Eating Crow: Positive Design and Mustafar

Eating Crow is when I admit a previous blog post was wrong, and why I think it was. This is a continuation a previous post. I recommend reading it. 

The Mustafar Duel is one of the big influences on Crescendo. Two brothers who have been molded by their experiences, who thought they meant the world to each other, only to discover they value their ideals more. This kind of moment should be happening in Crescendo all the time! But, in my years of playing, it has never come up since the metacurrency is dropped. 

Why?

Metacurrency is one of the chief tools of what I call Positive Design: do a thing and get rewarded for doing it! This triggers the Pavlovian response, and players then go for those kinds of actions instinctively. It’s a powerful tool. But this kind of design has a downside: it can short-circuit the soul. People just start chasing the kick. So, for a long time, I removed metacurrency rewards from Crescendo and focused on Negative Design, which allows players more inherent freedom. This sounded like a good idea. And I think Crescendo is a great game as it is in part because I focused on making the game inherently fun, without the dopamine kicks. Gameplay is smooth and easy and surprising. No session of play is like another. As it stands, Crescendo is by far the best long-form “storygame” I have ever seen.

But. There’s not even one Mustafar match, in a game about Heroes possessed by Beliefs. And that’s not how that’s supposed to work. Heroes are uneasy allies normally, or passionate friends/enemies. Crescendo not doing that experience is a critical flaw.

So what gives?

Well, it turns out I messed up. See, certain actions are just inherently unpleasant. Sticking to your Beliefs past the point of opposing another player is one of them. So the dopamine rush incentivizes you past the discomfort. And there are moments that should happen in Crescendo that are very uncomfortable. Like almost killing your brother. 

So, here’s how I changed the game. About a week before editing begins. It’s fine.

Fate Points

This is a metacurrency that can be spent to reduce the Margin during a Defy (which keeps the setting from changing in huge ways) or reduce an incoming Condition’s level, one for one. 

If you beat a Defy by 3, you can spend 3 Fate Points to make the Margin 0, instead.

So if you get a level 6 Lonely Condition (which would kill your Hero), you can spend 5 Fate Points to make it a level 1 Lonely Condition instead.

 You may cancel a Crescendo (a huge plot twist which has enormous consequences) for 8 Fate Points. Hit the Books to see what strange thing happens instead.

End of Chapter 

Go through each Belief. If there are multiple Players, go to a different Player each time. 

- Did you act on the Belief in a way that created trouble for others, particularly the other Players? If so, record a Bullet Point (a sentence in your Journal, which counts as XP for advancement) and take a Fate Point. 

- Did you act against a Belief in a way that created trouble for others, particularly the other Players? If so, record two Bullet Points. One is the action, the other is why you did it. Take two Fate Points. 

-If there are multiple Players, did your actions cause another Hero to receive a Condition? If so, take a number of Fate Points equal to the lowest level of Condition received. Write the Belief you acted upon to harm the other Hero as a Bullet Point.

- If you change a Belief voluntarily, take a number of Fate Points equal to the number of Chapters (sessions of play) you held it for.

Normally I would be reticent to allow Fate Points to be taken for acting on or against all your Beliefs. The dopamine kick would be very strong, and players would start gaming the system for Fate Points instead of actually role playing. 

But Crescendo has an answer for this: the Journal! 

You have to write the action down, forcing the more rational part of the brain to tun on alongside the dopamine lover, which is definitely one of the most human things one can do. It turns from “press button get pellet” to “I did something meaningful and here’s a pellet!” Humans are rationalizing animals. The more often you can get both halves of that existence to turn on at the same time, the better your life.

A further knock-on effect is that the Weaver can really take the gloves off. Role playing is a social activity, and giving out Conditions hits the “feel bad” center in the brain. Players, however, now have a means of lowering the sting, should they choose, using resources they earned. Defies, which can be extremely tumultuous, can be used only when the player actually wants to. Players have more control over the story… provided they mess things up themselves. From victimizing to empowerment!

Positive Design got a bad rap from me in the previous post. Not all actions are inherently pleasant, even if they’re very important to the experience, and therefore Negative Design can’t do much with them. In these cases, Positive Design can smooth over the rough edges, incentivizing actions that Negative Design simply can’t address. It’s a rough lesson to learn, but a vital one.

