Tag: WoD

Powers of Four: Characters

Published by Graham on October 25, 2018

At the beginning of this series we identified the following four types of characters rather than types of players in a tabletop RPG:

A fantasy version of the player themself as a whole person
Pretending to be something the player wishes they could be, but aren’t
Playing a part of the player’s personality, but magnified to become a defining trait rather than a smaller facet
Taking a theme and running with it as a part of a carefully crafted narrative

When inviting people to play a roleplaying game you should know if any of these aren’t going to work. Where the consequence of failure is character death, and this happens frequently, players who play themselves may be a bit too invested in their characters to enjoy it when they make one bad roll and that’s it. This is also the case when the player wishes to be integrated into some kind of grand plot arc. D&D is, so far, the best game I have played for types 1 and 4 above. The rules make it relatively easy to make characters into heroes.

The problem I find with this is that the path of least resistance for the DM is to present weak challenges and keep the XP spigot wide open, allowing the player characters to take a walk up the gentle slope to godhood. It gets tedious and is ultimately uninteresting to me when there is a shower of rewards without significant risk. It is, therefore, a challenge for me to run an interesting game for people who love to play these characters because introducing the risk of death or irrevocable failure is at odds with huge investment in a single character. It’s a challenge worth taking, I think, because wanting to play those characters is a valid desire for those players and I like diversity at the table. It just can’t be taken too far; if someone wants a pure power fantasy I won’t recommend joining any of my tabletop adventures or campaigns. At the same time, I will refrain from the rocks fall, everybody dies sort of excess sadism unless I warn characters beforehand that I am running something in the spirit of Tomb of Horrors.

*That moment when you find out that this fictional world doesn’t revolve around your own character.*

Type 3 represents the characters I typically play, which lends itself to some investment in the continued life and success of the same character. At the same time, it means that I should be able to part with a character (or see them completely fail) if my player-ego doesn’t run too high. This, and the wish-fulfillment type 2, can work in D&D but are also a little more suited to World of Darkness where characters are not 100% disposable, but are usually far from gods-in-the-making even with a few extraordinary abilities. Trouble arises when the desire to be the most powerful or the sleaziest man alive overrides the spirit of cooperation required for any group of players to function. I find that these are the easiest types of characters to write for as a DM as long as the players are willing to be flexible and show restraint in their expectations. I only find it challenging when I am the player who really needs to be doing more of those things.

Type 2 is, I think, the only thing that really works in an OSR meat grinder that the “evil DM” wishes to run. You simply can’t go into a game where character death happens at the snap of the fingers with a carefully crafted backstory and emotional investment. I don’t mind playing these, but definitely need to know ahead of time that I am NOT to play a character that I truly care about. I’m probably not going to run a whole lot of this with my regular group, but will for one-off events like Extra Life.

What I am trying to say here is that there is no right or wrong character type for a person to want to play, but that we have had some friction when we try and cram characters of type 1 and 4 into games that just don’t support that kind of investment. Considering character types is just another way to “know your audience” when thinking about starting up a game.

Powers of Four: Agency

Published by Graham on October 19, 2018

Agency is the character’s capacity to act, rather than simply have events unfold around them. The thing that makes the tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) so neat is spreading out the agency among several players rather than having one person, an author, decide what every single character does or does not do. It is not evenly distributed in most TTRPGs; the DM/GM/Storyteller being responsible for most of the characters that exist in the fiction. It’s not appropriately called a “game” if the person running the show narrates the entire thing. Players, in order to be players, must be offered the opportunity to act. The kind of options for action that are available, and the consequences of those actions, remain the purview of the person running the game.

*Your agency is your capacity to act. Threatening the Froggit is not necessarily an effective course of action, but you can try it without getting blocked by Undertale’s game mechanics.*

One way to offer players a chance to act is to present choices or dilemmas. Whether between two good options, two bad options, or one clearly good and clearly bad there is a direct choice: kill the werewolves and in doing so break your oath to the moon goddess, or let them sack the nearby village and deal with the displaced families afterwards. The DM who writes/runs these kinds of adventures probably reads up on ethical dilemmas and imagines how to weave it into a tabletop adventure for fun. Having dice and characters make things more fun than imaginary trolleys, after all. This is generally the style I like to play: I don’t get everything I want, but my choices and the choices of those around me matter in an important way.

