Judd started an excellent thread about summer gaming over on story-games. In writing mine out, I was pretty surprised at how many games I’ve played this summer alone. I don’t know if I remembered all the shit I played this summer. Seriously, the LAGames playtest circle has been the best gaming experience I have ever had. Weekly play of something without getting bogged down in interminable campaigns that go stale. Beautiful stuff.

So I’ve played:

Repertoire, three playtests of a design that gets tightened up and developed each time, and is shaping up into a fantastic game. Our troupes of actors roving from enclave to enclave have been huge on color, strong on conflict, ceaseless in backbiting. The post-apocalyptic worlds have been beautiful, quirky things created from madcap fevered creativity. Love this game.

Joy Division, Mark’s entry for that two-page game design thing. Folks, seriously, go download it from 1km1kt or whatever it’s called cause this game is smokin awesome. Lets you play Men In Black trying to forestall the singularity of technology and social development that will destroy the human race, with a die system that will not quit. Super fucking awesome.

The Shadow of Yesterday, played in the outskirts of Near, with a pair of very different goblins and a couple of humans who, it was my impression, really didn’t know what to do with the goblins. I really didn’t ‘get’ the game in the first session, but I’m looking forward to giving it a crack next time with a little more understanding of how things are supposed to go.

Dogs, me running and Judson and Jeff playing. Playing through a town that I’d run before and watching it turn out totally different, complete with a meddling ex-Dog and an entire game where guns didn’t even come out, let alone get fired. Also played Dogs earlier at Gamex, and this game is just simply a joy to introduce new folks to the indie catalog of games. Running it again this weekend.

Heads of State: 9 short games about tyrants, which we finally finished playtesting the last couple games this summer. Being that it’s Mark’s design, it’s a big quirky machine that churns out quirky situations and characters, but despite all that it produced some pretty interesting results, especially in terms of the dictator that we ended up playing around the most. Cubism + PoliSci + RPGs… who would have thought that equation equaled Awesome?

Full Light, Full Steam playtests of many stripes, watching the final bits and pieces of the system fall into place, seeing where the text needs some smoothing over and where entire sections should just be cut out and left behind. The total glee in watching players take my baby and run off in new directions that I would have never thought of — playing naval intelligence spies! Doing an upstairs/downstairs with the officers and enlisted men! Great stuff!

Cage of Reason in a hotel room with Jason and Mark and Judson, ‘just cause’ Jason was in town. Philosophers throwing down in cage-match wrestling style. Bizzare and funny.

Nine Worlds at Gamex, wonderful, beatiful game that I desperately want to play again, but there’s so many other games piling up in the hopper. The same basic situation, played by two different groups, came out in one as a soap opera and in ours as a paranoia-filled crucible as everyone was spying on everyone else.

Roach at Gamex, a little claustrophobic with only four players, but enough of a taste that I am so there when it runs this weekend. Our Regina Sutton actually survived, relatively unmarred, much as Jesse tried to kill her.

Primetime Adventures, also at Gamex. I was a little skeptical of the groupmindshare stories that I’d heard about the game, but in the end they’re all true. Our series, set in a mental institution where something is threading the patients’ delusions together, was fantastic, and in the space of four or five hours we managed to squeeze off a pitch, a pilot, and an episode in the middle of the series. I am so running this game again this weekend.

Man, now I’m all stoked for this weekend.

Full Light, Full Steam is all laid out, sans art. So all I’m doing now is waiting for the art to come in… and fiddling with the design.

Fiddle fiddle fiddle.

Seriously, I should go do dishes or something.

Fiddle.

Also, new title treatment:

The sole purpose of a game is to create a medium through which players can interact.

The measure of a game lies in the interaction it fosters — whether it encourages it, formalizes it to ritual, inspires new interaction, or constrains it into different shapes. A game that stifles interaction is boring and pointless. However, a game that allows otherwise strangers to interact on common ground is comforting; a game that pushes its players to interact on different levels is intense; a game that allows players to interact in ways that they’ve been unable to before is liberating.

