I just installed a little gizmo called Snap Shots that enhances links with visual previews of the destination site. For instance, this link leads to The Forge.
If you don’t want them, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out.
If you really don’t want them, comment here and tell me to get rid of them. I thought they were kicky.
So. The long-awaited brother-inclusive playtest #3 happened on Friday. My immediate reaction was that it was awful – that everything that had been broken was still broken and that some things were getting worse. A little bit of time between me and the event has softened that impression considerably. So, with that in mind, I’m going to lay out first what I think went right. Read more…
I know things have been quiet here lately, and I just wanted to let everyone (um…all…six of us?) know that I’m working on a post detailing all the great lessons from playtest session #3 and that it’ll be up as soon as it’s ready.
I was delayed in my blogging – as well as my editing - by my brother’s visit – a worthy cause for the delay, I assure you. Also, the visit prompted the high-productivity writing sprint last week and a focal point for the most recent playtest.
I’m done with the no-reading-until-I’m-done-with-these-parts parts! Actually, I’m finished with a complete top-to-bottom revision of the game. The big deals include:
I have a bunch of stuff left to do, including:
Obviously, I’m not done in the sense of…finished. But that’s one goal down!
So. I’ve been on this gangster kick lately. We just watched the entire run of The Sopranos over the last couple of months. Then the other night, we caught enough of The Godfather Part II on TV to assure that the good ones of that franchise end up on our screen soon enough. But commercial interruptions soon led us to watching Goodfellas on instant Netflix instead. What a great movie that is. Additionally, the lovely and talented R. is running a V:tM game for our group (yay! I get to play!) and I siezed the opportunity to create an Eastern European mobster-turned Ventrue.
What’s Russian for “Fugeddaboudit?”
Hello, it’s time for another update. Got lots done this weekend, but still not enough to call myself finished. Here’s how things stand:
Things are coming along pretty well. A lot of thinking about Contests all sort of fell out onto the keyboard tonight. I know it will need more massaging, but I think the basic tenets are strong. The game grows incrementally more complex as I go along. It will never be the 1-page RPG I envisioned so long ago, but I think it’s going to be a lot better than that game could have been. I am heartened by the fact that the ramifications of complexities doevetail nicely with each other and the primordial mechanics – I think that means that the more complex mechanics work. Only playtesting will say for sure.
I have some hope that I’ll have the section on Combat revised by the time my brother gets here. It’s a stupid, arbitrary, artificial deadline with no validity at all. But I want to show my little brother this cool thing I’m working on, see?
A small number of people may be amused to hear that the name of the GM in the examples given in the manuscript is “April.”
That is all.
So, it’s Charles Darwin’s birthday. Happy b-day, Chuck, and thanks for everything. Last July, my wife and son and I were in London, and we had tea in the snack bar of the Natural History Museum, where a statue of him stands. This Fall, we discovered (in Bill Bryson’s excellent book, A Short History of Nearly Everything) that the statue was there as an insult from a rival naturalist involved in the museum’s inception.
I remember when my parents explained evolution to me when I was a kid. I remember boggling at the idea, going up the forested hill from my house (we lived in the Manzano Mountains, east of Albuquerque) to sit on a rock that I had found fossils in before to think about how long it took for animals to become fossils and for single-celled organisms to become human beings. To think about how those fossils meant that the mountain I was sitting one was once seafloor. I got a sense of how vast the history of the world must be and how inexpressibly small my part in it was.
I work with people who don’t believe in evolution. And I wonder if it’s egoism – if they just never could get over the idea of their own minuteness, of the minuteness of humankind.
I’ve got a lot of stuff yet to do if I want to be able to run a playtest session a week from tomorrow when my brother’s here. Let me take stock:
Still to do this week if I want to have everything I know needs doing done:
Phew. Busy busy!
I’m thinking about the concept of “antitainment” – or should it be “exitainment”? No, that sounds too much like “exciting entertainment” when what it means is “negative entertainment.” More specifically, something that’s supposed to be fun, but decidedly is not.
Specifically, I’m thinking about when a game you’re supposed to be engaged in to have fun becomes more like a dreary chore that must be endured. Usually, this involves non-play activities required to create or maintain the state of game artifacts. Wow. I really started writing like a nerd there. Sorry.
This doesn’t mean you can’t do any work at all without your entertainment going rotten on you. After all to play even the most prosaic of games – checkers, for instance – you have to set up the board. There’s a certain amount of investment involved, upon which you rightfully expect a certain amount of entertainment as a return. I’m talking about the point at which the entertainment value derived is not worth the effort, or rather, the percieved burden of the effort required. The bit about percieved burden is important here. I use it because how long the effort takes, how many people are involved, how much it bothers someone to engage in the effort, how complicated the effort is, and other factors are all involved in how big a drag it actually feels like. It’s like temperature (effort) vs. wind chill (percieved burden).
I’m realizing that most RPGs are filled with antitainment. There are two sources of antitainment for players (as opposed to GMs, who have their own sources of antitainment) that come to mind right away:
Everybody needs to make characters in order to play, it’s like setting up the board in checkers. But at least you get to use the characters over and over again. It would be like getting to play checkers for years once you set up the board that first time. And that’s why people have ever bothered to play – the return on creating characters is pretty high. And I can hear the counter-argument as I write this – “If there were actually antitainment in RPGs, nobody would ever play them.” And that’s true. In fact, I can think of games that nobody plays anymore – primoridal Traveller (I don’t know about newer versions), with it’s “death in character generation” exhibits antitainment. And as I said before, antitainment is compounded of numerous factors, many of which I’m sure I am still entirely unaware.
But I have good players, dedicated players, players who know the value of the fun they’ll have when we play a game. And these players, as a rule, hate character generation. My brother, who’s coming to visit next week, and will hopefully serve as my first non-gamer playtester, has said to me in more-or-less these words, “I’d be interested in playing RPGs, but I hate making characters.” That is antitainment, right there. That’s a player alienated from the hobby. Bam. Point made.
Another locus of antitainment for players is character advancement – what is known even to the non-RPGing public now as “levelling up” thanks to many zillions of video games having co-opted the D&D model. Even in games where progress is made more evenly, in smaller chunks, improving the character is something few gamers in my experience look forward to – even though they usually look forward to having the improvements themselves.
I think that what joins these two activities is a set of common characteristics:
All of these activities are guaranteed to pull the player out of the experience of the game itself, to break the illusion everyone has gone to such lengths to share. It would be like watching a serious drama on TV and suddenly cutting to the “making of” that they were shooting for the DVD release. With no warning, the shared conceits of the show are shattered and the dreary business of making it happen takes center stage. One of my primary goals in designing this system was to minimize antitainment – I didn’t think of it as such when I started, of course, I just had the idea about antitainment now – but I did set out to make playing and running the game as easy as possible, and by lowering the barriers to fun, I think I’m lowering the chance of antitainment.
And yes, I am aware that there are people out there who like making characters and and advancing them. I like making characters myself. But I’m a systems geek (see nerdspeak above) and people who play games cannot be presumed to like the same things as people who create them. How many Monopoly players have been inspired to create their own roll-and-move boardgames? Personal preference is one of those contributing factors to the percieved burden.
I’m hoping to have all of the major mechanical issues I detailed in this post resolved by next Friday so that I can get my brother in on a playtest session. It’ll be a pretty good measure of whether my system is antitaining or not.
