2016 was weird for me and everyone else, in so many ways. Beloved celebrities left us, we endured easily the worst election of my lifetime, and seemingly just to mess with us there were a bunch of sightings of creepy clowns. (But hey, there were a bunch of geeky movies with superheroes and stuff.) Granted years are an arbitrary, man-made unit of measurement, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that 2016 in particular has been messing with us. The future feels uncertain, but I know that as these things go I’m pretty damn fortunate. I’ve gotten into doing contract work for tech companies, and while I could really use a permanent position with health insurance, I’m doing the best I ever have financially. I just landed a job that has the added benefit of letting me work from home most of the time. Still, as I finish up this post on December 31st, I’m glad this year is done.

I wasn’t able to get anything like the amount of gaming in this year that I would’ve liked, basically just scattered one-shots and playtests, and one major thing I want to do in 2017 is start a new regular gaming group. I did get to try some interesting new board games like Codenames, Splendor, Smash Up, and Castle Panic, which were a lot of fun overall.

In terms of RPG design, over the course of 2016 I transitioned to working on more ambitious projects, and while I’ve been really happy with the results, it takes quite a bit more time and work to make them happen. I got Melancholy Kaiju and Saving Throw out through Patreon (and then DriveThruRPG), self-published a mini-RPG anthology (Weird Little Games, on DriveThruRPG and Amazon), and got a bunch of work done on Pix, Kagegami High, and Spooktacular without finishing any of them. I feel like I have a much better handle on a methodology for designing RPGs, and when I start on a game it’s far more likely to come to fruition. 3 of the 6 games in the Weird Little Games book are ones that I’ve been wanted to design for years, that came together because of this recent change in my design techniques and skills.

• Spooktacular is my sorta-retroclone of the West End Games Ghostbusters RPG, a generally brilliant game, way ahead of its time, that faded into obscurity on account of being a quirky licensed RPG. I’m really happy with how Spooktactular has turned out and my own tweaks to the original game, and I’m now just waiting on the artwork. It’s going to be a slim book, around 60 pages or so, though I’m already thinking about doing a supplement, to be titled “Spookstravaganza.”
• Pix is a heartwarming slice of life game that takes place in a world that’s sort of a weird hybrid of real and video game, with Undertale as a major influence. The rules of the game are sort of a blend of Golden Sky Stories and Apocalypse World. There’s still a lot of work to do, but I have at least the first draft of the basic rules pretty much worked out. On the other hand Shantae gave me a bunch of ideas, so I’ll have to see where that takes me when I get back into working on Pix.
• Kagegami High is like a Japanese anime high school version of Welcome to Night Vale, by way of a variant of the Maid RPG rules (with some bits of Ghostbusters, Apocalypse World, and Fate mixed in). I set myself kind of a monstrous number of tables to write up for it, so that the final rulebook should be around 120 to 150 pages, and pretty dense with references.

I also started writing a book about RPG design, Tools for Dreaming. There’s still a lot left to write even with the manuscript already pushing 60,000 words, but I’m pleased with how it’s turning out. It very much fits in with my general push to encourage people to expand the horizons of role-playing games, not to discard what came before but to consider all the different possibilities. To that end it breaks down several different aspects of RPGs, from the mechanics to the cultural contexts the operate in to the simple act of role-playing (and the many varieties it comes in).

For Star Line Publishing, 2016 was the year we finally finished up everything we owed for the Golden Sky Stories Kickstarter, which included finishing up the two original setting books. I’m incredibly happy with the results, but getting artwork and then layout done wound up being pretty time-consuming. I also started working towards doing a Kickstarter to finally publish Dragon World, though it wound up being another thing that’s taking longer than I’d like. Once that’s out of the way we can move on to Kickstarting Mononoke Koyake, and then whatever comes next for SLP.

I’m also still doing freelance work for Japanime Games, primarily translation but also editing and helping with other aspects of production. This year they Kickstarted Heart of Crown and Dynamite Nurse, and since they’ve been ramping up licensed Japanese games, I’ve worked on about half a dozen other games besides (and not just deck-building games with pictures of sexy anime girls). There’s some really interesting stuff in the pipeline, from some interesting independent Japanese game publishers.

Asmadi Games is holding a pre-order drive to reprint Channel A, but it’s going slowly. I’m currently working on Channel A: Chaos Edition, a standalone expansion that we can hopefully Kickstart and generally get people interested in the game again. I also put in some more work on Fighting Fighters Colosseum, which is a descendant of Channel A, but about making up crazy finishing moves, and has a bit more mechanics to it.

