Creative Brain State

I like listening to podcasts. In fact, I probably spend ten hours or more each week just commuting to & from work so I have a lot of time to consume them. Most of them are factual, though. It could be psychology, politics, philosophy, theology, gaming. Only rarely do I find an audio drama.

By the way, if you like audio drama then I recommend Homecoming by Gimlet Media. Wow. Beautifully done.

My monthly gaming group is also quite a drive away from my home so I tend to listen to podcasts on that drive too. However, I've begun to suspect that the podcast content is starting to affect my gameplay. There are ways to affect a human mental state; to guide it towards a particular way of thinking. You can set yourself up for an analytic mental state, or a creative mental state, for example. To get into a creative mental state you can let your mind wander. It needs freedom from structures to be able to do that.

When I'm driving and listening to an informative podcast at the same time then I'm imposing structure on my cognitive processes. To be a good driver and a good student, I need to maintain that discipline. However, when I've arrived at the game and am sitting down at the table to play my mental state is far from creative. If I'm honest with myself I think it shows in how I play. I tend to drive the plot around accomplishments more than around character and I think that's a bit less appealing to both me and the other players.

So now I have a plan; an experiment, if you will. I have a game this Sunday and the long drive awaits. Inasmuch as I don't want to drive in silence the whole time, I think I'll give at least ten minutes (or a little more) of silence or music just to let my mind wander. If everything goes well then I'll have the right mental state for a story game.



Edit: Actually, looks like I'm picking up a couple of the other players on the way. But still, the theory holds!

Cheap but good advice for gaming in a group

I know a few musicians. One of them posted a piece of advice from Chick Corea and it makes good sense for story games too.

The earliest reference I could find to the origin of the advice was here. I thought about re-writing it to address it to the gamer, but then I remembered how smart you all are. Take his musical advice and riff off it.

1) Play only what you hear.

2) If you don’t hear anything, don’t play anything.

3) Don’t let your fingers and limbs just wander - place them intentionally.

4) Don’t improvise on endlessly - play something with intention, develop it or not, but then end off, take a break.

5) Leave space - create space - intentionally create places where you don’t play.

6) Make your sound blend. Listen to your sound and adjust it to the rest of the band and the room.

7) If you play more than one instrument at a time - like a drum kit or multiple keyboards - make sure they are balanced with one another.

8) Don’t make any of your music mechanically or just through patterns of habit. Create each sound, phrase and piece with choice - deliberately.

9) Guide your choice of what to play by what you like - not by what someone else will think.

10) Use contrast to balance the elements;
high - low
fast - slow
loud - soft
tense - relaxed
dense - sparse

11) Play to make the other musicians sound good. Play things that will make the overall music sound good.

12) Play with a relaxed body. Always release whatever tension you create.

13) Create space - begin, develop and end phrases with intention.

14) Never beat or pound your instrument - play it easily and gracefully.

15) Create space - then place something in it.

16) Use mimicry sparsely - mostly create phrases that contrast with and develop the phrases of other players.

Beautiful stuff.

Why They Avenged

I watched The Avengers last night. Let's put to side all the rambling, incoherent phrases of joy about how happy it made me feel. Instead, let's just point out something I'll polish in my GM kit: why they avenged in the first place.

It's a group of adventurers and do-gooders, after all. They're not all on the screen at the same time and they aren't all friends, so why work together? It's more than just the motivation for glory, it's a concrete thing. Without giving away spoilers, if CENSORED hadn't died, none of them would have come back from their in-fighting in order to take on Loki and the invading horde. It was enough to make them see beyond themselves in order to work as a team.

For my games, this is an important technique for group cohesion - assuming that it's the kind of story that needs it. The Big Threat (tm) sometimes isn't enough by itself and needs to be made personal to each of the characters so that they take action. Characters need to be personally motivated, not generally motivated. "Fame and fortune" are bad motivations. "Imprisoning the black knight for his crimes against my beloved people" is better, especially if the black knight has done horrible things which have personal significance to the player characters.

The motivation for the Avengers to work together is personal, not general, with the possible exception of Captain America, but even he was prone to in-fighting before CENSORED died. Make it personal and you'll get better response from the characters, creating better story.

Auscon Story Games

I met with the organisers of Auscon last weekend and agreed to help coordinate the story games component of Auscon. They've got some great ideas about running conventions and building community amongst gamers of various kinds and I'm looking forward to the Auscon weekend itself.

Story games will be run on Sunday May 1 and only on that day. It's a deliberate taster event for a larger convention in September or October this year. Watch out for details of the latter one as we draw nearer.

