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A fun interview about Dogs in the Vineyard
Rock of Tahamaat, Tyrant of IIEE
Weird-head Psi*Run
Secrets: the Smelly Chamberlain
Secrets
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ScottM in A fun interview about Dogs in the Vineyard
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2007-12-13 : Mechaton rules questions?
Hey, if you're stopping by looking for answers about Mechaton's rules, welcome, and I'm at your service.

2007-08-24 : Poison'd errata and Q&A
1. The cruel fortune accursing is all wrong. All wrong!
2. Ask the player if her pirate is enduring duress.

Click in for the rest.

2008-01-11 : In a Wicked Age: Four Oracles
In a Wicked Age: Four Oracles.

Also check out the Oracles page at Abulafia. Dave's got the Four Oracles and the original AG&G Oracle, plus space for new "unofficial" oracles. I believe I'll be submitting some new unofficial oracles myself, come a day.

In a Wicked Age
sword & sorcery roleplaying

2009-07-03 : A fun interview about Dogs in the Vineyard
A couple of weeks ago, Atomic Array interviewed me and John Stavropoulos (Jenskot around here) about Dogs in the Vineyard. It was a fun interview and they promised they'd edit me to sound smart, so go have a listen:

Dogs in the Vineyard (Atomic Array 026)

2009-06-24 : Rock of Tahamaat, Tyrant of IIEE

 
The Kaliste is an asteroid world, thousands of habitable asteroids and moons - hundreds of thousands uninhabitable - sprawling thick throughout the warm zone of a great smoldering gas planet. From his throne on Pium, at its heart, Rock of Tahamaat rules the Kaliste with iron, fire, blood and fear.

ROCK OF TAHAMAAT, SPACE TYRANT
a game about resolution

You'll need at least 3 players (4-6 is probably best). One player's the GM. One player plays Rock of Tahamaat. Each other player plays a character who is suffering under Rock of Tahamaat's tyranny.

Rock of Tahamaat
You are an 8' giant of a man, moody, energetic, possessed of vast appetites. Whatever you achieve, whatever you consume, whomever you bring to heel, you are never satisfied for long.

Your rule in the Kaliste is accomplished, no one dares dispute or defy it. Now your restless hunger demands that you look outward, into the galaxy at large. Already your first fleets of raiding ships are bringing you the wealth of the nearest stars. Your closest galactic neighbors fear your ships' sinister silhouettes and only whisper your name. Soon you will bring war and terror to the greatest powers the galaxy knows, confederations and empires spanning star systems in the hundreds. You hope that perhaps, when all the galaxy lays its tribute before you, at last it will fill the ravening void in your soul.

But this isn't that story! This is the story of the people who don't dare dispute or defy your rule, here in the Kaliste. It's the story of ... what happens when they dare after all.

Click in for the rest...

2009-06-22 : Weird-head Psi*Run
In case anybody's interested, I've just written up our recent Psi*Run game, here.

2009-06-22 : Secrets: the Smelly Chamberlain
(Picked up from here.) Imagine a GM plus 3 players. They're playing a fantasy game of the long-term sprawling sort where there are rival kingdoms and trade cities and so on, and the PCs have a home base in an inn, and kings' spymasters and ancient wizards and foreign ladies come and enlist them to go on adventures and stuff.

Gameplay's basically sandboxy and in-character. The GM has responsibility for everything in the game world but the players' characters; the players get to say what their characters think, feel and undertake to do. But, you know, sometimes there's an NPC villain with mind control powers, and when Mitch joined his character was from a previously undeveloped cult so he got to say a whole bunch of interesting things about its inner workings, so it's a little bit flexible. Everybody's here to have fun.

With me? Okay.

Setup

Imagine that the players get together behind the GM's back and say "hey you know the NPC Chamberlain, our contact with the king? Let's all, no matter what the GM says about him, let's all react to him as though he smells bad. We can't insult him to his face, we need him, but let's be subtle and see what the GM does with it."

So they do.

Does this make it true, but secret from the GM, that the chamberlain smells bad?

In the first session after:
Player 1: While the chamberlain's talking to us my guy edges toward the window, and opens the shutters. Want me to make a stealth roll?
GM: Uh, no, that's fine. You do, nobody notices.
Player 1: My guy notices! Thanks for that.
GM: Okay, whatever. As I was saying...
Otherwise it doesn't come up.