A while ago I got a CardMate business card cutter, and more recently I got a basic color laser printer, and (along with the Data Merge feature in InDesign), making card game prototypes is now vastly easier.

I’m going into 2017 with an unusually intense mix of exciting and worrying things. I get to work on all kinds of neat games, and as day jobs go the one I have is pretty great. On the other hand my general optimism about the world has suffered some pretty serious blows, and I’m still grappling with how to confront that personally and creatively. Whatever 2017 (which is a Year of the Rooster) has in store, I wish you all the best.

The other day I stumbled across a copy of the Star Wars Introductory Adventure Game at a local Goodwill, which West End Games put out in 1997 (though the WEG Star Wars RPG itself launched in 1987). I’ve also been thinking about the Ghostbusters RPG, which WEG put out in 1986. I actually have a copy available to me, but someone went as far as to put PDFs of it up online, which I feel okay about linking to for a game that’s 30 years old and decidedly out of print. (Update: Also it looks like there are some folks who’ve been doing a long-running actual play podcast and sell goodies for the game.)

Both of these come from the era when boxed sets were still a thing, before they became prohibitively expensive for most RPG publishers. Although the Star Wars box is an introductory product, it’s a far more robust introductory product than the sort that WotC has put out for D&D. The full version of the game has a lot more stuff to it, but the introductory box has the complete core rules, lets you create complete and functional characters, and includes seven different adventure scenarios. That’s in addition to dice, maps, cardstock miniatures, and reference cards. You could do a decent little campaign just using the stuff already included in the box, and having that much physical stuff with color photos and illustrations is just plain fun. The Ghostbusters box isn’t quite as extensive, but it’s similar, and comes with dice, character and equipment cards, amusing handouts, and so on.

The Ghostbusters RPG is a bit of an oddity, but also an incredible game. It seems like kind of an odd choice for making an RPG, especially given the state of RPG design in 1986, but Sandy Petersen, Lynn Willis, and Greg Stafford (among other things, the major designers for Chaosium, who did a ton of important work on Call of Cthulhu and Prince Valiant, two other impressively innovative games) created a game that was ahead of its time in many ways, and which became the progenitor of the D6 System that (in a more complex form) powered the Star Wars RPG and other WEG games.

• It was probably the first RPG to use a die pool system, where your traits are rated as a number of dice that you roll together. As far as I know, up until then RPGs mostly used either D&D-style ability scores or percentiles.
• The box also includes a Ghost Die, which has a Ghostbusters logo in place of the 6. Any time you roll, one of your dice is the Ghost Die, and if you roll the ghost side of the Ghost Die, it counts as a zero, and regardless of whether you succeed or fail, something weird happens. This is an early example of the “rich die rolls” that make help games like Cortex Plus, WFRP3e, and Don’t Rest Your Head so interesting mechanically.
• In addition to the four attributes, each character has a Talent associated with each attribute, and they get an extra 3 dice when doing something with their Talent. The book includes lists of sample Talents for each stat (and includes things like Break Things, Breakdance, Strut, Raise Children, Soap Opera Romances, and Sports Facts), but with the GM’s permission you could make up your own, making it one of the earliest if not the first instance of “roll your own” traits as seen in games like Risus and PDQ.
• One of the major mechanics of the game is “Brownie Points,” which are one of the first instances of a drama point type mechanic in an RPG. Among other things you can spend them to gain additional dice before you roll.
• In the original edition, BP were also in essence your hit points, and you had to spend them to give your character coincidences that would keep them from dying or getting unduly hurt. In the second edition (“Ghostbusters International”) they added the possibility of taking damage that would temporarily reduce your stats (something that also shows up in Risus and PDQ), but kept the option to spend BP to avoid harm. Both of these are decidedly unconventional, cinematic ways to handle injury, and a great fit for the source material.
• Each PC also has a “Goal,” something like Sex, Money, Soulless Science, etc., and achieving that goal is one of the major ways they gain Brownie Points. I don’t know if it was a direct influence, but it presages stuff like aspects in Fate.

The Ghostbusters RPG isn’t perfect or anything, but most of its imperfections pretty much come down to it being an RPG that came out in 1986. The writing style comes off as a little juvenile and not quite right for a Bill Murray comedy (and for some reason they really like using eating a telephone as an example action), and while the rules are way ahead of their time, the tendency to treat things as a physics simulation creeps in a little at times, most notably in the combat rules. Even then, for an RPG in 1986 the way that it explicitly skips over having rules for movement and such is an impressive step forward.

