The Century Logo is one of these things that I’ve been storing in plain sight from day one. One of those that aren’t hard to figure out if you just take a look. And a lot of the players have paid the attention, so it’s been a nice detail here and there. It has been serving as a roadmap of the three big things that have been central themes of the game.  That thing above there is the original version. With everything still intact.

It took quite  a while to get it right. Even if I knew beforehand what elements I wanted in the picture, getting them to look just right was a daunting task. The idea was to make the logo look inconspicuous. Sort of “ok, there’s a C with some clock hands and mystic mumbo jumbo in it” so that the individual elements would get ignored beforehand. The only thing that was more or less random was the font used for the C (which ended up being some font I found on dafont.com and then edited it a lot to fit the spherical shape I needed for the design). But the symbols on the background hold a specific meaning in the game and the clock hands are something I’ve used in old illustrations, creating a reference link to those in the process.

The next thing about it is the fact that it’s meant to evolve over the course of the campaign to reflect what’s happening. The variation stems from the way the player characters mess up with the given premise. And since Century is a semi-historical game, with the first game getting set at the Titanic, the first thing that was doomed to get messed with was the timeline. Creating an alternate history for the campaign (ok, to be exact, the alternate history spans a lot backwards, but that’s something the players had no clue of, yet). It took them some 15 games to really mess up historical facts for the first time. They saved Lenin’s life by mystic means, killed Stalin the same night. Made a nice ripple effect that still continues to the present day of the game’s timeline. The logo was updated to reflect this.

And, for a good long while, the focus was on the timeline-aspect of the whole thing, changing history etc. Logo looked so that things were bleeding out. Time was fluid, so to speak. And the players were enjoying doing this. Farking up with history while serving a corporation that was clearly evil. At least that’s what everything kept spelling out. There were people like “Mammon” or “Lucifer” working for the corporation. And the enemies had names like The Choir. And it was all getting very creepy.

But what’s in a name or two? And what’s this thing about there not being any languages in the world anyway? How can we mess our employers up? Why are we called Operatives? Why is there something called The Board there that dictates the actions of Gogam? And Gogam is Magog, spelled backwards, clearly evil corporation if you’ve ever seen one!

Player characters mess up their employer. First by shooting a couple of the big bosses in the head. And then just really ruining everything for them. And in the process destroying the thing that’s been making the world odd – lack of languages. A tower falls, suddenly there’s different languages in the world. (and from everyone’s perspective except the Operatives, this has always been the situation)

So, focus shifts again. This was a bit more an abstract one. Focusing on languages and the utter lack of meaning behind the words that you’ve assumed to hold so much relevance. (The Board, Gogam, Operatives, Seven, Choir, all that) Sort of a deconstruction happening left and right. Structures falling apart (if I had had more foresight, I would have made a tower part of the century logo beforehand and have it shattered as well at this point.), the realization of a greater universe where the stuff you’ve been doing is quite harmless. In comparison to what could have been. And now is turning out to be. The letter C, shattered in the logo, the end of things spelling out what they are.

And now we’re moving towards the final era. Focus shifts towards the third item on the logo. And without explaining further, I’ll just end this post with a picture of it. You’ll figure it out.

Of all the visual snapshots that get etched in my mind during my days, I think this is the one I will remember the best. A lone, solemn birch guarding the crops. A straight, white tree, standing on a rocky island amidst the golden sea of wheat. A sentinel swaying with the winds instead of breaking from them or ignoring their power. Clear blue skies above and behind as a painting-like backdrop. Quite majestic a sight. And approaching really really fast. Well, from my perspective.

They tell us that the people of days gone by thought that the birch represents a connection between the land of the dead and our world. That old birches get their white bark from the bones of the deceased. And that this belief still holds true in the modern age of rationality. The story goes so that when the first sailors who crossed the Great Divide and reached the New World, had seen the wall of white trees, had thought their lives had ended on the way through the great storm. And that they had reached afterlife.

The things that stick to your mind from classes.

In my defense I have state that I’m not a slacker. I just don’t always agree with the methodical way of teaching we’re presented with. I like books, adore all sorts of stories. But can’t just get my head around the whole “magic can be presented in formulas and calculations” thing and can’t be bothered to memorize the mathematics. And that’s probably why this huge snake made out of granite, with eyes of fire and a temper to match, managed to fling me across the wheat field and at that the only birch standing there.

Now, as my field of vision is more and more filled with the impending birchness, there are two surprisingly clear thoughts on my mind. First is that I might be a total sucker when it comes to playing the knight in shining armor to girls who aren’t exactly damsels in distress, and how I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t spent the better half of this semester ogling the fair Alissa (she’s one of the popular ones) instead of paying attention at classes. And the second thing… for a soulless elemental entity, that thing has a really good aim.

Ouch.

Where do we go from there? What got us there? What’s really important, anyways?

Been looking up the old College of War stuff on my computer. Character sheets, mechanics, themes, names. Lots of things to look and consider before going to work on the next one. Really.

