Gametime

(x-posted from Google Plus)

While driving today I was thinking about starting to play a new game. (Especially with new people; double-especially if they are new to gaming). A certain type of setup started to appeal to me.

(I'm dabbling in some online play and that has sharpened my attention; the lack of physical cues and general slow-down effect mean certain structures seem much easier to launch than others.)

I fixed on this, using a players + GM format:
* give the players clearly defined (but customisable) characters with relationships to each other
* put them all in a scene that goes to the essence of those characters and is interesting in itself
* LET THEM PLAY
* twist that scene to raise the stakes somehow
* LET THEM PLAY SOME MORE
* apply rules from here, but still, only lightly (at least from the player's perspective)

This kind of setup gets the shared fiction rolling, gives people a chance to try out their characters, and sees the emergence of story, and it gets there fast. That sounds like a good thing to me, especially when you have two hours and dodgy internet connections and you want to get something firing quickly.

Thinking about games that support this was trickier:

* Classic D&D - you get handed a character sheet that says "Dwarf" and "axe", then the GM says "you guys are at a cave entrance" and the girl next to you says "we cautiously enter the cave!" - boom. You're in. Rules come later and you don't need to understand them at all.

* Any traditional-style game with pre-gens and a predesigned adventure can do this, really. If the game would work in a convention setting, it would probably work for this context too. But these scenarios rely heavily on massive designer/GM investment beforehand, so they're an inelegant solution.

* Lady Blackbird - John Harper's game is a very close match! Characters, relationships, go! I haven't played this yet but I intend to roll it out soon for my next stage of online dabbling.

* Tonight We Slay A Dragon Or Die In The Attempt - Simon Carryer's fascinating new game, part of a broader collection of techniques he has cultivated. I'm very keen to play this with him and see exactly how he pulls the elements together at the table.

* City of Fire & Coin, for Swords Without Master - I read through Epidiah Ravachol's preview/playtest adventure yesterday and found it a pretty good match for what I'm thinking here, although I wonder how well the rules would resonate with the people I'm thinking of.

* Mountain Witch, by Timothy Kleinert - been a few years since I've played, but as I recall, it was quick to get this moving and to have players doing fiction-stuff.

Beyond that, I got stuck. As counterexamples - Fiasco and My Life With Master, which I think are both excellent games but have a setup phase that seems like a big imposition on my 2-hour-session online group of new faces (when setup is part of the fun with my 3-hour-session face-to-face crew).

So... any other suggestions, or comments, or whatever the hells?

[Over on G+ Hamish Cameron immediately suggested Dungeon World, which, OF COURSE.]

Last night I ran the second and final session of Treasure Hunt with Dungeon World. It was a lot of fun, fast paced and action packed. My only regret was that the game probably should have had a third session, as there was a lot of material left barely touched on. I think adding 50% to my estimates of length for Dungeon World games is a good idea :)

( Dangerous DMingCollapse )

As I prepare myself for Against the Cult of the Reptile God and Treasure Hunt with Dungeon World, I have learned something else. DW seems better suited for translating my old D&D experiences than other RPGs that I have looked at so far.

I have had a hankering to revisit the classic D&D module for a while in a hope to recapture some of the play style of that time (which now eludes me). I had looked at doing this with both modern rule sets like D&D4e and RPGs based on those older rule sets like Castles and Crusades. However, neither provided easy or satisfactory results in this regard.

During those efforts, I came to realise that the old D&D modules look pretty awful on paper and much of what I remembered liking about them was added to the game during play. However, to say that the D&D module did nothing to encourage the later aspect would be wrong. D&D modules generally are a snapshot of a dangerous environment. This at first appears woefully static and dull, but implied in the presentation is an expectation that this environment is merely a tool through which the group forges all the narrative flow and drama by playing in it, interacting with it, and changing it. When I read them, I quickly begin adding my own events, personalities and dangers, as that was how I read them in my youth. I think it was simply not considered the job of the module designer to write about certain parts of an adventure that now are, probably due to the most narrative approach of adventure writing pioneered by Call of Cthulhu and the like.

