Archive for February, 2009

Context:  Vinny speaking at the Indie Roundtable at Dreamation and the various responses (initial post on Fred’s journal)

The thought I had on Sunday night can be summarized as:  Provided the extra work is tolerated, some of Vinny’s concerns could be potentially solved with the enforcement of player-hour requirements for free GM badges.

So, when Kat emailed me that I was getting a free badge for Dreamation, I was honestly surprised.   I was only running two games, and then only for four players per game.  To me, this didn’t seem like enough to warrant a free badge, but hey, I won’t complain.

Vinny’s concerns of limited numbers of players and having to turn so many away are totally valid, and I was bummed to hear that people who wanted in Mythender didn’t get in.  At the same time, I wanted to have fun playing in other games and I know my game breaks with six players.  So, what am I to do?

Well, since I assumed that I wasn’t going to get a free badge, I felt the numbers were alright.  Last year, I ran three games — two four-player slots of A Penny for my Thoughts and one of Don’t Rest Your Head.  I felt I earned the badge then, but I also felt like I didn’t get to play enough other stuff (hence only two games this year).

Working back from that personal experience and towards what Vinny’s suggested of running six-player slots, here’s my thought:  not every game works for six players, and fitting games that don’t into that format will only create sourness.  But we clearly can’t do what we’re doing right now and just assume it’ll work.  Thus, I’m brought to the idea of serving the same number of players in two different configurations:  running two slots for six players (2×6 = 12) or running three slots for four players (3×4 = 12).

Now, you could leave this as player-slots or go to the GenCon standard of player-hours.  At four hours per slot (with some exceptions, which will disincentivize those slots in this model), that comes to 48 player-hours.

If you want to encourage this behavior, you need to create an incentive for that, either carrot-style or stick-style.  Carrot-style makes sense here; you get a free GM badge if you run at least that many player-slots or player-hours.

To concisely state my idea:  Require people to run enough games to fit 12 player-slots (or 48 player-hours) to receive a free GM badge.

If you buy the idea that this is a potential solution, we can talk about how to hack it.  I’m not saying I recommend any or all of these, but point them out to show how flexible a solution like this could be with some work.

Partial Credit. If you run, say, 1/2th or 2/3rds the number required, then perhaps you only get half off your badge.  It could still be a nice, shiny pink GM badge, but it’s one you had to pay for.

Playtests Count Less.  If you want to create a disincentive for the number of playtests on the schedule, you could count them as a fraction of player-slots, like 2/3rds or even 1/2th.  I do think this could blow up, given the number of playtests that happen at Dreamation (and, frankly, part of why I fly out from the West Coast to go to this thing.)

Minimum Player-Slot Counts. You could deny putting people on the schedule at all if they didn’t hit a certain count, like only running one game on the schedule (I’m talking about you, Tony! *grin*).  This might sound bad at first, but consider this in concern with a Games on Demand type place at the con, and it has a potentially positive spin on things.

In any case, that’s the idea in a nutshell.  Hopefully it’ll help someone wiser than I (like Rob Donoghue) articulate an idea that works.  It mainly came as a reason to Vinny’s comment on the playtests, saying that most of the people involved have pink badges anyway, and reacting with “Yes, but the fact that so many have pink badges is not exactly our fault.”  (Bleh, that sounds like I’m being ungrateful for getting a free badge, which I’m not since I have to worry about layoffs and travel expenses.)

- Ryan

So, I’m about to leave for my OrcCon-Dreamation trip, and thus won’t be around the Internet much (except for Twitter, thanks to the ease of using it from my iPhone).  If you find yourself missing out of hearing me talk out of my ass about gaming crap, I sumbit these shows I’ve recently guested on:

• 2d6 Feet in a Random Direction #41, where I talk a little bit about my D&D 4/e experiences and a little bit about the Dresden Files RPG
• This Modern Death #33, where I argue about downtime (which, yes, is still the wrong damn word — I’ve been hellishly busy this week to post more thoughts on that) and talk about pacing & conflict framing.  I might also be talking about your mother.  (It’s that sort of show.)  There’s also a bit of follow-up discussion of that ep on their forum.
• Stabbing Contest #22,where my audio apparently sounds like complete crap but I’ve been told that my thoughts on failure are worth listening to.

Enjoy!  Catch you whenever I have a free moment (hah!) or when I get back.

- Ryan

Master Plan #43: Interview with Crafty Games, Part 2

Right before heading off on a bi-coastal convention adventure, Ryan serves up the second half of the interview with Crafty Games. In this half, they talk about collaborating as a team and their main hurdles in revisiting their system & making Fantasy Craft & Mastercraft — along with, naturally, their own personal master plans. Afterward, Ryan tells you that he’ll be at OrcCon and Dreamation this month, and gives a shameless plea to donate to the show.