The campaign started out as a simple d20 variant fantasy homebrew with IOU flavoring. A silly world, with a strange College, where the player characters were studying to become magicians. This was years before Harry Potter, mind you. A College with the idea “what would a school be like if the world was epic and magic was commonplace.” And boy, did it turn out weird. Parodies after parodies, week after week, for a good year or two. The first campaign ended. But we returned to the world several times. After a few ends of the world, the setting has changed a lot. Toned down on the funny, explored the underlying ideas. The school hasn’t been the focus in a long while.

The definitive College of War campaign was a long one about a group of young Fieon (France expy) nobles finding their place in the world and eventually reshaping it by returning one of the moons to the sky. Lot of the imagery and feeling came from the movie Le pacte des loups (as well as half the family names). And as you can expect, it didn’t have anything to do with the school from the title (it did make a cameo appearance by the end of the game, but that was it), and was really something else than a light-hearted comedy romp. And it’s been going to directions from there.

The latest campaign of CoW I ran got cut mid-way because of a player leaving the country. It is pretty much the thing I’m basing my future work on – There’s a New Continent on the other side of the world. The three major kingdoms have established colonies there. There is a new College of War there, that pretty much mimics and mirrors the one in the Old World. It’s one part colonial America (frontier in the west / foothold in the east), one part Finland from the Swedish rule era, one part <insert baltic country here> under Russian rule. There’s armies, conspiracies, cults. The unease with the natives. There’s themes of obedience, independence, duty and devotion to be found. With everything like this in the air, the atmosphere could be very dark. But the truth is, life goes on as usual and for most part it’s quite light-hearted.

One of the defining things still is high magic, to the point of “sufficiently advanced magic can be viewed as technology”. There’s emergent magical transhumanism going on – magic used to build constructs, such as golems, is getting “commonplace” and the idea of moving one’s soul to a non-human body is out there, even if no-one’s been successful with it yet. Combat has moved from knights in armor to the more agile combatant (if a beginner mage can propel an enchanted rock at the speed of a bullet, then a plate mail armor is more a burden than a blessing on the field against one). Leaps have been taken in areas such as medicine. And there is a lot of flair in everything.

The west is still unexplored. The colonies are not at full peace with each other. The noble families don’t really find each other the best of friends. Lots of fertile ground for teen/tween drama. Yeah. I’m one of those people who love a good romance (gone wrong, just think of Romeo+Juliet). University life the way it should be in a fantasy setting. Whatever that means. Want to go hunt for the legendary beast of the Ash Hills? There’s extra credit waiting to happen right there. And it would make a hell of an impression to that girl you’ve been pining over.

And when the characters walk out there, it should feel like it feels when I walk into the woods here. There should be something mystical there, a deeper connection with life and nature, that just can’t be put into science, no matter how you try. Something out there. Something about that birch tree standing there. Seasons doing their thing. That sort of reflection of where I come from. And of course there’s the giant intelligent elemental snakes who just want to use you for a baseball.

In a way, it’s come a full circle. Taking account from everything that has happened so-far, but putting it back into the original milieu of University environment. Back where we started, without forgetting any of the stuff that happened on the way here.

(The next run of CoW will start December 12th, 2012)

Alissa, the girl mentioned in the fluff. An elf-blooded student at the College. Possible iconic example character for the game text. Of the privileged, wealthy, magical nobility type.

]]> http://www.the-cow.net/2011/12/on-the-majesty-of-the-birch/feed/ 0 http://www.the-cow.net/2011/10/the-slow-game/ http://www.the-cow.net/2011/10/the-slow-game/#comments Mon, 10 Oct 2011 23:16:04 +0000 Alvan http://www.the-cow.net/?p=895 Some mood text for a campaign I’d love to run one day. Cthulhutech-y enhanced humans -thingy.

The Slow Game

The dust has cleared. I approach the officer in charge.

“What just happened? Captain Adams? Sir?”

“We won. That’s what.”

“But that’s a dozen of our men down, two seriously injured!”

“Son, have you ever encountered a precog before? Dozen scratched soldiers is a small price to pay to catch something that can see possible futures.”

I look at the old guy. Seen him from afar before, but never actually spoke to him. Trimmed goatee, old army greatcoat, some high-tech mesh armor underneath. He’s probably in his 40s, but something in his eyes make him look much, much older. I clear my throat and reply as firmly as I can.

“No sir. I was just transferred from Winterhampton unit. Never been in combat with anything beyond clearance seven. Precogs are a bit above what they’re willing to tell me, sir. But we didn’t catch him. He ran and our men got injured by freak accidents.”

The man looks at me with a crooked, mischievous smile on his face.

“You do know how they work, right? The basics?”

“Well, I’ve heard the stories. They can see the consequences of their actions and choose the one route that brings them the best outcome. That’s why we can’t catch them. That’s the whole point.”

“I’ve caught nine. This one makes it an even ten.”

“So, are you a future-glimpser as well, or how on Earth do you do it? Takes one to know one?”

“Boy, do I look like a twitchy freak who spends his every moment considering the consequence of his every action. I’m a human just like you and me and him and him and … ok, honestly, I think she’s a clearance two with those legs of her, they just can’t be human. Damn. But, to answer your question. Human. No powers.”

“Then how?”

