Games Blog

I’m doing evil experiments on the players of my PBeM and PBmB games.

Up to now I’ve largely be using the technique known as ‘Illusionism’, which is Forgeite moon-language for arbitrary GM fiat deciding the results, especially with social conflicts with NPCs. I’ve slowly become dissatisfied with this approach, wanting something a bit more structured mechanically. In particular, I’ve been getting bogged down trying to solve social conflicts by ‘just roleplaying it out’, and want some actual system support.

I’ve decided to use a form of Conflict Resolution. This takes an different approach from the traditional RPG of rolling success or failure against skills for a task. Instead, you determine what the PCs and opposing NPCs want to achieve, then roll for that. The winner of the contest gets what they want, within limits. Determining those limits is what setting stakes is all about.

For simple conflicts a single oppose dice roll will settle things. But for dramatic extended conflicts I’m using the Fudge Wound Track to record progress. When one party in the conflict reaches Incapacitated it means the conflict is over and they’ve lost. If it tips over into Near Death, then there’s going to be some longer-term fallout.

So far I’ve got the following three scenes running that I’m treating as extended conflicts:

• An actual combat scene, with Legionnaire Kanon and his men taking on an angry mob, supported by the former Legionnaire Rotemdol. The immediate objective (and thus one side of the stakes of the conflict) is to arrest two individuals who have been identified as the ringleaders of the mob. The result of the conflict going badly will be the miscreants getting away, with the possibility of Kanon getting wounded in the resulting battle
• An example of social conflict, starring another Legionnaire, Kolath, trying to persuade the security chief of the Academy of Knowledge to explain exactly why his men have been firing artillery weapons within city limits. The precise stakes are not available at your level of clearance, because that will be a spoiler. (This isn’t a ‘full disclosure metagame’ where the players have GM-omnisicent knowledge of the situation)
• Finally, a more abstract conflict where Zul is trying to lead a prison breakout, with the jail itself as the opponent. If Zul wins, she’ll escape. The precise stakes if she loses will be determined as the conflict develops.

We’ll have to see how this plays out. One thing I’ve found already; trying out a conflict resolution system has certainly renewed my enthusiasm for a game which had been flagging a bit.

Great post in RPG Blog about Resolution Lag

As many of us get older, we often find that we no longer have time to game as much as we did before we grew up and had to deal with all this responsibility business, and that a wasted gaming session is a lot more of a nuisance than it was when it seemed like we had all the time in the world. To this I say, find the lag, and control it.

He identifies possible causes of resolution lag. It might be over-cumbersome game mechanics. It might be lack of player understanding of the game mechanics, leading to constant pauses while people look up obscure rules. Or it might even be scenarios that waste time on pointless activities rather than just cutting to the chase.

I find I’ve fallen out of love with long-winded combat systems that take forever to resolve a fight. I much prefer simpler and faster systems like Fudge, which resolve conflicts quickly and let you get on with the story. Of course, if you really like crunchy combat, that’s not for you, but there are probably other things you can cut. The point of reducing resolution lag is cut back on the bits of gaming you don’t like in order to concentrate on the bits you like.

Read the whole thing.

Ken Hite discusses indie games in his Ouf of the Box column.

Occasionally I’m taken to task by various peers and colleagues for “buying into the indie mystique,” but I will say this. Leaving aside the issue that the “indie movement” has produced at least half of the true RPG masterpieces in the last five years, the various self-identifying “indie” game designers I meet at these shows are almost always folks whose first instinct is to talk about game design. That might have a lot of explanations — I do most of my drinking with old-school designers, and so we have to decide where we’re drinking before we can talk about anything else, for example. But the indie folks care, obsessively, about game design — they have a lot in common with the War College types who, no doubt, will talk about pincer movements at Marengo at the drop of a hat. And this might help explain why the young Turks sell a whole lot of games at even the oldest-school of conventions like Origins.

I think indie games deserve to be judged on the basis of the actual games, not by the way some designers’ bad attitude towards established games resembles everything that was bad about the late 70s punk movement in British music.

For the record, I still think “Tales from Topographic Oceans” is a better record than “London Calling”. Unfortunately I don’t think many people will agree with me.

Vincent Baker comments on Ron Edwards’ new game, Spione

Spione is, however, a game that’ll inherently seem both very difficult and totally unrewarding to, well, to most gamers. It requires that its players have already developed – or be in the process of developing – certain skills, incompatible with certain other skills that most gamers rely on.

I gather the game is about cold war spies, focussing on the conflict between double agents personal lives and their roles as spooks. But apparently us traditional gamers are too brain-damaged ever to be able to play it.

Or alternatively, all he means is that the structure is radically different to a traditional RPG, and the stuff about ‘incompatible skills’ is either clever hype or pretentious nonsense, depending on your point of view.

Yes, it’s true. Igor is the first Dork in space.

A couple of links worth reading.

Charlie Stross thinks the political landscape of the early to mid 21st century has already been designed — by Gary Gygax. It’s a scary thought.

