Yudhishthira’s Dice

Neel Krishnaswami said, once upon a time in a post I cannot now find, that an RPG is a game where the fiction is part of the rules. I thought it was a very smart statement indeed.

The thing this says to me is that when you’re playing an RPG (and thus when you’re thinking about designing play) options are not limited to (one might even suggest are not always primarily located) in the mechanics, rules, and dice. The positioning of a character in the fiction, control over elements of the fictional world, and how and when and where characters come on and off screen are all powerful tools not just for telling a story, but for playing tactically in a game.

Here’s an example from a recent discussion about a Dog’s game by John (jenskot):

Vincent and I played Dogs in the Vineyard. I played this pissed off kid who had daddy issues. My initiation conflict was, “Do I shoot my dad………. for a second time?” I had a chip on my shoulder for having a dead beat drunk of a father.

Later, some crazy kid is running around causing all forms of un-heavenly chaos. I flip out and confront the kid’s mom ready to beat her down in a conflict over me chastising her for raising such an awful boy. Vincent sees my raise with the mom saying, “I had to raise him all alone without a father.” Holy crap! He hit my buttons perfectly with narration and even though I was kicking ass mechanically I had to give on the conflict.

It also isn’t just about tactical play. Its about ongoing play and continuity and narrative authority and all the rest. As Ron (the Devil Himself) Edwards recently said about Sorcerer:

As I keep saying, and which people only really understand once they’ve been through a few games, Sorcerer resolution and narration is very contingent on things that were narrated or established earlier in play - often which were not presented with any intention of being so important later. That’s the key concept, I think, that keeps judgments about “is intensive care available” away from GM fiat. That question should not be answered by whether the GM suddenly invents a team of paramedics who dash in from off-screen; it should instead be answered by checking around all the details and circumstances of that particular location in the setting. Given all that, is intensive care available? That question can usually be answered without controversy.

Now, I don’t know if Ron would say that the fiction is the important part of the rules there. But when I read it, that certainly is what I think. The things that we’ve made together, the fiction, is the binding rule that keeps these things together, that positions them and determines what is going to happen. We do not, at that point in Sorcerer, go to dice to see who has the right to narrate about intensive care — because it is about the fiction we’ve all created together, and not narration rights determined by dice.

Furthermore this means that when you’re playing an RPG it isn’t always an issue of if fiction or mechanics lead or follow. Most of the time there is going to be a more subtle interplay, and I have a feeling we miss a lot of it. Big chunky conch-passing rules with stakes resolution often make it seem like what is going on is simple, but even in those games I don’t think it actually is.

Now, for me and my group a strong fictional statement has as much weight as something coming from the mechanics, even in games where mechanics lead the fiction. And in games where it doesn’t, I either have to change gears about what it is I’m doing (like I start thinking of the game as a board game without a board, and then can have a lot of fun), or I get bored and annoyed. Which, I think, is one of my growing discontents with games whose rules mostly revolve around who gets narration rights. I don’t find narrations rights and simple stakes resolution interesting — I want something that spins in and around the fiction, something that pushes fictional statements forward rather than relegating them to the role of “mere color.”

Now, this can all be tricky, especially as there often isn’t one fiction in an RPG. Instead there is a lot of stuff from a lot of different points of view, all of which lays in and around each other in different layers. As the brilliant Emily Care-Boss recently said:

“Continuity is short-hand for a large, un-manageable piece of shared, vaguely overlapping mass of experiences interpreted as a narrative.”

So you know what I like? Things that help us keep all those pieces together, that help us develop a narrative and agree about it in some part. The trick about that is that those things don’t have to be mechanics and dice. They can also be lists and guidelines. For example, In A Wicked Age doesn’t tell have the dice tell you when endgame is going to happen (in contrast to, say, My Life With Master), but it does have a list of things that will indicate to you that a chapter is over. And that list, shock and surprise, mostly says “when the fiction tells you its over, and here are how to recognize the signs.” Which is also the kind of thing I was doing with my “A Way To Structure a Narrative Game” post — things about watching the fiction without having to have it mechanically enforced.

