The 20' By 20' Room

Jonathan Walton's Anathema

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on September 15, 2006 at 03:31 PM

Over at his personal blog, Jonathan Walton has been cooking up a homebrew freeform version of Exalted, called Anathema.

I'm posting a translation of a PC I played below the cut....

Continue reading "Jonathan Walton's Anathema"

Dolphin game thoughts

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on May 19, 2006 at 10:13 AM

Here are some random thoughts about Jonathan's dolphin game.

One difference between dolphins and people is that (as far as we know) dolphins don't use language. So a dolphin rpg should not require the use of language. This is not an insurmountable barrier, though, since intentionality -- being able to imagine the responses of others -- has been observed in plenty of animals besides humans, and I think that act of sympathetic imagination is the essential feature in roleplaying. So, one design constraint is to make it playable without words. This shouldn't be too hard, though, because improv-ers do it all the time (eg, making the actors use nonsense syllables in the improv).

Another difference is that dolphins have this cool sonar thing, and  we don't. Somehow I'd like the game to require the players to locate stuff using aural cues rather than (say) visual cues, just to get that feature of dolphin-ness across.

State of the Memeage

Posted by Ginger Stampley on December 1, 2004 at 11:45 AM

I posted about writing exercises a couple of weeks ago, but since then, there have been a number of changes that I should mention for those who are interested in gameblogging goodness and prompts to inspire posts.

Game Dreams, hosted by Doc, have gone the way of the dodo. Goodbye, Doc, and thanks for all the fish.

Bryant is probably too modest to admit that he still very occasionally posts a Monday Mashup.

Nuadha is trying to get back on the wagon and post Wednesday Weirds on a regular basis.

Li is now doing Lunchtime Polls with questions of interest.

And Scott, who has just started a blog dedicated to one-shots and convention games, has the start of a meme going. Maybe if a bunch of us answer it, he'll keep posting.

Last, but not least, there's a yahoo group that gets prompts for some of these memes (Wednesday Weird, Monday Mashup, and IRE for sure). The group even has an RSS feed for those of you who'd rather see it in your aggregator than your mailbox. Contact Bryant if you want to learn how to make your meme posts show up on the list automatically.

15 Questions, answers

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on November 24, 2004 at 03:07 PM

Here are my answers to the gaming questionnaire Ginger posted.

Continue reading "15 Questions, answers"

15 Questions

Posted by Ginger Stampley on November 23, 2004 at 11:36 AM

Our own Matt Snyder is too modest to mention that he has a gaming meme going in his LiveJournal. I've answered here, and I encourage the rest of you to go answer it too and give Matt some warm fuzzies.

Lunchtime Polls

Posted by Ginger Stampley on November 18, 2004 at 12:32 PM

My friend Li's experiment with asking about Supers games was so successful that she's now doing Lunchtime Polls, the first of which is about your favorite historical period for RPGs.

I'll also use this opportunity to stump for Game Dreams, the most recent of which deals with religion and RPGs. Go forth and gameblog!

Lexicon sighting

Posted by Bryant on August 30, 2004 at 10:36 AM

Morbus Iff is starting a Gamegrene Lexicon. It's not tied to a specific system, and in fact the nature of the world isn't even defined, so this is about as loose as a Lexicon setup gets -- it'll be interesting to watch it develop.

Meanwhile, I'm considering a Vampire: the Requiem Lexicon covering Las Vegas. Interested parties should comment or drop me a line.

24 Hour RPG

Posted by Bryant on July 23, 2004 at 02:49 PM

The 24 hour RPG concept has its own site, and there's currently a "Grand Act" going on. I'm not sure about that particular chunk of terminology, but I shall not be churlish: I like the 24 hour game concept. It seems to me that there's some value in a shotgun blast of concepts, polished or not. I wouldn't expect a slew of new campaigns out of this, but I would expect a slew of new campaign ideas, if you see the difference -- it's a writing exercise with a twist. I am in favor of anything that gives me new ideas to play with.

Game Dreams

Posted by Ginger Stampley on June 18, 2004 at 01:22 PM

Mitch Evans of Doc's Blog has decided to pick up where WISH left off with a new writing exercise, Game Dreams. He posted the first one today. Those of you who need a writing exercise fix, head over that way.

The Last WISH

Posted by Bryant on June 12, 2004 at 10:26 AM

Ginger has posted her last WISH. If you've never participated or read the WISHes, you've been missing out. Without Ginger's example of gaming blogs as discussion forums, I wouldn't have started the 20' by 20' Room. And so I wanted to answer the final WISH here.

