What gets reified

Posted on by September 26, 2013

A passing thought about gaming theory: it seems that whatever gets specified in a game, no matter how vaguely, becomes incredibly important and becomes the ground on which all else hangs.

As an example, I’ve had a situation where I told the players that an NPC has given them a look that could be interpreted as perhaps snarky, perhaps disapproving, or perhaps just stifling a yawn. The players almost immediately fixated on this NPC as someone to be investigated, and very possibly as a major baddie. Maybe the NPC really was just suppressing a yawn, but the players quickly fixate on that look as something of Major Importance.

Another example: I once ran a scenario that started with one PC merely overhearing an NPC mention their name in the marketplace. PC paranoia being what it is, this quickly became the crux of the entire scenario; the PCs all became intensely suspicious of the NPC who’d dropped the name, and it proceeded from there. To be fair, I’d planned the scenario that way — it wouldn’t have worked if the PCs hadn’t become suspicious of that NPC — but I still find it interesting that this particular kind of information-fixation is so reliably present in gaming.

Yet another example: Many times when I pull out miniatures for combat, I’m wary because I know that whatever I don’t draw on the map will get completely forgotten by the players. I’ve had situations where I told the players that there was a particular topology to the battleground (a ridge here, a gully here), but the players would forget it unless I actually took a piece of paper and folded it to resemble the lay of the land. It seems that whatever gets specified and illustrated in miniatures gaming will become incredibly important, and what isn’t specified will get forgotten. This effect sometimes makes me wary of using miniatures, because I know that as much as they will illuminate the situation, they may also obscure what’s going on by not reflecting the totality.

When the players fixate on some seemingly minor detail like this, it gets me wondering. Do I not specify enough? Should I be providing the players with more information on a constant basis, to build up their overall sense of what’s going on and thus to allow me to submerge the red herrings and important pieces of information in a sea of chatter? Or is this just something inherent in gaming — that whatever we bring out in play is automatically assumed to be the most important details of what’s going on, and therefore whatever gets mentioned must be The Core of Truth?

Con of the North 2013, part X: Reflections

Posted on by March 11, 2013

This has been a long series of posts, but Con of the North is probably the most intensive few dozen hours of gaming that I do in a year, so I think it’s worthwhile.

This year’s lessons for game-running at cons:

  • Stick to the number of players your scenario can handle. Make sure every player gets to do something important, and make sure every character can enable its player to do that something important.
  • GM exposition at the beginning of the game shouldn’t take longer than 30 minutes for a 4-hour game, and hopefully much less. Use handouts, illustrations, abbreviated (or no) character generation, simplified game rules — whatever it takes to get the players making meaningful decisions as soon as possible.
  • Make it clear what the scope of player and character agency is. Make sure the players’ expectations about the game — mechanics, genre, etc. — match yours as quickly and completely as possible.
  • Give the PCs reasons to work together, because the players might not have one. Unless, of course, the game is about PC conflict. In either case, try to establish a social contract while you’re setting up expectations.
  • As always, worldbuilding ain’t bad. But expositing at players needlessly — especially when there are time pressures — shouldn’t happen. Don’t detail what the players don’t need.
  • Streamline wherever possible. Cut out the fat. Don’t allow for needless errands, pointless side-quests or excessive planning, unless your session allow a lot of time for that sort of thing.
  • Try to end slightly before your session is scheduled to end. Allow a true wrap-up, and give the players a chance to describe their characters’ epilogues.

These are lessons I’ve learned before, but several of them were brought home to me in particularly clear fashion this year, sometimes due to bad examples, but quite often due to really good examples of how it’s done.

I had a wonderful time overall. No blizzard, no truly lackluster games — and a few amazingly wonderful ones. Con of the North continues to grow from strength to strength, and when it’s in a newer, bigger hotel next year, the few problems it’s been having (stinky rooms, insufficient garbage collection, horrific parking) will presumably be behind it. I’m already starting to concoct my games for next year.

