“This is a world built of darkness, where American gods war for the very oaks. You think you know this world — it looks a whole helluva lot like yours — but things creep in the shadows, and eyes are always watching. There are powers at work in this world that the great unwashed masses are unaware of — at least consciously. There’s always that niggling suspicion in the back of the mind, the unproven certainty that something isn’t right. It’s probably this, more than the Others, that is the source of the greatest differences between your world and mine.

We know something is wrong, but can’t prove it, can’t ever catch it out in the light of day. That starts to wear on you after a while, starts to show in lost sleep and directionless anxiety. It is displayed in our grey, lifeless streets and endlessly corrupt government. It’s even right there in our desperate, hedonistic nightlife — anything to drive that looming presence from our minds. The colors are being leeched out of our world, the spark of life drained to a dying ember.

That changes now. I am the Chosen One. And this is the end of my world.”

Playing the Web

Web of Shadows is a game where each player controls a supernatural conspirator — an Other — in a world superficially similar but far stranger and more dangerous than our own. It is also a world in crisis — the Chosen One has appeared as foretold, and the apocalypse is coming. Each game of the Web of Shadows is the story of the end of the Others’ world.

The important elements of the story are laid out on the table in a Web of cards and strings. Each card on the table represents one element in the story. A card can represent an individual character, an organization, a place, a thing, or even an ideal. Each card has four ’spaces’ on it for characteristics of that card. The first characteristic is the card’s name; the other characteristics are filled out in play. Each card also has four holes punched into its corners. These are used to bind the card to other cards with lengths of string to represent relationships such as love, hate, duty, familial bonds, history, and the like.

Play consists of a sequence of scenes. In each scene some of the players will roleplay events which grow and manipulate the Web of cards on the table. The rest of the players will serve as the audience, and determine how the roleplay affects the Web. In any given scene, you might be called upon to play any character in the Web, including the Chosen One.

The Prophecy

Begin play with a number of index cards equal to the players in the game. Number the cards on the back, and pass one card out to each, with the number face down. Then, starting with the player who has the “One” card, each player turns over their card and narrates one line out of the Prophecy which foretells the coming of the Chosen One. As they do so, each player lights a candle next to them; dim the house lights when the Prophecy is complete.

The first player must include in their line where the Chosen One is destined to arise; the last player must name the Chosen One. All other players contribute something else about the Chosen One or the prophecied End of the World. When the Chosen One is named, the last player writes the name across the top of a new card and punches a hole in each corner of the card. The Chosen One card is placed in the dead center of the table.

Creating your Other Card

Each player then turns their card over and prepares it for play as an Other card, representing their supernatural conspirator. Punch four holes along the top of the card, and then write down the left-hand side the words “Name”, “Need”, and “Shame.” These are the three characteristics of all Others. Unlike the rest of the cards in the game, which can have lots of different kinds of characteristics, Other cards always have these three.

Do not fill in the characteristics now. Your Other’s characteristics are filled in not by you, but by the other players during the game. An Other’s characteristics, once determined, cannot be changed.

The Names of Others are always evocative: Demmorash the Scourge, Titania the Everlight Champion, or Zebulon the Undermaster. Names suggest a great deal about the nature of the Other, but the best names suggest more possibilities than can all be true at once.

The Needs of Others are always derived from humanity: blood, tears, dreams, devotion, or the like.

The Shame of an Other is what sets that individual apart from the rest of their kind, if any. One might have killed the only human woman he ever loved; another might have abandoned his homeworld to utter destruction; yet another might have broken the laws of his kind.

Place your Other card in front of you, along with ten tokens and three blank cards. Punch holes in the four sides of the three blank cards; these are your facades.

Framing Scenes

Play begins with whichever player began the Prophecy and proceeds widdershins around the table. You must spend a number of tokens equal to the characteristics written down on your Other card (this will start at zero). If you cannot spend tokens, you must increase Tension (below) by one for each token for which you are short. If this triggers a Backlash, your scene ends before it began.

On your turn, frame a scene involving some of the cards in the Web on the table. Players’ Other cards cannot be included in a scene unless they have been drawn into the Web. Choose one or more players to serve as the scene’s Audience, and assign roles to the other players. These roles do not need to correspond to cards in play on the table — players may roleplay “incidental” characters as easily as characters bound into the situation.

Machinations

Each player with a role in the scene takes a moment to write down on a blank card one of four things they want to accomplish in the scene. This is their Machination card. They may Reveal characteristics, Corrupt characteristics, Bind cards, or Sever cards. These cards are then passed, face down, to the Audience players.

Revealing adds a characteristic to a card caught in the Web. The card must have an empty characteristic slot. You might write “Reveal that Tony saw the murderer flee.”

Corrupting changes a characteristic on a card in the Web to something else. You might write “Corrupt Jenny’s Popular Girl into Willing Thrall.”

Binding connects a card to a card in the Web. You may introduce new cards into play in this way; if it is a new card, you must write a name across the top as it is placed on the table. You might write “Bind Jenny to Tony.”

Severing cuts a connection between two cards. All cards must be connected, eventually, to the Chosen One; if a Sever would cut the card off from the Chosen One, it is invalid. You might write “Sever Jenny’s connection to Tony.”

Conflict

When two players come to a disagreement over the course of events in a scene, either player may call for Conflict. The player who calls for conflict is the aggressor; the other player is the defender. The aggressor begins by spending a token to activate any characteristic or connection involved in the scene and explaining briefly why that argues for their point of view; the defender must spend a token to activate another characteristic or relationship to respond. Then the roles reverse and the defender activates something to which the aggressor must respond. Roles continue to flip back and forth until one player does not respond, either because they have run out of spendable tokens or there are no more applicable characteristics or relationships. The other player then gets his way.

Facade Cards and Other Cards

Facades are special cards employed by players to project their conspirator’s influence into a scene in a more powerful way. Facades may be the Other physically present but in supernatural disguise, an illusion sent from afar, minions acting in the service of the conspirator, or any other such explanation. Facades are usually used more than once, and develop a certain personality of their own; this personality may reflect the real Other, but this is not necessarily true.

Blank Facades can be brought into a scene and bound to any card in that scene with open holes. Facade cards already in play can appear in any scene if they are connected to another card that is in the scene — either as a character being played, the location the characters are at, or a prop in the possession of a character being played. Both methods cost one token, and can be done at the start or in the middle of any scene.

