On Mighty Thews

A while ago on his blog Vincent posted a thing about the "Three Insights" that go into creating an RPG. He says:

First, you're saying something about the subject matter or genre of your game: something you think about adventure fiction, or swords & sorcery, or transhumanist sf, or whatever. Second, you're saying something about roleplaying as a practice, taking a position on how real people should collaborate under these circumstances. Third, you're sying something about real live human nature.

Here's the insights of my game "On Mighty Thews", which will be published this year.

1) Pulp fantasy like Conan, Tarzan, and all the derivative stuff like Jongor and Throngor and so on is basically about "Man's" position between civilisation and nature. Leiber, and then later Moorcock, were more about the tension between predestination and free will. What these things have in common is that the philosophical contradictions exist within the protagonist (Tarzan is a white man raised in the jungle, Conan is a savage mastering the ways of civilisation) but are never resolved within the protagonist. Tarzan never chooses the jungle or civilisation. Conan remains unchanged by his adventures in the civilised world. Elric never meets his fate. Instead, the protagonists inflict their contradictions on the world around them. The adventures are a lens for examining the contradiction at the core of the protagonist.

2) Creativity is kind of a product of the friction between freedom and constraint. Everyone contributing a small, obvious step can create a big, unexpected whole. The tension between protagonists trying to get what they want, and the world standing in their way creates a canvas for players to create a story.

3) I think people are the sum of their actions. We don't have an "inherant nature", and there isn't a "true" self. We exist as competing narratives and the expressions of such. We are what other people think of us.

Until recently, I think I struggled to realise these three insights well in the context of the game. Especially the first. The game was functioning well at producing interesting characters, and good plot. It flows well, with the creative burden passing around the table. But the story of most games never really exceeded pastiche. It was an imitation of a sword-and-sorcery story, rather than an original composition.

But a small change in the rules has, I think, changed all that.

In "On Mighty Thews" you start play by making a map of the world in which the game will take place. Everyone draws a couple of things on the map, and you end up with an exciting world of adventure and mystery. But it always felt a little flat. Sometimes there'd be original and compelling additions, but often they were kind of uninteresting. What was missing was the symbolic import of the locations on the map - their meaning in the world.

I've always been fascinated by old maps of the world - the way the geography was organised into a culturally-specific structure. Roads radiating from Rome. The Vatican as the center of the know world. Christian nations surrounded by the infidel. I wanted some of that symbolic meaning for my maps in "On Mighty Thews".

Characters in On Mighty Thews have a "d20 trait" which is the theme their character exposits. A character with the trait "Violent" will get a small advantage for every scene in which they are violent, and a large bonus for individual actions in which they are non-violent. Through play we see a picture of a person halfway between violence and non-violence. They are neither one nor the other.

My new rule for On Mighty Thews is that before you start drawing your map of the world, you mark "poles" on the map, and write your characters' d20 traits next to those poles. Things on the map near the poles take on the nature of that trait. People who live near the pole of Violence have a culture steeped in violence, while people grow more peaceful as you travel away from it. In this way, the themes of the characters are writ large in the world around them. Their tension becomes not just an internal tension , but a literal struggle between forces in the world. The characters are outsiders, not fitting into any part of the world with ease. They live on borders, they travel, they are wanderers and adventurers, bearing with them the inevitable contradictions of the world around them.

Mountain Witch

Last night was the first session of a planned four-session game of the Mountain Witch. TMW's a bit passe now it seems, since everyone's played it so many times, and even I've played it a lot, though this is the first multi-session game of it I've played.

There are things about the game though, which I think are still very interesting in play, and that aren't really present in many other games. Specifically, the way that the Dark Fates create a frisson of secrecy around characters actions, how everything the characters do and say is imbued with a deeper significance because it all gives clues to the Dark Fates, is surprisingly enjoyable even after playing the game a number of times.

I think multi-session play definitely makes the game shine. The limited scenario makes it a tempting game for scenario play, but the development of characters that comes across multiple sessions is adding so much to the game.

With four sessions to play with, I let the first session build very slowly, with almost no conflicts at all. We started play with the Ronin showing up in a grimy sakeya in the village at the foot of the mountain. The terrified villagers make their offer, and the Ronin each accepts. This let the players introduce their character in interesting and often significant ways. Some of them were clearly just in it for the money, while others appeared to genuinely care for the villagers.

We left on a cliffhanger, with the hostess of a dilapidated teahouse who had taken the Ronin in for the night transforming into her Ogre husband. Suitably bizarre for Japanese myth, and certainly a surprise for the Ronin, who were taking an onsen after a hearty meal of the local specialty, live nore sore.