(Now the GM has assented to one character's opening a window and another character's being glad for it, but nobody's put before him that the Chamberlain smells bad, so he hasn't assented to that as such. See it?)

In the second session after:
GM: The chamberlain comes into the inn's common room and -
Player 1: Hah, okay.
Player 2: My character needs to see to the wine cellar he'll be back in a bit.
Player 3: Coward.
GM: Huh?
Player 2: Nothing, my guy's just going down to the wine cellar.
GM: Okay...?
Player 1: We'll tell him what the Chamberlain says, later.
GM: Okay, whatever. As I was saying...
Otherwise it doesn't come up.

In the third session after:
Player 1: So the Chamberlain wants to talk to my guy alone? Wow.
GM: Yeah, and he says [blah blah].
Player 1: While he's talking, my guy edges slowly back from him.
GM [in Chamberlain's voice]: Is something the matter?
Player 1 [in character's voice]: No your grace, not at all.
GM: Okay, whatever. As I was saying...

Thinking about the game after this session, the GM figures out what they've been doing.

Outcome 1: the GM runs with it

In the fourth session after:
Player 1: When my guy sees the chamberlain coming he opens all the windows in the inn. He's opening the last one when he comes in.
GM: Okay, but it's a still, muggy day. It doesn't help a bit.
Players: Ha ha ha!

Over sessions 5 and beyond, the GM casually incorporates into play that the Chamberlain's having a little thing on the side with an untalented apprentice perfume-maker in the town, and it's a scandal and a matter of much gossip. Occasionally the GM will say that the Chamberlain both looks especially cheerful this morning and smells especially overpowering. It becomes a fun, ongoing, not-very-important detail of life in the city, and nowadays nobody really thinks about how it started.

Outcome 2: the GM reins it in

In the fourth session after:
Player 1: When my guy sees the chamberlain coming he opens all the windows in the inn. He's opening the last one when he comes in.
GM: Okay, but it's a still, muggy day. It doesn't help a bit.
Players: Ha ha ha!

In the fifth session after:
GM: The Chamberlain comes in. Somebody must have had a word with him; he smells fine.
Player 1: That's a relief.
Player 2: What does he have to say?

It drops out of currency and a few sessions later nobody ever thinks about it.

Outcome 3: the GM fights it and the players relent

In the fourth session after:
Player 1: When my guy sees the chamberlain coming he opens all the windows in the inn. He's opening the last one when he comes in.
GM: Now, no. The Chamberlain's clean, healthy, he bathes, his clothes are fresh, he wears a modest aftershave - he doesn't smell bad.
Players: Ha ha ha! You got us.
GM: Did your characters have a secret meeting without me? To make the Chamberlain look bad?
Player 1: Huh? No. You're the GM, our characters can't do anything without you. [Take this as true for this group, if not universally. The characters aren't in on the players' joke.]
Player 2: It was just [gesturing] us.
GM: You think you get away with that? No, your characters did those things, even though the Chamberlain smells fine. So what's the in-character explanation?
Players: Uh oh.

The players take their lumps and cobble together some retroactive in-character justification, properly chastened. Here's Simon from here: "On the otherhand, you could treat it as a childish conspiracy amongst the characters to humiliate him." That'd be an example: "I guess our characters had a secret meeting after all?"

GM: Real mature. When he figures it out he stops doing your guys favors with the king.
Players: Oops.

Outcome 4: the GM fights it but the players don't relent

In the fourth session after:
Player 1: When my guy sees the chamberlain coming he opens all the windows in the inn. He's opening the last one when he comes in.
GM: Now, no. The Chamberlain's clean, healthy, he bathes, his clothes are fresh, he wears a modest aftershave - he doesn't smell bad.
Player 1: So you say. My guy's still opening the windows.
GM: Why?
Player 1: It's just what he would do.
GM: Okay, whatever. But the Chamberlain smells fine.
Player 2: My guy sits as close to a window as he politely can.
GM: If your characters had a secret meeting to plan this, as GM I should have known about it.
Player 2: Nah. If our characters had a secret meeting, you WOULD have known about it, of course. They can't do anything without you, you're the GM! [Take this as true for this group, if not universally. The characters aren't in on the players' joke.]
GM: Okay, so you admit that he doesn't smell bad?
Player 2: Well I admit you say he doesn't. Anyway my guy sits at the window and tries to breath mostly outside air.
GM: WHY?
Player 2: It's just what he'd do.
GM: No come on. What's he thinking when he decides to do that?
Player 2: He's thinking "dang the Chamberlain smells."
GM: BUT THE CHAMBERLAIN DOESN'T SMELL.
Player 2: Are you telling me what my guy's thinking? Who's mind-controlling him? Don't I get a Will Resist Roll?
GM: Okay, whatever. Your guy sits next to the window thinking about how the Charmberlain smells even though the Chamberlain doesn't smell. I don't care. As I was saying...

