Ramblings in a State of Insanity
Posts tagged gaming
RPGs as Data Driven Apps
01 year ago
I meant to work on this post earlier this week but my week got real busy and I lost my time to write up posts.
I spent some time thinking about how pen-and-paper RPGs are best represented in an electronic medium. I don’t mean writing a full game like Neverwinter Nights; I mean representing the actual experience of the books, rules and dice in an app format. I realized that RPGs are by their very nature data driven: the character sheet, the rule set, the world setting, and the information that goes with it. Because everything is created whole-cloth — even those settings based on established properties — the game must be communicated with information for it to go. This is different than a card game or a board game which require a very small amount of fixed information (what’s on a card, say, or a die roll moves you 5 spaces, or you need to play this token) and a large set of rules. An RPG requires a large amount of information and an arguable amount of rules.
The devil is in the details with the amount and control of the information surrounding an RPG. This lies at the heart of many rules and design-based conflicts: how much information is needed for a person to interact with the world, how is the information manipulated to model the world, and how is this information communicated and stored. In the past, games often required a HIGH amount of information to interact with a HIGH number of system rules to determine a HIGHLY DETAILED piece of data after running the system — a simulationist system. Today, we have a huge number of styles from a low data with small ruleset games (like Fiasco) to moderate sized amount of data/character and data/world with moderate sized rule sets (like FATE or Cortex) to high information games with high detail (like D&D4).
This is all run on data. The nice thing about data is that data is about all a computer understands. It can hold data, process rulesets on data, and present data-driven results at the end of processing. So for example we have a large piece of data model in a character sheet. A character sheet possess stats in some form (d8 Wits, 18 Strength, 3 dots in Hawt, etc). The world may also possess similar unified stats — an NPC, a known test, a quantified piece of the world. Passing the world stats and the character stats through a known resolution engine generates a known result, which may also be stored and used to modify other data.
This is all basic game writing 101 and absolutely nothing new, but it’s important to lay out the basics before figuring out how to make it go. A character sheet is simply a line from a data model that has a paper-based persistence model representing a shared contract between player and game world. What becomes more interesting is in building up databases of world information. Pulling up, for example, cult information for Trail of Cthulhu with lists of cults (pick one) and integrated NPC and evil book lists, perhaps be able to cross-reference this with information either found online (automatically populate a database with reference information that auto-loads inline) and information in published material. Work against perhaps web services of a master repository that hosts a bigger centralized database and… but this is starting to get off the device and into web servers and databases and LAMP stacks and generally wandering off the reservation. But this is the idea — RPGs are data driven applications and more data makes them better.
This is where my mind is starting to go for RPG-based apps. There’s more to it than that, though:
* Core Data for storage, persistence, data modelling and all the CRUD facilities (create, read, update, delete).
* Cocos2D engine for dice rolling, card playing, and visual representations of game mechanics.
* WebKit for integrating web resources and maybe a shared repository
* Quartz for drawing really nice character sheets, game sheets, NPC sheets, and to generate PDFs on the fly.
* UIKit with Cocos2D for front end data management screens.
* Network stack for cross-communication between devices, communication with back end web services.
I think it would be nice to be able to have a database of NPCs whose sheets render nicely on the screen and then with a click be able to summon up world information around the NPC — their horrible organization, say, or, GOD FORBID, a RELATIONSHIP MAP… Computers are really good at knitting all this data together into a palm of the hand player, GM and gaming community set of tools. It’s what they do.
These are where my thoughts are sort of going for apps, but I also have lots of thought about an iFiasco app too which hasn’t been fleshed out yet.
And Man… iPad based Smallville Relationship Maps with integrated character sheets. Just…. damn. Can it be done? OF COURSE.
Knitting is Nerdier than RPGs
8I sort of have this long-running argument with myself: What, precisely, is nerdier than RPGs? I have used RPGs* as the ANSI Standard for Nerd for a long time. It’s not so much that it’s fantasy or science fiction and people sitting in a basement pretending to do fantasy and science-fiction things as much as the sheer pointless bookkeeping. Books and stats and monsters and endless rules discussions down to hyper minute.
Now a days, RPGs have taken a step away from that nerdy brink. The rulesets are getting cleaner, the adoption getting wider, and zillions of people play them online in MMORPGs. Popular RPGs are based on even more popular mass media. Even the uninitiated no longer finds that hand of Satan, D&D, to be frightening any more. After all, the ruleset has been streamlined into the core of kill things and take stuff to the point where it is reduced on convenient character class cards.
I began to reposition myself to the definition of ANSI Standard for Nerd (much like NIST I must, about once a decade, revisit my published definitions) and began to settle on a deeper, more grognard activity: Fantasy Baseball. I cannot even begin to fathom the depths of Fantasy Baseball. I can only admire its shining contours: the many websites, the pages of statistics, the arguments over pitching styles, the battle.** I was content that Fantasy Baseball encompassed the dark beer-spilled smells of deep blackness of the Internet forum while RPGs crawled forth from the sewers and burst into mainstream heralded by Big Bang Theory on Prime Time.
Then I hit the dehaired llama yarn review.
Okay, so. It is not enough to shave a llama and make a sweater from its hair. No, one must first shave a llama, harvest its delicious undercoat (and perhaps its meaty brain pods) and then fuse the delicious undercoat with strains of cotton grown on a certain plantation during a certain time of the year to blend to create just the right softness to use in that single skein that cannot produce even a full pair of socks. And the hair must be knitted with just the right steel — not wood, as wood will catch — needles of the tiniest width to create a garment just so. And for added goodness we’re going to throw in strange beasts called cables which no one quite understands except for the cabal that lives in the basement among their walls of books and gear and who cackle in the night and then launch themselves upon internet BBSs to argue for the greatness of the dehaired llama who is, by this time, really cold. This isn’t a hobby — this is a plot of a neo-post-Lovecraftian horror story wherein the dehaired llama hair with cotton blend is used to break through the ether that separates the line between reality and a composite reality full of awesome.
