Vampire 20th — Unasked Advice, Given!

Posted on March 22, 2011 by admin

Yes, there’s a new-ish version of Vampire: The Masquerade coming out. I won’t talk about what this means to CCP/White Wolf as I doubt I really know one way or the other, but the chance to say something about how Masquerade might be perfected is too sweet to pass up. It’s an open design process, so I guess I should break out headers and bolded text and tell Justin Achilli and co. how they ought to do it.

The Storyteller System

You’ll need to be gentle about the system because changing the base too much multiplies the effort by the number of child items. Still:

Do Something About Four Roll Combat: Attack, Parry/Dodge, Damage and Soak. Christ. Adopt Aeonverse Storyteller’s option for soak (and use the “heroic” mode for ½ lethal; aggravated damage needs more differentiation). Leave in a defense roll – otherwise, you end up with all kinds of wacky revisions. Damage is the other item you can get rid of a roll for, but purists will hate that, so leave it as an option, with a list of suggested base damage ratings that you add successes to in order to get a final total. I ran Mage like this for years and it was buttery smooth.

Multiple Action Rules Are Terrible: Easily the worst permutation in the system – worse than pre-Revised 1s wonkiness, even. The split action rules require you to pre-plan something the narrative treats as spontaneous, and makes players calculate a variable penalty – and doing even simple math to screw yourself sucks. I ran it where I just asked players to determine if they were taking full, split or total defensive actions. If it was a split the first action was -3, the second, -5, with a cumulative -2. I’d limit the total number of actions you can get this way to your Wits. Total defense is a cumulative -1 to parry/block/dodge starting from the first attack. A full action has no penalty.

Bottom at 3, Top at 9, Please: Get rid of difficulty 10 or 1-2 rolls. They don’t work. Mage Revised modified total dice if a difficulty went higher or lower. Use that rule. It’s better.

Make Health Easier to Track: Right now it’s a pain in all iterations of Storyteller/ing. Have I taken slashy, X-y or starry damage? I suggest you break it into separate bashing/lethal/agg tracks, where less severe damage rolls over to more, and the most severe damage type automatically fills boxes in less severe types. I can diagram this if anyone wants to know more.

Do Not Get Suckered into a Combat Framework for All Social Stuff: Only losers think picking up ladies and gents is like punching people in the face. Romance and many other tasks should be teamwork oriented, where characters combine successes to meet a threshold. Vampire bitchiness is combative, but it should be viewed as part of a different social framework.

Vampire Systems

Don’t You Touch Humanity: It’s a classic system. Do not apologize for it. Make it a bit more user friendly, maybe. I think the theft sin is poorly contextualized (“bread I steal lest jerk I become!”) but that’s it.

Differentiate Between “Extra,” “Important,” and “Supernatural” Humans: Some Disciplines automatically do things to humans, leading to arguments over para-human characters and other PC types versus the shmoes we know they’re supposed to affect. Serpentis should paralyze the average guy with no roll, but exceptional types need rules, too. This also gives you the ability to be more liberal with no-roll effects versus Extras.

The Celerity Issue: We all know Celerity is overpowered, and the Dark Ages solution of upping the blood cost doesn’t work. At the same time, I know people miss multiple actions. I suggest leaving the system as is with a sidebar with an alternate system that reduces multiple action penalties for physical actions and increases the maximum number of actions you can take. This engages the system through its “currency” of dice in the pool. For example, if Celerity 2 gave you 4 dice to put toward penalized actions you know where it stands compared to other systems.

Fortitude and What I Said Earlier about Goddamn Soak: Fortitude doesn’t work with static soak, so maybe you should just let it grant bonus Health Levels if you use a fixed soak rating, as you certainly should.

Watch Power Interaction: One of the great things about LARP by Laws of the Night (not Revised, which emulates tabletop too much) is the practical interaction between Disciplines and how they affect culture. You needed a Tremere to wake torpored vampires up. Auspex provided a disincentive for diablerie – until you got Soul Mask. This gave Obfuscate-bearing clans a certain reputation. Setites always pretended to be Toreador.

Vampire’s Setting and Other Stuff

World of Tripwires: Exalted does a great job mapping potential conflicts without letting them happen. I think this is a great model to go with. Provide access to all the major, smart metaplot conflicts as if they were current events and not “Year of,” remnants. Leave room for metaplot, however, since you may wish to execute it in various ways if this takes off – such as through an adventure path style chronicle.

Keep Uber-NPCs – and Make Them Useful: Yeah, fuck all those guys who feel the existence of powerful characters out there makes them unimportant. I’m pretty sure I don’t do public speaking like Barack Obama, but it doesn’t make me want to slit my wrists or anything. At the same time, Barry doesn’t fly up here and speechify my wife into leaving me. This is basically what bad storytellers use NPCs for in Vampire. NPCs need a “role” section that tells you what to do with them, and despite the current fashion, those things need not variations on “Give smooth handjobs to PCs to preserve their feelings.” STs should feel empowered to be fair or unfair in ways that help the group care about the story.

Create Signature PCs, Just like Scion: Scion’s ready to play signature PCs should be emulated in every game. I’d suggest an adventure series too, but you have limited space. Instead, you should revise the Transylvania Chronicles into a huge softback with significant rewrites.

Make Crossover Option-Heavy, Not Uselessly Vague: There’s no need for every line to fight for its interests/fans/pies, so instead of worrying that ghoul mages would be Far Too Powerful introduce multiple plot-hooky options for each collision. Nevertheless, you should identify the preferred option as far as Vampire is concerned for the sake of LARPers and other extended gamer communities.

Step into First Person: The game is 20 years old, so it’s time to introduce some straight talk about your experience with Vampire. Just keep it functional, so that we know what you were going for with such and such a thing, but don’t reveal everything. That would be no fun.

