lategaming

SXSW covers “Confessions of Superhero” which shows the strange and seedy world of superhero lookalikes…

We see Joe McQueen demolished by the heat inside his colossal Hulk costume — on a record 106-degree day, it’s a brutal 130 degrees inside the emerald-tinged mass of foam … Superman chugs milk right from the jug; Wonder Woman roots in her glove box through the open window of her car as valet parking guys check out her ass; Batman takes a smoke break.

Here’s the link at SXSW’s site and a review at WIRED DOT COM.

Lastly, here’s the web site of the film. Wonder Woman is kinda hot!

I commented to Matt the other day that the last time I actually *played* in a game was when he ran the original WatchTower game in 1998.

This got me to thinking that although I’ve read a lot of games, and I’ve played in a lot of campaigns, I haven’t really played lots of games.  Here’s the total list, from memory:

• Advanced Heroquest
• D&D
• Marvel Super Heroes
• MERP
• SLA Industries
• Torg
• Traveller
• Vampire

While I’ve played a much larger range of games, those are the only ones which fulfil the these criteria:

1. I’ve been a player (as opposed to GM)
2. I’ve had a character that advanced in some way (levels, experience points spent on skills, etc.)

(This, incidentally, has led me to a discovery about what I like about gaming … more in a future post).
If I look at it from the perspective of games that I’ve GM’d where my players would then fulfil these two criteria, the list would be even shorter:

• D&D
• SLA Industries
• Pendragon

I think this is because I’ve had a tendency to run long campaigns that I’ve really enjoyed (as has the group), and so there’s been little impetus to switch game.  Pendragon is especially good for this as the game is designed for long running campaigns.

I’d be interested to read about other people’s experiences, as players and as GMs.  Write a comment, or post in your blog with a ping/trackback.

I’ve turned off registration for comments because it should be off. Bit of a mea culpa there.

I am enjoying the discussion on sexism in RPGs which has been continued on thedeadone.net and Mary’s blog.

I wrote: “Some game companies are currently trying to market cute and fluffly and romance and “social” games to women which is utterly patronising.”

Mary writes back: “I can answer this personally without examples. I see games as inherantly a social thing. Hanging out with a group of people is a social thing.

I’m not disagreeing here but I deliberately put “social” in inverted commas. Gaming is a social activity because it usually means hanging out with people who have a similar interest. This is not the same as a “social” game.

I don’t know if I’m communicating this well but I’m trying to illustrate the difference between “gaming as a social activity” and “a game which contrives social situations in game”. We all know the former and real men squirm at the thought of the latter. Ahem.

Do I need to examine the way I do things? I have no women in my gaming group. Does this mean I have been shooing them away with my inherent and aggressive male chauvenism?

I did a check with the women I know. Some gamers, some not. They don’t think I’m a male chauvenist. I did need to check.

I started a little storm in a teacup with my last post. Even got someone else linking to me. And some of the comments on that posting (e.g. “Enh, I went and read the Late Gaming post, and it’s so stupid, I couldn’t even work up the energy for a reply.”) just prove the point.

Now. Jeremiah has a good point that perhaps the point of female archetypes is to make it easier for females to visualise character possibilities. Okay, I can accept that. The problem being that his commenters immerse themselves in political correctness. For the guy who didn’t have the energy to reply because the post is so stupid, thanks for commenting. You could have just put a me too and provided just as much contribution.

Jeremiah writes:“And I have to say that some people just don’t get it. And at this point I am thinking it is on purpose.”

Yes, some of it is in purpose. The whole point of blogging for me is not a confessional - there’s not a lot of point in writing something if it’s not going to start a conversation. As Robert Scoble says It’s good for us to change our scenery and start conversations with people we wouldn’t otherwise talk with..

Would Sherlock Holmes have appealed to more women if Dr Watson had been a genre-and-era-busting female doctor? At that point it’s getting petty. It’s like a TV show committee sitting around a table and cynically asking whether they could appeal to the bi-lesbian-gay-black-asian community more if they included some token characters in their sit-com. Do you really want to be targetted like a demographic rather than an individual? Do you want to be excited because a game has an archetype that breaks the demographic of the genre or would you rather be excited because of the opportunities the game presents. It seems to me that games WITHOUT art might actually appeal to women more if cheesecake art is such a turn-off.

