Sympathy for the Devil

This month I am creating a game for NaGaDeMon 2016. You can follow along from the beginning.

I've played a few more pieces of Texture to see how people have been using it. There's not a lot out there yet, especially with regard to the investigation mechanics I'm thinking about using. I guess I'll have to be the one to make them?

That's not to say I haven't stumbled upon a few interesting tidbits. Em Short's Endure involves translating and contextualising a piece of greek text from The Odyssey, and I think a similar mechanic would work for my (provisionally titled) graveyard game.

As a first step towards the design, I'm imagining that the "main screen" of the game will be interacting with a newspaper. You'd be able to [read], for example, the {front page}, {funnies}, and {obituaries}. You'd be able to [think about] certain highlighted people's names, locations, etc. The resulting text would reflect the POV character's perspective on the topics. You could also [note] certain topics, perhaps adding new verbs to your list.

There are several pieces in the Texture library one could essentially consider spam. Like there's one that is just an ad for someone who'll write essays for you. Another that's a little more interesting is a simulation of encountering a consultant at a trade show. I'm not sure it was intentional, but at one point the consultant asks for your contact details and you have the options to [give card], [give fake number], or [leave]--and if you hold [leave], no words are highlighted so you can't actually do it. Aside from being really funny in the context of playing an advertisement presumably written by the consultant you meet in the simulation, the idea of having an action that you can't do is a useful tool (which of course has been used to great effect in other interactive fictions like Rameses and Depression Quest. We'll see if there's an opportunity to use it in the graveyard game.

I've been thinking about the POV character, and the difficulty of encouraging the player to identify with the person they will inhabit despite the whole digging up corpses for a blood ritual thing. I don't want the PC to be like Dexter or Walter White where you root for them almost just because they're the protagonist, in spite of all the horrible things they do. I want the player to understand or at least empathise with the PC when they feel they have no choice and need to do this horrible thing. This can happen when the blood ritual is being done to stop something even -worse- from happening, something that the PC genuinely believes will absolutely happen if the ritual isn't completed.  I want to stay away from the Mythos as well, as a) it's been done and b) I'm not that into it. I'm put in mind of Mr Tuttle in Punchdrunk's immersive theatre production The Drowned Man. My interpretation of his story and his one-to-one scene is that he is aware that some horrible things are happening in town and he wants to stop them, but in order to do so he's gotten into some weird bad blood magic and has cracked under the pressure.

I don't think I'm a good enough writer to adequately give these experiences to players of the graveyard game, but uuuuh aim high I guess!

Next: either more theoretical procrastination by formalizing some of this design, or actually trying a prototype in Texture!

Atmospheric Conditions

Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: describe the ideal game room if your budget were unlimited.

I'm a big fan of setting the right atmosphere for a game. I try to always have theme music and appropriate ambience playing for games I run. For some halloween one-shots in the past I've played around with everything from using only a glowing salt rock for lighting, to having players dress as their characters and hiding blood packs in my mouth to burst in coincidence with a hidden capgun going off. There's a pleasure in making the gaming environment theatrical.

One attempt I'm particularly proud of was a way of setting up Dread. I'd hidden a speaker under the gaming table, attached to my phone so I could secretly play sound effects and loud musical cues, separately from themed ambience I was looping on my computer. One sound was a blood-curdling scream, and it absolutely made the players JUMP. It would be unfair to do that if the Dread jenga tower was on the gaming table, so I came up with an idea that you absolutely should try: I set up the tower low on a coffee table away from the gaming table. Players had to get up and leave the comfort of the group to try actions, and physically kneel or bend uncomfortably to move a piece. I'd also dimmed the lights and set up a cheap LED spot, shining diagonally from below at the top of the tower. This lit the blocks very dramatically, and also cast a shadow stretching across the ceiling over the gaming table. This shadow grew longer and less regular as the game progressed, a constant imposing reminder of the tower -literally- looming over the players. I think for horror games in particular establishing a tense atmosphere is important, and I think this way of setting up Dread went a long way toward accomplishing that.

So: my ideal gaming room would allow a huge amount of control over -atmosphere-. At minimum the table would be surrounded by speakers and theatrical lighting. This allows us to establish a mood with coloured gels and music, and highlight certain items or moments with spots and sound effects that come from specific locations. I would also love to control smell, using scents to evoke a musty old library or a dank cave (a trick used by museums and immersive theatre, already being explored in RPGs) But my budget is unlimited, so what else can we add?

Projection mapping would be great--on the walls, ceiling, and the tabletop itself. It'd have a library of different environments, and the tabletop projection in particular would be interactive, to display maps and control stuff like fog of war. Holographic tech might be interesting, but there's something about the physicality of objects that really feels good. So of course each PC would have a gorgeous, custom-sculpted mini, and key game items could be realized as props--old parchments and spellbooks, a legendary sword, a deadly puzzle from a dungeon...

