The Behind the Masc Zine Kickstarter is LIVE! This project is run by non-cis masculine creators and we’re making Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts playbooks, rich backgrounds for D&D characters, and some lovely art, too! Please check it out – we’ve got some awesome creators working on re-imaginings of masculinity!
Chris Evans is a representation for me, the log is my fear of running games.
I recently updated the biggest games document I’ve ever worked on myself, the Turn playtest document. It’s like almost 80 pages now. Like, that’s a lot. The updates included:
minor changes to Human role abilities for clarity
minor changes to Beast archetype powers for clarity
adjustment to refresh for exposure
integrated essay content
more Storyteller content
how to on session 0
session checklist
explanation of rules
character creation
an entire player’s guide to all of the roles and archetypes
elaboration on some mechanics
rewritten elaboration on mechanics
complete step-by-step on how to start a game of Turn
I don’t know if that sounds like a lot, but it was a lot of work!
I’m hoping to talk about a variety of these things over time, but the biggest one I wanted to talk about is the Storyteller’s Guide and how that came to be.
The Storyteller Purposes were actually written by dictation to John while we were driving across the state last year.
I am not a particularly gifted facilitator, especially not in an actual “game master” type of role. I avoid it like the plague because it stresses me out, I don’t feel like I do a good job, and I don’t have experience in it. However, for Turn, I have very clear ideas on how the game should work. It’s the only game I’ve run 4 sessions of, ever. But I didn’t write any of these ideas down.
So, when John and I went to the lake cabin (my parents’), he asked me a ton of questions. I answered as best I could, and realized I kind of had to write all of it down. Since then I’ve been adding text to the Turn document like wild! I have a lot of ideas for how to solve the little issues people have come up with before I made the changes, but I have no idea if they’ll work for people other than me.
To some kind of credit, I did try out the first draft of the “how to set up Turn” the other night and it went awesomely. I even did the new Session 0! And it worked great. I’ve added some detail since then, so I hope it’ll work. Here’s some things I wrote about, which are in addition to the materials I’d already written:
Character Creation This has guidance on helping the players answer questions about their characters, how to handle animal groups, a note on NPCs, and special rules for some of the roles. It’s stuff that I know will come up, but didn’t write down. Some of this is just hard to figure out how to word, or I hadn’t had time to put on paper. Some things I just didn’t know needed written guidance, but it did – like the special rules for the Late Bloomer or the NPCs. But, now it’s written down!
The Beastborn and Wolf character sheets for John’s character in my new game, created by John W. Sheldon.
Session 0 This is how to actually get the game going. It directs the Storyteller to the Beginning Your Game section and then walks them through a structured first couple scenes. I’m really pleased with it and when I tested it out it went amazingly well, for someone like me to run, so I’m glad it’s on paper. I had to really separate out what was important in a first session, and I think that this meets it – connecting the characters, placing them within the town, and establishing the personality of the characters.
Running an Average Session This covers the typical things a Storyteller will encounter in a session of Turn. Some people had expressed they weren’t sure how to engage stress or how to run beast scenes, so I wrote up some details on that to get people really on the same page. This involved writing up how you should pepper each session with mundanity – everyday tasks that will stress out shifters – and beast issues like territory and habitat struggles.
I also included a Storyteller Session Checklist that makes sure that there are NPC to PC connections, PC to PC connections, gossip, mundane vignettes, and beast scenes alongside the human scenes everyone leans to. I’m pleased with it!
Tracking Goals This section was to make more concrete guidance on how to handle players trying to achieve goals. It includes guidance on using progress bars based on difficulty, and how that comes across for each goal. I needed to give a more solid way to mark and record this so that there wouldn’t be unfair imbalance in how quickly some goals were achieved. Plus, this way the Storyteller can have visual representation of the progress.
A closeup of the character sheets – wolves have packs in the game, did you know? by John W. Sheldon.
Reintegrating into Animal Groups After Exposure After I’d made a small change to the refresh rate for exposure, I realized I’d never noted that animal group stress doesn’t refresh. I fixed that, and then wrote up some rules on how Storytellers will use a progress bar to help shifters reintegrate with their own group or find a new group, based on difficulty. I think that this, the explanation of exposure, and my new guidance on beast scenes will help Storytellers more actively engage that material.
