me to buy it, if not to try to run it. And he's got me thinking of fast, easy and fun hacks to go with a dungeon-crawling game.

1. Frex, a la Dogs in the Vineyard, it should be possible to generate stats for an NPC fairly quickly if you roll eight dice at once and read them off in order three at a time. For instance, a roll of 6-1-4-3-5-5-4-1 could become

Str = 6 + 1 + 4 = 11
Dex = 1 + 4 + 3 = 8
Con = 4 + 3 + 5 = 12
Int = 3 + 5 + 5 = 13
Wis = 5 + 5 + 4 = 14
Cha = 5 + 4 + 1 = 10

and you're done with that part.

2. An alternate attribute method for chargen:
a. Each player rolls makes six (unassigned) attribute rolls and records them in a list, using the attribute rolling method of your choice (3d6, 4d6 keep 3, 2d6+6, roll 8 3d6 and drop the worst two, roll 4d20 and keep the second highest etc.)
b. Put all the lists on the table for examination. If there are four players - A, B, C, D - you have four lists.
c. The group chooses one list by consensus - for example, list C.
d. Each player uses the chosen list (C in our example) to assign attributes, placing the numbers where they will.

With the number of niches most OGL fantasy games have to fill, you shouldn't end up with most characters having the same scores in the same attributes. People will put them where it makes sense for their planned character class. The method would work especially well, I think, with Castles & Crusades "primes" system.

3. Reading my Rules Cyclopedia reminded me of the tradeoff between provisioning and mobility - do you want to load yourself down with a long list of dungeon-crawling or camping gear and leave little space for treasure little hope for quick movement or do you want to go light but risk being out of spikes or rope or 10' poles or whatever.

I don't really like the shopping and itemizing, but I like the tradeoff. So, as a house rule, how about turning Encumbrance into a kind of gadget pool? You've got your weapons and armor specified. That leaves you with a certain free carrying capacity in coins or whatever. You just say, I'm taking X coin worth of spelunking gear, paying some amount of money the Gm agrees is appropriate. Then when you need a spike or an extra torch or whatever, you roll d20 against the difficulty class of the item (preassigned); your mod is how much nonspecified Encumbrance you took on. (+1 per 50 coins? per 100? Whatever.)

Bruce has also got me thinking of my abandoned fantasy heartbreaker again. It'll run on the "Few20 Fantasy" system, which will be OGLish but designed for small play groups with limited playing time. Right now the Big Idea is that you roll Initiative, Attack and Defense as d20 plus mods - all at once. You match off dice after they're rolled, a la that famous gunslinger game we've already mentioned once in this post.

More Kids, More Roleplaying

Posted by Jim Henley on September 22, 2006 at 07:24 AM

John Kim reports from the children's room at ConQuest. Very interesting stuff, especially John's experience that age has a lot more to do with how kids approach a game than gender does. This fits with my instincts about The Princes' Kingdom, though the coincidence of my own children's age/gender divide (older boy and younger girl) made me shy of being too sure about my conclusions heretofore.

Edge Cases Versus Vast Territories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lexicon Continues To Make a Ruckus

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

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

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

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

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

Plans for the Next Session

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

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

The Adventures of Cheese and Rose

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

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

Uh, yeah. And this is more of it.

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

Continue reading "The Adventures of Cheese and Rose"

Who Won the Indie RPG Awards?

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

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

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

An Eminently Predictable Conversation

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

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

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

Daughter: I want to play a Princess!

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

Daughter: I want to play a Princess!

Father: Okay.

Can't - Leave - Well Enough - ALONE!

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

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

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

Inside the game itself we learn that . . .

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

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

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

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

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

Princes in Shadow

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

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

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

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

Or maybe one of your many siblings will . . .

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

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

RPG.net Has Search Again

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on June 22, 2006 at 05:29 PM

FYI: RPG.net has a search function for its forums again. It's not a great search, but it's way better than nothing, and is responsible for the marked uptick in quality over the past month.

Nobilis: Seven Families

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on June 12, 2006 at 04:59 PM

A friend of mine (on the wrong side of the continent, dammit!) has started up a Nobilis game, so I've gotten nostalgic for it, and started thinking of Nobilis games I want to run. Here's one:

• It's called Seven Families, because there are seven Noble families on Earth: one for each continent. So Africa, North and South America, Antartica, Asia, Australia, and Europe each have a single Noble Familia. These people are the secret rulers of the world. As in: when a President gets elected, he gets to meet the Family, and his role as a pawn is explained to him by one of the player characters. It would be nice to do globetrotting, particularly to parts of the world where our games don't normally go. Bonus points if we hit a cynical/depressing anti-particularist note where differences in race or culture are as nothing before the Nobles' commonality as the ultimate ruling class.

