Games Blog

Easter weekend is time for Gypsycon, the annual gathering of the UK side of the Dreamlyrics community.

This year’s Gypsycon ran for just two days rather than the entire Easter weekend of previous years. We had an attendance of about twenty people, including three members of the Hat clan who I hadn’t seen for several years.

On Friday I ran the first face-to-faceplaytest for the Kalyr RPG, based on Fudge. Players were Pete Hat, AJ, Bruce Brown and Gary.

Since I really wanted to playtest the psionics system, I chose to run a scenario involved the players travelling into the totalitarian Konaic Empire to extract a human slave who’d developed psionic powers, and would be killed had he not been rescued.

For those not familiar with the Kalyr RPG, I’ve got the following deviations from baseline Fudge

• Keys instead of Faults – Unlike Faults, they give no bonuses at character creation time, but give Fudge points when they come up in the game.
• Abilities instead of Attributes and Skills
• Connections rated using the standard Fudge trait scale, representing the character’s social standing
• A complete psionics system, which needed testing for balance

I had four player characters, one specialised psionic, one optimised combat monster (the only non-psi in the game), and two characters with a mix of psi and mundane skills. The first two seemed to be the most effective characters, which seemed to confirm that specialists tend to trump generalists in most RPGs.

Keys seemed to work well, although I think five rather than the three I gave the pregen characters would be a better number. They did seem to encourage roleplaying. We used glass beads as Fudge tokens, which encouraged players to spend them, so the players had to hit their keys in order to refresh their pool of Fudge points.

The ending of the adventure was a little bit of an anticlimax, probably because I let the main villain go down too quickly. I should have remembered that named villains get Fudge points, which was my major faux pas as a GM.

Saturday was L’Ange’s Mage:Sorceror’s Crusade epic, set in his incredibly detailed Northumberland setting, following on from the cliffhanger ending from two years ago. This one was really a Mage/Wraith/Changeling crossover, since it only featured one actual Mage as a PC, in a party with a Fae princess and the ghost of a knight. Somebody pointed out that we had something looking like a DnD party with a fighter, a magic-user and a cleric, except we didn’t have a thief. My character was the priest with True Faith, which turned out to be a pretty potent power, when the opposition included undead and demons.

Roll on Gypsycon 2008!

Haven’t written any game-related posts for a while. But it’s now confirmed that I will be running a Kalyr RPG playtest scenario for four players at Gypsycon next weekend. Which of course means I do have to finish the scenario.

Should be fun. This one’s going to be psionics-heavy, because the psionics system is the one area that really needs some serious playtesting.

Interesting post by Bill Stoddart on generic roleplaying systems, in particular which ones to choose when setting games in a specific fictional setting. Read the whole thing to find out which fictional world he set his game in and why he chose the system he did. It’s very much about Simulationist systems, an area of gaming that seems to be neglected by the post-Forgeite RPG theory crowd.

BESM has what might be called a core model of what’s going on: If you’re trying to decide whether a rule or a game mechanic makes sense, you can try to visualize the game events as a series of pictorial images that you might see in anime, and ask if the game rules produce the outcome and the flow of cause and effect that you would expect in anime. GURPS, in contrast, isn’t designed around that core model. In GURPS, what you try to do is decide how things would happen in the real world, or in the-real-world-if-people-had-superpowers or the-real-world-if-magic-worked or whatever. GURPS reinforces this with the concept of “reality testing” and with the use of real units such as pounds, yards, and seconds, eschewing all game units such as game inches or encumbrance points. The reality testing of GURPS is testing against, well, physical reality; the “reality testing” of BESM is testing against anime reality.

…

It strikes me that other games might be looked at in similar terms, as each having a core model of how things work, that specific rules can be compared to to see how well they work. For example, the core model of Hero System is not a physical one but a tactical one: characters are tactical units that are supposed to be balanced against each other in tactical terms, to produce as even a match between opposing forces as possible and thus best allow players to test their skill in handling those forces. The core model of FUDGE is a narrative one: characters are defined in terms that could be used in a story, and the outcomes of their actions are supposed to be plausible elements in a narrative. The core model of Toon is of course classic Warner Brothers cartoons, a visual reality somewhat different from that of anime.