And no, it doesn’t have to be dice free or mechanics free, it just has to have some cognizance of how it is that it is working with the fiction. Sorcerer and Trollbabe and In A Wicked Age all do this in different ways, as does Spirit of the Century (in a whole different paradigm) and Nobilis (in yet another paradigm). I don’t think its an accident that all of those games are hot in my brain right now.

P.S. Jonathan Walton just tipped me to Sweet Agatha by Kevin Allen jr. I’m not sure what I think about it yet, but I do have to say that I enjoy his exploration. In some ways I think he may be headed off in a direction almost the opposite of what I’m talking about here and at the same time opposite to what a lot of mechanically conditioned games are doing. Diversity is wicked cool.

This is a rough, only partly tested system that I whipped up for a game of Afraid that I ran last Halloween. I found the notes recently, and figured I’d toss it out to the world.

The Eldritch Arcane is magic for Afraid. It could probably work for Dogs or a Dogs homebrew too. Its basic principle is that magic lets you go beyond the limits of normal human effort, but that it can exact a terrible price for doing so.

At character creation characters who have Eldritch abilities mark them as such. For now lets just say they come out of your normal dice, but get marked special when you declare them Eldritch. GMs who want to limit magic might say you can only use 1 or 2 dice at character creation as an eldritch ability. If you want to be fancy you could make a new background that grants access to Eldritch powers, and say you have to take it if you want any dice.

Eldritch abilities can be traits (Blood of the Dark 2d8), relationships (Slave of Kali 3d4), or gear (faerie cloak 2d8). In general eldritch gear can be temporarily lost as part of stakes or as part of gaining a condition, but losing it permanently requires a burnout consequence from magical backlash. (I’ll explain that below.) We also experimented with letting some of the dice for a Stat be eldritch, so that you could have Heart 3 (1) with that (1) being an eldritch dice. Results generally indicated yes.

In play, Eldritch abilities work just like others in terms of how and when they get rolled. You use relationships at the start, for those involved or at stake, for example. However, eldritch abilities work a bit differently when they are in play, and for that reason I recommend having dice of a different color or style than all the others in play to roll for your Eldritch abilities, as it will keep things easier once dice start hitting the table. If you don’t have enough dice of different colors you can just keep the eldritch dice in a separate area from your normal dice.

In play Eldritch abilities have the following special rules:

1. When you use one, you can make raise and sees that are clearly beyond the norm. In other words, it lets you do magic. Fly, crush people’s throats by squeezing your fingers together across the room, and so forth.
2. They give you access to the magical world, which allows you to use magical sites or ritual implements as improvised objects. (”Jeepers Scooby, its midnight on Halloween and we’re in Stonehenge? My Druid Blood gives me a 2d8 for this big, excellent ritual space.”)
3. You can use a dice from a magical ability to do something beyond the pale. An action that is beyond the pale risks backlash, a supernatural repercussion, in addition to other fallout. The benefit of going beyond the pale is that it lets you add one dice from a magical ability (and it must be a magical ability dice, the reason for the different color) to any raise, see, or taking the blow. If you raise or see you can do so with three dice total. If you take the blow you take one dice less fallout than you would normally take.

Note: You can use your eldritch abilities for the first two items without risking backlash. In that case they act just like normal dice, save that they let you do kewl raises. It is only if you add a magical dice as a third dice (or fourth for taking the blow) that you risk backlash.

Backlash

When you use an eldritch ability to go beyond the pale, you risk backlash as the inhuman forces rebound upon you. All eldritch dice used to go beyond the pale (add an extra dice to an action) are set aside after they are played (played, not rolled) and after the conflict all of them are rolled after normal fallout has been rolled. They are read just like fallout dice, but use the following tables to determine their outcome.

Backlash Roll
Any 1’s — Backlash experience
2 - 7 — Minor Backlash
8 - 11 — Major Backlash
12+ — Devastating Backlash

Backlash Experience

Note: Eldritch abilities cannot be raised with normal fallout, though they can be lowered. So you can make your Druid Blood go down as a result of fallout, but you cannot increase it. The only way to increase an eldritch ability is through backlash experience.