Con of the North 2013 part IX: Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator

Posted on by November 21, 2015

Logo of Artemis Spaceship Bridge SimulatorThe last game of the con for me was one of the highlights: the Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator. This is an amazing computer-moderated game in which three to six (but ideally six) players take roles of the bridge crew of a very Star Trek-like ship. (It’s just different enough to avoid IP infringement.)

All the players get a computer displaying various sorts of relevant information: the Weapons station gets firing arcs and missile loading tubes, while the Science station gets better-quality scans of distant objects, for example. Well, all the players except one: the captain, who has to command the whole affair and rely on the other players for information and effectiveness.

Every station contributes important abilities, even the communications station: comms can receive missions, command non-Artemis ships and get enemy ships to surrender (thereby avoiding the problem Gwen DeMarco had: “Look, I have one job on this lousy ship — it’s stupid, but I’m going to do it, okay?”). In this, it’s strongly reminiscent of the FASA Star Trek Combat Simulator, which uses similar (albeit paper-based) concepts to allow every player to do something important. That system uses paper dials, skill rolls and a GM, but it’s clearly a progenitor of Artemis.

I tried to take some photos and videos of the game as I was watching it, but my system wasn’t up to the task. Luckily, there are a bunch of videos of Artemis on YouTube, but I think this one illustrates best how the game actually plays. And, because why not, here’s an interview with the creator of the game.

This game wasn’t even listed in the Con of the North event book, or I would’ve registered for it at the drop of a hat. But once I, like a lot of other people, peeked my head into the room and realized what they were playing, I was determined to try it. And so were those other people — tickets were gone very quickly. I couldn’t even get a standby. Sunday night, I stuck around for the last (8-10pm) session. At first, I just watched; if I couldn’t play, I could at least observe. But in the very last game, starting at 9pm, a couple people dropped out and I got to join in. I took communications, because I’ve always been fascinated by Uhura’s position and its potential, at least if Gwen DeMarco’s problems could be avoided.

The game proved to be like a computer-moderated cooperative Star Trek LARP, and it’s brilliant. It could be played sloppily or in an unengaged way (and I saw a little of that in the first games I watched), but it works best when everyone plays the role their station has assigned; if the captain addresses people by station (as in saying “Helm, give us full engines!”) it works way better than when the captain gives vague orders to no one in particular, for example. And if the captain barks orders harshly or micromanages, things can fall off the rails quickly. The ship as a whole works better with calm, clear, direct communication and a diverse range of personalities. It captures the spirit of harmonious cooperation in Star Trek well.

There’s plenty to do for every station, all the time, and if someone slacks off, the ship as a whole suffers. I got a couple compliments on doing the comms position well; I actually got a couple ships to surrender, and tried to keep the mission updates timely and effective. At one point, I got to relay the message “Deep Space 2 reports, ‘Watch who you’re shooting at!'” after we’d accidentally shot at them.

It’s clear that the particular setup we were playing with is something special, too. Michael Mesich, who was running the game, has his own dedicated array of laptops, tablets, tables, projectors and speakers, and they made it something special. In particular, he has a system of lights that project off the ceiling to show when the ship is being attacked, under red alert, etc., and this helps enhance the mood considerably.

Another subtler, but no less important, technique that he uses is the seating arrangements. He set it up so the captain was in a chair facing the main viewscreen, well in front of the comms, science and engineering stations. This makes it less tempting for the captain to hover behind everyone and micromanage, and (of course) also simulates the Enterprise bridge better. In the various videos on YouTube, captains often seem to get up and wander around, but in the games I saw at Con of the North, captains rarely left their chair; this is appropriate, both in mood and in mechanics.

Michael runs Artemis at various places around the Cities. Con of the North was apparently a demo for him; at the other events he runs, there’s a charge of $5/hour to play. It’s not cheap, but for the experience, it’s very reasonable. I’m strongly considering trying to get to one of Michael’s other events to play some more Artemis.

