#RPGaDAY - Day 12: Magic Concerned Citizens

This is a toughie. The prompt is 'old RPG you still play/read', but I don't actually play that many games these days, and I only really read on the train; a situation barely conducive to mass market hardbacks, let alone game books. That being the case, I'm going to reminisce about a campaign that I occasionally like to relive through the GM's game reports and still point out to people as that thing that I did that was awesome and actually, you should read this stuff.

Greg Stolze and John Tynes' (thanks for the catch, James) Unknown Armies is a game about power and consequences. It's set in a world of deep occult conspiracies, where power is achieved by embracing contradictions with insane dedication, or by pursuing one archetypal aspect of humanity to the exception of all others. It has probably the best system for modelling dramatic psychological breakdown ever published, and if there are places where the elegant 'one-roll' mechanics break down and get weird (specialist combat characters, we're looking at you here), it's not the end of the world.

My first real introduction to Unknown Armies was a game that James 'Gonzo History' Holloway ran way back in '04-'05 (fuck me; this November is the 10th anniversary of this game's kick off). It was set in and around the Rose Crescent, Cambridge branch of McDonald's, with the characters a chapter of the Occult Undergrounds most naively optimistic conspiracy, Mak Attax. The Rose Crescent McDonald's is an oddity in itself, a low-key place which you might not spot for a McDonald's at all, if not for the succession of miserable looking employees who stand at the Market Square end of the crescent mournfully displaying a sign which fails to convince anyone that they are, in fact, lovin' it.

They didn't have that in '04, or I would have played the fuck out of that character.

As it was, I played Roland McDonald, an avatar of the Listener whose aversion to violence had been dangerously eroded by an abusive and hardcore Weird upbringing. His best mate was the crew's wizard, Jack, an American student whose practice of Personomancy was both an expression of and cover for her fundamental lack of self-identity (from the first, she was Jack as an employee and Jill as a student, since Cambridge students aren't allowed to work in term). Nigel was an avatar of the Merchant, but Tim could only make one game. Eventually we added Simon to the mix, a former city banker who screwed up and ended up working at McDonald's and who didn't believe to start with.

The game was a blast. We battled self-actualising adepts who were pioneering a school of magic based on manipulating others into self-harming behaviours (man, we really hated her), evil fathers possessing their sons (pushing most of Roland's buttons) and time-locked Nazis, and ultimately participated in a contest to redefine reality which played like a mixture of the Grail Quest and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

The game reports are still on LJ, and I think are public.

http://jholloway.livejournal.com/tag/rosecrescent

Why do I hark back to this game with such fondness? Well, lots of reasons.

First, it was a chance to get back to gaming with James, which I have always enjoyed (I could also have talked about his World of Darkness: Mortals live game, but that lacks the re-readability), and I think the first real chance I had to game with Allison - James's other half, and a good friend - and with Jon, whom I didn't know before, but who is now also a close friend.

It was a game in which the characters were competent and effectual, not by being some sort of badasses, but by getting their heads into the right game. The different characters, with their varied approaches, clicked beautifully as a unit with no pre-planning and the interplay between them - and the back and forth with James's NPCs - was quick, light and somehow real. As a group, we were on fire - in terms of plot and memorable badinage - and James just kept on passing us charcoal briquettes. We found ourselves in the US at the end of a ritual and instead of going home we went on a road trip, and James ran with it; we never went back to Cambridge again.

It was also one of the first long-running games I'd been in that meant something, in that it had overarching themes and an endgame, in which we won, but kind of died, or not, but won! (Go us.) We were the kind of slackers who held power-meetings at the Baker's Oven over sausage rolls and coffee, but we made it, ma! Top of the world!

Overall though, it was just a game that clicked into place and was a thing of joy at a time when, frankly, I really needed one. Sometimes, I find gaming to be a stressful hobby, when really it shouldn't be. In particular, I find that large-scale LARP can mediate the needs of its various players poorly, with the result that most weeks someone isn't feeling it.

Looking back over Rose Crescent's run reminds me of why I roleplay.

#RPGaDAY - Day 11: Weirdest Game Owned

Winner of the world's worst flautist award.

De Profundis is probably the weirdest game I've ever read, by design at least; I also saw bits of deaDEarth, which were insane, but not in a good way, as you might expect given the bizarre lengths to which the writer/publisher went to try to make it look like the game was being well reviewed, which showed a slick professional canny that simply wasn't evident in the game design itself.

