Orcs

Now—before you put this away, either “hurr hurr”ing like an asshole, or feeling vaguely disturbed, I want to ask you a question. That orc—you know, the orc in that room in the dungeon, you open the door, there’s an orc there. He looks up, a bunch of heavily armed human motherfuckers are charging into the room waving weapons.

What’s he supposed to do? Smile broadly and say “Hey, mi casa es su casa, amigos!”? No, he whimpers with fear, pulls out his pigsticker, and prepares to meet his doom. I wanna know about his childhood. Are you telling me he doesn’t have friends who are going to miss him? That he didn’t have hopes and fears and aspirations of his own? That you aren’t a bunch of fucking degraded monsters for wasting him without a second thought? You’re playing a fucking role, okay, you’re supposed to act like a real character in this world. And yet you saunter around, killing intelligent creatures like they’re just another widget, a bunch of pixels to blow away, a mechanism for obtaining experience points and treasure. That isn’t roleplaying. Not as I understand it.

Here’s what I want to do. I want to go into a Quake® deathmatch. And I want to strip down to a loincloth, sit down on the floor with a begging bowl, and call after the lunatics with the plasma guns as they flee past me, saying, “It is all samsara, it is all illusion, my friend”—for truly it is, pixels on a screen.  ”Reject the fleeting temptations here, what profiteth you another kill? There is another path.” And I want him to turn, think twice—and then I will smile benevolently as he tosses a rocket my way, blows me to my reincarnation as my peaceful self—and he runs on, and kills and kills again, quad damage, armor, another clip, heal and heal and blammo to the floor—until finally he turns, lays down his gun, and sits by me, asking me to teach. And then one by one, the players shall gather by me, sitting, assuming the lotus position, touching the ground in the earth-witness gesture, letting their thoughts still, contemplating that strange Quake sky as it streams overhead, peaceful, in unity, transforming this one, small, cyberrealm of unending war and mayhem into harmony.

Sigh.

Right.

I wanna be a shooter bhoddisatva, baby.

Man, I am so full of shit.

And then there’s this, from Over the Edge (2nd Edition), by Jonathan Tweet with Robin D. Laws; page 167, under Alternative Hypothesis:

…Perhaps exposure to tulpas, especially psychic contact, would give a person a brief glimpse of the universe as it really is: an infinite number of immortal spirits donning temporary identities in various “worlds” as they play out their intricate, never-ending games with no true concern other than shared amusement. What would one do with this knowledge?

I’ve been thinking about these quotes for a long time. It started when I had a conversation with a good friend of mine almost three years ago. We spoke about the near-death experience she had on an operating table, after being hit by a truck.

I wrote this in my journal, in February of 2009, a couple of days after the meeting:

…and [she] told me something that I guess she told me before but I didn’t properly understand. She said that death is like taking the blinders off—that when we’re not here, living our limited and individual lives, we are infinite beings, capable of infinite understanding. Of course, in a universe where everybody knows everything, beings get bored, so they invented this amusement park / school called life, where we can limit ourselves and experience everything like it’s new again.

Which ultimately means that nothing can truly hurt you. Nothing is permanent—not even death. The only heavens or hells we need to worry about in life are those of our own making. There’s no such thing as eternal punishment or damnation and ultimately there is nothing to fear, or hate, either in life or in death.

This is a very comforting thought—a great sense of peace comes with it. Life is what you make it, and there’s no need to worry. Everything will be okay.  That’s not to say that bad things don’t happen to good people, for reasons beyond their control. Of course they do. Tragedy happens. Evil happens too. But when these things occur, we have a choice in how we receive them. With a little perspective, it’s easier to not take them quite so personally, and thus deal with them more effectively.

Then, in the fall of 2010, I saw the first episode (“Is There a Creator?”) of Through The Wormhole, with Morgan Freeman. That’s where I first learned that the Simulation Argument is a somewhat respectable thought experiment in modern philosophy, and not “merely” an ancient philosophical idea (not to mention a seed for interesting fiction, like The Matrix, or Dark City).

If you’re not familiar, the Simulation Argument goes something like this: if it’s physically possible to make a near-perfect virtual reality, then chances are (given the age and size of the universe) that some technologically advanced alien culture has already done it. And if that’s the case, then they’re probably running multiple simulations—a multitude, even—including what might be called “ancestor simulations,” to study biological and social evolution, among other things. And if there is a multitude of simulations of the universe running, each of them filled with self-aware virtual beings; then statistically speaking, you and I and everybody we know are probably simulated people living in an artificial reality.

Now, it’s not like these ideas are revolutionary. Pretty much everybody at some point in their lives has heard or thought of the possibility that reality as we know it is an illusion of some kind, or that there might be some greater reality encompassing this one. It’s an ancient idea for a reason. But it really got me thinking.

The simulation argument suggests we may be living in a simulation. And given the state of present-day video games, it’s certainly easy enough to imagine a post-human society with super-advanced video games populated both by living players and simulated intelligences. It’s funny, really, because a lot of people of the transhumanist / singulatarian persuasion wouldn’t bat an eye at such a possibility; and yet will quickly balk at religious notions of a life beyond the one we commonly experience—whether those ideas are coming from a traditional or more New Agey source.

Maybe the Simulation Argument, and religious metaphysics, are just different ways of expressing the same idea—that ultimately, we’re really far more than we believe we are. Maybe in actuality, we’re all part of some vast collective intelligence—whether that’s an omniscient post-singularity hive-mind, or God itself—and maybe the difference doesn’t matter. And maybe, we just individuate ourselves from that totality of being to take on temporary, limited forms in simulated worlds, playing out parts for the education and amusement of ourselves and others.

