So the other day Toph drops this in the Hollowpoint wiki:

Since the Beginning, we have been at war. Both sides receive orders from a source that is omniscient and inscrutable, and so we fight. For a long time we used swords, silver swords once granted, that we all carried with us. But the nineteenth century, the seventy-ninth century since the Beginning, was a great time of innovation, and our swords were nothing against guns that people made. So we adapt to our new environments. It is ordained that we do so: whatever we may think, or feel, free choice is simply not in our nature.

We walk among them, and when they notice us they see what they want to see: people like themselves, usually; though stories do get told, and some sensitives see us as monsters, people who can change into hairy beasts. If our side has little crosses on our bullets, carved into the silver tip with our indestructible thumbnails, well, that’s just a symbol, a way of showing team loyalty.

If I had doubts about the Plan, if I could have doubts, I would wonder what purpose any of the conflict can serve. We can’t die – angels retire when the Story would have us retire. But it’s wrong that we don’t feel pain. My job – my vocation, I guess – is to hurt the enemy. I do it well, and will continue to do it until I retire.

Life hurts, and I am an instrument of its pain.

Yeah that’s right — Hollowpoint with angels. Now, I set out to write this game because I was enjoying re-reading one of my favourite comics, 100 Bullets. So when Toph hands me a piece of microfic that would not be out of place in my other favourite comic, Lucifer, of course I am intrigued. More than that, really.

So I got out the cluster generator to see if it could produce something fun fast with this as a premise. Well I intend to playtest it Thursday night but my instinct is that holy crap yes it will work.

So the war on Heaven didn’t quite go as written in the good book. In fact it’s still going on. The Fallen are losing and most are scattered throughout Creation. Wherever they go they create a toxic effect on their surroundings, poisoning parts of creation with freedom (agency!). The Agents — the player characters — are angels empowered by God to locate and convert, destroy or make inert the Fallen.

And, being warriors, their preference is for destruction.

Now one of the reasons this becomes especially compelling is that the abstract nature of the system invites narration and if you’re playing an angel, that’s a license to print wonder. When you succeed, sure you can shoot your opponent in the head, but the only game constraint is that you intended to kill — so if you choose instead to subtract him from reality with Heavenly calculus, that’s your business.

Angels with .45s are also awfully cool.

–BMurray

Okay so one of the things I think I am trying to accomplish by using some kind of cluster system for Hollowpoint is to create an easy-to-operate machine that creates conspiratorial situations fast. A referee should be able to turn the crank on this twenty minutes before play and make a situation that demands the attention of Hollowpoint agents somehow. So to this end I decided that an interesting trio of conspiracy-driving stats might be Legitimacy (how legitimate is the organization — this might tell us when we’re talking about a government institution, for example), Vice (are they seeking or supplying some bad thing that lots of people want), and Force (do they seek or supply violence). The “seek or supply” language is essential I think, because we will interpret the cluster in terms of economic relationships — just maybe not the economics of money. So links will show us the supply and demand of these three stats as well as the state of each organization.

Here’s what I got in my first test. The text is my interpretation of the results after about 10 minutes of thought.

It was easy to find the story in here — we had obvious government entities, one probably criminal one, and some that look like civilian or otherwise Force-starved legitimate authorities. The illegal organization wields force over everyone except one remote node that it doesn’t know about — and this is a potential huge supplier for its Vice.

So I can see agents employed by Beltway to find out what the city of Detroit’s big secret is, but that’s no fun because no one has any Force except Beltway. So obviously the agents are up against Beltway.

Interpreting this requires an idea about the nature of the Agency itself — you kind of have to know what its motivations are (though little more) and I didn’t start with that. If I had, it would have informed the interpretation and led to a natural mission objective. I didn’t do that though, so in this particular exercise I kind of have to invent an Agency but that’s cool too — because that’s another way to do the prep, especially for a one-shot. So, I think that the Agency is a secret arm of the federal government that has been ordered to protect Biome LLC from what looks like a very dangerous situation. They have carte blanche — Beltway is getting close to having sufficient force both overseas and at home that they threaten the government itself, especially when the collusion between them and a government entity — Archonics Inc. — comes to light.

Now this needs something to bring it to life. A couple of NPCs. A couple of personalities that will drive things and make for someone to hate or love or respect or fear. I wonder if they can be a different kind of node?

