#RPGaDay2021 Day 27: Practice

For today's #RPGaDay2021 post, I'll try tackling "Practice." I could go off from yesterday's prompt, doing that "Theory vs. Practice" thing, but I think I'll use the word as a verb, as that thing you do to get better at something. Is it possible to be better or worse at role playing? Can you get better with practice? Interesting questions that I'm pretty sure the answer to are "Yes!" 

Normally this idea that playing RPGs could involve some kind of competence tends to be limited to the skills of the GM. The RPG blogosphere has tons of tools, materials and suggestions for ways to be a better GM. Some of this I think is because as a population, GMs trend towards more deeply interested in the hobby, more likely visit blogs and forums dedicated to the hobby, are more likely to be engaged in home-brew and blogging and all the rest. When I think back over RPG articles I've read, "How to be a better GM" feels vastly more covered than, "How to be a better Player." There almost seems to be a kind of... "GM prepares (rules, characters, setting, situations), and Players should only have to show up for the ride" philosophy going on. I don't think this is necessarily bad, but I also think it's worth examining and seeing if there is room here to make your games better (as in, more fun) for everyone involved.

How players play is discussed on forums and blogs and there is some advice written for players. Even when players are discussed though, a lot of that talk is GM facing. "How do I address this problem player?" or "Which of these 6 broad categories do your players fall into (Hack'n'slash guy, deep story guy, normal guy who is just happy to be there, etc. etc.) and how can you accommodate their styles?" This reminds me of my own experiences GMing. I am a player almost always, and when I GM I tend to get very nervous, worried if I'm doing well. I want the players to experience a great session. I also, I guess, don't want to be considered the worst GM in the group or something like that. It makes me think... why is this the orientation? What do I mean?

As a player... do you have the same thoughts? "I want the players to experience a great session." Do you look back and wonder where maybe you slipped up, concerned you may have flubbed a session the way a GM might worry? Do you think about accommodating other players' play styles? Like, there are all of these articles and this advice GMs read in an effort to make the game better, cooler, more fun, however you want to say. A player has a different set of tools compared to a GM, but I think this drive should reside in everyone at the table. There are a lot of motivations that can come into how you play a character. Some people really want to sink into that immersed thing of vicariously living through their character. Some people want to use their character to make interesting story things happen. Whatever it is though, to make it shine... you've got to bring it. Ideally, you've got to bring it in a way that helps everyone else bring it. You've got to look inside your character, look outside your character & into their world, and outside the fiction to the world of your friends sitting around playing this game hopefully trying to make it great for each other.

Yeah, I'm going a little hard on this. To maybe dial it back, we've all been more laid back and casual about RPing than I'm pushing for here. Good, fun sessions come out of these casual sessions. I just think there is potential in the idea of Players taking on a sense responsibility for the success of a game at a level a bit closer to that GMs feel to provide a great session. Orienting beyond your own character to take in how what you're doing is influencing the whole game.

#RPGaDay2021 Day 26: Theory

Theory! I'd guess the average role player just runs and plays games without much thought given to theory. Even many RPG designers I'm quite sure have gone about game designing without much thought to RPG theory, even if they give thought to probability, or are informally theorizing. When it comes to theory and RPGs I definitely think of it as being more akin to Music Theory than... a Gravitational Theory or something of the like. A musician can also make plenty of great music without ever learning music theory, but music theory can open a musician up to some concepts they may not stumble upon themselves. 

Anyways, I'm sure some readers may be like, "RPG Theory? Never heard of it." Well, I'm definitely not up to defining it rigorously and will direct you to this Wikipedia page on Role-playing game theory just to get you started if you're fresh to the idea. I remember first hearing about RPG theory happening vaguely through the old newsgroups, where the "Threefold Model" was developed, and I personally visited The Forge forums during their heyday quite a bit, where Ron Edwards would publish his RPG theorizing. I personally found it to be interesting stuff, though internet forums have shown me it is very much not everyone's cup of tea.

This leads to another point... RPG theory on RPG forums can get pretty contentious and tribal and flame-war-y I've found. Other times tastes and theory are conflated when they shouldn't be. Sometimes someone's theory will be strongly stated, and this rubs certain people the wrong way. Debating and hypothesizing can all be a useful part of these discussions, but there is a dynamic where some people are inclined to take personal offense rather than just maybe think a particular theory is silly or maybe just not for them. 

