There’s a gag line over at Story Games that smells like something I once wrote, but my memory is unclear: “I stab him in the hope with my ennui.” It smells like mine because of the word “ennui”.

This is only a half joke, but it’s self-satire, so that’s okay.

Yesterday at lunch I got to talking with JB about the game he’s thinking really hard about and scribbling notes about, Chimaera. This is a very interesting project to me because I am pretty sure I don’t get it. I get what we have built so far, but we have browbeaten JB into making something that’s not quite what he intended. So I get the shared vision but I sense that we missed his personal target. Partly that’s because I can be an obtuse son of a bitch, but also it’s because it’s a hard vision to share without artwork and fictional touchstones, and those are all in his head and unable to escape intact.

We talked about non-violence and about how it would be nice if the game modeled non-violent solutions. Now, in the past we had talked about what non-violent solutions really are and whether that is even fun in a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Do we really want to try to understand our Demon Overlords in order to forge a better relationship with them in which they are no longer interested in sucking us dry and discarding our husks? And if so, how to we make that more attractive than (or attractive at all beside) violent conflict, which we need to model?

The daemons, you see, are defined by the fact that they are unable to use anything but violence to solve problems. You may smell an allegory. So obviously we want humans to behave differently. But why should they?

There are two answers and both are awesome.

The first answer is “mutants”. Mutants in this world are changed flora and fauna that now have powerful capabilities and incomprehensible motives. Flying jellyfish with hallucinogenic stingers that worship play. Amazingly smart bee colonies. That kind of thing. So how does that build on non-violent solutions?

Mutants are the only ally that humanity has in this world against the daemons. But mutants are extremely hard to understand and this uncomprehension often results in violent conflict. Neither humans nor mutants, though, can really afford this with daemons running around starting shit. So, in order to preserve communities, player characters will need to forge alliances with mutants. To do this they will need to understand them. In understanding them (we will see) we acquire ways to influence them non-violently.

The other answer is in the mechanical resolution of non-violence. Here’s the central gag: violence and non-violence are resolved the same way, except that violence gets bonus dice from a central pool (violence is easier) while non-violence adds a die to the central pool (non-violence is harder, but supports the efforts of others). The fact that non-violence indirectly makes violence more effective might be more self-satire or it might be a flash of genius.

The actual resolution is simple: the actor chooses the skill she will be applying to the target. She then also selects the “need” that will be operated on. If the actor is attempting to subvert the need, that’s violence. If the actor is attempting to support the need, that’s non-violence. Dice are rolled, results checked (details uninteresting here) and on success, the target is affected based on the need and the type of operation. So, applying SHOTGUN to HEALTH with VIOLENCE is pretty straightforward, resulting in injury and death. Applying SHOTGUN to HEALTH with SUPPORT might not be a thing at all. Skills might be binary in this regard or might vary, with some being binary and others unary. Special powers or stunts might modify this. But the important thing is that applying RESOURCES to HEALTH with SUPPORT has a story — offering to bring medical aid in to make things better for the target and perhaps her community. And this might be very persuasive indeed. Supporting checks, then, are not the same kinds of things as violence checks. Violence inflicts things (injury, slavery, insanity) but support discovers things — yes, she is indeed very concerned about the health of her friends and this offer would be very welcome indeed.

So how does this help? Glad you asked. Mutants have non-needs either instead of or as well as human needs. And you don’t know what they are. So while humans all have a need for MEANING, a certain species of mutant (say those jellyfish) might have a need for ENTROPY. This looks easy, right? Just support their need for entropy and all is well! Except that you don’t know that. It’s a secret. A key that the referee hides. And so when entering a conflict with an unknown species, you will need to take a turn or two to use your knowledge talents (whether lore or science or communing-with-the-weird or psychic-horseshit) to discover their needs.

However, SHOTGUN to the HEALTH pretty much always works. You can always kill your opponent because it is alive, treating it as an object in the most extreme fashion. The temptation, therefore, is to use violence to solve local (me, now) problems, which inhibits the solution of larger scale (community and long-term) problems. You can act reflexively and effectively at the cost of longer reaching effectiveness. But if all you do is touchy-feely stuff, you’ll also have a whack of dice for when the daemons show up, and they like violence. But you are prepared, because you have been building good-will and alliances and have a crapton of dice in the KICK ASS pool now.

