HWRNMNBSOL On Gaming

2002-11-07T15:47:00.000-08:00

GAME WISH #20: SKILL MISMATCHES

Moving on to Ginger's Game WISH #20, and a problem that every GM will eventually run into:

The situation often arises that a player's real-world skills and the skills of the character she plays don't quite match up properly. The character might be designed as a "face man"--a conman with a charming face and a ready explanation--but the player isn't as good at extemporaneous character interaction as her character is. Or the sci/tech geek player might be adept at solving logic puzzles, even when the character is a lumbering cretin with a giant axe.

How do you deal with this mismatch, either as a game master or a player? Do you play it as-played, so that the only character who can seduce the scheming noble's wife is the only player who can pick somebody up at the bar? Or do you play it as-written, so that the character can bluff the guards into letting him pass, even if the player's best effort is "I've got an urgent message for, uh, Lord Blah-blah-blah"?

I first ran into this with my old gaming buddy John Pendergrass. John was playing Nodonn, who was supposed to be a complete idiot fighter. Nodonn adopted the concept of 'hrair' as used in Watership Down, ie. rabbits can't count higher than four, so everything four or larger is 'hrair'. Nodonn just used 'four' to indicate 'large number'. This sometimes led to difficulties with other characters:

NIGHTOWL: Nodonn! how many orcs are coming from your direction?
NODONN: Four.
NIGHTOWL: Er....a big four or a small four?
NODONN: Four.

John is a smart guy but he did a reasonably creditable job of playing a moron. The only time he didn't do well was when he was trying to get on my nerves, which John was fairly good at. He did it, if you can believe it, with geology.

John was a rockhound. Our apartment was always full of interesting rocks that John had found. Then John moved out and left his rocks, which was really not fair. Anyway, John knew a lot about geology, far more than I knew. John liked to take advantage of this in the games by making Nodonn into a kind of geology idiot-savant. Every session would involve a conversation along these lines:

DM: The altar is five feet on a side with smooth stone faces.
NODONN: What sort of stone is it made out of?
DM: (summoning up what meager rocklore he possesses): It's a pink granite.
NODONN: Aha! would you say that it contains a fair amount of orthoclase?
DM: (guessing) Er.....no.
NODONN: (moving in for the kill) Well then, it's hardly a granite, isn't it? tell me about the phenocrysts and we'll decide if it's an andesite.

This led me to develop a fairly hostile attitude towards in-game geology lessons, with predictable results:

DM: You enter the cave.
NODONN: Describe the stone, please.
DM: It's of a sort you have never seen before.
NODONN: Can you describe the characteristics of the rock?
DM: Certainly. It's hard and it holds the roof up.
NODONN: Do I have a sense of the physical processes that shaped this cave?
DM: Nodonn suspects darkest magic.

Anyway, I wouldn't really describe John's little game as a problem. It was more like a comic interlude.

In a more serious vein, I do sometimes have super-charismatic characters played by less charismatic players, and this does create problems. As an example, in my recent Pirates! game, Greg Morrow played the Greatest Lover in the World. I am certain that Greg will not be offended when I characterize him as something other than the Greatest Lover in the World himself, and there were often times when Greg would say "My character says [x], only much more smoothly than I'm able."

In such situations I am much happier when the player fills in the above [x] as much as possible. My criteria for successfully attempting a task is that the player must have 1) formulated a strategy for what it is they wish their character to accomplish, 2) attempted to articulate a rough outline of the way one gets there, and 3) given their best shot at amusing themselves, the other players and me. All three items must be satisfied, generally speaking, for me to allow a roll of the dice. Examples:

"I seduce the barmaid."

DISALLOWED.

"I chat up the barmaid, get her drunk, and invite her up to my room."

FLESH THAT OUT A LITTLE.

"I ask the barmaid to join me. I tell her my life story. I tell her how wonderful it is to have such an empathetic companion, who by the way is extraordinarily beautiful. I ask her compare the two wines on the table and tell me which she likes better. I'll read her some poetry. When the moment is right, I'll suggest that some other poetry I have is better read in a private setting, with the lights turned down low."

MAKE A ROLL.

[heavy Spanish accent] "....and now, gentle radiant lady, I must die. I have enjoyed our time together, but I must now die, because your beauty has struck me through the heart. Like an arrow it has pierced my breast and my life seeps away, and only one thing may heal the wound. Yes, fair one, for the wise say that only love may salve the agony of a soul yearning for the touch of grace -- a touch that...."

OKAY, OKAY, JEEZ, ROLL AT +10.

"Then, ever so slowly, my hand gently strokes down her side, my fingertips trailing along with feather touches, seeking out the secret places...."

UM, THAT'S ENOUGH. REALLY.

I think the point I'm trying to make is that you don't need to be Don Juan to play a seducer. On the other hand, if you have a lot of Don Juan in your nature, you're probably going to do a better job of playing Don Juan. Gaming's a bit like writing in that respect.

I'm not entirely sure I stayed on topic. I think I hit the meat of the question, though.

2002-10-28T12:31:00.000-08:00

GAME WISH #19: HEART CHARACTERS

Ginger's Game WISH #19 asks about what leanings one's roleplaying may display:

Today's question is about your heart character. The heart character rests on the idea that over the course of a gaming career, players would revisit certain themes that were important to them for some reason, and that one or two characters in particular would embody those themes or ideas. Whatever it was about the heart character(s) would draw the player back to those themes.

Do you have a heart character? More than one? If so, what makes that character a heart character? If you don't have one, do you think there are themes you revisit with your characters? Or do you think this entire theory is full of it, and if you do, why?

I don't think the theory is full of it, but I think I would describe it in a different way. Or, rather, I'm going to talk about it in a different framework, but it could very well be that my framework and Ginger's paradigm are homologous. I haven't really examined the question closely enough to say for sure. Maybe after I've written this, I'll know better.

An earlier Game WISH question, which owing to the whimsies of timing I haven't yet gotten around to answering, asks about the process by which one invents a new character. For me, a crucial early step is an exercise in answering the following questions:

1. What parts of you do you like enough to retain? call this column A.
2. What parts of you would you like to change? call this column B.
3. Rummaging through these two lists, what combination of items from both column A and B could lead to fun roleplay?

Creating a new character is a balancing act. On the one hand, I don't want to play myself. I play myself on a daily basis, and sometimes it gets boring. I want to play somebody who differs from myself, hopefully in an interesting way. On the other hand, I don't want to play somebody completely different from myself. I would have trouble getting inside a role that was 180 degrees rotated from my viewpoint. What I like to do is sort of start with myself as a beginning template and then make alterations. The alterations tend to be fairly gross, so I rarely wind up playing, say, Andy in a dress. I change a lot of stuff as a general rule. However, there are always elements of me remaining in the character, such that I still feel like I have something of a handle on how that person operates.

The goal is to come up with interesting variations on what changes and what doesn't. For example: I'm fairly organized in thought but fairly disorganized in environment. I tend to argue things in an anal, logical manner, yet my notetaking skills are atrocious and my office is a pit. So, it might be interesting to see what a character would be like who is organized in every way. Would such a person be more or less effective? more or less persnickety in their reactions to other people? Would such a person drive me crazy? Another example: I'm a pacifist, yet I have a very bad temper. What if I played a pacifist who has no anger? (I've played a non-pacifistic, psychotic me fairly extensively during my teen years, thank you, and I don't think I need to do that any more.) I consider creating a character to be something of a personal exploration, and I'd rather explore stuff that presents interesting challenges in understanding.

Okay, so I keep parts of me and dump other parts. The thing is, I like parts of me. I like some parts quite a lot. I like them enough that I don't really want to dispense with them, even if I have an option to do so. For instance, I would rather plan than not plan. I don't particularly want to play a character who doesn't plan. I think I would be frustrated by a character who just did the first thing that came to mind, and damn the torpedoes. So, invariably, there are certain aspects of me that aren't generally changed when I make a character.

This leads, I think, to something of an intersection with Ginger's conception of a 'heart character'. The set of my characteristics that remains largely constant might be seen as my 'heart character'. Now, are there a set of characteristics that I don't have, yet always are incorporated into my PC's? I don't believe so. I don't think that invalidates the equivalency with the heart character concept, though.

Listing some core concepts of me that I almost always retain in my characters:

A. I make plans. Sometimes the plans are workable. Sometimes the plans are unworkable. Sometimes the plans are so complex that nobody wants to put them into effect, working off the assumption that the fancier a plan is, the easier it will be for sneaky bastard DM's to break it. It doesn't matter whether anybody likes my plans, I make them anyway. I'm always coming up with watch schedules and marching orders. Whenever my group is presented with a challenge, it's a fair bet that I will eventually propose "Can we spoof [x] in order to circumvent this problem entirely?" The actual process of spoofing [x] may be impossible, but I'm thinking about it.

B. I try to have fun. I'm just not a grim person. I like to make jokes and horse around. In real life, when I'm presented with a bad situation, I try to roll with it and see things in a good light. My characters try to do the same.

C. I find a peer group and stick to them. I'm a very introverted person, but I don't always play introverts -- sometimes I play people who can walk up to complete strangers and be talking with them about personal matters in moments, because that's not me and I am curious about how that works. But I always retain the inherent loyalty-to-friends that being an introvert has taught me -- if you aren't good at making new chums, you stick close to the ones you have. I generally play very loyal characters; even when I'm playing in a game where there is an element of intra-party suspicion, my little games are largely intended to be able to react well in the event that *you* go all funny on *me*.

D. I try to correct injustice. I grew up, I must admit, a fairly dishonest person. I had a kind of epiphany while in college, and nowadays I try to live my life as honestly as I can -- especially since I have children now who are watching. I just absolutely can't stand it when people cheat the system and don't get what's coming. My characters always follow along that same path; even the ones who are basically amoral wind up having a 'soft spot' when it comes to people who are getting screwed. On the other hand, the degree to which my characters allow the world to see their morality varies wildly.

So, I guess that's my heart character: a fun-loving, basically do-gooding planner who loves his friends. Which is really me, minus the stuff that I don't like or don't mind dispensing with.

2002-10-24T20:08:00.000-07:00

GAME WISH #7: MAXIMS

And now for Ginger's Game WISH #7:

List three or more maxims/proverbs/bits of conventional wisdom/etc. that you've learned in your gaming career, and explain what they mean and how you've seen them apply in your gaming experience.

The best three maxims I know concerning gaming all come together. They were written by Greg Costikyan when he created the ever-popular role-playing game Paranoia. These words are meant to be lessons that should be taken to heart by all citizens in the darkly-humorous, violent, backstabbing world in which his game is set. However, all gamers should hearken when I say:

1. Stay Alert!
2. Trust No-one!
3. Keep your Laser Handy!

Taken out of the Paranoia context, these maxims are all useful to remember. Let's consider each one individually.

