Victory Is Mine!

"There are no winners or losers in role-playing games."

That's a bit of accepted wisdom that's been with us for a long time. It's been said so many times that it has been granted the status of truth by virtue of repetition. But is it really true?

Some people, at this point, will generally point out: "The goal of role-playing is to have fun, so everybody wins if you have fun!"

Well, sure. Having fun is one of the best reasons for why we get together to play games. But having fun is the goal of games like San Juan and Ticket to Ride and Settlers of Cattan too. And those games still have winners and losers.

Another Definition
But let's go back to that statement for a moment: "The goal of role-playing is to have fun..."

The word 'goal' is hanging up there like beautiful fruit, and I can't let it pass. For our purposes, Wikipedia has summarized some of the game definition ideas of Chris Crawford, noted video game developer, founder of The Journal of Computer Game Design, and author of The Art of Computer Game Design when he was manager of Atari's Games Research Group.

In his book, Chris Crawford on Game Design, Crawford defines the term game (p. 6) using a series of dichotomies:

1. Creative expression is art if made for its own beauty, and entertainment if made for money. (This is the least rigid of his definitions. Crawford acknowledges that he often chooses a creative path over conventional business wisdom, which is why he rarely produces sequels to his games.)

2. A piece of entertainment is a plaything if it is interactive. Movies and books are cited as examples of non-interactive entertainment.

3. If no goals are associated with a plaything, it is a toy. (Crawford notes that by his definition, (a) a toy can become a game element, if the player makes up rules, and (b) The Sims and SimCity are toys, not games.) If it has goals, a plaything is a challenge.

4. If a challenge has no “active agent against whom you compete,” it is a puzzle; if there is one, it is a conflict. (Crawford admits this is a subjective test. Some games with noticeably algorithmic AI can be played as puzzles; see, for example, Pac-Man#Ghosts.)

5. Finally, if the player can only outperform the opponent, but not attack them to interfere with their performance, the conflict is a competition. (Competitions include racing and figure skating.) However, if attacks are allowed, then the conflict qualifies as a game.

Crawford also notes (ibid.) these other definitions:

* “A form of play with goals and structure.” (Kevin Maroney)
* “A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal.” (Greg Costikyan)
* “An activity with some rules engaged in for an outcome.” (Eric Zimmerman)

As we can see, Crawford, Maroney and Costikyan make 'goal' a central element of their definitions. We might also be able to argue that Zimmerman's 'outcome' is equivalent, but I think the point stands regardless.

So, for our purposes here, let's focus on item 3 in Crawford's series. However, if you're interested in discussing other items in the series and how they apply to role-playing games, I'll consider it on-topic in the comments section.

And the Goal Is?
Do role-playing games have goals associated with them? Largely, I think the answer is yes. Indeed, what I find particularly exciting about role-playing games is that groups and individual players have the ability to define these goals for themselves in many games, each and every time they play. However, and here's where this whole argument might get a little controversial, I think that creative agenda and GNS have an important role to play in this discussion. (If you are unfamiliar with these terms, I strongly suggest reading the articles Narrativism: Story Now, Gamism: Step On Up, and Simulationism: The Right to Dream. Also, the RPG Theory Glossary is always a useful tool.)

The definitions of goals can be many and varied. The goals could include: kill the dragon, defeat the dungeon, confront my brother, carve out a fief with my own hand, etc.

Old-school gamist play excels at this stuff. When groups shouldered their way into the pit of the slave lords or the web of the spider queen, they knew quite well who won and who lost, who made it out alive and who didn't, who "made it through" the Temple of Elemental Evil and who didn't.

In my view, protagonist (or narrativist) play is closely intertwined with gamist play. I would like to suggest that many of us who spend a lot of time focused on protagonist play have instinctively latched onto tools like kickers and flags because they are ways of explicitly expressing our goals. They are tools that create something for us to resolve through play, whether that resolution is concrete (like carving out a fief) or more intangible (resolving hatred for a brother).The 'win state' is resolving the flag with the player's desired outcome, and the 'lose state' is failing to achieve the desired outcome. But both are fun.

I want to tentatively suggest, with full acknowledgment that I am not an expert on the simulationist creative agenda, that 'goal' may be a core point of divergence between the simulationist creative agenda and the gamist and narrativist agendas. It seems to me that if simulationist creative agendas incorporate goals beyond exploration in the sense we're talking about here (and I want to reiterate that I am by no means stating categorically that they don't), those goals may be too impalpable for the purpose of determining a winner or loser. But I'd really like to see some discussion on this issue.

