Tenure or an eldritch roach in my head?

I am pretty sure that my experiences with Jason Morningstar's designs started with Shab-al-Hiri Roach. He's designed Fiasco, which I consider to be one of the most important indie RPGs, and Gray Ranks, which is an amazing and disturbing design. But before that, in his career and my exposure to his career, there was Shab-al-Hiri Roach.

Shab-al-Hiri Roach is narrative-based and GM-free RPG, which puts it squarely in what has increasingly become my interests. Although I played it before I got into those kind of games :D

In the game, the players are all faculty in a New England university in 1919. Underneath the genteel veneer of polite society is a seething pit of jealousy and rivalry. Over the course of several scenes, the players will engage in social conflicts, risking their reputations in order to increase those same reputation. 

Oh, and there's a Lovecraftian roach from ancient Sumeria who can empower and damn the players in its own quest to spawn and spread its malignant influence.

If you accept the roach or are possessed by it, you get some big bonuses. That little Cthulhu cockroach will give you some considerable mechanical advantages. BUT you can't win the game no matter high your reputation is if you are still possessed by the roach. And getting rid of that little eldritch abomination will require luck and sacrifice.

In my one experience with Shab-al-Hiri Roach, just about every last one of us caved in and gave in to the roach. The winner ended up being humiliated and forced to leave the university in shame and disgrace but, by golly, he won because he didn't give in to the temptation of the roach. 

It was a hoot.

Shab-al-Hiri Roach Is not one of the great indie games. Fiasco, which is an obvious comparison since it's also by Jason Morningstar, has slightly simpler rules, tighter relationship rules and the flexibility to be used with any setting. Shab-al-Hiri Roach doesn't just tell a specific type of story but a specific story. I'd play it again cheerfully but I wouldn't form a group to play it over and over again.

But it's still a fun game, in huge part due to the theme. For me, it's like a mashup of Lovecraft and Wodehouse (which, I know, has been done plenty of times) The concept, while it could be straight up horror, really lends itself to hysterical black comedy.

I view Shab-al-Hiri Roach as the promise of greater games to come in Morningstar's work but it's still fun on its own.

Ancient Committee is an odd beast

I read Ancient Committee is an Emo Band! (I'll just call it Ancient after this) because I needed a distraction while trying to write a blog about the Grey Ranks that does it any kind of justice. And I only found out about Ancient because Jason Morningstar mentions it in Drowning and Falling.

Ancient is a game about being in an emo rock band. It probably says a lot about me and how old I am that I automatically edited it in my brain to a garage band. That being said, the band is doing well enough to get regular gigs and sell T-shirts so you must be doing something right.

The mechanics are very very simple. After everyone decides what they're playing in the band and you create a set list, it's time for your gig. You play out how the audience handles each song and your efforts at making them like you more by drawing cards from regular deck of cards. Afterwards, also using a regular deck of cards, band members determine if they are giving up or burning out or actually staying with the band.

Beyond having a name and what you do in the band, character creation only consists of drawing merit and flaw cards that will give you bonuses in audience reaction. Amusingly enough, merits and flaws work the same way in gigs. Their only difference is how they affect your chances of giving up or burning out.

Not only is the game a GM-free system, it is a particularly GM-free system. Nobody takes on the role of temporarily being the game master, except maybe the random draw from the deck of cards.

Beyond the fact that Ancient Committee has to be in the named of the band, because you have all those T-shirts, there are two choices in the game design that I do find rather interesting.

First of all, while the game is set up for ten sessions, which is how long it'll take sell all of those T-shirts, you don't need the consistent group. Whoever shows up, they're the ones who are in the band. While I can see some serious issues trying to run a game like that, I still find it funny and appropriate for the theme.

Second, every session should take about an hour. And Ancient draws a firm line on that. The more time you spend fighting about who plays what instrument or the set list, the less time you have to actually play music. And the gig has to end early enough to figure out if anyone is giving up or burning out.

It's not the first time I have seen a hard and fast time limit set on the game. Puppetland did it earlier and better, with its emphasis about how you are playing out a children's story. However, I still like how it punishes you, quite logically, when you spend more time fighting about how the band is going to be and less time actually playing music. Punish being a subjective term, since you might just be there for the fighting.

Quite frankly, for a variety of reasons I can't see myself ever playing Ancient. For one thing, I'm not into the theme. For another thing, a campaign model that is built on whoever shows up gets to play doesn't seem like a campaign that will last two sessions.

Honestly, there are enough interesting one shots that I would rather play different game each week if I had such an irregular group.

I would be curious to know what people who actually been in an emo band think of the game.

Laughing while Drowning and Falling

Since I have been going through a bit of a Jason Morningstar phase lately, all thanks to the Grey Ranks which I will write about fairly soon, I got out and read through Drowning and Falling.

Drowning and Falling is made up of two parts. The first one is a loving parody of Dungeons & Dragons. The second is an actual set of functioning mechanics. To be honest, when I started reading the game, I wasn't expecting the second part.

