[Games Anatomy] Veteran Of The Edition Wars - Vampire: the Masquerade vs. Vampire: the Requiem

Edition warfare is a funny old beast. Seems like you can't produce even a fairly minor revision of your core mechanics and setting without your motivations for doing so being questioned, your approach to doing so mocked, and your efforts in doing so dismissed as the most vile and base calumnies ever to besmirch a gaming table. Woe betide you if it takes your fancy to make fairly major revisions, as White Wolf did in 2004 with the release of Vampire: the Requiem, the successor to founding father of the Entity: the Pompousness RPG naming tradition Vampire: the Masquerade.

I'm burbling about Vampire today because it's the edition war in which I have actually fought, on both sides at one time or the other. Like the soldier of fortune I am, I spurn the customs and fashions of the time and pursue pure profit, in the form of an improved gaming experience for everyone unfortunate enough to sit down at my tables. The weird thing is that in the eight years for which this conflict has existed, I have never even managed to get a Requiem game played. Read on, and perhaps we'll find out why.

(Note: no guarantee of findings-out is promised. Not even I know where this is going to go.)

When Requiem came out, I was all over it like a cheap suit. I'll talk about the reasons why, but I'll also talk about why despite those reasons I've ended up treating Requiem as a set of house rules for Masquerade rather than a thing in its own right. There's certainly the traditional edition warrior problem - Requiem was new and lots of people resented and resisted it because of that - and the usual problem of getting a group together, but there's a little bit more to it than that.

The first bit of more-to-it-than-that is the mechanics. As has been discussed previously, the core principles of the system involve your character having an Attribute and an Ability and adding them together and rolling that many ten-sided dice and trying to get high numbers. So far so good. What Masquerade did, however, was set variable target numbers based on, err, different things for more or less every occasion on which you had to roll dice, and occasionally remove dice from or add them to the core pool in certain circumstances as well. Keeping track of the difficulties involved in each ability meant you either needed a good memory or a fast and furious rulebook-indexing-finger, and given the size of White Wolf's rulebooks and their propensity to tuck new rules into splatbooks, that was kinda awkward. So was working out the likelihood of success on a given action, or being able to say with confidence that your character was capable or incapable of attempting a thing.

What Requiem did was to set a target number of 8 for every die rolled, with 10s counting double. All modifiers came in the form of added or removed dice from the pool. Simple, consistent and elegant; you know that more dice equals more attempts at success without having to worry about whether you need to roll fours or nines on Charisma + Intimidation for this particular manifestation of the Presence Discipline. On top of that, it removed some less-than-useful Attributes like 'Appearance' and instead imposed the 3x3 grid of Mental, Social and Physical Power, Finesse and Resilience. Whatever you were trying to accomplish, you could find the appropriate attribute to use simply by working out what kind of challenge was involved and cross-referencing; so picking a lock is Physical Finesse, while a staring contest is opposed Social Power, and keeping your cool in a crisis is Mental Resistance.

What Requiem also did was remove the cool 'ones cancel out successes, more ones than successes is a truly spectacular cock-up' rule (thanks to Lo for pointing that out to me - for reasons which will become clear, I've kept this one in for so long that I'd kind of forgotten it wasn't supposed to be there). I like this less. Fumbles are hilarious. Total cock-ups are hilarious. Hilarity is innately a good thing, even in a Storytelling Game of Personal Horror - the fourth pillar of happy gaming is irony, that capacity to look over your character's shoulder and shake your head sadly at the state they're into and know it's because you can't roll eights on a ten-sided die. Laughter provides the catharsis which allows fresh intensity to be generated. You can't sustain a perfect emotional pitch all night long - that would be harrowing and hard and not really very much of a game at all.

The thing is that, mechanically speaking, there's not much here that can't just be ported wholesale into the Masquerade setting. I've been using the Requiem-style core mechanic for my Masquerade setting game for months and it's proven perfectly viable, possibly because my gaming style isn't terribly engaged with the absolute nitty gritty of the rules but mostly because it's a fat sight easier to remember and it keeps things rolling. I've kept Masquerade's 'ones cancel' rule because I like a good botch now and then.

If I were keeping score, and I am, I'd say something like Masquerade 1, Requiem 2. The 3x3 grid is elegant, the core mechanic is simple, but the new kid on the block is missing that chance of random catharsis. It's not like there isn't a Willpower resource that can be spent to avoid rolling dice if you want to avoid cocking up, now is there?

Beyond the core, there are the particular rules for supernatural stuff. Masquerade-era White Wolf, you see, liked the idea of crossovers between their game lines, but also liked the idea that vampires and werewolves and mages and demons and fairies and mummies and ghosts all worked in their own distinctive and individual way, operating within different sets of limitations. This, frankly, made for a bit of a headache, and so Requiem introduced a universal system; no matter what the supernatural thing is, it has a characteristic value from 1 to 10 denoting how powerful an example of whatever-it-is it is. This value adds to the dice pool whenever it's trying to use a supernatural power on another supernatural entity, or resist the use of such powers on itself - so a new vampire, dead two weeks, with Blood Potency 1, will have the bugger of a time resisting the Dominate Discipline if deployed by the Blood Potency 8 Prince of London. Since the same 1-10 scale is present for mages and werewolves and stuff too, that means an elderly and powerful mage with Gnosis 8 has a similarly easy time of it against our brand new fledgling vamp.

So far, so tidy. The devil's in the details. Blood Potency, you see, accumulates extra points the longer the vampire remains active, over a period of years, then decades, then centuries. The higher it is, the more powerful the vampire is, but also the harder to sustain - after about 4, animal blood just doesn't do it for them, and at the 9s and 10s, even humans aren't good enough; it's the concentrated vitae of other vampires or bust. At this stage, many vampires go into a state of vegetative torpor for a while to let their blood thin out and their hunger quiet somewhat. This is still okay. I really like it. So far, so Anne Rice, and it's not like the very phrase World of Darkness isn't drawn directly from her earlier, less barking mad work.

This is all your fault, Anne.

The thing is, it replaced something equally nifty. The Masquerade's unique and awkward system for vampiric power was Generation, a measure of how many links in the turning-people-into-vampires chain existed between your character and Caine, the very first vampire. Generation was static and unchanging, and dictated the ease with which many powerful disciplines operated, the quantity of concentrated blood-power or Vitae your character could consume and use at a time, and the cap on superhuman Attribute values or high-end Discipline powers. Basically, in Masquerade, you were your great-grandsire's bitch for ever, unless you happened to devour and absorb the soul of an elder vampire and in so doing artificially raise your Generation. That's diablerie. It means some vampires will hunt you to the ends of the earth, others will lionise you as an embodiment of their principles, and yet others will see you as a target for similar activities; it leaves a stain on your soul for those with the Disciplines to detect it, you see, even if you're careful to hide that you're suddenly a lot more capable with the old blood-powers.

Diablerie exists in the Requiem, but it's a short-cut to something that will happen anyway if you can just stay awake longer than Vampire Dad. The temptation of power that can be acquired in no other way isn't there, and that shuts down an interesting story option in favour of a rather tedious waiting game. Sure, you can always diablerise your sire to get them out of the way, if you really really hate them, but I sort of prefer these things when the narrative and mechanical lures for taking such an awful risk actually walk hand in hand rather than sitting around scratching themselves.

So which do I actually prefer?

On the one hand, Blood Potency does facilitate crossover play if you're into that sort of thing, and it also eliminates the rather tedious genealogical book-keeping involved with Generation - lineage is a big part of Vampire characters, what with their clan and the number of ancestors they have in that clan being so definitive to what they can actually do in-game, and it feels a bit odd to have sixth and seventh generation vampires interacting with thirteenth generation vampires and not much in between.

You do end up drawing quite a few of these, if you're tidy-minded.
Hark's got one that covers every vampire Aziz has ever met, ever.

Generation doesn't go up over time, and it evokes the dread that things will be this way forever, and presents the temptation to take a soul-slurping short-cut, which makes interesting things happen in game. Blood Potency does, and so diablerie lacks its previous appeal, and so sitting around outliving your sire becomes more attractive, and ironically enough things end up being the same way... for ages, if not forever.

If I were scoring on this ground, it'd be Masquerade 2, Requiem 1. Eliminating ball-ache for the GM is good, but I don't actually run cross-overs very often; I like things to have some breathing room and really, vampires ought to be interesting enough on their own, and Generation helps them be more interesting.