“The basic thing to remember with any clearance four or higher is that their anomalies cause them to be pretty fried in the brain department. The need to survive and stay alive, the paranoia, those things take over when they’re threatened. With a temporal-causality enhanced perspective, the freak can see the multitude of paths their actions cause. And go through them, one by one, until they find one that leads them to safety. Just like it did today. It knew it had to come here to pick up the ransom money, but it also knew it was a trap. It’s known for hours before it ever came here. The really powerful ones can see their actions’ consequences to up to two days into the future, but with a punk like this, and judging from the results, I’m thinking some seven to ten hours.”

“The results?”

“He came in knowing the flaw in our trap. He was in and out just the way I wanted. If he had been a more powerful precog who could have seen twelve hours or further into the future, he wouldn’t have come. Or would have taken a different corridor, even if it had meant going into actual battle with my men.”

“How so?”

“It was filled with nice little cloud of nanites. They’ll flood his body with sleep-inducing chemicals in twelve hours that’ll keep him under for good full day. And start sending a homing signal while he’s dreaming away. We’ll have a good 4 hour window of picking him up and locking him away for good. It’s a slow game that works so well against these buggers, even if it means a few sacrifices along the way. Of course, my men know nothing of how the plan works so that they just follow orders.”

I smile and return from the scenario in my mind to the present day.

So the thing is a double-trap.

Sometimes it pays to play it safe and secure. Take it nice and slow. Think out side the box. Considering to return back after the theft, disguising myself as a trooper and asking questions, was very much worth it. I’ll have to re-think my course of action.

—

It’s been two weeks since the ransom drop incident. Killed a man there. Thought it would be easier after running through the scenario in my head a few times. Wasn’t. Haven’t been able to sleep without pills since. Going to bed at a warehouse hideout. Checking the morning just in case.

Can’t see anything in my future. Just the feeling of being restrained and hearing some unfamiliar voice telling me that “Sometimes it’s worth waiting for a very long time before taking action. The longer we wait, the harder it becomes for you to form a link between what you did and what effects it causes. And the harder that becomes, the more unlikely it is that you can precog it. And that’s where I come in. I design the next level of the trap, the level that works even if Captain Adams’ plan fails. Now just relax and get ready to be transported back into a holding facility…”

Frankly, it doesn’t matter if I’ve played it or not – the issues brought into play (ha!) are not unique to Rage, and apply to whole cartload of other games too. I’m just grabbing a muse and running with it, wrongly.

I remember when Rage was announced. It was very iD. Technical breakthroughs, innovations and pipelines that caress a hurting artist and make his/her life easier with megatextures and whatnot. Easier to build and paint massive, detailed and gorgeous worlds. That’s very, very important, in fact – if the toolchain bogs artists down, it bogs down the content. Period. It’s bloody hard to get the vision across and delivered if the tools hold you back, so it easily brings up the easy choice of cutting down on vision instead and keeping the coders busy on features instead of tools. Very valid from business perspective in a culture where the management walks down the hallways holding a shotgun in hand, in case of obstructive requests threatening the top-down task delegation and direct profit potential on screens.

It’s very linear game, that, played from a single person perspective. It has all the necessary savepoints and map levels laid out in advance. Open world it ain’t, not in most cases — few examples exist, and they’ve nailed it down. Valve and Thatgamecompany come to mind on top of their own game, doing their own thing by daring to fail internally when trying and pushing ideas across. No, I have no idea what the studio culture and working ways are at iD, but keep in mind I’m not talking about Rage or iD solely. This is widespread, so I’m happily generalizing and blaming everyone equally. Generally speaking.

Back to Rage. Yes. The review gives it the respect and merit for how much of an visual experience it is. Then comes the bad news that don’t surprise anyone anymore, except by their directness and frankness. We need painful and uncomfortable feedback like this, in the industry where every review is suspect to suspicion over advertisement dollars shining through on the same review site. We must be held accountable as well, not just reviewers.

Elsewhere, someone described how inviting and lush the world in Rage looks, how it looks like a living and breathing thing. From afar, I think he added. Invites to get closer and immerse oneself into the world, he continued. Haven’t heard more from him.

Yes, well. It certainly does have just about perfectly executed art direction and fistful of hard-ass visual styles reminding us of Mad Max and Fallouts and other favourites.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m an artist and thrive for graphical quality, but for the sake of all things dear and holy to the audience, it has to have the function and the reason. It must be the effect after a cause.

When I look at the world of Rage from graphical standpoint, yes, it’s bloody pretty. It runs at constant 60 frames per second on the 360 and flows like molten butter. Carmack is insane. Now here’s the kicker for me: I’d love to think of a world like that as the canvas for everything that really makes the world breathe. Canvas where the final color comes from creatures inhabiting it, each tangled in the sprawling storyline and cross-connections and interactions driving events and agreements and disagreements and love and war. Stuff you could potentially write a book about after playing through and running into plot twists and characters that develop, while the game engine churns out richly detailed lushness at natural flow to support the depth. Something to sink into.

At this point I should be following some rules of writing and offering clever counterpoints and fresh ideas to rectify stuff I present as issues. Yes, well..

… I draw blank, sorry.

I do have a thought about reviews and their relationship with the industry, though.

Reviews hold a power to potentially echo back into development of future titles, all the way to the initial business level when the project proposal is under scrutiny and compared to similar predecessors. If they’re skewed, it all rolls slowly down backwards.

