Had a great playtesting session with @gamesteratlarge & @simoncarryer last week.

+Simon Carryer has been developing a game which he pitches as "What if D&D has been designed by David Cronenberg?" Over the last couple of years we've worked through what the biologically-invasive monsters would look like and tried out a few versions of brutal combat. But there's always been this tension:

• the communities in this game are traditional and suspicious of outsiders and monsters
• the adventurers are outcasts from society being gradually transformed by their exposure to the dungeons they enter
• the communities need the adventurers but are primed to reject them.

We discussed how the adventurers could fit into the setting, and that prompted Simon to share some very cool ideas that had been implicit in his rules for a long time.

---

+Michael Sands has been designing a Napoleonic naval combat RPG for a while. Recently he switched it over to a science-fiction setting in order to explore crew creation without having to bring players up to speed with lots of historical information.

It worked great: crew design is a bit free-form, and we argued for a while about whether our stolen and experimental racing ship needed a User Experience Consultant in addition to our Pilot and Engineer. Plus we have a teenage stowaway and an uplifted (and kleptomanic) octopus who just wanted to fit in, on board.

Really looking forward to giving this more of a test next month.

---

We finished off with a playtest of my game, Soth. I think this is close: it's a game about cultists trying to summon a dark god. After the last round of playtesting, I've simplified the rules for how a community grows suspicious about what the cultists are up to, and introduced some Mountain Witch-esque not-so-secret agendas to complicate the cultists' attempts to maintain the appearance of normality while performing four ugly rituals to summon Soth.

One more playtest and then I think I'm ready to whip this up from a beta draft that I can use into something publishable.

My new game: 'Soth'. It's Call of Cthulhu, after you've gone mad

If you ever wanted to know what the world looked like from the villains' point of view, Soth is the game for you.

Soth (26 page .pdf)

It's a roleplaying game where you play cultists in small town America trying to summon the dark god Soth. 

I call it ‘the horrible game’: it starts with your cult having just completed your first ritual sacrifice, and continues with you having to juggle four things:

• covering up your crimes
• continuing with your cult’s rituals
• fulfilling your mundane responsibilities so your family, friends and workmates don’t get suspicious
• warding off the growing number of investigators looking to bring you down.

The tone of the game is noir. In my playtests, it's felt very much like a ‘cat-and-mouse’ thriller. Sometimes the cultists are on top and their evil plans seem unstoppable; sometimes they're very much on the back-foot, scrambling to save themselves. It's got a very competitive ‘players vs. GM’ dynamic.

This was my entry in this year's Game Chef entry this year: a scorched-earth rewrite of an earlier version that's now a mostly diceless hack of Apocalypse World.

If it sounds like your sort of thing, feel free to download, share, play and comment here.

Just gave some feedback on a game about Mars colonisaton

http://story-games.com/forums/discussion/17980/life-on-mars-beta-feedback-playtesters-wanted#Item_1

'Life On Mars' is a fascinating examination of how to present and teach a game. It's about three pages long, and each page introduces new rules into a game about a group of colonists travelling to and exploring Mars.

The game's being written for a competition that's due in two weeks. It's in a rough state at the moment, but I'll be checking out the next / finished version.

http://heartofthedeernicorn.com/downloads/lifeonmars-beta.pdf

What I'd like to play at Kapcon next weekend

Next weekend I'll be teaching and playtesting games at Kapcon, Wellington's best two days of gaming. Because of that, I won't have a chance to play many of the awesome games that are on offer. So I thought I'd look through the timetable and imagine an alternate timeline where I'm not busy - I'm just playing.

Here are the games I think'll be great:

Session 1
These Beasts Have Maiden Faces: Ivan runs Agon, the game of Greek warriors and demi-gods competing for glory.
The Mountain Witch: Russell (who I don't think I've met) runs a game of Ronin,  travelling together to the castle of the Mountain Witch, to claim the bounty in his head.


Session 2
White Rabbit: Karen is one of the most interesting game designers in New Zealand, and the word from the playtest reports of White Rabbit are very good.


Session 3
A Romantic Mystery (Hot Guys Making Out): Frank is running a session of Ben Lehman's HGMO, which by all accounts I've read is a gem of a game.


Session 4:
Freemarket: Russell again, running Luke and Jared's spectacular-sounding game of transhumans creating cool stuff in a post-scarcity reputation-based economy.


Session 5:
Love of Money: Dale has a great rep for running games.
CASE LAMBENT WITCH: IdiotSavant running a Charles Stross inspired Cthulhu game sounds like a blast to me.


Session 6:
I'd probably rest or head into the Games on Demand room where Steve from the prime timeline could run one of the following games for me

• Left Coast: my game-in-playtest about science fiction authors in 1970s California struggling with madness, money troubles, and an alien invasion slowly encroaching into their lives.
• Spione: In cold-war Berlin, truth is a weapon ... and the people you trust are the ones most likely to betray you.
• Microscope: a game where you create an epic history in 3 hours
• Umlaut: Heavy Metal! The very name drips with power and hairspray. Long of hair and tight of pants, play warriors on the stage of history, wielding your axes and mikes as your metal bands compete for fame and fortune
• Monsterhearts: a game of supernatural romance, where you play teenage monsters toying with each other
• My Life with Master: I'll be playtesting my scenario, My Life with the Snakes of Dr Oserlinde (which I'll be publishing later this year)

My project for the holidays: learn to edit by editing Monster of the Week

Mike's hired me to edit his game, Monster of the Week. It's exciting (because I've had a lot of fun editing and giving unsolicited feedback on games before).


