Category Archives: musings

GET PARSELY: Adventures With Text and Maybe Pictures

games, musings, , ,

Thanks to Parsely I’ve been really interested in text adventure games/interactive fiction of late. I’m currently playing the original Zork and generally trying to digest what implications IF might have for tabletop RPGs.[1] RPGs can use some visual elements during play, but as with text adventures, we often only convey images during play through descriptive words. On the other hand when you look at the packaging of any given Infocom game, it’s full of visual stuff to excite the player, to a degree that contemporary video games very rarely bother with. They even went so far as to include “feelies,” weird little props to enhance the experience. (Leather Goddesses of Phobos even had a scratch and sniff card with different scents that came up during the game.)

As video games started to become able to have some semblance of visuals, there was still a certain imaginative leap asked of the players. Game publishers usually had a professional illustrator do a painting that conveyed the general feel of the game, and even when, say, Nintendo, used pixel art on game covers, they still had more detailed art in the game manuals. There’s definitely a parallel to RPGs, which can have all kinds of illustrations to put you into the right mood, but ultimately consist of setting info, game rules, etc. and aren’t a visual medium per se. There might be some times when you can point to the professionally-done fantasy art in a D&D book and relate it to something in your campaign, but chances are the price tag for artwork of that caliber for your own characters will be out of your reach.

From the NES Metroid manual

Pixel Art
What’s rather interesting is how the role of pixel art has changed. The so-called “AAA” video game titles use 3D graphics and aspire to something like photorealism, and genres that were traditionally all sprite-based (shmups, fighting games, platformers, etc.) have come to use 3D polygons too. These days pixel art pretty much only comes up as an artistic choice, which in turn means that it’s more likely to be used in a stylish indie computer game (or by the likes of Paul Robertson), than to suffer the mediocrity of the kinds of games that keep the Angry Video Game Nerd raging away.

In an important sense we’ve more recently reached a point where pixel art is normally the proper visuals ans seldom winds up a rough representation of what the designer wants to communicate. Some of it is no doubt nostalgia, but I would like to see pixel art make its way into tabletop games more. As far as I know Jonathan Walton is the only one who’s really been experimenting with this kind of thing (check out the cover of Super Suit). Not unlike with Blowback‘s brilliantly effective use of photography (a mixture of stock and original), pixel art won’t work for every game of course, but as I’ve started looking into commissioning pixel art I’ve found that the artists on DeviantArt who do it don’t charge very much, plus there are quite a few free pixel fonts out there. I’m definitely going to be experimenting with this kind of thing whenever I finally put together a Parsely game of my own[2] (and I may even mess around with ASCII art a bit too).

A Side of Parsely
Parsely[3] is much more interesting than it might appear on the surface. It might be a bit of a stretch to call it an RPG, but it’s definitely an analogue RPG-ish thing played by people. While the layout of rooms and how things work within a given Parsely game is tightly restricted (almost comically so; there’s exactly one way to get past the orge), reading any given Parsely game you’ll find there are places where the Parser/GM must, at a minimum, think up how to explain what happens on the fly, and while you could give obtuse computer-like responses to things not already covered by the game (“That sentence isn’t one I recognize.”), players will inevitably come up with commands that are eminently plausible even in the absurd, constrained world of a text adventure (“Kiss the princess.”)

While Action Castle is a sort of medieval mini-Zork, Jared gets into trying an assortment of different things in the successive Parsely games. In some (Spooky Manor and Pumpkin Town) characters can turn into different forms with different abilities, for example, and Space Station makes use of a stopwatch. There’s also the concept of “Microgreens,” super-short Parsely games of 1-3 rooms, of which Flaming Goat is the only specimen so far. (Update: Scratch that; Jared posted up a second one, Blackboard Jungle.) Just as people have done all kinds of strange things with the medium of text adventures–from Infocom’s more experimental titles to the avant-garde efforts of the IF hobby scene–there is tremendous room for trying out different kinds of things.

The Parsely game I’ve started working on is called Miyuki Kobayakawa’s Doki-Doki Adventure, and aside from using pixel art and having the conceit of a setting inspired a bit by Paul Robertson and Takashi Murakami, it’s going to have an event that changes the nature of the locations in the game. I’m also contemplating a game based off of the webcomic I write for, where you switch between different cast members to resolve all of their various little quandaries.

[1]Also, I’ve been reading Twisty Little Passages, which is highly informative but also in an extremely academic style.
[2]I’m also contemplating trying out Inform 7 to make an electronic version once it’s done.
[3]Which BTW is now available in PDF; 99 cents per game.

