Character Effectiveness

This turned out longer than I thought. Skip to the end for the point.

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Characters are (usually, not always, but the vast majority of the time) the interface that the players use to interface with the fiction.

Character “effectiveness” is a good (and commonly understood, I think) phrase for talking about the way in which that interface works. A characters effectiveness may be because of the stats that it has, or it may be measured by a metaresource that is used by the player in order to change the fiction in order to “help the character out,” or whatever else. But it’s a trivial point to say that a 10th level D&D character is more effective than a 1st level D&D character, right?

Well, I’m not sure that thats a trivial point at all. Because, yes, a 1st level D&D character in the same party as the 10th level one will be overwhelmed - they just won’t be able to effect the fiction in a meaningful way through the manipulation of mechanics. They will not be able to hit any of the monsters, for example. Now, the person playing that character may be able to make them effective in a “soft” fashion - for example, someone plays a 1st level noble in that 10th level game, and he has social authority in the fiction that the 10th level barbarian doesn’t have. But, as a general statement, most characters in a given game usually have about the same amount of effectiveness, right?

Let’s keep looking at D&D. Whats the other measure of character effectiveness? Your hit points. When your hit points hit 0, you are no longer effective, because your character is dead.

This is the big thing that lurks in the background of most games, right? That your character, at some point, could die, thereby severing the players ability to effect the fiction.

Man what?

The point of a roleplaying game is that you are playing, right? So what is up with the constant threat of you not getting to play anymore?

Anyway, thats not what I actually wanted to talk about. Got sidetracked, sorry.

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Ahem.

So, for a certain style of play, player effectiveness = character effectiveness. My GURPS character that I just made has a 15 in the Occultism skill, so I the player have a chance north of 90% of successfully influencing the fiction whenever I use him to find something out thats related to Occultism.

For another certain style of play, player effectiveness is completely disassociated from character effectiveness. My last GURPS character died because I talked to the GM and said “hey, I’m not really interested in playing Reyes anymore, and I know you think it would be appropriate for a PC to die during this mission,” not because Reyes blew any rolls.

My question to you, gentle reader, is whether it’s ever more desirable for thematic or genre-celebratory play for player effectiveness to be curtailed because the character effectiveness has gone down. Easiest example, why should you have to stop effecting the fiction because your character dies?

The problem that I’m seeing in some of my play is that I don’t want characters to be injured, because it makes them less effective, which means that their players don’t have as much ability to have input into the game, which make it less fun for me.

This is a genuine question. Is mechanically determined lowering of character effectiveness useful? Why? When?

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!

Next Time I Run The Mountain Witch…

…I will be using these images.

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2008/03/japanese-toy-designs.html

Damn but I love running that game.

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!

2007 Recap

Guess it’s time for one of these, then.

2007 was interesting. I hated the internet a lot, so I think I dropped out of many of the web-based social circles that you, gentle reader, are involved with. I also had a lot of personal upheavals that severely impacted my leisure time, especially in the late-winter-spring-early-summer. Even now, I’m pretty gunshy about posting things to forums, and while I’ve been keeping contact with individuals, I’m pretty certain that my “online identity profile” is much lower than it was at, say, this time last year.

Which is totally fine with me, let me tell you what.

Umm, other than that, lesse…Hamsterprophet Productions did fine, overall. Due to aforementioned personal ish, carry was out of print for a couple of months that it really shouldn’t have been. I think that that killed any momentum it may have had left from Gen Con and Ron’s excellent AP at the Forge, and sales have pretty much flattened out since it’s been back. If I had the time and energy to proselytize for it, I’m sure it would do better, but hey, I am what I am.

I’m almost out of stock of the perfectbound version of Timestream, which is good.

And, while I started poking around with little projects off and on, I finally have traction on a game that I’m really excited about (Annalise), and which will be taking up most of my time for the next year or so, I think.

