Talking ’bout Story Games
Jay Loomis put together a great video interviewing folks from the Seattle-Olympia story games family, including yours truly, flanked by ducks.
“Play more! Less talk, more play! More play!”
Walk a Mile in Their Dice: The practical limitations of “Don’t be a dick”
“Don’t be a dick” has become something of go-to gaming advice, like a social Rule Zero.
As a general truth, it’s great. I mean yeah, don’t be a dick. As advice or a rule, it’s useless. Why? There are two cases where someone is being a dick in a game:
1) Malice: The person is intentionally being a dick. Will giving them advice help? No. Someone who is knowingly being a dick is pretty unlikely to say “oh, gee, you’re right, I should stop.” That’s part of the definition of being a dick. If you could just tell jerks to stop being jerks and they listened, the world would be a far simpler place. q.v. Trolls.
Fortunately, real malice is a vanishingly small subset of the gaming world, at least where I game. You may be gaming with a lot more jerks than me, in which case my best advice is to go hang out with a better class of people.
Far, far, far more common is the second case:
2) Misunderstanding: The person being a dick actually thinks they’re the victim, that other people are being dicks to them. They’re just defending themselves. Reflecting “ah, right ‘Don’t be a dick’” doesn’t help, because they don’t think they’re the problem: those other guys are being dicks, not me!
Before you know it the dick-spiral feeds back upon itself, rapidly becoming a nigh unstoppable dick-juggernaut: you feel the sting of an unintentional insult, behave like a dick to defend yourself (all while thinking the other person is the dick, not you), so others dickishly respond to your (seemingly spontaneous) dickishness thinking they’re defending themselves… Dick dick dick dick dick dick. Where does it all end?
This is the great quagmire, the root of most hostility at the table. It can happen to anyone, even the nicest, most perceptive person. Parroting “don’t be a dick” doesn’t untie this knot, because it ignores the cause. It winds up being smug criticism instead of helping you do the right thing.
My advice: stop saying “don’t be a dick.” Start thinking about why people are being dicks (or seem to be dicks). Start with the extremely magnanimous assumption that someone being a dick doesn’t intend to be one. Assume there’s a misunderstanding. Walk a mile in their dice.
Eliciting Reactions: Cart Meet Horse
So we’re having dinner and she says “When I GM, how do I inspire awe in the players? I want them to look at something and just go ‘wow!’”
GMs ask many subspecies of this question. How do I make them love some character I made? How do I scare them? How do I make them care about X?*
Sure, there are ways to do all of these things. But here’s my heartfelt advice: don’t try.
Instead of scheming to elicit some reaction your script demands, just play and let the players decide how to react. Describe things as they are. Play NPCs honestly. Don’t try to manipulate the players to like some character or hate another. But when you do see them react, embrace it! Don’t gnash your teeth when they loathe the NPC you thought would be their cherished mentor. Rejoice, for now your mill is full of grist.
Deciding how the characters feel is the players’ job, not yours. Your job is to give them things to react to and to respect their reaction.
* Ignore the whole metaphysical question of whether you are trying to evoke these emotions in the player or the character. That’s a different discussion.
“It was a gaming pyramid scheme.”
When the fine folks at RPG Geek asked me to do an interview, they may not have expected to hear the terrifying tale of how I first got started playing D&D. We’re talking a boxed set that came with cardboard chits instead of dice. Seriously, chits. When you made an attack you had to pull one out of a tea cup to see if you hit.
RPG Industry Professional Interview: Ben Robbins
See? Terrifying. And no, I never did game with the Gelatinous Cube guys.
A Good Year for Gaming, Examined
So as I already posted, I had an epic year of gaming. Sixty percent more games than any year for the last decade. We’re talking raw college-levels of gaming.
How did this magical thing happen?
For one, 2011 was the year of the West Coast game tour, with convention and gaming events large and small, epic and intimate: Johnzo-conzo, GameStorm, NemoCon, Fabricated Realities, Go Play NW, PAX, CozyCon, and GeekGirlCon. Fantastic and unique events all through the year.
Second, there was the mighty, unstoppable, dice-crushing juggernaut that is Story Games Seattle. Make no mistake: run a weekly public gaming meetup and you will game a lot. At least once a week, in fact. Civilians beware, it’s a highly virulent gaming vector. Just walk near the building and you’re likely to get sucked in and start role-playing. Before you know it you’re using words like antagonism and conflict resolution.
