Err on the side of simplicity.

Motivatiosn are good, purposes are better.

I’m pretty bad at chess.

It’s weird, because I love games. Give me a little luck or some hidden information and I’m good to go, but the total transparency of chess is just at odds with how I think. I’m one of those terrible players who initiates lots of piece exchanges just to simplify the board, and it still doesn’t help. I used to take a certain amount of perverse pride in this, especially because I excel at Knightmare Chess, but nowadays I just acknowledge it with a bit of a sad shrug, and file it behind “Drawing” and “Playing the Guitar” as things I might try to get better at someday.

But I still try to know chess. There is no other game out there I can think of that is so rich in metaphor and private language. Every game of chess feels like it holds the promise of a story or a war. And that richness is part of why we casually use it as a metaphor for almost anything complicated, indirect and adversarial. Usually, this is a pretty lazy metaphor, but if you drill into it, you can often find some useful insights. Specifically, Chess provides an excellent insight on how to run open-ended plots.

One important idea in chess is the threat, because it controls the cadence of play. When one piece is in a position to capture another piece, it is threatening that piece. In many ways this is more important than the capture itself because the threat can be used to (crudely) try to control the other player’s moves. Suppose I have a cunning plan for my rook over there, but you move a piece and threaten my bishop. Rather than go forward with my cunning plan, I now need to react to your move. If you’re very cunning, you’ve got another move that will force another reaction. Keep me on the defensive and you control the cadence of the game. Unless I can break this pattern, you’ve got me on the ropes.[1]

This move and countermove offers an incredibly useful structure for RPGs and their conflicts, in part because what looks very simple on the surface but is actually made out of several smaller parts that can all be informative.[2]

The initial threat is easy to model in any RPG. It might be an actual threat, but it can really be considered a stand in for any kind of clear tension. Something bad that will happen, but has not yet. This sort of tension is the basis of most action. Someone’s going to kill the duchess. A storm is coming in. Raiders will strike in the night. The Prince’s secret will be revealed.

Whatever form it takes, the important thing is that something bad will happen if no action is taken, and that something is undesirable. Compared to a passive threat (The Duchess has enemies. Raiders have a base outside of town.) these are vastly more useful for games because they already have momentum. They transition directly to action, and provide a clear purpose. Without that clarity, it is easy to get hung up on the rocks of distraction and research.[3]

Having started with the metaphor of the threat, let’s look to chess for how to handle this. When one piece threatens another in chess, there are several ways to respond: you can block, retreat, capture, threaten or cover.

You can block by putting another piece in the way of the threatening piece so it can no longer threaten the original. Unfortunately, the blocking piece is now threatened (and thus, a block may well be a sacrifice) and if the blocker is captured, the original piece is threatened again. Thankfully, there’s a bit more to it – the blocker also changes the nature of the fight by changing where it happens. The new location may be more secure because it’s covered or otherwise creates difficulties for the opposing piece. Of course, the whole thing may have been a gambit to move the blocking piece in the first place.

Retreating is more straightforward. If your piece is threatened, you move it so it’s no longer threatened. Simple enough. But it leaves an opening where your piece used to be, and your piece needs to go *somewhere*, and a good adversary can limit your available options by threatening the empty available to you. A retreat is dangerous because it hands tempo (control of the back-and-forth cadence of the game) back to your opponent, unless you can hid some sort of other move in the retreat.

Capture may be the most viscerally satisfying option; capture the threatening piece with one of your own to remove the threat. The problem is its rarely that simple – unless you opponent simply overlooked that his own piece was threatened[4], then its almost certainly a trap. The only reason an opponent would knowingly threaten your piece with one that is itself threatened is to force you to capture his piece. This will presumably either puts your piece in a bad position, or removes it from a place where it was doing something useful to you.[5] Unfortunately, if capturing is the only way you can stop a bad move, then you may need to willingly step into the trap.

Threatening counters the move by making a move somewhere else entirely, and initiating your own threat, so that you now threaten one of their pieces. If they capture your piece, you will capture theirs. This is a tricky game to play because your opponent will make his decision based on whether or not the final position of pieces is to his advantage or not. This is partly tied to the value of the pieces, but is not limited to that. It’s also important to look at how the pieces will be positioned when things shake out. Your opponent might let you take a pawn to capture a knight, but if capturing that pawn puts your attacking piece in position to threaten other pieces? He might hesitate.[6]

An even more subtle threatening response is one which does not necessarily threaten another piece, but rather is all about board position. If an opponent responds to a threat with an apparently nonsensical move, then think hard about what the board is going to look like after you make your capture. It’s possible your opponent is clueless, but more likely he’s taking advantage of the fact that he knows your next move (the capture) and is positioning pieces to be in a stronger position at the end of it. [EDIT: A suggestion in discussion may result in this being broken out from threaten as Flank or Maneuver]

Covering is the last option, and it’s a dangerous game. It puts a piece in position so that if the capture is made, the capturing piece will then get captured in turn. This is a straight tradeup, and even more than a threat, it calls for an explicit cost-benefit analysis. This is often the easiest thing to arrange, but its also a sucker’s bet, since it puts the decision in your opponent’s hand, and if he says go, he knows your next move. This is the one response to a threat that can’t be used to counter a Check, and that hopefully illustrates its weaknesses. However, it’s not entirely useless. It is actually a strong counter against very strong pieces, because the cost of the exchange is almost never in the attackers favor. That is, this works well against queens because the cost of losing a queen is usually too high. But for a closer exchange, its tough. This invites quagmire, but for all that, you’ll see it a lot because it is often on only apparent option.

