Dread: Horror Roleplaying Done Right

The last game I ran at the retreat was a game of Dread. I'm really glad I did that (though it was a little last minute, when we realized that Scott was running more games than others). Dread has a fantastic mechanic! In my mind it is one of the best mechanics I've seen, because it does a lot to help the feel of the roleplaying and story. It doesn't guide as much of the roleplaying, as say Polaris or Shock does, but at the same time I think it does far more for forcing the players to get into the setup of the game, and focusing the game. But what is the mechanic, I hear you asking! The mechanic is a jenga tower that you must pull bricks from in order to accomplish things. That is basically the entire system. Though the book has a ton of advice on character generation and how to generally run a good horror game.

The great thing about this mechanic is that it gets everyone very tense and concentrating on the mechanic of the game, and that tension and focus transfers well to the game that is happening around the tower.

I have since the game run it again for my Seattle group of players, and it worked similarly well. I'm planning on running a Dread session at ACNW. I'm not sure if I want to use the same story setup (something terrible happened at camp 10 years ago that is coming back on the players), but I think it could be pretty good. One of the things in the feedback of the game at the retreat that people latched on to was that I should've given them a roadmap to defeating the evil thing. That seems like a really good horror trope to give the players, since otherwise they are helpless to make the evil end (which was a focus on the game, though doesn't have to be in general).

The main problem I had the first time I ran it was a GM/plot issue that I didn't resolve well. I basically had 2 plots planned: a zombie horror game, and a camp horror one. I didn't know I had this problem, until I started the game and realized that everyone wanted to deal with the camp stuff. It couldn't be zombies, it had to be related to the dead camper! This was very obvious in retrospect, but caused the game to suck slightly in the execution.

I also tried to give something for the "eliminated" players to do. Namely I asked for some shared GM'ing so we could split the group and also give the dead folks something to do. I didn't want to decrease the sting of death by giving them another character. So, I let some folks GM some scenes. They did a great job at the scenes I asked them for, unfortunately I didn't think through my instructions very well. Shared GM'ing is something that my friend Mike really likes to do, but I still haven't found the right way to approach the scenes, and this was no exception.

Anyway, I think the game went well, and my second run of the game also went well. Dread is a fantastic system that really doesn't get in the way and really encourages the roleplaying.

I've disabled comments due to the amount of spam on this particular post.  Email me with any comments and I'll add them to the body of this post!

Hero's Banner and a new Technique

Continuing in my desire to post on more games from the retreat, I'll write up my experience with a slightly tweaked version of Hero's Banner that we playtested for Tim Koppang, and also a new GM'ing technique that Mike and I discussed as a result of the game.

For those that don't know, Hero's Banner is a game written by my long time friend Tim Koppang, and is designed to tell the story of a young man (or woman) choosing between life paths. You get 3 life paths: Hero, where you choose to act or be like someone you admire, Blood where your family's desires or needs take prominence, and Conscience where you own desires run free. The biggest change from other Hero's Banner games was that (at the cues of the write up) we did 3 players, 1 character. This was interesting, it got 3 very good players to put their head together and make 3 interesting, compelling life paths to choose between. Indeed, one of the biggest frustrations with the session was that we could only choose 1 path. Mike in particular wanted to strike compromises between the different life paths.

Beyond the character generation, there is a mechanic, which lets you succeed more the more passionate you are about one path over the others, which uses percentile dice (oh god why? WHY?), and a sort of game timer that measures overall progress towards narrating the final scene and epilogue of the character. These mechanics had a major impact on the game play, which in general is, of course, a good thing (in particular I thought it was good for us to abandon one of the paths, as it wasn't compelling or useful anymore), but too many times they felt like a burden. While we were always in line for choosing a path and agonizing over that decision, it felt like the players were, occasionally, jerked along that path fater or (at the end) slower than desired.

So what was our game about? Our Hero was Dame Plowman, a woman from common stock who had won her way into knighthood and an honored place at the Duke's court. The character (Damien) wanted to be like her, but mainly wanted to court and marry her, achieved by becoming a knight. The Blood story was the least interesting of the three. Our family was in trouble after the death of the patron of the family. Our mother and friend (Baron Landsher) wanted us to take on the duties of a noble and rescue our lands from our debts. Finally we come to the strongest story like, the horse trainer story. Conscience told us to become an Arabian horse trainer, which no non-arab had ever been able to do.

I think the biggest problem was the speed of the plots. I made the horse plot very strong by kicking it into high gear very quickly. First I tried to stage a scene in a village, getting Damien to pass judgment on an important matter (for the peasants). Mike ran from that, because he was late for horse training. On the way there they ran into Dame Plowman escorting a bandit lord from Uran to the Duke's prison. They witnessed the bandit lord attempt to stab Plowman, and decided to interfere despite the fact they were in peasant cloths going to the horse trainers (horse people hate nobles). They ran off quickly, after being stabbed themselves. At the horse folk's place, they were introduced to the master herdsman, (after meeting the hilarious and awesome Shaliq), and given a horse. They were then told they would have to stay with the horse for the next week all the time, with their hand sealed in wax to the horse. After that they went to talk to Mom, but found Dame Plowman at home, waiting to ask them why they were in peasant clothes and what this horse thing was about. Then they talked to mom, who revealed that their major creditor, Lord Fauntleroy was waiting to go over the books with Damien. Fauntleroy left shortly thereafter, thoroughly upset with the level of commitment Damien showed to his debts. Damien and the horse then went out to meet Plowman, and they had a romantic ride on the horse (Aiya). Plowman invited them to a ceremony to recognize her and his contributions to bringing the bandit lord to justice, in 3 days time. The horse was not invited. Over the next several days Damien fixed the village's problems, impressing Fauntleroy, but talked to their mother and told her they would not be the new lord for the land. They got permission from the master herdsman to be separated from Aiya for the 3 hours of the ceremony. They attended the ceremony where they were knighted in a surprise ceremony. Then the final horse scene took place, where they had to pass the final trial of the horse (I've skipped over the 7 horse trials they they've been doing each day). They failed (due to mechanics at this point). Then they went off with Plowman, finding Shaliq and his son fighting bandits, rescueing them and impressing Plowman at the same time. In the end, they chose to go with Sarah Plowman and join the knights of the garter.

I promised that I would discuss a new GM'ing technique from this game. I'm not sure it is coming through in the write up, but the horse plot was very interesting and awesome. All the players felt a lot of connection to both Shaliq and Aiya (the horse). So why was this? And could we find a way to replicate the awesomeness to other games? Mike and I discussed this at some length. The core of the idea goes like this: you as the GM want to make some item important or special in the player's mind, something that they (or the character) wants. First, you make them work for it. You make an entire people or tribe or group who's job it is to gatekeep the item or the best form of the item. The player gets in good with them. Then they are given the item or a proto form of the item. They must doing something that is awkward socially with that item for some time. After that the item will be completed or otherwise augmented. So for, say, a chopper character in Apocalypse World, that wants an awesome new bike. First introduce the nomad group of mechanics that make the best post-apocalyptic motorbikes. They given him a bike, doing a ritual to seal the bike to him, a lot of hoodoo nonsense with feathers and smoke. They let him go with the bike, but warn that the bike will have its own demands that if they are not met, will mean the destruction of the bike. Now comes the important part... The character now has a spiritual connection to the bike, and she (or he, depending on the sexuality of the character) is around as a hallucination all the time, asking for things, being socially awkward. Another example we thought of: a katana that must have a Samaurai's hand kept on it at all times for a week. A book that a librarian character desperately wants that can't be given, but can be copied, over the course of a demanding week. In all of these cases, a time commitment is important, it is also important for the GM to keep up the pressure. This shouldn't be a time-off week where nothing else happens, this should be the week that the plague comes to town, and jimmy falls down the well. There should be pressure to give up the item.

Obviously this item technique isn't useful in all games, but I think it might be a good idea. It certainly worked well in the Hero's Banner game we played.

BTW, Buy Hero's Banner!

The Retreat, Take 3

Well, another year has come and gone, so its time for me to update my blog again. We just wrapped up on the 3rd edition of the roleplaying retreat, which some folks are calling BenCon.

So what was the highlight of the week for me? I really enjoyed getting to play a bunch of indie games that I hadn't had a chance to try out. I'm going to try to be blogging for a while about the games we played, but today I'll limit myself to 1, and one I GM'ed no less.

The first game I GM'ed at the retreat was Dance and the Dawn. This is a very interesting game, extremely stylized and simple. The setup for the game is pretty simple. The players (up to 4) play the Ladies of Ash, which have been brought to the Midnight Waltz by the Duke of Ash at the behest of the Queen of Ice. The Queen provides 4 (or 5 in the case of 4 players) Lords of Ice, one of which is her son, the Prince of Ice. After some initial setup of the world (How does magic work? How do the Ladies find themselves on the Island of Ash), you create characters based on completing sentences (I was ____, I loved ____, I lost ____, I will ____), which I felt worked pretty well. The ladies also compose a couplet of peotry to describe their characters. The Lords then are created to help them achieve their "I will" sentences. The game proceeds on a chess board (read the book if you want the full details), there is very constrained interaction between the Ladies and the Lords (and everyone else). At most you probably get to ask like 3 or 4 questions to a particular lord. If you pick the one that was created for you, you have a happy life, otherwise, disaster (the left over lord is the soulless lord, whom no one will be happy with).

