Yesterday was one of those days when our Changeling game got canceled at last minute and we all wanted to kill Spikey for it. But nothing really new there, really. So, me, Taija and Mikko were grumpy for a while, pondering what to do next. Then Mikko came up with the idea that I should demo how the 4th Edition D&D system worked, since I had been talking a lot about it to him. Taija didn’t object, so we called Petsku, an almost-neighbor, made D&D characters and I ran a couple of encounters for them to show various aspects of the system.

After the demo, we talked about it for a while and the players were “Ooh, I want to play more with my fun character!”

And I was feeling really negative about it for some reason. Something about continuing the demo game further wasn’t “doing it for me”, but I couldn’t really name what was wrong, so I said a lot of “maybe”s and kept on smiling/nodding.

This morning, after spending good time wondering about it, it hit me. I want to get something out of a game I’m running. I want to challenge myself when I’m running games. I don’t want to get stuck on the same old, same old. I want to look back at a game and say that I did something new there.

The Summer DnD (I’ve mentioned a few times on the blog) is probably the last DnD campaign I’ll run using the 4th edition straight from the books – In it, I’m exploring the system, I’m trying to push it a bit each time we play, see how it works for what, all while having a fun game with it. But like with all the other gaming systems, I will want to move away from what’s been given to me. The next time I’ll start a campaign with the 4th Edition, it will be full of house rules, have a world that doesn’t look like the one given in the books on any level and will feel like my game from the start.

Starting a game based on random characters, made straight from the book, for a demo, just doesn’t qualify. It feels like doing the same thing over again, being bound by the same restrictions.

So, sorry guys, it won’t continue.

I sort of swore I wouldn’t go into my personal life in this new incarnation of the-cow.net blog, but I guess I’m just weak. The actual gaming-related whining is somewhere down a few paragraphs.

The original the-cow.net’s (back in 2002, yikes, that’s 7 years ago) first post read “Well, I’m single again” and it was posted on the day a relationship that had tried to turn me into a “normal person” had ended.

During the time I spent living in it, I did my best to focus on the things that aren’t frowned upon by the mainstream society – I worked hard, I did what I could to be a good boyfriend, and kept a very presentable self-image so that we wouldn’t be marked as “strange people”. For a while we lived in what was probably closest thing to a gated community there was in Turku. So I cut back on my habits of watching strange Science Fiction television series, focusing on on “funny” family friendly comedies. I didn’t have any time for RPGing, but instead exercised at the gym. I didn’t hang out with the LARPers on my free time as I was befriending the neighbors and had barbecue with them.

In general I was being the guy that I could see the girl wanting to spend her life with. Sad thing was that I wasn’t really that guy at all. I’m a geek, through and true. So eventually there was bad blood, there were tears and there was the end of the relationship.

After that I spent time finding a balance to the question of what I wanted to be in a relationship, something that led me to avoid them for a long time. Either I saw a “critical flaw” in the other party, one that made me think I’d have to compromise myself to be with them, so I didn’t even bother. Or I’d again found myself drifting into the role of that “normal guy” to impress them, and then, disgusted at myself, would back off before things got serious.

So yesterday, the topic of “Do you cut your game sessions short so you can see me sooner?” came up when talking with my girlfriend. It’s one of those questions that have no good answer, really – either I’m placing more value on the gaming than on the relationship or it’s an indication that I’m once again slipping to the “compromising who I am just to be with you” pattern I had fallen prey to all those years earlier.

Like I’ve mentioned before in the blog, our gaming group’s sessions have been going through a scheduling crisis the past year or two. We’re in a situation where even a simple game can get delayed for months because people don’t manage to fit their timetables together. On one hand this is because we’re busy with our lives and jobs, but on the other it’s become an issue of prioritizing. Everything goes before the games. But then, why would you want to spend the evening pretending to be in a fantasy world killing goblins when you can go see a great gig at the local nightclub? If it was just that sort of things that can be easily justified, I think there wouldn’t be a problem. Sadly, before gaming also comes watching some movie alone in your room, washing your hair or ordering your sock drawer. Games feel like a very low priority hobby sometimes.

And as it feels that much a prioritizing issue, I tend to ask those of my players who have problems with their schedules if they really want to continue playing. And let them know it’s not a bad thing to quit if they don’t feel like carrying on. But it seems that the issue really is about time just being a rare commodity and people not being available on the same days. Player A has choir practice on Monday and Thursday, and Player B could only play on those days. Finding a day that fits everyone is painful, and everyone wants to play.

So, cutting the game short once we’ve managed to get the session ready would be a bit unprofessional. And I told her the truth – I haven’t been cutting the sessions short to get to her earlier. But the rarity of the games is not the only reason why I answered so.

It’s been a way of gaming for us to keep game sessions short. 3-5 hours. This might seem counterproductive since we’re having such long breaks between sessions, but there are good reasons for it. With such busy schedules, investing 3-5 hours every now and then to a game is trivial – You can still get back home after it and prepare the presentation for the bank merger you need to have ready by the morning. It won’t ruin your life to commit to play in such a game. And also, you don’t really need more time to have a good game session. A lot can be accomplished in for example 4 hours. Everyone gets to play their bits and the attention spans stay solid (unless you give the players lots and lots of sugar to eat, but that’s besides the subject).

Doubling the time of the game to 8 hours would never double the time of productive play. Extra hours add up to exhaustion and eventual silliness that follows. And people would be tired as they’ve just come from work and will need to be up again in 4 hours when the game is over. And as a lot of our games rely on improvisation more than tedious pre-planning, exhaustion of the GM will hit at some point and start weighing down the game.

If I need to mention a major downside of the short games, it is that we’re friends, and friends need to gossip and be social when they meet each other. So if some people haven’t talked in a while, they will want time to do that before we start the game. So sometimes the planned 5 hours turns into 3 as everyone has to catch up on what’s been happening. But like said, you can accomplish a lot of gaming even if the time is limited. As long as everyone is into what’s happening and willing to contribute.

So if it takes 1.5 months to organize a 3 hour game session, it would be a bit wrong towards everyone for me to cut that to 2 hours because I wanted to be with my girlfriend just a bit earlier. But even if I said I haven’t cut a session short to get to her sooner, there is a “but”. Just like there always is. If it would happen that she’d ask me to cut a session short, I would.

So, nothing’s different from before? I’m still willing to make compromises to be something my girlfriend wants? Bad Alvan? Well, let’s compare… I’m working hard (well, been on a vacation, but theoretically), I’m trying my best to be a good boyfriend. I’m not watching that many odd SciFi shows (more to do with there being not that many good SciFi shows airing), but even fewer family comedies. I’m using some of my free time playing RPGs and some going to the gym. I’m hanging out with LARPers (if Karaoke with them counts) and barbecuing with friends when I have the opportunity. And if my girlfriend asks, I’m willing to cut down on my personal time… So nuances have changed, but it doesn’t really look that different.

