My Geek Life

So bruceb’s previews and musings on his New Horizons project got met thinking about the question of “hidden” aspects in FATE: essentially aspects that were not only both good and bad (as many aspects are) but often advantageous and disadvantageous simultaneously. Many of these revolve around what might be called secret or hidden aspects, where using them could be helpful, but revealing that you have them could be detrimental.

Take the example of a masked hero in the American South in the 1920s. Nobody knows that beneath his full face-mask and gloves is a black man fighting against injustice (and adopting at least one of the motifs of the Klan – like most masked heroes, the guy has issues). Faced with an angry black mob and the need to calm them, our hero could take off his mask (or even just one of his gloves), revealing his true race and color, even though he risks further inflaming the mob, to say nothing of exposing the truth to the white journalist who has been his sometime ally. How will he write about it in the next day’s paper?

Another is the “Silver Age” Promenthea from Alan Moore’s comic series: nobody knows the heroine Promethea is really a gay man named Bill, including her sometime FBI boyfriend! Given her magical origins and adventures, there are certainly occasions when the aspect “Transgendered,” “Both Man and Woman” (or however it is expressed on the character sheet) could come into play, but does Promethea dare reveal her secret? Readers of the series know the repercussions of such a decision.

Strikes me there’s a potentially interesting dynamic in the tension between tagging a hidden aspect for an advantage and revealing (and thereby compelling) the same aspect in the process. Sadly, I’ve no time to go delving for it right now in these final days before GenCon.

“Apophenia, noun: the tendency to see connections where none exist.”
— The Question, Justice League Unlimited, “Double Date”

One thing you hear often about roleplaying games is they are exercise for the imagination, they force players (including GMs) to flex their creative muscles to come up with all the imaginary stuff that goes into a typical roleplaying game session, to say nothing of a sustained campaign.

One of the elements of RPGs falling out of vogue as “uncreative” is creation of anything by one or more random die rolls: players demand more precision, more creative control, it is said. Systems of point-accounting or allocation are preferred to “roll 3d6 six times” or the like. What this new desire to take the randomness out of character, setting, and adventure design in RPGs does not seem to take into account is how inspiring that randomness can be. How the imagination fires when confronted with a seemingly unconnected list of things and told “make these pieces fit together.”

Take Marvel Super-Heroes for example. It’s character creation system is almost vestigial, since you’re expected to play Spider-Man, or Wolverine, or to fight over who gets to (or has to) play Spider-Man and Wolverine... At any rate, creating original characters is entirely by random die rolls, givng you a collection of abilities, talents, and powers. My game group still jokes about the “wings, claws, ice generation” combo that came up in one of our early games. Funny thing is, that system of randomly rolling-up characters provided some interesting sparks. Take the player who rolled up a super-strong, kind of clumsy hero with Quills who decided his hero was a humanoid cactus... the Mighty Saquarro! Would this player have ever just thought up such a character cold and decided “hey, that sounds like fun”?

What about the Traveller world-creation system that sometimes provided seemingly contradictory conditions? Some might say the system is broken, but what about the cases where the universe surprises us with seeming contraditions? What about the creative challenge of figuring out why that world with no atmosphere has such a high population? Could some sort of natural disaster have driven everyone into underground cities? Was cloning technology, intended to keep the colony alive during the Long Night, misused to create an underground world of overpopulated, disposable mine workers who have never seen the sky?

See what I mean?

Even that humble 3d6 roll. Imagine creating a D&D character as a blank slate, then choosing a class based on the character’s strengths and weaknesses (just as we tend to choose careers and vocations in real life). Rather than figuring out a class from the start and an “optimal build” for it, explain why your wizard is both strong (Str 14) and clumsy (Dex 8) in addition to his notable intellect (Int 17). Was he an oafish farm-lad far smarter than anyone gave him credit (because of his clumsiness) until the local wizard noticed him? Or was he on his way to becoming a soldier before a terrible injury almost crippled him, leaving him to study and discover a talent for the arcane? Or is he a wizard at all? Perhaps he’s a half-decent warrior, who’s slow in body, but a cunning tactician.

Sometimes RPGs forget that part of the fun of the game is not just putting together all those disparate parts, but filling in and providing the creative “glue” that holds them together and breathes life into them. There’s a lot empahsis on the mechanics of character building, rather than letting the random number generators (the dice) do a lot of the generating, and asking the imagination to fill-in the backstory.

[Poll #1263977]

I wonder if there’s a corrolation between different RPG play styles and verbal identification with one’s character in-game. The first person “I do this” is more of adopting the role, taking on the character, while the third person “my character does this” is more an element of the game, treating the character as game-piece or separate from one’s self. How do you play it and what, if anything, is the impact on how your game play feels?