In a scene, a Facade does not require a token to activate its characteristics and connections. When playing your Facade, however, you may spend tokens to perform supernatural tricks and stunts. You may spend one token as normal, or spend two or even three tokens, which requires your opponent to activate two or three characteristics of his own to respond. However many tokens you spend, this always increases Tension by one.

In the rare cases that an Other is drawn into the Web, any of their characteristics can be activated without a token by anyone in conflict with them. On the other hand, a player roleplaying her Other may spend tokens as a Facade to demonstrate supernatural powers; these tokens count double (so one token from an Other must be countered by two tokens by any opponents). An Other’s supernatural powers always increases Tension by one.

Feeding

At any point in a scene, any non-Audience player may declare that they are Feeding. They must select a card with at least one characteristic that is involved in the scene to Feed on. This allows the player to regain tokens up to their limit of ten tokens. Doing this, however, always increases Tension. The player may gain two tokens for every point of Tension they add. If their Facade is in the scene, they may gain three tokens for every point of Tension. If their conspirator is in the scene, they immediately replenish their entire pool, but immediately trigger a Backlash.

Feeding also acts as a Corruption, turning one characteristic into a notation that the card was the target of a feeding. If the card represents a person or group of people, they were fed on; if the card represents a place, people were fed on there; if a prop, someone holding the prop was fed on, leaving telltale marks on the prop, and so on. Feeding corruption happens immediately and does not need to be ratified by the Audience. Further, once a characteristic is so corrupted, it cannot be changed again.

Closing Scenes and Ratification

The Scene ends when the player who started it is satisfied that it is completed, or when the Audience declares that they’re bored. When each scene is concluded, the Audience players for that scene will select one or more of the Machination cards on the basis of their portrayal in the scene. The Machinations written on these cards come to pass; characteristics are revealed and corrupted and connections are bound and severed according to the instructions on the cards. For each card selected, each Audience member may take two tokens from those spent in the scene’s Conflicts. The rest of the tokens are discarded.

If any of the selected Machinations attempt to Bind an Other card into the Web, the player of that Other may substitute one of his Facade cards, instead. If he controls a Facade card already in play and it has open holes, he may use that card. Alternately, he may introduce a new Facade into the Web at no cost.

Tension, Backlash, and Exposure

Tension represents the general unease of humanity, who, while they are not consciously aware of the Others among them, still have a gut feeling that tells them that something is not quite right. Unsubtle acts of the Others increase that feeling of unease. If Tension reaches a certain Threshold, the Others’ supernatural manipulation has attracted attention and a Backlash of dire consequences follow.

The Threshold is equal to the number of players in the game. Each time a card is Corrupted or a connection is Severed, Tension is increased by one. Each time a Facade uses supernatural powers in a scene, Tension is increased. Tension is also increased whenever a player Feeds. Whenever Tension meets or exceeds the Threshold, a Backlash is triggered. If a scene is in progress, it ends immediately.

When a Backlash occurs, the Chosen One starts to put things together. On the first Backlash, every card connected to the Chosen One is marked with a black dot next to its name. These are the people, places, and things that the Chosen One has got to know, either through deliberate investigation or happenstance. On every subsequent turn, every card connected to a marked card gains a black dot of its own, as the Chosen One’s understanding of the situation grows.

Total up the number of black dotted cards that each player has Fed on (one card that has been Fed on by the same player multiple times still counts as one card). Add the number of that player’s Facades that has a black dot. If the player’s conspirator card has a black dot, double their total. Whoever’s total is highest is at least partially Exposed, and one of their characteristics will be set by the other players. If more than one player tie for the highest total, everyone with the high score is Exposed.

Each unexposed player makes a suggestion for how to define one of the Exposed Other’s characteristics, and the player with the lowest total chooses one. The exposed player also loses a Facade of their choosing — either one of their blanks or one already in play, which becomes a normal card. The Exposed player then takes a turn framing a scene, even if this upsets turn order, where the Chosen One somehow discovers the Other’s Exposed characteristic and the Facade is killed, dispelled, abandoned, or somehow nullified. Machinations are played and resolved as normal in this scene.

Tension is thereafter reduced back to zero, to inevitably climb back up to the Threshold again.

Endgame

Yeah, that’d be a good idea.

—

So. One endgame shy of a nice companion microgame to Conquer the Horizon.

I’m getting tired of this discussion. Can we move on, now? All of this hulllaballoo boils down to the equivalent of “what if we made a roleplaying game without levels?!?”

Of course you can make a game without player characters. But taking something out does not create a game, and we can’t really comment on what effect that now-missing element has when we don’t know what’s going in in its place, or what other elements will be there in its absence.

What do GURPS, Lacuna, Dogs in the Vineyard, and Shadow of Yesterday have in common? Answer: They have no levels. Can we really say anything worthwhile about all of these games? Not really. So can we stop wanking off about games that have no PCs?

– Josh, grumpy today.

So night before last I joined a few other game designers in the Los Angeles area to see about setting up a sort of Game Play and Design group. The results were very positive. The five of us are going to meet regularly, playing lots of different games with an eye for breaking them apart and seeing how the pieces work together. We’ll be doing the same with our own designs. I’m very much looking forward to this, especially the understanding that play is inextricably connected to design and vice-versa; there is such a temptation to design in a vacuum, making “the perfect game” and then having people play it. No such nonsense here! We get to use a little tool called empiricism, perhaps you’ve heard of it.

We start in on the game-breaking next week — I am so jazzed.

In an offhanded comment in Changeling vs Vampire I pointed out how while both titles highlighted shadowy political machinations in the text, the presented rules did not actually support play involving that content. Most of the World of Darkness line talks big about politics and pulling strings from the shadows, but in actual play, this usually just turns into character and setting color. Players get to feel good because they get to say, “I’m a Reformist! That means I’m not a stuffy Traditionalist!” Generally this is followed up by working for the Duke without question, and me shooting myself in the head. Now, if I wanted to rip out all the stuff that I liked about the setting of those games — shadowy conspiracies of demihumans lurking in the shadows of the modern world — and create a system to support the political and conspiracy play, how might I go about doing that?

