random average

Reading one of the 'Actual Play' entries on the Forge left me a bit... confused. Here's an excerpt:

We did a system switch: Spycraft to Wushu.

It's like the 6th game in the run, and we bailed on poor d20, which was boxing us in. My chief complaint about d20 I think is that it provides a lot of information about what a player and character cannot do. Your opinion may differ.

So anyway, Wushu. It's not for the lazy. No time to space out. You gots to be thinking up cool ways to earn those embellishment dice.

Our group really got into it by the end of the session, really riffing off each other's narrations, gaining embellishment from things that other players had worked into the scene.

I've bought and read Wushu awhile back , and it's a good, fun system. To explain the above
1. You basically have to succeed by rolling a number of dice
2. The number of dice are determined by your stats
3. You get more dice for coming up with cool stuff in the scene you're in

Not just personal stuff, like sliding down a banister into the bad guys, but anything very cool and like an action movie. You walk into the room -- and you add:

the camera is tight on my face, I'm wearing sunglasses and the fearful old man we're about to question... his cringing expression is reflected in both of the lenses of my sunglasses.

That's cool... have another dice.

Here's my confusion: SPYCRAFT DOES THAT. Am I crazy? Is there not a mechanic for getting extra action dice for coming up with cool stuff? Hell, you can get action dice just for being funny.

Hmm.

That aside, the thread (located here) did talk about the challenges of coming up with cool stuff all the time -- how much of a pressure that can be, but also had some good ideas for making that mechanic (talking mostly about Wushu, but it works else) work.

I have hopes of using some of that in the Spycraft game tomorrow, because yes, the game does have the mechanic but, being d20, the players don't naturally lean toward that sort of co-GMing narration.

I will do to Spycraft action dice was Stan did with the NPCs in Nobilis and encourage the cool thing.

Or I'll try at least. We'll see.

Side note: Something I mentioned to Margie yesterday that's odd -- I used to frame almost every scene of my games using the sorts of language that would most commonly be associated with movie and television action -- I used to really jones on the framing of a particularly cool image.

I don't do that anymore. Used to. Don't now.

Not exactly sure why.

Posted by Doyce at 2:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So for the last couple weeks I've been contributing the insanity of the Lexicon Of The Second Age, in which people are sequentially writing up entries on the Second Age of Creation for the Nobilis setting, following certain guidelines.

Once a few standard practices and guildelines worked themselves into place, things have gone swimmingly, and I honestly find myself looking forward to the next entry from the others and the next entry to write -- there's tons of stuff that's come out of the project that I'm already planning to use in my own campaign.

Today's "O" contribution was a little tongue-in-cheek (after several entries worth of Serious Topics) -- a time-jaunting band of heroes who spent the Second Age saving the world, doing good, and rocking out (a Noble tribute to the Hong Kong Cavaliers).

Good times.

Posted by Doyce at 3:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The 20' By 20' Room: Definitive Narrativism links to essays on the Forge (a rpg forum I won't bother to link to because you either already know what/where it is or, like me, don't find forums that useful) that define the current chic among RPG gaming theory -- the GNS model, in which gaming styles are broken down into Gamist, Simulationist, or Narrativist styles.

In short, the essays are fucking long. Here's the short version, because I am in no way recommending reading the bloody things unless you've got some time to kill:

• Simulationist = the character "fits" - its setting, capabilities, outcomes, behavior patterns, and so on, all reinforce the setting for everyone.
• Gamist = the character is a direct opportunity for player-strategy. Its construction doesn't hamstring the player (except with agreed-upon handicaps) and permits him or her to "Step On Up" (WeTF that means).
• Narrativist = the character's predicament is how the Premise is seen/felt, and what he does, and what happens is how a theme is realized.

Which, excuse me, is largely useless as a definition of category. I've yet to be in any group that doesn't shift wildly from one of these 'styles' to another from session to session or moment to moment. This leads me to believe they aren't that useful as a definition of play, player, or game styles.

Let me be clearer: if you make up a category, and nothing entirely falls within said category, it's a shite category. (Take My Life with Master for a quick example: It's Simulationist, because the character 'fits' and demonstrates the feel of the setting, it's Gamist, because the game itself is eventually going to come down to the resolution you're aiming at for your character, and your actions will be somewhat determined by the goal you have in mind... some folks start off from the beginning working toward a goal, some folks only get an idea of what they want near the end, but most anyone will eventually work towards getting their Attributes in line with a goal. Finally, it's Narrativist, since each character's predicaments explore the theme of that particular game (particularly true of MLwM).

