Update of sorts

My Athanor supplement is nearing completion when I have free time. I have an original, but not particularly well-done cover for the book, and I want to revisit the skill system to see if I can strip it down more and make that section cleaner.

Most of my time is being spent on school. By the end of the week, I should have finished a 35 page-ish paper (including bibliography and appendices -- only about 25-30 pages of real content), put together a 10-minute presentation of the paper, and made copies of my video project. Then the quarter will be done and I have until January to take some "time off" from class (a values of "time off" that includes reading some Foucault, Gramsci, Freire, Apple, Illitch and miscellaneous journal articles.) I just got my dissertation committee chair and I have made a good first pass at outlining and starting to flesh out a literature review, and have a good idea of big gaps. My next six months are going to kill me, as I need to take two classe per quarter and really wrestle with methodology and the development of an Institutional Review Board (IRB) proposal for human research, both for access to retention and graduation data from the institution and for interviews of students.

As a result of this pre-dissertation proposal madness, thinking about gaming has not been a high priority -- even though I will be gaming tonight and in a couple of weeks with my friends' 4e groups. But playing 4e has really gotten me thinking about some of the weirdness of contemporary gaming that makes me re-think the way I have approached the hobby for the last decade or two.

When I was a wee lad arond '81, we didn't have detailed backstories. We didn't set up "3 by" backgrounds for our PCs (which, I have to admit, I introduced to the my friend a few years ago and a D&D 3.0 game). Instead, we rolled up a quick character, and slowly accreted a background as we thought about it. Starting characters were cyphers, and only gained depth with survival. It's almost as if we were trying not to be attached to the FNG until he survived a few firefights. Background information was a sign of long-term survival.

Nowadays, D&D (and this applies to 3.x, too) takes more effort to make a character, and we tend to invest characters with things like backgrounds, and ideas of destiny and future as a result. But the important things here are a) that players don't want to lose characters as a result (though my Tiefling Swordmage, Malachi Skaith has a bit of a deathwish, and I don't count on him surviving until the end of the campaign), and that getting into the hobby involves a higher commitment on the part of players. Characters take more time to make, more systems mastery to make, and more storytelling skill to make.

This isn't a rant on the evils of contemporary D&D. Certainly, this very issue of complexity and ability to make the character I wanted moved me away from D&D to other games by the time I was in college. However, I wonder if the lack of ease of getting up and running as a new player is an issue for people new to the hobby, and not an incentive to just toss together a character on an MMORPG and get the gameplay and table chatter with a lot less effort.

Apparently, Geekdo is much more thorough than I thought.

Apparently, someone has made a page for Savage Swords of Athanor on Geekdo based on my files made available on Scribd, and I have a very empty creator page there.

This strikes me as rather odd, as I don't exactly pull a lot of traffic here, but it's vaguely flattering I guess.

But it's clear to me now that Geekdo is very, very complete.

Thoughts on defeat

Right now, I am preparing to do a write-up of a pilot study for my upcoming dissertation methodology, but still need to conduct an interview as part of that. The problem is, my initial study was a complete, dismal failure. Which on some levels isn't particularly surprising-- the kinds of problems I had in data collection were unsurprising, but still disappointing. So my report on the pilot study will be a reflection on problems, my 10% response rate, how that will complicate data collection and sampling, and alternative approaches to my research.

This comes as my friend Rich's 4th edition game faced our first major defeat. No big deal to me -- I have been gaming since 1981. I have faced worse defeats. My friend Will, who just started playing RPGs this year, was gobsmacked. We had regularly fought through some very tough circumstances, but this time, we had our asses handed to us, one of us was captured, and the rest of us left to retreat and regroup thanks to the sacrifice of Will's character.

Which all makes me think about the issue of defeat. One of the reasons I don't so much love killing off PCs is that I like the idea that defeat shouldn't be the end. Defeat is dramatic. Defeat is exciting. Defeat is motivating. This may be part of the reason that my favorite film in the original Star Wars saga has always been The Empire Strikes Back: it's the most fulfilling of the three films. Why? Because the bad guys lose. The rebel base on Hoth is destroyed. Han Solo is captured and carried away by Boba Fett. Luke loses a hand and finds out he's Vader's son. There's betrayal and self-doubt. And a seed of hope. A lot happens, and real investment in purpose and outcomes here.

Now, you can't have every game end in defeat or it will become boring and frustrating. But defeat serves a purpose, and a good one at that, by building tension and engagement. And teaching the players to think and consider options out of that defeat.

