April 30, 2012

Playtest Hillfolk With Me On Google Hangout

Do you have a webcam, a free evening this Thursday, and a hankering to try out Hillfolk, my upcoming game using the new DramaSystem rules set?

The playtest will take place on Google Hangout from 7-10 PM Eastern this Thursday, May 3rd.

To indicate your interest in taking part, leave me a private message on Google+, setting yourself up on G+ if you haven’t already.

In Hillfolk, you play tribal raiders at the dawn of the iron age, torn by conflicting desires in a time of hungry empires.

In your message, tell me who you want to play, providing:

  • your role in your small, hardscrabble tribe

  • your character’s name. Names in Hillfolk are metonyms—understandable words that reveal something fundamental about you. Examples: Skull, Thickneck, Farhawk, Rolls-the-Bones, Twig, Redaxe.

The rest will be revealed during play.

Feel free to list alternate choices for your role in the tribe, in case of duplication.

If I get more than six takers, I will choose between them by means inscrutable.

I’m going to try recording the proceedings, possibly using snippets of sound and video in the crowdfunding video. It might also wind up as an Actual Play resource. Respond only if that’s okay with you.

April 27, 2012

John Kovalic's The Birds: Vengeance

It’s The Birds Week!

To celebrate the release of the second volume of The Birds, There Goes My Dream Job, friend of the blog John Kovalic has pitched in with a week of guest strips—which also appear in the book.

Vengeance

Click here for the complete strip archive.

Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.

The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job is now available from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.

April 26, 2012

John Kovalic's The Birds: Realistically

It’s The Birds Week!

To celebrate the release of the second volume of The Birds, There Goes My Dream Job, friend of the blog John Kovalic has pitched in with a week of guest strips—which also appear in the book.

Realistically

Click here for the complete strip archive.

Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.

The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job is now available from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.

April 25, 2012

John Kovalic's The Birds: Cuter

It’s The Birds Week!

To celebrate the release of the second volume of The Birds, There Goes My Dream Job, friend of the blog John Kovalic has pitched in with a week of guest strips—which also appear in the book.

Existential Genie

Click here for the complete strip archive.

Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.

The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job will be available within mere hours from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.

April 24, 2012

John Kovalic’s The Birds: Lively

It’s The Birds Week!

To celebrate the release of the second volume of The Birds, There Goes My Dream Job, friend of the blog John Kovalic has pitched in with a week of guest strips—which also appear in the book.

Existential Genie

Click here for the complete strip archive.

Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.

The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job will be available within mere hours from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.

April 23, 2012

Jonathan Tweet Forewords The Birds

I couldn’t be more pleased that the second anthology of Birds strips, There Goes My Dream Job, includes a foreword by seminal game designer, and my frequent collaborator over the years, Jonathan Tweet. Jonathan, who these days makes Google+ his social media HQ, wanted to post it to the world at large. So here it is.


If you’re reading this book, you’re one of the lucky people who have discovered Robin D. Laws. In The Birds, he distills his insights into the human predicament down to a hilarious comic strip. It’s all about sex, death, family, lies, and popular culture—doled out in carefully measured doses. It’s rewarding to be one of Robin’s fans, whether you’re playing his games, following him online, or reading his comics. He’s a game designer by trade, but his curiosity and expertise slosh out in all directions. Robin usually has something right (and possibly funny) to say about politics, culture, media, or literature. You can count yourself lucky for knowing Robin’s work, but I’m even luckier. I’ve been a fan of Robin’s work for over twenty years, and he’s contributed to several of my own game designs. My collection of roleplaying games includes many of his innovative and original works. In one of his early games, the supreme god of evil is a twisted version of everybody’s favorite Disney-owned stuffed bear. Robin never bothers to do things the way somebody else has already done it. In another game, one that only Robin could have written, players extemporaneously invent a story that tests their knowledge of cinema genre conventions. Some of his roleplaying games sit on the very small shelf where I keep only those few RPGs that I actually play for fun. In addition to his games, my collection includes his fiction, the Iron Man and Hulk comics he wrote, and the first collection of his comic strip: The Birds.

The Birds reminds me of another cartoon strip written by someone who isn’t a cartoonist, David Lynch’s The Angriest Dog in the World. In Angriest Dog, each strip had the same art and only the words changed. Given how unsatisfying Angriest Dog is, I consider it not so much a comic strip as a work of time-distributed visual art in the structural form of a comic strip. Like Lynch, Robin gives us repetitive, static scenes, but Robin’s strips have the distinct advantage of being funny. The Birds is not just a comic; it’s actually comic.

