History of RPGs

This article over at Places to Go and People to Be takes a long look at the history of RPGs. Its a very interesting read.

social contracts and kibitzing

Every gaming group has a social contract. This is a promise of all the players (including the GM) about what is okay and what isn’t. Some of this contract is constructed through rules and some is just a simple agreement among the people involved. One example is alcohol. We don’t drink while we RPG. We might drink if we’re playing something on the Xbox or a board game that doesn’t require a totally sober brain (or can be fun if you are a little schnokered). Some of this social contract is for the best, and some is just the way we’ve always played.

One of the common social contract elements with many of the old school gaming crowds is the “no kibitzing rule”. It essentially goes something like this: if you aren’t currently on stage with the GM, then you, as a player are not allowed to provide input for the players who are on stage. We had a brief chat about it late last night, looking for deeper understanding into why kibitzing was always such a no-no in game.

Jeremy suggested that it had to do with the Paper Wall that separates the GM and their players. That the GM is controlling the story and the GM should only be getting input from the players they are currently addressing. Speaking out of turn is rude and maybe even cheating. The funny thing is that Angela cited the lack of interactivity as one of the main reasons why she didn’t find Table Top gaming as compelling as PC/Console RPGs.

Last night the setting was that Jeremy, Eric, and Michael had come to the table to further the adventures of their young girls in my GURPS: Eberron setting. Michael didn’t have his character ready and decided to just sit and watch the action. He knew we were starting to play very non-traditionally and he knew that the gaming had become very good recently. He confessed that he was worried that the gaming was good because he wasn’t there. I knew better, but let him work that out for himself.

Eric had Celia in a situation with high risks and high rewards again. Thanks to a mistaken assumption of an organized crime ring, she was playing the role of a ringer. In other words she was working a client in a gambling tent in the middle of a carnival. It was a nice back drop and the setting was pretty vivid and lively. The client was a river pirate and he was being fleeced for everything he owned. He had been winning for a day straight and hadn’t really slept in all that time. It was getting close to the time where the pirate’s luck would suddenly run out and he would be likely to bet his very last possessions, a matched set of pistols. The carnies wanted the pistols badly as they were incredibly valuable, but knew that he wouldn’t bet them if he was in his right mind. So enter Celia with her charms. As an opener Celia bumped into the old pirate and successfully determined that the pistols were on his person with a quick pickpocket skill roll. She didn’t lift them, but she did find them. When the pirate turned to see who had bumped into him her excuse for the mishap was to be that she was drunk, but Michael hesitantly jumped in and offered that she had instead been under the influence of a fortune teller’s “incense” she had encountered earlier. Michael figured this would be more believable since she reeked of the stuff and might make her seem a little more… adventuresome. At one point the pirate needed a little more motivation to continue losing his valuables. Angela was sitting on the couch and totally outside of the game and offered up, “give him a kiss on the cheek for luck”. This totally rolled into the game and made the atmosphere more lively and risky. Later as the game was going very badly for our pirate friend he was sure that he was totally out of funding. Celia leaned closer to him and said, “You still have these”, pointing to his pistols. At this point Jeremy piped up and suggested that the pirate display a revelatory look on his face, stand up, throw back his coat while saying, “Oh yea! You’re right!” while opening fire on the dealer to get back his possessions that still lay on the table. We all laughed at what a great idea that was and then started the process to make it happen. Luckily Celia was quick witted enough to come up out of her chair and kiss the nasty pirate full on the mouth and said something along the lines of “there’s no way you can lose now”. After a successful Sex Appeal roll from Celia, the pirate grinned stupidly at the dealer and thickly murmured, “There’s no way I can lose now” as he threw the weapons into the pile.

So, what I’ve just described was written by everybody at the table, one without even having a character, and a person totally outside the game. In the days of yore this would have been kibitzing beyond anything we had ever known. I know I would have been frustrated with it. My entire story for the evening involved bumping into the bounty hunter they had encountered in Mistmarsh. Not a silly carnival and some hapless river pirate. Instead, by trusting the players, we get a story that was beyond anything I could have come up with on my own with just another player. In no way did the narrative edits and player input damage the plot, quite the opposite.