For Auscon, though, I'm putting out the call for people to run games. Any system. Any setting. I want to see D&D alongside Fiasco, if possible. There will be ten tables available at the 9am, 2pm and 7pm sessions. That's 30 GM-slots I want to fill.

If you volunteer to run a game, there'll even be a sweetener for you - a weekend pass to Auscon. That's free entry to the whole weekend for anyone who signs up to run a game in at least one of the 30 GM-slots available. Send me an email at ((andrew)) (dot) ((mg)) (dot) ((smith)) at ((gmail)) (dot) ((com)) and let me know what you'd like to run and at which session. Slots will be filled based on who grabs them first.

Stories and RPGs

I had the chance to catch up on a lot of TV recently, and I noticed a lot of things that just don't seem to be features of most RPGs I've played over the years.

Most scenes have only two characters. Even if there are background characters, the scene is about the relationship or interaction of two characters. Of course there are scenes with more than two, but they don't make up the majority. Compare this to RPGs, in which the whole party is always present, all the time (and often with all their stuff in pockets and backpacks).

Most scene transitions don't care about travel. If a scene needs a character who was on the other side of the city just a moment ago, the character just appears in the next one. Sometimes it's represented by a knock on the door, or something similar, but the travel itself doesn't usually matter. And this applies to a wider range of things, not just travel. We need to remember in RPGs that we can skip some details without adversely affecting the story. Even if you want a William Gibson story, he leaves out the unnecessary details especially when he includes what seems to be atmospheric details. Only keep what you need.

Violence is a small part of TV shows, even action shows. With the exception of in media res, action is always preceded by lots and lots of talking, all of which builds to the tension that seems only to be resolved by violence. Most TV characters don't use violence as the first choice for solving problems, but in RPGs, it's a huge part of the game. See Rob Donoghue's Some Space to Think: Children and Tasers for more about this perspective.

And so on and so on. I think that game designers, GMs and players need to think about what they want from an RPG and play accordingly. Although, I think that if you really want all action all the time, you'll probably feel better playing a miniatures game than an RPG or story game.

Fight Scenes

I watched the new Transformers movie on the weekend, taking the time to treat my wife and I to one of the lounge-style cinemas. We ordered some nachos and a couple of hot drinks to come in a little after half-way through the movie. Now nachos aren't the easiest things to eat, and it takes some hand-eye coordination to get the food with the right balance of ingredients, and put that food in the mouth. It's just tricky enough to force me to take my eyes off the screen.

I had to make a choice: watch the movie so that I don't miss anything, or watch the food so that I don't drop anything.

And this is the moment when I realised something about stories and plots, and how it has now affected the way I watch stories and the way I run roleplaying games. I remember, quite clearly, thinking, "It's just an action sequence. All that matters is who wins and what happens to the characters after the fight."

For the theorists out there, this is a case of Scene Resolution rather than Task Resolution. For me (in the here and now), the only importance of a fight scene is how it impacts on the plot, so much so that I can look away from the Michael Bay extravaganza of Optimus Prime battling half a dozen Decepticons by himself... just so I can each nachos, and I don't feel as though I've lost anything.

This is how I like to run games these days, but I hadn't expect it to have such an impact on the way I watch movies.

(By the way, if you liked the first Transformers movie, you'll like the sequel. Enjoy!)

The Gaming Group as an Ensemble Cast

One of the common methods used to explain or teach a roleplaying game to someone is to liken it to a movie. It begins by asking the new gamer to remember her favourite movie and then to ask her to imagine herself as the protagonist of that story, making decisions as that character would decide. Unfortunately, this is a flawed model of story-making for all gaming groups. That kind of story has one or two protagonists, along with a cast of dozens of interested parties and even more people who might never know the story but who depend on the protagonists.

The gaming group is more like the kind of movie that has an ensemble cast. There are more than one or two main characters and as the audience of the story we are meant to be interested in all of them. So, as a game master, it is important to understand the differences between the popular story-form that has only one or two protagonists and the story-form that has many characters. For the former, the story is about those characters. It is about their struggle and their triumph (or failure). Those kinds of stories are best suited to games with only one or two players.

Conversely, the larger gaming group is the ensemble cast. The story is rarely about those characters but is more often about a theme that connects them. Take the movie Higher Learning as an example. This is a movie with an ensemble cast, with several smaller stories that interweave and ultimately meet in a tragic end. However, the movie is not about the story of any one of them. Rather, it is a story about racism and acceptance. The key to the story is the theme and not the narrative of the individuals.