It's also a completely new work process for me. I've peer reviewed and edited 10 page briefings and given overviews of novels before. However, it feels a little different to actually be working 'on the clock'. I'm being paid for about 10-12 hours of editing time, and I want to give Mike value for money.

At the moment, I think the best approach is to treat this in the same way I treated all the feedback I've received for Left Coast: I've read through the rules for Monster of the Week, making notes as I go. Now I'm going to create a mind-map of those notes and choose which of the issues I've identified are the most fundamental ones - the ones that'll make the biggest differences to the book. That's where I'll focus my efforts to start with - not on a line-by-line proof-read, but on a 'how could we present this information so that it feels like it's in the right place'.

I think my feedback (at this level) is going to feel more like the starting point for a conversation than a list of instructions to follow.

How would you write an adventure for Dr Who?

We recently playtested an adventure that Morgue's writing for the Dr Who role-playing game. After our game, I gave a little bit of thought to how Dr Who stories work. Here are the tropes I've identified - can you think of anything else?

TYPES OF DR WHO ADVENTURES

A Threat (or Threatening Situation): ala 'Midnight', where you're stuck in a frozen train with a monster, or 'Blink'.

A Plot: where you have a bunch of ideas for a cool sequence of events (basically a railroad/tunnel of fun scenario).

A Mystery: where you have to get to the bottom of something weird. 'The Girl in the Fireplace' would be a good example of this.

A Relationship Web: there's a whole bunch of complicated inter-personal stuff going on, that the Doctor et al stumble in to (I'm thinking of 'Vengeance on Varos' or your adventure, Morgue). This is often related to ...

... A Moral Crime: Like 'Vengeance on Varos' again, there is something unconscionable (by our standards) happening, and it will permanently remain this way unless someone intervenes. These moral crimes have 'People in Power', 'Victims', and (possibly) a 'Resistance'. All the people involved will want the Doctor or the companions to do something (much like in Dogs in the Vineyard).


SETTINGS FOR DR WHO ADVENTURES

When I thought about it, Dr Who stories seem to be set in one of these arenas:

- Earth's past (with or without an alien component)

- Earth's present (usually with an alien component)

- Humanity's future (either on Earth or off-world, usually with an alien component)

- An alien environment (it usually doesn't matter *when* this is set)

---

Jenni wrote more about our game, here: Playing established characters.

How to play Apocalypse World

I'm teaching myself how to use a new presentation tool called prezi. Here's something I made: some advice on how to play a game called Apocalypse World.

How to play Apocalypse World on Prezi

Developing a game. Ward X: a supernatural drama about forensic medicine

It's a world where supernatural medical conditions like vampirism and zombification are common-place ...

... but the elite medical team on Ward X aren’t interested in anything like that. An outbreak of lycanthropy is like the common cold to them: obvious to diagnose, easy to treat, and therefore boring.

Ward X only gets involved with the really unusual and difficult-to-diagnose supernatural afflictions: rogue curses, spectral parasites, exotic monsterism and the like.

Can you solve the case?

Left Coast: Interior Art

Got a couple of pictures I've been playing around with in Photoshop tonight.

What I've been up to: Left Coast

(Draft 1)

 

RPG: Playtesting so I want to keep writing

Hey, it's 10/10/10 today. That's worth commenting on!

Over the last couple of months, during spare-time, I've been writing little bits of Left Coast (my game about slightly crazy science fiction authors in 1960s California). The writing's been going fine, but I've also been thinking about what the next stage of playtesting will be.

Playtesting, for those who don't know it, is like redrafting a script or an essay but for games. You write a draft of a game, play it with some friends, and then figure out whether the game created the sort of fun you wanted it to create. If not, change some rules, change your approach, strip the game back and start again until you get it delivering the consistent fun you want.

It's a process I enjoy but something's been bugging me about it recently; this quote from Ron Edwards helped me articulate what I think the first step in my playtesting process needs to be:

My current thinking is that in earliest playtesting, people should be participating "for love," with less emphasis on breaking or even evaluating mechanics. I find feedback of this kind to be disruptive and demoralizing, including oh-so-helpful advice about how to write anything.

My concern at this stage is best served by addressing Color, i.e. the sort of imagery and flashy-stuff that characterizes the game (which may or may not include a specific setting and/or fixed characters); and Reward, i.e., whatever it is that I as the designer want to be the point and most fun about the system.

I've found out the hard way that including people not committed to these things, at this stage, can stop a project in its tracks.

So, less emphasis on mechanics and getting the rules 'right'; more emphasis on fun, being inspired to continue writing, brainstorming what the game could be.

