Gotta Lot Of Catchup Questions

I kind of slacked off, so I'm doing a few days of this non-D&D blog challenge all in one shot. I'll break it up with some images so it's not too boring.

What non-D&D monster do you think is as iconic as D&D ones like hook horrors or flumphs, and why do you think so?

I would say Cthulhu, but its just iconic period and not only in relation to RPGs. If I were to take a close second, I'd say Ducks from Glorantha. They're such an odd species to have around, but anyone who reads about them remembers them.

It's hard to take any character seriously when you imagine they sound like Donald Duck

What fantasy RPG other than D&D have you enjoyed most? Why?

I'd love to say Exalted...I really would...but I've enjoyed reading the books far more than I have the times I've played it. So that honor has to go to Palladium Fantasy (1st edition). We played the hell out of in high school as our first non-D&D fantasy game, and I have a lot of good memories of it. Unfortunately, in the late 1990s we had a nostalgia kick and I picked up the second edition...and we didn't enjoy it nearly so much. It was partly because of changes made to the system to make it compatible with Rifts and partly - well, fuck, it was just the system.

Yeah, the kobold looks whimsical now...

What spy RPG have you enjoyed most? Give details.

If we're going for only "spy" rpgs, I'd have to say 007. We played some Top Secret as well, but I really had fun playing 007. I don't remember a thing about the system though, or my character, other than his agent number was the one that always dies in the movies (006 maybe?).

What superhero RPG have you enjoyed most? Why?

I've not played many superhero rpgs, mainly because it's not my forte. I've played Champions a handful of times and didn't enjoy it much, but before that we played a lot of Marvel Superheroes in junior high and had a blast. It was my first introduction to adjective-based attribute descriptions (I still remember one of the levels for Intelligence...Feeble maybe...had the text "Has trouble with doors"). One of my best friends in junior high was way more into comic books than I was, and having him as a player in the game helped tremendously. I used to scour his Marvel Universe books for characters, and still remember all kinds of details even though I've never read the comics.

No one was surprised when I took an interest in VisiCalc 

What science fiction RPG have you enjoyed most? Give details.

In some ways, science fiction RPGs have traditionally been more in my wheelhouse than fantasy games. It's really a toss-up between CP2020 and Mekton, both of which we played a lot. I've run so many different games using Mekton, and we had Cyberpunk games that lasted for years. 

For some reason I always think the one on the left has an afro.

What post-apocalyptic RPG have you enjoyed mot? Why?

Tribe 8 which should come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog or my posts. Why? Because of this:

He has such a jaunty little hat...

What other old school game should have become as big as D&D but didn’t? Why do you think so?

Day 5 of the non-D&D blog challenge

This is a loaded question, because I think it has a lot more to do with who was first out of the starting gate than anything else. Any game that amassed the following that D&D had, was a reasonably decent game, would have made it and crowded out the other contenders. D&D was the one that would become as big as D&D in that case. It set the stage for what was expected of a role playing game - had it been a Pride and Prejudice inspired game, we'd have a hobby with very different priorities than we have today.

With that being said, given society and culture at the time I'd think it would have to be another fantasy-type rpg that would have become as big - and I'd put my finger on Runequest over any of the other contenders such as Tekumel. Runequest was accessible, had its own style, and could have easily become as popular as D&D became.

What other roleplaying author besides Gygax impressed you with their writing?

Day 4 of the non-D&D Blog Challenge

Gygax never impressed me with his writing...it just never clicked. So I guess my answer is, "Quite a few".

Since I'm not really part of the OSR community, nor do I play OSR games, I don't know how much of a pedestal Gygax is put up on. I acknowledge that he is, for all practical intent and purpose, the father of the roleplaying hobby. I was starstruck in the way that only a teenage nerd can be when I met him at a convention in the late '80s. But my experience sitting down with Mike Pondsmith for something like 45 minutes at a convention was a much greater influence on me. The authors who have impressed me is a long list and growing, and include - in no particular order - Kenneth Hite, Robin D. Laws, Fred Hicks, Josh Mosqueira, Marc Vezina, Greg Stafford, Steve Perrin, Sandy Petersen, Cam Banks, David Pulver, S. John Ross, and many, many more.

In what system was the first character you played in an RPG other than D&D?

This is for Day 2 and Day 3 of the non-D&D Blog Challenge, since I got nothing done yesterday.

In what system was the first character you played in an RPG other than D&D? How was playing it different from playing a D&D character?
This is kind of hard for me to remember. I DM'd a lot in the early days, and didn't get a chance to play much. There are two candidates though, both of which were probably about the same time (late junior high/early high school). My parents had friends who would often watch me when they needed a sitter, including when they took trips that I didn't go on. They had a daughter who was quite a bit older than me, and she had a boyfriend who played rpgs. He was really big into the 007 rpg, and I played a short campaign with him one summer. He also bootstrapped me into grokking Traveller, and I remember running a few sessions for him. There was also a guy who was a grade or two older than I who lived in our neighborhood, and I played Call of Cthulhu with him. So it was either 007 or Call of Cthulhu. How playing the character was different...I couldn't tell you. I remember the CoC character more than the 007 character. I created the character with the intent that he would be unhinged. It was, perhaps, my first brush with intentionally doing something that might harm my character (SAN loss from reading tomes and going toe-to-toe with Mythos creatures). He eventually went completely mad and I lost him as a PC, but for that brief time he was a M1911 in one hand, spellbook in the other type investigator.