Perhaps that explains why I’ve had such bad experiences with Deadlands; that system’s incoherent mishmash of mechanics completely lacks any identifiable core model, which is probably why the game simply doesn’t work, at least for me.

I agree with Bill about FUDGE, which is why I find FUDGE the most appropriate system to simulate the conventions of much written adventure fiction, especially through the medium of PBeM. Note that FUDGE isn’t really Narrativist in the Forgeite sense; the core mechanics are still pretty Simulationist, even though it’s simulating fictional conventions rather than the real world.

Been a while sing I’ve posted anything substantial on RPGs.

So let’s look at settings. What is a setting? How much or how little setting does a game need? On Troy Costisick’s Socratic Design, one of the better RPG theory blogs out there, Troy tries to define settings:

At the moment, I have identified nine aspects of Setting. They are:

-History
-Geography
-Authority (as in Government/Rulers/etc.)
-Social Situation
-Mythology/Religion
-Inhabitants
-Where the PCs Fit In
-Dynamic Forces
-The Mutables

ALL of these are important to a Setting, but not all of them are always present. The first five aspects I call Lesser Aspects. Not because they are unimportant (remember I said all aspects have importance) but because if they are absent, the game can still be quite functional.

I find it useful to make the distinction between the Gameworld and what I call the Campaign Frame. A given gameworld can include more that one possible campaign frame. To use a well known example, The World of Darkness is a gameworld, while Vampire is a campaign frame. ‘Setting’ is often used ambiguously to describe both, but in many cases they’re really two different things.

What Troy calls the Lesser Aspects seem to me to be attributes of the Gameworld. The last three aspects are attributes of the Campaign Frame. ‘Inhabitants’ is probably a bit of both.

Published settings seem to emphasise one or the other. Call of Cthulhu or Dungeon-Crawling DnD are all about campaign frames. Games like HeroQuest/Glorantha and GURPS:Transhuman Space are primarily gameworlds; the former contains several potential campaign frames, while the great perceived weakness of the latter is that it doesn’t provide any clear campaign frames.

Of course, ‘Dynamic Forces’ and ‘Mutables’ need definition; Troy defines them thus:

Dynamic Forces are forces that directly impact the characters. It can be anything from orcs to secret police to a terrorist organization. Where does the conflict in the Setting come from? What do the players play against? Finally, the mutables. These are things the PCs can change in the world. What can the player-characters impact? How do their actions matter in the context of the Setting?

So what about my Kalyr setting? I’ve got a lot of history, geography, mythology,social situation and authority; some of my players even claim to have read it all. One quite important element of Kalyr is that it can support a number of distinct campaign frames, which have different but overlapping sets of Dynamic Forces, Mutables, and where the PCs fit it.

For my online PBeM and PBmB games I didn’t start with an explicit campaign frame. I began by throwing the whole gameworld background at the players and let them come back with just about any character concept that caught their imagination. Then I built the game around whatever they came up with. The end result was a diverse roster of PCs with very different allegiances and agendas. I never really have a ‘party’ as such in either game, and there have been an awful lot of one-to-one threads. But the games have been running for 10+ years, and it’s been a lot of fun to GM (and presumably to play as well), so clearly I’ve been doing something right.

But for a face-to-face game that approach won’t work well. All the face-to-face games I play nowadays are convention-style one-shots. Such games really need much more of a specific campaign frame on order to work at all, both to cut down the amount of background information that the players have to assimilate before play, and to be able to create a coherent group of PCs with a rational reason to stay together.

My Kalyr gameworld can support at least four different campaign frames, possibly more. What I think would be useful for a published game would be tools to create campaign frames out of the conflicts inherent in the game world.

Slykin has an gaming question:

What if you could assemble an ideal collection of folk past of present to participate in your next role-playing experience? Who would be there? Figures from history, celebs, literary geniuses – your imagination sets the limits.