Design Journal: Conflicts and Pitches

I don't remember the Burning Wheel campaign Suihkulahde terribly fondly. On the one hand, it has some of the best world building I've ever done for The Wanderers' Psalms. On the other hand, the kind of  worldbuilding I did was completely outside the scope of Burning Wheel. Burning Wheel is entirely about the players' Beliefs. That's the GM's job. And when I want to play in that style, Burning Wheel is absolutely the best at it. But Gene Wolfe had added a new element: the world was its own thing. When the characters weren't looking, the world was having its own adventures. Reading a Gene Wolfe book was like walking on top of an iceberg. It was vital you kept your feet and it was cold and those things mattered... but you were still on an iceberg. 90% of the darn thing was unknown to you. Pretending that the unknown parts of the structure (i.e., currents and whatever behemoths swimming around the iceberg) were unimportant was an absurdity.

I could honestly write forever on the philosophical and ideological differences between Crescendo and Burning Wheel. But that would be criticizing the giant whose shoulders I stand on. I am where I am because of Luke Crane, after all.

And besides, I want to tell the story of how I came up with my solution, which is now in Crescendo.

The Tarot Map

I started by considering system-neutral house rules. I decided to lay out the Major Arcana of the Tarot in a randomized order. The players were always in the middle of this map, with that Arcana being "the current problem". The cards in the ring closes to the center, four in all, were situations that benefited from "the current problem". If things got hot enough "the current problem" would be cycled out to the edge, and one in the immediate ring would move in closer.

I hated this. It was too cumbersome. I didn't like having to come up with twenty some odd conflicts, only about five of them really mattering. And, frankly, I could barely keep track of more than three. So, obviously, this was not the answer.  I wanted to be able to walk, play, and then walk back out. I wanted a game, not another job on top of my job on top of my wife and kids.

Maybe, at some point, a few years after the fact, I'll revisit this idea. But it sure isn't now.

The Chronicle and the Drunk Rule

I decided to only have three Conflicts going on. It was the most I could keep track of at the table. I decided I would focus on "just" these three things, and  then journal between sessions about what was going on in the background. Simpler, for sure, and I like working on some stuff between sessions and all that.

It was during this time Kyle and I came up with the Drunk/Tired Rule: if you cannot play a game while drunk or tired and feel better for it afterwards, it is a bad game. Games are supposed to rejuvenating. Not just distracting, rejuvenating! This proved to be a turning point in my design, and what would eventually lead to Crescendo itself.

And this chronicling nonsense wasn't it.

Maybe if I was single, or without children, I'd have time to really write it all down between sessions. Focus, you know? But by this point I didn't want to do that. If I wanted to write fiction I'd write fiction! And I didn't want to do that, I wanted to play a game that had a story that came out of it! It was too much work for what I wanted to do.

Hitting the Books

At this point I figured that writing something down was the way to go. I needed a mechanic that would help generate unexpected results, results that could indicate that 90% the players weren't interacting with while they were on the iceberg. That's when I remembered the process of searching random passages in Virgil. For thos that don't know, if you want an answer to something, it was said that you could find your answers by opening a book of Virgil's, closing your eyes, and putting your finger down. Whatever your finger lands upon is the answer.

So why not do this with a book while playing? And make a journal, where you can control what goes into it, and thus make it a genuine mechanic?

So everyone opens their journals to where they know there's writing, closes their eyes, puts their finger down, and then reads whatever their finger landed upon. The GM then free associates all these prompts into whatever information they require.

The OSR does this with tables all the time, why not do it with journals or books? Not only does this make players write things down, but it provides an avenue of gameplay that is qualitative, which is what TTRPGs are all about! And this allows an incredible kind of player agency, one which subtle, but powerful: the ability to tweak the GM's subconscious. You get to program your GM! How is this not

Testing has not been completely free of problems. It was necessary to codify the rules for Hitting the Books a bit. But the tone, the feel, is exactly what I was going for. There's an odd coherency that increases as time goes on. The story has a rhythm and tone that are unexpected, but not overly so. And frankly, writing the story out is fun!

Conflicts and Pitch

Hitting the Books, however, was not the end of it. Hitting the Books is a mechanic, a means, not the goal itself. Fortunately, KISS is king. There's three Conflicts, which are future tense statements:

Mother is learning how to exist.

The wolves will invade Serpent.

