Design, particular and general December 29, 2006
Posted by Ian in Game Design, Methodological, Personal Reflection, Rambling, Theory.add a comment
[Caveat lector: this is a rambling post in a big way, only a modicum of organization and defined by things you can only barely call 'ideas']
Okay, so a couple of things came together in my head and I have been toying with creating another simple rpg. It all started with planning to run a TSOY session for some friends, set in the past of a campaign world we created for a 3.5 campaign arc. Before I knew it, I could see how to run the session with an entirely different set of rules.
Now, I’m actually going to run the game with TSOY, just because I want a system I can trust. But now I have a pet system to play around with and blog about, so I will.
I have a few basic goals with this game. First, to create a GM role that is very improvisational. I want each player to be able to, once per session, just look at the GM and say “I want this scene, with this character, now.” To support that, I want to work up a challenge chart, that the GM can use to quick build challenges with finite resources. When it comes to on-demand scenes, I see them getting a big chunk of those resources to build the scene.
Second, I want to make the mechanics tight, tight, tight. I want to see how closely I can tailor mechanics to concept. I have two attributes in mind (Water and Air) and I want every conflict to have a Water and an Air aspect. Water stands for what is actually happening in the scene, while the Air represents the ’spiritual’ or ‘ethical’ dimension of the conflict.
I have a mechanic (more on that in another post) that allows both aspects to appear in a single roll of the dice, and for a player to be able to win one aspect while losing another. And, I think, I don’t want any dice rolled for any conflict that does not require both aspects get dealt with. I’m hoping that keeping the concepts tightly wound around mechanics makes the game easier to both learn and get into. With any luck, I’ll get a chance to find out.
But all this has me wondering exactly why this game has hold of me at the moment. I really don’t have any pretensions to publishing, to making money, or, even, seeing people playing it a lot. What am I up to in my design process?
I started getting into the design process for this because it feels like it expresses something about my current emotional state, my current spiritual state. Those aren’t things I talk about a whole lot, but it plays a big role. The mechanics began as hodge podge, but I am clarifying them based on the affects (not concepts) currently dominating my life.
I’m not just playing with mechanics, but thinking about my life through them. It isn’t that they are a commentary on my life, so much as a parallel practice that hones certain attitudes I am trying to cultivate. On the one hand, it’s personal, but the final product’s success does not depend on someone being able to respond to it in according to that personal dimension.
I feel like that this probably plays a role in why other people design, but I don’t see a lot of discussion about it. It is, of course, a more personal and ‘tender’ issue. The debate over (art) – (not art) touches on it a little, but really seems to miss the point.
High or low, art or craft, there is a question of the person involved, of how they are involved. Some ‘high art’ is utterly mechanical, some ‘mere craft’ is riddled with the cries of sadness and joy felt by their creator.
Anyway, this is me just placing a bookmark by this question, a promise to myself and others that I will be returning to this idea, hopefully with more choate things to say about it rather than just wandering inchoately around it.
Back in the Day December 15, 2006
Posted by Ian in Community, Personal Reflection, Rambling.add a comment
Lately, I have been thinking about how the web seemed way back when before Google, Yahoo, and all the rest set about providing us with the tools to map the web. I’m thinking about how you used to get a web address from a bulletin board, a friend, or an article, and go look it up. About how you would crawl from site to site according to the links between them.
It was a fascinating time, when you really felt you were exploring some new land, stumbling across all these incredibly personal, raw things. I remember coming to those sites with less expectations of what I would find and more of a genuine curiosity. I read with a sympathetic ear, listening for the glimmers of light between the lines. There was something synaesthetic like that to it.
The emergence of the new web world, though, has created hubs. I appreciate them and it makes my life easier. But it has stripped the distance away from so many websites. I don’t go so often with the expectation of needing to listen, to cull, but to find my expectations elabrated for me.
And I miss that, am wondering how we might begin to foster that sentiment again. I think again to Walter Benjamin, to his essay The Storyteller, where he talks about how important it was for the story to come from afar, to bear within itself the promise and allure of distance, something that we accepted as containing the alien and the divine, which we must make sense of without being told.
Something profound, deeper than the sort of ‘interpretation’ we often talk about, which is little more than unfolding what we already know or what is already there but not yet known by us. This is an encounter, a moment when we must appreciate before we can begin to speak, a moment of silence.
Humor at the Table November 16, 2006
Posted by Ian in Actual Play, Personal Reflection, Rambling.add a comment
First off, I am actually getting close enough to a draft of my not completed MACE Game Chef entry that I can worry about whether or not it is actually playable. That is a welcome worry. But that isn’t what this post is about.
Humor at the gaming table…it’s a pretty common, basic feature of the experience for most of us. It has a long history in the hobby and partakes of a broader ‘geek’ humor. It is charmingly absurdist with pleasant deadpan accents. There is also a fairly long history of people being concerned about its negative impact on play experience. I think a lot of talk about ’staying in character’ and ‘no table talk’ have more to do with keeping the jokey tendencies of many players from taking over the game.
And that the concern is so pervasive, appearing again and again, speaks volumes about how difficult that project is. Which leads me to think that humor isn’t accidental, but plays an important role in many players’ gaming. So, what does this humor do for them?
