Character death in games

Yesterday, it finally happened. Having indulged in some constructive alienation to set up a framework for a dungeon combat challenge for the player characters, and furthermore, committing to a certain attitude by the enemies, I ran the game as it rolled, and one of the PCs died. Even in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, it's possible to die in battle, and it happened. And it was a good death, for several reasons: it was a heroic and somewhat foolhardy press forward to engage the enemy without really waiting for backup, which fit well with the character; this somehow worked in previous iterations, but his luck ran out. The player also will have to take a break from gaming for a few months, so the out-of-game timing was good, as well. But still, it's sad for me when a character dies, and especially when that is connected to the player leaving the game, even if it's amicable.

I am reminded of a round of Betrayal at the House on the Hill I played at Who's Yer Con 2019. The game starts out with all the players cooperatively exploring a haunted house, which is generated using random tiles. Things go wrong, until one of the players moves beyond a point threshold, and becomes the betrayer. The game is paused while this player consults an entry in a book expressing the haunting, while the other players consult a corresponding explanation in the other book of how to defeat it. Play resumes, and it is now adversarial, until either the haunted player is defeated, or the other players are all killed or coopted, or whatever other end condition is achieved. In this particular instance of the game, I was the haunted one. And I slowly had to take out the other players. This was the last game of the night, so as I was taking people's characters out, they left to their hotel rooms, or to drive off. And it was really unpleasant for me to succeed at each juncture, and then to win the game. I felt like I was kicking people out of the game, rather than just challenging them inside its rules.

In a single-player video game, the situation is often very different. If you run into a challenge, and your character dies, you can just reload and try again. Even without saves or continues, even if you have to restart the game every time, you're ultimately able to confront the same challenge - or type of challenge, if it's procedurally generated - over and over again, until you tire of it, or until you overcome it. Death is a signal to you that you have failed, and an invitation to try again. In games made for the arcades, it is also a way to push you to spend more money. But I think games have moved more and more towards focusing on the specific challenge at hand. Instead of having to start games over, there are saves, or checkpoints; some games automatically restart you at the beginning of the latest challenge, allowing you to retry it over and over. Some games will adjust the difficulty of the challenge down, so that you are not stuck in one area due to missing out on a particular skill or capability. And of course, there are many games where death isn't really a possibility; it's just a matter of which of a variety of endings you get to when the game ends. I personally find a lot of the older games a bit frustrating these days, although certain retro and retro-style indie games have captured my interest.

So my experience with death in games leans towards the negative. I don't like getting characters killed, as a role-player, as a gamemaster, or as a board game player, and I find video game deaths frustrating when they require me to redo a lot of progress. But when thinking about gamemastering, game design, and theory, I'm trying to avoid just focusing on what I like. So let's discuss some parameters for lethality in role-playing games.

Many old school games were very lethal, or could be made to be. Original D&D did not provide characters with many hit points, or quick ways of replenishing them, monsters were deadly, as were traps and poisons, some of which would kill immediately. It was also very easy to build a new character - I recently played an OD&D game, and even with checking up on whatever houserules were in place, it took me about half an hour the first time, and would probably not take me more than ten minutes if I wanted to do so again with the same table. Another important aspect of early versions of D&D is that it expected adventures which did not really dig into character backgrounds and motivations. You crawled a dungeon with other players to look for treasure. The constant threat of death motivated you to be careful as you crawled, although combat did often happen, as did falling into pits. If your character survived, it might develop a larger narrative, especially if it ended up taking its funds to settle outside, but it could easily perish, and you would write up a short memorial and start again from scratch.

As I noted above, meanwhile, D&D 5E makes it very hard to die, or rather, makes it very easy for a PC to survive brushes with death. Your character gets to revive some of your hit points with an hour's rest, or all of your hit points on a night's rest. Once taken to zero hit points, a character needs to roll 10 or lower three times with a d20 (or two if one of the rolls was a 1) before rolling three 11s or above to die permanently. Moreover, a critical success (a 20) has the character at 1 hit point and ready to get back into the fray - or flee, likely the more prudent option, albeit made difficult by the system's punishing combat movement system. Correspondingly, character creation is a much more arduous task than in the original edition. It is usually recommended that the party and the DM take up the equivalent of a whole session to build characters together, to make sure that they mesh well and that their backgrounds can be tied into the plot properly. The adventures are expected to be long-term affairs, with meaningful participation of the characters at each step, so a character's death can really mess with the process. But other things can happen when you play: allies and enemies can win or fail, you can alienate former allies, befriend former enemies. Your character's choices can have a lot to do with how that changes.

I think this leads to a bigger discussion of what stakes you are playing for. The stakes can be the life of your character. But if the character is easy to generate and is expected to be easily killed, what are you losing when it dies? The string of successes you've had with it against a hostile world? Definitely not time out of the game. Meanwhile, if a character is difficult to create and adapt to the world at hand, you're not only losing all that starting investment, you are also probably losing a significant amount of participation with the game as you are taken out of it to restart this process. And if the game involved a lot of social relations with other parties to the game, both player and non-player characters, then all of that is lost, too. Meanwhile, you can lose some of these connections due to poor judgment or failures without killing the character. So your experience of the game with the other participants continues, even though you have suffered setbacks, setbacks that can be significant for you, if you have become invested in the world and the people in it. It can be a meaningful experience even if it is not lethal for your character individually.

That being said, if there is combat in the game, there is no greater proof of how important it is to do it well than the death of a party member, with all that entails. If there is a dungeon, death by trap is the best way to show that it is vital to tread carefully. If there is a despotic society you must navigate in, there is no better proof that you have to watch your actions very carefully than a summary execution.

And on that positive note, rest in peace, 2020.

Deep Space 9 vignettes

I've decided to collect a few thoughts I've had about Star Trek: Deep Space 9. There are some spoilers for particular episodes and the general thrust of the show.

Not just a Babylon 5 knock-off

When I was a teenager in Israel in the 1990s, there was a sense of rivalry between fans of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Babylon 5. Sure, I knew many of people who were fans of both, but since they were both in the same niche of a space station-centric longform science fiction drama, and since there were a lot of specific parallels, and even a story about how one stole the premise from the other, there was definitely tension.

For broadcast availability reasons, it was B5 which I ended up watching through, while I only watched DS9 sporadically. I was left with a sense that the former was superior to the latter. I was taken in by the attempt to make a mature piece of work: a TV novel, and avoiding kids and cute robots. But recently I have achieved a more nuanced perspective.

After an almost complete rewatch of B5 last year, I did a complete watch-through of DS9 earlier this year. And I feel I should have given the latter a fair shake earlier. No, it isn't a TV novel. There is a TV novel hiding there, maybe about 5 seasons of it, but it is also attempting to be a particle of the week Star Trek series, and manages to pull that off, as well. The characters are very well-written, engaging, and grow with the plot and the passage of time.

One thing that stands out is how the kids affect the story. The parental relationships add a depth and sense of stakes to the world that, with all of the dramatic development in B5, just wasn't there. Seeing the world through the eyes of Jake and Nog as they grow up, seeing the emotional toll that long parting has had on the O'Briens and the Siskos when those occurred, the fear for Jake and Molly's welfare when they were out of sight, were irreplaceable. Similar situations in B5 involved adults being concerned for their adult relatives, relationships which we were only introduced to remotely, so the impact was lessened. No children grew up on B5, either, instead just coming in for a plot point and leaving.

So I don't think JMS got more maturity out of the bargain. Cute robots were absent in both, though, and neither felt neglected as a result.

Vic Fontaine as an artificial gamemaster

As part of the transition from a paramilitary ship to an essentially civilian space station, the public holodeck became a set of private holosuites, run by everyone's favorite Ferengi bar-owner, Quark.

I didn't cover the holodeck or the holosuite in my talk about virtual reality in fiction and reality, because at that point it had been a while since I've watched The Next Generation or DS9, and frankly, it's a very weird entity, that benefits from thinking more in terms of role-playing games, and specifically, live action role-play. In the holo experience, a program creates artificial beings and an environment, which react to the real visitors naturally, and/or according to the program's dictates. The visitors are expected to dress for the occasion, and also play their parts - so this sits somewhere between augmented reality and larping. There is some interlock that prevents real people from being injured, which is occasionally deactivated to add more tension, but otherwise, the experience feels real. There is a finite room which can be seen when the program is shut down, but the visitors are able to feel like they are moving freely in an open-ended environment, when necesary.