'How Interesting Vampires Are' is, however, mainly shaped by the setting elements. Vampire: the Masquerade had what you might call an abundance of riches in terms of playable options. Thirteen core vampire clans, some of which were, ahm, less compelling and interesting than others. Many, many sub-clans called 'Bloodlines', rooted in some semi-obscure element of the clans' convoluted histories. Dozens of moral codes that plugged into the game's essential Character Vs. Self conflict - find something to cling to or plunge headlong into the ravenous hunger of the inner Beast. Two primary factions each with their own mess of alliances, betrayals, subfactions, dark secrets and hidden inner orders. A recurring theme of working out just what was true about the accumulated weight of pseudo-history, mythology, misrecollections and outright lies of which vampiric history was comprised. Over a decade of creative energy expended in fleshing out a complex world that made one wonder just how many vampires there had to be to inhabit all of these factions in any interesting capacity, and where the hell all these vampires were.

Requiem is much, much tighter. There are five clans, each one directly traceable to some pop culture incarnation of the vampire - there are no dodgy 'gypsy vampires' or 'ninja vampires' or 'Mafia vampires' in here. There's the Dracula style lord on the hill ones, the Vampire Chronicles flouncy passionate sexy ones, the Nosferatu creepy ones who stand out like a sore thumb, the monstrous animalistic ones and the stealthy urban predator ones. There are five primary factions; the "we've always been in charge" one, the "we are God's cursed/chosen" ones, the pagan blood magic ones, the modern "we're all in this together" ones and the "let's work out how this vampire thing works so we can break it" ones. There are splatbooks, but I tend to ignore splatbooks in any system I play - the core rules manual should, if it's any good, offer endless potential for play on its own, and both the Vampires do... in theory.

And yet there's something about Requiem that seems to breed inertia. Masquerade had a feeling of pressure to it - there were prophecies that the clan founders were going to wake up one day and consume their spawn, and there was a centuries-long cold war between people who believed that and people who didn't, and then there were ancient feuds that still simmered away between clans who had wronged each other in the past, and then there was the actual mystery of whether Caine and the Antediluvians were really real or whether the elders had just made it all up or gone completely mad and started believing their own mythology.

Requiem has five factions who do have a few diametric oppositions - pagans vs. churchies, autocrats vs. democrats - but there's no pressure to resolve any of that. There's just an endless round of religious and political debates without the real kicker of some looming threat; vampire society in the Requiem has gone on for centuries and is likely to go on for centuries more, so what's the point to any of it? There's not even anything personal about it, as the millennia-long feuds of the Masquerade clans are absent, and the origins and history of vampire-kind have been lost thanks to the revolving-door nature of vampiric torpor (people tend to forget things while they're buried in the ground waiting for their blood to dilute).

For all that the Masquerade is convoluted, and relies on the unreliable memories of ancients and the implausible survival of artefacts, and that it's centred on a Judeao-Christian creation myth that canonically turns out to be right and shut down all the alternative intepretations (sigh), at least there's something to do there. I'd score this at Masquerade 2, Requiem 1 - sure, the Requiem is nice and tidy and clever, but there's no sense of motive or movement there. The material doesn't animate itself - it presents you with things and says "do something with this", while the Masquerade stuff has the feeling that the World of Darkness is active and alive, a place with a rich past and an ominous future, and it just says... come on in.

FINAL SCORE!
MASQUERADE 5 - REQUIEM 4

I wrote this because I used to be an edition warrior. I was adamant that Requiem was vastly superior to Masquerade, and I didn't understand why people would voluntarily play the old, clunky, cluttered-with-bullshit game, a byword for convoluted metaplot and slipshod design.

Running a Vampire game with a new group in the last year and a bit has finally made me realise what the Masquerade grogs have been on about for all these years. I wanted to give Requiem a try, I really did. I think it makes many advances as a game, and succeeds in its objective of pruning some of the mess out of Masquerade... but it prunes a bit too hard, and all that's left are stumps. And who wants to argue with a stump when they could climb a tree, eh?

For more images of typical Vampire players up trees,
go here.

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[Games Anatomy] The Politically Correct RPG, Part II - Novarium

Von and Hark are spending a couple of weeks looking at politically correct RPGs. Last week's effort, Blue Rose by Green Ronin was a bit too heavy on the wishful thinking for their liking; this week, their gaze turns onto Chubby Funster's Novarium.

Hark: i want to do another sick.  On this cover.

Von: Okay. Novarium. Mechanically, it is not worlds away from being a stripped-down version of Ars Magica, right down to the troupe-style gameplay and the covenant structure of the group's multiple characters. The twist is in the world-building:

Novarium is a troupe-style roleplaying game set in a unique fantasy world called Vaena. The angel Azakriel has visited the humans of this world and given the gift of magic to women, who have in turn reversed the sexism in their society and risen as powerful leaders. This was a last ditch ploy from the heavens to empower the humans to fight against evil, as the demihuman empires had been torn apart through their own greed and hubris.

Hark: i hate to say it but... don't women already have the gift of magic? That ability to make more of themselves? Also, 'reverse the sexism' - does that all men are merely cock-slaves or something?

Von: First thing - wombs are chambers of sorcery, it's true, but that particular kind of magic has yet to overthrow the patriarchy all by itself. It's not like you can use your magic womb powers to stop some bloke battering you round the head with a golf club.

Hark: "WOMB POWERS, ACTIVATE! i cast Chunky Gobbets! It's Super-Disgusting!"

Von: Thanks for putting me off genitals for life. Hope you didn't want kids. Weaponised menses... deary deary me.

Hark: All right, so you can turn blokes into chickens if they piss you off. Man, that'd be so great. Then you'd enter into a Peter Molyneux universe where you get points for kicking chickens... but that might be vigilante justice and therefore not quite right.

Von: It's no worse than what the average RPG party gets up to.

Hark: True. So... is sexism reversed, or is there just no sexism?

God [female] infused a powerful magic into Azakriel’s mortal form and when he died this power was transferred to all human women. Azakriel [angel sent to reorganise human culture] was aware of this condition and referred it the gift of the Light. It would grant all women the ability to cast magical spells and radically transform the human political system and culture.

The Gift dramatically changed the balance of power between the genders in human society. Centuries of female oppression were  reversed within a few generations as the physical power of women was dramatically augmented by the gift. Once legal and political equality was achieved, female power began to exponentially increase until their gender completely dominated the social landscape.

Hark: So yes, it was reversed, and it was reversed through hideous and bloody battle. And now men live as a slave race, afraid to put a foot wrong in fear of being turned into summat... unnatural. Glad to see that nobody at all misread feminism as 'women must rule all, for men are only good as brood slaves, sex toys, and tools for getting the lids off jam jars'.

Von: Plus, it's more "the only way that institutionalised gender inequality will ever go away is through magic from outside rather than honest human effort" shit.

Hark: It just sounds really horrific, and will have taken into account none of the small niggling sexisms that are at the root of supposed "female inferiority".

Von: You mean the little stuff, the supposed signifiers, that just look like expressions of a big problem rather than the way it keeps going, yeah?

Hark: Yeah, like 'girls are weak and so to call something 'girlish' is to insult it'...

Von: Although I get the impression that 'girlish' means 'badass' in Valdea.

Hark: By 'badass' you mean 'eldritch, terrifying and likely to turn me into a chicken'?

Von: That's still a definition from a masculine perspective, though, whereas I get the impression that the Valdea could be more about women defining terms from their perspectives. There's something about phallocentrism and patriarchy in the act of giving names to things, assigning words to things... something that sort of starts with Adam naming everything in Genesis, although it gets picked up again by some psychologist or another... I think it's Lacan. Yeah. Lacan's whole thing about men being the people who decide what words mean - I don't think that happens in this setting.

Hark: So 'female' means 'magical and in charge'.

Von: That's kind of the vibe I'm getting.

Hark: That seems sort of interesting as a thought experiment, but i'm not sure how i'd feel about roleplaying it... then again, i play Dark Heresy, and that's also a horrific dystopia that i'd never want to visit. i realise i've Failed the Emprah there, but there it is.