The new Ghostbusters movie has been controversial for kind of stupid reasons. I completely obsessed with Ghostbusters through much of my childhood, and the new movie did not ruin my childhood (bullies, poverty, and isolation messed things up way more than Paul Feig could’ve ever hoped to). It was actually a pretty fun movie, and while I don’t think it was as good as the original, I do think it was significantly better than Ghostbusters II (which I still like a lot). Even so, Holtzmann (the awesome mad scientist lady in the new one) is now my favorite single Ghostbuster, and there are a lot of nifty things in the new movie that got me thinking more about the whole thing and how easy it would be to write up in the RPG. They have a bunch of different ghostbusting toys, they do more different things with ghosts, and they have an angle of trying to get ghostbusting off the ground while facing intense skepticism and a deliberate government coverup.

Even though in theory I’m way too busy with more important stuff (and even though I have way more than enough other projects going on), I got inspired to start on a game that builds on the Ghostbusters RPG, filing the serial numbers off and taking the core framework and making a few modern additions, both mechanically and thematically (also, because this is me, several d66 tables). Although paranormal investigators with weird science gadgets for busting ghosts will still be a core conceit, you’ll be able to play, say a magician out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or a ghost-fighting esper out of an anime. I’m tentatively calling this game “Spooktacular,” and I’m thinking of making it a future Patreon release. But anyway.

I only played the Ghostbusters RPG once, and while most of our ghostbusters were relatively typical (I played the mad scientist guy), one in particular stood out. A friend of mind created Clara Robison, a single mother who’d gotten into the ghostbusting business because it was a way to make ends meet. Where the characters in the original were practically cartoon characters at times–and that’s before we get into the actual cartoon version–for me Clara added a certain undercurrent of everyday humanity to the whole concept of ghostbusters. It’s not something that the RPG deliberately or explicitly encourages, but it’s something that was very easy to make a part of the game.

One of the most human parts of the new movie is the backstory behind Abby and Erin. Erin saw a ghost when she was young, and the kids at school started calling her “Ghost Girl,” a taunt that bothered her until she and Abby became best friends, and together developed a fascination with the paranormal. While Holtzmann and Patty stand out more in terms of general awesomeness, Abby and Erin have a genuine enthusiasm for discovery that rivals Ray’s. They went as far as to make a tie-in book for the movie, which has not only Abby and Erin’s backstories, but a ton of information about supernatural hunters, ghosts, and haunted places both from real life (the book has a pretty extensive bibliography) and the Ghostbusters world. It’s generally a fun way to geek out about fictional science, and potentially a nifty resource for RPG purposes.

Anyway, I felt the need to blather about all of that stuff for a while. WEG did some amazing stuff in the 80s, and both the old and new Ghostbusters are awesome. So yeah.

All the way back in 2012 I published the Yaruki Zero book, and considering what it is, it’s sold surprisingly well. I’ve been working on the eventual follow-up, but I was increasingly finding that I wanted to write RPG design stuff without it being stuck in quite so personal of a format. That led me to start on a new book called Tools for Dreaming, my attempt at distilling everything I know about RPG design and publishing (so far). Right now the manuscript is about 46k words, but I feel like it could wind up being a good deal longer before it’s really complete. It has a lot to do with trying to expand the scope of what the medium is capable of (and is emphatically not about sweeping away what came before), and while it touches on a lot of the same territory as prior attempts at RPG theory, I’m mainly concerned with making fun and interesting games.

There are some parts of the book I need to figure out how to write, and some that I’m sure I’m going to need help with, but I wanted to start generally sharing it and getting the process moving, so this is the first of a series of excerpts from the work in progress that I’m going to be posting. The first chapter after a rather lengthy introduction is titled “What is an RPG?”, and it’s an attempt to break down the definition of the word and what RPGs entail, which turns out to be a lot messier than you might think. Today I’m sharing the section of that chapter on role-playing.

Role-Playing

Role-playing is one of the most fundamental and interesting things about role-playing games, and I think it’s worth taking a little time to discuss it in depth. Role-playing is where a person takes on a specific role and acts it out on the fly, with no script. There are many different types and styles of role-playing, and while we gamers tend to think of it in terms of portraying a fictional character, there certainly are role-playing activities that ask you portray yourself or someone else in the room in a particular situation. Therapists will sometimes use psychodrama and other forms of role-play to help people work through problems, language students role-play everyday situations to practice their skills, and people role-play themselves to practice things like job interviews.