In story terms, the holo experience seems to be a place for unrealistic crossovers to happen with in-fiction logic: TNG's Data can match wits with Moriarty, the crew can play Robin Hood's Merry Men, and, in DS9, a somewhat sanitized experience of 1960s Vegas is recreated, hosted by a lounge singer modeled after Frank Sinatra - Vic Fontaine. In time, the various crew members become his friends - he is very helpful and insightful, especially when it comes to their love lives.

One of these crew members is Quark's nephew, Nog. We have watched him succeed in achieving his dream of joining Starfleet, taking part in battle, and losing his leg. A few episodes later, in "It's Only a Paper Moon", he is back to the station, with leave to acclimate to a prosthetic and become rehabilitated. He visits the Fontaine program to cheer up, and then decides he wants to recover there.

This pushes the boundaries of the program as we have seen it so far: instead of watching a show and getting some advice from Vic, Nog is taken backstage. And an entirely novel part of the premise is revealed: the management of the casino and lounge, and particularly, its finances, which according to Vic, confound him. After an altercation with Jake, Vic tells Nog that he has to improve his attitude or he will not be allowed back to the lounge - until this episode - the only attraction of this program. Nog is finally convinced to have a look at the finances, and, in typical Ferengi fashion (the less said about a race of big-nosed aliens with a natural talent for money, the better), has an easy time sorting them out, and starts investing time in improving the profitability of the place, and even expanding it.

The fascinating thing about all this is how much this holo experience moves towards being an ideal role-playing game. Nog is able to be swept up by a part of the imaginary or simulated world that was only created to engage him, that wasn't planned in advance. This is something a good gamemaster would do; indeed, the framework, which does not require Nog to roll any dice or understand new behind-the-scene rules, much less reprogram anything, makes this closer to an ideal Blackmoor phenomenon, engaged with through pure larping. In our world, it would be very difficult to reproduce the freedom of this experience as a larp, because it would beg the question of how the new systems are designed and made to seem and sound and feel real, and where the new players required, or their clothes, would come from, and how they would be trained.

Odo as a literal referee

Earlier in the season, in "Take Me Out to the Holo-Suite", Captain Sisko manages to convince members of his crew to join him in playing Baseball against a team of Vulcans lead by an old nemesis of his. Since an actual Baseball court would be difficult to recreate on the station, it is reproduced in one of Quark's holosuites.

As we've discussed, holosuite programs are more than capable of creating people with complicated personalities, and a programmed umpire (Baseball referee) would have a perfect view and understanding of the situation in the field, but Sisko insists on having a person do it, specifically Odo. He wants a real person. He doesn't explain exactly why - it seems he mostly rejects a holosuite umpire on principle as what Solok, his nemesis, would do - but later something happens that is apparently not exactly according to the rules as, possibly, a holosuite umpire would do it: one of the Vulcans runs into the dugout without having touched base. Since he can't single out the Vulcan who had run in, he goes to them, one by one, touching them with the ball. It turns out that the one who had run in is the last in the seating order, and as soon as Nog gets to the player right before him, he runs and attempts to make home plate, but Jake is able to catch Nog's ball and tag him, anyway.

Had this been run by a holosuite umpire, maybe something like the MLB rules would have been used, and the runner would have been called out as soon as he entered the dugout. But instead, it was Odo who indicated that something was wrong, in his typical gruff manner, adding to the suspense and thrill of this small victory.

Sisko cheers and comments that it is this unpredictability of Baseball which he loves about the game. And having a living referee, one who can make mistakes, or idiosyncratic judgments, is part of what allows for this exciting unpredictability. Even in this, a competitive game with overall much stricter rules than any role-playing game.

Why was O'Brien self-conscious about his models?

As the series progresses, Bashir and O'Brien bond over holosuite experiences reproducing various desperate historical combat situations. The last one they repeatedly attempt is the Battle of the Alamo. In addition to playing at this scenario on the holosuite, O'Brien starts investing in recreating the Alamo Mission and the order of battle in miniature. And it is fascinating that he is repeatedly teased about it, with others constantly calling them toys, which he rebukes by stating that "it's not a toy - it's a model!" It's interesting because by the time DS9 was produced, actual model armies and miniature warfare were pretty well established as a grown-up hobby, particularly historicals.

This does remind me of a story suggesting why the author Robert Louis Stevenson gave up on miniature wargaming, which he enjoyed playing with his step son in Switzerland: apparently a friend mocked him so badly for playing a children's game that he never did much more with it, much less publish the rules he used, a loss to the history of wargaming.

What is Dungeons and Dragons made of - panel introduction

Back in October I was tasked with hosting a remote panel for an Israeli role-playing game theory group about the history of Dungeons & Dragons, with the documentary film Secrets of Blackmoor, and the book Playing at the World as starting points. My qualifications were mostly my having watched the film and read the book, and being interested in the subject.

Secrets of Blackmoor uses interviews and a bit of documentary evidence to trace Dave Arneson's development as a wargamer, and ultimately, as the first dungeon master, in the context of the Twin Cities group of miniature wargamers, while Playing at the World focuses on contemporary documentary sources to get a broader understanding of how D&D and early tabletop role-playing came to be, weaving a story from wargaming, the fantasy genre, psycho-dramatic role-playing, and the influential board game Diplomacy. To focus the conversation, we decided to stick to the immediate history of D&D.

The following is a translation from Hebrew of the framework I wrote up to get things started. As with any good panel discussion, the conversation started in earnest before I finished covering everything.

Introduction

In January 1974, a game called Dungeons & Dragons was published. It came out as a boxed set, with three instruction booklets, and a few loose pages with tables. The front of the box described its contents: "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures." But in truth, it was the first role-playing game product.

This discussion is going to wrestle with the question: "what is D&D made of?" Hopefully it will allow us to learn about the conditions required for a role-playing game - or at least, this particular role-playing game - and to derive a few lessons relevant to creating innovative games in a hostile environment.

What did Arneson and Gygax bring to Dungeons & Dragons?

A good starting point for the question of what D&D is made of is the names written on the front of its box, as well as on the booklets contained within: Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

What did they bring to D&D? Let's start with the common elements: they both brought many years of experience in miniature wargaming - creating terrain, painting soldiers, setting them out and fighting with them, in accordance with rules which they either adopted from elsewhere, or formulated themselves. They even worked together previously on a ruleset for Napoleonic naval warfare. They both also took part in play by post variations on the influential political board game, Diplomacy, which originally dealt with the era just before World War I. Some variations dealt with the Napoleonic wars - Gygax created one of those, and participated in a campaign that Arneson ran based on it - while others dealt with Medieval and fantastical themes. They both also brought a deep interest in the Medieval and fantastical settings, which became more popular in the 1960s and '70s as a result of the cheaper paperback publication of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

Dave Arneson

What did Arneson in particular bring to D&D? He brought experience with an attitude towards wargaming rooted in Prussian Kriegsspiel, which emphasized the position of referee. The referee is the person who decides what the premise is for the battle, what information is known to which of the players, and how to deal with what the players want to have their subordinates do in the game, whether the rules have accounted for these possibilities or not. He also brought experience in Braunstein-style freeform play, developed by David Wesley, which focused on group dynamics between characters who were played by individual people. These repeated attempts to push the boundaries of what was possible in wargames eventually brought about the Blackmoor fantasy campaign, which introduced a critical aspect of D&D: an adventure undertaken by a collection of characters played individually by players and managed by a gamemaster (not a dungeon master yet - this term came later). The participants in the dungeon adventures in this campaign were really excited about this novel implementation of the refereeing principles developed in Arneson and Wesley's circle, and after this was presented to Gary Gygax, he was taken in by it as well.

Gary Gygax

What did Gygax bring to D&D? First and foremost, rules: the Chainmail rules for Medieval battles, which he developed with Jeff Perren, and included the famous appendix for games with fantasy units, and became the initial mechanical basis for combat in Arneson's Blackmoor campaign, and therefore to the mechanics in the first tabletop role-playing game; experience in developing and designing rulesets, which allowed him to translate Arneson's tools into something that other people can use; and experience in board games, which got him used to thinking of these rules developments as something commercial, which can be sold. In addition to that, his love for the fantastic was stronger than Arneson's - he was so focused on the fantastic that he promoted it even in the face of backlash and public expressions of disinterest and hostility from the various wargaming communities, and even though this preoccupation distracted him from marketing an earlier game by the company he created to publish D&D, Tactical Studies Rules.

Secrets of Blackmoor and Playing at the World

The book and movie which form the basis for this discussion fill out many more details in the story of the formation of D&D, and the development of the role-playing game product afterwards.

