Fear the Boot; Theory from the Closet

I just listened to Fear the Boot Episode 80, which I think was one of their best in a while. I always enjoy FtB, but this one got me thinking more than usual. They talked about how to get new people into gaming, and I had some ideas on how to expand on what they covered. I think I'll say more on some of these ideas in the future on this blog. (And co-authors feel free to do the same!) Assuming I find the time that is.

I also just listened to Theory from the Closet Episode 15. I'm a long way from caught up, but I'm also listening to them out of order. In this show, Thor Olavsrud was the guest, and he talked about "Editing for Game Designers". I learned more about the process (which was great) from a very active insider (even better), and it was a good show as always. I appreciated, for example, the list of things that would go on a "style document" for a game. I have definitely seen that I have to make those decisions, and I've been careful about being consistent, but I don't have a specific style document. If this works, and I do end up writing supplements and so on, I'll definitely need the doc to remind me of how I used commas, what I capitalize and what I don't, how I notate dice-rolls, and so on. I've been particular on all of those things, but being consistent is tougher.

I also had a slightly sinking feeling, comparing the ideal situation to my current situation writing Parsec. I'll definitely be leaning on my (wonderful, generous, gracious, brilliant!) friends but I would love to have unlimited time to work on this.

Then I realized that, if I did have unlimited time, it would probably never get finished. So the limits are also a blessing, because without them, I'd probably have nothing. Given that, work continues - I'm around 40,000 words now, and starting to actually put together what I might call an Alpha copy - for playtesting and sending out for first reads from the aforementioned heroic friends. It continues to be an interesting process, finding a middle ground between what Jolly Roger wants and what I want in a game (as much as possible - deferring to them), and also writing the damn thing, which, yes, is definitely still way harder than writing a novel (not that I've written a good one).

Even if it wasn't interesting, stubbornness alone will see me through at this point.

January or bust!

Nostalgia II: What Makes A Gamer?

Gary Gygax's Dangerous Journeys was the first rolelpaying game that I played as a kid. I remember a trip to the bookstore - my parents felt like they should feed my book addiction with library and bookstore trips now and then. I was wandering the fantasy/sci-fi section, having just been turned on to this kind of stuff by Hobbits, Narnia, Earthsea and so on. There was this little section that stood out on the bookshelf, of larger books. One of them was the one pictured above.

I got the book and read it over and over, trying to figure out what the heck it was about. It took me a little while to figure out how a book could also be a game. It came packaged with two little ten-sided dice in shrink-wrap (I still have them, actually) and after a bunch of readings I finally caught on. Dangerous Journeys starts off with Mythus Prime, which is a very simplified version of the Mythus system. The other three hundred or so pages of the book, small print, double columns, was the full Mythus system in all of its convoluted Gygaxian glory.

So a weekend came up when we went camping, and as usual I brought along a friend, and I talked him into playing this game. It was goofy and absurd in every way that a game run by an middle-school kid would be, but we both had a lot of fun. We gamed an entire day, afternoon and evening by. People were worried because we just sat in the tent and played this game. We intuitively knew that it would be almost impossible to explain to my parents and their friends, so we probably didn't make a lot of sense when they asked. By the afternoon, though, they were all pretty drunk, so they liked that we were quiet, and when it started raining, we had something to do to keep ourselves occupied.

I got to thinking yesterday - what would have happened if I never found this book, if I never decided to give it a try? Is a gamer geek born, or is a gamer geek made? At this point, I can't imagine not gaming for any length of time. I can get by on MMORPGs the way prisoners can get by on bread and water, but they aren't real sustenance by comparison. Reading and writing stories and poems and nonfiction is also great, but not enough by itself. But would I have felt this way regardless, or is this the person I've become?

Part of why I am wondering this is because I wonder how someone gets into gaming in the first place. Is it a natural affinity? Or do you have to be sold on it (by a book, a friend, etc.)? I also talked to my older brother on the phone about Parsec last night, and gaming in general. He's past the point where he's worried that I'm going to Hell, it seems, but he still doesn't really get what it is that I enjoy doing so much.

Maybe its just one of those things.

Nostalgia

Yesterday I got a strange package from my mom - this happens sometimes, especially around my birthday, which happened recently. Inside, amongst strange thrift-store clothing and life-savers and a Transformers coloring book, was my old copy of Dragonlance Adventures for AD&D. Man, I used this book a lot with my friends Jordan and Nate back in middle school.

Its a classic of AD&D game design, with lots of details including fully statted-out deities. If you're eleven and playing D&D, what's more fun than finding some way to go to the realm of the gods and try to lay some smackdown on them? If you've already accepted things like the saving-throw tables and THAC0 as reasonable, you're halfway there already.

I remember devouring those books set in the Dragonlance world of Krynn, the main trilogy, the other main trilogy, the prequels, and the prequels to the prequels, and all of the other various and sundry books that they put out for kids like me to buy and read with our meager finances.

I think there's definitely a developmental aspect to gaming, especially for those of us who played for a decade before most people had heard of an indie game or a story game as such. An adolescent doesn't want to play in the same kind of game that an adult does, for the most part. At least, that was the case with me.

