You know that overused moment in film and television where someone levels a gun on someone else and issues an ultimatum? “Do what I say or I pull the trigger,” she says. “Talk or die,” goes the gunman. That sort of thing?

Does that decision arise in your roleplaying-game play? How about the variation where two serious people brandishing guns face off at gunpoint? How does your campaign (not necessarily your game mechanics) handle that?

This is fun stuff. It’s about designing a situation and not an outcome. It’s a pared down, high-stakes decision point. Would your character rather die than do this thing?

One important feature of this situation is clear: this is not a part of combat. This may be a statement, by the players or their characters, that they want to resolve the situation, that they want the stakes to be high (or are at least willing to accept high stakes), and that they want a single dramatic choice to reign, rather than a chaotic battle.

It is a pretty clear decision point, and potentially a classic impasse. One participant says “Do X or die” and the other says “Do Y or die.” It’s a dilemma.

Except, of course, the actual circumstance is often much more complicated, and that complication is essential to making the decision interesting. An actual “Do X or die” situation is simple and tense, but can be terribly un-fun—the target’s decision may hardly be decision at all. Is “take this forced action or stop playing” a good dramatic choice? No. So, “Do X or die” is actually “Do X or accept a risk of death,” which is more interesting, but also muddier, more complicated, and less predictable.

That muddy, complicated, unpredictable option might be more interesting, but those factors may also make it less desirable for the gunman, who must find the option more interesting than (and at least as easy to understand as) regular combat, or else the gunman’s player is unlikely to exercise that option.

Have you ever seen this next thing happen? A player says “I’ll go for his gun!” and then, when confronted with the grappling rules, says “Nevermind, I’ll just cooperate.” I have.

The reasons for beginning a standoff, as a player, must include simplicity, I think. Standoffs are staples of thrillers because they are bold, clear dramatizations. One or more characters demand, and one or more characters make defining choices. Simple, effective. If the setup and outcomes of this act are complex in gameplay terms, they are unlikely to be attempted much, if at all. That’s good if you’re trying to avoid them, but less good if you want your campaign to include these moments. (Whether you just like them or you’re trying to include them are touchstones of the genre or for some other reason is, for now, a separate issue.)

When I’ve done this, it’s with the understanding that a level gunshot to the head is not combat. Such a weapon is unlikely to deal 1d8+Dex damage, or whatever, and is more likely to propel the plot forward at muzzle velocity. Either someone ends up dead, and we deal with the consequences, or someone ends up an unlikely survivor (perhaps in a bloody chop-shop or underground hospital or remote monastic sanctuary) and the story is loaded up with revised or renewed stakes and motives.

A couple of other particular, iconic, and dramatic outcomes spring to mind:

• One participant relents and puts down his gun, as instructed. On film, almost never does the remaining gunman then fire anyway. (If he did, he’s a villain.) This is practically a rule—but should it actually be a rule in play? This is, essentially, a decision to forgo combat, at least for now.
• Both participants choose to abandon the standoff and enter combat as usual. (See Face/Off: ”Plan B. Let’s just kill each other.”) This may be an attempt to settle things through dialogue followed by a revelation that neither side is willing to die, right then, to settle things. So we settle it not just with dice but with a sequence of tactical decisions and randomization, possibly with escape hatches and lots of new inputs to consider.
• Everyone shoots, (almost?) everyone dies. Call this the Reservoir Dogs outcome.

How have you handled it? What game has mechanics for this that you’ve appreciated, hacked, or paid homage to?

An idea you don’t agree with might come to you in a metaphor. That metaphor is like armor on a bugbear. Striking the metaphor does not harm the bugbear.

Analogies, even weak analogies, can be ablative. Attack them and they may break apart, only sometimes revealing the argument underneath. You then have a chance to combat the argument—but this is where a lot of Internet discourse stops. The forumite writes, “Your analogy is imperfect, ergo your point is mistaken,” but that’s not necessarily true.

Fortunately, Sage LaTorra knows this. He has a good metaphor for how modular, home-altered rules can be relayed and function in the wild and he’s using it to make his position about the next edition of D&D (i.e. “D&D Next”) clearer. I think. (I sometimes disagree with Sage even though he’s a proven, cunning, forward-thinking designer. As if Dungeon World wasn’t evidence enough of that, read this post of his about putting D&D in a lunchbox.)

