Tag: sports

Five or So Questions with Fraser Simon on Young at Heart

Today I had the opportunity to interview Fraser Simons about his new game, Young at Heart, available on DriveThruRPG. It sounds like really fascinating game about baseball narratives, and I think you’ll enjoy this quick interview with Fraser!

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Tell me a little about Young at Heart. What excites you about it?

The most exciting thing about Young at Heart for me, is the reflection in the mechanics of that primal duality between the pitcher and the batter in a baseball game, and how subjective the two main resources are that reinforce that throughout play. Everyone always interprets pride and heart differently, sometimes radically. And during the course of play, you’re using your scenes to vie for your particular resource as well as narrative control. You really get to know each other as players when you’re doing this because when I control the pitcher and I act in such a way that I’d generate heart or pride, I’m displaying to the other player(s) what I think that is. I’ve heard people think that the duality there was acting like an adult or a child, I’ve had people think it was toxic masculinity vs healthy reactions to the problems posed. Lots and lots of interesting stuff, and I really love learning about the other players at the table so it’s really exciting.

Can you tell me a little about the mechanics used in Young at Heart?

The primary mechanics of the game reflect what I would call the “spirit” of the baseball while completely side stepping actually simulating a game of it. Players are opposed to one another in that they each pick either Heart or Pride to go after during the course of play and are constantly vying for narrative control over one character, the pitcher. During the course of the game though, both teams need to spend resources in order to continue and get what they want – the procedures in place are the primary mechanics. They’re used to simulate both a specific kind of dramatic narrative based on the novel it was inspired by, as well as the pacing and emergent subjective commentary that the game is driving at.


Where did your inspirations come from for the game?

My inspiration was specifically from a book I’ve re-read many many times in my life, For Love of the Game. In fact, the “pre-loaded scenario” for the game could be used to specifically re-create the story if you wanted. But It was important to me that the game be about discovering more about the players at an individual level if the players wanted that kind of bleed in it. I also wanted people to be able to play any kind of sports narrative type story they would like easily. Things like Bull Durham, The Natural, and, with a few tweaks, even things like Remember the Titans or Coach Carter. It’s a very simple game so could be re-skinned for a lot of different things, in fact someone recently said they could use it for a Whiplash type of story, that’s been on my brain ever since!

What commonalities do you see in games like Young at Heart that are focused on sports (such as World Wide Wrestling), and more traditional RPGs that focus on fantasy or cyberpunk, etc.?

I had to take some time to think about this and I am a pretty new designer, so I may just not be as familiar with as many games and the mechanics behind them as others – but I can’t really find any commonalities. It’s play to find out what happens and it uses six-sided dice, other than that it’s doing it’s own thing, so far as I know or can think of. I’m sure there’s things out there that I’m not aware of that are similar, though!

The narrative in sports is often a legacy that spans generations. Do you think that Young at Heart touches on this, or possibly predicts a story that could go on?

You could definitely use the game to do this, in fact I give advice on making it episodic. Like, if you watch the newer show on Fox called Pitch, for example. You could do a game where the pitcher is like Ginny Baker, essentially playing each game as an episode of the show with the trials and tribulations and unique issues she goes through as the first woman to play in the MLB. I think that would be super interesting to play, as well as each session being a generational thing.
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Thanks so much to Fraser for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you get the chance to check out Young at Heart on DriveThruRPG!

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Five or So Questions with Nathan Paoletta on World Wide Wrestling: International Incident

Today I have an interview with Nathan Paoletta! He is releasing his supplement to the fantastic World Wide Wrestling RPG. World Wide Wrestling: International Incident sounds like a great follow-up to WWWRPG, which brought in over double its Kickstarter goal in September 2014. I interviewed Nathan about WWWRPG, and now I’m excited to see all of the info on the new supplement!

Tell me about your upcoming project. What excites you about it?

This project (World Wide Wrestling: International Incident) is the first full-bore supplement to a game I’ve written. I’ve done micro-supplements and little settings and stuff like that, but this is going to be a whole complementary volume of background info and new rules that extend what the World Wide Wrestling RPG already offers to cover international iconic wrestling styles, as well as structural rules for some things I decided to leave out of WWWRPG originally. I guess I’m pumped about it because it’s a new thing for me to attempt, and also because it means I’ve been diving deeply into wrestling (particularly Japanese wrestling) to research it and just discovering all kinds of amazing stuff that excites me as a wrestling fan. Since I have the supplement in mind I pay attention to what I watch in a little different way, and I feel like I’m learning a lot more about these traditions than I would if I was “just” watching them, which is very cool. Learning is fun!

