The Hundred Millionth Day, Sessions 12 and 13

Posted on December 15, 2010 by admin

They took four days to get to the old moathouse. They were mostly uneventful, save for an encounter with a small swarm of giant ticks (they rode away on horseback) and bombardier beetles as they climbed one of the rocky drumlins over the wrecked fort (again, they evaded contact). They were unnerved by the large insects but not the moathouse; after all, the thieves guild at Heron’s Rock supplied them with maps and a general description of the land. Soon enough they mounted the last ridge to look down on the ruin.

They made their way down at a careful pace, eschewing the front door to skirt the woods’ edge, up toward a spit of wreckage on the northeast corner. They passed by some rush-filled pools — and giant frogs jumped out, catching them unawares! (Quareth the druid observed that this should have been expected, given large insects — ecological balance demanded it!)

It was a short, slimy, bloody battle that ended in a few frogs dying, a few more fleeing, and one caught in entangling reeds — less that glorious, they reckoned, though intense enough to influence a later choice to retreat to camp early, as their servant Lon was the worse for wear for having his head wholly enveloped by frog’s jaws twice!

The decision solidified once Kaith crept close to their target. He saw interruptions in the light and voices indicating a significant number of human occupants. So they went back to their horses and stayed on guard. They heard bandits brazenly tromping through the valley in stark contrast to their daytime subtlety, but managed to avoid detection.

The next morning, as they broke camp, Lon went to answer the call of nature, and came face to face with a big, curious black bear. He nervously called Quareth over; the druid spent an hour binding the animal’s will to his own. Only then did the henchman find the bravery to pull up his chainmail leggings.

(Random wilderness encounter from the DMG1 tables FTW. The bear is now an Animal Friendship-enabled pet. It was nice to have a very ordinary animal show up. In case you didn’t know many, many events in the game are driven by those tables.)

With a calm bear following at a cautious distance, the party hiked back to the moathouse, bushwhacking, keeping low and slow to avoid unwelcome meetings. They went back to the rubble-spit. Kaith jump across, climbed and hid. He saw nine bored, quiet bandits inside. He surveyed the courtyard from the top of a wall and saw foot traffic from humans and . . . things.

Kaith conferred with his companions. Then they jumped and marched up the spit single file to kill the enemy.

Kaith knocked down a stone, ruining the ambush, but he still managed to take a neck with his sword. Lon followed behind, savagely cutting down a parrying arm, then the warrior it belonged to. Under the direction of their captain, four bandits gathered into formation, two with voulge and halberd supporting a short-weapon’d front rank. The leader cut down Lon (critical hit again – negative hit points!) and Eileen swiftly attended to his wounds.

Quareth cast Charm Person. The captain recognized him as a trusted spiritual advisor — a holy man in unfortunate straits! He called on everyone to stop fighting.

(I rolled a reaction from the other bandits. The captain elicited murderous rage from his men. But they were busy.)

The fighting formation concentrated attacks on Kaith, but the rogue parried and slipped all but a blow with the flat of an axe: a scratch. Kaith responded with deadly blows to two enemies. Eileen seared an enemy with a Magic Missile Quareth healed Lon’s wounds.

The bandits thought their leader was a traitor. They struck at him but failed to bypass his mail, shield, and experience — and they dealt with lethal blows from Kaith and Eileen, who switched from magic to darts. Soon, just two remained, both running out the door into the moathouse — and they fought each other along the way, since one was the captain and the other was an angry bandit. Kaith followed; Eileen and Quareth supported him with sling bolts and darts. Kaith tried engaging the captain first, but the wily fighter struck true twice, hard enough to make the rogue think twice. Eileen’s darts (long metal thorns — darts in my game look like this) were more successful, hitting three times.

With the last lowly bandit distracted by the captain he hated, Kaith snuck in a gory blow that bisected his foe’s heart from the back, and sent a shower of blood from his chest to cover his former boss.

(This was a backstab followed by a critical hit for 30-odd damage, inflicted on a 5 HP dude.)

The captain surrendered.

He begged for his life and offered to buy it in exchange for the treasure the bandits kept under rubble. He told them what he knew about the level below — that there were bugbears, an ogre or two, more bandits and the leader, Lareth: a “man not like other men.” After haggling over the ownership of a fine wooden box he did not want to part with, the captain thanked Quareth for teaching him how impermanent worldly wealth and fortune is. He skipped the joint to avoid Lareth’s punishment.

The adventurers left the way they came, moved camp and spent a day and night resting for the next assault. It was October 23rd in the far future.

Notes: That catches me up. The frogs were a nuisance encounter, but the bandits were a decent pay off, as the frogs provided some pacing. Plus, it was a nice coincidence the frogs and randomly-rolled bugs fit together. Weaving random stuff into the narrative has been tons of fun.

We’re starting to get into the “15 minute workday” that D&D nerds complain about, where characters retreat after each battle to recharge. This doesn’t bug me because it feels more real than eight hours of resource-draining “adventure.”  Traditional room camping and grinding may come up once they hit deep dungeon levels, but I don’t feel anything’s bad about fight-rest-fight except perhaps for wanting to tax spellcasters a bit more.

The bandit encounter was the first really balanced fight, since it took out one party member and seriously injured another (Kaith). Once again, social rolls inspired an interesting situation due to the three-way split between the party, bandits and captain. I think this turned the tide in the end.

