GameDevBlog

Monsterhearts on IndieAGoGo

I've played several sessions of Monsterhearts and love it. 

You might be tempted to dismiss it as a Twilight pastiche but you'd be missing out - it's way darker and serious than Twilight - or at least it was whenever I've played it. For me, the TV show it comes closest to is Being Human. But a neat thing about it is depending on the character classes the players pick, you're going to get a different show. If somebody picks the Mortal - sure, it could end up a bit like Twilight or Vampire Diaries. (It could also end up like Let The Right One In.) But if you have Ghost, Werewolf, and Vampire? Being Human. Have a Chosen in there? Buffy. Or, most likely, a weird combination that's something completely new.

You might notice that there's sex in it and maybe you think that's a little creepy, but you'd be missing out. Hey, you don't have to engage with the sex rules if you don't want. Or you can keep it all PG rated: "We go in the other room and do it." No need to go this far (in fact, please don't if I'm playing with you.) And hey - it fits the genre. There's sex in Buffy and True Blood and Vampire Diaries and Being Human.

In the games I've played and run of Monsterhearts, innocents and not-so-innocents were seduced, names were called, hearts were broken, bullies were killed and returned from the dead (with demonic baggage), a ghost took a day trip to the earth's mantle so he could melt an amulet forged by Hephaestos, a church was blown up, demons were slain, policemen were addicted to experimental drugs, and a witch got her visions from a memory house - but her mother was in every room.

This is what Vampire: The Masquearde and all those World of Darkness games should have been.

So preorder it. Because I signed up for the "Joe runs two sessions for me" perk and want to collect.

 

 

 

 

D&D Next risks Grognard Capture or Tyranny of Choice or both

Can't resist throwing out my 2 cents.

There's a new edition of D&D coming and they claim they're going to 'listen to the people' this time - which makes for a nice PR story, but how true is it? How true can it be, really? There's already thousands of posts on their forums ranging from 'I want the rules to be a lot simpler, please' to 'I think it needs a character point-buy system like GURPS' and I can't imagine how you'd reconcile that.

A move like this doesn't open the game up to new customers. (D&D4e was actually a pretty good stab at doing that - too bad they lost so many of the old guard in the process.) This, trying to bring the old customers who have migrated away, risks Grognard Capture - Greg Costikyan's term for appealing only to the hardcore. When you listen to your fans they tend to want more stuff and that accretion of stuff makes the game more complex and alienates new players.

Me, even back in the days of AD&D, I was driven to The Fantasy Trip because of AD&D's overcomplication. I've come back to it, sometimes for years, only to be driven away again - the long waits between turns as other players weigh tactical options, as the GM takes their turn moving the monsters, the slow pace of 'story' - you're lucky to get through one or two action sequences in a given night - and why I've been playing the indie games (Apocalypse World, Fiasco, Shock, Geiger Counter and recently Monsterhearts and Psi*Run) I've been in love with lately. If D&D came in a rules-lite edition that had no battle map - so the action is all in our heads - like the Basic D&D of my youth - and required little-to-no preparation, like Lady Blackbird or Dungeon World - maybe they could bring me back to try it again ... but maybe not. I'm kind of done with dungeon crawls, period - the promise of D&D for me was always "make a story as you play" and "a bunch of heroes went into a dungeon and overcame some trouble and got the mcguffin and got out" is never much of a story.

Still, supposing WotC does listen to guys like me, and gives me that pick-up-and-play collaborative-story no-tactical-combat (no-dungeon-crawling?) Rules Lite edition, but they also have modular bolt-on rules sets so the grognards can have their kind of fun...  enter your Tyranny of Choice. "Which one should *I* play? What's the D&D that's right for me?" And the kind of paralysis I feel walking into a Coldstone (WoTC may end up having to do a 'popular flavors' list, like Coldstone has on the wall, where they recommend certain combinations of rules for certain players) is compounded - because I need to find other players willing to play with the same combination of rules as me. Not to mention, what if, after all that, there are still 3.5 and OD&D and Red Box D&D purists? 

And ... those risks are why it's kind of exciting to watch. So I signed up to see what's gonna happen. http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20120109 Hell, if they pull it off, it'll be nice to be able to tell strangers that one of my hobbies is "playing D&D" instead of having to say the more elaborate "I play tabletop role-playing games, y'know, like D&D? Except different?"