Timbrook is the Classic Vampire Artist: It’s true. The clanbook interiors are awesome. I guess Tim Bradstreet is famous, but Josh Timbrook is the artist I associate with Vampire: The Masquerade.

The Biggie

Respect Vampire: The Masquerade’s Game Design and Setting Design Merits: The reason Vampire: The Masquerade endures isn’t because It Was the 90s, or any of the other common wisdom that clusters around the false notion of TRPG design as an objectively improvable technology. It’s because it’s a genuinely good game that exceeded its predecessors in setting, presentation and even game systems. It didn’t invent dice pools and tiered powers, but it made them intuitive to use. Vampire’s character creation system is still one of the best in terms of sheer user-friendliness considering the detail you get out of it. The clans added social roles to character classes in a way that no prior game had succeeded in doing. V20 should feel like a vital game we want to play now.

Oh Yeah

If You Do This for Mage . . . well, I’m the best at Mage.

Posted in Tabletop RPGs: Art Without Prestige | Tagged , , | 18 Comments

Knights of the Hidden Sun: Chapter Four Developed!

Posted on February 21, 2011 by admin

Dorian Narr surveyed the dream of a world he would burn. He noted Ullat’s residential centres, granaries and other places where men and women exposed the mere humanity beneath their warlike virtues. Weak points. As he he considered his strategy, he heard steps from behind.

“Good. You’re finally here.” Admiral Narr rapped his desk as if acknowledging the visitor’s arrival. It was the same stone as his hand, his arm, his head. That head was perched atop a huge stone body. Dorian Narr was one of the strongest Golems in the galaxy.

The intruder – Narr knew it must be a Knight – merely glanced up with an annoyed expression. “Call off your fleet,” he said.

The admiral strode to his opponent unhurriedly, crowding him with his enormous black frame. The Knight was huge – what they called “ogrish” before the ogres became part of one Humanity – but the Golem was twice as big, with tusks a metre long and a double headed axe that might have been held by a statue in some temple to the dead Gods.

The stone giant chuckled. “I’ll burn you and dedicate the ashes to the Unspoken Of. And they’ll never know you existed.”

Narr readied the axe.

The Knight crossed 50 metres in a blink of an eye, taking ragged chunks of Golem stone with him: a wound carved with a blade of cold shadow. The dark, crackling longsword shed a cloud of rock dust as its wielder appeared at the far end of the room. Narr activated his concussion field. The Knight was faster than any human could be, but couldn’t outrun the wave of telekinetic force. It knocked him through two statues, so that broken images of the Archonate’s founders glared at him from the floor.

The admiral examined the damage and growled. Inwardly, he prayed – and felt the answer. A hate like a torch to detonate suns swelled within him. Silver runes on his body turned deep red. His stone chest heaved like a living creature. Bloody light welled to the surface, patching his wound, adding an exoskeleton of force and speed.

Narr pounced, axe guided by the red strength and inhuman rage. Every cut would have torn his enemy in two if the Knight had not twisted away, or responded with parries that only deflected part of each attack’s force – the rest knocked him from place to place like a doll thrown by an angry child.

“Why protect them?” The Admiral’s next swing narrowly missed the Knight and decapitated Loh Vess’ bust. “They’re pirates – outlaws too weak for civilization, and signs of our own flawed ways. The Archonate is fragile, rotten with suicidal mercy. It needs a war to refine it, to forge a crown to replace our rotten half-democracy. If crushing Ullat will bring that war, let it be cast into the fire!”

Narr lumbered forward to finish his stunned foe but the Knight’s long black blade vanished; a shorter sword and shield took its place, but still possessed the same pitch anti-glow. The shield held against Nar’s blows, but they still knocked the Knight to the floor. The Golem followed with a foot to his enemy’s chest, stomping, crushing.

“Righteous punishment. Purity through vengeance. We will not compromise what we stand for. What do you stand for?”

*          *          *

Holding the admiral back was like lifting a house. Secretly, Dinnik had always taken pride in his strength, but against the Golem he might as well have been a child.

“What do you stand for?” Narr chuckled and kicked again.

And in that moment, Dinnik couldn’t think of a response. Pain and doubt cast a haze over his thinking. Ullat was home to Roaa’s wprst criminals: murderers, terrorists and their allies. It was a pirate world, thriving on stolen souls. He remembered his argument with the Lords to let the Hunter Fleet have Ullat – even to sabotage planetary defences ahead of the attack. But the Lords sent him to save this world instead.

Dinnik kicked himself across the room and curled up into a ball. He felt a shattered rib float free as he raised himself up on one arm. He used the other to wipe blood from his mouth.

He felt a delicate hand upon his shoulder. The admiral’s charge slowed; a droplet of blood hung suspended in space. A sweet, amused voice whispered: “Look.”

His mind’s eye opened. He saw Ullat station; an enormous sphere with dozens of spider legs for docking ships. It shrunk to fit in the palm of his hand, and a red web erupted from it. He flew along its pattern.

He saw the connection to Amund Croth, the “poison snake,” inspecting smuggled weapons on Zythus. He followed a thread to Dread Richal, rogue runecrafter, torturing energy out of souls, and another to Bartholomew Deth selecting a world to ravage from a ghost display. Weapons, power, pirates – and a station to permit the transaction.

But threads didn’t just spin out of the station. Fine silver lines wove within, connecting lives. One bound Tadrith, maintenance foreman. He didn’t care what passed through station docks, just that they worked – and he got paid. His crowns supported a dozen relatives on the planet below: a clan elder, an artist. Young men and women swarmed the repair bays under Tadrith’s supervision, returning every “night” to tiny quarters, some made tinier still by children sharing the space. Dinnik saw them play in the bulkheads.

