So I’ve talked about POD before and how it’s been a great choice for us, and yet the current implementations leave a lot to be desired if you happen to get popular. In particular, the role-playing game world suffers and as it’s a tiny niche, it’s not likely to get serviced by the big guys.

Here’s the problem. I want to sell you books. I don’t want to warehouse books and I don’t want to do fulfillment and all that. I just want to create a book as an electronic entity and sell it to you as a real, physical, and ideally beautiful, book. What’s cool is that for the most part you want to buy this book. So it seems like we’re all good here. Enter the niche.

My best choice for this sort of riskless sale is Lulu. I just send them the data and sit back. They sell you books and send me a cheque. Problem is, Lulu customers are not mostly about role-playing games or even games in general. They are mostly about fiction. So it doesn’t seem to be the case that there is a lot of browsing going on at Lulu that ends up in a sale of my book, and that’s a problem — if I can only sell to people who already know they want my book, then I’m missing what I expect is a crapton of “opportunity sales”. That is, sales to people who know they want to buy something but don’t know exactly what. In a perfect world they stumble around in a place rich with possibilities and spot my book and buy it. Lulu is not this place.

A partial solution here is to supply to vendors. The downside of this is that now I have to get involved in pre-printing and fulfillment. First in small quantities to the small number of vendors who are willing to buy in volumes that make it worth my while (my margins are tight). Then maybe large volumes to a third party (like IPR, say) who can supply to vendors in a more appealing fashion (it still pays for them to buy in volume but they don’t have to absorb the risk of buying ten of my book — they can buy two of mine and two of another and two of yet another, and so on). Anyway, that’s all part of the business I am not interested in.

Enter RPG Now (Drivethru RPG, One Bookshelf, etc.) and their POD service. This is finally a real POD service. Real for me, anyway. The fact that it doesn’t quite exist yet does not bother me. Here’s what they are promising to do that no one else does, and that makes me very happy indeed.

They are promising high quality. As they will be printing through Lightning Source (a self-proclaimed POD service, but very much a first-generation one that has no storefront for authors and a clear preference for dealing with “real” publishers), a company that has very high quality standards, I am confident they can achieve this. We’ll be getting draft copies to verify this quality so we’ll know for sure soon enough. But I have high confidence. So far this is ground already covered by Lulu.

They are promising that the product will be a first-class product at RPG Now. That means that it will be part of the same publisher’s infrastructure there and that’s cool because it is super powerful — not only is the reporting to the author good, but also the capacity to bundle is there (and isn’t at Lulu, and that’s a big deal). So I can offer book + PDF at a bargain. I can offer all my books. I can offer all my books by a certain author. I can bundle with other vendors (one day there could be an “all FATE hardcover” bundle, say). Awesome.

They are promising that they will be able to offer vendor pricing to vendor accounts. This puts them in direct competition with IPR for this sort of item — if a vendor can browse and pick and choose in a way that might include my book, I am ecstatic. This will satisfy a very large number of vendors that I cannot satisfy right now. This is a new market.

RPG Now already has a reputation amongst gamers — it’s already a place that gamers go to browse. So this opens up my hardcopy to opportunity sales in two ways (site browsing as well as increased brick and mortar presence).

All of this smells too good to be true, but the fact is that most of this is just a user interface improvement over what Lulu does and so RPG Now seems to be aiming at taking the same (or less) out of the margin between print cost and sale that Lulu does. So for me, the publisher, the margin remains roughly the same. Selling to vendors can be similarly no different than, say, IPR as far as margin goes, assuming I pre-printed stock through Lightning Source or somewhere similarly inexpensive.

Okay so RPG Now wants to do all the work that I don’t want to do and they want to get paid such that I make the same margin I ever did. At the same time they want to vastly improve my options for bundling and make everything I publish available to an existing browsing audience. They have basically taken my IPR and Lulu defect list and made it their feature list.

Sign me up.

–BMurray

For a commie, I sure am a bourgeois pig. And really, the whole VSCA authorial pool is packed with this. There’s no question that it influences us and that we make mistakes because of it.

Here’s a mistake we made. In the uncorrected (which means wrong) version of Diaspora, in the platoon combat section, we have an example unit with a mind-blowingly racist Aspect — the unit is “Primitives” and the Aspect was something like “Crush the white devil”. The racist bit here is the automatic association between primitive and not-white. Now, there’s a mitigating explanation here for how it got past us that has to do with the origins and revisions of the platoon combat system (hint — it wasn’t always for Diaspora or even sf or even a role-playing game) but that’s not an adequate response. The adequate response was to acknowledge it and fix it.

So we did that. I’m proud that we did that. Because that means that we have certain kinds of blindness induced by our culture (and I’ll talk about what I mean by that in a second because it’s very specific and not vague at all in this context) but that we are capable of seeing. When the error was pointed out to us we saw and it was embarrassing and we fixed it. I’m proud of fixing that mistake. Not proud of making it, though.

Who’s we? Well the Diaspora team is four middle-aged white guys with comfortable economic situations. Okay, Byron can get downright Mediterranean when the sun hits him, but he’s still white. The other three are fish-belly white. Two are somewhere between balding and bald. This is the culture I was talking about — the four of us. And the people we deal with regularly, professionally and casually, also mostly belong to the same demographic (though with a lot more women in it, for sure). But age range and colouration and even salary are all pretty close. We belong to the privileged class of our continent, without question, and so we are bound to make decisions that reflect this unless we think really hard about every little thing.

No one has the patience for that kind of detail in a hobby (well, certainly some crazy people do, but let’s omit that large but scary category) and so we make mistakes, and sometimes they are serious boners like the one I just described. Not just “oops that’s not how you spell it” but more like “holy shit do we really think in a way that makes that not obvious?” Well, it’s at least certain that we don’t now, at least not that specific way that made that specific error not obvious, but I am certain we will make new errors in a similar vein.

We’ve added another author and playtester to the team, and he’s a middle-aged white male and balding professional. Oops.

We’ve got another guy coming to join our game in July (the guy I first played D&D with in the Old Days, with his mom as dungeon master) and he’s a middle-aged white male and balding professional.