• Add or subtract 1 dice from an existing eldritch ability
• Take an new eldritch ability at 1d6
• Change the dice size for one magical ability by one step
• Pick from the normal experience list

Minor Backlash

• One condition becomes true
• Seen (an evil occult force knows where you are and gains your highest backlash dice against you in the next conflict you have with it).
• Lose access to one eldritch ability for the next conflict

Major Backlash

• Two conditions become true
• Marked (an evil occult force now can track you and gains a relationship with you with a dice size equal to the biggest backlash dice you rolled.)
• Lose 1 eldrtich ability for the rest of the story
• Lose all eldritch abilities for the next scene
• Lose 2 dice from a Stat
• Change an eldritch ability to d4s

Devastating Backlash

• All conditions become true
• Tainted (as marked, plus against the being you are always considered to be either Alone or Unprepared)
• Lose all eldritch abilities for the rest of the story
• Lose 1 eldritch ability permanently
• Lose 3 dice from a Stat
• Require Real Medical Care

And that, as they say, is that.

Credit Where It is Due: Landon Darkwood had a big impact on this, as should be obvious if you read his article. Vincent Baker, of course, had some impact as well.

Recently I’ve been talking about freeform play in various and sundry places. I’ve also been talking about the construction of story and emotional play in RPGs, and the various ways in which we do them. As part of those discussions I looked at how I set up and structure conflicts as an ongoing part of a game that I am running, and tried to break it down into a procedural format.

The result was something of a step by step that I do when making conflicts part of a story in an RPG. Much of this stuff is not surprising, as its stuff many of us do. Its also not something that should be read as a hard and fast rule, as much of it was intuitive and all of it is always subject to the mode of the game, the mood at the table, and the specific things I want from a scene. It also is not a check list for running every style of game. (Duh!)

For the general type of emo-porn-metal game that I usually run, this is a basic checklist of what I do to run a conflict:

1. Have an idea of a meta-level conflict or situation. This is the big conflict of the game, story arc, novel, or season. From a Buffy Big-Bad to passing final judgment on the humanity of your own character in Dogs, this is the thing that you know you’re going to get to eventually, but aren’t going to get to immediately.

Some games have systems to do this. Burning Empires, for example, specifically sets up the Human vs. Alien arcs, and breaks them down into segments. You know that the issue is going to get dealt with, and you even know the general pacing of how its going to go.

Other games do this on a more moderate level. Trollbabe, for example, has stakes and consequences for any given story, giving something that gives a coherent focus to the whole story across multiple smaller conflicts. It also has the overall but subtle arc of troll vs. human, and the very real possibility that if you play a long enough game you will end up deciding the fate of one or both races.

The real point here is to have a chronic level issue, problem, or focus that keeps the game together as we in play focus heavily on the moment to moment acute conflicts. Most conflicts in a larger narrative scale don’t resolve instantly, and so having an idea of a large level conflict based on the situation is an important place to start.

In recent games the meta level conflicts I’ve done have been: Expose the conspiracy of serpents while figuring out who you want to be with; find your place in the life you lost and figure out if you really want to kill the mirror or yourself; stop the Titans from taking over the world; face the end of the glory of the Caliphate; rearrange the metaphysical nature of the world so that women have equal rights with men; and decide which of the perverted cults is going to become the new True Church.

2. Set the Stage and Foreshadow: From the earliest moment in the game there should be something that gives a general, lose finger pointing at the moon idea of the big threat of the game. This can be anything from the way that a Dog’s initiation conflict gets you to start thinking about who your character is and how they deal with violence to having your village raided by outriders of the orc army that is going to crush all human civilization. The point is that very early on you establish that there is something going on in the background, an arc that you’ll deal with over time, but without making that arc the main focus of conflict right now.

