Confessions of an Evil Hat Fanboy

On the weekend I bought a copy of Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies. It had been sitting on the shelf of my FLGS for a month, ever since they got in an order of some other indie games - including my copy of A Penny for My Thoughts. So I put it on my gaming shelf, in the indie section, and then paused at what was blatantly obvious from the spines.

I'm an Evil Hat Fanboy.

I don't know if someone has come up with a nickname for it (I shudder at the thought. Fan-group nicknames make me cringe: I'm looking at you, Duranees!) but it's increasingly true, with one very important and perhaps stunning exception.

I don't have the Dresden Files RPG, and I probably won't buy it.

It's not that the game is bad. It's a FATE game, and I really enjoy Spirit of the Century. In fact, Spirit is my most-requested game for Games On Demand. Based entirely on that, I expect Dresden to be a great game, with good design, good play, and good writing.

It's not that the game is expensive, especially with shipping to Australia. Like many gamers, I've bought game books that I've not used very much. The replacement dollar value of my library is embarrassing. Dresden would look great on the shelf and great inside, from what I hear about it in reviews.

It's just that I've never read any Dresden Files books. I bought a comic mini-series once and thought it was OK, but it didn't grab me enough to buy the novels and then the game. So I confess my sin against Evil Hat!

I, Andrew Smith, Evil Hat Fanboy, do not have the Dresden Files RPG and have no plans to buy it. Give me Penny, give me Swashbucklers, give me Spirit, and best of all give me Don't Rest Your Head, and I will play them as penance. May it rescue my gamer soul from purgatory.

Penny and PDF

I bought my copy of A Penny For My Thoughts yesterday. Nothing new there, I'm sure, except that I bought it at a brick and mortar store. For a little indie game that was written and published on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, this is good going.

The shop in question is a little hesitant about indie games, I feel. The best experiences they've had so far are Mouse Guard (sells well) and Dresden Files (good pre-orders). Their nervousness comes through in two areas: shelf space and PDF. The copy of Penny was high on the top shelf (almost at the roof), in front of the solitary copy of Spirit of the Century. It was the first time I'd seen either game there so I was excited enough by that. So, although it wasn't at eye level, it was still on the shelf and that's good progress. Of course I asked for a receipt so that I could claim my PDF from Evil Hat, and that launched a little chat about the Evil Hat PDF Guarantee. He was quite happy to facilitate it, even asking if I had a flash drive with me (I didn't), but was skeptical about Evil Hat's policy on trust. "Let's see how long it lasts," he remarked.

To be honest, I think he voiced what many people have thought[1]. Capitalism functions on self-interest, to be sure, but I think there's more to the PDF Guarantee than that. The fact remains that I could have easily bought the book from IPR with the PDF bundled together, but I made the choice to order it through brick and mortar. I wanted them to see how easy it can be to deal with small publishers, and also to get more indie games passing through the inventories of game shops.

Although I'm not a great game designer, I thoroughly enjoy the indie games that I own and I want to share that. Until now that's been limited to some games in my home, organising indie games events at Gen Con Oz and organising Go Play Brisbane. Buying Penny from a brick and mortar is the next step: evangelising to the game store owner and staff.

So I've bought a game from a store that didn't stock it, that is cautious about the PDF guarantee, and that lets me run indie games days in their store. If this isn't an Elton John "Circle of Life" moment, I don't know what is. And the conclusion to this whole story? Everyone wins.


1. And probably posted on lots of forums. I don't read many so I wouldn't know.

Crunchy and Smooth

Over at the Ninja vs. Pirates back catalogue is the interview with Paul Tevis about A Penny For My Thoughts. Hiding in there were some details about the Game Chef contest which triggered his game design. It was something like this:

Pick from two lists of four ingredients, but choose only three from that list.

All I could think was, "A gamer thought of this." And somehow I think that if it were either "Choose one of these two groups" or "Choose any three from this list" then I wouldn't have given it a second thought. It's the combination that makes it stand out.

One layer of complexity just doesn't seem to be enough for gamers. We're drawn to the multi-layered systems, and to all the combinations they entail. Making it more complex seems to make it more appealing, perhaps by making it look like a dilemma, something that needs to be optimised.

I guess this kind of crunchiness puts the decision in the player's control. Which weapon to use? Which spell? And then, when to use them? Or even, which character to wield them? The crunch is part of the appeal of the game, giving the opportunity for strategies to be devised in order to accomplish character goals and, more strongly, the player goals. It's good feedback for the player to have evaluated the options and the interaction of layers, and then to accomplish what was required.

However, I think there's a limit to how much crunch we can all stomach before the game becomes Operations Research. A fully-functional game system with lots of crunch might be accurate, but if it's nothing more than an exercise in optimising a multi-variable system, it's a different kind of game. I can't help but remember the advice from Poison'd, that the fiction should determine which rule to employ, and that the rule should always drive the game play back to the fiction. A very crunchy game can do this, but for a player experience the result will be retrospective story, the story that we tell after the game. A smooth[1] system works hard to have the story told at the table and needs elegance in design to ensure that the play experience is about creating the story, and not optimising the mathematics.

A lot more could be written about the role of the players and the GM in helping a crunchy sytem to become smooth, but I'll stop here with the remark that the GM and players can make it smooth if they know the rules extremely well. Getting the system to help you make a story takes longer with a crunchy system. For my money, a genuinely elegant system design does this with the least amount of experienced crunch. The elements can all interact, for sure, but it needs to hide so that it doesn't overwhelm the story being made.

