A Summarily Bad Idea

So I saw a post where someone suggested that the GM customize the way that something is described to the "intelligence" of the character. So if you were describing something to a player of a really dumb character, you'd use simple terms. If it was a very intelligent character, you'd load up the detail.

This is like reverse "firewalling", the act of putting up a strict barrier between in character and out of character knowledge. I think this is a bad idea on a number of levels. Setting aside the idea of tailoring information to a specific result, like for an awareness of knowledge roll (you roll poorly, you only get something vague - but if you roll well you get additional detail), the player should be the one deciding how they will parse the descriptions into what their character understands, and have their character react accordingly (and, incidentally, this is one of the reasons I believe it's impossible to completely separate IC and OOC knowledge, to the point where I don't even actively try).

Do really want the GM to talk to you like this?

I can foresee a multitude of misunderstandings and conflicts being caused around the table as a result of this. Plus, it simply seems like way too much work for too little gain. What do you leave out or include when the intelligence or whatever scores are very close to one another? Where's the cut off between talking to the player like they're a simpleton vs. just describing something normally vs. Niles Crane? What do you do when the game doesn't have a measure or attribute for intelligence?

So...tailoring the information given to a specific metric? Pretty much standard practice, I think. Tailoring how the information is given to the receiver based purely on in-game characteristics? Not really seeing how this is a good thing - unless someone can convince me otherwise.

Not Quite A Proper Blog Post

I've rearranged things slightly. There is now a page called Documents, Conversions, Hacks, House Rules that contains links to all of the documents and whatnot that I have shared in Google Drive. A large part of it is for Fate Core/FAE and includes all three Fate Tribe 8 conversions (Fate Core, Strands of Fate, and Spirit of the Century) as well as an assortment of other hacks. I figured it wasn't clear that the links to these that lived at the top of the blog weren't actually labels, plus the page calls out some specific things rather than just linking to the Google Docs folder. As I add more, I'll update the page as well.

I Started The D&D 40th Anniversay Bloghop Challenge...

But I just couldn't finish it. There were too many that would have wound up being, "See previous entry", "I don't know" or "Meh." So I'm going to turn this last post into a "What I've Learned From D&D" post.

I've never played anything other than BECMI in grade school and junior high, 1e in high school and a smattering of a few 3e sessions because my buddy needed another player. Never touched 2e, and I bought the Rules Cyclopedia but we never got a game going. I went through the nearly mandatory "D&D sucks so bad, play a real rpg" phase, but got over it. I went through the total nostalgia phase. As of right now I have no strong opinion  one way or the other about classes, hit points, armor class, saving throws or anything else. I really don't like alignments, but that's a personal preference and not anything against morality systems. If I were to play D&D again I'd likely pick Neutral and be done with it.

Looking back on my early play experiences with D&D, they're so far in the past that I really can't say how much different I play now. I was 10 years old when I started, so obviously my games were very sophisticated both in play and content. Certainly, with my love of games like Fate Core, I've transitioned to a more narrative focus - but from my perspective that's been a long-term tweaking of my play preferences and not any kind of transformation. Piecing together memories of various games, I can see that I took away from D&D an appreciation for figuring out the best way for the rules to serve what was going on within the game. Making rolls against ability scores and finding new uses for saving throws in lieu of having a skill system come to mind. The rules didn't cover every single situation, so we extended them as best as we could in a way that made sense.

Yet even those experiences, while interesting from an academic perspective, don't eclipse what D&D ultimately gave me: a common vernacular and cultural identity, and a whole hell of a lot of fun. In the end, I think the lifelong fun is the single biggest thing D&D has given me.

SilCore House Rules

As promised, I've uploaded a cleaned up document with some of my SilCore house rules. These got reasonably extensive play, and worked out pretty well for our group.

SilCore House Rules

I believe the complexity rules in this document are the prototype for one of the Complexity house rules that I wrote for Aurora.

What's interesting to me is how I latched on to a couple of concepts before really knowing what they entailed. I've talked about how I kind of halfway implemented "success at a cost" in Silhouette by having fumbles actually generate a result (instead of being treated as zero), just with the addition of a complication. For example, a character who fumbles a Firearms roll might still have a high enough roll plus modifiers to hit the target but their gun jams, they find out they're out of ammo, etc. The same thing happened conceptually with these house rules for Flaws - I saw that there should be some narrative currency attached to Flaws, rather than simply receiving character points for them. I just didn't have the context of something like the Fate Point economy to recognize the design pattern.