Its worth noting that in games where groups create situations, rather than just the GM creating it, a lot of the foreshadowing starts during the set up of the game. For some groups that out of fiction knowledge is enough. I find that I like to have an early scene in the game to bring it on stage, however. I like everyone knowing about the situation OOC, but until there is something that happens in the fiction, on screen, or however else you want to put it, its ephemeral and unreal. I have to put it on stage before I care about it.

In an Unknown Armies game I’ve been running for a long time, the very first scene of the game set this up (along with some other plot issues). The game was about Flying Women and feminism, and in the first scene of the game we have a professor lecturing the class and the female PC sitting with her lab partner male NPC. When the PC answers questions the professor ignores her, and then praises the male lab partner when he repeats the exact same answers. Whatever the PC does about the professor is fine, because the point is that there is a bigger problem than this jerk, and that problem is going to be an ongoing issue.

3. Show why the issues matter. This is where we start to put a human face and emotional investment into the issues of the game. Its the point at which we see that the princess actually loves the knight, acted out on stage before us. This is where we’re going to learn not just about why we care in general, but why we actually emotionally start investing into characters. (This often goes hand in hand with foreshadowing, but can be played separately so I’m going to list it separately.)

This is where scenes that don’t necessarily have conflicts at all, or only have soft conflicts, are important. There don’t have to be no conflicts at all, but they shouldn’t be about the most important thing, they should be about establishing details and furthering the demonstration of what is at stake.

For example, in the Thou Art But a Warrior playtest I played with Anna, we knew going in that the meta conflict of the game was the fall of the Caliphate. (That’s what the game was about.) We also knew that the Emir’s daughter was going to be at the heart of the conflict, both for being a princess and for being a named character on multiple PC’s sheets. So the very first scene we did I asked for Anna and Kitt to give us a scene in which we see the love between the princess and the brave knight, and then swept my asshole knight and the evil Imam into the scene on the heals of it. So now we’ve got a finger pointing towards the love, lust, jealousy, and betrayal at the heart of the court that is going to be part of the fall. We also have the main characters on stage, and have actually seen them being in love and being jerks, rather than just knowing that they are because we set them up to be.

Yes, this does number 2 and 3 at the same time. Yay us! In the Unknown Armies game I mentioned above, I was actually a little weak here. It wasn’t until much later in the game that the importance of women being overlooked in class came more directly on stage. We foreshadowed the ongoing conflict well, but we didn’t do the greatest job in that scene of showing why it mattered, or why we should deeply care. Luckily we got into that pretty quickly there after.

4. Introduce an acute conflict. Now that we’ve got characters on stage, have some idea of why we should give a crap about them, and know the general direction that things are going to be heading in the game, we can start making the character’s lives hard. This is where we start to push, to block, to make things hard, to make the characters fight and adventure and reveal themselves.

The first time you do this, this should be a pretty modest conflict. You’re not going to get the final moral statement of a Dog’s career in the first conflict, nor are you going to defeat Chronos in your first fight. This conflict is the one that is going to act as a the baseline from which other conflicts can build, the conflict from which you can say “yes, but what about now?” in future conflicts. So make it fun and make it count, but don’t blow it all first thing out the door.

Every time you do this after the first, you should be thinking about the other conflicts in the game, the direction of the meta issues, and if you need to repeat a past conflict with more intensity, or start a whole new kind of conflict to test a different issue or have a different kind of coolness.

Examples from games I’ve done recently include: Having hell hounds, which looked like big dogs at first, attack the characters; making a group of Dogs decide whether or not they were going to cut a hanging girl down; having the hot-headed swashbuckler get in a fight when he’s outnumbered; bringing the mayor home to find her drunken husband embarrassing her in front of important political guests; and about a million more. This level, alone, is really easy. I’m sure you can all think of 1 billion examples.

5. Complicate the conflict. (Optional, but usually recommended). Just when it looks like the conflict is going to be easy, add a twist in. Maybe the conflict is about more than it looked like at first. Maybe it turns out the guy you were sent to kill is an old friend, or maybe he’s a crazy 13th level Knight of the Purple Dragon, or maybe you fall down and drop your sword, or whatever. It works especially well if you can make the twist be something in thematic keeping with the overall meta issues, or with a previous or future conflict (more foreshadowing).