This impacts every level of design and play, down to the technique and ephemera level. Mechanics that privilege one player to speak without interruption (and interaction) for extended periods of time may seem like a good idea, but in the end they actually detract from the game experience. This is true whether the mechanics privilege the GM or the player who just won a die roll. The point isn’t to get your say; the point is to participate in a dialogue. There are other players at the table for a reason; the other players are the point.

The game is merely a medium created to allow the players to interact with each other. Everything else — the “content,” the “theme,” the “mechanics” — either forwards that goal or gets in the way. The essential core is people talking. The stuff that fosters that is good; the stuff that gets in the way needs to be ripped out.

I need to rewrite bits of FLFS.

It’s been one of those surprisingly productive days today. I’ve been a Full Light, Full Steam Illustrator-ing madman, doing up some little bits and pieces of layout art and then moving in on some play aids that I’ve been meaning to add to the game.

Situation Engineering Sheet Having run Dogs at con many times over, I’ve been struck by how indispensable the Town Creation sheet is. It’s like a character sheet for the Game Master, with all the important bits right there and handy. So handy, in fact, I doubt I will ever put out a game that doesn’t have a situation sheet. For FLFS, it’s sort of like a worksheet to guide players through Situation Engineering. You write in the inspirations you’ve gathered, create three conflicts off of the inspirations, build the individual conflicts with cogs, complicate the cogs together, and then write up the situation abstract that puts everything in an almost sensible order. Click on the thumbnail to download a significantly more legible pdf version.

Cog Cards

FLFS uses some heavy delegation of running NPCs, and the situation’s sets and props are more communal property than GM toys. This means that the details of characters, sets, and props — called cogs in Situation Engineering — need to be easily passed from player to player. I love me some 3×5 cards, so I set up individual cogs on separate cards — easy to flip around the table as needed. Folks who might not share my love with the 3×5 card can just print up sheets of them. Cowards.

And needless to say, click on the picture to download the pdf document.

All the copyedits and playtest edits have been added to the FLFS manuscript. The text of the first edition is, more or less, done.

Art, Layout, and Manufacture to go.

In those days, it was said that a hero was made of Timber, Steel, and Stone. The Stone was what stuff they might be made of — blood and bone but wits and beauty, too. The Steel was their deeds, whether it be monster-slaying, healing the sick, or tricking the unwary. The Timber was how they did it: through guile or force or grace or stupid luck. And a real hero, one that they’d be singing about for ages afterwards, had to have all three or else they’d be lost to memory.

Heroes live in a world that does not look kindly on change. The heroes’ ability and willingness to effect change is what separates them from the rest of the world. Where the common man avoids making waves, fearful of the consequences, heroes rock the boat and embrace the slings and arrows of fate, converting that fate into destiny. It is only by risking the ire of the status quo that real and lasting change can ever come to pass. Heroes know this, and their daring is the only thing that brings tyrants to their knees, slays monsters plaguing the countryside, and sets ancient wrongs right.

Without heroes, the world would never change — the tyrants would remain in power, the monsters would ravage the countryside, and ancient wrongs would fester in the forgotten corners of the world.

The world needs heroes. Will you stand up and claim that title?

Making a Hero

Heroes have two parts: abilities and relationships. Put very simply, abilities are what heroes do, and relationships are why they do them.

Assembling Abilities

Abilities come in three varieties: Timber, Stone, and Steel. Abilities come from Click-n-Locks, and each Click-n-Lock has two kinds of abilities on it. Timber and Stone click-n-locks represent your character’s personality. Stone and Steel abilities represent your character’s background, where they came from and how they were raised. Timber and Steel abilities are derived from your class, your professional training, exotic experience — or lack thereof.

Pick one of each kind of click-n-lock. Of the fifteen abilities listed on your click-n-locks, cross out any three. Rewrite any of the others that you don’t especially like or want just slightly different. Then number the remaining abilities in each category, starting with one and going up each time.

Abilities are used to roll the dice assigned to Conflicts — to do things that will help the characters get what they want. The ability’s value is the highest die that the ability can affect.

Forging Relationships

A relationship is a link from your character to another character in the story. Relationships are made up of a target and a disposition, and are rated from one to five. “My Father” might be the target; “Prove I am a Man” is the disposition.

