It’s also fast growing, the oncologist assumes I must have gotten it started Thanksgiving or so, and now it is occupying a major portion of my chest trying to directly strangle my aorta, superior vena cava, and press in on several nerve endings I use for stuff like eating and talking.

Through the greatest Mercy of God, I must have rolled some exploding luck die on a saving throw, because, 2 weeks ago a combined study was released on the New England Journal of Medicine which gives a 97% cure rate with this particular chemo mix. If they had caught it earlier and tried to treat, I’d be facing a much harder path with complications and less guarantees, and well, if it got caught later I’d be dead. I like to imagine I’ve spent every single Fate point, Luck point, or dropped 100 points in character creation to “Flip off Cancer once in your lifetime” advantage.

Mind you, the chemo cure is still 6-8 months of hard chemo, being in the hospital 1 week of every month, and I’ll probably be on oxygen for a couple of months until the mass gets off those arterial veins I use to feed by body the precious oxygen.

But I’ll be alive.

At some point, some friends will be organizing a donation site for my expenses. I’ll post when it comes to that, which right now is us mostly navigating the medical system and legal stuff. I’m just going to focus on getting through this chemo and living day to day.

Obviously, if I’m not playing games, I’m probably not going to be writing about them much for a while.

Peruse the archives, follow some links. Play some games!

Good wishes are appreciated!

I’ve been so waiting for this game.  You play animal spirits who help people out in cute ways.  If you want something lighthearted, where the power of friendship is everything, this game is it.

In the demo I played, I was a cat-boy who was trying to help a young boy find his homework that he lost while at school.  Since he found it before I could find it, I used my magic powers to steal it so I could give it back to him (“How can I help him if he helps himself first? No fair!”).

If nothing else, all of Ben’s games are vastly different in system and fictional tone – if you’re into trying out games that do a lot of different things, you should check them out.

Here’s some of my favorite games:

Polaris – Magical knights struggle to preserve their failing civilization as demons and apathy destroy it all.  The mechanics are all based on bargaining… with the demons in your heart.

Bliss Stage – Aliens have devastated humanity, and a few surviving teenagers find the technology to brain dive into the aliens’ dream world, fighting them with mecha built of their emotions. The relationship scenes you play in this game have made some of the best roleplaying moments I’ve ever seen.

Drifter’s Escape – A drifter rolls into town, just trying to get by, while The Man and The Devil each try to take his soul. An amazing game about power, evil, and the bargains we have to make to survive.

On the Ecology of the Mud Dragon – A silly game perfect for one shots and ridiculousness – crappy little dragons confused about the world try to “kidnap a princess”…and usually manage to only get themselves into trouble.

Most of the time, if we’re going to sit down and watch a movie, or read a book, we want a little bit of an idea of what it’s about – this is simply to decide if we’re in the mood for this thing.

Unfortunately, what we’ve had historically is games mislabeling these things (“This is a game of wonderous fantasy adventure!” “Actually you grime around in a dark dungeon hoping not to die”), giving a direction with no advice how to get there (“Be heroic!”), or having no direction at all, and the group either has to develop their own tools or flounder.

Fiction Hurdle

The Fiction Hurdle is how a group needs to know the answers to these questions for satisfying and functional play:

What kind of conflicts make sense for this game?

What kind of protagonists make sense for this game?

What kind of outcomes make sense for this game?

Typically, though, what we’ve seen happen is that many games leave this open without tools for negotiating it, and the default falls to a GM to establish these in play, with players who cannot pick up on the correct answers for the group (or refusing them) either being ejected from a group or grudgingly tolerated.

We’d also see that the usual fallbacks to solving this for traditional games were either to have an extensive set of fiction to establish the answers for these (“Read these 200 pages then you’ll get it!”) or to fall into a well established genre (“Golden Age Superheroes”, “Licensed-based game based on well known TV or book series”).

Knowing these is important regardless of whether you’re playing a player-input heavy game or a traditional “I control only my characters” kind of game – because even the players want to know what they’re getting into, and when games are significantly longer than movies, it’s a larger commitment of time and energy.

Design Standpoint

From a design standpoint, you want to either answer these completely and communicate it in your game, or, at least, answer it significantly and give tools for the group to finish the rest.   It certainly has to be more than “develop your play style” advice.