Now, being part of this privileged class obviously has a lot of advantages as well as a set of blinders that we can’t predict very well. I mean, it wouldn’t be a privileged class if it didn’t have advantages, right? And so while there is a distinct leftist leaning through the team (some leaning much harder than others) we sure like nice things. For example, we enjoy some pretty wonderful scotches during our sessions and we’re not very shy about it. We all can afford the time to play and to experiment. We can find the tools and the expertise to help figure out how to do things that we couldn’t otherwise do. We are near the pinnacle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, meaning that significant portions of our energy are spent on (or at least available for) self-actualization rather than finding food or avoiding wild dogs. I expect that an awful lot of indie game designers are here.

This is the 99th percentile of humanity. In fact it’s rarer than that. The kind of person that can afford the energy to, as a hobby, design and develop and publish and market a role-playing game with a potential audience measured in hundreds, is a rare and super-privileged beast. We are a bizarre anomaly in the set of all humanity. And so I have to wonder, having made the particular error we did, what sorts of blinders the whole community of designers (and probably players for that matter) have. I mean, we’re not all balding white male professionals, obviously, but we all do certainly have a startling amount of leisure time and the desire (and training) to devote it intellectually and creatively. We are certainly a subset (rich enough to have leisure) of a subset (interest in games) of a subset (interested in role-playing games) of a subset (interest in game design) of a subset (motivated to actually design games). I think there are more subsets in there actually.

So we count on those outside our tiny filtered niche to let us know when we blow it. As we design games to be played, we at least have players up above our little leaf on the tree. And we even have would-be gamers closer to the trunk still. But even all the way back to “people who have even heard of role-playing games” we have a really miniscule fraction of humanity in our potential pool of observers. As the whole idea of role-playing games is to essentially pretend that you’re someone you’re not, this seems like an especially glaring problem. Are all our characters also middle-aged balding white professional males? I mean, certainly we paint them different colours (black, female, poor, angry, and so on) but are they more deeply different?

This question bugs me in part because I’m not sure I want to play a character that is genuinely all that divergent from myself in these sorts of deep ways, and that’s obviously a cultural bias. Now there are some divergences that I know I can get a handle on because they are part of the fantasy space of middle-aged balding white males — Hollowpoint, for example, lets me play a character who is all I am but also amoral and a little stupid. Someone for whom violence is a functional early resort to practically anything. One could argue that D&D also goes to this same place, but the contrast I wanted in Hollowpoint is that these guys are not justified in it in anyway. Their opposition can be the good guys in all respects, whereas in D&D you can at least point to the goblin alignment and justify any action as purging evil. Evil! When we strip the idea of absolute and (therefore?) supernatural evil out, we get into some more interesting space. Anyway, this divergence is easy and familiar — I like watching movies like Heat or Reservoir Dogs or The Bad Lieutenant. This is not new territory for me, it’s just not exactly who I am.

I dread our next staggering error. But I also welcome it. I really have no idea exactly what I can’t see. I know roughly where it is, but looking there is such a deliberate act that it can only happen in little places. There have to be huge swaths of space that I can only see if someone points it out to me. And thanks to bankuei (though I wish the author made his or her real identity easier to discover — it would lend the criticism more weight, I think, to others) for shouting about this particular error.

You should shout too, so I know where to look to see things I haven’t before.

–BMurray

So yesterday I had a very interesting (to me) experience that involved the intersection of a bunch of relatively new cultural (and therefore also technological) elements. I was reading a book on my Kindle that was annoying me. I looked up and sighed and noticed that the young woman in the seat ahead of me had text tattooed on the back of her neck. It read, “So it goes.” I went back to my Kindle, bought a copy of Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” (yes I know that’s not the novel the quote is from, but my brain usually makes two or three jumps before I act, so sometimes I skip steps — if it helps, I also bought “Slaughterhouse Five”). I started reading that instead, dumping the previous book. I became happy and satisfied.

Nice, huh? A few things are happening in there that struck me as fairly novel.

I had no problem dumping a book I was not getting into. This is new to me. It’s now trivially easy to get a new book, but it’s also not taking up any space. My sense of ownership of the book is greatly reduced (and this probably feeds into the whole piracy function — we usually talk about what it means to the downloader, but the fact that there is a reduced sense of ownership on the owner seems more relevant to the likelihood they will offer it for upload) and I know I used to go to great lengths to try to read things I was not getting into, solely because I had invested in them. Now not so much. And yet the price of the thing hasn’t changed — just the artifact that I own.

A person sent a secret message to me via her skin. She never knew she sent it. It might not be the message she intended. But she certainly intended to send it, and I received something useful — a reminder that I adore certain Vonnegut novels and would like to be reading them right now. Of course, tattoos are not new, but the range of people that wear them now is different than it was twenty years ago, and I cannot discount the possibility that other things about this woman affected my receipt of the Vonnegut declaration. She was normal. Whatever that is. She was dressed unremarkably. She did not appear to part of any particular subculture. She was not especially young, old, beautiful, ugly, rich, or poor. Just a person totally unremarkable (at a glance) other than the message on the back of her neck. That seems relatively new to me. Or at least the fact that this is common is new to me.

And finally, if I want a book I can get it exactly when I want it. This is something the Kindle really changed for me — when I’m done a book (and now that doesn’t always or even usually mean I read it through) I can pick a new one and start reading it, and if I don’t already own it that’s not going to involve a significant extra set of steps. Click click click, read. The whole idea of pervasive wireless data access for consumer devices changes everything. While I was there buying I bought a couple more books I would also probably like, all based on the random receipt of a little message that triggered a chain of ideas in my brain.

Exploiting the fact that we can instantly react to little random messages in a commercially relevant sense regardless of location seems likely to be a feature of the next 50 years in which we will see huge growth. As more and more things become encoded ideas — as stuff becomes data — the capacity to receive it on the go includes the capacity to pay for it in order to receive it. What all that stuff might be is changing constantly (the other day I read about a guy with his resin-layering 3D printer making a bottle opener just as he needed it on the train — so what if I could instantly download the plans for whatever I happen to need right now?) and right now it’s mostly media. Books (weird that they are last so far), music, video, software, are obvious. What else is coming?