Let’s boil the concept down to three elements: politics, fantasy, and secrecy. Politics is all about relationships, power, and needs. Fantasy is all about encountering the Other and transformation. Secrecy is about facades, shameful truths, and fear. Connecting these, we get… the Other, behind facades, exercise power through relationships to feed their shameful needs, fearful of what happens if they’re found out. I’m missing transformation, though, which should permeate the entire thing. Yes, this sounds exactly like what lots of the World of Darkness was trying to be. But it also falls into the same trap as the WoD: these aren’t protagonists. No, I don’t mean good guys, I mean proactive characters. These guys are parasites, clinging to the underside of the world, purely reactive. Their goal is nothing constructive, it’s mere survival, a continuation of the status quo. Not people I’d be too interested in playing. You know what this needs? This needs T. S. Eliot. The only way that the Other will be able to step out of the shadows is to transform their world, but they fear that transformation as much as they fear the vengeance of humanity. So the concept becomes: the Other, behind facades, exercise power through relationships to feed their shameful needs, as fearful of the vengeance of humanity as they are of transforming their world. What we have here is the first answer to the Big Three: this is what the game is “about”.

What about the characters and players, though? The characters, obviously, are individuals from the ranks of the Others that are caught up in the transformation of the world that they both fear and need. Some might work towards transforming the world; others work against it. They do so by exercising that power through facades and relationships, careful not to upset the status quo too much too fast for fear of inciting the vengeance of humanity. Of course, all of their actions require that all-important need, and that need is dependent on the human society that they lurk within.

The original novelty of the World of Darkness line was its inversion of the encounter with the Other. Instead of being the vulnerable female protagonist encountering the terrible vampire, you were the vampire out to encounter your prey. Instead of being the knight lost in the land of faerie, you were the faerie lost in the real world. Let’s see if we can invert that back, but by doing so invert some other intrinsic bits of gaming culture. Let’s start with a protagonist — the Chosen One — on a 3×5 card placed in the middle of the table. She’s nobody’s PC, but she’s the main character. She is somehow essential to the transformation of the world — good or bad. Each player starts with a 3×5 card in front of them, for their shadowy conspiratorial transformed character. Because they’re a shadowy conspirator, though, the card starts out blank.

The players jockey their resources (power, facades, relationships) in order to carefully transform the fictional world towards their goal. The system will need to support and encourage the players actively shaping their environment — oh look, situation again — but make sure that they do it subtly. If they make too many obvious moves, humanity exacts vengeance. Perhaps every action increases tension, and if tension hits some threshold, badness happens — think the Black Ship in Catan. The Badness should not be a game-stopping event, and in fact I’d suggest that it should happen at least once in every game, knocking out some but not all player authority tools and changing the situation. There also needs to be a determination of how much transformation is ‘enough’ and the Others can live at peace, perhaps without need — in other words, the situation is resolved. Throw in some “pulling strings” system-color and I actually think the Stitch-a-Sitch idea from my prior article could be well-suited.

Let’s assume at least for now that players frame scenes and do a variant of the reveal-and-address elements of the situation that I outlined in that article. Everything that gets introduced into the situation gets based off of the protagonist in the middle of the table, slowly working out from her. Since the Chosen One is somehow the key to transforming the world, each player wants to weave the web of the situation back to their conspirator, which gives them more power over the situation, so they can effect the transformation they want, or squelch it before it destroys their precious status quo.

Players by default have relatively weak power over the situation by “pulling strings,” but can greatly increase that power by revealing and working through one of their conspirator’s facades, which allows them to take a little more control over developing events. So if I want there to be an art gallery party with a new collection to display, I introduce my conspirator’s facade as the art gallery’s owner, hosting the event. I imagine each Other has a limited number of facades — say three — that start out blank and can be defined as play progresses. The Badness created by tension thresholds might lose players facades.

Each player also has a pool of resources — call ‘em Influence Chips for now — that they expend in order to perform actions to shift elements of the situation. Spend a chip to add characterization to an established element, spend three chips to introduce a new element, that sort of thing. Thing is, the only way that you can refresh your Influence is to feed your need, and feeding your need always creates tension, whether it’s drinking blood, haunting dreams, or manipulating the stock market (Vampire, Wraith, Technocrat, for those keeping score). Feeding your need always impacts the situation — it must be a reveal or an address — which means that the Chosen One might track it back to you.

Conspirators (and perhaps all Situation elements) have an arbitrary number of ’slots’ for characterization — let’s say three — and players will want to keep theirs blank for as long as possible, remaining in the shadows. Other players will want to fill in your slots, revealing elements of your conspirator, and eventually exposing them. In other words, you start out the game not knowing what your conspirator’s true nature is — are they a hungry ghost, a vampire lich, a dark faerie lord, a grey from beyond the stars? — and through the course of the game the other players will be striving to shift the situation in such a way that lets them characterize your conspirator. Once all three of your characterization slots are defined, you are “exposed” — I imagine this means you can no longer use your facades, but have some potent personal abilities and a heavy turn-by-turn drain on resources (which you can then replenish, ratcheting tension). Needless to say, since the Chosen One is the main character, characterization of the conspirator always happens when the Chosen One finds out something about you. All the players around the table, then, will be motivated to make the Chosen One curious, prodding her with mysterious deaths and kidnapped friends, in the hopes of directing that curiousity at their opponents.

Which is nice and all, but I’m still groping after the end game or goal, the determination of how the world gets transformed and the situation resolves. I mean, I could totally bail out and do it the cowardly way, saying that, for instance, the last unexposed conspirator gets to narrate the end of the world / preservation of the status quo. Alternately, I could introduce some sort of investment mechanic where players flag certain elements in the situation as “significant” and if/when they all get connected (via relationships) to the Chosen One, the apocalypse occurs and the world is transformed. Facades are already in play as elements and carry some player investment; perhaps any need-feeding flags the involved elements as significant. The only thing missing from that is an incentive for the players to ever forge those relationships — perhaps whoever has the most Facades/Influence/Points/Whatever survives the transformation, and the others don’t. If it’s a threshold, it would be possible for two players to win and the others to lose, or even everybody to survive the world-transformation, for that matter (the “Super Happy Ending”).

There are lots more specifics to be hashed out and I suspect such a game would need some terrifically complex balancing of the mechanics to not spin out of control too easily. However, so far I’ve got hiding in the shadows, backstabbing, encounters with the Other, pulling strings, and dark secrets. I think they’re even supported by the system rather than suggested by the color. Now I suppose it’s time to put this on ’simmer’ for a while and see if it fades away as a diverting thought experiment or sticks around as a project worth spending some real development time on.

