10 by 10 room

Neel K, “Meeting Facilitation and Gaming”:

I started thinking that I should take the idea of meeting facilitation more seriously, and turned to Google to try and find out what people did about this. It was pretty neat; I never knew you could get professional certification in meeting facilitation. This makes sense, though, because I know I’ve lost some serious SAN sitting through pointless meetings…. Anyway, I did find some interesting sites, and one of the pages I found most interesting was the page on writing an agenda script for the meeting. The idea of writing down what I want to happen, and how long it should take, and who should get involved is something I never thought of.

Crossing meeting methodology with gaming? Then again, I realize I ended last week’s succession by getting each player’s “next action” for when we resumed play. So how about applying GTD to social gaming? What a country!

On this post I talked about advice on RPGnet regarding a game of Dogs in the Vineyard. The conclusion seemed to be that he highlighted problems were somewhat more on the social contract rather than mechanical level. But this got me thinking about some occasionally conflicting answers I have regarding this question: where do the rules belong?

One of Mike Holmes’s favorite rants at the Forge is basically calling into question: why do you have a combat system? And this really is the start of a lot of good revision of what a good game system is made of. When I first thought about RPGs, I took for granted the reasons to have a full-fleshed combat system, with more detail than the rest. But then I recognized: in many games, this was not the focus, and I could indeed do without the detail there. And then going further: the rules could certainly go the other way, focusing on that which matters.

Where do the rules belong?

From the aforementioned RPGnet thread:

Here’s my opinion—Dogs, like some other narrativist games, foregrounds social contract as a problem-solving mechanism.

In rules-lighter games, a lot of leeway is given to the GM (or the group at large) to make up for clashes within the game, over problems like “is toast a valid weapon type”. Dogs is not “rules-light” in my estimation, with some rules density devoted to the important parts of the game, but nonetheless puts a lot of weight towards this group (or GM-centered) ad hoc negotiation of the rules, and some of this is in the same spots – both Risus and Dogs in the Vineyard will need to group/GM discussion of whether “toast” is a valid reaction to gunplay.

Let me say something that is patently-untrue-yet-possibly-helpful: All games have exactly 42 rules. However, these rules may or may not be written down, and may or may not be implicit rather than explicit. So where are your rules now, and where do they need to go?

Happy New Years, folks!

What does this say to you?

Folk were talking about possibly adding “roleplaying bonuses” to Dogs in the Vineyard”, but the consensus was that the Social Contract among players was where a problem was really at. DannyK’s interpretation:

The price of a stripped down, narratively driven system like the DitV system is that the system doesn’t provide as much protection against asshats. That’s common to a lot of Forge-baked games. You could narrate your character god-modding and killling everybody n Chicago in hand-to-hand combat in a PTA game, and there’s nothing but the contempt of your fellow players to stop you.

Does that make them bad games? Of course not. It just means you have to be careful who you play them with. “Will allow you to play with asshats” is not a very good design goal for an RPG.

But really, Brand reminds us:

Of course, this is the same with D&D.

GM: “The orc comes swinging his sword at you, what do you do?”

Player: “I tell him I like toast”—player pushes forward a natural 20 and grins.

GM: “The fuck?”

Player: “I like toast with a natural 20. That’s critical toast liking.”

GM: “Right… the orc ignores your toast liking and kills your ass. Go roll up a new character.”

Of course there’s still a need to put more structure onto the rules / pre-existing social contract, rather than straining the ad hoc social contract further. But dude: toast.

“Everyone who creates games has a vision of their dream game. It often isn’t so much a complete game concept, but instead is a taste or emotion drenched feeling of what the ultimate game might be like. This vision exists always just out of reach and striving to make it real is what inspires each of us to great feats of creativity.”—Lost Garden, “Small Worlds”. Danc’s reaction to seeing the Studio Ghibli Museum.

For me, it’s music. I hear a totally sweet song, and instantly think “yes, this is it: the White Stripes is precisely the right soundtrack for my kind of Space Opera game”.

Continual fallout from the original Terra Nova post on Horde/Evil. Liz Lawley at Many2Many:

“When I was playing online on Monday, Joi Ito said that he thought World of Warcraft was becoming the “new golf” for the technology set. I think there’s some truth in that, but it brings with it all kinds of additional social pressures and complexities, of which avatar racial choices are only the beginning. I think there’s some fertile ground for research in that boundary area, the crossover between the real and game worlds, and the extent to which they influence each other.”

Consider also that this conversation happened while online with World of Warcraft. Consider that I’ve once considered playing WoW for business networking reasons. (Now consider the impact Warcraft on your business life if your new business partner was short on mana when your tank really needed a heal.)

Oy, golf.

Speaking of AvantGame: Zombie Village!, a SADL* game, is now under playtest.

*SADL: “Sleep, Accuse, Debate and Lynch”, a la Mafia.

“That’s right, ubiqutious gaming. Because the vast majority of pervasive games to date have no connection with the original design philosophy of ubiquitous computing, from which pervasive computing and pervasive game design flow.”

Jane at AvantGame reveals her double secret dissertation topic. Other pull-quotes include: “So stick that in your ‘this is not a pipe’ and smoke it!”

“If this isn’t the most brilliant thing ever said about playing role-playing games, I’ll eat my shoe.” Clinton comments on Rebecca Borgstrom’s paper, “Structure and Meaning in Roleplaying Game Design”.

I just read it last night, and I recommend it. Some long words, yeah, but actually well-paced and (to me) clear. Let me quote the part that got CRN so excited:

This paper views gaming as a computational process.

Gaming is work, in the sense of effort over time. That work takes the form of processing the raw data—-the set of possible stories applicable to the story’s premise. The players generate additional structure until a single story remains.

Structure is stuff that whittles down the possible stories down to the one that the players end up telling.

I also appreciated reading about her Fair Folk book, and seeing how the in-game structure of the surreal faerie world was to some extent a justification of making those metagame structural problems amongst players now explicit, and under the domain of the rules.