I guess to be accurate we are always living in a new culture. And when you get old, change probably also seems to be occurring at an especially rapid rate. I’m not sure the ways that things can change has ever changed this fast though. I’m not sure we can keep track of the cans of worms we are opening up. Every miraculous new commercial venture that sells something no one ever thought to buy before seems like the surface of something much more amazing, but not as instantly appealing. Are we missing some important things?

Technologies that are still nascent but will be industrialized in the next while include thin-film power sources (which means any electronic device you have now could be on a two dollar sticker soon — think about how that changes things) and magnetic resonance power transmission (wireless power). That means you could slap up a wireless camera anywhere for pocket change. So could anyone else. That means we have to think about treating power like data — do we need to encrypt it or is it time to treat it as a shared resource? Treating power like data? What kind of crazy world is this?

For me the amazing thing about the future is not the vast new ideas that we come to grasp. Well that is also amazing. But what really blows me away is what becomes trivial, and which by it’s very nature (trivial) makes it under-examined.

Who knows what avalanche the next tiny message might trigger.

–BMurray

I have talked a bunch about Soft Horizon and I have talked about the |d6 – d6| curve. So, last week, we had a few chances to play with this new curve in a FATE-like ¹ game. Here’s what it does to the game.

The 0-5 range with an EV ² of a little less than 2 has some interesting repercussions. First off, it’s highly predictable. The point at which a success is automatic is the skill itself, so there is less calculation involved in managing the extremes. It also means that the range of fortune in an opposed check is 5 (0 versus 5) instead of the 8 we see in FATE (-4 versus 4). This means that adjustments (aspects and spin) have different effects and we need to consider scaling them.

Because Aspects are only added to your roll (though actually in Soft Horizon we find there will be times when you use them to subtract from your opponent’s roll because this is no longer symmetric and so there’s a tactical choice involved) the scale of effect they have is only interesting if opposing entities have different numbers of Aspects to bring to bear. Generally speaking this is exactly the same problem as in FATE proper, so it’s a non-issue. It didn’t come up as an issue in testing. One thing that did happen, that’s tangential to analysis of the new curve, is that combat compels go away. I think. And that’s good — compelling someone to miss a turn was weak sauce. ³It works, but changing the structure of the conflict scene makes it unnecessary now.

Spin, however, is impacted by the range. Now getting a defensive difference of 3 or more is pretty unlikely and there is also now only one way get a defensive success that does not otherwise have mechanical effect (which inaction is what Spin is intended to offset). So, we fiddled in two ways. You get Spin whenever a defensive roll with no mechanical effect succeeds positively (so a zero result benefits no one, an offensive success has its mechanical effect, and a defensive success grants Spin). And Spin is worth +2 for symmetry, partially to simplify, partially because it’s rarer, and partially because positive bonuses are less interesting in general. Of course now we have to wonder if there’s a way to make spin into a free-taggable scene Aspect, which it has become functionally.

The end result is that Soft Horizon conflict has become very precisely tactical as the effects of fortune are reduced and always positive. When you couple the dice change with the rule that you can’t use the same skill twice in the same turn (and there are three phases and you might defend multiple times in two of them), you get a game that is more about resource management and setting up long term (multiple turn) goals for success. I’m pretty sure I like this — I don’t really like a scene to turn on a die roll unless we come into it with that intent. But it also means there’s a lot of thinking about the game when you play, and unless you are also thinking about how the choices tie to narration, it could be too dry. Personally I find deriving the story from the result to be about as fun as role-playing games get, next to good conversation between interesting characters with no mechanism at all intervening, so I think I’m cool with it. It won’t fly in every venue though.

So the resources you are managing are:

Your skills. Because you use them up for the turn and because there is significant disparity between your skills (you have one at 5, two at 2, and three at 0), you are carefully choosing whether you need to spend your best shot in support (Maneuvering to place and Aspect), in control (gaining battlefield superiority in order to manage who is where), or in combat. And even then, that’s not the end of that story: you may need to defend against a hostile Maneuver or a combat action, and so you may need to preserve your apex skill for defense, intrinsically limiting your ability to act otherwise. And that entails risks too, for reasons I may talk about another time.⁴

Your fate points. This is still a FATE game with fate points, and so your ability to bring Aspects to bear depends a lot about your fate point management. And that is coupled with the fact that there are no strictly mechanical ways to get new fate points when the game is played as a wargame, though it is certainly the case that story-level compels can happen during the fight, and that might be stronger here than in Diaspora.

Your free tags (including Spin). These are the things that change the course of the battle because they can be stacked and they cost nothing, but they are a resource because they either disappear or become regular Aspects (depending on context) once used. And because there is a Maneuver phase every turn, there can be a lot of them piling up. Using them when you are desperate can deny a killing blow to your pal. The sacrifice play becomes informed by many things now, including taking a bad hit in order to lure your opponent into the loose ground that your ally will use to push the enemy over into a fatal fall. Sure, you could use it to avoid injury….

Overall I’m pleased. Obviously a ton more playtesting is in the cards, but this has lots of pretty symmetries and other reasons for me to love it. I am pretty sure that this is the direction of travel from here on out for this game.

–BMurray

I’ve seen a few discussions around town about game balance and the joys and heartaches of it. The necessity of it and the irrelevance of it have been amply elaborated on. Even ambivalence to it has been addressed. So what more is there to say?

The discussion itself is largely a mismatch in objectives.

The thing is, “balance”, whatever that is (and it’s worth pausing to note that it’s so weakly defined that any argument can be put forth strongly on any side), is an implementation detail and we keep reading about it as though it were a requirement (or that its contrary was a requirement). Balance is not a requirement. Rather it is a way to achieve something else.

Now it’s unfair of me to imply that no one else sees this — everyone who talks about it bangs on the idea in some way or other, from some direction, but let me try to whittle it down and expose it and see what sorts of things satisfy the real requirement (if there is one). My instinct here is that both camps have the same requirement and different implementations, but I could be out to lunch here.

