Collaborative Gaming: A Response

CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM

A couple of weeks ago I posted the video from the ConTessa panel I participated in, Collaborative World-Building and Gaming. In that post I also expanded on some of my ideas about those kinds of games- why you might use them. Last week the Black Vulmea (BV) posted a response on his blog Really Bad Eggs. His post, "Under the Microscope," takes the panel and my post to task for some failings. BV’s one of my favorite blogger- someone I slow down to read when it pops up in my feed. I started following him when I saw some of his posts on Social Networks and how he handles them in his games. His always offers readable and useful posts. If you’re at all interested in Swashbuckling or Pirate-style games, this is the blog you should be reading.

BV has several concerns and criticisms of the post & panel which I’m going to try to respond to. He has  legitimate grievances, but I think some arise from misreadings. The burden of that misreading, at least for the blog post, lies primarily with me for not being clearer and/or more precise. There’s some interesting discussion in the comments, but I’m admittedly restricting myself primarily to BV’s post. Note that I’m speaking for myself and not the other panelists. They’re smart and likely more plugged into this area than I am. I can only really talk as a GM who has found these tools useful in my games. I’ll also be paraphrasing/ summarizing some of BV’s comments- so I really encourage readers to go and read his full piece. I do want to address one comment. Matthew Milller makes the point "The only thing that irks me is when CWB fans adopt a condescending attitude toward trad RPG players, who are framed as "fearing the players," unwilling to leave their "comfort zone," etc. Grr.” I don’t believe that’s the tone of my piece.  

HOW I CAME TO THIS

When everyone went over to d20, we were still playing many other things. But it was clearly something worth knowing about so I ran a campaign to see what I thought. I did the same thing with Savage Worlds, Gumshoe, Dying Earth, Fading Suns, and many other games that I ended up liking parts of, but not everything. I’d run Champions for years, but was willing to try other superhero games- eventually landing on Mutants & Masterminds as the one I tried and liked. But I also tried out Godlike, Silver Age Sentinels, and City of Heroes. I’ve explored other, more “indie” systems to see what they have to offer: Fiasco, Hollowpoint, Dread. People talked about OSR so I made sure I played and read some of that. Like every other GM, trying out other systems helps me see what I like about games I run regularly. Sometimes I find new ideas and techniques. I like how FATE describes the environment and I brought that back to the table. And I liked Microscope’s framework for collaborative world building. Has everything I’ve tried worked? No. I’ve learned things my group doesn’t like- things that other groups love: FATE Dice, Detailed Combat Mechanics and Timers from Scion, Abstract Combat Representation, Tag Lines from Dying Earth, Roll Under but High from Fading Suns, Modifier Heavy Systems, GUMSHOE’s standard action system, skill lists written to fit with the setting over clarity, etc.

I use collaborative techniques as another arrow in my GM’s quiver. I run mostly conventional campaigns- GM-created and crafted. You can see most of my campaigns are fairly classic style- here’s are two inventories of them from M&M to GURPS to Rolemaster to D&D to Homebrew to Exalted and so on (Fantasy World and Other). 

WHAT AM I TALKING ABOUT?

Black Vulmea talks about some areas of concern that I share: games which lack mystery and/or have a strongly shifting player/GM relation in the campaign play. But that’s not what’s going on with my sense and experience of collaborative world-building. I’m taking the long way around, but let me begin by distinguishing what I’m not talking about. I can really only speak to my own focus and interests (the panelists may be different).

• I’m not talking about GM-less games- like The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Committee of Exploration of Mysteries, Durance, Capes, or any of countless others. I appreciate games like Fiasco and Our Last Best Hope. They’re cool- and I’d recommend everyone, especially GMs, try one once. It might not be your cup of tea, but you might find something interesting you can bring back to your other games. I like these games, but generally they’re one-shot experiments or goofs on a free evening or between campaigns. They function like a board game for me.

• I’m also not talking about more abstract games which do have a “GM” but effectively have a negotiated resolution. I believe Murderous Ghosts, mentioned in the panel, falls into this category. In a sense these are randomizer-less- something I’ve not really been able to wrap my head around. These are more storytelling games- again a great and fun thing- but a little bit away from my interests in campaigns and rpgs. They’re cool for a one-shot.*I’m also not talking about games which give the players large-scale control over the narrative in play. By this I mean where they explicitly set the plot or adversaries along with the GM. I’ve heard about games like this but I can’t really point to any. I’m not plugged in enough to the indie scene to know what’s out there in this category. Perhaps My Life with Master. I own that but haven’t played it. My sense again is that these kinds of games are more one-shot than on-going campaign, but that may be my bias (i.e. I have a hard time seeing how that would sustain itself). If someone can give me some examples, that would be helpful.

• I am talking about mechanical systems or rules which help structure that process. In this case I am talking about some GM-less games, like Microscope or Dawn of Worlds. I’ve played Microscope as a stand-alone game and it was fun. But mostly I’ve used it as a tool to build a setting for a conventional campaign (I’ll come back to some examples later). Some standard rpgs have similar mechanical systems for doing shared creation- Diaspora mentioned in the video for one. Another would be The Dresden Files city creation mechanics. Ars Magica’s another early one- where the players create the Covenant and the GM role passes between players from story to story.

• Shared character creation: Various flavor of FATE offer a collaborative process used to tie the party together and create aspects. So a segment of the PC’s creation can be influenced by the group. The couple of times I’ve used this, I’ve been surprised by the positive response. It obviously wouldn’t work in all games, but FATE’s system of aspects makes it easy to use.