Ok, so these are a bunch of chess abstractions, but what do they have to do with anything? To my mind, these map VERY easily to options that players should consider when faced with a threat in a game, and as a reverse, to ways for a GM to response to player actions in a game. If you can identify a threat (that is to say, the source of tension) then it’s easy to ask “In this situation, what are my blocking options? Retreat? Capture? Counter-threat? Cover?” and as you look at it from each angle, it should suggest options.

This won’t necessarily work for every game. In a dungeon, these options tend to be greatly curtailed, but in a more open game, one with more “pieces on the board” as it were, this can be powerfully effective. And, certainly, you can never expect things to map precisely to chess. While move and counter is certainly the most common cadence of play, every now and again it gets disrupted by events in play, but keeping the underlying structure in sight can also help things.

All of this also points to a very important point that Chess illustrates well: the power of tempo. When one side is forcing a response from the other (as with a threat) then that side is in a superior position, and this ends up mapping to a lot of ideas about proactive vs. reactive play. Since the GM is usually the initiator, classic gameplay tends to revolve around the GM making moves and the players making counters – that is to say the GM being proactive and the players being reactive – until the GM runs out of moves (so to speak) and the players win. This works ok, but you can also take a lesson from chess to realize that it is incredibly powerful to change the tempo. A strong countermove can force your opponent to become reactive, allowing you to become the proactive party. This hot seat can switch back and forth over the course of a game of chess, and there’s no reason it should not be able to do the same over the course of an rpg session.

None of this thinking demands that you be good at chess (thank god for that), or that you even like chess. Chess is just a tool here to help frame the kinds of challenges and thinking that’s going to come up in any kind of indirect, adversarial play, much like you will find in most RPGs.

1 – Of course, this cadence can change very quickly, especially if the reactive player has been careful about his reactions or if the proactive player is too focused on his own plan. More on that in a minute.

2 – This is one of those rare cases where this model is equally useful to players and GMs, since it’s all about thinking about how to respond to things and try to claim the initiative.

3 – A lack of clarity has its place, but only when carefully planned for. If it just happens (as it often does) then its not a good thing.

4 – Or he was hoping you would overlook the threat. Either option may be reasonable for novice-level play, and in fact are good indicators for it, but stop being options as play gets more sophisticated. However, in situations with muddled information (like RPGs), that is a more reasonable situation. However, don’t just assume it’s a muddle unless there’s some real fog of war sort of problems afoot, and even in those situations, a threat may be a good way to flush out the opposition. If the enemy does something you can counter by punching him in the face, and you have a history of face punching, assume that if he shows his face for a punching, there’s more to it than it seems.

5 – This is something of a recurring theme, and one of the most important things to keep in mind when you apply this model to stories and games. The apparent threat is not necessarily the real threat. What is often important is what you’re not doing when you’re dealing with the threat. This is one of those things that looks incredibly cunning and manipulative at first glance (think Xanatos Gambit), but in reality is very simple problem solving. I want to get into the building, but it has guards. I will distract the guards, and go into the building. Easy peasy. Easy enough that it’s not hard to nest two or three of these in a pinch.

6 – This also introduces some muddiness into the clarity of chess. The value of pieces is well documented, but board position is far harder to quantify. An exchange based purely on piece value is predictable. One based on piece plus board position is less clear.

Not RPGs, though that’s part of it, but Video Games. I’ll play almost anything, and I can enjoy a clever mechanic as much as the next guy, but the games that really stick in my mind do so through their storytelling. Importantly, that storytelling only rarely takes the form of reading blurbs of text on a screen – more often it is an implicit part of play. As you play the game, you piece together the fragments of information available to you, and you build a more complete image of what’s going on. Sometimes there’s a lot of connective tissue (most RPGs) and the experience is like reading a compelling, engaging book.[1] Other times there’s so little there that you start creating images of what the story might be in your own mind (Limbo).

Story is tricky, though. Take Borderlands, an FPS with RPG elements. It’s a post-apocalyptic first person shooter that absolutely oozes style. The characters and places feel consistently mad-max-ey, and the design is really top notch. But it’s got very little story. Everything sort of stands around waiting for you to do things, and there’s very little sense that there’s a sweep of things you have stepped into. Net result is a game I enjoy playing when I play it, but which I very rarely think to go back to playing. Contrasted with Mass Effect II, an FPS with RPG elements which is all about the story, and I’ve played through it twice, and have almost finished a third playthrough. It’s a game I go back to.

MMOs are interesting in this regard because I like to explore, and exploration can be a great way to build story if the game is designed well. World of Warcraft’s geography tells stories about its zones and the world. They’re usually fragments, more likely to raise a question than answer it, but that keeps it interesting to poke into the corners and out of the way places. I have yet to see anything comparable in another game, but it could be done. Such design is a function of thought and storytelling, not technology.