2010 In Review

musings

2010 was a weird year for me in a lot of ways. Professionally, I went from being unemployed (as I was lamenting in my last belated year in review post) to having a job localizing freemium MMORPGs, which has me doing a job I enjoy, but making a good deal less money than I would like.

In terms of what I was playing, this year saw a big change in that I joined a second gaming group. It started as an attempt to get together to play Polaris, but subsequently fell apart and reformed as a sort of RPG tasting group on Friday nights. Thusfar we’ve done The Mountain Witch, Fiasco, Warhammer Fantasy 3rd Edition, D&D4e, Swashbuckers of the 7 Skies, and Sons of Liberty, with varying degrees of success. The other group has been almost exclusively D&D4e, though our Forgotten Realms campaign petered out and I started running a Dark Sun game (albeit rather infrequently). I did very little video gaming, something I’m hoping to fix in 2011, though both my Xbox 360 and Wii need repairs.

In terms of design, for me this year was mostly about Slime Story, with a bit of Slime Quest and a tiny bit of Raspberry Heaven on the side. I poked at Adventures of the Space Patrol a little (and did a couple playtests too), but only made very minimal changes to the game. On the other hand for Slime Story, Apocalypse World happened and had me again rethinking substantial parts of how the game works, and starting yet again a process of ripping out some bits and replacing them with better stuff. (Notably, trying to make the social side of the game more robust.)

I did a fair amount of blogging, but only a little bit of podcasting, and only one of the four podcasts I did in 2010 had anyone else on. (There are a few people I still need to bug about coming on the podcast…) Looking through my older posts, I was mostly preoccupied with Slime Story, though over the past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about the thematic and historical underpinnings of D&D. As with last year, I think I only did one Kyawaii RPG, though I still have half a dozen or so in varying states of incompleteness.

In July I went to A-Kon, an anime convention in Dallas, as a guest of honor. I didn’t get nearly as much out of it as I would’ve liked to, on account of being ill, anxious, and unprepared, but I had a good time all the same, and the panels I did were pretty successful. My favorite bit was at the independent RPGs panel I got to close by saying something like, “Everyone can create something that no one else ever would, everyone has their own unique vision that they can realize if they try, and that’s incredibly awesome.” Meeting Malcolm Harris (who does Witch Girls Adventures) was cool too.

In terms of non-RPG stuff, the webcomic I write for (Neko Machi) got started in November of 2009, but 2010 was its first full year. It’s had its ups and downs, and although the readership is not yet there, creatively I’m happier with it than ever. I didn’t get all that much writing done though, in December I finished four short stories (see my DA), and hopefully that momentum will keep up.

As for 2011, the big thing on the horizon is a publishing project that I’ll hopefully be announcing publicly pretty soon. I’m also aiming to have a table for Neko Machi at the Alternative Press Expo (though some RPG stuff may make it in there too). I don’t have any other plans in the way of going to conventions (money’s much too tight for Gen Con to be feasible), but I have more than enough plans for games to play and design. I also want to get more into language learning, both brushing up on my Japanese (before it deteriorates to mere manga-reading level) and expanding into new territory (although it’s not technically required, at my work not being able to read any Korean[1] is becoming frustrating).

So, what have we learned?

  • D&D was loosely based on several different kinds of fantasy (and understanding those will help you better understand the game), but it’s evolved into its own genre based on how it works in actual play.
  • Board game fans have this blind spot that prevents them from seeing that not everyone is into board games.
  • 4E haters make me not want to play D&D, both to make it easier to avoid their nonsense, and because half of what they complain about applies to most editions of D&D.
  • The internet has a certain baseline level of toxicity, and you’re better off not having too much of it.
  • Being a guest of honor at a con is pretty sweet, but pretty exhausting too.
  • What a game’s rules don’t do is sometimes at least as important as what they do.
  • Fiasco is really awesome, but chances are you knew that.
  • Mostly, I just need to get off my butt and do stuff.

[1]Alas, unlike Japan, South Korea doesn’t seem to have much of a tabletop RPG scene. Also, 안녕하세요.

A Strategy Guide For D&D

games, musings

I recently picked up a copy of the D&D Player’s Strategy Guide from a local used bookstore. I wouldn’t have bought it normally, but it was relatively cheap and I had some leftover store credit that I’d been hanging on to for the better part of a year.

