The dark ages of communication

A big part of the indie designers movement has been about good communication. It's something I identify with strongly,

What I find unusual is that some people actively resist communication. They say they don't want to talk about their characters, or what they want from the game. I just don't get that.

But once in awhile, I run across someone that makes me go, "Huh?" From a recent "game opening" post I saw…

If you want to play non-human, you will have to roll a 1 on 1d10. Otherwise you have to play a human.

Wow. People still play like this? No "let's talk about it," just "one in ten chance you get to be something I don't want you to be." (Or something I don't want more than one character to be.)

Instead of negotiation and collaboration, we just throw an important decision about characters to the dice. The GM gets to wash his hands of the matter… no being blamed for poor judgement, favoritism or whatnot.

But that's just an illusion… the GM set the arbitrary rule in the first place. If the dice produce an unsatisfactory character group composition, it's the GM's fault, not that of the dice. The GM is shirking his duty to help create a cohesive group by shuffling hard decisions off to the dice.

I think much more satisfaction is derived by discussing characters and collaborating on the total character group, to create characters everyone is happy with. But I'm probably preaching to the choir here.

Nice fodder for [[http://www.theartofroleplaying.com/|The Art of Roleplaying]], though. I happen to be planning out a series on communication, and this will fit right in.

Got any "bad communication" stories? I could use even more fodder. :)

The Fudge List lives!

Wow. We're having an honest-to-goodness constructive discussion on the [[http://fudge.phoenyx.net/guide/bin/view/Guide/FudgeList|Fudge List]]. And it's even about rules. (Using Keys from [[http://www.crngames.com/the_shadow_of_yesterday/|The Shadow of Yesterday]].)

How refreshing.

The podcast continues…

My The Art of Roleplaying podcast seems to be getting a good response. Episode 2 (the third in a series counting from zero, which is an odd tradition developing in gaming podcasts) went up a few days ago, which is kind of a record… Episode 0 took a year between recording and posting, Episode 1 went up six months later.

I need to find guests to converse with. I think people will get tired of listening to "just me," and I think someone to provide a balance would be good. Which means I really need to get Skype recording figured out. I've never even made a real Skype call yet!

Karen (my wife) is interested in some topics, but illness keeps getting in the way. (She's susceptable to URI problems, and has a rather annoying cough right now.) And there are some topics she's just not interested in.

Social mechanics derailing my plot

I was sitting here thinking, while writing my previous post, that one of the things that bothered me about Dogs in the Vineyard, and any game with strong social mechanics, that I don't like the game mechanics to tell me how my NPCs act or feel.

And it struck me… is that really any different than the mechanics telling me that the PCs took out an important villain two scenes before I expected them to? Is saying, "Despite all your interrogation efforts, the spy doesn't tell you anything," any less of a railroad than, "Despite all your efforts to stop him, the assassin escapes into the night"?

In the latter case, the players are going to expect a fair chance to stop the assassin. No matter how much I want the assassin to escape to further my plot, the players are going to get surly if the assassin escapes by GM fiat.

Should it be any different in the former case? If the spy revealing what he knows messes up my plot as badly as the assassin being captured, do I have some greater reason to control the outcome in a social conflict than in a physical, just because it has to do with mental decisions and not physical action?

Should I let social mechanics drive my NPCs' actions? (Presume for now that the dice aren't stupid and never make the character act out of line with his personality and motivations.)

One one level, I can see where physical mechanics are meant to represent a whole lot of things, including the randomness of a situation. But how much is represented in the workings of the mind? Do I break under the pressure? Well, my mind can't slip in the mud or be blinded by a flash of light, but are there other factors that justify using mechanics?

Here's an interesting thought… PC's use Fasttalk skill on NPCs, but how often do NPCs use Fasttalk against the PCs? How many players would have a cow if the GM said, "The assassin uses his Fasttalk skill against you, and rolling a Superb result, manages to confuse you long enough to get through the door you're guarding"? Traditional social mechanics have always been, in my experience, one-way… used to simulate the PCs' abilities of persuasion, etc. against minor NPCs. And when you get to the big-bad, you don't just roll against your Fasttalk to convince him not to blow up the world, you have to roleplay it out, and the big-bad's decisions are made by the GM.

I think the big issue is the feeling that the mind is totally under our control, and we should get to make our own decisions and not be subject to the dice. Roleplaying games are very often about making good decisions… and to have the power to make our own decisions about what our characters do, PC or NPC, just feels wrong.

This is certainly something for me to chew on.

Dogs in the Vineyard and me

Okay, this keeps coming up and I find myself defending my experience more than I'd like.

I had a poor experience with my one time playing Dogs in the Vineyard.

I really wanted to like it… I was excited about it, bought a big box of brand new dice straight from Chessex so my dice colors would be coordinated, and even bought a hand-made ceramic bowl in an "earthy" pattern to hold them in. I really wanted to like this game.

And it fell very, very flat. The dice mechanic didn't create the tension everyone said it did, and I found the dice getting in the way of the natural flow of give-and-take in a social situation.

Now, the caveats. None of us had played it before. The players didn't quite seem to know what to do, even when half the town was confessing the other half of the town's sins. So that certainly didn't help… but on some level, we just didn't grok how Dogs was supposed to be working, and the mechanics didn't drive play in the expected direction. I realize, in retrospect, that a lot of my problems came from poor stakes-setting… my biggest balking at the outcome of the dice came in a scene where I realize that I'd let the players set stakes that were too high. I wasn't willing to let the shepherd spill his guts just yet, so I shouldn't have let the stakes be, "Does the shepherd spill his guts?"

So I'm willing to accept that, despite my feelings about the dice mechanic, we didn't properly experience how Dogs was meant to work. I would really like to give Dogs another try, but with a group of experienced players. My ability to travel to any big conventions this year is very limited (blowing my budget to attend my brother's wedding in San Francisco), but I'd be willing to drive a ways to play a game.

I live in Wichita, KS. I could drive to Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, or Joplin. If someone were willing to put me (and maybe my wife) up for the weekend, I might be able to go as far as Dallas or Omaha, maybe even St Louis or Denver.

I'll drive five hours, maybe even seven or eight under the right circumstances, each way to give this game another chance, but it's got to be a group that has experience with the game (i.e. make it really worth my while to drive that far). Good food and good conversation outside the game would entice me further.