swim into games and stories with the milkyfish

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #11: Have you ever played a character that was morally gray, or actually evil? Why or why not? If yes, did you enjoy it?

I think the worst character I ever came up with was for a Fading Suns game: a telepathic dwarf noble who was too ugly and misshapen to appear in public, so he operated through a drugged, telepathically dominated slave-girl. I’m honestly quite glad that game never ran – I’m not sure I could have kept that up.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #12: Do prefer collaborative or competitive games? What do you think that says about you?

I’m easy. I’ll play pretty much anything. That said, I’ve yet to really enjoy a collaborative story-telling game.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #13: Who’s the best GM/storyteller/party leader you’ve ever had? What made him/her so great?

I’m honestly not sure. Define ‘best’. I’ve had a lot of good GMs and players, but I can’t pick a standout.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #14: What kinds of adventures do you enjoy most? Dungeon crawls, mysteries, freeform roleplaying, or something else? What do you think that says about you?

I’m a sucker for a good mystery – or a dungeon crawl. Anything that lets me delve into the world.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #15: People often talk about the divide between what happens “in game” and “in real life.” Do you maintain that divide in your own play, or do you tend to take what happens to your character personally? Why?

Er, yes, I maintain that divide. The other way lies madness.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #16: Who was the most memorable foe you’ve ever come up against in a game? How did you beat him/her/it? Or did you?

The Mechanical Turk, in a Hellboy game. He threatened us at gunpoint and demanded legs.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #17: What was the best reward you’ve ever gotten in a game? What made it so great? How much do you need tangible rewards (loot, leveling, etc.) to enjoy a game?

I can’t recall anything exceptional that I received, but I remember giving a reward that terrified the player. It was part of a long running Legend of the FIve Rings. One of the characters unexpectedly gained the power of the Oracle of Water, effectively becoming a water goddess. She was so overwhelmed with all her new power that the character fled and hid for the rest of the session.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #10: Have you ever played a character originally from a book/TV/movie? How did the character change from the original as you played? If not, who would you most like to play?

I can’t recall any campaigns where people played characters from other media (at least, not explicitly – I can think of plenty who were Conan/Aragorn/Han Solo in a silly hat). Con games are a different matter, and are much more suited to using actual characters from media. It’s a lot easier to say ‘you’re Mal Reynolds’ than it is to get a player to read half a page of background; for another.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #9: Have you ever played a character of the opposite sex. Why or why not? If yes, how did the other players react?

I’m actually playing one in a Hillfolk playtest right now, and it was the other players’ idea. A woman was the best fit for the cultural tensions in that game. In general, though, I stick to male (or neuter – I’ve played a few robots and AIs) characters, and mildly prefer it when players match their character’s gender. It’s easier to get the pronouns right when GMing.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #8: What’s the one gaming accessory (lucky dice, soundtrack, etc.) you just can’t do without? Why?

Scrap paper and pen. If I’m GMing, I do lots of sketch maps, notes and diagrams. If I’m playing, I doodle and make notes. I think best when writing.

Getting an iPad is on the agenda this year, and I suspect I’ll have a different answer after that.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #7: How do you pick names for your characters?

For a player character, I just pick a name that sounds right. Right now, for example, I’m playing a superpowered cop. The character concept is that he’s ex-military police, tough, and strait-laced with a undercurrent of brutality (he’s based on Agent Van Buren from Boardwalk Empire. For him, I wanted a name that sounded tough and harsh, so meet Sergeant Bart Tollman.

Other characters get puns for names. In another game, I’m Hatless Joe the Injun. The character is actually a hataali medicine man, but not a very good one, and the Fork-Tongued White Men don’t understand his role.

When I’m GMing, I need a lot of names. I try to do up lists of names, marking entries off as a minor NPCs pop up. Kate Monk’s Onomastikon is your friend here. Grabbing 10-20 culturally appropriates name is plenty, as you can easily make up similar-sounding names once you’ve got a base sound pattern to work from.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #6: Describe your all-time favorite character to play. What was it about him/her/it that you enjoyed so much?