• Player Narrative Control: Generally I’m pretty open about players introducing details to a scene- provided they fit the context and ‘ground rules.’ As I mentioned in the video- I encourage players to flesh things out, like describing that there’s a something at hand or in their pocket. Some games, like FATE, make this a mechanical device- allowing players to spend resources to create an impact on the scene. I’m OK with that. But in most of these cases that’s a pretty modest impact- with more significant ones requiring an action, a roll and/or the spending of resources. That’s more a GM technique, I think, then a question of collaborative gaming. I try to be pretty open about things- aiming for a more “Say Yes” approach. If there’s a question, we go to a roll. But I’ll say no if it doesn’t fit or represents a misunderstanding of the scene. I had a player for years who simply couldn’t process scene descriptions. I’d set the stage at the top of each round and even restate things before his actions and he’d still bizarrely misunderstand positions, set ups, details, etc- even with miniatures. I said “No” and “No, But…” with him many, many times.

So what am I talking about- i.e how have I actually used collaborative world-building and gaming?

ON TO THE SHOW

One of Black Vulmea’s key concerns is that the panel doesn’t strongly enough address or deal with the objections gamers might have to a collaborative approach. We do consider some of it in the panel, but not strongly or in depth enough. I think that’s a fair concern. However I’d say that the panel’s really about presenting perspectives on a tool which gamers can bring to the table. Yes, it is an advocacy panel in that regard. I think given the constraints of the format and the number of participants that’s the likely result. His point is a fair one and if I’m on panels like this in future I’ll give more space to why whatever technique I’m talking about won’t work for everyone.

BV has a bigger concern, “as a player, I want to explore the game-world, not build it. The "world of mystery" isn't something I want to get past; it's one of the most important features of roleplaying games for me” (emphasis his). 

I agree- I want to explore my worlds and I want my players to explore them. That’s the point of my section “Room to Build” from my original post- and really shows that I needed to be more explicit and precise about that. Bottom line: the collaborative approach I’ve used shifts the “GM/player dyad” for a short time before the campaign begins. It then returns it to a conventional “GM/player dyad” during the course of the actual campaign. And in my experience, that’s provided benefits, including increased engagement and excitement.

When I’ve run player involvement with world-building hasn’t detracted from the joy of exploration or the sense of mystery surrounding the world. Let me point to a couple of examples. Here’s the rundown of the collaborative session for the creation of The Last Fleet campaign. It sets up the world background and the history leading up to the present day. That’s what the players know- from that they went away and created characters. Based on that background and those characters I’ve run a 2+ years campaign.

And the game’s been all about exploration and surprise. Voyaging to new places and dealing with the bizarre challenges, while at the same time considering the weight of their own history. They’re the last of their people and they know what they’ve lost. I always hope for an ‘out-of-the-park’ campaign, and this one has delivered. Here’s the thing- the players at the start know as much about the setting as I do. That changes very quickly as I fill in details, add twists, and use the room they’ve given me to add depth. There’s no more lack of mystery than there would be if you were running an established campaign setting players know: Forgotten Realms, Star Wars, or even historical Europe. Here the players have definitely “read the background material” and have an additional connection, a sense of ownership and investment.

You can see another example, our Relic Hunters aka The Hunts Begin campaign, here. Look at the possibilities. They’re delicious and I made the most of them. That detail about the Blazing Sun became the centerpoint of the campaign, with the players trying to figure out how to put a stop to that. In the process the learned secrets about who had manipulated that to happen, what had been the reason for the purges of the assassin clans, and who the real threat to the world was. The players had to uncover the backstory for the Bells of Pelic, mentioned in the history, revealing more tragedies and terrors facing the world. They got to go to many of the places mentioned and actually see in play some of the figures- in their full complexity. By nature, this collaborative approach can only sketch the outlines- the GM still fills in the details. This can even apply to players creating their city - as in Grey Reign which offers more things for me to explore and twist at the table than I’ll ever get through. Or where the players create their family or clan, as in the Legend of the Five Rings campaign I’m running.

Collaborative worldbuilding doesn’t negate exploration. In the games I’ve used it, it made it richer. Mind you if players don't want to build the world, that's a fair personal preference. But not wanting to build it because then there won't be any mystery misunderstands the process. 

ASCRIBING FEARS

BV has some other concerns, “In Lowell Francis' blogpost, it goes rather beyond simply ignoring other positions to exaggerating a fringe argument, that referees who don't embrace collaborative world building may do so because they 'fear the players,' instead.” I don’t know if I’m exaggerating a fringe argument in my post- I hope I’m not. As I said I’ve seen that response pop up in a number of forum thread- on blog posts, on RPG Geek, and on Reddit. I’ve also talked with several GMs who expressed the same sentiment. That’s anecdotal- but I’ve seen it enough I wanted to address it. IMHO it hasn’t been a fringe argument, but a legitimate concern I’ve seen multiple times. So in my post, I’ve tried to answer that- if that’s your particular worry, I don’t think you need to be afraid. You may have other reasons for not trying it, but if you’re afraid of autonomy loss to the players with these methods, I don’t think you need to be.

Let me give a related example. When I decided I wanted to try out Microscope to build a campaign, I had a couple of my long-time players (25 years+ and 18 years+) express some real fears before we got started. They worried about “the other players getting it wrong.” Mind you, everyone else they’d also played with for years. They trusted me to do campaign and world creation, but they weren’t sure about everyone else at the table. Afterwards, both talked about their worries and how working through the process had completely changed their minds. That experience has made me more aware that players and GMs might have concerns along those lines- so I’ve tried to address those. I’m not saying you’re a coward if you don’t try these techniques- that would be stupid.

BUILDING IN PLAY

The last point Black Vulmea makes is, “the difference isn't between the players collaborating in world building or not -it's between collaborating in world building in-character or out-of-character.” (emphasis his).

