Chess Anxiety and RP Themes

 

Edie Cossaboom (not their real name) is a friend of mine, and posted this on FB today. It resonates with something I've been considering about RPGs for a while now, especially those of the more narrative bent. But trying to put into words twice now and being unsatisfied with how I'm explaining my thoughts, I think it might be better if I just post this here and let the reader interpret it as they like.

Cathartic Play in Action: The Despair System

Yesterday, I was introduced to Shane, a game designer living nearby, who is working on a narrative (Forge style) role playing game that he calls The Despair System. As you would guess from the name, it's about putting your characters through Hell to see how long they can hold out against creeping doom and hopelessness. 

I don't want to give away too much about the system, as he's still play testing, and things are subject to change due to our feedback. But I do want to talk a bit about the experience. 

I addition to Shane and myself, Dustie and Scott who I have played with extensively online over the past few years, and Keith, who I met for the first time, were the other players. I only met Dustie face to face for the first time at Richard's last Call of Cthulhu game, and this was the first time for me to meet Scott face to face. It was still comfortable for me, since I have played with these two quite a bit, and Shane and Keith were both friendly and easy to get along with. 

For the game itself, it started off by making characters and getting some rules explained as we did that. One interesting bit is that Shane had told us to bring pens, not pencils. In this game, once something goes on your sheet, it might get crossed out, but it never changes. Things get added through play. 

The system is setting neutral, and I mentioned in my previous post that Shane had us vote on what sort of setting we wanted, and it was Vikings. We'd had time to consider what sort of character we wanted to play. I think I had given it the shallowest thought. Or maybe Scott. Dustie and Keith had much more detail in mind when we came to the character creation portion. 

My pre-planning, knowing only that it was "Vikings making one of the earliest voyages West" was that my character, Wehostan the Wanderer, had been to Gardariki (Russia) before with his uncles, and that his father was an iron miner (brothers, too) and didn't want his son heading out on expeditions, but mining was the last place Wehostan wanted to be. 

Shane gave us character sheets with six lines, each with a d6 die face, arranged from high to low, and told us the six attributes he was using for this game. The attributes might be different for other genres. In a previous play test with Scott, they had done a Wild West themed game, and the attributes were not the same. So you can customize it to fit the theme, genre, and mood. Players can arrange their six attributes as they like, putting one next to each die face. Each had a bonus of +2 (the six, four and two faces), +1 (the five and three faces), or 0 (the 1 face).

After that, each character got to select a pair of traits, one positive and one negative. My positive was Wanderlust, and my negative was Superstitious. These were each connected to one of the attributes, and if a roll on that attribute would be affected by it, it resulted in getting to reroll a die of your choice if positive, and the highest die if negative. 

The mechanics were a bit convoluted for this sort of story game. Not that any particular mechanic was difficult, but there are a lot of different types of checks (all checks are rolled with 4d6, and those +1 or +2 bonuses can be used to modify one single die that was rolled). The "game" part of this is basically bargaining your creeping Despair, which is signified by filling in pips on the die faces and the bonuses for attributes. The Referee is working to put the characters into situations where they are challenged, and have the potential to earn Despair points. The more Despair you earn, the easier it is to gain more Despair, so the game is basically build around the idea of the death spiral. Even if you succeed on a check, you might still earn points of Despair while doing so. There are a few ways to mitigate how much despair you earn, but no way to remove Despair once it's on your sheet. If a die face has all pips colored in (and the one face starts filled in), then any result of that number gives you a point of Despair. If you fail a roll, the difference in your highest number rolled and the target number is the amount of Despair you gain (in addition to any from "dead" dice). So the more Despair, the more dice will give you Despair.

The specific mechanics aren't so important to my analysis right now, though. What I found was that while the game itself is leveraging the various mechanics of your roll (or bargain to avoid a roll), the creeping death spiral of Despair is actually more effective than my recent experiences of Call of Cthulhu. Don't get me wrong, I'm having fun in our CoC game. And maybe Richard has been going easy on us. But we haven't had that much Sanity loss, and I don't think we've suffered a character death at all so far. The Despair System is designed to force Despair points on you, so that you can't escape falling victim to it if you play long enough. 

