Impressions from TirCon 2021

Tir-na Nog'th Con 2021 took place over the last weekend, and I had quite a bit of fun attending a few game sessions and the closing ceremony - virtually, of course. It was my first opportunity to engage with this Amber Diceless-focused community in play. I had just finished reading through the system's core book, and have read the source material, Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, several times, though it has been a while.

I'll provide my initial impressions of the games. Only two of them were using the ADRPG system itself - of the other two, one used a unique system, while the other used an adaptation of Everway called Amberway.

While I'm going to be a bit critical of some games on a systemic level, I want to reiterate that it was a very enjoyable experience, and I do recommend trying all of these yourselves, if you have the chance. While I own copies of both of the non-ADRPG games I played, I have not had a chance to read them. I might do a more thorough review of them afterwards.

Alice Is Missing

Alice is Missing is a silent, text-message-based game played live. We played using a combination of Discord for the conversations and Roll20 for the more visual mechanics. The common premise to all sessions of the game is that a teenager in a small, decaying Northern California town has gone missing.  The player characters are closely associated with the missing Alice. Once they have found out about her disappearance, and as they try to find out what happened to her, the PCs are unable to meet in person, and this needs to be strictly enforced by whatever rationalizations needed until the end, to lend credence to the use of text messaging.

You, the players, get to choose from a few stock characters, with the facilitator playing as someone who's left town and is coming back for Christmas. I chose to play Dakota, Alice's best friend. Cards are drawn to decide certain initial details about Alice's disappearance, as well as prompts for the players to flesh out their PCs - this includes one secret each, that they should find a way to reveal to at least one other player by the end. There are then rounds of fleshing out relationships between the PCs and each other. Some stock non-player characters and locations are also given, and each player comes up with relations between those and the missing Alice. Having established this framework, each player is supposed to leave a voice message to Alice that would be found in her phone, based upon what's has been set up so far. Then the five location and five NPC cards, as well as other investigative cards, are shuffled and put aside.

The body of the game, which takes up 90 minutes of real time, is driven by an interesting card-based pacing mechanism. The players draw alternating cards which must be read only on the time written on them. The facilitator draws 90, and then the next player 80 and 40, the next 70 and 30, the next 60 and 20, and the last 50 and 10. Each of the cards indicates some other cards, usually a location, an NPC, or both, and a question that the player should answer, and then present to the rest of the players. Later cards will make use of the previous cards drawn, as well. The 90 minute card starts the timer ticking. Then the facilitator is supposed to start the group text, and texting, both private and public, can begin in earnest. Players are expected to talk as their PCs and describe what they are doing, and to incorporate the various clue cards that were drawn into their narrative - while making sure not to have any two PCs meet. The cards drawn determine how, and in one state, Alice is found. Finally, at the end of the 90 minutes, the voice messages are played, and the players can then talk about the game and decompress.

My experience of the game is very much like in an ongoing Vampire: the Masquerade live-action role-play I took part in for a few months, many years ago: the conversations, play-acting, and some of the narrative that evolved were pleasant enough, but I didn't really have a good sense of whether I was influencing anything that mattered. The mechanics felt both too tight - because they were on a timer and intervened significantly in the narrative - and also too loose - in that they did not to me seem to provide a good way of feeding back into the game meaningfully. I didn't feel that any of my decisions significantly affected how things were going, and Alice's end state was completely set by the cards rather than by anything we'd done.

Overall, I feel like I am far likelier to try and steal and/or adapt the pacing tool for my own purposes than to play this game again. If larping is more your style, this might be an interesting way of taking part in it without having to do so in person.

Amber Gothic

The first game I played with actual ADRPG mechanics, the premise was that I was one of several presumptive heirs to a mysterious distant cousin in a faraway land - specifically, Corwin, presumably the protagonist of the first five Amber novels, although my character wouldn't know that.

In mechanical terms, the players were expected to build characters with Human attributes, and a minor special power with a paired disadvantage. With a bit of thinking I made a pretty Lovecraftian protagonist: Elior Hayek, a Dartmouth junior studying architecture, who is running out of funds and could really use a windfall. He was able to accelerate his movement significantly for a few minutes at a time, at the expense of spending hours of real time too nauseated to move.