Kinda like this.

Which game had the least or most enjoyable character generation?
Mekton II had the most enjoyable character creation, because of the novelty of the Lifepath. It was one of the few games where I would create a character just to roll on the Lifepath tables. A close runner-up would be Traveller, for the same reasons. Having the mini-game include uncertainty made it fun. For least enjoyable, I gotta say Hero. I spent three days making a character for a Hero game once and I think I came away from the experience with less of an understanding of the process.

What was the first roleplaying game other than D&D you played?

So, I just found out about the non-D&D March blog challenge. This one might be quite a bit more relevant to me.

The first rpg that I played other than D&D was Star Frontiers. Technically it was the third rpg I owned, since I was given the Traveller boxed set shortly before I got my hands on Star Frontiers. This was back when you could get rpgs at Toys 'R Us, which is likely where I got mine. Oddly enough at the same time there was a Sears Outlet close by my parent's house that also had rpgs - I remember seeing Universe and Lords of Creation there at one point - so it may have come from there.

It was the Eighties...this was considered exciting

I grew up on a cul-de-sac with a handful of kids that had lived there their entire lives. My parents moved in just after the condominiums were built, and I was young enough to not remember the previous place we lived. All of our families knew one another, and I had made my best friend when I was five years old - Richie - who was also the one that I taught D&D to.

Then there was Melissa Broadway. Her and her dad were relative newcomers to the neighborhood. I don't think the sisters that lived next door, Missy and Heidi, liked her very much. But I was in love with Melissa from the first time I saw her. She was lanky and tomboyish, with dark hair, and we got into all kinds of trouble together. We played action figures, she played a game called "kingdom" with Richie and I where we each had a "kingdom" with borders and a ruler and an army, we got into dirt clod fights at the construction sites nearby, heck I think I even played dolls and "house" with her. We also played Star Frontiers.

I remember playing it with just her and also with Richie, but I can't quite remember the characters. I want to say that Richie's character was a dralasite, while Melissa had a Yazarian. I know that we played through the published modules - while I created and stocked a lot of dungeons for D&D, Star Frontiers was off the beaten path enough that I never considered creating my own adventures for it. Because of that, Melissa moving away a year or two later, and starting to get into Traveller, we stopped playing Star Frontiers once we go through the published modules.

Going to take a break for a couple days

The A to Z April Blogging Challenge is over, and I need to take a break (I'm not getting paid for this, you know). So I'm going to restart next week on a regular schedule of Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

The challenge taught me a lot, mostly that it helps to have a focused theme when doing it. It helped that one of my personal truisms is that it doesn't matter what I write about as long as I write (and the corollary that it doesn't have to be good writing either)...so while I might have changed some of the things I wrote about it, I likely wouldn't have written them any better. If I do it next year, I'm going to plan a bit more (which sounds a lot like my take away from my first NaNoWriMo attempt was).

So, I'll see everybody next week!

Zero-Sum Games And When To Avoid Them

In game theory, zero sum games are when in order for one player to win, another player has to lose the same amount. Poker and many board games are an example of this, and it works well for them. Roleplaying games, by their nature, are not zero-sum games - but they can contain zero-sum conditions. Whether they are good or not depends. Zero-sum conditions can be intentional or unintentional, and either way can have a negative impact on the game.

When zero-sum conditions appear in combat systems, it's usually due to a choice nullifying another choice - which means there honestly wasn't a choice. For example, if in a game system the only effective defense is to parry, but you have to sacrifice your next action to do it, that's a zero-sum result. It happens with weapons and armor too, where armor and weapons consistently null out one another's offensive or defensive capability. It isn't bad - there's strong real life precedent for it - unless there's nothing else in the rules to help break the cycle. This may also happen in games that force accuracy to be sacrificed in the name of damage. More accurate weapons don't do enough to get through armor while heavier weapons aren't accurate enough to hit anything.

Sometimes the mechanics tip things in one character's favor too much, and if they don't provide a way to recover it becomes zero-sum. Death spirals (as much as I like Silhouette's damage rules) are an example of this. Once a character has taken damage they are more likely to take more damage, and it just continues to get worse. This means, in most cases, the character with the first significant success will win. It also doesn't help that characters in Silhouette with identical offensive and defensive skill levels have a high probability of not being able to hurt one another - making it two zero-sum games for the price of one (you can't hit the other guy most of the time, but if you actually do hurt him now you're more likely to keep doing it).

Any point buy-type system where the net result is no change are zero-sum. This is typically intentional - for example, there's no way to be ambidextrous without either spending points or taking a disadvantage. I don't find point buys like that to be a helpful way of maintaining character balance (a concept I'm dubious of as it is). I understand the reasoning, and that some people prefer it). I'd rather have distinct spheres of character ability (such as traditional attribute/skill splits, or skill/stunt/aspect in Fate) where points can't be traded between them. Balancing that out is a lot easier than trying to figure out if +1 DEX should be worth the same number of points as being agoraphobic.