1. Stay Alert.

I think it goes without saying that most gamemasters are despicable sneaky finks. Oh, sure, they're also our friends and all, but at the core a good GM is a tricky and evasive scoundrel. This is because they are outnumbered by their players. You see, GM's want to advance their plots, often by causing the bad guys to do bad things. They want the bad guys to succeed, right up to the point of maximal dramatic tension. At that point they want the good guys to thwart them. That's because GM's worth their salt aren't really interested in rolling over the players; they just want to present them with a challenge that's, well, challenging. They want you to be at the darkest hour before the day breaks.

Aha, but in most games, there are many more players than GM's. These players are just as smart as the person on the other side of the stand-up screen. Their goals are usually different from those of the GM; they want to break the bad guys as soon as possible and not wait for the moment of maximal dramatic tension. The players are hard at work trying to divine what the GM's nasty little plan is, because they want to foil it before it can come to its wicked fruition. More often than not, because there are many more pounds of gray matter on the player side, the players can figure out what a non-subtle GM is up to long before he wants them to.

For this reason, GM's have had to become sneaky. They throw you little piecemeal clues. They mention important information as an afterthought, hoping to fool you into complacency. They invent convoluted red herrings to throw you off the trail. They hide vital data inside tortuous riddles and brain-spraining puzzles. Sometimes they lie.

You have to watch out for these tricks! Good GM's have a kind of cunning animal instinct for knowing when you are off your guard. It is at that exact moment that they will throw you something underhanded. Don't let this happen on your watch.

2. Trust No-one.

It really doesn't matter what kind of game you are playing, or what kind of world it is set in, or what the tone of the thing is -- there are certain vital and important themes that underlie whatever it is that makes human situations interesting, and these will inevitably crop up in any game you may play. One of the most important stories is that of betrayal -- a person you know, or trust, or ought to trust because of who or what they are, turns out to have goals that thwart those of goodness. Whether you are playing D&D or Ars Magica, Traveller or Over the Edge, Gamma World or any of the various GURPS settings, inevitably you will run into somebody who wants to put something over on you.

There is really only one way to deal with such a thing, and that is to always hold your cards where nobody else can see them. Do not confess all to that benevolent priest. The cute monkey that attaches itself to you in the bazaar may be up to no good. The urchin that pleads for your assistance isn't telling you everything. The helpful man in the curio shop is actually working for the cultists.

This doesn't mean that you need to play completely paranoid. When tear-streaked ragamuffins tug at your sleeve and ask if you can rescue their beloved pa, try to avoid going straight to initiative. The map given to you by the Faerie Queen shouldn't automatically be thrown in the trash. Every once in a while, an AI may actually want to help you. All I'm saying is, if little Timmy offers to guide you to the bandit camp, by all means go along -- but keep him where you can see him, and sleep with one eye open.

An interesting sub-case is where characters can't even trust other characters. In some games, such as Paranoia and Over the Edge, conflict between characters can often be built into the action, such that it's really quite likely that at some point you'll be exchanging gunfire with somebody played by the dude who drove you to the game. I think such conflict can be a load of fun provided everybody knows it's coming, and it's the sort of game where backstabbing adds to the fun. Otherwise, interparty conflict should be carefully banked by sensible GM's. I've seen too many games die because player #1 saw party cohesiveness as sacrosanct, player #2 cut player #1 off at the knees, and the resulting fallout fragmented the entire enterprise. Limited player mistrust and conflict can be tolerated to the extent that the GM believes the players can handle it. For instance, I played in a Vampire game where my character and Guppy's character were both interested in furthering applied high technology for our personal use; I had a series of moles in Guppy's R&D organization to keep tabs on his activities. Eventually I felt it would be prudent to develop countervampire weapons even though I was a vampire myself, because I was afraid a war would break out. Nothing quite like a crossbow that not only shoots a wooden stake, but then injects the target with a powerful coagulant....

3. Keep your Laser Handy.

Well, okay, keeping a laser handy in a Dark Ages game is probably not strictly relevant. It's the thought that counts.

Many fine games are based on nonviolent challenges. I really like a game that challenges players' skills in diplomacy, subterfuge, problem-solving and wit. The first Traveller game I ever played in was a game of forging a mercantile alliance between planets; the conflict was almost entirely at the bargaining table, as well as figuring out ways to generate markets for the products we had available. Often many sessions would go by without a single shot fired -- which was just as well, because in Traveller combat will kill you quickly and messily. The neat thing about this game was that, despite the fact that my earliest and most favorite gaming experiences were cast in the hack-and-slash mold, I never really noticed the lack of combat.

But....but! inevitably, conflict at arms must result. It's easy to drop your guard in essentially non-violent games. It's been my experience that it never pays to generate a character who is absolutely useless in a fight, because inevitably that fight will occur, and then you're hosed. It's also been my experience that even combat characters, when gaming nonlethally for a time, will 'lose their edge' in the sense that the player stops expecting violence, and then it happens, and again you're hosed. This is only true, of course, because GM's are sneaky bastards -- see item #1 above.

So: Stay Alert! Trust No-one! and Keep your Laser Handy! Also, don't eat all the Cheez-its by yourself, you pig!

2002-10-19T21:53:00.000-07:00

GAME WISH #6: SECRETS

In Game WISH #6, Ginger asks:

Sometimes the plot of a game requires a GM to keep secrets. Is it better for the GM and other players to keep most out-of-character knowledge secret, or to assume that players are capable of keeping in-character and out-of-character knowledge separate? Where and how do you draw the line as a GM and/or player between what secrets should be kept and which ones are OK to reveal?

I'm not of a single mind on this question. I have a number of different impulses on this topic, several of which tend to fight each other. It's hard to say which side will win out. In no particular order, here are things that influence my decisions to tell or not to tell:

First, unlike Ginger, I generally have no faith at all in my players' abilities to keep the secret stuff separate from the not-secret stuff. If a master thespian were immersing him or herself into the script of my game, really wrapping their head around it, and then went directly into intensive filming for the major motion picture to be made from my game, then I expect that person could pull it off. But my friends are not, as a rule, master thespians, and they are not, as a rule, immersed in my game. Generally speaking, my friends are actually slightly scruffy eggheads who only spend a few hours twice a month thinking about my game. I don't believe these people can maintain the mental discipline necessary to partition off the part of their head occupied by their character. And, frankly, why should I put them to that effort? It's a roleplaying game, not Concentration.

Second, I love coming up with clever little plot twists. If there's one thing I love more than coming up with clever little plot twists, it's people patting me on the back and saying 'Gee, Andy, that sure was a clever little plot twist.' So, neat little secrets are awfully fun, but the problem is that nobody else knows how fun they are if they remain secrets. I'm always apt to blab, for much the same reason that evil masterminds confess their entire plan to James Bond.

Third, I have a tough time tracking what information I've given out to people. A year after the party slew the Snorkle, they tend to meet up with Princess Golliwog, and I never recall whether I spilled the beans to them about the Snorkle actually being Princess Golliwog's fiancee under a sinister curse. And I can't very well say "Er, so, last year, I didn't happen to tell you something interesting about the Snorkle, did I?" because of course that would spill the beans. So there's always this paralyzed moment where I wind up telling them nothing, and then later on I get slapped upside the head and get told I denied people CRITICAL NEED-TO-KNOW INFORMATION. Often, rather than trying to remember what secrets are still secrets, I just tell the secret. "But you don't actually know that yet!" I conclude, chuckling nastily to myself over the fact that I've just placed the burden of recollection on the players.

Fourth, sometimes an entire plot is driven by the fact that the secret twist is surprising. If you tell the secret in advance of the money shot, you've just utterly screwed the story. Some secrets HAVE to be kept, because, you know, it's art.

So, if I had to map out the equation I use for determining whether to confess my game secrets, here's how it works:

1) As a default, I tell my secrets. This addresses Condition Three.
2) If the secret needs to be kept to avoid spoiling the story, I don't tell. This addresses Condition Four.
3) If I believe that telling the secrets will cause the players undue agony in not knowing the thing they actually know, I don't tell. This addresses Condition One.
4) Ah, but if it's a really cool secret, or if I'm tired, or if I fuck up, or a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo, or or or, I blab. This is the catchall Condition Two, bringing us back to my default, where I happily reside, a cheerful font of Secrets Mankind Was Not Meant to Know.

Everybody got that? there will be a quiz.

2002-10-18T20:56:00.000-07:00

MEANWHILE, ON CHANNEL TWO

I suppose I should mention that I have another blog. The intent is to skewer the news as offensively as possible. You might consider checking out And Now The Noose. Just don't complain to me.

2002-10-18T20:45:00.000-07:00

WISH 18: STICKING POINTS

Ginger's Game WISH question #18 reads like this:

Every player has sticking points. (Yes, you do. You may not have had your buttons pressed yet to know what they are, but you have them.). What are some things that are absolutely no-gos for you?

I have turn-ons and turn-offs for gaming like everybody else, but it's hard for me to identify something as strong as a 'no-go', a thing that, when encountered, means it's automatically time to seek out greener pastures. I can't recall having had such a strong '...MUST...FLEE!' reaction.

I can tell you what pisses me off in gaming. Does that count? Probably not. I'll write about it anyway.

I just can't stand seeing people be mean to each other for the sheer sake of meanness. That transcends gaming and applies to any situation I can see myself in. I guess a shrink would tell me that this stems back to my years of being an awkward newcomer, despising isolation when I see it. It just drives me nuts to be at a game, a place where people have theoretically shown up to have fun with each other, and somebody's trying to put a bug up somebody else's ass. Aren't there places set aside for such behavior where it's condoned, like debate tournaments, or usenet newsgroups?

I hate feeling stupid. I really like having my brain challenged with puzzles and riddles, but it totally sucks when I can't solve the damned things. When that happens I get a lot of 'why the fuck am I doing this again?' feelings, which are pretty immature, but it's my blog, so shut up and give me a quarter.

I hate ultra-slow pacing. Things need to happen in games at a certain pace or I lose interest. This pace varies widely from game to game and genre to genre. It's certainly true that the timescale of PBeM is much slower than FtF, and I can deal with that. But when games lag, I find myself comparing the small amount of precious spare time I have to the diminishing amount of joy I get from that activity, and concluding that I could be having more fun elsewhere. It's all about maximizing fun for me. I have a very Utilitarian lizard-brain.

I hate Rice University parking! let's not go there. Suffice it to say that I game at Rice, so it's not a complete discontinuity.