His vision followed these gossamer threads to the stars. Voices reverberated along them: “Leda, I’m still in this grey place, but I hope to see you soon.” “The shipment arrived! I’ll return soon with something for Grandfather.” “Made contact with Croth’s inner circle. We’ll be able to press charges soon. Say hi to Ricka for me.” “I learned this recipe from a Zythian gourmand, young lady! Finish your roots and I’ll tell you a story.”

The universe was bathed in silver. It dissolved Dinnik. He was a vessel for it, boundaries gone, able to take any shape to contain it.

Dinnik’s eyes opened. The Admiral’s foot was on his neck, falling in short, brutal kicks.

I stand for nothing. I am nothing.

Rhea was within him. She, the Original Darkness, able to contain anything. He caught the Golem’s foot easily. It weighed nothing.

I stand for everything. I am the darkness that embraces all light.

A short, quick, push sent the Golem crashing into the far wall.

I stand for perfect trust in Her as She trusts us all.

Dinnik rose up, kill gauntlets generating two black blades, saying, “I stand for everyone you’ve forgotten.”

*          *          *

Chapter Four was a real sticking point. This one talks about the Knights of the Hidden Sun organization, its enemies, and the setting’s overarching conflicts. Chris’ setting is extremely detailed, so cross-referencing dates and motives is extremely important. One tricky bit to consider is that the core villain of the game wears a few different masks. How do these plots interact with each other? What does that mean to the Knights?

From here on in, development is primarily technical, as I review the rules and playtest notes Chris has developed to adapt the Ready to Run system to his world. I look forward to it. My momentum kind of slowed down as I got interested in other projects and a bunch of things that have nothing to do with RPGs.

Remember that Chris has a blog and podcast based on Knights of the Hiddden Sun. I’m overjoyed to save the finished chapter, and move forward!

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What Tabletop RPGs Are Good At

Posted on February 17, 2011 by admin

As I’ve said many, many times, I think tabletop RPGs are particularly good at certain things, and that it’s usually a bad idea to twist the form toward things other media do better. An MMO-like tabletop game play experience is usually even better as an actual MMO play experience, and one thing better than generating a short story or cinematic narrative with a game is to actually write a story or make a film.

In my experience, gamers thick into the hobby love being literary, cinematic, or genre-y because they think (but might not admit) that tabletop RPGs are inferior pastimes, and that they need to redeem them by hitching them to more prestigious art forms — or failing that, to “real games,” defined as either popular games like CCGs or family games like Settlers of Catan or Monopoly. That’s the inferiority complex I talked about in the Suck article, and it’s driven much last two decades of RPG design.

Back in the Suck post I talked about three factors that combine to make RPG play experiences distinctive. Individually, they’re nothing special, but mix ‘em up and they provide the best reasons to play.

Place: Place is the sense of being in a fictional location. It’s the easiest part of the triad to nail. That’s the dungeon and hexes on the map, but it’s also about the relationships between places, such as trade routes, magical gates and war torn borders. Although RPGs focused on place early on, systematic work on place is uncommon, and often leans a bit too much on conceptual translations from video games (“zoning”). I think non-systematic work on place has led to a thick stew of ideas that newer systems fail to pick up — and since new game designers like to basically talk about how terrible what came before was, looking back isn’t usually a priority unless it’s for sentimental, anti-intellectual reasons — y’know, OSR style.

Society: Society could be the dynamics of a clique or a fictional nation — anything that helps us figure out what the fictional moral agents of the game think, do and relate to each other. Vampire: The Masquerade represented a huge step forward in thinking about society by using relationship maps and social rules that were gameable inside the story world, and not just in systems removed a step from the fiction.

The society concept has really degenerated due to systematization. Most social resolution systems aim for a false equivalence with violence, which is both sad and vaguely offensive (do I really “attack” someone to woo them?). This is not to say that social systems are bad, but they say things about the game’s world view.

In system or fiction, society sets expectations about the game’s values. My AD&D game’s social break points make mercy and negotiation central assumptions of the world, and leads to some powerful moments when enemies (like undead) don’t follow them. In Indigo, the anarchist command staff needed to present arguments that went to the mass of the ship’s crew. In Vampire, manipulating the rules of an Elysium or Conclave is a game within the game.

Time: Time — momentum in the story world — is probably the quality most in danger of being sacrificed to the gamer inferiority complex. Time is tricky, because we can let it just happen as something purely attached to character actions, but that leads to a hollow, repetitive play experience. Nowadays, people are so afraid that anything the GM does will make our inferiority-battered players feel even worse that nothing of consequence can be allowed to happen outside of characters’ pond.

Let me use visual metaphors. Conventional story is looking through a microscope. You can’t see much in that little circle, but you can see it exceptionally closely. Creators need to pack information into that tiny field, and imply things about the world beyond it, but rarely get to tell the reader that she’s insignificant because she can only see one tiny, bounded territory. You never want to imply that some microbes 1 mm outside the specimen dish are in the midst of this awesome epic that’s way better that the amoebic drama you get to see.

In RPGs, you stand up from the microscope, get a magnifying glass and look around. It’s impossible to build these contrived tableaux “on dish.” You’ll shove your magnifying glass anywhere! GMs have tried to solve this problem by screaming, “No, look at the fucking dish!” The newer, “indie” method is to create a tautology where looking at the dish is the only permissible form of looking, and didn’t you contractually agree to it, and isn’t asking what’s over there exactly like caning a child? One retro method is to talk about how In Ye Olde Days, Hexe I-10 Didst Hold Paramecia So Fierce,” and then boot everybody into the nearest dungeon, where the GM could constrain your vision again.