Also, the mechanism of sacrificing dice for effects is one that SilCore touched on only in terms of "deception attacks", but it's one that I had thought was a good axis beyond simple result modifiers even before that. It ties into my love of dice mechanics being used to "unpack" data about how something happened in addition to how well. Successes, margin of success or failure, the overall quality of the result, those are things that I like to see in dice mechanics. Justin Bacon has a good series called Dice of Destiny along those lines that I've mentioned before.

From the perspective of a 90's-ish, dice pool styled retroclone (which has been bouncing around my head a bit) I'd want something similar. It would just be a matter of doing it without counting successes, doing pairing of values, or any of the other dice pool tricks I've seen that I personally find distracting. I'd actually almost lean toward a "roll and keep and keep the highest" system, where you roll x dice and keep y based on some measures, and then take the highest from there. For extra detail, maybe there would be a small picklist of qualities that could be attributed to each die depending on the kind of roll. These wouldn't be fixed before the roll, the player would be able to choose after, "This die represents how fast I did this, this die represents damage done, this die represents knowledge gained". They also wouldn't be part of the base resolution mechanic - again, make the base die roll as quick to parse as possible.

This is definitely an avenue I'm going to be pursuing more in future posts.

That '80s Game

So Google+ had some kind of '90s meme that started, and thinking back on all of this stuff made me realize that 30 years ago this year I entered high school. While the '90s were my golden age of coming into my own (and not remembering most of it), the '80s were for me every bit the formative period depicted in The Goldbergs.

The '90s: Dazed and confused doesn't even scratch the surface

Being born in 1970, my biological decades are perfectly bracketed by the calendar. For me, the '80s wasn't just about puberty and awkwardness and discovering music that to this day I insist is the pinnacle of human artistic achievement. It was a complete transformative period.

From a very early age, I was fascinated by mechanics and game play. When I was a lot younger, I used to make my own board games. When coin op arcade machines hit and became all the rage, like most kids I used to save up quarters (i.e., tip over my dad's recliner to claim the change that had fallen out of his pockets) and hit the Stop 'n Go every morning before school and the pizza place after. A lot of companies started publishing cheap little guidebooks for various games. I'd actually take the maps and diagrams from those books, grab some markers, poster board, and construction paper, and make board game versions of the arcade games.

So at the beginning of the 1980s when I started playing Basic D&D it launched a parabolic arc of gaming experiences peaking in and just after high school. I quickly branched out to Star Frontiers and Gamma World, followed by Traveller, then Chill, Star Ace, Call of Cthulhu, Elfquest, Runequest, James Bond, Top Secret, MERP, Villains and Vigilantes, you name it. These experiences led to some interesting contrasts. I played Mekton, but not Battletech. I played Cyberpunk, but not Shadowrun. I played GURPS, but not Champions. By the time I graduated high school in 1988 I was already buying games that I read but never had time to play.

I also started to go to conventions when I was 15 or 16 - at first supervised day trips, but once my dad realized that there was little chance of me getting in any serious trouble I was arranging to go for the entire weekend with a group of friends. I learned a ton about financial planning, budgeting, and overall restraint from going to those cons. At least once, by the last day of the con we had eaten all of the food we brought, spent our last cent, and were forced to eat pickles from the condiment bar and drink tiny cups of water while waiting for my dad to come pick us up

By the beginning of the '90s, I had started to slow down quite a bit. I was clubbing, going to shows, having overly complicated and dramatic relationships, hanging out in coffee houses philosophizing and smoking too much. I still bought games and read them, but in greatly reduced volume. My gaming settled around a few mainstays: CP2020, Mekton II (and then Zeta), the occasional game of V:tM. I started adapting and reusing rules a lot more. Interlock with parts of Dream Park grafted on for fantasy games, for example. But with BBSes starting to connect to USENet, along with the first presences of dedicated gaming forums on AOL and CompuServe, I was able tap into the wider gaming world and absorb more information on trends in rpgs, rules, theories, etc. But all of that had been built on a foundation that I laid down in the '80s.