Notes on *Impro* by Keith Johnstone

Graham Walmsley's Play Unsafe (which I highly recommend if you play TTRPG's) took a lot of its ideas from this book Impro . I just read it recently and it was pretty mind-blowing.

• Status

First - the idea that all human conversation can be considered a status transaction. Once you start looking at the conversations you have this way you'll be both alarmed and maybe even a bit depressed, but it will also give you new insight and understanding. Just as an example, the thrust-parry-riposte -- "I'm reading War & Peace" "That's my favorite book!" -- has the first speaker trying to elevate their own status by showing how smart they are, reading such a big novel; and the second speaker trumping by saying not only have they already read it, they have a deep appreciation for it. (And it sounded so innocent at first!)

So, yeah, after reading that, I can't make a blog post or write an e-mail without being aware of how I'm trying to elevate my own status, bragging, etc. (Look at this book I just read! Look at this thing I just coded!) 

But also there's insight into other people: if somebody else says something that seems arrogant, it's usually because I've played high-status first and they're just trying to keep up.

Playing high-status can often get you what you want but it also can make you look like a jerk; it can lead to success but nobody likes you. Elevating someone else's status starts to look like a magic weapon, a way to create enough space for you to play high-status without coming off as a jerk.

• Creativity

Notice how almost all the media we consume is retread - or, at best, remix and mash-up? (sixty second shooter's a good example of mash-up.) Nothing unethical about that (though it does get tired) but what if you want to do something truly creative? Johstone has some neat tricks for getting right at your subconscious that can even be done by just one person. I played around with his 'automatic writing' trick (you imagine you're opening a book in a library and reading the text there) and came up with this weird thing. Another trick is to write a list of unassociated words. Combine that with reincorporation and boom - instant story.

What I'm wondering now is how to apply that to video game mechanic ideas ... using this technique, it would be easy to create a truly creative game story, but what about its mechanics ...?  Any ideas?

• Hypnosis and Trance

At the end of the book, he starts talking about 'mask work' and here he starts to sound batshit crazy. Apparently in his workshops when people wear masks they get 'possessed' and truly become different people. But it's actually not that far-fetched: no, I don't think that his students were suddenly taken over by gods, but there are lots of studies that show being cast in certain roles or being 'hypnotized' can make people do some surprising things. 

I'm not sure how to apply this to videogames but some of the best roleplaying experiences I've had were when the game rules encouraged or allowed me to play characters or act in a way that was totally out of my comfort zone. When I used to play 3rd edition D&D I tried to 'stay cool' - rarely talking in character, not getting too excited, usually keeping things to the math of the tactical situation (skip the role-playing, GM, we want to kill something!)

The other end of the spectrum is playing Munchausen - a party game where you play someone else telling stories. Maybe it was the booze (the game, I think, requires or at least strongly recommends that you drink) but the last time I played this I acted in a way that I never would have done if I didn't have an excuse. ("It wasn't me! It was the Munchausen!") Apocalypse World, Fiasco, and Kagematsu have all had similar effects on me - have me playing gay characters and love relationships like it's the most natural thing in the world. In a way, these games have hypnotized me - given me permission to act in ways I normally never would.

Is there a way to apply that to computer games?

3rd edition D&D considered as an illustration of the dangers of free-to-play

Lots of people have blogged about how your business model affects your game design. Here's yet another way of looking at it. This may sound like a slam on 3rd Ed but it's not - all I'm doing is pointing out that the nature of D&D fundamentally changed with the release of 3rd Ed, and the business model made that happen.

3rd edition D&D was almost completely open source - so much so that Paizo has been able to effectively re-release it as Pathfinder. Of course, the people at Wizards of the Coast said, "If we make this free, so that everyone can download most of it off the internet, how are we going to make money?" Every way they could think of: selling books (effectively merchandise at this point, something you buy because it's more convenient than looking up the rules on the internet, or because you're in a store and it's there and tempting, or because it looks good on your coffee table) and add-ons (splats, modules) and miniatures.

And, of course, they wanted to encourage their players to buy these things. The problem, as I see it, lies with the modules and miniatures. Moldvay's edition of Basic D&D - I believe the most popular D&D product in terms of units sold - said, on the back of the box: "This is a game that helps you imagine." Miniatures weren't required. Even modules weren't required - you could get a whole evening of play by rolling up some encounters on random tables.

