Design Journal: Adventure's not quite my thing

In case it wasn't clear, I'm developing this fantasy world and supporting rules for (hopefully) paying customers.

So I've really been thinking about this and trying to decide if "adventure" is the best approach for me to develop a fantasy world. The big problem Dragonlance had was that it had a very strong and deliberate story… if you took a "hard right" at module DL3 (the third in the series of twelve or so), the rest of the series of modules could get thrown right out the window. The world material is still useful to the GM, but the core adventure material might be totally useless.

Recently, Rob Donoghue (co-author of FATE and Spirit of the Century), talked about "What I Want From Setting" on his LiveJournal. And I found it really, really interesting. So interesting that I printed it off and saved it to study, which is something I very rarely do with blog posts.

To boil it down to the core, when a setting isn't merely backdrop but is supposed to be interesting in its own right, Rob wants a setting (or the portion of the setting in the supplement to hand) to have Focus, Faces, and Flashpoints.

• Focus - The material presented should be appropriate to the number of words. Don't waste words on things that don't matter to the story at hand. Don't fiddly around with "neat things" about the setting if they won't influence play.
• Faces - Good NPCs, not necessarily detailed, but iconic characters that represent the sides of the conflict. "Put a face on the important ideas of the game."
• Flashpoints - "Clear pointers to stuff that's begging to happen."

Let me pull out a quote that ought to show this clearly…

So, if there's a city state that keeps gladiator slaves to fight at the whim of it's mage princes, then the default narrative of that city is the inevitable rebellion of the gladiators and some awesome gladiator vs. mage fight scenes, with my players caught in the middle.

Now I can dig this, and more importantly, I can dig writing "adventure" material this way. Not with a pre-defined story or path to follow, but with flashpoints laid out and ready for the GM and players to tell their own story around, if they choose to. With everything the GM needs to tell that "default narrative" available.

Now the one place I run into trouble is trying to develop a setting piecemeal and meeting Rob's criteria that this piece of the setting's story cannot be dependent on some book coming out later.

An example of this is writing a sourcebook about the city-state of Foo, and stating that they are at war with the city-state of Bar… but Bar is to come in a later sourcebook. Obviously, the "default narrative" of Foo is wrapped up with that of Bar, and you cannot tell Foo's story (with the PCs caught in the middle) without the Bar sourcebook.

On another level, without writing a great big guide to the basics of the world, it's hard to say, "There are elves, but we're not going to really tell you about them until the Elf Book." Because players want to play elves now, and they're going to make up what they need… and then when the Elf Book comes out, it's going to conflict with what the players have already done. This used to be pretty common in the old days, with fantasy worlds being built by 16 page adventures or Traveller coming together piece by piece in the little black books. But more recently, SJ Games has done Traveller 140 pages at a time and still it has seemed like things were missing when the major PC alien races weren't fully detailed in the core book, and you "couldn't" have a trading campaign until Far Trader came out.

I think the latter is a trap… there is so much material in the GURPS Traveller line that will never see the light of day in a campaign. So much that just doesn't matter to telling a good story. (So much that I gave up on buying it all, or even reading what I had bought. It became clear that I was just never going to run a game that used even a significant fraction of all that information.)

So the trick I'm struggling with is just how much do the GM and players need to get started telling stories in the world? As far as geographically-based material, one city and the surrounding region at a fairly high level is enough. But what about the detail on the elves and dwarves and even the men?

It's interesting to look at old D&D and realize how much it relied on the players just figuring it out for themselves… either you just knew what an elf was, or you figured it out as you went. The thing is, now, when I want to develop a world in which the elves are a lot like D&D elves, but are different in certain ways, I have to be rather explicit about what they're like… I can't leave it up to the players to be mind readers.

Maybe I don't really need the elves and dwarves to be all that different, or different in a way that really matters to potential stories. Maybe I just need good location books with good Focus, Faces and Flashpoints to make telling good stories a breeze.

Admin: Comment system changes

I've done a lot of hacking to the comment system (a much-hacked Pollxn) to make some minor improvements recently… I think it's all working right, but please tell me if it isn't.

The details, for those who care

You'll be glad to know that I've finally managed to add to the notification emails a link back to the thread and the actual title of the post. (As obvious as those seem, that data wasn't available to the program until after a new post was processed. It took some rearrangement of the code to get that data before processing.)

I've also replaced '0 comments' with 'leave a comment' on the blog page. As trivial as that was, I don't know why I didn't think of it ages ago.

