John's RPG Journal

Solmukohta 2008 Report

2008-05-06T18:57:33Z

Somewhat belatedly, I'm including here my report on Solmukohta 2008 -- an international larp convention with a focus on analysis and discussion, held this year in Finland that I flew out to. (I had a separate post about my personal experience of it.)

I'll post this material soon on my Convention Reports page.

A Week in Finland

Modern Day Modesty

This was my Monday larp, organized by Santtu Määttänen. It was an abstract larp where none of the characters actually talked to each other. Instead, we lay in a darkened neutral room, and talked about why we were considering suicide. We heard the others only out-of-character. The mood was set in part by a soundtrack as well as the neutral environment. As an experiment, I was happy to try it -- especially since it was relatively short. However, the lack of character interaction would be a major issue for me if it went any longer or if there were several like it.

The Scarlet Railway

This was my Tuesday larp, organized by Andrea Castellani. This was an immersive larp where the characters were refugees from Bosnia in 1992. It had 3 hours of preparation, then 2 hours of the central scene set on a train between camps in Italy, followed by discussion. Over three hours, we first read up on the general background, then were assigned characters, and played out five scenes from our years together prior to the train trip. The memories played out were mostly positive, but our written character backgrounds had the horrible war crimes we experienced during the recent occupation of our village by Serbian forces. I played Roman, a Catholic priest and uncle to the family. After playing out the memories indoors, we prepared and moved outside to play out the train ride. As part of preparation, Andrea attached bandages over the eyes of one of the players, whose character was a teenager who had been blinded by the Serbian troops. During play, we had a problem of occasional loud construction noise by the balcony we were playing in that made conversation difficult. Other than that, play went quite smoothly.

I though the character interactions in the train ride worked quite well. We had plenty to talk about, both about our past and our future in the camps. I did feel some qualms that by playing a game about war crimes we were doing a disservice to the victims. However, the background was thoroughly researched and treated with great respect. I appreciated the preparation, which gave a deeper context of life and the roots of the conflicts.

War Council

This was my Wednesday, organized by Martine Svanevik and Marthe Glad. About 18 players were representatives of the four member fictional meta-nations of the "Southern Alliance" in a future world war. We sat around a big conference table in a classroom and discussed our plans for continuing a desperate war, where one of the points for debate was reducing the draft age from 16 to 14. We random took characters, defined briefly with a nation, a position, and a characteristic quote (mine was "What has been seen cannot be unseen"). At the start, we established background out-of-character of the conflict over Madagascar by voting on strategic decisions over it. Then we entered play.

In play, we debated many points of strategy and tactics around the table. Underying that, though, people were struggling with their beliefs about the war. Our main background was the tactical situation around Madagascar, with little about the causes or bigger picture of the war. As a result, players had very different internal pictures about what the war was about in the bigger picture. It was interesting to see, indirectly, how players thought to themselves about the war. It worked pretty smoothly in that players would improvise, and accept facts that others stated. However, I could see in our different reactions that we had quite imagined the larger war quite differently. This was distracting from the play, but it was interesting to reflect out-of-character on how different people imagined differently. I would put this also as interesting experimentally.

Prayers on the Porcelain Alter

This (aka "The Hangover Larp") was my Thursday larp, organized by J. Tuomas Harviainen. It was a short immersive larp (roughly 2 hours including a half hour of preparation). All of the characters were acting students who woke up with the worst hangover of their lives, not quite able to remember all the events of the night before -- the joke being, of course, that many of the players would have hangovers from the frequent drinking of the larp crowd. The characters had colors for their names as a mnemonic. The organizer explained as rules that we had the power to freely assert facts by saying "meta" before any statement. However, I never heard this used during the game.

I played "Purple" -- a quiet character, which is always a tricky issue in role-playing. It worked fairly well, though, in practice. The main action of the larp was not really a mystery where we worked out what happened. Rather, it was us being mean to each other in the course of working out what happened.

The Conference Itself

Organization and Attendees

Solmukohta 2008 was held at the conference hotel Kuljavanranta just 30 miles outside Helsinki. They organized buses from downtown. Compared to 2005 in Norway and 2006 in Sweden, my thoughts on the overall structure were:

1) It was a day shorter, Friday to Sunday rather than Thursday to Sunday. Since Friday and Sunday were both half-days with packing out and packing in, this was really one full day versus two full days -- which made it feel very short to me.

2) The accomodations were more comfortable than my prior experiences, being a nice hotel as opposed to a spread-out group of cabins in 2005 and 2006. However, there were drawbacks. We were generally three to a room with only two beds and a mattress. More importantly, my two roommates and I only had two key cards, which meant hassles over getting into the room. The event areas were still spread out, but they were connected by indoor hallways. This was more comfortable, but it meant people couldn't see each other as well wandering around.

3) The attendees were more internationally diverse than two years ago in Sweden. With around 250 people total, there were big blocks of guys from Germany and Israel, a scattering of people from Eastern Europeans, along with four Americans. Also, probably not coincidentally, the average attendee was a little older, with more men. I had estimated a little over one-third women at Knutpunkt 2006 (fifty-something out of 147), while it seemed under a third this time.

Program Items

Educational Role-playing

This was a panel talk and discussion on educational role-playing. The first topic of discussion was the newly-formed Danish public school which explicitly organized its program around role-playing, Østerskov Efterskole. Malik Hyltoft, one of the organizers of the school, talked about its curriculum and techniques. What stood out to me was how students would often not show any signs of going deeply into character beyond their costume, but still engaged more deeply with the material based on their role.

Matthijs Holter also spoke about his use of role-playing in classrooms, using techniques from tabletop games. His students had a character sheet made using ultra-simplified rules, and a key use of the role-playing was motivational -- especially givig experience points (XP) for solving problems. After that, many others spoke about their own examples of educational role-playing, such as a game to learn about refugee camps in a children's scouting program, and an extended game among schoolkids to learn about the politics around the forming of modern Israel.

Larp in Latvia

Agnese Dzervite & Diana Kazina gave a lecture on the larp scene in Latvia, including pictures and short video trailers made to advertise certain larps. They estimated there were 200-300 active larpers in Latvia, from a population of around 2 million. Games at first started with Russian speakers in 1997, who founded "Club Dragon" that continues to run three larps per year. The first larps in Latvian started in 2003, who are generally younger. There have been only a few mixed language larps. One used the language barrier in game, with humans speaking Latvian, dwarves speaking Russian, and elves speaking English.

The games were generally in the fantasy or post-apocalyptic genres. While they spoke of their efforts as primitive in some respects, they were able to get excellent locations for play -- especially on former military bases. They would advertise for larps on the Internet, including the videos trailers shown.

I was intrigued at how the general fantasy / sci-fi culture and gaming culture had transfered into Eastern Europe.

Translating the 3 Way Model

Troels Barkholt lead a discussion on the Three Way Model, which I was naturally interested in. I came into this somewhat late, but I was involved as people broke into groups to suggest different ways to split up larp style into three groups. Suggestions included

"Romantic" vs "Violent" vs "Intrigue"
"Heroes & NPCs" vs "Equal Masses" vs "Few Friends"
"Loose Story" (player-made PCs) vs "Tight Setup" (GM-made PCs) vs "Triggered Events" (directed)
"Powerful Drama" vs "The 360-degree Illusion" vs "Pervasive Game"

Having written up the Threefold Model at its start, it was interesting to see it being discussed eleven years later.

There were no strong conclusions -- just the idea that there is still some power in it, and some pointing out of problems.

Listening Dramatics

This was a workshop run by Anna-Karin Linder on picking up especially non-verbal cues from other players. We went through some exercises of walking around while watching for signals from other players. One exercise was to walk around and silently pick one person as your protector and another as your enemy -- and to walk so that your protector was between you and your enemy. We then tried to walk around so that as a group, only three people were walking at the once. Whenever one person stopped, the others would notice and someone would start walking.

After that, there were a series of eye contact exercises. The first was to have two rows of chairs facing each other, with everyone sitting in them, except for the odd person out who was trying to get a seat. We made agreements by eye contact with a person in the opposite row, then quickly switched seats without the person in the middle catching us. Another was to walk around and establish a "relationship" with another person by eye contact, then by silent agreement high-five them and move on. This was then complicated by having a jealous other who would try to prevent such relationships, thus including watching for other people's eye contact.

From that it progressed to more expressive mini-scenarios that included talking. We split into a group of judges who were forced to view a set of prisoners before they were executed. This was still interesting, but I don't think it worked quite as well as part of the workshop progression. (Though one problem was that we had a lot more people than the workshop was originally intended for.)

Tango for Two

This was an intriguing workshop and mini-larp organized by Tor Kjetil Edland and Even T -- where there were two players for each character. One player was the conscious mind of the character, while the other was the subconscious impulses. The subconscious player could give suggestions to the conscious mind, and during certain periods (when the lights were dimmed and tango music played), the conscious had to follow the subconscious' instructions. As we worked it out, the subconscious players would also sometimes interact with each other directly -- presumably representing subconscious cues between characters. However, the subconscious were invisible to other conscious players.