And when knitters come together knitters speak a strange language of nuance and jumbled letters and comments incomprehensible by those on the outside. They squat among their piles of books full of arcane languages of fibers and fibercraft and spinning and dyes and needles and hooks and techniques and stitches all to make, in the end, probably nothing because, much like RPGs, if the pattern is boring it is abandoned for the newer, the stranger, the front page of this season’s Vogue Knitting.
After a year of concentrated researcher and thought, I now can follow the basic flow of conversation on a single knitting forum. And even then! After the initiation of correctly executing a heel turn, even then I can only follow the basic contours! I dare not post to be exposed as… still… a mere newbie.
Much like RPG stores, knitting stores have their own bizarre personalities. Their own lines of yarn, lines of tools, locals who hang out on the couches day in and day out and knit (often the same sock over and over), who either APPROVE of your knitting style or DISAPPROVE of your knitting style and will FROWN at you until you flee with a new book and a skein in hand. Either you pass through the initiation of walking through the door or you do not; but what you never do is ask after crochet because the end of that road lies only doom.
I have been told Quilting is a deeper abyss than even knitting. Quilters are mad, they tell me. They roam the landscape in herds going to shows and symposiums and seek out quilting shops full of odd machines and strange bolts of fabric. I lower quilters below the ANSI Standard — they are beyond comprehension, even beyond dehaired llamas and Fantasy Baseball and even the odd Traveler campaign.
Frankly, I think I own about par of knitting “gear” (skeins, books, bags of tools) as I do gaming “gear.” They both take up about the same amount of space (a shelf on a bookcase, a big basket of stuff under a table) physically and mentally. And I find it about the same talking knitting and gaming — often to the same audience.
But whenever someone tells me gaming is nerdy, I flip through a knitting magazine and say… “If you think so, you should see some of this.”
* Role playing games, not Rocket Propelled Grenades. Although Rocket Propelled Grenades are pretty nerdy, too!
** “It’s all about the battle.” — Sports Night
[Review] Smallville RPG
3Smallville RPG by Cam Banks, Joseph Blomquist, Roberta Olsson and Josh Robey
From Margaret Weis Productions
I would never have picked up the Smallville RPG if it wasn’t enthusiastically evangelized to me from multiple sources. I avoid games based on licensed properties for a number of reasons. It has the double whammy of being JLA and I am allergic to JLA in all its forms. ”It has a great relationship system!” they said. ”Character creation is neat!” I can be worn down by shameless promotion and, despite never having seen an episode of the show and breaking out into hives if I pass old Green Lantern collections, I picked up a copy from DriveThruRPG. Never say shameless promotion doesn’t work.
First Impressions
The Smallville RPG PDF is one of those PDFs used as a demo piece to show off how well RPG PDFs can look. The colors are sharp and crisp. The font is clear and easy on the eyes. The art is mostly, with some exceptions, stills taken from DVDs and photograph-clear. It’s a pretty, professionally laid out game with top notch graphic design. Dark blue on white for callouts is more effective than bold or italics, and the text scans easily. It reads easily, too: the text is clear and takes an optimistic, upbeat tone. I found few errors in the text throughout the book and found it surprisingly easy to comprehend. RPG texts are notorious for being muddied and confusing, but not so here.
The PDF itself has the same attention to detail as the art, text editing, and layout. It reads a single page/screen on my iPad so no squinting required. It has bookmarks. However, the table of contents is not hyperlinked. I never missed that feature, though.
The content flows from overview of Smallville -> overview of the game system -> character creation -> playing the game -> game resources -> Smallville reference. The only issue I had was in flipping between the “overview of the game system” chapter (called “The Basics”) and the actual play chapters (“The Scenes”), and that character creation and character resources are separated by the chapter explaining how to frame scenes — a little awkward. I never felt confused by the presentation and the information was well grouped together. I just found it mildly strange going from the Basics to Scenes and back again to understand how to play the game. It also had a bit of inexplicable filler in the form of an “online” chapter which should have been cut or placed at the back. From 5,000 feet, I understand why the overview of the system is placed before character creation. Otherwise character creation makes no sense. How can a player buy anything in character creation without some passing familiarity with the system? But still, it felt off. Speaking of character creation…
Character Creation
Character creation is where the Smallville RPG shines. It is a game within a game; a game session where the text recommends one puts out snacks because everyone is going to be awhile.
The heart of the Smallville RPG are character relations. All of the player characters (called ‘Leads’ throughout the book) have interconnections. Character generation proceeds in rounds where each round is a stage of life. During that stage characters increase in power, pick up major life connections, and move to new locations. As characters change and grow during their formative years connections grow or whither, and some disappear all together to be replaced by new connections. The process is visual where the GM draws circles and squares on a map to demonstrate the connections.
This section of the book is… stupendous, actually. Not only is it chalk full of explanations and examples, but the book walks through the creation of a full map complete with all the important connections and life changes. The end product is a dynamic game where all the players have a stake in each other’s lives. Characters are not just people who hooked up in a bar and went off to go kill orcs. These are people. And it makes me want to play the game. It deeply makes me want to play the game.
The character generation chapter is worth the price of admission alone.