It is resolved: a game mechanic that allows for a re-roll of the dice, especially if it involves expending a limited resource (uses per day, points, etc.) should never result in a worse roll than you started with.

Sometimes (like today) I miss 64-page RPGs. You may know the ones, from the early days of the hobby, when an entire RPG came in the form of a 64-page, saddle-stiched (which is to say, stapled) booklet in a box. Oftentimes, there would be a 32-page adventure along with it, or maps, or other components (dice, counters, and whatnot), but the core, the essence, of the entire game would be contained in that 64-page book.

Many of mine became dog-eared, their covers intended with thumb- and finger-marks from holding them so often. I’ve still got most of them, games like Gamma World, Villains & Vigilantes, Champions (the second edition, before they went with a square-bound single book), Boot Hill, Top Secret (before S.I.), Marvel Super-Heroes, Star Froniters, and, of course, the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set(s). Those games packed whole worlds of fun and adventure into those booklets, and still do, in many ways.

Now, I’m not making judgments about more recent RPGs, with their hardcover “core rules” with hundreds of glossy, full-color pages. Hey, I’ve written or contributed to more than a few of them. Still, there are times when I get nostalgic for those booklets, for games smaller than many typical magazines these days. I know part of it is because, as the saying goes, “the Golden Age of adventure is around age 12,” and so, too, was the Golden Age of gaming, in many ways; my Golden Age of gaming, anyway (my “Silver Age” of gaming was around age 16, I’d say).

It’s no small feat, what those early game designers accomplished, fitting worlds into 64 pages. In some ways, we designers weened on their work are still catching up.

It occurs to me that ability scores in D&D are largely redundant, and have been almost since the beginning of the game.

In OD&D, abilities served something of a purpose: they were a sort of “natural selection” in that you rolled them randomly (much like an accident of birth) and they helped to shape the choices you made about your character. A high-Strength, low-Intelligence character was clearly destined for a career as a Fighter, not a Magic-User, for example. This made ability score requirements (as opposed to mere bonuses for high Prime Requisites) more significant: if being a Paladin required you to randomly roll a 17 Charisma, along with the Paladin’s other requirements, or being a Ranger required a broad number of above-average abilities, then those characters would be correspondingly rare in the game; playing one was a bit like winning a lottery.

In the evolution of D&D, player choice has displaced random determination of abilities, starting with being able to arrange rolled scores in any order (so you can put your high score in the ability important to your desired class), then variants like 4d6 and drop the lowest die, multiple sets, and various other mulligans designed to ensure nobody is stuck with a character they don’t want to play. D&D 4e has eliminated the final vestiges of randomness in character generation, going with a point-buy system for ability scores and even standardized hit point progression.

This approach renders abilities largely moot: after all, does the system really need support for weak fighters, dumb wizards, clumsy rogues, and foolish clerics? Sure, such characters might exist in the world as NPC plot devices , but it’s fair to say the vast majority of player characters follow a certain mold when it comes to what Castles & Crusades calls the “Prime” of their chosen class. “Strong” and “Fighter” are virtually synonymous, as are “Smart” and “Wizard” and “Nimble” and “Thief” (sorry, “Rogue”). Indeed, C&C almost goes far enough in recognizing this fact, but not quite: they still retain ability scores and modifiers, even with their clever system of Primes.

“But what about character individuality?” some cry. A system wherein all fighters are strong and all wizards are smart means everybody is the same. Personally, I think this is more of an issue of perception than anything else, but I think it can be addressed with a combination of secondary and tiertiary traits alongside descriptors, like the “Aspects” in FATE or specialties in the forthcoming A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying (SIFRP). Sure, fighters are all strong, but in what way? Big? Brawny? Savage? Forceful? Apply some modifiers encouraging players to play up their characters’ unique strengths and you get a wide range of differentiation with very little in the way of added mechanical complexity.

I’m woolgathering before leaving for the airport to pick up a friend who’s visiting us from out of town for a few days, and I’d like to pose a general question for readers of my blog:

What degree of “transparency” of action resolution do you prefer in an RPG? That is, how apparent should it be whether or not a character’s action has succeeded or failed, and why?

In a typical RPG, the players roll dice for their characters’ actions out in the open, and the results are fairly apparent: the players know the character’s relevant abilities and the result of the dice. The only real X-factors are the difficulty or modifier set by the GM. In some systems, even these are known (or the GM may choose to share them). The GM rolls dice for the actions of non-player characters, typically behind a screen or the like, so the players don’t know the results of either the rolls or necessarily the abilities/traits of the NPCs, although some players can and will figure them out from the available evidence. The GM has a fair amount of leeway to “fudge” results while remaining within the realm of credulous possibility.