Some game companies are currently trying to market cute and fluffly and romance and “social” games to women which is utterly patronising. There are some games which are really interesting to me from the point of being an immersive roleplayer. Nicotine Girls for example, does not appeal to the side of me that wants to play a muscle bound mutant. But I’d love to find a gaming group that would play it. I may have that gaming group right now but I’m not sure. For one thing, they’re all blokes. For a second thing I’ve only started gaming with them recently and I don’t know how far I can push them. Introducing them to Troupe Play was a big leap….

One issue with game companies making games that seem to appeal to males more than females? These male gamers are buying games. That means the law of supply and demand will apply to the big companies. It’s a small enough hobby already and the percentage of women who will play has always been a small fraction. I’ve always promoted strong genre-busting female character roles for the female players in my group (some may remember Aemilia (Ars Magica), Petrina Miles (Ars Magica), and Christine (SLA Industries) from my games (all played by my lovely ex-wife). Therefore you can look to indie game companies where the developers are writing for the love of the game rather than the money. I will have to ask some of my female gamer friends about whether my own games have appealed to them with positive character possibilities. It’s a conversation I have to have with myself at some point I guess.

Mary’s blog about games that appeal to her leaves me a little confused. One one hand I can see there are some really cool images here. The image for Gurps: Reborn Rebirth looks cool indeed. That’s a positive gender model. The image just above it, with the schoolgirls with the swords doesn’t inspire me at all. It features more of the things in Japanese culture that we whitebread westerners find odd or disturbing. Okay, the things I find disturbing.

But then it’s not about whether I’m inspired obviously. Or what I find disturbing.

I didn’t write yesterday’s post as a whitebread western male. I wrote it as an indignant gamer and I had significant input from a female friend who agreed totally. No-one wants to be patronised.

Over the last few years I’ve come to appreciate different methods of character generation. I’m not especially keen on point allocation systems due to concerns that they are unrealistic because a) not everyone is equal and b) they’re prone to abuse by min-maxing. (I find the latter to be more evident in games where you have hundreds of points and points give traits which different advantages and yes I am pointing the fingers straight at Champions even more than anything here).

I did however opt for point allocation systems for all of my games so far (with some minor exceptions in the generations, most notable in Testament/Creed and Zombi).

I really don’t like random generation - even though my randomly generated character in kinnygraham’s Delta Green scored lowest in his stat rolls and yet is arguably the most stoic player character (the other two being dead and mad).

An idea which I love is mentioned today on Collective Endeavour. Character generation by interrogation - which fits in well with the “1984″ theme of his game.

Which is best? Heck, I don’t know.

What I do know is that in the 20-odd years I’ve been a roleplayer I’ve spent far too much time generating characters (including hours and hours spent making characters for MERP for games that were never played).

We played Zombi at the local TTN meeting because it allowed us to have character generation done within 10 minutes of sitting down.

Amber! Now there’s a game. I never got to play it due to not having any players but I loved READING the character generation system even if, having never read the books, it was a bit beyond me.

My personal favourite was the generation system in HeroWars. I loved the idea of writing a short paragraph about a character and then underlining the bits that could be used as traits.

Rayden Kauppinnen was born in the Northern Reaches of Volyvia. He was apprenticed to Master-Jarl Tuppenijk and on his 19th birthday became a Journeyman in the Lore. During his Challenge of Certainty, he was given a Return Thread as a gratitude from the village of Chernetzy. These days he travels the roads as a Lore Mendicant with only his wits and a piebald pony with a stern temperament for company.

Oh….just writing that makes me want to play it…whatever the game is???

We’re not talking about games which are designed to get the GM a date with the hot new girl in the gaming club (as mabmorrigan will likely relate happily later) but rather games which can be started quickly, how to pick up a game and get started and the pitfalls of doing so.