Playing the Game
The system is dead simple. Every stat, relationship, power, asset, or resource in the game has a die value associated with it (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12). When characters get into conflict, they have a contest — and contests can be over far more than mere punching. The Smallville RPG has no combat chapter, as combat — if it actually comes to blows — is another kind of contest. When having a contest, one picks the associated drive (basic stat) and whatever relationship/asset comes into play, reads the dice value, rolls them, and adds the values together. Whoever is highest, wins. Whoever loses takes some stress. That’s… pretty much it from what I can gather without having played it.
The simple system hides some neat subtleties. The stress tracks ride along five different tracks: Anger, Exhaustion, Injury, Afraid and Insecure. A contest can bring stress into play. As a character takes more stress, the more an opponent can use it against them until the character ends up not in a hospital but curled up in a ball of fear or so angry they lash out at all around them. It is very cinematic.
Why would anyone want to get into a contests? Because contests yield up Plot Points, little bits of currency to spend in-game to make cool things happen. New relationship! New details! More dice! Activate powers!
The system works well with the recommended way to play the game: in tv show-like scenes. While most of this information feels a little filler at times, it does have good advice on how to frame, begin and end a scene so the game moves quickly. The chapter on how to build episodes through building on the existing character maps is interesting, especially when it explodes out into how to build in tension and conflicts into a gaming session. Good stuff.
Examples, examples, examples. The chapters with actual game information are full of examples. The material presents so many examples even I can follow the basic gist of the system while reading the book. Between the Basics, character generation, scenes and episodes, I find myself wanting to run the game. It’s simple! It uses dice! It’s highly cinematic! It looks like it is tons of fun. But… then again…
Other Stuff
The Smallville RPG is still a licensed property, so a good third of the book is dedicated to setting information. I cannot attest if this information is useful or not — I found it amusing to read some of the JLA members (Flash! Black Canary! The Martian Manhunter!) written up as various characters in the show. If nothing else, the large sections full of characters work as great examples and templates. It’s all in there somewhere.
The episode writeups came off as a bit flat. Having written these myself, I know they’re a drag to write. Most of the seasons are hyper compressed into summaries. Only the last two seasons are exploded out into full capsule summaries of each episode. And having never watched the show, I couldn’t do much with the information. It is aimed at the original audience of the game: fans of the Smallville TV Show. It is telling that, on the strength of its game system, it has wandered past its intended audience and into the hands of the uninitiated. It doesn’t help that Netflix doesn’t have Smallville on streaming.
Also, I so docked the game points for having writeups of the Wonder Twins. I don’t care if they do or do not show up. Dude, no Wonder Twins. Seriously. I’m duding the game here, man! *shudder*
Overall
The Smallville RPG is a strange game. I heartily recommend the character creation and the basic game system. Typically, the mark of a good game is three game ideas after reading the source material. But instead of three game ideas, I have three other games entirely I want to run and/or play using this system. It is the perfect system for playing “The Tudors RPG” based on the (incredibly tawdry) TV show. Or “The Reign of Elizabeth I — THE GAME.” Or any soap opera-like game — it would be perfect for Amber RPG. If I was going to pick a system for Amber, this would be it, the full on supers soap opera game.
I’m left with a mild glass-half full feeling. Smallville fans will likely find the exhaustive list of leads, features, extras, villains, and locations satisfying but may not be completely happy with seasons 1-7 summarized and only seasons 8 and 9 broken down into individual episodes. Those not a fan of the show may wish for more ways to adapt the system to other worlds and find the task of coming up with new Pathways or assets a bit daunting, and wish for a more generic game.
These are mild complaints. Overall, it is a well written, well produced game with a clever system at its heart. Character creation makes me desperately want to gut it and play my own supers/soap opera game with the rules. This is a rare game where not only is playing a villain a viable option, it’s a desirable option supported by the game system and game mechanics. The villain, the ultimate supervillain bad guy, has loves and hopes and wishes and backgrounds and has value as a PC — and that alone is worth the price of admission. You can be the Professor X and you can play Magneto and you have dice on your sheet that shows their adversarial relationship — and they come into play. Isn’t that what comic books are? Soap operas with punching?
Worth purchasing on PDF. I would run this game.
Smallville RPG: 4 stars out of 5
On Reviewing RPGs
7Now that I have an iPad and PDFs, I find myself reading an awful lot more RPGs than I used to. PDFs are ideal for RPGs — they are cheaper than hardcovers, they take up less space, and no one feels guilt if the game isn’t played. A hardcover is heavy and unwieldy; a beast that takes up precious shelving space better used for, say, comics. A PDF fits comfortably on my iPad with few concerns and Good Reader is a fantastic PDF reader. Good Reader + easy access to PDFs == reading games. I have conceded that I have no time to sit and play these games but I can, at the very least, give them a brisk read.
I like to review stuff I read but I want to approach in a structured manner. The question is: how? I have been tossing around evaluation categories for a few weeks to take the gut feeling of ‘this is good’ and ‘this is bad’ to a more concrete why one thing is better than another without major bias toward one type of system and another. Taking a shot in the dark, I have cooked up as broad categories for scoring, from a loose most important to least. These are for sourcebooks and not supplements — I am still working up how to handle supplementary material.
Organization
At their core, RPGs are technical manuals describing a mechanic to a group to play a game. Difficult to follow instructions are every bit as frustrating in an RPG as they are in IKEA instructions for assembling flat-pack into a bookcase. Imagine paging back and forth while putting together the new table just brought home from the Temple of Swedishness. That table would never get built. A game with poor organization never gets played. It’s that simple.
Is the index complete? Does the game have a table of contents? Are the sections logically organized with all the important bits for playing a part of a game (skill resolution or character creation or setting or other information)? Are the headings on sections clear? Can pertinent information on a question be found in under five minutes without scanning the entire book? Does the book function like a useful technical manual for a complex system?