I notice that I keep talking about “bandits.” I have real monsters ready for them, I swear! They just need to explore the lower levels more. I also need to mix up antagonist genders a bit to compensate for the 99% sausage party of 1e adventures — a situation I unconsciously replicated in the mountain citadel from prior sessions.

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

The Hundred Millionth Day, Session 11

Posted on December 8, 2010 by admin

Last time, our rogues fled from a chance encounter with a ghost. Kaith ran a different way from the rest, using his talents to climb and scramble. Aethelred soon discovered whence their lost, deadly sheep fled and led the others to his location: overlooking the very fortress they’d raided!

Now free of ghost-terrors, Kaith decided to scout the bandit fort; he saw some signs of disturbance even though their henchman Lon — a former bandit — said they had surely killed so many by now that the rest had fled.

(I figured party separation in Session 10 randomly, but we came up with the narration and location this session. I used a 50/50 roll to find out whether Kaith would flee back to fortress, because I thought it might be a cool idea, but did not want to override randomness completely. This play between systems and judgment is one of those things that RPG chatter is generally bad at articulating, though I believe it’s pretty common. It’s in Toon for Christ’s sake)

The party made it over the rise just as Kaith slipped behind the north wall. They saw him sneak there, and didn’t see him slay an inattentive orc guard. They scrambled down the ridge to catch up as Kaith switched from scouting to an improvised assault, a full melee with an ogre and spear-wielding orcs. The rest of the party helped him finish them off, and continuing further they killed the orc guards who attended a crude cage filled with sick mountain-folk.

They were rudely interrupted by a strange patrol of deep orcs and their tamed beetles, but as soon as they killed them, too (it was quick and efficient) they got back to freeing the prisoners, who were sceptical that adventurers — a tribe of known killers and cheats — had their best interests at heart. A few whispered amongst themselves that it’d be easier to kill and steal from these newcomers.

(That was me using reaction rolls, which indicated hostility, and then applying rerolls after characters changed the situation through negotiation. See my system here.)

The party calmed them down and agreed to escort them to the ridge. While this happened, close questioning revealed that the bandits captured them, but deep orcs (pale deep orcs, not the green hill orcs they knew and even traded with) took them away at regular intervals, never to return.

The adventurers led the mountain-folk partway home, then headed straight back for the Rock.

(Lon the henchman also graduated to Level 1. Eileen’s player decided he was a fighter, and found out via a Secondary Skill Table roll that he was also a gambler — one with some debts, we decided, explaining his eagerness to act as a bandit, then a henchman.)

(Oh yes: They levelled up again, due to the random assignment of an XP-heavy magic item: a Rod of Absorption. It was weird but not unbalancing, so I went with it.)

Back at the Rock they met with Liam the Perspicacious. The magus explained that he could no longer maintain the contract, as the Thane of Heron’s Rock had sent privateer outriders to “collect taxes,” and the whole situation was anathema to claiming mining rights over new dungeon entrances (and I, the DM, was tiring of hosing the PCs through Liam, though I strove to stop hosing them as rudely as possible).

Quareth returned to his grove congregation to meditate and share his tales with the bards while Kaith went home and discovered his old mentor, Thulbane the Spider, sleeping off a bender on his carpet. Bereft of wine stock and breakfast, the old friends headed out to find a remedy. Thulbane mentioned that the group of self-improving freemen to whom Kaith tacitly belonged (the thieves guild) would like to “give your friends an’ up and down.” So Kaith brought his friends to a meeting at the guild-run tavern, the Purple Bitch.

Thulbane had a job for them. You see, the mountain bandits were actually the waning phase of a small invasion of deep orcs and creatures into the eastern mountains, and the orcs retreated because another force, stranger and at least as evil, fought them head to head. Guild highwaymen fled before both sides. The invaders apparently didn’t have the stomach to raise more forces. They retreated — one side into the mountains to make an alliance with up-world bandits, and another to an old river moathouse. Unfortunately, this moathouse was guild “property.” The invading force had so far driven off or destroyed parties sent to reclaim it. But our adventurers were cut from tougher hides. Would they do it?

(Said moathouse was purloined from the Village of Hommlet! Aside from nostalgia, the cool thing here was to make maps for character use — the moathouse was the guild’s, so they already know the layout.)

Who were the mysterious newcomers? Eileen heard descriptions, synthesized rumours and realized (after her player rolled a natural-frickin-20) that the interlopers were trow: the mad dark elves of legend.

They pondered the threat and took the job on October 17th, far in the future.

Notes: I’m a session behind. They’ve actually hit the moathouse and tangled with giant frogs now. They still haven’t entered Heron’s Rock from the mountain bandit fortress, but that doesn’t matter; they’ll get around to it eventually. This session ended up tying up loose ends and “resetting” for the next major foray. My main failure was failing to integrate Quareth’s druidic animism. I need to flesh it out more.

I didn’t intend to give the trow away (I use the trow spelling because the dark elves’ name rhymes with “throw,” in my game, not “meow”) but I honoured Eileen’s critical success — in fact, I haven’t said enough, and need to give her player more information. The trow are different than standard drow, and I need  time to set them up so that the dark elves will be truly threatening and not a callback to Forgotten Realms stuff that isn’t my cup of tea.

