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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

But shortly after GURPS Fourth Edition came out, and we prepped an Infinite Worlds campaign, I discovered that the disadvantage system annoyed me. One of my players would always take the -10 disadvantage Smoking, because it was a meaningless disadvantage. And while, sure, we could do something to make smoking interesting, there were enough other, more immediately interesting things to play with. So, again, free points. In fact, in writing this, I’m pretty sure that trying to play with smoking would have somehow violated an unspoken social contract that had been built up over years of us playing GURPS, that it violated the game of “get as many free points as possible”.

That lead to a pseudo-principle: Smoking Makes Me a Better Gunfighter.

I saw that especially in WWII games. Those points went into the various Guns skills you needed in order to fire a rifle, pistol, submachine gun, etc. Of course, it was one in a few disadvantages that was taken to reach the disad cap, and other “free” disads would be worked in as often as possible. But Smoking always stood out to me, so that’s my association.

I contrasted that with the -75 disadvantage that someone else took, Cursed. That was interesting, it gave me things to play with, and most importantly for the sake of this thought process, it was the only disadvantage this player took for his character (because the cap was at -75).

What I said after the last session of that GURPS game was that in the future, I would just give everyone the full disad cap without having to nickel & dime with the bullshit disads…if they gave me something cool to play with. Cursed, or an enemy, or obsession — some plot-oriented awesome, not free stuff or a mechanical hinderance that didn’t matter because their character was optimized for a totally different set of actions.

Sounds a little story gamey, doesn’t it?

I recall playing a D&D 3.5 game with, among other things, the Unearthed Arcana options. I took a thing called a Flaw, which was an anti-feat — something that permanently penalized you. For that, you got a bonus feat. I took one that gave you a permanent -2 to ranged combat on a character that would never, ever do ranged combat. That’s what others in the party were for. Everyone felt like it was cheap, including me, but we all let it go, because the system was pretty much about twinking anyway.

Sometime later, our group played 7th Sea. There was an interesting idea, where you could pay for a disadvantage (called background) with your character points, the rationale being that said background would give you more experience points to play with in play, because you got credit when it came up. These backgrounds were all interesting, like the GURPS Cursed above, so there was no “free” bullshit one. I played a character with Amnesia[1]. But because (if memory serves) a tenth of my points went into this background, I was a tenth less functional than the rest of the group.

If you don’t know 7th Sea, it’s a swashbuckling game. And swashbuckling is a genre defined by competence. This made me seriously consider that the “pay for your disads for points later” was a cute concept, but also one that felt like bullshit. If this were some other genre not tied up with competence, sure, but here, bullshit. The game was fun, and my character could do stuff (and ended up because of said amnesia being way core to the plot), but I was left thinking that from a design standpoint, it shouldn’t have cost a damned thing.

Especially if I had decided that because it cost something[2], I would ditch it. Then the GM wouldn’t have built that particular awesome arc.

It also sends the message that you should have to choose between full competence out of the gate, and being an interesting character. (Plus the payoff factor is different for different length of campaigns.)

But more than that, backgrounds in 7th Sea required the GM to actively push them. If my amnesia didn’t matter in a session, I wouldn’t get shit for it. As a player, it’s difficult to push them.

Thus, with these experiences, I was left with some thoughts on the ideas of disadvantages:

• They should always fucking matter. No such thing as a free lunch.
• If you tie it to character currency, whether getting some more or paying some, you’re encouraging uninteresting — no, I’ll go as far as to say bullshit — behavior.
• The player should not be powerless to incorporate them, especially if they are tied to a reward cycle.
• And frankly, let’s tie them to reward cycles, whether it’s growth currency (XP) or competence currency (things like Fate points).

I often take time to reflect on what experiences have lead to what thought processes today. I cannot recommend enough that y’all do the same.

- Ryan

[1] This was one of my staples for a bit, along with “grunt with a sword”. I like amnesia characters because I get to discover & explore a personally-connected backstory.

[2] And yet, I don’t have that problem with Keys from The Solar System/Lady Blackbird. Probably because you start with some, and the buy-off cycle feels natural and right. Or because the experiences I’ve outlines lead naturally to things like Keys.

Technically, I fell short. I spent two hours today working on it. Anyway, if you want to check out my little, hastily-written game about psychics in Hong Kong’s underworld, here you go.

Later this week, I’ll talk about where the various influences of many games come from and why they’re there. Because, in my mind, that’s actually the important part of this experiment. (Though I do hope the game actually works and is fun, too!)

Enjoy!

- Ryan

Enjoy!