Here's what Crawford has to say, in The Art of Computer Game Design:

Games versus Simulations
"The distinction between objective representation and subjective representation is made clear by a consideration of the differences between simulations and games. A simulation is a serious attempt to accurately represent a real phenomenon in another, more malleable form. A game is an artistically simplified representation of a phenomenon. The simulations designer simplifies reluctantly and only as a concession to material and intellectual limitations. The game designer simplifies deliberately in order to focus the player's attention on those factors the designer judges to be important. The fundamental difference between the two lies in their purposes. A simulation is created for computational or evaluative purposes; a game is created for educational or entertainment purposes.(There is a middle ground where training simulations blend into educational games.) Accuracy is the sine qua non of simulations; clarity the sine qua non of games. A simulation bears the same relationship to a game that a technical drawing bears to a painting. A game is not merely a small simulation lacking the degree of detail that a simulation possesses; a game deliberately suppresses detail to accentuate the broader message that the designer wishes to present. Where a simulation is detailed a game is stylized.

"Consider, for example, the differences between a flight simulator program for a personal computer and the coin op game RED BARON. Both programs concern flying an airplane; both operate on microcomputer systems. The flight simulator demonstrates many of the technical aspects of flying: stalls, rolls, and spins, for example RED BARON has none of these. Indeed, the aircraft that the player files in RED BARON is quite unrealistic. It cannot be stalled, rolled, spun, or dived into the ground. When the stick is released it automatically rights itself. It is incorrect to conclude from these observations that RED BARON is inferior to the flight simulator. RED BARON is not a game about realistic flying; it is a game about flying and shooting and avoiding being shot. The inclusion of technical details of flying would distract most players from the other aspects of the game. The designers of RED BARON quite correctly stripped out technical details of flight to focus the player's attention on the combat aspects of the game. The absence of these technical details from RED BARON is not a liability but an asset, for it provides focus to the game. Their absence from a flight simulator would be a liability."

In Conclusion
As game designers and as game players, I think we can benefit from ignoring the accepted wisdom about winning and losing in role-playing games. I think we can make our games better by spending some time focusing on win-lose conditions. Do our games have victory conditions? Should they? If they do have victory conditions, how narrowly or broadly should we define them? Is there an end state we can use to create tension with the victory condition? Can players measure their progress toward the victory condition and end state? How? Can that measurement be used as a tool in pursuit of a player's creative agenda? Are any special powers granted to a player or players upon achieving the victory condition? What about players that fall short of the victory condition?

The Frozen Stars Reflected in Our Eyes Herald the Void

And now the preview of Burning Empires: The Iron Empires Forged on the Burning Wheel is up. Wow! It's an incredible feeling. It took us nine months to get to this point. And the last few have been a hard push. It feels like I can take a breath again.

Of course, now we've got to sell it!

Anyway, we've gone all-out on this one. Burning Wheel-sized: 5.5" wide x 8.5" tall. Hard cover, matte finish. Full color interiors on glossy paper, full bleed. 656 pages. Did I mention that all the art (paintings and sketches) are courtesy of Christopher Moeller, whom you might recognize from his work on A League of One and the covers to Lucifer?

It's going to look amazing! And it just rocks in play.

The Sixth Extinction Crept Up Slowly, Like Sunlight Through the Shutters, As We Looked Back In Respect

So it's been ages since I last posted here at the Well. It's not because I've had nothing to say. This beast has been a merciless master.

You can find out more about it here.

In any case, stay tuned! I'll be back as soon as I've managed to replenish my reserves a bit.

The Algebra of Setting in RPGs

I'm going to go out on a limb here and represent protagonist play (or thematic play or narrativist play, if you prefer) as a mathematical equation: Setting + Situation + Player = Story.

But where's character, you ask? Well that gets into what I want to do with this post. I'm going to focus in on setting here. I may explore situation at a later date, but for now, I think Chris Chinn has got it covered. And player? Well, I think that's all over what's happening in the Indie blogosphere and at The Forge. But maybe we'll revisit down the road in a more focused way.

So let's look at Setting. To continue our little RPG algebra: Color + Character + System = Setting.

Color

I probably put color first because I want to start trouble. I think color is probably the element of setting that most gamers value most (if dollars spent are any indication; see below), and at the same time, I think it is the least important of the three (though still essential!).