But now they want to sell pregenerated modules and miniatures - so they design a game that's heavily about tactical combat, about moving your playing pieces around on a board, so you'll be encouraged to buy miniatures. And they design a game that's complex enough, that takes enough time to block out encounters, that it's almost foolish to design your own adventures, or make up what happens on the basis of encounter tables, so you're encouraged to buy modules. In comes the railroad. Out goes the imagination - instead of imagining whatever we want, we're constrained by the minis and modules.

Obviously, a lot of people - probably even most people - like their D&D that way. The minis and modules bring a huge amount of clarity and rigor to the game, and make it a more consistent product. And while the old Red Box Basic D&D may have been the single most succesful D&D product, certainly much, much more money was made off of 3rd edition in all.

But it had now become a different game. A game I enjoyed some for what it was, but never got the same sort of awesome out of as I did with Basic D&D or Paranoia or Call of Cthulhu or Space Opera or the new school of indie rpgs like Apocalypse World - games where it's all about the imagination.

So - am I suggesting we avoid free-to-play? No, of course not, I'm planning on making sixty second shooter free-to-play. I'm just saying I'm going to tread carefully on the path and try not to lose my way.

Murderous Ghosts

D&D players get a little freaked out by the idea of playing an RPG with just 1 GM and 2 players. Partly it's social proof ("Well, if we couldn't find anyone else who wanted to play, this activity must suck") but a big part of it is that D&D has the whole 'you need a whole party of adventurers to survive' thing.

Unfortunately, the attitude rubs off on other RPG's - I know at least a couple guys who like RPG's but refuse to do it with only two other people at the table. "Well, maybe if they're GM-less," one of them said - but that attitude doesn't make sense to me - in fact, the way I see it, the more players you have, the more of a burden the GM becomes.  Because games with GMs typically take the form of the player telling the GM what they do, and the GM responding, in any game with a GM the GM is going to spend about 50% of the time talking. In a three player game, the players still get to participate 25% of the time - but in a five player game it drops to 12.5%. 

But I digress. My point being: if a three-player game is to be avoided, what must these guys think of a two-player game?  That must be completely nuts!

And - usually - I'd agree. For the most part when I've done two-player role-playing, there's been a noticeable lack of momentum. You're both straining to come up with ideas. When it's your turn, you're put on the spot - you can't just sit back and let one of the other players fill the void. And that pressure makes it even harder to contribute.

Which is why the new Murderous Ghosts is such a pleasure. When playing it, I never felt like momentum was lacking; I never felt stuck. 

I'm not sure how it achieves this. It's sort of like a two-player Choose Your Own Adventure, where you each have a book to consult to tell you what to do next, but, completely unlike one of those books, it leaves the actual description for you to invent. It's the structure of a story without the details - bones without skin. And ... maybe because it tells the GM how to prepare for a minute before play starts ... or maybe because it holds your hand so carefully as you go ... or maybe because it gives you a solid foundation to build off of ... like I said, I never feel stuck.

Not to mention, it takes under an hour to play, and the subject matter - intense horror - is just cool.

So it's easily my new favorite two-player RPG.

You can buy it here.

Play some indie RPGs at PAX

Hey, if you're going to PAX, there's going to be a room (Room 306) set aside for those cutting-edge indie tabletop RPG's I've been on about lately.

I'll be there most of Saturday & Sunday - come find me and get in on one of my games.

Why are these games so cool, again?

• they emphasize story over tactics; tell an entire story in one session, instead of just a single action scene
• everyone gets to contribute creatively
• no railroading - real freedom of choice
• they play fast and fluently
• and, if you're into that kind of thing, you can get your inner actor on. (But you don't have to.)

I'll be ready to run Geiger Counter (survival horror), the award-winning Fiasco (the "Cohen brothers movie game" - real actors and television producers play this one!), In a Wicked Age (bronze age face stabbing), Love in the Time of Seid (no dice!?!), or Lady Blackbird (steampunk action adventure). Come and join us.

Notes on Fiasco

Fiasco won this year's Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming. (The Diana Jones Award, I just discovered, has nothing to do with the author Diana Wynne Jones. Huh.) I'd just like to say, good choice! 

