Thanks to Mikael Andersson, Kel McK and the rest of the Hammercon crew for taking good care of me at the inaugural run of their very promising local convention. An enthusiastic crowd showed up to play RPGs, card and board games. I’m guessing around a hundred attendees; maybe an organizer can pop in to tell us how far off the mark I am with that estimation. The event managed to feel cozy within the confines of the Sheraton in downtown Hamilton. The venue is showing its age a bit, but that’s okay, as the conference rooms are nestled together on a lower floor, creating a sense that the con is in its own separate zone within the hotel. The RPG events were largely held in three-table rooms, avoiding the din you sometimes get trying to run in large rooms packed with fellow roleplayers. doc_mystery has pictures.

The show boasted a strong RPG contingent, perhaps reflecting the interests of the organizers. There was both a strong indie orientation and a solid RPGA presence. I was happy to see HeroQuest 2 and Trail Of Cthulhu on the sign-up sheets.

My worries about a 9AM start time for my Skulduggery run turned out to be unfounded, thanks to an alert and enthusiastic group of players, and a triple espresso procured in the mall attached to the hotel. Although the game is designed for four-hour one-shots, I had to split up each scenario during my in-house test, as my home group can’t meet for that length of time. So it was reassuring to finally play it in its intended slot and find everything working as intended. The game includes four scenarios: pirates, US politics, high school drama club, and space merchants. For Hammercon I ran the last of these, “If Space Permits.” The game system throws a lot of narrative balls in the air and allows the group to focus on the threads that assert themselves most strongly as the story develops. This time around the group faced a cloned rival, cyborg debt-collectors and a drug-induced messiah complex. They underwent two separate trials, one for murder and another for heresy. Unlike the in-house group, they achieved their objective of cornering the market on Silurian jump wine, without any of their number amusingly vaporized or having to suddenly flee the planet.Thanks to Chris, Darcy, Kyle, and Mark for taking part.

After that I had a pause and a spate of brain crash, thanks to the early rising needed to get to Hamilton for a morning slot. Who knew it was possible to feel jet lagged without leaving the GTA?

A double espresso later, I was ready for the panels, which turned into one panel that changed topics halfway through. Jonathan Lavallee, Pieter van Hiel, and Darcy Burgess and I talked about pitching the new game you want to run to resistant players and the pros and cons of house rules. Excursions were made into the effect of ideology on your perceptions of what’s happening at the table, the consistency of Gygaxian orthodoxy, and why you shouldn’t print more copies to bring down the unit cost. We either kept the attention of a small but attentive group for two hours, or made them feel too guilty to sneak out.

The takeaway is that Hammercon is a serenely well-run little con with real growth potential. Worth the drive for any hobby gamers in the Greater Toronto Area.

Tags: gaming hut, on the road, skulduggery

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How We Decide, reviewed earlier, describes the cognitive mechanism that apparently governs our spending decisions. When we consider spending cash in hand, the insula, an area of the brain that reminds us to husband our resources, sends us a jolt of anxiety. (Author Jonah Lehrer then explores the way that credit card purchases do not trigger the insula, leaving the brain to follow its default preference for immediate gains over long-term consequences.)

When designing RPGs I often gravitate toward resource management mechanisms that require players to weight the trade-offs of immediate versus long-term need. Examples include hero points in HeroQuest, which can either be used to boost rolls in the moment, or to add to your ability ratings like experience points do in other systems. Dying Earth / Skulduggery and GUMSHOE both give you pools of points keyed to each ability, which you can spend to reroll failures or increase your chance of success, respectively.

These mechanisms elicit a certain degree of resistance during playtest. Compared to straight up rolls, resource management decisions make some players uncomfortable. Perhaps it’s because these decisions get their insulas firing. Pool or hero points are a resource in hand, like cash, which the miserly voice in the decision making process hates to part with. Spending makes us antsy. There’s even an element of gambling to many of these decisions, as they typically increase chances of success without ensuring it. (In the case of GUMSHOE general abilities, you can guarantee success by spending lots of points, if you have them. But you don’t necessarily know the difficulty you’re shooting to overcome and may overspend. Or may spend conservatively and then lose. That’s gotta piss off the insula.)