Jordan Peterson also talks about this in his talk on Virtue as a Necessity. He begins by noting (at 3:47) that Life is Suffering. Life is Suffering because throughout our lives, our goals are thwarted by the arbitrary limitations placed upon us by nature and time. These are limitations like whether or not we’re smart, or good looking, or pre-disposed to certain diseases, and like the fact that one day we’ll die. All of these things are (Transhumanist optimism notwithstanding) beyond our control, and so they limit us. He says (around 6:20) that they are:

“…conditions of existence. Human being is predicated on a kind of fundamental limitation, in that we are what we are, and we’re not other things. And so that means, inevitably, that the awareness of human being comes along with suffering. Life poses the question: How to conduct yourself in the face of suffering. Not only yours, but everyone else’s. And it’s an inescapable question, except that maybe you’re fortunate, and you’ll have periods of time where something absolutely horrible isn’t happening to you…

…And to know this frees you from the false illusion that life can be conducted without suffering. Suffering is an integral part of being. Now, why is that? Well, who knows? It’s a metaphysical question. But I have some ideas about that that have helped me, and they’re things that I’ve read.

I read, for example, an old Jewish commentary about the reason for creation. It’s like a Zen Koan this idea. You take a being with the classical attributes of God: omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience; a totality. And the question is, what does a being with those attributes lack? And the answer is “limitation.” And then you think, well, what’s so important about limitation? Well, if you can be anything, or do anything, at any time whatsoever; there’s no being, because everything is one thing. There’s no differentiation between things. So something that’s absolute and total has no being—it has to be parcelled out into limited being.

And you know this because you all play games. You play video games, you play games with other people. You may play games you don’t even know you’re playing. And when you play those games you put limits on yourself. You play by a set of rules. And the reason you do that is when you limit yourself—arbitrarily, in some ways—whole new worlds of possibility emerge. And so there’s a powerful metaphysical idea that being is not possible without limitation…”

Maybe we’re all role-players, at heart.

Peterson concludes this part of his talk by noting: “So you say, what’s the price you pay for being? The price you pay for being is limitation. And the price you pay for limitation is suffering. So the price you pay for being is suffering.”

Why do we let ourselves suffer if we’re just playing an elaborate game?  Why would any all-knowing entity voluntarily experience pain and loss and uncertainty?  Maybe just so that we take the simulation seriously.

Maybe we’re all role-players, suffering for our art. Maybe we’re just playing characters driven by our passions—suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to educate ourselves, or the universe itself, in all the wonders of a life well worn. Just so we can feel, and be moved.

Maybe Shakespeare was right: The Play’s The Thing.

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.

—As You Like It, by William Shakespeare; Act 2, scene 7, 139–143

So, problem solved.  I’m back baby!

Big news?  Not really… just some quick updates:

• Although the game is approaching a more final form, it still hasn’t  gelled properly in a couple of important ways.  I’m thinking of consulting the Forge about this, but the Forge is entering the “Winter” of its intended lifecycle, and so activity there has slowed down a bit.  I haven’t been active on there for months myself, either.
• The Christmas holiday was incredibly busy and tiring, and I’m only now really getting back to normal.
• Got a couple of new & interesting videos to post on the topic of spirituality / psychology. They’ll probably be the subject of my next post, so tune in if you can…  if anyone can hear me…

*crickets*

Oh well.  In the meantime, be good, keep it real—or as real as reality gets—and enjoy your evening!

Anyway, I’m about to be involved with a social anxiety workgroup at my local hospital, and because they’re always looking for fun socially-oriented activities to do, I suggested some role-playing.  To stay topical (at least during official time), we needed a game that was itself “about” social anxiety in some way.  It also has to be learned and played in a single two hour session, by people of all ages (late teens to 70′s) who have no experience with RPG’s as a hobby.

I figured I’d be designing something myself, or heavily modifying something.  I asked around at the Forge, and got some good answers as to some games that involved some level of interpersonal anxiety, which could be used for inspiration.  Looks like I’ll be trying to get my hands on My Life With Master ASAP.

In the meantime, I started brainstorming for ideas.  This is unlike any game I’ve tinkered with before, but in some ways it’s really nice to work on something outside my normal niche.

The result is a (very rough) first draft of a small-scale story game about how you overcame anxiety in the past.  It’s pretty much based on a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) approach to dealing with anxiety—that is, identifying anxious thoughts and challenging them.  But I threw in some other touches to make it a little more fun.

Also, the stories the players create take place sometime in the speaker’s past, with the assumption that the encounter was successfully handled.   This just seemed to make sense—to ease people’s anxieties about playing the game itself. It also reminds me of a rough draft of a paper I read somewhere (years ago) on one of psychologist Jordan Peterson’s websites, featuring a therapeutic technique called a “Trauma Narration.”

The idea of a Trauma Narration was to take the memory of some harrowing event and re-tell it in a more positive way.  The theory was that by re-imagining the past, the patient could learn to ease some of the anxiety, shame, or regret that these bad memories were creating in the present.  I don’t know how far they got with that.  I can’t seem to find the link on the site anymore; but interestingly, a casual google search reveals that “Narrative Psychology” is an emerging field, complete with guru’s, believers, and controversies. We won’t worry about all that here.

I seriously doubt my game is going to cure anybody of their social anxiety. But hopefully it will help them have a little fun with their social challenges, instead of always feeling burdened and controlled by this “disorder.”

Anyway, it’s rough, and it still needs a proper reward system, and rules for going beyond a single short vignette. But you can find it below.

One final note regarding Jordan Peterson—for any gaming, fiction, or spirituality buffs out there, he’s got some really interesting ideas about the function of stories in creating personality, psychology, and in turn, history. He calls his theory Maps of Meaning, and you can find some of his presentations on Google video.

