Say Hello to Chop Downhouse

Ever wonder whether you could come up with the best character name of all time? Well the bad news is, you can’t, because that achievement goes to 5-year-old who came up with Chop Downhouse. CHOP DOWNHOUSE.

Yep, Caroline has started playing D&D with her kiddo: Mommy, Let’s Play Dungeons and Dragons

“And if you’ve ever heard a five year old say “Dungeons and Dragons” over and over again in his irresistibly cute voice you can understand that I was powerless to say no. And so our DnD campaign began.”

Highly recommended read. We can only hope for further updates, though I’ve heard rumors that the kiddo has already been tempted by story games and started playing both In This World and Microscope…

Follow In German

Want to play Follow with your German-speaking friends? The good news is a translation is in the works, courtesy of Plotbunny Games.

Nächstes Crowdfunding: Follow von Ben Robbins!

Work on the translation has already been underway and there’s going to be a crowdfunding campaign, so if you’re interested keep an eye on their website!

My Mom’s a Mech Merc on Mars

I’ve been GMing a very hacked version of Lancer. Our setting has kind of a Cowboy Bebop meets Hammers Slammers meets professional sports vibe: pilots are professionals but it’s just a job. It’s not personal. And because they’re in mighty mighty mecha, even if they get wrecked in combat they are likely to walk away with minor injuries so they can have a drink at the bar with pilots from the other side and talk smack between battles.

Likewise, most pilots change outfits a lot over their careers. You do a stint with the Wolves of Ganymede, but when your contract is up maybe you sign with the Redstars, until they fire you or you get a better offer. Which means you’ve got history with a lot of different outfits. An ally today might be an enemy tomorrow. But again, it’s not personal… except when it is.

So when the players are making characters, I ask them to tell me a little story about an outfit they served with in the past, one that they had a bad experience with. Some place that threw them under the bus or treated them unfairly. An outfit they would not want to work with again and which probably wouldn’t hire them.

When everyone is done, I ask them to tell me about another outfit they had a great experience with. Someplace they really liked and would gladly work with again. And of course explain why and what happened.

Great! Now guess what? The outfit you hate is actually the same as one that someone else loved, etc. Criss-cross randomly, but make sure no two players match on both the good and bad side (or just pass to the left, etc).

Yeah, INVICTUS abandoned you in the middle of a battle, cutting a deal to end the conflict and leaving you behind enemy lines, forcing you to hide from pitchfork-wielding locals and find your own way out when your mech ran out of gas. But that’s the very same INVICTUS who was founded by another character’s mother. She taught her son everything about being a mech mercenary, and yeah she *totally* loved having him on the team but eventually every bird has to leave the nest and fly on their own…

“That piece of shit is your Mom???”

It’s a little bit shades of Western Paranoia, except in this case the players all know right from the start even if the characters don’t. Or do they? I let each pair of players decide when and how they want it to come out. Have they been bickering about their conflicting opinions of this one outfit as long as they’ve known each other? (“Naw, the Hellcats are totally cool! You probably just weren’t a good fit…”). Or is it a landmine that has never been trod upon… until our heroes find themselves on the same battlefield as that outfit. And suddenly it’s awkward.

Who’s right? Are those people terrible or awesome? Who knows??? Every point-of-view is biased, and each person only sees some slice of the story. Maybe everything happened for a good reason. Maybe it was all a big misunderstanding. Maybe.

You should totally talk this out. Forget that you’re sitting at the controls of a 50 ton wrecking ball loaded with missile racks and autocannons. Use your words.

“That piece of shit is your Mom???”

Not the words I was thinking of. Okay fine: roll for initiative.

Now you can play In This World too

Did you miss the Kickstarter? If so, you can finally get your hands on the early access rules of In This World. When you pre-order the book or PDF, you’ll get the fully playable rules now, and the final version when it is released.

Lots of people have told me they only heard about the Kickstarter after it ended, which is the classic problem with crowdfunding campaigns — no matter how hard you try to get the word out, people miss it. Backers have had the early access version of In This World all to themselves for two months, so it feels about time to let people who were late to the party have some fun too.

I also started receiving topic ideas from people who backed at the world-builder level, and let me just say: *chef’s kiss!*

Do you remember Remember Tomorrow?

