Tag: LARP

Five or So Questions on The Playmaker Awards

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Richard Williams, who hosts The Playmaker Awards and is running a Kickstarter focused on them! This sounds like a fascinating initiative and I hope you’ll all check out the interview below and the awards themselves!

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A pair of cards thanking Sean Nittner for his work at Big Bad Con with a Thank You note from Sean.
This is so cute!

Tell me a little about The Playmaker Awards. What excites you about them?

The Playmakers are a set of awards not for great rpg designers, game-runners or even players, but rather for the people who work hard doing the admin and scudwork creating spaces for others to play roleplaying games.

So this might be someone who runs a convention, or the rpg track at a convention, someone who keeps a local meetup or open gaming group going. It could be in-person or online. Or it could be an entirely different way of creating space for others unique to them.

I think we often under-value and underestimate the time and labour that goes into these roles. Or just don’t think much of it at all. When I’m heading to an rpg event I’m going there to game and that’s where my focus is, and of course I’m aware that people organised stuff so that there’d be a room and table and chairs and other players, but I don’t see that effort. I just have the end-result presented to me so I can game and enjoy myself.

But I don’t think that any of these playmakers do it for the recognition; I expect most of them consider it a sign that they’re doing a good job if the public don’t see all the effort behind the scenes – that they have as seamless and smooth as an experience as possible. But that just makes it more important that these playmakers do get recognised by others, because they’re not going to put themselves forward and yet their effort is so critical to the hobby. I played my first game at a local convention. I rely on them, both to play new games and to keep in touch with people who I only otherwise see online. What would this hobby be without them? A shadow of what it is, to be certain.

As to what excites me about the Playmaker awards: every stage of it so far. When I asked for nominations I was fascinated to see who would be put forward. When I contacted people to tell them they had won, some of them were bemused to win an award they’d never heard of, but some others – I don’t know – I think it might just have come at a time when they really needed that kind of appreciation. Announcing them was exciting as well, to see word spread. And now I’m into interviewing some of them for the Playmaker zine kickstarter, which really is a privilege for me; these folk spend so much time working for others in the hobby already, it’s very generous of them to spend more time so I can find out more about what they do and why they do it.

How are you determining who fits the category to be nominated or win?

I tried to describe as best I could the folk I wanted nominated and then I’ve trusted the people who took the time to reply to one of my posts with a nomination. My basic criteria was whether someone created space for others to play. I specifically excluded rpg design-work – I think we have a variety of different ways already of recognising great designers – and game-runners (such as DMs/GMs) and players as they are the ones who get to sit down and play.

In my mind, the most obvious candidates are con organisers – the many folk who I’ve seen standing behind a desk or walking through the con who’ve given up their weekend (and I don’t know how many hours before) so that _other people_ can play. However, I also wanted the awards to go further. I don’t know what play spaces are out there today, nor what’s involved in organising them, and so keeping the nominations more open was another means of discovery.

What is the judging process like and how do you decide winners?

I knew I definitely wasn’t the person to judge or rank the level of contribution made by each nominee. And what would the benefit be of saying that this playmaker who runs the rpg track of a massive convention is more or less deserving than this other playmaker who has been running a small rpg club all by themselves for twenty years? What criteria would make sense to use? What other factors would you consider? If I’m not the right person to judge, who is?

I saw the judging process as a big minefield and ultimately antithetical to my overall goal of both recognising their efforts and building a network of goodwill in this time of separation and fragmentation. So, in essence, I pushed the judging process to the nominators as well. If someone else thought you met the criteria and thought enough of you to nominate you then – assuming I could contact you and you were the person broadly doing what you were being nominated for – then you were a playmaker in my book.

The final judge I should mention was the playmaker themselves. My first question for all of the winners was whether they accepted (and, in fact, one of them didn’t). I wanted to make sure that everyone was comfortable, both the people nominating and the people being nominated.

And I feel trusting folk and being led by their nominations worked. While I did go back to a few nominators to get more details on their nomination, I haven’t rejected anyone for being outside of the scope of the awards and I’ve included a bunch of playmakers who I perhaps wouldn’t have heard of if I had been more restrictive.

A card thanking the Gauntlet with quotes from their supporters.

What do you think the benefit is of an awards process for playmakers?

I think it’s different for the individual and the hobby as a whole.

For the hobby, I feel that awards help define its values. I previously did annual awards for the London Indie RPG meetup and I had an award for most played game but also one for most played designer because I didn’t want someone to miss out because they’d produced a batch of fun games rather than a single one.  I also had an award for most popular game runner, partly as a thank you but also to encourage others to run games as well. Finally, I included special awards that were at my discetion and went to anyone who’d brought something a bit special to the group during the year such as coming in costume or fulfilling a vow to run a certain game for someone. I think it showed that we as a group valued those who brought that little extra joy to our lives.

Similarly with the Playmakers, by having such an award and by having others support and endorse it shows that creating space for others to play is a service that we value and appreciate. Just as certain holidays remind us to thank significant people in our lives and events like GMs Day remind us to thank those who run our games, so too the Playmakers reminds us and gives us the opportunity to thank these folk as well.

As to what benefit there is to the individual? To be honest, from the beginning I knew I couldn’t provide much. I did want to give each of the Playmakers something more than just a ‘thank you’ and a blogpost, something to make the award a little more substantial, to show my own sense of gratitude and so I settled on a $20 DriveThru voucher figuring that, as the Playmakers spend so much time for others enjoyment that it’d be nice for them to buy something for themselves. At a friend’s recommendation I reached out to OneBookShelf (who are the people behind DriveThru) and they very generously agreed to sponsor 25% of the total, so I put in $15 and they made it up to $20. I knew that, depending on the response rate, by advertising the voucher while nominations were open I was essentially writing a blank cheque, but the awards were not so popular as to put me in financial difficulty!

I was fully prepared that when I started reaching out to the winners that the general response from them would be ‘Errr… thanks, I guess… who are you again?’ (and I did get that a couple of times!) But actually it was far better than I expected. Most of these folk who are so generous with their time working for other people were equally generous with me, and interested to see who else were receiving awards.

And in a few cases, just winning the award struck something deeper. I don’t know what stage each of them are in the hobby or in their lives, but I do know from my personal experience that there are harder moments. Times when I reevaluate whether my time and effort is actually benefitting anyone else or even noticed. I think in maybe a couple of cases this award has come through at one of those more reflective times and been all the more appreciated because of it.

