The funny thing about designing games is that you really don’t understand the full range of what they do and how they work until after you’ve finished writing and you play them a dozen times and then you go, “Oh, wow, look at that!”

I just realized that the Full Light, Full Steam character sheet is all flags. No, not just the bits that I was all, “Those are totally flags!” but the rest of it. The whole damn thing.

There are attributes and skills, right? Except you don’t use them to accomplish tasks or even resolve conflicts; you use them to take control of the narration. Because you only roll dice when your character does something related to the Att-and-Skill that you rolled, the ensuing narration always has something to do with that Att-n-Skill. Two plus two is four, and thus the Atts and Skills that you pick reflect the kind of narration that you want to introduce into the fiction.

How the hell did I not see that?

Also, this is my 100th blogpost. Kind of fitting that it’s me calling attention to my own stupidity.

So here’s an idea. It’s notes, it’s rough. I don’t care. The basic idea is to reduce pre-roleplay character creation to as little time as possible and transplant 90% of the pre-roleplay character creation into the act of roleplaying. It’s totally on-the-fly and quite possibly impossible to play.

Macro-Stats

First, a starting set of stats which serve as a common basis for all potential characters. The system only allows opposed rolls: no shooting for target numbers. Everything comes down to your guy versus some other guy.

Wits describes your ability to act decisively and correctly in an immediate situation.
Vigor governs all physical… stuff. Running and jumping and fighting and all that. You know what I mean.
Care covers how generally careful and precise you are in the things you do.
Savvy stands in for your general social prowess and standing.

I want to impress the duchess. My Savvy, her Savvy. Nice and straightforward.

Or maybe I wanna bash you in the head. My Vigor versus your Wits, if you’re trying to not be bashed. My Vigor and your Vigor if you’re going to just take it cause you’re that badass.

Some dude tries to poison you. His Care versus your Vigor. You’re not doing a thing; you’re just sitting there, hoping that your body can shrug off the effects. Cause you’re all hard core and shit. Or maybe a weakling. Either way, you still roll Vigor cause that’s what’s in the way of Mr Poison-Pants offing you.

You want to break into an inventor’s lab. Your Wits versus his Care. It’s a contest between your cleverness and his preparations. He doesn’t even have to physically be there for this to be true, and so the “dice” work out. Hell, he doesn’t even have to be alive.

Those are the big-boy stuff, the common-to-all traits that form the backbone of the system. Or, you know, something like them. Different games would require different macro-stats; these are just convenient generic examples. In any case, they are both capability and resistence, and they can presumably handle any kind of conflict that would come up in play. That’s the thinking, anyway.

Micro-Stats

On top of this chassis are added idiosyncratic, player-defined stats. So like, “PhD in Chemistry” or “Sword Ninja” or “l33t haqsor” or whatever. They can be abilities, training, relationships, character details, histories, whatever. They get brought in when they apply — the poisoner could use the PhD; when I’m bashing you, I could use Sword Ninja; when you’re breaking in, your l33t skizillz come into play.

Edit: Apparently the rough-notes thing reared its ugly head. The three examples I gave here are all in terms of skill/ability/training, which sort of implies that all micro-stats would be skill-ish things. On the contrary, “Raging Bitch,” “I am God’s Representative,” and “Scared of Girls” could all be worthwhile micro-stats, too.

Maybe these micro-stats add to the original dice, or add dice, or let you reroll dice, or maybe I’m not using dice at all. Maybe these micro-stats have ratings, maybe they don’t. Important point being they modify the macro-stat results.

Character Creation

You create a character by picking a name, concept, splitting some currency between the four initial macro-stats, pick one player-defined micro-stat, and then you start playing. Actually, your concept probably defines the one micro-stat you start with, or even is the micro-stat you start with, so it’s even fewer steps. Five minutes if you put hard thought into it; sixty seconds if you’re just jumping in with both feet.

Important point here: most players are not invested in the character at this stage, and that’s fine. You’re not supposed to be.

Anyway, you start playing, and you gain new micro-stats through play, either via conflict fallout a la Dogs, or by spending some currency in scenes, or by elaborating out from your initial stats, or picking them up as stakes, or whatever. The gist of it: do stuff, get micro-stats.

If at the end of any scene you’re not digging on your current character, you cash him out into pure currency and make a new one, spending the currency on the four macro-stats and starting in with one starter micro-stat again. Maybe there’s a little compensating rule that affords more screen presence to folks with fewer traits so they can catch up or something, I dunno.