Another way to do this is to offer deliberately blind choices. For horror games this usually means a choice between bad or worse, with no indications and/or possibly false indications to the players which is which. There really is no “winning” here, no solution to the problem or way to overcome the insurmountable. The choices the characters make are more about showing who the character is rather than what they can do to affect their situation. Although the game is interactive, the characters have a low degree of agency in the plot. If it sounds like I’m writing about this in a negative tone, it’s because this is a type of game that I find it hard to get into. It’s fine to run this game if the players know what they’re getting into, but possibly campaign-ruining if you have been running lots of heroes faced with ethical dilemmas type stuff and then want to show everyone that your new villain is really badass. It’s a fine way to run a game; I know what I am getting into when I play a game with “Cthulhu” in the name. I just don’t know a lot of people who can really get into that sort of thing and I’m a “maybe” at best.

The third is like a puzzle, sometimes literally and sometimes just functioning that way. There is one way to progress. The players need to solve for x. The only way to really lose is to give up, and the way to win is to find the answer (which could be a combination that opens a door or something less concrete like the identity of the person who committed a crime). This is something I can get into when it’s a video game, less so when it is a tabletop RPG, even less when I have created a character and a backstory. It just doesn’t mix well for me. If my agency is to be limited to things that solve the puzzle and things that don’t then I would much prefer to come in with a pre-determined character well-suited for the game to be played. I loved Portal and other such games, but I need my D&D or my WoD to be different than this.

Toriel doesn’t quite grasp the concept of agency here. Yes, the human acts when they flip the indicated switch, but any apparent alternate actions are blocked in favour of the one intended for the player.

The fourth way is where choices are basically made for you, which is where the word “railroading” has been a popular but possibly misleading way to describe what is happening. I’ve come to the belief that preventing a campaign from derailing is actually a good thing for a GM to do if the general consensus is that the game is intended to be consistent rather than absurd. That doesn’t necessarily mean forcing the players into a single course of action and making them feel more like their characters are being dragged along for the ride. This isn’t how any tabletop campaigns I have played in have been intended to run; it is what happens when a DM wants things to go a certain way so badly that they get a bit ham-fisted about it. I’ve done it as DM. It’s not a good way to go; the complete and total lack of agency almost never makes for a good game. If your group is doing something where the person running the event is more of an author than a game runner and encourages what amounts to audience participation, I guess this can be okay, but it’s generally the thing you want to avoid. And to be clear, prodding the players to leave the bus depot and explore the town after three sessions might qualify as “railroading” in the eyes of some, but that’s not at all what I am talking about here.

There may be more ways that agency in the form of choices for action may be offered in the TTRPG, but these are the four that I came up with in my conversation with the storyteller from my most recent WoD campaign that describe almost all of the TTRPGS we have played so far.

gf in local

Published by Graham on June 19, 2018

(My apologies to any email subscribers who received a draft version of this post earlier this week when I forgot to finish it before it automatically posted.)

Sometimes, when playing what I call large and expansive recreational games, I wonder how much potential they actually have to live up to my expectations. A few days ago, I was out ratting (that’s EVE-speak for using an imaginary spaceship to shoot hordes of NPC pirates, equivalent to “farming mobs” in other games). An enemy player appeared in local (a chat window with a list of all pilots in system). I warped my ship to my team’s space station, which is a common move when you see an intruder in your space. Ratting and hunting ratters is a game of cat and mouse: they win by catching me, I win by scurrying away too quickly. I make it back to the station and tether, which essentially means I am invulnerable. He starts talking in local. “Fight me,” he says. I tell him that I will not fight him in my ratting vessel (which are almost always ill-suited for combat with other players) or my salvage vessel (unarmed) so I go fetch something more suitable from the next system over. Now flying a nimble assault frigate, I warped to the same station. I tethered up, approached the enemy cruiser, and then broke tether by opening fire. We fight for a while, then a friend in my alliance stumbles across the fight and opens fire as well. I would have told him to back off if not for the fact that I saw in local that there was another alliance mate of the guy I was fighting somewhere close to us. There was to be no pretence of space-bushido here. So I won, not because I am am especially talented pilot, but through (ab)use of the tethering mechanic and unfair odds that I didn’t bother to make fair out of paranoia that doing so is taking bait for a larger trap. That, my friends, is EVE at its most basic essentials. We both write “gf” in local, which stands for good fight. Some people might find this strange, but not people who play this game.

