RPGaDAY 2017 – 'Which RPG cover best captures the spirit of the game?', 'You can game every day for a week. Describe what you'd do!', 'What was your most impactful RPG session?', and 'What is a good RPG to play for sessions of 2hrs or less?'

Here I catch up on the last four days of RPGaDAY. I honestly don't know if this is in the spirit of the thing, but...

'Which RPG cover best captures the spirit of the game?'

I'm not sure how to answer this, since honestly the best covers tend to gel smoothly with the design so that you barely notice them as a discrete element of the whole. Covers that fail to capture the spirit are the ones that stand out, usually when you get about halfway in and find yourself thinking 'why are five centuries of British history all happening at once and where the actual fuck are the pirates?'

1668? Bollocks more like.

Yes, that's right long-time readers, I'm talking about first ed. 7^th Sea again, and in particular the fact that its cover very clearly promised one thing – swashbuckling adventures in the Golden Age of Piracy (1668, to be exact,) and instead delivers a mishmash of historical fantasy including the weird assumption that Elizabethan drag never went out of fashion in a pseudo-Britain where Scotland is hardcore post-Catholic Stuart and there is no Commonwealth, because after all, history doesn't consist of related events at all.

You know, it's never really occurred to me before, but I think that after the massive dissonance with the cover, the thing that stopped me getting back into 7^th Sea however many people told me it was the most amazing thing ever(1) was that its world-building grated so much. Thea is a world put together from an anachronistic assemblage of each nation's 'classic' period, without regard for the fact that history is a great, interlocking machine, and that you can't just ignore those interactions and have each nation have reached their idealised historic peak simultaneously. Also, the Eisen looked ridiculous, and I turn out to have a serious twitch about a swashbuckling game with a full-fledged magic system.

Now, it's entirely possible that there is a solid fictional history behind the cultural clusterfuck of Thea, and I hear that the second edition is a very high-class piece of game design. I'll likely never know, because with my time so brutally curtailed by the demands of adulting, it's hard for me to take a chance on something new, and harder still to take a chance on something that's burned me before.

'You can game every day for a week. Describe what you'd do!'

A whole week with no other demands? Sleep?

Okay, if I am required by the terms of whatever scenario means that this can happen to be gaming, then I'm going to hire a place in the country and put together a programme, damnit.

Mornings would be fresh air and exercise after a late start and a good-size breakfast: Nice walks or visits to local parks and places of interest with my daughter, because yes I'm taking my daughter with me. Late morning we'd have board and card games out for those back from their walks.

There would be a social, but not sit-down, lunch at about one o'clock, after which we'd begin in earnest, with two hours of 'A Game of Ponies', followed by breakout boardgaming. A light dinner would be served early, followed by a large-scale boardgame while whatever kids are with us are put to bed, followed by a late supper for the grownups and the meat of the week, a five-part campaign, probably run in a relatively freeform fashion using Fate Core rules.

'What was your most impactful RPG session?'

The climax of James Holloway's long-running Unknown Armies game was a big one, dramatically reshaping a lot of my expectations of how a campaign should go when we wrapped up by running into a burning building with no real expectation of survival and called it an unqualified win.

'What is a good RPG to play for sessions of 2hrs or less?'

Wait; there are sessions of more than two hours? That would be nice.

(1) And there are a lot of them, and people I trust, although in truth a lot of the enthusiastic descriptions have served only to convince me that this isn't for me. One friend described the awesome pirate adventures her PC had while near-permanently shapeshifted into a cat. Weirdly, I would be more enthusiastic about a pirate swashbuckling game in which you could opt to play as the ship's cat, than one in which you could turn into a cat.

RPGaDAY 2017 – 'How do you find out about new RPGs?' and 'Which RPG have you played the most since August 2016'

Another twofer today.

New RPGs tend to come my way when Robin Farndon excitedly posts something about a Kickstarter campaign. I also see announcements from Onyx Path since backing the fascinating but virtually unplayable Mummy reboot(1), but for the most part that's a matter of curiosity.

This image is relevant to so much in this post.

Okay, I backed the game about anthropomorphic cats, but it's a game about anthropomorphic cats(3).

In broader terms, I get my news on game releases from social media, either because someone (not always Robin, sometimes it's Eleanor Hingley(4)) has taken a shine to something, or is pointing out a Lovecraftian thing to one of the serious Lovecraft completists on my friends list, or because Grant Howitt is releasing something new, blast his enviable blend of creativity and productivity(5).

So, before I get lost in my own footnotes(6), on to the second question.

As is well recorded in this blog, I don't get to game anything like as much as I would like. In the past year, the bulk of what I've managed to play has been the winding down of my online Fate game, Operatives of CROSSBOW, which suffered immensely from something I commented on on Ellie's blog the other day, and in an earlier post about letting other people design your character, which is the ill fit between the spontaneous, near-anarchic back and forth of Fate's core mechanics and the necessary formality that makes online video conferencing so much better for steering committee meetings than casual chat once you involve more than two people. The fundamental problem with CROSSBOW was embodied in the way the players declared their action. Seven in ten times, they would begin 'can I...?' The core concept of Fate is that yes you can, if you tell us how.

Well, that and I think one of my players had been burned once too often by GMs insisting that anything not explicitly mentioned during the planning session – like torches, lockpicks, a spy's pistol, or a hacker's laptop - wasn't there at all.

"All right, so can we get one of these?"

"Do you have an aspect called 'I'm a Spy' on your sheet(7)? Then keep going; I'll tell you when you need to spend a Fate point to have something."

