Today’s What Makes a Good Player? feature is with Danella Georgiev. Danella talks about genre preference and character relationships.
—
What do you try to do most often while playing games to enhance your experience and the experience of others?
As important as it is to try to progress the story, I’ve always found it’s more fun — for me as well as others — when we hang around between plot points and trade in-character banter. It doesn’t need to be long, but a few quips help pace the scene so it’s not just action-action-action go a long way. This also builds relationships between the characters… which is really what makes a game an RPG and not just a numeric dungeon crawl.
A lot of times it’ll draw out recurring themes and comments from individual characters and develop their personal subplots. It gives us all a sense of accomplishment to look back at the early “episodes” and see the changes.
Do you use any specific play techniques (narrative tools, improv tools, etc.) in your play sessions?
I haven’t formally studied creative writing or acting, so I’m not sure, but I do remember (and took to heart) something from my high school improv class: Always Say Yes.
That doesn’t mean your character has to agree with every single plan, but even their protests and complaints should try to highlight an alternative solution or motivation to complete a task. If you spend the whole session bickering about why you shouldn’t do task the NPC assigned, it’s a waste. It’s always more fun and more growth to see a reluctant undertaking. Part of this is on the GM, as well; the best quests are ones that are motivated by more than one reason.
How often do you like to game, and what is most comfortable for you to maintain good energy in games?
Most of my group is made of busy adults with a low energy level, so as fun as it is to be in a group of nerds, I find anything over three hours a session to be draining. We’re fairly distractable as it is, so if we go longer than that, we’ll get really wishy-washy. A few years ago, we had one that was 4-5 hours and it was fun but my butt started to hurt.
I’d love to play a second session a week but we’re all really busy. #goals, though.
What kind of games do you feel you are most comfortable with and enjoy the most?
Not sure whether this is a mechanics or genre question, but I like my fantasy and sci-fi very much. It’s where I live. It allows you to dress it up with humor, drama, romance, horror, everything. There’s a lot of settings to choose from or a lot of places to draw inspiration from if you’re going from scratch. Any opportunity to delve into the things original writers/showrunners never did is one I try to seize.
This makes FATE my favorite system to work with because it’s so flexible and adaptable.
Can you share a special experience in a game where you felt like you did a good job playing your part in the overall story and game?
I try to experiment with different roles (in combat and in social interactions), but my favorite was a pissed off elf I played in my very first tabletop. Despite being very contrary, combative, and oppositional, and despite me being new to the experience, I think I nailed the sweet spot between annoying, useful, and thought-provoking. Mechanically, she was great in a fight and did a lot of damage. But I think her presence changed the nature of the game from an adventure to a story about the dynamics of family and upbringing.
—
Thanks to Danella for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading.
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends! If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.
Today I have a brief interview with Marissa Kelly on the Bluebeard’s Bride RPG, currently on Kickstarter. I played an early version of Bluebeard’s Bride, and a second session as well, and really enjoyed it, so I hope you all enjoy reading about it and check out the Kickstarter.
From the Kickstarter:
Bluebeard’s Bride is an investigatory horror tabletop roleplaying game for 3-5 players, written and designed by Whitney “Strix” Beltrán, Marissa Kelly, and Sarah Richardson, and based on the Bluebeard fairy tale.
In this game you and your friends explore Bluebeard’s home as the Bride, creating your own beautifully tragic version of the dark fairy tale. Investigate rooms, discover the truth of what happened, experience the nightmarish phantasmagoria of this broken place, and decide whether or not you are a faithful or disloyal bride.
—
The story of Bluebeard is not commonly known in modern fairy tales, and is definitely not a media favorite. What inspired you to use this specific fairy tale to make a game?
The idea came from Sarah and Strix at the Hacking as Women event. As their coach, I was excited to hear that the fairy tale lent itself so well to the PBtA framework. It seemed like a great way to frame an elegant horror game without getting bogged down by too many preconceived ideas about what the player experience should be.
Tell me a little about the design process. I played the game at an earlier stage, and a second time a while later, but I haven’t seen the final product. What iterations did you have to go through to make the game an experience true to your intentions?
The game has certainly gone through many iterations. A lot of trimming, gutting, and trial and error. One of the biggest changes we went through was shifting a large part of the game to a diceless mechanic. I felt we had been running up against a wall with the Maiden moves, but eventually (with the help of a wonderful group of playtesters) we found a solution. This shift feels to me like a nod to old ghost stories that influence so much horror we all know and love.
Bluebeard’s Bride has a tendency (in my experience) to touch on some really intense, and sometimes difficult, topics (including domestic abuse). What safety measures do you have in place for the game, and how are you preparing the game materials to address those things respectfully? Yep! This horror game can touch on all of those things, so the game has advice, tips, and rules for helping the players and Groundskeeper manage any real out-of-character conflicts that might arise. For example, we use a variant of the X-card developed by John Stavropoulos that promotes self-care and dispels the expectation that anyone at the table will have to be a mind reader.
How does Bluebeard’s Bride encourage the players to work together to tell a story, while allowing conflict between the parts of the Bride’s psyche? It helps that we trapped all the players in the body of one woman! We have made space for disagreement within the Bride’s own mind. If a player has the Bride act in a way that one player didn’t agree with, the Ring mechanic allows them to take control and guide her actions when it is their turn.