This has, however, been an EXCELLENT year for my actual play. I think I’ve logged the most hours playing games this year than ever before in my life, and the vast majority of those hours have been solid fun. My brain is bad at dates and remembering things, but to the best of my recollection:

Playtests

• Snow From Korea, at Dreamation. This was with Shreyas and Russell (and someone else? Adam Dray?), and it was really beautiful!
• Misspent Youth, at DexCon. There’s a whole post that I need to make detailed how this game inspired me for Annalise.
• In Frankenstein’s Wake, a game that came out of my BibliOdyssey Design Challenge, by Eric J. Boyd. It imploded!
• Project Donut, two separate oneshots. Can’t talk about it.
• Darkpages. A metric ton of Darkpages - it was my Monday groups game for most of the summer, in addition to a couple of oneshots at SGBoston, and then I ran a session at Gen Con. It’s been really satisfying to be doing longterm playtesting, and see the feedback work it’s way into Jared’s brain and back into the game.
• Annalise, of course. I ran one complete game (5 sessions, I think) with my Monday group, and then I’ve done a couple of single sessions since then with evolving rules tweaks. Every time I play it I fall in love with it again.

Single Sessions/One-Shots

• A couple games of carry, at Dreamation and DexCon. Good times had by all.
• Dust Devils hacked to a space bounty hunter thing. Fun, but I still need to play Dust Devils straight and see if it works for me.
• 1001 Nights, like, a thousand and one times. At least four times that I can remember, and I’m sure another one or two are in there.
• Was my hardcore Primitive game in 2007? It may have been late 2006. Anyway, it was fun. I need to play more Primitive.
• Giants, at JiffyCon. I’m hoping to get a multi-session game of this in, and soon.
• Ganakagok, once at Dreamation and once at Origins, and ohmygodIlovethisgamesomuch. I mean, I don’t think it’ll replace InSpectres as my favorite game, but it is definitely the game that touches me the most in play.
• Oh, yeh, InSpectres a couple times, both running and playing it. KaKAAAW!
• Dogs In The Vineyard, finally. At Origins. Just the one town, and I kinda sucked at running it, but it was still cool.
• Acts of Evil, at Gen Con. Umm, I dunno if I’m up to playing it on my own, but damn it’s a artistic game. And I mean that in the most complimentary way possible.
• Roanoke, at Gen Con. It was sweet and educational to us brain-damaged story-gaming folk.
• A one-session version of The Mountain Witch at DexCon, which worked out really well. I love running this game.
• Agon. Eat my spear!
• The Pool, finally. It’s really good.
• Oh, and Unistat, finally. It’s also really good.
• Best Hunter Squad, at Gen Con. I died!
• Contenders, run by Malcolm on his Rock Star Tour. This is a good, good game. Maybe one of the best that’s come out in the last 1-2 years.
• I’m sure something else is in there, but hey. That’s a good start!

Long-form/Multisession

• Three-session arc of The Mountain Witch. It was REALLY good, despite some interpersonal issues among players. I was superhappy with it. I love running this game.
• GURPS. That’s right, I’m playing GURPS weekly. I took a break in the fall, but I’m on my fourth arc (each arc takes about 3-6 weeks, and they revolve through different genres and characters). It’s been satisfying in the long-term-character-immersion way, and socially the game is awesome.
• Darkpages, though it’s technically been playtesting, took up most of my summer.
• Again, playtesting, but Annalise is a longer-form game, and it was really nice to play it out as such, though I’ve been evolving the rules like whoa since then.
• Aberrant! My Monday group is on the second of three story arcs, and it’s been a blast running this game. We’re all on the same page about how fiddly we need to be with those silly rules, and there’s something that just feels right about using the character powers and such as written. There’s three characters, and each story is focusing primarily on one, and we’re right at the midpoint of the series. It’s fun and exhausting, sometimes - I have to do prep! Whoa!

So, playing lots of games is fun. And totally educational to me as a designer, and just as a fan of the genre. I’ve learned a lot this year.  And that’s what counts in my book.

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.

The Observer Effect

I’m subscribed to C.W Richeson’s LJ, in which he posts his RPG reviews. The latest one is of a game I’d never heard of, called Aletheia. It’s apparently an occult conspiracy RPG with an interested setting - anyway, you can read the review for yourself. It sounds like something that I would be interested in playing, but I don’t think I need to go out and buy it. Anyway, reading the review sparked some ideas that relate to my always-in-the-background desire to make Timestream a better game.

Brain Explosion, Go:

So, there’s this thing called the Observer Effect, or maybe Observer Bias, that all characters are subject to. What it means is that each observer of an event has a specific and subjective understanding of that event, and that consensual reality (i.e. the timestream itself) is the aggregation of subjective observation.