KKKKKK

That's Kazekami Kyoko Kills Kublai Khan, not Kabbalistic Kleptomaniacs Kidnap Ku Klux Klansmen, or anything else.

I'm playing it with a friend on wave, and enjoying the heck out of it all over again. Playing Kyoko instead of the Khan is making me appreciate games with different rules for different character types, and the whole structure of the game, which feels like a kind of shadow-boxing or Capoeira display, is making me thing about Mo's "Push and Pull" in a way that makes it super relevant to game design.

I keep thinking that the game shouldn't work, that there's nothing to push against, that I'll fall over, and yet it keeps working, just fine. As a rule, I dislike games that are just free creation of fiction, without tension or consequences. And yet the game has subtleties that make it work, that provide friction and consequence.

Too much out-of-play discussion would collapse the game, I think, turning it into just another creative writing exercise. But the uncertainty of expectations, the tension between your desires for the story, the other player's desires, and then the sexual nature of the content, preserves a feeling that each statement is a concrete "move" in a game where something real is at stake.

Alien World discovered in Math

http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html

Woah!

For the Story's Sake

There's this pernicious misconception that's been around for a while and which has always kind of bugged me. A few threads on Story Games recently have brought that misconception out into the open, and crystallised my thoughts on the issue.

The misconception I'm talking about is the idea that Story Now play is about doing "what's best for the story". The idea goes something like this:

Simulationists are all about "what's realistic?" or "what fits with the genre"
and Gamists are all "what will make me win?", Narrativists are always asking
"what's best for the story?"

Now aside from the stupid idea that creative agendas are a label you can stick on people, what's dumb about this is the fact that asking "what's best for the story?" is completely, directly, and unambiguously the opposite of Story Now play. Play in which the players are focused on creating a "good story" as the point of play is directly incompatible with Story Now play.

That seems kind of counter intuitive.

But it's not! The whole deal with Story Now play is that no one, not the GM, not the players, not anyone, knows what the story you're creating is going to be about, how it will eventually resolve the premise (if it does), and whether the story will eventually have a happy ending or a sad one. All this shit is up in the air. We don't even really know much about the genre of the story we're telling (There's a whole digression here about how genres are things that are retroactively applied to creative works, rather than a formula to be emulated, unless you're doing pastiche).

In Story Now play, it's impossible to know what will make the story "good".

So no one gets to say what the story is about, until it's done, until it comes out in play. If we knew what would make the story "good" we wouldn't be exploring a premise, we'd be emulating a genre. And yeah, sometimes that means that the story is going to suck a little. There'll be times when everyone will wish that the NPC hadn't got his head shot off, or that the dice had come down some other way, but we stick with how it happened in the fiction, because that's the contract we all made with each other when we started playing. We agreed that we'd see this thing through to the end, play by the rules, and live with it.

A "good story" is a shield for players to hide behind when they don't want the responsibility of making a statement in play. My character in Dogs doesn't slap a young woman NPC because I've decided that would titillate the other players. He does it because I'm saying right now that that's how he rolls. He's a guy who will slap a woman right in the face, and you have to deal with that. I'm judging him in my own mind, thinking "Fuck me, this guy is an ass", but I'm also thinking "I can't be honest to who this character is and not have this come out in play". And when the other players' characters judge mine, and find that he's not good enough to be a Dog, I agree with them. But it's not just something I thought would be "cool" in the moment. It was me saying "Here's a guy who, given this power over other people, thinks he's got the right to slap a woman in the face". And the other players are saying "Here are some people, given the same power, who won't cross that line."

It's us, the players, having a conversation about morality and power and the right to judge, and we're doing it through the medium of the game, and it's only possible because we stand behind our portrayals of the characters, and we don't let some idea about what's "good for the story" get in the way of that.

My character in Dogs, Michael, decided to stop being a Dog in our game last Thursday. It was tough, surprising for a lot of players, and the first real sign of the wear that the job is having on the Dogs' faith. Michael struggled to overcome his weakness, but he couldn't do it, and he knew it. He asked another Dog for help, and she told him she didn't think he was good enough either. It was harsh, and awesome. And none of us ever caved to what was "best for the story". There were panicked looks about the table as we discovered what was at stake in the conflict. I think Malcolm and Steve were worried that we'd somehow gone too far, that we should pull it back somehow. But we stayed on course. We saw it through to the end. And it was good.

