I’ve had a bunch of half-developed ideas for posts, involving social contracts, factions in roleplaying groups, story share vs. mechanical balance, etc. But I haven’t finished any of those posts. And this one isn’t one of those. I’m mainly posting this because I don’t have time to finish the others and this is more of a question than a commentary.
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jhkimrpg posted his thoughts on D&D4.0, including a link to a blog post by Ryan Dancey. It stirred up a lot of thoughts, including a rant about D&D that I’d been thinking about posting for a while. So, assorted D&D related thoughts behind the cut.
I’ve been poking through Spirit of the Century again. johnpaul613 has been talking about using FATE-style Aspects in Amber and it’s made me want to give them a second look. I was hesitant to just toss them in with out much experience with FATE, but now I’m feeling jazzed about the idea. (I’ve managed to temporarily get my gag reflex regarding FUDGE under control.)
While looking at the book I wondered, “How do they handle advancement with this?” So I flip to the back and read through it a bit, and noticed this chunk:
Player characters should always receive the same amount of on-sheet rewards, in order to make sure that everyone remains a peer of one another. Giving out advancement only to those who manage to attend one or more sessions means you’re penalizing those players who may have busier schedules. It’s impolite; don’t do it. The game will benefit when the characters are mutual peers. No one should come back from a playing hiatus to discover he’s become the sidekick.
This is something I’ve struggled with over several campaigns, and something I was planning on dealing with a bit more strictly in future games. So this paragraph gave me pause.
My thoughts behind the cut.
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I’ve been mulling around the idea of sparklypoo GMing lately. Also, it has occured to me that I don’t think I’ve ever explained my sparklypoo theory at any length outside of my private blog, and even then only in the comments of a post. So here are assorted sparklypoo thoughts.
*ding*
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Since ACNW ’07, Amber has been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve also started re-reading the Amber series. I’m in the early part of Guns of Avalon as of this morning. I’ve been thinking about what I’d want the next Amber campaign I run to be like. It’s also prompted me to look up some of the old maxims that people have posted over the years, such as those posted by Arref and Sol.
Assorted thoughts behind the cut.
I got up within a few hundred of being where I should be last night. I only need a couple thousand to be on target for the novel, but I’m going to try and get at least 4K in tonight.
The novel is turning out to be equal parts whacky and emotionally damaging. Last night I had a bit of awkward. While I went out to check and see if there were chalk marks on the car indicating that the parking nazis were watching my ass, I’d left my laptop on the couch I was sitting on between two of the people I knew. When I got back, I discovered that some musical chairs action had gone on and there was now some boy in his early teens sitting next to my spot.
Which would have been fine, except:
a. I’d just finished writing this pretty ugly scene of emotional and sexual blackmail that ended with fading to black on the beginnings of a sex scene.
b. The kid mentioned names of characters in my book that were visible on my screen in the scene that immediately followed it, with the sentence, “I know where you got those names. Solomon, Ophelia and stuff.” “Great,” I said, trying to give him the cold shoulder. The lsat thing I need is to get my chops busted because some kid saw something he shouldn’t have.
Note to self: don’t leave my screen up like that when writing the uglier scenes in the book.
As it was, the kid kept looking over my shoulder at stuff as I wrote. While it didn’t get as seedy as that one scene, it was still not age appropriate.
In the last couple posts I made about Amber I mentioned the challenge of subjective viewpoints when running (or playing in) Amber Diceless campaigns. And really, other games aren’t immune from this problem either. Any time you get into something not explicitly covered by the rules (and sometimes when you do come across something explicitly covered in the rules), there is some punting involved. The extra challenge with Amber is that the rules really cover very little so there’s a lot of punting involved.
Sometimes you feel stonewalled because the GM hasn’t provided enough information to keep you from chasing after a dead end. Sometimes you just think the GM is being unrealistic (or, if you’re the GM, the players may seem unrealistic). The person viewed as unreasonable likely doesn’t think they are being unreasonable, and perhaps if all the cards were on the table they would realize where things went wrong. But in the GM/player relationship there’s often a degree of keeping stuff back for dramatic effect. (One guide to GMing I’ve seen insists that the worst thing you as a GM can do is show weakness to your players. What kind of assholes do they play with?) Clearly some better way of communicating is needed, but what could that be?
I’ve been on both ends of the miscommunication gun. (And often the gun fires both ways at once.) I have no great answers. I thought I’d toss some examples up since it’s a slow day here on the eve of Thanksgiving and I can’t work on my NaNoWriMo wordcount. I’m going to try and avoid picking on GMs that have frustrated me and mainly draw any examples from screw ups I’ve made. I’m open to input on ways to work on these.
In my big “things that piss me off about running Amber” post, blue_monsta said, “I am eagerly awaiting the next post to read what you think should be done to fix these issues/problems.” I felt a little called out. I always hate it when people bitch about a situation without offering solutions, and that’s really what I was doing. I had no real intention of presenting solutions. I was just venting.
So here are my thoughts on solutions to my hated aspects. I’d started to work up something that covers all of how I tweak Amber to suit my needs, but decided to pare this down to just the stuff that addresses the aspects I hate.
This is the second draft of this. I’d tried writing up something before and it didn’t really address Amber specifically. So I tried to think about what I like in an Amber game and what feeds in to making that sort of quality Amber game. And really, they are the same things that feed into making any game excellent. (Or, rather, my idea of excellent.) Amber just provides a minimal system that makes what I like in gaming even better. The challenge, though, is that the same thing that makes Amber awesome can also lead to a lot of suck.
I’ll warn you that at times this becomes a little ranty. If you feel like you’ve been called out anonymously in this description, keep in mind that in none of the cases where my frustration is with focused more on the players is it a matter of just one (or two, or even three) people who have frustrated me.