"Cool. What about one of these?"

I'm not judging my players here. Learned behaviours are hard to escape, is my point, and especially when you add the social constraint of that screen and only have a fuzzy webcam image to judge other people's responses by when they're not speaking. There is simply no way that remote gaming of this sort will ever truly stand in for proper tabletopping; at least until immersive telepresencing becomes a thing.

This is basically the online gaming table and I wants it.

The only other game I've played any of is, as I mentioned last time, Tails of Equestria, with which we are introducing my daughter to roleplaying (well, that and Empire,) and that has barely got going thanks to our schedules.

(1) It joins old-school White Wolf's Wraith in the centre of a Venn diagram of 'fascinating mechanical conceit', 'mega-high concept' and 'there are maybe three conceivable combinations of people who could play this without it going off the fucking chain(2).'

(2) Not that I'm saying 'off the chain' is a necessarily bad play style, but it doesn't seem to be what they're going for as a default.

(3) I'm still a little disappointed that they went with Monarchies of Mau instead of presenting the cats as a communist collective under the guiding paw of Chairman Miaow, but I suppose a working game setting was higher on their list of priorities than a one-off pun.

(4) Very occasionally someone else, but like... 80% from that one household. 90% if you count the cats.

(5) Because envy, rather than because I want him to stop producing, although if he could slow down I might be able to afford to back more of his stuff. Or if I hadn't slipped and backed the cats thing. Oh, Kickstarter regret! Such grief you bring me!

(6) Seriously, they'll be in small type once I upload this, but right now they take up pretty much the same space as the text.

(7) Yes they did, pretty much for this reason.

RPGaDay – 'What Published RPG do you wish you were playing right now?' and 'What is an RPG you would like to see published?'

In the game of ponies, you win, or you
try again.

I'm only really involved in one game at the moment, and that's 'A Game of Ponies', my oft-in-hiatus campaign for the Tails of Equestria RPG. The PCs managed to not-quite destroy the Castle of Friendship when entrusted with guarding the Cutie Map, received a Cutie Compass – sort of a MLP version of the aleitheometer – and were guided west, past the mountains of Griffonstone to a city on the edge of a desert. They defeated Pie-rats on the way, although my daughter has requested no more of those, but have been stalled in Koto-Kolia for a long time now, as it's hard to find time to play around LARP and life.

For the same reason – plus my general, although obviously not absolute, aversion to licensed games – I don't really have an answer to the second question. It' hard to want something that is completely undefined, especially when it would ultimately just be another thing I don't have time to play. I'm hardly going to sit here thinking 'man, I wish there was a low magic horror-fantasy game out there,' especially if I don't have a group I might want to run that for.

So, what these two questions really highlight for me is that it's hard to get hyped when you know that you aren't going to have a game. If you've just got your Wednesday night group's schedule locked up for the next five years, you can still get excited that maybe you could slot Marvel Supers in for March 2023, but it feels very different when there's no real prospect of getting a game in at all. It's not something I know how to remedy, because in the general sense I would really like to have a game again, it's just that I'm not all that mobile and Arya's much too young to leave on her own.

Maybe I should offer to run some Tails of Equestria for her and her friends on a Sunday.

RPGaDay 2017

It's that time again, when a series of quesations are asked to provoke positive discussion in the RPG community. Here's this year's sexy, sexy infographic:

823 8476 09

Wait... that's the VAT number for the University of Cambridge. Here's the infographic:

Entries to come... soonish.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 31 - ...and by no means least

Prompt: Favourite non-RPG thing to come out of RPGing

Cut the cheque

This is Hanna, my love, whom I met through roleplaying, and our daughter Arya. If you feel you need more explanation than that, you're probably a nascent AI and I urge you to study love and compassion before you start getting any genocidal urges.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 30 - Who do you love?

Prompt: Favourite roleplaying celebrity

TV's - well, the web's - Mr Games.

So, what are we talking about here? Celebrities who roleplay or celebrity roleplayers?

Wil Wheaton is the poster boy, I guess, and I have a lot of time for the former Wes Crusher. I confess, I was mean about him as a youth, but it's not really his fault; I was bound to hate a character who was supposed to relate to me but whom even I thought was a swotty creep (and I would have been deemed a swotty creep by most outside observers.) With Tabletop and later Titansgrave, he's done a lot to move the gaming profile up from a subset of general geekdom to pretty much blanket geek coverage. He's also done a lot to out a great many other celebrities, some nerd, some more mainstream, as gamers.

Diesel & Dench

Advanced Diesel & Dench

About as mainstream as they come are Vin Diesel and even more so his #1 roleplaying disciple Judi
Dench. According to the story - nay, the legend -the Iron Giant hisself taught M to play D&D during the filming of The Chronicles of Riddick in order to illustrate what an Elemental was, which I have to say is hands down the coolest thing about The Chronicles of Riddick and one of the coolest things about Vin Diesel. Dench... well, she's lived a lot of life, so I'm not going to rule out her having done cooler. She handed Bond his balls at the age of 60 for one thing.

Roleplayers have slightly less
swanky headshots.

Okay, Laws knows how to headshot.

And then there are the celebrity roleplayers, the rock stars of the industry, chief among them I guess being Ken Hite and Robin Laws, game writers, game bloggers, podcasters and just plain gamers. They have the same sort of bubbling brains as my man James Holloway, of whom I spoke yesterday, which makes their writing always fascinating, even when it doesn't have immediate use.

Come back tomorrow for the last day of RPGaDay 2015.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 29 - Friendship!