In general, the book is awfully funny to read. The theme of the game is being some kind of generic sword and sorcery hero who goes out to fight monsters and get loot. If you fail in this crucial task, you are either going to drown or fall. If you find yourself on fire or being strangled, you're clearly doing something wrong.

Characters have a whopping 15 different traits. Definitely brings back memories of some of the old-school games I have played. However, since their only mechanical use is to help generate numbers that you have to roll under with two dice, it's not nearly as complex or overwhelming as it might sound.

Since this is a Jason Morningstar game, it's not a surprise that it's a GM-free system. At the start of the game, you deal out playing cards to everyone. They then use those cards to create challenges. If you are really going old-school, each one is basically the next room in the dungeon.

Really, the only mechanical purpose of either the traits or the cards that you use to create challenges is to generate numbers. Individual names and details are just flavor to create the story. Come to think of it, isn't that how most role-playing games work? Using your strength, charisma and clumsiness to overcome a firebreathing dragon is a lot more interesting then just saying roll under a five.

I have to admit that since I read this right off of reading the Grey Ranks, which is the emotional equivalent of catching a sledge hammer between the eyes and one of Jason Morningstar's masterpieces, it was a bit of a let down. Compared to that, Drowning and Falling has an impossible act to follow.

These days, I look at role-playing games from two criteria. Was it fun to read and what I want to play it? Drowning and Falling passes the first criteria with flying colors. It is really funny and I can see it getting laughs if it was read out loud on the stage.

However, while it is clearly a functional and playable game, there are other games that fill the same niche of being a silly, funny one shot better. Toon, Kobolds Ate My Baby, Baron Muchaussen. Heck, both the Shan-al-Hiri Roach or Fiasco by Morningstar would be games I reach to before Drowning and Falling.

There is only one time I can see where I would really want to play Drowning and Falling. That would be as the last event on a Saturday night of a convention, when everyone is exhausted and slaphappy and just plain silly. I think it would work really good then.

So, I had fun reading the game. I'm not planning on playing the game. And the proceeds for the game went to charity. On the whole, Drowning and Falling didn't change my life or give meet any amazing insights. But I don't regret reading it.

Ocean as a game and a discussion

I recently reread Ocean, partly to get myself back into reading RPGs for fun. I first read it when I was just starting to explore indie games on my own. And I found that it not only held up well, I appreciated it even more.

Ocean is a story-telling RPG that is built on a very simple premise. You are all amnesiacs who wake up in a deserted underwater that has monsters in the shadows. You have to figure out who you are, what the base is and what those darn monsters are.

The game is a GM-free system, something I have come to be fascinated by. It uses a dice-based economy where your dice pool is also your health points and you trade in dice to solve the mysteries. However, you can't directly trade dice in to solve mysteries. Other players have to take risks for you to get the bonus dice you need to solve mysteries.

While it is a rules light system, I have skipped over tons of details of how the game works. One of the important factors is that in order to solve the mysteries, you have to take risks and take damage. The economy is tight enough up that everyone should be hurting by the time it ends. And there is a high level of interaction because you can't earn dice on your own.

But what really made me appreciate ocean was the lengthy section about the philosophy of playing the game.

Narrative  games, by their virtue of being mechanically light, can sometimes be opaque in the way to play them. The players have to do a lot of the work themselves. 

Which is not only fine, it's kind of the point. Particularly in games that don't have game masters, the players have to take on a lot of creative control. And when done well, it is an amazingly rewarding experience.

However, I know that that's not the easiest thing for some players. Including players that have spent years playing mechanically heavy systems, where do you have a very defined framework to work with.

Having a chunk of the book made up of a discussion on how these games work and how you need to embrace the freedom that comes with the narrative game is really nice and really handy.

The framework of Ocean, both the mechanics and the theme, would be enough to interest me. However, the real treasure in the book is the discussion on play. 

Baron Munchausen - no prep, no GM, all fun!

The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a game that has cast a long shadow over my gaming life and it's also had a heck of an impact on role playing games in general.

You see, Baron Munchausen was one of the first games you could really call an indie RPG, coming out in 1998, before indie had become  an idea or a movement. 

Of course, at the time, not too many folks considered it a role playing game. Heck, when I first played it in 1999, I didn't think of it as a role playing game, just a fun party game. But, these days, after a lot of exposure to indie games, I think of it as both :D

Baron Munchausen is a GM-free minimalist system that requires no preparation and it can easily be run in just an hour or two. In it, the players reenacting mud.   the life of the actual historical Baron Munchausen. That is, sitting around a bar and telling outrageous lies.  :P

While the actual mechanical rules to the game take up only two pages in what's over a hundred pages in the latest version (and only consist of how to interrupt another player in the middle of their story), the book is a lot of fun to read. It gives you a good grounding on what kind of stories to come up with and, just as important, the tone of those stories.

It's worth noting that the designer, James Wallis, was also one of the designers of Once Upon A Time, a collaborative and/or competitive fairy tale telling game, which even further blurs the line of RPG and party game. 

In fact, while I now do consider Once Upon A Time an RPG, even when I didn't, I considered it a useful way to teach new role players how to play pretend and work together to tell stories.