All this is on my mind because Starcraft 2 came out yesterday[2]. The original is one of the all time great games, and its expansion, Brood War, turned the awesome up to 11. SC2 is pretty as hell, and the gameplay seems spiffy, but they seem to have done something with the story, as if Brood War never happened. I guess it might take place between the two games, but there are little oddities that seem to suggest otherwise. Now, I know a lot of people do Starcraft for the multiplayer experience, but for me it’s all about the campaign. As I say, I’m in it for the story. So I find myself at a bit of a loss. The emotional investment I’ve carried for over a decade seems to have been cast aside, and the replacement is…ok.

Now, I haven’t played for long. Maybe it will get better after the “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal” part of things, but all the same, I am finding myself able to walk away from the game, something I would never have expected.

Story is, I suppose, a double edged knife. It is good to get me invested and interested, but play with that at your risk.[3]

1 – Or, statistically, a really long, boring book. There are cRPGs I love beyond measure, but finding those has meant navigating some stinkers.

2 – Which is, not coincidentally, why this is a short, flaky posts. 🙂

3 – I’ve stopped watching NCIS, a dumb show I’ve enjoyed a lot. It’s not like I now hate it or refuse to watch it, but it no longer catches my attention when I’m reviewing options. This wasn’t intentional – I just realized it was the case one day. Upon realizing this, I thought about it, and it struck me I’d stopped after they ran an episode that profoundly gutted one of the characters (the Tony is a Creepy Stalker episode, for fans). They’d broken the contract. And that, I have to say, kind of sucks. I could ignore it, I suppose, but ignoring it would mean I didn’t really care about the show, which I do. Why else would I have spent hours of my life on it?

Another session of the Cold War game last night. Went interestingly, as the bit I’d expected to be the framing conflict ended up expanding to fill the session. I could probably have manhandled things back on track, but since this was primarily driven by player action/reaction it was more fun to run with it, and it will just mean that I have more notes prepped for next session.

Took my own advice at a few points, When planning this session, I was uncertain how to keep things dynamic, so I asked myself how I’d do it, and told myself to put another ball in the air. That very much did the trick. I also needed to actively stop myself at one point when a player’s plan didn’t make sense to me. There was a temptation to just force a quicker resolution, but I stopped, asked for clarification, and let the dice fall where they may.

I continue to have the “problem” that I am successfully engaging the players, but only rarely hitting their aspects directly. In large part this is because the aspects in the game are a little bit abstract, and that lead to a thought experiment – what would a game look like if all aspects were external? That is to say, what if all aspects were other people, places and things and none of them were internal or descriptive?[1] I certainly like the thought as a GM, since it helps me with using aspects as plot hooks, and I think I like how it would make players think. They can still have aspects that are effectively internal, but they need to have an external expression.[2] That is, if you want to be a Ninja, rather than take the ninja aspect,you take an aspect for your ninja teacher, ninja clan, or even sworn ninja enemy. That you are a ninja is implicit in the arrangement.

That said, this might be a bit weird (and definitely not useful for my current game) so I wonder if it might be more practical to allow players to “anchor” their aspects. Sort of flip the idea on its head. After they’ve picked the aspect, allow them to add a parenthetical note of the external thing which symbolizes that aspect to them, so it would be “Ninja (Enemy Ninja Clan)”. That may be the best of both worlds, since it allows the full range of aspects, but it still allows for hooks.

As I think about it, this also does a nice job of enriching the aspects as well, associating them with a character, a set or a prop[3]. For example, if Harry Dresden has an aspect like “Connected to Paranormal Chicago” then the anchor might be “Mac’s Pub”. On his “Wizard” aspect, “The White Council” makes an excellent anchor. Does the cause an aspect to do double duty? Yes, it kind of does. Is that a bad thing? My hunch says not. For players, it better defines the scope of when an aspect will come up, and that’s always useful. Also, as i thin about it, this ends up being a great shorthand for worldbuilding, especially for games that didn’t do a whole session of setting creation. There’s a lot of setting potential tied up in Anchors, especially if you can get your players to pick related anchors. [4] I think I’ll have to see if my players are up for adding some anchors.

TOTALLY UNRELATED QUESTION
Ok, this one has nothing to do with Fate or Aspects. I am pondering doing a little bit of light game design in this blog, at least in part because it seems like a good way to illustrate a few thoughts. To this end, I am pondering between a “Fantasy Heartbreaker” (a somewhat snotty[5] name for a D&D knockoff) and something in the Storytelling/Unisystem/L5R Stat+Skill spectrum. So that leads to two questions: 1) would that be worth reading and 2) which system approach should I take?

Genuinely waffling on this one, folks, so input is welcome.

1 – For DFRPG, make exceptions for the one essential aspect like “Wizard”. Heck, maybe even make the idea of one exception universal. Force players to think about what that one defining thing is.

2- Sort of like how in Over the Edge, each trait must be reflected in your character description, or how every setting element should have a face.