Unsurprisingly, some people have balked at the very idea of a “strategy guide” for an RPG. I had figured I wouldn’t need it much myself because I have so much experience with the game already. I was right–two years of playing a game will do that–but there’s an awful lot of stuff in the book I wish someone had spelled out for me from the get-go. 4E is a sufficiently complex system that it has a distinct learning curve, and this is a book that can help smooth that out for new players by explaining all kinds of stuff that the rulebooks either leave out (and that most RPG rulebooks would leave out) or only mention in passing. It’s common sense to focus fire and eliminate individual enemies as quickly as possible[1], but the Strategy Guide goes to the trouble of illustrating how big of a difference it can make with diagrams and everything.

The book covers a whole range of topics, including character building, party composition, tactics, role-playing, and some of the social stuff (including a section titled simply “Don’t Be A Jerk”). It’s all grounded in a very solid understanding of how the game works and what it can do, so that players can skip over some of the trial and error (emphasis on the “error” part) that we went through in the first year or so of playing 4E. If we’d had a better idea how to play defenders, or just how much it would cost us not to have a leader in the party, we might’ve done things very differently, and altogether better.

The thing about D&D in particular is that while it draws on various kinds of fantasy literature, it was always its own thing. In some ways this was a limitation of the designers’ understanding of this new “role-playing game” insanity they’d devised, and in other ways it was likely deliberate. Certainly when fans asked questions about why the game wouldn’t allow for a given element from Lord of the Rings or some other beloved fantasy title[2], Gygax’s usual answer was that it was a game first and foremost. While D&D started off culling ideas from fiction, it gradually became more and more about itself, I think in part because that’s all that its rules could really effectively provide.

I think that explains why works of fiction based off of D&D are at their best when they reflect what goes on at a typical gaming table. Typical D&D novels come off as stilted, and struggle to find the happy medium between slavish adherence to what the rules can do and getting into stuff the game inherently can’t do justice. That’s where the new D&D comics from IDW and even stuff like The Gamers really shine. The fun of D&D is less in Aragorn reclaiming the throne of Gondor, and more in the silly bickering and strange accidents that happen along the way (which makes movie Gimli the most D&D-like character in the whole of Middle Earth).

What I like most about the Player’s Strategy Guide is that it’s unabashedly situated in the same realm as D&D actual play rather than wishful thinking about such. It has lots of pragmatic advice about how to get what you really want out of the game, both from a social perspective and in terms of working the rules and building characters, and it’s written in a friendly tone, with cute little cartoons that lighten the mood and call to mind the ones in the AD&D1e Dungeon Master’s Guide.

[1]That’s a tactical thing so basic you can pick it up from the original 8-bit Final Fantasy.

[2]Dragon Magazine once published stats for Conan. Very few of his ability scores were below 20. You know that guy in the books you love so much that inspired you to play this game? Your guy will never, ever be as bad-ass as him.

Kinds of Fantasy

musings, , ,

As I mentioned the other day, I’ve never been much into sword and sorcery fantasy, and it’s largely unknown to the friends I game with. I decided to start reading some Conan to at least get a feel for what the stuff is like. “The Phoenix on the Sword,” one of R.E. Howard’s first Conan stories, is a great tale of the barbarian as a king, which relentlessly looks out to a far bigger and older world.

The anthology “The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian,” which strives to put together Howard’s original stories in an unmodified form in order of publication. It has a lengthy forward which makes clear something that’s fairly obvious from The Phoenix on the Sword, namely that Howard saw a certain value and freedom in barbarism, and in his stories expressed a distrust of civilization. It occurs to me that in the matter of “barbarism vs. civilization,” Japan’s version of Western fantasy falls squarely on the side of civilization. In Slayers, for example, civilization is pretty unambiguously positive, and the antagonists are mostly savage monsters and ancient demons. In Final Fantasy there has been the occasional evil empire, but savagery isn’t really the solution; a character like Gau (from FF6) is an oddity whose feral upbringing is an adorable character quirk and the basis of an unusual and difficult-to-use ability.

This is especially true when it comes to the way the differing styles of fantasy present magic. In the Conan stories magic is the province of evil sorcerers meddling with forbidden forces that threaten to make them spiral into madness. A magician on or near the throne is a travesty to be undone by a barbarian’s fierce blade. In the Japanese version magic is typically a tool, a kind of neutral technology. That’s why in J-RPGs and anime a school of magic is a viable concept. In the Hyborian Age a school of sorcery would probably be a den of madmen doomed to breed unconscionable evils.

