By "Games" I mean tabletop role playing games. But you assumed that, I bet.
It occurred to me that there are at least two ways that people approach a session or sessions of a role playing game.
There's "Beer and Pretzels", which needs very little explanation. Most games of D&D are this, heck - most role playing games are this.
"Serious Drama", Unlike the Beer and Pretzels approach, Serious Drama approaches role playing like people approach art or opera. This is "Serious Stuff". Not for kids or the faint of heart. In fact, one might not even want to refer to this as a "game". I'll pick on my own kind here when I say that folks in a Serious Drama game are likely to be elitist, aloof, a little snotty, and very particular about what goes on in the "game". LARPing and games like Vampire and some Indie RPGs can easily fall into this group.
I'm breaking these down because I noticed something recently on a gaming forum. Folks were discussing games in which "One person does something while everyone else twiddles their thumbs". I could be wrong on this, but I think that you'll find two things, that are sorta one, but I'll call them two.
One: You tend to only get this much in Serious Drama games. The rest of them let the players run around as a team or group, and often their goals are not so wildly divergent that they end up all over the map.
Two: The only games that this would be tolerated in anyway are Serious Drama games. Your average D&D player is going to get bored and start playing Yatzee after about 5 minutes of Watching Someone Else Do Stuff. And I don't blame them. Watching other people play games while you wait around is boring.
Let me pause for a second and note that I'm not trying to say that you have to involve everyone at the table, every second of the game. I feel compelled to throw in the word "FUN", all caps. The whole point of the first form, the Beer and Pretzels gaming, is fun. You guys could theoretically be playing a game of Talisman or watching Lord of the Rings, and having a great time too. While Serious Drama is a little different. Its not that you can't have fun, or that its not supposed to be fun, but its more serious than that. It means to be. It requires more investment, more time and focus, and those that favor that type of game would probably argue that the reward is greater.
I think people will tend to be in one of the two pools, and while you'll find some exceptions, I think that finding people who can hop between those two types of games are somewhat uncommon.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Monday, September 8, 2008
A Few Things That Are Cool
1. Spore
I've had my eye on this for some time now. I think it is pretty cool so far. I know there is some uproar about the draconian DRM licensing stuff, and I hope that EA will fix that. There's also some discussion about it being "boring". I dunno about that. I can only speak for myself, and only time will tell, and other cliche's, but I'm enjoying it so far!
2. Metallica - Death Magnetic
I love this album. I'm a big fan of Metallica. I love the old stuff, and I enjoy alot of the "newer" stuff. This album is hard like the old stuff, and I've totally been rocking out to it.
3. True Blood
That's the show on HBO that premiered this past Sunday. I like it alot! I'll stay tuned!
I've had my eye on this for some time now. I think it is pretty cool so far. I know there is some uproar about the draconian DRM licensing stuff, and I hope that EA will fix that. There's also some discussion about it being "boring". I dunno about that. I can only speak for myself, and only time will tell, and other cliche's, but I'm enjoying it so far!
2. Metallica - Death Magnetic
I love this album. I'm a big fan of Metallica. I love the old stuff, and I enjoy alot of the "newer" stuff. This album is hard like the old stuff, and I've totally been rocking out to it.
3. True Blood
That's the show on HBO that premiered this past Sunday. I like it alot! I'll stay tuned!
Friday, September 5, 2008
More on Stakes in TSOY
(As a followup to my previous post on our recent Shadow of Yesterday game)
For simplicity sake, here are some ways that stakes can work in tsoy:
win/lose: "If you win this dice roll, your action is a success. If you lose, its not and you fail." I generally think that these kind of stakes are boring and try to avoid them.
win/complicated win: "If you win the dice roll, your action goes off without a hitch. If you lose, you still did what you wanted to do, but it just got complicated - more guards just came in, or you realized that its a trap and they were waiting on you, or your sword/lockpick/gun/tools break during the process, etc" I love this kind of stakes, and usually try for this kind of thing. I think that it is important to note that these stakes are actually toying with the facts in the game, beyond "Am I successful or not?".
Its worth noting that Role Playing games are all about using dice to determine facts - Dungeons and Dragons does it - you roll your d20 to hit the orc, pick the lock, jump the wall, etc. Did you succeed at your task, or fail, you ask. The dice answer.