Here’s the weird part: I didn’t even have a regular gaming group in the usual sense. Y’know, that Tuesday night crew you try all your new games with. Instead I played with a huge variety of people. Story Games Seattle meets every week, but I’d be lucky to play with the same people twice in an entire month. It’s a constantly shifting roster of players and even when it’s fairly stable we mix up who plays with who. Case in point: in 2011 I played with 103 people I had never gamed with before, ever. This is a crazy and wonderful thing all by itself. Educational too. There is nothing that sharpens your gaming skills like gaming with strangers. I highly recommend it.
This was also the year I finished Microscope and sent it out into the world to make new friends. Anyone who tells you that isn’t a harrowing process is lying or they aren’t releasing a game they really care about. Sometimes it’s nerve-wracking and sometimes it’s fantastically rewarding. Those two things don’t cancel out: it’s both at once, or sometimes one right after the other. Has this scared me off game design? Clearly not enough, because I’m already knee-deep playtesting Kingdom.
All in all, this has been a really fine way to spend a year. Playing lots and lots of fascinating games with lots and lots of fascinating people.
To all the awesome gamers who made my year possible: thank you. Now let’s play more.
A Good Year for Gaming
A picture is worth a thousand words, right?
That’s how many times I gamed each year for the past decade. I know it’s quality not quantity that matters, but 2011 was a fiery ball of gaming win.
So next time you’re wondering why I haven’t posted on Ars Ludi in a while, there’s your answer: I’m busy gaming. Or designing games like Microscope. Usually both.
“There’s a much better randomizer that we use: human beings”
Want to listen to me rant for forty minutes about D&D camp, playtesting M&M, GMing or not GMing, Microscope, and how actually playing games trumps just sitting around talking about them? Then this is your lucky day!
Ben Robbins Interview (BAMF Podcast)
Really fun interview. Thanks to Mike Lafferty for having me on. Yeah, I get pretty fired up once I get going. What can I say: gaming is exciting stuff!
PAX 2011: GMless Role-playing Games (part 6)
The big finale! You thought we’d never make it. We’re continuing from part 5, but if you’re just arriving (because you’re seeing the last post first) you probably want to jump straight to part 1 and start there.
Indie 306
So… we’re just about done, unless people have questions?
One thing I want to point out before I say anything further is that: this is just a bunch of talk. And this is not how to learn about these games. The way to learn is to play them. Play them constantly. And in fact, if we were to drill a hole through this wall, and then another wall…
(unknown): There is a door there, you know?
Yeah but I want to drill. Can you imagine the look on their faces when we come in with our giant mole machine? In 306, four rooms down, is the room where these games are being played. And that is probably far more useful than being here listening to me. It’s crazy! 306. [sponsored by our beloved Gamma Ray Games] There’s a big sign outside and there are people sitting there Vanna White-style.
So my strategy (and in fact I argued to put this at the beginning of the weekend so people who heard about these games wouldn’t hear about them Sunday and then go home), if you want to learn about them you have to sit down and play them. That’s the only way to get your hand in. I highly recommend it.
Being A Good Antagonist
Morgan, you have a question?
Morgan: So in GMless games, how do I be a good antagonist?
Whole ‘nother topic. Whole ‘nother topic. But I’ll tell you what it is: Listen. Don’t do anything.
(unknown): Not like that Xander guy…
Xander: He’s a dick!
The best way to be an antagonist is to be a very sympathetic and caring person, as a player. Don’t do anything. Don’t steal the show. Listen. Listen to Xander talk. And wait. Wait until you know what he wants. You have to know what he wants.
Reid: Then deny it!
No! No. Let him have it… for a price. Attach a nice price tag on there! Like “hey, yeah, yeah, you can overthrow the government… if your wife dies.” Or “you can overthrow the government… if your best friend thinks you’re a hypocrite.” Or “you can overthrow the government… if the government you set up instead becomes a terrible jihad that is just as bad as the previous…” And he’s like “NOOOO! But I still want to overthrow the government…” Yeah, so that’s good antagonism. Never stop them. Always give them what they want and then just… yeah, we’ll avoid the profanity. But yeah, big price tag. But it’s about patience. You have to wait long enough to find out what it is they really want. You don’t rush in and try to make them want something.
What We Played
Any questions? I think we’re… we’re beyond good. Any last thoughts? [silence]
(unknown): Do you document the games?
Actually that’s a good question. Back to the document the games thing, think about it right, when you document the games as GM it’s because the players don’t care enough to do it. West Marches experiment, motivating players, one of the rules was I wouldn’t document anything. They had to. If they wanted documentation they had to do it. If you take that away from them you’re effectively just doing more of a “I’m running the game you’re just a [audio muddled. Spectator?].” In a GMless game there’s often someone at the table who is interested enough to write up something. Or not. If no one’s interested to write something up…
(unknown): I meant you personally.