Before I do anything else, I need to define what I mean by color. Color consists of the details that allow the participants in the game to imagine a location and how it works. It's the stuff that makes us feel as if we're there. When we describe the leaves of the trees in the elven forest, the population of a village, the creaking churn of the watermill wheel, the clothes your character is wearing, or the manner of succession for the kingdom, that's color.

One of my favorite Robert E. Howard Conan stories is Red Nails (if you haven't read it, I urge you to follow the link and read it now. It's good stuff!) Howard is a master at throwing in bits of color that flavor everything: the dragons in the forest, Derketa's apples, the roofed city of Xotalanc, the Door of the Eagle, and the black pillar with its red nails. The details are cool, but they're not the soul of the story. We could remove those details and completely replace them and it wouldn't alter the core story, although it would affect the feel.

In RPGs, color is introduced by players and GMs to fill in the gaps and smooth out the seams in the imagined environment we create together. Those details are integral to making the play environment feel real to us, but they don't really serve any other purpose and the game won't fall apart if they're not there, though parts might feel a little flat. Situation can grow out of color (like the method of a kingdom's succession), if the players become interested. That's the point at which we stray over into Chris Chinn's Flag framing. Mostly, though, color remains color.

Character

In 2001, Ron Edwards fired a shot at a little RPG sacred cow called scenario when he released The Sorcerer's Soul, a supplement for his game Sorcerer.

The shot took the form of his technique for Relationship Mapping, in which you graphically map out sex and blood relationships between NPCs in a game (with lines of obligation as secondary ties). While Relationship Mapping's primary purpose is to prep for scenarios (for which, see Chris' excellent work), it also makes a strong statement: Characters are the most important aspect of setting in a session (mostly).

Not the description of room 21, not the population of the village of Mistmere, and not the type of trees in the elven kingdom. That's all color. But the stuff that really sees use is all about characters.

In "Red Nails," Derketa's apples, the dragons in the forest, the roofed city of Xotalanc, and the rest really set the atmosphere. But the meat of the story stuff is about Valeria, Techotl, Burning Skull, Olmec, Tascela and Tolkemec. Everything else is incidental, dashed off in just a line or two of prose. Those characters and the ties that bind them are the elements that make the story work, and are also what would make "Red Nails" a playable and awesome RPG scenario (I've done it and it rocks!).

The relationships between characters draw us in as people and they make situations "grabby." Spoiler alert for those that didn't take my advice and read "Red Nails" earlier: When it is revealed that Tascela has ordered Olmec killed in a horrible way, it kicks us in the guts because they were lovers. When Tolkemec takes his vengeance, the depth of his hatred makes sense to us because of his love ties to Tascela. The whole feud fills us with horror when we realize that the two tribes are essentially one large, dysfunctional family that has spent decades murdering, raping, and torturing each other in the dark. And to place a protagonist in context: When Conan and Valeria arrive, their very presence throws this whole crazy, fucked up culture into a frenzy because it topples the status quo.

Or, if we look at The Lord of the Rings, relationships are what drive our interest in Aragorn-Arwen-Elrond, or Boromir-Faramir-Denethor, or Arwen-Aragorn-Eowyn-Faramir, or Eowyn-Eomer-Theoden. Layer on obligations and the tensions leap out at us.

In protagonist play, dealing with this stuff and the way situation affects the web of relationships is the core of play.

I believe this stuff points to a failure in many of the RPG setting books that so many gamers buy. Mostly, they seem to be pure color. In order to become more than that, they must generate investment by all the players involved (it's not enough to just get the GM invested), and the group must then see the way to translate that color into situation.

I suspect but certainly can't prove that only rare groups are able to generate anything more than casual investment from details provided by such setting material. I think some Tekumel, Glorantha, Harn and Middle Earth fans who are really, really jazzed about the settings and make them core features of play may be able to do it. For the most part, though, I think those bits of color contained in such books are not enough. In my experience, only the broadest strokes of color from such books get used in most actual RPG sessions. The rest never actually enter the shared imagined space (SIS), but get filled in retroactively by individual players according to their investment in the setting. (This paragraph and the one preceding it are all conjecture, by the way. Feel free to tear them apart -- as if you need an invitation.)

Can you sense the big, fat except lurking here?

System

Except when that setting color is reinforced by mechanics.

Mechanical details bring setting color to the forefront in a way that color introduced by players and GMs alone does not.

For instance, in Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard, buttes and snowy mountains are pretty easy to forget about when playing, but the fact that life is never more than a few words away from the greasy smoke of black powder is in your face at all times through the escalation mechanics. The fact that these people are your kin is in your face at all times through the spent (and unspent) relationship dice. Your authority and stature as a Dog is in your face every time you call on your Coat's dice in a conflict. That stuff is potent setting.