The beauty of it all is in the why. I’m being myself. So when I say that I would cut a session short if my girlfriend asked, it’s because there is no ambiguity about all the trouble we go through to get the games arranged. It’s easy to trust her with the power when she’s seen  me curse all my players to the depths of hell when yet another game falls through.

And like I trust her with knowing what things mean, I do trust my players to eventually get their schedules sorted. We managed to complete one campaign (even if it took time), we’ll manage the others. As long as they’re being truthful to me when they say they want to continue playing RPGs, it will be possible to find a date that fits all the players. And then we’ll play for a few hours, kill some goblins, fight off dragons and then spend ages wondering when on Earth do we have time for that short burst of fun again.

Just deleted four very good, very long, half-finished blog-posts because they were going nowhere and have been keeping me from starting any new ones for something like a month or two now.

Since we’re half-way into the year, I thought to look back a bit and write about how things have been progressing and what my feelings about them are.

First of all, the good news. We managed to complete the Henryn viimeinen iso keikka -campaign. There was a lot of things in it that didn’t work out the way I had planned, but that’s what always happens when you’re creating a new RPG system and put it to playtest. Things need fine-tuning, a lot of it. But the basic idea works, and that’s the important bit. The campaign turned out to be a petty bet between two old criminal masterminds where people’s lives were put into stake for a single dollar and ended on a cliffhanger with all characters on their way to a possible trap. The great thing was that we actually managed to complete a full campaign run even if it was only 7 games + character creation. Our games have had a problem that they have slid to oblivion instead of actually reaching a conclusion. A way to restore faith on gaming.

Secondly, peoples’ timetables are a total pain. Both the Changeling and the Summer D&D games have suffered from this and even Henry had slight problems. Month or two long breaks aren’t unheard of because people aren’t around at the same time. But that’s life. I’m quite pessimistic with Changeling, since it’s 3 people who all need to be there for the game to work, and we can’t manage to get a time for the game together. And it’s one of those games that really suffer from long breaks as the mood of the fairytale needs to be recaptured and the not-fully-human characters re-immersed into. Game-wise it’s been a fun experience when we’ve been able to play – surreal landscapes are fun and the rules don’t come to the way too much. The Summer D&D on the other hand can surprisingly live even with the breaks. While I’m not fully happy with what D&D wants to be as a game, I am slowly seeing the potential in it. Lots of neat moving parts that are fun to twiddle.

About future plans regarding gaming – There will be a round two of Henry in the near future with the tweaked system. Also I might have gotten slightly inspired again to go try running larps after the Knutepunkt trip a couple of months ago.

I’ll hopefully get some more inspiration / time to write some actual stuff in the blog in the near future.

I just need to get this damn post written before I head to Norway, so here goes, boring or not. Blogging from the Helsinki airport, connected to what is possibly the worst WLAN I’ve met in a while.

I’m known for how I like to run games that aren’t based on the world of any known system. Preferring to draw stuff purely from my own imagination, or at least dilute and remix the original source so much that the result is something that no longer resembles it. When I was asked to run a game for a group of mostly first-timers (including Spikey, who hasn’t played a single honest RPG in his life, just things like College of War run by me), the first natural instinct was to run something home-brew. But for some reason, I ended up running a game of Changeling: The Lost to them. And most surprisingly, it was more or less by-the-book.

The player characters were a group of people abducted to serve as pets and playthings of a couple of insane faerie sisters. Mikko played a burglar who had stolen a ring from the White Sister and because of this, spent 10 years as a pet of some sort to the pair of Gentry. Desperate to hide from the wicked one of the sisters, he hid in the trees, and eventually developed squirrel-like traits in the process. Taija played a emo/goth chick who ended up as a dancing marionette for the sisters for what felt like an eternity and then discarded like an old toy. When she returned to the human world 5 years after her disappearance, she was partly doll, unable to close her eyes and having hinges in her joints. Spikey’s character disappeared from the real world in 1973, and returned to a new, completely alien surroundings after being something of a Mr. Potato Head for the twins, who cut off his nose, ears, chin and whatever and replaced them with others so many times that holding on to what he was might have been difficult. The end result of all this was a man made of mirror able to switch his appearance on a whim to pretty much anything he wants to.

The two games we’ve run so-far has sparked a renewed enthusiasm in me to get first-timers to game with me. They aren’t burdened by years of action and adventure by Dungeons and Dragons, and things that might be “old” to the mainstream RPG crowd still provide endless amounts of entertainment for them. The game has gone into fantastically dark places and feels like what Vampire: The Masquerade should have felt like back in the day when we were playing it. We’ve so-far focused on the little and personal aspects of the characters as they’ve moved back to the real world. Mikko’s character has been replaced by a fetch made out of sticks and stones, who is now the father for his child and a husband for his wife. Spikey’s replacement is a shrewd bastard like the original, and seems like it’s taken an active role in finding Spikey. Something that is only made worse by the fact that he’s in the State Senate. And Taija’s character found out that her replacement had died, and its death had driven her family apart. And as said, I’ve been playing the game by the book, without the need to come up with something even more fantastic, because the players don’t know what to expect from the actual game. This is something that bothered me about Vampire: The Masquerade back in the day – EVERYONE knew the big secrets, and the little secrets.

It’s noticable how the players’ play styles differ. Spikey’s been mostly playing in over-the-top freeform high fantasy games GM’d by yours truly, so the notion of rules sometimes baffles him, he’s mostly a player who pokes at the game world to see if he can break it from within somehow and then laugh at the result. Manatic’s an old fox and it’s easy to see when he wants something to happen – he steers the situation towards it and makes it happen (which is ok, of course). He’s the closest to a story-focused player we have, and even he’s quite character-centric. And Taija is really immersing into the character. Pure character all the way. So a nice mix.

When I get back to Helsinki, I have to run some more first-timer games. So much fun. Now, I’ll be heading to the airport bar.

So, remember back in the day when everything was simple. Evil was Evil and Good was Good. Or at least it was easier to tell who was backstabbing you because they weren’t a part of whatever side you were on. And this gave you more than enough excuse to stab them in the eye first. Because, you know. They were the enemy.

The older I get, the more I seem to appreciate the simple things like that. When you can simplify a large group of something in a game to just a large group of something and be happy about it. While games full of individuals are fun, it’s nice to be able to identify groups as well. And in a large scale games, even better so.

When people ask what my favorite video game of all times was, I answer Star Control 2 without hesitation (unless I’m feeling exceptionally nostalgic about some other game that very moment). A big great part of the affection has to do with the amazing job the designers did with the various races in it. The basic setup of the game is that there are these big evil Ur-Quan things that have pretty much subjugated the whole galaxy under their rule (read: They’re The Evil). Including the human race, who are now living under a slave shield, stranded on Earth. The only beacon of hope is the player’s Captain and his super-ship, who goes around the star-systems, meeting old alien allies who have turned hostile or gone into hiding, trying to convert them back to the good fight. And maybe make some new allies in the process.