When all is said and done, what game elements do you think help the most to guide the story through horror and twisted narrative to its inevitable – and hopefully satisfying – conclusion? We have tools called Room Threats and Groundskeeper Moves that help guide the players through consistent bouts of horror. These Threats and Moves point at one of the cores of horror – that of personal, intimate fears. We also baked the conclusion of the fairy tale into the game so player’s choices will directly impact the telling of their tale. —
Thanks to Marissa for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading and get the chance to check out Bluebeard’s Bride on Kickstarter!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Today’s interview is with Darren Watts for his project Golden Age Champions, a setting book for the Champions superheroic game using the generic Hero system. It’s currently on Kickstarter, waiting for you to check it out! Let’s see what Darren had to say about his project.
—
Tell me a little about Golden Age Champions. What excites you about it?
Golden Age Champions is a setting book for Champions, the superhero game using the generic Hero System that’s been around in various editions since 1981. Specifically, it describes the Champions Universe (the modern version of which I co-wrote with Steve Long back in 2002) of 1938 to 1950, but more importantly it teaches GMs and players about the genre of Golden Age superheroing. We go into extensive discussion of the tropes, the styles of play, and the kinds of stories you can use these building blocks to tell at your table.
The Golden Age is at the same time similar and alien to fans of modern superheroing. Many of your favorite characters were created then: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America. But the Golden versions of those characters aren’t exactly quite the same as the ones you know. Many of the assumptions we make about how superheroes “work” were set back then, but again there are plenty of concepts that will be brand new to today’s gamers and fans. There are hundreds of superheroes in the period you’ve never heard of, and some of them are downright boggling.
The book is also a lot about how to run historical long-term campaigns. I’ve run several for years at a time, starting well before the war and carrying all the way through and past it. How do superhumans go to war? How do simple characters grow and change over time? How do we play with these amazing, imagination-charged concepts that don’t quite fit modern sensibilities? Indeed, how do we address the differences between then and today; both the social ones (the unfortunately-all-too-common racism and sexism, the ever-present shadow of the war) and the more technical ones (why do these characters keep splitting up?) that make for rough gaming at today’s table?
For some background, can you tell me about the game system Golden Age Champions is a supplement for?
Champions runs on the Hero System, a generic point-buy system that first debuted in 1981 and originally created by Steve Peterson and George McDonald. It’s famously crunchy, but most of the crunch is in character creation. It’s designed with a great many “adjustable settings” so that it can simulate a wide range of genres and play styles. Most Hero books focus on a specific setting or genre, so it scores very high on the “simulationist” axis. There have been six editions over the years, and I was president of the company for the last two of them.
The Champions Universe is the long-running fictional superhero setting for Champions. It’s also the basis for the MMO Champions Online, who are the actual IP holders and our business partners. I’ve kind of been the keeper of continuity since I wrote most the 5th Ed Champions Universe back in 2002.
Tell me some exciting things about running long-term campaigns! What kind of information do you have in the book for GMs to make them happen?
Well, the first thing you have to do is get great players! Or teach them to be great, I suppose, but I’ve been very lucky over the years. Then, you have to get them invested in the setting, which needs to be both deep enough to hold their interest and yet open enough that they have room to contribute and take some ownership. In this case I follow Ken Hite’s truism, “nothing is as interesting as the real world.” World War II is such a fascinating period, and I try very hard to bring it alive for the players. In my campaigns we have a very strong sense of time and place, moving month by month through the war and letting the great narrative of the actual history inform everything we do.
With superheroes in particular, you have to be careful. Players coming to a GA setting are presumably at least somewhat interested in the war itself from a historical basis, which means among other things they want the setting to remain based in the historical reality. They want to see Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Berlin, etc. and participate in it all on some level. But with characters who are too powerful, there’s also a strong pull to the question of “why didn’t Superman and Green Lantern and the Spectre, etc., all just fly to Tokyo on December 8th and stomp it flat, and while they’re at it take out Berlin on the 9th?” The tension created by those answers is interesting and fertile, I think.
How did you approach the sometimes-tough topics of racism and sexism in the era? Did you address any other issues like homophobia?
Well, I stay aware that I’m telling superhero stories, and so most of my characters are broad and the heroes in particular are idealized. But on the other hand I don’t want to ignore the range of people’s experiences or to whitewash history. My game includes female characters who show considerably more agency and breadth than most period comics (Wonder Woman as a notable exception!), and I have heroes who are POCs which were vanishingly rare in the period. As idealized heroes, we kind of default to an ahistorical sense of social justice because that’s just nicer to play. However, we do talk about the sexism and particularly the racism that motivated a lot of the horror on all sides of the war (and the US was a terrible offender itself- one of the sample heroes is a nisei from California who is fighting for a country who is currently imprisoning his family.) As superhero stories do, we can also talk in grand allegory- the Atlanteans are terribly prejudiced against airbreathers, and “lander” is one of the nastiest words in their vocabularies. I haven’t specifically talked much about homophobia in the book, but one character is clearly gay and again, in this idealized setting, his teammates know and help him keep it from becoming public.
[Blogger note: POC stands for people of color, just in case you didn’t know!]
Can you offer some of the concepts you think will be new to gamers and fans today, to help players and GMs understand what they might be getting into?
I’m not sure there’s anything “brand new” in either the rules or setting- I’m trying to reintroduce a quite old thing, actually, as far as the genre goes. If you’ve never been exposed to the sheer joy in goofy creativity of the period comics, then I hope to show you what’s lovable about it. Comics at the time were initially intended for small children, and it took publishers a few years to realize the size of their adult audience- Captain Marvel was the best selling periodical at military PX’s, beating out magazines like Time and Life!
—
Golden Age Championssounds pretty cool! There’s a lot to think about in the world of superheroes, and it looks like Darren has done a fair amount of that. Check out the game on Kickstarter, and share this interview to spread the word if you like it!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Today I have an interview with Ben Robbins on the game Follow, which is currently on Kickstarter. You may have heard about Followon Google+ or other blog posts, but I hope you’ll find something interesting in his responses below. Enjoy!
