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Rules, Social Dynamics, and Contribution

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

[Cross-posted from Cultures of Play, because this is really more of a statement of position on design than a discussion.]

In the last three weeks or so, I’ve realized that I’ve come to a place in my gaming thinking that I didn’t expect to. That is, I think that good rules and game design can help a group form a healthy social dynamic, but they can’t replace it. The rules give you a starting point for the group to coalesce, but they aren’t the whole story.

Last night, the group I play with had a conversation about the rules for In a Wicked Age. Ted objected that the action sequence rules allow whoever has narration to make big decisions that potentially effect other players not involved in the conflict. (The specific case was answering, “Yes, and then two weeks later…” when one of the characters was scheduled to be executed the next day.) My response was that if someone does something that you’re not cool with, you should say that and ask them to reconsider. In a Wicked Age explicitly allows this, but to me that’s beside the point. This something that I think you should do in any game, regardless of what the rules say. In my ideal world, the social dynamic of the group is such that sort of input is expected and encouraged.

What this revolves around for me is contribution. It should come as no surprise to anyone that I love collaborative storytelling. That’s why I do this. I totally buy into the idea of Story Now: that what we do at the table shouldn’t be planned beforehand, that everyone should contribute, and everyone’s contributions should be transformed by their interactions with others’. I think I loved this before I started doing improv; I keep doing improv because it does this. (To be fair, right now roleplaying does it a lot better for me, simply because its storytelling aesthetic better matches my own, but that’s a separate issue.)

Which gets us to the players-around-the-table level. I’ve come to realize that the mere existance of a mechanic for, let’s say, introducing a fact about the world, doesn’t mean that any given person will necessarily use it. If the social dynamics of the group are such that you, for whatever reason, feel uncomfortable contributing like that, you won’t. Similarly, I feel like the lack of an explicit rule to do that doesn’t mean that you can’t, provided that the group is open to those sorts of suggestions. I’ve come to realize the that relationships of the people around the table matter a heck of a lot more to the game than what the book actually says.

This not at all where I was in my thinking about games even a year ago, and certainly not where I was when I first encountered these things that we now call Story Games. The idea that we couldn’t just engage the rules and fix everything? Sacrilege. Player empowerment would save us! All we needed was good game design, and we’d overcome all of those messy interpersonal problems. If that wasn’t working, it must be a “social contract problem.” (I kid because I love.)

Now this isn’t to say that there aren’t games that push groups in the right direction. In fact, I think the best designed games are those that explicitly acknowledge that the game is played by people and focus on the design as (to continue stealing a phrase from Paul Czege) social architecture. Recently, more games have focused on how their rules are used, not just what the rules say. I think games like Primetime Adventures, where the scene-framing rules both don’t allow you to not contribute and don’t allow you ignore what people put out there, do what I want. It sets the expectation that people will contribute and that their contributions are to be built on. (Again, no big surprise, but my own current design, A Penny For My Thoughts, has this an explicit feature.) To keep on the PTA bandwagon for a minute, its use of Fan Mail to acknowledge and encourage contributes by others furthers this idea. As Christina has said elsewhere, the great success of much of PTA is in “invisible elements of player participation visible.”

So I think where I’ve come to is that I’m not as interested as I once was in rules that help us determine what happens in the fiction, though they clearly do need to do that. Instead, I’m more interested in how game design can help point us down the road to forming a collaborative, supportive social dynamic. And that’s a weird realization for me, but I think a useful one.

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A Penny For My Thoughts: Writing The Game Chef Edition

Thursday, May 8, 2008

When last we left A Penny For My Thoughts, I had just run a successful playtest from my original notes. Now was the time, then, get some these ideas down on paper. The Game Chef competition was roughly two weeks long that year, so I didn’t have too long to write it. That’s when two important ideas come together.

Remember that conversation I had with Josh and John at OrcCon? The thing that stuck with me was something John said about the nature of rules in RPGs. Almost all of them have what I call “systemic” rules; that is, they provide systems to deal with things that come up in play. These rules are concerned with hypotheticals: if you want your character to stab the orc, use these rules; if you want to swim to the other side of the lake, use these other rules. An alternative approach, John pointed out, is “procedural” rules. These are rules that tell you what do to. Board games work this way: On your turn, play a card, then draw card. There’s no hypotheticals here, because you’re always performing a step of the rules. You can draw a flowchart that completely encapsulates the possible states of play.

This latter approach, I realized, was a great way to present the rules for Penny, because they already inclined toward that structure. It also made it easier to implement the second ideas I had: presenting all of the rules text as in-game artifact. Here the, the big influence was a playtest of Ben Lehman’s The Drifter’s Escape that I’d been a part of. In it, players took on the role of drifters caught between the Devil and the Man. Conflicts were resolved by having the Devil and the Man play poker, and the drifter could buy a hand from either of them. The comment that my friend Roy made that stuck with me was that he liked how the decision he had to make as a player felt exactly like the decision his character had to make. That seemed really powerful to me, and I wanted to capture that idea in Penny. So, with the concept of procedural rules clearly in my mind, I wrote a rules text that didn’t admit that it was anything other than instructions for an experimental therapy, and I submitted it for judging.