A dynamic setting allows things to happen that are not merely backstory, but matter to the world on its own terms — and yes, even letting important things happen to *someone else.* We do not do this to upstage the protagonists. We do it because we want the players to feel less constrained about where they point the spyglass, and so that they have the opportunity to create their *own* sense of importance. A world that’s all hooks is always less interesting.

Posted in RPG Theory | Tagged , , , | 11 Comments

Overcoming Suck: Geoff Grabowski’s Exalted

Posted on February 7, 2011 by admin

Damn, Stew got there first. This was a lot like the kind of thing I planned to post, so y’all should pretend it’s part of the post-Suck canon. I plan on following the Suck Post along two threads. The first is more work on the Toy Dogma (which should respond some of Bruce’s concerns) and the second explores games that hit the spot.

So let’s talk about Geoff’s Exalted. (I don’t know much about post-Grabowski Exalted, so I’m not covering it, or much about the game’s earliest development, since I wasn’t involved and didn’t have “good seats,,” as it were.) Exalted is one of the big original successes of the 2000s, and it took licks for it. (Remember this hilarity?) In many ways, it isn’t my ideal game, but it demands attention to such an extent that even when I didn’t play (and yes, I did play it), it influenced other campaigns, design thoughts — everything. Here’s where I think Exalted avoided Fail Era trends and improved upon its evolutionary roots in White Wolf’s house style.

Exalted is about something . . . and that thing is not “Remember this other, cooler thing?” When Geoff was developing Exalted he started every outline with a short description of the game’s themes and where they step into the real world as allegory. Everything anybody wrote for the line was in some sense a response to that. I can’t tell you what the allegory is (we were specifically told not to) but I will say that it brought more depth to the setting than it would have otherwise had.

Exalted is not confined to its central themes and allegories. Like I said, I can’t tell you what Exalted was about (unless this policy has changed — I don’t follow Exalted fandom because build-obsession makes me want to vomit). Geoff developed the game in a manner where he didn’t force compliance with his core ideas directly, but just laid them out on the table — deal with them, and see where you can go from there. This dialectical process generated a bunch of fruitful creative tension (and sometimes it was tense — Geoff was a bit of a hardass as developers go) and elaborations of the setting that are diverse without being arbitrarily so. And Geoff’s unwillingness to get to the point kept his own politics and game design concerns from crushing all difference.

Exalted doesn’t just reproduce tropes, it rationalizes them. (Note that I’m using “tropes” in the loose “recurring stuff” sense because that’s apparently what it means now.) Greek mythology! Anime! JRPGs! At first glance, Exalted looks exactly like the kind of elevator pitch mire I despise. Geoff put each of these in their place by teasing function out of each form. Exalts use enormous Buster Swords — because these are effective weapons after they’ve been magically modified. Solars suffer Greek tragedies for reasons that exist in the setting — and NPCs you can talk to. Geoff had quite a bit more worked out than got into the books, such as fairly concrete ideas about Realm military doctrine and baseline stats for a Wild Hunt party. Exalted does the trope equivalent of backronyms.

Exalted is post-metaplot, not anti-metaplot. There’s no metaplot in Exalted, but it’s not a stupidly static setting. The setting moves; the game introduces a number of possible stories that will move with or without PC intervention such as the Bull of the North, the Locust Crusade and whatever the Scarlet Empress is doing — more than simple hooks and triggers, but no definite events. It’s a good balance, though not the only one possible. This way, the game partly avoids metaplot’s problems without throwing out its ability to make current events as compelling as geography and backstory, or the power to immerse the entire fanbase. Exalted isn’t the only game (or supplement) that’s hit upon a solution like this, but it’s one of the better known.

There’s more in there to talk about (tell me about it!) but that’s what fits in this time and space. That’s Exalted, that’s  Geoff Grabowski, and that’s creative leadership.

Posted in Tabletop RPGs: Art Without Prestige | Tagged | 8 Comments

Uh, Okay

Posted on February 6, 2011 by admin

So, that article seems to have struck a nerve. Scattershot comments follow.

  • Plenty of this criticism is self-criticism, you know? I know y’all are used to a constant stream of self-aggrandizing huckster bullshit, but that’s not what this is about. I’ve done just about everything I said was bad.
  • Man, is it ever shallow to render this down to, “Let’s go back to 199something!” I’m not talking about how it would be cool to have 90s style metaplots. There are better ways to explore similar ideas, and new stuff out there, too.
  • You must let go of the idea that everything is a technical problem in search of an equally technical solution. Those of you who boosted the idea, who pored over novel systems and character builds — you had your decade to prove it, and you fucked it up.
  • My interests are primarily artistic, not commercial, but they include making RPGs accessible and relevant, things which might have commercial consequences. My comments are not directed solely at bigger game companies. That’s why I refer to “the hobby.” Your discussions about what’s popular among the greying set right now is maybe half-relevant.
  • Similarly, the idea floated by some that I’m a shill for “the Industry” is hilarious, given that I criticize the “toolkit” principle used at CCP/White Wolf, where the majority of my publication credits come from.
  • More is coming, but as I said to Jim Henley, the Big Canonical Essay is dead, and they don’t reflect how people really process things anyway — they’re attempts to provide founding dogmas for communities, and I’m not interested in building a community around myself now. You’re never ever going to get some kind of final structure from me. There’s no master plan, and all master plans suck. I think I’ll start by exploring the virtues of games that I think buck the Suck trend.
Posted in Tabletop RPGs: Art Without Prestige | Tagged | 3 Comments

The Wizard’s Divan

Posted on February 6, 2011 by admin

Imagine a bard telling one of those dying-tales where he plays the Dark Judge and addresses you as heroes standing before him in the Last Palace, your lives’ deeds arrayed before the court.

You know the ones I’m talking about. One of them might go like this:

“You see the wizard decadently posed on a gilded divan, leaning against patterns in azure and emerald. Devil-concubines attend him, gracefully avoiding the tangled summoners’ threads that tie their necks to his rune-tattooed wrists. The four war-caste cambions surrounding his luxuriant perch carry enchanted voulges.”

