John's RPG Journal

Randomness in RPGs

2013-03-08T17:59:19Z

Via a Story Games thread, I happened across a talk from Gen Con 2012 with James Ernest and Jason Morningstar. Ernest's notes are online, as is a mp3 of the seminar. Part of Ernest's point is here:

Randomness in game design can be broken down into three general categories relating to game design: Cosmetic, biased, and fair randomness.

“Cosmetic” randomness has no bearing on the strategy or outcome of the game. An example
would be a change in background color, or the difference (in poker) between a heart and a
spade.

“Biased” randomness gives resources unfairly to one player over another; this includes most random events in most games.

“Fair” randomness is the rarest type, and the hardest to master. It challenges players to think
strategically in a randomized environment, but does not arbitrarily favor one player over
another. For example, allocating different but equally valuable resources based on a die roll, or randomizing the starting setup in chess.

It is possible to have random elements in a game that fall somewhere in between these categories, but in those cases the multiple aspects of the individual mechanic can still be viewed through this filter.

Some examples:

Cosmetic: We don’t talk a lot about Cosmetic Randomness, but its purpose is to provide variability without any impact on the game mechanics. It’s easier and more prevalent in computer games.

Biased: This is the easiest form of randomness to introduce, and the most common. Here are some
examples.

* A slot machine spin. Some spins are good, some are bad. In a slot tournament, whoever gets the
luckier spins will win the tournament.
* A roll in Settlers. This gives resources to some players, and nothing to other players.
* A movement roll in Monopoly. This can land the player on a good or bad spot.
* This-or-Nothing rolls, all over the world.

Fair: This is harder to engineer. Fair randomness should have a meaningful impact on the flow of the game without favoring one player over another. A strictly fair random event favors no one while slightly less fair events might only favor a certain player by a small margin. Some examples:

* A random setup in Chess (Chess 960)
* Random starting layout in Settlers of Catan
* This-or-That rolls (get Resource A or Resource B)

Beyond Success-vs-Failure

One way I agree is that there is a place for "this-or-that" rolls, or similar shuffling randomization. Rolls in play for RPGs tend to reduce down to only success-vs-failure rolls, possibly with degree, whereas randomness could potentially be in much more variety. Some examples from RPGs:

* Random encounter tables from old D&D, along with randomized treasure
* Drawing Whimsy Cards in Ars Magica, or the themed tarot deck of Everway, where each card has a meaning.
* Access to playset elements in Fiasco

These can definitely add interest to a game, and should be considered more. Random encounter tables have been out of fashion for a while - though they are coming back with the Old School Renaissance.

On the other hand, many things are technically this-or-that but not really all that different from this-or-nothing randomness. For example, in the card game gin, you always get a card - and high cards aren't better than low cards. However, you can still get lucky in the draw. Likewise, in Ars Magica, you could get lucky by getting a Whimsy Card that helps you do exactly what you want to - or you could get a Whimsy Card that gives you something irrelevant to your situation.

What is Fair?

Ernest's use of the term "fair" is out of whack with most people's usage - and often what they are looking for in a social game. In everyday English, a game of chance is considered fair if all of the players have an equal chance of success. However, he calls this "biased" and not "fair". I think this comes from the point of view that a game of pure skill is more "fair" than a game of chance. However, many people enjoy games of chance.

In tabletop RPGs, I think that random rolls of varying interest are used to create a type of social fairness by giving all the players a chance to shine. In many games, unusual random results give spotlight time - especially if they are distinguished as "critical" by the system, but to some degree even if they aren't. Suppose Shelly comes in to play and RPG, and she's had a rough day and isn't at her best. She isn't popping with great ideas. Still, she rolls a critical result at a good time, and she gets her moment in the spotlight. Her friends high-five her for doing well. This was unfair in Ernest's usage because that Shelly got the result when others didn't, but it was fair because everyone gets equal odds for lucky results like these.

Now suppose that the only results were this-or-that rolls where every result is equally interesting. As the saying goes, everyone being special to some degree means that no one is. If she can't get a lucky roll, then Shelly will still get to do things on her turn, but her turn doesn't stand out in any way. She doesn't get the social spotlight of rolling ++++ on a crucial FATE roll. This is fair in a game theory sense that her results depend on her personal performance, but in a social sense we often consider things fair if they spread stuff around regardless of skill.

Outside of RPGs, many games deliberately have less strategic fairness. Games like Fluxx or Talisman are not very strategic, but they are engaging to beginners for exactly this reason.

Reducing Randomness

So randomness can lead to a socialist sort of fairness, where everyone gets a chance to shine even if they aren't particularly savvy, charismatic, or otherwise skillful.

Suppose we do want to reduce the effect of randomness, though. There are a lot of ways to do this, and changing to this-or-that rolls is a good way but far from the only one. Some options include:

* Reducing the range of the dice. Greg Porter's CORPS RPG is a notable example of a game with low randomness. You could do similar in FATE by only rolling 2 or 3 Fudge dice instead of 4.

* Introducing a bell curve, or sharpening the curve. You could play a d20 based game by instead rolling three d20s, and taking the middle result.

* Drawing from a small deck of results. Unlike dice, card decks mean that if you get a streak of high cards, you are more likely to get low cards after that.

* Increasing the number of rolls made. If everything rides on a single high-stakes roll (like D&D's "save or die"), then the effect of randomness is high. If someone has to fail several rolls in a row to die, then that is less random because multiple rolls are likely to average out.

RPGs and a Rape Culture Controversy

2013-02-22T09:27:01Z

I've recently been discussing recent controversy over rape and rape culture in games. I wasn't involved in most of the prior discussion, and when I asked about it, there was a lot of misinformation or confusion over issues. Thus, I am creating a collection of links and information regarding the events in question.

This post is just about clarifying the events and issues. (Revised Mar 1, 2013 to include responses and requests.) I'll post my opinions on them later.

Timeline

May 8, 2012: Soda Pop launches a Kickstarter project for a card game called "Tentacle Bento" by Chris Birkenhagen, John Cadice, and Deke Stella. In it, players play tentacled monsters and compete to collect cards representing Japanese schoolgirls.

May 10, 2012: Desborough posts "The Advent of Private Censorship" on his blog, complaining about the flak Tentacle Bento was getting as an example of increased limit of free expression.

May 15, 2012: According to Eric Martin, the Kickstarter collected more the $30k during its first week, but then the project was canceled by Kickstarter based on complaints from writers Brandon Sheffield on Insert Credit and Luke Plunkett on Kotaku.

May 17, 2012: In video game news, Anita Sarkeesian begins her Kickstarter project "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games". She subsequently receives extreme harassment over the project, cf. Wikipedia for article references.

May 18, 2012: Eric Martin posts a news report on BoardGame Geek, "Links: Tentacle Bento Boxed by Kickstarter, Guess the 2012 Spiel des Jahres Nominees & More on The Wheaton Effect".

June 12, 2012: Writer James Desborough writes on his blog a post entitled "In Defence of Rape". Desborough had previously published the card games "Hentacle" (2004) and "Call of Cthentacle" (2009) that have a similar "tentacle rape" theme. (These two also have various supplements including "Sloppy Seconds", "Three's an Orgy", "At the Mountings of Madness" and "The Dunbitch Horror".)

June 13, 2012: Writer Christopher Bird posts on his RPG blog MightyGodKing a rebuttal to Desborough entitled "In offence re: rape". Amanda Marcotte reports on online misogyny on Slate, regarding the harassment of Anita Sarkeesian.

June 14, 2012: User "Ettin" starts a thread on the RPGnet tangency boards entitled "[Trigger/BBR] Desborough vs "Censorship"". Desborough releases a short YouTube video, "RE: In Defence of Rape" (5:08).

June 15, 2012: Desborough releases a short YouTube video, "Mailbag Catharsis" (7:31).

June 18, 2012: According to Maladicta, Mongoose contacts her for an update for their Mongoose Infantry program, of which she used to be a member. Offended by Desborough's post, she creates a petition on change.org entitled "Steve Jackson Games: Stop publishing James Desborough, rape supporter". (The petition was cancelled, but an archived view is available on archive.org. The text of the letter can be found by viewing page source.) She also begins a private email chain with Matthew Sprange of Mongoose Publishing that was later posted online. Desborough releases YouTube video, "Reply to Banshee" (15:08).