I fear that in the future game projects include a sub-plan entitled “reviews” under master marketing plan, where key high-volume reviews are designed to highlight the game features that are most cost-effective to implement, made to match and support those tailored reviews. All laid out in advance, calculated and monetized. Games become graphical technological featurepiles that need to be separately gamified. Is that where the mainstream high-dollar triple-a industry is headed? Gamification is already a standard term, driving investors into tears of joy and older developers into tears of rage. Sorry, I meant discomfort. Monetization is also an already established keyword in game development. They’re mostly coming up when pitching games to investors, and I understand the need for common language of $$ especially when investors are coming from outside the industry, but when they really do sneak their way up into game designs themselves, it becomes a bit creepy for many.

We love doing games for all the potential they hold as we see them blossom and grow on our screens during development, not what they often end up as. After a project is done, it’s usually remembered as a series of war stories over a pint of beer. I’m sure artists, animators, coders, sound designers and leads at iD loved to see their vision shine, and they certainly deserve all the possible credit for their work. It sure is beautiful. I just worry about what gets left behind.

I mean to say, ahem, damn. Yes. This is how narrative and being-there experience and involvement and all the other once-vapour golden ideas will be done. By recognizing the need for them, and then shoveling resources at them like it was nobody elses business, because it’s not impossible unless you keep blindly listening to grey-faced suits who project future core targets based on what has sold in the past five years. Don’t look there. Future ain’t in the past, unless you take into account other mediums and forms of storytelling. Like, I don’t know, books or television series with people in them. Possibly interacting with each other. Ok, that was slightly on the trolling side but how else can it be said?

I’ve often heard how a properly done AI companion could feel like a buddy on coop-mode at your side. Watching the AI / NPC gameplay video, that goes right down the drain. Know why? Your buddy is never present.

Let me open that one.
When your best mate evar is playing alongside with you, you see only his actions and the resulting effects. Solved puzzles, blown guard towers, whatnot. What the videogame and the mission requires. However, when you turn to look at the guy or the gal you’ve spent your childhood with, falling in sync from trees and hitting the curb face first while barreling downhill with crap bicycles, you don’t see him/her. Just a badly animated videogame character that slides around and repeats the videogame motions.
No visual connection or context to tie with, nor personality shining through. Your bud can do just what the player character is limited to do, and that’s always in minority compared to AI characters who need to connect with at least the context of the story and dialogue when interacting with the player. Player model, who incidentally, stands proud and motionless like a big tree, deferred light glimmering in his normalmaps.
Point being, you can’t properly connect with a stiff slidey videogame construct that has less naturality to its movements than an average kitchen appliance.

Your NPC buddy AI companion thing is not limited, though. As in the gameplay video, he/she can project very human traits — constructed, of course, but if they’re triggered by the surroundings and situation, they can become human. They become something player can relate with. Almost human reactions, if you may. If there’s an underlying structure and balance between predictability and unpredictability, they start to give off a whiff of a personality behind the actions.

Of course, there are logistics underneath. Building personality through animation, context sensitivity, AI, sound design, dialogue and all the other cogwheels of the machine is a massive task and there’s no sense nor chance to populate whole game world with such characters. It’d be awfully nice, of course, but then designers and writers would break their heads trying to make the key characters stand out. The mass and weight of it just needs to be recognized and placed accordingly in the game, to have it impact the world and story.

In regular co-op, as fun and blast it may be, your best bud fighting alongside you isn’t going to humor you by sticking his head into a barrel and testing the echo for the fun of it. That’s not acting out in a world together. It’s more akin to perhaps scooting radiocontrolled cars around a track together. Bloody good fun, yes, but try and stick that into a narrative context and something’s gonna be missing, unless just watching events unfold from synchronized actions counts. Sometimes it does, but even then it has to be done from the get go with that in mind without shooting for what can’t be done. Recognizing the means, etc.

Of course, getting back to the gameplay video, nothing’s done right until it’s in the hands of everyone and receiving actual love and tears. So far there’s only a glimpse of gameplay video, and cynicism is easy. I for one try and be optimistic about this, as I take this bloody personally. Now, that camera and some of the strained sort of animation.. Ah, can’t have everything in one go, can I?

0. Have a session just for creating the characters and the campaign.

Get together just to talk about what you will be wanting from the game before you run it. Create characters, create everything. Just spend time talking about what you’re doing without hurrying to play on the same evening you’re planning. It will be worth it to a) take the time to plan properly and b) have that time between character creation and the first game.

1. Speak your mind and hear what they’re saying

The first rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. But when it comes to tabletop gaming, being honest about your vision and communicating it to the players, doesn’t necessarily hurt. At base level this is stuff like saying “I’m running a scifi campaign so no elves”. But being specific about what you’re thinking of and why is a great way to go about. Even if you go down to gritty details with “well, I’m thinking that in this game you’ll start off as the trusted men of the king, but somewhere, maybe about halfway through the campaign you will betray him or he will betray you and you’ll end up on the opposite sides. And the end will be focused on that” it won’t hurt. Just as long as if you leave enough space for people to maneuver in. Knowing the road that will be ahead will prepare everyone for the journey, even if it means giving up some of the twists. If the players know that it will eventually be a game about a zombie apocalypse, they’ll know to set up relationships with NPCs in ways that are fruitful for the sudden but inevitable twist in the genre.