One nice bit of drama was the dispute with the prisoners, which came entirely from reaction checks. It brought out great in-character moments from everyone as they portrayed their anger at ingratitude through the frames of their alignments.

More later. It’s too late for me to really be writing this. I need to sleep.

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

Steve’s Combat Skill Challenges for D&D4e

Posted on December 6, 2010 by admin

So tonight, we faced the red dragon that’s been our behind the scenes antagonist for the last year of the campaign. The dragon was really too powerful for us to defeat; the idea was that we were going to hold it off until the cavalry (the city’s top wizards) showed up. Our DM Steve decided to use a skill challenge instead of standard combat. It was pretty neat. Here’s how I think it worked (as a player; Steve might correct me, as I’m going from memory).

  1. Normal initiative
  2. Each “round,” (I believe time was a bit more abstract during this fight) make a skill check instead of an attack (this is basically your attack action). Narrate a cool attack. If you can work in a power, use it up and add +2 for an encounter power or +4 for a daily power to your role.
  3. If you succeed, add a success as per a normal skill challenge. Steve also allowed a bonus success if we hit significantly above the  DC, which in this case was 26. If I was to make it a rule, I’d say 10 over the DC does this.
  4. If you fail, take a set amount of damage or lose a healing surge — your choice.
  5. If the party allows a set number of failures to get through (3, in our case) everybody loses two healing surges and takes an additional penalty — usually a condition and/or extra damage as the enemy gets the upper hand. After a “big fail,” reset the failure counter to zero.
  6. Hit the target successes and you meet your objective!
  7. No attacks of opportunity, square-based movement or mapping, unless some stunt requires it.
  8. Healing powers, damage reduction powers, and powers that buff other people work normally, except that attack roll buffs add to skill checks if it makes sense for them to do so.
  9. Stunts that do not concern the challenge directly (saving another party member) are handled “on the side,” outside the challenge framework.

I thought this was a lot of fun. It had some rough bits, but it was a generally good system, bringing to mind the ability The Burning Wheel has to let you flip between detailed and quick combat. In this case, though, the fight was actually a bit more “special” due to its less detailed nature. I’d like to flip through 4e again and create my own version of this, but I’m of two minds about tightening things up. I think the fact that it was a “semi-formal” game system, fuzzy around the edges, meant Steve got to tweak it as we went and make easier snap judgements about what we could do than if it was set in stone. Then again, I may be biased because this fuzziness is something I value in my own GMing.

Posted in RPG Sketches | Tagged | 3 Comments

Toy Dogma 5.2

Posted on December 4, 2010 by admin

Egoistic Mode

Definition: The egoistic play mode uses both explicit game rules (usually a technical text) and customs of play (passed on orally or through non-technical text) to fix player roles and manipulate relative status between players.

Examples:

  • All games which assign the GM a miscellaneous authority
  • D&D’s fighters are expected to be among the primary close combatants in an action scene. When the fighter’s player accepts this role and performs well, the group approves. If the player has her fighter cower or she makes a serious tactical error, she’ll lose status in the group.
  • A game group falls into a pattern where one player is the leader, one is the jester, and another quietly serves a support role across multiple stories.
  • Aeternal Legends provides a system where system-defined expert characters get “first crack” at a task in order to keep non-experts with extroverted players from talking over the expert’s player.

Details: In egoistic play, the stakes are social status and role assignment. Subjection, which retaliatory mode thrust us into to make us feel pain and pleasure when game systems operate, turns into the target of play. Social status is what tells us how much we can quantitatively influence activity at the table; role assignment determines what type of influence we are permitted to have.

Social status and role assignment are closely linked, to the point where some roles automatically grant a status advantage. The GM is the easiest example to cite, because so many games give GMs sweeping powers. One of the classic mistakes made by other theories is to assume the conventional GM is just a degree of status, and get obsessed with the role as a power locus that needs to be controlled or broken up. But there are low status GMs and high status players, too.

In egoistic mode, roles tend to be fixed to particular players; the traditional player/character or person/player isn’t really up and running, so players tend to stick to roles in the group after a period where they negotiate (argue, stare meaningfully, write dreary basis of unity statements) for the choicest pickings in the set of roles everyone recognizes, consciously or not. This fixedness actually intensifies competition. People holding advantageous roles (party leader, “the chosen one,” GM) struggle to hold the advantage, while low-status players negotiate for power or subvert the significance of their roles, other roles, or all roles.

To make this work, game groups move from retaliatory mode initiation to instrumentalization: the process of making the player not just a subject to be administered by the direct application of texts, but as a tool for the regulation of power between participants — but this can’t happen until the group figures out two things.

  • Role Definition: It’s easy to identify the GM, but harder to figure out what the other roles are — you might slip into one without even knowing. The game’s text, gaming traditions and broader cultural borrowings all determine the cast of roles. For example, D&D’s character classes influence the roles that pop up in the game. But in Toy Dogma, the “fighter” is not a role — the “guy who plays the fighter” is.
  • Status Signs: Culture and game also determine which signs represent status. Signs like talking over other players or getting more “spotlight time” are performances that assert the will and right to power over the game. (This is why extra attention and success even situations that are supposed to be handled with mechanistic systems seem to go together — or haven’t you noticed that the popular guy wins more?)

Again, these are related. Your role determines which sorts of status performances you’re permitted.