That never gets old

Finally, we get to my last example of a zero-sum condition in an rpg: the players versus the GM. In games where the GM takes on an adversarial relationship with the players - especially more traditional games where there's nothing the players can do about it within the system - there's typically only one true outcome. The players "lose" (their characters are killed) and the GM "wins". This is nicely summed up on the TV Tropes entry for Killer Game Master. But it doesn't have to be the over-cliched extreme of the Killer GM. For some GMs,  it's "common sense" to do things like increase the difficulty of every encounter, skill check, die roll, etc. as the characters advance, in order to give players a "challenge". While it's great to tailor something to the power level of a group, doing so by rote can result in a zero-sum if everything included in the encounter completely nullifies every advantage the PCs have, then there's no real reason for the "challenge."

After all of this, it might seem logical to ask, "So what do I do about zero-sum games I don't want?" The answer isn't clear cut because it depends on the situation. Games like Fate Core address this by allowing invokes after the dice are rolled (meaning the use of the Fate points aren't a complete gamble), as well as in the concept of "failure as success at a cost". Other solutions might mean tweaking portions of the system to allow a loss for one player that doesn't automatically translate into an equivalent gain for another.

In the end, not all zero-sums are bad. Examining them is probably a good idea, though  - if only to make sure that the zero-sum condition is something that was intended (or even fun).

Your Game Has The Fate Fractal Too

Did you know your game already has the Fate fractal? Even if you don't know what the Fate fractal is? Well, it's true to one degree or another. Do you remember that time you wrote up a trap that attacks as a 10th level fighter? Or you assigned a hit point value of a door that had to be broken down? Or gave a penalty to driving rolls because of the car having a bad suspension? Or had the PCs roll saving throws versus cold in the middle of a storm? When you did those things, you were roughly operating within the Fate fractal.

For people who haven't heard of it before (or have and just aren't sure what it is), the Fate fractal is not so much a rule or a standardized process as it is a design pattern. The core parts that make up characters in Fate - Aspects, skills, stunts, stress tracks - aren't limited to just characters. Anything can have them if needed to show importance or enhance the narrative. The trap gets ranks in Shoot. The door gets a stress track. The car gets the aspect Bad Suspension. The storm gets the aspect Blizzard of the Century and a Frostbite skill to attack the characters.

So, if nearly every other game already has the equivalent of the Fate fractal, what makes the Fate fractal so different in Fate? The key word is equivalent. The Fate fractal isn't a hack or a stopgap measure. While most modern rpgs have unified resolution mechanics, most still have different systems for dealing with characters, inanimate objects, the environment, etc.. In Fate it's implicit in the system. It's possible for an aspect to have a stress track. Or an aspect to have an aspect. Or a stress track to have a skill. It abstracts out to a level that is not only still useful in game terms, but infinitely useful in making the game and the narrative work together.

The Fate fractal doesn't need to be used all the time - it usually suffices to name an Aspect and keep right on trucking. But when something is really  important, you can go further down the rabbit hole and do it without a whole lot of trying to fit round pegs in square holes. This is why I think, for the Fate fractal alone, every game master should at least look at Fate Core once it's released. The concept applies to nearly every game, and even if it's not used in the same way being cognizant of its existence is just another tool in the GM's toolbox.

Xeno: A Fate Accelerated Edition One-Shot

After nearly a month of posting six-days a week it's not surprising that I'd miss a day. But real life does take precedence, and it's better late than never. I also think that this was well worth it, because I'm presenting a highly focused FAE hack: Xeno.

This is intended not only to show off various things that can be done with Fate Core. It's intended to happen with a specific structure - that typically found in the source material it emulates. It also may not be perfect, because I kind of rattled it off the top of my head in the space of a day or so. Either way, it should serve as a great starting point for anyone wanting to run a convention game, demo or other.

You can grab Xeno from this link:

Xeno: An FAE One-Shot

Why Fate Core Is Awesome

+David Larkins  on the Fate Core G+ Community said he'd like to see a post on why Fate Core is awesome so here we are.

Why is any game awesome? Typically because it's fun to play, it has the options to support one or more styles of play, or it's rules are particularly well written, elegant, or hits the right spot in terms of what it covers. To me, Fate has all of those things. I haven't played Fate Core yet (working on that), but I have played Fate-based game and they were great.

It's fun to play because what the people around the table want out of the game inform the rules, and not the other way around. Aspects aren't just indicators of what the players want in the game - they're instructions for how to do it. When a character has the aspect My Favorite Dish Is Revenge, it's saying the player wants to have a game with betrayals and revenge and also communicates the theme and tone for that happens. It's a little capsule of how and why.

From a system perspective, for me it feels wide open. Rather than having to think outside the box to recreate some element in the game, Fate Core encourages redefining the box. It's not so much that Fate Core is the first to introduce concepts such as the treating anything like a character - in  other games a car, for example, might have hit points or stats like how fast or maneuverable it is. The difference is that in Fate Core if I want a haunted house, I just say it's a Creepy Old House. I don't have to figure out what kind modifier or rule covers "old" or "creepy".