A whole fuck-ton of my gaming experience has been on MUSHes. Exactly two of the people who read this blog have more than passing experience with that platform, so I thought I might elucidate a bit. This is where I’m coming from.

What is a MUSH?

A MUSH is an online platform that allows many different people to connect and chat via text. Apocryphally, MUSH stands for Multi-User Shared Hallucination, but it doesn’t actually stand for anything — the name was chosen for its elastic sound, as opposed to prior code bases like MUD (which actually does stand for Multi-User Dungeon, because the code base supported killing monsters and taking their stuff). In the platforms’ heydey, there were very literally hundreds of different games ranging over all manner of crazy themes and worlds. I played on a lot of World of Darkness MUSHes, a line of books which (for reasons I’ll get into later) suited the MUSH platform well. The other big genres and themes in the world of MUSH are Anne McCaffrey’s Pern, Amber, generic fantasy, and — shit you not — Transformers.

This is how the MUSH platform works: you log into a Player-object — think of it as a little car you drive around — that has a description (blue hair, blonde eyes, et cetera) and may have game stats (strength, dexterity, basket-weaving). You can then drive your little Player around, through an often elaborate system of Rooms. In the Rooms are other Players as well as Objects. The Rooms are connected by Exits. You can see the historical dungeon influence, but a Room can be a pasture or an asteroid belt just as easily as a kitchen. The whole thing is often referred to as “the grid” since they’re often streets laid out in orderly rows and columns. In any case, you can look at Rooms, Exits, Objects, and Players to see their description, and you can interact with them (in a relatively limited way, provided the thing is “coded” to allow it). More importantly, you can speak and pose — writing out what you “do” in text — and all the other Players in the Room will see what you do on their screens. This is the roleplaying part, in case you didn’t notice. Additionally, there are channels that allow you to talk to other people on the channel no matter what Room you’re in, and global information commands that allow you to access text files and bulletin boards no matter where you are on the grid.

However, that’s just the mechanical bits. Properly speaking, a MUSH is a social system far more than it’s some database on some server somewhere. The most compelling thing about MUSHes is the fact that you can log in any time of day and find people to interact with (providing the game has a large enough pool of players). Sound familiar? That’s the oft-touted appeal of MMOs, but with one significant difference. I can open up many different windows, each connecting to different MUSHes, and play in multiple scenes and multiple worlds, all at the same time. Using the global channels and bulletin boards, I can coordinate meet-ups, scenes, and plotlines. If I log in at about the same time every day, I’ll find a relatively consistent group of people with whom I can regularly roleplay and get to know (both in-character and out). Often a group of players who play related characters (or the player who has the leader character) will be given the power to create and maintain some of the Rooms that make up the grid; this usually comes with the expectation that they will “create roleplay” for other players, as well. And then there’s the “MUSH Staff,” the people who run the entire game, who dispense these priveleges and in some cases approve new characters and new Rooms for play. Think of them like LARP organizers.

MUSH Gone Wrong

So — a persistent, easily accessible virtual space populated with a number of players who can interact and roleplay and are empowered to create the setting that they roleplay in. That’s the ideal, which actual implementation generally shreds to pieces. Power politics, usually involving the MUSH Staff and the in-character leaders, tends to orbit around hording the power to change the grid and approve new characters — in other words, to enforce their view of how the game “should be.” All sorts of bullshit descends from there, from excluding people from scenes to undermining their private roleplay to lobbying the Staff to change the rules of the game to introducing entire plotlines to advantage or disadvantage one side over the other, et cetera. Combine such a milleu with the tendancy to clump up and form cliques — remember that group of like-minded folks I happened to roleplay with and get to know? — and the result is a factionalized player base endlessly bickering over minutiae.

This is why Vampire: the Masquerade, where you play one of the damned undead endlessly bickering over minutiae with your faction of like-minded leeches, was such a good match for the platform. The other books in the line, all of which were variations on the theme, followed shortly thereafter. I personally played a lot of Changeling: the Dreaming, and as a data point and example, most games divided up the grid into fiefdoms with freeholds and presiding nobles, who gathered together other players for their courts. Said courts would spend about two percent of their online time questing and fighting dragons and spend the rest of it bickering over which flavor of changeling politics was the best, playing dominance/loyalty games, and getting into and out of in-character relationships. Now, the text as published is already schizoid in its portrayal of five different games as if they were the same thing; you can only imagine what happened when you threw that sort of set up into a social milleu with little to no formal means of deciding between the various options. Mass fucking chaos.

System and Credibility in MUSH

I can easily look at the entirety of MUSHdom as a stellar example of games using systems that don’t support actual play. World of Darkness and its Storyteller System is a poor match for tabletop to begin with, making promises about machiavellian politics and ideological battles and then giving players combat rules. Slap those rules into a game all about collaborative creation, and the dissonance can shatter windows. Example: on a Changeling MUSH, there’s no reason to spend XP on anything besides magic powers, because that’s all you ever roll; combat is time-consuming and avoided and all social interaction is “roleplayed out”. Therefore just keep pumping your magic powers, because they give you more options to directly affect what is happening in the game. A MUSH plays out in a framework of Players, Objects, Rooms, and Exits, the Scenes that animate them, and the relationships that connect them, but the provided rules address absolutely none of that. The rules are as fictional as the stories that we tell in the game.

The System actually in use on most MUSHes is hugely social, informal, and in many cases obfuscated by those in power. Often the stats on character sheets are reduced to no more than color — what really determines what happens is the reception of your writing ability by the other players, especially faction leaders and staffers, your loyalty to the same, and a network of personal favors ranging from moral support and encouragement all the way up to gifts sent through the mail (hence the obfuscation). To whit: you are only given a character after you have proven you can write well enough to meet the game’s standards; with this character you can basically participate in other people’s stories, have in-character relationships, and maybe a little cybersex. If you want more, you need to display more writing ability. If you want to own and maintain a corner of the grid, you must write the descriptions and have them approved (a parallel and secondary requirement might require you to have the in-character resources on your character sheet to afford it; these resources are gained by writing well). If you want to start your own stories and plotlines, you need an in-character position of power, which you get by writing even better and convincing the staff that you are reliably online and not creating problems for them. If you want to take the reins and become a staffer, it’s entirely a question of loyalty and sympathy with whoever is “hiring” you into staff. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, on those games which employ XP, it is most often dispensed by means of player votes — which means, again, the players who write the best and maintain a strong network of friendships will receive the lion’s share of the reinforcement reward.