1. RPGs are like peanut butter, we have either crunchy or smooth. That's probably my own hack on game theory vocabulary.

Wishes Come True

Back in January I posted my 2009 gaming wish list. Now it's time to see how many wishes came true.

1. Run games for others, without necessarily organising them.

This happened once in 2009, when I made it to Newcastle for the EGG meeting in August. All I had to do was turn up with a game ready to run. Nice!

2. Organise another Go Play Brisbane

Done. I didn't get around to organising the second one, though, on account of some other commitments. Watch for Go Play Brisbane in 2010.

3. Run indie games at Gen Con Oz

Done, done and done. With a giant d12 on a stick, and tables of gaming goodness, this was the gaming highlight of my year. It was coupled with two good seminars as well, in which the gaming prowess of others came to the fore. Honestly, it makes me feel good to be able to help others find new games or to design their own games.

4. Burning Wheel Campaign

This one didn't happen. However, there are still 7 days left in 2009 for me to at least try Burning Wheel.

5. Try at least 2 new games

Indeed! Poison'd, A Penny For My Thoughts and Zombie Cinema immediately come to mind. I'm glad I tried them. I'm still undecided about buying Penny, but the Aussie dollar is strong at the moment...

So that was my 2009 wishlist, just about wrapped up. It was ambitious and I didn't achieve all of it, but I managed most of it. 2010 has its own wishlist, and you'll just have to wait to find out what it is.

E.G.G. A Penny For My Thoughts

The final game I played in my trip to the EGG this month (apart from the catch-planes-on-time game) was A Penny For My Thoughts. This indie games darling of 2009 has received a lot of press since its release date was announced, probably because the Evil Hat crew have honed their skills in marketing over the years, and also because the author, the editor and the layout-er (?) all have podcasts and significant web presence. In other words, if you followed the American indie games scene at all in 2009, you know about A Penny For My Thoughts. You couldn't miss it.

I went into the game with a little trepidation, fearing that it might be over-hyped, and came out the other side with good news. The experience I had playing this game was unforgettable and left me wanting to play again, though not immediately. Read on to understand why.

The game mechanisms are simple, and they effectively allow the players to take key points of the plot and connect them in creative ways. They also drive the game directly to the narrative, rather than being mired in the paraphrenalia of the game itself. Because of this I, as a player, wasn't distracted by the gaming artefacts and could get involved in the story.

The game experience managed to engender a sense of wonder and curiosity, partially because I was interested in understanding this new game, and also because the game immediately places the players into the fiction. As a GM who plays mostly convention style games I've often had to start a session by explaining the rules. Conversely, in Penny, this is written to be part of the game and means that I had the sense of being in the fiction (a patient being treated for memory loss) straight away.

I think that the group I was with didn't quite do justice to the first of the three recollections: Recall a pleasant memory. We followed the rules of the game well, but during the first part of the turn, the leading questions (followed by the "Yes, and...") were almost all dark or sad. I don't think that we, as players, stepped up to the task properly and created a pleasant memory out of those facts. The end result was that all the stories in our group featured empty-souled delusions and depressions, or were more at home on Jerry Springer's "Worst of Springer." Herein lies the challenge of the game for me as a roleplayer (GM and player). Learn to take the ingredients from other players and turn them into something more than the sum of parts, to turn them into a story. This dialectic is the challenge that I experience when I run Don't Rest Your Head, and is the technique I most need to work on. A Penny For My Thoughts is a good workout.

So, where to from here? As a group we discussed it afterwards and concluded that the vanilla Facts and Reassurances document could go in dangerous directions, and that before playing the game some boundaries should be set between players to identify topics which should be excluded. By "dangerous" I mean that the game could stir deep emotional traumas in the players, and that bringing them to the surface in pseudo-therapy could do more harm than good.

I want to play this game again, with different Facts and Reassurances and also with the question that was implied in the recent episode of Narrative Control: "Was I there too?" Or perhaps, pointing to another player, "Was she there too?"

If you like your roleplaying game to spend most of its time in the fiction, and you like the challenge of weaving diverse and disconnected story elements into a single narrative, then you will enjoy A Penny For My Thoughts.

Every Gamer? That's me!

I finally managed to reach the Every Gamers Guild meeting. Fantastic! Courtesy of some smarter travel arrangements than my previous failed attempt, I made it there and back in one piece. And because of Nathan Russell, I had a place to stay.

Ostensibly, the reason I went there was to see a local piece of architecture. At Gencon Oz 2008 the Novacastrians raved about it as the shining glory of their town planning. It stood proudly (prodly?) on the shoreline, fully exposed to visitors and locals alike. A quick look below (thanks to a Wikipedia photo file) reveals the artificial construct in question.

But enough dicking around...

The game day itself was fantastic. I think I'll split some detailed thoughts into other posts throughout this week. It started with a game of Spirit Of The Century, a request from Riley. I ran through some ideas from the adventure I'll offer at the indie games on demand tables at Gencon this year. Second was my first game of Zombie Cinema in which I played a Russian housewife. Dodgy accents are fun. The gaming finished with a game of A Penny For My Thoughts, which stirred the same response from me as Grey Ranks.

And of course it was great to catch up with some familiar faces, as well as some new ones. Seems to me that Newcastle is a contender to become the gaming capital of Australia.