Monthly Archives: January 2012

Buy My Stuff: Tales of the Far West

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Tales of the Far West cover

Tales of the Far West

While I’m waiting for the other formats for Slices of Fate to drop, another project I’ve worked on has arrived. Tales of the Far West is available in Kindle format, as well as through DriveThruRPG – I contributed the story “In The Name Of The Empire,” where a sheriff is charged with the murder of an Imperial Magistrate.

Imagine: A fantasy world, but not one based on Medieval/Dark Ages European culture and myth, but rather on the tropes of the Spaghetti Western and Chinese Wuxia. Add steampunk elements. Mix well.

A fantasy world that mixes the inspirations of Django and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon… The Good, The Bad & The Ugly and House of Flying Daggers… Fistful of Dollars and Fist of Legend.

A fantasy world that’s explored through a book series, a constantly-updated website, a tabletop role-playing game, comics, artwork, webseries and much, much, more.

This is FAR WEST.

If you’re curious to learn a little of the process I used while writing the story, you can read this series of posts:

Go! Buy Tales of the Far West! Spread the word! It’s a dozen stories of wuxia-western-steampunk-fantasy awesomeness!

Spiderweb Software Has Eaten My Soul

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In many ways, I am an ideal customer. If I find an artist or a company that I really like, I tend to latch on to them. Back in the day I would play anything by LucasArts or Sierra. I’ve played many games just because they had the BioWare label. Last year I became a convert to Wadjet Eye Games. I am prone to loyalty.

Over the holiday I had an itch to play a classic CRPG, but for some reason Planescape Torment and Baldur’s Gate weren’t scratching that itch. Then I stumbled across the Geneforge Saga on Steam. At the time, it was $10, which was a ridiculously good price for five games, so I snapped them up. Within a week or so, I bought Avadon: The Black Fortress as well.

Just now I did a little math. Assuming my Steam account is accurate, I’ve put in 150 hours into these games. It’s probably more than that — Steam has a habit of not tracking the occasional session of gameplay, and I’ve also put a few hours in on the demo of Avernum VI. I’ve finished Avadon, I’ve essentially finished Geneforge 1, 1 and I’m starting on Geneforge 4. From there, I’m planning on trying Geneforge 5 again, and then hopefully Avernum: Escape From The Pit will be out for Windows.

This is a bit odd for me. Granted, I am prone to mild obsession. I’ll spend a few days watching an entire season of a TV series, or listen through hours of an audio drama I like. Once I reread the first ten books of the Dresden Files all in a row, just so I could remember the context for the eleventh novel. But it’s only now, over a month later, that I’m feeling the grip of Spiderweb games letting me go enough that I can think a bit more rationally on why these particular games have snagged my attention.

If you’re not familiar with this company (and I certainly wasn’t), it’s very small. In fact, it’s more or less one man — Jeff Vogel — who runs everything. Wikipedia tells me the company’s been around since 1994, back when shareware was a thing. The games he makes aren’t particularly pretty, and have little to no music. They don’t have voiceovers, and often the assets are reused between games. The games have small, incremental improvements within the series. They are games in a very specific genre — turn-based, isometric RPGs — catering to a very specific audience.

And yet, I think these are strengths, in a way. It’s like playing D&D 3rd edition, and then moving to another D20 game — you recognize a lot of the parts of the game, and it’s easier to drop in. The assets and lack of music score starts to become a voice, something noteworthy and distinct. The parts that are new and distinct stand out more, and can be appreciated more.

I’m planning to dig into more details about the games I’ve actually played in future. But for now, I’m continuing to enjoy the feeling of finding a new company to obsess over.

  1. I’m two maps from the end. I’m stuck, and don’t want to spend several hours figuring out yet another way to get to the Geneforge. So I did a YouTube search of the ending, and called it a day. ↩

What I Learned from OWbN Girls

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Permission to use granted by OWbN Girls and Meredith Gerber

No, it’s not a game. It’s an organization. But I still learned a lot about game design from OWbN Girls.

Over the past few days, I’ve been getting a trickle of drama in my various social networks around the group. For those not in the know, OWbN Girls is an advocacy group within the organization One World by Night that strives ”to play fair in the gaming community, educate those that believe in the stereotype [of unempowered female gamers], and engage non-gamers in joining the community.” I admit that I’m not entirely sure what the drama is,1 but it brought me back to a particular thing I keep picking at: sexism (and really, many different “isms”) in gaming.