Secrets of Blackmoor

The film is mainly based on interviews with people close to Arneson, and comes with a certain agenda to correct the lack of attention that he seems to have suffered from, even though he was one of the two creators of this influential, and eventually, profitable game - as far as the filmmakers are concerned, he was the more important contributor. But there is one point, appearing towards the end of the film, that is vital for understanding the wider context: Greg Svenson, one of the first players in the Blackmoor campaign, says that after D&D was published, the participants in the campaign didn't feel like there was a big difference. They felt that they were continuing to play Blackmoor, but with slightly different rules. All that changed was that other people could play this same game that they were playing.

You cannot replicate Dave Arneson

That's a critical point: had this experience not been converted into a product that people can buy, it would have been stuck as something that is hard to replicate without either knowing Arneson personally, or someone who understood what to do from experiencing Arneson's game. This is especially true since Arneson tended not to explain the rules he used to his players, but instead asked them to focus on how he described the world, and how they wanted their characters to react to it. The fate of similar attempts at role-playing games, sometimes more expansive ones, coming from science fiction and fantasy fandom, was similar. You had to know someone who knew someone from the Society for Creative Anachronism, or some improv group going in a role-playing direction, to get a similar experience. A box with rules as a product, as a game, was like the Apple II's draw over the mainframes, in terms of accessibility to the general public - in Gygax's case, to begin with, it was mostly focused on wargamers like himself, but from there it spread out to science fiction and fantasy fandom, and to a much wider hobby.

Playing at the World

Jon Peterson's book provides a wider context than Secrets of Blackmoor, explaining some of the points I brought up. It goes deeper into the long history of Kriegsspiel games from which Arneson eventually got his approach to refereeing; investigates the history of the fantasy genre as it crystalized towards the time of D&D's creation, which in the author's view, was especially adapted to creating a target audience for an experience that would carry them into an imaginary world; looks into the history of games which pushed into group dynamics and discussion, like Diplomacy and its derivatives; and then takes all of these and connects them into a deeper explanation of what D&D was, why it was created when it was created, and where it, and role-playing games as we know them today, went from there.

Theoretical Questions

Since this group is focused on theoretical rather than historical discussions, we can ask different questions than who did what. For example: what do we think about the claim, that recurs both in Secrets of Blackmoor and in Playing at the World, that the fact that characters can do whatever their players want them to do is the critical element for the transition into a role-playing game? Do we agree with this? Does this conform with more current theories about role-playing games?

What about accessibility to the public? I think that opening the experience to the public, as much as it was partial, requiring then and now constant updating with respect to the audience to which they are being opened, as well as to the tastes of TSR and then Wizards of the Coast, is still critical when attempting to bring more people into this hobby. How important is it to adapt this accessibility to new media, such as through recorded and live actual plays and podcasts?

And how important is the personal and immediate experience to role-playing games? Is there a qualitative difference between playing by post and playing in person? Would it be interesting to compare with Tony Bath's Hyborean wargaming campaign, which came before Blackmoor, where the main dynamic was strategic decisions by post on behalf of characters, which Bath and another referee would adjudicate through discussion and board and miniature wargames between them, without a concurrent and immersive involvement of the various players, instead updating them through in-world and out-of-world reports sent after the fact?

Watercrawling to find out - charting through play

My introductory sketch of watercrawling, and the subsequent attempt to apply it to Ghosts of Saltmarsh, assumed a certain traditional form of information generation about the imaginary world, and its flow: the GM builds the setting, structures the information about it, and populates that structure, and then it flows to the players through play. The players act on it through their characters, but they are ultimately discovering something pre-existing. Meanwhile, many modern, narrative games go by variations of the motto "play to find out" - the fiction, that is, the imaginary world, is created by all participants, through the players` character` actions, as well as a combination of in-world rationale and interpretations of the results of dice rolls. While the GM has certain privileges, they do not have exclusive or even predominant authorial power. Any information that was not generated through play is known in advance by everyone. Is a structure like watercrawling relevant in that scenario? Let's post to find out!

I'll use Blades in the Dark as my model for a modern narrative game in which participants play to find out, mostly because it's the one whose rulebook I read through, and which I've playtested a tiny bit. It does, however, have a few interesting features for this project: the game's setting, the city of Doskvol, is mapped, which is a good start; it also has a sea that ships go into to hunt leviathans and extract their blood, which powers this haunted steampunky electrified nightmare city; the region in which it is set also has a map. Additionally, the system's character sheet game is elaborated by also having a crew sheet, for the team of scoundrels that holds the characters together - this sheet, in turn, has a somewhat abstracted board of turf nodes, locations which the crew can gradually conquer during play.

So our starting chart can just be copied from the book, without adding more details than the various starting cities, such as Duskwall. The GM will either fill this in before game start, or it will be filled in later, as we will see below.

Next we sketch out a crew sheet that will be fitting for this type of adventure: Pirates of the Void Sea. The abstract pirate turf could contain elements such as secluded bays to hide treasure in, a smuggler's bar in which booty can be more easily sold for coin, a temple to a forgotten sea god which provides the pirates with some luck if the proper sacrifices are made, and so forth. These can all be eventually be placed on the chart above.

The main loop of Blades in the Dark usually involves a somewhat freeform information-gathering phase, where a target is found and chosen for a heist. Then, to avoid analysis paralysis, once the players have settled on a target, they decide on a general approach to the heist, how heavily they will be armed - balancing preparedness with inconspicuousness - and then, using a variety of parameters, an engagement roll is rolled - its result determines how well or poorly the heist begins. And so it starts, in media res - afterwards, if circumstances are encountered that would have benefitted from planning, flashbacks can be used to attempt and establish contingencies retroactively. After a few challenges the heist ends one way or another, and then some housekeeping is performed, including potential for increasing attention from the authorities, characters landing in prison, and the changes in the relations to various existing factions in the city. Then comes downtime, when characters can work on long-term projects, indulge their vices, create or procure specialized equipment and otherwise while away the hours until the preparation for the next heist.

The way this loop can fit into a watercrawl essentially comes down to two factors: the types of heists, and the way they fit into the map. For a heist in Doskvol, the city map is used to choose the location, which in turn has information keyed to it about the populace, the environment, the kinds of things that are easy or hard to do there, and available NPCs. The party has headquarters and local turf that are also in specified locations. In the sea this could be different, as a pirate ship would normally be on the move, although a hidden cove can act as a more traditional, static base of operations.

As for heists - a treasure island, a lost leviathan hunter, or a trade convoy ripe for the picking - their placement will be determined in one of two ways. The first way is if the GM decides to chart the sea in general terms beforehand: where the currents are, what the weather is everywhere, indeed, a structure very close to how it would be done in a traditional RPG, except that this will all be openly known to the players. Then, when a heist happens, the GM can actively choose to tune its difficulty by putting it closer or farther away from the current location of the pirate ship, in nicer or less pleasant waters, near or far from the pirate crew's existing turf. The crew can draw a course between their current position and the heist target, and this choice will change how the engagement roll is performed - but once that is done, the crew can be said to have made it to the start of the heist in a state depending on that roll, and it can go on as it would in Doskvol, with more aquatic shenanigans available. Afterwards, the rolls in the post-heist state determine where the pirate ship manages to go, either some other random point on the map, or to one of the existing turfs.

But we can take this whole thing further. We can roll to find out not just what will happen in the heist, but to generate the very details of the sea chart. So the ship starts somewhere on the mostly blank canvas. A heist is decided upon - if its details suggest proximity to a known landmark, the GM can just pick a point near there, otherwise, it can either be selected randomly now, or after the engagement roll. Then, an engagement roll is performed - and the difficulty of the journey between the pirates and their target is determined by the result of this roll. If the roll was good, then perhaps there is a usable current in that direction - then that current is marked on the map as part of the nature of the sea. If the roll was poor, then perhaps there is an area of turbulent waters, or even reefs, in the middle, that can be marked on the map. As the map is filled in, the location of the next heist can be more and more constrained by the known aspects of the charted sea, rather than randomly picked. If that becomes too constraining, a feature can always be changed - especially in the Void Sea of this post-apocalyptic nightmare world, it is entirely possible for currents to change, difficult archipelagos to be pushed out of the seabed or swallowed up entirely, and changing seasons can also be made culprits. The point is that you are playing to find out what the sea is like, and having a narrative experience consistent with the structure of the game in the process. You have painted this canvas with your actions as players and GM.

