Exploding Dice: I resisted it, but it looks like I’ll need it to help characters deal with long odds and can’t-hit scenarios. So if a hit die rolls an unmodified 10, roll another die and add it to the total.

“Kills:” Naturally, the final Kill can represent a nonlethal victory, such as subdual, a knockout a wrestling hold, etc. And no nonsense about declaring intent is necessary.

Mobs and Swarms: You can allow multiple hit dice to represent a bunch of similar creatures. Obviously.

Parrying: You can split some hit dice to parry, or even use all of your hit dice. Make an attack roll; instead of being penalized by armour, you’re penalized by the attacker’s weapon. Each “Kill” removes one Kill from the enemy’s attack. You can always hold dice back to do this, and can announce “parry!” right after the attack roll.

You must devote as many hit dice as the opponent possesses to the sum total of your attack and parry dice each round, or all of your hit dice if you don’t have as many hit dice as your enemy. That’s before any modifiers to dice.

Unarmed Grappling: Grappling ignores armour. Each “Kill” forces the opponent to remain entangled with the opponent for a round so that he can’t move, but inflicts no damage. If an opponent parries your grappling attempt they also inflict damage — 1 Kill per “Kill” of parrying. Optionally, you can shove an opponent 10 feet per “kill”" instead, but you immediately lose control of them next round.

Unarmed Striking: Unarmed striking is standard combat with a weapon modifier of 0, but can considered to be two weapon combat if the attacker chooses.

Unlimited Criticals: This isn’t very OD&D but it is very Chainmail to allow a weaker opponent to smack a stronger one with instant death. So attacks now inflict a number of Kills equal to each die divided by 10, rounded down (1 at 10, 2 at 20, 3 at 30, etc.).

Weapon Load and Shields: Some guys want two weapons. Some guys want shields. Some guys want a two-handed weapon. Some guys want one hand free. Let’s make each option interesting but not overwhelming.

• Two Handed Weapon: Two-handed weapons benefit from 150% of the character’s Strength bonus.
• Two Weapons: You may split dice to attack opponents that you would normally need to use your full hit dice against more than once and you earn a bonus hit die to one of these pools when you attempt multiple attacks, but your attacks suffer a -2 penalty because of lighter weapons or lack of coordination. You can always refuse the benefits to ignore the penalties.
• Weapon and Unarmed Hand: The standard. No adjustments, though you can treat your off hand as a weapon and act as if you have two weapons, above.
• Weapon and Shield: If you split dice to parry, add 1 die to your parry roll. The shield’s type can add up to +4 to your parry if you’re a fighter or cleric, but nothing if you’re a thief.

Weaklings: Some creatures are weaklings with ½ hit die. They suffer a Kill on a 5 or better, and roll 1d5 to attack, but their rolls explode on a 10 on the d10 die face (even though the roll’s value is 5). In a mob, 2 weaklings = 1 hit die.

Hit Dice: Every character has a certain number of d10s (I started with d6es but the modifiers are too big) but no hit points. Fighters get 1 per level, clerics and thieves get 2 per 3 levels and magic users get 1 per 2 levels.

Battle Points: Every class gets a pool of battle points to modify incoming attacks or their own strikes after the dice are rolled. At 1st level, start with 1d5 (half a d10) battle points modified by your Constitution modifier (minimum 1).

• Fighters get 1d2+Con adjustment per level (min 1). Fighters enjoy the special Con adjustment they get in AD&D.
• Magic users get 1d3+Con adjustment (min 1) for each level where they don’t get bonus hit dice. (I tried to find a d10 only way, but they all sucked. You can always divide d10 rolls by 3 and discard 10s instead).
• Other classes get 1d5+Con adjustment (min 1) for each level where they don’t get bonus hit dice.

Battle points compensate for dead levels and add a bit of resource management to the game. You recover 1d5 + Con modifier (min. 0 — you can fail to recover them) battle points at the end of each combat. Reroll your entire pool after a full night’s rest. You might get a second wind or lousy day to come no matter what you rolled at character creation.

Attribute Modifiers: Strength modifies melee attack rolls by -3 to +3. Dexterity modifies ranged attack rolls by -3 to +3, and opponents’ attack rolls by the same amount. Use boxed set D&D tables for reference. These modifiers apply to each die rolled.

Class Equipment Modifiers: Fighters impose up to +4 to each die when they roll to attack due to weapon load, and penalize attacks by up to -4 from armour.  Clerical wargear imposes up to +1 to attack, but -3 against attacks; thieves’ gear applies up to +3/-1. Magic users apply +2/0. Magic gear can add further bonuses.

In this context, equipment is a mixture of gear the character is trained to wear (fighters are comfortable in heavy armour) and the maximum potential a character can get out of a weapon or piece of armour (a magic user with a greatsword isn’t going to get more than a -2 bonus). Really though, this is inspired by Chainmail’s use of troop type to set “to hit” numbers.

Attacking: Apply bonuses and roll your hit dice. Your target number is 10, modified by bonuses and penalties to each die. You may also modify attacks with your battle points — again, adjustments apply to each die.

Every 10+ roll is a Kill — enough to slay a normal human. 20+ inflicts two Kills. Critical hits are there to provide a further inducement to spend battle points.

You may choose to make each Kill equal to a hit die and subtract them when a target suffers Kills, creating a death spiral, or you can track Kills separately. Each character gets 1 Kill per hit die.

Characters die at -1 Kills and defeat monsters when they knock them down to 0 Kills.

