Cut Your Wins

Time to ramble about losing, again.

So, we lost our first Frosthaven scenario.  I don’t read the scenarios ahead of time, so I keep screwing up the special rules.  But, it was just not all that pleasant to play.  I think on replay it will seem really easy.  I knew the big issue for me was going to be running out of cards …  Well, okay, every scenario is an issue if you run out of cards.  But, it was a 12 round scenario that was explicit about that up front, and I’m not proficient enough on how to manage rests to really maximize staying power.

As much as it wasn’t all that appealing in the specific, I still think it’s enjoyable from the standpoint of seeing different things occur.

So, I have more going on in life in 2024 than in recent years, so I’m not as mentally invested in VTD as I used to be.

VTD 23 was last weekend.

Did three runs.

Friday night was team run.  With fewer players and given recent history, decided to do Nightmare.  It was easy.  Well, NM is always easy, so *shrug*.  I played polydruid and wasn’t able to do different elemental every room.  Cheesed Trollform only in rm6.  We got all of the puzzles with zero puzzle damage.

Saturday morning was Epic Double Down.  This was easy …  I only took damage in rm7 and never bothered to get healed.  Okay, the dungeon was just sad.  I ran monk and did my two attacks a round for 60+ when they hit.

Sunday morning was Anti-Cabal.  We chose Epic for obvious reason.  Not only was the dungeon easy, but the monster ACs were really low.

I died in rm5.  Then, I died again from push damage as we were only halfway through monster.  Rm7 monster killed three of our five party members around round four.  Fighter was only one still alive when time ran out.

Yes, they tweak dungeons over the weekend.  This was not like the others.

One of our players got mad, though maybe less at the difficulty and more at *how* the room was changed.  They changed rm5 so that the two biggest damage sources against monster were autonegated.  Besides that not scaling for smaller parties – consider the solo player who can’t deal any damage at all.  This sort of mechanic has been used in the past and continues to annoy players because it works against what is actually fun in the game.

Crits are fun, even I think so and I’m a sardonic, jaded cynic.  So, monk keeps hitting for 60 multiple times a round and someone else does something unusual and does zero.  It undermines rogue’s only good combat feature – Sneak Attacking for a lot.  It punishes barbarian disproportionately as barbarian has highest base damage.

I enjoyed the last run.  I got to see the failure video!  I would have preferred and even explicitly stated “I wish this was what Epic was like yesterday [earlier in weekend].”

It was a weird weekend where Saturday’s run was pretty much the least enjoyable as there was no good metagaming to do, no metagaming actually mattered due to sadness of dungeon, and it wasn’t really satisfying.  Yet, I still enjoyed it as a game experience.  There is a reason I still try to do at least three VTD runs every weekend.

Trying to relate to topic, I’m probably happier to fail a third of my runs because then dungeons feel like a challenge *and* it gets me thinking about how to metabreak the dungeon.  If just win all of the time, who cares what one’s build is, in which case why have I spent so many thousands of dollars on tokens?

What else am I excited by failing at?

Gamingwise?

Have had a couple RPG experiences recently.  One, I didn’t fail and saved the poisoned dude.  Had second John Carter session.  Unlike the first session, the pace of play here and the flailing about not accomplishing simple things was much more akin to my typical home play in recent years.  Did I fail at anything?  Well, not really in a mechanical sense as made die rolls, including die roll I wanted to make.  I suppose narratively failed to uncover useful information while tagging along on an investigation and failed to advance plot in a meaningful way and failed to interact with NPCs in any meaningful way.  That wasn’t a good thing.

But, this post is all about how awesome failure is.  So, at other times, while a feel bad in the moment, failing leads to interesting story inflections.  I’ve said as much before, though I don’t think I’ve used “story inflections” in this blog in the last 15 years.  I keep looking for failure in our supers play – something that hasn’t happened recently – because supers failing is important to making the bad guys seems impressive.  Not personal failure, so much.  Party failure.

Anyway, failure in RPGs I’ve brought up before, so it’s more that failure in other game types can lead to more interesting results, can lead to being enthused to try to do better the next time.

So, I don’t pay for pro wrestling except the one time I went to Wrestlemania.  I read reviews of Wrestlemania’s two nights and watched various highlights plus I still follow AEW.  One of my frustrations, which may be more of an AEW thing as I don’t watch WWE regularly, is that failure is so boring.  I tune out of a number of matches now not just because I know who will win but know it won’t be interesting in how the match resolves.  We need the disqualifications, the count outs, the non-title matches, and whatever else so that the loser doesn’t just have all of their heat killed.  The way AEW works these days, losers lose square if not always fair.  Then, they make a big deal about people’s win-loss records.

80s NWA, I expected heel champ to lose by disqualification a lot to hold on to the title but put over the face.  Now, you just see losers as losers and wonder why the other stars who aren’t allowed to lose outside of a PPV don’t get title shots for all of the various belts.

It’s just so extreme, when the value in success and failure is that there’s a slim margin between the two.  You know, like how sports is entertaining because upsets happen but not all of the time.

I don’t want to lose Frosthaven scenarios because they are stupidly hard – I want to lose when I don’t play as well as I could have.

I don’t want to lose TD runs because I don’t have every token in existence – I want to lose when I don’t play as well as I could have.

I don’t want to lose CCG matches because only five archetypes are viable – I want to lose when I don’t play as well as I could have.

I don’t want to lose in RPGS … hardly ever because real life is so good for losing, and it’s not a competitive game type, and being an expert in RPG play is not something I really aspire to.  But, it loses impact to succeed all of the time.  My understanding of modern D&D is that every encounter is supposed to be won, just a matter of how many resources used to win it.  That just sounds so hollow … that I have to mention this for a second time in this blog.

Giving Again

Played VTES on the 13th.  Only three player game, but it was a solid game.

I rescued Arika so that my predator had a predator.  She didn’t go down again, so we eventually got ousted.  I did have a window to bleed my prey out, but he drew into additional Deflections, and I didn’t get another crack.

Got together with a friend in person for first time since pandemic started.  We had played some stuff through online meeting software.  We played This War of Mine …

… of course.  We did not come close to succeeding.  We made zero progress on first objective.  Learned that getting wounded is really, really bad.

So, one of my recent thoughts was same old, same old – I love CCGs and RPGs and a few specific things like mahjong, but there are plenty of games I don’t have the same level of enthusiasm for.

But, before getting more into that and trying to relate to something else recently, time for me to use an analogy.

I’ve seen the ending episodes of Naruto already, but they are being shown on Cartoon Network and so I have been watching those and some episodes I skipped.

Anime is anime.  Fight anime is fight anime, though Naruto has a lot more going on than Dragonball Z, Bleach, YuYu Hakusho, or a bunch of other stuff.  It’s more similar to Yu-Gi-Oh! in having a very long character development arc.  Then, lots of other things are of a similar ilk to what I’m slowly getting at.