This ties into my previous post, On Giving Feedback; again it's a quote from the Forge, which I'm finding to be a valuable resource for thinking about how to lead a productive creative life:

What I need is feedback that puts energy into my efforts. What I need is feedback that helps me see the full elephant, to understand the meaning of the whole beast that has yet only a crude shape under my mortal hands.

I am already scrutinous and critical enough of my creative efforts. What I need is feedback that strips away the bullshit that's holding me back, empowers and armors me against the certain doubts and contrary notions of others, and gives me energy and momentum.

Games: March to June

Here's some game-related stuff that I've been into over the last couple of months:

ImmorTall is a lovely little Flash game with an simple interface (move left or right) that forces you into some tragic choices.

Air Pressure is a gentle, ever-so-slightly depressing Flash game about a break-up.

Mike gave me a copy of Sorceror and Sword, a supplement for Sorceror which focuses on the pulp fantasy Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Elric (among others). It's an inspiring book - in the sense that it inspires me to want to run games using it, and it provides a methodology for creating stories in a fantasy setting without getting bogged down in pre-planning an epic story for a seven-year campaign.

Continuity is my favourite Flash game in a long time - a combination of platformer and sliding puzzle. Have a go. The first level should only take you a few seconds to work through.

Shade was a nice little Twilight Zone styled piece of interactive fiction. When in doubt, consult your to-do list!

I gave a little bit of feedback on Love in the Time of Seid by Jason Morningstar and Matthjis Holter and Blowback by Elizabeth Shoemaker. Providing feedback on games I'm excited about is one of my favourite things about my game design hobby.

Love in the Time of Seid is a game set in a royal court that creates a situation filled will the potential for betrayal and love (of both the doomed and true varities). It relies on a few simple rules (and no dice) to draw out the players' creativity in creating scenes, and to make them challenge each other to go deeper into the scenes (in order to create a story that matters).

Blowback is a spy game to create stories much like you'd see in Burn Notice (highly competent spies trapped in suburbia). The basic ideas of mission planning and how to handle the big conspiracy are excellent, and I'm looking forward to reading the next draft.

Rock Band and Singstar continue to be the greatest games ever created. Pure fun encoded onto a disc. Singstar, in particular, constantly surprises me with its ability to keep me playing until midnight.

I've enjoyed this Minesweeper variant, which crosses Mindsweeper with a D&D-esque reward system of 'levelling up' in order to tackle tougher squares. I also enjoyed Warp Shot - it's like golf, with gravity wells and Portal-esque wormholes.

I also attended two sessions at Day of Games, a day-long convention where people rock up, choose a game they're interested in, and play for a couple of hours. I ran Poison'd, Vincent Baker's game about pirates for Malc, Donna and Karen (with Mark, who showed up about 15 minutes after we'd created characters). This is the second time I've run it with really fun results. The game is slightly internet-notorious for encouraging the players to make nasty, pervese, and sexually reprehensible dramatic choices. What I realised during this play of it is that players engage with (or veer away from) that sexual and violent content as they're comfortable with. In particular, the game has a few questions in its character creation section that I consider to be like the safety on a handgun. If you ask questions about whether the characters have committed particular sins, then you're taking the safety off, which in terms of this game means that you can expect those sexually violent behaviours to be part of the story of the game. But you can equally leave those particular sins off your list of questions, which - I think - creates a safer environment (useful, if you're not sure about the comfort levels of the group you're playing with).

Day of Games also gave me the opportunity to playtest two fantasy games by Simon Carryer. On Mighty Thews is pulp fantasy with a (as we played it) ironic, light-hearted attitude (think Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, ... with dashes of Elric and Conan thrown in there too). Simon's other game (which I shall not name here because I don't want the google hits) is fantastic - he describes it as D&D ... if it had been invented by David Cronenberg. Still very much in development and in need of rules that distinguish it from old-school D&D dungeon crawls, it's a great mix of a grim mood, character classes that examine gender roles in a primitive society, and biological horror (of which I want to see much much more). I expect this to be an unsettling hit once it's completed.

I've also played and finished a seven session game of Bliss Stage, which I think will have to be a separate post. Great fun, though. Creatively challenging, and also socially challenging as I got to know and respect the playstyles of some people I haven't played much with. I thoroughly recommend Bliss Stage, and I think I'll be taking some design lessons from it and applying them to my own games.

Games: January

Battlestar Galactica: The Boardgame. It's a good game that nicely captures the 'struggle for survival' dynamic of the earlier seasons, and has the 'all the players co-operate against a common pressure but one of them might be a traitor' structure that I love. However, I'm not convinced I ever need to play it again.

My third one-shot of D&D 4th Edition was an almost-dungeon-crawl undertaken by a group of all 'arcane' (magic-using) characters. Most important thing I took from this game: Skill challenges can be great. I really enjoyed how they give scenes importance and weight. Skill challenges take encounters that previous editions of D&D would have solved via conversation, GM fiat or a single dice roll ... but under the skill challenge system, role-playing conversations and investigations is encouraged and then converted into successful and unsuccessful tests. If you accumulate a pre-defined number of successes or failures and the plot advances. Luke (as DM) was great at making them 'follow the fiction' rather than just be dry dice rolls.