The answer seems pretty obvious—it keeps the emotional drama of the game at a distance. It lets them see their characters, others’ characters, as fictional objects. The linguistic play characteristic of that humor focuses the game on the words. The objectifying slap-stick keeps the players’ attention on the mere appearance of violence and suffering, not its internal and social corollaries.
Which is pretty damned important if you look at what happens in most D&D-style games. I mean, how many times can you really identify with getting chopped by a battle-axe? Especially when it has no real impact on your character’s performance? How much can you identify with your character’s motivations when you are expected to shoehorn them into whatever module-style plot your DM has cooked up? It’s a recipe for really deep frustration, and humor keeps it from sinking in too deeply.
And this humor does not disappear in indie games. Games like the Shab al-Hiri Roach and My Life with Master tend to encourage the same sort of humor, albeit with a more insistent dark undercurrent. The reason behind it, too, is the same. It is uncomfortable to identify with characters undergoing such unpleasant events. The more horrible the events, the more insistently players seek out the humor.
The humor is fatalistic, finding pleasure in the surface absurdity of a world in which you have little control, in which your character is just one more surface effect. If it weren’t funny, it would be wrist-slashing depressing. And it might just be interesting to see a game where that shift occurred, where you actually played through that.
This also means that the humor has a diagnostic quality. It is a symptom of player distancing. When everyone is laughing, joking through the horror, it is a cue that they feel a need for emotional distance. This may not be the ideal time to chastise them for breaking the mood, but a sign that it’s time to ease up a little, let everyone catch their breath, go to a happier place in the game, if just for a brief respite.
Vincent’s Meme October 19, 2006
Posted by Ian in Personal Reflection, Rambling.add a comment
Okay, Vincent started this over here and it was a tough one to resist.
I began with D&D, 1st edition, watching my older brother and getting him to run a few sessions for me. I must have been like five or six years old. There was a little Star Frontiers and Gamma World thrown in for spice.
I played a number of computer games like Zork and Curse of the Mummy on the old TRS-80, following in the footsteps of my mom and brother. I can still remember using bonafide tapes instead of disks.
I picked up a friend or two through elementary school and we would play D&D. During this time, my brother spent a lot of time babysitting my sister and I, and kept us entertained by what amounted to live-action spy roleplaying, with code names, missions, and sneaking all around the house. I seem to remember a few days where we got to ‘play’ monsters from the Monster Manual II.
I played D&D on and off with friends through elementary school. Right around the time middle school started, I developed a voracious appetite for game books, buying and playing as many as I could on my admittedly limited budget. This tendency only grew through high school.
This was also when I began designing my own games—filling a hefty three-ring binder with my tight, scrawl. I have no idea what happened to that binder, but it must have been filled with dozens of three to five page games. I can remember some were just bizarre D&D clones, but I also dimly remember a swath of others that were about any and every thing that caught my attention.
I have this memory of my brother looking over one of my early efforts and saying “but D&D already does this” and deciding that I would do something D&D didn’t. I would pay money to lay hands on that binder—I’m sure the games are *terrible*, but to get a little window into my childhood head…
D&D remained a staple of early adolescence, but my palate broadened to include Warhammer Fantasy, Morrow Project (dredged from my brother’s stash along with Harn), Marvel Superheroes, DC Heroes, MERP, FASA’s Star Trek and Dr. Who (although I may never have even played a full session of that), and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (none of them more than three sessions).
By high school, I fell in with a couple groups of gamers, mostly college age and older, and played a session or two of games like Call of Cthulhu, Chill, Tales from the Floating Vagabond, more DC Heroes, Champions, Cyberpunk, Teenagers from Outer Space, and the first generation Vampire RPG (I was living just outside of Atlanta at the time, so this was real big news in the local stores).
In general, though, high school was dominated by two long-term campaigns—one Traveller and one TORG. I picked up a certain snobbiness at this time about ‘clunky’ level-based systems like D&D.
We moved my senior year and the social disorientation left me without a group for a couple years. By my sophomore year in college, though, I was back in a couple groups, playing a mixture of White Wolf (mostly Mage and Changeling, but a little Wraith and Werewolf), Call of Cthulhu (just a few sessions), SpaceMaster (maybe a half-dozen sessions), Palladium’s Nightbane (only one session, but really liked the setting’s backstory), GURPS (*maybe* 5 sessions), and a tiny little bit of MUDing. I also played a little D&D, a session or two of Ars Magica, probably a few other things I can’t recall.
Graduate school killed my tabletop gaming for a good four years, but I did play a lot of Myst-style puzzle games—the new versions of games like Zork. Also, now that I think about it, often played simultaneously with my brother and mother again, talking by phone and email—a little family bonding.
I started back up again with D&D 3.0 which I stuck with for a good four or five years before finally getting the bug to do something different after I had homebrewed about as much as the system would stand. Played a few alternate 3.0 one shots like Arcana Unearthed. Somewhere in here, I stumbled into the indie gaming scene. With my 3.5 group, looking to explore a little, I tried some Castles & Crusades, fiddled around with TORG again.
Played a cooperatively GM-ed short campaign arc of 3.5 D&D, stumbled upon indie gaming, played a session of the Shab al-Hiri Roach, went to Gencon and got the indie flavor sampler. Played one session of old-school 1st ed. D&D. Now, I am currently playing in a TSOY game.
