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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–BMurray

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

I know I started something yesterday and it’s frustrating to interrupt it, but I’m reading Herman Melville at the moment, so I’m in the mood for ten thousand word parentheticals.

I got an email the other day and I wanted to react to it in depth and publicly because it probably voices the sentiment of a lot of Diaspora players and so the default audience for anything new that VSCA will produce. I won’t reproduce the email (it was sent as private communication after all) but here’s the gist: Hollowpoint seems like a cool place to play (modern action) but the system is alien and not to my taste — please please do it differently.

From the general, abstract place in my head: Hollowpoint is an experiment and experiments need the freedom to fail. One of the things it experiments with is a kind of objective that is common in action scenes and badly modeled (sometimes impossible to model) in what I will call “guy versus guy” systems. So I’m going to try something very different (though not unrecognizable: leaf through your copy of Reign) to get at what I want to get it. I am certain that this divergence will be unappealing to a lot of people. That’s cool — that’s data. It’s also really appealing to at least one person so I hope there will be others. If you’re on the fence (and as the game does not yet exist, that might be a good place to be), hear me out. If you’re committed to disliking the very idea, move on — there will be other VSCA games and if you love Diaspora, you can already get that.

So I was watching Heat the other night — a Michael Mann movie with some very smart action scenes — and noticed how well Hollowpoint maps into it, and that’s exciting, because that film is very much in the target zone for the game. By way of example is the famous bank robbery scene: the crew has executed a bank robbery without violence and in the course of exiting they are bounced by the police. The crew has automatic weapons, great training, and willingness to cause harm and hurt but they are also professionals: their objective is to escape with the money.

No in guy vs. guy gaming, this is really, really hard most of the time. Because the system will focus on which cop your character is trying to kill each time-slice, you the player are focused on the wrong thing with distinctly uncomfortable (to me, and in this genre) effects.

First, I (the player) have to plan how to most effectively kill police officers because what the system primarily lets me do with my assault rifle is kill people. I am not enjoying that in this context.

Second I (the character) am not explicitly interested in killing police officers. I am interested in escaping with the money and don’t care if I kill police officers. But the system models me defeating police officers with my rifle.

Finally I (both player and character) have sophisticated, staged objectives that involve violence against a large opposing force with full knowledge that I cannot just kill all of them (and here’s a place where some guy vs. guy games really drop the ball for me — I can kill all of them. Seriously, I can kill the entire LAPD to solve a problem, just by looting corpses for ammunition.)

The scenario is a classic “breakout”. The police are technically a defensive surrounding force and the robbers objective is to create a weak point in their line, penetrate it, defend their egress, and escape. People are going to get killed, but the solution is not about killing people. You don’t create a weak point in a defensive line by killing everyone — you create it by making a zone where no defender is willing to oppose you effectively. If they are all dead, that’s certainly one solution, but you, with the objective of breaking, don’t actually care. And if you’re a pro you also know it’s not a feasible step in your plan anyway.

A breakout is achieved by aggression. The unit under siege identifies a point of egress and advances on it, concentrating fire. Flanks are protected to avoid being enveloped but the focus of fire is the point of egress. And you advance constantly and aggressively. Go watch Heat and come back.

Okay see that? That’s what you want. And when the line folds, you exit, secure transportation, and depart. The criminals are using several important tools in this process: they are making people feel too afraid to be effective by shooting the shit out of them. Terror is the tool there. They are identifying and neutralizing core sources of resistance (vehicles, commanders). Killing is the tool there. They are leveraging the fact that they do not care about innocent bystanders and the police do, giving them vastly more free mobility and fields of fire. Again, this is mostly about Terror.

But the bulk of it is not about a series of guy vs. guy incidents. It’s about effective use of ammunition, mobility, aggression, planning, knowledge of the space, sustaining fire (rapid reload!), and effective fire (shooting at the target — a notoriously hard thing for non-sociopaths to do). So a system that gives you a tool for defeating one other person by intimidating or killing her is not giving you enough to work with. The richness of this scene — and all of its energy — would be missed by focusing on who shot who. Watch that scene again and listen to it. This is one of a very few films that use accurate sounds of gunfire. Turn the volume up. Listen to the difference between the light assault rifles of the crew and the boom of Pacino’s heavier rifle. Listen to the echoes off the buildings. The chief issue resolving this scene is how afraid everyone and how willing they are to do harm. The ability to accurately hit a target is a tertiary factor at best.