Does it work? I have no idea. Needs play.

–BMurray

Okay two things feed this. First is last week’s playtest of Soft Horizon, in which we experimented with a zero refresh for fate points and a central pool that you draw from when you narrate with a scope reference. So basically, when you play to the points you said were interesting about your character, you take a point. This unburdens the ref a bit — your character being your character is no longer my problem. When you do what you said you wanted to do, you pay yourself. I’ll make sure there are times to do that. If you are a HEARTLESS SON OF A BITCH then you can pay yourself when you act that way. I can concentrate on making the universe react amusingly (negatively perhaps) and you can take your chances by playing your character. That strikes me as a more interesting framing (at our table anyway) than the standing Fate compel system, which is unreliable in action (some tables report awesome, some report fizzle, and the causes are not well understood).

The second thing pouring in is Toph’s great actual plays from Hollowpoint with kids. Kids really dig playing the bad guys, and that shines through these crisp little reports. Anyway, what is doing the feeding here is the difficulty with the teamwork pool. And the difficulty is such that I’m thinking of throwing it away altogether. And so I sketched up an alternative.

Okay back to the first. During that Soft Horizon playtest someone produced an awesome little bit of narration and, in total violation of the rules, Bob (who shall not otherwise be named lest his true identity be revealed, which embarrasses him despite the fact that he plays games with AWARD WINNING AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS) reached into the pool and handed the awesome guy a fate point.

That’s now a rule.

You could do this in Hollowpoint.

I re-invented fan mail. Prime Time Adventures is the most famous for this sort of mechanism and I’ve known about it for ages. But I had to see it happen spontaneously to really get it: players like rewarding each other. I think that as I prefer games with a referee there is a lot of residual baggage I have about who gets to do what, and rewards are traditionally bound to the ref. But there is really no good reason to avoid letting the players do this for each other (assuming you manage this mechanically somehow, and I’ll go there, but you could rely on trust, too, and that is a big deal for us — the Table is Trust).

So in Soft Horizon you can do what Bob did. If someone is awesome, anyone can pay them from the pool. This is self-regulating on a couple of points: there are only so many chips in the pool, and no one wants to look foolish at the table by offering rewards for stupid shit. There is too much trust and respect and naked fear of humiliation.

So maybe in Hollowpoint, teamwork isn’t nearly as important as being awesome. So instead of a convoluted system of ask and accept or reject and stuff, a fixed pool of dice goes in the middle of the table, and whenever someone narrates something awesome, any player can give that awesome player a die. You could get a die from everyone if you are truly amazing. And you can hoard those or spend them as you like (save your awesome for the final scene). Because of the way the dice stats in Hollowpoint work, this even has a nice richochet effect — if you roll a lot of dice, you increase the chance that you will get badly burned by your cockiness (hubris if you are using a serious tone): you will likely get a big fate set and go first, and then have nothing left to follow up with. This is the mechanism behind leaping out from behind cover, guns blazing, only to discover you are out of ammunition and standing alone by the pool, looking at a dozen bad guys with Uzis.

This all wanders around the fact that players get lazy and stop narrating their dice and their use of resources. Or the actual narration slacks a little. The ref can prod for it, but that gets old too, and often the dice game is still fun so it’s not really an issue. But those moments of great narration are the stories we tell about the game after, and the stories we tell after are how we generate enthusiasm in others and keep wanting to play. And get more players. So this fan mail, in two new forms, should serve to encourage sustained narrative input. When you burn a trait (shot in the Thin Black Jeans), if it’s awesome you get paid. And so, in theory, you have a little more motivation to be awesome, a motivation that balances against the inherent laziness we all bring to the table to some extent or another.

Some people say you shouldn’t bribe people to do what they already want to do. I disagree. A lot. Just because someone wants to do something doesn’t mean that they have sufficient motivation to actually do it. Adding further incentive can push them over the edge and turn “okay” to “awesome”. If all that costs is a nifty little player-managed resource juggling, fuck yes, count me in.

