Weekend: Roleplaying and Poly Party

I correctly remembered that December is always busy even without something I'm working on, between yuletide fanfic exchange, plans, presents and cards for xmas, and many social events and hopefully have avoided over-committing myself too badly.

Roleplaying

On Saturday I went along to one of the Heffers gaming events -- they've recently started a roleplaying night on Mondays, basically a venue for GMs to coordinate and host one-shots or campaigns, but still have some roleplaying sessions at the regular board game nights, which now are utterly gigantic.

It was run by a GM I've seen on some of the rpg facebook groups around Cambridge but not met, but he was pretty good, he was good at quickly building a world, and did some great NPCs.

The setting was just lovely, anthropomorphic mice gathering food for winter, and for the midwinter feast. Yes, we were derailed into a philosophical discussion about Owls and Mice both being sapient and what that implies for Owls :)

I played the stoic Head Chef. AK played the head of the woodland watch. The two other players played the incredibly bard-y minstrel, and forager with the lovely cart-pulling ferret. We sought the remaining fresh herbs, stood up to the burrow council, calmed a revolt, escaped a cat, caught and eventually reunited a thieving romeo and juliet couple, and muddled our way through plenty of slapstick hiding-from-the-burrow-council moments.

Aside

Oh gosh, I had to try so hard to drag my mind from the generalities (some discussed below) to the specifics which are probably much more interesting to read.

System

It was based on the apocalypse world system (roll 2d6, 7-9 = "succeed, but with caveat", etc) which I've played before and now have Thoughts about, which I'm not convinced worked great, but was sufficiently low-intrusive that the game worked great without worrying too much if the mechanics were the best.

The character generation was really excellent, giving pre-generated roles like Head Chef, Chief Forager and head of the woodland watch, but encouraging the players to give names and personalities, and fill in pre-suggested questions like "what animal pulls your cart" and "which member of the kitchen staff", and then a final question, asking "which previously mentioned NPC has been..." It was a very seamless way of encouraging the players, beginners or experts, to contribute to the world creation, and ensure that the NPCs were cross-linked into a society, not just a background cast separate for each player.

I'm assuming James gets the credit for writing those sheets, but many Apocalypse World variants do have excellent prompts of that sort, it's one of the things other systems could learn. I certainly do similarly even in fairly old-school DnD.

Note to self: "You're delving into the tomb of the lich emperor seeking a... what?" makes players remember the goal and macguffin a thousand times better than just telling them its jeweled sword of so-and-so.

Cambridge Polyamory Meet Winter Party

This was lovely. Amy rented Rock Road library, the events room, but also, just letting everyone have the run of the library if they felt like, which feels really lovely.

People brought v good food.

And we played the "write a phrase, try to draw the previous person's phrase, try to guess the previous person's drawing, repeat" game, which was absolutely hilarious.

Lots of lovely people, including some I haven't seen for a while and it was nice to catch up wit, including Steve who was moving away and doing his best to give away a lot of sci-fi and programming books first, including the interesting but provocatively-premised "compiler engineering in JAVA". I mean, JAVA is probably a fine language if you want to learn about compiler writing, but I wouldn't really choose anything but C or C++ for writing compilers.

Apocalypse World and My Ideas for Roleplaying Mechanics

Inspired by playing an apocalypse world inspired system at the one-shot on Saturday, my brain started thinking about roleplaying systems again.

Apocalypse World

This is the system where you roll 2d6 (possibly adding a stat or a bonus), and on 10+ you succeed, and on 7-9 you succeed but with an inventive drawback that keeps things dramatic, and on 1-6... well, I'll come back to that. There's hundreds of different settings based on variants of this system because it's easy to adapt to any setting.

As best as I can tell by reading around online, the intention of the system is to take a more narrative approach to resolution than DnD like games have. I want to be clear about what I mean by that, because both types of progress get muddled together in most games. By mechanical, I'm thinking of systems like DnD where the GM is expected to set up a situation and let the players explore it, and alters it on the fly to a greater or lesser extent, but by and large the results of a player action are some physical change in the game world known to all.