The metaphor: RPG rules are cookbooks.

Sage’s post, “The Rules Are Not A Thermostat,” presents the cookbook as an analogy for how to present and communicate RPG rules. Sage’s analogy isn’t perfect (are analogies ever perfect?) but his underlying point is pretty great. Players should be shown more than a list of components and told that they can combine into an exciting adventure experience. A game text should show you how to mix the ingredients to achieve certain results.

How is it imperfect? RPG play is less like chemistry than cooking is. It’s also even more subjective than cooking is, I’d say.

Recipes For Play

People buy cookbooks to get ideas for things to make, not to have their meals dictated to them, right? A cookbook’s recipes don’t carry the same implications as an RPG’s instructions. I’ve never heard somebody think of a cookbook as demanding we cook a certain way or GTFO, yet I see people on gaming forums get told to play something else (which is tantamount to “Play this way or get out,” to my mind) when they take issue with the way a book teaches. My trouble is in the point where Sage says the cookbook says “this is the dish you’re going to make,” except a cookbook never says that, does it? It says “if you want this, do the following.” I agree that RPG rules should do the same.

Recipes often assume the reader knows a few things about cooking. I’ve seen RPG manuals get in trouble for making similar assumptions. Not every cookbook repeats the instructions on how to caramelize onions. A cookbook that says “heat the shallots for five minutes” doesn’t have to tell you to stop if the shallots, you know, catch on fire.

A recipe might tell you to put in a certain amount of garlic to achieve a certain taste. Doubling the garlic might make the dish awful to some and a delight to others. It’s clear and obvious to say, “if you add more garlic, this dish tastes more garlicky.” It’s harder to put such a clear understanding in GM advice. If I say, “if you add more blood to your descriptions of combat, your game becomes grittier,” does that work? More blood is sometimes grittier and sometimes sillier. (I watch and dig the Spartacus show, so I know what’s up.) One person’s gritty fountain of gore is another person’s satirical spray.

A recipe presumes everyone wants to eat at the end of it but in games some people show up just to throw flour and hear things sizzle. To what extent can a gaming recipe tell you what the proper dose of seriousness is to get your players invested in the fate of fictional characters, especially while the joker at your table is adding doses of puns and farce to the mix? How many rounds does of combat before a player gets bored? Depends on the player, depends on the length of the rounds, depends on the fiction—depends on a lot of things.

The thing is, tastes vary. It’s not just a question of the right amount of spice. It’s a question of what garlic even tastes like.

Game sessions can become too complex for a recipe to be reliable. A recipe speaks to an outcome in a way that gameplay can’t always abide. A recipe can struggle against the notion of playing to find out what happens. I know I want chicken and garlic and tomatoes but I don’t know if I’m making soup or pizza until actual play.

If a recipe goes wrong, I know a lot of variables were in play—the quality or suitability of the ingredients, the quality or suitability of the utensils, the skill of the cook, the clarity or accuracy of the recipe, etc.—but I don’t declare the recipe “broken” or “hack” or “drift” the cookbook, exactly. I might vary the recipe next time or try another, similar recipe, or whatever, but I understand the recipe as a self-contained thing that might not undermine all other recipes in the book if I do it wrong. Recipes don’t interact the same way RPG rules do.

The Role of the Cook

I’ve long said, GMing is a skill, which means you can get better at it. That also means that reading instructions can get you going and save you some time but it cannot substitute for the mistakes you make and lessons you learn during actual play. Following one recipe doesn’t bestow more than a limited amount of experience or instincts.

Underlying all of Sage’s post is the echo of his earlier entry in his “Indies & More” column, which Sage writes in response to Monte Cook’s D&D-specific “Legends & Lore” column. I don’t want to imagine trying to write a design column every week knowing that Sage was going to pick it apart every week, challenging my design goals against the fact that other designers have had different design goals for other games. [Edit: Note deleted.] I don’t feel quite like either Monte’s or Sage’s columns represent my own position, frankly, but it seems to me that Monte is stating only what he thinks his game—D&D—should be like while Sage is telling Monte either what Monte’s own RPG should be like or what all RPGs should be like.