3 – Yes, that’s a bit of an explicit TV bit of thinking, but having known sets and props in play is pretty useful in my experience.

4 – As an example, suppose Harry Dresden picked “Wizard (White Council) ” as an aspect and anchor pair. What happens when someone else in the group picks the pair “Duty (White Council)”. To me, that suggests some instant mojo.

5 – Enough so that I am using it tongue in cheek.

When people talk about the difference between games and stories, one of the most important points of distinction takes the form of the characters. When you create a character for a game, you are[1] focusing primarily on capabilities, those things the character can do. When challenges come up in play, tension is created by raising the question of whether or not those capabilities, modified by a randomizer and optimized by player choices. That uncertainty means every part (especially capability and choice) is meaningful. A talented GM or well-designed scenario will put the whole event in context, giving it some meaning and resonance, but that’s not a necessary step. Things work (in a well designed game) without it.

On the other hand, when an author creates a character for a story, he has entirely different considerations. The capabilities of the character are never in question, and when faced with a challenge, he will overcome it or not as based on the author’s needs.[2] But at the same time, the author must provide context, because that is what matters to telling a good story. That is to say, the author does not care if the character can climb that wall, he cares about why it matters whether or not he climbs that wall.[3]

These are very different goals, and at their core, they’re contradictory ones, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not room for stealing between them. The more a player likes context for his actions, the more he might want to look at the things that make a good character in fiction (Connections, motivations and so on), and a fiction author would be well served to construct characters with their capabilities in mind so it doesn’t look like they’re cheating when the character proves capable of something.[4]

But there is an interesting point of overlap between the two in that both depend on convincing challenges – that is to say, challenges where the outcome is in doubt. Even if the author and the game master have different means of resolution, both are poorly served when the player/reader looks at a situation that should be important and feels there’s only one way it could possibly play out (unless someone cheats).

The most obvious place this comes up is in capability-centric fiction, which a lot of adventure fiction is[5], most notably comic books. I talked a little bit about Batman last week, but let’s flip the camera and talk about Superman. Superman is a tough character to handle because he is so capable that it’s difficult to convincingly challenge him. Because he’s so powerful, just throwing more powerful guys at him is a poor solution, because they have to come from somewhere and because too many such guys and Superman’s role in the setting starts getting called into question.

This puts the author and the GM in the curiously difficult position of needing to really work to find a good challenge for the character, and they likely turn to the same place – challenges that strike at the place where his power is not going to be quite so overwhelming. Hit his friends and family, bring in tough moral choices and generally proceed from the assumption that yes, he’s crazily capable, so we’ll work with that.

Now, this is where we start getting the weird divide between gaming and writing. For a writer, we’re doing ok, albeit working very hard to stay fresh and interesting since we’re trodding over ground that has been trod many times before. There’s a temptation to change things up by perhaps introducing a new weakness or a change to capabilities that gives him new material to work with. In contrast, in gaming, Superman’s player’s been stockpiling his XP so that he can buy off those annoying “Weakness: Kryptonite” and “Dependant: Lois Lane” disadvantages so that his character will eventually be perfect.

And that, right there, might be a problem. Proceeding from the assumption that playing the game is fun, Superman’s player’s goal is to be so successful that he will never be challenged, which means he’ll have nothing to play, which means…no fun.

It’s an extreme example, but a lot of people play with that underling perspective. In attempting to address their own flaws or weaknesses, they forget that the purpose of the game is to provide challenges for the player and that even if you resolve one set of challenges, there are always others. And this is where there’s a little something to be learned from the author. See, the author knows that things need to be kept interesting, and the first place he’ll look for interesting things is the character. He see’s Superman and see’s things like Kryptonite and Lois Lane and he views them as opportunities to tell a story, not as things that weaken the character. That’s a useful perspective for a gamer too.

See, when you take drawbacks (whether they’re mechanical, or just something you write into the character), you are steering the game. Provided you have a GM who takes any authorship of her games[6] then you are telling her about the kind of problems you want to have. And since you’re going to have problems anyway, wouldn’t you rather like to have some say in what they are?

The bottom line is that you do not need to be “creating a story” or taking an author role to appreciate that your characters problems and limitations can be as essential to your fun as their capabilities. Even if you never care about the context of the challenges you face, and the story elements implicit in that, it’s a simple matter of combinative math. The problems you bring along with you will make the challenges you face more interesting and personalized, and that personalization also means you’ll have had time to think about solutions. Which means you’re more prepared, and who wouldn’t want that?

1 – In most games. There are, of course, exceptions.

2 – If taken into play, the logical extension of this idea is to have character success or failure depend upon “the needs of the story”. This is one of those ideas that people suspect story-driven gamers are proposing, but I don’t think anyone is actually a big proponent of it. If that’s really how you want to resolve things, there’s a reasonable question as to why you’re playing a game.

3 – If you ever want to see how much meaning can be squeezed into the simple act of climbing over a wall, then pick up Lois McMaster Bujold’s “The Warrior’s Apprentice” and read the first chapter.

4 – That is to say, an author can decide his character can fly a helicopter at the moment it comes up, but the character will be more consistent if that fact exists on his “sheet” from the getgo, so it doesn’t come out of left field.

5 – If the protagonists main assets are his gadgets or martial arts skill, then capability is a big part of the fiction.

6 – You might not. You might have a GM who uses only published adventures, though realistically that’s only on option for D&D and is variants, which don’t offer much mechanical support for drawbacks anyway. If that’s the case, then keep your head down, bring a 10 foot pole and keep checking for traps. I mean, yes, you can try to convince the GM to use your personal enemies rather than the generic ones from the adventure, but let’s be frank – if she’s only using published adventures to be begin with, then she may not be comfortable with changing things up like that.

I love Batman[1]. Lots of people do. But he’s hard to talk about because there are, like, thirty seven different Batmen[2] depending upon which media you’re absorbing, which writer is at the helm, the needs of that particular story and so many other things. Elements of character (Anger, calculation, paternal instincts, striving for human contact) and capability (Detective, martial artist, gadgeteer, icon of fear, iron will, long term planner) shift around based on the specific vision, and the particulars of the title that he’s in. The Batman who patrols the streets of Gotham and the Batman who fights alongside Superman in the JLA[3] are so different as to be almost unrecognizable. Almost. Somehow, they’re all still Batman, and that’s a testimony to the power of the character.

This introduces an interesting and long-established challenge in gaming – how to mechanically represent Batman. Part of the interest of this problem is that it’s very easy to model any particular Batman, even the JLA one, but very difficult to model all of them. If JLA batman were unleashed on the streets of Gotham, those would make for some very boring stories because he’d outclass the challenges so quickly as to perhaps be funny, at least for a little while. Similarly, Gotham Batman isn’t going to last long on Apokolips.

The easiest solution is to fragment up the “levels” of play, so that street-level Batman simply has a different set of stats than JLA level Batman. Unfortunately, people seem uncomfortable with this sort of approach, because it’s a bit too meta for taste.

Another option is to try to point balance things so that Batman really is as tough as other JLA’ers, at least on paper. The old DC Heroes game did this and, to be frank, it was pretty crazily broken since it managed it through what can only be described as an arbitrary and capricious pricing structure.[4] The net result was a Batman who was technically “balanced” (ish) with Superman by using a build you would never, ever see in play.

If you want a really fiddly solution, you can make it all about resource management. Batman has a ton of 2 point tokens, Superman has a dozen 10 point ones. When faced with almost any problem, Superman can overcome it by spending a token, but that’s maybe not smart if it’s a small problem. In contrast, batman needs to spend a LOT of tokens (like 16 of them) to get a 10 point effect, so it’s not cost effective for him to do the big whammies. So Batman uses his tokens to deal with small menaces (though he can combine them when he must) and makes sure Superman has the “budget” to deal with the real problems. [5]

The last simple option is to make up the difference in narrative control. If it costs 20 “points” to make Batman in your system, but 100 to make Superman, then you hand Batman’s player 80 points worth of narrative control, usually in the form of something like Fate Points. Now Batman has the ability to make declarations and manipulate events with the explanation being that he “planned for it”. When he’s not playing at that level, his Fate Point supply falls down to the appropriate budget (so maybe it’s a 40 point gap when he’s with the Outsiders, and no gap at all at the street level).

This actually works pretty well on paper, but in practice it depends a lot on how the Fate Point economy works. If Batman has only a few more Fate Points than Superman, or Superman can earn them just as easily as Batman, then they stop being a unique point of distinction for Batman.

Thankfully, this a solvable problem. I mean, I can’t tell you what the solution is because it depends on the game. For example, the Refresh mechanic in the Dresden Files RPG[6] addresses a similar problem to this, but it does it on an abbreviated scale. The difference between a 10 refresh character and a 1 refresh character is noticeable, but it’s no Batman vs. Superman. But even it can break down depending on how the game is played. In a game with stingy rewards, high refresh is very potent. In one with generous awards or lots of free tag opportunities, then a difference in refresh doesn’t represent much of a handicap.[7] This is one of those things that’s going to be determined from table to table, from session to session, and it’s very hard to come up with hard and fast rules for how to handle it.

The solution I find myself toying with is also allowing those “normal” characters more bang for their buck, so that Batman not only gets more Fate Points, he can do more with them. This might be generic (like the list of effects or bonuses gets bigger and longer) or they could be bought (like superpowers) to do specific, schtick supporting things.

The former approach is, I think, pretty self explanatory; the latter is trickier. It runs the risk of looking a lot like Batman has a different character sheet at “JLA Tier”, so that needs to be accounted for. While a bit ham-fisted, they could be explicitly called out as functions of the tier, not the character, but that’s not terribly satisfying.