While Baron Munchausen was innovative in the way that it took parlor games and improvisational exercises and turned into a role playing game, it's not the end all, be all of indie gaming. You're not going to get a deep or introspective game. You're going to get light, silly fluff. Of course, Baron Munchausen isn't promising you anything but that.

Baron Muchausen still holds up as a fun game, after all these years. It's a role playing game that you can literally just sit down, make up funny titles for yourselves and start playing.

Looking forward to someday getting lost in The House of Unusual Size

The House of Unusual Size is not my favorite entry in the Free RPG's Harder Than Granite contest from back in 2013. (That's a toss up between Keeton's Journey and A Flask Full of Gasoline) It is, however, the game I think I'm most likely to play.

The game is set in the ancient mansion of Ezra Keeton that was built atop a mountain and undoubtably built into the mountain. In a twist that feels like it's straight out of Lovecraft's Lurking Fear, the Keeton family vanished long ago, perhaps into the mansion.

The players wake up alone and without any memory in the mansion. As the game progresses, they must explore not only the mansion but who they really are. In the end, they must find each other and escape from the tangled labyrinth that is the mansion of Ezra Keeton.

The players start off with a blank character sheet. As the game progresses, the story will let them define a positive quality, a flaw and their connection to the Keeton family.

The House of Unusual Size is a GM-Free system, something that I have come to really enjoy. The player to the left of the active player serves as the GM for that player. They flip a coin, with heads being a positive scene and tails being a negative scene. The scenes can include self-discovery and challenges and fantastic encounters. The other players help fill in details and play other characters or creatures who might be in the scene. You just flip a coin if you have to figure out if a character fails or not at doing something.

After everyone is figured out who they are and what they have to do with the Keeton family, there will be a climactic scene where everyone escapes from the mansion together. There is really no mechanic for everyone dying or catastrophic failure but, if the group wants to play a game like this, they should have no problem filling in those details.

Oh, make no mistake. The House of Unusual Size is far from a perfect system. The rules and the structure are so vague that I don't think it's new player friendly at all. I think it would would only work with a crew of players who are experienced with narrative games.

Frankly, the rules being so vague and requiring interpretation would normally be a game breaker for me. However, the sheer ease of pick-up-and-play and the degree that the theme lends itself to easy story telling makes the game appealing to me anyway.

If I am going to have a role-playing game that I can print out on one page, fold up, and put my pocket, I wanted to be one that can be pulled out and played at the drop of a hat. A House of Unusual Size pulls off the trick. 

After all, all you need are the rules, a coin, and a way to write things down. Spooky houses are a genre that is easy to run with. Heck, in a pinch, you could use rock paper scissors instead of the coin and memory if you don't have anything to write things down with.

I can see it being an easy game to play during a road trip, at a cafe, or Skype. I can even see playing it via conference call, although probably just to prove that you can. It would be easy to hack to make shorter, like having every scene add an element to the character sheet with the last round of play being the escape.

The House of Unusual Size definitely needs a group that's prepared for a strong narrative focus and one that can handle minimal rules. Despite that, I can see myself packing this tiny little RPG in my convention bag, just in case. It makes a great use of its theme, strong enough to carry the minimal rules.

http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/house-of-unusual-size

http://www.thefreerpgblog.com

Microscope - building a history

Microscope has been the GM-free RPG I have played the most over the past couple years. Quite frankly, it's the RPG that I've played the most period, since I've been able have ongoing games via email.

It may not be the first GM-free RPG I've tried (that'd Baron Munchaussen), or the one that won me over to the concept (that's Polaris) or the one I think has had the biggest global impact (Fiasco), but I have gotten some serious mileage out of Microscope.

Microscope definitely plays with some of intrinsic concepts of role playing games. You don't play specific characters, although you might still play someone in any given scene. Instead, you are basically omnipotent gods who ignore space and time in order to create history.

In essence, Microscope is about creating a timeline. At the start of the game, everyone agrees on a beginning point and an end point, along with some guidelines (like magic is real or no Nazis, for example, both of which have shown up in games I've played). Then, you take turns adding stuff to the timeline, ranging from periods to very focused scenes.

Here's what makes Microscope really neat. After you agree on a theme and some guidelines, there is no further conversation. This is not design by committee. When it's your turn, no consulting with anyone else. You are Johnny-on-the-Spot and its all up to you.

Which leads to a lot more surprises and creativity.

When you play face-to-face, you actually role play out scenes, the most discrete and focused element in the game. When we've played by email, the person whose turn it has just written out a scene, like a little short story.

Oh, and in Microscope, you are not limited to just going forward in time. You can jump back and forth along the time line like Doctor Who on six expressos. (If caffeine has any effect on Gallifreyans) I've seen games where you go from the space age to the Stone Age in two turns.

Microscope plays plays with time and collaborative story telling and world building in ways I haven't seen before. It's very accessible but it also works very well. I have had a lot of fun with it.

Seriously, Microscope lets you play with the vastness of time and space. It's good stuff.

http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/

The Final Girl, your own schlock horror movie

While I have yet to play The Final Girl, it's been a game that has been discussed in my circles for years. And, while its focus isn't something I am deeply interested or invested in, rereading it has made me appreciate it more.

