Expecting the Unexpected and Narrative Purity

My Cyberpunk 2020 campaign ended last night in rather unexpected fashion. Well, the ending was planned - I'm transitioning to an OD&D Yoon-Suin campaign, though we'll also be doing a rotating-GM-style Microscope-created Shared World type project in tandem.

I tend to glaze over when reading other people's Actual Play blog posts, but I've done some short APs from the "Cyberpool" campaign here and here. It may be remembered that my players had a huge project underway which involved parachuting £200,000 of heroin into an inner city park, hiding it in plain sight in the form of an aerial DJ gig in front of an audience of 10,000 people. (They came up with this crackpot idea during a secret gaming session in my office in blatant contravention of regulations - we live this cyberpunk shit.)

There was another "grand theme" to the campaign, in which the PCs had become involved in a corporate-war-by-proxy between Gazprom and a Bulgarian IT conglomerate called STRELA, and one of the characters was about to throw himself full-pelt into this.

In the end, neither of these strands came to anything. In the final session (I think we've had somewhere in the region of 12 to 15) the PCs rocked up at the Cameroonian pentecostal church whose mysterious pastor, Father Philemon, is their erstwhile employer in the parachuting heist. They had, in true cyberpunk fashion, decided that their cut of the heroin money (10%) was not enough given their expenses (they'd already spent about £10,000 laying the groundwork for the gig) and they had decided they wanted the whole £200,000. In order to achieve this, they hatched a plot to smuggle a cell phone, jury-rigged into a primitive bugging device, into the church, and use it to gather information on the organization. Their ultimate goal appeared to be to set up a huge bomb under the church by entering the sewage system, thus killing Father Philemon and his cronies and allowing them to complete the parachute jump and keep the full amount of smack.

They didn't even get this far - after an altercation with Father Philemon in an attempt to create a distraction for planting the bug they were marched outside and told the deal was off. Things rapidly spiralled downhill and guns were pulled. 15 seconds of in-game time later and one of the PCs was dead (after taking at least a dozen bullets and two shotgun blasts) along with 5 of Fr. Philemon's gunmen, who were mown down by Patrick's assault-rifle-toting Somali teenage girl. The remaining PCs then fired a Light Antitank Weapon into the church and drove off.

I decided this was a reasonable point at which to End Credits, at least for Season 1.

From this we can draw two lessons:

1) In CP:2020, handguns and shotguns are all very well, but what you really want is an assault rifle when the shit hits the fan.

2) More importantly, I think our campaign demonstrates the messiness and Picaresque brilliance you get when you give players free reign. If I'd been plotting things out, there's no way the PCs would have ended up even coming up with the parachute heist anyway - I threw so many other adventure hooks their way - but once they had done, it would almost have been perverse for it not to happen. It would have been such a natural conclusion to the campaign - such a narratively logical, complete note on which to end it. It would have been climactic.

Instead, not only did the parachute jump never happen, the PCs plotted an entire level underneath it (kill employer; keep heroin), which itself didn't happen, because they ended up involved in a full on gun-fight which laid waste to all of their carefully laid plans in the course of less than 20 seconds of shooting.

If it had been a film or book, there's no way it would have turned out this way. But it did, and it was in its own way highly satisfactory: we didn't get a plotted ending, but we got an ending - and one that felt realistic. Life doesn't tie things off neatly. If you were going to compare it to something plotted, the ending seemed more like the end of Season 1 of The Wire: confused, slightly arbitrary, unexpected, and very life-like.

The conclusion being that it's important to stay true to your principles: when the sirens of plot and narrative come singing, plug in your ear wax of sandbox purity and keep on going. You won't be disappointed with the results.

Everything is Dolphins

Two links for your amusement and edification. The first is Everything is Dolphins, a homebrew RPG in which, well, everything is dolphins. It is best described by its "discoverer":

Everything is Dolphins occupies a curious place. While it is clearly the work of someone new to the design of role-playing games, it also displays the some of the sophisticated sensibilites one would expect from an old hand. Rather than the excess of complexity that clutters most freshman efforts, Everything is Dolphins offers concision and simplicity. The author gives few examples to illustrate how to use the system and no sample adventure, leaving much to the player’s imagination (and effort). With its bare bones, lacunae, and undeniable beauty, Everything is Dolphins is the role-playing game analogue of outsider art.