The races (read: factions) in the game are wonderfully unique when compared to each others. They are made quite simplistic, so that they don’t have a huge number of defining characteristics. A big part is of course the speech-patterns and the way they look, but they also have quite a personality. Each race is like an extension of a very solid, vivid, coherent personality. There is the sycophant, the coward, the honor-obsessed, the angsty, etc. race. The race as a collective share the traits, but there might be individuals who are individuals, while still being part of the race. Each of the races have a couple of these character traits that they embody, and each have a very strongly defined society. They have their superiors and they have their political systems. They have their passions and they have their quirks. But, all in all, they can be discussed with caricatures. “Those hippie birds”, “The honor-obsessed kamikaze/samurai rodents”, “The communication impaired great old one fish” and so on.

And they have a wonderfully complex relationship with each other. No man is an island, so to speak. Even if in this case the men are alien beings that aren’t even remotely human. To quote something from the game:

“This may come as a shock, but the Shofixti are reborn. We have a Shofixti Captain here with us. Now do you believe?”

If this is being a true thing, there will be many changes.

But we are a species long wise in the ways of deceit.

Ye must be proving these words ye say, Captain.

Send the Shofixti to us as a way of proof.

Those were the words of the Yehat, a funny-looking bird-like race who lived and died by their code of honor. When they failed to protect their marsupial allies, the Shofixti, the whole race fell into despair, and only through the leadership of their queen, they managed to stay even semi-coherrent, and joined the Evil Side to forget the tragedy.

I’ll switch to tabletop roleplaying for a moment – You might have heard of a game called Vampire: the Masquerade, where they came up with a great mechanic that has been later dubbed the clubhouse system amongst friends. Every character belongs to a club. Membership is mandatory. A character can belong to a single club. And can’t change their colors. The vampires’ clubs in Vampire: The Masquerade were their clans. You get bitten by a vampire who belongs to a clan and you belong to that clan as well. There was an artist clan, there was a businessman clan, there was a rebel clan, there was a clan of ugly vampires. And that worked damn well. It was easy to connect with, easy to vary, twist, mirror and all that. You could make a vampire character that was a part of the businessman clan, who was a brute. You could make him as much of a brute as you wanted. But he was still initiated into the vampires through the a part of a proud and long tradition of businessmen. He was chosen by the businessmen to become a vampire, and thus he is defined by the clan even if he wanted to be defined by it or not. If he had been a part of the artist clan, the fact that the artists had chosen to turn the brute into a vampire would have mattered as much, or even more, than the fact that he’s a brute.

And it was easy to build political structures for the vampires. Every relationship was in the end defined by the clans – even if some vampire boss managed to rule his city so that all the different vampires from different clans were one big shiny happy family, if one of the clans’ big names arrived to the city, the clan members were more than likely to flock under his wing. And usually even this wasn’t needed for the players to talk about things like “Wonder what the Tremere (the magician clan of the vampires) are up to, we haven’t heard anything of them lately” or “If we want to go to the woods, we may need some help from the Gangrel (the half-animal vampire clan)”. Even if the whole local Gangrel population was a group of former zookeepers and biology professors, the instinct would be to run to them when planning a woodland trip, because “The Gangrel, they know the woods.”

Besides the clans, there was the division between “us and them”, the Camarilla and the Sabbat. In the early works, Sabbat was pretty much an undefined terror that was only very loosely described in the source books. Camarilla was the group where the clans belonged to and that had all the player characters in it. Later, Sabbat got some clans as well, making it equal to Camarilla and as playable. But before that, while there might have been political squabbles and backstabbing between the Camarilla clans, when it came to Sabbat, there was a nice solid threat that everyone hated equally.

White Wolf released several games in their game line after Vampire: The Masquerade, that tried to follow the same mold, but only Mage: The Ascension came close to managing a good, pure mandatory clubhouse system. With games like Werewolf: The Apocalypse, where the clubhouse you belonged to was determined by birth (thus there being no “why is this character part of our club” thing) or Wraith: The Oblivion, where the clubhouses were kind of odd and hard to point out, it didn’t just work. In Mage, the character gravitated towards one of the clubs because of the similarities in their worldviews, which made the club something that could be more easily thought through.

Now, exit the old White Wolf games and enter the next generation. The clubhouse system evolved there. Each strain of bogeymen (vampires, werewolves, whatnot) have not one, but two clubs they belong to. The club they are born into (this might be the vampire’s clan, or the fairie’s type) and the club they join (the vampire’s ideology, much like Camarilla or Sabbat in the old days, or the court of faeries the critter belongs to, or something like that). This creates a far more complex network of relationships between various factions, as each character is usually loyal to at least two external bodies. And as they say on the internet, “OMFG TEH DRAMA” when these two come to clashes.

But it’s taken something away from it all. Without the clear-cut clubhouses, the factions have become blurred, and it’s no-longer a question of wondering what the Tremere are up to, it’s a question of the individuals in that particular city. It takes away from the grandeur of it all to know that you’re most likely just involved in local politics than to be, through the clans, actually affecting something greater. To return to the earlier example of Star Control 2 – the fact that you were dealing with a real faction allowed something like the following to happen:

“All right, I’ll send over the Shofixti.”

We are scanning the separation of a vessel from yer fleet, Captain and indeed, its configuration matches that of a Shofixti Scout vessel.

This had better not be a trick, Captain!

We are knowing the power of a Glory Device, and if you detonate the weapon near us the price for you shall be dear, very dear.

The Scout has docked, and we await the pilot’s appearance at the airlock.

The atmosphere cycle is complete… the door slides open… and

AWK!! BRAAK!! YEEP!! IT IS TRUE!!! THE SHOFIXTI ARE ALIVE!!!

Look at that furred muzzle, those shining black eyes, the sweet claws!

Our children have returned from oblivion!!

But now we are faced with the cruellest truth!…

…We who have sacrificed our honor! We who have lain with our enemy!

WE ARE NOT WORTHY! WE ARE NOTHING!…We are less than nothing.

But wait! We are not Spathi. We are Yehat… OF THE STARSHIP CLANS!

We will NOT live this lie any longer!

Listen as I speak these words! If our Queen makes the dishonorable command

then it is THE QUEEN WHO HAS NO HONOR!

And a dishonorable Queen is NO QUEEN AT ALL!

We, the Zeep-Zeep, are the only Clan who remember the TRUE MEANING of honor we shall TEAR THE QUEEN FROM HER THRONE!

The two-thousand year reign of the Veep-Neep Queens IS OVER!

THE REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN!

Sorry. A bit carried away there. But if you’ve played the game, you know how much pathos that bit of text contains. I mean tha because it’s clear that the Yehat are a honorable race, and that they mourn over the loss of the Shofixti, it’s possible, that when the race (as an entity) is presented with a Shofixti captain, they will actually rebel against their queen. Not just go “oh well, me and Bob agree with this and think the system’s a bit bad now”, but have a revolution.

In old Vampire The Masquerade this sort of wholesome clan-movement happened a lot. One of the Camarilla’s clans actually got fed up with Camarilla and left. The Gangrel got fed up at some point with the system and decided they could leave it behind. Of couse a few individuals here and there stayed behind, but the Clan, the Club, as a faction, decided to call it quits. And when I spoke of how the clan defined a lot about the character, it came quite obvious at that point. If you were playing a Gangrel, you would be defined as “a Gangrel who stayed as a part of Camarilla” if you were one of those who didn’t want to leave.

