Original Photo by Laura Desnoit

A couple of weeks ago, I ran a different kind of RPG session, something I called an “anthology” session. Since some people online were asking me how it went, and because I believe Gamemastering is best viewed as a shared education, I finally got some time to sit down and write up the experience.

Like most of the experiments I do at the table, this came from necessity. In this case, I had been running a series of The Dresden Files, and I was left with a few extraneous scenes that didn’t really warrant a full session. I debated doing them in downtime between sessions, but part of the Dresden Files mechanics is a bit where other players can jump in by spending a Fate Point. In fact, much of the design of the system involves the players as audience as well as participants, and running sessions without that audience cheapens that (have I mentioned that the FATE system is very, very clever?) I started thinking about the metaphor of the game as a series of connected novels (in this case, I’m shooting for a rough “trilogy” of novels), and I wondered if the metaphor would extend. What if I did the scenes as a collection of “short stories”?

I decided that if I was going to do this, each person should be the star of their own scene. This gave me a chance to dig into each character’s backstory (via Aspects and the various brainstormed materials from the City Creation session) and pull out one scene that made sense for each. I then realized that there was a bit of a progression between each scene, as there were connections and references to a particular plot thread — the introduction of a new drug — over and over. I tweaked a couple of things in my notes to take advantage of that.

Then it was just a matter of setting the stage. I gratefully stole an idea from Matt McFarland of having the characters meeting in a bar and trading stories of what happened to them over the course of the previous few weeks. I gave each player a notecard with a number on the back for the order of the stories, and the rough first sentence of their story. The first sentences were designed to get the interest of the characters (and the player holding it), so it was things like “Well, I almost died a few weeks back” or “That reminds me of the time I had to meet the dragon. Alone.” I explained this all to the players, set the scene, and let them go. When they worked the story opening in, I started the short story.

Things That Went Well

Showcasing characters: The session went really well for making sure each character got their moment to shine. Only one character didn’t really have a whole lot of character development, and he and I agreed that we needed to sit down and dig into his background a bit more.

The notecards: Handing out the notecards ahead of time was a good idea. It helped me to keep things moving, and the players seemed interested in finding ways to inject the snippets of information into the roleplay.

Teaching the system: I somewhat intentionally structured each scene to have a key conflict. Partially this was because of my years working on the Storytelling Adventure System and identifying the key mechanical conflict in each scene, and partially because I felt the group (myself included) still didn’t quite “get” the game mechanics, and it was a good way to push that issue. In that respect, it worked great, and I think we all understand how the game works a lot better.

Things That Could Have Gone Better

The notecards: At one point, I had to change the order of the scenes, which meant I had to put the current story on pause and start a new one. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have pre-determined the order of the scenes and went with something more organic. I don’t have an idea what that would be, though.

Forwards and backwards in time: Which led to another problem — the constantly time-shuffling led to some confusion. The previous example had three different timeframes happening at once, and a couple of times players were afraid to take actions lest it cause the scene in the bar where they were trading stories to be invalidated. I think next time I’ll use a different frame that doesn’t require any predetermined continuity.

All in all, it was a really good experience, and a couple of the players want to try it again at some point (probably between the second and third “novels” in the series).

Tor announced that their books were going to go DRM-free as of July. My coworkers have been buzzing about it, and I remarked that there’s some bigger wrinkles on this, and that this decision could impact the ebook sales landscape as a whole. I was asked to explain, so I compiled it into an email.

This is that email.

As a caveat, I don’t have any insider knowledge — this is all info I gleaned from the Internet. If someone has more accurate information from a credible source, I’d be happy to update this post.

Earlier this month (April 11th, specifically), the Department of Justice started a lawsuit against major ebook publishers and retailers for allegations of price fixing. Specifically, they were targeting groups like Apple, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble working in conjunction with publishers like Macmillan to keep prices within a specific range (generally, $2.99 to $9.99). ¹

Now, some of this comes from publishers like Macmillan choosing to move to the agency model, specifically to prevent retailers like Amazon getting a complete monopoly. For those not in the know, the nutshell is that in the original wholesale model, the publishers sells units to a retailer as a predetermined price, ² while in the agency model, the publisher sets the retail price, and gives the retailer a set percentage. The issue is that the DOJ is alleging that publishers and retailers conspired to keep ebook prices within a certain range.

So, on the surface, this looks like either a) Amazon and Macmillan are being douches, and the DOJ is stepping in, or b) the DOJ and the U.S. government are woefully out of touch with 21st century business models.

Now it gets a little weird.

Most of the companies contacted by the DOJ have settled. While names are not mentioned (which is common in settlements), two companies have openly admitted to fighting the lawsuit: Apple and Macmillan. Particularly, the CEO of Macmillan posted an open letter on Tor.com. This is the key point:

“We have been in discussions with the Department of Justice for months. It is always better if possible to settle these matters before a case is brought. The costs of continuing—in time, distraction, and expense— are truly daunting.

“But the terms the DOJ demanded were too onerous. After careful consideration, we came to the conclusion that the terms could have allowed Amazon to recover the monopoly position it had been building before our switch to the agency model. We also felt the settlement the DOJ wanted to impose would have a very negative and long term impact on those who sell books for a living, from the largest chain stores to the smallest independents.