The Climbers, the Abdicators

Make no mistake, you can spend a lot of time and even enjoy a large portion of scaling that social pyramid, and a number of MUSH players have scaled pyramid after pyramid. There was only ever about two hundred regular Changeling players in all of MUSHdom, playing on multiple games simultaneously, and a handful of them became famous (and infamous) for their pyramid-climbing feats. I don’t doubt for a moment that they found that sort of thing to be terribly rewarding — especially considering that they did it so many times over. Other folks, however, finding the pyramid-climbing to be uninteresting, retreated into their own heads, enjoying immersion and abdicating most if not all power to change the progress of the game. You can imagine how much the pyramid-climbers liked having the abdicators around to climb on top of. And then the MMOs came along, and whisked the abdicators away into a realm of graphical goodness that let them have all that in-my-head immersion without ever expecting them to do anything that wasn’t pretty clearly telegraphed by the cues on the screen. The pyramid-climbers only had each other to climb on.

When MUSHing is good, it’s very very good — compelling, engaging plots and character development stretching over weeks and months, with easy access to elaborate and add to the continuing story on a daily basis. It is basically immersive collaborative writing, and can produce “logs” which are still entertaining to read years after. When MUSHing is bad, it’s very very (very) bad — bitter, mean-spirited, cynical power plays using the characters as a mask for years-long player grudges. When I quit MUSHing, the MUSH community was hemmoraging players, losing new players to World of Warcraft and other alternatives that offered the good parts — log in anytime, meet friends, do stuff — while removing or reducing large parts of the bad — power plays, arguing over minutiae, et cetera. The players who were leaving weren’t the good players or the bad players, they were the masses of people in the middle, which left the dedicated, cooperative, helpful people opposite the spiteful, manipulative, assholish people. We held on for a while, but one by one, the tide of mean-spiritedness overwhelmed our capacity for being constructive, and the good players started leaving, too. There are still some good, honest, well-meaning folks left playing, but many have retreated to private “Online Tabletop” formats where they can’t be bothered by the raving loonies.

Revival or just Revulsion?

MUSHes are closing all the hell over the place, which isn’t anything new. What’s new is that there are fewer and fewer new MUSHes to take their places. The playerbase is shrinking. Common wisdom says that MUSH is “in decline” and, for most of the reasons I outlined above, most days I’m not too upset about that. The thing of it is, I do miss a lot of what MUSHing used to give me. I miss being able to log in at all hours to interact with dozens of like-minded people and create neat stuff together. I miss the collaborative creative nature of the MUSH medium that MMOs simply cannot supply. And inexorably, I consider what a MUSH might look like if it had a system that actually facilitated the real meat of play, rather than obscured the real power relationships that were going on behind the scenes.

If collaborative creation is what we’re after, we need to reinforce that behavior. We give everybody a budget of resources that they use to build and create — Rooms and Objects as well as Scenes (summoning an autologger). We then make the appreciation and use of others’ work reward the creators with more resources — roleplaying in a Room nets the builder resources, and reading the logs of Scenes nets the participants resources. Maybe supplement that with a basic allowance so people who run out without netting an audience aren’t completely unable to participate. Stuff in the database that isn’t used gets phased out over time (or if it gets bashed, does it disappear faster?). Lastly, transform Staff — they maintain the operation of this resource economy and nothing else, and do not do not do not make things happen in-game (they can participate, not lead, with alts — another player-object). Throw in some unremarkable resolution system for player-versus-player disagreements (hell, flip a coin), and let ‘er rip.

What would a game look like if you started with a small medieval hamlet (to go bog-standard fantasy) and let the players set the course from there? They can build a spooky forest and some monsters to fight, then start a scene where they fight them. The spooky forest stays there and the scene gets logged. If people read the log (and give it a rating?), the participants get more resources to do more scenes. Other groups of players can tumble into the forest and do up their own scenes doing different stuff, and get resources when their scenes get read and rated. If somebody tries to monkeywrench things, making a spaceship filled with Smurfs, and nobody reads or rates the scene highly and nobody ever roleplays in the spaceship, that quietly fades out of the game.

Would such a system give rise to players well-known as “directors” and others who were sought-after “actors?” Would they organize themselves into “troupes?” Would they serialize their adventures to increase their “sales” and the resources they get back? If the disbursement of resources gained by read logs could be tinkered with, would they have disputes over their cut? Would they make that forest, and then make the cave beyond the forest, and then the ancient ruined city deep in the cave, and then the tunnels leading back up to some other land beyond that? Interestingly, would the center of population shift from the starting hamlet off into the more interesting stuff that people made afterwards? Would they create elaborate histories of the origin of humanity, complete with pantheons of gods? Would another troupe create a different history? Could their pantheons of gods then throw down?

Most importantly, though, would people log in regularly and collaborate to create cool stuff? Cause I’d totally be there.

The AP Report on Full Light, Full Steam’s Second Playtest is up on the Actual Play forum. There’s a couple rough spots highlighted that I’m still working on filing down, and I’m not above taking constructive criticism!

Prompted by my earlier BSG musings and by John’s very neat schematic over at The Mighty Atom, I’m thinking about game structure, and pondering how I would implement a sort of ‘guidance system’ to a game design to forward engaging play.

I totally abdicated all responsibility in this area for Full Light, Full Steam, telling the GM to prepare a (very specifically constructed) situation without a predetermined resolution and then having the players toss narration rights back and forth via the resolution system. This creates a rather freewheeling group storytelling experience with people butting in and jostling and adding stuff and that sort of thing. As the resolution system is heavily weighted toward characterization, the end product that it guides ends up being about that characterization. That’s one way of approaching game structure; now I want to investigate others.

Underpinnings

The core of any game experience is the situation. A dungeon with riches to gain. An evil dictator about to do something nasty. A pair of potential lovers discovering if they will become actual lovers. A town in crisis. Practitioners of the colorful, meaningful, traditional ways threatened by the weight of the grey tide of the modern world. This is what the game is “about.”

The structure of the game experience is made up of scenes. Coming into port at Victoria Station. Confronting the eldritch necromancer. The dinner date on the wharf. Scrambling down the cliffside to the wrecked airplane below. This is the fictional content of the game, and the stuff you’ll relate when you tell your friends about that great session you had last night.