The game itself ran like a pretty reasonable mystery game, albeit without the usual expected skill rolls. The ancestral home was appropriately gothic and spooky, the locals and fellow players odd and interesting, with growing references to the source material. We ended on a typical Lovecraftian note, too, dying in the tentacles of an eldritch horror.

The concept was very nice, but ADRPG has a lot going against it as a medium for gothic investigative play. For starters, there's a reason that a typical campaign starts with an attribute auction in which players are encouraged to field points to position themselves at significant above-baseline-Amber rates that are strictly differentiated from each other - that's what makes adjudicating conflict both between PCs and between them and NPCs and environment challenges doable and exciting in play. Having everyone at Human level meant essentially doing freeform.

Another issue is the focus on private communications. A typical ADRPG campaign involves a lot of conflict and political jockeying between the player characters, starting with the player attribute auction, which cements some conflict, and then undergirded by the secret acquisition of advantage in secret, and conspiracies with the GM and the other players. This is death to an investigative convention game, where gathering up clues about the external mystery takes up so much effort already. I felt that even if we had wanted to play PCs who were suspicious of each other, and I think most of us did not, keeping the inter-player communications in the open would have made things much smoother.

I do feel like some Lovecraft-Amber mashup is possible, but it might be better to simply use a system like Call of Cthulhu, or one of the others that already incorporate investigation of the eldritch unknown, instead.

The Great Amber Bake-Off

Full disclosure: I'm almost certain that I entered this one by mistake. Due to how the conference was set up, it was decided that prospective players would vote for sessions they wanted to play in any individual slot, and then these votes will be taken into account when deciding how to allot them - and I think I voted wrong. I've never watched any of the Great British Bake-Off shows, and don't really know much about baking. However, when I found out that I'd been assigned to this game, I decided I'd give it my best.

Without giving too much away, the premise was that some of the best and unusual bakers in all of Shadow were brought together to compete in the style of the Great British Bake-Off, with a rising set of culinary challenges, some known in advance, others a surprise to all. Each player needed to come up with a character with baking as a side-attribute, rather than simply "someone good at baking". We were given a bit of an explanation of how Amberway works, and how it will be interpreted in the context of baking and cookery. Considering the red lentils I had soaking at the time, I came up with Jacob Samson, essentially a mashup of the Biblical Jacob and Samson, with Biblical verses inspiring his special cooking powers. I was especially thinking of Jacob using red lentil stew to buy off Esau's birthright, and Samson's riddle of the beehive in the lion's carcass. I rationalized that food was serious business in a Biblically-inspired Shadow, and a wise leader's culinary finesse needed would serve nicely in competing against the best bakers in all the realms. A Biblically-inspired character also meant I could make use of the one non-TV-American accent I feel comfortable using in English, the Israeli one. We ended up bonding in and out of character over the challenges we faced.

While the other players suggested existing baked goods based on their actual knowledge of the field, I either appropriated foods that wouldn't normally be served as cakes or cookies, or made things up from whole cloth. Since the rolls were based on how I approaches the situation rather than on actual cooking abilities, it went pretty well regardless - and honestly, I do want to try some of the things I imagined, they sound delicious. For this type of ultimately friendly conflict, whose purpose is to be judged better than another in front of NPCs, the Amberway system provided excellent flavor, with the playacting and not-quite-mechanically-based interactions with the NPCs serving as a wonderful substrate. I cannot recommend this game enough.

Excuse Me, Are We Related?

This game made the most use of ADRPG as a system and a setting. The premise of the core book is that the players will be playing the children of the princes and princesses of Amber, who were the main movers and shakers in the first five books. This scenario decides that these children of princes and princesses are mooching off Castle Amber and are generally underfoot, so the King sends some of them out to Shadow to find other fruits of royal indiscretion, bringing them in if they're useful, leaving them in place with some safety information if they like where they are, or possibly disposing of them if they're a threat. We were to use points to buy attributes in what was essentially a one-step auction, buy Pattern Imprint so that we could all travel Shadow, and otherwise buy most other things we would, within reason.

I chose to create Bella, daughter of Caine, with pretty even attribute points, no special items, familiars, or powers, Caine as a Family Friend, and some Good Stuff to spare. She had a bit of a love-hate relationship with her father but otherwise a cheerful demeanor to pretty much everyone.