–BMurray

I had a bit of a revelation on the weekend. It was one of those sustained flash-bulb moments that you’re sure are profound — even prophetic — but that immediately afterwards you realize that almost everyone already knows about this “new” insight. In fact, when done correctly, you realize that you already knew it too. Maybe you forgot it along the way or something.

Over the past year, with the increasing success of Diaspora (such as that success is — I don’t want anyone, especially the Canadian government, to get the idea that we bought yachts with our proceeds or anything), I have been thinking more and more about game design. We’ve had at least five ideas cross the table for new games and perhaps three of them are getting serious attention in alternation. New stuff is getting written every week. Some weeks, every day.

Amidst all this activity is a sense of confidence. Because we did it once, we (by which I mean I) have the strange idea that we know what we’re doing. With this notion comes a desire to cleverly mechanise everything — if there’s something I want the game to do, then there ought to be a mechanism that does that. Not a hand-wavy “hey if this happens then think about it and maybe do this” but a concrete “if you have seven points then this thing happens which changes your character this way”.

My revelation was this: not every important thing needs a mechanism.

See, I told you it was pedestrian in the light of day. Everyone knows this. But I had been following a path that pointed my head away from this fact, and so when I looked around it was startling.

Oddly, as I apply this new wisdom, I find new mechanism asserts itself. Good mechanism, too, but of a different kind. In particular, we re-discover the stress track. I agree this begs for concrete discussion.

So here’s the issue I was working on when I woke up. In Soft Horizon, there are Duties. Among the Duties a character might have are several that require the player character to change a specific basic statistic of a plane. For example, the Mystic duty requires that the character decrease the Arcana stat of a plane, making magic more occult, mystical, and inaccessible. The problem is that in play there is no mechanism for doing it and, worse, it’s really hard. My hope was that the player with that Duty would exercise a significant effort in driving the narrative towards his interest, but what I discovered is that this is an unfair burden to place on a player in a game with a referee.

There are several reasons for this. First is that there is a referee and so there is an implicit structure to the game that suggests that players ought to follow the ref’s lead if he presents one. That is, when I create a huge visual event with lots of howling and hair-pulling, the players expect me to expect them to investigate it further. And not only is this understandable, it’s also desirable. That’s exactly what you want!

Second, players don’t want to compete against each other in this sort of game. They want to act as a team in a concerted effort to solve problems and make stories about the team. Sure, each wants spotlight time and glory and success, but it’s just plain embarrassing as a player to wind up leading the narration into your guy’s success. When that’s also away from the ref’s preparation, that’s even less comfortable. And so it generally doesn’t happen and when it does it’s less than satisfying.

So I attacked this problem by imaging different mechanisms that would support the Duties without infringing on anyones’ interests. And then the light went on.

This conflict in interests is actually the tool.

Instead of mechanism, I wrote some concrete referee’s advice. It’s basically this: here are a bunch of ways to set up a session so that a specific Duty can be resolved eventually. This has the advantage of being a shortcut for preparing a session (having a simple list of things to prepare beforehand) as well as facilitating the resolution of Duties (the preparation feeds directly into creating scenes that will be about what the Duty-bound character needs). And it’s unmechanized and so it remains free and loose and role-play-ey. And that’s what I want because the game has been stilted so far — the burden of mechanism has created unnatural moments in narration and frustration over meeting goals.

Now that there is a way to resolve a Duty every session, we do need to think about how to keep that from making the plane stats juggle willy-nilly all the time, which feels like it would make players disinvest in them. And so here, as millions have discovered before me, is where the mechanism actually goes: it is inserted to change the pace, to mitigate the results of role-play rather than supplant it. The solution is at least as obvious as my revelation: give each stat a track, and reward the player for changing the track rather than the stat. When the track is exceeded, the stat changes.

And now we know what to do with leftover fate points to (amplify an effect on a track).