I don’t know if I am in fact onto something here, but it does seem like the old sword and sorcery fantasy, especially that of R.E. Howard (who would’ve happily written historical fiction if he could’ve gotten paid enough for it) harkens back to ancient history, while the Japanese version has a distinctly modern sensibility. Of course, the history of D&D has been a transition from sword and sorcery to modernist fantasy. The Tolkien influence already muddled the sword and sorcery style that Gygax seems to have preferred, and in terms of genre influences D&D became more and more about itself. I think D&D has largely sidestepped the kinds of issues brought up by the notion of barbarism vs. civilization, and any themes inherent in the game as written are more from the way the rules, derived from wargames in a rather haphazard fashion, happened to play out. I haven’t made much of an effort to experience the breadth of what’s out there, but In a Wicked Age really seems to capture the essence of sword and sorcery, in a way that D&D scarcely even aspires to, much less achieves. (Though Dark Sun probably comes a lot closer than any other part of D&D.)

Although I can definitely appreciate the mythic grandeur of Conan and his ilk, I think on the whole my tastes fall more on the side of modernistic fantasy. I like the fantastic things that are possible in the fantasy genre, but I think I find modern sensibilities more capable of involving themes that I can readily relate to. That’s another reason why I’m looking forward to bringing Slime Quest to fruition.

APE/Raspberry Heaven/Slime Story

musings, projects, , ,

APE 2010 Report
I went to the first day of APE (Alternative Press Expo), an indie comics event held yearly in San Francisco. If you want to see my thoughts on it you can check out my blog post over on Neko Machi. I’m really jazzed to have a booth there next year, which may include some RPG stuff, depending on what we can get together.

Raspberry Heaven: Rethinking
I’m thinking of giving Raspberry Heaven another major rewrite. This mostly came from looking at what I want it to do and comparing it to how Fiasco does what it does. It’s becoming a major theme in my grappling with RPG design lately that there’s a sharp distinction to be made between guided and unguided creative input. While as a player I don’t want a game to constrict what kind of character I can make too much, starting with a totally blank canvas is much harder. If I want to make a fully realized GURPS or BESM character, it’s going to be a major project, best undertaken a week or more before a campaign starts. Compare that to a game with more input provided be the rules, whether it’s a Fiasco playset, an In a Wicked Age oracle, or even just the suggestions inherent in picking a race and class in D&D, and I have a starting point to hold onto so that the whole thing goes much more quickly.

With the current version of Raspberry Heaven there’s a tension between the game wanting to be a light pickup thing and it requiring lots of unguided creative input to really get off the ground. While the source material (slice of life 4-panel manga about schoolgirls) lends itself to long-term storytelling (in an episodic kind of way), the tone of the genre and game are such that I think it needs to be more about getting into role-playing situations with ease and finding out where it goes from there. Although for a variety of reasons it’s definitely not going to be a clone of Fiasco, the generation of the situation and characters definitely needs to have something of Fiasco’s ease of use. That still leaves the question of what will go on during the actual play, for which I’m getting various ideas from Jeepform and Norwegian Style, and the Jeepform adage of “structure but not rules” is proving particularly helpful. The end result isn’t going to be much like a typical RPG, and it’s likely not going to be much of a “game” in any traditional sense, but I think it needs to be that way.

Slime Story: Relationships and Stuff
Right now the major thing I’m struggling with for the next revision of Slime Story is the relationship/connection rules. While I have the combat rules pretty much where I want them, the connection rules and the stuff surrounding them should pretty much be the entire other half of the game, and they need to both be interesting and have incentives to engage them. I’m still working out how to do that exactly, but the ability to strain a relationship in order to help you out with other things is likely going to be part of it.

Another thing I’m adding is explicit guidelines for “Stunts,” which is just a codeword for “stuff not explicitly laid out in the rules.” They are my attempt to pull back a bit from stereotypical D&D4e “pick a power and use it” combat, with the added advantage that in Slime Story if a proposed stunt seems especially difficult the GM can have it cost Awesome Points.

Slime Quest and Essentials and Stuff

musings, projects,

On the whole I don’t think all that highly of either ranting on the internet or creating in response to perceived flaws in something. For example Houses of the Blooded (while not to my personal tastes) sounds a lot cooler when you sell it on its own merits instead of on the ways it’s not like D&D. On the other hand I really want to have a fantasy RPG of my very own, something just right for me and my friends. Slime Quest, my planned fantasy spinoff of Slime Story, is looking like it might just be that game some day, which has me really excited to make it happen. There are a lot of reasons why I want this, including but definitely not limited to the things I do and don’t like about 4E and the subcultural baggage that it comes with.