Multiple Attacks: You may split your hit dice to attack inferior opponents. You must devote at least as many of your hit dice to attacking an enemy as the enemy has hit dice, to a maximum of your own, current hit dice. That means a 10th level fighter can attack 10 1 hit die goblins, but needs all of his dice against one 12 hit die giant.

That’s the lesson I’ve learned in this phase of developing Knights of the Hidden Sun, Chris Challice’s interstellar fantasy RPG. I got a bit obsessed with the third chapter because it covers runecraft: one of the most distinctive concepts in the game. Runecraft gives cosmopolitan Roaans space opera luxury, telepathy, even immortality. The Gods are dead, destroyed by an exploding star, but they left hints about the secret powers of souls. Later scholars reversed engineered these innate divine powers, developing them like a technology that tore the galaxy from the Dark Age.

The only problem? The galaxy needs souls — billions of souls — to power its industries, starships, data processing across the Star Net. Everything is an ancestral intervention. Ghosts manipulate dream-data and fill hypersonic craft with motive force. Souls burn in the limbs of immortal Golems.

It’s awesome, but I kept asking myself, What is it like to live with this stuff? Runecraft is build by guilds, sold by merchants, used by everyone — but I thought it would be sloppy not to expand Chris’ material into a more involved discussion of what runecrafters do day to day, how the economics of the soul trade work . . . everything. It was just too cool so I started doing too much.

So I got stuck in the chapter. Now I’m crawling out, looking away from heavy immersion in to the world through setting text alone. Thanks to this experience I’ve learned to look at the work holistically, since looking at one part creates the temptation to make it bear burdens that other sections can take up just fine. It’s also taught me to pick my “battles.” Some information is critical and creates the framework of the setting. KotHS is an unusual setting so finding pieces of the frame has been a challenge, particularly when some very cool aspects are presented subtly. At some point you have to trust that the roots — vital information needed to envision the world — have been planted.  I think they’re done for this chapter and I need to finish it off, move on and get to edits, production and all that cool, game making stuff.

Sorry to those of you who’ve been waiting! It’s coming along, it’s cool, it’s taking a bit of time (It’s a much bigger draft than originally anticipated — over double the size!) but we’re moving forward.

Just thought you should know.

Jim took me very seriously and came back with a very detailed rebuttal (each word goes to a different segment of the response). I really appreciate that, so this post follows his with some thoughts about friendship in RPGs, why I emphasize it and what it’s doing to design and culture. I brought up how the decline of friendship might influence RPGs before, and linking to it is a good way to refresh the idea and remind everyone that this is a real social problem, not an off the cuff supposition.

Naturally, veteran readers may wonder where I get off telling anybody about friendship, given the fact that I don’t play well with their pretend-happy communities and just insulted them in this sentence. Here’s what I think:

• Just because you trade big emotional notes with people over the internet doesn’t mean you’re making friends with them.
• Online communities like to model themselves on performance communities (both crave attention over intimacy) but tabletop RPGs aren’t about performing for a third party.
• While low trust groups have always been part of roleplaying, the past decade marks this being considered the best we can aspire to, instead of something to be overcome with practice.
• Friendship rot is pretty embarrassing to status-conscious gamers and geeky folks in general, and the most embarrassed react by attacking the whole project of friendship. These are the guys that quote that Geek Fallacies article all the time. They need procedural rules because they can’t hack an ethos of compassionate friendship.

(I don’t think Jim necessarily fits the bill in all ways, or maybe even any of them. If I named names, he wouldn’t be on the list. This is a general observation.)

People frequently think a relationship is friendship when in my view, it isn’t. So what am I talking about? What are the characteristics of friendship?

A friend is an end, not a means.

This is the granddaddy and heart of “indie” gaming’s failure. Its ethics are corrupt from design up, and destructive to real friendships. It assumes that relationships mutual, egoistic exploitation are the rule, and that the goal of any system is to efficiently regulate selfishness.

True friendship requires you to think of any systems, customs and tools as ways to please your friends first. Even your character exists to further that friendship, not drive an ego trip. Even if you believe that all actions are ultimately selfish, this principle remains true because in that case, a friend is someone for whom you find selfish satisfaction in their enjoyment. They are very nearly one and the same.

Friends trust each other.

This too-obvious point never seems to stick. Players don’t trust GMs, RPG theory types don’t trust game designers and people post complains to RPG boards because they don’t trust their groups to handle an issue. (Yeah, posting behind your group’s back means you fail the trust test in a pretty basic way.)

If your relationships are like this you’ll need systems that are more than toys to play with (and ignore or tweak when the spirit moves you). They have to carry the creative process because your group can’t function without them.

At one point, Jim talks about what Capes “promises” him that GURPS doesn’t. That’s the problem: Games don’t promise. People promise. Friends make promises you can trust. They’re the basis; rules are toys that provide interesting output.

(Naturally, somebody’s going to call this “system doesn’t matter” rhetoric. It isn’t. Toys matter.)

Friends place emotional bonds over ritual relationships.

That brings me to my next point. Friendship thrives in liminal moments where no one has a particularly well-defined obligation, but come through nonetheless. Nobody tells you to pass your friend the spotlight, but you do it because you want her to be happy. Telling that joke might damage focus, but it’s fun, and you want your friends to have fun.

Recent RPG designs target these undefined moments, incorporate them into formal rules of play – the RPG ritual, in other words – and steals them from the dominion of ad hoc judgments based on mutual trust. And no wonder: Without the primacy of an emotional connection, you’ll see these interstices as threats. You’ll bitch about Rule Zero all day along.

A friend sets the example for new relationships.