What are the biggest challenges you encountered in making a full size supplement for World Wide Wrestling?
Existential ones, for the most part. What “deserves” to be in a supplement, which is to say, what kind of new content is of enough value for players that its worth printing, binding, etc to make a thing? I’m balancing how to add new mechanical material such that it doesn’t invalidate extant content, as well as distill the insights of the WWWRPG community over the last year in order to fill some holes that keep on tripping people up. Because the mechanical framework already exists, it’s a lot of thinking about how to frame the new content, and a lot less writing of rules that I’m used to. Also, there’s 15 official Gimmicks already out for the game, and “balancing” the 6 new ones that are coming such that they don’t overlap with the older ones, and can still be played alongside them is a lot of work that I didn’t expect. I recently made a big spreadsheet of every Gimmick to compare the hard rules across all of them, because I realized that I was designing power creep into the new ones by accident! I had to zoom out and formally reframe them in context with what’s already out there.

What were some of the coolest tidbits of trivia you encountered while doing your research?

Getting introduced to the British wrestling that was broadcast on a show called World of Sport may be the biggest highlight – trivia-wise, the rules for those matches were esoteric by todays standards (much more like boxing), but it means the psychology in the ring could be very, very nuanced. There’s a ton of stuff on YouTube but yeah, watching old Marty Jones and Rollerball Rocco matches from the late 70s is just a joy and so different from todays style.

As a single trivia bit, I had no idea that this happened: Ric Flair (widely regarded as the greatest pro wrestler of all time) and Antonio Inoki (legendary founder of New Japan Pro Wrestling and, arguably, the Japanese “Strong Style”) wrestled in North Korea in 1995 in front of the largest crowd for a wrestling match EVER, 190,000 people. Muhammad Ali was there too. Here’s a great Sports Illustrated story about it.

What are some of the concepts you’re exploring mechanics-wise with the supplement?

The wrestling company itself, the promotion, as a character. This is present but pretty abstract in the core game, and in the supplement I’m adding a more structured way to measure the progress and growth of the company that the wrestlers all work for. It really highlights the tension between the performances and the effect that those performances have on everyone’s welfare, and I really like how that’s coming together. Part of this is a new system for what I’m calling “Mythic Moments,” which trigger on certain really good die rolls, and create these rare but memorable moments that can end up defining a character’s career. Those two things together give a sense of really building something together, I think.

The other big one is providing some more fine-grained structure for wrestling matches. The basic method of handing them works fine, but I think players who are educated in how pro wrestling works appreciate having some more nuanced mechanical ability to represent that knowledge in the game. I’m working on providing a couple of different methods to “zoom in” on a certain match and play it out by leveraging different aspects of your character to maximum advantage, for players who have mastered the core mechanical cycles of the game.

Finally, one of the surprising (to me) pieces of feedback I’ve received from the community is that wrestlers advance mechanically more quickly than some groups expect – I think there’s a community of players who come from experiences with year-long-campaign style games, and seeing their characters grow session to session feels rushed to them! So I’m adding some optional rules that actually slow advancement and provide more space for playing out extended stories and feuds, to accommodate that playstyle in a way that’s not just me saying “uh, play slower?” 🙂

Do you think this supplement will change gameplay in any significant way, and if so, how?

The goal isn’t to change gameplay fundamentally, but extend it to address more and varied aspects of wrestling! I hope that it encourages people to set their games in more diverse promotions and with more varied rosters, for sure. I think the new rules about the promotion growth as well as the Mythic Moments rules have enough obvious play value that people will start using them for long-term games (I hope!). The rest is generally “optional” in the sense of, if it’s providing an experience you want, you should use it, but adding it for the sake of adding it isn’t going to change much.

That said, my biggest prediction: I expect to see a lot more Luchadores in games at conventions!

With World Wide Wrestling, you have managed to catch a pretty big audience with a lot of passion. As an experienced designer and entrepreneur specifically in the game design industry, what are the things you look for when working on a project to help find your audience and are there ways you tailor the experience to their interests, and did you do that at all with WWW?

I’m a big believer that projects have different “fits” with the overall audience and culture. One of the benefits of experience is being able to discern that fit earlier in the design process, I think. Some work is clearly never going to have a wide appeal, other projects needs a certain pitch or skin or other orientation to make them more accessible that they otherwise would be. Most rarely (again, in my experience), a project just has a spark to it that all you need to do is cultivate. With World Wide Wrestling, I often feel like I’m just stoking the fire on it so that it stays hot, to mix some metaphors. The RPG+pro wrestling overlap audience is out there, and a lot of my job is maintaining awareness and trying to make sure the game remains in the conversation over time! For this supplement in particular, it’s a nice alignment of interests. I’m capitalizing on something I’m already interested in (non-US wrestling), reaching out to folks who are especially interested in those styles to maybe look at the game for the first time, and rewarding folks who are already fans with new content that, I think, will be a net positive to their game experiences.

Thanks to Nathan for the great interview! I can’t wait to see the final product, and I think World Wide Wrestling: International Incident is going to be a killer product.

