So the last time I posted I laid down a kind of formula for getting back into the swing of things after a campaign has lain dormant a while and the enthusiasm for it has eroded. As evidence that my method works, I offer the actual play report from the session that followed.

We certainly hit all the targets we have for the game, Soft Horizon. We got big, big heroic ideas — regicide, becoming king, death magic, and the death of a god’s avatar. We have criticisms (this is playtest after all) but all good ones. None are of the form “this game sucks” but rather of the form “if we did THIS the tension would be better”. Most notably there are practically zero rule revisions but rather only clarifications, so this game is certainly on track. I mean, it’s derived from FATE, so it kind of starts out on track, but I think the changes in Soft Horizon make a better game than “just” FATE for this kind of epic fantasy.

Certainly the dice curve I talked about before is cool and functional, but dice games are really secondary to this design because, I think, part of what made epic fantasy gaming epic when I was younger was the free-form role-playing and single-roll checks and not the big dice-heavy fights. So we’re concentrating on that and even in a big detailed conflict, the emphasis is on making sense of each step in a big dramatic way. That seems to be working.

One insight we had during play that we didn’t expect, however, is that really big heroes need an assistance mechanism that is outside of the causal chain at the table. That’s opaque, I know. What I mean is that we really need to be careful to avoid what I called “chess douchebaggery” in one context — that temptation to say “you already acted, you can’t go back and change that”.

Because heroes are vastly more awesome than I am or you are, we need a way for them to make fewer mistakes. By this I don’t mean just “they should succeed more”, because actually good heroic stories are mostly about failure. But they are about making bad decisions and grieving over impossible moral and ethical choices, and not about missing your skill check because you forgot to prepare before-hand. I mean unless acting without preparation is one of your fatal heroic flaws of course.

So the mechanism, if you can really call it one, is to demand that players narrate their heroes with a flexible attitude towards the flow of time. I think we often do this anyway in role-playing games, but in Soft Horizon it’s necessary and so we call it out: when facing a bad roll and looking around for Aspects to tag, it is perfectly reasonable to tag a friend’s Aspect with the narration that she would have helped you prepare before-hand in some fashion. As a side-effect of this news flash, we also get the corollary rule (don’t know if it’s obvious to you, but the chain links are clear in my head): it’s also reasonable to ask the player who is assisting to pay for that tag. Ta dah! Now we have an assistance rule that doesn’t require a whole lot of planning before every skill check.

This is important because simple skill checks (you know where during narration it becomes obvious that we should roll for success — just one roll, it’s not a fight or anything) emerge organically. They aren’t usually planned into play and so you just sort of suddenly know you need one. But you are playing characters that are ready for the shit to go down — they don’t forget they have the powers that define them, but players sometimes do. And, further, even though the need for the skill check is immediate from the table perspective, inside the fiction it may still represent a large chunk of time, in which there is space for preparation and execution. Essentially, the time-flow inside the fiction and at the table are totally different, and it’s just kind of cheap to penalize heroic characters for being in the table’s urgent time space.

So here’s permission to play in what I call “around the heroic now”. You don’t need to play in the now. You can play a little before it and a little after it. It’s perfectly acceptable to say (after a failed roll), “Thankfully, this morning Winsome prepared all of the rites including a script for me to read here. I’m tagging his Ceremonies Aspect, ‘I know the right things to do’. And, being as I’m resurrecting him and so he has little choice here, I’d like him to pay the fate point for the tag.”

We are weak and prone to error but our heroes are rather less so. And so cheap little failings of ours should not be reflexively translated up to our heroes. They should NOT fail because we forgot to prepare. They should fail for far more engaging reasons. And they will, so don’t sweat these little things.

I was going to end there but I realized that there’s something else in here and it might be a sacred cow (well, calf, anyway, because it’s a new idol) and I am killing it. Or at least threatening it with a knife. There’s this excellent idea that you shouldn’t roll if failure is boring or stupid. This is a great heuristic, but like all heuristics it is badly applied as a rule sans inspection. And here’s why: when you fail in a FATE game, you have the opportunity to make it succeed by adding narrative based on circumstances and issues and abilities that you have previously declared are important to you. Things you want to be in the story. And so a roll even for something that is uninteresting in failure can become elaborated through forcing success with tagging. And this elaboration can be marvelous — it’s not really a failure avoided, but rather encouragement to elaborate. You’re not being told, “ahah, you are going to fail at this dumb thing so fix it”, but rather “tell more about how you being awesome makes this suddenly difficult situation resolve”. And this can be fun even if it’s just a locked door you have to get through. And the loss of resources is valuable new tension.