Now, without further ado, the game:

_____________________________________________________________________________

I Have Overcome

(need a better title)

A story game of triumph over Social Anxiety

by Andre Canivet

• A game for 2-4 players
• Players take turns telling each other about times when they were anxious, but were able to handle their anxiety. These stories will be fictional—the players will make up the details as they go—but they will be told as if they really happened, and with the knowledge that the speaker handled the situation well. They’ve met with a difficult encounter and emerged victorious—now they just have to fill in the details, and maybe, explain what they learned or gained from the experience.
• For a session of a couple of hours, assume 15-30 minutes to demonstrate the game to the entire group. Also assume that each player will have 10-15 minutes to tell their story, and that each group will need 5-10 minutes of prep time. For a group of around a dozen people, this means breaking up into three smaller groups of 3-4 players each.

• You Will Need:
  • 2 to 4 players, including yourself.
  • Paper & Pencils (pen is okay too)
  • 1 standard deck of playing cards

• Within each group:
  • Begin by brainstorming a list of 4 to 6 settings: a crowded party, a bus stop, a shopping mall, a workplace, etc. Someone should write these down on a sheet of paper.

• • Now shuffle the deck.
  • Each player draws one card. The player with the highest valued Spade is the speaker for the first turn. On subsequent turns, the speaker will be the player to the left of the previous turn’s speaker. The speaker is the person whose turn it is to tell a tale.
  • Now it is time to assign roles.
    • There are four roles in the game: Speaker, and the Speaker’s Head, Heart, and Gut. The speaker is the person who is telling the tale (played by the player’s whose turn it is to hold the floor). The speaker’s head, heart, and gut (played by the other players) represent the different aspects of the speaker’s experience. Each informs the speaker in different ways.
  • On the first turn–Shuffle the deck, then everyone draws a card. The player with the first (or highest valued) card in the suit of Spades is the Speaker for the first turn. The player with the first (or highest) card in the suit of Diamonds is called the Head. The player with the first (or highest) card in the suit of Hearts is called the Heart. And the player with the first (or highest) card in the suit of Clubs is called the Gut. Keep drawing cards until everyone has a role.
    • In a four player game, every player has one role.
    • In a 3 player game, one player is the speaker, one player has two roles (from head, heart, and/or gut), and the third player has the remaining role, and also takes the notes.
    • In a two player game, one player is the speaker; the other player does everything else.
  • In subsequent turns, the speaker is the player to the left of the previous turn’s speaker. Re-shuffle the deck, and the other players draw cards to determine their roles, as in the first turn.
• The Speaker picks a setting from the brainstormed list, and starts by stating where he or she was (and perhaps what they were doing). For example:

• • “I was at a crowded party…”
  • “I was waiting for the bus…”
  • “I was just getting home…”

• The other players each ask one question from the following list, waiting as the speaker answers each one in turn, making the description as vivid as possible in one or two sentences:
  • • “What do you see?”
    • “What do you hear?”
    • “What do you smell?”
    • “What can you feel?”
    • “What do you taste?”
    • The other players may prompt the speaker a little bit. If the setting is a party, a player could ask “Do you hear music? What kind of Music?” But the questions should be open-ended.
    • Try to question a particular sense no more than twice… if someone has already asked the speaker “What do you hear?” then someone else may ask “What else do you hear?” only once.
• The Speaker’s Heart asks: “Who else was there?” And the Speaker answers.
  • • • E.g. “There was this pretty girl across the room…” or “The stop was crowded with commuters…” or “My husband was waiting in the kitchen…” or “A couple of co-workers were there…”
• The Speaker’s Gut asks: “What were they like? And what were they doing?” And the Speaker answers, describing the other person or people in the scene.
• The Speaker’s Head asks: “Was there something you wanted to say to them, or something they said to you?” And the Speaker answers.
• And the Speaker’s Head asks: “How anxious were you?” And the Speaker names a number between 1 and 5 (see chart below), describing their level of anxiety.
  • 1 = Hardly anxious
  • 2 = Sort of anxious
  • 3 = Fairly anxious
  • 4 = Very anxious
  • 5 = Totally anxious
• The Speaker then draws 1 card for each level of anxiety he or she is feeling, and turns them over one at a time.
  • • If the Speaker turns over a diamond, the Speaker’s Head asks: “What was going through your mind?” And the Speaker names an anxious thought, and writes it down.
      • • e.g. “Everybody thinks I’m a loser.” or “There’s no way out of here.”
    • If the Speaker turns over a heart, the Speaker’s Heart asks: “How did it make you feel?” And the Speaker names an emotion, or describes an image or metaphor; and writes it down.
      • • e.g. “I feel like I’m in the desert, all alone” or “I’m angry and tense” or “I feel like she is distant; cut off”
    • If the Speaker turns over a club, the Speaker’s Gut asks: “What sensations do you have in your body?” And the Speaker names a physical sensation, and writes it down.
      • • e.g. “My palms are sweaty” or “My face is hot and flushed” or “My stomach is clenched”
    • If the Speaker turns over a Spade, he or she may name a thought, emotion/relation, or physical sensation, at his or her discretion; and write it down.
• Once all the cards have been turned, and the results written down, the cards are put in the discard pile.
• Now all the other players in unison say “But how did you handle it?” And the Speaker draws more cards—one for each thought, emotion/image, or physical sensation that he or she has written down. Then she flips them over one by one, going down the list of anxious experiences and responding to them in turn. With each response, a line is struck through the anxious thought, emotion, or sensation, and the response is written next to it
  • • If the Speaker turns over a diamond, she names a healthy thought to counteract the anxious experience.
      • • e.g. “No one will hurt me here; I’m among friends.” or “I can handle this.”
    • If the Speaker turns over a heart, she names a healthy emotion or image that counteracts the anxious experience.
      • • e.g. “I feel pleasantly warm.” or “I am a pool of calm, clear water.”
    • If the Speaker turns over a club, she names a healthy action she takes to counteract the anxious experience.
      • • e.g. “I excuse myself and withdraw to the washroom to regroup.” or “I relax my shoulders and take a deep breath.”
    • If the Speaker turns over a spade, she can name any thought, emotion/image, or action that counteracts the anxious experience.
• Once all the anxious experiences have been addressed, the Speaker’s Heart asks: “And How do you feel now?” And the Speaker answers, and is free to fill in a sentence or two about how the interaction goes.
• If there is time, the Speaker can move on to describe another anxious moment in the scene, or to wrap up the scene and pass the torch to the next Speaker. (Probably, there should be a limit, agreed to by all players. Each “moment” is called a beat, and the number of beats per speaker per turn should be decided right after brainstorming. However, 3 is probably more than enough, and 1 is probably best for beginners or when there is limited time. It’s more important to make sure everybody gets a turn than to continue the scene). IN FACT: The Speaker should always change after 1 turn. If the game comes around again, then the Speaker can choose to start a new scene, or to continue one from his or her previous turn.
• At the end of a Speaker’s turn, re-shuffle the deck, and begin again, with the player to the left of the old Speaker as the new one.

