Here’s Vin Diesel being cool about Dungeons and Dragons:

And, if you haven’t heard, a new Charity RPG Bundle to support Doctors Without Borders Pakistan Food Relief. Get nearly 700 dollars worth of RPG stuff for 25 dollars!  Some great stuff in the bundle: Don’t Rest Your Head, Exalted 2nd Edition (if you like Exalted that is), Icons, Starblazer’s Adventures, and on!

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My current avatar for the game is female. Much prefer to watch her slay monsters than him, don't you think?

I’ve been playing Monster Hunter Tri for the Wii over the last week. Still working through the offline game so far. There has been a lot of hype about this game, but it matches up to what I expected, which isn’t the same as what is hyped. I debated with myself if I would get my money’s worth out of it as it appears to be a game that requires a bit of a time commitment (and a bit of “grinding”, something I swore I’d never waste my time doing), but in the end, it was watching How to Train a Dragon for a second time with the kids that changed my mind.

Like what excites me in tabletop gaming, it’s the experience I’m after when I play a computer game, be that pure fun or a thrilling adventure. One of the first games I got for the Wii was Resident Evil 4 (I never played any of the others in the series) and the first few hours of play were great. A lovely creepy, mysterious and thrilling experience. I’m not sure how much I’ve done of it, but it’s gotten to the point that the experience has worn off and I’m just playing a game; managing ammo, expecting the ridiculous and impossible twists, the pointless searching of tunnels and out-of-place puzzles. I think this is because I have the time/attention-span of a casual player but the desires of a hardcore player. I don’t play long enough that the experience carries me most of the way. (Zelda has done the same to me, I can’t believe after getting the armour together I have to go explore yet another nine dungeons or something.)

We've watched it twice, once in 2D and once in 3D. The 3D doesn't add much. Still loved it, loads of gamer references

Watching How to Train a Dragon again, the final battle between the Vikings and the great dragon, just reminded me of the trailers and screenshots of Monster Hunter Tri, and it struck me. MHT has a wonderful simple premise. One that would work just as easily as a quick game or a much larger roleplaying experience. Though I’m not interested in computer gaming roleplaying (this isn’t a slight against WOW players or anything, I’m just not interested in it), it occurred to me that it’d make a great premise for a tabletop roleplaying game.

My big chip about tabletop RPG fantasy games is that they are often highly detailed evolved worlds. Lots of rich source to explore when you play. A lot of people love this I know, but I guess I’m a little different. This, to a degree, puts me off because it presents a learning curve to the world. To make a proper character to roleplay means you should, at the least, have a good idea of the world you’re creating the character for. A detailed fantasy RPG makes me feel I should have a strong knowledge of the world before play and, quite often, you have tons of choice. And when you have too much choice, you have no choice, in a way. I could pick up a Lord of the Rings RPG because I’m a fan of the books, but Exalted wears me down. Riddle of Steel has a great combat mechanic, which makes it stand out, but the setting is detailed and dense, putting me off the setting part.

But that’s why I think MHT is fascinating. It doesn’t offer a fantasy world. It offers a premise. You are a hunter of monsters. You have seven (I think) different types of weapons to specialise in (compared to pages of detailed descriptions of medieval-inspired weapons for example). But by using different materials, buying charms, etc. you can make these weapons quite unique. The game starts you in a village, and gets you to hunt different types of monsters (and doing some grinding too) and you learn about the monsters in play. You don’t start with a big list, you build your knowledge via experience. You don’t have tons of choice, you are a hunter and you have several weapon-types to specialise in, but it does offer quite a range of customisation the more you play. (Which was one of the things that attracted me to the game, being able to create a fairly unique character.)

If you had a decent tabletop RPG mechanic for combat fighting the monsters, you could adopt a similar premise. Start small, add bits to the world (new monsters, towns, NPCs) as the players get better. Having such a simple premise would make it easy to layer on top bigger narratives as the players get more confident and attached to the world, suggesting hints of a possible invasion or conspiracies of a far away empire, etc.

Great old school RPG and I had a great character, a young teenager trying to become a warrior... which he did and became scary good!

My GM has gotten himself an job (good for him) and is now travelling the world, so we haven’t gotten to finish our “The Enemy Within” campaign, set in the Warhammer Fantasy world (1st Edition mind you so “old school”). This campaign worked because all of the players rolled up characters instead of creating them. Our initial choices were made by the dice. It allowed us to create basic characters with not that much pre-existing knowledge of the world. The campaign then set us off with our group direction and carried us around the world to the point we learned the world in play.