–BMurray

The VSCA has at least two games that are almost ready to publish. Before we get there, though, we need to get back into playing these games after almost a month away from it all! This is surprisingly hard work — enthusiasm you generate at the table fades rapidly over time and can be very hard to recover. Flailing around trying to even remember what was cool about it is painful. Sure, you can start over with a new character and world creation session (and this is often the solution we use) but this is in danger of being a never ending cycle. And we love character creation, so there is little resistance to doing this. Danger, Will Robinson, as they say.

Trying to bull it out and just fabricate the enthusiasm is dangerous too. After an hour or so, if it doesn’t come back to you, the session is shot. You’ll either play through and be dissatisfied but be in no position to decide whether it’s the game or the situation that caused it (which doesn’t help design and development at all)  or you’ll quit early and play Battlestar Galactica because it’s a reliably awesome game with built-in enthusiasm generation.

Oh yeah, I already thought about that last bit. Can you make a role-playing game with built-in enthusiasm generation? I think that, because it’s usually a staged event, the initial session is exactly that and then you count on momentum and regular play to keep that up. And that works.

Anyway that’s not what I’m here about. I don’t intend to re-design these games to create mechanisms for generating flash every session. I think that’s a problem of a whole different sort and I also don’t want to go back to the drawing board for these games. Instead I am thinking about what I am actually going to do to regenerate enthusiasm. As a referee for the game (and host as well, which is a related issue) I am assuming an obligation to make the session work. Certainly I expect the players to cooperate and stuff, but I have already taken up the mantle and the viking hat and so whether or not it is my moral duty, it is a duty I have decided to adopt.

So the problem of “how do I regenerate my enthusiasm” is now “how do I propagate my fabricated enthusiasm”. Interestingly, this latter one is easier than the former. Huh? Because I love to teach, to demonstrate, to mediate. I am already enthusiastic, not necessarily about the topic but about the process. So that’s step one: I will deliberately take on the responsibility of re-selling the campaign.

STEP ONE: Deliberately take on the responsibility for re-selling the campaign.

(I was just re-reading Diaspora this morning and loving the rule call-outs in it. They work. I will re-use them.)

So part of what was making me enthusiastic about this campaign back when we started generating characters was, not surprisingly, my character. Yes, even when I intend to referee, I usually generate a character. It becomes and NPC and may die or something. That’s not important. The character is my touchstone in the world, and that’s important. It gives me a person to imagine acting in the world and some eyes to see through, not so much during the game but before while planning. And given my prep style, by planning I mostly mean “thinking about” and not necessarily writing anything down.

STEP TWO: Grab the thing that used to be fascinating and look through its eyes at the world.

If this doesn’t generate a spark for you then it’s possible there never was one. So for me, this is The Gan, a mechanical shaman in a mechanistic world who talks with ghosts. Until recently she was certain that there was no such thing as ghosts — that she and all her machine-exorcists were charlatans. That changed, though, and with it everything else. Now she collects the raiment of the cultures she visits outside the Machine of her world, Cognate, which are places where spirit and ghost and the unexplainable are expected features. They are assumed rather than denied.

Okay so now I have eyes and a mind. I will add a voice. I will riff a vignette where The Gan is the eyes of the scene. I’ll use some things generated by the other players in this vignette because I don’t want to simply preach or tell stories, but rather I want to make them excited about their creations too.

STEP THREE: Tell a story that celebrates the creations of the other players.

Doing this is a form of praise and people love praise. Even people who know you are manipulating them with praise still love it. It’s like the swallow reflex. You have no choice even though it makes you feel dirty sometimes.

Okay maybe that’s too vivid. But remember every picture in your head there is your own fault. I didn’t say anything about oral sex.

So I write that because writing gets me jazzed too. I just like doing it. Here’s what I came up with:

Ee-ket holds up the sky, she does
And sunset is all the colours of her ass.
She chases death for laughs, she does
And she lets him kiss her coloured ass.

Ee-ket is dead as shit, they say
They tore her to pieces for sport and for joy.
The chimps devoured her brain, they say
And danced in her sky without joy.

The sky stands aloft
But the earth now free
Of elaborate fickle bonds
Is torn by the whims of murderous
Lusts. Ee-ket still holds up the sky, she does.
Sunset is all the colours of her ass.