–BMurray

So I’m not super happy with the Diaspora softcover and now understand why I was resisting it for a long time. Part of it is Lulu’s quality control on softcovers is not great — I just did a bunch of back and forth tweaking my source data only to discover that the variation at the printer’s side is greater than the variations I was submitting. This is very frustrating. So the cutting is inconsistent and because the cover is also cut, the cover positioning is also inconsistent. It’s not ghastly but it’s not up to the standards of the hardcover.

On the upside, the blacks are generally better because the cream paper colour is very forgiving. The reduced contrast is easier on the eyes and so it’s actually more pleasant to read. That’s nice to know, because softcover is the preferred format for our future work, so now I have an idea of its strengths and weaknesses at Lulu.

This opens up a lot of opportunities for us for various reasons — the margin we make on a softcover is about the same in absolute terms as the hardcover, but as a percentage of the cover price it’s quite a bit higher, which lets us make more attractive deals to vendors. That also lets us place in IPR and still hope to make a dollar or two  (though not much more than two in many cases) which is probably a win, though I still haven’t heard a really convincing argument for it. The numbers look like less overall profit for an elevated risk and I’m just not hearing anyone shout the upside. Please, shout the upside. I guess it’s supposed to be obvious. It’s not.

The big actual advantage to getting this thing out the door, though, is that I can get on with the next priority item, which is the PDF. That at least is not controversial in terms of profit as it has no production costs after it’s released, so it’s intrinsically risk-free. I’d still like to make good on my promise that it will be useful, though, and so there is some layout work to get done to make it what I need it to be. Once that’s done there is another possibility which opens up that I can’t really talk about.

So that’s where we’re at. I’m probably still a little depressed from being sick and so I’m not as enthusiastic as I could be about the softcover, but honestly it feels like whoring. It just makes me want to get on with the next product where I can again pursue an artistic vision instead of fill an order. That probably means, as it will be softcover, it won’t be through Lulu.

–BMurray

I have an excuse. I had a brutal fever Sunday night and on into Monday — went to work and then turned right around and went home. My thermal regulation is still cracked, though my fever is gone, so I’m at work with the cold sweats. So that’s why I didn’t write anything yesterday — I could barely speak coherently and I have no one who will take dictation anyway.

Actually that’s probably not true — I bet Jack would take dictation but I suspect her transcriptions would include some editorial comments. I might experiment with that one day but not until I feel a lot better.

Anyway of course I am getting ribbed for this because “obviously” I was just hung over after celebrating our Olympic hockey victory on Sunday night. Sadly that was not the case.

This hockey victory, especially in the context of the Olympics itself, was an interesting study for me in the way that reality is crappy fiction. I suspect this relates to role-playing games also being crappy fiction when they are at their best (with notable exceptions, Mr. Newman!)

Consider this. The Olympics are held in Canada and the very last event to play out is a hockey game (our sport!). It’s between Canada and the USA and Canada has already lost once to the US team. The game goes 2-2 in regular time and then runs for a substantial sudden-death period before Canada scores an elegant and uncontroversial goal, securing the gold medal.

Now if you were writing a sports movie, even a bad one, and this was your script, you’d be laughed out of every producer’s office from here to Bombay. This is a ridiculous story. But in real life, where there is no space for the fiction to be questioned (though interestingly we do see a lot of reality questioned as fiction these days — conspiracy theories are more popular than ever) this is just a nail-bitingly tear-inducingly too-many-adverbally awesome story. It could not have been more perfect.

But in fiction it would raise every suspension-of-disbelief alarm bell that there is.

So how about a role-playing game? I have occasionally heard it said that there are too few sports-themed role-playing games. I don’t know if that’s true — it seems to me that if there really were too few then there would soon be some more — but here is the kind of model for what you would want to deliver. You want substantial stakes. You want a defeat that does not require a final defeat. You want a gritty comeback. You want a final success (or failure!) that has awesome timing.

Who do you play though? I’m not sure one guy on the ice is the right perspective, though that does let you pull in personal stories to impact play and of course gives you some correlation between player and character. But with all the experimentation in what a character can be these days — we have games where characters can be space craft, corporations, and other aggregate entities — maybe it’s a signal that we should consider the team itself as the character. See I was going to suggest the coach, but that’s actually just a cowardly way to say the team — a way that keeps a traditional character but still deploys the action against the team proper.