Biggest problem? I found that combat was an excuse to unplug from being involved with the character for LONG periods of time. Combats are fine and will go faster when you know the system, and running encounters using video game logic and level design would be great.

I also think you have to aggressively work to contribute to the game's fiction when you're in combat. For instance, me narrating tentacles coming up around a platform to drag an enemy to his death works far better than simply activating a power. But that's something I have to push for and remember, rather than something that's encouraged or mandated by D&D's rules (for a completely different experience, try playing Dogs in the Vineyard sometime).

I spend a couple of weeks in January taking a deliberately low-key approach to gaming. I reduced or postponed game pre-Kapcon, to avoid burnout.

In that time, I played VVVVVV, a brilliant platformer that's challenging, but not too challenging. Click on that link to play the first two levels for free.

I also checked out the Doom Roguelike, an overhead ASCII version of Doom I. This was my first experience with Rogue-like games. I liked it, and decided to uninstall it before I got too deep in, as I could feel the addictive properties starting to well up inside my brain. Basically, I asked myself, "Is it 'worth' spending the time learning the interface and mastering?" In this case the answer was, no. But I recommend it, anyway.

Canabalt is a nice simple adrenaline boost of a Flash game. Got about 5 minutes amusement out of it.

One of the reviewers on Play this Thing described Avalanche as the best Flash game ever. I found it completely frustrating.

Despite my commitment to not continuing to play Poker on my cellphone, I cracked another level on this game. I continue to be impressed by the economics of this game - and by the way each level forces you to develop a feel for different aspects of poker.


KAPCON

Kapcon 19 is a two-day games convention held in Wellington, NZ, in late January. This was the third year where I was helping run Games on Demand, where we pick the games to run based on player enthusiasm.

In the first session, Jenni insisted I run Bad Family. Excellent peer pressure from her. Mike summarises the session nicely here. This was my first test-run of the revised rules, and I thought for the most part they worked splendidly. I'm particularly happy with a section in the set-up of the game where everyone asks one question of everyone else's characters - it generated a lot of good material to use in the game. Probably one more revision from here, which will focus on creating an Apples to Apples style simplicity, and fleshing out a few bits of the text to make them more readable.

Poison'd, Vincent Baker's game about nasty pirates was very satisfying. My first time running it: we captured a ship, took down two of His Majesty's vessels, killed a plantation owner after setting his mansion on fire, betrayed the captain twice (once, successfully), and made deals with both God and the Devil. Playing this helped me see how you can adjust the dial from extremely brutal to fun romp, and that you really need to, depending on the players you have.

Two-thirds through the game, I was a little worried that after a couple of ship-to-ship combats and some time on shore that things would get a little repetitive. Fortunately, the design of the game and some excellent characterisations from my players shifted the story into a revenge/atonement finale that proved extremely satisfying.

Bliss Stage was a highlight of the con - a powerhouse of gamers I respect sitting down at the table to create a gritty, incredibly tough story about the cost of war on a group of teenage soldiers. Apparently just as good, if not better the second time it was run.

ACTION CASTLE! is a work of genius. It's the game of 1980s text adventures. One person plays the computer telling you what you see, and every other player gets to take a turn giving the computer one single command. ('Go north'. 'Examine tree'.). Remember to save!

A World of Possibilities was an excellent scenario created by Mash. In discussing it, I need to give away a little bit: this is one of the games of TORG (*) I've always wanted to play, and I got a lot of satisfaction out of fighting in a war for reality. My only advice to Mash might be to emphasise the cost of our decisions a little more - spend a little more time milking the denoument for pathos. On the other hand, it featured a brilliant Mash-created cosm that was plausible, freaky, and stunningly clever in its Twilight Zoneness.

(*) Don't worry if this means nothing to you. It's totally a 90s RPGeekery thing.

In Session 5, I decided that I was feeling exactly in the mood to run some Primetime Adventures. I got together a large group filled with some welcome familiar faces and some people I'd been curious to meet for a while. The brainstorming session to decide on a show, I decided to run it in an extremely relaxed, no-pressure style. I wanted us to take our time, build some trust and share some ideas about the types of TV we find excited. We actually found a show idea that 'clicked' pretty early - after talking about the "Anything's possible" vibe of New Dr Who, and getting a hit from the whole group when Sapphire and Steel was mentioned, we started creating a show about an organisation that fixes problems with reality. We spent a bit of time mining the show for ideas and structuring the series, and ended up with the group playing members of two rival teams - one that solves problems through creativity and compassion, the other using guns and murder.

We decided to play an episode where the two teams collide on a mission, and an excellent conflict-filled series of scenes and time-loops followed. Props to Eric in his second Kapcon experience for playing a real bastard of a military leader, to Andy for playing his minor role with comedic aplomb, and to Rohan for a great characterisation of an intellectual who really didn't look like he was capable of saving the day.