TSOY has taken this a step further, and that's one of the reasons that I love the game so much. Dice checks are usually very binary, the answer is either Yes or No. TSOY changes that, and lets you talk about what "yes" or "no" means.
I recently got to play with Inspectres, and read through Houses of the Blooded. Both systems use mechanics that turn over some narrative control of the game to the players. The players get to say "This happens." Which is totally cool.
I have always run TSOY in a somewhat traditional fashion. I, the GM, know what is happening in the story, and through the game I share that with the players. I have a cast of good guys and bad guys, I have a plot, I know where the McGuffin is, and what it does. The players are along for the ride, to interact with the story that I've created. The difference with this game was that I pitched that out the window. Kindof by accident. I mentioned in my previous post that we did some stakes like: "Win - Stephan walks right into you, Lose - he went into hiding somewhere that is going to be damn tough to reach." This makes me froth at the mouth a little because I let the players decide how the game goes. Right now, brewing in my head are stakes like "We arrive at the keep of our dear Uncle Bob, how's he doing these days? We'll roll our Socialize skill. On a win - he's doing just dandy and there's going to be a huge gala held here in just two days, woo! On a loss - he just died from an assassins dagger, like - two minutes ago. The keep is in an uproar!"
For simplicity sake, here are some ways that stakes can work in tsoy:
win/lose: "If you win this dice roll, your action is a success. If you lose, its not and you fail." I generally think that these kind of stakes are boring and try to avoid them.
win/complicated win: "If you win the dice roll, your action goes off without a hitch. If you lose, you still did what you wanted to do, but it just got complicated - more guards just came in, or you realized that its a trap and they were waiting on you, or your sword/lockpick/gun/tools break during the process, etc" I love this kind of stakes, and usually try for this kind of thing. I think that it is important to note that these stakes are actually toying with the facts in the game, beyond "Am I successful or not?".
Its worth noting that Role Playing games are all about using dice to determine facts - Dungeons and Dragons does it - you roll your d20 to hit the orc, pick the lock, jump the wall, etc. Did you succeed at your task, or fail, you ask. The dice answer.
TSOY has taken this a step further, and that's one of the reasons that I love the game so much. Dice checks are usually very binary, the answer is either Yes or No. TSOY changes that, and lets you talk about what "yes" or "no" means.
I recently got to play with Inspectres, and read through Houses of the Blooded. Both systems use mechanics that turn over some narrative control of the game to the players. The players get to say "This happens." Which is totally cool.
I have always run TSOY in a somewhat traditional fashion. I, the GM, know what is happening in the story, and through the game I share that with the players. I have a cast of good guys and bad guys, I have a plot, I know where the McGuffin is, and what it does. The players are along for the ride, to interact with the story that I've created. The difference with this game was that I pitched that out the window. Kindof by accident. I mentioned in my previous post that we did some stakes like: "Win - Stephan walks right into you, Lose - he went into hiding somewhere that is going to be damn tough to reach." This makes me froth at the mouth a little because I let the players decide how the game goes. Right now, brewing in my head are stakes like "We arrive at the keep of our dear Uncle Bob, how's he doing these days? We'll roll our Socialize skill. On a win - he's doing just dandy and there's going to be a huge gala held here in just two days, woo! On a loss - he just died from an assassins dagger, like - two minutes ago. The keep is in an uproar!"
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Thieves of Highwater Street: Sibling Rivalry
I had the pleasure of running one of the coolest sessions of Shadow of Yesterday ever.
After a very long wait, we picked back up with the Thieves Guild themed game of Shadow of Yesterday with Michael and Kelly. This time, we had those two, Jason, Michael's wife Beth, Doug and Sonya.
Beth had not played with us before, and was new or pretty new to role playing games. Doug and Sonya were new introductions to me. Both have played role playing games, and Doug had played or run a FUDGE game once before.
In order to simplify things, speed things up, and give us some good story hooks, I created character backgrounds for everyone, and let everyone get familiarized with them.
