I’ve wanted to do this but never have. Have you done it?

The idea is simple, the execution complex. For each major chapter in your RPG campaign, you use a different game to resolve the action. You hack and modify the games you want to use like crazy, some more than others. What starts as an investigation lead by various governments in a weary, war-torn metropolis leads to the highest tier of society (Cold City). There, in glorious and lavish penthouse ballrooms untouched by the war below, the glitterati dance and drink and dare each other  (via The Dance and the Dawn) to determine who gets whom. That leads to a Fiasco involving miserable spouses, true love, stolen diamonds, and broken hearts that return us to the lowest levels of the city.

Or what about a military campaign that plays out over a century, beginning with complex machinations and paranoia (via Burning Empires) before progressing to the madness of an all-consuming galaxy-wide war (via 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars) and finally culminating in the least likely soldiers fighting in the bombed-out remains of the last human city (via Grey Ranks).

A great many of these games don’t let many characters out intact, so the traditional notion of following a core cast of PCs on a long literal or figurative journey might not work out. Rather, it might be necessary to tie individual games together with a few standout characters—who are playable only in certain chapters, maybe—or narrative connective tissue like monologues, flashbacks, or just a recurring theme or motif that brings together what would otherwise be a loose anthology.

My gut says this idea would require a lot of cooperation, maybe to the point of demanding certain metagaming choices be made during play, but I think the unique satisfaction from pulling it off would be worth it for the group that finds this compelling. Remember, the game that covers the next chapter wouldn’t have to be preordained. It might be that whoever gets the happiest result of the Fiasco story gets to decide what the next chapter is about, for example, so this wouldn’t have to be a strictly planned experience.

What games might you connect into a campaign if you could?

Chicago, Illinois (© Will Hindmarch)

Each roleplaying game is a city.

This is what I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been turning over definitions of roleplaying games and story games in my head, these past few days. RPGs and cities are two of my favorite things to read about and explore. I love them for their emergent beauty and their complex identities. They are things made up of multitudes.

An RPG, like a city, has many inhabitants who may love the place for disparate reasons, see it different ways, live very different lives amid the same avenues and structures. We may not travel the city in the same way, we may be visitors or residents, we may support different teams or be regulars at different pubs—we may even think the other is not getting the proper local experience. Yet we are neighbors.

Each game has its own character and history and internal geography. We can say that your hometown and my hometown both have grids or boulevards or grand plazas and that helps us understand each other but it doesn’t attempt to wrap up the whole city, to contain it, bottle it up, or define it. We can say that one city has a lot of beautiful bridges and another has cultivated a dazzling skyline and appreciate both for their own charms without damning the other by comparison. We can prize one city’s grand plaza without reaching the conclusion that cities lacking identical plazas are “broken.”

Cities may have common climates, similar architecture, interwoven histories, while at the same time being too complex and too full of myriad tales, intersecting stories, moving individuals and unmeasured networks to be easily appreciated through summary. The planner who lays out the park can’t know how many couples will propose marriage inside it and how many will break up on its benches. Your London is a city of first loves, awkward kisses, and blurry first dates. Mine is a honeymoon spot, that place where I saw the big dog trapped at the bottom of tube escalators, where I ate a sandwich in the rain outside the Tate.

We don’t actually attend places, we inhabit places and times together. Our experiences—happy or sad, precious or common—may be statistically uncommon but no less genuine. I’ve been robbed in San Francisco and that does not make it a city of thieves and nor does that get me my stuff back.

Roleplaying games are likewise vast and experiential and emergent and poorly rendered through categorical descriptors. We talk about cities by sharing details, by offering advice, by giving directions that may not be the only ways to reach favorite spots. We can report on population density or elevation or annual rainfall and get one sense of a city but that is not the same as meeting people from that place and that is not the same as going there.

Successfully defining the word city (Oxford American tells me it means “a large town” or “an incorporated municipal center”) does so little to tell us what cities are actually like. If I say “Picture a city” and you picture Istanbul and I picture Tokyo we are both right. One is not more representative of the form than the other.

We can bullshit about populations and histories and skylines, we can defend our favorite city over beers, we can insist that New York is more quintessentially this and London is more iconically that, but none of those things takes us to the place and introduces us to the people and feeds us the food. Our citizenship can be long-standing and loyal, our dedication true, but none of that establishes our expertise over the form. Understanding the electrical grid of Miami doesn’t improve the plumbing in Cairo.

It seems to me that so many arguments about RPGs devolve into geographical trivia mistaken for indicators of quality. You say Chicago is a certain distance from Atlanta and I think it’s probably not that far. We could curse each other’s names over it yet, if we were together in person, chatting over drinks, I imagine we’d say something like, “Well, whatever, the point is, there’s this great bar I love in Little Five Points called the Porter, and if you get the chance, you should go there.”

Atlanta doesn’t become more Atlanta-like or “better” than Boston if we establish exactly how far either is from Tulsa. The yardage between burgs doesn’t tell us that much about the cities themselves. It doesn’t help us understand what a city is.

The metaphor’s imperfect. Of course it’s imperfect.

How far away is Apocalypse World or Night’s Black Agents? Depends where you’re standing.

Is your new game walkable? What do I care—I like cars, I like trains, and I’ve got time.

What’s the tallest building in Eclipse Phase? How high is Burning Wheel above sea level? Is that new Marvel RPG on the Gulf Stream? Did you know Mutants & Masterminds has more parks per capita than Technoir but that Technoir’s got citywide wifi? You know, D&D stands on the site of an ancient fort where many bloody battles were won.