Want to know the difference between D&D and high fantasy?  See the difference between earlier Naruto and end of series.  What inspired my thinking about this recently is Obito.  Obito’s present is a perfect example of something you *could* do in a RPG but will frustrate folks who focus on the mechanics of such games.  High fantasy isn’t about mechanics.  Well, most written fantasy isn’t about mechanics including game fiction.

It’s such a struggle … in my experience … to capture dramatic moments that occur in scripted works because the point of a game is that it isn’t scripted.  You roll or flip or allocate or whatever and you win when you weren’t supposed to win and lose when you weren’t supposed to lose, and the narrative emerges from decisions and randomness rather than being predetermined.

Um, okay, everybody already knows this.

So, let me bring up failure again.  I have a recent example that makes me want to belabor this topic as well.

In our Iron Empire campaign, we are at Imperial Winter Court.  Our Statuses are high enough that this is plausible.

There are a bunch of events going on every week.  We participated in five so far while still being in first month of three month WC.  None of the three of us have won any, and we usually don’t place at a reward level.  This is reminiscent of The Princess Police campaign, though I know one PC did well in some major event there (in a session I missed), possibly did well in a second event, and another PC might have done well in some other event.  But, then, those characters were vastly more experienced, and there were more of them.  I accomplished nothing in the events I participated in.

Our experience levels aren’t high enough to plausibly compete in contests/tournaments.  Sure, one PC has Earth 4 and Agility 4 and another has Air 4.  I don’t have any trait above 3.  It’s just not feasible to compete against multiple NPCs with traits of 4, even with superior strategy and tactics.

Which in and of itself is fine.  It would be thematically weird for inferior participants to win heavily contested events.

But, what does losing mean?  We had a 49% chance of placing in the most recent event with our final roll.  At least, I think we would have gotten some reward if we had made that roll.  But, I/we didn’t.  So, what does that mean?

Naruto (the two series) has an epic story arc, not just for the main character but also for some other characters.  Boardgames interest me so much less because they rarely ever produce any stories, which is interrelated to how they don’t normally allow for bringing one’s own personality and style into the games like CCGs and RPGs do.

When I ask what does it mean, I mean what does it mean for a character/party/campaign narrative?  It makes sense in a module that there’s only success and no failure for things like contests as they are just opportunities to shine while questing for the 4th XP.  But, why, in a home game, have any sort of event where only winning matters?

The point of rolling dice is to have stakes.  I can “internalize” failure.  I feel the failure as a player.  I can portray my character as a loser – it’s not like we are really heroes, at least not in this chapter.  But, that doesn’t fit my character’s situation.  He’s not supposed to win any of these things.  He’s an inexperienced generalist.  His schtick is to roll 4k3 on pritnear everything as base roll to support a wide range of activities.  So, why should he care if he doesn’t win?

So, why should he care about any of these events?

One thing interesting about play in this campaign is that it’s very different from the bulk of my L5R play, admittedly a lot of which was living campaign.  I view the system as a system of success with failure being more like a botch.  You blow your Tea Ceremony roll, and you lose like a rank of Glory or gain Infamy or whatever.  But, that’s not how this play is.  This play is more like other systems where failure is routine and success at things you want to succeed at is … maybe not an exception but … an achievement.

I keep harping on the same things for a reason – I keep experiencing the same things.  It’s hard to get excited about talking about things that aren’t relevant to my play.

Achievement.  PCs don’t have to always achieve.  They should fail at least some of the time.  But, they should routinely achieve something.

Sure, I’ve gone in two different directions.  On the one hand, I’m promoting the idea that failure should matter narratively.  On the other, that achievement should be common, though there are obviously different levels of achievement.

If I don’t achieve my ultimate goal at WC, that’s fine.  My goal is … extravagant.  But, I should feel like I can achieve something.  I don’t have any sense of what I can achieve.

Yet another reason combat is such a good activity for parties.  Not dying is an achievement.  Killing your enemies is an achievement.  Conserving spells is an achievement.  One-shotting some dude is an achievement.  There are so many opportunities to feel like you are accomplishing something.

I’ve been thinking about social challenges in recent months for various reasons.  A huge problem I find with social challenges in my RPG play is that I have no sense of what I’m achieving or not, of what I can even achieve or not.  I got an idea to write out what PCs can accomplish in various activities should I pick up the mantle of GM again, as I’ve grown weary with the nebulous nature of trying to make some impact on the world that isn’t mowing down things trying to kill me.

The way to do any sort of significant activity is to have a PC’s engagement with the world change in some way whether successful or not.  There are lots of ways to accomplish this, like having some NPC offer to help a PC do better in an event or have some NPC claim something of import that a PC failed to claim through their loserinesses.  NPC could have bet on the PC and be pissed at a poor showing.  NPC could be happy a PC sucked “My baby was sure they were going to lose to you, but now is so supremely happy to be less of a loser than you are that I’ll now offer you a job to go to the Stinky Swamp to eliminate the Demon of Disgustingness and claim these four pretty trinkets I keep in my pauper’s hut.”  Butterfly effect of some insignificant match leading to … murder.

It’s hard getting good mechanics for contests, at least with L5R R&K systems.  I thought our last event had good mechanics.  But, I went out of my way to prep for the event, and it didn’t really matter either in terms of making the player decision to prioritize the event or in terms of the results of failing to achieve anything of note.

We have had seven sessions at WC, and I don’t think a single thing of import has changed over that span for our characters.  It’s okay to have some sessions where a particular PC doesn’t have any narrative advancement.  Should be significantly less than half.

So, I’m being ranty again.  It’s my nature.  Being thankful and grateful are much less so.  I’m grateful that I consider these sorts of things as more major problems in my life.  I’m grateful when someone cares about this blog.

And? Or? Neither?

Watched four more episodes of Andor.

No, really, that’s the main topic here, not because I want to belabor the problem of lack of stuff happening in RPGs or I have something insightful about splitting PCs up or whatever but because it’s my blog and I’ll talk about stuff that isn’t gaming sometimes.

Those were not easy to get through.

It’s not a good thing when I start comparing you to Rings of Power.  Much like Rings of Endless Subplots, these episodes saw the main characters all doing their own things … interminably.  The obvious game relevance … because why not? … is that you don’t leave PCs split up, you split them up for, uh, reasons, then you bring them back together again so that what they do separately matters to everyone.  It is weighty for PCs to do things on their own or in subteams.  It becomes less weighty the longer they are on their own or in subteams.  Whether thief sneaking around, scout scouting, or decker decking, get it over with so that everyone else cares what they did.  Same with subteams.

It’s not a good thing when I start calling you torture porn.  Yes, the prison stuff made Empire look more evil.  So what?  Plenty of things can make baddies look bad, like, you know, stuff that happened earlier in the series, not that I recall much of the details from first six episodes.  Nothing was moving the plot forward.  Sure, it furthers the idea that Andor has to be a rebel even as he fights the idea.  You know what worked well in the good Star Wars movies?  “I want to help my friend. guess I’m a rebel now.”