So what worked? I thought the imagery questions from the world setup worked really well. We quickly sketched out a very stylish setting and one that was intimately realized for each of the players. People were also pretty nervous about their end game decisions, despite everything working out for the best in my group. Though the soulless one was figured out fairly early by folks. The sense of courtly intrigue and propriety shown through despite the constricted mechanics and setting, which was awesome (in fact I think the constricted setting and rules that only allowed for a dance were the reasons those pieces worked).

On the other end of things, I found the lack of real romance to be disappointing. After having run my True Love game about 4 or 5 times I was looking forward to having a cool romance game that really brought things home other than the one that I made (with the help of others, see last year's write up for details on that game). But, the constrained nature of the game / characters and the clue-esque mystery that was the centerpiece of the game (who is their true love) served to leech out all of the romance and turn it into a more clinical game, at least in my opinion (though I would love to have comments from my players).

Over all, "Dance and the Dawn" worked pretty well, and was very cool, and I think we even told a cool story, but it is not a game about love or engendering player emotions. Well worth a play :).

Cloak, Dagger, and Dragons!

Mike and I have come up wth a number of pieces of roleplaying discussion shorthand. Sort of small quips that remind us of big concepts when we are talking about games (about what went right and what went wrong). I've already talked about one of these ("stunt your failure") in 'The Death of Cool' post, but there are a couple of others that I think are really useful, and one in particular that caused me to write this article.

1. The Belly Of the Dragon.

This is a concept that relates to getting players onto your plot and not some other plot that you might've accidentally hinted at. Basically the story goes like this: your players are at the local inn. You have a big adventure planned with the forest elves. They need the player's help to overthrow their god and regain their sense of morality. You have a bunch of NPCs, compelling story hooks and such, but the adventure starts with them in the woods, meeting the elves. So you give the players the hook: there have been a lot of bandit attacks out in the woods, if only someone could help! Instead of charging off into the woods like you wanted, the players say "Well, we should get the local lord or duke or whomever to fix this." You panic. Of course there is a duke and he doesn't like bandits, so you need some reason for him not to be interested so you say "the local duke doesn't care about these people, he won't help." a player responds with "we need to make him see the plight of these people". And so it continues. And eventually you find yourself saying something like "Well, you could go up to his castle, which is protected by the king's elite guard and is renowned across the land as the most defensible fortification for 100 miles, but a dragon has swallowed the castle whole and now its in the belly of a gaint dragon. You think you've won, they won't go up there now. The players on the other hand hear "there is a lot of cool stuff at the castle, it must be where he wants us to go, plus we get to fight a dragon!".

This concept boils down to: if you place too many cool obstacles in front of players, it isn't a turn off, sometimes it is a challenge and the more you heap on, the more some players will want to tackle those challenges. I think this is the reason I sometimes drag games off course. I almost always seek the plot like an arrow, but if the GM starts building up some problem or place, I will think that in the plot and start pushing towards it.

Some ways to counteract the belly of the dragon effects include sudden role reversal... "Oh the duke will talk to you, yeah, and he wants to hire you to route out the bandits, no we don't need to roleplay the interaction with the duke". Another technique would be the metagame hints ("you feel a pull to go out into the woods", or "your childhood friend is traveling this road and he may get hit by the bandits!". Basically, though it boils down to: if you find yourself talking about things that aren't in your grand plot, stop! Don't talk about things the players aren't supposed to do, either it convinces them not to do something (which could've happened quicker by not talking about it) or it derails the game.

2. No more secrets!

This is a technique that generated some controversy at the retreat. The basic idea is that secrets are bad, or at least not very interesting. I want to talk about this from 2 perspectives: player and GM secrets. This post was actually inspired by this Geek Girls Rule!! post. I was struck by one particular sentence: "It’s friends only as much of the information there is not stuff other players/characters would necessarily know". This is exactly the sort of reasoning I want to argue against. (Note: I have no idea what trust level exists between players in Tammy's game and it may be the case that she has completely valid and awesome reasons for hiding this stuff)

First off GM secrets. In general these take the form of plot points or other things. Some of this is OK. But a lot, in my opinion, should just be thrown away. For instance, lets say you have a game plan of the players creating a rock band, getting killed in a plane crash, and recruited by Satan to corrupt the world through rock and role in order to be placed back on earth. This was a great game that was run by Keith a long time ago ("Paladins for Satan"). Now that game went well, but it could've easily gone badly, because our character instructions were "make a rock band". Now, for instance, we could've make a christian country music group. That would've been bad. While the character conflict over serving Satan might've been delicious, the meat of the game was supposed to occur after we were back on earth, doing his bidding (As it turns out we made a death metal band and everything was great). In my opinion, it would've been better to be like "make a rock band who will be recruited by Satan to corrupt the earth". Now, yes, I have just revealed a major plot point. But that plot point is going to occur and I need the players to say yes if we are ever going to have that awesome rock off between the players and the 2nd coming of Jesus. This also allows people to make that christian rock band, with the full knowledge that they WILL be turned to the side of evil (this is a form of player by in through character generation).

It is my firm opinion that whenever you have a secret as a GM you should think long and hard about keeping it a secret from any players. Even if it is a secret from the characters (this doesn't really matter), it shouldn't be a secret from the players. For one thing, people enjoy the game a lot more when they know some big thing is going to happen, and what better way to indicate that than telling them what the big thing is. Trust in your players to keep it OOC, and run with it.

I said I also wanted to approach this from a player perspective. Secrets for players seem to take 2 forms: back story secrets and character planning secrets. So, lets say you're a Cylon (traitor) in a Battlestar Galactica game. Think about what is cooler: the other players seeing all the cool cylon things you do as you subtle work to mess up the ship, or the other players being bored as you talk to the GM out in the hall yet again. Additionally you should always be thinking of ways to reveal to the other characters your secrets. As Mike once said "if you never reveal a character secret in play, it isn't any different from not having a secret at all". As a player you should have a plan for the best way the other characters find out your secret. Do they catch you shooting up before a mission? Do you tell them in a tear-filled confession. It may not work out the way you're thinking, but having a plan and communicating that plan to the GM can make for some really awesome roleplaying.

At the end of the day, both GM and player secrets should be revealed. If you never reveal them, its like they never happened. Have plan for getting them out, and take any opportunity that comes up. If you hide it away, then you never get to have an awesome story about the secret, and that is what you want, right? Hiding things from players is almost never right, since it excludes players from enjoying all aspects of the game. Hiding things from characters has a necessity, but all secrets should have an arc that includes their reveal, so that you have have some cool story around the secret (otherwise why have the secret at all?).

Thoughts?

Look to the Left, Look to the Right: Who is having fun here?

One of the things that was very interesting to me that came up at the retreat was the concept of player engagement rescue. What I mean by this is, sometimes, for whatever reason, players are not engaged. As the GM, you try to watch carefully for this, and reengage the player as much as possible. There are lots of GM'ing techniques for this, and really the GM side of this equation is worth writing about 10 books. But what I want to talk about today is the player side of this story. If you are another player in this game, it is a really cool idea to try to look out for this and fix this as well. It takes the pressure off the GM (if successful) and is often even more engaging than what the GM could do with his limited camera time.

I first noticed this technique when used by Chris Lightfoot, a great guy and an awesomely experienced gamer, and I'm embarrassed to say I only noticed it because he did it to me. I and several others were not really engaged with the game or with the plot, and he came over, got us organized and got us back in the game, and it was awesome. Ever since then I have been trying to do the same for others (in addition to figure out how to be more engaged all the time myself), and sometimes I can do stuff and sometimes I can't.

The easiest form of this technique is very simple and also, in my opinion, effective. Simply ask for another player's help. Going out to investigate something? You need the taciturn warrior to accompany you, no question, what if you ran into trouble? Trying to lure the big bad out of a cave, well, the only thing is to have that barmaid turned adventurer on your arm to help you, she might know something about caves! It's pretty cool to see the other player turn to you and suddenly become more active; to know that you just made their game experience at least a little bit better.

There are several different ways I've seen to approach this technique. First of all, ask for their help, as above. Second would be to look at what they are interested in doing (what do they come alive for) and engineer a spot in the plan for them (perhaps even by scrapping your intricate sneaking plan and letting the 9 ft tall cyborg guy smash through a wall to get into the secret lab). Another technique, which has to be used with care, is to engage them adversarial, if the game is of that form... See what their characters care about and suggest destroying or maiming it/them. Or just outright attack them in some manner. Players are never more involved than when defending what they care about. (Note: this can only be used with players who can play with this level of confrontation, unsure players or new players will almost always just fold and go along with your plans, even if it does require the bloody sacrifice of Aunt May, and then you've driven them away even more).

I'd love to hear how people have approached this technique or idea themselves, weather it is what has worked well on you or what you have used to good effect. As players there are a lot of things that we can do that the GM just can't (like change plans). This is, in my opinion, a high level technique that a lot of people just don't think about, but can really turn a so-so game into a great game.