So why is Dungeon World suited to this particular approach? There are a number of reasons. Two of them actually touch on my last two posts. The first is the Discussion. This approach along with the GM Moves pushes the GM hard not to treat any environment in a static way. When the GM has a turn in the discussion, they are looking for how to bring in danger, signal danger or set danger up somehow. If the GM just focusses on the immediate environment then the GM soon runs out of danger to use in an interesting or believable fashion, so instead the GM views the environment as a dynamic one, with each part related to other parts of that environment. The GM is also encourages to fill in those blanks as needed to link the environment together to suit the needs of the drama as it unfolds.

The next is the Difficult Situation. The natural flow from PCs going into one dangerous situation and then out again adds a sense of dynamism. This is along with DW's rule set being forgiving on the GM, allowing them to easily brave any situation from a mechanical perspective, allowing the situation to evolve however it may.

The last main reason is the way the way scenarios are created. After some initial playing with Adventure Fronts (and they are very much a "that's how we have always done it" part of the RPG) I have found that it became very easy to break down D&D modules in the manner suggested and also improve on them. The simple process of identifying the adventures in the module, the various dangers within those and the agenda and ultimate goal of those dangers, immediately provides a dynamic antagonism to the seemingly static environment.

In fact, viewing old D&D modules in this light not only captures a lot of that older play style, it can also improve them in a few instances. There seems a lot of times in old D&D modules where some antagonists are directionless and do things to support a wider story without any real reason. Giving them an agenda provides reason for their actions, and though this can change some of the things in the original module, it generally seems to work better.

On running Dungeon World, I confirmed my suspicion that one thing that really makes it shine in play is the fact that it never shifts out of a discussion mode and into a wargame or board game mode. In most traditional RPGs, once combat starts, the objectives become almost exlcusively reducing your opponent to 0HP before the same happens to you. In Dungeon World, I found that the same flow of hard choices continued into combat, which was very satisfying.

However, from my actual play experience, I found a secondary aspect of the game quite appealing too. Dungeon World has a simple system, which can be boiled down to roll 2d6 and add a modifer. 6+ is failure, 7-9 is success with a cost. 10+ is success. As many people have already discussed, the 7-9 result is a core aspect of the *World games in that it keeps the narrative rich, complex and compelling for the players, as there is a constant stream of compromises, costs and choices that result from play that build on each other. The PCs often find themselves in difficult situations, frequently of their own making.

That is all well and good, but that's not the whole of it. DW's high probability of success, with the accompanying high probability of cost (which is not necessarily injury or death), means that when the PCs find themselves in a difficult situation, they can often get themselves out of it. And by doing so, they often set up for the next difficult situation. One result of this second aspect, which I didn't foresee, is that it encouraged me as a GM to follow through those difficult situations that the PCs put themselves in. In many RPGs, I am often reluctant to do this as the "kill or be killed" nature of combat tends to be final, meaning that those scenes result in reducing the drama/complexity once resolved. As a result, these scenes are generally reserved for the end of the story. In DW, playing through those scenes increases the dram/complexity once resolved.

To give an example from yesterday, one PC decided to confront an entire crew of pirates, who had his brother held captive. The resulting chaos saw them both survive (at considerable cost) and the pirates vanquished. And it raised all kinds of drama between the two PCs, leading to a very dramatic scene later in the game, where the PC who saved his brother abandoned him instead. In some other RPGs, the fatal nature of this scene would have had me as a GM look for ways to avoid it. Another example was a PC who tried to backstab the big bad, a very powerful sorcerer, in the middle of the scenario. I gave him a chance to succeed knowing that I had ways to reflect the consequences of failure without necessarily killing the PC. This also led to the PC having to compromise with another PC to deal with those consequences, which ultimately led to the PC's dramatic climax.

So, another reason that DW appeals to me is that it encourages the flow of play of putting PCs into difficult situations and then getting them out. Out of the frying pan and into the fire over and over again.

I have recently been looking closely at Dungeon World. The RPG seems to really push some people's buttons, so as a fan of D&D I was interested in trying to find out why. On its surface, it looks like a decent system for running D&D with a light yet explicit system. Most of the mechanics in Dungeon World leave you with a good impression, though lacking in innovation. I hear quite often people scratching their heads and saying "sure, but that's how I have always done it".