If you don’t have a selfless, trusting informal relationship with the people you game with they aren’t your friends – not really. You may swear friendship up and down, but your claim lacks substance. And if your self-defined friendships lack these qualities, what about the people you meet online or at conventions? If anything, it’ll be worse. That’s why in my experience, the “indie” table is one of the unhappiest at the con.

I often surprise people by being so affable in face to face interactions, and when I run games at conventions (something I’m generally reluctant to do, by the way – when it happens, it’s to support relationships I value) people usually leave satisfied.

I associate gaming with some great friendships, so my first reflex is to assume that the potential for more of the same exists with anyone I play with. I don’t worry about them being “little bitches” (to refer to Jim’s comment about actors and improve) because it’s not acting – the performance to the third party isn’t adding its unique pressures. Tabletop play is about intimate experiences. It thrives on compassion. It needs friendship, or good faith in friendship to come.

• Distribute a retro cyberpunk RPG this way.
• You’d get an artist to gussy up the hard drive to look like some menacing bit of futuristic technology according to 80s design aesthetics. I’m thinking of early Walkmans with chunky, battered chrome, maybe with an LED readout — actually, especially with an LED readout. I’d probably keep some of the drive’s steel around just because hard drives look agelessly rugged and cool by themselves.
• The game would be written in a user-editable web format (maybe an offline WordPress installation and crosslinked wiki) with the option to print a version or see it in PDF.
• It would of course be graphically rich, with all kinds of art I can’t afford, but it would also include a bunch of tools such as a dice roller, a character creator and sheet, maps and so forth. Of course, if I’m indulging a fantasy maybe an engine for graphical netrunning that automatically implemented skills.
• The offline web format provides the means to port it online as well. Perhaps a hosted chat system should be thrown in there too. Ideally, you should be able to just move the whole thing to a server with minimal tweaking.
• Not many ideas systemwise. It would have a light setting, perhaps with an annex about how to “modernize” it for those who want cell phones, more than three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi, and posthuman pretensions, though I think gripes about the aging tech kind of miss the point.
• It would only be available via hard drive — maybe in cheap old 6GB drives (I was looking through my old Quantum 6GB drive from 1998 when the idea hit me, and looked them up – 5 bucks each on EBay for good ones, 99 cents for maybe-dodgy ones).
• The super crazy and impractical option would be to integrate the game into a dedicated operating system, such as a build of Chromium OS. You would “boot to RPG” when it’s time to play. Chromium is designed to primarily boot from SSD if I’m not mistaken, though, so it’s not my first choice. The *click* *whirr* of battered steel is just too cool.
• . . . and the craziest option of all would be to only ship the game in full computer form — probably an ASUS Keyboard PC because it has the cyberdeck form factor. It would need some case modding to make it look right. Yeah, not gonna happen. But if you’re dreaming, may as well dream big . . .
• There would be some kind of home site for each drive/game to talk to and share resources with.
• Of course, you’d make the game open source, though you’d sell the physical artifact for some outrageous price to cover the costs. In my fantasy I saw one option of using this format to release an official Cyberspace Trilogy RPG (it’s a fantasy, after all) with proceeds going to charity (because of course this would convince William Gibson’s representation to not charge me any money! — and because I am actually considering ideas for a permanent RPG for charity right now) via the inflated price of selling an RPG in an artisan-modified hard drive.

I could actually do 90% of this (not get the license, do the art or do some of the cooler UI mods) if I had a spare self lying around that wasn’t busy, or somebody to pay me a truckload of money to drop everything I’m doing. Maybe a wealthy patron can order it done or a network of nerds can work on it.

Of course, it’s more doable once you scale back expectations, but once you commit to the hard drive format I think you’d need to throw something pretty damned special under the hood.

It can work with electronic games, where players need the freedom to choose their own commitment level within the structure, since they’re playing with the product as the partner, not other people they value beyond the play space, or maybe convention play where people are temporary companions in a sharply delineated experience. It can work for the odd one shot. Beyond that, sustainable RPG play happens in a zone of negotiation, where play and text conflict, produce useful compromises, and give birth to a story through the responses of participants to the crisis.

I’ve been reminded of this lately on two fronts. First, I did a search for Mage: The Awakening’s Nemean: an NPC I created to helm the game’s signature city, Boston. Second, RPGNet talked about the end of Mage: The Ascension six years later — specifically, the scenario I wrote, “Judgment.” Both of these presented cases where I wanted to provide practical stuff in creative tension with Big Ideas (or Big Ideas I thought gamers would assume were there). So, one at a time:

Judgment: The Consensus is Just a GMPC

One of the important elements of Mage: The Ascension is that reality is determined by the massed, mixed up beliefs of human beings: the game’s Capital-C Consensus. That leads to a vision of ending the game where one faction or another wins, or we get some kind of new compromise as vetted by the human majority. The problem with this is that it contradicts the idea that the PCs decide what’s happening, and it’s not much of a basis for the action-oriented, fantastical and horrific elements of the game. I suppose I could have designed a scenario where the PCs go on a massive PR campaign, shake a lot of hands, save the Computer’s baby and win it to their side and dodge Republican Technocrats with Guns, but that would have been either boring or hokey. Boring, in that having meetings isn’t very action-fantasy-horrorific; hokey in that as contrived as “Judgment” was in some places, it would require an even bigger contrivance to set up scenes where the PCs win hearts and minds based on big stunts. Basically, the Consensus takes the place of the unbeatable NPC, whose heart is only moved by the GM’s whims or whatever is coded into the adventure.

