Category Archives: Bloggery

My general blog entries.

RPGs: The Anthology Session

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Original Photo by Laura Desnoit

A couple of weeks ago, I ran a different kind of RPG session, something I called an “anthology” session. Since some people online were asking me how it went, and because I believe Gamemastering is best viewed as a shared education, I finally got some time to sit down and write up the experience.

Like most of the experiments I do at the table, this came from necessity. In this case, I had been running a series of The Dresden Files, and I was left with a few extraneous scenes that didn’t really warrant a full session. I debated doing them in downtime between sessions, but part of the Dresden Files mechanics is a bit where other players can jump in by spending a Fate Point. In fact, much of the design of the system involves the players as audience as well as participants, and running sessions without that audience cheapens that (have I mentioned that the FATE system is very, very clever?) I started thinking about the metaphor of the game as a series of connected novels (in this case, I’m shooting for a rough “trilogy” of novels), and I wondered if the metaphor would extend. What if I did the scenes as a collection of “short stories”?

I decided that if I was going to do this, each person should be the star of their own scene. This gave me a chance to dig into each character’s backstory (via Aspects and the various brainstormed materials from the City Creation session) and pull out one scene that made sense for each. I then realized that there was a bit of a progression between each scene, as there were connections and references to a particular plot thread — the introduction of a new drug — over and over. I tweaked a couple of things in my notes to take advantage of that.

Then it was just a matter of setting the stage. I gratefully stole an idea from Matt McFarland of having the characters meeting in a bar and trading stories of what happened to them over the course of the previous few weeks. I gave each player a notecard with a number on the back for the order of the stories, and the rough first sentence of their story. The first sentences were designed to get the interest of the characters (and the player holding it), so it was things like “Well, I almost died a few weeks back” or “That reminds me of the time I had to meet the dragon. Alone.” I explained this all to the players, set the scene, and let them go. When they worked the story opening in, I started the short story.

Things That Went Well

Showcasing characters: The session went really well for making sure each character got their moment to shine. Only one character didn’t really have a whole lot of character development, and he and I agreed that we needed to sit down and dig into his background a bit more.

The notecards: Handing out the notecards ahead of time was a good idea. It helped me to keep things moving, and the players seemed interested in finding ways to inject the snippets of information into the roleplay.

Teaching the system: I somewhat intentionally structured each scene to have a key conflict. Partially this was because of my years working on the Storytelling Adventure System and identifying the key mechanical conflict in each scene, and partially because I felt the group (myself included) still didn’t quite “get” the game mechanics, and it was a good way to push that issue. In that respect, it worked great, and I think we all understand how the game works a lot better.

Things That Could Have Gone Better

The notecards: At one point, I had to change the order of the scenes, which meant I had to put the current story on pause and start a new one. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have pre-determined the order of the scenes and went with something more organic. I don’t have an idea what that would be, though.

Forwards and backwards in time: Which led to another problem — the constantly time-shuffling led to some confusion. The previous example had three different timeframes happening at once, and a couple of times players were afraid to take actions lest it cause the scene in the bar where they were trading stories to be invalidated. I think next time I’ll use a different frame that doesn’t require any predetermined continuity.

All in all, it was a really good experience, and a couple of the players want to try it again at some point (probably between the second and third “novels” in the series).

“By No Means Vulgar” Now Available!

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Just a quick note to let folks know that the anthology for The Play’s the Thing which I contributed to is now live. It’s called By No Means Vulgar, and it features stories from Greg Stolze, Filamena Young, Jess Hartley, Will Hindmarch, J.R. Blackwell, Crysa Leflar, and Jason Corley. I contributed a short story telling Hamlet as a hard-boiled noir story. It’s only $2.99, so go check it out!

Tor goes DRM-free, and what that means

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Tor announced that their books were going to go DRM-free as of July. My coworkers have been buzzing about it, and I remarked that there’s some bigger wrinkles on this, and that this decision could impact the ebook sales landscape as a whole. I was asked to explain, so I compiled it into an email.

This is that email.

As a caveat, I don’t have any insider knowledge — this is all info I gleaned from the Internet. If someone has more accurate information from a credible source, I’d be happy to update this post.

Earlier this month (April 11th, specifically), the Department of Justice started a lawsuit against major ebook publishers and retailers for allegations of price fixing. Specifically, they were targeting groups like Apple, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble working in conjunction with publishers like Macmillan to keep prices within a specific range (generally, $2.99 to $9.99). 1

Now, some of this comes from publishers like Macmillan choosing to move to the agency model, specifically to prevent retailers like Amazon getting a complete monopoly. For those not in the know, the nutshell is that in the original wholesale model, the publishers sells units to a retailer as a predetermined price, 2 while in the agency model, the publisher sets the retail price, and gives the retailer a set percentage. The issue is that the DOJ is alleging that publishers and retailers conspired to keep ebook prices within a certain range.

