An RPG.net photoshop thread of RPG Motivational Posters. Much merriment. (via chadu).
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Category: Roleplaying
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For Want of A Nail: Bicycle-25
Bicycle-25 is my first entry in the For Want of A Nail Lexicon. Over a 1000 words, and I think only 400 of them are actually about that alternate history. I hope it came out vaguely coherent.
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Afraid
Vincent Baker’s Afraid is a horror roleplaying game, posted on his blog as a set of notes. The mechanics, a system similar to Dogs in the Vineyard, read like code to me, but the sections on setting up scenes (in each scene, a PC is either alone, in trouble, lost or unprepared – or a combination), and on creating monsters and their victims, are lovely bit of zen GM instruction.
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Hobbies for old people
I was thinking recently how roleplaying is going through the same sort of process that the comics field has gone through, namely, it’s catering more and more to an aging audience. Overall this is a good thing. If you are in that aging audience. For the hobby, though…
Let me elaborate.
You can tell your audience is growing older when instead of asking “Who’d win in a fight, the Hulk or the Thing?” they ask “Will Peter Parker ever marry Mary Jane?” Or, when instead of asking “which spell is the coolest?” they ask “how does the economy work, and where can we get a better deal on a 10′ pole?” (answer: eBay) When your fan base is obsessed about continuity and metaplot, when they read comics for the complex soap opera and new readers can’t figure out head or tail, when you need a stack of supplements and magazine articles to roll a character, well, you’re catering to the faithful, and not winning new converts.
Once the companies realized this, they try to maximize the revenue generated by the steadily shrinking audience with spin-offs and crossovers and splatbooks. And the audience buys this, for a while. Until they realize that they’ve become collectors instead of readers or gamers, and that they have shelves and boxes of unread comics and unplayed games.
Yes, I’m looking at myself, obviously.
Of course, the adaptation continues, and instead of parasitizing, the hobby industry actually starts to provide value to these older gamers and readers. So in comics, you have series “written for the trade”, because a sizable audience is going to buy the story in convenient trade paperback collections, and the collections have a long and healthy shelf life, much better then the single issues that have this bizarre life-cycle where they go from disposable ten-minute reads directly to an existence as either mylar-bagged “collectibles” or bargain-bin pickings. And in roleplaying games, you see, I think, games that are slowly adapting to the format of providing a short campaign with a simple, high-concept set-up for busy people with adult lives. Actually, I’d say gaming is lagging behind in this department, because it means more retooling then just breaking out a piece of story into a collection, but you see signs of this. Stuff like the Savage Worlds books, which are a setting and adventure combined, and the limited-scope lines from various publishers (White Wolf’s Orpheus), and the single book settings for GURPS. Of course, a lot of the indie games are optimized for this, often just a cool idea for a one-shot adventure with some very lightweight (and tightly focused) rules.
I think there’s a pretty coherent list of things that older gamers will like in a game that will make them enjoy playing it: simple (and familiar) rules, simple (or familiar) setting, high-concept, fun-now, characters drawn in big bold strokes, that sort of thing. Or maybe that’s just me. Textured settings, deep characters, angst and long spell lists, whether you’re talking of old Gloranthan Runequest (A game for graduate students
) or nineties-ish Amber/White Wolf, that’s for younger people who have more time.
D&D, of course, is for 30 year olds with kids whose wives don’t let them build toy train sets.
On the other hand, in games they don’t really play, older gamers might value other things. I picked up Weapons of the Gods, Mage: The Awakening and White Wolf’s Chicago source book at the last Bigor, and I did it mostly because they were beautiful books. Hardcovers with (in the case of WotG) full color interiors or sleek exteriors. The two rulebooks here are pretty heavy with way too many rules for me to digest. This is the sort of product which makes you feel you’ve got good value for your money, but which I’ll never read thoroughly enough to play.
The sad side to this, as I hinted in my opening paragraph, is that while it’s good that the hobby industry is actually adapting itself to accommodate its aging audience, it’s depressing to see how the main players in the field are actively erecting barriers in front of newer, younger audiences. The wonderful Batman and Justice League animated TV series have got kids all excited about these comic superheroes; my nieces adore Wonder Woman. In the comics, Diana has just snapped Maxwell Lord’s neck (somewhere in the labyrinthine reaches of the Infinite Crisis mega-multi-crossover). Oh, and this series also really emphasizes that Batman is an asshole. Meanwhile, you need the convincing charm of mud to get my nephews excited about Dungeons and Dragons. But is there a red box type introductory set anywhere to be seen? Well, there might be something, but it’s in English. And just creating characters is such an arduous fiddly process that I imagine they’ll fail their fortitude saving throw before they roll up their constitution score.
So, animation, video games and CCGs trump comics and roleplaying, and the latter seem to be destined to be considered more and more geek hobbies from days of yore.