Narrative games like this aren't really my style of game, but as a one-off (or maybe two, Shane asked if we'd be interested in giving it another try), it was kind of fun. Because he was play testing, Shane skipped us through a lot of things. He would put us into certain situations, and not give us full freedom, but he did say that in a regular game there would be more player input and choice in the story, and more back and forth role play time. 

While it was a little off-putting at first to have him just dictating scenes and then making us roll (or test our abilities in other ways), after a few scenes I got used to it, and it actually made more sense. He needed us to test the mechanics, but also, the whole point of the game is to experience mounting despair in your character, as things that were easy to do at the beginning of the session get progressively harder and harder to accomplish, or at least harder to accomplish without adding more Despair points. We only made it half-way through the story line Shane had prepared, and none of us topped out our Despair, but I was pretty far gone, having lost the two, three, and four die faces, having taken on a second negative trait, and having crossed out two of my abilities (crossed out abilities could still have checks made, but at a penalty of removing the highest value die rolled on that check). Wehostan was not in good shape. 

It was an unusual experience, and I'd like to try this game again in a non-playtest mode before I make any final judgments on it, but it seems to me like Shane has put a lot of thought into how to make this game so that it provides the experience he would like for it to. Some more traditional, old school, or new school players may be put off by the game, but if you go into it knowing what it is, it can be a fun experience. And it was definitely more coherent in form and function than some other story games I've played in the past.

Escapist Play vs Cathartic Play in RPGs

On Sunday, I've been invited to take part in a play test session for a local guy (I've never met him before) who is working on his own game. Of course I said yes. 

He sent us a message a week or so ago with a few options for a setting for the play test. 

• American Western
• Late Middle Ages
• Modern Day
• Warhammer 40k
• Near-Future Sci-fi
• Viking Age

Viking Age ended up the winner, which is good. It was my #1 choice out of those (WH40K being bottom of the barrel for me).

I don't know much about the system yet (I was told "Bring 4d6 and a pen, not a pencil"), but from a few clues, and from a message he sent yesterday with some of his expectations for the game (not just vikings, but 8th Century horror set in Northern Europe at the dawn of the Viking Age), it was pretty obvious to me that he's working on a Forge style Story Game, rather than an old school or new school style Adventure Game. 

I'm not the biggest fan of the story games side of the hobby. I haven't had the best experience with them, because I find that either the mechanics support a GAME, in which case it takes a lot of force to make the right sort of story emerge, or else the mechanics support a STORY, in which case there's not really a lot of relevant game play to keep things interesting. 

I'll post my thoughts on the session, his game system, and everything next week, of course. For now, though, preparing for this game has got me thinking about that dichotomy. 

JB at BX Blackrazor has started calling his games Fantasy Adventure Games (FAGs... yeah, he knows) rather than RPGs. I think he may be on to something. Whether it's OD&D, Gamma World, 5E D&D, Traveller, any of the myriad of Palladium system games, various licensed property games like any edition of a Star Wars RPG, they all have one thing in common. They're primarily escapist. 

You get to create a character and go on adventures. Maybe you become a great hero or villain, maybe you get slain by a kobold or shot by the first stormtrooper to cross your path. It's exciting, it's fun, it's a way to get away from all the stress of your daily life. 

It's like going to see the latest MCU movie in the theater. A fun afternoon. Or it's supposed to be, anyway.

Sometimes, that silly popcorn movie of a game impacts you deeply in some way. And when it does, it makes us love the game all the more. But we're not expecting the game to change us in a deep way every session. It's part of the game, actually. Whether the session will be exciting or boring, pedestrian or deeply moving...that's all up to chance. It's unexpected. 

