Archive for the ‘Role-Playing Games’ Category

As part of May of the Dead blog carnival put on by the Going Last Gaming Podcast, I’m going to wax about some horror thoughts. Long-time readers know that I loves me some horror gaming and have a lot of thoughts on it. Today, I want to dive into some thoughts on a hypothetical game system[1]: what separates lowly monsters from truly horrible beings.

What notion I’ve come to is: the scariest of monsters are those that don’t miss.

Part of horror comes from a discrepancy between the protagonists’ competency and the Threat’s. Whether that Threat is Dracula, Azathoth, a Terminator, or other sight that causes nightmares in those whom encounter it, the core is that the Threat will win in a stand-up fight.

Oh, and yes, I so want to run a horror game that is about the first Terminator movie.

But many of our games don’t reflect that, at least not strictly speaking. Games often have the Threat roll to see if it hits, and there’s a good chance that it won’t. It’s reflected in our language: “the vampire attacks!”

Let’s fold, spindle and mutilate that. This means trying some experimental stuff with our games, namely (as the title says): Don’t Roll for the Horror. Start it off not with something as wishy-washy as “attacking,” but something more concrete:

The vampire jumps on you and rips your neck open with its fangs!

Now, the reason we tend to say “attack” is because we’re inviting the potential victim to respond, in no small part because the game system gives them that privilege. But by jumping right to what the Threat seeks to do with no softening, we’re doing two things:

• We’re changing the language used to respond. Horror as a theme is partly about rebelling against that which is more powerful than you. So instead of just saying “I defend” in response,” you’re saying “No! You don’t just rip my neck open!”
• We’re saying that if the Threat doesn’t succeed, it is entirely because of the protagonist’s action.

Those are both awesome things to me. So let’s look at how to rock that structure:

1. The Threat does something. Something big. It doesn’t ask. It doesn’t try. It just plain does.
2. A protagonist responds to push back, drawing the line in the sand and fighting the good fight.
3. The protagonist rolls for that action. And just the protagonist. Not an opposed roll setup. You know how strong or dangerous this specific moment is, so set the difficulty accordingly.

Depending on the result (and the numbers involved will vary from game to game), the following happens:

• Fail by bad enough: the Threat fully succeeds. Someone is probably dead.
• Fail by some amount: the Threat doesn’t get what it wants, but you’re hurt in the process.
• Succeed by a small amount: give-and-take. You’re hurt, but so is the Threat.
• Succeed by a large amount: a moment of reversal, when the Threat is the one hurt or driven off.

Each of these is important. If we’re saying that a Threat might just straight up kill someone, the roll has to reflect that chance. Otherwise, we’re just lying in our descriptions, and everyone at the table will see through it. Tension is dropped. And the middle two reflects the notion of partial failure & success — horror thrives not on absolute moments but on small victories and setbacks. Finally, you need to give hope in the moment, which is where the last result lives.

If we’re doing away with rolling, this means we throw out the idea that the Threat might act slower than protagonists — you know, initiative. Horrific competence means Threats push first. The only time when that might be different is if the protagonists are aware of the current situation and somehow make themselves able to get the jump on the Threat, and even then that’s about chance rather than certainty.

After all, that’s how it often works in horror fiction.

Finally, since I bought up “getting hurt”…my favorite system for damage in any horror game comes from Unknown Armies. It’s easy to die, and you never know how many hit points you or anyone else has left. The GM rolls & keeps track of stuff in secret. While normally I hate secret rolls, I like it for damage in horror. It has two things going for it: one, you don’t have absolute certainty of how far you can push your character; two, and frankly far more important, it causes the table to rely on the hurt described rather than numbers. That’s very powerful mojo, because it’s language that makes a horror game really pop.

Again, this is about an idea of a new game system, but it wouldn’t take much to try some of these ideas in an existing one, as long as the game can support horror beats.

***

A word of note: this setup doesn’t do action-horror — at least, if it’s the sort of “action-horror” that is more action than horror. Which most are; it’s a fun subversion of classic horror construction, where competency is more at parity even if vulnerability is still vastly not.

- Ryan

[1]To be fair, it’s not entirely hypothetical to me. I have notes about using this idea for a game system that uses my Emerging Threats Unit campaign frame, but it’s far from primetime.

Last night, I had the pleasure of spending the evening chatting with Ron & Veronica Blessing, Ed Doolittle & Lee Langston[1] on their new gaming podcast, RoleplayDNA. We discussed sandbox games, including:

• What we see is and isn’t a sandbox game
• The sorts of sandbox games we’ve run before
• Sandbox games and IP games
• Degree of player-ownership in sandbox games
• Shoot, degree of GM-ownership in a sandbox game with heavy canon
• Helping players not used to this sort of game dive in
• Player types & expectations with such games.
• Setting up sandbox games
• Giving me shit for Dresden’s lateness. And me giving some back.
• etc.

