Creating Roleplaying Opportunities

The other week I played DCC for the first time. It was a blast. I had a wonderful time. Three of my level zero wusses died in the first session, in hilariously awful ways. Blood was flowing, we were solving puzzles and trying to survive... and boy was I failing. But I noticed something while we were having a great time: we weren't really roleplaying, as I had come to understand it. Again, I had a blast! I was engaged! But it wasn't like we were truly RPing.

This isn't a complaint. It's more of a meditation. A processing. Please keep something in mind: I have been playing either Burning Wheel or Crescendo constantly for going on... ten years? I have been steeped in very deep, narration-heavy, roleplaying for a very long time. I don't say that as a boast. It's a fact of my life, and in order for this post to make sense, you have to know that.

Now, I am a firm believer that systems influence people. I think it's possible to encourage people into roleplaying more, into any system, with just a few modifications. After thinking about it, here's what I thought of:

Whenever possible, hook mechanics into roleplaying.

You can't make a fictional world in an RPG without the rules the players agreed to. Throwing the rules out actually makes the world incomplete. I've found that the more you bring the rules into roleplaying itself, the better the roleplaying itself is.

Hold any possible skepticism for the moment. Here's some ideas on how you do it. 

Use Their Player Classes/Archetypes/Backgrounds to Describe Scenes

Whenever you're done describing a scene, ask each player to add a detail that would interest their someone of their class, archetype, or background. Let the players add to the scene. Let them help you tie the noose.

Players Must Justify Success

If a player doesn't narrate why they should succeed in their action... they don't. It's not "Roll for it", it's "No". That simple. 

Rolling comes up, generally speaking, if the GM feels that the plan given by the player might be plausible. This one little rule will almost entirely do the trick, just on its own. If you require actual narration, with an attempt to solve the problem before them, players will do it. 

Justify Advantage When Rolling

Rolling should never be neutral. Either the player has justified having advantage on the roll or they get disadvantage. 

This comes down to system choice, of course, but the general mechanics of most RPGs can be fit to this rule pretty easily. This rule keeps the player engaged in the fiction, even as they pick up the dice. It's a small trick, but it keeps the flow of narration going. Be more merciful than not. Rolls are usually instigated by the GM, not the player, so if you're forcing a player to fend for themselves and then not be terribly lenient about them responding it's actually going to kill engagement. Let the players feel like they're rising to the occasion.

Let Them Narrate the Loss of HP

Or whatever negative stuff you have in your game. If something happens to the character (like gaining Stress, losing HP, gaining Conditions), ask them what that looks like for their character. Players naturally want to use the system to describe their characters. Let them! They'll invest if you let them do it.

Conclusion

The idea that the fictional world is complete without the rules of the game doesn't really work, because it doesn't. You aren't just playing make-believe, you are using a ruleset to guide make-believe. Bringing the rules into the fiction, to make it an aspect of roleplaying, makes the overall experience more cohesive. The rules are in the world. You bring the rules in, and the loop is complete.

B/X is the Template for a Reason

Let’s get this out of the way: I think there are objective rights and wrongs to design, and by that I mean there are universal ways to make RPGs easier to play and run. I also happen to think a lot of RPGs aren’t designed very well; they take too much work, and are way more troublesome than they’re worth. I’ll give you a hint: if it rhymes with trad it’s more than it’s worth. A good game is easy to run at the table, with minimal prep work. I also don't think that OSE is a perfect game, nor do I think B/X is perfect.

See, here's how a lot of modern games work, particularly trad: the players show up and rely up on the GM to make every single narrative decision worth a damn. Even in something like PBTA, where collaboration is a lot stronger, the actual table experience of a GM is vastly more complicated than a player's. A player has really one thing to worry about: what the GM is doing and what the GM tells him. Everything else flows off of that for a player. This then means that the GM, if he is to provide the operative environment, has to make quite a few more decisions than even one player in the same amount of time. Without a good way to shuffle some of that mental load onto something or someone else most games essentially consign a GM to mental exhaustion. This is supposed to be a game, not me doing taxes thank you. In this situation you don't want to prep, and who could blame you! You're worn out from the session and needing to take a break. Having to prep after that's torture, just flat out.

So is it any wonder that Moldvay’s Basic/Expert (BX) is arguably the basis of the OSR, because of its easy of running? It certainly isn't to me, not after perusing this book for five minutes.  Don’t believe me? Here’s what you do: draw a map and bookmark the random tables in the book. During the game every two character turns you roll 1d6: if you hit a 1(or higher if you think your players are being dumb) something happens. Roll on the random tables provided (or the ones you made up for fun) in the book after that, roll for the reaction of the mosnters, and go from there! You will be expending some energy, sure, but you will be using a hell of a lot less energy than you’d expect; you go from having to figure everything out to interpreting results. This is a huge difference in the mental and creative load. You can just go along with the procedures and not have to worry about where anything is going, because the game's job is to give you plot points to interpre. You go from playing the long game of a session to just focusing on the next task.

And OSE preserves these procedures exactly. Now, here's what I'm not saying: OSE ain't the only way to replicate such procedures. In fact, OSE's procedures are limited and narrow and if you don't want a dungeoncrawler turning to domain warfare and whatnot OSE won't work for you. That's okay. A game is a game because of its focus, not because it is so freaking large as to catch everyone and everything in its net.

Does that make 5e a game?

Do you really need me to answer that? Do you really me to bring up all the videos of people complaining about GM burnout and how hard it is to GM that mess of a game?

No?

Didn't think so.

Anyways, what I am saying is that, of all the things on the market, B/X is one of the ones with the most comprehensive support for both players and GM. It's not that I want everything to be B/X; I'm in the middle of designing several games, so obviously I think more can be added to the market. It's just that this is the space I think needs the most work: games that support and encourage, rather than demand and drain. There's a reason why Gygax could run games on an almost weekly basis, and it's because of the principles that are now encapsulated in OSE and a lot of the OSR. The fact that the OSR is arguably a commentary on B/X should say something about what this one game accomplished. 

And we all should be learning from it.

How I World-Build: Viestinta's Conceptualization

So I decided to write how I world-build, and began the last week with a short post on the planet that started it all, Heranyt. As I wrote, I realized that the full notebook of stuff I have on Heranyt... well... I don't have any of how I got there, not anymore. Heranyt appeared in a fever dream of gameplay ideas and philosophy and mythology and religion and, well.... I didn't really write any of it down. So this time I'm writing the process down and hopefully others will find it mildly entertaining, at the very least.

