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| Thursday, November 19th, 2009 | | 7:04 pm |
| | Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 | | 7:20 pm |
Fuller GASPCon report
Over the weekend, I attended Gaspcon, at the behest of Jason Godesky (who we played Polaris with some time ago. I had never done any gaming with GASP previously (though multiple groups of players I knew were involved). So I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Nonetheless I accepted responsibility for running three games at the con and went to see what would happen. Gaspcon is basically the smallest con I've ever attended. There were a few dozen people there, mostly locals, so you kept seeing the same people in different games. The guy who played in my game then ran a game I played in, and we both played together in another game, along with people I saw or played with in other games. This is a sort of different feel than at larger cons (though it's surprising how you run into the same people over and over at Origins or the like). Everyone was very friendly: the event organizers seemed eager to see that I had a good time, and identified me early on as someone not normally associated with GASP. I was supposed to run three games over the weekend: Executive Decision, Bloody Forks of the Ohio and Department Nine. Only one of these had enough players show up to play. But in the other two slots I played some other games, and it all worked out. (It seemed like there were more indie games than there was demand for such at the con, so we often had three GMs at adjacent tables unhappy that their games didn't have enough players, which would then collapse into a single table with enough people.) The games I played were: The Fifth World, Jason's game set centuries after the apocalypse. It was very interesting how this game took familiar places and made them strange and wondrous. I liked this game more then I expected to. My cannibal guardsman from the tribe that lived at the point had moral dilemmas, joined the good tribe that worshiped the Incline, fought panthers in Oakland and helped explore the abandoned tunnels below Carnegie Mellon. That's all pretty neat. Bloody Forks of the Ohio, the sole game I successfully GMed over the weekend. I plan a more in-depth discussion of that later (maybe tomorrow). Mouse Guard, which was not entirely successful as a game. I still didn't have a handle on the rules by the end of the game, and the story and characters were particularly thin. It did not do anything to sell me on the game. Don't Rest Your Head, in which I played a doctor throwing himself into his work so hard that he hadn't slept in weeks, and was hearing electronic devices whisper people's secrets. This was probably my favorite game of the con, even if my real-world sleep deprivation meant that my character wound up fairly passive and inconsequential for the last big set piece. Finally, I played In a Wicked Age, using a homebrewed Oracle (basically a randomized situation/fictional element generator) based off of remaking local native american myths into fodder for swords and sorcery tales. And that worked pretty well, though the local aspect might have been played up more (maybe that was bad card luck). In contrast to Mouse Guard, this made me see why the internet loves the game so much. Also this weekend, we saw The Men Who Stare at Goats (which I liked more than the average person is likely to) and attended a bonfire in celebration of four or so birthdays that occur in November. So I had a good weekend, basically. | | Monday, November 16th, 2009 | | 7:17 pm |
Local convention, emphasis on the "local"
This weekend I played five different roleplaying games. The settings of these were: -Pittsburgh 1,000 years into its mythical past -Pittsburgh, 250 years ago -Pittsburgh, 400 years after the apocalypse -A national forest just outside Pittsburgh, as seen from a mouse's perspective -the Pittsburgh you only see in nightmares. Notice a theme there? | | Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 | | 2:27 pm |
| | Saturday, October 24th, 2009 | | 2:48 pm |
[A Hatful of Rabbits]
That was a bit incoherent. Probably because I was thinking as I was typing. Let's see if we can make it any clearer. Here's the outline for the game: To play the game, you will need the Major Arcana from a Tarot deck, and three to five people. There are three roles that you will play in a given scene. After each scene, the roles will rotate around the table, meaning that everyone will play every role at some point in the game. The roles are: The Magician, who roleplays out our aging stage magician PC who is on a quixotic quest for glory at the end of his life. Mechanically, the Magician player can call for conflicts and decides between options that The World presents. One person plays the Magician at a time, for one scene, then the role passes to the next player. The World, which represents any minor NPCs in the scene, and is charge of background material. The World offers suggestions and feedback, encourages and guides narration from the Magician and the Arcana. If either the Arcana or the Magician calls for a conflict, then the World's job is to set stakes for the conflict. If you have four or five players, then multiple people play The World. In conflicts with multiple World players, they should talk with each other to decide what the most interesting/dramatic/complicated/heart-w renching stakes would be for the conflict. The Arcana, who plays the major NPC for the scene. The Arcana player plays the primary NPC for the scene, begins scenes by asking a difficult question about the magician, ends scenes once the