System-hopping, and why do we play the game?

Recent, a friend complained about system hoppinghttp://www.livejournal.com/users/iamtim/67478.html">system hopping> and how he can barely get a game started before he discovers some new, hot game system that he just has to try.

Meetup followup…

Well, we had our first Wichita Roleplayers Meetup Group event last night. Four of us met at Mulligan's Pub (which was a nice place for this… they're about dead on Tuesday night and it was pretty quiet) and talked for a couple hours about the games we play, exploits of our characters, why Farscape shouldn't have been canceled. You know, gamer kind of stuff.

I'm not sure what the future of this group will be. BruceG is looking to do some roleplaying… being without a group, he's looking to make the Meetup into a gaming group. I'm more inclined to keep socialization the primary purpose of the main monthly meeting, though that wouldn't preclude playing some card or board games. I just don't want to exclude anybody because they already have a game group and aren't interested in another, or just don't like what the group is playing. I want to keep the Meetup group a meeting place and forum for roleplayers to discuss the hobby.

But now that Meetup lets us schedule other events, there's plenty of room to add a monthly (or twice-a-month) gaming event as well as the regular Monday event.

But I had fun, and I'm looking forward to attracting more roleplayers as folks see that we're actually having meetings.

Meetup.com and Roleplaying

Meetup.com has re-invented itself this month, and I think it's going to make a big difference in their success in smaller cities.

Meetup's purpose has been to build communities in the real world, instead of online, by helping people with common interests find each other and get together. But in the beginning, they had a clever plan that just didn't work.

They picked the categories, like Roleplaying, and decided when all the Roleplaying groups would meet. So every third Tuesday of the month, at 8 PM, every Roleplaying Meetup group in the world would meet. It was supposed to be neat, knowing that everyone else in the world was meeting at the same time as you, except that they weren't… only those in your time-zone were. And since this was about local, face-to-face groups, it didn't really matter who else was meeting. Strike one against the clever plan… they didn't let local needs influence the meeting time or date.

Then, they had a database of venues and presented three of them semi-randomly and asked members to vote. This meant that the meeting might not be at the same place every month, the winning voters may have no idea if the venue is even open or able to accommodate them, and private homes or venues not in the database weren't available. Strike two against the clever plan… voting doesn't guarantee a responsible party making sure the venue is appropriate, and local needs are again ignored.

Finally, if a meeting didn't have five members RSVP ahead of time, it was canceled. So a group with less than five members had no chance of meeting at all, and there was no way to communicate with other members online to arrange a meeting anyway. They wanted to encourage meetings in the real world, so they didn't provide online communication tools, which actually kept people from meeting. Strike three against the clever plan… if only three people want to meet, why not let them meet?

There were other issues, but those are the big ones that have prevented any of the Meetup groups I'm a member of from meeting since I signed up in June 2003.

But this month, the strikes are removed from their record. They now have forums and private messaging to allow members to communicate about details of the meetings. The group gets a volunteer coordinator, who chooses (through use of polls and discussion), the meeting dates, times and venues. The group can have more than one meeting a month. You can even have multiple groups about the same topic in one region (mostly for groups that are too large). Basically, they've put all the control of the details into the hands of the local group, instead of arbitrarily deciding for them. And that makes all the difference… the Wichita Roleplayers Meetup group is meeting for the first time this Tuesday. There may be only three of us (out of 14 members), but that's better than nothing and may be the boost we need to get some more of those members out.

Now what does all this mean for roleplaying? Roleplaying is already a social activity, so there are a lot of roleplayers meeting face-to-face. And some cities have really good game stores with playing space and opportunities for roleplayers to meet other roleplayers. So what does Meetup have to offer?

In my area (Wichita, KS) there just aren't any really good game stores. They're "mostly adequate" but what gaming space they have is very devoted to collectible games and wargames… there isn't a good time to go and meet roleplayers there, in part because nobody's organized such a thing. And that's where Meetup comes in… it's organizing something in a way nobody's really organized before. I recently learned of the WSU Gaming Society, but they're an all-types-of-games club, including board and video games. And they have a 1-hour "business" meeting, followed by games, including several roleplaying campaigns. They're not really what I'm looking for, though, because I mostly just want to meet other roleplayers and socialize with them.