Dogs Interview

I don't normally listen to podcasts, mostly because I don't have time, but I've been home sick with the Bacon Fever the last few days, so I gave a few a listen.

Since we're playing Dogs at the moment, I checked out this interview by "ninjas vs pirates" with Vincent regarding Dogs.

I was impressed with the interview. They'd clearly done their homework, because they asked a bunch of questions that had popped up in Story Games threads from the previous couple of weeks. Vincent was cogent as always (is it just my New Zealand ear, or does he sound just like Adam from Mythbusters?). I think what I found most interesting was how they asked about specific mechanics, and how that contributed to the way the game plays. That was interesting from the perspective of playing Dogs, and from the perspective of designing games.

For my own play of Dogs, the question about "what's at stake" in conflicts was the most relevant. In our last game, we'd had a conflict where it took us a long time to figure out exactly what was at stake. I think we came to the right conclusion in the end, but some of the advice in the interview would have helped.

I'm definitely going to check out part two of the interview.

"Roleplaying" in RPGs

I've been having a frustrating couple of weeks with Story Games. It seems like the interesting threads with good topics get ignored, while bickering and inane banter just piles up the comments. I guess I'm mostly frustrated because I feel like I've made some interesting comments which haven't had any kind of useful response. So in other words, I'm feeling whiny because I haven't been getting enough attention.

Rob Bohl started an interesting thread about encountering players for whom "roleplaying" was an undesirable impediment to the process of playing roleplaying games. The thread (and my comments in it) didn't get the attention I think it deserved, so I'm blogging about it here.

This is largely a semantic issue, which usually means it's boring and pointless, but I thought it was a good opportunity to expand on a thought that had been percolating in the back of my mind for a while.

I think that "roleplaying", in the sense that the gamer Rob is talking about means it, is best described as a set of techniques. An (incomplete) list of these techniques would look something like this:

• Saying aloud what your character says
• Thinking about and describing "what your character would do"
• Having your character interact socially with other characters in the fiction
• Describing non-essential information about what your character does

These techniques are often very important to people's experience of roleplaying games, to the point that games that don't support these techniques are often described as "not roleplaying games".

Defining what a roleplaying game is is a notoriously difficult subject, because, I think, there's no clear consensus on which techniques are essential to defining a game as such. For example, there are a large number of techniques that are employed in "traditional" RPGs but not in some newer games, leading some people to lable those new games "not RPGs". Some of these techniques include:

• Each player controlling one in-game "piece"
• Increasing in-game effectiveness
• Mechanics for simulating violence
• A "GM" or similar

I think most people likely to be reading this would agree that none of those techniques are essential to a roleplaying game. I'd like to argue, therefore, that the techniques from the first list are not essential either. They're all techniques that are commonly associated with RPGs, but none of them alone make or break the definition.

So are there any techniques that are essential to something being an RPG or not? The best I can come up with is the idea of a shared imagined space.

"Shared Imagined Space" is the idea that the players all contribute to a shared understanding of what is happening in a fictional space. In short, it's players describing fictional stuff about what's happening in the game, and the other players all agreeing that yes, that is happening.

But Shared Imagined Space itself doesn't make an RPG, right? Otherwise you could describe stuff happening in your game of Monopoly, like "oh, the hat and the iron are getting married" or whatever, and make it an RPG. Some people play a lot of games like this (especially games like "Bang!" and "Lunch Money"), but I don't think that makes them RPGs.

Or maybe it does. I don't know, but it doesn't sit easy with me, mostly because I hate playing games like this.

So another way to think about it, that gets around that problem, is to define RPGs by the use of the technique of Shared Imagined Space with impact on the mechanics of the game.

In other words, you describe stuff, and what you describe has an impact on how the rules of the game work. Purely based on judgements about the fictional content of the game, you make decisions about how to impliment the rules of the game.

That's a pretty controversial definition though. It excludes some indie favourites like "Contenders", and nearly excludes "My Life With Master", and I would argue (based on my previous post) that it comes close to excluding D&D4E as well.

So it's close, but not quite right. It's floating around in there though. It's something about how the Shared Imagined Space impacts on the game, or on the decisions that the players make.

In the end though, I don't think it's a very useful thing to have a definition of what is, or is not, an RPG. I think it's more useful to look at the whole list of techniques I described above, and look at a game as having more or less "RPG qualities". That's a useful definition I think, because it frees up thinking about designing and playing games. There is no technique that is "essential" to an RPG, and there is no technique that is forbidden. Not all RPGs use the same techniques, and when you play an RPG, it is useful to be aware of the techniques it supports.