I have an idea! industry panel in audio

"I Have An Idea! How To Get Into The Industry" Panel - Dragonmeet 2004

If you're at all interested in working in the RPG industry, this might be of interest to you.

It's a recording from RPGMP3.com of a panel from Dragonmeet in England. Steve Long, long-time writer for and now co-owner of Hero Games, has quite a bit to say… and as a guy who went from lawyering and RPG freelancing to owning a long-standing game company and working full-time in the industry, he's just about experienced it all.

The audio could have been cleaned up quite a bit, and one panelist is very difficult to hear, but Steve comes in loud and clear when nobody else (like the woman announcing vehicle's about to be "clamped") is talking over him.

I can summarize in about three sound-bites: If you can write and follow directions, you can get freelance assignments. Don't expect to get paid and you'll have a great time. PDF sales over the web is the low-risk way to start self-publishing.

Nothing new there that I didn't know, but they were encouraging. When I'm finished with school, I've got a few projects I need to get back to.

Order of the Stick

In case you haven't seen it, I wanted to mention that The Order of the Stick, by Rich Burlew, is the best roleplaying-related comic strip on the web.

Don't let the stick-figures fool you… Rich has a degree in graphic arts! Start at the beginning and read the archives… it's fast reading and hilarious as heck, even if you don't play D&D.

Action, Theatrix, and overwhelming odds…

I just finished watching Blade II. Watching the action, and especially the scenes in the drainage tunnels where Blade's outnumbered thirty or forty to one, has got me thinking a lot about some of the things I've written about here recently.

Let's recap real quick:

9 I roleplay to be part of a story like what I read in books or see in movies. 9 I want my roleplaying combat to work like an action movie: fast and maybe even breathtakingly so. 9 I'm finding that rules get in the way of the second point and often can detract from the first. 9 Freeform (but diced) combat seems like it's going to work for me once I get the hang of it.

Now let's pull in the earlier discussion of the Theatrix combat examples that one of its authors did. Huh… I thought I blogged about this extensively, but I can't find a trace of it on LJ or in my archives. I keep a backup copy of everything I post. And I can't find where I talked about it on any other forum.

Anyway, In both cases, he threw overwhelming odds against the PC… trapped in a hotel room with six Uzi-armed men trying to gun him down, or on top of a train about to go toe-to-to with someone superior to him in hand-to-hand, while a helicopter gunman tries to get a bead on him and goons below are climbing up to assist the first goon.

In both cases, he throws the PC into overwhelming odds and essentially tells the player to sink or swim. I discussed this a lot with Karen (which is maybe why I think I blogged about it), and this just isn't the kind of thing we normally see in a roleplaying game. But like in Blade II, it's something we see in movies all the time. The hero is constantly faced with overwhelming odds and finds some way to survive the ordeal.

If this is the way movies work, and many of us want our games to more or less work like a movie, why don't we see these "overwhelming odds" in our roleplaying games? I have a bit of a theory…

RPG combat is generally built around the idea of "balance." The entire game system is usually built around this concept. And the idea seems to be that you only throw the heroes into situations to which they are equal. Balance the heroes against equal opposition, more or less. If the opposition is a little stronger, the heroes usually has some kind of "hero points" that give them an edge, or the GM just fudges things to keep things balanced the way he wants them. Or more likely, the way the players want them.

My gut feeling is that players, through their characters, prefer to be in control of the situation. Looking at the "hotel room" Theatrix demo, the player was constantly struggling to put his character in control of the situation… which is quite reasonable, because that's obviously what his character wanted. But it's interesting that that "lack of control" feeling translates directly to the player. The player wanted to give up at several points… he was convinced that he couldn't win without GM fiat. The GM insisted that if he won, it would be because of his own efforts. (That's arguable… in a diceless game, everything that happens is controllable by the GM. If you win by creativity, it's because the GM decided you were creative enough.)

When faced with this lack of control, players don't have to think in real-time the way their characters do… they can analyze the situation, look for the best opportunity. This can be good, but it can lead to paralysis. It happened in the demo… the player said something to the effect of, "I can't win," and didn't declare an action… he was uncomfortable and was ready to quit. The GM pushed him to keep going… and the scene carried on for quite some time after that.

I think the basic fact that not having control of the situation pushes players out of their comfort zones. Is the whole point of having rules to keep everyone in their comfort zones? In a way, I think it is. For certain things, that's a good thing. But maybe we carry it too far. Maybe we miss out on making our games what we want them to be because learning how to do what we want to do is uncomfortable. (This is certainly true of my learning to play with very few rules.)