Next time perhaps some review of some interesting concepts we've come up with, like "the belly of the dragon!".

The Death of Cool

Okay, so I don't have as much time to write tonight, so this may not be as long or as thought out as some of my other posts. In this write up, I would like to discuss stunting (a subject you know I think a lot about if you've read this blog), and make a case against them, which may surprise some long-time roleplaying companions of mine.

First of all, what is stunting? In a great comment to my last post, Tim asked why we needed a special word for it at all, wasn't it simply explaining things in a cool way? I can definitely see how for most roleplayers I have seen (outside of my weekly groups) and for most systems, their form of stunting is exactly that: a cool way to describe a sword swing or your character's efforts to unlock in the mysteries of the tree folk's magic. However, I believe that what we normally engage in during play sessions with my group is much more complex, and does deserve its own word, simply because it is that much more complicated.

A great stunt is a story all on its own. It has a beginning middle and end. Narrative control is seized from the GM and promptly used to execute feats of awesomeness impossible without the ability to control everyone and everything around them. There may be dialogue in there, there may be graphically described magical abilities or items. There will almost certainly be some shaking of the earth or some equally significant sign that the universe is in awe of the proceedings. Ideally the conclusion brings forth something that has been hinted at throughout the rest of the stunt. The best stunts call in character traits and previous events that remind everyone why they are here, fighting against the challenge. And the absolute best stunts leave the other players and the GM gaping, slack jawed at the spectacle of pure imagination that has been erected before them, their minds desperately racing to take it all in, for the stunt only lasts for a moment before the next person wipes the slate clean to begin their sword-born story of glory and death.

Stunts have become so integral to the ways that the sunday crew played (when it was happening), that we even had games that were essentially nothing but one long stunt after another. Persona was beaten out of shape in order to support more fully this fully stunt-driven game we were playing. Now don't get me wrong, that slack jawed amazement is something to experience. It is addictive like crack, and you're always looking for the next awesomeness high. I think it appeals to the action movie fan inside most of us, the one that wants one more explosion in the movie, one more gun fight, or one more no-holds-barred brawl on the wing of the airplane. It is an adrenaline rush, and it lets you tell very cool stories. As an example of some of the crazy things that can be done, here is one of the player-created stories that occurred in one of my games without my planning or even helping with it:

The character was the last detective at the end of time, when murder no longer existed for no one could die. He was the only one to still care, because he was the last one to loose someone. He coulnd't help but spend every moment thinking about her. Even when the last star died out signaling the end of humanity he thought of nothing but her. While traveling back through time to save everyone he thought only of her, and when the climactic battle had finished, he only had thoughts for the one thing that gave him strength to see it through. He realized something then: in order for the human race to live, in order for him to complete his role in the pivitol battle, he needed his motivation. So, as his final act, he used his time travel powers to go forward once again to the end of a star and kill his one true love.

That is a pretty awesome story, I think. If I saw that as the plot of a movie, I would love it. And, because the player basically made up the story as he went (for instance: he didn't know at the get-go that time travel would be involved in the game), he couldn't get help from me as the GM to tell his story (or plan it out at all until it was almost the end already). With our form of stunting, however, he didn't need to get my buy in as the GM. He was free to tell his story, because like clockwork he got extensive narrative control whenever there was a significant challenge.

Maybe, hopefully, I have conveyed to some of you what stunting is like in our group. My opinion is that it is an extreme form of storytelling that occurs at break-neck speed, concentrating on combat (though can be done for just about anything), and whose main focus is to spread awesomeness around like rice at a wedding.

This, however, isn't good enough for me anymore. What I have found is that as we concentrate on stunting, as we perform the stunts, even if we are telling an awesome character driven story like the one above, it abandons a large piece of more traditional roleplaying. One of the great thrills I get in roleplaying is fully connecting with my character, sinking into their mind and their behaviors, and experiencing their emotions. Its the same thrill I get from acting. Now,I know that many people approach roleplaying very very differently. For me its all about the emotion and the in character feelings. For others, different things (which I won't even try to get into here). But for me there is this strong element of characterization and of in-character thoughts. Even if you don't play looking for this feeling, I think / hope most people would say that this is at least part of the roleplaying experience (disagree? comment it, baby!). When we stunt, as we have trained each other to do in my groups, the characterization disappears, there just isn't any time or need for it. Why try to roleplay out a story when I can just tell it easily when the next stunt opportunity comes my way?

Stunt provides another large challenge: the uninitiated. I have had countless discussions with people in my group about initiating new players into stunting. We are all stunting up a story in the game, and the new people probably aren't at all. In fact they may not know where to begin (those who didn't start stunting with us just see our current level of skill and not the long climb to get there). It can be very intimidating. And intimated players rarely have a good time.

At the retreat (see this had to relate back somehow). I ran 4 games. 3 of them were stunt platform games, and one was not. Guess which one worked the best? People didn't know always how to act or what level of buy-in was expected (fulled-stunted games require all the buy-in you can give). They would get irritated at their own lack of experience at thinking of stunts and feel discouraged. Also, as I player I wouldn't've enjoyed these games. Yes, they could be quite fun on a surface level, there was a lot of action and plot, and if you put it in there, character driven story. But they wouldn've never triggered any deep emotions within me, and I never feel very connected with my stunt platform characters.

It is for this reason that I think I'm done with stunt platform games entirely. Small-scale stunts themselves I definitely will still support and encourage, but I'm going to try to keep the focus away from the stunt platforms and on the characters (or perhaps the spotlight will be on whatever I figure out the players want to be doing with their characters). I love the large scale stunts a lot, and I think they have helped me to become a much better GM (for several reasons relating to greatly improved descriptive powers to preventing blocking training), but I think it may be time to let stunts take a back burner to other techniques and ideas, like the ones that I have been discussing in this blog this week.

Tomorrow: Player engagement techniques! The Retreat continues!

Blood and Sand

So today I wanted to write about an exciting new GMing technique I tried out at the retreat. Mike created this technique for his Amber group down at Georgia Tech. I think he might've gotten the idea from my series of Devil games that I've run with the experienced Amber crew up here, where hard choices made by the characters shape the world around them. Unlike my decisions, which for the most part took place outside of combat, Mike places these decisions entirely inside combat (well, I should say that I assume he has hard large-scale choices outside of combat too, but that he also brings them inside combat as well). What results is something very interesting: roleplaying doesn't stop when the swords come out.

At least if you're me, every time your character resorts to violence you feel a twinge of regret that you aren't talking in character some more (I'm not saying this ever stops me, as people who play with me will attest). Additionally, if you're me, you probably wish that you had more character-based decisions to make in combat. In the current phase of my roleplaying career I look at combat as a place to make the action cool, not as a place to do interesting character decisions or create interesting changes in my characters. But by forcing hard decisions on the players in a combat, I think it is possible to put the characterization back in the game, even after the thugs start their work.

Basically how it works is this: say I've got a character who is just a normal, everyday fighter. For some reason they have gotten into a shouting match with the local village tough, and a fight has broken out. A standard intro could be something like: "He pulls out his sword, threatening you." or even, with more stunting, something like "His metal-laced scars glinting in the twilight, he begins a chant that draws forth a magical blade from his heart, blackened by his own evil. He begs you to lay your life down on his blade". Both of those are fine, if all you want is a fight. But what could be more interesting? Perhaps something like, "Without a second's thought he lunges for a watching lady, his fingers dig into her arm drawing blood. You see an opening, but the woman will probably be hurt by him as you thrust home, what are you doing?" Or perhaps he has captured something of value to the players and they must risk breaking it. Either way, the purpose is clear: by making a choice you reveal something about your character. Does she care only for justice, thrusting her sword deep into the ruffian's belly? Does she try to bargain for the woman's life? Does she purposefully run the woman through in order to complete her mission? I believe these are much more interesting questions to answer than just how you attack the bad guy, no matter how great a stunt you can make.

In the game I wrote about yesterday, "Both Alike in Dignity" the second half of the adventure consists of a couple of combats, with a couple of moments of rest to allow the players to do something I didn't think of. In the most recent iteration of the game, I used this style of combat quite a bit. Now in my particular setup I didn't have to work to hard to make the players make choices, since their "one true love" was right there with them. Do you gain an advantage over Benedict or protect your lover? Do you save the king of Amber or prevent a single scratch from befalling your companion's body. The best choice I thought up all night was "do you risk your unborn child or allow your lover to be stabbed". But even when the choice was easy to make, I felt it allowed the characterization to continue to flow. I really felt like we discovered stuff about the players during the second half that we hadn't in the first, even though the first was pretty much geared solely towards characterization, and discovery.

I was super pleased with how well this worked and the engagement I think I saw in the players, and I know that the next campaign or adventure I run I will be trying this technique again (perhaps my players will jump in on the comments and tell us otherwise, but I felt it worked well).

Tomorrow some thoughts on stunting and characterization or perhaps comments on player-assisted engagement!

Fiascos, Fights, and Ill-advised sex: Player Scene Generation as Player Buy-in

A couple of years ago on the drive back from the incomparable Ambercon NW, Mike and I had a discussion about a game I could possibly run the next year. That game was based on a previous game by mike and focused around the creation of true meaningful relationships created by the players. The idea way that to start off the game we would have the players break off into explicit couples and come up with scenes they wanted to play through between each other. These scenes had prompts. For the ACNW game they were: 1. A scene where you fight each other and it comes to blows, 2. A scene where you defend the other to a family member, and 3. a scene that results in ill-advised sex.