—
Tell me a little about Follow. What excites you about it?
Follow is a deceptively simple game: you pick a quest, make a group of characters to tackle it, then play and see what happens. The quests provided cover a variety of stories, from slaying a dragon, to colonizing a planet, to getting a candidate elected — anything where people are working together to accomplish a goal.
I sit down and play with random groups all the time — many strangers and many people who have no experience with this kind of game — so I’m keenly aware of the challenges of teaching games and getting people on the same fictional page. I made Follow to be a game you could whip out when you wanted to just sit down and get straight to the good stuff. I wanted it to reduce the barrier between wanting to play and actually doing it.
People have joked that getting our characters to work together in the quest reflects what’s happening at the table — trying to get the players to work together to play a game — and they’re exactly right.
Can you tell me about the mechanical and structural setup for a standard game of Follow?
Quest templates provide the framework for your game. You pick one and that walks you through setting up your situation, establishing what makes your quest difficult, and creating the fellowship of characters that will try to tackle it.
Play centers around challenges. Each is a chapter of the quest and establishes the next step the fellowship needs to take to move closer to their goal. We play scenes to see how the fellowship deals with the challenge (and each other) and at the end of each challenge we draw stones to see whether we succeeded or failed, plus any fallout to the fellowship. We might lose characters or even be betrayed by someone in the fellowship.
What about Kingdom and Microscope prepared you for designing Follow, and what do you think is really different about the game?
I play my own games over and over again, both before and after I release them, so I really get to know all their strengths and weaknesses. I try not to harbor any illusions about them.
Because I play pickup games a lot, I’m very focused on the game as a set of instructions that someone at the table is trying to process and execute in real-time. Anything that slows that process down or requires a lot of page flipping or causes confusion can really kill the fun. Microscope is conceptually a very unusual game, but put a lot of work into making the process of play easy and intuitive. Simple actually takes a lot more work than complex.
Thematically, Follow shares some similarities to Kingdom. I love Kingdom, and it makes incredibly good stories at the table, but I’d be the first to admit that there are a lot of rules to absorb for a one-shot. There’s a pay-off but there’s definitely a learning curve. With Follow I tried a very different approach to capture the “united but divided” feeling of Kingdom but make it much simpler and easier to play.
How did you go about designing the game for replayability? It’s a huge challenge. What keeps players from getting bored or feeling like they’re just running over the same ground?
Replayability is a huge priority for me. I really can’t overstate that. Every time you learn a new game, you spend minutes or hours just processing rules. Playtime is precious and rare, so if you don’t play that game a bunch you’re getting a minimal return on that time investment.
To maximize replayability, I start with a structural concept instead of something specific to a setting or genre. Microscope makes histories. It doesn’t matter if it’s science fiction or a zombie apocalypse or the Wild West. Kingdom is about communities. Any kind of community works, because the game focuses on how people interact and influence their community, rather than a particular type of organization. Same with Follow: “Working together to accomplish a goal” applies to a vast range of situations.
The trick (I think) is to really drill down to the heart of the structure or pattern you’re modeling. If you get that right, it works. Like the power/perspective/touchstone breakdown in Kingdom: once you see that distinction you start to notice it in organizations all around you. I want my model to feel like something that’s true, rather than an artifact of the game.
Do you have any mechanics or tools in place to help guide content and keep players comfortable as part of Follow?
When I started running Story Games Seattle back in 2010 and really started gaming with strangers all the time, I included an abbreviated version of Lines & Veils from Ron Edwards’ game Sorcerer as part of the welcome spiel at the start of every meetup. We’ve done that ever since, though we recently switched from calling it “the Veil” to “the X” (as in, “let’s X that out”), partially to eliminate some confusion about how we differed from the original Veil concept but also to make the phrase more similar to the X-card, which had gained a lot of popularity — they’re not exactly identical, but if you’ve used one you’ll go “ah, got it!” when you encounter the other.
An important part of the X is that it is *not* part of the rules of the game. It trumps the rules of any game you’re playing. That’s a very important distinction, because we’ve seen cases where players mistakenly thought they couldn’t X something out because of a particular game they were in. So I think the proper place for these kind of overarching “social contract” rules is sidebars that explain that, and also encourage using them in *any* game you play.
Honestly I think we’ve only scratched the surface of this kind of communication & consent in role-playing games. We’re way behind where we should be after decades of role-playing. And as a designer I’m a little concerned that if I codify something it will be antiquated or even seem counterproductive to me by the time the game is a year old. It’s not such a big deal to have out-dated mechanics for stabbing dragons in your game, but giving out-dated advice about how to handle player discomfort is potentially much more serious. At least that’s how I see it. It’s a discussion and exploration that’s happening right now. The technology is evolving as we speak.
—
Thanks so much to Ben for participating in the interview! I hope you all check outFollow on Kickstarter, and that you enjoyed reading Ben’s responses.
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Today’s What Makes a Good Player? feature is with Kate Bullock. Kate talks about gaming regularly and Powered by the Apocalypse games!
—
What do you try to do most often while playing games to enhance your experience and the experience of others?
I try really hard to find out what people are doing with their characters, what they want in terms of challenges or moments of shining, and I try to give it to them. I try to put my own character out there so that I can help invest in other people’s stories and help them shine. To enhance my own experience, I invest in other players’ characters and so my story is impacted by their story doing well or thriving. I also try to go for what’s good for their characters’ stories over mine, but I find that very satisfying.
