Well of Urd

Technique: It's All About Teamwork

2007-04-04T14:06:00.000-04:00

Thanks to everyone that participated in the profiling thread. The results are great.

In particular, I was interested in the responses to the final question, "Name one thing your group does that you think could help others make their gaming better."

Many of you responded along the same lines: We communicate with each other, we listen to each other, we work together, etc.

To me, all of it boils down to the foundation of a good role-playing experience. My last Technique post discussed listening, which is the first part of the foundation. The remainder is teamwork.

Ron Edwards likens the act of role-playing to playing music in a band. And that's a very fit analogy, especially if we're talking about something like a jazz band, where we riff off one another and everyone gets the opportunity to solo and shine.

Maybe the idea of a role-playing group as a sports team speaks to you better. Regardless of which analogy we use, teamwork remains at the core.

Role-playing as we're talking about it here is not and cannot be a solo activity. In order to have the best experience we can, we need to interact with the other players. Further, we need them to buy into our contributions to the game.

There are a myriad of ways in which a group may decide which of our contributions it will buy into and which it will discard. In fact, that’s precisely what a role-playing system is: It’s a method for determining which contributions will be accepted by the group. But that’s outside the scope of what we’re here to talk about.

So the first step to playing a game together is really listening to what the fellow members of our group are contributing. And to be clear, I’m using the word listening, but it’s really all forms of communication: A combination of hearing, seeing and even intuiting the contributions of our fellows, depending on the cues available. And even more than that, it’s about recognizing when we are not clearly understanding the contributions of the other members of the group—when we don’t understand the intent behind an action or the reason they’re asking whether there’s a fire pit in the room—and then requesting clarification.

The better we get to know our fellow players, their styles and their techniques, the better we’ll be able to navigate the communication of contributions, to “get on the same wavelength.”

So far, this has all been a refresher on the listening post. But to really kick ass in play, cultivating effective communication is not enough. It’s just the first step. The next step is to use that information, to put it in action.

To describe how this works, I want to first briefly return to our analogy, using sports this time. In basketball, there’s a tactic called an offensive pick and roll, also known as a screen. A pick occurs when an offensive player attempts to block, or “screen,” a defensive player away from the man he is guarding, thereby freeing up the player who was being guarded for an open shot or pass. A similar tactic is used in ice hockey, where an offensive player will attempt to use his body and that of the defender guarding him to obstruct, or “screen” the view of the goalie, allowing a fellow player to take a shot the goalie can’t see. That’s teamwork. It’s creating opportunities for action on the court that would not be possible by a single player—no matter how talented—working alone.

So what’s the equivalent in role-playing games? It’s using your contributions to send the action of the game hurtling in the direction that a fellow player desires, allowing him or her to pick up the scene and run with it. It’s recognizing the potential for a conflict that a fellow player has clearly been aiming toward, using your contributions to push for that conflict, and then stepping back to let your fellow player take the leading role. It’s also recognizing when a fellow player is setting things up for you, and then stepping up to the action without fear. It’s recognizing when another player has been idling in the background and helping to shift the spotlight to that player’s character.

These are the sorts of things a good GM is often expected to do. But the fact is that everyone at the table needs to work at it to kick a game into overdrive.

Here’s an example from a recent game:
We’re playing a Burning Wheel game inspired by Earthsea. Drozdal is playing a wizard who is intent on learning the secrets and lore of the Tsaivar, a strange people that have been raiding our lands and helping to make our lives miserable. Luke, Alexander and I each have characters that are interested in protecting our people from the Tsaivar threat and the crushing tribute they exact from us, but have no interest in getting to know these people or travel to their lands. And yet, Dro’s character is all about that.

Recognizing this, we made a concerted effort to help Dro achieve this arc of his character’s story. Mayuran, as the GM, set a scene in which Alexander’s character had an opportunity to actually talk to a Tsaivar captain who had previously tried to kill us. And Alexander, recognizing the opportunity for Dro, stepped up. He confronted the captain in a Duel of Wits and together they generated a reason for us to make an incredibly dangerous journey to the Tsaivar lands. It was then up to Luke and I to find motivations for our characters to go along. We pulled together to make it happen.

Another example:
Luke’s character, from the same game, is a coward. But Luke has clearly been aiming for an arc in which his character becomes a fearsome warrior and leader of men. And yet, my character is the one who is taking that role at present. In our most recent session, we got into a fight with some eunuch cultists in a narrow tunnel. My character, being the brave hero, stepped to the front and attempted to fight the cultists one-on-one. Luke was very clear that his character was behind mine, hoping that my character would take care of the danger. Almost immediately, my character was stabbed and badly wounded. I failed a Steel test and had to Hesitate. I had a number of options, but knowing Luke’s character was behind mine, I decided to throw the ball to Luke by running and screaming. Now Luke had a choice: He could either have his cowardly character run after me, or he could step up to an incredibly dangerous situation and attempt to save my character’s life. He did step up, and thus took one of the first steps toward fulfilling his character’s arc.

Making this sort of thing work is not easy. It requires good listening, as well as a sense of drama, tension, narrative flow and pacing. Fortunately, they’re all skills. You can get better at them by working on it and practicing. In fact, that’s what these Technique posts are all about.

At the same time, it’s important to note that everyone has off days. Some nights, musicians and athletes aren’t at their best. The same is true of role-players. But the more we work at it, the more good nights we’ll have.

Here are a few core concepts to keep in mind:

Motivation. It’s always possible to find a reason that a character will go along, no matter what “my character would do.” If you’re having trouble, ask the rest of the group to help you, but find a way to play ball.
Spotlight. Who’s done the most talking, the most rolling, during the session and who’s done the least? Recognize it and find a way to put the spotlight on the player who’s done the least. There’s no bench warming in role-playing.
Pass. Is there another player whose character is more angled to take on the current conflict than yours? Be gracious and let them have a chance before you step up.
Shoot. Is the present conflict what your character is all about? Then don’t hide in your shell and don’t hang back. Step up and engage! Fear lost opportunities more than failure!

So tell me more about your group’s teamwork! Give me examples of which you’re proud! Also, if you have more core concepts to add to the list, please share! And questions and other comments are welcome too, of course.

Back from Alaska

2007-02-28T11:59:00.000-05:00

Nothing role-playing related today. Just wanted to report that I've returned from my trip to Alaska. That's me above, with Denali (Mt. McKinley) in the background. I'm on the road to Talkeetna, and will shortly take a flight to Denali and land on one of its glaciers.

And that's the plane, of course. It was a truly incredible trip. And I now have a deep appreciation for what -30 degrees Fahrenheit (-34.4 degrees to you metric folks) feels like.

Technique: The Art of Listening

2007-02-14T12:14:00.000-05:00

Role-playing games are social games. It is by talking to each other—sharing our imagined content—that we establish the environment of the game.

Anything that is not shared, obviously, does not become part of the collective experience of the game. That doesn't mean that things you keep to yourself aren't important, or that they don't contribute to how you portray or even feel about your character. But unless you share what your character is feeling or thinking, others in the group can't pick up on it and act upon it. Nor are they going to be able to fully appreciate your character's actions taken as a result of those feelings or thoughts.

All that is a roundabout way of getting to what I consider to be the most essential, foundational skill in role-playing: listening. And yes, you're right. That's not such a deep observation. But sometimes it's helpful to review the fundamentals. In fact, I'm bringing this subject up because I needed the review.

What gets your fellow players jazzed about their characters? What sorts of conflict or bits of setting or color get them excited? What sorts of situations get the GM to turn it up to 11? Also, what sorts of things make your fellow players tune out? Being aware of these things is the first step toward helping your group achieve amazing play consistently.

Whether you're a GM or one of the other players, do your best to focus on the other people at the table and what gets them excited. If you can keep a running tally in your head, great. If not, make a note of it. I find that I need to make notes if there are more than four players other than myself.

Use those notes as you play. When it's your turn to do something, try to ensure that your actions activate the interests of at least one other person in your notes (or your running mental tally). And, of course, do your best to avoid actions that will cause others to tune out.

Simple, right? If you've got any tips or tricks to aid this process, please share!

A Return to Action and Profiling

2007-02-13T14:28:00.000-05:00

Welcome back. It’s been a while. With my life slightly less hectic now that my company’s office has moved—following a nearly 10-month acquisition and integration process—I’ve decided to revisit the Well and see if anyone’s still stopping by.

I’m hoping to get up a few things on some new topics in the next few days. In the meantime, assuming anyone is still stopping by, I’d like to do a little profiling to talk about what we’re playing and how our experiences are going.

Here are the questions:

What’s your name?
Where in the world are you?
What have you played recently? With whom did you play and where?
What’s been your best gaming experience recently? Why?
What’s been your most problematic or least satisfying gaming experience recently? Why?
What gaming are you looking forward to in the near future?
Name one thing your group does that you think could help others make their gaming better.

And naturally, I’ll start.
1. What’s your name?
Thor Olavsrud

2. Where in the world are you?
New York City

3. What have you played recently? With whom did you play and where?
This is gonna be a long one! In the interest of some brevity, I’m going to leave out Dreamation last month, though I’ll note that I played in Judd’s 1st Quest wolves game, Mike Miller’s Mutant Academy scenario for his excellent game, With Great Power, a playtest of Kevin Allen jr.’s work-in-progress, Sweet Agatha, and John Wick’s Wilderness of Mirrors.

So here we go:
The Monday group has continued its extremely fun Burning THAC0 game, a Burning Wheel game that consciously seeks to embrace all the wonderful tropes of the original Dungeons & Dragons game. For nostalgia’s sake, the game is set in Mystara, in the Grand Duchy of Karameikos. Our characters have just returned from an expedition to the Isle of Dread, and I have managed to make the grandmaster of villainy, Bargle the Infamous, my wizard’s nemesis. All I can say is, “Die Bargle, Die!”