We can have both. We can collaboratively build the world and then do everything BV mentions as a play activity within the rules of the game, whether that game’s Flashing Blades, Rolemaster, FATE, or whatever. At least as I’ve used them, these two segments exist independently. We get together as a group and build a world. Then I, as GM, go away and put together some character creation mechanics to fit the world and the system we’re using. Then the players make up characters and play within that world they’ve created as you would with a conventional campaign. In Last Fleet they’ve made alliances, they’ve founded a new homeland, they’ve developed romantic plots, they’ve risen in ranks and status- all in classic gameplay. They continue to change and shape that game world from within. They continue to explore and learn about that world from within. But the players aren't OOC building the world during play. Instead they're playing in that world. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

This isn’t something Black Vulmea specifically mentions, but I want to be clear. Collaborative gaming is a tool and a technique. As I mentioned above I strive to try out new things to see if they add to my games. Many times they don’t and I set those aside. The positive reaction I got from players had encouraged me to do more with shared world-building and collaboration. Will I use it for everything? No. It doesn’t fit for some things I want to run. Collaborative character building, for example, won’t necessarily work where I want the PCs to begin as strangers or unconnected. Like every playstyle- it has a place and may not fit with every group or GM.

But for me it has been a success. I think that it is worth trying at least once to see if it works for you or if there’s something there you can steal for other games. In my case, and again this is anecdotal, it added to the players’ excitement; the groups (sixteen players in six distinct groups) spoke about how much they enjoyed it; the challenge pushed me to develop great new material; quiet players ended up being able to show what they wanted (where they usually didn’t articulate it when asked directly); and most of all it has been super fun. 

I want to thank Black Vulmea for his excellent blog (Really Bad Eggs) and for taking the time to watch the panel and read through my post. I hope I've addressed at least some of your concerns with this. 

Dear NSA,

I shouldn't even have to post this. 

More on this here. 

Crux

PATRIOTIC DELAYS
I will plead forgetting that this was a holiday week- combined with a packed weekend and strangely scheduled week. I have a couple of posts I'm working on. In the meantime, here's the map I put together for the Dragon Blooded Exalted 1e campaign I ran, the layered and broken city of Crux. 

I Know Who You're Running: Three Poles and Player Acknowledgement

IF YOU PLAN FOR SOMEONE, THEY WON'T SHOW UP

Last night we scheduled the grand finale for the second arc of our Mutants & Masterminds campaign. In our previous session First Wave confronted and defeated one of the last Cabal Overlords- Kang, revealed to be Tony Stark- with their own armor-wearing Tony Stark revealed to be a clone. But that victory proved to be short-lived as they looked out upon NYC and saw the horde arrayed against them: gargantuan monsters of legend like Fin Fam Foom; Dog Demons; and Hela and her armies- and alongside, her general the Mighty Thor!

...which would have been awesome except one of the players had a power outage  so we had to reschedule for two weeks from now. I'd planned on writing something about the campaign for today, so instead I'll offer another piece that I've been working on and is more than a little raw- I'm still not sure about the concepts. 

BEYOND ROLL CALL

At a recent session of our new Legend campaign, we found ourselves in an Inn. That’s pretty standard fare- a stopover for rumors as we headed on to deal with the question of the silent village. It has been a while since I’ve had a chance to play rather than GM. I’m enjoying the slow reveal we’re getting about the GM’s world- a place with lots of interesting bits and pieces. He’s smartly presenting those in drips and drabs. In any case as we come in- the GM describes the common room, with a few striking characters and clear plot hooks. Then he mentions that one of the groups in the room consists of members of a particularly brutal mercenary company from my home region. They recognize my heraldry and give me some scowls. It prompts some discussion in the group about my history.

And that’s it- we don’t get into a fight with them until a later session. They didn’t seem to tie to the main plot. They’re there and offered some color. More importantly they acknowledged that the GM remembers who my character is. I gave Derek a pretty Spartan background, a few details, but those details remain importantly to me. It has been a while since I played with Derek; the last campaigns were more procedural. We had cases or assignments. If something popped up from someone’s backstory it was because it tied to our current undertaking tightly. Here, in just a couple of minutes of scene I felt like my character mattered in the world and that the GM was thinking about cool stuff for me. Not just random plots, but ideas and concepts which played off of the work I’d done.

The moment stuck with me when I caught up on Ken & Robin talk About Stuff podcasts the following week. They had a segment on the perennial question of railroading, something I think every gaming blog and podcasts has wrestled with. I’ve written on it more than few times; Sandboxes & Finales and Another Inevitable Post on Railroading. Anyway that discussion plus some ideas about ways to use skill competency to mark players got me thinking about another way to see the tensions between what some might call “directed” versus “free” in an rpg. Instead of seeing that simply as a tension between the GM and players, I think we can three poles operating in a game. I’m hoping that thinking about it this way might help me understand where my campaigns- run and played in- work or didn’t work.

Story: We traditionally considered the GM’s core interest. The idea that the GM has a tale to tell that links or works at a meta-level to the scenes and sessions. Some gamers discuss this negatively- where a GMs focus on the story means that they don’t get to make meaningful choices, don’t have their characters acknowledged, and their result have been effectively mapped out. Gamers often point to Dragonlance as an exemplar of this kind of story orientation. As with all three poles, focus on this can exclude other elements. Story can be softer than this- where there’s a plot the players explore, such as in a mystery. Struggling to defeat a big bad’s a story trope and form. There’s a difference between plotting and plot in this case. Story can also be added later- with an emergent story, crafted by the players and/or the GM as things move along.