And finally, I feel the light at the end of the tunnel. I’d set myself a deadline of July 15 to be finished the core mechanics. Well, I missed the deadline, but the last few weeks have been incredibly fruitful. I’ve got a semi-solid core mechanic, a combat and social conflict system that I’m confident about, and lots of great ideas about character advancement, metagame currency, player motivation, and encouraging role-playing. I feel like all I really have to do now is write it all down in a coherent form, and play the shit out of the thing. Previous playtests have taught me much, but soon it’ll be time to really let the thing run, and only make the most unavoidable changes.

Bottom line, I’m going to finish this fucker. If I suddenly get a brilliant new idea, it’ll have to wait for the next game. Somewhere I have a podcast of a GenCon game design panel featuring Jared Sorensen, Luke Crane, and John Wick, where one of them said the most important thing I think I’ve ever learned about making games: “Better is the enemy of Done.“ Finish the game you’re working on. Make the next game better. Otherwise you’ll drown in the feature creep. A great deal of life outside the game is also the enemy of done, but that part I can’t do anything about—at the very least, I don’t have to compound the problem by, well, compounding the game.

So, now that I’ve declared my oath of completion before the Gods, can I tell you a little bit about the game itself?

My last game design post was almost a year ago, although I’ve been too busy with other things for most of the last eight or ten months to really get much work going on my games. What work I have been doing has been focused on my semi-universal system (the one referred to in previous blog posts with the boring codename Martian Cycles. Because it’s setting non-specific, I’ve started calling the system Metapunk: Poly, or MPP, for short. As you can guess from the name, it uses polyhedrals for primary resolution (where most of my designs use D6′s or playing cards).

There are still a couple of options on the table for how this works, but the one that seems to fit the best uses a pair of dice, the exact combination of which is determined by a “ladder” of ranks which defines character abilities. At ability rank 6 you roll 2D6, at rank 7 you roll D8+D6, rank 8 is 2D8, and so on. Your roll is compared to a competing roll (using a difficulty rating along the same scale), and whoever is showing the highest die result wins (the dice are not summed). Obviously it’s a bit more complex than this, but that’s the basic idea.

Your abilities are defined in 3 ways: a set of skills or possibly careers, “boons” which modify those skills in positive ways (including skill specializations called “knacks,” as well as more specific tricks and techniques), and a small set of “attributes” that define your general aptitude for certain types of tasks. The chief duty of the attributes will be determining initiative in different situations, but they may also control perception rolls in different arenas, starting ranks for skills governed by each attribute, and perhaps basic resistance ratings to certain types of attacks / stress (although these might be handled by an even smaller set of secondary attributes).

Characters will also have a series of karmas—backgrounds, relationships, and character quirks / flaws which are the main source of experience in the game. This way, they act as motivating factors–always driving both story and character development.

Combat is intended to be fast, furious, and flamboyant, with an emphasis on description but still following a more or less traditional RPG pattern. I want combat to be fully integrated with social conflict, so that rather than forcing scenes to be either combative or non-combative/social, you can play out a fight interspersed with conversation and manipulation. I’d like to be able to play out the final scene on the Death Star in Return of the Jedi, where Luke, Vader, and the Emperor are all engaged in emotionally charged (and often manipulative) conversation between saber swings.* It’s dramatic and immersive in a way that you just don’t seem to get in D&D or Rifts or other more traditional combat oriented games; at least, not when I’ve ever played them.

Social conflict itself is intended to be dynamic—with mechanics that guide role-playing without getting in the way. As social encounters develop, tension builds until characters either defuse it, or reach a breaking point. Past the breaking point they can’t control what they’re feeling—they’ll be under the influence of a particular emotion and will have to see it through somehow. Clever players may be able to redirect their reactions, but the key here is that some sort of reaction will occur—driving the story forward.

I’ll leave it there—no need to spoil the thing before it’s finished! In any case, you can see that I’m pretty excited. It’s taken a long time, but I’m finally getting to where I want to be with MPP.

I can’t wait to get this thing done.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————

*Say what you will about Lucas as a storyteller (and I’ve said plenty myself), scenes like that one in RotJ are what give the series its magic and are an example of what he really got right. Grand emotions in the midst of grand adventures… the characters work out their angst in the middle of a swordfight. That’s what makes it awesome. Sure, a quick and deadly battle with no talking can be cool too, but that’s a lot less Epic.

Anyway, in that post he says:

“Roleplaying is people collaboratively imagining events. Everything else is optional. No really, everything else. Designing a game is directing that activity towards a specific purpose. You, as the designer, choose that purpose. Everything else that you add needs to serve that purpose.”