I've got some minor tweaks left to do, including linking from the thread back to the blog post. fixing the "3 comments comment(s)" bug, and figuring out how to handle the "leave a comment" link on older posts where commenting is locked. But those'll come later.

Admin: Software change

I've made a behind-the-scenes software change that hopefully won't give you any grief. If you see errors in formatting (especially in old posts) please let me know.

The details, for those who care

I use the Blosxom blogging software with a home-grown plugin to use Wiki markup to format the text. I type simple text symbols and the plugin converts the symbols into HTML codes. Stuff like *this is bold*, and it's that simple. I write nearly all my creative work this way, because I work in a plain text editor. (I then convert it to HTML and dump it into Open Office when I want pretty formatting.)

Until today, I've been using a markup language based on a sub-set of TWiki markup, in a module that I wrote to manage my personal files.

Today, I switched over to using WikiCreole, which is a markup language meant to bridge the Wiki world. It was created by a consensus among many of the great minds involved with Wikis, and most Wikis seem to be adopting it.

Since I find the markup acceptable, and I've been hoping that this would eventually come about (it's a pain to move from Wiki to Wiki, each one doing its own thing with markup… I use TWiki at home, TikiWiki at work, TiddlyWiki for personal projects, MediaWiki to contribute to Wikipedia, etc. and each one has its own markup), I'm adopting it now myself. (After fixing a bug in the Perl Text::WikiCreole module. :)

Now, the nifty thing about Blosxom is that all of the original source files are preserved and I can edit old posts ("status" posts like the "About Me" post, fer instance) in their original format. But since Blosxom uses those source files every time it has to render the HTML, I had to write a little utility to convert all of them from TWiki markup to WikiCreole markup. I think this worked successfully.

Of course, in writing this post, I used the incorrect markup three four times and had to back up and fix it. :) Old habits die hard.

Design Journal: Writing a fantasy world

So here's the deal. Fudge needs good fantasy support, and I think part of that is having a solid fantasy world to back it up. But writing a D&D-ish fantasy world that is interesting and captures attention is difficult.

Ideally, this world would draw people to Fudge. Which means it ought to be innovative, while at the same time familiar.

Dragonlance did that… it took a standard D&D world and innovated within that context by creating the dragon wars. They created an over-arching plot and actually created the world through a series of adventures.

Now there's an interesting point. Granted, it was a different era of gaming, but they didn't come out with a big world sourcebook first… they came out with an adventure. And also granted, they came out with a novel pretty darn quickly, and the novel had a lot to do with the success, I think.

But novels aside, they started with an assumption (typical D&D world), threw in a hook (the dragon war), and published a series of modules.

Perhaps that worked because they didn't have to define the basics of the world. The world was already defined through rulebooks and existing shared imagination. What the modules defined was a story.

Ya know, that's exactly what Paizo's doing with Pathfinder, too. Some people want to call Pathfinder unique, but it's just Dragonlance all over again with higher production values. A series of adventures that define a new world, based on the assumptions of core D&D.

So if that worked well for TSR, and it's working well now for Paizo, would that work for creating a new world for Fudge?

One of the problems is that we lack some of the assumed underpinnings that D&D had. But Dragonlance introduced new PC and NPC races as it went, just as Pathfinder introduces new world material as well.

Now, both of them are based on a preconceived storyline… something that a lot of gamers think is anathema. That approach may not work for this particular target audience. So I'm not sure a series of adventures focused around a critical story path would work, but what if we could come up with a series of adventures with a lot of flexibility built into them?

I'll have to think on this.

Moving toward dreams

One of the things that keeps coming up for me is that writing and possibly publishing roleplaying stuff has been a dream of mine for years… but the longer I live, the less writing I do. I get wrapped up in stuff that, while fun and often worthwhile, moves me away from fulfilling my dreams. Or maybe it's more like, "The more complicated the Internet gets, the less writing I do."

I think Gary Gygax's death has really highlighted this for me… while he had a spotty career, and is by no means universally loved by fandom, he's accomplished so many of the things I'd like to do. I've been talking about starting a game publishing company since the mid 1990s.

And I realized, at nearly 40, if I'm ever going to do the things I dream about, I'm going to have to get started for real… I'm eventually going to run out of time. My dad's 70, and he just had a coronary stent inserted… when I visited him in the ICU, he was watching golf, and mused that he'd never learned to play but that it was too late to start. When I'm in my retirement, I don't want to be musing about how it's too late to start.