This is a slippery one to define: I hate gaming with people who piss me off. This is different from most instances of 'I hate [blank] with people who piss me off'. For instance, I don't like working with people who piss me off. That's obvious. I don't like having sex with people who piss me off. That's obvious too. (fortunately Dema doesn't piss me off....much.) But gaming with people who piss me off is just wrong. When you're at work, you don't really get a choice of who you rub elbows with, so what can you do? You generally do get to choose your sexual partners, but I can recall one personal example of where a sexual relationship existed in defiance of complete personality disconnect, mostly because the relationship wasn't about personality at all. Gaming, on the other hand, is all about human interaction. It's an activity that continues despite competition for our spare time from television, computers and videogames, I believe because there is a real and elemental need on the part of most people to rub brains with other live humans for fun. So when I game with people who annoy me, there's a feeling that goes beyond annoyance -- it's like I've been robbed.

Finally, a specific subset of the above paragraph, I hate gaming with people who think it's amusing to whack me with a whiffle bat. You! yes, YOU! Sit! DOWN.

2002-10-17T20:26:00.000-07:00

WISH 5: COMMUNICATION

How very easy it is to ignore one's blog when one gets busy. Fortunately, blogs aren't children or pets. There is little chance that my blog will die if left unattended. It will not crap on my bed to express its dissatisfaction. It will not escape my computer, go missing for months, and return with a string of little blogs in tow. I can fail to post to my blog for a week, and nothing untoward will happen.

So, uh, why do I feel so guilty?

Never mind that! onwards to Ginger's Game WISH question #5, which regards you sternly as it asks:

Gaming requires the GM and players to communicate a large amount of information about system, plot, setting, character, and actions (among other things). There are a lot of places where a failure to communicate on the part of the GM and the players leads to disappointments for the GMs and the players. How do you deal with miscommunications and invalid assumptions as a player and a GM? Give one or more examples of situations and how you resolved them or how you are avoiding them.

Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Communication. Uh-huh. So, um, what was the question?

Something about listening, wasn't it?

Right, okay. I will now give two examples of games I have played in, where my expectations going in were not equal to what I got out of it. Afterwards, I will talk about what I did to make the situation better.

Game the First: A couple of years ago I picked up a PBeM game called Tangorea. I ran across it while searching the web for 'world-building', something I was checking out in the spirit of philosophical inquiry. (Possible future Game WISH question: how do you go about building a world, peopling it, filling it with history and geography and physics and character? Do you strive for completeness at the outset or just invent what you need immediately and, if necesssary, backfill continuity?) Tangorea was a game set in a fairly developed world. It was 2nd edition AD&D with a few house rules and great flexibility. For some time I had hoped to find a game wherein I could play a character sort of like the engineering student who gets thrust into a fantasy world in Joel Rosenberg's The Sword and the Chain, and the GM was willing to accommodate this. We created a character class called a 'Builder', who wasn't much at combat or magic but had a lot of secondary skills, and we were off and running.

In this game, us good guys were combating orcs who had raided a town. The GM was fairly graphic in his descriptions of the orcs and their rapacious depradations, including the carrying off of women for purposes that were painted rather obviously. This bothered me relatively little at first -- I came up in gaming circles that featured zero females and 100% male teens, so coarse and immature talk combining sexuality and violence, while not my definition of fun, is also something I have built a tolerance for.

As the game went on, however, it became obvious to me that this sense of violence towards women wasn't just a kind of icky flavor of the game -- it was an attitude that was pervasive throughout the entire storyline. Like John Norman's Gor books, the notion of male dominance over women, often by force, was in the deep structure of this game. The game involved a lot of cool players, the DM put a lot of work into his game and his descriptions -- there was a lot to like about this game, but there was also no way I could continue on playing in a game that, while not exactly condoning rape, sure liked to parade it around a lot. What to do?

Game the Second: Rick Jones used a modified version of the Star Wars d6 system to run a game in the Star Wars universe. The Empire has fallen a while back, and now evil Sith guys are running around trying to collect evil Sith artifacts for their evil Sith purposes. The good guys, us, are Good guys trying to find the Sith artifacts before the Sith guys do, thereby neatly combining two Lucas franchises (SW and IJ) into one game. Neat premise, Rick!

I decided to play a droid. I had an idea for a robot that would buck the system of Bots as Chattel. My little repair droid would have a will of its own and a kind of Black Panther ideology that self-aware droids should throw off the mantle of biologic ownership by force if necessary. When we had created characters and gotten into the game, however, Rick pointed out that this went against the grain of the Star Wars universe. Star Wars is all about things being black or white, Rick said, and certain factoids about that world, pleasant or no, are accepted as givens. Hence, bots are still property.

This was a problem. I had built a character around a certain mode of play, and now was being told that this mode was not acceptable. I couldn't play the character that I had designed. What to do?

I have delayed mentioning what I did in both scenarios up until this point, because I now would like to point out that these two situations really reduce down to the same question: when player vision doesn't match gamemaster vision, what happens? Although these games are very different, this fundamental problem is an invariant. I don't believe it is ever the case that a player and a GM are picturing the exact same thing when they agree to game together, although the degree of discrepancy between their viewpoints can be great or small.

I've spent all this time getting to this point because I believe it points up the fact that Ginger somewhat begs the question with the phrasing of Game WISH #5. Is it really the miscommunication between GM and players that causes the disappointment and the conflicts, or is it the mismatch in expectations itself? Phrased another way: even if the GM and the player communicated via telepathy, with no nuance or idea fragment lost in transmission or reception, wouldn't there still be a conflict between me and my GM's in the two above examples?

I will now say how I dealt with these two games. I believe these examples will show that communication is certainly important, but even more important is flexibility on the part of both parties -- the ability and willingness to shift one's game paradigm to more closely approach that of the other.

In game one, I confronted the GM. I told him, hey, I have a problem with the way that violence towards women is presented. I feel you have a good game going here in many respects, but the theme of rape and degradation that I am perceiving is incredibly offensive -- so much so that I'm considering quitting. Can you tone it down a little? The answer came back: no. The GM didn't seem to be particularly defensive, but he also was firm on the notion that his game had a certain flavor, and the substance of that flavor wasn't negotiable. He and I agreed to disagree on whether that flavor was 'Mature' vs. 'Beat a Chick for Fun and Profit', but we found that this difference of opinion was sufficiently great that we couldn't continue to game together. I quit the game and haven't looked back. (Although I have kept up with some of the players.)

In game two, I also confronted the GM. Rick, sez I, what are we going to do? I don't particularly want to play in a game where I'm somebody's slave. There that whole free will thing, you know. Besides, in the Star Wars movies, the roles of bots are usually limited to 1) waiting with the landspeeder, 2) getting comically disassembled and reassembled, and 3) burbling cutely to maximize merchandisability. How fun is that?

Rick was pretty flexible. Look, he said, your fellow player Pete von der Haar has made a Han Solo analog; you can be sort of like his Chewie. Maybe he takes a liberal view of bossing around his bots. Maybe you can even harbor ideas of being your own bot, even if you don't advocate for AI Lib. Rick also allowed me to build a 'design flaw' into my droid (the reason he was the only bot of his kind left in the universe): his memory doesn't wipe cleanly, so even if some rascal decided to have me blanked, there was a chance I could come back from it. So, I accepted being somebody's bot, took a liking to screaming 'Boss! boss!" at inopportune moments, and generally did everything as cherub-enticingly as possible to guarantee that QT-107 ('Cutie') would wind up on every lunchbox in America. I had fun in that game as long as it lasted.

I posit here that communication, while imperfect, was probably about as good as could be expected. Had I communicated perfectly in game one, however, I would still have had the same argument with the GM. The argument would have come before the game instead of months down the road, but I still would have had the same bad feelings. (and wouldn't have met some cool people who I like.) The main reason game one ended unsatisfactorily for me was that I had a game view, the GM had a different game view, and the two could not be made to approach. In game two, however, the GM and I each made compromises. We examined the final product of that bargaining and both decided we could have fun with the results. Hence, owing to this flexibility, game two was successful.

Every person has differing thresholds of tolerance for viewpoint mismatch, and differing abilities to flex themselves. On the matter of violence towards women, I wasn't willing to move much. On the matter of free will, I was more able to accommodate. Other people have almost no ability to flex on any axis; such people don't last very long in games that aren't of their own creation.

So: Communicate, yes, by moving your lips when you have a thought that needs sharing! but also, once you have sent and received, be willing to alter your own message as much as you can and still have fun.

2002-10-11T18:56:00.000-07:00

WISH 17: PROPS

Here is presented Ginger's Game WISH question #17, for your delectation and enjoyment:

How do you use props in your game? Give three examples, and discuss why you use them. What do they bring to the game? Are there any downsides to using them? For those who do convention games, are there differences between the props you use in campaigns and the props you use for con rounds?

I like to buy bloody carcasses from the butcher and flop them wetly on the gaming table to graphically illustrate the nasty business of hack-n-slash.

No, I don't. I'm not a hugely prop-intensive person as a general rule. I've written about Eop the Raven and the use of a bat puppet to bring him to life, so writing about that would be cheating. So, something else, something else....

I'm a big fan of maps. I love to draw full-color game world maps and present them for the players' use. I also like to draw sketchy maps and update them as the players explore the world. It's fun to do, and it's a reasonably useful tool, especially if the group needs to do a lot of travel planning and logistics. I also use AutoCAD to plot out custom battlemats for 3E D&D fights and other encounters.

In my most recent round of DUDE I used two props to good effect. In this game, I was playing the executive producer, and the players were playing action movie actors. After an initial phase of wrangling over the direction of the picture we were about to shoot, one of the players was designated the 'Actor/Director'. I had bought a black beret for that individual's use. The Actor/Director would then artily lay out how the forthcoming scene would be shot. Meanwhile, I had bought a prop for my own use: a novelty cigar, as large as a cucumber, that really blew smoke without being lit (although a tiny LED lit up at the end when it was puffed on). I think these props added a bit of ambience to the proceedings.

It's not really a prop, but it was a definite artifact in use during games: when I ran my long-running AD&D game in college, we had the rattiest comfy chair you can possibly imagine. It was a scum-green armchair with the stuffing spilling out of numerous rips in the fabric; also, for some reason that was never quite clear to me, the legs had been entirely sawed off. My freshman year this chair was rescued from a dumpster and brought to our room. During gaming it was used as the DM's chair; despite its low stature and gnarly appearance, it was really quite comfortable. This chair was dubbed the Chair of Power and remained in use for quite some time, despite horrifying substances spilled on it and its increasingly moldy stench. I can't say that the Chair of Power actually added much to the games, except that it was so low that I could sit in it and scootch it backwards under our quasi-bar table, thereby lurking in shadow while governing the proceedings.