I never considered this show Star Wars – there’s no good wizards versus evil wizards fighting.  But, at least stuff was happening.  It just stopped dead to dwell on stuff I don’t care about.  Where did his girlfriend come from?  That might have been interesting.

Continuing the torture porn was Mon Mothma’s situation.  We long, long ago in a galaxy far, far on the screen were beaten over the head with how much her family sucks (well, perhaps not the cousin).  Let’s just put the character through the same suffering over and over and over again.  Because why?

Is the point of this series to get some acting awards?  To spread the unnecessary message that evil empires are bad?

Move the plot.  RPG play can have character development moments.  It can have things go from bad to worse.  Move the plot.

Anyone out there want to play out prison scenes?  I’m not interested in breaking out of prison scenes let alone the miseries of what real people have had to go through.  Not remotely cathartic seeing people break out or whatever.  The whole thing came across as silly.  Take real world BS and then solve it with fake world BS.

Getting a useless character to somehow matter … does not work when … well, I don’t even want to write it as it actually sounds worse written out than spoken.  You know what’s cool to watch?  Heroes bucking the system by outclevering the bad guys.  And, doing it quickly, not just wallowing in agony.  Is it realistic to be able to beat bad guys quickly and, possibly, easily?  No, that’s why I’m watching made up stuff where good actually succeeds rather than dealing with the real world.

While I could imagine a game where a player suggests or a NPC suggests using a PC’s family member in such a way, it’s not something want to think too deeply about.

Then, the cousin.  All the cousin managed to do was point out how many loose ends are being completely ignored while mains are being tortured (one way or another).  What is Cinta doing?  What happend to Bix?

Sure, there are two more episodes in this season.  Gaming advice – do not save resolution to the season’s end.  I know, I know – it’s just all the same griping about the same sameness.  Have PCs achieve stuff, regularly.  Achievements don’t have to be to clear the dungeon or whatever.  But, there should be some marker of progress.  Every session should feel like progress even if don’t finish an episode in a session.

This is where living campaign modules do manage to accomplish something weirdly missing from so much of my home play.  Okay, that’s not a new comment, either.

Back to bitching about this show getting worse.  Star Wars was space opera.  What is space opera?  Whatever, go read and donate to Wikipedia.  Positive.  It’s the high fantasy of space.  I kept waiting for someone to accidentally bust Andor out because that’s how space opera works.  I keep hoping to never have to suffer through whatshisname’s presence on screen again as he obsesses over law and order.

Characters in fun shows may have tragic backstories.  Those don’t matter.  What matters is killing evil wizards or blowing up Star Destroyers or whatever.  What are you doing now?  Right now?  Oh, you are making machine parts.  How fascinating.  Oh, intriguing in exactly the same way been intriguing?  Yeah, that’s like the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.  Just pull a blaster and shoot somebody already.

I’m sure it’s happened.  May have even seen it.  What I would like to see are “You’re fucking with me?  Um, no, that ain’t happening, now you die because I’m better than you and your evil empire are.”  “You seem to be bothering one of my loved ones.  Guess that means you die now.”  “Hey, they are really shitty people.  Guess we kill them all now.”

Does this make antagonists weak?  Perhaps.  Or, perhaps you have the weak antagonists protagonists slaughter and have better antagonists somewhere else to get slaughtered later.  Or, maybe you tell a more space opera story where bad guys get wins without showing people suffering in realistic ways.  Timothy Zahn’s stuff is great for having heroes both win and lose and not getting bogged down in excruciating stuff until Luke gets trained by crazy dude.

Well, at some point, might watch Ahsoka.  Let’s see what I can find wrong with that.  At least it has the chance of being Star Wars in that it, in theory, has a good wizard fighting evil wizards.

Fantasy V Fantastic

I thought I had blogged more about this, but I’m having trouble finding relevant posts.

… In searching for posts, I find that my system of categorization is not good.  I find it really hard to find things I know I wrote about.

Book ’em Danaan may be the most relevant, maybe not.

Anyway, I was having a conversation that turned to the difference between fantasy and fantastic in RPG play.  I routinely view FRPG play as not fantastic … not in the sense of enjoyable or not but in terms of …

What do I mean by the difference?

I did some minimal online research, and a French person said they make a distinction where fantasy is where magic is part of the world and known, where fantastic is mysterious, etc.  That does a pretty good job of capturing the concept I’m thinking of.

I started using the Spellsinger series of books as examples of fantasy versus fantastic.  Jon-Tom’s adventures are replete with fantastic.  The entire world he ends up in is fantastic.  But, is Clothahump, his turtle wizard mentor?  That is more fantasy.  Given a world full of humanlike animals, a humanlike animal is not fantastic.  It’s just a known aspect of the setting.  I used the example of his encountering and getting away from the shapeshifters to be fantastic.  They were an unknown, with an unknown weakness.

Fantastic is weird.  However, we want the weird to also have verisimilitude.  We don’t want silly (well, not in my FRPG play).  We want mysterious, awe-inspiring, disturbing, … to steal from overused corporate jargon … disrupting.

Because it’s fantasy.  So much of the time, I find myself in a mode of thinking of the mundane concerns with fantasy play.  Not suggesting they shouldn’t exist, but just throwing a different monster manual monster at the party isn’t fantastic – the world is supposed to be, um, magical.

I think that’s an area that isn’t used enough – the world.  More specifically, physical settings.

I can’t help but bring up Rokugan/L5R adventures.  Any oni is fantasy.  Going to other spirit realms is fantastic.  The politics isn’t even fantasy, but that was a different blog post.  Btw, Deryni novels – how much fantastic is there?  I tend to think of the politics more than the magic, as some of the magic is rather silly both in terms of how it’s used and in how it isn’t used.  Healing when introduced was fantastic.  Then, it became just fantasy as it became commonplace.  Ironically, the minor scene of them using magic for archery is more fantastic than fantasy because there’s a novelty and unusualness to that.  “Oh, by the way, we never miss targets because we know psionics, I mean magic.”

I was pointing out that water flowing uphill, trees made of fire, etc. don’t break my suspension of disbelief in fantasy worlds because … fantasy.

The Shadowlands is fantastic, and that’s maybe why I have tended to enjoy modules that go there more than most others.  Not just because of randomly deadly stuff or attempts to spook players with eerie noises or whatever but also things like cities just existing in the Shadowlands – it’s all mysterious.  L5R’s stories has plenty of fantastic.  The building of the Carpenter’s Wall is fantastic.  Patrolling it is fantasy.

“Gunso, another attack by goblins, trolls, flying oni.” – fantasy.

“What just happened, oh my Amaterasu, I’m a goblin!.” – fantastic.

Anything can happen in D&D – some god/godlike thing just teleports in, (non-statted) plants start talking to you without a spell, cities can be run by a parliament of oozes.  But, there needs to be a point to it.  Weird for weird’s sake isn’t a better experience.  Weird to spark player creativity is a better experience.  Weird to make players feel like they are playing something other than a videogame or something other than sit around a table rolling dice is a better experience.

Feng Shui – how often do PCs have to deal with critical shifts?  Transformed animals reverting?