The Point

The idea here is that character-creation-prep is lightning-fast, especially if you use the rolling-dice variation. It means you can bring in another character in the space of time it takes the GM to stand up and get a refill of soda. Players aren’t invested in these characters at this point; players only become invested with the characters by playing them. How much more will I care about that “Trained by Ninja Monks” trait if I earned it, rather than just bought it? Additionally, all of those microstats on your character sheet are there for a reason, have a backstory, and probably suggest plot developments in the future. They’re all attached to the situation in play (or a situation that was in play). And if you don’t like the character that develops after a scene or two? Ditch ‘em, turns out they were a secondary character, anyway.

Notably, however, this is missing flags and situation-creation. When characters are created so quickly and are so simple, they do not (at first) have the capacity for expressing player interests. And situation should always, in my book, be based off of player interests. So. Still work to be done. And, you know, I need a game to attach the mechanics to…

So Ben Lehman is poking fun at Rich Forest’s tongue-in-cheek definition of a roleplaying game which is, simply “A game that resembles D&D.” Which is all very funny and ha-ha. It has been dubbed (by Nir Shiffer) the Forest Criterion, which unfortunately means that I am almost incapable of identifying roleplaying games, having had nearly zero experience with D&D. Them’s, apparently, the breaks.

More seriously, I’ve never quite understood why we have such trouble defining a term which is self-definitive. A roleplaying game is… get this… a game where we play roles. It’s like word games, which are games where you play with words, or math games where you play with math, or real estate games where you play with real estate.

Identifying whether or not something is a roleplaying game pretty much comes down to two yes-or-no questions. First, is it a game? Second, do the players play roles? If both answers are yes, then it’s a roleplaying game. If you only net one “yes” between the two, well then, it’s either a different kind of game or a roleplaying experience-thingy. But you have to have both elements in order for it to be a roleplaying game.

Dungeons&Dragons - it’s a game, there are roles that you play. Yes, it is a roleplaying game.
Dogs in the Vineyard - it’s a game, there are roles you can play. Yes, it is a roleplaying game.
Once Upon A Time - it’s a game, but you do not play roles. It is, in fact, a card game.
Sensitivity Training At Work - it’s not a game, but you do play roles. It is, in fact, a roleplaying experience-thingy.
A Ripe Banana - it is neither a game, nor does it have roles to play. It is, in fact, a fruit.

I mean, seriously, this isn’t moon-language, is it? Roleplaying game — a game in which you play roles. What’s the difficulty?

Here’s a little aphorism that’s been rattling around in my head recently:

An engaging game leads players to make decisions whose consequences affect later decisions.

So: do I buy Park Place, decreasing my cash on hand and giving me a potential profit later, or do I let the other players bid for it on auction, perhaps spending significantly more or less than the list price in order to gain that same potential later advantage? Whichever way I go, I will have changed the variables of the game so that when I later land on Boardwalk, I will have different cash, assets, and/or competition that affect that decision.

In the “traditional roleplaying game” this principle is harnessed in weak and uncertain ways. The consequences may risk hit points, spell points, maybe willpower; occasionally some gear can be lost or gained. Those are the concrete things that can get involved. Most everything else involved in the decisions and consequences, though, is in the fiction. You risk alienating the Duke but might gain the support of the Archbishop; you might find the McGuffin or incite the tribesmen or disrupt the timeline. Or its most basic: the tunnel splits in two directions: down one tunnel is riches and the damsel in distress; down the other tunnel is goblins and pit traps. Generally speaking, both the arbitration of the decision and the consequences of the choice made are in the hands of the GM or hanging out there in imaginary space between the players at the table. It’s hard to get a handle on any of this stuff, and you can run into all sorts of problems with disconnects between player expectations, realism, favortism, social maneuvering, and the like. As I said above, it is all weak and uncertain. But it certainly feels immediate and visceral, like you really are deciding the fate of the Duke, Archbishop, tribesmen, damsel in distress, et al.

Here’s what I like second-best* about Dogs in the Vineyard — writing new shit on the character sheet. Taking moral stances on complex situations is nice and all, but hot fucking damn do I love playing the character and in so doing defining what the character is about. In fact in my (short-term) experience I keep finding I want more ability to shift and grow the character through play, and I think it’d be neat if new traits happened more often and your starting set of defined traits was smaller (Annie Rush’s Hatch will attempt to do just that). But what’s at the core of my glee, here? It’s that feedback loop of decisions and consequences — I stared down the Steward and he’s going to support me, now? That’s nice. But I’ve got this new trait, I stared down the Steward 2d4! To me, the consequences in the fiction are secondary to the consequences on my character sheet. The fictional consequences are just that — fictional. And they’re going to go away when we head off to the next town. But this thing I’ve written on my character sheet? That’s tangible and lasting — that’s something that I can use in later decisions as long as I care to keep it.