In Burning Wheel, life is cheap and blood spills easily because of the Fight! and Injury mechanics. Magic is potent as hell according to the spells and dangerous to the caster according to the Tax rules. Miracles are incredibly potent and extremely rare, according to the Faith rules. Grief crushes elves who see too much according to the Grief rules. Words are weapons as potent or more potent than steel, according to the Duel of Wits. Nobles and others who actually own land are wealthy and privileged, while peasants are poor and probably half-starved, due to the Resources and Lifestyle Maintenance rules.

In Conspiracy of Shadows, everyone feels the weight of impending doom that hangs over everything, due to the Doom mechanics. We all know that trust in your fellows is essential for survival and will lead to an inevitable knife in the back, due to the Trust mechanics. We know that dark, ugly magic lurks just below the surface, and Taint will inevitably corrupt those who use it, due to the Witchblood and Taint mechanics.

These bits of color are reinforced over and over again as we turn to the rules to resolve what's happening in play. They become the most potent color in the game.

Conclusions

So what to do with all of this? As designers, I think it provides a few core principles that we should consider when creating:

1. We need to determine what color is essential to expressing what the game is about and what color simply exists to provide flavor and texture to the experience of the game.

2. Color that is essential to what the game is about should be expressed in mechanics.

3. Relationships seem to be fundamental to protagonist play and are key to explaining how to build play with our games.

4. Pure color gets players excited. Even if it's not central to play, it's important and shouldn't be neglected.

For players of RPGs (including GMs), I think it also provides a few core principles:

1. System Matters. Pick the right one for the job. It's important to pay attention to the things that a game's mechanics encourage or discourage.

2. When prepping for a game, allocate the majority of your time for developing NPCs and their relationships.

3. Don't neglect color either. Color shores up the SIS; it's the mortar of the imagination.

Manifesto Games and Our Pole Star

Are you familiar with Greg Costikyan's Manifesto Games? It's a new venture he launched in September with his partner, Dr. Johnny L. Wilson.

But Greg's all about video games these days, right? What am I doing talking about this here? Well, those of us who have spent time at The Forge in the past few years ought to appreciate what he's trying to do. He wants to build a strong indie scene for video games.

From 'Designer X's' Scratchware Manifesto:

The machinery of gaming has run amok.

Instead of serving creative vision, it suppresses it. Instead of encouraging innovation, it represses it. Instead of taking its cue from our most imaginative minds, it takes its cue from the latest month's PC Data list. Instead of rewarding those who succeed, it penalizes them with development budgets so high and royalties so low that there can be no reward for creators. Instead of ascribing credit to those who deserve it, it seeks to associate success with the corporate machine.

It is time for revolution.

And from Greg's Gaming Needs an Indy Label:

But we need more. We need a company committed to publishing truly original, offbeat, cool product and building the channel for its distribution--instead of shoveling the same old crap to the same old stores.

Gaming needs an indy label. For the sake of its own health, to act as basic R&D for the entire field, to find new gaming styles that can attract a large audience. Because development costs continue to spiral upward faster than unit sales and we have to find a way to break that iron cycle. But most important, because I'm tired of the same old same old and want to play something really cool and new.

These ideas, I think, mirror what many of us who have participated at The Forge or worked on the games discussed there feel about table-top, pen-and-paper role-playing games. Perhaps attracting a large audience is not at the fore of our thinking (though I doubt we would turn up our noses at one), but the spirit rings true.

So, we've managed, with the help of guys that really broke ground, like Ron, to lay a foundation. We've found ways to make games ourselves without selling our IP to others, to establish the beginnings of a language for discussing what it is that we're doing and trying to do, to get the product out there to people that play, and to begin marketing that product to the people that are open to it.

Clearly it's possible for us to do all of these things better. And maybe there are other things we haven't even begun to address yet. So that's the purpose of this post, to ask the questions: what's next for us as a movement of people that are trying to create and innovate and as people running our own businesses? What do we need to do to improve? How do we market better? How do we distribute our product better?

This is just a brainstorm. Any and all ideas are welcome.

Immersionism, Accepted Wisdom and Internal Conflict

Vincent made a fascinating observation today:

"Let's go back to the jumping-off place here, then, which is playing your character in another character's memory. Really what jazzes me about it is that it's a trick like frickin' Matt Wilson's trick: it makes us think of our characters as characters, so we approach our stories as stories, not as made-up journalism."