While the birds in Robin’s strip are often the same from one panel to the next, each character has two distinct expressions. A cartoonist would probably base the two expressions on emotions, such as “happy” and “sad,” or “happy” and “angry.” But Robin isn’t a cartoonist, he’s a Canadian. The two expressions he gives his birds are “gun” and “no-gun.” In practice, the “no gun” expression actually means something more like “no gun (just yet).” With all this gunplay, plus the lies and the spare staging, Robin’s strip reminds me of Quentin Tarantino’s debut film. Maybe it should be called Reservoir Birds.

Cartoonists take pains to show that their cartoon subjects are in motion. They use dynamic poses, motion lines, and spelled-out sound effects to get across the idea that, for example, a little boy and a stuffed tiger are on a runaway wagon careening down a steep hillside. But Robin is not a cartoonist, and that’s what makes his cartoons so outstanding. The poses of his characters suggest not motion but stasis. In the typical scene, each bird is standing still, probably with hands in pockets, possibly leveling a handgun at the other bird.

The instantaneous switch from the “gun” state to the “no-gun” state might be Robin’s way to avoid drawing motion lines. Based on my estimation of Robin, however, I suspect that it’s actually his homage to quantum physics, in which electrons jump from one state to the other with no intermediate step. Reading the latest installment of The Birds is like opening the box to see whether Schroedinger’s cat is alive or dead. “Who drew on whom this time?” we want to know. Like a radioactive isotope, the “no-gun” state inevitably “decays” to the “gun” state. Presumably, the “no-gun” state has a measurable half-life, telling us how many panels it takes, on average, for the gun to appear.

With all the motion happening either off-stage or between panels, the characters are static. These static images are reused from one strip to the next. At risk of overthinking a humorous enterprise, let me suggest that Robin’s subtle humor goes along so well with these motionless, repetitive images because his comic strip is about people being “stuck.” Figuratively, they’re stuck in bad marriages, stuck in bad affairs, stuck in bad friendships, stuck in a bad families—crazy people stuck in a world with other crazy people. The visuals reinforce this theme: the characters are stuck in place. The repetition of the same bird in the same pose pulling the same gun reminds us that these characters have been stuck where they are since the strip began. Application of this insight to the one’s own life is left as an exercise for the reader.

While Robin displays many varied sources of inspiration, in the last analysis, his strip demonstrates his debt to French existentialism. The moral of his comic strip is that, as Sartre succinctly put it, Hell is other birds.


The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job will be available within mere hours from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.

John Kovalic’s The Birds: Existential Genie

It’s The Birds Week!

To celebrate the release of the second volume of The Birds, There Goes My Dream Job, friend of the blog John Kovalic has pitched in with a week of guest strips—which also appear in the book.

Existential Genie

Click here for the complete strip archive.

Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.

The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job will be available within mere hours from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.

April 20, 2012

Facebook Bounces Back

If you’re seeking proof that a few months is an eternity in social media land, check this out.

Back in January, I reported that Facebook’s share of referrals to this here blog had dwindled dramatically, compared to Twitter and the still baby-fresh Google+. Here’s a snapshot of a week’s traffic from back then:

Referrers Jan

Now, a week from April shows a dramatically different story:

Referrers Apr

Overall traffic was the same then as now. It’s the shares that have shifted. Google+’s share has slipped only three points from January. At the same time, referrals from non social media sources, chiefly Google searches, have popped up by exactly that much.

Facebook’s gain is Twitter’s pain. It’s up by 15 points, and Twitter is down by 16.

Given the symmetry, I’m assuming that the same people who used to be coming here from Twitter are now back to doing it from Facebook. My guess is that Facebook’s alterations to its news feed algorithm has restored links to their former prominence and allure. If so, it shows how much difference the constant tweaking of the Facebook interface can make from one adjustment to the next. What seems like a force to write off in January can bounce back to its old self by April.

April 19, 2012

New Tales of the Yellow Sign Cover Reveal

Progress in moving New Tales of the Yellow Sign from MS to publication continues, with an exciting announcement to come. Lucya Szachnowski has done a bang-up job on the all-important proofreading.

My test of the e-publishing waters with the free short story The Star Makers has proven educational. Some things you can only learn by doing. For example, I’ve discovered how long the Smashwords approval process is—now at a month and counting.