Each character had a few secrets from the other characters. We are not doing any sort of PvP, but there's certainly some subterfuge and conspiracy at play. We discussed handling these secrets in a Cards Up or Cards Down fashion. Cards Up indicates that we as players are all In The Know. Like the audience in a book or movie, we already know the juicy secrets. This style is better suited to casual, easygoing and friendly play. Cards Down indicates that we keep all the dirty secrets until they come out in play. As a group, we decided on Cards Up. During our quick Spilling Of Secrets, Michael mentioned that his character Thomas had a crippled father, and because of that, he worked for the Guild, to keep his family fed. Doug spoke up and asked if he could add to the background info, and asked if his character could have, on orders, been the one who broke Thomas' father's back. Oh Hell Yes.
I began by outlining that the players formed part of the Highwater Street Crewe. Not all of it though, as there are "bit players", or cronies who do stuff off screen as well. The crewe had a few things that needed to be accomplished. They still needed to turn up the missing courier and gems that their boss, Malek, wanted. They also needed to make sure that they were collecting "protection money" from the businesses around Highwater. I explained that they had a short list of establishments that had not or would not hand over money. They started at the Golden Drink gambling den, looking to secure some cash from the owner. He told them that he had little cash, and that his business had dried up in recent days. They asked as to why, and he told them that his customers had instead been buying some kind of narcotic off of some hooligans up the street, and he pointed them out. Now, Doug was aware that his character had a brother who had recently arrived in Highwater. This brother had falled in with some street punks who were selling a narcotic. Doug asked if his brother was among them. Yes. He took off up the street to get his confrontation on. He got into a physical altercation with his little brother and the two toughs with him, and we went to dice. Simple stakes, Doug won. He intimidated an agreement out of his brother to leave the dope alone and get lost, and his brother took off.
They headed on down the street, debating whether to look into the missing gem courier, or into the businesses that they needed money from. They passed by a group of city militia harassing two young men. The goody-two-shoes Lieutenant was with the guards, as well as the tough-but-corrupt watch Sergeant. The two young men were familiar to the characters, one of them being an errand boy for the Guild. Kelly's character, who has a bone to pick with the city militia, along with Beth's character, marched up to the guardsmen and started in sarcastically on the Sergeant. Soon, they could see that the watch was going to let the young men go, and Kelly's exchange with the guardsmen began to get dangerous. Beth's character chilled things out by getting them out of the confrontation, once they saw that the young men would be released.
Soon they passed the business of a dock hauler, one of the businesses that had not paid up. They debating how to deal with them, considering some options, before deciding that they needed to make an example of someone, and preferably a somewhat easier target than a bunch of haulers. They settled on a well-to-do seamstress shop just up the street. When they walked up to the shop, they recognized a young man sitting outside the shop os one of the Brickdown Street Crewe, a rival crewe to the north, and headed by the son of the Underboss. He told the characters that this seamstress shop belonged to the Brickdown Crewe now, and that Underboss Malek had given it to them. There was much consternation and discussion about this. Soon, Sonya's character went in to the shop to talk to the owner. The owner became concerned about the prospect of being caught in the middle of a Guild dispute, but Sonya's character assured her that it would be handled without any problem, and said that she would need to be giving her Guild payments to them instead of the Brickdown crewe. Headed by Michael's character, the rest of our crewe soon ran the lone Brickdown fellow off. He threatened a bit, and left.
The crewe decided that they wanted to do some hunting for the gem courier, and sought out the other gambling hall in Highwater, the Lady's Dice, and things began to pick up. Up until this point, we'd only rolled dice once or twice over the entire evening. I was having a blast narrating and playing the NPCs, and the players seemed to be having a fine time doing what it was that they were doing. At the Lady's Dice, Kelly's character did some socializing, and Sonya's character went and talked to one of the bouncers. She had taken Secret of Contacts, and decided that this bouncer was a contact of hers, a good buddy. He came clean that they'd underpaid a little, but he'd not seen this gem courier. Sonya asked if he hung out with the bouncers at the other places, and if he might be able to coax any information out of them. A light came on above my head, and I said sure - that we could go to dice for it. If Sonya won, then the bartender left work after a few hours, went and hung out with his buddies, asked them about the gem courier and got a lead. If she lost, his buddies had no information for him. This was solid gold. Tons of gift dice came out, and she handily won the contest. Her bouncer friend informed her that the gem courier who'd been thrown out into the gutter in front of the Golden Drink gambling hall, had been rolled by some punk kids.