Remember Tomorrow by Gregor Hutton is a weird little game that you probably never heard of. It came out back in 2010, and it’s possible that it made less of an impact because on the surface it doesn’t look weird at all. You play a character with a goal, fighting bad guys to get what you want. What could be more straightforward?

We have two — count em two — Remember Tomorrow games going right now. One straight cyberpunk, and the other digging more into one of the fantasy eras of one of our Kingdom legacy games. Did I mention it’s a cyberpunk game? Yeah that’s the default setting but we found it works just as well for swords & sorcery. So long as you have daring individuals being opposed by groups or organizations, whether that’s scheming corporations or hooded cults, it works.

We used to play it at Story Games Seattle every now and then, but trying it again recently reminds me that yes, it is a good game and deserves more love.

“Come At Me Bro!”

Cool, cool, cool, you say. But what’s the interesting part? Why should you check out this game?

The interesting part is the very unusual structure. The best way to describe it is a tapestry of stories that are loosely interconnected, but with threads that come and go based on what we think is interesting. I know it sounds like Microscope when I describe it that way, but that’s probably just me. It isn’t at all… except maybe in spirit.

Each player has their own character, which looks very straightforward, but you only keep that character for as long as they’re interesting to you. On your turn you can choose to abandon them and introduce a new character and launch their story instead. Your old character goes to the center of the table and sits there, untouched, unless someone else decides they want to adopt them and continue that story — giving up their old character in the process.

Each character has a goal, and their story is all about accomplishing it: you want to cure the cyber-plague, or kill the killer who killed your partner, etc. But the strange part is that the only way you can move towards your goal is by making *other players* interested in your story too.

On your turn you’ve got exactly three options:

1. Introduce a new character (or faction), which I just described
2. Have your character make a deal with a faction
3. Forget your own character for a moment and describe a faction attacking someone else’s character

The second option, cutting a deal, can give your character a leg up, but at the cost of making a faction more powerful. Ultimately factions are all the characters’ enemies, so it’s bad for everyone. And the important thing is that while a deal can give you a buff, it *cannot* give you the checks you need to move closer to your story goal.

The third option is the key. The only way to get your story checks is if another player, on their turn, decides to forget about their own character for a moment and describes how one of the big bad factions is attacking you. They take off their protagonist hat for a moment and decide to be your antagonist. That scene, on their turn, can be one of the big story beats that moves your towards your goal. CEL-X tries to shut down your research lab, but that proves to be the critical moment when you isolate the transmission vector of the cyber-plague, bringing you one step closer to a cure.

It’s hard to wrap your brain around at first, because players keep thinking that their turn should be about their character–and it can be if you’re introducing a character or cutting a deal–but once you get in the swing of it it’s very fun.

Tapestry of Characters, Tapestry of Players

What happens when you accomplish your story goal, or fail and go down in a flames? That character is done. They’re out of the game. You make a new character and start a new story thread.

What I love about the whole combination is that we have a bunch of *potential* stories on the table, but the ones we follow and how they turn out must be the result of us building on each other. One person puts forward a character and a story goal, but that goes nowhere unless some other player is interested in creating adversity for that story.

And it’s a decision each of us makes individually, deciding how to spend our turns. The story *I* like might be quite different from the one that interests you, and that’s totally fine. All these threads weave around each other, creating a rich tapestry.

Is the game perfect? I think it has more fiddly bits than it needs, adding a little too much complexity in some places (I’m looking at you, conditions), but we have house rules to simplify it while still keeping true to the core mechanics.

The tapestry structure also means the game is super-flexible in terms of players coming and going. You can run it at a con, and if someone has to leave, no problem you just keep going. And if someone wants to join in they can just make a character and boom new thread added to the mix. Even if they know nothing about what’s already happened in the game, they can jump in on a new character’s story and get right into the action.

There’s always room for one more character, and for one more player.

Time Is A Tentacle

Microscope game recording on the Roll Play Game podcast. They’re expanding on an existing published setting, so there’s a lot of negotiation and discussion at the very start about what fits, but after that they get down to proper Microscope-business.

Storm of Whispers – Prologue I: The Origins of the Race

And when they say “origins of the race” they mean a race like vroom-vroom! I missed that at first, leading to some hilarious misunderstandings on my part.