Given this, it took me a while to hone in on the essence of what I like about Dungeon World in particular. It is because it uses a discussion model to moderate/manage the interaction of the players, GM and mechanics, rather than a wargame or board game model which has become the default for most RPGs. Whether we are aware of it or not, most RPGs use their mechanics much like that in a wargame or board game given the roots of the hobby. This is especially true in areas of conflict and high tension, where mechanics are used to avoid the whole thing resorting to a "bang, you're dead" exercise. In many RPGs, this shift is light, almost imperceptible. In others, its quite obvious, such as in D&D 4e. Either way, we end up with the concept of "turns", "turn order", "actions" etc, which has little bearing on the actually flow of what's happening other than to break things down into manageable chunks and provide a level of certainty.

Dungeon World doesn't do that. Instead, it uses the concept of a discussion to moderate/manage these moments. Someone says something, and the other person responds, back and forth. What a discussion is is not something that we may think about too often, but everyone understands the concept well and I think we would all realise when something said feels forced or breaks the usual flow in a discussion. As such, it provides a less intrusive way of dealing with those moments of conflict and high tension with some level of certainty. The RPG ties this into rules use simply by have specific narrative triggers for each rule and also explicit rules around the flow of discussion.

Now, I know what you are going to say. "Sure, but that's how I have always done it". And that's right. A lot of RPGing uses this model already. In general, it is during combat that the wargame or board game model takes the fore. Even then, some GMs run their games almost in their entirety in this way. I use the discussion model for combat in Cons and it also works for some RPGs like Call of Cthulhu, where initiative is kind of irrelevant. It is also worth noting that this model is not necessarily better than the wargame or board game model in that it decreases equity of action and some certainty (which in some groups would be untenable). In exchange though, it provides less intrusive way of dealing with moments conflict and high tension, empowers the GM more to make the action exciting and increases overall flexibility.

In any case, the reason why this definite shift appeals to me for Dungeon World is twofold. First, I think it opens us D&D to new players. D&D is often seen as the uncool kid on the block. This is partially because it is the poster child for the wargame or board game model, which it introduced to the hobby. It has also become increasing mechanical, shifting toward an specific set of terms and rules. For many RPGers, it no longer provides the best entry in the hobby as they aren't interested in that model and find that flow of play to be unnatural. Second, I think it also captures one of the main appeals of old school D&D, where much of the gameplay was created not from the application of rules but from a discussion between the GM and player. Interestingly, Dungeon World does this whilst circumventing much of the debate around rules v ruling. It has explicit rules, but they don't exclude rulings.

Don't get me wrong, Dungeon Would is not the be all and end all of D&D RPGs. I remain a fan of D&D first and foremost. I think that 4e's exacting use of the wargame and board game model is sublime, the madness of the AD&D1e ruleset is fun, Moldvay's B/X is the soundtrack to my youth and Castles and Crusades' ability to capture the essence of D&D regardless of edition to be awesome. Dungeon World just provides another avenue into that world of awesome that I can travel down with old and new friends. And that is why I like Dungeon World.

This past weekend was Kapcon, one of NZ's biggest gaming events. As it has been for over a decade, the flagship event was a large Saturday-evening live-action game. This year it was "Fragrant Harbour", set in Hong Kong in 1899, enjoyed by 75-ish players.

The team - Catherine Pegg, Stephanie Pegg (also of Gametime), and Ellen Boucher - did an incredible job with this game. I had a great time & there's been lots of great chat and war stories. Here, I want to call out two aspects of the game that might be of interest to folk who weren't part of the game.

** Culture & Safety **

When "Fragrant Harbour" was suggested as a possibility, I freaked out a bit. I'd been thinking a lot about culture in gaming, and starting to address some of the emergent issues, as well as reading a lot about privilege and representation. With visions of players invoking Yellow Peril imagery and general disapproval from my Asian friends, I went on something of a bender saying it wasn't a good idea. Eventually I calmed down enough to see how I was overreaching, and to their great credit, the "Fragrant Harbour" team forgave my outburst and even welcomed my help later on.

In conversation with me, Stephanie identified what was driving my anxiety - it was about safety. The idea as I interpreted it did not make me confident about being safe. I think of it now as a "Facebook Tag test" - if I was tagged in a photo from this, would I feel like I had to untag it so some of my friends wouldn't see it?

(And to be clear why this is a salient test for me - I have lots of friends who work very closely with issues of cultural engagement and sensitivity.)