Von: Well, if you want an example of the kind of world that Novarium lets you explore, shall we consider its Ten-Definitely-Not-Commandments:

1. Thou shalt treat all humans with respect and dignity.

2. Thou shalt have courage in the face of mortal danger.

3. Thou shalt care for the aged and the young with tenderness, for physical weakness is never a part of moral calculus.

4. Thou shalt conduct thyself without frivolity in all matters.

5. Thou shalt not harbor resentment towards others for past wrongs, but thou  shalt not forget them.

6. Thou shalt have loyalty to your Liege, if thou has taken one as thy protector and guarantor.

8. Thou shalt seek knowledge and experience out in the world, for revelation rarely occurs within the cloister.

9. Thou shalt resolve differences of honour through combat, in accordance with the rules and regulations of such affairs.

10. Thou shalt not delight in the suffering of others.

Von: Can I just say that this sounds worryingly like some sort of Paladin Code. The bit about 'all humans' especially, 'cause in old-school D&D Paladins were a human-only class and there's still dwarves and stuff in this world, and there's just something about a game world that suggests that sentient life is only respectable if it's Like Us (TM) that unnerves me?

Hark: KNIGHTLY BULLSHIIIIIT! And where's the bit about 'Thou shalt put both toilet seats down', eh? This isn't written by women! And it really misses the point with number 3, you care for the aged because you can still learn something from them, or use them as cheap child support, or because you owe them for caring for you at some point. It's not about their weakness, it's about them having different strengths to you now, and about an exchange of services. That sort of implies "if someone is physically disabled, you have to Look After Them, because they're Weaker Than You Are"...

Von: Rather than 'you should Help Them Out, because they are People and Helping People Is Not A Bad Thing'.

Hark: Because they may need leading onto stage, but you can't play the piano as well as them.

Von: It seems like there's a lot of doing good things for really really dodgy reasons. Or because an angel told you to.

Hark: It's very white-knighty, let-me-take-care-of-you, paternalistic, divine-mandate bullshit, as opposed to "want a hand with that? no? okay, just thought i'd ask in case you were having trouble because i wouldn't like to see another person suffer.  also you might help me in the future".

Von: Yeah.And what kind of crapsack commandment is 'Thou shalt conduct thyself without frivolity in all matters'? 'Thou shalt go about with a stick up thine ass, for aye verily, thou canst not be a Good Person without being an Uptight Douche'. more like.

Hark: Are your Discordian sensibilities upset?

Von: My social-justice-tactics-nodes are being upset. I know I come across like a humourless boor when I'm wound up about problematic stuff, and I'm not the only one, and being a humourless boor doesn't advance the cause any, does it?

Hark: Not all the time. Not if you're a hundred per cent humourless boor. It seems that people start off thinking "aww yeah, i'm gonna do something Politically Correct, show people how the world should be", and then it just ends up being really obvious, boring, preachy Political Correctness on top of half an RPG, instead of treating it with the same respect that they do ideas about elves or magic, putting some actual thought and potential fun into it. It's nice that they're trying to put the message out there, but if i wanted to read a political tract, i'd buy a Big Bumper Book of Political Tracts. i've bought an RPG because I'm hoping that, at some point, a game may break out.

Von: And then what you get is an angel telling you Thou Shalt Not Commit Lulz. There's a difference between "I can't laugh at this because there are people who are victims of it and if anyone's going to laugh it off it should be them, making the choice for themselves" and "NOBODY CAN LAUGH AT THIS EVER"... it's a difference I don't always remember to distinguish but that's me fucking up and alienating people, and people tell me I'm being boring and I try to ease off a bit because I know I'm fucking up.

Hark: Ceiling Cat would never stand for this. Lolcat Bible. It's all about lulz.

Von: I'd like to make a quick pass over a few more setting details, if I may:

Noble status is traced through the matrilineal line of inheritance. The matriarch of each family is responsible for their progeny and lesser nobility retain the rights of judgment and trial for law enforcement purposes. There is no formal legal code as no political entity has the power to enforce it. Instead, the Book of Azakriel is sometimes used as a substitute for a legal code.  

Conventional knighthood is also now in the hands of women and men are only trained with weapons if they have proven themselves competent beyond what one would demand of a woman. After all, they must suffer the handicap of lacking the Gift of Light. 

Hark: So everything goes Jewish and women can't even be as good at sexism as men are?

Von: Pretty much.

Hark: All I can see is the words 'no formal legal code'. Huge and terrifying.

Von: It is interesting that Valdea (the world of Novarium) is set firmly in that default, arbitrary 'dark age'. So's the other Chubby Funster RPG, actually, and while I do get why - it's to do with adventuring being a lot harder to justify when the world's more known and joined up and people have more responsibilities and there aren't huge unknown and unexplored spaces and history doesn't have so many embarrassing gaps in it - it's a bit chillier here than it is in Errant, which is his love letter to AD&D.

Hark: You'd think there'd be some Victorian-esque D&D somewhere. Or Wild West frontier stuff.

Von: Well, there's a lot of manifest-destiny kind of stuff in D&D, certainly as Gygax wrote it. Going out there and taming the land, building your domain in the endgame and all that. It's definitely defaulting to a world with unexplored territories and moving borders. That's kind of how Novarium does things as well - the campaign starts with your Novaria (your collection of magical powerful women and their associated companions and servants and soldiers) being granted a tract of land and having to build a settlement and extract the magic and make contact with the natives and basically push the borders on a little way.

Hark: Still, it's always set in some medieval-Europle clone. Why not up it to the Wild West time period, so instead of Sword and Sausage it's Guns and Gears... and oh wait, i just steampunk'd myself.

Von: And in that moment, the Iron Kingdoms were born. But even then, that's a world with a lot of unknown spaces in it, a lot of preserved Room For Adventures - it's a world that's been broken and put back together fairly recently, which is kind of one step on from the not-even-put-back-together-ness of most D&D settings. I mean, people try to do things like Backsword and Buckler or Lamentations of the Flame Princess which have definitely got a more Renaissancy, urban feel to them. And there's Tekumel, which is set somewhere kinda Indian/Meso-American/Middle Eastern/Egyptian.

Hark: Mmmm, non-European.

Von: Which is another thing, actually - how fuckin' white all these worlds are. Both of them, really. And it's not like Mohammed A. R. Barker (author of Tekumel) wasn't born Phil, so you don't even have the 'the writers are white!' excuse. I don't even know if the Blue Rose folks are...

Hark: You can be green. You can be blue. You can be furry. But you can't be a funny brown colour.

Google 'black fantasy warrior'.
Get a lot of pale people drawn in monochrome.
*sigh*

Von: So. Final thoughts. Blue Rose vs. Novarium. Who's Doing Political Correctness Right?

Hark: *long, drawn-out sputtering sigh* Farts!

Von: Who's doing it Less Wrong, then? See, for my part, Blue Rose falls down because it's all wave-a-magic-wand-wishful-thinking-put-the-bad-thing-somewhere-else, whereas Novarium is at least doing that hard science fiction thing of saying "so we change THIS thing about society and think about what might happen", even if it's doing it in a kind of stick-up-your-ass not-addressing-things-fully sort of way.

Hark: Whereas i think Blue Rose is slightly preferable, in a political correctness sense anyway, if only 'cause paladin-esque ethics are just such Aryan-Nation, edging-on-eugenics, far-right guff.  It just seems like they've changed one thing and the world is slightly worse now, and kinda scary. At least i could have a happy griffin boyfriend in Blue Rose.

Von: Yeah, but you could play a lesbian in Novarium and apparently they're the best things EVER in Valdea.

Hark: Yeah, but in Blue Rose, even about the undead, they're are all 'well, they've got terrible table manners, but we're trying to bring them round', whereas in Novarium you'd probably be playing the Lesbian Fun Police, and i bet that's not as sexy as it sounds. i'm just not sure where the enjoyment lives in Novarium.

Von: I suppose if you wanted to play 'to tame a land' you'd just, y'know, play Ars Magica with stripped-down rules, which might be what I really like about Novarium. Ars Magica doesn't say Thou Shalt Not Have Fun, it says 'here are six different mechanical processes to explain exactly how fun-loving your character is, and what kind of fun they love, and how good they are at having it', which is its own and entirely different problem, really.

Hark: And if we're playing Lesbian Fun Police, i want someone to do an RPG of Brazil.

Von: I think there's a copy of second edition Paranoia in the cellar, actually.

Hark: Oh, God.

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[Games Anatomy] The Politically Correct RPG, Part I - Blue Rose

This Games Anatomy is a little different. For one, it's actually comparing two games - both attempts to create an RPG that addresses some of the problematic assumptions at the heart of the hobby. For two, it's got -

MEEEEEEEE.  What?  i heard someone mention "problematic assumptions at the heart of the hobby", and i just had to get in on that.  Also, i haven't had an internet fight in weeks.  They boot you out of the Mad Feminist Birds Society for slacking, y'know.