The next day I attended the weekly session of World of Darkness I play with my friends. We went totally off script, but ended up bringing a split party together onto the same narrative thread, no rails in sight. This is the tabletop gaming that I like to think is so good and interesting, rather than it being a tangle of out-of-character debates about arcane rules that makes me wonder why I think so highly of the game. There have been times, in many different campaigns including some that I have run, that I feel like the esteem I hold for the tabletop RPG is misplaced. Not last week.

*World of Darkness is often hard to pace when you have a plot arc in mind but players are more interested in negotiating their dice pool for each and every action (me, guilty of this myself? nahhh)*

So what’s the point? Some games can suck up a lot of time and not produce measurable returns. I don’t think, though, that this means we should eliminate recreational games from a healthy life balance that includes other activities just because there is no instant gratification. While it may be true that Yahtzee (or, as my wife’s off-brand set calls it, 5-dice Game) always produces a winner, it’s never going to be satisfying in the same way as having a great night at the WoD table or a fantastic example of the “gudfight” that capsuleers spend so much time seeking. Not even when I have the disgusting luck of multiple Yathzee rolls (five of a kind) in a single game. It’s there… and then it’s gone. It’s a game, but not a story. I happen to think that making new stories is just as good a way to spend a midsummer night as sitting on the patio enjoying some cold ones, or cycling, or whatever. That’s what I need to remind myself the next time I feel like I spend too much time listening to other people discuss their dice pools or spinning my ships in citadels and not enough time working or writing or designing or…. any of those other things I can maybe stand to do a little more of, but should not pretend like I could be doing it all non-stop.

Site update: in case the unscheduled break wasn’t a clear enough sign, I’m having a bit of a hard time keeping up right now. I have a few more posts in progress, then I am going on a semi-vacation from active blogging for a month. A generous donor has decided to supercharge Alastair’s Steam-Powered Hope initiative which means Almost Infinite will be running 100% Full Steam Ahead, every week in August. I will still be monitoring things behind the scenes and moderating comments, and then be back in September with what I hope will be more of the content I want to be creating rather than falling into the habit of steam-of-consciousness posts about whatever I happen to be playing, just to get something published for the week. There will be more applied game theory and philosophy posts after the break. Thanks for reading.

The Quiet Con

Published by Graham on May 7, 2018

This weekend (Friday evening May 4, 2018 to Saturday night on May 5) was the first spring iteration of Edmonton’s IntrigueCon. I had a great time playing some 5e D&D (and running it for the first time) and playing a flavour of World of Darkness that I hadn’t tried before. As much fun as those sessions were, I have to say that the most interesting game to talk about wouldn’t be any of those. It would be the one that involved no dice rolling and drawing a map on the paper table covers.

The Quiet Year is a game that uses nothing but pencils, paper, a few six-sided dice, and a standard deck of playing cards in addition to the rule booklet. There were no grand maps of the city of Waterdeep at this table nor any carefully arranged dungeon maps. Although there are a few rules to pull the game along to its conclusion in an orderly fashion, the rules have very little impact on the success or failure of the fictional civilisation being rebuilt.

The first thing we did was set the scene by drawing a coastline, a river, and some mountains to frame the area.

This is how it works: a society has suffered a catastrophic conflict with “the Jackals” and have four seasons to rebuild until the “Frost Shepherds” arrive to mark the end of the game. What the Jackals are (literal canines, gang members, aliens) is not specified, nor is the precise cause of the fall, nor what the Frost Shepherds are. This means that this game can be played out as a science fiction adventure on an alien world, as a medieval high fantasy, or anything else a person might come up with. In our case, we went with a fairly plain post-apocalypse theme.

Extremely well-drawn golden idol — *The discovery of this expertly-drawn golden idol buried in the clay near the river bank was a result of drawing a card directing the player to discover an omen of some kind.*

On each turn, the players draw a card and play out the corresponding events from the booklet. This may direct players to choose what shortages or abundances of resources there are, or do something specific with the map. There is often an OR choice on these events and there is nothing regulating how many times the players can choose the good (or at least less-bad) event over the worse one. After playing the card, the player may make their own choice of starting a discussion, adding something to the map, or beginning a project of their choice. Again, there is nothing stopping the players from making oh-so-convenient resources readily available, that fill the gaps in resources, and that are close to an idea plot of land to build a village on. Players may also start a crisis for the community with forest fires and poisoned rivers. It is entirely up to the players at the table whether this is a legend of prosperous pioneers or a tragic tale of woe and misery in the twilight of human civilization.

