thedeadone.net » COG

Frustrating!

Mark Cunningham — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 10:50:14 +0000

… and just a little soul draining. My last few entries on my blog have all been about the Game Crafters Guild website and mostly technical in nature. Here, here and here.

I thought the idea behind the GCG site was/is a good one. It would be something I would contribute to and participate in. So I made a new feature-rich version of it and it went live a little while ago. I didn’t just plug together some pieces of software, I wrote code to join them, tested it, created new themes and templates for and brought it all together. It works. It is alive.

However, it is barely shambling forward.

I only know a little about getting communities started. I believe I succeeded with the Redbrick Wiki, failed with Project Freebrick and Occult Wiki. The IrishGamingWiki.com is ticking over, at least more so than GCG. I’m only involved in running Redbrick Planet but that seems to be trickling along.

The Formula: People must want it, then you fulfil that need and off you go. Once you have three or four people who believe the idea other than you and start using it earnestly, things start to happen.

With GCG, I was under the impression that there were quite a few people who would be interested in it. But I guess I did the site upgrade in a sort of vacuum. No-one was calling for it. No-one was arguing about it. Just me, thinking it was a good idea. Still do. Still working on the site. But there was no “buzz” anywhere about it. It just happened. Perhaps I should start some flame war on igaming or irishgaming.com/forums… that would generate interest, polarise people for and against the idea…

It’s just frustrating that barely anyone has logged on. I can imagine more than few had a look at the site and went “hmm, that looks good, when people start using it” and then buggered off… not realising that we need to turn you lurkers into users. I feel like a cafe manager sitting in a brand new cafe, that’s totally empty with the staff constantly cleaning tables to look busy. People look in and see it’s not busy, so they’ll come back later!

Maybe I’m just coming down off my “creative” run with it. I did do a lot in a short space of time. Maybe I’m not patient enough, that it’ll happen in good time. Perhaps with the impending Gaelcon, people are too busy but after Gaelcon will start using it. Maybe. The worst thing is when your friends say, they like it and would use it and they’ll log on… and then don’t. They have good excuses and all that, I can’t fault them per say, but they all have excuses and reasons.

What do people who read my blog think about it? Is GCG a good idea? Would use it and if so, why aren’t you, what’s the thing its missing?

One of the more frustrating elements about it is that I put some other personal projects on hold to try and finish the site. In a sense, I got buried in code so I can’t contribute to the site as a user would, as I would if someone else had created the site. I have a project (mentioned here and here as “COG”) that I had planned to use the site to do something with for example but that’s paused right now. I had a few blog entries I wanted to write about too, which are now just empty drafts waiting patiently to be filled in.

“Conflict Resolution” and you thought I was weird?

Mark Cunningham — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 10:09:04 +0000

I know a few people think I’m a little “out there” when I start talking or writing about roleplaying theory and concepts (see “no need for backgrounds” for example). Well I found something that I think is a little “out there”! I came cross the phrase “Conflict Resolution” on the Fudge mailing list.

To be honest, Conflict Resolution is not the best wording for it. Apparently “Scene Resolution” has been thrown around as well. Not any better. Personally I don’t see the big deal with “Conflict Resolution” because, I think, in a sense most good GM’s use conflict resolution. Still I think it’s worth talking about a little.

Most RPG systems are task based (or “Task Resolution”). To achieve a goal you do A, B, C, etc. and roll for each one. However, even if you roll a success you can fail. For example, you break into a house, find a secret safe, crack the safe… yet the safe doesn’t contain the information you were after. Even though you succeeded (rolled well) at breaking in undetected, finding the safe and opening it, you still failed. This of course is under the GM’s control. He let you fail, even when you succeeded. a good GM’s know how to use this to make a good adventure.

So what’s Conflict Resolution then? Well in my safe-breaking example, the player was trying to get information. That was his goal. If we use Conflict Resolution, the player would state that his intent i.e. get the information. The how isn’t that important initially. The player and GM would then agree on the “stakes” of the conflict. If the player wins, they get the information, if they fail, he doesn’t or he gets into some form of trouble. They roll but in this case if the player’s roll is good, they get the information. The GM cannot say “the information was not in the safe”. The player wins, they get the information and now it’s up to the GM and player to describe what happened. Perhaps the player find some torn up pieces of paper in the bin while in the house that led him to safety deposit box, etc. you get the idea.