Do you use any specific play techniques (narrative tools, improv tools, etc.) in your play sessions?
I ask very pointed questions, which is a big part of the PbtA systems. I’ll pause to even ask “What do you want out of this?” so I can help facilitate that into happening. I’ll also do some ground work ahead of time by finding points of story where I can push as my character and come to the table prepared to engage the other characters with new problems or ways to bring forward more story. I also use the X-Card at everything because I find it lets me dig deeper and play darker because there’s a safety hatch in play.
How often do you like to game, and what is most comfortable for you to maintain good energy in games?
I play campaign games anywhere from 2 – 6 times a week. I game regularly on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and some Sundays. On Mondays I usually blog or podcast. I love gaming. It’s part of my life blood. The best way for me to maintain good energy is to stay engaged and listen and ask questions. I find emotionally investing myself helps a lot and eating good food and having good snacks and lots of water. I also spend a lot of time talking to people online about what they want to see so I have cool ideas before I get to the table, but I’m not beholden to them. I’m happy to let the fiction do its own thing and follow it where it may lead.
What kind of games do you feel you are most comfortable with and enjoy the most?
I play for emotionally intense experiences, most often of the sad and dramatic kind. This has lead me down the PbtA road towards Urban Shadows and Monsterhearts a lot. I also really enjoy story games, like Before the Storm, Fall of Magic, Summerland, and a few others. Anything that addresses emotional feedback and payoff. I’m comfortable with almost any game, as I’ve played a lot, but the minute things get very detailed and simulationist, or have a huge expansive world that requires a certain degree of canon knowledge, I’m out.
Can you share a special experience in a game where you felt like you did a good job playing your part in the overall story and game?
Hm. Most of my special experiences are as a GM. But I was playing Monsterhearts a few years ago as the mortal. It was my “job” to make people feel like monsters, but also feel human at the same time and offer salvation and redemption with kindness and love. I had been terrified when all of my friends became their darkest selves, so I made a deal with a fae redcap to let him out of the fae realm if he gave me fairy dust that would remove the monster from my friends. And then I proceeded to find all my monster friends, whom were all guys who had some interest in my mortal character, and blow dust on them, at time when a murderous fae was on the loose (oops). My lover got out of his darkest self, found me, we had sex after saying I love you, and he became the demon darkest self once again. It caused a lot of drama, a lot of issues, and drove story in a great way that included everyone. I dug it.
—
Thanks so much to Kate for participating! I hope you all enjoyed reading.
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends! If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.
In today’s post, I’ll be talking about my experience at Metatopia 2016, the event I mentioned in my previous post about being a con playtester. This will not be an actual play report, but will include discussion of the games I played and a little about my own time there. I will not be mentioning everyone by name because some of you I don’t know your names, some of them I will have trouble remembering, and some of everything is lost to the winds.
First and foremost, thank you so much to my fellow attendees, and to the event organizers, for making my experience excellent, and for being supportive for me in my time of grief. Going to the convention was a challenge for many reasons, and it was even harder going with the recent loss of my grandmother. You all made my time much, much easier. So, thank you.
Some awesome people.
To the timeline!
I arrived Thursday evening to a bustling lobby and plenty of friendly faces. I mostly just planted in one spot and sat that evening, chatting with friends, and meeting new people who like my blog (hiii!!!). It was a good night to not worry about things. I set up plans for the next day, and conked right out eventually.
Friday morning I woke up earlier than I tend to like for a breakfast with Darcy Ross, who is awesome and you should definitely keep an eye out for the work she’s doing. We were joined by none other than Ron Edwards, the designer of Sorcerer (among others) who also coined GNS theory, who I’d never met.
As with most legacy designers, I was a little apprehensive, since I’m still new and I have a lot of Opinions and Thoughts. My fears were rapidly dashed because Ron was a pleasure to talk to, and initially he, Darcy, and me talked about the game design landscape, tools for content control like Lines and Veils and Script Change (the latter of which both Ron and Darcy said wonderful things about and made me so happy to hear), and what we were playing. After Darcy left, Ron and I continued to the Big Board and further discussed social issues in games, feminism, and a number of other things. It was pretty great! I was happy to meet Ron and I’m hoping I remember as much as I can of what he shared with me, and I hope he finds what I had to say just as valuable.
I didn’t have a game until later, so I mostly just bounced around until then, meeting new friends and seeing older ones, and geared up for Glenn Given‘s Something is Out There, a storytelling game told in third-person inspired by shows like Stranger Things and the movie IT, where young kids are the ones who have to deal with the spooky scary things happening in town. Glenn had asked if I’d play over Twitter, so I luckily got in to try it out.
more here>>>>
Glenn doing prep.
It uses a fun tile-and-dice-based mechanic, somewhat board-game like in mechanism but very narrative otherwise. From the description:
[Something is Out There]…and only you can stop it. Something is Out There is a cooperative storygame of coming-of-age horror in the vein of Stranger Things, IT and Monster Squad. As childhood friends you are the only ones who can defend your community against an unearthly terror stalking your town. For fans of Fall of Magic, Companion’s Tale & The Quiet Year.
The character actions are shared, which makes the story really flow differently. One thing I particularly liked is character creation, where you describe your best childhood friend, and choose their three main traits, then reverse something about them (gender, race, orientation, behaviors). It made the characters both memorable and interesting, which can be hard to do (for me) with children as characters.
In case you were wondering, the baddie was a giant, irradiated, star-nosed mole. We did win after someone blew themselves to allow another character to take out the monster.