June 19, 2012: In response to the petition, Matthew Sprange posts a poll to the Mongoose General Discussion board entitled "Is Mongoose a Bad, Bad Company - You Decide". The poll links to Maladicta's petition and asks users the question "Should Mongoose Destroy all Copies of Sex, Dice and Gamer Chicks?" (The poll was deleted, but an archived copy is available on dropbox.com.)

June 20, 2012: According to Maladicta, she begins to receive complaints from Mongoose fans, including rape threats. James Desborough tweets a response: "Apparently the person who started the petition is getting surprise sex threats. Not on. However I'm sure she knows they're not genuine threats." Matthew Sprange begins to respond on the RPGnet thread to Maladicta's claim that Sprange was "hostile, rude, and accused me of dishonesty". The poll thread on the Mongoose boards is deleted around this time. Also, conversation is going on in Google+ including a post by Frederick Hurley that Gareth Skarka cites as threatening.

June 21, 2012: User "Ettin" starts a thread on RPGnet regarding the petition and Mongoose, entitled "Mongoose, and reactions". Discussion on Google+ covers this, involving writer Gareth Skarka and Tracy Hurley among others. Skarka post on the situation, which lead to a conversation with Tracy Hurley where Skarka ends with "Now fuck off. For good. And you and hubby better start hoping that I'm not the vindictive prick you portray me as."

June 22, 2012: Maladicta posts a summary of events on her blog entitled "How Not to Handle a PR Crisis: Mongoose Edition", including the contents of her email discussion with Matthew Sprange. According to her summary, her main complaint is Desborough's book, Sex, Dice & Gamer Chicks - though she also mentions Desborough's blog post and the working title of "Project Love You Long Time" for a Mongoose Vietnam miniatures game under development. Around this time, Matthew Sprange announces that Mongoose will lapse Desborough's book out of print and not hire him again as a freelancer in a statement posted to their forums and RPGnet.

June 23, 2012: A more general thread starts on RPGnet, entitled "James Desborough and rape culture". Also, a thread starts on theRPGsite entitled "The War Against Desborough and Mongoose Publishing" regarding "a small group of people terrorizing a game publisher and an author". Desborough posts on his blog, "It‚Äôs Not All One Way".

June 24, 2012: Andrew Girdwood of GeekNative posts an interview with Desborough. LiveJournal user "Erratica" posts her summary, "James Desborough, Gamers, and Rape".

...

Feb 13, 2013: Chronicle City is a board, card and roleplaying games company founded by Angus Abranson (previously of Cubicle 7, Dragonmeet, and Leisure Games) in late 2012. Desborough posts on his blog of his imprint press an announcement, "Joining Chronicle City Full Time". Soon after, user "Cargo Culture" starts a thread on RPGnet entitled "James Desborough hired as Creative Director at Chronicle City". The third post, by user "Numanoid", has a picture of Desborough with the caption "Good day, ma'am! My name is James, I'm your new neighbor... and I'm required by law to let you know that I'm a repeat sex offender."

Feb 14, 2013: User "Sacrificial Lamb" starts a thread on theRPGsite entitled "The War Against Desborough and Chronicle City".

Feb 18, 2013: James Desborough includes a description of his own sexually-themed publications on theRPGsite thread.

Feb 20, 2013: James Desborough posts a summary of the events from his point of view on theRPGsite thread.

Products and Petition in Question

I've looked at most of the articles linked above, but certainly haven't read all in detail (especially the ultra-long RPGnet threads). I have pirated copies of The Slayer's Guide to Female Gamers, Macho Women With Guns d20, and Hentacle. I browsed a copy of Sex, Dice & Gamer Chicks in a game story, but did not read it in detail. I followed a review of Tentacle Bento and asked questions about it that were answered, but have not seen the game itself. I haven't seen Desborough's Call of Cthentacle at all, or its supplements At the Mountings of Madness and The Dunbitch Horror. Based on this, a few clarifications:

Tentacle Bento has no nudity, and does not specify what happens to the captured school girls - but there is a lot of sexual innuendo about them.
Hentacle is graphic and specific that the women "victims" are bound and penetrated by penis-tipped tentacles, though it does not use the term "rape".

My quick reading of Sex, Dice, & Gamer Chicks and longer reading of The Slayer's Guide to Female Gamers is that they are indeed full of crap that pictures females as alien outsiders to normal gamers. It is intended to be humorous, but it is not in my opinion satirical any more than Benny Hill or Amos & Andy. It engages in a lot of bad stereotypes of both male and female gamers, such as saying that if a female doesn't run away screaming from the regular gamers, then they have an apparent affection for one of them. I first opened up to a "Poon-tang" table. Shortly after that is the female gamer section - where "female" is a type of gamer, like "rules lawyer" or "munchkin" or "thespian".

The text of the letter for Maladicta's petition is as follows:

For years, the hateful and violent ideas of James Desborough have been receiving vindication in the form of publication via several companies. Ideas such as the notion that female gamers prostate themselves for in-game benefits, which makes it okay to treat all female gamers as prostitutes (Sex, Dice & Gamer Chicks, Mongoose Publishing); that women are mysterious, unknowable creatures instead of people (Munchkin's Guide to Powergaming, Steve Jackson Games); or that "[r]ape is fucking awesome" ("In Defence of Rape," Grim's Tales (12/06/12)) have received wide distribution in their inclusion in his gaming work.
That companies continue to publish James Desborough's work is nothing short of abhorrent. Female, gender-nonconformist, and equalist male gamers make up a much larger demographic than the misogynistic rape fetishists who find his work enjoyable. That his work is still in publication is a stain on the hobby and vocal condemnation should be the only response.
Until game companies apologize for publishing such hateful material and openly condemn James Desborough, they will not receive our money. With the multitude of tabletop RPG companies, there is no need to support the ones who promote hatred towards large segments of their demographic.

While her comments on his writing are arguable, the letter completely misquotes Desborough's blog post in a misleading and slanderous fashion.

Commentary

I'll be posting my more general opinions in a later post.

DunDraCon report up

2013-02-22T05:02:06Z

I have now posted my DunDraCon report to my convention reports page,

DunDraCon 2013 Report

I ran my pulp villains larp, "Shadow Centurions Assemble!" for the third time - and I will shortly be posting the full larp materials to the larp webpage at

http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/spiritofthecentury/shadowslarp/

Past and Upcoming conventions

2012-09-20T20:03:12Z

So I've finally updated my Convention Reports page with at least brief reports on

Gen Con Indy 2012
and
Pacificon 2012

As preview, here are the two games I am running at Big Bad Con in October:

Hellcats & Hockeysticks
St. Erisian's school has stood for over a hundred years and survived war, plague, famine, demonic attack, strange explosions in the science block and countless attempts to get it closed. To be fair, not _ALL_ of these disasters were the fault of the students... As the headmistress says, "At many schools, the girls are left unprepared for the cold, cruel world. At St. Erisian's, it is the cold cruel world which must be prepared for our girls."

This is a session of mayhem in the spirit of the St. Trinians movies, using the Hellcats & Hockeysticks system - billed as "the role-playing game of chaos, anarchy, and decidedly unladylike behavior." Characters are upper class girls at the strange and infamous St. Erisian's boarding school, and will be created using templates either in advance or in the session. cf. http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/hellcatsandhockeysticks/

1001 Nights: Shajar al-Durr
In the year 1250 in Cairo, a new Sultan has been appointed. With the crusaders defeated, it seems like a high point, but trouble brews with those who dispute the appointment.

This is a run of Meguey Baker's A Thousand and One Nights, set in medieval Egypt with premade characters. This has a rotating storyteller, so we will all pick characters from the pregenerated set and create stories as our characters. cf. http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/1001nights/

And here are the two games I am running at AmberCon NorthWest in November:

Nine Princes in Onyx
By some accounts, Onyx was created when the rainbow serpent gave grandfather Daquain the jewel - and from that he carved the primal Pattern. But the future is being threatened now that prince Keyon has returned to vie for the throne.
This is a re-imagining of Amber with different cultural roots. Like Zelazny, it isn't a particular real-world mythology, but it draws on various myths - just different ones than unicorns and knights on horses. It is set at the parallel time to the first Amber books, as prince Keyon returns to Onyx after long absence.
This will be character-heavy, run using a variant of traditional Amber Diceless rules.