Anything that gets in the way of experience, takes from the whole thing. Just as with writing, anything that jars the reader from work is bad. You don’t want your reader to be correcting your grammar or laughing when they shouldn’t be at the way one of your character’s talk, how will they take anything else seriously? The same goes for roleplaying books and playing them. And for me the “burden” of a huge setting that I can’t relate it to or hang it on something is really off-putting. Warhammer fantasy is sort like a European medieval/renaissance alternative history (with Elves and Halflings) and it does it well. There’s my hook. Post-apocalyptic settings are also based on the modern world but imagined after the big bomb. Modern day games, such as urban fantasy concepts (like most of White’ Wolf’s World Of Darkness games), I can grok too.

The same also applies to far future based worlds, where the technology and science are so far advanced, they are incomprehensible as anything other than magic. Though I sometimes feel that there is something more interesting in such settings, because they ask the question, what’s going to happen to humanity? But then you’re playing, not a human, or at least not a modern human, but someone or thing so advanced that they are effectively alien.

And that’s the other thing that bugs me some what about fantasy worlds. They often shoe-horn in modern perspectives in very different worlds. Sometimes this can work when the setting doesn’t take itself too seriously, or it’s close enough to the readers world that its easy to get. But it can sometimes lead to claims or appearance of “cultural misappropriation” or it can be used by players to hide anti-game decisions (“that’s what a follower of X would do!”). So personally I prefer human or close-enough to human type characters. I’m not saying you can’t have a game or play a game where characters are significantly different, but there is a point when a human becomes too alien to play convincingly or to have a good experience with as a player, unless it’s down simply for kicks.

In Lost Heroes I make an explicit ruling on this. I say something like: “you can play a human that can turn into a dragon, but you can’t play a dragon that turns into a human.” The difference is subtle.

Okay, this post has become a lot longer than I intended. Must stop rambling. All really to say I think the premise of MHT would make an interesting tabletop RPG game.

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Okay, this post is about pen-and-paper roleplaying games but I’d like to start by using computer games to illustrate a point. Have you ever played one of those strategy based games that involves building a base, collecting resources, expanding technology while battling an enemy? Like Starcraft, Command and Conquer, Rise of Nations, etc. etc. Would these games keep your interest for long if you were the only player and all you did was build? (Right now I know some of you are shouting SimCity at me… but I’m trying to illustrate a point about roleplaying so kept with me for a few more sentences).

I feel like I’m caught in a conundrum here. On one side, players should drive the story and GMs (Game Masters) should not railroad players. On the other side, GMs should be providing a good game and therefore should be driving the players if needs be. Delicate balance.

My current GM gave off recently that not all the players have given character backgrounds (see here for my opinion of character backgrounds) and because of that the characters who had given backgrounds were getting all the lime-light. That pissed me off. — Before I speak further about our current game, I have to be honest. We’re playing White Wolf’s Exalted. “So?” you cry. Well, I think Exalted sucks! Crappy combat system and boring setting. Also the GM and myself disagree fundamentally about roleplaying, what’s important, wants not, etc. He’s dogmatic and, dare I say, conservative? I want to try different things (for better or for worse). I guess I should stop here. I mean, surely anything I say now is biased? Yea probably. But I committed to it 100% (I think). Heck, I enjoyed D&D not too long ago, so I’m sure I can find something I enjoy in Exalted, right? I like my character, like what he can do. The last thing I should mention as well is that I’m one of those awful player that doesn’t turn up to half the games but I have a damn good excuse: my wife, Sophie, is six months pregnant with our second child. I simply cannot make every game or even the majority this year. It’ll get better in time, just not right now. The group knows that and seem happy with it.

