SF and Gaming Blog

Carl Cravens of The Raven’s Mutterings runs across someone that makes him go “Huh?”

From a recent “game opening” post I saw…

If you want to play non-human, you will have to roll a 1 on 1d10. Otherwise you have to play a human.

Wow. People still play like this? No “let’s talk about it,” just “one in ten chance you get to be something I don’t want you to be.” (Or something I don’t want more than one character to be.)

Back in about 1981 something like that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow. The market leader was first edition AD&D, and it was full of illogical and arbitary things like that.

Carl’s example just goes to show that there are still people living in sealed bubble who appear ignorant of every development in the hobby in the past quarter century.

If that floats your boat, I suppose…

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.