Saturday, August 24, 2019

Play to Find Out What Happens

In a lot of the Powered by the Apocalypse games that I've looked at, the section of the rules for gamemasters often looks, at first glance, to someone unfamiliar with PBTA games, like just advice on running games in whatever the setting of that game is. Most of the content doesn't look or sound like rules. And yet, it is. And it's very important to the system that these things are rules and not just advice or guidelines.

The Way it Works:

Gamemasters/Narrators/Masters of Ceremony/whatever they're called in the specific PBTA game you're looking at have three different sets of "rules" to follow: Agenda, Principles, and Moves

Agenda

A GM's Agenda is a list of about three to five things that make up the core of what the GM is supposed to do. Everything the GM does through the course of the game should be traceable back to the Agenda. Oftentimes, the agenda will include points like "Make the setting seem real," and "Fill the player characters' lives with conflict/adventure/trouble".

Principles

Principles expand upon the Agenda in more specific and direct ways. These guidelines help to provide a more complex framework for the GM to follow in running a game. Again, all actions should be traceable back to the principles. These might include things like "Be a fan of the protagonists," "make a move, but never speak its name," "think off screen," or "name everyone and give them a Motivation."

Again, this just sounds like good advice, but PBTA games are set up such that if you aren't acting in accordance with the Principles, the game will likely fall flat.

Moves

Moves are the things that Gamemasters can actually and actively do in the course of the game. They are how the GM moves the game forward and propels the story. These include things like "Separate them," "Deal damage," "Reveal an unwelcome truth," "Give them a difficult choice," or "Turn their move back on them." 

While the Agenda set's the GM's purpose and the Principles set the GM's focus, the Moves provide the GM with things to do.

I told you that one so I could tell you this

One of the items that frequently appears within the GM's agenda, is "Play to Find Out What Happens." This appears even in the agenda for The Veil, which I'm going to be running for my next campaign. And this is one that I think will be particularly challenging for me as a GM. But I also think that's a good thing.

Play to Find out what Happens

The basic idea behind this point of the agenda is that the future of the story is within flux. The players don't control what's going to happen, and neither does the gamemaster. Both parties have moves to influence the story, but neither really has control.

From a GM perspective, this means not having a plan. Sort of. It means not setting out a 'this is going to happen, then this, then this." It also means not planning one true path for the players that they need to take to "win." (The idea of "winning" in RPGs is a bit debatable and subjective as it is, but that's, perhaps, a subject for another time.)

Mechanics supporting Story supporting Mechanics supporting Story

Why is this more than just a guideline? Why is it a hard and fast rule that gamemasters have to follow? Well, some of that has to do with the way PBTA games work mechanically.

For a significant portion (maybe most) of PBTA games, when a player wants to do something that they might fail at, they roll 2 six-sided dice, and add any modifiers they might have (from stats, movies, abilities, or situational aspects). If the result is 10 or greater, awesome, the player succeeds. If the result is 7-9, then it's a partial success. The player might succeed at what they were doing, but maybe they only partly succeed or maybe that success comes at a cost. This allows for interesting situations and complications to arise in play. If the result is 6 or lower, then the player fails at what they were attempting.

A lot of the players moves in PBTA games can be pretty big and sweeping. Failing or even having a partial success can entirely change the situation at hand. This can throw a big monkey wrench in the plans of the players or the gamemaster. Since all rolls have about equal odds, there's no way for a gamemaster to prevent or support particular courses of action by raising or lowering the difficulty. 

So, a gamemaster that relies heavily on a specific plan or level of control for the plot will end up being disappointed when the players' plans or rolls subvert that. 

But this is good. Succeeding at a cost and having a set difficulty overall help to keep the drama and storytelling interesting for everyone at the table. It just also means that everyone, including the GM, has to be able to roll with the punches, pun intended.

Why it's hard for me

I like to think that I don't railroad my players. But I do like to have a plan, and I do like to have control. I tend to have a story that I want to tell, or things I want the players to accomplish. I can be flexible on how they get from point A to point B, but I definitely often have point B in mind.

Even with Caerwent Ascending, which I wanted to be completely open world, I ended up forming schemes and ideas of how I wanted things to go down. And I had been disappointed when the players weren't latching on to my idea of what the campaign should have been.

I like to have a plan, and I like to have control.

Why it's good for me anyway

I think that a lot of times, I, as a gamemaster, get caught up in the idea of the game as my world that I'm sharing with the players. The story is my story, and they are just participants in it. But that's not what roleplaying is.

Roleplaying is a shared experience, owned by both the players and the gamemaster.

By letting go of my "plans" or direct control, I allow the players to more fully experience and participate in the roleplaying game. Thus I provide a more full experience for everyone at the table, including me.

I've realized this and I've tried, several times, to take a step back and give the players more control. But I'm bad at letting go of that control and inevitably end up trying to seize it once more.

So, I think that with "play to find out what happens" being encoded into the rules, both on the player and GM side of the game (although in different but cohesive ways), the game will force me to let go of some of that control and will help me to grow as a GM. Hopefully this will also provide a better experience for the players as well.