For example, Sage writes:

There’s one bit where I feel like the essay goes a little off the rails: “Empowering DMs from the start facilitates simulation.” First of all, why is the GM “empowered?” There isn’t some finite pool of authority split between the designer, the GM, and the players. The GM and the rulebook (i.e. the designer) work together. The GM isn’t there to fill in the details “the way no rulebook can.” A good rulebook is written to work with the GM, not provide some rules that the GM can then do whatever on top of. A rulebook fills in rules by giving the GM a system, including GM techniques and goals, to work with.

Sage is right in that many RPGs successfully take Sage’s approach to the GM power dynamic and yield great fun. Here, though, Sage is prescribing one GM dynamic for all games and the fact is that an empowered DM is a dynamic that works for lots of play groups and has for a long time. (I don’t agree with Sage’s implicit assumption that DM empowerment comes at the expense of player empowerment, either, but that’s another thing.) The DM as adjudicating renderer and processor may be old tech but it’s not outdated; the people who play that way don’t just not know any better, many actually enjoy it. They may enjoy Sage’s preferred style too and they are not required to choose a side in this scrap.

Sage’s post argues that a game should tell you how to play. I agree, up to a point, but that’s a notion some RPG players rail against. (This is an age-old conflict between the notion of “how to play” as meaning “how to carry out the process of play” versus “we’ll tell you what’s fun,” I think.) Not everyone wants the game to tell them how or what to play; they want it to facilitate the stuff they decide they want to do later.

For example, players may decide they want to be bloody reckless dungeoneers plundering monster lairs for ancient treasure who also go home and use their wealth to play a game of influence with lords and ladies. If the game wasn’t built for that game of influence, do the players just hit an invisible wall or get shuttled off to some other game when they attempt it? If D&D can support—with clarity and precision—both dungeon crawls and courtly intrigue, that’s great, right? Because I might want courtly intrigue to spur the next dungeon crawl in my campaign without having to switch from one game to another midway through my saga.

Some RPGs can say, “Play this game if you want A, B, or X,” and suggest that if you want other things you should hack it or play something else. (I’ll set aside, for the future, the question of why some RPGs get playfully “hacked” and others get bitterly “fixed.”) D&D doesn’t have that luxury. If D&D is perceived as not covering wide and diverse kinds of play, it gets lambasted.

To serve the audience that wants (or wanted) to self-identify as D&D players, the game has to offer access to many more possibilities and options—too many to strictly define “how you to play D&D.” By defining the limits of D&D, you make it easy for people to identify when they have left the territory. Wizards of the Coast’s designers, to capture and maintain a robust and diverse audience of people playing different campaigns and play styles, presumably want people playing on the periphery, on the outermost marches of the land, to still identify as citizens of the republic.

The more precisely D&D says “Do this and you’re playing D&D” the easier it is for people to feel like they’ve detached from the game, even if most of what they’re doing is still descended from D&D. Of course D&D doesn’t want you to engage some other game for the political intrigue with the king’s family and some third game for the chase through the swamp and so on. It wants you to chase down the king’s traitorous brother in the swamp, using the magic items you won in the dungeon, and see that it’s all D&D.

Serving Suggestion

As I was writing this, Robin Laws wrote on his blog about the power of core gameplay and elasticity, and as usual said it better than I have:

But it’s much easier to establish your alternate core activity if the one provided as a baseline is readily apparent and strongly realized. If told that they can do anything in a game, players get stumped. If told they can do X, they may do X, or they may decide to do Y instead. The presentation of a choice, even if that choice is rejected, orients players and allows them to test their desires against the expectations the game presents.

Having a core activity and accurately teaching the dynamic of the game are both important, but elasticity is not a vice. D&D is free to declare the DM empowered and would do well to teach DMs how to DM in a way that is clear, easy to reference, and inspires confidence. If that method bestows extra authority on the DM, that’s a design decision they’re allowed to make. D&D may get both its desired elasticity and vital core gameplay out of creating a DM/player dynamic that is teachable, provocative, and rich even if that dynamic is not the one Sage would pick.