What kinds of things did you do in games, and what kinds of games did you play, when you first started out?

Design Journal 11: Playtesting

I'm still getting closer and closer to the first playtests of Parsec. As I work with that in mind I find that the problems that I realize I need to deal with increase exponentially. Its like whack-a-mole. However, I'm looking forward to some playtesting because I like improvising, and as I improvise fixes for rules that don't work, I'll probably come up with some good ideas.

I'm listening to the Sons of Kryos Episode 51 which deals with playtesting, and trying to absorb as much advice as I can in general from all kinds of sources.

To be really candid, I'm actually really nervous about this whole processes. Its one thing to write a game in your living room for months and think its ok, and quite another to subject yourself to comments from lots of other people, some of whom know you and some of whom don't. Its nerve-wracking. I'm not a lover of criticism, though I like to think I take it...relatively well.

I'm partly insulated by the fact that I'm writing a game for someone else. I'm still writing a game that I would definitely play and enjoy, but it is ultimately a game that I am writing as a freelancer for someone else. So I can just claim the cool stuff and pass the weaker stuff off :)

I'm looking at the various things I want to accomplish through running playtests and, hopefully, having helpful friends run playtests with other friends in various parts of the country. I'll also be having other friends just read through the text as it stands now and give me their feedback - both from gamers and non-gamers, since I want a wide variety of responses.

Here's what I want to accomplish:
1. Get some cheap copy-and-content-editing by having friends read through the thing. A significant number of them are at least as good writers as I am, and many of them are also avid gamers.
2. Work through the character creation system and make sure that it isn't broken - that what I'm thinking of is what comes across, and that the end result is a playable character that makes sense, has a story she's embedded in, and so on.
3. Iron out the various conflict systems, especially physical conflict (read: Combat!) because in true RPG tradition it is the most complicated system of rules in the game, and will also be one that will have a lot of mileage put on it.
4. Get more ideas and suggestions in the area of setting and concrete details. "About a hundred years in the future" could include a hell of a lot of themes, technologies, societies and so on. I have my own ideas, and I've been reading a lot more in futurism (the tech kind, not the art kind), but I want other peoples' ideas as well. (I'm also leaving a lot of setting material off to work out in more detail in supplements.)
5. Be provided with some examples to use throughout the text - currently they are lacking, and are definitely necessary. But I think that if I come up with all of the examples, then there might not be enough variety to help people better understand the system.

In conclusion: If you have any wisdom to share on playtesting, or want to read through the game and give feedback, or anything of the kind, please feel free to let me know. That would be awesome. Even if you can link me to a forum thread that's really helpful (I'm trolling forums for this kind of thing already) that would be great.

Design Journal 10: A Samurai Cuts!

In her book Writing Down the Bones, which I recommend to anyone who writes anything, Natalie Goldberg talks about how, when you are editing your writing, you must be like a samurai. Why? Because a samurai cuts!

I'm finding that is more true of fiction, but it is still true of game design.

It has been a unique challenge. Writing what is essentially an instruction manual, but one that people will want to read, which describes something you do with your imagination.

I'm now doing more editing than writing of new material. It looks like I'll ease past 30,000 words total in the near future. There's no question that given this amount of effort and time I could easily have written 100,000 words of fiction, but designing and writing a game is a lot slower going.

I'm still aiming for finishing the playtesting copies by December so I can send them out and run playtests myself. I'm nervous about it. Because of the time constraints on the whole project, I'll have to send out relatively rough material in some cases. I'll actually be depending on my friends' suggestions and the playtests to let me know if/how this whole thing works. My nagging fear is that I'll try it out and it'll...you know...suck. It won't be fun, it won't make sense, I'll have overlooked massively important systems, or created systems that are broken. And so on.

I don't mind editing, but I hate other people reading what I write, with a few exceptions in a previous Mage game and a current BESM game. I think many people feel this way, actually, but at the very least I do.

There are definite glaring weaknesses in the text as it stands now. Resources in general - money and equipment specifically - have no system that works at all. There is actually, at the moment, no fixed damage system for combat. And no recovery system once you're damaged. Maneuvering is a little shaky, and while I like the concept of "the initiative", I definitely need playtesting to see if my ideas of how it can work stand up.

Basically, I'm putting a lot of weight on playtesting and getting feedback.

But, I keep grinding away. I'm going to finish this thing, and hopefully also not fail any of my classes or let anyone down at my internship in the meantime.

Combat in Gaming

A recent experience with a pretty horrible D&D one-shot got me reflecting on rpg's, their history, central mechanics and GMing as a craft. Yeah, a lot of disparate stuff. This is gonna be stream of consciousness so go somewhere else if that bugs you.

D&D came out of tabletop strategy games. At its heart it always has been (and probably always will be) a combat simulator with some roleplaying elements appended to it. Sure, you can run a D&D game where roleplaying is primary, but you'll end up doing it almost entirely outside the system. The vast bulk of the rules, the massive energy of WoTC R&D and the preference of most of its players keeps D&D focused on battle. Hell, your character has a base attack bonus! What is it for if you're not whacking things on the noggin? Yeah, when you get right down to it, D&D is about combat.