– a folk song of the Timpani mandrill tribe, Rotten Spray Cove

Sunset

The Lost One, the old hag, that bitch who moves you where there are no gates, she’s missing now and you are stranded (at least Stefos says you’re stranded — “There are no gates here. None secret, none hidden, none.”) on a rich island in the sky of Sephira. It is hot and humid because it is nearer to the sun than most, and you are the guests of the King of Rotten Spray Cove, a crowned baboon who rules over an ancient city carved from living granite and strung with jungle creepers and vines. Every building is open to the sky and the locals revel in the sudden rainfall that drenches them ever few days.

Stone faces are carved into every flat surface and stairs lead up and down needlessly everywhere. The city is home to all apes (well, all that have hair) and some monkeys, but each kind tends to keep to itself in regions of the city unmarked in any way you have yet determined, though the gorillas among you suspect scent is the key. The only race without a place are the Rakes, murderous bands of chimpanzees that rush through the broad stone streets at night and kill without purpose and without fear of punishment. Sometimes they are slain in this night frenzy, but they are never pursued in the day. They’d be easy enough to catch as they sleep all day, wherever they were when the sun rose.

And so it is, for some of you a little familiar, and you rest in the care of Badang and Ripat, the bonobo diplomats of the king’s court. You can hear inane laughing chants of the baboons as the sun sets, their song that keeps the Cove in the sky where it’s warm. You are comfortable but stranded. The Gan hums and clicks and whirs and Ord lies dead asleep (he seems to either feel rage or sloth and naught in between). Stefos paces.

A babble rises in volume to a thousand-voiced cry in the city. Badang, the smaller of the pair, rushes in. The King has been poisoned.

Poisoned. An invisible killer has somehow returned. Ee-ket’s pact has been broken and the nameless god she chased away has gained some purchase again.

The Gan strides to the window that overlooks the Meet, the vast assembly space where the King holds — held — audience at the base of his ziggurat. The Gan inhales, which is something none of you have ever seen before. He turns and says, “A plague is on the wind.”

Now this is incomplete — I really grabbed on to one player’s creation, the ape-world of Sephira, which has lots of embedded culture and has a great rule: there is no invisible death. Inhabitants die of violence and stuff like that but there is no poison or disease. Whenever someone hands me a rule, the hook that it obviously recommends is to break that rule.

STEP FOUR: Break a rule to break the ice.

This works because I know I have at least one player invested in that rule and I know they trust me. And so I reasonably expect that the reaction here will not be “Brad is a cock for ruining my creation” but rather the in character reaction, “Oh my goodness everything I have believed is turning out to be false — how could this be?”  Hopefully followed by, “we better investigate.”

When we meet I will re-tell this. Some things might change. I will try to make each player think about what this means to them by offering some narrative about them as the event unfolds — it’s essential that everyone be attached to the opener.

STEP FIVE: Touch everyone.

And then I’ll sit back and hope it works. When everything goes right, the players attack the hook and create the game. I have several cool NPCs to talk with, and that often livens things up. Whatever, the point is, if it livens up, the session will work.

If it doesn’t, I have Settlers of Cataan handy.

–BMurray

I am not a botanist. I have not done a ton of research into botany. Do not use this article as a primary research tool.

Every week-day I twice pass a lovely new playground that the City of Burnaby has constructed next to a well-preserved region of wetlands. The soil here is wet (duh) and fecund. Animals thrive here. Obviously the first priority of the city is to prevent that from happening in the playground. I make no moral or ethical judgment here, it’s just true: no one wants their kids playing in a swamp and the residents want a place right here that kids can play. Ergo, it cannot be a swamp. Swamps want to make more swamp, and so you need to defend your playground against the constant encroachment of the swamp and do so without killing the swamp, because the swamp is mandated by provincial or federal law. I don’t know which.

So you build a nice sterile gravel path at least a meter and a half deep between the swamp and the playground. You don’t want a sterile playground — in fact you are going to surround it with lush lawn-quality grass — but you do need a defensive perimeter. Okay then — maintaining this perimeter is now priority one.

No problem there. The city is doing a fine job of maintaining this perimeter. There is no danger of the swamp encroaching on the grass. There are two reasons for this: first, the sterile path idea actually works; and second, they managed to kill the soil under the grass.

I’m pretty sure this is how lawn grass and lawns in general work: you regularly cut some bog-standard (aware of the pun, thank you, and there will be more) grass. This is not an aesthetic thing you do. This is part of the control you need to exert over the whole growth culture of grass. What you are doing is preventing the grass from reproducing sexually. I know, put that way it sounds cruel, but it’s true. Because grass grows two ways and one is intrinsically cooperative while the other is intrinsically competitive.