But more than all that, Fate Core has a number of "Oh shit, I never looked at it that way before!" moments. I've always used some measure of "fiction over physics" in games I've run. I've also used some variation of "Yes and/but..." for years without realizing what I was doing.  But die rolls measuring the distance from success, and failure possibly being a success at a cost? That's huge. Conceding versus being taken out, and giving the player a choice in how badly they want to push in a conflict instead of just wearing down hit points until they're dead? That's exactly how I want characters being removed from play to work. The entire Fate fractal? Brilliant in its simplicity. It's like the first time that Basic D&D really clicked, after multiple times of reading it. Or the first time I heard Skinny Puppy and realized how much music there was in non-music. Or when I read Neuromancer for the first time. Or first picked up Tribe 8. Fate Core for me is a perspective-changing experience.

The feeling isn't just novelty either - it changes the way I look at every game. Even when I'm not running Fate Core, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. Fate Core is part of my gaming consciousness now.

Vimary Redux

When Tribe 8 first came out, it wasn't a huge secret that the setting, Vimary, was the remains of Montreal, Canada (Vimary is a play on Ville Marie). But there wasn't a whole lot to go on, aside from looking up other maps and information on the area on the Internet. We didn't have Google Maps or Google Earth to get a bird's eye view of the locations in the game. Looking over street view and photos of different locations in Google Maps, I think there are some tweaks that can be made to Vimary as a whole.

First is the proximity of the Z'bri to Tribal lands. They're just too close for me to find it believable that half of the Tribes don't see them as a large threat, at least in the default starting point of the game. My solution, at least in my game, is to move the Z'bri lands on Vimary proper back across the river. The areas where they were become a no man's land, an extension of the Discarded Lands that acts as a buffer between the Z'bri and the Tribes. This can be seen as a mutually agreed upon DMZ. It facilitates all kinds of story opportunities for the Z'bri to harry the Tribes by releasing monstrosities into the no man's land and fostering Serfs, forcing the Joanites from the Seven Fingers to have to deal with them.

A corollary to this is the Seven Fingers gets an upgrade. In the canon setting, the wall is a very porous border. In my game, it gets beefed up into a formidable fortification. There aren't any holes to exploit (except going underground), and the Joanite population is increased. The line of the fortification actually crosses over and continues toward Duskfall, although the actual Seven Fingers are still located where they are now. In addition to the increased fortification, the Seven Fingers are also imbued with Synthesis to repel Z'bri (similar to how The Wall in A Song of Ice and Fire is warded against the White Walkers). In fact, I see the Seven Fingers as being a spiritual counterpart to The Wall.

Similarly, I think the Jo'han Skyrealms are too close for comfort. I can see a handful at most taking residence  high up in the remains of skyscrapers on the outskirts of Tribal land where they can't be reached from the ground. I think parts of the underground would be better suited for the Jo'han than living atop a skyscraper.

Speaking of the skyscrapers, these are structures I think the Tribals would generally avoid being near period so the Skyrealms might work out. Anyone who's seen Life After People knows that the elements, lack of maintenance and time conspire to bring these buildings down. They're just not that safe to be around. I do think the Tribals would make extensive use of the Emporiums year-round as opposed to in the winter season. The majority of the population in and around Bazaar probably live down there. It also gives them refuge in the event of some kind of attack.

There's a fort on the island. Why was that never mentioned?

As far as Hom, I've always envisioned that the amusement park that makes up the center of the settlement is in relatively decent shape. Part of this is due to once the Fall began, it just wasn't a place where people went to and suffered relatively little damage. The other part is due to the spiritual nature of the setting. Sure the place is still a shambles, but there are some structures that are not doing too bad. These are the structures like the ferris wheel, carousel, funhouse, etc. Maybe whimsical things like statues or whatnot are still mostly intact. Also, a lot of buildings on the island look really cool. I mean, there's a freaking fort there. As the Fallen come into their own, the place starts to look better and better. It gains less of a depressed, tent city atmosphere and more of a vibrant one. Part of this is going to be tied to the spiritual nature of the setting and things happening like when Lilith [REDACTED].

Access to Hom over the Fallen Bridge (the Pont de la Concorde) to me is not realistic. I think that the bridge would have near completely collapsed and would not be an easy access point onto the island. This is noted in Tribe 8 1e, but I think even "makeshift" efforts aren't enough to allow access. The South Tier (Jacques Cartier) bridge, on the other hand, would still be mostly intact. For some reason,  the rulebook doesn't make mention of the off ramps leading from the bridge to the island. While they might have partially collapsed, I can see access to the bridge being easier the other bridge. It would be the primary means for Fallen to get on and off the island (besides boats). Thematically it works well too - Tribals are perpetually looking down on the Fallen from the bridge, and Fallen going to the island have to descend to get there.

I've always assumed it's not important to get things 100% right - it is a fantasy game. The landscape will have changed through altered river courses, erosion, natural disasters, etc. Supernatural influences can shift things around and cause conditions that can't exist in the real world. But going back and looking over Google Maps and Google Earth...there's a lot of awesome stuff in Montreal and little tweaks that can make Vimary come alive.

UML for Gaming?

Falling back on another programming-related post, because I didn't have anything else planned for today.

UML stands for Unified Modeling Language. It's a standardized set of notation and symbols for modeling workflows, data diagrams, etc. It's different than flowcharting because it covers details - though still high level - of how a process is supposed to work; the inputs, outputs and other interfaces; messages that are sent from one process to another.