I finished Kapcon by running my craziest game of Inspectres ever (and that includes the game set in the town of Footloose). I've been feeling a little burned out on InSpectres, and was tired and headachey, so I warned everyone I'd be running it mean, activating the death and dismemberment clause, and pushing hard. By the end of the game, we had recruited an entirely new second (and rival) franchise of InSpectres who were sitting at the other end of the table, solving a parallel mission - team one consisted of three beta-male losers struggling to make their business work, and team two consisted of their extremely aggravating ex-wives. Featured: a ghost with Alzheimers, the transformation of Brian Tamaki into an immortal, an ex-husband and wife meeting-cute over an alien abduction, and regular spots in the confessional chair to call out to our sponsor: Hell Pizza.

Great stuff.

2009: Favourite Games

I think I'm reaching the end of my run of 'What did I think was cool in 2009' posts. This one is about four notable games I played last year, and why they were fun.

-1-

Stephanie Pegg ran "Sitting Shiva", a LARP (short for Live Action Roleplaying) for about eight players. A LARP is kind of like improvised theatre: the players are expected to be fully committed to acting as their characters, moving around, continuously speaking in-character. "Sitting Shiva" took place at the wake of a friend (who was also a participant in the game, bringing a supernatural air to the event, and making our faux-mourning even more tangible).

There were two things that really struck me about this game. First, I loved how it dug into quite emotional material - we played heightened versions of ourselves, dealt with grieving and our attitudes towards death, and learned a lot about the recently-deceased (played by Frank P, in this game). There was an intense focus and full commitment to maintaining a mood as we played.

Second, with only 8 players I was able to feel involved in all of the unfolding story. My previous experience with a LARP had about 80 players, and by necessity I could only keep track of maybe 2 or 3 of the unfolding plotlines, maintain an awareness of about 5 others, and was completely oblivious to at least 5 more. Obviously, this amount of story complexity is pretty awe-inspiring and I felt like I had a complete story-experience for my character in this 80-player LARP, but I found the inability to experience the totality of the story extremely frustrating.

Stephanie's thoughts on Sitting Shiva are here.


-2-

I also played the second season of 'The Other Side', a game which lasted about six months and deals with a fantasy kingdom that's been colonised by modern-day America. Taking that basic conflict as our starting point, we created a rich cast of eccentric characters and a sprawling uber-plot that actually sort-of tied together (concerning an attempt by the Kingdom of Hell to invade the fantasy kingdom as well).

As a group, we exercised a tremendous amount of awareness of each other's strengths and weaknesses, pushing each other into hilariously uncomfortable conflicts and in-character romantic entanglements. I was also impressed at how Celeste grew to dominate the game (and discover her affinity for conflict-creating characters) through her portrayal of Fifi, the fairy godmother from Hell.

This is one of the games that my Tuesday night group has had the strongest committment to, I think and it was a pleasure to play (even if my character hardly ever got what he wanted, and when he did he was usually misunderstood). To use some RPG theory, in Big Model terms I think our group were pretty much totally on the same page when it came to the game's creative agenda: we were strongly encouraging each other to help create an inventive anime / soap opera with lots of romance, culture clash and teen angst.

There's a partial write-up about the Other Side, here.


-3-

I've played and run one-shots of Dogs in the Vineyard before, but they did not prepare for what happens when you sit down with a group of good friends and play through seven towns over half a year.

In Dogs you (effectively) play teenaged Mormon missionaries in 1840s Utah. The idea is that you travel from town to town, sorting out the extremely human problems to do with sex, pride and jealousy that inevitably emerge in tiny isolated communities holding each other to impossible religious standards. If Dogs has a genre, I think it's 'biblical noir'.

Our characters consisted of two outsiders (Emma played a prostitute who'd converted to the Faith; Malcolm played a Native American convert), and two philosophical opposites (Simon played a 'golden boy' who was completely confident in his Faith and authority; I played an intellectual from 'back east' who challenged the Faith and tried to rely on his own judgment).

We rotated the responsibility for designing towns and running them for the others. Each time we GM'd, we tried to focus on the character issues that had been revealed in previous towns. To me, it felt like an excellent TV series directed with a 1970s Western aesthetic by directors like Robert Altman and Clint Eastwood.

For me, the big discovery was that I changed from 'trying to solve the town' to 'treating the fictional townsfolk as real people, and just trying to make their lives better'. I also developed a lot of admiration for Emma's no-bullshit approach - at least once a game, she would make people surrender in a conflict just by saying the exact right thing that would cause them to realise they'd fucked up. At one point, she made Simon's character decide to retire, shattering his confidence and his Faith.

By the end, it was obvious that the game was really about the future of the Faith, as it was under threat by the arrival of settlers and railways from Back East. What was at stake was how we Faithful would respond: with violence, by running away, or by trying to assimilate, change and exercise passive resistance. The ending of the game was melancholic, and it haunts me still.

Dogs in the Vineyard: play it if you like totally character-based campaigns set in the Wild West.


-4-

At Post Box Con, I had the opportunity to jump in to a fully-prepped game of Bliss Stage. It was incredibly satisfying to unleash my inner emo for the second time this year.(*) Bliss Stage feels gritty, desperate, and deals with sweaty, troubled relationships. I love it and I want to play a full game to its conclusion.