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Nathan Paoletta on World Wide Wrestling

I got to talk with Nathan Paoletta about his new project, World Wide Wrestling!

Tell me a little bit about your project. What is exciting about it?

The project is a professional wrestling RPG built on the Apocalypse World engine, called World Wide Wrestling. I’m a big wrestling fan, and started the game just as an exercise in modeling the kind of wrestling I really enjoy watching the most – character-driven, consequential, with the in-ring action feeding into the development of the characters over time and vice versa. As it turns out, the game really delivers on that experience, and playing it is super fun! The AW engine is a really good chassis for representing the world of wrestling with it’s iconic archetypes, ever-evolving storylines and abrupt changes of fortune. I’m running a long-term playtest game right now, and I haven’t looked forward to each weeks session so much in a long time. And, best of all, it’s making some of my RPG friends more interested in wrestling, and bringing some of my wrestling friends more into the world of RPGs, which is super-great!

What kind of players, aside from wrestling fans, do you think would dig World Wide Wrestling?

I think anyone who’s interested in over-the-top action and melodrama can find something to dig. Wrestling is basically the combination of universal storytelling tropes with superhero personae, so there’s a lot of potential avenues to get into the right mindset for it. If you have vague memories of being a kid and watching Hulk Hogan and Macho Man bodyslam each other and how awesome that seemed at the time, you have enough context to play the game, I think. I’ve had a lot of playtesters tell me “I’m not a wrestling fan, but I want to check it out now since I played this game,” which is great and tells me that it’s “working” on some level. I don’t really want to convert anyone or anything silly like that, but there’s a lot to love in wrestling and if the game can open up someone’s horizons to the good parts, that’s a win for me. And it’s definitely a low-investment, pick-up and one-shot friendly beer-and-pretzels style game, so it’s easy to check out and see if it’s really your thing or not.

Did you alter the *World mechanics much for the game? If so, how?

They’re pretty significantly altered! It’ll be familiar to people who have played other *World games, but I ended up spindling and mutilating a lot of the basics. Some stuff that’s the same is the core rolling +Stat and picking results from a list mechanic, having playbooks (“Gimmicks”), and gaining Advances to improve your character. On the player side, the mechanics and Moves are all about gaining Heat (roughly analogous to Hx) with the other wrestlers in order to gain Audience (kind of an inverted Harm track, actually). You’re not in physical danger (though you can get injured relatively easily if you have bad rolls), but your popularity is always at risk! On the MC side, a lot has changed. Creative (the GM role) literally books play like a wrestling booker, deciding ahead of time who’s going to win what match in order to advance the storylines. Players have the agency you’d expect in any other RPG, though, so they’ll throw wrenches into the plans all the time, and there’s a structure in place to help Creative make it look like they had it planned that way all along. I’d say that there’s actually more similarity on the surface than there is under the hood, so to speak. It’s been a really fun process to work through!

Who is your favorite wrestler? You can pick more than one!

Oh man, the hardest question! Well, not really, it’s more like the answer is always changing. But my favorite pre-modern era wrestler is definitely Macho Man Randy Savage, may he rest in peace. I will also always love The Undertaker, who is technically still wrestling (once a year at Wrestlemania!). There’s an amazing tier of young talent in the WWE right now that I am really, really enjoying watching. Roman Reigns is a warrior prince who deserves all of your tribute, Antonio Cesaro is probably the guy I most love to purely watch wrestle, and Bray Wyatt is the greatest, creepiest character the WWE has had since I’ve been watching wrestling. On the indy circuit, there’s a pretty well known dude named Jimmy Jacobs who I think is great. El Generico was my favorite indy wrestler until he retired to go work with orphans in Mexico, but there’s a guy on WWE’s developmental show NXT named Sami Zayn who has a lot of the same moves, and I think has a bright future in wrestling.

What else are you working on? What’s next for you?

Once WWW is out in the wild, I’m going to be bouncing back to my other game-I’ve-been-working-on-forever, which is a monster hunting game set in the gothic world of Edgar Allen Poe called The Imp of the Perverse. The mechanics are pretty solid, but I have some period research to finish and a bunch of writing to do for it. That will be in playtest for awhile yet, and it’s probably going to be my next big thing after WWW. I’m also working on a second edition of my Vietnam war drama game carry, mostly to update the physical book but also doing a full edit and revision of the text. I have a 2-player fantasy struggle-between-good-and-evil-for-the-fate-of-the-world game that I’d like to get back to soon. There’s a couple concepts I have for microgames, and who knows when one of those gels and demands to be finished. And I want to maintain releasing cool stuff supported by my Patreon backers, so I’ll have little things coming out every couple months through that venue, hopefully. Lots of stuff, I guess!

Thanks to Nathan for the great interview! You can check out Nathan’s Patreon and his website to keep up on his current work!