But I don't own a copy of deaDEarth, nor - as it turns out - of De Profundis, or not anywhere I can locate. In fact, I'm short on hardcore weird games in general. That being the case, let's make like we're middle class conservatives, interpret 'weird' as 'innovative' and instead look at a couple of the indier games that I own:

Wield: A little game of ancient powers is a fun-looking little concept game in which the players take on the roles of ancient, sentient artefacts seeking to accomplish some aeons-old goal through the manipulation of mortal instruments that they call pawns, but most people call maize*... I mean, heroes.

The game is, at first reading - I really just got hold of it from a Kickstarter campaign - flawed, but interesting, and most of the flaws are essentially proofing errors in the early-release PDF, such as not including an easily referenced not as to how many wounds heroes have, or how to design named NPCs. There are also at least two or three vatcha powers that shortcut the torturous process of destroying a vatcha (and powers explicitly overrule other rules).

In brief, each player designs a vatcha, a relicts of a long-dead empire created and endowed with vast power and intellect to achieve a specific goal, but having to work through human intermediaries to do so. The ST then creates a hero for each player, with each hero starting off as the wielder of another player's vatcha. All wielders are fundamentally disposable and a hero can be lost and replaced many times, or even passed from vatcha to vatcha, but a player never controls a matched pair of hero and vatcha, because the central theme of the game is the conflict between the two. The vatcha can grant incredible powers to its hero, but at a price. The more power the vatcha gives, the better the hero can serve its goals, but also the more control the hero has when their destiny clashes with the vatcha's goals.

That subtitle knocks White Wolf's 'a role-
paying game of [pretentious nonsense]
taglines into a cocked hat

In some ways, it's like a less-serious, fantasy-themed version of Wraith: the Oblivion, in which each player controlled their own character and another character's dark impulses, which was great in theory and practical only with a vanishing minority of gaming groups.

The other game is Fiasco, which doesn't have anything as bizarre as the setting of Wield, but has a mechanic and play style so innovative that it is only just an RPG.

Inspired by the spiral of chaos ensemble pictures of the Cohen Brothers, Fiasco is a one-shot parlour RPG for about four players, which uses a bucket of D6s and a series of random tables to generate character ties and plot hooks. Players then take turns to play out one-on-one scenes, each of which is deemed to have gone well or badly, from which each player collects a set of 'good' and 'bad' dice.

At the end of the game, the players narrate the end of their chatracters' stories based on their collected dice set, with the most tragic and pathetic outcomes falling to the characters with a mixed set. There is no skill set to speak of and the game, while it has winners and losers among the characters, has ideally no PvP element. The collection of random tables used to create hooks, ties and plot twists for a playset, and there are dozens of these available pretty much for printing money.

Come back tomorrow for an oldie but goldie, and look for the RPGaDAY hashtag for more weird games today. In particular I draw your eye to the following quality sites by people I love:

Gonzo History Gaming Edition

Dice Tales

The Anxious Gamer

* I swear, I didn't pick the game for the pun, it just came to me as I was typing.

#RPGaDAY - Day 10: Favourite Tie-in Novel/Gaming fiction

This cover is, like all of the covers in the series,
entirely inaccurate and misleading as to the
nature of the character, and I love that.

In preparation for today's topic, James Holloway defined two types of game fiction: terrible fiction relating to the game, or good fiction only tangentially relating to the setting. I'm not sure he isn't missing fiction which is neither any good nor relevant to the game, but he also defines a single positive intersection and I'm keen to find out what that is.

I'm a fan of Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain series, but I accept that it probably falls into the second category somewhat, in particular in its depiction of a co-ed regiment in the Imperial Guard, a force with barely a female model to its ranks.

Ciaphas Cain is a commissar in the Imperial Guard, one of the grim-faced elite who enforce discipline with a las-blast to the back of the head of a fleeing officer. Only... he isn't. He is by his own admission a quick-witted slacker who would rather not give officers thinking of fleeing a reason to shoot him first, and by all the evidence an endlessly resourceful officer with a considerable understanding of morale and motivation He and his fellow officers and soldiers are, if not complex and three-dimensional, at least interesting and two-dimensional characters, which invests his adventures with a degree of involvement, but what really sells the series to me is the humour.