question is answered, and calls for conflicts if appropriate. The NPCs introduced each demand something from the Magician in some way, often things that come at a cost to the magician. At start of play, determine who is playing each role in the first scene. (You could mix the Magician, World and Judgment cards around to decide this randomly if you want; whoever gets Judgment starts as the Arcana, and the other two play the role shown on their card.) Remove the Magician, the World and the Judgment cards from the arcana, then shuffle the rest and place it down. If you have four or five players, take two cards from the minor arcana (I like the look of the Two of Swords and Two of Pentacles from the Rider-Waite deck, but that's purely a visual aesthetic matter not based on divinatory meanings.) Place the Judgment card next to the deck. Each scene, you will have one of these cards in front of you, which determines which role you will play in that scene. At the end of a scene, you pass your card to the player on your left. (??? Or otherwise redistribute the roles somehow?) At the start of the scene, the Arcana player turns over the top card of the deck, which determines what sort of NPC they will be playing. Each card remaining in the deck of major arcana is tied to some sort of NPC and a category of questions to probe into. The Lovers card means that the Arcana player will play someone the Magician is romantically interested in, or that is interested in the Magician. And the Arcana player will as a difficult dramatic question about who the Magician loves, or about relationships, emotions and related matters. If the Arcana player draws The Hermit instead, then you have an NPC who does not want to b associated with the Magician, and is trying to avoid him for some reason, and the Arcana player's questions involve avoidance or secrets or mysteries (either detective or religious). To start the scene, the Arcana player ask a difficult, probing question concerning the magician's character/motivation/goals/history/etc. That question acts as the frame for the scene: you keep playing that scene until the question has been answered. The Arcana player then describes the NPC they will be playing and sets the scene, which plays out until the Arcana player is satisfied that the question has been answered, or at least addressed. We need to know more about the Magician by the end of the scene than we did at the beginning. The NPCs played by the Arcana player all want something from the Magician character. Intangibles like respect or love or peace of mind are probably better than tangible goods, and these things should cost the magician in some way. (Not sure on the viability here, but working on it.) In a scene, either the Magician or the Arcana can call for a conflict. In this case, the World player(s) decide on a set of stakes, and offer the Magician a set of two options, using the "cut the pie" resolution system from House of Masks and this thread, that I don't want to go over right now. JudgmentOnce everyone has played each role at least once, then instead of drawing an Arcana card, the Arcana player can declare that this will be the last scene of the game. This should be done only after the Arcana player thinks that the story has played as much as it is going to: perhaps you reached a natural ending, or perhaps you are approaching the end of your available time. If there are no more facedown cards in the arcana deck, then you have reached the end of the game, and must play a Judgment scene. In that scene, the question is something along the lines of "Does the Magician find what he was looking for?" (I need to tweak that wording to get it just right.) It's the final resolution of the Magician's story, in which we discover is he is ultimately successful or not. And once that is finished, the story is done. There could be some different endgame mechanics for this scene, but I can't imagine why I'd need any. I think the game would be playable in one three or four hour session, but that depends on scene length, really. | | Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 | | 5:42 pm |
[A Hatful of Rabbits] rough sketch of some game mechanics
I was recently lamenting the fact that, though my 2008 Game Chef entry won an award, I had never played it. (A group of Italians did, but that's a different matter.) The game as written required exactly six players to function, and social logistics are not my strong suit, so I never had the right number of people on hand. Following said lament, Ross said that I should rewrite the game to work with fewer so that we could playtest it sometime. So I think that I will wrench out the "Cut the Pie" conflict system from that game and use it here, at least until I see some good reason not to do so. That will increase the chances of playtesting the game. Other thoughts on the game: The game should focus on one, elderly protagonist, and be a character study in that one character. This is different from your usual RPG party of varying characters and personalities. And so that one player doesn't get the juiciest role, play of the main character will rotate around the table from scene to scene. Variances in how the character is played are because of growing amounts of senility. Other roles rotate around the room as well. I think that the game consists of a series of scenes as the main magician PC encounters his friends and loved ones, and each scene is probing into the the magician's personality and motivations. At the start of one scene, one other player might decide to play the magician's ex-wife, and the player would ask the question "did you ever really love me?". Play continues in the scene until we know whether the magician did or did not love her, then we go on to another scene. Perhaps in the next scene, a different player is playing the magician's old booking agent, and the player asks "who are you trying to impress with this show?". Or the magician's doctor is in the scene, and his player asks "when did you know you were going to die?". Or a retirement home attendant asks "when did you first get the idea for this crazy scheme, to put on one last big show?". I gotta get back to work now, so I guess I'll have to explain how those two bits integrate in a different post. | | 4:44 pm |