This morning I search on the Forge and find that the issue kibitzing is something that is actively encouraged typically. The player “on stage” can request no input, but most of the time it’s wide open. When making characters a lot of the indie systems even require kibitzing to make sure that everybody fits in together.

My favorite part of the evening was seeing Michael’s response when I told him that soon they would be helping me run NPCs. Not just NPCs that I had already drawn up and brought to the table either. I’m talking about inserting somebody who I had no plans for and playing them out as if they were co-GMing. That level of exciting around gaming hasn’t been present since 1993 for me. Sure I’ve had interesting sessions and fun stories, but for the most part the great sessions were the exceptions and not the rules. For nearly a month we’ve had the best gaming I’ve had in my life without exception. Who knew that breaking out social contract and kibitzing could be such an effective tool?

I really think that a lot of GMs could benefit from taking a hard look at their group’s social contract. Figure out why you do the things you do in gaming and what you fear would change if you did it differently. I would bet that most of us have been gaming with the same social contract for years if not our entire life. That’s not, by default, a bad thing but it is worth understanding. Think about how many stories your players have had and not been able to tell because it wasn’t part of the flow. Think about how many times you’ve asked them to blue book something that turned out to be way more interesting that anything you had going on that evening. Think about how many times a player has had a mind-blowingly cool back story that never once saw the light of day in your game.

thread on bass playing

If you liked the "Places to Go, People to Be" article on Bass Playing check out this thread. I have to deeply agree with his observations. I don't think I could go back to a non-player driven story or ref in a system that didn't allow me to tweak in what works for me.

That's the joy of looking into systems like Burning Wheel and Dogs in the Vineyard. You start realizing that staying with your old mechanics are all about staying with what is familiar and satisfying the "gamist" urge, but not because it's the best system. I no longer feel like I have to defend GURPS. I play it because it's what I know and it's what my players know. They are open to experimenting with new mechanics as long as it doesn't get in the way of actual game play.

electronic gaming for distributed players

Not all players can make the time to table top game. The huge success of multiplayer games like World of Warcraft and Halo are living proof that people want to game with other humans and if you create an effective method for doing so you will be able to write your own check.

I've been working on tools to help with my table top gaming and just stumbled across what appears to be one of the best ways to play when you can't play tabletop.

I'm going to pick this up and see how easy it is to convert to GURPS. Somebody posted in the forums about this doing just such a thing. The only real issue I have with it is that my players would have to shell out money for the client. Still, interesting to see what's out there.

social mechanics

We had a small event in our RSG that threw me off a little last week. It’s left me wanting to fix it either through mechanics or social contract.

In a nutshell, one of the characters is beautiful and charming. She’s not bad with a dagger… err, large knife either, but she’s no combat monkey. For the most part she gets her way by being sneaky and charming. The mechanics for doing this are her high IQ attribute (which is the base for all social skills, your will, your awareness, your alertness, and your ability to perceive the world around you) and a few social skills like body language and fast talk. The attractiveness of the character is stuff of legends and in her wake are many broken hearts.

So then one day, a member of her country’s royalty saddles into town. He’s a legendary charmer and seems to be shaping up to be a dangerous opponent in the soft skills arena. During a moment when Celia, our stunning charmer, tried to read what this slick artiste was lying down. The player, Eric, knew that he was being lied to because he had just heard the same charm come from my mouth to Jeremy’s character Sadie. Sadie is specifically, and mechanically, naïve. So pulling the wool over her character’s eyes wasn’t a difficult task. However, Celia should have had a really good chance to meet this guy head to head.

Now understand that I wanted him to win. I rolled well on his behalf and Eric rolled poorly on Celia’s behalf. It pretty much was an open and shut case. However, Eric decided to roll again as the consequences of believing his lies grew direr. In order words Eric felt that the NPC had taken it up a notch and felt that this would prompt another roll. Now I didn’t want Eric to feel as if his poor Celia had no chance of not swallowing the tale hook line and sinker. I wanted him to help create the story of a young girl who is socially adept beyond her years and well practiced in the art of deception. So with the tension around this moment the dice flew out.