• All the usual hidden-fantasy critters, like vampires and demons and stuff, all exist, and they stay in the shadows because the Families have decided they prefer it that way. This could be a fun way of inverting the usual setup, where the PCs are the monsters struggling to stay in the shadows: here, the PCs are the ones MAKING the monsters stay quiet.

• In this kind of game, I'd like the human world to play a bigger role than it normally does. Actually controlling nations should be valuable, and besides it's fun when the petty vanities and tiffs among the Nobility lead to nations burning in the real world, and when the costs of that kind  of monstrous egotism become plain.

Some rules hacks that would be good ideas....

1. Miracle point pools should be unified into a single pool. This lets players be more flexible and toss of little miracles with fewer worries.
2. Bonds should provide miracle points when they come into play, to give the players an incentive to risk the things they love by bringing them into the fray.
3. The point pools should refresh every conflict, rather than being persistent. This will simplify GMing, because you don't have to worry that the asymmetry inherent in having NPCs who are rarely in scenes and PCs who are in every scene will mess up the level playing field between the PCs and NPCs.
4. Speaking of conflicts, some kind of stakes setting conflict resolution would be nice, especially if we can integrate important bits happening as part of conflict resolution. More DitV, less 9W/HQ.

Thought on Terminology

Posted by Jere on May 11, 2006 at 10:54 AM

Let us talk about the language we use for a moment, or at least part of it.

Continue reading "Thought on Terminology"

I need monsters!

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on April 30, 2006 at 06:25 PM

In yesterday's session of Nine Worlds, one of the PCs managed to simultaneously piss off and impress Artemis. Artemis is angry with the PC for doing something despite knowing it would make her mad, but impressed at her idealism and willingness to stick to principle in the face of divine wrath, and so she naturally needs to do something that will a) punish the Hypatia for defying her, and b) give her the opportunity to shine in the face of adversity.

I think that Artemis might send a monster after her, because hey, I like monsters, and the Moon is a giant ecological preserve filled with horrible chimeric monstrosities. So, while Hypatia is off doing her own thing -- hunting down the fanatical luddites who hurt her friends back on Earth and trying to punish Prometheus for permitting ignorance to flourish on Earth -- a monster should show up to make her life more complicated.

So, cool monster ideas? Particularly ones that Hypatia could use to achieve her own ends if she's canny and ruthless enough.

Sticky Fingers

Posted by Rob on April 22, 2006 at 12:23 PM

For some time now, the devious little minds in my Boston gaming circle have been puzzling over the problem of the heist or caper game. The goal is to create an RPG that plays something like The Italian Job, Ocean’s Eleven, or David Mamet’s Heist. Or maybe more like a con movie—The Sting, The Hustler, The Grifters, and so on. It’s an attractive conundrum. Attractive, because these movies are a lot of fun. A conundrum, because the twists and surprises of a classic caper flick don’t translate easily to a traditional RPG. In a typical RPG, each player runs one character and expects to know more or less what that character knows at any given time. In the con or heist genre, the protagonists know what is going on, but the audience is kept one step behind. The fun comes in revealing to the audience things the protagonists knew all along: The Feds are in on the sting. Mr. Orange is a cop. The gasoline was in the bus. How do you make that work in a game where the audience and the protagonists are the same people? Caper flicks have been around forever, but they may be having a “moment” right now, especially on the small screen with all these shows like Heist, Hustle, Thief, Finagle, Filcher, Yoink... My buddy John O’Brien has written the beta version of a game called Caper, a GM-less shared-narration kind of thing that by all early accounts nails the conundrum and takes its lunch money. I’ve got a copy of Caper on my hard drive but I haven’t read it yet. I was already working on this post (like I said, the heist genre is having a moment) when John sent me the PDF. And so I wanted to record my own unfinished ideas on the subject before I read how he went about slicing this Gordian knot.

What follows are five [two for now] rough ideas as to how you could run a heist game. I've ordered them from most traditional gaming style to most indie avant-garde. For each one, I’ve also tossed in a sketchily defined setting or situation, because who loves ya, baby?

Continue reading "Sticky Fingers"

Statistically Analyzing Story

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on April 17, 2006 at 10:14 PM

This is a way overblown post title, but hopefully it's grabby. Anyway, this post arises from a conversation I had with Nick Wedig.

In high school English class, I learned that a good story relies as little as possible on coincidence -- the events of the plot ideally arise organically from the essential natures of the characters involved. As a result, the action plays out with internal logic, coherence, and a sense of inevitability to it.

RPGs seem like they would make a good venue to actually test the idea that a good story has an inevitable force to it, because we can replay scenarios to see what happens differently each time. For example, we could take Dogs in the Vineyard, and take a particular town writeup and a particular set of PCs, and then simply replay the scenario three times with the same players, to see if substantially the same story happens, or if the story varies wildly from run to run.

My suspicion is that the stories will turn out very differently. Two different productions of the same play can be very different, even though the scenes and the dialogue are the same. But: I don't know that this is the case!