However, even if we strictly stay within the realm of tabletop games, there’s still a lot of variety. What we call “role-playing” is something of an umbrella term for a number of different mental and emotional processes. Different people role-play differently, and the same person can shift between different approaches to role-playing, even within the same game. I’m a little wary of jargon and categories, but I’m going to try to outline what I see as the major forms of role-play people employ in RPGs.

Many people role-play by immersion, and for them a character is like a second self they slip into for a while. This kind of role-play uses our human capacity for empathy. Empathy is a process by which you use your own experiences to create a mental image of someone else’s emotional state.[1] This is likely an important aspect of how people function as social animals, and is one of a number of prosocial instincts in both humans and other species. Some people are more naturally empathic than others, and a portion of other people’s differing experiences will be more of an abstraction to you. Even so, empathy is a basic part of being human. Therapeutic role-playing uses this capacity to foster a cathartic release and greater empathy with others, while RPGs use it to let us vicariously experience some of a fictional character’s emotional state. Instead of putting yourself in your significant other’s shoes to better understand their point of view, you put yourself in your character’s shoes to enjoy seeing and interacting with the world as they do. While it’s not the only way to role-play, it’s where traditional RPGs excel, and where many people find the fundamental appeal of playing an RPG. It does have some drawbacks though, most notably that it can be emotionally taxing at times.

Others use a more calculating, performative approach. This is more like improv theater, where even if you outwardly portray a consistent character, your mental state is focused on creating a particular performance. RPGs are for smaller groups of people than improv shows, so it’s a bit different from playing to an audience in a theater, and I suspect that performative role-playing in a tabletop RPG is a bit more geared toward one’s own enjoyment. Regardless, it shifts the priority from the character’s mental state and objectives to presenting a particular outward performance of the character. It’s a less emotionally engaged way to role-play, but it makes it easier to separate what you want the character to be like from your character’s own desires. People are more likely to use this form of role-playing when they’re trying to portray a well-established character.

Still others are most comfortable when acting more like an author. In this mode, you control your character from above, ready to step outside of them to steer the overall story in whatever direction you think is best. It’s another step removed from immersive role-playing, but players are free to concentrate on making the best story they can. There are a number of independent games that specifically foster this style of role-playing, particularly when they have mechanics that require players to make decisions and give creative input from a vantage point outside of the character. It’s a very different way to play an RPG, but it can create really fun, unique experiences.

Because RPGs are also games with mechanical, board game-like rules, players also sometimes role-play less as a portrayal of a character and more in terms of playing a game, even if they do so in a way that’s consistent with their character’s abilities and personality. RPGs often ask players to make decisions based on practical and mechanical matters, especially when it comes to combat. In this mode the character becomes more of a playing piece, and the mechanical distinctions that the game provides the character are more important than the character’s personality and emotional life. This is the mode that’s the most difficult to rightfully call “role-playing,”[2] but it’s also an important part of many of the most popular RPGs. Games like D&D can provide lots of interesting things for players to do in this space, and learning to skillfully wield the mechanical aspects of a character is a genuine part of the fun of playing such games. This mode doesn’t necessarily have to be about hard mechanical matters either. Players who are debating who gets what treasure or trying to formulate a plan can wind up speaking as themselves rather than their characters, even if the “game” they’re playing is made up of words and concepts instead of numbers.

All of these fall under the umbrella of role-playing to some degree. Some games work better with particular approaches, and people are often more comfortable with some approaches than others, but what people actually do at the game table is fluid. It’s good to be aware of how your game might pull people towards particular approaches, but it’s not necessary to force players to stick to one single mode of role-playing. The thing to be wary of is asking players to do too many of these things at once, especially when they have opposed motivations. RPGs that ask players to act more as storytellers tend to suffer when they also encourage players to heavily identify with their characters, because what’s good for the story can often conflict with what a character wants for themselves. Likewise, if you have rules that pull players into more of a board game mode, you can’t expect nearly as much in the way of conventional role-playing out of them while those rules are in play.

Also, it’s been my experience that as a group, beginners don’t inherently gravitate towards any one style of role-play. People who cut their teeth on traditional RPGs sometimes assume that immersive role-playing is the most natural, but I’ve found that a significant portion of first-time role-players naturally think they have power over the story around their character, such that teaching them to play a traditional RPG is a process of getting them to pull back and only control what their character is attempting to do.

[1] Not a scientific definition, just my attempt to explain the concept as I understand it.

[2] Hence the kinda dumb and overused thing of calling it “roll-playing.”