Beware False Prophets

A digital Fahrenheit 451 meets Twitter. Censorship, online connectivity (or the lack thereof), and everyone winding up miserable.

That’s the history I got to play with some folks who had never tried Microscope before, or hardly any story games for that matter. Playing with new folks is — let’s not mince words — always a fucking treat. It shakes up your habits and keeps you on your feet.

At one point in our history, after people disconnect en masse to defy the terrible terrible tech overlords, true believers compile the Lexicon, a digital “all book” with all the knowledge that could once be found on the net.

But for *waves hands vaguely* fantasy technology reasons, the Lexicon can be transferred but not duplicated. Only the one true Lexicon can exist. And because people have gone offline, the sole Lexicon is downloaded into someone’s brain. That person bears the sacred book hidden within them, until they pass it on to another carrier.

We had already introduced the “World Saviors”, a secret society that, as the name implies, is determined to save humanity from the pit it has found itself in. How? Neural nanotech, of course! The common people can’t be trusted to figure this out themselves, so the World Saviors are going to make the decision for them. Totally cool dudes and not patronizing at all.

From the World Saviors point of view, the Lexicon is just out there somewhere, not in their control, hidden yet venerated, and that simply won’t do. So what’s their response? They create a bunch of *fake* Lexicons and embed them in people to go forth and claim to be the one true bearer.

False prophets wander the world, preaching Reconnection and the benefits of neural nanotechnology, while the true Lexicon remains hidden. At some point the true bearer dies before passing it on, removing the real Lexicon entirely until someone finds their grave years later and digs up their body to resurrect it. In the meantime it’s nothing but false prophets.

And did I mention that the Lexicon is almost certainly haunted by the spirit of its first creator, the rebel daughter of the original tech lord? Yeah, that hasn’t been a problem *yet* because we only found out towards the end of the game, but it puts everything that is going down in a very different perspective. Not just the Lexicon is being hunted: *she* is being hunted.

Hindsight is a powerful thing in Microscope.

Barbie x Microscope

Yes, that’s Barbie Microscope.

There are close ups of the timeline in the thread which are just loaded with golden moments: “Ken is good at taking orders.” “Why does Ken have big feelings???” I can *see* the story arc unfolding.

I have… no words. Just infinite love and respect.

You got Kingdom in my D&D!

How do you introduce a big mysterious enclave of druids to your D&D players without a boring info dump? Well if you’re a bold experimenter, you have the whole group play a game of Kingdom to create the enclave, so the players already know all about it. Oh and maybe you have to do that with seven players, just to add another wild wrinkle.

How did it go?

In short, it was an incredible experience, met my needs, and is highly recommended. So long as I, as a GM, was able to give my players an untouched section of the lore for them to be free in I was able to achieve:

• An epic, complex history that my players all understand out of experience rather than memorization.
• A plethora of characters and events more diverse and complex than something I could have easily generated on my own, especially ones that break with traditional tropes and cliches
• A series of meaningful explanation as to WHY that organization has its particular quirks and characteristics (now my players understand why the organization is paranoid about outsiders and humans without just seeming arbitrarily weird or racist, for example)
• Best of all: my players had a great time, and really enjoyed themselves

There’s two posts, the first preparing for the game and the second reporting the results. There’s a lot more detail covering both the good and the bad, so I highly recommend a read.

And yeah, this is all in the new /r/gmless forum…

A Place to Talk About GMless Games

I’m trying a little experiment.

Role-playing games with no GM are… let’s face it, a tiny weird niche in the tabletop RPG universe. So when you try to talk about GMless games in a forum that is 99.9% about games with a GM, it’s hard to generate any useful discussion density. Lots of people have zero idea what you’re talking about, or are concerned with the kind of things that only matter to GMed games.

We need a place to talk about GMless games specifically. So we made one:

/r/gmless

It is brand new, hot of the presses, new car smell, the works. I will take time to get traction. I doubt a single person is in there yet. But that first single person could be you.

I don’t intend this as *my* forum for *my* games, but as a place for everyone who is into GMless games to talk about our weird and brave little hobby. I’m definitely looking forward to other people taking the reins as mods, etc. And yes, in a perfect world it would be a standalone site, not owned by some external corporation, but right now it feels like the best bet is to go where the people are.