Since it is the granddaddy of our hobby almost every other game out there has similar issues at heart. The Indie gaming scene of late has been fantastic about trying to put story at the center of their games and White Wolf has for a long time been working on more immersive story experiences, rather than hack 'n' slash, but a huge majority of games still include combat as a central element, or the central element of the game. Flip open almost any RPG manual and you might find alot of different things in there, but there is almost bound to be a section on resolving combat. And most players I know, even the hardcore roleplayers, wouldn't be satisfied with a game if combat didn't play a role somewhere in it. It's part of the genes of this hobby that the characters we play end up in violent conflict.

Partly, as I said above, this is due to where RPG's come from - tabletop strategy games. Maybe it's more profoundly anthropological than that. Maybe it's because the root of all games is the kind of playful interaction that teaches baby tigers how to be good predators. Maybe gaming itself is a way that humans have of preparing for warfare. Or maybe we just have such a hard time imagining interesting stories that don't involve violence because we are saturated with it everywhere else in our lives. Movies, television, novels, real-life - violence is a big part of it all. Most likely violence in gaming is just an extension of all that.

Whatever the reason that RPG's are so violent, it is worth having a look to see how much time and energy you put into "combat" as an aspect of your gaming. WoTC, for example, doesn't seem to even ask questions like "why are 90% of our rules about fighting?" Consider the number of man hours being spent on system design so that you and your friends can beat up some orcs. Consider how much time your GM puts into preparing combats (and it's ungodly with D20). Then think about how much time around the table is spent with the mat and minis out. Is that really what this game is about?

Is Wizards of the Coast Killing D&D?

My local game store, Gamescape North, runs a discussion forum for their customers and the local game community. Recently there has been a huge discussion going on about what WotC is doing with D&D 4th Edition. Check out at least the first post in the discussion before you read further.

It seems that WotC is not only doing nothing to support local gaming stores, but is doing multiple things to actively undermine them. Distributors like Amazon and Borders are getting D&D books weeks before local game stores are, and are able to order massive amounts of books and therefore sell them at less of a margin. Their announcement has also ensured that those 3.5 books will be almost impossible to sell over the holiday season.

WotC is also pushing this Gleemax/subscription model drawn from MMOs, which I think is asinine. As many have humorously pointed out, they'll be competing with their own MMO in that market - but it seems to be what they're intent on doing. To use their lame online dungeon software, you'll have to register unique codes from all of the books and expansions you buy - or else you can't use the rules contained in them.

They're also keeping third parties out of the loop on the OGL material. They claim that 4th Ed will be OGL, but I wonder whether it will be meaningfully so? As of now, since 4th is coming out, no one is buying 3.5 anymore and those are gathering dust on the shelves. Third parties are unable to develop new 4th Ed material because WotC is telling them nothing about 4th Ed. So I guess they just sit there twiddling their thumbs and laying off staff or something.

This is bad because the OGL has been great for the hobby. It has allowed an incredible number of creative people to contribute content and has spawned a number of new companies putting out quality material for d20. It looks like, even if 4th Ed eventually goes OGL, the time of rich contributions from third parties might be in a major decline.

Is this anything but a crass money-grab from people who have no interest in the hobby overall beyond their own profit margin? Sorta looks like it.

As I said on the forum linked to above:

Long-term prediction: WotC kills D&D, Hasbro realizes you can't really make money in gaming, and they sell the license to a better company as TSR did one upon a time, and life goes on. 5th Edition comes out at GenCon 2012 to great fanfare and huge paper-mache dragons. By then game stores have had to diversify somewhat, and the industry takes a while to recover, but the WotC D&D Reich has fallen, and we have our damn hobby back.

Rolemaster Express vs HARP (Again)

At the most recent event at my local gaming store, the owner handed me a copy of Rolemaster Express by Iron Crown. It is essentially a boiled-down version of their famous Rolemaster system, which I encountered mostly in the form of MERP.

Having read through it, my response is basically "Yup, that's Rolemaster." Its free, so if you want to get your hands on it, check out the Iron Crown link above and get a copy for yourself. Your generous local gaming store may also have a few copies to hand you if you ask.

There's enough in this slim book to get you acquainted with the rules. Its actually pretty thorough, with a sampling of races, spells and monsters as well as things like basic equipment and the combat rules and so on.

What really struck me, oddly, was the comparison between this free book and HARP, which is about twenty bucks as I recall. First, some of the art in HARP was also in this book - but what appears clearly pixellated and faded in HARP is dark and fresh in Rolemaster Express. It actually makes the HARP book look a bit like a zine that someone made by cutting out art from xeroxes of this Rolemaster book and blowing them up with a scanner or something. But I've already really talked about my frustration with a book that has unprofessional-looking art.

Its just that art is a major expense for the production of any book - and the art in the free book is better than the art in the book they're charging for. That's just weird.

If you want to convince some stingy friends to try out Rolemaster, though, this is the book to use. Its free and contains the basics of the system, ready to use. I'm not going to give it a rating, really, but I recommend it for that purpose.