You know, there can be just character interaction

 One of the questions I recently found myself pondering yet again is the difference between character interaction and player interaction. 

More precisely, I was thinking about GM-free games where everyone chips in to provide the content and the conflict. Games like Fiasco or The Name of God or Microscope or The Quiet Year. In those games, it’s possible that characters might never be in the same scene but everyone works together and gets their hands dirty.

On the other hand, games where characters can be treated like playing pieces and the game master is basically a referee, you don’t have to actually interact with the other players. Your piece or pieces can interact with the other pieces. I have been in RPG sessions where some players were just taking up space on chairs. (And apparently having fun doing that so more power to them)

Of course, any game can have a strong level of cooperative interaction. But some games absolutely require it and some game can take or leave it.

I have been in Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons campaigns that were extremely collaborative where the players actively molded the story and developed the world with the dungeon master. And I have been in others where we moved from monster group B to monster group C and the other players could have been my cats with automatic die rollers as far as the actual game went. Still had a marvelous time.

Honestly, I think that fourth edition was designed so that it could be played as detached as possible and I think that’s a feature not a bug. It is definitively not a bad option. Sometimes, depending on the group and the need, it is the right option.

Yeah, I had fun with fourth edition

When reminiscing about Dungeons and Dragons and loophole abuse, I found myself musing about the red-headed stepchild of the system, fourth edition.

I'm not sure you can say which edition was the most radical overhaul of the system. Well, unless you count first edition as overhauling the Chainmail miniature game :D But fourth edition was a big change from 3 and 3.5.

I don't know how fair it is to say this but, speaking as someone who never played World of Warcraft or any other MMRPG, fourth edition felt like trying to create as close to a World of Warcraft experience as a pen-and-paper game without getting sued. Classes got broken down into specific roles in combat and special abilities were painstakingly precisely defined.

Now I'm willing to bet there is a community out there that loved and still loves and still plays fourth edition but, in my circles, feeling ranged from fair to outright hatred. Part of the problem was that it really didn't _feel_ like Dungeons and Dragons. Spell casting was completely different, the baseline concepts of the setting were different than Gygax quirky wheel-shaped cosmoverse, and combat actions were like pushing a button.

And from a gaming philosophy point of view, it seems silly to focus on what an MMRPG can do better rather than focus in what is special and unique about both table top role playing games and D&D specifically.

But, to tell you the truth, I have a lot of found memories of my time playing fourth edition. It didn't really feel like Dungeons and Dragons and, in many ways, it had as much in common with a board game as a role playing game. But I still had fun.

A lot of that had to do with the group I played with. We would could have played (fill in the blank with whatever game you think stinks) and had a good time. Okay, those of you who chose F.A.T.A.L., you're right. We wouldn't enjoy that.

HOWEVER, fourth edition was also very user friendly with a very easy learning curve. You couldn't, simply couldn't, get as creative as you could with every earlier and later version of Dungeons and Dragons. The actions were spelled out so exactly that there wasn't any wiggle room. Which was both a plus and a minus. On the one hand, not being able to be creative is not a plus. On the other hand, that did make it easy to teach and play. 

But where that really sang was for our game master. After years of running 3.5 and dealing with all of us turning into rules students who dreamed up clever character builds, running fourth edition was a breath of fresh air and relaxing. Fourth edition biggest plus as a sword and sorcery role playing game was how easy it was to run.

In fact, if someone were to ask me to run a fantasy RPG, fourth edition is one I'd consider. Dungeon World would probably win but fourth edition would be in the running.

Look, it is good when a game gives you a lot of flexibility and the ability to get clever and creative. That's awesome. But it's also good when a game is simple to play. Those two ideals don't cancel each other out. It just means that they have different goals and different audiences or situations. The real question is if they do what they set out to do well. On of fourth editions goals was to be D&D and it didn't do that well. Another goal was to be a balanced, playable, fun game and it did achieve that.

Fourth edition didn't feel like Dungeons and Dragons and I am very glad to finally be in a fifth edition game, which I like as a system much more and feels like Dungeons and Dragons again. However, fourth edition wasn't a bad game.

Games for seasons

The Since I left the world of playing in a weekly Dungeon and Dragons game that plays all year round, I have realized that different seasons favor different flavors of role playing games. I'm not talking about one-shots, although that's probably the case too. I mean shorter campaigns, ones that last one to three months.  

