The Player's Side of the Screen

Here's a link to a listing of the Unspent posts, if you're a newcomer to this.

With a plan in hand, the group was ready to tackle the Fae menace, however they could. They were down a Jake and a Leona, but George had come back, and they all had a hunch that a lot of this focused around Rachel Strait, the poor woman who until now had been in the shadows. So Sharon went to find out where she was living...

You know, it's funny how good ideas come: at the strangest times, from the most unexpected places. Brainstorming can be one of the most informative exercises a writer engages in, resulting in plenty of "I never would have thought of that!" moments. It's immensely important to keep your ideas fresh, and when it comes to roleplaying games, those ideas can come from a place that's rather in line with this blog: the players.

WARNING: This RPG contains frequent instances of strong language, and is therefore NSFW. The review will follow usual blog guidelines, and be SFW.

Misspent Youth is a game about adolescent rebellion and sticking it to The Man. It's also a game that completely took me by surprise, doing things that I never even considered doing in a game. It's loud, authoritative, intense, character-driven, and even tragic. It's also a great example of a tightly focused game; instead of giving you the tools to make certain elements of drama happen (this is the case with roleplaying systems), it structures the game so that certain things just happen.

This post will actually have very little to do about the Super Bowl, and I'm not even going to make any mention of Blood Bowl beyond this first paragraph. I'm just going to do a little reflection, inspired by this famous event. I also don't expect this post to get much readership today, seeing as so many people are watching said Super Bowl. At any rate, here it is: what the Super Bowl has to do with your fantasy world.

As you've no doubt heard countless times before, one of the big evil words of roleplaying games would be "railroading". For those who haven't heard it, here's a brief summary for you: it's when the GM runs a game as a linear adventure. Player choices have no impact on the storyline, and no matter what the players do, the game progresses. Any alterations to the story are inevitably minimized, and the whole thing plays like a videogame, moving towards one conclusion. If you're lucky, you get a "two possible endings" scenario. The opposite of railroading is sandboxing, where players have complete control over there destinies, and can go anywhere that they wish.

It's often villified, for good reason, but this often makes GMs (especially new GMs) shy away from anything which might remotely be construed as railroading. That's a bit problematic, at least from my personal perspective...

Pitfalls Ahoy!
See, when you give your players the freedom to run amok through your world, they truly run amok. They throw a healthy (and then unhealthy) amount of chaos into your governments, NPCs, plotting, and the like, forcing you to figure out what the ramifications of all those actions are. Usually, the GM can't handle the realistic consequences for, say, killing off a corrupt official in the dead of the night, and the power imbalance it might bring about, so the GM will typically handwave it, leaving the players with one impression: it doesn't really matter what they do, and all actions are acceptable.

A complete freedom for the players, though, is bad for another reason. This reason is more subjective, and it has to do with some observations that I've made, as a player. When I'm thrust into a situation, I like to know what some of my options might be. I'm not the type of person who will figure out how to blaze a trail out of absolute nothingness. I like to have some basis for my next goals and courses of action, whether that be tales of an enemy to fight, important NPCs to get information from, or clues to find. I like there to be enough hooks that I can follow the story that's out there.

Two Open Worlds
Mount & Blade: Warband is the game which got me thinking about this. It's an "open world" game: you wander around a dynamic world, doing quests for various nobles, building your army, raking in money, and trying to scratch out a living. It's an interesting formula, but what I find most interesting is the contrast with another, similar game that I play: Sid Meier's Pirates! That game is essentially the same, except that the delivery of the story is far more abundant.

In Mount & Blade, it's a lot harder to get a handle on the story, because there is literally none. Even the dialogues with characters aren't terribly interesting. Pirates, on the other hand, is bursting with flavor. It's also a tad formulaic (visit the tavern to get quests, repair your stuff in ports, report to the Governor to get promotions), but the formula ensures that interesting quests are always there, for you to choose from.

Tell the Players
Finally, something that Pirates has over Mount & Blade is, quite simply, transparency. With an integrated map and quest log, it helps you figure out where you need to go in order to do things, and what things you need to do at the moment.