“When Macmillan changed to the agency model we did so knowing we would make less money on our e book business.” [emphasis mine]

Apple, as I understand it, has made similar statements. For a while, it looked like Macmillan would be filing a countersuit with companies like Apple and Amazon in this. Now, it looks like Amazon has settled (which, frankly, I’m a little surprised by if it’s true), which leaves Apple. Still not a lightweight partner.

Then Tor pulls this. This is notworthy for two reasons (and kind of a third):

1. Tor caters to a very tech-savvy audience. Tor.com is a well-run site, and their blog clearly caters to a sci-fi and fantasy audience well beyond just literature. So they’re getting a lot of the heat on the DRM decision, and probably have been for years (more than, say, Harlequin or the non-fiction publishers).
2. Tor is owned by Macmillan. This means that Macmillan has made the decision to take its most tech-savvy portion of the audience and give them what they want. DRM has mainly been something left to the retailers to enforce and encourage. So, effectively, Macmillan has decided that it doesn’t need retailer support as much as it did before April 11 (although the decision might have been earlier).
3. The founder of Tor Books, Tom Doherty, owns a chunk of Baen Books, which has been DRM-free and on the outer edge of ebook marketing and retailing for years. So it’s entirely possible that this has been floating around Macmillan for a while.

Macmillan and Amazon are the two companies mainly targeted in the past year or so for being the price fixers. This move, though, really only benefits Apple, who has been steadily moving to push people towards their own storefront (iTunes) while still allowing other retailers to use their wares on Apple products. Making Tor’s books DRM free basically says “Hey, all those books you bought on the Kindle? You can still read those on other devices.”

It’ll be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

And, naturally, I learned a lot.

Tutorials Don’t Have To Be Blunt: For a while, I didn’t understand the whole point of the Millennium Fair bit at the start. In fact, the first hour or so of gameplay isn’t like a lot of the rest of the game on the surface, and felt a little weird. Once I got a few hours in, though, it all clicked into place: the entire Millennium Fair is the tutorial.

I didn’t realize it, though, because it didn’t feel like a tutorial.² But everything you need in the game is there — talking to NPCs, making decisions, purchasing and upgrading equipment, the occasional mini-game, picking up a new party member, and combat. But there isn’t any part of the game telling you to go over here and click on this thing — it just starts with a few NPCs saying “Weren’t you excited about going to the fair?” and letting natural player curiosity take over.

Come Back Later And Try Again: After a certain point, the game opens up, and you’re likely to run into stuff that’s way above your level. Normally, this drives me crazy in games, but for this it felt fine, because by that point I could go to another time period or switch party members and do something else. Or, if I was really clever, I might just get past it. Unlike, say, Castlevania, I wasn’t hard gated from anything, but rather I was just politely beaten into the ground.

The Fiction Should Determine The Design: Granted, this is something a coworker of mine (who has worked on a bazillion MMOs) has also been beating into my head, so it was on my mind when I played, but I think it shows here. Some games use time travel just as a way to showcase different levels — it’s just set dressing rather than a meaningful mechanic.³ But in this game, time travel becomes part of the design. There are a number of puzzles that require you to do something in one time to change something in a later time period. It’s a clever way to present new areas of the “game world” without invalidating the exploration the player did previously. And the writing of the time travel actually reminds me of Moffet-era Doctor Who, which is a good thing. But the design of the game clearly came from this time travel story idea, and it’s clear that it benefits from that.

Grinding Doesn’t Have To Suck: It’s a JRPG. There’s going to be some grinding. And yet, the pacing of the grind in this game seemed about right. Right around the time I got sick of a particular stage, it was over (or, in one case, I just left and came back later). I’m still noodling around the place of grinding in modern game design, but certainly this game showed me that shitty grinding sucks not necessarily because it’s grinding.

Recommendation: This has often been called the best RPG ever. I won’t speak to that, but it certainly has a lot to offer. You can still get it these days (I was able to buy it on my iPhone), so I think people who like these kinds of games or who are building an RPG-style video game should play it if they are one of the four people left on the planet who hasn’t.

Another respondent indicated “I don’t Role Play in games, so generally what my character is like is dictated by the class and my personality” (emphasis added). Since the game’s programming rarely attributes a certain set of behaviors to the avatars directly, based on initial creation, the implication of this respondent is that gamers also project certain behavioral obligations to certain classes: healers must heal, and thus must produce an empathetic personality. However, behaviors produced by any given class will itself vary from player to player, thus indicating that while the player perceives a certain behavior-per-class expectation, no such standard exists objectively.

That right there is a perfect example of what I called unexpected confinement. More specifically, even people who don’t consider themselves “roleplayers” will confine their activities based on their perceptions of their avatar. Further, “no … standard exists objectively” to predict what kinds of behaviors players will project onto their avatar. Sure, you can make informed assumptions — healers must heal, after all — but you cannot accurately predict how players will confine their play based on their avatar.

So how do you find out how real players will react to your design? Playtesting, playtesting, playtesting. Get real players in front of your game, shut the hell up, and watch them play it. Take notes. Don’t correct them or tell them how to play, but watch how they are playing. Playtesting in the design phase (or “internal playtesting”) is valuable, but playtesting with people outside of the design team (or “external playtesting”) is just as important for a new design.