EDIT: Hey, Nick has a weblog!

Good Articles on Adventure Design

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on February 15, 2006 at 02:39 PM

I'm sure many of you have already seen these, but Chris Chinn (Bankuei) has put a pair of great articles on adventure design on his weblog: Flag Framing and The Conflict Web.

And There Was Much Rejoicing

Posted by Jim Henley on January 8, 2006 at 10:02 PM

Mo has new material at Sin Aesthetics. See

Holiday Blues, Chargen, and Contextualization
Agenda Affirmation
Stance Crap and Authorial Intent

Treasure Tables Q&A Forum

Posted by Ginger Stampley on December 31, 2005 at 10:56 AM

For those who haven't heard about it by other means, I'd like to point you at the Treasure Tables Q&A Forum for GMs. Martin has set up the forum as a one-month experiment to see how it goes. It's more focused on traditional gaming styles than indie GMing so far, so even folks who play more traditional games will find some good advice.

I'll be adding the forum to the sidebar early next week. If you have a blog that needs to be added or would like to recommend one that isn't there, please feel free to drop an email or a comment, and I'll pick up the new blogs at the same time.

Around the Blog(ck)

Posted by Jim Henley on December 13, 2005 at 10:13 PM

New and newish gaming blogs you should know about and stray doings:

20x20 Room contributor Jonathan Walton has set up a solo game-blogging home at 1001.

Victor Gijsbers' The Gaming Philosopher is both new and already chock full of meaty stuff.

Thomas (LordSmerf) has a new essay up, "Utilizing Props in Game Design (1 of 6)" that's worth a good look.

Jay Loomis' Shining Dodecahedron rhas rolled from Blogspot to Livejournal.

20x20 mainstay Ginger Stampley has shut down Perverse Access Memory and will be doing her solo gameblogging on her Livejournal. Blogosphere historians will notice immediately that her LJ now bears the same title as her original blog.

Mo is surely working on the follow-on immersion essay we all crave, and Brand undoubtedly contemplates further development of his Myers, Briggs and Gaming work.

Qien Es Mas Macho?

Posted by Jim Henley on December 13, 2005 at 09:59 PM

All the talk these days is of "hard choices" and "playing like you mean it" and "risking what's important" to the PC. "Narrativism" is now not addressing premise or creating theme but "passionate characters having their passions tested" (warning: thread tragically truncated currently) and "If you want to hold your character as she is, don't play her." A lot of the reported play sounds like good fun. But the talk about it sounds very locker room sometimes.

Are "hard choices" the new angst?

Sharing RPG Memories

Posted by Ginger Stampley on December 6, 2005 at 09:28 AM

Those of you looking for anecdotal data about geeks, gamers, and ex-gamers might do worse than to read this Monkeyfilter thread soliciting old gamer war stories. I'm the clueless geek girl who didn't realize she'd been asked out on a date by the guy for whom she was painting a miniature (who is now my husband).

The interesting thing to me about the MoFi thread is that the group is general-interest, so these are garden-variety geeks. A lot of them have fond memories of gaming and are willing to talk about it in public. I can remember a time when that wasn't true, and it still surprises me a bit when other people openly talk about gaming among the mundanes.

Light a Single Candle

Posted by Jim Henley on December 3, 2005 at 05:36 PM

Levi Kornelsen of the intriguing Perfect20 (pdf) project asks, "Why not do theory on RPG.net?"

The Cliché Is Its Own Reward: Systems, Reward Systems and Play

Posted by Jim Henley on December 2, 2005 at 11:58 PM

I promised Elliot I'd promote a developing comment-thread drift into the subect of reward systems to a top-level entry, but I don't have time to make it any better than I did in the comments. On one level, all I'm doing is saying "But the play is its own reward!" one more damn time, but I'm also trying to explain how I think that is necessarily the case.

If there's a formal reward system that gives me X, say, experience points, for doing Y, is the idea that I'll do Y so I can accrue my X? Because what is it about X that makes it worth having, necessarily? Chances are the function of X is to make me more effective yet at doing Y, right? (It has to do something.) So if I wouldn't be inclined to do Y in the first place, why would I do it just to get X so I can do Y even more? (Or even better.)

Take "classic" D&D. If I kill things and take their stuff, I get experience points. Which will make me better at killing things and taking their stuff. IF I want to kill things and take their stuff in the first place, I'm good. But if not, not. If I really want to kill things and take their stuff, why start me out bad at that, and only make me good later? This is probably related to why so many actual existing D&D campaigns start characters out at 3rd level or 8th level or whatever - the written reward cycle fails to match up with player desires.