Prompt: Favourite RPG website/blog

So, I think that just from having referenced it so often, this one goes to James Holloway's Gonzo History Gaming. It's seems a little damning with faint praise, as I don't really follow any others, but it is also a grand read and covers a nice range of miniatures and history in and about gaming. James is a bit of a renaissance man and his blog is occasionally brief, but never less than interesting. I also heartily recommend his non-gaming blog, Gonzo History Project and created that most beloved of webcomic characters, Robot Face Smith, History Bastard.

My remaining posts are scheduled to release each morning, as I'll be spending time with my family, but won't be shared to G+ unless I can grab a moment to do so and work out how to do so on my phone.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 28 - Hello Darkness my old friend...

Prompt: Favourite game you no longer play

Not the edition I knew, but a better pic than I
could find for 1st ed.

I loved the old West End Star Wars. It was one of my first games and it was a lot of fun. The mechanics were... interesting (progression went +1, +2, add another D6 to your roll, then +1 again) and the game contained absurd amounts of detail on different types of Stormtrooper armour, although since our GM was into action movies we could do more damage with a shotgun than a blaster cannon. We also had a habit of crashing starships (the Aluminium Falcon and the Millennium Dustbin both bit the dirt) and stripping them of weapons, heedless of encumbrance, recoil and common sense.

Fun fact; all four of the soldiers on this
cover are the GM from that Star Wars
game.

Oh, yeah; we were 12 at this point, so things got pretty Gonzo. we basically bimbled around drinking too much and shootin' Stormtroopers. We had to take out a boy band at one point; the whole thing was oddly reminiscent of early Schlock Mercenary, but more... 12. I mean, my character was a bounty hunter called Loki 'Spanners' Amenhotep, also known as 'the Bastard', which probably tells you a lot about how assiduously we stuck to the established themes and continuity of Star Wars.

Ah, the wild excess and joy of youth. It was dumb as rocks and fun as anything.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 27 - Strange Alchemies

Prompt: Favourite idea for merging two games into one

Yeah... no.

So... Hmm.

Man, Age of Sigmar has really turned me off this concept. Even my fondly planned campaign in which WFRP PCs lead a defence of the Empire against a force of crashed Imperial Guardsmen fallen through the Warp Gates seems less appealing in the light of Games Workshop's reboot of the Warhammer line, apparently to a) simplify the rules and b) make it more 40K. Successive editions having already transformed the Old World from a culturally blurred pseudo-Renaissance fantasy setting into a planet of nation-hats, they've now gone and blown the entire planet up (you maniacs. God damn you all to hell. It's a madhouse.) and replaced it with some sort of high-concept God-Realm where colossal superhumans punch each other across the dimensions and no-one is playing Blood Bowl.

Are you happy, Age of Sigmar? You killed Blood Bowl.

That was a great mashup though: An American football simulation and Warhammer? I wish 40K had something like that*, especially now I'm playing in a 40K LARP. What sports do 40K citizens follow? I think we know that Ciaphas Cain was good at sports, but not what he played. Probably the Schola Progenium equivalent of the Eton Wall Game**. Maybe a lot of field hockey with chainblades on the sticks, or fire, in the case of the Sororitas novitiate. Paintball assassin with real guns. Hot lava on the gantries over the furnaces.

The few times sport is mentioned in the source material it's almost universally in the context of hunting something immense and malignant in the local fauna. Or war. Maybe the Imperium is actually like the upper classes and the only sports are huntin', shootin' and fishin'. On the other hand, you can imagine inter-platoon soccer matches played by the enlisted men of the Guard, with the ultimate honour going to any team that can beat a Stormtrooper Eleven. And do the Navy play zero-G volleyball along the vastness of a cargo bay?

Death Worlders have a sport; they call it 'staying alive'. The rules are pretty simple, and no-one wins***.

Now Orks; Orks know about sport, I'm sure. Squig fights, squig races, kustom kart racing, 'itting each uvver 'til someone remembers dey've won. I guess the Dark Eldar have sports, but I'm not sure ritual bikini murders and slave beating have a place in a respectable live game. The Eldar must have sports, a Way of the Athlete which they spend centuries obsessing over before moving on to something else; perhaps they play some form of insanely acrobatic touch kabbadi. The Tau... The Tau probably have a sport where both sides win.

Tomorrow I'll be talking about a thing to do with roleplaying (preparation!) Favourite game I no longer play (thank you other tab.)

* The nearest they had was Gorkamorka, a skirmish game with lots of vehicles, but alas not a racing game, and they dropped a bridge - well, orbital strike - on that one.
** From Wikipedia: "The main game consists of the two sets of players forming a rugby-style scrummage (called a "Bully") in which neither team may "furk" the ball." Blood Bowl almost seems more reasonable.
*** Actually in fairness, we did create 'Arborian chain disc frisbee' last game.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 26 - Take a Look Around

Prompt: Favourite inspiration for your game

In a word, everything. Literally anything can be a source of inspiration: fairy tales, other people's fiction, anthropology, folklore, history, oh my, history.

Not to be a broken record, but you'll find better words on using the real world and history as inspiration on James Holloway's video for today and the same Ken Hite interview I linked yesterday. In particular, James talks about the denseness of stuff that only comes from reality, and Hite about exploiting the alternate history fictioneer's greatest natural resource, the instinctive human propensity for pattern recognition, the faculty that lets us see a man in the moon, gods in rock formations, and Illuminati in the White House.