Sadly, the timetables to get a game to market often allow for enough of the former, but not always enough of the latter (aside from fixes like bugs and rules corrections). In most cases, what happens is that designers learn from feedback from the past design to inform the next one.

If you have the time, I do suggest reading the paper. It has a number of fascinating little insights, and the team is very open about some of the conflicts and problems they had during the study, allowing you to put the data into the proper context. (Sadly, a lot of game design “science” doesn’t actually apply scientific rigor, so it’s refreshing to find a study that does.)

A Dog Cannot Play Basketball

I have no idea if this scene actually exists in the movie Air Bud, but some version of it probably does.

Scene: A basketball court. A dog shows up, dressed to play.

Referee: Hey, get that dog out of here! Players only on the court!

Manager: That dog is a player!

Referee: That’s crazy! Dogs can’t play basketball.

Manager: (handing Referee a copy of the rulebook) Tell me where it says that only humans can play basketball!

Referee: (flipping through book) I’ll be darned. There’s no rule against it. The dog can play!

It’s ludicrous. It’s funny. And it neatly spells out a common conflict in game rules, especially games where the rules are constantly interpreted by people.

Most of what we commonly think of as “rules” are actually only a subsection of the rules being used. Rules that are spelled out are called explicit rules. But there are all sorts of rules that aren’t written out — gentlemen’s rules, social assumptions, and so-called “unwritten rules.” These undocumented but no less real collection of rules are called implicit rules.

The best way to showcase implicit rules in action is to use an example — preferably one a little more down-to-earth than golden retrievers playing basketball. Poker is big these days, so let’s use that. The rules for, say, Texas Hold ‘Em are well-documented. But let’s use another fictional movie scene to illustrate a point.¹

Scene: A saloon table in the Wild West. The protagonist is in the middle of a long game with a number of desperate banditos. The protagonist stares as his cards, worried about how good his hand is.

Bandito #1: (staring at Protagonist) Well? Are you going to bet, or do we shoot you full of holes?

This is an implicit rule in play: “The player will make his bet in a reasonable amount of time.” It’s not a rule that’s written down, but it’s an implied rule of just about any game — you can’t just walk away from a game of Monopoly or Tic-Tac-Toe. Instead, players will either require you to return and actually make a turn, the game will go on without you, or some sort of victory will be conferred to the remaining player.

As a designer, some of these implicit rules you can anticipate, like “players should not cheat.” But a number you can’t, and sometimes these implicit rules change the experience of the whole game for the players. This can work a couple of different ways:

• Unexpected confinement: I notice that this happens a lot to people who have played different versions of a particular game — the way it used to be done gets stuck in the heads of the players, and they confine their options in ways the current rules don’t intend. In some video games (particularly RPGs), I find that I sometimes follow the fictional logic of the world instead of “game logic,” and I end up missing parts of the game that the designers intended me to explore.
• Exploits: On the other side, an implicit rule might blind the designer to a particular strategy that ends up providing an unfair advantage. Players find that putting rules together in a particular illogical but legal way provides a disproportionate value.

An interesting side point is that implicit rules may become explicit in certain environments. Most of the online poker games I’ve seen make the implicit rule of “bet in a reasonably amount of time” explicit by giving players a timer. Professionally competitive versions of games often incorporate a timer as well.

No matter how you look at it, though, there are always more rules to a game than the ones spelled out. As the rules gets more complex and have a larger legacy of previous games, that body of implicit rules gets larger as well, and has a greater potential to be out-of-sync between designer and player, or between players. But those rules are no less valid, even if they are harder to articulate.

So, no. Dogs cannot, in fact, play basketball.

Have Blaster, Will Travel

I know that for the past several weeks my blog’s been a bit devoid of content, aside from mentioning the slew of interesting things I’ve been involved in. Most of that has been due to working on the two anthologies that hit my desk, as well as a number of podcast interviews. Further, I wrapped up one tabletop game I was running (or at least, the first season of it) and started a second. I’ve also been increasing my time at the gym, as I’ll be working with a personal trainer two to three times a week in addition to my usual cardio. There’s other personal stuff in there as well, but the practical upshot of all of it is that whenever lots of things are changing in my life, the blog is always the first thing to go.

I always intended this space to be irregularly updated as I had time, but after working on Tour de Holmes, I got used to posting at least weekly, and I feel like I’ve fallen off of that wagon. Anyhow, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get back to more regular updates of actual content here soon. I’ve got another “What I Learned” in the back of my head, as well as another game design thought (this time about implicit rules). I also have a couple of topic requests from last year that I can get to. Finally, I’ve been kicking around an idea for a project with Meredith Gerber, but I don’t have any details to share yet.

In the meantime, one of the previously mentioned anthologies is getting a Kickstarter. This is the one for Bulldogs! called Have Blaster, Will Travel, which features some great writers like Greg Stolze, Gareth Skarka, Jared Axelrod, Christiana Ellis, and Mur Lafferty. The Kickstarter is to help fund the print run of the anthology. There’s all sorts of cool stretch goals, including hiring new writers, getting new artwork, and even (my personal favorite) getting me paid $100 more for my work! So, this is a really great way to support my work, as well as helping out Galileo Games, which is turning out to be a really smart company that puts out quality work.