Tell me your favorite war story. Why is it your favorite? What does it show about your character or the game/campaign you were playing? What does it exemplify about why you like gaming?

Continue reading "The Last WISH"

Memoir Found In A Wiki

Posted by Rob on June 2, 2004 at 12:26 AM

I've been thinking the 20' By 20' Room is some sort of mad fruitcake, with Neel as the tasty bits.
-- our own Bryant Durrell

If Bryant is killed tomorrow in some gruesome industrial accident, and if Emily runs off to be a pirate, and if the rest of us are afflicted with gigantism or lost in the Mystery Spot, the 20’ By 20’ Room will at least be remembered for its third post. (I’m not saying it’s GOING to happen, I’m just saying IF…) IF all these misfortunes were to befall us and the 20’ By 20’ Room was to go defunct, it would at least be remembered for giving the world Neel Krishnaswami’s Lexicon.

It actually seems like just about every gaming site or forum I visit has at least one brilliant post by Neel on it somewhere, but the Lexicon is a contribution of another order, a game that is out there in the ideaspace and actually getting played. Indeed, it’s one of those ‘why didn’t I think of that’ inventions that are so truly ingenious, once they’re around you can’t remember ever not knowing about them.

I recently played in Jeremiah’s second Nobilis Lexicon, the Lexicon of the Lost 500 Years, and in Allen Varney’s Paranoia XP Lexicon, the Toothpaste Disaster. I wasn’t a model player in either, I must admit. Both games coincided with the final push to finish my PhD dissertation, and I missed a lot of deadlines in each. The pace of the Paranoia Lexicon, with something like two dozen players posting in the early turns, was particularly brutal. But both were a lot of fun, and playing in one right after the other inspired the following reflections on the Lexicon format and on the very different Nobilis and Paranoia settings.

Continue reading "Memoir Found In A Wiki"

The Component Model

Posted by Emily Dresner-Thornber on March 8, 2004 at 09:54 PM

I'm sitting on the couch doing what all old gamers eventually do -- I was working on my own game. It isn't very long and it is still just a few scraps of cool ideas. I was writing my way through a few examples of play and I had a bit of a revelation.

I'm an engineer at heart. I'm also an engineer during the day. It molds how I view the world, a kind of strange, abstract, mathematical mesh where everything can be ultimately expressed with tiny little figures drawn with LaTeX.

I like to build things in chunks. I don't like looking at a big problem and tackling it straight on. I like to plan strategy, break the problem into manageable pieces to chew on, and work in small little machines.

So I had my revelation, and here it is.

Continue reading "The Component Model"

Lexicon Thoughts

Posted by Jere on February 24, 2004 at 08:45 AM

The Lexicon of the Second Age has wrapped up just recently and I’d like to post a few of my thoughts.

Continue reading "Lexicon Thoughts"

Sandman (Not Goth)

Posted by Bryant on February 12, 2004 at 12:07 PM

I discovered today that Sandman: Map of Halaal is available for purchase. This seems as good an opportunity as any to talk about this unique product of the mid-80s, particularly since it was in part an attempt to address the difficulty of finding and teaching new gamers.

The whole thing really started with Masquerade and the other treasure hunts of the 80s. The gaming industry picked up on the fad. As far as I know, the only RPG publishers who published treasure hunts were Metagaming and Chill Pacesetter, who also published Chill (thanks, Jack!).

Metagaming just extended their existing Fantasy Trip line. Pacesetter did something entirely more interesting with Sandman: it's designed to be playable by complete novices with close to zero learning curve. The only exception is the GM, who doesn't need to have prior experience but who does need to have read and understood the rules and scenario.

The first scenario starts with the players as amnesiacs on the Orient Express, which removes any need for a complex character sheet. They develop and discover abilities through use, which spreads the load of learning out over the session. By my standards, the plot is a serious railroad -- there's very specific advice to the GM on how to get the PCs to follow the train tracks -- but I have yet to be convinced that new players will be turned off the genre by railroading. One man's locomotive is another man's safety net.

From there on in, things get very surreal. Map of Halaal is the first part of a series, and there's nothing except the mysterious figure of the Sandman to tie the weirdness together. Since the story doesn't end, the train inevitably goes off the tracks, and you couldn't use this as an introductory campaign. Still, I'd recommend it to anyone doing serious work on introductory RPGs.

New Meme: the Wednesday Weird

Posted by Ginger Stampley on February 4, 2004 at 04:01 PM

Readers who enjoy participating in game memes might like to try the Wednesday Weird, a new meme by James, aka Nuadha, of Claimh Solais. The meme, which is explained in detail here, is about developing unique answers to standard gaming problems or tropes such as mugging, defending a home against a robber, or the like.