The table would be large, and solid, and a beautiful carved and varnished piece of wood, with comfortable surfaces for writing on and rolling dice, and holders for items like character sheets and pens. The chairs would be as ergonomic and cool-looking as we could get them--maybe a different set for each different setting. The walls would have paintings and sculptures depicting people and events from past campaigns.

And fuck it, throw in a fog machine too--oh wouldn't that be lovely for an unexpected trip to Ravenloft. The point is, I would want every tool at my disposal to immerse the players in the game world and get that atmosphere dead-on right.

Improving the Geekosystem

Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: what hobbies go well with RPGs?

Role-playing has always existed in a geeky ecosystem (a geekosystem?) alongside sci-fi, horror, and fantasy novels, comics and movies, as well as board games and video games. These are obviously great interests and hobbies for role players--not just because they're fun but I think specifically because they provide shared background knowledge. It's easy to underestimate the importance of making sure everyone at the table understands the genre conventions of the games we play. When your group all have a passing familiarity with Tolkeinesque fantasy, that's a lot of groundwork already done!

There are some less common hobbies that dovetail with roleplaying in a very satisfying way. For rules-lite or even GM-less games, I can't express enough how good it is to have a feel for improv. More and more I'm seeing crossover of improv comedy and theatre with RPGs, from the structured explorations of Nordic LARP to the celebrity/comedian players in show games like Tabletop and Harmonquest.

Now, these might be a little esoteric, but the basic principles of improv are so obviously applicable to role-playing in general I'm kind of surprised it's taken this long for people to realize it and start formalizing it in games (like Fiasco) and GMing advice (like in Graham Walmsley's excellent Play Unsafe).

Even a totally basic memory for the phrase "yes and" can, I believe, improve and transform your play. If there's one thing that trying improv as a hobby can give to roleplaying, it's this: accept what is offered, and build on it. Players will try to do things or make assumptions about the world. Roll with it! Make it hard and make it interesting, but accept it. The same goes for the players responding to the GM. Accept the GM's world as presented, and add to it. We don't have to contradict anything already established as important--play within the constraints you've set up yourselves! Improv as a hobby is great for anyone at the table--not just the GM.

Fragile Crystalline Structure

Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: Which gamer most affected the way you play?

This is kind of a tricky one. When I'm a player, I tend to hang back and just enjoy the gaming ambience. I like to explore the world the GM creates and see what crazy stuff the other PCs do. As far as I know I didn't pick this up from any specific gamer. I suspect I'm hardly alone; most players figure out how to play as they go, picking up cues and behaviours from their formative gaming groups.

This is -weird-. There's a staggering amount of information on good GMing, and there's a fairly regular interest in classifying types of players and researching gamer personalities. But I've seen little on what we can learn from specific players, or on how to be a good player in general. In fact the only thing I can think of offhand is Grant Howitt's piece. And somehow, roleplayers cobble together a feel for how gaming works.

So if we don't learn how to play by modelling good behaviour, how do we learn? Well, maybe we all learn from -bad- play. As a gaming group coheres socially, part of that process is figuring out what doesn't work and what isn't acceptable, gradually and intuitively, from each others' mistakes.

I played in a game once that lasted maybe three sessions. The three players had strong and divisive personalities, and the GM was not yet practiced at maintaining the peace. The game world was a detailed homebrew fantasy setting, with kingdoms and economies and a unique pantheon and such. One player spent gaming time poking holes and criticising the world building. We managed to play through an adventure fine, but the atmosphere was less fun than it could have been, as we would often argue about some setting detail.

It came to a head when the GM explained that the currency in this kingdom was crystals. The nit-picking player started criticising this, and then explained how he was going to use low-level spells to destroy as much crystal as possible, with the specific intention of destabilizing the economy to prove how stupid crystal currency is. The argument between him and the GM raged to the point where the third player and I had our characters commit suicide. Total game meltdown.

I'm not sure I -learned- it from that game, but it solidified for me that buy-in to the setting is up to the player. It is -more fun- to accept the world on its own terms and explore, rather than try to destroy it from within with some kind of reductio ad absurdum apocalypse.

The behaviour of that player also influenced my thoughts on GMing--I have an intuition that making too many setting details is dangerous, either because of inconsistency or more likely because they misdirect players away from stuff that actually matters. Today I really like to give players input into the setting so that they can actively contribute rather than simply discover what I've come up with. It's possibly contradictory, but I think the same intuition drives the way I play, of just taking the GM's setting on board as-is, for better or worse. The play experience at that table, how one player just not giving a shit destroyed the game, shows how important buy-in can be.