That’s when the trouble started for me. Eric critically failed his roll. A straight up 18 and a critical failure, in combat at least, means big trouble for the character. In a physical situation it could mean that the character has damaged themselves or a partner or let down their guard. But in a physical situation there are several back and forth exchanges. Character A swings an axe and Character B and so on until somebody is out of combat one way or another. In this charged environment the consequences for mistakes are decidedly deadly by the nature of the exchange. But there is no such exchange socially. In fact, 4^th Edition GURPS specifically warns against telling the players how their characters feel about an NPC. I have to say I understand the sentiment, but consider this unacceptable for my group. I feel like, as long as I have the trust of my players, I can indeed tell them that they really like or don’t like somebody. The player can think as she pleases, but the character is enough under the collective control that it’s not only possible but recommended. In a lot of ways that very thought is what has lead me to my new approach to gaming.

I know metaphors to combat in social situations are made all the time, but it just felt ham fisted in Celia’s situation. In other words I didn’t want a single bad roll to end her conflict. The party has to end at some point, but the consequences of Eric’s poor roll were pretty strong. We collaborated and decided that Celia would not only believe our exceptional liar’s tale, but would have a difficult time disbelieving him in the future. Meaning what would prompt Eric to roll on Celia’s behalf should now require much more punch. In game mechanics terms Celia is now at a -8 to all her rolls around resisting the charms of this NPC. Our decision was totally outside of the rules that GURPS provides. This was simply an unexpected turn that leads to an interesting piece of conflict for Celia’s story. As the creators of this story my players and I know that it is “not a good thing” for Celia to believe this man. He seems a little unstable and while extremely helpful isn’t somebody they want on their bad side.

So that all sounds great as a story progression, right? Well except for the part where Celia is now a master social engineer except when she is around this guy. It’s an opening for tragedy of a scale that could affect all the characters. And it all happened because Eric took a chance on the dice to try and keep Celia from buying another round of the royal bullshit. Sure it makes sense in terms of the student versus master manipulator going head to head. But what doesn’t make sense is how much she lost in terms of what was happening in the conversation. That is to say, she was just talking with the guy. She was trying to figure out if he was lying. She failed to roll as well as he did and so she couldn’t tell. So when he pushed the limits of disinformation, she pushed harder to disbelieve and the result was not only did she believe his story but somehow he ended up with a huge advantage over her. He wasn’t trying to do this. It was as if she suddenly lost her mind and decided that blindly trusting this guy was a good idea. Eric protested and checked to make sure that I wasn’t going to enforce such an arbitrary result long-term. I assured him that I wasn’t and that was the right decision I feel. But how do I ensure that such madness doesn’t happen again?

What I really want is much more of back and forth in social game situations. I want there to be a sense that there is an exchange in the conflict. I want it to feel like stakes are being raised over a series of exchanges and the longer it goes on the more that is at risk. In combat this is the loss of hit points over time. Every round you lose a little more until finally you are down below a level where you can continue. Either you are dead, dying, or unconscious. What I’m picturing is a system where you have a finite pool of social resources. You spend them, or risk them to move forward in the exchange. You know how much longer you are good for and you know how much longer your opponent is good for. In other words you can tell how the exchange is going and can choose to retreat or press on. I want there be a way to hold your ground defensively or make daring slashes into enemy territory. I want for this to be quick and easy to resolve so that gaming doesn’t bog down in a bunch of minutia. Finally I want to leave room to reward good role playing but not require it to be mandatory.

I know, I know, I’m so in love with the DitV model of conflict resolution that it’s blurring my vision. But what I wanted was for Celia to be able to shine without an all of nothing approach to socializing. I wanted her to be able to bail out before she was so far in over her head that Mr. Slippery had her partially brainwashed. Of course I expect it to be the results of a young girl (however gifted) taking on a court trained subterfugist. She should get taken behind the shed for her presumptions, but it shouldn’t be a simple dice roll that determines the results. And she should still be able to surprise both of the player and the GM.