Hope you enjoy it. Runs 48 minutes, 41 seconds.

- Ryan

[1] Lee’s note on the hosts’ about page proclaims him the “The God of Gaming.” People should not tell me that they’re gods. Ever.

Josh Roby & I are at it again. Pay close attention, my sons and daughters, for one is totally free and the other is being Kickstarted. These are the Vicious Crucible games, which Josh Roby explains both us in this sweet Kickstastic video:

If you’re allergic to videos, here’s what’s up:

The borderlands of the Verdigris Valley have never been peaceful, but now an invasion force gathers at the summit of the Pashuan Way, looking hungrily down on the rich homesteads and crippled fort below. The days to come will throw six men and women into a gauntlet of desperate pressures, crushing obligations, and entangling relationships. Some will fall; some will triumph; some will cave to the pressures; some will bask in the flames like a phoenix. These six stand on the precipice of The Vicious Crucible of Verdigris Valley. The only way out is through, and the only way through requires a painful transformation into something new.

The Vicious Crucible of Verdigris Valley is game for up to six players and a GM. It plays in three to five sessions, or a pulse-pouding single session of jump cuts and action sequences. Best of all, it’s free.

All Vicious Crucible games are released as a free download. I’m using a “ransom model” for funding the project, with a bit of a twist. The first game, Verdigris Valley, is already released for free (download below). If the ransom is met, I’ll publish the next game for everyone to enjoy. On top of that, when you back the project, you also get the Franchise: you get to vote on where the next Vicious Crucible will be.

So check out Verdigris Valley and decide if you’d like to see more. Then hit up the Kickstarter and pick a reward tier that looks fun.

As with Void Vultures, my role in the project is editor & co-developer, Unlike Void Vultures, this system is actually is only a few pages long. The rules are six pages in total (and Josh gets into the process of designing for that), with the supplemental material for the adventure 30 pages beyond that (including characters, locations, and a map). It has a witty back-and-forth beat mechanic that’s focused on character elements to generate the scene’s language[1]. Check it out; it’s free, and I think worth your time.

For that second game I mentioned (in case you didn’t finish the video above), Josh is doing the Kickstarter for the second Vicious Crucible game, which the backers will vote on if it succeeds. Consider backing the Kickstarter if you’re interested in that, or you just plain like what you see in Verdigris Valley and would like the see the creators get some coin for their work.

Thanks!

- Ryan

[1] Which has become one of my favorite mechanics. I love it in Cortex Plus, loved it in Dogs in the Vineyard before that.

When you’re writing a book, it’s crucial to know who your audience is and to write for them.

That sound obvious, right? It’s harder than you think. Many indie peeps will write to the audience immediately around them, the folks I call alpha fans. They’re super easy to write to, because they already have a buy-in to what you think. You can engage in minimalism with them to a lazy degree. And if they’re the only people who you expect will ever buy your book or play your game — like you’re just making something for your friends — cool.

But a writer honest with him- or herself has to go farther than that, to imagine what other people outside of the alpha fan group will likely be checking this out. After all, how else are you going to grow that group? (I should point out that you’re doing this for two sets of folks: you, as a creator showing that you care about a broader group of people; and your alpha fans, who probably want more great people to play with.) So then you have to consider who, realistically, is going to check out your fan, should for some reason you break out of a small circle of folks who know about your thing and into a the notice of a larger population.

This isn’t just fantasy land. Look at Wil Wheaton pimping Fiasco. Something like that could happen to you, perhaps at that scale, perhaps smaller but still larger that your own sphere of influence.

So, who is that group? That’s something we had a discussion about with Fate Core, which ended with to following notions of audience:

• There are a lot of alpha fans of Fate. They get the ideas, which is to our benefit. So we shouldn’t write solely to them. We’re still writing for them, but we should be writing to their friends, folks they want to introduce to Fate.
• There’s a non-insignificant who want to get away with reading as little as possible, until they’re sure they’ll like something. These folks are more focused on kinesthetic learning (whether due to preference of brain makeup, whatever). So let’s make it so they only need to read the short Basics chapter, as long as someone (ideally the GM) reads the rest of the thing. And we’ll declare that to be the case upfront.
• The Fate veterans will need to have spelled out some of the terminology & rules cleanup we’re doing for Core. Since there are a bunch of different implementations of Fate right now, we don’t know which ones someone will have in mind when they’re reading Core for the first time, so we’ll have to make sure we don’t confuse them while writing to their friends.
• We will not be writing to an audience not aware of roleplaying games. Evil Hat doesn’t have the sort of advertising budget to reach out to totally new people. Like with almost every other RPG producer, we rely primarily on word of mouth & exposure to get new people to try out games. Very few people are actually exposed to our hobby directly from a book these days; they are from friends who have already been exposed. So we’re not going to waste time trying to explain our hobby to someone completely new.
• And because a game can live and die by the loudness of its alpha fans, we’re definitely still writing for them. Just not solely to them.