Conan stories are often about discovering ruins or isolated cultures or whatever.  When there’s something new to be concerned about, fantastic.  When it’s just kill natives until escape, fantasy.

It occurs to me that the reason I get attracted to exotic RPGs at Gen Con is the hunt for fantastic.  Native American fantasy play is fantastic to me.  Babylon (the city) fantastic.  Exotic isn’t a bad synonym.  Meanwhile, while I can appreciate some Alice in Wonderland play, that doesn’t feel fantastic as we know elements from the stories already.  There’s a reason book characters keep encountering new stuff – that’s fantastic.  When they just deal with the same monsters, evil wizards, magic items, then it’s fantasy.

It occurs to me that that may be part of my problem with reading more Moorcock.  Corum learning to use the eye and the hand to solve his problems is fantastic.  Yet another eternal champion vs former eternal champion argument is not so much.  Yet, it occurs to me that what makes early Moorcock (in my case, early Elric) so appealing is that it’s constantly fantastic.  Maybe I don’t read enough modern fantasy, but it seems like there was a shift away from weird tales to more realistic characters with more mundane problems.  Spellsinger, which is also humorous fantasy, has a nice balance to me much of the time, though it occurs to me that sometimes I grow weary of his mundane concerns.  Certainly, his magic is fantastic as it’s completely out of control what will happen, well, it is at first and for a long time, then we get to where he has mastered his craft well enough that we no longer get scenes about how some song does something he didn’t expect but rather just bard battles where song choices get glossed over.

The point of more fantastic isn’t to screw the players.  Sure, their character sheets may become less relevant or relevant in a different way than used to.  But, fantastic doesn’t really need any mechanics; it just needs to make the world less predictable, less ordinary.

Not everything fantastic has to be some one-off.  Once you know the Forest of Magic Eating Trees exists, still fantastic when you lure your magical enemies into it and righteously slaughter them.

While a different genre, I can see analogous elements in supers play.  Change to power sets is fantastic.  Shorting out electronic locks with lightning is fantasy.  I enjoyed going to the fae realm more than a lot of adventures because it had those fantastic elements.

Anyway, do you find your FRPG play to have much fantastic in it?

Home Movies

I’ve been thinking of how to follow up one of my various loose ends from other posts.

Best thing I have at moment is episodic play in home campaigns.  Helped that I was talking to someone who provided a similar observation to one of mine.

So, what does episodic play mean to me in a more detailed sense than just saying “be like TV shows where episodes are largely self contained and end state isn’t terribly different than initial state”?

By definition, well my definition, a campaign can’t just be playing adventures with same characters with characters never changing.  So, there’s an inherent conflict between minimizing change and requiring it.

Is it just a matter of minimizing the amount of change so that you can pick up a new session with no real concern for the past?  In fact, you could change the order of adventures and it would not really matter?

TV shows are known for being episodic where you don’t need to watch any other episodes to consume essentially the same experience (ignoring multipart episodes).  But, are movies really different?  Well, in that there may never be another movie with same characters, sure.  But, Indiana Jones movies are essentially episodic to the extent that TV series often used to be.

Of course, TV has changed.  In some ways, having lasting story arcs between episodes in a season is better.  In some ways, not so much.  I’m used to storylines just dragging when what makes the characters appealing isn’t the same supervillains plotting for half or all of a season.

Ah, supers.

This is what convinced me to write about home episodic play.

My supers play is vastly more episodic than my other RPG play of recent years.  Sure, living campaign play, like HoR, doesn’t have virtually any sort of multiepisode story … out of the .pdf.  But, where I was into HoR the most was when there was an evolution, sure, heavily tied to mechanical evolution.

Anyway, back to supers play.  If I played my original character sheet, there would be no real meaningful difference in nature of abilities.  Sure, I was unable to hurt things originally and now can kill stuff in two shots like all properly designed superheroes.  Nominally have a girlfriend, though she never shows up.  Still rich.

Because supers undergo such dramatic changes, they need to undergo those dramatic changes to actually feel different.  Sure, stuff gets retconned or undone or whatever, but characters change in some substantial way in abilities or personality or role in world.  We are still Denver based.  Still don’t use any actual teamwork.  We had one stretch where we were trying to deal with a single menace, except nothing really changed after that was over.  We aren’t in a postapocalyptic world run by alien vampires.  We don’t have an Aztec goddess ruling Aztecia.

We pretty much go into every new episode with same characters doing same things and functioning in same ways only with a lot more XP.

Now, was my Conan play that different?  I would say that looking back at play of yesteryear, the more I think about how different Conan play was from so much of my other play.  Sessions could be self contained.  More so, several sessions were largely self contained.  Now, there was character development beyond just taking more Feats and pumping attributes while numbers got bigger.  I don’t see even now describing that play as episodic, it was just closer.

So, what is the draw of having each session or, maybe more accurately, each episode as story arcs routinely cover multiple sessions being largely self contained and interchangeable?  I like my favorite characters doing cool things and being recognized for them, having continuity that matters.  But, it doesn’t have to be all of the time.  Cool characters are generally cool all of the time and not just when they’ve matured or suffered or whatever.  So, characters being minimally different, from the outside anyway, seems fine.  But, what about from the inside?  Do I get bored playing the same character over and over?

Well, let’s come back to that later.  What about plot?  Are long story arcs or short arcs better?  I think a huge problem with so much of my play is the lack of resolution on story arcs, that players don’t get a chance to feel like they’ve succeeded at something important.  Obviously living campaign modules end and you get rewards every adventure.  Again bringing up Conan play, we had lots of short arcs.  I’d say the least enjoyable play was an experiment on the GM’s part to do horror that felt like it dragged on (miserably).  While contending with giants in what was essentially Norse lands took multiple sessions (I think it did), it was still a tight story arc that had little connection to what happened before and what happened after.  It could have happened when characters were lower levels or higher levels, in some different order of play than it did.

What about the setting changing?  One way for play to evolve is for PCs to change, but another is for the setting around them to change.  Usually, both occur.  We started out Conan play with running for our lives from Picts.  Eventually, my primary character became an ambassador in essentially Mesopotamia, even if our adventures didn’t change much because of that.  He changed.  Our world changed.  Is it non-episodic if the setting changes?

I’d have to think more about that.  A sequel to this post already without even getting into anything that meaty!!  So much winning.

What’s the problem with episodic play?  I think a lot of folks would say that not gaining abilities, not becoming more mechanically impressive, would turn them off.  Yet, a lot of power increases are meaningless in a narrative sense – the street gangs just power up too.  I can see what I’d call highly episodic play where PCs became vastly more powerful, so moving on.  What if PCs don’t change in some narrative way?  Care about the same things, do the same things, gain a love interest every episode and lose it by the next episode.  Is that a problem?