I value these moments of displeasure, and the corresponding micro-shot of dopamine that presumably accompanies success, because they emotionally cement players to important moments in the narrative. Strong drama is about tough choices. Dramatically resonant rules should mirror this essential narrative dictum by requiring tough choices from the players as well as the characters. These rules mechanisms require players to decide just how much they care about a given turning point. By spending a limited resource, they’re investing in the moment in both senses of the word. I can’t help thinking that these cognitive mechanisms are partnering with me, and the GMs, in bringing impact to that decision to care.

Tags: cognition, dying earth, gaming hut, gumshoe, heroquest, skulduggery

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Next Saturday, Oct 17th, I’ll be appearing as Guest Of Honor at the inaugural edition of Hammercon, a game convention in Hamilton, ON. In addition to a couple of panels in the late afternoon / early evening, I’ll be running a playtest session of Skulduggery. This will be a true test of one of the game’s key features: although it requires an experienced, improv-ready GM, it’s also easy to run—or so I claim. The game tosses a whole lot of elements onto the table and lets the players run with them in a self-propelling series of schemes and counter-schemes. The GM becomes reactive while the players take center stage. This game session will be at the terrifying hour of 9 AM, meaning I have to get up at a seriously ungodly hour for my trip to a nearby city. So if the session is any good, it will be due to the design, not to any measurable brain activity on my part. And coffee. I expect that there will be coffee involved. The downtown Sheraton will have coffee nearby, won’t it?

Hamilton is the hometown to several notable LJ gaming worthies, including pyat, doc_mystery, and now nottheterritory, recently fled from Toronto and my gaming group. In Toronto myth and lore, it is to us what Newark is to New York City. I will do my best to be a proper guest and not make any Hamilton jokes before or during my visit there.

If you’re in the area, come by and say hello.

Tags: gaming hut, on the road, skulduggery

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elgorade and an anonymous commenter left HeroQuest rules questions in the comments to my post on Thursday. I have seen them and do intend to reply. First, though, I seek your indulgence as I explain why I haven’t yet done so, these several days later. This has come up in the past and will again, so for future reference I’m making this a blog post of its own.

My ability to do rules support is unfortunately limited by the realities of freelance game writing. On any given work day, the main priority has to be my paid gig of the moment. It gets first claim on the finite pool of time and alertness that writing requires. Unlike a staff writer or a publisher who devotes time to the task as part of a general basket of tasks, any rules support I do is on my own time. I can justify it by stealing from the time budget I allocate to this blog, which is a combination of self-expression and self-promotion.

When there’s a question I can readily answer in a few lines off the top of my head, I’ll do that in a comment reply. However, the more interesting a question is, the less likely it is that I can dash something off. There’s a reason, in addition to time constraints, why designers don’t typically do rules support. Our nemesis here is Impromptu Redesign Syndrome. IRS strikes when the designer, foolishly thinking himself the master and commander of his own text, blithely dashes off an ill-considered answer to a rules query. In my designerly folly, I may think that I’m properly answering the question. In fact, unless I’m careful, I can easily contradict the more thoughtful answer that I actually took the time to write into the text, or otherwise contradict the rules as published. It’s not a pretty sight when you have to errata your clarifications.

Worthwhile rules support means checking the book and carefully understanding the question. I can justify the time it takes to do that only by counting it against my blog time budget. That entails turning a rules answers into a new blog post, and wrapping it into a broader point to appeal to the blog’s readership at large. Which I hope to do soon in the case of both of the aforementioned questions.

I also try to keep a balance between the topics covered on the blog, so it isn’t all HeroQuest or GUMSHOE or Hamlet or Cinema Hut all the time. Accordingly I’ll want to space out the supporty posts so that they don’t overbalance the blog’s other ingredients. The result will be a response time sadly bordering on the glacial.