That discoverer is the owner of PlaGMaDA, the Player Generated Map and Document Archive, whose "mission is to preserve, present, and interpret play generated cultural artifacts, namely manuscripts and drawings created to communicate a shared imaginative space":

The Archive will solicit, collect, describe, and publicly display these documents so as to demonstrate their relevance, presenting them as both a historical record of a revolutionary period of experimental play and as aesthetic objects in their own right.  By fostering discussion and educating the public, it is hoped that the folkways which generate these documents can be encouraged and preserved for future generations.

A laudable goal. Take a look at the Archive. You'll not be disappointed.

Why Are Adults Still Launching Tabletop War?

The BBC has an article today about the 25th anniversary of the release of Warhammer 40,000, which is doing the rounds. Typically for the BBC there has to be an angle which will give the cognoscenti something to fret about (in this case, the fact that 40k supposedly "exploits" younger fans), but still, it's surprisingly sympathetic and avoids the kind of tongue-in-cheek comments you usually get when RPGs or table top wargames are discussed in mainstream media. The comments on the article are, as always, completely batshit mental, but raise a smile nonetheless.

There are two "!" instances worth mentioning. First, this:

Gillen contrasts Warhammer 40K to role-playing fantasy gaming like the online World of Warcraft (the modern equivalent of Dungeons and Dragons). [Emphasis added]

Get that? Almost as if D&D doesn't exist anymore except in the form of WoW. Not sure what to make of that. And second, more positively, there's this:

"It's like why theatre remains popular in the age of cinema," says 32-year-old Andrew Ruddick from Cambridge, explaining its enduring appeal. He describes himself as a "relapsed" Warhammer gamer, slipping back into it in his 20s with friends. "There's an intimacy. With tabletop gaming you are there."

Which is worth emphasising, I think. The USP of table top gaming needs to be shouted from the roof tops at every available opportunity.

Know Your Enemy

-C has an interesting post up today, talking about my recent musings on consensus-oriented play. Melan makes a comment that is worth reprinting in full:

I am really frustrated by a lot of game discussion on the net - particularly on RPGNet's d20/D&D forum - where posters assume that typical gamers will be acting in bad faith in situations that depend on human choice. There is, I don't know, a complete lack of generosity towards roleplayers, and some sort of almost paralysing fear about bad experiences.  

As a conclusion to these assumptions, the discussion then shifts to how a game's rules should limit or outright prevent the potential for human error by limiting human choice; moreover, the experiences of posters who come from a different point of view are written off as atypical or downright wrong. I see these assumptions as damaging - used to argue against them for a few years, but I have mostly given up because I just ended up attacked over it.  

So, yeah, sportmanship. A mutual commitment to group enjoyment. That's the point. That's the entire point, and I don't want to play in a game that doesn't give me that.

This absolutely hits the nail on the head. There is something poisonous about discussion of RPGs in online forums - a cynicism, a meanness of spirit, a failure to understand basic human decency in game contexts - which I find genuinely worrying, and it does seem to flow from rpg.net's d20/D&D forum, although you see it elsewhere too. It's not the majority of the forum-goers (many of whom contributed excellently and pleasantly to my Monstrous Manual thread, for example), but a large minority of fevered egos, tainting our collective subconscious.

I don't find it worrying in any sort of WE'RE ALL DOOMED sense; rather, I'm anxious because it seems to me that the Powers That Be in the RPG world take what goes on in forums very seriously. I can't help but feel that a lot of what 4e tried to do in "fixing" D&D was in response to what a large number of the fevered egos in places like rpg.net were saying was wrong with gaming, but that this was ultimately a quixotic goal because it wasn't properly understood that people who are very vocal in forums are not really very representative of the majority, and are pretty much by definition guaranteed to be odd, not to mention socially inept and angry. Their concerns are not the concerns of normal gamers, but the concerns of cynical mean-spirited people who do not understand basic human decency in game contexts, and readily assume bad faith at the drop of a hat.

It's related to the problem that is experienced by TV-show makers, radio broadcasters, and media personalities the length and breadth of the world: you get complaints about something and try to make changes in response, forgetting that people who are bothered enough to complain are by definition rather strange and also tiny in number in comparison to the unoffended masses - so by effecting changes in response you are in fact chasing wild geese.