The following evening I was lucky enough to have dinner with Kimberley Lam and her wife, along with my husband. Kim’s current project is Blood is Thick, a live-action game about the Cambodian genocide, described on the Metatopia site:
One family struggles with unresolved pain years after the ousting of the Khmer Rouge’s brutal regime by Vietnamese invaders in 1979. “Blood is Thick” is a small group LARP about struggling with the lingering impact of genocide on a family where victims and aggressors reside side by side.
I have heard only good things about the playtest experiences, which is pretty great. Kim has done a lot of research for the project, and I hope this game goes off well.
This weekend carried one unsurprising thing: I would be playing a game by Will Hindmarch. The surprising thing is that somehow I managed to land in three Will Hindmarch games over the weekend: Databank, Adventurous, and Chroma (a follow-up to Always/Never/Now). Will is a great designer, and I always enjoy his game master style and his games, so I’d tried to get into all of them, figuring I’d only get into one. Surprise! I played Databank Friday night, Adventurous Saturday night, and Chroma on a very sleepy Sunday morning.
Databank was really, really cool. From the description:
Don’t dream like an electric sheep. Remix yourself, body and mind, into the person you want to be, whether you were born an android or not. On this derelict colony planet, everything you need to be who you want to be is in the databank, where the top percent lives. You just have to get it.
Each character has a psyche, where you have your general personality, memories, and some basic stats. Using certain tags lets you add dice, and you roll mainly with a d20, adding d6s. The cool part came next.
When Will pulled out the whole character sheet, which is your psyche laid over a body (the chassis in which your personality is housed), I teased a bit because I’ve been messing around with this exact character sheet layout and setup for a shapeshifter game in private. This is actually kind of funny because I like that a lot of what Will does is what I think quietly that I’d like to do (aside from that whole card mechanic situation in Project: Dark ;P), so it was another moment where I felt lucky to share any part of my design sense with someone I admire.
There is interaction between the body and psyche, including gaining memories and therefore abilities from the body into your permanent psyche. I really dug the game, and there are multiple types of bodies that you can switch out, including – I shit you not – a centaur. Now, how the bodies look is up to the players, and we all got very creepy, I have to be honest. So when I saw the centaur body type, I knew I had to have it, so we stormed the location where the bodies were held, and I yoinked it, then described it: a half-formed bio horse that they had to give up on making because it didn’t work, so they added a robotic upper body (why? because science, that’s why!) and started using it for violence. In the end, I got the centaur’s memory from the horse body – the horse body with the skin stretched taut and hydraulically opened compartments in the torso, mind you – of the horse being created, and it gave me battle disadvantage.
Brutal.
I took pictures at a somewhat-off-books Goth Court that will be released after I gain permission from the creators and attendees. I generally ask permission before taking photos, and when I take them in closed games, I prefer to check before I post them.
I spent the night with good friends and good company. It was a blessing, honestly, to be near so many wonderful people. Special, deep thanks to Anders Smith for his kindness, generosity, and shared experiences that will never leave me.
Anders is the best!
The next morning, I had the absolute joy of playing Storybox.
A cooperative storytelling game that has players randomly drawing physical objects from a box at specific moments to help them tell their tale. Everything associated with the object in hand, from physical descriptors to abstract memories, is fair game for adding details and establishing elements about the story. Designed for newcomers and old hands of story games alike, Storybox blends the familiar with the new, creating a uniquely inspired story each game.
I got to play with two people I adore: Jason Morningstar and Amanda Valentine. They’re really great people and really good players, and the designer, Roe Nix, is a fantastically kind and intelligent person. The game is relatively simple and somewhat early in development, I think, but I liked it! You build characters and setting around pieces pulled out of the box of objects, and then pull more to inspire scenes. Did you know you can find junk drawer boxes on Etsy and eBay to play this?
We constructed a kind of heartbreaking story about a family tied around a piece of property and a cobbler’s shop, with three very age-separated children whose parents had just passed and an apprentice of the father who had owned the cobbler’s shop. In the end of the story, we discovered that the parents had sold off the mineral rights to the land and that it was worthless. This kind of game is really my jam, and playing alongside Jason in story games is such an amazing experience for me, every time, so having a game that allowed that to happen without me worrying that the mechanics wouldn’t support our story was great, and I’m really happy about it. I can’t wait until Storybox is in my hands and on my table.
We told a gorgeous story with these items.
I told Roe once they finish the game, I’m going to hack it to make a con-floor game. 🙂
To be honest, most of the rest of the day is kind of a blur. I did the Con Wellness check-in, which went pretty well. Not many people showed up for any particular purpose, but those that were seemed to appreciate the space. I’m hoping to do it both days I’m there all day next year.
I saw a lot of people I loved to see. I got to chat with new friends. I also spent probably over an hour talking to people about behavior in games, conflict types, accessible formats of information about conflict resolution and player behavior for GMs, and a whole bunch of associated stuff. Poor people.
That evening another Hindmarch was up – Adventurous!
Stranded beyond our world and outside of time in a mystical netherworld, the only way to survive is to explore. Delve into ancient tombs. Recover futuristic treasures. Build a new home. Discover hidden secrets of the Islands of the Never. Together, we’ll fist-fight evil and learn how (or why) an airplane got inside an ancient pyramid.
This was really fun! Will has done some interesting things with pacing in regards to having peril that you have to challenge with die rolls to whittle it down, but allows you to add to it by using key phrases on your character sheet. You also use Fate dice!
The +, -, and [blank] all matter to the way the game plays. The + rolls count as successes and can be used to knock off peril and the peril descriptors, and can also be added to the tracks on the table to gather experience for upping stats.