I think the Olympic victory demonstrated that there’s something in this. I wouldn’t play it and I’m not going to write it because I’m just not interested in most sports. But if there really are not enough sports games, here’s a potential vein to mine for some.

–BMurray

So we sat down last night to game and decided to take a break from designing and testing and to just play some good old-fashioned righteous heroic fantasy. JB brought his shiny new Pathfinder tome and we started to make characters.

Holy crap.

Well I learned a lot by revisiting this sort of game, especially as a player hoping for the GM to guide us through the process of character creation, setting establishment, and play. Foremost is that this game (and it follows the organizational structure of the WotC games very closely indeed, so this is endemic) is not intended for people who have never played it. It’s clearly for people who already know how to play and just need a reference for details. Approaching the game as newbs trying to figure out how to make a character, it was a disaster — there’s essentially zero (discoverable) pedagogical text in there. If there was a chapter (near the front I’ll suggest) that had headings like “If you have a very high Intelligence, you might want to play a Wizard” that then detailed, step by step, how to make that wizard, that would be awesome.

If the character sheet walked you through the process, so that everyone had a built-in reference by virtue of having a blank character sheet, that would be double-awesome.

So in the end we spent a long time building characters. It wasn’t a great time because most of it was frustrating — trying to figure out what we needed to find in the book and then trying to find it. And that led to boredom and ill-will and a general disinterest in making the session work. This is a crappy foundation for righteous heroism. So we didn’t have any. So here’s a couple for the Game Designer Mission Statement list:

You shall teach people to play your game.

It will be fun.

It also struck me (largely because of my reading list I think) that the extraordinary detail provides only an illusion of choice. Now I could be wrong about this because I know that there are people who have spent many many hours understanding the rules in detail and they still find space to argue with each other, but when I built my first level rogue and looked for a melee weapon that would be suitable, I found a single “best” choice and nothing remotely attractive nearby. If you’re a rogue, you get a rapier. End of story. There are dozens of weapons to choose from but there is really only one choice.

People are generally used to this — I go into the 7-11 and there are hundreds of cans of different kinds of soda — what a choice! — but no lemonade, which is what I actually want. Well one kind and it’s crappy. That’s “illusion of choice”. It ties into “illusion of freedom” which we also have plenty of.

Extracting ourselves from these illusions in the real world is hard because there are complex, powerful, algorithmic (that is, not conspiratorial — it’s a kind of social machine that does this to us) forces at work. But in a game there is no excuse at all and so this has to be a new Mission Statement (part of a long list) for me as game designer:

All choices shall be real choices.

That’s actually a lot harder than it looks because it’s in constant battle with functional abstraction, but it encourages me to at least make an argument for the reality of a choice or acknowledge and embrace false ones — and if you don’t pretend they are choices then at least there’s no duplicity.

I wound up taking some javelins for my ranged weapon. They are a suboptimal choice but I think they are cooler. I don’t really get why I am penalized for making a cool choice, but I suspect it has something to do with “realism”. I am certain that this realism is horse shit. Because ultimately we actually chose this game because we wanted characters that would be fun to play when played to pursue heroic, ethical, moral objectives. We wanted to save princesses from dragons, liberate villages from tyranny, crush oppressors, and all that great fantasy heroic stuff. We got nowhere near that.

Would we have gotten closer if we already had substantial mastery of the game? I’m not sure we would. I think that the illusion of choice militates against that result significantly, wedging you into a small number of iconic characters. Certainly they will become more interesting over time through play — that always happens in a good rousing game of D&D or similar — but I think I would like my character to be compelling, novel, and clearly addressing my interests right out of the gate. You don’t get that with a first level character — despite the myriad statistics (illusion of choice, complication masquerading as complexity, illusion of freedom) the granularity of variation within a class is actually quite tiny. Even between classes, it’s kind of depressingly narrow. And so:

Characters shall be fun to play as soon as you’re done defining them.

Because there’s a way in which the character creation process is not done until the character is fun. That means that a character in this game might be undergoing technical character generation for the first four to six weeks of play. Now I like some good character generation, but this is not what I mean by it.