In all, I think in some cases the best thing that has come out of it for the winner is the nomination. When I asked for nominations I didn’t really expect anything more than ‘Person A for doing Thing B’, but some of the nominations are far more detailed and far more thoughtful. And I think it’s this personal message from someone a playmaker has helped can be the greatest benefit.

Recognition cards for Réka Korcsmáros about her online RPG community and including a thank you from her.

How would you encourage playmakers to act and what would you encourage them to do to make them a more likely candidate for the awards?

Just to keep doing what they’re doing! If they’re still enjoying it then keep at it, or change it up or take a break if it’s just become a labour.

I don’t intend the awards to change anything about what the winners do, rather I’m really hoping that it will inspire others to do the same. I did originally think that the awards would end with simply announcing the winners, but further it progressed the more I realised that this would be a disservice to the concept. The nominations have been great but they’re only a tiny glimpse of the Playmakers’ stories.

To that end, as part of Kickstarter’s ZineQuest initiative in February, I’ll be crowdfunding a collection of new interviews some of the Playmakers, getting into more detail about what they do, why they do it and what they need to do it better.

It’s been great to give these folks an award and a thank you, but it has been so much more interesting to dig deeper. I hope that the final product will be a unique perspective on the state of public rpg play today and that hearing their stories will inspire others to do the same.

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Thank you so much to Richard for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading it and that you’ll check out The Playmaker Awards and the Kickstarter!

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Five or So Questions on Erotia

I interviewed Ray Cox about Erotia, a game about sex, gods, and communication. It’s currently available on itch.io, and is a super lightweight game materials-wise. Check it out!

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Tell me a little about Erotia. What excites you about it? 
Erotia is a small Freeform LARP that I designed with the help of my friend Fin. It’s about sex, gods, and communication. And it is small enough that the whole game fits on one side of a business card!


I’ve wanted to include more sex in my games for a really long time. I’m a professional GM, but the people I play with have never been super into it. Which is fine. Recently though I started Designing my own RPGs and LARPs. And I realised I wanted to make a game about sex, where you can have sex as part of that game. And after a lot of failed ideas, we have Erotia.

Let’s talk about safety and consent. How do you handle these in Erotia? What tools and structure do you use to ensure that Erotia is safe and consensual?
Well so Erotia being a game about sex and flirting, it was really important for me to include some safety tools. It was difficult however to fit everything into the small format. What we went with though was framing the safety tools as the most important part of the game. You always begin with a discussion of comfort, limits, and what you’re hoping to get out of the game. As well as electing a Safeword, which is a concept introduced to us through BDSM.
A person in a black tank top and a chain choker with a pink mohawk.
Ray Cox, the designer.

What is the narrative of Erotia like? What do you play out and do as characters in the game?

Once you have an idea of what everyone wants to explore, the game moves on to play. The play beginning with everyone introducing their gods, and then interacting. Your Erotia might be a dinner party, a picnic, or some divine friends cuddling up on a cold winter night. Part of your introduction of your divine role is telling others how you wish to be interacted with or interact with others. And those are mostly there as prompts for folks that might not be too sure of themselves. If my god likes having their neck kissed than someone could start by saying: “Hi, I’m Apollo; may I kiss your neck?”

The game lasts as long as there are people still in the play space. The game also ends for all players if the safeword is used. This is so that we can focus on giving proper aftercare to the person that needed play to stop.

 

Why did you include the gods as part of the game, and what do you think it brings to the table?
I really like narratives about gods; in particular gods as people with more confidence, and a clearer sense of purpose.
I wanted to make a game where you knew you were sexy. Where you had no choice but to feel confident. For me, pretending I’m a god brings that. And when ever I play RPGs where you get to be a god that is how I play it. So yeah, what I think it brings is a sense of power, and also the knowledge that everyone around you is bringing that too.
What are some positive experiences you’ve had while playing the game that related more to the emotional or social aspect of Erotia?
Well I’ve never played Erotia, and I have not met anyone that has. I do currently have a date scheduled with a Long Distances lover of mine to play the game when next we meet though. I’ve done the character creation part of Erotia a fair bit. I often use it as a creative exercise to help refine my gendermood, or to pump myself up before going out. You can also use it to flirt. Aforementioned lover and I have been sending each other fliracious letters with text like “I am Rei, the season. My domain of power is change. I am worshipped with loving praise, & offer submission in return that we might make out till sunrise.”

But if you’re reading this interview, and you’ve played Erotia, I’d love to hear what you thought?

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Thanks so much Ray for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it, and that you’ll check out Erotia on itch.io today!

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Five or So Questions on My Jam

Today I have an interview with Eric Mersmann and Jeffrey Dieterle about My Jam, a live action game currently on Kickstarter! It’s very musical, and a unique kind of empowering. Check out their responses below!

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a person in party clothes in a room full of people, holding up a wreath of leaves while dancing enthusiastically
This image, done by Lawrence Gullo, is so powerful!
Tell me a little about My Jam. What excites you about it?


My Jam is a one-shot 4-hour larp where you embody high school aged musarchs—people who gain magic power from their relationship to music—during the biggest dance of the year. During the dance, your song will come on and you’ll be the deity of the dance floor for its duration. A whole lot excites me about this game! We’ve been working on it for over a year (our first playtest was at Metatopia 2017) and people seem to get a real rush out of it! The most surprising thing to us was people coming up to us after playing who HATED high school dances and told us that this really gave them the experience they wished they had! It kinda empowers players over something that might not have been such a positive thing at the time. At the same time, folks who LOVED high school dances also said they enjoyed this game so yeah! Music! Magic! Drama! What’s not to be excited about!?!?!

