Shining · Dodecahedron

Here's the idea: I have learned a lot about role-playing games in the past five years since stumbling onto the Forge and, with it, the indie-game revolution. There's a lot of stuff I don't know still, of course. But I'd like to start getting my thoughts about RPGs in order. What I'm going to do is post a series of entries entitled "The thing about [some RPG thing]". In each I will chat about my views on what's good and (perhaps more often) bad about some RPG concept of topic. I was going to call this "What sucks about [some RPG thing]" but that sounded too negative. I'll probably still talk a lot about what sucks, so fair warning.

So...

The thing about role-playing is that it isn't just a type of game, it's a social phenomenon that all too often gets ugly. There's the part where you play your game and (you hope) have fun. That part is fine. Like any other hobby, reading books for example, you do the thing because it's fun and it enriches you in some way.

But then there's the lame part. I can only speculate that it comes from the all too common overlapping of gaming group and outcast support group. This is the part where you don't want to be honest with the folks at the table. The social dynamic of so many gaming groups is whacked.

Let's take a scenario. You get out a board game and have some friends over. You play a game, Settlers of Catan for example. When you finish, you might very well have a little chat about how it went. One friend says it was the best game in a long time (this friend probably won). Another says that it was lame because he got screwed by the dice the whole night and couldn't do anything. Then maybe you chat about how the dice mechanics are designed and (if you're a game geek like me) maybe you suggest a house rule that addresses the issue. Perhaps one of your friends tells you that he doesn't really like the game and would prefer that you not play it in the future. Now, there may be some reluctance to be open and honest about how things went based on social dynamics of the group, but on average, folks have no reason not to talk about it.

Now take the same scenario but substitute an RPG. On average, from my experience and from what anecdotal evidence I have from other gamers, you get much less willingness to talk about how it went. So a lot of this reluctance probably arises from the fact that for 95+% of the RPGs out there, how the game went has as much to do with the GM's performance as with the game rules as written (and don't think that isn't going to get its own post). But there is definitely something more there. Your gaming group is (or at least has been historically) the place where you will be accepted for who you are. These are the guys you can make annoying references to Monty Python and the Holy Grail with guilt-free. These are your people. You can't ask them to change because that would mean that they might ask you to change. So you play sucky games over and over without saying anything until, like so many, you just stop playing RPGs at all.

And that's what sucks about RPGs. It sucks doubly because of the potential greatness of RPGs that it craps all over.

I recently started playing in a D&D game for the first time in a while. I have a natural disinclination there -- I don't really like D&D. However, I have found myself thinking about what D&D is (and what it has been over the years) and I've come to the conclusion that it has very strong roots.

D&D, especially in the early days, was very clear about what it was. It was a game about overcoming a series of tactical obstacles by making clever use of limited resources. When you succeeded you were granted incremental improvements to your character that provided more resources for use in future challenges.

In the context of the original object of the game, the mechanics are almost brilliant. Nearly everything about the system was tailored to support the goals of play.

Jenifer and I went to see Proof perfomed by the Tacoma Actors Guild this afternoon. It's the last day of the show, so a review wouldn't help anybody, even if anybody was listening. Regardless, I will say that it was a fair production (my opinion being somewhat colored by the fact that the play isn't really my kind of thing).

TAG didn't impress me as far as their professionalism in the business sense. When I ordered the tickets online it told me we were booked in the center section, but our tickets were actually for the extreme left. The ticket taker at the door didn't know what I was talking about when I asked where Will Call was. When we did find the Will Call / Ticket Window is was abandoned with all of the will call tickets out in plain sight where anybody could have reached through the slot and taken them. There was no soap in the dispensers in the restroom. Lots of little things that didn't make me happy. As usual for live teater, we were one of four or five couples in a nearly full house under fifty years old.

However, it is good for me to go to these passable yet not stellar plays as I get back into theater. It helps me to remember that my standards are incredibly high and that you can get audiences without perfection.

The Monday before last my regular gaming group did some testing of Chanson de Gestes as it existed then. It was a bit muddled, until I realized the most important thing (which holds true for Dog in the Vineyard as well, because CDG got its basic conflict resolution philosophy from Dogs): when you are describing your action, you have nearly total narrative authority. What you say has weight in the ongoing narrative in a way that most systems basically never give a player. And when you aren't used to that, it's kind of hard to do.

We only got there toward the end of the session, but as soon as we did, things picked up right away. The trick is to know what is off limits. Which boils down to anything that would ensure or prohibit anybody's stakes. Everything else is on the table. When nameless mooks are in your way, you can narrate your way through them without batting an eye. You can pull any crazy maneuver you want and describe it in loving detail. As long as you don't mess with the stakes or make anyone call BS, what you say has immediate unquestioned authority in the shared imagined space.