We paired up and went through a few exercises. A key point was in using physical pointing, directing, and pushing to influence the conscious player in addition to talking. We drew some random traits out of a hat for our characters, including two goals with regards to other characters. The situation was that we were business partners, where a large company had hired a smaller company to do sexual harrassment awareness training for its employees. We had some token costuming to associate the subconscious with the conscious, where each wore an identical hat or scarf. The subconscious players also marked their faces with black greasepaint.

The game itself was quite chaotic, as one could guess since there were five subconscious' all whispering and pushing at once while the conscious players were trying to have a regular conversation. But it was very interesting, and made me ponder about ways to work a mystic or otherwise thematic subconscious into a larp.

Metatechnique Toolbox

A lecture and discussion lead by Anna-Karin Linder, concerning different metagame techniques. This drew especially from techniques used in the larp, "A Nice Evening With the Family". These included:

Having invisible characters like angels or ghosts.
Allowing players to speak out monologues that are only heard out-of-character
Having a designated special room that was a "safe space" for meta-discussion and playing out of touchy subjects or scenes
Having a designated hour for meta-discussion
Having an "off-focus" area where players can step out to watch the game but not be a part of it
Using time jumps or voice-overs during a game
Using fixed drama (i.e. a known storyline) or fate play (i.e. a future event with a known place and time)
Having acts with declared themes

These and others got some discussion, but mostly this was a grab-bag of different techniques and reports of their use rather than in-depth discussion of any one topic.

Larp Management

Anna Westerling lead a very large workshop on larp management, where we broke into groups of 6-8 and planned out a hypothetical larp, and discussed other ideas. I found there to be a bit of culture shock, as some of the Scandanavian folks at the table discussed applying for grants and getting a massive budget for even a moderate-sized larp - as well as having a complicated web of official positions among the organizers. To myself as an American, and to Diana as a Latvian, this was utterly alien to our experience of larps -- which were for us something thrown together by a few friends. Still, it was interesting to see, and we had some fun planning out our hypothetical horror larp -- "Bottom of the Food Chain".

Larp in Eastern Europe

This was a Sunday morning panel, with people speaking on larping in Russia, Latvia, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. I was pretty tired through this one, but there was a lot of description. As in most places, the dominant larp genre seemed to be outdoor fantasy larps influenced by Tolkien and D&D, where players create their own characters and costumes. There is occasional overlap with the living history or reenactment crowd.

I missed the description of Russian larps, and I had already heard about the larp scene in Latvia (see above). Croatia fantasy and sci-fi fans concentrated in the central city of Zagreb, and the larpers and tabletop role-players overlapped heavily. There it seems common for characters to be transfered from one game to another. Czechoslovakia's role-playing was also D&D influenced. Hungary evidently had a boom of tabletop RPGs in the 1990s, followed by a religious backlash against the games as satanic. At present, there were perhaps 400 to 500 medieval fantasy larpers, 100 to 200 World of Darkness larpers, and 20 or so organizer teams.

Conclusion

Overall, the content seemed to have less of a weighty, experimental feel. Some of the big topics had a "retro" feel to them -- meaning taking after fantasy larps using boffer weapons, or influenced by tabletop games from past decades. These included the discussion of larp in Eastern Europe and Russia, which don't have as much of the experimental scene. It also included larps for younger players used in education. At the book release party for "Playground Worlds", some people described its collection of essays as celebrating an earlier ideal of "play". There was even a lecture on the memory of Gary Gygax.

Still, larps were clearly more popular and accepted within Scandanavia than elsewhere -- emphasized by projects like the massive Dragonbane larp and the Danish public school, Østerskov Efterskole. If they want larp to grow, there are probably some lessons to be taken from Scandanavia -- including both their traditional and experimental larp scenes.

An overview of the books can be found at nordicscene.org.

On Gender Disparity in RPGs

2008-04-15T23:01:28Z

There has been some recent controversy over gender and gaming, bringing up the spectre of evolutionary psychology again that I last talked about in 2006 commentary on an article by Chris Crawford.

Edit: I wrote more on my issues with evolutionary psychology in general in a post on my personal LJ.

Sirriamnis of Geek Girls Rule noted about a recent panel discussion on gender in a post on "Gamestorm 2008", saying,

Then we attended a panel called "Why does gaming mostly appeal to guys?" The title of which we took exception to. Fortunately all of the panelists felt this way as well. However, if I have to hear one more guy talk about how girls play with Barbies until they're ready for something more, I am going to kick him in the shins. We kind of took over, explaining that girls had been more or less excluded from gaming for years. Nearly every woman there had a story about not being able to game when she first wanted to because she had been told that girls didn't game or couldn't game.

robin_d_laws' posted on the same panel "Gamestorm Day 4", where he described the panel as:

The noon "Why does gaming appeal mostly to guys?" seminar began with a thorough rejection of the premise and moved on to a justifiably optimistic take on the hobby's slow yet inexorable march toward gender parity. This was one of those panels where if anything there were too many good points being made by too many interesting people. My take on the gender and gaming issue is, in a nutshell, that we're seeing a massive cultural shift where the geeks are inheriting the earth, and that the population of gaming-ready girls and women is growing as nerdly activities become ever more mainstream. Overall response from the audience provided perhaps the most hopeful take on the subject than I've seen at any con -- including Finland, where they've pretty much achieved gender parity. This allowed the group to move on to the thornier topic of ethnic and class divisions in America, and what gaming could to do bring in the groups in those categories it currently has little truck with.

Jonathan Tweet (co-author of Ars Magica and D&D 3rd Edition) then posted a response on his blog at WotC entitled "gender and gaming", saying,

Roleplaying, as currently construed, appeals disproportionately to guys because it's mostly about the things that men evolved to enjoy: hunting and warfare. It's about a group assembling to undertake (imaginary) risks for glory and dominance. It's the same reason that team sports, such as basketball, are more male, whereas women compete to be judged beautiful and worthy (ice skating, gymnastics). TCGs are even more male-oriented than RPGs as they're about direct conflict with little to no story or personality. When I was in Finland 5 years ago, the TCG players were typified as guys without girlfriends. LARPing has more female appeal because it's more about personalities, relationships, clothing, and make-up. Finally, the quality of gamer men is a factor. A Finnish gamer I met said she got into gaming as a way to meet good-looking guys. The US gaming scene has less to offer along those lines.

This was responded to in two Astrid's Parlor threads, first "Jonathan Tweet on Gender and Gaming" (now locked) and later "Gender Blog Discussion".

First of all, I'd like to explain why I am annoyed by this and what difference I think it makes. The evolutionary explanation is that the D&D gender disparity is "natural" for how RPGs are constructed. If that is accepted among the set of people that care about the gender disparity in RPGs, it has a couple effects.

1) In practical terms, it encourages focusing on ways to construe role-playing completely differently -- i.e. RPGs about completely different subjects, or very different storytelling-focused systems like Everway -- as opposed to addressing issues like having a woman with a straining bodice on the cover. I feel that presenting . For example, Werewolf: The Apocalypse is very much explicitly about taking risks and adventure for glory -- explicitly so. However, my experience is that it has been popular with women.

2) Presenting the difference as essential suggests that to make games appealing to women, they must be less appealing to men. I don't believe this is true. It is interesting that Tweet cites Finland as achieving gender parity, because it seems to me that in Finland -- not only is there more gender parity, but gaming in general is relatively more popular than in the U.S. I suspect that bringing more women into the hobby could make the hobby more popular with men.

3) It suggests that women tend to not be interested in competitive games such as trading card games, requiring more "story and personality". While I don't have any hard numbers on this, my experience is that more abstract boardgames and card games have more female participation than tabletop role-playing games and wargames.

I also take issue with the evolutionary logic used, similar to my issues with Chris Crawford's article. I think they're a bit of a side-track from the gaming issues, though, so I'm not going to detail them here. (cf. my evolutionary psychology post on my personal LJ.)

A Master's Thesis in French

2008-04-11T01:18:05Z

Via Kyle Aaron in a thread on theRPGsite, I came across Coralie David's Master's thesis in comparative literature for University of Toulouse, entitled "Le Jeu de Rôle, mode d'expression littéraire?" . I think that is roughly "the RPG, a mode of literary expression?". The thesis is being hosted on the French RPG site Roliste Galactique, along with an interview with the author.

It cites a lot of different material, and it focuses on three RPGs as detailed examples: In Nomine Satanis / Magna Veritas, Shadowrun, and Vampire: The Requiem. It also cites a number of theories and analyses, including both American and Scandanavian takes on theory.