New experience or new game - putting the CSG to work

Suppose you're a role-player. You've been playing the same game with the same gamemaster for a while, or maybe even with different GMs, and it's starting to bore you. You want to experience something new. What are your options?

Let's be more specific about your current position. Since you've been playing whatever ruleset your GM is running for you for a while, you're already familiar with its character sheet game (CSG). You've either spent a lot of time mastering it, or at the very least you know how to use it and tolerate it to a degree, depending on your proclivities. So the path of least resistance moving forward is to either ask your GM, or find another GM, willing to change things up in the rest of the RPG. 

If, until now, your GM has been satisfied implementing combat with theater of the mind, maybe they can start using miniatures on a map, and add constraints outside of your character sheet into combat - for example, drawing battlefields with interesting geometry, and having foes use that geometry for some clever tactics. Maybe wilderness travel has been dull, so they can run your given character, or a new character, through a sea-faring watercrawl. Maybe they can structure challenges using your skills in ways that have more depth, like building an investigation with node-based design. Moving beyond structure and information management, maybe your GM can spend more time on in-character play-acting of the non-player characters, and encourage you to do the same with your character.

There is a whole space of changes they can make here - a resourceful GM can take the same CSG and create a whole variety of experiences for the player. The player, in turn, simply has to play along. A GM struggling to develop ways to do this themselves can find many helpful guides: blogs, books on GMing, videos, even innovative adventure modules already adapted to their familiar ruleset.

A more arduous path is finding a GM who will run an entirely new game for you. For example, instead of them building structure around the Dungeons & Dragons 5E CSG to create a heist game, or running a module that does that for them, they can use a ruleset that is built from the character sheet up to support and encourage heists, like Blades in the Dark. But that requires not just a GM willing and able to run it, but for you to learn a new CSG. This could be daunting, either because just getting comfortable with the old CSG was enough of a hassle, or because you've already spent an inordinate amount of time optimizing your CSG builds for the current system, and find starting again from scratch unappealing; alternately, the design possibilities in the new CSG are uninspiring.

To give examples from my own limited experience, there are many ways that I've run wilderness adventures in my ongoing D&D 5E campaign, from very abstract theater of the mind, to point-crawl, to hex-crawl; NPC interactions have gone from somewhat loose playacting to a more structured attitude table framework and back; I've even had an individual battlefield, most of which ran as a zone-based theater of the mind, while the focal region of combat was grid-based. On a larger scale, the challenges my players` characters were faced with ranged from investigating a haunted house to mediating an alliance between initially very hostile factions. My players took to this variety with little problem and much aplomb. Which is to their credit, but also, I believe, because we were still playing with the same CSG.

Whether I would be able to convince this group to move to a different rule system like RuneQuest Classic is another matter entirely. It would depend on how easily I can become familiar with the ruleset, how easy it is to teach, how it runs at the table, and whether all of this can truly provide a sufficiently novel and enticing form of play. My more mechanically-inclined players would have to abandon an impressive list of interesting builds for the existing system. My not entirely comparable experience with playtesting Blood & Bronze with another player group suggests a serious challenge for all involved.

What is the operative conclusion of all this? I think that if I were trying to encourage people to play a new role-playing game ruleset that I have designed, I would spend some time making its character sheet game more accessible. Not just an easy way of generating new starting characters, not just a series of examples for each section of the character sheet, but an easy way to feel out how the strictly mechanical player-facing aspects of it work. Perhaps learning from solo games, I would use an oracle to generate encounters or challenges, and walk the reader through a few examples, before letting them loose on my system. I would make learning how to be a player into an engaging gameplay experience, as, for example, various versions of D&D's Basic Set did for dungeon masters.

From my novice point of view, there is still room to grow in the pedagogy of role-playing games, and focusing on making accessible solo variations of their character sheet games may be one path forward.

Plane Defensive - my old indie game prototype

After finishing my PhD in physics in 2015, I decided to pivot towards video games. I went to some talks and workshops at Tech Valley Game Space in Troy, New York, near Albany, gathered up some tools, and started coming up with ideas, vetting them, and turning them into something playable.

The main product of this period was a game called Plane Defensive. The latest (and probably final) version can be played for free here. This was the end of a long line of prototypes that I playtested at TVGS's Interactive Showcase, which allowed members of the Troy community to try out locally-developed game. 

The premise was that the player would be controlling some kind of defensive platform, whose purpose was to deflect invaders from another dimension. To begin with, the platform would live in a two-dimensional plane and deflect invaders that came into it from the third dimension; I was thinking that some day I'd try to create a version where the platform would travel around our own space and deflect higher-dimensional foes.

Working on versions of this game taught me a lot about the differences in what you can expect from people familiar with video games, as opposed to people coming to play one for the first time. Many things that seemed obvious to me required a bit of education, like clicking and dragging objects around. I also saw first-hand how adapting a game to different platforms can be a challenge: for example, tying text to size in pixels is not great when you're developing on a low resolution laptop for high resolution test computers.

In terms of content, I went through a few separate conceptions of how to express that there is a way for the two-dimensional platform to peek into the third dimension. At first I mixed different cameras, but eventually I decided that the most convincing detector would simply point towards the projection of the high-dimensional being onto the play space - given enough directional detectors, the invaders can be triangulated and anticipated. I also played around with using stereo sounds for some of the challenges. The visuals were very "programmer art", and the sounds were simple generated effects.

You can see a full play-through of pretty much all of the versions, along with a more elaborate discussion of my process, in this video, part of a series called Devs Play, hosted by TVGS for a span of time. Enjoy!

Watercrawling resources in Ghosts of Saltmarsh

My previous sketch of what a watercrawling system might have was low on specifics. It will be helpful to look at some products that purport to help gamemasters run sea-faring adventures, and see how they fit within that framework. I'll start with Wizards of the Coast's Ghosts of Saltmarsh, because I am somewhat familiar with it due to using it for my current campaign.

The book starts with a very compelling description of the town of Saltmarsh, and the factions acting within it. The bulk of the book is a series of adventures adapted from previous editions, and Saltmarsh features in three of those - The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, Danger at Dunwater, and The Final Enemy - except that the dungeon master was tasked with using the tools in the AD&D 1st ed. Dungeon Master's Guide to generate it, while here it is provided for us. The rest of the adventures are only loosely tied to Saltmarsh, but they are all somewhat related to the sea or shore. The book ends with three appendices: the second and third contain the new monsters and treasures, respectively, featuring in the adapted adventures, while the first, titled "Of Ships and the Sea", is the most relevant to our discussion. It includes rules for treating ships essentially as NPCs, with several example stat blocks, deck diagrams, and descriptions; rules for ship-based combat, that integrate into the usual rules; various things for officers and crewmates to do, in and out of battle; and some ship upgrades.

Then it's off to elements that might feature in building your watercrawl, albeit only if you're on the open sea. First there is a restatement of the unspecialized travel rules from the 5th ed. DMG. While traveling, hazards can be rolled for at random on a uniform table, or arbitrarily chosen, with no explanation of how to design tables for keyed regions. Fogs and storms do appear on the table, and can slow down or pull a ship off course if poorly handled by the officers and crew, which is an interesting phenomenon for a watercrawl. Currents are then introduced, and can be taken advantage of, or fought against, although they are presented as phenomena near shore, and their relations to this shore - to or from, along, what causes them, etc - are not further elaborated. After a few magical variations are added to the mundane hazards, we get to monster encounter tables. Here, again, there is no real sense of how to tailor them to regions of the sea; instead, they are split up by challenge rating. Following this there are some tables for providing detail to ship encounters, and a somewhat more interesting section about islands: you can roll or choose their theme, and each theme allows for a variety of further structure, including characterization of the inhabitants and story hooks for engaging with them. This appendix ends with some specific, mapped out underwater locations that can be engaged with as dungeoncrawls, and related plot hooks leading to them.

This is all sparse enough, but what is really missing is guidance about putting all of this together to form a cohesive sea to crawl in. There is no real discussion of how to draw and scale a chart for sea voyages - the characters of the captain and the quartermaster can draw a map and improve navigation, respectively, but that doesn't help the DM manage the ship's location in the world. There is no sense of keying regions or otherwise taking the variety of sea environments into account. The closest to an existing charted open sea is about half of a 10-league hex of the Azure Sea with some shore and an island singled out, as part of a bigger, mostly terrestrial hex map. You would be hard pressed to flesh out the hook of the Sea Princes - an established pirate group attacking shipments to and from Saltmarsh, which attracted some of the attention from outside interests leading to important political developments - into an adventure charting their waters and rooting them out, unless you decided to make a linear trip with some minor rolls causing challenges, delays, and potential failures along the way.