Her cheerfulness lead her to bring the party of youngsters to their first lead to potential royal progeny, which turned out to be a dead end. I am bringing this up because this type of failure is important to provide a sense of realness and to the imaginary world. Subsequent attempts were more successful, although not without some close scrapes and even serious injuries. We got awarded points for each cousin brought back, two for whoever distinguished themselves. We put those into our attributes, but how much effect that had is not clear, due to the opacity of the ranking system.

Unlike with Amber Gothic, the measurable differences in ability among the PCs, as well as between them and the usual Shadow denizens, made every encounter interesting. How tired are we getting? Which of us is the most fitting to do this somewhat impossible thing we're attempting this time? How do we handle the limits of shape-shifting? How is a given level of Psyche combined with Pattern powers doing against this Logrus adept foe? The fact that we were spared an actual attribute auction, as well as the choice not to have secret communications, made cooperating very straightforward. An engaging, exciting and overall wholesome affair.

Conclusion

As I said, the convention was lovely, and I was extremely pleased to be able to participate in games that put some of what I'd read about diceless systems into practice. I do hope to write something more substantive about ADRPG and game design and practice without randomness, or at least actions adjudicated by dice, eventually, and I'm glad I won't only be leaning on text and theory for it.

Whose Score Is It Anyway - Blades in the Dark's heist structure in focus

Introduction

My last post was essentially a short series of complaints about Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, in light of a campaign I ran with it. As I promised in the prior post that lead to it, I intend to write a longer discussion of D&D 5E's character sheet game. But to do it justice, I want to compare it to at least two other systems that I am not only familiar with, but that I have at least played.

Thankfully, the creator of the Discord server where I helped playtest Bounty Hunter TTRPG, Pinkerton One-Shots Agency, hosts a variety of one-shots by several GMs, and is open to new people (like me!) setting up their own games. After having played the BHTTRPG playtest, and an unrelated Call of Cthulhu session, I pitched a one-shot, titled "Whose Score Is It Anyway?"

Premise

The idea was simple: since one of the most influential elements of Blades in the Dark is the heist structure, or the score, I would try to run a session with as little preliminary work as possible before getting to the starting point of this structure: the engagement roll. This would go the farthest into simulating the heist genre, putting the players and their characters in media res, and hopefully we could learn and gain experience with the rest of the necessary rules as we went along.

Normally, there would be some discussion of the crew sheet, choice of lair and starting district, and free-form in-character play and information gathering, before the score was settled upon. However, that is where my previous attempt at running BitD got stuck, so I decided to dispense with it. I would use the crew only as a starting point for choosing the specific score. I also ignored the score's district, treating Doskvol as a unit.

The written pitch was "zero prep", but I did have to make some preparation, if nothing else to build the pregenerated characters, as well as to refresh my memory of some of the mechanics, as it has been a while since I've finished reading the book, and a while longer since I've last attempted to run the game.

Session

After the players chose their characters from a list of pregens, in line with the idea of spending as little time as possible on thinking or making decisions before the score, I rolled a random crew type, and then I rolled randomly on the table for relevant scores, and asked the players to choose which of the three choices they liked the most. The crew rolled was Hawkers, purveyors of vice, and the chosen score involved dealing with a competing product on the market, which led us to conclude that the vice was illicit drugs.

Then I had them use the contacts in their character sheets (which I also generated randomly) to provide detail for the approach. One of the characters, a Slide, had a small-time drug dealer as an ally, and the player proactively claimed that they used to be supplied by the crew, but hasn't bought anything in some time, while nevertheless continuing to sell, suggesting they would make a good contact with the rival crew. Another player, a Hound, suggested that they could follow this contact on their next supply run. They decided that this is how they will sneak into the rivals` lair. That took care of the plan (stealth) and detail (point of entry).

Next I explained how the load-out system worked, and emphasized that specific items are chosen only during the score, rather than being predetermined. The characterization and details of the plan were enough to suggest how heavily they would be equipped for action, so this didn't take long.

Finally, we went over the engagement roll. One die for luck, and another die for using a weak spot of the target (a handoff point for the drugs). The roll went well, so I established that their Hound was well situated to watch over the contact entering what turned out to be the rival crew's manufacturing facility.