I ended up running this game both for a Sunday session last summer and for ACNW. Both of these games went very well, but I never got to the final part of the adventure. After the scenes were played out, the couples were supposed to face a great challenge, and hopefully overcome it as a couple. In both previous runs, I was unable to get the players to the conclusion in time. (In the sunday session we didn't have enough time to explain Amber to a new player and also get through everything, in the ACNW game, my players didn't seem interested in that part of the adventure, so I abandoned it). So, for the retreat I decided to run "Both Alike in Dignity" once again.

For the retreat version of this game I changed the scenes (since one person had already played with these scenes), and Keith and I were able to come up with: 1. A scene where you convince the other to love you despite their hatred, 2. A scene where someone dies, 3. A scene that results in ill-advised sex. We kept ill-advised sex because the relationship doesn't feel solid until you have it, in my opinion. These scenes worked great and the two couples (Mike and Evelyn, Jesse and Carl) I think got some really excellent roleplaying done in their scenes. Best of all this time I was able to get everyone to the conclusion!

This game has worked really well everytime I've run it. It was certainly the best GM'ing I did at the retreat last week, and it was the best Ambercon game I've run as well. In thinking about this I figure that one of the big reasons for this is that I'm asking for direct player involvement from moment one in creating these relationships. I think of how many times I have tried to get a love interest going in a game (normally with an NPC), and it normally takes one of two forms: 1. the player ignores my hints, and nothing happens 2. the player desperately latches on to the hints, and it feels awkward and unfinished. Maybe all of that is me, but I think the reason these relationships work is that the players are responsible for making it happen.

Player Scenes as a method of generating buy-in for adventure ideas I think might be really cool. I have another idea for generating intense relationships in a family that I think might be very cool, and that I want to try at some point. I also think this shares a lot with the "stunt your failure" concept that Nikita introduced to our stunting group. Basically Nikita was the first GM to say "this is too hard, you cannot succeed, please stunt your failure to kill the dragon". While a little wierd the first time (since people are used to just succeeding all the time in persona), it has really grown on us all. It is a great GM tool (to be used sparingly, of course), but it really gets the players' buy-in and lets them feel cool while still failing (and lets them fail on their own terms). In much the same way, I feel that these relationship building scenes generate player buy-in and involvement, and are definitely a valuable tool I am adding to my GM toolbox.

Tomorrow I'm going to try to write about the cool new GM fighting technique I tried out at the retreat that Mike came up with for his Georgia Amber crew.

Roleplaying Retreat II: The Re-retreatening

So I just got back from the second roleplaying retreat, and I have to say I think it was a success! I really enjoyed playing with a bunch of my friends, and making a few new ones to boot! Everyone was a very skilled roleplayer with a lot to bring to both the gaming table and the discussions, and basically: a smashing success. In an effort to organize and record my thoughts, I'm hoping to do a couple of blog posts on some of the things we discussed, some of the problems we found, and some of the games we played. So, hopefully (assuming I'm not a total blog writing loser like normal) this will be the first of 2 or 3 posts.

One of the most interesting things we did was a session on improv exercises. Impro for Storytellers is, in my opinion, a great resource for anyone looking to work on characterization and plot techniques in a roleplaying game. It is my belief that almost all of the stuff that goes into making a great improv session can be applied to roleplaying sessions. I know that since my introduction to this book I have come a long way in terms of blocking, tilts, and predicting the desires of players through their actions.

For the retreat we first tried to do a couple of the blocking exercises. For instance, we played the game where you only stayed in until you blocked something. No one stayed in very long (though we did eventually get into the swing of things). Another exercise we tried was the butler, where you only block (one person suggests things to do and you have to agree with them incharacter but block them, like "Yes, going outside would be great, but I'm afraid its raining sir). I thought these went pretty well, though since I had forgotten the book we couldn't do a lot of exercises, only the ones that Mike and I remembered. But that gave us time to come up with roleplaying exercises!

Ever since Mike found the improv book above and thought it could apply to roleplaying he and I have been tossing around ideas for small exercises, like the ones suggested in the book. In general they are short and sharp, meaning they don't take long to do and they focus very tightly on a specific skill. We finally got to try one that we made up on the spot after we ran out of "normal" improv exercises. I'll call this exercise "GM Plot Workshop".

So we had 5 people working on this exercise (Mike, Carl, Evelyn, Brittany, and myself). One person would be the player, and one the GM. The other three would each think of one of Setting, Character, Story Goal (in that order). Then, the player would in a very out of character way, say what the player's plan for achieving or approaching the story goal was. The GM would then say what they would do. One example was with me as the GM, and Mike as the player. Setting: Post-apocolyptic world where humans were forced underground to a Zion-like city. Character: a young scientist. Story Goal: Make the surface safe for humans. Mike said something like "I lead an expedition to the serface to figure out why we can't live up there anymore". I responded with "After arriving on the surface your scientist team finds that there are microbes in every plant and animal that take over their minds, and that these are fatal to humans". After doing this, we would then have commentary from everyone. For instance, in our example one piece of feedback was that the character should have discovered the microbes not just the team he is a part of. Also alternate plot suggestions like "Wouldn't it be cool if they had to fight to the surface or the microbes were caused by his great-grandfather". The plan and response would take 2-4 mins, and the discussion anywhere from 5-10mins. Then repeat. We did 3 of these per GM/player pair. This was really great in helping people see problems with their plots "You're right it would be cooler if there was a rival band they had to challenge to a rock-off" to player anticipation: "Oh, I see that I guided the player down a path they weren't excited about, which was indicated by this action". Plus, for the more experienced GMs it was easy to add in difficulty-increasing elements like "I'm a new player and I don't know how to communicate my story goals other than through character actions, and I get frustrated easily" (which is what mike played for me). Everyone agreed it was very useful and awesome to be able to do basically entire sessions in about 10 mins and get immediate feedback with different ideas and suggestions.

In this vein I have thought of a few more exercises that would be cool to try some time:

• GM player prediction - same setup as above, but have the GM try to guess the hidden story goal only through in character interactions through NPCs
  
• Player assisted engagement - This time there are 3 players, and 2 of them have to work in character to engage the 3rd one, who is disengaged and not having fun
  
• Hooking players - each person thinks of a character and setting, GM suggests plot hooks for each.
  

In all of these cases you would engage in a round of discussion after each round of play. This is the most important part as figuring out what should've or could've happened differently or better is many times something only other people can see (We did the discussion for every game we played at the retreat, not just the exercises, which really brought a new level of awesomeness).

Let me know if you try out any of these ideas. I think I will if I ever find some people willing enough again! I'll try to get another post on the retreat out sometime this week.

A Rocket Ride

I recently ran a game with a very strong group of players, and I thought I'd relay that experience here. The game was called "Rocket Ride" and is based on a song by Tom Smith. This is a great song about the joys of old-school sci-fi. Here is an excerpt from the lyrics

I want a shining tower of glass and steel,
A rubber jumpsuit and a freeze-dried meal,
The will to survive, the need to explore,
The love of adventure, who could ask for more?

Who couldn't love that?! Anyway, so based on this, I ran my rocket ride game. It was an impromptu meeting of the Amber gaming crew, and included Mike (visiting from GA Tech), Chris and Leslie, Andi, and Keith. I posted a future of the 1950s, complete with finned rockets, smart heros, and the drive for the future.

We started with the premise that all the characters were employees of a corporation that was trying to make the first space trip. That right, in grand Heinlein style we had corporations beating the government to space.

The players began by thinking of characters. And we had all the old great sci-fi tropes out in force. We had "Captain Dr. Thruster" the high-flying leader and pilot. We had the boy-genius "JET - John Edward Thruster, nephew of the captain", guaranteed to get captured by the bad guys, his intelligent dog companion Sirius, the russian food scientist "Red", and the eccentric mathematician / computer scientist.

We started with the first launch of the "Liberty Rocket" (the name of their spaceship) being interrupted by the presence of the Evil Galatic Sector Lord. After arranging a darring escape from Earth with the help of the Air Force, they went to the homeworld of the Sector Lord to see what they could find out about him. Of course, it was full of communists (who else?). There was a beautiful princess (the sector lord's daughter) to woo as well as a revolution by the capitalists to help.

All in all, it was a light-hearted romp through the 1950-based future. And of course the heros came out on top, evil was vanquished (but lived to fight another day), and Captain Thruster got the girl.

The Art of Being a Nerd

I was just reading Tim's blog, when I came to this great article, which describes, in painstaking detail, the thought processes of a nerd. As a confessed member of that group, I had an intense desire to read it, and it was great. Its a little too late for me to get really excited about this topic, but I thought I would pass it along to others encase they missed it.

In roleplaying news, we've been trying some more character-focused roleplaying with immersion rather than stunt platform style games. I think its been working out fairly well, at least for me. I got to play a completely evil character last game, which is always fun. I think I've been hitting the evil a little hard recently, though, so I'm planning on a happiness and light character for the next time I get to play.