*Dice are used as counters for how many turns it will be until the project is complete.*

As the game progresses, players add projects to the map and use the dice as counters: projects may take up to six weeks (each turn is one week), and this timeline is set entirely at the discretion of the player placing it on the map. The only limiting factor is that there are a set number of project dice to be deployed at any given time, so players are occasionally compelled to choose between starting a community discussion or adding a new feature to the map instead if there are too many projects active.

*This is what we had created when the game ended. The clear conclusion is that none of us are taking the plunge into making a living as a freelance illustrator.*

The whole experience was a lot different that the tabletop games with wargame ancestors. This was as much of a collaborative storytelling experience it could be while still being a game rather than a writers’ circle. Looking back on how much stress I was experiencing in trying to get my dungeon set up and getting players set up with suitable characters for D&D, I really see the value in a game like this where there is no preparation required and no storyteller/GM/DM to have expectations of. In being so minimal in its restrictions on players it really allows something interesting to develop at the game table. As excited as I am to run another 5e scenario at IntigueCon’s main event in October, this is the game I am going to remember for being something different.

Everybody Wants To Build The World

Published by Graham on September 2, 2017

I met up with most of my regular tabletop group last night. It’s been a little while since we’ve played. We didn’t play our main game last night because it wasn’t until after dinner and social time that we realized that all the notebooks and character sheets were at someone else’s house. So we pulled out the playing cards and had a different sort of games night before getting on to discussing the current World of Darkness campaign as well as the next one coming up. It was exciting to talk about the new campaign, the new characters, the returning characters, the setting. Right up until the storyteller said something that troubled me. “I guess I am going to have to hurry up and end this campaign if you are so excited to start this next one.”

*Every DM/Storyteller/GM shares the desire to set the scene according to their creative desires…*

The statement troubled me because I have been in that exact same position. I know what it’s like and I want to avoid making people who are running the current campaign feel like the excitement is because what they’re doing is not good enough. At the same time, the friend who wants to start the next campaign is also a very good DM/Storyteller and I legitimately want to support that endeavour. I want for my friends the same thing I want for myself: to be recognized as a talented world-building creator of fun and engaging content for interactive gameplay. That’s the game-atop-the-game I want to play, where the winning condition for me is that people get excited for when it’s my turn and tell stories of their adventures long after they have been played out. What I want to avoid is making that strictly competitive; I would like for my friends to win just as much as I do.

So, my advice: be explicit in showing your appreciation for the person running the game you’re playing. Make an effort to avoid making them feel like they’re being pushed out of the storyteller’s chair. Then, remember how hard it was to achieve that balance when it’s your turn to run the campaign and you’ve got a party excited for the next one. Enjoy the fantasy world you’ve created while the players are still invested in it but be prepared to yield. Nothing ever lasts forever.

The High Cost of A Free Action

Published by Graham on May 13, 2017

A few weeks ago I was explaining the concept of The McLauglin Group to someone who was not familiar. At its best, it was a roundtable discussion where several points of view were heard. At its worst, it was five pundits incoherently shouting over each other on television. It has always reminded me of how conversations about current events went in my family growing up, but now that I think about it, the spectacle of five well-known characters talking in five different directions over top of each other all at once reminds me of what happens when dialog scenes in D&D or WoD break down. Of course, in some tabletop games such as the session of Great Ork Gods that I played last night, dialog can look a little more like this than a raucous debate. But as a DM I have often struggled with the fact that most groups don’t get together and appoint a captain of the party with whom a prospective employer/quest-giver can easily converse with. Five different voices, five different agendas, five different questions.

The problem, I think, is that “talking is a free action” has become a slogan which is used to wring out more opportunities for a player (through their character) to do something impressive, outside of the action economy. In “combat” type situations, there are usually very specific rules on what a character can do as an action, and how many of those they can take before it is the next player’s turn. The rules of D&D make it clear that you don’t have to wait an entire round before shouting “HEY!” at one of your party members. I don’t think that it was ever intended to support off-turn monologues, but that’s sometimes what it mutates into at the expense of the flow of the game. It’s easy as a DM to make actions in a puzzle-solving or trap-defusing situation flow in an “initiative” order complete with turns and action economy even if it’s not exactly a fight. I find it difficult to rein in some of these things without seeming like I am coming down too hard on someone’s attempt at role-playing. I am usually thrilled when my players try to do things in-character rather than a metagame-rich conversation with me out of character. But right now? Really?