A lot of games with good mechanical systems will get the mechanics to do a lot of this for you — Trollbabe conflict resolution and re-rolls, special templates or powers in D&D, critical fumble tables in Rolemaster. All of these exist to give the conflict something more than you expected, or harder than you expected, that happens and suddenly things are moving in real time.

Note that sometimes its enough to let a simple acute conflict resolve. When it feels like its enough, then skip this step.

6. Resolve the acute conflict. Figure out what happens, here and now. If you’ve got conflict resolution rules use em, if not, do your thing. This step is probably worth a flowchart of its own, and really it is here that many, many games “conflict resolution” lives. Some games (Trollbabe, Beast Hunters, maybe Afraid) combine this and the above step, some don’t. Some games don’t have a conflict resolution at all, but have a system of some sort that lets the players figure out who lives, who dies, and who cares. However, this is the level that most RPGers already know pretty damn well how to do, so I’m going to leave it at that.

7. Show what the conflict has changed, in human terms. After big tense conflicts this is the place where we have a softer scene. Much like the scenes way up in scene 3, this is where we’re going to deal with the human, emotional levels where the characters live. We know who won and who lost and how hurt they got, what the fallout was. But how is that going to hit the rest of the people on stage? Will the princess still love the knight after he was felled from his horse? What does it mean if our Dog just ran from her first conflict and doesn’t think she’s worthy of being a Dog anymore?

In some games you can have a whole chain of conflicts before you get to this point. For example, in Dogs in the Vineyard you might have a conflict, a follow up, and a follow up to that before you get to a break in the constant shooting in the face. That’s fine, as that’s just cycling through steps 4-6 a couple of times before you get here and this is what happens when the whole chain reaction cycle of current moment current level conflicts is finished. This scene will probably happen eventually, however, as without it there is real risk of the story being full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Some examples of this from games I’ve played is: Having the Steward come talk to the Dog about why she ran away; getting the PC to talk to a shrink about the gunfight she was just in and why she shot her professor in the face (”because it was where his mouth was” she answers); having the princess left alone in the room with the man she loved to deal with each other now that she’s seen him murder someone; and blocking out a scene where the PC sat amid the wreckage of his life and wrote a song about how all the sex means nothing when you’re left alone with broken bottles and blood stains at the end of it all.

8. Follow up, follow through, and expand. We’re going to head back to step 4 soon, but we’re also going to do a little bit more than just start a new conflict. We’re going to place that conflict into the context of what has gone before and where we want to head. What I do here is start to develop a cycle of conflict, to deal with things on the same level of the old acute conflict but exploring outwards, into new territory.

This can be new thematic territory or it can be literally new territory as the world is revealed. Either way, this is a step more than just cycling back to 4 to do an immediate follow up conflict, but a little bit less then pushing the whole game to a new higher level of conflict like we’re going to do in step 9. What I’m really doing here is making sure this current plateau is sufficiently alive, sufficiently fleshed out before I go on to bigger and meaner things. You aren’t there yet, but you’re setting up to be and letting the players all get the sense of anticipation about what is going to come next.

There is a way that I often think about this when doing games based around theme rather than challenge or verisimilitude, that Mo calls the thematic tension cycle. It works constantly in the background of all steps of the process, but tends to come most to my attention at this step. So its right here that I’ll break it down, despite the fact that its happening all over the place.