(*) The first time I emo'd this year was during Jenni's excellent parody of Twilight.

Left Coast: The First Playtest

Back in 2005, I wrote a game called Left Coast, where you play science-fiction authors in 1970s California who are all struggling to write novels and hide your growing insanities from your families. It's a quirky, funny setting with a very clear target audience - and until last Sunday no-one had ever played it.

What that meant is that I had an idealised version of the game in my head. I was pretty confident I knew what sort of stuff would happen, what sort of fun would be had, and what problems would emerge. I was making a lot of assumptions, and the process on playing and testing the game on Sunday was really a process of challenging those assumptions.

I thought that setting creation would be fun and easy, and that the characters would wander around hanging out and having conflicts naturally emerge. What really happened was that setting creation (which involves brainstorming a sprawling relationship map) was fun but slow, and when we started to play, it wasn't at all clear what should happen in a scene. Additionally, I became disturbed that:

+ the game lacked subtext
+ there was no process for turning the stuff in the setting's relationship map into scenes
+ there was no sense of what the characters should do.

(You can find a previous thread discussing this game, here.)

In this post, I'm going to briefly describe the characters and setting Simon and Malcolm created, and give an equally brief description of the two scenes we played through. After that, there's a short list of the huge issues that this playtest threw up for me. I'm hoping that Simon and Malcolm will join in with their thoughts on the playtest, so I can see it from their point of view.

In other words, I don't have a clear 'goal' for this playtest report yet. What I'd like to do is gather some impressions and mull the experience over. (Also: I'm not actively working on Left Coast yet. My current aim is to finish Bad Family by the end of the year and then start thinking about what's next. The opportunity to play Left Coast is an important part of that.)

Characters and Setting

Characters in Left Coast are defined by the type of author they are, a first or middle initial, a significant relationship, and a goal. Malcolm created K. Joshua Fresnel, a Jewish right-wing idealogue whose dog 'Benito' talks to him. Fresnel's goal was to find someone to put on 'Traktofaktori!', the musical satire of communism that he wrote while locked up in a psychiatric facility.

Simon came up with Richard H. Long, a hack and a pervert (think: your worst sterotyped assumptions about the author of the Gor novels) whose most significant relationship is with his feminist daughter. Long's goal was to find a publisher for his serious novel, 'The Wandering Years'.

Setting design consists of brainstorming elements to do with Family, Money, Nuttiness, and Alien activity. This was a fun but problematic stage of the game, but we came up with elements such as Behind (an alternate reality), Karl Hickenlooper (editor of 'Stories from Beyond'), Rabbi Schlomo Troutmann (who Fresnel owes money too), and Richard Nixon.

Scenes

We played out two scenes - one for each author. I was disappointed in myself (as GM) during both of them. Primarily because the game doesn't provide a way to turn all of this interesting setting material that the players are excited by into scenes.

However, there were also problems in:

+ identifying conflicts (and whether conflicts, in fact, need to exist)
+ what to roll when the conflict doesn't fit into one of the existing arenas (Family, Money, Nuttiness, and Alien), and
+ taking a 'Californian' approach to scene selection - leaving what dice to roll undefined until the conflict is clarified.

I'll let Malcolm and Simon talk about the specifics of what happened in their scenes if they want to. The short version is that both scenes were supposed to be about the author taking a step towards their goal only to have someone interfere with that. As a GM, I felt I was being pretty clumsy about introducing an obstacle/NPC into the scene, and that things felt increasingly adrift as the scenes went on.

The Big List

I took notes throughout the playtest, and afterwards the three of us spent quite a bit of time debriefing. I tried to identify some of the fundamental issues that I'm going to need to address if this game is going to end up working. I've ordered these so that the issues I think are most important come first ...


What is Left Coast about? What's its subtext?
The major thing that threw me during the game was while Simon very reasonably started to explore what the first conflict in the first scene was actually about. We were talking about whether there was stakes-setting in this game, the free-and-clear phase in Sorceror and IIEE. And all of a sudden, Simon asked, "What is this game about?" Which completely threw me - it's a question I don't have an answer to; it's a question I've usually needed to play a game a couple of times before I start having an answer to it.

Related to this was that in the two scenes we played, the game lacked subtext. There was no story going on underneath the events we were playing out; there were no NPCs with hidden motivations; there were no conflicts or agendas pushing back against what the authors wanted; and there was no sense of significance or resonance to the events we were playing. That felt like a problem to me; the game felt hollow.

What's the situation? What do the characters do?
Left Coast seems to be a game with a strong idea of who the characters are and a clear setting (in fact, I felt all three of us were a little bit in love with the setting - I certainly am). The game just lacks a situation that combines the characters and the setting together.

When Simon and Malcolm pressed me on what the characters do, I thought about it for a while and then said, "They try to form meaningful relationships." I'm not sure if that's 100% right; I need to think on it more.

Why do you have conflicts?
When do you hve them and what do they resolve?
The main reason I pushed for conflicts was that they are the way of introducing more stuff into the setting. They're also a way for the PCs to advance towards their ratings. But that's not an answer to the question of 'Why do you have conflicts?' It's got to be more than just me as a GM putting obstacles in front of the characters, doesnt' it?