Some bits of it that stood out to me were from page 26:

Mais le théâtre suppose un public et, comme nous l'avons déjà dit, les joueurs ont un double statut: le créateur du message est également son référent. Lisa Padol1 fonde en grande partie sa définition sur ce point:
un jeu de rôle permet aux gens de devenir simultanément à la fois les artistes qui créent une histoire et le public qui la voit se dérouler.2

Une histoire qui se déroule suppose donc tout une création narrative, point que privilégie Liz Henry:
Les participants des jeux de rôle (...)sont engagés dans un processus complexe de narrativité de groupe; ils sont les auteurs, les narrateurs, les personnages, les acteurs, les lecteurs, et le public d'un texte qui est à la fois une expérience et une orientation vers le produit.3

On peut donc dire que le rôliste occupe beaucoup de fonctions littéraires au sein du texte, ce qui constitue une particularité qui lui est propre. C'est en effet une "expérience" car la narration se vit par le biais des personnages, qui doivent en général, "produire" quelque chose, c'est-à-dire atteindre des objectifs ou remplir une mission. Bien que le cadre soit virtuel, les interrogations, les décisions des personnages et les conséquences qu'ils doivent assumer sont une réalité du jeu, et donc les émotions qui en résultent sont censées être ressenties, à différents degrés, par le joueur pour donner à son personnage une réaction cohérente.

And from page 34:

En effet, son succès fait que certains la reprennent en la modifiant quelque peu, comme John H. Kim sur le site anglo-saxon Darkshire2 qui, un peu comme The Forge, analyse et critique le jeu de rôle. Kim, qui choisit de nommer cette théorie "Le Modèle Triple "(The Threefold Model)" change le terme narrativisme pour dramatisme3, mais le sens reste le même. Au niveau du simulationnisme, il met également l'accent sur le fait que "la résolution des évènements dans le jeu se base seulement sur des considérations en rapport avec le monde du jeu, sans prendre en compte d'éventuels éléments méta-jeu pour affecter la décision"4.

Elliot Wilen translated the first part of this as

"In fact, [GNS]'s success has led others to take it up and modify it somewhat, such as John H. Kim, on the English-language site Darkshire, which, like the The Forge, analyzes and critiques RPGs. Kim, who chose to name this theory "The Threefold Model", replaces the term narrativism with dramatism, but the meaning remains the same."

So it seems to reverse the derivation, since Edwards' GNS was derived and renamed parts of the prior Threefold Model. A bit annoying, but it is at least nice to be mentioned.

Off to Solmukohta 2008

2008-03-28T19:05:03Z

So tonight I'm leaving for Finland to attend Solmukohta 2008, an international larp convention that rotates between the four mainland Nordic countries. (I've sometimes called it the Scandanavian larp scene, but I should correctly call it Nordic now if I'm going to Finland.) So there's a week of sightseeing, larping, and drinking beforehand (called "A Week in Finland" by tradition); then the convention itself which is more about analysis and theory than play.

I'm especially interested in what they have for the book this year. I have an article in it about parlor larps, which I hope is a good introduction and issue raiser, but nothing ground-breaking. I am eager to see what others wrote, though.

See my Knutepunkt 2005 Report and Knutpunkt 2006 Report for more details on what it's like in general, along with my larp LJ tag.

What makes me a gamer?

2008-03-17T17:44:08Z

So some thoughts on the RPG community and subculture. This was inspired by some other discussions -- this time I'm putting links on the bottom, since I want to emphasize my positive message first.

What makes a subculture?

Gary Alan Fine, in his book Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds , analyzed the gaming community in 1979 as a subculture. He defined a subsociety as a collection of individuals who have importance as a distinctive segment of society -- and a "subculture" as a subsociety where there is (1) a network of communication, (2) self-identification as a group, and (3) identification by those outside the group.

Why am I a part?

So for role-players, the key activities would be the games themselves, and communicating in a network of people who play. That would obviously include being a regular in online forums, but one can connect to the network in other ways, just so long as the chain eventually connects to the central sphere of gamers. So a group who just talk among themselves aren't part of the larger subculture. However, if a few of the group connect to large forums, then they are part of it. Those more central to the subculture may spend more time gaming, participate in online discussions, write gaming articles, and/or self-publish their own games.

For myself, I obviously communicate with other RPG players -- through my LJ, various forums, my webpage, and a few conventions. I also identify myself as a gamer. (My license plate says "RPGNERD", for example.) I would say that the main reason I consider myself a gamer is that I play games with others and also talk about games with a community of those who play. I remember being distinctly surprised when Lee in my group said in conversation that she wasn't a gamer -- I felt that by regularly playing games with others, one was a gamer. (She clarified that by "gamer" she meant someone who played video/computer games, which is the more common understanding of the term.)

I could compare this to other subcultures. For example, I am more marginally a part of the Korean-American subculture. I connect to a network through my Korean relatives and subscribing to KoreAm magazine. I identify myself as Korean-American, and others identify me as such. I have some other hobbies, though not as involved as gaming. These days, I don't identify myself as a singer, even though I sing fairly well, because I don't sing in groups often enough to feel it significant. I have in the past been involved in theater as well, though the theater groups I was in were somewhat isolated from any broader scene.

I know a little bit about a few other subcultures by proxy, like the poetry scene and the queer scene (at least in the Bay Area).

What is distinctive about the gamer subculture?

Demographically, gamers tend towards white, suburban, middle-class. They are often college-educated. Within the U.S., they are notably strong in the Midwest, but are pretty widely spread. Religiously, they are mixed with many being agnostic, but with a over-represented minority of pagans. As seen in "Psychological Studies on Role-Playing Games", the general trend is that tabletop role-players tend slightly towards introversion but strongly towards openness to experience (cf. Big Five Personality Traits). There is a trend of estrangement from mainstream culture, which basically means they watch less of the most popular television programs and magazines.

Beyond this, there are a host of traits that most readers are probably aware of. Gamers tend to dress informally in t-shirts and such, similar to sports fans though with different icons. They are not very physically fit, not surprising for a sedentary hobby, and no more pronounced than what I've seen of other sedentary hobbies. They strongly enjoy and prefer science fiction and fantasy, overlapping heavily with SF/F and comic book fandom.

Personally, I'm at least as comfortable in the general gamer scene as I am in other social groups -- including subcultures like a Korean-American crowd or theater geeks, or mainstream culture like going out to a local sports bar or club. I do have things that I am not happy about, but most of them are specific to my tastes rather than universal improvements.

The one dissatisfaction that comes to mind for me is lack of women. Broadly speaking, I'm fine with having gender biased space. For example, I'm fine with predominantly female gatherings like WisCon or BlogHer. I'm also fine with male-dominant spaces like men's movement gatherings or guys' nights out, as long as there aren't real-world perks hinged on them (i.e. like male-only golf games that make business connections). However, I find that within gaming, I enjoy a more gender split like AmberCon NorthWest.

Of course, there are lots of other things I would wish for. At conventions, I'd like better organization, more social activities, and better kids programs or child care -- but that's just sort of a general wish for better stuff. Similarly, there are a lot of hypothetical RPGs that I would like to see published. I would also prefer less division of camps in online discussion. I would describe those more as wishes than dissatisfaction, though.

Dissatisfaction with the Gamer Subculture/Community

This post was inspired by some recent comments about gamer subculture. Matt Snyder posted in "Dice Quixote" that he wanted to play role-playing games, but not participate in the surrounding subculture apart from the games. I discussed some interesting points in the comments to that with Lisa Fleishman. Keith Senkowsky followed up in "Amused..." saying, "Snyder has been accused of saying the subculture is beneath him (which he did not say). Well I am saying it. The subculture is beneath me. How you like them apples?" In response, Stuart Robertson started a thread on "The Myth of Gamer Subculture" on Story Games, and a parallel thread on theRPGsite.

There have, of course, been other negative comments on the gamer subculture in the past. However, they are often not consistent. For example, quite the opposite of Synder's point, Ron Edwards has criticized the tendency of gamers to not socialize outside of games -- notably in his often self-referenced 2002 Forge thread on "Social Context", where he suggested that participating in more out-of-game activities with other gamers was healthier than just playing. Others, more like Snyder, have claimed that gamers socialize together too much -- to the extreme of "doing everything together".

These clash both with my own impressions and the psychological studies of gamers that I've seen. I have seen nothing to indicate that gamers on average have any greater problems than the general population. They have a slight introversion tendency, but it is not pronounced, nor is introversion a flaw. I have seen both gamers who treat their games as a casual night out without socializing otherwise, and gamers who are a closely-knit social group with the people they play with. I don't think see a problem with either behavior. This is not to say that gamers don't have their problems, but then so does everyone.

Gygax's Passing

2008-03-12T17:47:33Z

A little more about D&D and Gary Gygax is in order, I think.

There has been a surprising outpouring of mainstream media attention to Gygax's death -- far more coverage of tabletop RPGs than I've seen in a while. In the New York Times article "Herald of a Global Imagination Revolution", Seth Schiesel wrote: "Without Mr. Gygax, there would have been no Ultima, no Wizardry, no Bard's Tale, no Zelda, no Final Fantasy, no Baldur's Gate, no EverQuest, no Lineage and certainly no World of Warcraft. But most important, without Mr. Gygax (pronounced GUY-gax) millions of people - mostly young men, but also some women - would never have discovered the liberating strength of their own imagination." On Wired, David Kushner wrote an extended article, "Dungeon Master: The Life and Legacy of Gary Gygax". NPR had a number of mentions of the event, most amusingly getting U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling to answer D&D trivia questions as part of "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!". There were a few critical pieces -- such as Slate Magazine's article, "With Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax created a monster", by Erik Sofge -- in which he attacked D&D for its experience rewards for killing. But that was a rare exception.