This group’s core consists of Anthony (the GM), Rich, Pete and myself. Luke has recently become a regular member, and Jared now makes cameos when he’s in town. We play in a conference room of our local Public Television affiliate, Thirteen, which Pete works for.

The Thursday group has been experimenting with Weapons of the Gods, which we’ve been quite excited about. We may get back to it in the near future, but we have some other games on the agenda first. We played a wonderful session of Dogs in the Vineyard last Thursday. It’s been more than a year since half of us played Vincent’s little gem, but it still produces consistently wonderful experiences. My Dog is perched on the precipice between being a force for good and becoming a cult leader and sorcerer himself.

This group’s core consists of John, Drozdal, Mayuran, Alexander and myself. Jon has made a cameo in the past and is more than welcome to return at anytime. Alexander has been out the past month or so dealing with visa issues, but that’s resolved now and he should be back soon. We play in the conference room of Nettwerk Music Group, which John works for.

The Sunday group has taken a break from its usual Earthsea-inspired Burning Wheel game (which Mayuran GMs) while Alexander has been out, so instead we’ve done a short Burning Wolves campaign, using the Great Wolves lifepaths from Burning Wheel’s Monster Burner. Our pack of Spirit Hunter wolves had to deal with the encroachment of the mad forest god as he sought to conquer the god of the mountain. We had numerous tussles with fox god, bear god, moose god, night god and fire god, as well as confrontations with other Great Wolf packs and ravens. Let me tell you, entering a Duel of Wits with a mountain is a scary proposition! This game came to a conclusion on Sunday, with four of the six player characters killed in the godswar. We all found ourselves interested in pursuing another game in the world.

This group’s core consists of Mayuran, Drozdal, Alexander, Luke and myself. With Alexander out, the roster for the Wolves game was actually Mayuran, Drozdal, Luke (as the GM), Danny, Chris, Rich and myself. We play at Game Headquarters, in Luke’s room.

4. What’s been your best gaming experience recently? Why?
It’s my poll, so I’ll cheat a little bit and list two.

First up is the entirety of the Burning THAC0 experience, rather than a specific thing. Burning THAC0 gaming has a lower intensity than most of my other gaming. It is intended to be a fun, casual romp, with lots of nostalgic references to old D&D experiences. We unabashedly game situations, make off-topic pop culture jokes, and kill things and take their stuff. Our teamwork is fun. There’s a lot to be said for the beer-and-pretzels experience.

Second up is the setting we created for the Burning Wolves game. When we sat down to burn our characters, Luke grabbed an Ilocano-English dictionary to use. We named our characters from it. We also named our relationships and our territories from it. When new NPCs (usually gods) were brought in with Circles, we named them with it. Luke drew a little map of our territories with all the names on it. Horut the Mountain towered over our territory, Daga. Balat the Forest sent his trees and grasses to war against Daga. Karayan the River brought us water to quench our thirst, and was in turn the child of Horut and Yelo the Ice. Aguma the Maker, with his lantern and axe, was allied with Balat, or was he? Agradam the Night made us shiver with terror, while Soro the Fox tricked us over and over and Manaketa the Bear gave us no end of trouble. Bukig the Moose bade us hide from our troubles. Our pups, Uken, Bato and Tiniteg gave us hope. Fellow great wolves Immalsa, Nasaglat, Cayanga, Abaken, Bison, etc., were our rivals and mates.

As these names grew around the things we created, the world really took shape in our imaginations. These places and characters grew organically over the course of the six sessions of the game and really gave the place a unique flavor and character.

5. What’s been your most problematic or least satisfying gaming experience recently? Why?
Interestingly enough, the Burning Wolves game is also my answer for this one and I’ve been struggling to answer why for several weeks. I think it comes down to this: I really cared about the subject of the game. I’m fascinated by wolves: their biology and physiology, their behavior, their pack structure and hierarchy, their hunting strategies, their ability to communicate with each other, etc.

I think it all stems from an account in Barry Lopez’s book, Of Wolves and Men, in which he relates how the pack he followed fed an elderly female that was no longer capable of hunting. Lopez noted the possibility that she had some sort of knowledge that was useful to the pack, and which justified their efforts to feed her. That always resonated with me.

I really wanted to see that stuff take shape in a game, and I pushed for this game. But gaming is a cooperative endeavor, and it’s not realistic to assume that everyone in your group is going to care about the things that you care about to the same degree. I wanted a game that really focused on stuff like pack mentality, pack community, and the communal effort to survive and raise pups. I noted that I wasn’t interested in seeing the game turn into “Man vs. Nature,” with “good” wolves trying to defend pristine Nature against “evil” men. I wasn’t interested in anthropomorphizing these creatures; I wanted them to feel like real wolves.

But there were six other people at the table with me, and they all had their own ideas. That’s fine. In fact, that’s how it should be. But because I really cared about that stuff, I was unwilling to give very much ground in those areas during play, even when it became clear that the rest of the players didn’t really care.

Gaming will never be satisfying if you’re not willing to give ground and allow other people to change your vision. In the end, the problem with the game and the reason it was unsatisfying was me. I was too attached to the subject matter.

6. What gaming are you looking forward to in the near future?
I’m looking forward to a number of games. Starting Wednesday, our friend Bob comes to town for a week from Boston. Between Wednesday and Sunday, we are going to burn a world and characters in Burning Empires and play through an entire phase. We’ll World Burn and Character Burn on Wednesday, play sessions Thursday night and Friday night, and marathon sessions on Saturday and Sunday. I expect it will be grueling! But also fun!

On Friday, the Gotham Gaming Guild returns, and we’ll set the stage for a 6-session run of a Burning Wheel game about Ronin from Hell. I hope to play a Yamabushi spirit-binder aiming to send the demons back where they came from. It should be a blast.

After I return from a trip to Alaska next week, the Thursday group is going to take Ralph Mazza’s work-in-progress, Robots & Rapiers, out for a spin!

7. Name one thing your group does that you think could help others make their gaming better.
It’s all about naming. See my answer to question 4, as well as Technique: The Magic of Yevaud’s Name.

Ok. That’s me. What about you?

Technique: The Magic of Yevaud's Name

2006-09-22T14:56:00.000-04:00

"You are a very young wizard," the dragon said, "I did not know men came so young into their power." He spoke, as did Ged, in the Old Speech, for that is the tongue of dragons still. Although the use of the Old Speech binds a man to truth, this is not so with dragons. It is their own language, and they can lie in it, twisting the true words to false ends. . . "Is it to ask my help that you have come here, little wizard?"

"No dragon."

"Yet I could help you. You will need help soon, against that which hunts you in the dark . . . What is it that hunts you? Name it to me."

"If I could name it -- " Ged stopped himself. . . .

"If you could name it you could master it, maybe, little wizard . . . Would you like to know its name?". . . .

"But I did not come here to play, or to be played with. I came to strike a bargain with you."

Like a sword in sharpness but five times the length of any sword, the point of the dragon's tail arched up scorpion-wise over his mailed back, above the tower. Dryly, he spoke: "I strike no bargains. I take. What have you to offer that I cannot take from you when I like?"

"Safety. Your safety. Swear that you will never fly eastward of Pendor, and I will swear to leave you unharmed. . .

A grating sound came from the dragon's throat . . . "You offer me safety! You threaten me! With what?"

"With your name, Yevaud."

Ged's voice shook as he spoke the name, yet he spoke it clear and loud. At the sound of it, the old dragon held still, utterly still.

[Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea]

Ms. Le Guin is a very wise lady. Names ARE magical. And they are potent, potent tools in the hands of role-playing gamers.

When you name something in a role-playing game, whether a character, a house or inn, a city, or a sword, you make it just a little more real, more substantial, to everyone else. A sword found in a tomb? Big deal. The Sword of Seven Shadows found in the tomb of Aras-Ekbar? That's something special.

When you introduce something new to the shared fiction you are creating with your group, name it! It will create a connection between the others at the table (and yourself!) and the fictional element.

You can do some pretty neat tricks if you get creative with your naming. For instance, you can assign different earthly languages to cultures in a fantasy game. One group that I'm currently playing in keeps a Mongolian to English dictionary at the table. Any time we need a name for a character or a ship or an island, we dive into the dictionary and pull one out.

Assigning different cultures to different languages creates auditory differentiation between the two cultures in a recognizable but pleasingly subtle way.

Or I go to Chris Pound's Name Generation page, or the super cool Random Name Generator (which uses US Census data), to generate pages of names that I bring to the game table. Whenever a name is needed, I grab it off the list, making a quick note next to the game about who or what is getting named.

When you have a list of named characters generated from the technique, you can perform a version of a more advanced technique that the Durham 3 have been talking about quite a bit lately: reincorporation.

When you want to bring in a character, run down your list and see if anyone of the characters you've previously introduced would suit the role. If so, bring the character back and reincorporate it into the fiction. The other players will love you for it!

Technique: The Language of Gesture

2006-09-19T14:03:00.000-04:00

A core strength of our hobby is the fact that we sit face to face with each other and can interact on that primal human level (I apologize for leaving out those of you who play online, but this technique is purely for face-to-face play). That simple fact opens a whole range of rich communication options that are not available to us otherwise. I mean, of course, kinesics, or body language.

You can give your play a little extra punch and color by using body language selectively to emphasize a feeling at the table and add spice to interactions between characters, particularly if your play style tends toward first person, "in character" portrayal. The technique is a bit less useful for players who tend to guide their characters' actions and interactions in the third person, though it can still be used to great effect in certain instances. You can get by with just a handful of simple gestures and postures, though players who are really interested in portrayal may want to do more. But really, the most important thing is to make an effort to stay more aware of your own body language and that of the other players in the room with you.