As a specific aside, I submitted an entry to the RPG Geek GUMSHOE One-Sheet contest that was inspired by the real world and which really exemplifies the sort of thing Hite discussed in the interview. I started with the Pech Merle caves in France, which are full of monstrous - eerily Cthuloid - paintings and rock formations, and as I was writing it discovered that a) Pech Merle is down the road from the 'Chateau du Diablo', and b) the timing of the discovery and excavation of the caves matched almost perfectly with the dates for events in 'The Call of Cthulhu'.

Anyway, as stealing from real life has been done, I'm going to talk about stealing other people's fictional ideas instead. It's a cheap trick - although sometimes a profitable Dan Brown - but so long as I'm just writing stuff for me and my friends to enjoy, I don't feel any real shame in giving my Geist game a creepy fenland district that mashes up Silent Hill, Ravensholm from Half Life 2 and a creepy fenland village from James Holloway's Unknown Armies game. If I were writing it as a novel I intended to publish I imagine I would be rather more coy, but these are games and not for publication.

Did I say Dan Brown*? I meant 'practice'.

I do feel that it behooves me to make enough changes that the original is hard to discern. It's one thing for someone to look back and be all 'oh; like in...', but if they're thinking that from the get go, then they're more likely to be thinking about the original than your version while they approach that plot and at that point you might as well just sit down and watch the movie, because easily recognisable borrowings never come on their own. You can't take one thing and leave the rest; once identified it brings with it a lot of other expectations, themes and atmosphere. If you have a blue guy who teleports, you'd better be prepared for your players to expect the X-Men and to act accordingly. If on the other hand you borrow the Quartet for the Dusk of Man from Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slicked Precipice of Darkness, change the words and scribble down your own cosmology and god names, you've basically just got a moody piece of verse to pass down and the loose framework for a game, and the players probably won't be anticipating fruit fuckers or Gabe showing up to punch a god in the face.

And again, while it would be cheeky to use that plot and that altered verse in something I was publishing for money, I don't feel too bad using it to entertain my friends for a few evenings a month.

Tomorrow is day 27 and mutant hybrid games. See you then.

* The irony is that the fiction he cribs from tends to be derived from the methods employed by Holloway and Hite. There's that pattern matching again.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 25 - Stop! Hammer time

Prompt: Favourite revolutionary game mechanic

"It's murder. And somebody's responsible."

So, there are two of these that I want to talk about, and they both work by taking the crunch of the system and making it visible for dramatic effect. Cards on the table (that's not the mechanic) I'm not enough of a student of mechanics to know which ones are truly revolutionary, so bear with me if this is old hat to you.

The first is in my old fallback, Fate Core. When you roll, you always know what your opponent rolls, or what the static difficulty is, and once you've seen the outcome, you can then choose whether to spend Fate points. This means that you never blow your Fate points, a scarce resource, on a roll that comes up against you anyway, and gives the players - and the GM, who also has Fate points to spend - much more direct control over the action. This is of course on top of invoking for effect and creating advantages, both of which are means by which the players can control the scene.

GUMSHOE has a more adversarial feel than Fate - the GM is specifically setting puzzles for the player characters to solve, or not - but its investigative focus is highlighted  by the division of skills into General Abilities, which use a regular pass/fail mechanic, and Investigative Abilities, which always work at least perfectly, maybe even better, thus ensuring that - unless the GM has screwed up and included a need for an ability no-one in the party has - you always have all the information you need to solve the mystery, although you may yet fail to do so.

-

I know I put this up before, but seriously, that is a lot of fucking
cards and tokens.

It's a lot harder to come up with revolutionary mechanics than it used to be back when THAC0 was the height of innovation and, indeed, still seemed like a good idea somehow. Those were the heady days, when drama points were unheard of and non-cuboid polyhedral dice were so alien as to give HP Lovecraft conniptions, before roll-and-keep, playing card mechanics, custom dice, custom card decks and - gods help us - 10div5*. The sprawl of cards and tokens and dice that, while six sided, are completely useless for anything else due to their custom symbols used in Fantasy Flight's Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition are perhaps the ultimate evolution in terms of complexity, but also something of an evolutionary dead end** in a world in which simplicity (and, given the ever growing number of available products, affordability) is increasingly preferred***.

In this interview from yesterday, Ken Hite quite coincidentally**** sums up this point by explaining that the industry is moving away from the model of games as super-expensive magazine series for which you must get a loyal audience who will keep buying the stuff so that they can keep playing the One True Game, and towards looking at games as individual small press books, with each as a largely stand-alone product that only needs to sell itself. This is all tied in with the OSR***** and the increased presence and relevance of self-publishing, epublishing and PoD through outlets like DriveThruStuff, and of course Kickstarter, making it increasingly likely that the garden variety gamer will have an eclectic mix of stuff rather than a huge, coherent set of core and expansion books for a single game.

Anyway, come back tomorrow for Day 26 and my favourite inspiration.

* The system for the new World of Darkness Mind's Eye Theatre live games, which had the revolutionary effect of turning experts into barely competent amateurs and dilettantes into useless assholes. In fairness some of this came down to implementation, but combat was a joke.
** Like a giant, sabre-toothed cat that can take down any threat but needs to eat a mammoth a day just to keep get up in the morning.
*** Like some diminutive, lippy primates jeering at the flailing death throes of the once-mighty sabre-tooth while they pass around a mango.
**** Man, if I could afford to pay Ken Hite to drop apposite references into interviews for me to point to, I would just buy my daughter all the tiny, adorable Frozen dress up clothes I could find. Sorry, Ken.
***** I expect. Honestly, whenever I start to talk authoritatively in these things, you can be 90% sure I'm blagging it. The other 10% is educated guesswork.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 24 - The House Always Wins

Prompt: Favourite House Rule

I don't know that I have a favourite 'house rule'. I find them useful, but have yet to find one that I thought 'wow; yes. That.'