So, while the '90s were a pretty cool time (my sons were born in the '90s), the '80s were definitely more my time, in terms of diversifying my gaming and personal growth.

If You Are A "AAA Pro-Video Game Developer", It Means You Write Code

This is a belated response, of a sorts, to a thread on ENWorld started by a poster named Gorgoroth in which he lambastes the idea of the "damage on a miss" mechanic in D&D Next (and I guess it appeared in 4e, I don't know).

This post is not about the "DOAM" mechanic. Rob Donoghue already did a breakdown that, from my AAA Database Developer eyes, looks good enough.

Instead, I want to highlight Gorgoroth's arguments that he is somehow especially qualified to be put on the pedestal of tabletop gaming design.

In particular, these quotes:

As a pro game developer with over a dozen AAA games to my credit (go ahead and ask me for my CV, and I will share it with you, Mike), I have identified, based on both your own design goals, and my general game design and debugging experience, as well as 25+ years of D&D on top of that (which qualifies me eminently better than 99% of your survey recipients) with GWF:

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?352516-Open-Letter-to-Mike-Mearls-from-a-pro-game-dev&s=d4a00883a7d16f717f6b2056a55151e3#ixzz2sZBSywga

and

The opinions about game rules by pro game developers should be taken more seriously. That's what expertise means.
When people start paying you six figures for your game dev skills, call me.

and

CRPG devs routinely make six figures, and the work we do is far, FAR more complicated, widely-scrutinized, analyzed, profitable, and generally pertinent to more people than D&D could ever hope to be. Keeping things simple is not merely a worthwhile design goal for us, it's an absolute necessity. Which is why I recognize Mearls as a pro, and see eye to eye with him in most ways.

First off, this guy needs to comprehend that the similarity between the implementation of video games and tabletop rpgs, from a nuts and bolts perspective, starts and ends with the word "game". Conceptually, there might be some cross-talk between the two fields (as evidenced by the folks who migrate to the video game industry to video games), but that doesn't really make his "game design and debugging experience" specifically something that makes him a guru that everyone must follow when it comes to tabletop game design. Again, there's some osmosis between the overall function of a developer of any stripe, but the game part of it isn't nearly as portable as he thinks.

Second, there's the "I makes the big money and my work is important" bit. Does this mean that game developers should listen to me about how wrong their tables are organized because I'm a highly paid database developer? Should I write an open-letter to R.Talsorian Games about how they need to normalize their tables (which, btw, the tables in Mekton Zeta are near impossible to place into a normalized database - I've tried). Because the analogy between database tables and reference tables is about as solid as the one between video game mechanics and tabletop rpg mechanics.

It shouldn't need to be said that, no Gorgoroth, I don't take you seriously.

Too Many Things To Write About

Work and home have conspired against me, and I haven't found time to blog about a few things that have cropped up.

The first is an interview with one of the people involved with FATAL, James Hausler, with a lively discussion posted on RPG.Net. I haven't had a chance to listen yet (apparently it's four hours worth) and some of the commenters on RPG.Net have been delving into the specific details of the interview. What's interesting to me is the guy's apparent off-loading of the "bad" parts of FATAL (not the parts you'd think) while taking credit for the "good" parts (also, not the parts that you think).

While digging around for some things (like a mention of a "secret" page on the former FATAL website that allegedly demeaned various either sexual conquests or people who had rejected sexual advances) I stumbled across this thread about what looks like a roleplaying forum for something called "Hot Wet Planet". I was pretty awestruck by the responses of the author to the criticism. I have some parallels to draw between Hausler, Arisama from the Hot Wet Planet thread, and Mykal Lakim from Dark Phoenix Publishing but haven't had a chance to fully gestate those thoughts.

Add Raven S. McCracken and we'll have a complete set!

Hopefully in the next few days I'll get a chance to play some catch-up and get some other gaming-related stuff done.