Characters: The narrative and details players tell about who they are. It includes character sheet bits and also how that gets expressed at the table. At the most basic level, this consists of the PCs class/race/role. In other games, this includes stories about those details (i.e. The Elves of Alfheim bear no ill-will towards the Dwarves of Rockhome). In games with an emphasis on character this often includes somewhat mechanical details like aspects, merits, flaws, disadvantages, complications and so on. More broadly it includes the backstory and character history which players come up with- told at the table or written up. Generally these elements are of greater value to the player than to the GM. Taken to the extreme offers a game that’s simply about the characters interacting. A negative spin on that might be to call it diddling around. GM-less games like Fiasco focus on this.

Environment: The setting and backdrop. Not the backstory, but simply the things which the group interacts with. Places, battle maps, described locations, discrete incidents, NPCs- these all make up the environment. This may be more or less interactive and responsive- for example NPCs on one end and a dungeon room on the other. This also includes the rules covering the game since that’s a both a kind of environment and the laws governing the backdrop. Hex and Dungeon Crawls often put an emphasis on this over anything else. In extreme versions, there’s no compelling story beyond a win condition or goal. You characters don’t really matter to the game, except as they impact available rule choices. But generally any characters could be slotted into games with a focus on environment.

Some games focus on one of these poles- that’s less interesting and less fun for me. Below are some notes about the extreme versions of these positions. What might be the implications of an obsessive focus?

Story Focus: No power, no interactivity, no choice. What the players do doesn’t really matter. I’ve played in games where it became pretty clear that the GM had a plot and we were going to get there regardless of what we wanted. Work we did to shape events would be washed away or dismissed. I’m not sure if it is better to know that up front or find that out as the campaign progresses. Sherri played in a game where she had the opportunity to build up resources and contacts for her character. She was given the impression that would be a significant part of the game. After several sessions of that, the GM threw them away and moved the party on to the location he wanted them to be at. Her worked ended up discarded and unmentioned.

Character Focus: No driving group goals, lack of direction, potential for misreading. I think when people dismiss some games as being dithering, dollhousing, or pointless, they’re talking about games like these. Character focused games draw plots and details from the PCs. Exclusively doing that suggests that the world revolves around them. If the group has players with different levels of energy, some can get left to the side. If can also devolve into everyone playing in parallel rather than towards something collectively. A character focus requires the GM to know the characters as well as the player. We had a series of campaigns with a player who communicated their goals and desires badly- and moved the goalpost. They became resentful when they weren’t given what they wanted, but wouldn’t communicate what that was. It meant they didn’t have to justify themselves.

Environment Focus: Characters don’t matter, board game play, disconnection, higher rewards for system mastery. Could devolve into a mechanistic approach: calculated challenges needed: monsters, traps, skill rolls, and plug those in. Strip away materials to get to the engine and result underneath- a procedurally generated approach. Games become samey. Characters become dismissed as tools. Non-optimal characters for the environment don’t work.

IS THAT USEFUL?

OK what does breaking that down actually do for me? Is it a useful way of doing things? I’ll say this- I tend to have a Story and Character focus in my games. I know and can identify that, so how can I bring that better into balance with the Environment. How can I present and scale challenges to make them interesting. I’m thinking about the mechanistic side of things there. But how can I present the environment/setting in a way that allows the players to muck around with it.

Crucially the GM- in the early days of a campaign, and then on a regular basis throughout the campaign- should show the players they know and remember their character. I talked before about the importance of establishing trust with players. This can be mechanical- showing that you have mastery of the system and want to use it for fun rather than straitjacketing the group. It can be about attention by demonstrating that in a scene everyone will get an opportunity. It could even be about taking them seriously- taking them at their word and considering even the goofiest ideas with some care. I believe that players need to trust that a GM recognizes who they are and acknowledges that the player has a kind of cool character.

As a side note, in an ideal game, as a GM, I love all of the PCs. I have affection for them or at the very least I don’t hate them. That doesn’t mean I’m not going not put them through the ringer. It doesn’t mean I’m going to protect them. But I’m going to do that because I want to see them rise to the top, I want to see how they overcome the challenges set before them. Depending on the game, I come to enjoy the character in several ways. In more classic games, that’s purely through personality and play- clever, funny, interesting, whatever. That’s how the player puts themselves out at the table in a heavily procedural game- like a dungeon crawl. In longer games or those with a greater narrative focus, I’ll come to that additionally through things like backstory, personality flaws, and dangling plot threads.

So how can a GM acknowledge the characters? At the basic level that’s remembering who the characters are- names, classes, event details. Where characters have competencies, like thiefly skills or particular kinds of spells, I can present opportunities to use those. Call on those players who have those skills and abilities- which in many cases may be several at the table. The nature of these games is that there’s often overlap. A GM has to figure out how to give people with a focus in something a chance to use it, while at the table time giving others who’ve invested in it some opportunity: offering a bonus, an insight, or even splitting the group to give additional players shots at those things.

But that’s really a set of crunchy conventions- about practical play. Most often I’m running more narrative games, so I have to figure out how to integrate the player’s backgrounds and history. Every session, I want to at least once mention something about a character that’s a call-back: a tie to their history, a past event they were key in, a description that centers on skills they’re excellent at, an NPCs comment on them, mentioning them to another PC or an NPC, putting forward or highlighting something that their character likes, getting them to express a goal, even something as little as asking them to describe their character or how they’re acting in a particular situation.

This isn’t about planning the session around the PC or shaping the story to them- I figure GMs will know how much they want to do regarding that. I’ve posted before some ideas on how to do that easily in GM prep (my Three Things sheets or the 3 Up/3 Down character assessments.)

NEXT WEEK: Practical applications and further thoughts. 