So here's the deal: Viestinta is meant to house two different games: Realms of Peril and Hearts of Wulin, which is Chinese melodrama. Sound totally contradictory? It didn't to me, so I figured I'd try and figure out why that idea was so compelling to me.

Realms of Peril is an OSR/PBTA merge that's meant to be an open table game. I've been slowly coming around to the concept, after multiple years of trying to run things with a larger than three player crowd... only to find that the campaigns just can't seem to hold together. Schedules get way too weird. In fact I find non-open table games to be so hard to run that I specifically designed Crescendo to be a resilient against schedules as humanly possible, but that's principally by having the group be incredibly small. If I want to play with a larger group, I'm SOL. Welp, as it turns out Realms of Peril has been tinkered with to get everything not open table to go away. It's got a really good basic resolution system, and you can get a character to the table within minutes.

Hearts of Wulin is a PBTA about wuxia fiction. It's meant to be have proud and restrained badass warriors trying to not get their hearts broken and failing. The game, like most storygames, is meant to be played out in shorter spurts, short enough to where people can safely commit for two to four sessions and then move on. A lot of PBTAs try to solve the logistical issues by making sure there's less logistics, just period. I like wuxia enough to get over my usual aversion to PBTA, and found that the game is actually very good and I can't wait to get it back to the table.

On the one hand you have a drop-in, drop-out game and a short wuxia story generator. That doesn't explain it at all, does it? 

Nope, I don't think so either.

So I decided to write down "the story" of the setting, the thing that I'll base everything else on. Maybe there's an answer beyond "I just think it's neat" somewhere in there.

I know I wanted to keep yuan-ti and dragonborn, so I renamed them to hserpa and drahskin.

The clannish drahskin and devious hserpa, after wiping out all other civilizations except for humans (which they enslaved), turned their millenia old magical and martial prowess on each other. Given their strengths it surprised no one that the war was rather even, although the collateral damage could be truly awful at times.

And then one day the khen-zai artifacts were discovered.

Deep beneath the earth both sides found great store houses of the ancient race: medicines, weapons, and other technologies that could have advanced their respective civilizations hundreds of years in a matter of hours. The Emperor of Fire and the Emperor of Scales met in secret to discuss what they had found. It wasn't a long conversation: they sealed their discoveries away again, and had those who found and those who sealed the discoveries killed. They then agreed to assign guards over these sites, with strict orders that all who were to be found on these "sacred lands" would be publicly executed in the cruelest ways imaginable. They figured that the upheaveal would destroy both their peoples utterly.

And then one day the khen-zai returned.

The fabled elder race, the ones who had become totally ethereal beings, returned with their puppet bodies, to reclaim what had been theirs. Their living chitinous warships pounded the planet with an orbital bombardment that the peoples of Viestinta will never forget, nevermind the planet itself. All the people who had died to protect the planet's way of life... all was in vain.

But then the unthinkable happened: the drahskin Amgala, hserpa An, and the human Gi broke into one of the vaults and, using Gi to pilot, flew a mech into the heart of the mothership, and killed every single of the weak-bodied khen-zai. They returned, triumphant heroes. The planet had triumphed.

Nope.

The khen-zai had actually captured Amgala, An, and Gi, and tested a new technology on them: menticide, the art of brainwashing. They forced the three to believe they had won and sent them back. The khen-zai, while they were originally annoyed that their engineered toys had survived in their absence, they were intrigued by humanity able to use their tech. They had run into it before with other humans, but figured it was a "local" genetic anomaly. They were wrong. So they decided to spare the planet, and see what would happen with this unexpected turn of events. They retired to the ethereal plane to enjoy their debauched cruelties, and waited. They were in no hurry.

The Emperors' long-standing deceptions were quickly discovered and punished. Humanity was freed from slavery, and a world-wide republic was formed, with the technology discovered in the vaults being used to build quickly. Those who were on board were benefited. Those who were not were ignored, ostracized, or killed if the first two methods didn't work out. 

Those who weren't in the sprouting cities languished in small shanty towns, holding onto a way of life that, with the constant allure of the cities calling the young away, became insular, toxic, and more than a bit racist. But they see the error of abandoning the old ways. Or at least they think they do. The worst thing is not death or discomfort, but losing the meaning that comes only with death and discomfort. We'll see how long that lasts.

So that's a good place to stop. There's a lot of this that jumps out at me, and why two games are contained within it. On the one hand you have the newly formed Parliament, with all the hope of the good and the apathy of the evil intermingling, and it being hard to tell the difference at times. A new era has dawned! It is up to those in power to make sure that new dawn is worthwhile. There's all the idealism, honor, folly, and passion of such an enterprise, contrasted against the bloody and benighted past that may not be so past, but an ignored present situation that may kill everyone. And, to me, that speaks Hearts of Wulin.

On the other hand all you have to do is learn about real-world cases of mothers in the Appalachian Mountains giving their children Mountain Dew (which dissolves their teeth) instead of water, because there is no infrastructure to produce clean water there, to see the downsides of such a venture. A good drive through Steubenville, OH, a decade or so ago, would have shown a place dying because it wasn't a part of the global initiative.  And in these places one must survive however one can, whatever that looks like. Even if that means breaking into tombs and stealing tech and robbing the globalists at every opportunity to live... all the while espousing values that are not practical to hold anymore, because the world no longer works according to blood and sweat, but rationalization and passion. This desperation screams out Realms of Peril to me.

So the setting, unlike Heranyt or Rakkaus, now serves two functions: playing an open table sword and sorcery game, with people dropping in and dropping out, and short but intense personal stories that may or may not involve excessive mounts of idealism and doomed romance. Those things don't seem so separate to me anymore. And in fact, at least for me, it may not work out any other way.

Viestinta is a world in the midst of bifurcation. On the one hand you have the prosperous elites who no longer really know they're elites, having to deal with the consequences of globalization and the deadening effect that has one one's soul. On the other you have those left behind, who are trying to scratch out a mean existence in a world that has forgotten them.. and the horrors that live so close to them. It is a world of rapidly growing magitech and skyscrapes with squalor not even one hundred miles away... all watched over by the curious and otherwise-bored khen-zai.

That's a chilling set up.