For timely responses, you’ll do better to seek out the places where actual rules support happens.

For HeroQuest, that’s either the HeroQuest rules Yahoo mailing list or the Moon Design blog. Moon Design partner Jeff Richard has also been known to brave the waters of RPG.NET.

For GUMSHOE or the game-soon-to-be-reconfigured-as-Skulduggery, go to the Pelgrane Forums. Trail Of Cthulhu-specific support also happens on the Yog-Sothoth forums.

Thanks for your understanding on this.

Tags: gaming hut, gumshoe, heroquest, meta, skulduggery

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Previous posts in the series are here...

After deciding to tune the Dying Earth system, in its new incarnation as Skulduggery, for one-shots requires an alteration of rules structures pegged for long-term play. The most obvious example is the tagline system, which has always been central to the game’s fun. In DEPRG, you’re rewarded for adroitly weaving supplied lines of dialogue into your scenes. This is how you earn improvement points to scale up your character. In a one-shot game or short series, that reward becomes meaningless, and must be replaced with some other juicy carrot.

Another goal with the new design is to reduce the rules overhead—you need fewer crunchy bits to explore if you’re only playing for short stints. In DEPRG each ability has a different suggested means of refreshing the resource pool connected to it. (You use points in the pool to pay for rerolls of die results you don’t like, or to keep going in contests against other players.)

The solution to the first problem cleans up the second. Now you don’t perform particular actions to refresh a particular ability. Now you refresh them by using taglines. The more aptly you use them, the more pools you refresh—or can soon refresh, if you’re currently up to snuff.

During in-house play we’ve seen much more tagline use than in DERPG runs. I’m not sure if the current group simply finds them easier to use, or if the more immediate reward for using them has ratched up their use.

More later...

Tags: dying earth, gaming hut, skulduggery

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I’ve set my faithful LJ to autopost while I take a brief vacation. Please excuse in advance my failure to reply in a timely fashion to your comments.

[Previous installment here.]

During the lifespan of the Dying Earth game, we’d often hear back a variation on the following: “I’d love to run this, but I’ll never convince my players to do it.” The new design material in Skulduggery is all about overcoming that problem. The game acknowledges the dilemma in order to pull a ju-jitsu move on it.

A game spotlighting drollery and verbal dexterity, which deliberately undercuts the tropes of power fantasy of the adventure genre, can be a tough sell to a group of resistant players. Where GMs tend to be pollinating bees, wanting to try new systems, players can be more conservative. Skulduggery becomes an easier sell when pitched as a change of pace, or occasional lagniappe between more traditional fare. It tackles their resistance by reducing the initial commitment.

Skulduggery is therefore tuned for one-shot play. Character generation occurs in minutes and is radically simplified. (More on that later.) Characters are fitted not just to a genre/setting, but to the specific, single scenario you’re going to play. You only need the setting details relevant to the scenario. Driven by player schemes, the scenarios are loose and improvisatory.

Tuned for one-shots and low on prep time (assuming you have an unplayed scenario on hand), the game should be ideal for impromptu sessions and play at conventions.

The trick is to get people playing and having fun right away without having to overcome the hurdles they put up when they fear they’re making a multi-week commitment to a style they’re unsure of. The design is frontloaded to achieve this.

With Dying Earth we’d often hear players look at the game admiringly but with trepidation. They’d doubt their ability to pull off the Vancian language, not predicting how contagious it is in play. Then they’d sit down and play, and be brilliant at it after a few minutes. Sometimes afterwards they’d still claim that it was beyond them, even though they’d just proven otherwise.

Once you’ve overcome player resistance and shown them that they really do have the roleplaying chops they need to have fun playing Skulduggery, then you can look to the optional rules providing for campaign play.

The focus on one-shots requires certain minor adjustments to the system seen in Dying Earth.

More on that later...