A typical role-playing game assumes that we have some small number of people, from 3-6 (yes some games are different and yes, you often play with only two people or as many as thirty but who cares) and that one will mediate and the others act and react under her mediation. Now, in this arrangement everyone wants to have a good time playing this role-playing game. Presumably, that means they want their characters (their roles) to get some time engaging the problems presented and managed by the mediator. Some may want more of this time and some might want less, but everyone is there at least nominally to get some of it.

It is a well-known fact that humans do not communicate well when everyone talks at once.

These two facts work together to demand some kind of turn-taking, whether it’s a round system (you, she goes, he goes, I go…) or a scripting system (we all write down our orders and reveal them, taking turns narrating it or letting a mediator narrate it) or whatever. We can’t all talk at once. We all are there to talk.

Okay so we have humans competing for talking time. This is usually called “spotlight” but I am not calling it that because lots of folks use the term to also or solely mean time when the story is about their character. I’m only a little bit interested in that, because it’s satisfiable by the mediator talking about your character and that’s not what I care about.

Some people want more and some people want less, but everyone is there to get a share of the role-playing time. So that’s the requirement: everyone wants a piece of the pie.

In a game where most interaction is mechanical or derived from mechanism, the way you get some face time is by having dice to throw.

In a game where most interaction is free-form, the way you get some face time is by manipulating the mediator, whether socially or through rules that might exist for getting her attention.

Now we can see how balance is an implementation: one way to make sure everyone gets the face time they want is to make sure that all of their characters are equally capable so that each player has the opportunity to engage the story with a play that is strategically appropriate.¹ Where a table (that is, a game plus a certain group of people) is all about cool stories and not explicit success in task resolutions, everyone still wants their face time but they may prefer to fail in order to get a cool scene about failure.  Or about how weak their participation is and how badly they feel about that.

And there’s where balance as a requirement grinds.

Balance (and its brother, niche protection) is a way to manage certain kinds of face time. Lack of balance is also a way to manage certain kinds of face time. So the requirement a designer needs to get her head around answers the question, “What sorts of face time should my game guarantee?”

Niche protection follows the answer “everyone must have something to do on average”.

Balance follows the answer “everyone must succeed as often as everyone else”. ²

Lack of balance follows the answer “everyone should be able to bring a novel story to the narrative”. Maybe. Something like that, anyway. I am waving my hands here.

These implementations (with the possible exception of niche protection when you look at it funny) all focus on what we can do for the character or the player. I wonder how interesting that is. Let’s explore a little.

Something I am always conscious of (partially because I have been openly critical of games that are not conscious of it) is the fact that we have many people at the table and each correlates to a character in play. Yes, that’s a very traditional structure. For games that lie outside this expectation, move on — I suspect that the whole issue we’re on about here is uninteresting for those games.³ We can get all mechanical and balance things and protect niches, but all of that is addressing symptoms. Let’s examine a systemic approach to the disease.

What if your game acknowledges this structure as a basic premise and uses it, providing some way to manage the group activity rather than patch individual activity? What if, because your game will be played by multiple people acting roughly in concert, your game is also about multiple characters acting roughly in concert? And I mean “about” in a deep way, not just that it happens to be true, but rather that the game deliberately and mechanically supports exactly this. The setting implies or demands it. The mechanisms support it. The players are told that it is expected. From the moment you start making characters, it is clear.

It strikes me that any mechanisms that support this necessarily also support face time issues.

And this is why Diaspora and soon Soft Horizon have calculated success curves for resolution that are best managed by supporting action. In Diaspora it’s mostly a hint (really successful tactical play requires teamwork but you can get by, often boringly, without it) and I think in Soft Horizon it will be a demand (many challenges will be impossible for a lone individual to succeed at).

Again, this is implementation. It is not the case that all games should do this.

If it is not likely, mechanically, for a single character to succeed at an important task without support, then two things happen. First, the table of players must communicate to develop a strategy for success, and second, the characters must act in concert (each getting face time for their piece of the puzzle) in order to execute the plan. By assuming a team and developing a system that expects (or demands) a team, we get team participation both in and out of the narrative. We don’t actually care about balance, necessarily (though in these particular games we have it) and we don’t care about niche protection. We can have it or not and still get (and eat) our cakes.

Games where each player acts alone and in turn (I swing with my sword. I cast my spell. I heal the fighter) bore the hell out of me. Having a niche is a partial solution, but it assumes a certain tactical pattern for success and that also bores the hell out of me — when I play D&D, say, I like it when everyone decides to play a thief. The heterogeneous party that the mechanisms of the game expect (more with every revision) are stultifying. Assuming only that the challenges are overcome by teams and not by a succession of individual actions is way cooler.

To me, in my opinion, your mileage may vary. Bottom line, though, is that balance is an implementation detail. So let’s stop arguing about whether or not it’s a requirement.

–BMurray

So we are getting close to closing out another quarter (our financial year at the VSCA is a little wacky and one day I may clean that up, but also maybe not) and the last three months will probably our best yet. No one is close to quitting any day jobs — we’re still looking at maybe a week’s worth of regular work pay in three month’s time, but not bad for not doing any new work at all. Anyway, that’s slowing down a lot now: I expect the upcoming quarter will be our weakest though I hope to see some rebound after Evil Hat’s spotlight time moves on (Dresden Files is doing amazingly well — kudos to Fred and the team!)

Anyway, thanks to everyone who lobbied for us to produce a PDF. That turned out to be profitable as well as a useful education, and I’ll say it clearly to anyone who’s still holding their breath: you were right.

I was right too, which makes that easier to say of course.

The past is fun, but the future (especially for someone with a reputation for science-fictional interests) is more fun. And so, here’s what’s coming. I can’t announce dates yet.

Diaspora. Yes we are still doing stuff with Diaspora, though not creating new content. Sometime in the next few months we’ll be getting Diaspora printed through a cheaper printing service so that we can supply it in bulk to IPR and consequently get in more physical stores. This has never been a huge priority for us, but the cash flow is sufficient now that it doesn’t actually burden us much to do it — and keeping this thing fun and riskless has always been a priority. We are doing this for a good time and cheap whiskey and not much else. It’s also a low priority because I don’t want to get stepped on by the giant releases in the FATE and FATE-ish world around now — Dresden Files from the aforementioned Evil Hat and ICONS from Adamant Entertainment. I don’t want to step on their toes either, but it would be a little egotistical of me to claim that was likely — these guys are selling the hell out of great products.