Being a programmer, a geek in general, and a visual person means I really like diagrams and charts. I'm having a great time right now creating a chart showing the relationships between Spark rpg setting creation elements. A version of UML for gaming is really intriguing idea, but I'm not sure how practical it would be. From a system design perspective, it might be useful just to get the feel for how the system flows and identify any potential issues. There are a number of things in the UML standard that could be taken as is, but some of the notations and symbols would need to be changed I think, particularly several of the structural things and notations. Maybe someday I'll tinker around with doing a straight UML diagram of Fate Core combat or something just to see how it all fits together.

Tribe 8

I'm going to get lazy and make a Tribe 8 post for today's A-to-Z Blogging Challenge post, but it is actually rather timely so it's not that bad.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about when I mention Tribe 8, it is a roleplaying game published by Dream Pod 9 in the late 1990s. It is best described as a "spiritual post-apocalyptic dark fantasy" setting, with elements of body horror (the Z'bri), social upheaval (the Fallen), clockwork goddesses (the Fatimas) and a healthy dose of a New Agey vibe.  It is my favorite roleplaying game ever as it has a perfect mixture of horror, dark fantasy and post apocalyptic elements

Which one is the clockwork demi-diety?It isn't the bear

The line had about 25 books or so and a second edition, which isn't a sorry run by any measure. The second edition signaled the end of the line, although it had the grace to outline the remainder of the metaplot in very broad brushstrokes and detail a number of big reveals regarding the bigger picture.

That's right, I said metaplot. Coming on the coattails of the White Wolf pioneered splat book and metaplot business model, Tribe 8 had it in spades. The implementation was great in many respects and abysmal in others. A number of the metaplot books were well-written and were good at handling some of the sticky points with regard to players coming into contact with the plot. Others, not so much. In addition, many important pieces of information were dribbled out here and there, sometimes buried in in-character narrative (which, for better or worse, was a defining feature of the line). I've already opined about the lack of a Keepers sourcebook, which was the last thing the line needed to be complete. I've also posted about the metaplot in more detail.

So, the point of this post is to highlight some of the fan works I've created for Tribe 8.

• The newest is my completion of my Fate of Vimary draft, which consolidates the various rules modifications I've made to support Tribe 8 in Fate Core.
• Next, I'm going to be doing a quick Spark setting write-up. This is actually for the eventuality that I run a dual Fate Core/Spark Tribe 8 game. I'm thinking two parallel games, but I'm not sure yet.
• Previously, I had worked on an adaptation of Tribe 8 to Strands of Fate called Strands of Flesh and Spirit. Since reading Fate Core, I've stopped developing that branch but it's reasonably complete.
• I have a blog dedicated solely to Tribe 8 called Dreams of Flesh and Spirit. It is the spiritual descendant (no pun intended) of my long-gone Tribe 8 website of the same name.
• I also have a pretty much empty Wikia wiki called The Hundred Books. This will be an eventual rebuild of the wiki I once hosted on my website (which was sadly lost).

If you think Tribe 8 sounds the least bit interesting, I highly suggest picking up the first edition core book and the Vimary sourcebook. They're really the only things you need to run a good Tribe 8 game. Get the core book in hardback, if you can find one. If you want even more, the Tribe 8 Companion (which can be hard to find), Horrors of the Z'bri, Into the Outlands, and Adrift on the River of Dream round out the additional "must haves". After that, if you want additional detail on the Tribes you can pick up the "Word" books - Word of the Dancers, Word of the Fates, Word of the Pillars. Finally, there are the Cycle books themselves if you want to run the metaplot. The set is rounded out by the non-metaplot books - Book of Legends, Harvest of Thorns, Word of the North and the Capal Book of Days.

Finally, Blood and Sacrifice is one of the best Tribe 8 fan sites out there, hosting material by some of the people who worked on latter Tribe 8 books. It includes the write-ups of the Destiny Deck cards, which are kind of like the Tribe 8 tarot (and, if it were up to me, an automatic stretch goal if a Tribe 8 Kickstarter ever happened).

When Do You Succeed?

Fate Core has a concept of "success with a cost". It's a rather difficult subject for people coming from other systems to wrap their head around. Basically, even if a player fails to meet the difficulty, they can still succeed - provided they are willing to accept the cost of that success.

Here's my slightly expanded take on what it means to succeed or fail. Success means that the player gets what they want on their terms. Anything else is a failure, even if what they were attempting actually gets done. Success at a serious cost and completely failing to accomplish the task are both the same thing if it's the overall goal that is failed as a result.

Getting into this mode of thinking can take some doing. The first thing that has to happen is the players and GM need to be completely upfront about what their goals are, and what is at stake. While the GM should have say over what success at a cost actually means, in order to make an informed decision on whether to accept it the player should know what success, a tie, outright failure, or success with a major cost will result in beforehand. Also, the goals should be set appropriately.

An example would be a character who is being forced to hack into a system in under 60 seconds or the Big Bad Guy will blow his boyfriend's brains out. The main question should be: is hacking the system the goal, or keeping the boyfriend alive? If it's the former, than failure or success at a cost on the roll would be logically related to the hacking itself (I'm not saying it has to be, just that it follows). If the goal is to keep the boyfriend alive - which is what I think it is - then this drives the narrative of exactly what happens on a failure. Either the boyfriend is getting killed, or there is going to be some other cost. For success at a cost, maybe right at the 60 second mark, the character yells out, "I found a back door! Give me a few seconds!" and the Big Bad Guy shoots the hacker instead, giving him a minor consequence, to show that he "meant business."