Performing Badass, Epic Feats

Mythenders are incredible titans, who can do amazing feats! Break mountains, move rivers, control mortals—there’s little you cannot accomplish. But that power comes at a cost, for those feats are powered by your Mythic nature, and from there lies corruption.

When you want to do an epic feat and you’re not in a battle, answer the following:

Is This Feat Mundane or Uninteresting?

Then don’t use these rules. It just happens, with no benefit or further effect.

Is This Feat Inhumanly Possible?

Answer these questions:

• Are you capable of this feat?
• If so, are you creating or destroying a blight?
• Are you embracing or resisting corruption?

Are you capable of this feat?

No Mythender is omnipotent; you each have limitations. You can accomplish an epic feat if it fits under one of these conditions:

• It is merely something that takes godly might, speed, skill, wit, etc.
• You can explain how your Weapons enable you to do this feat.
• You can justify it either directly or inspired by your Fate’s power.

In addition, if there’s a blight that would prevent you from doing this, and the feat you’re doing isn’t attacking that blight, you’re restrained from this action. At least, for the time being.

If you cannot do the feat because it doesn’t fit any of the above, don’t worry! Once you fall and become a Myth, you can totally do it.

If you can do the feat, then it is done, unquestioningly. You and the Mythmaster describes what happens.

Are you creating or destroying a blight?

Epic actions can create or destroy blights. This is optional; not every epic action needs to deal with a blight. (For more on Blights, see page XX.)

If creating a new blight, pay 2 Might, take a new blight card and write its description down. Write your Mythender’s name on the “Created by” line. Finally, check off the first charge box and the Lasting box.

In lieu of creating a new blight, you can bolster an existing blight that you or another Mythender created. Rewrite the blight’s description to reflect how its more powerful, then check off two more charge boxes.

If destroying a blight, pay 2 Might, take the blight card, write your name on the “Destroyed by” line, and cross the card out. Or, if you’re feeling particularly theatrical, rip the card up.

You may only create or destroy one blight if you’re resisting corruption (below).

If embracing corruption, you can create and destroy as many as you can afford. You can use Might gained from embracing corruption to pay for them.

Are you embracing or resisting corruption?

The choice you have here is if you are trying to use Mythic power while attempting to resist its corruption, hoping that it does not change you and make you closed to becoming a Myth; or you can embracing what the world of Myth wants you to become, and gain power from it.

Embracing Corruption

If you are embracing your mythic nature, this is also Terrorizing Mortals for Power, even if you’re doing this in a “nice” way or for kind reasons. If there were no mortals in this moment to begin with, the Mythmaster will introduce some witness your horrific power. Do everything in those rules as well.

If this action assaults or removed a mortal’s free will, it is always embracing corruption. That’s pretty inhuman.

Resisting Corruption

If you are attempting to resist corruption, this is a risk. Grab two dice if the Mythmaster says there are no mortals to witness your act, or one if there are. (Note: the Mythmaster will usually play handball here and introduce mortals in a scene where there didn’t seem to be any. Mortals are drawn to horrific power.)

Reminder: Companions don’t count as mortals, because they no longer have true free will.

Roll the dice. If either come up 5 or 6, you have resisted Myth’s corrupting influence! You’re unchanged. Otherwise, treat as the result of Terrorizing Mortals for Power, except you only claim 1 Might. There is less reward if you resist your mythic nature.

Oh, and if you do fail, the Mythmaster might create a new Blight for the Myth based on how you were unable to contain your nature. Or not. Whatever.

Describe the Feat and Push Forward

You and the Mythmaster should describe what happens, based on blights created or destroyed and how you handled corruption.  Once everyone at the table is satisfied with playing out that moment, move on.

Limits to These Gains

While you can do incredible feats, you do not have limitless power. After a feat, you must rest for a few moments—walking around and talking will suffice. And if you do one shortly afterward (around two hours or less), you will not gain any additional Might. The Mythic World cannot grant you limitless power while you still have the scent of mortality about you.

Examples

Resisting Corruption

Rashid wishes to put out a raging inferno consuming a town and surrounding forest, one started by fire giants in the prior battle. (Raging Inferno is a persistent blight.) So he summons the very spirits of the fire and shove them back down into the deep earth.

Now, no one had mentioned anything about the fire having spirits before, but the Mythmaster knows better than to question it. Of course it’s fire spirits! And it’s interesting, so we proceed.

The feat’s inhumanly possible, all right. Qualifies for these rules. And Rashid is capable of this feat through his relic weapon, The Book of Dominion over Demons and Spirits. No question about that. He’s focused on destroying the blight, so that question is taken care of.