We'll start focusing on importing real world stuff next time.!

The Most Important Thing Heroes of the Grid Taught Me

Play is not the same thing as games. Play is a state of creativity and imagination that is objectively good for you. One of the ways us humans make play easier is by designing games. I'm pretty sure at this point the point of a game is whether or not it actually makes play easy to enter into. So long as a game can get someone into play then it is doing its job.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written about Heroes of the Grid. It’s been longer since I’ve played it. This has been a practical thing: toddlers destroy cards with alarming quickness, and the heart of HotG is in its cards. So up went the game! It’s too bad, but I’d prefer to be able to play later than lose components now. And I do actively feel the loss: the Guardian system, as I believe it is now called, is a fantastic thing. Mr. Ying had better be proud.

First off, the cards. They’re not too wordy, but the concepts they frequently communicate allow for a decent amount of depth for what they are. The cards and how they interact have a learning curve to them, but once a player understands what they’re looking at they find a responsive and intuitive ruleset, so much so that letting yourself lean into it is the trick. Looking for structure in the game rules themselves will only lead to frustration; there is no rule telling you what to do. Most new players I’ve introduced to the game sit there blinking, deerlike, as the structure has no inherently obvious use. “What do I do? When may I do it?”

Heroes of the Grid, in that respect isn’t like most board games at all. The rules are specifically reactive to the conversation at the table. Gameplay hinges off your ability to look at the board and talk about what you see, with friends who aren’t trying to boss you around. The conversation at the table is itself the game. Heroes of the Grid just gives you cards and dice to steer that game in unexpected ways.

I play this game a lot with my sons who, while they don’t really grasp the mechanics of the cards yet, still very much understand this rule: talk and play a card at some point, maybe even roll some of those chonky dice! Other games I’ve thrown at them they like well enough (Lanterns particularly) but time after time they open the box of cards for Heroes of the Grid and we fantasize about when we’ll next get to play.

So now we get to my point: the other day one of my sons was going through the cards as we both pined about being able to play again. My son knows I love playing MMPR Red Dragonshield, colloquially known as Jason Dragonshield. My son asked to see Dragonshield's deck and noticed that I was picking and choosing from the MMPR red cards. He realized I was constructing a deck, that I was making it up. He was stunned; he thougth there was a predetermined list of cards for Jason Dragonshield! I laughed and told him that the game supported you making your own character from the available cards you had. My son's face lit up, and he asked me to show him the deck all over again and explain it to him.

Jason Dragonshield

Team Tactics (Gain energy, someone else plays a card)

Blade Blaster (Dump energy for damage, 1 to 1)

Risky Moves (Take damage to grant bonus dice to another attack)

Lead the Charge (2D attack next attack at +1D)

Haymaker (1D attack, more dice for each shield on top of discard pile)

Power Sword (5D attack, +2D next attack)

Start with Dragon Dagger(3D twice) and Dragon Shield (-3 damage +1D next attack) in hand, giving you a greater than normal hand size. 

My son was curious about my choices, so I broke down the tactics of having a leader who could become a serious fighter if he needed to be. I had to break down each card and why it went into the deck. I then grabbed a few more rangers from the box and showed him how to balance the deck, and that there was a huge variety of things that could be done to make exactly what you wanted. I watched as my son's eyes glazed over a second trying to comprehend what he had just been told. He was no longer looking at a box of predetermined options, but an entire box of tools.

So now in the mornings whenever we take "the box" out he asks me how I would combine characters and why. The game went from just being something to do to being a vehicle to actually engage in play. Heroes of the Grid makes an honest attempt to put mechanics at the service of the conversation and off-table creativity, and that's positively impacted my son, who's now realizing their may be more to playing a game than just following the directions and seeing what happens.

It's a really cool thing to watch.

Dunno if this post any other point than that. But there it is.

“I Attack” Isn’t Realistic (And that’s Boring)

4e DnD had the most realistic take on combat in all its editions. Yes, really. Same with spellcasting. I didn’t say it did it well; it didn’t. But 4e’s basic ideas were best by a country mile.

Don’t believe me?

Ask a boxer to punch someone and see his irritation. “What type of punch?” he’ll ask. “You want me to give him a good warning shot or do you want me to knock him out and how do you want me to do it?”

If the same boxer gets into a fight you may see a variety of approaches with a variety of punches. Everything thrown is done with a different effect in mind. Some of it is designed to give him a breather, to open up the opponent, to give spacing for a power shot… and that’s just one boxer. Grab someone from the same gym and you’ll get a very different usage of the same style. Go to another boxing gym and you’ll find something different again.  And that's before you ask "But what if I want to kick?" or "Punching isn't going to kill very quickly, what if I want to use a weapon?"

There is no “I attack” option in combat. 

4e’s menu of powers is actually a pretty decent take on an actual combat paradigm. Notice I didn't say it was good, just that it was better than about 99% of the games out there.

Well, today I'm going to break down what should probably be done if you actually want something that feels like a real fight. Guess what, folks? We've already got a really good starting point: skills. I'll break down the skills I'd use to simulate an actual combat.

I'm assuming D20 as a base. Get rid of the attack roll entirely, and just have it be a situationally based skill roll. With each roll ask: what are you trying to accomplish for this roll?

Rush: Get in the shot before the opponent does!

Jump: Change your elevation to get extra power into your shot, as well as surprise them.

Leverage: What most people think of as power is actually just leveraging your weight correctly.

Coordination: Your general ability to pull a complicated move off. Useful for spins and other stuff that keeps you from falling on your face.

Toughness: Taking hits so you can get your move in.

Insight: Duh.

Perception: Um, duh.

Deception: Also, duh.

Intimidate: Also also duh.

I'd have each player narrate their action, and then check that narration against the above list: the player gets +1 to their roll for each skill they're trained that they referenced. If they weren't trained? -4 per. If you happen to have range advantage (dagger while inside the reach of a sword, a spear in pretty much anything but grappling range) you get a +5... and -5 if not.

Then the GM picks a Stat, which represents his primary approach:

Strength: Using your physical power to overpower an opponent's defenses

Dexterity: Overwhelmingly out speeding your target

Constitution: Trying to wear out your opponent by just. Not. Stopping.

Intelligence: Laying in intelligent combinations or outplay the opponent.

Wisdom: Getting a read on your opponent and looking for tells.