Presentation
Does the game look nice? Is it laid out well? Does the layout use a readable font? It might sound stupid, but something as simple as a poorly chosen font detracts from the reading and comprehension experience. Most RPGs use standard fonts pre-chosen for readability but woe be to he who chooses to publish a book in comic sans. Headers, footers, watermarks, bleed — fancy art has a way of interfering with understanding the text. If reading the book causes a headache, the book will not be read, let alone played.
Art is a bit of a waffly subject because it is so “your mileage may vary.” A good RPG does not require art but most utilize it in some capacity to evoke genre and mood. Well chosen art counts for points. Does the art detract? Is it appropriate? Is it drawn by Rob Liefeld? Art is great. Bad art is far worse than no art.
Readability
The text must be read. Is the text well-written? Is it clear? Does it scan well? Can someone who only read the book understand the game well enough to discuss it? Beautiful art can mask terrible text, but terrible text ensures the ideas contained in the book will never get exercised by actual people.
Is the text clear? Do I understand what you mean when you give me a dense pile of rules?
Character Creation
Is character creation clear? Does it have complete examples and a walkthrough? How much flipping back and forth through a book(s) is necessary to find all the skills/stats/equipment/add-ons to create a character? Does this cause tons of aggravation or is the process smooth? Does the game include sample complete character sheets? How much free stuff is available off the game’s website to support character generation?
Recently, I have run into the trend of group character creation. I am all for group character creation. I like it. But I like even more complete walkthroughs and examples of how to apply it to a play group. Bonus points for reminding the GM to provide snacks.
This leaves out things like “how much is the player invested in their character at the outset” or “are the equipment lists full of neat stuff.” The primary concern is: what is chargen and can a group navigate it without wanting to throw the book across the room.
As a note: I put character creation above game rules resolution because if one cannot craft a character from the rules as presented, one cannot execute the system and exercise the ruleset.
Game Rules Resolution
This is the “game” part of the game. Usually this manifests as skill resolution but not always. It is some presented resolution mechanic to resolve conflict or facilitate taking turns to move toward a goal.
Do all the facets of a regular skill resolution — player vs. environment, player vs. npcs, player vs. player — get spelled out clearly? Do they make sense? Is it easy to grasp the general gist of the rules through a simple read through? Do they feel clear? Is it overly complicated?
Are there examples? Is the core mechanic and all important ancillary mechanics given plenty of clear examples and scenario walkthroughs? Does the text walk through what happens when someone takes damage? When someone is knocked out or harmed? How a character recovers? Do the examples flow logically from one part of skill resolution to the next, from simple to more complex?
It may sound like I am harping on examples. I am. Examples, examples, examples. Games can be radically different so teach me yours. I don’t want to be told how to play. I want to be shown.
Setting
Not every game has to bring a great new setting to the table. I have read great games that are quite thin on the setting details and poor games with heaps of settings. A great setting with a poor system is salvageable. A poor setting with a great system is also salvageable. I like great settings but if the text is poorly organized and the system lacks the game part of a game, it leaves me wondering if the authors are better off working on a novel.
Add-Ons
The most minor of categories but worth considering. Does your urban fantasy game have a section on city construction? Does your military game have a callout for squad combat? Is there something new and interesting and outside the main formula this game brings to the table? And is it necessary?
I’m certain I am forgetting some important categories. I left off character advancement because I’m not certain how important it is any more. To some games it is extremely important but to some, it is left on the cutting room floor.
Wow, this is long. Have I left anything out? Any sections I am overlooking? I am planning to apply this to an RPG as soon as I finish reading it to see how it works out for providing a comprehensive review.
I Don’t Like the New D&D
0Disclaimer: This is not to go knocking other people’s preferences or to start screaming that Mike Mearls is a poopyhead[1]. I had this conversation with Rob yesterday (largely spurred by his post about Dark Sun) and I’m trying to work this out in real time in public because, oh, hell, why not.
Onward we go….
I don’t like the new D&D 4th Edition.
I have played it. We played it when it came out and I took photographic evidence to prove it. And when we played it, I enjoyed it. It was fun. We used LEGO guys for Minis and some grid paper and some index cards and all was good. It didn’t feel like regular D&D but it wasn’t bad.
And we never played it again.
Since then all sorts of tools and widgets, from online character creators to minis to cards to a re-balance release to D&D Essentials have come out. Lots of toys, lots of books, even some settings. I thought to myself: it’s an age thing. I’m not interested because of age. I am simply too old. A simple, easy, pleasing answer. I started with D&D Red Box God knows how many years ago and I’ve just outgrown it. Off I go to read comic books which are so much more adult[2]…
Yet, since I acquired my precious iPad, deliverer of media, I have started reading games again. I went on a seven year hiatus but today I buy them from Drive Thru RPG and slurp them onto my iPad and they look spectacular. Then I lay on the couch and read them. I think about them. And I’ve actually played a little bit lately. I don’t think it’s an age thing.
I wandered off and thought about why I don’t like the new D&D. Right or wrong, I came around to this conclusion:
D&D 4th Ed takes the old Dungeons & Dragons formula, smooths out the lumps, shakes out the dust, and offers a pure, undiluted, shining new D&D formula. No more worrying about calculating weird negative THAC0s. No more 5 foot steps. No more worrying about buying a spell that turns out to be utterly worthless. No more Tasha’s Uncontrollable Hideous Laughter. No more 1st level mages with 1D4 hit dice. Everyone gets to be awesome. Everyone gets cool magic foozles to use in a fight. It has maps and minis and dice and cards which show you what you can do. Pure reward cycle of kill things, take their stuff, get the ex-pees, and move on.