None of the above should be considered to be inherently positive. In fact, griefing is a powerful “status performance.” So is nitpicking.

5.3 next. That’s the Peer Mode.

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Toy Dogma Interlude

Posted on December 4, 2010 by admin

Reading reactions to the Toy Dogma series has been interesting, whether it’s the meandering thread on The RPG Haven or the predictably venomous reactions from folks at Story Games. The comments on this blog have been illuminating as well, and I’ve enjoyed reading discussions about “lost” theory, where we are and where we’re going. I’ve read some great reactions, but also signs of the problems I’m writing Toy Dogma to address. So I’d like to bring up a few principles that are currently bopping around behind the scenes. These may answer your questions and concerns, or make the worse. Whatever.

No Telepathy Rule: One of the big problems with current game theory is that it jumps between mindblind solitude and an idealized shared space. I don’t write anything that assumes that if we get everything right we’ll mystically share an experience. Toy Dogma takes a frank look at power relationships as they exist even in “good games.”

It’s Only a Model: Toy Dogma is post-structural, in that while it introduces narratives and schemes about how we play and design TRPGs, these are types of play themselves; I’m making idea-toys to reveal something about how roleplaying games work, not to talk about precisely described essential properties. Those might exist, but nobody will know what they are without some Singularity-bullshit style leap in our understanding of human thinking. If you believe your ideas really hit an “essence” you’ll end up writing about “brain damage” or saying that women are evolutionarily incapable of liking D&D as much as men. The Toy Dogma is sincere, but everybody’s sincere about things that have arbitrary schemes.

Crisitunity Friendly: One of the mots common reactions I get is, “Say, isn’t (problem) necessary to make things work at all?” Sure —  but play and design issues are often the flipside of necessity. Jason Corley has repeated my point about the role of marketing in the development of RPG theory, and problems acknowledging intractable and paradoxical issues spring from theory’s relationship to salesmanship.

To sell you something, a theory has to claim that it represents a “step forward.” That’s crack the theory and design communities have got to stop smoking. The current divided state of D&D fandom is the most prominent example of how thinking your game “progresses” leaves people behind.

A lot of my stuff talks about (and will talk about) issues that either can’t be fixed, or can be good or bad, depending on how we approach them. 5.1′s retaliatory play (especially initiation) is an example of this. Bad stuff can be good stuff. Bad stuff can be necessary. Instead of digging for a term with a nice pedigree, I’ll go with a Simpsons-ism: “crisitunity.” Toy Dogma is crisitunity-friendly.

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Toy Dogma 5.1

Posted on December 2, 2010 by admin

I want to look at moral stages of play some more. Let’s call them modes instead of stages. Even though the source literature is about overall moral development, I’d rather highlight discrete techniques, leave room for good people to wander into bastardry, and give suckers a chance to find virtue.

Man, this is going to take a while. I’m going to root through some other theory to get there, too — more work! So I’ll start with the first stage:

Retaliatory Mode

Definition: A retaliatory play mode drives player actions and attitudes with punishments and rewards directly (or nearly directly) administered through explicit rules — typically those supplied in the game’s text.

Examples:

  • A  player portraying an adventurer easily slays an orc. This irritates the GM responsible for the encounter. The GM introduces a demon that kills the adventurer’s player.
  • A GMing advice section tells you to punish characters (damage them, belittle them, etc.) when players behave in some “difficult” fashion. These consequences are determined prior to any naturalistic effect that might arise from the game’s story. A dragon could get you at any time, but this dragon did because the GM is angry, not because the Fictionian Wastelands features roaming dragons.
  • Mind’s Eye Theatre features a player-run Status Trait economy that leaders use to punish unpopular characters, and reward popular ones.
  • If your character turns to the Dark Side in the original (West End Games) Star Wars RPG, you hand your character over to the GM, losing the ability to play him — just as if he had died.
  • Exalted awards “stunt dice” for interesting descriptions of actions.

Details: Direct rewards and punishments are explicitly built into game texts or play practices, or attached through a very strong implication of what a player ought to desire, and what he or she ought to dislike. For example, a D&D player in this mode views hit point loss (and character death) as punishment and XP as a reward.

This contrasts with a primarily indirect reward or punishment where (for example) a player receives praise when her character gets damaged doing something entertaining.

It should be noted (thank you Lee Short — see the comments) that in this mode, punishments are usually more prominent than rewards, even if the text or group doesn’t come right out and say so. Consider D&D, where the reward system has grown relatively weaker (balanced adventures represent a “treadmill” so levels and items primarily allow characters to keep pace) while punishments (hit point loss, penalizing conditions) are the most common game effects. (I should note that punishments are also more “balanced” because the game is designed to specifically act as a check on retaliatory GMs.)

Lots of upsetting experiences grow out of retaliatory mode play, but it also lays a dangerously compelling foundation for play and design. Its lack of ambiguity makes it easy to link behaviour to rules and traditions — as long as players understand their roles as the subjects of these tactics. Retaliatory mode sucks, but it’s easy to design for.

It’s seductive. You might end up assuming that’s just how games are without a boss or boss-text to control things.

Retaliatory mode lays bare a basic truth:  With or without supporting texts, the game group makes players believe its rules and traditions constitute meaningful rewards and punishments, and that people identify with the constructed person/position they act upon.