This stuff is communicated in: the tone throughout the book, the examples, play advice, example adventures/scenarios, example characters, fiction in the book, artwork and imagery.

(Small related note with regards to representation in games: under “What kind of protagonists make sense for this game?” if your game only presents white people, or men, in the artwork, that also says something… There’s a couple of games I point to where the text says “These are brown people” and the artwork only shows white people.  That’s pretty interesting in terms of what messages the game is presenting…)

Playing At the Table Standpoint

Part of what got me to thinking about this is that when a game is doing it’s job on this front, when I put together a quicksheet, it’s pretty much rules focused, but when a game is not doing it’s job, I have to lay out some of this in the quicksheet so the group can align in play.

Examples of the Hurdle

A few years back I was playtesting Dog Eat Dog – one of the players went into this elaborate description of building a cave hideout full of traps because it was clear he was thinking this game was some kind of survivalist thing when the game mechanics and structure, make such precautions useless, pointless, and counterproductive to the focus of play.   Basically, he didn’t know what kind of conflicts made sense for the game.

My first time running Dogs in the Vineyard, a player wanted to play an older, sinning Dog who basically broke all the rules all the time.   While this could be interesting at the edge of play, what it did was pull things off kilter – the player didn’t know what kind of protagonist made sense for the game.  (and, later, I’d see Vincent’s advice to simply play the game with the characters being simple Dogs – 19, fresh out of training, etc.).

For awhile, I played quite a few games of Falling Blossoms – a samurai game where the outcomes have a sort of back and forth bidding mechanic (“If X happens, then Y happens”).  The problem that would regularly occur is that we’d start sliding into gonzo territory (“Then the demons appear!”) which, in hindsight, made for a weaker game.  We didn’t know what kind of outcomes (or really, boundaries for outcomes) made sense for the game.

So really, it’s just a question of when male gamerdom will step up and stop being horrible. Same old privilege problem as always.

Well. Sometimes things look easy until you try it. What the Pathways system does is provide colorful packages for basically bumping up dice, which isn’t too bad, conceptually, until you realize the full process is actually 40 decision points of picking a package, then assigning those steps or getting abilities each step of the way.

Simple tasks repeated 40 times are not so simple in gestalt – it’s tedious and decision fatigue begins to set in, as the choice of getting a new ability or pumping up a die size has to be made several times. In a lot of ways, the choices are made to seem more complex than they are, because you’re iteratively doing it over and over – instead of simply saying, “add 3″ you get, “Add 1. Then Add 1. Then Add 1…”

Anyway, aside from showing off a major play issue for that game, it really highlighted the overall issue for a lot of roleplaying games – complicated character generation not only makes high demands of new players, it eats up a lot of time just to even get to play.

Although I can definitely admire the sorts of system mastery necessary to make a perfectly built character mechanically… it’s usually an impediment to play that usually involves 1000x more fiddling than payoff for everyone involved.

The longer the process is to prepare for play, the more you “hide the fun” from the actual experience of playing. Comparatively, right now the internet is tearing the hide out of EA for their newest SimCity game because it involves 20-30 minute waits before you can begin playing – how much is that the norm for roleplaying games in general? And not just mindless waiting, but having to choose and pick between mechanics that maybe you’re not familiar with and having to develop system mastery on top of it?

I’ve been thinking about game texts, how many on my shelf tell you how the rules work, but not why you, as a player should care about rule A or rule B in the larger context of play. I’m realizing most of the quicksheets I write are not just how the rules work, but also “Here’s what you should do – which mechanical rewards to pursue, which situations to seek/avoid, to get to the fun part of play.”

Basically, it jumps the first 1-3 sessions of system mastery that players have to get through to even know what the hell they’re supposed to be doing with the system.

But… if you’re a game designer, why would you make the players have to flail around to find the fun in your game?

Understandably, in competitive games, you generally don’t explain all the higher level strategies because working that out is a part of the competition – but given the amount of games which are not Gamist, but Sim or Narrativist in design… hiding those things is counterproductive to getting to the fun part of play.