All the same, the PC-centered quest makes everybody else look like they’re sitting on their asses, being overrode with True Will. So what’s a poor boy charged with blowing up a corner of the World of Darkness to do? Telos, as conceived by Bill Bridges, was pretty loose; I probably could have run “Barack bani Obama: Telos We Can Believe In!” or the Glorious Proletarian Mass Magical Thing (some of both was in Judgment, but I didn’t have room for one and had to cut the other). But subtext slithered beneath M: TAsc‘s bombastic, thesis-first front. One subtext had to do with an increasing realization that parts of the Consensus concept were unworkable, sinister and even immoral. Ethan Skemp often spoke of how the concept undermined the idea of humanity being part of nature. Under Phil Brucato, the game said spirits wore masks, but kind of had their own thing going on no matter what anyone thought. I also wrestled with a number of disturbing thought experiments (Does a sexist Consensus make women stupider?).

Plus, I increasingly became aware that M: TAsc had a very deep mythology and one that was surprisingly well integrated for something built by people who often had wildly divergent ideas about the game and how people should get along in general. I wanted to be true to that. I wanted to answer the prophecy in The Fragile Path and build upon obscure references in Sorcerer’s Crusade (which is where the Ixoi come from — I didn’t make ‘em up). And I wanted to give Voormas his due because I knew from direct experience that he was one of the greatest antagonists for real, ongoing chronicles. I wanted to make things work with Kathy Ryan’s stuff as much as possible, after a productive, epic phone call that helped me leave room for individual personalities, since these drove her work on the line.

And of course, I wanted to exercise a writer’s privilege to make a few observations in reaction to a game that I loved. One wrestles with a good game, and I spent five years wrestling with my M: TAsc chronicle.  This gave me room for boots on the ground insights that aren’t so neat and tidy (like the Nephandi being self-deceptive, since they really come off as clowns under smart PC examination) but felt substantial at the table. I decided the best solution was to take this stuff, question the Big Idea of the Consensus, mix it up with all that canon, and bomb my players with it. I adjusted the results in the writing and Bill Bridges told me how to best fit it into the book.

So that feeling of struggling, at once accepting and questioning the basis of the game — and aiming for something that felt naturalistic despite all of the Big Scary Crap translated itself into the result, designed to be playable in the context of a game wrestling with the consequences of its development, and the PCs wrestling with the results in a structure that let them tour as much of it as possible — all while leaving something with a comprehensible basic structure, and without something as lame as “We like unicorns now. Signed, Humanity.” Writer fiat that throws an archmage in your face at least sets the stage for an unpredictable result (Protip: Voormas can probably kick your ass, and will countermagic attempts to do that 10 success Corr trick in the book unless you’re very sly). Writer fiat through 6 billion people working the Fifth Business is just lame.

The Wizard Crapped in Your Cornflakes

Ah, the Nemean. I love that guy. Mage: The Awakening went through lots of iterations. That includes the Boston section (and book). We knew that the game was going to feature lots of internecine struggle — “all against the Man” was there, but not  as big a deal as its predecessor. The preconditions for the Nemean already existed, but the Consilium structure was fairly open-ended. It could be a whole bunch of things, from a tyranny to Grownup Hogwarts. This made the whole idea of making Boston a “model” Awakening city problematic. The closest thing you could do was make it a staid academic gathering that must band together against something or other from time to time when it’s not arguing over brandy. Boring!

I didn’t want a “model.” I wanted something people would use in real games. So I designed a real sonofabitch who could be ported into these roles:

The Quest Guy: As the boss, the Nemean can send PCs to do cool stuff. Yeah, this isn’t innovative, but sometimes “innovative” takes a back seat to something people will actually use. Plus, Mage was redesigned so that a quest provides concrete rewards (Arcane Experience) even when you don’t get to keep all the goodies.

The Hammer: Novice GMs sometimes need a guy to lay down the law and declare standards, and even experienced GMs can use a guy like that. Again, this isn’t original, but it works. I knew the dangers of this (killer NPC!) which is why I declared that in the Nemean’s Boston, you can grab ass and stab each other as much as you want if you leave the city and general order of things intact. He won’t bug you except to enforce basic minimums that also happen to be what GMs need to avoid SWAT Shooting Gallery Nights.

The Predecessor: Finally — and this is the big one — the Nemean was designed to be replaced. One of the shallower critiques of this guy is that the Bad Ruler is Vampire‘s shtick (really? There can be no bad bosses outside of Vampire?) but Mage has a mortal hierarchy with no time constraints on gaining power. It’s inevitable that a PC cabal will eventually earn the power to overthrow him, and his desire to stay on top means it automatically generates a plot, particularly since he sits on one of the setting’s secrets.

This is the basic difference between writing for play and writing to satisfy somebody’s sense of structure. If I was just looking at it as filler that adhered to a format I’m sure I could have gone the fannish route and picked Guy Who Fits In, but I didn’t want him to end up on the same ash heap as so many canon characters. (Do you know who the Awakening signature characters are? I do, because I’ve got ‘em written down, but they’re not doing much. They’re not bad, but for some reason nobody ever ran with them as they did with Solomon Birch.) I wanted people to use him.

Did it work? I’ve seen him in dozens of games and writeups. There’s an early 1900s hack of him on Obsidian Portal. I’ve seen folks commiserate about dealing with him in their respective games. I love that. Not only is he getting used, but he’s generating common experiences. As for me, I actually started with him deposed in my Toronto-based game, and got lots of mileage out of a treacherous alliance with the PCs.