Hollowpoint. This is a strange beast that burst into my head just about whole after spending a weekend re-reading 100 Bullets and then chatting with JB about dice systems for Chimaera. Basically we worked out a cool system for his game and then while he was thinking about it I went away and wrote Hollowpoint to use it. I stole his toys. I am a bad man.

This is okay, because Hollowpoint is about bad men. It’s about a crew (and this is essential — this is not a game about a group of individual heroes) or maybe even more about a mission (the crew can be secondary as you’ll discover). The crew is super-competent, very cool, not necessarily all that smart, and they love their violent, dirty, underhanded, evil work. They love the noise and the smell of a gunfight. They do not argue but rather they act.

So this game is very much crafted around the idea of a mission and will include tools to build that at least as carefully (okay probably more carefully) as the characters are crafted. This game is not an opportunity to create a deep understanding of a single character (though that could happen) and in that sense it owes a debt to 3:16 (Gregor Hutton’s game over at Box Ninja) I suppose. Certainly it arrived in my head after playing a bunch of 3:16. It is an opportunity to sit down with a minimum of preliminary fuss and run an exciting and twisty heist or investigation-turned-sour or extended chase or double-cross. Or really anything with guns and shouting.

It will contain swearing and you will probably want to swear while playing it. In tests it runs about 2-3 hours a session, so it’s fast. You will be encouraged to let your character die in order to get two cool scenes all to yourself — one where you die, and one where you play the replacement berating the team for getting a valuable member killed. ¹ It’s fast, unusual, and a lot of fun. You can run a campaign, but in doing so the running constant is really the organization that employs the characters — that’s what you’ll come to love and elaborate, because the characters will come and go.

Hollowpoint is basically done as far as design and development goes. This week I’ll box it all up and start writing it as a flat document (which means no one else can directly modify it) and we’ll start editing and playtesting from this document. So you will stop seeing the current rev at the skunkworks and we’ll start making a real artifact. It’s a short game (Toph says around 20K words) so I bet we can have this laid out and read for sale in the fall. But I am not committing to that.

Soft Horizon. This game is suddenly interesting me a lot after a bunch of time on the shelf. It’s getting a lot of fairly deep revision now in the skunkworks and so it’s not coming out any time soon. It needs a lot of playtesting too.

This is a game about fantastic heroes like Elric or Conan or Den. It’s Heavy Metal and it’s stream-of-consciousness (a la Mobius). If you read The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius or Arzach and loved it, you’ll hit your stride playing Soft Horizon. Heroes in this game are individual wonders that you will want to explore over the course of a campaign and hopefully the environment is too. The setting is, like Diaspora, loosely defined through the game mechanisms and largely developed during a first session of cluster generation. This cluster, however, is a group of planes that are of interest to some pantheon of deities and the characters are people who can act across planes and have an interest in opposing or siding with these gods. These are big characters. We don’t care about their farm-boy period. They have already had adventures and already bear scars. Now they are icons of their specific competences — a Soft Horizon character whose best skill is Sorcery is the sorceror in the cluster and not a sorceror. An advancement system will not be necessary, but some system for change will be.

The actual mechanisms under the covers in this game are actually still in flux. It was originally intended as a FATE game but we are still thinking (as anyone following this blog has already seen). New dice are implying new resources and, well, everything is moving. So I don’t see this getting out of the skunkworks soon but if the enthusiasm remains high it could. A lot of new text has gone in over the past few days and it’s feasible this could see print by the end of the year.

The other two games, Chimaera and Soulscape, do not show signs of being released this year so I won’t talk about them in detail. They both remain interesting and are both getting work, but the former needs some time alone with itself and the latter needs a champion to drag it out and wonder what it is out loud at the table.

Oh Jack just told me the Lulu cheque came in. It’s a little lower than last quarter but this time around we get to add two deposits from RPGNow. The total is about 35% over last quarter’s profits per author. So we will look back, I think, on this as a peak period for Diaspora and the start of some great new things. I hope you all are open to new ideas, heartless violence, some cussing, poetic tales of strange people in strange places, the motives of gods, and a little risk.

I’m in, at any rate.

–BMurray

What is the FATE system?

This is getting asked all over the place, though most vocally over at RPG.net and on the FATE mailing list. It’s interesting because the current incarnation of FATE is basically a list of exemplar works that declare themselves to be FATE. This is not actually all that helpful because each tries to bring some new ideas to bear (it’s not fun just applying paint to an old game and calling it new — you want to improve it) and file off stuff from other exemplars that doesn’t work for you. And so the resulting definition of FATE is the intersection of all these exemplars and the intersection is both small and shrinking.

So my declaration is this (and it’s typical B.Murray vaguery): until there’s an official document declaring what FATE v3 is, no one knows what FATE v3 is.

Okay, so now I can tell you what I think it is.

First, FATE v3 is a core resolution mechanism that is not unique to it: fixed measure of competence + fortune + narrative benefit versus target value or opposed roll. The common expression of this, or rather the canonical one as in Spirit of the Century, is Skill + Fudge dice + Aspect invoke/tag. I think it’s fair to say that a game that doesn’t do some variation of this is probably not FATE v3. But lots of games do pretty much this and are certainly not FATE games.

So FATE v3 is also characters with Aspects. And so we need to define Aspects. Characters have Aspects if they have one or more descriptive phrases that can confer mechanical benefit (see “narrative benefit” above) at the cost of a narrative currency: the fate point. And so here I will say that the fate point and therefore the existence of a fate point economy (which at a minimum is used for mechanical benefit) is a FATE v3 requirement. I think that we also need to include the Compel as essential: there has to be a way to get as well as spend fate points.

I think that’s it. Everything else can come and go. Consequences are special Aspects. Stress tracks are completely detachable. Stunts are wildly malleable (as we’ve seen) and don’t need to exist at all. But a game where you roll dice and add skills, then narrate in your features and pay for the result is FATE. A game where you are shilling around for more of these points is also FATE.