There are a lot of ways to go about this, and most are going to be completely dependent on the context. But keeping an eye on the appropriate goal can help make the distinction between a success and a failure, even in cases where the player chooses success at a cost.

Successful Kickstarters!

In the past few days, a couple of very cool Kickstarters have wrapped up. Last week was Jason Pitre's Spark rpg. Today was Godmachine Production's Apotheosis Drive X. They were very successful, not only in terms of blowing away their funding goals but in the buzz that they generated. Both products showed an enormous amount of potential during their Kickstarters and I'm sure they will live up to it when they are released. Spark has even picked up an Apotheosis Drive X setting write-up for cross-promotion goodness. With ADX's setting anthology, there will be more Fate Core-based mecha goodness than I'll know what to do with. Spark does what Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth tried to do, but without all the terminology and obtuseness and hundreds of pages. For my part, I have a setting I pitched for ADX as well as a Tribe 8 write-up for Spark in the pipeline.

There are other really good Kickstarters going on if you're feeling like you missed out on Spark or ADX, or just need to spend more money. Trigger Happy, Invulnerable and Short Order Heroes are well worth checking out.

Recursion in RPGs

Before you read any further, I need you to go to Google right now and search for "recursion" and take note of what Google suggests under "Did you mean". Being a database guy, recursion is a very good friend of mine. But what does it have to do with rpgs? There are two ways I can think of. Any time the characters are playing  another character within the game, or the game acknowledges that the characters are doing so, the game is recursing. Obviously this doesn't happen very often.

Pretty much exactly like that

The Dream Park rpg was one of them. You played a character who had a character in what amounted to a high-tech LARP. We actually never played the game like that (I used Dream Park for a short lived fantasy game). By the way, I loved Dream Park's Beat Charts and still use them for helping pace games. Immortal: the Invisible War started its recursion one level higher...by default you played yourself, in the game. It could also be said a game that admits it's a game is recursive. HoL is an example of this, as are a couple of RPG.Net joke games like D02 and Man What. A second example is actual recursion in RPG mechanics. This is both harder to find and not nearly as useful a concept. The closest I can see would be games where you keep rerolling if you get a certain result. We used to do this in Interlock - when you rolled a 10, you kept rerolling and adding until you stopped rolling 10s. Another example would be those tables where if you roll a certain result you roll again. Theoretically you could keep rolling that "roll again" result (even though that would be highly unlikely). Honestly except for the rerolling concept I can't think of any time that recursion like this would be desirable. It is something to keep in mind when designing mechanics or tables so it doesn't become part of the game accidentally.

Quantum Libet

Quantum libet is Latin for "as much as you please" and is used in medical shorthand on prescriptions. Seeing this (and struggling to come up with a post topic that starts with "Q") made me think about a number of related concepts that I've been flitting around for the past month or so. Namely, the ideas of "Yes, but...", failure as a costly success, and die rolls setting the threshold for how much success will cost instead of being binary success/fail.

When I think of "as much as you please", it brings to mind the "Too Much Is Too Much" rule in Teenagers From Outer Space. Effectively, when a roll was too good it meant there unintended side effects. The classic example is the character that tries to develop a pheromone spray to attract a girl he's interested in. The player rolls so well that it not only attracts her, but every female in the entire school. Other examples are the hacker who's so good at covering his tracks that he fixes something else that was wrong on his way out, or the accountant that cooks the books so well that he is never audited and gets a massive influx of unwanted attention or clients. It's the opposite of failure being "success at a cost" - it's "success with strings attached."

From a Fate Core perspective, the half-assed idea I have is when the roll is substantially high enough over the difficulty then the GM can bring quantum libet into play. I think 6 or 8 over might be about right - either way the idea is to make it very difficult for this to happen unless the character is 1) highly skilled, 2) rolling for low difficulty tasks or 3) invoking lots of aspects. In this manner, the player is almost asking for "too much is too much" by either rolling for a low difficulty task they are sure to beat by a huge margin or are stacking lots of aspects. I'm thinking the GM would place an aspect on the character (possibly called Quantum Libet) or just reserve the right to have the success come back around at a later time. It isn't something that can directly harm the character and needs to be a logical extension of what the original roll was for. It's not intended to be an actual "punishment" for rolling too well. I can see this method used to discourage players from dumping all of their invokes into rolls ("blowing their wad", as it were) when they don't need to.

Obviously this would be something totally genre (and table) dependent. I think it would work for light-hearted or generally less serious games better than gritty ones, and wouldn't be something that was a hard and fast rule for every die roll...only when it can liven things up a little bit.

More Programming in RPGs

In response to yesterday's post, +Robert Hanz brought up that a discussion of messaging and the actor model in RPGs might be a good thought exercise, so I figured I'd take a shot at it. This is high level and steamrolls over a lot of nuances and details within the actor model. I'm not going to tackle things like message queues or service layers or anything else.

What's interesting about this in relation to yesterday's post is that Alan Kay, who developed the Small Talk programming language and is considered one of the founding fathers of object-oriented programming, lamented that he should have called it "message oriented programming" because it is the message and not the objects that are relevant. He felt everybody was concentrating too much on the objects, class libraries, etc.