*This does not seem like the right solution to the problem.*

As far as solutions, I don’t think a chess clock or an egg timer or a conch for each player’s speaking turn would be most effective. Dialog in dramatic situations flows more freely than it does in a stilted structured debate format. What I am going to try to do is have more courage and more faith in my player groups: if I, as the NPC they are dealing with, demand to have a single point-person on a regular basis I am going to try trusting the party to appoint one without it becoming a problem. I fear that having a party leader would legitimize the behaviour of steamrolling over anyone who isn’t the loudest and most assertive player, but maybe that’s something I can trust the group to work out themselves. I am going to try and remind myself that it is legitimate for an NPC to pound the table (and maybe drive a dagger into it if it’s a fantasy setting) and demand that the in-fighting stop or tell everyone (in-character) to shut up and take turns speaking. And as for those timing devices, I might pull one of those out if there are other events going on (such as a bomb in the room or guards closing in) and subject the entire party to it at once: it’s all well and fine to debate how to disarm the ship’s self-destruct sequence, but they only have five real minutes to make it happen. Hopefully these two strategies will be effective when conversations derail the game, and I will certainly be on the lookout for more.

Today, before I say bye-bye, I am proud to announce a new series of posts on Almost Infinite; Full Steam Ahead will be written by my good friend Alastair who has decided to share the story of his adventures in exploring the backlog of his Steam collection. Like my writing about video games, he will be reviewing the experience of the gameplay rather comparing each game to its peers. I look forward to having more than one author publishing on this site.

Priests and Pantheons

Published by Graham on May 6, 2017

In Myth and Place I wrote about the use of myth to give a sense of where a game takes place. For escapist role-playing games it is important that the setting is made distinct from mundane places. Whether it is a campy romp through space, a heroic tale of sword and sorcery, or a Victorian horror thriller, myth is required to separate the in-game setting from the real-life context that it exists within. Often, but not necessarily, this is done through religious myth in particular.

Every Dungeons and Dragons game I have played in relies heavily on its pantheon. Whether it is an original concept created by the DM or the deities of Greyhawk detailed in the official resource books, the gods always seem to matter in D&D. This isn’t as much the case with other systems, such as most World of Darkness variants (except Scion where everyone is a demigod). But whenever religious myth matters at all in one of these fictional game settings, I find that it tends to serve very similar purposes to the mythology of real religions but with much different weightings and outcomes. And if the DM isn’t making religious myth enough of a big deal, sometimes the players will start to fill in the gaps.

In our real-life religions we tend to rely on the pedagogical and sociological functions of myth more heavily than the mystical and cosmological. In plain terms, most people don’t reach for their Bible or their Quran first when trying to explain the physical properties of matter. Many of us do, however, go straight to the stories within those books to define the right way to live, what is right and what is wrong, and what kind of values ought to be enshrined in the rules by which our societies operate. This is not to say that all of us have entirely abandoned the cosmological and mystical functions of our respective religious mythologies, but that we have a tendency to spend more time seeking answers about the human experience than about the concrete physical realities of the world.

*Whether by design or emergent from play of the game, fictional gods can’t help but make themselves known.*

In the realms of fantasy fiction, though, we lean much more heavily on religious myth to explain the exotic cosmology and the mystical aspect to make the setting feel different than the world we actually live in. We don’t seek answers to big life questions from our fantasy pantheons. We seek theatrical intervention, plot advancement, and a coherent explanation of the physical world the characters inhabit. Moral and ethical frameworks matter in interactive role playing games, but without a sustained focus in the roleplaying those big questions can easily take a back seat to looking into the settings religious mythology for how to do about smiting ghouls and skeletons with divine light or effectively leveraging the force or whatever it is the player characters are trying to accomplish at the time. Campbell’s four functions are still there, but the emphasis is different.