What inspired My Jam, and what was the path like from inspiration to reality?
The original inspiration for My Jam is the comic series Phonogram written by Kieron Gillen & drawn by Jaime McKelvie, which is about “phonomancers” who get power from music. Jeff conceived of the idea for this game, and asked Eric if he wanted to collaborate (uh is it ok if we talk about ourselves in the third person? seems weird but let’s go with it…) in late summer 2017. We worked up a playtest for Metatopia 2017 just to see if people would be interested in larp dance parties and uh… they were!!! The game has changed a lot since then, thanks to playtests at Larp Shack down in Durham, Dreamation, and elsewhere. Mostly we refined the gameplay to focus on the “My Jam” moment and developed workshops to support play so everyone could have fun which segues nicely into…
How did you design the game to be approachable and fun for all the different types of players?
WORKSHOPS!!! We have about an hour of pre-game that’s intended to help people get into their characters and start moving around in response to music. Unfortunately, My Jam is not for everyone, but we’ve worked really hard to make sure it’s for as many people as possible and that the people who do play it are able to enjoy themselves. We’ve tried to take some of the worst parts of high school dances out while still keeping the drama and emotional intensity. And finally, we reinforce that the players are more important than the game and we give the players some tools to help and empower the palyers to mediate their experience.
How do you handle safety and consent when you have music playing? Do you find players are more free with their movement and action with an environment framed like this?
We use a number of “standard” larp calibration techniques that all focus on the idea that the players are more important than the game (stuff like door is always open, cut, slow down, check-in lmk if you want me to go more in-depth) and we have a few Jam Commandments that we developed specifically for issues that arise in this game:
  1. 1) touching only with consent – this is especially important for dancing, and people have a lot of baggage around being explicit asking for consent so we try to cut through to say that touch should only happen with consent and consent is an ongoing process.
  2. 2) celebrate culture with respect – music and culture are intrinsically connected so we say explicitly no singing along with slurs and no adopting mannerisms or vocal inflections meant to imitate another culture
    3) rivalry without hate – this game is meant to capture the feelings of highschool but we’re not interested in giving people an excuse to practice abusive or oppressive behaviors so we forbid role playing oppression-based bullying.
We also recommend making sure that the volume of the music is loud enough to dance to but still quiet enough to talk over and we also recommend having a space where players can be free of the magical powers: a circle of protection/chill-out zone.
Our experience is that with the warm-up workshops and the safety it allows players to embrace their bodies and music with less fear of judgment. There’s definitely an added level of vulnerability, but we try to instruct the facilitator in how to create an environment where people can experience that vulnerability. So far our players have reported back success!

Your Kickstarter approach seems a little different from other Kickstarters. Why are you approaching the model differently, and what do you expect to see from it?

We went around and around on what the final form of My Jam would be. At one point we were discussing pressing an audio version of the workshops into vinyl! At the other end of the spectrum we considered putting out a simple pdf. With a little introspection, we realized the thing we wanted more than anything was for as many people as possible to have the game. After that we wanted the game to be uh “cool” for lack of a better term. Hence doing a zine. This let us keep production costs low (keeping it accessible) but still gave us the freedom to experiment with layout and printing styles and create an artifact that was kickstarter-only. We worked with an artist Lawrence Gullo (@hismajesty on twitter) who had played the game to make some cover art and other assets (like the cool moon/records we use on the kickstarter page.) This way the fixed costs were pretty low, enabling us to keep our target low. Luckily we hit it pretty early, and we now have a nice little margin to add more art. We’re not doing stretch goals per se, we’re keeping everything about those two goals: get the game to as many people as possible and make the game artifact as cool as possible. We had discussed stretch goals (guidelines for how to play as a 50s sockhop! cyberpunk dystopia My Jam!) but ultimately these things felt like distractions.

Then we started adding silly jokes. Sometimes we worry that the jokes make people think that we don’t take the game seriously, but it’s more like we take it SO SERIOUSLY we needed to fill our campaign with jokes just so we could breathe!!!

We’re hoping that our love for the game and for larp shines through and attracts other people who might feel similarly. So far, so good we guess!!!

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Thank you so much to Eric and Jeff for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed learning about My Jam and that you’ll check it out on Kickstarter today!

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Five or So Questions on Improv for Gamers

Hey all, I have an interview today with Karen Twelves about Improv for Gamers, a new book being released through Evil Hat that includes workshops and exercises to help any roleplayer or GM become better at improv! These workshops, like the one offered at Big Bad Con this October, promote fun, low-pressure environments to try out new skills for GMs, larpers, roleplayers, and more! Check out Karen’s answers to my questions below!

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Tell me a little about Improv for Gamers. What excites you about it?

I’ve always been excited about giving people a practice space to try out this improv stuff they’ve been hearing so much about. I’ve been playing tabletop rpgs since high school, and when I took my first improv class back in 2008, I was stunned by the obvious skill overlap. And also surprised that there weren’t more improv classes for roleplayers, especially being taught outside of conventions. It’s been super fun and rewarding to teach the Improv for Gamers workshops and give people some ideas and tools they can take back to their games. But what I’m most excited about right now is coming out with this book, because it gives people a bunch of exercises they can just pick up and play with friends in their living room.

What are a few of the skills you’ve picked up in improv and cover in the book that serve you the most often in gaming?

In both improv and gaming, you need to pay attention to what your fellow players are contributing to the story. If you’re not listening to how the story is shaping around you, you’re going to have a hard time navigating through it–to mix metaphors, all your subsequent ideas will be off-key. Active listening is required in order to say “Yes, and” to your partner, which is the act of honoring someone’s ideas and building on them. (There’s more to unpack with “Yes, and” about it not being a blank check, and nobody is actually beholden to accept every offer, so I prefer phrasing it as “Consider yes, and.”) But to build off an idea, you need to have actually heard it first. This is just as important in a game that weaves a narrative between characters as it is in a fight sequence where you’d want to keep tabs on what everyone is doing on their turn. So the book has a lot of great exercises that specifically practice paying attention to and acknowledging your partner. You might copy someone’s movements, repeat what they said, add a line to a shared story, create a cast of characters, or communicate through eye contact. But at the heart of all collaborative storytelling, you need to be listening.

A skill that I really love is handling invisible objects. You may have imaginary items in a larp, and you can also embody your character a bit at the table. Maybe you just mime your character polishing their glasses, or drinking a coffee. It’s a lot of fun. The book contains exercises that practice holding and using invisible objects, and it’s something that I still practice a lot in my improv troupes. It definitely came in handy during a larp where my healer character was asked to remove an invisible spear from someone’s leg and patch up the wound, and we had zero props.

How do you make this content approachable for new people and people not into the gaming scenes that favor improv?