Many of these customs aren’t explicitly taught because people often grasp them reflexively. (Some aren’t explicitly taught because even though they’re bizarre, the group is too insular to know that such-and-such-a-thing is weird, but that’s hard to spin theory about) Examples:

  • “I am my character.”
  • “The GM is emotionally invested in the game world.”
  • “The more social influence one has in the world, the better.”

The retaliatory mode introduces a twofold play initiation that gamers carry through sessions, perhaps even into games that are supposed to be very different from the ones they were initiated into. (We’ll go through different initiations throughout out lives. I think some key initiations especially affect how we play ever after — our first, the ones we associate with making new friends, those related to life stages, sex and other Big Things). It also transfers to other modes — it’s a core part of adopting a TRPG.

Play initiation at this stage includes:

  • Discipline: Texts and oral traditions enforce ideas about what pain and pleasure mean during the game. One game measures success (pleasure) as triumph over a monster, and failure (pain) as being eaten, beaten or driven away. Another links pleasure to the ability to make a desired story event occur.
  • Subjection: The group forces players to identify with the target of discipline. Retaliatory play fails when you do not identify with the character, or identify a narrative you’re building with part of your personal story. If you are not your character, you cannot feel the character’s pain or pleasure; retaliatory play in a game with player characters has little power over you. (This does not require “immersion,” by the way. The type of investment is flexible, as long as it is facilitates discipline.)

That’s it for now. 5.2 will explore the Egoistic Mode.

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Lore of the Hundred Millionth Day: The Trow

Posted on December 1, 2010 by admin

“History of the Trow,” From the Palatine Legendarium

(Ex Libris Liam ap-Sithe)

Long ago, before the Final Empire, the universe wept the deaths of monsters blood-red into the sky, crimson of their blood, of the aura of the HUNDRED-HANDED falling fast enough to rip the sky, and of the weight of suns compressed into atoms: jewels set in the eyes of the Great Titans.

The queen TAMAS was not permitted to live in the privileged folds of space, black, her burning gaze radiant over the substrata of all; the Universal Fire was for the Gods alone, not their engineer-parents. ”Cast me from the root of all suns,” she said,” I am the brushstroke of the Law; I cannot be erased save by what destroys Law itself.”

“It’s enough to deny you administration of the Fire,” said the King of the Gods. They exiled her from the Fold; she fell to the world of her birth. Matter was insufficient to contain the full code of her nature. She saw the Gods’ trap: Without energy, information dies.

“So I abide in the Uncreated,” she said, slipping through the rough, cool stones of Earth. “I consign the strata of my nature to condensed, cold possibility.”

She slept in the darkness, bleeding the full library of her being into strange planes, and from those dimensions that blood returned, mirror-condensate of being brilliant with possibilities harvested from realms beside the Law — and unspeakable other-times where the Law failed, and misborn world-systems wailed.

Of the Great Titans, only she remained close to the Third People. They dared tunnels dug in the savage past to find the TAMAS’ tomb and honour their former queen. But the Gods promised peace to the Third if they would learn the codes of worship and leave old slavery behind.

But a few were always intrigued with her. They meditated at the shores of her darkness, that sea of lore made chaotic matter. They were outcasts. They fought for her cause past the Peace, making themselves hated even by fellow-partisans. Even the Titans’ old generals knew that a renewed Titanomachy was the End of Ends.

“Taste of laws unwritten. Baptise yourselves in my blood,” she said. “I gave you the mirror that brings sorcery; the sight of codes that might be written in the fundament. Drink of me me to know that reflection in every gyrus, and systems written for the secret places beside Time.”

They baptised themselves. They drank deep of the blood, the mirror, the black liquid of knowledge. The Night People.

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Toy Dogma 4

Posted on November 30, 2010 by admin

So last time, I stabbed at a working definition of what happens in tabletop roleplaying games:

  • In TRPGs, participants communicate using rules and customs to establish details about related fictional narratives that are not yet defined.

. . . but there’s one more thing: our guard against absurd arguments about some impossible tabula rasa:

  • In TRPGs, participants communicate using rules and customs to establish details about related fictional narratives that are not entirely defined.

We need guidance right from the beginning, though these bits (genres, mission statements, core stories) are subject to interpretation. Bad game theory promotes these initial definitions into a kind of church; follow the doctrine or fuck off. Play is obedience is play.

But this wasn’t always what we meant by play. What happened? It would be too easy to get into sappy talk about child’s play. Child’s play can be vicious; kids haven’t learned who has status, when to speak and when to shut up. They can be casually cruel. It’s the land of Lawrence Kohlberg’s first two stages of moral development, and a bit of his third.

(Note that this little trip of mine is not dogmatic Kohlberg. He ain’t perfect — Carol Gilligan’s critique is the best known. He’s too focused on formal polities as moral instruments. His framework is interesting, and I’m warping it as I go.)

Kohlberg also talks about “higher” post-conventional morality and here discusses a concept whose name will excite certain gamers: the social contract. The notable thing about social contracts as Kohlberg defines them is that they have little to do with the failed RPG theory of social contracts. Focused on “being on the same page,” rigid sets of expectations, and reward/punishment systems, dead-theory mechanisms prod players through a stage one (moral choices from fear of punishment) to restricted stage four (code-driven — Christian Fundamentalism is an example) framework. Highly defined notions of genre and convention (“back to the dungeon,” or a “Golden Age” implying an inescapable historical process) have the same purpose, through it’s rendered less formally.