When grass is prevented from seeding, it reproduces asexually, which is not as fun and makes lawns. Because the grass is regularly cut, there is no competitive growth (it’s all mostly the same length and it’s all short so sunlight is equally available and equally consumed). New grass is budded from the existing grass from at or below the soil line, creating a nice spongy mass that holds the dirt together and is very efficient at trapping water and transmitting nutrients. The grass is happy. It’s hard for alien plants to get a foothold in a good lawn, because this lawn is so good at what it does (and the regular cutting is bad news for anything that doesn’t also reproduce while really short). When you cut grass you are literally leveling the playing field, and grass wins this because it is a powerful cooperator when denied sex.

The City of Burnaby did not regularly cut this grass.

More to the point, they let it go to seed and then cut it.

When grass starts to get longer, a marked difference in the amount of sunlight any given blade receives can be had by increasing height.  Increasingly long neighbours strangle out the light for shorter neighbours, and they die. This results in clumping — now the most efficient way to get light is for clusters of tall grass to climb as high as they can (for two reasons, actually) which creates rings of shade around the best competitors. In these rings of shade, very little grows. If it’s dry (and it is) the soil will become rather less fecund in a positive feedback loop: because nothing is growing in these little bands, they cannot retain water well.

This is not all bad. At some point the grass uses its height to seed effectively. The high stalk allows the seed to be carried away on the wind, hopefully taking root somewhere new and fertile and, pointedly, far away from the parent so that it will not compete directly. All of this also creates competitive space for alien species that are good at the hard drier soil between clumps. This will create a new and different diversity provided there is a lot of water.

There isn’t a lot of water. The path maintenance prevents the wetlands from overflowing into the park.

And so then they cut the grass. Now there are patches of short grass all over the park. This short grass needs lots of water but the soil is no longer suited to holding a lot of water — grass gone to seed needs constant external influx of water because it doesn’t bind the soil the same way that asexual grass does. Oh crap! So this truncated sexual grass dies. Now you have a fucking desert in the making. Worse, there’s not really a way to nurse it back to health because the change in the soil is so dramatic. You need to till the whole thing under and add water or rip it up and re-sod with manufactured asexual happy cooperative grass.

Or let the swamp in. The swamp knows all this stuff and knows how to maintain it. Skunks are cuddly!

–BMurray

Okay that was fun. All the fiddling with my Terrible Grant, I mean. I’m jazzed about layout and typography and stuff relevant to this Highport idea. But is there anything to it? What would go in one of these? Who would get paid and how? What would it cost an end user?

Maybe those should be looked at one at a time. Is there anything to it? Sure. I could be persuaded to generate or acquire and edit content on a relatively frequent basis and fiddle with amusing software to get it done. I’m cool with that. So it’s certainly feasible.

What would go in one of these? That’s the kind of thing that makes lists in my head! So here’s one:

• A Diaspora cluster in some detail. Not everyone feels creative all the time. Detail might include common equipment and maybe military structure ready for use in platoon combat. Ships? Sure! This is already looking like something that could easily span multiple issues actually.
• A new game. I remember photocopying Dragon magazines and chopping that up to build my Snit Smashing boardgame. Making something like that happen regularly would thrill me.
• Preview upcoming VSCA titles. Things like our space combat free PDF release could be stuck in a VSCA magazine.

Obviously I’m thinking mostly about concrete, playable content and not editorial material. Some of this is stuff fans have already been asking for, so it would be cool to be able to fork it over. I can’t see it as being very art-heavy, frankly, but rather more of a nuts and bolts periodical manual for actual play. Tables, charts, diagrams, rules, and enough fluff to get you thinking about how to use it in your game. Very little more. It would look sharp but austere on your iPad.

Who would get paid and how? See now that’s a good question because it’s not sustainable as a single-person effort. As Bob implied earlier, the clone army is not yet ready. But there are some kick-ass game designers and other creative folks withing a few dozen blocks of me and many more within reach of the interwebs. So I’m thinking of some kind of flat fee for a usage license with VSCA not owning the content. So basically I would pay a contributor (of art or writing or whatever) for the right to publish, but they would retain all rights to their content. I thought about doing a royalty thing but honestly I’m just not interested in the accounting.