A brief glimpse into our last two games: 1. Steve ran a game of human diaspora with the earth being destroyed and us eventually discovering alien life. 2. Keith ran a game of Amber where we started with founding our own new Amber (I was this universe's Oberon)... That character was well an truely evil and sadistic (I really tried to give it that Oberon feel), which worked in some respects but I think in others it was a little too much, which is why I'm planning on going the other way in the future.

We've also gotten up to session 2 of my new Saturday game Devils of Royalty and Divinity, which I think is going well (though you would have to ask my players, really). Last session saw the creation of a new god of logrus and pattern and the promise of much havoc to come.

Inner Roleplaying & The Central Library

So my previous post has generated some amount of comments :). (And no, Tim, I never thought you were attacking persona :) ). I thought I'd respond in a post, and also include a game description for one of the games I'll be running at AmberCon NW

The thing that seemed to spark the most comment was the remarks I made about looking for a more inwards focused game. I think I'm not describing myself well with that description. I feel like the games we've been playing, while very fulfilling in terms of scope, epicness and plot, leave something to be desired when one considers internal character strife. But even that doesn't really describe the problem... Closer would be to say that when you're stunting on such a large scale, and with the persona system, character individualization becomes meaningless.

This of course begs the question, how could one setup mechanics or a game to make the differences between characters more important. Just asking that question, though, isn't that useful. We see differences all the time flavor and inform the stunts that occur in game. This might be the real issue: I feel like there is no interaction. We sit down at the table, and no one's characters talk. The GM gives several challenges to the players, and the players think of some awesome things to do and stories to tell. What doesn't happen is the players rarely interact in character, in meaningful ways.

So, what do we need to make this more apparent? Bliss Stage is a great example of a system that won't allow you to get away with that style of roleplaying. Every scene in Bliss Stage is interaction between characters, and it rocks. Now, I think you loose the epicness of the thing and also plot is extremely difficult to come by. So I think what I'm looking for is closer to a middle ground. Something as free and flexible as persona but requiring you to interact like Bliss Stage. This might be as simple as making fragments purchased through character interaction... I'm not sure of the details of that, but if you had to have some past scene roleplayed in order to take a fragment, that might work. Even going so far as having the other players take the roles of NPCs in that scene, a la Polaris... I worry that that won't get the characters together though, just have more roleplaying in the discovery of their own character. A slight modification of that idea would be to have the scenes only take place between PCs, but I think then the PCs have to have a history together for that to make sense.

Thoughts?

Anyway, I thought I'd also include the description of a game I'm running at AmberCon NW. I've already run it for the sunday crew, and it went very very well. I'm planning on running 3 games at this con, and I think I'm most excited about this one...

--- Game Description ---

Adventure / Heroic -- Non-Amber

To Leaders of the Houses of Literature

I hereby summon your representative to the Written Court. The Great
Scribe Jules Verne has petitioned me to engage a expedition to the
Central Library to bring the Librarian back from that most sacred place
and bring a new golden age to the world. I am commanding all of the
Houses to send a companion for Sir Verne to assist in this greatest of
quests. There will be much danger but also much reward, as those who
journey to the center of the world will have their names live forever
in the Word.

The High Wordsmith
Great Wordsmith of the House of Horror
Queen Mary Shelley

---

What if the world really did revolve around books? What if you could
journey to that fabled Central Library and see what it contained? What
if lived off of reading books? What if you gained magical powers from
reading the greatest of novels or becoming widely read? Journey to the
Central Library with Jules Verne and find out!

--- Setting ---

Set in a quasi-historical victorian setting. A world where reading
books provided sustenance and all the librarians are a little pudgy. A
fantastical world of literature and magic, all driven by the
imaginations of the Wordsmiths.

The system will be Persona, a very lightweight and fast system detailed
here:

Persona System


------------------

So if you think that sounds interesting, you should come to ACNW in Portland in November! Its the best con I go to all year!

The Dying of the Light

We played a great game last night. Ok, so I'm biased, especially since I ran the game, but I thought it went well in any case. But first things first; the title of the game was "The Dying of the Light". Which you should recognize as a quote from a famous poem, right?!? 4 intelligent players last night, and not one of them were familiar with Dylan Thomas' famous poem! Anyway, I will refrain from continuing to rail against my player's erudition.

The basic idea for the game was that we lived in the final stages of the universe. Somehow Humanity has survived the trillions of years necessary, and but a whisper remains of both the universe and the human civilization that spanned it. The sky is dark, because all of the stars have burned themselves out. The final members of humanity huddle in their Dyson Sphere huddled around the last stars. The remaining stars have been frozen in time, and strung in a line. The death of the old star is used to power the un-freezing of the next star, and we join the PCs at this change over.

Of course, given the title of the game, there was no way that star was actually starting up. And in fact, humanity gave all of their remaining stored energy (it was essentially a golden age post-singularity civilization, so the only thing you could lack for was energy) in a useless attempt to help the new star restart. Instead the PCs followed a crazy guy into the new star, armed with devices he claimed would transport them back in time to fix the issue (there was some evidence that the star had been sabotaged billions of years ago).

So they travel back, and emerge at the birth of the star they went into. As it turns out I had already made a big deal that the Final War had started right after the last star was born. So, of course, this star was that last star born and they emerged to see an entire dyson sphere of humanity watching the last starbirth. As they emerged from the star, the Final War between the nihilists and the continueists began. Giant planetoid warships rampaged across the stars. Also, the PCs gained the power to time travel in any way they wished.

Well... That was basically the setup for the game, I'm sure you can agree that it was quite epic. But that doesn't really give you the scale of things. Soon the villain of the piece (who I made the mistake of making understandable and a little sympathetic) was flying around in a literal Starship (with a star completely inside of it!) and causes galaxies to collide so that they would tear each other apart and deny their energy to the end times. After the PCs saved the milky way, we upped the ante to all the galaxies smashing together and eventually to trying to rob the big bang of its energy. This was great for the most part, extremely epic and awesome.

So, that was great, but I've begun to worry that we're getting into a rut of just stunt after stunt, without any real character interaction. Stunting is very good and fun, but I've begun to feel that our games are becoming just stunt strings with nothing else. There needs to be character interaction and acting-roleplaying, or at least my heart of hearts things that. I sorta think we've really explored the whole epic side of adventures, which I've had issues with in the past, but it may be time to turn the games inwards and see what kind of roleplaying will result from that.

Roleplaying in 20% time

We just completed an interesting game... I thought of it just before tonights regularly scheduled Sunday session and I thought I would give it a try. The premise goes something like this: 'We stand at the twilight of Humanity. The great engines of creation are grinding to a halt and the universe is coming to close. All hope is not lost, however, as the legends tell us that in the last moments of life, the Great Dreamers will come to humanity again, and they will use their power to save us one last time, to bring humanity to a new era of prosperity and life.' The premise is that each of the players (and the GM) are one of the Great Dreamers, one of the people who brought some aspect of the universe into being. In our crew we had:

1. The Dreamer of the Stars - Me - who brought the stars into being and let humanity play amongst them


2. The Dreamer of Shadows - Nikita - who brought shadows and darkness to the universe


3. The Dreamer of Ambition and Ruin - Ghen-ki - Who brought humanity's drive to better itself, and the fact that that very drive leads most to ruin


4. The Dreamer of Harmony - Keith - Who let the animals and creations and things of the world exist as part of a group, who created civilization


5. The Dreamer of Perspective - Jes - Who gave everything a place in history, and let them know it.


6. The Dreamer of Consciousness - Steve - Who created thought itself

Together the dreamers came to the convocation and, as has been decided eons ago, they brought with them their proposals for the new universe. For the Dreamers were not to save this life, but were to create the world anew, and allow humanity to play there. Practically, how this worked was I signed up to run 5 games, each of the other player's world designs. Each person in tern would think of a world, I would generate an adventure, they would generate characters, and we would play for about 40-50 mins in the world. So, for this game, we had 5 times the worlds and 5 times the character generation. Despite how that might sound, it actually turned out really well.

I was very concerned going into this about a couple of things. First and foremost was the buy-in from the players. If I had lost them in the setup or scared them off with the creativity requirements, the game would've been a non-starter. Fortunately, we're all friends and we all bought into the game. Secondly, was thinking up 5 interesting and compelling plots, on the fly, for 5 different settings. Also fleshing out those settings, making them real. We had one snafu with the settings, but other than that it went very well, and even that one, I thought wasn't terrible, I just didn't do a great job with it.

If any of you have read 'The Golden Age' this adventure idea was based off of the Universe creation contest that is held in the first book. It was one of the best pieces of an incredible series, and I wondered if that could be reproduced in roleplaying.