As a GM - Thor, in a Nobilis game. Heavily inspired by the neurotic, confused Thor in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. It’s immense fun to grumble about trivialities from the perspective of an immortal thunder god with a rather confused grasp of the modern world.

As a player – probably Simeon, from a Vampire: The Masquerade game I played way back in 1995 or so. Simeon was either a fugitive Salubri who pretended to be a Malkavian to avoid suspicion, or else a Malkavian who thought he was a fugitive Salubri pretending to be a Malkavian. I told the Storyteller to pick one option, but to hide it from me for as long as possible. Trying to puzzle out the truth while dodging Tremere assassins and the character’s own growing paranoia was tremendous fun.

I’ve always wanted to do a Thief-style game, and a potential mechanic for it popped into my head while playing Mansions of Madness.

It’s based around a standard deck of playing cards. The four suits correspond to situations: Hearts are emotional/social, Clubs are violence/force, Spades are the environment, and Diamonds are intellect/puzzles. A character has four stats, ranging from 3 to 7, and a number of skills -things like Lockpicking, Archery, Hiding… or whatever the player comes up with (player-defined skills).

Here’s the gimmick: when you try to do something, the GM sets a difficulty number to beat. Say you’re trying to pick a lock – that’s a Spades challenge. Your running total starts equal to your matching stat. Each round, you flip the top card of the deck. If it’s a Spade, you add its value to your total.

Depending on the circumstances, the GM may nominate one, two or even three of the other suits as hazards*. If the card matches one of those suits, you’re hindered by some new problem, and the card’s value is subtracted from your total**. For example, flip a Club (violence), and a guard comes around the corner. Flip a Heart (emotion), and you might suddenly doubt your skills, or be distracted by greedily looting a nearby jewelled candlestick. Flip a Diamond, and you discover the lock’s trapped. If your total drops to 0 or less, you fail the challenge and bad stuff happens***.

If you’ve got a skill that fits the current challenge, then you can use it to add non-matching cards to your total, but doing so spends a point from the appropriate stat. Say you’re in the middle of a sword fight (so you need Clubs), and you flip a big Heart. Normally, that would be deducted from your running total – maybe your foe goes into a battle frenzy, maybe you panic, maybe you can’t bring yourself to murder someone, maybe you recognise your lover behind your foe’s mask – but if you’ve got the Swordfighting skill, you can reduce your Hearts skill by 1 to add that Heart to your total.

The nice thing about the mechanic is that it throws in lots of complications and unexpected twists. You don’t just miss an attack if you don’t draw a Club – a flock of startled pigeons flies in front of you, you sudden realise that your target’s a member of a rival crime family and you’ll be targeted for retribution if you kill him, he spots your sniper’s nest in the cathedral tower and ducks into cover.

It feels intuitively like a nice little system, assuming I can get the numbers right. I’m not normally a fan of playing cards as a mechanic, but it suits this setup. Your thoughts?

*: Flipped cards in a suit that’s neither hazardous nor beneficial still do something, I’m just not sure what. Probably hang around as a complication that doesn’t currently impede your task.

**: What about Ace/Jack/Queen/King? I’m tempted to tie them to factions and groups within the game. So, drawing a Jack means the Thieves’ Guild are involved. An Ace represents the city watch, and it’s high or low depending on whether or not they’re on alert or not. Queen and King…not sure yet.

***: Drawing from Hamlet’s Hit Points, I’m thinking of giving a bonus card to a character who loses a contest that can be used in the next struggle.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #5: Have you ever introduced a child to gaming, or played a game with a young person? How is gaming with kids different than gaming with adults?