Loosely based on George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman series, Ciaphas Cain's self-narrated stories (footnoted for historical references by his inquisition biographer and sometime SO) are told with a dry, self-deprecating wit which offsets the overblown machismo of the Warhammer 40K setting. Perhaps this inhibits the story as 40K fiction, but it makes it readable in a way that other offerings, with their astonishingly po-faced approach to the almighty grimdark, are not; to me at least. I know a lot of people go for the 40K full Monty, but it doesn't work for me where Cain does.

Critically, however, Mitchell tells the story with humour, but even when Cain criticises aspects of the setting, he doesn't parody them. The tower of Gothic imagery and testosterone that is 40K is so close to self-parody that it simply can't weather the slightest attempt at external parody. It's not made to bear that sort of criticism; it would just fall down, and Mitchell doesn't succumb to the temptation to mine that vein for cheap laughs.

So, yeah; Ciaphas Cain. Despite some deviation from implicit canon, it doesn't turn the universe on its head (score over most White Wolf fiction), it doesn't wallow in the grimness of the setting, nor mock it. It's fun adventure fiction with decent characters, pacey plots and a song in its heart.

What's your game fic of choice? If you'd like to know what other people have gone for, look out the hashtag for more RPG a Day.

Check back tomorrow when I assay to discuss the weirdest RPG I own.

#RPGaDAY - Day 9: Favourite Die/Dice Set

'The Boys'

Dice are at the core of what we, as roleplayers, do. With a handful of exceptions, which are either entirely non-random systems - a concept pioneered by Amber Diceless Roleplaying - or utilise a different means of random number generation, such as a card draw, every roleplaying game eventually uses dice to simulate the vicissitudes of fate in some fashion.

Some roleplayers seem to genuinely fetishise their dice, keeping favourites with 'the 1s rolled out', or shaming those that misbehave (although I suspect/hope that most diceshaming is mostly done in fun, rather than earnest). I don't, so instead of talking about my favourite D20 ('I call her Vera'), I'm going to muse on a few of the different ways that various games ask you to use these most ubiquitous of gaming paraphernalia (well, the most ubiquitous apart from purely mundane kit such as pens and pencils and bits of paper).

Polyhedra

Probabilities

The simplest method of using dice is to roll a single die and read off the result, perhaps adding a fixed number to it. The appeal of this is of course that the probabilities are extremely simple. You have the same number of possible outcomes as the number of sides on the die and, provided a rough approximation to an unbiased die, an equal chance of any given outcome. On a D6 you're as likely to get a 1 as you are a 6.

3 or 13?

If you want something a little more predictable, rolling two or more dice and adding them together gives you a bell curve. If you roll 2D10 there are one hundred possible outcomes, of which ten result in a total of 11 and only one results in a 2 (or 20); there's a possibility that you'll get an outlier result, but the chances are good that you'll end up somewhere in the middle.

Of course, those same two dice read as the tens and units of a D100 bring you back to the flat probability distribution on a much larger scale, and make it easy to work out the chance of rolling less than or equal to a given number as a percentage. Percentile systems are popular because people have a pretty solid understanding of percentage, or they think they do at least, even if that understanding stops at 50/50 means even odds.

Say hello to my little
friends

Clusters

Do you want a) more exciting probabilities or b) more rattling? How about dice clusters? Roll a whole bunch of dice, but don't worry about totals; just count the dice that turn up above (or below) a given target number. The ur-example is probably the White Wolf/Onyx path system, which reached its ultimate expression in Exhalted, where 'bucket of dice' ceased to be hyperbole for high-powered PCs.

Dice clusters, and especially that little fistful of D6s over there, brings me to the first of two dice mechanics that I want to give a little more thought to. Don't Rest Your Head is a game in which the characters are insomniacs, whose level of sleep deprivation has become sufficient to catapult them into a parallel reality where exhaustion brings power. To do anything of note in the system, you roll a number of D6s, so does the GM.

Resting your head is, it turns out,
a really bad idea

As standard, you roll 3D6. These are your discipline dice, you always roll them, and a roll of 1, 2 or 3 is a success. Get more successes than the ST and your action succeeds. There is a good chance, however, that the ST will be rolling more pain dice than you have discipline dice, in which case you can make up the difference in one of two ways.

Exhaustion is a measure of how tired you are. It starts at 1, and you can increase it by 1 every time you take an action. If it hits 6, you collapse into unconsciousness. Why increase a stat which eventually knocks you out? Because every level of exhaustion is another die you can roll. Again; 1-3 succeeds.

Madness is pure risk taking. You can add up to 6 madness dice to any roll, just like that. 1-3 succeeds.