I did give a background. I even gave several options for how I could have been introduced to the group, numerous story hooks and goals for my character. That should be enough? The real problem the GM wanted to address is not about backgrounds. This is just some unconscious mis-direction. It’s about players driving the game. The two players who “gave backgrounds” have becoming a driving force in the game, meaning that the other players, including myself, are side-lined. Why are they a driving force? Well because they are building things. One is a captain who owns ships and the other powers-up on the occult side. Hopefully you’ll see why I used the computer games example at the beginning. These two players are building up power. When there is a slow in the action, these players fill it in with “I want to do X or Y”. While I just want to play. Am I a bad player? Looking back at my background, none of the motivations or goals were about gathering power. The GM never once brought in any element of my background into the setting. Now the game has gone on for a while, I can’t just say “right I’m going back to where I killed all those monks to see if the Dragon Blooded know?” That would be utterly “out of character” and counter to my own precious enjoyment of the game. (And yes you can argue too that I’m being sidelined because I can’t attend every game and that is a good reason, but then the GM shouldn’t go on about not giving backgrounds when I did and he ignored it!)

Perhaps it’s the nature of Exalted that’s at issue here. It’s a game where the players can get a lot of mechanical power from the system yet they must always hide it from the Dragon Blooded in the setting. This leads to the “building power” syndrome: gathering resources, making contacts, being secretive always, avoid using powers openly, etc. I guess I’m not driven by that kind of meta-gaming (is it meta-gaming?).

My characters goals and story hooks require the GM to use them. I gave a bit of angst and a dark side to my character’s lavish humour, he murdered his brother monks and fleed his monastery when he become an Exalted. The Dragon Bloods are on his trail. None of this has come up in the game. No hunters came looking for Riptal Verek. His face is not plastered on street corners. The problem, I guess, is that my character’s goals are not independent of the GM’s designs. I can’t drive the game without input from the GM. If he chooses to ignore my background (which he did) I’m nothing more than the comic side-kick to the power-gathers.

In a sense, the GM should be driving the chronicle to a degree (at least for a bit at the beginning) for my character to get involved. I want the GM to drive the game, to keep the pace up, rather than wait for me to act. But the GM is content to let the players drive it, which should be ideal… but it isn’t.

What’s happening is that the driving-players are engaged in world-building, just like in those computer games. They build and build and build. Then when the GM introduces some conflict, we battle. Then we recover and build again. It becomes a big strategy game. And, while I like the occasionally game of Starcraft, it’s no Wii and the fun value comes in diminishing-returns (the more I play it, the less I enjoy it, but the occasionaly one-off game is great time-killer).

I guess those big epic fantasy stories are in a sense “strategy games”, but they are interwoven with sub-plots that are purely character based. It’s like the model for this campaign is “world-building”. We expand the world, building on it, meant to be getting involved in it (but I’m not), but two of the players have got the big stakes. One of the other players is a thief, how do they fit in with this power-gathering drive? How does a thief gather power? Shouldn’t an Exalted thief live from escapade to escapade? That, in my mind, would be what makes a character a “thief” as opposed to someone who can just steal really well or is just a kleptomaniac. There are other models for campaigns (see here for one I’ve tried to develop).

There isn’t anything to conclude except to ask “am I making sense”? I probably not, but it makes me feel better to get that rant out of my system.

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Over the holidays, I read a weak fantasy book called Prospero’s Children (by Jan Siegel published in 2000). It was one of the many second hand books I picked up before I left. It isn’t very good, well at least I didn’t think so. But the world and mythos it created screamed parallels with Mage the Awakening RPG (also see here, a previous post about it). In the book, there are the “Gifted”, mortals have inherited the gift from ancestors in Atlantis. Atlantis itself is the origin of all these gifted beings. They even use Atlantean language to cast magic.

I didn’t think it was very original idea (the novel or the RPG) but I thought, if you took this mythos and then put White Wolf’s WOD2.0 formula onto it (see Vampire the Requiem) and extended it a bit, you would have Mage the Awakening. However, I don’t think White Wolf have to worry about being sued for copyright, there is more than enough that is different.

I don’t like Mage the Awakening. In the same way I don’t like White Wolf’s Exalted RPG. They are both unoriginal, which is not necessarily a negative quality. However if you do go with unoriginal, you better do it well and/or do it in an original/inspired way. Do I think they did it well? Shrug. I don’t know.

To be honest, the reason I don’t like them is that I find both games un-inspiring. A concept it would seem that is hard to phantom by at least one friend of mine, however. While I do have qualms about the setting and system for both games, it is not as important, because even attempting to fix those will not rise it above uninspiring for me. “Boring” is probably a more appropriate word than uninspiring. If a setting does pique my interest, then a broken system will not stop me trying it out or if the concepts behind the system excite me, I can forgive failings in the setting.

C’est la vie. That is all I will say on Mage the Awakening and Exalted.

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