One thing I freely admit about the guy is that he’s not the height of eccentricity and innovation. I’ve designed all kinds of bizarre NPCs, but I didn’t want the Nemean to be one of them. I wanted him to be accessible to people just getting into the game, but giving him a strong (if mostly passive) core motivation, an easy way to portray him and ways he could move the game along, but with room to make him more complicated, if necessary. Vampire‘s Solomon Birch has a lot of these same accessible qualities. He’s got a strong personality, an unusual look, an immediate hook via his faction, and is set up to get things done.

Fighting With Yourself

In both cases I was tempted to just go with the flow, accept the Big Idea at face value and slot things in. Instead, I erred on the side of making something to play, then fought to reconcile it with all the Meta stuff. In one case I got something very complicated; in another, I ended up with something pretty simple, even stereotypical. I’m happy that people have made use of both, even if they did their own wrestling along the way. I encourage people to discover cool, playable stuff that throws the Big Ideas of their own games into question. Yeah, you’ll end up making excuses (I am, right here!) but the important thing is that they’re cool excuses.

Example: Fall of the Hegemonic Ministry

In Mage: The Awakening’s Seers of the Throne sourcebook I foreshadowed the fall of the Hegemonic Ministry, one of the big Seer factions. It’s rotting from the inside, relies too heavily on state control of the economy and is ripe for replacement. If Mage had a metaplot you might actually get to see the Hegemonic collapse in a source book. How should we do it while sticking to the principles in my last article? I’ll to try to stick to as few steps as possible but don’t look at this as some strict methodical road map.

(Don’t look at this as an actual development document, either. In the real thing, I’d be more specific about content and wouldn’t have to describe a lot of the process, and I’d divide content by chapter and section, not steps in a creative process.)

1) Come up with a cool name.

Really! This lets us do more right-brain work on the topic by exploring it through lose tricks and wordplay — and it helps with marketing, too. How about Shattercrown?

2) Brainstorm the plot.

All I know right now is that I’m kicking the Hegemonics to the curb in a story called Shattercrown. The name makes me think of aristocrats. Seers of the Throne tells me that the money-focused Ministry of Mammon is the Hegemonic’s heir apparent. Aristocrats and money make me think of Monaco. James Bond. Movie Stars. High Fashion. Yeah, this is going to be about occult shenanigans, spy-fi and Terrible Old Men with Money.

I think the Hegemonics are running out of money and Mammon is to blame. Seers get off on wealth, so losing it is a terrible blow. The Unity’s servants look shabby compared to their rivals now. Seers are ambitious bastards — Hegemonics must be running to better paying factions. The top levels start to get desperate and sloppy. There’s a Master with a gambling problem. When he loses big thanks to some surreptitious Mammon countermagic it sets off a flashpoint. Spells fly, mages die and the rogue Master escapes. Oh, it’s on. Each side gets ready to duke it out.

Pentacle communities notice the Seer civil war. It’s their big chance to hit the Throne hard. The Silver Ladder will call an emergency Convocation, perhaps the first Grand Convocation in over a hundred years. The other orders modify any plan to suit their own agendas. That renegade Seer Master is wiling to help them and has sent underlings to let Pentacle representatives know, but it’s hard to track him down. Both sides in the civil war want a word, you see.

Okay, cool.

3) Provide procedural advice to get players into the story.

A metaplot isn’t useful unless we can get play groups involved. A typical White Wolf book would do this implicitly (“Faction X buys more pancakes!”) and we’ll still use that method, but it’s time to give the Storyteller (GM, whatever) direct advice on how to add this to a running chronicle/campaign. Back in the last book for Mage: The Ascension (called, er, Ascension) I wrote a sidebar about setting up trigger events in your game to start a metaplot’s engine. I want to do that here, too. I’ll  suggest several ways character actions can set up a chain of events that lead directly to the event in Monaco. I’ll also address Reign of the Exarchs, since with the right framing it can act as a prequel to the Shattercrown event.

4) Design global events.

So, stuff happens that moves the story forward. It’s time to set it down (along with the question of who buys pancakes or in this case, sides with or against the Hegemonic Ministry). I see this creating a fluid time in Awakened politics, where Seers try to entice Pentacle mages into temporary alliances, promising special consideration if their side wins. It’s a time for traitors and double agents. The Silver Ladder and Free Council won’t stand for this sort of thing, of course — they won’t compromising with the Throne for favours. The Mysterium would sure like to get its hands on the Seers’ stuff, however. This is half of the event book style stuff (like Requiem for a God).

When it comes to whys and hows, we’re going to follow the Mekton Empire model for some items. I’ll provide complete information for the main thread of the story, but I’ll also ask a bunch of questions about hidden facts and motives without answering them — but I won’t leave lame adventure hooks as a consolation prize. I’ll set down a list of 3 to 5 possible options so that harried Storytellers can make simple multiple choice selections, along with a reminder that pure DIY is encouraged.

Incidentally, part of making a metaplot work involves reaching back as well as moving forward. I’ll invent new bits of history here and in the adventure.

5) Make cool toys.

It’s not a metaplot unless there are some neat systems and more entrenched setting elements to support the main set of stories that might take place. I’ll design a system for espionage, trust and faction loyalty and a bunch of new spells mages might use whipping down the Autobahn after rogue aristocrat sorcerers. Setting-wise, I’ll design a few new factions to support the most obvious player and antagonist stances, along with one or two that don’t fit in one box or the other so easily. This is the other spot where event book techniques work well.

(Keep in mind that in a full treatment I’d probably have  more metaphysical, secretive story happening in tandem with obvious stuff. It might all be fallout from an Imperial spell, for example. Odder factions and systems can easily take root here. I’ not going to go into detail because that’d be too much work for a blog piece.)