The Guild will change how the city Serpent exists.

Notice that what these statements mean is up for debate. It's flexible. Open. 

But when do the Conflicts shift? That's what Pitch is for. Pitch is a counter attached to each Conflict. Pitch increases whenever it's addressed in a scene, (by 1-3) and all Conflict Pitches increase by 1 at the end of every session.

Whenever a scene ends, the Conflict that the GM used is rolled against with a D20. If the GM rolls equal to or lower than the Pitch, an Opportunity comes up to end the Conflict. Whether they do or not, given the Opportunity, is up to the table. After the Opportunity is addressed, the GM either modifies the Conflict or writes a new one, and resets its Pitch to zero.

Conflicts and Pitch, combined with Hitting the Books, eliminates prep while creating a mysterious narrative. You write your three Conflicts. The Pitch tells you the chances of that Conflict blowing up at any time, and it constantly builds. You just engage the players where they're at, and overarching setting stuff gets injected randomly via Hitting the Books, forcing everyone to make meaning for themselves.

People like doing this.

It's good for them.

And isn't that kinda the point?

 Crescendo is a truly amazing experience. I can't wait to share it with y'all.

Game Design as Alchemy

 

As I continue to go back through Breath of the Wild like an addict that really can quit at any time, I have decided to record the positive outcomes of my perpetual imprisonment. Think of this as my far lighter Gulag Archipelago of captivity. Today we'll be talking about the tight economy of Breath of the Wild and the need for mechanically using every single part of the buffalo. From combat to climbing every single action in Breath of the Wild is a mechanical exchange. This mechanical alchemy is a good thing, and is the center of what makes a game a game: a miniaturization and simplification of the world's processes into something manageable.

We'll start with the most obvious one: base movement, aka walking. This one's pretty simple: you give up time by not doing anything special. If you walk you turn time into distance. It's not the most economical trade-off, which means people don't want to do it.

That's where the game comes in, by the way: trying to figure out how to max out your output.

Anyways.

So you exchange time for distance. The fun comes in trying to cheat that. So you get something with a speed boost and now you have "beaten" the system: you exchange whatever you put in the pot for less time while traveling. An alchemy has occurred. You exchanged something to get something else, and there's a definite feeling that you accomplished something. Breath of the Wild capitalizes on this feeling everywhere in the game.

Yes, that includes combat. And weapon breakage.

So the core of this idea isn't that you get something else with effort, it's that you give up something for a chance of getting something else. You walk in a direction and hope you'll find something worth your time. You swing your weapon, giving up some hardiness, for the chance to kill the monster and farm their remains.  Once again, it's an alchemical exchange: weapon hardiness for materials or time. This keeps the situation changing, and thus requires focus to figure out, and is thusly amusing.

Why do I bring this up?

Because I think this is the heart of a lot of good game design: nothing is wasted. There's no moment when the player feels like their careful attempts to manipulate the system are for nothing. That doesn't mean that players are always succeeding at their intents, only that they affect the game world somehow. If you're using dice "failing forward" is a version of this, as you get your intent, but not how you wanted it: the world dicks you around a bit and you have to work with the new situation you accidentally generated. There's a good reason why "failing forward" should have the failure announced before you roll. Players should feel like they have a good feeling of what's going on. Turn structures also work, in the vein of encounter dice or BDnD's turn orders. You also don't necessarily have to tell someone whether they succeeded or failed,  but I think they should know the likelihood they succeeded or not. Take below, for instance, from the 1e DMG:

Yes I know the image is too large. It's readable now.

I think those odds should be public, or at least findable. Long as the player knows that there are numbers for this sort of thing and trusts the GM to not fudge the rolls then all is well and good. As long as the player knows where his actions might go, all is well and good. What the player did mattered, even if it wasn't what they expected.

It should always feel like player action matters. While mechanical stuff shouldn't be guaranteed, there should always be the feeling that what the player did impacted the game and story, in equal measure. I think that's part of what keeps me coming back to my not addiction: nothing ever feels wasted. The buffalo is always stripped down and there's nothing left.

Ah, crap I need to go play some more.

I mean.

I want to. I can quit anytime I want.