Overall, I really enjoyed the game! I think it did great with pacing for the theme of the game, the characters were really fun and interesting, and I certainly enjoyed when Kevin Kulp’s (of Timewatch) very-well-performed character fought a dilophosaurus-velociraptor hybrid using old batteries. For further reference, Kevin is a hell of a roleplayer – I discovered this at a Bluebeard’s Bride playtest two years ago, and it is still very accurate.
A small note: During this playtest I was introduced to the Edgewise card. The Edgewise card is an accompaniment to the X-card like the O-card that I’ve spoken about before. The purpose of the Edgewise card is to make people aware that you want to interject into a conversation without interrupting. While I see the card has uses and I hope people find it useful, I’m not a huge fan, but unpacking it will have to wait for another time. I just know that the tool was brought up this weekend and wanted to make sure everyone knew I know about it, and that I’ll explain why I personally won’t be using it at some point in the future.
Saturday night I freaked out for a while about being in a room full of femmeness before I was, in fact, in a room full of femmeness. I did makeup and took pictures for the Crystal Council, a late-night event where a group of attendees playedTales of the Crystals, which is effectively a boxed live-action game for children. When I was around… 6? Maybe? I remember seeing it in stores and desperately wanting it, but between lack of money and lack of friends, it didn’t happen. Seeing it brought up on Twitter by Glenn and Meghan Dornbrock made me super excited, but I admit that I slowly realized that I’m not 6 anymore, and that with my current gender adjustments, being in really femme spaces can be pretty fraught. So, I elected to just take pictures, and it was great to watch everyone play the ridiculous game in their tutus and tiaras. I haven’t gotten permission to post the closed-door pictures yet, but I did take some of the play materials.
Play materials from the game box.
Player-contributed materials during the game.
There were also cupcakes and mochi. That made it very much a good time!
I then stayed up inappropriately late, misbehaving as I tend to. I woke up to go to Chroma and I was sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepy. But thankfully, Will was great and excused my almost-sleeping-at-the-table fuzziness. I promise to be better next time!
Chroma was a great time. It enabled me to play my character going from masquerading as a bumbling intern at a high tech organization to John Wick-ing the shit out of the place. I killed many. I gave no mercy. *evil laugh*
Chroma has some Lady Blackbird in its lineage, I think, using various narrative tags to add dice to your roll. The experience system looks really fascinating, though we didn’t get to try it out overmuch. We had a really interesting crew of characters, and I want to note that Will has – in every game I’ve played of his that I can recall – included a nonbinary or agender character. It sounds simple, but for me, it’s really great to see.
The big interesting thing for me is the pacing mechanic Will has included.
The game has a small flowchart-esque map, with different stats identified by differently shaped boxes. Each box is a section/room with a challenge of some type, and you can overcome them with tests that match the stat associated with that box. I admit to missing some of the details here due to fuzzy brain, but I really enjoyed it and felt like it did a great job setting pace for the session and giving structure to the adventure.
I want to point something out and I really hope that the people I played with will read this and identify themselves to me here or privately, but, that session of Chroma had some of the best player dialog behavior I’ve ever been a part of. While I can definitely be a dominant player, I can also easily be steamrolled. I play with my friends more often at cons to avoid that experience, and at Metatopia I always have to branch out. The fellow players of mine at this table were amazing. We shared the discussion both during the action and when we were giving feedback, and I was so happy to see that people gave each other space to talk, and not just one or the other of us, not just a gendered permissiveness.
There were multiple times where I made the indication that I wanted to speak and instead of someone else taking an opening when they also wanted to talk, indicated that people should listen to me, and I saw that around the table. Even when we interrupted, we apologized, and gave each other space. This was amazing, and inspired my heart into desiring to play more games with these people, so much. Unfortunately, I lost track of all of their names (thanks sleepy brain). Still, it was wonderful, and gave me such a good end to the con.
I left Metatopia really satisfied with all of the games I’d played, and I was so happy to see all of the people I cared about. It was a hell of a con, and I can’t wait until next year!
Want to have a cup of coffee with me next time? Let me know, and we’ll make plans.
Soy milk, please.
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
The lovely creators, Aleksandra Sontowska and Kamil Węgrzynowicz, have sent me an additional copy of The Beast, so I’m giving out TWO copies! Additionally, those who entered will be recieving a discount code to DriveThru Cards for their order of The Beast. The winners have both asked that their names not be released, and so I imagine their explorations will be the darkest secrets. Congratulations to them both!
If you want to check out The Beast, click here to go to the DriveThru Cards page.
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
Had a brief discussion just now with John about my experience playing Sagas of the Icelanders at Origins this year, and how it was about gender expression, emotional expression, and struggling with my own abilities.
I played The Huscarl, which is like, Super Manly and involves a lot of behavioral cues, from my perspective. I play men or androgynous/fluid people a lot of the time, more often than women, for any number of reasons, but in part because I can’t be a man or androgynous visibly, or perform that, in any other part of my life. I look and am seen as A Woman and I hate it a lot of the time. So, games! And playing against my assigned gender! This game actually was an element in my walk towards coming out officially, too. But!
One of the things I was discussing elsewhere about toxic masculinity and emotional play (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+BriannaSheldon/posts/CMKjyQG2f8p) is that there are emotions I can express as a man that I can’t as a woman. When I played this character, I did three things I can’t do when I’m presenting as a woman without being given dirty looks, being shamed, or being told to calm down:
– I was jovial, which if you look at a lot of historical language is not commonly used for women, and I was allowed to be so just as I was.
– I was angry, blustering, and loud each at least once or twice, but no one looked down at me, in character or out (this was in part because of a beautifully arranged group, but they were all men, and allowed me to perform that). At one point in the game, I even got to play out the experience of a good man hurting someone unintentionally out of masculine bravado and egoism, and it was totally great to get that experience – not because I hurt someone, but because of the perspective it offered on the entire scenario and my character.