So what can you do with body language? I suggest selecting a gesture/posture or two that corresponds to a particular character, based on the role the character is playing. It will make the character stand out and provide cues to everyone else about the character. Choose the number of gestures/postures based on how important the character is. Simple walk-ons should only have one. Important antagonists will probably have a few postures and gestures that stand out, while the protagonists will probably use many. If you play multiple characters in the course of a session, a list of gestures/postures and the attitudes they convey could be a handy resource.

For instance, you can signal your character's respect and liking for another character through the use of Angular Distance. In general, people square up, address and aim their upper bodies at people they like, admire and agree with. Conversely, people tend to angle their torsos away from people they dislike or disagree with.

Angular distance can be used to reinforce a message of animosity when a character is dealing with an enemy. You can also use it more subtly. For instance, perhaps you are portraying a character that is supposedly friendly or an ally, but is in reality working to betray a character with whom he is interacting. Angular distance can be used to telegraph the coming betrayal.

If you wish to communicate that a character expresses dominance, superiority, confidence or haughtiness, you can use Antigravity Signs. Use palm-down gestures when speaking to signal authority, and square your shoulders, lift your face and chin, and otherwise raise yourself up to indicate that you mean business. Tilting your head back by lifting your chin and leaning backward to look down your nose is an example of an antigravity sign that can be used to signal superiority, arrogance and disdain.

Crossed Arms can indicate a number of things. If you hold your arms and elbows close to your body, it can indicate nervousness and defensiveness. On the other hand, if you hold your arms and elbows less tightly to your body, with the elbows slightly elevated and pointing outward, it can indicate a guard-like stance, suggesting arrogance, dislike or disagreement.

A Hand Behind the Head, including grasping or scratching the ear, or touching the side of the face or neck, can indicate uncertainty, conflict, disagreement, frustration, anger, or dislike. It can also telegraph unresolved issues that need to be verbalized and explored. In fact, the hand behind the head gesture is an example of a Probing Point. Other examples include pursing your lips, shrugging your shoulders, clearing your throat or bobbing your adam's apple (assuming you have one, of course). Probing points signal that a word or phrase has touched a nerve, and represent a strategic opportunity to search between spoken comments. If you want to telegraph that a character has unvoiced agendas, unrevealed attitudes or hidden uncertainties, a probing point can do the trick.

A Gaze Down, either by looking downward with the eyes or tilting the whole head downward, can be used to convey defeat, guilt, shame or submissiveness, while a Head Tilt to the Side can be used to indicate friendliness, rapport, coyness (as in courtship), or submission.

There are obviously many other signs as well. The Non-Verbal Dictionary can serve as a quick and ready source, and you can find other examples here.

Use this technique sparingly, like a spice, and don't get too caught up in it. Afterall, paying attention to the others at the table and what they're saying should be your number one priority. But a little non-verbal communication can really help everyone get into the mood of what's happening at the table.

This technique was inspired by Keith Sen(k)owski, creator of the role-playing games Conspiracy of Shadows and untitled.

If you have an idea for a technique you'd like me to share, write me at wellofurd@gmail.com

Technique: Jared's Rule of Three

2006-09-15T15:44:00.000-04:00

In Jared A. Sorensen's award-winning game octaNe: premium uNleaded, the psychotronic game of post-modern trash-culture america, there is a gem of technique hidden among the sprawling mass of sheer coolness that comprises the game.

Jared calls it 'Detailing.' I call it Jared's Rule of Three. In octaNe, Jared writes:

When describing how your character looks, here's a trick: only write down three details. Nobody really cares about your character's exact height and weight or the color of his eyes. C'mon, really. What you should describe are the things that really stand out:

Wears a raggedy tuxedo and horn-rimmed glasses. Carries a fender guitar.

Dresses in dusty leathers and wears a jury-rigged brace on his leg. Has a sawed-off shotgun slung on his back.

Huge dude wearing wrestling boots and a red leather mask decorated with orange and yellow flames.

Has a tattoo of dice on his neck that says "Born to Lose." Wears a cowboy hat and a big gold chain.

Small monkey wearing an orange sash and carrying a small stick.

Hot chick with spiked heels. She's wearing a tight black cat suit that's unzipped to her navel.

Bipedal gila monster. He's wearing off-the-shoulder overalls, and he's chewing a toothpick.

So here's an official rule: You can only describe three distinct details about your character's appearance.

Extrapolating a bit, Jared's Rule of Three can be a powerful tool in our arsenal for bringing more color into our games. And a comforting one too. You don't need long descriptions laden with carefully-selected adjectives to inject a serious dose of color into your games. In fact, that would be counterproductive, in my experience. The more someone drones on and on about details, the more likely others are to tune out and grow bored.

Details are like salt. A touch releases flavor. Too much makes the entire dish unpalatable or even inedible.

Instead, take some inspiration from Jared's Rule of Three. But don't confine it to characters. If you have the opportunity to describe something, give it one to three short, succinct details that make it stand out. Use the technique for characters, locations, objects, or anything else that you want to introduce into the narrative fiction that you and your friends are creating. Have trouble coming up with details on the fly? Keep a list of cool adjectives/descriptors on a notepad, and cross them off when you've used them.

Try it. Your game will start dripping with cool.

If you have an idea for a technique you'd like me to share, write me at wellofurd@gmail.com

Technique: The Importance of the Words Previously, Meanwhile and Later

2006-09-12T16:33:00.000-04:00

While working on Burning Empires, one of the things that became very clear to us was the importance of color description. You can see me wrestling with the concepts in a previous post, The Algebra of Setting in RPGs.

Especially in games with lots of points of contact (interface with the rules), it is often a natural tendency to start playing the mechanics with little or no description of what's actually happening in the fiction. Examples include scripting a combat in Burning Wheel with little or no reference to what the combat looks or feels like, playing the cards to a conflict in Nine Worlds without adequately narrating the action, or a fight in D&D that comes down to a series of rolls and statements of "I hit" and "I miss."

The lack of color description for the scene can lead to feelings of disconnection and boredom.

There is a similar risk in games with few points of contact, like Primetime Adventures, if players push too hard toward conflicts without letting scenes breathe and take on gravity. (for additional discussion of an intimately related problem, check out this excellent thread at Story-Games).

Now, the revelation that color description is important in role-playing games probably seems obvious. But if we were all to take a really rigorous look a the way we play, I suspect we would find that we mostly offer a lot less color description to each other than we think. I'm hoping that this post will become the first in a series of irregular short features on relatively simple, painless techniques we can use to introduce more color to our gaming.

But first, why is color important? Here's what I wrote in the post I referenced above, The Algebra of Setting in RPGs:

"Color consists of the details that allow the participants in the game to imagine a location [Thor's note: scene, rather than location, would have been a more appropriate word choice] 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."

I'm going to repeat the last bit, because I think it's really important: Color is introduced by players and GMs to fill in the gaps and smooth out the seams in the imagined environment we create together.

One of the most important points to take away from this statement is that PLAYERS, as well as GMs, are responsible for introducing color and helping everyone gain a better imagination of a scene.

With that meandering preamble, on to the very important words: previously, meanwhile and later.

One of the simplest bits of color we can provide each other while playing is context about the temporal location of a scene. Even if there is no overt connection between two scenes (i.e., they're in different places, involve different characters, are about different issues), telling everyone else at the table when a scene falls chronologically in relation to the scene or scenes just played will forge a connection between the scenes. This is a principle that has been proven true over and over again in the world of sequential art (comics). Scott McCloud explains this in an accessible and incredibly illuminating manner in his truly excellent work, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.

When you tell the audience that the current scene happened before the scene we just played, or is happening during the scene just played, or after the scene just played, you create a connection between the two scenes. Because human minds seem to be predisposed toward organizing events into narratives, we just naturally start to fill in the gaps between the two events and find a way to turn them into a cohesive whole.

In other words, using the words previously, meanwhile and later to give each scene a chronological tag will help you draw the whole group into your shared narrative. Try being rigorous about using this technique and tell me what happens!

No Rest for the Weary

2006-08-09T00:22:00.000-04:00

Hey all, sorry I've been away for the past few days. I had planned to open another discussion on scenarios this week, but the Burning Empires books arrived on Monday! We've been frantically stamping, signing and packaging books for the past few days in an effort to get out as many preorders as possible prior to Gen Con.

Luke and Drozdal managed to get some of them over to the post office today, but not all. The rest will have to wait until we get back from Indy.

Burning Empires: From Inception to Finished Product (Part V)

2006-08-01T15:10:00.000-04:00

Continued from Part IV

The Weeks of Pain (May)
Finally, by May, we reached the phase of production that I call the Weeks of Pain, the last push before a project goes to the printer.

Playtesting had continued through this point. I had broken off and taken most of the core players (Drozdal, Mayuran, John, Alexander, myself and a new addition, Ryan) for Playtest Eleph. But Eleph soon fell apart, and I think that was because we were all exhausted. We were frustrated and arguing and not having much fun. Even so, some fruitful material came out of those abortive sessions, including the Vaylen Infestation rules, which give Vaylen characters an increasing level of access to Human-only traits, like Iron Trained, in each phase of the Infection (Infiltration, Usurpation and Invasion). We also added the Commander and Captain lifepaths for the Vaylen as a result of Eleph, allowing Vaylen characters to take Anvil Lords and Hammer Lords as hosts. It would have been horrible to miss that!

Luke had also put together a group, going back to his old Burning Wheel crew (Luke, Andy, Rich, Pete and Danny) for Playtest Otos Prime. That group was having a blast, but had to go on hiatus when the Weeks of Pain arrived.

Luke takes his layout seriously, and so do his roommates, but in their case it is involuntary.