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 Truth Found in Death

 

Awhile back I was talking with the inestimable Mike Low, who linked me to one of his articles on violence in gaming. I'd been thinking on some of the stuff that he brought up in the article, and randomly decided to try and change the name of my Conflict mechanic in Crescendo to Struggle. I wanted to see if Mike was right; would removing words usually associated with violence in our day and age lead to people using the mechanic for non-violent purposes?

Actually, it did.

One of my playtesters called it out, specifically, when she noticed the change from Conflict to Struggle: "Wait, this isn't just for fighting?"

Mike, you were right. Not that I should be shocked. But yes, you're right.

Now, as a martial artist, fan of MMA, and US vet, I don't think violence is inherently a bad thing, nor is killing. If you have to do these things when you really need to there shouldn't be a stigma around it whatsoever. There's a very good reason why pre-modern societies tended towards militarism and blood: to say you're a state means you're willing to kill to keep what you and yours have. But games shouldn't necessarily be about violence, its costs, and things related to it. Violence should not be the default option. Period.

The Truth Found in Death is about violence. It's about the necessity of violence and courage in the face of certain death. It’s about how yes, violence can be beautiful, because people are beautiful and therefore can commit violence beautifully. But it’s also about the cost of violence. How you have to harden yourself to take it and dish it. Your body and soul will pay costs you never thought you’d have to, but here comes the piper a knocking! And ultimately how that violence may bereave others of their loved ones, changing them permanently. That change doesn’t stay put; it radiates out. 

The Truth Found in Death will use a modified PBTA engine. The game uses a single d20 to resolve all Moves. There are no stats in the game. Instead there are Exploits, feats of derring-do in the form of a sentence.You may use these Exploits to reroll your d20 rolls as often as you like… at the expense of possibly changing the plot in large ways. As you gain and spend XP you will be able to use your Exploits more often without affecting the story as much.

The Black Swans I pioneered in Crescendo return here, as does journaling! Journals will be used to not just record specific actions and use then to make more Black Swans, but also to record the actions of NPCs affected by the players’ actions. Lore will also be recorded in the journal, primarily as campfire stories and snatches of songs the party members sing to each other. Training sessions, where party members test each other, will also have elements of that time recorded.

And then there’s the core of the game: the fighting. The Truth Found in Death does not feature a dedicated combat system. That may sound odd, but without a mechanical start/stop this allows combat to ebb and flow organically, which help keep the immersion of the players. All creatures the players face have two principle elements to them: Locks and Approaches. Locks are a defensive aspect that has to be figured around: a kobold is a Jumpy Little Bastard. These Locks are absolute mechanical defenses: if someone swings at a kobold they’re going to miss, because he’s a Jumpy Little Bastard and moves out of the way! But if his back is to the wall, where can he go? He’s stuck, isn’t he? Or, y’know, maybe you just get him at the top of a cliff… the fall will do the trick, won’t it? Creatures also have Approaches, which tell you how they’re going to try and hit you. If you mess up your attacks or aren’t paying attention then you’ll get hit, flat. HP is low, and while HP recovers quickly the Conditions you get when you lose HP don’t, further hampering you in the fiction.

Thera is a lot to do on The Truth Found in Death yet; the game text is very much so in its beginning stages. I’m truly blessed to have friends who are willing to test my initial ideas, so that I can see where I want to go. 

I find game design to be a form of meditation. It helps me to process my life and figure out where to go next. The Truth Found in Death arises from musings on the incontrovertible fact that the most beautiful moments in my life are in no small way indebted to the ugliest.  Without those dark moments I’d not have the light I have today. Goodness does not come free. 

The payment, invariably, is in blood.

No, you won’t get the same answer to that problem. 

Nor should you.

SPACE OPERA EPISODE VIII: Designing For My Table

 

I had a system I thought worked. SPACE OPERA EPISODE VIII was originally meant to be Rooted in Trophy, with strong on-the-fly scenario creation. Play was supposed to be character-focused, fast, and unpredictable, with the seat-of-your-pants being attached to a rocket. It was meant for the times when someone couldn't show up to a session of one of my longer-running games. People could still play, have a great time, and move on, all in between an hour to two and a half hours.

I just scrapped most of the mechanics and started over.

Don't get wrong, I loved the mechanics! They produced interesting results. Trophy's got some seriously awesome mechanics behind it and I can't wait to finally play me some Trophy Gold with the hardcover I ordered. Trophy Dark is just boatloads of fun. Once I get some more development of this game and Crescendo done, further down the line, I think I'll do some Trophy Dark scenarios. I love just how evocative the whole line of Trophy is.