Ideally it will become a really great place to ask questions about how to play and have fun with GMless games. A place to share what we know and make our games better.

Now get in there and say hi!

Just Him and His Dad

From an email I’ve been meaning to post. Today seems like the right day:

Just wanted to let you know – I introduced a friend of mine to Microscope with a 4-person game a few months back, and he enjoyed it so much that I bought him the rulebook. He texted me yesterday saying that he played a 2-person game the other night, just him and his dad (a first-time Microscope player), and that:

“I haven’t had an interaction with my dad like that since we played first edition D&D together when I was a kid.”

It really meant a lot to him as an adult to be able to sit down with his dad and just kind of “play catch” with their imaginations like they did 20-some years ago. Thanks for such a cool game.

Stuff like this makes being a game designer feel pretty great. Happy Father’s Day.

In This Life

“I’m tired of characters who are just shallow stereotypes…”

We had just finished a delightful session of In This World and were basking in the afterglow. Talk turned to different stripes of gaming, from story games to D&D. Which is when Ace said how tired they were of one-dimensional characters. Characters that were just cardboard cutouts or well-trodden stereotypes instead of digging into what made them who they were. We all agreed that this was indeed a pox upon the house of gaming.

And then Joe said: I wonder if you could use In This World to make more interesting characters?

Naturally I looked at him like he had two heads. Make characters? What? C’mon, this is a *world* building game. It’s right in the title!

But we talked about it and I had to admit, it made sense. Not only did it make sense, it seemed like a surprisingly good fit. My innate game design caution made me want to retreat to my thought-cave and carefully weigh the changes that would be necessary, so I could be sure it would work.

Or, shouted Joe and Ace, we could try it RIGHT NOW.

So yeah, we had just finished one game of In This World, and we turned around and jumped in and started another, hacking together the rules for In This Life…

What Makes A Jock A Jock?

In This World takes a concept and then imagines a world where that idea is different.

But to make interesting people, we didn’t want to change the stereotypes, we wanted to explore how individual people might not fit the stereotypes we expect or project on to them.

So we start with a category of person we want to explore — in our first game it was “jocks” — and then the statements are the things that people expect to be true of that stereotype. For example:

Winning matters
Sports are life
Team is your family
Coach knows best
Play hard, party hard
Studying is for nerds
etc

Classic jock stereotypes, right? And then instead of worlds, you make individual people. A person who doesn’t fit one of the stereotypes we just outlined. Coach knows best, but this jock doesn’t trust their coach. Studying is for nerds, but this jock cares about getting good grades. Winning matters, but this jock doesn’t take it all that seriously. They just enjoy the game.

And then dig deeper, following the same procedure as normal In This World to see how these breaks from expectations affect this person’s life and those around them. You see what happens when someone doesn’t fall into that neat little box.

The result was — just as we hoped — complicated and interesting people. And maybe more importantly, sympathetic people. Each character we created, we cared about, even when they messed up, confronting our own preconceptions about those stereotypes in the process. We would have happily kept playing any of those stories to see what happened next.

It also feels different from normal In This World because you’re inherently exploring a tension that arises from being different, from not fitting in. It’s gripping story soil.

Just Scratching the Surface

The funny thing is that even though I didn’t tell playtesters any of this, *multiple* groups independently came up with the same idea. Not all in exactly the way I described here, but some variation on the concept of characters instead of worlds.

“In This Life” is going in the book as an alternate way to play, because it is just too good not to include. I have… a few other ideas in mind as well, but we’ll see if they’re good enough to make the cut. I’ve said before that In This World says it’s a game where you make worlds, but it’s really a tool to examine assumptions. I think there may be a whole host of ways or places we could use this method that we haven’t even thought of yet.

We’re just scratching the surface.

Combining Worlds: See You Space Cowboy…

We had an urge to play some space cowboys. But what does “space cowboys” even mean to us? There was one way to find out: play In This World and chew on our preconceptions.

Our plan was to play In This World to prototype some worlds, and then pick one to use for another game we were going to run. Rather than trying to define “space cowboys” as a concept at the start, we used the ‘combine two things’ technique and inserted space into slot 1 and cowboys into slot 2, just to make sure we were really starting from the ground floor.