Well that means that a good canonical statement of what is necessary to be FATE v3 shouldn’t take more than a half-dozen pages or so. And then six hundred pages of stuff you can glue onto it.

The end result of this is that I don’t know if any of the upcoming VSCA games are going to be FATE games now. Let’s look.

Hollowpoint. Dice pools that owe more to ORE than anything else and no points economy at all. Aspects are their own economy, burned when used. Certainly not FATE.

Soft Horizon. Tricky one because we’re just now thinking hard about changes. Certainly it’s FATE-like — the resolution is skill + dice + aspects, but the dice are in flux (could be |d6 – d6| — see the skunkworks). So far it retains a fate point economy as well, so I’ll call this one FATE on my own terms, but it could be debated.

Soulscape. I don’t know. We need to revisit this design before we know what it is. It is imagined as a pretty straightforward FATE v3 game but that was a long time ago and I think it could benefit from something more deliberately addressing its premises.

Chimaera. This game is, unsurprisingly, the most chimaeric. It uses a cool dice pool mechanism that’s distinctly unFATElike, and uses an Aspects-as-economy system not unlike Hollowpoint rather than a strict fate point economy. It also has some very cool dice-as-record-keeping tools that are fun to manipulate and also very much not FATE. I think we’ll call this “partially inspired by” but to be honest it’s more inspired by the play we got from FATE games than by the games themselves.

I guess that as players and designers we are continuously evolving our games and we don’t feel any particular attachment to whatever the core of FATE is, partially because it hasn’t been clearly stated. And I think that, even if it was, now we’d be as happy to say “it’s not FATE really” as “it’s another FATE game!” I mean, I get that there is a kind of built-in audience for FATE games just as with any other generic identity because there’s a community associated with it even though the definition is nebulous.

Maybe that’s at the heart of it — I would like for FATE to remain poorly defined exactly so that the community remains diverse and open to experiments and hacks. Hacking on it is what got me into design in the first place. It made the VSCA exist. I’d hate to lose that spirit in that community and a rich and rigid definition would risk killing it.

So here’s to FATE: skill + dice + aspects to resolve, and a fate point economy in action all through play. Hah, six pages indeed.

–BMurray

One of the problems that a lot of us have in game design is that it’s all too easy to get your brain stuck in the mechanism. I don’t mean in the mechanism of the game (the way that, mechanically, the game is going to deliver the experience you want) but rather way deeper in the nuts and bolts. Specifically, it’s easy to get really into a cool way to roll and interpret dice.

This is a potential disaster. Cool ways to roll dice are just not all that interesting. Unless, that is, they deliver something particular, nifty, and intentional. Okay, actually intentional is not necessary but it sure puffs you up as a designer.

The crux of any dice system is the probabilities it delivers. Typically what you’re choosing between is a small number of interesting distribution curves — linear ones, like a simple d20 roll; nice peaked curves like multiple dice summed; and stark triangles with a zero peak, like d6 – d6.

While working on the games we are currently planning, we have to confront the Fudge Dice. There’s a lot of FATE inspiration in our work and some even look very much like FATE, but there’s also the fact that we are pulling some of the novel concepts from Diaspora into the games, and Diaspora uses Fudge dice. So when, for example, we re-purpose cluster generation, we have to decide whether the whole game can use Fudge dice or whether the cluster system can be effectively rebuilt with something different to match the new game. Or, least appealingly, we might use Fudge dice in one place and something else somewhere else (and it’s interesting that this bugs my when AD&D used five different kinds of dice back before your creepy d10 and that didn’t and doesn’t bug me).

So while working on Chimaera, which relies heavily on a cluster generation variant but uses d6 for the most part, we danced around the dice a lot. The resolution system is cool and pretty novel and we didn’t really want to mess with it, but the d6 – d6 triangular distribution was not working either — the zero peak was too low and the extremes too high. Then we (I say we because I can’t remember who) stumbled on this curve: |d6 – d6|.

You get this by rolling two d6 and subtracting the smaller from the larger. It’s basically the d6 – d6 curve folded around the zero and it’s a cool curve. It turns out to be ideal for Chimaera‘s community statistics (which don’t really need a negative — they are very well defined and terminal at zero).

You get a lot of zeros — 1 time in 6. But the peak is now at 1 instead of zero, so fully half of your rolls will (in the long run) fall on 1 or 2, which is desperate but functional territory in Chimaera. Score! 3 is as rare as zero, and five is remote at 1 in 18. You won’t usually see any 5s at the table during community generation, but it will happen and much more often than the Diaspora extremes, making the communities vary more but not in undesirable ways.

The fact that this only needs two dice is also cool — no fistfulls, though the rest of the game satisfies the desire to wield many dice. It strikes me that it could be a pretty nifty resolution tool as well, using, say Skill + |d6 – d6|, because if zero is failure then you have a relatively low chance of failing on average (low whiff factor), a good chance of doing adequately or even well, and smaller chances of extreme success.

Is there a downside to having no negative result? I’m not sure it matters mathematically because labeling the results exactly as their sum is actually kind of arbitrary — you could translate the result anywhere up or down the number line by adding or subtracting from it and get a different curve. Subtract 1 if you want your peak at zero, say. There is, however, something visceral about roll four minus results on Fudge dice — just seeing all those little failures is an emotional let down. I think that generally you want that — you want a roll that sucks to look like it sucks.

So I don’t know if there’s a resolution system to be built over this curve but I’d like to see it. None of our games at the moment demand it so I’m not really experimenting with it in any detail. But that shouldn’t stop you. If you make something nifty with this (or know of someone else who already has — I haven’t really researched it or anything), shout!

–BMurray

Addendum: I just realized that because all of the bars are even numbers, this maps perfectly onto a range from 1-18, which is D&D stats ranges. And it implies that there is specialness in the ranges 1-3 (0), 4-8 (1), 9-12 (2), 13-15 (3), 16-17 (4), and 18 (5). And so I’m now wondering if there’s not a very cool way to map this dice system onto D&D stats and get rid of both the d20 and the funky stat bonus calculation by applying stats directly somehow.