• Thematic Declaration: This is what we did back in steps 1 to 4 the first time around. The PC make their initial stand, they’ve shown the first signs of what they believe. If any character hasn’t done this, they need a conflict or median scene where they get a chance to do so. So I’ll cycle back to 3 to 7 until everyone has made their declaration, shown what their character believes, stands for, or pursues.
• Thematic Reinforcement: This is when you reinforce that a character or scene or issue really is dedicated to a certain stance, theme, or goal. This is where you fight the titan spawn again to show that you’re dedicated to the war, or swear an oath to stop the orc invasion you’d already fought against by accident, or fight for another woman’s rights like you just fought for your own.
• Thematic Support: This is the kind of scene where a player’s choices get rewarded, reinforced, or highlighted by the world for the choices they’ve made. Their protagonist role gets underlined. This is where the whole village starts to come together because of your leadership against the orcs, or where a woman you used to help learn to read is now going to get her high school diploma, or where Zeus gives you the Aegis for your fight against the hellhounds. These types of scenes tend to go well into the humanizing scenes from step 7, but can be the seeds of new conflicts pretty easily.
• Thematic Opposition: Here you start to challenge the nature of the stances that characters have taken, to make issues problematic, to introduce conflicts that show the motivations (and possibly even nobility) of the enemy or the corruption of the ally. This, in a real way, is the “okay, so you fought for it then when it was easy, but what about now when its all getting hazy and the lines aren’t so clear anymore?” scene. It also often makes a good place to bridge to step 9 and some escalation, but it can happen just as well without. Some examples include: Facing the orc shaman who tells you that your people drove them out of their lands with great slaughter two hundred years ago; finding out that the man you’re after for killing a woman had good reason to kill her; finding out you could overthrow Zeus and replace him as a god yourself.

(I do not know for sure, but suspect these might have parallels in other creative agendas — for example the occasional “gimme” conflict in a gamist game where the point is not a huge test, but to demonstrate how bad ass the character is. I’m sure you can figure out your own things here.)

Anyway, by looking at what kinds of thematic scenes I’ve already done at the current level of intensity and past levels of intensity, I know the basic kinds of things I want to provoke from more scenes. And if I think that enough has been done at this level, then we move on to step 9.

9. Escalate and Intensify. This is the point at which you start stepping up the conflict on the road towards that meta-level situation you started out with way back at step 1. Where you’ve been fighting hell hounds you’re now starting to face off with demi-gods, where you’ve been fighting orc bands with your village you’re now fighting companies with your own troops, where you’ve been having to question your love of the princess you now have to decide to save her or save your mother, and where you’ve been judging sinners you now have to judge another Dog.

Make the new conflict escalate or progress from the old. This can be a harder challenge (gamist), a deeper creation of world (sim), or the “yes, but what about now” (nar) or just “well you’ve fought an imp, but can you fight a full demon” type of bigger (gonzo) — but it should push forward and be a “bigger” conflict than the one before it. It can also be a “move the story forward” type of conflict, where now that the local boss is gone the characters have a chance to learn about the regional level boss, or whatever.

In general I like to go back to step 3 at this point, and show why the escalation matters. After that when I hit 4 again, I’m going back deeper, nastier, and wider in scale, scope, or human trauma. Many games have this type of thing preset to some level. Like in D&D we all know that when you hit level 15 or so you’re suddenly facing the kinds of things that would have been a total party kill at level 10; or in Trollbabe when you move the conflict from Group to Kingdom you know the size and scale of your next adventure is going to be huge. Games like Dogs do this when each town pushes your issues a little harder than the last town, which is less hard coded but just as effective*.

10. Bring it on home. Eventually as you hit step 9 again and again and get a little bigger and badder every time, you’re going to end up at a level where your conflicts are synonymous with the meta conflict you started out with in step 1. Once that happens you’ve hit endgame. Pull out the stops, drive everything and every lose end towards Apocalypse, and bring the story arc to a close with a purgation of terror and sympathy.

Then if you want to play with the same characters or the same setting again, cool. You’ve told one full long arc story (like a novel or a season of a TV show, probably) filled with shorter chapters. You can walk away now, or go back and start at step 1 again. In the new novel, or new season, everyone is going to have new thematic stances and new meta level conflicts. But this time you’ll have an even deeper understanding of the characters, so rock out.