Some of these are actually point in favour of 4e I realize, and that’s cool. 4e fell flat for me for related but different reasons. Certainly my character was ready for adventure and clearly defined for me as soon as I was done, and I was done relatively quickly. I also recall it being less painful to figure out.

Anyway, I can only guess that the (maybe unexamined) expected play model for Pathfinder is, in the most newb-heavy case, one veteran well-versed in the rules guiding the new players through the process. It must be hoped that they will be sufficiently new to gaming in general that they will not see through the illusion of choice or that characters will start at a level that allows them to diverge a little and gather some mechanical personality. And this “mentor” model for reproducing the game (the play of the game — making new tables of players) is actually pretty good provided there is a lot of real-world cross-contact between interested parties. But man if you don’t fit the mold it’s a load of bollocks.

And I played 3e for five years.

–BMurray

Chimaera is getting some action again on the wiki (and I try to remind myself, if it doesn’t get written down, it’s not development!). The redoubtable Toph is helping me out with how to generate initial Communities. I have a clear conception not only of the game but also the system underneath (which I want to call “Hologram,” “Fractal,” or perhaps more colourfully “Mandelbrot”). I think I’ve found where I want to be between PDQ, Fate, and Story Engine, which I’d been orbiting all along.

At this point, any entity has Traits, which have a score determined by how many Aspects they carry underneath them. The holographic bit comes in as Aspects that are names of other entities. This introduces a conception of scale, as well as feeding into Toph’s way of developing characters. In his idea, a character gradually becomes remote from their early-career concerns and skills. (We joked at the table what a middle-aged sort of thing that is: “now that I’m a middle manager, I’ve forgotten how to write a decent line of code!”) So as you advance you are constrained to develop Traits that reflect communities of greater and greater size until you command great armies.

Aspects can (probably) be invoked, tagged, and compelled like usual, and we’re looking at making them capable of being burned–permanently rubbed out for some bonus or damage soak. Maybe also make them capable of being targeted for damage, or possibly leave that as part of Taken Out or Concession negotiation. I think this merely formalizes stuff that happened at the table with Diaspora–we have a tradition of having a chat about Aspects we think dropped away or changed, or new ones that deserve to be introduced. In Diaspora, this was just a fun way to a) razz each other a bit while simultaneously b) showing character development. That development was in a more literary sense as the total never changed. Chimaera does a bit more of the “zero to hero” trip so a little more structure is probably called for.

Community Clusters is getting the most recent love and it’s looking nice; probably we’ll only roll up 3-5 and Brad has suggested exactly 3, with development that in-fills new communities rather than spreading the cluster outwards. Coolest of all is his suggestion to have a community’s links dependent on single Aspects, so your Trade 3 Trait would have an Aspect under it of “Rebekah the Wily Arms Seller”. If she gets killed, the Aspect is destroyed, the Trade Trait drops to 2, and New Brighton’s link to Lethbridge disappears. I think this makes a pretty slick, simple way of doing Reign-style Comapnies.

Big shout out to Brad for lunches and Toph for wiki comments!

I’ve had plenty of pointers to “Read an RPG Book in Public Week”. The idea is that we are all so ashamed of our hobby that we would never read a book obviously related to it in public and that we should work to make it common place. Apparently by reading a book in public one week out of fifty-two. I’ve probably mis-characterised this effort for effect, but I think what follows, derived from that, still works.

Why are you ashamed to read an RPG book in public in the first place? Do you really believe that the rest of the world is so much more mature and serious than you that they have legitimate cause to look down on you? If not, then you never had any reason to hide. Grow up and read what you want where you want.¹ If so, then you shouldn’t be reading RPGs at all — apparently they reveal that you are someone less than you want to be. Cut it out. Grow up. Become more mature and get out your copy of The Economist. That is, if your shame is legitimate then you should quit doing what you find shameful. If it’s not legitimate, then you should do what you want.

The counter is of course the repercussions of doing what you want — some will say that revealing their desire to imitate an elf for a few hours a week places their job at risk. If you think that, then you need to look really hard at the sentence you agreed with there. You are afraid of the repercussions of doing what you want, and what you want is harmless and fun. When we say we live in a free country — that democracy is delivering freedom of the best kind for the most people — is this really what we mean? How free are you if you can’t do what you want because you fear for your job and therefore the well-being of yourself and your family? Are you really this terrorized?