Over the next few sessions, the players keep having their characters act like the Chamberlain smells bad, and the GM keeps denying that he smells bad, but they can have their characters do whatever they want. Eventually the story moves on, they're dealing with the king directly now, and the Chamberlain doesn't really come up anymore.

Outcome 5: the GM fights it and the game busts up

We join session 4 in progress:
Player 2: ...Anyway my guy sits at the window and tries to breath mostly outside air.
GM: WHY?
Player 2: It's just what he'd do.
GM: No come on. What's he thinking when he decides to do that?
Player 2: He's thinking "dang the Chamberlain smells."
GM: BUT THE CHAMBERLAIN DOESN'T SMELL.
Player 2: Are you telling me what my guy's thinking? Who's mind controlling him? Don't I get a Will Resist Roll?
GM: Nobody's mind controlling him. I'm just telling you, he wouldn't be thinking that, because the Chamberlain doesn't smell.
Player 2: You get to tell me what my guy's thinking now? That's the new rule?
GM: Well you sure don't get to tell me that my guy smells.
Player 3: We're just saying what our characters do...
GM: Oh please. You're saying the Chamberlain smells bad and you have been for 4 sessions now. He does not either.
Player 2: You say my guy doesn't think he smells, but I say he DOES smell and my guy smells him plain as day.
GM: I'm the GM.
Player 2: It's my house.
Player 1: They're my Fritos.
Player 3: This sucks.

They never play again. They try another session but it devolves rapidly. Eventually they all have happy lives and are still good friends but they don't talk about this game much.

Outcome 6: the GM never catches on

Maybe something else interrupts and ends the game before the GM figures it out.

Maybe the GM just doesn't figure it out, or doesn't care enough to think about it. For many sessions after, the players have a snicker at the GM's and the Chamberlain's expense, and the GM's always just like "huh? I don't get it. Whatever. As I was saying..."

So the question is...

For each outcome:

(a) When did it become true in real life that the Chamberlain NPC smells bad, if ever?

(b) When did it become true inside the game's fiction that the Chamberlain NPC smells bad, if ever?

2009-06-17 : Secrets
Rob tells me that for controversy's sake I should explain why I think that you should keep secrets from your fellow players. It's easy, though! If any of this turns out to be controversial, I'll be startled and dismayed.

1. In roleplaying, there are no secrets.

When you're roleplaying, the only thing that can make something true in the game's collaborative fiction is the entire group's full knowledge and assent. That's what "collaborative fiction" means. There's nothing in roleplaying that's true-but-unknown or false-but-unknown. In the real world, yes; in fiction, no. It's like in Blade Runner: is it a secret whether Rick Deckard's a replicant? True-but-unknown or false-but-unknown? No, it's ambiguous. There's no reality behind the film that we can appeal to to know what's true. Rick Deckard isn't real, so he's certainly not really a replicant, we just don't know it. Same in your game: is it a secret that your character's really a man? No, it's just ambiguous.

2. When roleplayers talk about secrets, they're really talking about plans.

So is it legit for you to be all like "my character's secretly a man," and not tell anybody? Of COURSE it is. What's going on is, you're planning something that later on you'll put before the group for our full informed consent. Or maybe you won't; that's fine, lots of plans don't work out. Then it stays ambiguous forever, like Rick Deckard.

Meanwhile, what you'll do is prep us for your planned revelation. Drop hints, lay groundwork, warm us up to the idea. That way, when you say "my character's ... a man!" we'll all agree. "Oh holy crap you're right!" we'll say. "Why didn't I see it?" (Answer: because it wasn't true, it was ambiguous. Now it's true, and retroactively, just like how now it's true that Darth Vader is Luke's father and has been all along.)

If you don't prep us for it, we'll withhold our assent. "What? A man? That's stupid. My character saw your character naked, remember? If she's a man you needed to mention it then, or at least tell me that my character never really saw her naked. Sorry if this messes up your plans, but nope, I can't go along."