[A Hatful of Rabbits]
I'm currently writing a roleplaying game for Nathan Paoletta's Two Games One Name RPG Design challenge. The idea of the challenge is that each participant is assigned a title for a game, that they have to design. But another participant was assigned the same title, and has to design a different game entirely. A set of optional binary restrictions are given to help the games diverge from one another. (You ranked the titles in order of preference, so that you got a title that you wanted, and Nathan did his best to give everyone their first or second pick. It worked out pretty well, from what I can tell, though it had a chance of being an insoluble mathematical quagmire.) I chose/ was assigned the title "A Hatful of Rabbits", along with Graham Walmsley. We were given the additional choice of doing a game that was either "Suitable for children" or "suitable for the elderly". A couple emails went back and forth, and Graham got to do the kid's game, while I'm making the game for the elderly. Though initially I would have preferred to do the kid's game, I am growing more pleased with doing a game for the elderly. My kids won't be roleplaying for another few years yet, anyway. So far, Graham has begun generating some interesting discussion about children's literature. And I'm thinking my game will likely be less for the elderly and more about being old. The premise of the game is that an elderly, possibly senile retired stage magician decides to have one more big moment of glory, and you the players start exploring his personality and motivations and personal connections. Hopefully, the game will turn into something fun and playable. | | Monday, August 31st, 2009 | | 3:07 pm |
Game Chef time again
As is by now becoming a tradition, I'm trying to make a game for the International Iron Game Chef competition. I've set up a separate blog for that purpose, so direct your RSS readers over to Blogspot if you want to follow my attempts. Or don't, if you're bored with the nitty gritty of designing a roleplaying game. I'd encourage almost anyone to try designing a game. It's fun and easy. Or you could go over to the consolidated feed of Game Chef blogs and find a few to follow and comment on and see how they develop. Maybe someone will design a game that you love. | | Monday, August 24th, 2009 | | 5:31 pm |
I feel like I wrote this post already once before
The recently posted freeform Dark Sun game got me thinking about the relationship between a roleplaying game and its source material. Now, all roleplaying games have source fictions that they draw from, just as all fictional works themselves take elements of prrevious fictions and repurpose them. Superman is an amalgamation of Hercules, Charles Atlas, baby Moses and Depression era science fiction. And my superhero PC is in turn an amalgamation of Superman, Spider-Man, Dr. Orpheus and Joe Biden (or whoever). But what I'm thinking right now is about the games where they don't file the serial numbers off first: your Star Wars rpgs, or Middle Earth Roleplaying and the like. Games designed to emulate a specific work of preexisting fiction, rather than a genre. My main thought at the moment is "choosing a system for a specific fiction is an act of interpretation". You have to decide what is important within that fiction, and how it will affect other aspects of the game. Same is true for designing a system to match a fiction. go over here and read what people think Dragonlance is about. Note how for even a relatively uncomplicated piece of fantasy melodrama (no offense), you get a variety of answers that only barely relate to one another. And this isn't some experimental art novel full of ambiguity and metaphor designed to keep English majors busy. It's a set of mainstream fantasy novels, yet none of those posters quite agree on what Dragonlance means. It's a bit like translating a novel, or adapting a book into a film: easy to get wrong, easy to focus on surface details and miss the genuine core of appeal in the fiction. And in adaptation you put a little of yourself into it: you choose a roleplaying system that reflects your priorities and your beliefs about what was important to you in the source fiction. Here's another example: Star Wars. There used to be a lame online joke that you could play Star Wars using any gaming system at all. And in some strange way, it's true, or nearly enough true to be interesting to consider. Star Wars is partly successful because every person has their own reasons to attach themselves to Star Wars: some like big explosions and exciting chase sequences. Some like the interpersonal relationships between the main cast. Some like the implied larger science fiction universe, and some like the underlying mythic narrative. Each of those reasons for liking the same property suggests a different system for Star Wars. And whatever system you choose says something about how you're going to relate to Star Wars: If you choose Feng Shui (as we did once), then you're saying the game will straddle