My interview on the horror genre for the Flagons and Dragons podcast is now online. Carl was a wonderful host, and I had a great time talking about horror, therapy, why Werewolf is a different kind of awesome from Vampire, and my shameful appreciation of Stephen King.

You can listen for yourself at the Flagons and Dragons website: http://flagonsanddragons.com/interview-with-eddy-webb-game-designer-and-author/

The “not quite as big but still exciting” update is that Slices of Fate is now available in ePub and mobi (Kindle) formats, as well as print on demand. If you already bought the PDF, the other formats are now available for free from DriveThruFiction.com. And right now, it’s on sale! I actually get dividends from this, so please go buy a copy if you want to support my work.

The biggest is that one of the anthologies I’m slated for has been announced: Have Blaster, Will Travel, a fiction anthology for the Bulldogs! role-playing game. I’m looking forward to working on a sci-fi property, and especially excited to be working with J.R. Blackwell on the project!

It even has a book trailer!

Have Blaster, Will Travel from jrblackwell on Vimeo.

• For those that missed it, I was approached by OWbN Girls to do an interview elaborating on my blog post “What I Learned from OWbN Girls.” You can hear the hour-long interview over at Soundcloud.
• There’s been some idle talk about doing a feature over at that podcast, covering all kinds of topics about LARP culture, game theory, and the like. I’ll keep you posted.
• I’ve also been approached about doing a piece with the Flagons and Dragons podcast about horror gaming. Again, I’ll keep you posted on that.
• I sent off the final draft of “I Knew Him” for the The Play’s The Thing fiction anthology. The editor was really pleased with the rewrite, as was I — I think it’s much better now. I should be getting a proof to review soon-ish, and then hopefully you’ll have another chance to buy my stuff.
• I’ve also been approached to contribute to two more anthologies. Right now, it’s still at the hush hush stage, but once I know more I’ll pass that along.
• I’ve finished off my contribution to Werewolf: the Apocalypse – 20th Anniversary Edition, and Ethan is now diligently doing redlines for many, many writers.
• With everything going on, I haven’t had a chance to even touch Watson is Not an Idiot (my “Tour de Holmes” essays). Maybe April? I do want to get that done, but paying work right now trumps personal projects.
• I’ve been idly talking with a publisher about taking the fantasy RPG I’ve been working on (Bloodmourne) and doing something with it. That’s a much longer scale project, if it even happens, but it’s something else bouncing in the back of my head. Don’t worry — it’ll have vampires in it.
• I do plan to do some more “What I Learned” posts — just haven’t had much time to sit down and put my thoughts in order.

On the surface, it’s got a lot in common with Double Dead. It’s a premiere novel. The protagonist is undead and generally disreputable, and part of the plot revolves around the character coming to terms with a new state of being. Also, both authors don’t shy away from bad language and splatterpunk gore. Oh, and zombies show up in both. But that’s where the similarities end.

City of the Lost is, essentially, a modern-day crime novel. The protagonist, Joe Sunday, is a hitman for a local mobster who, through a variety of mishaps, ends up turned into a zombie. Because that’s just what happens in L.A. And yet, the supernatural elements don’t end up overpowering the plot — the story slips in and out of the mystical parts effortlessly, making them feel like a natural part of a story that is really about one man’s attempt to get what’s owed him, and maybe a little payback if he can get it. In truth, while I starting thinking Chuck Wendig when I started the book, towards the middle the book felt more like Seth Harwood‘s Jack Palms novels, and by the end I found myself in love with Stephen’s unique voice. You can point to a lot of things it’s kind of like, but it’s not exactly like any of them.

I am eager to see what Stephen Blackmoore does next in this world.

One of the disadvantages of having lots of talented writers and designers as friends is that I end up with more books to read or games to play than I have time to read or play them. I know that one of the best ways to help a fellow writer out is to write a review, and I sometimes regret that I don’t always have the time to do that.

When I saw that I had a couple of dozen ebooks in my Kindle app on my iPad that I hadn’t read yet, I decided to try and do something about it. So I’m starting a new feature on my blog called “Peer Review.” These are highly biased reviews, because they’ll be of the work of my friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, but it’s a chance to help some friends out, and a chance to expose some great work to people who might not otherwise have heard of them.

Let me start off with a quick story. When I was visiting my mom a couple of weeks ago, I met my stepsister’s boyfriend for the first time for dinner, and we fell into talking about vampire and zombie movies. He pointed out that he didn’t know of any movie or book which featured both zombies and vampires. I pointed out that there is one book where this is true.

Thus: Double Dead.

Double Dead is Chuck Wendig‘s first published novel. That seems weird to me, since I’ve been working with Chuck for years, and I feel like he’s always been more prolific than the rest of reality considers him to be — something, I will note, that he’s been rapidly working to correct the past year or so. And this book showcases some of the best of Chuck’s technique and narrative voice. A number of people know Chuck for his intensely surreal and foul-mouthed patter, but I’ve always known Chuck as a very subtle storyteller. The profanity and scatological humor are like a magician’s flourish: a distraction to draw your attention away from the real magic, the engaging story that’s dragging you along and making you care about the characters and the world he’s creating.