I was already aware that my old Indie group tended to play more serious, even sorrowful, games in the last few months of the year, fall into winter. Games that had a lot of bleed. Keeping in touch with them and occasionally playing with them online, that has continued to be the place.

And I have realized that my oldest DM, who has long stopped trying to run never ending campaigns, now regularly runs short campaigns every spring. Until I started to really think about it, I didn't really realize that.

So, at least in my circles, it seems like spring is the time for adventure and the end of the year is the time for sorrows. And no one ever seems to be up for gaming in January and February, when we're recovering from the holidays and gearing up for the new year.

For years, summer has also been an off season. Vacations and conventions and general summer time activities. However, I am now wondering if there are good systems or themes for summer. The fact that I live in Arizona and we're going through a heat wave and have to spend as much time inside as possible has nothing to do with that, I'm sure.

While I was reading InSpectres, a game that is totally going to get a blog entry of its own, I found myself thinking that it was both a system that I wanted to try and that it would make a good campaign for the summer time.

At the heart of that idea is because it is a very light and light-hearted game with a lot of comedic elements that also has a strong through line for a campaign, running your own Ghostbusters-style franchise. It's not serious or full or bleed but it does have an ongoing storyline to keep coming back to.

I've decided that a summer campaign should be like summer reading. Light and maybe with lots of explosions. Something everyone can laugh and have fun with but doesn't require that much raw, bleeding feelings.

 

You know, most of the comedy games I've played have been more suited for one-shots. Finding ones aimed at campaigns isn't as easy. (Although I've been in comedic 'regular' games) My theater friends all tell me that tragedy is easy. Comedy is hard. But I think summer calls for comedy.

The issues of Micro RPGs

OfOver the last few years, I have looked at a decent number of micro RPGs. Those aren't just RPGs that are designed for one-shots but ones that take up only a few pages. I often discuss them with friends, including some who are really only interested in longer, deeper games.

One of those recent conversations really hammered home to me how micro RPG's are odd genre, one that is more defined about format than anything else.

Seriously, while micro RPGs are all minimal rule systems, minimal rule systems don't mean micro RPG. Baron Munchausen has two pages of rules but it has very a hundred pages on setting, theme and tone. It is designed for light, short one-shots with minimal preparation but it's not a micro RPG.

Let's be honest, when a role playing game is only a few pages long, it is impossible for it to really discuss setting or gaming philosophy or anything more than the bare bones. And sometimes... okay, most of the time, that's really not enough.

The ultimate goal of a micro RPG is that you should be able to pull it out if your picket, slap it down in front of people who have never seen it before and have a game going in five minutes. 

I have seen some that do pull that off. The Name of God, which is even laid on a set of cards for easy transport, is one. But most just don't have enough meat. To be painfully honest, I have read two or three dozen of them in the last three years and there are only three or four that I seriously want to get on the table. And I am obviously part of their target audience.

But, I don't think that's entirely a bad thing. Even if I don't view them as games to play, that doesn't mean they aren't interesting thought exercises. I get a lot of fun out of looking at them in experiments in game mechanics. And it is really easy to and one to a friend, see 'here, read this', and have a conversation going in five minutes.

A great example is A Flask Full of Gasoline. It is an absolute hoot to read and I have shared it with a lot of my friends. Really, anyone who might even be slightly interested. And I would never, ever play the game since it includes rules for drinking gasoline. Not the characters. The players. But, man, have I had some fun conversations about it.

Let's be honest. I am going to keep on reading micro RPGs and I am going to keep on commenting on them. Because it is fun and they give me a quick RPG fix and because they do bring up ideas worth discussing.

Heck, how many full-size RPG's am I going to play? :D Really, when you think about what a micro RPG has to pull off, I am lucky to have found ones like the Name of God or Keeton's Journey that I think would be really good to play.

Time Lord, a game time forgot

I just stumbled down a rabbit hole and a blast from the past when I rediscovered the role playing game Time Lord. It was the second role playing game about Doctor Who. I actually picked it up back in 1991 and even tried playing it. However, it faded from my memory.

Time Lord was a very rules light game for the time. It will also wasn't published by a gaming company but by Virgin Publishing who marketed as a regular mass-market book. In other words, a good chunk of its potential audience never even heard of it. The game pretty much sank and is now just a footnote in the vast history of Doctor Who.

Heck, even though I am a role-playing enthusiast and a big Doctor Who fan, I totally forgot about it.