The coolest prop I think I've ever seen in a game had to be some papers painstakingly penned by Jason Modisette. Our characters were in a library researching old crime scene records which had been handwritten with poorly blotted penmanship. The record we were really interested in was missing; the bad guys had spirited it away. However, we shortly realized that the poor blotting of the ink had led the missing record to leave a backwards imprint on the piece of paper that had lain on top of it; by taking that page and looking at it in a mirror, we were just barely able to make out the information we needed. Jason had worked quite a long time on getting the writing to read right backwards, and making it faint enough to not be terribly obvious.

I really like illustrations. I don't generally do a lot of research to procure them for my own games, but I always enjoy games more when there are pictures to look at. I still fondly recall that first heady experience of playing in AD&D adventure S3, which contained an illustration booklet with quite a number of gorgeous pictures of bizarre encounters (S3 is set inside an alien spaceship). Nowadays Kenzer and Company has brought back the illustration booklet for their Kalamar d20 adventures, which makes their adventures worth a look, if not an actual purchase.

For my games, the prop that sees the most use must be the whiteboard and pens. There is always some need to explain the situation the players find themselves in graphically. I make a lot of use out of sketching and doodling.

2002-10-10T21:40:00.000-07:00

WISH 4: SYSTEMS

Catching up! [pant pant] Only fifty miles to go! [pant pant]

Ginger's Game WISH question #4 is posed thusly:

Describe three systems you have gamed under: one you thought was good, one you thought was all right, and one you didn't care for. What were the good points and the bad points of each system? Did the systems support their genre? Were they complex or simple? How easy were they to GM and play? Is there a system you'd really like to try that you haven't? Which ones wouldn't you try based on reading them?

Hey! that's not one question! that's, like, ten million questions! mutter, mutter....

I think the best game system I have played is Paranoia. Here the definition of 'best' is limited to mean the system that appropriately matches the mechanics of play with the flavor of the game, and thereby causes the minimum of disruption by dint of its mere existence. Here's what I mean: the way you generate characters in Paranoia is fairly arbitrary. You randomly generate your stats; you randomly pick your secret society and your mutation; you get the barest minimum of flexibility in choosing your skills and equipment. This arbitrariness really sets you up well for the arbitrariness of the game universe. In Paranoia you don't have a lot of real choices, and at any time the whim of [essentially] God could smack you down. In other games lack of choices would be annoying and wrong, but in Paranoia it's just perfect. Other than character generation, Paranoia doesn't lug around a lot of rules; it pretty much shuts up and gets out of the way of the action. This frees up characters to try pretty much anything, as it says right there in the rules that just about anything is possible if you roll high enough, and showing a lot of brass should be rewarded by the GM. If you want to encourage fearless, thoughtly, quick-tempo play, this is exactly the sort of system you want. For slower, more methodical play, you can play a system with rules for everything like D&D. If you want a fast game, D&D is not for you.

My feelings are mixed on Torg / Masterbook. This system is not terribly rules-intensive either; the largest part of the Torg rulebook was source material. The game has a neat mechanic in its deck of cards. Players and GM alike receive special cards which give bonuses for certain types of actions. Every round of action in a conflict there is an approved action; performing said action allows one to get more cards. This is a good thing because it encourages players to do something other than shoot the enemy all the time; often the approved action is something like Bluff, or Trick. With respect to the people I game with, this mechanic succeeded in keeping a combat-oriented group from automatically shooting anything that moves. However, the cards became just another mechanic that could be abused. This abuse earned the name of 'card-mongering', which is the practice of performing the approved actions in such a way that one maximizes one's cards and thereby accumulates personal power. If a mechanic can be manipulated in such a way that the pursuit of such an effort eclipses the non-systemic parts of the game, it has failed. Rules fail as soon as they enter the radar screen of your conscious mind. I liked the several games I played within the Torg and Masterbook rules sets, but this was probably more a function of playing in a properly set up game than playing a good system.

I just absolutely can't stand the World of Darkness rules. I know a lot of people just love those games, and I'm sure Rein-splot-Hagen is a genius, but the system makes my skin crawl. Here's my beef: WoD counts as a system that has a fair number of rules. There are a lot of powers, a lot of different tallies to keep track of, a lot of lookups on skills to see how well you did, etc. Any system that has a lot of rules needs to have good balance -- ie no matter what choices you make during character creation, you can create a character with a reasonable expectation of having capabilities of a level similar to your fellow players. If you don't do this, you wind up with 1st edition AD&D: a broken system that can be abused by those who know how to abuse it. Now, mind you, not all systems need to have lots of rules. Games that are all about atmosphere and not all about kicking ass shouldn't need a lot of rules. I should think that [Critter]: The [Gerund] would want to be more atmospheric and dispense with all the roll this and compare that nonsense. But it doesn't, and it's poorly balanced, and it's arbitrary (what's my difficulty number?), and is therefore quite a bit like 1e AD&D -- EXCEPT that 1e AD&D doesn't make any pretenses about being an atmospheric roleplaying game. Advanced D&D was pretty much about looting and killing, and no bones were made of it, so I can't complain too much. But I just loathe the World of Darkness system now, even though I've played a few games using it, and I don't intend to play in any more. I actually hate two systems worse than World of Darkness (Ysgarth and Aftermath), but those are sufficiently obscure that I'll just leave it at that.

I've never gotten to run or play in Over The Edge, although it looks like fun. Angelo recommended Deadlands to me, so I'll want to check that out someday soon. I'd like to try the d20 modern system for something like James Bond or Car Wars, although I would emphatically not like to try it for something like Call of Cthulhu.

I read RuneQuest and never opened the box again -- it looks too goofy for words. I've heard nothing but badness from MERP, although some of their source material is pretty good. Rolemaster sounds pretty bad. The revised Traveller looks sufficiently overcomplicated that I shouldn't touch it.

In the category of less mainstream games: people who haven't tried it should try Skyrealms of Jorune. It's lightweight and has a richly developed world. Reading the rules to HOL is probably better than actually playing it, but read 'em anyway. Similarly, read All Flesh Must be Eaten.

2002-10-08T22:10:00.000-07:00

WISH 3: SETTINGS

Ginger's Game WISH question #3 reads as follows:

Discuss three setting ideas or ideas for elements of settings that you got from movies/books/TV/etc. that you have read or seen recently. These do not need to be full-fledged settings, but can be single elements that could be incorporated into existing games.

Do I hafta do just three? no, I don't think I do. If this offends anybody, quit reading after the first three. Everything afterwards is just gibberish. Fnord.

Item: a while back the BBC did a pretty good show called Star Cops. The setting was a moonbase in the middle of the next century. Humanity has expanded pretty fast out into the solar system, and there's a lot of lawlessness and uncertain jurisdiction out there. Those nominally in charge of upholding the law are the International Space Police Force, led by a terrestrial cop who really doesn't want to be out of the gravity well but doesn't have a choice in the matter. The ISPF, given the derogatory name 'Star Cops', find that ordinary base human nature is alive and well beyond the earth's atmosphere. The show is much like an ordinary police drama, but set against the background of space. I think this would make a cool game, especially if somehow combined with Buck Rogers: near-future scientists and cosmonauts work a liquid oxygen farm on a moonbase, there is a disaster and they fall into the LOx reservoir; their bodies quickly freeze and they are left in suspended animation. They are revived a century later in the moonbase that has mushroomed up and through the old pod-style base. They are put to work doing special missions for the moonbase law enforcement because they aren't a part of the system and are therefore effectively invisible. The big corporations have built their own little enclaves where the law barely reaches, so the good guys have to be sneaky and diplomatic. Then there's a nuclear war on earth, and moonbase needs to deal with a flood of refugee ships....

Item: while we're on the topic of cool BBC series, there was a cool show in the 70's called Survivors. (No, not that show.) It was sort of like Stephen King's The Stand, minus the supernatural stuff and the frothing. The world's population is decimated by a plague, and the survivors must somehow go on living. The show is amazingly muted when it comes to ick and gore, and instead focuses on small but important stuff, like how people deal with the loss of the comforts we take for granted. It also has a strong theme of the danger of power implemented by force -- when there's not many people in the world, a handful of thugs with rifles is a scary thing indeed. I think this would make a great game just the way it is.

Item: I recently reread LeGuin's Wizard of Earthsea series. I think it would be fun to run a game with a bunch of neophyte wizards at the School of Magic. There is lots of opportunity for conflict and intrigue -- something like a Hogwarts situation, but the students are older and the struggles are rather more dire. I think I would enjoy playing a Namer, or a wizard who learns the true names of things, which gives one power over those things provided the names are used carefully and sparingly.

Item: For a long time now I have wanted to run a Mission: Impossible game. I'm not talking about M:I as implemented by Tom Cruise, as that was an abomination and cannot really be talked about by me without my face turning purple and my friends getting spittle on their faces. I'm talking about the old TV show, where the good guys planned and snuck and spoofed and spied, and if somebody swung a fist (or, egad, shot a gun) it meant something had gone SERIOUSLY WRONG. I really like caper games, especially in PBeM where you can do the planning and the execution justice. It's often kind of a let-down in FTF gaming where, after hours of planning, the GM just says 'Okay, it works perfectly!'

Item: I'm perverse along peculiar axes of oddity. I think it would be fun to run one-shot games where the chief thrill was the irony of it all. Things that would be amusing in this vein: you could roleplay The Hardy Boys and their various pals and chums, quipping their way across Bayport on their sleuthing missions. You could play a game called something like 'It Came From Beyond', which would be the roleplaying game of 60's drive-in scifi/horror movies starring Steve McQueen. (female characters would have to scream a lot. male characters would have to wear button-up sweaters. everybody would have to pepper their conversation with 'keen!' and 'swell!') I really think it would be amusing to play a game that attempted to model Cannonball Run, with wacky hijinks and cleavage aplenty. And wouldn't you be amused for at least a *second* if you got to play in a Thundarr the Barbarian game? Demon Dogs!

Item: I don't know why I have never seen or heard of a Raymond Chandler style mystery PBeM. I've seen plenty of CoC, but a good old-fashioned gumshoe story? I'd love to have a good group of writers each take the part of a good guy, a bad guy, or a neutral contact, and just play it out. This would also work pretty well as an online Host-a-Mystery thing. You know, all of you are suspects trapped in the mansion / boat / island / whatever, and one of you did it; you have to piece together the clues that each person has in their possession....

Item: I know lots of people who like to play superheroes. I know lots of people who like to be funny. But it's rare that you see people playing funny superheroes. That's why there should be a Tick rpg, or a Mystery Men rpg. You develop your character strictly for yuks, then see who can make everybody else laugh the hardest. Probably would only work in FTF gaming, and then only with the right crowd.

Item: Speaking of supers -- I have been rereading Wild Cards and would like to play in a Wild Cards game. I know that Gurps put out a Wild Cards sourcebook, but honestly, I'm not a Gurps fan, and I don't think Gurps is well suited to supers play anyhow. It really should be done with Villains and Vigilantes, or some sort of rules-light / diceless system.

