moved...

I've redone Somaseptic to catch all of my random thoughts about gaming.

If you want to follow that noise, http://www.somaseptic.com is the place to do it.

the "fun never" manifesto

What we do is for fun. Shouldn't we make sure that we maximize the ratio of fun to grind?

The Fun Never Manifesto cuts to the chase around things that can break a gaming group down and up.

thoughts on brain damage

Excellent article on dysfunctional play up in the Forge. At the core of what we do there is a lot of dysfunctional behavior. I'm beginning to believe that the concept of "bait and switch" that is discussed in the article is the core of most gaming instruction (rule books). "GURPS lets you play in any setting", they promise, unless you want detailed rules that are fortune and resource based to socialize in the game. What it should say is, "GURPS lets you play in any setting that needs detailed combat". Now before you post a comment telling me how you had a session where meaningful social exchange took place understand that what I'm saying is not that *you* can't have social exchange in *your* version of GURPS. I'm saying that out of the box GURPS has little or no social rules.

If you don't believe me tell me how you would set up a scene where a PC and an NPC had a duel of wits. Imagine that both characters have "Social!" at skill 12. How do you determine how long the engagement takes? What are the core arguements in each player's stance? Do the players have to role play to get bonuses? What determines the bonus amount? In other words, isn't it just the GM deciding how well the wits of the PLAYER are acted out? Would your players stand for this arbitrary ruling if combat were involved. Yet, in GURPS, it's acceptable and even sometimes welcomed.

As we shake free of dysfunctional gaming it takes a lot of self observation and awareness to stop the patterns of years of "play". I feel like daily I wake up to some new pattern that is broken for me in terms of game play. When I decide to be open and honest about our play it means admitting all the ways that I've forced stories, bullied players, abused my role, and made it nearly impossible for my players to get their stories told. All of this on top of my players telling me that I'm the best Storyteller they've ever known.

Perhaps it's just evidence that we are starving for stories.

Flag Framing reference

I'm posting this article on good gm'ing mostly for reference for later. It's a really great look at how to GM in terms of game prep and focus.

Plus I think it will help us continue with the awesome gaming we've been having.

GM Fiat sucks

We've made a lot of changes to our gaming. Last week one of my alpha players made a point of exclaiming, several times, that the past session was the best he had ever had. Like me, he's prone to hyperbole so while I believed him (cause it was the best gaming ever) we had encountered a grievous social conflict which he choose to blow up at. He made a choice to drag the rest of the group into it. He was very angry and defensive, pretty much on par with what I’ve seen from him in the past. He and I have always had social difficulties but for the first time I found the event to be something that baffled me. I was able to express myself pretty calmly I thought and let him know.

One of the things that I’m trying to do away with is GM Fiat. Not because I think the concept is evil or broken, I just think I want to move towards a healthier model of socializing. When I read this article above I was struck by the lines:

I mean tell me, how many of you have had to sit there while some asshole in the group role-played through buying shit or had to listen to someone’s long winded soliloquy while the rest of the group had to sit and watch. See, when a game has rules to govern this shit, it doesn’t stop it from happening. All it does is constrain that bullshit so everyone at the table can have fun, including the poor bastard who is tongue tied but likes the idea of playing the snarky diplomat.

We had a social train wreck because I was still stuck in GM Fiat mode. I had strong ideas about what was happening in a scene and was not clearly making room for the players to set it up as they envisioned. It’s the very thing that every GM I know fears about giving up Fiat. “What if the players want to go ‘off map’ or want to something that just doesn’t work with my current plot?” they ask. My alpha player became very agitated and assumed that my desire to move the scene in a specific direction was a desire to block his creativity and expression. Honestly my fear centered more on a desire to avoid what I feared would be juvenile wish fulfillment. After all we had just had an amazing session with realistic character development and story driven events. It seemed like he was falling back to a “must win” situation and I was falling back to a “here is how the story should go” angle. Neither of us was right, but by the time there was conflict we were both pretty emotionally invested in our personal outcome. After he expressed his frustration I was able to see where I had gone wrong. It didn’t matter where my ideas were going or how good I believed them to be, I couldn’t just shift my promise to cut back on GM Fiat.

Good GM Fiat is going to continue to be a simple matter of providing tools to the players so that they can get their stories told. I’ll take care of the world building and kickers. Otherwise nothing is off limits or out of a player’s reach. It’s my promise to my group and my development as a GM.

Lines as Character Development

Lines and Veils is a concept that Ron Edwards presents in the excellent supplement to Sorcery called Sex and Sorcery. A Line is defined as something that will not be crossed in terms of story. In Breaking the Ice, Emily Care Boss compares Lines to the MPAA rating system. So a G rated game will have no sexual content and a PG will have implied sex, but nothing on screen and so on. A Veil is a device where something is happening in game, but not “on screen”. The classic "fade to black" technique when a character is experiencing something that is beyond the player’s comfort level is a type of Veil. So while the activity is definitely happening in game, the players aren’t experiencing it.

In most gaming situations the only hard Line a character faces is the “hit point Line”. If they run out of hit points they die and the character is changed and possibly unplayable. There are other systems where hit points and sanity or humanity mark this Line. What we are looking at is the fact that Narratively the players are watching for a specific Line and understand that by approaching this line they are building Narrative tension. As in “oh no, I’ve only got 3 hit points left, I’m going to DIE!”. What I’m wondering is what if we change this Line up or introduce a series of Lines representing differing degrees of change.

