Player Buy-In, or, We All Want To Play

Here’s something interesting that I’ve observed about the indie scene and it’s development. Because much of it is in response to the general bizarre social dynamics and outright dysfunction of the roleplaying community over the years, there is this wierd kind of over-compensation in design. It goes like this:

I don’t want my game to support dysfunctional play (alternately, I want my design to hilight dysfunctional play so that the group can deal with it in the open).

One of the hallmarks of dysfunctional play is the deprotagonized character - that is, the character with pages and pages of backstory about an ancient prophecy blah blah blah that, who, in play, just sits there as he kills orcs all day. Or the like.

The reaction to always being deprotagonized is that you stop investing in the character, leading to a downward spiral (my char never gets to do anything cool, I’m not going to invest in him and try to do anything cool, etc).

I want to ensure that everyone is invested in their character (alternately, everyones invested in everyones character) in my game.

And tipping over into the interesting part: If I don’t make everyone be invested, they won’t be.

It’s something that I feel underlies some conversations and designs - the idea, or fear, that if something like player investment is not demanded by or supported by the rules, it won’t happen at all. It’s easy to see how this corrolates to the System Does Matter ethos, right? Or do I need to go into this?

But, here’s the thing - in a functional group, everyone is there to, y’know, play. There’s this lingering fear that the people at the table will be intentionally reticent or trying to “break” the game (I know I have it), and the reaction to it is to try to design around or against it - “making” people invested in their characters so they have an interest in sustaining the game.

But the fundemental assumption of roleplay is that you’re making shit up with your friends, right? There’s an initial amount of buy-in that happens just by sitting there, at the table, playing the game. Your interest in investing in your character is that you want to play the game. Your reward for your investment? A good time.

Obviously, there are certainly different forms of investment, aimed at different play experiences, as well as things like investment in the game world or in the other characters. But I feel like starting with the assumption that the people are there in order to play, not in order to mess up play, is one that isn’t necessarily made. And it should be. Its healthy.

Maybe I’m just focusing about this because it’s something I’ve noticed in my own design-think, and that I’m working on fixing. But the basic point is this - social dysfunction will always trump good design. Design for the functional group.

Oh, Deary Dear

Warning: softy personally stuff ahead.

So, I’m looking at the schedule for Dreamation. My Saturday Timestream game is at the same time as the Continuum tournament game.

(For those who may not know, Continuum is a time travel game that came out a couple of years ago (2002, maybe?), and it widely regarded as a really, really cool game thats really hard to play. Timestream is, of course, my “cinematic” time travel game.)

Now, Continuum is a fantastic text, both in ambition and in execution. There is so much thought in there, and so much of it is well-realized in terms of mechanical process, that you can’t help but admire it. All of which is, sadly, hitched to a fairly boring/traditional task resolution system, with all the extra combat rules (hit locations!) and bizarre character progression that that implies, not to mention a design philosophy that I find at once fascinating and slightly repugnant (your character can’t gain Span until you, the player, have been playing a continuous campaign for months or, for higher levels, years? Uh…ok dudes). I will say that the Time Combat rules are a completely and absolutely brilliant conflict resolution system, and that if the entire game was based around them, I probably would not have had the drive to write Timestream.

So, as you may be able to see, Continuum was both a huge inspiration for me, and a game that I was very much reacting against with Timestream. Which may explain why going up against it, as it were, is putting big, big butterflies in the ol’ digestin’ hole. I feel like my potential audience totally overlaps with theirs, so thats one problem, but I also feel….I dunno. Small. It’s been out for a while, has some amount of presence (at least in the Indie community, where I’ve seen many a mention), and is bigger in both imaginative and physical scope (i.e. it looks and reads like a “real RPG”). And here I am with my little 6×9 84-page “light” system with no fan base. It’s hard not to feel intimidated.

Which is totally an emotional reaction - rationally, I’m sure that my presence there won’t be a blip on their event’s radar, and that the indie track audience probably isn’t the type to be clamoring for tournament events. Not to mention that, since my event is a continuation of the one the night before, I’ll hopefully (fingers crossed!) get a repeat player or two. But it’s as if I got a serious opportunity to submit a set design for a Broadway show in a professional competition, or something. I’d do it, but I would feel mighty presumptuous going up against the established designers…

So, basically, on top of my general nervousness at going to my first Con ever (!), and meeting all of these awesome designers and gamers (!!), and talking to folks about business-y stuff (!!!), and selling product for the first time (!!!!), and worries about running my first demos of my first games and not having it suck (!!!!!!!), I get to have this niggling back-of-the-mind voice worrying about being dismissed as not good enough to compete with Continuum.

Why yes, I do have a touch of performance anxiety. Why yes, it does make me feel better to throw it out for public consumption.

In any case, it’ll be an interesting car ride.

CUT TO: Samuel L Jackson punching a snake. The snake is wearing a pair of jeans.

I saw this in my latest issue of Wired.

Snakes On A Plane

There’s snakes. On a mutherfuckin’ plane. AND THERE AIN’T NUTHIN YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.

Related things you must see: this, this, and this.

I feel it is my duty, as a humor-loving human, to spread the word. Snakes on a plane. Summer 2006.

Dreamation 2006 & Other Matters

In case you don’t know, Dreamation 2006 is happening next weekend. Full details on the con are here.