What about this lot?

• Sean Connery as the Real Man
• Robert De Niro as the Real Roleplayer
• Spike Milligan as the Loony
• George W Bush as the Munchkin

Who would want to GM that lot? It would have to be someone that can be trusted to hose the Munchkin!

For historical figures only, how about this lineup for a classic D&D party?

• Julius Caesar as the Fighter
• John Dee as the Mage
• Martin Luther as the Cleric
• Ronnie Biggs as the Thief

In a post which is mostly about podcasts and gaming conventions, Carl Cravens says:

I’d talk about indie/”story” games tangentially, but I’m not heavily into them… I steal bits and pieces that are helpful to me, but I’m not looking for a “narrative” experience… I don’t want to tell a story, I want to experience a story. Most story-games don’t work for me because the mechanics are about who has narrative rights… who gets to tell the story, and the mechanics may not even be tied to what’s going on in the story at all.

This reminds me of the post by Joshua BishopRoby that I bookmarked ages ago but never got round to blogging about. It looks at the more extreme narrativist approach to gaming, where little or nothing is defined at the start, and just about everything, including fundamental elements of the setting itself, is made up on the fly during play.

Characters are incorporated in the setting and situation quickly, powerfully, and often inextricably. Actions and stunts become grand to the point of excessive. Stunning reversals and byzantine plots are commonplace. Which isn’t better, I want to state very emphatically and very up front. It’s very, very easy for this kind of set up to create a torrent of too much, too fast that tears through stuff that may be better approached with a more measured, sedate, and nuanced approach. To dodge away from LotR for a moment, this approach does not create Star Trek and Stargate; it makes Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Who.

In extreme circumstances, it makes me wonder if you really are creating a story, or just the outline of one, as emphasised by Joshua’s later anecdote.

Recently, Merten at story-games started a thread asking for clarification because he simply didn’t understand why Tony Lower-Basch wants to distill a complete storyline down to one hour of high-impact play. “What’s your hurry?” he asked, “Why can’t you savor the experience?” In responding to him, I realized that, to a large extent, I didn’t understand why he didn’t want these powerful tools to rock the story over the cliff screaming the whole way down. In the course of discussion, I think I understood a little better that he wanted to be there and experience events directly, and I hope he came to the point where he could see how some people weren’t so interested in being there as implying things about being there.

I’ve played and enjoyed Primetime Adventures a couple of times, which I think is a good example of the sort of game Carl is talking about. But I consider that sort of game is so far removed from a traditional style of RPG that it falls into a quite different genre of game entirely. They give such a different play experience that I don’t believe either can be seen as a substitute for the other.

So where does this leave the games I’m running? Interestingly I’m using two different approaches on my online games with a lot of the same players Kalyr has a richly detailed setting, with a lot of fundamental elements nailed down. I’ve defined the political and social structures, what technology is available, what psionic powers can and can’t do, etc. I’ve also got a whole load of NPCs with pre-defined agendas. The other game, Arrhan Empire Frontiers is much more freewheeling. This is partly because I’ve taken over the game from another GM, and don’t have the same feel of ownership over the setting. So I’ll quite happily make up major plot elements on the fly, or let the players introduce significant bits of setting.

The world has lost SF author, game writer and railway enthusiast John M Ford.

I never met the man in the flesh, but was always aware of his online presence, as one of the most consistently witty posters on Pyramid Online and Making Light. His “Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow” taglines on Pyramid were legendary. He will be missed.

Steve Jackson and Teresa Nielsen Hayden have appreciations of his life and work.

Some of his comments in the Dangling Engineer thread give a flavour of his humour.

I haven’t posted anything for a while about the Kalyr RPG, the Fudge-based vaguely Vancian science-fantasy game I’ve been working on. I have been making slow and steady progress, to the point where the first draft is now substantially written. At times I’ve found it quite difficult to boil down something that’s been in my headspace for more that fifteen years into something coherent enough to be worth publishing, especially trying to seperate out the core elements of the setting from the specific detail of the games I’ve been running in it.