So, turn it back to my man Mo from our OTE campaign, now on the point of being discussed ad nauseum. (Boy, am I livin' the dream or what? I'm getting away with going on and on about my character in a roleplaying game! <G>) My rewards for the unconventional, unpredicted turn were, first, considerable internal satisfaction. If nobody else enjoyed it, I'd have been miffed, but I'd KNOW, myself for sure, that I'd made something good. Second, the appreciation of Nate and Mark and Bill, whose esteem means a lot to me. Onto that you COULD layer an explicit, intentional mechanical reward but, like they say in the Taco Bell commercials, "I'm full!"

I'm not done yet; stay with me please.

Let's subtract Nate and Bill and Mark's respect and attention and swap in, oh, extra experience dice. Not a fair trade! Does that mean the mechanical reward is completely useless? Not quite. It's useful as an attractor. It's an effective advertisement, basically. It's a signalling device to people THINNKING about the game that the game wants to attract players with a certain set of interests. That's not valueless. But it's something that every other component of system also does. (In a well-designed game.)

In a well-designed game the entire system is a reward system.

The most important "reward system" in OTE, as far as structuring play, is the bonus/penalty die mechanic, e.g. the bonus for "good description/tactics/etc." But what happens here, and I think it's all that can happen with any mechanic, is that it becomes a site for explicit or implicit negotiation ("What counts as a COOL description?") IOW, the mechanic is a big sign that reads "SOCIAL CONTRACT GOES HERE." It can be a useful way to structure social-contract understandings, but I'm not sure it can be more (or at least more reliable) than that.

The Bill from earlier paragraphs on our games and others:

I'm in two different gaming groups . . . In one group [the OTE-campaign group], the cool, narrative stuff happens whether you reward it or not. Reward systems might be nice, but they run the risk of unintended consequences (e.g., in Primetime Adventures I found myself thinking about each thing Jim was doing and evaluating it as to whether or not to give him Fan Mail instead of just sitting back and letting it all roll over me and then just sliding all of the Fan Mail over at the *really*cool* part of the session when he killed my character's connection in cold blood).

In the other group, the cool, narrative stuff just doesn't happen, regardless of reward system. We've played games with explicit in-game rewards for doing stuff like that and eventually, they either make do without the rewards or you have to "grade on the curve" so much that it makes the rewards meaningless.

I'd like to hear more about the kinds of things Bill's group does enjoy doing, and how formal reward systems do or don't play into that. My recollection from discussion with Bill is that that group dropped a couple of systems that specifically rewarded "narrativist" behaviors because they didn't like playing that way, rewards or no. This is no surprise: it just says they've got agenda that, say, Heroquest doesn't serve. The real function of the Heroquest reward system is to say, "This game is not for us" to such a group; but again, the rest of the system is saying that too.

I was going to say that I was particularly concerned about one type of reward in narrativist games, the kind that, gives you more power to make even better, cooler stories. Because, if our group wants to make the best possible stories, let's make that Story, to coin a phrase, Now. But now I'm thinking of something a reward system could do, which is to keep from inundating novices with too much at once.

For instance, Polaris is based on an intricately designed interaction of ritual phrases. It's a very cool idea, and very original. A game like Polaris might have an "advancement system" in which the group earns access to new, more complex or more sweeping phrases during the course of play - start players out with a limited but functional set, and when they can handle that, throw a few more at them. D&D's experience system does this for a different style of play. If you're a true D&D n00b, some early kobold-killing is useful real experience before you tackle the tougher tactical challenges ahead.

There are probably other things that reward systems are good for, particularly for people who are naturally attracted to formal, mechanical approaches to goals. Which includes most game designers.

Forge Theory Forums Closed

Posted by Bryant on December 2, 2005 at 11:39 PM

The RPG Theory and GNS Model Discussion forums at the Forge have been closed.

"This forum is no longer available for posting. It has served its purpose: to develop a sensible framework for discussing play, and the children of play, design and publishing. That framework is available as the Big Model."

DIP & DAS in Indie Games: One Player's Experience

Posted by Ginger Stampley on November 22, 2005 at 10:10 AM

Jim brought up the question of develop-in-play and develop-at-start gaming styles in the context of immersion in comments a post or two back. He's called me out twice now, which I suppose means I need to offer some comments on the topic. For all that I'm fascinated by the indie games process, I haven't actually played that many of the games. I'd be interested to hear input from people who have actually played the games about their experiences with DIP and DAS in indie games in the comments.

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Campaign Nostalgia

Posted by Ginger Stampley on November 7, 2005 at 03:05 PM

As part of our move process, I've been going through boxes of old paperwork and files and finding some interesting stuff. One of the things I located was the original notebook I used for recording character information for the Voyagers campaign, in which my husband Michael and I played about eight years ago.

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Heartbreaker Heartbreak

Posted by Jim Henley on October 31, 2005 at 10:57 PM

So I spent Saturday afternoon at TerpCon in College Park, where I played my first D&D since . . . 1981? I played in Amanda Moser's "Candyland" scenario and had a great time as a Dwarven fighter with a sweet tooth. I also cleaned up in the raffle!