To conclude: assuming you have learned how to chart out an open sea watercrawl, this book can help you figure out how to plug what you already know into the D&D 5e ruleset, and populate it with some interesting locales and adventures. It can help your players structure their ships and use them in battle, provides you with some issues they might run into, like rat infestations or low crew morale, and gives you tools to flesh out ships they might encounter, and islands they might randomly sail through. Beyond that, you are on your own.

Language in role-playing games

In the real world, language connects us, and yet keeps us apart. It does the same for characters in role-playing games. But the participants, the players and the gamemaster, usually speak the same language. What can in-game language do for you?

It can frustrate. If you use the rules as written for most versions of Dungeons & Dragons, the party's player characters won't be able to communicate with most fantastical creatures. If the default engagement you're expecting from your players with any sufficiently different entity is hack and slash, with some sneaking and running away when appropriate, then maybe that's just fine. But you could also harness this frustration into a challenge for both you and your players. If the NPCs can't speak to PCs, you have to express their physical reactions, which can help immerse both you and the players in the imaginary world. The players, in turn, have to come up with novel ways of overcoming the language barrier, adding non-verbal detail to their characters.

This can go beyond the possibility of occasionally parleying in a random encounter. Generally, it can be difficult to explain why the party of PCs has to swoop in and solve a problem that several existing, well developed societies cannot resolve; however, if two factions are separated by a language barrier, that only the party can bridge, this immediately creates a credible rationale. This happened early in the campaign I'm currently running: one PC spoke one faction's language, while another PC shared a language with one bilingual member of the second faction, leading to a big game of telephone, which in turn was a good way to add subterfuge, so that the players felt involved and hoodwinked at the same time. Paradoxically, this also cemented ties of friendship and trust that are holding the campaign together to this day.

Even when the party is not necessary for translation, multiple factions attempting to work together without sharing a common language makes any attempt at coordination an elaborate affair, potentially public, with serial translation as representatives speak. It's not necessary for you as the GM to repeat the same thing several times, but this process is a good place to have specific NPCs react to specific items of data as they are brought up in their language, and any PC who can understand more than one of the languages spoken has a distinct advantage in that regard. Again, this came up multiple times in my campaign.

Moving forward, the frustration that comes from having limited direct communication can result in a unique form of character growth. A player can try to use the time their character has spent with a society in order to have it learn the language. A system like RuneQuest allows that to happen directly; you can fudge with Dungeons & Dragons to get a similar result, especially if, like me, you dispensed with racial languages to the point where a character had a few extra "language slots" that have remained unused.

So language adds possibilities and interesting challenges, enables novel types of adventures, and can even guide you in directions to advance your character. So have at it!

The character sheet game in practice

To my surprise, since I posted it, I ran into two instances relevant to the character sheet game.

First, I was directed to The Old School Hack, which pares down the Red Box (BECMI Beginner) version of Dungeons & Dragons into a roleplaying game that is almost entirely focused on simple encounters addressed through what is on the character sheet. This is an RPG that is almost identical to its character sheet game.

Second, I ran into a video where Cody of Taking20, a Youtube channel focusing on D&D - and, until recently, Pathfinder - player and dungeon master advice, explains why he's abandoning PF's second edition. I suggest that you watch the 18-minute video to get the full picture, but within my framework, his problem can be expressed as the character sheet game for this version of PF not being deep enough to be interesting (it leads to simplistic and repetitive optimal strategies), but requiring so much work from both players and dungeon master (has so much "crunch") that he doesn't have time to enjoy the rest of the role-playing experience.

Playtesting Blood and Bronze

Earlier this year I picked up Blood & Bronze, a role-playing game set in what it terms a mythic Mesopotamia. Like RuneQuest's Glorantha, it's set in the bronze age, but based on an historical environment. I really liked the art, which is evocative of the Assyrian rooms in your favorite Near East museum exhibits, as well as the idea of a setting that might be close to depictions in the Hebrew Bible, for which my secular Jewish schooling in Israel has given me a taste.

Reading it made me want to try it out, so I decided to gather some players and learn it by playtest. I was just getting into my systems obsession phase, so I wanted to run things by the book as much as possible. I also chose to run for fellow Israeli Jews from overseas, because of their slightly different perspective on role-playing, and because I felt that they would have a similar affinity for the Biblical-adjacent setting.

So I read the core rulebook all the way through. I made up a simple premise: the players were some assortment of guards for a trade caravan between Sippar and Dur Kurigalzu, two historical cities in Mesopotamia which are represented in the game. This path would take the players through a region that has random encounters set up for it in the back of the book. That would allow me to have an open table where each week I could run an encounter, learning the system and slowly populating a cheat sheet (in Hebrew).

Unfortunately, it was very difficult to run those encounters. While the book was readable enough as a static explanation of the system, it was not particularly well-organized for use in play. Moreover, the "rulings not rules" paradigm taken from the OSR movement lead the authors to present far too many encounters whose resolution is not supported by the rules - for example, there are no rules for pack animals, even though you are able to capture some in the desert, and even though that would be an important part of travel. Mass combat rules were also unavailable; it felt clunky to simply play through a mass combat, and one of the encounters I rolled involved the player characters intervening in a fight between two factions with 10 and 12 active members, respectively. Not having good rules for initiative when more than two sides are involved didn't help, either. Overall the rulebook had no worked examples to show how the system plays in practice - it seemed to expect familiarity with an old school game system, into which these new rules could then be dropped.

It was an interesting challenge, nevertheless, because the system has some unique features. Like in D&D, B&B has you roll for six innate abilities, but they are peculiarly different. For example, one of the abilities is Guile, and having a high score at it makes your character good at both fooling people socially and sneaking around them physically. This challenge to the mind/body separation paradigm assumed by D&D's three physical and three mental abilities is worth considering when thinking of what innate abilities mean, or rather, what they do for us when we are creating a character. Some classes you can choose allow you to reroll some abilities, or add to them, or swap them around.

Abilities are used in two ways: actively, they are translated into d6 dice pools, with success defined as getting at least one 5-6; the total number of dice which turned up 5 or more is significant for the rate of success. Abilities can also be used passively, as a saving throw against attacks or hazards tied to the ability; in that case, you want to roll under your ability with a d20. A significant way the active roll is used is when attacking: there is a damage dice pool that is equal to the number of successes, and these dice depend on the weapon used; they explode on maximum for most weapons.

When fighting, there are a lot of choices you can make. If you're acting in melee, you can decide to force something to happen rather than cause damage; for example, you can state that you are trying to disarm your foe rather than hit them. If your attack roll has succeeded, the foe can decide whether to accept what you wanted to do, or take the damage. That is done after knowing how many successes occurred, but before rolling for damage, so there is a bit of a gamble in making such decisions.

Armor provides a saving-throw type defense. It always soaks up the damage if you choose to use it, but you have to roll under its rating or it is destroyed, a nod to the more fragile bronze equipment available in this setting. Shields simply reduce damage from hits. Ranged attacks can be mitigated or avoided using a save on another ability, Senses.

Overall, combat can potentially be very complicated, but short and deadly. Reminiscent of RuneQuest's, albeit with more elaborate dice combinations - RQ uses roll under percentile mechanics almost exclusively.

There are two magic subsystems, each corresponding to a special material, and to a class that may use it. The Mystic may use Lotus Magic, while the Seer may use Bone Sorceries. Lotus Magic is based on lotus powder, an addictive substance. All characters can take it to suffer/gain certain effects rolled on a table; the Mystic is unique in being able to avoid the effect, instead using a dose to cast one of a variety of spells. The encumbrance system is important for the effects of this substance, because addiction is treated mechanically as follows: you are always encumbered as if you're carrying as many doses as the maximum that you have ever carried. This means that you have to limit the amount of doses you take with you to cast spells while adventuring, lest you leave no room for anything else.

Bone salt, similarly, can be used by any character to generate special effects, which the Seer can ignore in favor of casting sorceries. While it isn't addictive like lotus powder, it poses its own risks: it's a highly unstable substance, so the more of it you carry, the higher the chance that it will explode and dissipate when you are incapacitated, leaving you high and dry for the rest of the adventure - and if you have too much of it on you, the spirits in the salt will take over your body until you are healed. These systems guarantee that magic is difficult, dangerous, and interesting in specific mechanical ways.