Going back and looking at it now, Time Lord is a curious mix of very traditional role playing concepts and remarkably streamlined mechanics. On the one hand, the characters are made up of eight stats and you are going to need someone to be the game master. 

On the other hand, the mechanics break down to subtracting the value of the appropriate statistic and any skill from the difficulty of the task. If that value is higher than the difficult the, you automatically succeed. Otherwise, you roll to six sided dice and subtract the lower from the higher. If you beat the difference, you succeed.

You know, that actually sounds complicated when I try to write it out but it's really super simple. You figure out what the difference is between your total ability and the difficulty and you need to roll higher than that. OK, the only reason that you don't just roll one die is because you need to be able to get a zero result.

Anyway, having such a simple resolution system creates a framework that can easily resolve just about anything quickly. It does lead to a lot of things being generalized. At the time when I first read it, I found it strange that the Auton blasters were just as deadly as the Dakek ones.

From a more much more experienced standpoint, this just makes sense to me. Powerful alien blaster kills people. Period. That's really all you need to know to make the game work.

Actually, the biggest legitimate weakness of the game, other than some serious marketing issues, is that it doesn't have character generation. Instead, it just gave you the stats for all the Doctors up to that point and a bunch of companions.

To be fair, this is still better then the Indiana Jones game from TSR. One person got to be Indy and everyone else had to pick someone like Short Round or Willie. (Oddly enough, the rules did not begin with 'there will be a fistfight to see who gets to be Indiana Jones'.) In Time Lord, folks could be different Doctors meeting through special circumstances or have everyone be a companion with no one being the Doctor. And there are plenty of companions to pick from.

That said, it wouldn't be hard to make a character with house rules and rules for character generation have been added in the later, online only rule set as well as some of the fan-based supplements.

These days, when I have been playing extremely streamlined games, ones that often don't even involve having game master, Time Lord doesn't quite fit what I'm looking for. However, I really wonder what it would have been like with wider distribution.

Simpler, more intuitive systems have become more and more common and accepted. I would even go so far as to say there has even risen a minimalist school of thought for role-playing game design. From that standpoint, Time Lord was ahead of its time.

The designer made a revised edition available for free online back in 1996 so I'm going to revisit Time Lord, see what it looks like now.

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. 

Something Global: is it gaming via tweeting or just tweeting?

In Something Global, you play an ape rising up against humanity in rebellion in pretend and tweet about it in real life. Your success as an ape rebel depends on how many favorites you get.

This officially blows my mind. Mostly because I don't tweet and I don't understand that environment very well. I'm assuming that favorite works the same way as likes do in Facebook and I barely even use that.

Seriously, I've pretty much described the game it's entirety in the first paragraph.

I have looked at and played some odd games. Microscope is about building a timeline and I've played it via email. Lexicon is a writing game about building your own fictional wiki. Happy Birthday, Robot has you tell a story literally one sentence at a time.

But Something Global feels like it crosses a I line for me. After all, isn't the idea of tweeting to get people to read whatever you posted and to give you some kind of thumbs up for it? Something Global sounds like doing normal tweeting behavior and coaches it in the terms of a bunch of apes doing it.

Am I looking at a game or social commentary? Is Something Global a game or an experiment or satire? (Okay, it can easily be all three but which one was the designer's primary goal?)

Something Global is part of the Indie Mixtape Megamix, a big collection of tiny little RPGs. The vast majority of them, while minimalist, are clearly designed to be played. I have to wonder if Something Global was designed simply to be observed.

Blind bidding and the Prisoner's Dilema as the basis for an RPG

The kingdom is at war and the king lies dying. A power struggle has begun between the rightful prince, the supreme general and the the resourceful bastard son of the king. One of them will rise to the throne but war might destroy the kingdom before them.

Make the King is a tiny RPG designed to be played with exactly three-players. It was part of the Free RPG Blog's 2013 24 Hour contest. What makes it interesting for me is that the mechanics use blind bidding and a variant on the prisoners' dilemma.

Each player starts off with two mugs, one full of black chips and the other full of white chips. Two empty mugs sit in the middle of the table, one for each color.

The players will take turns playing the king, calling the other two characters to the king's deathbed. The king will ask questions, asking the two of them of the wars going.

After they give their versions of the situation, which will probably be completely conflicting with each other, the two players bid on who's version of the truth is real.

