In the light of getting my new price-adjusted iPhone, I have a request for the podcasters out there:

Get some art on your podcasts! My podcast line-up is a long row of black squares because only the Sons of Kryos have got themselves some art. It’s very sad.

Thanks!

At Gamex, I got interviewed for Have Games, Will Travel by the inestimable Paul Tevis. I would say that I sound funny and that I don’t normally sound like that, but I think it’s mostly just how you never sound like you think you do. So apparently I sound like a nebbish. Good thing to know.

Paul and I talk about Full Light, Full Steam, the Sons of Liberty playtest, NerdSoCal.com, and… a whole lot of other stuff.

So the other day I went to France, right, and let me tell you, I couldn’t understand anything that anybody was saying. It was all fromage this and quel horreur that, and no matter how much they said, they just kept saying more, and let me tell you, it made no sense whatsoever. A few times I tried to get them to clarify what they were saying to each other, but they only looked at me funny and kept blathering on using their terrible, opaque words.

So finally, I quite reasonably told them, “Look. I’ve got an idea. How about you stop using all those silly words that you’ve built up over the last few thousand years and use the words that I’m more familiar with? Wouldn’t that be so much better? Then I could understand what you were saying to each other!”

Sadly, they kept speaking French. I wonder why.

Greetings, fellow roleplayers.

Over the last few months, there has been a series of discussions about how “geeky” roleplaying is and how roleplaying is ostracized from the respectable adult world. Folks have been trying to identify what exactly is geeky about sword-and-sorcery or space opera or pulps, what parts can be used in roleplaying, and what parts will drive away “non-gamers” like garlic waved in a vampire’s face. The relative merits of roleplaying’s geeky core have been debated: is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Is it interfering with spreading the Good Word of roleplaying across the globe and making every human being a roleplayer just like us?

Many times over, I’ve debated wading into these discussions, but I have abstained. You all seem to have been having so much fun. The discussions seem to be diverting little bits of self-identity, cotton candy for the geeky soul, as harmless as a cute furry creature. However, the discussions are reproducing like tribbles. If this goes on, we’ll be up to our eyeballs in them, and they’ll suck up all the air. I’d like to talk about something that isn’t how geeky you think our hobby is. Therefore, I’d like to take this opportunity to make the one contribution to these discussions that I’ve long refrained from making.

Roleplayers, please: get over yourselves.

You think roleplaying is considered geeky by outsiders? The adult world does not waste its time contemplating the geekiness of roleplaying. In fact, it does not waste its time contemplating roleplaying at all. The adult world has far more pressing matters to concern itself with, chief among them being who will be voted off of American Idol this week. Why would anyone spend half a moment’s thought on an activity whose existence they’re probably only dimly aware of when they could be figuring out how to afford a giant flatscreen television on which to watch sports, impress their friends, and keep track of their fantasy football team? The outside world does not care how geeky roleplaying is.

The only people who care about the geek-factor of roleplaying are roleplayers. I’m not even sure why. It certainly isn’t a valid concern over the hobby’s image: the hobby doesn’t have an image, any more than quilting has an image. Instead, it really must be something within roleplayers themselves that makes them obsess over their own geekiness. Is it the lingering effects from being snubbed at school for playing D&D? I think it’s about time to get over that. Is it because your parents don’t understand your hobby? Join the club called the Rest of Humanity. Seriously: are you not getting laid enough? Is that the problem? I assure you roleplaying has absolutely nothing to do with you not getting any.

What is all this sound and fury about? Why are we spending this much time talking about our own geekiness? Are any of these discussions improving the quality of your gaming? Designers: has your current game design developed because you discussed how nobody outside of gaming understands pulp? Indulging in a little self-centered identification is nice now and then; making an entire hobby out of it seems a little, well, narcissistic. In fact, for all the talk deploring how unfortunate the geeky label is, discussing that label ad nauseum is one of the best ways to make sure it sticks. Which is, quite frankly, the most probable reason so many folks jump into these discussions: establishing geek cred, and distinguishing oneself from the monsters of the outside world, who are themselves too busy watching Deal or No Deal to notice that you’ve taken your leave.

Me personally, though? Your obsession with your own badge of pride is getting on my nerves. You know what? You’re a member. Congratulations: you’re one of us, and not one of them. Now sit the fuck down so we can actually talk about roleplaying. Let’s talk about the games we played last night, the techniques we discovered, the book we just bought, the system we’re designing, the house rule we’re testing. Let’s talk about what place roleplaying has in our lives, rather than what place our lives have in roleplaying. Just, please: get over yourselves, already. This hobby is much more fun to participate in than to talk about. Go Play.

So I’m going to start with an axiom that may or may not work for all of you: people roleplay in order to experience things that they would not normally be able to experience. At its most oversimplified, I’m saying, “RPGs let you be Frodo.” To be all nuanced and erudite about it, I’m saying, “RPGs let you experience what it would be like to enter a liminal state where you interact with the apotheoses of significant influences in your life, whether they be oppression, intolerance, compassion, stress, camaraderie, or many others.” But I’m going to stick with Frodo cause that’s easier.