6) Create lots of characters to fill PC and NPC roles

I’m taking some influence from Scion here, as it gives you ready to play characters at each tier of power. These guys are really handy because even if you don’t play the Son of Thor you can always bring him in as an antagonist, ally or Fifth Business dude in some godly meeting. Lots of the characters are useful; I want maybe 150% of the number I need to just get the plot on its feet. I’ll describe their intended uses in a straightforward fashion: as a supplement to more atmospheric descriptions, not a replacement. And yeah, I might add a few really powerful guys because they’re useful, but I’ll follow up with advice on how to use them.

I’ll design one or two relationship maps so that we can find out how the most important characters get along at a glance. Vampire: The Masquerade’s Chicago by Night is a great example of this technique in action.

7) Design an important adventure

The attached adventure shouldn’t just be a side story, but something the travels through the heart of the metaplot and has a chance to alter its outcome (though not necessarily completely — part of a rich setting comes from there being things players can’t change, but as this causes the money wailing of a thousand nerds you should never say so in the book). The adventure is the machine that shoved the metaplot to its ultimate resolution, even if it doesn’t do so in a way that necessarily meets player or character objectives.

8 ) See if breaking any metaplot rules would make it better. Mix things up. Smooth the bumps out. Question structure.

I lied — I totally want to deprotagonize you beneath my cool Mary Sue NPCs! Well, not really, but if we get to far into a method we’re likely to end up with some boring-ass thing that feels like the gaming equivalent of painting by numbers. People say they want structure and ways to make reconfigure chunks of stuff within set rules, but the finished product usually ends up seeming a bit soulless. At some point we need to smooth things over, build seamless links between the chunks and make it feel like an organic whole with its own mood, motifs and message. It needs some soul or else nobody’s going to care.

So what happened?

The Rise of the Practical Tablet Form Factor: Tablets are nothing new but tablets that don’t suck? That’s 2010. Sensitive resistive and inexpensive capacitive touchscreens with multitouch combined with software that works for a change (Windows 7, Android 2.0 to 2.1) made it possible to finally release practical general purpose tablets — previously, this form factor was mostly limited to specialized industries. Virtually every major company presented a tablet. Many were obvious responses to Apple’s rumoured iSlate, but recent patent applications from Apple indicate that the iSlate may end up being released with some dodgy mobile subsidy a la the iPhone, and might feature limitations similar to the ones that prompt people to jailbreak their iPhones. Basically, you want alternatives.

Tablets are important because they let players and GMs use machines at the table without the antisocial barrier of a screen and with natural game table actions such as written notes, page turning and more. Would a pure tablet suit gamers best? I’m not sure about that. HP did showcase an inexpensive convertible capacitive multitouch netbook however, meeting 75% of my requirements for an good next gen tabletop gaming machine.

Lots of E-Readers — Crappy, Crappy E-Readers: It’s easy to look at the abundance of e-readers at CES and conclude that they’ll be the best way for tabletop roleplayers to interact with books. That’s confusing popularity for practicality. CES’ ready for market e-readers don’t suit RPGs graphics-intensive qualities or gamers’ need for supplemental utilities such as character creators and dice rollers. They’ll get better, but will tablets get better first? I think they probably will, and e-readers may end up being an intermediate device.

Pixel Qi (and Maybe Mirasol): As Gizmodo put it: E-ink is dead. I’ve been watching Pixel Qi for a while. The technology lets you switch from a full colour backlit LCD screen to a non-backlit, power saving reader mode just by turning a dial. In reader mode you can still access normal applications and even watch video, though the colour is washed out. Screen response is far faster than e-ink. But the real killer behind the technology is that as a form of mature LCD technology it’s ready for mass production using the current LCD manufacturing infrastructure.

The only thing with a hope in hell of beating Pixel Qi is Qualcomm’s Mirasol display technology. It doesn’t piggyback on standard LCD but it does do colour and video (even 1080p HD) and it’s supposedly going to be installed in next gen Kindles. Basically, if you’re thinking of buying a Kindle for gaming (not standard reading, where the current versions work fine) don’t bother until the model with Mirasol and prepaid 4G shows up. Even then, you’ll want a mature app selection for any such e-reader to match a tablet-form general purpose machine with Pixel Qi installed. Otherwise, you’ll get the books, but not the tools (dice, campaign management) that really make going electronic worthwhile.

Androids in the Cloud: After a few experiments in the Chinese market, Android jumped into netbooks and tablets. This is probably a stopgap, as we all know the Chrome OS is coming (and Google has said it may eventually merge Android and Chrome) but it demonstrates that once again, tech companies want us to try (quasi) thin client computing. Unlike past initiatives, it looks like this will actually work because we can do pretty much anything remotely now. Companies should definitely think about serving tabletop RPGs this way, though it may only be viable for the top of the market.

Slow but Graphical – NVIDIA Tegra and Mobile Flash: One of the most interesting trends to come out of CES is stupid machines — that is, mobile-ish devices that run more slowly than traditional desktops and laptops but work just fine for the Web. The only problems with this approach were that ultramobile devices (smartphones and MIDs) struggled with video and couldn’t read Flash (Youtube on current devices uses an emulation script, not straight Flash video). The NVIDIA Tegra chip is set to augment devices to the point of playing streaming HD video and the Flash problem has been fixed for many devices. That means 2010 is the right to to roll out all of those funky graphical RPG applications like virtual tabletops.

Let Me Tell You What to Do

How should you respond to these developments? Here’s what I think:

Gamers: Buy a capacitive multitouch convertible tablet that uses Pixel Qi display technology. This will give you a flexible device that doesn’t interfere with face to face gaming, allows easy reading and saves power. They aren’t available yet but they should be soon. Find web apps that you can use with a glance and swipe. Unless you have money to spare, don’t buy a dedicated ebook reader for gaming purposes alone. The technology isn’t good enough yet but it’s okay for conventional books.