An interesting thing happened in the World of Darkness campaign I am a player in. The Asylum setting lends itself to stories with a Gothic fiction feel rather than those which prominently feature interventionist gods. Initially, the dominant religion in the setting was just there to make life feel complete; the first mention of it being when my character decided to make seasonally appropriate holiday decorations for her kids as something to do while waiting for other events to play out. Over the course of the campaign, religion has become a central focus and the mystical function has taken on a much bigger role than the sociological. This was not something that we were shepherded into. On the contrary, one of our players almost single-handedly dragged the religious myth of the settings from the margins into the spotlight. The character, in her self-appointed role of priestess in a tabletop system where spellcasting clerics aren’t actually a thing, picked up on religious myth and ran with it so far that it has become part of the canon. Now our characters look to their religious mythology for answers to physical phenomena. This is a fine example emergent gameplay at the RPG table, and I love it. And so, while a highly detailed and original pantheon may not be required for every interstellar mission or dungeon delve, this is not something we can afford to ignore in an open-ended campaign. God only knows what can happen when players engage with the religious mythologies of fictional universes.

Puzzles and Players

Published by Graham on March 18, 2017

The Fellowship of the Ruby Amulet (oh, so original, guys!) enters the temple ruins and finds a pile of rune stones in the middle of the room, with a others occupying zones indicated on the floor around the edge of the room. These runestones are actually tactile elements, just like the player tokens and the gridmap. The DM obviously spent at least fifteen minutes making those.

“20, total;” says the player behind the Dwarven cleric, making it clear that he doesn’t mean to say that he rolled a critical success (20 on a 20-sided die) but 20 with all bonuses included.

“Not quite what I had in mind,” says the slightly disappointed DM who had hoped that the players would try and figure out the clever puzzle amongst themselves through in-character dialogue rather than reaching straight for the dice.

“Oh, great. Another one of these,” complains the player behind the wizard. He is frustrated because he would rather be lobbing fireballs than sorting runes and he is really not looking forward to another session that boils down to guess what number the DM is thinking of?

*Why does the only door to the alchemist’s lab have to be locked with a rune puzzle?*

This is why some of us who run Dungeons and Dragons games (or similar tabletop games such as World of Darkness, etc.) are nervous about putting puzzles into our campaigns. We want to seem clever and give the players a problem that can’t be too easily solved (or too easily rendered impossible to solve) by a single roll of the dice. Yet we don’t want to be seen as wasting time, distracting from the real game at hand, or being too cryptic. Here are some suggestions for Dungeon Masters who wish to strike a good balance:

Read your group. To make this easy, you can ask them directly if they like puzzles or hack-and-slash. Surprise them with the puzzle itself, not the existence of puzzles. You can’t please everyone all the time, but some groups just aren’t puzzle-solving groups. And that’s okay. If your friends want hack and slash and you don’t, then don’t invite them. It’s okay to not invite all of your friends to all of your things (see also: Geek Social Fallacy #5).
Steal. Borrow. Make homage to. Whatever you want to call it, there is nothing new under the sun. If you take the time to read up on previously published puzzles, whether in pure logic puzzle form or already adapted for tabletop RPG, then you know that it’s solvable by someone other than your own clever self. It is not hard to adapt a good published module to fit any setting, but one of the things I want to do in the next few months is read though Wikipedia’s lists of logic puzzles and games in game theory to see if I can come up with some innovative if not completely original ideas.
Use puzzles as deliberate diversions or for earning extra rewards. If players can abandon the puzzle and carry on with their lives, they may just do that instead of spending hours getting frustrated over being unable to unlock the only exit. Maybe they will decide to go without those extra spell scrolls or self-sealing stembolts or whatever in-game items would be helpful in your setting. If you are feeling especially maniacal, pack a container with useful items and if the players skip it then give the items to the enemies later to make things harder.
Build stages of difficulty into the puzzle that can have dice rolls for giving hints rather than solving everything at once. The inherent difficulty for the DM here is that it means taking extra time to build it into the game, and I have sure had those sessions where I’ve figured out the plot and the tactical encounter mere minutes before the players arrive. I think it is worth it, though, especially when you have someone roleplaying a very intelligent character who wants to feel really smart even if they are actually struggling to get it. I’ve been that guy a few times.
Throw in immediate consequences to not solving the puzzle in a timely manner. Putting a timer on a puzzle is useful because it pushes the players to try solutions rather than overthinking it, allows action-oriented players to have a chance to shine. The guards/kobolds/etc. that have been chasing you catch up if the lock isn’t opened in time. The container explodes after a set number of failed attempts. This also encourages the DM/designer to keep the puzzle relatively simple rather than going overboard on trying to be clever.