Treasure Chest Friday

I had a lot of gaming material that I developed in the early-to-mid-90s go up in smoke. I didn't have any kind of cohesive back-up scheme, basically jumping from failure-prone floppy disks - which were usually the primary copy - to a hand-me-down tape drive that took too long to write to and even longer to read from, to burning things on CD when I remembered. A bunch of my backup CDs eventually got written to a hard drive  and then tossed. Or rather a RAID array, which is what I decided I needed for a "real" backup strategy. That RAID array eventually had a failure and I wasn't able to recover anything off of it. Also when I had my own domain, I did regular backups of the content but what I neglected when I downloaded everything prior to cancelling my account was the database that had the CMS content. Between those two failures, I lost everything.

Needless to say, I am now a diversified backer-upper. Cloud and multiple redundant drives, mainly.

So imagine my surprise when I was going through folders looking for tidbits for my Tribe 8 game that I ran into a few fragments of my past gaming life. It's spotty - some house rules for SilCore, a write-up of Titan for Jovian Chronicles, some trade good cards for Tribe 8 that I'm not sure where they came from, and a few other things. I have some clean up to do (the house rules are in a mind-map and I no longer have the application that generated them), but I'm going to be posting things up as I process them (and find more).

For the time being, here are two of the gems:

• Titan - A write-up of an alternate Titan for a Jovian Chronicles game that I was going to run. It was actually to be the beginning of alternate write-ups for the entire solar system, tweaking things out to take advantage of discoveries that occurred after JC was written.
• Trade Good Cards for Tribe 8 - I have no idea where these came from.
• Spirit of Vimary - My original Spirit of the Century hack for Tribe 8. I previously only had a partial, corrupted copy of this - this one is from what I can tell the final. I never had a chance to playtest it, but it completes my trifecta of Fate conversions for Tribe 8.

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge Day 5

I honestly have played very little D&D, I mostly ran it. That means that over the course of a couple years, the small group of players that I had got themselves up to whatever the maximum level was as we moved from Basic to Expert to Companion to Master (I'm not sure we ever did Immortal). However, I did play in an AD&D game where I played a Paladin named Felice who, after the class appeared in Dragon Magazine, became a cavalier. She was inspired by the iconic paladin picture, as well as another one that I can't find that I think had a fully armored female paladin on a horse (it was possibly Elmore or Caldwell).

You know the one

Felice made it I think up to 18th level or so. The DM wasn't nearly as much of a douchebag as a lot of DM's I've heard about regarding paladins. She strove to maintain her code, followed all of the rules, and stood up for what was actually right. We even had the "you find young evil creatures" dilemma, which if I remember right was dealt with by putting them in the care of the church. The debate that followed was along the lines that half-orcs could be good, so if the creatures we found - orcs I believe - were raised by the pious they could learn to control their chaotic tendencies and be good as well. Either way, Felice refused to hold them accountable for their parent's evil and insisted that she would slay anyone who hurt them (and, by that time armed with a holy avenger and probably at least +3 plate, the threat wasn't idle). For 14-15 year olds, this was pretty philosophical stuff.

The other factor about this character that probably stands out is that she was a woman, especially considering that I was a teenager. There was some disagreement about whether or not a woman could be a paladin, until I pointed out Joan of Arc (I was a moderately erudite kid). Ribbing ensued about wanting to play a girl, but the DM - who was older - okayed it. Felice was my first real encounter with "character concept". I had envisioned the character as a "her", I had inspiration from a book I was reading with a strong female character (it may have been one of the Julian May books, who did have a character named Felice, but I'm not sure), and my ability rolls had set me up for a paladin. I likely would have made a female whatever regardless. In the end, to me it didn't matter if the character was a he or a she, and I didn't see any issues with being male and portraying a female. Of course, it probably helped that she was a paladin - it allowed for me to sidestep any potentially (for my age and maturity level) squicky issues about romantic entanglements, and I'm sure that I mostly portrayed her as a dude with long hair and boobs. Miraculously, our group also dodged the bullet of any players or DM trying to introduce any problematic behaviors or situations as well - my experiences with perverted (or just plain sick) players wouldn't come until after high school.

Group Resources in Fate Core Tribe 8

This was a small addition I made to the Resources rules for Fate of Vimary that I felt was general enough to go here. Note that it uses another slight tweak, namely that characters have fluctuating Resources scores as they use and gain Resources. This Extra allows for the group to have a Larder that they can use to draw resources from.