When I teach the workshops I always stress that I’m not expecting anybody to be actors. It’s a practice space, so things might feel weird or be a little rough and that’s okay. Nobody’s going to walk out thinking “Cool, I’m perfect at this now!” And I repeat that a lot in the book–that the focus isn’t to be perfect, or funny, or entertaining, but to just try stretching this one specific muscle that the exercise is highlighting. There’s only a few exercises that are actually “scenes,” the majority are group games, so there’s less pressure to perform. There’s also some things that speak to GMs, like identifying when to switch from one scene to another, or how to quickly come up with some specific voices so your NPCs sound different. And that thread of “listen to each other and make people feel included” runs throughout all of it, which is a life skill, not an improv skill. But you can practice it through some fun improv exercises!

The improv for gamers cover with a traditional actor's mask and dice on the cover.
What are some practices and behaviors in games that you think could be improved using improv, and how do you address them in your workshops and book?

There are games where it makes sense to be protective of your character, and there are games when you could be more reckless with them. I definitely wanted my Pathfinder fighter to make it into double-digit levels! But my Blades in the Dark whisper? That game grinds characters down by design. They’re supposed to get hurt, physically and emotionally. Character death is definitely on the table. And if I’m in a one-shot game, I’ve only got this one story with this character, so I’m definitely going to take more narrative risks because I’ve got nothing to lose. There are so many improv exercises where you’re encouraged to get your character into trouble, or play someone without a lot of power or status. I’m not saying that the best way to play is to play to lose, but it’s a style that works well with a lot of games. And if it’s a style that’s kind of new to someone, I want to give them the opportunity to get into that mindset, take some risks, and have a lot of fun doing it.



What are some ways improv skills help with different roles in game, like GMs and players, and different types of play, like larping and tabletop?

Like I mentioned earlier, GMs have the daunting task of making sure everyone has an equitable amount of time in the spotlight, so you want to have a good sense of when you can put a pin in one scene and switch over to another. Improvisors develop a similar sense of knowing when to cut a scene so it ends on the right note. And during a show, that’s a shared responsibility–much like in a GM-less game, everyone should be conscious of when it’s time to see what a different character is up to.

I would say that any skills regarding character development are useful both at the table and in larping. There are so many tabletop games that have a line right on the character sheet for a defining belief or worldview, and you may even get a mechanical reward for expressing that belief in play. Similarly, regardless of what style of improv you’re doing (fast-paced comedy, thoughtful drama, or something in-between), it’s important to identify what matters to your character. That’s going to color their decisions in a scene. It doesn’t have to be something grand like “Blame the carpenter, not the tools,” your defining value could be “I love trains!” and that’s still going to lead to some really cool interactions. And whenever you’re feeling lost and not sure what your character would do, be it improv or gaming, you can fall back on that touchstone for guidance.

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Awesome, thanks so much, Karen, for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Improv for Gamers today!

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approachable theory: Post-Consent Safety Paradigm

The approachable theory logo, with the text "approachable theory" and an image of two six-sided dice with one pip showing, with a curved line below it to make a smile. The dice are black with cyan for the pip and yellow with black for the pip.

Hi all! Today I have a post from J Dymphna Coy on the subject of post-consent safety paradigm. For some advance clarity, consent is basically whether or not we grant permission for people to do a given thing. And if you click here, you can find some references for the safety tools mentioned. Otherwise, I think you should be able to follow the article pretty well! 

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A few months ago, I attended a session at RightsCon about Sidewalks Toronto. Sidewalks Toronto is a project by Alphabet (i.e., Google) to build an entirely new neighborhood in the city of Toronto from the ground up. They want to create a so-called “Smart City,” which uses various electronic surveillance tools in order to allocate resources more efficiently.

Naturally, the attendees of a digital rights conference cast a somewhat skeptical eye at this development. But one of the things I kept hearing about was “informed consent.” The most common question was some version of the following: “How can we make sure that people have informed consent about what kind of data is being collected about them?”

Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation brought up an interesting point: the business model of Google (and virtually every other Silicon Valley company) is to collect as much data as possible and then decide what to do with it all later. How can we even have informed consent, he said, when even Google doesn’t know what we’re consenting to?

Ultimately, my conclusion from the session was this: consent is ultimately meaningless in the context of the information economy. We cannot place the burden upon the populace as individuals to protect itself from Big Data; we must collectively assert our rights as a society and place the duty upon megacorporations to not exploit us.

a graphic representation of an index card with an X on it
That’s all well and good, you might say, but what does it have to do with gaming?
The inimitable Jess Hammer once mentioned that the X-Card has been dubbed a safety tool when it should more properly be considered a consent tool. The observation stuck with me, and I’ve been tooling it around in my head ever since.

So what is the difference between consent and safety?

Consent* happens before a game begins, or during a game. It involves mechanisms for determining the content of a game, or whether the game will continue at all. The X-Card, cut-and-brake**, and lines and veils are all good examples of consent tools.

Safety happens during or after a game. It involves mechanisms for directly attending to the emotional well-being of the players. A well-done debrief is a safety technique. De-roling is a safety technique. Anything that requires that players provide care (rather than merely asking if care is necessary) is a safety technique.

This is not to say that consent tools are bad, or should not be used. Quite the opposite is true! But they should be regarded for what they are, and used in a way that complements safety tools.

So why should I bring up Google’s data collection practices in this context? Surely a put-upon LARP organizer who already has to deal with the utterly thankless task of running a game does not have anything in common with Silicon Valley megacorporations. After all, the power relations are completely different. We can negotiate consent with another player of a game in a way that we can’t with a company like Apple. I can walk up to my fellow player and say, “Hey Fred, please don’t include bananas in this game, I have terrible fructiphobia!” By contrast, the notion that would could just write a letter that read, “Dear Apple, Please remove line 52 of this iTunes agreement because I don’t like it!” and expect results from it is absurd.

I bring up the comparison because much like Sidewalk Labs, your fellow players of a game have no idea what’s going to happen, and therefore any consent-based paradigm has limited utility at best. I bring it up because I want to emphasize the importance of safety and care, and to make sure that we’re not glossing over these things as designers and communities.

I’m not a big fan of making up categories of things for its own sake, or of having self-important internet arguments, or crushing my community with the tyranny of small differences. But I’ve heard the common complaint for years that safety mechanics don’t quite do what they’re advertised, and I hope that making the distinction between consent and safety might make something clearer in at least one person’s head, and maybe even make games a little better for the people who play them.