One feature that we did not get to check out while playtesting was advancement. Modern D&D gives you experience for killing monsters or for passing certain milestones. Older D&D gave experience predominantly for finding treasure. There is no rationale for this, considering that experience eventually leads to gaining levels, which improves the overall prowess of the character irrespective of how they gained the experience. B&B does have a rationale: the way you gain levels is by gathering up sufficient treasure to sacrifice to Ninlil, the Queen of No Court, who gives you her blessing, in the form of higher levels. So your money is XP in the sense that you spend it to gain levels, similar to buying training in RQ. Another way of gaining power is covenants with different entities, a subsystem that is only hinted at in the base rules, although examples exist in some of the adventure modules and on the developers` blog. Mixing covenants requires paying additional tribute to the ones you have not been faithful to, and may lead to your untimely demise. Overall, an elegant way of handling this important but often arbitrary part of the role-playing experience.

I really do like the bronze age as a technological and social level for role-playing in, and Mesopotamia as a setting. I hope to return to it soon, perhaps even with this system. If any of this sounds interesting, I would recommend picking up the free Player Compendium, which has the basic character creation rules and a description of the various classes, and should give you a better idea of what you're getting yourself into before you buy. Unfortunately, the blog has not been updated since September 2018, and I have not seen new products coming from this publisher or line since, so do not look for long-term support. However, the base rules are there, as are some adventure modules, so there is plenty to work with if you find a group in the right frame of mind. Let me know of your experiences - I am really curious to know how other people manage to run this at the table.

Constructive alienation in RPGs

Note: This is a translation and revision of a comment I made on an Israeli RPG theory group, asking about what rolling dice was for.

When discussing the character sheet game, I said that my personal bias was against elaborate character sheets and mechanics, in favor of exploring the imaginary world. On the other hand, when sketching out systems for watercrawling, I said that I do seek frameworks that capture parts of the world mechanically, even allowing for some procedural content generation. So which is it? Do or don't I like mechanics? Am I looking for more or fewer rules?

What I want is for mechanics and rules to do certain things for me. As a player, I want to immerse myself in the imaginary world, and have what mechanics I do use answer questions that I can't just think my way around, like whether my character can climb that wall or pilot this spaceship, or whether my character was able to keep its cover under the scrutiny of a counter-intelligence agent. As a gamemaster, I want the system to adjudicate situations fairly, and to allow me to fairly present parts of the world to the players.

By "fairness" I mean filtering some of the bias from my decision-making. If I don't have mechanics or rules to fall back on, all I have for rulings is what makes sense to me in the moment. Do I really, in the moment, feel like adding another run-in with the law, or do I just want the party to make it to the safehouse, for the next step in the adventure, which I just know will be really cool? Do I think this non-player character that the party is interrogating is going to budge under threat of death, or is she all in with the criminal underground? What gender is the captain of the freighter the party is meeting?

If I use an encounter table, then yes, maybe sometimes the party runs into more trouble than it had been expecting. If I allow the interrogating player to convert the death threat into a roll against the NPC's mental fortitude, then maybe this lets them drive a wedge into the criminal underground when my judgment said that it was premature. If I roll the gender of the captain on a table, then maybe it leads to romantic opportunities I wasn't considering, and that in the moment aren't all that important to me. But so what? This system allows the players to surprise me, and rewards all of us for improvising with a new situation that even I, the GM, did not have full control over in the moment. It is hubris of me to think that the judgment I have at the table, directly adjudicating decisions as they come up, is better than combining the will of the players with the sometimes unpredictable results of dice rolls engaging with a system representing the richer world that I have spent time synthesizing from my ideas and past player actions.

Aside from non-specific biases about how it would be interesting for me personally for any individual session to continue, some of my biases could have to do with what I feel about the different players. While they may be implicit, the players will pick up on them with time, and may not feel comfortable confronting me about them. This can have dire long-term consequences.

The fact that I have relinquished some control over the world to a known random distribution due to player action, inasmuch as it allows me to examine some of my biases about the world, as well as to avoid implicit bias between the players leaking into decisions about the world, leads to more trust from the players, which, as I argued in my discussion of the Monty Hall problem, is vital for allowing them to feel confident in engaging rationally with the imaginary challenges I am putting in front of them.

This is what I call constructive alienation: having done the work to build systems for generating content for the world, and for adjudicating some of the actions performed upon it, I put it at a remove, and we transition from a state of "the players don't know what will happen next because they can't read my mind and my biases" to "the players don't know what will happen next in a context that they have gotten some information about, because I don't know either - it depends on a dice roll that hasn't been made yet". It's a step I take towards the players in order to create a shared experience of a world I created with them.

There is still a lot of in-the-moment improvisation involved on my end, of course. The system can't, and shouldn't, capture all that happens - a lot of the fun in tabletop RPGs is in the open-endness. But falling back to system rather than to arbitrary decision makes for a more textured and collaborative imaginary world, and for deeper experiences therein.

Beneath the Rising - review

Premee Mohamed is an eldritch scientist beetle who writes speculative fiction. I first encountered her on the pages of Analog (Sep-Oct 2018), in Shepherd Moon, one of the many stories about commercial spaceflight that were published there that year. It touched me emotionally, so I sought the author on Twitter, to find out more about her, and when and where she'll be publishing more work. I discovered an entertaining and insightful science and fiction personality, who belongs on your feed. I am joking about the beetle, but I'm not always sure she is!

Her Beneath the Rising came out earlier this year. Like most good cosmic horror, it isn't just about Horrible Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and What Goes Wrong When Man Seeks Them Out Anyway, but about people, how they live their lives, and what they do to each other. Well, it's also not about "Man" - Mohamed's Herbert West is a woman, a teenage girl, in fact - Joanna "Johnny" Chambers, a child prodigy with rich white parents, and best/only friend of the protagonist, Nicholas "Nick" Prasad, who is supporting his poor Indo-Guyanese family on retail wages. This friendship, crossing class, ethnic, gender, and professional lines, is what holds the narrative together. As they learn more about the threat that Johnny has awakened, and race to stop it before it destroys the world, Nick and the reader also learn more about this relationship, as circumstances test it, and its past is slowly revealed.

Having read a lot of Clark Ashton Smith's fiction lately, it's refreshing to experience some cosmic horror that isn't revealed to be race realist as soon as the narrative crosses the ocean to Africa. Instead, we see a protagonist who transitions from a feeling of otherness resulting from being a visible minority in Canada, to a feeling of otherness due to being in an unfamiliar country, when he and Johnny cross over to Morocco, where it is she who is singled out as a foreigner just by the way she looks, even though she is the one who is fluent in the language and culture. These evolving terrestrial feelings of strain and dread complement the more cosmic, Lovecraftian tropes that appear throughout, all the way to a very emotional conclusion.

I enjoyed Beneath the Rising very much, and recommend that you get it. A sequel, A Broken Darkness, comes out next year, and is available for preorder.

Virtual reality and immersion - a reflection

In 2017 I was planning my annual trip to Israel, to see my family and friends there. I aimed for the Jewish fall holidays, because they corresponded to one local holiday off that I could take, and meant more of the people I would like to meet would be free. I realized that I could schedule things so that I can attend ICon, the big Israeli science fiction, fantasy, and role-playing game festival. I announced this on Facebook, and a friend asked "well, what will you be presenting?"

I hadn't considered presenting anything, but I realized that I definitely could. I had left academia about a year before, but still had some presentation chops, and I was working in virtual reality, which was really hot at the time, and often featured in genre fiction. So I decided to propose a talk comparing virtual reality in fiction and in, well, reality.

For recent advances in the field, while I needed to do some reading, I mostly could depend on the work I was doing for a living. For a more historical view, and references to fiction beyond my own favorites like William Gibson's Neuromancer or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, I read through Howard Rheingold's Virtual Reality, from 1991. This, in turn, lead me to The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster, Pygmalion's Spectacles, by Stanley G. Weinbaum, and other early works. To the written fiction I added a discussion of The Matrix and the Holodeck in Star Trek: The Next Generation. So there, I had a series of comparisons, as promised. But would that make for a good enough talk?

People with a better liberal arts education than mine probably already know that any type of non-fiction work is carried best by some kind of thesis statement. So I needed one. And as I read the fiction and delved into the history of the field, I came to realize something important: immersion didn't really require all of that technology, what was presaged in Cyberpunk literature, or what I was using at work. I could think back to spending the '90s on IRC, arguing with people across the world, feeling that I was together with them, even though it was just text going back and forth. I was reminded of BBSs, and MUDs, and text-parser games that were able to immerse people in worlds, together with others or alone, without high quality graphics or audio, not to mention VR headsets. I compared it to immersion when reading, or in the theater, both as an actor and as spectator.