So the cookbook needs to contain a diverse and carefully cultivated array of recipes that match varied and contradictory expectations while also teaching core cooking techniques that other cookbooks might presume readers already know. (Like how to caramelize monster stats or know when a social encounter has reached the right temperature, just to drag this metaphor nearer the cliff.) That’s a tough challenge, but I applaud the D&D designers for taking it on.

We used to say that an RPG system was akin to a language. I think that’s apt, if likewise imperfect, though I like how it interacts with the notion of actual play as a conversation (since it is). The thing is, all the analogies are imperfect. RPGs aren’t exactly anything else but RPGs.

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?

Gamemastery NPC Illustration by Tyler Walpole (© Paizo)

I laid out seven cards I’d selected from Paizo’s GameMastery deck, Urban NPCs, in a row at the middle of the table, where both of my regular players could see them.

Without any preview or overview, I tasked my players with answering the questions below. (I actually even changed the order of the questions at the last minute as I rethought the questions I was hoping would arise during the process.) We shifted the cards around the table to indicate different answers and create a quick sort of infographic describing the NPCs’ relationships with the PCs—allies were pushed above the baseline, enemies below it, dead characters were flipped over, etc.

This is part of my Dragon Age RPG (#DARPG) playtest campaign, where I try out not only new AGE System mechanics for the Dragon Age world but experiment with different techniques and styles of play. I do this all the time, in almost everything I run. From week to week I might riff on questions of pacing, timing, narrative authority, unreliable narration, and all sorts of other tricks, to give individual adventures distinctive feelings. For this particular Dragon Age campaign, we’ve been keeping separate character sheets for the characters at three different levels (3rd, 5th, and 7th now) and flashing back and forth between levels to tell nested and interwoven stories. (I’ll write more about that next.)

Because we’ve been playing the characters across multiple levels simultaneously, these relationships work a little differently than they might in another campaign. Thus we can introduce a character at an earlier point of the story knowing—all of us together—that he or she will end up feeling a certain way about the PCs later on in the story. That adds a dramatic bit of foreshadowing as well as a bit of narrative structure to climb on like a jungle gym.

We can even hop over the actual incidents that changed the characters’ relationships, since there’s little suspense there, and decide what happened in the intervening levels through alluding dialogue (“I can’t forgive you for leaving me on that island.”) or out-of-character exposition (“Remember, now that you’re not romantically involved anymore, he probably doesn’t want to see you.”). If we do choose to play out the actual scenes where relationships dissolve, solidify, or otherwise change, we may do it without engaging the dice because there won’t be questions of success or failure in involved—we’ll be dramatizing a process for which we already know the result. That can be a fun play space, too, including plenty of opportunities to riff on the facts and introduce meaningful surprises while respecting what’s come before (for us, the players) and what we know is to come (for the characters).

Here are the tasks in the order we did them:

1. Two of these characters are enemies or rivals by 7th level. No matter how you feel about them, they are opposed to you now. Pick them now.
2. Two of these characters are allies or cohorts. No matter how your dynamic starts, they are friends or allies now. Pick them now.
3. One of these characters is alive at 5th level but dead by the time you’re 7th level. Pick that character now.
4. One of these characters has a romantic dynamic with one of you—it might be mutual, it might be a love triangle, it might a one-sided infatuation. Pick that character now.
5. You are indebted to one of these characters. You might owe money, service, or your life or freedom. Pick that character now.
6. One of these characters has information or an object you want. Pick that character now.

In actual practice, I deviated from this a bit. Since we had a couple of characters get multiple answers, I assigned the sixth answer to one of the remaining, unselected characters, just to diversify.

Once that was done, I revealed a final wrinkle:

• Two of these characters are turncoats. They may not be what they appear for long. They may turn against you or switch to your side.

Dragon Age Set 1 from Green Ronin Publishing

Which two characters? I predetermined that before I dealt out the seven cards and started the players’ selection process. The turncoats may not live long enough for their embedded loyalties to be revealed, they may be driven into corners or welcomed into the fold through actual play before they can change their stripes—the players still have the power to act on those characters, in other words—but the two characters I preselected have built-in goals and loyalties that go into the mix along with the players’ choices. The rest of the NPCs I put on the table get characterized now, between sessions, to fit the decisions the players made about them.