I love people's RPG theories and takes just as a general rule, especially when stated boldly. I'm playing in and enjoying my own games, but other peoples' thoughts can only expand my point of view, and if I'm lucky, give me a brand new insight or angle to look at things from. A satisfying RPG theory for me is one that provides a lens to examine other games or my own play through, and it goes in a bag where I can pull it out and use it whenever I'm in the mood. It's not about right or wrong or "truth", only "does this spark interesting thoughts in my head" or "does this clarify my tastes and help me get to RP & games I enjoy more."

So, enjoy your RPG theorizing, but don't forget to play!

#RPGaDay2021 Day 25: Box

To hell with it! Today I'm taking the "Box" prompt, and it's all about boxed sets!

Back in 1974, the first RPG was released as a box containing 3 booklets and some reference sheets (umm.. you know, original D&D). I believe the first two RPGs I ever purchased also came in boxes, the Marvel Basic Set and MegaTraveller. Over the years the boxed set has fallen out of favor, and the reasons make sense. For one thing, it is easy for boxes to get crushed, damaged or otherwise end up looking shabby compared to a well cared for book. The other thing against the boxed set is that they aren't quite as cost effective in today's age of PoD printing, etc. Still, there is something about popping open a box full of goodies that makes me feel like I'm entering an exciting new world more than flipping open a book does. I'm pretty sure there is not much rational about the feeling I get, but there are a couple things RPGs from boxed sets do that I think have merit. Prime among them is that they tend towards smaller books, maybe splitting the game into a couple books, some cardboard miniatures, a die, reference sheets, an ad for the company's other products... Point being that I find games chunked into smaller books are more approachable to me. 

So, I just took a browse through some old boxed sets, and yeah... OD&D came in 3 30-something page booklets, Traveller was a bit larger but also 3 main booklets for 40-some pages each and an introduction. The Marvel Super Heroes Basic Set came with a 16 page Battle Book, a 48 page Campaign Book, and a 16 page adventure (along with 2d10 and a wax crayon, a fold out map, an ad, etc.) The Conan RPG from 1985 came with a color map, 2d10, a 32 page rule book, 16 page reference guide and 48 page setting guide. The Ghostbusters box was sporting a 64-ish page GM/Adventure book, a 24 page Players/Main rules book, then some reference sheets and equipment cards. MegaTraveller came in heavy, with 3 books of 100-ish pages and a fold out sector map. Moving up to B/X D&D, the Basic set comes in at a 64 page core, 32 page adventure and some ad sheets, etc., and the Expert set being similarly sized.

Looking at those games... they just felt like the offered up huge worlds of adventure, and MegaTraveller aside, they all came in around 90-100 pages (B/X combined is 128 pages of rules, 64 pages of adventure). Star Ace is another personal favorite of mine that comes in with 2 books totaling less than 120 pages. There are RPGs printed normally as books that also make these kinds of page counts, and I appreciate them for their brevity as well. Something about the boxed set form factor really seemed to encourage this tighter page count approach though. This smaller page count makes so much sense to me, especially when imagining a kid excited about space or wizards or super heroes who wants to play. Don't make that kid read your 690 page tome. Hell, even the current D&D5e core books add up to almost 1000 pages! I'm just going to be opinionated and say that shit is totally uncalled for.

OK, so I got a bit negative there at the end. To put a positive spin on it, I'd say a nice boxed set RPG, or an RPG that aims for brevity in the page count keeps things light and approachable for me. It reminds me of young adult fiction, Choose Your Own Adventure books, and an overall easy and breezy, yet exciting feeling I had when I was taking my first steps into role playing.

#RPGaDay2021 Day 24: Translate

"Translate" is an interesting prompt word for me. As is probably pretty clear to anyone who reads my RPG writing regularly or knows me, I'm a huge fan of Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game. This game was published by White Wolf back in 1994-95, then the license expired and the game went out of print. There was later an effort around 2004 to create another Street Fighter RPG (to be called "Capcom World Tournament") based on d20 rules of the D&D 3 era by a company known as Living Room Games, but it was never fully completed or released. 1995 was 26 years ago. What do you do when an RPG that is quite possibly your favorite goes out of print forever, now gone over a quarter century ago?

Well, it turns out I had a plan, but we'll get to that. It also turned out that the Street Fighter RPG wasn't only published by White Wolf in the form I knew it. The game was also published in Brazil, originally in the form of a magazine spread across a few issues, then eventually collected and printed together. Dragão Brasil Especial 9, 11 and 13 laid out the core rules, which were then bound together in issue 24. This bound together edition of the game published in Dragão Brasil Especial 24 was published in 1999, a full 4 years after publication by White Wolf had ceased. These rules were the equivalent of the core rules we saw here from White Wolf, but with different art and presentation. They didn't have rights to publish all of the supplements that White Wolf produced for the game, and so they filled out the rules themselves in further magazine articles with new styles, villains and rules. Aside from the White Wolf game, they also published an adaptation of Street Fighter Zero 3 in another game system from Brazil, 3D&T.