Damn. It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

The decision I’ve come to is this: I’ll create two games; one relatively traditional tactical game with some room for thematic play (which we’ll keep calling Martian Cycles for now), and another, much more thematic game called Gangs of the Factory Zone, which will be more focused on an area of the world called “the Zone.”

The Zone is a sort of slum or shanty town that has grown up around and among a collection of large corporate factories.  Built outside the border wall of the main spaceport city on Mars, there are no labour laws in the Zone.  So the factories can employ people off the street for almost no wages, and these unfortunates have no real recourse except to wander off into the badlands beyond the zone, or try to become a citizen of the city.  In the meantime, there’s all sorts of trouble to get into within the zone, as many criminal elements thrive there.

So, in Gangs, characters have to decide what moral path they’re going to take to try and make a better life for themselves and their loved ones.

I wrote a little more about it on First Thoughts forum at the Forge (hey, I finally joined the Forge!), which you can find here, if you’re interested.

So what does this mean, design-wise?

Well, for Martian Cycles I’ll more or less keep the skill system and dynamic initiative combat system I was planning to do.  And for Gangs I’ll do something a little more radical.

I’m hoping to create a central mechanic where the players bet points in order to demonstrate their commitment to an impending conflict.  Then the conflict unfolds as actions are resolved and narrated.  The plan is to build up tension in the betting phase, then unleash it in the resolution phase.  The idea was also to set it up so that characters could “fold” out of the conflict if the stakes got too high.

[rant begins]

See, because this is a big problem with the tactical games I’ve played (including and especially the ones I’ve GM’d—I’m just as responsible).  In those games, it’s just been assumed that whatever threat you face is going to fight you to the death without thinking about it.  But that’s not realistic (or thematically sensible) at all.

I don’t want the PC’s to be killing machines mowing through countless hordes of mooks whose only purpose is to die in extravagant ways.  I want the mooks, and the PC’s, to be able to back out of a fight if it looks like it’s going to lead somewhere too troublesome.  Real people will do just about anything to avoid a fight; even if it means running away, trying to talk their way out of it, or, failing that, submitting to the stronger person’s demands.  Even bad folks don’t jump into combat at the first sign of trouble, and as a rule they tend not to leap joyfully onto the heroes’ swords.

This makes a lot more sense from a storytelling angle too… Gangs is really a space western, and in classic westerns, there’s frequently a series of confrontations where the stakes get progressively higher.

At first, a few coarse words are exchanged, and all that’s at stake is somebody’s pride.  In the next encounter, the opponents may have a heated argument or even come to blows, and the stakes might be somebody’s reputation and maybe a few bruises.  Next time, somebody draws a gun; lives are at stake, and everybody backs down… until finally you have a confrontation that nobody can back out of, and an honest to goodness gunfight breaks out at the climax of the movie.

This is how stories build tension; and I’ve really noticed how that’s missing from the games I’ve usually been involved in.  But when every conflict in the game is a fight to the death, the stakes are always the same, life has no value, and game play becomes a series of tedious encounters where your biggest concern is whether or not you’ll have to make a new character.  It’s boring as hell.

[/rant]

But I digress…

I don’t know how much of this is a lack of GM experience/imagination and how much is a failure of the game designs I’ve played in facilitating realistic and tension building character behaviour.  That’s a question for the Forge.

In any case, I’m hoping to foster more interesting play with Gangs.  I want the threat of a violence to be at least as powerful a motivator of character behaviour as the violence itself.

I ran into a small problem with that: I was planning to base the points used for the betting mechanic on the character’s relevant effectiveness scores for the coming conflict.  But that doesn’t quite work…  You might be the best fighter in the world, but your ability to intimidate somebody before a fight acutally breaks out is going to be based more on your swagger or cool or determination, on your reputation, and on whether or not you are brandishing any vicious looking weaponry.  In other words, stuff that is only loosely related to combat effectiveness.

So, there’s still a lot of hard thinking to be done before I’m close to a solid design.  But I’ll keep at it.

Until next time, this is Andre signing off…

Well, I know it’s been a while but Metapunk is back up and running, after a few hurdles. First I decided to move the blog, then the site was hacked and I lost all my comments (not that there were all that many, but…) and had to repost everything from backups. But we’re back, baby and better than ever! Also, I’m going to make ever so much more effort to post on a regular basis, even if it’s only a paragraph or two.

A lot has happened on the game front—there have been some radical changes to the design. I mean, I’ll be able to make ten games with all the failed attempts I have.

I’ve also actually been writing some prose—a short story I plan to enter in a literary contest. It’s kind of on the experimental side. Anyway, after it’s been through the judging process and so on, I’ll probably post it here so you can read it, if you’re interested.

And the holodoxy, while it has not advanced particularly, has been sort of fleshed out a little bit… More on that coming soon.

So if you’re one of the few people besides my mother who has been waiting for the site to come back online, well, you’re in luck. Cue AC/DC’s Back in Black…

]]> http://www.metapunk.org/blog/2009/09/were-back/feed/ 2 http://www.metapunk.org/blog/2009/08/uncharted-territory/ http://www.metapunk.org/blog/2009/08/uncharted-territory/#comments Sat, 15 Aug 2009 03:58:33 +0000 Andre http://www.metapunk.org/blog/?p=36

I seem to be fumbling toward some kind of important personal discovery in my game design. For a long while now, I have struggled to define exactly what it was that the game was supposed to be about—not in terms of setting or colour, but in terms of the experience of playing.

It’s because I am an inspiration junky. I read another game text or review, some piece of theory, a fragment of a forum discussion, and I start getting all these ideas about how I can improve my own work. But it never seems to end—my game never gets done. It’s the worst case of Feature Creep this side of Duke Nukem Forever.

