Category Archives: Gaming

My Love/Hate Relationship with Amber Diceless

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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.

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What My Games Are About

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Had dessert with ogremarco, sirriamnis and Mrs. Z last night. ogremarco has gotten pretty amped on indy games lately and is trying to encourage me to write a game. Having been down this road a couple times before, I’m a little skeptical. But I’m trying to keep an open mind. He did bring up some points that got me thinking about my own games and how I tend to run them. So here’s me musing on what I want my games to be about and what I’ve poached in order to accomplish that.
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Frozen Misery of Centuries, Session 3 After Action Report

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Our group was a little smaller than usual this last session. Two players got plucked away by PAX and so there were just four people for me to torment. I thought it went fairly well. I managed to dump a lot of info onto the players and did so in a fashion where they couldn’t really help but share the big chunks. I think the only thing that nagged me was one player who managed to get himself a bit orphaned. I never know what to do in those circumstances.
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Frozen Misery of Centuries: Session 2 After Action Report

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Had the second session of my Exalted game yesterday. It had a few logistical challenges, the biggest being a weird split in the party. Two PCs were in the “home base city,” where there was a lot of political intrigue raining down. The other four were in the middle of nowhere with an army at their back, beating up barbarians. It was pretty hard to balance out camera time between the two locations. With the one-month time-jump I’d inserted, there was a bit of strain on some of the believability for some of the NPCs withholding their master plans.
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The Language of Roleplaying: Establishing Tone

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A while back I wrote a post for my private journal about the sort of “language” that other mediums will use and how there isn’t an equivalent in roleplaying games. If a game is the sort of game to have a section on GMing in it, there might be some suggestions on film tricks or narrative tricks you can use when running games. I recall such bits in the back of assorted World of Darkness games. So notions such as flashbacks and cutaways creep into roleplaying with varying degrees of effectiveness. Or you might hear someone tossing around improv terms like “blocking.” In the end roleplaying (and GMing) are almost their own medium. They bear many similarities to improv, but it’s still a bit different of a beast.

So in a movie if you want to convey a great height, you might have a point of view looking down over the edge of where someone might fall off, perhaps having the camera sway a bit to make things a bit more dizzying and adding in a sound effect of wind blowing by. My original question revolved around, “How do you convey that in an improvised fashion in a roleplaying game without just having someone make some dice rolls to maintain their balance?” But there are a lot of other scenarios that you could imagine where you’d really want to really make something more vivid and believable to the other players.

There are a lot of tricks that we invariably just stumble over, some working and some not so much. So I tried to think about things that I’ve tried out in games that I thought worked out pretty well. The first one that came to mind is what I’ll call “establishing tone.” I don’t know that this will be very deep or insightful, but it’s something that I’ve been mulling around. I’m hoping that if others find this interesting they can expand on it and write their own pieces on the subject of how to define the process of storytelling in roleplaying games.
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Frozen Misery of Centuries: After Action Report

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Had my first session of my new Exalted game this weekend. Went far better than anticipated. vinnydapoo has gushed about it more than once, so my head is a little big for my neck at the mo.

It’s a very tight time slot. Because of a game the night before, I can’t really start earlier than noon. And due to player schedules we can’t really run past 5. We started closer to 1 due to a couple players that were running late, so it was a tight four hours. I’d really like to try and hit the ground running next session. Let’s see how well that pans out.

There were some notable gaps in my preparation. Some players just seemeed to have a lot of lag and I really need to prep for them a lot more. ogremarco, on the other hand, was a force of nature. I really need to plan for him less as he’s just great at driving his part of the game whereever he wants. Him organizing a celebration at his house before going on campaign in the north was a fun bit of action, though the camera then revolved around his character seeking out other PCs at the celebration. The other PCs didn’t mingle too much and I was having trouble improvising events at the party.

I was also a little surprised that the players didn’t share information as much. So a few secrets managed to stay well hidden, including the prophecy that was done out loud but not shared in character.