Back here in the USA, after White Wolf allowed the game to drop out of print, the fandom for the game continued through Yahoo! Groups to a large extent, and through a number of fan web pages. As you might naturally expect, the fandom shrank over time and activity dropped quite a bit. In the early 2000s, the US fandom was creating new rules, making commentary on what was or wasn't considered broken, writing articles that got combined into little PDF fan magazines, but it all started to wane at some point. No one used Yahoo! Groups anymore, some lonely RPGer would from time to time call out to see if anyone was still there. Matt Meade of sfrpg.com continued to work on a solid supplement, the G-File, intended to fill out maneuvers styles and stats for all of the Street Fighters that weren't in the game material produced by White Wolf. A Google+ community was set up for fans to keep in touch, which saw some traffic but not tons.

Back in my world, my group played Street Fighter almost obsessively from... I dunno, 1994 until 2000-2001 or so? Even after this we would find times to play, though less regularly. We had tons and tons of characters and stages and maneuvers and rules we'd house-ruled into the system over the years. Some of these rules, styles and maneuvers were distributed between us on dot matrix printer printouts, because that's how old we are! Still, after 2001-ish or thereabouts we were past the heyday of our Street Fighter playing. Street Fighter was always fondly remembered, but life happened, the old group was out of college, the GM had long spells of living overseas, kids were born, new games were played with different people. It wasn't until some point in early 2014 I believe, that I started on my plan.

White Wolf, as a game company, went through a lot of ups and downs, was acquired in 2006, sold, acquired again. A lot of folks that worked for White Wolf went on to continue producing games with the IP as Onyx Path Publishing. As the famous White Wolf "World of Darkness" games approached their 20th anniversaries, Onyx Path began to Kickstart deluxe 20th anniversary editions of those games, collecting all of the rules material and synthesizing it all into one definitive rule book. To me, the best White Wolf game was always Street Fighter, and I believed it deserved a 20th Anniversary Edition of its own, as impossible as that was. So, I started to make it myself! 

I transcribed and wrote and assembled for a few months before I contacted Matt Meade on October 13th, 2014, linking him to some in-progress material I had and letting him know about my project to create a compiled version of the Street Fighter RPG. My goal was to release this "20th Anniversary Edition" by the end of 2014, to match up with the release of the original game back in 1994. Matt published an article on his blog. I teased the release on the Google+ group. That was a bit too ambitious, it turned out. I burned out for a while, but eventually picked the project back up in 2015. By that time, some people on Google+ were pretty sure it was a promise unfulfilled, but with the transcription and editing help of some friends I was able to release the 20th Anniversary Edition on September 8th, 2015.

Around this time, Google+ was winding down and a new Street Fighter RPG community was formed on Facebook. I was happy to find the 20th Anniversary edition was well received, and in chatting with Matt Meade, he was also inspired to keep working on his G-File. What the Facebook group revealed to me, however, was the vast fan community the game still had in Brazil. They had been publishing their own fan supplements, adventures, and zines, and not a small amount of it. They also had their own main fan site and their own Facebook group. In fact, their Facebook group is over 3 times larger than the English speaking group! Yes, at last we are getting to today's prompt word! An English speaking community and a Portuguese speaking community... and the internet had finally got us interacting in a serious way!

So...  a lot of members of the Brazilian community would visit the English Facebook group, just for fun, but also because they had questions about what White Wolf had produced here. Matt Meade had managed to land a few interviews with original creators of White Wolf material for Street Fighter, and so it was an interesting time. One of the writers for the game became a regular in the Facebook group as well. Between these interviews, my release of SF20, and some resultant increase in fan activity, Street Fighter was feeling more alive than it had in quite a while, but even with this increased activity it was pretty clear that the Brazilian scene was more alive. They had a fan produced magazine with tons of issues. They made their own supplements, and aside from Matt's G-File, the English speaking community had not done that since maybe 10 years earlier! It was time to break down all of the walls between the two communities. This was not going to be simple, it'd take some work. Fortunately, there were people in the scene willing to put in that work. There is a good number of people on both the Brazilian and English speaking sides of the community that were involved, but key among them was Richard "Bat" Brewster of Batjutsu!