Unsurprisingly, there have been many reactions within the RPG blog community -- almost all positive. For a while, Story Games had the title line "Thanks, Gary, For Our Hobby. You Will Be Missed." There wasn't a whole lot of substance to most of the threads, though, so I'm not including a lot of links.

I do find it sad -- Gygax pioneered the field, and added a fun, whimsical spin on fantasy. I didn't generally enjoy his writing, and his mechanics were clunky, but the larger structure of dungeon design was inspired and remains so. Other designers have created much superior rules, in my opinion, but the D&D style of dungeon design remains a key concept in structuring adventures.

As a rare exception, Matt Snyder posted "A guy who made a game. The end." -- saying "Clinging to Gary so you, the self-conscious gamer, can avoid feeling alone and awkward in your nerd shame is giving Gary a lot more credit than he deserves. You and your friends earned that by what you did." I don't see how credit can't be shared. If a writer credits an earlier author as their inspiration, eulogizing them on their death, it isn't generally taken as self-deprecating shame. Instead, it is considered respectful and appropriate.

However, it seems to me that game designers and gamers are often considered lesser than writers. A writer who mourns an influential predecessor is given more credit than a gamer who mourns a designer. In the media coverage, there is often good-humored mocking mixed with nostalgia. Though, to be fair, Gygax's D&D is not the most serious of works -- and should be compared perhaps to a popular pulp writer, who would also likely get some jokes.

Even though I've rarely played D&D since grade school, the game has still been a huge influence on me. I think Gygax has had more influence on me than any of my favorite novel authors, whose passings I would also mourn.

D&D 4th Edition Previews

2008-03-04T19:27:59Z

NOTE: Especially in a D&D post, I should note that it seems that the Gary Gygax, one of the founders of D&D, has just passed away -- as posted on Troll Lord Games, via zigguratbuilder and RPGnet. It was reported as a front-page link on CNN.com.

I had just been writing an update on 4th edition D&D. The past weekend was the Dungeons & Dragons Experience -- an RPGA event in Arlington, Virginia. There special preview demos of the new 4th edition were given. Mike Shea created a D&D Experience Liveblog to cover it. He posted lots of pictures and commentary as well as a Demo Adventure PDF. There are also a set of zipped PDF character sheets available from WotC. (I have a page of conversions for easy browsing of the character sheets.)

Really, the mechanics and background details are being discussed to death in many other forums more focused on it. I don't have a whole lot to add. Personally, I'll wait to see some reviews of the full game once it is published in June and maybe play some demos. I will at least post the new proposed cover of the flagship, the new Player's Handbook.

This is contrasted with an earlier proposed cover that was circulated back in October or so.

I'm seriously disappointed in both of these. The theme seems to be showing a rather monstrous male creature along with a woman showing both cleavage and thigh in a rather twisted pose. (Actually, there aren't any gender identifiers that I can tell on the dragon-like humanoid in the latest cover -- however, I'm sure that it will be considered male.)

Even before any point about considering younger players and female players, I consider it terribly cheesy marketing to put sexy images on the covers of things to sell things that have no connection to sex. I think it's fine to use sexy images to sell attractive clothing or beauty products, or for novels or films that feature sexy visuals. However, it just comes across as stupid when you just throw it on the cover of something unrelated. I could understand showing cleavage on the cover of a tabletop RPG that encourages PC romantic relations -- like Teenagers from Outer Space or James Bond 007 or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. However, D&D has never featured that.

In practical terms, I had been thinking of getting D&D 4th edition stuff for some kids I know -- like our friend's kid Ellie or my nephew Nathaniel. This makes me seriously question it. What's more annoying is that the Astrid's Parlor forum -- originally created as a "haven for women gamers" -- seems to have devolved into primarily guys arguing over feminism 101 stuff, as seen in arguments on the "New PHB cover" thread, for example.

Just out of interest, here are some of the prior Player's Handbook covers that I looked over for comparison:

On the one hand, the new covers have added active women. However, I'm not thrilled about their presentation. In discussion back in October of the original cover preview, I had suggested that it was fine for art to be cleaner and simpler in style than earlier editions. I don't think D&D should look like Exalted, but I think some change to reflect more recent popular art styles would be good. D&D4 should look distinct from D&D3. For example, here's Caanan White's cover for the Ptolus comic:

I think this has a similar comic-influenced (obviously) style. While this picture specifically shouldn't be for the PHB, I think something similar would be good. The leading Dungeons & Dragons book cover should feature a dungeon and/or a dragon, among other things. Still, the Ptolus comic cover has a variety of characters which is good for broad appeal. Also, the women are attractive without being in twisted poses to show off cleavage and thigh.

Another point of comparison might be the World of Warcraft covers. I recently looked over a few of those:

While World of Warcraft is hardly a shining example of appealing to women, it at least doesn't try to put cleavage on its covers.

Revising "Gender Roles in RPG Texts"

2008-02-06T06:26:56Z

There has been a fair amount of discussion about gender in RPGs regarding D&D 4th edition -- some on the WotC Gleemax board Astrid's Parlor, but also elsewhere.

On the amusing side, there was the controversy over whether female dragonborn (i.e. bipedal dragon-like creatures) should have human-like boobs. Badgerbag had an amusing post on that, "Boobs, butts, and platypi" and Metafilter post "But what about the platypi?".

On the slightly more serious side, there was some discussion of my study from several years ago Gender Roles in RPG Texts. In discussion of D&D 4th edition, I brought up the question of the characters used in rules examples -- in a thread first started back in November, "Do Female Example Characters Matter?"

There were some fair criticisms brought up. I had meant for a while to revise and/or extend that essay, but naturally other things came up. Since this was on a D&D forum, naturally my analysis of the 3.0 edition Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide. My conclusion about that was that it made a notable effort to be inclusive of women, with two women among the four recurring example characters. However, I did cite that the women seemed markedly less effective. In the thread, I shortened it to the following summary. Totalling up all their actions within example combats within the Players Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, here is how the four example characters fared:

Jozan (M): Casts three spells in combat, and hits twice (out of two attacks) for around 17 total damage
Tordek (M): Hits twice (out of two attacks) for 26 total damage
Mialee (F): Casts no spells and does no damage in combat
Lidda (F): Hits once (out of three attacks) for 3 total damage

Now, I consider this a pretty subtle effect -- many people might not consciously notice it. However, I think it does come across in the characters come across. Intriguingly, one poster complained that I should be paying attention to whether women were portrayed as "weaker, cattier, and less capable" -- yet considered whether they actually succeeded at anything irrelevant to how capable they were portrayed.

Another poster suggested that my choice of products to review was biased. He gave as a list of products that would lead to the opposite conclusion -- Space: 1889 (GDW), HarnManor (Columbia Games), The Way of the Unicorn (AEG), Delta Force (Task Force Games), Star Trek: the Next Generation (Last Unicorn) and Street Fighter (White Wolf). Interested in this, I went through the only one of those that I have at hand in my collection, Space:1889. My findings were:

There are 19 rules examples using named characters, and none of them include women. There are also thirty-something examples without any names, where they use "he" for the generic pronoun throughout the book. There are five unnamed sample NPCs on page 39 of which one is female -- a maid.

There are also a great many characters mentioned as part of the background -- some real and some fictional. In particular, there is detailed background in Victorian Age section on pages 22-33, and the fictional Mars and Venus background sections (pages 148-200). There are also some characters and background scattered through the rest of the book. There are roughly 45 named characters by my count. With the exception of a special section on page 32, there are three women mentioned: Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth I (mentioned once), and Miss Jennie Jerome (mentioned once as the American wife of Lord Randolph Churchill). There is, however, a special section on page 32 entitled "Remarkable Woman" which describes seven women of the period.

Now, this is certainly more inclusive than some other games. It has a special section where it pointedly mentions women of the period. However, there is something off about the approach where women are mentioned in a special women's section rather than anywhere else in the book.

Now, I am sure that there are RPG books out there where women are portrayed more favorably. I will see about including some studies of these. However, I wouldn't want to deliberately seek out such works for the study. One poster did have the fair suggestion that I should study many of the key popular works (like GURPS, the HERO System, etc.). However, I only have so much time. Perhaps I will see about regularly adding a game or two to the set.

The Ethics of Open Content

2008-01-29T00:38:28Z

So there was a recent thread on RPGnet, I found out about some accusations about me that I was disturbed by. The accusations have to do with System Reference Documents Page on my site.

