Over a year ago, Ron coined the term “Murk” to describe the tendency in rpgs to leave the larger structure issues of play completely absent. (“Who can input into the fiction? How? How do you make a scene? Where does conflict come from?, etc.”)

Some stuff in recent play and questions that have come up made me realize that this is an issue, especially if you’re teaching a game… and, probably where we see a lot of CA clashes, because it’s just not clear.

I made setting quicksheets, system quicksheets, but I didn’t make a structure quicksheet. Of course, part of it is that I’ve internalized a lot of features of play as “standard” even though there’s no such thing as “standard” roleplaying across games.

I’m going to need to think up some standard questions, and see about doing a structure one-sheet. Maybe it’s something we need for a LOT of games…

This is everything wrong right here:

Ways to Punish a Slave

When I ran Steal Away Jordan, I found myself wanting more ways to punish slaves. After the third time of describing a horse-whipping, it loses its impact.

Can you think of some good ones? Not too weird, please: I want things I can use in a game.

First, context: Steal Away Jordon is the roleplaying game based on folk tales and history of American slavery – it’s explicitly about trying to live under the genocidal institution of slavery – and the characters are to be played as people- 3 dimensional characters in this situation.

Unpacking above: First, why would you ask this question on a gaming forum, instead of using Mr. Google? Reading a book? Anything? There’s more than enough historical records of the atrocities people have visited upon each other.

But see, that’s actually the first problem in that whole thing- it’s about making it a hypothetical, like, “How do I feed a dragon?”. The point of asking it there is because it’s not actually having to engage the history, the reality of it. I’ve mentioned before both Glockgal & Willow’s observations on our fictionality in the white worldview, and here’s a perfect example of the blinders of their own history!

Second: the reason to do so is for gamer impact!!! Basically, the same kind of logic that goes into stuff like Slumdog Millionaire- where the suffering is pain porn for a white audience. Whippings? Ho-hum! Bo-rrring! We need more cruelty!

Then there’s the responses…. Again, written from the standpoint of practicality while completely normalizing it! “Well, see” I mean, UGHGHGHGHGHG. It’d be like if someone wrote, “How should I narrate child rape in my game? How should I describe the penetration?” “Oh, well, you want to make sure to…”

GAHGLghalglaksghd

You know, it’s not that people put this in their games, it’s the way in which it’s so casually identified and the way in which they go about talking about it. I think back to the logic of The 13th Child where the questions of disappearing Indians are all asked in the hypothetical, all fictionalized to avoid dealing with ugly histories, for the sake of white squees.

Goddamn it. I almost was ready to completely enjoy and support this game.

And, while reading the “platoon combat” section, I come across the entry for “Primitives”, who have the following Aspect:

Crush the White Devil

Really?!? REALLY?!?

I was quite happy to have a game that didn’t mention any form of racial shit. After all, it’s god knows how many thousands or 10,000’s of years of humans across vastly different star systems and ecosystems and genetic drift – humans could look like anything after living under a blue sun and 1.3 G with 2 Celsius temperatures.

OH WAIT PRIMITIVE = NOT WHITE. And clearly the other tech capable cultures are assumed white. And the primitives are clearly violent, irrational, and racist, right?

GOD DAMN IT.

We’re not being irrational, you assholes keep putting this shit in your games, media, and movies.

This, right after I’m re-reading Battle Angel Alita- where we have the mixed bag culture of post-meteor survivors on earth, a mostly white eugenic society in a tower city, the high tech Indian society at the top of the Space Elevator, post-human cyborgs on Jupiter, post-human genesplicers on Venus, and an Arabic, N.African, and German nation on Mars…

You couldn’t have made a fucking sci-fi game without a nod to racism, could you? It was just too hard to let that many words pass by under your fingers without having to take it there.

White supremacy is primitive and irrational.

The rest of us are waiting for you to come join us in the future.