All that remains is to see if he’s embracing or resisting corruption. He could easily embrace it, shouting at fire spirits and making everyone in the town bow before his terrible awe. But no, he decides that mortals should keep their free will or some junk, and resists.

There are mortals around, so Rashid’s player picks up just one die. He rolls it, getting a 5! He successfully resists corruption! (Which is handy, because I haven’t described how Terrorizing Mortals for Power works yet.)

So he describes forcing the fire spirits into the deep earth, and the fire vanishing with it. The people witnessing still bow before his terrible awe, but not in a “I accidentally destroyed your free will while trying to help” way.

Embracing Corruption

Unna arrives at a village after some monsters have already slaughtered many of its people. So she figures, hey, why not just bring them back?

That certainly isn’t boring. Her Fate is Death, so that fits with her Fate’s power: Power over the life and death of mortals. There’s no blight in play that’s she’s destroying—there are no inactive blights like “people are dead”. She also doesn’t really care about creating one, though she could make one like “my loyal risen army” or the like. But that’s not Unna’s point. She just wants some dead people to be…less dead.

As for corruption, her player says “Bring it on!” Because corruption is sexy, and also gives you sweet, sweet mythic power. Sure, it’ll mean that the mortals she’s bringing back to life will have their free will destroyed, but them’s the breaks, I guess.

The rest of this example is covered in Terrorizing Mortals for Power (p. XX), since Unna’s embracing corruption.

Not Bothering With These Rules

After the battle against giant scorpion-men, Erik the Hated jumps from one side of a chasm to the other, in order to retrieve his sword, Viperbane. The scorpion-general knocked it out of his hands as his last action, as it was being totally ended. Since there’s nothing interesting going on, just a bit of color to show how casually Erik gets his sword back, none of the Epic, Badass Feats rules are used.

Now, if Erik’s player wanted to make a big deal about it, he could push it further, but he just wanted to say “Yeah, I just wanted to describe how I got my sword back. Let’s move on.” Everyone’s happy.

- Ryan

For those unfamiliar with the best RPG in existence, I say to you to buy it. It’s available in PDF now. Still, it wouldn’t be much of a blog post if I just said “hey, buy it, mic drop.”

There are three Passions: the Fear Passion, the Rage Passion, and the Noble Passion. (They are also called Stimuli in the text.) Each is something that is a hot button for a character: what terrifies them, what enrages them, what causes them to raise above their id. The important thing is that every single character has all three[2]. And that’s something that can be brought to a game to make every character something beyond a cardboard cutout of good or evil.

They are always form the imperfect perspective of the character, sometimes internal struggles and sometimes external issues. I’ll skirt the spirit of copyright by pasting the example passions below:

Fear Passion Examples

• Fire. Fire claimed your house, and with it your wardrobe, your record collection, not to mention all your photos and yearbooks. It’s bad stuff, not just dangerous and painful but unpredictable as well.
• Foreigners. When you were overseas, you always knew they were talking about you behind your back, jabbering away in that weird monkey language. Now they’re all around you, even in the streets of your home town.
• Temptation. You don’t drink anymore. When you get drunk you do terrible things, so you don’t drink. Much. No, not at all. In fact, you’re careful to stay away from bars, restaurants, and that liquor store on Third and Main.
• Possession. You don’t like to talk about the exorcism. You don’t like to say the creature’s name. You know it’s still out there and calling it could bring it right back.
• Dogs. You’ve got marks on you from the red jaws and white teeth. Even those barky little shit dogs make you nervous, and big beasts like a Doberman or Saint Bernard? Forget it.
• Victimization. You weren’t the one who got hurt, you were just the one they made talk. You tried to be tough, and that made it all your fault. Now you can’t stand to see people get hurt. To you, watching the victim is worse than being the victim.

Rage Passion Examples

• Backchat. Is it too much to ask that people be polite? You understand someone who throws a punch at you, but a sarcastic loudmouth really gets your goat.
• Enemy Drivers. You’re an excellent driver. You wish all the bad drivers around you would just realize it, hang up their cell phones, and get the hell out of your way.
• Laziness. When someone does a half-assed job, they’re not just disrespecting their duties or their boss. They’re flipping the bird to everyone who has to put up with their shoddy work. God help one of your employees if you catch her slacking.
• Sleaze. Booze. Pornography. Foul language. Toilet humor. The country is swimming in filth, and no one’s doing anything about it. It’s time someone took a stand. Someday a real rain is gonna fall.
• Stuck-up Assholes. Just because you didn’t go to college and don’t drive a Lexus doesn’t mean those rich fucks get to look down at you. Goddamn snobs. Someone ought to take them down a notch.
• Those Fat Cats in Washington. Democrats and Republicans are just the competing teams in the “Screw the Taxpayer” Super Bowl, brought to you live by the Army, the Post Office, and your local Police Department.