I probably shouldn’t bother with online forums, at least not quite so much as I have been lately. D&D Essentials (along with the interview with Mike Mearls that appeared in The Escapist) has revived the nonsense we had to put up with surrounding 4E before and after its release a couple years ago. This time around there are at least far fewer factually incorrect complaints about 4E (in 2008 those accounted for something like half or maybe even two-thirds of what I saw). People are at least arguing based mostly on actual reality. On the other hand, the identity politics side of things is alive and well, not to mention I still feel like a huge portion of complaints against 4E read like reasons to drop D&D entirely, and especially 3.x. It’s weird to complain about tieflings and dragonborn when you’re playing a game where half-dragons are not unknown, it’s weird to complain about classes being too rigid when you can play a game without any classes at all (i.e., one of the vast majority of RPGs that aren’t D&D), and it’s odd to say 4E doesn’t encourage role-playing enough when D&D was pretty much only the best system available for role-playing during a brief period in the 70s when it had no competitors. While it’s low on my list of reasons for working on Slime Quest, part of me does want to proudly display a middle digit and proclaim that I have my own awesome fantasy game to play.

I have said that I design games that I want to play with my friends, and I’ve realized that this isn’t always true. In fact some of the games I want to make have a sort of distantly hypothetical audience; I’m not sure if I can actually pull together a group that would play Raspberry Heaven the way I meant it to be played, for example. Slime Quest on the other hand looks like it would be more or less perfect for that group, because it’s going to build on what we like about 4E and hopefully avoid some of its problems. 4E has been a big hit among us, even with the people who weren’t the slightest bit interested in D&D before that. For my part I always liked the bizarre worlds of D&D (especially Planescape), but the actual game never became anything like what I wanted to play until 4E. 1E (which I stumbled across at the local used bookstore) was just strange to me, 2E was intriguing but nonsensical, and 3E we tried out and got tired of after a while.

4E clicked for us in a lot of different ways. It’s like D&D, only your characters have something of the heroic stamina that you would actually expect a fantasy adventurer to have. Old-school D&D is great as a game about a bunch of nobodies struggling to survive in a very dangerous world and eventually making something of themselves. It’s not as great as the game about fantasy heroes it sometimes claimed to be. In 4E, first-level characters, while nowhere near immortal[1], aren’t disposable weaklings, and recovering from getting hurt[2] doesn’t require weeks of healing or a literal miracle from a deity. The MMO players in our group like the optimization and tactical combat, while the non-MMO players like the awesome fantasy settings and can enjoy the tactical aspect of the game without feeling like total failures for not putting double-digit hours into character optimization. That’s not to say I’ve been totally satisfied with the game, but on the whole it’s been head and shoulders above most of the other games we’ve tried long-term, particularly in terms of the actual rules contributing to our fun.

The major things I want to keep from 4E is the interesting tactical combat and characters with clear roles and interesting in-game abilities. However, I want to make the tactical combats a bit simpler and quicker, and I want the game to encourage role-playing and characters with some personality. The former is pretty easy, and in Slime Story I already have the makings of the combat system I want. The latter will be trickier (especially in terms of marrying it to a game with tactical combat), and I’m still in the process of working out how to go about it. I don’t really find complaints about “dissociated mechanics” to be terribly compelling, least of all coming from people who like older versions of D&D, but one way or another I do feel that I want to make a game that’s a bit better at generating interesting stories at the table.

There has also been some talk of the new D&D being less about the influences that lie at the game’s original roots. Gary Gygax originally made the game a mishmash of all his favorite sword and sorcery novels–Conan, Dying Earth, and so forth–and grudgingly added Tolkien stuff in later at his friends’ insistence. It seems like in an important sense D&D stopped being about that stuff and started being more about itself and its spinoff novels[3], to the point where I’d welcome some video game influence simply because it would make the game’s fiction a bit less incestuous. But then the thing is that in the case of the people I play with, influences culled from novels are basically irrelevant to most of the group. References to Conan only hold sway if they fall into the most memorable bits of the movies (“Hear the lamentations of their women!”), and the likes of Jack Vance are off the radar entirely. In stark contrast to that, video games and anime are what we’re all about. Concepts culled from Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest are much more recognizable to us than ones drawn from the works of J.R.R. Tolkien or Robert E. Howard. Slime Quest is going to be unapologetically getting inspiration from anime and video games.