Collaborative World-Building and Gaming

ON THE PANEL

ConTessa, the online gaming convention by women for everyone, wrapped up successfully yesterday. We had a weird schedule between games and other obligations so I didn't get to play in anything, but watched several cool panels and bits. You can find numbe rof the videos on the site there and on YouTube. For me the highpoint was the Collaborative World-Building and Gaming panel arranged and moderated by my wife Sherri Stewart. I had the amazing chance to participate on this panel with some amazing designers. Meguey Baker’s done unique work with A Thousand and One Nights: A Game of Enticing Stories and Psi*Run. She’s also done a nanogame I didn’t know before the panel- Valiant Girls, a striking game about heroism and Ethiopian girls. Brad Murray wrote Hollowpoint, one of my favorite pick-up games and an amazingly constructed rpg. His Diaspora game may be the first product which forced me to seriously think about systems for group construction of a setting and campaign. Finally Ben Robbins wrote Microscope, the game that’s perhaps more than any other changed how I play in the last couple of years. He’s just wrapped a successful Kickstarter for his new game, Kingdom. I look forward to seeing more cool and amazing games next year with ConTessa. Stacy put together an outstanding online convention- professional and sharp. It is hard to believe this was only the first year given how well assembled everything was. 

Note: The excellent OSR blogger Black Vulmea had some problems with the panel, which he details here. He raises some interesting points which I address in this post. As I say there, he has some legitimate points but some arise from misreadings. 

Side Note: Someone in the comments during the panel asked about other collaborative and shared games. I put together the start of a list for those a while back. 

Here are a few additional thoughts I had about the topic...

FEARING THE PLAYERS

One of the worries I’ve seen other GMs express in person and on forums comes from the perceived lack of control present by this approach. They have stories they want to tell- why would they give that up? I don’t dispute that- you may have an awesome premise and concept that will play out amazingly. But in the back of my mind, when I hear that I worry the GM may be too tied to that- may really have a story, an arc that they want to run. If so, how much will my character matter? I’m making assumptions- thinking that the GM will be “That Guy” which probably isn’t true. Some Gms may not get to run as often as they want, so a tool like this may not be for them because they’ve been desperately planning and brainstorming for the opportunity.

But let me answer the question of power or loss of autonomy first and then consider the benefits. Yes, you will lose some control; you will lose some grand scale choice. Given free rein, the players may come up with ideas about what you consider core elements for the world: high magic when you’re more comfortable with low; positive tech when you wanted a dystopian universe; hordes of elves when you prefer a human-centered campaign. That might happen, yup.

But in actual play, you’re still going to have the power. Just because the group’s done the world-building together, you still get to run it. You take what they put forward and fill in the gaps, twist the ideas, and offer them surprises. You don’t violate or contradict, but you make use of them in new and exciting ways- because you’re a GM. In the panel, I give the example of the player who off-handedly put Unicorns into the setting. When we actually ran the campaign, they turned out to be the bad guys, the Illuminati behind the scenes. I could do that because they’d been put out there generally, with few details beyond that. The players can only sketch so much in the course of world building, they’ll always leave you loopholes.

ROOM TO BUILD

Let me give two other examples drawn from games where the players really built the world. In our current Mutants & Masterminds campaign, I built the world based on the players choices. They would run re-envisionings of existing heroes, playing out their “Year One” experiences. One player chose to be Iron Man, Tony Stark very much as presented in the movies instead of the comics. Last session, the penultimate one for this second arc of the campaign, the players fought Kang- the apparent last survivor of a group of supervillains who had secretly ruled the world for 50+ years. In the course of the battle, Kang tore off his mask and revealed his secret. Kang was, in fact, Tony Stark, and the PC Tony had been a clone. When the Cabal of villains had been destroyed and Kang vanished to escape, PC Tony had been woken up as a decoy, programmed to run Stark Enterprises until Kang returned. But then the events of the original film had occurred leading to clone Tony becoming Iron Man. It was a great moment- and one the player enjoyed. It didn’t violate his character’s conception, but instead deepened and added to it. I had plenty of room to do that.

The other example comes from the session I ran the evening of the panel, a two-year campaign built from a Microscope session. The game offers a fantasy riff on Battlestar Galactica, with a shattered world and skyships. In the campaign, a portion of that shattered world has been destroyed leading to the PC fleet’s escape to another segment of the sky. About a year ago, one of the characters, Marreg, discovered an apparently lost god of his Orcish people in a ruined city. Marreg agreed to serve as the god’s vessel for a time. I turned to Marreg’s player and ask: what is it the god of? He hesitated for a moment and then answered, “the god of new worlds.” Cut to a year of play later. That god thread has come up a couple of times in the interim, but mostly in revolving around the gods in general. During play I finally bring back the thread the player created- the fact that there is another world, one the players and their community can escape to- evading the threats of the Elemental Lord and the Elvish Empire hunting them. It offers hope and a chance for survival for everyone they love.

And that’s completely off a throw-away line from a player. Honestly that’s one of the most satisfying elements for me as a GM. Taking the material and concepts players throw out into the ring and reforging them. Before he came up with that concept of a new world, I had a different spin on where the campaign would likely go. I put that away because this was better and the players’ owned the idea. Here player input didn’t limit me, but instead offered a new take.

WHAT DO YOU WIN?

So what are the advantages of collaborative setting creation, shared campaign building, and/or group character design?