A perfect example of this is the protagonist: Coburn the vampire. He wakes up in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, and is pissed off that blood has basically stopped falling into his mouth. He is, to put it mildly, the worst kind of self-entitled asshole. And yet, by the end, I was rooting for Coburn (and his dog), even during the worst parts of the zombie apocalypse. Sure, there’s a lot of pure fun in the story, the kind of enjoyable ass-kicking and crass humor that makes for a good action film. For 80% of the book I felt I knew exactly where the plot was going, and I was enjoying it like a good road trip — the journey meant more to me then the destination. And then, a number of twists hit me like rabbit punches to the gut, and it was all over. I was down for the count, staring at the words THE END and wondering how in the hell I ended up on the floor.

… I lost the metaphor a bit there. I’m still recovering from the end of the book.

Go get Double Dead.

I wrote a draft of this blog post last weekend, while sitting in an apartment in Lakewood, Ohio — the apartment my mom and my Uncle Tim rented. It was a beautiful two floor house with each floor divided into a separate living unit. The layout was surprisingly similar to the one Michelle and I had when we first moved to St. Louis nearly nine years ago. The place felt comfortable, and it felt natural to throw my coat over a chair and sit at the table to write, just like I did when I was starting as a freelance writer.

It was also the apartment my uncle’s corpse was found in, surrounded by empty vodka bottles, the carpet black with his own bloody vomit.

As Mom’s boyfriend, Bill, drove us back to his house from the plane, she told me what had happened. Uncle Tim had come home drunk again. “It’s like he’s two different people,” she said, “and I can’t stand the one that drinks.” She left to spend a few days with Bill, afraid of what she would say or do if she stayed and watched him drink again. By the time she came back, he was dead, face down on his bed. All of the empty bottles of alcohol around him filled a garbage bag by themselves.

Her voice was sad and a little shaken, but mostly she sounded resigned. This is an old story with our family. Uncle Tim once tried to commit suicide with pills while drunk. My Uncle Mike succeeded — the same Uncle Mike who encouraged me when I was very young to make art and follow my dreams. The same Uncle Mike who walked in on his father, my grandfather, after he had drunk himself to death. As my mom tells it, Grandpa picked up a bottle right after Grandma’s funeral, and proceeded to drink for the next two years until he was dead.

Bill’s a nice guy — I really like him, and I think he’s good for my mom. I haven’t seen my mom in years, and as we talked we fell back into old, comfortable rhythms. I’ve missed her, and she’s missed me. But she suggested quietly that I could stay at the apartment if I wanted, and I agreed. I needed some time alone, time to think things through, time to sweep my metaphorical bottles into a garbage bag.

Since I found out what happened last week, I’ve mostly just felt numb. I haven’t seen Uncle Tim in the flesh for 20 years, since I took a train with my mom to visit him in Colorado in 1992. He’s not a total stranger to me, but I have trouble calling his face to mind. I can’t say I feel a loss for something I barely had in my life. But I do remember all the phone calls from my mom over the past few years, all of the frustration and hurt and confusion of watching him drink himself to death. All of the lies about missed bills, all of the failed jobs, all of the fights with bosses and crushed fenders and empty bottles.

Really, I think I’m angry at him, at the men in my family, at the steady parade of death that comes one drink at a time. Three of the men in my family were plunged into depression, gripped by a dark mood that prompted them to kill themselves sip by sip. The Sweeney legacy: a garbage bag of bottles.

All that said, I’m generally at peace right now. I know I’m not them, not held in the same grip as they were. For all the darkness surrounding this, I think things will improve from here, for me and my mom. I certainly have the occasional moment when I’m not sure what to feel, when my mind is a little cloudy and I wonder what I’m really feeling. But all in all, I’m just relieved that my mom doesn’t have to go through any of this ever again.

This is a little hard to write, but blogging about this is the easiest way to reach the largest amount of people all at once.

Last night, I got a call from my mom as we were starting our D&D game. It turns out that my uncle, who has been struggling with alcoholism for years now, is now dead. She gave me a few details, but to be honest I was pretty numb for the rest of the evening, so I don’t remember them all, and I didn’t want to push my mom while she was having a calm moment  Sadly, this kind of death is nothing new for my family.

I have purchased airplane tickets back to Ohio, and I will be there for a few days. I’ll have my iPad with me, so I may be online as wireless connections permit, but don’t expect a lot out of me for a little while; I am giving myself permission to check out mentally for a few days while I help my mom. I’m not sure how I’ll be after seeing my mom again — I’m looking forward to it, mind you, but grief hits everyone differently — so while I’ll be back in Atlanta by Tuesday, I may or may not be fully up to speed by then.

Also, now would be a really bad time to complain to me about your copy of V20 or bitch about something I posted or whatever.

Tales of the Far West

While I’m waiting for the other formats for Slices of Fate to drop, another project I’ve worked on has arrived. Tales of the Far West is available in Kindle format, as well as through DriveThruRPG – I contributed the story “In The Name Of The Empire,” where a sheriff is charged with the murder of an Imperial Magistrate.

Imagine: A fantasy world, but not one based on Medieval/Dark Ages European culture and myth, but rather on the tropes of the Spaghetti Western and Chinese Wuxia. Add steampunk elements. Mix well.

A fantasy world that mixes the inspirations of Django and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon… The Good, The Bad & The Ugly and House of Flying Daggers… Fistful of Dollars and Fist of Legend.