How can I make it easier to GM? How do you turn the piece of paper with all the setting elements written on it into scenes and conflicts?

How can I make setting creation flow smoother?
It needs to be more fun. It needs to be faster. This was probably the area of the game we discussed the most, and had the most ideas about. Starting points to explore include: reducing the number of facts each player has to create; introducing elements via playing out scenes with them; using Apocalypse World's technique of 'walking around the setting' during the first session, just to set everything up.

Should I amalgamate the Nuttiness and Alien ratings?
These two ratings felt like they covered similar terrain - imaginative, weird stuff in the setting. In addition, 'Alien' is supposed to be about abductions, UFOs, government conspiracies, invasions, etc. When we were playing, it felt like that was locking down the subject matter of the game too much; as the person who'd written the game, I'd pre-decided what the weird elements of the setting where going to be - and that didn't interest me when we sat down to play it.

Bad Family: Starting to develop a pitch

I need to figure out how to pitch and market Bad Family.

Andy Kitkowski developed a set of 19 questions to figure out how to market a game.

I'm going to fill in those questions as I get the inspiration and time. If you know anything about the game, I encourage you to help me in the comments.

The idea is to take the finished stuff to nzrag and gametime for further development, and then off to Story Games (the big leagues).

Here we go ...

Andy's Narcissist Self-Interview 20

PART I

1) Here is the name of the game, and how I came up with the name.

Bad Family.

I started with names based on the central mechanic of the game. So, it was stuff like 'Good or Bad', 'The Hand You're Dealt'.

Then I decided to focus on the family that is at the heart of the game, and at the same time introduce the idea that things will either go really well or really badly for them. So I had names like 'The Fortunes of the Joneses' and 'Lucky Jones'. That didn't sit well with me, and I began a search that may have lasted six months or a year for a name that worked better - and by better I mean I felt good about saying it out loud to other people.

Eventually I settled on 'Bad Family' - it's a riff on Bad Santa, it feels a bit current and catchphrase-y, and it clearly emphasises that it's about a family and that they may well do bad things to each other.


2) How would the "back cover blurb" for the game go? Imagine it being read by the "Movie Commercial Guy" ("In a World...")

Imagine your family - loving, complex, weird, and a little screwed up. Now imagine each of them having the worst day of their lives at the same time ... today. Imagine your family - you love them, hate them, and they're a little screwed up. Now imagine everyone in your family is having the worst day of their life.

Bad Family is the game about that day.

Bad Family: answering the question of whether you love the selfish jerks who are trying to stop you from getting what you want.

Alternatively, I have this:

Do you like animated sit-coms like The Simpsons or Family Guy?

Do you like stories about dysfunctional families, like The Royal Tennebaums, or Malcolm in the Middle, or Married with Children, or American Beauty or pretty much any TV show ever?

That's basically what Bad Family is about: together we'll create an episode of an animated sit-com about a dysfunctional family.

You'll play one of the Family Members, and as part of the game you'll set up a goal your Family Member wants to achieve by the time the episode ends. You win the game by getting what you want before everyone else does. You can increase your chances of winning by creating horrible situations for the other members of your family. Horrible situations like you'd see in any episode of a sit-com.

3) This is a brief example of what play might look like, involving three players and no more than 10 "lines" of text.

SIVA:
Okay, we're back to your turn Elise. Now, if I remember right, your character's Want is to 'Prove he's not gay'. Where did we leave him, and what are you going to do next?

ELISE:
The party had just gotten started at my parents house, and all of my friends from school had arrived. So I think the music's loud, we're all dancing, and everyone starting to get drunk. And that's when Katie shows up.

TOBIAS:
I'll play her. "Lee, great party! I've never been to your place before - it's not as weird as they say at school."

ELISE:
"Thanks ... uh, do you want to have a look around?"

TOBIAS:
"I'd love to see your bedroom. I mean get a look at where you sleep. I mean -"

SIVA:
I'll there. So the best case scenario is that you go up to the bedroom, and - who knows - you might get up to all sorts of horrible embarrassing hijinks in the course of proving you're not gay. My worst case scenario, on the other hand, is that Brian arrives. And he chooses just that moment to get down on his knees in front of you, and Katie, and everyone at the party, and declare his love for you.

ELISE
Oh shit. Okay, I'll draw a card ... Failure. Crap! ... Well I'm not going to let that stand. I'll spend a Bonus and redraw.... Failure. okay, okay ... I need to save my Bonuses for later so, crap, I guess Brian arrives and does his thing.

EVERYONE:
(in sympathetic embarrassment)
AARRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGRAGGGGOOOOH!!!

TOBIAS:
Do you want to spend a Bonus to continue the scene?

ELISE:
No. Guess I'll pass the turn to you.... Crap.

[Hmmm ... I'm not sure - does this come across as homophobic? It's based on a real moment in a playtest, and when we were playing it was awkward, sympathetic and felt true. I'm not sure how it reads, though.

4) This is my target audience.