So on to the worlds:

• The first world was from Ghen-ki. He gave us a world with humanity just beginning to diaspora out into the stars. He gave us great world-ships where humanity would travel in hollowed out planets. I started everyone off in just about modern day. Richard Fine, a very rich entrepreneur had secretly hollowed out the moon and was going to take as many people as he could get to come along. The players each made a semi-modern day character who would leave their entire life to go on a trip to the stars. The game went from trying to get past the millitary that was trying to shut down the shuttle launch that was getting the characters to the moon, and quickly moved to the moon. On the moon, we blasted off after some words from Richard, and then visited a couple of worlds, leaving small colonies in our wake. On the third world, an alien ship was encountered, which proceeded to assault the moon. Just before the moon lost all atmosphere and everyone died, the characters got nano-disassembled into computer-based beings. After that, everyone decided that we would need to build and armada of ships to fight the alien menace. We left the universe just as the alien armada, and the human fleet of planetoid warships began their epic clash.


• The second universe was from Nikita. He envisioned a world were your shadow was just as much you as you were yourself. It could interact with things, you could pick things up by their shadows, and in general crazy shadow and light based things were possible. To this description I added the City of the Great Sheik Yusef. This was a city that was under seige from 'The Other', and we would be joining the player characters as members of the honor guard of the sheik, attempting to get the sheik's son Darien out of the city while The Other finally sacked the city. There was a lot of detail with the crazy world, as the city changed its shape through out the day as the shadows moved, and there was a ton of stunting around the projection of shadows and its effect on fighting therein. The plot went something like: the characters are all standing guard, the notice freewalkers (shadows freed from their physical bodies) moving like a wave across the courtyard and coming to the Shadow Palace. After a great battle, they rushed the son Darien by order of the sheik out of the castle by way of the Dark Ways. In the Dark Way, they were ambushed by a man that looked a lot like a younger sheik Yusef, and were about to barely fight him and his demonic shadow minions off. They then took the son to the hill people were they raised him. After about 20 years, the son gathered them to him, and took away their aging physical bodies and left only enternal shadows to aid him in his quest to take back his father's city. Eventually Darien and the players stormed the city. As the game came to a close, we left the characters run down the Dark Ways after the new honor guard trying to save the son of the old sheik (and thus, time itself is a mere shadow of what has come before)


• Third, Jes brought us the backwards world. In this world, rather than making a new universe, the scientists figured out out to reverse entropy, so that the universe would travel backwards towards the big bang. It was a great idea, but hard to wrap our heads around. Eventually we decided that time still moved forward, it was just the the universe tended to order rather than entropy. The players played scientists involved in the construction of the entropy engine responsible for reversing time. After activating the engine, and having a big big party, the characters (especially the youngest) began to wonder what would happen as they aged backwards, youthining towards their birth. After some investigation (for only the youngest children were near this happening), it was discovered that God himself took a hand in the situation. For as the young disappeared, an Angel would appear, and create a new (very old) body for the soul, and place the soul in it. It was also revealed that as the soul experienced death, it would remove some extraneous portion of itself, become more and more pure as we approached the end of the universe. Now that entropy was backwards, your soul gained pieces as you youthined to a new body. When the first player character, the first scientist involved in the project had this happen, the Angel spoke to him, telling him that God intended all things to come to an end, and either he and his companions would work to stop the engine or God would wipe the slate clean. There was much arguing as to what should be done about that, but eventually the engine was shut down (but not before someone shot an Angel, just to see what would happen), and the universe resumed its march to death.


• From Keith we got a post-apocolyptic cyberpunk world where humanity had been mainly taken over by a mind virus. That virus wanted ultimate order in the universe, so it proceeded to organize and stack the elements of the city, and take over more and more humans. The PCs started the game as members of a tribe of humans just outside BAMA (Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Area, my favorite cyberpunk setting). They each created a character and a strong link. Then I set them to gather supplies for the tribe from the city. Chris, Steve's link, was a scientist trying to figure out how reverse the virus to save his sister, had decided that the only way to investigate the virus was to get someone he knew infected and watch them. He took Alex, Keith's link, and put a tracker on him and then arranged to have him captured by the virus's zombies. Jenna (Keith's character) then proceeded to rescue alex, come hell or high water. At the end of the session, Steve's character sacrificed himself so that Chris could live, and Jenna had discovered a way to destroy the virus, one drone at a time.


• The final universe (from Steve) was a universe of pure thought. The was a universe were only consciousness existed, and the only thing those minds could do was talk to other minds. This one really gave me a fit... In fact, Steve pitched his idea and then we ran Keith's first because I was having a hard time thinking of what kind of adventure could happen in this world of zero physicality. After the cyberpunk game, though, I had an idea. Basically, I said that as the conscious universe grew, it was inevitable that a group mind, a universal mind, would emerge. Moments before the universal mind formed, erasing all individuality, the last strong individuals gathered to decided what kind of being would be formed. Each person was given 1 minute to pitch their idea of universal consciousness to the others, advocating for one purpose of existence or another. After that we concluded. At this point, despite my time management, we only had about 10 mins for this entire universe, so this was all we had time for.

This was a pretty fun game, but it was definitely challenging. Not just for me (and it was no easy feat), but also for my great players, who had to generate 5 characters and a world each (6 characters if you count the Dreamer itself). We all came through great and everyone had a good time, I think. One thing I'll definitely say is that even though we had a great time, the creativity requirement for the game was so high we were all nearly dead when the final universe rolled around, it was intense, but very rewarding. If any of you players are reading this, thanks for the great game and your patience with it!

I felt compelled to tell this story, but hopefully soon I'll write up a post about the 'Central Library' game were the world literally revolved around books. Or maybe I won't, I may run it at a con...

Chrome Dawn

Just before Mike left for Georgia Tech, he and I began discussing a new roleplaying system. Nothing crystallized since he and I were running around trying to get him ready to leave. However we did have some time available on the 3k car ride to Atlanta. Now as some of you may have heard, that particular trip didn't go entirely smoothly. But, we were able to come with a pretty awesome system, called Chrome Dawn.

Before I get too far into it, here is a link to a pdf version of our booklet: ChromeDawn.pdf.

The thing to know about Chrome dawn is that, as Mike likes to say, its a system for those of your who think current cyberpunk games are missing some cyberware. This is a hardcore game for really cyberpunk lovers. Once example of this is the power level, Chrome Dawn rangs from levels 1 to 10. We figure most other systems top out at level 2 and some manage to make it to level 3.

Perhaps it is better to take an example from the write up.

For instance, at level 8, the level at which you can modify groups of other people at will, the Dawn of Cyberspace and the Engine of Cyberspace Child Adept could read like:

With the power and wisdom of the King, the great net gates are built: orante magnificent archways that allow AI and man to pass freely from one realm to the next. Also forged are the great Cyberswords: Excalibur, Arondight, and others; physical weapons of pure cybernetic energy identifying the avatars of the King. These terrible weapons carry almost he full power of their creator - dangerous and powerful in both worlds and accorded great respect among all those who seek the favor of the king of cyberspace

I highly recommend reading through the examples of various cyberware, its a cool read and part of the system we spent a great deal of time on (starts at page 4 in the pdf).

I really like the system, in concept at least. Having cooperatively chosen realms of conflict (the first thing you do in the game is define the 3 dawns of cyberware that are the only areas in which you have stats / tests) is great. Having "Just In Time Character Creation" is another great thing. But I think one of the neatest things is having an entire character defined in terms of cyberware (the only stats in the game are all cyberware related).

We took this game to GenCon and played 3 games with friends. I think it went OK. Mike and I I think were both a little bit overwhelmed by the 4 days of driving we had just done, and I think our games suffered a little bit. Nevertheless there were some cool moments, and I really enjoyed the fashion dawn that occurred in one of Mike's games.

Anyway, I would love to get the opinions of some people out there, I know there are a number of roleplayers who read this blog, and I'd love to get your comments. I think there are some rough edges. In particular, I fear the Steel (the defensive version of Engine) may be too powerful. I also feel like the overemphasis on Engine means that chrome (smaller pieces of cyberware) fall by the wayside.

For those of you who aren't roleplayers, you may still get a kick out of the cyberware descriptions in the booklet.

Kindling and other news

As per my previous post, I do now have an Amazon Kindle. Perhaps even more interesting is that I've almost finished reading my first Kindle book. It works pretty well. Books are actually still better (due to being able to grip it anywhere, but it definitely works even for long reading sessions.

In addition to the book I'm reading ("Poison Study" if you care), I am also experimenting with a newspaper and magazine subscription (Seattle Times and Times, respectively). This is actually going really well for the newspaper, every morning I take a little time to skim the headlines and read some of the articles, and I feel much more in touch with the world. The convenience of having it wireless delivered is really quite large.

I'm also trying to convert my library of DRM-free roleplaying books to the Kindle. I already have a really good version of Bliss Stage on there, but Amber and Exalted are having a very tough time getting translated (partially because they are 50 MB in size). But it is working somewhat, and does allow me to search through the books on the kindle.

But enough about what I love about the device, if you really want to read poetic verse about it, read this MacWorld opinion piece on the subject, its very very positive, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Moving on... I'm not sure I ever updated the blog with car news, but I did end up buying a BMW 5 series. It has been built (I had to order it because I wanted a manual transmission), and is currently on a boat coming to california. It will arrive there in 24-30 days, and another 10 days after that will be up here in Seattle. It's a long process, but hopefully one that will be worth it.