The basic groundwork laid out so far is that the newly Exalted Solars and Lunars were back in Cherak and feeling the heavy breath of the Wyld Hunt on their necks. One PC also found out that he was a son of the Scarlet Empress and was being pressured by his Daimyo into an arranged marriage engineered to take the Imperial throne. Some of the PCs, feeling the heat of the Hunt, decided to go campaigning in early winter in the tundra to the north. By the end of the game, the group was split in two main groups. Four of the PCs were battling further north, tracking down icewalkers connected to the group that killed off a chunk of their house and slowly revealing their Exalted nature to their followers. The other two remained in Cherak to try and root out what they can there, as well as prepare for the arrival of one PCs future bride.

So, things to work on for next time:

  • Planning more for players who didn’t get as much camera as last time.
  • Rub some salt in some of those psychic wounds that some of the characters have. I didn’t get a chance to read sirriamnis‘s character quiz until after the game. Had I known, I would have had a lot more lighter fluid for this session.
  • Figure out what to do with the folks on the march. I have some ideas, but it involves a bit more GM fiat. We’d sort of glossed over a month but I’d like to cover some finer bits of what they learn.

    • Gaming as Spectator Sport, Supplemental

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    I started this post a while back, but with my recent schedule I haven’t been able to finish it.

    In response to my previous post, arrefmak had pointed out that an engaged group of players that are not on camera can also serve as an audience. I’ve had mixed experiences with that in the past and I’m not really sure how to adapt that, from a GMing point of view, to other ideas I’ve had about engaging the players.

    The crux is that sometimes, as players, you are totally into the whole damn thing and at other times you aren’t. There are times where you’re really digging the other players and their characters, everything is all very exciting, you’re on the edge of your seat for fear of what will happen to other characters. There are times where you are bored to fucking tears and you just want to bring out the book you’re reading.

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    Gaming as a spectator sport?

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    When we talk about games and game design, we use a lot of occult language. In other words, I use literary terms and he talks like an actor. I talk about theme, metaphor, and plot. He talks about breaking the fourth wall.

    “It’s more than just addressing the audience,” he tells me. “It’s making the audience feel as if they’re a part of the event.”

    “What about the fifth wall?” I ask him.

    “What’s that?”

    I smile. “Making them feel that they are the event.”

    — John Wick, Playing Dirty

    Thought I’d open with another Wick quote. I whipped this one out a while back on my personal blog, and colomon felt that there was a flaw in it because… well, there’s not technically an audience in roleplaying. I gave my response to him briefly then, but since then I’ve been mulling it around since then. The notion was fanned a bit recently by a friend complaining about his attempts to run games for his usual D&D/Champions friends and not feeling like they roleplay much. They make their character and then they show up to be entertained. I’ve had similar problems in games as well. (And I’ve likely been that player more than once.) And talking to him about this made me think, “There’s the audience right there.”
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    The Frozen Misery of Centuries

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    I have a big, pontificating post about gaming in general, but thought I’d post something about the game I’m getting ready to run. As fun as the beer-and-pretzels Shadowrun game is, I’ve been wanting something… more. So I thought I’d try and get something more roleplaying and player oriented. I’m stealing mechanics from all over the place to try and see if I can empower players more (and let go of a bit more of the narrative control than I’m used to).
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    I want so much more than they’ve got planned…

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    A week or so ago I picked up the newest $40 iteration of, “We’ve rewritten the d20 Star Wars rules again, give us money.” Mockery aside, I was really looking forward to this. The teasers the the WotC Web site made it look like the fixed some of my big gripes about the older systems. (Well, aside from the fact that it’s still d20.) Prior to this, I had been thinking that any future run I did of Star Wars would involve me adapting a lot of the concepts from True 20/Mutants and Masterminds to the old Revised Core Rules.

    They’ve stripped out and merged a lot of stuff to streamline it a lot. Which I think is awesome for the most part. I like simple and elegant rules. But then I discovered that they stripped out what I’ll call the “fluff skills,” skills which provide little to no mechanical benefit. Craft, Entertain and Profession are all gone. Their practical aspects have been mostly absorbed by other skills or talents. You can’t have Entertain (actor) or Profession (lawyer) but you can take skills like Deception and Persuasion that emulate the benefits that come from those skills. I immediately grokked why they did that. Being able to sing well or paint a picture or build a house have no mechanical, measurable value in the game. This was confirmed by a game designer who happens to moderate the Star Wars mailing list, who felt that if someone wanted to be a great musician, they didn’t need to devote character resources to it. It could just be part of their background.

    I’m of conflicting feelings about the subject.
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