So, on the surface, this looks like either a) Amazon and Macmillan are being douches, and the DOJ is stepping in, or b) the DOJ and the U.S. government are woefully out of touch with 21st century business models.

Now it gets a little weird.

Most of the companies contacted by the DOJ have settled. While names are not mentioned (which is common in settlements), two companies have openly admitted to fighting the lawsuit: Apple and Macmillan. Particularly, the CEO of Macmillan posted an open letter on Tor.com. This is the key point:

“We have been in discussions with the Department of Justice for months. It is always better if possible to settle these matters before a case is brought. The costs of continuing—in time, distraction, and expense— are truly daunting.

“But the terms the DOJ demanded were too onerous. After careful consideration, we came to the conclusion that the terms could have allowed Amazon to recover the monopoly position it had been building before our switch to the agency model. We also felt the settlement the DOJ wanted to impose would have a very negative and long term impact on those who sell books for a living, from the largest chain stores to the smallest independents.

“When Macmillan changed to the agency model we did so knowing we would make less money on our e book business.” [emphasis mine]

Apple, as I understand it, has made similar statements. For a while, it looked like Macmillan would be filing a countersuit with companies like Apple and Amazon in this. Now, it looks like Amazon has settled (which, frankly, I’m a little surprised by if it’s true), which leaves Apple. Still not a lightweight partner.

Then Tor pulls this. This is notworthy for two reasons (and kind of a third):

  1. Tor caters to a very tech-savvy audience. Tor.com is a well-run site, and their blog clearly caters to a sci-fi and fantasy audience well beyond just literature. So they’re getting a lot of the heat on the DRM decision, and probably have been for years (more than, say, Harlequin or the non-fiction publishers).
  2. Tor is owned by Macmillan. This means that Macmillan has made the decision to take its most tech-savvy portion of the audience and give them what they want. DRM has mainly been something left to the retailers to enforce and encourage. So, effectively, Macmillan has decided that it doesn’t need retailer support as much as it did before April 11 (although the decision might have been earlier).
  3. The founder of Tor Books, Tom Doherty, owns a chunk of Baen Books, which has been DRM-free and on the outer edge of ebook marketing and retailing for years. So it’s entirely possible that this has been floating around Macmillan for a while.

Macmillan and Amazon are the two companies mainly targeted in the past year or so for being the price fixers. This move, though, really only benefits Apple, who has been steadily moving to push people towards their own storefront (iTunes) while still allowing other retailers to use their wares on Apple products. Making Tor’s books DRM free basically says “Hey, all those books you bought on the Kindle? You can still read those on other devices.”

It’ll be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

  1. Interestingly, while much of it was around the retailers and authors not having the ability to lower their prices below $2.99 without losing significant royalties, there are some groups that also want to increase prices, particular textbook publishers. It’s not just about lowering prices. ↩
  2. This is why many prices are marked MSRP, or “manufacturer’s suggested retail price.” It’s just that – a suggestion – and retailers can change the price in the wholesale model. ↩

What I Learned from “Chrono Trigger”

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Chrono TriggerI have a confession: I never played Chrono Trigger back when it was released. In fact, I missed out on all of the RPGs released on the Super Nintendo, due to not having a Super Nintendo.1 Over the years, I have heard a steady stream of “Oh my god YOU HAVE TO PLAY CHRONO TRIGGER” in my life. A few months back I bought a copy and played it.

And, naturally, I learned a lot.

Tutorials Don’t Have To Be Blunt: For a while, I didn’t understand the whole point of the Millennium Fair bit at the start. In fact, the first hour or so of gameplay isn’t like a lot of the rest of the game on the surface, and felt a little weird. Once I got a few hours in, though, it all clicked into place: the entire Millennium Fair is the tutorial.

I didn’t realize it, though, because it didn’t feel like a tutorial.2 But everything you need in the game is there — talking to NPCs, making decisions, purchasing and upgrading equipment, the occasional mini-game, picking up a new party member, and combat. But there isn’t any part of the game telling you to go over here and click on this thing — it just starts with a few NPCs saying “Weren’t you excited about going to the fair?” and letting natural player curiosity take over.