"It should be noted for the record that I literally drove Shy and Rick out of the house while I was doing the layout. By about page 400, the layout became physical pain and mental anguish. I was sleeping four to five hours a night, and then spent the rest of the time howling and kicking my filing cabinets."

This part of the process began once the edits were largely complete. Luke started placing the color artwork, adding the curved edges and drop shadows to the images in InDesign. At this point, Luke also put together finished pages of the cover and a selection of interior pages to send to the printer for proofs. Unfortunately, getting the proofs back proved to be an exercise in patience, due to Chinese holidays.

Once the layout was finalized, we began the real trial: final reads. I took a few days off from work and reread and edited the entire text, with finished layout, one-and-a-half times in the space of about four days. The others weren't spared either. Drozdal, Mayuran, and Andrew all read various sections as well, and Luke and Alexander both did complete reads, keeping at it for nearly a week after I had to return to work.

On the first night of the final read, we started getting more playtest information from Mike, whose group had detested the game. The reports that we'd been getting from Mike had been very disappointing, and Luke, again, was almost ready to pull the plug on the entire game based on the results. Mike's group felt that the entire game was a railroad of epic proportions that kept players on an inescapable track. Luke and I were extremely puzzled and confused by their take, as it didn't match our experiences at all.

We were communicating with Mike over IM, and I started asking questions about Beliefs and Artha. As we asked more and more questions and the answers started flowing back, a very different picture started emerging for us. It wasn't that the game wasn't working, far from it. Instead, faced with the choice at the core of the game (as I described back in Part III under Playtest Agra)—the choice between doing what is necessary and pursuing one’s personal goals and desires—the players had ruthlessly made the choice to "do what was necessary" again and again. When certain players had sought to pursue their character's personal goals and desires, the other players had denied them access to Conflict Scenes.

In our playtests, our characters had been earning three or more points of Fate and multiple points of Persona each session. We had multiple players who resolved every Belief on their character sheet, rewrote each one, and resolved each of the new ones. All within six sessions of play. No one in Mike's group had gotten a point of Artha for playing into or against a Belief in multiple sessions of play.

It wasn't that Luke was railroading them from afar through his system, but rather that they were extremely focused on their goal.

Luke and I came away from that conversation with a real sense of success. It was ok that the group didn't like the choices they had made in play (or the game as a result of that). We don't expect everyone to like our games. But the text and procedures of play themselves had worked wonderfully.

Even better, it became clear that it was possible to be so ruthlessly focused on winning the game that you wind up denying yourself a very valuable resource to use toward winning! I know that's a little confusing so let me untangle it. Burning Empires is a competitive game. The Infection rules were designed so that the group would attempt to defeat the GM over the course of the campaign, and the GM would attempt to defeat the group. Each side would have to play within the rules and use the limited resources available to them to succeed. Artha is one of the most important of those resources. But in order to earn Artha, whether player or GM, you've got to focus play on your Beliefs, and that often means taking actions or risks that could benefit the enemy. If you play to win too hard, denying your character's human needs and desires, you will also deny yourself the Artha that can be used to win.

With a renewed sense of purpose, we dove back into the text. Chris had looked over the final draft and given us some more feedback and clarifications on the Iron Empires material. Based on that material, Luke hacked apart the Iron Empires chapter in the book and rewrote and reorganized it. Also, while the rest of us were reading, Luke cobbled together the Credits, Table of Contents, 'Ography and Glossary.

During this period, the fiction pieces from Sean and Rich also returned. Luke and I both edited them and called for revisions to a few of them in several places.

Finally, Luke processed all the final edits and built the index. As mentioned above, the proofs had taken quite a bit longer to get to us than we had scheduled for. Our deadline to get everything to the printer came and went, but the proofs still hadn't come, and we couldn't submit to the printer without going through the proofs. It was while waiting for the proofs that Luke and Alexander continued their reads after I returned to work. Finally, the printer got the proofs to us and Luke color corrected a few hundred pieces of artwork in just a few days. He then ripped the PDFs, burned them to CDs, and ran to the printer's office to deposit the materials and sign off on the contract. It appeared that the few days of delay hadn't hurt us. But just to be sure that we would have books for Gen Con, and realizing that shipping by sea from China might take longer than the month we were told to expect, Luke arranged for seven cases of books to be sent to us via air freight so that we would definitely have books for sale at Gen Con.

Post Production (May)
We received the final proofs 10 days later. And with them came another unwelcome surprise. In addition to the random assortment of pages we had requested for color correction purposes, we also received a full color proof of the entire text—a proof we had specifically requested the printer not send us—and were billed $2,000 for it. We could only register a complaint about it, and have yet to resolve that situation fully. Regardless, Luke proceeded to make minor corrections to the proofs, mostly postscript errors on the printer's end. He then returned the proofs to the printer and all those corrections were proofed via PDFs from the printer's prepro department.

Three weeks later, we received six gorgeous approval copies. In the meantime, Luke had put together the preorder materials (a T-shirt design, buttons, and an agreement with Dark Horse to allow Luke to resell the graphic novels), and got Chris to agree to individually illustrate 40 preordered books. He also leaked the first real mention of Burning Empires to the Web by replacing the normal front page of the Burning Wheel Web site with the full cover (front and back) painting for Burning Empires. After a day, he took the painting down and put up a preview page with a cropped version of the cover and a download to whet the appetites of fans. He would add more downloads over the coming weeks.

And that, more or less, brings us up to the present.

-Fin-

Burning Empires: From Inception to Finished Product (Part IV)

2006-07-31T17:45:00.000-04:00

Continued from Part III

Editing Phase I (March-April)
As we moved into the seventh month working on the Burning Empires project, I was deep in my editing pass. We had gotten to the point where we had established a rolling sequence. There was enough material to edit that Luke was working and redrafting ahead of the sections I was working on. As Luke received my edits, he'd input them and send the section to Rich, who would then take his pass. Once the section was in Rich's hands, Luke couldn't touch it.

"The hardest part was keeping my hands off the material that Rich was working on. That's where the process becomes counter-productive. I can't touch stuff that's with an editor or copy editor, even if I see a mistake! I’ve got concentrate on other stuff and hope the editors do their job."

It was also in this period that we decided the Alien Life-Form Burner would use a similar process and mechanics to the Technology Burner. With that decision in hand, Luke wrote the Alien Life-Form Burner and Playing the Game section, and heavily revised the Technology Burner based on the feedback from our outside playtests.

Luke also began an intensive, month-long conversation with Jordan Whorley on the background art and concepts during this period, as they sought to hammer out the layout concept for the book. They had begun with a very different concept from the eventual look of the book, one that was much more like Burning Wheel, but they just couldn't seem to get it right. But as Luke started going through Chris' sketchbooks, and the color plates started coming in, Luke settled on his concept, a sort of "future book from the past."

"The sketches would be the author's own illustrations in his future-past book. The color pics were from the book's archive. It's never explicitly stated anywhere that this is the case, but that's the concept I had in the back of my mine as I settled in to do the layout."

Once they settled on the concept, it only took Jordan a few days to put together the page border and the various markers that served as tabs and would allow the reader to know where he was in the book. Jordan even included a very fine grid that would underlay each page to hint at a screen.

The Art Comes Through (March-April)
While the editing phase was gearing up, preproduction for the art was also underway.

Black & White Part I
It was time to deal with the sketchbooks Chris had sent us in February. Luke and Drozdal spent a fair amount of time researching scanners. Chris' sketchbooks were hardbacks, and he had drawn into the spine on quite a few of the pages.

"We tried to find a book scanner specifically designed to accommodate for the spine bend. There was only one reasonably priced model. Everything else was tens of thousands of dollars, so we had to make do."

Luke, Drozdal and Alexander then proceeded to dig through the sketchbooks, noting which pieces we wanted and which pieces we didn't need. Once they had flagged everything, Dro scanned them all.

"He did several hundred scans in just a few days. It was pretty remarkable. Then Dro and I cleaned up the grayscales—which can get pretty ugly if you don't clean them up—and began to crop out all the elements from the full pages scanned. We cropped heads, weapons, vehicles, characters, but I also kept the full pages in reserve in case I liked a detail and wanted to see what else was going on in that page. This process took a couple of weeks. We had these done before Jordan had delivered his finals and before Chris had provided the color."

Color Part I
On the color art front, the color plates from Dark Horse, mostly covers, arrived in March. Meanwhile, Chris supplied a list of all the originals he still had in his possession. Armed with the list, Luke and Drozdal began combing through the comics to correlate Chris' list with the pages and determine what we needed from the pieces he had available. They also compiled a list of the art we wanted that we would have to scan from the comics themselves.

Luke then passed the list on to Chris so he could begin scanning all the originals in his possession and burn them onto CDs. It took Chris about three weeks to scan all the art and send it our way. Luke rode him pretty hard through the whole period. We all recognized that it was a potential deadline killer if he took too long. We were sunk if he didn't provide the art in time.

As soon as he got his hands on the CDs, Luke sorted the images into three categories: unusable, usable in parts, and full page. The 'unusable' images were those that chopped up the action too much, or, based on a closer look, didn't fit the chapter they had initially been intended for—though some of the unusables did end up in the book in other contexts afterall. The 'unusable in parts' images were those in which the pages would be taken apart and the individual components would be used separately. And the 'full page' images were those images that would be used 'as is.'

Luke color coded each category for easier reference. He then proceeded to do some basic color correction and begin cropping down the usable in parts pieces by chapters (i.e., images intended for the Firefight chapter, images intended for the Duel of Wits chapter, etc.). Unfortunately, the images were so large at this point that Luke rapidly ran out of disk space. We had to run over to CompUSA one afternoon to pick up a new 300GB internal drive in order to accommodate the project.

"This process was a lot (a lot!) of work, but it was necessary. I had to dig into the material and get a feel for it. Doing cropping and color correction is a great way to become intimate with the artwork, especially when you're doing a lot of it.."