Which is a roundabout way of saying, I really wish people like Monte Cook and Mike Mearls would lock themselves away from the internet when designed D&D 5th edition and just make a game that they think normal people would enjoy, and play-test it the traditional way by just playing it a lot without input from the "fan base".

Speculating Wildly about Culture

In this post at therpgsite, a lot of people are speculating about why RPGs are apparently not popular in some countries (India, China, etc.) while relatively popular in others (UK, USA, etc.). Seeing as I enjoy speculating wildly about culture, I threw my own hat into the ring, and will now elaborate on to your education and edification (or rejection and dissatisfaction, whichever you prefer).

First, I've been around the world enough to know that cultural differences are real and have an actual impact on the way people think and behave. People are the same in Japan, France, Kazakhstan, Israel and the UK in that they like good food, having fun, having sex, they care about their families, they worry about the future, and so on, as you would expect: the core is the same. But there are differences around the edges. For instance, in Japan there is no real culture of entertaining in the home. When people socialise they tend to do it outside - at bars, restaurants, clubs, whatever - and house parties are pretty rare (although they do happen).

It would be naive to assume that cultural differences like this would not have an effect on how the practice of playing RPGs translates between cultures. Certainly, in the naive sense, in societies like Japan where people tend not to socialise in the home as much as they do in the UK or North America, there is less of a culture of parlour games and hence a correspondingly smaller window for RPGs to enter.

But also, more deep-rooted cultural mores can impact on how RPGs are played and interpreted, I think. I've written quite a bit before on this blog about cultural differences between the UK and the USA, and how it seems perfectly natural when you think about it that one should produce Warhammer and the other should produce D&D. I didn't really do enough gaming in Japan, but I do have a lot of experience dealing with Japanese people in small group contexts and know that all the stereotypes about Japan being a deferential society are stereotypes for a reason: age and seniority are strongly correlated with how much people are willing to listen to you and agree with you. (This is strongly reinforced by the language.) This makes me wonder about how the role of the DM is interpreted in the Japanese context and how my own relaxed and egalitarian style would fit.

I also think it would be naive to assume that the literary and artistic traditions exhibited by certain societies would not be a factor in how readily RPGs are absorbed. For instance, it seems to me (speaking as a lay person and an outsider in a completely extemporaneous way) that there is a strong fantastical tradition in the modern (as opposed to medieval or ancient) art and literature of Spain, Portugal and Latin America, more so than in some other societies - that those countries produce cultural artefacts that seem more readily fantastical and more readily associated with fantasy than others: that, for instance, the steps from Borges to Vance to D&D are tiny, and that Borges is just one person in a heritage of fantastical weirdness that goes back to Picasso, El Greco, Cervantes... And it also seems to me at the same time that RPGs and fantasy literature are pretty popular in Portugal and Spain, at least to my limited knowledge, and that for instance I'm always stumbling across Portuguese translations of fantasy novels on author blogs, and I know George R R Martin goes on book tours in Portugal quite a lot, and I knew this Spanish girl at university who was an even bigger Tolkien geek than I was. And I also know that the plural of anecdote is not "data", but still.

Of course, you wouldn't want to play down the significance of either language, politics or economics. People in China speak Chinese, and comparatively few speak English well enough to read D&D in the original. People in North Korea don't have easy access to DriveThruRPG. Most people in Zambia don't have the disposable income to spend on frivolous RPGs.

And if living in a foreign country for a number of years taught me anything, it's that it takes a long, long time to get to know a society well enough to pontificate on its mores. I feel confident talking about Japanese culture because I lived there for a large chunk of my life, I worked in a Japanese environment, I speak the language, I dated the women, I played football with the men. The same isn't true of Brazil or India or the Philippines, so what the fuck do I know? And I also know that when I hear people who don't know Japan as well as I do talking in a general way about "Japanese culture" I always think they sound as if they're talking out of their arse, so I'm wary of doing the same thing.

And yet I just have, and will continue to do so.

D&D as Straight Man

How do you like your whimsy? I prefer mine leaning towards the slightly melancholic, surreal, sardonic, and cruel. But there is whimsy of a blunter and more prosaic kind in D&D. From the Rules Cyclopedia, page 261, in the "Room Contents" advice section:

Trick Monster: This applies to any variation of a listed monster, such as: A two-headed giant ogre, a carrion crawler that walks upright and has paralyzing tentacles for arms, a wild bore (a shaggy man who tells long, dreary stories), a quartering (half-sized halfling), a Mouth Harpy (who can't sing but plays the harmonica), an Ogre Jelly (looks like an ogre, but . . .), and so forth.