I think that it’s possible to also define a character’s Lines which can be different from the player’s and unique to each character. So if we have a character that has “murder most foul” as a Line the character should never directly experience such things without there being a significant shift in how they experience their world. Most of the time this is implied in the game, but if you specifically focus in on it and even write it on the character sheet we suddenly come up with a limit for the character that is more than simply running out of points of health or sanity or humanity. This could easily create scenes where the stakes and consequences are much easier to express.

It seems that the tough part about this would be that a Line isn’t absolute. It just might not work in large groups since what is happening to the character in question is driven by a single player and would leave the other players out of the loop. Also it would be easy for situations to occur where the Line was too Boolean and either the character is safely on one side of the Line or over and in the danger zone. Part of the solution is simply a function of good Storytelling and making sure that the character approaches the Line slowly or through a series of events that all draw them closer and closer to a place where they will change and Lines will be re-drawn.

Finally let’s look at some realistic sample Lines that could come into play and ways that they could surface.

Singer is a dedicated warrior of the light who has a Line defined as “Not Suffering Evil a Hold on the Innocent”. Obviously a development where Singer witnesses an innocent hopelessly twisted by forces of darkness is going to push them right over the Line. But if we slowly progress in an ebb and flow struggle versus darkness we will discover some pretty interesting things about Singer and how they define their Line. What if they are put in a position where they have to sacrifice an innocent in order to smite a greater evil? What if they have to allow evil to flourish in a small area in order to lower it’s guard to a counter strike? These grey areas might not cross the stated Line but surely push at the core of this character. One can see that with just a few more Lines drawn for the character and we’ve suddenly got some deeply intriguing stories.

Another example would be Serra who has a Line stated as “Not allowing anybody close to her”. The player states that she would have the classic “acquaintances but no friends” stance. So what happens when another player character saves her life? What about a situation where somebody is doggedly doing all that they can to become her friend? A suitor who has dastardly political motivations begins to charm Serra to secure a favored icon of the people.

While none of these things are necessarily unique to the table top experience it is interesting to start defining character limits as something to explore. As an added spice or the entire focus of a session we can start to see strong investments from the players behind the characters and story lines that focus on their desires and fears. Instead of elaborate settings and twisting plots as the focus, the focus becomes the character’s own internal process.

How I'm Bringing "What's at stake" to my game

Two postings recently got me thinking more about stakes.


Avoiding Trivial Stakes

and

Fucking Meaning…

So my current thinking is that anytime it’s even possible for a player to grab some dice and start rolling (even combat) I’ll want to ask them “what’s at stake here” or “what do you want to have happen and what could failure mean here”. If the answer is dull or mundane, we don’t roll the dice it just happens unless I can raise the stakes somehow. If a player jumps a NPC in a dark alley with the intent of delivering a dire warning to the slavers the NPC is a member of then I should ask the player in question “what happens if you fail”. The player can then honestly answer “I just want this to be a warning, if this NPC is any real threat to my character I want to wait until somebody weaker comes along”. That’s totally fair and together we’ve co-storied who this NPC is and advanced the story. Now of course I could counter with “No, this NPC is a total bad-ass who will put your life on the line and therefore jumping them raises the stakes considerably. Is this still what you want?” It’s all out in the open and we know what is at stake one way or another. The point is to make sure that the story in my head matches the story in the player’s head and that everybody knows what is at stake before a single toss of the dice is made.

Bribing players to involve characters

Bribing players to involve characters

I’ve been reading a lot of information about moving the story along with specific player input. I’ve been kicking around this idea that I think I’ll suggest to my fellow gamers this Saturday.

Each of them will get a set number of points (I’m thinking based on the people in attendance, like 3 points per person present) that they can use to influence another character to behave in some way or take some course of action. The player being influenced can refuse the bribe at any point even if the bribe is being applied to an NPC. These points are simply added or subtracted to a dice roll for an event. These points can be applied to an NPC in the scene or to a player. If negative points are given to a player character then the player being affected gets an equal amount of points back on the positive side. A player cannot spend points on their own character. The point is to encourage players who aren’t on scene to think about interesting twists and developments for characters who are on the scene. They stipulate what they want, and it has to somehow vary from what the original intent is. They reward or penalize with as many or as few points as they choose with the only stipulation being that there has to be a reason behind the points.

Example: Lilia walks into a stable to get her horse and finds a close friend dead on the ground with a warforged standing over the body. As a GM I describe that the warforged is trying to apply bandages but Jeremy suggests that Chris should have Lilia roll for alertness to actually tell what the warforged is doing and that the roll should get a -4 penalty so that there is a good chance she doesn’t notice. Jeremy proposes something along the lines of “I think it would be cool if Lilia didn’t notice the bandages before she started reacting.” Then Eric chips in with “I’ll give you 8 points to spend in combat as you see fit if you just fly into a rage and attack the warforged”. Chris can refuse either offer as he sees fit.

Links:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/jhkimrpg/17595.html
http://www.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/2006/01/push-vs-pull.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/tigerbunny_db/1503.html