Over the course of the last few years... efforts have been made to translate all of the major efforts of the Brazilian community into English. Something like 34 issues of the "Warrior's Fist" (Punho Do Guerreiro), a couple very well produced adventures, a Mortal Kombat supplement, "Circuit Guides" of new fighters and more. Going the other way, while not a direct translation, the Brazilian community were inspired to create their own "20th Anniversary Edition" as well. It's been a wonderful thing.

Translation: Bringing the world together. Keeping games alive.

#RPGaDay2021 Day 23: Innovation

Today I'm taking on Innovation! Being a fan of novelty, I'm inclined to appreciate innovation. Innovation, creativity, brand new things! As for the value of innovation, as much as I appreciate it, I do feel it is often over-rated. How do I mean? Well, I'll talk about it as it related to game design.

One thing I have seen online when someone gets the idea they want to design their own RPG, is that they think the game needs an innovation in order to generate interest or really to even serve a purpose. Sometimes this desire to be unique or different is separated from... what actually improves the game. For example, new designers seem to be obsessed with resolution systems, possible different ways to roll dice, and is maybe there a new way? It is worth investigating how different games handle resolution and maybe even trying to come up with methods of your own, but a game isn't going to be better or worse because you use cards or 2d6, or a d20, or a dice pool where you add up successes... at least not in isolation. An RPG should be created with a vision of what the creator wants it to be, a vision of the kind of play it would produce, not just an assemblage of ideas that strike the designer as interesting. With that vision, a designer can then use their knowledge of existing systems and their own creativity to bring together a system that works for the purpose. Sometimes an innovation can take a game to a higher level, but a game could contain no particularly innovative mechanics or ideas even, but if executed perfectly, or is satisfyingly novel in its manner of combining old known elements... be the better game. Don't let an idea be held so dear that you'd let your game suffer to preserve it. It's a variation on the ol' "kill your darlings" advice.

This leads on to another area where innovation gets over-rated. Sometimes folks who are interested in creating a new something, RPG in this case, get concerned that they'll come up with a brilliant, innovative idea, but if they let anyone know too far ahead of time it'll get stolen. Also along these lines are people who come up with ideas and have a wish that others would build them out. Basically, the point is that work and implementation is vastly more important than any thought or idea that may strike you as innovative. It's reminding me of what I wrote for the "Write" prompt last week, there are a lot of ways to spin your wheels and avoid doing the thing you claim you want to do. A seemingly innovative idea is not much more than a fantasy until implemented. Also, what seems innovative sometimes falls apart when you actually move beyond that surface level of interest and really get into the nitty-gritty of it. Innovation is great, but sadly it doesn't let you bypass the effort and commitment needed to bring something into being.

May you find it in you to bring your innovations to fruition!

#RPGaDay2021 Day 22: Substitute

There is nothing I feel great about connecting to the word Substitute. I suppose I would say however that there is no substitute for great players. No decision has more impact on how good your game night will be than the decision of who you will play with. This comes across in two ways. Firstly, game night is a social occasion. Do you enjoy the company of everyone you're playing with? Secondly, do your play styles vibe and bounce off of each other in pleasing ways?

When I was younger I'd definitely had times where I'd gamed with people that were either not kind, or I just didn't enjoy their company socially. This isn't even a case that they were "bad people" necessarily, or anything. It's just about how good it feels to spend time with people, game or not. It's not easy for everyone to find a group's worth of people they unreservedly enjoy spending time with, but I've been lucky in this regard. From time to time we'll have a drop-in player that doesn't fully fit, but even there we've had good luck (or whoever invited the drop-in player has had good judgement). The place where I most often come across players that don't fully work for me now are RPG conventions. I've had great conventions sessions, but they can also be a great reminder of just how good I have it at home. Once you find yourself in an RPG group where you enjoy everyone's company socially, I don't know if you'd ever want to go back. More than having compatible play styles, this is foundational to whether I'm even bothering to game in the first place or not.

In the Street Fighter campaign I'm currently in, in addition to social enjoyment, we all love how we bounce off each other while playing characters. The way we improvise and interact and set each other up is just a joy, reliably. I remember after one of our sessions we just talked about how great it was, and how great Street Fighter was. Because it reminded us of the way Street Fighter has made us feel in the past we gave the game itself a lot of the credit at first. But then... yeah. Chemistry is chemistry, and we've come to feel that we could make almost any game we were each into work. Rules and setting and all the rest matter, but in so much as we are playing a role playing game and love how we interact in that... the rules can only do so much to create or destroy it.