Game Companies: Develop touch-friendly web applications and get back to graphically ambitious tools such as the virtual tabletop. Look at how magazines are developing new content delivery methods for the iSlate and other tablets. Try developing games in the cloud and get past the idea that a pretended book is the best way to present content electronically.

What What?

These reactions are nigh-incoherent yet feel genuine, mirroring the good and bad in metaplots. The bad things about metaplots — that they make the setting less accessible and harder to work with — might be unavoidable in some respects but I think they also stem from some bad design habits in RPGs:

1. The idea that RPGs can be improved like a technology.
2. The notion that one tool, insight or design movement can take care of #1.

Developers use (or used) metaplots to drive fan loyalty, reboot game systems, tweak settings and justify adventures. I don’t think any development tool can do it all. Metaplot’s no exception. The more you expand a tool to do more, the less you focus on its best qualities. If it does everything, it doesn’t mean anything. When metaplots lose sight of a core mission in favour of lots of discrete, ad hoc tasks it gets difficult to provide practical advice about how to use them. If one book adds a development to introduce a new bad guy and another justifies a shift in the magic system, what can I say to gamers to help them own the whole thing from start to finish? It just looks like a bunch of crappy patches — and sometimes, that’s all it is.

It’s Okay, Everything Sucks

What can I do to fix it? One answer is “Nothing!” Then you throw your hands up and make a great show of contrition that you ever sought to oppress gamers or something.

I don’t think that’s the best answer. It’s a big mistake to give up on metaplot. It’s not a tool for everything but it is an effective tool. It remains one of the best ways to create a convincingly detailed setting, build a community and develop enduring parts of your IP. Metaplot even seems to be better at inspiring details about the back story of the “Year Zero” setting than the alternatives. When you reach back and add something to justify a new development the game’s history expands organically. Vampire: The Masquerade looks like it got all kinds of nifty things (and a few duds) out of the process.

One alternative is to make a toolkit out of your setting. These are often great resources, but might damage the community’s ability to develop common interests in the game, or the developer’s ability to build expand the setting in interesting ways.

I’m skeptical of toolkits. Like metaplots, they’ve bloated what they’re good at — but if you disagree with me fear not, because most people do! I remember when we got down to Seers of the Throne and I told Ethan and the other freelancers that I thought the toolkit, make your own bad guy approach was a bad idea. I used Vampire: The Requiem‘s VII book as an example. VII is a great book, full of compelling, well-executed ideas. You get to pick from multiple versions of VII. That can only be a good thing, right?

Think again. Any VII you want means:

• No future material about VII without breaking the implied promise of the VII book.
• No basis of unity for fans to develop VII on their own, because there’s an immediate division based on the version you want to use. It seems counterintuitive for more choice to hinder gamer creativity, but think of it this way: If you have 10 people split among three versions of VII (3/3/4) the chance of each sub-project dying from lack of interest goes up, since so many of these things have over 50% attrition, leaving 1/1/2 people who think nobody cares.

It may sound like I’m harshing on the book. I’m not! I own it and used parts of it in my Vampire/Mage game. This book didn’t fail but its tools have a price. Metaplot adds its own difficulties, but it’s not alone.

(At this point, people who love structure may accuse me of conflating metaplot and setting — and that’s true. Fact is, the boundary between the two is pretty vague in practice.)

Whatever we do, there’s a trade off — RPG Design Culture Tendency #1 blinds us to it, but it’s there. If metaplot is a particular pain in the ass it’s probably because it did more than should have (Cultural Problem #2) and we were so busy applying it that it was hard to get to the intellectual space where we can look at it from afar, appreciate it as a general thing and see how we can give it a proper place.

Metaplot 2.0

Let’s get it right.

First, we’ll ban ourselves from using metaplot as a game design multitool. That means:

1. We won’t use metaplot to justify rules changes. We won’t kill every assassin in the Forgotten Realms to support an edition change. We might add and change systems to support an event, but it’s for the sake of the event (and it had better be a good one).
2. We won’t use metaplot to invalidate any fundamental character or setting structure (choice of character types, factions, etc.) unless we’re going to a new edition or some equally momentous release. We won’t kick your splat out of the Splat Social Club in a supplement.
3. We’ll never make book B require book A unless book A is a core book to limit declining accessibility. This is the tough one.

These are the rules. We’ll only break them in a dire emergency or to support a eucatastrophically awesome idea.

Next, we’ll set some objectives:

1. We want to build a community around the setting, where gamers can talk about basically the same people, places and things.
2. Related to #1, we want to build loyalty to the game setting. We want good fans, and we want to reward them for being fans — without alienating newcomers.
3. We want to open up lots of new possibilities for stories.
4. We want a sense of verisimilitude and living history.

Frankenplot Lives!

You can find bits of Metaplot 2.0 strewn across dozens of game books. If I wanted to elevator pitch it I’d go with, Scion + Requiem for a God + Mekton Empire. You might come up with different examples, but let me explain myself here:

• Scion features playable signature characters and a default campaign structure that has a powerful effect on the setting.
• Requiem for a God is a complex resource for a single event that doesn’t lay out a firm source of events beyond Odin kicking the bucket (or whatever).
• Mekton Empire features one of the best implementations of setting secrets, bar none, where there are multiple choice answers and space for GMs to add their own (a toolkit idea! I’m a hypocrite! But let me explain . . .)

