The Problem with Magic

Magic.

The name, almost literally, conjures up certain images for us. Certain assumptions, certain expectations, and certain dreams. Gandalf and Merlin. Ged and Elric. The enemies of Conan and allies of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. From Harry Potter to Harry Dresden. Even Old Ben Kenobi plays the part well.

And, yet, RPGs seem to consistently fail to capture the mystique and majesty of magic. It is a list of powers, a bit of extra book-keeping, and a pain in the ass to balance. Why is this? Well, it's very easy to lay the blame at the feet of D&D. (And, admittedly, I tend to more often than I care to admit.) After all, they took one specific archetype that is quite deliberately unusual ("Vancian" magic), and then very deliberately devolved it into a system of rules suitable for miniatures combat. It was then re-evolved, if you will, into a system suitable for a true RPG. Mostly.

How Fudging Could Have Saved the Day

In the way of these things, the topic of fudging die rolls has come up on a number of the podcasts and blogs I follow lately. I'm not going to expound on my personal opinion here. Instead, I want to tell about two of my greatest GM failures. It's relevant because both of them came about specifically because I refused to fudge the dice.

Can you handle the dreaded Licensed Setting!?!

I just listened to Fear The Boot #210 last night. (Ed. note: Obviously, this was written a while ago.) One of the two big topics was using established settings for your RPG, a la Star Wars or Dresden Files. I feel the spontaneous need to respond to this podcast.

Are you now, or have you ever been, Chaotic Evil?

So, here we are. A gaming blog, tackling that toughest of all topics, alignment. Will I add anything useful to the discussion? I certainly hope so.

What *IS* an RPG, anyway?

So, I have been toying with a few different systems and settings for RPGs. I was thinking about whether or not I could actually devise a new and improved RPG. I'm sure that there is ground yet to be trod. But, how to find it?

An awful lot of the indie games seem to delight in spewing forth wacky mechanics. I think that, as a community, they are attempting to derive the perfect RPG through some sort of Darwinian process. They create games like you create creatures in Spore, then have the games compete for "survival" (measured in mentions on Forge and RPG.net, as many of them don't actually have sales figures). Key features are then re-incorporated in newer games (though generally with the key terms changed, so that the writer can convince people his work is "original").

I thought that I would rise above this mish-mash, powered by nothing but my own hubris. I will devise the perfect RPG, not through some messy evolutionary process, but with SCIENCE!!! (Please don your protective goggles at this time.) (Ze gogglez! Zey do nothink!!!)

In some seriousness (since I seem to be incapable of all seriousness), what I am looking for initially is some idea of what RPG rules actually do. I know what an RPG is. And I know a couple dozen rules sets. But, if I want to make a contribution that is an actual revolution, and not just a gimmicky new mechanic, I need to have some idea what my goals are. So, what needs do the rules of an RPG need to fill?

The Problem with Death

There was a spate of posts on the RPGBA blogroll a couple weeks back regarding PC death.  Given the number of OSR-oriented blogs on the site, they were heavily in favor of the constant threat of death.  I am going to give an opposing point of view.

Long-time readers may note that many of my points were previously discussed when I talked about why "old school" games suck.  The comments, especially, dealt with the subject of random death quite a bit.

The Problem with Elves, Redux

I experienced a runaway success with my post on The Problem with Elves, thanks to a repost by Greg Christopher over on Google+ and Alias at his blog (in French!).  There were a lot of great responses, so I feel that I need to make a follow-up post.

Why LARP Is Not For Me

I have tried LARP.  It is not for me.  It is a great medium for other people, and I have several dear friends who love it.  But, I just cannot get into it.

There is a trend among tabletop gamers to really look down on LARPers as "weird" and "socially deviant."  I find this baffling, given that we are all gamers.  Not only do we pretty much look the same to outsiders, most LARPers are also tabletop players.  So, this post is not one of those.  Instead, it is a look at some of the things that make LARP different from tabletop, and how those things are a turn-off for me.

The Problem with Elves

(Which is not the same as The Problem with Elvis, just so you know.)

Most fantasy settings have elves.  Or, if they don't, they have some other race that is very long-lived and intellectual.  For me, such beings have always been a real stumbling block when developing a setting.  How can the fallen Empire be a time of misty legends when you have people walking around who were there?  Also, how weird is it when you meet up with your new companions at the tavern at first level, only to realize that the elf in the party knew your grandfather when he was a boy?  And why is it that someone who spent five times as long on their apprenticeship as you knows pretty much exactly the same things?