Vincent reminded me of a post I promised months ago about internal conflict in roleplaying games. I want to see more about what Vincent means by "made-up journalism" as that's not necessarily the phrase that I would use. I would instead propose that it makes us think of our characters as characters, rather than seeing our characters as people. That is, independent people with their own existences outside of us, the people that play them. And yeah, that means I'm diving into the whole, ugly immersion argument.

So, for years, in roleplaying, the accepted wisdom was that immersion was the be-all-and-end-all of roleplaying. Getting into character was the most prized skill of any roleplayer, and he that could go more deeply into character was a better roleplayer. The idea is still common today, and is especially strong among LARPers. The Turku School of Roleplaying, based in Finland, has taken the immersionist idea to great lengths.

Obviously the idea of deep immersion holds great appeal for many players. I can't deny that. But I don't accept that it's the be-all-and-end-all of roleplaying either. I think getting into my character's skin is fun at times, but if I am constantly experiencing my character's life during play, I can't simultaneously appreciate his story.

In other words, I'm suggesting that I can't 'be' my character and think of him as a character in a story at the same time. And generally, I'd rather think of my character as a character in a story most of the time. That allows me to place him in situations that would be terrifying or traumatizing for him, but entertaining for me: I will unhesitatingly put him into the sort of blood and guts conflicts that characters in stories get embroiled in, and real people try like hell to avoid. It also allows me to place him and his actions in relation to the other players (including the GM) and their characters. When I keep an idea of him as a character rather than a person, then I retain the awareness necessary to use him to set up something interesting for a fellow player's character.

The latter is especially important to me. I find that I enjoy games the most when everyone at the table is conscious of and invested in all the protagonists (player characters) and their story arcs. So Mayuran is just as interested in seeing Alexander's character's story play out in a satisfying way as Alexander is. And they're both invested in the shape of my character's story. It's a very different experience than deep immersion, but I find the resulting play to be more entertaining and more rewarding.

And the crux of it is communication. The players need to be in constant communication, as players, about what they are liking and not liking, whether they feel something is stepping on their toes or not, etc. And here's where internal conflict comes in (I bet you thought I'd forgotten!).

Internal conflict is a staple of comics and novels. We get inside the character's head and see what makes him tick. In those media, internal conflict is easy to convey: the writer/author shares it with the audience/reader. 'I'll never be good enough for her, Marius thought.' Simple.

But it gets tricky in a roleplaying game. Our instinct, especially if we've grown up with the immersionist thinking, is not to share the conflict, but simply experience it. But that creates a problem for me, because then only the player of the character gets to appreciate the conflict. It exists only in that player's mind, much as Scott's Outsider-ness existed only in his own mind.

So how do you open it up to allow the other people to appreciate the internal conflict?

The first step is to recognize the lesson of the comics and novels. The writer has to communicate the conflict to the audience. In the case of a gaming group, the writer is the character's player, and the audience is the rest of the group.

Once we recognize that, we have some choices that can turn internal conflict into a real vehicle for serious play in RPGs.

First, we have the soliloquy, a favorite solution in the theater for dealing with this very problem. An excellent example of a soliloquy solution is the Thought Balloon from Michael Miller's phenomenal game, With Great Power (fair disclosure: I edited it). Whenever your character is experiencing an internal conflict, you grab the Thought Balloon, hold it over your head, and express the character's thoughts to the rest of the group. Once that happens, the rest of the group is aware of the conflict and is able to bring their resources to bear in stressing that conflict. It's fantastic.

The other method is to find a way to externalize the conflict. Try to take the conflict that is inside the character, and show it with an NPC relationship. One of the easiest ways is to develop a flag about the conflict. Flags are game elements that communicate a player's desires for his character to the GM and the rest of the group. For instance, let's say you have a character that is all about the following: "I believe life is sacred and no one has the right to kill, but some of these bad people might really have to die ."

In this case, I, as the GM would encourage the player of the character to look for an external factor to represent the obligation toward holding life sacred, whether it's a connection to a family that holds this philosophy, or a temple/church, or what have you. Once the group has that, they can start adding weight to the obligations. They can use their own scenes and characters to push the player's buttons for his character. If the player chooses to have his character kill, it's going to put the obligation in jeopardy. The nature of the relationship will have to change.

The GM, working with the other players, can create scenes that add to the obligation, juxtaposed with scenes that show that allowing these bad guys to live will spread disaster and death all around them. The climax comes at the point of serious choice: kill them and betray yourself, or stay true to yourself and allow them to live.