Now, Stephanie and Catherine and Ellen were already thinking about these issues before I spoke up. In their hard work on this game, they continued to think hard about them and address them carefully, in such ways as:
- strong guidance embedded in a lengthy costuming brochure, mostly by promoting accurate, researched period costume rather than pop stereotypes, but also telling players to avoid using makeup to indicate ethnicity
- plenty of contextual information around the era and cultural forces at work in the society, so players had a framework to rest on (even if some players didn't remember or even read it, they knew there was an historical context and structure to the game which would influence their play decisions)
- offering a big bunch of diverse and individual characters, which clearly pushed players into exploring the individuality of their identities (and thus also to avoid resting on stereotypical depictions)

Most powerfully to me personally, they recruited me to go and talk to some people in the local Chinese-NZ community with some awareness of issues surrounding cross-cultural depiction. I spoke to several well-connected people, and went into detail with three of them. All three were supportive of the idea and the approach the team were taking, and some made suggestions about potential interesting content to include. Apart from being a gentle rebuke to my earlier freakout, it was great to note this engagement, and it gives the game design process an ironclad narrative of honest consideration of cultural risks. (Not an excuse - it ain't about excuses - but a record of definite, sensible, extensive, good faith steps taken to make sure they aren't messing up in unforeseen ways.)

So in conclusion on this point - there are some risks in this kind of project. (Although fewer in this case than I initially thought.) Catherine, Stephanie and Ellen demonstrated a bunch of excellent ways to manage them and even harness them to make a stronger final product. In future I'll point at this as an exemplar of how to address cultural safety concerns in an entertainment project.

Oh yeah, as a final note on how well they handled this: the post-game email asking for feedback included questions specifically concerning cultural issues. Nice.


** Culture & Learning **

All of this got me thinking about the other side of the my recent interest in culture - using this game as a learning experience. (This, I should clarify, is just some idle thinking about what might be possible, rather than any specific call to action.)

Cultural educators I know can spend a lot of time and effort sending groups into "cross-cultural simulation games" - some of which have larpish elements - in order to develop their cultural competency. Here we have loads of people voluntarily researching and costuming and stepping into a different cultural context for fun. Now the constraints of the first that allow learning aren't really compatible with the fun of the second, but there must be some potential for crossover here.

One idea: imagine a run of this game that included a bunch of "cultural experts" as players/NPCs. Chinese people who have knowledge of the history of the period and first hand experience of how Eastern cultures differ from Western. Nothing else changes - the game just runs, everyone plays, everyone has fun. The only difference is in the debrief, where those cultural experts get a platform to talk about what they saw, and what people did. Not judging people of course, but maybe talking about how they would expect a Chinese person to respond to a given in-game situation; or explicitly drawing on their own cross-cultural knowledge to say they did "X" in the game because they were treating it as Chinese-culture-appropriate, even though in their everyday life they'd be more likely to do "y" in response to that type of problem because they live in a Western cultural environment. Other cultural learning points could be hung off this. I think this would be a productive learning experience because after a larp, the urge to trade war stories is high, everyone wants to make more sense out of the experience they just had, and emotional engagement with the game makes expert comment on cultural stuff relevant contextually. It's too elaborate and uncontrolled to be a go-to cultural training tool, but if you want to offer a fun event with some added cultural training value, this has an immediate and obvious appeal...

Second idea: there are some very active Chinese youth leadership networks in NZ. I wonder if there'd be any interest there in such a group hosting another run of Fragrant Harbour, sending their people along to it, and inviting other youth organisations to fill out the numbers and provide a cross-cultural player base? Even with no other cultural learning stuff laid on, this could deliver some cool benefits. Hmm, intriguing.

I had a third idea but it's flittered out of reach right now. Two's enough, anyhow, so I'm gonna post this.

(Keep an eye out for a published version of Fragrant Harbour, too...)

One of the things which has often perturbed me a little about the so-called "Story Games" has been how they shy away from really getting to grips with the mechanics of the genre form they're going to try and emulate.

For example, A Wilderness of Mirrors brings onto the table the concepts of planning a mission and Control eliminating a "rogue" agent - but it never ever talks about what kinds of things happen on a spy mission and why those things happen that way. This means on the one hand that the game is totally flexible - but it also means that unless you can bring substantial genre understanding to the table yourself, things may not go well at all. The game works beautifully in the hands of people who "get" the genre really only needed the gentlest of prompting. The kinds of people who probably don't even really need the system to begin with. Examples are lamentably common, from Zombie Cinema to Fiasco.