- two authors - Hark's joining me on the magical mystery tour this week, mostly 'cause I'm bored of talking to myself and I thought she'd have something interesting to say about all this -

You poor deluded fool.  You only think i'm interesting 'cos you can look at my tits whilst i talk.

- For three, it's bloody long, longer than usual, even after we split it in two. I'd put the kettle on before I clicked that 'read more' button, if I were you.

Get us some biscuits while you're there.

First up: Blue Rose (Fast Play version)

Welcome to the world of Blue Rose, a fantastic reality where brave women and men, gifted with arcane powers, live and work side by side with intelligent animal companions. The heroes of the peaceful kingdom of Aldis strive to uphold the ideals of fairness, justice and equality, while protecting their homeland against its aggressive neighbours.

Hark: I'm going to do a sick.

Von: Surely not. What could possible induce vomiting here, with all these high and noble ideals and such?

Hark: Intelligent. Animal. Companions. "Whassat, Skip? Evil invaders from across the border?"

Von: Okay, fine, but you play characters who talk to animals in other things. What's so badwrongfun about this?

Hark: *frowny face* That was just the first thing my eye alighted on. i'm not sure whether we're going for a slightly-more-intelligent-than-average dog that's going to be all "i'm going to point at a thing with my nose. i think you should dig up", or are we talking Beaver with a Capital B? Intelligent by the standards of mankind? If i can play an intelligent beaver i might judge this game slightly less harshly.

Von: I'm guessing it's Beaver with a Capital B. Blue Rose, for those not in the know, is touted as being 'in the romantic fantasy mould, inspired by the fiction of Mercedes Lackey, Diane Duane and Tamorna Pierce as opposed to Robert E. Howard's swords-and-sorcery style'. I'm guessing that talking horses with whom one shares a special and deep spiritual bond come with the territory.

Hark: And by "deep, spiritual bond", you mean buttfucking?

Von: Are you suggesting that Ms. Lackey has a bit of a preoccupation with what's vulgarly dubbed 'teh ghey'?

Hark: And fantasy furry. She does like people shagging griffins. Especially boys shagging boy griffins. Not that there's anything wrong with shagging griffins, griffins are very attractive as mythological creatures go...

Von: Nothing wrong with it... and yet, we sneer. Why do we sneer so?

Hark: Weeeell, she is very preoccupied with people shagging animals. The occasional one would be all right, but it did seem to be a big thing.

Von: It is a griffin's thing. They're quite large.

Hark: Naa, they're part bird, part cat. It'd be quite small. Might even be a cloaca.

Googling 'cloaca' will return some TERRIBLE THINGS,
so here is a picture of budgerigars cuddling instead.
Now I must go and bleach my brain. Repeatedly.

Von: So, summarising... three hundred years ago, the Kingdom of Aldis threw off its tyrannical sorcerer-kings and has since become a kind of utopia, thanks to the Golden Hart and the Blue Rose Sceptre, which have brought about 'a realm where all people can live together in peace... a culture of art, learning, craftsmanship and understanding'.

Hark: Oh Gods. And Goddesses.

Von: What's wrong with that?

Hark: Far too many capital letters for a start. One must be sparing with one's High Fantasy Proper Nouns (TM).

Von: Well, I think all RPG developers indulge in a spot of gratuitous proper nouning from time to time. What about all the utopian stuff?

Hark: It's a bit... not even childish, but that thing where you decide that people are Bad for some weird, strange reason that's due to their genetics or something, rather than the real reasons that people are bad.  That you can carefully breed any suggestion of meanness or selfishness out of your kingdom, and it can be 'all so beautiful and lovely, and about joy and joyness and careful supervised visits to Candy Mountain'. No wonder all of the surrounding kingdoms want to kill them all the time, they're probably sick of the smug gits.

Von: Yeah. Those surrounding kingdoms. On the one side you have a realm of undead ruled by a tyrannical Lich King who longs to bring about the return of rule by sorcerous oppression, on the other you have a fanatical 'Church of Pure Light' which is all about the scourging, the purging, and the 'rigid and proper behaviour'. Real fire-and-the-sword stuff. Not that this is an allegory or anything.

Hark: No, not at all. i don't know why he's tyrannical. Sorcerous oppression? He lives by magic... undies by magic... he just wants a place for his undead dudes in the world. This lot are probably all "'i don't like the undead, they smell and oppress my nose, it doesn't smell like blue roses and so I don't like it."

Von: See, I think that's my problem with it. Aldis is a kingdom that will love and tolerate the hell out of you... unless, you know, you're undead or adhere to a strict religious code, in which case you're out by default. It's a nasty little enclave of inclusiveness, where 'inclusive' is defined as 'you're welcome as long as you maintain the status quo and don't challenge our liberal sensibilities and ideology in any way whatsoever'.

Hark: It's not that I want RPGs to be full of "and i killed him and looted the body!" "But that was just a road-sweeper!" "Killed. Him. And. Looted. The. Body." "But his children. They're right there." "i kill them, and loot their tiny bodies."

i don't like it when they tell you you have to be nice... unless we get into it and there are Rules for being nice, and you have to really think about being that nice. Make a roll for Niceness. "You were not polite enough to the city clerk. He fines you three Bad Points. Save a kitten to continue the game."

Von: "You have too many Bad Points to remain in Aldis. I'm afraid you'll have to leave the kingdom. Please leave your sentient griffin boyfriend inside the gates. He won't be welcome in the Lich Kingdom of Kern." "But I only wanted to challenge my griffin-parking ticket! I don't want to live among the undead!" "I'm sorry, you were Rude to the clerk. Rude people are not welcome in Aldis."

Actually, that's it. I'm all in favour of telling people that their attitude to women/foreigners/homosexual sentient griffins is, well, problematic for this reason and this reason and that reason, but I don't want everyone who has problematic attitudes booted out of the nation and left to fester. That doesn't strike me as a way to make the world a better place, it strikes me as ignoring the problem and hoping it'll just go away of its own accord...

Hark: Yeah, and there's gonna be no human interaction in the Kingdom of Niceness. You're not going to get any problems for the individual characters, unless it's "your griffin boyfriend feels you have upset his feelings. You forgot your thirteen-month anniversary..."

Von: HOW CAN YOU HAVE AN ANNIVERSARY AT THIRTEEN MONTHS? ANNIVERSARY, FROM L. ANNUM, YEAR! THEY COME EVERY YEAR! *wheeze* *wheeze* Sorry. Pet peeve. I'm okay. Do go on.

Hark: "Thirteen is his favourite number! That's why you have a special anniversary! Griffins love the number thirteen! Oh my Blue Rose, you're so speciesist!"

Von: You know why it's called Blue Rose, right? The blue rose is a symbol of love and prosperity that cannot exist in nature. A beautiful and unique impossible flower. This is equality and diversity for the generation that claims it's a half-unicorn half-werewolf half-dinosaur reincarnation of a tenth century Wiccan priestess on its Tumblr page and damn the torpedoes of logic, historical awareness or common sense.

There's thought experiments and identity play and they're awesome, of course I think that or I wouldn't play RPGs, but this isn't thinking, this is sticking your fingers in your ears and ignoring anything that makes the world appear other than you would wish it to be, and the thing about wishing is it doesn't change jack shit.

Hark: It just seems that if i wanted to deal with a furry huffy boyfriend and people whinging at me about things i can't change then i'd live in the real world.

Von: I resemble that remark. More to the point, I think living in the real world involves whinging at people about things they can change, at least if they actually put some thought into avoiding it, which doesn't seem to be the premise of Blue Rose. The premise of Blue Rose is more like "We all wished that hate and fear and prejudice would just go away and leave us in a magically protected miracle land which for some reason still has an inherited monarchy because there's nothing innately divisive, unfair or socially damaging about an institutionalised class system."

Hark: But their sparkle powers gave them extra joy and they have to share it with people! From a throne! Of soft!

Von: Whatever, it still reeks of unquestioned class privilege and makes me want to get my China Mieville on. The problem isn't that you have the sorcerer king instead of the Golden Hart Queen or whatever, the problem is that you're looking to the monarch to sort everything out by special monarch magic, even though the only thing that qualifies them for the gig is being someone's daughter and fitting in the sparkly hat.

Hark: i wish i had a sparkly hat.

Like... like this? No? No, darling, don't do that... spoons aren't meant to go there!