The term “social contract” is poisoned; we have to use something else. Fortunately, Kohlberg’s notion of the social contract also marks a point where we can look to his critics and pull back from an overly academic, political context (Kohlberg tends to identify “higher morality” with sheer scale, and with formal institutions that carry Big Moral Plans out — the problems are easy to see) and into a style of interpersonal relationships that recognizes:

  1. We possess different interests, and that diversity usually tolerable, if not intrinsically valuable. (If everybody was the same, we’d get bored.)
  2. We also possess common rational interests that can often be inferred from early-stage development. (Avoid pain, seek pleasure, play that utilitarian banjo.)

The natural conclusion is that we must fairly negotiate the role of our differences in various contexts. This unites our differences and our common self-interests into a single process. This fairness does not, however, require a fixed set of rules to “get on the same page” or any of that bullshit.

Kohlberg discusses a “prior to society” perspective, but this is a bit grandiose. Certainly, we must return to primordial, progressive honesty as best we can to evaluate the most fulfilling way to play from moment to moment, and  ideally, this region of our thinking comes before we apply rules and customs, but we’ll always get a little “dirty” with other concerns — we are never in a pure place.

We’re starting to create a process, answer a question from last time: What kind of communication takes place?

Negotiation. Constant negotiation. Simple and complicated negotiation. Negotiation where each party believes something different happened but it still works out.

Second question: How do participants use rules and customs while communicating?

The answers depend on our moral commitment to the game. Let’s come up with some stages:

  1. Retaliatory (“You killed the Big Bad? ROCKS FALL, EVERYONE DIES,” or “Escalation.”)
  2. Egoistic (“Look at me! Look at the GMPC!” or “Bringing the Awesome.”)
  3. Peer Pressure (“This is how you play a proper Tremere,” or “I will never abandon you.”)
  4. Fundamentalist (“System Does Matter” and D20-supremacist dogma)
  5. Interpersonal (“How do you feel? How do you want to feel?” This mature mode of gaming is our realistic goal. Negotiation with a respect for difference.)

Beyond this, I could posit a Transpersonal Stage moral commitment, where social good and high level artistic achievements take centre stage, but Kohlberg’s already-shaky structure loses its grounding.

But what about those kids? A moment ago I looked down on idealized childhood roleplaying, but in the West (and maybe elsewhere) we’ve got life stages where we bounce around: adolescence where we roam around the first three stages as we try to find a place in the power structure, and early adulthood, where, conventional identities in hand, we appear to fall back into an antisocial low stage when we’re really arguing with cultural norms — and as often as not, that argument is a good idea.

Coincidentally, these life stages — these “Fuck the Law” eras — are also where most gaming takes place. That’s what some dated market research says, anyway.

Basically, we do most of our TRP gaming during volatile periods where we might be at our worst, but which also have the potential to liberate us from being boring, obsessed with social conventions and base reward/punishment cycles. When we’ve been hurt by this it’s easy to get stuck fixing things with rules — that’s how society, with its naturally low opinion of the us (the mob), already regulates our behaviour.

Toy Dogma is more optimistic. It craves the dangerous realm of play because post-fundamentalist play demands we listen to each other now, and not just during design or setup. It’s hard to listen when rules tell you to shut up, how to speak or what to say. We know we’ll bounce around different levels of commitment. Games help us; they don’t rule us. We play with them like toys.

Posted in RPG Theory, The Miscellaney | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

4e Hack: Power Points

Posted on November 29, 2010 by admin

Today featured a kickass fight in my buddy Steve’s D&D4e game. My warforged ranger, Cinnabar, is 10th level and rocking some nice power combos. But if you play 4e you can’t help but look at your sheet toward the end of a major combat and wish for more powers, or another go at a current power. This is inevitable — if it wasn’t, the game would be too easy — but I think I’ve hit on the first draft of a simple, rough way to hack D&D for more flexibility. The reason it’s relevant to other folks is that it should also act as an alternative way to deal with criticisms that D&D’s systems don’t follow what’s happening in the game world closely enough. Anyway:

Power Points

Every time your character gains an encounter or daily power he or she also earns a power point. You no longer expend powers just by using them. Instead, you spend power points to activate a power: 1 power point for encounter powers and 2 power points for daily powers. Your power point total represents the maximum you can possess at any given time along with the amount you possess after a full rest.

If you use the same power more than once during an encounter, increase its cost by 1 (non-cumulative) unless you have selected it for more than one use in a row using the standard rules.

In addition, you may spend power points on powers other than your own. This represents a mix temporary inspiration, cross-training and luck. Doing so incurs additional costs. Add to the cost of such powers as follows:

  • Power belongs to your class, but you don’t know it: +1
  • Power belongs to a class you have trained in via multiclassing, but you don’t know it: +1
  • Power belongs to a different class (that you have not trained in), but the same power source (Martial, Arcane, etc.): +2
  • Power belongs to a power source and class you have not trained in (a fighter uses a warlock power): +3 and an in-game rationale.

Recovering Power Points

Power points recover at the rate of one per scene or per two hours in the game world (whichever is slower; notable scenes are assumed to be more taxing than insignificant stretches of time), or completely after a night’s rest.