You see, The Final Girl is another GM-free system, something I spend a lot of time writing about. I promise that I'm going to write about games that actually involve using a game master one of these days. Since I've been looking at so many systems based around that idea and The Final Girl makes some very smart voices for making it work.

First off, The Final Girl is an RPG about creating a B horror movie. While the title implies that you will be pulling out a slasher of some sort, the system will work with zombie apocalypses or alien invasions or even giant radioactive dinosaurs from under the sea. 

It uses a Troupe System, which is honestly how most GM-free systems work. In a lot of Troupe Systems, the players take turn being the focus of the scene while everyone else acts as a collective game master. In The Final Girl, players take turns playing the slasher (or monstrous killing force of some kind or another) and directing the scene. So you take turns being the game master for everyone else.

And no one actually owns character. Characters are just names down on index cards and put in the middle of the table as a pool for everyone to draw from. Characters will develop relationships with each other, which can be friendship or rivalry or screwing, which counts as both friendship and rivalry. (Horror movie, remember?)

These relationships can influence a character's chance of surviving an encounter with the slasher, one way or the other. When the slasher decides to kill someone or everyone, you basically play War with a deck of cards to see who dies.

Of course, you reach endgame when you're down to X number of characters, which depends on the number of players. You can only have so many characters in the final showdown, after all. Which could result in everyone dying, by the way.

There are a number of things that I like about the design of The Final Girl. I like the variation on Troupe Play. The player playing the slasher could end up being game master entirely for that scene or the group could come together to create the scene with the slasher just picking who to kill.

I also like the fact that it has a playing time of under two hours. Part of the reason why I even started looking into games like this is because I don't have time to play in a campaign.

While I do enjoy the occasional horror movie, it isn't a genre that I'm really focused on. Really, I tend to go in more for cosmic horror, like good old Lovecraft. So that's something I'm pretty indifferent about when it comes to the system. I do realize that, with the right group of people, it can really inspire.

The fact that the system is designed to create your own horror movie  without a lot of flexibility beyond that doesn't bother me. Seriously, a lot of these games are tightly focused and I'm not going to knock an intentional design choice like that. Not every game can be a sandbox.

Truth to tell, the focus of The Final Girl is both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, you're using a genre that most people understand. It won't be too hard to get a game going. On the other hand, between the horror genre and that no characters belonging to anyone, you're not going to get a lot of serious depth. 

In comparison, while Fiasco also embraces movie genres, it's a lot more set up for character development. And other GM-free systems like Polaris or Ribbon Drive really make character development the primary focus.

That isn't necessarily a weakness of The Final Girl. It's just something that you have to know going in.

The Final Girl isn't a deep game that will change your life or redefine how you see role playing games. It should be good for a couple hours of silly fun with horror movies, though.

Vast and Starlit helps you develop your very own cold and uncaring universe

Imagine, if you will, that you are an escaped convict from an intergalactic prison. You and your fellow escaped convicts have managed to take control of a spaceship of mysterious origins. You are now wandering alone in the vast universe with no one but with other conflicts you might not trust, searching for a place where you can be safe, a place you can call home.

That is the basic premise of Vast and Starlit, a role-playing game that basically takes up four large business cards if you include all the expansions. No game master is required to play, which is something of a theme for the games that I have been looking at lately, but you will need plenty of imagination and the ability to collaborate.

Vast and Starlit uses a Troupe  System, which was first described in Ars Magica. It means players take turns being the focal character in a scene while everyone else handles the setting and all the other characters. So, you could call in GM by committee. It still means that one of the biggest reasons to use a GM-free system still applies, no one has to spend hours outside of the game setting everything up.

Like Astrorobbers by the same designer and The Name of God which Vast and Starlit helped influence, a scene ends when there's some kind of tough decision that needs to be made, particularly when someone could get hurt. One of the players sets up the consequences of that choice and you move on to a new focal player and a new scene.

Which isn't a bad core mechanic. It keeps everyone involved and encourages creativity. It also, interestingly enough, doesn't involve any random elements, like rolling a die or drawing a card. I've gotten to the point in looking at quirky RPGs where I take that in stride.

But that's not what makes Vast and Starlit interesting. Oh, no. The system has a whole bunch of smaller systems to help you develop alien races and worlds and technology, as well as handling long term conflict and relationships.

Which is kind of impressive, considering how short the whole thing is.

The various world building mechanics are really what is interesting for me about the game. It takes a very round robin approach. For instance, when creating aliens, players will take turns choosing animals and cultures while other players choose aspects of other players' choices. Not design by committee but refinement by assembly line. It's a system that shouldn't get bogged down and should come up with something interesting.

I really like the idea of world building like that. There is a definite process, so you're not just all sitting around, hoping to start brainstorming. It gets everyone involved but no one gets to veto anyone else. That last bit is big. Ideas keep getting built up, not torn down.

Vast and Starlit definitely has some potential. I can even picture being able to play it as a campaign rather than as a one shot, even though I'm not looking for campaign play right now. The theme reminds me of the start of Blake's 7 or the first couple seasons of Farscape but there's a lot you can do within it. When the universe is your cold and uncaring playground, the stars are the limit.