On the other end of the spectrum, probably the majority, there are games that focus on the minutae of procedure that are the result of these story/structural forces - they are, in essence, a recipe book rather than a manual of principles. They allow you to replicate an experience, but not necessarily understand why. I want to talk a bit more about two specific games that fall into this category: A Taste For Murder and Dirty Secrets, and I'll try and come back around at the end to talk about how to cover both ends of the problem to provide a story schema without straight-jacketing the gameplay.

Both games try and evade the central question posed in all detective fiction: Whodunnit? Both games explicitly want this to be unresolved until the last possible moment, when it is resolved by the mechanics and then post-rationalized by the play-group. Normally in detective fiction, "Whodunnit" is approached through 4 different and contra-balanced questions: Motive, Means, Opportunity & Alibi. These are the basic story-mechanical entities in play, and the basis of almost all classical detective fiction is that one of these things is never directly stated, but must be rationally deduced.

This approach is the opposite of Columboism - instead of everyone knowing the murderer at the start, nobody does, and indeed, every character is Schroedinger's Murderer: there's no way to know until you crank all the way through to the end of the system and open the box.

This evasion of the central question seems like a neat circumvention of the well-known problems with investigative games, but actually, this evasion means that these two games leave only the surface appearance of the genre intact. In doing so, the game must inherently violate almost all of the famous "Rules of Detection" that lurk in the story mechanics of most of the "Golden Age" fiction that inspired A Taste For Murder must obey. With reference to S. S. van Dyne's specific fomulation of the formula, in effect, the core principles of "ratiocination" (i.e. logical deduction) are thrown out on the simple basis that there is no logical process for determining the guilty party.

What that means is that inside the fiction, we no longer need to really address the four principal questions of detective fiction. The action of the game can thus be nominally "investigative" but the investigation is actually irrelevant. It can be completely impossible to solve the crime in fictional terms: without the arbitrary and irrecovable intervention of the system, ambiguity could always remain. That makes the stories inherently unsatisfying as mysteries - it shunts the games firmly into another interesting genre, the melodrama, where the revelations and counter-revelations are given impetus by a murder.

I think this is reinforced by the play advice after the main rules, which is all about the interpersonal relationships and period detail. For me though, this begs the question of the game's existence. Why would I play a game called A Taste for Murder for my dose of melodrama and interpersonal strife?

Dirty Secrets is even less functional as a game, primarily because where ATFM calls for a collaborative "and" approach to improvised detail, Dirty Secrets actively and enthusiastically calls for blocking and obstruction at every turn. It is the most adversarial game I've ever read. It does redeem itself slightly by mentioning the key phrase "Theory of the Crime." What it says is that in every scene, each player should have a theory of who did it, why and how, and be working to insinuate facts which support their theory into the game. It gives no guidance on what this theory should look like - what are the moving parts, what are the constraints - but it does mention it. Once you as a group decide that the adversarial aspect isn't necessary, and collaborate on the theory of crime, moving the conflicts into the fiction rather than around the table, the game does produce a fictionally-functional crime, inasmuch as you are capable of it based on your understanding of genre.

Is it practical to demand any genre-emulating game to also function as a poetics for that genre? Do we need A Taste For Murder and Dirty Secrets to spell out the possible crime schemas? Well- yes. I think that there is a tendency, exemplified by these two games, to try and treat the game mechanics and the fiction they create separately. The two are usually explained in parrallel, encouraging the reader to see the points of equivalence, but there is a strong causal relationship to story "anomalies" from certain mechanics. What we're looking for here is a statement like "X Rule implies Y player behaviour."

In A Taste for Murder, for example, all the play advice is structured around the melodrama, but there is no specific discussion of how the need to have motives for murder will shape that melodrama. The advice is "investigate relationships, don't investigate clues." But there isn't a discussion on what kind of relationship is appropriate for the needs of the story.

One game that does this fairly well is EPOCH. It is built around explicitly calling out the effect of certain mechanics on player behaviour, and hence on fictional outcomes. For example, when your survival inside the fiction relies on you being interesting, then you make that effort to be interesting. In the play-advice, EPOCH is one of the clearest games around for outlining what will actually happen at the table, and how the game mechanics push the game to turn out that way.