The setting of Slime Quest (the continent of Galania) isn’t going to be anything astonishing, but I do like having the opportunity to do some stuff that the official and implied D&D settings largely avoid, both in terms of cultural issues and simple surface stuff. Religion is a prime example of this. While religion is ubiquitous in D&D settings, it tends to be a vague polytheism, with plenty of meddling gods (and until relatively recently full game stats for them), but very little sense of what kinds of practices these religions involve or how they fit into people’s daily lives. Although I’m not going to make such things central to Slime Quest, it isn’t going to totally ignore them either. Galania is home to both a monotheistic religion (the Church of the One God) and animist/shamanism religion, which have been forced to more or less coexist for pragmatic reasons (for now). It’s also got firearms, trains, airships, a postal service, and some other nifty stuff. (Also, an organization called the Happy Slime Club.)

[1]As we very quickly found out when we first started playing and those kobold slingers really messed us up. 30 hp goes by a lot faster than you’d think.

[2]Or rather, recovering from losing HP, which can at (vague, undefined) times represent mere fatigue rather than injury.

[3]One really wonders how much the ranger class’ design has been informed by a need to make Drizzt a viable character.

In Other News
I got Apocalypse World in print from the FLGS, though I’m still reading through it. The writing style is very Vincent Baker, though it’s weird to get 300 pages of it at once. I also got the PDF manual of FreeMarket, but haven’t had a chance to do more than skim it a little bit. The good news is that if I really wanted to I could put together the materials to play without too much difficulty, which is fortunate considering I really can’t afford the $75+s/h for the boxed set. A friend picked up some RPG stuff for me from Japan last month… hopefully we’ll actually get a chance to meet up in person before too long.

Thoughts That Are Random

musings, projects,

Pockylips Worldo
Apocalypse World has been generating a heck of a lot of discussion, and I think I’m going to have to join in, possibly in podcast form, especially once I finally get a copy of the actual book. I got to play it at the South Bay Story Games Day event at Game Kastle in Santa Clara, and was very impressed, though it’s worth noting that it was MCed by a gentleman named Carl who was very experienced with running it.


One particularly interesting thing about it–which somewhat ties in with what I talked about in the last podcast–is how the game very carefully and thoroughly delineates the GM’s job, to a degree that is basically unprecedented. (Which explains the change in terminology to “Master of Ceremonies.”) As Jonathan Walton put it, apart from explicitly encouraging hacks, “it makes no effort to offer flexibility to people with different tastes or desires.” On the one hand I don’t share Will Hindmarch‘s (apparent; I may be misreading him) discomfort with AW’s approach, but on the other hand I really like the idea of this development and the tools it implies existing, but on the third hand (I’m running Dark Sun this weekend; maybe it’s a hypothetical Thri-Kreen?) needless to say I wouldn’t want every game to work that way.

Over on Theory From the Closet’s interview, Vincent said he’s a game designer rather than a teacher, and in light of that it makes sense that he’s sending what he’s figured out about GM techniques out into the world in game form. While it goes without saying that he never meant it to be the end-all be-all of GMing techniques, the GM’s role is one of the single most ephemeral things in RPGs. There are definite advantages to that of course (another Theory From the Closet Episode has David Wesley explaining how using a human referee saved his wargaming hobby), but there’s also the problem that we don’t really have the vocabulary or techniques that we probably should for discussing (much less modifying) what exactly the GM does. There’s a lot of good advice out there, but it’s really hard to be concrete.

A Story of Slime

Of course, right now the thing with Apocalypse World that’s more immediately relevant to me is the Hx/History system (the one that gave Ryan Macklin a little trouble), since it’s pointed me to a way to improve Slime Story. Setting up connections between characters is currently one of those things that can easily become tedious because it asks for largely unguided creative input.[1] AW’s History mechanic the setup of the PCs’ relationships and shared history into kind of a minigame with different abilities per character type, which also serves to dump the players into having to work with mechanics and each other. While I’m not completely happy about stitching yet another piece onto this Frankenstein monster of a game, it looks like it has immense potential.

A while back I made the acquaintance of Steven Savage, who amongst other things does the Fan To Pro blog and the Seventh Sanctum name generator site. (And if we can ever get our schedules to coincide enough he’s going to be on the podcast.) When I told him about the game I was working on he, having recently seen the Scott Pilgrim movie, said Slime Story sounded like “magical realism.” While Slime Story doesn’t strive for a Jorge Luis Borges type of style or anything, it does juxtapose the real and fantastic, and I think that in terms of the setting that’s its real strength. There’s an inherent tension between the teenagers’ ordinary lives and the absurd monster hunting they do. I’m not sure what to do with this epiphany apart from including it in the text, but I think it’s very important to realizing the game I want to create.