Every Meal a Banquet
"Every meal's a banquet! Every paycheck a fortune! Every formation a parade! I love the Corps!" That's how sarge would wake you up. But in the thick of the action, the choices get more difficult. When the T-Rex mercs have been tearing through your front lines, and drones keep breaking through platoons point defenses, your whole life may flash before your eyes - and you might not like what you see.
This is a game about space marines, but it's about who they are and the choices they have to make rather than shooting enemies. It will be diceless, with some dialogue scenes acted out.

Rant: deep+interesting =/= negative+traumatic

2012-07-02T07:21:48Z

Looking over my larp list from the last post, one thing that stands out is that half of them are light and comedic, suitable for pre-teen kids. I think there's a tendency in culture as a whole to view tragedy as more deep and interesting than comedy - particularly if the topics are highly charged and extreme. This is reflected in some of the Nordic larp scene - including American and other attendees.

A discussion I had with Wyrd Con was over the issue of bringing in negative trauma into games - like cold-blooded murder, rape, torture, suicide, oppression, etc. I'm thinking in particular of Kapo, The School Trip, the jeepform Drunk, System Danmarc, The Tribunal, and others. I don't think that these elements should be strictly excluded from games, but I do feel like they consume too much attention and analysis - when there is more interesting stuff going on in other games.

Games being fun doesn't make them any less creative, meaningful, deep, and/or educational. Fun is engaging, and draws players in to participate more, open up more, and create more. Conversely, a game isn't more deep and interesting just for having picked trauma as a subject.

To get more concrete... American larpers as represented at Wyrd Con tend to prefer fantasy or science fiction genres and more mechanics in their games than the Knutepunkt crowd. I love the Knutepunkt scene and always have fun playing there, and I'll want to draw on stuff I've learned from them when I run something at next year's Wyrd Con. Still, my Wyrd Con game will be fun in the fantasy/sci-fi and with mechanics, just also pulling in other ideas I've learned from the Nordic scene.

Wyrd Con and my larp history

2012-07-01T20:13:01Z

Last weekend I was introduced to Wyrd Con, a interactive storytelling con in southern California now in its third year. It's now listed in my convention reports page. As usual, it's long and over-detailed, being a substitute for my memory.

Wyrd Con 2012 Report

I didn't run anything this time, but I think I might next year. It seems appropriate to make a brief recap of my larp history:

In college and early grad school (early 90s) I ran and wrote several murder mystery games, though we didn't call them larp. I played in a Camarilla larp in Chicago in 1996 (Chicago Requiem). After that I went to my post-doc and I continued RPGs but wasn't interested in larp until I started corresponding with the Knutepunkt crowd in 2004. In 2005, I played in J Li's "Queen of Spades" at DunDraCon and then went to my first Knutepunkt in Norway. After that, I ran and played in several of the Shifting Forest parlor larp series, plus co-GMed a P.G. Woodhouse larp. I started writing my own in 2007:

Stagecoach
A larp set in the Firefly/Serenity universe, first run at GenCon Indy 2007. It uses the Parlor Larp system from Shifting Forest story
Redwood Realms
A hurriedly-assembled outdoor fantasy larp that I put together for a friend's 13th birthday party in summer 2009.
A Royal Celebration
A fantasy larp inspired by The Princess Bride, first run at Pacificon 2009.
A Hero's Welcome
A sequel to the prior fantasy larp, first run at Pacificon 2010.
Reunion Wishes
A modern-day paranormal larp, first run at KublaCon 2011.
An Eye for an Eye
A larp set in the Firefly/Serenity universe, first run at Pacificon 2011.
Shadow Centurions Assemble
A 1930's larp about pulp villains, first run at KublaCon 2012.

Solmukohta 2012 Report

2012-05-01T16:37:02Z

I got back from Solmukohta 2012 in Finland two weeks ago, and I finally got around to finishing my detailed convention report. It's now listed in my convention reports page. It's long and is basically an info-dump of my notes, observations, and a few thoughts.

Solmukohta 2012 Report

I continue to have a swirl of thoughts about larp and role-playing in general going around in my head (along with Billy Joel songs thanks to Sarah Bowman). Hopefully I'll get some time upcoming to start writing them out.

Player Feedback and Pecking Order

2012-03-31T07:20:59Z

Earlier this month, on the relatively new blog Gaming as Women, Darla Magdalene Shockley posted about some pitfalls of player feedback mechanics - drawing from experiences with Paranoia XP and Primetime Adventures - in a post called "Game Design and Sexism: Player Feedback Mechanics" . This was a controversial post, and by way of explanation, Jessica Hammer followed up with a post,
"On Being Left-Handed" that detailed how a mechanic could cause issues for a group without being. Robin Laws also commented on the topic, in "Precisely Subjective".

Way back in 2007, I posted about social hierarchy in my post "Status and Gamism" - which was jumbled mess of an article. So I'm going to try to post a little more clearly about social hierarchy and relate it to player feedback mechanics - which basically means players or the GM giving rewards (like XP or hero points) to players for doing cool things. First, some basics...

What is status hierarchy?

Any social group will have some sort of status hierarchy - also known as a pecking order, or just who is coolest and/or hottest. There may be multiple hierarchies of importance, but people will establish some sort of pecking order. These rankings correspond to how people in the group give respect to others.

Some people associate a pecking order with bullying or other dysfunction, but there is always a hierarchy. In nicer hierarchies, the people at the top may behave better and give respect back to others. However, there is still an ordering going on.

How do games affect hierarchy?

Games make a social space separate from the usual interactions. So when everyone goes out to play basketball, the person who is at the top when hanging out by the lunchroom might not be the star. Instead, the star might be someone else - based on skills different than the usual social skills. On the other hand, the usual social hierarchy can also influence the game. For example, kids playing basketball might be more likely to pass to someone they think is nice than someone they think is a jerk.

Games can reward game-specific skills (like chess strategies), isolated real-world skills (like Trivial Pursuit), or broader real-world skills. Broader skills are likely to be a basis for social hierarchy. For example, someone who is creative and outspoken may do well in party games and also be high in the social hierarchy.

What about RPGs?

RPGs are social games that tend to correlate to the group's usual social hierarchy. For example, Gary Alan Fine published his sociological study, "Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds", about 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.

That isn't purely the case, though.

RPGs - along with boardgames and card games - tend to force turn-taking that gives everyone a more equal chance to shine. In contrast, some sports like baseball put certain players like the pitcher a more prominent role than others. RPGs also use other ways to rotate the spotlight, such as distinct niches for each PC. For example, if the quiet person is playing the cleric, he may still get his turn to shine when it comes to facing undead. Other games have more explicit rotating spotlight. For example, Ars Magica players take turns who is playing the more powerful magi, while campaigns of Primetime Adventures have different spotlight sessions for individual characters. Equal turns moderates or flattens the hierarchy, but it doesn't change the ordering.

Randomness can also change ordering. A player who is lucky with cards or dice may get extra attention.

In addition, some RPGs reward game-specific skill - sometimes called "system mastery," though that may emphasize only the mechanical aspects. Complex games like Burning Wheel or Champions may give players a boost who have developed skill in manipulating the system. This can change the ordering, though the more skilled player may also be the ones already socially dominant.

What do player feedback mechanics do?

Player feedback mechanics here means mechanics where a player or GM gives rewards for broad reasons like "that was cool" or "good role-playing".

It seems to me that player feedback mechanics shift the focus away from game-specific skills and from randomness, and more towards general skills. In other words, they make the game hierarchy more like the general social hierarchy.

Assuming I like my group's social dynamics outside of the game, this can be a fine thing. However, if I'm dissatisfied with certain things about the group, then the feedback mechanic may highlight those more compared to playing without that feedback. Apropos of Darla's post, a female player might be dissatisfied with her position in the social order, feeling that it's influenced by biased cultural standards. The feedback may highlight this compared to not having that feedback.