Power Points and Action Points

You may spend an action point to immediately regain 3 power points, and vice versa. I hate how uninteresting and stingy the game is with action points anyway.

Lending Power Points

You may lend power points to another character that are earmarked to use a power that you know or belongs to your class. For example, a fighter might give a warlock quick advice about hand to hand combat. This uses up your character’s next minor action. You may lend the extra cost the character would incur for using that power.

(Half-Baked) Stunt Points and Item Points

Maybe you can assign extra points to be harvested from the environment if characters succeed at skill challenges. maybe you get points for items that can only be used to fuel item powers.

That’s it. The number of points and values probably need tweaking, but this at least throws the concept down.

Posted in RPG Sketches | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Movie Review: The Last Airbender

Posted on November 26, 2010 by admin

I was not surprised that The Last Airbender was a terrible movie. I was surprised about the nature of its awfulness, the complexity of it, and its surprisingly engaging conclusion. The whole thing put me off balance. I braced for garbage and instead found myself understanding — almost — what M. Night Shyamalan was trying to do, but thinking to myself that he was on a dumb quest anyway.

I know the cartoon. I love the cartoon. I know about the whitewashing, too. Hated that. I gave this movie a shot when I figured renting from my local independent video store (Have You Seen, Peterborough folks — obviously!) wouldn’t let a penny fall into the hands of anybody responsible for it.

The Context

The cartoon it’s based on, Avatar: The Last Airbender, is a strange mix of anime, manhua, Western animation and central conceits so similar to those of the tabletop game Exalted it demonstrates how easily more-mainstream entertainment rips off RPG ideas (but that’s a discussion for another time). It’s a fantastic show, too, rarely stumbling over three seasons of steadily rising tension and a conclusion . . . well, just see it yourself. And in a rare step forward for fantasy genre entertainment it doesn’t equate “human” with “white dude.”

But I always had some mixed feelings about the cartoon, too. I have never liked the way South Asia, Central Asia and Southeast Asia don’t seem to count as “cool Asia.” (Maybe I notice this because I have ancestors and relatives from not-cool Asia.) The cartoon took language, ideas, symbols and the term “Avatar” from these cultures, but it mostly left the people behind, seemingly because because they’re not “anime” Asian. This is not such a big deal, though, and I could certainly imagine (well, pretend) the rest of Asia was broadly represented right up until the cartoon ruined it by adding the over-obvious Desi ciphers of the Combustion Man (A yoga-fire projecting quiet guy who had a frickin’ Saivist symbol on his forehead) and the Guru (let’s just not talk about him).

There was also a certain degree of general American flavour that I note, but didn’t dislike — it’s an American cartoon, after all. American messiahs always seem to pit chaste, broadly compassionate purity against love and friendship. That’s Neo. That’s Luke Skywalker, or even Jake Sully in the movie that stole The Last Airbender‘s name and was damaged for different interesting reasons. That’s part of the Hero’s Journey we’re all supposed to pretend is universal (Note: bullshit!). Jesus has to be your buddy, or else he becomes impersonal, remote and overly intellectual like Barack Obama as depicted on Fox News.

But the (not)titular Avatar of cartoon and film are not just drawing from American Buddy Hero Jesus. The Avatar controls all elements, and in this respect he greatly resembles Maitreya, whose body is said to emit light and who demonstrates thorough attainment of supernatural powers (having just one, like bending a single element in the Last Airbender universe, would be a mere magic trick or ascetic skill).

Maitreya and the Buddha Nature in general do not have the personal role we like to give Buddy Hero Jesus. The Buddha Nature is bigger than your friendship, even your love — and in that context it can seem callous. The cartoon hits the edge of this, but ultimately casts its vote for the Buddy role (and gets Aang, the Avatar, out of this trap by punching him in the spine with a rock — not joking!)

The End

So, back to the movie, which was terrible.

Its ending was magnificent, though, and that pisses me off. Aang, an unwilling Avatar who ran away rather than accept veneration and installation in his role, takes it up in a conclusion that was better than the cartoon episode it came from. In the cartoon, Aang gets angry and goes berserk. In the movie he demonstrates compassion and in doing so, accepts his role as something greater than a friend — something that may actually be antagonistic to normal friendship. The easy way would have been for Aang to spend his energy in a selfish catharsis before having friendship anchor him. That’s how the cartoon did it, but M. Night Shyamalan knows that this is total American Buddy Jesus bullshit and doesn’t go for it. And where the cartoon lets the Fire Nation (bad guys with fire kung fu) completely slink away, the film shows some of its soldiers bowing as well, because the Buddha isn’t Jesus on one faction’s side, ever.

I would have loved a movie that didn’t suck to have reached that ending.

The Cast

Okay, I promise to get to the body of the film but the casting is famously messed up so I have to talk about it. Let’s run it down:

Aang: The hero/Avatar. A kid. He seems okay. He looks like Miranda Cosgrove’s brother. I think I can remark on the resemblance with some expertise because my kid won’t stop watching iCarly. He looked like he could act and he moved around okay. He only comes into his own during the ending.