While any game benefits from strong characters and individualism, I love to think that there is a huge benefit in being able to lump these individuals into generic boxes. Be it as simple as race “He’s a bugbear”, or profession “he’s an adventurer”, or something a bit more complex “He’s one of the people from the Northern Mountains”, it still makes cataloging the person when big wheels turn on the world. If you know the people from Northern Mountains have declared war, you have to make judgements about the people frrom NM whom you know.

I apologize to all three of my readers (myself and Spikey included) that I haven’t written anything in a week, but I’ve been busy with all the things that happen after you’ve been in bed rest for over a month and finally feel well enough to go out. Things like “go meet your boss for the first time this year”, “enroll to classes” and “play some RPGs with friends”. So when I’ve had time to pause between these things, I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity, fun, rules and the related concepts. And one of the big dilemmas for me when it comes to role-playing games – where do I stand in the eternal struggle between the game and the play.

Don’t know about you lot, but when I’m presented with a situation where there are strict rules in place, but a lot of freedom to what can be done with those rules, my first gut reaction is to start searching for ways to use the rules to create something that wasn’t planned for them. And I know I’m not the first one – most of the planets in Spore are filled with various monsters that resemble human genitalia and people use Little Big Planet to create mechanical calculators and other oddities.

When it comes to RPGs, this is one of the key reasons I like systems that have very detailed and strict rule set. They allow the player to get really creative with the limited material that is available. While the systems that allow a player to formulate things about their character more freely encourage the players to do exactly what they want to do, systems that rely on preset variables tend to inspire me a lot more with a “ooh, I could totally try this one out!” or “I wonder how I could make a character like this using this system?”

The other great thing about detailed rule sets is the fact that they also serve as a great wall of defense when someone else (usually the person who is running the game) tries to pull something off that limits my control over the options available to my character. I must admit, I become a bit of a rules lawyer the moment a game master tries to start railroading the game to only please his need to narrate his story to the players without having the players have any say in what’s happening. I’m one of those assholes who find it so much more fun when they are actually allowed to participate and change the outcome of events if they get stuck in an interactive environment. So, when there is a description of how the enemy bogeyman, who the characters have been after, runs to the portal to safety, I will be the one asking to get a dice roll to prevent that from happening because the rules say I should able to do that.

Now, I do have my dirty hippie side buried somewhere underneath that this. So I should probably say something to support the touchy-feely side of RPGs, where we have less rules and more just plain fun. When you’re playing a free-form game, where the rules are more set by the social contract (of not being an ass) than some rulebook, things can work out really great. The biggest plus side to this sort of games is the fact that there is nothing that even remotely points to “winning” – everyone is just having fun and enjoying the moment. And that’s something that roleplaying games should be about. We’ve all played like this as kids, and usually things went really well (until you got too tired and cranky and had to go take a nap), so why not do it as adults as well. Adding rules also adds to the need to compete.

Now, when I’m talking about rules, I don’t mean that the game should be a strategy/tactical simulation of medieval warfare (been there, done that, we shall never speak of it again), but more a situation where, when conflict arises, the judgment of what happens next is not left fully on the shoulders of the game master. He should and could be able to rely on a strong set of rules that start with the basic rule of “say yes or roll the dice”. But I must say I’d like to expand on that.

The game master is often a self-proclaimed king of the game. He’s above the rules – what he says holds true. And he’s an artist extraordinaire, he can paint any picture, climb any mountain. .. and so on. He (read: me, usually) is a pompous artist who doesn’t have to live by the same set of regulations the other players do He lies and cheats and creates his own vision if the one presented by the game isn’t pleasing. He tells the players a little less than they deserve so he can take their characters down another adventure on his terms. He decides if there are 3 trolls behind the corner or 30. That calls for some limitations. That’s where I think most role-playing games need more rules.

As a positive example of what I mean by rules for the game master, I present this: In the game 3:16, the game master is mechanically limited by the game’s system. There is a certain number to the number of enemies he can use on a single planet depending on the number of players in the current game. And during the planet, the creatures the player-characters run into are actually defined by a series of rolls. And the players have an option of actually saying “no, we’re not doing this” in many different ways, from evacuating their characters from the planet, to blowing a tactical nuclear weapon on the planet, destroying the rest of the opposition. And the way the world reacts to the success or the failure of the players’ gaming is determined by simple formulas. This means that the amount of bullshit the GM can pull is controllable. He can’t create enemies that are somehow unbalanced, because the mechanical effects are limited and determined by the rules. And he can’t pull stunts like punish a PC because he feels like the character could use a snap on the wrist. If he wants to do it, he has to do it by the rules. And if he decides to make something so hard that the player characters will not be walking out of it alive, the players can opt-out of the mission and the game master has to accept that he can’t use the same tricks again. A delicate balance of things.

Another one that needs a nod is Bliss Stage, where the game master plays one character, just like the rest of the players. He (and his character) just has some responsibilities that the other players don’t. And it’s perfectly possible for the game master’s character to die, and be succeeded by one of the other players’ charactes, turning that player into a new game master.

Now, to extrapolate from these thoughts to think of a system that I would find most pleasing. On the player side, there would be a lot of crunch. Many moving parts – interlocking bits that create a character that has a lot of different effects he can use. Some combination will be of course be more specialized, some more generic, some quite unexpected, but still working. There would be a mechanical watchdog in place to ensure that all the characters would have the minimum amount of abilities to survive in the game, but have a lot of room to maneuver beyond that. If there is some sort of a balancing system, it will be such that it balances only the things that are somehow relevantly connected – if I want to play a former artist in a game where the player-characters are all assassins, me taking art skills shouldn’t hinder the assassinating of people. But I might have to make decisions if the assassin I play prefers knifes or rifles to do his work. Also, the mechanical system would be transparent enough so that I, as a player, can call, without the game master’s decisions, if the action of my character was successful or not.

And on the game master side, I am provided with a similar set of interlocked rules I am allowed to use to create the adventures. I don’t have to of course tell the players which pieces I’ve used while the game is in progress, but I would have to be able to produce the story in the form of the rules to the players after the players had gone through it, so they could look at it and nod at “yes, that’s what happened, and it was done by the books, very good”. There would also be rules that allowed the GM to pull some crazy stunts – sort of cheating even. But using them would mean that he would have to give the players something in return. It would be a beautiful harmonious system. These rules would of course leave the game master a lot of freedom to fill in the blanks, so the meat around the pre-set bones would be still done by him. And that’s where we come a full circle.

Don’t know about you lot, but when I’m presented with a situation where there are strict rules in place, but a lot of freedom to what can be done with those rules, my first gut reaction is to start searching for ways to use the rules to create something that wasn’t planned for them. That would mean that when I am, as a game master, given only three encounters to introduce the plot elements, and only two of them could feature creatures of any kind, I would have to focus on taking everything out of those available resources. I would have to actually be a bit shrewd to pull of the things I would normally take for granted. It would make me pay attention more to what I’m doing as a game master. And the way I would probably be doing the stories would be quite refreshing to when the sky was the limit.