Michael S. Miller and Tony Lower-Basch have been doing a mad good job of coordinating the Indie Games Explosion gaming track and vending booth. Which promises to be about 19 kinds of awesome. For a schedule of the indie games offerings, check this out.

I will be there, running two sessions of Timestream and one of Carry, hopefully playing in a couple games of somethin’, and cutting my chops at the sellin’ booth. I’m totally geeking out at the prospect of meeting the fine, fine people that will be in attendence. I really hope I’m not totally lame. Anyway, for more formal details on my own schedule and demo offerings, check the website.

There’s other news coming down the pipeline this week, also, but I’ll wait till everythings actually set before announcing.

Also, I’ve been getting a little pickup in sales of Timestream, which is awesome. This is just me being excited, not really news, but hey.

I also have an essay entitled “What Roleplay Is” that I’ve sketched out, building on my early posts here, that I’m trying to pull together. It’s basically a descriptive analysis of the unique dynamics that define the act of roleplaying. I look forward to getting some feedback on it from you smart people.

Carry is coming along. I’m putting a lot of thought into the endgame, and hope to have something clean for the demo at the con. Speaking of which: if you’re going to be there, and are interested in playing, it’s not going to go till 4 in the morning. I anticipate 2 hours of play (which is what it’s designed for), and then Q&A and feedback discussion. But yeh, don’t let the time slot scare you off!

Huh…and it appears that my website needs a little fixin. Dern.

Anyway, that’s all the news, for now. Word.

Percolation

I really don’t know what to make of the Push/Pull thing. I’m letting it percolate in my brain for a bit, methinks.

In other news, I’m finding it really difficult to work on stuff right now, which is bad, because I need to pull my shit together for Dreamation. I’m starting to get the Fear again. Blah.

So, basically, read this as an apology for not posting anything worthwhile recently, with a hopefullness for pulling out of the slump soon.

Visibility

Good Call, Ben. Check it out.

It’s Alive!

The new Hamsterprophet Productions.com site is up and running. Still needs some tweaking, but hey, it’s about a bazillion times better than the old one. All hail WordPress!

I did decide, however, to keep my blogs seperate for the time being. I dunno, I kinda like having seperate things. Could it change? Yeh, eventually. But for now, I’m happy.

An Entirely Different “Wow”

So I’m looking through the chapter on Shadowguiding from White Wolf’s Wraith: The Oblivion, because the whole Wraith/Shadow thing was very cool, and I’m stealing a lot of it for Imp. On page 177 I come across this sidebar:

A Matter Of Trust: It is recommended that at the beginning of each session, player and Shadowguide sit down for a few minutes to discuss the character the Shadowguide will be tempting. Some players may balk at this, fearing that by sharing the secrets of their character with their Shadowguide, they are also giving the Shadowguide’s character an unfair advantage in the form of knowledge of their Passions and Fetters.

While unscrupulous players may take information they learn out of character (i.e., as Shadowguide) and let their regular characters use it, Wraith players should be mature enough to seperate what they know from what their characters know, and to trust their fellow players not to “metagame” or cheat. If you can trust your fellow players to report their dice rolls honestly and create their character honestly, you should be able to trust them to keep your character’s secrets.

(from the 2nd Edition, 199
Oh man. Sometimes, there aren’t the words.

I M Lemming

Now, in case anyone hasn’t figured it out, I really just want to be Joshua BishopRoby. So I’m playing around with WordPress for my website, mainly because I’m tired of it looking like it’s straight out of 1996 (which is when I learned HTML, so it basically….is). It’ll prolly take a couple days to get up off the ground, but then this here thingy is moving over dere. I think Game A Day will stay here (seperate spheres, seperate spheres…) for the nonce, though.

Yup.

Reactions to Art/NotArt

The latest widely addressed topic - are RPGs art?

I think that, yet again, there’s a huge f’in difference between the Text and the Play. In short, an RPG sourcebook is not art. Actually playing an RPG, thats where the art does or does not happen.

The Text is an object. It can be aesthetic or not, well-written or not - basically, it can be a nice thing or not. But it’s not a novel. It’s not a text that has been written in such a way that your interaction with it brings beauty, or meaning, or whatever into your life. It’s closer to a play (though, I would argue that plays-as-written are a seperate artform than plays-as-performed), in that it’s something that has to be enacted.

The Actual Play can be art. Is it always? No. But it certainly has the potential - I truly think that a session of roleplay can be as beautiful or as touching or as memorable or as meaningful as any book, play, sculpture or painting.

The difference, though? The artist, in roleplay, is not the author. It is the players. That’s right. I don’t think that I’m an artist - I’m an enabler. If I am good at what I do, I enable the true artists to do their thing, reliably and well. If I’m bad, I give the artists a vague idea of what they can create, which they may or may not actually acheive.

Does it need an audience to be art? Of course. And every single fucking session of roleplay that has ever happened has had an audience - it’s the participants. Roleplay is based upon the interaction of audience-participants, remember? Roleplay is the only entertainment form in the world that is always seen by the exact audience that it is intended for. When roleplay becomes art, it is always witnessed by those best enabled to appreciate exactely what that art is saying.

The unfortunate reality is that, the majority of the time, RPGs are read and not played. Which, given the reality of math, is unavoidable. But it leads to the conflation of the author/designer with the artist. RPGs are a kind of combined form of entertainment (Text) and art (Play). It’s no surprise that people hold strong, strong opinions on both sides.