Typically the group will have a community pool of resources, known as the Larder. These Resources can be used in place of personally rolling against resources when the Larder can be accessed, at the expense of depleting the group’s reserves. Having a Larder is slightly more bookkeeping, so it may not be desirable for all groups, but fortunately most interactions with it would be done either between sessions or during session startup, etc.

The Larder has a Resource rating equal to the median of the group’s Resource rank - in other words, the middle between the minimum and maximum. If the lowest Resources within the group is 0 and the highest is 4, the Larder is Resources 2. The Larder has a stress track with two stress boxes with an additional box added at Resources Average(+1) or Fair (+2), or two more at Good (+3) or greater. In addition, the Larder has three Consequence slots. On the chance that the Larder has Resources of Superb (+5) or higher, it gains an additional mild Consequence slot. The Larder’s Resources do not fluctuate when the individual group member’s Resources fluctuate, although it might increase if members of the group permanently increase their own.

The stress and Consequences for the Larder work slightly differently than a character’s stress and Consequences. Whenever a character needs something that would call for a Resources roll, and they have access to the Larder, they can use the Larder’s Resources instead. This can be used to directly take a specific needed item from the Larder, as well as to create advantages prior to an expedition or journey. The roll is made using the standard difficulty for obtaining the item or creating the advantage. If the roll succeeds, then an amount of stress equal to the value of the item is marked off the Larder’s stress track. Once the stress track is filled, the Larder’s Resource rank drops by 1 and all stress is cleared. If in a single “transaction” the stress would overfill the track, the Larder takes a Consequence equal to or greater than the overflow. Once Resources reaches zero, the Larder is depleted and has to be restocked. Stress can be “soaked” by instead taking a Consequence of equal or greater value than the stress. Consequences represent a specific shortage within the Larder, based on what the characters were trying to do. For example, preparing for a Joanite attack might result in the mild Consequence Running Low on Ammunition or Limited Food and Water.

Restocking the Larder must be done from the Resources of the individuals contributing to it. Typically this is done using teamwork, with the character with the highest Resources rolling and every other character with Resources of Average(+1) or higher contributing +1 to the result. The difficulty of the roll is Fair(+2), and each success restores one rank of Resources. All Larder Consequences must be cleared before the restock attempt can take place. If the roll is successful, each character reduces their Resources by 1 for the remainder of the session.

If There Was A Little Dust, Please Pardon It

After some consideration, I have deprecated my Tribe 8-specific blog, Dreams of Flesh and Spirit, and imported all of the old posts here. I turned off the feed during this process, to eliminate the possibility that I would suddenly jam over a hundred posts into other people's feeds.

You know you miss these stupid things

All of the posts from DFS are tagged with "Dreams of Flesh and Spirit", as will all other Tribe 8-related posts that I post here.

I made the decision mostly because having to worry about which blog a post should go on, or feeling the need to duplicate posts between the two, just isn't going to work out. I do this because I enjoy it, and I want to continue to post whatever random thing comes to mind.

So, let's welcome the new DFS posts to Aggregate Cognizance. But don't make them too welcome - we don't want them to get complacent.

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge Day 4

For this post, I'm supposed to tell the tale of the first dragon that was slain playing D&D.

The problem is, I can't freaking remember. It's been over 30 years, and there's just no way.

Piecing together memories of how our adventures played out, and the fact that I got the boxed sets kind of in pace with characters levelling, I'd have to say that officially the first dragon would have been while playing through X1, Isle of Dread. There might have been a white dragon before that, but the memories are just too damn fuzzy.

Looking at this (awesome) walkthrough map, it was most likely a green dragon because that's what's shown. But it might not have been.

I mostly remember dinosaurs, lots of dinosaurs

So, this one is going to have remain a mystery for the ages.

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge Day 3

Going back to Keep on the Borderlands being part of my experience when I first starting playing D&D, the Caves of Chaos were the first dungeon that I ever ran anyone through.