I do have a clear least favourite house rule, that comes from the old IoD chronicle. The ultimate power of the vampire discipline of Presence is called Sovereignty; it's a room control ability that prevents anyone acting in a way that would displease you. They can't attack you unless they beat you in an opposed contest or you are directly attacking them, although they can try to stop you attacking an ally. That's not a problem; it's a powerful effect, but it's a top-tier power.

The problem was that as written it was a high-maintenance power: Each time someone tried to act, the user and the opponent had to make a test and the one with the most successes won. If you managed to act, you didn't need to test again. This was a lot of tests, however, and the unofficial (despite claims to the contrary - see below - it was never incorporated into the addendum for the society) house rule was that a) the user tested once, when activating the power, and b) you had to test to act, and if you failed, that was it; you didn't get to test again. A meant that the user could pump what was already bound to be an imposing pool through the roof, and combined with B meant that any chance of a lucky roll getting you through was gone, which meant in turn that unless you were a complete monster (or had the right Carthian devotion) then you might as well not bring your game to a fight, because some motherfucker was more or less bound to have Sovereignty, and if you'd spent your points on being good enough to cut it in a fight using the appalling Mind's Eye Theatre rules, you sure as shit weren't going to stand a hope in hell against a long-term character's Sov.

-

One of the things that made it impossible to ever change the above ruling was that when people remembered that it was a house rule at all, they assumed it was an official part of the addendum, when in fact it was neither. This is actually a common problem with house rules, from Monopoly (the most common rule that people assume is part of the official game is that fines go in the middle of the board and you collect them if you land on Free Parking) to any RPG with a complex enough rule set. For LARP in particular, people tend not to want to got to the rulebook any more than they have to, so the ultimate authority is whomever sounds confident enough.

Come back tomorrow as we enter the closing straight of RPGaDay 2015.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 23 - Under pressure

Prompt: The perfect game for you

My perfect game would probably be a narrative/dramatic adventure game with aspects of anachronistic technology and alternate history, and some elements of the mystical (probably falling short of a full spell-casting system,) puzzles and conspiracies and strong collaborative elements.

I'm pottering on a very vague concept of the sort running on what I call the Steam Engine (I'm sure that's been done,) the central mechanic of which is Pressure. Players build up Pressure when they fail important rolls, or can voluntarily take harm or accept narrative complications to add Pressure to their pool, and then spend Pressure to boost later actions, resolve complications or otherwise advance the plot in an interesting way, thus ensuring that all characters get a chance to do something, because even if the dice hate them, they'll eventually have enough pressure to do something awesome.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 22 - Welcome to the jungle, we got roleplaying games

Prompt: Perfect gaming environment

Nice quick catchup here, because I've already talked about gaming environments in posts about the advantages of playing tabletop at an actual table, and virtual tabletops (and c.f. Day 14.)

Job done.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 21 - I can show you the world...

Prompt: Favourite gaming setting

Don't be fooled. These daft looking buggers will quack you up (although... I
don't know what's going on with that shield.)

So, my knee jerk response to this one is Warhammer 40,000, which I do adore in all its overblown, grandiose, Gothic-punk, sometimes-ironically macho glory, although as an observer from outside the wargame I am aware that the setting has undergone some changes I don't care for, like the implication that the Emperor gained his powers (aside from immortality) from a pact with the Dark Gods of whom he is the antithesis. Aside from this making little sense cosmologically, from a narrative standpoint it harms the purpose of the Emperor, which it always seemed to me was to illustrate that in the grim darkness of the far future, even a godlike, entirely benevolent superbeing can't do shit in the long run to make the universe less crappy. That just be how it is.

Also available in webcomic form.

This being the case, I'm going to go with Glorantha, which I love simply for its absolute commitment to a realistic anthropology (allowing for the proven, indeed unquestioned existence of gods, spirits, magic and anthropomorphic ducks.) In the computer game, King of Dragon Pass, the only road to victory is to immerse yourself so much in Orlanthi culture that you can make the most Orlanthi decisions, rather than necessarily the most rational from a real world perspective. Moreover, when undertaking Heroquests it was necessary to memorise the story of your quest, then adjust for the existence of Chaos and any other variations, again by being totally Orlanthi about your decisions.

Anyway, I have no doubt that once more James Holloway is doing a better job of selling Glorantha* than I am. Again, it's one of his focus areas.

It's odd, given that one of the things I like about 40K is its vastness, that what makes Glorantha more appealing to me is the limits to its scope; that what lies beyond your borders is a total mystery, which means that your focus is on the here and now. You might look to the horizon, but ultimately that won't get the pigs in.

-

So, what about writing settings, because when push comes to shove, I'm a writer and a world-builder. Another friend of mine is currently working up a world-building project on his blog, so you can check that out, but it's made me think about my own process and my own flaws in setting writing (short version - way too much detail, leaving no space for the PCs to inhabit.) We were talking on G+ recently about gods and godly 'domains', which is a kind of D&D concept, I guess, but not an uninteresting one, and about how magic affects society, but I think more importantly from a writing perspective, how much information is needed to sell the setting.