And as well as you being honest with them, you should be open to their suggestions and ideas – let them bring to the table what they think is cool and support that. Let the players share with you what they would like from the game and work towards a consensus that you can all sign on. If there are some parts of your game that you absolutely want to have in it, tell that to them. But give them the same right – if one of them is adamant on having some medical drama in your zombie game, let him. It’s not that much to ask, is it?

We did this. My original vision was a game set in the present about criminals with cool cars and motorbikes running away from something. It ended up being set in the 80s (the era wasn’t crucial to my vision) and the players being less criminals and more just people ending up in the bad situation. But it was still about running away in cool cars. The reason for all this is that because we’re talking about a few sessions, each being only a couple of hours of gaming, there is just no time to include everything. If everyone knows what’s up, everyone can play along.

And of course, when starting the game you won’t know everything. But tell them what you know and let them tell you what you want, and then start running the game like you were originally talking.

The idea of being open about the game was first introduced to me by the Jeep guys, so credit for this goes there.

2. Set a theme and a mood

Sort of related to the previous one as this is things that you should really talk about openly. One of the first things I said about the game was that “this game will be about running away and freedom” – it’s a simple enough concept that translates well to different sort of things, offering something to focus on without limiting things too much. Sure, it means this won’t be the game where the focus will on a happy, ever-lasting marriage. (Unless you’re running away from something and ending up there in the end). When running a focused game, having a strong central theme to work with is quite important and enjoyable.

And again, bouncing the ball back to the players, “How will your character fit in this theme? How will he explore it?” And we end up with three interesting stories that are different. We have an undercover cop stuck between the two worlds, constricted by both, a woman in a loveless marriage with a cartel sub-boss and a guy who is just doing what people expect without really knowing what he wants to do. From there it’s easy to move forward.

Then there’s another important question: Mood. Are we talking Film Noir? Romantic Comedy? Also a lot of related questions arise from thinking about what the game should feel like… What’s the level of violence/sexuality people are comfortable with? How gritty should it be? How realistic? Are we talking about a Hollywood action movie when it comes to a gunfight or more what would happen if you drew a gun in downtown L.A.? Will everything feel desperate or is there hope? Is the metal in the world more chrome or rust? Again, it’s a good thing for everyone to know what sort of a thing they’re playing.

Think theme and mood were first introduced to me in White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade. Even if I never used them to good effect when playing that game. To be honest, that’s one game that is full of great ideas that no-one ever used.

3. Set the pace and keep running

This is something I learned from Primetime Adventures and have been using for a good while with success every time. Know beforehand how many games you will be playing and where the focus of each game session will be.

For this game it meant that one of the questions we answered on our character creation session was “how many games will we be playing this thing for?” My suggestion was really either seven or five. With three players, seven sessions would have meant four that were focused on the “plot” and three that were spotlight sessions (will get back on that in a moment), with five, it meant two plot, three spotlights. We went for the latter option, with the plot games serving as “bookends”, being the first and the last game, and each of the middle three would be focusing on one of the characters.

I use the spotlight system without a shame these days in pretty much most of the mini-campaigns I run, be they D&D or freeform. Quickly summarized it means that you, as a player, get one game session in the campaign where it is all about your character and his central issue. It will pretty much be the focal point of his story. Everyone knows who is on the spotlight, and for that session will be playing to enforce that part of the story. It does not mean that if it’s not your spotlight, you won’t get screen time. Just that the focus will be on the question of the spotlight. “Am I a good cop or a bad cop?”, for example.

In the game I’m running we’re using a three-tiered spotlight system. Each player has one game where their character is at priority (rating 3), the spotlight game. They also have two games where their plot is at “secondary” level (rating 2), and two where their character’s issues is put on a back burner (rating 1).

This translates to an individual pace for each of the stories of the game. A pattern of “2 1 1 2 3″ for example means that the character’s issue will be there at the beginning, then go on hibernation for a couple of games and then make its way back into the last game, climaxing in the very last one. “1 2 3 2 1″ on the other hand means something that will be directly in focus on the 3rd game, but will be set up during the previous one, and the fallout from the climax will be seen in the fourth. And so on.

In one game session one player might have a game with a rating of 3, one with rating of 2 and one with a 1, which means that the first player will be on the focus, but the issues of the second player’s character should show through a bit. Bit of foreshadowing or something. And the third player will play his character maybe as a foil or to support some decisions or make the choices tougher for the other two. Whatever suits the story.

The players know when their issues are on the focus, so they don’t have to worry about not getting their say in the matters. Everyone has their moment to shine and everyone knows what to support and which questions to raise when needed.

…

Looks like I will have to write a second blog post somewhere in the near future about the actual things we do in the game that work, this one is quite long on its own with just the preliminary stuff in.

There was Sean, the player character. One of the longest-surviving characters in the game at the venerable 59 years of age. A cult leader, a king of an African tribe, physicist, mystic. And there was Edward, the non-player character responsible for handling the Operatives and sending them off to missions. Basically the quest-giver. Who also, for certain reasons, held Sean responsible for the death of his beloved sister.