"My character's secretly a man" is exactly the same as "I'm going to have the werewolf attack at midnight." Drop hints, lay groundwork, warm us up to the idea, so that when you act on your plan, we're receptive. "Oh no the werewolf! Crap!" instead of "huh? Werewolf? That's stupid, do over."

Your ownership of your character gives you enormous credibility when it comes to acting on your plans. It does most of the groundwork for you, automatically; all you have to do is not mess it up. In Dogs in the Vineyard, same thing, the GM's ownership of the town's backstory means that the GM can enact her plans almost unilaterally. That doesn't make them secrets. They're just plans that are really, really likely to work out.

(Does it matter, this difference between a secret truth and a plan that's really likely to work out? Well, it's a real difference, but no, maybe it doesn't matter. That's fine. Lots of things are real but don't matter. The difference between a secret truth and a plan that might not work out, though, that's a difference that matters a whole lot, and that's where most "secrets" in roleplaying live.)

3. But keep your plans secret, yes!

I for one don't want you to sneeze out, unfiltered, every plan that tickles your brain. Yikes, you'd never shut up, and all about stuff that isn't even happening yet. I can't think of a game where announcing your every fleeting plan would be the right way to play.

Drop hints, lay groundwork, warm me up to the idea, hit me with your big planned revelation, or never do, that's what you should do. Don't blurt out "my character's secretly a man" prematurely, save it for when the time's right.

In some games, the time's right at the beginning of play. That's fine, tell us then. In other games, it's your call when, the game doesn't require you to tell us at any particular moment. That's fine, tell us when you want to, and set us up for it meanwhile.

Dogs in the Vineyard would be absolute crap if I revealed the town in a big infodump at the beginning of the session, for instance, instead of revealing the town naturally over the course of play.

GM, keep your plans secret from the players until it's time to enact them. Players, keep your plans secret from the GM, or each other, or both, until it's time to enact them too.

4. Play Steal Away Jordan.

You should anyway, because it's a great game. But you also should because it's a crystal-clear mechanical take on keeping secrets at the table, and it'll show you how interesting, useful and good keeping secrets can be.

Anybody arguing for 100% transparency at the table across the board, but you haven't played Steal Away Jordan, I'm sorry but you just don't know what you're talking about.

2009-06-16 : Real and Fictional
When Sebastian was just three we lived in an apartment in Amherst with a grad student named Jake. Sebastian and Jake bonded over music; they were both big fans of Jonathan Richman. They'd put on his disks and run around the living room with their arms outstretched, making airplane noises.

One day Sebastian came up to Jake with his eyes very wide. "Let's not pretend to be airplanes," he said. "Let's really be airplanes."

Jake made his eyes very wide too. "Okay," he said. So they ran around the living room, arms outstretched, nrrow, nrrow! Wangity-wang, wangity-wang I'm a little airplane nrrow!

I think Jake had double-majored in philosophy and cognitive science, and was now pursuing some kind of cogsci masters. Sebastian made him a happy, happy Jake.

2009-06-15 : GM Agenda
Saith John Harper:

GM Agenda: yeah, that's a thing. Reading AW (and Dogs again) really helped me think about that more clearly. I could talk about it, but maybe it's too much of a tangent here. I think it's working the way I want.

2009-06-15 : Lazy Play vs IIEE with Teeth
IIEEteeth. Heh.

Here's my personal rephrasing of IIEE. For this thread you can take it as definitional:

In the game's fiction, what must you establish before you roll, and what must you leave unestablished until you've rolled?

In other words, what fictional stuff do you need to know in order to roll at all, and what fictional stuff should you let the roll decide?

Look familiar? It's what I've been talking about for the last 2 months. Fictional causes, fictional effects.

Here's a quick resolution mechanism.

1. We each say what our characters are trying to accomplish. For instance: "My character's trying to get away." "My character's trying to shoot yours."

2. We roll dice or draw cards against one another to see which character or characters accomplish what they're trying to accomplish. For instance: "Oh no! My character doesn't get away." "Hooray! My character shoots yours."

What must we establish before we roll? What our characters intend to accomplish.

What does the roll decide? Whether our characters indeed accomplish what they intend.

What do the rules never, ever, ever require us to say? The details of our characters' actual actions. It's like one minute both our characters are poised to act, and the next minute my character's stuck in the room and your character's shot her, but we never see my character scrambling to open the window and we never hear your character's gun go off.