Each character begins with two relationships. One must share a target with another character in the game. Targets can be other player characters. Split five points between the two relationships however you like.

Relationships store Fate. Relationships can safely store a number of Fate tokens equal to their value; if a Relationship has more Fate than its value, the character is overdrawn.

Note: You can jump-start a game and start at a higher power level by starting with more relationships or more points spread between relationships.

Other Characters

Heroes need villains, oppressors, monsters, and tyrants to overcome. They also need townspeople to defend, princesses (and princes) to rescue, and knights to rally. They need mysteries to unravel, ruined ancient temples to explore, and chase scenes to run through, and all of those are characters, too. All the other characters in the story are represented by two kinds of characters. The simplest characters such as victims and regular folks are “stone characters”, made up of twelve Stone abilities and a Free Conflict. They never generate Fate; they avoid change and only ever do what they’ve always done before.

More complex characters are made up of Timber, Steel, and Stone abilities just like Heroes because they are Heroes. They’re just heroes for the other side. If one set of Heroes are a trio of do-gooders protecting law and order, the heroes they oppose might promote anarchy, chaos, and corruption. Both sides will attempt to change their world, and both sides will become Fated and earn their Destiny. The question is whose changes, and whose Destiny, will win out.

Through the course of a game, everybody will play Heroes and little people on all sides of the story. Some characters may switch sides, and some may switch sides more than once. Some Heroes will ally together only to fall apart and oppose each other later. That’s fine! The clash of Heroes is what fantasy is made of!

Resources

Players use three primary resources: Fate, Destiny, and Inspirations. Fate is gained by using abilities and losing Fated Conflicts; Destiny is gained by losing Fated Conflicts; Inspirations are gained by winning Conflicts.

Fate

Using any ability generates Fate, which are counted with whatever tokens are convenient for you.

Whenever you use a Steel ability, the Fate goes to a relationship. The player may choose which relationship it goes to. The choice need not reflect anything in the fiction whatsoever.
Whenever you use a Stone ability, it absorbs the Fate (put it next to the ability name). That ability cannot be used for the rest of the scene. At the end of the scene, the Fate is discarded.
Whenever you use a Timber ability, it may absorb Fate (as a Stone ability) or the Fate may be put towards a relationship (as a Steel ability).

When the number of Fate tokens is greater than the value of the relationship the Fate is on, the relationship is overdrawn. At the beginning of each page where a character has overdrawn relationships, they must roll the highest die that they are allied with and accept any lower result. The character must do this for every relationship that is overdrawn.

Fated Conflicts

You can stake Fate onto Conflicts, making them Fated Conflicts. The Conflict in question must relate to the target or the disposition of the relationship the Fate comes from. Staking Fate on Conflicts allows you to Split or Schism as in Capes. If you lose the Conflict, you get your Fate back doubled. If you win the Conflict, your Fate tokens turn into Destiny tokens which you hand out to the players on the losing side.

Destiny

Destiny can be spent to:

• create an extra Conflict at the beginning of a Page
• claim an extra Conflict at the beginning of a Page
• play one more Character at the beginning of a Page
• take another Action at the end of a Page

Inspirations

The winner of a Conflict gains Inspirations by matching dice just like Capes.

Character Development

Resolving Relationships

Whenever the action in the fiction has a character achieving a disposition in regards to its associated target, that relationship can be resolved. The player may do one of four things:

• up the ante - change the disposition of the relationship and increase its value by one.
• redouble - change the target of the relationship and increase its value by one.
• move on - create an entirely new relationship at the same value and remove the old relationship from the sheet.
• complicate - keep the original relationship exactly as-is and create another new relationship at a value of one.

In addition to whichever option he selects, the player can rewrite a number of Abilities equal to the prior level of the Relationship. Abilities cannot switch categories (Stone abilities cannot become Steel abilities), but if two or more abilities in a category are being rewritten, they may swap their values.

Short Form:

I make games about people.

People are gendered.

Gender appears in every game I make.