So here was my thesis statement. I broke down immersion into three types, which I will credit properly if they are not my own invention, once I find my notes:

1. Authenticity - do you feel like you are in the virtual world?

1. Connection - do you feel involved in the goings on in the computer?

1. Belonging - do you feel part of a community?

and stated that the first is not necessary for the other two. In fact, people have felt a connection to virtual worlds and each other through computers for almost as long as there were interactive computers. Furthermore, the kind of control the user has over their immersion when not encased in a headset can be very important for a variety of use cases.

I gave this talk in Israel, in Hebrew. A few months later, the local IGDA chapter needed someone to substitute for a last-minute cancellation, and since I had already redone some of it in English for a small VR interest group, I expanded it and refocused on my thesis, concluding with a long example concerning Chile's Project Cybersyn, as documented in Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries. That talk was recorded, and you may watch it for a full treatment.

After that I didn't pick up the material for a while. Instead, a few months further into 2018, I went back to tabletop roleplaying, first as a player at conventions and with a local group, and then taking over said group as a dungeon master, with my own campaign. And as we have been forced to move online, I find myself returning to my thoughts from creating those presentations. It might be worth reflecting a bit more, especially if I can find more documentation of my research leading up to them. Immersion is one possible goal for role-playing, and I think this connects well with my thoughts on radio. The need to be able to control immersion is also relevant, especially when considering the importance of safety tools in role-playing games.

RuneQuest Classic - first impressions

I've been making my way through RuneQuest Classic, a reprint of the second edition of Chaosium's role-playing game set in Greg Stafford's Glorantha. Like many games of that era, it seems to be trying to do many things at once - in today's terms you could say that it has several competing creative agendas. One of them is immersing you in the shamanistic, bronze-age setting of Glorantha. So far it is hard to say whether it's successful, because of the dominance of the second agenda, led by designers Steve Perrin and Ray Turney: improving upon some shortcomings of Dungeons & Dragons, first published in 1974.

Did you find classes in D&D restrictive? In RuneQuest, there are no classes; instead, you generate a character who has attributes which lead to access to potential skills, some of which are martial or magical. To a certain extent, everyone can participate in fighting, casting spells, crafting items, and other aspects of adventuring in the world.

Did you not like how advancement in D&D was tied to experience points, which in turn were tied to finding treasure and killing monsters, with no relation between how you got the experience points and what you got better at doing? In RuneQuest, individual skills, as well as spells, cost money to learn and improve upon because you have to pay experts to teach and train you; in addition, using skills lets you roll to see whether you've improved in them, and there is a hard limit on how good you can become at a skill when you don't go out into the world to try it out. Using specific weapons, and specific ways of using them (say, attacking and parrying), are each considered skills, as well; although there is a default way of using half your skill in, say, one weapon to use a similar weapon you are not trained in.

Did you find D&D's combat unrealistic and insufficiently lethal? RuneQuest has an elaborate system with specific skills for individual weapons, complicated combat rounds where the timing of your strike depends on the type of strike. When you do strike, you can hit individual parts of the enemy, and you can easily kill someone just by hitting them hard enough in the head, measurably different than an attrition of hits in separate limbs. Whether the hit connects depends on the target defending and/or parrying the blow, with results on the weapons or shields involved; and shields, armor, and weapons can be worn down or destroyed in combat. Comments in the second edition suggest that melee combat, at least, was simulated based on the authors` experience in Society for Creative Anachronism mock battles, rather than D&D's simplified rules, scaled down from the statistics of mass combat. The fumble table (for really bad combat rolls) is populated with embarrassing situations that came up in SCA fights.

Did you find spellcasting in D&D, which involved choosing to prepare individual spells, which then disappear when used? RuneQuest... well, it bases your ability to cast spells on depleting a POW attribute, but there is also an INT attribute which decides how many different spells you can have ready to apply to begin with. I am not sure if it's really an improvement, but it's certainly different.

I have an adventure concept I'm eager to try out, so once I've read the book through and done some play-testing, I will be able to decide whether adventuring in Glorantha explicitly is captured well. If this RuneQuest doesn't work out, nor the more recent edition, I might decide to take up HeroQuest, Robin Laws` narrative system, as an alternative. In the meantime, King of Dragon Pass should allow me to get the vibe in a solo computerized environment.

Watercrawling in RPGS - a sketch

Premise

A party of players tells you "we've decided we're going to travel down the river instead of taking the King's road; we think we can make it through the rapids." Or they ask you "how long will it take us to cross the Atlantic?" Or they say "we've found Blackbeard's treasure map - how do we get to the island he's describing?" You want not only to have a specific answer prepared, or improvised on the spot - you want the answer to fit in with the rest of what the players know about the world, you want to support additional decisions they might make either on their way to their goal, or figure out what achieving their goal might lead to next, and you want to prepare for sessions in a way that will help you do this without overworking yourself. You need a watercrawl game structure.

The Alexandrian blog talks a lot about game structures, and why they're important for knowing what you need to prepare to make interesting sessions, and then how to apply what you prepared in-session in the best way. I can't say I've put a lot of it into practice, although I've tried. I've found some of his discussion of hexcrawling useful for creating interesting content as my players did some overland travel, but I did not use it to the furthest extent, and really didn't need to - this was a short trip to a very specific goal, it's not going to be a West Marches-type game with extensive recurring exploration. It was nice to generate random content that challenged me as a gamemaster while corresponding in general terms to how I felt the area they were traveling through would be like.

Earlier in my campaign, there was some water-based travel, and I didn't feel like I had good structure for it. I didn't know exactly how to deal with the players` choices, or even how to present them with options, so it ended up being very rail-roaded, in the sense that they were stuck on a ship that was traveling however it liked, and just happened to go where they (that is, me, my preparation) needed to go; or they essentially had to swim to specified areas. At best I could have been said to have provided them with a point-crawl, a network of specified places they could go with set paths between them, some of which involved going through water.

Here's a sketch for a structure that would help me do a better job in future campaigns. It will be geared more towards traditional, or even old-school play, where most of the information is generated and managed by the gamemaster, then discovered by the players as they engage with the world through their characters. I do hope more collaboratively-generated games would benefit, too.

Types of waterways

"Waterways" are areas mostly made up of water for traveling through. I am assuming that characters are not naturally aquatic, so they are starting and ending on dry land, and usually will want to remain dry, and therefore afloat, for most of their travel time. Here are some types of waterays in ascending complexity:

Rivers

Rivers are easy - they are essentially roads made of water. The simplest river is a wide waterway that you can go up and down, with banks that are easy for a row-boat to stop on. You can make it more complex by having a fast stream, add rapids or narrows for tricky or dangerous passage, connect them into a network of tributaries and splits, have them push into a marshy delta, or have the river end in an estuary in the sea, but your focus when planning can be as if you are looking at a graph of roadways which happen to be watery, and to which the price of entry is either excellent swimming or a vessel to ride or pilot. Rivers can interface with more complicated regions like marshes, lakes, and shores.

Lakes and marshes

Lakes and marshes are a bit more involved, but should still be easy to navigate. The periphery is visible (so we are not considering something like the Great Lakes), and you're unlikely to be lost on a clear day. Inclement weather can be avoided by just landing your vessel near the shore until it's cleared up. But if you do want to go somewhere in the lake when it's raining, or snowing, or very windy, a navigator and crew's skills can be tested to the limit. Nevertheless, in terms of planning, you would be focusing on points of interest, maybe deciding that some parts of the map are shallower or deeper, but mostly when deciding on approaches or paths.

Shores, estuaries, archipelagoes

Here we still expect landmarks to aid in navigation, but the open sea starts calling to us. Sudden streams and waves can lead us astray, and if the ship is shorebound, not meant for navigating out of sight of land, that can mean death. You can key hexes that contain the parts of the shore you're interested in, or the archipelago - it essentially becomes either the periphery of your land hexcrawl, or a hexcrawl over some range of the ocean.

The open sea or ocean

Here the characters, or whoever is in control of their vessel, need to use actual navigation, of the historical modern era, or of a magical sort. Sampling the soil and comparing it to your knowledge of the area can help in shallow waters, but for the most part you want a combination of compasses, astrolabes, and divination spells. You'll also want to use whatever methods of meteorological predictions you have, because weather can make or break your voyage, especially if you are sailing.