Tags: dying earth, gaming hut, skulduggery

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As Pelgrane’s Simon Rogers revealed last week, I am currently at work on Skulduggery, a genericized version of the Dying Earth RPG rules. As of this writing, I’ve done the initial draft, am playtesting in house, and am about to shoot the results to Simon before taking a quick vacation. (If you want to participate in our outside playtesting, drop Simon a line.) I’m basically tweaking and repackaging an existing rules set, so I’m figuring there are no big secrets to conceal and will be occasionally posting about the design process here. Since we’re in the early stages, everything I say here is subject to change as we refine based on playtest results.

Superficially, the task seems similar to my brief for HeroQuest 2 (available at midnight on Wed PST): to take a rules set designed for a very specific and distinctive setting and expand it to fit a wide range of settings.

The impetus behind the projects is quite different, though. For HQ2, my task was not only to generalize the rules for any setting, but to bring the game back to its original design intent. This was to create a system enabling GMs and players to create stories using the same creative processes used by authors and screenwriters. (In the case of the Glorantha-focused original, it was to tell stories like Greg Stafford tells stories.) Over the course of its previous development, HQ had developed a simulation/world-modeling focus it wasn’t built to successfully execute. My objective was to make the new rules much more explanatory and analytical in teaching the narrative techniques it enabled. I also wanted to reduce the complexity of my original design, specifically the extended contest system, and to built in more options to use the resolution system in different circumstances. I’m very proud of the results and hope you check them out.

We’re turning DERPG into the generic Skulduggery because the license to Jack Vance’s famous fantasy world, which inspired the original right down to the reversal-filled die-rolling system, has lapsed. Perhaps perversely, the Dying Earth’s going out of print sale sold crazy numbers, bringing the game to wider attention just as the lights went out.

Here the rules are still well-tuned to their original intent, but need to be presented through a new framing device. My solution has been to make the game playable in multiple settings, but not to try to emulate every narrative well. It’s still tuned for stories of drollery, betrayal and verbal oneupmanship.

More later...

Tags: dying earth, gaming hut, heroquest, skulduggery

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Act V, Scene Ic: A) Confronting a priest, the priest in charge of Ophelia’s funeral, Laertes demands greater ceremony for Ophelia’s funeral, and is rebuffed.

If we were treating Laertes as a PC, this would be a failed persuasion interaction for him. Since we’re concerned about Hamlet, who watches unseen, we have to see this from the vantage of his procedural or dramatic progress. It serves as another reminder of Laertes’ temper, and thus his danger to Hamlet. The reminder of the threat he poses is procedural, and because it intensifies, we score this with a down arrow. It’s been awhile since we had a suspense beat, and the last one also underscored Laertes’ menace.

B) Hamlet realizes that the funeral is for Ophelia.

The dramatic irony completes itself: Hamlet now shares the audience’s knowledge of Ophelia’s death. He undergoes the shock and horror we’ve anticipated from him since the previous scene. As armadillo_king pointed out earlier, her death represents both a dramatic and a procedural setback for him. He loved her (if we accept the dramatically strongest choice for the actor playing him) and tried (though perhaps half-heartedly) to get her out of the way of his campaign of vengeance. So we mark this with both arrow types, both pointed down.

In an RPG, this would be the moment when the character gains information that the player already had. This is how our form resolves dramatic irony.

C) Seeing Laertes leap into the grave, Hamlet follows. A fight ensues as each seeks to proof the greater magnitude of his grief.

By allowing himself to be overcome with grief and anger, Hamlet sabotages his procedural goal in the course of seeking his emotional goal. He’s seeking emotional absolution, but impulsively employs an aggressive tactic. Not unexpectedly, he fails to get his emotional goal, too. Another pair of matched down arrows.

This scene reminds us of games like Pendragon or Dying Earth (and soon, Skulduggery) where characters must roll to avoid acting on their emotional impulses. It seems as if the player has been forced by his character’s emotional qualities to act against his procedural interest.



Check out the full map here.

Tags: dying earth, gaming hut, hamlet, skulduggery, turning points

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