We excel when we can’t have everything we’ve wanted.

So, Game Mastering is like making love to a beautiful woman – Lots of work, but if you do it well and you do a lot of it, it gives you something to talk about when you’re golfing with your divorce lawyer.

Cosmo, GQ and other magazines are full of seduction tips. To be honest, half of the tips are basic human interaction stuff just put into words so that people realize what they are already doing / what they are already doing wrong. The other half of the tips are something that can be used by a good GM to accomplish something in the games they’re running. So, in spirit of these – a top ten list of seduction tips that have their uses for GMs.

10 – Be the Alpha

In social animals, the alpha is the individual in the community to whom the others follow and defer.

- Wikipedia

This neat little tip has two ways it relates to RPG sessions and Game Mastering. First, while it doesn’t necessarily mean that when one of the lower-ranking members of the group gets out of line, you’ll dry hump them against the table until they recognize your superiority, it does mean that you are expected to have some charge of the situation. While there are games where the Game Master isn’t the ultimate authority in the game world, it is a fact that if you’re the one inviting people over to play and organizing the gaming situation, you’re in a way responsible of keeping things rolling. This is an authority position and you should embrace it as such. Someone needs to think of the game first, and that’s sort of your role. If the others think about it as well, that’s good too.

The second thing about being an alpha in a game is that you need to be able to stand confidently behind your words. If you say that something is happening in the game world, then that is happening in the game world. If you constantly have to go about correcting yourself, you appear insecure, and the rest of the pack will a) eat you alive b) leave you behind to the wolves. Depending if you’re carnivores or vegetarians. The most common type of failure in taking charge of your actions is demonstrated best by the following:

Players: “We enter the room”

You: “There are three menacing yeti in the room”

Player 1: “Yeti, sweet. My character has this special ability to make any yeti my friend. I’ll use that.”

You: “You can’t do that, they seem to be uhmn… mind controlled yeti!”

Player 2: “Great, I’ll use my character’s de-mind-control -power to make them not mind controlled. And then P1 can make them his friend!”

You: “Uhmn… They’re robots. They attack! Roll for Initiative!”

If you say they’re yeti, be man enough to keep them yeti even if it that doesn’t lead to the result you were originally hoping for. Don’t let that weakness seep through. The players are most likely expecting you to be the reliable leader that is best for their pack. Act the role. (Note: Being an alpha doesn’t mean being macho or even manly. You don’t need to boast – let the actions speak for you.)

9 – Stay Fit, Have a Life

If you sit in your mom’s basement and just watch TV and eat cheeseburgers, you might get great ideas for your games and your friends might really like the way you run them. But seriously, for a game master, there are two great reasons for staying fit and having a life.

First is that frankly you’re a lot better off when you’re in good shape and have some form of social life beyond your gaming group. Being fit makes you more cheerful and less lethargic. And an energetic game master is a good thing to have. The second, a bit less obvious bit is that having a life and being in shape means you’ll be out and about. Meeting interesting new personalities and getting mugged by yet another generation of street thugs. Experiencing the life outside the four walls of your home. By having a larger social peer group you will not be obsessing about games as much, and you’ll be guaranteed to get some real inspiration out of that. You’ll hear stories that are odd and wonderful. Low key and world shattering to the people telling them. A new person you meet might give you an idea for a new character. Or she might turn out to be the love of your life, for that matter. But the first thing is to get off your ass and go get a life.

Also, there is no shame in dressing in something else than black jeans and the Metallica T-Shirt you bought 15 years ago. Getting a shave and a haircut wouldn’t hurt either. Just saying. Real job maybe?

8 – You Cannot Seduce Someone Who Doesn’t Want To Be Seduced

Sometimes there are players and games that just aren’t meant to work together. Maybe the player has very different ideas about roleplaying than you, or maybe she just doesn’t like you, the fellow players or the game. Maybe she’s going through a rough patch and the game isn’t what she needs just now. Maybe she’s a pretentious bitch who thinks you’re a lowly brute for your interest in 12th century underwear. You just need to set your personal motivations aside and let her slide. The game will be harmed more by the obtrusive player than it will be by her leaving the group.

If you notice a player who is constantly away from your games, or cancels at the last possible moment, or just doesn’t seem like she’s really that interested, be frank about it and offer her a way out of the group. If you can’t say “Okay, this doesn’t work and I don’t want you to come to this game anymore,” tell her a lie – something along the lines that there is a friend who would like to join the game and could take over her character. It gives her a way out that leaves everyone feeling a bit better. Sure, saying to someone that it might be better to “do it” with someone else is painful, but will help a lot in the long run.

7 – Seduction Is As Much About Conceal As It’s About Reveal

The age old wisdom from the TV series Lost is that a good way to keep the audience hooked to a show is to generate more questions than you give answers to. Also, the same show has taught us that if you overdo this, it just gets ridiculous. When you have a good group together and you’re selling your game to them, keep them wanting more – keep them waiting to find out what happens next. And after teasing them for a while, give them a reward for their patience. Reveal to them some of the things you’ve been teasing them with.

You can use this question-answer cycle as a motive for the game to move forward – if you leave something hanging in the air, you can then have the characters go explore it. By doing that they’ll find out things about it, but also new questions. Don’t answer all the questions you have posed with new questions. That just gets frustrating for everyone.

6 – Use Stories To Sell You

This has actually more to do with selling NPCs than selling you. When you introduce a person to the game and want it to be interesting, give it a story to tell the players. By a story I don’t mean a full-fledged narrative, but something that is interesting and tells the players something about the NPC. Could be something like when the new recruit to the team comes in a bit late, she says “Hi guys, check my new gloves – I had to actually tear them from this chav chick’s hands over at the store. They were the last pair and I weren’t going to let some skank have them before me. So, what’s going on?” This is something that will help the players relate to the NPC a bit better instantly. Even if the game is about fighting supernatural terrors from beyond, a character that nearly got into a fight at the H&M will be remembered better and with more personal attachment than some cute chick with neat gloves.

In fact, keep a few different stories around for each character and tell them as the game progresses – to re-introduce the NPCs to the players every now and then. Maybe every few gaming sessions.

5 – Be Interested In What She Has To Say

Interaction is the core of RPGs. This means that you have to pay attention to what the other side is saying. And by paying attention, I mean really paying attention. What are the things that keep coming up again and again when they talk? Which parts of your GMing they react to? When are they being non-responsive? When you’re playing with other people, these are the ways they can and will give you clues of what they want from the game. Sometimes a direct approach helps (asking “What do you want from the game?”) but might also lead them to just bullshit their way out of the situation – telling you what you want to hear. What you want from the game. Thus, being interested in what they say when in actual game situations comes in handy.