the line between celebrating and satirizing the Star Wars movies, just as Feng Shui does with action movies in general, and that the game will have over-the-top action sequences (more liek the prequels than the Original Trilogy). If you choose something weird, like My Life With Master, then you're choosing a more radical interpretation (or reinterpretation) of Star Wars. In a MLwM Star Wars game, you might be young Sith trying to build up enough Love to rebel against the Dark Side and throw the Emperor down a ventilation shaft. This would be a game that interpreted Star Wars as the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker: how he fell to the Dark Side due to a malicious mentor and eventually grew to love his estranged son enough to kill the Emperor and redeem himself. A game like Dogs in The Vineyard is focused on having the characters face the consequences and limitations of their black and white morality, which works just fine for prequel era Jedi. The Jedi in the prequels constantly claim moral certainty, and constantly face the backlash from their own certainty. A Star Wars Dogs game would make this central, whereas other games tend to sideline those issues to varying degrees (including the various official licensed Star Wars rpgs). None of those systems are the wrong game for Star Wars, but they each say something different about Luke Skywalker and company. So then I'm thinking about the Dark Sun game I designed and the forthcoming 4e Dark Sun, and they both seem very distinct in how they approach the setting of Athas. (I haven't seen anything about 4e Dark Sun to speak of, but have seen enough 4th edition D&D to extrapolate.) The two games could be seen as complimentary, rather than competitive: one sees DS as big pulp adventure about defeating opponents in a focused D&D vein, while the other (my game) is about feel and setting fluff and not at all about overcoming obstacles, really. | | 4:25 pm |
"A camel is a horse designed by committee."
If Intelligent Design advocates were really serious in their pseudo-scientific claims, they could deal with the attacks on their nonsense a little bit better. But since they are self-admittedly just trying to sneak religion into science, they miss some easy outs. Take the dysteleological argument: that humans and every other species is designed really quite poorly. Our brains are so big and our hips so narrow (which relates with that bipedalism thing) that many of our children or mothers die during childbirth. Or how everyone gets back problems, or the retinal blindspot, or the appendix or all of the other built-in diseases and problems we suffer from. Would an perfect God design us so imperfectly? If the ID advocates were more interested in the claim that we were designed by intelligent creators (instead of pushing monotheism on us), then they'd have an easy answer for this: Committees. ID as an almost scientific theory doesn't demand that only one intelligence designed us. Christianity demands that. ID doesn't demand a perfect creator, like the christian creation story does: all ID requires is a conscious creator. ID just speaks about intellect, not the number or nature thereof. And anyone who's been in a committee for any length of time knows what a committee's output looks like: awkward, with a variety of weird holes, half-measures, concessions, and compromises no one is really happy with. Come to think of it, anyone paying attention to the health care reform should know what an animal made by a committee looks like, too. Maybe we still have an appendix because the appendix lobby was particularly strong at the beginning of human history. Maybe we have a blindspot as a special concession to the god of giant squids, who wanted something that they could do better than us. Or maybe I've been in yet another pointless Human Resources Web meeting all afternoon, then went reading more blogs about atheism again. | | Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 | | 5:38 pm |
I accidentally designed a game
Following the announcement that Wizards of the Coast would be coming out with Dark Sun for 4th edition D&D, I've been on a bit of a Dark Sun kick. so I was going back and reading DS stuff, which I never did in great depth in the 2nd edition days. And while reading about the cycle of years being tied to the irregular cycles of Athas's two moons, my mind created an interesting game mechanic based off of the interesting, flavorful names of each year and the overlapping 7 and 11 year cycles of the moons. I didn't mean to: I was just enjoying the Dark Sun Campaig boxed set in anticipation of the 4e version next year. But instead my mind seized on this cycle of years, threw in a bit of Guillotine and Johnathan Walton's Avatar: The Last Airbender game and got a game that is intimately tied to the Dark Sun setting, but otherwise is about as different from D&D as I can imagine. It still needs work, including refining the list of associations of each Theme Card. And I probably need to explain the Theme Card cycle more clearly, and give lots of examples. But I think it might be serviceable and interesting to play. And it's only a few pages long, so you might as well read it, right? I call it "A World of Fire and Sand" after a line from the original campaign setting book, as I suck at writing titles. I think the best use for the game might be as interludes in a regular D&D Dark Sun game, like as myths or bard songs or strange rumors that are told in between normal adventures of killings monsters in the desert wastes. | | Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 | | 7:30 pm |
What weird indie game should I run at GASPcon?