Story Games in the mold of The Forge, however, are typically designed to emulate fiction. They want that Three Act, or Five Act, structure that movies have. They also tend to try and explore some theme, linked to emotion and trying to get into the head of someone going through some shit. In that sense, they are a lot closer to the origins of Role Play as a psychotherapy. You're there to explore emotional impacts, traumas, and hard moral decisions in the game. And if the game is well designed, you'll also create an interesting narrative out of the experience. 

It's like going to see an art film at a film festival. It's cathartic. Or is supposed to be, anyway. 

Sometimes, though, that deeply moving, lovingly crafted art film is just a boring dud. You come away from it feeling like you just wasted a few hours of your life, because you couldn't connect to the characters, and the story was purposefully vague or anti-climactic to make some sort of statement. Maybe you kind of get what they were going for, but you still didn't really enjoy the experience. 

And I think for me, one of the reasons this always seems to happen to me when I play more narrative-focused Forge style games, is that I know how the sausage is made. I've studied creative writing and screenwriting. I've been a DM for 4 decades now. I've got insider knowledge on both ends. 

Being able to see how the game mechanics are supposed to craft a five act structure, or manipulate you into feeling just this sort of way about the events in the game...well, I see through it. 

It turns what should be an entertaining, if challenging, art film experience (or literary novel read, take your pick) and turns it into one of those poorly made films where you see every "twist" coming a mile away. Or at least it seems like that for me. 

Still, I'm looking forward to seeing what this guy has done. I may not be the target audience for his game, but that may make me more valuable to him as a play tester. And maybe, fingers crossed, this will change my experience of story games. I'll let y'all know soon.

The Death of "The Big Model" (GNS)

The Forge, Ron Edwards' rpg game theory website, is no longer the powerhouse it once was. Early in the days of the internet, so much indie game design was influenced by this website. Probably still is, even though it shut down its forums nearly a decade ago. I know I still use lingo derived from The Forge when discussing game theory stuff simply because the one really good thing they did was set down a list of definitions that were clear and concise to discuss various aspects of role playing games. 

GNS, and later the Big Model, though, was supposedly Edwards' crowning achievement. A theory of game design that posited the idea that all RPGs are composed of a combination of three modes of play: gamism, narrativism, and simulationism. Or, people make games to game the system, or to create a story, or to run an imaginary world. 

But that never sat right with me. Partly, I think, because Edwards believed (still believes? I'm not in contact with him anymore after the destruction of Alderaan...I mean G+) that good game design focused on only one of these three modalities and sought to deliver a game focused only on that modality. 

Enter Alexis Smolensk and his elephant. The linked post didn't receive any feedback directly in the form of comments, but Alexis makes the same argument in this post that I have made against GNS. A good RPG doesn't seek to cater exclusively to gamists or narrativists or simulationists. It needs all of them to be a good game. Hell, I didn't need Alexis to figure that out. But what Alexis does in the post is set out what some of the real modalities of play (creative agendas in Edwardsian/Forge lingo) are. 

Escapism (distraction in Alexis' post)

Performance 

Exploration and Discovery

Problem Solving

I can add a few more, things like Immersion (related to escapism, but not the same), Wish Fulfillment, Camaraderie, and again I'm sure there are more. These are things players are looking for in a game.

Edwards wanted a tight little 3-part model. He also erroneously linked players' creative agendas with designers' agendas. They are not and should not be the same. Edwards' three agendas may or may not be pertinent creative agendas for game designers, but they really fall short when trying to classify reasons people play RPGs. 

 A well designed game should be an elephant. Different parts of the game should cater to different agendas, but all should be part of the whole. And as a designer, myopically focusing on only one modality of play really limits the design.

Oh, and Alexis at the end turns his post to his kickstarter menu project, which again I'd urge you to support. I'd like to see it succeed. He only needs about $700 (US) to fund it.