In the past I’ve dealt with this through engaging head to head with players in role playing bouts. The cleverness and acting skills of the player would determine how well they did. Basically the level of success depended a lot on how entertained we all were by the drama that was occurring in the role playing. However, a big part of the problem was that this drama was frequently the same roles played over and over by the same people. It was fun, but it was getting a little stale. After all, just because you dress Clint Eastwood up in a Japanese school girl uniform doesn’t mean that you really believe that he’s not Clint Eastwood. No matter how many pretty ribbons you put in his hair. Also it meant that I had to be really over the top with my role playing to make the successes and failure seem plausible. After all, if I’m playing Generic Crusty Drill Sergeant #4 he should not get so flustered with a conversation that he cannot continue. But I’d have to give the entire series of Drill Sergeants Intimidation Skill at 25 to effectively play him the way I want him to be played. Instead I want to be able to say, “Sgt. Ironass is not going to be somebody you can sweet talk”. And for them to say, “I want to try and bluff my way through it”. Then we role play a little, check a few dice rolls, and BAM. We have more story told without it meaning that the character will now do whatever the Sgt wants whenever they want.

Now I’m trying to find a way for me and my players to actually reach outside of our typical characters without resorting to acting classes. For the most part the co-storied aspects of our sessions are working almost perfectly. I still like “showing” more than “telling”, but I’m finding that by doing a more conscious “telling” I’m able to give room for the players to say, “That’s not really what I would expect him to do based on what you’ve told me about him”. Then hopefully continuing with, “do you think he would actually do it like this…”.

Right now its either down to a dice roll or two and some role playing with no sense of back and forth and understanding where those dice rolls logically belong. After all, are we talking about a single contest modifier by each side’s relative merits and positioning? Are we talking about a series of volleys with modifiers carrying successes and failures from the previous round over to the current one?

discussion on railroading characters

The live journal of eyebeams has an excellent post about story structure and in the comments is a brillant comment on railroading a plot and how it all comes down to Player/GM trust.

In summary, if the players trust the GM to give them the sort of story they expect then being railroaded isn't a bad thing. An example of this is Paranoia. The players have very specific expectations around what is going to happen to their characters and how heavy handed the GM is going to be in regards to their characters.

As our Saturday night geek-fever rages on I ponder over the balance between micro/macro railroading of my story. We have had cut scenes (as Eric likes to call them) where I described the passage of time for the characters and what had happened around them. In these cut scenes the players were welcome to throw in long action input, but I'm not sure they knew it or saw a place for it. In fact, I don't think I knew I would be accepting of it until just recently. But I think it might be an important part of having the players co-story. Make room for them to throw in their $.02. After all, if it's not important enough to apply mechanics to (dice rolling, RP'ing out) then it's not important enough to begrudge any changes they want to introduce.

kiss your sweet brain goodbye

I've finally found a "new gaming" article that totally seems to express the revolution that is happening in my head around my gaming style and specifically my GMing style.

I've discovered a label for my particular style and now know the name of what I've been trying to give birth to and why it's been so difficult for me. My brain is cripsy after reading this.

simulation in gaming

I've said in the past that my players were Simulationists. I should actually go back and correct that. My players are capable of being Simulationists. If you count me (to do so is debatable) there are three software developers in our regular gaming group. At our max capacity (5 people) that makes 60% of us developers. That means that working with simulations is something we either know how to do, like doing, do for a living, or all the above. However one of the developers is deeply story driven. He loves role playing and doesn't really rule lawyer and isn't really interested in doing so. He'd be happy with d20 and in some ways actually prefers it's abstractions. The other is much more of a gamist. He's self admitted to be a poor loser and as such likes to maximize his chances of not doing so. If that can happen in the context of a good story then he's good and I think actually prefers his winning to happen in such a context. It makes it richer and more interesting. My other other two love the story and both enjoy writing fiction and being generally creative. But one of my creatives also loves the wargaming aspects of a crunchy system like GURPS. He understands that using the crunchy parts can bog down story time, but give him well executed crunchy wrapped in a good story and his inner Gamist is more than good.

So what I've been musing over for myself and for my group is what would happen if there were a method for having all the number crunching happen behind the scenes? All the little +1's and Ready actions. All the movement point tracking and every little nit-picking rule was tracked and handled behind the scenes and automatically for the players? Would the Gamist and Simulationist feel like they were playing the game they wanted to play? Bottom line is, if I had the perfect GM assistant software tracking all the variables and reminding me of the rules that could be in play around a player's choices, would more Narriative style surface? I've been so curious why better software hasn't surfaced for GURPS GMing when there are such great products out there for d20. Why is there no GURPS equilivant to DM Genie or DM's Familiar?