It’s the perfect Utopian D&D. It is well designed.
And yet I’m the John Savage of Brave New World of gamers:
“But I like the inconveniences.”
“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
There it is.
I appreciate the design and the goals of the new D&D. To my perception, it’s not so much an RPG as an interesting and complex board game; an in-person version of Final Fantasy Tactics. I love Tactics; I have played it and many variations on my gameboy, but that’s where I want it to stay. I am pro-tactical turn-based strategy board games. I’m not certain I want that in an RPG.
I can see where the rabid split lies — between those who want to play this exceptionally tuned game and those who “don’t think it is real D&D.” Here’s the rub: it is real D&D. It’s the realist version of D&D ever produced. It is real and pure and shiny. It is D&D rubbed of all its little barnacles and fungus and clingy little bits that made no sense and balanced and made easy and neat. All the things: maps and spells and minis and killing kobolds, it is all there in the box. Who hasn’t played D&D with graph paper and markers and arguments? It’s D&D.
Yet I want THAC0s. I want 5 foot steps. I want Mages with 1D4 hit points. I want 10 foot poles! D&D happened for me in the little inconveniences and variances. The game lived and breathed for me in the stupid little spaces where we argued if Monster Summoning IV would allow you to summon a whale 50ft up and drop it on your enemies in a horrible splatter.[3] Those arguments made the game special. Frustrating and stupid, yes, but also special.
Yes, I know Pathfinder exists. I will take a look at it. Meanwhile I am immersed in FATE variants and the CORTEX system and GUMSHOE[4] so I’m good. A little sad, but there it is.
Update: I have been told I mean SKULLDUGGERY and not GUMSHOE. But they are both Robin Laws systems and thus both awesome by definition.
[1] I have it on good authority that Mearls is not, in fact, a poopyhead.
[2] I went on another ripping tear about “Why I Hate Green Arrow” yesterday. So much for maturity.
[3] The only way we could find a good area of attack spell for Bards in 3rd ed. No one bought it.
[4] Based on the system from the Dying Earth RPG! You’ve at least read the Dying Earth RPG, right? RIGHT? No? *shake fist* And I think it’s out of print, too. It was marvelous beyond words. *sigh*
(A Little More) Dresden Files Noodling
7A problem I have with most games lurking in the urban fantasy genre is this: those that have are PCs and those who do not are squishy meat.
Non-supernatural characters in urban fantasy games are worse than afterthoughts — they’re filler. They wander the world as empty ghosts who run the clubs where PCs hang out, get out the spackle when they get shot, die when spells go awry in messy splatters and wander through the living universe like potential hamburger. A few games have humans strike back against the super special guys via secret societies who act as limp antagonists, but typically You Haz Powahz or You Suck.
This was a major In Nomine problem. Angels and Demons are supposed to hide among the masses and never let their masks slip, but why? Humans are so weak compared to Celestials they hardly make pets let alone servitors or a race whose souls need saving. Paper thin humans stood around helplessly miming their scripts as Celestials limped into the hospital rooms full of bullet holes. Expert surgeons were unable to dig a bullet out of a Celestial thigh with even the shiniest of scalpels.
There was no patch or workaround; the system had a scale issue that divided a world into Celestials and Meat.
I saw this the few times I played Vampire. It popped up a little in the horror games of the 90s. It does make sense from a design standpoint: why would anyone ever play a human being in a supernatural world when the supernatural world is neat and the mundane world is… mundane?
Why indeed?
I credit Buffy the Vampire Slayer* for showing off humans vs. vampires — and the humans not being quite so lame as previously presumed. Quite the contrary. True Blood is sometimes even better — Jessica and Hoyt, anyone? Humans do populate the world, vampires can be killed with a well-placed stake through the heart, monsters can be defeated by cunning plans and a dash of insanity. Humans do not need to be formless meatbags filling a meatbag universe. They can be people, too.
This brings me around to Dresden Files, a game which takes the True Blood High Road and makes humans relevant. Not just relevant: actively dangerous to the supernatural community if they find themselves in position to be knowledgeable and can use a stake. Human allies, servants, servitors, lovers, enemies, cult members — these guys now have value. It changes the whole feeling of a genre formerly populated by ghosts and wisps of memory. I assume this comes from the novels but I see it clearly in the system.
The FATE point refresh mechanic is as elegant a bit of RPG engineering as I ever saw. It’s a simple and neat package of a solution. Regular humans may not have all the whizz-bang supernatural powers of the local magician or vampire, but they’re luckier. They can pull off a high-risk maneuver more often. They can bring out that down side of the other guy just a little bit more for advantage. Simply level the playing field by giving those without supernatural powers more playing field.
And it’s so simple. You pay for your powers out of your refresh pool. When you, the supernatural dude, refreshes FATE points, you get less than the guy who doesn’t have supernatural powers. The FATE economy in the game ensures a big pile of FATE points in the center of the table but, when push comes to shove, you, the supernatural guy, have to horde a little bit more than the human who is more inflow-positive. It’s a balance in incentives, a triumph of basic economics — humans have more so they will spend more and they will reap the benefits of having more because the fun is in moving FATE points around. And you, the supernatural guy, you get to cast a lightning bolt, but just slightly less than your human driver gets to jump the party’s Subaru over the gap of slowly raising sides of the drawbridge.
Humans get slightly more narrative control.
A simple and clean mechanic solves a problem that plagues the genre. Worlds are populated with people instead of meat. Humans have narrative worth. All the bits about hiding among humanity and the dangers of humanity and being hunted by human secret societies now have heft. Weight. Don’t screw with humanity because while you may be able to live off human blood these guys can shoot you.