So last night we did a playtest session of Soft Horizon. A playtest session usually means that we do a “first session” and then talk about the results and about mechanism and then maybe divide up duties to progress the project. If the last session was a “first session” then it will be a regular session instead and we’ll probably discuss mechanism in the context of our play. We haven’t been together for a Soft Horizon game for a while, so last night was a “first session”.

No, this is not another trick post that appears to be about stunts and then turns out to be about Herman Melville.

So we got cool characters and places. We have a world that is an enormous living buddha, his lap forming a still ocean and his head crowned with castles. We have a place where the mountains move as slow, slow, giant things lumber across the world. We have a place where winds whistle and flute through the intricate caverns that men now inhabit and where they harness the wind for power — one of these caves crosses the planes, terminating in the buddha’s ear, and is to him the soft whisper of the shakahachi. We have a character who has vowed to never again lead his clockwork armies in war and whom the gods envy. We have a terrible fighter of the monsters at Spyglass, now seeking peace. And we have a diplomat known to everyone who can broker bargains between the very elements but who cannot find for himself a goal worthy of effort.

Big stuff! This game is ostensibly FATE, though there are deep changes, huge elisions, and constant debate over whether Fudge dice are right for it (they still are, for carefully and repeatedly considered reasons). There are skills with a crafted structure that is even more pyramid than the pyramid (that is, even more deliberately designed to guide into the apex skill). And there are aspects, though again with more structure, using the scope concept from Diaspora as a central feature on the character sheet.

There are no stunts.

But maybe there are. See, stunts are so nebulous in definition that this other thing we have, Duty, can easily be called a stunt without confusion.

A stunt is, in its heart, an ancient form of game-design complexity. It has some deep-rooted appeal in human brains. It is permission to break a rule. It has boundaries: you can only break this rule, and you can only do it in this fashion or at this time. When you get “taken out”, if it happens off-screen, you can show up in the next scene, dusting yourself off (under some circumstances, taken out for just means “skip to the next scene” rather than “out of the game”). You can use your Surgery skill for Laser Weapons when fighting the animals you studied for years (probably humans). Once per session you can use your Amazing Thing as though it were any piece of gear (you are not strictly bound by the implicit logic of gear: that a thing does what you think it does and that you only have things you say you have).

I say ancient because I can trivially trace it to chess, where pawns have at least three stunts I can think of (they attack on a different axis than they move, they can kill in passing in very special circumstances, and if they reach certain squares they change into a more powerful piece) and the king-rook pair have one (the formalized dance of castling). But many (most?) games have something like it. Some use it heavily (card exceptions in Monopoly spring to mind, as do instruction squares in Candyland) and some are almost composed of the concept (Magic: The Gathering where every card is a kind of stunt/exception and the basic rules are in manipulating these exceptions).

You could also look at stunts (and all these other examples — I want to keep the mapping) as new and highly specialized rules that have owners. Sometimes the owners are tied to a game artifact (a space on the board or a kind of playing piece) which is a weak version, and sometimes the owners are the players (a card or a character feature) which is a stronger version.

Obviously, looking at them this way and with the eye of a software designer, these look like patchwork kludges glued into the system as it evolved over time as ways to make the rules more finicky, more novel, and more distinct per player/place/time. They are cheap ways to increase the need for mastery, I guess, as they are all special cases you have to know about. However, because they are pervasive, they are no longer this thing because they are also now an expected part of game design. So now we have mechanisms that attempt to undo the mastery requirement: in chess you still need to know about en passant, an obscure rule for novices, but in Magic: The Gathering precise instructions for how to wield your exception are printed right on the playing piece that grants it to you.

Now with that as the core concept of stunt, FATE stunts have two problems that I have danced around before. If you own Diaspora, you already know part of that dance. First, because they are unrelated kludges, they become shopping lists. I don’t like shopping lists in most of my gaming. Second, they lack a deep relationship to the rest of the system.

However, beyond being just kludges and expected, they deliver something useful and are analogous to something interesting (precisely because they are not deeply related to the system): they differentiate the character by giving him something novel even within the rules (because they are exceptions) and they provide a way to make exception/supernatural/magical powers be analogously exceptional in the rules. To analyze this further would require deep wondering about what magic really is in games — to think about why we try to balance it and attach costs to it that are far more onerous than we would apply to mundane skills. Doing that makes us further think hard about the nature of supernature and decide whether it is appropriate to treat magic as an exception. In some settings the answer will be YES! In others NO! I think rarely will the answer be other than all-capped and exclaimed. Well maybe you can damp no.

So in Soft Horizon one of the unspoken conceits is that magic is absolutely, totally, understandably, consistently, real. It is not an exception to natural law. It is part of (if not the basis of — there is no science skill, after all, but there is a sorcery skill) nature. It is therefore not appropriately a stunt in this game. It nonetheless needs constraining because all natural skills have constraints — it’s just that the ones we are actually familiar with have constraints like “physics” which we understand at least intuitively. I can’t use my talent for firearms to conjure a bunny. But, unconstrained, I could probably convincingly narrate puncturing my enemy’s liver with magic.¹ So there’s no intuitive constraint but a constraint is necessary. We solved that with a couple of rules and observations and it’s not what this post is about. I’ll tease though: magic only operates on elements, which are different per plane and the character sheet is drawn such that the place sorcery resides on it implies things about what it does and to who.

So, anyway, we don’t have a strong need for stunts in the usual sense. Here’s what we do have, though: characters in Soft Horizon are propelled through story by their Duty. Duties have three components: an obligation, a punishment for failure, and a power. The obligation is doable but requires deliberate action. The punishment is harsh but negotiable. The power is interesting, engaging the player.

Obligations include things like changing a statistic on a plane: your duty demands that you organize the entropic or return natural dominance to the satanic mills.

Punishments are all of the form: achieve your obligation or be taken out. When taken out you can always negotiate a concession. So when you fail you can retire your character or establish some new complication to her life and her world. But you have to do something, and something big.