For my money then, we still need a better mouse-trap. For all that there have been innovations around the field, the fundamental problems that exist with investigation-based games have not been resolved. And before anyone says "Gumshoe" - that system does not address the story mechanics of a crime or its investigation, it just takes the random component out of it by guaranteeing clues will be distributed during the game.

When Morgue began ruminating about the GMIS, the concept was along the lines that the GM is essentially like a modelling platform - the entire world fits inside their mind, and so they are the arbiter of what is and what is not. This is complicated in many indie games by the conscious de-powering of the GM so that they do not have unilateral fiat over all aspects of the world.

We tend to think about the SIS in two different ways - either as a Sandbox, where the PCs are more-or-less free to roam, and the LockBox, where the locations are constraint. Similarly, we think about the events inside the SIS as being either sandbox (unhelpfully conflating the space the characters experience and the activities they undertake) or a railroad. I want to focus for a moment on how players interact with the story mechanics - the rules of story formation, to explain how Dread and EPOCH work differently from most games, and so how it is possible to run these games incorrectly.

In almost all gaming environments, whether sandbox, lockbox or railway, the basic operation is for the scene to be set, and then for the GM to ask: What Are You Doing? Thus it is the player who provides the impetus for action, even if that action is constrained by the lockbox or railway. Thus the stories are inherently centred around player characters. If the GM doesn't allow the players to inject story energy, you tend to get a situation where the PCs become observers of NPC stories - god knows we've all been there and it sucked! Most indie games are in some way or another focusing around preventing that basic scenario on every level, allowing the players access to directly alter the SIS through mechanics as well as empowering them to make decisions for their characters inside the SIS.

The Dread environment is structured completely differently. The game begins with player questionaires - these are a lengthy set of questions intended to provide the players both with instant buy-in to their characters and useful information about the game world. The answers to the questionaires will often determine critical elements of the story infrastructure, without which the game simply cannot function. Players who arrive at the table thinking purely about a character are missing the point, and missing an opportunity. In essence, while there are a number of basic premises built into the scenario, the meaningful contents of the SIS are player-generated.

In the three examples scenarios in the core book, this is often obscured by the specificity of the premis. Under a Metal Sky's premis is "you are the characters in Alien". The impersonality of the foe they face thus means this game functions with a crippled SIS, and the tower, rather than the players, does most of the work. Beneath the Mask begins to allocate the real story responsibility where it belongs with its leading questions about the psychology of the characters. The ideal Dread scenario is probably one in which the GM provides only the thinnest skeleton of the structure while the questionnaires provide the bulk of the setting information, at least in terms specifically related to the story.

These questions seem like they should have the same effect on the opening phases of a story as a "kicker" does in Forge terminology. They provide an immediate impetus to character action, and hence build-in a player responsibility for moving the story forward. In a conventional game, this runs in parrallel to a GM-authored story, and the two interact. For a conventional game, that still retains the basic operational sense of the GM saying to the player "what now" and then adapting and inserting in response. In Dread however, the GM then takes over the direction of the story and explicitly begins framing all action as a block in response to this initial momentum.

Hopefully a quick example can make this clear. In a conventional game, the GM describes you feeling hungry in a room with an Orc and a pie and says "now what?" The player decides whether to eat the pie or the Orc. In Dread, the GM describes the same scene and then says "the pie eats the Orc, unless you pull." Player agency is automatically withdrawn, and you fight to get it back through the Tower. If you try and run Dread in the permissive "what now" style, then you are constantly going to have players try and do nothing in order to avoid a pull, so you need to push the Tower and you need to play the villain.

What this means is that the GMSIS is now explicitly intruding into what would usually be thought of as the player's part of the space: their character. The GM pro-actively imagines the characters getting doomed, unless the player is willing to interfere. This is a powerful technique, and because players are usually unaware of the actual mechanism for their disempowerment, they become afraid of the Tower instead of recognising that the Tower is actually their weapon against the GM, repelling the GM's intrusion into the player SIS.

The emotions generated by pulls are therefore more complex than described in the rulebook itself. Yes, the Tower is potentially deadly, but it is also, crucially, your most potent tool for story power in a scenario and game system designed to make you powerless. Naturally the greatest expression of this is deciding to knock down the Tower in order to achieve your objective, albeit at the price of death.