Noble Passion Examples

• Entertainment. How much better would the world be if people devoted as much effort to making one another happy as they do to getting rich or becoming powerful? You believe laughter is the best medicine—so if you cheer someone up now, the future takes care of itself.
• Historical Preservation. If we can’t learn from the past, we’re doomed to repeat it, and all those who suffered did so in vain. Preserving our links to the past gives us a firm foundation to build a better future.
• Landmine Removal. Landmines are deadly, indiscriminate, and a bitch to remove. You’ve seen their carnage firsthand and you’re dedicated to removing them physically (by working as a minesweeper) and politically (through activism to get landmines banned).
• One for All. Most people are crap, but you’ve made a tight bond with your friends. They’re all right, and your loyalty to them is unshakeable.
• Pedagogy. Education is the key to it all. Knowledge rinses away prejudice, eases misery, and exalts all that is good about the human condition. Educating others is your mission in life.
• Protect the Elderly. Most old people have already had seven courses of misery and heartache in their lifetimes without an extra helping in the eleventh hour.

How to Use This Elsewhere

This should be straightforward: when you have a significant character, come up with their passions. It doesn’t matter if there’s a mechanical hook, though some games (like Fate) make that easy to do.

It’s easy to make a one-dimension good or bad person. It’s far more interesting if there’s more going on. Take one of the heavy NPCs in Unknown Armies, Eponymous. He’s a straight-up sociopath[3], and as described: “When Abel says jump, Eponymous throws you off a building.”

• Rage: Betrayal.
• Fear: Poison. Dying of a stab wound or gunshot doesn’t scare Eponymous nearly as much as the thought of dying from some slow, agonizing venom.
• Noble: Throughout it all, Eponymous has always wanted to do a good job

Now we have something more interesting that “powerful sociopath that will kill you as soon as look at you.” We now know what makes him mad — enough to motivate or enough to cause a mistake. We know what he’s deathly afraid of. We know what he believes in.

That’s a take on a villain. What about the other side, someone who is on the surface totally good?

Lili Morgan, agent of the House of Renunciation (which doesn’t need more explanation for this), who believes in helping people:

• Rage: People who are as selfish and uncaring as she used to be.
• Fear: Unpredictable ascensions scare Lili.
• Noble: The abstract, general welfare of humanity. She doesn’t care about individual people.

The noble one is obvious, much like Eponymous’ rage one. But seeing how this genuinely nice person would get angry & break her sense of peace gives us a bit more. And her fear stimulus is the sort of ones that creates a drive, something beyond “hey, everyone should be compassionate and caring.”

What About Your Game?

Do you have a villain in your game that just exists as a foil for the PCs? What’re his/her/its passions?

Do you have a benevolent character in your game that just exists to help the PCs? What about his/hers/its?

- Ryan

[1] The first time I remember seeing this in full effect was in playing Final Fantasy VIII, where Seifer, after capturing your party, exclaimed about how he was the hero and his day of bringing the villains — your character — to justice was at hand. Fuck yeah.

[2] There’s a mechanical incentive to make interesting ones, but that’s beyond the scope of this. Again, go buy it. :)

[3] Which UA has mechanics for. And they aren’t positive ones.

It doesn’t work, so I’m going to ditch the idea. I’m running out of room, so I can’t fit in examples. And I have a hard cap at 32 pages for a given booklet, because that’s eight sheets of paper, and stapling more than that in the middle is asking for even more trouble.

I’m dead sure it would work for other games, but isn’t working here. The idea is of making the game easy to print & have at the table, but I don’t think that’s going to be possible with this setup, which means I shouldn’t sacrifice clarity for this goal that I can’t achieve. The better product then is the one that’s clear rather than the one that’s printable.

That means one PDF that contains everything, and shifting it from having natively printable dimensions to having tablet screen dimensions. (Which isn’t a huge shift, from 8.5″x5.5″ to having a 3×2 setup, but changing the paging elements to be uniform rather than left/right will take a bit of work, and that changes the atomic unit of information from the two-page spread to the screen — what a reader sees at one given moment of time.)

Mythender will still have booklet-sized stuff; after all, I have to still make twelve Mythic Worlds thanks to the Random Kindness Bundle $250 backers. And instead of making larger booklets that contain everything, I can make smaller booklets that are quick-references & other handy stuff.