Luke also began negotiating with Chris about the book's cover toward the end of March. They had a very long conversation about it. Luke pitched an idea for a sort of Bayeux Tapestry of the Iron Empires, but Chris backed him down and got him to agree to something simpler. Luke though, insisted that it still tell a story. They agreed upon a concept.

"Once Chris gets rolling with the visual stuff, he's very vivid and precise. It's impressive. He sent me a sketch the next day. I made some revisions and asked, "What's next?" He said, "Now I paint!" He goes from sketch to painting. No finished pencils or anything! Scary."

It took Chris about three weeks to paint Lady Kate's final, tragic war against the Vaylen

Copy Editing and Layout (April-May)
By April, we had signed on Johanna Novales (who, like Rich Forest, was another veteran from the Burning Wheel Revised project) to make the second copy editing pass. Once Rich finished his edits, Luke would input the corrections and send the sections to Johanna. I was finishing my first editing pass through the text at the time, so the full process had sections flowing from Luke to me, back to Luke, on to Rich, back to Luke again, on to Johanna, and then back to Luke a final time.

"Keeping up with the edits as they were rolling in was a daunting process. I almost lost it somewhere in there."

I finished my first edit near the end of the second week of April, and Rich and Johanna finished their copy editing passes not much later. I told Luke that I needed a few days to recharge my batteries, especially as my day job was getting busy, but that I would dive back in and begin my second pass through the text after he finished inputting Johanna's corrections.

Meanwhile, as Rich and Johanna were finishing up, Luke began putting together the finalized layout, placing the color artwork and sketches. This process had to wait until the end, because the images were to be associated with the text, and the text would move and change according to the edits.

"There's nothing worse than redoing 600 pages of layout!"

It was at this point that the money for the project began to run out. It appeared that Luke would either have to call in some of the loan promises he had secured, or he would have to return to work before the project was completed, putting a severe crimp in our schedule. Luke and I began discussing a strategy for a preorder that would help cover the printing costs. If he could cover one of the payments to the printer with a preorder, it would give him a little more flexibility on the budget front. Fortunately though, Burning Wheel was selling very strongly in this period. We were averaging sales of more than three books per day, a year after Burning Wheel had been released. When the sales numbers came in from our fulfillment houses (Key 20 and Indie Press Revolution), it was clear that the loans would not be necessary.

In the meantime, Chris was looking at a draft layout and loving what he saw. With the project nearing completion, Chris also managed to clear some more time in his schedule for us.

"After the cover was finished, Chris started doing more artwork for us. He did a couple dozen finished pencils for the book, mostly weapons and vehicles."

He also found the time to paint a cnidaria makara, the great, intelligent jellyfish that plied the waters of the Vaylen's original homeworld, the first species to be enslaved by the Vaylen and still the preferred host of the Yaadasahm clan. It's one of my favorite pieces in the book.

When we began the project, Luke had promised himself that each and every weapon and vehicle in the book would have an accompanying illustration. So when we had a few holes after laying out the chapter, he turned to Chris to sketch some additional pieces. Chris was very open to the work and did it incredibly quickly, even when Luke commissioned him to draw a brick for the improvised weapon entry. The piece is Luke's favorite in the book, and I believe he plans to buy the original from Chris and have it framed. I'm pretty sure he's the only person who's ever commissioned Chris to draw a brick.

Finally, as this whole phase of the process began to draw to a close, Luke and I began discussing ideas for the fiction introductions to each of the four lifepath chapters. We hashed out basic concepts and assigned two each to Sean Bosker and Rich Douek, who had supplied the fiction in Burning Wheel.

At this point we also saw the production dummy of the book from the printer, which was very exciting!

In the next part: The Weeks of Pain and Post Production

Burning Empires: From Inception to Finished Product (Part III)

2006-07-27T19:15:00.000-04:00

Continued from Part II

Shotgun Playtests (Dec.-Jan.)

Once Luke finished the initial rewrite of the Burning Wheel and moved on to the Character Burner, we began holding regular playtests of the various new mechanics during the evening at BWHQ. We’d sit down and set up a Firefight or burn Worlds, or even use the Infection mechanics to go through whole campaigns at the macro level of play.

The shotgun playtests were absolutely necessary, as they allowed us to very rapidly use the mechanics over and over again, time after time, to a degree that would take months or longer inside the framework of actual play. The tests were quite enjoyable at first, as we were still challenged with shaping the rules to conform to our vision of how they should work. But as time went on, it became less about the fun of creating rules and more about making sure that we were consistently getting the results we wanted. Without the investment of actual play and the connection to character and color that play engendered, it became tedious. Still, they were incredibly valuable, and the game would not be what it is without them.

These tests would often run late into the night, and I was consistently bleary-eyed walking into work the next morning.

Playtest Agra (January)

With the Character Burner rewritten, it was time to put together another playtest. Drozdal was off visiting family in Poland for the holiday, so we brought in Alexander to replace him.

This time we had a more fully formed World Burner to work with and actual lifepaths to use. We soon saw some of the things that were still missing from the lifepaths, but the lifepaths also gave us much better traction for understanding the setting we had created and also allowed us to use the Circles mechanics to greater advantage.

Additionally, we had now formalized something we did instinctively in Playtest Alpha: each character had to have a relationship with a figure of note on the other side of the conflict (i.e., with one of the GM’s antagonists). One of the things that had made us love the Iron Empires comics was how human the protagonists (and antagonists!) were. Sure, they were wrestling with the fate of their planet against an implacable foe, but they still loved, hated, committed adultery, etc. They were fighting to save humanity, but they were at the same time led astray by that which made them human. It really suggested the very core of Burning Empires play: the choice between doing what is necessary and pursuing one’s personal goals and desires. The first step in making that choice central to play was requiring that every player tie his character personally to the enemy in some fashion.

Now Burning Empires wasn’t just about fighting for the fate of the planet, it was about the fate of fathers, sons, sisters, husbands and lovers. And working to save one might mean sacrificing the other.

Agra also led to another key aspect of Burning Empires: scenes as currency.

One thing that Luke and I and others at the Forge have seen very clearly is that role playing texts in general are pretty poor at teaching players how to use them. Invariably, creators do things when running their games that are essential to making the games function as they should, and yet some of the most important of those things never make it into the text. We do things that are so ingrained that we take it completely for granted that other players, who learned to play in other environments, do them too. Once you release a game, if you interact with your fans, you quickly start to see patterns in the questions they ask. Pretty soon, the conclusion is inescapable: you’re doing something at your table that is not actually in the text. Burning Wheel is no different than other games in that regard.

Luke and I pledged that we would do our best to hard code the way we played into Burning Empires by critically evaluating every nuance of how we played our games, and making sure it made its way into the text.

During Playtest Alpha, Luke and I had watched very carefully what we and the other players were doing, how we went about involving each other and how we built toward conflicts. Just as importantly, we noted where things fell down and tried to understand what caused the failure. Luke synthesized it all and brought the new scene rules to the table for Playtest Agra. He had divided the things we did in play into four distinct types of interaction with the rules and each other. We used Color Scenes to allow our individual characters to take the spotlight and introduce cool details about the world that made the game a richer experience for all of us; we used Interstitial Scenes, which consisted of scenes of pure interaction between two or more characters; we used Building Scenes to lay the groundwork for conflicts, stuff like creating propaganda, buying technology or hacking a network; and we used Conflict Scenes for the serious action—big firefights and duels of wits.

Luke identified the different sorts of things we did when playing and broke them up into the above categories. Then he turned those scenes into currency by limiting their availability. In one Maneuver of the Infection rules (which equates to half a session or a full session of play, depending upon your speed of play), each player would have access to one Color scene and one Interstitial scene. Each player would also have access to one Building scene OR one Conflict scene. Additionally the players were guaranteed one Conflict scene, but could have a maximum of two in a Maneuver. The GM, also, had access to one Color scene and one Interstitial scene for each of his figures of note (he can have up to three), and one Building scene Or a Conflict scene per character. The GM was also guaranteed at least one Conflict scene and a maximum of two. Players could invite each other into their Interstitial and Building and Conflict scenes, as well.

“One of my design goals for Burning Empires was for this game to do what BW did not: BW does not enforce the structure of a story. You can sit around with BW and jerk off. I wanted to try to design a game in which the players HAD to tell a story. We accomplished that in two ways. One is the Infection mechanics (including the World Burner point totals). Knowing that the game is moving inevitably to an end encourages a narrative arc in play. It's an unconscious reaction—if there's an end, there's going to be a beginning and a middle. And those are the basic building blocks for a narrative story. The other commodity for enforcing the story is the scene structure. By preventing players from just sitting around and jerking off, we infused the game with a narrative pacing. You've got limited screen time. You've got to do SOMETHING. A little pressure like this went a long way to increasing the quality of player participation in the game. And it also had the necessary (and intentional) side effect of making the game feel like the comic books.”

We found that making scenes into a commodity created a very powerful dynamic in play. It really knit the group together. It made players shove the spotlight around, and created tremendous pressure to force the story/game forward with every scene. It also produced an unanticipated but very pleasant effect from interaction with the Advancement rules. Tests in Burning Wheel have always been a commodity, as they allow characters to improve, but the scene mechanics meant that which tests you chose to pursue during play became a very important consideration. It also made the opportunity to help your fellow players on a test much more valuable.

During this playtest, the Technology and Vehicles rules also took shape.

Once the first draft of Burning Empires was finished on January 9th, I began my first editorial pass through the text. At this stage, I was ignoring most grammatical considerations, focusing my attention on clarity and whether the mechanics worked. Most of my edits had to do with strengthening or better explaining particular mechanics, though I also included suggestions for new mechanics in certain instances.