Consensus on that one seemed to be about 1500 words, preferably with something to break up the text like an image or timeline; enough to give a taster of the world without overloading your poor readers. I suspect that it might also be advisable to write this before fleshing out the details, at least in draft format, as for a game setting the appearance is arguably more important than the finer points, which are ultimately something for the players to find out, change and possible even define in play. Fate Core is very specific about this, and part of the game prep process is sitting down with your players to a) determine what kind of game you all want to play, b) generate characters, and c) define certain fixed points in the world. In play, it is possible to invoke aspects for effect to change the world on the fly; it's all part of heroing.

Also an intriguing setting in its own right, with
its fusion of  magic and science.

While rarely enshrined in the mechanics, this is something of an assumption with RPGs in general; that your PCs are free agents and can change the world. It's not going to be easy to rig the ballots, assassinate the king, or overthrow the deerocracy in favour of a system of government founded on the altogether more rational basis of strange women lying in ponds, but you could do it. If you were so inclined, you could walk straight past the tavern and camp in the woods, or mug the old storyteller and steal his stuff. In some cases this would be a total dick move, but consider - for example - The Ashes of Valkana. No spoilers, but if you've seen that through to the end you'll know that the party would have been entirely justified in telling one particular Quest Giver where to shove his giant, rotating exclamation mark, even if it would require the GM to wing it while they became fugitives from justice.

This is why 40K RPGs tend to favour a local setting. You're never going to overthrow the Adeptus Terra, the sheer scope of such an enterprise boggles the mind and would test the most robust of mechanics, involving as it would millions of ships the size of city blocks and a number of people that the brain can not comfortably encompass acting across a substantial percentage of the galaxy. You probably could do it, with a lot of effort and a highly narrative system, and it would be a very long shot, but manipulating planetary or even sector politics is a much more achievable goal, which makes it fun to try, while the difficulty of moving such a calcified system makes it potentially rewarding even if you fail, so long as you fail interestingly (cf. small victories in CoC.)

I'm out for the next couple of days, so I'll be back on Monday with a round-up of the next few topics. That will be 'perfect gaming environment', 'perfect game for me' and 'favourite house rule'. In the meantime, check out the hashtag for posts by folks who get at their keyboards during the weekend.

* Not that I've watched today's vid yet, so more fool me if he's talking about Puppetland.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 20 - The horror!

Prompt: Favourite horror game

Duh.

Yeah, the immediate answer on this one is a bit of a no brainer. Call of Cthulhu may not be quite everyone's cup of gibbering cosmic terror, but it's kind of the horror game. Once more, James Holloway covers this better than I could, being a colossal Lovecraft nerd where I am more of a colossal dilettante nerd (not to say that he doesn't have his share of dilettantism, but Lovecraft is a bit of a specialty.)

-

So, to talk about something other than Lovecraft, what is the purpose and place of horror in gaming?

While the Big C... No, wait... While Cthulhu looms large in the background of any discussion of horror games, there was a time - the 90s - where the first and last word belonged to White Wolf's World of Darkness game series. Sort of. Vampire the Masquerade was billed as 'the storytelling game of personal horror' and Werewolf the Apocalypse as 'the storytelling game of savage horror', but Vampire games often ended up more towards a mafia-based soap opera in feeling, and Werewolf as Captain Planet: The Furry Years*, due to the former's emphasis on byzantine vampiric politics and the latter's on combat against truly and unequivocally monstrous foes. It was only with Wraith the Oblivion that White Wolf really produced a game that focused on horror thematically, rather than mechanically, but Wraith was an agonisingly difficult game to play well and a pain in the arse if you were playing it wrong.

I think in the end, the old World of Darkness failed as horror because their rationale for incorporating horror into the games was almost certainly, because this was the case with just about anything else, because it was cool, and horror that is cool is seldom really horror. I mean, did anyone ever watch The Lost Boys for the horror thrills?

In Call of Cthulhu and it's ilk, and perhaps in general, the primary purpose of horror is cathartic. As James notes in his video, the fact that you ultimately never win in CoC means that it's okay to lose, but it also means that small victories become triumphs as you overcome the unstoppable, if only for a moment. To me, that is part of the appeal of horror; not the inevitable defeat, but the small moments of triumph along the way. In vampire horror it's a major win making it to daybreak; in zombie horror a night of sleep is worth more than 100 gold and a really big party. Mere survival becomes a victory when victory becomes unattainable.

I guess that's why, for my money, Changeling the Lost is the most successful 'horror' game in the old and new WoD series, because it really is about facing something that you can never defeat; not just your Keeper, but your past. In some ways it ties in with the Lovecraft theme, because Lost is about characters who don't know who they are; whose very psyches are prone to collapse whenever the fragile networks of validation which they create are breached. Like Lovecraft himself, the Lost cling to evidence of identity and value that they know to be a lie, because they have nothing else. Creeping dread is difficult to maintain in the atmosphere of a gaming group - easier in many ways in LARP, which is more immersive - but identity crises can be managed with any group with a reasonable level of character investment.

And perhaps that's the real challenge to horror gaming: To find investment in a character you know to be short-lived. Certainly it's the real trick to horror writing, to snare the reader's sympathy for someone they know to be doomed.

* I'm being flippant, but I've enjoyed many games of both.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 19 - You'll Believe a Man Can Fly

Prompt: Favourite supers game

Oh, man; old White Wolf straplines. That was some
pretentious shit.

I've not played many superhero games, so while Marvel Heroic Roleplaying is almost certainly better, I'm going to pick out White Wolf's Aberrant - the second game of the Trinity Universe, set in the unimaginably far flung future Libertarian paradise of 2008 - as my favourite of those I have played.