As for the rest of the session itself, suffice it to say that it started off sneaky enough, with slowly escalating levels of alarm, culminating in a gun fight and a blockbuster of an explosion, wrecking the warehouse and its surroundings. The characters came out wounded but alive, while their rivals were only able to keep half of their equipment and supplies. I then got some feedback from the players, and bid them farewell.

Things that worked

The session itself went well. Starting this way did save a lot of time before the action came in. The players took to the setting and to the properties of their characters. I was lenient in allowing them to retcon a few details when there was confusion, and I happily took advantage of immediate feedback and suggestions from one player, who has had a lot more experience with the game, to pull it off.

Despite the lack of mechanical team incentives, the shared challenge created a sense of camaraderie that I've seen when running D&D in a similar in media res situation. With time, the players got a hang of the main resolution mechanic, pushing oneself and accepting a devil's bargain, helping each other, the use of load and clocks, and so forth. The trappings of Doskvol also made themselves clear through play. 

Things I would do differently

I was hoping that we could learn more of the rules as we encountered them, but feedback suggests that I should have just had a very clear explanation of the main resolution mechanic, focusing on the fact that every character is able to try anything - even if they have zero "dots" in an action rating, they have a 25% chance to succeed with at most some complication, and as long as the player is aware of the amount of stress they're in, it's not that hard to push oneself or accept a devil's bargain to get up to 50%.

Less mechanically, It seems like I need to find a happier medium between freeform roleplaying and the strict laser focus on building on the engagement roll, because it did feel a bit jarring to some to just jump in this quickly.

An important aspect of Doskvol I forgot to mention, until someone had already committed to killing someone, is the Spirit Wardens and their swift response to death. It serves an important purpose in making the game less bloody. Fortunately, one of the players, whose character was a Whisper, stepped in and provided an excusable way to mitigate it, but it is a fundamental worldbuilding element whose ramifications I didn't pay enough attention to, not to mention explain to the players.

Another comment I got in feedback that I think is very poignant is that the possibility of flashbacks really needs to be brought up for new players in a more proactive fashion. It is one of the foundations of what allows the scores to run as they do when this game is played best.

I think districts add flavor to the scores and to the city at large, so I would roll a d12 to choose one.

Insights into the game

Since this was a one shot with no crew structure and no real ties to Experience Points, some of the incentives a full game would have were absent. For example, one incentive to attempt actions in a desperate position is that it leads to immediate XP gain. Similarly, some forms of characterization are encouraged by the means by which different playbooks gain XP, as well as how different crew sheets do.

The absence of an expected downtime period also meant that the Heat implications weren't visible, nor was there a significant mechanical connection with the vice as a tool for eliminating stress.

Mechanical shortcomings

The fact that the game is 1d6-based, but there are 7 playbooks, 4 starting builds for each playbook, 6 heritages, 7 backgrounds, 7 vices, 5 clever friends, and 8 starting special abilities, made quickly creating a few pregens more difficult than it should have been, and make for longer character creation in a normal game, as well. The text contradictorily suggests assigning the extra dots to attributes based on heritage and background, while also providing this in the quick build - if the backgrounds and vices were reduced to 6 each, and if there were a table for assigning attributes based on heritage and background, that would have improved things. There are 12 districts - if there were instead 11, and if it made sense for some of them to have more scores than others, then 2d6 would have made for a good way to roll for one.

Conclusion

I and the players had a good time with this concept. Some of the adjustments I will want to make to improve my next run of this nature are entirely on me, while others may require a bit of rules hacking to get right. I do recommend giving this type of experiment a shot if you've struggled to make sense of BitD. It will force you to reckon with the game's heist structure, which is a real breath of fresh air - at the expense of missing out on a lot of very interesting further structures. However, it might also make for a good start to a fully-fledged campaign, if you are willing to do some work to retroactively apply the results of your first score to the full system.

Tic-tac-toe RPG - CSG-driven design

My first attempt at applying the character sheet game leaned towards the analytical and explanatory, with a few suggestions for design. This time around, I'm going to apply it directly to designing a role-playing game. I'll start with one of the simplest games of all: Tic-tac-toe. For brevity, in line with the roles of the game, I will refer to the first player in the board game as X, and the second as O.

