You have a single prize to award to one noun — person, place, thing, or event — in recognition of excellence in gaming for the previous year, from July 2010 to July 2011. This is a prize of celebration and recognition only. No trophy, no money, no stickers, no medals.
What do you call your prize?
To what do you award your prize for the past year?
The short list for this year’s Diana Jones Award has been revealed and, as is ordinary for these extraordinary awards, it’s a wonderful list. I got it from Robin D. Laws’ livejournal, but Matt Forbeck has the list all linked up: Diana Jones Award Press Release. It’s the home of the press release until the official DJA website gets descriptions of the nominated games posted (and this year they’re all games), sooner or later.
In alphabetical order, the nominated games are:
I (Will) am a big fan of the Diana Jones Awards. They represent a degree of raw enthusiasm and appreciation that I dig. I can’t wait to find out what wins.
Just a quick note tonight. If you haven’t yet read it, you might well find something provocative in Ben Lehman’s newest guest-post at Vincent Baker’s blog: Rules and Their Functions. Besides being a thoughtful read on its own, it has got a great discussion happening in its (albeit unthreaded) comments section.
The thrust of the piece is that RPG rules fall into two distinct types—continuous rules and immediate rules—that we interact with in meaningfully different ways during play. From Lehman’s post:
Rules in role-playing games perform two distinct functions, and for the moment let’s say that they fall into two distinct types. There are what we might call “continuous rules,” which continually shape our play process. Examples of this might be “I’m a GM; I control the world and the minor characters” [...]
Alternatively, we can think of rules which perform immediate, direct functions on the fiction of the game. We might call these “immediate rules.” These are rules like “when you act under fire, roll 2d6. On a 7+ …” [...] They are engaged only in specific, immediate instances.
I’ve talked elsewhere about implicit and explicit rules in RPGs, about things that are presumed to be understood and things that benefit from (or outright require) being stated outright, and the difference therein. I talk in panels and seminars (as I will at Gen Con this year) about establishing things and then letting them run in the background, and I think it’s fair to describe (some of?) those things as rules. For me, the foreground/background, active/passive, explicit/implicit language fits my head better than continuous/immediate, but we’re not talking about exactly the same thing… and I’m about to conflate Lehman’s post (which is about rules) with dramaturgy and setting, so maybe I should stop.
Anyway, I found myself nodding along with a lot of what Lehman was saying in this post. I’m still meditating on it (and am finding the discussion loaded with jargon that I’m not always in love with), but for sure I’ll be thinking about this post as I press forward on this summer’s numerous RPG projects. Go forth and do thou likewise, if you’re so inclined.
Did you read these posts? Over on his blog, Ryan Macklin wrote about what he calls use-whenever stats and why they don’t quite work for him:
Give me a situation and a generic approach, and I’ll make them fit. Which really means I have these three stats:
- d10 Be a successful-but-one-note character
- d8 Show a but more color to your character, at a penalty
- d6 Like I’m going to use this stat
This sparked a post from Dan Maruschak about emotional versus rational decision-making in RPG play, in which Maruschak considers the psychological aspects of the issue:
When one choice is obviously mechanically better then the rational part of the player’s brain will feel obligated to pick the most mechanically advantageous option, even if the emotional part of the brain thinks its an unsatisfying one. In my opinion, this kind of breakdown usually manifests as either one-note characters (if the player follows the obligation) or a reduced emotional connection to the game (since the the player is using emotional energy to deny the obligation and play the character “right”).
This is especially provocative to me, lately, because I’ve been playtesting a couple of games with widely applicable abilities—abilities that apply to certain plays based almost wholly on their fictional boundaries—and I’ve been considering the differences between pushing and pulling a player towards certain kinds of plays. It’s sometimes the difference between being enticing and being demanding, between procedure and provocation. Do you force a player-character to swing swords against shields first, or is that a strategy you make attractive through the interactions of abilities? Do you make attacks against armor or ennui mechanically identical but fictionally distinct? Is your audience invested enough in the fiction to make emotional decisions despite the rational consequences?
Can Forceful ever be as quick as Quick? What makes use-whenever stats equal versus making them identical? How much overlap can stats have in their Venn diagrams before they’re functionally interchangeable? I personally like stats to have a little overlap, to allow for creative play and multiple approaches to the same solution, but games with rigidly demarcated abilities are often tighter play experiences.
Want to fire a bow? That’s Dexterity. Want to swing a sword? That’s Strength. Without a feat, never shall they overlap. (In D&D, the overlap between Skills and other abilities is often up to the DM and often fluid.)
Want to Manipulate someone? That’s roll+hot. Manipulate someone with a show of force? To roll+hard and get a promise from someone might be a custom move—a bit of temporary overlap before the abilities snap back to their default positions. (In Apocalypse World, moves are practically mapped to hotkeys, though custom moves let you hotwire the whole thing.)
Anyway. I’m just thinking out loud right now.
What do you look for in RPG books describing or detailing historical periods of play?
Graham Walmsley asks over at the Story Games forums, and I thought I’d echo the question here, to get some more takes on the subject. What do you like to see? What do you need to see? What justifies the purchase or the time spent reading an RPG book when you could be reading a straight-up history book?
Turn it around, too: What irks you? What diminishes your enthusiasm for an historical setting for play? Has a book ever convinced you that a particular setting was a terrible time or place to play in? How did that happen?
I’ve long thought that part of any historical setting book’s job was to grant license to play amid the history. Not to observe or recite or recreate, but to play. That means giving out toys (in the form of people, places, customs, trivia) and permission and authority to experiment.
I’m tempted to say, here, that historical-setting books should actually be story guides. They should concern themselves with the stories to be found at the intersection of time and place—focus on the conflicts and the characters. Don’t just show us the proper way to address a Spanish duke (or whatever), but show me why I’d want to or what the consequences are for not doing it right. That’s conflict. Don’t just tell me who people were, tell me what they want and why they don’t have it yet. That makes them characters.
Fill the book with potential energy. Things should be on the verge of happening, whenever the book is set.
The truth, though, is that I’ve enjoyed plenty of game books that employ other approaches. So I don’t think it’s my way or the highway. Just thinking about this has me that much more excited to hear what you like in historical-setting books.