• Buy In: Player buy-in. Players have a vested interest in things they create. They care more about them. That’s not a defensive or protective response. They want to see how these ideas play out. They’re pleased when concepts they created pop up in new and interesting ways. With character creation, the effect’s just as strong. Players feel connected to one another and come in with a solid sense of who the other PCs are.
• Work Reduction: For some GMs this may not be an issue. I often hear them talk about the pleasures of world-building. In my experience, a collaborative process doesn’t steal away from that. You still have plenty of room to build and create, but you have other rich material to create from. Collaborative creation shares the burden while still allowing the GM to put in as much effort as they wish.
• Demonstrating Trust: You get a chance to concretely show your group that you enjoy and respect their ideas. 
• Challenge: There’s a real pleasure to taking the various strands and ideas out there and shaping them into something even more solid and coherent. That’s a magic trick which will leave your players with their jaws dropping. It can be a tough and risky one- the players will often be thinking about these things just as much as you. But if you want to stretch your skills as a GM, you owe it to yourself to try it once.
• Reasonable Background: We stress this point from the players’ perspective in the panel. Collaborative creation means players with as much expertise as one another and the GM. But it also helps to keep your own work in line. I’ve seen GMs go overboard writing up world background and details which don’t matter. They often don’t matter for two reasons. Either the players will never make contact with it- extensive histories, details of wars, nations far away; or the players won’t read it. Too much information- even nicely presented as a gazetteer will more often than not be lost on players.

DRAWBACKS?

This approach does offer a few hurdles for GMs, beyond not being able to tell exactly the story you had in your head.

• Comfort Zone: As I mentioned above, what the players come up with may not jibe entirely with what you like. But players express their interests through this process- so you need to take those seriously. At the very least you may learn more about what your group likes. If it isn’t exactly to your taste, consider running it short-term as an experiment.
• System: Players may add things to the game world which don’t exactly fit with existing systems- especially those with lots of world assumptions (Pathfinder, D&D, etc). You’ll likely find yourself having to do some homebrew or house rulings on things. Even with a more open or generic system like FATE or GURPS, you’ll need to figure out how to model what the PCs come up with (tattoo magic which can be stolen, all magic works in cycles to give two examples from my sessions).
• Investment: Players may want to play longer. The Last Fleet campaign I’d planned to go exactly one year. The players wanted more, so we’re just not hitting 26 months of play.

Playing in Their Worlds: Play on Target Ep. 12

WELL, ACTUALLY...

For this episode of Play on Target we take a look at licensed products and the hurdles they involve. We record early so this episode doesn’t touch on one of the more interesting developments in recent months- the shutdown of the Marvel Heroic RPG. That decision seems to have been a purely economic one done in mid-stream just as the game seemed like it had begun to gain traction. Consider that Marvel Heroic walked away with two Origins Awards for RPGs last week, despite being OOP. On the other hand, I’m used to MWP closing down lines and selling things off: Smallville, Supernatural, and Serenity. The first two never seemed to get off the ground. Mongoose is another one which seems to have burned through and picked up licenses in recent years. They did an interesting job with the Conan RPG (despite editing horrors), but hit the end of what they could do with it. A number of really interesting games and supplements have vanished from the scene never to be reprinted: ICE’s awesome MERP books, FASA’s Star Trek, and GURPS Conan for example. That’s a real danger in having a license- it suggests a limited lifespan. Eden apparently managed to overcome that hurdle. While they’re not producing new Buffy products, they still seem to have the rights to sell electronic versions of them. More publishers need to work that into their contracts so that games don’t vanish.

LICENSED PROPERTIES AND RPGs
Play on Target Episode Roundup

In the podcast I mention some of what seemed to me to be oddball licenses. I mentioned a few GURPS choices that seemed odd to me, but even there I left out a few: GURPS Humanx, GURPS Alpha Centauri, GURPS Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, GURPS Lensman, GURPS Myth, GURPS Riverworld, and GURPS WitchWorld. I mean no offense- as the folks at SJG clearly have great taste in that they read or played many of the same things. Of course they had a few more popular ones with the Discworld Roleplaying Game and the Hellboy Sourcebook and Roleplaying Game. But many of these felt like odd choices- suitable for a fairly narrow audience. In some cases an audience purely of deep sci-fi readers. I bet if I checked with my present group, the majority of them wouldn’t have any idea what those products are- and they’re mostly contemporary with me. They came to sci-fi and gaming through a more pop fiction route. 

Of course there are other weird choices for adaptations. Consider Leading Edge Game’s forays into the field- games intended for tie-ins from a company which specialized in dense and highly mechanical systems. There’s Bram Stoker's Dracula Role Playing Game based not on the novel, but on Coppola’s 1992 film with Keanu Reeves. Or The Lawnmower Man rpg (based on the original and not the inferior sequel obviously). On the other hand, one would have thought ALIENS Adventure Game might have done something. Except when you release the game five years after it was in the theater, you face an uphill battle. For other weird choices, consider West End Game’s flurry of licensed products in a desperate attempt to make MasterBook a popular generic system: Necroscope, Species, Tales from the Crypt, and Tank Girl.

So what do I think are really good licensed games? I’m tempted to say MERP, just for the amazing research and resources on offer there. But honestly the game itself doesn’t fit. And that’s not just about the question of magic in the setting. The weird power levels on display there make it feel completely unlike Tolkien. Weirdly my three favorite licenses still in print are all from Green Ronin. The Black Company remains one of the most amazing fantasy sourcebooks I’ve ever read. Not only does it provide a ton of information on Glen Cook’s gritty setting, it also manages to tune and tool the d20 system to really reflect the tone of it: grievous wounds, the magic system, the armies, the class builds, etc. if you like fantasy world-building you should pick that up. Equally Dragon Age offers an outstanding introductory fantasy rpg and does a tremendous job adapting concepts from the video game to the tabletop. Adapting a computer game, where so much work goes on behind the scenes, can be tough. DA’s an awesome translation and makes you feel like you’re playing in that world. Finally, Wild Cards quite simply shows how a sourcebook for an existing setting ought to be done. It is clear, coherent, and playable.