For most of that time, I have focused on mechanical stuff; the core dice-rolling scheme, the combat sequence, the skill system, etc. I’ve succeeded a half a dozen times or more to create perfectly serviceable simulations of reality, only to throw them out and start over from scratch. Each time, something just wasn’t right—the aesthetics were off.

This has only gotten worse since I started reading the Forge, and learning about the Big Model and GNS theory. Before this, despite my burning ambition to create story-focused, literary kinds of games, I really had no idea what that meant. Instead what I was doing, over and over, was refining a tactical game, to facilitate the sorts of storm-the-castle and back-alley-gunfight scenarios my friends and I were used to from our days playing Rifts and Palladium Fantasy. I mean, that’s all any of us have ever really played—and honestly most of the other games I had (World of Darkness, Millenium’s End, Heavy Gear) would have just given us more of the same tactical play with more coherent rules. I have some different kinds of games now (Shock:, Dogs in the Vineyard, Everway, Over the Edge, etc.) that I’m dying to try out, but I don’t see my friends often enough anymore to really get into something new. Our very limited gaming time is always focused on playtesting my own designs. Yet I want to try something new, even if that means doing it without the aid of someone else’s rules. I’m sailing off into uncharted (or at least unfamiliar) territory.

The thing is, there’s no real challenge in tactical play. By “tactical play” I mean games where the players work together cooperatively in order to slaughter armies of generic bad guys as efficiently as possible, using “realism” focused rules, with dramatic concerns as window dressing between action scenes. I guess I shouldn’t say that there’s no challenge to that—there is; but the challenge, and the stakes, are entirely artificial. Sure, my character might die or fail the mission, but I don’t come away from the table feeling like I’ve learned anything, or done much that I can’t do in a game of Call of Duty—only much, much slower. It’s not that I don’t like the tactical stuff—it’s just that I don’t want the game to be about that and entirely focused on it. Just like a good book or a movie, I want to be moved by the experience; not just impressed with my frag count.

Let me tell you what I mean. I just rewatched Back to the Future III; which may seem like an odd choice for an example. But consider the showdown (the mini-climax) just before the main climax of the movie: Marty McFly has to face Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen in the street. He can’t back down, because Mad Dog’s men are holding Doc Brown at gunpoint. Marty has already demonstrated that he’s quite skilled with a gun (thanks to years of arcade game experience), but is he really ready to kill a man?—even someone so low-down and mean as Mad Dog, and even in self-defense? In fact, if he did kill Mad Dog, he would endanger his own existence, because it is only through conflict with Mad Dog’s descendant Biff that Marty’s parents get together. So what’s he going to do?

Marty of course solves the problem by wearing the iron stove cover under his poncho—imitating Clint Eastwood in a scene from A Fistfull of Dollars (shown briefly in Back to the Future II). It’s a terribly convenient solution—and really the only one that would ensure Marty’s continued existence, but I still felt tension watching the scene, because at least in theory Marty is still having to face a difficult choice. He has to decide what kind of man he is, and how to reconcile bravery and honour with self-preservation and mercy. Even though it’s a comedy and it was obvious how it was going to end (plus I’d seen it before), for that brief minute I was still thinking: “What’s he gonna do?” and I couldn’t look away.

Is that what thematic / narrativist play is all about? Because whatever it is, I really want more of it in my gaming.

So, I’m at a turning point. I can continue to write the big, generic, tactical simulation—which as it turns out is also a phenomenal amount of work with everything that needs to be defined—and which really isn’t what I want to create. Or, I can write something small and focused, with strong themes and simple and flexible rules. It’ll still be work, but it will be much more rewarding work.

I’m going to try the latter—although it means trying to write for a style of play that I’ve never done before. It’ll be a bootstrapping operation. Or, to quote Wernher von Braun: “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” Looks like I’m just doing research.

I’ve been working on my RPG for a long time, and in the last year or so, I’ve learned a lot more about the table-top RPG industry—well, as much as you can learn from the Internet, with fairly infrequent gaming sessions, and without actually going to gaming conventions like GenCon and the like (logistics don’t allow it, currently).

The field more or less shapes up roughly like this: You’ve got your standard, post-Dungeons and Dragons games, and your Indie games. The first type of game is designed for competitive or semi-competitive play in immersive worlds, using rule-sets that tend to be on the complex or “crunchy” side—that is, they spell out most conceivable situations that might arise. These games are usually set up to be universal—a basic game engine that can be adapted to any setting you might try to inject it into; and with any given setting you can expect a large number of supplementary books to be produced in addition to the core rules. They follow a standard, big publisher distribution model; with a development team working for or selling their game to a publisher, who then prints and distributes the finished game through standard retail channels.

Then there are the independent games. As with other forms of expression, the “Indie” label connotes innovation and experimentation—small, one-off projects with very focused designs. They often have simple, or at least, succinctly defined rules—they don’t define everything, tend toward more freeform play, and tend to follow a more “narrativist” creative agenda.

Now, the term narrativist is taken from the Big Model of RPG Theory, which was developed chiefly by Ron Edwards and other contributors on The Forge. Narrativism represents one of three main “creative agendas” proposed by the big model, the other two being simulationism, and gamism. A creative agenda means the style of play that an individual person, or his gaming group will gravitate toward. You really have to read the articles to understand the nuances of each agenda, but I will try to describe them each in turn, as well as I understand them. (If anyone familiar with Forge theory is reading, feel free to correct me, as I’m sure I’m flattening the picture somewhat).

In a nutshell, simulationism is a focus on the depth or realism of the simulation that the game produces—exploration of a well-defined character and/or a well-defined world is key. Those with simulationist preferences are bothered when one of these things feels logically inconsistent or unrealistic.