But the problem is that I want a one shot that can do a game in an hour and a half to two hours, maybe two and a half hours. I don't get a whole lot of time to game, doing it after the kids are put down for the night. Which is late. I also don't want it to jump into another session, as usually when a player misses they only miss the one session. So that makes it a pain to include him or just... wait until the next time he misses? I guess? I know this isn't necessarily a problem for everyone, or even really anyone but me, but... I kinda have to be able to test the game I designed! I also wonder if other older players don't run into this problem as well. How many games are designed for more time-intensive singular sessions of play, and are thus inaccessible to folks with small kids? Not sure, but I'm in the situation so I can't help but design for it. 

The other problem is that I am a bit of a rolling junkie. I really like Trophy's rolling mechanics, as stated before, and found that I was constantly calling for rolls. My testers went with it because they're good people, but I could tell they just wanted to let the game breathe for a minute. So I decided to make it a mostly-diceless game. where you build up experience chits to eventually get to the decisive roll, the moment of truth, in each act. This strips the mechanical overload to a fraction of what it currently was, with still some back and forth, as players have to negotiate around getting chits for the end of the act versus how that affects the narrative in the meantime.

The biggest problem, of course, was the scenario generation. I'd built a system to make up a scenario with players on the fly, and it's a lot of fun! It made for some hilariously wonderful conversations. The problem? It took too long. The point wasn't to make a cool scenario, but to finish the scenario in a short amount of time. Fortunately the solution was simple: the GM just comes up with the scenario beforehand. Character creation is short enough to where players can just roll at the top of the session, but obviously making characters beforehand is polite.

There's a lot to be said for the older version of SPACE OPERA EPISODE VIII. But you have kill your darlings if they don't work. And this didn't work. I want something fast and decisive. And the earlier draft just wasn't doing it. Further playtesting is necessary, but I think I'm on the right track.

Design Journal: Crescendo and Gene Wolfe

There is no author with half the influence upon Crescendo as Gene Wolfe; Crescendo is meant to emulate the deeply psychological and spiritual fantasy shown in The Solar Cycle and the Latro Trilogy. But Wolfe's works are almost impossibly large, not to mention byzantine in structure. So what do I mean when I say Crescendo is heavily influenced by Wolfe? I mean a few things. Protagonists make their way through worlds that are always moving, regardless of their actions. Wolfe's stories are as much about the protagonists learning to be a part of the world, with adventure being just one aspect of their lives. Stories are not centered on defeating the Big Bad(s), but end when the protagonist has reached a point of development that makes an ending statement. Wolfe's stories are almost ruthlessly character oriented. Crescendo grabs all these points and is attempting to make a cohesive RPG from them.

Sorry, no complex interweaving of enigmas, not yet! If anyone has ideas for that let me know! But I've never personally felt a draw to the puzzle-unravelling that a lot of people seem to have with Wolfe. What Wolfe is saying, behind those puzzles that I can't figure out, is a lot more interesting to me than the puzzles themselves. That's not a knock upon those who like doing that, but if you're looking for a game that is an enigma in a box, I'd suggest Bleak Spirit. Maybe some of that tech may wind its way into Crescendo. But it's not my focus, not at the moment.

Most RPGs I've played and read are not deliberately psychological. Play centers around the actions of the characters, with the psychological impact of those actions left up to the player. Crescendo will be a deeply psychological game. Players draft Tenets, which are what their character is willing to fight for. These Tenets have what are called Resilience Points, which measures how much failure the Tenet can take before the player has to make a decision about that Tenet. Characters also have Limits, which are traits that the player can use to recharge the RP of Tenets; act on the Limit and heal your Tenets! There's a lot more than that involved, but those are the basics: act upon Tenet, lose RP, and use Limits to recharge. At each stage of development I've checked in with licensed psychologists of varying backgrounds to ensure that the mechanics are psychologically accurate and healthy, with more input to be sought in the future.. I have always found gaming to be a cathartic and helpful experience, and wish Crescendo to be deliberately so. 