That said, I'm more interested in trying out The Name of God. I think it has a tighter structure and more tightly interlocking systems. When so much of a game is free for, what structures you do have are very important. But that's just me.

Vast and Starlit opens up a lot of creative doors in just a few pages.

https://dig1000holes.wordpress.com/vast-starlit/

Choose Your Own Adventure is not GM-free

In my researching GM-free systems, I came across the idea that gamebooks, like Choose Your Own Adventure books, are GM-free systems. 

While I am willing to accept the idea that gamebooks can be considered RPGs, although they occupy the design space that interests me the least in RPGs since there's no collaborative story telling.

And some gamebooks do have built in mechanics, for combat and such, which definitely gives them an RPG feel. In fact, Tunnel and Trolls has a long history of solitaire gamebooks, for lonely gamers. 

Seriously, back in the days before computer RPGs (or, more importantly, portable computers like, say, smart phones), gamebooks  were the best option if you couldn't find anyone to play with. Although I remember a friend recommending Role Master for gamers without friends so you could spend hours making a character without  the heartbreak of of the critical hit table killing them in five minutes.

I do have some found memories of gamebooks. When I reread the Cave of Time, I felt like I was reading a map made of pages since there wasn't a plot per se. It was pure exploration, which was kind of neat.

However, i cannot consider them GM-free system. The book is the game master. Or, if you want to get pedantic, the author and editors combined forces to become the game master.

In fact, due to the extreme limits to your choices, I would consider gamebooks to be more game master than most game masters!

I do understand that the Fabled Lands series that came back in the 90s tried to create a sandbox environment in a gamebook format. I've picked up the first book so I can take a look.

A Trip to the Moon creates a safe environment to tell a sweet story

The entire time I was reading A Trip to the Moon by Matthijs Holter, I had 'I'm Your Light in the Night Sky' from the Pajaminals running through my head (I am a parent of a toddler) and when I was done, I found myself thinking that that was the closest I have come so far to reading the Little Prince the RPG.

A Trip to the Moon is a very simple short form RPG. It borders on being a GM free system, although one player will play the moon and that borders on being the game master in some ways. It is also a very sweet game with one of its guiding principles being that you should treat each other well.

In A Trip to the Moon, almost all the players will play children who are somehow magically visiting the moon. The one person who doesn't  play a child is going to play the moon itself. The ultimate goal of the game is to tell the kind of bedtime story that will help a child go to sleep and have sweet dreams.

While each stage of the game has a different set of rules, there are three rules that always apply. Always listen to each other. Accept with the other people have to say and work with it. Always create something that a child would like to hear.

At the start of the game, you dim the lights and everyone sits down on a pillow and snuggles up in a blanket. The game is entirely spent as a conversation, with everyone having a turn to speak. You will use something like a tennis ball or other token so you know whose turn it is to speak. You should use simple, clear sentences with one idea. 

The game gently progresses in stages. The players create children and choose which children they will play. They describe how they go up to the moon and then the moon will interact with them. When the children grow sleepy, the moon will send them home where they can go to bed.

I have looked at a lot of games that don't require game masters and play with storytelling and push the limits of what you can do with role-playing. In many ways, A Trip to the Moon succeeds in doing all of that but by going in the opposite direction then I am used to.

Honestly, I think the biggest hurdle a group will have with this game is that there is not only no conflict, but an active requirement to be nice to each other.

I have also looked at a lot of games with an eye for playing them with children, ignoring the fact that my son will probably only be interested in baseball. While the goal of A Trip to the Moon is to have adults embrace being childlike, I think it would work well with real children.

Part of what makes the game so accessible to my mind is that, despite the amount of free-form it allows, it also has a very tight structure. There are distinct stages that you go through as you play the game. I think that would make it work well with people not used to role-playing games, as well as children.

A Trip to the Moon is a game defies most of what I expect in an indie game and it's even out of the Nordic School. But it's one that I think would be a really good one to play. It's a game about creating a safe environment and I haven't seen many like that. 

https://norwegianstyle.wordpress.com/2007/12/06/a-trip-to-the-moon/

Astrorobbers is a tiny RPG that might be too minimalist

While I had been looking for Astrorobbers after Alessandro Piroddi referred to it in his design notes for The Name of God, I stumbled upon it completely by accident.

You see, the game is actually in a free pamphlet called 'What is a Roleplaying Game' with no hint that it might be called Astrorobbers. Heck, for all I know, the game might technically not have a name and Astrorobbers is just a knick name. I found it when I was looking for Vast and Starlit, another game by Epidiah Ravachol, and decided to take a look at it.

Astrorobbers uses a stripped down version of Vast and Starlit. The original version of Vast and Starlit was designed to fit onto a large business card and Astrorobbers is a stripped down version of that. Wow.

Astrorobbers is basically a heist movie, a la Oceans Eleven or the Italian Job or Reservoir Dogs. The players are a group of criminals who are planning a big job. The twist is that they are also astronauts since who's going to suspect a bunch of NASA astronauts to be robbing a bank on the day that they are blasting off into space? Of course, since this is a heist movie, there are going to be complications and things are going to go terribly wrong.