Charisma: Forcing your opponent into accepting you as the alpha.

The GM then tells you what type of damage dice to roll, should you hit:

Advantage: D12

Normal: D8

Disadvantage: D4 

Does this take more time? Yup. But why does it take more time? Because players have to roleplay. They have to take a second, think, and narrate. They're rewarded for how they engage with the fiction and their character's capabilities.

Crescendo: The Journey

I will always maintain that the journey is the most important part of a fantasy story because it’s the way the reader gets to know the setting. Immersion is king in fantasy, and what gets you immersed better than seeing the countryside and how it operates? I’d put a journey mechanic above just about everything else in a fantasy, and that arguably includes even a basic resolution mechanic!

So yes, Crescendo has a Journey mechanic. But in order to understand why it works so well we have to cover several unique mechanics in Crescendo and how the Journey utilizes them. 

First off there’s the Locale. A Locale is a discrete chunk of the setting. Some power dynamics and the basic concept of the place are part of a Locale, but the most important part of the Locale is its History: the significant events that have happened there.

And then there’s the journaling: everyone in a game of Crescendo has a journal they are responsible for. There’s various prompts for writing in it, and there’s times you’re expected to reference it: open to a page you know has writing, close your eyes, and put your finger down on the page. You read that aloud. So does everyone else. The GM then assembles the prompts into whatever he needs for that moment. Others can make you write their actions into your journal, and there’s a bunch of mechanics where lore is made up and then written in too.

The next piece of the puzzle is The Black Swan. A Black Swan looks like a twist, but is really someone else’s story coming out of the blue and smacking into yours; you get a chance to change the Black Swan, in an intense series of rolls that can truly change things, forever. Black Swans are always based off the History of the Locale you’re in, and are generated by Hitting the Books. So basically the world butts its head in on your situation and you have to respond or lose something of yours. It’s an intense mechanic. And most of the time it can be avoided.

Excerpt during journeys. Then that crap finds you. A lot. And all you can really do is navigate it the best you can.

What comes out isn’t a series of random encounters, but an organic evolution of the setting. Because the events generated are from the journals y’all have put so much into the Black Swans are always an evolution of what came before. It feels like there are multiple stories happenings around you that you’re only JUST privy to. The world feels alive, like it has its own purpose… which you just interrupted. And, since the journals get updated with these events, it means they’ll come back, and almost never where and when you expect them to. This takes a tremendous amount of work off the GM’s shoulders, allowing him to find out what happens at the same time the players do!

Crescendo has a unique Journey mechanic. It allows the stories of the word to really come to the forefront, impacting the players’ characters in unexpected ways… which then makes the story richer. All without having to occupy the GM’s brain. Because of how coherent the journals make twists it’s east for the GM to generate situations that not only challenge the players, but do so in a way that makes the world feel alive.

Fixing XP

 

Milestones, where the GM tells you that you level because you met some goal, are the absolute worst way to level up a character. The. Worst. Basically it's whenever the GM feels like giving you a level for doing whatever nonsense he came up with. It takes the already-bad trend of GMs throttling the life out of their players and amps it up to eleven. "Trad", where the GM has total control, needs to be eliminated, not further entrenched. 

The problem is that XP is normally implemented so poorly that it makes more sense to hand the GM leveling power. XP isn't really anything, it's just numbers on a sheet. There's no context to XP, there's nothing you do except get it. Anything is better than milestones, but XP usually isn't. So how do we fix it?

Those who know Dark Souls are laughing, because I didn't exactly bury the lead here, didn't I?

Dark Souls is certainly on the right track: XP becomes a resource: you use it as currency, you lose it if you die and have to get it back, and it requires actually being at a bonfire to spend to level up. You also can farm XP, deliberately going to places where you know you can get a lot of XP relatively easily, kill everything in sight, and then go back to the bonfire, reset the area, and farm some more. You can manipulate XP gain. Mechanically and setting-wise it's an object, part of the game in all senses.

The OSR keeps the old ways, even if they're imperfect: gold brought back to town is XP. It's not perfect because XP is still just this random abstract object, but the way you get it is by playing the game in an objective way, outside of GM fiat. How you get that gold which gets you the XP is totally up to you, so long as you get it. And this creates a really cool loop of players picking their own goals, going out in the world, and getting their gold how they want to. The GM preps the sites and the players go where they want, doing what they want. At that point so much player stuff is going on that nobody cares if XP is an abstract object, with no actual game relevance beyond marking what you've done so far. If anything the XP then serves as a marker, as a "YES WE DID IT!" sorta an object.

But I think more can be done with it. Here's two ways I mess with XP.

So in Crescendo I use XP as a resource. You get it by various actions and yes, you spend it on stats and skills and whatnot... but you can also use it as currency, and to bypass certain challenges in the game system. Basically it's used to get around certain things I don't think Crescendo to get around. And, since it's not used as a static number to level, you don't really have to care whether or not you spend it. You have it. You do what you like with it. It's a resource, not a tracker.

There's another game I'm kinda working on, Once More!, where XP is gained for each and every HP regained; you're rewarded for getting roughed up. Now, you can spend XP or burn HP to improve your rolls at any time. Given that you get XP for regaining HP, you'd probably opt for one or the other... until you hit a threshold of XP; I'm thinking it should be the character's current max HP. When you do, you must get your XP back down to 0... which means spending it to augment rolls. And then you level up. The problem is that if you roll too high you run the risk of creating unexpected trouble in the setting. This little trick puts the player in an environment where getting in trouble isn't just inevitable, it's necessary. You get this awesome romp, where your character is super powerful and just breaking everything in your way, while setting up for the next arc.

Milestones are bad. XP  can be a good way to provide an objective measurement of progress, but it can be so much more! Dark Souls already paved the way on that, showing that XP can be a general all-around resource. I've been experimenting with a few ways that XP can be used as resource, and am definitely looking to do more! If you've seen some innovative ways to handle XP let me know!

But not milestones.

Milestones very bad.

Initiative is Badly Handled

 

The other day I was playing in my weekly Level Up game, and it went particularly well: I almost drowned. The previous session I was almost eaten by zombies. And the session before that I did actually die. And was then brought back to life by the god of justice, cause as it turns out Sir Solomon the Ugly is too cool for school, nevermind death. I have a habit of throwing characters into certain death with an aplomb that's a bit unnerving at times. This time we had some creatures coming up and out of the ground... so I asked Marty the GM if we were gonna roll initiative. And Marty said no. I raised an eyebrow.