Changing a track value (a Trend — Divine Trend, Arcane Trend, Civil Trend) happens by table agreement. When a Trial ends and everyone says “oh yeah, this is a less Arcane place” that’s when the track is altered. It’s tempting to put a mechanism in there — roll some dice — but it is counter-productive. We already know. We don’t need no stinking dice here. Better, because the referee has followed the soft advice, he already knows whether this Trial is a candidate because it’s part of the plan to allow change. Better still, failure may indicate the opposite motion on the Trend and that’s hair-pulling time.

So the key to fixing this whole mechanical issue seems to be stripping out some gears, putting in a gauge, and adding a few thousand words of advice. And even better, this advice is basically to add in the bit that’s been missing in play: cool NPCs that are fun to talk to.

–BMurray

I’ve talked before about compels and how they don’t quite work as described for me. And apparently for a lot of people, actually, judging by fan feedback for Diaspora and other sources. Fact is, at my table they just don’t drive the fate point economy like they are supposed to and I’m not comfortable relying on a mechanism that isn’t actually mechanical — that is, that is really a paint job over the statement “you ought to play this way or it kinda doesn’t work”. I want mechanism to function, every time, or I want no mechanism and a clear statement of intent. I think.

Anyway this all gelled in my head (what a mess) on the way to work this morning as I surfed Story Games and my own notes trying to dream up ways to really ignite my playtest session on Thursday night. It has to do with the way people don’t “get” compels, the resistance to paying players to do what they said they wanted to do, and the way the fate point economy stalls unless everyone is in the same headspace as the designer. And sometimes even that’s no solution.

First, playing with people you know are awesome only demonstrates your game will work with awesome people.¹ So will just chatting up a good story over whiskey. A good game needs to deliver that, not just make it possible. It’s always possible with any game, given the perfect people. We need to at least facilitate it and at best generate it. Which is interesting, because in the last session of Soft Horizon we learned that there is “a machine that makes kings” and that’s what I want in my game.

My instinct is that the solution can’t be complicated. Or at least it can’t be revealed by complication. Once we get its head above ground, we may have to construct a more elaborate trap, but here’s my plan to flush it out.

Eliminate the refresh. You heard me, and thanks Paul Beakley for the revelation (though now I can’t find his post). Characters all start with zero fate points. There are no compels in the game.

The refresh at the beginning of a session starts with the referee putting a big stack of fate points in the middle of the table. All players should be looking at this stack and licking their chops.

Whenever a player makes a decision to act based on one of her Scopes (not Aspects directly!) she mentions or points to or otherwise indicates the Scope (I’m kind of partial to a little ritual here, say starting the decision narration with the Scope text) and takes a fate point from the stack. If anyone thinks it’s dumb we expect them to speak up, just like any time narration generates mechanical effect.

That’s it.

Part of what led me to this is the stuff I already pointed at, but also while I was looking over character sheets for cool stuff to compel, I realized first that I didn’t really want to do the compelling and second that the Scopes are really great decision drivers. And loading up Scopes with more power seems like a good idea to make the number of them a relevant trade-off against the number of Aspects (keeping the zero-sum construction we use now). I mean look at these Scopes:

The Hag (the crazy oracle that allows the party to hop planes)
My Faith
The Lost One (the crazy oracle that allows the party to hop planes)
Asandalos (the god of Death)
Form of a Machine
The Madwoman (the crazy oracle that allows the party to hop planes)
Death Shaman
The Broken Blade
My Reputation
My Ceremonies

As a player, if you were faced with a hard decision and looked down at your character sheet for inspiration, these all pretty much sing to you. And they are containers for Aspects that have a different mechanical use, but also elaborate the context of the Scope. The character sheet becomes a rich place for narrative inspiration for the player and less of a cheat sheet for the referee. And it should be — we spent time and energy and laughter and good liquor in writing those. They should pay us back in play.

So with the compel gone, Aspects are polished to an elegant and glimmering razor’s edge: tag one and get a bonus. That’s it. No whiffling about what you can or can’t demand/request/suggest and no implication that you need to play at a certain minimum correspondence to the authors’ style. Whatever you narrate (though you will want to check out the Hollowpoint section on “Adult Diapers” for a discussion that transcends this) it nets the same benefit, which is the “Can I have a bazooka” effect I talked about earlier. Yes you can.