We then worked together to stat up one of those two cohorts as a companion warrior (a tank, in this case) to help the PCs in forthcoming battles.

Notice that, to start, the players have very little information to go on. They’re choosing their enemies and allies based on the most superficial features. Still, they had enough information to go on to make some surprising and provocative decisions. Both of the PCs are Dragon Age elves (one’s a city elf, one’s Dalish), with subplots about fighting for elf rights in a human-dominated world, yet they chose the only elf in the lineup to be an enemy. It surprised and enticed me as much as it did them, I think. As they moved the cards around on the table, though, interesting combinations of answers emerged and they naturally made choices that they wanted to play out or deal with the fallout from later. They didn’t shy away from drama. They created rich situations that they wanted to know more about and also wanted to play with.

The NPCs are toys, like building blocks, which the players used to build a playground.

In case you’re curious, my players ended up pairing off some of the choices in really compelling ways. They are indebted to a dead dwarf and have a romantic entanglement with one of their enemies. So we have two sources of inspiration and action awaiting us: we can dramatize the circumstances by which predetermined facts come about and we can play to find out how these circumstances get more complicated (or maybe even resolved).

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

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.

Apparently, I’ve recently taken to talking about roleplaying games and story games with one of my weekly gaming groups in a particular way. What way? I don’t know, exactly. I was just blathering something about how I thought this or that was “more of a story game than an outright RPG” (sic) and one of my players—who has played a lot of RPGs and storytelling games but doesn’t participate in online debates about their territory and definitions and badges of honor—asked me to clarify. What did I mean by “story game,” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s a good question.” Do I even know? If I did, I don’t know now. If I do know now, I probably won’t know tomorrow.

Fortunately, Mike Sugarbaker approaches the question with more poise and smarts than I have, lately. Thanks to a thread on Story-Games, I found this post by Sugarbaker: “What is a roleplaying game?”

An excerpt:

What Gygax and Arneson did that made their game the hit it was, and the classic it remains, was to open the loop. They deliberately put a place in their rules for wandering out of the loop and making stuff up, and the stuff you made up could come back into the loop of the rules, and determine in part how the rules created new states and conditions.

(Sugarbaker’s post even cites our book, Hamlet’s Hit Points, by Robin D. Laws, which is a treat.)

Now, although I feel I do have a dog in the field, hunting for these elusive definitions, I have a lot of appreciation and sympathy for hunters in different fields. In that Story-Games thread, the terrific Jason Morningstar questions whether a label like story game informs a potential customer more than the word game alone. Good question. What does story game actually communicate—to the gamer, to the roleplayer, to the newcomer?

What do we gain by separating story game from roleplaying game? What do we get if we put one box inside the other? What do we gain by bottling the waters at all? Brace yourself: I don’t know. More to the point, I’m not sure anymore. The more I play, the more I want to relate to and talk about individual games and the less I want to imagine some kind of invisible armature on which they must hang.

I’m going to write more about this. I can hear it coming like a distant train. In the meantime, though: What do you think?

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.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #2: What is it about gaming that you enjoy the most? Why do you game? Is it the adrenaline rush, the social aspect, or something else?

Some days I game to visit other places, sometimes just to play with my friends, sometimes for the thrill of keeping a narrative aloft as long as possible—it varies.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #3: What kind of gamer are you? Rules Lawyer, Munchkin/Power Gamer, Lurker, Storyteller/Method Actor, or something else? (Search “types of gamer” for more ideas!) How does this affect the kinds of games you play? For example, maybe you prefer crunchy rules-heavy systems to more theatrical rules-light ones.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #4: Are you a “closet gamer?” Have you ever hidden the fact that you’re a

gamer from your co-workers, friends, family, or significant other? Why or why not? How did they react

if they found out?

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #5: Have you ever introduced a child to gaming, or played a game with a

young person? How is gaming with kids different than gaming with adults?

I’ve introduced a few new gamers to RPGs, sometimes successfully. That said, I haven’t played an RPG with kids below 12 or 13 years old, I don’t think. Kids need wrangling and constant inputs—in my experience, they want new things to react to and build on at a fast pace. They want to see immediate reactions in the game world, so that every action gives back vital telemetry. And why wouldn’t they?