Doug immediately expressed concern over whether his brother had been involved in this, and there was much speculation around the table. The crewe decided to go off in search of the brother, Stephan. They weren't sure where he'd be hiding, so they decided to start checking at the homes of relatives. They went by an Uncle's place, and Doug's character asked his uncle if he'd seen Stephan. The uncle replied "no", and I told Doug that we'd need to go to dice. The uncle was lying, and the dice would tell us whether he was fooled by it or not. The dice came up a tie, and Doug decided to bring down the pain. Thanks to lucky rolling on my part, and unlucky rollng on Doug's part, he finally Gave, and his character left, frustrated.
The crewe regrouped in the street, and debated their next move. They still wanted to find Stephan, and Jason proposed a dice roll to try to get some word as to where Stephan was hiding. Jason went for big stakes, and proposed that if he won, Stephan walked right into them. Wanting to meet his stakes scope, I said fine, and that if he lost, Stephan had gone and sought shelter with their rivals, the Brickdown crewe. Gift dice flew at Jason, and he won handily.
They grabbed Stephan and the guy with him, and began trying to get information out of him. We went to dice, and they learned the names of three street punks who'd done the rolling.
Quick note:
Stakes in TSOY have always been awesome. Letting stakes decide truths in the game, and the direction that the story and narration goes? AWESOME.
This was a fairly quick writeup, and I may post more about it later.
After a very long wait, we picked back up with the Thieves Guild themed game of Shadow of Yesterday with Michael and Kelly. This time, we had those two, Jason, Michael's wife Beth, Doug and Sonya.
Beth had not played with us before, and was new or pretty new to role playing games. Doug and Sonya were new introductions to me. Both have played role playing games, and Doug had played or run a FUDGE game once before.
In order to simplify things, speed things up, and give us some good story hooks, I created character backgrounds for everyone, and let everyone get familiarized with them.
Each character had a few secrets from the other characters. We are not doing any sort of PvP, but there's certainly some subterfuge and conspiracy at play. We discussed handling these secrets in a Cards Up or Cards Down fashion. Cards Up indicates that we as players are all In The Know. Like the audience in a book or movie, we already know the juicy secrets. This style is better suited to casual, easygoing and friendly play. Cards Down indicates that we keep all the dirty secrets until they come out in play. As a group, we decided on Cards Up. During our quick Spilling Of Secrets, Michael mentioned that his character Thomas had a crippled father, and because of that, he worked for the Guild, to keep his family fed. Doug spoke up and asked if he could add to the background info, and asked if his character could have, on orders, been the one who broke Thomas' father's back. Oh Hell Yes.
I began by outlining that the players formed part of the Highwater Street Crewe. Not all of it though, as there are "bit players", or cronies who do stuff off screen as well. The crewe had a few things that needed to be accomplished. They still needed to turn up the missing courier and gems that their boss, Malek, wanted. They also needed to make sure that they were collecting "protection money" from the businesses around Highwater. I explained that they had a short list of establishments that had not or would not hand over money. They started at the Golden Drink gambling den, looking to secure some cash from the owner. He told them that he had little cash, and that his business had dried up in recent days. They asked as to why, and he told them that his customers had instead been buying some kind of narcotic off of some hooligans up the street, and he pointed them out. Now, Doug was aware that his character had a brother who had recently arrived in Highwater. This brother had falled in with some street punks who were selling a narcotic. Doug asked if his brother was among them. Yes. He took off up the street to get his confrontation on. He got into a physical altercation with his little brother and the two toughs with him, and we went to dice. Simple stakes, Doug won. He intimidated an agreement out of his brother to leave the dope alone and get lost, and his brother took off.
They headed on down the street, debating whether to look into the missing gem courier, or into the businesses that they needed money from. They passed by a group of city militia harassing two young men. The goody-two-shoes Lieutenant was with the guards, as well as the tough-but-corrupt watch Sergeant. The two young men were familiar to the characters, one of them being an errand boy for the Guild. Kelly's character, who has a bone to pick with the city militia, along with Beth's character, marched up to the guardsmen and started in sarcastically on the Sergeant. Soon, they could see that the watch was going to let the young men go, and Kelly's exchange with the guardsmen began to get dangerous. Beth's character chilled things out by getting them out of the confrontation, once they saw that the young men would be released.
