Hot damn why did I not get around to attending gaming conventions until now? All the years of unexploited opportunities! It makes me weep.

I’m back from Gamex, and despite coming down with a little Con Crud the day after, and despite quite possibly the worst My Life with Master player ever, I am coming away from the weekend all smiles and exultation. Sadly, I have to wait until August to do it all over again. I am so saving my pennies for GenCon Indy next year — I’m sure it’s completely different, but that just makes it more intriguing.

Here’s what I played:

Dogs in the Vineyard — I ran with six players, none of whom had played before, and we managed to pull off a good game. Not a great game, but at least a good, solid game. Solid enough that three of the players asked where to get the game when it was done, and as far as success metrics go, that’s a pretty good one.

Prophecy — I didn’t wake up early enough for Paul’s first Nine Worlds game, so I ended up playing this board game, instead. It was pretty neat — sort of like Talisman, except designed well. “But have you played Runebound?” everyone keeps asking me, and no, and I’ll fix that soon, but Prophecy was pretty hot shit, too.

Shab al-Hiri Roach — It was me and Jesse and his wife Meghan and some total stranger Doug playing; I had not had the pleasure before. It was lots of fun. I grabbed the Roach early on, when I got the card that turned all of my dice to d12s, and stocked up a high stack of reputation. I ditched the Roach in the next event, and was sailing towards winning… only to pull the Roach in the last Event. Sadness. But Regina Sutton died, so I suppose not everything is lost.

Primetime Adventures — The Ward — Judson and his SO Stacey came down to Gamex and paid admission to play only one game, and it was this one. And I have no idea why they paid admission. But! This was awesome. I’ve never had the pleasure here, either, and that has been revealed to me to be a travesty of untapped opportunity, much akin to not having gone to gaming conventions. I admit, I was skeptical and somewhat put off by the “groupthink” that everyone always raves about in PTA — skeptical that it would happen and put off by the very suggestion that such a thing might be enjoyable — but wow when it happened it was awesome. We put together our series and played two episodes in five hours. The Ward is a serial set in a mental hospital where the patients’ hallucinatory world is shared for reasons unknown. There was all sorts of lingering doom and unspoken possibilities of what might be happening, but all we did in our two episodes was gleefully pile up the mysteries without a care in the world as to what everything might turn out to be in the end. I would love to play a long-term PTA game to see what it’s like to play an entire season.

Nine Worlds — Paul ran the same scenario/situation twice, and based that situation off of a previous game of Nine Worlds at ForgeCon (you all know that’s what the thing is called, so give up calling it “Forge Midwest Gathering”). Basic idea: six people with diverging agenda are on a ship heading from Point A to Point B. Apparently the first game the day before, which I did not wake up in time for, played out as a soap opera with the principals all flinging love and desperation and whatnot at each other, and ended with people settling down to raise children. Our game, by contrast, played like Paranoia, with everybody spying on everybody else, and follow-up conflicts that were all about finding out that they knew that we knew that he knew that they did something else. We ended with me jettisoning two of the other players out into space. Marvellous.

My Life with Master — I’m going to chalk this one up alongside Sorcerer in the category of “games that were interesting and developed a lot of things in the design-o-sphere but by the time I played them there wasn’t anything new for me there.” Also, the paucity of available options (Villiany or Violence and only character action) drove me up the wall. And it didn’t help that we had a player who had responded to the initial pitch of “you’re a minion of an evil mastermind” without understanding the implied addendum and it sucks. Said player and the friend he brought with him had lots of fun wreaking havoc with their character-pawns, but the fact that they were racking up a stat called Self-Loathing was apparently lost on them. All that said, it was still an entertaining game and I’m happy to add that notch to my belt — although I’m not sure I’d want to play the game again.