Long Form:

Gender appears in every game I make, either explicitly or implicitly, because there’s no such thing as an ungendered person and good roleplaying games are about people. I always include gender consciously, because I know it’s important — and, quite frankly, because it’s fun and engaging. Additionally, because I live and write in a gendered societal context, I cannot escape including gender unconsciously, too. If I do my job well, the balance falls into the conscious category.

One of the best things that’s happened to gaming recently is the (re)introduction of sex and gender into games, the recognition that it can create compelling stories, and that it’s as much if not more a part of the human experience as gaming’s first love, violence. This really should come as no surprise to us — every player in the world is gendered, after all, which means that gender in games provides something that they can relate to, whether it’s sympathetic (that’s me!), alien (that’s not me), antagonistic (that’s bad), or idealized (that’s good).

Then

Gaming has a history with gender, though. One which has been the topic of much brouhaha, well-meaning diatribes, and vitriolic flame wars. Gaming’s history includes objectification, infantilization, and stereotyping of genders, primarily women. We’ve all seen the covers of Avalanche Press; we’ve all heard the bullshit arguments. All of this, though, really should come as no surprise to us. Every player in the gaming world was gendered, after all, which means that gender provided something that they could relate to, whether it was sympathetic, alien, antagonistic, or idealized. Moreover, it sold books. It sold books primarily to one gender — boys — and it did it well. That these games did not appeal to girls and women is very similar to complaining that the Lifetime channel doesn’t have enough programming for men. That wasn’t the point. They had a market; they knew what their market was; they knew what their market wanted. They supplied the demand of the market — and went home to feed their kids.

For every young girl who was told that they couldn’t play D&D because it was a boy’s game — well, to some extent, that was true. It was a boy’s game, made and marketed for boys. Girls did not have any more right to have a roleplaying game written for them than the boys had a right for My Little Pony action figures made for them. Or to take it a step further, they had no more right for a roleplaying game than the boys did in the first place. Nobody has a right to have a roleplaying game written for them. Roleplaying games exist so the guy who makes it can play it, enjoy himself with friends, and maybe make some money to pay for rent. The game is the creator’s property, and nobody — girls or otherwise — had any right to say what the game should be. The roleplaying hobby didn’t fail the girls in its demographic — girls weren’t part of the demographic to begin with.

More seriously, that gaming’s history with gender may have led to objectification of women outside of games — that’s a completely different argument, and one that is difficult to prove. Did gaming promulgate destructive stereotypes that gamers applied to real women? Probably. I like to imagine that in the deluded young gamers’ encounter with real women, the real women kicked the shit out of the boys’ stereotyped expectations. On the other hand, I like to imagine a lot of things that are rosier than reality. But if the boys decided to apply make-believe principles to real life, is it really the fault of the books they based their make-believe on? To me, as one of those boys, I’d say it was way more our stupid fault than the books we read. Isn’t it the approximate equivalent of trying to cast Magic Missile on the schoolyard bully? What happens in make-believe doesn’t happen in reality — somehow, I don’t think that’s a warning label that was really necessary.

Now

Which brings us back to the present day, where the young boys have grown up and hopefully figured out that Magic Missile doesn’t really work, and the girls who were excluded from first-generation games are in a position to write and publish games that are made for them. So we look around and we ask ourselves what we’re going to put in our games. It will surprise absolutely nobody that I’ll now point out that answering this question is a marketing concern, and an important one. What we put into our games is determined by who we write the games for. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not writing games for prepubescent boys. Consequently, I’ve got a pretty profoundly different palette to work with.

Part of that palette is gender, and I am absolute ecstatic to have such juicy material to work with. The gender material that I get to work with in writing games for adults, though, is almost completely different than the gender material that I would use in writing for boys. Adults have different interests when it comes to gender. Boys are exploring gender for the first time, and everything comes in broad strokes; adults are familiar in at least some corner of the vast gender landscape, and are either exploring new corners or are delving into the details and subtleties of their own psychosocial backyard. Boys don’t recognize stereotypes as stereotypes because they have little to no empirical experience with which to compare and evaluate them — what is presented is accepted. Adults, on the other hand, know stereotypes well — so well, in fact that they are often quite adept at manipulating them to their own ends (this means you — if you’re a man, you’ve accessed your male privilege before; if you’re a woman, you’ve let a guy carry something heavy for you). Boys accept things at face value (girls don’t like adventure stories); adults know that there is always something behind what they’re seeing and experiencing (my wife doesn’t like this particular movie for about a thousand different reasons). I could keep going for quite a long time, but already the adult gender palette is familiar, detailed, nuanced, manipulable, subversive, layered, multifaceted, and quite simply complex. What’s not to love?