Dice Within Dice
I was at Toys R Us the other day and wound up buying the “Pavilion Games Black Die Multi Game Set.” Pavilion Games is apparently a brand name TRU came up with for selling cheap and generic board game stuff. I’d seen this many times before and put off buying it because it was $19.99, but it was on sale for around $12. It’s a black faux-leather box like a black d6, about 6½ inches on a side. Inside are two decks of cards, four small dice, a doubling cube, a set of poker dice, a small game board for chess and backgammon (with pieces for both), a rather small set of double-6 dominoes, and a booklet of rules. I think I like it more for the novelty of the box than what’s inside, though I suppose even given that I’m not really into board games it’s not a bad idea to have those things around. (Someone was working on an RPG that uses dominoes, right?) Also, it has enough room to fit several of the other assorted game materials I’ve accumulated.

[1]I’ve heard such complaints about, for example, Prime Time Adventures’ pitch sessions. The results can be great sometimes, but I certainly don’t find that kind of thing terribly efficient with my friends.

Yaruki Zero Podcast #15: The Big Picture

musings, Podcast

Yaruki Zero Podcast #15 (34 minutes, 58 seconds)

This episode is an attempt to unpack certain underlying “big picture” things in role-playing games that I’ve been thinking about lately. It’s not about how they fare in the marketplace (though there’s a little bit of that), but RPGs are and how they work. There’s a good chance other (smarter) people have said this elsewhere, but I need to put it out there in my own words.

Show Notes

  1. Intro
  2. Text vs. Play
  3. Artists vs. Consumers
    • Non-Commercial Gaming
    • Gaming as Consumption
    • Structured RPGs and Creativity
    • Consumption as Shortcut
  4. Rules vs. Not-Rules

This podcast uses selections from the song “Time Machine” by To-den from the Grünemusik album of the same name, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website or via Jamendo.

Very awesome caricature of Ewen courtesy of the talented C. Ellis.

Updates On Stuff

musings, projects,

After basically being unemployed apart from some sporadic freelance work throughout 2009, I now have a full-time job. I’m not going to discuss the details publicly unless I get explicit permission, but it’s in the video game industry, if an odd niche of such. Trying to keep up creative stuff while working 40 hours a week and having a considerable commute to contend with has been a challenge so far, especially since my social life has gotten busier too (I’ve had regular stuff going on four days a week, though that’s calming down a little too), but I’m starting to get a handle on it.

I don’t want to get into the details here, but I’ve decided I need to scale back my internet use a bit, or at least my use of certain parts of it. At work it’s hard to find much else to do during breaks other that surf the web, and after a month I just feel the toxicity of it too much. This won’t affect this blog except insofar as some of those sites give me ideas for stuff to post or podcast about, but you probably won’t see me posting on RPGnet or Story Games as much (not that I was ever a prolific forum poster anyway). I’ve also stopped using my main Twitter account for the time being in favor of a new one (@bunnymuse) where I tweet nothing but random bits of stories and other prose ideas. I don’t know how long I’ll keep this up, but so far every time I’ve gone back on this decision I’ve wound up regretting it.

Slime Story
Slime Story has reached a point where I basically have the core rules where I want them for this revision, but I have to deal with a bunch of interdependent crunchy bits to get it ready to playtest. Writing up monsters is particularly challenging, since I really need to have the right variety of them and ensure that they provide the right kinds of stuff for providing adversity and interesting monster parts to make “alchemical” items with. “Monsters” in general are not an aspect of RPGs I’ve ever dealt with very much, and I think that inexperience is part of what’s making things difficult. It’s also still damn hard to come up with Talents to go with cliques, especially since I severely reduced the importance of social conflicts, which were the most combat-like part of non-combat stuff. Still, Slime Story is easily the creative project that most excites me of late, and it’s gotten more of my limited time for doing that kind of stuff than any other.

All of that means I’m getting pretty close to being ready to playtest Slime Story again, maybe even as early as next week. Slime Quest is much further off, since it will require both changes to the rules and even more assorted crunchy bits (a wider variety of “monsters,” classes and races with talents, equipment including magic items, etc.). I wanted to mention that I also have other ideas for “Slime Engine” games, most notably a new version of Thrash (I think the battlefield map system is exactly what it needs) and a thing about teenagers with special powers in the vein of A Certain Scientific Railgun, Kampfer, s-CRY-ed, etc. (so a mixture of superpower battles and boarding school life). But if those ever amount to anything they’ll be a long way off.

A-Kon
A-Kon is coming up really fast, and I’ve got some preparation and such to tackle still, even with the convention handling a lot of the more basic logistics for me. I’m going to be involved in something like six different panels, a lot of which are in the evening (9 p.m. or so), and a couple of which will require some considerable preparation on my part. The one on Japanese RPGs especially will take a lot of prep, since I want to put together a PowerPoint thing to show stuff off rather than lugging a ton of books to Texas. OTOH I think I could do the one on Anime and RPGs more or less off the cuff, considering how long I’ve been blogging and podcasting about the topic.