(There’s a larger point here about how in the process of open design, you’re going to backpedal because some ideas don’t work, and what that means to the work and the process. But, as I’m fond of saying, that’s another post.)

- Ryan

[1] I didn’t get paid for Mythender, even though people paid for it, so it’s free work. Incidentally, this is why when I do charity stuff, I know not to take offers of work to support that charity unless the work’s already done. Why did I do that this time? Because I knew I wouldn’t totally flake on myself. :)

As I am reading over Fate Core, I started thinking hard about that assumption. And how that needn’t always be the case.

Imagine it the shifts generated were exponential, like so:

• Meeting the difficulty = 0 shifts
• Beating by 1 = 1 shift
• Beating by 2 = 2 shifts (so far, the same)
• Beating by 3 = 4 shifts
• Beating by 4 = 8 shifts
• Beating by 5 = 16 shifts
• etc, doubling each time.

Master Fencer: (Weapons) When you are fighting off a horde of mooks, your shifts are exponential.

Master Engineer: (Engineering) When you are building or fixing something, your shifts are exponential.

Master Against the Dark Arts: (Wizardry) When you are fighting against the dark arts (necromancy, curses, and other evil magics), your shifts are exponential.

If that seems too large, it could be unlocked by spending a Fate point. No idea if this works, but it came to mind, so I thought I would throw it out there.

(Incidentally, stuff like this won’t be in Core, because it’s not, well, core to Fate. But I am considering it for a Fate build I’m tinkering with.)

- Ryan

You may have noticed that this is a week where I’m throwing out half-ideas. I wrote about doing this quite a bit ago, but found myself not doing it as often as I feel I should.

However, there is one place where I’m seeing a lack of noir tone in Technoir: the distribution of Push dice.

If you don’t know, well, check out the free Technoir player’s guide.

The players start with all the Push dice, giving them the power to make lasting change and defend themselves. The GM’s characters, in contrast, don’t.

That’s the opposite of noir, in my view. So what happens if you give all the Push dice to the players?

I don’t know. But I look to find out.

- Ryan

P.S. Thanks to EZ for his comment on yesterday’s post that triggered this thinking.

[1] That said, putting framing elements (like questions or options) into character creation could more easily push noir into the game, but creating characters that remind us of those tropes and themes, with elements on the character sheet to reinforce that. Which, I think, it does pretty well for cyberpunk, and I’ve had fun with as long as I treat the game like a harsh cyberpunk world and allow noir to be a happy accident.

Fate Points as Closed Economy

Imagine if, when a game starts, the PCs have their refresh in Fate Points, and the GM has none to use. At the players spend Fate, the GM keeps them (unless you’re talking PvP, in which case the affected player keeps them instead). Later, the GM can use those Fate Points to compel the PCs or invoke aspects for her NPCs. This tackles one common question about Fate: does the GM have any?

Because the GM has none to start, she cannot right away compels. If that’s not desired, either the GM should start with a couple, or some compels (perhaps all) should come from the ether rather than from her pool. This means it’s no longer a closed economy, but semi-closed.

Similarly, the refresh mechanic at the start of a session or crucial point makes the economy semi-closed, since if you have more than your refresh in Fate Points, you keep all you have. Not sure how I’d want to tackle that inflation, but it’s something to consider.

Fate Points Delayed

Fate Points that you gain are not immediately available, but become available after the current conflict or scene. This is a necessary component for a closed system to work; otherwise, you can keep something going by throwing Fate Points freely back and forth.

Now, this isn’t something for every Fate game. My gut says (as I just thought of this and haven’t tried it) that this will be a somewhat grittier game.

What do you think?

- Ryan

What is the purpose of the superpower we all know and love as “Flight”?

Since it tends to be a fast-moving power, at least at car speeds, it’s a power of mobility. And that, in comic book stories, is really about either the tale of the race (can you stop Lex Luthor in time!) or a way to go from one set piece to a radically different one.

And since often flight-enabled supers have flight-enabled foes, it allows for badass aerial fights, which is yet another great set piece.

So, if flight’s really about the ability for a comic writer & artist to vary set pieces, let’s look at who tends to have flight. Superman, of course. Wonder Woman in various forms. Green Lantern. Storm. So on and so forth.

These are high-status characters. To have flight is to say “I am free of gravity when others aren’t”, and puts you in an arena of physical conflict that few can reach. And it’s majestic & awe-inspiring; by being literally above mankind, you are figuratively above them. These characters are capital-H Heros, superbeings that do not hide from the world.

That leads me to think of the golden age-old question: Would you pick Flight or Invisibility?

Heads up, I always pick invisibility. I have practical thoughts about that. And of course, there are the “what about clothes?” or “how much can you carry when flying?” sub-questions, but I now realize those are irrelevant.

Invisibility is a much more street-level power. It’s a power to alter a situation in the moment, and in an underhanded way. Thus, invisibility is a low-status power. It’s the effect that muggers have in dark alleys, or that horrors have in other fiction. Unlike those with flight, these are superbeings whose very power is that of hiding.

So, the question really is: “If you were a superhero, would you be a high-status or low-status one?” Or “Would you be global or local?”, which is maybe how one would define high & low status in a comic world. And another way: “Would you be a source of inspiration & majesty or fear & dread?” (Note: the question isn’t about supervillains, who when they’re done right always produce fear & dread.)

Suddenly, I’m rethinking other powers in the light of status. There are probably some status-neutral ones, but man, now I’m seriously thinking about what it means to pick a power beyond what effects it has.

Because really, no one *needs* to fly in a comic book story. The writers can just have closer set pieces and make races against time local in scale. And no one *needs* invisibility to solve impossible situations, as the writers can change how that impossible situation is solved with a different power–ones that don’t tap into primal fears of the unseen. Powers don’t enable comic characters, they define them. So those powers really are, from a writing standpoint, about status in the world at large.

- Ryan

Role-playing games used to do this, and then some of the current fashions of gaming, particularly in indieland, went away from this. Namely:

• Die rolls should be out in the open
• Failure should be interesting and move the story forward

While those are fucking great ideas to put into most games, they inadvertently weaken the horror game. And I’m not talking about games that engage horror tropes without its themes, like Monsterhearts[2] (which is not a slam against it, since it’s not emulating a horror story but a damaged supernatural teen romance one, and does it well), but an honest-to-fuck scary, anxious, terrifying game.

Let’s go back the camera work. That’s such a huge element of visual horror media, and it’s not something that RPGs can emulate well.

Or is it…

You remember the old-school trick of “roll notice” and saying nothing if people failed? That created the sense of “did we miss something?” and “are we about to get our faces eaten?” You ever watch how people react in those situations, where suddenly the tone of play changes because there is a sense of impeding doom?

That’s our version of camera work. So let’s unpack what’s similar.

Being watched isn’t just about the feeling of impending doom. It’s also the feeling of knowing you’re missing crucial, immediate information.[3] In horror, camera placement that shows, say, the Alien stalking the humans shows you that the humans are missing that crucial information, and you so dearly want to tell them to run or turn the fuck around and fire. Or jarring camera placement that suggests stalking without revealing the stalker gives the viewer a sense that there’s information somewhere they can’t quite see, again achieving the same effect.

What’s important is that the viewer either knows or believes that there’s missing information. It’s not just that there is the lack, but that the lack is felt. It’s made tangible in our minds. That’s key. The dread of knowing that you don’t know, the loss of confidence — all those are hallmarks of horror.

This is why I love that Unknown Armies hides hit points. The idea of hiding notice rolls is also interesting (as long as it’s not a long mechanical beat). Hide all damage rolls, and rely on the GM to describe what that damage looks like — the unreliable narrator element can also play here.[4]

By the players knowing that there is something going on but the information is not guaranteed, we can create a sense of being watched and truly dealing with the unknown. So my horror games will involve these elements — but new takes on them, to see if we can’t make them shine a bit more. It may not be what’s in fashion right now, but those are the right choices for the genre I cherish.

- Ryan

[1] Once Mythender’s done, I’ll pitch the Emerging Threats Unit game that I started to attempt as a Fate game some time ago. It’ll likely be its own system, and that’s why I keep tweeting about Delta Green stuff.

[2] At the time of this posting, there’re twelve hours left on its IndieGoGo campaign. Check it out!

[3] The horror game and the mystery game are kissing cousins, as they’re both when done well very tight information games. And that’s why some Call of Cthulhu games fall flat, because the information is already loose if you’re dealing with Mythos elements that everyone knows about.

[4] Though, I’m jumping onto a tangent here by talking about hidden damage rolls. Something for later.

At JoshCon, a large group of us were watching Push on cable after breakfast, waiting for more folks to show up for gaming. I’m a fan of this movie[1]. Afterward, I said “okay, I want to run that with Technoir.” Four people agreed, including Jeremy — which is novel, to have someone else run your game for you. We settled on the Hong Kong Transmission, of course, and I outlined the basic idea for the hack: in character creation, you picked one of your verbs to be your “psychic” verb, and you could narrate doing things with that verb psychically rather than just physically.