The Catholicism of Wolfe is indispensable in understanding his work. But Wolfe was no ordinary Catholic; he was well-experienced in the healing power of God, not to mention his historical, theological, and philosophical background. Thanks to my own experiences (some of which I have put on this blog), combined with my private studies of the Philokalia, Leanne Payne, Thomas Carlyle, The Book of the Elders, Antirhetikous, Meditations on the Tarot, The Emerald Tablet, The Golden Legend... I really hope I'm up to the task. Cause I assure you that's a drop in the bucket in comparison to what Wolfe had read. Wolfe's emphasis on the healing of a personality by encountering Others, especially those of the supernatural order, will be a primary theme throughout the mechanics of Crescendo. To be whole one must encounter the whole of creation. Locales provide feedback loops that create encounter that would be random in any other game, but here are deeply significant to the development of your character.

The setting the players have crafted will always be in motion; the actions the players take will be mirrored in the setting, producing a living and breathing world that will have an uncanny familiarity to them. On the GM's side this means Movements, which are the big three things happening in the setting at the moment. The GM and players will keep journals of some of their actions, so that they can be imitated by the NPCs in the setting, as well as informing further actions in the narrative. Your decisions matter, they reflect into the world over the course of the game.

One of the things that's struck me as I've read Homer and other ancient writers was their emphasis on games and festivals, not to mention philosophical discourse. Characters exist in a larger world and not only do they enjoy it but they talk about it! Wolfe takes this trope and runs with it. And so will Crescendo. There's festivals, executions, strategy games, and other contests. Characters get bored and will have conversations that build the world, as well as the themes of the story. This means that when conflicts do occur, whether by word or steel, they are quite unusual and intense. Crescendo will not just be about the big plot. The game will reward any action you decide to take equally, so it can take almost any tone you like in any given session. But because of the focus upon the player's Tenets and the GM's Movements you'll find that the experience is cohesive. Wolfe writes to see the journey of a character. The narrative meanders along, with elements from the background jumping in to develop the protagonist... only to fade into the background when its end is complete. Crescendo is entirely based upon the interactions of the players. There's no grand scheme at the forefront of the action. What the players put on their character sheets is only a beginning, the fuel you put the fire of your time to. Each session ends in a twist, wrenching the narrative into unexpected territory, forcing the story to stay on the characters.

And this brings us to what I think Wolfe and Crescendo are about: the person, with all their flaws and virtues, in the context of their world, with all its flaws and virtues. Person and world crash into each other, evolving into something different and new. After processing what they've changed into they run into each other again. And again. And again. And at some point you know they're going to be fine, somehow. So you leave them be.

Everything I've read of Wolfe's has made me a better person, in no small part because he's part of the original story, the primal narrative of the ancients: man looks at the cosmos; the cosmos stares back. They size each other up, trying to understand each other.

And then someone blinks.

Design Journal: Shadow's Tower

CAVEAT: These are the half-mad rantings of a designer who has not tested these ideas.

I've never played Dread. For those of you who don't know what that means, Dread is a roleplaying game where you play with a Jenga tower. Each time you do something you pull a block from the tower. When the tower falls the person who knocked it over dies. It's a gimmick that either lands or it doesn't. I've always meant to try it.

We'll get back to the tower in a minute. First we need to talk about what inspired Shadow in the first place. 

The very initial designs for Crescendo were Dark Souls level of punishing. It was flat out oppressive. And, while that design proved to be fun, it didn't feel like a fantasy game should. I'd designed a horror game. And one I liked. 

So I started taking my harsher ideas and saving them in a separate document that I named Shadow. By shadow I mean the Jungian definition: everything you're not. And that's what this game was, at least at the beginning: everything Crescendo was not. For that piece of humor alone I wanted to make the game. 

Crescendo's implied setting is very loosely based upon 9th century Britain. So of course I wanted Shadow to be in 19th century Britain, or an analog thereby. I can think of no spiritually worse time to be alive than the 19th century, with its triumphant neutering and enslavement of Western Christianity, along with the large-scale abandonment of its Eastern counterpart. Western Europe had so effectively ruined Christianity that one would be spiritually safer engaging in theistic Satanism. At least Satanists know they offend God.

Anyone who doubts me should try reading The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman. Actually, regardless of who you are, you should try reading that book. My copy is currently gathering dust because of how relentlessly bleak it is. It is Hell on earth. But it is also showing an unvarnished truth about modernity and liberalism in general. And that horror that book communicates? That feeling of an oppressive system beyond our control? It seems unique to our age. Sure, Nature's a fickle bitch but nobody takes Nature shitting in our lives as personal. You can't say that about the age we live in.