What would it cost the end user? Well this is interesting. I’m exploring Magcloud because they already do the full-colour magazine thing using a model I like, but also because they have an iPad app and that’s really what I want to get in on: delivery by iPad. Also paper — I love paper — but PDFs can look so damned good on this thing that I am compelled to show you. With product. Currently Magcloud offers content through the app for free with a click-option to purchase the hardcopy. Things looks os bloody good on the device, though, that I’m afraid that’s ass-backwards — it almost makes more sense to sell some kind of ownership and charge a minor printing and shipping fee for hardcopies. Anyway, they will sort that out and if I’m working with them on this I’ll be providing vocal input. They’ll work something out. So there are a few models that would intersect with the Magcloud method:

• Charge the base rate + profit on the Magcloud hardcopy. When they let me charge for the app delivery, charge a base rate + profit. This is least interesting to me, partially because in soliciting art and writing I incur risk and hope to get paid from the Magcloud revenues. This smells old-school.
• Kickstart each issue and use a fraction of that money as budget for the issue and a fraction as profit. Release the PDF for free, selling through Magcloud at the minimum possible (just the Magcloud costs basically) for hardcopy and iPadd app release. This is pretty appealing (zero risk, leveraging technology) obviously.
• Some combination of the above.

Anyway that’s what I’m thinking. I like the visual austerity of Diaspora ¹ and would be aiming at that + colour to really take advantage of the iPad as delivery system. This would not be a magazine you buy for the cool artwork. Lots of folks do that already. I want to produce game-stuff. Shitloads of it.

–BMurray

I did a ton of fiddling with my Terrible Grant® today, mostly working with some ideas for building a VSCA magazine as discussed in my previous post. Some cool stuff is coming together here and certainly having a full version of Adobe CS5 is making a big difference. And so this isn’t a long note, it’s just a loving one. This is for Mr. Terrible. This is the beginning of the evil I will use the grant to wreak upon the world.

I’ve talked — okay really I’ve gone on and on — about  the way that publishing is changing and also about how gaming is in a position to take the vanguard in these changes, at least in part because we have limited ties to traditional methods in the first place. Sure there are still the “big boys” out there who do things the usual way, and sure there are still a lot of very small publishers still entrenched in the print-run-investment model, but gamers seem to be fast to explore new media. Now that has implicit risk, too, because sometimes experiments result in answers like, “no”, which means that while the bleeding edge explorers tend to have an open mind about trying new things, they (we) also go through new things like toilet paper, leaving a lot of guesses swirling down the can.

The VSCA has adopted a very low-risk model for its business, which happens to align nicely with new technology. Now, just this morning I was reading about another new technology and then remembering an old conversation, and I ot a little synergistic flash in my head that thrilled me because it implied that I might be able to dick around with fun stuff even more than I already do. This is a good sign, because I am more likely to do something if it’s fun.

So here’s what I’m thinking. What if the VSCA made available on a reasonably fast schedule (monthly say) its current design state for all projects, as well as a few blue collar space articles, and some other stuff, hopefully containing a complete (small) game every time? By small game I mean like a subsystem for something in development, but repackaged as a small stand-alone idea. And what if it was in colour and available digitally or print on demand? I’m thinking somewhere between 24 and 96 pages, delivered regularly, purcased either per-unit or by subscription.

I’m not really approaching this idea as something I think anyone wants, yet (which is why I phrase all this as a giant question) but rather as something that sounds fun to do and has been enabled by recent changes in technology and position — I’m thinking specifically here about Magcloud‘s recent announcement that they have an iPad app pending and that they will be giving stuff away for a while.

So we’re talking here about leveraging (actually I see our methods at VSCA as more parasitical, but “leverage” leverages Leverage, which is hot right now, even though I haven’t seen it yet) someone elses work (Magcloud making an iPad app to deliver colourful content with option to print, with them managing all the customer interaction and just sending us a cheque) so that I can do only the fun parts. And this, as I’ve said before, is how technology and capitalism work together to empower pocket socialists like me, turning my leisure into Scotch.

This would enable us to produce Diaspora supplements, for example, by putting them in a concise format that still has a profitable delivery mechanism, and that is super appealing to me. I’ve avoided supplements so far mostly because the document needs to be above a certain size to make sense turning into product, but if it’s part of (even the largest part of) a magazine format, then that’s solved. It can be as large or as small as the idea is. And I’m keen on Diaspora supplements.

What do you think? Could this be a new way to make games? See, I could see Diaspora broken up into distinct stand-alone pieces that together make an awesome game. If you got those pieces one at a time, would you be happy? If you came to the complete game having played the platoon-scale game for a few weeks and a couple of social fights already, would your experience be better or worse? Now naturally this doesn’t preclude more traditional (if you can call our parasitic method traditional) publication, but rather would augment it. Maybe customers on the subscription list get a discount. Or maybe I figure if you spent $50 on magazines then you already bought a game and I mail it to you. I dunno yet and I’m not promising anything.