Von: Okay, so mechanically it's basically the d20 system with something called 'Conviction' that works suspiciously like Willpower in the World of Darkness (it's based on your self-esteem and belief system and you can spend it to achieve a bare-minimum result on a die roll). Other suspiciously World of Darkness bits include a system of tick-box wound levels rather than hit points. Feats appear to have been replaced with 'arcana', magical powers like entering a psychic rapport or being really good at playing dead. We also have a sample adventure...

In this introductory adventure, the four heroes are all envoys of the Sovereign’s Finest, special agents of the crown of Aldis. They’re called to investigate the disappearance of some children from a village not far from the border closest to the Kingdom of Kern. Although there are unliving creatures involved in the disappearances, they are not tied to the agents of the Lich King, but to the ghost of a sad, lonely mother who simply wishes to be surrounded by the laughter of children once more.

Hark: Awww.

Von: That's... weirdly more affirmative than the game seems to be.

Hark: And  like that there must be people going "oh, that fuckin' Lich King, 'e's always nickin' children, 'e is" -

Von: They wouldn't say 'fuck', you probably get thrown out of Aldis for that.

Hark: *grumpy face* Well, local equivalent. Anyway, then it's like "actually it's a ghost of one of your own dear departed" ... although they should probably just use her as childcare.

Von: That reminds me of the world I designed where necromancy was legal and there was a Dead Rights movement and such. Got a ghost with a fixation on children? That's fine, she's cheaper than a living nanny and she probably won't nick the silverware. Oooh, that's a bit classist of me actually. I'd probably get thrown out of Aldis for that... if classism were acknowledged as a problem in Aldis... which it's not.

Hark: i like that you nearly wrote ALDI. ALDI doesn't throw you out for being a bit classist.

Von: Good job too, I need cheap German yoghurt in my life.

Hark: So... is that the adventure? Or is there something more now? It seems like the job's done if they've found out it's the sad mother ghost. Do we need to just go in there and Winchester it up, or negotiate rights for the childcare?  Or send an envoy and apologise to the Lich King of Kern for accusing him of child abduction?

Von: Well, among other things, there's an encounter with some skeletons who are abducting a child and apparently you're not actually supposed to fight them in case they harm the babby or something. Which is at least a bit more interesting than "IN THE ROOM THERE ARE SKELETONS! FIGHT!" And... the ghost is possessing someone and you have to persuade her to give up the body and there are about two pages of suggestions on how to use your arcana to do this in case you are, in point of fact, so utterly without initiative (since you've never experienced conflict before in your Be Nice Or Get Out kingdom) that you can't look at a rule and think "I could use that for things that are of advantage to me but not to others!" Frankly I'd rather be the envoy to the Lich King of Kern. Maybe he's recruiting.

Hark: Surely the persuasion is just... roleplaying.

Von: Well, some people are comfortable with funny voices and some people just want to roll Charisma against a target number based on Hostility. Don't judge them. You'll -

Hark: i don't want to get thrown out of the kingdom for judging!

Von: Too late. You have been cast out of Aldis. Maybe Valdea will be more welcoming?


Next week: Von and Hark take on Novarium.

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[Games Anatomy] I'm Not Playing A Game With Arse In The Title

Ars Magica, or 'the Art of Magic', is an early effort by White Wolf Games, (former-as-of-this-year developers of the World of Darkness and Exalted). It's set in Mythic Europe, an idealised and romanticised version of the thirteenth century where magic works, fairies exist whether you believe in them or not, and there be dragons here. And there. And in quite a few other places. It's an embryonic version of the Storyteller System, with many similarities to Mage in particular (unsurprising, given that they're games about wizards by the same developer), but with some elegant and interesting structural differences in how the game is actually played. And, true to form, I can't entirely work out how to feel about it.

Rather than going for the from-the-ground-up dissection of system and setting like I usually do, I want to spend some time discussing what makes Ars Magica different from its antecedents, and why the game both attracts and repels me in equal measure. Hopefully that'll cover more or less the same ground.

Things I Like About Ars Magica

1. First and foremost, the structure of the group. Everyone at the table has a Magus character (a powerful and learned wizard with a startling array of available magics and allegiances), a Companion character (a trusted associate of the wizard, who has some sort of worldly skill which the wizard needs in their friend/ally/catspaw) and several Grogs (mundane background figures of the bit-part caricature variety, like 'jolly cook' or 'stern guard sergeant'). All these characters are assumed to live together in a kind of magical settlement called a 'covenant'.
   
2. Players take it in turn to act as 'Storyguide' and run a session or two of play covering a covenant's antics and adventures around a sigificant event, and the assumption is that one session will cover one event and will represent perhaps a year or a season of game time. There's no 'random encounters', no 'roleplay every tedious bit of social interaction' - instead there's a tight get-it-done focus-on-the-important-stuff structure. Everyone else chooses which of their characters they're going to send off on adventures or inhabit for the duration of this session's events, and everyone else is assumed to be off keeping the background stuff ticking over. I like this because nobody has to stay as GM for very long, everyone gets a turn at GMing, and the regular rotations between not only who's GMing but which character everyone's playing should keep the campaign very fresh indeed.
   
3. The very core principles of the rules are clear and apparent. You roll a 10-sided die for damn near everything your character might conceivably wish to do. You add or subtract modifiers based on a character's characteristics, abilities, and personality traits, all of which are expressed as positive or negative modifiers - so things are expressed in the form that you're going to be needing them.
4. The combat system is clearly expressed in terms of stages. Book-keeping, movement, shooting, melee (which is a subroutine of three opposed rolls, basically 'initative', 'hit' and 'damage'), then magic or any second shots that happen to be going on. All the stuff about actions (is it better to charge, bull rush or grapple?) is tucked away in an optional 'duelling combat' system that you don't have to use and can reserve for really important fights.
5. The basic principles of the magic system are awesome. Basically, there are five techniques (verbs) and ten forms (nouns) and if you can express something as a verb-noun command which operates within those provided classifications, it can be done. There are set, ritualised spells which have been inherited and tested, which brings out the Hermetic backstory of the game very nicely, but there's also a fundamentally chaos-magic, freewheeling option for those without the patience to wade through and evaluate page after page of provided spells. Also, it's all in Latin, although the game does rather huffily note that you can feel free to just translate them. AND there's a page of hand gestures for each technique and form, so you could - if you were that way inclined - wave your hands about in a consistently mystical way when casting your Magus' spells.
6. The pre-generated characters are not remotely generic at all. Each one is distinct, interesting, comes with a bit of backstory and a sense of being an actual person rather than an archetypal representation. I had genuine trouble picking out one that I might be interested in playing.
7. Mythic Europe. The fact that it's a quasi-historical setting, rooted in yer actual medieval belief systems, means that you have this huge rich world of stuff that's already been made up for you (and much of it is richer and deeper than anything one person could imagine, purely because it was imagined or made to happen or both by squillions of people over hundreds of years) and you can concentrate on breathing life into it. I have to admit, I'm not a 'make up a whole universe from the laws of physics up' kind of GM, and while I have a lot of respect for people that can do it, I hope they don't expect me to remember, in the heat of the actual playing of the roles, that Our Gravity Is Different. I'm much more a 'hey I read this book the other day and now I want to put this myth in the game' kind of GM, and Mythic Europe is ideal for people like me.

Quiz time. Why is this one of Von's favourite paintings?

Things I Don't Like About Ars Magica

1. Many RPGs have that 'you must fill out an application form [character sheet] before playing' thing going on, to a greater or lesser degree. The first stage of the game being boring paperwork increases the buy-in that's needed from potential players, and - as I've discussed - RPGs already have buy-in problems compared to, say, board games. Ars Magica has a really profound case of this; there's a four page character sheet (admittedly only Magus characters need all of them, but since everyone will be making a Magus, does that really matter?) and multiple characters to be developed and you have to work out what sort of person they're going to be, in staggering and mechanically-expressed detail, before you start playing. I'm much more into emergent gameplay, generating a character's character as you play them, and having the interesting things about them be things that develop in the game, shaped by your collective decisions and triumphs and failures, rather than beforehand.
   