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Shadow of My Playtest
So yesterday I had Ori, Itamar, Boaz and David over to try and play my game. Well, David actually wanted to play Munchkin, but we overruled him. In retrospect, I’m not sure that was the right choice…
It was strange having guests. David remarked that the apartment has a strong feeling of someone’s presence (as if it’s haunted?) I just think it’s the rat trap for old people to die in ambience…
We spent about 2 hours on character creation, mostly on coming up with Objects of Desire. Then David left, and we played a bit (well, first I unloaded the big complicated explanation of the Adversity rules I had written the night before; it would have really helped if I’d let people read the rules instead of trying to guess how these worked). In the scene we ran, Boaz’s character, a sort of Amberite Fonz (an eternal high school king), traveled to a pseudo Victorian London to “milk” a legendary extinct “Blue Burmese Deer”, which was supposed to produce a magical salve that would cure acne; in the London Zoo he ran into Itamar’s character (a weird scientist, himself a failed experiment of the eccentric Biomancer Momir Vig), and they both discovered the “deer” was actually a Peryton. It took me way too long to realize that my/our subconcious was totally dominated by the Stag’s head hanging over our heads (the most prominent thing in my living room, aside from the shelves of dusty comics).
In the cold light of the morning-after, the problems I had with the game – which start with the character creation process, but spill on to why this makes play very different from what I hoped for – were very clear to me. In fact, so clear that I regret wasting people’s time. I could probably have solicited people to create characters on the internet to discover these basic problems.
A central idea to Shadow of My Desire is that characters are defined by what they want. So I wanted to start the game by having each player come up with an Object of Desire for his character, even before describing the character. The problem is that because of how I set this up, people went about creating powerful magic artifacts. Boaz started by choosing “My Cool Muscle Car” as his first object of desire, and gave it 3 qualities that were more like stats then what I had in mind. I should have thought about this, of course: anything numeric is going to be treated as something mechanical. This then escalated, with Ori creating a world-spanning spy network as his “Object of Desire”, David creating a magic ring which granted his character 3 psychic powers of magic knowledge (with plans to mix astral projection and mental domination in there) and Itamar creating research papers that contained information on everything. In round two, Boaz created a leather jacket of holy-relic magnitude, with dimensional pockets, cheat notes, and bulletproof protection; Ori created a Zen garden that was very much an Amberish private (mini) shadow, David created a “Flying Space Harley” (and tried to make “flying motorcycle” just the description, so he could add 3 extra powers as the actual qualities), and Itamar created “The Weird and Wonderful Failed Experiments of Dr. Momir Vig”, a horde of bizzare and otherworldly creatures that appear out of nowhere in an awe-inspiring stampede just when needed.
The actual characters – Bo’s Fonz of Amber, Ori’s spymaster, Itamar’s failed experiment and David’s somewhat-incoherent traitorous ex-advisor of Caine (yes, the Vampire: The Masquerade Caine; he knew VTM, but not Amber) – were somewhat flat (Ori put this down to the initial focus on artifact-creation). In the post-game post-mortem, Itamar and Ori mentioned that the lack of a defined setting was a problem; that I needed something to tie the characters together better, and give them more of an interest to interact. Also, if Objects of Desire were so important, this needs to be built into the game more strongly. Perhaps stealing essence from other People’s Objects of Desire is possible, or even tempting. Ori said I needed some social structure, like the strict codes of the Camarilla (or the anarchy of the Sabat) to make play more social.
Now, since I’m the only person who knows what I was looking for, it’s clearer to me what the problem was: Objects of Desire weren’t working the way I wanted. When I thought of “test cases” for this, I was thinking of players inventing silly Objects of Desire and abusing them for the Essence gain, but in play, no one used any Essence: instead of using Objects of Desire to gain Essence so they could use cool powers, they just built the cool powers into the objects of desire for free and used them.
So, what I think needs to be done is to flesh out completely the section on Powers in the game text; a lot of things that the Objects created in this game did should be powers, fueled by Essence. Knowledge artifacts? That’s Scrying. Pockets that work like Merlin’s Logrus tendrils, letting you pull any object out of them? That’s some variant on Shadow walking, and should be priced accordingly. The actual abilities of Objects of Desire will be scaled down, and at least some loopholes need to be closed.
One option is that when an Object becomes “real”, it can be upgraded to be more similar to the Objects created in this session. Just like a person becomes PC-material when the spark within them awakens, so objects can become artifacts, like the leather jacket and the magic ring, and places become abodes (suggestions for a better term most appreciated), which are more like personal shadows with special powers.
I also need to find rules for dealing with defining a large group as an “Object of Desire”, for example the spy network or the horde of failed experiments. I’m inclined to deny such multiple Objects of Desire as either too abstract or open to abuse. In the specific case of these two examples, I would have allowed them in as background elements, perhaps. Or maybe I need to have a system that lets you purchase allies for your character, like advantages, merits, etc.
I don’t have a good solution for this just yet.
One thing that is pretty clear to me: if Boaz is comfortable in this game, it isn’t working as planned… ;-)