The game begins. I inform Sean’s player that her character is in mortal danger. There is a short conversation.

Edward: “So, do you remember anything of what just happened?”
Sean: “No, and I want out. I hate this place. I hate these missions. I’m no use to the firm, why the hell do you keep dragging me back to work for you. I’m useless!”
Edward: “Agreed”

And Edward pulls a gun and shoots Sean, there and then. Bang. The character is dead.

The shock the players had on their faces when this happened was what you can expect. There was a stunning moment of silence. And Sean’s player managed to let out a “That’s not what I was aiming for …” while staring at me and the situation in disbelief. After 50 games of Century, there was a moment’s pause. Something like that could happen. That the “your character is in mortal danger” stated at the beginning of the game actually meant something. Like I always had been saying. “If I tell you you’re in mortal danger, you really are.”

Sean’s player of course made a new character there and then, and we continued with the game. With a very different mood.

I might have killed a Player Character yesterday.

And I think it was the best thing I’ve done as a GM in a while.

First things first. Where are we on Century, statistics-wise? The player pool consists of 42 players. This is people who have actually made it to the games – there are a couple who have wanted to come, but have missed it because of some real-life issues. Of those 42 that have played the game, only about 15 are part of my old gaming groups (ie. people who I’ve played RPGs with before Century). And of the 42, ten or so are people I really didn’t even know before running a Century game to them. Somewhere around the Second World War (in game world time), people started telling other people at parties that there was this campaign where you could come play in. Mass invasion of new players happened.

Over 25 player characters have died. Spikey, my co-blog-host holds the record with 6 deaths. Beyond the deaths, at least two have been possessed by otherwordly entities. One is suffering from a lethal radiation poisoning from a Russian nuclear test. One is permanently unstuck in time whilst on a vision quest of sorts. Etc. That means there have been something like 60ish or so different player characters in the game. And, as said, we haven’t reached the half-point yet. The game is lethal. Sometimes to the point where there just isn’t a matter of luck that can save a dying character’s life. Sometimes, on the other hand, miracles happen.

Oh yeah, and we’ve reached stage two of fragmentation. Or “Level Two” as two players have been told. More or less, a step forward in the structure of the game.

A clear tell-tale marker of “stage two” is that the game is no-longer run just by me. We have a pool of 5 Game Masters. Four of us have ran games, one is still planning on what to run. This is also the reason we’ve reached the respectable number of 50 games way before halfway on the clock. A byproduct of having multiple GMs is that I have actually managed to play a character in my own campaign just like a normal player. Adrian (my own character) has survived two game sessions so-far with incredible luck and skill, once stealing the Olympic flame from Helsinki in ’52 and the second time was exorcising a ghost in Japan in ’59 . I’m still of course the primus motor of the campaign, running a gaming session every 10 days. The other GMs can run games when they want, I’m sort of in charge of setting the constant pace.

The players have managed to completely screw up history already. There is a third superpower in the Cold War thanks to them. A superpower that’s leading the space race, I might add. The Greater Austrian-Hungarian Empire, led by The Undying Emperor von Üdel, hero of the nations and a father of few. Von Üdel is a player character. Yeah. This is one of those games where player characters might actually gain some power sometimes. They also managed to screw up a mission to kill Hitler so bad that the Führer actually got saved from his bunker by the magics the player characters were attempting to kill him with. And Big H is currently living somewhere in Argentinean jungles, waiting to return as a major bad guy later in the campaign. Because, I mean, there are few things as awesome as having Hitler as a recurring villain in an alternate-history campaign. There have been other wonderful things like that have have happened over the years. Usually because of the incompetence of the player characters.

And there have been a lot of stories there that have been on and about the human level of things. As said, The Undying Emperor von Üdel is a father of two. Quite many characters have offspring (some have puppies, but that’s another story). Some of the kids have matured enough to become player characters at the age of 20. There are powerful families that stem from these lineages. The biggest emotions have risen from things in the sidelines of the actual missions. To be honest, these days, the average game session deals more in things that don’t have anything to do with the mission than with the things that do. Family ties, new loves, old feuds.

Then there is the disturbing fact how some of the Operatives (a name given by the players to the player characters that has stuck in the game world) have started getting visions of Operatives who have died previously working in the business. Getting their memories in dreams and sudden bursts of insight. Gogam, the company that’s been hiring the Operatives has slowly become worried about what they’re actually dealing with. It’s clear these Operatives aren’t just anybody.

It’s also clear that they’re not alone. The Operatives share the world with countless factions that have their own agendas. There are The Unknown, always dressed in black and standing there in the corner of your eye, watching and opposing the Operatives. There was a metallic alien biomass called The Choir that nearly managed to invade Europe during the Second World War (but thanks to the actions of the Operatives, it was contained in a stable time loop and the world was saved). Russia was controlled by Baba Yaga and her monstrous children. And there is talk of other factions. The Eight, who are rumored to be controlling the States through careful manipulation. The Blue Kings. The Board. And no-one can be sure what all the internal factions of Gogam are up to.

