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Archive for April, 2024

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The Art of Fighty One Shot Pregens

April 29, 2024

A couple of friends outside my normal Errant group want to check out Errant. I figured I’ll run a oneshot, and kick together some pregens… so… a good time to talk about building pregens which is a little different than the usual “just make a character”. This is, of course, for games where we’re talking tactical combat, since the pregens you do for a narrativist focal thing are more about making good motivations that intersect in interesting ways.

70% optimized

Generally, if I’m running a one shot for people new to a game, I build the characters to be “70% optimized”. They have to be good at what they do, but not hyper specialized because usually if you do that, it drastically limits the players’ options AND they don’t learn the system really.

If you do run a oneshot with the expectation of experienced players, you can be more specialized, then, because the players will have a good idea of how to work the more basic systems when they need to adapt outside of their character’s focus.

Play to type, not against

Make it very clear how the character is supposed to be played. Think of how fighting videogames try to telegraph to you what this character is about and how they play. Usually the small characters are fast, the big characters are slow but powerful. If you see a character floating with energy glowing, you figure they have some kind of ranged attacks, etc. In the same sense, make the characters fairly straight forward in what their role is.

This doesn’t mean they can’t have a secondary ability or skill to cover a weak point or give variety, it’s just make sure most of what they do is clearly set up. Since you should be only optimizing 70% of the way anyway, you can usually set up builds with some secondary tools as well.

If you get character art for your pregens, might as well get images that also reflect the type so people can latch on quickly.

Give basic strategies

Write it somewhere on the character sheet. “This warrior is good for getting direct into melee.” “You will do best darting in for your touch attacks then getting distance.” etc. Note that you can also include a bit about the secondary options I mentioned above – “Don’t forget you can use your minor Arcane ability to do some ranged stuff in a pinch” etc.

It also helps to give some basic strategies specific to this system: “Always try to Help each other to get extra dice”, “When your armor breaks, ditch it so you have more inventory space.”, “You can use your Push action to get enemies grouped up for your Big Swing or one of your allies’ AOE attacks”, etc.

This can usually be like 2-4 bulletpoints, enough someone can scan it and get the idea, or, between turns, remind themselves of generally good ideas for the way this game flows.

Extra Rules Notes

Since I play a lot online, I like to put direct links in the character sheets to specific rules or quicksheets of the rules that matter to the characters. Or I’ll just screenshot the section of the rules and drop in the image file right there.

In person, I would make and print front-and-back quicksheets so players could just look at those during the game.

If the character sheet has space, literally include some of the most important rules if you can. It’s one fo the best things I’ve seen going way back to Dogs in the Vineyard, and one of the bits we lose a lot in online character sheets.

Time is a premium

For a oneshot, more than anything, time is a premium. You don’t want to spend time having people trying to look stuff up in the book, having trouble navigating their character sheet, on top of everything else.

A key part to one shots is remembering they’re a one shot; it’s a teaser, a demo, not the full experience. When you try to jam the full experience into the short time of a one shot (for games not already built to do that), it’s like trying to watch a movie at 4x speed. You’ll get… some of the movie, but you’re definitely not getting the full experience anyway.

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Primetime Adventures Game Kit

April 23, 2024

It’s pretty rare that I’m travelling or in a situation where a pick up game is possible, but I did assemble a very simple traveling kit to play Primetime Adventures on short notice. It’s probably only going to come out when I go to the rare convention or travel out of town and know I’ll be hanging out with some gamer friends.

First, I got one of those little EDC organizer pouches to serve as the kit.

As you can see, everything fits in real tidy:

I’ve got playing cards, extra cardstock chits to serve as “Fan Mail” tokens, and I cut up some of the “Reminder cards” as a rules cheat sheet. Although one of the cards is a “character sheet” it’s there more as an example if players needed to write their own (though frankly for a one shot characters are mechanically simple enough most everyone can remember their characters aspects).