If the situation is what the game is about and scenes are the game’s content, then it’s pretty clear that some scenes relate to the situation — rescuing the informant before he sinks to the bottom of the river — and some scenes do not — talking with the guard at the gates of the Swiss embassy as World War Three is brewing*. I’m going to call this relevancy — if a scene is relevant, it relates to the situation; if a scene is irrelevant, it doesn’t.

Generally speaking, you want to avoid irrelevant scenes. We get into them for a variety of reasons, some of them puerile (the scene where you travel down the road, rolling to see how much distance you cover each day, when time isn’t an issue in any significant way, but you do it because that’s “what’s next”). Other reasons that these happen aren’t so overlookable. If one player is really pushing this scene where she talks to the Swiss guard, despite the fact that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the situation, consider this a giant red flag that she’s not very interested in said situation. Chances are, this scene isn’t very engaging for everyone else at the table, but it may be engaging for her, because her interests are not well-represented in the situation as presently constructed. This is a good time to refocus the premise, update the situation to include what she’s interested in, and make her actions relevant rather than a “waste of time.”

Relevant scenes are preferable since, assuming the situation engages all players, scenes which relate to that situation will inherit that engagement and have all the players interested and plugged in to what’s happening. A well-constructed scene will goad the players to reveal the situation and work towards an address of the situation, which might even resolve the situation.

Especially in the beginning scenes of a situation, the players must determine what the situation even is. This is the process of revealing the situation. While most traditional games frame this as ‘investigation’ or ‘discovery’ as the GM dictates information to the inquiring non-GM players, in reality this is a process of all the players saying stuff and agreeing with it, whatever their authority distribution may be. Even in the most tightly-controlled game, the non-GM players can cause the situation to be revealed in ways contrary to the GM’s plans — who hasn’t taken a liking to the character who was supposed to be the irredeemable badguy? In any case, the revealed situation will present the players with a number of conflicts (composed of a character, a desire, and an obstacle) which engage the characters in such a way that they cannot be ignored.

After most or all of the situation and its conflicts are revealed, the players tend to want to do something about it. This takes us into the realm of the address, which calls upon the player to act or speak on the situation. Players go from input-mode to output-mode. An address is an attempt to actively change the situation, usually by fictional means. It can take the form of out-and-out action that changes the status of elements involved in the situation (cut off the sorcerer’s head!) or it can be made of “mere” words, which change the relationships of the elements involved in the situation (go ahead and kill yourselves, I’m not involved in your bloodfeud). The best addresses are ones which will change the situation regardless of character “success” — this is where good stakes come into the picture, and an attempt to infiltrate the Holy City will either result in the characters in the Holy City in secret or in the Holy City in chains.

Now, a situation can’t last forever. Eventually, the elements of the situation are changed so much or the relationships of those elements are changed so much that the situation no longer bears any conflicts, and the situation is resolved. The lich king is dead, so can no longer oppress your countrymen. The spaceship is repaired, so the passengers are safe. The clans are still at war, but the characters have left the homelands to found their own colony. The determination of when a situation has been changed so much that it is resolved can be handled a number of ways, from fiat to communal agreement to something as banal as scoring enough points. The mechanics are irrelevant; what matters is that the determination is based on the changes brought about by the players’ addresses.

For ongoing play, a situation’s resolution results in the creation of a new situation. I’ll hit up that topic in a later article, as it’s positively massive.

Now we take a step back. A relevant scene is one that “relates to” the situation. Between revealing, addressing, and resolving a situation, the common thread is changing the present understanding of the situation. If you want to go the extreme route (which I thoroughly endorse) and say that nothing exists in the game until it’s proposed and ratified by the players, then you can even say that each scene simply changes the situation. Contrariwise, an irrelevant scene is one that does not change the situation (this is also a better definition than above, which required the situation to already exist in order to be related to). What’s the difference between relevant and irrelevant scenes? If it was a movie, the irrelevant scenes are the ones that end up on the cutting room floor. In roleplaying, we don’t really have the luxury of editing stuff out, so we need to either avoid irrelevant scenes altogether or coopt them, turning them into relevant scenes.

Design

So remember back at the beginning of this article where I said I was thinking about design, and then I went off on theory for 1000 words? Yeah, welcome to my brain.

Basic Framework: Players frame scenes. In each scene, each player takes a couple turns narrating events (twice around the table, say). In the course of their narration, they must do one of: (a) introduce a new element (reveal), (b) forge a new relationship between existing elements (reveal), (c) change or characterize an existing element (address), or (d) change an existing relationship (address). Situation elements and their relationships will be written on 3×5 cards and laid out on the table. At the end of a scene, everyone votes whether the situation is resolved.

Push Currency: Along with the Basic Framework above, play starts with a pile of tokens in the middle of the table; if you reveal, you take a token, if you address, you give one token to any number of other players or back to the pot. Whoever among the players did not receive a token votes on whether the address is successful (changes what it is meant to) or not, and contributes to a brief bit of narration why or why not. Ties lose.

Pull Currency: Start with the Basic Framework but invert the token currency above. When you narrate, another player must approve and ratify your proposal; they take the tokens or spend them. Spent tokens are given to you or returned to the pot. If more than one player wants to ratify, whoever is willing to take the least or spend the most actually does so. Whoever foots the bill narrates the results of any address. Events you narrate occur whether or not you are ratified; ratification gives them an effect on the situation.

Yarn Relationships: Use Basic Framework, one of the currencies or neither. When you introduce a new element on a 3×5 card, use a hole punch to put holes on its four corners. When you forge a relationship, string a length of yarn through the holes punched in the cards you are relating. Of course, every card can then only have four relationships (or howevermany holes is ’standard’). For an additional layer of elaboration, make each punched hole represent a different ’socket’ for connections — heart connections, head connections, job connections, hate connections, whatever. Or have the color of the yarn represent the kind of relationship. Disturbingly, you could call a published form of this game “Stitch a Sitch.”

Incorporate Ownership: With any of the above, newly-introduced elements are “owned” by their creators, who are the only ones with the ability to characterize the element (relationships are still up in the air) and can veto narration that contradicts that characterization. Other players can bid tokens to buy owned elements from their owners (prior to, not instead of, narration).