New gamers, regardless of age, also seem to trust the authority of the GM in a way that experienced players sometimes grow to question. For some players, this happens quickly, especially as rules are visibly engaged. “Why can that monster do that?” I might get asked. Or, “Why is the difficulty only 10?” Or a hundred other questions that suggest either a suspicion of someone else’s narrative authority or a curiosity about the wizardry going on behind the curtain of play. All that said, I think that’s more about hours logged in play and less about player age. In other words, I haven’t logged enough hours playing with kids to answer this question with confidence.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #6: Describe your all-time favorite character to play. What was it about him/her/it that you enjoyed so much?

Seriously, I don’t know. Some of my favorite characters to play have been NPCs in long-running campaigns of mine, whether it was the pious interstellar fighter pilot with the callsign of Avarice or the laid-back underground spymaster and benefactor who’s integral to the storyline of Always/Never/Now or someone else, I can’t say.

I don’t attach as strongly to my own PCs because I feel like I have less control over them, so often. I often engage with characters by showing how they change over time and the dice (or the collision of PC agendas) sometimes work against my vision for character progression on my own PCs. I don’t get too attached because what if they die? What if the dice suddenly conspire with the GM to declare my character to be inept or lax? Often I avoid getting attached to my PCs because the idea I have for who they are doesn’t last long—they have to adapt to the circumstances and tactics of the adventure. I don’t inhabit them the way an actor might, I write for them. This gives me greater adaptability and helps me avoid fighting back against compelling but unwanted inputs from other players and the GM. Otherwise, historically, I rail against challenges that diminish my character concept or keep me from playing the persona I had in mind.

As I’ve said before, the character you create for play often ceases to exist once play begins. You have to be ready to follow the character where the adventure takes him or her. Thus I tend to make characters who are at the end of one arc, rather than the beginning of one. I don’t have to prove that this character is an ace pilot, she should be able to start off that way. The question is, what is she going to be next?

I’ll write more about this soon, I hope.

All that said, I really liked playing Mr. Fishman, my first woeful and ill-fated Fiasco character. And I had a weird Western-themed D&D sorcerer named Early who got magic powers after surviving a cannon blast; I dug him.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #7: How do you pick names for your characters?

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #8: What’s the one gaming accessory (lucky dice, soundtrack, etc.) you just can’t do without? Why?

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #9: Have you ever played a character of the opposite sex. Why or why not? If yes, how did the other players react?

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #10: Have you ever played a character originally from a book/TV/movie? How did the character change from the original as you played? If not, who would you most like to play?

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #11: Have you ever played a character that was morally gray, or actually evil? Why or why not? If yes, did you enjoy it?

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #12: Do prefer collaborative or competitive games? What do you think that says about you?

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #13: Who’s the best GM/storyteller/party leader you’ve ever had? What made him/her so great?

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #14: What kinds of adventures do you enjoy most? Dungeon crawls, mysteries, freeform roleplaying, or something else? What do you think that says about you?

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?

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.

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.

Fiction and characterization absolutely emerge in the space between characters, I think Sage and I agree on that. Teamwork, yes, can also be an emergent property of play with a party of characters. I don’t agree, however, that teamwork is only emergent or that codification quashes emergent play. All those codified feats enable emergent play in their chaos, after all, both within a single character’s abilities and within a party.

Friends in Battle

I’m thinking, now, about two examples of teamwork in my RPGs. I tried to codify player groups a bit in the Feng Shui book, Friends of the Dragon, of course, in which teams of characters get access to schticks and abilities that change the way they fight and heal together. (Most of those schticks are foggy to me, now, and might be improved by speaking more directly to ideas we know now as the fruitful void and the social contract, but what’s done is done.)

I also think about the characters Min and Hench from a long-running D&D 3 campaign. These characters were built to fight together, designed to take advantage of battlefield modifiers and the powers of individual characters. Min was a Tiefling with the ability to conjure darkness and Hench was a blind half-orc monk who fought as well in the dark as he did in the light. Min darkened the battleground and Hench throttled the poor saps who were stuck, blind, in the zone of darkness. They developed a small retinue of tricks and tactics to keep bad guys at their mercy, riffing on their core combo of abilities like invisibility, silence, martial arts, and darkness.