Both Glockgal and Willow pointed out that in the white worldview POC aren’t real people, but rather figments of fantasy in people’s heads. Newspaper Rock comments on the fact that when several Quileute youth are invited to take part of the opening night- most of the stars and people are shocked to find out it’s not a made-up tribe:

Comment: Let’s think about this a minute. Millions of people have read the Twilight books and seen the Twilight movie. The media has written tens of thousands of articles on the Twilight phenomenon. Yet after all that scrutiny, half the media don’t realize there’s a real Quileute tribe?!

This is what happens when you turn real Indians into fictional warriors, shamans, and werewolves. You place them in some alternate reality of mystery and magic where they never fought European invaders, signed peace treaties, or established modern governments. By equating Indians with ferocious beast-men, you deny that they have the accouterments of a civilized people: history, culture, language, religion, philosophy, and art.

The problem remains that the fiction about POC is more prevalent than the fact and, when tied with strong aversive racism and privilege, you have a power structure supported by folks who are willfully ignorant and unwilling to deal with people as people, as well as making concentrated efforts to keep us from having access to venues to tell our stories.

The argument “it’s only fiction” really can only apply if you have context to understand the difference between fiction and reality.

And it’s always interesting how one group profits in reality for making fantasy about another.

I get that the game is supposed to be super hard sci-fi, with Erector-set looking ships and such. Still, for me, I’m more into stuff like BSG, Mass Effect and Firefly ships- where they’re stylized, look cool, etc. (If I’m playing a game of the imagination, I might as well make things I’d rather imagine… you know?)

So with that in mind, some tech ideas to use when I get around to playing:

Artificial Gravity

AG can produce up to 2Gs, although after you turn it on, it takes about 24 hours to produce a G under normal microgravity conditions. More mass increases the energy costs exponentially, so generally AG is just for crew quarters, or for passenger ships. (so, no, you can’t make G-bombs, or gravity warps to deflect attacks, or tractor beams).

(Game thought: Unless you have gravity, melee weapons beyond knives become mostly useless. All of our weapons and biomechanics are based on using gravity and having anchored footing of some sort. Of course, you could have stuff like chainsaw weapons, contact lasers, etc.)

Heat Lances

A common method for quickly dumping heat is a Heat Lance (also known has a Thermal Harpoon or Temp Anchor). It’s a harpoon connected by tethers to the ship, with coolant tubes – usually not more than a few hundred meters reach. You launch it into something cold (like ice) and run the coolant out to dump the heat.

Most ships have 2-4 lances, and usually keep one in reserve, in case the others get damaged. Military ships which might need to dump heat quickly or special missions might be equipped with several.

Ships that regularly travel through space with cool gases or near atmospheres also have heat webs- long grid-like nets of coolant tubes you just splay out and dump heat quickly.

(Neat game thought- this also means that ships will be leaving a “trail” of hotspots where they’ve dumped heat, and it also means that spots where you can dump heat become strategically valuable spots in space.)

Slip Stations

Any system with regular travel will set up permanent space stations near the slipknots. Great in case ships jump through damaged, also to house regular patrols to prevent piracy. More anarchist systems will probably develop one as well, which might be getting great profit from the folks who escape pirates and haul their damaged ships to them for repairs…

Slip stations would probably use heated coolant from ships to produce turbine electricity, as well as having some level of manufacturing and possibly horticulture.

A lot o folks have been really excited about Diaspora- so I decided to check it out. The game is a hard sci-fi setting and it uses FATE, which is very not-crunchy, which is neat.

The group as a whole rolls up some star systems which are connected by “slipknots” (wormholes) in a small handful of connected systems, which forms a cluster. You end up with a closed economy of systems, which have widely varying resources and technology levels. The players set up the actual context of the systems and why/how they got to be that way, which is a nice set up for a campaign setting.

Diaspora is pretty up front about the fact that high tech cultures will be preying resources from low tech cultures, though, it’s a bit hard for me to figure out how to make that into a fun game when the cultures do not even have to intersect (“Hey, you see that one continent there? They’re all learning to make bronze. Isn’t that cute?”)