This conversation about audience came after some of Fate Core was written, and Lenny & I had a sit-down to talk about how we need to reflect to our audience. This solidified which of the two approaches for Core we were looking at:

• The first was a purely toolkit model. After the Basics & Aspects chapter, every single thing in Fate is entirely modular. We were going to focus solely on how to built your own Fate game from that modularity.
• The second was to take a slim setting example and build around that, so we had some finalized Core rules that embodied Fate Core, the sort of thing we could use to start with, and then drift from that central point in future discussions of toolkitting.

Because we realized the primary text focus should be to folks new to Fate, not new to roleplaying, and likely have a friend around who knows this but not necessarily, we went with the second approach. Once we understood this model, we were able to put the toolkit element — which is critical to Fate Core — in context.

What that means for the text, well, we’ll show you when we can. But for now, I just wanted to write a bit about thinking on your audience.

- Ryan

P.S. This is the core of my problems with I used to talk about Apocalypse World’s text. Which I stopped doing because rather than actually engage in conversation, the fans I talked with just said “Well, I don’t see that” and shut conversation down. Of course you don’t, you’re in the alpha group. But that’s a possibly future post, about how that phrase is toxic slime in various geek cultures.

A bit ago, Daniel Solis posted this image on his blog, about an observation on RPG design from intent to play, which Luke Crane titled the Starvo Principle (after the guy who came up with this, John Stavropoulos):

I’m having a complex reaction to John Stavropoulos’ model, because I agree with the base ideas, but see it differently.

User Interface, not Tools

What John calls tools I see as the user interface, the things that the players directly contact with. But it’s not just character sheets, dice, etc. It’s also the text, post-layout. Not only because pages can be printed out in order to to be ad hoc cheat sheets, but also because layout is the tool by which a book cements certain key ideas into the minds of readers.

Which is to say that if rules are the (or an) implementation of intent, and text is the implementation of rules, then user interface is the implementation of text. Although that’s someone strange, because much of user interface is developed in concert with rules, and text is a product of merging the two.

Intent and Play Culture

Here’s where I have a really weird reaction. Intent is treated as a separate thing, and to me, intent is all over that chart, like jam on toast. What I would put in its place is play culture, or reaction to play culture. And our interface axioms start from there.

I’ve been big about discussing play culture over the years. The indie scene in its early days (and sometimes still today) was pretty bad at creating books that required an understanding of the designer’s play culture in order to successfully execute. Or, as my good friend Paul Tevis said about one indie game[1] back in 2007, “The game isn’t in the book. It’s an oral tradition that happens to also have a book.”

Minimalism makes the assumption that the reader either is in or understands the play culture intended by the designer. That understanding is a context channel. It’s easy to unintentionally be deficient in explaining how your game works beyond it’s mechanics if you’re not used to explaining your play culture.

However, when your game is the result of your reactions to a play culture — usually when there’s something you really don’t like or doesn’t work for you in a certain mode — it becomes prudent to go beyond minimalism and explain said play culture. Which, to go back to John’s model, carry your intent all the way through the rules, text, and tools. I’ve had this experience working on Mythender, because the way the GM is suppose to act is a reaction to what people have called “epic” games in my play experience.

This is why I see intent not as the bottom rung but as a separate input to rules & text. Intent as expressed by mechanics & rules isn’t the same as intent as expressed by advice, which is in the realm of text. Which leads us to…

A Place for Advice

There is no clear place where advice or best practices hooks it. It doesn’t really hook directly into text, because it’s parallel to rules. It’s developed along the same time as rules, even if not yet clearly explained until a first draft[2] is written. Some instances of advice live in the intent/play culture layer, yes, but not all of it. And because of the language used in the chart, rules are prioritized far over the idea of advice & best practices.

Unless you consider advice to be “rules” along with mechanics. Then cool. But many people don’t see that definition of rules. (I do, but I tend to have to explain such things assuming that a good portion of my audience doesn’t, thus this entire section.)

To phrase another way: the when & why of rules is as important to the interface as the how.

John Is In No Way Wrong

It may sound like I’m criticizing John, but that isn’t my intent (hah). John has gotten me to think about my own model, and in blogging about it, made some of those thoughts concrete. I invite you to do the same — I know some folks have around the internet.

John Stavropoulos is one of the sharpest guys I have ever had the pleasure of chatting and dining with. He could write papers on RPG scholarship, GM practices, group dynamics, all sorts of things. he’s achieved something pretty cool here (which Daniel has then turned into something somewhat larger, by applying a visual tool to John’s text[3]).

So, what has it made you think about?

- Ryan

[1] Remember, I never talk about a product publicly unless I think there’s some merit to it, however flawed.

[2] Tomorrow’s blog post (which was actually written before this one was).

[3] Which is a great illustration of the top tiers of John’s model.