But, to get back on the level of playing the game, there is room to make different choices than one would usually do in a game, even if this doesn’t seem apparent at first. There is room in it to move so that you don’t always have to follow the “typical adventure path” when it comes to solving things. To battle a drought, you can actually ship water in in large containers to alleviate the worst catastrophe instead of wandering around the coutryside trying figure out if there is an Indian curse somewhere that’s causing all this (pro tip: no, there isn’t). There is room to actually go and shoot the people you’re supposed to be working for. In the head. And they die. A lot. There’s room to say “no” in places where you wouldn’t think you could.

Also there’s a room. It’s in a building. You just woke up in it, and you don’t have any idea how you got there.

You see, we flock to Twitter to have followers. We dive into Facebook not exactly only to be in regular contact with friends – all 1500 of them – but to enforce them to follow us on our daily adventures. Myspace I won’t mention as it’s completely passé and therefore bad form these days.

Mundane mishap with bacon becomes an adventure for others to reflect upon when it’s written in an appropriately cynical and/or hurt and/or humorous manner. We thrive to be recognized and noticed, and by gods, if someone retweets our daily adventure further down the social pathways, we are accepted en masse, and what could be better than that? Have Justin Bieber answer “<3″ to you?

We post photos to Flickr not solely to catalogue them to ourselves, but to receive attention from likeminded strangers. Oh, we just want some love. DeviantArt I’m not even going to talk about.

After indulging in this outright whor- ..selfpromotion that’s quickly replacing the oldfashioned mirrors at home, we settle down on our always socially acceptable Ikea Klippan and grab the latest socially approved game console controller in our hands, or stand around waving hands as per the new trend. We engorge ourselves with arbitrary puzzles, ultraviolent birds or outright mass slaughter, whatever happens to reflect our current needs of latest trend.

Now, one of two things may or may not happen.

For the first option let’s assume we play a game, controlling a character we of course project our needs into, being psychologically weak bags of meat. Our surrogate waddles around the designated game world, doing whatever darkly deeds we make him do within the set limitations. Now, again, in this one thing, one or two further things result. Projecting his daily self (or his need to act like complete opposite of his daily self) into virtual adventureland, our gamer avatar creates a massive mishap and more often than not the surrounding random NPC’s do not reflect on it. Nobody comments “haha lol didnt know you could do that with bacon! is awesome”.

Experience feels detached, unless it feels to the player just like it does in Facebook and Twitter where nobody comments on your antics either, in which case it really is just very sad. Then, if they do react, it’s most likely one spoken line randomized out of list of three after which they fall back into their walkcycles oblivious to the event that should have changed their depicted virtual lives.

Come to think of it, how closely that also matches Your Daily Facebook Experience is just downright creepy.

That’s it. World goes on inside the very tubely shaped game, indifferent as ever, because the characters don’t have to guide you forward – merely provide some mood filler, provide the backstory piece by piece and preparing player for the next level in a subtle, non-intrusive manner.

“Oh, didn’t know bacon could do that. By the way, stranger with a nice face I place my trust upon, did you hear the uberkapitan of our oppressive alien enemy forces has been seen three blocks ahead of you, just now? Can’t imagine anyone would take the opportunity, really, these days. Won’t they think of the future of our children. Goodbye!”

Of course, it doesn’t matter if our player listened to the dead-eyed monologue of future events or not, since he’ll invariably end up three blocks that way anyways, and will end up shooting things until things go away in various fashions. End result is the same. Both ways, our player might feel a bit cheated and dirty for being treated cheaply. Also, the bleak pointlessness of heard-it-already monologues is the reason they get always skipped. They don’t really add anything for most players.

Second option is we get a permission to wander off the plot path into the wild blue yonder of sandbox, a prospect that terrifies the already shambled minds of story- and game designers.

In there, player actually relies on feedback to be kept on the plot pipeline, fending off the dreaded situation where player gets lost, out of sight of any story engine characters and plot points. Of course, rarely such possibility is allowed to happen – you are essentially kept on a steeply inclined surface with nowhere to go but in the generally correct direction.

In here, mishap with a bacon gets commented upon as you need to be coerced into deeper interaction with NPC’s in order to figure out your way. Of course, the bacon that caused your wildest mishap ever was most likely an important macguffin in which case all apparent freedom is just a logical series of traps to lure you forward. All very elaborately designed set pieces one after another to produce an invisible tube you hopefully run through, either straight and ignoring the outside world or zigzagging around to enjoy the inessential.

If a sandbox game world had no lures and traps and big pointing arrows, player would eventually slumber to stop, bored with nothing to do – just like in his real world, except devoid of social networking sites. THAT crap does not sell.

But I’m not really writing about any of that stuff.

What player loves to find in the game world is some sort of recognition and results from his actions. Only a few games have done a longterm cause and effect stuff for the insanely horrible convoluted mess they are to create. You know, stuff like burning a village down making you a bad guy in those parts AND forcing the locals into bitterer and poorer bunch of bastards, planting a tree and coming back in few years gametime to see it has grown, awwhowniceandcute, et cetera.

Of course, those games suffered from other anecdotal mishaps which took over the whole public view and ended up defining the games. Devs just couldn’t put the brakes on after figuring out a nice world to live in, and instead ended up with extra buggery people loved to laugh about.