And I charged.

Marty was surprised. 

The warlock facepalmed. "Oh God, not again".

What followed was essentially a puzzle as we tried to figure out the weird creature I'd managed to piss off was. It got... really intense. Like I said, I almost drowned, after reducing the creature to 1 hp underwater... and then passing out first. The warlock pulled me out of the water, none too happy about having to save my fanatical ass, yet again. We exchanged the usual pleasantries over a warlock having to save a paladin. For the third time in as many sessions.

Later on Marty asked me what I thought about the session. I told him that I had a great time and that that particular session had felt pretty unique. I wasn't even sure why. Marty's encounter design is absolutely pristine. There is literally nobody else I trust to run a trad game, because Marty's got a good enough head on his shoulders to handle the normal awfulness that is trad design. But this was particularly good, even for Marty. We fought a goopy tentacle monster with a gigantic-ass skull for a head. It had eight legs I think? Took a long time to find the head, and then killing it was... it was something. I got stuck when I hit it, and couldn't get out, and we spent all our resources to figure out that it hated radiant and necrotic damage... and then realized we couldn't do any more of either of those types to the stupid thing. So we had to brute force it into oblivion.

Like I may have pointed out, I almost died.

Anyways.

It felt different this time, a fact that I pointed out to Marty. I couldn't really figure out why the fight was so much fun. I mean, it was a good design on Marty's part, but he's done a lot better. So we talked it over. And for a few minutes I just couldn't figure it out.

But then I literally started shouting on the phone, causing poor Marty to wince. He asked me to calm down and explain. 

See, the thing that people don't understand is that special modes inside of RPGs are... well... special. You have to treat them differently. During playtesting of Crescendo I found that if each scene was ended formally players made the transfer to the myriad game scenes that Crescendo has pretty easily. Because of that formal ending to scenes players were able to handle multiple game modes. Their concerns were tied up, debriefing happened, and they were able to move on with a clear head. Clear demarcations helped a lot, specifically ending the scene. In fact I'd argue that doing different sub-mechanics should have some form of debrief before, simply to get everyone's head in the game.

See, the thing is that, without the initiative, there wasn't the muscle response to "combat". Sure, we were using attacks and whatnot, but there was a definite feeling that was not there from not rolling initiative. Had we had an opportunity to book it for the hills after my charge we would have. And it was specifically because we didn't have this klaxon going off in the back of our heads going "KILL. MONSTER."

Instead it was just a puzzle. With swords.

We didn't have to fight. Heck we didn't have to do anything other than just get around it. 

I commanded Marty to try a few more encounters with us that didn't involve initiative, to see if it stuck. We'll see.

But going from one mode of play to another suddenly may not work out. We'll see.

The Problem of Advancement and Endings

So the modern RPG usually follows a pretty settled formula: you start out unable to stop bad crap from happening, so you get some XP and level up, gradually erasing the chaos from the game. You now have control, hurray!

Well, not really. That’s boring as hell.

See, the thing that makes a plot move is tension, the pull between law and chaos. Without tension stories don’t live. So basically most Western TTRPGs,  on a design level, kill themselves. We remove tension and the game deflates. Storygames are particularly bad at this, creating games where complications are tied inherently to failure… which the advancement system totally chokes out. PBTA particularly is bad at this, and can only be played for a short amount of time before the mechanics grind the story to a halt. For a genre that prides itself on mechanics generating story, this is a deadly flaw.

“Just have the GM smooth it out!” you might say. "That's up to the group to figure out!" No, that’s making excuses for bad design: a game should not need a GM to houserule or ignore the mechanics to keep playing. Period.

“These games aren’t meant to run for long!” Even if that’s true grinding to a halt isn't the same thing as an ending. Storygames don’t usually do ending mechanics… which I think a really bad idea. Endings are the hardest part of a story to get right, enough RPGs don’t have advice and mechanics to support this to where an entire book, World Ending Game, focused on ending the stories from other games.

So not only are most storygames advancing the fun out of their game, but they're going into mechanical oblivion.

Yes, trad games are usually worse about it. That should just be a given.

The irony is that it’s because we bastardized DnD.

See, we get XP from The World’s Most Banal RPG. Duh. We all knew that. But XP and level growth originally happened in a context: the random encounter. Advancement didn’t affect the chances of random crap happening to you, it just indicated how big of stuff you could handle, and even then the numbers weren’t perfect; by and large you weren’t ever the top of the pile. And therefore you were always in danger. That’s good game design!

Trophy Gold is another game that manages to thread the needle. Dungeons are made as flowcharts of possibilities that must end. Not only that, but advancement doesn’t turn you into some god on earth, but just gives you a BIT more of an edge. You could run a Trophy Gold game for years, with bite-sized little adventures that you can drop in and drop out of. And that's a really good setup!

And yes, Crescendo and The Truth Found in Death address these problems, each in their own ways.

Crescendo's solution is to make higher rolls create more chaos within in the setting. So the more powerful you get the more out of control things get in the setting, because your efforts are just so much more powerful. As the game progresses it gradually goes from deep introspection on who your character thinks he is to having to deal with his intentions not matching up to effects those intentions have. And that's the sort of thing character development thrives on! The ending of an arc of Crescendo is called The Festival, where characters discover how they have changed, in the context of a public celebration. The ending of a game of Crescendo is called The Apocalypse, where players get one last time to define their characters, and the world responds one last time... but not in the way the players expect. The game ends in a final, irrevocable, statement on the characters and their relationship to the world.

The Truth Found in Death takes the problem in a more BDnD way: by putting chaos generation into the framework of the game. In every adventure there are four times when the players have to help randomly determine where the plot goes. Nobody knows where the one-shot is going. No one. And four  times in those two hours the plot jukes like this... and then ends as the characters wrap up the adventure on go on to their next thing. Which we may or may not see in a future session. Dunno. But it's done. Eventually players will be able to build and protect their own towns, which will dramatically alter gameplay for those who have stuck around long enough. By that point there will be differing levels of player interaction going on, and the game will have gone from a bunch of murder-hobos looking for adventure to a political thriller. With lots of blood. Since The Truth Found in Death is a Westmarch game I don't think it's the type of game to have an ending, per se, but each session will be totally standalone and offer its own ending.