Each player can bid up to half of either their remaining white or black chips. If they both been wanting to, the larger bid wins. The winner gets the losers bid and their bid goes into the mug on the table designated for white chips. Black chips always beat white chips and both bids going to the mugs on the table. If both players good with black chips, the higher bid wins with both bids going into the mugs on the table.

Well there are rules to make sure that everyone gets to play the king twice, the game ends when one of the mugs on the table is full. If the white mug is full, whoever has the most white chips left in their personal stock, they become the new king and describe how they win the war. But if the black mug is the one that is full, the kingdom has lost the war and been conquered. Everyone loses but whoever has the most white chips is the scapegoat.

On the one hand, the board gamer in me likes the simple but tight auction mechanic with the twist with the end. It's simple but it works from a mechanical standpoint. It reminds me a lot of games like Terra and High Society. It isn't a proper prisoners' dilemma but it reminds me of it.

On the other hand, what I don't like is that the role playing isn't really tied to the mechanics. It doesn't matter what you do in your interviews with the king or what kind of story you create. This is a game with a real winner and loser and that is solely determined by how well someone works the auctions. That really isn't a winning point for a role playing game for me.

I've seen mechanics that make more sense in board games used in RPGs before. Mars Colony and Dread come to mind. But in those cases, they were married to the story and helped drive it.

Still, to be fair, Make the King is an entry in 24 hour contest. It had some interesting ideas. I don't see myself every playing it but I did have fun reading it.

http://www.thefreerpgblog.com

http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/make-the-king

My changing philosophy of role playing games

I don't know if it is a shift in my interest in role-playing games or if there is an actual shift in the industry or culture of role-playing games. However, 15 years ago, any game that I would be involved with was at least theoretically a long-term campaign and commitment. Now, there are a lot more games that can be over and done with in one sitting.

I didn't make a Dungeons and Dragons character with the idea that I would only play them for one session. Sure, sometimes that happened because the game fell apart or the character died horribly. But that wasn't the plan. 

But now there are games like Fiasco which tells the whole story in two arcs or games like The Quiet Year or Ribbon Drive or Baron Munchausen that are clearly designed for one session. Even indie games designed for longer play, like Polaris or Apocalypse World, are still designed for a limited number of sessions. 

Some of that comes purely from mechanics. You can get a game of Fiasco rolling in ten, fifteen minutes. On the other hand, you would spend hours just making a character for Role Master. (And then have them die in five minutes due to the critical roll charts. There's a reason I only played Role Master once)

But the mechanics for a short form game wouldn't exist if the demand wasn't there. More importantly, they keep on coming out which means that there is an audience for them. Possibly even a growing audience.

In the boardgames and now in role-playing games, I find that the concept of accessibility is becoming more and more important. When I first got into role-playing games in the 80s, you had to be pretty serious and dedicated because the rules were so complicated and convoluted. Now, there are games that you can pick up and play, even if you don't have years of Dungeons & Dragons under your belt.

Which has led me to another change. At least for me, I would only be playing two or three rule systems at any given time. Often, only one rule system. Games like Dungeons & Dragons or Call of Cthulhu are life style games. They don't leave a lot of room in your calendar for other systems.

But games like Fiasco or The Name of God are small enough commitments that it's much easier to put a lot of different games. That is definitely a change in how I think about role-playing games.

There is a definite switch from game mastery to game exploration. With more complex systems designed for long term, virtually indefinite play (I knew a D&D campaign that went on for over twenty years on a pretty much weekly basis), you end up doing a lot of research and, by virtue of extended play, practice. In some cases, I've seen it turn into who can use the rules better.

With short forms, it becomes about story exploration. You aren't trying to explore how the nuts and bolts work. You are exploring how narratives work. Sometimes in a comic form and sometimes in a tragic form. And, in my experience, the players are more inclined to collaborate.

I think there is a legitimate shift not just in the design of games but in their philosophy.

Into the Odd, old school with some indie ideas

I want to like Into the Odd so much more than I do. True to its name, it's an odd combination of indie mechanical sensibilities and serious old school theme. And that's something that should work but, in this case, it came out feeling half-baked. 

At its heart, Into the Odd is an old school dungeon crawl. And I mean 1974 Darkmoore old school, before dungeon crawls were codified into medieval European sword and sorcery. 

Character creation and mechanics are dirt simple. You make a character by rolling 3d6 three times for strength, dexterity and will plus a d6 for hit points. You then cross reference your highest stat and your hit points to get your starting pack. Which doesn't just include equipment. You also get things like supernatural powers or disfigurements. The chart is the great equalizer. If you have lousy stats, you get great equipment and powers.