This map brings back memories, but it's missing the pencil marks and crayon

The memories are pretty hazy about how it actually went down, but I do know that at the time we didn't have any real concept of "out of character" knowledge. Having run through the map so many times when we were playing D&D "wrong", my singular player knew everything pretty well - where the orcs were, where the treasure was, where the secret doors were. It was a total cake-walk, but the one thing that was different were the interactions with NPCs and monsters. I now had the notion that the other characters were supposed to be played....that they could take their own actions, that the PCs could talk to them. It wasn't Oscar-winning stuff, but it was something. This, combined with following examples from the rulebook, meant that not every monster was necessarily fought - some were tricked, some were avoided (because before we thought you had to go to every room in number order - true story!). Playing D&D right also meant that now characters were leveling up, and started us down the path of maintaining some kind of continuity. Since I was writing a lot at the time, I think this was the beginning of writing down our character's adventures as fiction, as well as taking various D&D modules and writing fictional accounts of other characters.

But the one thing that looking back at all of this has reminded me is that we really did play to have fun, rules-be-damned. There wasn't any kind of "Well, even when I was eight years old we role-played and we did everything right." Fuck no...we played using OOC knowledge, had totally stupid implausible things happen, fudged die rolls, and did damn near everything that most adults (even me) would consider "bad gaming." And we had a blast doing it.

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge Day 2

So, as I said in the first challenge post, I was "introduced" to Basic D&D by the next door neighbor kid. In a way, he's the first one I introduced D&D to properly because he was who I played with once I actually figured out what the fuck was going on in that crazy game. We replayed through Keep on the Borderlands, properly, although I don't remember what his character was. I do remember that we eventually came to the conclusion that losing characters sucked, so once he rolled up his third or fourth - an Elf I believe - he was able to get that character through subsequent sets up to Immortal. By that time I had branched out into other roleplaying games - including AD&D and Traveller. Unfortunately, divergent paths once I got into high school (plus a number of other factors) meant that I started playing with other people.

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge: Day 1

I haven't touched any flavor of D&D in a number of years, but I figured that I'd throw in for this one because it would be interesting to revisit some memories.

I was introduced to D&D - specifically the Basic set - by my next door neighbor and childhood best friend, Richie. He had gotten the boxed set for Christmas (I want to say 1979 or so), but he was a couple of years younger than me and couldn't make heads or tails of it. I had heard of the game, even seen it a couple of times in the used science fiction bookstore my dad used to take me to called The Magic Door. He had never been willing to shell out the cash for the game, but I did have some experience with a number of microgames that he had bought me. So when Richie asked me to help him figure out how to play, I figured (in my 8 or 9 year old way) that I had a handle on it.

We were pretty wrong, and it took until I got my own set when I was 10 or 11 to actually figure out how to play and what was going on. In the interim, we drew on the maps and tried to play it like a boardgame. We "played" through Keep on the Borderlands over and over again. I don't remember anything about what characters we used. In all, it was a pretty abortive attempt by a 9 and a 7 year old at trying to puzzle out Basic D&D on our own.

Major Campaign Milestones: When Bigger Is Better

When a Fate Core game reaches a major milestone, it's a big deal. This is the time when the campaign's skill cap goes up, refresh increases, or even character's High Concepts change. It's the wrap up of multiple arcs, and oftentimes that means the game world (provided the next campaign will be in the same world) may change as well. This is all pretty well covered in Fate Core, so I don't have a lot to add to it.

If you think about it, though, changing a campaign aspect is a pretty profound thing. It's just a few words. A short phrase maybe. But going from:

When The Stars Are Right

to:

CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN

is freaking huge. The world is pretty much over, and just because some words changed.

So the next time I hit a campaign milestone, given of course that it's appropriate, I'm going to try to practice changing the campaign aspect in the smallest way that gives the most impact. It's really easy to succumb to the urge to keep adding aspects to the campaign - I think it's a lot harder to just change one and have it reflect all of the changes you want in the setting.

Short Order Heroes

I first became aware of the Short Order Heroes Kickstarter shortly after I started getting more involved on Google+, since +Jesse Butler had somehow made his way into my RPG Circle (and, at the time, he was local to me - although we never had a chance to meet in person). I thought it was a really awesome idea, but it came about at a time I really couldn't sink any more money into Kickstarters. The Kickstarter was really successful, and I always thought that the cards would be super useful and liked the style of the art.