As explanation of the page... In 2000, with the release of Wizards of the Coast's SRD, I started up a separate page of open content that did not use trademarks like "D20 System" or "Dungeons & Dragons". At first it was just the fantasy SRD from WotC, which I converted to HTML for easy browsing, as well as spell and monster data as XML or MySQL. I later added the Modern SRD and fantasy 3.5 SRD (from Wizards of the Coast) as well as other open-content sources from a number of publishers -- including the Anime SRD (derived from Mark C. MacKinnon's BESM d20 system), the "action-oriented SRD" (derived from Mark Arsenault's Action! System), the "runic SRD" (derived from Matthew Sprange's RuneQuest - based on original material by Greg Stafford), the Fudge SRD (derived from Steffan O'Sullivan's Fudge system), and the FATE SRD (derived from Fred Hicks and Robert Donoghue's Fudge variant FATE). All of these were converted the content into HTML for easy browsing.

My intent with this was as a resource for people developing open-content games, that this would be a like a library of open content to draw on. By having a bunch of open-content mechanics in one place in an easy-to-browse (and human-readable) format, it makes it easier to compare and contrast, and avoid re-inventing the wheel.

The Specific Controversy

A fellow RPGnetter informed me by PM that Chris Helton was making some claims on RPGnet about my SRD collection, specifically about my collection of OGC from Green Ronin that I labelled the "True SRD". In a recent RPGnet thread, he commented about "Except that violates some of Green Ronin's IP from Blue Rose, and the compiler won't take it down despite requests." ("True20 Licensing Fees To Go Away" - Jan '08) Also, I found that a few months earlier he had cited a source for this, saying: "In fact Nicole Lindroos has said that the 'True' SRD has a number of Green Ronin's Product Identity in it." ("Thoughts on & Questions about the True SRD" - Jun '07). I have not received any official notice from Green Ronin about any such OGL violation. However, they have stated that they are opposed to free sharing of their open content (see below).

Also, in the discussion several other posters suggested that I was an asshole or an unbelieveable jerk for posting open content from Green Ronin.

What I've Done

I've been maintaining my SRDs page since 2000 when I posted various parsings of the original fantasy SRD from Wizards of the Coast. I also had been a fan of the Blue Rose RPG when it came out in early 2005, and created my Blue Rose fan pages with various content and utilities. In June of 2005, I first asked on the Green Ronin True20 boards about the idea of creating an archive of some of the open material. The discussion thread is archived as "True System Reference Document" (GR forums, June 2005).

In that thread, I asked if there was moderate position where some of the open-content material might be released. The response from Chris Pramas was no -- they did not want any of their open material ever being shared. I stated that I disliked this position, but that for the time I would do what they wanted.

At that point, I had an archive of the open-content system material for Blue Rose, that I used for my own interest. However, in keeping with what they wanted, I kept it in a password-protected directory. I would occasionally give out the password, telling people "This is open game content, but don't repost it because the creators don't want their open content freely shared." After a while, though, that explanation felt pretty hollow to me -- particularly after the original source line (Blue Rose) was closed.

So towards the end of 2006, I removed the password protection from that directory. I didn't announce this anywhere, but I did list it mixed in with the other SRDs on my SRD page.

The Ethics

There are some general ethical questions here.

Is it legal?

Yes, all the SRDs are legal following the terms of the OGL. Regarding the True SRD, Green Ronin openly disapproves of it, so presumably if they felt there was a legal violation they would inform me of it. (By the terms of the OGL, I would have 30 days to cure such breach.) There were two claims in the RPGnet threads of violations. (1) was that my calling it the "True SRD" violates the trademark clause, because "True" is too close to Green Ronin's trademark "True20". Of course, Green Ronin sells the True20 System knowing that it relates it to WotC's D20 System. (2) was that the use of nationality adjectives like "Aldins" in the favored skills/feats table of Chapter 1 constitutes a violation of Product Identity (PI) of Blue Rose. Blue Rose declared "character and place names, histories, and description" to be PI, but this doesn't strictly include race names or nationalities.

Isn't it wrong because it hurts the companies?

I can't really tell if or how much it may hurt companies involved. Making the open content easier to browse and access could hurt sales of books containing that material. For example, a group might only buy one book, and simply browse open content for additional reference. On the other hand, having the open content there could raise interest in the books, and help sales.

But supposing the former is true, should I take down open content to encourage buying books that have it? I do feel some desire to help companies, but on the other hand I think gamers and designers benefit from being able to browse open content. As a parallel, I do post negative reviews, which hurts companies, but I think it is good for the field as a whole.

Is it wrong if the company objects?

While I'm concerned about harm to companies, I'm less concerned about their demands. In particular, I don't want to punish generosity on the part of companies. That is, if one company is helpful with making its open content accessible while another complains about any sharing of its open content, I wouldn't want to punish the former. So if I'm going to take down open content, it should be on the basis of harm rather than how possessive the company acts about its open content.

The Questions for Me

The question for me is whether I should change or remove my SRD collection. My previous behavior has basically been to keep open content material offline for some time (1 to 2 years), which allows for a fairly large window of profit. Offhand, that seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Still, I'm open to opinions.

RPG Model Diagrams

2007-12-15T09:12:48Z

Lately, there has been a bunch of GNS / "Big Model" talk on the Knife Fight forum of late. In addition, the_tall_man has posted a series of posts called "The Big Muddle" as a variant of these. The most recent version of the explanation is the RPGnet Revision. (For historical development of this, he first posted a series of LJ posts in five parts (1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , and 5). He then had discussion threads about these on Knife Fight as on Knife Fight (registration required) and on theRPGsite.

I'm drawn to do a compare-and-contrast of some different models of role-playing, particularly in how they create a hierarchical diagram of play. I'll try out several views, ordered chronologically by when they were created. For this, I'm picking out Daniel Mackay, Ron Edwards, Eetu Mäkelä et al, and Levi Kornelsen.

Mackay's Spheres of Performance

In his book The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art (2001), Daniel Mackay makes a contrasting model of the hierarchy of role-playing based on the theater studies work of Richard Schechner. He is analyzing role-playing as performance, although a very different one from traditional theater. His hierarchy diagram (from page 60 of the book) is:

This is based on increasing levels of specificity in terms of how it is perceived by the players. The "Drama" frame is the nitty-gritty of how the game went, corresponding to a particular performance. The "Script" frame is the context for this, i.e. how the given session was prepared for, but as we all know a game can go in wildly different ways from how it was prepared. The "Theater" frame is the concept of the shared fiction, which the could be adapted in different ways to the game. The "Performance" frame is the widest frame that includes the wider social context outside of the fiction.

Edward's Big Model

Ron Edward's "Big Model" diagram was from about the last stable revision to his GNS discussion, from late 2003. (His "Glossary" article with the specific diagram below was from early 2004.) His approach was in terms of RPG system design.

In some ways it is quite similar to Mackay, though arrived independently. He too puts the elements of fiction (the "Shared Imagined Space") at the second-to-broadest box, and the narrower boxes are more specifics about how that fiction is implemented by the players ("Techniques" and "Ephemera").

One difference that stands out is the emphasis on mechanics design. For example, Edwards puts "IC/OOC" (In-Character/Out-of-Character) in the narrowest box as "Ephemera", whereas Mackay puts "Performative and Constantive" in the second-to-broadest box. On the other hand, Mackay only mentions the mechanical rules in the narrowest box -- whereas Edwards puts "System" in his second-to-broadest box. Mackay has an avowed focus on performance, whereas Edwards is focused on system design. It seems that elements perceived as more important are put in a broader box.

The Process Model

The Process Model of Role-Playing is a paper by Eetu Mäkelä, Sampo Koistinen, Mikko Siukola and Sanni Turunen written for the Knutepunkt 2005 book, "Dissecting larp". It was clearly influenced by Edwards' Big Model, but it is expressed as a flowchart rather than a hierarchy. The diagram is:

Note that there is a slight hierarchy. The "Shared Imagined Space" (SIS) is inside of the "Shared Space of Imagining" (SSI). It shows that "Circumstances", "Roleplaying Processes", and "Methods" overlap with the SIS, whereas Social Processes and Results are apart from it. However, there is no other overlap.

Compared to Edwards' view where techniques are in small boxes within Exploration (including the SIS), this picture puts more emphasis on processes compared to the SIS. Obviously from the title, this was intentional.

Levi Kornelsen's Big Muddle

The latest is Levi Kornelsen's take on Edwards' "Big Model", that he has posted titled as the "Big Muddle", most recently as an RPGnet thread. There are a series of prior diagrams showing people standing in the outside, creating the "Form of Play" through agreement, then stepping inside the form and creating the Fiction through agreement. The final diagram with labels, though, is:

Though this purports to be a version of Edwards' Big Model, it is quite distinct in many ways from Edwards' diagram. Kornelsen identifies the "Form of Play" as including Authority and Credibility, terms from Edwards' model. However, he puts the Fiction (aka Shared Imagined Space) in the smallest box at the center -- while Edwards puts it on the same level as Authority and Credibility.