Aberrant's advantage is not really its setting, which like all old White Wolf games is pinioned by the weight of a sacred metaplot, although there are aspects of that which I quite like. The basic spiel is that a disaster in an orbital space station bathes the world in phlebotinum radiation and superheroes are born when ordinary humans spontaneously manifest a nugget in their brains that allows them to control quantum energies and do stuff. What they can do varies massively, from 'supernormals' who are simply extraordinarily good at mundane skills, to Superman-style flying bricks, elemental manipulators, teleporters, speedsters, telepaths and everything in between. The in-all-other-games-largely-benevolent Aeon Society establishes itself as a registration agency for 'novas' and uses this to keep Earth's superhumans controlled, occupied and chemically sterilised.

What Abberant did pretty well was allow different power levels of Nova to play in the same ball park, although at the top end there wasn't much you could do about canon characters like Caestus Pax (black, officially sponsored Superman) or Divis Mal (godlike continuity-wide antagonist who might in fact have been able to just create his own world and fuck off into it if he got bored.) The only time you got to do anything involving them was in the canon campaign where you could watch Mal hand Pax his ass (oh, White Wolf.) But yeah; overall there was equal play in being a badass supernormal or the human bunsen burner, although the former tended to require a little more effort from the player*.

-

Scale is difficult in superhero games, and the reason for this is simple. Batman. As Captain Atom once pointed out, on the basis of his abilities, Batman is a comically underpowered C-lister. In universe he walks among the gods of the DCU because of his intelligence, tactical ability and the liberal application of headology (he can fight alongside the likes of Superman because he fights alongside the likes of Superman,) while in 'real' terms he does it because, well... he's Batman, and while most people accept that he's a bit of a cock, that doesn't stop them enjoying seeing him punch an uppity metahuman or alien god in the face***. If it wasn't for Batman, martial arts detectives would probably stay happily in their own genre, karate kicking mafiosi in the throat. Not even Frank Miller would envisage a scenario in which the Green Hornet and Kato went toe-to-toe with Superman.

But Batman is a superhero, and that makes things complicated****, because narrativism be damned, all RPGs contain an element of simulationism and superhero games in particular really like to define power sets, and that means you need a mechanic in which Batman doesn't just spend all his time in traction. Many approaches have been tried, from fate point-based meta-mechanics to the 'ah, fuck it' approach of early supers games, which just didn't try to balance. One I haven't seen yet - although Marvel Heroic Roleplaying's affiliations are similar - would be to link characters and stories to themes or genres, giving different characters an edge when a particular story is clearly taking place 'in their book'.

Advancement is also difficult. Most superheroes plateau fairly quickly, as the alternative is the kind of power creep that results in super-ventriloquism, whereas RPGs thrive on steady progression. D20 supers games are among the worst for this, since D20 assumes a protracted mook-punching phase in your career path, where most superhero narratives require a much quicker escalation (unless you're playing something more like Smallville, in which case you probably want the Smallville RPG,) and a system which requires you to jump over 10 levels of power progression to play what you want to play is the wrong system.

I guess what I'm saying is that superheroic roleplaying is hard because the mechanical side of RPGs entails the kind of specific analysis that superheroic fiction was never intended to weather. Superhero stories thrive on the willing suspension of disbelief, the acceptance that a man can fly. As soon as you start talking about the physics of it - well, once you get past the whole 'but science says a bumblebee can't fly'***** business - you're no longer willing that suspension, you are asking to be convinced, not just that Superman can fly, but that Batman, an ordinary human of extraordinary skill, could evade Darkseid's inescapable Omega Beams. Despite the massive crossover in fanbase, the gamer instinct to dissect and model is almost completely opposed to the comic reader instinct to accept and marvel; it's a curious phenomenon.

Come back tomorrow, when I think we're talking about horror. In the meantime, do look out the hashtag and in particular, while I've not seen it yet, I would be very surprised if James Holloway's video for today didn't have some interesting things to say, because the man knows his comics.

* One of the PC in my old campaign was a tactical genius, but the player never talked to me as the ST about what might be a genius tactic in a given situation, nor listened when I said something might not be**, thus never gained any advantage from the ability.
** Seriously; there is a particular class of player who ignore GM cautions and seem to believe that the world that the GM has created and the situations that they have crafted will somehow prove the GM wrong. This is not the same as coming up with solutions that the GM didn't think of, which is awesome. It's as if you were doing the Monty Hall problem, but instead of Monty revealing one of the doors you didn't choose had a goat behind it, he opened the door where the car was and you still chose a different door.
*** The Golden and Silver Age mash-up series The New Frontier had my favourite take on the Batman vs. Superman fight ever; I won't spoil it for you if you've not read it.
**** Starting with screwing up the definition of superhero.
***** It says no such thing. What it used to say was that it didn't understand how a bumblebee could fly and wouldn't it be nice to have faster cameras so we could work it out.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 18 - SCIENCE!

Prompt: Favourite sci-fi game

And when we say that in the grim darkness of the far
future there is only war, what we mean is that changing
tagline over 6 editions is for wussies.

Despite the picture, Warhammer 40,000 isn't my favourite SF game, largely because it's not an RPG and I don't wargame. There are plenty of 40K RPGs, of course; almost too many, each with subtle rules variations, but in the end mostly too complicated to be my favourite game (but wait until we talk about settings.)