The conflict for me is that the extremes are disagreeable. It seems like whenever things like sexism comes up, the two options float to “suck it up and deal with it” or “turn into a politically correct wasteland.” I don’t agree with either option, so I keep picking at it because it’s important to me as an artist and a game designer. It’s a more complex problem than it appears on the surface, which is true of any important problem, and there isn’t a simple, tweet-sized answer. In talking on Twitter to the OWbN Girls account and admitting that it’s a bigger problem, I came up with some ideas on how to extract some of these threads.

Controversial content is okay. I may personally hate the ideas that games like F.A.T.A.L.2 espouse, but the alternative of someone deciding whether I can consume it or not is a million times worse. Further, controversial content often gets conversations going about important topics. This is something that entertainment and art does, and interactive entertainment does on an even more important level. We need games that challenge us, make us think, and put us in uncomfortable situation. If someone doesn’t like the content, they can (and should) exercise their rights to refuse to buy or consume it.

So let’s assume that’s a given: controversy is not inherently bad.

Forcing me to act in uncomfortable ways may not be okay. But there’s a flip side. It’s one thing to have a game where, say, you can choose to have random sex with women to get something. It’s another to force me to do that to proceed. It’s okay to have characters that are terrible to each other, but it’s not okay to require players to be terrible to each other (and especially if they have no idea that they need to be terrible to each other to succeed). And this is a tricky line, and probably more than a little subjective, but for me I think the choice needs to be there.

Let me pick differently controversial example. In the game Geneforge,3 you play a character that can choose between three factions (or, indeed, can ignore them all). For brevity, all of the factions are composed of magically-created slaves, and you are one of the magicians that can create such creatures. One faction wants to work together with the magicians (called “Shapers”), while another faction wants to be led and treated like cattle. And yet, the faction that wants to be led has more resources which you can really use to help you. The third faction that wants to murder all the Shapers is even more powerful.

In this example, there’s a choice. I can go with the morally safe route and accept the increase in difficulty in progression, or I can choose a less moral road and get a benefit. I can be a good person or a terrible person (or, more likely, something in the middle), but the game doesn’t force me to enslave a race or commit genocide. I can feel bad all on my own, because of what I decided to do. And better, the thoughts and ideas this game generates are more powerful to me because I am the one who choose a particular path, instead of having it force-fed to me.

What does this have to do with LARP? Let me loop back around a bit with another example. In 2005, I made a character for the Camarilla Vampire: The Requiem game that was sexist. He was a sneaky bastard that frequently used women to get what he wanted.4 I went to a number of female players I knew and said I wanted to create a collection of background ties with their characters to represent this. I also made a commitment to myself that I would never even hint at this kind of sexually-exploitative roleplay until I cleared it with the player outside the game first, even if a female player started it. Really, the whole idea could have gone horribly, horribly wrong, and I was prepared to scrap it all on a moment’s notice.

Every single female player I approached was okay with it. I even refused some people who came to me about it, because a couple of times it got a little weird for me. And I played the character for years before he was murdered.

I’ve often gone back and tried to reconstruct why that worked so well. Quite a lot of it was likely due to the women I approached (who were all people I’d gamed with before and built up a measure of trust with), but perhaps the biggest, I think, is that the roleplay was never forced. The fact that the character was perceived to be sexually exploitative was enough — I didn’t have to say or do anything to prove that. Many times I would say “And they go off and have a good time” and leave it there, or I would drop out of character and mention that my PC would then proceed to make lewd suggestions instead of actually saying them. Granted, a lot of that was because I am a married man and was frankly uncomfortable with the details much of the time, but I think that had the benefit of making it clear that I wasn’t doing this for my own personal titillation. The whole point was to portray a character for the other players to enjoy (or, more accurately, hate enough to plot to murder him).

I do not recommend this path for most players. I’m not even sure I would try to do something that ambitious again — as I said, it could have been really bad. But it does show that it can be done.

Conclusion: “Isms” are important in interactive art, but only at a remove. I think it’s okay if content is controversial, but I don’t think design should be. If I as a player know that I have control, I’m willing to give up a little bit of it to see where things are going. I’m willing to risk making myself uncomfortable if it means I can walk away at any time. For a movie or a book, this is binary — you’re consuming the content or you’re not. In a game, however, there are shades of interacting with the content. That switch, that ability to walk away from what’s uncomfortable needs to be part of the game somehow, so that someone can walk away with only a little consequence and continue with the game.

This is a big topic. I’m under no delusion that this blog post is anywhere close to answering the problems that come with controversial games. But I absolutely believe that it’s important that organizations like OWbN Girls continue to ask the question.