Street Game Festival

2011-11-02T14:24:46Z

There is an ongoing festival of "street games" that is going on in San Francisco. I haven't participated in any of them, and will be attending AmberCon NorthWest this weekend. Still, I'm curious about the relation of these with live-action RPGs.

Come Out & Play 2011 San Francisco

Certainly a few of the games sound very much like LARPs such as the Cowgirl Way Society's Wanted!:
Maggie Durrant is WANTED! Dead or alive! And there’s a generous bounty on her head.

Maggie Durrant is on the run. Ever since she left the East Coast, her uncle’s goons are on her tail. Will you help get Maggie and her horse get on the next train out of town? Or, will you try to catch her for the bounty? With the stealth of the Underground Railroad and the dynamics of assassins, you’ll wind your way through Mission streets and alleys trying to throw the other team off the trail. Meanwhile, the Cowgirl Way Society will help you unpack Maggie’s story, make and spot lookalikes, track down safe houses, and scrape together the right train information.

Big Bad Con 2011 Report posted

2011-10-25T02:52:52Z

I've finally updated my Convention Reports page with my report on the premiere of Big Bad Con - a new Bay Area gaming convention.

It was generally a good start. There were around 220 players, and 83 games on the schedule. A fair variety of RPGs (including 5 LARPs), and a bit of board and card gaming - though no miniatures that I saw. One store was in their dealer's room (End Game Oakland). The venue was overall mediocre. Tabletop RPGs were four to a large conference room, with reasonable sound baffling from heavy curtains.

The big difference from other cons was that sign-up for games was done in advance, on a first-come first-served basis. Only one of my games took advantage of this by contacting players via email before the con, but perhaps more games will take advantage of it next year.

For the full gory details:

Big Bad Con 2011 Report

LARP Scenarios Posted

2011-09-19T06:19:19Z

I have just put up three of my earlier LARP scenarios on my LARP Page. Their write-ups are rather rough, but the materials are all the ones that I have used in my runs of them. The three scenarios are:

A Royal Celebration (run at Pacificon 2009)
A Hero's Welcome (run at Pacificon 2010 and AmberCon NorthWest 2010)
Reunion Wishes (run at KublaCon 2011)

Pacificon 2011 Report

2011-09-17T19:11:15Z

I just posted my Pacificon 2011 Report, linked as part of my Convention Reports Page.

On a related note for those in the Bay Area, there is a new convention called Big Bad Con that will be starting October 7-9. The schedule is posted, and signing up for games in advance will start tomorrow at 1:00PM.

A Critical History of Role-playing Games

2011-09-17T07:39:06Z

I have an essay from a long time ago on the history of RPGs. I have just now linked it into my RPG Theory page, along with a collection of other links on the history of RPGs. Here's the essay itself:

A Critical History of Role-playing Games

I had written it for an old academic call for papers, and I worry that it's too dry. Still, any comments or suggestions would be welcome.

French essay on role-playing immersion

2011-08-31T23:19:24Z

So Mike Pohjola posted a link to this essay in French by Vincent Choupat,

http://www.electro-gn.com/article-immersionnisme-1ere-partie-l-enfant-batard-des-theories-rolistes-80373168.html

I scanned it via the Google Translate version, but of course that is prone to huge misunderstandings.

The funny part is that the last section is titled "Kim 1 - Pohjola / Bockman 0." From what I can tell, he is referring that Bockman's adaptation of the Threefold Model for Scandanavian larp, where he substituted "Immersionism" instead of "Simulationism". Choupat seems to think that this was mistaken, in that while he accepts the Threefold Model divisions as useful, he feels that immersion can be a part of any of those styles - just different kinds of immersion.

I have been wondering for a while about what to say about the Threefold Model. I still think it was a good idea at the time, and I have the feeling that I should be moving past it to more nuanced distinctions. Still, it seems to stick around.

Thoughts on "Wrath of Ashardalon"

2011-08-24T09:05:11Z

I first played Wrath of Ashardalon in May at KublaCon, but I didn't play it again until my summer vacation in New York. I've now played it half a dozen times, adding to another half-dozen times playing the Castle Ravenloft board game. Besides BoardGameGeek, there is an unofficial wiki with a lot of data from both games and the upcoming "Legend of Drizzt". There is a short official FAQ and a more complete unofficial unofficial FAQ (PDF) with reported rulings.

Overview

Ashardalon and Ravenloft both use almost the same rules with different sets of player characters along with monster, encounter, and treasure cards. Coming from the dungeon crawl experience in RPGs, it can seem bizarre in that new monsters and/or traps pop up with every character action. Thus, between one of your turns and the next, five or more new monsters may have appeared and several traps or events. There is a lot of room for teamwork, but it is in a different sense than otherwise.

Compared to Ravenloft, Ashardalon has slightly less brutal encounter cards - though they are still brutal. The characters seem roughly balanced, though I haven't compared point for point. Treasures seem definitely more powerful in Ashardalon - which I consider a positive point. Ravenloft sometimes seemed like a beatdown with no rewards or letup, while in Ashardalon there is more positive feedback.

Strategy & Tactics

Mobility is Key - Something I only realized in the Ashardalon game is how much faster PCs are than monsters. The PCs can travel 5 or 6 squares per turn and still attack - or move 10-12 squares per turn by not attacking. Monsters almost all move one tile per turn. A tile is 4 squares across, but monsters can't move diagonally. So monsters are extremely slow at turning corners, while characters can zip around a corner to go through 3 tiles and still attack. Most of the scenarios depend only on reaching an end goal after exploring a dozen or more tiles. This means that a coordinated party can pop up a host of monsters, but rather than fight them - they just leave the monsters behind in their dust while jumping ahead to reach their goal and win.

Ashardalon provides some useful tools to accomplish this. A crucial one is the "Wizard Eye" Utility Power. This lets the wizard turn over tiles from an independently moving token. Moving the eye substitutes for the wizard's movement, so you may have use some tricks or forego some attacks to catch up, but it is very useful to have monsters pop up 5+ tiles away. Others include:

The fighter's "To Arms" utility power may be misnamed as it is great for running away from monsters, pulling a slower-moving ally with her.
The "Flying Carpet" item would slow you down to a crawl of 1 tile per turn if you used it continuously. However, it lets another character carry the wizard with them for one hop from the back of one tile to the front of the next - which frees the wizard to move his eye token instead.
Taking the "Charge" at-will power makes the fighter the fastest character - able to move 10 squares and still attack.
The rogue's "Positioning Shot" at-will power lets him shoot an enemy 1-2 tiles ahead of him, then even if he misses put it a tile behind him, and then move ahead out of its reach.
The wizard's "Hypnosis" at-will power also lets him push back a monster 1 tile automatically, and he can then move forward.
The Long Hallway and sentry monsters put monsters 2 tiles away from you (or more if there is a chain reaction). When you hit them, turn and go another direction if possible.

The funny thing is that it often isn't necessary to fight the chasing monsters at all. They can get left so far behind that you can finish the scenario without ever fighting them. There are some dangers, though.

A chasing monster can catch up if it has a duplicate card between two players - going on both of their villain phases. Kill the extras, though, and it slows down again.
The "Dazed" condition is deadly, and in particular the Gibbering Mouther is insanely dangerous - able to attack heroes on 5 tiles and Daze them all. Do everything you can to kill it quickly.
Chasing creatures will tend to all clump onto one or two tiles, which lets the wizard kill swaths of them with his area-effect daily power. "Flaming Sphere" does more damage but spread over 3 turns. "Shock Sphere" does less, but is good if you have some dangerous 2 hit-point creatures that need killing immediately.
The cleric's daily power "Blade Barrier" is also amazing in that it can do 5 guaranteed damage to chasing creatures, which can be incredible for killing off the vanguard of chasing creatures - but I don't recommend it because...
Another cleric daily, "Cause Fear," is even better. It lets everyone on a tile get a free at-will attack, and then pushes all surviving monsters two tiles back. With that lead, you likely will never have to fight them.

I have been starting scenarios by having all the rest of the party break off to the left, then have the wizard go last and cast Wizard Eye in the upper right corner of the start tile. That lets it explore for two turns without moving.

