RPG Haven episode 11 – Josh Roby on Smallville the RPG (57 minutes and 32 seconds)

The interview is reportedly “so long and informative that we didn’t do any intro discussion or preamble,” which I’m not sure is good or evidence that I ramble. However, if you’ve got an hour to spare, we go into detail on the Smallville RPG as well as some retrospective on Full Light, Full Steam and Sons of Liberty. We even chat a bit about my upcoming projects Coronets and Agora, not to mention Rooksbridge. Conan and Ryan were a blast to interview with, and it’s a fun hour.

Optional Drinking Game: Every time I say, “Absolutely,” take a drink.

I took the six core procedures that players will encounter in a given turn and wrote quick bullet-point summaries of them. Then, with a little ghetto-hypertexting via text color, I came up with the following Agora Turn Guide:

At some point I’ll make an Incident Guide that handles Creating Incidents, Audience options, Burnout, and Fallout — but it’s my impression those aren’t critical right now, whereas the turn flow certainly is. The Turn Guide is in the playtest package, as well.

Friday night we checked in and all that and then I settled down to play Montsegur 1244, a structured freeform game which is getting a lot of play and buzz. I went into it expecting it to be not-my-thing, and I came out of it knowing that it was not-my-thing. Lack of strong character goals and a blindness to the parts of historical context that I really dig into were the big problems for me; I was also sort of an odd man out in our (randomly-generated) situation: everybody else was playing the sex-and-family bits of the situation, whereas I was the only one playing the religion part of the set. Which all sounds more negative than it really is — everybody else was having a blast, and it’s a nice little package of game-situation.

Saturday morning started off with In a Wicked Age, which Will calls, “The game I don’t like that I have fun with every time.” Which is pretty spot-on accurate. We played in God-Kings of War (best for cons) and ended with a giant naval battle determining the fate of an empire. Schweet.

Saturday afternoon I took the baby which Meghann had so kindly been entertaining while I was wicked-aging. She went off to play a Star Wars game; I played A New World: a Carcassonne game with Prudence strapped to my chest. The game is very neat and challengingly different than basic Carcassonne. After that was done, we all (myself, Meg, Paul, Ryan, Jesse, Will, James, Morgan… who am I forgetting?) sat down to a luxurious two-hour-long dinner slot, which allowed us to have a lot of casual social time. I really hope Strategicon retains the new schedule; I don’t mind getting to the morning game an hour earlier if it means dinner isn’t a big harried rush.

Saturday night I played in the Houses of the Blooded LARP, which I went in expecting it to be not-my-thing and was totally blown away by the awesome. John has devised a very, very slick conflict resolution system that is near-perfectly tuned to the LARP environment. It incorporates mechanics directly into the roleplay in a nearly seamless fashion. Yes, even combat — at the conclusion of the first (and only) duel of the night, John declared combat over and all the Vampire LARPers cheered because it was over so quickly and cleanly. The “private scenes” which are played out in public give the whole experience a great sense of pacing and introduce tons of information into the game constantly. Nobody walks around wondering where the action is — everybody walks around scheming on how to turn the action to their ends.

Sunday morning I had the baby again — I can’t recall what Meghann was playing — and so played Thurn and Taxis again with baby in the sleepy wrap. I love that thing; I don’t know how people raise babies without it.

Sunday afternoon saw me running the Agora playtest/preview, which succeeded on both fronts admirably — I got some good playtest feedback and also introduced the game in an engaging and entertaining manner. Thanks to Jesse, I even have an Actual Play recording of most of the game. Playtest feedback mostly centered around “selling” player actions, and will result in a couple new (small) procedures and some chunky Mastery player advice.

Sunday evening, my parents trekked out to the convention just to take the baby off our hands for a timeslot. While Meghann played Mouse Guard, I was able to just kick back with Ryan Macklin, who I don’t get to see often enough, chatting about game design but also just things-and-stuff. When they were done, Meghann returned spouting superlatives about Mouse Guard, so presumably there will be mice with capes and swords in our gaming future.

Monday morning I was literally the only RPG on the schedule, and so our game of Primetime Adventures had six players. We did a “Yes, and…” sort of series-building and came up with something truly spectacular. Running in perpetual syndicated reruns on TVLand, our show was “Trouble in PERL-dice,” a 60s-era sitcom-spoof (think F-Troop) about the Board of Directors of the international criminal organization PERL (pronounced ‘peril’). As the show was ostensibly in reruns, we played one episode out of a “marathon,” so started with the very end of one episode, including the “Next Time On…” segment. This allowed us to have a Next Time On list for the episode we played, and this worked marvelously. Our climax featured two flying aces in a dogfight using invisible planes — in other words, two guys in sitting position arcing and spinning around in the air. Fantastic stuff.

And then it was time for post-con Mongolian BBQ with almost the whole gang (Paul and Ryan understandably buggered off before then), completing a fantastic convention.