– I was seen as displaying positive vulnerability when I did seek help in character.
This is not meant to say that men have an easier time of playing, not at all. Men playing to express feminine-coded emotions is definitely a valid thing and I totally get that, because this is my experience expressing masculine-coded emotions, where I’m allowed leeway that I wouldn’t be as a woman. And I tell you this after edging-up-to-20-years roleplaying, there are benefits to playing against gender, or against expectation.
But this also got me thinking of one of the things I addressed in game. One of the questions of the game, which is a challenge for me, was the subject of fertility and barrenness. However, it gave me an opportunity I hadn’t expected. While most people were concerned about the ability of my character’s betrothed to reproduce, when it came to light that her past husband had been infertile, I let my character experience the fear of losing or not even having virility.
For me, however, it wasn’t of “can I have children?” but “do I lack the power to support the ones I love and give them what they desire?” See, from my perspective, the concept of fertility in history has often been tied to virtue (though that’s a very ridiculous thing), and virility is tied to power. Fertility is reproducing and making, virility is inception and creation. They work together, obviously, but there’s a lot of emphasis on virility being related to a man’s power and him being weak if he doesn’t have it – his body is weak, his body has failed him – and for fertility, the woman who lacks it has wronged herself and the world somehow.
These are both shit things, but through those concepts and the setting of the game, with the help of my character’s betrothed and the aunt in the story, I was able to express myself in anger, in vulnerability, and with power, and it was incredibly meaningful. One of my favorite moments I’ve ever had in games was having a touching, emotional discussion with Tracy, playing my betrothed, and sitting next to Eric (playing the aunt) while he encouraged me in character to stand up.
I don’t have a lot of physical power, and my mind is not often at its best. To explore the idea of losing power as something my mind conceived to be a powerful person? That was so helpful to me, to work through some serious feelings, and it echoes even now, months later.
Basically what I’m getting at is that sometimes these games can be super meaningful. We can experience all kinds of feelings and think about all sorts of things, and playing against type can really make a difference in that regard. It was such a beautiful game, and I hope to have many more like it.
In today’s What Makes a Good Player? feature, we have an interview with Kirt Dankmyer! Check out his interview below. Note: Content warning for discussion of negative player behavior including the topic of rape in game. —
What do you try to do most often while playing games to enhance your experience and the experience of others?
So, like most avid players, I can be somewhat of an attention hog, so one thing I try do the most often is make a deliberate effort to share spotlight. This isn’t entirely unselfish, as watching other people go is great for sparking creativity, and even the most “conventional” fellow player has all sorts of surprising things in them.
Do you use any specific play techniques (narrative tools, improv tools, etc.) in your play sessions?
Hmmm. I did improv in college, but I never cross-applied the techniques much, except maybe the principle of saying “yes” to suggestions about what’s going on (yes, we’re brothers… yes, I’m in love with you). That is, avoiding negation when possible, because that slows down the flow of play.
Rather than having a particular grab-bag of techniques I always use, I try to make use of the narrative potential or opportunities created by a particular ruleset and/or setting to its fullest extent. For example, in 13th Age, you in essence make up your own skill list, which can be as flavorful as you like, while still being useful in a generic way. So, given that opportunity, I make sure to take the skill “Burglar Emeritus of the Drakkenhall Rogue’s Guild” rather than just “Thievery.” Even something like old-school AD&D has areas where you can do something like this, though obviously some games provide more opportunities than others.
How often do you like to game, and what is most comfortable for you to maintain good energy in games?
I like to game once a week. I used to like to game more often, but I’m in my 40s now and I get exhausted more easily.
As long as I feel like I can actually affect the action in some way, I can usually maintain pretty decent energy. Obviously, a game that pushes my various genre loves (science fiction, post-apocalyptic, cross-genre, urban fantasy) or system preferences (highly focused, indie-style games) helps maintain energy. I’m an introvert, but gaming is one of those areas where I’m super comfortable, so using gaming as an opportunity to interact with people I like and even to meet new, interesting people also helps me maintain energy.
The flipside of the latter is I’m not afraid to drop a game if it’s not working for me, particularly if there’s a personality conflict or some other dysfunctionality. I don’t believe that any gaming is better than no gaming. I’m sad to say I’ve been in several games that were way, way worse than no gaming at all, especially in terms of the amount of negative emotional energy that they generated.
What kind of games do you feel you are most comfortable with and enjoy the most?
So, I have a big soft spot for cross-genre stuff, but in terms of “pure” genres, as I mentioned before, I’m pretty big on urban fantasy and science fiction, particularly post-apocalyptic stuff and space opera. Being in a genre I’m a fan of and/or comfortable with is a good start.
Setting aside, as a Forge veteran, I know that system matters. I’m most comfortable with a game that has a very specific thing it is trying to do and does it well, ideally in as a tight manner as possible. Even a “generic” game can do this; Fate covers a lot of genres, but it’s very focused on a particular style of cinematic play and the rules encourage a particular sort of narrative arc. As another example, I’m a big fan of the Powered by the Apocalypse games, particularly the subtle way the chosen list of moves influences how the game runs. Even if I think a system is a little too complex for my tastes, like GUMSHOE, I can respect a decent implementation of a game’s focus, such as the way GUMSHOE handles investigative play and clue gathering. I’m also a huge fan of games that share more power with the players than the “traditional” D&D paradigm.