– Overall this has been a heck of a lot of work. This is only the ONE section, out of all of the ones in my bulleted list up top. The thing is, I’m not really changing rules for 90% of this – I’m just explaining stuff. More of this whole project is explaining things than I ever thought it’d be, and I’ll tell you, I’m hoping that this makes a difference when people get into the text!
One of the hardest things I’ve had to do is make guidance for Storytellers. It’s not something I do a lot, and honestly, a lot of people in that role are people I don’t actually enjoy working with (just a personality thing, maybe?). I don’t necessarily want Storytellers in Turn to work the same way a D&D GM would, or even a Fate GM. I want them to care a lot more. It’s a heavy workload to run the game, by many people’s counts, especially for a “story game” sort of game – but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I started a game on Friday as Storyteller, and we have a fantastic group of a Late Bloomer otter, a Showoff raven, and a Beastborn wolf in a town full of intrigue because the shifters know who each other are and there’s formal shifter culture, and it’s incredibly exciting to think of the places it could go. I know I’m gonna have a lot of little progress bars and it’s gonna be exciting to mark each one off. I can’t wait!
Our town, Script Change, and the Human Form struggles – just the stuff I was reviewing while I was taking a break.
And that’s the thing, right? I’m excited about running a game. Me! I have literally pretended to be sick to avoid doing it, and here I am, enthusiastically planning NPCs and secrets, anxiously bugging my friends about playing the next session. I actually did an okay job, and it’s me saying that!
There’s so many things I love about game design, and as hard as it can be to do it on spare dollars, I can’t ever stop being amazed by how much it teaches me. It is a constant learning experience, and I’m very glad that my time spent digging into Turn’s mechanics and text has encouraged me to do something I find terrifying – and made it exhilarating instead!
It’s awesome, and so is Turn.Check it out if you want to see the hard work I’ve been putting in! Thanks for reading <3
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
For the past several months I’ve been gearing up to start a new project called Leading with Class. Leading with Class is a web series I’m doing to teach leadership theory and practice using roleplaying games! It’s so exciting to have it together!
There’s a Patreon for the project and I have a Twitter set up that I’ll be trying to use for the project as well. It’s a dream of mine to teach important skills and make knowledge more approachable using games, and this is a great opportunity to use my experience and my education to put some good into the world. I hope you’ll join me!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
So someone is playing Turn and I’m very excited about this, but they and a fellow player have both stated clearly that they don’t think they’re playing the game the way I want it to be played.
And like.
This is my favorite and most often used gif.
Okay, I would like people to play quiet dramas, and slice-of-life style stuff. That’d be cool. But quiet drama means different things to different people, and part of why I need playtests is to see what it means in people’s interpretations of different types of towns and stuff. Not every play of a game is going to be the same, and I accept that.
So like, I’m struggling because I don’t know exactly how they’re playing, and I don’t think it is “wrong” or anything, but I do think that the way they did setup and what themes they chose influenced the play, and that matters. But how do I even say that? Like, even if you’re playing the game slightly differently than I expected does not mean it’s not playing the way that is appropriate based on the way you’ve set up the town?
Like, here are the ways you can play Turn “wrong”:
play it in a city or suburb, or a place with a large population
don’t have shifters in it
appropriate culture to play it
violate the “don’t do this in Turn” section of the essays (re: content)
pretend it’s just a standard PbtA game and don’t engage the mechanics
ignore identity and community as aspects of the game
don’t emotionally engage with the narrative or subject matter
Yeah, I know, don’t tell people not to do what they want with your game. *eyeroll*
All of the other stuff is interpretations of my design, which I can’t control. Tempo, subject matter, etc. are all stuff that are different in a lot of games, like Fiasco can go anywhere from “wow, this is exciting!” to “wow, this is depressing!” to “wow, I am super confused” in one freaking session. Monsterhearts can go from dark and filled with examination of abuse and sexuality to a few kind-of-friends Scoobying around town trying to protect everyone. This is to say little of trad games like D&D and Shadowrun, which can run the tonal rollercoaster AND still let you explore the subjects the games promote.
There are tons of types of small towns, all with their individual leanings and themes and politics. Small towns can have microcultures that make surrounding towns look at them like they’re upsidedown in a teakettle, and that includes the way people deal with things there. It’s complex, and that’s why there are different themes and elements of the towns you create in Turn. The thing is, I haven’t played all of the combinations!