A fantasy world that’s explored through a book series, a constantly-updated website, a tabletop role-playing game, comics, artwork, webseries and much, much, more.

This is FAR WEST.

If you’re curious to learn a little of the process I used while writing the story, you can read this series of posts:

• To The Far West: Research and Outlining
• To The Far West: By Any Means Necessary
• To The Far West: Writing is Rewriting

Go! Buy Tales of the Far West! Spread the word! It’s a dozen stories of wuxia-western-steampunk-fantasy awesomeness!

In many ways, I am an ideal customer. If I find an artist or a company that I really like, I tend to latch on to them. Back in the day I would play anything by LucasArts or Sierra. I’ve played many games just because they had the BioWare label. Last year I became a convert to Wadjet Eye Games. I am prone to loyalty.

Over the holiday I had an itch to play a classic CRPG, but for some reason Planescape Torment and Baldur’s Gate weren’t scratching that itch. Then I stumbled across the Geneforge Saga on Steam. At the time, it was $10, which was a ridiculously good price for five games, so I snapped them up. Within a week or so, I bought Avadon: The Black Fortress as well.

Just now I did a little math. Assuming my Steam account is accurate, I’ve put in 150 hours into these games. It’s probably more than that — Steam has a habit of not tracking the occasional session of gameplay, and I’ve also put a few hours in on the demo of Avernum VI. I’ve finished Avadon, I’ve essentially finished Geneforge 1, ¹ and I’m starting on Geneforge 4. From there, I’m planning on trying Geneforge 5 again, and then hopefully Avernum: Escape From The Pit will be out for Windows.

This is a bit odd for me. Granted, I am prone to mild obsession. I’ll spend a few days watching an entire season of a TV series, or listen through hours of an audio drama I like. Once I reread the first ten books of the Dresden Files all in a row, just so I could remember the context for the eleventh novel. But it’s only now, over a month later, that I’m feeling the grip of Spiderweb games letting me go enough that I can think a bit more rationally on why these particular games have snagged my attention.

If you’re not familiar with this company (and I certainly wasn’t), it’s very small. In fact, it’s more or less one man — Jeff Vogel — who runs everything. Wikipedia tells me the company’s been around since 1994, back when shareware was a thing. The games he makes aren’t particularly pretty, and have little to no music. They don’t have voiceovers, and often the assets are reused between games. The games have small, incremental improvements within the series. They are games in a very specific genre — turn-based, isometric RPGs — catering to a very specific audience.

And yet, I think these are strengths, in a way. It’s like playing D&D 3rd edition, and then moving to another D20 game — you recognize a lot of the parts of the game, and it’s easier to drop in. The assets and lack of music score starts to become a voice, something noteworthy and distinct. The parts that are new and distinct stand out more, and can be appreciated more.

I’m planning to dig into more details about the games I’ve actually played in future. But for now, I’m continuing to enjoy the feeling of finding a new company to obsess over.

Permission to use granted by OWbN Girls and Meredith Gerber

No, it’s not a game. It’s an organization. But I still learned a lot about game design from OWbN Girls.

Over the past few days, I’ve been getting a trickle of drama in my various social networks around the group. For those not in the know, OWbN Girls is an advocacy group within the organization One World by Night that strives ”to play fair in the gaming community, educate those that believe in the stereotype [of unempowered female gamers], and engage non-gamers in joining the community.” I admit that I’m not entirely sure what the drama is,¹ but it brought me back to a particular thing I keep picking at: sexism (and really, many different “isms”) in gaming.

The conflict for me is that the extremes are disagreeable. It seems like whenever things like sexism comes up, the two options float to “suck it up and deal with it” or “turn into a politically correct wasteland.” I don’t agree with either option, so I keep picking at it because it’s important to me as an artist and a game designer. It’s a more complex problem than it appears on the surface, which is true of any important problem, and there isn’t a simple, tweet-sized answer. In talking on Twitter to the OWbN Girls account and admitting that it’s a bigger problem, I came up with some ideas on how to extract some of these threads.

Controversial content is okay. I may personally hate the ideas that games like F.A.T.A.L.² espouse, but the alternative of someone deciding whether I can consume it or not is a million times worse. Further, controversial content often gets conversations going about important topics. This is something that entertainment and art does, and interactive entertainment does on an even more important level. We need games that challenge us, make us think, and put us in uncomfortable situation. If someone doesn’t like the content, they can (and should) exercise their rights to refuse to buy or consume it.

So let’s assume that’s a given: controversy is not inherently bad.

Forcing me to act in uncomfortable ways may not be okay. But there’s a flip side. It’s one thing to have a game where, say, you can choose to have random sex with women to get something. It’s another to force me to do that to proceed. It’s okay to have characters that are terrible to each other, but it’s not okay to require players to be terrible to each other (and especially if they have no idea that they need to be terrible to each other to succeed). And this is a tricky line, and probably more than a little subjective, but for me I think the choice needs to be there.

Let me pick differently controversial example. In the game Geneforge,³ you play a character that can choose between three factions (or, indeed, can ignore them all). For brevity, all of the factions are composed of magically-created slaves, and you are one of the magicians that can create such creatures. One faction wants to work together with the magicians (called “Shapers”), while another faction wants to be led and treated like cattle. And yet, the faction that wants to be led has more resources which you can really use to help you. The third faction that wants to murder all the Shapers is even more powerful.