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*It is perhaps worth noting that consent originated as a legal term. It’s designed to protect various parties from indemnity or liability. While legal protections are important, focusing on what technically legal is not necessarily the best way to give guidance on how to navigate ways to avoid hurting or exploiting the people around you.

**The OK check-in straddles the line between what I’m deeming as “safety” versus “consent.” It resembles safety insofar as it places the onus on the entire community to ensure that that all of the participants are OK, rather than on other mechanics that place the onus on the affected person to tell the other persons in the scene to stop. I’m calling it “consent” here because it primarily involves whether or not care is necessary, as opposed to actually providing said care for the most part. But like all categories, the point is not to get into nitty-gritty arguments about where the boundaries are, unless you find that sort of thing really exciting (I find it tedious).

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Thank you so much to Dymphna for the excellent article! I hope you’ve all learned something a little new today. 🙂

P.S. If you’d like to write an article for approachable theory, email Brie at contactbriecs@gmail.com with a one paragraph pitch, your name, and your pronouns.

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Five or So Questions on Something is Wrong Here

Today I have an interview with Kira Magrann, talking about her new live action game Something Is Wrong Here, which is currently on Kickstarter! It’s a very different game, from what I can tell, and that makes it all the more interesting to me. I hope you like reading Kira’s responses!

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Kira, a dark haired nonbinary person with hair and clothing styled after a quintessential David Lynch character.

Tell me a little about Something is Wrong Here. What excites you about it?

Something Is Wrong Here is a roleplaying game inspired by the dark and uncanny work of David Lynch. It’s atmospheric, emotional, and personal, and THOSE are the things I’m most excited about in the game! A lot of Twin Peaks style games have been more like small town murder mysteries, which is great and fine, but my love of character relationships, dopplegangers, and personal horror is bleeding like, all over this game. I designed it to FEEL like a David Lynch gig more than follow the PLOT of one of his things. So its a pretty emotional experience, and I love that about it.

You talk about following David Lynch’s creative process in the Kickstarter video. What was the creative process? How did it affect the game in comparison to other processes you’ve used?


David Lynch’s creative process is very fine art and drawn from his subconscious. It’s so weird I love it, especially the fine art stuff. I’m a sucker for surrealist painters like Francis Bacon, who David Lynch’s uncanny films have often been compared to! He was a painter before a filmmaker, and he sees films like moving paintings. I see roleplaying games like fine art experiences, immersive and social performance art, so I really connect with this correlation of the cross contamination of art media. His ideas are drawn from meditation and dream images. He often says “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.” 
I thought I would experiment with this process while making a game inspired by his work, draw from my background as a fine artist as well as my own dreams and subconscious. I thought, what scares me the most in David Lynch things? What do I connect to the most? How can I make the narrative more from my queer non-binary perspective? I thought and dreamed and meditated on it for awhile. From there it was easy to focus on the identity issues that are so relevant in his work that I also deeply relate to. Issues that focus on multiple selves, and what we really need emotionally from relationships with people, and of course that feeling of creeping dread that I really do enjoy (I love being scared and always have).
Small cards with descriptive text on them, one titled "Optimistic innocent"
Character cards!
What is the structure of the game like, and how do players mechanically interact with the narrative?
The game’s structure is somewhat fluid in the plot sense, in that the plot isn’t the most important thing about the game. The characters are the focus, and the scenes that unfold are there just to focus on the each character’s personal feelings, and how their relationships with the other characters might influence their decisions in the final act. There are two acts basically, and the mechanics are card based, in addition to a Facilitator who helps frame scenes, keep time, and play music. The cards change and serve different functions as the game goes on. At first they are emotional prompts, then they are acting prompts that happen in scenes, and then finally they are cues to how to make decisions in a suddenly uncanny environment. The players are encouraged to dive deep into their character’s minds, and perhaps see correlations between those minds and their own. This, in addition to atmospheric props like a box and a mirror, create some deep emotional play. 

How did you playtest and develop a game with this kind of complexity – and how replayable is it, with playtest experience in mind?
I actually just playtested it as normal! It played excellent both at home, and at a convention. It’s oddly simple once it gets going actually, as the rules are easy and repetitive, like a ritual, and the facilitator really just needs to guide the scenes and the timing. It’s reasonably replayable, because the spoiler doesn’t reaaaaaaaally matter to the story, its more what happens to the characters and the decisions the players make that are the heart of the game. People could play different characters, or you could end up spending more or less time in different setting options, and I bet it would present a different emotional journey each time. Although it is designed to be a unique, one night experience!

How is Something is Wrong Here different from the works it reflects? I think you address this a little with looking for queer, nonbinary aspects – how do you think that shows most in the game?


Hahahaha well, I love David Lynch but he is an old white guy with some problematic ideas about gender and hardly represents people of color in his work, etc etc problematic faves. My work obviously attempts to diverge from those problematic aspects of his. This game doesn’t have representation in it per se… the character archetypes are very flexible and undefined so you can make them whatever you want them to be. The clearest setting elements are “America” and “a forest, a living room, a diner, a roadhouse” so you could imagine perhaps a small American town, but it doesn’t say where. SO really, the queerest and most non-binary parts of this game are about questioning dualities and pre-determined endings. Like, at the end, each character has a choice when they’re confronted by themselves. How can you confront yourself? Are parts of your identity different than other parts? Those are pretty essential to my personal non-binary thinking. My identity is complex, and made of fluid moving parts, and sometimes I analyze different parts of myself like different parts of a big whole, right. So those themes about the complexness of identity are really central to Something Is Wrong Here.
A box of cards labeled "Something is wrong here" with thematic art.
The mockup for the cards and box!
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Thanks, Kira, for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Something Is Wrong Here on Kickstarter today!

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Five or So Questions on Gather: Children of Evertree

Today I’ve got an interview with Stephen Dewey on Gather: Children of the Evertree, a freeform GM-less game currently on Kickstarter. Gather sounds like a really fascinating game and uses one of my favorite mechanics: asking questions. Check it out!

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a box and individual card with the text Gather: Children of the Evertree on it, fully illustrated.
Gather: Children of the Evertree box set.

Tell me a little about Gather: Children of the Evertree. What excites you about it?