On the other hand, there’s all sorts of useless crap that I can pitch over the side once I abandon my plans for selling thousands of books to wide-eyed young boys. The cheesecake can go right out the window; in the simplest terms, it serves absolutely no purpose any longer. The embedded assumption that men must take up violence in order to save helpless women I can discard — but I can keep the shape of the assumption so that it can be held up to the light, with players poking and prodding it and challenging it and subverting it. The superfuckingcool overpowered giant dick-replacements — the mechs, the daiklaives, the endless angst — can go swirling down the drain. The mechanical underpinnings that say that all conflicts are solved with violence, that power is an end to itself, and that bigger is always better can evaporate away. The thus-lightened game is liberated, flexible, adaptive — and so much more capable to let the players tell their own stories rather than participate in a story the gendered skeleton of which is embedded in every book written for boys (cause they need the skeleton for guidance).

It’s not that gender assumptions and stereotypes need to be ripped out of gaming. We’re reinventing gaming from the ground up. We’re writing for new, more adult audiences. We now have access to so much more gendered content — assumptions and stereotypes included — that we can include in so many more ways. What might be a stereotyped constraint in OGL 17 Magical Lands of Wonder can be put to better use in our games rather than expurgiated wherever it appears. We can take it and use it, encourage our players to examine it, to identify with it and evaluate it, to challenge it and perhaps even find a little corner of it where they still find some truth. Instead of rejecting what has gone before, we can adopt and subvert it and make it ours.

And that sounds like a whole lot of fun to me.

Welcome to Alexandria Prime. You may be somewhat disoriented, especially if this is your first visit to a noological construct. That will pass — or persist until you have a psychotic episode. One way or another, your consciousness will adapt to existence outside of time and space, which is where Alexandra Prime is situated. As a noological construct, Alexandria Prime is composed only of information; in our case, AP is the repository of all human knowledge ever recorded. I’m sure you can understand its significance, if only for archival purposes — which is why we’ve brought you here.

Alexandria Prime is in trouble. The information which composes Alexandria Prime is being corrupted from within, and we need your special talents and experience in order to correct it. The library is infested with noological parasites called owlbears, which destroy information by removing the distinctions between units of data. We believe they originated from a book in the Americana section, which is where the infestation is centered. That is why we have awakened your consciousnesses from the written works you produced within your lifetimes — we believe that you will be best suited to deal with their threat.

Some of you will not recognize each other, since you lived in different time periods of the era known to history as the Deep Fried Period. You are: Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway, Alice Walker, and Edgar Allen Poe. Your consciousnesses may be slightly overlapped; take a moment to figure out exactly who you are.

Once you have self-identified, we will insert you into the Americana wing of the library. Your consciousness will experience this as a sort of menagerie of locations and scenes drawn from your era’s literature. No doubt, as you are all authors, you will be able to detect the aberrations to the pure noological matrix caused by the owlbears. Find the owlbears, and stop them. You have approximately four hours — as you experience time — before the corruption destroys the entirety of the Americana wing and we will be forced to call in Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce. Don’t make me do that. We are counting on you. Good luck, and godspeed.

I will not add new, unplaytested material while copyediting.
I will not add new, unplaytested material while copyediting.
I will not add new, unplaytested material while copyediting.
I will not add new, unplaytested material while copyediting.
I will not add new, unplaytested material while copyediting.
I will not add new, unplaytested material while copyediting.
I will not add new, unplaytested material while copyediting.
I will not add new, unplaytested material while copyediting.
I will not add new, unplaytested material while copyediting.
I will not add new, unplaytested material while copyediting.
I will not add new, unplaytest…