All this came shortly after a recent "house cleaning"… dumping many of my self-imposed "obligations" to the Fudge community and the local roleplaying club, and putting my own dreams as top priority.

Gorilla Con helped get me interested in gaming again, which is a good thing. Now I just need to find people to game with.

As a present to myself, and an emphasis on "just writing", I bought an AlphaSmart 3000 off eBay for eighty bucks. I wrote most of this blog entry on it and I'm finding it quite nice. It's essentially nothing but a portable word-processor… with a 4 line by 40 column screen, enough memory to store "about 100 pages of text", and runs around 700 hours on one set of AA batteries. Everything I type is automatically saved and it boots in about two seconds to the exact place I left off.

More importantly, it doesn't have Internet or any other applications to distract me. I can't do anything with it but write. It's light-weight enough I can take it nearly everywhere with me, its instant-boot feature means I can pull it out to just take a few notes and put it away in less time than it takes my laptop to boot, and I never have to worry about power while I'm writing.

On top of that, a herniated disc in my back has kept me from getting up and about and given me plenty of time to get acquainted with my new friend. (That was fun… it happened Sunday morning at the con, in my hotel room as I was getting ready to load my car, check out and hit the game room. Instead, I rounded up some help to load my car, checked out, and managed to leave town at 10 AM. Sunday is kind of a dead at Gorilla Con, but I was hoping to get in one last game.)

So what am I writing? I think I'll talk about that later. That's enough for now.

Gorilla Con followup

Gorilla Con was about what I expected, which means it didn't live up to my hopes. There were basically no roleplaying games outside of Living Greyhawk. (The one pick-up game that was offered started at midnight, and that just didn't work for me.) That kind of sucked, and I wasn't mentally (or emotionally) prepared to run anything. But I got to play a few board games (Cutthroat Caverns is cool!) and talk to some folks… some of them unexpectedly even knew my name, and one recognized me from the Fudge List!

Overall, GC did what I hoped it would… it got me out of my funk, and I'm interested in roleplaying again. And I'm interested in writing again, which is mostly another story I'll relate later.

Where have I been?

So, aside from the comment about Gygax, I haven't said anything for three months… and I last left off with "I haven't had a game in a year, I need to run something." So what happened?

I had an allergic reaction to all my commitments in the gaming community. It was suddenly all too much… the Fudge community, a potential Fudge Factor relaunch, the Wichita Roleplayers and potential Game Days, Gorilla Con and a game I said I'd run… and on top of that I piled "I'm going to come up with a new campaign and recruit a new group!" And I couldn't even come up with anything I wanted to play, let alone run. And I was darn busy with non-gaming life, and Cub Scouts turned out to be a lot more stress than I expected.

Yikes. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. I walked away from all gaming-related stuff… I quit reading gaming blogs, I quit listening to gaming podcasts, I silently dropped plans for the Fudge Factor relaunch, I'm not talking about Fudge (though I moderate the List), and I gave up on trying to put together a group and even trying to do any gaming-related (or even non-gaming-related) writing. I stalled on the decision to go to Gorilla Con next week, and still haven't made up my mind… would it be "good medicine" or would it be a waste of a weekend and a couple hundred bucks? (Last year wasn't what I hoped it would be.)

I thought about writing something here earlier, but I wasn't even sure what to say. With Gorilla Con coming up next week, I'm coming up on the anniversary of the last time I roleplayed with adults, and that wasn't a very good experience. And I feel like I could go another year without roleplaying and maybe it wouldn't bother me.

The last five years or so of gaming has been frustration for me. Every session has left me wondering what I'm doing wrong… trying to find the right style, the right balance of rules, and I'm never really comfortable with how it comes out.

So I find myself asking, "What do I like about roleplaying games? How far back do I have to look in my gaming career to find the games I really liked?" I think it was the Miramer campaign… and that was over ten years ago.

I'm wondering if my frustration stems from people issues… most of the people in the Miramer campaign don't even live in Wichita anymore.

So I'm not even sure what I want anymore. I think I'm going through a midlife crisis… regretting my choice of career, frustrated with where my bad (probably ADHD) habits have put me, and now finding that the one hobby I've stuck with since middle school, the hobby that is a core part of my identity, brings me no joy.

Maybe I just need a good gaming session to kick-start things… but I don't know where to find it.

GM's Day, and Mourning

Today, March 4th, is Gamemaster's Day.

Today, E Gary Gygax died. How ironic is that?

I think I need to go play me some D&D now.