My 2009 In Review

musings

A little belated, but I wanted to put together an overview of what went on in 2009, mainly gaming-wise. 2009 was a strange year for me overall, and I think in the future I’ll remember it as a period between when I finished grad school and got some semblance of a career going. I did a fair amount of freelance translation work, but not nearly enough of it. That left me with a lot of free time, which I don’t feel I used anywhere near as effectively as I could have.

My gaming group was all about D&D4e at this time, and particularly in terms of really engaging the rules, it was one of our best campaigns ever. The end of the prior campaign left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths, and I’m still trying to really deal with the issues it presented, particular with regard to player agency and basic communication. From D&D4e’s initial release, I played three different characters, finally settling on a human warlord, and the whole group’s understanding of the rules became progressively more sophisticated. It’s been more hack and slash than anything, but we’ve enjoyed it a lot all the same. The composition of the group has changed quite a bit, with one friend leaving, a new (and altogether less serious) one joining, and a friend’s roommate becoming more of a friend through gaming with us. I did get to run other games on rare occasions (notably 3:16 and Mouse Guard), and I ran a non-gamer friend’s very first game session. I also ran Maid RPG and played D&D4e at FanimeCon, the local anime convention. I got in a tiny bit of playtesting (most notably my first session of Slime Story), but as I was lamenting the other day, I’ve gotten very little done at all.

In terms of game design, in 2009 I mostly worked on Slime Story, with a little bit of time put towards Raspberry Heaven. Slime Story morphed from a big mess into something encouraging yet in need of lots of work, and I refined Raspberry Heaven a bit. I only did one new Kyawaii RPG the entire year, and that was a role-playing poem, so the amount of work involved was not great. I think I have like 5 or 6 other Kyawaii RPGs started but nowhere near finished, some of them potentially a lot of fun if I ever get them done. Not a few other games I had started on way back when (Tokyo Heroes and Moonsick spring to mind) completely languished during this time.

I posted my first podcast in April of 2009, and did a a total of 12 over the rest of the year, half recorded with guests and half by myself. It never had a huge audience, but I have gotten some encouraging feedback (and The Walking Eye has been kind enough to link to it). While I don’t have the skills, the money, or even the motivation to put together a “professional” podcast per se, its quality wasn’t always what I was aiming for. But on the whole, I like to think I came up with something reasonably engaging, and certainly something quite different from what other RPG podcasters are doing. I’m targeting a small niche, or maybe a niche of a niche, but there definitely are some people who are interesting in the intersection between RPGs and anime (and other elements of Japanese culture) and other stuff I like to blather about. Of course, I’m doing so very irregularly, with podcasts coming once a week when I’m really motivated, and months apart when I’m not. The positive spin I can put on that is that when I do post a podcast you can be sure I have some real enthusiasm behind it, rather than just posting stuff up because I feel I should have something going up. (And it takes a lot of motivation to talk to myself for 40 minutes with a recorder going and my voice getting more messed up the whole time.)

In 2008 I became better acquainted with Andy K and Ben Lehman through working on Maid RPG together. In 2009 that indirectly led me to strike up an acquaintance with Clay Gardner (designer of OVA: Open Versatile Anime) via AIM, and I also had conversations with Jake Richmond and some other interesting people. I’m immature enough to enjoy having a little bit of internet fame, but mature enough to not think too much of it. Still, I feel like I’m starting to reap the benefits of having my name out there. There’s a small group of people who really like what I’m doing and want more of it, so at the very least I’m not in fact talking to myself here.

Near the end of 2009 I was able to start up Neko Machi, a webcomic about catgirls, with the help of my artist friend C. Ellis. Although the overlap between that and my RPG stuff isn’t nonexistent, there are definite contrasts between the two areas. A webcomic is perhaps an easier sell than RPG stuff, but I can assure you it doesn’t happen overnight. The new Neko Machi has only been around since November, and this blog has slightly more traffic lately, but then we haven’t really started trying to market the comic.

I don’t know how much legitimate success will visit me in 2010 (so far, not at all…), but this year will definitely be interesting at the very least. I’m going to be a guest of honor at A-Kon, and I should have some new translated games available for purchase before too long. That to me is by far the most exciting thing in the pipeline, though the pipeline is proving to be twisty and annoying in some places, mostly because of human factors, my own included.