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.

The Birds: Blocked

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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.

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.

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.

The Birds: Jokes

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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.

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.

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.

The Birds: Emergent

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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.

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.

Don’t Read This Book

Evil Hat has released the cover image for Don’t Read This Book, its upcoming anthology of short fiction set in the Don’t Rest Your Head game setting. The insomniac protagonists of DRYH slip from our world to a surreal parallel realm of gothic strangeness, fearing both that they will never sleep again and that they will awaken, losing their strange new powers. My contribution to the book, “Don’t Lose Your Shit”, tells the tale of a recent inductee into this unending night, as he discovers a weird convenience store on the head-pounding borderland of sleep and waking. There in its beverage refrigerator awaits a troubling array of unfamiliar energy drinks, which hold out the promise of both doom and salvation to its haunted and shuffling denizens.

Note the impressive roster of writers assembled by the book’s editor, the fearless and peerless Chuck Wendig. I await announcement of a release date with hallucinatory fervor.

The Birds: Brno

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The Leng Connection

A Ripped From the History Books Scenario Hook for Trail of Cthulhu

The exact extent to which the 1938-39 Tibet expedition led by explorer Ernst Schafer served the Nazi agenda remains a matter of controversy. After the war, Schafer claimed to have come by his posting as an SS Hauptstrumfuhrer unwillingly. Also unclear is how successfully he derailed Himmler’s goal for the trip—to have Ahnenerbe pseudoscientists measure Tibetan skulls in an attempt to prove that Siddhattha Gotama, the historical Buddha, had been an Aryan in good standing.

Perhaps the greatest mystery is what Himmler thought he stood to gain by proving this, given the incompatibility of Nazi ideology and Buddhist thought.

If we fictionalize it a little, though, we get a Trail of Cthulhu scenario of high altitude high adventure.

When a politically fervid fellow inquirer into the mythos conspiracy goes missing in Tibet, the investigators follow his trail. They discover his plan to infect Himmler’s minions with contagious madness, by leading the Ahnenerbe to the Plateau of Leng. Do they help him destroy Nazi scum—or see the vast potential for backfire, and work to thwart him?

Source: Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, Stephen Batchelor

Disorienting Exposition

In fiction set in unfamiliar times and places, it often falls to the author to explain details of the world well-known to the characters but not to the reader. How straightforwardly to lay this out is a matter of style, and therefore taste. I tend to want to deliver it in a compact way and get on to the story it’s supporting. Some readers prefer obscured approaches that take longer but don’t necessarily signal themselves as expository—world detail through dialogue being a key technique.

A more complex technique presents expository detail about the world as if addressing a reader already familiar with it. Most often you'll see this in SF novels. The narrator rattles off terms and describes situations without full explanatory context.

According to the beat analysis system found in Hamlet's Hit Points, these mystifying references serve as question beats. They arouse our anxiety and our curiosity, impelling us to read on, in search of clarification. As we figure out the world through additional context, we feel counterpointing up beats, when those questions are answered.

This might be seen as the SF version of a common literary fiction gambit, where details of the story being retold are teased but not fully laid out. In both cases these can substitute for the basic building blocks of most fiction, dramatic and procedural scenes.

How much one digs this is another matter of taste. Personally, I prefer to be invested in a character, to hope for her success and fear for her failure, before I’m asked to puzzle through an alien future. Other readers might be perfectly happy with pure world extrapolation, without all that pesky story and character always rearing its head.

Carts and Horses

Apropos of a previous post, Josh W asks: How often do you find yourself budding systems off and turning them into other distinct games? If it happens often enough, how do you deduce the design through-line that subsystem fits?

For reasons implicit in your second question, this happens to me exactly never. I’ve certainly created sub-systems only to realize that they don’t fit the design through-line. Usually they interpret the design goals too literally, or are disappear down a rabbit-hole of unnecessary simulation. Because of this, they are also usually flawed in and of themselves and thus go to the great discard pile in the sky.