Con of the North 2013, part VII: InSpectres

Posted on by March 13, 2015

Cover of InSpectres gameFor a few years now, I’ve been trying to get into one of the InSpectres sessions that Heather runs. I’ve heard a lot about how fun they are, and I’ve been determined to see for myself. But it has seemed that, every year, something has prevented it: I only got an alternate ticket, or the game was before I could practically get to the con, or opposite a game I was running, or something else. This year, I nearly didn’t register for InSpectres; there was a Microscope game running in the same slot, and it was hard to decide. But in the end, I thought I needed to try again for InSpectres, out of a sense of historical commitment if nothing else.

Heather started us off by giving a pretty good explanation of the game, though (I’d say) not a perfect one; I didn’t quite get what level of goofiness/gonzoness was appropriate to the game. Ghostbusters, which InSpectes is pretty heavily based on, includes ghost traps, proton accelerators, statue-engulfing masses of pink goo and Babylonian deities powerful enough to change the minds of New York architects. Was that level of cinematic action appropriate? Or was it all more like in Scooby Doo where anything seemingly supernatural turned out to be some guy with a fog machine? It was equally difficult to tell what tone we were aiming for: cartoonish where anything goes as long as it’s funny, or something more like a cynical take on a reality TV show? All this took me a while to get a grip on, and I don’t think I’d really gotten a thoroughgoing grip on it by the end of the game. A good deal of the action results are player-narrated, which made it more difficult to know what I could or couldn’t do. I was accordingly somewhat reserved in my roleplaying.

But it turned out to be a lot of fun anyway. Scenario design in InSpectres seems to be about as complicated in that for Og; it appeared that the entirety of Heather’s scenario design was “there’s a pool full of pink goo in a fitness center”. (There was other prep, though: making character sheets, making nametags, etc.) The vast majority of the plot was driven by us players. Some of what happened:

  • Sampling the blob of goo with an ice cream scoop attached to the end of a pole;
  • The blob later shambling out of the fitness center with the pole and a still operating Sawz-All embedded in it;
  • Discovering that the blob was actually the Blob (of the movie, cruelly denied even a credit for its work in the movie, much less any royalties);
  • And finally one PC taking the goo out on a date where we finally began to rebuild its rightful reputation as the leading polymorphous ectoplasm in Hollywood.

There were tons of quotable moments:

  • The big mass of protoplasm gradually accumulated various objects stuck to or within it. We referred to this as “Katamari Goo”.
  • When the Blob needed to sign a contact, I just attached a pen to its Sawz-All. A very jagged signature to be sure, but more legible than some.
  • Somewhere along the line, we figured out that we had test strips for supernatural-ness. We joked about what else these could be used for; it lasted probably a good five minutes, culminating in the line “Honey, we’re going to have an ectoplasm!”
  • The Blob entered the movie theater with its embedded Sawz-All, but it courteously obeyed the request to silence all electronic devices.
  • While watching The Hobbit, the Blob really appreciated the Goblin King’s wattle.
  • One player was doing a rather bad Southern accent that seemed to meander towards Scottish, Afrikaans and elsewhere.
  • I don’t quite remember the context for this one: “It slices, it dices, it’s legally binding”

We had a semi-animate semi-NPC join the party, in the form of a towel that’d started dancing after being immersed in the pink goo. After a trip to the bathroom, I brought in a clean hotel towel and we quickly filled out its nametag: “Towely”. It became a sort of mascot for the group.

In the end, it was a great deal of goofy fun. We barely used the confessional narrative mechanic, because the game mostly turned out to follow the rule of “if it’s funny, it flies”.

Still, though, I couldn’t help but try to find out how the nearby Microscope game was going. I popped in and checked with the GM. He said that the game had gone okay, but not great; there’d been a wide range of player ages in the game, and a wide divergence in expectations for how the game would go. The tone of the history was therefore pretty scattered. So, in the end, it looks like my choice to play InSpectres was right in more ways than one.

Con of the North 2013, part VI: The Valley of Sands

Posted on by March 2, 2013

The Valley of the SandsMy second and last GMed game of the weekend, this went a bit looser than Karna’s Cache did. But as with the prior game, I made sure to have a good variety of important characters for players to choose from, good handouts (in the form of manga with all relevant pages marked), and a pretty linear plot that both had a bunch of points for each character to make meaningful contributions, and had a couple problems with no predetermined resolution.