This is a different conception of fiction, I think. It pictures the fiction as more of a product of play, rather than an active part of the play environment. For both Mackay and Edwards, techniques of role-playing are inside the fiction box. For Kornelsen, they are outside. In the build-up, he pictures the participants creating the Form of Play and then stepping inside it. They also create the fiction, but remain outside of it. It is illustrated as a pile of papers, whereas the Form of Play is a green field that participants stand on.

My Analysis

I don't think any of these diagrams are entirely right or wrong. However, they project the things which they want to emphasize as positions in the diagram. All of them have the full social context as the broadest box -- i.e. including any out-of-game material as well as in-game. However, where rules and fiction and techniques fit in the diagram is purely a matter of emphasis.

For example, in Levi's diagram fiction is the smallest box in the center. However, there are cases of multiple ongoing campaigns set in the same fictional game-world -- where the participants regard the whole as one fiction contributed to by different people, with possibly different forms of play. Similarly, a campaign might switch from using one system to another. Conversely, though, a group might have a regular campaign where they switch settings -- like a weekly GURPS game that changes settings.

As far as giving a structure to play, the definiteness of the diagrams is useful. However, as far as describing how play actually happens, any diagram with more than two levels fails to represent the fluidity of play in work. For example, in Levi's diagrams, the participants get together and specify the form of play first, then create the fiction. However, often players will get together and decide on much of the fiction before they have specified crucial parts of the forms of play. i.e.

"Let's play a Star Wars game!"
"Cool. I've always wanted to play a Wookie Jedi."
"What period should it be set in?"
"Maybe just before the original, that is, A New Hope."
"That sounds good. Should we use the West End D6 system, or the Wizards D20 system?"
"What about using Spirit of the Century or Wushu?"
"Well, each of them handles different things better. Let's figure out more before we decide."

The point being, the group can go back and forth between deciding on entries to the rules and entries to the fiction. They can decide some things, and then go back and change some things previously decided in either. Most often, this is handled outside of the game. However, some games include world-building as part of play, such as Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth or Primetime Adventures.

So I would take all of these diagrams as ways of structuring the a game, but not the only way.

First Thoughts on D&D Fourth Edition

2007-12-11T18:45:22Z

This being a blog about RPGs, I've sort of avoided the elephant in the room at this point, which is the upcoming 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. This was announced back in GenCon Indy in August, and will be debuting in June 2008 (with some preview material leading up to this). The ENWorld site has a fairly nice Unofficial D&D 4th edition info page that collects significant descriptions by topic.

As a side note, by my count there have alredy been nine major releases of D&D -- the original booklets, three versions of the Basic Set, two versions of AD&D, the "Rules Cyclopedia", "3rd edition" and "3.5".

Mechanically, there are to be a host of changes under 4th edition, unlike the "3.5" update. My impression is that the biggest change is trying to undo what Mike Mearls called the "five minute workday." This means a bunch of resources (mainly spells) that recharge once per day, which means that the party runs out of resources and has to hunker down and sleep after just a short period of adventuring. Second biggest is a push for less of the "Christmas tree" effect, meaning how higher level characters have to be loaded down with more and more magic items to be considered balanced. Mostly, though, there seems to be a lot of tweaking of small bits of balance. James Wyatt described:

The reason there's a "sweet spot" in the current game is that it's the approximate range of levels where, purely by coincidence, the math of the system actually works. In those levels, PCs don't drop after one hit, and they don't take a dozen hits to wear down. In those levels, characters miss monsters occasionally, but less than half the time, and monsters miss characters only slightly more often. It's pure chance, really, but it means the game is fun. Outside of those levels, the math doesn't work that way, and the game stops being fun.

In Fourth Edition, we've totally revamped the math behind the system, and that's a big part of the way that we've extended the sweet spot across the whole level range.

What's Its Target Market?

I think a big part of the aim of making D&D4 easier is to try to draw in new players. To a large degree, I think that D&D3's success was in recapturing former players who lapsed during the nineties or even those who were only part of the eighties D&D fad. However, that base is aging. It seems to me that 4th edition is trying for younger players who are interested in fantasy games. In particular, I suspect that there is some fraction of World of Warcraft and other MMORPG players who might be amenable to tabletop RPG play. D&D only needs to get a few percent of the millions of WoW players to make a huge difference.

With only vague rumors about the new rules and background, I can't say about whether they're doing a good job of distinguishing the tabletop game from online games.

Broader Significance

So what will D&D4 mean for role-playing as a whole? D&D is about half the RPG market, so it will by definition have a huge effect. The more interesting question, though, is what other people will do in response.

Even compared to 3rd edition D&D, this seems like much more of a huge, corporately-organized development project that leverages WotC's size as a company -- whereas D&D3, while big and well-playtested, was more the brainchild of three designers. I think the intent behind this is make a unique niche for D&D4, discouraging publishers from going head-to-head with it via close OGL products like EverQuest and Conan were for D&D3. If successful, there would be the fraction who make supplements and adventures for it, and those who make distinctly different games. I'm not sure if this will work, but I think at least there will be less cleaving to the system of D&D4 than there was of D&D3.

Storytelling Games?

Ryan Dancey has been making a number of industry predictions on his blog. Of particular note is his call to "Redefine The Hobby" to be "storytelling games" rather than roleplaying games. I would take all this with a big grain of salt, since he is trying to sell "Ryan Dancey's Storyteller's Guide to D20 Games". Still, it is interesting.

He posted on theRPGsite post on industry scale, as part of a general thread called "Regarding Ryan Dancey's Claims About Story and RPGs". He guessed the indie RPG market is equivalent to ten publishers selling 2000 units per year. That's seems potentially optimistic, but not outrageous. For comparison, here's Fred Hick's latest sales to date (2231 for SotC and 1053 for DRYH) and Chad Underkoffler's "Back of Envelope Numbers" for sales, and Vincent Baker's lumpley games in 2006 (700 copies of DitV).

I think that indie storytelling games will continue to grow incrementally, possibly joined by a few non-indie games of similar style. However, I don't think they're going to be a major force in the market -- and I don't think that D&D4 is particularly going to change the state of things either way. Still, there is interesting reading on his blog about related topics.

D&D for Kids at Thanksgiving

2007-12-06T09:43:25Z

So on my Thanksgiving trip to home, I ran an AD&D game for my three nephews and son. My nephew Nat (age 8) had written an email to me earlier to pointedly ask me to run a D&D game for them. Later, his father explained that a friend of Nat and his brother had gotten them interested in D&D. The dad had played it in high school back in the early 80s, and still had his first-edition AD&D books that he lent to the kids. For myself, I packed up my 2004 D&D Basic Game and my pile of D&D miniatures for the trip. I also brought along my 1983 Talisman boardgame as something similar but easier for the kids.

The kids are Nat (8) and his brother Zack (6), their cousin Truman (7), and their other cousin and my son Milo (7). Also, Truman's little sister Lillian would peek in on games a bit.

Over vacation time in their grandparents house, we played a bit of Talisman at first, and then a full Talisman game (in two sessions) later. It has a number of role-playing-like elements like the character sheet, gold, and experience. It's very easy to get started with, and has clear rules that the younger players understood easily.

Which D&D?

Nat had originally waffled on whether he wanted to play with the rules from the original AD&D1 books that he had seen, or the rules in my fancy new 3.5-era Basic Set. During the break, he said he wanted the original AD&D, so I borrowed his dad's first-edition PH, DMG, and MM along with DM's Screen. However, I still used the current-edition dungeon tiles and prepainted minis.

The Action

We played in three sessions. A morning session of character generation, a fight with kobolds in the evening, and then exploring and taking on the evil necromancer and his very young black dragon the next morning.

Most of the action was all mechanics and fighting. I found that any sort of description that didn't have something down on the table for it lost their interest extremely quickly. That's partly personality and group dynamic rather than strictly age. For example, I know that Milo can hold attention longer, but it is a struggle.

Players and Characters

We did regular AD&D character generation -- best 3 of 4d6, arranged to the stats you like. House rules were you had max hit points for first level, and started with average gold. It took nearly two hours to explain everything and walk through all the character creation, especially equipment. However, I had basically planned on this.

The players and their characters were:

Nat, age 8, played "Sir Aralon (Lord of Fear)" -- a lawful good human fighter
Zack, age 6, played "Sir Hittr" -- a lawful good human magic user
Truman, age 7, played "Sir Dragonair" -- a neutral good dwarf fighter
Milo, age 7, played "Eodred" -- a neutral good elven magic user
Keary (Nat and Zack's dad) played "Ralf" -- a lawful good human cleric

Names were a troublesome point for many, including Milo who demanded I suggest a good elven name for him.

How Did It Go?

The kids loved it and were extremely eager. My parents called me "heroic" for keeping the kids all focused and entertained for that long. For the kids, the highlight was certainly their feeling of hard-won victory defeating the necromancer and her very young black dragon. It was an edge of the seat victory, and I made all my rolls out in the open declaring what number I needed. Everything was by the book, though I was prepared to fudge with the dragon's attacks by not saying which rolls were its 1d4 claws and which was its 3d6 bite.