Satisfaction

The game does scratch a certain system-mastery itch for me, so I've enjoyed play. However, I find that the tactics are dominated by strange artifacts like the square/tile distinction. It is a very different experience than a role-playing game. Still, it's fun as of now, and my son has been interested. He laughed his head off at a bunch of the tactics.

I'm not thrilled about this as an entry point into RPGs, since even for this genre of game, I find it not very evocative of the fictional world. There's too much gap between the game design and even minimal logic - like how even rockslides or falling boulders can't damage monsters, but do damage heroes - while fireballs ignore heroes and damage monsters. This isn't simpler rules-wise. It would be simpler to just say that everything in a tile takes damage. I suspect that the designers thought it would be easier to mathematically balance this way, but I'm not convinced that it worked.

Procedures of Play and Streamlining

2011-08-20T00:51:29Z

On vacation in New York with my family recently, I played a bunch of boardgames along with a few RPGs. It has me thinking about game procedures and components of play. My son and two of my nephews were enthusiastic about the PS238 RPG.

In addition, I ran a humorous live-action game with the larger family. Our board and card games included Magic the Gathering, Apples to Apples, Scrabble, Risk, Pandemic, and the D&D boardgame Wrath of Ashardalon.

It has left me thinking some about procedures of play. What follows isn't a soft of stream of consciousness of how my mind considers aspects of play. This is something that I feel is important regardless of the underlying game design. In other words, no matter how you design your game, the mechanics should be handled smoothly and quickly.

Case 1: Pandemic

Pandemic is a fun cooperative boardgame where you move your pawns across the globe in an attempt to keep four diseases under control while you search for cure. Others have lauded its clear instruction book. I would generally agree, but there were some things that struck me.

The first was that the map could be difficult to read. In play, we several times would misread that cities near each other that were not connected. To clarify for my own curiousity, I made a simplified diagram of the cities. This doesn't map global position very well, but has the same rough layout while putting close cities together in a somewhat organized way.

The above still has the wrapping connections from the left to the right. I also made a map that doesn't have this wrapping, putting all connections on as lines. At this point, it doesn't look anything like a world map, but still has the right connections.

The second issue I had when playing it was how to count cards. From the setup, I knew that the Epidemic cards were spaced in blocks of (N) through the Player Deck. However, in play I really wanted some way to count cards so that I knew which block we were in. A few ideas sprang to mind:

At first, I put a counter beside the Outbreak track on the board to count up from 0 to 9 for how many cards we were into a set. However, in practice we would sometimes forget that would invalidate the account.
I thought a better way might be to put a ten-sided die on top of the Player Card deck. That way, every time you drew cards, you would be forced to remember to update the counter.
It's also possible to put in spacers (like post-its or index cards) between the blocks of the Player Card deck, but interestingly my sister considered that cheating even though it was not cheating to explicitly count the cards.

Pandemic is a fun game, and well-designed. I think some of the challenge may be in reading the map. Playing with kids, it has some value in teaching geography. Still, clarifying procedures is something to consider.

Case 2: The PS238 RPG

PS238 is a wonderful comic series by Aaron Williams about a public elementary school for "meta-prodigies" (i.e. budding superheroes and supervillains). The RPG is a mostly verbatim copy of the HERO System Sidekick rules (a condensed version of 5th edition) combined with background on the comic and character sheets for the major figures. I realized that when I wanted to play it with actual 10 to 12 year olds, though, that the core die roll mechanic had a problem. Here, for example, is the verbatim explanation of the Attack Roll:

To determine if an attack hits its target, you make an Attack Roll using 3d6. You calculate the Attack Roll this way:
Attack Roll = (11 + Attacker's OCV - Target's DCV) or less
Example: If the attacker has an OCV of 7 and the target has a DCV of 10, then the Attack Roll is 11 + 7 - 10 = 8 or less.
A result of 3 on an Attack Roll always succeeds; a result of 18 always fails.
To speed play, use the accompanying chart to determine the Attack Roll.

I felt that this was going to be a significant issue. My solution was to instead add 10 to all DCV values. You roll 3d6 and add you OCV, and that is the highest DCV that you hit. (Note that this is the same fix that 3rd edition D&D had for Armor Class.)

To be consistent, skills can be converted from notation like "(13-)" to "(+2)". Add the total, and if the result is the difficulty or better (default 10), you succeed.

Case 3: James Bond 007

I didn't play these on vacation, but that table got me thinking about the James Bond 007 RPG. This was an excellently-designed and ground-breaking RPG in the early eighties, that used percentile rolls that refer to a universal table. In particular, it used quality of success more than almost any game before and since. However, the process of percentile roll and table lookup can be slow. There are potential ways to simplify this in play.

James Bond 007's table is used to classify results into 4 levels of success (Quality Rating or QR).

From the table, QR1("Excellent") is the top 10% of rolls, QR2("Very Good") is the next 10%, QR3("Good") is the next 30%, QR4("Acceptable") is the top 50%. So if you have a 60% chance of success overall, then 01-06 is QR1, 07-12 is QR2, 13-30 is QR3, and 31-60 is QR4. The thing is, this can be exactly matched by rolling a third d10 with the percentile dice. Ideally it would be a die numbered with QR1, QR2, three QR3s, and five QR4s. Just rolling such a die alongside the percentile roll would give you exactly the same distribution with no table lookup.

Case 4: Marvel Superheroes

The TSR Marvel Superheroes game also uses a percentile roll and universal table to determine quality of success (rated as Green, Yellow, or Red). The method doesn't break down quite as easily as JB007, but it is still possible to get almost exactly the same probabilities without a table lookup. I outlined my breakdown of the success chart as part of my series of articles on dice mechanics, specifically at

Marvel Superheroes roll analysis page

The short of it is that the table can be simplified to a d20 roll, where if you beat the target number by 6 or more, you get a Yellow result you roll a d6 to check for critical ("Red").

Conclusions

I don't have a strong conclusion here, except that even in otherwise well-designed games, the mechanical process can often be streamlined. Streamlining designs is generally a good thing, though arguments could be made for the good of extra effort in some cases.

State of Indie RPGs and RPGs in general, 2011

2011-08-14T08:25:16Z

Now that Gen Con Indy is over, I was thinking about the state of indie RPGs and of the RPG hobby in general. Besides the Indie RPG Awards, I was inspired by two threads: Steve Dempsey started thread on the Story Games forums about the state of indie RPGs, and on theRPGsite, "Bloody Stupid Johnson" made a thread on Gen Con Event Breakdowns.

RPG Awards

In the ENnie Awards and the Origins Awards, the Dresden Files RPG took top place. In the Indie RPG Awards, Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World was the big winner - taking Game of the Year by a large margin and also netting two other awards. In the Diana Jones Awards, Jason Morningstar's Fiasco took top place.

Convention Play

Gen Con Indy was apparently a big success. An ICv2 report says that Gen Con Indy broke previous attendance records, with 36,733 attendees.

To see what was played, "Bloody Stupid Johnson" analyzed the schedule of games at Gen Con Indy 2011, and broke them down by system. For each, he had number of scheduled games, maximum number of players, and total hours.

D&D (all editions): 436 games , 10469 max players
Pathfinder: 251 games, 3258 max players
World of Darkness (LARP): 17 games, 2715 max players
Legend of the Five Rings: 30 games, 1008 max players
HERO games (various): 104 games, 769 max players
Shadowrun: 97 games, 718 max players
Call of Cthulhu: 98 games, 657 max players
Star Wars: 71 games, 442 max players
Savage Worlds: 71 games, 442 max players
GURPS: 18 games, 121 max players
World of Darkness (tabletop): 17 games, 76 max players
Palladium: 6 games, 47 max players
Indie RPGs*: 55 games, 1216 players

The status for indie RPGs is hard to measure. I count 35 specific games of the recent indie RPG trend (Dresden Files, Dread, Don't Rest Your Head, FATE, Mouse Guard, etc.). However, there are 20 identical slots of "Games on Demand" for any "indie RPG" with maximum 48 players.

Note that there are no numbers for how many games got their maximum number of players or even how many ran at all. So this is more a measure of interested GMs than of players. Interesting point that I took out of it were the resurgence of HERO games, that World of Darkness has shifted almost entirely to LARP.