So let's say we want to create scenes like in Blade II and the "hotel room". What conscious steps can we take toward this end?

9 If the rules are getting in the way, modify or ditch enough rules that they stop getting in the way. I've started down this road. 9 Recognize and agree that what we want to achieve won't be achieved by cautious play, GM versus player mentalities, or "balanced" encounters. 9 Recognize that this process may be uncomfortable at first, but should become comfortable as we adapt to this style of play. Accept that we'll all make mistakes and learn from them. 9 The GM will not "punish" players for bad snap-decisions, and the players will be tolerant of the GM and each other as well. 9 Agree to play for the common enjoyment, not just our own.

Is there something I'm missing? Maybe your games already work this way. Leave a comment and tell us your thoughts on the matter.

On plot and planning

I've been thinking a lot about plot and planning in my roleplaying games. I find that I occasionally (maybe even often) have difficulty with things bogging down in the middle of the story… the players don't have enough clues, but aren't quite looking in the right places to find the rest of the puzzle, or they're off on a tangent that's not going anywhere but they won't leave it alone.

In my recent issues with rules and dice, I've been reading over Theatrix again. I've read the book cover to cover three times and skimmed and reread parts of it countless times. The interesting thing about Theatrix is that it not only uses the idea of "your game is like a movie," but it goes a step further and brings in movie script-writing ideas for developing adventures. I think Theatrix is probably the closest I've seen to a "how to" manual for gamemastering.

It primarily borrows from Syd Field's The Screenwriter's Workbook. Field's Screenplay has been considered the "bible" of screenwriting for years, and the Workbook is a workshop format exploration of ideas in Screenplay, with some extensions to the Paradigm that aren't in that book.

The Paradigm is Field's way of structuring the three-act screenplay. Theatrix borrows it almost verbatim, even up to the point of reproducing copyrighted images of it. It's basically a little time-line of a three-act movie (almost all Hollywood movies have three acts), in which consist of setup, confrontation, and resolution. The first two acts end with "plot points" that "hook the story and spin it in a new direction". (There are a couple other items, but they aren't important to this discussion.) Here's a picture…

I've been reading the Workbook, and the Paradigm feels like a really useful tool for laying out the basics of the story. Now obviously we aren't planning out a roleplaying game in the same way we'd plot out a movie script… we don't control all the characters and the outcomes of the scenes. But I still think there are useful elements here. (As did the authors of Theatrix.)

Now here's the deal, and this is probably where a lot of us run into trouble planning. I know what Acts I & III look like. For superheroes, action-adventure and Buffy, it's very often the same pattern: Act I is, "Introduce the big-bad, or something that will lead to him." Act III is, "Confront the big-bad, for better or worse." My problem is, for one of the story threads I'm working on, I have no idea that happens in Act II.

This is where I find the Paradigm helpful… because I hadn't been thinking in these kinds of terms, I'd develop the setup and know more or less what I wanted the ending to look like. But it's the middle part that I've struggled with and thought I could wing in-game, "because the players are unpredictable anyway." But as the Paradigm points out, Act II is half of your movie, and I'm entering my game with the middle half virtually unplanned.

For the other story thread I'm working on, the Paradigm has really helped me plan Act II in more detail… the trail of clues is more solid and I've planned NPC's in better detail because I better understand the role they play in the story.

For the thread I'm having trouble with, the Paradigm points out where I need to spend more effort. Instead of glossing over the middle and planning to make it up on the fly (because pre-planning is difficult, and Field says that Act II is always the hardest to write), I focus on that big blank spot in my note card and how I'm going to fill it.

Obviously, I'm not advocating railroading or otherwise forcing the PC's down a path they don't want to go down. But for a roleplaying story to have drama, it needs to be supported by dramatic structure… which is what Field set out to do when he created the Paradigm. It's a structure, a framework, a way of thinking about the story and the elements required for a dramatic story.

(I'm thinking a lot how this fits into an on-going campaign, where Plot A and Plot B and Plot C are interwoven and don't fit nicely into a two-hour movie format. I think the ongoing campaign is more like a television series… each TV episode has its own three-act story arc, and then there are larger story arcs that span an entire season, or even multiple seasons. The question is, can I plan the season-long story arcs along this same three-act line? Or is a different structure more appropriate?)

BTW: Since my primary creative partner (my wife) is playing in my game, I can't bounce my plot ideas off of her. Anybody want to volunteer to be my superheroic cohort in crime and let me bounce my story ideas off of you?

It's about the story

I'm not usually one for blogging just to provide links to other articles, but this one by Travis J Lee over at GamingReport.com entitled On Being Part of the Group Story is worth reading.