(To be fair, though, Min and Hench didn’t last long—the players got bored of the schtick and moved on to other characters eventually. This probably says something about the importance of characters being individually satisfying and something about the emergent possibilities of their routine feeling exhausted. I’m not saying that emergence can’t be restrained by abilitiy selection, only that it need not be.)

Modeling Teamwork

Teamwork needn’t be solely emergent, though. It can be modeled through a savvy set of character builds, just like an expertise over magic or thievery can be. RPGs don’t have to be tactical tests of teamwork, do they?

Why do I need player skill to master a dynamic between my fighter and your thief even though neither of us needs player skill to be better at those individual roles? My skill as a combatant isn’t dependent on my knowhow as a player, so why can’t we depict an experienced working relationship between two characters with stats? Do I the fighter’s player need to develop actual secret hand signs to represent a years-old familiarity with the thief and her player? That’s fun for some players but a chore for others.

Rewarding Teamwork

Looking back at Sage’s original terminology of prescriptive versus descriptive powers, though, let’s consider the possibilities of descriptive traits that recognize emergent play—of actual game abilities that emerge and are written in response to actual play.

Emergent inter-character dynamics can maybe best be recognized by designing special content that recognizes the emergent ability in game terms. It’d be like developing a special feat that grants two characters a bonus when they fight side-by-side with the right weapons. That ability may seem prescriptive if written prior to play (because it tells the players “you’ll do better than usual if you fight this way”) but descriptive if it were written as a reward for two specific characters (because it says “we discovered or established during actual play that you two fare better when you fight this way”).

Can’t teamwork be incentivized with codified mechanics? Can’t a teamwork trait be part of the reward cycle? Imagine a D&D feat with a prerequisite that reads something like, “Defeat an Elite while staying within 3 squares of your cohort.” (Or whatever.) First you have to demonstrate actual teamwork and coordination to pull that off, then you get rewarded with a mechanical expression of your teamwork.

It’s a question, in part, of whether the players interact to exploit the game or the game rises to meet them and reward their exploits as characters.

Dungeon World is comfortable saying “the GM will describe it” (e.g., “Last Breath,” p. 26) and the GM will offer a “hard bargain” (e.g., “Defy Danger,” p. 23) so why can’t it say “the GM adds a new outcome option to this team-based move reflecting the ideas you came up with while playing,” I wonder? I mean, consider a hard bargain for the Defy Danger move that asks the player to choose which party member gets hit by the poisoned-arrow trap’s shot. That’s a hard bargain that might get systematized by a group and incorporated into a lot of Defy Danger rolls—the game can handle that kind of adaptation.

Do traits that occupy the space between multiple characters (like Bonds do for two characters at a time) inhibit emergent play? I don’t think they do. Fiasco’s characterization mechanics exist solely between characters and they serve as a starting place rather than an inhibitor—a married couple can get divorced in the first scene of actual play. Emergence doesn’t stop when things are codified. As long as players have room to riff on the fiction and describe a trait in action, emergence shall persist.

In the Dungeon World

All that said, what would be the right way to handle party-level traits or moves for Dungeon World? I don’t have a good answer yet. Mechanics might emerge for travel sequences (in which the group cooperates to journey to Death Mountain or whatever), cooperative Discerning Realities (in which the whole party shares information, but no one can keep a discernment secret from the rest of the party), or a coordinated Parley (in which the group can persuade or promise as a whole by rolling +number of cooperating allies or something). Other hooks for party play might include the highest or lowest Bond in the group, some centralized trait like Trust or Reputation (so by joining you take on the company’s rep), or even just a selection of Looks and Names to get things going.

I think it’s probably true that Dungeon World doesn’t need party mechanics—the game plays great as-is—but I think exploration is good. More importantly, I think emergent play reveals itself even when tangible landmarks like traits and moves are introduced to a fruitful void. Such things can easily be subtracted to restore a fruitful void’s true emptiness, but they may also be the markers along the path for some players.

Codification might change the place from which things emerge, but I believe emergence is too tenacious to be easily thwarted.