Gather: Children of the Evertree is a worldbuilding game built around a freeform/LARP style of play. I call it a “roundtable LARP” because while you’ll be immersed and in-character from start to finish you’re still sitting around a table with friends while you play. In Gather, you take on the role of Speakers – each of you an elected representative chosen by your respective Kinship or community – that have crossed the vastness of the Evertree to attend an annual meeting known as the Gather. In theory, the Gather is a great idea. Every year the Kinships of the Evertree may send a Speaker to go the Gather and discuss the previous year, talk about shifts and changes, discuss the affairs of the world, and so on. However, the Gather is a meeting so saturated with laws and customs that trying to conduct this meeting is often frustrating, limited, and feels almost alien and otherworldly (to the players) in its execution. The rules that govern the Gather don’t only limit what you can talk about, but how you can talk about it.

Practically, the game is played out with a deck of cards. The game is GM-less, zero prep, you just draw the first card and dive right in. The cards explain how to play, provide a little bit of information about the world in which you live, and then present the heart of the game – a number of Question cards. You’ll draw a card, ask the question to the group, and then the answers to these questions form the “discussion” of the Gather. What’s exciting about this is that every question and answer helps to shape the world around this meeting. Not just in abstract ways, but in how the world relates to the Kinships gathered at the meeting. We see the world through their eyes, and that’s what shapes it. A few small pieces of setting at the start, along with the questions, provide the edges of the world, but you fill in the rest of it as you play – what’s going on in this world, how do these Kinships interact, what threats are out there, what has happened, what is going to happen. It’s all hashed out as you play, and presented as it relates to the people who live within the world. In that way, the world is built less by images on a map, and more by the relationships and connections that fill it, which means that the parts of the world that you’re going to really dig into and flesh out are the ones that you’re interested in, and that you want to see more of.

How did you write the question cards and keep them from being boring or repetitive?

Every time you play, you’re playing with twenty question cards. Twenty-one if you count “By what name is your Kinship called?” which is always the introductory example question given near the start of each session to get players accustomed to how questions are asked and answered. Of the twenty remaining questions, five are set. Essentially, how large is your Kinship, what do you have a lot of, what do you have a shortage of, how many have joined your Kinship this past year, and how many have left or died. Thematically, these five questions were the ones asked at the very first Gather ever to be held, and so they have been asked at every Gather since. Conveniently, these also help players setup the boundaries and pillars of the world and Kinships so we can see the stakes we’re working with.

Beyond these, there are fifteen additional question cards. There are pulled, at random, from a deck of fifty when you’re setting up for your session. Thematically, these are questions that have been asked at other Gathers that have come and gone in previous years, since each time the Gather meets a new question is added to the collection (more on that in a bit). This provides you with a lot of variation when you play. Every time you sit down for a session you could choose to revisit a Kinship you’ve played before, or make one entirely new, and this may change how you play and the interactions you have with others. However, changing what the questions are from session to session and, just as importantly, changing the order in which they’re asked will drastically alter how players approach the game, and the themes that are present at your table.

After these twenty question cards have been gone through, every player has a chance to ask one question of their own design to the group. Once these have all been asked and answered, a vote is held, and a single player-generated question is added permanently to the game for a chance to be asked at all future Gathers.

Tell me more about the Kinships. How are they made up? What meaning do they have?

Your Kinship is the community, family, guild, nation, or assembly that you have come to the Gather on behalf of. It’s your job to represent your Kinship as their Speaker. Every player takes the role of a Speaker, each of them from a different far-flung Kinship scattered across the Evertree. To take up the role of Speaker is a heavy responsibility because within the Gather you don’t even speak as an individual. Every word you speak carries the weight of your entire Kinship behind it, so it is tradition to hear Speakers use words like “we”, “us”, and “our” rather than “I” and “me”.

Kinships start as nothing more than a name. While you’re learning how to play the game players are given an introductory example question which is: “By what name is your Kinship called?” Everyone then has the opportunity to name their Kinship. You know a little bit about the world at that point, about the Evertree in which you reside, but beyond that the name of your Kinship is entirely up to you. You’ll announce it, and then write it down on a notecard for all to see. Maybe you’re The Branch Tenders. Maybe you’re The Forgotten. Maybe you’re the Astral Cardinals. Maybe you’re Those Whom The Rot Found. Whatever you’d like. After the Kinships are named however, and you start into the first few questions of the Gather, magic happens and these communities that didn’t even have a name fifteen minutes ago suddenly come to life. All of the Gathers questions relate back to these Kinships, how they’re doing, what they need, and what they have to offer, so every time someone answers a question you learn a little bit more about what that Kinship is, who they are, and how their little corner of the world works.

Video by Galactic Network talking with Stephen about Gather.


How does player interfacing with the layers of tradition and rules at the Gather influence storytelling?

To really explain this, let’s delve a bit into the mechanics behind the Gather, because how the “laws” of the Gather force you to engage in this meeting directly influence how storytelling takes shape. Once players have gotten past the setting cards and the “how to play” cards they’re left with the core of the game – the question cards. When a Speaker flips a question card they read it aloud. As an example, the question might be “Has war been brought upon you by another this past year, whether by words, stones, powder, or hex?” All of the Speakers then consider their answer to this question, and at the moment the Speaker who read the question discards the card all of the Speakers answer the question on behalf of their Kinship in unison. This unified answering is a critical component of the laws that govern the Gather as a sign of respect to all Kinships. No one Kinship’s voice is more important than another. Every Speaker begins the game with three tokens, and after this cacophonous answer is given to a question, Speakers may offer their tokens to their fellow Speakers, offering them to anyone they’d like to hear more from. This could be if you heard someone give an intriguing answer through the din, or for any number of other reasons. Once all of these tokens have been handed out, if you’ve been granted such a token (and have accepted it) you have the opportunity to state your answer once more. This time, you’ll say it by yourself, and may elaborate on it if you’d like.