Also, whenever writers are working something out as they write, they tend to write in the Passive Voice. It’s very common when you’re trying to explain something to yourself. Unfortunately, Passive Voice leads to incredibly convoluted sentences that can be very difficult to follow. So, many of my edits at this time also involved an attempt to eliminate uses of Passive Voice to make the text easier for readers to understand.

While I was working on the sections of text that Luke was sending my way, Luke spoke with Rich Forest about working as one of the copy editors on the project, making sure he could work within our deadlines.

As my edits came rolling in, Luke started going through the edits I had submitted and began redrafting the text. Once my edits had been incorporated, Luke began passing sections to Rich for a turn.

Moeller’s Three Sketchbooks Arrive (February)

By February, three sketchbooks of Chris’ work—everything he had done in the period leading up to and during his work on the Iron Empires—arrived at BWHQ. Aside from goggling at Chris’ sketches though, we were not yet ready to start dealing with the black & white art.

Luke was still working on trying to get Chris to do some original art for us, but Chris’ schedule remained far too tight. Getting nervous, Luke and I began discussing the possibility of bringing additional artists onto the project, a frightening prospect as Luke had not budgeted for such an expense. Luke also discussed the issue with Chris.

It was at this point that we received the most severe blow of the entire project, and one which led me, at least, to question whether we had played a very bad hand of cards when we decided to go forward with this project. Luke asked Chris for the original plates for the comics, to see what could be done to make them stretch to fit our needs for the project. And we learned that Chris did not have all of them.

As is apparently common among comic book artists, Chris had sold a number of the original plates to fans and collectors. And as the comics had initially been released in the 1990s, prior to the mass adoption of digital technology in the business, he did not have digital versions.

We turned to Dark Horse Books, which publishes the graphic novels, but though they were very easy to deal with and very professional, they had only a small archive of Chris’ work—mostly covers. They didn’t have what we needed.

Our choices were limited at that point. We were six months into the project and had a lot of time and sweat invested already. We’d have to make do with the plates that Chris had and try scanning the rest from the comics. Fingers crossed.

Wider Playtesting (Feb.-March)

Meanwhile, with Playtest Agra drawn to a close, we put together another group. Drozdal had returned from Poland, and Alexander had left us to put together an outside playtest group of his own. We had been playtesting with four players and a GM, so we thought it best to see what would happen with a larger group, especially in light of the scene mechanics. Our playtest group for Morelia consisted of Luke, Drozdal, Chris (not Moeller), Mayuran, John, Danny and myself.

Morelia was one of the most difficult worlds we played for several reasons. First, as we had suspected, the number of players made working with the scene mechanics a little difficult. We determined that four or five players were optimal for Burning Empires play. Also, I played a character that was ambivalent as to which side he was on, to see what would happen. It worked, but there was a great deal of tension at the table and between the group. It also happened to be a world that was thoroughly unbalanced in the Vaylen’s favor (we were playing the human side), and so we were steadily losing ground to the terror and turning to infighting as it happened. On the whole, the world worked, even though it was hard, and was a fascinating test.

While Morelia was under way, we had also sent the text to outside playtest groups. Alexander, Mike, Judd and Kevin all gamely gave it a go with our very roughly cut gem. Others, including the estimable Mike Holmes, agreed to read the text and comment. Several were not able to make it through an entire Phase, as outside commitments got in the way.

The rest, to our good fortune, had considerable difficulties. Giving your baby to someone else, and letting them sputter and founder with it, can be one of the most difficult things a game designer can face.

Luke can react very negatively when things seem to be going badly, especially when we get into this phase of a project and the strain starts to tell. Burning Empires was no exception. The initial playtest reports contained some very troublesome issues, and there were a few times when Luke was ready to give up as a result.

But the fact of the matter is that playtests that go wrong are by far the most rewarding. Few things will teach you more about your game’s weaknesses, and what is happening at your table that’s not in the text, than a troublesome and turbulent playtest session.

These months were very intensive in the development of Burning Empires, and the text evolved rapidly based on the input of the playtesters, Mike Holmes and my edits. Luke was releasing revised drafts nearly every week.

That, in itself, became somewhat of a problem. Due to the size of the text (it was a brick even then), few if any of the outside playtesters printed new copies of the rules from the revisions. Keeping track of who was playing with which revision, and whether the problems they were experiencing in play had already been dealt with in the up-to-date text, became increasingly difficult.

Finding a way to control that issue will be a priority in our next project.

It was also in this period that we finally settled on a name for the project: Burning Empires: The Iron Empires Forged on the Burning Wheel.

In the next part: Editing Phase I, The Art Comes Through, and Copy Editing and Layout

Burning Empires: From Inception to Finished Product (Part II)

2006-07-26T13:41:00.000-04:00

Continued from Part I

Drafting Ideas (Sept.-Oct.)

With the contracts well underway and our first high-level discussions begun, Luke spoke with his friend Bob and got his blessing for the project. Bob is one of Luke’s oldest friends and Luke considers Bob’s initial reactions a key part of his creative process. In this case, after Luke described his ideas for the Infection mechanics and Firefight, Bob told Luke he was nuts.

Generally, the more Luke’s friends are opposed to his mechanical ideas, the more driven he becomes to make them work. So Bob’s reaction was exactly what the project needed. Ultimately, Luke was so feverish in his description of his ideas that Bob told him to go for it.

With Bob’s blessing, it was time to get down to the grunt work. During this period, Luke was on the phone with Chris semiweekly, getting Chris to expand on setting concepts and the nature of Iron Empires society, and also trying to convince Chris to work on new original art for the game. He had some success with the former, but Chris’ regular work for DC Comics was keeping him too busy to do any additional work for us.

Vaylen

In the meantime, Luke and I began focusing on Vaylen culture, which we needed to understand before we could create any rules for them. Burning Wheel’s lifepath system, which we had decided to keep for Burning Empires, requires that you thoroughly understand the structure of a society in order to create lifepaths for it.

There wasn’t much to go on in the graphic novels, aside from talk of Vaylen ‘fingers’ in Faith Conquers and mention in Sheva’s War of Vaylen clans staking their wealth on attempts to colonize human worlds. Chris had some ideas to share about what the Vaylen were like, but largely we had to draw the few, disparate details into a cohesive whole.

First we had to answer the question: What does it mean, psychologically, to be a parasitic worm that can only gain sentience, memory and emotion by stealing the body and mind of another sentient creature? We decided that Vaylen don’t think of themselves as 'using' humanity. Instead, their leaders, the ones with human bodies, think of themselves as human. Their sentience is human. Their emotions are human. The memories they take from their hosts are human. If they leave their hosts, they lose sentience, emotion and memories (those that aren't encoded, anyway). If they enter a different host, the quality of their sentience, emotions and memories is different.

Vaylen desperately want to be human. And they want their children to be human.

But at the same time, they are creatures that gain sentience, emotions and memory all at once, in a split second of time. I imagine them as loving all emotion and sensation. At the same time, they do not have the direct experience that allows real humans to differentiate between good emotions and bad emotions, between good sensations and bad sensations.

The Ascetic that practices denial and restraint offers a path that is as interesting and sensation-ful as the Dilettante that pursues pleasures of all stripes. For instance, we gave the Dilettante the option of taking the Cannibal trait because the sensation of horror that emanates from the host when breaking that taboo is as delicious to the Vaylen as the sensation of sexual intercourse or drug-induced euphoria.

Once we had that concept, we had to explore the cultural ramifications of such a psychology. What happens to a society when one’s levels of intelligence and ability and depth of emotion are merely a matter of taking a new host? When a person that wants to experience childhood again simply has to take a child host?

What does it feel like to look upon your children in a tank and know that their capacity to experience is dependent on the bodies you secure for them? They can be animals or geniuses.

Then, for our own sense of closure, we had to satisfy ourselves as to why the Vaylen couldn’t simply clone human bodies to satisfy their needs.

Once we had answered all these questions, we were able to settle on a caste structure for Vaylen society, in which clans were regimented in the types of bodies they could own. Only the most powerful among the clans had access to human bodies. The rest had to make due with genetically engineered creations with less mental sophistication. Even better, we realized that the only way for members of less powerful clans to attain human bodies was to join a Vaylen finger (spies that infiltrate human planets). Perfect.

Luke began researching the Indian caste system and their system of familial power, and much of the feel of the Vaylen flowed from that research. He decided that the Vaylen needed to exist on two axes, the family and the caste. That way there could be internal tension, and they wouldn’t be a boring, monolithic alien culture.

Kerrn

The Kerrn were up next. In many ways, they proved more problematic for us. We only see one Kerrn in the graphic novels, but it’s clear that they’re intended as the ‘warrior’ aliens. While we really enjoyed the Kerrn Gopher in the comics, we frankly found the concept of ‘warrior’ aliens boring. They’re almost always some weird amalgam of Vikings and Samurai that I call Vikurai. Boring! We knew we had to do something different, while still upholding Chris’ vision for the Kerrn.

We started with what we knew from the graphic novels and Chris’ notes: The Kerrn were a genetically engineered slave race created by the Vaylen from human and plant genetic material. They looked like frogs, were capable of subsisting on photosynthesis, and were tough enough to withstand brief periods of vacuum. Somehow, a small group of Kerrn developed the ability to regain control of their consciousnesses and expel the worm from their bodies. The Kerrn fought a war with the Vaylen and won their freedom, fleeing to a hidden world. They would later join forces with humans and a select few would become the Emperor’s honor guard.

As with the Vaylen, we had to explore the psychology of genetically engineered slaves that won their freedom, and the cultural ramifications of that psychology. How would such unimaginable torment and horror shape a culture?