And the answer for a good many people is yes, they are this terrorized. There is no interesting way in which a person in this circumstance is free because there is no interesting way in which they can escape this terror. They are being dominated, albeit not by a conscious and deliberate dictator, and they have no hope of escape. Technically, most of you reading this are in the same boat — that is, the threat of destruction of your livelihood actually hangs over your head all the time (certainly it hangs over mine) — but some will choose not to be terrorized by it and some just haven’t thought about it in that fashion. And some will insist they are free despite the long list of things they dare not do for fear of angering their employer. Free how, exactly?

So to this end I suggest instead that the thing we are really missing right now is legitimate and intelligent political discourse, and the best place to start here is with the smart subversives. It’s a well known fact that socialism in all forms is intrinsically Evil. It’s a well known fact that the private sector can always perform more efficiently than government (even though a counter-argument is trivially arranged).² So it’s time to start reading, in public, arguments against those facts. They might be wrong. They might not. You won’t be accidentally infected by them — reading something you believe you disagree with won’t change it essential content. If it’s flawed, you will probably find yourself unpersuaded. But there’s altogether too much avoidance of counter-argument altogether and rational, progressive, political discussion demands a reasoned and thoughtful consideration of all possibilities. And it warrants a re-consideration over time as things change.

Here’s one thing that’s changing (and yes, finally, we are on-topic for the blog): it is increasingly the case that private citizens can perform in realms previously accessible only to much larger organizations. And these organizations are either carefully not paying attention or are terrified or are angry or some combination of the three. A single person can now carry a written work all the way from idea to delivery, using their own intuition as a guide for pricing, form, and marketing. This is terrifying some small publishers because where the individual’s choices (and motives!) are different, this undermines the larger but still small entity — she’s formed her business on certain assumptions about the competition and these assumptions are eroding. And all of this is over course percolating up — the intelligent small publisher is now also realizing technological benefits and finding new niches (witness Evil Hat, for example, which embraces the support of individual self-publishers, finding a way to do the part they don’t want to and do it well and for a profit — good for everyone and not a result of fear).

And of course as individuals acquire more power over their labour (MARXISM ALERT) many of the Marxist and new-Marxist criticisms of modern capitalism similarly begin to erode (and I suspect this does or will terrify those organizations). Which is good because their criticisms were in many regards bang on — anyone who will not do what they want, despite it being harmless, because they fear for their livelihood is not free.

So here’s what I think you should do: you should refuse to be afraid and you should take steps to ensure that you don’t need to be afraid. You should read subversive political works in public. You should find ways that technology empowers you to do what you want. Because Rousseau didn’t foresee this when he said you might need to be forced to be free. He knew you might become comfortable in your chains but I don’t think he figured you’d fail to notice them. Even complain about them at the same time as fail to notice them. Marcuse saw it though.

So there’s two. John Stuart Mill is another good one. Read your Pathfinder stuff every other week of the year.

–BMurray

I’ve been resisting this. Really.

However, I started playing around with something for Hollowpoint (tired of the acronym) based on some feedback from friendly and interested folks on Buzz and Twitter and Etc. Turns out they are smart too. Because Hollowpoint is basically about agents of some agency handling some more complex relationship diagram, it is a natural to build that relationship diagram and the cluster system from Diaspora has already demonstrated functionality. Okay I give.

The first idea was to define the agency itself, but I don’t want the agency to become a character. The opposition, however, is a character, so that’s what we’re defining. I establish three attributes, use the same rules for linking as in Diaspora, and then add some rules for interpreting the results. Some of the rule outputs need re-wording but I think the idea is clear. So the attributes are:

Honour. How honourable the entity is.

Cash. How much cash the entity has.

Manpower. How much force the entity can bring to bear.

Now because we’re using six-siders for Hollowpoint, this must also, so we use the d6-d6 method: roll two differently coloured dice and subtract one from the other using a pre-determined rule (subtract black from red, say). This gives a shallow curve from -5 to 5, peaking at 0. So we roll that for each stat and then for each node roll it again for connections. A negative result connects to the neighbouring node only, a zero result adds a connection to the next available node after, and a positive result adds a a third connection to the next neighbour open after that. An open neighbour is one not already connected.