Item: I forget who wrote it -- perhaps it was Fritz Leiber -- but there was a really neat short story out there about a guy who comes unstuck from reality. The people around him kept having conversations with him, but they were obviously hearing things different from what he was saying, or they were talking to him in a different part of the room. Eventually the guy becomes something like a ghost, drifting unglued and out of phase with the world we know. Then he discovers there are other entities there with him, and they don't mean any good for our world. I did a bit of brainstorming a game a while back that I was calling Up the Down Escalator that works along the same lines as that story. The people who are out of phase gather together to see what they can do about the strange horrors that are fiddling with the underpinnings of reality, and try to get back into sync with the real world in the bargain.

Item: I like the world of Blade Runner. And my inner Cheez-head likes the world of Escape from New York. So why not combine the two? Earth is a hellhole, and the only people who are left here are the undesirables. You try to leave the atmosphere, they shoot you down. Of course, they try to keep people from developing launch capabilities in the first place; that's where the androids come in. No sane person would infiltrate earth, so they have robots do it. The good guys want to kill the robots. Or maybe they are the robots? Maybe both! maybe neither! I don't know! Maybe we're not supposed to know! what the fuck is that unicorn? where's Donald Pleasance? anybody seen my electric sheep? I'm SO CONFOOOOZED!

Item: okay, so riffing on Escape from New York. At the end of the last movie (which sucked, but stay with me), the doomsday device is detonated that frags all high technology on the planet, right? So, time for the sequel: Escape from Galveston. Lots of people have gone just completely nutso from the overnight fall of civilization into the Dark Ages. They can't build a sanitarium big enough to hold 'em, so they stick 'em on Galveston Island and block off the causeway. Anybody trying to cross the intracoastal highway gets an 8-pound ball smack dab in the gunwhales. The PC's are sent in -- their mission: find and kill Snake Plisskin! (you've heard he's dead, but no matter.) It turns out that Snake is in charge of the nuthouse; he's got a plan to (brace yourself) recommission the USS Cavalla (a defunct WWII sub at Seawolf Park) and live a jolly life of piracy on the high seas! should we kill him or join him? decisions, decisions....

Enough! I have many game ideas! I can't think of them all right now. Many of them suck, but some are good. Someday I will run one or more of them, provided my petition to increase a day's length to 30 hours goes through.

2002-10-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

WISH 2: ROMANCE

Could I please skip around some more? Ginger Stampley's Game WISH question #2 is:

Describe two romantic relationships involving a PC you've seen in a game. One should be a romance that worked for the participants and the other should be one that failed, died, or came to an end. What was good and bad about these relationships from the point of view of plot and character development? How did the GM make the romance appealing to the players?

[CUE FAINT STRAINS OF ACCORDION MUSIC]

Ah!....l'amour.

Un moment, s'il vous plait....

[SUDDEN STACCATO SOUNDS OF WHACKING PUNCTUATED BY AGONIZED ACCORDION SQUEALS. THE INSTRUMENT EXPIRES WITH ONE FINAL PATHETIC WHEEZE]

There. Much better. Where were we?

The question asks for one successful romance and one not so successful. Well, sorry kids, but I seem to only play in games where love goes horribly wrong. I game in universes where cruel fate, foul curses, perfidious villainy and bad timing conspire to condemn aspiring lovers to loneliness, and loving lovers to torment. Hey, it's not like I'm doing it on purpose! it's just that I'm unlucky when it comes to game-karma for LUUUURVE.

Back in 1992, when the earth's crust had only recently cooled and the web was only known or thought about by complete eggheads, I helped found alt.pub.dragons-inn on USENET. This was a shared-fiction newsgroup set in the fantasy city of Generica, where anybody could post to introduce a character, interact with other characters, and have whatever adventures one chose. A group of good writers emerged who wrote quite a number of interesting and intricately interwoven stories. My main character was T.E. Kron, a middle-aged Sergeant of the Watch, who wound up being something of the Generican Batman.

Over the years Kron did a lot of running around with Jameson Walker, a professional wanderer, storyteller, and occasional whacker-of-evil. The relationship between the two started out professionally, but eventually stray looks and comments bled into the narrative, and before we knew it they were going on what one would have to call a date. At that point things went horribly wrong. Kron got turned into an anthropomorphic plant, and Walker had her own issues she was running down. The romance went nowhere, in part because the characters were on diverging paths, but also because I was feeling increasingly weird about my character having a relationship with a character belonging to a single female. I'm a lot less uptight about such things now, but that was my first PBeM experience, and I wasn't dealing well. If you happen to read this, Kelly -- my bad.

I am currently playing in the Bohavia PBeM game, one of the longer running examples of such games that I know about (started in November '97). This game is one of the stranger D&D games I've been associated with; it's set in a pseudohistorical analog of Czechoslovakia, but nevertheless the characters have managed to run into the cast of the Wizard of Oz and, well, a giant nose. You had to be there. Anyway, my character fits right in -- he plays a paladin of the God of Thieves and a confidence man; he makes his living pretending to be Yiri of Podyebrad, the legendary savior of the nation. One dark stormy night my character weathered a storm in a ruined chapel of the Goddess of Justice, and woke up the next morning cursed with a conscience. He still worships his dark God and serves him as best as he can, but he also tries to live his life as Yiri, doing good deeds and liberating the nation. My character has had a very thin line to walk to please both elements of his personality, and that line got even thinner when he met Kist, an actual real-live paladin.

Of course they fell in love. That's how it is with these stories. So they actually had a decent romance going, with the hand-holding and the questioning-of-the-value-of-chastity thing going on. Then, the HWRNMNBSOL curse fell: Kist's player got pregnant, delivered her child, and ran out of energy to game. Argh! danged reproductive system -- we hates it, precious, we hates it FOREVER! Anyway, the DM hasn't been wild about continuing the romance with Kist as an NPC, and he's recently hinted that her character is Tragically Doomed. Of course, playing tragic loss is perfectly fine too, but romance it ain't. Feh.

I've seen quite a bit of romance over PBeM, but much less so in face-to-face gaming. I think that whole physical detachment thing really helps us introvert-types get into the roles we want to play without the paralysis associated with making the smoochie-face noises at the hairy guy across the table.

2002-10-06T10:26:00.000-07:00

GAME WORLD #1: FIRE FIGHTERS

The fire fighters trudged out of the smoke still blanketing
Hill 19. They were clearly exhausted; theirs had been largely
a holding action this day, keeping the fire from jumping the
breaks and spreading into the fields of parched grass beyond.
There were a dozen of Charlie Squad trooping wearily down to
base camp, sweat blazing trails across soot-smeared foreheads,
respirator masks swinging crazily, open coats flapping in the
hot breeze.

Cranston, the lieutenant, met them grimly at the bottom. "Lost
Reffert today," he said matter-of-factly.

Hurd took a swig from his canteen, then spat the water out to
get the taste of ash out of his mouth. "How?"

"Got trapped in a canyon." Cranston offered a stick of gum,
thoughtfully flown in by the USO. "Thought he had it beat
back with the water cannon. He went in to try to wet down
a stand of mesquite, but an arm snuck in behind him." Charlie
Squad winced in unison; Cranston shrugged. "We couldn't get
to him in time."

"Shit." Hurd scuffed at the ground with a heavy boot, cracked
and blackened from weeks of tromping across baked ground. "He
was a good kid; family in Galveston."

"Galveston's got its own problems," replied Cranston. "Just
came over the wire; the fire jumped the Bay. It hid on a
barge full of old tires, banked really low; then it flared
up and jumped to the saltgrass. Town's on fire."

Hurd squinted at Cranston. "Goddamn fire is a step ahead of
us every damned day. Any more bad news?"

"I guess." The lieutenant looked like he was going to be
sick. "They dropped the bomb on the ruins of Albuquerque,
hoping the shock wave would blunt the spearhead of the
southwestern front. Didn't work. Fire actually seemed to
gain energy." He gulped. "It seemed to *like* it."

Hurd's nasty reply was interrupted; Mazurczek ran up.

"CO says come quick. Got a chunk of fire boxed in and
isolated. He wants to ask some questions."

"Fuckin' A," replied Hurd, cocking the lever on his cold-
thrower. The CO2 tank was still half full. "We gonna
have ourselves a little interrogation."

- * -

The canebreak was on fire. Tongues of flame licked twenty
feet into the air, wafting smoke and cinders onto the updraft.
Water hoses sent a constant intercepting curtain of water
vapor above the fire, mopping up the runaway ash. There would
be no escaping.

The ground around the canebreak was cleared for fifty yards in
every direction. Members of the 12th Airborne Firefighting
regiment stood watchfully around the prisoner, ready to
direct spray hoses and CO2 bombs at the slightest sign of
trouble. Hurd and Charlie Squad came in behind to watch as
the CO addressed the fire using a bullhorn:

"The situation in Kansas City: is it true that you are
holding hostages to be exchanged for dry timbers and plastics?"
At a gesture, an aide nervously stepped forwards with a pane
of heat-sensitive paper the size of a posterboard. The flame
licked out in a surly fashion within a yard of the aide, and
the paper blackened to spell out crude words:

D O N ' T K N O W

"Give it a half-dose," barked the CO. A gas cannister was
launched into the break and exploded with a dull *krump*.
The fire immediately shrank down to knee height, entirely
extinguished in places, writhing in obvious pain in others.
Then, as the CO2 dissipated, it slowly rose back to its
original height.

"Mean one," commented Hurd quietly. Cranston agreed.

"Another question," continued the CO. "In Missoula you
waited to press the attack until the last of the water
stores were depleted. How did you know? where are you
getting your information?" The aide stepped forwards again.
The tendril of flame did not come forth.

"Answer!" demanded the CO.

All at once the fire reared itself up. Twisting in on itself
like a giant serpent, the inferno roiled and roared, sending
a directed burst of blazing chaff and superheated air directly
at the unlucky communications aide. The man screamed, falling
to the ground and flailing as the lining of his surcoat
ignited, a human ball of flame.

"Fog it! fog it now!" the CO shouted. The generators kicked
on and a cloud of mist engulfed the canebreak. Hurd and
others charged in behind the leading edge of the water vapor.

"Die, you fucker! die!" hissed Hurd through his mouthpiece,
throwing halon grenades into the heart of the conflagration
and stamping on the blazing grass with his asbestos-lined
boots. The stuff might give him cancer in twenty years, but
in the here-and-now, nothing kept the fire off better. Hurd
cursed and stomped and extinguished and cursed some more, and
when he looked around, the fire was out. Where a stand of
wild grasses had once been, only a churned plain of mud and
steaming straw remained.