This game was also something of an experiment. First, I didn’t originally write Blade & Crown to have guns. On that front, it adapted very well; the combat was easy to make just as smooth as the combat was in Karna’s Cache. Second, it was very high-powered, in the form of very high Trait levels. All the characters had Traits at rating 4, for example. This side of the experiment was less successful; I should’ve been clearer about the possibility range for rating 4 Traits, because players didn’t really start doing the amazing things that those high Traits imply until fairly far into the game.

And in terms of running the game, there were a couple hiccups I should’ve prevented, or at least stopped in mid-stream. One, the players ended up going into the Sea of Corruption not one, not two, but three times: first by airplane, then by kai, then by airplane again. It was understandable, but it left too little time for other pursuits and made the ending a bit rushed.

The second hiccup was the end, which was not only rushed, but a little too loose. I realized as I was running that I needed more detail about the starship and its environs, but I hadn’t prepared much, nor did I have much time to do so. But I improvised some appropriately Miyazaki-esque aesthetics and ideas along the way — giant flea-like creatures spewing engineered miasma, and a bizarre structure that looked like a fractal tree or bronchial tube — and hopefully the players enjoyed it well enough.

The open-ended problems proved to be pretty interesting and flavorful. The initial incursion of bugs and miasma could’ve been handled violently, compassionately, or something else; the players figured out a way to do it compassionately, which was very in keeping with Miyazaki’s vision. The final confrontation with the pseudo-heedra ended up going more violently than I’d hoped, but it was dramatic, at least.

One player was perhaps unsatisfied with the end. He left a couple minutes before the scheduled end, in a rush to get out. I hope he was rushing to his next game, rather than rushing away from my game. He seemed to be having a good time throughout the game, at least. I didn’t get his contact information, or I’d inquire.

The other players, though, agreed it was a good amount of fun. By my standard that the players should have plenty of opportunities to do important things, and that everyone who wants to do something important should get to, it was pretty successful. Playing a game set in the world Miyazaki had built was great. I could even see myself running more games set there.

Con of the North 2013, part V: Karna’s Cache

Posted on by March 1, 2013

Section of map for Karna's CacheThis was the first game that I ran at Con of the North 2013. I used Blade & Crown, as I so often do these days. The scenario concerned a group of thieves living in a tenement together who discover a map leading to a possibly-grand treasure.

The game was full — all five slots were taken, and I had to turn away a couple people with alternate tickets. It’s always tempting to let in more people, but I find that adding players inevitably decreases the amount of important action each can take. I think I had presence of mind to recommend that they try my next game, also using B&C, but anyway, I kept the number of players capped strictly at five. (This all contrasts with the first time I tried to run this scenario, when only one player showed up. I’m pretty convinced this is entirely due to the time slot — before, I was running the game Sunday night, I think it was, but this time I was running it Saturday afternoon.)

I didn’t take many notes during this game. I usually take some form of notes when I’m playing or GMing, because otherwise my memory of what’s gone on gets exceedingly dim later on. But because this was a con game, and because I was GMing, I let note-taking fall to the wayside.

I probably did the sequence of explanation wrong — I explained the mechanics before the players had character sheets in hand. But my overall goal of getting the GM expositing done quickly was successful; I think the players were making meaningful in-character decisions by about 25 minutes into the game.

The scenario was, I admit, pretty railroady. Once they were on the track of finding the treasure, it was basically a straight sequence without much room for side adventures or alternate paths. Railroady games are, I think, pretty appropriate for a con, especially one with only four hours to play. With time pressures on, you have to keep cracking that whip and moving the PCs towards the climax.

But there were still a few problems with no set resolution, and there were good opportunities for player interaction and character action. They had varying ideas of how to proceed to the town the treasure was apparently located in, and once they got there, they even split the group briefly to explore paths to the spot marked with the big figurative X. All the characters contributed something meaningful to the final acquisition, I think: the fallen cleric forged a document, the pickpocket did some important scouting into a cellar, the ex-mercenary engaged in a bit of combat with a ghost, etc.