I came across this last night while stocking one of the levels of Sangmenzhang, and it raised a wry smile, but I have to say my kind of D&D doesn't really tolerate this kind of thing. I get the joke, I get that not everything has to be po-faced in any RPG, but still, it's an incredibly unsubtle way of crowbarring humour into a game.

I have two objections. The first is the simple one: every single RPG session I've ever been involved in, as player or GM, has more laughter in it than serious moments at a ration approaching 2:1. This is achieved without anything substantively "funny" in the rules, set-up, or content of the game. It's just because that's the way gaming is - funny things happen, and when they don't, funny things can be said about the things that are happening. So actually, I've never felt any need to insert pre-planned jokes or make any self-conscious attempt at humour in the setup of a game or session. It happens organically anyway.

The second is more philosophical, and is that jokes and puns are a kind of Brechtian alienating device which distance the players from the game world. As soon as a Mouth Harpy makes an appearance, suddenly you're not even remotely inside your character's head - your willing suspension of disbelief has been shattered and you've been wrenched out of the Secondary World which has been created. This is not really conducive to what I enjoy about gaming.

What this boils down to, I think, is that good humour is generally about what the Japanese call the tsukkomi and the boke, or what we call the straight-man and comic: you need a sensible springboard for the jokes to bounce off. For me, whatever the game is you're playing, the game's contents have to take on the role of straight-man - they have to be relatively serious on the face of it for the jokes to riff on. Seriousness of content is the necessary foil for all manner of jokes, sarcasm and piss-taking - and the overall level of humour in fact suffers without it. That is, overt humour built-in to the game world undermines it: to borrow again from theatrical comedy, there is no-one "feeding" the lines, because the lines are all stupid jokes in the first place. 

Porfiry Petrovich I Hardly Knew Ye

Porfiry Petrovich, a PC in my Cyberpunk 2020 game, died tonight. He was summarily executed at 3am by security men after being an unwilling accomplice in a drive-by shooting which saw a drunken local politician threatening 4 Russian mobsters and 2 of the other PCs from the window of a Porsche which Porfiry was driving after all 8 men had participated in a night of whiskey-fuelled gambling together at a local casino. In a scenario almost literally too complicated to untangle, one of the Russian mobsters was shot by the local politician who was tazed by Porfiry and then beaten to death by the surviving Russians while the other PCs fled into the night, whereupon Porfiry, for reasons far too complicated to go into here, attempted to gun down the other Russian mobsters. Security personnel from the nearby corporate mall delivered the coup de grace by massacring Porfiry and the Russians in the street and asking questions later.

All in all, a good session and a somewhat fitting end: Porfiry's epitaph reads, in his player's own words, "He lived as he died, acting like a tit." Although I think that's a bit harsh - Porfiry was in large part the engine behind what was going on in the game and the leader of the "gang", and his player was resourceful and ingenious.

His next character is a homeless 19-year-old Somali immigrant girl who carries an assault rifle around in a sports bag.

I love gaming.

Your Players Know You're Not God

One of the key elements of my GMing style, I've realised, is that I tend to involve the players in the decision-making process rather a lot, so while I'm the final arbiter, I'm always open to suggestions on rulings and ideas on how to handle things. For instance, let's say I'm GMing a game where the rulebook doesn't include anything on calculating damage from falling and one of the PCs is falling off something from a 30 foot height. I'm just as likely to say to the players as a whole, "What do you reckon? How damaging would that be?" and let them have some input into the final decision as I am to just say, "You take 1d20 damage" off the top of my head.

I'm also likely to draw on the players' expertise in decision-making processes too. My gaming groups include veterinarians, firearms experts, people with PhDs in mathematics, and computer scientists. It would be almost perverse not to draw on their knowledge to make decisions and rulings that are realistic and sensible. (The firearms expert in particular always comes in handy; "John, would a 12.7mm round penetrate the brick wall Andy's character is hiding behind?" "Yes.")

Reading around forums and watching other GMs, I realise that this isn't really the norm, or at least I do it more than most. I can't really understand why. I take the view that we're all adults, and my players know I'm not God - it's not like I'm shattering any illusions by revealing I don't know something or I could do with knowledgeable input.