Clean solutions to nasty little balls of problems warms my little engineer heart. This is why I find myself talking up the game: not only does it solve a balance problem, it does so in such a nice way no one ever notices the problem ever existed in the first place.
* A show I, granted, never really watched because I am the world’s worst nerd. I am a really terrible nerd.
Dresden Files Noodling
6Licensed properties are never my first choice for a game. Nor my second. Nor my third. I pass them by on the shelf. Untouched. Unloved. I’m not a big enough fan of most properties to crack the spine let alone dig into the meat of the game to get to the goodness lurking within.*
I have not read any of the Dresden Files novels, nor read the comic book, nor watched the TV show. Twelve novels, at this point, daunt me; my reading queue is quite deep and I have all the patience of a methhead. I am coming at the game as someone for whom the property has no draw. This turns out to be the selling point, if not the winning point: the Dresden Files RPG is a fantastic urban fantasy RPG which does not need the Dresden Files. It is yummy taco filling surrounded by a property corn shell — the Dresden Files content holds all the good stuff in so it doesn’t go running all over the plate but it is not strictly necessary from a meal stand point. It can just be all taco. And also, salsa.
The cheese, as they say, stands alone.
I won’t bother with a lengthy review deconstructing the 400+ page tome of the first source book alone. Suffice to say it is an excellent game, well designed and well laid out with attractive art and a flow that makes sense.** The Internets overflow with 1000 word reviews full of praises for FATE, a system I hear actually works, so go read those. I have a special fondness for the city creation chapter since, in my hoary old age, I find I have less love for vampire love then for tools and toolkits.
My gut tells me had I had this game in my hot little hands ten years ago this would be the game, the Holy Grail, the great RPG beacon in the sky shining down the light and the goodness and I would have been insufferable with it. Every game must be this Dresden Files thing. Space opera? Dresden Files. Vampire soap opera? Dresden Files. Cthulhu?
I draw the line at Cthulhu. Cthulhu is sacred.
Since I am old and I spend all my time talking about the Good Old Days, my core urge is to go off and convert it to everything I have ever played. I am giving into that urge. Here’s what I would run with the FATE version contained in the “Your Story” volume of the DFRPG:
In Nomine: I have spent years trying to convert IN to something that would work for IN and became convinced FATE was the answer a few years ago when it was in an Earlier Incarnation. With DFRPG I’m convinced; it would take some new stunts and spells in the magic section to fill it out and a mechanic to deal with some of the finer bits of IN like disturbance rules*** but it would work. It would not only work it would be a vast improvement: non-useless humans, human servants with actual power, angels and demons working in a humanity that could take them out.
One of the great weaknesses of IN was the terrible imbalance between normal humans (squishy worthless meatbags) and mid-level servitors and high-level servitors. With DFRPG still would have some power imbalances but it would be less lumpy. Now those Vampire servants of Death have worth and we won’t even talk about the serious juju those Jesuits get up to with their Relics in the Vatican basement. The world got fuller: an encounter with an Ethereal on the streets of New York has epic consequences but so does finding that Balseraph lurking in the upper ranks of the Pentagon who can send out his secret military Angel-capping squads who can actually hit with their weapons. The dangers are real and people are dangerous. You cannot let slip your faux-human mask because those guys have guns that hurt.
It would be a different game, I think. One populated with more characters. But with more than angels and demons. And I come down on the side of being good with that.
Nephilim: I have spent years trying to convert Nephilim to something. For those who don’t know (and that is everyone), Nephilim was an occult/urban fantasy RPG (a familiar genre!) from Chaosium with an extremely compelling back story and an excellent magic system in concept but terrible in execution. It was converted from an even earlier French game but bore almost no relation to the original game except the Tarot themed groups and the secret societies — of which the Knights Templar were the ultimate hunter killers.
When FATE 2.0 came out I did a character creation with Nephilim’s multiple reincarnations through history system and it worked ridiculously well but it didn’t have all the stunts and the magic system (yet) so I had a part-Nephilim. Even with DFRPG the magic system would need to be redone to pick up the Nephilim occult flavor. But there I was, reading the “Your Story” book, thinking about the Nephilim character with two Aspects: “Phoenix” and “I love Judgment — AND SO DO YOU.” And around the corner from my buddy the Phoenix Nephilim with the alchemically enchanted flaming sword are the Knights Templar with God Knows What…
A long time ago I wanted to run a Nephilim game that was based on the coming of the Fool because all Nephilim games are based on coming of the Fool. Now I am thinking about how easy it would be, with the DFRPG, to run a game based on Tarot-themed secret societies. And strange beings who live for thousands of years. And the Knights Templar. And horrible secrets hidden throughout history. And how awesome it would be.
Anyway, moving on…
DFRPG Tactical Combat: I recently read through Diaspora RPG (and so should you). Within the pages of that lovely little book is a platoon combat mini-game that runs on FATE and uses FATE characters. And once upon a time I read Delta Green.**** Who hasn’t?
So imagine a game where the ultimate capstone scene after hunting down the nest of Fey in downtown Chicago where they’ve holed up. A bit of squad combat breaks out when highly trained commandos break into the nest and start hosing it down with automatic weapons fire and arcs of mystical lightning — what squad wouldn’t have their mage units? But the Fey, they’re prepared, and they have their own squads of shape shifting were-spiders and mystical armor and the essence of Baba Yaga’s chicken footed house….
I want to marry the Delta Green pragmatic research into the horrors that lurk underneath the surface of normality with the Dresden Files groups of vampires and fairies and weremonsters. And I think it can be done with the help of a white board and some useful rules used for taking out space monsters.