And it totally worked! We made four tasty worlds. Well, universes really, because: space. All very good, all very distinct takes on what it meant to be a space cowboy. But which one to use for our game??

Spoiler: we used all of them.

Yep that’s right. After a bit of pondering we realized that all four ideas we created could interlock together, perfectly.

World 1 was a planet where a colony ship crashed long ago, leaving survivors to spread out and settle the barren world. Security androids from the ship had been repurposed into law enforcement, creating relentless robot sheriffs prowling the badlands. A totally cowboy vibe, but on a distant world.

World 2 was a lot more sci fi, with “cowboys” as frontier mech jockeys, on the very edge of the expanding universe, fighting to claim infinitely valuable star-seeds from the emerging cosmic proto-matter before anyone else. They are the legendary adventurer-heroes every child dreams of becoming, their names written among the stars.

What, no hackers yet? World 3 has you covered. Cowboys roam the data nets, infiltrating and stealing. But this is an interplanetary internet, the data connecting a thousand worlds and a myriad of races in a great galactic civilization. Humanity are small fries, a tiny unimportant race, except for one distinction: for reasons unknown, they are the only species who can project their minds into the net. They are the only cowboys, so the other civilizations have to hire them to do their dirty work. Essential but eternally outsiders.

And then World 4 takes us back to a more classic cowboy vibe. The entire galaxy is united and civilized, but one world has been kept wild as a haven for people who don’t want to follow society’s rules. Anyone can reject civilization and go live on the badlands planet, where there is no law but what you make… And once you go, you can’t return.

Four very different worlds, but I think you can already see how they click together. Worlds 1 and 4 are the same place, a world where a colony ship crashed long ago and has now been set aside by the interworld-government as a free haven, an outlet for those who can’t adapt to the galactic utopia. And that galactic civilization is world 3, where humans have a rare niche as hackers, but are otherwise unimportant… with that unimportance perhaps fueling the desire to escape, one way or another. And then world 2, with the larger than life mech-cowboys on the edge of the expanding universe are just the outer fringes of that same civilization, another place where heroic individualism can still survive.

Normally you can merge ideas with a little adjustment, but this was exceptional because we didn’t have to change a single thing. They just clicked. Was that a side-effect of creating them all with In This World? That even though we knew they were independent worlds, our brains were already primed with similar ideas or subconsciously making things that worked together? Who knows? It’s not something I’ve seen in other In This World sessions.

Either way, our combined setting gave us three distinct kinds of space cowboys in this one universe:

• galactic mech fortune hunters on the edge of existence
• second-class citizen hackers, the underclass of an otherwise utopian alien civilization
• pioneers who have rejected civilization and “gone west” to make their own way on the badlands planet

Which actually brought us right back to our initial question: what kind of space cowboys did we want to play? If you guessed dusters, speeder bikes, and robot-sheriffs prowling the wastelands, you would be right. But now we knew so much more about the civilization outside our world, the wardens of our tiny preserve.

We knew what we had turned our backs on.

Early Access Released

My original plan was to release an early access version of In This World to backers after the Kickstarter ended, so they could get started playing before the whole book was done.

But then the other day I was having a great time playing with a new group of people and it made me think — for the millionth time — that this game is just fun to play. And I thought to myself: why wait? Why not let my backers start playing as soon as possible?

So that’s what I did. I finished incorporating all the playtest feedback, revised and improved all the explanation text, made sure everything was ready to go, and then sent it out to backers. Just in time for the weekend!

I can talk about how much fun In This World is all day, but the real test is people sitting down and getting to play it for themselves. And now they can.

Gameplay Video: In This World

Trying something new! I’ve uploaded a gameplay video of one of our In This World sessions. The topic for our worlds: Vacations!

I’ve never tried posting video of our sessions before, but a lot of people have asked to see what all my games look like in action, so we’ll see how this works!

It is, of course, totally unscripted. You get to see the whole process, from sitting down to picking a topic for our worlds to hashing out all the details. Real gaming, warts and all! Big kudos to Caroline, Marc, and Al for being willing to take the plunge!

Like and subscribe and all that jazz!