Now, he's running a contest to give away a set to someone who posts about it and what they'd do with it. This is my entry. First off, I'd give it a proper review, which would include inflicting it on my girls as a stand-alone game. I'd probably even post their opinions (or even a video of us playing). Next, I'd use them to help generating NPCs for a couple of Fate games that I'm planning and I'd probably post them here. Finally, I'd do my darndest to get to Gamex or Gateway (whichever one Mr. Butler can get to) and thank him personally.

Metagaming Is Good (There I Said It)

Or, at least, it can be good and is often not only unavoidable but desirable. It just has to be handled correctly.

When discussing issues of "metagaming" I think sometimes people lose sight of the fact that playing role playing games is always, to some degree, about the metagame. Regardless of how hard any particular player tries to avoid it - and I don't see why anyone would - it's still there. It kind of comes with the territory and the reality is that you are a human being portraying a character in a game. At the end of the day, every decision is a player decision no matter how much the player wants to wrap it in "character decision" wrapping paper and put a bow on it.

In the scope of Fate Core, it definitely requires a little more "meta" thought than many other games, at least from the perspective that some of the rules the player is engaging (namely, Fate Points and aspects) aren't directly tied to the character's attributes, abilities, etc. Yet a lot of the complaints I hear about this are tied to a play style that I honestly can't figure out why anybody would engage. In essence, that the players only ever engage the aspects and Fate Points at a purely mechanical level, apparently void of the context that they are being used in. They apparently place them front and center of what the game is about, instead of...well, what the game is actually about. When I see this, I begin to wonder, "Is that actually how they are playing it? Instructions are just being issued with absolutely nothing hooking in to what is going on within the game, with the GM and players just pulling things out of their collective asses with only regard for the mechanical benefits and not what actually makes sense?" Because, even if that's not how they're playing the game, it's the way that most people I've seen who complain describe it.

For me, the flow of any roleplaying game has always been about what makes sense, what would follow from doing this or having that event happen. The system has always been slaved to the imaginary space in our heads, not the other way around. Fate's no different. So in the case of just engaging aspects at a mechanical level and pushing the "Fate point economy" to the forefront of the game, yes it does strike me as "bad" metagaming. I can see why anyone would be put off by it. I'm put off by it - regardless of what game we're talking about. It's detrimental to the game and the story. And to be clear, when I say "story" I am talking about (to use +Robert Hanz's words) "the stuff that the characters do, and how the world changes and reacts" rather than "the preplanned story the GM wants to tell". To me, while it is jarring to hear someone say, "I make a Fight roll" instead of "I punch the guy in his face" - it's not nearly as bad as only ever saying, "I invoke aspect X to get a +2".

Part of the reason for this is because aspects naturally flow with the language of what is happening within the game. To me, they demand to be used as seamlessly as possible. Their influence on the game is about what the characters are actually doing with them, and not how they can be manipulated from a mechanical perspective to do things. From that perspective, that's the good kind of metagaming.

Aspect Magic, Part 2

In my last post, I went gave an overview of how aspect magic in my fantasy setting works from a game-perspective. I've since had some time to somewhat solidify how it works from a system perspective. Essentially, anyone can use magic simply by taking a Lore stunt, and Sigils are created by making a Lore roll. The Sigils have to be created somehow, whether they are drawn, etched, painted, built into, etc. an object or character. So far, so good.

The Mark from Dishonored

The base difficulty comes from the scope of the Sigil. The scope is essentially what kind of aspect the Sigil is - boost, situation, character, High Concept or even game aspect. It's also possible to use Sigils to grant stunts. Once the scope is determined, the exact aspect or stunt that the Sigil represents has to be determined. From there, how has to be decided - does it add an aspect to the thing that bears it, does it modify or replace an existing aspect, or does it remove or nullify an aspect? These base actions can be summed up simply as addition, alteration and removal (replacement is actually removal and addition combined). There will be some other factors that go toward the difficulty, mainly the quality of the Sigil itself. The more permanent or well-crafted the Sigil, the more potent it has the possibility of being - a Sigil scrawled in charcoal on a piece of paper isn't going to hold up as well as one carved into stone and inlaid with silver. Sigils can be created from nearly anything that can be used to make a pattern, from a bundle of shaped sticks to a tattoo to an engraved amulet to architecture. A well-crafted Sigil is one of the most effective ways to increase the Sigil's Resonance.