So, ultimately you'll read about games you maybe want to play. Characters and settings, rules you want to try. Try them all, but nothing they can do can even come close to providing a substitute for the lack of a group of friends with a great RP dynamic.

#RPGaDay2021 Day 21: Simplicity

Am I going to do that thing where I advocate for today's prompt word like it's a virtue? Kinda a little. Simplicity is convenient, more than anything. Simple things are more easily communicated than complicated things, can be seen clearly by more people. Simplification is a tool. Where does simplicity aid us in RPG play? Ideas follow.

Mysteries and Plots

It is easy for mysteries and plots to feel simplistic when you're coming up with them, to feel like there should be more witty complications and twists that can be revealed in play. Most of the time simple does the job however, because players aren't hooked into what's happening to the same level of detail as they would be reading a novel. Individual players can be distracted during play, or maybe a player never quite has their character communicate some bit of information back to the rest of the party, and so mystery and plot details get lost. Likewise, players are pretty good at coming up with crazy theories or odd obsessions that fall far from a mystery or plot that's actually going on, and pursuing those theories for... a while!  For these reasons, I think it's best to start from someplace simple with mysteries and plots, adding complications and twists as you get a feel for how much of what you're trying to lay down actually gets across to the players.

Characters

This applies to both PCs and NPCs, but especially NPCs. A single, or a couple really bold, easy to grasp characterizations or motivations are better than anything subtle, hidden, or complex almost always. With NPCs especially, they often are only "on stage" for a short amount of time, and so there may not be time for hidden depths to be revealed. Simplicity here is just a matter of what can be communicated. During game night there is cross-talk, people are considering divergent things, their own characters, and it's a noisy environment in some ways. Bold and simple comes across, it breaks through static and noise more reliably. Subtleties and sophistication can only get across when the static and noise is low, when everyone is tuned in. Yeah, it's a radio analogy. I'm not trying to say that subtle, sophisticated characters are bad, only that they are difficult to successfully play. I think the way to make more subtle or sophisticated characters work is for them to also have that simple, bold core, something people can easily grasp and you can have fun playing... but then when those quiet moments occur, you've got those more subtle aspects of the character in your back pocket and can bring a bit of it out. Sometimes it doesn't even get across to the whole party, but one or two people see what's happening and it's your own private thing.

Rules

Should a game's rules be simple? I think it's obvious to say they should be as simple as you can manage to make them, while also assuring that they do what you want them to do. When it comes to getting rules across to players and GMs, the 2 things that make this more difficult are 1.) Less simple rules, requiring more steps, more modifiers, more memorization, or require more decisions and calculating of odds before using. 2.) The rules are poorly explained or vague in their application, insufficient examples are given, a step by step procedure is not explicitly laid out, the author is just bad at explaining what their intent was, etc. So, you could have an RPG where the rules are, "When a character does something and the outcome is uncertain, flip a coin. On heads, the character succeeds, on tails the character fails" which is about as simple of rules as I can imagine outside of "The GM just decides what happens." For many RPG players, this would be too simple. Rules give a game texture and shape play. I think many of us have played games that feel too complex, crunchy or fiddly for our tastes as well. 

When it comes to adding rules, the satisfaction they provide in play has to be balanced against the downside of their handling time and the overall increase in complexity they bring. Many times it is possible to come up with a rule outside of play and have it feel clever and elegant, but then in play it just rarely gets used or feels like a hassle. Some of this is because playtesting reveals things, but also, even a clever and elegant rule can be a bad rule if it is addressed to subjects the game is not about. For games that attempt to be about everything, by which I mean so-called Universal or Generic games (GURPS, Cortex Prime, EABA, etc.), I feel that they can suffer from this. To counteract this idea of creating rules to cover everything, many of these systems try to take a modular approach, which then requires a GM to pick and choose which options are available and communicate that to the players. This is not as simple as it could be, but... if everyone enjoys it, it is simple enough.

Conclusion

So, simplicity isn't just better on its own. The ideal game would flow like water and everyone would be able to get across what they are trying to get across, but there are factors that create friction and add noise, they slow down play and lead to misunderstandings. Simplicity is a tool that attempts to reduce the friction of play, lower the noise floor, or be easily perceivable through that noise. Simplicity isn't the only tool in the box for this. Players could study rules and be more attentive. Fewer players makes things easier. Being more competent at communication. Being well rested. Having good ears and eyes. Maybe I'm starting to sound silly now, but I think you get the idea. 

Good luck playing the games you want to play!