Here’s a summary of the chapters I’ve written; it more or less follows the outline I posted a few month’s back.

• Introduction – This is very short (just three pages) consisting of a brief summary of the setting plus a glossary of RPG terms.
• Character Generation – The first rules-heavy chapter, which I’ve knocked into reasonable first draft shape, although the rules themselves do need playtesting. Because I’m using a template-based system there’s actually quite a bit of world background buried in the text.
• Game Mechanics – This has proved to be the most troublesome chapter. It’s already undergone one complete rewrite and several further revisions. It’s now essentially complete, but still quite rough. It really needs some FtF playtesting.
• Psionics – The third rules-heavy chapter, but I’m much happier with the overall shape of the first draft. Still needs playtesting, of course.
• Equipment and Technology – Most of the text is there, but some things (such as weapons) need some game stats.
• Culture – This is the first of three chapters covering the world background. This one details culture, religions, and the political and legal systems. It’s mostly complete, but there are a couple of pure colour sections (stuff like food) that could do with expanding.
• Organisations – The second world background chapter covers the major organisations and guilds of Kalyr to which player characters are likely to belong. I’ve largely created this by pulling together and re-editing a lot of pre-existing notes. The section on The Legions needs expanding to the same level of detail as the two major guilds, and the whole thing needs a final edit.
• Nations – The first draft is more or less complete; like the previous chapter this one’s largely pulled together from existing notes, but I’ve written quite a bit of additional text covering things like adventure possibilities.
• Beastiary – Covers both minor races and animals. This one still needs a lot more work. Many of the entries (especially the animals) need fleshing out, and the whole thing lacks any game statistics.
• Campaigns – A lot of semi-random GM musings. Still needs quite a bit of editing.

There’s still quite a bit to do; most important is to give the thing a snappy name. “The World of Kalyr” is not going to cut it.

This is an ‘actual play’ example of Conflict Resolution.

The context is that Kolath, an officer of the 5th Legion, with his assistant Hollis, is paying a visit to the Karazthan, the secretive technology guild, to find out precisely why they’ve been firing artillery weapons within city limits. He’s managed to arrange a meeting with Guruinath, the Karazthan chief of Security.

All this is unedited transcript from the forum on Dreamlyrics. I’m the GM, playing the part of Guruinath. Exeter is playing Kolath, and Nicki Jett is Hollis. Even if you’re not into RPG theory, or even into RPGS, give this a read, and see if this makes any dramatic sense:

[GM]

Guriunath’s office is high up on the western side of the dome, with windows on the outside looking out over the lights of the city, and windows on the opposite wall looking over the bustling activity of the workshop floors in the dome interior.

The side walls are quite spartan, except for a shelf of bottles on one wall, and a rack of weapons on the other. The weapons are an exotic mixture; even to Kolath’s expert eye most are of unrecognised types.

Guruinath himself is a handsome middle-aged kandar of aristocratic look, with piercing mauve eyes. He remains seated as Kolath and Hollis are shown into the room.

“You’ve from the legion, I gather”, he says in well-measured tones, “What is your business here?”.

[Hollis]

**That,** Hollis thought, **is exactly the wrong tone of voice to take with Kolath. Admittedly, unctuous would make him suspicious, but haughty just makes him mad.**

An attitude of professional cooperation: that was the key. Fortunately for the good guys, the bad guys never seemed to figure that out.

She clasped her hands demurely before her, and looked down to avoid rolling her eyes at the somewhat rude kandar.

[Kolath]

The Kandar legionaire’s eyebrows quirked upward, evidencing the only change in his expression, but his posture stiffened and he seemed suddenly taller, more formal, and he cocked his head to one side slightly as if to obtain a new perspective of the Karazthani.

“I am indeed a Legionaire and am conducting a legal investigation on behest of the Legion. We would appreciate your cooperation.”

[GM]

“Let us begin again”, he says, “You desire my cooperation; precisely what form or cooperation do you desire?”.

[Kolath]

“What form of cooperation?” The Kandar rolled his eyes briefly, glanced down at Hollis and then back to the Karazthani.