Come Back Later And Try Again: After a certain point, the game opens up, and you’re likely to run into stuff that’s way above your level. Normally, this drives me crazy in games, but for this it felt fine, because by that point I could go to another time period or switch party members and do something else. Or, if I was really clever, I might just get past it. Unlike, say, Castlevania, I wasn’t hard gated from anything, but rather I was just politely beaten into the ground.

The Fiction Should Determine The Design: Granted, this is something a coworker of mine (who has worked on a bazillion MMOs) has also been beating into my head, so it was on my mind when I played, but I think it shows here. Some games use time travel just as a way to showcase different levels — it’s just set dressing rather than a meaningful mechanic.3 But in this game, time travel becomes part of the design. There are a number of puzzles that require you to do something in one time to change something in a later time period. It’s a clever way to present new areas of the “game world” without invalidating the exploration the player did previously. And the writing of the time travel actually reminds me of Moffet-era Doctor Who, which is a good thing. But the design of the game clearly came from this time travel story idea, and it’s clear that it benefits from that.

Grinding Doesn’t Have To Suck: It’s a JRPG. There’s going to be some grinding. And yet, the pacing of the grind in this game seemed about right. Right around the time I got sick of a particular stage, it was over (or, in one case, I just left and came back later). I’m still noodling around the place of grinding in modern game design, but certainly this game showed me that shitty grinding sucks not necessarily because it’s grinding.

Recommendation: This has often been called the best RPG ever. I won’t speak to that, but it certainly has a lot to offer. You can still get it these days (I was able to buy it on my iPhone), so I think people who like these kinds of games or who are building an RPG-style video game should play it if they are one of the four people left on the planet who hasn’t.

  1. Or a Sega Genesis, for that matter, although I did get a chance to play that some in my youth. ↩
  2. Also, while I might have missed the SNES era of JPRGs, I HAVE played a lot of JRPGs, so this stuff is in my gamer DNA. ↩
  3. I’m looking at you, Turtles In Time. ↩

Healers Must Heal

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World of WarcraftOn the heels of my discussion of implicit rules, I finally got around to reading “Outside oneself in World of Warcraft: Gamers’ perception of the racial self-other”, which was co-written by my dear friend Amanda Barton McBrian. It’s written in academic-ese, but it’s a fascinating read, especially in light of “What I Learned from OWbN Girls.” But this part of the paper tied into my last post in a very interesting way (it’s in paragraph 3.11):

Another respondent indicated “I don’t Role Play in games, so generally what my character is like is dictated by the class and my personality” (emphasis added). Since the game’s programming rarely attributes a certain set of behaviors to the avatars directly, based on initial creation, the implication of this respondent is that gamers also project certain behavioral obligations to certain classes: healers must heal, and thus must produce an empathetic personality. However, behaviors produced by any given class will itself vary from player to player, thus indicating that while the player perceives a certain behavior-per-class expectation, no such standard exists objectively.

That right there is a perfect example of what I called unexpected confinement. More specifically, even people who don’t consider themselves “roleplayers” will confine their activities based on their perceptions of their avatar. Further, “no … standard exists objectively” to predict what kinds of behaviors players will project onto their avatar. Sure, you can make informed assumptions — healers must heal, after all — but you cannot accurately predict how players will confine their play based on their avatar.

So how do you find out how real players will react to your design? Playtesting, playtesting, playtesting. Get real players in front of your game, shut the hell up, and watch them play it. Take notes. Don’t correct them or tell them how to play, but watch how they are playing. Playtesting in the design phase (or “internal playtesting”) is valuable, but playtesting with people outside of the design team (or “external playtesting”) is just as important for a new design.

Sadly, the timetables to get a game to market often allow for enough of the former, but not always enough of the latter (aside from fixes like bugs and rules corrections). In most cases, what happens is that designers learn from feedback from the past design to inform the next one.

If you have the time, I do suggest reading the paper. It has a number of fascinating little insights, and the team is very open about some of the conflicts and problems they had during the study, allowing you to put the data into the proper context. (Sadly, a lot of game design “science” doesn’t actually apply scientific rigor, so it’s refreshing to find a study that does.)

Implicit Rules and the “Air Bud” Defense

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A Dog Cannot Play Basketball

A Dog Cannot Play Basketball

I have no idea if this scene actually exists in the movie Air Bud, but some version of it probably does.

Scene: A basketball court. A dog shows up, dressed to play.

Referee: Hey, get that dog out of here! Players only on the court!

Manager: That dog is a player!

Referee: That’s crazy! Dogs can’t play basketball.

Manager: (handing Referee a copy of the rulebook) Tell me where it says that only humans can play basketball!