And there you have it. Noting new or revolutionary, just a step by step breakdown of what is in practice a far more organic process. I do find, however, that having broken it down for myself this way has been helpful, as it lets me be a little more mindful of what I’m doing, to ask myself questions such as “should I be escalating now, or doing some reinforcement?” and such. Even if this method doesn’t work for you, I think taking some time to figure out how it is that your brain organizes story and narrative development is worth it. The unexamined game, as they say, is not worth playing.

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*Its worth noting that I don’t do all of these in all games as well. In Dogs I usually don’t foreshadow as much (or at all) because the players are more in control of the pacing. However, even then I will push for stakes that replicate some element of this flow chart — like if it is the Dog’s first interaction with a given character I will usually drive for small stakes around the line of “get X to feel Y” or “get X to confess Y” or something like that. This does the same thing, in practice, as step 2 and 3 — it shows the building relationship between the characters, gives a greater context for how they fit together and what both have at stake in regards to each other and the town, and gives more meaning and context to the bigger conflicts to come. The rest of the cycle works slightly differently, but in a pretty similar order, just by following the rules of Dogs.

It was one of those days where things came together online.

Someone recommended Google Reader to manage my blog addiction. I tried it, its working nicely. Now all my feeds are in one place, all right next to each other.

One of my feeds was talking about Shock!. One of my feeds was talking about the new report from Microsoft Research about human-computer interface in 2020. One of my feeds was talking about the possibility that our skin my act as an antenna to broadcast information about us.

And suddenly a Shock! game was born. I attribute it to the AI that is emerging from the net. I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.

As you can see, no Dog’s review yet.

My computer died, it ate the review, it made me cry.

Maybe someday I’ll rewrite it.

So I’m going to start doing some game reviews. I’m going to start with Dogs.

I’m doing Dogs first for several reasons. First, I’ve now been playing the game for years and have played dozens of sessions with dozens of different people, and have talked with a lot more people about the game. I feel I have a good handle on what the game does, how it does it, and what the strengths and weaknesses of the game are. I feel that I can really review the game critically and honestly, and have a good chance of being accurate and possibly even insightful in what I say.

Second, its well known that I love Dogs. I’ve repeatedly gushed and raved about it, and so everyone knows about where I stand on it. I think it is a very strong game, and I want to talk about why that is in detailed terms — sort of creating a bar for discussion. However, I also don’t think it is a perfect game, and there are some issues with it that I will be talking about. This too is a bar for discussion.

Which leads to the third reason: there are many ways in which the future reviews are going to build off of the Dog’s review. I won’t just be reviewing games in isolation, I will be comparing them to each other and talking about how they reflect, progress, or assume upon conventions and paradigms of game design. This is because, in my not humble opinion, reviews should be more that “do/do not buy” guides or lists of one liners and snark designed to show how clever the reviewer is or how in with the crowd and down with the hotness they are. Good reviews should help form a community of discourse that can help consumers find the right material, but also to help push and spur the community and designers. They should also give enough material for consumers to decide on their own about a game, rather than looking to the numerical score so as to rely on the judgment of others as to the report card grade of a game.

I have to admit I’ve been spurred in this by several recent articles about book reviews and their import. From Salman Rushdie talking about the importance of book reviews with Stephen Colbert to my personal reflections about Walter Pater, to opinion pieces about what’s gone wrong with reviews, there has been much entering my mind of late about the way that reviews and criticism, when done right, are actually constructive and promoting of a community. I do not think that the majority of RPG reviews in the past have come up to that level. Some have, and there are a small handful of people whose work I will be using as inspiration, but looking back on my own work in reviews in the past I’m disappointed. I want to do something better. Maybe I fall on my face, maybe not.

So… first: Dogs. After that I’ll try to do one or two a month. Beast Hunters and Polaris will probably be the next couple, with TSOY and Trollbabe coming close after.

So Mo and I are getting into Beast Hunters. I’ll be posting a review soon.

In the meantime I’ve done up some cheat sheets to help keep from having to flip and look up the first few times you play the game. (Its easy once its down, but to keep it flowing smooth, I thought the sheets would be nice.)

You can download the .pdf right here: Beast Hunters Cheat Sheets.