So what kinds of themes are present in our games? What is the theme of the adventuring party in the fantasy setting? Perhaps it is nothing more than adventure itself. How about the cyberpunk setting? Rebellion against the domination of corporations and government. So, as GMs, we need to ensure that our stories are about putting those characters in to those themes and situations, and about giving opportunities to explore those themes. Without paying attention to these themes we are left only with the many variations on the level-me-up games.

As you were

Go Play Brisbane came and went on the weekend. For me personally this was an interesting experience and one which achieved the three primary goals of a local indie games convention.

1. Have fun
2. Meet other players
3. Meet other game designers

I managed to arrange it so that Go Play Brisbane delivered all of this to the participants. Nathan Russell and Mark McPherson were both there, with their games in tow. We talked about the design and production processes of Dash-in Dungeons (a 3 year project!). We also met other players of indie games in Australia - all of whom are keen to play more. And most importantly, we had fun playing indie games.

The fun is the most important part of it all. Meeting other players, meeting designers, organising conventions... all these things exist to support the fun generated by play.

And for that, Go Play Brisbane was an unqualified success.

Ack! Playtesting!

Well, now I'm in a bit of trouble. I've got my two games to a point where I need to test them some more. If I follow the example of other game designers I'd get together with some local gamers to run the games and get some feedback. So now I need to hear from you. Are you interested in doing some preliminary playtesting one or both of my games? You need to be in the Brisbane region and willing to provide useful feedback. Drop me a line at andrew (dot) mg (dot) smith (at) gmail (dot) com and let me know.

The Stories of Games

In the Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastery seminar at Gencon, one of the audience posed a question, but with a preface that included the idea that telling stories is an ancient activity, having been done for millenia around the campfire. He then made the comparison to cinema, novels, television and even roleplaying games as contemporary variants on the campfire.

I like to suggest that this anonymous questioneer is not quite right with regard to roleplaying games. Cinema, novels and poems are all story telling media. A pre-written story is conveyed through one of these means to an audience which does not participate in the telling of that story. Nor do they participate in the making of that story.

The key phrase here is "story making." A roleplaying game, with several participants, is not merely story telling, it is story making. As a group the players make stories about a group of characters. Some games limit each player to a single character and delegate the rest to the GM. Other games leave it open for players to take on the roles of multiple characters. In either arrangement, the players are responsible for making the story, and not just telling it.

Having this knowledge on top of the table will help turn your dice-and-stats game into a story game.

GenConOz: Games on Demand

I think I've narrowed down my list for GOD to just three: Spirit of the Century, Agon, and Don't Rest Your Head. I'd honestly like to run more, but I think I won't be able to practise enough between now and then to ensure that I can run a decent game.

Honestly, I think that DRYH will be the most difficult of all of them for me to run, because it is the least crunchy of the lot. Agon has such a simple heroic premise that it's easy to ensure group motivation. SOTC is similar in that regard, but DRYH is the one that still confounds me a little.

Sounds like a worthy challenge, if you ask me.

The aftermath of Agon

My monthly indie game took place over the weekend and I'm happy to say that we all enjoyed it. For a first game, I spent surprisingly little time flicking through the rule book and I think that's testament to John Harper's work in keeping the concept simple. Of especially good use were the reference tables available for download from the Agon site. They saved us all a lot of time.

I won't go into the details of the first quest, but I feel that I timed it well enough. What I need to do better next time is throw more Strife at the heroes. They were simply too strong for the NPCs and minions that they encountered. With one cautious player and one gung-ho player it wasn't long before the cautious player was using the gung-ho player as a shield.

The only other snag that I feel we hit was with regards to persuasion. In a contest of Oration (seems to be the most appropriate ability), when the heroes win there was no doubt that the NPCs would have to fold. However, if the heroes lose there is nothing to force them to submit to the goal of the NPCs. I think I might need to make it more clear that when the dice are rolled, it is a branching point in the story. I think I also need to frame the scene and the contest better to ensure that the players don't simply say, "No, I'm not going to do that, no matter what the dice have rolled." I will have to be more explicit in laying out the consequences of winning and losing a contest.

Mistakes that I made

• Armour impairments can be removed during an interlude, as with any other ability
• The Shield ability should be used during combat
• Defeated minions are only worth 1 glory, without adding the Strife cost
• I didn't spend Strife correctly

Other things that I will change next time

• NPCs will be fewer and more powerful
• Objectives will be more linear

But there will definitely be a next time. Oh yes indeed.