There wasn't any depth to the game -- much less so than my Kids Games at ConQuest SF 2006. The kids were younger and had more trouble focusing. The real struggle was keeping them from arguing with each other too much, and focused on the game. The miniatures and illustrated dungeon tiles were invaluable for this. The one token role-playing interaction was that there was a captured bugbear whom I convinced Nat to not kill immediately because he agreed to help them, though he did run away when things got tough. The rest was all pretty much tactical.

Overall, it went pretty much the way I expected, except that their attention disappeared even more quickly than I thought for verbal, non-combat action.

P.S. For reference, I've added a new LJ tag for my posts covering role-playing with younger children, "kids".

Solmukohta Call For Papers

2007-11-29T17:06:27Z

If you're like me, then when you're getting a new job and dealing with other home issues, you forget about deadlines. Like how abstracts for papers in the Solmukohta 2008 book were supposed to be due November 17th.

Luckily for me (and probably others), they've extended the deadline to December 1st.

The books for the nodal point conferences (Knutepunkt/ Knutpunkt/ Knudepunkt/ Solmukohta) are focused on larp but are wide-ranging in the sorts of articles. From analyses of larps in practice, craftsmanship, to theoretical focus are covered. I think all of the books have been excellent, but the Finns last book ("Beyond Role and Play") especially so.

Recent Convention Reports (Fall 2007)

2007-11-28T08:35:14Z

I've posted two convention reports for my recent conventions,

EndGame October 2007 Mini-Con Report

AmberCon NorthWest 2007 Report

A few words on the games I ran.

At End Game, I ran another Spirit of Serenity game based on the popularity of previous runs. And it went quite well as before. I'm still struggling a bit with the system in my campaign game, but with well-designed pregenerated characters it has worked great for me in one-shots.

At ACNW, I ran two games: a predesigned Parlor Larp scenario ("Hamlet") and my Amber-setting Spirit of the Century game "Big Trouble in Little Amber". Both turned out quite well. Most of the conflicts in the Parlor Larp game went smoothly, and moved the game forward. The SotC game worked pretty much as I hoped -- I think practice in making a good group of pregenerated characters was good. In particular, making up good aspects is tricky -- and even trickier for the GM to compel them with zero familiarity. So I recommend pregens for SotC one-shots.

More details are in the reports.

Hârn Campaign Status

2007-10-23T21:18:19Z

I haven't talked about my Hârn group in a while. This is a group that I've played with for several years, roughly biweekly. When I joined the group in July 2002 it was four guys: Jim, Dennis, David, and me. Daniel joined about two years ago, and Mark joined this year for the current campaign. We've played a bunch of Hârnmaster, mixed with various other campaigns -- Lord of the Rings, a little Dogs in the Vineyard, James Bond 007. Prior to our current campaign, we had wrapped up a 9-month Call of Cthulhu campaign in March (cf. "End of the Golden Dawn Campaign"). We all agreed that we were going to play a Hârn campaign using the Burning Wheel rules game-mastered by Jim, but it would take some time for both him and us to prepare. We had a boardgame session or two, then played through three Burning Wheel one-shots to try out the system. We then started in June, and had eight sessions thus far (including the character creation session).

The Campaign

Our campaign is about a group of Ilviran missionaries, come to the biggest city on the island of Hârn to found a temple there. For non-Hârn fans, Ilvir is an odd Earth god known as the creator of monsters, whose worship was founded by the earliest settlers of the island of Hârn, the Celt-analogue Jarin. We've had to deal with things like anonymous threats from rival Ilvirans, offers of help from a more violent cult, trying to buy the land for our temple from an owner hostile to our religion, and dealing with the holy creatures of our order being fought as monsters in the city's gladiatorial arena. (Well, really they are dangerous monsters, but they are still sacred to us.)

The player characters are:

Bowdyn of Ressa, played by Mark our newcomer, a stone-mason who is fighting with his wife over his decision to come to the new city.
Jaroud the Hound-Master, played by Dennis, an enterprising dog trainer who has now struck a deal with a shady boss in the city.
Judyn of Denach, played by myself, a formidable older merchantwoman full of schemes to advance the order and herself.
Kalrun the Veteran, played by Daniel, a retired soldier who has forsworn killing and adopted a teenage girl orphaned by war.
Maban the Soothsayer, a young woman first raised by a monstrous Nolah not knowing who her parents were, then by Ilvirans in awe of her. She is developing a reputation as a crazy witch and prophetess.

Thus far, most of the action has still been exploratory. In seven sessions, we have only had one armed fight, and three one-on-one fistfights. We also don't often have a conflict that we see going to Duel of Wits over, and so DoW is roughly as common. You can read session logs on Jim's campaign website.

Last Session

Just to give an idea of how things go, I'll give a picture of a session. The Saturday before last, we met at 4:00 at Jim's apartment for session seven. Everyone was roughly on time. We played for a few hours, then we had a late dinner that Jim had cooked. It started with a salad with olives and orange slices, dressed with a mix of cinnamon, lemon and oranges juices, and orange blossom water. The main course was lamb with apricots, honey, and cinnamon served over couscous. The wine with this was a Domenico 2003 Aglianico from Amador County. I'm not much of a wine connoisseur, but I liked it. Then we played for another two hours or so.

A summary of the events is posted on the site at here. Roughly, we dodged an investigation of us, found out a little more (including that we were being charged with crimes by an enemy), and as the main action successfully concluded a deal to buy the land for our temple.

Status

The next game session will be this coming Sunday. We did have a bunch of email discussion after the last session, about the way the game was headed. One of the great things about the group is that nearly everyone is interested in discussing and analyzing how the game is going.

Status and Gamism

2007-10-17T04:09:03Z

In a recent post, I discussed "GMing as a Social Position". Here I would like to talk about informal hierarchies rather than a formal position.

First, an assertion: any social group will have some sort of status hierarchy. There may be multiple hierarchies of importance, but people will establish some sort of pecking order. That is, the group will give respect for certain qualities to people in proportion to their perceived ranking.

Status in the Gaming Group

On another forum, it was suggested that traditional RPGs reward mastery of a shared culture of gaming -- i.e. which includes rules mastery to an extent, but also tropes specific to fantasy gaming such as when to expect a trap and what monsters are intended opponents. This would create a dominance hierarchy based on "spurious set of made-up skills".

My response was that games always reward skills, and thereby establish dominance. For example, poker rewards a specific set of skills, and tends to give very concrete rewards for them. Someone who is new to poker has a more difficult time than someone who is experienced at it, and will have an associated status. I don't think this is something that needs to be fixed. Poker skill per se is specialized, i.e. There are specific "made-up" techniques like the odds of different hands that help you. However, there are also more general skills blended into this, like the ability to bluff.

A specific question was whether the skills rewarded for indie games were any different or better. Obviously the answer to this depends on what one means by better. For example, someone might want games to be less about "made-up" skills dependent on the game, and more real-world practical skills. Overall, I don't think indie games are any more educational (i.e. developing of real-world practical skills) than traditional RPGs. It's just a different set of game skills. For example, traditional RPGs tend to be more rules-heavy, and challenges on literacy, memory, and grasping complex systems. However, there are exceptions. Burning Wheel is rules heavy and rewards complex systems mastery.

I think this bears some elaboration. Most games test "made-up" skills. That is, common games -- like ping-pong, billiards, poker, chess, soccer, and even theater acting games -- are all based on learned skills. Someone who has experience with them will do better than those who do not. For example, all other things being equal, someone who starts out doing improv games isn't nearly as good as someone who has done it for years. This is not a criticism of it as a game.

Games do have barriers to entry -- but that is not time to mastery. The important question is how quickly you can start having fun with a game. Having fun with a game does not require being of top status. If that was true, then only one person in a game would be having fun. Rather, people can have fun while learning to play the game. The question is how quickly they can start enjoyable play.

Learning can be enjoyable, and provides an opportunity for advancement. For me, one of the promises of role-playing is the ability to shake up the existing social order. The mousy teenager within everyday life can become the feared warlord.

I think that this is something that MMORPGs are doing well, in that people can drop innate traits (like age, size, and sex) and be a social role in the game totally different than in real life. One of the intents of the original Ars Magica, I think, was that the social order would be shaken up by the rotating positions. I was disappointed, though, to read in Gary Alan Fine's sociological study, "Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds", that this wasn't generally true in his findings. Studying mostly D&D groups in the midwest circa 1980, he observed as a sociologist that social status in the game mirrored the social status outside -- i.e. the alpha male in real life was the GM or the party leader / caller.

Research and Competition

I would like to relate this to competition in games. Last summer I had a post, "Thoughts on Competitive RPGs", about my personal preferences for competition in RPGs. However, there is some better data on this available.