This is why Dread actually works - and that leads me to the problems with it. Players are often used, in con environments, to being essentially passive - cutting directly against the basic model of play I discussed above. To accomodate this, the best one-shot games both allow a player to be vegetative, and incredibly pro-active. In Dread, the passivity renders the GM's basic strategy obvious, because the GM ends up having to force the character into a situation where they need to pull, rather than the player levering themselves into a position where a pull gets them what they want. Passivity cripples this game, although even then, the fear of the Tower can actually mean that on a simplistic measure of apparent stress, the game still works, so it can limp to a conclusion. Just as deadly, is if the GM over-plays their intrusion, making the action feel too heavy-handed, making the players feel like their punching bag. Players who feel like the GM is trying to "get" their characters can always resort to refusing to pull - opting out of the game, making the GM powerless.

So let's roll EPOCH into this discussion, because it's basic mechanic uses a similar tool to Dread's. In EPOCH, the characters have a limited resource that they expend - like pulls of the Tower. Also like Dread, the results of any given mechanical encounter are basically that the PCs succeed if they live, but the GM has the option to put a stinger into the situation, and actually, EPOCH may be a little stronger on that than Dread.

Unlike Dread though, there is no way to opt out of the process, so passivity is not an option. Even more than that, the resource that you expend can be gotten back - by being "interesting" to the rest of the group, and so proactivity is rewarded by life, and passivity by death. Thus it restores to the player their familiar and natural role as the people driving the action, but with the same kind of tension-driver that Dread uses so well. It therefore feels a lot more natural both as a GM and a player, while delivering the tension that you need for that physical response.

Where Dread uses the GMSIS as a hard boundary that is used to direct the characters, EPOCH achieves the same ends with a more usual GMSIS structure.

A new horror game from Wellington's Dale Elvy has just been released. EPOCH contains his recipe for genuinely scary one-shot horror gaming. It's a fascinating design, and draws on his years as the go-to horror GM at local conventions.

Check out his blog post about EPOCH, where he outlines the origins of the concepts underlying the game.

Very exciting to see another game launch out of NZ! Congrats, Dale!

So, just over a week ago, my sister and I ran a fairy tale larp that was trying to mess around with the form. And our players. But in a good way!

I had two main things driving the design. One of them was a reaction to the intense emotionally charged psychodrama games that often get called Nordic larp. There are a lot of really powerful techniques being used, but a lot of the time they seem to revolve around making people feel miserable - I wanted to see if I could engineer a situation that would have the opposite effect. The other one was a video game called The Path. This came out a few years ago, and it just really stuck with me. The basic scenario is that you're a version of Red Riding Hood walking through the woods to your grandmother's house, and the gameplay is that you choose to walk, or stop for a little and encounter some object that's sitting in the woods, or if you're feeling lost and lonely you can wait for a guide character to come and give you a hug and take you back to the path. Or you can encounter the Wolf, which is devastating, and the only way to find out what will happen is go through with the encounter. And eventually you end up at your grandmother's house and there's some stuff that happens that depends on what you did in the woods. It's atmospheric as hell, and totally awesome. So I ended up with a game where the premise was that a group of lost 'children' (some of the characters were adolescents or adults) had each, once upon a time, fled from their own personal Wolf and become lost in the woods. Their goal, which they weren't explicitly told, was to find some sort of resolution with their wolf.

Game Design Stuff
First off, I'm going to thank my co-writer Catherine a huge amount - the original idea was from me, but if she hadn't been letting me bounce ideas off her, and helping me work out the mechanics - and writing some key characters that got me through writer's block, the game just wouldn't have happened. Plus, she really came through with the creepy doll. ;-)

For a lot of things in the game, there was often more than one reason why it was like that. The first one was the movement rules - the lost children had to keep moving, had to stay in the company of someone with a black headband (actually the GMs, the backstage helper 'wood sprites' and the wolves), and there was an OOC call "push-me-pull-you" to trigger them moving if they'd stopped. Partly this was to stop the game clogging up, which is something I've seen in other forest games - there's a huge play area, but 'something interesting' is happening at a particular site, so everybody stops and clusters around it, and ignores all the other interesting things going on. Another one, was that it was a way to make people tired. I wanted them to feel physically challenged but not in real danger, so that when they got to stop walking, that was a relief, and hopefully that would affect their emotional state. And the third reason - the be with someone with a headband rule - was to control the game and make sure that we could keep the lost children circulating around the different wolves, and so that no one was stuck by themselves for too long.