Sokka: My wife liked the guy who played Sokka when he tried cartoon-Sokka’s facial expressions. I went, “Whoa, white dude! Being white! Hanging out! And white!” Visually, ethnically a failure. I thought the argument that Katara and Sokka were Inuit analogues was silly (I’m Canadian; “Inuit” is not reflexively a prop category for me.) But they weren’t this white guy. But he doesn’t get to do anything and his fights get shitty choreography.

Katara: The actress who played Katara had some nice modern dance Tai Chi aerobercise thing going on but was terrible at acting. I don’t normally say cruel things about children, but her bio tells me she’s a rich girl who got here via nepotism (like Pale Sokka) so she can take it. Everything about her is wrong. Everything.

Zuko: I rooted for Dev Patel! Pure related-to-Desi bias. You can tell Dev really wants to act and he channels Cartoon Zuko well — but he has no opportunity to say much of anything. (The monologue where he talks about his feelings happens mostly off camera!)

Zhao: Here’s a fun thing: When you watch this movie, whenever Aasif Mandvi has a longist line of dialogue, earnestly say, “John,” at the end, or jump in at the start with, “Well John.” Yes, it’s cheap typecasting, but it fits his delivery.

Iroh: I liked this guy. He had an original take on the character.

Ozai: A constipated bureaucrat who is only good and menacing in a scene that was actually cut. I’d guess it was chopped because the other actor in that scene looks like a 14 year old white kid wearing a spray-tan. This destroys the excuse that the factions weren’t colour coded (if they weren’t, why the spray-tan?)

I think that’s it. Oh, the Waterbending teacher sucks and Katara and Sokka are whitey-white-white-white because they come from the White Water Tribe. White.

Fuck’s sake Hollywood. Please believe me when I say that I have a sufficient supply of white people in media. I am not in danger of running out. You may be assured I have mangiacake types laid like cordwood in my mind for the next million winters.

Okay, the Movie

After Refusing the Call to Adventure Aang and his flying bison hang out in ice for a century before being rescued by the only third generation billionaire corporate scions on the North Pole. Aang is obviously confused, but nobody bothers to tell him what year it is, where he is, or anything you would tell a lost little boy from an extinct ethnic group who’s gone through a major trauma and has auspicious signs — and flying bison! — all around him.

They ignore the enormous flying bison until it is dramatically appropriate and anyway, they need to fly. Everybody affects an air of muted emotion and seriousness. Nobody laughs in this version of The Last Airbender, even though camaraderie, charm and a bit of cheesiness made the cartoon cool.

The Fire Nation shows up. Man, are they real jerks or what? We’re twice told that Zuko’s after the Avatar to redeem himself and that (“Well, John”) nobody likes him. We see a little bit of elemental martial arts — bending — but it’s slow and weak. All of the fight scenes in this movie have this strange combination of inappropriate realism and silly lassitude. It takes half a minute of posturing to get anything done. I also never thought I’d see Aang triangle choke Zuko MMA style, but that’s in there (and actually isn’t too bad there even though it’s a sign of the muddled action direction).

I’m losing focus, jumping ahead. Why? This movie sucked. They free some villages. They tell earthbenders to fight off people they could have beaten ages ago. Sokka kicks people in the bum. M. Night Shyamalan cuts off anything interesting and fast and tells while showing and telling in character for extra Boredom Points; for exterior shots of people walking to palaces while voiceovers talk about walking to palaces and characters talk about how they’re walking to palaces. I don’t care any more.

What the Hell, Man?

I can’t call it bad directing per se, so much as direction that was terminally misaimed. M. Night Shyamalan looked like he wanted to make a movie about real children caught in a supernatural world at war, dealing with Buddha-messiah figures and the cruelty that sometimes strikes when we look for a higher compassion and find ordinary friendships cast upon the altar of a higher cause. But real kids would be frightened, angry and emotionally traumatized, with the flatness they show in the movie. It’s totally wrong. Sixth Sense trembling isn’t exactly suited for a jokey fantasy ensemble romp, is it? It’s the right tone for a film where a scared kids initiate themselves into warriorship with blood, but this is a PG-rated kung fu adventure, dude! You can’t talk like there’s blood on the line and then show the audience that there will never be blood.

(The movie fights include something I call “Xena sword fighting.” That’s when fight scenes feature swords clashing, but never cutting or stabbing, even in a bloodless way, and characters parry with swords, then kick people in the face. Happened in Xena a lot. In this movie. Zuko shoots fire at Katara and only manages to make her faint. Even the cartoon was better for that!)

This movie is like playing Dungeons and Dragons with a DM who never lets you tell jokes about the game, thinking that makes everything more serious. It just bottles up the laughter to burst out later, and adds a tinge of contempt besides.

The fight scenes tell of distinct discomfort with choreography, and maybe arrogance in thinking it could be reinvented (he tries to do interesting things and mostly fails). They’re slow, clumsy and often reject high-flying wuxia for schoolyard slapfighting. The bending that should have been fast and intricate is a series of arthritic dance-offs. The casting makes it look like a 1950s country club vomited on the Tang Dynasty.

This movie sucked but in the end, compassion was not the product of a self-centred journey where you have a tantrum, repent and hang with your best buds, but a dictum at the heart of our best nature that comes first. I loved that. But I almost feel like talking about it will make you think the rest of the movie isn’t worse than someone urinating directly on a camera lens for over an hour. That would be a mistake.

Posted in Movie and TV Reviews | Tagged , | 7 Comments