I pitched Luke on the idea of using Mossad as an inspiration for the Kerrn. Also, based on the narrative that we had, Luke had the idea that after their war with the Vaylen, the Kerrn crashed their damaged, stolen spaceships together and built a hidden, artificial world for themselves. Using that as inspiration, Luke decided to use the culture of submariners as an additional source of material for the Kerrn. The Kerrn would flow naturally from those roots in time.

Firefight, Psychology, Iron and Injury

Once we had a feel for the alien cultures, Luke began working on the Firefight rules. We knew that we wanted to base them on the Duel of Wits rules, and that each Firefight would have stakes. Firefights would not be simply about killing or being killed. That would happen regardless. They had to be about something. The early rules were very rough, but it was enough to allow us to begin a playtest.

We also began sketching out ideas for what Psychology (psychic powers akin to those described by Asimov in Second Foundation) would do, and how to translate that into mechanics. We spent a lot of time pouring over Sheva’s War, looking at the dialogue between Vienne, Sheva and Philippe, searching for clues as to what Chris’ psychologists could and couldn’t do. It was immediately clear that Psychology would be problematic. Psychologists have the ability to control minds. They can change Beliefs! How could we allow that sort of thing without turning Psychologist characters into generators of Social Contract dysfunction?

Luke had an answer: Connections. For most Psychology effects, a Psychologist would require a Connection. And we decided that our rules would not allow for a Connection to be forced upon a player. Instead, the Connection would be a player-to-player contract. A player of a psychologist could offer a Connection to any other character in the psychologist character’s presence. The player of the target character could accept or refuse, and that would be the end of the matter. Accepting the Connection would open the character up to a range of effects, both beneficial and deleterious. Most importantly, accepting the Connection would give the target character a FoRK die toward all social skills (including Persuasion, Oratory and Command) as long as the Connection was maintained.

We also created downsides to having too many Connections out as a psychologist: The more Connections you had, the lower your Barrier to incursion by other psychologists. To really give that teeth, we determined that a psychologist could not end a Connection on his own. He would have to request his Connection die back from the other player, who could then decide whether to give it back or keep it.

We believed these rules would ensure that psychologists had powerful juice, but that other players could use game-derived social pressure to keep abuses in check.

Luke also began putting together the rules for Iron (power armor) at this time, and we began to explore ideas for how we wanted Injury to work in Burning Empires. We explored the possibility of making all Injury trait-based, but eventually discarded the idea as too complicated within the Burning Wheel framework.

Playtest Alpha (November)

With a feel for the culture and some new mechanics to work with (but no lifepaths), we put together the first playtest group: Luke, Dro, Chris (not Moeller), Mayuran and myself. We created the world of Ogun using the new World Burner, but still had to use the Burning Wheel lifepaths to come up with analogs of the types of characters we wanted. Drozdal decided to play a Kerrn, and Luke had him use the dwarf lifepaths to simulate it. He would complain mightily about it in true Polish manner in the weeks to come.

While there wasn’t much of Burning Empires yet in place, this game really showed us the types of things that players would want to do in Burning Empires. We learned very quickly what sorts of things our rules did not cover. It also showed us what the new Lifepaths of Man would require, both structurally and in terms of skills.

The initial Technology rules began to take shape at this point. We didn’t yet know exactly how we intended to handle them, but knew that we wanted players to be able to talk tech into existence.

Based on the six sessions of the playtest, Luke revised the Infection, World Burner and Firefight mechanics.

Luke Carves Up the Burning Wheel (Nov.-Dec.)

As the playtest was getting underway, Luke was also beginning to plan the physical design of the book. The very first step Luke takes when designing a project (before logos, layout, etc.) is to select fonts.

“Fonts are the foundation for the look of a book. They’ve got to knit together all the other elements. So for BE, I knew I wanted a different look than BW. It had to have a classic look to it, like BW, but also had to be modern.”

Luke went through his font database of several thousand fonts and made a short list of the fonts that suited his needs. He knew he’d need four fonts: body copy, chapter header, subheads and example copy.

His first selection was ITC Tiepolo.

“I selected Tiepolo for the body because it’s a semi-serif with very shapely letters, but very unobtrusive, and it benefits from looking both modern and classic at once.”

He selected Europa for the subheads in order to mimic the covers of the graphic novels. Caliban, for the example copy, made the transition from Burning Wheel.

“Caliban stayed on from BW because it was convenient and it linked the new text with BW, which was serendipitous because later Caliban fit nicely with the layout concept of the future computer from the past.”

The final selection was Democratica, which had a very mechanical look, as the script font for the titles. However, Luke soon realized that Democratica had been used in a number of other RPGs. Luke believes that fonts make people who see them form strong subconscious connotations. He didn’t want readers to mentally connect Burning Empires with those other RPGs, so he chose a new font: Oxford. Luke felt Oxford wound up being the better choice, as it would fit better with the eventual design concept of the book.

Arguments

With font selection out of the way, Luke and I started holding the first of many (sometimes heated!) discussions of the best way to present the information in the new book. Burning Wheel consisted of two books, allowing us to send new readers from one to the other in a manner suited to learning the rules, while also keeping the information compartmentalized in a way that made it easier for reference in play. But Burning Empires would be a single book. We had to decide upon a structure that would give it a logical flow to a new user while still being easy to reference.

The most important decision at this point was that the World Burner had to precede the Character Burner. Our conceit was that players would not be able to burn their characters until they had collaboratively created a world. We would later reinforce that mechanically.

“The World Burner to Character Burner decision was huge. It shaped the rest of the game. We knew that we wanted the players to be able to add their own stamp to the setting via the World Burner. We knew that from the beginning. But I don't think we understood what that meant for the rest of the game. Not until I physically put that chapter in the beginning of the book did we truly see that your choices when building your setting affected everything else about the game you were about to play, from your Lifepath choices, to the maps you were going to draw in Firefight!”

We also decided the Character Burner would precede the Burning Wheel itself, and the order of the lifepath chapters and all the chapters in the Burning Wheel section. The latter would not remain static, as chapters would move, merge or disappear entirely based on our play experiences in the coming months.

Grunt Work

Once the structure had been determined, Luke set to work. He rewrote the Burning Wheel in November, excising chapters that were no longer needed (Fight!, Range and Cover, Sorcery, Emotional Magic, etc.), and incorporating our new material. He then set to work on the Character Burner in December, pulling together the Human, Vaylen, Kerrn and Mukhadish lifepaths, the new skill list, and the new trait list. The skill list chapter and the trait list chapter, as always, were some of the hardest, most painful chapters to write. Luke, who is incredibly driven when working, pushed through and completed the first draft of Burning Empires by January.

In the next part: Shotgun Playtests, Playtest Agra, Moeller’s Three Sketchbooks Arrive, and Wider Playtesting

Burning Empires: From Inception to Finished Product (Part I)

2006-07-25T16:41:00.000-04:00

Last week I posted about Brennan’s description of his process for writing Mortal Coil, and promised that I would give Burning Empires a similar treatment. Well, here’s where I start to deliver. It was such a long, intense process (I’ve been gathering notes and consulting with Luke about it for the past two days) that I’ve decided I need to break it down into multiple posts. What follows is a description of the very first steps we took.

It All Starts with Jihad

The story of the Burning Empires project actually began with Burning Sands: Jihad, the Dune-inspired space opera supplement for Burning Wheel.

Jihad was our love letter to Burning Wheel fans, a thank you for all their support. It was also the first real collaborative project at BWHQ. I wrote the World Burner, Drozdal was the mad scientist behind the Black Market rules, and Luke did all the other heavy lifting, though Dro and I came up with some of the lifepaths and traits.

To Luke, the success of such a collaborative project was fundamental to going ahead with the Burning Empires project.

“The reason the collaborative nature of Jihad was so important is that I knew the BE book would be big and stressful and would require some serious effort from you [Thor] and Dro. I don't know if I would have taken on the project without the knowledge that we could work together. Or, if I did take it on, it probably would have been a disaster.”

Jihad got a very warm reception from our fans when we released it just prior to Gen Con, despite the fact that we had kept it under wraps until it was done. We were very pleased with the results. Dro and Luke started talking wistfully of giving Chris Moeller’s Iron Empires (recently re-released) the same treatment.

Meanwhile, the playtest group I’d put together for the Jihad project was still going strong, and I was very pleased with where the Propaganda War rules were taking us. As we discussed the play results over lunch at Dosa Hut, our favorite South Indian vegetarian restaurant, Luke and I were also tossing around the idea of a more robust and rigorous treatment of those rules.

On a whim at the end of August, after we’d returned from Gen Con, Luke decided to send Chris an email about the possibility of doing Iron Empires as a role playing game. Fortuitously, Chris had recently decided that an attempt to do the Iron Empires as a role playing game with another company wasn’t going to go anywhere, and he was going to shop it around to a smaller company that was excited about the property.

We’d just come off a fun and very successful Gen Con, and were seriously discussing setting out in a new direction with our designs. However, once Chris showed interest in pursuing an Iron Empires project with us, Luke decided that we needed to strike while the opportunity was available. Luke convinced me (grudgingly!) that we needed to put the project on which we were now focused on the back burner and turn our attention to the Iron Empires.

Legal Matters (Aug.-Oct.)

Chris and Luke consulted their lawyers and Chris’ agent, and spent August to October hammering out a contract. Our lawyer advised us against doing a licensed product, but we stubbornly felt the advantages and opportunity to work with Chris Moeller outweighed the risks.

The legal process was made far simpler than it might otherwise have been, as Chris owns all the rights to the Iron Empires and Luke owns all the rights to Burning Wheel. Still, the contract had to make clear that Chris retained his intellectual property and Luke retained his, whether the project was completed or not. The final contract specified that Chris would retain ownership of all setting material, even material created by us as part of the design process, while Luke would retain ownership of all mechanics, even those designed specifically for this game. It was also necessary to nail down how costs and revenues would be allocated, and what Chris and Luke’s responsibilities were. Chris agreed to supply all the color art from the comics, as well as several spot pieces and the cover for the game.