These are the questions I'm asking myself lately as I work on my own GURPS GM Assistant.

Quick NPCs with depth

I think its a good idea to have a list of NPCs at hand that you can just grab and put into play at a moments notice. The problem in the past has been that the time sink of creating a stack of NPCs that may never see day light is risky. Some sessions all I'll have is a list of names and a list of "roles" that need to be filled. When the NPC shows up to play they rarely turn out as I expected, so no matter what I try to keep them fuzzy in score and broad in detail.

One of the problems with this is that my NPCs can then cycle through the same 3-4 characters with little or no variants between them. There are several tricks I'm eager to try in the near future, but my first step is to start getting a bare minimum of detail down for every NPC I'm creating. A good rule of thumb (and totally ripped off from C.M. Cline's article The 7-Sentence NPC published in Dragon Magazine) is to write down a few brief sentences that summarize the NPC in question. A good list to start with is:

1. Occupation and History - what do they do and how did they get to where they are today
   
2. Physical description - what things stand out and what will observant PCs notice
   
3. Attributes and skills - a general over view is all you need here
   
4. Values and motivations - how does the NPC see themself and where are they going
   
5. Interactions with others - sometimes it helps to imagine them talking with a young child, a greasy salesperson, a superior, a loved one, or an equal
   
6. Useful knowledge - everybody knows something, but limit this to things that could help the PCs
   
7. Distinguishing feature - don't limit it to physical, a voice or aura could come into play also
   
8. Distinguishing gear - weapons, armor, mount, eyewear, pets
   
9. Secret - not necessarily something the PCs need to know, but definately something the NPC doesn't want anybody finding out
   
10. Standard reaction to Players - how does this NPC feel about people who are of the PCs background, race, religion, nationality?
11. Famous Actor this NPC most looks like
12. Accent that this NPC will most likely have
    

See. Simple, direct, and with a stack of these short blocks in hand you can fill the lives of your PCs with deep and interesting NPCS.

Special thanks to Beau Yarbrough for the "Secret" for the NPCs since that is quite handy.

interesting quote

Lumpley Principle: System is the means by which any group of players comes to agreement concerning the content of the shared imagined space. -Vincent Baker

wake up call

Recently I felt like I had a wake up call around my role as a Story Teller and the player’s handling of their characters. My “win conditions” in gaming were to tell a good, if not great, story. But it started me thinking more and more about why gaming would be the way I expressed myself. Why shouldn’t I just sit down and write a piece of fiction? Why not break out the animation tools and make a story come to life? Why shouldn’t I grab a video camera and write out some scripts and make a short film? Why do it with a bunch of other guys and gals around a table every Saturday night? What was it about this medium that attracted me?

The players I worked with seemed fond of my stories and the gaming aspects. In a traditional setting all the players would give me detailed backgrounds for their characters and I would attempt to weave in elements of their histories into my plot. Some of this would be overt and some of it more subtle. However I was finding that it was difficult to keep in mind that character “A” had a paralyzing fear of water and character “B” has lost his mother in a freak railroad accident. The result was that these bits of flavor that the players kindly offered to me were lost in actual game play. After all, they should be figuring out a way to get past the guards, into the attic, and inside that trunk. That’s the story I’m telling, not your silly mother’s lack of foresight regarding train schedules and villainous land lords.

But then something changed. I’m not sure if it was just me taking a First Step and admitting that I was powerless over the plot or something simpler. On a whim I asked the players to reveal their entire character’s background to all the other players. This had amazing results. I don’t just mean that they talked about “Bob is from back east and likes dogs”. They revealed advantages, disadvantages, secrets and inner demons. This came out in play as them reminding each other about how facing the roundabout train station might give them the willies considering what happened to their mother. It came out as enforcement of disadvantages that might simply be unpleasant for the player to consider. Most of all it came out as a group effort to breathe life into the characters that was never present before. It was as if I lifted up the cover just a peek and a torrent of creativity came pouring out. My players were actually helping me uncover plot twists and developments that I would not have thought of. They were discovering their character’s voice quicker and deeper. They were getting to explore a more realistic life for their characters and the result was that we collective started creating a better story.