The only remaining question regarding tagging Aspects (and now there’s only one word for using an Aspect, too, which makes so much more sense to me and will facilitate teaching the game) is who gets paid? So try this on for size: tag yourself and pay the pool; tag any non-agent and pay the pool; tag an agent and pay them.

Tagging an enemy’s Consequence? Pay him.

Tagging a friend’s Aspect? Pay him.

Tagging your own? Pay the pool.

Tagging the zone? Pay the pool.

Now we have a mechanism by which fate points should organically zoom around the table. When you’re low you know how to get more. When you see your friend is low, you know how to recharge him (make him awesome!). When you are rich with them, you spend easily.

I think that this isn’t really Fate any more. We should probably rename Aspects, though I expect we will still say “Aspects” around the table. So I don’t know what to do about that, though our culture will have more momentum than the culture of a table new to the game and playing from scratch. So maybe that’s a non-issue.

Fate sure polishes up nice, don’t it?

–BMurray

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

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

I have some great news but I can’t tell you about it yet.

There comes a time — usually several times — during the design of each game I’m involved in at which I hate the game. Sometimes just a piece of it, sometimes huge swaths of it, and sometimes the whole bloody thing. I only have one published significant work (and it works) — Diaspora — and so I can’t yet say that I know everything will be alright, but I do know that I hated Diaspora several times during its construction, so I suspect all is cool.

In Hollowpoint right now I hate the teamwork pool but I also love it. It creates an essential tension — a resource that depletes over the course of play and that becomes essential in the endgame, so managing it between all players is a necessary part of succeeding at a mission. I don’t want to drop it because that bit gets hammered all the time in play. But a lot of the play that surrounds the teamwork pool smells a little funky and I don’t have a good solution yet to the imperfectly understood problem it represents. Because I tend to feel either neutral or extremes and nothing in between (the Fudge dice curve is no good for pegging my emotions), this imperfection means I hate the game.

Now, understand, this is an awesome game. It delivers very cool action scenes with a lot of player participation in the details. It creates a high-pressure story arc that makes the endgame tense and uncertain. It establishes a a context in which bad play means someone usually has to die in order to succeed in the mission — by three-quarters through play, it becomes clear that the only way to get enough dice to beat the enemy is to replenish the teamwork pool, and that means someone has to die. In our last playtest we had one player tactically trying to get killed so that we could beat the mission, and that’s pretty cool.

But something still itches and I don’t feel I have the perspective to address it. Fortunately, I have collaborators. Specifically, on this project, C.W. Marshall (sometimes Toph) is energetically proposing changes and fixes and generally sees the same faults that I do but from a different angle. This happened on Diaspora as well (though there I had three gung-ho collaborators with competing interests, so something different happened there) and was the reason the game went where it did. If I’d followed my original ideas through it would have been just another fan hack to do Traveller a slightly different way. My collaborators had different ideas about what made Fate fun and even what Traveller is, and so something exciting happened that I didn’t expect or intend.

So right now I’m trying not to think too hard about Hollowpoint (which is why I am writing a thousand words or so about it, right?) until there’s more external action on it. I don’t want to throw my darlings away (like the teamwork pool) but I also need to step back and let my partner do what he needs to do rather than defend something while I don’t like the game. That usually makes for a bad defense and, worse, reinforces the idea that I don’t like the game and I do. I do like it. I love it in fact, but loving something is more complex than just a shouted hurrah. It’s a dynamic thing that jerks you around all over the place. That’s just how that works.

So I’m not going to second-guess myself right now on that game.

Soft Horizon, on the other hand, I don’t hate. Reviewing the design notes, which I’ve been away from for quite a while, is funny because my ideas about how games can work have developed a great deal over the last year  and so a lot of the game seems dated — quaint even — now. It looks like something I wrote when I was a kid. A kid of 43. That’s part of why I started playing around with a different probability curve for it, really — it’s an attempt to re-energize the game and bring in a new idea that might force us to re-think other parts and consequently differentiate the game well from other games. And it did that and now it needs a lot of play and I don’t hate it. I just need to play it a lot. Not write it.