Also, this leads to another seduction tip that I have to mention here – Eye contact. Eye contact. Eye contact. Don’t just observe, show that you’re observing. If you’re hunching into your rulebook while the player is trying to explain her ideas, you’re discouraging her. She will think that you’re dismissing her ideas outright and will not go all the way with them. Even if you were actually listening while reading, you’ll miss on content as the other party thinks you’re not interested.

4 – Mirror Her

Now, a mirroring technique in seduction means something where you are copying a person’s movements and gestures and eventually noticing how she starts to mimic you, and you’ll be able to get her bend over backwards for you. In RPGs the techniques are more about you being willing to let the players influence how the game works to get them drawn in and using that to your advantage.  If you paid attention a moment ago when I was talking about paying attention or even bothered to read the player’s character sheet, you already know quite many things about what a player wants to do in the game. And more often than not these wants and needs the player has are in opposition to your own ideas about what the game should be about.

How is it done? Simple. Pay attention when the players are explaining their characters to you and start the game with the players having their characters involved in exactly what they’re wanting. Give them positive things to associate with the game by doing what they like to do and then slowly introduce your own ideas.

The benefit of this is that the players get more excited about games where the things they like are happening. So if you give them a game where the focus is on these things, they’ll be eager for more, even when you start bringing in plot elements that aren’t the ones they were originally interested in.

3 – Learn From Each Encounter

Sometimes things go right, sometimes things go wrong. What is important is to know what worked and what didn’t.

After each game, try to think what was good and what was bad. And then think how to replicate the good in future games. And how to avoid the bad. Much more demanding than it sounds. Players are usually horrible at giving feedback, especially negative. You’ll have to listen to what they say went well and then fill in the holes as “ok, they didn’t say this thing was good. Was it mediocre or bad?” And every time you start a new gaming session, try to fix one of the things that have been going wrong and hold on to one of the things that went well (if you manage more, that’s even better, of course). Eventually you’ll get the hang of what went right and what went wrong.

2 – Don’t Say Things Just To Impress Her

A good player can spot bullshit a mile away. When you try to feed her stuff that is not really you, you’ll get made. Of course, as a Game Master, you will have to create NPCs and tell stories. But try to be something you’re not cut for and you’ll end up with the players rolling their eyes. If you can’t create great action scenes, settle on creating good ones, but make the social interaction great. If you have problems running games with huge complicated conspiracies, run games that don’t have them. And if you decide to make a scene that seems really cool, make sure both you and the players have emotional investment to it so that you’re not just running it to impress everyone while your heart is not in it.

Also, know your shit. The more things you need to pull out out your ass, the more your authority ends up under inspection. If you are playing with a new system, try to know most of it beforehand. And if you don’t know something, say “I’m not 100% sure about this, but is it okay with all of us if we use a variant of this rule here,” at least you’re being honest. And honesty can be a great thing when you’re getting called on doing things differently than the rulebook said.

1 – The Best Way To Get Over a Bad Lay Is To Have Ten Great Ones

And when everything went to hell, and half of the players aren’t talking to you anymore after you tried some experimental Norwegian artsy things they didn’t like, the best way to get back on the horse is to get back on the horse. Play something light everyone likes, don’t try too much. Roll AD&D characters and play a scenario you found on the internet while laughing together at how bad it is. The best way to get over a bad game is to ignore all the fancy things, all the roleplaying game theory you know, and just to hang out with your friends. And roll some dice.

So, second season of Moving Wallpaper has started and with it, thoughts of play-within-a-play type of storytelling. There are a wonderful lot of takes on this, varying from Shakespeare to Tropic Thunder, from Simpsons to Slumdog Millionaire. It increases the complexity of the story somewhat, but with that complexity comes the freedom of exploring things from a different view.

If I had to make a guess, I’d say the most typical story-within-a-story in role-playing games is the exposition story. While they’re not really independent stories, they still fit the profile enough to be mentioned. The more common type is when the Game Master tells the players a story of what has happened before, through the tales of a non-player character. This is, for example, used to frame the quest the characters will set on. Sort of a mission briefing, one might say. The mirrored version of this is the player-character-back-story-revealed, where the player tells the dark history of his character to the rest of the characters (and thus the players). This is most common in games where the players keep their character histories secret from the rest of the group (because of some creative GM agenda, usually). Usually it is done at a moment of dramatic revelation, even Now, usually both of these are quite short “stories”, more valued by the amount of information it reveals than any artistic merits.

Another quite common thing that gets done in RPGs is things like book-within-a-game or play-withing-a-game. Sadly, these are again more likely to be just brief references to what happens “The story on the stage is a doomed love story.” Period. That’s it. “The book tells the tragic history of the castle’s owner’s cat and how it died by eating a poisoned mouse.” Period. Maybe if someone asks a question about it, there is some more details revealed, like “The cat was brown” or “There is some singing in the play”, but more likely than not, it’s just a few or two to provide a backdrop, not really a story. Sometimes they get interwoven with the story if the GM can be evocative enough, GM bouncing the stage action with combat action, for example. But these are very rare situations.

And frankly, it’s usually just great that they’re not explored in more depth than the very surface. While every GM dreams of a game that is a story told by his great imagination and every player wishes their character could be on the center stage all the time, the time it takes to monologue out a proper story is pretty long. And in a game that’s supposed to be interactive fiction, there just isn’t room for that sort of stuff. Also, neither is fully a story-within-a-story, by the standards usually presented.

xkcd's take on this

While playing a game where players are playing people who are playing a role-playing game might be quite interesting (for example, having players play player stereotypes playing a game could provide an interesting commentary on your gaming culture, or at least your view of how you see typical gaming), it might be surprisingly hard not letting the game slide into a friendly parody as you’re bound to be comment on what you’re doing while playing a guy doing the same thing. And parody tends to distract. But things like playing a game where the players are playing characters who are, for example actors, trying to get a play working, could work a bit better, as the play-withing-the-game comments on things that happen on the game (actor) level.

But, coming a full circle back to the Moving Wallpaper thing, the best experience so-far has been on our BtVS-RPG (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) campaign “Apocalypse, Cleveland”, where the game worked on the level of the production crew and then on the actual game/series level. Looking back, I would have wanted to work on that aspect a bit more in the game. There were production meetings pre-game where things got discussed and the audience’s opinions (decided by random dice rolls) and the creative crew’s responses to that explored. There were also some meta-level things planned, like falling out between actors and surprise pregnancies. Sadly, the game ended when the main character’s player left for Sweden and we (read: me) didn’t feel like going the X-Files last seasons route or recast the character, even if that could have been fruitful, viewed from hindsight. This is one of the things I probably miss most about Primetime Adventures RPG – some sort of commentary on how creating that perfect television series isn’t as easy as it might sound, how there are many things that need to be considered beyond the basic story.