Speaking of combat, the game proceeded almost entirely without it. When melee finally did happen, I kept it highly streamlined, and in fact didn’t even tell the players what calculations I was making. I hope this didn’t detract from their fun or sense of GM fairness. And I hope the players weren’t expecting a combat-heavy game; I seem incapable of running such games, even when I try.

In fact, the game seemed to have a lot of talking. There was a lot of planning, discussing what questions to ask, plotting out how to do things… without actually doing them. I think this may have been due to the combination of players involved, and also due to the semi-gritty nature of B&C; it seems to encourage players to plot everything out before making a move. Or maybe it’s just the kinds of adventures I run. I got a little frustrated that they didn’t take action more quickly, and at a couple points, I asked what they were trying to accomplish and elided the intervening stuff with a couple die rolls.

Also, I should’ve allowed time for an epilogue. I set all the PCs up as having big plans for the treasure that they found, and I should’ve given the players time to describe what they did with the treasure.

As I mentioned, though, all the PCs got to accomplish something important, and there was some very good roleplaying. There was a good level of joking, adventure and tension in the room. There were some good quotes (that I didn’t manage to preserve, as I wasn’t taking notes). One player bought a copy of B&C, and later gave me quite a nice review on RPGnet. So, overall, I think the players had fun.

Con of the North 2013, part IV: Lost Days of Memories and Madness

Posted on by March 27, 2014

Cover of Lost Days of Memories and MadnessSaturday morning started nice and early with Lost Days of Memories and Madness, aka the Elf Memory Game. Eric facilitated this (it doesn’t have a traditional GM, though he knows the game best, so he was teaching us).

The group of players was pretty well suited to this game; we came up with a great bunch of initial memories, ranging from the romantically beautiful to the deliciously twisted. Kingship changed three times during the game, which I haven’t seen before, and one character (Chad’s) was actually driven mad, which again I haven’t seen happen in the game before. I didn’t get down the whole plot, but the elements around which the game revolved included:

  • The Amulet of Kiper, which grants immense power but which can also be caused to melt, along with its wearer, if the right command is issued;
  • The mysterious Highlands, homeland and power-base of one of our Elves, and full of a dread fog;
  • The Pond of Seven Willows, where drowned people sometimes come back to life; and
  • The tragic lover Moylan, relative to several characters (including apparently me at one point) and possible carrier of the immortality plague, whose picture (it turned out) was contained within a locket — the Amulet of Kiper.

There was a lot of interesting character development, and some nail-biting dice rolling where it all came down to an extra die here or there. There were several great quotes:

the current “ear situation”

That’s awesome and terrible.

It was a very interesting game from a representation and identity standpoint as well. There was one character who was differently abled due to a wound caused by one of the other characters (we were never entirely sure whom, due to the way memory works in the game). This character rode about in a succession of amazing ways, from a palanquin to a howdah.

The same player seemed to be frequently confused by the gender in the game. Due to the fluid nature of memories in the game, characters frequently found themselves remembering what it was like to be someone’s lover in multiple genders. Many of the PCs seemed to have some sort of trans history, and family relationships were highly complex. In fact, there was one character whose relationship to my PC simply confused me throughout the game, and I played this in character. But rather than embracing the complexity, this one player continually wanted to clarify the genders of all concerned in the Moylan love tesseract. At one point, I considered just getting a timeout to ask her to be less uptight about gender, but it never got quite bad enough for that.

All these shifting histories made this Elf Memory Game one about identity, and about how memory shapes identity. I hadn’t realized this aspect of the game before, or at least it hadn’t been brought home so thoroughly to me before. The game could be quite an interesting place to actively, intentionally explore what identity is — at least, what identity is when memories can be commodities.

It also showed me the difficulty of running a backstabby game when you don’t already know everyone at the table. I am fairly certain that putting “Mature players only” in your game description attracts just as much people who shouldn’t be in the game as it discourages. And it’s hard to feel comfortable enough with strangers to run a vicious, political game. (I remember one disastrous Paranoia game at Con of the North a few years where the GM was poorly prepared and none of us players knew each other… yuck.) But I think that here, we were lucky to have a group of people who mostly got what the game is about, and who were able to work together to create in-game viciousness matched with out-of-game harmony.