The communication aide was swaddled in fire blankets. The
medics were injecting him with heroin and spraying antiseptic
foam onto the charred remains of his face. If he was unlucky,
he might just make it. Hurd spat on the ground.

"I'm done playing with fire today," he snarled, thrusting his
largely empty canteen into Cranston's hands. The lieutenant
stared wildly at Hurd's form for a few moments as it retreated
through the smoke in the direction of Charlie squad's picket.
Then, looking around self-consciously, he swigged down the
last of the water and followed.

- * -

Cranston drew the flaps of his tent closed. The rest of the
squad had gulped down their rations and hit the sack; they
were headed for Hill 23 tomorrow, and it would be a tough
fight. Fires seemed to draw character from the lands they
burned; out here in West Texas they were just plain ornery.
Cranston turned off his electric lamp and listened to the
heavy breathing of the fire fighters under his command. Then
he reached into his duffel bag.

The lighter was a fancy affair, all gold encrusted with
diamonds. He had found it in a burned-out limousine in Dallas.
Something about it had spoken to him. He had kept it even
though such things were forbidden. Cranston flicked the top
open and spun the wheel.

The tiny flame sprung to life. It was faintly green and
shimmered. As he looked inside it, Cranston could see
smaller flames dancing within the larger one, following some
pattern that he couldn't immediately decipher. It was, he was
certain, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

Long ago, when our species was still more ape than man,
instincts of no known origin forced our ancestors to love
and care for that which reason dictated they should only fear.
So it was that humanity formed a partnership with fire, with
a basis in the hypnotic effect that dancing flames can have
on the mind. These same instincts governed Cranston's gape-
mouthed adoration of the flame, and his sudden anxiety when
it began to gutter and shrink.

"No! wait! stop!" he muttered. "I'll....I'll tell what I know!"
Relief flooded over him as the fire, coyly, hopefully, began
to stabilize and rise once more.

"In Biloxi," Cranston began, "they're out of nitrogen. They're
expecting a new shipment soon...." The flame of the lighter
rose high and capered a new dance Cranston had never seen
before, twisting and mincing and making love to itself,
holding him spellbound as he spoke.

Meanwhile, the moon rose high overhead, a dim disc barely
visible through the omnipresent smoke. There would be no
rain for some time.

2002-10-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

WISH 16: OLD AND NEW

Okay, I had meant to answer all of Ginger Stampley's Game WISH questions in order, but then I'd be really late with the up-to-date ones, and then I'd, like, get an 'F' or something. So, at the risk of confusing people who might be reading this blog in sequential order, I'm going to skip from the first WISH question to the last, and then double back again. I don't really mind confusing people. I consider it a day wasted if I don't make at least two people say 'Ha!', three people say 'Hey!', and four people say 'Huh?'

So, without further ado, in Game WISH 16 Ginger writes:

In the gaming you are doing lately, what do you miss from earlier games? What works so much better you never looked back? Three examples?

Well, I've been doing a lot of thinking and writing about past games, so I'll just go down memory lane again....

I miss favorite old characters. When you really like a character and get inside their head and enjoy being them for a while, and then the game ends or goes on hiatus and you have to stop, you feel like you've fallen out of touch with an old friend. I had a character in Greg Morrow's long-running D&D game named The Eye. He was a paranoid, self-serving enchanter whose chief modus operandi was getting other people to do the dirty work because he was allergic to danger. As the game evolved, and one of our former adventuring companions turned into the Lord of Darkness who threatened to take over the world, The Eye reluctantly had to follow the course of Good. I remember that philosophical twist very fondly. Now when I play wizards I have to carefully tell myself 'no, you're not the Eye. Stop doing that.'

I miss the freedom to play at the drop of a hat. I have a family who needs me, a job that eats a lot of my time, and a metabolism that just isn't the inferno it used to be. These days I count myself lucky to be able to participate in one face-to-face game just about every week, and a handful of email-based games with sporadic turnaround. I would game more if I could, but I would do so at the sacrifice of something else. I'm booked solid. But I still remember a time not so very long ago when friends would call up and say "Hey, I'm starting a new game, wanna play?" and without missing a beat, without pausing to reflect, without having to weigh the advantages and disadvantages and check my schedule, I could answer 'Hell yeah, sounds like fun!" And I remember drinking ludicrous volumes of Dr. Pepper until the wee hours of the morn, tiny blood vessels in my eyes swelling up like earthworms in a rainstorm, half-shouting out nearly incomprehensible plans for achieving imaginary goals whose exact nature is long gone in the fog of my memory. Only one concrete fact from those days remains: that was a load of fun.

Frankly, I miss not being jaded. I have been playing rpg's since 1980, pretty much without taking a break. I have played in a lot of different systems and with a lot of different people who employed a lot of different gaming styles. I wouldn't say I've seen it all yet -- I've barely scratched the surface of diceless play, for instance, and I've never LARPed, and I need a lot more PBeM experience before I can say I've milked that for all it's worth. But I've covered most of the terrain of role-playing games time and again. Minus certain tweaks in plot and tone, there is really a very finite number of plots and themes you can experience in rpg's, and I've probably seen each of them at least once. I get occasional flashes of deja vu when I'm playing, where I think 'Jesu Christu, I just know I've played this exact same scene once before, but where? when?' I miss those first heady years of novice gaming, where everything was brand new, and the DM could describe a bizarre creature without me and some other guys confidently nodding our heads and saying yup, it's a flumph, two hit dice, seen it, yawn. I miss feeling like a gaming expedition was a *real* expedition, where anything could lie around the corner. I miss that a lot.

But there's a lot not to miss too. I don't regret playing with mature people. (um, well, for certain values of 'mature'. You know who you are.) When I was a kid and played with other kids, there was a lot of stupid crap that people did and said. There was a lot of overt sexism and racism and homophobia, a lot of cruelty, a whole lot of questionable morality and general stupidity. These behaviors were largely self-reinforcing, too; there wasn't any mechanism to curb them. ('cos, see, I didn't game with gurls, or non-whiteys, or anybody who would own up to being gay. Then I went to college. That was new.) These days I game with a more grown up class of people. I rarely cringe in games anymore. That's a good feeling.

I don't miss being unselective about who I game with. There was a time when I would accept any game invitation and play games with people I had never met before. I learned over time, though, that this is a bad idea for me. Gaming is first and foremost a social enterprise, and when you don't match well with your fellow players, the game is going nowhere. These days I make sure that I either have met and vetted the participants beforehand, or I make my initial participation on a trial basis, ie. I'll give it a couple of games and see if it works out. I feel like a bit of a snob having this attitude, but I've gamed with too many people who have ruined the experience for me by doing nothing other than having a personality that didn't mesh with mine. I'm usually pretty easy, but when Joe Freak sitting next to me thinks it's okay to whack me with a whiffle bat to illustrate what his barbarian thinks of my plan, it's time for me to find another game. (this happened. never met the guy before. unbelievable.)

I also don't miss being picky about the sorts of games I play. One of the things I have learned about myself is that I am an inveterate smartass. I simply cannot turn down a good straight line. I can't even turn down crooked lines. Sometimes I think up a straight line and response, and then goad somebody else into uttering the straight line so I can be a wit. I do this all the time. For most games it's okay, but for games with aTmOsPhErE, it totally sucks having me along. (when I get to the Game WISH about game mood, I'm gonna have a field day.) I do a lot better in PBeM, thank goodness, or else I'd only be able to play games where it's okay to be a goofball, and that wouldn't be much fun. These days I am very careful to choose games that I think I'll enjoy, and that I think will enjoy me.

Ack, brain vapor lock. Game WISH is hard!

2002-10-04T07:07:00.000-07:00

PIRATES!

Earlier I wrote about the DUDE system that I used for one-shot games at JohnCon. Now I'd like to write about an adaptation of the system that I invented for use in an ongoing campaign.

I went into full-on post-mortem mode after the first JohnCon, trying to figure out what went right and what went wrong with my game. A number of mechanics issues needed to be changed or repaired, that much was obvious. What really struck me, though, was that something about the simplicity and pacing of the game really resonated with players. DUDE often moves at a highly frenetic pace (I actually encouraged the players to drink too much caffeine for the round) because it's so lightweight; you don't spend any time recalling the proper rules for adjudicating any given situation because there aren't any rules. This really lent itself well to the thrill-a-minute cinematic action that the game was supposed to model. I think a lot of people really want that simplicity in gaming; it's very liberating when combats don't take over an hour to resolve, as they sometimes do in D&D or (kum bay yah!) Champions.

I had a lot of fun running DUDE, so I sat down to think up a way that the game could be adapted for play in a weekly game. DUDE as run in JohnCon had a number of features that made for bad continuing play. First, nobody was playing a particularly sympathetic character; everybody was running some sort of big-headed Hollywood type. Second, DUDE scores shot up very fast in a single four-hour round of play -- the victors in each round rose from a score of 5 to over 15. Such growth obviously couldn't be sustained over even a few episodes. Finally, I felt the millieu of play would get boring quickly. Eventually, people want to play roles with some sort of importance, whether it be heroism or the pursuit of some internal ideal.

I eventually came up with some modifications to the system, rounded up the usual suspects, and voila! the game of Pirates! was born. Pirates is very loosely set in the real world setting of the Mediterranean Sea circa 1800. However, it's very fluffy history -- I'm an engineer, dammit, and my liberal arts education was pretty scanty. I use the SAT analogy method of describing the setting:

Real-world history : Pirates! history :: Ancient Greek Myth : Xena Warrior Princess

ie. many of the names are appropriate, and some of the stories fit into place, but they're all jumbled around and wrong and bad and stuff, partially because I'm ignorant, but largely to suit my selfish GM purposes.

So this story is set during a time when the British are feuding with other nations for naval supremacy and winning. In this game the British are Evil with a capital E, and are generally used interchangeably with Nazis in standard pulp games. The game occurs some time after the end of the Golden Age of Piracy, but a lot of malfeasance is still going on on the high seas, whether it be the Barbary raiders, sneaky American merchantmen, or anybody quick or stupid enough to challenge the Evil British's mighty boats and cannon.

Our heroes were criminals, of course, but your standard swashbuckling sort of roguish good guys, having been caught by the Evil British and tried unfairly for their crimes. The heroes were thrown onto a British Prison isle in the middle of the Mediterranean with no weapons and many hostiles all around. In the course of their quest to survive and then escape, they pick up the thread of some ancient secrets that have come to light. The game quickly turned into a globe-trotting adventure of rescuing beautiful royalty, breaking into and out of prisons, raiding pyramids, thwarting sinister magic, swinging from long ropes, outmaneuvering British gunboats and generally shouting 'Arrr!' at appropriate (and sometimes inappropriate) intervals.