More effective, I think, would be some way to build these things so they scale up while supporting the same schtick, so the type of effect remains the same, but the scope of it changes with the scope of the game. Take, for example, Batman being the greatest detective in the world. At the street level that lets him do all kinds of Sherlock Holmes stuff, but at the JLA level, that Sherlock Holmes stuff scales up to things like outsmarting alien god minds, and making plans that unfold over millennia. . At street level, his icy glare can make a gangster back down. At the JLA level, it can cow the warlord of a thousand worlds. All because he’s just that awesome

What I like about this approach is that it allows you to support the other human-but-awesome characters. If you go with a generic system (where they all just get more fate points, or generically more useful fate points) then the difference between Batman and Green Arrow becomes one of schtick, not mechanics, because when you’re operating at Superman’s level, it really doesn’t matter if that attack came from a bow or a batarang,

With unique “narrative powers”[8], you can call out Green Arrow’s schtick so that he can, for example, spend a fate point to create a situation where there’s a tiny target that needs to be hit to great effect. “Great effect” might mean blowing up a car (at street level) but it might mean killing a sun (at JLA level).[9] As I think about it, this works incredibly well for gadgets. Street gadgets might include a mini blowtorch and some flash bombs. Super Or higher level gadget start getting much sillier (though one of the nice things about not-superfriends Batman is they keep the gadgets toned down these days. I dig that.)

It’ll be worth thinking some about what these things-to-be-named later look like. It’s easy to come up without he first dozen or so, but it may take some kicking around before I’m convinced this is a sustainable idea.

As a final nod, twitter shout out to @semiocity, @boymonster, @ThadeousC , @johnoghue and others whose discussion drove me to this post, which was quite different in its intent when it started.

1 – I love Superman too, but this is not the time for that particular geek dialectic.

2- And about 6 different Bruce Waynes, just for good measure.

3 – For those only passingly familiar, here’s the issue in a nutshell. The JLA has guys like Superman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and The Flash. Batman is smart and tough and fast, but he’s still a normal guy, so those really only go so far. So given that, how does Batman keep from being utterly useless when fighting villains who are dangerous enough to threaten the whole Justice League? Historically (think Superfriends, if that means anything to you) it was by making him a gadget guy, to the point where his utility belt probably outclassed Green Lantern’s ring as an item of power. Modern writers have concentrated more on the tactical and planning advantages of havign the World’s Greatest Detective on the team, and Grant Morrison’s JLA run cemented Batman as a chessmaster, the guy who wins because he’s always several moves ahead of any opposition.

4 – Pricing skills in a supers game is tricky, but it gets really crazy when they’re treated like they’re on par with powers. If Martial Arts are more expensive than Heat Vision, you may have a problem.

5- Entirely impractical, I know, but it’s an interesting thought experiment. Consider, for examine, that many other JLA-ers may have 8 point tokens.

6 – Short form: The more magic you have, the fewer fate points you begin a session with.

7 – Which is why we don’t depend on refresh as the *sole* balancing mechanic.

8 – Oh, god, as soon as I said that, I broke out in hives. That’s a horrible, fight-picking name. It desperately needs to be called something else. I mean, in FATE terms they’re a particular flavor of stunts, but that’s not an answer. Aspect stunts? Might make sense in Fate terms that these stunts need to be tied to a specific aspect, like “Greatest detective in the world” or “Master Archer”

9 – Yeah, as an aside, the Archer power is not to be more accurate, but rather to create situations where being accurate matters.

I seem to have blown past 200 posts. This is nice, but somewhat aggravating, since I did the same that at 100 – I figured I’d use the 100th/200th post for some meta commentary, but completely spaced. I could probably get away with lying about it – it’s not like anyone else is actually counting posts – but that seems like poor sportsmanship.

given all that and the fact that I am wiped out and in a weird mood, I think we’re going to get a less grandiose version of things.[1]

So, back in 2008 I went to Gencon in what was probably my most “professional” mode to date. I put that in quotes because even as I say it, I’m not entirely sure what I mean by that, but I met new people and got to be “in the industry” mostly by acting like I was. Many cool things came as a result of this, including some freelance gigs. A few more followed, and while it was no huge amount of assignments, it was kind of fun to write for someone else. It was also intensely educational.

Writing game books is just one more type of project, and all the good and bad realities of project management come to bear just as strongly. Communication, feedback and clarity are all going to be functions of how the person running the show handles things, and since they are usually juggling deadlines and multiple contributors, it can be a crapshoot to see how things shake out. Previous to that, writing I had done had either been in a straight professional context (which is to say, people I was doing it for/with were in the same office, and thus freely available) or for myself or Evil Hat (where I was pretty much accountable to me) so this was a very different experience and one which I think would have been pretty daunting if it had been my first time out.

And, even so, it was a little bit daunting. Some of it was process – different companies and different developers made for different atmospheres. WOD:Mirrors was made notably fantastic by Chuck Wendig keeping all the writers in the loop, kicking things around, rather than totally siloed off. It was a great experience, but there was an edge to it: It was fun and informative, but but it also left me less certain of my own writing.

Anyway, this ended up stretching writing muscles I didn’t know I had, and I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the result. I mean, the stuff I wrote was OK, but the one thing I ended up walking away with was the sense that it could have been better. Not just the writing, but how I wrote. My usual method was long dry spells punctuated by bursts of productivity. When I was writing for myself, this was no problem at all since I set my timeline[2] but on a contract job, that’s an issue.

