To finish out the month, a maddening miscellany...
1. Epilogue: I ran a couple of VirtuaCon games last weekend.
While my session of The
Warren didn’t go, 13th Age and DCC did. I feel OK about the two sessions (I’ll say more about that later). But I managed to
make a rookie mistake. I try to be strongly aware of the time when I’m running. At the start I tell players that when
we get to the last 30 minutes, I will cut and compress. I told them that and planned for it, but
in both sessions I still used up all my time.
Sessions feels stronger when you get a few free final minutes to decompress; ten minutes at least. That gives players a chance to go over what they liked, ask questions, develop closing statements for characters, and make future
connections with the other players. A GM can also ask for casual impressions. Almost as important you give players a break between sessions. On Sunday I ended up closing one tab and opening another immediately to get to my next game, with no breather between. This advice holds especially true at a face to face conventions where you might
also need to free the table for other groups. I heard a couple of horror
stories from Gen Con this year. GMs completing ignoring that they’d run over,
even with another group of players waiting.
2. Overstatement: I’m beginning to think that Dragon Quest 9 is the best JRPG. It has a strong focus on
playability, lots of room for character development, tons of quests, great
monster animations, and nice dress-up features. It’s a little disappointing
that Nintendo turned off the online features of the game, closes off some
additional content. Despite that DQ9 keeps impressing me. One
little example: when your characters run to use stairs set in the floor, it
doesn’t matter which side you approach from. The stairs trigger, and you don’t have
to run the group around. Plus when you appear on the new
screen, it starts your characters at the bottom of the stairs. You don’t have
to do any wasted motion to go down. It’s a tiny, tiny thing but there’s lots of that
throughout the game.
3. Paranoia: I found a hack for PbtA Shadowrun. I haven’t taken a look
at it yet. I’d been thinking about doing the same sort of thing- trying to
create role moves and figuring out what’s the most important play into those
games vs. most important to me. So here’s the thing if I’m thinking about working
on this: do I work on it and then read this version to see what it adds or do I
read it and then work on mine? I’m not sure if I worried about contamination,
cross-pollination, or that someone will have already done a cooler version.
4. Clueless: I mentioned in Tuesday’s post that I'm worried about how
much I focus on mysteries in my games. One of my co-participants on a This Imaginary Life panel surprised me when they flatly said they didn’t do mysteries. I
couldn’t grok that. But then I thought about mystery games: I’d played in: bad mysteries. Games filled with red herrings,
intractable NPCs, nonsense events, and closed off paths. So yeah, I can see how
folks could dislike those. They also require different kinds of investment. Mysteries have a kind of continuity- from
session to session, scene to scene- to put the pieces together. You can also be
right or wrong with a mystery. I don’t know if that makes a difference.
There’s another thing which looks like a mystery
but isn’t: problem solving. I mean that in the broadest sense. Rather than
answering a question, the players have to complete an objective. Ashen Stars does
something like this, but the stories there still have a mystery at the core. I’m talking about things like scams, extractions, shadowruns, infiltrations,
and so on. They also have info gathering, but that ties into player
agency. In those cases the players want to figure out a solution which fits with
their skills and needs, rather than one that absolutely matches the world.
5. Narrowed: I’ve been thinking about the bits I dig from Blades in
the Dark, both concept and system. Keep in minds my experience with this has
been watching some AP and using some of the elements in my game. There’s a lot to
love about the setting- the tensions between the gang and their rivals, the
efforts to develop their group, the relationships among the characters. I’m
wondering, and this might seem strange, if you could do a satisfying game like
this where you shorthand or handwave the “jobs.” Play would focus
on the cool bits of internal tensions, alliances, and figuring out what would advance
the gangs agenda. You could random table- with some choices and modifiers- results
of these operations and what the group gains from them. Maybe you could have a
flow-chart with rolls and choices for each op type, leading to final results.
6. Considerations: I want to do a podcast with Sherri about RPGs. I have to
figure out how to make that happen.
7. Malcontent: I received my copy of Urban Shadows yesterday. I hadn’t
experienced it before, since I’d skipped reading the backer pdf. It’s a lovely
book, with dynamite and consistent art by Juan Ochoa. Of course, because I can’t
be happy with anything I immediately began thinking of how I would adapt it to
play Changeling the Lost. Mind you, I do that with most new games I read.
8. Optimist: Since my 13th Age online game wrapped up, I have a little more room. Once we get done
with the DFAE playtest, I’m thinking of running something online, trying to
round up new folks or folks I rarely play with. I’d aim for 5-6 sessions, done
on Wednesday evenings or Saturday mornings. That’s about all I’ve got so far.
9. Luddite: Had some irritation with Roll20 this weekend. Usually it’s
pretty stable for me- and I’ve been skeptical when I hear others have problems with it. But we usually use it stand-alone, with Skype for the audio. For VirtuaCon I used Roll20 inside of Google Hangouts and it crashed multiple
times in both Google Chrome and Chrome Canary. I ended up having to close every
other tab and program. Only after that did the feed remain active
and stable. That happened both times. It also didn’t play nice with my audio
recording for XSplit, eliminating my voice almost completely. I thought it might be
my mic, but the audio’s fine on the standard YouTube recording.
10. Estimations: I don’t have solid data, but in my experience, it tales
30-40% longer to run something online than it does f2f. That’s based on running
several scenarios online and off, plus just general GMing. That has some
important implications for my scenario planning.
11. Visualization: I ran a 13th Age session for the convention. I think my scenario design really came up
against my bad time sense. I wish I’d had some compressed plot points- I felt
like I dragged a couple of things out. I went a little heavy on numbers for the
final battle: too many mooks and lesser levels. I think it might have allowed
for more movement on the field if I’d had fewer, but more potent foes. It’s a
learning exercise.
12. Communication: Last month I read and commented on nearly all the #threeforged
rpg entries. I also read through all the reviews and analyses I could.
Many offered awesome and useful feedback. I learned a lot from those, even when they weren’t my games. That got me thinking about my own
experience as an editor and being edited, as well as how I write reviews. I
came back to something I have to reteach myself constantly.
It’s equally important to identify what you like and what
works, as it is to point out problems. If you don’t call that out, there’s a
good chance they’ll kill the good stuff with the bad while revising,
reworking, and editing. You need to identify the ground the writer has to stand on.
I’ve had editors and collaborators who only focus on the negative, and then get
frustrated when changes don’t meet their expectations or cut out “the good
stuff.” I’m not saying you have to find something nice in everything, but that
when you’re communicating to a designer/author clarifying both sides of your
reaction offers better feedback.
13. Belated: Halloween almost here and no talk about horror games this month? Luckily I still have a post for a couple of years ago as a “go to”: Halloween Horror RPG Round Up
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