I like this guy's thinking

 After struggling for a year or so to make my West Marches game feel like an old school exploration game using 5E, I gave up and switched to Classic D&D. Don't regret the change at all. But yesterday, I clicked on this "suggested video" on YouTube and liked what the guy had to say. He's making videos for 5E, but at least this one from yesterday and one more I watched today make me think that he understands old school play and what makes it fun and interesting. 

In this one, he talks about how you don't need a lot of game mechanical resolution for a lot of exploration-based play in the game. Thinking of Johnathan Tweet's "Drama-Fortune-Karma" breakdown of how to resolve actions, exploration is mostly a mix of drama and karma, and the rules tell you when you need to involve fortune. Old school play tends to have a different idea of when fortune should come into it (newer school play being very character skill check based, while old school tends to be more about DM systems of management or set abilities with set probabilities), but in both new and old, drama and karma (and some common sense) can manage a lot of it. 

The second video, which I just watched shortly before posting, deals with Simulationism (of the dreaded GNS theory). He's got an interesting take on what simulationism means, and his discussion of having a stable and unbalanced world to game in again seems very old school. 

I think I'll be watching more from Zipperon Disney.

The Underground Railroad (rant-ish)

Several disparate influences coalesced in my head this evening, as I was on my way home from work, and I came to realize how to express verbally my distaste for "indie story games" of the Forge variety. Sure, I've talked about it before, and I always assumed it was the people I played with rather than the games. Now, I think it actually is the games. But, as Dav Pilkey says in his Captain Underpants stories, before I can tell you that story, I have to tell you this story...

Years ago, so long ago I can't remember if it was on an RPG forum, a blog, or where, I remember reading someone expressing the opinion that any player that wants to play a Paladin is tacitly giving permission to the DM to make them fall from grace. This esteemed sir or madam espoused this as an absolute. Any player who chooses a Paladin is asking for a fall, and any DM with a Paladin in their campaign is duty bound to make them fall at least once during their career.

Now, that's literally ridiculous. Literally, as in I shall now ridicule this idea.

Every player who plays a Magic-User (Wizard in newer editions) is asking the DM to take away their spellbook at least once during their career, and any DM worth his salt must take away the spellbook of any Magic-User that survives past the goblin warrens and giant rat tunnels of low level.

Every player who plays a Cleric is just begging the DM to take away their spellcasting ability due to an alignment issue. Often. DMs need to be on the watch for any potential slip by the Cleric's player to take away their spells and make them atone.

Every player who plays a Dwarf is fully expecting to be cast out of their clan-hold, beard shaven off, and exiled on pain of death. DMs will make sure every dwarven clan is a bunch of judgmental assholes in order to make sure that any adventurous upstart gets taken down a peg in this way.

Ridiculous, no? It shows such a lack of imagination, such a lack of narrative principle, to assume that just because some player wanted to play such a class/race wants to play out that tired, cliche story line every time they play the game. Sure, there may be rules in the books for what to do if it does happen, but that doesn't mean it's the only way a Paladin's (or MU, Cleric, Dwarf, whatever) story can play out. It's not how every character X's story should play out. To force this on the players and to assume it's with their consent just because they chose option X at character generation instead of option Y is a form of railroading.

Now, there should always be the risk of these things happening, but whether it does come to pass should depend on the player's choices in the game, rather than through a no-win situation engineered by the DM.

And that brings us back to indie story games.

You all know Ron Edwards's pet game theory, the Three-Fold Model (and his later Big Model, which was as far as I remember the same thing with more jargon to keep the newbs from acting like they understood it) of Gamist/Simulationist/Narrativist games. Said theory posited a triangle of three things that games can be, and the closer a game came to one of the vertices, the more pure it was, the better that game was. A good "gamist" game focused ONLY on gaming the system. A good "simulationist" game focused ONLY on recreating a "realistic" fantasy setting. A good "narrativist" game focused ONLY on providing a coherent story for the players. A game like D&D, despite its vast popularity, sits somewhere in the middle of the triangle of competing forces, so obviously must be a craptastically designed game, no matter how many people have years and years worth of fun playing it. If only they'd move to a game a the point of the triangle that best matches their interest, says the theory, they'll be having ever so much more fun.