If you're trying to do something that doesn't involve hurting folks, you need to roll under the appropriate stat on a d20. 

For combat, you don't need to roll to hit. You just roll for damage and subtract the other guy's armor from it. Hit points are really just ablative. After you work through them, you start damaging strength with a chance at doing critical damage. Some things, like poison, do extra nasty stuff with critical damage.

That's pretty much the rules in a nutshell. It takes about a minute to explain the rules and another minute to roll up a character. Of course, quick character creation and simple rules aren't that hard to find.

What actually makes Into the Odd interesting and ultimately, heartbreaking for me is the setting. It owes more to Jack Vance's Dying Earth than it does to Tolkien or Howard or Leiber. Although it's never actually explicitly stated, it sure feels like a post-apocalyptic world where the good times are so far gone that they are just vague myths. Not quite to the point of the Dying Earth but working its way there.

It's clearly not medieval since there are things like guns and factories and steam engines. On the other hand, most of the world seems to be nothing ruins and wilderness with city states being the biggest form of government.

Adventuring in the world of Into the Odd consists of going out into the wilderness and ruins and forgotten catacombs to find the lost wonders of the ancient world. So scavenging and grave robbing is clearly a major economic force.

What really gives the setting a distinctive flavor is the Arcana, the lost wonders and treasures of a forgotten age of miracles. These are not your generic magic items. They range from tchotchkes that can fit in your pocket to pieces of architecture. 

And they do very specific, ridiculously specific things. Think the mini-series The Lost Room things. Figuring out what Arcana can do and then how to make that useful is definitely a distinct part of the game.

I do have to say that the book doesn't just include the standard starter dungeon but a good-sized wilderness area around it, complete with a wandering encounter table and  encounters and story books on different hexes. As long as you're willing to wander around the Fallen Marshes, there's a decent amount of adventuring a GM can run in the fly.

Here's the rub. Into the Odd has simple rules and will make for a good quick and dirty dungeon crawl. But neither of those things are that hard to find. There are a lot of options out there for either one of them.

It's the setting, which is so old school that it touches the primordial roots of D&D that is the selling point for Into the Odd. And while the city of Hopesend Port and the Fallen Marshes do give you enough to run a short campaign, I wanted to see so much more of the setting. Yes, minimalism fits the old school feel but I could have easily enjoyed more than twice as much setting material.

Simple rules are nice but the flavor and setting was what I took away from the game and I wanted so much more.

Into the Odd is a quirky game that is three quarters Old School Revival with one quarter indie sensibilities about simple, intuitive rules. If it wasn't for that being a such extreme juxtaposition, I don't know if I'd consider it a indie game at all.

It's really not a game that I'd suggest. These days, my interests are in narrative driven games. But if someone else wanted to play it, I'm sure I have fun.

http://lostpages.storenvy.com/products/10964031-into-the-odd-print-pdf

 

Building the apocalypse out of your own fears

It is after the end. Civilization has collapsed. Everything has fallen apart. Your fears are all around you, threatening to destroy you and everything you hold dear. Yet, somehow, you keep clinging to hope and keep on trying to keep on moving forward.

The Last One is a post apocalyptic horror RPG designed for two players, one who will play the last one and one who will play the other, the cruel world that will to its uncaring best to snuff out the last one and their hope.

In addition to being designed for only two players, the Last One is also a short form, designed to be played out in seven scenes. It is also almost entirely narratively driven but has a fairly tight structure for that narrative.

The player begins by coming up with three fears, a hope, and a safe house that is the end goal for the last one. The other will use these things to come up with the world after the end.

An important idea is that the fears shouldn't be the fears of the character. They should be the fears of the player. Personally, I find that a big, bold idea. It's pretty obvious that the guy who designed The Last One wanted to make sure that it was an emotional gut punch to the player.   

There are two kinds of scenes in The Last One, After Scenes and Before Scenes. As the names suggest, they are either set before or after the apocalyptic event that ended the world as we know it.

In the seven scenes that will make up a game of The Last One, the After Scenes are the odd-numbered scenes. They are also the ones that have crucial choices that will impact the last one on their journey.

You see, both the player and the other are dealt seven cards at the start of each after After Scene. When the player wants to make a critical action, the player and the other lay one to two cards face down and simultaneously reveal. High card wins and that person gets their way.