But the real sticking point contract-wise was final approval for content. Recognizing that our production timeline would not allow for any delays caused by approvals (as we have seen with multiple licensed RPGs in the past few years), we were loath to give away final approval. Nor were we much entranced by the possibility of having to compromise our creative vision for the project. At the same time, we recognized that Chris had an equal interest in protecting his setting.

In the end, contrary to our lawyer’s advice, Luke agreed to give Chris final approval. Under the conditions of the contract, Luke was obligated to submit material to Chris. However, the contract also stipulated that Chris had three days from the material’s submission to request changes, after which final approval for that material reverted to Luke.

Research and Meetings (Sept.-Nov.)

With the legal process underway, Luke, Drozdal and I began to put together our game plan in September. We held a series of meetings to nail down the core concepts for the game. The first thing we settled upon was that the underlying metaphor for the game would be disease. The Vaylen were a parasitic infestation infecting the bloated, dying body of humanity. Once we had that concept down and had a chance to explore the ways in which we could extend that metaphor throughout the game, we began putting together the initial World Burner questions and numbers and rudimentary Infection mechanics (based on Jihad’s Propaganda War and informed by that mechanic’s strengths and weaknesses in play).

Meanwhile, Luke started investigating printing options. He knew right away that he wanted the book to be digest sized, full color and hard backed, with a traditional print run. With that in mind, Luke contacted several colleagues who had recently printed full color, hard backed RPGs to gather information about printers and quotes. Armed with that information, Luke then approached several printers for direct quotes on the project.

Far and away, the best quotes for a project like ours came from companies based in China. In fact, the US printers cost about twice as much for color offset printing. It was not exactly what we wanted to hear. Luke had decided that he was willing to pay a premium not to print in a country with poor labor protections and a history of human rights abuses, but the reality was stark: We would not be able to produce a profitable RPG that met our production values without printing in China.

The project almost died right there. But the opportunity to work with Chris Moeller and have access to that much beautiful, color art doesn’t come along every day. We decided to press forward.

Luke settled upon Hong Kong-based Regent Publishing, which conveniently has an office in New York, and met formally with its representative, Robert Conte, on November 15^th. Robert gave Luke the contracts and they discussed the timeline for production. Regent has published numerous RPGs and was familiar with the product. Robert even asked Luke if we needed to have the book ready by Gen Con.

The contract with Regent was soon settled, though our lawyer had advised us against printing in China. Aside from ethical consideration, he also noted that we would have difficulty seeking recourse if anything should go wrong. A great deal more nervous than we had been, we continued on.

Research was a major part of this phase of the process. In addition to rereading the graphic novels and notes with which Chris had supplied us, we read as much SF as we could get our hands on, especially stuff that is considered canonical. We paid special attention to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels, as we saw them as ‘foundational’ (sorry) to Chris’ work and they also rank among our favorites. The research materials were passed freely among the BWHQ crew and most of it found its way into the ‘Ography.

As an interesting side note, playtesters who had not read the graphic novels were not allowed to read them during playtesting. We focused them on the game and their virgin impressions of it, as we didn’t want them inadvertently filling in details that weren’t there.

Luke also sought and secured loan promises from friends at this point. Although the loans never became necessary, the promises were key in allowing the project to move forward. Luke had just been laid-off from his job and had made the decision to live off his savings until the project was completed, allowing him to work on it full-time. The loan promises gave him the confidence to do that, rather than immediately seek another job.

In the next part: Drafting Ideas, Playtest Alpha, and Luke Carves Up the Burning Wheel

Brennan Offers a Look Inside the Process of Creating Mortal Coil

2006-07-20T16:50:00.000-04:00

Brennan has written a fascinating, in-depth description of his process for writing Mortal Coil over at his blog, Why Is a Raven Like a Writing Desk?. If you're working on a game, or thinking about it, I heartily recommend taking a look at it. The particulars might vary, but the sort of process, planning and execution that Brennan describes can be the difference between holding a game with your name on it in your hands and simply talking about a game you'll create some day.

If you've already created a game, care to share a little about your process? I'll do my best to get something together about the Burning Empires process in the next few days.

The Value of Creating Scenarios for Your Game

2006-07-19T14:01:00.000-04:00

This question is for game designers: Do you have scenarios or "adventures" for your game that are available to your customers (whether for free download or for purchase)? If such a thing is possible within the context of your game, I believe that you should.

In 2000, when Wizards of the Coast released Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, we saw a renaissance in modules. It seemed every RPG company under the sun was releasing adventures for the new game. It wasn't very long, however, before the modules started disappearing from the store shelves in favor of setting books, or products that featured new Feats, Prestige Classes, and the like.

Why did modules flower and then die on the vine and why am I insisting that scenarios are still a good idea? Well, a little simple math ought to help us understand the module phenomenon. Only a percentage of the people that buy your game are going to also shell out money to buy a supplement for your game. That holds true whether the name of your company is Wizards of the Coast, White Wolf, or Burning Wheel. At BWHQ, our experience suggests that you should be able to sell a top-tier supplement (i.e., one that holds appeal to all types of players, whether GM or not) to about 25 percent of your installed base, give or take a few percentage points. If you've sold about 2,000 copies of your game to end users, you can pretty well count on being able to move about 500 copies of your supplement. Now our sample pool is rather small (we've only released one supplement that isn't also available for free download), so if anyone else has data that corroborates or deviates from our findings, please share.

Supplements have both pros and cons associated with them. On the negative side, you will sell far fewer copies of a supplement than you will of its core product. In general, you'll get less return for your time and effort, and your production costs are likely to be higher, especially if you are using traditional printing. On the positive side, if you are using traditional printing methods, you can gauge the size of an optimal print run fairly accurately. And that accuracy will increase as you collect more sales data.

The problem with scenarios is that they aren't even first-tier supplements. By their nature, scenarios tend to only appeal to Game Masters (assuming the game has one). In a game group of five players (one of which is the GM), a scenario product is only likely to appeal to 20 percent of the group (i.e., the GM). Still assuming you've sold 2,000 copies of your game, your addressable audience has dropped from 2,000 to 400 (or 20 percent of 2,000). If my numbers hold true, you can sell a scenario to 25 percent of those 400 users. In other words, you can count on moving about 100 copies of your scenario.

The numbers are grim. Unless your installed base is in the tens of thousands or higher, it's hard to see the financial sense in investing in such a product.

So why am I telling you that you should make them?

The answer is simple: Don't treat scenarios as products. Treat them as an investment in marketing.

Last year, Mike Holmes made a very interesting point. Basically, he said that in the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, people learned how to play the game from the modules, especially stuff like Against the Giants, the B series, and Aerie of the Slave Lords. The core books taught them the rules, but not really how to apply them. While many later players were taught through apprenticeship, the early players didn't have mentors to turn to. Instead, they used the modules.

Scenarios don't just teach players how to apply the rules (most of our texts do a very good job of that these days), they teach players what your game is supposed to look like in play!

Our sales of Burning Wheel are good. We sold out of our first print run of Burning Wheel Revised in less than a year, and are already through a good portion of our second printing. But on our boards we saw a dramatic upsurge in questions and discussions clearly motivated by actual play after we posted a PDF of our scenario The Sword for download. The Sword accomplished two things: One, it showed our customers what to do with Burning Wheel; and two, it made it easy for people who purchased Burning Wheel to approach their groups about taking their cool new game for a spin without a long-term commitment. They could try it for a night and see what they thought.

Suddenly, the time and money invested in creating a scenario makes sense, even if you make it freely available! If you have created a good game and a good scenario, you will turn a percentage of the people that run it into evangelists for your game. They will run it for their friends, they will talk about it, and they will even run it at cons that you aren't attending.

Genre Conventions and Definitions

2006-07-18T10:35:00.000-04:00

In the Burning Empires Approval Copies thread, Jon and Joshua started a discussion about just exactly what it is that makes an SF RPG qualify as SF.

Without putting too many words in their mouths, I think I can sum up the bare bones of their arguments as follows:

Jon believes that Sci-Fi color is all that is required to make a game Sci-Fi.
Joshua is taking the stance that SF (quoting from a post of his at Story Games) "is a genre in which human conflicts take place that can only happen in the environment of the story."

The perspicacious among you (and I expect that's all of you) have noticed that I used different terms to designate each version of science fiction. More than just a difference of opinion between Jon and Joshua, it's one that divides a lot of genre fandom.

Interestingly, I think Burning Empires can straddle the divide and come down on either side depending on the priorities of the players. By default, Burning Empires is a space opera game, which would align it with Jon's Sci-Fi argument (as Guy noted, Star Wars is a fantasy, not science fiction, unless you accept the Sci-Fi argument).

On the other hand, the World Burner and Technology Burner allow Burning Empires players to focus on how particular technologies and environments might affect human conflicts, if that interests them.

Joshua's Shock:, on the other hand, is designed to provide a laser focus on that particular type of story.

So, with that as a primer, let's open this topic up for discussion. We don't need to restrict ourselves to science fiction either. Feel free to discuss what it is that is essential to establish a particular genre, and why.

Burning Empires Approval Copies

2006-07-10T19:31:00.000-04:00

The approval copies for Burning Empires came in last week!

Man are they gorgeous! And hefty.

I can't wait to see people flip through this beast at GenCon.

Victory Is Mine!

2006-05-29T11:50:00.000-04:00

"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

2006-05-15T17:00:00.000-04:00

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

2006-05-13T14:01:00.000-04:00

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

2006-02-07T17:15:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-03T12:06:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-01T18:41:00.000-05:00

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!

2006-01-31T13:04:00.000-05:00

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.