Now, Edwards and the Forge heavily biased their community towards "narrativist" play. Edwards was always political about saying that gamists and simulationists could have their fun playing games their way, but in his opinion the narrativist way was the best way.

But you know what? Those story games have a BIG problem. The "best" of them are nothing more than railroads, similar to the type described above. No one's making you do X instead of Y, no one's pulling a quantum ogre on you in these games. You're free do do whatever you want!

...as long as whatever you want is what the game is "designed to be about."

You can't just do anything you want in these games. If you play, for example, Dogs in the Vinyard (full disclosure, never had a chance to play it, but heard/read plenty), you can't escape the game's theme of dispatching justice to a small town in the Old West. Sooner or later, the game is going to force you to do just that. It's designed to bring these situations to a head so that your Mormon gunslinger can settle things the Mormon gunslinger way.

You're not playing these games to make up your own story. The game designer has already predetermined the story for you. It's a railroad, but it's subtle. Hence the title of this post.

And the funny thing? Now that I've come to this realization, I get the feeling that I now "get" story games, and might actually be able to have fun playing one now. But for the time being, I'll stick to D&D and play-testing Chanbara.

Social Interaction Rules and the Dick DM

Trollsmyth wrote a post about something Ryan Dancey said about trying to add Dogs in the Vinyard style social interaction rules to D&D. Someone named Erin replied to Trollsmyth's post with her own post, and Trollsmyth then responded to her criticism. Then Greg of Errant RPG threw in his two cents, and that's what actually prompted me to make this reply to the whole shebang.

My take?  Well, number one I disagree with Mr. Dancey that RPGs are designed to TELL stories.  At least the more traditional ones I like to play aren't.  The Forge/Indy games I've played that were designed with the express purpose of telling a story aren't very fun for me. I think this is because the stories that get told in them aren't usually very good stories.

It's not easy to come up with a good story.  Especially when you're only giving it one shot, like in an RPG session.  My buddy Paul and I have been developing our movie script for over three years now.  It took us over two years just to get the story right.  Now we're working on getting the script right (yes, there's a difference).

RPGs can be used to create stories, but they're really poor at telling a story.  The whole Edwardsian concept of 'story now' seems silly to me.  I've said it before, but I think the best stories that come from RPGs are created AFTER the game, when you recount what happened and leave out all the boring bits, or make connections after the fact that you didn't in the heat of the moment, or add a bit of gilding to the lily of what happened in the game.

Why do you think most recordings of actual game sessions are boring to listen to?  They're great fun to play, but like golf they're really not as fun as a spectator sport.  Now a properly edited video or audio recording of a game session might be interesting, because like that 'war story' told later at the pub, it cuts out all the rulebook look-ups, Monty Python quotes, and the ten minutes of real time spent carefully examining an empty room for traps and secret doors that didn't exist (or just weren't found).  They cut to the chase of the interesting NPC interactions, important combats, and PC interaction that is interesting.

That's how you can create a decent story with an RPG session.  Editing.

Now, as for the need to add social mechanics to an RPG like D&D, I've heard the arguments before many times.  Erin's post is just rehashing all the tired arguments I've heard over and over again on the internet.  Greg makes some good points in his post about his experiences dominating others in a game where diplomacy happens but it's not in the rules.  But I don't think it will typically apply to most RPG sessions.

First off, I usually only play RPGs with friends.  I think the majority of RPG groups are friends (or at least on good terms with each other even if they don't hang out besides at game time).  Con games, pick-up games at the FLGS (if you even have one anymore), tournaments--they're the exception.  Most people play with folks they know.  Because you know these people, you know who's extroverted and who's introverted.  You know who enjoys getting into character and who just enjoys the game aspect of play.  And you, as GM, can form responses to player input based on that knowledge. 