I think the point is that roleplaying isn't our first love. Novels and movies, these are our first loves. Roleplaying only comes after… the desire to create and participate in something like these loved stories. And if the story is our first love, and we got into roleplaying because we wanted to be a part of the story, why don't we work harder at making the activity more like the stories that we say we want to emulate?

I suppose there are some who don't connect the roleplaying game with "being a part of a story like Lord of the Rings" or whatnot, and really just see it as a type of wargame. And that's fine, I suppose, but I feel a fundamental disconnect with them… I cannot relate. I like a fine wargame… I was a big Car Wars fan and I own multiple editions of Battletech. But to me those are very different from roleplaying, because roleplaying is about participating in stories.

Even when I was in middle school and Dungeon Mastering my first dungeons, it was still about story. Not in the way I think of it today, but it was still about the characters and their exploits, and I remember the characters as people, not as collection of combat numbers. My brother's cleric, who chanted his prayers… at first level, he chanted, "Ooommmm." And with each level, he added another syllable to the chant. "Oommmm, mey ni ah-so, oh-soooooo. Oommmm."

Little things that, as shallow as the characters may have been, added… character. They created memorable moments. Some of the memories are about killing monsters. Many of them aren't. And while we didn't tell stories with coherent plots (with clear beginnings, middles, and ends) and consistent motivations, our characters still told their story.

In the beginning, just being in the story was enough. But eventually, the desire to tell more interesting stories grew, and now my roleplaying is almost entirely story-driven. So I really can't seem to find any common ground with players who aren't in it for the story, at least on some level. And maybe those players are in it for story and don't realize it… I never thought of it in those terms back in the eighth grade. I just wanted to play D&D because I knew it was fun, and it was like Lord of the Rings and stuff. But I know why I've stuck with roleplaying as my primary hobby since then, and that's the chance to participate in the story.

How does abstract combat work?

I've been thinking a lot about various levels of abstraction of combat. This post on The 20' By 20' Room was pretty interesting, and got me thinking quite a bit. Basically, you've got three "levels" of combat, casual, moderate and serious. Casual combat is resolved by a single skill vs skill roll. Moderate is best of three, and serious is best of five. The "higher" the level of combat, the more serious the consequences. You can choose to start at any level. If you lose at a lower level, you can escalate to the next level, but you fight at a penalty and pay some kind of penalty. (You lost, after all.) It's maybe the best high-level abstraction idea I've seen. (I think most of the original idea is from Trollbabe, by Adept Press, but I've never seen the game, so I don't know how much was borrowed. I'm very interested in seeing the rules, I'm totally uninterested in the subject matter.)

It's very interesting food for thought. It feels like it might do the kinds of things I'm wanting to see in combat without bogging down in lots of maneuvering. It keeps unimportant combats short and sweet, and automatically allows the characters to make a combat more important if they choose to.

But the description of this system does one of the things I keep seeing when people about combat, and especially when it's abstract combat we're talking about. The examples, and whole mind-set of the system, is always about one-on-one duels. And so much of that abstract combat seems to work very well for one-on-one. But how do you adapt that one-on-one duel abstraction to fit team-on-team, where partners may trade targets, attack more than one target at a time, etc, etc? This question is especially important with superheroes….

I suppose that you could apply this abstract roll to the entire group, but that gets rather abstract… and you have to find some way to measure relative combat ability. That can be rather difficult to do when comparing teams of supers. So if you don't abstract the whole combat, how do you abstract the individual interactions?

Supers is, at a certain level, about tactical combat. So maybe this level of abstraction just isn't appropriate for most superheroic combat. I'll have to think on this some more.

Playing without rules, Session 1 report

Sunday's session of forcing myself to run without rules went pretty smoothly. Although we had a combat that lasted about two hours, that wasn't unexpected since the combat was a core element of the plot. And supers is 80% about beating people up anyway. But I think combat will speed up as we get into the groove.

I used Fudge dice, but only eyeballed them, not comparing them in a hard-and-fast manner to the characters' traits. The characters were written up in Fudge, and I have a little chart that does some comparisons for me… a brick wall is Defense 4, a .44 Magnum does 4 damage, etc, but I didn't need it for this combat. But beyond that, there aren't any actual "rules" for in-game play.

I was pretty comfortable with it, I think mostly because we'd gotten together the day before and talked over all the stuff I've been blogging about. It was a pretty simple fight because the semi-sentient plant monsters were not very smart, pretty single-minded, and moderately difficult to hurt. So their combat options were pretty limited. I think it was a good combat to move into this mode of play with.