West Wing Flavor: Basic Framework, Pull Currency, and Ownership rules. All characters start with two characteristics, Party and Job. All players must first introduce a primary character before they can narrate any other effects. Primary characters must work for the president (or be the president) in one way or the other, directly or indirectly; you cannot sell off your primary character unless you own another character who can fit the bill in a few rounds of narration. You keep your primary character from situation to situation.

Battlestar Galactica Flavor: Basic Framework with Push Currency, and start with everybody having a character on a 3×5 card in front of them. Only they may make that character act (but anyone can characterize), and all of their narration must somehow incorporate the character. Whenever a new element is introduced, the next player must forge a relationship for the new situation element (it would therefore be impossible to have situation elements unrelated to one or more characters). No matter which of the four options narration exercises, it must always increase pressure on one or more characters. Tokens for reveals and addresses always go to the owners of these characters. An episode consists of a set number of scenes. The situation is only resolved when you expend your last token to address, paying everyone at the table, and there are no more tokens in the central pool. Episodes end without resolution all the time — and get worse for the next episode.

You could add relatively arbitrary dice or card mechanics making the success (ratification) of any narration in doubt. I don’t, however, see how this adds anything terribly useful, and in fact could get in the way of the deep involvement with the situation that this attempts to foster.

While I can see how the game would work with just the Basic Framework and one Currency, I can’t think of a good, relatively well-known example without prominent characters like BSG and West Wing are push and pull examples. If I knew more about the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I might suggest that, as I suspect it fits the bill — something with lots of players without well-defined “sides”. If anybody more knowledgeable than me wants to do it up in comments, or post your own flavor of whatever stripe, I’d love to see it.

Now I want to play West Wing, though.

—
* If you read like I do, you’re thinking of ways in which talking with that Swiss guard could relate to a possible situation — maybe you need to guage the opinion of the everyday Swiss citizen for something. Assuming that the situation has already been determined, scenes can certainly be unrelated. That’s the simple answer. The more complex answer is that, if the situation has not been fully determined or if the player is empowered to do so, such a scene could be said to refocus the premise and introduce that swiss guard as a significant element of the game. (back to article)

I’ve set up LiveJournal Syndication for this blog, just in case anybody cares to follow on their friendslist.

So Mo finally updated Sin Aesthetics with an article by the name of Stance Crap and Authorial Intent. In the article and ensuing discussion, I think lots of folks are using Stance to mean a lot of related issues. I’ve been prone to do the same, myself. In the course of commenting, I tried to formulate a definition of “stance”, because I’m all into defining stuff right now in the absence of writing Full Light, Full Steam. In any case, when I started picking it apart, it fell into way too many pieces, most of them assumptions, and this is why stance won’t be making an appearance on the Terminology in Use page here. It’s almost rhetorically useless.

This is what I came up with:
stance - the fictional information that a player is allowed to call upon, the fictional elements the player is allowed to affect, and whose priorities the player is expected to follow when proposing statements about the fiction.

This term is weighted with a ridiculous number of distinctions and switches, many of which are mired in irrelevant assumptions. The one little itty bitty term comprises (a) available information, (b) available targets, and (c) the proper decision-making protocol, combined with (d) tons of social contract stuff (’allowed to’, ‘expected’), and (e) the basic operating principle of roleplaying. I’ve removed the GM/Player assumption, but the in-character/out-of-character assumption is still pretty profoundly embedded in the definition I’ve got, and I can’t figure out how to get it out. How did we ever use this term to meaningfully communicate with each other?

The answer, of course, is that the assumptions in the definition were the context of discussion back then, and the very suggestion that players could do things that the GM was doing was a novel one to most of the participants of the discussion. I am totally taking up the role of some punk kid toting a laptop who’s snorting at a room-filling mainframe made out of vacuum tubes, here. This ain’t a criticism of the RGFA’s work in distinguishing the stances, this is a recognition that we’ve come far enough down the road that we don’t need “stances” any more.

There’s a lot of talk about “playerless” games right about now, which goes right up this alley in a different tack. We’ve sort of dug down through the history and assumptions of “what gaming is” to the point where we can see that roleplaying is basically saying stuff and agreeing with it. The guidelines and restrictions on what we can say and when and how we agree about it are multifarous and nowhere near as limited as the handful of stances that we started with. I am curious if we’ll still really be role playing once we discard the roles, but that’s a largely irrelevant question and one of my doomed New Year’s Resolutions is to stop quibbling about semantics.

Let’s take apart stance, shall we? The stuff you can affect — the actor/author versus director bit — let’s call that reach. Guess what? We already have a term for what “reach” is, it’s an authority tool. If I can say something about some fictional element, I have authority over it, and you’d think that we’d either agree to that ahead of time (explicitly or implicitly) or maybe write it down… hey look! Character sheet! I have “Really Fucking Strong 2d3″ written down on Strong Man Jim’s character sheet, so I have authority over statements which involve Jim’s strength! Look over by the GM, he’s prepared for the game and he’s got all kinds of character sheets next to him. It’s another case of “we’ve been playing like this the entire time.”

The information you are allowed to base your conclusions out of is founded on the assumption of a player character, and we usually want individual characters to act organically. We’re all clever enough to finagle a way to get a character to do something that we want them to do. Do we even need to codify this? The priorities that we base the decision on, well, that falls under the same category, doesn’t it? Let’s make the characters act in character, doing what they would in the ways that they would want to. We can do this in two different ways, as a restriction, “Characters cannot act out of character,” or as a requirement, “Characters must act in character.” Yes, there is a difference — if we do it up as a restriction, then authority tools only apply to character intent when such an intent is appropriate to the character. If we do it up as a requirement, however, use of associated authority tools must be used to forward character intent. See the difference?

I’m going to speculate here that most of the “problems” with people making statements of character intent based on out-of-character knowledge are symptomatic of the player not having any other way (or any other easy way) to get what they wanted out of the current structure. Their “reach” wasn’t big enough for them. If we scale that according to player preference, or just bash it apart through playerful or GMful play, do we need restrictions on characters actually acting like themselves anymore? What if we define the characters as tools with purposes? What happens then?

Alternately, look at Polaris, look at Capes, look at apocalypse girl, and the many different ways they dice up ‘who says what and when’ and then the second step, ‘how the rest of the table responds.’ I don’t think any of the three stances adequately describes the operation of these games. If I play a character’s good side and you play the character’s bad side, how the hell are we supposed to distinguish what information is available to either of us? We can’t, and we don’t need to in this instance. These games have transcended stance.