Edited to add: The breakdown of D&D into different editions may also be of interest.
4th Ed. - 232 games, 8325 max players (including 188 RPGA games, 7742 max players)
3.5 Ed. - 77 games, 1291 max players
2nd ed. - 17 games, 60 max players
1st ed. - 110 games, 793 max players

Sales

Most RPG companies don't release their sales numbers. However, there was interest last October because Evil Hat released its sales figures at the same time as its Dresden Files RPG made ICv2's top 5 RPGs in hobby store sales. (ICv2 depends on self-reporting from hobby stores, so its rankings are prone to error, but they are still significant.)

Fred Hicks of Evil Hat posted Q3 2010 Sales Numbers post, showing a combined 3061 DFRPG book sales through "distribution orders" and 4427 DFRPG book sales total. Cyclopeatron's blogged about the ICv2 Q3 2010 sales. I can't do this for other quarters because Dresden Files didn't again make the top five. (If someone paid a bunch they could get the ICv2 full report - I don't). For comparison, Vincent Baker posted his 2010 sales numbers, showing that Apocalypse World sold 174 copies total in Q3 2010 - an order of magnitude less. On the other hand, countering the ICv2 numbers, author Shane Hensley commented that Savage Worlds product sales were 3-5 times bigger than the reported Dresden Files sales.

(For historical perspective, Gareth Skarka noted that his game Underworld sold 7500 copies in 2000.)

About Indie RPGs

Dresden Files has both taken mainstream awards and is selling an order of magnitude more than any indie RPGs. However, it is doing so mainly through the traditional distribution network - not the direct sales that most indie RPGs do. While I don't have sales numbers to confirm, I suspect that the best-selling indie RPGs would be Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard. However, these also have traditional distribution. Also, although Mouse Guard is solely written and copyright by Luke Crane, it is printed and distributed through Artesia author Mark Smylie's company Archaia Press.

Along related lines, I note that last year, indie RPG authors Rob Donoghue and Ryan Macklin helped freelance write the Leverage RPG for Margaret Weis Productions. Also at Gen Con Indy, Margaret Weis Production announced that they will be created a Marvel Heroes RPG line - a very major license.

The short form is, the current community of indie RPGs have started to merge with the mainstream. Even if they aren't really #5, Evil Hat have become a success in mainstream distribution - like previous author-founded companies Steve Jackson Games, Palladium Books, and even TSR. Authors of the current indie scene are being recruited for freelance work. However, the bulk of the indie RPG scene remains a small corner of RPGs as a whole - as evidenced by Fiasco and Apocalypse World. Whether you see this as indie authors gaining ground or selling out may depend on your point of view. *

Edited to add: The Dresden Files RPG was primarily written as work-for-hire and thus should not be considered indie. That mostly matches up with my point, that Evil Hat who published many indie games now also has a non-indie success.

About RPGs In General

The sales numbers I included above provoked some controversy. Gareth Skarka, in his October 2010 post Tabletopocalypse Now, predicted the "utter systemic collapse of the tabletop games industry within the next 5 to 10 years at most." He cited low sales numbers, and moves by White Wolf towards online play. Malcolm Sheppard added his own post, noting the decline of Google searches on the term "Dungeons & Dragons" - which Skarka responded to in a follow-up post. The significance of the Google search trend was fairly debunked by noting downward trends of "chess" and "Microsoft" and other terms. As noted earlier, the ICv2 numbers are also suspect. So while a downward trend in the industry is likely, the scale of it isn't clear.

I don't think doubtful about predicting any long-term future trend based on this. The RPG market has had plenty of ups and downs, and it has always been small after a brief fad around 1980 or so. There was a rise in the early 2000s with d20, but that bubble burst and there was a decline that followed. I suspect that the industry will continue to decline, though not drastically, until there is a new big splash.

In the meantime, convention attendance seems to be strong and not declining. Gamers continue, and lots of people are still publishing RPGs. Recruitment is limited, but it always was. On a good note, I have been seeing more kids events at the conventions I am going to. These are generally the children of gamers. Given that the peak of RPGs was around 1980, there could be a second wave as kids of those people come of age. As an anecdotal data point, my sister has not played any RPGs since high school - but her two sons are quite enthusiastic about D&D and the PS238 RPG.

2010 Indie RPG Awards Announced!

2011-08-05T21:32:11Z

The results for the 2010 Indie RPG Awards have been posted on the website and are summarized below. There are voter comments and details at the website.

2010 was the ninth year of the Indie RPG Awards, as the field continues to mature and change. There was a single clear winner for Game of the Year, that also took Best Support and Most Innovative. There was split for the other awards, though.

And the winners are...

Indie Game of the Year

Winner: Apocalypse World - 68 points
First runner-up: Happy Birthday, Robot! - 21 points
Second runner-up: Blowback - 16 points
Mars Colony - 15 points
Freemarket - 13 points
High Valor - 13 points
Twenty-Four Game Poems - 11 points
Dread House: A game for kids and brave adults - 11 points
Hell for Leather - 8 points
Nordic Larp - 6 points
In Harm's Way: StarCluster - 6 points

Indie Supplement of the Year

Winner: Hot War Transmission - 54 points
First runner-up: B/X Companion - Fantasy Adventure Game - 20 points
Second runner-up: Blood Tales: More than you can Chew - 14 points
Agency Resource Guide: A Terror Network Guide Book - 8 points

Best Free Game

Winner: Stars Without Number - 46 points
First runner-up: Misspent Youth - 37 points
Second runner-up: Danger Patrol BETA - 37 points
Bloody Forks of the Ohio - 24 points

Best Support

Winner: Apocalypse World - 52 points
First runner-up: Happy Birthday, Robot! - 23 points
Second runner-up: Hot War Transmission - 8 points
Hell for Leather - 8 points
Misspent Youth - 7 points
Freemarket - 6 points

Best Production

Winner: Freemarket - 54 points
First runner-up: Happy Birthday, Robot! - 40 points
Second runner-up: Hot War Transmission - 24 points
Apocalypse World - 17 points
Blowback - 17 points
Misspent Youth - 9 points

Most Innovative Game

Winner: Apocalypse World - 37 points
First runner-up: Freemarket - 33 points
Second runner-up: Happy Birthday, Robot! - 30 points
Twenty-Four Game Poems - 21 points
Dread House: A game for kids and brave adults - 12 points
Mars Colony - 11 points
Hell for Leather - 6 points

Belated mini-campaign notes

2011-06-09T17:49:25Z

A few belated notes about a mini-campaign I played back in February. run by Mike Sullivan, playtesting his system for "path fencing". The center was an interesting dice pool combat system, that I thought I should share musings about.

In the system, you had a pool of attack dice and defense dice (all d10s) and faced a single opponent. Each round you roll randomly for who attacks, which could mean several rounds on the defensive. The winner makes an attack from your personalized table using a flexible number of dice, then uses at least one die to press to the next attack - which can be on the same or different row. After you find the successes of your attack, the opponent has to choose a number of defense dice to roll to block that attack. If the defender has dice leftover and the attacker has not spent dice to disengage, then the defender can roll to riposte and get automatic initiative with extra dice. Everyone had 12 wounds.

I thought it was an intriguing use of dice pools that definitely has potential. My character, the Brawler, was like this:

Attack pool: 12 dice, Defense pool: 6 dice, Defense target: 5+, Riposte target: 5+

First Attack	Scratch Attack: 5+ Defense mod: +1 Effect: Scratch Press: 5, Disengage: 4	Maneuver Attack: n/a Defense mod: n/a Effect: none Press: 7, Disengage: 3	Thrust Attack: 9+ Defense mod: +1 Effect: 1w Press: 7, Disengage: 3
Second Attack	Kick Attack: 4+ Defense mod: 0 Effect: 1w Press: 7, Disengage: 3 Brawling	Cut Attack: 8+ Defense mod: 0 Effect: 2w Press: 4, Disengage: 6	Pommel-Strike Attack: 7+ Defense mod: -1 Effect: 1w Press: 2, Disengage: 8 Brawling
Third Attack	Back-stab Attack: 4+ Defense mod: -1 Effect: 4w Press: 3, Disengage: 3 Dishonorable	Slash Attack: 6+ Defense mod: -1 Effect: 6w Press: 3, Disengage: 5	Gut-Wound Attack: 5+ Defense mod: 0 Effect: 6w Press: 7, Disengage: 4
Fourth Attack	Force Submission Attack: 7+ Defense mod: +1 Effect: 1w, unconsciousness Press: 4, Disengage: 8 Brawling	Kill Attack: 5+ Defense mod: 0 Effect: 8w Press: 3, Disengage: 3	Destroy Attack: 6+ Defense mod: +1 Effect: 10w Press: 3, Disengage: 3

For the most part, RPG dice pool systems that I've seen just used the pool to generate a curve. While there were rules for splitting the pool, they tended to not be used. For this, how you split up your attacks was key to winning. Usually you would put just one die in the first attack which was ignored, and then try for some combination of heavier attacks depending on the situation.