Also long past due—my giving you a peek at the cover illustration by Jérôme Huguenin. Due to Jérôme’s policy of outdoing himself, Jérôme has outdone himself on this one. Check out this creepy contemporary take on Robert W. Chambers’ pallid mask motif. I couldn’t be more delighted. In a horror sort of way, of course.

April 17, 2012

Five Reasons to Fear Quandos Vorn

During character generation, after determining why they want vengeance against the common enemy called Quandos Vorn, Gaean Reach players specify why catching up with him will prove a task of epic difficulty. Each supplies a reason of particular relevance to his own motivations and backstory. In the in-house playtest, it was determined that Quandos Vorn:

  • maintains a troop of elite cloned bodyguards

  • constantly disguises himself and is constantly on the move

  • controls, through corruption, resources even within the IPCC (interstellar police force)

  • can track one of the PCs’ movements and can't be surprised

  • constructs elaborate schemes which repeatedly ensnare another of the PCs

This not only further defines their nemesis, but again proves that, given a measure of narrative control, players will screw themselves over in ways they would never permit were a mere GM doing it.

April 16, 2012

When In Doubt, Remind Him He’s a Dwarf

Welcome again to Scene Study, where we break down dramatic scenes in recent popular entertainment as they might play out in DramaSystem.

In the Game of Thrones episode “The Night Lands” (Season Two, Episode 2) [stop here if you don’t want to know] Tyrion Lannister tries to assert his new authority as the king’s right hand over his contemptuous and headstrong sister Cersei, regent and mother to the young king. After a power play in which he banishes her chosen head of the city guard in favor of his own candidate, he renews his effort to school her in the politic realities of her tenuous position. Unfortunately, his default tactic, the deployment of withering wit, proves less than effective in this case. After a snide reference to her incestuous relationship with their brother Jamie, she furiously excoriates him—blaming him for their mother’s death giving birth to him, and once again reminding him that he’s a dwarf.

If Tyrion’s player is the scene caller, his intention is to extract a concession from Cersei, admitting that he deserves and is equipped to use the power their father has vested in him. Cersei refuses to grant his petition, so he gets a drama token as a consolation.

If Cersei’s player is the caller, her intention is to browbeat the upstart Tyrion, earning an apology and continuing free reign at court. Despite the virulence of her outburst, he blocks her as surely as she blocks him. In this framing, it is Cersei as refused petitioner who gets the drama token.

April 13, 2012

Crunch v. Fluff: The Unstackening

On Wednesday I unloaded both barrels on the crunch vs. fluff dichotomy in roleplaying design, labeling it a stacked framing meant to grant an air of objective authority on one set of gamer tastes. Monte Cook, whose post inspired that one, doesn’t much care for the terms either.

Which raises the question: is there a neutral way to describe this real separation in player tastes?

To do that, we need to find positive terms for both ends of the continuum, which respect the essential role they play in a roleplaying experience, and the players who strongly prefer one side over the other.

“Crunch” works as is, as one would expect for the quality the framing was built to favor. I used the related term “crunchy bit” in Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering to evoke the satisfying interplay of imaginary hard details. There is an aesthetic pleasure in these interactions, both as abstractions and in the ways they claim to simulate real-world processes. Players find a certain complexity level emotionally satisfying. Inconveniently for game designers, that level varies even among crunch-lovers. Crunch also suggests what one tends to do with these rules—crunch your opponents upside the head. It appeals to particular player types, placing vital tools in the hands of butt-kickers, tacticians, and power gamers.

“Fluff”, however, has to go. It’s inherently dismissive of the RPG elements that bring storytellers, method actors, explorers and casual gamers to the table. We need a punchy, fun term to encompass the invented histories, character portrayals, setting descriptions, visual imagery and other imaginative elements that together make up the form’s narrative side. “Imagination” or “visualization” describe what these bring to the game, but sound dry and lack that one-syllable pizazz.

In exceptions-based card games, one sometimes uses the term “chrome.” That sounds cool and shiny, but, like “fluff”, implies a superficial layer placed on top of the true substance. Which is arguably the case with the art, flavor text and setting elements in a card game, which are much less central to play in a card game than their analogues in an RPG.

The term “flavor” gets us a little closer. Who would want food without flavor? But it still sounds like an added ingredient rather than one half of a balanced whole.

With a little free association, however, we can springboard from “flavor” and “chrome” to two possible alternate terms.

“Sizzle” seems at least as cool as crunch, and sticks with the latent food metaphor. It draws out the emotional dash that story elements provide.