(I also have this zany idea about doing a Beast Hunters hack to run White Wolf’s new Scion game, but more about that later. Maybe.)

So the post for this week is just another link, to a redraft of How to Draw Superheroes. I find it awesome and funny.

There’s a new gaming forum up, not just for RPGs but gaming in general. It’s focus is a feminist-oriented community for women who love gaming and men who want to network with and learn from said women.

It is The IRIS Network and I wish it well. If all my talk about sexism and inclusion turns your crank, you should check this one out.

Recently in a thread on Knife Fight, I said:

As we move back and forth between games where you play a character, games where you tell a story through a character, games where you tell a story based around a character, and games where you tell a story, we’re going to have to work out more advanced methods of knowing not just where and when we can step in, but where and when we should. I think we’re still in the early stages of that, and there is a lot of work left to do there.

I think this is something worth considering at multiple stages of game.

If you are designing a game you need to let your audience know how to play it. We all know this, right? Okay, so if you are marketing a game that is about telling a story without focal characters to the existing market of RPG players who are used to playing a character, you need to have some specific guidance for them (system based as well as explanations) as to what that means. Some games already do this to greater and lesser degrees — for example, its hard to read Universalis and not know that a game of it is inherently going to be different than a traditional game of Vampire. The very way the game is set up, talks about character and focus, and shows examples of play all say “this is not about playing a character, it is about telling a story.”

If you are GMing a game with different assumptions than your group normally uses, you might want to talk to the other people about what to expect about the game play. I don’t mean long painful conversations, but a short “in this game you aren’t playing a character as much as you are telling a story through your character” talk is probably not out of order the first time you’re playing a new game or a new style of game. Forewarned is fore armed, after all.

I’ve actually had an AP experience on that note that was shockingly revealing to me. I have a friend that is an awesome RPer. He’s hardcore and deft in his portrayal of character, and has recently been making strides in thinking about story in RPGs with startling speed. But there were occasional bumps in the road. So one night we played My Life With Master, and I explained it as a story game about the fall of a master being dethroned by his servants, and oh by the way you play the servants. I didn’t even do this consciously, I was just thinking in those terms that night. But because I described it to this player as something other than “an RPG where you play a character” in a direct fashion, that night he came instantly and consistently to address of premise and worked harder at making the story work than making his character work. (The character still worked out awesomely well, btw.)

Now, to be honest, games on the far ends of the spectrum are probably the easiest to explain. If you are telling a story and don’t even have characters that you’re playing — or all share the same character (City of Birds?) — then it’s pretty easy to differentiate from an immersionist RPG in which the whole point is to be in one character and who cares about story. Its the games that do the lines in between, the ones that are in blurrier boundaries of telling a story through a character and telling a story based around a character, that you need to pay particularly sharp attention.

How is this game going to deal with it when the character is forced to do something the player of that character would not want to happen? If it is a physical action or failure? What if it is an emotional response, such as being forced by a dice roll to say that this character now loves someone that they hated five minutes ago in such a way that the player can’t even understand why it happened?

Its worth thinking about this kind of thing because for a lot of established players, play is something they do largely by instinct, precedent, and an many unexamined techniques and assumptions about “this is how you play an RPG.” (And no, I’m not talking about Forgites vs. non or any such thing. Everyone I’ve ever played with does this to some degree. I know I do it a lot.) So if you are doing something with a game that might require a different stance, it helps a lot in getting over the rough bumps if you set your game up to obviously follow a different stance. Let people know up front that they shouldn’t be trying to tell a story, or they shouldn’t be trying to control their characters emotions, or whatever specifics are needed to smooth the road for the kind of play you want your game to have.

And, of course, as a player in a game it behooves us to pay attention to what we are being told about the game and adjust our play as much as possible to fit with what is going on. Just because the game is asking something different of us doesn’t mean it is wrong, but it may mean that we need to change how we approach it. (Even if that change is not playing that game anymore.)

Of course, that requires that you know what kind of play you want your game to have, which is probably why its so damn hard.