I had actually set this blog[3] up a while ago, as a hedge against the day I moved off Livejournal, but hadn’t used it much,and I decided it was the tool for the job[4]. I would write something every weekday, with the intent that this effectively be a workout for my writing muscles. Having a clear purpose was somewhat liberating. It is an absolute joy when people read and comment on your blog, but it’s a hard thing to come to expect it. Writing a blog for other people is a good way to end up depressed. Hell, even knowing that this blog is first and foremost for me, there have definitely been days where I get all “This was a really good post! Why has no one[5] commented!” Thankfully, I can usually just shake it off.

In any case, I mark this as a definite success. I think the blog’s been good and occasionally useful, and my writing has gotten notably stronger. It’s still full of holes and weak spots, but my ability to just do the work and produce words has increased measurably, as I discovered in a recent freelancing gig. I had to do a bit of a writing sprint for it and discovered that 2-3000 words per day is now my cruising speed, and I can push much higher. That’s a good number. It’s not amazing (the words per day rates of some folks I know put it to shame) and it’s only so meaningful a yardstick (3000 words of crap is still crap)but at the same time it’s something concrete that I can point to, and that’s a big deal. 3000 words used to be work, and it isn’t anymore. That’s progress, and progress feels great.

Anyway, I don’t mention all this as a preamble to any change. I’m still enjoying the blog, and there are still many problems with my writing that I’m hoping it will help with. But for everyone out there reading this, I just want to say “thank you”. It’s easy to say that I just do this for myself, and that I’d do it even if no one was reading, but in the real world, I would hate to test that theory. I treasure every comment and every eyeball, and consider myself lucky for every one.

1 – While Inception was totally worth seeing, seeing it on a weeknight has totally blown my sleep schedule.

2 – And in a professional context it doesn’t come up because technical writing uses a different part of my brain, so far as I can tell.

3 – I have WordPress set up as well, but in WordPress I am infinitely tempted to fiddle with the settings, plugins, tools and such. I went with Blogger in large part to curtail those instincts so I would just write.

4 – This was also accelerated by my getting very badly burned out on RPG forums, but still wanting a place to discuss gaming.

5 – What’s really dangerous is “No one” can end up meaning “No one in the past 3 hours”

We are not perfect people. But sometimes that’s useful.

Have you ever tapped out the notes of a song on a tabletop, perhaps with a pencil or your finger? There’s been some study of this, where one group tapped out songs and the other side tried to guess what they were tapping. The listeners had a horrible success rate, which is no great surprise if you actually listen to someone tap without already having the song on your head. But what was interesting was that the tappers were convinced that the listeners were a bunch of morons because it was SO OBVIOUS what they were tapping.

The internet makes me think about this a lot.

Anyway, this is also the basis of one of my favorite GM tricks, and that is this: your impressions suck. I know you think you’re totally *nailing* Walken there, but really? Terrible. We’re humoring you, but if you didn’t use catchphrases like “more cowbell!” we’d have no idea who you’re pretending to be.

That truth might be a little embarrassing, but its also very useful to a GM, because when you try to play an NPC like a particular actor, that means you will be _consistent_ in your performance, but you don’t need to worry about being to obvious because, as noted, you suck at this.

Ok, on the off chance that you don’t suck, then just step outside of the usual media. Use your fantastic skills to imitate a character from books or comics. Your interpretation will, again, be consistent, but it should be virtually unrecognizable. All in all, it’s a good trick for keeping characters straight. Especially if you suck.[1]

Harsh truths, I know, but we’ve got more coming. See, I’m not sure how to ask this, but, just between you and me, are you a bit of a dork?

Not you? Too cool for that? Well SOMEBODY is watching that anime, buying those Batman comics and keeping Syfy on the air, and it’s not me.[2] So it must be you.

I mean, you can see it in the characters you create. You finish creating a character, and you start thinking about all the cool things this guy or gal might be able to do someday. That cool power combo. That dramatic last-minute escape. That heroic facedown with your nemesis. The sacrifice in your moment of understanding. And the awesome swords. Don’t forget the awesome swords.

But it never really goes that way, does it? Sure, games are fun, but they’re never quite those perfect moments that the fresh character sheet promises you. So you tuck those hopes away in a dark place where they rot and become bitter, driving you to a life of posting on RPG.net and telling people how they’re gaming wrong.

Yes, it’s a sad story. But that’s not the only ending for it. The thing is you need to take all those shameless, delighted moments of hope that you’ve tucked away and stop thinking about them as things you’ll never get to play. Instead, think of them as gifts. Gifts you can give your players. Next time you’re going to run a game, make a character first. Make an AWESOME character first. Release all the restraints that have been put in place by years of lowered expectations and discussions of balance. Make that character you’ve always wanted to play that you know you’re never going to get a chance to. Think about him and all the things you could do with him with the perfect GM running your game.

Then take that character sheet and rip it into very small pieces. Now is your time to be that GM. All that cheesy, cool fun stuff you really want? Hold onto it, but start thinking about how to give it to your players.[3] Certainly their tastes may not exactly match yours, but if a lot of exciting ideas are universal, and it is far better to make them happen for someone else than to never have them happen at all.

Lastly, that bit if laziness that tells you that when you’ve only got a little time to prep for a game so you’re totally going to steal the plot from that TV show you saw last week, only with some ninjas instead of accountants, and maybe on the moon?