The area of the game was a set of interlinked tracks at a scout camp that I knew pretty well from previous larp events. We had a small fenced off area in the middle of the forest with benches and a single entrance (the scout camp's chapel) that we used as a base camp during the game, the mid game break area, and the final destination for the end game. There were also some buildings close to the game area with toilets and hot water facilities - we advised the players that while IC they were stuck with the group, OOC they could take a break at any time and wait at the chapel to catch up with the rest of the players. I don't think anyone used this, but it was important to me, because I figured that anything that we could do to increase people's physical feeling of real life safety would help them relax and enjoy the game content. We also scheduled a ten minute break for everyone about an hour into the game. This was originally for strictly practical reasons - to get some water and hot drinks, and food, into people in what could have been any kind of weather (Auckland in spring can be really hot and sunny, or cold and miserable, and no way to know in advance), but as we were working through the game design, it made sense to turn this into the emotional turning point of the game.

We cast people by questionnaire - a lot of this was the standard stuff, like do you have any health problems, do you want to be a lost child or a wolf, is there anyone you do or don't want to be paired with. We also got people to fill in tag clouds, a grid of key words related to fairy tales which we asked people to decorate with word art, colours, bold, stuff like that to give me an idea of what they were interested in. We also put in a brief description of the Lines and Veils rule and asked people what squicked them out so we could cast them away from any problems.

We used the technique which I've seen in some other games of giving people the skeleton of the character, and then asking them a series of leading questions about themselves. Partly this was to help them buy into the characters, but we also staged this so that the lost children answered their questions first, then gave that information to the wolves so that they had a lot of information about their paired lost child, along with the lost child's tag cloud. We also set up an IC roleplaying forum a couple of weeks before the game with the intent of having each pair roleplay out their first encounter in which the child ran away from the wolf, so that we could set up some shared experiences pregame, and hopefully jump start the warm up period that I've often seen in larps where it takes a bit of time for people to feel comfortable with each other.

On the day things - the very first part of the briefing was that everyone had to shake hands and introduce themselves to everyone else, regardless of whether they'd met before or not. I nicked this idea off someone on Story Games (can't remember who, sorry) and it's awesome. It's a straight out jump start to get people from silently staring at you to giggling and slightly embarrassed in a "we're all in this together" way. I've also read a couple of articles out on the interwebs on the role that touch has on bonding - you get a small spike of a hormone called oxytocin, which is related to feelings of well being and attachment. Apart from this, we defined the touching rules as people's faces, arms and hands only, to keep things in a relatively neutral frame. The fighting rules were none - you weren't allowed to fight at all. You could talk it out or run away. This idea was robbed from a video game I can't remember the name of, where they'd found that if they gave players the ability to fight the monsters, people would try to do that even if it was difficult and a doomed effort, then complain that the fighting mechanics were clunky; whereas actually the game designers wanted to emulate the narrative of a horror movie where it's mostly about fear and hiding and survival. So they removed the ability and found they got better emotional responses.

We turned the mid game tea party into a 'tilt' event - we asked the wolves at this point to offer some food or drink to their lost child, and to change the tone of their roleplaying, from scary and messing with them as they'd been at the beginning, to more vulnerable.  (I think the line my partner quoted from me on Twitter was: "Try to manipulate her into realising that you have no power over her."  So, um, yeah.  Like that.)  After the tea party, we also encouraged them to split up the group more - reminding people that they could go off with any wolf or wood sprite, if they wanted. We also asked the wolves to try to push the storyline to a resolution - perhaps the lost child overcame their fear of the wolf and was willing to walk alone with them, or could finally stand up to them, or had found a way to let them go.  Once they'd reached a point where the wolf felt the story was resolved, they were asked to bring their lost child back to the base camp chapel, where everyone who was there had been asked to give them a big cheer (because everyone, at least once in their life, should get a cheer.  It's a rule.) The final debrief was the reverse of the opening, asking people to split up into pairs, shake hands, and tell each other something they liked about each other.

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Right, I'm totally planning on writing up an Actual Play account, but it's late and I'm tired, so it'll be in a day or two.  But I have pictures for you...