Of more use are the concept of Bangs:

Bangs are those moments when the characters realize they have a problem right now and have to get moving to deal with it. It can be as simple as a hellacious demon crashing through the skylight and attacking the characters or as subtle as the voice of the long-dead murder victim answering when they call the number they found in the new murder victim's pockets.

[further]

Bangs are always about player-character responses. This is why Bangs are not represented by many of the fight scenes or clues in traditional role-playing. Throwing mad hyenas at the player-characters is not a Bang if the only result of the fight is to wander into the next room. Nor is a clue a Bang if all it does is show where the next clue may be found. A real Bang gives the player options and requires his or her decision about how to handle it.

I would submit that a 'clue' that gives out enough detail to provide the character with several options about how to deal with what's going on isn't a clue but a revelation... but that's a nit. Anyway.

It also defines a couple common terms seen on the Forge: Fortune-at-the-End and Fortune-in-the-Middle.

Fortune-at-the-End: all variables, descriptions, and in-game actions are known, accounted for, and fixed before the Fortune system is brought into action. It acts as a "closer" of whatever deal was struck that called for resolution. A "miss" in such a system indicates, literally, a miss. The announced blow was attempted, which is to say, it was also perceived to have had a chance to hit by the character, was aimed, and was put into motion. It just didn't connect at the last micro-second.

Fortune-in-the-Middle: the Fortune system is brought in partway through figuring out "what happens," to the extent that specific actions may be left completely unknown until after we see how they worked out.

Now, unlike the GNS thing, I can see this in any number of games, and generally a game is either of one type or the other... therefore, it's more useful as a categorization, simply because most games fit in one or the other of these two boxes.

One bit I found amusing in the Narrativist essay was a bit of discussion on groups who think they're sharing a game of cooperative story-telling when what's really going on is a sort of group self-delusion that the story simply ... "arrives" as a result of playing... that no one's really moving it -- like that pointer on the Ouija board.

What I see from such groups is the following:

• They use a highly customized house-version of a given rules-set, usually AD&D, BRP, or an early edition of Champions; many of the customized details are unrecorded.
• They employ a personalized set of subtle cues and expectations that arise out of their long-term friendships and habits of play.
• The satisfaction-moments are rare to the extent of being perhaps a yearly event. "Nothing happened tonight" is typical, but the group believes that you don't legitimately get the cherished moments any other way. Such moments are treasured and carefully repeated among them.
• Rarely, another person participates and (horrors!) actually overtly moves the story around, or discusses how it's being moved by everyone else, who are trying to pretend that story 'just happens'. That person is instantly ejected, with cries of "powergamer!" and "pushy bastard!"
• They're socially isolated from other role-players, as their play is so arcane and impenetrable that no one else can easily participate. If they go to cons, they go together, stay together, and leave together. One of them buys a new game that "looks good," and they rarely if ever try it, always rejecting it when they do.
• They're socially isolated not only from gamers, but from everyone, insofar as their hobby is concerned. Forget social context; it's just these guys, aging, playing their tweaked versions of the game, reminiscing about that one awesome time when character X did that awesome thing.

Not to be unkind, but that's about 90% of the Amber games I know of, counting my own.

Posted by Doyce at 9:48 AM | Permalink

RPGnet: Review of HeroQuest

Posted by Doyce at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Weekend games on the Game Calendar updated through May -- Friday games to be updated soon.

I'm liking this tool a great deal.

Posted by Doyce at 3:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 82: Three Word Summary

Sum up one or more games that you GM or play in 10 words or less. (Three is best, but not everybody is that pithy.) Don't restrict yourself to current games if you have great ones in the past.

Starting with current and working backwards:

Chrysalis A: Creating Party Central

Chrysalis C: Excrucian Target Practice

Necropolis: God! You people...

Spycraft: Jess' gonna kill me.

DCM (DnD): Everyone roll initiative.

OA: Grandpa's damn Quest

Prince of Alderaan (Star Wars): Roll Sense Motive

TiHE: Don't trust Unicorns

Posted by Doyce at 12:49 PM | Permalink

A long email exchange on magic in rpgs -- not a lot that resonated with me, but I did want to refer back to this passage, which touches on a possible problem I'm having in Nobilis (and possibly other stories).