Fiasco epitomizes the new-school of tabletop role-playing game that I've been on about lately, the no-preparation, no-GM school:

• The mechanics are incredibly simple, mostly boiling down to choosing black and white dice (effectively stones, as faces don't matter during conflict resolution) to decide how scenes resolve. The epitome of "rules-light", and the opposite of recent editions of Dungeons & Dragons.
• Where a lot of "game master-less" games actually have a rotating game master, expecting every player at the table to be able to do that nebulous stuff a game master does, Fiasco distributes the role - in particular, with the "scene framing" role of the GM.  Fiasco's main rule is - on your turn, you either frame your scene, in which case the other players get to say how it turns out, or you let the other players frame your scene, in which case you get to say. So somebody uncomfortable with making up a scene never has to do it.
• So with such light rules, how do you decide what happens? I've found when I play it comes down to a mix of voting using the dice, and following the fiction. In other words - "karma" and verisimilitude. Sometimes you want to see a character get hurt because it makes sense for the moral of the story; sometimes you want to see a character get hurt because it makes sense from what's happened so far in the fiction.
• It is great for newbies. I've played it with people who have never roleplayed before (including my dad, age 74), people who couldn't care less about the difference between D&D's standard and full-round actions, and seen them shine as improvisational actors and storytellers.
• The setting and genre gets away from trite swords and sorcery and usually finds itself in the present-day: lately I've found that it's easy to roleplay present-day stuff, because we all know it. (It's easy to roleplay fantasy because anything goes - but it's hard to roleplay, say, historical fiction. Suddenly there's an onus on you to be right about stuff.)
• Borrowing from In a Wicked Age, it has a system for setting up random situations and backstories that start your play. Very quickly you get a pregnant situation from which a story will emerge - so there's not much 'what if?' or back-and-forth at the table as you try to hone in on what your game for tonight will be about. And the constraints breed creativity. (I tried to steal these ideas and put them on playing cards with my own That's Drama, but In a Wicked Age and Fiasco have something that That's Drama is sorely lacking: specificity. Where That's Drama might introduce "Wealth" as a prop, Fiasco will introduce "a mason jar full of gold coins."  Details sell the story.)

The way I see it?  Kind of like Wil Wheaton says in the introduction to the Fiasco Companion, Fiasco is the new "red box" Basic D&D.  A gateway drug to this new school/old school roleplaying - and hopefully it'll have the same sort of success that Basic D&D had in its day. (It's already very succesful as indie rpg's go - but I think is it has a shot at the same sort of mainstream success D&D has. If Fiasco has a fatal flaw in that department, it's that it's not suitable for children, and although the Fiasco Companion partially fixes this (I still wouldn't want my 10-year old reading the text) I'm imagining that a "Fiasco Jr" would be at home on the shelves of Wal*Mart next to Apples To Apples. Jason & Steve: if you're reading this, and you do that, I want a cut.)

Fiasco.

More notes on *Apocalypse World*

The more I engage with this game, and compare it to other games, the more I appreciate its genius.

The Core Mechanic

The core mechanic should seem familiar to people who have played D&D - it's a little less granular - instead of saying "I shoot him" you say things like "I point my gun at him and make him back down" ("going aggro") - but the idea is the same: you want to try something in the game, you usually have to roll for it.  A lot of the modern collaborative-story-heavy rpg's have moved away from this traditional approach, but AW makes it sing. How?

Any move you do, you roll two dice, and add them together, and maybe add some modifiers if your character is good at that thing or whatever. And you try to get a 7+. Still, standard roleplaying, right? Roll dice, add modifiers, try to beat a target number.

Not quite: if you fail a roll in AW (6 or less), something bad happens. Where it just would have been a 'whiff' in D&D, here additional trouble is piled on. And if you ONLY get 7+ - if you don't get 10 or higher - you get a mixed result. Something good, something bad. Or something mediocre.

Bottom line: whenever you roll the dice, something happens. You don't get that feeling of "I might as well have just skipped my turn."

Historical note: this is a bit like Otherkind Dice and Ghost/Echo. There, you rolled multiple d6's, and some would be whether the good result happened or not, and some would be whether a bad result happened or not, so it was very possible to get mixed results. It was still possible to whiff, though - nothing good, nothing bad. AW fixes that and streamlines things.