Games that can be started quickly

I designed SpaceNinjaCyberCrisis XDO and Zombi to be pickup games. Small size books, really simple character sheets, simple rules, only using d6 dice and strong, easily identifiable genres. Likewise, The 23rd Letter, though more involved for the GM is good for In Media Res gaming and I think that qualifies. Another excellent pickup game in my opinion was the Quick Play Vampire rules from White Wolf. Not only were they free, but the rules were vastly simplified. You can download the Demo rules from White Wolf’s web site. Similar games might include Mikko Kauppinen’s PowerGame or some of the games from the Indie RPG Designers Forum. There are some indie games which are very limited in scope, being more like Adventures with Quick Play Rules added (and The Mountain Witch would be a perfect example of this).

How to pick up a game and get started

Okay, you’ve an idea of where to start and assuming that you’re going to avoid the “Adventure with Rules” type of games, then you’re going to wonder where to get started. We’ve recently had a post telling us that pregenerated characters are bad, mmmkay. So, you’re going to need to make up some characters. Just tell them what you want. You’ve a grain of an idea in there and you need that to get the game started. Ivor and Paul in my TTN game will know this as I just told them “Make up characters who work at a TV station.” Without further prompting from me they made up a roving cameraman and his anchor. They’re good players so despite the fact I only had the bare bones of a plot (it’s Zombi, what else is needed), they threw me a few bones. As the game went on, my imagination started working again and soon I had a plot, an idea, a conspiracy and a game!

Pitfalls

The biggest issue for me is longevity. I really enjoy long campaigns and pickup games don’t really provide for that a lot of the time. I’ve told my TTN players to make some more characters in their spare time as mortality is a real danger and it’s easy enough to find ways to introduce them. Without longevity of character (an issue I often have with Call of Cthulhu), I tend to find games a little unfulfilling.

Conclusion

I’m already writing some game design notes for WotW and Viride and I see these as Action games and Culture games (more on that later) and I have a couple of idea for Pickup games. Games that are little more than Adventures with rules….Watch this space.

I have a list that is rapidly growing of things to post here, but for some reason this is on my mind just now, so…

When I was growing up, roleplaying was that weird thing you did afterschool that no one was entirely sure wasn’t some form of devil-worship.  The stigma seems to have abated some as the years have passed — thank heavens — and I’ve been glad to see more parents allowing or encouraging their children to take up rping.  It’s a good compromise between the old pasttime of books and the modern advent of video games… all the adventure, not so solitary, a bit of risk, and no vegging out in front of the tele.  Yes, good solution.

One thing I’d really like to encourage GM’s to look at is the extraordinary possibilities of using roleplaying as an educational tool.  I’ve done this a number of times with some youth groups in various areas where I’ve lived, and always with astounding results.

Roleplaying is a wonderful vehicle for relaying vital facts and information in way that is anything but boring.  I’ve created roleplaying sessions (using White Wolf’s easy-peasy char-gen modified to hell and back for flexibility’s sake) designed to throw teenagers back into mythological Ireland, bringing them face to face with all the wyrds and wilds of a superstitious world.  All the info I gave them was accurate.  Names of haunts and heroes, and we used a map of Ireland for navigation purposes.  I got compliments from a couple of parents because the kids picked up Irish mythology books at their next round at the library to prepare for the upcoming gaming sessions.  If they could reference me a truth about the time period or a figure from history when something was encountered, I gave them marks for experience.  I had some rather avid little readers on my hands.

I’ve also used rping as a way to help teens prepare for tests on eras in history.  History, unless you just love history, can be a bone-gnawing, sleep-inducing subject.  But if you take that same history, get youth involved in making characters from that time period, it can change their interest level drastically.  When they have to answer questions such as “Where did my character live?”, “What did they wear?”, “How big was my family?”, “What did my dad do?”, and so forth, they’re learning a multi-level approach to history which ensures comprehension.  Roleplaying requires investigation of social, economic, political, artistic, and religious movements.  Anytime you get more than one facet on the jewel of a period in history, you have a better grip on its worth.  You can take rote facts and drop them into “newspaper clippings”.  You can have war casualty figures delivered via courier.  There are endless ways to make history come alive for kids through roleplaying.

I haven’t even touched on the possibilities of using roleplaying situations to help youth confront issues of loyalty, peer pressure, death, jealousy, and more advanced human ethics in a controlled situation.  But it’s all there.  I would really like to see more teens roleplaying.  And more GM’s willing to cater to that age level.  Roleplaying may be immense fun, but it’s also an arena where learning, even for us adults, never ends.