Putting Swashbuckling into the Game

When I was but a wee lad (okay, I don't think I was ever what one would call wee, but indulge me here) I played AD&D and grew frustrated at its lack of elements of what I would call swashbuckling options. I read Burroughs and Howard and I watched movies and I wanted heroes like I read and saw: in light armor and leaping off balconies and swinging from chandeliers. But we all saw a simple reward for wearing heavy armor in AD&D: you had a better armor class.

It was simple: a guy with a rapier and a dagger just sucked compared to the dude in plate mail and a shield.

And that was just the start. Old-school published dungeons often seemed to be flat expanses of rooms where controlling choke points like doorways and learning to avoid danger from traps and deadly monsters led to a flight or fight (and by fight, I mean slog toe-to-toe) methodology. My dreams of fast, exciting combat moving across the room seldom occurred. Mostly it involved throwing oil, shooting a round of missiles and spells, and closing in for down-and-dirty killing.

So by the mid-1980s I was already looking for new options. It started with trying to find ways to define new character classes to fill in the blanks and then moved on to looking at systems like RuneQuest to fill the gap (it didn't), then to others that kind of did, like Hero System. But after a long time, I found that even systems that tried to fill in that gap left me more and more dissatisfied, and for a simple reason: I didn't want to deal with the rules. In the time since I started gaming, RPGs have become pretty hefty, and harder to explain to new players. Even simple rules have eschewed the simplicity of random character generation, and pushed the idea of new players coming to the table with no preconception of what they wanted to play.

RPGs today seem to be by gamers, for gamers. Which is a shame.

That's what led me back to thinking about Tunnels and Trolls and early D&D. At first, I wanted to rewrite a simpler D&D from the d20 SRD, then I saw the retro-clones, and then I saw Swords and Wizardry, tinkered, and ended up with a set of rules I thought was okay.

But there's still an issue of the swashbuckling. It's still better to wear armor, isn't it? Well, yes and no. There are ways to control that, some of which are simple (making powerful magical rare or unknown -- the difference between plate and no armor and plate +5 and no armor, for instance, is important), some of which are moderate (parrying rules, allowing dex bonuses to AC), and some of which are harder (social and setting reasons why wearing armor is a Bad Idea), but I think I can change the feel in actual game play.

In theory, I think that the actual experience of gaming at the table is a dynamic relationship between the players, the DM, the rules, and the game world. In adjudicating the rules within the setting based on the input of the players, a separate reality should emerge, though in real life I know the balance of these elements is essential and affects game play. My theory is that by diminishing the presence of rules and emphasizing the other three elements consciously (rather than organically as I have done in the past), I can help shape the tenor of the game and the assumptions of play. (See, all that grad schoolin' has some value.) In essence, I hope to have the game as written and the game as played engaged under the guidance of the DM in a sort of Hegelian dialectic. The Game presents a thesis, the players an antithesis, and the DM helps produce a sort of synthesis that builds the "real" game world. And I think that happens in encounter design, how the world and NPCs react to the heroes, reward structures, and the like. If I emphasize Undercity dungeon crawls in armor, that will differ from how things play out more than focusing on political intrigue and urban adventures. If I want chandelier-swinging and bannister-sliding and the like, making that easier and having NPCs use that to their advantage will make PCs more likely to pursue that sort of thing. As a not-wee old lad, I now realize how much power I have as DM to make things happen in a particular way without making special game rules to support such things.

At least that's the theory.

We'll see what happens when the dice hit the table. Or, if I end up getting an invite and doing this using Google Wave, when the dice-bot spits out its results on the screen.

Rules Complexity and Game Theory

Brian Gleichman over at Whitehall Paraindustries has been writing about rules complexity and role-playing games, which has turned out to be an interesting read. But I think what strikes me as an interesting question is why people like complexity in a role-playing game.

In his Friday, October 23 post, Brian muses over whether there is a sweet spot of complexity that offers more satisfaction of game master and thus more user satisfaction. Let me up the ante on that thought.

I propose that part of the enjoyment of role-playing games is exploration of space -- this is an obvious part of the actual content, since exploring dungeons and wilderness has long been the basic trope of the game. But the very structure of game play, in my mind, includes several types of exploration of constructed spaces:

• The players (including the GM) explore the space of possible activities within the set of game rules.
  
• The players explore the fantasy world.
  
• The players explore the role of their character, creating personalities, experiences, and potential actions.
  
• The players explore a dramatic space through collaborative plot development.
  
• The players explore social space through the development of a set of informal and formal social rules, roles, and expectations.
  

Discovering, uncovering, and constructing these explored and collaboratively created spaces gives RPGs a unique potency as a recreational experience. The exploration of rules-space is the safest, most consistent, and most easily portable beyond the social event of the game, making game complexity an interesting sub-hobby on its own.

At least that's my half-baked off the top of my head thought.