Then I was supposed to run Capes next, but I only had two folks sign up — the troublesome player and his friend from My Life with Master. Now, while I had been sitting in MLwM and wishing that I had something like Capes to moderate this guy’s, say, casual “accidental” violence to women, I had no wish to play Capes with just he and his friend. I wouldn’t have the player resources to fight them both off, just to begin with. And Capes with three kinda sucks. So I cancelled the game and went to play (wait for it)…

Vampire LARP — All throughout the con I was complaining that I didn’t get to play any mainstream games, since I wanted to play all the indie games that were on offer and that left me no time to “ground” myself in the default gaming experience that so many gamers assume to be the entire world of gaming. Also, I have never LARPed before. So with Capes shelved, I accepted an invitation to play in a Vampire LARP. Good fucking god. I spent, no joke, twenty minutes trying to get out of a room. While they were calling out initiative order for Round Three of the combat that somebody had conveniently placed right in front of the door, I thought to myself, “Why can’t they just deal everybody a couple cards and decide who wins right now? It worked in Nine Worlds this morning…” I am completely unfamiliar with the new Vampire, and have passing knowledge of the old Vampire, which gives me the level of knowledge of exactly dangerous, and easily confused by statements like “The Brujah are a bloodline of the Gangrel.” So it was very profoundly reiterated to me how much White Wolf games are all about mastery of setting minutiae: lots of stuff was happening, and there were boons and favors being exchanged, but to me all of it happened without any significance, so it was an oddly flat experience — like a four-year-old watching movies. Things explode, but who knows why.

All in all, a very successful, entertaining, and educational weekend. Anybody in southern california that aren’t going to Strategicon events are missing out — they’re not big high-production affairs, but they are a few hundred players gathering in one place and cool games being played. Hard to pass that sort of thing up!

This weekend at the LAX Westin is Gamex, one of Strategicon’s triannual cookie-cutter conventions. I’ll be there running Dogs, Primetime Adventures, and Capes, and playing Nine Worlds, Shab al-Hiri Roach, and My Life with Master. If you’re in Southern California, admission is pretty tiny ($26?) and it’s a nice little con.

Y’all act good while I’m gone.

Following Shreyas’ comments and some poking and prodding of my own, I realized that I’d left out explicit Surrender rules, and attached a few little bits and pieces there that should make things a little more interesting.

The following new section, and a couple smaller fixes, are included in the Playtest document.

Surrender

Scenes end when one side decides not to continue and surrenders. Players may only surrender between exchanges of Challenges and Stands; players may not surrender instead of taking a Stand. When a player surrenders, they lose their stakes but do get to narrate a cliffhanger to the end of the scene.

If a player decides to surrender when it is their turn to make a Challenge, they may attempt to gain a Surrender Epiphany. This is an advantage to be used later that the character is able to extract from the conflict despite losing the stakes. The surrendering player rolls their Burnout pool. If any of the dice roll ones, the player may keep one of them to use as an epiphany in a later scene.

If the player is the last to surrender out of a conflict, they earn the right to narrate a cliffhanger, a turnabout at the end of the scene that introduces a surprise or new element to the scene. A good cliffhanger suggests later scenes and conflicts. Cliffhangers cannot negate the stakes that the other side wins, but they can complicate them.

Example: Surrender
Jason can see that he’s going to run out of dice if he tries to push through another round. He does not think that he’ll be able to get Nathan to roll in his fourth ideal, so he decides to surrender. He waits until the round is over before he surrenders so he can try for an epiphany.

For the epiphany, he rolls his Burnout pool, which consists of a 1d4, a 1d6, and 2d8. He rolls two ones and keeps one of them as an epiphany. The die is recorded on the obstacle sheet for when the Horizon’s Teeth is used again in a later scene. It might be used to narrate a collapse of mining tunnels, some misplaced explosives, or similar advantage.

As his cliffhanger, he narrates that from their vantage atop the mountain range, the miners spot smoke from a settlement’s fires off in the distance. They have neighbors — and judging by the amount of noise they’ve been making, the neighbors know they’re there.