I think this was where my HoR 3 and 4 play was weak.  My characters felt hollow or paper thin when they didn’t have events cause meaningful change in their personal story arcs.  Tatakisu had a great story arc, seemingly lucked into it (by Luck failing him!!).  Shigeo never felt meaningfully different.  He was a Sparrow-trained Moshi to begin with and to end with and taking out a couple gods using a pre-Empire artifact didn’t really mean anything.  On the other hand, Takumi did have a story arc … somehow … as my secondary character.  My second HoR4 PC didn’t feel like anything changed for him – once a Frog, always a Frog.

But, is that due to expectations?

I played in a one-shot con event where my party was hunters and werewolves and other party were vampires.  My character got XP and I had great ideas for how to spend it, yet he would have been essentially the same character in the next adventure.  I’ve played the same PC in multisession con events.  I could focus on the plot of each session and not on what it meant in the grand scheme of things.

So, why episodic campaign and not just play a different system every session with new characters?

Episodic shows still have broader stories.  There’s still cool continuity stuff with the Doctor even if someone could watch episodes of two different Doctors and still get that this serial is its own story.

Yeah, I’m not really convincing myself.  I don’t think there is a lot of reason for strongly episodic campaign play.  Yet, the reason why this interests me as a topic is moving toward more episodic play to generate shorter, tighter story arcs, possibly ironically to have more character development and more world development.  When Arrow or Flash or whatever has a season long villain, what really changes in that full season?  More changes when you have ends and not just endless middles.

So, episodic play without episodic campaign?  Maybe that’s the one true path.  That’s what HoR was at its best.  That could be a description of our Conan play.  I’d say it’s how our supers play is supposed to work but not enough about our PCs or the world changes when an episode ends.

Wrong Turn

The Oakland A’s are moving to Vegas.  Why?

Weak fan base potential?  Cheap owners?  External demographics?

Cubs had cheap owners.  A’s not only had successful history in Oakland, with two runs of championship teams, but had highest attendance in MLB in Bash Brothers’ time.

Certainly, Oakland is struggling right now.  Much of the local news involves crime or investigations in Oakland.

But, I think there’s an obvious aspect to Moneyball style management that doesn’t get enough attention.  Same reason Florida Marlins won championship then had awful attendance before turning into Miami Marlins.

Too much focus on “efficiency” over narrative.  Yup, this is a post about gaming.  Can say it’s the cheapass nature of constantly letting talent walk for efficiency, but it’s not like the A’s weren’t trying to win.  They missed the point that winning doesn’t solve all ills.

Someone always wins.  I can’t remember most winners in most sports, even sports I follow more closely.  But, I can remember where LeBron was when he won or that the Natinals won after Bryce Harper went to the Phillies.  My favorite baseball team only won after it stopped being my favorite.

Humans crave stories.  What was the A’s story in the Moneyball era?  That it traded stars for draft picks or whatever they did that meant name players moved on.

That’s a bad story.  Not only do we crave stories, we crave protagonists.  The A’s dumped their protagonists.  Sure, baseball is more of an individual sport than others, like NFL.  Sure, there are people who root for teams rather than individuals, not me with major professional teams, but a lot of people.  In general, we favor familiarity.

How much do companies work on their brands?  What became the A’s brand?  That they could win with no names or with just become names that were going to be gone soon to less cheap teams.

Oakland has some issues and the coliseum area is not very attractive with a park with overflowing septic systems.  But, they killed their own fanbase.  They didn’t kill it by losing, even if they lose a lot now.  They killed it before then by not giving the fans some*one* to root for.

And, so we get to gaming.  Not just RPG play, where it should be obvious how focusing on the wrong things in RPG play can kill interest.

Consider True Dungeon.  There are a lot of people in favor of the new event at Gen Con that is only four rooms long and still $58/ticket.  Why?  Because they want a level playing field playing with randos.  I don’t care about that as that was my only TD experience for many years.  I want to do interesting builds playing with just the people I know.

Consider CCGs, let’s say Magic.  How did Commander become so popular?  Because it was closer to the old experience, the experience outside of tournament play.  I’m not saying companies never learn what their products’ selling points are, but they often miss the point.  Does Babylon 5 CCG all about techno-mages and Drakh and ISA and Nightwatch enthrall me?  Beyond the Rim no!!  Mains and the struggle between B5/Shadow/Vorlon influence … well the latter never worked well … but it made me want to build decks at least.

We didn’t expect Traveller Card Game solo play to be as popular or more popular than two-player play.  Then, we didn’t strike while the iron was kind of warm still to support solo play with a solo pack.

Simpler games avoid this problem of missing the point.  You either like chess or you don’t.  Sure, there are chess variants, but they pale in comparison in marketshare.

Yeah, I can just beat the dead, winged unicorn about getting people on same page with RPG play.  I think I’ll try to eschew that.

Why is the media so excited by MLB this year?  Because the new rules are leading to more balls in play, more scoring, shorter games, and more stolen bases.  Baseball has had a boring problem.  It’s less boring.  I find the no shift rule idiotic as players should be able to solve that problem, but whatever – not like I’m a baseball fan anymore, anyway.

I enjoy VTES, but would I enjoy it more with no events, no Imbued, no Ashur Tablets?  Of course.  These plays pull you out of what made the game such a draw in the first place.

Anyway, I don’t get to talk much sports with folks I know as few are even interested.  I’m not an A’s fan and never have been.  I feel bad for Oakland for various reasons.  I just found it compelling to note that a team with a rich history in its present location failed and failed in what I considered a very obvious way.  Worry less about new ballparks and instead give your audience someone to root for … then get your new ballpark so that your franchise value goes from hundreds of millions of dollars to billions.

These Three Things I Know Are …

Had some ideas as I actually talk about RPG play regularly now.  I don’t necessarily remember them, but this title helps me with this topic.

So, hopefully it’s clear that I’m tired of RPG play going badly.  Can it be hard to give people what they want if it’s not what you want?  Sure.  But, then, I’ve played in not just one-shots that I appreciated but also home play I’ve appreciated, even if it wasn’t perfect.

So, I keep thinking of what my next attempt would be like and ways to align expectations and deliverables.

Obviously, it helps to align interests.

But, let’s get to my project planning style way to make it clearer there are aligned interests.

We can either pick a good system like L5R R&K or can even put system off until this activity is conducted.

Your deliverable before we get to playing, chargen, or whatever is to name the three things that are most important to you about new home play.

Pritnear any three things.  Can be mechanics related, thematics related, play a certain character type, be good at something, not include something annoying, … or operational/meta/logistics related.  What are those things like?

Here’s my list:

1. The game will play consistently and people will build play into their schedule.
2. Players will have things to engage with out of plot and/or world and will engage with them.
3. The genre will be respected.

The first is an operational/logistical element of play.  As much as I have preferred genres, which is a thematics related aspect of play, number 2. is the meta aspect of play of always having something to do that relates to a narrative or to changing the world (including the PCs).  The third is also meta in that it’s not saying everything has to be one type of genre but that whatever the genre is that it not be undermined.  Otherwise, why bother playing that genre?  Just play whatever actually comfortable playing.