And then we interpret based on these rules:

A connection between nodes that both have positive or both have negative values for an attribute indicates that the nodes are allied on this attribute. Honour implies friendliness, cash implies a mutual reliance, and manpower indicates a pact or truce.

A connection between nodes where one or another has a zero attribute is ignored.

A connection between nodes where one is negative and the other is positive indicates an imbalance that is a potential source of friction (mission driver!) So for honour this is a debt of honour: the negative seeks revenge on the positive. For cash this is a simple debt: the negative owes money to the positive. For manpower this is weakness and strength: the negative is weak to (and therefore defers to) the positive. Here’s an example:

Well I have to say that that invites some missions. We have some debts, some weaknesses, an interest in revenge and an interestingly cash-poor overall operation where everyone is interdependent. Clearly there are too many families in this syndicate! We also see the hub — that second node that everyone is weak to and everyone is connected to. And their sole realy strength is manpower — violence.

There’s something deeper in the cluster creation system than it looked at first. And though we touched on what it might be right there in the book, I don’t think it was clear until now just how rich it is in the abstract. It’s nice that it’s also an icon for VSCA, so if I use it in everything I ever produce I guess that’ll be okay. Or at least explicable.

–BMurray

Warning: this may ramble.

There is a lot of work on the table that tries to understand role-playing games in terms that we already know from trying to understand story. We’ve been trying to understand story (and story has been changing over this time, but also not, if you get my meaning here) for a really long time and so it seems natural to apply this knowledge to role-playing games. They do look like stories, after all. Well, at least after we finish playing and think about what happened, we hear a story in our heads. When we type up an actual play report, we present a story.

When I listen to the audio of an evening’s play, however, I mostly hear a social event in which a game is being played and some great scenes are being described. In a way it’s rather more like geeks talking about a film they loved and re-hashing their favourite parts than it is like an actual story.

So when people use theory to try and make role-playing games better at delivering story, I have to wonder if that’s really on the right track. Maybe role-playing games shouldn’t be stories.

The reason this struck me recently (it has struck me in the past too) is because we are in the process of critiquing the Game That Still Has No Name But Likely Will Be Called Hollowpoint or Ruthless (GTSHNNBLWBCHOR) and one of the criticisms external to play experience is that the tactically solid choice of sacrificing a character for resources and consequently getting a new character de-protagonizes the character. It creates a greater disjunct between player and character than we normally expect. The unstated implication of this critique is that this is a bad thing.

So this actually has several hidden premises which I will try to reveal in order to understand why this issue is not actually an issue in play.

One premise is that being the protagonist is a valuable story element to bring to a game. This is the deepest laid premise I think and one which is taken for granted in most games, so let’s look at it.

A tabletop game with four or five people interacting is not usually about a single hero and her sidekicks. Instead it is less artificial and more natural: it is about people who perceive themselves as the central element of the story even though they are not. This does not work well in a traditional story because the author is trying to forge a relationship between the reader and the story and the cheapest and most effective way to do that is to have her identify strongly with a character. We might call this character the protagonist. So having half a dozen protagonists dilutes the effect of the story by trying to sell the reader on investing in multiple characters. The difficulty here multiplies if the characters have opposing motivations, asking the reader to sympathise not just with multiple characters but with mutiple distinct perspectives.

So, from this we have to conclude that when a role-playing game is not explicitly about a single protagonist and her henchmen, we have a disjunct between traditional story-telling and what we want for fun play at the table. Fortunately, however, we are not speaking to a single reader — the whole table comprises a communal audience-as-author — and so we are not bound by elements of storytelling that assume one. As this is a novel (though not unique) form of entertainment — a story that is told only through its construction and that therefore has to be compelling in its mechanism (the process of construction) as well as in its output (the story, though clearly we want a better word) — it perhaps merits a more novel analysis.

This doesn’t speak to the fact that a player might want to cling to a character. That’s all cool and should have a reward attached so that they get something for fulfilling that desire, so that they don’t feel that striving for it is pointless. But shucking it does give you something that clinging to it doesn’t: the heroic sacrifice. If we hold the player-character connection (protagonization) as a sacrosanct feature of gaming, then we lose the capacity to have a heroic sacrifice, an ironic fatality, and all that other good stuff in the middle of play. And (as we will see) if we assume “play” means “long-term play” then we can only have it if we wait a long time first. And then we risk only doing it when we’re bored of the character, perhaps deflating our experience of the irony or the sacrifice.