What happened was social networks, viral, sharing funny screenshots and agreeing with critics to become a popular dude, you know. People happened. It’s why we can’t have anything nice.

Anyways, think about it. What’s important in my mind is that games should retain a tangible relationship with you through your actions. The world you return to after your TwatterFissbookSpace journeys have to feel familiar, with your own proverbial shoeprints all over. I say return to with italics to make a certain point. We return to home. We return to familiarity. We stick to our old shoes because they’re comfortable and they smell only because they’re full of ourself, as horrible as that sounds. We’re on buddy terms with the grime we leave behind. If the game feels like you have left your fingerprints all over, banged the nice old villagers daughter and got even his dog a lasting drug addiction, you’re immersed because shit has just got personal through involvement.

Maybe, one day on your neverending journeys, you return to the same village which you have forgot about in your 15 in-game years of exile and come across a bastard teenage boy NPC with certainly very familiar facial features. Oh, hello, world just dropped you a kiddo bomb and you can take it as a sidekick.

If real life can stab you with a loving knife when you’re not expecting, why shouldn’t game world?

Even better,your character starts an unstoppable aging process from that point on to bring out another “oh okay, let’s watch this one out” trap for the player to keep playing those extra 35 hours.

Then he dies next to his son, in whichever timely manner an old hero would die in.

Game ticks on without falling back to “End Unlocked! Here’s A Badge! New Game? Y/N” trope.  Slowly realize your thumb twitch on the controller jolted the old mans’ son who, by now, after accumulating experience with his battlehardened father, is now a formidable character of his own. Sense of involvement through heritage, hoo boy.

It all pans out quite smoothly as a concept. If there’s NPC party involved, you’re the logical next leader again and game flows on without breaking a sweat or beat. If NPC party disagrees, enter the short skirmish among buddies as a player tutorial to your new character skills.

Sure, it’s nigh impossible to create, but I can bloody well dream while running in my tubes shooting things that look different. Maybe next gen allows us to create stuff not as limited by hardware. Maybe next generation of publishers allows us to create stuff not as limited by quarterly fiscals.

On a sidenote, we’re still calling current gen next gen. What’s up with that? Why isn’t there anyone trol-.. prepping us for new stuff already?

“Oh hi, nice blog post, didn’t know you can write. By the way, stranger with a nice face I place my trust upon, did you hear your gaming hardware is well out of warranty and oh right did you hear there is this really cool video leaked where a character in a popular television show is playing a game that looks amazing and it’s something very nextnext gen looking and everyone’s talking about it online..”

We’ll know it’s coming when we scramble to share it to our massive entourage of people who knows us by our links only.

Meanwhile, have a look at none other than Salman Rushdie checking out in-game storytelling where you can deviate from plot path whenever you like.

Possibly based on a true story:

Spikey: You don’t really need to overanalyze The Event. They’re just going full speed ahead with all the conspiracy clichés out there and it’s fun. Fun for the evenings! For the whole family! AIEEE! BLACK HELICOPTERS! MOLES IN THE CTU! UFOS! FUCK! The characters are just irrelevant filling between all the awesome! This is my deep analysis of the series.

Me: *sigh* There aren’t any characters in the series I could care about. There aren’t any plots in the series I could care about. There’s absolutely nothing in it that makes it worth watching! It’s like if X-Files, Lost and Flashforward had a child and realized when looking at it that “Boys, I think we’re all closely related to each other, since this kid is a damn Deliverance freak.”

Spikey: But Deliverance was entertaining.

Me: No, not that kind of Deliverance freak, really. More like the kind you lock up in the potato cellar and hope it doesn’t figure out how to feed on the rats to keep itself alive too long.

Spikey: Ok, granted, it’s clear that the “others” in Event aren’t aliens but humans from the future, etc.

Me: No. It’s clear that NO ONE CARES who the “others” are.

Spikey: Well, ok, I accept that the effects were utter crap. The plane was flying too slow and the particle effects were made terribly. But there are plot twists!

Me: I’m still waiting for the two important plot twists: The one where I suddenly find a character in the show I like. And the one where there is a plot twist that gets me interested in the damn plot. The show is horrible!

Spikey: But with the ridiculousness, they could do any sort of jumping-the-shark tricks and it would fit the show.

Me: I’m assuming the writers are too busy writing their theories about the polar bears on the Lost forums to jump any sharks. Or write any decent plots. Here’s a pro tip for them: THE POLAR BEARS WERE ADDED JUST BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T MAKE ANY SENSE AT THE TIME!

Spikey: Well I t…

Me: OR they might be just drooling at old pictures of Gillian Anderson! It’s so clear that the addition of Sofia or whatever the redhead leader of the whatever they are, is a lame attempt to get us as viewers to return to those glory days of spending the evenings with a watermelon that had Scully’s face taped on it.

Spikey: Well, at least the plot has gone further in the first two episodes than it did in the first three seasons of Lost.

Me: Nope.

Spikey: Come on, I mean, nothing happe…

Me: In the two episodes of The Event, the single thing that has actually happened is that a plane crashed. That happened in the first episode of Lost.

Spikey: But … … There were other things. … Not many … But …

Spikey goes to get a beer, defeated. I reign supreme.