I do sometimes. If there’s four players, I probably do it a quarter of the time. Other times I don’t want to. Other times I’m like “well that game was fine, but I don’t feel like writing anything about it.” And there are different motivations. Because it’s a one-shot game you don’t need documentation in the long-term, it’s more of a “let us share this experience with the internets” or so that other people who haven’t played this game will know whether they will like it. When we do Story Game Seattle, that’s our motivation for documenting games: to teach other people what game they could have played had they been there. And they can look at it and say “Oh, yeah. Pickets & Fences. That game… I don’t know if I’d play that. Didn’t feel like they had a great time.” We try to be [honest]… we try to make it a learning experience, not just about the fiction, but about how the rules of the game created the fiction. So it’s a little bit of a tutorial of what kind of game you’d get if you played it.
Bad Rewards vs Gaming As Art
Ben M: Just something I would like to throw out for everyone. Use it or not as you please. Something I’ve done coming from a very old school GMing background and trying to get people more creative. If you’re playing a game like Pathfinder / D&D / GURPS, whatever, give people mechanical bonuses to encourage their own creativity. Such as, if your character is a swordsman. Okay do you sell your swordsmen ship academy? Yes. Okay, make you a deal. I’m GM, I will give you an extra 500 EP (or whatever your system uses) if you write me up a usable to the other players description of the swordsmanship academy and some interesting NPCs there, that they can go muck around with.
Morgan: Kind of like spread out narrative control a little bit that way?
Ben M: Yeah
It is kind of late in the day, but I will point out one thing. This isn’t exactly what you’re talking about, but there are some games that reward you for playing the character you said you were going to play. Like you say “My character’s a joker!” Every time you make a joke, you check a checkbox, and that’s progress.
Think about that for a second. Think about how stupid that is.
Morgan: Waaah, I love that.
Think about it. Morgan said, “hey I wanted to play this certain guy.” But I don’t really trust Morgan, that he would just do that on his own. I feel Morgan needs a donut every time he plays his character correctly. I feel in some ways that might possibly be the most insulting thing to say to a player…
Morgan: But I need it…
It’s not quite exactly what you’re talking about… But, we’re playing because we enjoy the game. You picked that character because that’s the character you wanted to play. I trust that that’s what you want. You’re an adult. Why don’t you want to play the guy you made? WHYYYY? Why am I giving you donuts?!?
Morgan: I’m going to have to disagree with you. Morgan is not an upstanding knight. Morgan is a power gamer. [laughter] That’s why he plays role-playing games. But if you give Morgan a carrot, an advancement power gaming carrot…
I’m teaching you the wrong thing. I’m teaching you to want the carrot. In fact there are psychological studies…
Morgan: No, no, no, it’s like eventually… [audio muddled] If you have a treat in your hand when you tell the dog to sit, it will sit, and then eventually it will sit on its own. [laughter]
And that’s the thing. I feel very strongly against the idea of treating the players like dogs. But more seriously, psych studies have been done (you can look them up) that say that basically if you have a pleasurable activity and you associate a reward with it and then you take away the reward the pleasurable activity stops being pleasurable. You can actually de-pleasurize things that initially the person liked, because their desire switches focus and becomes focused on the reward. In other words, you stop playing the joker character because you want to play the joker character, you start doing it because you want the “dings!” And that, I feel, subverts… it takes you down exactly the wrong path. Instead of teaching you to be a happy role-player, doing what you want to do, it teaches you to…
Morgan: I’d be interested in seeing the psychological studies and seeing if the reward is tangible or if it literally is checkboxes.
Checkboxes are very tangible.
Xander: Yeah, checkboxes are actually used in my job, which is Skinnerian psychology all the time because it’s a great to reinforce people without giving them a million cookies or something. But, the point is, you get to choose what your own rewards are, like FATE which is an example and in Shadow of Yesterday, or in AW [Apocalypse World] which also does that. You get some control over you want to have the focus on. I have a joker aspect. Every time I make a joke and it’s inappropriate, I get rewarded for it. But you can always be like…
Morgan: I’m sorry, you get rewarded with narrative control…
Xander: No, you receive a ding. The ding in some of these allows you to get more narrative control.
Eventually, you might get narrative control…
Xander: But the ding that you’re getting, you get to choose it. And you can always say, “Five games later, I haven’t used this joker aspect in a while, I’m clearly not feeling it, I’m going to switch it.”