Then the bard sings your battle against the enemy, his spells and traps. In the end, Death sends you to the High Mansion. You win.

Everybody loves those songs. They tell old men like me that the Gods know our lives and no matter your fate, at least your life-tale is immortal, and enters court lore of those most silent lands. If you’re young, it tempts you to polish a few wall-hangers, give Dad’s hauberk to your burly friend, and test some goddamned dungeon or other.  Maybe you’ll buy a map to a byway in the Heron. These days, smart novices belay down one of the air-pits to bypass mined and looted regions. They say the first thirty levels are played out anyway. You want the real Black Sweat, right? Random encounters. Untouched stone chests. Death machines.

You’ll learn Stealing Strides and other thieves’ footwork. You’ll buy wine-stained sheets from a stolen grimoire, will some wyckfires by rote and call yourself a demimage, or take cut-and-thrust sword lessons from the bravos who duel drunks outside the Purple Bitch. I can’t condemn it; playing maze-spider deep in the Rock bought me a house upriver from the shit, didn’t it? I don’t even care about your skills – in the end, I learned that ambushes are simpler than any adventuring trade and more effective, too. Stab a man, a woman, a dog, a thing in the back without pause of doubt, and your fight’s mostly won. That’s why smart people turn bandit instead. Stay on top. Mug the experts after the crawl back from the Black. Then all you need is a good waylay, and maybe the gin to forget you did it to them.

No, I can’t say you lack skill, will or inspiration – just intelligence. Dungeons require quick, flexible minds. They devour idiots and shit their possessions as treasure for the next pack of bastards.

Think on that dying-tale passage. Pretend you’ve just burst in on the mage and his retinue. What tells you what you need to know? Guards? Whores?

It’s the divan.

I’ve seen it. It’ll be my dying-tale, I suppose. It was, what – eighty years ago? I broke down the door and saw it all lit by mauve-tinged balefire: sorcerer Colm Devilbinder and his servitors.

Real maze-spiders suck questions out of every sight and answer them dozen to an eyeblink. They don’t do it in anything like a linear examination, either; they skip to the meaty facts first. If they didn’t, something would eat or stab them mid-scheme.

The concubines are easy to ken; they’re spell-called, and tell us Colm’s at least a full Magus, skilled in the higher formulae. That explains the cambions as well. The devil-bastards’ parents assigned them indenture through the netherworld’s chain of command.  The polearms are typical affectations; war-caste cambions like big, intimidating weapons.

Does that make sense? Excellent – you’ll die with trivia in your head. You took the long way around, deciphering the scene in some kind of order. But there’s no time; you’ve either deciphered Colm’s fuck-bed or died.

The Devilbinder’s divan is something special, looked like it was carved and decorated to adorn a noble’s debauch-cottage. Sure, a wizard of Colm’s rank could probably conjure furniture by pumping a visualization full of ontic force, but he’d produce wobbly legs and ragged cushions. Imagination doesn’t replace artisanal skill. Can we blame his minions for the thing instead? No; the Infernal Host doesn’t do upholstery. Teleportation’s out, too. It would require a personal journey to pick up the divan, or a highly skilled sorcerer – one capable of building his own lair – to sacrifice his ambitions to act as a petty majordomo. Unlikely.

No. They carried it down to him. Servants walked it through level by level, probably as part of a whole caravan: four to a dozen men to carry, escort and guard Colm’s belongings.

That’s more than a few henchmen set to a trivial task. The divan implies the existence of agents in the upper world: operatives to commission craftsmen and bribe officials. No inviolate lord would let a sorcerer from the Black send minions to and fro without interference. Merely living Below is a crime, indicative of abhuman intent. The Devilbinder’s supply line must be a small creature in his bestiary of plots.

Nothing indicates the wizard’s power as much as this casual indulgence. No devil or artefact should intimidate you as much as the divan.

I remember. Colm regarded me with one arched eyebrow. He said nothing, but a beautiful boy-devil caressed his forearm and laughed at me. So I killed an armoured cambion, ripped my blade out of its sundered shoulder, and thrust for the wizard’s face. He twisted aside, but I still left a little red line on his cheek.

Companions charged to my side, readying arms and witchery. He sent the half-devils against us, made a great show of hissing and fleeing. Voncrov trapped them in warp-webs; Lonrae skipped in for the backstab. Colm escaped but we won small sack of gold, a wyck-knife and more from him, and we called ourselves hard spiders: adventurers.

I didn’t understand the divan.

He waited for me to marry Lonrae before he killed her. Devils can do it fast and quiet or slow and showy, but I suppose you know that from the legends. We were sleeping together. That was my old house – now it’s the rubble across from this one.

Voncrov probably avoided torture. He called the True Fire to his tower, blew himself up.

I saw men outside with sorcerers’ tools – iron wands, horned orbs. I dug one of the latter out of the ashes at Voncrov’s. It’s a tricky thing to send a devil-assassin for a long distance kill. That’s where the legends are wrong – you need handlers you can trust to follow and refine its bindings.

I knew better than to approach the Thane. Agents enough for the divan. Agents everywhere.

I wish my lesson could be rendered simply: something like, “Don’t underestimate your enemies.” No. The divan, the wizard – they imply a deeper order.

We walk past the Heron Tower and into the Rock, or any dungeon, and believe we pass from the known to unknown; from farms and trades and civilization’s web of labour to an Other, fecund from a black mire of history and magic, birthing treasure to pluck, horror to conquer. But there’s no secret wheel to spin our rewards, no divine hand weaving heroes’ opportunities.