Over on Story Games, some folks helped me do some brainstorming to compile a list of Player Skills. Much like GM Tasks, these are things that players are commonly asked to do in different games. Also like GM Tasks, though, players are not always expected to always do the same things the same ways in the same proportions. So while they have wide applicability, no skill is universal to all games, and no one means of exercising a skill is universal to all games.

Here’s the list:

Acting / Immersion Skills

1. Bring issues you really care about to the character in ways you can deal with
2. Connect emotionally with your character
3. Keep the character true to its core concept
4. Know when and how to be meaningfully still and silent
5. Speak in Character
6. Think in Character — modeling other minds (e.g. both what are my fellow players thinking, and what are these fictional people thinking, in order to predict behaviour; this may be particularly relevant to playing with young kids when this ability is still emerging)

Creative Skills

1. Build a full-fledged person (character) from given parameters (background, stats, whatever).
2. Build Relationship Maps — attaching Characters to other things (other PCs, NPCs, organizations, etc)
3. Develop Character
4. Develop Setting
5. Contribute ideas — content and color
6. Create Characters with Proactive Motivations
7. Combine ideas from various sources (particularly when the sources are people who aren’t you)
8. Conflict: Creation
9. Conflict: Development
10. Conflict: Escalation
11. Conflict: Resolution
12. Conflict: Setting Up Later Conflicts
13. Doing interesting things
14. Extrapolate from the current state of the fiction to a future state.
15. Identify potential conflict or transition in the fiction, even when they’re not obvious.
16. Identify what actions or events can make your desires concrete.
17. Imagine your surroundings from limited source material (filling up the blanks when someone describes something).
18. Invest Characters in the Situation
19. Juggling multiple characters and plotlines within and without the current game
20. Narrate Action
21. Narrate Color
22. Pacing — ie, know when the story needs something more
23. Frame Scenes
24. Spend Character Resources Unstrategically (because it’s in character)
25. Set Stakes
26. Work within premise (or other restrictions)

Cooperative Skills

1. Compromise
2. Expect other people to react
3. Follow someone else who’s driving the story
4. Get others to emotionally connect with your character
5. Help with rules
6. Know when to hold ‘em, Know when to fold ‘em, Know when to walk away, Know when to run.
7. Know when you’ve got something worth doing unilaterally and giving consensus the quick, raised middle finger and not being ashamed or backing down
8. Lead the GM around by the nose
9. Listen to other people
10. Positively acknowledge other people’s contributions (Cheering other players on)
11. React to what the story drivers are doing
12. Flags - Reading them
13. Flags - Hitting them
14. Read the mood of the room
15. Resolve player disputes
16. Screw the other players over in amusing ways (which sounds odd, but it’s essential in Paranoia)
17. Share your goals (selling)
18. Share others’ goals (buy-in)
19. Step out of the spotlight if there’s no reason for you to be in it.
20. Theme - Identifying and Understanding it
21. Theme - Participating in it
22. Theme - Contributing to it
23. Accept character development in unexpected directions

Reasoning Skills

1. Abductive Reasoning
2. Deductive Reasoning
3. Inductive Reasoning
4. Use different Reasonings together

Game Skills

1. Buy Character Abilities (Traits, Powers, Stats, Whatever)
2. Separate players from characters (both own and other players) after the game.
3. Set Difficulty Levels
4. Spend Character Resources Strategically
5. Spend XP and have a sense of future XP Spends

However, now that I’ve got this very handy list, I’m not sure what to do with it. Because each skill is used in a different way in almost every game out there, it’s difficult to impossible to talk about any of these skills in isolation, and I’m not sure there’s much use in that to begin with. I fear the list is too long to be very useful as a design tool (The Player Skills 64!), and I’m not sure what you’d do with it if you used it in that way. This might be useful fodder for designing drills, but even then how a custom-created drill teaches a skill might differ greatly from how another game might use it.

So right now I’m going to archive this bad boy, put it away for a bit and maybe come back to it later. Additionally, if anybody’s got some bright ideas of how this might be useful, I’d be happy to hear them!