But I am thinking real hard, and grinning.

–BMurray

Okay, so really all technology is transitional in a sense, but the technology I’m thinking of now is that which opens up genuinely new possibilities and everyone is scrambling to figure out what to do with it. Look, for example, at the personal computer in the early 80s (when I was first discovering that I happened to be a kind of geek that just got created). For at least ten years from when I got my first computer (an Apple ][+ clone from Hong Kong), the central function of this device was to actively wonder what to do with it.

Fortunately it came well equipped for this. You could program the thing right away and if you felt like delving deeper, you could trivially enter memory data directly, programming the machine code in hexadecimal. You learn a lot that way. If you were even more curious, the machine came with documentation that included schematic diagrams of the whole circuitry and a complete commented listing of the code for the read-only memory.

A few years later my newer computers, Intel boxes for the most part, lacked the tools do wonder. I suppose by this time the manufacturers of such things felt they had done all the wondering that needed to be done and so they could now sell us the fruits of their wondering and we could just consume. Of course this was not sufficient (I bought them to wonder) and so tools became available (and whole operating systems) that let you wonder again. Linux, for example, came with a compiler and a tool chain again and so you were obviously invited.

Anyway, the personal computer is a General Purpose Computing device. It’s not for anything, really, but rather it’s capable of anything that can be programmed into it. As a result it’s in the thing’s nature to always be transitional — we will constantly be wondering what else we can make this thing do because it will constantly acquire more and new power. So I would argue that it always needs to come with wonder-enabling tools because that’s what it is for.

Now this iPad is a different beast but we still don’t know what it’s for. What is different, however, is that the class of people who are equipped to wonder about that are a little more elite. By elite I don’t mean better or smarter or richer, but rather only that they are a small subset of the usership. You need certain skills and certain investment in order to wonder about this thing in practical terms. That’s okay — this isn’t a rant about the loss of wonder. I’m in the elite (or at least I’m invited) — I could wonder if I wanted to. But the fact that most of the developers for the iPad are still wondering has led to an enormous feeling of transition when using the device and the surrounding technologies.

By surrounding technologies I don’t mean technologies that directly support the iPad. I mean technologies that are developing in other contexts but that the iPad is positioned to exploit. These are the places where many users of the device are scratching their heads and wondering (aha!) why the iPad doesn’t do this. For example, why can’t I edit Google Docs?

Okay wait, I know why. I know the technical reasons. I also know they will be surmounted soon enough. But really, this is why the iPad exists — remote storage of data for local manipulation at any arbitrary node (and the iPad is as local and arbitrary as it gets today) and Google Docs is the repository for such remote storage right now. So when I see word processors for the iPad and they do not support Google Docs, I immediately wonder WHAT THE FUCK?

On a more general level, consider Dropbox. Anything that stores any kind of data should be able to export it to Dropbox. If I make funky images with Granimator (and I do), I want to share them with other iPad users (because they make great wallpaper images) and Dropbox is a solid way to offload all that sharing logic to someone else rather than integrate it into an iPad app or, worse, the operating system.

But it’s in the nature of new technology to flounder for a while (a long while in some cases) before it finds niches where it sings. Here’s another example: electronic books. See, I can tell this is transitional because there are some I can only get through Kindle and there are others that I can only get in PDF and there are others still that are self-contained apps. All of these are viable ways to deliver textual content and we don’t have to settle on exactly one (which is good because they have diverse and only partially overlapping strengths and weaknesses) but the disordered management and access to these documents smell like a technology that has not figured it out yet. And it’s clearly not as simple as just integration (like Goodreader, say) but rather a deeper problem of needing a new technology to cope with new technology.

And then, as if it wasn’t enough that technology is changing, technology is clearly changing us too. Our expectations are different than they were twenty, ten, or even five years ago. We expect (reasonably!) to trivially share practically anything with people we have never seen or spoken to. Not just make it available, but genuinely share it — make them know it exists, allow them to get it, allow them to change it, and understand their changes. Solid collaboration is still the killer app that doesn’t quite exist yet and a lot of people are stabbing in the dark at it (and wondering) — wikis, Google Docs, Dropbox, Google Wave…all these things are trying to figure out real, distributed collaboration. None of them do it yet, though of them all at least Google Wave (still the least useful for this) is not just an old application elevated to the new shared space. It’s closer to a genuinely new idea, and we sure need one.