It also seems to me that sessions always run smoothly when it feels as if everybody is pulling in the same direction. My GMing decisions are generally as objective as I can make them and I try to create a neutral game world with rational consequences, but it doesn't hurt for players to feel as if they have some input into the process of refereeing - it gives things an atmosphere of consensus and collegiality rather than of paternalism.

Let's face it - I'm also pretty lazy, and the more I can farm out and outsource to the players, the better.

Generic = Bland

This thread provides interesting food for thought for someone such as me; I'm not old by any means, but I'm getting older, and I'm also busy. Nowadays, the prospect of picking up a 200 (or more likely 400) page-long tome of new rules fills me with dread and boredom rather than excitement, and I find that my attention span is only a fraction of what it used to be. It doesn't help that most RPG rule books are full of extraneous crap that no sane person could possibly want to read, like page after page of "game fiction" with no purpose other than exercising the game designers' frustrated-novelist demons, either.

So the thought has occurred to me: isn't it easier to just give up on learning new systems and pick one generic system which will allow you to run anything?

And yet I'm obviously not alone in finding generic/universal systems unutterably bland and dull. Whether it's GURPS, d20 Modern, Savage Worlds, or whatever else, something about a generic system leeches all the enjoyment out of gaming for me. The process ceases to feel immersive and begins to feel increasingly gamey in the worst sense, almost like a lesser simulacra of what role-playing is: all the flavour disappears.

I'm pretty sure this is to do with authorial voice and authorial intent. Because, while I might despise the kind of ridiculous fiction which appears in some game books, it can't be ignored that there is something personal in the best RPG systems. OD&D is not just a fantasy role playing game - it's a fantasy role playing game created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Pendragon is not just a game about Arthurian romance - it's a game about Arthurian romance created by Greg Stafford. Apocalypse World is not just a game about the post-apocalypse - it's a game about the post-apocalypse created by Vincent Baker. Cyberpunk 2020 is not just a game about cyberpunk roleplaying - it's a game about cyberpunk roleplaying created by Mike Pondsmith. (I could go on, but you get my drift, I think.) Those games and, I would submit, most games that really work, contain something personal of the author in them - something that communicates passion, mood, emotion and personality above and beyond merely being a ruleset. They come from something the designer loved, not something the designer thought would fulfil a certain function.

Pretty much by definition, then, I feel, generic rulesets will lack the crucial element of authorial personality. They will by necessity be an exercise in engineering rather than flavour, because they are created not from the heart but the brain, and this will inevitably lead to them feeling dry. They may be exquisitely designed. But they won't contain any spirit, or passion - and they will inevitably tend to dullness.

(Naturally, there is one exception to this: Risus. But Risus always defies categorisation.)

Old Stuff Day

Everybody else is doing it, and Fridays always seem low on inspiration for me (I also have a raging hangover) so I'll partake in Old Stuff Day, the idea being to highlight old posts on your blog that:

• You consider special but didn't get the attention they deserved 
• People liked in the past but haven't seen recently
• Posts created before the blog received much traffic, and deserve to be reshown
• And content you're particularly proud of.

Well, here goes:

Planescape Borges and the Library of Babel, from May 2008, is an old favourite that I think was an early indication of the way this blog would evolve, containing a nice mixture of pretentious pseudo-intellectualism, "fantastical" fantasy, and solid creative ideas.

Old Johnny in the Lake, the Crayfish Demigod, again from May 2008. If you don't want to read an entry with that title it's a fair assumption this blog isn't for you.

Beware the Were Stuff, from November 2009, the "Silver Age" of Monsters and Manuals. I just think this is one of my best ideas, and the idea of a were-secretary-bird still makes me chuckle.

Chaos Patrons!, from September 2008. I stole this idea, unashamedly. It's still good though.

How to Describe a Campaign Setting in 25 Words or Less, from March 2009. This was when I was first formulating Yoon-Suin. 

My Top 10 Monsters, from February 2009. This is the first post of mine that ever caught on mimetically, I think. It was a proud moment.

A Slug is as Evolved as You and More Molluscs, from January 2009. I got bored and drew some pictures and put them on the interwebz.

Towards a Theory of Demihumans, from May 2009. One of my solidest ideas. 

Finally, Panthro Says Silly Names Are Silly, from March 2010. I don't often make myself laugh with my writing, but I do find this entry funny.