Damn, this article’s running long, so it’ll be a two parter. See you!

(I should double-emphasize that it’s not as if RPGs don’t have a ways to go with that last one. For instance, I’m still a bit stung that the transgendered cop I created for “Bloody Mary” in Urban Legends got that part of his background cut at the developer’s insistence.)

Right after the D20 licence came out but before the Book of Erotic Fantasy I floated a thought experiment with some other writers about attacking the license with three books:

• The Killing of the King: The occult flow of causality requires you to assassinate JFK using every possible permutation allowed by the (loosely conceived) constraints of evidence to prevent the early rise of “Third Way” liberalism, because it sucks. Just look at how many times Tony Blair had to lie.
• D20 Eco Ops: This’d be a modern resource with rules for eco-activist sabotage. The game systems would be integrated into comprehensive descriptions of the organizational and tactical methods used by real groups, with the explicit position that the book was an ideological training ground.
• The third one is still a project I’m pursuing so I won’t go into too much detail, but it involves methodical real-world drug use by characters to stimulate their creative autonomy.

In retrospect a rewrite of the D20STL would have just resulted sooner, but the real point wasn’t to attack the license as much as use it as a conceptual benchmark in pursuit of challenging ideas. It’s all pretty contrived, but I’m afraid that I don’t think RPGs are doing better right now. They’re about Meta-issues for gamers, either situated in the game or the community. There are a whack of games stabbing at depth, but they just don’t succeed. It’s stuff like Man, organized religion sure is screwed up! or It’s hard when people die! or Poor people sure have it rough! or Aren’t you offended when I’m gross!

Challenging art requires to to fight a position that’s commonly believed in a way that gets to the point. Gamers are overfond of Star Trek-style superloose allegories (It’s really about black people/queer folks/etc, not aliens!), possibly because these were invented to avoid complaints from people just like them. The fact that these people lived in the 1960s indicates we haven’t come very far, have we? We like to use these to dodge blame for the bad stuff (like orcs as stand ins for colonized peoples) and take credit for the good stuff. We need to build challenges that are harder to dodge.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Mage: The Ascension (and others; just going with what comes to mind first) both tried out these sorts of challenges, though neither succeeded completely. Werewolf started out by saying Human nature and corporate capitalism in particular are immoral, destructive forces. Mage said Modernity isn’t necessarily desirable, probably isn’t rational and is a servant of political interests, anyway. Boy, did that make people mad, and not mad in a kind of throwaway fashion. Gamers still get pissed off about it. They get pissed off when hints of it come up, like when Awakening added a nod to John Zerzan-like primitivism in Tome of the Watchtowers, or whatever Phil Brucato wrote in Changing Breeds, and they’re probably not going to like something in an upcoming book where the easy colonized-peoples metaphor are the smart guys.

This kind of thing doesn’t happen too often though. It’s hard to present a commercial proposition that’s based on telling the audience their beliefs are screwed up unless it’s about religion. If it’s about religion it’s pretty easy because people who can’t irreverently manipulate signs suck at RPGs anyway. So besides things like like Satan was a good guy! Angels were stone killers! writers and designers get scared of saying this stuff because they don’t want to alienate their audience, especially now that segments of the audience can broadcast all kinds of crap in response on a public forum.

You would think that smaller publishers would pick up the slack here but by and large, they don’t. They’re pretty addicted to Trek-level allegories to inoffensively pick up the slack, with a side order of the ‘ol grossout (like that Old School thing where the guy details the evil things you do to summon demons and crap). I’m not saying it’s never been done there (Steal Away Jordan, for instance) but the small press sure has some ways to go.

It also doesn’t help that the culture of gaming is chock full of creative machismo. Everybody wants assurances that their creative impulse isn’t being oppressed by the GM or designer or group of something — everybody’s an enemy of the big swinging cock of self-expression. Challenging that . . . Well, it pretty much feels like pointing below the belt and laughing to these types, and making a statement about how you ought to think or feel can’t help but do that. It’s a pity, because it other media people take more responsibility for their responses.

I’ll put it this way. You know those crazy far right movie reviews that talk about how every flick will turn you into a gay(er) (more) heathen (card carrying) communist? Keep that style of analysis but remove the slant (mostly; there’s something inherently totalizing and fascist about that mode anyway) and you have how pretty much every internet-vocal gamer reacts to new RPG stuff they have a problem with. If someone did that for every movie they saw without a hint of satire or comic effect you’d probably think they were assholes, wouldn’t you?

Finally, you can’t do your best job without revealing something of yourself. It’s possible to do a good job writing against your beliefs, but it can be seriously disconcerting. I despise the world views of the Euthanatos and Silver Ladder, but people frequently cite that stuff as some of my better work. RPGs represent a special danger because the audience generates its own deep narratives and might really piss you off with them. I really sympathize with Vincent Baker dealing with Dogs in the Vineyard being used to play SS members, resulting in oneupmanship where everybody tried to sympathize with the SS. The answer to these challenges is that doing something like this means you’re an asshole, but nobody really wants to be put in a position where they have to call somebody an asshole. And win or lose that fight, you’re dealing with someone who created an involved narrative to an immoral end.

That’s the danger; that’s the challenge. Once you flirt with the heavy stuff you’re not dealing with remote intellectual questions any more. You’re laying it out, and you may end up confronting what you don’t just think is a creative conflict, but a basic moral error while you’re fighting for a position you believe leads to something finer in the world.

Who’s up to the challenge? Am I up to it? I don’t know. I think we need it. I hope we get it in 2010. Like I said at the beginning, it’s not the purpose of art, but without it, an art form has no purpose.