So anyway I can go like this for a while because this game and this system can definitely support warring Tarot-based secret societies going to war with one another while human groups bent on eradicating the occult and supernatural hunt them all. Or maybe it can be Angels and Demons instead. Either way, the system is there, it just needs a bit of patching. A few stunts, some new spells, and it is good to go.
And now I’m thinking more about the Fool than I have in years.
Oh! One last thing, although surely this won’t be the last on occult urban fantasy games — I did look over the second book. Great if you love the Dresden Files. Not too useful if you are trying to shove Those Who Creep And Nibble into the game system.
Rob! I need a cult creation toolkit! My platoon squads of military priests need to go eradicate them with the Holy Assault Rifles of John the Baptist!
* Hilariously, I have written on licensed properties. Sadly, this property has kept me from looking at Smallville which, I have been assured, is quite good, but I have a physical aversion, almost allergy-like, to JLA.
** Rarer than it seems in RPGs. However, the index is hot linked in the PDF which made for an interesting surprise. Skim the index WOAH I’m on page 283!
*** Diaspora provides a compelling patch with shifts in their personal combat rules.
**** See? Call of Cthulhu. All roads lead back to CoC. Everyone says it goes back to D&D but they are wrong. CoC is the grand daddy of all these games and I bow before its might. And I roll d100…
[Game Review] Diaspora
0It’s not too often I sit down and read a new RPG. Okay, it’s never that I sit down and read a new RPG these days. I’m always like, yeah, sure I’ll read stuff but… I was sufficiently intrigued and I actually purchased an RPG and read it, and that RPG was the excellent Diaspora.
Diaspora is a hard science fiction game based on FATE 3.0, a snazzy storytelling system that does many things well and other things perfectly and smooths out many lumps in the gaming experience. It’s also a toolkit and it can be used for anything. Once it was used for Pulp, it’s quite popular right now in the urban supernatural genre, but me, I come from an old Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov and Robots and Empire background so I was mighty interested in hard sci-fi and see where it could go.
This is not a book about other people’s fancy characters. The guys who wrote this game are not interested in telling you about their campaign. (Yes, the campaigns are used as examples but it is not the crux of the book in any way.) This book is a toolkit with a minimal hard science fiction gimme — the faster than light drive for space travel between worlds and some very excellent background on technology — and then hands everything else over to the gaming group.
Diaspora is essentially an RPG wrapped around six internal mini-games, all powered with FATE and using FATE dice: cluster creation, character creation, personal combat, starship combat, platoon combat (!) and social combat. The first two only come into play when starting a new game while the other four are set pieces for different parts of the game. These are optional, but Diaspora would not be Diaspora without them.
Cluster creation I could play all day long and never get bored. Using FATE dice, one rolls up sets of words and defines them with three attributes (Technology, Environment, Resources). Each of the three attributes has a -4 to +4 sliding scale. One can have a string of low tech garden worlds full of rich bounty for the harvesting, or a vastly technological world raping its system to the core to make a ringworld, or a system just starting to explore space. Or all of these. Then dice define how the cluster is put together. This is the local Diaspora universe and each game is different. Simply talking through planet and cluster creation brings up tons of ideas for scenes and games and entire campaigns. None of them feature Cthulhu.
Character creation is very much standard FATE character creation with a heavy emphasis on weaving the PCs into each other’s background. This is standard for every FATE game. Diaspora has a nice list of skills and stunts.
Where Diaspora shines for me are the mini-games. Diaspora takes what could be very crunchy, mini-requiring wargames and turns them into fast, furious and fun games baked into the juicy FATE shell. The best part of the mini-games is that they stand alone; one only needs to either make some characters or take some pre-genned ships or platoons and go to town. They do need a whiteboard and markers to work properly — these are the sort of mini-games that require props — but the results feel so satisfying. The examples are clear and to the point. They don’t muck around much with story. They show you what they need to show you and get out of the way.
And yes, I made a little squeeing noise when I saw the platoon combat mini-game. Me! I did! All I could think about was Aliens. But my favorite of the four by far is the social combat mini-game. It’s the best RPG social gaming simulator I have seen since Chris Aylott’s “Dynasties and Demagogues” for d20, a system that never did social combat well but tried. Unlike FATE which does social combat, and with the Aspect system and compels and social maneuvers, does it well. It feels like the ebb and flow of social combat. It feels like the board has pawns and bishops and queens and the players can push them all around by making cunning rolls and burning FATE points. Maybe I am very visual and I like being able to see the little dots on the field and know what my political target is and how far there is to go to win or lose, but it clicked with me on a deep level. I want to take Diaspora’s social combat system and use it everywhere.
Yeah, I would totally play Diaspora. It appeals to my deep gearhead geek. It gives me toys and gets out of my way so I can go play. I would probably lose at the starship battle and platoon battle the first several times I played but FATE allows one to lose gracefully so that’s all good. I’m sure there are now fancy Indie gaming terms I have completely forgotten to codify why I like it but in my terms it is: excellent narrative structure for flow of play, incredibly clean and clear game rules, excellent examples, lots of ships and weapons out of the box, and the process of creating a cluster filled my head with ideas. It passed my test — if I could think up three campaign ideas while reading the source book, it’s a damn fine game. If I could think up three ideas and understand the rules clearly then it’s a win for the good guys.
The PDF is only $13, so it is slightly above the “I would buy it just to skim it” price. It looks fantastic on Good Reader on the iPad, so if you have one of those, you’re in business. I hear it’s in paperback now, too. So go buy that. You can even go buy it here.