Never have I accidentally created a rules subset that would work fine, if only I were working on a different game. In my view, building a game and its core activity around a nifty rules idea is a recipe for disaster. Start with the activity you think will make for engaging play, then facilitate that with rules that enable it in as simple and elegant a manner as possible.

Sometimes I do encounter games that feel like they sparked first from a system idea, with the core activity yoked in to serve it. If it even has a clear core activity. When you ask a designer to describe his game and he starts with a game mechanic, that’s a warning sign of a game designed from an abstract rules concept outwards. (Or maybe he’s just lousy at pitching.) For a few categories, like abstract games, design from sub-system out may be desirable. Often, though, you'll get the feeling during play that you are working for the rules rather than having them work for you.

The Birds: Happiness

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Precisely Subjective

At Gaming as Women, Darla Magdalene-Shockley posits that subjective reward mechanics, dispensed for entertaining roleplaying, carry the risk of unconscious gender bias. Regarding actual play with Paranoia XP, she observes:

[W]e are all socialized very strongly to view women in certain ways. We expect women to be responsible, do the boring administrative work, and in general shut down the fun.  We emphatically do not expect women to be silly.  So women are less likely to be silly, and everyone is less likely to notice when they are.  The Paranoia GM (despite being quite the stand-up guy) is less likely to notice and reward it.

Unexamined assumptions at the gaming table, including those surrounding gender, can certainly play havoc with what is meant to be a facilitator of gaming fun. Many people first came to RPGs as a structured way of overcoming shyness. Quiet, uncertain or casual players, whether they’re that way out of socialization or inclination, or both, will get left behind by rules that do this—and maybe feel uncomfortably singled out when the GM takes compensating measures.

On the other hand, all games inevitably favor certain personal traits over others. The vast corpus of traditional games reward math savvy, recollection of complex rules, and willingness to spend time poring over rules text searching for optimal character build choices. In this context it hardly seems unreasonable that players with confident performance and improv skills will prosper in games falling on the story side of the spectrum.

A middle ground can be found by narrowing and defining the subjectively rewarded activity. The Dying Earth and its descendants, Skulduggery and The Gaean Reach (which I’m working on now), all mechanically encourage you to weaving taglines (supplied lines of dialogue) into the session. They bribe you to talk like Jack Vance’s characters, an essential element in creating the feeling that you’re exploring his worlds.

The GM does judge how effectively you use a given tagline, but by gauging the reactions of the group to your bon mots, which takes into account an observable, gestalt subjectivity if not objectivity. Where the instruction to “be entertaining” is broad and hard to define, the metrics for taglines are clear and simple. If, for whatever, reason you’re less than voluble, taglines give you highly structured permission to seize spotlight time.

Kickfinisher?

In the latest episode of the That's How We Roll podcast, hosts Fred Hicks and Chris Hanrahan talk to author Chuck Wendig about his work on Evil Hat’s burgeoning fiction line. I tuned in hoping to hear Chuck on Don’t Read This Book, an upcoming anthology set in the Don’t Rest Your Head universe, to which I contributed a piece. Much of the run time goes to their inaugural Spirit of the Century novel trilogy, Dinocalypse.

The top of the chat deals with issues well-known to anyone plying the waters of tie-in fiction. There’s the eternal question of balancing material that serves the story at hand with choices that put across the broader property. Then there’s the parallel, game-specific matter of how much license authors are afforded to reference or sidestep game rules.

What I learned from the podcast arises from Evil Hat’s Kickstarter strategy. As someone on the brink of a crowd-funded project or two, I found it a salutary exercise in preconception adjustment. Fred talks about the value of having material not just in the notional phase, but ready to deliver to funders, instant gratification style. This tells me that an issue I’ve been concerned about is actually a plus. Perhaps taking the name of the main crowd-funding organ too literally, I’ve been assuming that pledgers want in on the ground floor and might shy from projects already in a high state of readiness. Why make happen what has already happened? Instead Fred and crew indicate that pledgers want something the creators have already invested their time and money in. It’s more about putting the project over the top than providing seed capital. If so, it’s another example of the culture of a web entity moving away from the assumptions of its original creators.

With benefit of hindsight, it might be called Kickfinisher.