+ People who want to play a comedy game.
+ People who want a complete game in an hour.
+ Board gamers, maybe.
+ People who haven't played an RPG before (I want Bad Family to be accessible and non-geeky).
+ Groups of friends who like to take the piss together.

This is a really important question and I need to put more thought into answering it.

5) These are other games, media, etc am I blatantly stealing from (or, what I am inspired by)

The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle, and Angel. In fact, Angel was the original inspiration because I noticed that in the show was never about how skilled a character was - they either succeeded or they failed when they tried to do something. I wanted a game that would be that simple.

Primetime Adventures is an inadvertent influence - the game has turned out like a stripped-down version of PTA.

6) Here is one single sentence which describes 1-2 things about my game idea that other games don't currently offer (to my knowledge).

I totally don't know how to answer this. I don't think there are any other games that aim to create animated sitcoms. Cartoons, yes (Toon, Cartoon Action Hour); sit-coms, no.

7) Here, in no more than three sentences, is what the game is about in general.

Cartoons.
Dysfunctional family.
Worst-case scenarios.
Selfishness.

Obviously that's more than 3 sentences but I'm happy to brainstorm on this one and then winnow it down.

8) Here are one to two vignettes about the game's setting.

Depending on the group, the setting can veer all over the place from realistic to totally surreal. Occasionally I've had playtesters who think this is a problem - but over time I've grown to see this as a feature; each group sets up a particular tone for their game.

On the realistic end of things, one player wanted her character to be a teenage boy who was struggling with whether or not he was gay. He ended up at a party, with the girl he was interested trying to lead him upstairs to a bedroom - while at the same time his best (male) friend from school gatecrashed and declared that he loved him in front of everyone. It was an extremely awkward moment in the story that made all of us cringe in sympathy.

Towards the more surreal, I've seen a grandmother character stoned on peyote, stripping off all of her clothes under a hot sunny day while cycling to her weekly bridge game. And one young kid accidentally invented a time machine when he tried to soup up his bicycle with some spare parts stolen from a local army base.

New Thing: The Long Range Game

I've started a new game project based on the thinking I've been doing about planning and visualising the future. I get a little frustrated with myself - I care about the world; there are problems that I want to solve. But I don't know where to start.

So I'm writing a game about figuring out where to start, what could happen next, and what to do about it. This is a game to help me visualise the future. This is a game that will hopefully make planning fun.

I've given myself three restrictions:

• Must be under 3000 words
• Must not use randomisers like dice or cards
• Must be playable online.

I suspect it'll draw off Morgue's work with Small Group Action (pdf) a little bit.

RPG: Danger Patrol

Played Danger Patrol last night - a new game of pulpy cliffhangers in an alternate 1950s universe filled with rocketships and rayguns. Think Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.


It didn't go very well, but I think it has lots of potential for delivering a style of gaming I really enjoy.

I'll be running it again, probably at Confusion in August.

My comments on the game are here.

Bad Family: 100 words a day

The re-writing of Bad Family (*) has been warming up over the last week or so (although it'll have been just over a month, by the time this entry is auto-published).

(*) My game about dysfunctional relationships, family sit-coms, and the struggle to get what you want by the end of the episode before your big sister screws you over.

Really, it feels like the writing is happening at the intersection of seven personal productivity hacks that I've been using for a while:

1. I've set up the home page of my browser so that the Google Docs page where I'm writing Bad Family is right in my face whenever I go online. Using Google Docs also has the advantage of making it easy to work on it anywhere.
   
2. I have started a Seinfeld chain - basically, the idea that if you can see you're making progress every day, you don't want to take a day off (and break the chain). You can see my chain for Bad Family here.
   
3. I'm using an idea from Mark Forster called the Current Initiative, which is that you choose one project that you want to make progress on, and make it the very first thing you do each day. So, when I wake up I write on Bad Family for 10 minutes. I also make it the first thing I do when I get home.
   
4. After reading 'In Praise of Slow', I'm putting less pressure on myself to complete this game RIGHTNOWASSOONASPOSSIBLE. By taking the pressure off, I'm trying to make it more fun.
   
5. I'm writing it with a specific audience in mind. This is a hack suggested by Jonathon Walton - writing it to a particular person gives it a more personal voice. Hopefully it also makes it a more enjoyable read.
   
6. I'm making this my main writing project for the next two months (till the end of July). I'm now alternating a period of serious, focused writing with two weeks of playing around with various projects, finding out what's fun.
   
7. I'm writing 100 words a day. Again it's a suggestion by Jonathon Walton, in this thread on Story Games.

Basically, I'm looking forward to 'finishing' this thing. Not only will it tie off the last Old Thing I've been working on, but it'll also allow me to release Matt, Karen, and Gino's artwork into the internet.

EDITED TO ADD: I've also been 'gameifying' my writing - finding easy levels (sections) to complete and working on them; gradually I'm working my way up to the harder levels.

Graphic Design Practice #7

More Photoshop challenges (where you get a random picture, title and quote, and make a book cover):



That's my second draft. My first draft (where I wanted to play with the title a little) looked like this: