Posts Tagged ‘little thoughts’

There is something that we do, as geeks in the community, that if sit-coms are to be trusted is stereotypically masculine: we present solutions to problems before we actually understand the problem.

Stop that. You’re helping no one.

Too often, fruitful discussion of problems is derailed by proposed solutions and then argument over the solution’s foreseen effects. Sometimes, that leads to further understanding of the problem, but just as often it turns into a pointless waste of energy in the form of a flame war.

It also creates a situation where “I see a problem and want to talk about it” is unhealthy, because the discussion desired is not the discussion created. And then those sorts of conversation seeds are less often planted, which hurts us all (if, like me, you believe that discourse is how we elevate our communities).

Next time someone presents a problem, take a moment to understand it. Set aside your assumptions as best you can — especially when those assumptions are counter to the problem. Like countering someone saying “I don’t like playing games like Burning Wheel because they’re too crunchy for me” with “Well, it isn’t for me” as though the human being you’re replying to is the problem.[1] Ask questions. Get some sense of what is behind the problem.

I understand the desire to immediately problem solve, because that is for many of us its own reward cycle. And I understand the impulse to be the first to post a new solution online, because then maybe you look smart and that’s yet another form of reward. But slow your roll and take some time to understand problems, and you’ll get something even better out of it:

You’ll become one of the sharpest people in the room, for having come to understand so many viewpoints. And you’ll be one of the more appreciated people in the room, because instead of being an assuming cockbite with fast, vacant answers, yours are thoughtful and are themselves worthy conversation seeds.

So, if you cannot bring yourself to slowing down and understanding someone else for the good of others and the community overall, consider the rather selfish ones I just stated. :)

- Ryan

[1] If you say that, punch yourself in the face right now. That’s pretty damned insulting to immediately suggest the other person is him or herself the problem.

Here’s a thought for publishers out there of the small press stuff. For the past several years, I’ve flown around from convention to convention running indie games for people. Many of them try several games, like sampling a buffet. If I’m excited about a game, like I am right now about running Technoir tonight, I’d like to leave an physical impression on them as well as an experiential one, to maybe get them to check out the game.

So, publishers, how about this: make a one-page document that has fliers for your game on it. Make it so that one page will print out six, ideally 3×2 or 2×3, whichever. Make it easy to cut out after printing from a normal desktop printer, that doesn’t look weird because the outer margins are larger than the inner ones — take mandatory page margins into account. Put your game’s name/logo, your name/company name, website, and maybe one more line on it, and you’re done.

If you’re compelled to make a color version, also make a black & white version for those who don’t have color or are trying to avoid using whatever color you are because they’re out of that ink. Similarly, don’t make an ink-heavy version…or if you do, make an ink-non heavy version too (both to save the ink and to not have the end product have ripples from wet ink drying).

Here’s a text mockup:

Not that I’m a visual designer. That’s someone else’s job, like the wonderfully talented Jeremy Keller. Now, maybe no one will use it, but is there harm in throwing it out there and seeing what happens?

For those games that have related games, like the various in the GUMSHOE line, you could also use this as a space to direct to those games. (Edit: Kit adds a smart idea in the comments about tying this to a meeting/networking/friend-making element.)

By the way, you can totally check out Technoir’s free player’s guide at TechnoirRPG.com. :)

- Ryan

(I’m pretty sure I wrote about this idea years ago on my LiveJournal, but that was an eon ago in Internet time.)

So, a bit ago I made the distinction between Story Games and Adventure Games. Lately, I’ve been thinking about that a bit, and a long conversation between Paul Tevis, John Wick, and some other fine folks whose names I’m spacing on, I hit on another thought:

When it comes to role-playing games, dramatic arcs do not exist in the moment. They only exist in our retelling of what has happened.

This was met with some, uh, disagreement. So here’s my attempt to explain the thought process.