Mechanically, Astrorobbers is a GM – free system with the players basically acting as a troupe. You take turns playing the focal character while everyone else fills in the world around them. The scene ends when you reach a critical decision, with the non-focal players offering consequences for the decision.

The theme really only comes into play with mechanics in a couple of ways. One player has to plan the heist while another is the  commander of the space mission and one person has to plan to turn themselves into the authorities. Beyond that, the game ends when everyone is captured or dead or in orbit.

Since the game consists of a cover page and one page of rules, it only took me about a minute to read through it. And I don't regret taking that minute. The theme is certainly kooky but not so kooky that you could use it. And it is always interesting to look at a minimalist system, which Astrorobbers definitely is.

At the same time, Astrorobbers is really more of a thought experiment for me then a game I could never see myself playing. Simply put, I want to see more structure.

Technically, a game like Baron Munchaussen has fewer rules. You're a bunch of nobleman drinking in a bar and telling stories with the only mechanic being away to interrupt each other. However, in one sentence, I've described the framework that the game works around. With Astrorobbers, you pretty much have to build the framework yourself with the theme just being a suggestion. 

And yes, with the right group of players, that won't be a problem. Heck, I have played with that right group of players more than once. However, a framework and a structure gives you the parameters of what you are exploring. Astrorobbers is so free-form that you can do anything with it. The author freely admits that you can use the rules to do something completely different.

A good narrative game should give you a lot of freedom. However, it should also give you the tools that you use to create the story. A good set of rules should not restrict you. A good set of rules should inspire you and guide you, challenge you to find different ways to think outside the box. Unfortunately, I just don't think there's enough to Astrorobbers to really do that.

However, I'm not going to knock it for that. Both the Name of God and the author's own Vast and Starlit build on these rules to make much more interesting and inspiring games.

The ideas in Astrorobbers are fine, they just don't go far enough. But, hey, it's a free giveaway. Asking it to change the world seems a bit much.

https://dig1000holes.wordpress.com/what-is-a-roleplaying-game/

Campaign for Name of God ends with a ton of extra goodies

The Kickstarter for the Name of God has come to a close and it has passed and flying colors. Tons of stretch goals were met which means that The second addition is going to be light years past what the first edition was.

(I am, of course, taking it on faith that, now that the campaign is done, everything else falls into place. Lord knows that doesn't always happen. Still, I'm willing to trust Piroddi)

Man, for as much as I have blogged about this game, you would think that I had stock in it.

The first edition was a one page PDF that you could cut into eight cards with black and white clip art. And half of those cards were the rules. Which is cool from a minimalist design standpoint (How small can you make an RPG and still have it be meaningful/interesting/any good?) but the second edition is going to have a lot more content.

It's going to have better artwork and you'll have the option of having it either regular card-sized or tarot-sized. (Okay, I really don't care about the different sizes)

And of course, what is really exciting, there are going to be at least eighteen more cards, all designed by different indie designers. (Seriously, I've heard of some of them and I wouldn't call myself an authority of indie games)

If you are coming from an old school, D&D is your RPG of choice, the fetish cards are your classes. If you are new school, they are your narrative direction. At any rate, having at least twenty-two to pick from rather than four is a LOT more content and replay value.

I will be following Piroddi's updates with a lot of interest. I get the impression he will do good job keeping backers up-to-date, which is something I enjoy. (That's a big part of why C. S. Ferguson gets me as a regular backer)

I'm also looking into some of his other designs. Piroddi designed a version of the Fate system that is both GM-free and designed for campaign play. I've got to see how he did that!

What we talk about while sinking into the ocean

In my endless quest for a quirky little role-playing games, the next game that I stumbled across is Until We Sink by Magnus Jakobsson. While I stumbled across it while looking at Nordic LARP, it's really more of a tabletop game then a LARP. Even though you are role-playing people sitting around the table talking.

Until We Sink also fits into another category that I am fascinated by, games without game masters. There is no GM, everyone is a character in the story that unfolds.

In Until W Sink, everyone is a guest or a local on a tiny little resort island in the Pacific. In fact, there's no one else on the island. At the beginning of the game, the one person who isn't one of the players is found dead. And, as the title implies, the game ends with the island sinks into the ocean. But don't worry, everyone is going to get off the island alive. Maybe not emotionally healthy but definitely alive.

While the game is almost entirely narratively driven, there are some mechanics to provide structure for the story that you will be living out. Trust me, I have seen longer games with even less mechanics then this one.

At the start of the game, everyone draws a card that gives them a rough idea of who they are playing but they get to fill in all of the details. What your character is really like in what part they will have in the unfolding drama is something that you have to discover for yourself.

The game depicts five to seven days on the island, which is going to turn out to be the last five to seven days in the island's existence in fact. Every turn covers another day and consists of everyone sitting around the table talking about what happened that day.

You have an event deck, a good chunk of which won't get used in any given game. Every turn, a new event gets drawn. It describes something mysterious that happened on the island that day, ranging from someone's underwear getting stolen to animal mutilation or attempted murder.