Gamism is a concern with achievements of one sort or another, both in the game and beyond it. Those with a gamist agenda play to win. They may seek out high scores in experience or wealth earned as the game progresses. They may also play for the thrill of defeating powerful in game enemies, or that of out-competing other players or outwitting the GM.

Narrativism means wanting to create a good and meaningful story—in the literary sense—and in a collaborative fashion. Someone with a narrativist agenda may not mind letting her character lose a conflict or even die, as long as it serves the needs of the story. These players play to be moved and informed by a meaningful story that they helped create.

There’s nothing right or wrong about any of these agendas; everybody has their own personal blend of the three, and just hopes they can find a gaming group where everybody’s personal creative agendas are compatible. The theory also goes that different game rules facilitate play under particular creative agendas, and hinder play under others.

This isn’t the only theory of role-playing out there, and in some ways it’s even controversial, but you have to admit, it’s quite compelling—at least compared to the seat-of-the-pants approach that game designers have traditionally taken. You also have to admit that a lot of really interesting and innovative designs have been made by Forge contributors.* Indeed, if you spend any time lurking on the Forge forum like I have, it’s quickly apparent that it is really an online school of game design—both in the sense of a system of thought, and a place to learn a skill. I haven’t formally joined the forum yet because I have only recently pried my eyes away from my own seat-of-the-pants designs long enough to discover it and start absorbing the theory and reading the relevant games.

But it’s exciting to look at things from a fresh perspective. And it’s that spark of fresh understanding which is my problem. Most of the games that follow the big publisher model have tended to facilitate a simulationist and/or gamist approach, while many Indie games, or at least Forge games, are typically more narrativist.

For years, I have committed myself to creating a game that was hopefully better than a lot of the games that I had played or studied, but which was more or less following their conventions. Now I can see more possibilities, and I’m really drawn to the simplicity and ease and focus of design that Indie games tend to convey. I mean, some of them are flat out elegant—works of art. And to top it off, I’m really drawn to the narrativist style… it really appeals to the writer in me—and beyond the writer part, there isn’t much else of me to look at.

So my dilemma: do I go the distance with the system I’ve been working on for all these years, or do I put that on the back burner and do something tighter, simpler, maybe more original, and more in keeping with my interests in fiction?

I try to bear in mind that the system I’ve been working on is designed to compete with systems that usually have teams of five or ten people, with additional support staff, working on them. Maybe that’s really my problem: I’m daunted by the scale of what I’m trying to do, as well as realizing that it may not get me where I really want to go. Maybe there’s a happy medium—I can scale back the system as it is, it’s not too late, but there’s still a lot of work ahead of me.

Wish me luck!

* Games developed by Forge contributors include  Dog’s in the Vineyard, Sorcerer, My Life With Master, The Shadows of Yesterday, and others.

Addendum:

Before my site was hacked and I lost the original database, Joshua A.C. Newman, the designer of Shock: Social Science Fiction, stopped by and left a comment:

Joshua A.C. Newman
July 14th, 2009 on 17:04

Hey, Andre, there are some real problems with the G/N/S terminology,
in that they lead you down specious alleys.

I find that people grok the theory better when I say that there are
three (recognized) modes of play:

Challenging play is where the primary form of enjoyment for the
players comes from overcoming obstacles, competing, and the like.
Players make choices that are strategically and tactically optimal for
the resources in their possession.

Thematic play is where the characters in the story take a moral stance
and the players are empowered to make meaningful moral choices with
those characters (irrespective or success or failure, mind).

Beautiful play is where the experience of the environment — whether
it’s reproducing Star Wars or making your own from scratch — is the
primary form of enjoyment for the players.

(These are GNS, but with the confusing names stripped off.)

If you’re reading the Forge at all, you already know the Forge itself has done away with the original G/N/S terms, calling them instead Step On Up, Story Now, and Right to Dream. I hadn’t quite understood that when I made the original post, but now that I do, it should definitely be pointed out. I think I like Joshua’s terms a little better, but the point is: What’s in a name? These modes are best understood in actual play, of course, but failing that, it helps to have a few different ways of looking at the concepts.   Anyway, thanks Joshua, if you’re reading!

—Andre, September 27, 2009.

“… and that’s when I pulled out my soul-drinking rune guitar, +1!”

In my last post I mentioned that I was trying to think carefully about how magic ought to work in Martian Cycle. In most games, and most fantasy fiction, magic is a given—that is, within the confines of the setting, magic is real and obvious to everyone.  In fantasy worlds, magic is the high technology of the day, and magical talismans are as common as cellphones are in the modern world.  Everyone has a crystal ball in their house for watching dragon races on, and the heroes might be able to sling fireballs as easily as you or I might turn on a light.

But I wanted to do something different. First and foremost, most people in the game—at least, most Ironfolk—don’t believe in magic, psychic abilities, or the supernatural (at least, not outside of organized religion). Meanwhile, the Iduni, in general, do believe in magic and spirits of the kind that a shaman might be involved with. So magic in Martian Cycle needs to be subtle, reflecting the animism of the Iduni, while still allowing for the skepticism and derision of the Ironfolk. Standard fantasy magic just won’t do.

“Magic is seldom spectacular because it seldom needs to be”

—Donald Tyson, Ritual Magic

Real world magic, if it exists at all, is a profound but elusive thing. It lives in the space between certainties, in the realm of coincidence and luck. Very rarely does something obviously inexplicable happen—quite often, events simply turn out this way or that, for the best or for naught—without us ever really knowing or even suspecting if there’s someone behind it all, manipulating things. Magic in roleplaying, or at least in Martian Cycles, should reflect this.