The mini-campaign itself was pitched as "The Winter Guard".

You are the loyal retainers of the de Winter family, late of somewhat ill repute. Your martial skills are astounding, your sword tolerably long, and your pride unparalleled, though you are poor, politically un-powerful, and rather unpopular. You will strive to develop a reputation and uphold the honor of your patron, primarily by means of stabbing people with swords.

Swashbuckling! Heavily inspired by The Three Musketeers, though perhaps just a tiny bit less cheerful than that story. Slightly fantastic world, not set in France or the real world at all, and Lady de Winter is an homage to an awesome name, not actually the character from Dumas. A somewhat complicated custom die system for swordfighting. Expect lots of duels. You are encouraged to call things "insupportable!"

The fantastic setting meant we had a fictional religious split more easily glossed over, and eased things slightly for my character as an openly female member of the guard. The players and characters for the mini-campaign were:

Eric as Cyrano, the Swashbuckler
Laura as Jean, From the Old Country.
Keith as Andre, the Duellist
Bernie as Vincent, the Generalist
Madeline as Guillaume, the Reactive
Myself as Roxanne, the Brawler

Everyone liked the mini-campaign pretty well, though we had some issues with how it ran. It was a mix of the involved fencing duels and a storyline split between establishing ourselves in the city with reputations and lovers, and rescuing Milady de Winter who was kidnapped early on. An issue we had was that the combat had to be one-on-one and took full attention, so to do multiple combat we had to have players running NPCs. If I were to try to run it, I would consider having the story use a GMless proto-system, rather than the diceless GMed system we used.

2009 Indie RPG Awards announced!

2010-08-06T19:19:28Z

The results for the 2009 Indie RPG Awards have been posted on the website and are summarized below. There are voter comments and details at the website.

2009 was the eigth year of the Indie RPG Awards, in a changing field. There were close races in all categories this year, with a wide range of registered games!

And the winners are...

Indie Game of the Year

Winner: Kagematsu - 27 points
First runner-up: Fiasco - 22 points
Second runner-up: Beat to Quarters and Little Fears, Nightmare Edition - both at 18 points
Chronica Feudalis: A Game of Imagined Adventure in Medieval Europe - 17 points
Diaspora - 16 points
On Her Majesty's Arcane Service - 15 points
Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies - 15 points
Montsegur 1244 - 15 points
A Penny for My Thoughts - 14 points
44: A Game of Automatic Fear - 14 points
Ganakagok - 11 points
Atomic Highway - Post Apocalyptic Roleplaying - 10 points
Escape from Tentacle City - 10 points
Hellcats and Hockeysticks: A Role-Playing Game of chaos, anarchy, and decidedly unladylike behavior - 9 points
S/Lay w/Me - 9 points
Lady Blackbird: Adventures in the Wild Blue Yonder - 9 points
Shotgun Diaries: A Zombie Survival Roleplaying Game - 8 points
Time & Temp - 8 points
Slasher Flick - 7 points
Norwegian Style - 6 points
The Drifter's Escape - 6 points
Uml‰ut: Game of Metal - 6 points

Indie Supplement of the Year

Winner: The Day After Ragnarok - 60 points
First runner-up: RPG = Role Playing Girl 2009 - 49 points
Second runner-up: Thou Art But A Warrior: A Polaris Supplement - 48 points
Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales - 33 points
Bloodstained Stars - 24 points
The World of Near - 15 points

Best Free Game

Winner: Lady Blackbird: Adventures in the Wild Blue Yonder - 108 points
First runner-up: 44: A Game of Automatic Fear - 63 points
Second runner-up: Last Train Out of Warsaw - 29 points
MonkeyDome - 17 points

Best Support

Winner: First runner-up: Fiasco - 52 points
Second runner-up: Beat to Quarters - 23 points
Atomic Highway - Post Apocalyptic Roleplaying - 17 points
Lady Blackbird: Adventures in the Wild Blue Yonder - 13 points
The Day After Ragnarok - 13 points
Diaspora - 11 points
On Her Majesty's Arcane Service - 9 points
Action Castle - 8 points
Time & Temp - 6 points
Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales - 6 points

Best Production

Winner: Lady Blackbird: Adventures in the Wild Blue Yonder - 29 points
First runner-up: Fiasco - 22 points
Second runner-up: Atomic Highway - Post Apocalyptic Roleplaying - 20 points
A Penny for My Thoughts - 16 points
Diaspora - 16 points
Uml‰ut: Game of Metal - 15 points
The Drifter's Escape - 13 points
44: A Game of Automatic Fear - 11 points
Ribbon Drive - 11 points
Witch Girls Adventures - 11 points
The Day After Ragnarok - 11 points
Montsegur 1244 - 10 points
Kagematsu - 9 points
Chronica Feudalis: A Game of Imagined Adventure in Medieval Europe - 9 points
Bloodstained Stars - 6 points
The Dance and the Dawn - 6 points

Most Innovative Game

Winner: A Penny for My Thoughts - 32 points
First runner-up: Ribbon Drive - 22 points
Second runners-up: Kagematsu, Fiasco, and Ganakagok - all at 21 points
S/Lay w/Me - 17 points
Action Castle - 16 points
Montsegur 1244 - 11 points
Misery Bubblegum - 10 points
Little Fears, Nightmare Edition - 10 points
Hellcats and Hockeysticks: A Role-Playing Game of chaos, anarchy, and decidedly unladylike behavior - 8 points
Lady Blackbird: Adventures in the Wild Blue Yonder - 8 points
On Her Majesty's Arcane Service - 6 points

(NOTE: The points listed are according to a priority system from peer voting. Over eighty indie RPG authors were invited to participate, and over three dozen participated in voting this year. Each peer voter has three ranked choices as explained in the FAQ, resulting in the point totals above. This year the votes were spread widely.)

Spirit of the Century campaign wrap-up

2010-06-18T20:52:55Z

I've posted a few times about previous games using the Spirit of the Century rules, collected under my SotC Tag. Recently, though, I've wrapped up my first run of it using the defined setting - the 1920s, playing members of the Century Club. We played about 10 sessions, rotating who GMed. Daniel made an extended blog post about it, along with a short LJ comment by snej, who started out as the first GM.

We made PCs twice with a full character-creation session each time, but I was absent at both of these and made my two PCs offline.

My first PC was a Chinese-American mastermind, Chuko Liang - named after the legendary strategist from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and partly patterned after pulp Chinese-American detectives like Hugh Wiley's James Lee Wong and Earl Biggers' Charlie Chan. I couldn't help but think of Bruce Baugh's New Horizons project for Evil Hat, currently in Limbo (cf. Bruce's LJ tags for the three project tags). He was fun, but it was a little awkward - partly in his being Chinese-American, and partly in trying to run a mastermind strategist rather than a two-fisted hero.

My second character was "Shifty" Henry - a former American gangster, whose trademark was in disappearing. This was a blast - especially riffing off of Jens' character, Rocco Malone - who was another clear archetype. Jens' background novel, "Rocco Malone is The Atom Smasher!", was inspiring:

Rocco turns to single-minded revenge after his mentor Marie Curie is assassinated in 1920 by a sinister cabal that she stumbled upon while investigating why the world's supplies of radium and pitchblende were being bought up: The Manhattan Project, a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy whose goal is to create atomic-powered weapons to terrorize the world!