The judges will also accept “flash” as a short, positive word that describes that selfsame impact.

So if you want to speak honestly when discussing the balance of mechanics/tactics and character/story, call it “crunch vs. sizzle” or “crunch vs. flash.” Then we can talk.

April 11, 2012

False Dichotomy, or Real, Though Annoying, Dichotomy?

Apropos of his participation in a recent panel discussion, Monte Cook contemplates the opposition between crunch and fluff in roleplaying games. He comes to several wise conclusions, including that the fun side of any argument is whichever one will allow you to debate Jonathan Tweet. Where the central question is concerned, he says:

I really do think it's a false dichotomy. I think that, for whatever reason having to do with human nature, people like to take parts of a whole and declare favorites, or rank importance. But the dichotomy is often false. To declare that the chips in chocolate chip cookies are more important than the cookie is to ignore the beautiful synthesis of chocolate and cookie. A handful of chocolate chips is okay, but all melty inside a freshly baked, still warm cookie? That's much better.

I wish that crunch vs. fluff was a false dichotomy, but unfortunately it’s not, in that it reflects a genuine and hard-to-bridge gap between player taste groups. To extend Monte’s metaphor past its sell-by date, we as game designers are trying to create the perfect chocolate chip recipe for a crew of eaters, some of whom like both dough and chocolate, a vocal faction who only care about the cookie, and a counterpart group that barely tolerates the chocolate.

You can see the opposition at work in the framing itself: “crunch vs. fluff” is not only a frustrating dichotomy, but a stacked one. The terms (which Monte doesn’t like either) presuppose that character, setting and emotional elements are just fluff—a disposable, if not useless outer layer on top of the real stuff, the crunch.

A similar, older framing is likewise stacked, in the other direction. The old “roleplaying vs. roll-playing” opposition sought to privilege character portrayal over a focus on mechanics and tactics.

Like so many other conceptual frameworks people have devised to describe their RPG experiences, both “crunch vs. fluff” and “roleplaying vs. roll-playing” are definitional gambits meant to lend taste preferences the appearance of objective superiority. They legitimize the parts of play that the framer likes and delegitimize the bits that bore him.

If this was just a false dichotomy, we could argue people out of it, and teach them all to enjoy the entire cookie, like most of the player base does. Really, though, one small but significant chunk of the player base comes alive only for the rulesy stuff, and another digs only the narrative bits.

When designing for a niche audience, you can sidestep the issue by cranking the dial to one side of the spectrum or the other. Monte, along with the rest of the DNDNext team, faces the challenge that comes with the stewardship of roleplaying’s flagship product—to strike the ideal balance between the two tendencies.

April 10, 2012

Five Reasons to Hate Quandos Vorn

With Hillfolk in outside playtest and on the brink of a crowdfunding campaign, I’m now in the early stages of The Gaean Reach, Pelgrane’s game of interstellar vengeance, based on the classic cycle of SF novels by Jack Vance. While I originally thought this would be a Skulduggery variant with some GUMSHOE grafted on, it turns out to be the other way around: GUMSHOE with a touch of Skulduggery.

The game’s default campaign frame pits the characters against a nemesis, who they hunt by increments over the course of the series. Every group defines its own nemesis, usually called Quandos Vorn. During character creation, each player indicates what Quandos Vorn did to incur his or her PC’s wrath. This delineates both the nemesis and the player character.

In the in-house game, this is why the protagonists plot revenge against Quandos Vorn:

“After I critiqued his academic paper, he saw to it that I lost everything—my tenure, even my family.”

“I used to be a corrupt interstellar cop on his payroll, until he killed my partner and framed me for a series of crimes I didn’t commit.”

“When my casino would not accommodate his obscene requests, Quandos Vorn shut it down.”

“His ponzi scheme collapsed the star-spanning financial empire I was supposed to one day inherit.”

“To keep himself sharp, Quandos Vorn hunts, battles, and kills clones of himself. The only clone to ever survive one of these pursuits, I seek to avenge the humiliating defeat that left me hideously disfigured.”

From those five statements, we know much about Quandos Vorn’s behavior and capabilities—and even more about the people who seek him.

April 05, 2012

Angry Cleaning in Lingerie

Welcome to another installment of Scene Study, where we break down dramatic scenes in recent popular entertainment as they might play out in DramaSystem.