Go to the places. See the sites. Come back and share your perspective, your photos, your stories. Love the cities you love. The cities stay cities, no matter what we say in this pub.

The Reverb Gamers blog prompts, from Atlas Games, have inspired quite a few game bloggers this month. The project offers thirty-one prompts for thirty-one days of January blogging. It’s a fine idea. Alas, without the time to devote to daily blogging, I’ve been working on the first 14 prompts slowly over the course of a couple of days. Here, then, are my first fourteen responses—some are serious, some are sass. All of these prompts got me thinking, though, and make me think I should write more about some of these topics.

Are you writing from the Reverb Gamer prompts on your site? Had any breakthroughs or realizations as a result? Point us to your answers in the comments.

On with it.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #1: What was your first roleplaying experience? Who introduced you to it? How did that introduction shape the gamer you’ve become?

My first RPG experience was ostensibly a game of D&D. It was a birthday sleep over right before I started sixth grade, it was right around my birthday, too, I think, and the DM was the father of the family hosting us. At the start of that night, one of the other kids was, in real life, a dreadful threat to my happiness and dignity (I was an easy target). We played with sketchy character sheets and a few ability checks made with the dice. We fed inputs to the DM and he fed us back images of giant scorpions, invisible thieves, and furious minotaurs. (My fighter slew the minotaur with one shot from his trusty crossbow, without any worry about AC or hit points.) By the end of that night, that kid I feared? He and I were laughing and scheming together about ways to get our loot out of the crumbling dungeon.

I started DMing after school later that week. I haven’t stopped yet.

(more…)

Again with War in the North.

I’m using this game to explore some questions because (a) I am currently playing it and (b) because it’s a relatable property even if you’re not playing it—I feel safe assuming that many of you have seen the Lord of the Rings movies or know of them. War in the North is a third-person action RPG set in the movie-adaptation version of Middle-earth (or something so close to it that its familiar characters and locations resemble actors and designs from the films). It focuses on a cast of new heroes battling Sauron’s forces mostly in environments drawn from Tolkien’s lore but not seen in the films.

This isn’t really about War in the North, though. It’s a flawed, fun game that I’ve been enjoying as a fan of Middle-earth and as a gamer looking for light RPG elements, a dose of combat, and some handsome scenery. Still, I can understand why it’s not connecting with some players and reviewers—it’s not a richly complex combat challenge or a deeply varied RPG experience. It’s a light, straightforward affair for casual co-op play and a good deal of Middle-earth sight-seeing.

No, I’m singling out War in the North again because of Game Informer‘s review of it, in which Joe Juba writes:

The conceptual framework is solid, and with some extensive tuning and polish, it would be fun to play. Just thinking of War in the North reimagined as an old-school isometric adventure (à la Dark Alliance) gets me pumped up…but it’s too late for that now. [via]

That bit got me thinking (again) about how games get reviewed.

How much should a game be marked down for driving a reviewer to want the game in a different form? Is it fair to penalize a game for not being another game? How much responsibility does a reviewer have to buy into a game’s premise when reviewing it—and how much of the premise must be accepted?

I mean, if a reviewer thinks that RTS game would make for a great shooter, is that a fair mark against the game—the fact that it is not some other game? I feel like that’s somehow analogous to complaining about a film’s genre or casting; these can be legitimate gripes (“The lead actor was a bad fit for the part”) but they can also go too far (“Tommy Lee Jones should have played the curmudgeonly mentor—I like Tommy Lee Jones—so this movie isn’t what it could have been”).

It’s not that a reviewer is out of line to say “This game made we wish for a new isometric RPG” or “This developer has had greater success with isometric RPGs” but to what extent should a game be faulted for not being something else?

I’m all for reviewers reporting their honest opinions. Isn’t there a difference between reporting one’s opinion and faulting a game for not sharing them, though? To some extent, I should not review RTS games because I objectively suck at them but were I to do so anyway, I think I’d separate my opinions of the medium from a value judgment of the game’s success at fulfilling its own promise. The very best RTS game still makes a crappy FPS.

To what extent should a reviewer grant the game its premise and measure how well it executed that premise—and not how close it came to what the reviewer’s prefers?

I think you should review the game you got. That can be tricky, though, especially as borders between game categories continue to blur. A game with RPG elements might make for a lousy full-on RPG but a great shooter. If a game’s marketing plays up its RPG elements, but the actual game focuses on its job as a shooter, is it fair to fault the game for the expectations set by the marketing department?

As artworks, as products—reviewing games is a complex business.

Here’s another thing that’s been open in my browser for a while: Mike Birkhead, via Gamasutra, asking “What makes combat fun?”

I love reading this kind of article. Birkhead gets into details in this piece, breaking down what combat actually is in a game and how we engage it. It’s tricky to capture and define fun, but Birkhead gives it a good go:

Combat is at its best when you provide the player with multiple valid Intentions and Action Sequences, and then constrain them through the situational context of their Goals, their Environment, and their Opponents. It sounds simple, when you read it, but we both know that it is not.

It seems to me that threads pop up at RPGnet and Story Games with some frequency asking about RPGs that rely on things other than outright combat to derive their thrills. Lots of games are about non-violent conflicts like racing, exploration, bidding, and so on, but violence seems to be the stock activity in so many games, from RPGs to (duh) shooters.

(I have a nascent RPG in some stage of development that’s about what happens after combat, as a response to this idea.)

Why is something so dreadful and frightening in real life the crux of so much of our fun? What makes it fun? When does it stop being fun?

What do you think?