The open sea is not necessarily featureless; trade routes involve following big currents or consistent wind patterns, although, as in shorebound travel, inclement weather can lead you astray, and these features are not as dependable as dry land. There may also be known islands and lighthouses to show you that you have arrived near your goal, or to ward you off dangerous shoals.

You might also know of a destination, but little else, say from a pirate's journal: combining known coordinates and stellar navigation, you may know where you need to go at any point in time; but using known routes for part of the way can help you travel speedily and safely, while uncharted waters might lead to unexpected dangers and opportunities along the way.

Charting itself can be an important challenge, or even the goal of an adventure. This requires very good navigational skills on the part of the character, but also potentially the gamemaster and players.

Indeed, I don't know that I would be able to hone down open sea adventuring without actually looking into real navigation and charting. I have a few books on the topic, and will have to spend time on them to get a sense of how much of a task it would be. Hopefully it's possible to have a map with general coordinates and points of interest, and for you to easily keep the position point of the vessel on the map and how it relates to them. A kind of multiscale map, keying trade routes, trade winds, notable regions, then notable smaller areas, islands, and lighthouses, might be the way to go. The ship's coordinates might need to be calculated exactly, even if not all of the models require such precision to decide their effects.

The map also points to something else: open sea navigation pretty much requires that you decide the overall shape of your world. Is it a deformed oblate spheroid, like Earth? Is it a flat lozenge, like Greg Stafford's Glorantha? You have to decide, because much will be determined by it, not the least of which the coordinates you will use, and what potential edge cases they might lead you to.

Weather

Trips on water are significantly affected by the weather. Even rivers can overflow or dry up based on precipitation; and a storm can turn an easily navigable lake into a deathtrap. Winds and waves can lead you from a simpler area to a more complicated one, for which you might not be prepared. Some climates can turn the very water into solid hazards: frozen lakes and regions of the sea, and icebergs. You need to think about seasons, and how they affect weather in your world; the different climates and what they entail. How far you want to go - do you just want to have a random generation of daily weather, or correlated patterns requiring meticulous journals to account for?

Inclement weather can impede navigation, and unlike getting lost on land, water moves. You may find yourself in a place you weren't expecting even if you attempt to be still until the storm passes.

Conclusion

Adventuring by water, whether taking a barge down the river, exploring a lake where a secret treasure is rumored to be buried, or looking for a pirates` hoard in unchartered waters, is an interesting aspect of genre fiction, and something that role-players may be interested in exploring. Some day I would like to have a good framework for allowing them to do that. Until then, I have this sketch, and now you do, too.

Radio texts

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've decided I want to use Vincent McInerney's Writing for Radio to improve my role-playing craft, specifically describing the world so that it has substance in my players` theater of the mind.

The first chapter presents a philosophy of radio, and argues for choosing mindvisible (his term) descriptions over what is too abstract to be visualized, or built up to be confusing in the mind. The way it teaches this is through text comparison. First come a few where it is clear one is better than the other: a few obtuse metaphors compared with a vivid description of the sinking of the Titanic; a description of life in a concentration camp, already taken from a radio broadcast, compared a discussion of torture in Gibbon's The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire - the former is very evocative, while the latter takes too long to digest for someone being given a description in real time, and in any event discusses things too abstractly.

The bigger texts are then left for the reader/student to digest, compare, perhaps edit for radio: descriptions of a party in Charles Dickens` David Copperfield and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace; descriptions of torture and its consequences in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Wolfgang Langhoff's The Rubber Truncheon; and finally fantastical texts, William Blake's A Memorable Fancy, and Peter Redgrove's Being Beauteous. I worked through them a bit, read them aloud, recorded myself reading them. Mostly I've come to appreciate the craft of Dickens, Orwell, and Redgrove quite a bit. Orwell especially - I've read 1984 in the past, but it didn't really hit me just how visually and emotionally powerful his prose was there.

For texts that were not taken from the book, I'll be looking into two accounts of Chateaubriand's entry to Constantinople, which I myself translated from the French. A friend sent the sources to me a long while back. The first account is by Chateaubriand himself, and seems very literary, but not very easy on the mindview; Julien, his lieutenant, I think, is more pedestrian in his descriptions, and more evocative for all that.

Recording and re-recording these texts to hear how they sound out loud is an experience. My own voice is still hard on my ears. I have to wonder whether my players suffer from my poor enunciation and diction. Something to improve before I get to work on the content of my words, I suppose.

The character sheet game

Note: this is a revision of a post I made in an Israeli RPG theory group, incorporating some of the feedback and discussion there.

Let's perform the following thought exercise, using a role-playing game of your choice, which we'll just call "the RPG". Let's say it's a conventional enough RPG that it would normally feature a gamemaster-equivalent and 4 player-equivalents, which we'll call "the GM" and "the players", respectively.

We will attempt to convert it to a corresponding five-participant board game. In this game, which we'll call "the corresponding character sheet game", or "the character sheet game" for short, one player agrees to be the GM, while the other four are the players. Each player gets a character sheet taken from the RPG, and uses the RPG's rules to build a character. That's the main board, or boards - the four character sheets. They will contain names, attributes, skills, equipment, aspects, personality traits, statements of current health, weapons to fight with, spells to cast, bonds with other characters and NPCs, and so forth.

Now, during a session of the RPG, the character sheet would change in many ways: some resources would be depleted, new aspects taken up, old bonds severed, wounds accrued, experience points added, skills improved, and so forth. There are also a lot of things that would happen that would not change the character sheet directly: acting out "in-character", discussing strategy, asking questions about the environment, etc. 

To create the steps or actions of the character sheet game, we limit ourselves to "encounters": episodes of play that might create changes in the character sheet, while depending on features written in it. They might also change the world, and depend on other features of the world, but we are specifically ignoring that for this exercise. Events include battles, repartées (but only in games where this requires skill rolls or might allow for the use of spells, and where there's a specific writeable benefit), solving puzzles (again, only when this requires skills or might allow for a spell-based or other type of solution based on information in the character sheet, and will result in benefits), overcoming obstacles, finding treasure, even resting for a certain amount of time.

The GM's job is to create these encounters, and then manage their side of things; depending on the system, that might include rolling reactions, attacks, or treasures on a table. How the GM and the players negotiate about these encounters might depend on the GM and the RPG. If the RPG is a more collaborative game like Blades in the Dark or HeroQuest, it might be expected to be a bit more balanced; if it's D&D or games like it, perhaps the GM will decide unilaterally, consulting tables to make sure the encounter difficulties will allow for reasonable chances of survival.

The players, meanwhile, can decide on a variety of goals for themselves. Maybe it's to maximize treasure, or to improve the characters as much as possible within this system (using experience points to gain levels, or training and adventuring to increase skills), or just to survive as long as possible without reaching character death. Maybe there will be opposing goals: each player will want to be the last one standing. Character death might be treated in several ways: maybe the player is simply removed from the game, or maybe they just need to create a new character using the RPG's rules.

As the character sheet game is played, the players might find that there are character design strategies that prolong survival, or maximize the possibility of advancing, or the amount of treasure gained. And this lets us take a step to a different view: the RPG designers`.

The RPG designer can look at the character sheet game as a possible way people might engage with their original game. For example, it can be an easy view from which to look at how people design very specific, multi-level character builds, in some versions of D&D or Pathfinder, and try to deter it, by using ideas about the reduction of the strategic horizon. This is something you can see in AD&D 1st ed's treatment of magic users, which had to roll to randomly decide which spells they were able to learn, rather than simply being able to plan ahead all the way to 20th level how their career would look. On the contrary, a designer might want to encourage the engineering of character builds, play towards players who enjoy this aspect of the game. One way of looking at the infamous Traveller character generation rules (you could die before the game started!) is developing the character sheet game into a full-fledged experience before the player even encounters other participants.

I can only assume that this is not new, that designers look at their games like this. The character sheet is a common denominator between players with a variety of playstyles, and gaming groups with a variety of GM proclivities. Many players might spend a long time looking at character creation before they even get to play a "real" game. Solo games are also based on a similar idea - with the GM replaced with an oracle, a table on which the player rolls to get a prompt for the next encounter.

My personal bias is that I don't like spending time on the character sheet; I have most enjoyed playing games where the sheets are quick to generate and easy to enjoy playing with even without any kind of engineering, and where most of the interest lies in the space between the sheet's updates, in the exploration of the imaginary world; as a GM, I have a hard time focusing on the specifics of my players` sheets, instead consulting their history engaging with the imaginary world we've built together. 

It's a bias I need to overcome to help playtest other people's designs, and might hinder my ability to design a game of my own, should I ever choose to do so.