If this is the mid-point, then the extremes would be:

1) Where all resolution must be out in the open and transparent; the GM makes rolls the same as any other player, open to player scrutiny and the only unknowns are the actual traits of the NPCs, and perhaps even they must be known (depending on how the resolution system works). Even if they’re not, players will pick up on them quickly. Or...

2) Where all resolution is hidden from the players and handled by the GM (much as some “secret” rolls are in mid-range games). All the players know are their characters’ traits; the outcomes of the dice are like a black box, and the GM has even more leeway to “fudge” results. The players are more heavily reliant on the Gamemaster’s interpretations of what “actually” happened.

What level of transparency do you prefer in your RPG experience, and why?

It occurs to me that, in many regards, the lauded goal of “creating stories” in RPG play often leads to the mistaken belief that playing a good RPG should be like reading a good story of the same genre, whether fantasy, four-color comic book, cosmic horror, or whatnot.

However, in my experience, the “story” part of an RPG actually comes after the game is over, when you and your friends are recounting the cool story of what happened to each other or to someone else (”Hey remember that time we saved the world from the Overshadow?”). Playing the game is actually more akin to writing a story, including all the missteps, edits, typos, mistakes, unexpected turns, and revisions that go along with that process. It’s when GMs and players expect the game to play like reading a novel or watching a show—where the author (GM) has done all the work in advance—that things become railroady, frustrating, and disappointing.

My friend and fellow RPG designer maliszew has been ruminating a great deal lately about the roots of sci-fi and fantasy RPGs: looking at the core essential ideas that constituted the earliest expressions of those genres in roleplaying (ruminations that have borne fruit in the form of his Thousands Suns RPG and his “Pulp D&D” project). This had led me to wonder about the roots and core RPG expressions of a favorite genre of mine: superheroes.

For me that means the days when the landscape was dominated by Villains & Vigilantes and Champions. I don’t dismiss games like Superworld out hand, but I never played them back then, so from when I started gaming in 1981 or so, until the release of Marvel Super-Heroes in 1984, V&V and Champions were superhero gaming for me. What do they tell us?

Well, like games at the time, they were short: little more than booklets by today’s standards (especially the 500+ page monster Champions/Hero System has become). They differ in approach: V&V was random character generation and relatively set powers (with some variables based on ability scores) while Champions was build-to-order with one of the first real point-build and effects-based systems. What was interesting in both was how implicit the superhero genre was: neither had an established setting, indeed, V&V never had one, and it took years for Hero Games to eventually try and cobble together a coherent “Champions Universe” out of their various sourcebooks and adventures.

Adventures were, in fact, the name of the game. They were practically the sole supplements for V&V, apart from a couple licensed things like DNAgents, and made up the bulk of early Champions releases, although Hero Games did experiment with some sourcebooks as well, primarily “monster manuals” focusing on particular organizations or villains (like the Enemies series). The adventures talked fairly little about the setting or genre, they simply assumed the obvious: the player characters were members of a superhero team, they had a headquarters of some sort, and they fought evil. What else did you need to know?

And what about Marvel Super-Heroes? As I said in my essay in Hobby Games: The 100 Best, MSH is the gold-standard of superhero RPGs, the basis for my longest-running campaign, and therefore a significant part of my “gaming DNA”. It was the first licensed superhero RPG, taking the gaming genre out of the realm of the theoretical (where you assumed your superhero setting was like the comics) and into the actual, where your superhero setting was the comics. Like V&V, MSH was a random-roll creation system with fairly broad power descriptions, assuming you weren’t playing the provided Mighty Marvel characters.

Adventures were also a staple of MSH, but sourcebooks were prominent as well, since the game sought to describe as much of the existing comic book universe as possible in game terms. This may be the beginnings of the expectation of superhero RPGs having a set “world” to them (followed on by DC Heroes, and then the development of an “official” Champions Universe). By contrast, by the time you look at Champions: New Millennium in the '90s, you see a superhero RPG coupled with a pre-packaged setting and “signature” characters.

Seems like superhero RPGs have gone from relatively light and often random or vague systems with the adventure as their basic supplementary unit (much like the individual comic issue for a superhero) to more structured and detailed, with built-in setting(s) and the genre book or sourcebook as their standard supplement (like the rise in popularity of graphic novels and trade paperbacks?).

I was struck by this line from Hiro in last night's Heroes episode and the character's (completely understandable) reluctance to kill someone, even someone like Syler, in cold blood. I was also immediately struck by how completely un-dramatic such a scene would have been in an average RPG:

Ando's player: "You have to kill Syler now!"

Hiro's player: "Okay." (Dice clatter on the table) "Critical hit! Kickass!"

GM: sigh....

Apart from "it's all roleplaying" I wonder if there's a good mechanical way to reflect the dramatic build-up to an action where the drama is all in the decision to act rather than the action itself. Or is that imposing mechanics where they shouldn't go, dictating how characters act and react and disempowered the players?