So for this post, I'm going to look at only the messages that are sent between the actors, and who those actors are.

No, NOT him

So what is this "actor model" anyway? In simplest terms instead of everything being an object, everything is an actor. That is, it is able to act upon or in response to other actors (that's my wording and may not jive 100% with the actual model). Actors send messages to one another, and in response they can do one or all of the following at the same time:

• Send messages to other actors
• Create new actors
• Decide the behavior when the next message is received.

A classic example would be driving a car. The driver and the car are both actors. When the driver presses the gas pedal they send the message Go faster. The car responds to that message and through the speedometer sends the message I am now going 65 mph. The driver receives the message and decides they're not going fast enough, and sends the Go faster message again. If the car has a governor, or is now out of gas, it may respond by not going any faster and may begin to slow down (deciding the behavior when the next message is received).

These messages can be synchronous or asynchronous. The gas pedal transmits a synchronous message as the gas pedal is depressed. The driver doesn't need to press the pedal, wait for the car's speed to respond, then press the pedal again. The pedal provides a steady flow of information to the engine. Asynchronous is when you start your car. You have to turn the key and wait for the engine to start before you can start driving. The messages can also be concurrent or non-concurrent. If the car runs out of gas just as you are pressing on the pedal, both messages are sent at the same time and are concurrent.

So in the context of typical rpg combat between two characters, the messages may look like this:

Actor 1 sends a message to Actor 2: I'm a wreck your face!
Actor 2 receives the message and responds with a message of their own: Oh no you didn't!

Depending on the game the messages can be parallel (attack and defense roll at the same time) or non-concurrent (or asynchronous), such as rolling an attack versus a static value like an armor class.

Now let's say Actor 1 succeeds. He now creates a new actor - damage - which transmits a message to Actor 2: Subtract x hit points. Actor 2 receives that message and decrements his hit points by that amount.

Modifiers to actions are the actor changing behavior when the next message is received. If Actor 1 did an All Out Attack, the actor's behavior in response to the next attack may be "Lose a turn.". If the game has a wound system with penalties, his response to the next message coming from Actor 1 might be Subtract x from defense roll because of wounds.

Another example of actors (or characters) creating new actors would be casting a spell that has an effect independent of the caster. Summoning a monster is the most obvious, but pretty much any spell is a new actor. It will be able to send and receive messages and respond to them in predetermined ways (such as reacting to a counterspell or a dispel).

So far the ability to create new actors has been inferred. In other words, a particular character is only able to create a limited number of specific actors (which fits perfectly into the actor model). In games like Fate the actor can decide what new actors to create, plus when and how, through the use of Fate Points and declaring aspects.

But the biggest takeaway in how the actor model applies to Fate is the fact that in Fate everything is an actor. Things like a security bot are obvious. But what about the tree with the aspect Just High Enough To Get Over The Wall? Or a trap with the aspect Spring-Loaded Trap and the skill Spiky-Hurty Bits +2? Those are actors too. When you use Security Systems to create the advantage Targets My Enemies on a turret control panel, you're sending and receiving messages with the panel as an actor and changing its behavior for when it receives the message "Detects presence of an enemy".

Even the setting is an actor. In yesterday's post, I talked about dwindling Resources creating skills the setting can use against the players. Resources send a message to the setting I am now at 0 which responds by creating the aspect Struggle For Survival. In addition, the setting sets its behavior so if it receives the message from Resources I am now at -1, it will create three actors in the form of skills (Hunger, Thirst, and Exposure). These actors can now start sending messages to the characters (i.e., starvation, dehydration or sunburn) until Resources is above 0 again.

Much like object-oriented programming, I don't think that the actor model is something that would be a singular design goal for an rpg. But the parallels are strong enough that just a slight change in viewing what is an actor and what isn't can have profound effects on how pretty much any game is designed or played.

Object Oriented Principles in RPGs

Being a programmer, I like to think programming concepts with regard to games and rules systems. Sometimes I go a bit further, like the time I built a .NET Silhouette vehicle design program or built a SQL database out of the Mekton Zeta Plus construction rules. Today's topic is object oriented principles in roleplaying games. Before we get into that, a couple caveats:

First, I wouldn't be surprised if this post has one of the lowest view counts of any post on this blog. I'm fine with that - it's more of a philosophical pondering than anything else.

Second, for anyone who's not familiar with object oriented programming languages this is a really good article (it is long, I'll wait while you read it): What Is OOP. If you don't want to read it (or just want to hit the salient parts) I will only be discussing these three things:

• Abstraction: Stripping something down to its basic elements or characteristics.
• Inheritance: The reuse of abstractions to build new ones.
• Polymorphism: The ability to use the same interface but with a different implementation.

Now almost all game systems do these to some degree (as well as many of the things the article's author says "isn't OOP").  A good example of abstraction is a weapon. In the real world,  the subtle differences between weapons probably have an impact, but it's too hard to keep track of that stuff in an RPG. Instead, the system abstracts out the basic elements: damage, range, accuracy or balance, etc. Some of them go into more detail than others - such as durability or quality - but all weapons have the same basic characteristics. They use inheritance to create, say, a magic weapon. It uses the base weapon class but then adds a attribute such as "+1" to it.