I recently bought several bookshelves, 2 6ft. tall ones and 2 "media" bookshelves for DVDs/video games. I've got all but one of them assembled and put together, and I'm really glad I got them all. Now I have room for all of my books that heretofore were piled in stacks throughout my apartment. My dad is coming to visit next week, which is why all of the work. Hopefully I'll have it all done by the time he gets here.

We finished the Bliss Stage game. The endgame, at least when you're trying to force your crew to an end, doesn't work as smoothly as other portions, and I kept having trouble trying to bring about the semblance of a plot I cooked up, but overall I'm pretty sure everyone had a great time. I for one hope to play another game, and maybe then I can play a pilot and actually get a mecha. We had a little wrap up and we all agreed that the best portion of the game was the interludes with the character development rather than the mecha fighting, even Nikita, whom I had to entice to the game with talk of laser guns and missile tubes and so forth. Next week we try out my crazy DnD idea, where we take DnD for a 2-4 session trial to see how the other side lives. And yes, we've all pointed out that we're playing DnD on "indie" night, but we're still going to do it.

Thats all for now!

Playtest: Bliss Stage Part 2/3

So we just wrapped up the 3rd game in our Bliss Stage campaign. I know I never blogged about our second game, but I'm here now aren't I... Next week we're going to play a little bit of a fourth game, but we could probably keep playing for at least another 3-6 sessions if we let it. This game is awesome.

There are definitely some hiccups with the game, and perhaps I should detail them before going into how awesome it is. The structure of the game is such that as the GM I feel that I am very powerless to effect a story. I have almost no control over the mission actions, other than to state their goal in the voice of a character, and I have even less control over interlude actions other than to specify who is in them. I have more control as a player of the authority figure / secondary characters than I do as the GM. I don't really have a problem with taking away the GM's power, quite the contrary, I enjoy even GM-less games like Polaris and Shock. But this in between state where I have to decided what interlude actions exist, and what the missions goals are makes it very difficult to craft some kind of story (like the players want) without stepping on their toes by giving motivations to characters or by taking little bits of narration over from the anchor in the mission actions.

The other big problem with Bliss Stage, I think, is the big dichotomy between mission actions and interlude actions. Interlude actions are where the meat of the story lies. Its where all the betrayal happens, where the trust building happens, where the gritty life of the characters occur. After 3 sessions of play, I can definitely say that it seems like the interlude is what we want to be playing, and the mission actions exist just to give us a break and to effect our characters mechanics. They are necessary to propel change and strife in the relationships, but are not the meat of the story. Consequently, they lack a certain earnestness on the part of the players. To counterbalance that effect, I try to provide the characters with meaningful goals that are personal and character related (or I try to do that by adding nightmare elements to the scene, galvanizing the character). See above for why that is difficult to do.

So, now that I've mention the two difficult things about Bliss Stage, I should definitely talk about the awesome things about Bliss Stage. The greatest thing about Bliss Stage is that there is nothing to do but develop relationships. Its like the designer removed from the entire universe everything that wasn't either developing or destroying a relationship. Indeed except for 2 things (trauma and bliss) there are no stats other than relationships. That combined with the fact that ever interlude action has to have a mechanical effect of some sort, means that every time characters are interacting they are effecting a relationship.

Because of this, you can effect some significant change in relationships. In the last session we saw:

1. An abusive father apologize to his daughter, and a new, changed, interaction between the two arise.
   
2. A devoted lover enter into an affair while the other side was reaffirming their relationship by rejecting another suitor
   
3. A brand new relationship gain intimacy up to and including sex.
   
4. Two old lovers rekindle their relationship in a completely new and different way.
   

Maybe I'm not playing the right kind of games, but those kind of actions are a once a campaign style of thing, not all in one session. This compression of development is incredible and really gives you a feeling of anticipation as you wait with baited breath for the next shoe to drop.

The most amazing part to me is that despite all the character development emphasis, everyone in my group has seemed to enjoy the game. This includes people whom I wouldn't have predicted enjoying a purely relationship focused game. If that particular feat is repeatable, then Bliss Stage will have achieved something truly remarkable.

Ambercon Northwest 2007

Ambercon NW happened again this year, this time it was the first weekend in November (they've moved it up to accommodate another scheduling conflict). Once again, it was held at the glorious McMenamins Edgefield, and incredible hotel, with what looks like 9 restaurants or bars on site. This is the best convention I go to all year, and a decent part of that is the Edgefield.

This is the first year that I managed to get another person (besides myself and Lee) to come to North West, Keith joined us. This was Keith's second Ambercon and I think he really enjoyed coming to this one.

The big event of the con turned out to be the plague. Evidently Guy (one of the con organizers) got a bad stomach virus right before the con, and before he knew he was sick, managed to infect several people. This provided merry fun as games had to be canceled or combined with others due to missing people, and in general it seemed like every 3rd person you talked to was either sick or getting there. There was even a story of one GM trying to run his game from the bathroom! I managed to avoid it, though Keith did not.

But besides the plague, the con went very well, and I got to play in a lot of very cool games. The most memorable were:

1. Monster Mayhem III - Run by Lee, this is the continueing moster movie themed game that I had played in twice before. I played a very fun character "Robert Noble (, yes I am)" and his sidekick "Pippy" a tweleve year old girl. Actually a horde-quantity 52 pt item, but you get the idea. There was much frivolity, and Pippy managed to get killed at least 13 times by player characters, the first one before character description!
   
2. Giants in the Playground - We played a game-within-a-game with the elders playing DnD with Order of the Stick characters. This was hilarious! All the sniping between elders and all the grittiness of DnD. The game was made especially good by (I believer her name was) Susanne, who played Dara, the mother of Merlin the GM. It was priceless, and a lot of fun.
   
3. To Trip the Light Fantastic - I ran a game of Persona cyberpunk, and for once a con game by me went well. There were only 3 plaerys, but I think they all enjoyed themselves a lot, as they got to experience the craziness that is persona in all its glory. At the end of the game, humanity evolved into a group mind and left earth behind... Very Cyberpunk.
   
4. OMG!! We're like totally BFFs! - Ah yes, the Best Friends game. Or more appropriately, the game were Ben, Leslie, Chris, John, and Pol get to play snarky backstabbing high school girls. It was awesome. Leslie started us with the idea of all playing girls with T names (Tina, Trisha, etc), and Chris expanded that to be all variations of Kristen. So we had: Keirstan, Krysten, Christina, and Kristeen. Oh, and June. June had replaced Kris (the villian of the story, sorta), whom we had had a falling out with last year after she stole a boyfriend or some such. We had a secret sign and a load of puns, like Kris-tastic, Krissy Council, Krissy Quorum, and the best, Krys-tastrophy (which must be said with a frown, and very sadly). Additionally we had I believe no less than 3 or 4 boyfriend stealing events (the game started with one), a car accident while trying to make a subtle get-away, and one girl getting herself drunk to seduce someone. It was glorious.
   

As always, I had fun with all my games, those were just the highlights. We are now looking forward to ACUS in March. Oh, also, I even managed to win an Obie (think Oscar, only for ACNW) in the category of "The Prince Brand Memorial Award for Necrotic Merit" for Pippy. ;)

Playtest: Wacky Samurai Sports

The last week of indie night we eschewed our Bliss Stage game (though it will return at least once more, we can't get enough of those angsty teenagers fighting for humanity). Instead, we returned to Persona and played a great game of Squash. Yes, thats right. We roleplaying a high-school squash team. And it rocked.

For those of you who aren't aware, there is a sub-genre of anime that can be very strange. Mike and I call it "wacky samurai action anime." But that isn't quite fair because its not exactly wacky (at least the characters in the series take is very seriously), there are never any samurai involved, and unless you count high school sports as action, there isn't action. There is, however anime. Its wacky samurai action because these showes generally follow a formula that we were first exposed in Rurouni Kenshin, a samurai anime. Generally they will concentrate on one particular sport or activity (Street Racing, Go, Girls Baseball, American Football, Soccer, etc), and they will have crazy techniques with names ("Oh my god, its the Dunk Smash", "Drive B!", "The Hand of God"), and a lot of commentary. Generally the main character is extremely good at the sport (from breeding, practice, or natural talent), and they join a team, and proceed to have many many many fights exploring their skill relative to others.

So, last sunday, after explaining all of this to my reluctant players, we attempted to play some wacky samurai sports anime. I suggested Squash because it seems to have a lot of awesome stunting potential, and one of our players plays. I read up on wikipedia about the game, and we were just about off.

Our cast of characters consisted of:

1. Hideki - The old captain, experienced in the ways of squash, and therefore life.


2. John Cockran - The former curling player who brought the skills of the ice to the court


3. Naoki - Tragically injured in a Kendo match, and never able to play again, Naoki has entered the squash circuit looking to escape his past

In addition, we generated rivals for everyone. This worked out pretty well, as there was a lot of room for comedy.

1. Squash Player X - With special dispensation for medical reasons, squash player X wears a face mask at all of his actions. He also goes to the same school as Hideki's younger brother, and, oddly, those two are never seen together


2. Hiroyuki Sakai - This french chief has been insulted one too many times by Cockran, and is now out for blood
   
3. Ryu Hiyote - Naoki's former kendo rival, responsible for his inability to ever play kendo again has followed Naoki to the squash courts
   

As you can see we had a colorful cast of characters. After having our first clash of the titans and establishing the Hideo High squash style as the "Squash of the Heart", we quickly moved into the training portion of the adventure. At this point, I went all out on the comedy. After flying the team to tibet, the coach informed them that in order to have any hope of competing at nationals, they would have to climb a mountain without gear, without food, and without help. That mountain: Mt. Everest.