Prep: Plots verses Scenarios 

Now, I know what you're thinking: "No prep? That sounds impossible." And maybe it would be. But I didn't say I couldn't prep anything. Just that I couldn't prepare plotlines. What I can prepare is a scenario. For a lot of PBTA games, this looks something like this: 
  1. There exists a threat/danger. An NPC or other force that can have an impact on the player character's lives and on the setting as a whole.
  2. This threat wants something-and has a plan to get it, or at least to get closer to getting it
  3. Then I look at the threat's plan and determine steps of what would happen if the players never got involved in the situation.
  4. However, once the players *do* get involved in the situation, I have to adapt accordingly.
  5. All NPCs in the setting have motivations. How the players interact with these NPCs might determine future threats and scenarios.

Bonus Points: Loss of Setting Control

Related to my giving up control: Most PBTA games don't have an "official" or "preset" setting. Many of them are left generic so that blanks can be filled in cooperatively by players and GMs alike as the story goes on. Some of them have means of generating the setting to begin with. The Veil is one of these. This means that not only have I been unable to plan any sort of linear plot, but that I've also been unable to plan the setting, do world building on my own, or otherwise think about what aspects of the world might impact the game.

This is very hard for me.

But hopefully it'll pay off.

My campaign of The Veil, begins next Saturday, 31 August, 2019. I'm sure I'll let you know how it goes.

Ruins & Robots: Available Now

If you've missed the announcement, my Ruins & Robots series of books has started now. Ruins & Robots is a robot-bases space faring post apocalyptic series with cyberpunk themes and gamelit elements.

The story follows MAI, a robot whose role is to raise up projections of human personalities as she and her team search the ruins of humanity in search of anything valuable that our race left behind.

You can grab the first short story for free here:

The first full book of the series, which follows where the short story leaves off, can be found here:

Sunday, August 18, 2019

New Campaign: The Veil

So, since my Numenera campaigns (Caerwent Down and Caerwent Ascending) are now over, I wanted to talk a little bit about what I've got coming up next.

I knew that I wanted to take a break from Numenera/Cypher System for a while, having been so focused on it for so long.

My Initial Idea: World Jumping Modern Fantasy

I had gotten an idea a while back for a modern fantasy game focused on jumping between different worlds, but I had very specific ideas on what I wanted for it. I couldn't find a system that could do what I wanted the way I wanted to do it, and I haven't yet had time to sit down and create my own system for it.

Powered By the Apocalypse

So I looked to other things. And my journey brought me to Powered by the Apocalypse (PBTA) games. These are games that use the game engine developed by Apocalypse World, but cast into different settings and genres.

One of the biggest things that drew me to PBTA games was actually one of the things that had driven me away from them when I'd looked in the past: playbooks. Rather than having "character classes," most PBTA games have "playbooks." These documents are usually one page front and back and have everything a player will ever need to play their character. Games I've looked at usually have between 8 and 18 different playbooks for players to choose from, with each playbook representing a different archtype of that genre/setting. The playbooks have choices for the player in character creation, as well as all their options for advancement throughout a campaign.

Now, this can be...pretty limited, which was why I was hesitant about it to begin with. However, most of the times the playbooks are unique enough and interesting enough that I don't think this limitation necessarily matters.

The reason it stood out to me is because of the problem I've noticed with some of my other campaigns: I have some players who just don't want to work on things outside of the game. So, having playbooks is nice. It makes character creation as well as advancement quick things that can be done at the table without really taking away from the game. It means players don't have to look through book after book to figure out what their best options are. It puts everything right in front of the players, and that is...exactly what I needed for this game.

Genre: Cyberpunk

It wasn't initially my intention to go with a cyberpunk game. What I had really been thinking I wanted was a game focused on pulling heists, with the intention of running something like Leverage. I realized that cyberpunk was probably one of the better genres I could come up with for running a game like this, so I tried to look into what PBTA options there were for cyberpunk.

I found two of them: The Sprawl and The Veil.

The Sprawl was exactly what I had been looking for. It was a game entirely focused on heists/jobs and did so in a dynamic and interesting way.

But The Veil fascinated me as I read about it. Each of the playbooks represented a dynamic aspect of cyberpunk, with characters being defined more by who or what they were than by what they could do. Instead of having generic stats, characters have emotional states that affect their rolls, forcing players to think about how their character is feeling at any given time. It was wonderful. It wasn't heist-focused, although it would support a heist game if that is what my players end up deciding they want to focus on. It's just...PBTA games, in general, are more narrative than mechanical in their focus. The Veil seems even more so, and within that focus it is just so poetic.

So, I decided to go with The Veil.

Our campaign starts at the end of the month, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Ruins & Robots: Available Now

If you've missed the announcement, my Ruins & Robots series of books has started now. Ruins & Robots is a robot-bases space faring post apocalyptic series with cyberpunk themes and gamelit elements.

The story follows MAI, a robot whose role is to raise up projections of human personalities as she and her team search the ruins of humanity in search of anything valuable that our race left behind.