In the Mad Men season opener [stop reading here if you don’t want to know], Don Draper and his new wife Megan find themselves at odds after she embarrasses him with a surprise party, at which she performs a suggestive yeh yeh number. The next day, discovering that she’s left work, Don heads to their new apartment to have it out with her. Megan puts him on the defensive with a bizarre tactic—lashing out in anger while simultaneously shucking her house coat to clean up the still-trashed apartment clad only in sexy lingerie. Taken aback, and then finally overcome with desire, Don jumps on her. Cut to: post-coital reconciliation.

In DramaSystem terms, Don is the petitioner—he’s the one whose desire for an emotional concession from Megan kicks off the scene. Megan proves an aggressive granter, throwing Don off by presenting him with bold emotional demands of her own.

Were I playing Don Draper, I’d score the result as refusal of the petition, earning me a drama token. I wanted to get my power back from my surprisingly formidable young bride, and instead established her power over me. Another player might score it as a granting of the petition, earning Megan’s player a drama token. In this view, Don wanted to reconnect with Megan, and she let him, in a way that saved face for both of them. Given the apparent direction of the new season, which might be sub-titled “Don Gets Old”, both Matthew Weiner and I might disagree with you. But in DramaSystem, the petitioner’s player is always free to specify that his petition was granted, whether the GM and the rest of the group agree or not.

April 03, 2012

House Systems and Forced Fits

Regarding a previous post on why I don’t repurpose discarded sub-systems, Chris Angelucci asks:

What does this mean for companies with "house systems?" Will any game concept end up being a forced-fit?

I’d argue that mostly this doesn’t become the case, for a couple of reasons. House systems are often created by an RPG company’s key designer, who then goes on to design, or influence, later iterations. The core rules think like that designer does, and so do its later expressions. So while you might not like Joe Green’s take on superheroes, or think that the JoeGreenRules fit that genre well, they’re likely internally consistent.

On a related point, the design concept is, explicitly or otherwise, to do the JoeGreenRules take on a new genre. The core audience for a rules platform wants to see what happens when it’s applied to space opera, or swords ‘n’ sandals epics, or whatever. They’re invested in that game and way of thinking already, and want to see a game that arises in the meeting point between the game rules they know and a genre they know. White Wolf fans aren’t necessarily looking for the platonic ideal game about modern fairies, so much as they probably think the ideal game about fairies will be Changeling—a variation of the core rules and approach they already dig.

To cite a counterexample, the Ars Magica rule engine might not have been the ideal basis for Rune, the game of hyper-competitive, Viking mayhem I did for Atlas. But given that the concept itself was so far removed from anything that had been done before, and that it was a stretch for our timeline and playtesting resources, it was the right choice practically. To invent a new core engine, and make that work, and then make the GM-swapping, point build encounter superstructure also work on top of that, lay beyond our time budget.

If the call to adapt the Rune video game had come just a few years later, the D20 license would have been in play, which would have served the pragmatic aspect of the project and been a better fit. We’d likely have been able to draw from a bigger playtest pool and could maybe have sold enough copies to justify the long development window its ambition required.

April 02, 2012

Equinenimity

Sarah Monette applies her experience of real-life horses to list five ways in which the actual creature differs from its portrayal in fantasy fiction:

Diana Wynne Jones famously deduced that the horses of Fantasyland are vegetative bicycles. Here are some ways that real horses are anything but:

1. Horses are very large animals. This is something that you can know in the abstract, as we all do, and still be taken aback by when interacting with an actual horse. Horses take up space. Their heads are massive chunks of bone. Even when they're being affectionate, they're still a good eight to ten times larger than a human being, and they are proportionately stronger. [Read on...]

I am not a horse person and will totally cop to a nagging anxiety whenever I write a fantasy scene with riding in it. Sure that I will get called out for reality-defying nonsense, I keep the horses in the background to the maximum extent possible. Fortunately the latest novel is set in a city, with lots of walking and almost no horses testing its verisimilitude.

Another problem, though, is that real horses are disjunctive in most narratives. As Sarah describes, they’re fragile and headstrong animals, both of which traits have a tendency to suddenly disrupt a protagonist’s momentum. (A recent headline reinforces their fragility: the show Luck, in which that fragility was a major theme, has had to cease production after a string of horse deaths.) Well-constructed narratives don’t provide much space for accidents or distractions. If an accident leads to a crucial plot development, it suddenly becomes a contrivance. If it exists only to show that accidents happen, it’s failing the rule of fictional parsimony, which allows only for events that drive the story or in some other way relate to its overall throughline.

Hence the convention of the herbivorous bicycle.