They had to face 4 challenges:

1. Don't die from starvation! - Wherein we learned that the northern bear squash style can evidently take out goats
   
2. The Ice Cliffs of Death - Wherein we learned serving strategies for climbing sheer cliffs
   
3. The Thin Air of Everest - Wherein we learned that the vaccuum ball technique can be used to increase the air pressure of an area, also evidently the Squash of the Heart only requires one breath to accomplish anything
   
4. The Helicopter of Death - Wherein machine-gun like squash serving machines were imployed to knock the characters off the mountain
   

These were a lot of fun. And everything culminated in the nationals. There was much stunting and awesome tricks played on opponents.

In the end, I think I convinced myself of a couple of things: almost anything can be a fun roleplaying game, as long as you're willing to be loose about it (and you use Persona). Making technique a cheap fragement is really effective at promoting a "wacky samurai" feel. Fun games don't have to be planned, at all, but it helps to know the rules of squash.

I'm not sure if I'll run another wacky samurai game soon, but I do know I won't hesitate to in the future.

And just to sum up, some of the awesome techniques we saw:

1. The Spirit Of Japan
   
2. The Eiffel Tower (and its cousin - The Tokyo Tower)
   
3. Vaccuum Exploding Ball Serve
   
4. Hurricane Whirlwind Double Wall Bounce
   
5. Snowman-san
   
6. Squash of the Heart
   
7. Gyrosopically Minded Ball
   

If anyone from the game remembers any of the names better or more techniques, tell me and I'll update this

Playtest Report: Bliss Stage Part 1

This is the first installment of what I hope to be a number of playtest reports. See, I am a member of 3 different gaming groups. Wednesdays is Exalted, approximating twice monthly on Saturdays is the "Amber" group (though we often end up playing non-amber games), and Sundays is the "Indie" group.

The original goal of the indie group is to play a new game every week. Sometimes, we just play some persona setting, or someone wants to run a particular system that we've tried before, but I do think we see a decent variety of systems. We've managed to try out: Shock, Polaris, Dogs in the Vineyard, Hero's Banner, Shockaris (A blend of Shock and Polaris), L5R (Legend of the Five Rings, not exactly indie, but what can you do), and maybe a couple of others that I can't remember. I hope to write up play reports for each of these games, now that I'm blogging, so that others can live vicariously through me (Mike, I'm looking at you ;))

This last Sunday, we managed to get together a crew for the very awesome Bliss Stage game. This is part one of the report, because we all agreed to play another session of it, since we didn't get through all of the adventure I had planned.

Let me start by giving a brief overview of the world of Bliss Stage and the system. Basically, at the moment you sit down to the game (as far as a timeline goes), "The Bliss" takes out the adult population of the world (16-17+). Everyone just gets sleepy and falls asleep, never to wake up. For a little while, the children have fun with that, looting stores, eating candy and the like. But after a while, you want your mother and father to wake up and take care of you. Too bad. After a month, all the modern services, like water and electricity are completely shutdown. After 2 years, some sort of society is beginning to form. Then the aliens come. They brought the bliss, and now they have remotes that can operate in our world, and they begin hunting down the nascent society that is forming (which already has troubles, with its oldest members "Blissing out"). 5 years after the Bliss, someone finally manages to take down one of the alien remotes. They begin studying its technology. 6 years out, they start experimenting with reversing the technology and allowing some of the kids to enter the dreaming with their own remotes, the tests are brutal. At 7 years, the technology is ready and the pilots are trained, and its time to strike back!

So, if you haven't picked up on this yet, its a roleplaying game for playing mecha pilots who are children, fighting against an alien force that has already conquered the Earth. Wow! But the fun doesn't stop there, it gets much better. The mecha that the children pilot in the alien world of the dreaming are formed out of the strong relationships the children have with other characters in the resistance cell! Your shield is your love of Alice, your lover, your rocket powered fists is the loyality you feel towards the cell's leader, etc. Wow! But wait, there's more. When a pilot enters the dreaming, his anchor (another child trained in instrument reading) must interpret the reading and tell the pilot what he is seeing and what he should do. Thats right, the anchor (a child in the cell) GM's the pilots combat actions in character voice! Wow! Ok, now I'm basically done.

Those of you who know my roleplaying preferences and my anime preferences have probably realized that it would be difficult to make a game more to my liking. Add in the fact that every number / mechanic in the game is designed to either reaffirm or destroy your relationships with other characters, and you've basically got everything I could ask for in a game. Now that I've told you a bit about the game setup, let me tell you about the world we created.

We started with where we were located. The book suggests that we create a resistance cell somewhere near where we are physically in the world. So we thought about where around post-apocalyptic Seattle a resistance cell might be. After discarding as too obvious the Bus Tunnels and the Space Needle, we settled on House boats, lashed together in the middle of Lake Washington. We decided that we had ready access to fish (being on the water), and were fairly able to defend the boats against other bands of children. We decided we didn't have electricity and that sanitation in the middle of a lake was also an issue. When it came time to decided what the aliens were like, it was a little more difficult. We tossed around a couple of ideas, but eventually decided on the very awesome "they are twisted mimicries of people you have relationships with." Going from there, it was fairly obvious that the dreaming was a twisted mimicry of the physical world around Seattle. Some color includes trees growing upside down and buildings in the real world occasionally being replaced by their twisted doppelgangers. That dream stuff, we decided, is what powers the mecha creches we use to fight the aliens.

Once we had established our setting, it was time to get into character creation. Characters in Bliss Stage are generated by the group collaboratively all at once. Once they are all created, the characters are handed out to various players sort of willy nilly (with characters with close ties hopefully going to different players). We started with the Authority Figure. The AF is an adult who has managed to stay awake for the last 7 years. After 7 years, these guys are normally a bit crazy and only being kept alive through some combination of drugs, meditation, gilligan's island tapes and lots of coffee. They are the leader of the cell, and the person who brought in the mecha machines. For our group, we made Robert Morealis. He was a commercial fisherman, who when the Bliss hit was forced to pilot the big hauling boat back to seattle by himself (throwing overboard his shipmates, probably). When he returned to Seattle he found some kids looting his house boat (let by Jed, a pilot), and got them to rally around him. He also led a search team to find his daughters Kat (A pilot) and Meredith (older sister, since fallen into the Bliss, but kept around on the boat and regularly visited by Robert and Kat). Kat is a young hotshot pilot trying to prove herself; to the world, to Robert and also to herself. Jed is the most experience ANIMa (mecha) pilot, and he is growing bitter with the world (and getting close to the Bliss), he has authority issues with Robert and probably half the kids on the House Boat Rafts are still loyal to him. Roderick (Ro for short) is the final of three pilots, who is in love with his Anchor Alice, and the only couple of have had a child "Spike" a one year old boy. Other characters include Sergey, the son of meth lab junkies who carries on his parents work to help keep Robert awake. Megan a girl on the rafts that is in love with Ro, who schemes with Jed (who has a crush on Alice) to break up the only fruitful relationship on the boat, and Shevaun, the unsteady Anchor for Jed (replacing the one that died in his arms after one disastrous mission), who is still unsure of her worth to the group.

Needless to say, with a twisty maze of relationships like that (I haven't even enumerated all of the craziness we came up with), the character interaction just basically flowed easily from there. I think we were also all grateful for the shared character creation, which allowed a lot of voices to really get into these characters and really make them damaged or ambitious or caring.

After that, it was finally time to play (only took about 2.5 hrs to explain the rules, eat, and generate characters and setting). Every game of Bliss Stage is supposed to start with a "defend the base!" kind of mission. This was definitely what we did, and it was really cool to see people get into character voice on both sides of the equation, and really go at the aliens. By the end of the mission, everyone had nightmare elements (sent by the aliens) in their world view, and there are some really twisted things we were able to come up with. The mecha combat was fairly smooth and not very painful as far as mechanics are concerned.

Once that was done, it was time to tackle interlude actions, where we get the chance to really get some character interactions and play with our relationships. Jed and Shevaun had an interesting interaction where they talked about some of what it really meant to be involved in the resistance and why they both worked as pilot/anchor. And what it meant to see the dead anchor reflected in the aliens as Jed fought them. Ro and Alice had it out about why Ro was able to so casually destroy aliens that looked like both Alice and their son Spike. And, in one of the funnest roleplaying moments I have ever taken part in, Robert and Kat argued about how she failed to really give it to the aliens, and hesitated over the demon that looked like Robert. Robert also pointed out that she has to be better than she is if she ever expects to save anyone from the aliens. Then they slapped and punched each other, really hitting and hating the other one.

We were about to go into the next mission, when we realized it was late, and we should probably play again next week.

Once we understood the system, it was fairly lightweight and generally awesome. It really forced us to focus on the twisted, strained relationships that must happen in such a horrific situation. And it allowed for some awesome mecha combat. Wow! What more could you want from an indie RPG?