I don’t have to play more L5R.  Don’t have to avoid a D&D style experience.  Could maybe even play post apocalyptic or hard sci-fi or whatever else interests me vastly less – you only get top three most important things to you.  Can play zero to hero, no advancement at all, garbage advancement like getting better at what skills you use.

As a player, I can survive inconsistency of play.  As a GM, a role I’m not that enthused to take to begin with, I just have no tolerance for it anymore.  It annoys me enough as a player not knowing when going to play, but I see GMing as work, and I don’t see a reason to do work for people who can’t make time to play games, an activity designed to be fun, aka making life better/worth living.

I may be a jaded cynic prone to sardonic humor, but I actually like various genres.  L5R may be goofy if you think too much about it, but there’s a lot of space within it that I like.  Actually, most genres are pretty goofy if you think too much about them.  Even if I’m not that into a particular genre, if I chose to play it, then I don’t want to fight it.  If I’m going to fight it, then it was a bad life decision to choose playing it.

I’m not sure what the struggle is with having things to do.  Maybe it’s that people have gotten into their minds that RPG play isn’t supposed to have plots, even though they totally should.  Plenty of con one-shots aren’t good, but only a few have nothing happen.  The plot can be “You are wandering around looking for treasure when you find an opening into a dungeon and can see orc tracks.  What now mechwarrior?”  Is that really a plot?  It is now because our narrative is that we are going to murder our way to gold pieces and magic items until we can memorize more spells or however your RPG system works.

I’m not saying can’t sandbox.  But, if there’s not a story being interrupted by the PCs, then there needs to be stories generated by the PCs poking around the hood or poking hotties in the hood.  Stuff needs to happen because PCs did or did not take some action.

I’m not saying your three will look anything like mine.  Your three may be to play with certain people, not play with certain people, play Fate of the Norns, use a hex battle map, play the same character you always play, play with this new figure you just painted – I don’t really care unless I’m playing with you.

The GM(s) take these top threes and relates them to own expectations.  Yes, the GM has a top three, too, as maybe only wants to GM Swords of the Middle Kingdoms and doesn’t give a crap about what the players want to play.  Sure, if you are trolling for players to play your game, this process needs some adjustment.

But, humans tend to suck at communicating.  There are other methods to promote people actually expressing what they are looking for out of play.  Reason why I’m interested in this one is that too often people limit what they communicate, and I’m hoping to open up what it is people are actually looking for to address those aspects of play that are going to make a fun activity not fun enough.  I’ve been in tons of conversations about systems, genres, character types, and those may be really important to somebody, but those don’t make my top three wants.  And, I want to know whether I’m in some superminority of being concerned on more meta levels of play or whether it’s just that other people keep harping on the wrong things for why play isn’t better.

Just Not A Fish

Another L5R character died.

In this case, in my PBP play, my first character died died (rather than whatever happened when a bunch of explosives … saved us).  At Winter Court, had only just been appointed Dragon Daimyo in the Colonies.  Getting to the last competitions during WC.

And, so, the fishing(!!) competition began.  In terms of fashion statements, Mirumoto Taiyosei (yes, I used this name again) had chosen cormorants to fit the bird theme of the court.  To allude to how the Dragon were in the process of fishing for the Emperor (rather than doing nothing like they were before I took charge).

I make my Hunting roll to find fish.  I fail my Sailing roll and fall overboard.  So, one of my goals as supreme Dragon was to develop the Colonial Dragon into a seafaring clan due to the placement of our Southern holdings, unlike how mainland Dragon only had mountains to care about.  So, full of winning at this point.

I’m given the opportunity to Jiujutsu a fish.  I roll really, really badly.

Thinking while trying to track shapes moving around, ‘I will have to make a joke about my wife learning more about boating than I have in the short time we’ve had to get used to the sea so that the clan, at least, can save some face. That one …’ As the box jellyfish floats closer, struggles to get out of the wedgefish’s mouth, ‘Stop turning! There we go. Now, to not drown. Ow!’ As the stream of bubbles dissipates and control of bodily functions fails, ‘Sorry. Just sorry.’

My wife abdicated any political responsibility.

So … you may be wondering how a game without botches has a PC just die in a court competition.  Or, maybe wondering what the denouement was on this play.

The thing is is that we are still playing in the setting.  We were planning on switching characters when WC ended anyway, thus the comical demise.  With our new play starting up right after WC, there hasn’t been time for all of the repercussions of this “tragedy” to sink [sic] in.

I didn’t bother writing anything after M. Taiyosei bit [sic] it.  No standing in line in Meido, Waiting For Emma-O.  This will be the first time I will have written that MT’s only hope for reincarnation is “just not a fish”.

We have actually already started up playing new characters, so I’m going to get to some analysis after saying a few things about Kitsu Sezoku.  Yes, another Kitsu.  However, unlike Kitsu Kagayatsuki, this Kitsu (unsurprisingly) is not remotely spiritual, in fact the antithesis of spiritual.  Low Void, no spiritual advantages (I hear maybe one spiritual advantage is particularly mechanically puissant), no spiritual disads.  Essentially, he’s a botanist.  And, of course, when I play Lion Elite Spearmen, his primary weapon isn’t a spear.  Just too much affinity for nagamaki.

Continuing to not get to a point I want to get to, I started thinking about my favorite families.

Fox Clan is my favorite clan, though Kitsune is not a family/clan I play much.  Only has the shugenja school, which isn’t terrible except … it’s a shugenja school.  Fond of Monkey (don’t tell Shadowfist players), but pretty much never play grossly overpowered Toku.  Komori has similar problems to Kitsune while not being my favorite clan.  Tsi has kind of similar, kind of vastly different problems.  Toritaka is okay.  Usagi okay.  Suzume … I don’t think I’ve ever played a Suzume Family member, just the Suzume Bushi School.  Miya grew on me.

While what I’ve played doesn’t entirely line up to what I prefer as some campaigns aren’t suited to certain builds, I’d put forward Kitsu and Moshi as my two favorite families to actually play.

Anyway, some analysis, campaign and otherwise.

I’m not into internal play.  This is where the other player and I vastly differ.  I want to have stuff happen, then I can think about it later and develop a personality over time but, more importantly, over action.  Spending time within a character’s head is not interactive.  Deciding who someone is before playing them is not interactive.