There's a pretty big gaping hole in most RPG designs when it comes to advancement and what you're advancing to. It's not a universal problem (and ironically enough DnD not only did it first but better than most), but it's widespread and asks players to do something that full-on professional writers have a hard time doing: pacing and finishing the story. But I'm not just blowing smoke out my ass. Whenever Crescendo and The Truth Found in Death get released they have their own ways of handling advancement and endings that will help each story to be satisfying.

RE: What's Wrong with Nerd Culture, Epilogue: "On Love and LARP"

 

The three comprehensive virtues of the soul are prayer, silence, and fasting. Thus you should refresh yourself with the contemplation of of created realities when you relax from prayer; with conversation about the life of virtue when you relax from silence; and with such food as is permitted when you relax from fasting.

- St. Ilias the Presbyter, Gnomic Anthology III

I still want to scream that Dave is just as right as he is wrong. There’s always a healthy sub-culture of crafting and art in every geek and nerd community that I’m a part of. Hell, the TTRPG community has always embraced a relatively high level of DIY. I mean, I was doing homebrew almost out the gate, in high school! Technically I’m doing it now. It wasn’t very good in high school. One might argue I’m not very good at it now. But I’m doing it. But Dave isn't talking about the minority, he's talking about the general trends. See, the problem is that, four years after this series came out, not a lot has changed in the fandoms I follow. Star Wars is still as toxic as hell, in no small part because of the eradication of the EU and Disney making a "new" canon (EU was never canon folks, sorry).

But see, there’s a healthy way to approach all of this. We cannot stop contemplating the good, true, and beautiful. I didn’t say we shouldn’t, I said couldn’t; humans are built to constantly meditate upon what they think is good. We do that or rot. But our brains wear out after prolonged exposure to direct thought. They get tired and need to relax. 

And this is where the quote at the top comes in. “Created realities” is what’s said. For some that may mean a life of hiking or gardening. For others martial arts or philosophy. But some of us? We wanna get into something abstract, a sub-creation of the mind. We like having something made up to think on. That’s relaxing.

The object of St. Ilias’s statement isn’t to make a straitjacket, but to simply say: “Goodness is the point, however you get there.”

If you can relax while playing a game with your friends, and thus build relationship and affection? Great! Mission accomplished! Is watching a TV show filling you with hope? The hope’s real, who cares how you get it? If playing an obsessive amount of RPGs helps you understand and forgive the real world, then fantastic!

It’s drifting away into nonsense and ennui that’s evil. Whatever helps you stay here, with the ones you love, that’s what’s good to contemplate. And, when people do this together, it’s naturally communal. They build silly little things. The fact that they are silly is the point. The fact that they aren’t real is irrelevant. As people build and debate they build a culture, something informal and invincible, so long as their higher goals align. Things like The Brothers Grimm, LOTR, fan fiction, it’s all folk culture.

Or it can be.

The thing is that geek/nerd culture is a bastardized form of folk culture: the difference between someone who paints his own minis and those who carve their own chess pieces is academic. But now we can rely upon these huge centers of production and we have gotten lazy, and even the bits we do do we scoff at, because they're not shiny enough like the mass-produced bullshit.

Yes, I'm aware most fanfic is awful.

But that's not the point. 

The point is that nerd/geek culture is the monetized form of folk culture... which then chokes out folk culture. Because the love of money does that. We've gotten to the point to where we just take in this stuff passively, as opposed to making it ourselves and giving our own little tweaks to it.

Corporations making up crap for us consumers is not culture. Culture comes from the bottom up, in response to top-down influences. Instead of guiding us along in contemplating the good when we’re tired most of these corporations merely want to make a buck. 

And I think the drive that Dave woke up in me, years ago, was to not be a part of that bastardized imitation of culture. I didn’t know it then, but the drive to make games that pointed out something good while you were tired began here.

Because yes, this is ultimately why I design now. I want things that help guide me to goodness when I’m too worn out to do it myself. I want to be able to relax and not lose a second to evil, because evil rides in with tides of disintegration and time. Evil doesn’t need to try, not here in this world. Good does.

None of us deserve that. We should be able to relax and still keep our focus on goodness. We need to trust that we will be carried, just a bit, while we rest from the exhaustion that living can inflict. 

No, I don’t think Dave quite has the picture, even now. His truly black pessimism allows him to see the rot, but like many of the neo-reactionary YouTubers he has trouble realizing what the point of having a point of view different from the rotten mainstream is for. But without his promptings I wouldn’t have gotten here.

The Black Swan

 

There was a 5e game my buddy Andy was in that he told me about with great amusement. One of the other players was interested in telling a deep and complex story; everyone else was playing 5e. They got into a situation where actual morality and thinking was required. Andy watched as this new player tried to apply just those two things... in a 5e game. 

Of course it didn't work! Rules are setting; you are defined in large part by the system you operate in. And 5e does not reward thinking; it rewards killing things and turning your brain off. There is utility in this type of game, although I find it less useful the older I get.

Rules. Are. Setting.

What is Setting?

Setting, as I define it for this article, are the unconscious rules you take in. These are the things you just take for granted, like gravity, death, taxes, the slot machine that is social media, etc. You just accept these things and work within those assumptions. And make no mistake, you are molded by these unconscious rules. The folks in that 5e example had internalized these unconscious rules, much to the chagrin of the player who wanted to do something different, which the the world itself would never reward. 5e's rules create a world where killing was normative.

So what is a Black Swan? And why did I just spend all that time trash-talking 5e? And telling you that a lot of social media is intentionally designed like a slot machine?

I'll answer the last two questions first. I'm cantankerous, think 5e is hot garbage and still bitter about the fact that the most famous RPG in the world is now a shell of its former self. And frankly the thought that social media, particularly Facebook, is designed with slot machine mechanics in mind is terrifying to me, as I have almost no impulse control to speak of. My environment is something I find I must constantly tinker with in order to remain someone I recognize.

That aside aside, what the hell is a Black Swan?

The Black Swan is what's outside your expectations, which were molded by your setting.

A Black Swan, as defined by Nassim Taleb, is a highly improbably event that, while not random, was not expected and thus appears random. Black Swans are entirely a matter of perspective: you cannot entirely know what you do not know. There is a gap between what you know you don't know and what you don't know you don't know. And that gap is where Black Swans come from. 