It will always be the decision of the player to make a choice. The other cannot force them to make a choice but if the player chooses not to make a choice, then the other determines  the consequences of not making a choice. If you decide to not do anything when someone starts shooting at you, the consequences can be pretty extreme. I 

After three choices have been made, the other will resolve the scene and bring it to an end. The other isn't allowed to kill the last one or destroy their hope until the seventh and last scene. Every horrible thing short of killing them is fair game, though.

The even-numbered scenes are flashbacks that explore who the last one is, how they handled the end of the world and why their hope is important to them. There are no choices or other card play but the other gets to ask three tough, probing questions.

While the flashback scenes might not allow the other to do any harm to the last one or their hope, they definitely help with the whole character development and role-playing part of the game.

There are a number of things that I like about the Last One. In particular, I like how there is a lot of freedom while there is still a tight structure. The end of the world could be through disease or nuclear bombs or zombies or something else. The player's hope could be their child or lover or dream of freedom or their pet cat. And, of course, the fears can be anything.

At the same time, all of that will be explored in seven scenes that use the choices and questions to pace the scenes. Sometimes you need a framework to get the job done. 

At the same time, making the game all about the player's fears might be a bit much. That might cross the line between fun and engaging and go into disturbing.

I will admit that my absolute first choice for a short form or game for two players is Baker's Murderous Ghosts. It has a very interesting structure that definitely keeps the tension circling in upon itself, one way or another. The card play in Murderous Ghosts feels like it's much more tightly connected to the narrative. Plus, the danger and the horror are more immediate and visceral.  

The Last One explores horror in a completely different genre and fashion. With the flashback scenes, it becomes a more thoughtful and reflective way to deal with horror. Still, it is nice to have options and different views.

I do have to make one more note about The Last One. Each page was thematically  decorated with splatters the blood over the black lettering. Maybe it's because I'm colorblind but it was really hard for me to read.

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/131888/The-Last-One-english-edition

Monophobia: You are all alone in the dark... with the shogoths

Monophobia is a collection of three Call of Cthulhu adventures that are specifically designed for just one player. After I already wrote about two player games and Lovecraftian ones in particular, I knew I had to read it. 

Since these are adventures, I'm going to try not to give too many spoilers away. After all, there may be folks out there who want to play these adventures.

There are three things I judge RPG adventures these days: Did I enjoy reading it? Do I think it would be fun to run or play? Can they be mined for ideas for homebrew adventures?

Vengeance from Beyond is an adventure about the investigator being  haunted by an angry ghost who will drive them to insanity if not stopped. Frankly, it is my least favorite of the three adventures and I think it's the weakest.

That's because it really has the narrowest range of options for the player. There's only one way to deal with the ghost. If the player doesn't figure that one way out, that's it for the investigator. It's a bit like a railroad where you have to find the track.

Frankly, that can be a real problem with Call of Cthulhu adventures in general. Sometimes, they read more like a script than an adventure and this is far from the worst case I've read.

Of Grave Concern has the investigator dealing with a zombie wizard who keeps swapping bodies with them with the long term goal of taking over their body forever. 

This is my favorite adventure of the lot. The player has a lot of avenues to explore and ways to go about their investigation. It has much more of a sandbox feel. And, while there's only one way to put the zombie down, it's a lot more reasonable than Vengeance from Beyond.

Robinson Gruesome has the investigator become a castaway on a desert island where they have to resonantly Mythos cultists and the horror they worship. It's actually a very simple adventure with a fairly tight timeline for what all the evil types are doing. However, the investigator has a lot of leeway in what they can do.

But what I really like about this adventure is that it can be mined for more ideas for adventures. While the Cthulhu genre is no stranger to Robinsonades (Dagon by Lovecraft for instance), I haven't seen a lot of adventures that use it. You could build a whole campaign around being a stranded island.

All through out all three adventures, there's advice how to handle only having one player and how to make sure that bad dice rolls don't kill them. After all, poor planning and bad decisions on the part of the player can take care of that just that fine.good advice goes a long way towards making this a good supplement.

Monophobia isn't perfect but it does a good job tackling the idea of running one-on-one Call of Cthulhu in three different ways. It's pretty much a must read for anyone interested in that.

http://www.unboundbook.org/?p=82

Games about physical and emotional distance

One Missed Call is a short form role playing game for two people trust explores physical and emotional distance. Seriously, some of these short form games are one researcher short of a psychological experiment.