Last fall, Brant Guillory's Games Research Project came out. It was analysis of a survey of 3551 gamers hosted by Ohio State University and partnered with GAMA and The Wargamer magazine. Of these, 1146 responded that RPGs of some sort as their favorite game -- where the top four favorites were "Fantasy RPG", "Miniatures War", "Board War", and "Board Euro" (in that order). The brief summary is that he did factor analysis to see which questions correlated to each other, and found seven factors:

The Challenge of Playing, having a sense of accomplishment over a hard task being overcome and completed.
The Exciting Alternative, seeing game play as a stimulating way to spend time, divert from less interesting tasks.
The Discovery Narrative, having an interest in the game's narrative elements that allow a level of wish fulfillment.
Competition with Peers, having some skills and abilities to compare with others, prove self as better.
Catalyst for Socializing, playing the game as a reason to spend time with others.
Creative Control, enjoying the ability to manipulate gaming elements.
Pleasurable Immersion, feeling present in the game to the exclusion of other thoughts, worries.

The factors in bold were the statistically significant ones for the top four categories of gamers. Other than those two, the results are not scientifically firm, but at least provide a basis for speculation. A few interesting points:

The survey asked whether respondents had modified rules or scenarios, created them from scratch, or distributed them. Oddly enough, more people reported modifying rules systems than scenarios.
None of the top four game categories had competition or challenge as statistically significant factors for their play.

Consequences for Gamism, and Speculation

Role-players were the most popular top choice among respondents, with 75% of those in the fantasy genre. So they are presumably dominated by D&D, and yet neither challenge nor competition were significant factors. A common idea within GNS thought has been that D&D3 is a well-focused Gamist engine, yet the survey did not reflect that with either challenge or competition being significant.

What is also interesting to me is that the "challenge" factor was distinct from the "competition" factor. I think that this highlights a problem in formulations of Gamism that fail to distinguish these. Since the term was coined by Jim Henley on rec.games.frp.advocacy, Gamist play has often been associated with competition -- even if it was not formally part of the definition. I think the reason is that there was no acknowledgement of status or competition within non-tactical, non-mechanical play.

A while ago, I had made this observation about power-gamers. Often people have said that power-gamers (i.e. those seeking to maximize the power of their characters) are characterized by focus on mechanics. My observation was that there were two categories of power-gamers who tended to specialize: rules lawyers who manipulate objective rules to their advantage, and what I called wheedlers who press the GM for advantages. Wheedlers will design their characters to what the GM likes, and press for special advantages not in the rules -- or options in the rules requiring special GM permission.

However, the term "wheedling" is pejorative, when in general playing to what others at the table like can be positive. Game systems like Soap and Primetime Adventures explicitly give mechanical rewards for matching what other players like. Other games, like Over the Edge and Sorcerer, have the GM give explicit rewards of approval -- which is just an immediate form of the much earlier practice of bonus experience points for "exceptional role-playing". In general, playing for the acclaim and rewards of others at the table can be part of fun play.

Still, I think it is important to recognize that this is competitive, regardless of whether the rewards are purely mechanical. Mechanical rewards simply make more explicit the status exchange that is already there. Creative players get to show off their ideas, whether that is engaging performance of speaking in character, or inventive ideas for the plot, or colorful description. Players are being given recognition and status for their contributions.

Critique of GNS Gamism

Unfortunately, I think that although Gamism was originally defined in terms of challenge, the idea of social status has often been associated with it. This was particularly exacerbated by Ron Edwards' formulation in his GNS essays. He originally defined it as trying to "win", later phrased as "competition". He further refined his view of Gamism in his June 2003 essay, Gamism, Step on Up. There he suggested:

"Gamist play, socially speaking, demands performance with risk, conducted and perceived by the people at the table. What's actually at risk can vary - for this level, though, it must be a social, real-people thing, usually a minor amount of recognition or esteem. The commitment to, or willingness to accept this risk is the key - it's analogous to committing to the sincerity of The Dream for Simulationist play. This is the whole core of the essay, that such a commitment is fun and perfectly viable for role-playing, just as it's viable for nearly any other sphere of human activity."

I think the key flaw in this is that it is associating this with Gamism, when any social activity has some recognition or esteem put on the line by playing. For example, consider traditional storytelling, such as ghost stories around a campfire. I think there is little doubt that this is narrative, but there is also a risk here in that by stepping up and telling a story, you are being judged in comparison to other people's stories.

Conclusion

I think that gamism should reasonably be considered as play concerned with tactical and/or strategic challenge. This does not depend on social stakes or competition with the other players. For example, a player might be interested in optimizing his character power according to the rules system using any build system from D&D to Champions. A players could be interested in this as a challenge regardless of how the social dynamics work.

Any skill -- storytelling, creative tactics, strategic manipulation of rules, depth of knowledge, character performance -- can be held up as an ideal that the game group will give positive recognition for.

More on D&D for Girls

2007-10-12T20:34:51Z

So as a followup to my earlier post, "Cerise Magazine, September 2007 and 'D&D for Girls'".

Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress

I did read Shelly Mazzanoble's book, Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress: A Girl's Guide to the Dungeons & Dragons Game, now that it is actually out. Unfortunately, I lost my copy of it, so I'm not prepared to doing a long formal review. However, there were two reviews by others that I should mention.

Robyn Fleming gave a mixed but overall positive review of the book in the October 2007 Issue of Cerise -- which also has many other worthy articles. On the other hand, bluegargantua gave it a rather scathing review on his LJ -- though he did put in some caveats after his wife defended the book.

Personally, I'm somewhere in between. I did like descriptions of the play sessions, but the introductions about the game itself were painful to me. I realize that I am not the target market. Nevertheless, I am fairly sure that if I gave it to the 11-year-old I know interested in D&D that she would quickly become disgusted after reading about Mazzanoble having the DM make a character for her, since she was put off by the complex rules and math.

Judged solely as a gateway for girls to be introduced to the game (i.e. a guide to playing as billed), it seems quite limited to me. There is not much concrete information, and it is written to a narrow audience. On the other hand, I think it has something of a dual purpose. It is a sponsored marketing piece, not just to get new paying customers of D&D products, but to change the image of D&D players more broadly. It raises the visibility of not just female D&D players, but "girly-girls" (as Mazzanoble describes herself).

Astrid's Parlor

On a less mixed note, I am fairly pleased with how the new Wizards of the Coast forum Astrid's Parlor is turning out. It is named after Mazzanoble's original D&D character described in the book, and is intended for topics focused on or related to female gamers. There remain some detractors, but it is far more promising than my original Cerise article would have suggested.

Marketing Games to Girls: The Bigger Picture

I did note two recent articles on the topic of marketing games to girls, via the IRIS Network Forums. These deal with the computer/console game market primarily, but I think that could have an influence on the tabletop games industry -- at least in showing what is possible.

First is the UK Times Online article by Leo Lewis, Nintendo's women gamers could transform market. It is about the market in Japan, where the article reports, Japanese women have overtaken their male counterparts to become the biggest users of Nintendo's Wii and DS machines in a seismic shift that the company said would "transform the video games industry."

Second is the GameDailyBiz article by David Radd, "Game Marketers Increasingly Targeting Women". It focused on an interview with Maleea Barnett, former VP of Atari now working for NeoEdge Networks, a company that focuses on advertising-supported online video games. They study users to put in targetted ads, and their most recent press report notes that hottest trend in gaming is the market of women in her late 30s or early 40s who playing on an average PC -- as opposed to men in their 20s playing on expensive consoles.

Jane Austen Playing D&D?

On a related note about D&D marketing, I came across an interesting reference. I am almost finished with the Naomi Novik's terrific new novel, Empire of Ivory -- the fourth book in the Temeraire series. As I turned it over, I noticed the top quote on the back cover read:

"Enthralling reading--it's like Jane Austen playing Dungeons & Dragons with Eragon's Christopher Paolini."

It's attributed to a Time magazine review of the first Temeraire book, His Majesty's Dragon. What's intriguing is that a Time magazine reviewer was giving a favorable view of the book by comparing it to playing Dungeons & Dragons -- and further that the book publisher then decided that it was the best quote to sell the book with. There are plenty of people who find the quote offputting, but I guess not so many since it is apparently selling quite well. From a search on the web, I found what I guess is original article on the web, Lev Grossman's 5 Great New Books. The full mention is:

A British naval captain boards a French warship (this being the Napoleonic era) and discovers a dragon's egg in the hold. This does not surprise him. In his reality, dragons are in common use by the military; popular breeds include Winchesters and Regal Coppers. But dragons bond at birth, and when the egg hatches at sea, our hero, Captain Laurence, must become the dragon's rider--which distresses him, since, as everyone knows, "no woman of sense and character would deliberately engage her affections on an aviator." Laurence's induction into the strange, insular world of 19th century dragon riders and his unfolding relationship with his highly intelligent mount, Temeraire, make enthralling reading--it's like Jane Austen playing Dungeons & Dragons with Eragon's Christopher Paolini.

I've liked Novik's series a lot, but trying to picture Jane Austen playing D&D just leaves me blank. Anyway, I just thought I'd share that bit.