“The kind where… for the safety of the polis… I ask you questions and you answer them to the best of your ability. Where we…” he made a vague, all-inclusive gesture, “the Karazthani and the Legion, share information for our mutual advantage.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and composed himself.

“We could start with the flying ship hovering over your compound and the blasts fired from it last night.”

[Hollis]

**This is a man,** thought Hollis, **who is not used to paying obeisance to anyone.**

She wondered just how far he would be able to suspend his arrogance, and whether he might even decide it was prudent to eliminate this annoyance Kolath represented. To defend against such an over-reaction, she remained particularly alert, following the interrogation but maintaining her senses and her powers, on high alert.

[GM]

“Ah”, he says, feigning surprise, “I thought it might be something to do with that. Our security were engaged in a covert operation against a force hostile to our guild and the city Because they encountered forces more powerful than that which we were expecting, they requested backup”.

Kolath is fully aware that the guilds do have the legal power to act and even use deadly force in response to immediate threats. But he’s also aware that it’s accepted practice to at least inform the legion when using military-type weapons. There isn’t really a precedent for using artillery pieces inside city limits.

[Kolath]

“Aha,” he said slowly, one eyebrow quirked upward and his expression cold as he listened to the Karazthani.

“And your reason for not informing the legion? So we could help with the… defense?”

[Hollis]

Hollis had all she could do to keep a straight face. So she was a threat to the Karazthan and the city? Unless there was something else out there and she just happened to be in the line of fire. Thank the gods for darkness and distance and surprise; it was unlikely anyone could have recognized her.

[GM]

“Look, Legionnaire”, he says, his voice angrier in tone, “Since when has it been the accepted procedure to inform your Legion of every single small scale operation? I had to make a snap decision on escalation to save the lives of my own men. Sometimes we have to do what we have to do; the niceties and diplomacy can wait. I sure you understand that. Does a Tavinoleyr refer every small decision up the chain of command? Surely the Legion could not function in battle if it worked like that!”.

Something seems to have rattled him.

[Kolath]

His expression grew even more stern, but there was an element of surprise on his features. He looked a question at Hollis and then turned back to face Guruinath.

“Neither I, nor the Legion, expects immediate notification of every security procedure on your part, Guruinath, but, for the safety… the joint defense… of the city, it would seem a logical move on your part to share information with those, like the Legion, who are not inimical. Especially when such a procedure includes the use of such… heavy weaponry.” Kolath suddenly felt himself being… over appeasing to the Karazthani security chief and took a deep breath to control his growing temper, glancing off to one side and looking over the displayed weapons for a few seconds before turning back to the Karazthani.

“It seems, however, that you are becoming upset… to an extent out of balance with any offense my questions might logically have elicited and I wonder why that is so.”

He wanted to ask Guruinath what the Kandar was hiding, but he had no leverage to enforce an answer.

[Hollis]

Hollis had seen that look on Kolath before. The fat was about to hit the fire. So she blurted out, “He’s asking you tell him just what kind of ‘threat’ would make you sweat so hard under questioning, be dangerous enough to justify breaking out the monster weapon, and yet be so insignificant you forgot to notify the Legion.”

She looked quickly at Kolath, made a wry face and mouthed **Sorry**. She backed up a little and tried to look invisible once more, making a little tick-a-lock gesture over her lips. Hopefully he would take the hint and stay calm. He had the Karazthani sweating bullets, if he just kept up the pressure.

[GM]

“I don’t know who in Vandrak’s name you are, but I’m not going to take advice from a mere human on how to do my job”, Guruinath replies with the sort of contemptuous sneer that Hollis has witnessed many times before from Kandar chauvinists.

He turns to Kolath.

“Who is that human?”, Guruinath demands, “And what is she doing here? I refuse to discuss this matter further in her presence”.

[Kolath]

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath before turning slowly to look at Hollis, a warning evident in his expression. He shook his head slowly, but said nothing to her for the moment. He took a deep breath and turned back to the Karazthani.