Emphasis mine:

... [I am] against taking magic for granted, relying on the system, instead of trying to elicit that which the system is designed to facilitate. Relying on the system has the paradoxical effect of making the magic both more and less real: on the one hand, it removes everything from the realm of concrete action and physical description, distancing everyone from what’s really going on; on the other hand, by invoking rules, one lends an air of authority if not verisimilitude to the proceedings. “I’m using Waters of Vision to try and see what’s going on” implies that the magic is real*; “I’m peering into the water in the bowl on my dresser to see what I can see in the ripples” leaves crucial room for doubt and ambiguity**.

(The paradoxical epistemology of rpgs: precisely because they are so subjective—based almost wholly on the subjective cause-and-effect dialogue between players and referee—they end up being much more objective than the real world.)

* -- "Real", read "measurable and solid", which is so antithetical to the idea of what magic is in most settings that it makes Magic into Not-Magic (Technology). Magic in DnD (and in virtually every other RPG out there), for instance, is actually Technology -- very reliable technology, come to that.
** -- But lends a solidity to the act itself. Compare "I do a Divination of his location." to the actual concrete actions described in the example above: which one immerses you in the world of the character more? Which allows (or forces) a certain emotional separation from the scene?

This all goes back to a problem I choose to perceive in the Nobilis games I'm running, in that most of the sessions fail to have anything resembling a mythic tone to them. I know that most of this lies with me -- to have a mythic feel, a lot has to come from me, and frankly I think most people of my generation are going to have problem with mythic thinking -- it's not what we were raised on, after all -- sesame street is a far cry from being raised on oral tradition stories and fairy tales at bedtime. My myths are those of Tolkien -- a magical world with very very VERY little that is overtly magic in it: a world with histories but not myths... myth doesn’t enter into it, and the closest thing to fairy tales are Bilbo's encounter with the Trolls and the regrettable Tom Bombadil (who really should have been in a short book of his own... preferably in a different world entirely).

And to top it off, I taught myself systems at a young age whereby everything that happens in Tolkien can be quantified (RPGs) -- just to milk that last bit of wonder myth out of it.

(Note to self: buy many books of fairy tales -- read them to children as they grow up.)

So, back on track, I don't necessarily know the imagery of myths, and thus my Nobilis games tend to feel more like (best case) an Unknown Armies game where everyone's playing an Avatar or (worst case) a Supers game.

Supers... the myths of our time, and more's the pity; though you can have mythic supers tales (cf. Hitherby Dragons), that's the exception, not the rule.

So, Question the First: how to think mythically? How to encourage the players to think/act mythically?

The other thing that is leeching the magical out of the Nobilis game is that I'm very focused on the rules right now, because I'm trying to teach them to my players -- so that even when they simply describe "this is my concrete and emotionally immersive action", I break it down from the subjective-but-immersive to the objective-but-non-immersive -- I'm very much into showing everyone what gears are turning behind the curtain right now, because I want them to see how the machine works.

My motives are good: I want people to know the rules well enough to be able to ignore them, but I'm beginning to think that that's not going to happen, at least not quickly.

So I think "We'll, we'll let everyone be subjective-concrete-immersive and I'll be the only one making sure the game system is being observed and everyone can just trust me that it's fair."

Which is fine, if everyone trusts me, and maybe they do. I'm nervous about that because I-the-player got really burned on that about a year or two ago and I'm still compensating for that in most of my games, trying to make sure that everyone knows I'm working with a fair and balanced rules set even if they never asked.

So, Question the Second: How to move from my current mode of "objective-non-immersive" to "subjective-immersive" to let people be engaged in the action, not the rules. Ideally, the goal should be that the players are always utterly confident that they did what they say they did, but unsure as to whether the 'magic' will behave as expected. This is easier, provided trust-in-the-GM by both the players and the GM.

What frustrates me about this is that I was DOING this (creating more mythic imagery and veiling the hard rules) at the beginning of the game before I really learned the rules, and I'm doing it less now because I'm thinking of them too much.

Posted by Doyce at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Interesting thoughts on why to decide your Estate last when creating a character in Nobilis, stored here for my convenience:

The crux of Tony's process is that the Estate is the LAST thing you choose when designing your character.

What it does (I feel) is discourage people from playing Estates and Affiliations instead of characters.