There are many ways you could combine all of the elements in Turn, and frankly, I don’t have 4 hours every day for the next mumblemumble years to test it out fully. That’s why I’m excited to see other people play it! Yes! Show me your thing you did with my thing! That sounds really weird but I don’t care!
Tell meeeeeeeeee
Now, I’ll be real. There are a few things that bug me, and this is not a thing that this person did really because they highlighted at one point how my game was not doing this thing, but man, everyone calls it a Powered by the Apocalypse game.
I freaking. Okay. PbtA is a great system and has a purpose. Vincent and Meguey made a really amazing thing, and a lot of people have done amazing things with it. Turn is not a PbtA game. It’s inspired by it – and yes, I realize a lot of people think it’s the same thing to be inspired by a thing and actually a thing, but it is not – and I designed the game purposefully to go against PbtA principles I have seen reflected in related design. First, there’s no category of PbtA games. And second, here are commonalities between Turn and some games that are PbtA, and then some stuff that’s just Turn or not in Turn:
1) 2d6 (also you have a third die sometimes)
2) Move-like structure (you are rolling to resist rather than to take action)
3) Character sheets with personal information on them (you have two, one of which is sometimes swappable)
4) Stats with smaller numbers (you have 8, one for each sheet, and they’re absolute values)
5) Scaled results (you never fail in Turn, the results are to determine the consequences related to success)
6) No sex/intimacy move
7) No Hx, strings, etc.
8) Goals for Human and Beast that control advancement
9) Exposure tracked on relationships
10) Stress to measure turning from Human to Beast & etc.
This is not me saying “my game has nothing to do with PbtA,” this is me saying there are differences, they matter, and we need to stop saying everything is one kind of game because it happens to use a specific dice roll or has moves (which could be like feats), small stat numbers (like a ton of games), and scaled results (which I think was actually a thing in Shadowrun too, just not framed specifically this way?). Things are different! One thing is not necessarily the other thing! Like! Friends! We need to be a little more forgiving with definitions, or make some freakin’ new ones!
me.
Turn was originally conceived because I came home from playing my first session I can remember of Monsterhearts (this one*) and felt off about it. Something wasn’t right. It wasn’t hitting the right tone. I spent the next… really fucking long time… trying to figure out what that was, and meanwhile flipped numbers around, took out entire things, mentally threw out tons of material, and settled on what Turn is when John made me finally write it down because one of my greatest fears is that people will look at it and go “huh, oh, just another PbtA hack” and my fucking opus will be washed away into nothingness because some dingus can’t tell the difference between two different games that are wildly. fucking. different.
Sigh.
I’m a little…passionate today about this, and I think I always am, and always will be. But there’s reason for it. We use categories, especially manufactured ones, to scoop quality things into the trash all the time. Oh, it’s just another fantasy game. Oh, it’s just another PbtA hack. Oh, it’s just another Fate hack. Oh, I’ve seen so many games about zombies. Like come on. And the thing is, I rejected some of what I saw in PbtA work on purpose, and while some parts of mechanical structure remain, there are a lot of things I pulled from elsewhere conceptually.
I would never dare to call myself original, but when you don’t have your own ideas, storebought is fine, so long as you mix them up in a new way and it still fucking tastes good.
I want to share my game with people without having the ever-burning comparison to “oh but you’re not as good as Monsterhearts and AW and and and” screaming in my face every time. I know you don’t mean to do it, most of you, but it sure burns my biscuits that you think it’s fun to tell me how much what I have labored so extensively over is Just Like That Other Thing. That’s what this is. This isn’t categorical. My game is different enough that it is reminiscent of PbtA work, but in part because of how many other games you could find similarities to, it is not the same.
And that’s what I mean about people getting Turn wrong genuinely.
I think.
It’s possible that I wouldn’t play Turn in the way you’re playing it, if you’re playing it and think you’re playing it differently than I intend. That’s like, good though? Because I am not every player. I am not able to imagine all possible ways my game could be played and executed beautifully, still exploring the concepts of identity and community while doing things with more passion and intensity, because the town they built makes more sense for that.
So basically, I want to hear about the ways people explore Turn. I might be surprised, or unsure, or need to think about how something goes. But if the game works? If it is telling those stories, asking those questions, and it’s enjoyable? Then you’re probably doing okay.
Roll 5 dice (any size). Choose two of them & add the number together. Now, publicly & positively recognize that many (out) trans, genderqueer, & nonbinary people.
To win the game, put this on a calendar reminder for next year & play it again.
💜
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