I don’t think puzzles are necessary or always desirable in a tabletop RPG, but a good one can result in a better story than “I solved the thing because I rolled a really high number on this die.” I will be trying to follow my own advice over the next few months as I finally get around to taking some of those ephemeral campaign ideas and putting it into a coherent set of DM’s notes. If you have anything to add, please leave a comment somewhere (here, Facebook, Twitter, wherever you post the most).

Characters and Kayfabe

Published by Graham on February 11, 2017

Professional wresting isn’t something I normally think of as being a thing I enjoy. I understand it for what it is, and I feel like I gave it a fair chance in my younger years. I watched a little bit of it, and got to go see it live with a friend (who loved the whole spectacle) when the WWF came to my home town on a tour. I even made one of those little signs to get into the fan rivalry. My sign proclaimed Kurt Angle to be “our Olympic zero” riffing on his gimmick of Olympic hero. It was fun, but even at that peak I never fell under the spell of wrestling fandom in the way I could be drawn into science fiction and fantasy. If I was going to do pretend violence, I wanted to do it with fireball spells rather than folding chairs.

So, when I was offered the chance to play World Wide Wrestling, a tabletop RPG based in the world of wrestling kayfabe rather than one of magic or spaceships I wasn’t sure how much I could enjoy this if it has been over fifteen years since I last felt compelled to engage with this kind of show in any way. But at the table with my group that usually plays World of Darkness or D&D, we started roleplaying as professional wrestlers. It turned out to be loads of fun.

This kind of scene does not occur in my usual tabletop games (source)

One thing I would recommend for anyone who isn’t already a wresting fan who wants to play World Wide Wrestling is to have a cheat sheet of professional wrestling moves handy so that you can narrate your character’s actions in the language of professional wrestling. Like the theatrical performance of professional wrestling, WWW is heavy on the narrative side. Reading your character sheet and the rule book give you a lot more information about who your character is than about the specific techniques he or she can employ. It’s up to you to know how to describe the thing you want to do, and it’s helpful to have an extra reference if “seated senton” is not part of your usual jargon. There are a couple pages of this in the WWWRPG Final Play Aids document, but I found that having Wikipedia’s list of wrestling attacks to be more helpful.

What I found is that while the real-life performance of this art is theatrical, the tabletop game plays out surprisingly dramatic. Yes, as it is in the real thing, management plans out who is going to win each match before it begins. However, how we arrive at that conclusion develops spontaneously based on dice rolls, and the narrative arc that connects the matches changes in unpredictable ways based on character choices. It’s up to Creative (that’s the role equivalent to DM or GM) to line up the matches and decide the outcome, but to weave the matches together into a coherent show is an interactive process that includes the players. The end result cannot have been predicted by Creative before the players arrived. It’s not unlike the process of sketching out a plot for a fantasy RPG and then having it warped and twisted by the schemes and actions of the players.

In many ways, this is a gaming experience that is not fundamentally different than what I consider to be more typical tabletop roleplaying games. Like the theatrical performance, I don’t think I could get into this one week after week, but every once in a while I think it’s good to try something a little bit different and I have found World Wide Wrestling to be a good way to do that.

The Con, Part 1

Published by Graham on October 22, 2016

I found out about IntrigueCon during the pre-game discussion leading up to that time I tried to pull some Wizard of Oz tomfoolery during a Pathfinder one-shot. In a city where the local anime convention can attract over 9000 fans and the general interest Expo attracting tens of thousands, you would think by making some not-so-wild assumptions that there are a lot of people who play tabletop roleplaying games in Edmonton. And there are. But as one of the players around the table was saying several weeks ago, it can be hard to run a convention based on this particular hobby because it is too much like monogamy: once you find the one table you want to play at, you tend to settle in and stop looking at what the market has to offer. As much as I am inclined to accept that model for my love life, I have come to find that my tabletop gaming life should be different in this way.

I don’t have a problem with my usual D&D group, but for some time now I have been open about my desire to play at other tables. It’s not that I dislike playing with them, it just gets too routine after a while and I get worried about contracting geek social fallacy #5. That is one of the reasons why I decided I needed to go to IntrigueCon, to play at tables with people I never would have met otherwise and to expand my horizons, and that I did.