And the whole push/pull thing keeps going, most recently in Story-Games’ Clear and Concise Actual Play Examples of Push/Pull. Tony is jumping up and down making the arguments that I’ve always had in a somewhat quieter way, and I’ve come to the following polyvalent conclusion.

One of the Following is True:

1. Push and Pull do not exist as universal phenomena. Which sounds harsh, but by that I mean that perhaps it’s just something in how Mo (and others) sees the world. Now, I know Mo, and count her a personal friend. Thing is, there is almost nothing that Mo and I have in common outside of gaming. Oh, and we’re both white. But otherwise, just about any descriptor that you could apply to me, the opposite applies to Mo. If I were playing Breaking the Ice, I’d play Mo. Which is all to say that Mo sees the world in ways very differently than I do. Maybe it’s just that.

   To illustrate, this is how I tell left from right: in my kindergarten classroom, posted above the chalkboard was a right hand and a left hand. To this day, I visualize that chalkboard to tell the difference. (Incidentally, that chalkboard is on the west wall, and I can also usually tell you which way is west by visualizing the wall — it’s kind of bizarre.) In any case, I bet you don’t do that. Perhaps Push and Pull is something that Mo uses to understand game interactions like I use the classroom wall to understand left and right.

2. I alternate Push and Pull so much that I can’t make the distinction. Or perhaps the distinction exists and the reason that I don’t see the two as different approaches is that I am utilizing both all the time. I drink water, but I don’t think of it as hydrogen and oxygen, I think of it as water. Mo has said that every pull invites a push back, and vice-versa, and I’ve seen a lot of descriptions that appear to be pushing and pulling at the same time (pullsh!). Perhaps I’m just doing both, and doing both in combination and bouncing back and forth so frequently that I don’t see them as separate phenomena.

3. I Push so much that I can’t even see Pull. In my usual self-depreciating way, this is my lurking suspicion. Perhaps I’m so much a pushy my-way-or-highway kind of guy that I don’t even understand the possibility of another way of approaching things. This would be roughly analogous to trying to talk to my grandparents about Communism — love them as much as I do, they are so embedded in the American Way that they can’t see Communism as anything other than the Evil Empire that’s going to come make everybody drink vodka. When my wife Laura played Conquer the Horizon for the first time, she employed a lot of crazy strategies that I never even envisioned (and won the game), so maybe it’s that — I can’t even see Pull when it’s right in front of me.

Mo has promised an article soon that takes a stab at defining Push and Pull in a more definitive manner. I’m looking forward to it, if only so I can pick one of these three and stick with it!

So you’re reading a book, right? And there’s this character who’s cute and engaging and he’s had some hard lumps so far, and in the part that you’re reading, things are finally turning his way and it looks like he’s getting a brief little spot of sunlight. And you think to yourself, oh, I hope that he’s going to get to be happy for just a little bit; I hope that nothing goes wrong to spoil it. And of course, since it’s a story, something does go wrong. Something has to go wrong. In fact, things have to keep going wrong on a regular basis or else the story will just dissolve into rainbows and bunny rabbits. And you know this. It’s lurking in the back of your mind that it can’t last, and you want to hope but you know that you shouldn’t, cause sure enough, something comes out of the bushes and screws up everything even more for the character. And when that little hope is crushed, you aren’t really that disappointed, cause you knew it was coming. Right? Okay, remember that bit.

So you’re volunteering as a Big Brother, right? And your charge is this thirteen-year-old punk kid who’s had the world piss on his head for thirteen straight years, who’s never had the least breath of opportunity, has been outside the city sprawl maybe three times in his entire life, if ever. But he’s got a thing for octopuses — who the hell knows where he got that from — and so you’re taking him on a road trip to the aquarium upstate. And you think to yourself, oh, I hope he enjoys this, I hope he gets engaged and wants to learn more and sees that there’s more to the world than canyons made of grey buildings, and I hope nothing goes wrong like a flat tire or some punk kids to distract him or whatever else could happen to ruin everything. And you take precautions and you plan appropriately and since I’m not being a cynical bastard for five minutes today you have a fifty-fifty chance that this might be a day that changes the rest of his entire life. So you hope, and when everything goes off without a hitch, you’re elated; and when everything crashes down around your ears you’re crushed, really and truly disappointed. Right? File that away, too.