Spiritual Attributes

Players are starting to really get into their SAs at this point. Looking for opportunities to work them all in and looking at changing some of them to meet who their character is or who they want their character to be. This is pretty much the heart of the game, so I’m glad everyone’s starting to click with it.

They’ve also begun spending down the SAs to make improvements to their characters, which is a crucial point – having to pick when and how to spend down dice which creates a flow to every character – a story arc of being down and out vs. being “powered up” with the extra dice.

Combat Strategies

One of the reasons I really like Riddle of Steel is that it does have a level of system mastery in the tactics of combat. It helps to know the rules and what you’re trying to do. This session involved a competition which involved wrestling crocodiles and then having a mock battle with wooden weapons – the players choose competitors who were quite skilled, and I played them smart.

We started using special Maneuvers and range became a key issue, and everyone started really thinking about “Do I want to spend those 2 dice to do this thing, or play it safer? And is it really safer to give this guy another chance to take a swing at me?” and all that kind of thinking. I’m pretty excited, because next time we play, I’m guessing the players are going to have thought a bit more about their strategies and turn up the heat.

I had to do a lot of work to clean up the maneuvers from the book as most of them were pretty badly designed so it’s good to see them running smooth in play. I’m sure we’ll find some bumps though.

Setting and prep

Prep has been pretty light – we’re running 90-ish minute games which means I simply need small situations and maybe 3-8 NPCs. Prep is about 30 minutes or less with most of it being pondering what’s better choices to use rather than stat juggling.

I’ve been running it as “each session = new place” but I might play around with the idea of a larger area (a nation, whatever) so I can start reusing some ideas or NPCs. If anything, I’ve been pretty light and weak on NPC characterization because it’s been “Hey, let’s all learn how the rules work, hey, let’s get right to the conflict” but one of the strengths of using SAs is NPC motivations become the source of conflict.

The other thing which has been a lot of fun is the “magic roll”. We’ve set the default setting to “magic exists, it’s just rare and people have a lot more beliefs about it than happen to be real” – so when players encounter something that might be magical, they roll a die and then we find out if it actually IS magical right then and there.

The surprise of the night was Bafana slamming a crocodile into submission and demanding to know where the Father of Crocodiles dwelled and having the defeated beast speak!

These are things I can’t prep for and make things pretty damn amazing.

As some folks point out, “inclusive” by itself is a little broad. To really talk about this, we have to understand there are basically three levels we can set the bar at, especially since, if you read a lot of the replies you can see these are very different things:

1. Acknowledgement of existence (AKA – The Chinese people in Firefly)

Games that point out you “could play” any gender, or that you “could play” any race, or some kind of setting that says racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc. is gone. The reason that this is such a low bar is that saying this without any further details basically puts all the onus on the group to try to figure out what that looks like. It also means no real thought was put into the setting itself if this is the only real place where it shows up.

If you SAY all sexual preferences are accepted, but your setting only SHOWS heterosexual relationships, you’ve now put all the work of actually making that true onto the people playing your game while not accepting the same responsibility yourself- a disingenuous ass-covering move if anything.

I’ve seen a few RPGs do this really interesting thing where they say the characters in question are supposed to be brown people, and then proceed to have no art depicting them, or, art that would suggest otherwise. In this sense, this is the same thing where it’s an invisible acknowledgement without actually having to have them there…

2. Portrayal

Ok, so you include the actual folks – artwork, characters, setting bits, etc. Good for you! Now come the harder questions – are the portrayals negative? Are they based on stereotypes? Are they only there to serve the privileged audience rather than the people who they’re supposed to represent? (The difference between lesbians as hot media icons for straight men vs. lesbians as characters for lesbians…) Are they only secondary or minor characters?

3. Good portrayal

If you get through the questions in the previous bar, you should reach good portrayal. What defensive privileged folks often confuses is the idea that “good portrayal” should mean some kind of spotless 2D idealized figure, when in fact, all folks are asking for is real humans who are not based on the caricatured stereotypes are NOT real.

Anyway, when we look at these 3 potential levels of inclusiveness, you can see that stuff like, “Play a transhuman game, you can play ANYTHING” is a shitty response that doesn’t really do much of anything.