So Hollowpoint, being interested in this sort of scene, does not do guy vs. guy action except as an exception. Instead it’s about the individuals in the crew and their contribution to an action against an opposing force with a common objective. An assassination, for example, is not “killing a guy”. An assassination is a sophisticated preparation of a space in which an effective killing blow can be struck while allowing the assassin to escape. An ambush is not “killing six guys”. It’s again a preparation of space in order to destroy a unit of men (as a unit, not each man) and then exit the location safely (or otherwise manage the objective: you ambushed them for a reason).

Now I am not slagging guy vs. guy gaming. Diaspora is very much a guy vs. guy design and I love it. But the model doesn’t do everything well and it doesn’t do what I want here. So far, in play, Hollowpoint certainly does meet my needs. I know every roll that Val Kilmer’s character made in every scene. I know what choices he made with the dice he got.

Interestingly, the most disappointing part of that movie for me is the last half hour or so. I think it’s obvious why, in light of this discussion. It forgets what it’s really about. Or it doesn’t detect what I think it’s about.

It’s cool to dislike some or all of my games. Vive la différence.

–BMurray

Getting six people to work on a focused goal is pretty easy — I’ve run teams plenty of times and it’s just not all that complicated. It works easily, however, because the social structure lets it basically be me with five extra sets of arms. That is, I plan and organize and command and review and collate and present. My team members get their piece done according to my plan. This is not collaboration. It’s a way that some things work, and it’s good, but it’s not collaboration.

VSCA projects, by contrast, are strictly collaborative. Each author has (theoretically) equal input and consequently organization needs to coalesce rather than emerge whole. This means that we need a richly iterative model in order to get work done. This was brought home for me recently while discussing Chimaera progress with JB, during which I tried to explain how we were going to bootstrap the idea into a game. All too often I have no idea what I am doing until I try to explain it to someone else, at which time I discover that I really do have a methodology.

The essence of VSCA collaboration is play. We never go away and write a game whole and then playtest it, but rather we playtest very coarse drafts and fragments of subsystems and revise based on the information from that and over and over and over. Always playing. We don’t have meetings, we have game nights. But we’ve had precious few game nights in the past two years that haven’t also been game designing. I don’t think I can go back to “just play”. This is play for me now.

So we don’t really do anything with a project until someone writes enough to play with. It can be just a subsystem or a dice gimmick, but it has to be enough to drive an evening’s play and discussion. So we start with this kernel of a few thousand words in which someone tries to explain the game. It doesn’t need to be refined and it doesn’t need to have a “voice” yet, but it does need to convey enough to everyone else that we can all get our teeth into it. Until this happens there is no project. I don’t care how much information you have in your head, until you share we aren’t collaborating.

Once we have that kernel it goes up at the wiki where anyone can hack at it. Now all kinds of semi-organized work happens. Links to AP reports and audio go up. New text goes in. Micro-fiction from play or imagined play goes in. Proposals are made. Things get re-organized. Images and other art tests get made and linked up. Basically the wiki becomes a multi-media creative collage of effort from the collaborators. It’s a mess. Probably no one can play with it but us. But we certainly can.

Every game night that is exploring a project is recorded. Immediately after play, someone tries to capture the essence of what we learned that night and post it up at the wiki. Early on there are more questions than rules, but that’s cool. We are confident that an organized project will show itself over time. We don’t need to make it happen yet.

The basis of iterative development is obvious — the idea is that you cannot design perfectly and then implement. That is, designs are always flawed. With that as your core premise, one solution is to design only a minimum and then get it working in as real an environment as possible, take notes, and push those back into design. Revise the implementation and re-test. This avoids designing shit you don’t use and highlights stuff you didn’t know you needed. Anyway, all of this is familiar to software designers and fits nicely into the led-team model.

It also works for peer collaboration. In fact it works better for an important reason: it establishes a certain amount of investment (even ownership) in all the collaborators. The core idea will change — although that came from one person’s head and was perhaps perfectly clear in there, in play and revision the author’s peers will take what they like and expand it. They will tear down what they don’t like. They will tell you what they saw when they played and it will be different than what the initial author saw. The game, in short order, will be other than what the originator intended. This is real collaboration and it’s terrifying.