(This gets to the idea of the primacy of the impossible in games, which is a bigger topic in general than this execution of it is.)

Psychic Verbs

There are nine verbs in Technoir, which you can see on the character sheet: Coax, Detect, Fight, Hack, Move, Operate, Prowl, Shoot, Treat. The four players each took: Move, Operate, Prowl, and Treat, so we worked more on fleshing those out than others. But if I’m pressed to give a short description for each (and by writing this blog post, I am):

Oh, I should say that because it’s Technoir, this has a cyberpunk twist to Push. So…

• Coax: Implant suggestions in the minds of people whose eyes you meet (even with mirrorshades on) — “pushing” from the movie. This means you can actually roll Coax for things that would be unreasonable and automatically failing, like “put the gun in your mouth and pull the trigger.”
• Detect: Psychically feel things through other senses — tracking people by sniffing their stuff and having that imprint in your mind, psychometry, ESP, things like that. Get information that’s impossible for a normal person to get because it’s esoteric or distant. Sniffers & watchers have two different flavors of Detect.
• Fight: This is what we see a lot of in the movie, using telekinesis to augment punches. It could also be a psychic battle mind, akin to how we see Sherlock Holmes fight in the recent Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes flicks.
• Hack: Psychic hacking. Who needs an uplink when you can just think your way into a machine. The upside: you don’t actually need equipment, as you are the equipment and can only be accessed yourself by other psychic hackers or counter-intrusion equipment written specifically to deal with hackers. In a sense, though, cyberpunk already does this, so Hack is about unnatural access rather than unnatural action.
• Move: While this verb is typically active in a different way, I’d treat it as basic telekinesis. Movers from Push do this. Granted, that blends with using telekinesis to Fight, which is where this hack slightly unravels.
• Operate: Since Operate is about piloting and using machines, similar to Hack & computers, this is psychic piloting, driving to machines at the same time with your mind to calling out to your car from a distance. My description sounds weak, I think, but I would totally Jason Statham up this fucker. (Which I believe Jeremy did, as he chose Operate.)
• Prowl: Bending shadows around you, muffling noise, even cloaking yourself from psychic detection. The shadow does a bit of the last one, though it’s not an action we can see.
• Shoot: Here’s another case of battle-mind. Someone who is utterly prenatural, with limited future-sight when it comes to using guns enough to know how to use her gun to do unnatural or surprisingly safe things. Knowing where ricochets will hit, seeing the vectors and executing them, all that jazz. I recently watched the Thai flick Demon Warriors, and the badass gun character has death-sight. So it would work like that, I’d think.
• Treat: Psychic healing. The stich in the movie did this. Cam Banks played the Treat, and he was a mob doc who put in implants psychically so that they healed & integrated faster. Given how the stich worked in the movie, I might allow this to bleed into a combat role as well, since she fucked up the mover just by touching him.

Later we added a five player who arrived, who took Coax. I’ll admit that some verbs are stronger than others, but then I’ve only run this hack once so I haven’t refined it. I’m open to discussion on tweaking it, though. (Or maybe even decoupling from Verbs, being their own thing to choose. That sounds rather interesting, too.)

Psychic Tags

Partway through the game, we collectively realized that the game’s promise of psychic awesome was constrained, because we were given areas of primacy, we needed to create an analog to gear for psychic powers in order to both allow tags to be added for dice, and reinforce how your specific power works. For that, I’d add as the last slot of gear “Psychic Tags”, where I’d put those tags.

Unlike with regular gear, you can’t use that core bit to add a die. That’s essentially covering “you can do this weird psychic thing”. But you can add dice with the tags underneath.

If you are shaky with your powers, you have one tag. If you’re decent with them, you get two tags. And if you’re a world-class psychic, you get three. I don’t have a sense of how once “levels” between them; these were made on the fly to mirror the movie, where some characters we less confident in their powers than others.

There are other things that could be done to this hack, but that’s an exercise for the future, and for you readers.

- Ryan

[1] As is Carl Rigney, who has a Don’t Rest Your Head hack with it called Don’t Push Your Luck.

Naturally, most of the game designers are saying “no, you’re not.” And that’s tragically short-sighted. There is more to a role-playing game, by its very nature, than the rules behind it.

Before I go farther, might I point out what you see on the right-hand sidebar (if you’re reading this on my blog): Fighting For Gwen. If you have a little bit of spare coin and would like to help a sweet girl get the education she deserves, please consider donating.