The trail leads to a sinister mesa in the New Mexico desert where the villains, led by the absent-minded mastermind "Doc" Einstein, have their lair. Through a combination of violence and sarcasm, Rocco and Rosie are able to fight their way into the base, where, after a big fight with Dick "The Safecracker" Feynman, they set off a chain reaction that leaves the mesa-top a ruin of radioactive slag! But the villains make their escape too, and take the plans with them.

In response, I decided that Shifty's mentor was Frank Lloyd Wright, and he was trained in martial arts by Charlie Chaplin. His novel was when he was unwittingly drawn in to stop a plot by Salvadore Dali to freeze time.

Here's the short form of my thoughts on the system and setting as written:

1) On the strong side, invoking aspects and mook conflict worked very well. Picking stunts was interesting and many of the stunts were a lot of fun - "Vanish" and "Master of Disguise" come to mind, along with various gadget stuff.

2) On the weak side, some things were too slow: character creation, conflict against named NPCs, and looking things up in the book. Character creation is fun, but especially for a game that sells itself as a pickup game, it just takes too long. Parly, there's too many skills (28) and stunts (268). I think it would work better as a pickup game if there were many fewer choices and more that you could define on the fly. See Faster Conflicts on the SotC Wiki about that - we went with "hit points." Looking things up we just dealt with.

3) We gamely took most of the advice without worrying about details. The Centurion Club didn't really add much to the game, and forcing all characters to be the same age (all born Jan 1st 1901) didn't serve much purpose and minorly restricted backgrounds.

Here's my top five thoughts on what I might do next time I try this:

1) Organizations are organized, and need factions

Were I to do this with my own background, I'd want to make up more of my own Centurion Club background. I loved the mix of the real and fantastic for Rocco Malone and Shifty Henry's novels. I'd want to do similar as GM to make the Club easier for PCs to write themselves into.

2) Plan a focus

Rather than only tying the PCs together, I think it might help to focus the PCs by picking some themes and patterns for the group before making individual PCs and tying them together. i.e. Are they crime-fighters in New York City, or globe-trotting soldiers-of-fortune? I think there could be some general questions to answer for this.

3) Have social rivals besides lethal antagonists

Our PCs' nemeses were generally people to fight immediately. It would be interesting to also define NPCs who are opposed but more suitable for social conflicts rather than physical ones.

4) Limit Fate Points and use Faster Conflict

Our last two sessions, we started with 5 Fate Points instead of 10 - and we used the hit point option to speed conflicts.

5) Start with the action!

I started my session either from a cliffhanger at the end of the previous session, or with a "teaser" - a conflict that the PCs suddenly find themselves in the middle of. For example: the car from the airport is actually a death trap from their nemesis.

Sad news, but new resource

2010-04-12T21:12:38Z

On a somber note, one of the lead playtesters for the Parlor Larp series died three weeks ago. I was at a game with several people who knew him when they heard.

Because of this, though, J of Shifting Forest Storyworks has released all of the Parlor Larps as freeware. They can all be downloaded in PDF format from the newly re-opened website, www.shiftingforest.com.

These scenarios are a terrific set of gaming resources that I would highly recommend. It is just sad that it would happen after a tragic event. You can read my review of the Hamlet scenario along with other play reports on my own Parlor Larp page.

ACNW and other Fall 2009 Convention Reports

2009-11-24T06:51:27Z

Two weekends ago I was at AmberCon NorthWest, which was excellent as usual. The main down side was that I only went for three days this year because of my tough school schedule, so I only played in four games. On the mixed side, I missed my flight back Sunday night, but it meant I got to stay and hang out more with the excellent folk there before returning in the morning.

So here is my backlog of Fall 2009 convention reports:

Pacificon 2009 Report

Nerdly Beach Party Fall 2009 Report

October 2009 Mini-Con Report

ACNW 2009 Report

2008 Indie RPG Awards Announced

2009-08-19T05:22:36Z

The Indie RPG Awards have been posted on the website and are summarized below. My apologies for being late on this. They should have been posted concurrent with GenCon on Friday, but a series of technical difficulties delayed it.

2008 was the seventh year of the Indie RPG Awards, and the contestants were particularly strong. As one voter described it, the field showed "a growing sense of diversification and love of production as simplistic boundaries of 'trad' and 'indie' as labels of content rather than production start to fall down." Another simply said "indie games are breaking through all over."

There were close races for best game and supplement this year, and a tie for free game! Best Production, on the other hand, was won hands-down. It seems there are a few names that no one can compete with in production values, and for this year frequent winner Luke Crane had teamed up with former winner Mark Smylie's company, Archaia Press. Most Innovative, though, went appropriately enough to an author new to the awards. Also, even though the awards are only for English-speaking games for now, we are starting to see more foreign entrants. Translations from Norway and France were prominent this year. The only down side was that there was less buzz about support from anyone, and many voters left off that category.

And the winners are...

Indie Game of the Year

Winner: Mouse Guard - 49 points
First runner-up: 3:16 Carnage Among the Stars - 41 points
Second runner-up: Hot War - 22 points
Starblazer Adventures - 15 points
Sweet Agatha - 15 points
Zombie Cinema - 15 points
In a Wicked Age: sword & sorcery roleplaying - 14 points
Barbarians of Lemuria - 11 points
Desolation - 10 points
Houses of the Blooded - 10 points
A Flower for Mara - 9 points
A Dirty World - 6 points

Indie Supplement of the Year

Winner: Don't Lose Your Mind - 62 points
First runner-up: Magic Burner - 60 points
Second runner-up: Obsidian Portal - 25 points
Archipelago - 13 points
Forbidden Tiger Manual - 9 points

Best Free Game

Winners: Sea Dracula and Sufficiently Advanced - 55 points each
First runner-up: Mutant Future - 31 points
Gates & Gorgons - 12 points
Shell Shock - 12 points

Best Support

Winner: Mouse Guard - 37 points
First runner-up: Don't Lose Your Mind - 23 points
Second runner-up: 3:16 Carnage Among the Stars - 18 points
Houses of the Blooded - 12 points
Starblazer Adventures - 11 points
Desolation - 10 points
Mutant Future - 8 points
Arsenal of Heaven - 6 points
Duty & Honour - 6 points
In a Wicked Age: sword & sorcery roleplaying - 6 points
Magic Burner - 6 points

Best Production

Winner: Mouse Guard - 64 points
First runner-up: 3:16 Carnage Among the Stars - 22 points
Second runner-up: Hot War - 17 points
Hellas: Worlds of Sun and Stone - 15 points
Starblazer Adventures - 12 points
Desolation - 10 points
Houses of the Blooded - 9 points
Sweet Agatha - 9 points
Alpha Omega - 8 points
Serial Homicide Unit - 8 points

Most Innovative Game

Winner: Sweet Agatha - 49 points
First runner-up: In a Wicked Age: sword & sorcery roleplaying - 22 points
Second runner-up: 3:16 Carnage Among the Stars - 16 points
Zombie Cinema - 16 points
A Flower for Mara - 15 points
Sea Dracula - 15 points
Serial Homicide Unit - 14 points
It's Complicated - 13 points
Barbarians of Lemuria - 10 points
A Dirty World - 8 points
Duty & Honour - 8 points
Hot War - 6 points

Voting Open for the Indie RPG Awards - Games of 2008

2009-08-01T20:42:15Z

The voting period for the Indie RPG Awards has officially begun for games released in 2008. After a week of voting, I'll add up the totals and announce the winners in time for Gen Con.

This year we have 42 games and 4 supplements registered. That's short on supplements, but still a wide range. You can check out the full lists (in order of registration) at Indie RPG Awards 2008.

All of the voters should have received links to the new voting form that I set up -- please contact me via info\@rpg-awards.com if you haven't received your link. Also, the emails I had on file for the following people bounced:

Bill Corrie
Christopher Helton
Jeff Diamond
Darrick Dishaw
Gary Pratt
Philip J Reed
Evangelos Hugo Paliatseas
Keith Senkowski
Derek Stoelting
Ed Cha
Jasper McChesney
Jason Blair
Ethan Greer

If you have any info on how to contact them, please let me know.