Form Before Function

Posted by Emily Dresner-Thornber on February 2, 2004 at 07:33 PM

I seem to be plagued with literally millions of very strange and interesting ideas, but none of them are ever candidates for games. They're either too bizarre, too unapproachable, or too linear. I seem to be lost in a sea of strangeness with nowhere to go. So I ask these questions of the reading public:

* When trying to write a game, do you start with a game system and then write the world? Or do you work the other way around, with the world first and then the system?

* How do you know if one of your ideas even has the chance of becoming a game?

* How far do you go before you decide your current idea should end up on the cutting room floor?

Inquiring minds would love to know. Discuss.

Example of Play

Posted by Emily Dresner-Thornber on January 27, 2004 at 09:55 PM

I’m sitting here in bed on my laptop, and I’m reading through the Forge forums. I come across a fine thread about designing games starting with an example of play. From the example of play, you can derive how munchy you want your game, what kind of mechanics you want, and how you want control to flow from GM to player and player to player. The thread is here, with assorted comments. It’s an older thread, but I hadn’t seen it before, and I was happy that Forge threads tend to hang around instead of timing out.

Has anyone done any game design starting with examples of how you’d like to play the game and then working up setting and rules around that flow? If so, how has it worked out for you? If not, why haven’t you tried it yet?

(I marked this as a "writing exercise" so it's an exercise for the reader!)

Advancing Steadily Forward

Posted by Bryant on November 26, 2003 at 12:29 PM

The Ghoul's comments on his dice post and a recent post from Rick Jones got me thinking again about what effect experience points actually have on PCs. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm talking about more traditional roleplaying games; some of the stuff over on The Forge has very different paradigms. That said, when a GM awards a PC a bunch of experience points and she levels up, what's happening in the gameworld context?

Continue reading "Advancing Steadily Forward"

Lexicon: an RPG

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on November 20, 2003 at 08:43 PM

Here's a little roleplaying game that I've been toying with. I call it the Lexicon rpg, in honor of its inspiration, Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars.

The basic idea is that each player takes on the role of a scholar, from before scholarly pursuits became professionalized (or possibly after they ceased to be). You are cranky, opinionated, prejudiced and eccentric. You are also collaborating with a number of your peers -- the other players -- on the construction of an encyclopedia describing some historical period (possibly of a fantastic world).

The game is played in 26 turns, one for each letter of the alphabet.

1. On the first turn, each player writes an entry for the letter 'A'. You come up with the name of the entry, and you write 100-200 words on the subject. At the end of the article, you sign your name, and make two citations to other entries in the encyclopedia. These citations will be phantoms -- their names exist, but their content will get filled in only on the appropriate turn. No letter can have more entries than the number of players, either, so all citations made on the first turn have to start with non-A letters.

2. On the second and subsequent turns, you continue to write entries for B, C, D and so on. However, you need to make three citations. One must be a reference to an already-written entry, and two must be to unwritten entries. (On the 25th and 26th turns, you only need to cite one and zero phantom entries, respectively, because there won't be enough phantom entries, otherwise.)

It's an academic sin to cite yourself, you can never cite an entry you've written. (OOC, this forces the players to intertwingle their entries, so that everybody depends on everyone else's facts.) Incidentally, once you run out of empty slots, obviously you can only cite the phantom slots.

3. Despite the fact that your peers are self-important, narrow-minded dunderheads, they are honest scholars. No matter how strained their interpretations are, their facts are accurate as historical research can make them. So if you cite an entry, you have to treat its factual content as true! (Though you can argue vociferously with the interpretation and introduce new facts that shade the interpretation.)

4. This little game will probably play best on a wiki, and it should take a month or so to play to completion. At the end of it, you'll have a highly-hyperlinked document that details a nice little piece of collaborative world-building.

The owner of the wiki should set the general subject of the Lexicon. I suggest that he or she make use of the technique of "open reference" when describing the historical period: "You are all revisionist scholars from the Paleotechnic Era arguing about how the Void Ghost Rebellion led to the overthrow of the cyber-gnostic theocracy and the establishment of the Third Republic." What a cyber-gnostic theocracy is, or what happened to the first two republics, or what the Paleotechnic Era is are all unknown -- they are named to specifically to evoke a mood and inspire the other players' creativity. (This is an idea which I've first seen in fully articulated form in the character creation rules for Robin Laws's Hero Wars game.)