It is of note that, in the entirety of Taleb's book, he never once, not once, shortens Black Swan. Given Taleb's temperament it is not accidental.

For those of you who caught it don't tell. Just chuckle.

It is important to note it again: Black Swans are not random, they are inevitable, you can't see the actual event coming. Taleb, when he talks about how to deal with Black Swans, suggests that the solution is not to predict the Black Swan, which is impossible, but to shore up fragilities in your systems so that they cannot be exploited. You wouldn't predict if someone is coming to break in, you look at your house and realize it doesn't have a security system. If you're in a nice neighborhood and decide to not put the security system in your house it's a lower risk, but do not think it's not a risk. If you're in a high risk neighborhood you know what the risk is, you just can't necessarily see when and how it will happen.

And maybe the underlying problem of gang violence will result in a gang war that no one saw coming, because everyone thought that had been taken care of! How were they supposed to know that the two eldest children of the rival gangs had been in a secret relationship.... until one of them killed themselves over the other? And now all bets are off! To the vast majority of the world that is impossible to see coming, and is thus a Black Swan. Their Setting seemed stable. So they didn't look.

One only has to look at the bodies in the street to see how that turned out.

So, as I was reading this a few things jumped out at me:

1) This was a part of my worldview I'd never been able to articulate. Setting is not stable. You just want it to be.

2) I'm not aware of a story game modeling this on purpose, and yet Black Swans are incredibly important to history and people. My favorite literature could not exist without it. The OSR is filled with random tables and with a joyful acceptance of Black Swans, but from what I've seen in the story games department there is a dearth.

So I decided to put it into Crescendo.

My first model came from my worst instincts. I built a Black Swan Counter. The player could push off failures and make checks easier by hitting the counter, increasing it by 1 each time. And then the GM would roll a dice to see if a Black Swan went off.

Now, the thing was that I didn't want Black Swans to be "consult a table". The whole point of a Black Swan is that it's outside your context, which means that the twists need feel like they come from outside the game. 

Which is when I remembered the consultation of the Aeneid.

Most people think of the Bible when you bring this up: open up to a random page, put your finger down, and that's the answer to... whatever it is you have questions about. But the Aeneid did it first, because Virgil was regarded as the poet, and therefore the lens to see reality through. So I thought, "why not?"

So I decided upon a mechanic called Hitting the Books. The GM brings the Aeneid, while the players bring their favorite narrative work. Whenever Hit the Books is declared everyone opens up to a random passage and reads it aloud. The GM then takes the pieces provided and comes up with a new new plot idea, one that goes right at the PCs. The GM would determine randomly which plot element was affected by the Black Swan.

So I threw these things at James, my hapless player/test subject. And you know what? Surprise surprise, he hit the counter almost every time, because the dice rolling system I'd come up with was punishing. So I lessened up the pressure... and James hit the counter 75% of the time. Still way too much. Crescendo is not directly about Black Swans, it's about deciding what you believe in a world that changes you just as much as it changes itself. Characters get sick, they get tired, they have to rest, they can have mental breakdowns that take months and years to get over....

The Black Swan only aids that process so far.

So I decided to dial it way back. You roll to see if a Black Swan happens at the end of every session, and whenever a player advances (or tries to advance early) a Skill, Save, or Potency a Black Swan is definitely going to happen. Both of these are outside the session, giving all players the time to process. I will probably need to make a way for players to remove certain setting elements from the list, possibly even allowing them to dictate how certain setting elements improve in the face of a Black, because they saw it coming. 

Obviously I'm still tinkering. I like what this mechanic does so far: it removes the GM from mucking about from the game too much, allowing him to just focus on what's right in front of him, with the Setting itself being impossible to entirely pin down. I usually prefer it when a fantasy world is impossible to entirely pin down. 

The world is larger than all the players, especially the GM. I think it should feel like it. 

More as I have it.

"Games Need to be Accesible"

(Or "sOmE GaMeS ShOuLd bE AcCeSiBlE bUt ThEy DoN't AlL hAvE tO bE, as Aaronsolon said)

So I'm walking into my workplace one day, minding my own business, when a coworker of mine runs up to me and strikes up a conversation. I'd talked with this guy a few times before, but had never talked in-depth with him. As we were going along I randomly decided to tell him about the board game night I and a buddy of mine host on Friday nights, after the kids and spouses are asleep. He was thrilled, but kinda blanked when I told him we would be playing Power Rangers. He told me that Thuy Trang was his eternal love and he would be there. Two other people had RSVP'ed and I was excited! Four people playing Power Rangers meant that we would be past the dreaded three player mark, where the game is probably at its hardest. People were claiming colors and it was gonna be a great  evening.

Yeah, no one else showed up but this guy. Oh, and he was new to anything beyond Monopoly.

I smelled disaster.

Part of the challenge of Heroes of the Grid is that it's a very intense game. You have to really know the character you're playing and have to be talking to everyone else constantly, otherwise the influx of attacks flattens the group. With a system as uncompromising as this game's I was afraid that I would not be able to help my newfound friend figure out the character in time. I was right. We got completely and utterly stomped, losing three times over, but choosing to complete the game anyway. We narrowly beat Scorpina, almost losing for a fourth time in a row. And it was great!... at least for me. We were both emotionally exhausted from the ordeal and it was past midnight. I kinda figured this would the last time I'd see this dude, honestly. Two people had bailed on that night and he was given a game that was completely and utterly overwhelming with few people to rely upon and, especially after the ass-kicking we had been subjected to, I wouldn't blame him if he didn't come back. I was also a little bitter that the game was this friggin' hard.

"So this was great! Let's have more people next time, yeah?"

We had a conversation about the game, and he was practically bubbling about it. Yeah, his luck had been horrible and the game was a bit overwhelming, but it had been such an adrenaline rush! We both wanted to play again, but again, past midnight and all that. I told him about some of the other experiences I'd had and he listened attentively. He said he wanted to get better, so he could have more fun with the game. I told him he would, if he put the time in. He nodded, said he'd be there next week, and left.

I stared, sorta slack-jawed, as he walked back to his car.