  1. Nor do I want to dig into it — I’ve had too many years of LARP drama in my past to actively look for it, thanks. ↩
  2. No, I’m not linking to it. I refuse to give that game any traffic. I will, however, link to a hilarious review of it. ↩
  3. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the Geneforge series, and by this company. Expect more posts in the future on these games. ↩
  4. Granted, it was all really a cover for his attempt to become a god and to deal with his misplaced mommy issues, but that’s irrelevant to the example. ↩

Politics: Throwing Chairs for Fun

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Sorry for the delay. After the holiday I got wrapped up in working on Victorian Lost, as well as settling back into working on the World of Darkness MMO. Then I got sick, and didn’t feel like doing much of anything. But now I’ve settled back in, and ready to tackle more of my backlog of blog topics. In fact, bringeroflight over at LiveJournal asked me to talk about “writing political and social systems into an RPG, especially when it may end up in a low NPC LARP.”

Oh man, do I have opinions on this.

Politics in RPGs (and indeed, in fiction as a whole) are not the same as politics in real life. Without getting into a political debate about what is best, I’ll only say that in the real world, it’s often desirable when politicians are calm and productive and work together to accomplish something. In games, the opposite is true. In fact, I have often said that politics in LARPs should be more about throwing chairs than making policy. So, if you’re designing a political system, you need to think less about a functional political system and instead worry about making an interesting one. There are a few things to keep in mind with this.

Avoid Dictators. There’s a reason why the Prince in Masquerade went from the all-powerful elder in First Edition to being a toady largely at the control of a Primogen Council in Revised — dictators are boring on both sides of the equation. Sure, it’s fun for ten minutes to do whatever the hell you want, and there’s some narrative juice you can get from trying to overthrow a heartless bastard to prop up the next idealistic utopia that will ultimately fall to real-world pressures, blah blah blah, but the reality is that playing in that state is binary: you can do nothing or you can do whatever you want. The more people you can spread the power around to, the more interesting your political dynamic will become.

Power Needs To Mean Something. On the other hand, “dictator” has to seem like an attractive option. Playing in a town council that only has the authority to change school names or decide on the color of flower arrangements isn’t as exciting as playing a board of organized crime bosses who have the power of life and death. If political power means something, then people will hold on to it harder and work to get more of it, and so will everyone else. This means that those people will constantly clash against each other, which continues to generate entertaining situations. If you’re designing a game, this power has to matter to the mechanics at some level (which goes back to my thoughts on mechanics and setting — it all applies here as well).

There’s Not Quite Enough To Go Around. Part of that meaning has to revolve around resources, and specifically resources that are a little short of being enough for everyone. If there’s a game where all powers require a gem to use and there’s more than enough gems for everyone, there will be liberal sharing. Make the game where there’s enough gems to give to half of the players, and things get interesting. If you’re playing a group of vampires fighting over land, that land has to be small enough that not everyone can have a slice. (And yes, that land has to have a mechanic behind it.)

Politics are Player Vs. Player. I have run heavy political games both with players taking on all the political roles and with NPCs taking up most (or all) of those roles. In general, when the political choices are in the hands of the players, it’s a political game. When they’re in the hands of NPCs, it’s window dressing to a different game. It is certainly possible to have a strong political game where the players are all a coordinated group working against other factions to do something amazing or whatever, but on a basic level it’s no different than fighting a bunch of monsters. There’s a certain dynamic that comes only from players going all-out to screw each other over. The game Diplomacy is pure player vs. player politics, and I have heard more stories of people who won’t speak to each other after playing that game than in any other openly competitive game.

Decide What Politics Means For Your Game. In the end, you have to decide why politics are important.

For most mission-based or adventure-based games, all that matters is that there’s a guy that gives you orders or that you have to overthrow. In that case, prop up a king under whatever name you choose and point the players at him.

If you want a game where politics offers a flavor or spice to your game but isn’t the main thrust, consider a structure where power is divided between a few people or groups. You can define some groups as “bad” and others as “good” or paint them all with a uniform coat of gray, but in the end the players will likely side with one (or form their own faction). The act of picking and choosing a side feels political, but from there the game becomes a slightly more complicated version of “kill the bastard with the crown” again.

If you want a game where politics are the point of the game, you have to give that power to the players, and that power has to have teeth. There have to be reasons to work together as well as be at odds with each other. The right balance is where compromise is the only attractive option because it stops the fighting.

What political systems in games have you really enjoyed?