Now, the root of all that is the experience — the context, here imaginary, of people and places and events. That’s what we’re after. So we read The Lord of the Rings and we think to ourselves, “I wonder what it would be like to visit Rivendell while on an epic quest to save the world.” It’s the “what it would be like” that we’re looking for.

Direct Experience

Now, the obvious way to go about getting the “what it would be like” is to take a single point of view (we call it a character), start at an arbitrary time and place (the ’start of the adventure’), and imagine sequentially what that character might experience and how they’d react to it. What the character does helps determine what things we experience (Frodo goes out the door, we experience what’s out in the hallway). In addition to these in-character cues, however, we also respond to conscious and subconscious out-of-character cues (like, “I wonder what’s outside the Shire?”) and engineer means to manipulate the experience to get us what we want (chased out of the Shire by ringwraiths!).

So, guided by both in-character and out-of-character cues, we experience all the stuff we can’t in our regular lives. I’m going to call this direct experience since we experience the hot desert town by visiting the hot desert town and getting sand in our imaginary shoes. I also identify this with immersion, but — and here’s my big disclaimer — I am not an immersionist and have had some sincere problems grokking immersion, so I may be way off. Point being, this approach takes the short, direct, and obvious route to connect us to ‘what it would be like.’

In my experience with this kind of play, your Frodo tends to be a little more prosaic than the one in the book. The reason is obvious: the book portrays the characters talking as spent dinner dishes are swept away. In the pursuit of experiences what that’s all like, we want to have the dinner as well as the conversation. We want that context, and we want to directly experience it. This applies to the rest of the game, too: instead of griping about an argument with a merchant, I want to have the argument with the merchant. Instead of explaining that there were guards at the door but they’ve been taken care of, I want to actually sneak up on and take out those guards. The whole point here is to experience everything directly, usually in chronological order.

Other Media

Now, that’s not how things are presented in movies, or books, or newspaper articles, or in fact any other media besides the most honest and completist journal ever written. In other media, we as audience experience the people, places, and events portrayed indirectly instead of directly, and in necessary order rather than chronological order. To continue on with Frodo, we don’t know about the White Tree of Gondor until the characters in the book are standing face-to-face with the tree dying in its planter on top of Minas Anor. Before that, it wasn’t necessary for our experience as audience to know that there was this thing called the white tree. We don’t know about “Strider’s” heritage until he’s musing over his broken sword, because up until then all we needed to know about him was that he saved the hobbits’ heinies. Or going back into The Hobbit, we don’t know that the ring is actually really really bad through that entire book, and continue in our ignorance until the beginning of Fellowship when it’s necessary that we know that it’s bad.

There’s a number of reasons for this. The first that should be mentioned is that when Tolkein was writing Hobbit, the ring was just a bit of nifty treasure and the author himself didn’t know what he was eventually going to do with it. Whatever the “reality” of the fiction, the ring was just a useful device to both the author and the audience. Secondly, and perhaps relatedly, is the simple fact that the world in the fiction doesn’t actually exist, and is being created in your head as you read. So if you only ever read The Hobbit and preclude the possibility of ever reading the rest, the ring is, always has been, and always will be a nifty bauble that Bilbo uses to get out of trouble.

Now, audience members are actually profoundly smart. They are more than capable of continually incorporating new information into their understanding of the status of the fiction, continually revising and retroactively uprooting and reworking the world in their heads. This applies to kids reading Harry Potter just as much as it applies to fans of Dr. Who. We’re all very capable of revising the worlds we create in our heads as we go. It’s the fundamental act of reading and film-watching because it’s the fundamental act of living our lives. We’re all capable of saying, “What? You weren’t at that party? Man, I wonder who that was!” We do the exact same thing when watching or reading a fictional story. “What? The ring’s actually a big evil artifact? Man, I wonder why Gollum had it!”

Implied Experience

To drag this back into the world of RPGs, it’s more than possible to approach our experience-getting goal with the same strategy. Instead of creating all the details of a character before we begin experiencing the game, we can start with only those things we need established to begin the experience. This is actually very, very little — a description of what the characters look like (so the players know what they’re looking at) and a description of their immediate surroundings (for similar reasons) is about all you need. Then you can jump right into play, introducing new elements of setting, character, and situation as you go. You can reveal to each other that the ship is heading towards Planet Doom, that the life support is failing, and that one of the passengers is a spy. You didn’t need to start with any of these; everything can be “revealed” (read: created) in play.

As new elements are introduced into the running experience, they will continually redefine that experience by implying new information about the experience. I’m going to call this implied experience to contrast with the direct experience above. Now, this is very much not the obvious point-A-to-point-B approach to getting our goal of “what it’s like.” This is, in fact, probably about as circuitous as possible. I am seeing this strategy with increasing frequency in story games and the Forge end of the indie pool. I also see it a lot in short-form games produced in design contests and challenges. Two obvious reasons: (a) in games that seek to prioritize story, it’s an obvious decision to coopt the strategies used by stories in all other media, and (b) short-form games often leave the onus of creating the setting and situation with the players, and create-the-world rules start leaking from pre-play prep into mid-play procedures.