The major outcome of the day was to start writing up the ideas I've had for my fantasy heartbreaker. (Since, after all, "everybody should write" one.)

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Creepiest PTA premise ever

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on October 31, 2005 at 04:59 PM

This is the creepiest Primetime Adventures setup I've ever seen. Good going, Jim!

Viral Marketing at its Finest

Posted by Jim Henley on October 28, 2005 at 09:25 PM

The Dogs in the Vineyard flash video. (That's the Mozilla version. There's also an IE version. If you use Opera, it's trial and error for you.)

This item brought to by Jim's resolve to make 20x20 more bloggy.

Finding Players

Posted by Ginger Stampley on October 26, 2005 at 05:53 PM

Most people who read here have already seen it, but I thought I should post something that's really valuable to me right now: FindPlay, a player-finder. I'm fortunate: I found some people to game with before I moved (last week). Folks who aren't as lucky as I was may have good luck trying it, though.

ETA: Should have mentioned that FindPlay is the work of Clinton R. Nixon, whose game company site it sits on. Thanks, Clinton!

Bleg: CMS for Game Site

Posted by Jim Henley on October 22, 2005 at 11:01 AM

I'm thinking of putting up a catchall game site to which I could post campaign material and general stuff. My options seem to be a wiki or an open-source CMS - the chief options here being drupal, geeklog and mambo, all of which have install scripts from my webhost. (They offer two different wikis too - phpWiki and tikiwiki. Any opinions? I value ease of use, ease of design modification (so I can make it look pretty). As for authorship, I'd like it to be less open than a classic wiki - in my so-far hazy vision I could give authorship permission to members of current campaigns, frex, but others would contribute primarily through a comment/bbs functionality. (Actually, ease of comment "promotion" would be a big plus.)

Any recommendations or blackballs?

Bloggy Thoughts Blog Post

Posted by Jim Henley on October 8, 2005 at 11:25 AM

1. Am I nuts or - "Fading Suns with the Prince Valiant rules"?

2. I love free-trait systems (e.g. Over the Edge), but I'm half bored with it as a design concept. The opposite pole is something like Amber, with its four common attributes and no skill list (though a handful of Powers).

How about a mashup? Notionally, the first thing a play group does when planning a campaign is to settle on a set of common traits/attributes. All PCs will have those traits and only those traits, with each player presumably having different scores.

What would such a system be for? One possibility, a relatively focused campaign centered on some theme or problem. Each trait represents a way of solving problems touching on that theme. Assigning a score to that trait signifies an investment in that approach.

The use of the Force, Insight and Determination attributes in Legends of Alyria influenced my thinking here. I'm imagining a metasystem in which the first step is to decide what the chosen setting/theme's "Force, Insight and Determination" are.

3. Now that I have a copy of Prince Valiant (thank you, Abebooks), I'm surprised by how "traditional" the much-discussed GM/Storyteller advice is. The long play example constitutes an explicit tutorial in How to Railroad. The alternating storyteller provisions in the advanced game don't seem to completely undo the straightforward Illusionism of the bulk of the text.

Gaming as Process

Posted by Jere on October 3, 2005 at 03:03 PM

There is a certain school of though that process is process and that you can apply the same basic templates to just about any activity involving a group of people and obtain good results. One of those is proper change control management, which I think gamers could serve to learn a few things from.

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Gaming Podcast

Posted by Ginger Stampley on August 2, 2005 at 11:50 AM

Continuing my trick of referring you elsewhere for interesting information, I note that Paul Tevis, a gamer I know through college alumni circles, has started a gaming-related podcast at Have Games, Will Travel. It also has a feed at havegames_feed, for those of you checking it out through livejournal. I haven't had a chance to check it out yet, but I have found Paul's gaming writing to be be thoughtful and interesting.

As a bonus, Paul is not a big Forge-ite, so his RPG discussions do not exclusively revolve around indie games.

Gaming Theory Blogs

Posted by Ginger Stampley on August 1, 2005 at 03:29 PM

The Forge has a good list of gaming theory blogs you should be reading if you're interested in Forge-style design discussions. A number of the blogs are linked on our sidebar, but others are new to me.

The blogs on the Forge list are not game design journals, but theory discussions. Ginger-Bob says, check it out.

The Appearance of Fairness

Posted by Ginger Stampley on June 21, 2005 at 12:29 PM

This is a topic I've been kicking around a lot in various forms on various fora (mostly the Master's Council) lately. It encompasses questions like "Is it OK for the GM to allow some players to have two characters when others have only one?" and "How should the GM treat his or her spouse in the game?", among many others.