In other words, it gives you tools to set up a setting, and to set up characters, and to resolve actions, but “what characters do” is something you have to inject into the game completely.

The biggest innovation is Diaspora’s “social conflict” rules, which give options for long term actions- influencing a culture, swinging an entire star system into war or accepting immigrants, etc.

What makes this different than Burning Empires or Hero Quest’s form of long term conflicts is that it actually encourages you to set up maps – with end goals and situations ON the map. “We go to war” vs. “We accept these people” on different ends, and skill rolls are about pushing groups one way or the other on the spectrum.

Aside from being a perfect way to really start setting up the cultures and your situations in play, in long term goals, it also lets you set up really interesting player character dynamics.

You could, for instance, set up a map for each character with an Issue ala Prime Time Adventures (“Hit Rock Bottom” vs. “Give up the Bottle”). You could set up love triangles, or issues of crew trust ala Battlestar Galactica. Of course, just because the option is there, it’s going to be up to each group to figure out if they want to take it there, and if so, how.

Of course, the one drawback to this is that these conflicts work solely through skill checks… and the game has no real incentive for players to really go with sub-optimal choices at any point in play – skills are not “grown” by use, nor is there any reward for not putting your best skill forward all the time. It’s not a super bad flaw, but you’ll probably see players will cluster all their actions around their top skills as a result, like many other games.

All said, I think it’s an interesting system, a toolbox primarily, and it’s going to be really dependent upon each group to tweak and focus play on things they find interesting.

I finally got a chance to pick up a copy of Mist Robed Gate by Shreyas Sampat.

It’s probably the only tabletop wuxia game I’ve seen that “gets it” – that is, the game isn’t a hyper fetish of various kung-fu moves and techniques, but rather focuses on the personal drama of conflicting loyalties, personal drama, that basically sums up modern wuxia movies. (“Modern” because the game is clearly based on Zhang Yimou’s movies more than, say, Heroes of the Water Margin or Jin Yong novels).

Mist-Robed Gate has a unique system for resolution in play – “The Knife Ritual”, which involves a series of escalations, with a knife as a prop on the table, sheathed and wrapped in a cloth, which starts at unwrapping it and handing it to another player when your character makes a demand on another character, and, ends with the character sheet getting stabbed… and then, touching the flat or blunt side of the blade to someone’s hand.

Obviously, most folks will probably end up playing with a red marker or something instead of a knife.

As someone who does knife training in martial arts, I get it. It’s one of those things where there’s no danger if everyone is playing with trust, respect, and common sense… and not carelessness, ego, and fear… which kinda tells you who this game intends you to play with.

It’s actually kind of a powerful design decision – you play this game with people you trust to hold a knife to you and not hurt you.

The game also includes rules for LARP play, which, surprisingly are actually safer(!), since instead of using a knife to indicate escalation, you use colored flags or scarves to be hung in the areas you’re playing. It has an interesting setup for dealing with scenes running co-currently, and since I’m not a LARPer, I can’t tell how it’d actually play out, but it seems very interesting.

The book includes a bunch of recipes, info on tea, and an extensive wuxia movie guide. Interestingly enough, this rpg avoids depicting any characters or people, but, unlike other POC-focal games which do this in a problematic way of erasing the people, Mist-Robed Gate does this respectfully – the text, the food guide and the movie guide instead point the reader to go look at the source material, the movies and the culture. (I suppose, too, that it’s really damn hard to have any kind of illustration that can compete with all the actors and imagery you get in those movies as well).

I’m looking forward to playing this!

After this month is over, life should calm down and I’ll have time to actually get back to Emperor’s Heart. That said, some useful things floating in my head at this point about redesign in general:

Taking time away is really useful. Not like, “I’ll only fiddle with it”, but like, complete cold turkey deal with other stuff in your life and don’t think about the game at all.