The events add a little bit of focus to your discussion and you have to resolve or explain them all by the end of the game. However, there's nothing that says they have to be the real focus of the game. You have the freedom to discuss what ever you feel like in character.

The story could turn out to be a murder mystery or a psychological thriller or a supernatural horror story or a domestic comedy or a slice of life. You and the other players will figure out what kind of story you want to tell.

The only real restriction, and this is one that is common in improvisation, is you shouldn't say no or deny. If someone says that they saw your character do something, you don't say no. You incorporate what they saw into your story.

Until We Sink exists in a curious hinterlands between being a tabletop RPG and a LARP. You spend the entire game sitting at the table and the cards on the table create a framework for the game, even getting marked off with tokens when you resolve them. BUT all the characters you are playing are doing the exact thing you are, sitting around the table.

I guess if you played Baron Muchaussen at a bar (which I have), that might count as a LARP too :D

Until We Sink feels like a very accessible and 'safe' way to try out the Nordic school. Not only is it not necessarily a LARP, it can be as mild or intense as you want it to be. Some Nordic games, the Pebble comes to mind, are designed to be very  emotionally intense. Until We Sink is a lot more safe.

There are a lot of games in the Nordic school that I personally wouldn't play. Until We Sink, though, is one that I would.

https://norwegianstyle.wordpress.com/2007/12/07/37/

Lexicon - an RPG about creating your own wiki

Lexicon is a game that was just recommended to me by Russ Williams, all around brilliant member of BGG. Between my interest in GM free systems and my interest in RPG's that can be played online, he made a good call in knowing that I'd be interested in it.

Lexicon falls into that category of role-playing games that are really about developing worlds and settings. My beloved Microscope is another, as is the Quiet Year. It is an unusual design space in the world of role-playing games but I still believe that it falls under the larger umbrella of role-playing.

In Lexicon, each player is a scholar who is helping write an encyclopedia. At the end of the game, the encyclopedia will be made up of 26 entries, one for every letter in the alphabet. 

Here is the twist, that makes the game of Lexicon one that is interconnected between all of the players. At the end of your entry, you have to cite to other entries. Indeed, at the beginning of the game they will be entries that haven't been written yet. And, you cannot write or have written an entry that you have cited.

The designer recommends that you set up a wiki to play the game, hyperlinking the citations. So, when the 26th entry has been written, the one that starts with a Z, you will have a tightly linked, self referencing document.

Honestly, this sounds so cool to me. I have really gotten a lot out of my email games of Microscope and Lexicon would take a lot of those ideas is an even more online friendly place.

And I like how, unlike in Microscope or the Quiet Year, a player can actually take on the role of a specific person. Namely a scholar or researcher who may have their own agenda and who may not think much of the other goobers who are trying to hone in on their area of specialty. You know, the other players.

BUT I have also found that keeping people involved and active in an email game can be a struggle. The commitment might be smaller, in some ways, than getting together for one four-to-six hour game but it will be a commitment that will span weeks or months.

AND Microscope has a fail safe valve in be form of periods and, in particular, events. Only a sentence or two long, they let folks make quick moves when they are strapped for time or thought. In Lexicon, every turn is a full entry and one that has to involve two other entries. That's a lot more to ask for.

For all that, I am still hoping that I manage to play a game of Lexicon in 2016. I'm certainly not going to try while I have a game of Microscope already going and some of those folks are the first ones that I would try and involve.

http://lexiconcubine.wikidot.com/lexicon-definition

More thoughts on games without masters

After looking at the Name of God, I got curious as to how many GM–free systems I have played over the years. As it turns out, I have played at least nine different GM-free systems, not counting playing Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition with no DM.

The list includes the Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchaussen, Fiasco, Microscope, Once Upon A Time, Polaris, The Quiet Year, Ribbon Drive, The Shab-Al-Hiri Roach, A Thousand and One Nights, and Zombie Cinema.

I realize that there are folks who will argue that some of the games, Once Upon a Time for instance since it's a card game for some folks, aren't RPGs. Well, those games don't have to be RPGs for them then :)

But these are all games where folks get together to tell a story together. For me, that is a huge part of why I play RPGs and what defines an RPG for me.

Of course, having a game master is a big part of the paradigm of role-playing games. After all, somebody has to control the world and tell all the NPC's what to do. That's how Dungeons & Dragons works. That's how the World of Darkness works. Heck, that's even how Apocalypse World work.

At the same time, it's not like games without GM's are some wild and crazy new idea that is springing up in a liberal college campuses while stodgy old gray-haired grumps like myself yell at these young whippersnappers to get off my lawn. Baron Munchaussen was first published back in 1998, close to 20 years ago. More than that, I'm pretty sure I remember early issues of Dragon magazine having instructions on creating dungeons as you go for when you didn't have a Dungeon Master.

Personally, I have become more and more fond of GM free systems. Why? Well, frankly it comes down to time and effort.