The group can also play up the human side of the villain. Show their obligations to their own family, the good things they do. And juxtapose it with scenes of the violence and horror they spread. Eliminating these people will stop the devastation, but will also destroy the lives of innocents around them. Now the climactic choice has much more weight.

All this works best when the entire group is on board to make this stuff happen; to bring that character or church or whatever into center stage whenever appropriate.

I'm Done with This Guy!

Neat post from Alexander over at his blog today.

"One of the very exciting things about (maybe I'll just cave and call them 'Story Games', which I am not sure I like) is that when they're done right, they allow us players to tale those things that our subconscious has popped up as 'creativity', and to address them in the context of the game and story. The setting is usually sufficiently abstracted from our reality that it is safe for us to explore modes of behaviour that we would not otherwise use, but as Bettelheim suggests fairy stories do for children, the scenes and events still resonate for us in a meaningful way. When we've explored them enough, we can put that character away (or we'll find that the character is now 'boring'). This is healthy."

I'm Done with This Guy! is, in many ways, the mirror image of the Eight-page Character Background.

I see recognizing that you are done with a character as healthy, functional play, whereas the 'eight-page character background guy' attempts to bring his character into play at the moment that 'I'm done with this guy! guy' is hanging him up.

Warning! Extensive Character Background

For the past few days, RPG.net has been discussing "I just wrote an eight page character history."

For many, a massive exercise in character backstory is seen as the hallmark of an invested player, something to be admired and encouraged. While I won't claim that all such backstories are dysfunctional, I do suspect that a great many of them are.

In a nutshell, I think that many instances of multipage character background are symptomatic of what I tend to call "damaged player syndrome." These are players, often quite creative ones, who have repeatedly had their creative contributions stomped on by GMs, or occasionally fellow players. More explicitly, I mean that their attempts to put their own creative stamp on a game have either been ignored (e.g., "No one cares about the brother who left you for dead!") or their contributions are deliberately sabotaged (e.g., "your lothario attempts to look suave as he flirts with the queen. You failed the seduction roll? Ok, you spill wine down the front of her dress.")

So let's say that a guy comes up with a character. And part of getting really into that character is imagining how cool he is. He might imagine the scene where all his wizard's careful plotting comes to fruition, and he's able to set up his former master before the Council of Wizards, finally gaining his revenge. Or he might imagine his sailor lashing himself to the helm as he attempts to ride out a massive storm as a kraken rises out of the depths. Often a player will imagine a number of these scenes. This is the stuff that makes a player care about his character! That's incredibly important! GMs and other players should fuck with it at their peril.

So what if the wizard's player never even gets the opportunity to exercise his political muscle because the GM or other players aren't willing to go in that direction (or just ignore the implict request to go in that direction), or the GM doesn't provide any opportunities for the sailor's player to take the story onto the high seas? The players start to feel frustrated. Even worse, what if the GM makes your wizard look like a political hack, and has the former master see right through your machinations before you even approach getting to the cool stuff. Now, not only are you not ever going to get the cool scene you imagined, but the GM is literally making your character look like a schmuck, which is totally against that awesome concept you were imagining when you created the character.

As I mentioned above, this is the stuff that makes you care about your character. It's why you were excited to play him or her in the first place.

A natural reaction, then, is to attempt to codify the coolness you've been imagining by turning it into backstory, and thereby hardcoding it into the game's setting. That way, even if your the character's coolness never comes out in play, at least that coolness is "protected." Everyone that writes lengthy back story assumes that the GM (and possibly fellow players) will be eager to read the backstory and care about it as much as the writer. Hopefully, this time things will be different. This time they'll be really into your awesome character and let him be totally awesome in the game.

Naturally, to make everyone truly appreciate the coolness of your character, you've got to paint the coolest picture you can. And that means taking those scenes you've been imagining and making them part of the story. That way, they've already happened and no one can fuck with it.

The problem is that when all the cool stuff has already happened, it can't happen in play. All your character's issues are resolved and you'll never get that cathartic moment in play. Sure, you might develop some in play, but it's going to take a lot of fumbling around between you and the GM.

Players that have sunk into a protective shell this way are often difficult to draw out, even when they join a group that embraces everyone's creative input. But it can be done. And recognizing the signs, like the eight page character background, is often the first step.

Musings on the Role of Social Contract on Play Decisions

ScottM made an interesting response to Jere's post Musings on Social Contract in The 20' By 20' Room last week.