The arguments made by Erin and plenty of other people on RPG message boards and blogs--that shy players get screwed by a lack of social mechanics--maybe holds true in a game with strangers, or a Dick DM.  But with most groups, I'd assume [spare me the "assume makes an ass out of 'u' and me" quotes, please] the DM knows the players and is not a dick.  And the DM who knows the players and isn't a dick is likely to take player interactions and input relative to their knowledge of each player.

As an example, I teach English to Koreans and Japanese.  If I'm having a class, and the good students are speaking a lot, and doing well, I'm happy.  But if the poor students, or the shy students show a little bit of effort, I'm a lot happier.  When a kid who's barely said more than two or three sentences all month finally gets up and reads a paragraph from the book in front of the class, that's much more rewarding to me than if the kid who lived in Australia for 2 years gets up and reads three pages he wrote himself.

In an RPG, if there's a player who is introverted, or just cares more for the 'roll play' than the role play, or whatever, says to me, "I want to sweet talk the Duchess.  I've got a 15 Charisma."  I'll weight that statement according to what I know.  I'd likely make a Reaction Check with a bonus for the Charisma for the player's benefit, or even just decide to allow it.  Just like I'd do if the smooth talking player said, "I want to lift the treasure chest.  I've got a 15 Strength." 

And when it came time to assign rewards (XP or whatever), I would hopefully not give out less XP to the shy player for asking for that social reaction to be done through game mechanics than I would for the smooth talker to do it through role play.

The second point I'd like to make is that D&D and most traditional RPGs are NOT competitive games.  The players are not playing against each other.  They're not competing for a limited pool of XP awards.  They're cooperating to achieve goals both in game and out of game.  This is the flaw with Greg's tale of the war game with diplomacy uncoded by the rules.

Both the shy player and the smooth talker will benefit by sweet talking the Duchess.  It doesn't matter if shy just points out that his character has a high Cha and he'd like his character to do it, or if the smooth talker actually spends time chatting up the Duchess with in-character knowledge.  Either way, the PARTY will benefit from gaining the Duchess as an ally/benefactor. 

So long story short, I don't think adding more intricate social interaction rules to D&D will make it more 'fair,' nor do I think it would make D&D into a 'story telling' game.  It's already a story creating game (better in my opinion), and with a typical group of friends playing together, it will already be 'fair.'

"Forge-style" gaming

The other thing that I was thinking about related to yesterday's post and megadungeons, which I intended to write about but ended up writing my expat gamer blues post, was about Forge style indie RPGs and a weird similarity they share with a megadungeon campaign, the way I'd run it.

For those not in the know, the Forge was the home of GNS theory. Now they've moved on to something else, and while interesting to read, I could really care less about most of the things they talk about there.

But most of the games born out of GNS were a) designed to deliver one, and only one, flavor of gaming--Gamist, Narrativist, or Simulationist. The idea being that a 'well designed' game only caters to one interest. And the vast majority of Forge games catered to narrativist style.

In these games, there is typically a game setting and style tied to the rule-set. If you're playing Dogs in the Vinyard, your character is a Mormon paladin gunslinger in the evil Old West. End of story. You can give your MPG any sort of personality you like, but the game only works if the players are MPGs running around getting forced into morals challenging situations about how to clean up evil towns. Players who don't want to be a MPG need not apply.

And a Megadungeon campaign really isn't so different from one of these, at least to start. Assuming you're using D&D, AD&D or a retro-clone, no matter what your class/race/alignment/personality, your character is a dungeon delver. That's what you do. The rules assume it, and players who don't want to be dungeon delvers need not apply.

The only real difference is that in DitV, that's the whole of the game. Whereas in D&D et al. you can get out of the dungeon, explore the wilderness, become rulers, etc. There's expansion. But early on, and potentially for the whole campaign if it's interesting enough, dungeon delving is what it's all about.

Even though they have completely different intents and styles, there is that commonality of implied 'character buy in' in these games. You can't be just anything you want and expect it to work. You have to give up some of that precious control over who your character is to allow the game to work.