I have been in campaigns that have lasted years, even decades. They were amazingly immersive and they created lasting friendships that I treasure to this day. However, even before I became the daddy of a toddler who is running around in circles even while I am typing this, it became harder and harder to find the time to commit to a long-term campaign and find the mental energy to really participate in one.

And, heck, I wasn't even one of the game masters. Over the years, I have seen some serious burn out and even bitterness in game masters. Some of them spend hours and hours of work every week for a bunch of ungrateful bastards. And that's me speaking as one of their ungrateful bastards :P

Role playing games without game masters tend to be much shorter affairs, usually design for only one sitting. No one has to do any work before hand, no dungeon masters spending hours working on maps and back stories and timelines. Everyone just comes to the table to play.

Of course, there are some downsides to playing without a game master.

For one thing, almost all of these games are simple and light affairs. You aren't going to get the depth or immersion that you would from playing in a game that takes weeks to years to complete. And if you are someone who really enjoys crunchy  complicated mechanics, this is not going to scratch that itch.

And, while the games do tend to be simpler, everyone has to understand how they work in order to play the game. I was playing Dungeons & Dragons for years before I really bothered understand the nitty-gritty of all of the mechanics. The DM handled all of the fiddly work for me. Heck, Sandman: Map of Halaal was designed to have the game master handle all of the mechanics. The players are actually intended to be ignorant about them.  On a certain level, games with game masters are better for casual gamers.

Playing without a game master can be very helpful if you don't have a lot of time either to devote to a regular game or to prepare for a game. At the same time, I think that it has a bigger initial hurdle for new players to get behind than playing with a game master.

Exceptions work both ways to that rule. Some of the games that I have played, Once Upon a Time for instance, are so rules light that they will work for anyone as long as they are willing to play make-believe. On the other hand, my experiences with Polaris were a multiple-session campaign that involved a fairly intricate system.

When I started poking around, I found somebody had compiled a list of over 200 games that were designed to be played without a game master. (https://doubleninja.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/the-ultimate-big-list-of-gm-less-rpggames/) Clearly, this is an idea that has inspired a lot of people.

And there are some games, like Fiasco, that have made a legitimate splash. There's an audience out there and these games will get played. I don't think GMs are going to go away but I do think there is growing room for games without them.

After actually reading The Name of God

After enough people asked how exactly The Name of God worked, I wrote to Alessandro Piroddi to get permission to get the PDF of the first edition early and review it before the end of the Kickstarter campaign.

He said yes, so here we go! (Thanks Alessandro!)

In The Name of God, you are a small god who has fallen from power. You are trapped in a mortal body without your name or even money or shelter. You are a homeless outcast in the city. But you have a hope of regaining your divinity. But, of course, there's going to be a cost.

The Name of God is a GM-free system. It's a role playing game that doesn't require any prior set up and everyone has an equal part in running it. The rules take up four cards, unless you double side them. In the original edition, which is what I'm looking at, the rest of the game consists of the four fetish cards. (The second edition will have more than twice times that number of fetish cards, by the way.)

At the start of the game, everyone will take a fetish card. They've got three parts. The name, which is something cool like the Wyrm or the Shadow, that gives an idea for that fetish's theme. Some questions that will help you define your character. And, finally, the ritual action. That is the big deal, how you try and manifest your forgotten divine presence.

On a turn, one player will be the active player. Their lost god/homeless madman will be the main character for that scene. After they describe what urban wasteland they are at, the other players fill in key details. Who else is there? What is bizarre or wrong? What is dangerous?

You then play out the scene, with the other players taking the roles of the other people and the environment. Effectively, everyone but the active player collectively is the GM or the stage manager, if you like the Our Town analogy. (I love it, which is why I drag it out on a regular basis. Hate the play, though)

The scene keeps going until an action is taken that is either difficult OR perilous OR difficult and perilous. One player must call it out and another player describes the consequences of that action.

The active player can either accept those consequences or they can perform their ritual action. The other players tell them what they must do to perform the ritual action, who gets hurt and other details. The active player must then decide if they are willing to pay that cost.

No matter what, after the action is resolved, ritual action or no, the scene ends and the next player becomes the active player.

An individual character journey will end in one of two ways. They will successfully perform their ritual action three times and regain their divine nature and power. Or they'll die. The game ends when everyone finds their final destiny.

Now, let me say I have played a number of GM-free systems over the years. And I have to say that they actually work. Looking over The Name of God, I'd honestly say that it shouldn't just work but it'll be harder to mess up than others I've seen or played.

Part of that is because what everyone has to do is pretty straight forward. The other part is because the concept and setting, which has been used in works like American Gods is both real enough for people to understand and fantastic enough to be safe.

(The concept does remind me of Terry Pratchett's Small Gods, while being completely different in tone and setting. At the same time, I can imagine playing a stray dog or an alley cat who is secretly a god)

Of course, there are still going to be speed bumps for getting into this game. You have to go in with the goal of telling a good story, not to win. The better story might to be to reject the price of divinity and die, unknown and unloved in a filthy alleyway. If you can get into that, awesome!

I thought the idea of the Name of God made it worth backing. Now that I have seen the actual Core System, I'm pretty excited to get the expanded game.