Caption — Some tabletop RPGs involve pretending to be an elf and running around shooting arrows at orcs. This one involved playing a sentient wool sock on a quest for an artifact known as the “golden needle of parliament.”

The first game I got to try was one called Threadbare. It was obviously still in the development stage, but I could not help but be intrigued by the opportunity to play in a world that is a perfect mix of Toy Story and Wall-E. Each character is assembled from toys or other junk. My character was a sock puppet (a “wool sock” is a very specific archetype right there on the playbooks) aptly named Red. The rules look similar to Apocalype World, which I have not played yet, but much simpler. We relied on only three characteristics (scrounge, strongarm, and smile) rather than five (cool, hard, hot, sharp, weird). Like in Apocalypse World, the statistics are more personality traits than they are measures of physical qualities like strength or dexterity. I think this lends itself to more role play than roll play. though I found out the hard way what happens when you botch too many scrounge rolls in a row. Negative consequences take the form of having to tear a piece off your character which is both neat and distressing at the same time. So there I was, hoping to repair some minor damage, but ended up stripping it down to just the base sock as I thrashed madly in a pile of parts.

The part of Threadbare that struck me as the most profound is that in the science fantasy setting we played in, nothing was inanimate. We tend to think of hot air balloons, jet planes, etc. as things rather than friends or enemies. You really have to rethink your playing strategy when your party contains a sentient fried egg plushie who starts speaking to, and nearly going fisticuffs with, the getaway jet. I think a game like this has a lot of potential for assumption-smashing and that’s what made it fun even as I had to tear another piece off my character. The boundaries are at least as mutable as in a D&D world if not more so, since it’s not every fantasy world where your wagon (let alone your horse) might have some suggestions or objections to how to proceed with your adventure.

I think Threadbare, in its complete state, might be great to play with kids who aren’t quite old enough to introduce to D&D, World of Darkness, etc. as the rules are very easy to understand and the setting can be dark and gritty without the need for explicit violent or sexual content. At the same time, the “stitchpunk” setting is also far from being so obnoxiously saccharine that adults who are seasoned tabletop players will still be able to access it with their role playing brains rather than their caregiver brains.Once it is finished I am sure the potentials will outweigh the pitfalls in the case of Threadbare.

The next morning the second session started where I had signed up to play the Maid RPG. I knew going in, based on my experience of anime fandom culture, that there was a high risk that this would involve some elements that would be off-putting to people who actually view women as people. However, I came to try things that were different from my regular D&D (typically an ensemble cast of heroes in a high fantasy setting) and what could possibly be more different than a game based on being the best maid?

Indeed, some of the rules that came straight out of the book were pretty gross. However, the great thing about the authority of the DM (I got to run part of the session that was set in an actual dungeon, so DM is sometimes more apt in Maid than GM) is that you can exert some authorial power to take the edge off thing a bit. I know if I could do it again I would shy away from the scenario where players can gain favour by “accidentally” kissing an NPC. Or, if I am going to run something where women are seen as playthings for entitled rich men, then I would at least create a setting where boorish ribaldry could be played for laughs. If someone hasn’t created a Trump Tower themed Maid adventure yet, I know what’s going on my list of homebrew scenarios to run.

The best part of the game, though, was that it involved aggressive action without (necessarily) violence. Competition without the need to see someone die. It was a neat little mix because it didn’t dispense with any of the tension inherent in games where there is a little bit of combat simulation, yet completely avoided the concept of “hit points” et. al. In this game you simply have to prevent your stress level from getting too high. It is hardly unique to emphasize the need to do more than hit things with a sword or shooting things with a gun; what I am impressed by is how vicious Maid can get without going there. It’s certainly not a game about talking and friendships either. It is every Maid for herself in a quest to gain favour.

In our session, the random events from the book were mediated by a custom board with figurines as game pieces. In an otherwise very abstract game I thought this was a nice touch. — *In our first session, the random events from the book were represented by a custom board with figurines as game pieces. In an otherwise very abstract game I thought this was a nice touch.*

After that new experience I went to the next session for something a little bit familiar: Dungeons and Dragons. We played the introductory adventure in the new Curse of Strahd adventure book. This was a good old dungeon crawl where I finally got to stress test my halfling fighter that I am playing in another campaign that involves far more investigation and conspiracy than swordplay. However, I am running long in the word count for this post so the whole story will have to wait. To be continued…