All this probably means I should play around with layout ideas for Hollowpoint, because that almost always jazzes me on the game again. Whenever a piece of the project seems intractable I go to a totally different part of the project and tinker with that, even if it’s too early (or late) to be productive. This lets me channel the game through different parts of my brain, and that tends to jog loose good ideas. It also does something essential to collaboration — it gives me time and space to detach a little from my little obsessions. There are things in each design that I will cling to because … well for no good reason other than that I invented them. Stepping back and looking at something slightly different, or from a new angle, sometimes allows me to let these go and it’s only then that I really hear my collaborators’ voices on the subject.

So there I am. A little depressed about some things, elated about others, and looking for a path through all that which leads to the release of a great game. So I’ll sit down and have a drink and let Toph blaze the trail a bit.

–BMurray

So now that we have Hollowpoint all set up for playtesting, I’ll reveal what I’m thinking about for managing this beast. This does not contain things you need to do — this is just how I will be handling what I hope is a decent flow of information about the game. In keeping with the rest of my brain, this process will be evidence-based. I think the time for speculation about how the game might succeed or fail is past.

Another principle that will be followed is that the game is not intended to please everyone. It’s not a universal system and it uses methods to deal with topics that aren’t going to make everyone happy. I’ve talked about this before — it’s okay to not like the game on principle. That won’t change what we’re doing. If the game just isn’t fun even though it sounds like a good time, that’s more interesting.

So as reports trickle in I’ll be filing them in three categories.

Textual. These will come from anyone, but will be about the only thing that people reading and not playing can offer. Textual reports are about the structure of the document and the language — can you understand how to play the game from the text? Is it organized logically? Is the “voice” functional? Are you aggravated by it and if so why? That kind of thing. Anyone should be able to comment credibly on the text by reading it.

Textual reports we can react to pretty fast and usually get them addressed (either incorporated or discarded) within one release cycle.

Mechanical. Here’s the meat. Mechanical reports are about how the game plays — whether the mechanisms of the game work and how they fail when they fail. I expect a fair number of mechanical reports that don’t include examples from real play, and I’ll have to discard these unless they are very compelling: mechanical reports need supporting evidence because reading the game is not the same as operating the game with multiple people with different expectations. Game mechanisms for Hollowpoint have been developed during actual play so I expect them to exhibit non-obvious behaviour in play. So as a playtester, it’s worth your time (and mine too!) to look at your reports and, if they are mechanical, include actual play that suggests the problem.

Now if you have only read the text and suspect a mechanical problem, you can still participate here: fake some actual play. Just write a dialogue of fictional people playing the game in a way that exposes the defect. This has less weight than real evidence, but it helps everyone (including yourself!) think about the mechanism in more practical terms, and stands a better chance of exposing a real weakness.

There’s a gray area here that I’m going to keep in this category: textual mechanisms. I’m thinking here mostly about whether or not the text enables an owner to teach the game to the rest of the table (because I assume that the usual model at the table is one eager early-adopter buys the game and wants to play and so teaches it to everyone else). This is commentary on the text but, again, requires evidence from actual play to be useful.

Discard. This category is where everything we can’t use goes.

Done. This category is where our solved problems go.

So for every report I get I’ll break it down into specific issues and file these under one of these three categories. Toph and I will then analyze them (including a playtest if necessary) and decide how to act on each. Either the text will change and the report filed under “done” or the report will go under “discard” because it doesn’t need to be addressed.

I expose this information because I think understanding my process might help playtesters file better reports but also so it’s clear why some things get discarded — one of the risks at this stage is that enthusiasm from outside sources can steer the game into a place it wasn’t intended. Now, if that’s awesome, then that’s where we’re going, but right now the game has a pretty tight objective and I want to stick to that if possible. Certainly if you read the text and can’t figure out what that objective is, then that’s a textual problem needing attention!

Oh yeah, credit. At the end of the day we’ll credit everyone who sent in a useful report in the book, and make sure there’s a comped digital version of Hollowpoint (at least — I’m still thinking about this end of things) for them as well. Your name in lights! It’s not much but it’s within budget, and with luck you’ll have a good time playing this game before anyone else gets their hands on it, too. That’s been worth something to me, so far.

–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