First, life is experienced in real-time. Take right now. I’m on vacation, visiting my family in Denver. I’m staying with my mom, who is at work. Last night I was talking with a fantastic person until 3am on IM, not realizing that my computer wasn’t set to Mountain Time, so I thought it was only 2. I woke up this morning, took a shower, realized there was no shampoo, went to my mom’s bathroom to grab some of hers, got a text message while in the shower about planning for Sunday, and when I went to towel off I discovered the towel was new, so I got towel fuzz on me, making me wondering if I should just grab another shower right now. Then…

Okay, that’s enough of that. But we experience life like that, right?

Look at any vacation: you wake up, shower, leave the hotel room, forget your buffet coupon so you go back in your room to get it, etc.

Look at any sports game, like basketball. There are a lot of moments that are of little consequence, but when we’re watching a game, we’re experiencing them all.

But the stories well tell of these times is not told like that. We skip the parts of disinterest (except when we’re making a point to highlight that they’re of no interest). We promote the parts of interest. And why? Because we’re communicating to someone else. Because we’re getting feedback and happy brain chemicals firing off when we get them interested or exciting in our telling.

When my sister called today, I told her about my utter failure at time change, and that I woke up at 10. That was the relevant part for her, and she was also perhaps somewhat amused.

Vacation stories about exciting or frustrating things that happened. You only tell me about going back to get your buffet coupon if it means walking in on your son and the maid…

Sports stories are about the…fuck, just watch a sports movie. It’s all about triumphs, reversals, moments of glory.

How we retell these events makes up the stories of these events.

How this relates to gaming

When we’re playing a game, we’re playing it out n real-time. The game may take place in a fictional time, but we as players are experiencing it in real-time. The Trollmaster teleported in and threw troll lightning at the party! I saved, and then I was up next. So I charged forward with my I Don’t Like Your Face power. I rolled to hit, then I rolled damage because my to-hit rocked, but the damage was ass. Now it’s Bill’s turn, and he used his daily power of I Slept With Your Mom, and he totally rocked that with a crit, knocking the Trollmaster back into the lava, doing extra damage.

That’s now how we’re going to retell the story of that. That retelling is dry because it’s just a play-by-play. Instead, we might retell it like this:

Dude, we were all rocking out against his minions, and BAMF the Trollmaster comes in. Hits us all with lightning. Half of us are down. I get in with my shot, fucking him up some. He’s tough, it’s kinda desperate. That’s when Bill throws down, using that power he just got this level, I Slept With Your Mom. Man, the new Bard powers rock. Anyway, he hit the Trollmaster and BAM! Fucker’s in the lava…

Granted, if you’re not at all interested in the story, it won’t matter either way to you. But if you are, the retelling is key. In retelling, we cut out or re-contextualize the “boring” parts — like how instead of “I rolled for ass,” it was “I fucked him up.” We add further commentary, like “He’s tough, it’s kinda desperate” — emotional context for the moment. We change up the language to intensify bits of the story we’re telling, like “and BAM! Fucker’s in…”

This can, of course, extend into the macro-level, where you tell the story of a campaign like this. And I’ve heard loads of stories. Every time I hear one, I ponder about what isn’t being said, or what’s being altered — intentionally, to make a better story, or unintentionally, because memory is imperfect.

The day-to-day life we experience isn’t the same as the one we talk about.

The vacation we experience isn’t the same as the vacation stories we tell.

The sports game we watch or play isn’t the same as the game we describe.

So this brings me to a key point:

Why should we push to make a role-playing game’s experience at the table match what we would tell later? There’s a lot of obsession in indieland about story, arcs, etc, and frankly I don’t think they exist in the table experience. Not one bit. But the moment we talk about that game after the fact, even if we’re just talking to the same people that played in the game, that’s the moment when an arc exists. Just like we’re taking a collection of experiences in our real lives and turning them into stories with arcs, emotional contexts, reversals, etc., that’s what we’re doing with our role-playing games.

Perhaps it’s even when we just think about it after the fact, though I suspect talking about it cements the transfer from pure experience to story.