Allowing your vision to be influenced by others requires an incredible amount of trust, especially from people who are trained to operate in an authoritative role. We (people like me, I mean) expect to command with a limited amount of dispute after a certain (brief) period of initial research. But when everyone at the table is at least as smart as you, you can no longer afford this ego-friendly attitude. And it makes you realise that, because the disputes and changes are emerging from real play and an effort to have real fun with diverse brains, it is a reflection of the interests of a potential audience as well. And consequently you are tricked into respecting the audience in the same fashion. The game now has its own design goals (or perhaps the design goal of the gestalt brain that the collaborating team represents) and these goals are roughly representative of the audience, because any gathering of four or five people probably has many general qualities that are represented by a much broader subset of people. I might not be well represented by any substantial group of other people, but the intersection of the interests of five of us certainly is.

So respect and trust are created by earnest iteration over play. Play. Let’s say that again. Play. That’s an order.

–BMurray

It’s time for me to think out loud about the game document as an application. All this talk about electronic books and manufacturing buckets and so forth has me thinking that practically every instance of the electronic book is at least as flawed as the paper book in some way or another. See, what the book does right is convey the content via efficient and effective use of the medium. What the electronic book does so far is attempt to mimic the book or extend it incrementally.

Seriously, an electronic device with gigabytes of space a millions of cycles per second and the best we can do is pretend to be a four dollar book? Fuck that.

Exploiting the new medium — a handy computer that does stuff besides display “Hello world” — is going to take some serious innovation. This is not a matter of making new standards or writing books using them or any of that. Real, serious changes to use the machine to do what we really want to do.

See, the game text is a compromise between what the author wants to do for the end user and what the medium is capable of doing. So when we make the machine pretend to be a book, we adopt the same compromise that the author has made for almost 700 years. I think maybe we can do better. Moore’s law, applied since 1450 or so, suggests we can do astronomically better.

What the author wants to do would, in my industry, be encapsulated in a requirements document. We don’t generally do this for books because the compromise we accept cuts so very deep — there’s just not all that much we can do. By contrast, when developing content for a computer, you want to start with the assumption that we can do anything. So now we have to constrain to what we want to do.

So what kinds of requirements would a role-playing-game-delivery-application (usually a book but now released from these bonds) have? Well, a place to start is a little use-case analysis. Here are our users (assuming a traditional RPG structure):

• all players
• non-GM players
• GM players
• readers
• reviewers

Yeah, see, even at this early stage in the analysis we already see that we have vast possibilities open to us just be acknowledging that we can be different things to different people. So let’s look at the most function-rich (I’m guessing!) user — the GM. What does he need this document to do?

• Display rules that are in the context of the current action at the table
• Search for a rule by keyword
• Display action-relevant information for each character
• Display action-relevant information for NPCs and monsters
• Adjust resource elements (fate points, gold pieces) for all players and maybe the environment
• Roll dice
• Display and modify campaign notes relevant to the action at the table and upcoming action
• Record table audio and video
• Convey private information to players (and observers?!)

I could go on. But starting with the assumption that we have a general purpose computer with audio-visual capabilities, a network, and some storage, we find the doors blown open on “what is an RPG if not a book?” As a GM I should be able to award fate points (in secret and in private), get updates based on player activity (“I am tagging ‘Zany funster’ for +2 because I’m just so awesome to be around.” click and fate point tallies on all machines are updated), see what aspects are begging for compels (maybe literally — a player might flag an aspect as a fun thing to tweak and the GM can respond to that red flag). It’s packed with back-channels that are both in and out of story.

So this is what I’m working on right now — what are the use cases for a Next Generation RPG Delivery System? Then after that will come the requirements proper. Then a design. And then I start developing iPad applications? Maybe.

I better go buy some books on that.

–BMurray

Designing games is fun, but having several game designs on the burner has the uncomfortable side-effect of making every game session also a design session. And I kind of miss just gaming.

When you’re working through a design by play, which is basically how we roll, the flow is constantly interrupted with discussion — theory, effects, probability, and so on. It’s very hard to get at the emergent story that we play for in the first place, because we are so immersed in the mechanism. If a scene goes into unfun territory for mechanical reasons, it behooves us to figure out why, re-jigger the mechanism, and re-run the scene to make it work. The end result is that these sessions are very technical — they are sequences of mechanical application with only the thinnest material joining them, because we already know that that thin material can get spun out to story in a real game. When you’re “just gaming”.