And that's horrific. 

Horror is reaction against this virus of self-defined reality that we know as modernity, against the feeling of artificiality. I feel it, know it all the way down. But y'know what intuitions are worth without sources?

Absolutely nothing.

I needed to read Poe and Lovecraft first. I had my suspicions about what the two had written, but besides a negligible exposure when I was in highschool I didn't know much. Instead of reading Poe I got to read Maya Angelou and freaking Great Gatsby. This is what's known as a bad trade, folks. I found Angelou insufferable and Gatsby is not a highschool book in any capacity. Maybe Angelou isn't either.

What I've found in Poe and Lovecraft is far more valuable: all lies are punished. What is hidden is revealed, usually in blood, tears, and screams. And those lies don't have to be personal; you can (and do) pay for others' lies just as often, if not more often, than your own. No sins are private. Each beat in Poe and Lovecraft the characters strip away another lie, getting closer to the truth. It may be a stupid thing to do, but the essence of their protagonists (by and large) are uncompromising truth-seekers. Most people find Lovecraft's protagonists stupid. But all the stories I've read indicate they're fed up with artificiality. Even if it kills them. Before reading The Proud Tower I'd not have understood why.

But my God I do now.

And I probably would have preferred insanity to the horror show that was their world. I mean, the remnants of that world persist on in the very worst aspects of our society today. 

All of this suggests a story about people poking and prodding, knowing they'll probably be destroyed, but they have to know. Must. The world is so bad , so artificial, that any reality, no matter how awful, would be better than what they currently have. But they don't how deep the lies run, do they? They think they can handle it.

At what point does this start sounding a Jenga tower to you? Pulling at the tower because you want to see how much you can pull away, because you don't know how integral it is to you? Once the image entered my mind it wouldn't leave.

I threw out everything I'd come up with and started over.

Here's what I got so far: every player drafts up what are called Isms: beliefs about the world the characters have that the player wants proven false. A stereotypical Judeo-Christian worldview is not just assumed, but is insisted upon

"God loves me"

"The dead stay dead."

"Sex is everything."

These Isms aren't individual to characters; they're what the group wants to subvert and destroy. This can get hairy, being horror: the Isms require a unanimous vote.  Whenever something touching these Isms comes up any action you take requires you pull a plank from the tower. If you succeed you have to say why you did. Whatever you say, it's a lie. 

"I succeeded in getting away because God has a plan for me."

"I avoided... Whatever that was,, because it was just my mind playing tricks on me."

At this point I'm toying with the idea of the GM writing down all the lies. You just keep pulling blocks until the tower falls. If that takes multiple sessions so be it. But once the tower falls? The GM brings out that list he's been making of all your lies.

You rebuild the tower.

And then the GM begins to bring your lies back to haunt you. He presents situations that mock your lies, that call out the pettiness of it all. And with each new situation a block must be pulled. No more skating by, it all counts now! 

When the tower falls that character is dead,  or insane, or ruined. That player joins in now, becoming a co-GM. And each player who falls after that gets in on it.

When you're out of lies or characters the game is over.

At least, that's what I got in my notes so far. Kinda needs playtesting. But that to me is a horror game.

Design Journal: Crescendo's Stones

CAVEAT: this is a journal entry. Concepts talked about here may or may not make it in this form to the final version.

Crescendo's a game about character development in a mythological world, where Mortals and Immortals push their agendas. Crescendo defines characters in three principal ways: their Tenets, Limits and the setting's Movements. Interacting with these elements produces a metacurrency called Stones, which you can use to make sure your agendas succeed. It's meant to be played over a long period time: thirty sessions, forty, 

Tenets are the things about your character that you find to be worth fighting about. Tenets are what your character deliberately goes and gets in trouble for.  When you write Tenets you are telling the GM and the other players what you want the game to be about. Tenets are in the format of a sentence, usually short.

"My father can be saved."

"My sister is the last hope."

"Violence as a last resort."

The bar for these Tenets is if your GM can challenge them. If he doesn't like them then work with him to make it something he wants to challenge and that you want challenged. In general you can expect to only make dice rolls related to your Tenets; the rest are handwaved (or denied if you're asking for absurdities). The point is to get to a situation that matters for your character and then hammer that situation as hard as you can, bringing out the dice to see what could happen when it matters to you most.