So, the sweet spot for me is a game that has a focused rules that allow me to exercise some interesting narrative control, and is in a genre that I like. I could spend an entire page giving examples, but in the urban fantasy genre, Monsterhearts comes to mind, especially as rather than eliminating the sex moves from Apocalypse World like most Powered by the Apocalypse games seem to do, Monsterhearts adapted the idea to add the proper tension to a (supernatural) teenage soap opera.
Talking about sex moves reminds me of another comfort issue. This is less about particular games, though some games have a relevant mechanism built in or discuss the sort of thing I’m talking about in the text, but I’m most comfortable where there’s up-front discussion at the start of a campaign as to what people are okay with, and possibly making use of the X Card or a similar mechanism. I’ve been in too many games where lack of such discussions or lack of a safety net like an X Card has lead to serious problems.
Trigger Warning: Rape.
As an extreme example of games where lack of discussion or safety valves lead to an issue, and also apropos of games that are worse than no gaming at all, one should never come back to a game after missing a session to find that the other PCs have allied themselves with a gang of rapists. Yes, this actually happened. I don’t want to get too much into it as it could get into even more serious trigger territory, plus talking about that game, and that terrible, terrible gaming group, is probably a multi-page essay that’s best left unwritten.
So, yeah, returning to a more cheerful topic, a tight game with decent narrative control and in a genre I’m a fan of is likely to keep me extremely engaged.
Can you share a special experience in a game where you felt like you did a good job playing your part in the overall story and game?
Hmmm. This is a level of “toot my own horn” that I’m not sure I’m comfortable with, but I’ll give it a shot. I’m probably going to veer into “let me tell you about my character” territory here, but that seems pretty inevitable, given the question. 😉
One example that comes to mind is a Castle Falkenstein game I was in back in the 1990s. The GM told us the game was going to focus on three daughters of a British military officer, a very tight focus that would lead to more extreme things in a standard Castle Falkenstein 19th century Steampunk/Pulp “Tales of Adventure” sort of way.
I jumped in with both feet, creating a character that was a faerie interested in romance, but had been disappointed over the centuries in that most of his partners seemed to be more interested in what he was rather than who he was. Therefore, as he became attached to one of the daughters, following a standard romantic trope, he disguised himself as an ordinary human, so that he could tell if she loved him for himself rather than his faerie nature. This actually gave the other player characters a lot of chances to shine, as I needed their help to maintain my secret, and several of them rose heroically to the occasion. I also made sure to repay the favor, by helping out the suitors of the other daughters and generally being willing to stick my neck out to help them with their plots, like a proper gentleman faerie.
Aside: While I went that way because it’s a fun trope in fiction, I want to be clear I think “testing someone’s love” in real life is pretty much a total dick move. Keep it in novels, soap operas, and RPGs.
In any case, as many campaigns often do, the game eventually collapsed, but not before I was able to complete my romantic arc and reveal my true nature to my beloved, confident that she loved me for who I was. It was pretty heart warming and it definitely made the GM happy, as it was exactly the sort of thing he was going for, and by that point all the other players were almost as invested in the plot as I was, so they were pretty happy as well. Sadly, apropos of spotlight sharing, I had been looking forward to fading a little more into the background and cede a bit more spotlight given my arc was largely done, becoming largely a support character, and like I said, the campaign collapsed soon afterward. I still feel a bit guilty about that.
In any case, however, I think it’s a good sign of the job I did is that people who were in that campaign, aside from me, still talk about the game, and that character. It came up as recently as a month or so ago, decades later. Ugh, now I feel old…
—
Thanks so much to Kirt for the interview! I hope you enjoyed reading these answers!
This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends! If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.
A performative/participative game inspired by Whose Line is it Anyway?
(This might already have been done, but I felt like writing it.)
You’ll need:
~30 minutes (~10 setup/takedown, ~20 play) 8-10 players Up to 5 audience members Paper and pencil/pen or typed as described Random tokens (at least 10, not more than 25) Props if you like them – anything appropriate to an office or holiday party
Before the game, take ten folded pieces of paper (small enough to hold in hand) and on the outside write a basic description of a normal person who would attend an office or holiday party (name, profession, hobby). On the inside of half of the papers, write a description of a ridiculous character (see examples). You’ll want to mix up, add, and remove some of these every time you play.
At the start of the game, tell everyone that they must play all of the characters they are given. The character on the outside is their regular character. The character inside the card is their secret identity, and they need to act it out as well. They can do this by physical movement, vocalizing, and other behaviors, but can’t explain who or what they are. For those without an identity, they play their outside characters as though they are completely normal, and their job is to keep a straight face.
Set a timer for around 20 minutes. During this time, the players will play their parts, starting out as though they’ve just arrived and settled in at an office party. The scene proceeds as improvised, including people playing one or both character parts.
The audience will be seated near the area where the party is going on. Each audience member needs at least 2 tokens. Tokens count as points. When an audience member particularly enjoys one of the player parts and how they’re acting as a part of it, they can go into the party in a role of waitstaff or family dropping off a beverage or snack by passing a token to the player they want to reward. They can give these awards at any time during the game, but the rule is that they do not interrupt play, and the players do not acknowledge them aside from accepting the token.
At the end of the 20 minutes, play ends, and the players reveal their secret identities, if they have them. There is a round of applause, and the game ends.
—
Normal Person Examples:
Bill, who works in accounting. He enjoys golf.
Jenna, a manager. She rock-climbs on the weekends.
Ashton, a programmer. They do cake decorating.
Ridiculous Character Examples:
A giraffe with too short of a neck.
Someone who has just eaten multiple ghost peppers.
Ten tall men put into a small sized suit.
This post is free! Support Thoughty on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!