We sell the dungeon our power and it dares us to take it back. The divan is our object and the wizard’s our man, as engaged with the world above as any smith, farmhand or aristocrat. If I was an optimist, I’d say Colm Devilbinder hides in the Black to avoid one truth: He’s part of us, among us, and we might win power over him through his dependencies. Tonight, however, I’m not that man, and I’ll render my converse thoughts:  We’re born in the Black and don’t know it. The sun and upper Green of the world’s a mask stone and darkness wears to calm its prey, the great lords are below, and we sun-people are puppets who’ve been taught to look up for strings – the wrong direction.

Posted in Single Shot Fiction | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Why Do RPGs Suck?

Posted on February 3, 2011 by admin

They do. You can feel it. I’m not talking about your personal island of gaming, which you’ll complain in comments is all you need, but the broad cultural enterprise of tabletop RPGs. Gamers flail around to and fro, looking for scapegoats, but The Other Guy, The Industry, and Those Guys Playing Games That Are Bad For Society aren’t at fault.

You bitch a lot. (I bitch a lot, too!) I don’t think it’s the for reason you believe it to be, but at least there is a reason. Let’s chat, shall we?

Steve Long recently blogged about The Licensing Trap and identified one perspective on the basic failures of tabletop RPG designers and the broader culture. The top games are now either D&D variants or media licenses. That can’t be seen as anything other than a collective fuckup. It’s my fault. It’s your fault. It’s especially the fault of game designers, editor-developers and brand/IP managers working at all scales of the industry, hobby, or whatever you want to call it. I’m sorry. You should be sorry, too!

I’m gonna lay it out in big, bold, simple statements:

The tabletop RPG hobby is suffering from creative failure. The reason your interest is either waning or oscillating more rapidly according to convention or forum trends is because few people are producing anything worth your attention. They’re giving you retreads (clones), destroying the powerful contexts in which their prior creations exist (toolkits) or providing empty, easily discarded novelty (story games).

This is a failure to refine the strengths of the form: social-matrix play within a progressive story world. The tabletop RPG form is good at a particular thing: the ability to move through a story world composed of place (sites where interesting things are), society (fictional people with coherent relationships) and time (events caused by the interaction of the first two elements, with and without main-character intervention). At its best, the form requires complex aspirations.

Note the relative unimportance of game systems in this formulation. That’s why Amber Diceless Roleplaying works, for instance. Yes, that does mean that the epic arguments of crunchy game design are pretty much orthogonal to how tabletop RPGs engage people over the long term. It’s also why livejournal-y fandom RPs have essentially claimed the grassroots interest in roleplaying in a way that every attempt from inside the rotting TRPG hobby has failed to do.

Most new game designs take it as axiomatic that tabletop RPGs and their players kind of suck, and the hobby is shameful. The last decade and a bit of RPG design has suffered from an internalized inferiority complex that rejects what tabletop RPGs are good at in favour of either aping other media or, in an expression of disdain for self and audience, simplifying its creative objectives to shallow, pithy mission statements: shit like “hexcrawls” or “Actor Stance Narrativist.” It’s all the same symptom, and it’s all failure.

This state of failure is over a decade old. Gamers recognize the hobby’s problems now, but I think the basic patterns were established by 1998. D&D 3e and the “back to the dungeon” ethos was an expression of this failure. Shallow aspirations produce new editions faster.

This creative failure is systemic, and makes even talented people create shitty stuff. The insidious thing about the state of game design now is that it ruins the talents of smart people. Pathfinder’s fantasy setting, Golarion, is an example of how smart, talented guys can be coaxed into producing mediocre content under poor creative leadership. This is inherited from WotC doctrine, which blends the ideas of a bunch of cool people with the concerns of a bunch of boring people to produce a grey slurry of the utterly expected — like OMG Eberron is magic steampunk! And has dinosaurs! And racist pseudo-Africa! And other leftovers! Fuck!

This failure is a collapse of leadership in favour of networking. With the release of D&D3e, Ryan Dancey put forth the reasonable argument that you ought to carefully investigate what your customers want and give it to them. Unfortunately, this is wrong, though seductive — with online feedback, it doesn’t feel wrong. You can toss Lovecraftian homages and TVtropes bullshit all day long, and they’ll eat it up — and then they won’t, and you’re left holding the bag — well actually, a deep discounter is, isn’t he?

The reason this happens is that when you keep making things people could have made for themselves, the people eventually notice. Blather about going Back to the Dungeon for long enough, and somebody’s bound to figure out that they can go all the way back to 1979 and not care about you any more.

Designers and companies are complacent, and let this failure compensate for and amplify their weaknesses. Giving people what they want is easy and lazy. Relying on our subculture’s motifs is easy and lazy, and made more compelling by the self-hatred the infuses the hobby, and makes it reluctant to explore its true distinctiveness. This complacence has become an infection, and led to laziness in areas beside conception. For instance, a great many games and supplements are obviously influenced by the designer’s poor writing stamina, non-budget, or inability to get a functional gaming group together. There hasn’t really been a revolution in the efficiency and focus in game writing/design. There are people who don’t have the mix of time, money and talent to make longer games — and when they get the time and money, notice how those games grow (example: the Dresden Files RPG).

The Fix: The hobby needs creative leadership again. It needs communities that are fundamentally interested in something more than defending bullshit minutiae about some sub-scene that nobody who doesn’t play RPGs cares about.

At the same time, that creative leadership needs to own its heritage and the hobby’s natural strengths — the power to create histories in our imaginations and more — and celebrate the eccentric things that grow from it.

Celebration is not a set of weak callbacks. It isn’t “retro.” You don’t go back to the dungeon. You ask why anyone would want to go to the dungeon for the first time, and how that’s different from a generic Hero’s Journey.