We are smart monkeys and so we always re-purpose any technology to make it do what we think it ought to do. As the technology becomes more powerful and as the interconnectedness of people and projects exceeds the point at which we can really analyze it, we will be pushing the human-technology hybrid animal into newer and newer places. The iPad is one of those things that makes this clear. It’s equally clear that it’s a prototype of what will be — it’s clumsy and scattered and poorly integrated. It does a whole bunch of things you already did but in a bigger and smaller package with better and worse graphics. But it is certainly the result of someone smart wondering really hard.

I can’t wait, then, to see where we are next year. Because this transition is more about software and about adoption and usage than hardware. And so, to all you iPad developers out there wondering your asses off for ninety-nine cents a download, my hat is off to you. And my wallet, frankly, open. Wonder over here where I can see it and fondle it and test it and make it do things you didn’t intend it to do. But make it play nice and play freely, because it’s this gestalt technology that is going to really blow us away.

–BMurray

I said I’d fix it, didn’t I?

–BMurray

As activities go, role-playing games are surprisingly hit-and-miss for me. It’s not surprising that there is a fairly high proportion of failures but rather that we so eagerly tolerate it, which suggests to me that there is something outside the game that keeps it worthwhile, and/or there is a different kind of fun in failure. I will bet on “and”.

I am a problem solver. That doesn’t mean that I solve problems, but rather that I enjoy trying to solve problems. If someone tells me what’s bugging them, I will try to construct a plan to solve it. This pisses a lot of people off. Within the context of gaming, though, it means that when a game goes badly I get to analyze it and try to figure out why it broke and then how I might fix it and if that happens at the table, then the evening can be a stunning success for me even if the game failed.

But I want to talk about success. There’s a lot of talk about “story” moving around the role-playing-game-meme-o-sphere and I think it has a lot of merit, though the word “story” is dangerously overloaded. Here’s what I buy, because the idea that fiction maps directly onto gaming strikes me as completely broken, but I don’t think a lot of people make the claim anymore anyway. I’ll also add that there are huge swaths of the gaming community who want to talk about how railroading sucks and so when anyone uses the word story, they use that as a launching point to talk about railroading.

There are things that writers do when writing fiction that works (as opposed to “good” fiction, which is orthogonal) that can probably be ported to gaming. I’m not a trained fiction writer so I don’t necessarily know what these are. But I know what kinds of things work for me in a book that also work for me in a game, so maybe I can get by without the correct terminology. Here goes.

Characters. One of the things that makes a stellar evening’s play for me is having an awesome conversation about something entirely in-setting from the perspective of an interesting character in the game. If I could only have one trick up my sleeve it would be this: make sure there is one character who is passionate about something and that the players will be in a position to talk to. The sharper among you will notice that there are some more tricks embedded in that trick.

Passion. In order to engage the players, someone has to be passionate about something. This is hard. You can’t expect your players to do it — even if they have a dozen aspects, three beliefs, and a handful of statements explicitly declared as passions, there is a disjunct between what the character is passionate about and what the player is passionate about. So there are a couple of ways to manipulate yourself and others to get some passion.

You can bring it. Seriously, you’re the ref, you’re reading this, you care. So bring some passion to the table. Tie it to a character (or two — anyone passionate about something is usually intense about it because they are opposed, so now you have another passionate character automagically) and now that character has something to talk about. And if that conversation goes well you can at least credibly enlist cynical mercenary players and at best sell them on the character’s vision (or its opposition!) and create motivation. Even if you get only one good argumentative in-character scene, it paid off. The evening will be memorable.

As a player (and this is the second ref trick: tell your players this bit) you can get passion without fabricating it by making your character care about something you do. I know, the thespians will balk at the idea of playing a character that’s like you (I play to be someone else!) but let’s face it, you don’t get to cleave off heads in pursuit of your passion, so even if this character shares your deeply-held convictions, she is different from you: she’s going to do something serious about it. And, if the ref is on the ball, she’s going to be challenged on it.

Imagery. At some point you are going to be describing stuff. You will want to get at least one setting-establishing image into play every session. Something awesome that the players can see in their heads. Some people use props, some use prose, some use pictures from the interwebs, some use combinations of these. It doesn’t really matter how you get there, but if you can plant an image in the heads of the players, and if that image is part of what compels you to ref in the first place, then you stand a chance of creating a shared atmosphere that will be memorable.