He wrote:
Your werewolf story reminds me of a similar situation I ran into not long ago. I was playing a character in a Buffy game who was an albino (I know, I know). What was in my mind when I chose that admittedly bizarre characteristic was a desire to explore -- in that foregrounded, metaphor-made-literal Buffy kind of way -- the issue of being physically marked as different, the issue of feeling like you were born an outsider, like you weren't given a choice about your nature, etc. (Said character was also, of course, a Slayer). I ended up pulling out of the game in part because I realized that what I wanted to explore with the character, and how I wanted to explore it, really wasn't fitting in with the rest of the game. Her outsider-ness was being constructed more as a psychological roadblock in her own mind than something which was externally true.

The last two sentences really struck me. This is a perfect example of how Social Contract, in the absence of textual rules concerning the issue, need to feed back into actual play to prevent dysfunction.

Scott had a very specific aim with this character: he wanted to explore character and the issue of being an outsider that has been marked as such by circumstances outside her control. Great! It's an interesting concept, and he's chosen to externalize this largely internal conflict (hoo is this the subject for another post) with a cue that can be used by everyone else at the table to bring the issue into the foreground.

But it fails. Why? As he puts it, "Her outsider-ness was being constructed more as a psychological roadblock in her own mind than something which was externally true."

How could Scott have gotten what he wanted out of this character? It seems to me that the missing component is an understanding by all the other players at the table as to what Scott wanted out of the character, and a commitment to helping Scott explore that in play?

In English: The other players (including the GM), needed to make Scott, as his character, feel like an outsider with their role-play. More than that, they needed to make him, in his character persona, feel like an outsider because she was marked!

Since that didn't happen (and to be fair, I'm only guessing here based on Scott's post) the only way for Scott to fullfill that aim in any way was to imagine it as "a psychological roadblock in her own mind."

This sort of thing cannot be done on one's own, regardless of one's "role-playing ability." It requires the group to come together in support.

Toward a Definition of Role-Playing Games

On the nerd boards lately, there's been quite a bit of wrangling over just what a role-playing game is. I believe that what we do as role-playing gamers is inherently different from what improvisational actors do. I believe a role-playing game is more than simply playing (or being) a role. It is, for instance, quite different than role-playing in its original (and continuing) incarnation as a tool for clinical therapy.

We should start with a definition. Here's the one that I propose:

A role-playing game is a game in which a group of players create a shared imagined space (SIS) and commit to exploring that SIS with purpose: addressing premise; establishing tactical supremacy; or focused exploration of character, setting, situation, system or color. The latter is often coupled with a concern for the internal logic and experiential consistency of that exploration (realism, etc.).

The core of that definition is that players of RPGs come together to create the SIS playing field for more than just amorphous fun. Each comes to the table with a purpose for that game. That purpose is the means by which a player aims to have fun. For that SIS to truly exist and be shared in the sense that we all have equal ownership of it, our purposes would ideally be the same, or at least compatible, so that they work with and support each other.

For instance, I can come to the table commited to exploring the premise, "Is vengeance an acceptable alternative to justice?" And my friend might come to the table committed to exploring what it's like to be a vigilante crimefighter. So long as we both have interest in supporting each others' purposes, we can probably generate some very satisfying play, although we may run into some friction here and there. I submit that we'll have the best experience if we are both committed to one or the other.

Establishing 'purpose' is part of what I consider to be the Social Contract, the rules (often unspoken) that govern the social interactions between the group. At the top level of the social contract is stuff like, "We don't talk about Mike and Jane's relationship troubles." "Colin is responsible for bringing the chips." "We wash any dishes that we use." But as we get closer to the level that contains "playing the game," it also includes stuff like "we're here to play this game because...[purpose]."

The actual mechanical rules of the game bridge the space between social contract and play. Rules are a fundamental part of the game aspect of role-playing games. If we accept that a role-playing game is a game in which a group of players create a shared imagined space (SIS) and commit to exploring that SIS with purpose, then it follows that the rules are the conditions (agreed upon as part of the social contract) by which players may change, add to, or challenge the content of that shared imagined space.

Here's a visual representation (by Ron Edwards at The Forge).

To make an analogy with a board game: The shared imagined space is the playing board, created by the group collectively. The rules of the game are the ways in which we have given each other the power to change, add to, or challenge each others' contributions to the playing board. The purpose is the method by which we hope to entertain ourselves and each other through this activity.