For example, if you heard me say something about hexes amid the united answer, you might offer me a token to hear more because hey, hexes are cool. If accepted I would repeat my answer and elaborate on it. For instance, I might say “Yes, a war of hexes. We believe the Rotchildren have laid a hex upon our crops. They do not grow, they only crumble and spoil in the fields.” Maybe I’ve just called out another one of the Kinships at the table, or maybe I’ve invented a new one. Now that I’ve given my answer, any Speaker may offer me another token to speak further, but these must be paired with a question. If I accept the token I must answer the question. So, you might ask me: “Believe? Do you have any proof that it was the Rotchildren?” If I accept your token, I’ll respond. “Technically, no. But we know the ways of the Rotchildren. This is how they work. Everywhere they travel in the Evertree they bring destruction with them. They have always looked on our lands with envy.” Again, any Speaker might offer me a token with a new question, and this will continue until either all questions have been asked and answered or until I refuse to answer a question. Perhaps the Speaker for the Rotchildren offers me a token and asks “And who exactly did that land of yours belong to before you stole it away?” If I hold up my hand and refuse to answer (sometimes a far more dramatic choice than answering) my time to speak is done and we move on to the next Speaker who was given one of the initial tokens.

While everything outside of the question cards and the initial setting information is entirely improvised and created by the players during play, this playstyle of questions and answers creates built-in prompts for storytelling to build off of. You’re never presented with a blank canvas and told to “go!” instead you’re guided more easily into collaborative storytelling by building off of each other’s prompts, questions, and answers.

What themes and setting elements do you think Gather does best, and what unusual possibilities are there to explore in the worldbuilding?

The structure of Gather’s gameplay is very similar to the Evertree itself. A good way to think about the game is to think about the question cards and the answers given in unison as the trunk of the tree. These are the solid foundation of the world. A question tells us things about the world, and the answers tell us things about the Kinships. From there, players have the ability to go down these tangents of questions and answers, literally off-shooting from the trunk like branches. These branching paths of answers, questions, more answers, and more questions allow you to follow these paths of story and worldbuilding as far as you’d like, letting players focus in on what is cool to them and really digging into the threads that excite everyone, before coming back to the trunk and shooting off onto the next branch. Finally, when all the branches you want to explore have been explored, we move up the tree to the next piece of the trunk.

I know that freeform, live action, or improv-heavy games can be intimidating to more traditional tabletop groups, but as with many of my games I have endeavored to make Gather a more guided experience. It’s like an improv with a safety net. Even if you’re not quick on your feet with creating answers that doesn’t matter as much because you can just speak quietly and let you half-answer get lost in the din. Not interested in exploring your thread further? You can always reject tokens. There are a lot of options here even for people who may not be as comfortable spinning worlds off the top of their heads.

What’s especially fun to explore in the worldbuilding is that there are very few boundaries. This world can truly be what you’d like it to be. And even if you play the same Kinship session after session, that doesn’t mean that anything about the world or the Kinships within it will stay the same. Are there societies and cities in the Evertree’s branches? Are you human? Are you a nest of birds? Nearly anything is possible, so the possibilities from session to session are endless. I anticipate that this is a game that will fuel fantastic, terrifying, and beautiful concepts for Kinships that will keep you wanting to come back to the table with it to try out your next great idea.

The words "Gather: Children of the Evertree" in white over an image of yellow-green leaves on dark brown trees, looking up through them into the blue sky.
Lovely image of the Gather: Children of the Evertree title.

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Thank you so much for the interview, Stephen! I hope you all enjoyed hearing about Gather: Children of the Evertree and that you’ll check it out on Kickstarter today!


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approachable theory: Types of Fun

The approachable theory logo, with the text "approachable theory" and an image of two six-sided dice with one pip showing, with a curved line below it to make a smile. The dice are black with cyan for the pip and yellow with black for the pip.
The approachable theory logo.

Hi all! Today I have a post by Selene Tan on Types of Fun! Selene is a game designer who is always up for a design competition, and writes about games and GMing. This post is about types of fun – the ways we enjoy games – using a variety of existing theory and talking about how we can understand those things in our own experiences. Selene said she loves “interacting with dynamic systems that produce unexpected and inspiring outcomes, and it’s even better with friends!” So let’s see what she has to say!

I ask that you remember the requests I put forth about treating my writers with respect and understand that a lot of game design theory is still growing, so definitions can be a little fluid. 

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A table with assorted playing components, dice and playing cards, and play sheets and mats.
A collection of materials for a game of Roar of Alliance (Game and photo by John Sheldon.) during play. 

Whether you call it “fun,” “enjoyment,” or “involvement”: when you’re playing the right game, there’s something that makes you want to play it, and keep playing. But not all games are fun in the same way.

The fun of tactical miniatures combat in D&D 4th edition is different than the fun of a collaborative story/map-making game like The Quiet Year. There are many types of fun, and while people have preferences, none is intrinsically better than any other.
We can sort these different types of fun into categories. Sorting and labeling experiences is a good way to analyze them, and analyzing game experiences is a key skill for game design. There are schemes that classify games or players, and schemes that classify fun directly. I find schemes that classify players reductive. As a player, I enjoy many kinds of games, depending on my mood and situation. Classifying games is more useful, but again, most games combine different types of fun. I prefer to classify fun because as a designer, those are my building blocks. The types of fun I want to focus on are a key part of my design vision.
It’s worth comparing several schemes to learn what works for you. The main factors that I consider when deciding on a scheme to use are:
  1. how applicable it is to the kinds of games I want to classify. If there are a lot of experiences not covered by the scheme, some of the types are unused, or most experiences go under one type, the scheme is a bad fit.
  2. how easy it is to remember. If there are too many categories, or the names are confusing, it’s hard to remember the scheme.
  3. how easy it is to apply. The categories should clearly describe what experiences belong to them, and most experiences should clearly belong to one or two categories, without confusion.
I’m including links to several others, but here are three schemes with different approaches that I find
useful for analyzing RPGs.