Could this work for other really light games? Probably. Certainly stuff like For the Queen or Decaying Orbit which already have their own card decks as the primary play tool. Otherwise I’d probably want one of those games that uses either a single die or maybe 2d6 or percentile and you can throw some pregens on index cards or something. (of course you could use a dice roller app but then what’s the point of the physicality of the kit?)

Part of what makes this really nice is that I can bring it if I’m not sure if we’re gaming or not. The cards are just normal playing cards, so that covers basic card games, too. It fits in a jacket pocket, and it’s light enough that if it gets left untouched, the dead weight isn’t much so I don’t feel like I’m lugging things around for nothing.

I’m guessing relatively few people are in the situation of random pick up games as well, but if you are gaming enough or in the right social circles, this might be exactly the thing to have.


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The House Under the Moondial = Narrativism

April 17, 2024

I saw folks saying The House Under the Moondial had amazing layout, and it absolutely is that; smart links on the PDF set up all the promises people wanted from (aiyah, I’m so old) early hyperlinking.

However, I’m not that big on buying adventures for any game; few end up fitting well with my settings or sensibilities about where I like play to focus on. And I’ve only taken an initial look at THUTM so I can’t say if it’s something I’ll run, but I can say this; this is 100% Narrativism.

Literally on the first page after the cover, you get this guidance:

Foreword:

…This is an adventure that assumes the PCs gain XP from gold. That they aren’t here to save the day but have an opportunity to do so. This is an adventure with paths that lead to a heroic ending, but trusts the referee won’t force their players in this (or any) direction. This is a living world: the story is whatever the players choose. And the consequences of that.

Also on that same page:

An open-ended module

This module is built around a timeline and NPCs/Factions who want things.

Once the timeline goes off rail thanks to the PC actions, it is up to the referee to determine the events, maybe with the help of randomness….

This should lead the adventure to a logical conclusion, unique to your table and impacted by the players’ choices.

If you play through this module based on this guidance, you have Narrativism happening. The party may try to avoid getting entangled in the messy conflicts and situations presented, but averting one’s eyes, choosing when and where to help people, or not at all, is also a moral choice that sets up the core of what the module presents.

Back in the Forge days we’d say “You can play Narrativism in systems that aren’t built for it explicitly; it is not mechanically difficult but the group has to be engaged together to make it happen if the system doesn’t support it.”

Anyway, I’ll probably have more to post later on down the line, probably just around the layout aspects, which more RPGs should look to for inspiration on organization.

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Fucking AI (vs. the Same Page Tool)

April 14, 2024

I was trying to quickly search one of my older posts, and apparently typing in my name had Google “helpfully” offer this AI tidbit about the Same Page Tool… which is literally wrong from the first sentence.

I try not to full on rant too much but… fuck AI so here we go.

The game you are trying to run should determine how much planning a GM does. If it has a GM. Which maybe it doesn’t.

The Same Page Tool exists because historically a lot of game texts leave massive chunks of structure instructions out, or have contradictory bits, most of the time because the designers either assume everyone is playing the same way, so they leave it out, or because they hope to have a “big tent” design where groups who play mutually exclusive styles of play all will buy the same rules.

The problem is, when people with different assumptions of “how all roleplaying works” show up at the same table, trying to play from the same book, and then clash because… again, mutually exclusive understanding. We can play Spades, we can play Poker, we can play Go Fish, we can’t just play them all at the same time.

While the AI summation is correct that it is important for the group to “agree” to the same selections on the Same Page Tool, it writes it like it’s a negotiation, but generally most of the choices are locked in by the game mechanics and by GM capacity/habit. So it’s less “let’s agree what each dish in the meal will be” and more “let’s pick a restaurant”; if you don’t agree, you’re not in the restaurant with us at all. (and yes, you can always go have your least favorite food to hang out with your friends, but if you had to do it all the time, you might decide to stop eating with them and hang out in other contexts instead.)