But what else could be done as a story within a story, or at least with the lesser techniques present there. Flashbacks have been mentioned and of course lead to flash-forwards. But how about alternate scenarios. Short glimpses of how things could have ended if they had made another choice. Maybe the next time the characters participate in the wedding of a group of NPCs, you give each player a written role in the “main cast” of the wedding, and have a look at how the oh-so-beautiful wedding isn’t really all that beautiful at all. Or the next time the military commanders do another decision that the players find stupid, you have the players fill in for the roles of the generals, maybe even change the outcome from what you had planned. Or if you had last left one of the characters reading a pirate-love-story comic on a street corner, you spend the beginning of the next game playing out that romance, have players create the main characters for it and let the chips fall as they may. Maybe even have some other player GM the game about the pirates and you play there with the rest.

Including the players somehow where normally there is just a moment of stopping and the GM explaining things. That’s where the beauty might be found.

As a quick dodge at the end, from the computer games point of view, I just have to mention a couple of things currently happening in the game world – the Shakespeare plays on Second Life, where people are using their avatars to bring plays to life. While technically it might be more easily compared to puppet shows or something like that, the way the avatars that people are playing differ from who they are in real life makes me want to give out a shout to them at this point. The second thing is the City of Heroes Mission Architect that’s coming up in a few weeks time, where players are allowed to create their own content to the game, that also might result in some “people role-playing heroes in a virtual world, creating stories for a virtual realm inside the game” action. The closed beta is already on its way and some lucky people could be already doing it as the rest of us are just blogging about it.

I’ll leave spikey to expand on the topic of “why on earth do games rely on cutscenes to convey stories” when he gets back online and writing. I know he has much more to say about it than I do.

Oh Boy. Talk about gauntlets getting thrown. So, sound-effects, soundscapes. Music versus noise. Carefully arranged notes in a constant form with pattern, lyric, meaning, sometimes good, sometimes plain awful. Themes, especially the ones that repeat, grow and mutate. And then just silence. Followed by a soft echo of footsteps. A noise here, another there. Sound of the ship’s bulkhead bending in the storm. And as you step out, the roars of wind, rain and lightning hit you in the face with the full force of nature. You hear it roar in the distance, and know it will soon be upon you.

There are soundtracks of wonderful music that guide our thoughts and there are sounds that do that as well, forming a soundscape of the environment we’re in. The big difference between a soundtrack and a soundscape when talking of things like movies or RPGs is that the soundscape, the world of sound effects, is something that exists on the diegetic level instead of the extradiegetic world of the typical soundtrack. These fancy words mean that you can assume that the characters of the story are hearing the soundscape, whereas usually a soundtrack is there only for the audience of the story, not audible to the characters inside the story (exceptions exist, of course).

Now, a well-designed soundscape is something that’s very common (one could say, a necessity) in television and movies, somewhat common in video games but pretty rare in RPGs. At least any I’ve participated in. The two things that have come in the way, to be honest, are the amount of preparation of using sound effects compared to music, and the technology that has been evading the typical game master.

Building a proper soundscape for a roleplaying session isn’t as easy as one might think. In movies and television, you don’t need to think of the lasting aspect of your sounds. The scenes will linger in environments for a few moments so you can think very nicely what exact sounds you need and time them to the millisecond. When you’re playing games like Half-Life or Left 4 Dead, the sounds around you get generated by the computer in response to your actions, the actions and presence of other entities, and randomized from a pre-generated pool of environmental sounds to create the needed effect.

In tabletop RPGs, neither approach is fully usable. Compared to TV, there is no guarantees how long a scene lasts, as all description of action is done as speech and there is a factor of the actors having a say to what happens. You might think a warehouse scene lasts for 5 minutes tops, but your players might spend 10 minutes with their characters at the warehouse, or they might take an hour. Having the same 10 minute planned soundscape loop six times gets annoying really soon, especially if the selected sounds are there to provoke a response. They not only lose their effect, but they will turn it against you as the immersion gets broken – suddenly (gasp) the same creepy footsteps are heard for the third time. As they are present on the character level, they will get ridiculed on the character level. Or you will have to explain that they are not part of the diegetic level anymore.

Computer games give a bit better starting point – a video game’s sound director can’t go about thinking beforehand that it takes 5 minutes, 32 seconds for a player to complete the level. He has to build a generic sound base that will give the player a feel of the environment, without invoking specific action. He avoids the repetition by adding some computerized randomization to the base sound pattern and of course avoiding sounds that would require a response from the player on this base-track. Then he moves forward, having something on his side that a standard GM doesn’t – he can combine the sounds with the triggers from specific events beforehand, so that they play when someone fires a shotgun or walks on a metal floor or topples a pile of cans by accident. Or even when the player is approaching a certain situation or location on the map. Automated responses to the actors, and to be honest, the most realistic soundscapes stem from that.

For a RPG soundscape, like for a soundtrack, you’d pretty much need that base that you can play while there is nothing interesting happening. As a soundscape can be assumed to be heard by the characters as well as the players, it requires more attention than a soundtrack. This base-scape will be playing a lot in a campaign, so it would have to be extremely long to avoid the feeling of repetition. In fact, you’ll need a few extremely long, different bases when you’re building a campaign – there will be various situations that need a somewhat distinctive feel attached to them. Besides those you’ll need other sounds. Sadly, what you can’t really do, is to have sounds for the actions that the players have their characters do – you can’t have a sound-effect for every one of their actions as you have no clue what those actions might be. And even if you did, you’d be always firing the sounds of only after the action has happened on the diegetic level, so there will be unnecessary redundancy that doesn’t especially benefit anyone. And in my opinion, most of the sounds made by other actors should be left to imagination and description as well “you hear the approaching footsteps of the scientists returning from their break”, “the guard accidentally drops his soda can on the floor and curses” as you will need to provide the players with information like where the sound came from and in most cases who was making it. On the other hand, using audio samples to play when something breaks the standard ambiance, yet wouldn’t benefit much from emphasizing on it on the level of the story, would work. A strange sound, a scream, a roar, the sound of thunder approaching that would gradually turn into the base sound once the thunderstorm is upon you. Things that predate actual action or are there just as sounds, nothing more. Yet. Echos of the future.

On practical side, for campaign play, I’d probably start building the base soundscape myself from scratch instead of using something fully made beforehand by someone else. Even if getting quality sounds for free can get tedious, it becomes much more personal and the feel is less hectic if you take time to manipulate the material to fit your needs. There are good services like YLE’s Tehosto around that can get you started, but the samples you get from one source are usually too short to be used on their own, so you need to look around the internet to find enough sound bits. And even when you have enough material to fill a nice long soundscape, you’ll notice that when you start mixing from sources, the difference in quality and style can sometimes be audible. And you will end up ditching a good portion of the sounds you have, eventually needing a lot more sounds. If you want to be really personal, you can record a sound from some place by yourself. Getting a good enough microphone to be able to record the ambiance of an environment on your own might be a very costly task, unless you have friends in high places who can borrow or rent you one. But recording an hour-long thunderstorm will really pay off if you use it on the background in a game – it will sound a lot less cheesy than something you stole from a sound effect box. Once you have a large enough library of sounds to play on the base, you compile them together with some sort of a tracker program, I suppose. I haven’t done that stuff since the 90′s, to there might be better ways to do it these days.