But what about larger cities? Surely they don't need Meetup, do they? I've been talking to Ron Pyatt, the coordinator of the Dallas-Plano Roleplayers Meetup Group. The Dallas area is pretty big, and their Meetup group has 78 members. They've had 10 meetings before the big redesign, so Meetup is at least getting them together. Looking at their new members, it looks like Meetup is working well for people new to the area or wanting to get back into gaming after a long hiatus. (One of their venues, the InfiniTea coffee house, loves Meetup and puts up signs to welcome meetup groups on nights they meet there. Sounds like Meetup's working for InfiniTea, eh?)

There are 245 Roleplayers Meetup groups… why not see if there's one in your area?

Let the game begin…

Today we got our superhero campaign off the ground. Just barely, and we're still kind of wobbly, but at least it's moving.

None of the characters are quite complete on the character sheets (one of them still hasn't been translated from Champions stats), we're not even entirely sure how we're using the rules, and I had a half-baked idea for a starting adventure… but by gosh, we actually roleplayed. I've been away from it for too long… going on a year, I think. It's nice to be roleplaying again, even if our start is a bit shaky. And we didn't even get to have combat. (The actual roleplaying was a bit short because we were doing some character info tweaking, deciding just how everyone met, what kind of headquarters, if any, they might have, and where everyone lived. The latter is especially important to ask of a pack of five winged space-lizards who don't have a job.)

In my last post, I talked a lot about Fudge Scale issues, and while I still feel like the only way to use Scale usefully in a superhero game is to have arbitrary, non-overlapping Scales, I just decided to pretty much can the Scale thing altogether and just go with numbers. Everything else I tried felt too artificial (the non-overlapping Scales) and trying to compare Superb Heroic Strength to Good Super Armor just took too much mental work. So I'm just using numbers because they're the quickest. Nobody knows what Superb Heroic Strength really means until they look it up on the chart to see about how much you can lift with it or compare it to the defenses of inanimate objects. Without a real-world reference (how much can I lift, how fast can I fly, how think a wall can I blast through), the adjectives just aren't very descriptive because the scale is very open-ended. In fantasy, I can say that Legendary is the peak of human ability and we can all get an idea of what each level means in that context. But that doesn't work so well with fifteen or twenty levels in the "usable by PC's" range.

One of the things I'm finding hardest about trying to choose the rules to use in a "mostly freeform" format is that I tend to creep more and more into "concrete rules" instead of "freeform." I had started to throw out Relative Degree because it can act wonky at large scale differences (in my opinion, yours may vary), but then I started asking since when I paid close attention to relative degree anyway? I mean to use it only as a guideline… in fact, the die rolls themselves are only supposed to be a guideline. Yet I find myself again and again wanting to fall back on the "crutch" of having rules to back up my decisions, or make the decisions for me when I don't know what I want to do (or what I'm doing). On one hand, I need a frame of reference… I want a good, general idea of how the system is supposed to work before I start freeforming the results. I don't know why that is. Maybe it's because the superhero abilities are so broad and all over the map, and I don't have any clear reference into just how thick a wall the group brick can punch through without either describing the character's strength in painfully minute detail ("Now, say you're faced with a double-thickness cinder-block wall… how many times do you have to punch that in order to make a hole big enough to walk through. Now what if it was triple-thick?"), or making a set of general rules which I can apply and use until I get a more intuitive feel for the kind of results it develops.

That's kind of a weird approach… using rules to develop a baseline from which to base my freeform decisions. Heh. I don't really care if we roll dice, add up numbers and do some comparisons, so long as it's all fast and I can tweak it on the fly when I need to. I don't need every decision to be "ah, you rolled high, he rolled low, that will certainly hit, and you do… um… oooh, he looks pretty hurt by that one." The danger I run into is what I did in the last fantasy campaign… the heroes won far too often. I couldn't seem to bring myself to really hurt them, because that would have seemed like I was hurting them arbitrarily. So instead, I let them win arbitrarily. I was just at the point where I realized that I really needed to do something about that when I took a break from gaming to keep up with school.

Now, just to get the balance right in the superhero game from the beginning, without arbitrarily walking all over them in the first combat.