In my attempts to play Nobilis I have seen characters who seem designed to govern a pre-selected Estate. That's okay, but I maintain that it's only okay with careful consideration and balance. Without a critical eye, choosing the Estate first (from my experience) can lead to a more shallow and two-dimensional character. Why? Because the tendency is to create a character whose background is retrofitted to rationalize and justify why they were ennobled as that particular Power. (ie. the computer hacker who is the Power of Computers, the painfully shy girl who loves to read to the exclusion of anything else is the power of Libraries)

Or the abused child who grows up to be Affiliated with the Fallen or the Dark.. It begs the question of who wants to play an abused child and why? Is it just to rationalize why you're affiliated with the Fallen or the Dark- or because it's truly part of the character?

The London cabbie who is the Power of Coincidence is more interesting in my opinion, because he was somebody before he became a demi-god.

Now someone will fairly argue that Imperators might select some one to steward an Estate based upon their interests and predilictions. I'll grant you that. I do maintain that it leans towards to a more contrived character, but no - not a guarantee; this is a generality, not a hard and fast rule.

The only note I will add to this is that, in my limited Nobilis experience thus far, I've had the most 'problems of two-dimensionality' with the characters whose backgrounds were designed around their (eventual) Estate. I love everyone's characters, but them's the facts.

The old Amber-ism of 'make up the character you've always wanted to play' works pretty well here. (Hell, in any game, come to that.)

Posted by Doyce at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As I've mentioned before, I sometimes miss things that are going on with the players in my games.

Back in TiHE, I used to periodically take a poll of everyone to see how they thought things were going -- a feedback sheet if you will -- but I stopped doing that after awhile because, well, I've been playing with the same basic group since about 1997 or 1998 now, and I figured I'd... y'know... KNOW.

Also, when I look at campaign I'm running, I have a general idea of how things are going... who's doing what, who's 'getting somewhere' and who isn't, et cetera. Generally I think that's pretty accurate, since I've got the bird's eye view of the world.

For instance, in the Chrysalis C campaign, Fungus is the Investigator -- she's the one who has made the most progress in figuring out the (*counts*) two or three main mysteries of that group's storyline -- she's had to fight tooth and claw for every bit of info, but she's essentially the one who's gleaned 90% of what there is to glean about the mysteries that affect the group-as-a-whole. Conversely, Sian has gotten the most tangled up in side-stories and personal drama, and Mariska and Lil' Doc fall somewhere in between.

Tonight, Margie presented her POV of the Nobilis game to me... which essentially amounted to exactly the opposite of what I just said: Fungus gets nothing done, and all sorts of things happen to Sian. (Actually, I guess that's not wholly opposite of what I said, it's just a really surprising summary -- Fungus has a lot of info s/he hasn't acted on yet, and while lots of stuff happens to Punishment, none of it is GOOD stuff :)

Obviously, I think I need to go back to polling people.

Posted by Doyce at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Random Name Generator

I want this thing on my palm.

Posted by Doyce at 3:48 PM | Permalink

The makers of the Historic Tale Construction Kit have taken various bits of art and lettering from the Bayeux Tapestry and loaded them into a web-based application that lets you use the elements to create your own story. No, really.

I want to use the to retell the Miami Breakthrough or something :)

Posted by Doyce at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Game Wish asks:

What do you think is the best cast size for the games you’ve played? What are the factors that go into your answer: genre, play group, gaming system, etc.?

The simple answer is "four or five players, plus GM", regardless of game system. Ironically, I rarely GM groups that small.

Right now (or recently) my group sizes were (NOT counting the GM):

• DnD: 7 (and too big, really)
  
• OA: 4.5 (with .75 npcs)
  
• Nobilis: 4, or 7, or 8, depending on how you look at it. I'm currently running two groups of 4 in a concurrent intertwined storyline on different days. While I might do a massive Group Thing in the future, doing all eight people regularly would drive me nuts and probably be less fun for most everyone in the long run -- that said, we started the Nobilis story with one group of seven.
  
• Pulp: usually six, which still feels big, but it's mostly designed for Convention play, so what're you gonna do?
  
• Star Wars: six, and again, that was really a bit unweildly.
  
• Amber: I ran TiHE with anywhere from two to seven people, plus the GM. We started with five and when we dropped to two I didn't know if I'd ever figure out how to run the game at that size. I figured it out, and it went really well for awhile -- it was just different -- then we added a few other people and it took me awhile to remember how to deal with a larger group.

I've got other games I want to run and a genral idea of how many players I'd want for each, but I'll keep all that to myself for now.

Posted by Doyce at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)