I’ve posted before on some games I’d really like to see done as tabletop rpgs. In particular I examined VGs in Video Games as Tabletop RPGs and a follow-up Emulation & Beyond: More Thoughts on RPGs & Video Games. I also think we can’t underestimate the power and accessibility of homebrew and unofficial adaptations of various settings and licenses. The Savage Worlds community has an amazing array of fan-created sourcebooks. Since FATE Core landed, the community has exploded with tweaks and developments to simulate amazing things- from movies to comic books to other games. When I think about it, the “licensed” games I’ve played for the longest have all been homebrews trying to capture the spirit of the source material: HALO, Fallout, and Star Wars.

If I had to pick three existing properties that I would love to have a game/sourcebook for, I’d have to begin with Steven Brust’s Jhereg aka Vlad Taltos series. They’re amazing and rich and apparently originally come from an rpg. They have action, adventure and politics. I can easily imagine borrowing something from Houses of the Blooded or the like to handle the ideas here. But perhaps the best engine might be something like Amber Diceless. Rumor had it that there was a homemade adaptation using Amber floating around the net, but in many years of hunting, I’ve never been able to track it down. Second, I think if someone could figure out a way to build a core, easy universal engine with some depth and make it work with Final Fantasy, that would be a license to print money. You’d have sourcebooks filled with information for each of the games. Each book would have slight changes and variations to keep up with the mechanics of the particular iteration. But I can’t imagine what kind of hoops you’d have to jump through to get that license and manage it. It could only be a nightmare. I had a friend who worked on a licensed book for a movie that had been out for over a decade and the hurdles there were insane. Anima wants to be the FF game, but the engine’s not to my taste- and frankly, what I want is the sourcebooks and art. Finally, Liz Williams’ Inspector Chen series- weird and wild as they are, might make a really excellent setting.

LICENSED PROPERTIES AND RPGs
Play on Target Episode Roundup

If you like RPG Gaming podcasts, I hope you'll check it out. We take a focused approach- tackling a single topic each episode. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes or follow the podcast's page at www.playontarget.com.

The Path to 750: Gamer Reflexivity

So this is my 750^th post. Let’s hear it for arbitrary celebrational benchmarks.

BEFORE I BEGIN

I will be participating in a panel for ConTessa, the free online gaming convention by women for everyone. That runs this weekend, and if you haven’t checked it out yet, go and look here. The panel is called “Collaborative World-Building and Gaming.” Here’s the blurb:

Harness the power of the group to make better games. Collaborative gaming doesn’t necessarily mean a GM giving up power. Instead it can serve as a tool to draw players in, create novel settings, and provide engaging experiences. The panel will discuss ideas and practical applications. We’re excited to announced our scheduled participants: Meguey Baker (A Thousand and One Nights: A Game of Enticing Stories, Psi*Run), Brad Murray (Diaspora, Hollowpoint), and Ben Robbins (Microscope, Kingdom).

I’m there purely as the voice of a GM who has moved to more of these shared-world technqiues over the last several years. The panel takes place this Saturday at 2PM. It will be recorded as a YouTube video, so you’ll have a chance to check it out after the fact.

SCHEDULES

This week’s an odd one for me. For my tabletop campaigns, I run on alternate weeks. For online, I run weekly. This normally would be my heavy week- running Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. But of the middle three, two have been bumped due to player schedule conflicts and the third is on break until mid-July. I’ll admit that I’m always a little thrown when the schedule opens up like that. If I’m smart I’ll have planned some things- like nights of painting minis or boardgaming. If not, I end up on the PS3 or with some Steam Game I bought on sale but still haven’t really played.

Late in the Fight: Pity the Dead

OVERGAMER

I GM a lot. I’m primarily a gamemaster- when I do play I try to only play in a single campaign at a time. Right now I’m in a fantasy game using Mongoose’s Legend system. I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the mechanics of that. It has been years (GURPS 3e) since I played a game with a roll-under mechanic instead of one aiming at # of successes or beating target numbers. I was running six campaigns recently until I finally wrapped up my f2f Changeling the Lost campaign after a little over four years of play. The three of the five ongoing campaigns are tabletop: Libri Vidicos, a magic steampunk school game in a long running fantasy setting (begun Feb of ’07); Last Fleet, a fantasy riff on Battlestar Galactica (started June of ’11); and New Dragons, an L5R family campaign with homebrew rules (begun last November). I have two online campaigns. Changeling Lost Vegas which uses straight G+ Hangouts (begun last Dec  and has a YouTube Playlist) and First Wave Series Two, the second arc of a Mutants & Masterminds 2e game using Roll20 & Skype (begun last June and has a wiki). I also have a wuxia campaign- White Mountain, Black River- which is on hiatus but we will eventually finish. Two of the f2f games- Libri Vidicos and Last Fleet will wrap this year- and First Wave will do one more series and then will finish.

DEFINE YOUR GAMING

Like many veteran gamemasters, I’ve run using many, many systems. Too many. For those who see GMing as a calling, there’s a weird push to get the perfect game- the game which does everything right. So we critique when we read new games, we run something and then discard it in favor of another game, we go back to old models, we tweak new ones. We hunt for the Holy Grail even when we’re running campaigns that keep humming along. Dissatisfaction rules. Or maybe that’s just me. So I’ve run V&V, D&D, M&M, Champions, DC Heroes, James Bond 007, Vampire the Masquerade, Mage the Ascension, Call of Cthulhu, Mutant City Blues, True20, Rolemaster Classic, Rolemaster Standard System, GURPS, BRP, FATE, Ars Magica, Hollowpoint, d20, Fading Suns, Dying Earth, AFMBE, Conspiracy X, Ghostbusters, Paranoia, Hero System, MERP, Storyteller, Scion, Exalted, World of Darkness, Savage Worlds, Armageddon, and blah, blah and more blah.