Anyway, the Same Page Tool exists because of the intersection of incomplete rules, shitty game culture insisting “everyone can/should be in the same game together”, and that for half of the hobby’s history, people often only experienced a couple of game styles, all through the filter of D&D and no understanding there is a vast breadth of possibility out there. What was a “problem player” in one context is actually the ideal player in another. That unspoken assumptions aren’t useful for consistent play coordination – clearly stated ones are.

The usefulness of the Same Page Tool exists in the yawning gap left by designers; the ideal future is when everyone looks at it and goes “Why would we need this? The game I paid for already makes it clear how to play it or how to choose between the modes that work with this game.”

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PbtA Principles and Moves – building on Dice Exploder

April 14, 2024

There’s two posts from Dice Exploder on PbtA Principles and Moves ( Apocalyptic Principles and Millers Law, and More on Apocalyptic Principles ) and I thought it would be worth expanding a bit on the ideas there.

Resilient vs. Fragile Design

Something I saw Vincent Baker write about, in designing Apocalypse World, was that the mechanics were designed to resilient as a system; if you forget some rules, you can keep playing and the system as a whole doesn’t necessarily crash or go bad because of this.

(There was a period were people were designing quite a few games where the game economy was very tight and doing stuff like forgetting something would make it fall apart, and even if it was mechanically simple, we started coming to the point of calling these fragile systems.)

So the idea of the modularity of Moves, and the broadness of Principles, work together to keep the game rolling, even if you end up forgetting parts at times. You don’t have to keep them all in head all the time, you just need enough to keep the game running in the direction (genre and play expectations) it’s intended.

Directive vs. Procedure

In the second post, it’s noted that Principles are of different types; advice vs. action. I think this maps pretty closely to what I write about in terms of Directive vs. Procedure mechanics.

Grouping & Chunking vs. Layout for In Person Play

I do think the idea of breaking up things a bit better into grouping can help groups mentally file and navigate Moves, etc. in play and not many PbtAs do this well.

I think a part of the problem is that Apocalypse World was designed specifically with in-person play as the core expectation rather than online play, and certain layout choices are the result of that – other PbtAs sometimes copy it and it’s a detriment to understanding.

Imagine we’re playing in person: I have a dozen little printed character playbooks on the table for you to look at while I’m reading the set up expectations from the book. (AW does this; does any other PbtA? Huh.). The playbooks are both your character “classes”, a bit of setting/lore drop, and a player’s primary reference of the rules. You have the Basic Moves and your character’s specific Move set options in the playbook. A player never actually has to look at the full rule book.

For the GM, Apocalypse World throws a copy of each playbook in there, and a full list of the Moves and expanded info on how to run/think about them. It’s a bit like how games used to have a glossary near the beginning; it’s a terrible thing to read through straight, but it’s a useful reference in the middle of play. It’s even more disorienting if you expect players to mentally assemble how the game works based on this structure.

Once you remove the playbooks as the primary gateway for players to understanding the rules, this whole structure doesn’t work as well overall. Also, I feel like a third of the Moves in the book are under “Optional” which is a key point tying back to the resilient design; if you think you need to remember and implement all of those all the time, instead of “oh we’re having a Duel, let’s use the Duel move, I’ve been thinking about that”, it makes it more of a cognitive load when it’s a fun extra.

Personally, I think most PbtAs would do well by splitting up groupings of Moves into Basic vs Optional, Action, Social, (Magic, Hacking, Whatever), provided designers don’t fall into the trap of imagining you need equal number of Moves for each subcategory.

A key component of Moves is that you can often have 1-2 cover a BIG field of action. For example, in many campaigns of Apocalypse World I’ve run and played in, Seize By Force and Go Aggro Moves have covered the entirety of using violence even in situations that could just be best described as “post-Apocalyptic John Woo movie” levels of gun play.

Anyway, I’m just very glad to see people really analyzing PbtAs through their play experiences and specifically what makes it easier/harder to run and why.

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