Lame!

April Fools is, like, the lamest thing ever. Google usually gets me, and Jared has had some good ones, but other than those? Gah. Please stop.

In productive news, some things I’ve been thinking of posting about!

- First Quarter play report.

- Useful technique: three-stage character jam.

- How I run InSpectres.

- Empires of Glass.

And finally, new Annalise stuff soon! I hope!

Commercial Gaming!

I dunno if Dev shared this with anyone else, but I think it’s hilarious.

(via Dev)

JiffyCon Boston 08

Wow, what a great time!

This my first time co-sponsoring an event (along with Dev) and it went pretty darn smoothly. We had a good attendance of 30+, including peeps from far-flung NYC and New Jersey (thanks for making the trip, yo!) as well as locals and many representative from Western Mass. We even had more people than games in our morning slot, and Dev got to run a playtest of his game The Dance and the Dawn. So it was, like, Boston designer playtest day, between that, my Annalise, and Jonathon’s Geiger Counter.

I facilitated a very solid playtest game of Annalise in the morning, and played Misspent Youth (again, a playtest) in the afternoon. I think Rob got some good feedback out of that game, so that’s a nice feeling.

And I saw friends and had a good solid chunk of social time! Shreyas and Elizabeth were wonderful houseguests, and it’s always exciting to see the friends I’ve made since getting into this fragment of the hobby. Thanks everyone for coming!

And, without further ado, the pictures:

Jonathon and Shreyas have introspective moments while playing Annalise. Prominently displayed is our third sponsor and official morning fuel of JiffyCon, Dunkin’ Donuts. In the background are Melissa, Kat and someone I can’t make out playing the Dance and the Dawn.

Adam Flynn winds up for another knockout punch while running Spirit of the Century! for a full and (from what I was overhearing at the time) enthusiastic table.

There were some kind folks present who have been filming a documentary on Pandemonium, the game store that graciously provided our venue for JiffyCon. They came by and filmed a couple games and did a couple of interviews, and were generally cool people. Yay, JiffyCon on film! I’ll be sure to put a link when the thing is available.

Two friendly fellows whose names I, unfortunately, don’t remember (sorry guys! though, they were playing characters by the names of Sam and Cornelius, respectively) flank Eppy as he poses for me. Ah, always posing for me, thats my Epidiah. We were playing Misspent Youth, by the way.

My Misspent Youth character sheet and notes.

Emily Care Boss playing Shooting the Moon with John and Deanne Adams. John is aghast at the dastardly deeds of Emily’s shootin’ fingers.

Shreyas runs a playtest of Mist Robed Gate for a packed and super-boisterous table. There were tears AND Kung Fu. Most excellent.

So, again, thanks everyone for coming! It was a blast!

Investigation Game Mechanic

I had a dream about a game mechanic, and when I woke up, I (a) actually remembered it and (b) it didn’t turn out to be totally incoherent.

It’s pretty simple, and I’m sure someone has something like this in one of the bevy of investigation games that are out/coming out around now.

So, the GM (or whoever’s in charge) has a whole bunch of plot threads going on, and he or she writes down a number of discrete clues and/or information that has to do with finding out whats really going on. Either each clue has multiple levels of potential detail, or the clues themselves are ranked by how important/detailed they are. These levels have some kind of number associated with them.

When the investigators make a roll, or accumulate evidence points, or whatever they’re doing to actually get clues, they’re trying to meet or exceed one of those thresholds. If they do, they get the clue! Hooray!

Next time they’re making a roll (or whatever), they can do it like normal, or they can risk, and thus build on, their current clue(s). If they do this, the threshold of the clue they risk is the new floor for the roll (or whatever), but if they don’t make it to the next threshold, they lose that clue. The witness clams up, the evidence disappears, the investigation deadends suddenly, everyone has a case of amnesia, whatever.

I see this as being Agon-y, with the GM having a Strife-like budget that he or she divides among clues initially to set thresholds, and then can use to make things more difficult during the game as well.

Hrm. Maybe this would be a neat Agon hack.

Anyhow, I like the idea that you can be losing some clues as you gain others in a nonsequential manner, making finding everything out much less linear. A critical component would also be keeping clues on physical cards, and not allowing anyone to take separate notes about them. So, as the game progresses, there’s an effect of trying to fill in holes from memory.

Update & Some Music

I’m heading out to JiffyCon on Saturday, which I’m mega-excited about.

I’m running a weekly Aberrant game for some friends, which is going well and is scratching all my long-term-established-setting-high-character-immersion itches.

I was playing in a weekly GURPS game with rotating “campaigns”, but I’m sitting the next cycle out. I need time to work on Annalise. It’s, as my buddy who’s playing in both of these games with me and who playtested Darkpages and Annalise with me aptly said, “A different kind of fun”.