The rules of a game create a sense of platform & expectation. For games that have a heavy combat element, through play I know how well my character will do when fighting, say, an orc or a hobgoblin. The experience of all those moments feeds into thoughts about how the game world works and what one should expect consequences to be for a given action — the imaginary physics of the world, if you will.

And I propose that a role-playing game isn’t the rules of the game, but the physics & nature of the world…which is necessarily executed and reinforced by the rules of the game. Those who see rules-first are putting the cart before the horse.

Thus, if we’re playing a session where we touch the dice[1] little or not at all, we are still playing the game if our descriptions and actions are in accordance with the imaginary physics of the world, and expect that they’ll be validated by the mechanics in later play. The moment your play deviates from those imaginary physics, then you are no longer playing the game you were before.

Why? Because those actions & decisions will feed back into dice-play, and thus will be validated by the game’s physics as being true to the world your game’s protraying.

One example that was brought up by Gareth Hanrahan was a session about planning a siege in D&D. What he still playing D&D? Some argued no, but I very strongly say yes. Some argued that he might as well have been playing Warhammer Fantasy or Runequest, and I strongly disagree.

Why? Because those games have different imaginary physics. The actions you consider and decisions you make have different ramifications, however slight or subtle, that influences how you’re interactions are going. In addition, they also influence when to trigger dice-play — some games with a stronger sense of social conflict may trigger dice-play sooner, and some not — thus cause consideration on whether to engage the core rules or not.

And when you’re considering the rules, whether directly or indirectly, you’re playing the game.

To say otherwise is to forget that we’re not playing a board game and to not fully understand this medium & the full effects a ruleset has on fiction.

- Ryan

[1] Which is an interesting idiom in gaming, as it really means “to not engage the core rules of the game,” even in games without dice.

Mythender is still in the writing process, but that’s coming along. Garret Narjes has run a couple games, and has told me places where the rules need better explanation, where it needs to be clearer what the Mythmaster should be doing during the game, and where the rules totally broke.

On that last note, I have a quick story:

I was enjoying my pipe while hanging outside at JoshCon. During that time, Garret was running Mythender inside. I didn’t want to poke my nose around too much — as I joked, Mythender was getting its run-by-someone-else cherry popped, and I wasn’t going to be a weird voyeur around my “kid.” But really, I didn’t want to chime in at all.

Garret comes out and says “So, uh, they almost one-shotted Odin in the first round. And now he’s not threatening at all. What do I do?”

I thought for a moment, and asked him what Odin’s Weapons were. He told me, though I cannot recall exactly what he said at this point. I replied “Odin can destroy one of his Weapons to gain ten thunder dice. Be epic in description.”

He smiled and went back inside. Later, he debriefed me and said “Dude, when I did that, the players freaked. It was awesome!”

So now that’s a rule, which I’ve used in my own games since. Combined with a couple other rules changes I made back in November, Mythender finally had the last piece of the game to make fighting a god feel desperate & winning early crucial.

The form factor has proven a hell of a challenge, but one that’s forced me to write better. I hope to have it done and ready for folks I’m calling “my cabal” in the next couple weeks. These folks will check what I’ve written and tell me if it’s off. Once that’s done, the game will be available for Random Kindness Encounter donors in its pre-edited state. Once it’s edited, it’ll be available to the world & I’ll start on the custom content that I promised high-end donors. I’ll also probably leak a bit out beforehand, because I’m that sort of guy.

I’ve got some near-done sheets:

• Character sheet
• Myth sheet
• Blight sheet

I’m also starting to work with an artist for the individual covers. I’m pretty excited!

Finally, Mythender will be released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Because why not.

Thanks for being patient! :)

- Ryan

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #31: How would your life be different if you’d never gotten into gaming?

Gaming has influenced my life so much that it’s hard to say. At minimum, I doubt anyone before friends, family & random coworkers would know my name. I wouldn’t be invited as guests to places and all that jazz.

More than that, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t be alive today. That I’m typing this is right now is no small deal.

But I’m not ready to explain that in more detail. At least, not yet.

- Ryan

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #30: What lessons have you taken from gaming that you can apply to your real life?

That’s a tough question. I have been gaming sine late high school. My friends, social life, and now business prospects all involve gaming. Narrowing it down to one set of lessons? I don’t think I can.

But rather than try to iterate many lessons, I’ll name just one. One I have mentioned before: we make our own win conditions.

Gaming & being a game designer over the years has taught me about the value, power, and limits of amateur psychology.

- Ryan