While building Diaspora we did get to the “just gaming” point, where we had the system smoothed out enough that we could really play and build stories and have a great time gaming, so maybe I’m just frustrated at having a bunch of games in the mechanical stage. On the other hand, when I tried to get 4e working, or even 3:16 for that matter, I had that same jointed mechanism feeling — hopping from one mechanically guided scene to the next with interstitial role-playing that was perfunctory or absent. So there is also a risk that we’re making games that aren’t what I like playing, because if that’s all we can do then I’d rather play something that’s about the mechanism. Something that doesn’t even pretend to have a more creative context. Settlers of Cataan, say, or Wings of War.

So I think my objective for the next few weeks of gaming is to find the story and I think I know where it’s hidden. And if we can’t find the story then we need to seriously re-think the new designs. My suspicion is that what’s missing is compelling non-player characters — there’s not enough conversation with people I care about on topics I care about. Or rather there is but it’s with the people and not the characters. Those conversations turn the interstitial hinges joining mechanical play into the memorable part of the evening. This relegates the mechanism to the space it should be. In playing “properly” it may serve to highlight mechanical issues from a more interesting angle, too.

I think this is born out by our two Burning Wheel sessions from last month. The highlights of play, for me, where a couple of conversations with unstatted NPCs. They utterly lacked any mechanism (though the entrance points and exit points were mechanical — it’s certain that mechanism let the NPCs be awesome by setting the stage and supported the exit) but they are the images I have now of “what was fun”. The ghost of an ancient orc king, from back when orcs were artisans in their hate and not just monsters. His speech let me create a whole culture right there for the players, and that kind of thing is why I game.

So maybe it’s just time to start thinking about gaming as a hobby again. Maybe the business of it is too close; too looming. I’m not really interested in business. Or maybe I was but now I’m bored of it. We need to play.

–BMurray

Compels are a problem.

They are also a feature. An awesome feature. But whenever I read about people having trouble — deep trouble, mind you — with the FATE system it seems to come down to compels. And I have to say that I feel their pain. I understand the logic and get why it’s not actually a problem. And yet it continues to be. So the problem must lie somewhere not so accessible to reason. That might go some distance towards explaining why it’s just not a problem for some tables as well.

A compel is a simple thing and it’s a mechanization of something everyone does in every role-playing game ever anyway. It goes like this: the GM looks at the character’s sheet and finds something on it (in the case of FATE an Aspect — a player’s declaration about his character) and thinks, “Hey that could complicate things.” He then mentions the thing and the complication. See how this happens in every game? The characters walk into a swanky restaurant in full armour because they say that’s how they roll. The GM says, “Well, okay, but it’s very unusual. You are in no way inconspicuous. And the rich and powerful people here now think you are crude and boorish louts. Including that guy over there. The mayor. Who you have a meeting with tomorrow.” The players might concede that they are not in full armour here and a generous GM might accept that.

Well in FATE we do exactly that a lot of the time. But sometimes it is mechanized as a compel. The GM spots “Brilliant plate armour” and offers a fate point saying, “That armour is mighty conspicuous and discourteous and this place is filled with influential people.” Exciting! Same thing happens but the player gets paid for the detrimental effect! Or he can pay a fate point and say “Oh I would never wear my armour in here.” The process is encoded in a mechanism that helps power an economy that does all kinds of cool stuff. And it’s functionally the same as above. Even better, the player has a little more agency by turning the crank on a mechanism rather than negotiating with the GM.

And yet players balk at the second even when they would have no issue with the first.

I think this is because they have to pay to get out of it. There is additional pressure to eat the detrimental effect because you need those fate points for stuff. Well, fact is, you don’t always need them all that badly, but because it is a currency and because we are trained to think certain ways about currencies, we are acquisitive and protective of our hoards. We would gladly surrender to the narrative but we resist paying our valuable currency!

This is especially interesting because the instinct to hoard game currency is several layers of abstraction removed from nature. But that’s for a different kind of blog — one that explores how real the brain is prepared to make fictions of fictions of fictions. Money is an amazing invention.

So compels can create resentment and I think it is because you have to pay to deny it. You feel railroaded. You have to deplete your treasure to have things go your way. Yes, we know, the player chose the Aspect and maybe even chose it deliberately to get compels, but right here in the actual situation where she actually cares about actually solving an actual problem in game, it’s not so fun any more. Well not always and not for everyone.

