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June 16th, 2007
09:27 pm - Celebration and Dragons of the Yellow Sea
So a while back, in December 2005, I had posted "What makes a good celebration?" -- where I discussed the idea of making a good celebration and applying that to RPGs.
I now turn back to that in light of some of the revisiting of Ron Edward's GNS theory -- notably Chris Lehrich's "A GNS Question", plus some Story Games threads including complaints about jargon and Forge Glossary help; and also the Knife Fight threads (only open to members) on "GNS Theory in Wikipedia" and Ben Lehman's "To Understand Simulationism, Study Simulationism".
So partly as an extension of Chris Lehrich's excellent Ritual Discourse in RPGs, the concept of RPGs as celebration is one of the more interesting ideas to come out of the Forge, I think. I made a Celebration / Celebrationism entry in the Theory Topics wiki.
Construction vs. Deconstruction
One of the key points about my first post was the celebration shouldn't feel deconstructive. That is an important point for me. There is a big difference between a constructive work and a deconstructive work. For example, I would say that Alan Moore's Watchmen and Miracleman series were deconstructive of superheroes. Reading them, the reader was struck by the contrast with what the superhero conventions are -- they expose and criticize the tropes of the superhero comic genre. On the other hand, Kurt Busiek's Astro City is celebratory. It is still transformative of earlier superhero comics, but it works more by building on what is there and transforming it. It introduces new ideas wrapped in the symbolism of superheroes, using the older tropes to introduce new things rather than dwelling on the older tropes themselves.
So a good celebration is constructive -- it builds upon what is there. This doesn't leave the object of celebration untouched. You don't leave a wedding feeling the same way about the relationship. You don't leave a birthday feeling like you did about the previous year.
Dragons of the Yellow Sea
I would like the ongoing Dragons of the Yellow Sea campaign to be a celebration of Korean culture. This is tricky, because there is a lot of elements of 19th century Korea that we don't want to celebrate -- the Confucian repression of women by men, and of commoners by yangban; as well as the insularity that ultimately proved nearly self-destructive. For example, in a deconstructive mode, I could have some scathing things to say about how the story of Chunhyang has the appearance of celebrating women, but really is enforcing women's place as chattel.
I would prefer a constructive approach, though. I'd like to create a positive, pulpy page-turner -- which isn't necessarily historically accurate but still at least draws in and celebrates Korean culture. What does that mean? Well, to some degree it means learning aspects of culture. However, it is more than that. Teaching culture can easily be dry and critical, and the students learn facts that they internalize as facts about other people. In a celebration, however, you join in the thing that you are celebrating. You will internalize what you learn differently than if you treated it as something you are a part of.
Now, I'm not trying for a masterpiece -- just a pulpy adventure saga, but one that is distinctly Korean rather than just American pulp with a veneer of Korean history. This is still difficult, I think. Some of my thoughts on the matter have been: - Highlight issues of the times -- including class conflict between yangban and commoner, corruption of the central government, and the balance of foreign influence shifting from China to Japan.
- Rather than revenge, in stories, the betrayed tends to prove his/her worth by serving the cause all the more.
- Show different sides of Confucian ideals, positive and negative.
- Show a respect of poetry and romance as popular forms of the times.
Campaign Update
We just did the second session of the campaign on Friday. It's going pretty well, I think. There are brief session summaries out on the wiki. The first two episodes were a fairly self-contained adventure, where a royal investigator came searching for the culprit who had killed the crew of a ship bearing goods for the magistrate of Jeju, and taken off with the crew.
One of the techniques that went over pretty well was assigning of nicknames. Within the Korean sources that I've read, people are generally referred to by their family names -- not their given names. This can be confusing, though, since there will often be several people with the same nickname. It's common to refer to people by their position, but also common for people to have nicknames. So we assigned nicknames to each of our characters. During the first session -- which was after the character generation session and finishing touches to the characters by email -- each player described their character, and then everyone else discussed and assigned them a nickname. The nicknames were often distinctly not what the character assigned would want, like "Princess" Song.
We're still struggling a bit with the rules, in particular that people are having trouble deciding what their Aspects should be. It's getting better, just slowly.
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March 29th, 2007
01:12 pm - Adapting Spirit of the Century
I am getting into the details of how to adapt Spirit of the Century to our campaign "Dragons of the Yellow Sea". Background information on the campaign can be found on my nascent web page and on the Campaign Wiki. Basically, I'm mixing Korean history and the Temeraire novels by Naomi Novik for the campaign. They are roughly a take-off of Hornblower in a parallel history with domesticated dragons -- see her site at temeraire.org for more info).
This is pretty different from the primarily modern pulp source material that SotC is based on. Thus, I feel there are some differences to be dealt with.
Scale
The most obvious thing is the idea of scale -- i.e. how do you represent the different kinds of dragon characters? SotC is based on Fudge, but it dropped the Fudge concept of a Scale stat for characters. I would think that it's appropriate to re-introduce it. Scale would reduce physical damage taken and increase the successes of damage done. I suppose you could just give dragons outrageous ranks in Might and Fists and Endurance, but I think that scale is a better way of representing this.
So a dragon character would have a scale stat, but otherwise has just a normal tree of skills.
Minions and Damage
Another aspect of the SotC rules is the nature of Minions. SotC has a sharp division between minions who drop like flies (often multiple in one attack), and main characters who will generally take 9 to 12 hits in order to eliminate (or slightly less if you're using the optional "Grit" rule).
This one I'm not so sure of what to do about. In the source material, I don't see such a sharp distinction between minions and main characters. I want to maintain the simplicity of it in order to handle extended conflicts. For example, in Throne of Jade there is a scene where a massive gang assault a group of ten or so barricaded in their room. This would take forever played out shot by shot. However, it seems to me like there should be a middle ground between minions and main characters.
Also, I think I might reduce the size of the damage tracks in general. Some pulps have very long fight scenes for which it might be appropriate to have 15 to 20 rounds or more between two opponents. However, in Novik's material this is an extended battle with many opponents, not a long knock-down drag-out fight.
Damage and Weapons
One of the unusual aspects of the SotC rules is that weapons are irrelevant to damage. In keeping with the "two-fisted" ideal of pulps, someone fighting barehanded is just as effective as someone with a sword -- and a thrown rock is as good as a shotgun. However, I not sure this is as true of the Hornblower-esque genre of Novik's world -- where being without a weapon is a more serious concern.
One way to both reduce the length of fights (as mentioned earlier) and address weapons would be for weapons to do more than one box of damage per hit. Perhaps hand weapons do 2 boxes, and guns do 3.
Other Changes
Obviously for an 1860s game as opposed to 1920s, a bunch of the gadget material will be different, and a number of the stunts should probably be changed to reflect the culture and technology. I think these can mostly be dealt with on a case-by-case basis -- though I will go through in advance.
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