Most of my abiding memories of running games for kids are bad ones, where some kid has signed up for a wildly inappropriate game and no-one suggested that maybe they might play something other than the over-18s Call of Cthulhu game about the necrophiliac Shub-Niggurath cult. These awkward games go in one of two ways:

Scenario One: Expurgation

Me: Ok, you spy on the cult ceremony and they’re all… dancing around in a circle, fully clothed.

Kid: I sneak in and read their spellbook.

Me (looks at detailed handout, complete with plot-significant skyclad woodcuts). Er. It’s evil.

Scenario Two: They’re The Ones With No Filters

Me: Ok, you spy on the cult ceremony and they’re -

Kid: It says here I was in World War I, so I know about grenades and I have a grenade and I throw the grenade and they all explode.

Me: Well -

Kid: And the ones that don’t blow up get blinded because of all the blood in their eyes, so I run in and slit their throats while they’re blinded -

Me: Hold on -

Kid: And when I cut a guy’s throat and all the blood’s spurting out, I turn him around so the blood shoots into the eyes of the next cultist to keep him blinded and then I cut him too!

I’m sure gaming with kids can be fun and rewarding – as long as you pick the right game.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #4: Are you a “closet gamer?” Have you ever hidden the fact that you’re a gamer from your co-workers, friends, family, or significant other? Why or why not? How did they react if they found out?

Ahahahahaha. No.

I do wish I had a better “so what do you do?” spiel, though.

Q: So what do you do?

A: I write roleplaying games.

Q: Huh?

A: Er… have you heard of Dungeons and Dragons?

Q: No.

A: It’s…sort of like a board game. And I do the rules.

I could say I’m a writer, but that just adds another couplet onto the start of that dialogue.

As an aside – since Reality Optional (buy my book!) came out, I’ve got far more congratulations and well-wishes from friends than for any other project. While this is welcome and deeply appreciated, it’s also interesting. Do gamers attribute more weight to ‘real’ writing, even if it’s about clones and mad computers and in-jokes? Do we ever fully leave the gamer closet?

Writing fiction is exactly like running a game for the worst bunch of players imaginable.

Not only do you have to come up with the plot and the setting and so forth, but you’ve also got to motivate the characters. Without the GM prodding them to get up and do something, they just lie there, a panoply of apathy. On the rare occasions when the characters do act of their own accord, they run off in unexpected directions instead of following the plot you’d planned for them.

That’s why writing fiction was such a hurdle for me. To borrow from Woody Allen (edit: who borrowed from Groucho Marx, known Commie Mutant Traitor), I didn’t want to play any game that would have me as a player.

When Allen Varney approached me about writing a PARANOIA novel, I accepted in the hope that taking on a deadline would stimulate my guilt gland -

(You don’t have a guilt gland? I do. It’s hyperactive. I take medication for it.)

- and force me to write fiction.

The plan worked… eventually. The outline took longer to write than the book did. Writing a detailed outline for an rpg adventure is anathema – a good adventure leaves the major decisions up to the players, so at most you can have an outline full of conditionals, counterfactuals and loops (if the players choose x, then y. If they’ve already done y, then you can salvage the situation with z.)  In the past, I approached fiction in the same way, which doesn’t work.

So, this time, an outline was necessary.

(The passive voice is much safer.)

The first outline let to the second outline led to the third outline led to an endless death march. Allen & I would send each other mails starting off “I’ve got the homicidal thoughts under control now, so…” The book wandered in the desert for rather more than 40 nights.

My legal team & I are pleased to report that the endless death march did, in fact, pay off in the end and therefore there’s no need to smother anyone with a giant pile of old outlines. Once the final outline came together, the book flowed like The Computer’s own Bouncy Bubble Beverage. It was fun to write. That’s fun in a genuine way, not in an Alpha Complex reactor-shielding-is-fun way.

Some writers can write without an outline (Stephen King’s the best known example.) The big lesson from writing Reality Optional is that I’m not one of them. I need a map to keep me on course. That’s a very valuable insight to take away from the whole experience, and one that I’m going to build on this year.

The map’s not the territory, but it’s the first step to conquering it.