Schemes of Fun

8 Kinds of Fun

My personal favorite scheme, and the one that started me on categorizing fun, is 8 Kinds of Fun, originally described by Marc LeBlanc as part of the Mechanics/Dynamics/Aesthetics framework (overview).
Chris Sniezak at Gnome Stew has written in more detail about the 8 Kinds of Fun for RPGs. Here’s a quick summary of the types:
  • Sensation: Game as sense-pleasure. e.g. playing with miniatures and detailed terrain, background music, or props; drawing; manipulating dice.
  • Fantasy: Game as make-believe. e.g. exploring a world from the point of view of a character. This is the most “RPG-y” kind of fun.
  • Narrative: Game as unfolding story. e.g. playing through a story with cool set-piece encounters, crafting a story together with other players.
  • Challenge: Game as obstacle course. e.g. dungeon crawls or combat-focused games, any encounter where the point is for players to overcome it with skill.
  • Fellowship: Game as social framework. Playing as an excuse to hang out with friends. e.g. Kaleidoscope, where you “remember” (invent) a movie with friends and discuss it.
  • Discovery: Game as uncharted territory. e.g. sandbox games, hex crawls, and dungeon crawls.
  • Expression: Game as soap box or self-discovery. e.g. drawing your character or other game elements, creating detailed characters.
  • Submission: Game as mindless pastime. In RPGs, this is usually combined with Fellowship. e.g. Kick-in-the-door play where the goal is to defeat baddies without thinking too hard.
Pros

Classifies types of fun, not games or players
Flexible enough to apply to RPGs, board games, and video games
The eight categories cover a wide range while being easy to remember
Cons

The categories have a video game bias
Some of the word choices seem awkward (submission, soap box)
A table with assorted playing components, dice and playing cards, and play sheets and mats.
I used Roar of Alliance because it has a variety of materials and two parts of play, with strategic combat and “downtime” roleplaying making up the game – both could be very different kinds of fun. (Photo by John Sheldon.)

Quantic Foundry Gamer Motivations

Another scheme is Quantic Foundry’s Gamer Motivations. It classifies reasons that people play games, where each reason is a type of fun. There are two schemes, one for video games and one for board games. The video games scheme has 12 motivations in 6 groups, while the board games scheme has 11 motivations in 4 groups.

These are the video game groupings:
  • Action, containing excitement and destruction, e.g. fast-paced combat like Savage Worlds, or causing mayhem in towns.
  • Social, containing competition and community, e.g. combat in Agon, where whoever deals the killing blow gets more Glory; most D&D play where the party works together; or D&D Adventurer’s League play, where you’re part of a larger community.
  • Mastery, containing challenge and strategy, e.g. dungeons, combat, and character build optimization.
  • Achievement, containing completion and power, e.g leveling up, stomping enemies, and completing quests.
  • Creativity, containing discovery and design, e.g. hexcrawls and sandboxes, creating characters, or coming up with unusual uses for items and spells.
  • Immersion, containing fantasy and story, e.g. speaking and playing in character, following elaborate pre-planned plots, or playing dynamic characters that create emergent plots.
Pros

Data-driven. Quantic Foundry used a combination of survey questions about preferences and favorite games to create clusters of users, then labeled those clusters to get the 11-12 motivations.
Comprehensive. It’s hard to think of anything not covered.
Cons

Since the schemes are for video and board games, some categories are barely used while others are heavily used for RPGs.
It’s hard to remember all 11-12 motivations.
The category “Immersion” has a different meaning than its usual meaning in RPGs

Threefold Model and GNS

The third scheme is the Threefold Model (Drama, Simulation, and Game), including its descendant, Gamism/Narrativism/Simulationism (GNS). The Threefold Model and related models classify play styles or modes by what aspect of RPGs is their highest priority.
Gamism is a play style where the highest priorities are challenge and competition. One example is the Dungeon Crawl Classics “character funnel,” where each player starts with multiple Level 0 characters and tries to keep at least one of them alive to Level 1.
Narrativism/Drama is a play style where the highest priority is exploring theme through character. Different characters address the theme in different ways, and highlight it through decisions. For example, every playbook (character class) in Apocalypse World has a unique take on surviving in the wilderness, from solving everything with guns to building a community.
Simulationism/Explorative is a play style where the highest priority is to experience a world or characters that have deep, consistent internal logic. Investigating crimes in Mutant City Blues, where the Quade Diagram describes how mutant powers relate to each other and therefore what kind of mutant criminal you’re looking for, is an example of simulationism/explorative play.
Pros
Created for RPGs
Only three categories to remember
Cons
Lots of arguments and confusion about the definitions of each category
Ignores some common types of fun, e.g. Sensation or Creativity: Design

Other Schemes

Using Schemes

One way to use a classification scheme is to analyze play. I’ve adapted Nathan Paoletta’s Two List Method for this.

Make a list of all the things you like and dislike when playing RPGs.

Then play an RPG session with that list in mind. Afterwards, write down a new list of things you liked and disliked from that session. If you won’t get to play for a while, make a list from your most recent session, but it’s best to do this while it’s fresh in your mind.

Pick a scheme and classify your list items. For each like, write down the type of fun. For each dislike, write down the type of fun it interferes with, and if applicable, the type of fun it promotes. Don’t worry about forcing things to fit: it’s okay to have some lone items. But if there are a lot, you might want to pick a different classification scheme!

For example:

I like to play characters that help people. (Fantasy, Expression)

I dislike games where everyone plays backstabbing schemers who are out to get each other. (Inteferes with: Fellowship, Submission. Promotes: Challenge, Expression.)

You’ll see trends arise from the lists. Some categories will have more items than others, and some reasons will keep showing up.

The categories that keep showing up in your likes are the types of fun you enjoy the most. You have the most experience playing and creating that type of fun, and the strongest intuition for them. You’ll also find complements: groups of types that keep showing up together, or types that show up occasionally on your list of likes but not in your dislikes. The types that show up on your dislikes list interfere with or detract from the types you enjoy.

When you’re designing a game or wrestling with a mechanic, ask yourself what types of fun you’re aiming for. If the mechanic doesn’t seem to be working, is it encouraging a different type of fun than the one you’re aiming for? Is it related to a fun that interferes with your goal? If you have a design that feels like it’s missing something, try adding one of the complementary fun types.

If you want to read more about classifying and analyzing fun, here are some resources:

A table with assorted playing components, dice and playing cards, and play sheets and mats.
Roar of Alliance is a fun game to play, and now after reading Selene’s article, I can’t stop wondering how someone would evaluate the game in regards to the type of fun – what type of fun is your favorite game?

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Thank you so much to Selene for the excellent article and for making the theories of fun a little more approachable! I learned from reading this article, so I hope you did, too! Please share and keep checking back for more approachable theory!

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Leading with Class

Hello all,

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!

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I love you and I adore you updated!

I love you and I adore you, my queer love letter writing game, is now fancier and up on https://briecs.itch.io/i-love-you-and-i-adore-you!

the very simple cover for I love you and I adore you

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