In this example, there’s a choice. I can go with the morally safe route and accept the increase in difficulty in progression, or I can choose a less moral road and get a benefit. I can be a good person or a terrible person (or, more likely, something in the middle), but the game doesn’t force me to enslave a race or commit genocide. I can feel bad all on my own, because of what I decided to do. And better, the thoughts and ideas this game generates are more powerful to me because I am the one who choose a particular path, instead of having it force-fed to me.

What does this have to do with LARP? Let me loop back around a bit with another example. In 2005, I made a character for the Camarilla Vampire: The Requiem game that was sexist. He was a sneaky bastard that frequently used women to get what he wanted.⁴ I went to a number of female players I knew and said I wanted to create a collection of background ties with their characters to represent this. I also made a commitment to myself that I would never even hint at this kind of sexually-exploitative roleplay until I cleared it with the player outside the game first, even if a female player started it. Really, the whole idea could have gone horribly, horribly wrong, and I was prepared to scrap it all on a moment’s notice.

Every single female player I approached was okay with it. I even refused some people who came to me about it, because a couple of times it got a little weird for me. And I played the character for years before he was murdered.

I’ve often gone back and tried to reconstruct why that worked so well. Quite a lot of it was likely due to the women I approached (who were all people I’d gamed with before and built up a measure of trust with), but perhaps the biggest, I think, is that the roleplay was never forced. The fact that the character was perceived to be sexually exploitative was enough — I didn’t have to say or do anything to prove that. Many times I would say “And they go off and have a good time” and leave it there, or I would drop out of character and mention that my PC would then proceed to make lewd suggestions instead of actually saying them. Granted, a lot of that was because I am a married man and was frankly uncomfortable with the details much of the time, but I think that had the benefit of making it clear that I wasn’t doing this for my own personal titillation. The whole point was to portray a character for the other players to enjoy (or, more accurately, hate enough to plot to murder him).

I do not recommend this path for most players. I’m not even sure I would try to do something that ambitious again — as I said, it could have been really bad. But it does show that it can be done.

Conclusion: “Isms” are important in interactive art, but only at a remove. I think it’s okay if content is controversial, but I don’t think design should be. If I as a player know that I have control, I’m willing to give up a little bit of it to see where things are going. I’m willing to risk making myself uncomfortable if it means I can walk away at any time. For a movie or a book, this is binary — you’re consuming the content or you’re not. In a game, however, there are shades of interacting with the content. That switch, that ability to walk away from what’s uncomfortable needs to be part of the game somehow, so that someone can walk away with only a little consequence and continue with the game.

This is a big topic. I’m under no delusion that this blog post is anywhere close to answering the problems that come with controversial games. But I absolutely believe that it’s important that organizations like OWbN Girls continue to ask the question.

Oh man, do I have opinions on this.

Politics in RPGs (and indeed, in fiction as a whole) are not the same as politics in real life. Without getting into a political debate about what is best, I’ll only say that in the real world, it’s often desirable when politicians are calm and productive and work together to accomplish something. In games, the opposite is true. In fact, I have often said that politics in LARPs should be more about throwing chairs than making policy. So, if you’re designing a political system, you need to think less about a functional political system and instead worry about making an interesting one. There are a few things to keep in mind with this.

Avoid Dictators. There’s a reason why the Prince in Masquerade went from the all-powerful elder in First Edition to being a toady largely at the control of a Primogen Council in Revised — dictators are boring on both sides of the equation. Sure, it’s fun for ten minutes to do whatever the hell you want, and there’s some narrative juice you can get from trying to overthrow a heartless bastard to prop up the next idealistic utopia that will ultimately fall to real-world pressures, blah blah blah, but the reality is that playing in that state is binary: you can do nothing or you can do whatever you want. The more people you can spread the power around to, the more interesting your political dynamic will become.

Power Needs To Mean Something. On the other hand, “dictator” has to seem like an attractive option. Playing in a town council that only has the authority to change school names or decide on the color of flower arrangements isn’t as exciting as playing a board of organized crime bosses who have the power of life and death. If political power means something, then people will hold on to it harder and work to get more of it, and so will everyone else. This means that those people will constantly clash against each other, which continues to generate entertaining situations. If you’re designing a game, this power has to matter to the mechanics at some level (which goes back to my thoughts on mechanics and setting — it all applies here as well).

There’s Not Quite Enough To Go Around. Part of that meaning has to revolve around resources, and specifically resources that are a little short of being enough for everyone. If there’s a game where all powers require a gem to use and there’s more than enough gems for everyone, there will be liberal sharing. Make the game where there’s enough gems to give to half of the players, and things get interesting. If you’re playing a group of vampires fighting over land, that land has to be small enough that not everyone can have a slice. (And yes, that land has to have a mechanic behind it.)

Politics are Player Vs. Player. I have run heavy political games both with players taking on all the political roles and with NPCs taking up most (or all) of those roles. In general, when the political choices are in the hands of the players, it’s a political game. When they’re in the hands of NPCs, it’s window dressing to a different game. It is certainly possible to have a strong political game where the players are all a coordinated group working against other factions to do something amazing or whatever, but on a basic level it’s no different than fighting a bunch of monsters. There’s a certain dynamic that comes only from players going all-out to screw each other over. The game Diplomacy is pure player vs. player politics, and I have heard more stories of people who won’t speak to each other after playing that game than in any other openly competitive game.