Creative leadership isn’t about tools or thematic foci, either. Those things are ways to appease people who are already on the inside, and they already know how to make everything you made for them unless you apply serious sweat and complexity.

Look at Amber again, for example. Amber has everything that’s supposed to be terrible in modern, Fail Era gaming, with important antagonistic jerkwad NPCs. If somebody designed it now they’d probably fall over themselves apologizing about how Gerard can kick your ass, and post on RPGNet about how It’s All About You and elsewise rip their own dicks off to appease the fans about a million times.

That’s why they wouldn’t design it. That person (who in this thought experiment is not Erik Wujcik) would design some lame system for building societies because a rules framework would look more fair. But they people who would really want it would have been able to tweak the Amberites to their liking anyway. The whole endeavour is a stunt that manages to alienate novice gamers (who want actual NPCs instead of tinkertoys) while having little value to the experienced grognard.

Creative leadership is about making things that are unexpected, that require more effort an ingenuity than the average hobbyist has time, energy or talent to muster. It’s about concrete contributions to story worlds and relationships, and it’s bold — sometimes it says things some people don’t want to hear. That’s okay; it;s better to make things that people want to respond to for longer than the 90 day sales n’ buzz cycle.

My earnest wish for 2011 is for the hobby to demonstrate some of this — to stop its self-hating pixelbitching trip, to end the Fail Era of the last decade, step up, be proud of itself, and unflinchingly ask how it can do more of what it does best, instead of apologizing for, yet repeating the stupid shit it does the worst.

Do better.

Posted in Tabletop RPGs: Art Without Prestige | Tagged , | 120 Comments

The Hundred Millionth Day: Savage Lives

Posted on January 27, 2011 by admin

Last Tuesday we finished the 16th session of The Hundred Millionth Day, my increasingly modified, dying earth genre AD&D 1e game that, Dear Reader, is still probably more true to the original rules than your favourite retroclone or whatever. In fact, it’s more true to the rules than any AD&D1e game I ran or played in back in the old days.

Yeah, I was doing formal actual plays last year. Fuck that. I got bored. You know I never liked doing it.

We’re hitting the moathouse from The Village of Hommlet. There’s no village — instead, the local thieves want the party to reclaim the place, as it used to belong to them. They’ve heard about the mythic trow and their agents, and some contest with Colm Devilbinder, an insane wizard from the local megadungeon, the Heron.

I started out this campaign by putting my trust in Gygax not out of any sense of nostalgia, but to see exactly what I was missing when I learned to play D&D as a kid. I wanted to let the text guide me past the expectations I built up about what AD&D was.

Totally worth it.

Now that the characters are going strong at levels 3 to 4 and they’re zeroing in on the lair of Lareth the Beautiful, I have to admit that in places, I’ve been too lazy to implement some of the most important stuff consistently. For example, I’m spotty about weapon vs. AC, even though it really changes how combat works, and I need to keep remembering that Eileen’s dart attacks happen first and last, and on her action. Most AD&D games never used these, and I understand why AD&D1 fans want to think they don’t matter even though they really, really do.

But I’m not here to give unqualified praise to AD&D1e. It sounds strange to say, “It does amazing things, badly,” but it’s true. As I’ve said before, 1e’s systems are much better integrated and balanced against each other than many people realize, but they’re so burdensome that it’s just easier to take the hit to the game by abandoning them. Weapon vs. AC is one such example, because the modifiers are more of a pain than the weapon differentiation is a pleasure (and it really is a pleasure!). So my house rules have concentrated on doing cool AD&D stuff efficiently (and stuff from all editions of D&D — higher AC and BAB is just better in every way, and just add +4 or +5 to 20s and subtract that amount from 1s to get your precious tables, ‘nards!). I haven’t made it to weapon type or initiative phases yet, but I did do the social systems.  They make AD&D a completely different game, where characters struggle to win loyalty and destroy the enemy’s confidence because they know that social break points exist at every turn — and they aren’t conflicts that work like the “social combat” or skill-check-y thing people are used to.

(Think about the implied values of social conflict systems for a second. What is love in a game like that? How do people fall in love? How is a roll that represents enforcing your will upon someone to make them love you not creepy?)

Anyway: the moathouse.

The adventurers had cleared the bandits before making their escape and camping in the bush. They fought off a hobgoblin ambush on the way back, defeated it, and crept back into the Black Chamber where they’d fought before. They found a secret door there and through it, descended to an antechamber: a  treasure hold the thieves mentioned in their briefing, and noted on a map. But the thieves didn’t mention a second secret door leading from the antechamber to unmapped regions — and that’s where the party went.

They stabbed ogres to death, hacked at rats, and found a secret room. Pressing on, they slew a troop of bugbears before retreating to that room to “camp:” a restless affair that included encounters with another ogre, the sound of dead things walking, and more rats.

They got up and took the other way in the junction. They met the gnolls.

The fight was one of the best I’ve ever run. I won’t do justice to it in writing. The adventurers started with some early, fast kills, but they took a few hits too, and slowly, steadily, attrition from axe blows got the better of the heroes until, with multiple characters bleeding out and two gnolls left, Quareth the druid dropped a Charm Person and ended the fight.

This was a big deal because I use social systems constantly, but this time, the gnolls didn’t flinch when their leader (who the PCs targeted to induce a break point) went down. No quarter was asked, or given until the druid’s spell. The module said the gnolls responded to parley attempts but would otherwise fight to the death, so that meant not morale checks, and turned the battle into a toe to toe meatgrinder — a huge change from our normal fights. If I hadn’t set up expectations and then broke them, it wouldn’t have been anything special. If it was many bog standard D&D games, the gnolls would always fight until killed, or until “bought off” with a skill challenge. Not here, mofos: when folks don’t surrender, that’s a big deal.