Tic-tac-toe is a very simple game. In fact, it's solved: if you're X, there are strategies to always win, or at least come to a draw, with any opponent; if you're O, there are strategies to come to a draw, regardless of what the opponent does. There are clearly better and worse moves to make at each point, and it's clearly better to be X.

What does it mean that the CSG of an RPG is based on Tic-tac-toe? The character sheet should be a Tic-tac-toe board. The player will act as one side of the game, while the encounters generated by the gamemaster will act as the opponent's moves. But that's not specific enough. We still need to make a few more decisions.

First, we need to decide whether the player is X or O. Being X suggests a game where players have the advantage, while being O instead suggests a very challenging road ahead just to break even.

Then, are we going to be differentiating characters when they're created? That is, are we starting the corresponding RPG with any mechanical differentiation between characters, or are they all going to be equivalent, outside of playacting the characters? The easiest way to differentiate the characters would be to move for X at character creation, either randomly - say, by numbering the squares in the the board and then rolling a ten-sided die to decide the move, rerolling on 10s - or by letting the player choose the first square. Using what we know about the original game, there are obvious better and worse choices, and random generation is going to create a significant variety in mechanical power. Which choice is better of course depends on whether the players are X or O. If the players are O, then it would make more sense for some kind of random generation to pick the first X, or for the GM to do so, just to be consistent with the idea that encounters correspond to X.

The next step is encounters. Who chooses the moves, and what happens as a result? How does the mechanical loop of an encounter look? If the player is to remain X or O throughout the game, then each encounter has to involve two moves. To avoid combinatorial explosion, let's say we decided to randomly generate characters with a first move of X, which is the player's move. An encounter has to involve a move, because there's nothing else going on in the character sheet, and we've defined encounters in the CSG as involving some kind of interaction with what's written there. And since the player is X and the encounters are O, and we already start with an X, we need to get back to it - so an encounter has to involve an O move followed by an X move. The O move can either be random or determined. Randomness is tricky - unlike in games where rolling high or low is better, here it's a matter of randomly choosing out of the remaining squares. It's clear what good or bad choices are, if there's still a distinction, but that's going to depend heavily on the current state of the board. Also, since there's nothing else going on in the sheet, there isn't anything else to help determine any probabilities of the next move. This leaves us with the option of an encounter simply determining a difficulty probability for making a good O move, rolling, and then making that choice. The player's following X move would probably have to be explicitly chosen - there is no other information in the sheet from which to make any non-arbitrary decisions, and therefore the player has to decide whether to try to win or break even, if that's possible, or whether to lose, if that's possible.

This brings us to the a wider look at gameplay, and the endgame. Tic-tac-toe is very short. At most there are going to be five X moves and four O moves, and since we've decided that the first X move is at character creation, and each encounter is an O move followed by an X move, at most there are going to be four mechanical encounters in the game before it ends; usually, fewer. So either the corresponding RPG will be short, or it'll involve a lot of playacting or other, non-mechanical experiences, interspersed with very rare encounters going through the CSG. Once the character sheet Tic-tac-toe ends, there can be no more CSG encounters. So the character's progression would be in mechanical stasis. One way to interpret that is to say that winning Tic-tac-toe is ascending to godhood, a draw is retirement, while losing is character death. Another is to talk about becoming famous, returning to ordinary life, or living on in infamy. Any of the three would require creating a new character in order to further engage with the mechanics of the game.

So that's a glance at the design space created by Tic-tac-toe as an RPG's CSG. We can see that it's extremely constraining, and doesn't allow for interesting choices, even at game start, much less later. It also limits the length of play, because of how short the CSG is. Honestly, it's hard for me to imagine a group starting an RPG with this CSG without hacking it to break some of Tic-tac-toe's rules. For example, allowing a healing mechanic to undo moves would significantly change the possible interpretations of the CSG in an RPG context, and prolong potential play indefinitely - at the expense of reducing how much the current state of the CSG reflects the history of the character.

Nevertheless, I hope that this sketch shows how to use a board game as a starting point for an RPG through the CSG framework, and what that entails. I can't wait to see more interesting games come out of it!

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.

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.

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.