By contrast, the narrative resolution is more like, the player describes what happens, and as long as it doesn't depart what's physically plausible too far, you roll some dice to determine, "does the character mostly proceed, or does something that make you say uh-oh happen?"

E.g. in DnD, it makes a big difference if you have a short sword or a long sword because it affects how much damage you do. In dungeon world, it's not that granular, instead, you're expected to describe your character -- whoever they are -- facing off against some orcs, until conflict happens where the result isn't obvious, when the dice determine what happens. But the specifics could be anything, "having the orcs flee" or "killing them" uses much the same mechanic, as does, if you fail, it doesn't mean "miss", it means, the gm gets to ratchet up the tension, e.g. "your sword swings wide, the orc looms over you" or "you trip and drop your sword" or "you stab the orc, but suddenly, you hear a vast drum sounding from deep in the mines, DOOM, DOOM..."

That is, you wait until something dramatic is happening, when both failure and success have interesting what-happens-next-s like a choose your own adventure book, and then you roll to choose one or the other.

The specifics vary between the variants, and I've only experienced one or two, and not any of the originals, so I can't speak with much authority here, but I think that's the idea, and it seems like a good one. So what's the problem?

It doesn't work

I'm sure I must be being too negative here. Thousands of people have played this game. Hundreds of people have written adventures for it. Some people must have found doing so successful. I'm interested to know if anyone (any of you?) feels like the game has worked well in a narrative way.

Because my impression is that lots of people have had really great games by basically ignoring the mechanics and hoping for the best, but that's not really what your mechanics for.

What problems, based on a fairly cursory investigation, do I see? Well, the mechanics that there are don't really fit the ostensible aim. In Dungeon World, the battle with orcs is supposed to be quite cinematic. But the rules encourage you not to resolve the combat at a high level of abstraction. You can't say, "we outnumber the orcs, we charge in for the slaughter, rolling?, mixed success, ok, they all die but one of us is wounded", the rules specifically call for the orcs to have a fixed number of hitpoints, and actions which attack cause a specific number of hit points worth of damage.

So lots of people have a problem of just saying "we attack" repeatedly, and all get dead if the GM is harsh with their counter-actions, or win boringly if the GM is benign. A good GM certainly CAN avoid that, but it seems like the dungeon world rules encourage you into the unhelpful behaviour, not the fun behaviour, and don't provide a lot of guidance.

Or suppose there's a battle and all the characters want to act at once. Is there a secret round mechanics where everyone gets to act, even though the rules don't specify it? Or it just a rules back and forth with "player action, GM action only if player failure, etc" with no mechanically-relevant actions by the opponents outside that, where the players are incentivised to let the hack-iest character keep acting and everyone else keep their head down and doesn't actually contribute anything? And just rely on "common sense" that having four PCs is better for defeating an orc than one?

And lots of the moves are weirdly specific. Like, a class has some specific possible action that gives +2 to something or other. Which often seems completely at odds with what you might expect to be able to do, and weirdly restraining. Like, I should just narrate? But then it suddenly matters that I have this very specific action?

And there's a lot of other things. The resolution is defined by specific success/failure values, modified by the player's abilities. And you can add other modifiers but that doesn't seem to be the standard. So if you're bad at talking ALL your talking attempts will be "probably fail" ones. That's dramatically appropriate. But you can't ever have some easier challenges -- it's either so easy you succeed automatically, or so hard you probably fail. So you've no way to get familiar with what's possible. And if you're good at something, all your rolls will be easy ones, there's no way to face a harder-than-average challenge unless the GM adds some negative modifiers to you.

Jack's rules of thumb for how heavyweight mechanics should be: Lightweight

If it comes up at most once a session, it should be extremely lightweight and it doesn't really matter how it works, the GM can just wing it and it's fine. Even crappy systems usually handle this fine because the GM will just fiddle things if it doesn't work and seat-of-the-GM's-pants works fine.