SF gaming, as I mentioned yesterday, has fewer iconic games than fantasy. James Holloway touches on the same topic in today's video*. I think what it comes down to is that SF fandom is more compartmentalised than that of fantasy. Plenty of fantasy fans are willing to argue over whether David Eddings or Robert Jordan or The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Rapist are good or bad, but very few who care to stand up and say that by failing to adhere to the Judeo-Christian framework adopted to a greater or lesser degree by Tolkien or Lewis, they aren't really fantasy, whereas what is and isn't SF or scifi or speculative fiction is a discussion that can get real nasty, real fast (never mind Trek vs Wars, hard vs soft** is a regular bag of cats.) Fantasy is a melting pot; SF is an uneasy federation of mutually antagonistic sub-genres.

Traveller is the ur-hard SF game, and displays one of the major problems of that subset. By undertaking to be hard SF, is simultaneously demands a vast array of technologies real, theorised and speculative, and a gritty, simulationist approach, which is why there are editions of the game in which you can spend upwards of an hour designing a gun and calculating its stats from its barrel length, calibre, propellant and other specifics. I was well into that when I was thirteen, but these days I treasure simplicity.

At the far end of the spectrum is Paranoia, a game with minimal stats and technology that works (or doesn't) just because (blue lasers are higher clearance than red lasers, thus blue lasers pierce red armour, but red lasers don't pierce blue armour, despite the only described difference being the colour.)

Somewhere in the middle lie the vast - and I mean vast - array of licensed SF RPGs. SF vies with superheroes for the title of most licensed RPG genre (or would if that was a title anyone cared about) and that again is an oddity, because an RPG invariably demands more detail than the show or movie provides and thus the creation of a whole mess of fragile and occasionally contentious deuterocanon (the arguments over the canonicity of the described nature of Ra from the Stargate movie in SG-1 terms in the latter's RPG were rivaled for ferocity by little on the Gateworld forums.) Also in this hinterland are the likes of White Wolf's old Trinity continuity, which in and of themselves ran the gamut from pulp action (Adventure) to comic book supers (Aberrant) and into psy-fi (Trinity,) representing the increasingly fine detail of the powers as a shift in genre to a harder style of SF.

In summary, the SF RPG market is splintered because SF fans... I'm not sure how to put this. It's not that fantasy fandom doesn't have opinions, oh gods does fantasy fandom have opinions, rather than opinions in fantasy tend to be qualitative and continuous, whereas SF fans make discrete, even binary judgements not of whether a thing is good SF, but whether it is SF at all***.

* And yes; I wish I'd thought to call my post Science Fiction Double Feature.
** Dating back at least to Verne vs. Wells.
*** And not just fans. Margaret Atwood is arguably an SF author (sometimes), but she denies it (always.)

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 17 - You're in a crowded market...

Prompt: Favourite fantasy RPG

This is what happens when Fantasy Flight make an RPG. I hear good things,
but seriously: "Forget paper, pencil, dice and friends; I need a wagon!"

No surprises on this response for those who followed my #rpgaday entries last year. I remain a huge fan of WFRP, despite the immensely problematic issue of the rules. 2nd edition, which I dearly loved, was still insanely overcomplicated, while 3rd edition manages the complications with a system of intuitive cards and counters, but requires, therefore, a lot of cards and counters to play, in addition to its own special dice. I don't think there is a version in print at the moment, but between the second edition ruleset and first edition setting material, I still love it to bits.

-

Fantasy is surely both the easiest and the hardest genre to set an RPG in. On the one hand, it is in many ways still the go-to genre for roleplaying as a whole (SF is really giving it a run for its money, but getting on for half of all horror games are really just Gothic or urban fantasy with fangs and open shirt-fronts.) On the other, while that means there is a much larger market than for other genres, that market is equally or even more so the most crowded. From my essentially dilettante viewpoint, I would say that both the dominance and the overcrowding of the fantasy RPG market are in decline, with SF and contemporary material on the rise, but as long as there is D&D roleplaying will remain in the domain of fantasy.

What this means for Johnny Aspiring Gamewriter is that while fantasy RPGs are a little more likely to be well received (and not least because SF fandom tends to be significantly more compartmentalised,) it's much harder to stand out from the crowd. You need to tick the boxes, but think outside them, and that's increasingly difficult to do. What if the orcs were heroes? It's been done. Elves are bastards? So done. All the characters are trees...? Probably done*. It's not enough to slap together a post-Tolkien Euro-setting and put some numbers on it, because there are literally dozens of those around.

WFRP succeeded by having a grittier setting with an emphasis on a more concrete role for adventurers (the career system, which in its fullest application basically involved characters looking for employers on a semi-regular basis although as early teen players we didn't really think about that,) more restricted magic and a culture more in keeping with the European Renaissance than traditional fantasy kingdoms. Later editions pushed a higher fantasy aesthetic by increasing the bond with the wargame and making different nations into much more obvious hat cultures instead of flavours of money-grubbing rogues, but I always liked the original.

Of course, now they've blown up the Warhammer World in favour of the Age of Sigmar, cyclical time, fantasy Space Marines and Threx Skullbrand the Bloodsecrator of Khorne. I guess it stands out at least; I can't think of much else that has bloodsecrators in it**.

As ever - well, until the end of the month - come back tomorrow for more from #rpgaday, and in the meantime, check out the hashtag.

* Note to self - write an RPG in which all the characters are trees.
** Exploitable niche or not, I won't be the man to answer the call for more bloodsecrators.

#RPGaDay 2015: Day 16 - The long, dark night of the SAN

Prompt: Longest session played

The longest sessions I've played were probably university all-nighters, having assiduously avoided all-IC weekenders. This is because the former experience taught me that I ought not to roleplay when falling-down-tired. IC bleed doesn't begin to cover it.