Speaking of, I’ll be running it at JiffyCon, and shortly therafter have it available for interested readers, I expect. This is the first game I’m writing while listening to an extensive soundtrack (or any soundtrack at all, really), which has been a very rewarding ritual. So far tonite:

• Depeche Mode
• Goldfrappe
• Rammstein
• Oingo Boingo
• Lords of Acid
• Healer
• Evanescence
• The New Pornographers
• Rilo Kiley
• The Cure
• Sisters of Mercy
• Bauhaus

Though, the single theme song for the game is definitely Bat for Lashes’s ‘Sarah’.

Gen Con AughtSeven

I had a really good time at Gen Con. I’m also doing a lot of thinking as a result of it, which is always good.

I promised some pictures - unfortunately, I lost my stone-age digicam half-way through the con (which is good, cuz I need an excuse to get a new one, but is bad, cuz I had some great pics on there), and my cell phone pix aren’t apparentely ready to come through the intertubes yet. So, there will be some pictures, but not quite yet.

I started doing this by day, but my brain is mush and it all runs together anyway. So, in very rough chronological order, bullet points

• I broke my (two-convention) streak, and didn’t meet anyone in the airport that I knew. Lame!
• We need better logistics at the booth - not to blame anyone, cuz we’re all volunteers, but we did a lot of waiting when we could have been doing a lot of setting up. That said, the load in went smoothly, ’specially cuz Bill and myself had Origins to train us on the equipment.
• The Diana Jones Awards, while fun with the free drinks and the….attentive…wait staff, was a little underwhelming. Maybe cuz I didn’t care about any of the three things up for it, maybe cuz there was little AC and little loudspeakering, maybe cuz I was exhausted, but I really wanted to have more fun there. Oh well, maybe next year?
• Seeing people is fantastic! You are all my friends that live in different places that I only see a couple days a year, but its totally worth it.
• I particularly enjoyed spending time with people that I kinda knew, and developing those relationships more. Kevin, Jason, Steve, Eric, Brennan, Bill, Krista, Paul, Danielle, Clint, Matt, Justin, Gregor, Julia, Ron, and I’m sure there’s some I’m forgetting - thank you for spending time, meals and games with me. This isn’t to say I didn’t really enjoy gaming, chilling with, meeting or bullshitting with the rest of you people, I just don’t remember your names at the moment!
• The dealers hall was much more manageable, probably a combination of me having experienced it before and it actually being a little less crowded this year. The Forge booth had plenty of space, and even with the increased electronic games presence, there was still a lot of unused space - like, the Segway challenge was in the dealers hall. Wierd!
• Free loaves of bread from the mall food court. A Dro sandwich ensued.
• Going to a sleazy underground bar with Kevin in pursuit of his spy game goal, and watching him win 100,000 in two hands of blackjack. I felt like a superspy, and I wasn’t even the one kidnapped. Unfortunately, we never did find the final clue, and Kevin failed to save the world.
• Going way off the beaten path with Kevin and Jason and Eric to relax and eat and have a great chat. Indianapolis has some hella cool buildings, and the extra 15 minutes of walking were totally worth it to get out of the con zone.
• Hatching secret plans & ideas for a booth next year.
• The booth was rocking, but exhausting. I was doing double-duty as IPR rep and Forge booth participant, and even though they were in the same physical location, I really couldn’t muster the energy to do well by the booth. I didn’t end up running a single demo of carry (though others did, thanks Ron!). I did run Primitive (which got recorded by Canon Puncture) and a couple of InSpectres demos, all of which were fun. I like running demos for other peoples games way better than my own, I’ve come to realize.
• Morning conversations with Krista, Brennan and Bill as we all got around and on the way to the dealers hall. These always put me in a good mood, and we had some really interesting talks in that hour or so every morning, not to mention some hilarious moments (f’rex, “Dude, I’ll punch you right in the sleep-hole”).
• Getting lost EVERY NIGHT getting back to my hotel. I’m glad I had a map. My brain is not built for directions.
• My hotel was neat! There was a train in it, and ghost people! I wanted to play Drifter’s Escape sitting between the train cars!
• Playtested Darkpages twice. The first was an incredible lineup of players (I ran it for Jared and Jason, the authors; Thor, the editor; Dave Turner and Mike Mearls, who have been following the games development for awhile, as I understand it), and was an incredibly productive playtest, I thought. I can’t wait for the game to take a final shape. The second was much more abbreviated (with Kevin and Alexander), but demonstrated that the previous playtest had pointed the game in a good direction.
• Played Roanoke. It was fun, but our story gamer brain damage got in the way. Kevin was hard on himself about not running it well; I think we had some expectation/execution dissonance in play that contributed, and I kinda went off in a weird direction with my character. Nevertheless, it was a good time for me, and I would play a game with those guys (Kevin, Clint, Jason, Eric, Matt Snyder) in a heartbeat.
• Playtested Acts of Evil, kind of. Well, we did, but we didn’t get through too much of the game. But what we did get through….this game is awesome, in the most literal sense. No less than three times I sat back at the table, staring into space and going “Holy crap, Paul. That is BRILLIANT and disturbing.” - about game mechanics. Oh yes. Oh yes.
• I am so incredibly glad that I stayed until Monday. Sunday evening dinner and gaming after the pressure of the BIG SHOW is off was really great, and I don’t want to ever miss it again if I don’t absolutely have too.
• Ron and Jason and Julia and myself had an interesting conversation about our games. A subject for another time, but…there’s something interesting happening in game design, and while I’m not sure that it’s a big ol’ deal, there are some fascinating implications to some of these games that are happening right now.
• I saw a lot of great costumes, and it’s really sad that I lost my camera for that reason alone.