What I learned is that I prefer simple systems. At the same time I want some chrome and some choice. I want that to be mostly on the player side. I don’t mind complexity and variety in character creation, so long as that doesn’t bog down or slow things when we get to actual play. So the powers, abilities, feats, and everything like that should be easy for players to remember and use. We shouldn’t have to go back to be book too much during the session. I tend to strip off the rough corners and edges of the games I do play. If you watch any of the YouTube videos of my Changeling sessions you can see how I move through those things. I aim to reduce complexity- and funky edge case rules often get dropped. Some of that’s my desire for speed and efficiency- we only have two hour sessions for that. Some of that’s my system mastery- I’ve only been running nWoD since last November. I don’t think it makes for a bad game, but I imagine players who enjoy crunch and like digging into the depth of the mechanics might find my games less fun for them- I might not be able to offer them the game style they want. I’ll admit that keeps me from really wanting to run more online with new people. My group’s pretty settled and used to my style. They go with it. Some of them play Pathfinder which satisfies a different itch of rule-heavy material. But in the back of my mind I’m worried I’ll be pointed out as a fraud if I try to run something more complicated on G+.

The South Wall of the Game Room

REALLY DEFINE IT

For tabletop gaming, I run a homebrew system we’ve been playing for about 13 years. It has gone through several iterations and multiple campaigns (ten I think). I’ve written about that homebrew, Action Cards, before. It began as an idea for card-based resolution with each player having a unique deck. I wanted a game with more room for narrative and easier core mechanics. Over the years I’ve stripped out complexities from the mechanics (point spend actions and initiative, overly elaborate magic systems), changed out various basic concepts, and borrowed ideas from games I’ve enjoyed- trying to tweak the game to make it work with the campaigns we’ve played and make the play feel more involved and interesting. I’ve borrowed some ideas from FATE and ended up putting dice back in the game purely for damage- because people like rolling damage. But at heart Action Cards offers simple resolution, with players able to narrate moments if they can get the right cards and effects.

I don’t know exactly why it works but it does- and for a group that’s played across a lot of systems, with including players who would probably go with Pathfinder or Champions as a second choice. It is a group which as a rule loathes FATE for one primary reason: they hate the dice. They hate, hate, hate them. I’ve tried to run FATE straight with the dice and the players have enjoyed the ideas and concepts and hated the play for the dice. Despite that, my f2f group (ten distinct players across three games), likes Action Cards. The primary benefit AC offers is a sense of ownership- with unique decks and cards players can mark up and modify. Imagine being able to mark and modify a unique set of dice for your character. 

HOW WE PLAY

We play narrative-focused games, with stories but hugely freedom of choice. I try to provide incidents and have the players choose which way they want to head. But I also try to come up with interesting incidents and scenes- and often these will be turning points (like the current coronation the players are at where a forest has begun to swallow the world and the church is surrounded by a legion of vampires). We often have whole sessions of “once-arounds” where individual players follow up on their own stories and interact with NPCs. These push the character’s own stories forward and I often lay the groundwork for other interesting events in these. We have combats on average once every three sessions. That can accelerate when the hit the third act of a campaign. Often we use miniatures and maps but I abstract distances and have now moved to having zones rather than squares. I still use terrain and scenic because many of the group really enjoy that tactical feel and don’t like just having aspects defining things. So I have to mix that up. My sessions run three+ hours, longer if we have something important happening. My players are more apt to spend resources on planning, status, and social interactions rather than in combat. They trust that investments in those areas will pay off in the long term. As a GM I try to track and remember those actions and reward players for that kind of creative thinking and preparation. NPCs they were good to return to help them, reputations gain them advantages, financial investments come back to them, the house they built offers them a sanctuary, etc. I try to balance a focus on rules, environment, and character story- but I’ll admit that my attentions often more on the last two than the first.

Train Fight with Cake and Detached Car

WHAT ELSE SHOULD READERS KNOW?

I’m a freelancer still hunting for short-term and part-time work in writing and editing. The environment’s tough and that’s something I usually avoid talking about too much. If you’re looking for someone consider this blog; my DramaSystem piece for Pelgrane Press “A War on Christmas”; or my entry for the 24-Hour RPG Contest, Arclight Revelation Tianmar as examples. I’m comics you can see stories I did in Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard Volume 1 or Rocketeer Adventures Volume 1. I also scripted and co-plotted Flashpoint: Project Superman for DC. 

Currently I have a board game design, Right of Succession, that I’ve been shopping around and will be sending out for some more testing. I have a couple of other BGs that I’m sketching once I get that to a finished place. Art Lyon and I have been working on some independent comics pitches, a couple of which are in final stages and we’re beginning to hunt for artists. Eventually I plan to put Action Cards together as a product and at risk of being a cliché, I will likely Kickstart that. I’ve been thinking of how to expand and develop the “History of X RPGs” project into a larger volume- perhaps with interviews and some more value-added details. I’ve also been using Scrivener to put together a concrete version of the most interesting stuff from this blog. In doing so I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the number of useful pieces out of the 750 posts, but there’s also some serious dross to trim.

I plan to be at GenCon for a couple of days this year, so I hope to run into some of the really creative gamers I’ve followed online.

THANKS

So thanks to anyone who reads this blog- I hope I provide some interesting insights. This is one of those self-indulgent posts, the kind I often skim through on other people’s sites. I’ve you read to down here, then a double thanks for your attention.

I always welcome requests, comments, questions, suggestions, review copies, and criticisms. I get decent hits and I hope people find the time to check things out. The variety of sites and choices available means every comment's a rare and precious thing. I need to be better at that myself. Anyway- I hope whatever kinds of games you run or play in, that you have awesome fun, always.  

750 posts. That probably means I can time it to get to 1000 at the end of 2014.