Cthulhu D6s - could be
good for pain or
madness

So, low rolls are good, right? Well... sort of, because once the basic business of succeeding or failing is out of the way, you check which set of dice has the highest number showing (hence the multi-coloured cluster there; white for discipline, black for exhaustion and red for madness. I wasn't running the game, so I have no pain dice.) That set dominates, and you really want that to be discipline when possible. When discipline dominates, you are in control, even if you failed; you keep it together.

If exhaustion dominates, you pick up another point of exhaustion; this is what most often causes people to pass out, at which point the gribblies come for you and you are completely defenseless until you wake, and mostly defenceless for a good hour afterwards, since being rested in the world of the Mad City is to be borderline functional.

What fresh lunacy is this!

If madness dominates, you completely lose your shit, and you can only do that a few times before you lose it for good.

Finally, if pain dominates, your situation deteriorates, even if you succeeded.

I am filled with admiration for this system, which combines pretty much every major facet of the system and setting into a single exchange of rolls, even while I don't especially like it as something to play. It's slick and clever, but it means that characters have almost no significant strengths or weakness and there is virtually no strategy, beyond the game theory involved in deciding when to risk going mad and how exhausted you're prepared to be. It's emblematic of the fact that the game is more about the setting than the characters, and as a result it's fun for a bit, but there's no great mileage, for me at least. On the other hand, it's well worth a try if you get a chance to play.

Minimising randomness

Modern FATE cares
little for the colours of the
dice, but two pairs is
traditional

A final approach, and one that is increasingly popular in recent years, is that of FUDGE dice.

A FUDGE - or increasingly FATE - die is a D6, but in place of numbers it has two sides with + symbols, two with - symbols, and two left blank. They are rolled in sets of four, with each + adding 1 and each - subtracting 1 to modify a base stat. This minimises the randomness inherent in dice rolling because the outcomes will average at the level of the stat in question, but leaves present the possibility of a wildly atypical outcome.

In modern FATE systems, the outcome of a roll is also modified by spending Fate points for a fixed bonus. This system maintains a level of uncertainty, but ultimately means that PCs will usually succeed at tasks within their field of expertise; a bad roll tends to mean putting more effort in, rather than failing outright.

FUDGE/FATE tries - and to a large extent succeeds - to have its cake and eat it, maintaining the tiny random gods of gaming tradition, but at the same time placing agency squarely in the players' hands. Again, well worth a look, and something I'll be coming back to.

#RPGaDAY - Day 8: Favourite Character

He wasn't quite like other dwarfs after the...
incident.

If I was ever the kind of roleplayer to talk about my character ad nauseum, I think I've passed that phase, and I tend to only discuss my PCs in the wider context of the game.

I think. My friends may be shaking their head and chuckling.

But either way, I couldn't get a grip on today's topic as talking about a favourite character that I'd played, so I'm going to talk about my favourite that I've seen played.

Sven the dwarf was played by my friend Ben in a WFRP game at Uni, and he was kind of the opposite of the classic WFRP dwarf. First Edition WFRP had a phenomenon called the iron dwarf, which was when a starting dwarf character could be too tough for any goblin to hurt, barring extreme circumstance.

Sven wasn't like that; he was the glass dwarf, as fragile as a dwarf could be. He was, like, elf fragile. He was also slow, and not all that smart, but he was as strong as an ox. As a party, our combat strategy against heavy opponents was to make sure Sven made it through the turn still conscious so that he could belt the enemy into the middle of next week.

But the joy of Sven, who ended up as the Graf's champion of the city of Middenheim, was his simple and uncluttered perspective on life. When we were discussing how to prevent anyone stealing our boat, Sven chipped in:

"Let's sink it!"

When he won the challenge to become Graf's Champion he demanded a song, and was delighted by the improvisational skill of the Dwarvern Valley Singers when they subbed one instance of the word 'gold' with 'Sven'. On their own, these incidents were amusing, but what makes Sven my favourite character was the unrelenting Svenness.

Ben was a smart guy, but he threw himself into Sven to the point that we would occasionally feel a flash of annoyance at his inability to grasp the nuances of a situation, followed by a deep admiration, because Ben did grasp the nuances, but he chose to overlook them without a second thought. He never let up, never compromised, yet never actually screwed us over because for all his one-note response strategy, Sven was our guy.

Sven, Sven, Sven, Sven
We'll sing of his deeds, again and again
With the strength of a plough horse
And the wits of a hen,
We'll never forget him,
The dwarf they call Sven.