In any case, it was a lot of fun.

Con of the North 2013, part III: Codename Jedburgh

Posted on by May 4, 2013

This was my first RPG of the Con, using Chad’s variant of the Fate rules for WWII. He started by asking us how gonzo we wanted it to be. I tend to want less cinematic, more realistic games, and it seemed so did the rest of the players, but as play continued, things kept getting more and more gonzo. It’s like weird science exerted some irresistible force on the game; each element allowed in a handful more, til at the end we’d had a motorcycle land at full speed from an airdrop, zombie soldiers, arc throwers, stiletto whips and a de-revivification ray.

But before that was character generation. I’m usually wary of character generation at cons because it can be interminable and, most important, it takes time out of actual play. But Chad has this down to a science, and it only took us about 15 minutes to make characters. And as we were doing it, he was generating a relationship map of the NPCs that he brought in quite well as the game progressed. There was the callous, foul-mouthed Lt. Col. who brought all of us PCs together, and the upstart “Professor” Priapinski who’d stolen all of one of the PC’s work, and the undead Übertoten against whom I’d sworn revenge. The PCs were all pretty much stereotypes: my famous actress-turned-resistance fighter, Tom’s Jewish mad scientist and Mike’s Sgt. Rock lookalike. But we breathed a good amount of variety and spice into it all; there were lots of great lines and scenes. The mad scientist’s frequent refrain:

Priapinski is a cretin!

As the gestapo officer ruined my resistance fighters’ cover as reporters:

Don’t go before we get your picture. Boys, please shoot him!

And there were lots of others that I didn’t get down. The game was very quotable.

Chad did a great job of keeping the action flowing, and of creating memorable characters and scenes on (what appeared to be) the fly. That’s one sign of a great GM: when the players can’t tell whether your memorable stuff was preplanned or not. He also clearly made good use of the relationship map, continually pulling in motives that would keep our characters involved and important.

Another thing that helped it be memorable was, ironically enough, being unafraid to be clichéd. We were all working hard to come up with original scenes, but we were also willing to just state what we thought was obvious. The way this works, of course, is that what one person thinks is obvious, another person thinks is brilliantly unexpected — and thus we had a bunch of wonderful, classic ideas slinging back and forth constantly.

I’d been in one of Chad’s Jedburgh games at an earlier Con of the North, and because of that, I was worried that this session would be repetitious, or that I’d know too much about what was going on. But the way it all flowed organically and brilliantly out of our character designs, it was a completely different game from what I’d played before. And it was a great deal of fun.

Con of the North 2013, part II: Hansa Teutonica

Posted on by February 21, 2013

Cover of Hansa TeutonicaQuite soon after Ace of Aces ended, I got into a game of Hansa Teutonica. I’d actually just played my first game of it a week before, and liked it. Hansa Teutonica is a game of building trade routes in late medieval Germany. Like a lot of German games, it has a fair amount of fiddly bits and some very interesting mechanics. Unlike a lot of German games, the mechanics have a good amount to do with the flavor. There are barely any random elements, and the amount of player interaction varies interestingly depending on how much interaction the players want — it can be really placid, or it can be really cutthroat. The production values are wonderful; the board, in particular, reminds me of Eric Hotz‘ work on the poetic maps for Hârn.

The person explaining the rules did perhaps a better job than the person who explained the rules to me the first time; among other things, the Con of the North teacher preserved something of the flavor of the game, which is important to my enjoyment. The two people varied a fair bit on their interpretations of the rules, and in particular of the scoring. Having looked at the rules myself, it looks like they weren’t translated all that well from German, and that they were fairly complex to begin with.

Nonetheless, it was a good amount of fun. The other players seemed pretty into it, and I certainly had a good time. We ended up with a wide split in scores; two players were separated by only a point in the lead, two players were very close for last place and I was in the middle, with a dozen or so points on either side.

This was my only boardgame of the weekend, and nearly my only non-RPG. There were a lot of good RPGs on offer this year.