“The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”

—Eden Phillpotts

Okay, so it has to be subtle—Check. What else should the magic system be? Well, consider the article Breaking Out of Scientific Magic Systems by John H. Kim. In a nutshell, Kim points out that most of the magic systems you’ll encounter in roleplaying games—and even in a lot of fantasy fiction—follows the patterns of modern science more than those of mysticism, which really doesn’t make much sense. Magic is rated in terms of energy, in the form of power points or mana.  Spells are formulaic, and they always work no matter who is casting them or why. Magic itself is described in most systems as supernatural—that is, above and beyond nature.

Contrast this with classical literature, where magic is a mysterious thing. It only works for certain people, often depending on their individual morality, be it the magic sword that only works for the pure of heart, or the demon who only answers to the wickedly evil. Magic in such stories is immeasurable and ultimately creates more questions than it actually answers—and yet it is a part of nature—it’s just there, it always has been and always will be; an unusual but normal manifestation of a living cosmos.

Another essay linked on John H. Kim’s magic page is an essay by Lev Lafayette, called Magic in Roleplaying and Reality. Lafayette expresses some similar views to Kim, in that magic, when you consider real world examples of animistic / magical worldviews, is not really open to scientific inquiry. Magic in such a worldview revolves more around wisdom and meaning than it does around knowledge, which is the purview of science. Magic transcends the subject/object distinction that science depends on in order to test hypotheses. As such, magic is not something science can either prove, or properly falsify. The two worldviews are like ships passing in the night. So it doesn’t make much sense to base the magic system in a roleplaying game around scientific principles of mass-energy, measurable properties like “magical radiation,” specific genes responsible for magical ability, or even conventional causality.

“Choke on that, causality!”

—Hubert J. Farnsworth, Futurama

I was a little more passionate when I first thought about these ideas, and wrote about them in my notes:

Magickal beliefs pre-dated science by thousands of years, and there’s no reason that they must conform to scientific thinking—anything but, in fact.  Magick, by definition, deals with metaphysics, not physics.  Its power lies not in forces of electromagnetism or gravity, but in emotion, attention and intention, and metaphor—qualities associated with a living cosmos, not a mechanical one.  Philosophically, a magickal worldview is more akin to idealism than materialism—a counter-point to science, not a slave to it.  So, where magick is concerned, take all the rules you learned in science class and chuck them out the window.  I mean, it is magick, after all.

Looking for magick in physics is a classic example of not being able to see the forest for the trees.  It’s like casting about the world asking “but where are my eyes?”  You can’t see these things because they are what allow you to see.  Magick is the stuff of subjective experience, not objective matter and energy, and we are in fact performing magick all the time.

Or, to put it another way: consider how cool and awe inspiring the force was in the original Star Wars trilogy when it was a mysterious but meaningful force; compared to how stupid it sounded when The Phantom Menace introduced us to the essentially scientific notion of the midichlorians, microscopic organisms that live in a Jedi’s bloodstream. Sigh. I’ll never get my money back, will I, George?

Well, anyway, I think the main problem is that traditional “scientific” magic systems are mechanically easier, and fit well within simulationist and gamist-oriented fantasy games. A more mystically enabled magic system means more roleplaying for the players—which seems like it might be initially more challenging, since not everything is spelled out, but ultimately more rewarding, since it evokes a sense of meaning and wonder, transcending the merely mechanical aspects of the game. Some mechanics are probably unavoidable, but those mechanics should be as unobtrusive as possible—they should let the magic shine through.

“Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with the will.”

—Aleister Crowley

So, our magic system has to be subtle, believable even; but it also has to be literary, mysterious, and definitely not scientific in its approach. But what exactly is magic and how does it work in the context of the game? Well, I don’t know exactly. Not yet. I have several possible explanations in mind, which should be different enough to allow different factions in the game to have wildly different views of the subject, and wildy different abilities.

There’s a third factor, besides subtlety and non-sciency-ness, that magic should have: it should be personal—it should connect the magician to the wider universe. I want to leave you with one particularly interesting quote I found on the io9 science fiction blog. Author Ted Chiang says:

Roughly speaking, if you can mass-produce it, it’s science, and if you can’t, it’s magic. As an example, suppose someone says she can transform lead into gold. If we can use her technique to build factories that turn lead into gold by the ton, then she’s made an incredible scientific discovery. If on the other hand it’s something that only she can do, and only under special conditions, then she’s a magician. And I don’t mean that she’s a charlatan; she might actually be able to transform lead into gold. But scientific phenomena are reproducible by other investigators; they aren’t dependent on a specific person.

Electricity might have seemed magical at one time in history, but it works for everyone; you don’t need to have an innate talent or be descended from someone special for a light bulb to turn on which you flip a switch. It took the work of very smart people to get us to the point that we can all use electricity, but none of them were magicians, precisely because they were able to make their discovery work for everyone.

To go on at slightly greater length, the reason magic can’t be mass-produced is that it usually relies on some subjective quality of the practitioner: her intense concentration, her spiritual purity, something that can’t be substituted with another person or with a machine. Magic is, in a sense, evidence that the universe knows you’re a person. When people say that the scientific worldview implies a cold, impersonal universe, this is what they’re talking about. Magic is when the universe responds to you in a personal way.

In all seriousness, I have experienced times when the universe seemed to know me as a person—which, for me, is why it is so much more important to be good to other people, to yourself, and to the planet itself. If you trust and honour the world, it’s far more likely to trust and honour you back—in the long run (just not always in the ways we imagine). No matter what happens in life, how lost you might feel, or what beliefs you might hold, there’s something out there that cares about what happens to us. God maybe, or maybe just a universe that’s alive and cherishes every part of itself. Who knows? I just know it’s something to trust. Nothing is permanent, not even the manifold injuries and embarrassments of a human lifetime.  Magick has never left the world, people have just stopped paying attention to it.