There’s probably a Heisenberg joke in here somewhere. But seriously, it’s by commenting on our observations that we turn experience into story. In real life. In a role-playing game. That’s just how brains work, how memory works, how two-way communication works.

The only question is: is it a story about what happened in the fiction, or what happened with the people playing the game? And that’s a question to be answered on a case-by-case basis.

- Ryan

(Normally, I only allow myself one blog post per day at max. But seeing as the last one was just an announcement, I can bend the rules today.)

As a story game designer, I often wonder what the difference is for me between story games and adventure games[1]. Oddly, the difference hit me while watching Crank 2: High Voltage last year. In short:

• Adventure Games test competence
• Story Games manage page

See, here’s the thing. Crank and Crank 2 are classes in action beats. There’s little more to the film than that, by design, so you get an eye-full over and over again of what makes an action scene work. It’s all about beats — action, reaction, follow-up. And what we do with adventure games models only a piece of that, the initiative system and flow of turn order. But by testing competence and allowing for the sort of failure that blocks or fucks with the flow of the beat, we make games that look less like action movies and look more like, well, like a fight in real life.

Which brings me to another difference:

• Adventure Games model a fair, consensual reality (and often strongly)
• Story Games model a desire for an arc (and often weakly)

Not that I want to get into GNS theory here. Fuck no. (GNS is about play dynamics, I’m talking about design modeling.)  But it’s the qualifiers that I want to get into. Adventure Games have a strong modeling, intentionally. Fairness, and thus the feeling of success or safety net against abuse, requires a strong modeling. Sometimes that modeling is rules-heavy, and in other cases rules-light, and they often fall back onto an arbiter of sorts (the GM), to manage the modeling, fairness, and people. But because of this focus, creating tools for an arc are a secondary thought, if that.

(Often, the tools are in the form of GM advice, which is a fine, fine tool for such a job. And I think we Story Gamers forget this from time to time.)

Now, Story Games often model weakly, also by design. Yes, we have games that have strict sense of timing, with our love of pacing mechanics, but they don’t strongly model arcs the way that adventure game strongly model fairness. Again, by design. These games are tapping into the shared sense of media, of story, as a way to fill in gaps and allow us flexibility in how we interpret that pacing.

If you look at a lot of freshmen indie games, they try to too strongly model an arc. The very complaint you get in a lot of poorly-designed adventure games — of rule loopholes and soft points and weakness — are what you need in order to make a story game work. Make a story game too tight, and you risk making a game that’s about parlor narration, one that you feel you’re along the ride for rather than an architect of.

Which brings me to…

• In an Adventure Game, strongly-modeled rulesets allow for the players to contact the world
• In a Story Game, strongly-modeled rulesets disengage players from the world

So, when we’re testing for competence, we need strongly-modeled tools. Otherwise, we’re not really being competent if we’re not in the face of fairness. (Even dramatic fairness, like using a Hero Point to reroll or the like. There is room for some movie logic here, just not overly.)

But when we’re modeling for narrative arcs, we need weakly-modeled tools. We need to be able to project our own ideas in the game.[2] That’s how we come into contact with a story game, not by attempting to do something by by attempting to express something.

And that’s why, as I’m writing up a bit on a little game I’m tinkering with, Gun ‘n Fuck, I find I’m making a story game about action beats and not an adventure game about a dude on a rampage. I don’t want to challenge the main character’s competence constantly. For this specific purpose, that would be boring as fuck. (As one playtest proved.) That means I have to figure out what I am doing, and that’s where pacing and timing are the key.

Nothing more for now, just a few thoughts on keyboard. Oh, I should leave with this:

• At no point am I saying this is what makes an Adventure or Story Game good or bad. Just observing games I’ve played over the past few years.

- Ryan

[1] I do not condone the use of “traditional” or “trad” to describe these games. That’s a useless term, sometimes used derogatorily, and makes use folks in the story game scene look like pretentious hipster fucks. Just sayin’.

[2] Why, yes, this post was partly inspired by Inception.