And, in case you think that was a fluke, I had called one of my buddies who had first played this game with me and asked how much he wanted to keep playing, since I wanted to buy expansions for the game and didn't want to waste my money on it if he wasn't going to play. Our first games had been very rough, with the first one ending in abject defeat and the second one sorta being cheated through. So I was pretty nervous. I had enjoyed the game, but I really enjoyed the challenge. I do not assume others have such a thrill at finding a game that takes some work to understand. But his answer surprised me. "Yeah, it felt like whenever I first played Pandemic, that same 'HOW ARE WE GOING TO BEAT THIS??'  was there. But that turned out alright and it's one of my favorite games now, so I figure why not keep cracking at this one? It's a lot of fun, even though we lost!"

The thing is, I don't mind easy games. One of my favorites, Tsuro, is extremely easy and simple. Anyone can play it, at any confidence level. I've never seen someone not be able to play Tsuro, and it's so aesthetically pleasing to lay down those gorgeous to lay down those tiles and laugh as you realize that everyone is screwed and that's OK. And I'll be damned if Smash Bros isn't an immensely fun game to play with people who have no idea what they're doing! It's got a pretty low threshhold of initial play. I certainly think there should be be gateway games for every genre of play imaginable. People need to know that these can be fun and achievable, in that order.

But I also think that some games should not be. The challenge is part of the point of that game, that adrenaline rush as you realize that, while you may not understand the rule-set, it is open to you and it is on you to understand and master and, should you fail, the system punishes you, sometimes severely. The experience is fraught with the danger of being sent all the way back to the beginning, sometimes with nothing to show for your trouble. And these types of games are extremely frustrating at times, especially for the people who love them. A good game that is difficult does not fail you because it failed, but because you failed. And that distinction has to be very, very, very apparent when playing the game. I haven't beaten Ornstein and Smough yet because Ornstein and Smough are intrinsically unfair, I keep losing to Ornstein and Smough because I'm not respecting the rules that the game has bound the world to. I don't dodge enough, I get very greedy for just that one extra hit that won't actually do anything but HE'S OPEN AND I SHOULD TAKE IT AND OH MY GOD IF I DON'T DO IT I'LL DIE. Such a panic mode is a trap, and these games are designed to punish panic. Do not panic. Think. Breathe. Be judicious. If you lose, you know why you did. If you won, you definitely know why you did. You earned it! You faced something that looked insurmountable and almost was, but you did it! The adrenaline high is unlike anything else, to know that, even if others did it or not, you did. Life is different after a victory like that.

There are some, however, who cannot partake in that experience. Whether it be an actual handicap, money, whatever it is, they cannot keep up, and feel bad that they can't. It doesn't help that the people who can weather such experiences rub it in their faces, which is all sorts of wrong, but even if they didn't there'd probably be some people who wanted to experience a different aspect about the game than the difficulty of it. Perhaps the story is something you want to experience, or maybe the aesthetic really appeals to you, or maybe you just want the damned designer to give you a break. And there are games that do this! And I have no issue with that! The designer, the one sending the message, thinks it should be more open. I'm perfectly fine with that.

But some don't, and that's fine too. Games are a communication of an interactive nature. The designer sets up a design and the player goes through it, guided by the rules into an experience that the designer intended. Some designers are a bit more specific about what they intend. They have forged an aesthetic, a set of mechanics, an experience, a message that is inseparable from the difficulty of the game itself. And yes, the designer gets to be the one who makes that decision. Yes, it excludes some people from playing. I doubt I'll ever finish Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. I'm just not very good at platformers. It's not something I really grew up with, and therefore a game that other platforming gamers have told me is hard is something that I'm not going to have the best experience with. And that's alright by me. The world is not about me, and I have no issue with someone telling me "No, this is not for you", because there are plenty of other things that are. In fact I have issue with games that say "this is for everyone!" because it means that they're precisely for nobody at all. I am quite sure that I will some day meet someone who hates Tsuro, although I've no idea if that person will have a true pulse or a soul. I may have to call for an exorcist at that point, but such is life. But Tsuro is also designed for a specific experience: an intro party game. It's not deep, and anyone trying to get real depth of gameplay out of base Tsuro is going to have a really bad time with it. But fortunately Tsuro's design is extremely clear and I don't know of a soul that has ever mistook it for a tactically deep game.

No game (or media) is for everyone, all the time, or sometimes ever. Not everyone can read Dostoevsky. Not everyone can read Gene Wolfe, or Tolkien. I don't think people should be machismo about it (although sometimes a good victory roar and chest pounding feels pretty dang good, particularly Dostoevsky), but let's not beat about the bush here: if you are not talented in the way that a game (or media) demands the designer has absolutely no obligation to make it so. In fact, he has a responsibility to make sure it hits a certain audience, and only them. Communication is, by nature, exclusive. I'm not going to deliberately (yes, that's in there on purpose... sigh....) tell someone else other than my wife and children that I love them with every fiber of my being. I am not going to call my best friends "Beppin", cause that's what I call my wife, nor would I say "DA BUB" to anyone but my firstborn son, because those things are meant to for them, and them alone. Is it elitist? Abso-friggin'-lutely it is, it's only for them and I mean to keep it that way! Are they good enough for me, which insinuates that others are not? Yes! Should I be a jerk about it? No! Just because I love my sons enough to talk absolute nonsense to them with a big grin on my face, in a way that only they understand, should not mean I should share that experience with my brother-in-law.... although I think he'd find that awesome.

I'll have to process that later.

Anyway. 

So, I don't think that games are for everyone, everywhere, at all times. No one is that good at designing. I think you can either say "my game is for everyone" and be lying, however unintentionally, or you can say "No, I've designed for this experience" and, if you don't want to compromise that experience or make a similar experience, there's absolutely no issue with it. Should people be jerks about having that particular talent? No. But those people shouldn't be penalized by not having a game built for that particular experience. They should not have that particular talent excluded from a gameplay experience. Excluding people from your game is an inevitability. The question becomes who do you want to talk to, and why?

And I think that's a lot more interesting than saying "This game is too hard and I think it should be made to fit me". If it's too hard for you, then look elsewhere. I know I have and I'm glad I did. But, sometimes, just sometimes, try it again. And again. And again. And again. You might get something you didn't expect to.

BUT HEAVEN HELP ME IF WE DON'T WIN NEXT TIME

EDIT: I changed a few things meant in good humor that, as it turns out, were not taken that way. There will be a further edit later, but I cannot do that at the moment, so I hope this very short  apology will have to do before I put in a longer one in later. My apologies are offered. It's the internet, so I don't assume forgiveness, but that out of my control.