Limits are what your character is, no matter how hard he tries. Limits come back and haunt you at inconvenient times, reasserting themselves when you wished they hadn't. Unlike Tenets, which can be changed whenever the players and GM find appropriate, Limits change much more slowly, usually after an arc of play. They're usually one or two words.

"Impetuous"

"Noble"

"Jaded"

You start with two Limits. You can't have more than four Limits at a time. Pick Limits you'll have fun bringing up into the narrative.

Movements are not the player's mechanics, but they are really important to character growth. Movements are what the GM has going on in the world, his top three priorities. These are statements of grand, sweeping narrative, currents of the world the players find themselves caught up in. 

"Kalir's barbarians are destroying the town. 19"

"Vena is corrupting the mayor. 15"

"Saboteurs will destroy the Jarini Dam. 10"

Movements are happening no matter what you do. They will move forward unless you stop them. Assuming, of course, that you want to! There's a number at the end of every Movement. At the end of every session the GM  rolls a d20. If he rolls equal to or above that number he lowers that it by 1+margin of success of that roll. Players can modify these rolls by their actions in-game. Once that number drops to 0 the Movement is accomplished. If a Movement goes above 20 then the GM must write a new Movement.

Schemes start at 20 (subtle background stuff), 15 (something just beginning), or 10 (urgent, well on its way to being completed). Each Stone the players earn increase or decreases a relevant Movement's counter by one, player's choice; the player's earning of Stones changes the world around them.

Characters in Crescendo won't have formalized goals. This may sound backwards at first; isn't the game about players pushing their characters' agendas and thus evolving into heroes? You are correct! It would make sense on paper to have a Goal for each character. I've played games similar to Crescendo where there are formalized goals and it works... well enough. But I don't think it works great. The essential part of a game like this is to subvert information and twist the characters against themselves. And that means that Goals can get in the way of meaningful character and story evolution; it takes time to rewrite Goals and there is a very strong Pavlovian element going on with them, which can straitjacket the narrative. Pavlovian elements aren't bad, but they have their place in a game about character growth. So I think it better to put vectors (Tenets, Limits, and Movements) on the table and have the players put the pieces together however they want.

Which finally brings us to Stones, this game's metacurrency. You push your agenda and get rewarded! Pavlov rings the bell! 

There is only one prerequisite for getting Stones, of which there are three kinds: did using this Tenet, Limit, or interacting with this Movement meaningfully change the story y'all are telling? If so, you get a point! 

Did you betray another one of your Tenets or Limits or a Scheme to get that Stone? Great! Get two Stones instead! Crescendo is about complex characters, which means you should get something special for making characters who are conflicted but utterly sincere in their inner conflict.

There are three kinds of Stones,  each for a different element: Favor (Tenets), Dynamis (Limits), and Persona (Movements). Favor is help from the Immortals, who enforce Fate Herself. Favor is when circumstances change in an odd way, usually with an omen from the Immortal who helped you; the Challenge Dice is lowered a step (d10 to d8, for example). Dynamis is your inner world forcing itself upon the outer world; reroll your Stat Dice. Persona is when your connection to the world makes you stronger; increase your Stat Dice by a step.

The last bit of the Stones Cycle is that all spent Stones become XP. XP, as you can probably guess, is used to improve your character. But suppose you're not spending a lot of Stones? Crescendo has an OSR approach to rolls: if you must roll it's a challenge a gauntlet thrown. Sometimes that's not going to be an issue. Stones are good but you may not use them. Perhaps you won't roll a single dice in a session! And y'know what? That's fine. I don't see that being a problem, given how Stones are situated in mechanical spots you want control over, but it is possible. So any Stones you don't use can be converted to XP. You can't transfer them back, however! That change is permanent. So there will be no bloat. I hope.

Crescendo is meant to produce a flexible framework for all the players to get invested in. The reward system doesn't guide what you do, but  rewards what you're already doing: telling a story about your character and their development. As you play out the story what that looks like will change, right along with the characters. When you get to the end, thirty, forty, or however many sessions later, you'll find the characters and story to be different, but familiar. They've been through a lot. And you've had a hand in their change every step of the way.

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.