I can write fiction.  In fact, speaking of fish, here’s a story I wrote that my new character told in our first scene of new play:

There was an old fisherman with a cat named Fuwa.  Fuwa never tired of eating fish.  One morning, while still dark, the fisherman decided to go out as he hadn’t had much luck the day before.  Fuwa had perches not quite at the edge of the boat to see over the side but rarely did much until they returned to their hovel.  The fisherman pulled a net in and inspected his catch.  While he had caught eels before, he had never caught a lizard before.  The lizard leapt at him and Fuwa leapt at the lizard.  Both the fisherman and Fuwa ended up in the water.  The fisherman was a competent swimmer, but the strange lizard had frightened him and he struggled to orient himself.  Eventually, he pulled himself back into his boat.  After gathering his energy, he assessed the situation and realized Fuwa was not on the boat.  “Fuwa.  Fuwa!” he cried out in a worn voice.  He pulled up his other nets as quickly as he could.  Then, he dropped into the water and swam underneath the surface looking for Fuwa.  He didn’t want to get back into the boat but eventually did.  “Fuwa …” he voiced weakly.  A bird flew down and landed on the boat.  It asked, “Why are you forlorn, old man?”  The fisherman thought he had lost his mind but replied, “My cat fell into the water.”  The bird asked, “Does your cat like being wet?”  The fisherman exclaimed (weakly), “Of course not!  She usually stays away from the water.  There was a lizard and …”  The fisherman just got lost in his confusion.  The bird squawked to get the man’s attention, “What does she like?”  The question confused the fisherman at first, but, after he repeated it to himself, he answered, “Even though she eats fish all of the time, she loves to eat fish.”  The bird hopped closer and said conspiratorially, “You two seem well matched, then.  I saw a group of fish on the other side, maybe she is trying to eat that group.  You have plenty of nets.”  The fisherman had nothing better to do and dropped a net into the water on that side …

 

…  When he pulled the net up, it had some fish but no Fuwa.  Less angry and more irritated, he turned to complain to the bird.  The bird was not there.  He saw it flying away with what looked like a lizard in its mouth.  Disconsolate, he tried to do something but didn’t know what as he couldn’t think.  But, then, he felt something butting against his leg and his vision cleared.  “Fuwa!!”  Her fur was flattened by the water, but she looked healthy enough.  He picked her up and looked at her face.  She opened her mouth and he could smell fish.  He sat down with Fuwa in his lap and said, “What happened today?”  When he didn’t get an immediate answer, he continued, “I don’t care.  I have you still, and that’s all that matters.  We seem to have enough fish for a while.  Let’s go home.”  He didn’t want to stop squeezing Fuwa, but he tried to rub some of the water off of her with a rag then navigated the boat back to shore watching Fuwa the entire time.  When they were back at their hovel, he rushed to settle his catch while a fire was built to help them both dry.  He offered Fuwa some fish, and she nibbled at it.  Eventually, he said to her, “I’ll take you to the shrine and we can thank the bird fortune that reminded me that what gives value to my life is providing fish for others … especially you.”

I make up stories all of the time in my head, pritnear every day.  One of the reasons I’m not excited by coop storytelling style RPGs is that I don’t put as much weight on just making stuff up as I used to, largely because I can just make up anything I want at any time.  There’s no validation by outside sources like what I look for out of RPG play.

Btw, my including that story is because, while my PC was making a point through a story he had heard but didn’t feel, it means something more to the player.

PCs, to me, should be bouncing off of what the GM describes of the world and the situation, bouncing off of what other PCs actions are.

There was one portion of the campaign where it mattered to me what MT thought about things.  Otherwise, I was looking for what to do and for what was happening.  What happened with the magistrate position of Durapur?  What happened with his four Servants?  What happened at the Dragon WC (in terms of normal stuff to care about and reaction to their daimyo suddenly being dead)?  How did Usagi Chen and family take his death?  … Um, I guess nothing I tried to accomplish was all that important as not a lot else I care about knowing about, well, besides knowing that the seafaring Dragon days didn’t last very long.

Our new characters aren’t likely to advance mechanically, which is fine, but it did get me to thinking about how I’d like to have some RPG play where I really felt like advancement meant something.  Not meant something in terms of power level, like HoR play where had to keep up with other PCs combatwise.  Advancement that tied in tightly to on stage experiences that made the character better but better at interesting things and not just powering up to switch from goblins to orcs.

Well, there you go – some description of play, some miscellaneous thoughts on play, a story I wrote in about 20 minutes.

Fairly Unjust

So, I generally like to read theangrygm.com, which may not be shocking given my style of writing.  That it has a bias around D&D style play means that sometimes it isn’t as relevant, and, yet, the internet is rife with GMs and players complaining about the same things I find in my play.

Recent article was on dice.  Not having seen card based systems (along the lines of choosing cards not just flipping cards) in campaign play, not sure what it would be like, but I can imagine enjoying campaign play without dice.  What I do agree on is that narrative dice are crap.  There’s no reason that a game needs to have “yes, but”, “no, but”, opportunity or whatever.  Here’s a secret about RPG play, at least tabletop RPG play – it’s all made up.  The GM is free to add complications or not, adjust success levels or not.

But, that wasn’t the topic I wanted to get to.  That’s just a pet peeve of mine as “100% storytellers” don’t need to be forced by dice to tell a story.  What I did want to get to is something he says about dice being fair but unjust.

So, I ruminated about that for a bit.  Then, days past, and my thoughts are likely less focused.  But, anyway, the idea is that dice aren’t biased – if you have a 31% chance of success and play some horrible percentile system, then you have a 31% chance of success.  However, a “just” result is something that fits our ideas of a coherent narrative.

For instance, I Honor Rolled something in HoR3 with a 97% chance of success.  It annoyed me to fail.  First of all, I shouldn’t have failed the roll in the first place, so the real probability of the combination of failures was less than 1%.  Then, this was something I obviously cared about succeeding at or I wouldn’t have gotten annoyed and just found it amusing to fail at something like a Lore: Heraldry roll or other meaningless filler roll.  That failing an Honor Roll meant losing a rank of Honor, which matters for most characters because of things like, oh, Honor Rolls meant losing a resource that mattered.

Anyway, I was trying to think about how I felt about fairness and justice in RPG play.

As I like fitting stories and not just random results that reinforce that we are deciding what happens randomly and not fittingly, I would seem inclined to be a champion of justice.  I certainly prefer systems with rerolls or after roll modifiers or (less so) preroll modifiers like Void Points because small sample size means remembering those times when probability was un- … unfortunate.  I suppose I could post on his site what he thinks about systems that mitigate the fairness of dice, but I don’t really care what other people think.  Relying entirely on randomness to determine results on very specific rolls that I care a lot about, like winning shogi tournaments with my 4k2 dicepool (where I don’t think I rerolled in that tournament) just sucks out the fun, maybe not always after time passes but also often after time passes.

Again, I think there’s an illusion of challenge in RPG play.  The more rely on dice, the less illusion.  Some players definitely want to wargame their RPG experiences and enjoy things like rolling up new toons, but that just makes me stop caring about my characters and view the game as a boardgame.

Now, I do have more appreciation for failure than I used to.  I also tend to like botches … for things like social rolls.  In combat, fumbles need to get decapitated, immolated, and banished to the realm of unrealminess.  Now, it depends upon the GM (about botches).  But, then, can say that about failure in general.

What does it mean to fail a roll?  The challenge is increased?  One would think so, but I’m a relativist when it comes to challenge.  That you fail your immediate goals?  I suppose that works in my case, where my goals are often to make the world better and/or make my characters more popular/respected in their worlds.