One of the themes I keep seeing in my own answers is that the problem isn't always the GM's conduct. It's the player's conduct. Sure, there are advantages to being the GM's spouse: watching how the GM thinks and behaves day in and day out is an advantage. What matters is whether the spouse takes advantage of that access to get ahead of other players in the game somehow. I've seen a GM's (non-romantic) roommate do that too, and it influenced my sense of how to properly behave with GMs I had extra access to.

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Oh No You Didn't

Posted by Rob on May 30, 2005 at 01:01 PM

This post is about retconning. Originally, it was about something else but then I went back and changed it.

We all know what a retcon is, right? It’s short for “retroactive continuity.” In serial fictions like comics, TV shows, movie sequels, etc., it happens whenever a later work alters details established in earlier installments of the story. Sherlock Holmes didn’t really die at Reichenbach Falls. That whole season of Dallas was just a dream. Darth Vader was actually a whiny little punk-ass bitch. Wikipedia says the term comes from DC Comics letters columns in the 1980s, but the practice is obviously longstanding and widespread. (This site about retcons contains an essay on inconsistencies in The Flintstones, of all things, in which “Flintstones historian” [!] T.R. Adams exposes the terrible truth that the quarry where Fred works has borne sixteen different names. Horrors.)

Retconning happens all the time in gaming, too. In a long-term game, with a complex storyline improvised over time by several authors, inconsistencies and wrong turns are almost unavoidable. Little retcons and course adjustments are a natural way to deal with these. Yet many of us also have a sense that retcons are a violation of something. But what?

An aside: It seems to me the last three Star Wars movies would not have been such an emotional minefield for fans of the original trilogy if they had been sequels rather than prequels to the first three films. If Han and Leia’s children turned out to be whiny punks, in other words, I could have easily shrugged that off. Mucking around in the past of a story we’ve already experienced, revealing the way things “were” all along, alters our relationship to the original work much more than would constructing a new future. We can remember the past and alter the future—never vice-versa. In fact, that’s a pretty good working definition of “past” and “future.” You mess with that and you mess with the way we construct narrative and meaning.

So, what about retconning in RPGs?

Continue reading "Oh No You Didn't"

Roleplaying in a Strange Land

Posted by Bryant on May 27, 2005 at 12:04 PM

My constant fascination with other forms and other kinds of roleplaying has been further fuelled recently by a flirtation with World of Warcraft, the MMORPG. (Content warning: people who dismiss the idea of "real roleplaying" associated with computer games should stop here.)

As with many other MMORPGs, World of Warcraft has a few servers which are designated as RP servers. There's very light enforcement of this -- no naming policy that I've seen, no real pressure from the in-game support staff to RP, and so on. (This is not always the case; I'm given to understand that Dark Age of Camelot's RP servers had more stringent enforcement.) Social pressure is somewhat effective in pushing people to RP, but all in all it's a pretty light roleplaying environment. I kind of suspect a good number of the players on any given WoW RP server are there because the server populations are low and there's less lag.

However, there are some player groups which push heavily towards relatively immersive roleplay, one of which I've fallen in with, and it's been kind of interesting to watch and be a part of.

The basic mechanics of roleplay -- those work pretty much just fine, in terms of characters interacting with characters. At a basic level, what you've got is an exceedingly pretty 3D stage and a bunch of 3D player-controlled models moving within it. The range of expressions is low, but there's all the room for full text interaction that there is on an IRC channel, and people use those for satisfying RP all the time. (The MMORPG convention is that physical activity can be conveyed both by moving the avatar and typing emotes.) Plus you get the additional benefit of attractive scenery. It's a virtual stage with a rich backstory.

The fun stuff comes when you start looking at the intersection of game mechanics and roleplay. What does it mean to be level 35, in IC terms? If two characters are fighting, do you use the in-game mechanics for player vs. player combat, or do you roleplay it out? If the former, how do you deal with two characters who don't want to kill each other?

World of Warcraft gameplay mostly revolves around quests. My PC might get a mission from an NPC instructing him to go lop off the head of a notorious bandit. OK, I succeed, and that's cool because it generates roleplay. I can talk to people about how I went down into the Deadmines and fought goblins and so on... but how do you adjust around the fact that after I lopped off the guy's head, someone else went and did it again the next day? There's no good answer to that question; you have to agree to sort of let that kind of thing slide past.

On the other hand, the quests and the background provide a structure that freeform online text RP (MUSHes, e.g.) sorely lack. It's not just the static background you'd find in, say, a World of Darkness MUSH without heavy GMing. Your characters have storyarcs, and while they're on rails, you can choose the rails you ride on. If your human character wants to head up to Ironforge and run through the dwarf quests, that's possible.

So yet another way in which our hobby produces fun.

Ghosts of Games Past

Posted by Ginger Stampley on May 19, 2005 at 01:51 PM

Tim Hall has a lovely nostalgic post about a game he loved. The game I'm having severe nostalgia fits about right now is Greg Morrow's old Voyagers Champions game. It wasn't perfect--no game is--but it was the most successful game I played with a group of people I really like: Greg, Rick, Michael, Pete, and the occasional Angelo guest shot, among others. And it must have hit a sweet spot because Rick uses the cast every time he thinks about writing a supers prospectus, and Greg is reviving the campaign world for another group in Houston.