For the specific sounds that get played, you’ll need some form of a mixing software that allows you to play multiple tracks at the same time. – a somewhat affordable solution is Virtual DJ Studio, that offers a very nice, fully working trial version for you to toy around with while you wonder if you want to use it. Then just line up the effects you want to play next to your base track and slide them in when it is their time. And there you go, a soundscape. I can imagine it working very well in horror scenarios, where the players are already on the edge of their seats because of the story.

As a counterpoint to all of this, I must admit that I love using a non-story level soundtrack on the background of RPG sessions – partly because I takes a part of the pressure off from me if I try to get the game going toward a certain mood, and mostly because I love toying between the story-level and the storytelling-level of the game. You can create a lot more contrasts with music than you can do with stuff that exists on all levels of play. Using music on the other hand allows you to stop using music, which on its own can be very very effective (as Buffy the Vampire Slayer has taught us). Doing a full campaign where the ambience was fully created with sound-effects is something I probably would never do, but using some ideas from this post might eventually creep into the games.

So, me and good old Spikey over there were talking about how my blog posts tend to be there for a very small audience, because I talk about the slight intersect of RPGs and Television, and rarely about anything else. I came up with the idea of trying to open up the reasons for this a bit, but it came out a bit dull on the first try, so tonight’s solution:

This should help a bit. Notes in italic are written on the morning after.

So, Alvan, television and role playing games, 101. As one might see from the odd blog posts I write, both are a big part of my daily thought process. To be honest, I don’t actively play RPGs these days. It’s almost more likely for me to have a month when I don’t play a single game than one when I do. On the other hand, I still maintain my healthy interest in TV-shows, watching the essentials daily and sometimes popping to the non-essentials in nice big rounds (season at a time, DVD rental these days is awesome). But let’s take a look back in time.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I convinced my mother to buy me the Finnish edition of RuneQuest after seeing the Dungeons and Dragons Red Box in my best friend’s bookshelf. Now, to a toddler like me (I was something like 10 back then), the mechanics of the game were way too hard to understand. My best friend managed to play a couple of D&D sessions with me, but he never got RuneQuest. Neither did I, but kept returning to the book, trying to figure out what the deal with it was. I made simpler versions of the rules and had a couple of games, but to be honest, I spent most of the time just reading the book. By “simpler versions of the rules” I mean something like “let’s roll these dice and if we roll something like X or lower, then we succeed, okay?”, not something that was really thought out – as said, this was when I was very very young.

Years passed, monkeys found monoliths and discovered fire and death. Somewhere around this point I met a lot of the people who are still part of the gaming group I still consider I belong to. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons became the game of choice (and in case you’re wondering: I still don’t understand some of RuneQuest’s rules, and have stopped trying 15 years ago), as we knew how to read English (I blame the computer games and old-school Batman TV series for that). So, back when I was something like 14, the RPGs we were playing were pretty much about a group of good guys (the players’ characters) fighting the bad guys (who were about as 2-dimensional as they get). And the biggest thing that was considered a story twist was that the game master poured a surprising monster or two at the end, or an ally turned out to be a traitor.

At some point, humans escaped the Garden of Eden and the games started getting more mature with the players. There was the Vampire: The Masquerade era when the games moved to a story-focused and more serious direction. Story-focused meant that it was pretty much the game master telling a story where the players were allowed to listen. And serious meant that things were cool. On the outside. The worst of this era was probably symbolized by a legendary game called “Varastoalue”, where the players were so desperate to affect the story (which was bad) they actively tried to kill own their characters.. and failing. All while the Game Master’s “story” went on. With cool ninja bodyguards and whatever else that was supposed to be awesome, but in reality just dreadful. As manatic comments below, Varastoalue wasn’t a full-fledged, planned adventure. But to be honest, not many games back then were. Lots of improvised one-shots that tended to be nearly as awful as Varastoalue. It just has a symbolic value that shines over the other games of the era because of the sheer absurdity of the things that happened in it.

And so eventually mankind blossomed, built pyramids and cathedrals, and we got pissed at it all – the railroaded games, the superficial cool (that wasn’t cool) and the gaming. I think we actually stopped playing for a good while at some point. When we came back the games started to change, something a bit different. (there’s a 10 years or so leap somewhere here in time). And after being so pissed at how things had worked, we started questioning the fun of the games we were playing.

And with the questioning of the games and gaming, we started looking for answers in the other things that we had been comfortable with. In my case, it was television and popular culture in general. To give another example before moving on – one of us has moved towards exploring the games through linguistics and history.

Now, to emphasize the point of loving TV series, here’s a photo I took earlier when cleaning my DVD cabinet (yeah, here only to show off, also, sorry about the quality, cameraphone + bad lights = not a good combo):

Bonus points if you recognize them all. Hint, my Whedons aren't there. And someone's got my Life on Mars season 1...

Whoa, pretentious much, well – I guess when you have taken a photo of the collection, you need to post it somewhere.

Now, what was I saying. Yeah. (the port’s good btw, you should try it someday) I’ve grown with television series. Mostly the geeky stuff you’d expect – Star Treks, Babylon 5s, Batman (the old series), the works. But also other things – Love Boat, Knight Rider, MacGyver, Twin Peaks… Hmm, I guess those are the geeky stuff too. Lovejoy, Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Bergerac, The Darling Buds of May and other quality Brit drama. So, anyways, the main point – watched lot of TV, and TV started affecting the way I viewed my games.

And while movies and books are great when you’re talking about a singular story structure that’s maybe played in one session as a RPG, television series (in my mind) provide a way better analogue to story structure of a game that gets split into sections. Sure, it’s not perfect, but quite many problems that come up with TV series also apply to games. And thus I blog. About the problems of television series, and try to create the analogues to RPGs the best I can when they arise.

Now, as said, I don’t actually play that many games these days. I have returned to the phase I was when I had RuneQuest. I try to keep up with the trends of the games and still buy the books that I find interesting, but most of the time, I just read them and think about how they might work. Most of the game design I tend to do these days is when I’ve watched TV. And try to see what’s good, what’s bad and what can be learned from it.

So. The best I can come up with for parting words now that the Niepoort has been working wonderfully are: When you’re reading these blog posts of mine you will hear me talk of role playing games. And if you’re someone who is not familiar with them, there might be some preconceptions that might make you want to just ignore the posts. When that happens, please try to think less of the stereotype (that I might somewhat fit, granted) of sad grown up men in their parents’ basement, rolling dice and talking about Sir Ben Dover saving the fair elf princess from the vile Dragon of Omfgawesomeness of +5. And maybe think about the text more in terms of writing and thinking of television drama – should make the reading experience a bit more balanced and maybe a little less sad. And most of the time it might even make sense.

I’ll take another look at this tomorrow and see if there is any sense in what I’ve written. Now it’s time to go rest and hope I feel better in the morning. Yeah, wasn’t half as bad as I had imagined. I can live with this. As someone commented on IRC – it’s a “this is why we can’t have nice things” sort of a history. Whatever that means.