What can we do?

There is a place in Diaspora where this doesn’t happen so much: in the mini-games. In the mini-games you can only use a compel (and anyone can use one, not just the GM, and that might mitigate the pain too) to make someone miss a turn. Obviously the narrative for that is more complex (“You’re pinned by our ‘withering covering fire’” or “You stay where you are because there’s a ‘live grenade’ in that room”) but the essence of it is pure mechanism and that mechanism is familiar. We’ve all landed on a LOSE YOUR TURN spot in a boardgame or nine. And it’s FAIR. We know the price of moving forward is a fate point. No problem. The exchange is formalized, known in advance, and consistent.

There’s another place where we feel less pain: when players offer compels to allied players. I’m not sure why this one is so painless — maybe because there is no assumed authority between players no one feels compelled (LOL) to take this too personally. The other player is not dominating you, he’s just offering that your character could be played more interestingly. I know, it’s EXACTLY THE SAME as with the GM, but we’d be foolish to ignore the fact that the GM has certain kinds of authority and that that might colour her exchanges with players differently than the same exchange between peers.

And finally, the best part of the solution, is consistent with FATE v3 in all its incarnations: the player can solicit the compel. When players do this, the system sings. This is where I would most push the compel mechanism if you are experiencing compel-pain: don’t ask for compels at all as the GM but rather encourage players to offer them. Point out Aspects in play but ignore the pay-or-get-paid offer. See, it’s not actually all that important that the player pay that fate point. There is plenty of opportunity for players to pay. It is important, however, that they get paid for making their Aspects shine, and so that’s the way the offer needs to work.

In future FATE games I make, I am pretty sure I will just drop the “pay to deny” part of compels. It doesn’t do anything useful and it creates this weird authority issue that’s just not fun (for me, IMHO, YMMV, IANAL, etc.)

Go forth and compel, but in a fun way.

–BMurray

This always happens. Well not always, but often enough that it’s time to talk about it.

Everyone wants their character to be special. That’s cool. That binds you to your character. That invests you in him or her and that is good for the game. But if everyone is special then no one really is, and a game about the antics of a group has to see the group as the central feature because it will need to stick together somehow. So it’s more important that the group be special than that each character be special. I promise — play will make you special in ways that are cohesive as well as fun.

Anyway in my upcoming game special is not really the problem right now. Everyone is special, but in fairly subtle and undisruptive ways. We have only one non-human, so the group doesn’t stand out as a bizarre anomaly for the world and nor does it imply a D&D-style world of roughly equal racial representation. That’s good. In fact that’s really good. Magic is supposed to be rare and there is only one person who can wield it. Non-humans are rare and there is only one in the group. Not too special. Hurray!

No, the problem here is slightly different but oh-so-familiar. In creating characters we have many with opposing interests. Not just different, but flat-out opposite. Specifically, we have a wandering revolutionary and two people whose job is hunting revolutionaries. I’m not a big fan of just covering that land-mine up and walking very carefully and pretending it’s not true undermines the character stories and makes the characters significantly less of what the players wanted from them. So what to do?

I game with adults. That means one of the things I can do with some reasonable hope of success is just push it on the players. “Here’s the problem folks, tell me a story that makes it work.” But that just sidesteps the issue, because then the question is just, “what can they do” instead of “what can I do?” So what are the options?

We could declare that past jobs are past. The spy is no longer a spy and the hunter is no longer a hunter. Or the revolutionary has reconciled with the new government.

We could find a way to reverse a loyalty. The revolutionary now believes in the right to rule of the new government. The spy turns on his master. The hunter has become a revolutionary.

We could find an over-riding motive. The political interests of the individuals are overshadowed by some much more urgent and dangerous issue. This of course risks returning to the problem when the new issue is resolved, but it might be credible at that time to have the characters reconciled, having worked together through some great hardship. This is kind of nice because it gives us a starting point — the revolutionary arrives in town where the spy has laid a trap for him and the hunter (working with the spy) arrests him and then bang zoom a much more terrifying thing happens. That’s pretty nice and suits my opening image idea.

Hmm, in fact I think that by writing this I solved my problem. I open with the scene of hardship and bonding disaster and maybe let the players handle the backstory for the capture and so on as a flashback.

Damn I never really got the idea of flashbacks in a role-playing game before but this is singing in my head now. Thanks for your help, folks!

–BMurray