As I may have mentioned, I’m in KinnyGraham’s DeltaGreen game. The other night, after losing one agent to the nameless horror and receiving a chewing from our DG contact, my character came to two startling revelations.

• There is something horrible out there. Something unworldly. Something that wants to kill us. But it’s all separate incidents. There doesn’t seem to be an all-encompassing conspiracy.
• The government is involved and our erstwhile allies, Delta Green, by telling us that if we get caught we’re on our own, are not on our side.

His reaction, therefore, is to bug out. He’s just had a friend killed, another ally has completely wigged out, he received a chewing from DG and a large proportion of the blame and now there’s some bossy hispanic woman too.

And what’s with the blame? He had the misfortune to be involved with DG (something they engineered). He’s been doing as he is told. And the reason he got the blame for this is because the other two are either a) dead or b) mad as a stick.

Would it be so bad to bug out? To run in a calm, calculated way rather than waiting to join his friends in either the morgue or the asylum? Would Delta Green come after him or would they assume that he just needed a longer leash? Would he find himself living the life of Jason Bourne…except being chased by both Deep Ones and his previous DG allies not to mention the conventional law enforcement officials.

And what would Graham think if I convinced everyone else to bug out? Would he be pissed? Would he want to run with the “DG-Rogue” campaign that I had thrust everyone into? Would he rather confiscate the character, insist I make another and then make it the order of the day that we track down our former comrade (my old character) and terminate with extreme prejudice. I don’t know.

Either way would make an interesting story…

Am busting out for another game now that kinnygraham has booked Wednesday or Tuesday for a continuation of our much delayed DG campaign. To this end, paulk has nabbed his friends ivorw and jonathanl to join up. I’m intending to introduce them to the world of 2300AD. I’m not 100% sure of the system I’ll use (and finding my rule books was impossible so I bought the PDFs from drivethrurpg).

See how it goes. I need to write a “habilitation” document which will help them get used to things. Things like Stutterwarp, the political situation….and of course the weapons..

Here’s an excerpt from an email:

PaulK wrote:

I’m not into specifics.

I need a big gun that fires lots of big bullets
very very very quickly. It will be called Mabel.
Nobody ever messes with anyone called Mabel.

My reply:

I believe standard issue is a 4.5mm Gauss rifle,
60 round mag, with integral 30mm grenade
launcher. Single shots are very accurate and it also
has lower velocity for autofire making it very
manageable. Optic sights include a low power
laser range finder.

It's a French model, Fusil Automatique Magnetique-2090.

There's also the Type-81 Storm Gun. A 20 mm
binary propellant exploding round rifle designed for
light antivehicle anti-bunker fire. Only a 10 round
mag but has surprisingly good area fire cover
using the standard 20x31mm APHE round. 

Having made your selection, please proceed to the checkout.

He doesn’t care however. Just wants the guns which fire lots.

Earlier this year I lost a heap of stuff. About two years worth of unpublished writing and all my original files for my books. Absolutely gutting. Essentially, my backup was destroyed and my “personal life” contributed to the oversight so I didn’t find out until much too late.

Gutting.

Still. I’ve been piecing it all back together from old floppies, old zip disks, emailed copies I’ve sent to people (I have email records in some cases going back to 1996) and other bits and pieces.

I’m not going to dwell too much on it however. I want to get the first system-draft of either Viride or WoTW:Earth out before I do any other work.

I’ve also tried to get another gaming group going. I’m playing in this guys game in Belfast but we’ve had a hiatus for a couple of months and I’m busting for a game.

I’d love to play a superhero game. I’d GM. A game people would talk about the way people talk about my Ars Magica came from the early 90s, or my SLA games from the late 90s or my various superhero games. I love reminiscing with players from these old games. Even now I get a little chuckle when Eamon says ‘Imposing Beard!’ or when Conor reminds me that he was the best archer in Christendom despite having only one hand. Remembering that I made a grown man scream playing SLA in Dublin at Gaelcon. Remembering when the Watchtower players discovered time travel and then discovered paradox and what happens when you change your past…