That you get less treasure/power-ups?  Sure, this works.  I guess.  For some players, it’s a big deal.  (For some, too big of a deal and get mad when failure happens.)  I think this works for me as I don’t feel strongly about these things.  I do care about missing out on cool stuff, like having a ship named after your PC.  But, I both feel the loss of not maxing out in power while not feeling that strongly about it, so it makes for decent stories – “I could have become a god, but, instead, I just became destined to be an eternal flunky to the gods after I bit it.”

Regardless as to how gamist, simulationist, or storytellerist one might be, I think the best RPG play is when there’s an emergent story.  Just how you get there is different.  Dice results (or any probability results) create that unscripted result.  On the other hand, player decisions/actions also create that unscripted result.  The reason why I’m not just looking to play a character sheet is that my decisions and my actions are not going to be the same as anyone else’s.

I don’t think I care much about fairness in RPG play.  At least not in this context – I’m rather negative towards griefy play where fairness means something different.

And, yet, I want that illusion.  Pulling back the curtain and realizing that failure isn’t really an option makes success just hollow.

I guess that’s it.  Something in here got me to thinking about a different topic – dice use besides determining success/failure.

The Best of … 2019

That time of year again.

I actually have another post to do, which I’ll plan on doing tomorrow as it is less time sensitive.

What do people want me to post about?  Maybe something to do with L5R R&K, but that’s kind of hard to write about still.  Maybe VTES if I was winning major tournaments or coming up with new deck ideas, but the former is kind of hard to write about.  I guess the latter isn’t that hard, if I was motivated to build decks.

January

Dismay

Much easier for me to focus on failure these years.  I try to analyze why my last campaign failed.  That’s fun for people to read about, right?

March

I have to dig deep to find posts that I think should be called out.  This is the problem with wanting to spew gaming philosophies – there are only so many.  More event reports would be more content.  More design posts about creating worlds, characters, decks, etc. would be more content with no necessary end.

The Agony of Victory

More negativity.  Can’t even win a competitive game and enjoy it.

Tomato Pie And Colder Than Saudi

This has no meaningful gaming content.  However, if we step back, this was itself an adventure.  I read three of my mother’s mystery paperbacks recently.  A varying factor in formulaic books is setting.  Can tell the same stories over and over and just change the sensory data.  This setting was outside of my norm.  While I’ve been to a place in the world with great natural beauty quite often, the visuals here were different enough to be … um … different.

So, one of the thoughts I have with RPGs is to not try to tell different stories but tell the same stories in different places.  Don’t need to be clever with storytelling, just entertaining.

L5R Mechanics – Sample Advancement

While hardly as important as much older posts about character building, some people still read this.  It’s obviously limited by focusing on a specific character that you all don’t care about, but that was going to be the case, and I think there are enough words to try to broaden the analysis.

May

Capture The Enrapture

You could read this low content ramble or you could glean every useful element from it if you just remember to … phaser the rocks.

Nowhere Near The Badlands

This is not a terribly important post … for you.  But, for me, I should occasionally remind myself of my own observations.  I may keep thinking my ideas will fail, but there are some ideas that could be tried anyway.

June

Origins 2019

Sure, why not?  It’s a major convention report and not much more.

Deck Dreck

I don’t think my more recent posts are better in writing or content.  But, I don’t think I can tell, anyway.  Because it’s all so familiar to me at this point in a general sense that I just kind of tune out what I say.  But, feel free to read all of my new posts lots of times with like likes and comments and shares or whatever!!

There’s a concept here that maybe deserves more exploration.  Maybe.

Wan-Ting

I started dragging my mother to things because of her mental health.  Did give me some insight into how to differentiate gamers from non-gamers.

July

Show Me The Game

Okay, this post actually should be read more.  When you observe the world around you, you can start relating things to each other in interesting ways.  Is there a way to leverage mechanics used to entertain humans in one arena to another arena?  Of course.  But, how?

Dungeons & Dissonance

I’m more invested in True Dungeon than any other pursuit these days.  So, so much can be written about the dissonance between the fundamental flaws in the model and how it seems to work great.

August

BattleTech – Arms Race 2

BattleTech – Arms Race 6

Enter The … Virtuous Rangers!

I like stories.  I like reading (some) stories.  I like experiencing (some) stories.  I like sharing stories (that some-times might be of interest).  I will play games just to pass time, things like solitaire, where there’s no story.  But, I’m a gamer because of stories.  These posts get into what I want out of BattleTech or similar games.

September

World Changing

It’s easy to make lists, if maybe not accurate ones.  I explain why these games meant something profound to me.

October

Gloomhaven – Heart Of The Matter

What does this post do for you?  I don’t know.  For me, this post makes me think I should play more Gloomhaven.

Towns & Taxes

How long do you think it takes me to come up with world creation ideas?  This is the sort of stuff I think about for a couple hours in my life.  Would I want to play this?  Probably not, especially after a game I did play that was fun but which highlighted how much I don’t get what I want out of RPG play.  Would I want to run it?  I have no idea how well it would work (with the right people playing).

Gaki & … Other Gaki

What is this post about?  Way too long to read to find out.  [Don’t say things like that.]  Oh, right, just publishing to the world our Gaki Mura campaign concept.

I spent more than a couple of hours thinking about Gaki Mura.  But, how long do you think I spent thinking about the mechanics of town building or whatever?  I enjoy world building and I enjoy mechanics building (within an existing framework).  Most mechanics I come up with are like “let me write something down” over a few minutes of thinking about how something will work.  The town building mechanics required more than that, but they were hardly vigorously thought out … and it showed.

Still, this is actually a more useful post, methinks, from 2019.  If you want to build a campaign, this may not be how you go about it, but it should still be interesting to see how someone else went about it.

December

A single post in November?  Brutal.

Raze Of Skywalker

How is a movie (trilogy) review important?  Let’s step back (again).  What excites dicechuckers about new campaigns?  What they think it will be about.  Maybe the GM had a good pitch, maybe not.  But, players have expectations.  I’m hesitant on new RPG play similar to old because the (recent) old just isn’t as good as it should be.

We have expectations of Star Wars.  My expectations aren’t Episodes 1, 2, and 3 that I barely remember.  Nor are my expectations just 4, 5, and 6.  There’s also the Timothy Zahn, extended universe books.  This trilogy was horrendous.  Worse than the individual components because it was utterly unsatisfying in resolution.

I don’t feel any need to see another Star Wars movie.  I’d be more inclined to read a newer Anita Blake novel.

I was certainly in a review mode at the end of the year.

2019 wasn’t a good year for me.  Had my good run from middle of 2015 to like Fall of 2018 in terms of personal activity.

Why read this blog?  Early on, for VTES, then L5R 4e analysis.  Maybe something else.  Maybe even some of the philosophy.

2019 saw my 10 year anniversary of this blog existing.  I said then that I’d continue on.  I still am interested in continuing on, but there’s not a ton of reason to hear myself speak.  If you are reading this, maybe see if you know someone else who might get some value out of it.

And, on that happy note, let’s all hope 2023 is better than 2022.  I could use a good year, for a change.