This is probably the biggest thing that a GM can learn from these two examples. If you don't tell players where the goodies might be found, or at least show them what they can do to figure it out, they'll probably never bother seeking them out. Give them options, and tell them what those options are, and they likely won't take too much time running your world into the ground.

First and foremost, sorry I haven't gotten a post down, I'm trying to get back into the rhythm of working on posts, after having been out of it for a while. And, well, last night I got sucked into an epic conversation that took place in tandem with playing Portal...yeah. It was awesome, but I didn't write up my post last night. So it's a bit later than I'd like. That's okay, though, because I came up with a cool topic.

It All Started...
...with my playing in a very unique RPG system, called FactionRPG, developed by one of my fellow forumgoers at Myth-Weavers, a forum site dedicated to roleplaying games. The basic premise of FactionRPG is that each player, instead of controlling one character, controls the actions of an entire faction, and roleplays out their discussions and arrangements with other factions, deciding on in-game actions to be taken after a fixed length of plotting with other factions. Actions play out, things are destroyed, secrets are found out, and then it's back to scheming again.

All in all, it's a very interesting system...kinda like Diplomacy, but less of a board game and more of an RPG. It's all about shifting alliances and figuring out how all of the assets you control fit into the grand scheme of things. It also got me thinking on a completely different level of RPGing. The rules are so abstracted that individual characters' powers are never defined explicitly. Rather, what is defined is their relative power level, which denotes their strategic importance. What did that do? It focused the system more on running an organization with multiple characters.

A New Responsibility
I wonder if this sort of approach couldn't be taken by more new RPGs. The "play out one character" aspect of RPGs has been stuck to so frequently (barring innovations like Burning Empires), it would be a great breather to get something so remarkably different. What if you were in charge of not just one character's story, but all of their stories? Not only could this allow for greater ensemble drama, but it could also bring in entirely new dimensions of roleplaying.

Another interesting problem this solves is the problem of character death. In traditional roleplaying games, losing a character is something that becomes tough to do, which is probably the reason most roleplaying games make dying so hard for characters. Though there's some exceptions, the general rule seems to be against fatality. That's a design choice. When you've put so much work into your character, choosing feats, ability scores, getting magic items that work together...you don't want to have to do all of that work all over again, to make a completely new character. I can understand that.

This approach fixes that. When you're distanced a bit from characters, losing a character is no longer a total loss. Sure, it's a loss, and it's pretty major, but it doesn't mean you have to start over all from scratch. To me, that can make for a much better story. In drama, characters come and go, live and die, but the organizations, the groups, the things they belong to--those live on. It's only rarely (and climatically) that an organization becomes destroyed utterly, to the point where a player would have to make a brand new one.

Another unique approach would be to have players focus on building up a dynasty, somewhat like what I've heard Pendragon does. In this approach, characters have a limited lifespan, but that's part of reality. There's always going to be a new character who comes after, to carry on the legacy. As long as character creation is somewhat simplified, this can work out quite well. I think it's a cool idea too.

So, that's all the thinking-about that I've got for the moment. I may end up coming back and fleshing this out...or who knows? I may decide to make this into a system of its own.

So, just as an aside, I had an interesting idea to utilize Twitter. As some or possibly all of you know, Twitter is an online service which lets you broadcast 140-character "tweets" of information. It's like micro-blogging. This limit lends to all sorts of creativity in tweets, and so...

While reading a tweet from Steven Jackson Games, under its "#hook" tag, I was struck by how it encapsulated an entire setting, in just a few characters. "Now, you ain't never been out this far west before, but you're pretty sure Comanches don't normally ride bears and breathe fire. -Fox" Which in turn inspired me.

So, here's my suggestion to you. If you're on Twitter, make some one-tweet settings. Using the tag "onetweetsetting" before it, type out a brief characterization of a fantasy/scifi, etc., setting. Make a few. And spread the word, see what creativity we can get flowing!