I ask of you, dear reader: What game should I run at a con I've never been to? Background:Jason (a guy we played Polaris with for a while) is trying to convince me to go run something at GASPcon (local con run by the Gaming Association of Southwestern Pennsylvania). He wants to have a bigger presence of small press/indie rpgs/story games/etc. That's a reasonable goal, in my mind, and so I'd like to support that plan. ( background and options and general indecision )I suppose I could run something else, too, if someone were to suggest a good idea. There are a ton of interesting games out there to run; this was mainly sticking to the ones I have on hand and have read thoroughly enough to consider them as options. I am currently leaning toward Executive Decision and one or two other games. What other games? Is there some compelling reason not to run Executive Decision? What game should I run? | | 5:33 pm |
The strange thing about running a series of regular LARPs is how the mind begins to look at everything as a potential seed for a future game. Last night for work I attended a city councilwoman's community meeting talking about a nearby poorly designed intersection. And I spent the entire time watching the group dynamics of the situation, and considering how to run it as a LARP: more structured than the Bloody Forks of the Ohio July game, but less so than the Executive Decision May game. Several people play local residents with insane, contradictory demands, while the rest of the PCs play small time local officials trying to justify decisions they did not make and cannot change. Or then I read an article in Newsweek about marijuana smugglers in the 1980s, and think about a game like that: they just scored a big score, and are throwing a huge bash, but fear government surveillance and potential undercover cops. One smuggler's wife thinks he's cheating on her, while he is trying to keep that a secret, and both want to keep their occupation secret from their young son... Anyway, I begin to see where there is a disconnect between authors and normal people regarding the question "where do you get your ideas?" When you put your mind in the right setting, everything you encounter is a bit of narrative waiting for you to remold it into a story. Everyday people less often think in this way, I think, so they are surprised by the universal authorial answer of "everything I do is fodder for ideas" or the like. | | Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 | | 4:15 pm |
| | Monday, June 29th, 2009 | | 6:57 pm |
Origins!
So we went to Origins, and I played a lot of games while Amber volunteered many hours. It was all good, in general. Specific breakdown of my time there: ( Specific breakdown of my time there )So that was my convention, more or less. I mostly focused on games, because the rest is sort of a vague blur in my mind. Con time is a weird thing, as the con seemed extraordinarily long and also really, really short. | | Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | | 4:36 pm |
Other people doing my work for me
I keep thinking about writing an entry about President Obama being the Nerd-In-Chief. But then I never do. So now I see that Personal Computer stereotype and my personal hero, John Hodgman, has established the POTUS's geek credentials better than I could have, and funnier, too. I suppose this is why Hodgman gets to be famous for being a nerd, while I just am one. | | Saturday, April 25th, 2009 | | 12:07 pm |
I have a tendency, when watching something television or a movie that is not especially good, to construct theories or explanations that make that narrative into something grander. Something where there's a secret story ocurring in the backgrounds of the obvious story. Do other people do this? I don't know. But it helps a lot when you have a two year old picking a noticeable percentage of the television that you watch. ( Handy Manny, James Bond, Star Trek and Heroes. ) | | Saturday, February 28th, 2009 | | 1:45 pm |
Last night we had the fourth annual First Friday Of Lent giant cavalcade of meat, in celebration of our apostatic nature. As always, the Green Forest restaurant provided us with sufficient quantities of cooked animals, on swords. The swords is a clear bonus. Apparently others had gotten the idea to also celebrate their non-Catholic nature as well, since the restaurant was more crowded than in previous years. Did these other guys hear about and steal our idea? Were none of them Catholic, or were they all very bad Catholics? Then tonight we have the February LARP tonight. And Ross and his girl came from out of town for the meatfest and the LARP. So we ate at Spice Island Tea House today for lunch, which was also delicious as always. And then tonight Sean and Sara are coming for the LARP as well. And they have threatened to bring the terrifyingly awful Dragonlance movie with them, in case the LARP goes short again. On Sunday we may finally finish Keep on the Shadowfell, so my time travelling cowboy wizard will finally catch up to regular campaign continuity. So it's a good weekend, all in all. There'll be an after-LARP report on the blog for that sort of thing. I certainly hope it goes well. | | Monday, February 2nd, 2009 | | 5:12 pm |
LARP-A-Month blog
I set up a separate blog over here to write about the monthly LARP project. We'll see how that turns out: it might just be a repository for the LARP documents as they get written. Hopefully it becomes something more, though. I plan to write a second post for it soon, as I forgot my notes on the February Larp(s). | | Saturday, January 31st, 2009 | | 2:33 pm |
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