Now, I’ll wrap up by being a little pragmatic. As introductory terms, the stances are still very useful for folks whose entire roleplaying experience has been traditional, mainstream gaming. We should keep them around, but with the understanding that they’re beginner terms, and will lead to beginner questions, like toddlers asking if an omnipresent god is in the potty, too. They’re little knots of possibilities, not the strings themselves, which can be tied up in dozens, if not hundreds, of different ways. So for the new guy, we can hand him the knot first, show him how it works, and then untie the knot to show him the strings they’re made out of. Meanwhile, I’ll be playing with the strings.

Battlestar Galactica is back for season three. I say this as literally and precisely as possible: this is the best television show I have ever seen. If you are not watching it, find a way to do so. It’s on Fridays on Sci Fi Channel. The miniseries-pilot and both prior seasons are available on DVD, but the seasons are the genius bits. Genius, and directly applicable to gaming.

This is why BSG rocks the genre world: every episode, and I mean every episode, picks a couple characters and the issue or conflict that most applies to them, and proceeds to stomp on it, applying excrutiating pressure on it, then adds more pressure, and then more pressure. It starts this process before the opening credits roll. There is no downtime in BSG, there are no throwaway scenes. Every minute of every scene serves the purpose of the episode as a whole, forcing the characters to explore every corner of their humanity, no matter how recessed, dark, forgotten, or difficult. The result is some of the most beautiful and powerful expressions of what it is to be human that I have ever seen.

I was talking with a coworker yesterday about BSG, which she hasn’t gotten to see, and she compared my capsule description of why it’s so good (above) with the X-Files. Now, I never got into the X-Files, mostly because it didn’t do what I described above. From my perspective, each episode of the X-Files presented the main characters with a situation to which the characters found a way to personally relate, there was some creepiness and bad camera angles, and then they resolved the situation by reinstating cultural norms (you’re a bad man for doing X). The X-Files’ slogan was “The Truth Is Out There” and indeed, the focus of the show was consistently out there and not, as in BSG, in here, in the hearts and souls of the characters.

The difference between the two is that the X-Files required the characters to relate to the situation. Imagine the characters thrust into a big white-walled room, with a strange thing in the middle of it. They poke it, prod it, and sort of figure out why it’s important. Lots of genre art works this way: I’m watching a lot of Stargate, which works in exactly the same way, as did every incarnation of Star Trek and about half of Babylon Five.

Contrast this with Battlestar Galactica, where the situation relates itself to the characters independent of the characters making an effort to make that connection. Instead of the white walled room and the object to be considered, BSG’s situation pops out of nowhere right next to the characters wherever they happen to be and proceeds to beat the shit out of them. There is no time for calmly figuring out the situation; the situation escalates, escalates, escalates, piling on the pressure until the character reacts to the situation, which may or may not actually resolve anything.

You can probably see where I’m going with this, now. The typical ‘adventure’ for a roleplaying game presents the players with a situation, lets them poke it and prod it, figuring out how it works and why it’s important, and then once they figure it out, they apply their cultural norms (you’re a bad orc for burning down that village) and resolve the situation. The stereotypical dungeon works like this, yes, but so does Dogs. Here’s a town, figure out what’s wrong with it, in the process say something about right and wrong. Over time this develops the characters of the Dogs, yes, but it doesn’t hit that immediate, pounding-on-character-issues tempo that I find in BSG.

In order to replicate BSG’s framework, we need two things. First, we need situations that relate to the characters, not the other way around. For this we need hooks that are clearly identified as ways to relate to characters (what Chris Chinn calls Flags), and we need the situation to be directly built off of those hooks and nothing else. Primetime Adventures and its character issues may produce this kind of play, but I haven’t got to see it for myself yet. Full Light, Full Steam should provide this through Engineered Situations (a Town Creation like setup where the conflicts are based off of character thematic batteries and player expectations, and specific fictional elements are related back to the characters as foils).

The second thing we need is what the writers of BSG work under every episode — a time limit. I’m not talking about a time limit before which the characters must resolve the situation — most BSG episodes don’t resolve the immediate situation, and if they ever did stop the Cylons from chasing them, well, the show would kind of end. What I’m talking about is a time limit until the character must react to the situation, whether or not they resolve it. You do not get to ‘do the right thing’ and reinstate those cultural norms; you end up doing the human thing, and qualifying and complicating those cultural norms.

Rough system design example: the player writes down his character’s present impulse on how to react to the situation, and updates it as the game progresses (perhaps only at certain junctures). If the time runs out, the character acts on that impulse. If said action resolves the immediate situation, great, it’s one of those episodes with a happy ending. The next episode introduces a new situation.

If said action does not resolve the immediate situation, great, it’s not one of those happy episodes. The next episode introduces the same situation but in a different way that hits different characters in different ways. So the evil theocrat’s campaign to ostracize believers in the old faith was aimed at Character A’s brother; Character A acted on his impulse to shoot the theocrat in the head, which didn’t resolve much. Next episode, the theocrat has become a martyr and the crusade against the old believers has come to the city where Character B is a magistrate. They’re howling for blood.

The stickiest part right now is what constitutes a resolution and what’s just a reaction. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that judging which address of situation is valid is a moot point under such a structure. Hell, there could be like a target number of bits of information and benchmarks that the characters need to hit (and each time they do so they can update their impulse) and once they get enough, their impulse is automatically a resolution. Benchmarks from prior “failure” episodes can be brought forward to the next episode. Resolutions are earned, not figured out.

I’m thinking this is about one twentieth of a system that might reliably provide a structure for episodic play — which is what 90% of roleplaying is — that has that immediate, hard-hitting power I see in Battlestar Galactica. Other parts might involve a PTA-like screen presence, a season structure as in Buffy, et cetera. In fact I’d even go so far as to suggest that this system would need to reach down and dictate the sequence and impact of scenes, so that you cannot frame a scene that does not somehow increase pressure.

This would not be leisurely gaming, where the players amuse themselves with toying with a collaborative fiction, this would be some desperate scrambling to beat the clock and resolve a situation before you only succeed in making the situation worse. This is, in short, gaming that lots of folks (including my wife) would hate. On the other hand, can you imagine, after running a sequence of four or five sessions/episodes where the situation is complicated instead of resolved, how gratifying it would be to finally nail a resolution?