The modified DUDE system was still based on the notion of having a single DUDE score. In addition to this, however, one was allowed a limited number of attributes (three) and skills (five). An attribute or skill could be just about anything one wanted it to be, within reason. If an attribute or skill applies to any action one is attempting, you get to add a die. Example: the characters had a DUDE score of 3, but if a character had an attribute of 'Agile' and a skill of 'Fencing', he would be allowed to roll 5 dice during a swordfight. Only one attribute or skill could be applied to any given action. Each character was also allowed one Schtick: something unique about them that helped them out. One character had the hearing abilities of Radar O'Reilly, for instance; another gained extra dice when performing actions in the name of True Love; still another could choose to perform a patently impossible action once per game session and would be allowed to double his dice pool. Finally, each character had to select a downside -- stuff like 'hates guns', 'drinks too much', 'will do anything for the ladies', etc. They then wrote up character histories and we were ready to go.

The rules for allowing DUDE scores to go up based on uttering action movie lines went away. Instead, healing after combat was allowed, and a slow character advancement system was developed. After one story arc you would be allowed to add a skill point; after the next, an attribute; after the next, another skill point; after the next, a full DUDE point. The cycle would then repeat. We only got through 2 out of 4 story arcs, however.

The overall plot was that, long ago, a monstrous creature fell to earth. It was the size of a mountain and was thoroughly evil. It also generated a kind of field that allowed humans with the right stuff to work magic. It planted itself out in the ocean and forged a sinister empire that ruled mankind for thousands of years -- an empire known as 'Atlantis'. Then, an alliance of three wizards teamed up to create a magical weapon that could destroy the creature. A terrible battle was fought and the creature was laid low.

The wizards were about to slay At'lan when the creature copped a plea-bargain. Destroy me, it said, and magic goes away forever, and with it your power on earth. Look, don't kill me; use your weapon to render me utterly weak and imprison me. Then I'll just hang out on the ocean floor harming nobody and generating my magic field, and you guys can keep on ruling the universe. This sounded like a good deal to the wizards. They sent At'lan to the ocean floor and then founded the civilizations of Greece, Egypt and Babylon.

The trouble was, At'lan knew that men are mortal and eventually forget things. It was also able to subtly reach out from its prison and influence the minds of others. Over the years civilizations rose and fell, but At'lan hung out on the sea floor biding its time. It slowly gathered its forces, teaching secrets of sorcery to a few black-hearted souls, and helped forge a new empire under its subtle sway -- the British Empire. Then it sent its human agents out to look for the magical weapon that had imprisoned it.

The trouble was, the original wizards weren't entirely stupid. They realized bad things could come to pass if the weapon ever fell into the wrong hands. So, they broke it into three pieces and each wizard got one to hide as he saw fit. The Egyptian wizard built a mighty library at Alexandria and hid his piece there. The Babylonian wizard constructed a mighty fortress to secure his bit, a structure that eventually would come to be known as the Hanging Gardens. The Greek wizard opted for security through obscurity and hid it in a tiny shrine on an obscure little island -- an island that eventually would come to be used by the British as a prison island, and where our heroes would begin their adventures.

The artifact, known as the Eye of Kyprios, had a will of its own. It didn't want to be found by the forces of evil. It therefore did a bit of manipulation over the years, causing an individual known as Mulligan to come to be. Mulligan was a pirate who loved to explore ancient ruins and pry into secret places. Unknown to him, Mulligan carried the bloodlines of the original wizards who imprisoned At'lan. Mulligan, operating of his own free will, had himself imprisoned on the isle so he could find the first of the shards of the Eye. His goal was to find them all, reunite them, and do in At'lan for once and for all. He never made it off the island, however -- betrayed by a jealous lover.

The characters found Mulligan's remains and, in poking around the island, found the shard. They also awoke the attention of the forces of Evil, who pursued the good guys all over civilization. The good guys escaped the island, gathered information and rounded up an unlikely crew at Mulligan's home base, and sought out the second shard in Egypt. They had just found it, after many adventures, when we decided to play a different game. Still remaining in the story was the finding of the third shard, the uniting of all the pieces, and travelling to Crete to lay At'lan low.

This was a pretty good game. The flow of the action was still quick and rules-light; people were able to do anything they wanted to be able to do with a minimum of head-scratching about mechanics; the PC's and NPC's were all amusing to play with. Pirates! will probably remain one of my favorite light-hearted action rpg's for a long time to come.

Later on I'll write a bit about a more grim game that I invented, which had a highly involved rules set. It was called NightSide, and it was fun too.

2002-10-03T14:59:00.000-07:00

WISH 1: SUCCESSFUL NPC's

This is the first question presented in Ginger Stampley's Game WISH writing exercise:

Describe three NPCs (not major villains) that you really liked and what they added to the game. The NPCs can be from any game you've been in as a player or GM, and any system or genre.

I like this question a lot. The good NPC's are often what makes a game fun for a GM, and are a big part of the interest for the players too.

1. Eop

Eop was a bird. No, he wasn't even a bird. He was a bird that existed entirely in a PC's imagination.

I was playing in Kellie Getty's Vampire game, as was Rick Jones. Rick was playing a fairly crazy Malkavian nutso vampire. He had a companion named Eop ('Poe' spelled backwards, although this etymology has been questioned), a raven that only Rick's character could see. There was some question regarding whether Rick's vampire really was just imagining Eop, or whether it was some sort of spirit that was enjoying tagging along with his crazy compadre. Either way, Eop hung out with the group.

At first Eop was fairly colorless as an NPC. However, Kellie had a little bat puppet lying around, so one time I took it upon myself to pick up the puppet and fill in the role of Eop. Eop was highly disdainful of this bunch of vampires running around and making trouble, and he had few qualms about expressing his true feelings on the matter. His feelings could usually be summed up with a single word: 'MORONS!', croaked out as witheringly as possible, yet with a world-weary air of eternal suffering-these-bozos-not-so-gladly. Eop usually managed to work the word 'moron' into conversation every time he opened his beak.

Eop quickly became a public character. Whenever somebody did something really dumb, another player would seize the bat, croak 'MORONS!', and cause it to shake its little head in disgust. This is, in my opinion, the way good NPC's should be: utilities and resources managed by the entire gaming group as a collective. One day Eop would be useful for a gag; another day I would spend essentially the whole session behind the couch holding Eop up over the edge, peering balefully (and mostly quietly) down on the entire proceedings to generate a sort of creepy atmosphere. (A dude spending his spare time hanging out behind a couch? yeah, that's pretty creepy.)

2. Mulligan.

In my Pirates! game, the characters were essentially on a giant treasure hunt, following the travels of the pirate captain Mulligan in their search for the ancient secrets that he uncovered. Mulligan died 25 years before the action of the game, and hence the players' opportunities to actually interact with Mulligan were limited. [They managed it anyway, having a run-in with his ghost and then bumping into him during a short foray into time travel. Mulligan got around.]

The characters mostly got to cross paths with the traces that Mulligan left behind: diary entries, annotations on ancient artefacts, and of course three amazingly competent daughters, each unaware of the others' existences. Mulligan was also an escapeologist and was constantly breaking into or out of places he shouldn't be; more often than not the PC's got to the places they were going by rediscovering Mulligan's escape tunnel.

I liked developing Mulligan as an NPC because it forced me to figure out ways to present a character without that character being right there, in the flesh. I think I painted a decent picture of Mulligan for the players despite the fact that he mostly existed in past tense.

3. Orville Wright

For years Angelo Benedetto ran a very good PBeM Call of Cthulhu game. We didn't actually get very far with the adventure; we were mostly interested in roleplaying the crap out of our characters, describing minor interactions in excruciating detail, and generally trying to play along with the atmosphere of claustrophobic creepitude. We succeeded pretty well in this, I think, but often at the cost of moving the action along. This seems to be a common theme with the PBeM games I play in or run.

The pacing wasn't helped by the fact that the ability of the participants to contribute was often somewhat erratic. For various very good real-life reasons, often one player or another was not able to post, sometimes for long stretches. Ultimately this loss of momentum killed the game, which was too bad. However, during one such lull near the game's beginning, I decided I would take the lead and fill in for the GM. A group of us needed to take a day-trip down to the Smithsonian Institute to get some routine information, so I briefly took the reins as the GM (more like the lead writer, really) and started fleshing out the trip.

The characters got to the Smithsonian Castle and entered, only to encounter the beginnings of a physical confrontation between the Institute's director and a wild-eyed middle-aged man. My fellow players got a bit excited -- after all this was a CoC game, where nameless colours from beyond space and time wait behind every hedge for the opportunity to devour foolish yummy humans -- and came in with swords drawn and revolvers brandished. The offending person came to his senses and stalked off.

It evolved that this man was nobody other than Orville Wright, of aviation fame. True story: even though the Wright Brothers successfully flew a heavier-than-air craft under its own power for the first time, the Smithsonian refused to credit them for this until the late '20's. This was because the Wrights' chief rival in developing a plane was the Institute's director, who was contracted by the gubmint to produce an 'Aerodrone'. Sadly the 'drone didn't actually fly, as gleefully recorded by the press during several embarrassing attempted launches on the Potomac. Anyway, the Wright Brothers won that race, but the Smithsonian refused to give them credit; they continued to display the Aerodrone with the label 'First Flying Machine'. Orville had come to the Institute, once more, to argue that he and his deceased brother shouldn't be shut out like this.

It was a neat little sidestory because it was fairly unexpected; I think my fellow players were expecting some shoggoth action and they got the History of Technology 101. Orville wound up being fairly sympathetic and, in my opinion, a well done NPC.

My character's schtick was that she was constantly interacting with famous people from circa 1925. She was constantly running afoul of the Algonquin Round Table and Harpo Marx, and I hadn't yet had an opportunity to have her bump into an eager young student from Columbia named Theodore 'Dr. Seuss' Geisel before the game ended. Writing those little bits really made the game for me.

Wow, three NPC's, all originated one way or another by me. Is that ego or what?

2002-10-02T13:37:00.000-07:00

THE ORIGINS OF DUDE

At this point I would like to write a bit about a gaming system I have been happily monkeying with for several years. Its name is DUDE, which stands for the Dynamic Universal Determination Engine.

I was surfing the internet one day and came across Mark Hughes' gaming pages. Mark's pages are very thorough and are worth a read, particularly if you hate AD&D or want to read up on non-mainstream games. Anyway, Mark had invented a system with that same name, but his acronym stands for the Diceless Universal Determination Engine. This engine powered a game that I found highly intriguing: The Alan Smithee Project. This is a game where players take on the roles of actors making movies so bad that the directors refuse to use their real names on the project (hence, a number of real Hollywood dogs through the years have been directed or produced by 'Alan Smithee').