Soon they passed the business of a dock hauler, one of the businesses that had not paid up. They debating how to deal with them, considering some options, before deciding that they needed to make an example of someone, and preferably a somewhat easier target than a bunch of haulers. They settled on a well-to-do seamstress shop just up the street. When they walked up to the shop, they recognized a young man sitting outside the shop os one of the Brickdown Street Crewe, a rival crewe to the north, and headed by the son of the Underboss. He told the characters that this seamstress shop belonged to the Brickdown Crewe now, and that Underboss Malek had given it to them. There was much consternation and discussion about this. Soon, Sonya's character went in to the shop to talk to the owner. The owner became concerned about the prospect of being caught in the middle of a Guild dispute, but Sonya's character assured her that it would be handled without any problem, and said that she would need to be giving her Guild payments to them instead of the Brickdown crewe. Headed by Michael's character, the rest of our crewe soon ran the lone Brickdown fellow off. He threatened a bit, and left.
The crewe decided that they wanted to do some hunting for the gem courier, and sought out the other gambling hall in Highwater, the Lady's Dice, and things began to pick up. Up until this point, we'd only rolled dice once or twice over the entire evening. I was having a blast narrating and playing the NPCs, and the players seemed to be having a fine time doing what it was that they were doing. At the Lady's Dice, Kelly's character did some socializing, and Sonya's character went and talked to one of the bouncers. She had taken Secret of Contacts, and decided that this bouncer was a contact of hers, a good buddy. He came clean that they'd underpaid a little, but he'd not seen this gem courier. Sonya asked if he hung out with the bouncers at the other places, and if he might be able to coax any information out of them. A light came on above my head, and I said sure - that we could go to dice for it. If Sonya won, then the bartender left work after a few hours, went and hung out with his buddies, asked them about the gem courier and got a lead. If she lost, his buddies had no information for him. This was solid gold. Tons of gift dice came out, and she handily won the contest. Her bouncer friend informed her that the gem courier who'd been thrown out into the gutter in front of the Golden Drink gambling hall, had been rolled by some punk kids.
Doug immediately expressed concern over whether his brother had been involved in this, and there was much speculation around the table. The crewe decided to go off in search of the brother, Stephan. They weren't sure where he'd be hiding, so they decided to start checking at the homes of relatives. They went by an Uncle's place, and Doug's character asked his uncle if he'd seen Stephan. The uncle replied "no", and I told Doug that we'd need to go to dice. The uncle was lying, and the dice would tell us whether he was fooled by it or not. The dice came up a tie, and Doug decided to bring down the pain. Thanks to lucky rolling on my part, and unlucky rollng on Doug's part, he finally Gave, and his character left, frustrated.
The crewe regrouped in the street, and debated their next move. They still wanted to find Stephan, and Jason proposed a dice roll to try to get some word as to where Stephan was hiding. Jason went for big stakes, and proposed that if he won, Stephan walked right into them. Wanting to meet his stakes scope, I said fine, and that if he lost, Stephan had gone and sought shelter with their rivals, the Brickdown crewe. Gift dice flew at Jason, and he won handily.
They grabbed Stephan and the guy with him, and began trying to get information out of him. We went to dice, and they learned the names of three street punks who'd done the rolling.
Quick note:
Stakes in TSOY have always been awesome. Letting stakes decide truths in the game, and the direction that the story and narration goes? AWESOME.
This was a fairly quick writeup, and I may post more about it later.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Houses of the Blooded
Houses of the Blooded is a new indie RPG that pimps itself as "anti-D&D". It goes on to say that while D&D is a game about bad asses that roam the land without any real bond or connection or tie, and often with little regard for law, Houses of the Blooded is a game about people who are bound to and connected to the land, and for whom laws are everything.
Oh - you can get the PDF for five bucks here.
Here's my brief rundown on it, with my thoughts.
The players take the role of "Blooded Ven". Blooded = nobles, ven = the race of people that populate this corner of the world. The game is part Role Playing Game, and part Domain and Resource Management game. And while you could almost call them two separate games, they're totally linked together.