Murder by Numbers

Poison is an ancient tool of the subtler forms of warfare.  It is also a key device in literature, from Romeo and Juliet to the Count of Monte Cristo.  And yet, it is rarely handled well in RPGs.  I talked about it a bit on RPG Circus last night week, and just wanted to expand on it a bit here.

Fluff vs Crunch

It is very common these days to divide RPG material into fluff, text that focuses on the description and story, and crunch, text that focuses on the mechanics and action. When developing the game, it is important to separate the two as cleanly as possible. When actually playing the game, though, the two need to be brought together.

You say you want a resolution.... part 5

When taking an action in an RPG, there are five stages: intent, declaration, resolution, effect, and description.  We've already covered intent, declaration, resolution, and effect.  The action ends when someone, most often the GM, describes what just happened.

Harkening back to the discussion on declaration (and foreshadowing the discussion on fluff vs. crunch), there is a difference between the effect and the description of that effect.  Boiling it down, the effect works on the mechanical level, and the description works on the character level.  The description is also important to tie the whole action together, much like the summary section at the end of a paper.

You say you want a resolution.... part 4

When taking an action in an RPG, there are five stages: intent, declaration, resolution, effect, and description.  We've already covered intent, declaration, and resolution.  Now we get to the effect.

The effect is usually pretty simple, and predetermined by the system.  If you hit with an attack, you deal damage.  If you succeed with a perception check, you find something.  However, there are some nuances here that both separate one style of gaming from another, and are areas where a good GM can introduce extra layers of awesome.

You say you want a resolution.... part 3

When taking an action in an RPG, there are five stages: intent, declaration, resolution, effect, and description.  We've already covered intent and declaration, so today is resolution.

There are a dozen ways to slice and dice types of actions and types of resolutions.  If the action is either obviously going to succeed, or failure is not interesting, the resolution should simply be the GM saying, "OK, it works."  If there is no way the action can succeed (e.g., the character attempts to leap across a forty foot gap with normal human abilities), the GM is well within his rights to give the player a dirty look and say, "Come on, play seriously."  But most of the tasks in an RPG fall in the big grey area between, in which both success and failure can lead to interesting stories, and it is not clear which path our hero will go down.

You say you want a resolution.... part 2

Continued from part 1...

Yesterday we discussed intent.  Today, we'll discuss declaration.  For those joining us halfway through the woods, this is a series of posts of task resolution, breaking it down into five separate stages: intent, declaration, resolution, effect, and description.

You say you want a resolution.... part 1

Yesterday I talked about dice.  Today, I'm going to unpack task resolution in some detail.  Specifically, I'm going to look into the nooks and crannies between intent, declaration, resolution, effect, and description.  We make a lot of assumptions about how those all fit together, and I think the differences in those assumptions are largely responsible for the differences in our gaming styles.

[Ed. note - The words just kept pouring out of me.  I'm breaking this post up into several sections of its own.  This first one will deal with intent.]

The dice tell me ... nothing!

So, I have been chatting over in The Rhetorical Gamer's blog the last couple of weeks about dice and task resolution.  It became quickly obvious that we view gaming pretty radically differently.  So, he asked me to unpack some of my thoughts on this, with some concrete examples.  This is probably going to take me a couple of posts.

Today, why the heck do we even have dice in these games, anyway?

Shared Fantasy - Conclusion

So, we have finally come to the end of this journey.  This is Chapter 8, where Dr. Fine reiterates all of his points, and presents his conclusions.  I was originally assuming that this wouldn't even require a post of its own, but his summary actually produced a number of really good quotes.

Shared Fantasy - Chapter 7

Chapter 7 of Dr. Fine's book is all about the relationship between the player and the character.  In other words, oddly enough, it's about playing your roles.  Most of the chapter is pretty straightforward, but there are a few rather lengthy passages that are worthy of comment and thought.

As a note, I discussed my reading of Shared Fantasy on RPG Circus last night.  You can catch the episode here.

Shared Fantasy - Chapter 6

This is the chapter where Dr. Fine pulls out his sociology chops.  It really is the meat of the book, and he does a strong job of making his points.

The essence of this chapter is about how gamers deal with shifting between "in character" and "out of character" perspectives.  As Goffman, a sociologist whose work on frame analysis strongly informed this chapter, says: "Fanciful words can speak about make-believe places, but these words can only be spoken in the real world."