Decide What Politics Means For Your Game. In the end, you have to decide why politics are important.

For most mission-based or adventure-based games, all that matters is that there’s a guy that gives you orders or that you have to overthrow. In that case, prop up a king under whatever name you choose and point the players at him.

If you want a game where politics offers a flavor or spice to your game but isn’t the main thrust, consider a structure where power is divided between a few people or groups. You can define some groups as “bad” and others as “good” or paint them all with a uniform coat of gray, but in the end the players will likely side with one (or form their own faction). The act of picking and choosing a side feels political, but from there the game becomes a slightly more complicated version of “kill the bastard with the crown” again.

If you want a game where politics are the point of the game, you have to give that power to the players, and that power has to have teeth. There have to be reasons to work together as well as be at odds with each other. The right balance is where compromise is the only attractive option because it stops the fighting.

What political systems in games have you really enjoyed?

Starting on Friday, I have 11 days of vacation set up. Of course, I’ll still be doing a little White Wolf work during that time (because “vacation” really means “a chance to catch up on work”), but I really do want to try and relax. So, the first announcement is that I’m planning to be less available on the Internet during that time. I have vacation responders set up for both of my email accounts, I won’t be on social networks as much, I won’t be updating this blog, and so on. I’m not going to be completely off the grid, but I do need some time away and live in my own head for a bit.

Part of the reason I’m doing that is that I want to finish off my Hamlet short story, and then roll right into revising and expanding my book of Tour de Holmes essays. Aside from comments on each of the stories, I also have in mind a discussion of Smart Watson vs. Dumb Watson, the popularity of Moriarty over the other (and sometimes more visible) villains in the canon, Holmes’ cocaine use, Watson’s wives, and (if I hate myself enough) the chronology of the cases.

So, faithful audience, what topics of the Sherlock Holmes canon would you like me to discuss/rant about in such a manuscript?

Michael Cunliffe

And I obey.

I’ve had an informal maxim in my head for years now as a game designer, and with every year that passes and every design I work on, I’m more and more certain it’s the right one. I’ve never really written it down before, but it goes something like this:

Mechanics drive player behavior.

On the surface, this sounds simple – a game about westerns should have rules about gunfights if it wants to have dramatic gunfights, and so on. But it goes deeper than that, I feel. Games feel different depending on what mechanics they use. This is more explicit with board games, card games, video games, and less flexible genres of game, but even the flavor and tenor of role-playing games are impacted by their choice of mechanics.

Take games of a similar genre, such as Boot Hill and Dust Devils.¹ Both are Western games, but each is focusing on something different, whether the design is intended or not, and as a result you get different games. While there is a tried-and-true tradition of hacking or drifting rules in RPGs, what the game focuses on in terms of mechanics will consciously and subconsciously impact how the game is played. While some players can (and will) resist against the tide of mechanics, most will gladly be swept right along, and will indulge in the gameplay the mechanics present and reinforce. And a chunk of the feel and setting for an RPG is created by how the players act within it.

So yes, mechanics should help establish the setting in RPGs. But as a designer, how can you do that?

First, you have to know on a very real level what your setting needs to have enshrined in a mechanic. I believe every version of Dungeons & Dragons has alignment, even if the actual system has gone through various changes. The reason, though, is simple: the difference between "good" and "evil" matters in that game. Even if it doesn’t often come up in the game (and in my experience, it doesn’t come up much at all, aside from the odd "Detect Evil" spell), the fact that it exists and that there are parts of the game that work differently depending on that choice means that in D&D being good or evil is meaningful to the game, and therefore to the setting.

Next, you have to make sure those mechanics matter. Every version of Vampire has had Humanity as a mechanic. And not only a little mechanic, a small number tucked away on a character sheet, but a large ladder of dots. It generally takes up a fair amount of real-estate on a character sheet, and many fans of the game will remark on it being a core element of the game. The actual mechanic isn’t used that often compared to other parts of the game, but when it is, it’s often a significant moment. You can literally lose your character on a bad dice roll, so you’re encouraged to take actions that keep you from having to make that roll. If you make that mechanic matter to the player on a fundamental level, it will impact their game.

(As a side note, I once was in a chronicle of Dark Ages Vampire while I was also playing in a different campaign of D&D. There was a fair amount of overlap in some setting elements, such as "medieval hero uses unusual powers to deal with problems," but each game felt very different at their base because of the different emphasis in mechanics. Similarly, I’ve played an Exalted game under the same Storyteller who ran Dark Ages Vampire, and again they were very different feeling games because of the mechanics.)

Finally, the rest of the game needs to reinforce this mechanic. Paranoia is good at this. Although different editions emphasize different parts of the setting,² the setting always reinforced and encourages the kind of player-against-player backstabbing and treachery that the rules encouraged. Everything about the game – even the name – backs up and supports this player dynamic.

This is why, I think, small games with a few mechanics and a strong direction are doing well these days – if you have a good vision for the game and everything else supports that vision, the game is stronger as a result.