And the powers are cool. In a lot of cases they are pure player-stroking, which I recently discovered is amazingly satisfying in play. You want to make players feel like their characters achieved something really important? Have an NPC that they like tell them that they are awesome. Seriously that’s it. No gold pieces, no experience points, no fate points, no level-ups, no potions, no coins, no dinguses. Have a kid come up to them after a successful mission and exclaim she wants to be just like you when she grows up! You want proof that this works? Fire up World of Warcraft or you XBox or practically any other multi-million dollar gaming property (unlike our austere and therefore comparatively under-explored niche). Now look at achievements. For the most part all they do is announce to others that you’re special. Other players. They codify bragging rights, and they are generally adored. Well, so implies the flow of money, anyway.

So while some powers are mechanical to provide certain niches not appropriate to skills (like Horizonwalker, whose power is the ability to move between planes without using a gate), most are things like “Everyone knows you” or “If you want to talk to a god, the god wants to talk to you”. These are narrative attaboys that constantly apply as well as being story facilitators. In a way they are bits of authority stripped from the referee — a character with the Noble Role is known everywhere — the referee can’t contrive a place where she is unknown unless the player is complicit because the player owns that fact.²

So are Duties stunts? Well, we didn’t call them stunts, so maybe not. But they fill a similar role. They differentiate, certainly. They provide the player with ownership of a piece of the rules (or an exception to them, depending on your viewing angle). So yeah, kinda. Kinda not. But most stunts are kinda and kinda not. They are aggravating little kludges that reek of shitty design. And they rock.

–BMurray

Haha, you thought this was going to be about Stunts, I bet.

I mentioned before that I’m reading Herman Melville (specifically, Billy Budd) and that it’s making me think about things and write stuff and write funny. Actually I owe a lot to Melville but only recently have I read his work with an eye to what he’s really doing in the text, and now of course I am wondering if it applies to games. And if so how. I might not explore that bit here but I’ll talk about my observations and maybe application will suggest itself.

There’s this rule of story-telling that often is given the weight of axiom but that I suspect is more like a canard. It has penetrated gaming as well and I think it’s poisonous: “show, don’t tell”. Symptoms of this disease include learned scientist characters that explain high-school physics to each other. I expect that it has something to do with “flow” and I will posit that it’s the cheap path to that sort of immersion. Personally, I want to be immersed in the book and not just the story. And so, Melville: he doesn’t just tell, he expounds. Billy Budd has eight chapters near the beginning that comprise one huge essay on 19th century naval warfare. You want this knowledge in order to appreciate all of what follows because part of the story is the technical exercise of discovering what people do inside the framework of this history, but rather than assume the knowledge or, worse, contrive a way for characters to reveal it, he just tells you!

Man I wish more people would ditch the clever subversion and just tell me things I need to know.

Partly he gets away with this (and there’s an irony in here I bet) because he is the narrator. That is, the narrator is not absent or abstracted and he’s not a character revealing the story. The author is the narrator — a direct and clear descendant of the campfire orator. He tells you stuff, anticipates questions, goes back and forth, lingers on stuff he likes, skips over stuff he doesn’t, and explains his position when it seems to need explaining. The narrator is present. I like that. I think it has direct relevance to gaming where there is no question that the GM (or anyone else supplying narration for that matter) is present. We should leverage that rather than pretend it’s not true.

Now because he is present, the narrator can also do some really cool things unrelated to exposition. Let’s take for example the scene after Budd’s trial where Captain Vere is entering his cell to explain the sentence — that Budd is going to be hanged because that’s what the law demands even though everyone knows that morally Budd was not in the wrong and that everyone involved feels wretched about it. Melville steps back and gives them some privacy. Not figuratively, mind you — he doesn’t omit the narration. And not as a demand of the point-of-view — the narrator could consistently describe exactly what happens in the cell. But rather he chooses to say, in effect, “this is a private moment and we don’t know what was actually said, but we can surmise it was something like this because these people feel this way”. It’s an amazingly intimate moment precisely because it has been granted privacy and yet still somehow narrated. The reader is complicit in feeling they deserve their privacy! You are drawn into a sympathetic relationship with the author — not the narrator as a character, or a character explicit in the text, but with the writer as he writes. With the story-teller.

The last thing I want to call out is the way Melville uses volume of text to suck you in. The trial itself is a great example — over and over we are informed that this is a summary matter of law. There is no way this can end except a guilty finding and a capital sentence. But the jurists agonize over it. The captain explains that he knows everyone feels this is unjust and he knows it is unjust and this is why it is and that is why it doesn’t matter and this is why it doesn’t sit well but that is why we must honour this duty in a time of war. Reading this scene, I am (without realizing it) drawn into a role. This is not just a place where we are experiencing flow, sympathizing and losing oneself in the moment. What I found myself doing  is going through the same motions I imagine (not told!) the jurists are going through: trying to find a way out of this mess. Trying to find a way to save Billy Budd.

This is awesome. This novel is a role-playing game. I get technical background information delivered to me in an efficient fashion. I get characters that are interesting. And I find myself in a strangely active role while reading it! I don’t really know who my character is or what his capabilities are, but that is not affecting my experience, which is also interesting. In fact, by the end of the trial I know how my story might have diverged and so in a sense Melville has delivered multiple branching stories, most of which I have given myself by taking the role he offers implicitly.

This may not so much give me license to break “immersion” at my table (Melville does it so I can) as explain why it doesn’t bother me. Hell that’s too weak. The fact that I am really enjoying Melville, immersing myself in all aspects of what he’s delivering as well as the fact that it’s a multi-faceted delivery not content with merely conveying story as pure story, explains why this is not just okay but highly desirable to me in my gaming. If an sf game pauses with a divergence on the current knowledge regarding degenerate matter, along with some examples and possible ramifications, before proceeding to the narrative proper that now incorporates this knowledge, I am not tolerant. I am ecstatic. When my game contains story, teaching, acting, divergences (yes I like my parentheses), jokes, mechanical pondering, and all that good stuff ancillary to the story, I am happy. I am experiencing flow. I am “immersed”. And so when Melville packages this up in a “novel” with no apologies and am also happy. And vindicated.

The fact that so many people dislike Melville doesn’t bug me.  I think they are just reacting badly to the constant homoerotic undercurrent.

–BMurray