To be continued…

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RPGs, Interpretation, and the Groupmind

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

My frequent partner-in-crime Ryan Macklin has posted an essay on his LiveJournal entitled “GM as an Oracle for the Groupmind.” Considering it spun out of a IM conversation we had, I find it intriguing and have a few things to say about. Come join the discussion over there!

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Game Idea: My Life with D.Ops

Monday, May 5, 2008

This game idea is a bit of Holy Grail for me. I’m a fan of the old TV series The Sandbaggers and Greg Rucka’s novel (graphic and otherwise) series Queen & Country, and I’ve always wanted to do a game based on those. I just finished reading the latest of the Q&C novels, so I’ve been thinking more about them of late.

The action in The Sandbaggers revolves around Neil Burnside, the Director of Operations for SIS (D.Ops, for short). In Q&C, it focuses on Tara Chace, one of the members of the Special Section (also called the Minders), though there’s a good bit of drama around Paul Crocker (the Burnside analogue in the series). In both series, D.Ops deals with political maneuvering within SIS and the Her Majesty’s government, while the Special Section operatives deal with the missions he sends them on (and the psychological damage they suffer as a result). It’s a bit formulaic (I’ve joked about making a “random problem table” along the lines of the Lester Dent scenario generator to generate episodes/issues), but it makes for wrenching drama.

I’ve never been sure what I’d want to run it with. Obviously Spione treads on some of this ground, and you could certainly do it with Primetime Adventures. But in Volume Eight of the series, I came across this quote, from Dr. Callard (the SIS staff psychologist) to Paul Crocker:

“One of the things you look for in a Minder is an inability to accept affection on its own merits. You don’t want them to like themselves for who they are, you want them to feel they must prove themselves to others. The problem here isn’t that Chace was honestly in love with Tom Wallace — and most likely had been for the last several years — it’s that he was in love with her, and Chace not only knew it, but accepted it.”

And there’s the answer. You run it with My Life with Master.

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A Penny For My Thoughts: First Playtest

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

The core idea for Penny came to me during a bus ride, as I talked about earlier. That idea was simple: the game was about amnesiacs who were taking some experimental drug to recovering their memories, and pennies played an important, totemic role in this process. I knew I wanted to incorporate the basic ideas of “yes, and” and of endowing other players from the improv I’d been doing, and I wanted the game to reward engaging other players. I hit on the idea of using pennies to tie those goals together. There wasn’t much more to it than that. So I did a playtest with my local group of the rules I’d sketched out. I still have the notes on it.

It largely works, but some details need to be worked out. In general, the game is a bit long and doesn’t build gradually enough. Also, while the setup works as a great justification for the rules, the rules don’t reinforce the themes strongly enough. It seems to be a perfectly fine improv game, but not enough of a game about amnesiacs. We got too much information too earlier, and not enough sense of creepiness.

The basic structures (memory seeds, framing questions, decision points, giving pennies, and the coins as pacing devices) all seem to be doing what I want. There’s no need for radical change there.

With that in mind, I started writing the first Game Chef draft. I had this crazy of doing the whole thing “in character.” But that’s another post, I think.

To be continued…

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Game Idea: Generational Group-Focused Campaign

Thursday, April 3, 2008

This one came to me, like of my ideas do, while I was out walking around my neighborhood listening to music.

One of my favorite recent campaigns was a Burning Wheel game set in fifth century Britain. The action was centered on a tight-knit family group on the Isle of Wight who were big political and military movers and shakers. My favorite part of the game was the way we structured it: each arc of the campaign (which each lasted about fifteen sessions) played out across a six-month period from spring to fall and was separated from the adjacent arcs by a four or five year jump. In between each of these arcs, the players were able to rejigger their characters. (In the case of the second jump, they got recreate them entirely, as we switched from using The Riddle of Steel to Burning Wheel.)

What I liked most about this was that we got see real character growth and closure. Take Aeron, for example. At the beginning of the game, he was a brash young soldier eager to prove his worth in battle. Over the course of that first arc, that’s exactly what he did, winning the acknowledgment of his father and the respect of his tribe. He also discovered that there was more to life than being a skilled warrior, so when we advanced the timeline by four years and he went from being sixteen to being twenty, the player controlling him decided to refocus the character on learning how to be a leader. In later arcs, we saw the shine go off his idealism, and we saw his loyalty to his family put to the test. By the time we were done, he’d gone from a scrappy kid to a respected elder.