On the role playing side of things, its a heavily narrativist system that uses pools of d6's, and wagers in order to get to narrate facts about the events at hand. It uses Aspects, which may be familiar to you if you've read Spirit of the Century or FATE. The characters are all land owning nobles, and there are definite rules to live by, or in some cases, flaunt. Think rules like the rules in Vampire the Masquerade/Requiem. The players can expect to go to social events and practice their charm and subterfuge and intrigue on other NPCs and players. I happen to be currently reading George RR Martin's Game of Thrones series, and I cannot help but make comparisons. Words are dangerous, and Insults can quickly get you involved in Duels.
The domain management side of things plays in a way that reminds me of Birthright - an old school D&D game about nobles. You start with some land, and some details about that land, and you can select some vassals. Each Season, you have a number of Domain Actions that you can perform, depending on your lands and your vassals. Also, vassals can perform some domain actions for you. You can improve your lands and infrastructure, explore new areas, deal with troublesome bandits in your lands, produce goods, trade those goods, create fantastic works of art, hire new vassals, etc. I have a weak spot for domain management games, and so I've already been hungrily eyeing this portion of the game.
Oh - you can get the PDF for five bucks here.
Here's my brief rundown on it, with my thoughts.
The players take the role of "Blooded Ven". Blooded = nobles, ven = the race of people that populate this corner of the world. The game is part Role Playing Game, and part Domain and Resource Management game. And while you could almost call them two separate games, they're totally linked together.
On the role playing side of things, its a heavily narrativist system that uses pools of d6's, and wagers in order to get to narrate facts about the events at hand. It uses Aspects, which may be familiar to you if you've read Spirit of the Century or FATE. The characters are all land owning nobles, and there are definite rules to live by, or in some cases, flaunt. Think rules like the rules in Vampire the Masquerade/Requiem. The players can expect to go to social events and practice their charm and subterfuge and intrigue on other NPCs and players. I happen to be currently reading George RR Martin's Game of Thrones series, and I cannot help but make comparisons. Words are dangerous, and Insults can quickly get you involved in Duels.
The domain management side of things plays in a way that reminds me of Birthright - an old school D&D game about nobles. You start with some land, and some details about that land, and you can select some vassals. Each Season, you have a number of Domain Actions that you can perform, depending on your lands and your vassals. Also, vassals can perform some domain actions for you. You can improve your lands and infrastructure, explore new areas, deal with troublesome bandits in your lands, produce goods, trade those goods, create fantastic works of art, hire new vassals, etc. I have a weak spot for domain management games, and so I've already been hungrily eyeing this portion of the game.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
A game about superheroes
Got a few things to post about. I'll get to them each in turn.
First, we got to hang out with the Williamsii over the Labor Day weekend, which was great. We played Marvel Ultimate Alliance on the Xbox360 which was a lot of fun.
But I need to direct some feedback to the many console game developers that read this blog.
Why do your "Action RPG" games contain a large element of play that can be defined as: "Smashing boxes"?
I'm not saying that this is the first or only game in which I've had to do silly and contrived things during gameplay, but this one and its predecessor just have a whole lot of crates and lockers and walls and things that need to be smashed. Its great that people keep money in them, and occasionally items, but I hope that you understand that while your game is fun, our banter goes like this:
"These crates will rue the day that they aligned themselves with Doctor Doom!", or
"So our mission is to save the computer that this database is on, right? Do we just have to smash ever piece of furniture in the base except for the main computer, right?"
Here's my point: Next time - be a little more creative, and have us to less crate smashing. Its dumb.
First, we got to hang out with the Williamsii over the Labor Day weekend, which was great. We played Marvel Ultimate Alliance on the Xbox360 which was a lot of fun.
But I need to direct some feedback to the many console game developers that read this blog.
Why do your "Action RPG" games contain a large element of play that can be defined as: "Smashing boxes"?
I'm not saying that this is the first or only game in which I've had to do silly and contrived things during gameplay, but this one and its predecessor just have a whole lot of crates and lockers and walls and things that need to be smashed. Its great that people keep money in them, and occasionally items, but I hope that you understand that while your game is fun, our banter goes like this:
"These crates will rue the day that they aligned themselves with Doctor Doom!", or
"So our mission is to save the computer that this database is on, right? Do we just have to smash ever piece of furniture in the base except for the main computer, right?"
Here's my point: Next time - be a little more creative, and have us to less crate smashing. Its dumb.
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