   
2. The default structure of 'one session per significant event, i.e. season or year of in-game time' assumes that there's a lot of time available and that players will be abstracting over a lot of things. I tend to be lucky if I can get a four-hour session in, fortunate if the players' instinctive awkwardness is overcome within an hour, and mind-boggled when things move along at the kind of clip where a major plot can be resolved in one go. Admittedly, that last thing is down to me liking it when people roleplay out minutiae, but the thing is, Ars Magica seems to expect that everyone knows what's important and skips over the little things - and little things, like when your character spends half an hour conning some university students into buying a 'prize-winning racing pig' despite this being entirely incidental to anything you set out to do, are kind of the best part of roleplaying. Or one of the best, anyway.
   
3. The difference between an ordinary die (where the 0 on a d10 is 10, and is a good thing) and a stress die (where the 0 on a d10 is 0, and is a bad thing). It's not that hard to remember but many of the people I play RPGs with would balk and shy from it like frightened racehorses because it's weird and inconsistent and annoying. Even I have to admit that I do prefer systems where the numbers on the dice mean the same thing all the time. It's just one more thing you have to remember in a system full of things that you have to remember.
4. Eight. Stages. In. One. Combat. Round. Many of which have sub-stages (rolling for how much damage a missile weapon does, or constructing a spontaneous spell successfully) and all of which have slightly different internal processes. This sort of thing may be fine for experienced roleplayers, but I usually have at least one novice at my table, and at least one person (it's usually me) who struggles with inconsistent turn sequences and remembering the exact process difference between a melee attack, a ranged attack and a magic attack, and whether you can dodge this or that, or whether you're casting a ritual or spontaneous spell... I wouldn't mind so much if it was a 'combat is brief and dangerous' system and you only had to go through those eight stages once or twice, but since it's a 'characters have lots of defences because we want them to stay alive to serve the story' system, a quick to-the-death struggle with a bandit might end up taking sixty-odd stages to resolve.
5. Hermetic magic should have arcane and incomprehensible rules, an obligation to do a great deal of research and testing, and be heavily invested in the idea of a body of canonical knowledge transmitted from master to apprentice. However, the actual rules for casting, learning, devising or otherwise dealing with spells at your RPG table should not take up hundreds of cocking pages of unique sub-systems that both pad the rulebook to new-player-scaring proportions ("I have to learn all that?") and are guaranteed to require play-stalling reference when they're needed (because you don't need any given fiddly little subsystem often enough to learn it, and everything has a fiddly little subsystem of its very own). Also, even the quick-and-simple spontaneous casting is done in Latin, and that makes quick reference quite fiddly for everyone except my ex-girlfriend who's doing a PhD in Classics. In the heat of the moment, when you have to think "oh gawd, how do I say what I want with just five verbs and ten nouns?" the last thing you want to do is look down at your character sheet and see these words and not even be entirely sure which ones are verbs and which are nouns.
6. The pre-generated characters are loaded with mechanics - merits, flaws, traits, reputations. When everything about a character's personality is not only represented with a mechanic, but with a significant mechanic that has bearing on some aspect of play, the front-loading of rules for this and that makes it sort of difficult to see where the player fits in at all. Also, if I were coming to the pre-generated characters first and the actual descriptions of, say, the thirteen different Houses of the Hermetic Order second (which I would be, because that's the order that the book gives them in), I'd have to make an un-informed choice based on these quite complex people without having any idea how they might actually work as playing pieces in either the mechanical (you can do these things with magic) or social (you have these associations) context of play.
7. Mythic Europe. A game that's about the myths and magic of Western Europe (and let's not kid ourselves here, it is basically Western Europe, even if the map makes it as far as Constantinople before giving up and going for the 'pagan lands' label) is always going to be somewhat parochial. Ars Magica fails to offer any sense of how the Thirteen Houses interact with, say, hedge magic, or Catholic heresy, or Jewish mysticism, or anything at all that might have come out of North Africa. The game is so pre-occupied with mechanising every aspect of the Hermetic magus' character and abilities that it ultimately fails to live up to the potential of its historical setting.

I want to like Ars Magica. The essential principles are clean and flexible, but they're buried under pages and pages and pages of cruft. The troupe style of play is interesting, but the systems for generating characters make creating and inhabiting so many of them a burden. The setting is potentially great, but White Wolf approached it with the blinkers firmly on, and it shows. I think, if I were ever to write a retro-clone, it'd be a version of Ars Magica with three-quarters of the rules ripped out.

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An Explanation, of Sorts

Do you want to hear a secret? Course you do. I can tell. Come over here, be seated, and Uncle Von'll let you in on a little mystery.

I'm feeling a bit burned out on roleplaying at the moment.

 


The current game is sputtering; playing is currently an 'if we have nothing else to do' or a 'we haven't done that for a while' rather than an 'oh man I wan to know what happens next' activity, and this troubles me somewhat. It's a slow game, and an unfocused game, and it's having to present the case for roleplaying as a worthwhile activity to new players, and to be honest, I don't think it's doing the job. It feels staid and pedestrian to me, unappealing, maybe-it'll-get-going - and I'm the one who loves these games and is prepared to commit whole days to running them. I can only imagine how it feels to the players, some of whom balk at spending more than an hour or two at the table; it's certainly not persuading people to commit their time either to establishing a session of play or staying invested when it happens.

Not much is happening, and I don't know why. It might be the laissez-faire, make-it-up-as-I-go-along GM style that I've developed after years of running for experienced roleplayers, which might conceivably make a new, how-is-RPG-formed kind of player flounder a bit. It might be the historical setting, which doesn't really have that wild-crazy-stuff-can-happen quality - we were two weeks in before I found something interesting to do with the world, and now I'm trying to steer the existing game around toward that. Thing is, the game's infrequency and the slow pace of sessions make it ponderous and difficult to shift, and I'm half tempted to scrap it and start again with something that's more inherently... open. Basically, I think I need to be running a game with clear objectives and an open premise, and I'm running a tangled web with quite a closed one.

What I'm basically saying is that I read about Lo's game and think I'd rather be playing in that than running mine. I also think that I've never run, or even imagined, anything that freewheeling, that go-anywhere-do-anything. 'My game' has always been embedded in a setting of limited scale, pursuing depth rather than breadth, which is interesting to me but seems to lack appeal for my current players. It must do - if the game appealed to them they would want to play it more often.


It might, conceivably, be my actual GMing. If I'm honest, I feel my GMing is becoming rather wayward and lacklustre when I am pinned down to do some. It's been a while since I whipped up an NPC portrayal or a narrative event that raised anything other than laughs, and given that I've had people expressing regard for NPCs years after their death or scared to sleep without the light on after a session before, that's worrying. The moments of drama that have occurred in games that I've run have been in games where I barely had to do any GMing because the party dynamics were innately hilarious. The best bit of the Backswords and Bucklers so far has been player-instigated, and that's fine, but it's also been small-scale, muddling around, and it feels like there's so much more that we could be doing there.


Do you want to know another secret?

I'm not sure I care.

I started running games largely because I'd played in a couple of sessions run by other people and thought "I can do better than this", and lo, I rather think I did. I became a go-to GM for quite a few years, ran a lot of things in a lot of systems and settings. Wouldn't necessarily say I've been 'prolific', but I've definitely been active.

The thing is, of late, I've become partial to playing rather than running. Despite a few personality clashes, I enjoyed the Star Wars d20 game last year. I was really getting into the WoW-RP business before it was laid low by a combination of summer absenteeism, end-of-expansion blues among guildmates, the time-devouring new job and commute and, above all, a desktop that wasn't on speaking terms with the Internet. And I'm really looking forward to the prospect of playing in a Dark Ages Vampire game run by someone who isn't me, because it's been the best part of a decade since I last had a player character in any Vampire of any flavour and I've never actually gotten to play my favourite clan.

There's also a certain appeal in not having to think about the game between sessions unless I want to. I'm starting to understand the lassitude that's at the root of the 'getting a group together' problem. By its very nature, an RPG has a considerable amount of buy-in.

All games do. Obviously, the point is the social dimesion - you're sitting around with people you presumably want to sit around with, participating in some sort of conversation. If the game isn't more attractive than just sitting around shooting the proverbial breeze, you wouldn't be playing it, so there has to be something about the game that makes it attractive and provides a reason to buy in to playing it.

Look at a board game - the preferred medium of several current players - and you see something which is designed for pick-up play. The mechanical process of playing the game is, if it's at all well designed, what makes 'playing this game' worth doing over 'sitting around bitching about the new Red Dwarf'. The thing with a board game is that it's all in the box. It might take a couple of goes to learn the rules properly and if it's a good board game it'll be a bit different every time and have that replayability factor, but everything that's worth doing about it, as an activity, comes from inside the box.