I’m pulling my players more and more into the co-creation process. I’ve still got a plot that is being revealed session by session, but it’s no longer difficult to remember the nuances of the character’s background. Instead the story is about them and the place they live in. I present a series of dilemmas but they grow with these experiences and not just “win” a skill roll or gain points to spend on better skills. The experience is much less passive for the players and much more hand’s free for me. It lets me focus on the story in ways I never thought of.

Then I start finding out that the thriving Indie RPG community are starting to turn their eyes towards new ways of thinking about RPGs and table top gaming in particular. One of the biggest trends is to involve the players much more in the mechanics of the game. This means, in some cases, doing away with the traditional roles of GM and character. Everybody is a GM and everybody is a character. When plot points are presented there are mechanics in place to allow a character to veto the result and suggest an alternative. In many ways this is what lies at the heart of the gaming experience. I suggest that the zombie attempts to bite off your character’s face and you roll dice, compare the results to your “save face” skill, and inform me that you were either able to dodge the bite or are watching in horror as a zombie swallows down what was once your low lip. But what we are talking about here is above and beyond a skill check based experience. We are talking about core elements of the story line being altered so that maximum satisfaction is generated for all the players involved. In some systems I could even see that all players control all the characters.

This is so far away from how I’ve played in the past that I can’t begin to fathom it. However, I’m so flushed by my recent successes that I’m almost tempted to start incorporating more and more elements into our game that will allow more and more player participation. Why not had over an NPCs full character sheet and just hang onto gems of background that need to be uncovered over time? The possibilities are intriguing.

Dogs in the Vineyard style events in GURPS

I’m currently reading through an indie-published game called Dogs in the Vineyard. It’s really pretty amazing and seems like a fresh idea in a pretty unique setting. There is no way I’m going to convince my players to switch systems since most of them are Simulationists and therefore we play GURPS nearly exclusively. One of the first things that jumped out at me from the character creation mechanics was the “Events” section. This is basically a way to build up a character’s background. It reminded me of the life path chart from Talsorian Cyberpunk 2020 except that it the DITV version is totally narrative driven. So I decided to consider how to create a GURPS version of this system. Here’s what I have so far.

Make a list of key defining moments of your character’s life thus far. Let’s say 2-6 events. To start with think of a brief sentence that describes this event. For example you could say “learned to use her sword for self defense versus a rabid dog that was attacking a beloved family pet”. Next figure out when in the character’s life this event happened. At this point decide on the difficulty of the event relative to any current skills your character possesses. So if you’ve currently got a sword skill of 16 then learning to use your sword was probably pretty effortless. So if we decide that your event was considered Easy then you roll your current skill +4 and I roll against the same skill but unmodified. If the character wins the roll then the event turned out for the best or very close to how you described it. In the rabid dog scenario we’ll find the dog was dispatched and thus began the start of your remarkable reputation for swordsmanship. However, if you fail the contest, then we will now have more contexts around your skill and your feelings around it. Perhaps a bystander jumped in and drove the dog away. Maybe your childhood enemy killed the dog with a bow and shamed you. The results could be as simple as nightmares filled with dogs or as complex as your town folks know of your “failure” and worry that you overestimate your sword skill.

In essence, you decide the event and together we decide the results for that event. Winning or failing the event has no impact on your characters current abilities. You don’t gain new skills or abilities from doing this. It’s possible to pick up quirks or perhaps plant the seeds for some future advantages or disadvantages if you like. But the point should be that your event now influences your worldview and possibly common perception. This will add some flavor to your background in a dynamic way that reflects our storytelling environment. Doing it collectively gets the groups creative juices flowing and, I believe, will provide depth to your characters.

Welcome to Co-Storied

What does it mean to be a pen-and-paper gamer and more specifically what does it mean to be a referee (or GM or DM or Storyteller) in today's gaming market? How are electronic aids changing gaming mechanics and style? Here I'll throw out topics of discussion around gaming, meta-gaming, and general RPG theory.

If it's your cup of tea then let's get started. Oh, and welcome to the table, let's get started!