Not quite 1000 words on antihistamines and cold medicine on a game. Awesome. Also, it occurs to me that I do not mind reviewing games as long as they are available in PDF that displays on Good Reader on the iPad.
PAX East 2010 Roundup
02 years ago
Short form: We had a fucking fantastic time.
Long form: I am not a big fan of cons and I don’t attend gaming cons. I have never been a big enough tabletop gamer to want to dedicate my entire weekend, plus a drive, plus hotel, plus food, to tabletop gaming. But since I was about ten, I have wanted to go to a video game con — any video game con, anywhere. For years I devoured the coverage of E3 until it became so tepidly lame that it finally died. I would have gone out to Seattle to PAX if I could have swung it and the moment I heard there was a PAX East, we had tickets. I bought tickets three hours after they were announced and sat on them since September.
Video games are my primary nerd-dom, followed by (indie) comics, then indie music. PAX is awesome. Main passion is video games? PAX. Like comics? PAX. Into card and board games? PAX. Want to spend your entire weekend playing D&D 4th Ed? PAX. It is a pinnacle of nerd fury.
We drove up to Boston and stayed in the Sheraton Boston attached to the Prudential Center which also housed the convention center so we never went outside. I wasn’t a big fan of the hotel — the room was tiny, the bar sucked, everything was overpriced, and they tried to buy me out of my room the moment I arrived. (Um, no? How does NO grab you.) But we spent very little time in the hotel.
PAX East 2010 had a problem with underestimating the amount of space needed for all the panels and activities/people, so everyone got real friendly and there were problems with space and seating. Without dedication to the entire convention, it was very difficult to get into many of the main events. We already know that next year it is moving to bigger facilities for demand but once we figured out that getting into major events meant waiting in lines, we dedicated ourselves to waiting in lines.
Some of our high notes:
Wil Wheaton’s Keynote: It’s online (search YouTube for ‘wil wheaton pax east.’) It was a pitch-perfect speech that addressed getting Old and still being a Geek.
Saturday Night Concert: If we were going to do anything while we were in Boston it was see Internet Troubadour Jonathan Coulton perform live. We nearly killed ourselves getting guaranteed seating. We stood in the pre-line for the line to get the wristbands so we could get in the line. We were not disappointed.* The highest point was the performance of Mr. Fancy Pants on a Zen Drum hooked to Logic Pro. Seriously. Make with the clicky.
Also, if for some reason you don’t know or listen to Mr. Jonathan Coulton and you claim to know me, click the above and exchange money for music. Or go to the old Thing a Week and listen to some of the tracks and then buy CDs.
Eric met MC Frontalot: What else do I have to say? Eric had the MC Frontalot demos off the website and wanted to exchange money for CDs. And completely unbidden, every CD cover got signed and Eric got a signed poster. It was awesome. You should totally buy a copy of the new LP, Zero Day. It has Jhonen Vasquez cover art! A bonus XKCD comic just for MC Frontalot! A song about Kingdom of Loathing! I don’t like hip hop but even I like the CD.
Steel Battalion: I would have nothing to do with this incredibly wrong game but we had to watch a match. We had to. Steel Battalion is a game for the old XBOX that required this enormous 40 button controller and was a “complete power suit simulation.” They had 10 machines all lashed together on a LAN to play tower defense games. It was insane.
Apples to Apples: We couldn’t get into the MC Frontalot concert on Friday night, so instead we discovered we could actually check out board games and card games. We met another totally random group of guys and played three hilarious rounds of Apples to Apples for an hour and a half. It summed up the entire con for us: people were on the whole awesome, people were looking for other people to play with, and you could hook up with total strangers to play games. (I also bought a Fluxx deck finally.)
The Rock Band Lounge and the Handheld Lounges: The Rock Band Network took over a room and turned it into a faux-bar with beanbags and chairs and had people get up on stage and make total jerks of themselves playing Rock Band. If you didn’t play on Expert you were booed! Best run of the con were the guys who played Iron Maiden — total props to you guys. You know who you are.
The best part were the long hallways covered in beanbags. Anyone could just go collapse with a handheld or a laptop on a beanbag for a while. Two huge hallways had beanbags on two floors so there was always a beanbag free. This was just brilliant — if you collapsed from just tiredness you always had a place to go.
The EXPO Center: I thought the Expo was too small — and we already know it will be bigger next year — but most of the booths had playable demos. I saw Puzzle Quest 2 with the big upgraded interface, so once that comes out nice knowing you guys. I saw tons of really compelling tech from the huge upgraded video cards to the tiny portable gaming rigs with 12 hours of life to the full six-string guitar controller/trainer for the XBox 360. (They gave me a free t-shirt — there were free t-shirts everywhere.) The new Rockstar game looks fantastic. Big downer though: I couldn’t get into the Civ5 demo.
I still seriously want that gaming table/dining room table.
Awesome people: From the guys who played Apples to Apples with us to the guy who told me the horrors of trying to win a Mario Cart DS tournament (avoid the blue bombs!!!) to the guys who let me watch their Mafia card game to the guys who demo’d their insane D&D4th edition flat-screen table with minis, everyone was just awesome.
Friends! We saw Chris and Jen, and I had lunch with Mark, and then we had a great meal with Mark and Eleanor. We will see you guys at the end of May!
Despite scheduling issues and having real difficulties getting into panels and that we are so sore, I am intending to buy our PAX East 2011 tickets the moment they go on sale in September. For the first year, it was great, and it will be guaranteed to be better next year.
I do have a photo archive up. They’re not the best pictures but they’re something.
* We had a backup plan if we couldn’t get into the concert. Freezepop was playing at the Harmonix Showcase just outside the convention center.
Recent Comments