Wargames have a higher initial buy-in of list building, assembling, painting and so on and so forth, but once that's done once, the experience is more like the board game - you can pick it up and just play it without having to really put much of yourself into it. Of course you'll get more out of it if you do, but you don't have to. You can decide, on the spur of the moment, to pop down the pub club and play some Malifaux, and you can.

An RPG, by contrast, has quite a lot of buy-in, and I'm not even on about the initial hurdle of having to fill out a form before you can start playing (that is, basically, what character generation is, no matter how streamlined). An RPG isn't self-contained, like a board game. For it to be lively and interesting and more rewarding than just sitting around chatting, someone - ideally everyone - has to bring it to life and invest in it. Otherwise, it's just an overcomplicated, understructured board game with a mildly threatening am-dram component that takes ages to play and might need you to commit to doing the same thing again for weeks and doesn't have a definite structure and doesn't hold the players' attention well enough to stop them wandering off to bake a cake halfway through the session.

And the thing is, the first person who has to be on-task, who has to be lively and interesting and provide a reason for the players to buy in in the first place... is the GM. Even if you buy a module pack and use pre-generated characters, that material still needs to be performed in such a way that people want to play Call of Cthulhu instead of Arkham Horror and want to put on funny voices while they roll their dice. Players can wander off and dick about and still derive enjoyment from the proceedings but if the GM isn't buying in from the start, the game is never going to be worth playing.

And right now, mine isn't.

I think playing in someone else's regular game might re-charge my batteries a bit, but the thing is, it's usually me that ends up running things. Most other people's games either never get started, or just... don't appeal to me, for various reasons. I'm not, for instance, a big fan of the huge crossover World of Darkness games where the group might have a vampire, two werewolves, a mage, a ghost, a fairy and a demon - to me that's a game where everything's tossed together without room to breathe and be interesting.

I'm also not a fan of playing RPGs with people I don't actually know and like. Wargames are different 'cause a pick-up game's over in a couple of hours and you can stomach someone you're not entirely comfortable with for that long, but anything barring a one-off session of an RPG involves committing your time to these people in the longer term, and who wants to commit to spending time with people they don't like when they don't have to?


It's getting to the point where I'm hoping that one of the ladies I run B&B for will take an interest in Mistressing a Game. That'd be nice - something for the house group to get its teeth into, and something that I don't have to spend time on, or feel accountable for the success of. In the meantime, I'm doing... other stuff. Playing a lot of pick-ups, mostly Malifaux and Race for the Galaxy at the moment. Repairing my Vampire Counts models at last. Taking up fencing again. Thinking about doing NaNoWriMo. Recording a lot of amateur radio. Anything but playing RPGs. And given that I don't have huge amounts of free time, blogging about something I'm not currently very enthused by doesn't feel like an effective use of the free time that I do have.

And that, folks, is why I haven't been posting my Saturday posts as regularly as I should be. Sorry about that. Sorry about this post, which is much more about me, my hobby and my game than I feel a blog network post really should be, but I figure you deserve some sort of explanation.

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[Games Anatomy] Leave Your Message At The Scream Of Primal Terror

This week:

Sandy Petersen's Call of Cthulhu is a funny old bear. It purports to be a new way to experience H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, so heavily indebted to the old neophobe's fiction that it opens with a welcome reprint of 'The Call of Cthulhu' - a story in which several disconnected adventure narratives with nasty endings are woven together by a young man who proceeds to do sod-all with them. A marvellous evocation of the weird, to be sure, but also a kind of destinationless ramble. Things just happen, or rather things happened in the past, and the narratives of these events are collected and reflected on and a conclusion is drawn; namely that well enough should be left alone as the truth is just too big and scary and the conspiracy of Cthulhu's cult too large. As premises go, there's something lacking there - a sense of resolution.

The Lovecraft tale it's more closely indebted to, really, is the rather more pro-active 'The Dunwich Horror', in which a primordial nasty emerges, is discovered, and rebuked through the deployment of arcane lore drawn from the pages of an ancient tome of forbidden knowledge. I suppose that would have made a dodgy title for an RPG though.

To be honest, Lovecraft's fiction itself makes something of a dodgy premise for an RPG; too many of his protagonists are inclined to faint and blunder their way through narratives which ultimately end in their death, madness, or - in my personal favourite case, 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth', discovering their secret Deep One heritage and going down into the ocean to be with their people. Call of Cthulhu owes more to those writers who came after Lovecraft, uniting his disparate works into a cohesive Mythos - even the term is not Lovecraft's own - and positing that there exist powers equivalent to the likes of Cthulhu that are capable of repelling them, and a series of correspondences between alchemy and the various supermundane entities inhabiting or interested in Earth, and... a whole lot of what I could cruelly dismiss as 'typical over-explicated nerd stuff' which misses out on any of the horror-at-the-unexplained-and-inexplicable business - the sensation that Lovecraft set out to evoke.

All of which may make it sound like I hate Call of Cthulhu. I do not. I kind of like it, in spite of its somewhat muddled objectives and inspirations. Mostly, I like it because it has this reputation, a reputation set by statements like this one:

each round d3 investigators are scooped up in Cthulhu's flabby claws to die hideously.

The thing about Call of Cthulhu is that, despite its premise of trying to thwart the Great Old Ones, their minions, and the machinations thereof, the general expectation is that bad things will happen. Call of Cthulhu adventures are, by general custom and expectation, precisely-orchestrated follow-the-trail mysteries, where pretty much any diversion from the trail leads to the manifestation of eldritch horrors and doom falling on some scale or another. Even if you're into giving people a fair chance and engineering something other than a series of plot rails for your players to run down, the concept of 'cosmic horror gaming' kind of implies at least the prospect of a dark fate. Basically, it's the only game I run where people actually expect their characters to die or go mad.

Which is nice.

Anyway. One of my favourite things about Call of Cthulhu is the handy little two-page spreads covering the core aspects of the game. The Character Creation one blocks out a six-stage process in simple steps, corresponding to areas on the character sheet. MORE GAMES NEED TO DO THIS. It starts with statistics - Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Appearance, Power (which is used for casting and resisting spells and stuff like that), Size, Intelligence, and Education (kind of important in a game where you'll spend a lot of time discovering things). None of these, however, are half as interesting as Sanity.

Sanity works sort of like hit points in d20 games, only it tracks losses of mental rather than physical fortitude. Sanity points are lost whenever something psychologically taxing occurs - treading in a corpse in the dark might lose one's character d3 points, while witnessing the manifestation of Great Cthulhu knocks off a mighty d100. Furthermore, Sanity ties into another statistic, one that begins at zero and accelerates every time the Horrible Truth About Reality is encountered - Cthulhu Mythos.

As Cthulhu Mythos increases, through encountering entities or reading tomes or conversing with one's fellow scholars of the uncanny, it can be used to discern the right way to maintain or restore the structure of reality, banishing nasties and dispelling dark sorceries - but every point of Cthulhu Mythos ticks off an available point of Sanity to recover. The more you know, the crazier you go, and there comes a point where your character's mental reserves will start to be eaten away.

Characters also have a damage bonus, tied to Strength and Size, which is added on to all their melee attacks; they have the orthodox hit points, derived from Constitution and Size; and finally, another thing that I really really like about this game, they have the Idea, Luck and Know rolls. These are percentile stats, derived from Intelligence, Power and Education respectively, and they can be tested whenever a player experiences a brain-fart related to decision-making, being in the right place at the right time, or knowing some piece of mildly obscure know-whats.

I like these because they're really handy for kicking play into motion when it stalls because nobody has any idea what to do next; they're handy as quick resolutions for whether a character's trodden in the carcass or not, whether they actually have a book of matches about their person, or whether they get their fingers caught in the holster in a moment of crisis; and they're handy as ways to drop out a little bit of exposition or to work around bits of real-world knowledge that may be lacking at the table.

Alongside all these stats, there are skills - yeah, RPG design's kind of predictable like this, I'm afraid - which are all percentile, which you need to roll under to have your character succeed at stuff, and which are available to your character depending on their occupation. These are sort of stripped-down character classes, which only really govern the skill sets that are available, and they're based heavily on the source literature. The typical party might comprise a private detective with a weird case to solve, a posh tart with deviant intellectual tendencies, a junior librarian who's nicked the keys to the Forbidden Lore wing, and an antique dealer who's come into some really peculiar statuary.