You can grab the first short story for free here:

The first full book of the series, which follows where the short story leaves off, can be found here:

Wednesday, August 7, 2019

2019 GenCon Reflections



Alright, I'm back from GenCon, so I decided to put down some of my thoughts on the events I played in.
 

Paranoia: The Happiest Sector in Alpha Complex

This was the adventure I ran at GenCon. I greatly enjoy running Paranoia for all the chaos that it brings about. The adventure focused on players trying to stop a terrorist plot in an entertainment sector of Alpha Complex.

The enemies, it turned, out, were employees of a different entertainment sector that were tired of Friend Computer World getting regularly named "Happiest Sector in Alpha Complex," and so had set out to drive away its customers before destroying the sector altogether.

During the course of the adventure, my players destroyed two of the rides in Friend Computer World, with very little provoking from the adversaries. The sector got shut down because of the rides being blown up, and the enemies used this as an opportunity to set up their weapons. Of course, this was when the players managed to catch them and stop them, after having caused far more destruction and killed far more people themselves.

Monster of the Week: Weekend at Winsome

I've been looking into a lot of Powered by the Apocalypse games lately (more on that in an upcoming post), so I was happy to get to try out two different PBTA games at GenCon.

Weekend at Winsome had us investigating attacks in a small town that seemed like they might have been caused by a large wolf. It wasn't a wolf. It wasn't a werewolf either.

Our team had a unique collection of characters, and I felt like our character types really did have an impact in how the adventure played out. The adventure was slow at a couple points, but all-in-all pretty good.

Masks: Caped Extravaganza

Masks was our other PBTA game of the convention. Here we got to play as teenage superheroes that were starting to gain recognition in the city.

I liked the variety of character types. The mechanics and moves seemed like they were fun and could keep things moving well.
The GM was very nice, and she tried to give us each an opportunity to explore our characters and experience different events based on what our characters wanted to do.

However, the adventure itself was a little bit...lacking. There was really only one encounter of the whole thing that was at all conflict-based, and that was a bit repetitive. I'm not sure what things looked like behind the GM screen as to if there was something we had to do to beat the boss or if we had to rip up his equipment a certain number of times, or if she just ended it after we each had taken a couple turns.

I think that because the adventure was so limited, there were times when the GM floundered a little bit because she was trying to draw things out. I think this took away from the game a little, and came off as a bit indecisive/uncertain.

Don't get me wrong, I greatly enjoyed playing this game, but I would say that based on the adventure itself and its execution, this was probably my least favorite of the games I played in at GenCon

Over The Edge: Under Broken Wings

Masks and Monster of the Week both provided a large number of character options with a lot of customization within each of those choices. Neither of these was as open-ended as the character options of Over The Edge, where the only limitation really is just one's imagination. This allowed for an incredibly unique team that included a pathological liar conman (my character), a short bodyguard, a monster hunter, and a rock bassoonist.

I think that this was the funnest adventure that I played at GenCon. The adventure was a little more gruesome/horror-ish than I tend to enjoy, but there were a lot of wacky bits that made the whole thing a lot more fun. The GM was very adaptable and did a good job responding to the crazy things that we, as players threw at him.

The setting of Over the Edge seems interesting and like something I'd be interested in exploring in more detail in the future.

The system itself didn't seem all that special, and I don't think there's anything it did that wouldn't have been handled as well or better by something like The Puddle. (Not that it did these things poorly, just that the system didn't really stick out to me as something remarkable.)

Call to Adventure: Board Game Demo

I almost managed to get out of GenCon without buying a board game this year. There were several that had caught my eye, but I never have as much time to play board games as I'd like, so I didn't want to spend a lot of money on something to just have it sit on my shelf.

Sunday, the last day of the convention, we'd gone back and looked at the exhibit hall and seen everything we wanted to see. We were going to grab a quick lunch at the food trucks and then head home.

We just happened to choose a table with this guy who had bought the game Call to Adventure, and who seemed incredibly excited about it. His explaination of the game spread his excitement to us, so me and one other from my group went to check out the game in the exhibit hall. We sat down and enjoyed a quick demo.

A lot of games that I enjoy (Betrayal at the House on the Hill, Untold, Secrets of the Lost Tomb, etc) are really almost more a mechanical justification to indulge in stories. Call to Adventure seems like almost the reverse of this. 

With Untold especially and Betrayal to a lesser extent, the mechanics of the game don't really matter as much to me as whatever the story/events of the game are that time through. The mechanics are there as an excuse to tell whatever the story is.

Call to Adventure uses a lot of storytelling-type elements, but they are being used instead to justify the mechanics of a board/card game. In Call to Adventure, players are given a character type and background as well as a secret destiny/goal for their character to get bonus points at the end of the game. Gameplay extends over three phases, or acts, ranging from a character's humble origins through their growth as a hero or antihero to their climactic finale. In each phase, players gain cards representing different events in the hero's journey but mechanically granting additional resources to gain more cards. When one player manages to get their hero to the end of Act 3, gameplay ends and players all tally up their points (from cards, experience, and other things). Whoever has the most points wins.

It's a pretty fun game, and it's notably playable with 1-4 players and only runs 30 min to an hour, which makes it easier to play than some other games I have which require more time or players.