So, in short, good times. Very good times.

Some Thoughts on Contenders

I played Contenders last Wednesday at SGBoston. It’s a game about boxing drama, though it’s really a game that uses competition as the focus for asking what drives people to get what they want. I played with traveling rock star Malcolm Craig, who facilitated the game and SGBoston stalwart Eric. I had a surprisingly good time! We made a really compelling story about three boxers in 1930s Colorado, each trying to scratch a living out of the hard times and take care of the people that they loved. I’m planning to pick up a copy at Gen Con. It very much hilighted a couple of game design things that I’ve been thinking about a lot, such as….

Good Rules Take You Somewhere New

Why do we have rules for RPGs? Because they take you somewhere you wouldn’t have gone on your own. My boxer was a kid, 19, just out of school, who wanted to box and the marry his sweetheart. He was a good, honest kid in a bad town. On my own, his story would have been one of struggle against his internal demons, with a lot of interaction with his sweetheart (when should they get married? what if she’s pregnant and he doesn’t want a kid yet? what if he doesn’t have enough money to support them both?), the boxing hilighting that conflict.

I got knocked out in the first round of my first fight, and that pretty much set the tone for the rest of the game. Due to a combination of poor card draws and personal decisions about what kinds of scenes I wanted for myself, I ended up with my Pain stat skyrocketing. I never had enough money to do anything, and I ended up being beat up by pretty much everyone (other boxers, the Mob, the other gangsters, etc). By the end of the game, I tried to use my measly earnings to get my sweetheart a ring….but her father didn’t even allow me to see her, because I was such a loser. I ended the game jumping on a train and becoming a tramp.

Wow! Totally not what I had had in mind for the character when I made him, but it was a really compelling, tragic story arc that grew directly and concretely out of my engagement with the game system and my poor, poor luck drawing cards. I’ve played games where failing almost every roll (or draw, in this case) was extremely frustrating; in this game, the system is such that you always have a slim chance to overcome your past failures, and it was enough to give me hope for the next time around!

So I really admire it as a piece of tight, streamlined game design, much more than I had expected to, to be honest.

GM is a concept, not a person

I also dug the way that GM duties are apportioned out in Contenders. Basically, you choose and frame your own scenes, and you can choose to assign other players to NPC roles in your scenes if you want. But you can also narrate your own scenes entirely, draw some cards, then narrate the end. Which sounds kind of lame….but the other part is, you HAVE to interact with each other in actual boxing scenes, because someone else needs to play the other boxer, even if it’s not another players character. Also, the Brawl scenes are specifically for fighting another boxer outside the ring, so it’s another avenue. Finally, the system acts as a kind of general, overarching adversity, as your own stats determine your opposition to non-boxing conflicts. I never had the sense that we were playing seperate games in parallel (which I get with GMless games sometimes), even before we started involving each others characters in our scenes.

Anyway, I’m working on a GMless game right now, and I’m glad that I played Contenders so’s I can steal from it.

So…

I liked Contenders a lot, and I’m excited to get it and hopefully play it some more.

Origins 2007 after-action report (Part 2)

And just in time for Dex Con…

Anyhow, when last we left off, I was sitting down with Alexander, Michael Miller, and Peter and Gary Adkison to play Ganakagok. I played the Arrogant Shaman, Michael was the Intrepid (or something) Whaler, Peter was the Youthful Explorer, and Gary was the Wise Stargazer. Though Gary had to retire after the first player-turn, he really put a lot of oomph into his character, narrating how he spilled out a glass vase (the only glass object in the village) full of wolves teeth to show the village how they were allowing themselves to be divided (by an argument between my character and the village chief). The Stargazer than went out into the frozen wastes, ending up in an ice chasm, confronting the spirits and the stars and allowing them to convince him that he had to go back to heal the rift in the village. It was really awesome, and I think we were all a little surprised to see Gary (an elderly gentleman with a mainly traditional gaming background, AFAIK) bring the awesome like that. It was good surprised!