Observer Bias can be strong or weak. The more involved with an event you are, the stronger your Bias, and the more tangential or secondhand your knowledge or involvement, the weaker.

So, time travel and temporal manipulation are always working against the Observation Effect. For new experiences (i.e. everything in your subjective future) you don’t have any Observer Bias, cuz you haven’t observed them yet. For anything you have already experienced, you have a certain amount of personal Observer Bias, which is what you have to overcome in order to change those things. There’s also a certain built-up Observer Effect for most things, that represents how ingrained that event is in consensual reality. Once your able to personally re-experience the situation, then you can try to overcome the ambiant Observer Effect.

So, in some kind of mechanical way, I would think that Bias is the effective “difficulty” of a roll, or set of rolls, or whatever, while the ambient Effect is the “hit points” of the event, which you have to bring to 0 in order to change it.

Big, famous event that you have known about all your life (uh, Hitler, for example, or the JFK assassination) has a high difficulty and loads of hit points.

Big, famous event that you’ve never heard of (like, maybe something in China’s revolutionary past  for a working-class American, or the like) has a low difficulty, but still loads of hit points.

Small event that you were personally involved in (basically, anything from your personal past) has a a high difficulty, but if you can overcome that it doesn’t take much to change.

Small events that you don’t know anything about (most of everything else) has a low difficulty and is pretty easy to change.

So, here’s a self-correcting framework for saying “it’s hard to change big things or personal things, but easy to change things that you’ve had nothing to do with and that not many people know about”. Also, once you change an event, you have a stronger Observer Bias (because of your multiple sets of memories about it), and changing it the next time is subsequently more difficult.

Strain (i.e. Paradox) comes from when you can’t overcome the Observation Effect.

So there’s some thoughts.

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.

Ties

I just got really excited about my tie-breaking mechanic for a new game.

“Once the active player and the scene guide both have dice, they roll them and order them sequentially. Look at the highest single result for each person; if the active player is higher, then he “wins” the first volley, and he describes how his trait and actions get him closer to his goal. If the scene guide is higher, than the active player loses the first volley, and the scene guide describes what this means in the fiction. If they are a tie, both dice are returned to their owners and you look at the next highest pair. If all pairs are ties, then the contest is interrupted by something that means it will have to continue on later. This something can be declared by anyone at the table, and that person automatically claims the conflict (as it has become a discrete repeatable action).”

That’s right; ties mean that the conflict gets broken off before it’s resolved, and turns into a resource that someone can bring back at any time in order to influence a different conflict. That’s hella cool, no?

Prospectus: How To Roleplay

A Beginners Guide to Roleplaying

Introduction

• A Brief History of the Hobby
• Definitions of Roleplaying
• Good Terms and Ideas to Know
• What’s In This Book

Picking A Game

• What’s Out There?
• Genre, Style and “Footprint”
• Free Stuff
• Conventions and Low/No Commitment Gaming Gatherings

Creating A Group

• How Many People Do I Need?
• Where Do I Find Them?
• What If None Of Us Know What We’re Doing?
• Do I Need the Same Group Every Time?
• Playing On-Line

The Group

• Where Do We Play?
• Talk To Each Other
• Who’s Responsible for the Fun?
• What If We Don’t Have Fun?
• I Want To Change/Leave/Add to the Group

The Game Master

• The Game Master Is Not A Person (He’s A Set of Responsibilities)
• Games With A Game Master
• Games With Distributed Game Mastering
• How The Game Master Contributes to the Fun

Playing A Character

• How Do I Make a Character That Is Fun?
• Do I Need to Play the Same Character All the Time?
• Where Can I Get Inspiration for my Character?
• I Don’t Understand All of These Numbers
• What If I Don’t Like My Friend’s Characters?
• What If I Don’t Like My Character?
• How You Contribute to the Fun

Shortform Play

• What’s Shortform Play?
• What Games are Good for Shortform?
• How Do I Get the Most out of Shortform?

Longterm (Campaign) Play

• What’s Longterm Play?
• What Games are Good for Longterm?
• How Do I Get the Most out of Longterm?

Conclusion

Resources

• The Internet
• Your Local Library
• The Local Favorite Game Store
• Other Resources

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Thoughts?