More than any other game, Call of Cthulhu depends heavily on party composition - not so much because "we need a healer" but more because "everyone needs some reason to give two shits about what's happening here". Every Call of Cthulhu character needs some vested interest in unravelling secrets and pursuing leads - and a few points in the Library Use skill. Trust me on this.

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[Games Anatomy] Monkeys Optional

A couple of weeks ago, Aurenian asked a rather searching question of me: "how rules-lite is too rules-lite?", and it came with the suggestion that I turn my scathing gaze on Risus, 'the Anything RPG', by S. John Ross.

Risus posits itself as a complete game in six pages, ideal for those occasions 'when the brain is too tired for exacting detail' and, cheeringly, presents us with a 20 second character creation process.

Intriguing.

Rather than conventional 'classes' and 'statistics', Risus characters are defined by Clichés - shorthand which describes a character's capabilities in much the same way as a D&D class does. We know a Fighter can fight well, we know a Wizard can fling spells around, we know a Druid is a tree-hugging waster with too much silver jewellery* - moving outside that, if we say, 'Biker' or 'Escaped Lab Monkey', there's a picture borne out of Western pop cultural understandings that emerges there. Each Cliché is defined in terms of Dice, a pool of six-siders which are flung whenever your skill as a Fighter or Lab Monkey is put to the test. You have a pool of ten Dice to divide among as many Clichés as you see fit - one die in a Cliché represents next to no competence, six represents absolute mastery, four is the recommended cap for a character who's at the beginning of their career. So far, so White Wolf, and fairly reminiscent of other rules-light designs like Discordia! or PDQ. Let's put that 20 second thing to the test, shall we?

Von 
Description: bearded, British, fond of big coats, silly hats and elaborate sentence structure. Slightly smug, slightly posh, slightly overweight, slightly overzealous.
Clichés: British (3), Amateur Dramatist (2), Goth (2), Nerd (3)



That took longer to format than it did to think up. At this point, it occurs to me that the Risus pledge is probably really spot on if you have a clear idea of Who You Want To Play at the start, what I believe the blogopshere cool kids call 'storygaming', but if you just want to play Some Generic Dude and work out who they're going to be as you go along, it probably grates and grinds a bit. Presenting someone who is still at the "how is RPG formed?" stage with a blank slate seldom results in anything more inspiring than brain-farts, and even the most seasoned of players, when told "you can play absolutely anything", tend to flounder for a bit. It's a rare soul who immediately comes up with "Leopold Leamington-Smythe-Smythe, a Pretentious Leopard" or "The Mole of Misconception, a Tiny Superhero", unless you're running for a bunch of demented art students. That said, there's a fairly decent list of sample Clichés and what they're good for, which also sets the comedic tone for the game. Apparently you can play Risus straight, but that's suggested once and then promptly forgotten about for the duration.

Actual gameplay is set very much in the 'set a target number and roll to beat it' school. I'm quite keen on the "whenever anybody wants to do something, and nobody is actively trying to stop [them], AND the GM doesn't think that success would be automatic, the player rolls dice" call-out, 'cause this is something which I think most roleplayers eventually come to internalise but which doesn't always make itself explicit to first-timers. I also like that the target numbers are relative to the character's Clichés - a task which might be dead easy (target number 5) for one character might be a real challenge (target number 20) for another. It might be tremendously easy for Von to stomach a slice of black pudding while hung over (he is British, after all), but not everyone likes the taste of fried, congealed pig blood in the morning.

You eat WHAT? With WHAT on the side?
Humans are sick.

Equipment is abstract; every character is assumed to be carrying the stuff they need to do what they do. (Answers on a postcard in ref: what is required to be British). Characters might conceivably lose their gear by cocking up an outside-chance task, in which case the Clichés which tie into that gear either operate at half dice or not at all until the gear is replaced. Which it is depends on how essential the gear is. How do you tell if that Goth's a Goth when they've lost all their remotely morbid clothes, eyeliner and Sisters of Mercy CDs?**

Combat, meanwhile, is one of those nice systems which covers any sort of conflict in which any character is trying to beat someone else at doing things. I do like a good universal combat system which also covers social or intellectual situations and isn't limited to purely physical attacks. At the end of the day you're using your resources and capacities against someone else's and trying to do better at it than them, and I don't think an extra set of rules for doing that with words or weapons or spells or copies of Eats, Shoots and Leaves is really warranted, let alone an extra set of rules for each of those things.

To make an attack, you describe what you're going to do - in entertaining detail or theatrically - and nominate a target for it. The GM decides which Cliché you're using to attack and the defender decides which Cliché they're going to use to defend. Then you both roll the appropriate dice pool, and the low roller loses a die from their pool, representing being worn down in some way. Whoever runs out of dice first loses, and whoever wins decides the fate of the loser. You can swap Clichés in and out during a combat - if Von decides that facts are a better bet than dodgy poetry and switches to rolling the Nerd pool rather than Goth, that's fair enough, but if he runs out of dice in any Cliché, he's lost.

Hordes of enemies, rather than having their own individual sets of cliches, just have one bigger-than-average Cliché pool to roll, sticking together as a team until they're defeated (although there's always one left over for the winners to victimise). Player Characters can likewise team up to pool their dice, in which case one PC - the one with the highest relevant Cliché pool - is designated Team Leader. All their dice count toward the team's total in combat, as do any sixes rolled by the rest of the team. Damage is randomly farmed out to any member of the team - however, if anyone 'steps forward' and volunteers to take the damage, they take twice the normal amount, and the team leader gets to roll twice as many dice in the next round as they avenge the fallen. Breaking a team in combat inflicts a die of 'damage' on each member, and dropping out of a team reduces the drop-out to zero dice as they run off and hide.

Healing damage, the time each round takes up, effective ranges and suchlike are all dealt with by the GM, set to whatever scale is appropriate for the conflict being mediated. Which, again, I like - it means that subtle conflicts like passive-aggression within a marriage over several weeks can be resolved using the same basic system as a punch-up that's over in seconds. Making me learn extra systems for the sake of learning extra systems is Not Good. I do, however, wonder how well this one would fare for the kind of player who likes jockeying for advantage and comparing resources - sure, there's room to be inventive in the applying of inappropriate Clichés, but there's a slight hint of "you may use your initiative, intelligence and imagination only in these permitted avenues" to any system as abstract as this one. To some people, it matters whether they have the higher ground, a longer weapon, a higher-quality helmet; to Risus, it really doesn't, just get on with it and roll.

There's one more twist for particularly silly games, and it is suggested that this one be reserved for silly games - the Inappropriate Cliche. If you can roleplay or describe how you use Goth to win a boxing match, you can try it. If you win a round of combat by doing so, the opponent loses three dice, rather than one. Basically, Risus rewards the ridiculous - if you can be amusing while you're doing it.

Now, this is all well and good unless you're a player who is more into the ins-and-outs of mechanics and tactical combat, more into dungeon-crawl-as-resource-management-board-game-and-puzzle-system than flouncing about pretending to be a beautiful elf princess. If that's you, Risus is frankly Not For You. It's perfect for people like me and lousy for people like my housemate K, who is a boardgamer to the core and actually quite likes complex systems, mechanical choices and granular details, while loathing improvised dialogue and descriptions.

Hmm. I don't like games which aren't flexible enough to include all my friends, Von.

Neither do I, monkey.

To its credit, Risus does offer a few crunchier options, but they're mostly wired into the existing mechanics character creation or dice pools; there's nothing in there that actually factors back in the kind of granularity that some people enjoy, nothing in there to differentiate between a guisarme and a Bohemian ear-spoon if that's your thing, nothing to add a consistent scale or a structure for character definition and growth. Nothing, in short, that actually makes it more inclusive. Sure, you could add those things, but... well, the difference between house-ruling things into abstractions and starting out abstracted is simple. If someone says "too abstract for me!" in the first case, you can just go back and restore some things you've taken out. In the second case, you're stuck either changing games or making up systems from scratch, which isn't always as easy as it looks.

Bottom line: Risus is more or less what I end up house-ruling any game into after a while, but I know for an honest-to-god fact that at least one of the people I currently roleplay with would despise it and I'm not sure how well it would go down with the others.

* - note - this is not in point of fact the case. Von supports druids and the playing of druids. Especially if your game has those nifty shapeshifting ones.

** - if you answered 'they're still Goth on the inside', you are deeply overestimating the depth of subcultural allegiance, but you're also a decent, forgiving soul, and probably a better person than me. For whatever that's worth.

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