Referee: (flipping through book) I’ll be darned. There’s no rule against it. The dog can play!

It’s ludicrous. It’s funny. And it neatly spells out a common conflict in game rules, especially games where the rules are constantly interpreted by people.

Most of what we commonly think of as “rules” are actually only a subsection of the rules being used. Rules that are spelled out are called explicit rules. But there are all sorts of rules that aren’t written out — gentlemen’s rules, social assumptions, and so-called “unwritten rules.” These undocumented but no less real collection of rules are called implicit rules.

The best way to showcase implicit rules in action is to use an example — preferably one a little more down-to-earth than golden retrievers playing basketball. Poker is big these days, so let’s use that. The rules for, say, Texas Hold ‘Em are well-documented. But let’s use another fictional movie scene to illustrate a point.1

Scene: A saloon table in the Wild West. The protagonist is in the middle of a long game with a number of desperate banditos. The protagonist stares as his cards, worried about how good his hand is.

Bandito #1: (staring at Protagonist) Well? Are you going to bet, or do we shoot you full of holes?

This is an implicit rule in play: “The player will make his bet in a reasonable amount of time.” It’s not a rule that’s written down, but it’s an implied rule of just about any game — you can’t just walk away from a game of Monopoly or Tic-Tac-Toe. Instead, players will either require you to return and actually make a turn, the game will go on without you, or some sort of victory will be conferred to the remaining player.

As a designer, some of these implicit rules you can anticipate, like “players should not cheat.” But a number you can’t, and sometimes these implicit rules change the experience of the whole game for the players. This can work a couple of different ways:

  • Unexpected confinement: I notice that this happens a lot to people who have played different versions of a particular game — the way it used to be done gets stuck in the heads of the players, and they confine their options in ways the current rules don’t intend. In some video games (particularly RPGs), I find that I sometimes follow the fictional logic of the world instead of “game logic,” and I end up missing parts of the game that the designers intended me to explore.
  • Exploits: On the other side, an implicit rule might blind the designer to a particular strategy that ends up providing an unfair advantage. Players find that putting rules together in a particular illogical but legal way provides a disproportionate value.

An interesting side point is that implicit rules may become explicit in certain environments. Most of the online poker games I’ve seen make the implicit rule of “bet in a reasonably amount of time” explicit by giving players a timer. Professionally competitive versions of games often incorporate a timer as well.

No matter how you look at it, though, there are always more rules to a game than the ones spelled out. As the rules gets more complex and have a larger legacy of previous games, that body of implicit rules gets larger as well, and has a greater potential to be out-of-sync between designer and player, or between players. But those rules are no less valid, even if they are harder to articulate.

So, no. Dogs cannot, in fact, play basketball.

  1. Yes, I know Texas Hold ‘Em rules weren’t around in the 19th century. I also know that no one in Hollywood actually cares about that fact. Just roll with it. ↩

Meaningful Content, Coming Soon

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Have Blaster, Will Travel

Have Blaster, Will Travel

I know that for the past several weeks my blog’s been a bit devoid of content, aside from mentioning the slew of interesting things I’ve been involved in. Most of that has been due to working on the two anthologies that hit my desk, as well as a number of podcast interviews. Further, I wrapped up one tabletop game I was running (or at least, the first season of it) and started a second. I’ve also been increasing my time at the gym, as I’ll be working with a personal trainer two to three times a week in addition to my usual cardio. There’s other personal stuff in there as well, but the practical upshot of all of it is that whenever lots of things are changing in my life, the blog is always the first thing to go.

I always intended this space to be irregularly updated as I had time, but after working on Tour de Holmes, I got used to posting at least weekly, and I feel like I’ve fallen off of that wagon. Anyhow, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get back to more regular updates of actual content here soon. I’ve got another “What I Learned” in the back of my head, as well as another game design thought (this time about implicit rules). I also have a couple of topic requests from last year that I can get to. Finally, I’ve been kicking around an idea for a project with Meredith Gerber, but I don’t have any details to share yet.

In the meantime, one of the previously mentioned anthologies is getting a Kickstarter. This is the one for Bulldogs! called Have Blaster, Will Travel, which features some great writers like Greg Stolze, Gareth Skarka, Jared Axelrod, Christiana Ellis, and Mur Lafferty. The Kickstarter is to help fund the print run of the anthology. There’s all sorts of cool stretch goals, including hiring new writers, getting new artwork, and even (my personal favorite) getting me paid $100 more for my work! So, this is a really great way to support my work, as well as helping out Galileo Games, which is turning out to be a really smart company that puts out quality work.