In my mind, the time jumps were critical to this organic character growth. It allowed us to rationalize how the characters had changed and to adjust the external situation to focus on the new issues we wanted to explore, while at the same time giving us a great sense of continuity. It worked out far better than I could have expected. It was also important that the group the characters were all a part of stayed together, as its goals provided the through-line for the entire game. (Recently, a group I’m playing with finished up the first arc of a game where I was tempted to suggest doing the same thing with, but we ended making far more drastic changes to the game instead.)

The game I was thinking about the other day is one where this sort of play was systematized. There are three games that I know of that do something close to this, but none is quite what I want. Hero’s Banner is too focused on the “single important decision that determines the rest of your life,” which counter to what I want. Pendragon can (and probably should) be played out over generations, but I’m specifically interested in not playing every single year. I think In A Wicked Age might be the closest (I haven’t played it yet), but I’m interested in doing more than one chapter before jumping, and I want continuity of characters.

So there you go. I know what it is that I want, I’m not sure if there’s anything that does it, and I’m not sure how I’d go about doing it. But there it is.

(cross-posted to this thread at Story Games)

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A Penny For My Thoughts: A Pre-History

Thursday, April 3, 2008

I’ve been working on Penny for a little more than year. I know for a fact that I wrote the first notes on it in the back of bus on the way to Mammoth Lakes, California, on 16 March 2007. That weekend was my wife’s company’s annual ski trip, and it was also the first day of Game Chef, which I was participating in for the first time. I remember standing in a windswept parking lot in Mojave getting the ingredient list over the phone from my friend Josh while the bus drivers took their mandatory break from driving.

It actually goes back a little further than that. In the summer of 2006, I got the idea for an action-oriented roleplaying game based on some of the old-time radio dramas I’d be listening to on the Internet, serials like The Shadow and Doc Savage. I was also heavily into podcasting at this point, and I was interested in the sort of things people were doing with recording and posting play sessions. Wouldn’t it be cool, I thought to myself, to design a game that you could record and end up with a radio play? This thought stuck in my head, and I shared the idea with some folks at GenCon 2006. They were noticeable excited, so I told myself that I’d work on it and have it done for GenCon 2007. The name I gave to the project was Fabulous Days of Yesteryear.

The rest of 2006 proved to be less than productive for me, as I gave notice at my old job roughly a month after GenCon. The process of finding a new one and settling in took up most of my time and almost all my mental energy for the rest of the year. I had, however, read a book on improv theatre by Keith Johnstone called Impro, and the ideas in it were rattling around my head most of that fall and winter. In January, hoping to figure out more about this stuff, I started taking classes at the Ventura Improv Company.

Fast-forward to February of 2007. I’m sitting in a room at OrcCon in Los Angeles, with Josh Roby and John Wick. They’ve just finished playtesting Josh’s Sons of Liberty, and I’m tossing out ideas for this radio play game. I’ve got some really loose ideas in my head, but it’s clear that I can’t tie them all together. I’ve got traditional ideas about conflict resolution colliding with improv techniques and running headlong into genre concepts in a way that just doesn’t work. John and Josh do their best to tease the good ideas out of my head, and while it turns out to be a really valuable conversation, I don’t realize it until later.

And that brings me back to that bus ride to Mammoth. I’d decided to do Game Chef as a way to jumpstart my creativity so that I could get back to working on Fabulous Days of Yesteryear. But as I’m scribbling in my notebook, staring at the choice of ingredients (and circling Memory, Currency, and Drug), I start to realize that some of the ideas that I had and that didn’t fit at all into that game might fit into the one that’s forming in my head, a game I decide to call A Penny For My Thoughts.

To be continued…

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Introducing Gameslinger Enterprises

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Welcome to the Gameslinger Enterprises blog. I’ve had this domain registered for more than a year now, but as I started to ramp up production efforts on A Penny For My Thoughts, I realized it was finally time for Gameslinger Enterprises to make its presence known.

What do I plan to do here? Two things. First, I’ll be talking about my game publishing efforts, starting with Penny. Over the next few months I’ll be posting a series of articles about the genesis of the design, where I’m at now and how I got there, and, as we move forward, how it’s progressing. I hope they’ll spark some interest in a game that I’m really excited to publish.

Second, I’ll be using this as a place to post my game design thoughts, primarily about roleplaying games, but board games certainly aren’t out of the question. This is something I haven’t talked about much online. For the last two years or so I’ve been writing down design ideas as they occur to me, but I haven’t been sharing them. A month or so ago I had an idea for a hack for Spirit of the Century, and instead of filing it away, I posted it to Story Games. I was amazed and thrilled by the discussion it generated, so I decided that I should do more of that. If the last two years of writing and designing have taught me anything, it’s that the old adage about ideas is true: they’re cheap, so don’t worry about people stealing them. It’s only when the hard work and polish are put behind them that they’re really worth something.

There’s always the chance that this site will get put to another, unanticipated use, but I guess we’ll deal with that when it happens. Sound good? Great. Let’s get started.

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First Post!

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Thanks to the generosity of Josh Roby, the Gameslinger Enterprises website lives! Actual content to follow. I promise.

–Paul

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