The other premise is that this character will last longer than one or two sessions. If the game is run as a one-shot, then there is no strong binding between player and character anyway. This seems to allow us to emphasize the “life is cheap” motif of the game and deliver samurai-story gaming rather than long term heroic gaming. For sure there is no “hero’s journey” to be had here. There are no heroes, period.

Now this is not to say that feeding the character-player connection is universally (or even usually) wrong! Far from it. It’s a design principle that is common for good reason. Indeed it’s arguably the primary reason for all character advancement systems (the zero-to-hero model has always smelled like horseshit to me in the context of gaming, but that’s another post). But we need to occasionally wonder if there’s not some other things to experience that are also fun by dissociating ourselves just a little. By reveling in the superstructure in which characters play their roles as well as in the characters themselves.

I think that’s the place where GTSHNNBLWBCHOR wants to be. Emphasizing that life is cheap, that fatality is a tool, that you can’t sustain an adrenaline rush forever, and that the new guy, arriving with a history, has a story too.

–BMurray

In a game I am working on that I can’t name because it still doesn’t have a satisfactory name, we ran into an interesting impasse. While playtesting we hit an unexpected state that revealed to me exactly what we were making. Here’s what happened.

First a little background on the game. In this game the characters have limited resources in which to complete a mission. A mission is composed of multiple conflicts, each of which chew up resources. There is a way to refresh some resources, but let’s assume there isn’t because it is Special. Just hold on to something — I promise I’ll explain that.

Now every time the characters win a conflict, the opposition escalates. The next conflict will be a little harder.

Stated this way it’s sort of obvious what can happen but it surprised me anyway. Maybe because I never stated it clearly. Anyway, what happened is that the players won four conflicts in a row without achieving their mission objective. So now they are facing the hardest conflict yet and with no resources. Intellectually that’s really cool. I think it’s a wonderful result. But can it be fun?

On the surface of it there are two solutions. They can confront the last objective directly, knowing they will probably die trying. This is highly consistent with the genre and, I think, a desirable choice. Or they can slink off, failing the mission, because they forced the opposition to entrench and prepare by doing too much without pursuing the objective adequately (partially because the objective was badly defined — something that the rules will fix now). Both of these work for me. There’s actually a third possibility that derives from details of the system, but it’s another win-by-failing, though very specific to a single player. It’s also genre-consistent.

What this state revealed to me is that the game is being played by the players (to win!) at two different scales when we thought it was only one. Certainly you play to win each conflict, choosing your resources well and your skills to bring to bear and what dice to do what with. There is tactically rich play inside the conflict that you have do well (it’s not hard, mind you) in order to win. And the probability calculations are not (remotely) straightforward, so you learn by playing.

But because you have resources that are largely limited per mission, you are also playing a resource management game at the mission scale, and that’s what we all missed. Sometimes you have to make a sacrifice play and lose a conflict in order to preserve (or regenerate) resources for a more important conflict. If you blow resources on a conflict that doesn’t progress the mission objectives, you’re playing the mission game badly. Unless you have a plan to recoup them, of course!

Rewarding sacrifice play is something I certainly want to come out of this game. There is no question that (and this wording is deliberate) I want PLAYERS to make sacrifices during play. Characters too, but I want players to sacrifice their characters to achieve success sometimes. And I think play last night underscored that that has to happen (players were operating very conservatively compared to the previous play test) and let me write some new rules that encourage it. So that’s really cool. That’s the kind of playtest I love.

Oh yeah I promised to mention the Special way to refresh resources. If your character dies (or otherwise exits play), your new character brings fresh resources with her. So one way to renew some resources is to make sure you get taken out in a conflict. You get rewarded personally, too — the next scene after a character exit is always the new character being sent in to fix this giant cock up, explaining to the others how it’s going to get on track and not get anyone else killed and talking about how valuable and wonderful the exited agent was and how everyone should be ashamed for letting her down. Players really seem to get into this scene.

–BMurray