To reiterate, the core components of a role-playing game:

1. A shared imagined space

2. A commitment to exploring that shared imagined space with purpose

3. Rules through which we assign each other the power to change, add to, or challenge each other's contributions to the shared imagined space

Conflict Resolution vs. Task Resolution and Fudging Dice Rolls

From a post I made today at nerdnyc.com

I hate GM fudging and hidden rolls. I say put the dice on the table and let everyone weep at the outcome!

But seriously, if you play a game that gives you more latitude to determine what success or failure mean, you need never fudge another roll or hide the results.

Jenskot, I know you've been reading Vincent's blog, and this is pretty much what the whole Conflict Resolution vs. Task Resolution thing is all about. When a die roll is resolving a conflict rather than a task, you never need to fudge the results.

Over at the Forge, they suggest that everytime you go to the dice (or other method of Fortune, like cards), there are actually four steps that happen. They call this IIEE (Intent, Initiation, Execution, Effect).

So how does that help? I'm going to steal an example from Abzu to help illustrate. Let's say you're playing a fantasy game, and your character is in a castle and running from some guards. He comes to a locked door.

Step 1: Intent. You say, "I want to get through the door before the guards arrive!" That's your intent. That's what you're trying to achieve with your roll.

Step 2: Initiation. I, as the GM, ask you what skill (or trait, or however the system you're using judges these things) you're going to use to accomplish your intent. You say, "My lockpicking skill."

Cool! Now we have an Intent and have established the Task that you will use to accomplish that Intent. As a good GM, I'm going to help you qualify that by restating the risk (or stakes) for you and making sure you understand and agree.

"Your Intent is to get through the door before the guards arrive. If you fail the roll, the guards arrive before you get through the door. Cool?"

Step 3: Execution. You've consented to the risk. The dice hit the table. Failure!

Step 4: Effect. "You struggle with the lock, the pins are a bit rusty and you really have to push to slide them into place. Your heart is beating a mile a minute and sweat is trickling down your brow as the last tumbler falls into place! The lock clicks open! Just as you begin to tug the door open, two guards stumble around the corner, shouting, "Halt! Thief!"

See? The conflict in this situation was never about the lock at all. It was merely a complication, placed there as a problem to see if we can't eke a little more drama out of your escape attempt. In this case you failed the lockpicking roll, but that really had nothing to do with your Intent in the scene, so as the GM, I'm free to let you open the lock. Unfortunately, it took you long enough that the guards were able to catch up with you. Now we have another juicy conflict to deal with.

You can do this sort of thing with any system. However, some will support it better than others. For instance, Clinton R. Nixon's game, The Shadow of Yesterday, gives this sort of thing awesome support (and he explains IIEE pretty clearly). In his system, you cannot have a deadly conflict unless a player intentionally escalates things to a deadly degree.

The Kolat Tradition

I've been giving the Kolat Tradition in HeroQuest some thought, since James has decided to play a Kolating animist in our HeroQuest game. The trouble is there's very little information available about the Kolating Tradition, aside from this post.

So building on that, here's what I have so far:
The Kolat Tradition
The primary practice of Kolatings is The Seven Winds Practice. Primarily, The Seven Winds Practice has access to Air Spirits, Cold Spirits, and Weather Spirits. The Seven Winds are the Spirit Winds that Kolat controls: North, East, West, South, Above, Below, and No Wind. Of course, these winds are spirits, not the daimone winds controlled by the gods. But they may have similar characteristics. The Kolat Winds are erratic, and not usually strong. They may often carry bits of spirits, including disease spirits, ghosts, and nature spirits seeking to incarnate.

When he opens his Bag of Winds and releases the North Wind, Kolat is sometimes known as the Lord of Snows. North Wind spirits roam freely in winter. They are willful, but can be relied upon to blow a certain way when directed by a shaman. These spirits are similar to the Valind Storms sent by Valind and his minions in Darkness Season and early Storm Season.
North Wind Spirit magic: Blow Relentlessly, Freeze, Hate Summer, Howl.

The East Wind is the dry, savage wind that blows from Prax, scouring all before it. A component of the terrible Urox Storms that come to Dragon Pass at the most unpredictable times, Kolatings are often called upon to propitiate this wind, though it often blows when chaos is near.
East Wind Spirit magic: Dessicate, Scour with Sand, Blast Chaos.

The West Wind is a strong, warm, and moist wind that is generally considered the most gentle of the wind spirits under Kolat's command, but it too can blow with great violence under the right conditions. It can rapidly escalate into the great thunder with little or no warning.
West Wind Spirit magic: Change Weather, Warming Breath, Water Thirsty Plants, Roar with Thunder.

(I'll finish this later)