For most DnD games, most things outside combat, i.e. mostly skill checks, fall into this system. There's a big minority of DnD adventures where there are a lot of skill checks, but in most, it's just one every so often, so it only really matters that some characters are good at this, some are bad, the specifics, and whether the skills are well-chosen or should be merged together or split up doesn't really matter.

Jack's rules of thumb for how heavyweight mechanics should be: Less Lightweight

If it comes up repeatedly in a session, you need to make sure the mechanics you use to resolve it are fun when the players are trying to navigate through the system and succeed. That can be lightweight, but it at least needs to be consistent, and it needs to be well balanced without any gaping flaws.

That doesn't matter in every single game, but in most games, the players are rooting for their characters, and it's much much more fun if "the things that make the characters succeed" has a significant overlap with "the things that are fun for the players to have the characters do". If one ability is overpowered, you'll find out here. If there's too few possible actions and combat just comes down to "I hit him, he hits me", you'll find out here.

In DnD this is combat, and DnD puts a lot of effort into that. I think most games benefit from having some 'central' resolution mechanic like that, whether it comes up often or rarely, to give some weight to decisions because the players know that how dangerous the situation is actively determined, and not just up to GM fiat. And usually it rewards (some) player skill as well. Although you might count something like a "doom track" counting down to red alert/horrors break through/night falls/etc as the same sort of thing, that there are clear understood rules come up repeatedly, and the players understand when they're hastening bad things.

Nanowrimo: Superhero urban fantasy

Woo, I did nanowrimo! Well, not quite, but I did about 25,000 words between November and maybe a little head start in October. I continued a story which had been knocking around in my head before.

I learned a lot which I think I've already talked about elsewhere, mostly I should invent vivid characters and use them to sell the premise. So I'm quite excited to try that on some shorter stories and see how it goes.

But what about this story? Well, superhero urban fantasy, partly inspired by LitRpg although I don't describe it to people like that because the connotations aren't as positive.

A large alien macguffin appears in pieces scattered across london. The same thing has happened in other large world cities the last decade. Everyone who touches them gets superpowers but (as earlier cities learned the hard way), lapses into a coma eighteen months later. Unless, you touch every one of the different pieces, in which case the game ends right then, you're coma safe, but everyone else succumbs immediately.

This leads to a lot of conflict, and superheroes from one city often plan to work together as a team, but then fall into conflict later after all.

Macguffin shards not touched by people activate something non-human nearby instead, turning it into a monster, which can be benign but often rampages, fighting these is something superheroes are often called upon to do. There's often some sort of theme, e.g. in Tokyo, giant monsters, in London, monsters dwelling in an underground labyrinth across the city.

The protagonist Dennis get a straightforward "blast it" power but immediately starts thinking how to exploit it most effectively. He fights a couple of monsters I love including the adorable CRUSHBOT-9000, meets another super, meets a whole group of supers slowly coalescing into a team, clashes with some other supers, and eventually about half way through the book the situation starts to settle down into a stand off between:

* A slight majority of London supers, members or loosely affiliated with one super team hoping to resolve the prisoner's dilemma situation amicably, including most of the protagonists, and becoming recognised by civil authorities as an authority on all things super, and have a giant mansion where they act like rock stars
* The Raven Woman, who thinks she's a god, scarily infests everyone dreams, and has coopted other powerful supers to work for her
* The government, trust us, get registered, work as auxiliary police officers, we have a plan to fix the coma thing, need to know, you don't need to know, no, none of the people we've disappeared have been "disappeared", oops, forget we said that
* TBD based in the labyrinth

A lot of this gelled as I was writing so what I have is a bit inconsistent with the tone and worldbuilding which came later. It has several high points I really, really enjoyed writing, but I'm not sure if it's worth working into a consistent whole or not. If I can I would love to at least fix the formatting and gaps in the first half so I can show people, but I'll keep you posted.