Listen to it. It’s smart.

Good luck. You may need it.

1- Just to restate, this is about consistency more than quality. In reality if you pick someone particularly obvious, like Walken or DeNiro then you might tip your hand, but if you step it back just a little, but keep with people you know well (tv actors, especially dramatic rather than comic ones, tend to be good for this) so that you maintain the same tone whenever you imitate them. The imitation may not accurately capture the actor in question, but it will come to capture the *character*.

2 – Except it totally is.

3 – In addition to inspiration, this can be a mechanically useful exercise. Setting aside that a GM should go through chargen at least once for ANY game she’s going to run (if only to catch the pitfalls) this can be a very good way to understand expectations. If you make a character and realize all the cool stuff has to wait until he’s accrued an absolutely stupid amount of XP, then maybe you need to consider handing out more XP in your game, or starting with more of it. Finding out firsthand what the system can and can’t support is much better done before play begins than after.

So, the first real session of the light supers Cold War game happened last night after a long interruption after chargen finished. It was short, as will be its fate as a weeknight game, but I think it went well. Small number of dice rolls – everyone at the table is experienced with diceless play and the character sheets very clearly communicated what the characters were strong enough at that rolling wasn’t really necessary. That alone was an interesting experience: All the things system is there to help with happened – skills and issues were engaged, and important elements were brought to the forefront – but the system itself barely raised its head at all.

I’m not the sort to just treat it as a “What a great session, we hardly rolled dice at all!” sort of event without examination, and the examination is an interesting reinforcement of an idea I hold close to my heart. To my mind, there’s sort of an idealized level of play where important things just happen because that’s the natural sensibility of the table. Because this is something we don’t necessarily know, we come up with rules and systems to help us reach that, and depending upon what that ideal is for us, we gravitate towards rules and systems that help support that ideal. But because rules serve that end, they are ultimately disposable if you ever reach a point where you can get the things you need without them. It’s roughly akin to a writer following instructions and answering questions until something clicks and he can start writing. He doesn’t discard the rules, he just internalizes them, or proceeds from an understanding of why they’re there.

The specific table I’m playing the cold war game with is one with whom system does not really contribute a lot We know each other well, as the players seek out their own pain instinctively. Hell, we barely touch aspects because everyone falls into effectively self-compelling without a second thought. I could be running this game with almost any system under the sun, and we’d have used very little of it.

Which is not to say I’m considering going systemless. Last night was, in large part, a framing session. There were threats, but they were sufficiently within scope that there was little tension in the actual conflicts (though there was plenty in the build-up and in the less overt conflicts). When it comes time to ratchet up the threat level, system will become more important if only because abstract numbers are perceived as meaner than I am. But even that is an excellent illustration, at least to me, of how important it is to understand the role of system.

Anyway, that’s all a bit tangential to what I was originally going to write about which is, of course, Burn Notice. See, I’m a big fan of rules that make for easy scenario design, such as Robin Laws’ “Three Fight Scenes” rule for designing Feng Shui scenarios. Another one that I’ve become fond of, and which really helped in designing last nights game, is the Burn Notice Rule.

See, the show Burn Notice revolves around Michael Westen, a blacklisted spy and his badass friends. Michael is super-competent, and much of the joy of the show is watching him end up somewhere between James Bond and MaCgyver. He is so competent, that most of the challenges he is given are well within his capabilities, but that would make for boring TV, so the average episode of Burn Notice presents him with two challenges[1] which, while not in conflict with one another, force him to split his effort and allocate his resources to try to manage both, something that is more challenging and thus more interesting to watch.

This model is incredibly applicable to other games and stories where the hero is very capable. Rather than presenting additive challenges (which is to say, more powerful opponents, demanding steady escalation of foes), the addition of an extra thread can provide a serious challenge without undercutting the character’s competence[2]. Creating a bad guy who’s more powerful than Superman is a disruptive thing. Creating two bad guys who are less powerful than Superman, but able to create a problem isn’t. All of which is to say, that you can often get more mileage by widening the problem than you can by deepening it.

So as I looked at my notes for the game last night, I felt like the thread I had was good, but it fell a little short, and so I turned to the Burn Notice Rule – If things seem to simple or easy, add another plot. And wham – suddenly what had been a too-clear, too-linear set of ideas became a properly Cold-War-Esque muddle, full of interesting points of engagement. Worked like a charm.

So thank you, Burn Notice. You really do make everything better.

1 – In normal parlance this second thread is a B plot, and the B plot is a hugely important thing in making useful stories. But I single out Burn Notice in this regard because the B plot tends to be really big and robust, more like a plot in parallel than a true subplot. Contrast this with a show like White Collar – there’s usually a B plot (Neal working on solving his mystery) and it might create a complication or two in the main plot, but the main plot is still clearly on center stage (until the episode where the B plot moves onto center stage, but that’s a whole other thing).

2 – Which is one of the real problems with additive opposition. By the time you reach the fourth or fifth iteration, you’ve transformed the character from being a badass to being the bottom rung of some unending ladder. This is, by the way, the plot of about 90% of the fighting anime I’ve seen.