On the 8th of the 8th 2008, I managed to get everyone (or at least enough people) to agree to start a new roleplaying game. We choose Spirit of the Century as the first game to play because its, apparently easy to pick up and just play (only one person in our group has played it before and I have a textbook knowledge of how to play it). You’ll be able to read write ups of it here on our roleplaying group’s site (in fact you can see write-ups and characters from all our games on that site).
Unfortunately my wife comes down with the flu the next week and is pretty bad this week too. So I haven’t actually managed to attend any games! Arg. But hopefully there is next week…
Continuing on from Story Hooks, this is the second part of item 8 of the L___ H_____ system.
Update #1: 
Fudge Passions by Mark Cunningham is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Fudge Passions v2.0
Fudge Passions was originally conceived as a way to link a character’s emotional state to other parts of the system (like Gifts or Powers). It is built as an addition to the Fudge RPG system but also replaces Fudge Points (Passion Points replace Fudge Points). It was designed and tested in parallel with my Story Hooks system but both can be used independently.
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Part 1 of to do item: number 8. Part 2, Fudge Passions, will be online soon.
Update #1: Story Hooks by Mark Cunningham is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Story Hooks v2.0
Story Hooks is a system I created to replace the creation and management of players’ characters’ histories (see here for more). The first version, which I designed and wrote-up for L___ H_____, was very basic and involved a lot of hand-wavy “use as you see fit”. It consisted of the “Back-Story” and a non-delimited list of “Story Hooks”, which were practically Story/Adventures Seeds.
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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.
I saw a post on LJ (livejournal.com) from mytholder which made me think I should write up some of my thoughts on running gaming/roleplaying campaigns (or chronicles) as opposed to adventures.
I’ve just started, hopefully long-running, Nobilis campaign, I’ve started seriously thinking about how to handle campaigns. However I wouldn’t consider myself well versed in long campaigns. I’ve played a few that have lasted more than a few months (real-time) and I once ran a campaign that ran over two years. Still I can think about it.
My understanding is that people think of, or use, three different types of campaigns:
- Episodic Adventures: The campaign is made up of a series of distinct adventures.
- Rolling Adventures: Adventures and stories roll into the following adventures and stories. There is no apparent distinction between one and the next adventure.
- Extended Adventure: Or The Big Plot. There is one big adventure (though it can comprise smaller adventures).
However, I believe these categories are mostly artificial.
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It is an Enchanted Device Generator for Ars Magica (4th Edition). It’s built using PHP and Sajax which is a free AJAX toolkit.
It’s been quite an enlightening experiment. The buzz and hype generated around AJAX is quite something, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I started with an idea, a simple script that takes in a few values and does some calculations and presents the result to the user. But, I wanted the user to be able to tweak the values and see the results immediately. That sounds like something AJAX is perfect for.
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This theme is a clear three column view with a useful toolbar on top. It has support for easy customisation (per category, author and whole site).
This theme is originally a conversion of my site when moving from a MovableType setup to Wordpress. Because of that I added a lot of extra functionality into the theme but don’t worry, it’ll work out of the box on a new system without any plugins. (If your interested in the code, most of it is in “tdo-functions.php”).
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I only just noticed that Wordpress 1.5.2 has been released. Took, oh, about 30 minutes to upgrade this site, that site and an other site.
Also, MediaWiki 1.4.12 was released last week. Took another 30 minutes to upgrade that site and that one of there.
’tis important to keep web software up to date otherwise you might end up getting hacked like the IrishGaming.com forums did today.
You wake up. But it is not your home. Not your house. Not your world. The people are strange. Odd. They don’t seem to care about anything. There are people going mad on the street and everyone watches as they kill themselves. And what the hell is it with that countdown?
If your looking for an RPG based on the cartoon ‘Reboot’ - this isn’t it!
Reboot is a Roleplaying Scenario. In includes characters, setting and plot and is designed for FUDGE (but includes rules to use it with the Storyteller/World of Darkness game rules).
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I haven’t really done any new content for the site in ages.
This is due for the most part because I have been updating Murder of Crows Blog which is a collabroate webage for my regular PnP RPG troupe. Added lots of functionality and features like a random quote, search engine and email subscribtion for comments!
Unfortantly only one other member from the troupe is using it. This may change when we start roleplaying again (3 weeks without a game; I’m going slowly mad!) because theres no need for it at the moment. It’s nearly enough to make you cry. Well okay not really then.
Anyway… plan to do some writing (finish over Dreamer in Paris and start Big Brother) and drawing over the next week. You’ll just have to hang on! 
Ah. The smell of the usual friday morning fry is wafting through my desk. Must eat greasy fattening food!