If you've spent any time playing Dogs, this is all old hat. I only played it briefly before ripping off some of its ideas and it's still sinking in for me. Every player contributes to the story with basically equal weight. The GM is dead, long live the GM!

I'm way stoked for tomorrow's game with the updated mechanics!

Inspiration comes when you least expect it. Around Christmas time I started planning a fantasy game for my regular group. I toyed with Burning Wheel, Hero System 5th, and others with little satisfaction (my initial notes say "Fantasy Hero Campaign" on them). Then I decided I would, "just adapt Dogs in the Vineyard". Famous last words.

So now, even though my mind wasn't even close to in the right mode at the start of the year, I have a largely complete system on my hands. I am calling it Chanson de Gestes (Song of Deeds). It's about chivalric heroes fighting the leftovers of the dark ages. It still resembles Dogs, in that conflict has that same, brilliant, back and forth narrative authority that makes dogs so cool. Each day the specific resemblances gets hazier and hazier.

I hope to post more about it soon.

So, being bad at maintaining a journal was an understatement. No suprose really.

It's been a year of getting back in touch with my theatrical past. Plus some small movement on the roleplaying front. More later.

I have a lot of design ideas in the fire. I talked about some of them on my Blogger site last year. Despite a lot of "cutting edge" design ideas, I keep coming back to Gallant, my game of swashbuckling adventure. This is a game that I started designing before having any exposure to the wealth of new RPG theory on the Web.

Gallant is far from perfect, so I have pushed it to the background multiple times over the past few years. But I am coming to realize that there is no such thing as perfect. I need to get a game out there, published and played, and then move on to the next one, whichever that turns out to be. It's very hard to get that point across to myself, though--particularly when people are saying new and provocative things about RPG design all the time out here in the geekoshpere.

Anyway, I'm back to focusing my development time on Gallant. And I'm starting to feel very serous about getting the damned thing done.

Apart from playing RPGs, I am a fan of board games. If you don't know, it's an awesome time to be a board game fan. For the last ten years and more, America has been on the receiving end of a huge wave of German games. These games are clever, well-designed games that play relatively quickly. They are, by and large, a delight.

But there has been a catch. Most of the German games are under-themed. That is, the thing that game purports to be about is just pasted on to clever mechanics. If you want a game about the civilization of ancient Egypt, you might take a really clever auction system and paste an Egyptian dynastic theme onto it (and you'd have Ra, which is a great game, but under-themed).

Americans have, historically, been quite good at coming up with simulation style games. Games that start with theme and then have mechanics forced onto the theme. This results in games that are rich and flavorful, but take a lot of time and effort to play. A good example is I.C.E's Fellowship of the Ring, which I love the idea of, but have never played all the way through (please don't correct me if this game was designed by, say, Englishmen--it fits the American game style well enough for my point).

Now we are in exciting times. The German games have made their way into the minds of American developers. The result is a slow but steady increase in the number of games that merge the two styles into something extremely cool: well-themed, engaging games that have clever and efficient rules. I don't think we have even scratched the surface of the potential of this new hybrid. But games like Twilight Imperium 3rd edition are on the front of the wave. And I, for one, am stoked.

So why are boardgames getting this revitalization when RPGs advance at a snail's pace? Lots of reasons, I'm sure. But here's one that disturbs me: I never hear a board game player say, "Whoa, this isn't a board game! I'm just going to play risk." Something to think about.

Lately I find myself watching a lot of movies adapted from Jane Austen novels. Go ahead and snicker if you want to. There's something about Jane Austen that is very important to roleplaying, and it's the same thing that draws me to movie adaptations.

I have stressed the importance of getting to the issues that really matter in your roleplaying. To refresh, the idea is that what really matters is something about the characters involved. We are people, so what matters is people. With Austen, the stuff that matters is basically all there is to the story. There are no layers of machismo hiding the human emotions of the characters. We (the audience) are right there with the characters without emotional buffers. This makes the protagonists very easy to care about.

So what am I saying? Is it that we should all start playing Pride and Prejudice the RPG? No. But being mindful of what's important and focusing on that without getting distracted by the other stuff is definitely the way to go.

And before anyone gets all defensive about how what's important to them is different from what's important to me: you're right. If what's important to you is making tactical decisions that outshine your fellows, any Jane Austen game would be excruciating. I'm not really talking to you folks anyway--not because I think you are playing wrong or anything, but because I can't relate.

I'm serious. If I could play in a game that produced fiction half as fun as Casanova I would consider myself lucky.

Ignore the critics. Get your significant other and go watch.