Ben Lehman once asked why I enjoyed playing the highly problematic Legend of the Five Rings and I pointed out it’s one of the few games where I could play an asian character and no one would look at me and think, “You’re just doing that because you’re asian!” (Of course, the horrible white folks’ Japan fetish in that game scene is a whole other issue…) – but the point is that there’s plenty of games where problematic representation can be had, and it’s really kind of the roleplaying equivalent of “You can have space in our imaginary world as long as your heroes conform to our racist stereotypes.”

Escapism and fun for all, indeed.

Personally, I’d rather look at the 3rd tier as the one to aim for. Inclusive means it’s actually got people in mind, not appropriating things through a stereotype lens for the entertainment of the privileged nor simply hitting a checklist of inclusiveness for show.

In that space, I think of these games as inclusive – Dirty Secrets, Steal Away Jordan, Dog Eat Dog. There’s maybe 1 or 2 borderline games I’m waiting to see which way they fall. Maybe there’s some I’m forgetting, and if so, I’ll add them later, but, yeah, it’s a small small number.

Riddle of Steel, background and context

The Riddle of Steel came out about the same time Burning Wheel did, and both were parallel creations that hit similar places from very different angles – action + drama in a fantasy setting.

Both placed an emphasis on tactical combat, though Riddle of Steel leaned towards abstraction a bit more and ran quicker. More importantly, ROS had an amazing reward system built on motivations – “Spiritual Attributes” which became the inspiration for Keys in Shadow of Yesterday (and Lady Blackbird, which then also became Milestones in the Marvel Roleplaying game…)

Sadly, though, Riddle of Steel is currently out of print, and probably one of the biggest issues was that the game needed a lot of clean up in terms of cutting off crusty design bits and a better presentation, though the folks who picked it up after the creator, Jake Norwood, sold it, focused mostly on supplemental material.

Setting up to play, rules-wise

Anyway, it’s been years since I last played it, and in my head, I had remembered it as having a solid core and thought, “I’ll just have to cut a few spots and it’ll be good”. …well, I actually cut a lot and still am finding places where I’m like, “that’s… just a terrible rule.” and having to cut more. So it went from “cut a little” to “Just remove the heart and rebuild a body around it”.

This really came from a simple urge – “Do I really want to subject my players to this shit?”

Things still on the “to-do” list: rules for ranged weapons, rules for falling/throwing people that are better than what’s listed…

Structure and Premise

The Nokwazi have a rite of passage – youth reach the age of majority and leave the people for a year or two, traveling the world and proving their strength, courage, and intelligence by doing great deeds in the world and seeking to bring something home which will improve everyone’s lives – which could be anything from a magical artifact to a new way of doing architecture. Part of their belief system is a general skepticism – the world is magical, but not all of it, and a lot of people fall victim to superstition, therefore, investigating the truth is part of this process.

Gameplay-wise, I’m basically setting up different people with their own sets of problems that the PCs run into, and what the people BELIEVE is going on, both politically, magically, etc. and as we play, there’s a random roll at points on the magical elements to see if they are, indeed, magical in any way. As one of the players put it, “It’s like a fantasy X-files, maybe there’s something weird going on, maybe not.”

Our First Session

Things went really well. I was quickly reminded that fighting in Riddle of Steel is over quickly once you can get past someone’s defenses. The short actual combat was the PCs having gotten in on unprepared enemies and straight murking them. I’m looking forward to a more prepared fight where the enemies actually get a chance to try to attack back or a few rounds of back and forth before a killing blow.

Once the players started clicking in with their Spiritual Attributes, we started picking up momentum. What’s interesting is that some of the SAs I expected to hook into didn’t and others did, but at least it served to help me understand the characters better for the next time. I think with a few sessions I’ll be better able to home in on exactly what will be solid.

Setup-wise, I found myself using less than 1/2 of what I prepared, but that’s fine – most of it was simply a character name, title, and a motivation. I generally set up these situations with characters who are on different areas of the “reasonable” to “unreasonable” spectrum, but even unreasonable characters can be good as long as you give them an understandable motivation for their actions.

The other part is making sure that any of these places the characters reach, that the people are not completely hapless and helpless – they’re making choices to deal with their problems – maybe not the best choices, maybe not good choices, but choices still.

More to come!