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.

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I hesitated to post this here because this isn’t a Gameplaywright project, but you might be interested in seeing it all the same. I’ve launched my first Kickstarter campaign to fund the completion and publication of a story-game adventure called Always/Never/Now. Everything you need to know is at this link.

Truth is, I’m eager to talk more about this project but I’m focusing on work (on the Dragon Age RPG and Always/Never/Now especially this week) rather than blogging. If you’ve got questions or comments on the project, though, let’s hear them! I’ve already been inspired to add new language, material, and ideas to the project from requests on Twitter for one-on-one player support to game forum discussions of maps and theme. This is all material that was built into the project before but I’m re-energized and re-focused in great ways, now. So my attention is on writing games rather than writing about games, right now. Thanks for bearing with us.

To open this up a little bit, though, let me ask you: What about Kickstarter? As we close out 2011, what are your thoughts on Kickstarter and gaming?

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.

What about traits that emerge during play between characters? What about traits that describe a group of characters, like an adventuring party or a superhero team?

I’m thinking out loud about this because of something Sage LaTorra wrote about yesterday on Twitter. While discussing the place that group traits might have (or might not have) in Dungeon World, the dungeon-delving RPG he designed with Adam Koebel, he wrote: “[A] party sheet feels prescriptive, not descriptive.” [via]

I don’t agree. I don’t think a party trait is necessarily more prescriptive than an individual character trait. Dungeon World‘s “moves” are somewhat prescriptive as it is (they say, in part, “you can act on the game world in the following ways”) and that doesn’t seem to stand in the way of emergent play. Both Dungeon World and its applauded ancestor, Apocalypse World, use move mechanics to manage and systematize player inputs, yet the interaction of moves and their described outcomes can generate unexpected and provocative emergent fiction. This is true even though these games’ parts don’t interact on the order of, say, D&D 3 or D&D 4, with their hundreds of colliding feats and interacting powers. In Dungeon World, if your character has high Strength, she’s going to be good at the Hack and Slash move unless the vagaries of the dice say otherwise.

I thought Sage was talking about emergent play and it turns out I was right. While I was writing this post, Sage updated his position on party traits, writing, “teamwork and group-ness are emergent properties of working together.” [via] He continued: “So making a group a mechanical thing is denying that fun emergence in favor of codifying.” [via]

He’s talking about what I write about below, except he’s come to a different conclusion than I have.

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I’ve just scratched the surface of Lord of the Rings: War in the North but I’d been looking forward to this game for a while. What drew me in was its promise of an original story set in Middle-earth’s less-visited locales, like Mirkwood or the ruined city of  Fornost, all rendered with a mix of the movies’ art style and original visions of Tolkienesque landscapes. Plus it promised a chance to face down Orcs and Trolls in a cooperative slugfest, which sounded like it’d be fun if I could get anyone else to buy the game with me. (No luck so far.)

War in the North faces the problem that so many Gamemasters face when telling stories in licensed worlds, though. How do you get players invested in this tale when we know that the main thrust of the War of the Ring involves, you know, that infamous ring? Who cares about the stories Tolkien chose not to tell?

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