Now you’re playing a game. You’ve got your character, who’s down on his hit points and luck points and sanity points and the situation is pulling him apart from five different directions. And he stumbles into the underground chamber with the lava flows and the giant demonic idol and the evil sorcerer, and the girl is chained down on the altar, and his father is listening in over the radio connection, and the demon lord that tormented him his whole life is about to be brought into the real world. And you think to yourself I hope he can do this, I hope he makes it, I hope his hit points and luck points and sanity points can stretch that far. And the dice are rolled and… he doesn’t. The girl is killed, the demon lord is summoned, and dad always knew you couldn’t do it. That hope you harbored for your character is crushed, but are you disappointed?

Is it like the story, where you knew things were going to get worse, so now you’re looking forward to fighting the demon lord and contacting to the girl’s ghost and arguing with dad?

Or is it like the aquarium, where this mattered and now the thought of going forward seems like just pushing the ashes around?

But wait wait — go back to the lava and the demons and the last couple of hit points again. You roll the dice and he does it! And he saves the girl, banishes the demon, and wins the approval of dear old dad. Are you disappointed here? Is it like the story, and since everything is resolved now it’s over? Or is it like the aquarium, and now everything is possible?

My wife, for whom I wrote Full Light, Full Steam, hates what the dice system in Dogs in the Vineyard does to the story. In her words, “You say all the right things and pull out the Book and the sacred earth and you pray and you use all the skill available to you, but now there’s a demon floating around in the room. Can something else go wrong?” For her, it’s the aquarium. She’s invested. (And with every Raise and every See, she’s invested even more.) She hopes that it will turn out right, and when she hopes that it will turn out right, she really and truly hopes that, she really wants to see that happen. She doesn’t want to see it reversed at the last minute, defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, no matter how clever the reversal might be. She’s all about Bad Things happening after that, in the next episode or in the next room or whatever, but right here and right now, she desperately hopes things will work out all right. Her investment is in that hope, and when her hope is crushed, it destroys her investment in the story. This is why FLFS has one-roll conflict resolution with counterstakes: she knows what she’s getting into, and it’s set up and resolved before she can invest so much that she can’t bear to lose her stakes. And then we move on to the next Bad Thing.

Me, I like to hurt things. I like to hurt my characters, I like to hurt the NPCs, I like to hurt the setting. Brand once told me about a planned campaign arc that we never got to finish, where my character was going to be given the Red Button, and the choice whether to let the world erode into mediocrity or blow it sky-high and let the mutants and the bunker-psychos fight it out to rebuild civilization. Lemme tell you, I would have been all about pushing the button. Similarly, I love me the Battlestar Galactica, where nothing ever goes right, and every two steps forward is accompanied by one step back and losing a limb. When I watched Jurassic Park, I laughed every time a dinosaur jumped out at the characters. I am invested in character suffering. Hope is merely a sort of spice that makes the suffering all the tastier. The only Nobilis character I ever made, but didn’t quite play, was the Power of Hope, and she followed the Code of Darkness, intent on crushing humanity. So that’s where I stand.

Now, the last thing that gaming needs is one more reductive duality, and so I’m not going to say “There’s two kinds of gamers in the world.” Because really, for the purposes of this article and my current thinking, there’s two kinds of gamers in my house. But I think there’s something in here — somewhere — that’s useful. This isn’t a creative agenda thing; it’s like creative agenda’s cousin. Do you want things to go well for your character, or to go poorly? It’s sort of a strange question, but I think the answers may tell us a great deal about the players who put real thought into the answering.