I liked the premise of TASP a lot, and I liked elements of Mark's DUDE system. In particular, Mark's system models big-budget cinematic action well because everybody has only one stat: your DUDE score. Most role playing games allow you to be good at one thing but lousy at another -- you're incredibly strong but stupid; you can pick locks but are weak in a fight; you can fly a starship but have no idea how to repair one. This is the absolute opposite of most movie realities, where the big stars play characters who are good at everything and everybody else is a mook. So, the philosophy of DUDE is that you should stop wasting your time with multiple stats and skill points and feats and crap like that. You should even stop worrying about whether you're armed with a sword or a gun, because in the movies, you're either a death-dealing machine or you suck. You have one statistic, and you use that statistic in every action you perform.

I found this sort of system particularly appealing because a simple truth has been looming larger and larger in my forebrain for years now: rules inherently get in the way of good gaming. It's neat that there are systems out there that allow you to accurately model the flight of an arrow based on wind speed and direction, the fletching and point type, the shaft and head materials, and bow strengths (I'm thinking of Aftermath here). It also makes for incredibly dull gaming. Who gives a shit about all that stuff? The joy in gaming comes from interacting and doing and saying, not hashing through the mechanics of interacting and doing and saying. A game system ceases to be an aid and starts being a liability the very moment somebody unfamiliar with the game says 'Okay, how do I do [x]?'

So, I liked a lot about the system, especially the Over-the-Edge-ish scornful disregard for the need for pages of mechanics and tables. Other parts I didn't like. In particular, I felt the use of cards and poker chips as a determination mechanism was simply replacing dice with something similarly random. I don't dislike the rolling of dice as part of the game, and my gaming buddies are largely all dice-slingers, so eliding dice from gaming struck me as something I should have a good reason to do. I hadn't got any such reason at the time.

There were other elements of movie-type action that struck me as conspicuously absent. The rules, for instance, talk rather vaguely about each actor's goals -- but what do big-ego actors really want? Ultimately their ambitions all converge on the same thing: the acquisition of even more stardom. It seemed to me, therefore, that the objective of a game like TASP really should be the building of one's DUDE score to ludicrously high levels. Thus was my DUDE acronym born: the dynamic universal determination engine is so named because one's DUDE score goes up and down throughout the game, based on one's actions during the course of the action.

I developed my version of DUDE for use in a Houston-area mini-convention. A gaming friend of some gaming friends was coming into town, and as his name was John, it was decided that there should be a long weekend of gaming called JohnCon. (There is a real and very successful annual sci-fi/gaming convention by that name at John Hopkins, something I didn't know at the time.) Various people threw together one-shot games, and in the end we had about 30 people participating. I created Hell on Wheels, a DUDE scenario. In this game, I, Quentin Tarantino, had been tapped with a budget of a billion dollars to create a post-apocalyptic sci-fi/horror film ala Road Warrior using six of the biggest Hollywood stars of the past or future. With a billion dollars I could clone long-dead actors, you see, and age them to perfection. So, the players took on the roles of various megastars and set to the matter of 1) making a hilariously bad film, and 2) infighting to see who would have the best DUDE score and hence get top billing in the movie.

This game was a qualified success. The chief mechanism for boosting ones' DUDE score was the uttering of clever action movie one-liners during the coup de gras, which was offset by losing DUDE points any time zombies or monsters hurt the characters in combat. The upside of this was that many truly bad lines were delivered, and egotistical action movie actors were effectively mocked. The downside was that the awarding of DUDE points for one-liners was necessarily arbitrary, and hence some people did better than others just because their brains were running in a higher gear that day. This wasn't particularly fair, and my friends were good enough to (gently) tell me so. Nevertheless, a good time was generally had, and the mini-con was deemed sufficiently amusing that it has become something of an annual affair.

In each subsequent JohnCon (JohnCon II: the Wrath of John and JohnCon III: the Search for John [John couldn't make it]), I have run a variant on DUDE. I have made some changes that have helped to blunt the arbitrariness of the first version: every scene there is a reset back to your starting DUDE total of 5, for instance, in case you really get torn up; I have added secret agendas and special awards for performing Action Movie Schticks; in the most recent version the actors were actually actor/directors and squabbled over the artistic direction of the film as well as who got to be the star. I have really enjoyed running this game, and I'm certain that most of the participants have really had a good time. Every con I have run two rounds of DUDE, and each time I have had to accommodate extra players due to strong interest. I hope there will be a JohnCon IV next year (John's Voyage Home, provided he can make it), and I plan on running a DUDE round at that time. I also plan on making the game different every time, just to keep people on their toes.

Next time I hope to write about a variant on DUDE that I employed for a more straight-ahead rpg -- Pirates!

2002-10-01T14:27:00.000-07:00

I, SYSTEM WONK

I am, I confess, a gaming systems wonk. I don't like to admit it, because I feel that I am first and foremost a roleplayer. When I am playing in a roleplaying game, it is the adoption of a new and different persona that I most enjoy -- that, and the subsequent interactions with friends who are also wearing new and different personae, and the fireworks this inevitably causes. I enjoy the act of gaming the same way a pyromaniac enjoys a merrily burning condominium.

However, it is also true that I tinker with rules. My first version of the preceeding sentence read '...also true that I like to tinker with rules.' I changed this because I don't particularly enjoy the process -- or, rather, I don't directly derive enjoyment from it. I tend to approach the fiddling of game systems with the same inexorable sense of dread that one carries when going to renew one's license plates at the DMV -- there is a certain grim set of the jawline and a desire to get this over with as soon as possible.

I don't fiddle with game systems because I love doing it. I fiddle with them because, to my perhaps overly critical eye, there is something the matter with them. The game system represents the rules of the universe one inhabits all too briefly during one's playtime. If there is something that strikes your mind as disturbing and wrong about the rules of the universe, one is obviously going to have a tough time giving one's self over to the fantasy of occupying that strange place.

Consider a highly absurd case. Suppose you were playing in a game system that attempts to model the Old West, with all the attendant gunslinging and hoss-roping attendant to it. Suppose you have rules for firing a sixgun -- on a good roll of a d20 you hit your target, but any time you roll a 1, your gun explodes and you die. In my junior high days I got to play in a game with just this rule (the system was invented by a schoolmate) and I just couldn't play within this system. This system would require a gunslinger to have the mindset that at any moment, out of the blue, you could fire your weapon and kill yourself with no chance of escape, and the odds of this happening are not vanishingly small. Obviously, this system was badly in need of repair. The minimal requirements for matching reality, whether it is a reality equal to our own, or some other internally consistent and enjoyable reality, were not met.

(Mercifully I have since played in several rather good games with an Old West feel, notably Rick Jones' Kingsbridge Saga, and Elmo's Beaufort Cowboys and Dragons campaign. Both are now defunct, but they were fun.)

Now, I must admit that my threshold for minimal reality matching is pretty darned high. This was encountered during a recent poker game, in which the usual suspects were discussing enjoyable movies. The topic of The Shawshank Redemption arose, as it is often wont to do in such discussions.

"I hated it," I confessed. There was much staring agog and protestations to the contrary. I was forced to explain myself.

"The plumbing was all wrong," I elaborated. Mason was convinced this was some sort of sick joke, but it really wasn't. I explained that the whole premise of the movie revolved around the protagonist's clever escape from jail. This involved tunnelling through walls down to the basement, and then (in the midst of a torrential rainstorm) smashing open a large storm drain line and worming his way down it to freedom. I'm sorry, but this is just plain not possible. Even if such a line existed in the configuration shown in the movie, even if it were large enough for a person to crawl down, even if he didn't suffocate during the crawl, it wouldn't be possible for him to get into the pipe in the first place: the height of the column of rainwater extending up the roofstack of a tall building would create a veritable gusher of water at the pipe's break, making it impossible to get in. I design plumbing systems for a living, so trust me.

People were still shaking their heads. I gave them a final example to illustrate my side of the story. "Supposing," I said, "you were watching a mystery movie. It's very suspenseful because you know who murdered Mr. Body, and you know where he did it and when, but the police can't arrest him because they haven't found the murder weapon. The movie goes on and on, and finally at the end it is revealed that (drumroll) the man was killed with a KNIFE fashioned from CHEESE."

I allowed this to sink in. Then Everett spoke up. "I think I saw that movie," he said, and hilarity ensued.

But enough with these horrid digressions! The point is that it's tough to enjoy a universe if, deep down inside, you feel that universe is broken. I am probably more sensitive to broken universes than most, so I fiddle with game rules. Hence, I am a System Wonk: a person who is constantly toying with game systems and rules, not for fun, not for profit, but because he can't enjoy gaming unless he fixes what's wrong with things.

Fortunately, my System Wonk personality is willing to run in the background. I am actually capable of enjoying a roleplaying game even if the system has a flaw, because I can make a mental note to deal with the rules problem later and get on with the game at hand. I'm not such a putz that I'll stop the game and say 'That's all fucked up, Mr. GM!' I'll often send mail later on suggesting rules modifications, though.

The main trouble with being a System Wonk is that it leads to a related disorder: Power Gaming. It stands to reason that if one is looking at rules trying to figure out why they're broken, one is also easily able to figure out how rules can be exploited to create a character with more and better abilities. This is the Dark Side of the Force -- easy and seductive. Creating a good character shouldn't be about creating a powerful character. I fight this all the time.

In future posts I hope to talk about some of my attempts to create new systems, in the hopes of creating that wonderful end-all be-all system that will allow pure gaming to shine forth without any nagging system imperfections. (These attempts to date have all failed in this regard, but have generated some fun times along the way.)

2002-09-30T22:29:00.000-07:00

WHY BLOG?

This blog will principally feature thoughts on the playing of games. I expect most of this talk will feature roleplaying games, but I like strategy and tactical games as well, and I might write a bit about poker if you're unlucky.

Why do this in the blog format? Several reasons. First, it seems to allow for the sorting of otherwise unsorted or unconnected thoughts, and as I tend to free associate a lot, this makes a lot of sense to me. Second, a number of my friends own gaming blogs, and it's easier on everybody if I can just write what I want here and link it up. Third, I'm curious what the rage is all about. Everybody was doing it! THE FIRST HIT'S FREE!!!

2002-09-30T12:36:00.000-07:00

DANG I'M 'CYBER'

This is my first post to a blog. When beginning a new endeavor, all sensible persons must first ask the question: will this suck my soul? Will I, with this extremely small shift in my means of personal communication, become a blogging mutant? Will I post my laundry lists, my sports predictions, my trivial hopes and dreams and fears? Will I be working on a blog about 50% of the time I am at work? Will I expound? will I elucidate? will I -- saints preserve us -- whine?

Of course, I'm not a sensible person, so I don't ask those sorts of questions. Where's that laundry list?