(My wife pointed out to me that there is a movie called One Missed Call, which is an adaptation of the Japanese horror movie, with the distinguished rating on Rotten Tomatoes of 0%. Which means  taping two people playing this game would probably garner better ratings.)

In One Missed Call, the players play two people are are far from each other and are either drifting apart or coming together. You sit back to back so you can't see each other and play out phone calls.

At the start of the game, you decide how physically apart you are and each person secretly decides if you are coming together or falling apart. 

You then will phone each other. Note I don't say take turns. Let's be painfully honest, life doesn't act so fairly either. The non-calling player has a choice of answering or not. If they don't, then the other player has a choice of leaving a voicemail or not.

Each player has a list of phrases. Comes with the game, you don't pick them out yourself. They include things like I love you and I'm sorry I couldn't make it. When you say them, you check them off your list. After you have checked all of them off, you can't make any more calls or answer any calls.

After you have three minutes of silence, probably awkward silence, the game ends.

One Missed Call strikes me as the kind of game that I don't really want to play but I think does a good job doing what it sets out to do. On paper, it is about physical distance and physical separation. Of course and obviously, it's about exploring emotional separation.

As with any game like this, the players are going to get as much as they put in the game. The rules freely admit that you might be very casual and flippant with your phrases. And that works too because that's another way of coping with emotional separation.

There are even rules for playing via email or real phones or even the post office. Frankly, I think that might be a good way to make the game real. Perhaps too real.

One Missed Call really reminds me of Slower Than Light from Twenty Four Game Poems by Marc Majcher, which is a collection of very short forms. In Slower Than Light, you were communicating with the other players by passing notes. However, with every turn, everyone grows farther apart. You have to wait more and more turns in order to read a note until, at the end of the game, you leave with one note unread.

While I am not a fan of every game in Twenty Four Game Poems, I do think that Slower Than Light is pretty brilliant. With a very simple mechanic, it does a wonderful job of demonstrating growing distances.

Physical distance and, more importantly, emotional distance are very powerful things. Both One Missed Call and Slower Than Light create a way for people to discuss them.

http://lessthanthreegames.com/onemissedcall/

RPGs designed for two players

Role playing games that are designed for two people has always seemed like an odd design space for me. Since my earliest experiences with games like Dungeons and Dragons, role playing has always been a group activity. Even mechanics light, narrative driven games likes Fiasco or Microscope benefit from having more voices and imaginations thrown in.

But the idea of two player games have been around for a while. One of the earliest examples that I remember running across was Paper Chase, an adventure for Call of Cthulhu who specifically designed for one keeper and one player. Heck, that one was in the third edition basic rule book.

I have heard it argued, quite convincingly, that horror games are best played with only one player. After all, everything is scarier when you are all alone. There is an entire Lovecraftian system called Macabre Tales designed for two-players and a noted collection of Call of Cthulhu adventures called  Monophoboa.

And, over the last few years, I have found some interesting two player systems. Beast Hunters, Martian Colony, and Murderous Ghosts to name three very strong examples. Incidentally, all three of them have fairly tight structures for play.

Beast Hunters has the players swap the role of GM back and forth with a budget for threats. Murderous Ghosts actually uses a paired set of Choose Your Own Adventure style books for the mechanics, although you fill in all of the narrative details with your own imagination. Martian Colony's mechanical structure resembles a resource management, push your luck board game!

While there are some obvious benefits to only having two people involved in a game (like only having two schedules to worry about), there's a lot of issues as well. For instance, a lot of systems are designed to have a variety of abilities to tackle problems. (I cast magic missile/swing my sword/backstab the kobold! You kill it! And the other eight kobolds swarm you.)

Also, and this can definitely be the case in a Call of Cthulhu adventure, is that having only one brain working on a problem means the lone player can miss clues or other plot points. (Monophobia actually recommends using idea rolls to let the keeper flat out give clues player)

Two-player games also can have a stronger level of intimacy than group games. I've read more than a few which are actually about romance, with Emily Care Boss's Breaking the Ice being the one I'm the most interested in reading and researching. Whether or not this is a good or a bad thing depends on whose playing, I guess.

Two player games don't interest me as much as GM-free systems do. However, there's no denying there's a wide variety of them out there, both from a mechanical angle and thematic angle. It's a sub-genre of role playing games with some interesting ideas.

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/