If you look at it like two continuums… two roads you can go down. One… you said you were a power gamer and you wanted to stop, I don’t think this is going to help.
Morgan: I didn’t say I wanted to stop… [laughter]
There are two options. One where I’m going to engage your reward cycle. Like WoW [World of Warcraft], which is a great, carefully, carefully sculpted reward cycle. All those video games. Carefully, carefully designed by psychologists. Perfectly designed. That’s great. And that keeps you chasing it. And then there’s a different way to do this. To say “Hey, let’s use our brains. Let’s engage in artistic activity, in which we are being creative people and making something cerebral that is touching… we’re artists.” And you say “I don’t need a ding if I’m trying to be like Mozart…”
Morgan: Okay. But on the other hand though, maybe Mozart needed to be bribed with a couple of cookies to pick up the violin the first time. That’s all I’m saying. Maybe if you gathered a bunch of artists together and just handed them paint, it might not go that well no matter how creative they are. The training wheels… [more and more laughter]
From play what I see… the reason I’m really against this is when I see it in play, the worst thing that happens is the people who are focused on the reward cycle (because they know they’re going to get a long-term benefit), they don’t play heads-up. They go “oh I made a joke! -check-check-”. Their brains — character sheets are the devil — they get back down here, because now they’re tracking an inward thing. They’re not sharing their character anymore. They’re not out here [with the rest of us]. They’re not paying attention to your character. They’re tracking their own little progress. They’re playing a solo video game at that point.
Reid: That’s the first thing that happened to me when I started playing Burning Wheel.
Heads down?
Reid: “I get things every time I do something! I’m gonna do something now, and then now…”
You remember Pendragon, from back in the day? If you go basket weave, you’re going to get a level-up. And this isn’t really true but it’s an old joke we used to make in the dawn of time. So people would be like “I’m hiding in my room and basket weaving for three days! -check-check-check-check-! Best basket weaver ever!” “You are a knight.” “Best basket weaver!” And mechanically it’s accurate, and mechanically it’s realistic, but…
(unknown): There’s a guy, I think he’s a game designer from Seattle, he wrote an essay on ethical game design. And a lot of it’s about the reward cycle in WoW… like you can make bad, unethical and addicting rewards… [audio muddled]
Or it might even feel fun, it just might not be something that human beings should be doing.
(unknown): The guy from Spiderweb Software
Oh, Jeff Vogel. Jeff Vogel’s awesome. Love Jeff Vogel.
This is just me. I feel that as gamers and game designers I’d rather go up here (see me raising my hand). I’d rather go up to this higher level where we talk about… even abortion. We talk about real issues. We talk about deep stuff and we go away saying “I felt touched by that.” I’d rather go away saying “That was a moving, touching scene. That part where I made the king sleep with his daughter and we all freaked out. It was crazy!” But if I did that to get a ding… would that have happened?
(unknown): You would have leveled up!
I would have leveled up! It would have been awesome! [laughter] In a way I think it’s almost magically convenient that if you’re playing a one-shot game, a “story now” game, since there isn’t really a “later,” leveling up doesn’t exist. Most of these games have no character progression at all, because where would you have it? So you’re kind of saved from the reward cycle that would be incumbent in a lot of traditional long-term play games.
We’re really almost done, so whaddya got?
Xander: Well my response to that is, that the problem is that’s great to be on that level, but not necessarily everyone is there.
Not everyone even wants that! That’s cool!
Xander: I’m there on Thursdays [at Story Games Seattle] because I’m doing this on Saturdays. I’ve been doing this for years.
They’re different activities.
Xander: I have four people at the table with me, not necessarily all of them on the same page and if I can say “Look, you get a carrot…”
Sure. And it’s very important to not think they [role-playing games] are all the same. When I sit down to play fourth edition D&D, I know I’m not playing Shock. I don’t say “we should make this more Shock-like!” That would be… kind of rude. Like going to a movie, but saying “y’know I think I should LARP some of this movie! Wooo! Rocky Horror!” [laughter] I mean, it would be inappropriate and rude. But because we call them all role-playing games, we think it’s all the same thing, but in fact they’re a very broad… Be respectful.
Reid: I disagree [laughter]
And I respect your right to disagree!
Reid: Some RPGs are just better than other ones!
And I think with that… we’re done!
[applause, rioting, collapse]
Huge thanks to everyone who came and participated. It would have been a lot less fun without you. No really, a lot less fun. And thanks again to Jobe for thinking to record the workshop. Now stop listening to me and go play some games!