Making Light discusses the worst excesses of fantasy and SF cover artwork, mullets and all.

As is always true with Making light, some of the best stuff is in the comments; in this one commenter Paul A comes up with the following:

I remember, at a convention once, somebody advancing the theory that the real reason The Revelation of St John was included in the New Testament canon was that the marketing department had already commissioned cover art featuring a half-dressed bimbo and a dragon with seven heads…

Carl Cravens announces that he’s getting into publishing:

I’m starting a publishing company to publish Fudge-compatible PDFs, and eventually larger POD works.
…
Yes, I have a company name and I’ve registered a domain name. I’m not going to tell you the name until I have something to show. Gotta keep you in suspense about something.

What am I going to publish, you ask?

My focus is going to be on short, interlocking books… I’m thinking around 32 pages max, unless that turns out to not work for what I’m doing. They should be fairly affordable… maybe $5.50 for 32 pages. (More expensive per-page than 3rd Edition GURPS books… but we’re talking a niche market here.)

I’m going to start with a free “quick-start” fantasy rule set based on Fudge. It will be a “complete” rule set, with all the options set (no “toolkit” here), but it will be bare-bones. After that, I’ll be building a fantasy world, about 32 pages at a time. The opening book will be kind of like The Keep On the Borderlands… it will contain a little bit about the world, some detail about a specific area, containing an adventure and enough material to get you started. The world is one that my wife and I started working on a couple years ago… it’s familiar enough that your D&D-playing buddy will be comfortable in it, but it has enough twists and turns to keep things interesting.

Fudge really needs some decent settings. It will be interesting to see how this one turns out, especially when it’s published in small 32 page installments.

Mike Mearls profiles The Year Ahead in RPG Releases: 2006

The Eighties RPG, 2006 Edition: Remember that game from the 80s? It’s back! Again! We changed the rules for ducking behind a platypus to avoid detection by an incoming torpedo. And you’ll buy it, suckahs! We even went in and screwed up some functional rules to set the stage for the 2007 edition. Eat it, fanboi.

It’s Another Game About Angst!: If mom refuses to buy you that Limp Bizkit album, if dad and his “how was school today” is just a stupid face, then this is the RPG for you. You are an outcast with great powers, but should you use those powers to do anything the suffocating world of mundanity will destroy. Yours is a dance at the edge of oblivion. Guaranteed to reinforce every damaging, self-defeating, and ego boosting falsity that you cling to! That pointless, trained monkey job you have, the one that requires minimal skills that are still beyond your talents, won’t be so soul crushing once you play this game.

We Will Kill Stuff Because That’s What We Like 8th Edition: 979 more ways to kill things! 372 more things to kill! 439 more things to take off the corpses of dead things! Are we having fun yet?

Cruel, cruel. I have a nasty feeling that “Pointless Licensed RPG Number Eight” is taking the piss out of something I actually own…

More positively, Troy Costisick asks: “Does Setting Still Matter?“, and comes to the unsurprising conclusion that it does.

Forgeite-Narrativist games tend to emphasise system at the expense of setting, possibly a reaction against the 90s emphasis on setting at the expense of system. That trend led to games with complex, baroque settings married to often clunky and sometimes vitually unplayable systems. Can you say “Deadlands?”.

I find it difficult to conceive of a game that doesn’t actually have a setting, because I find it impossible to create a meaningful character without some sort of context for him to exist in. I guess this reason why I never understood the appeal of Tavern Gaming on RPGAMES.

Of course, there are a lot of games that don’t have settings, but instead provide the tools to create one. The most extreme example is Primetime Adventures, where you actually create the setting as part of the game.

This makes me wonder about how much setting a game should include. How much is too much? Or two little? The history of RPGs is littered with games for which supplement after supplement added up to hundreds of pages detailing cities, nations, cults and societies, with vast numbers of canon NPCs all tied together with an all-encompassing metaplot. It all makes me wonder how much of that stuff ever got used in a typical campaign. But is it better to describe a cool setting in broad brushstrokes, and let individual groups have fun filling in the details?

These are some of the problems I’ve wrestled with in the Kalyr RPG I’m still trying to write….

I’m not sure of the actual date because I no longer have the archives of the very early posts to hand. But I do remember that I posted the first actual game moves to the CompuServe RPGames forum in mid-May, 1996.

That means the online game has been running for ten years. Much longer than I’ve owned the kalyr.co.uk domain.

The old CompuServe forum is long since gone, and for long and complicated reasons I’m not going to go into the game has bifurcated into two parts, one of which runs on The Phoenyx, the other on Dreamlyrics.

There are currently about a dozen players in the two games, and at different times there have been over thirty different player characters. Sadly none of the first six from May 1996 are still playing, but I’ve still got one active PC who’s been playing since the first few months.

Being an online game, players are scattered all over the world; I’ve currently got players from Britain, the US, Canada, Germany and Israel. I’ve actually met just four of them face to face.