Crafty Games:

• Fantasy Craft
• Spycraft 2.0

Running time: 21:29 / File size: 14.8M

We all know that the Internet is full of people disagreeing. On rare occasion, that disagreement is actual civil and worth conversation. I believe that a quick little bit over Twitter between myself & the esteemed Jeff Tidball is one of those times (along with a question provided by Rich Rogers of Canon Puncture):

RyanMacklin: I wonder if I’m just tired of goal-focused RPG campaigns.

orklord: @RyanMacklin if not goal-focused RPGs, then do you want sandbox ones, or something else?

RyanMacklin: @orklord I guess I’m just tired of character exploration bring sacrificed on the altar of “plot advancement.”

jefftidball: @RyanMacklin Plot, though, is the best way to *do* character exploration, because then it’s exciting. To choose just one is to #fail.

RyanMacklin: @jefftidball I don’t always agree with that.

RyanMacklin: @jefftidball More specifically, since it’s too complex for a tweet: downtime from plot is where I see a lot of awesome exploration.

So, here’s my open reply to Jeff, in a space where I can actually talk about something in more than 140 characters.  Maybe it’ll be something even worthwhile.

Jeff,

Now, before I start, I will wholly admit that (a) I could be wrong and (b) maybe we’re actually talking about the same thing, only the limitations of the medium make us fill in more to the conversation that ends up being incorrect assumptions.  (I say that partly so that people who have a need to read what I say on the internet as uncharitably as possible can check that shit at the door.)

Here’s my thought: in moments of crisis, which tend to be focused around plot, we see certain sorts of character exploration — we see what people are willing to do in order to achieve something, we know how far people can go.  To draw parallels to fiction, specifically to the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, we see what sort of calls Adm. Adama will make to save the human race, how far the various pilots will push themselves to get the kills and keep the fleet safe, how far the political leaders will go to gain & secure power, etc.

That, to me, is a given in a role-playing game.  Moments of crisis, and of conflict, are maybe even the norm.  But I have grown to see that such moments are only half of the equation — and that when all you do is crisis, conflict, plot advancement, you’re cutting off a really potent avenue of character exploration: downtime.

As I play more, I want more downtime in my games because I want to meet the character not just at moments of crisis, but at moments of calm. I know how the character reacts to some Centurions crash-boarding onto Galactica — she fights like hell.  But I don’t know what happens in the aftermath, like a wake for a downed comrade or looking in on her half-Cylon child, whatever.  Or, rather, I might know in some abstract, but I haven’t really met the character in those moments if I’m denied those moments.

By the way, as the name suggests, “downtime” isn’t meant to be all the time.  Without moments of crisis, downtime doesn’t really impact.  But you can have games that are just crisis-after-crisis or conflict-after-conflict.  My original comment is probably misleading; I should have typed out “I am tired of people turning up their nose at downtime because they think it isn’t ‘playing the game’ or doesn’t have an immediately-presentable conflict or they actually don’t care about the character as much as they want to ‘beat the GM,’ whathaveyou.”  But that goes beyond the 140 characters of Twitter, and is really only the beginning of a conversation rather than the entire thing.

In an upcoming of This Modern Death (maybe up tonight), we talk about this.  We played in a Primetime Adventures game where Shaun & Randy pushed for conflict during scenes that I, as the Producer, was looking at as downtime.  This lead to dissatisfaction overall in the game.  The conversation got heated, partly because that’s always good for “ratings” (whatever the fuck that means in the world of podcasting) but also because we had a serious clash of agenda — I value downtime as a vehicle of character exploration as much as they value plot for that.

To close with a downtime moment from BSG, there’s that one episode where everyone gets together for the no-rank boxing night.  There was no major crisis there, no major conflict.  In that episode, we got to meet the characters not when they were under the immediate threat of doom, but when they had a chance to breathe.  And what did we learn?  That the defenders of the human race need to be violent regardless of whether there are Cylons around (among other things we learned).  We would not have truly met the characters if we only saw them in crisis, because we wouldn’t have seen what they do when they can relax and let go, or what they do to process the aftermath of a crisis.

So, yeah, to me downtime is the best way to do character exploration, but for downtime to be effective, it needs to be surrounded by crisis and conflict — tools that tend to be associated with “plot advancement.”  Sacrificing downtime for more plot advancement is the quickest way for me to grow disinterested in a game, as is “ruining” downtime by engaging in conflict mechanics.

- Ryan

Edit: Nancy posted up a thread on Cultures of Play as the beginning of a response to this.