I think we all loved our characters: the White Lioness, Cybermancer, Microtech, and the late, lamented Agent Zero. The style of the game was a lot of fun, too. It was early Fantastic Four, with the PCs as the first major supergroup in the new supers era. Greg was very good about letting us add things to the game (Shambala, the 60s generation of spy heroes, KWR), so we all had a big stake in the world and the game. In some ways it worked better as an exploration exercise than it did when dice hit the table. But it was magic, even when it was frustrating.

Now the players are scattered to the winds or have other responsibilities that keep us all from gaming together again. But if I were still in town and the others could make it, and Greg were willing, I'd be at the table with my big bag of d6s in a heartbeat. And thinking about what worked and didn't in the Voyagers has been a big influence on my own GMing.

Everybody should have a game they love like I love the Voyagers. What's yours?

FTotW: Perpetuating Single-Sex Play

Posted by Ginger Stampley on May 16, 2005 at 01:41 PM

There's an interesting thread at the Forge about perpetuating single-sex games and whether that's good or bad. There's some talk about all-female groups, which is a gaming variant I'd love to try, and more about all-male groups.

One of the factors that nobody has discussed, and it's not relevant to the sorts of discussions they have on the Forge or I'd post it to the thread, is that a single-sex group is often as much about social issues as it is about how we game. One of the men in the thread says something about how gaming is all-male for some groups just like poker night. My immediate thought is that, as a woman, I'd take a 'no' from that group as an "I don't want to socialize with you", which is never nice to hear. That was exactly what I got from of the junior high boys who refused to game with me, although I suspect now that it was adolescent fear of girls more than personal hostility. I wonder whether men and women perceive the social value of a refused game invitation differently in that light.

If I were running an all-female group, I think I might invite a man who wanted to join into a different group or to other social events to make it clear that a refusal wasn't personal or a social slight. Unless, of course, the group was willing to open up the space to the man in question, in which case we'd just stop being all-female.

Speaking of Ordinary Protagonists

Posted by Bryant on April 25, 2005 at 11:59 AM

Bill Amend's Foxtrot has been known to touch on our recreational pasttime once or twice. With stunning timeliness, given Matt's last post, he gives us Houses and Humans. In all seriousness, I think he's coming down on Matt's side of the argument -- while the punchline is worth a chuckle, it's also an illustration of how ordinary PCs can still provide wish fulfillment.

Looks like he's into simulationism rather than narrativism, though.

Doomed to Repeat (a rant)

Posted by Jere on April 25, 2005 at 10:18 AM

RPGs are a hobby of do-it-yourselvers, its part of the culture, its certainly part of the self-image. Which explains why it’s the first instinct when presented with a problem, whether in mechanics, setting or otherwise, to roll up your sleeves and build something. The problem here, and I think this is a fundamental one, is that you are probably treading over the same ground as someone else, and not making much headway. Knowledge is added to by building on those who went before. And I’m not so sure we as a hobby are doing a good enough job of this.

Continue reading "Doomed to Repeat (a rant)"

GoO Thread of the Week: Rat Bastard Amber

Posted by Ginger Stampley on April 20, 2005 at 11:31 AM

Here's a (mostly concluded) thread from the Guardians of Amber board about how to run a Rat Bastard Amber game--the "traditional" Amber game where everybody is out to get everybody else.

As far as Amber is concerned, I'm in the Arref camp: rat-bastard to decent-person games are more interesting to me. But the thread also interested me in other genres/games that could be run Rat Bastard style: Sorcerer, noir detective games, Shadowrun (which my local Houston group ran Rat Bastard style before I met them), or possibly a "serious" Paranoia game. A short arc with one of those might be a lot of fun if everyone knew going in that it was a Rat Bastard game.

Dogs Influences

Posted by Ginger Stampley on April 19, 2005 at 12:34 PM

My Dogs in the Vineyard campaign has been on hold due to illness, but the break given me a chance to think a bit about my approach to GMing Dogs. One of the things I find really interesting about Dogs is the influences I find at work in my town design. I was raised among hellfire and brimstone Southern Baptists, which makes it interesting GMing a group whose childhood religious influences include country-club Methodism, orthodox Conservative Judaism, and atheism, and I find that I want to drag strong Southern imagery into my towns.

In particular, I was looking at the town of Cut'n'Shoot, which, like all my towns so far, is named after a little town in Texas, and realizing that the imagery was all very strongly based on Jim Crow: "Mountain People don't let the sun set on you here" and the lynching the players rode into town on.