Now, I will say, again with disclaimers, that this approach looks really poor for immersion. Starting with only what is necessary for the experience means that character motivations and histories are often created midplay rather than preplay. This means that characters often start as blank slates, and it’s hard to get into character when there is not yet any character to get into. And if the game is primarily about creating from wholecloth, people who are interested in detailed piecework are going to be disappointed. It’s good for some stuff, and bad for others.

As direct experience play tends to make your game a little more prosaic, implied experience is like giving your game crack cocaine. Characters are incorporated in the setting and situation quickly, powerfully, and often inextricably. Actions and stunts become grand to the point of excessive. Stunning reversals and byzantine plots are commonplace. Which isn’t better, I want to state very emphatically and very up front. It’s very, very easy for this kind of set up to create a torrent of too much, too fast that tears through stuff that may be better approached with a more measured, sedate, and nuanced approach. To dodge away from LotR for a moment, this approach does not create Star Trek and Stargate; it makes Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Who.

Actual Play: Sailing for Atlantis

In the recent Reversed Engineering Design Challenge, I wrote a little snippet of a game called Sailing for Atlantis, and this game is the germ of most of this article. Note that most of what I’m about to talk about are totally emergent effects, not intended when I wrote the game; I’m not trying to toot my horn, I’m saying, “Oh my god, look what happens when you do this!”

The basis of Atlantis is that you create both the situation and your characters in play. You define your character on the fly, and other players redefine your character as you go, as well. In fact, you start play with only one thing defined on your character sheet: what you say your destination is. You don’t even put your name on the character sheet. You are nothing until it shows up in play.

In our playtest, I started off without making any plans whatsoever for my character. He was wearing a military uniform. He gave his name as Astor. How was I to know, at 2pm that day, that by 11pm it would turn out that he was, in fact, a member of a centuries-old conspiracy to subvert the entire underworld in order to restore the monarchy of Atlantis and usher in a new Golden Age? That he was using his son — Jesse’s character — as a pawn in order to ensure that he’d have influence over both the world of the dead and the living? That he was going to marry a goddess and become the King of the Underworld himself? And that’s just jumping from the start to the finish. That’s skipping over the part where he went insane, or the part where he was the Fisher-King and his well-being translated to the well-being of the universe, and vice-versa.

Throughout the game I had very clear means by which I could influence the experience of the game for both myself and for the other two players. I also had some interesting “constraints” if you can call them that. I didn’t have a name. About halfway through the game, I stopped referring to myself by any name, except occasionally “King of the Underworld” and the other two players took to calling me “scaryfuck” or something similar. But because I had no name, I never felt compelled to maintain any sort of continuity with any “core character concept” and felt very free to completely transform my character as I went. Things that I had believed were true of my character and history early in the game I turned into lies and deception later. In fact, the only character-seed you start with is where you say you’re going, and this is almost guaranteed to turn out to be untrue. This in turn made everyone at the table distrust each other’s characters from the outset, and give players a bye for lying through our teeth. I mean, if even I don’t know if I’m lying, can you really blame me?

Which means we had free reign to utilize implied experience as much as we liked. We channeled, incarnated, and married a goddess, not because we knew all about the goddess from the start, but we introduced each step through the game mechanics. We didn’t even know there were goddesses to summon at the start! As we introduced things that happened, we also introduced the very possibility of those things happening. And if that happened, something similar or related might happen. Step by step, conflict by conflict, element by element, we constructed the entire context of a world and built up an experience unlike any other game I’ve played.

It was heady stuff, and I want to harness that power. It’s not a panacea, and it’s not appropriate for all applications. It’s like rocketfuel: good for rockets to the moon, bad for the car to the market. But for the over-the-top, dialed-to-11, make-up-the-crazy, this is good stuff.

Tomato, Tomato

All of which may sound totally uninteresting to you. We are starting to see some strains in the gaming community along these lines. As is so often the case, we gamers have been using one term to mean many things, and we’re surprised when it turns out that we’ve been talking about different things the whole time. When I said “roleplaying” and meant implying things about a fictional experience and some other guy said “roleplaying” and meant directly experiencing the fiction, we were talking past each other. I hope as the technique develops, we’ll start to see the distinctions better, and come to better understand and appreciate what our fellow gamers are doing.

Recently, Merten at story-games started a thread asking for clarification because he simply didn’t understand why Tony Lower-Basch wants to distill a complete storyline down to one hour of high-impact play. “What’s your hurry?” he asked, “Why can’t you savor the experience?” In responding to him, I realized that, to a large extent, I didn’t understand why he didn’t want these powerful tools to rock the story over the cliff screaming the whole way down. In the course of discussion, I think I understood a little better that he wanted to be there and experience events directly, and I hope he came to the point where he could see how some people weren’t so interested in being there as implying things about being there.

It’s also possible that these two methods — direct and implied experience — might find their way back together again. Perhaps we can peel them apart, write a few games about them, throw them around until we intimately know how both work, and then thread them back together into a better-constructed whole. Won’t that be an interesting game to play!

Doyce played The Princes’ Kingdom with his 6-year-old daughter, and she produced the Cutest Character Sheet Ever.

Awwww.

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.

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.