Tony Lower-Basch is doing something that I hope will ratchet that action up another step with his game-in-progress, Misery Bubblegum. The stakes of each conflict are shifted between players — so if I win a conflict whose stakes are Sophie Loves Me, I take control of the Sophie Loves Me card. My “character sheet” is composed of the stakes that I’ve won throughout the game. The various cards on the table all represent different elements of the fiction, and controlling those cards means you can exert control over those elements of the fiction. It’s all Decision and Consequences land made real and tactile and immediate.

Stepping beyond the player character, this is something I am groping towards in Web of Shadows. Each and every scene inescapably has specific consequences on the situation as represented by the web of cards. This is the easily-overlooked first part of the aphorism I’m talking about: an engaging game leads players to make decisions. This shit isn’t optional. It shouldn’t be possible to not make decisions with attendant consequences. With a good deal of luck and a little bit of good design, the consequences of player decisions elaborate the world, creating a vibrant context in which to make later decisions. It’s iterative creation, and can be applied to characters (Misery Bubblegum), situation (Web of Shadows), and setting (minutiae in Shock:). It isn’t hard to argue that this is how individual scenes work in every roleplaying game out there.

It’s also useful in analyzing why some games or individual mechanics within games fall flat. If a decision has no consequences, it’s not engaging the feedback loop. If I’m playing a game of Mage and I choose to make a Son of Ether, there are two broad “consequences” to that decision — I get a dot of Matter and I’m a member of the Son of Ether organization. If I was already planning on buying one or more dots of Matter, the first consequence is weak to the point of irrelevance. If my character’s membership in the Sons does not bear any affect on the ensuing game, so is the second. This has led many Mage players to tell me “it doesn’t really matter what Tradition I choose” and explains a lot of limp organizations and politics in Mage games. You’re a Euthanatos mage? So what! More significantly, when the available choices include options that will have consequences and other options which will not, you have what Chris Chinn calls “bunk choices.” If the consequences are good, of course you pick those options; if the consequences are bad, of course you don’t pick those options. Either way, this is not really a decision, and the consequences are more the creation of the game designer than the players. Less investment, less engagement, less fun.

I’m not sure how far to go on this tack, however. I’m tempted to leap from the rooftops shouting, “Every invocation of the mechanics must have consequences outside the fiction!” and I’m not certain that that is the case. What about those short conflicts in Dogs where nobody takes fallout and the only repercussions is that some guy gave and told you what he knows? Do they have a place, or are they instances where the GM should have just said Yes in the first place? Or take a glance at Capes — if somebody puts out a conflict that nobody expends any effort in winning either side, is it really a conflict? The only consequence is that the original player spent their turn putting it out there. And of course there are the players out there in the world who are perfectly happy eating dinner in character, chatting away merrily about the weather of their fictional world. Where do they fit in on the decisions-and-consequences diatribe bus? I never know where to put them on any bus I’m driving.

—

* What I like best about Dogs — it says what it does, it does what it says.

“You are responsible for this, monster. You and your kind have built a world out of darkness, claimed status as American gods, and waged war for the oaks. You have conspired from the shadows, manipulating everything from governments to street bums, CEOs to soccer moms, to feed your dark agenda. You distract us with pervasive violence, mind-numbing television, and desperate hedonism, all the while you lurk just out of sight, pulling the strings.

That changes now. I am the Chosen One. Welcome to the end of the world.”

Playing the Web — Object of the Game

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. There are three kinds of scenes — Development Scenes, Backlash Scenes, and Endgame Scenes. The bulk of the game consists of Development Scenes, which are started by the players taking turns around the table. Backlash Scenes occur when Tension causes the masses of humanity to boil over with rage, and occur in between Development Scenes. Endgame Scenes occur after one Other has been fully Exposed, and the apocalypse is being decided.

Through the course of play the world of the Chosen One, as represented by the Web of cards on the table, will radically change and eventually become so entangled that it collapses into an apocalypse — the end of the world. There are two potential apocalypses — one in which some of the supernatural Others are drug out into the light of day and exorcised from the Chosen One’s world, and one in which the supernatural Others throw off their disguises and wreak havoc on the world. Your goal is to manipulate the Web so that you end up on the winning side — safe in the shadows as some Others are exposed, or out rampaging across the world when the apocalypse comes.

The Prophecy — Starting the Game

Begin play with a number of index cards equal to the players in the game. Number the cards on the back, shuffle them, and pass one card out to each player with the number face down. Then, starting with the player who has the “One” card and proceeding in ascending order, 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, circles it, and punches a hole in each corner of the card. The Chosen One card is placed in the dead center of the table.

Preparing your Other Card and Facade Cards

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