My first reaction to this was that it was just scale, putting tasks, A, B and C into one roll. Fudge’s Story Elements do this already by diving “tasks” into dramatic or narrative elements. So a fight could be done in a single roll if it’s not that important to the narrative, for example. But no, this is not CR (Conflict Resolution). In CR it’s about intent. What do you want your character to achieve? Combat and combat systems are terrible examples because we’ve all been preconditioned to think about combat as win = kill all the bad guys/survive. It’s actually built into the system.

CR works more on a player level than a character level. The player decides what he wants to achieve, what is his characters intent. In TR (Task Resolution), we make character decisions from moment to moment. What would my character do now? Even if you know your character’s intent, you decide action by action how to achieve it and you may never achieve it. With TR you can roll well and fail. With CR, you get what you want if you win. The GM cannot prevent you from achieving that aim.

It’s akin to asking the players “why do you want to do that?” until you get their goal. It also pulls some of the power away from the GM, if the player succeeds, they succeed and the GM can’t go back on it. There is haggling of course between GM and player about what the stakes should be, if the player requires all the information (i.e. stuff their character wouldn’t know) and even after the roll, what actually happened. The player could even describe what happens. The GM can also determine the degree of success. So in the case of “getting the information”, if you do only okay you get it but the bad guys know you have it. If you do brilliantly, you get the information undetected, for example.

It’s odd that when I started designing COG I kinda developed the same idea as Conflict Resolution, but to resolve a completely different issue, which is that of what the character knows how to do, but not the player. For example playing or roleplaying a “riddle contest” in game; your character would know riddles and solutions to them that you yourself would not. If a player answers the riddle, did the character succeed?

Part of me also reacted to the idea of summing up entire actions in one roll. With CR you could pull together a whole adventure in a single roll! But that’s not necessarily how it works. You can build a sequence of rolls depending on the conflict at hand, for example FATE using “wounds” to model what it calls “dynamic tasks”. You keep doing “damage” to each other until one wins.

It is an interesting idea, but until I actually experience it in play I can’t make up my mind about it. It could be great, but I don’t think it’s something every gamer is going to go for. What do people think?

(g|G)od(s)

Mark Cunningham — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 07:43:12 +0000

I was working on COG and I was doing some writing about what I think “mythic” is and I was considering the nature of “gods” (that’s with lower case g and pural). I wrote, “It is not that the gods exist it. It is which gods you worship.” Hmm. That made me pause. It makes sense of course, but where did that thought come from? What was the logic (if any) to get there?

As I see it, the myth creators used the gods to describe the world greater than them. They used them to simplify the cosmic to the trivial, or more importantly man’s relationship with the “bigger picture”. Elements of human existence became personalities i.e. gods. The various gods of war, for example, are cruel and brutal, enjoying bloodshed and laughing in slaughter. This is because ordinary folk saw war as cruel and brutal and that war itself seemed to enjoy the unending slaughter it caused. It was something in their lives that was simply beyond the scope of most peasant folk to really understand.

Descendants then let other elements of life gravitate to existing personifications, extending the mythos of these gods. These formed symbolic links and made sense to the people of the time. Stories built up about these links as way of explaining them and sometimes justifying them because it may not be obvious. The mistake came, and probably quite early on even as the mythos was expanding, that people believed that the gods really did exist. It begs the question then, why bother with gods if not to believe them? Well, because it allows people to understand a world on a subconscious/intuitive level, giving them a place within the cosmos and in a sense, by personifying it, allows control (or the illusion of control) of it.

The greater world is one that causes awe (or horror depending on your perspective). Giving someone the belief they have some control over that, is psychologically powerful. As an example, a warrior that “invokes” the god of war will become cruel and brutal, able to ignore pain for long periods and willing to bring slaughter as required (or feared). This was required for battle and these were the qualities of the war god. It could give them a ferocity that might give them an edge.