#RPGaDAY - Day 7: Most Intellectual RPG Owned

I'm not much of a collector of RPGs and I've never been a big part of the Indie RPG scene. Most of the games that I own are pretty straightforward, or where they want to be intellectual are aspirational old World of Darkness supplements which drop the ball so astoundingly that they don't really count. I was, therefore, at a loss what to write about for this day, until James reminded me that De Profundis exists.

Now, I only own De Profundis in a slightly nebulous sense, in that I bought a copy and may have the PDF somewhere, but I can't download it again if I don't because it's attached to a DriveThruRPG profile connected to an email I don't use anymore, with a password I've forgotten, which is a level of abstraction that kind of suits De Profundis, although I think it also applies to the PDF of Mummy: The Curse, all my Fiasco materials, Diana: Warrior Princess and a game about warrior squirrels.

(ETA: Having gained access to that account - one of three that I seem to have wound up with - I can confirm that I never bought a copy of De Profundis from DriveThruRPG, so where did I get the one I read, I wonder?)

De Profundis was originally presented as one of Hogshead Publishing's New Style games, a line which included Puppetland - a narrativist, but almost normal game in which you played puppets rebelling against the vicious rule of Mr Punch - The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen - a pub storytelling game in which players take on the roles of Prussian aristocratic adventures and make up outrageous exploits and use a system of challenges to force other players to get even more outrageous - Violence - a self-loathing dungeon crawl where you kill the occupants of a complex and take their stuff, but set in a modern apartment block - and Power Kill - a metagame attached to a normal RPG in which players take on the role of delusional schizophrenics who think that they are the characters in the regular game.

As you can see, New Style is a rich ground for today's topic.

De Profundis is an epistolary game, in which the players write letters to each other about their lives. Not the lives of imaginary characters, but the actual lives of their actual selves, embroidering the details to cast a Lovecraftian interpretation on everyday events.

It's pretty much named after Oscar Wilde's cathartic breakdown letter, written from prison to Lord Alfred Douglas, in which he describes their relationship and then compares himself to fellow romantic artist Jesus Christ, so I don't think anyone could argue that it isn't intellectual, in aspiration if not in attainment.

In his video for today, James asks: What can you put in 100 pages of a De Profundis core book (I won't say rule book, since as James points out, there are no rules). As I recall the entire book is written in the character of the games designer unlocking his own realm of horrors through writing the book and warning prospective players of the potentially disastrous mental effects of actually playing the damned thing. Which is different, although I confess I am undecided whether it is brilliant or just hopelessly up itself. I tend towards the latter, but as I am something of a pretentious git at times, it's hard to say.

(ETA: Apparently there are also sections on playing as other characters and even a diceless tabletop version of the game, but I clearly never read those bits.)

If nothing else, De Profundis is the game I 'own' which has the most aggressively intellectual aspirations. It's not just the influence, it's the determination to explore perception in a way that challenges the ontological foundations of the everyday, or at least aims to make semi-traumatic IC bleed a feature rather than a bug. If Rona Jaffe had ever got hold of a copy of De Profundis it would have literally blown her mind. Pat Pulling would have spontaneously combusted.

Either of those two outcomes, by the way, would be a reasonable interpretation in a game of De Profundis, if... (checks Wikipedia) Ah, hell; that was... I had no idea, really.

Come back tomorrow when we'll be talking about favourite characters, and hopefully avoiding accidental tangents of extreme bad taste.

#RPGaDAY: Day 6 - Favourite game that you never get to play

So, here it is; my first ever video edition of Out of My Mind, and I go and refer to the wrong blog in the video. Twenty-first century, I am in you!

I've talked a lot about WFRP, but Only War is the one that really fits for this topic, since I've never got to play it at all. It's a streamlined version of the 40K RPG system, which I hear good things about, and also has a nice subsystem whereby each payer controls their main character and also their loyal comrade in arms, who acts as a semi-disposable adjunct to the main PC.

Like WFRP, it's the setting of WH40K that hooks me, with its insanely Gothic aesthetic and black on very dark grey morality. I also prefer the older versions of this setting, which were generally grubbier and less organised, and I'm not wildly keen on new additions like the Tau and the C'Tan. My Dark Heresy campaign had Squats and Imperial Beastmen.

Head back tomorrow for Day 7, and remember to check out the hashtag for more game-related goodness.