Maybe we CAN say what our characters do. Maybe the way the dice or cards work, there's a little space where we can pause and just say it. Maybe that's even what we're supposed to do. "Always say what your characters do," the rules say, maybe. "No exceptions and I mean it." It remains, though, that we don't HAVE to, and if we don't, the game just chugs along without it. We play it lazy, and we get the reading-too-fast effect that Frank describes.

Contrast Dogs in the Vineyard, where if you don't say in detail what your character does, the other player asks you and waits patiently for you to answer, because she needs to know. She can't decide what to do with her dice without knowing. Dogs in the Vineyard's IIEE has teeth, it's self-enforcing.

In a Wicked Age has a similar problem to the example's. Maybe a worse problem. The rules say "say what your character does. Does somebody else's character act to stop yours? Then roll dice." That's what the rules say. But if, instead, you say what your character intends to accomplish, and somebody else says that their character hopes she doesn't accomplish it, and you roll dice then - the game chugs along, not noticing that you're playing it wrong, until suddenly, later, it grinds to a confusing and unsatisfying standstill and it's not really clear what broke it. If you play In a Wicked Age lazy, the game doesn't correct you; but instead of the reading-too-fast effect, you crash and burn.

So now, if you're sitting down to design a game, think hard. Most players are pretty lazy, and telling them to do something isn't the same as designing mechanisms that require them to do it. Telling them won't make them. Some X-percent of your players will come to you like, "yeah, we didn't really see why we'd do that, so we didn't bother. Totally unrelated: the game wasn't that fun," and you're slapping yourself in the forehead. Do you really want to depend on your players' discipline, their will and ability to do what you tell them to just because you told them to? Will lazy players play the game right, because you've given your IIEE self-enforcement, or might they play it wrong, because the game doesn't correct them? Inevitably, the people who play your game, they'll come to it with habits they've learned from other games. If their habits suit your design, all's well, but if they don't, and your game doesn't reach into their play and correct them, they'll play your game wrong without realizing it. How well will your game do under those circumstances? Is that okay with you?

Take Dogs in the Vineyard again: not everybody likes the game. (Duh.) But most of the people who've tried it have played it correctly, because it's self-enforcing, and so if they don't like it, cool, they legitimately don't like it. I'm not at all confident that's true of In a Wicked Age.

You could blame the players, for being lazy and for bringing bad habits. (As though they might not!) You could blame the text, for not being clear or emphatic enough. (As though it could be! No text can overcome laziness and bad habits.) Me, I blame the design, for not being self-enforcing.

Anyway, you're the designer, and maybe it's okay with you and maybe it isn't, that's your call. (It's my call too for my games, and for the Wicked Age, yeah, maybe it's okay with me.) But I raise the question because from experience, slapping yourself in the forehead when people don't play the way you tell them to gets pretty old. If you don't want the headaches, do yourself a favor and make your game's IIEE self-enforcing.

2009-06-09 : Adequacy, Cause and Effect
Here's a subsystem from a game I just made up (similarities not especially coincidental):

When your character attacks, describe the attack and roll d20. If you roll less than your opponent's ADV (Armor Defense Value), your character hits! The GM describes the hit, and you roll your character's weapon's damage die for damage.

GM, on a hit, choose one of these, based on the details of the attacker's attack and the defender's position:
* The defender stumbles and falls.
* The defender backs desperately away.
* The defender's guts spill out.
* The defender's foot is half-severed.
* The defender's skull is cracked.
* The attacker's weapon wedges in the defender's ribs.
* The attacker slips and looses her footing.
* The attacker has to draw up or she'll overreach.
(Some of these have mechanical implications, but not necessarily all of them.)

When your character attacks, describe the attack and roll 2d6. The defender's player says what happens. If the GRIM die beats the SLAPSTICK die, the defender's player makes what happens be something grim; if the SLAPSTICK die beats the GRIM die, she makes what happens be something funny.

2009-06-08 : Restating: Fictional Causes and Realization
Since at last I've graduated to obviousness (thanks, Josh), let me restate. Here's Frank T again:

...I'm saying that one should invest in the SIS, and specifically, in Situation, moment-by-moment. Who's there, what's going on, what does it look like, sound like, feel like? In my experience, if you have a game system that works perfectly well without investing much in the SIS, people may tend to rush the story and their imagination of the actual in-game situation gets rather blurry. Such games still sound great in a write-up but to me, they're leaving a bad taste, like reading a good book way too fast.