The charmed gnoll and his companion stood down, provided directions to an alternate exit that emptied into a valley 400 yards away and agreed to leave in peace. The adventurers crept back the way they came and (after an overlong play-DM negotiation about how hard it would be to find it — sorry!) snuck back through the alternate entrance.

Now they’re back in, facing off with some ghouls, and ready to hit Lareth the Beautiful. It’s Halloween in the far future, too. Awesome.

Posted in Tabletop RPGs: Art Without Prestige | Tagged , | 1 Comment

A Lazy New Year

Posted on January 23, 2011 by admin

I took some time away from blogging to other things, and nothing. Sometimes, doing nothing is a virtue. Regularity, reliability — too often, these are the things that lead to dull-ass blog series designed to boost your searchability, and soon enough you’re reposting Cracked.com and Reddit content and generally making the Web stupider. I had ideas, but I wasn’t interested it blogging all of them. At one point in my career I created content for about 20 different blogs simultaneously and produced about 2000 words of Web content a day, so I can comfortably say that there’s more than enough thin stuff folks fluff with known SEO-friendly techniques. There’s no need to add more.

On the other hand, I have been busy. I assembled a bunch of short stories to self-publish, (not conventionally saleable since they’re about gamerly things so I figured, what the hell) ran some excellent 100 Millionth Day AD&D sessions and caught up on a number of creative projects. A new supplement for Aeternal Legends is edited and nearly ready for layout, and I’ve been continuing to work on (the admittedly delayed) Knights of the Hidden Sun.

Anyway, I feel like writing now, so here we are! I’d like to tackle the question of creative leadership in tabletop RPGs because I think it’s a major factor in the bad stuff. I’ll do more Toy Dogma, write about more about the 100 Millionth Day game, (I’m three sessions behind and after a recent, awesome combat scene, the players want me to set it down) throw up more short fiction, and maybe talk a bit more about media. We’ll see.

Depends on if I feel like it.

Posted in Tabletop RPGs: Art Without Prestige, The Miscellaney | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Toy Dogma 5.3

Posted on December 17, 2010 by admin

Peer Mode

Definition: Peer mode supplements game rules and essential customs with goals and standards drawn from an imagined community (real or not) — so much so that the relationship with the community can overshadow play.

Examples:

  • The “golden rule” appears at this stage.
  • Gamers post to social websites asking what the “consensus” is about a game.
  • “Actual Play” becomes a ritual to legitimize a game or play style, even to the point where its representations of play are inaccurate.
  • A game group develops censorship and conduct codes and discusses “triggers” of upset, often in elaborate or ritualized detail.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade clanbooks lay out how you ought to play members of each vampire clan.

Details: Peer mode’s a real problem nowadays because it’s deeply tied to the Web. Before the internet, communicating outside of your group was a high-latency affair; you waited a month, quarter or year between inputs from outside your group — plenty of time to explore playcraft autonomously. Peer mode existed before the internet, however; close players are peers too.

Peer mode is where you start formulating what constitutes good or proper gaming beyond self-centred interests, but not within a larger theoretical architecture.  You and your peers muddle along, driven by whatever influences you bring into the game in a non-systemic fashion. You think of good gaming not in terms of artistic goals, but answers to questions. In fact, this mode can encourage a shallow anti-structural stance because your peers areeverything. “Just don’t be a dick,” is a common peer mode sentiment. This is an answer begging for elaboration, which it only gets in haphazard tactical positions: spot answers to questions, confusion and challenges.

(Lots of RPG theories are really peer mode tools. It’s a set of vague words used to develop tactical responses. Peer mode is also the primary mode used by marketers.)

If you say the internet expands your real time peer group, you’d be simplifying it; it really represents an alternate peer group that overlaps with people you really game with. This is occasionally useful, often disastrous, and can even represent a type of play related to, but not the same as, conventional game play. What we’re witnessing is a whole set of performances for the online peer group that don’t necessarily lead to better TRPG play. We now often mediate the interests of multiple imagined communities: peer groups we visualize as having certain tastes and responses that we want to appease. 

On a more positive note, peer play represents the first stage of normative play morality. While we never totally outgrow other modes, adopting peer mode represents the kind of maturity you expect from older teenagers and later. Valuing others’ opinions is essential to peer mode. Ironically, stepping up to peer mode away from the “wars” of other modes mean that we start thinking less of individuals, and more of “good” power blocs and what might impress them.

The best thing about peer mode is that this is where we start to think about breaking the rules for the sake of the group, but it isn’t essential to do so.

Here’s what peer mode groups need:

  • Referents: As peers concentrate on smooth interpersonal relationships, their need for specific objects to provide context only increases. They need to agree about things, not just about being agreeable. One of the easiest examples to look at is Mind’s Eye Theatre games, where details about combat and power use actually increase in importance despite the fact that it’s supposed to be a social game. This happens because fairness is important to most peer groups, and that value needs a firm context to express itself in. On the other hand, peer mode promises freedom from rules, because they’re a means to an end in the people, not the game. Nevertheless, groups need specifics to use as props in performances where they demonstrate how much they want to make peer play work. Groups in this mode often talk shit about game systems because they need systems to be “broken;” those provide an opportunity to demonstrate peer loyalty by “fixing” them.
  • Tactical Consensus: Peer mode relies on bringing people together to consider what they want on a case by case basis. These are not conscious aesthetic positions, but they can be organized enough to work with broad hypothetical scenarios. Make yourself understood by grabbing a referent, assign it some significance, utter a rallying cry and appeal to your peers. You need to fix a combat system, maintain discipline in Clan Ventrue, or promote your favourite system. You might ape an overarching justification for why you have these tastes, but at this stage it’s a ruse; you really want agreement.

Next time: Fundamentalist Mode.

Posted in RPG Theory | Tagged , , | 3 Comments