Game Moderating As Maintaining A Collection of Threats or Dangers

There's a line in the AW book that says it calls for one method of GMing - that the entire game is built upon it. I didn't understand what this really meant until recently, when I was looking at another game: Danger Patrol. (A free game you can play right now, google it.)

A quick naive non-exhaustive taxonomy of roleplaying methods, divided by the kinds of prep you do:

* The sandbox: a map with hidden stuff in it. Could be a dungeon, could be a wilderness, could be whatever. Older D&D modules were like this: a big map. Where do you want to go? What do you want to do?

* The railroad: a series of encounters that the players will meet in order, providing they play nice and don't say anything like, "What? Save the world? I didn't sign up for that." This was how I used to GM, because I wanted to tell a story in a fairly linear order. Modern D&D modules are more like this - because you can only fit a couple encounters in in a session and they take a lot of planning, they may have maps but the maps are linear.

* The relationship map: instead of it being about the terrain, it's about the people and what they want from each other and who the players know. GMing this requires some creativity. "Okay, the players are doing this. How do my characters feel about that? What are my characters going to do now?" To make this work, the characters have to have incompatible wants, so that a story will happen. In a Wicked Age and Smallville are modern examples of games that rock this method. 

* Threats or dangers. There's just a list of bad stuff that could happen or is happening. Could be a character wants something from someone and that's going to lead to problems - a bit like a link on the relationship map. Could be a bomb in the building. Could be a stormfront. In Danger Patrol, Ghost/Echo, and Poison'd - these troubles are written down on cards or post-its for all the players to see. When a player tries to fix one of the troubles, and gets a 'Yes, but...' on the dice - the trouble might go away or be mitigated, sure, but another trouble is plopped down, on another card. The whole thing organically grows and shrinks. The players have the freedom to do whatever they want and the game responds appropriately. And with DP, GE, and Poison'd, it would never occur to you to remove the index-card-danger mechanic. It's just part of the game.

With Apocalypse World, however, the dangers and troubles (called "threats" in AW) are (sort of) secret. The moderator keeps track of them on their own sheet of paper and doesn't show the players. So a GM might approach the AW rules and say, "Well, I'm going to skip that part." But that would be like removing the board from a board game.

So that's why the rules say the game calls for one kind of GMing.

And, just as a side note, this method of GMing? One could make a computer game out of it. The creator of the game would need to prepare ahead of time the things that ordinarily are made up in play - which is a lot of prep: most people would only see a fraction of the content unless they played multiple times. But there'd be a lot less prep than, say, trying to make one of those choose-your-own-story books. (And it's much more promising than my experiments in having intelligent agents with wants that are supposed to come into conflict - which is the relationship-map method - that was one I banged my head against for years with almost nothing to show for it.)

 

It has no name

So I got to hang out with some kick-ass "story game" designers a couple days ago and, to my shame, have discovered that they don't like the term "story game":

* It's divisive. Players of traditional role-playing-games are probably saying, "What do you mean my game doesn't do story?" Any rpg can do story.

* It's vague. What about games like exquisite corpse, Once Upon a Time, Dixit - aren't those story games? But those are different from what I've been talking about lately.

Which leaves me in the lurch. "So what am I supposed to call these things?"

"Role-playing games," they say. 

"But ... I have a totally different experience playing Lady Blackbird, Geiger Counter, or Fiasco than I have playing D&D. How do I tell people about that?"

And they shrug.

So I'm thinking about this, and I can't point my finger at any specific thing about one role-playing game that makes it a "story game" in my mind that doesn't rule out some other game that I also think of as a "story game."

GM-less? But Apocalypse World and In a Wicked Age aren't GM-less.

No prep? But Dogs in the Vineyard requires prep. And Paranoia and Toon, a couple games from my youth, didn't require prep. (Paranoia did have modules but my experience was they were irrelevant to the fun, as my friends would start shooting each other in the first room. Kind of an ancestor to In a Wicked Age in that way.) Maybe "story games" have been around forever.

Rules-light? Annalise and Burning Wheel and Universalis are actually pretty complex. And there are a lot of rules-light RPGs out there that don't scratch the itch for me.

So, okay guys, I give up. I will stop using a blanket term for a bunch of these games, and in the future talk about them one at a time on their own merits.

Sofia's motivation

Sofia made her own motivation card for That's Drama. That's my girl!