Anyhow, after he left we managed to get through the rest of the game before it got too too late, and it was really fun. My Shaman ended up dying of a plague brought upon the village by his wayward apprentice, but in death he chose to follow his people and be their spiritual guide rather than rest with his ancestors. This was noble, but ultimately futile; the Nitu got absorbed into a southern people within two generations of leaving a melting Ganakagok, and with that my shaman’s soul was cast adrift in the void, forever without companions or anyone to watch over.

I love this game.

Saturday

Another less-than-intense sales day, though I tried to put more time in at the booth to make up for my wandering about on Friday. However, I did get to do some fun stuff. I did an interview with Michael Erb, a journalist who writes game reviews for a print newspaper. (Note: this may have happened on Friday. I don’t honestly remember). Audio will be posted at some point, I am led to understand. Later that day I crushed him in a demo of Burning Wheel’s Duel of Wits, which was fun! I love crushing!

Our Saturday was about as good as our Friday. After hours saw some solid hanging out and drinking at the Big Bar, including a big ol gang of people getting revved up for the Origins Awards ceremony. Earlier in the day I had been informed that Jake Norwood has never played Dogs in the Vineyard, and Alexander asked me if I would run it. I hemmed and hawed a bit (I’ve run exactly one game of Dogs, for one Dog), but finally decided to give it a shot.

Weevil Gulch

As the crowd swept their way to the Origins Awards, I got some dinner and started prepping a town, calling it Weevil Gulch (don’t ask why, I don’t know!). I ended up running it for Alexander, Jake, Thor Olavsrud and Ralph Mazza. We could have had a bigger group, but I was nervous enough about handling four players, so we kept it to that. Character creation and initiation conflicts went very well (Jake was the only one who lost his), and we went right into the town.

It was a simple enough town, and I did my best to just lay out the pertinent info. It was about 10.30 or so by the time we started playing proper, and I think we were all set to cut to the chase. A brief but exciting time later, we had a dead ruffian, a deposed Steward, and a quartet of Dogs that knew a little bit more about each others theological leanings. And gunplay skills.

My brain totally shut off right at the ultimate conflict of the town, and I just had the Stewards wife confess her sins to the Dogs, after which they narrated how they dealt with the problem, and we called it a game. It was fun despite my brain freeze, and Jake said that he had a good time, and that now he saw what all the fuss was about. So I call that one a win.

And The Award Goes Too…

Oh yeh, during the Dogs game we got word that Burning Empires won the Origins Award for Best RPG. So that was awesome.

And The Rest

The rest of the night was spent hanging out, shooting the shit, and generally basking in the reflected glory of Luke’s award. I stayed up till 4.30, got back to my hotel at 5, and left at 6am for my flight. So, that was the end of my Origins. And it was a hella-good time.

I’m definitely gonna be back next year.

New Spaces

I’ve recently signed up with two new places to talk about games. These are new, not because of their chronological age (though they are both new in that way as well), but because they are places that are constructed for talking about things about games that other places (the Forge, Story Games, RPG.net, publisher websites) are not*. Stuff I tend to think about as “real stuff” sometimes.

I would knife fight a man is for talking about God, sex, and rpgs. And a bunch of other stuff.

The IRIS Network is a female-oriented community for gamers, with a decidedly feminist bent.

I’m still in read-and-don’t-talk mode, but I’m glad that these exist for me to read right now.

*Footnote: Now that tabletop games are growing and changing and evolving into something new, I’m glad that people are starting to consider them in a way that positions them against the rest of life. I can’t help thinking about how we look back at the first films (even the first talkies) and go “wow, how hackneyed and blind and full of unexamined cultural assumptions, even though there’s really good stuff.” And as the medium evolved and changed, directors and screenwriters starting bringing more and more “real stuff” into them.  It’s a process of maturation, and I’m glad I get to see and participate in it.

On My Plate

(cuz if I don’t do this, I’ll forget everything)

(so not in order of importance)

Write up a Mountain Witch AP thread at the Forge.

Write up an outline for Kevin & I’s Push 2 article DONE!

Send in corrections for carry so it can be back in print. DONE!

Read and review all of the BibliOdyssey entries. DONE!

Update website with links to carry AP threads.

A couple of IPR-related tasks.

A followup blog entry about the culture of Awesome.

AND THEN I CAN WRITE GAMES AGAIN!