I think in part that is why I’m drawn to Chaos Magic because it reflects this attitude. The idea of “paradigm shifting” (I term I’ve only ever seen on Wikipedia), accepting completely a different belief system to achieve a goal, is a powerful psychological tool. Useful in today’s world as it was back then, however it’s not to battle and war but to art, writing, business, relationships and a whole host of trivial and human matters.

It’s not that the gods exist. It is what they represent. The ancients, though trapped by their own dogma, were still wise enough to not forget the other elements of the world. Many temples dedicated to one god, also contained small shrines to the other gods so they wouldn’t be offended. The gods represented a way to approach life and to become part of the cycle of life. Understanding one god is to attempt to understand humans’ relationship to the things that that god represents. It is also stating that this one element is the reason for existence (or at least their existence). But doing that to the exclusion of everything else is a dire mistake, the path to self-destruction.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to an answer to the question: Does God Exist? It is irrelevant. To understand God is an attempt to understand the whole world and humanity’s place in it. Some see God as being “out there”, separate from reality, a supernatural entity. Maybe, maybe. But I think it’s more practical to see God as being the universe, a cosmic spirit of everything if you will. It doesn’t matter if God really exists, only that we try to understand the world and our relationship to it. If that involves being a philosopher, a scientist, an artist or just living life, so be it.

Anyone who argues dogma or fact should really make sure they don’t offend the other gods.

Writing, huh?

Mark Cunningham — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 21:59:12 +0000

What’s going on? This is my second post in one week. Have the immortal Watchers woken up from their vile degradations? Have the secretive Authorities kicked-started their master plan? Have the walls of the world cracked and the Nameless one’s non-defined tentacles stretch out into our world?

Ehhh, no.

I guess I’ve just got that writer’s bug right now. My second super-secret RPG project (codenamed COG) is actually going really well at the moment. I originally had no intention of doing another RPG project after my first one. That first one is in a kinda limbo at the moment, not moving forward or backwards. Mostly because my revised (and seriously updated) Reboot adventure may be published by Grey Ghost and there is a connection.

It’s so strange the difference in my creative process for these two projects. With the first one (lets called it LH for the time being), I started with a vague idea. Built it up. Found a system. Rewrote. Reworked. Restructured. Thought about it. Went in a completely different direction. Researched. Reworked. And so on.

For COG, however, everything is different. The experience of LH thought me about game design, world design and even non-fiction prose. Before I even started writing it up, I’m designing it, jotting down all my ideas and then shuffling them around and constantly re-structuring them. Essentially, I’ll have the world and system complete before I start to write it. The whole origin of COG is from some idle thoughts about roleplaying in the general. I had a little flash, not a big eureka. I started expanding that idea and it began to consume my thinking. It was, literally, so out there… it had to be done. I shared the core of the idea with a friend who in the past has disagreed with me on various aspects of gaming. We’re into gaming for very different reasons. I expected him to shoot it down. However, he didn’t. That was more than enough to drive me forward.

I guess the goals are very different for both projects. For LH, the purpose was to create a RPG as good as a “White Wolf” book and also to learn how to rewrite. Rewriting, I’ve found, is often the hardest thing to do to your own work. Now I’m on version 0.18 of LH, so I think I’m getting the hang of it, don’t you? Also during the process of designing and writing LH, my research, reading and thinking changed my opinions of what roleplaying is about and so the “White Wolf” book in my original purpose became “an RPG I would play”. However for COG, I had an idea. And from this all things came. I’m focused. I know what I want from the get go.

It’s great how my creative processes have changed, I’m starting to ask myself the hard questions when I sit down to write. I consider things like structure, character and images before plot, before putting any words down. Hopefully you’ll see it in these blog posts. The last idea I had, started with just an image, within 10 minutes I had a story, with character, plot and even a number of themes and scenes. However, the last idea I had, I thought it was wonderful, a complete novel nearly. But I felt, weirdly, I wouldn’t be able to do it justice. I feel I don’t have the wordsmith skill, that mastery of prose, to pull it off. And sadly I don’t think I have the worldly knowledge either. I guess that’ll be my next challenge.

thedeadone.net » COG

Frustrating!

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“Conflict Resolution” and you thought I was weird?

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(g|G)od(s)

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