Polymorphism can typically be seen in mechanics. Fate Core is a perfect example of this. Each of the four basic actions you can perform with a skill (overcome, create advantage, attack or defend) has the same interface (the die roll), but the implementation within each of them is different (the rules inside them are different). The output - failure, tie, success or success with style - is also the same. As an aside this is also an example of encapsulation - the inputs and outputs are the same, but the interior "code" of the action is a "black box" (at least in terms of the output not caring what happened inside the action).

Fate does an excellent job of embodying these concepts. Take the "Fate Fractal" for example. Anything can have an aspect, or a skill, or a stress track - up to and including the setting itself. I recently implemented survival rules where as the players run out of Resources, the setting gains an aspect representing their Struggle For Survival. As their Resources go into the negative, the setting picks up three skills: Hunger, Thirst and Exposure. These skills can be used to "attack" the characters. This implementation is fundamentally object oriented in nature.

Most systems can accommodate something like this, but Fate Core (and other Fate games) facilitate it through design, and are especially good at it. This isn't to say that an rpg based on  OOP principles is "good" and one that doesn't is "bad". Game systems aren't code or operating systems in the most technical terms. But I think some games, like Fate Core, definitely do it better than others. There is at least one game, Alternate Realities, that claims to "object oriented". I've taken a look at it and think it's much more complicated than it needs to be.

Also, on a related topic to object oriented principles is a rather lengthy PDF called Design Patterns of Successful Roleplaying Games by John Kirk. Kirk identifies various design elements and then uses those to try to determine the design patterns in various rpgs, through a lens similar to software design patterns. It is highly detailed and I think it's successful in a lot of ways. Obviously, because of the sheer variety of rpgs there are likely to be some that slip through the cracks (and I predict at least one comment saying how such-and-such rpg doesn't fit any of those patterns). I wouldn't say it's required reading for all game designers, but just as it can be helpful to have an eye toward high level object oriented principles when designing an rpg, being aware of the possible design patterns can't hurt either.

Non-Protagonist Characters

First off, I'm not trying to redefine the "non-player character" Cougartown-style. I've seen the term "Non-Protagonist Character" in several games, and it fits how I consider NPCs better than "non-player character" does. If you don't like it, there are extensions for Chrome such as Word Filter and similar ones for Firefox (and I'm sure others) that can replace words in a live webpage. Have a field day.

NPCs have always been somewhat hit or miss for me. They're arguably the most valuable means for the players to interact with the game world (aside from the PCs themselves). When NPCs are done well, they can bring the game to life. When they're not, they can turn the whole thing into a parody of itself. The unfortunate thing is that, as a GM or player, I'm a poor actor. I suck at voices and I suck at portraying mannerisms. I can do expressions okay because I do have a face. Overall I'm in this gig for storytelling, not drama club.

This means I fall back on something that I am (or think I am) much better at - writing. I tend to describe things in narrative terms and seldom take on the direct role of the NPC. Instead of sternly saying, "Not in my courtroom!" I'll say, "The judge sternly says, 'Not in my courtroom!'". I'm not quite sure it makes my games better or worse, but I've gotten few complaints. It goes along with the very astute advice, "No silly voices." To me playing the NPC is not much different than describing the scene, or narrating the action.

Describing the NPCs in this manner, rather than "playing" them, means a constant tightrope act between making the NPCs "pop out" from the background and having them just be part of the scenery, forgotten as soon as I stop talking about them. By the way, I suffer from this as the GM, and I'm sure if I was trying to "be the NPC" it might not happen so much. Because of this, I'm always on the lookout for ways to improve my NPCS. Having key mannerisms or phrases are pretty much part of GMing 101. Just as I do when writing fiction, I usually draw inspiration from real people that I know. I can loosely mimic their behavior, speech patterns, etc. and hope that the character comes across as more than a cardboard cutout. Sometimes just Googling for a general image gives me an idea for how to portray the NPC off of.

But I think have a new technique, or at least a way of looking at NPCs, that I'm itching to start using. It may have originally showed up in the Dresden Files rpg, and is also a part of the Spark rpg. They are called Faces. Essentially, a Face is an NPC that is the essence of a particular location or faction. I'd actually extend that out to include scenes, concepts, themes or moods. For example, a tavern where the PCs frequent might be populated with dozens of NPCs - only one of them is the Face of the tavern. It doesn't even have to be the barkeep, either. It could be that old man who's always sitting by himself, mumbling to himself with odd random outbursts. Or the hulking Northerner who is always challenging people to arm wrestling matches. The Face might change with the night of the week, or the season. By making the NPC tied to something else,    I think it would help cement the NPC in my head and improve the portrayal.

You know, that guy

Luckily for some games, like Tribe 8, this is an extremely easy thing to do. Various characters have already been created that are the Faces of their outlook, tribe, faction, sect, etc. That doesn't mean they're the only NPCs for each of those, but it helps anchor them a bit and increases the chances that I'd use them in the game (especially, as I pointed out in yesterday's post on Metaplot, I now know which characters are important and which aren't). One way to look at it is a form of "What's my motivation?" (although that is a remarkably good method too). Instead, it's "What am I giving a face to?". Once I get this game up and running, I'm certainly going to give it a try.