Click the following to download Part One and Part Two.

I always have a lot of fun on Ryan’s show, and in this one I really enjoyed the opportunity to relax a bit, call myself on my own bullshit, and talk nuts and bolts rather than big, high-minded abstracts. In other words, I got to talk about game design fueled by my enthusiasm for game design and not some misdirected attempt to spread my brand or drive sales. Very refreshing, and very fun. I should also note that a lot of the podcast is also about Ryan’s upcoming game-in-development, Mythender, which was lots of fun to talk about and sort of counter-interview Ryan about.

So this is my very small contribution to the thing (which cannot even be said to be a debate at this point). This white guy would like to see some more diversity in sf/f, and when I write and publish, there will be (and has been) characters who are not white guys who are more than token color in the background. I’m not going to wade into the crazy that is the blood-orgy internet dogpile that is RaceFail ‘09, because I’m not equipped to do much good there, so I will, outside of this post, confine my efforts to what I produce. That is, I wager, the most effective thing that I can do.

Once, there was a War. Then…

Shar of the Mulong rises up to reforge his tribe of plantation slaves into cut-throat corporate pirates.

The technicians and scientists under “Mad” Doctor Bones vow to peel away the mysteries that shroud the secrets of the universe… whatever the cost.

Justicar André and his army of penitent monks teach the ways of peace, traveling by way of the fist.

And from the crashed battlecruiser Kingsrook comes wave after wave of Admiral Wargrave’s space marines, intent on winning a war already over.

…or perhaps it happens a different way.

Agora is a roleplaying game where you will lead refugees crash-landed on the forgotten planet Agora, the last untouched world left in the wake of a galactic apocalypse. Played from the fiery descent to the surface, through turmoil, suffering, and hard-won victories, all the way to the dawn of a new age of humanity, the game offers an epic experience of unprecedented scope.

The task is nothing less than the rebuilding of human civilization. The story is the reconstruction of the human soul.

I have been working on Agora: how shall we live? for over four years and through many incarnations. Version 3.0.2 has finally reached beta playtest: the game is ready to be unleashed on the world… and vice-versa. In many ways, this is the game that I’ve always wanted to play and always wanted to publish, and you can help make that happen. Agora needs playtesters interested in pounding out their own future history of humanity on the treacherous world of Agora, and in pounding out the last kinks in the rules of this massive game.

You can download the playtest document here.

Agora is competitive and cooperative, GMless, and procedurally dense. In each of five stages, new game procedures, options, and tactics are introduced to keep players on their toes. Part of Agora’s appeal is the challenge of mastering the game’s system — and then using it to outwit, outmaneuver, and outplay the other players at the table, all to fulfill your goals in shaping the future of the galaxy.

The playtest opens now and will close July 31st, 2009. Yes, that is a five month playtest window, because Agora is a big, long, epic game. By my best estimates, a full game will take about eight sessions of four hours each, at minimum. That’s eight sessions of exploring, exploiting, and fighting over your own Agora, and if everything works, that’s eight sessions of awesome. Because this is a pretty hefty social footprint, I’m making sure all of you fantastic souls who’d like to help out have the time to do so. (Just don’t put off starting till July!)

All the procedures and mechanics you will need can be found in the playtest document; in addition, you will need:

• four to six players
• a pile of dice (10-15 of each size: d4s, d6s, d8s, d10s)
• a stack of about 100 index cards
• a handful of pencils
• eight to twelve sessions of four hours each

Playtest feedback is essential to making a game sing, refining new ideas, and creating innovative play experiences. Which is a lot of big words to say that games need playtesters as much or more than gamers need games. Your help is beyond value. As with my previous games, I will be gratefully including the names of playtesters in a byline to recognize their sizable contribution to the quality of the game. I really can’t do this without you guys, and I can’t overstate my appreciation.

If you’d like to take part in the next chapter of Agora, the future of civilization, and my latest game, download the playtest document now.

So in the car today, I was listening to Narrative Control when all of a sudden, a fix occurred to me for a problem I wasn’t until then aware I had. In Survival Stage, the players are trying on the lieutenant role and playing with lieutenants as you play your ideogogue. Also in Survival Stage, full-blown incident creation is introduced. My original thinking was that incident creation, with its attendant declaring of participants, was necessary for lieutenants. However, I was mistaken. What is necessary for lieutenants is lieutenants.

So the ‘fix’ — move the introduction of declaring participants to Synthesis Stage. In Survival Stage, you just pick an obstacle player (as you do in Descent, so nothing new there) and everybody else starts the incident as audience members. This nicely introduces audience members and what they do (turn into ideogogue, obstacle, or lieutenant players) before you have to actually decide on who to make an audience member. Basically, it allows players to understand their choices before they start making them — which is, in general, a good thing.

So there it is: a simple procedural shift that smooths both gameplay and the learning curve. One less hurdle to getting some fun play. Rockin!