I use “memorable” a lot because I don’t think fun is all that important. Everything we can say we “liked” is defined by our memory of it — no action exists anywhere but in the instant and as a memory, and memories are all stories. How you will recall an evening’s play is the story you will tell about what happened. That’s why memorable is more important than fun. Fun smells of frivolity and frivolity is not a necessary component of a successful game. What’s important is that you relish the story you will tell about it (even to yourself — maybe especially to yourself as many of us have learned hard lessons about picking up girls by re-telling the exploits of Smegnar, our Fighter-Thief) and the priority for establishing a future story is memory. Memory is necessary for a successful sessions. I cannot recall any successful but forgotten sessions. I don’t need to remember detail for it to have been successful and detail will fade over time, but I do need to smile and look up a bit and think, yeah, I had a swell time when Tirian found the sword at the bottom of the cavern lake, littered with the skeletons of ancient elfish kings.

I will be remembering the people, their passions, and the imagery of those moments.

–BMurray

So last night we got a reduced team together for a pre-Canada-Day game night. We didn’t have enough to do any serious play-testing of Soft Horizon (which was the original plan) and I didn’t really feel like working with Hollowpoint since Toph has upstaged all actual play with his son, Jonah. So we pulled out a Random Indie Game that we hadn’t played but had read and that I thought highly of.

I’m not sure why I thought highly of it, now, except that it’s beautiful. It’s really pretty.

In trying to actually play it, we found the rules remarkably vague. I mean, they sound clear when you’re reading it for fun, but when you actually try to extract a game out of it, it fails. I’m pretty sure some of our writing has failed the same way, because when we write we already know what we mean. It tales a third party with no pre-conceived ideas to really notice the failures. We’ve already seen this in some of the third party play-testing we’ve had for Hollowpoint so far, where readers have found really deep failures in explanation that it knocks me over to have missed. But you can’t see in from the inside.

The other thing that failed, once we had a grip on the rules (kinda), was that despite the presence of a lot of mechanism for play, none of those handholds and dials and levers actually helped us have any fun in the game. The game is hard to play. It expects a great deal from every player and if you’re playing badly it’s not fun. So it would be nice if some of the mechanism we invested time learning actually helped make the hard parts easier, but it doesn’t. In fact for the most part the mechanism didn’t do much of anything that flipping a coin wouldn’t do.

To be fair we didn’t play it wrong. Maybe it gets a lot better. There were things about it I like enough to steal, but they are all surrounding prep and character definition and nothing about play.

This isn’t a review, so I’m not naming the game.

It’s cool by me if some games don’t work all that well. I don’t mind buying a game and having a crappy time with it because, as a game developer, I learn from others’ mistakes at least as well as I learn from my own. Probably more, even. So I don’t resent buying it and even before playing it I got a number of ideas just from the layout and typography. Hell I’ve already stolen some of those ideas. It has reinforced a few ideas I’ve suspected were true, and it’s always nice to be right.

First of those is that third-party play-testing is a lot more important than I thought it was. It not only reveals pedagogical failures, but also exposes parts of you game that you think are awesome but are in fact only the awesomeness of your group — seriously, if you play-test only with super-creative and enthusiastic people who already get all there is to get, then you risk having a great time with a game that isn’t what you actually sold anyone. The game, as some say, is at the table, embedded in the people and the food and the drink and the mood of the night, and finally the rules. So if you have everything else going right, the rules might not be delivering all — or even most — of that fun you had.

Second is that the text must teach. It must also act as a reference and I’ve talked before about how hard it is to get both right. They are orthogonal and so if you get it right you’re pretty damned smart. How does teaching text fail? Well it fails in ways that are not obvious when you already know your topic (and so that feeds back into the need for play-testing, obviously). Things like consistency of terminology and repetition: you need to use the same word for the same thing all the time (and not until after you’ve defined it) and you cannot shy away from stating the same rule each time it needs to be stated — referring back is second best, but assuming a rule is understood (or has even been read) by the time its second or third usage is actually broken, because during play the learner will open the book in the middle (and with some desperation) to find clarification. You better give it then and there.

Finally, a pretty book and the accolades of trustworthy people are enough to sell a lot of books. That suggests that a lot of people never play the games they buy, and I don’t think that’s actually all that controversial, but it’s kind of disheartening when you put a lot of effort into delivering a functional text and then realize you could have sold five times the copy if you’d ignored the text and bought more art. You can (and I do) tell yourself that it’s better to be read and played than to be read and displayed (as though that’s a dichotomy — there are plenty of games that manage to fire on all cylinders, delivering beauty and game without compromise) but it’s only partly true. You only know what actually happens to a very small percentage of what you sell, so really, it’s better to sell a crapton of anything you’re proud of.

–BMurray