At some point, I want to trade off GM duties with the other members of the group to see what they come up with for imagery. I suspect it will be very different. I'm also wondering what kind of imagery other GMs and players use and what their influences for the Old West, religion, and supernatural elements (to the extent that they appear) are.

RPG.Net Thread of the Week: Lousy Players and Lousy GMs

Posted by Bryant on April 6, 2005 at 07:04 PM

A little while back, Greg Stolze opened a pair of threads to collect opinions on what makes a lousy player and what makes a lousy GM. He has compiled the results and posted them. He also added his own thoughts on how to overcome some of the problems.

I'm amused that insufficient detail/preparation and railroading were equally disliked. I know they're not the same thing, but I still got a chuckle out of the juxtaposition. Also: I nodded my head a lot when one of the most common player complaints turned out to be apathy and rules laziness.

Cool Lexicon Application

Posted by Bryant on April 1, 2005 at 11:40 AM

Cool Lexicon application of the week: Kip Manley is running a Lexicon for the players of a Nimus Animae, a campaign loosely based on Ars Magica. I think. Anyhow, the Lexicon is specifically oriented towards defining the covenant's magical library -- which is a terribly cool idea; I hadn't thought of running one with that kind of tight focus, but I bet it'll work superbly.

And then I started poking around the site and read this. I'm fascinated by these big campaign worlds that have been built up by multiple GMs over time. I've brushed against a few of them: Before Breakfast comes to mind. So does the Global Guardians universe, and you could make a case for Amber being a manifestation of this phenomenon. There's a real richness that comes with lots of creative minds at work; you also get seams and odd crevices that don't make sense, which are less common in single-GM worlds but which add to the verisimilitude

Mech A RPG Contest

Posted by Bryant on March 21, 2005 at 10:20 PM

Over on RPG.Net, there's a contest brewing. Basically, this guy bought $300 worth of mecha art and then decided not to finish his game. Andy Kitkowski said "Hey, you should have a contest for who can produce the best RPG based on that art. I'll kick in $100 to the winner." Things snowballed from there. The rules aren't finalized yet but it looks like things are getting pretty close. Very cool idea.

I'm trying to figure out what I could chip in for the prize other than money. I'm kind of tempted to offer 5,000 words of fiction, world-building, or adventure for the winner's system -- kind of egotistical of me, maybe? Hm.

Cool Mini Or Not?

Posted by Ginger Stampley on March 17, 2005 at 06:40 PM

I had to give up miniatures painting a few years ago, but I still enjoy a well-painted figurine as much as the next Warhammer addict. Accordingly, I present Cool Mini Or Not?, which lets you play Hot or Not with other people's miniatures.

Apparently there's also a store where you can buy some of the miniatures (those sculpted by small foundries). If I were still painting, this site would be extremely dangerous to my pocketbook.

Roleplaying and Security Clearance

Posted by Bryant on March 9, 2005 at 01:19 PM

The IDF (Israel Defense Force) automatically downgrades the security clearance of incoming recruits who play roleplaying games. Saith the army, "They're detached from reality and susceptable to influence."

The article has the usual picture of LARPers as a representation of roleplaying, but someone who's read the original Hebrew article comments that "the Hebrew version mentions LARPing and RD&D specifically, with traditional D&D only mentioned as background on the game." He doesn't define RD&D, but from context I think he means another form of LARP.

As of the moment I wrote this post, the final comment in the thread purports to be from thor@asgard.net. I'm not sure that this really strengthens the case for D&D players, alas.

What Are You Playing?

Posted by Ginger Stampley on February 11, 2005 at 10:51 AM

One of the features I've really enjoyed over at the Forge is the every-so-often discussion of what people are playing. It's a tradition I'd like to bring over to 20x20, so I'll start by tossing down: I'm currently playing Primetime Adventures FTF (actual play), GMing Dogs in the Vineyard FTF (GM journal), GMing House of Cards, an Amberway (Amber/Everway cross) PBeM (current play log), and playing in several PBeMs, mostly Amber, and one Vampire PBeM. And I'm prepping Amberway and Amber games for cons this spring and summer.

What are you playing?

Matrix Game In Progress

Posted by Bryant on February 10, 2005 at 03:38 PM

We've talked about Matrix games here a couple of times; I haven't gotten around to trying one but I am still intrigued by the form. We are also, of course, generally big fans of experiments with Web-based RPG forms such as Lexicon. I am thus happy to be following World of Titans, a Livejournal-based Matrix superhero game. I especially like that there's a non-LJ person making arguments over the GM's shoulder.

Changing My Gaming Worldview

Posted by Ginger Stampley on February 8, 2005 at 05:15 PM

For me, one of the marks of a good roleplaying game or idea is that it changes the way I play or the way I think about gaming. I realized today that Dogs in the Vineyard has really started changing the way I think about how I play my characters even in non-Dogs games.

One of my PBeM characters is currently in the middle of a confrontation with some (pr