“She is an assistant of mine, helping with certain aspects of my investigation, Guruinath.”

He darted another glance at the human.

“She need not concern you.”

[Hollis with the big mouth]

Hollis wanted to apologize and then put both hands over her mouth. but she wasn’t sure that the Karazthani wouldn’t take it as another insult. Actually, maybe she should make the closed fist up-and-down motion that indicated she thought the weasel was jerking them off. Maybe *that* would be appropriate.

She glanced at Kolath.

Maybe not.

She settled for another mouthed *sorry* and then thereafter remained very quiet and perfectly still, not even rolling her eyes.

[GM]

“In that case, I’ve told you all you need to know”, Guruinath replies, “Now if you will excuse me, I have many other things I need to attend to. My men will see you and that creature of yours out of the building”.

There are visible beads of sweat on his forehead. It’s now patently obvious to Kolath that Guruinath knows an awful lot more than he’s letting on.

[Kolath]

“Just a moment, if you do not mind, Guruinath.”

He turned to look at Hollis, his expression impassive, but his eyes hard. “Wait for me outside.” He turned back to face the Karazthani without waiting to see if Hollis had left. In fact, it would never have occurred to him that she would not leave when he told her to do so.

Kolath was much more liberal in his outlook than most Kandar, but he was still Kandar.

“Now, Guruinath of the Karazthani, perhaps we can be of benefit to each other. I had no intention of insulting your… sensibilities.”

[GM]

“I hope that you won’t be telling Dalarath Blerynthar about my little outburst”, he says, “It won’t help the harmonious operation of our organisation. All I can say is our mission went somewhat awry, I had one of my own men seriously wounded, an innocent bystander killed, and we still have some very dangerous individuals at large in the city. Now, if you will excuse me, I really do have a lot of things that require my immediate attention. My men will show you and your human companion out”.

Kolath is reminded of a case on barracks a couple of years ago when he helped expose some large-scale pilfering from legion stores. The evasive behaviour of the ringleader, the assistant quartermaster, was remarkably similar to that of Guruinath. Not lying as such, but not telling the whole truth either.

[Kolath has met the head of Administration, Dalarath Blerynthar, on a number of occasions, usually on issues of procurement of equipment]

[Kolath]

His expression hardened even further and he made no move yet to leave the room.

“If your efforts met with such… notable lack of success, that is all the more reason how we could benefit from cooperation.”

He scowled slightly and glanced down at the nails of his left hand.

“Perhaps I should speak to Dalarath Blerynthar.”

[Hollis]

Normally even Kolath wouldn’t be able to get Hollis to move without an argument. But…she could read the writing on the wall. The Karazthani was covering something up. She knew it, and Kolath knew it. Or she hoped he did, since it was nearly tattooed on the man’s forehead.

But he wasn’t going to give it up with her standing there, so she obediently wheeled about and left to wait outside.

[GM]

“We have human rebels threatening us”, he says, “And I believe they have made a tactical alliance with Karmorki agents. I do not know who is using who, but both groups have an interest in destabilising things in this city. As you may well know, there have been incidents of sabotage within this guild. We are still attempting to hunt down those saboteurs and their confederates. We will inform the legion if we require any logistical or intelligence assistance for this. Likewise we will keep the Legion informed of anything we discover that concerns the physical security of the city”.

[Kolath]

“Threatening you…” he mused, the digits of one slim-fingered hand stroking his chin. “Threatening individual Karazthani or threatening the Karazthani as a whole?”

He grimaced, thinking over what the other Kandar had said.

“Threatening you physically or threatening your business affairs? And what makes you think the Kamorki are involved?”

[GM]

“I do not like the tone of that accusation, soldier”, he replies, “You are making very serious accusations against a senior Master of this guild. Very serious accusations which you have no evidence to back up”.

[Kolath]

His eyebrows lifted in surprise.

“What accusation did you infer from my questions? I have accused you of nothing and have not threatened you.”

As you should probably be able to figure out, Kolath has won the conflict. He’s realised Guriunath is lying, and is now twisting the knife.