It pulls you away from the emotion you’ve invested in specific design choices, making it easier to let go of things you were dead set on earlier. It also pulls you away from what you’ve fixated on during playtesting. Also, playing other games really helps bring things back into perspective.

If you find something that works perfectly, sometimes, and crappily, sometimes, you’re probably missing a crucial bit that’s being supplied by the group- either a choice in how to use a mechanic/set of mechanics or a choice in how NOT to use them.

If you’re stuck, there’s probably at least two mutually exclusive things you’re trying to get your game to do. Figure out what bits are fighting each other and pull one out to use for another design, some other time.

It’s easier to put in too much structure, guidance, and trust players/groups to strip it down and go outside of it later, than it is to give too little guidance and expect folks to figure it out.

Ganakagok is, “a quasi-Inuit Silmarillion as seen from the inside looking out”. A bunch of folks had recommended it as a great game. It uses a sort of tarot-system to set up the situation, the characters, and play out the game. I picked up a copy yesterday, as I’ve been meaning to check it out for sometime.

Skimming through, my first big twitch was the images of the example cards, using Pacific Northwest NDN artwork… UM. And then stuff like character names: “The name should be primitive and icy, vaguely Inuit in sound and form.” WTF is “icy”? Then there’s “Shaman”, “Good Medicine” and “Bad Medicine” …

For a game that claims to be a look from the inside-out, it’s chock full of exotification.

This brings us back to the larger media issue- we’re forced to either only indulge in things where we’re invisible (“Look, we don’t show up, so no problematic imagery… uh, yay, I guess?”) or things where we show up distorted and stereotypes (“At least I get to have media with people who look vaguely like me… I’ll just imagine there’s scenes and spaces where we get to see them as normal”). Which pretty much sums up my love/hate relationship of L5R.

And beyond that, the bigger social issue of why us telling stories, about ourselves, is absolutely required in the face of cultural genocide.

I suppose that’s also why roleplaying as a hobby, is where it is.

Who gets to tell your story? Right?

Over the last few years, I’ve been less and less interested in the types of dialogue produced by forums and the blogosphere.

The problem isn’t just the need for filtering, there’s also the major issue of attention posting, status games, and the simple but also real issues of signal to noise, produced in part by numbers of people and by the need to constantly educate folks to get up to a minimum standard.

At the same time, having a group discussion to bounce ideas off of is useful. So I’m toying with a different setup for online discussion that maybe some folks will find useful.

1. Small group (12 members, 6 men max, 6 women max)

Enough people for multiple ideas, and enough people assuming that not everyone will participate or care about any given topic. This is based on seeing most functional forum threads, or blog posts discussions, usually revolve around 4-8 people.

2. Private, but quotable w/permission

The discussion is private to the group, though anyone can talk about their own thoughts publicly, or quote others with permission.

Keeping it out of the public eye cuts out a lot of the attention posting, plus it also allows people to start doing a lot of the exploratory/unfinished thoughts stuff that tends to get pushed aside on the public spaces.

3. Limited Duration, forced mixing

If you form this kind of group, it needs to have a deadline, an endpoint. My suggestion is something like 3-6 months. After which, the group breaks and if you choose to form a new group, at least half the people must be new people. (And, it might make sense to form multiple groups, if you have specific topics).

The deadline does two things- one, it pushes folks to try to make the most out of the time people have committed to being available- if I have access to 5 really smart folks who really know the topic, and there’s a good gestalt, I better use it! Second, it stops the other major problem that shows up a lot- the formation of identity around spaces- “We’re Forgies” “We’re Storygamers” (or, equally problematic, “They’re Forgies”, “They’re Storygamers”).

The point of the group is the function of what it produces, not just having a new set of buddies (and if you are buddies, you don’t need to be in an online group just to maintain that friendship…)

At the end of the duration, it makes sense to have a followup on how things shook out, and what, if any valuable ideas folks got from it.