Prototype Addition Sigil - this would have to be modified based on the exact effect

Example modified Addition Sigil to add flame to something. While this would be completely functional it's very basic and doesn't account for Resonance modifications. The actual Sigil would likely have embellishments and other more varied elements. For the astute, yes this is inspired by Chaos Magic.

Resonance is a measure of how the Sigil reacts with other aspects - namely those of the person utilizing it. For Sigils that operate somewhat independently of a character - say, a ward on a door - Resonance applies to that object. The base Resonance is determined by the scope of the Sigil, and can be modified by both how well the Sigil is created and how complex the user is aspect-wise. There are techniques for increasing Resonance, and a failed Lore roll can be turned into a success by decreasing it. Whenever the Sigil is activated, the character (or GM, if the Sigil is static) makes a Resonance roll. Failure means the Sigil works, but there is a side effect. I'm still deciding exactly how that works, but most likely it would be a choice between a compel on an aspect or one of the character's aspects altering the effect of the Sigil in an unexpected way.

That sums up the basics of what I have so far, and I'm definitely a lot closer to a workable system with a few tweaks.

Review: Laundry Files: Agent's Handbook

This is a followup to my review of The Laundry RPG.

The Laundry Files: Agent's Handbook is a sort of player's guide to The Laundry. It adds a ton of options and bells and whistles to player characters in The Laundryverse and, by extension, Laundry games overall. Like the core rulebook, it's well-written and put together and chock full of good information.

Pretty much every base is covered by the additions: new character professions, training courses, additional information on how to navigate the Laundry bureaucracy, expanded weapon and equipment lists, and guidelines for playing atypical Laundry characters ranging from non-humans to clueless civilians, and character templates. The equipment lists I kind of glazed over (as I typically do) - they appear complete, and have a couple of cool little widgets, a bunch of firearms that should satisfy gun-bunnies, but their inclusion or lack thereof isn't a selling point for me.

The biggest appeal for me in this book is the first chapter: Tradecraft. This is something that I was chomping at the bit for when I finished the main rulebook. This is really, really good stuff that covers everything from how to keep an identity, gather information, recruit informants and agents, various ways of signalling and passing messages (with a great reason why the Laundry sticks to older methods such as dead drops), and field operations such as tailing, evasion, surveillance, etc. The section incorporates the occult elements and tactics The Laundry employs seamless with the time-honored traditions of spycraft.

My second favorite chapter is Black Budget, Red Tape which adds some more detail to navigating the bureaucracy surrounding The Laundry. There are even Bureaucracy Random Encounters to drop on unsuspecting players. They are intended to make things a little livelier (especially when failing the check on one of them requires that you return to the office to fix it).

The new training courses hit the mark with the kind of corporate training that I've seen (such as "Achieving More With Less", "Aspiring to Senior Civil Service" and "Managing Changelings") plus military training courses and (of course) occult courses such as "Eschatological Countermeasures" and "Occulinux Installation and Use." There is also a small selection of Special Instructor Courses, dealing with specific oaths, rites, and books - these are courses you can sign up for (they're assigned) and the cost doesn't come out of your departmental budget. They of course cost SAN instead.

The chapter on Weird Characters is one of the ones least likely by me to get any use, but it is nice to have a "template" to put over an existing character if you need to turn them into a Gorgon or a Residual Human Resource (aka zombie, but HR doesn't want us to use that term anymore - it's insensitive). Parallel Dimensional Refugee characters are interesting - basically they're people who have slipped through from a similar dimension. Fringe meets the Laundry makes Walter Bishop's form of crazy a lot more ominous.

Likewise, Outside the Laundry has some pointers for running non-Laundry campaigns, such as civilian paranormal investigators, independent sorcerers, or just plain cultists. Unfortunately, a lot of it can be distilled down to 1) avoiding the Laundry because if they catch up to you, it's pretty much over or 2) coming up with contrived reasons the Laundry is looking the other way. The options seem somewhat unsatisfying to me (at least at the moment), and I know that I'd rather just play a straight Laundry game. There are also more details for playing agents agents from other OCCINTEL agencies.

Join the Black Chamber! Kill, and become host to, unspeakable horror!

The final chapter gives a brief summary of The Laundry during different eras. An Eighties campaign would probably be pretty cool - while computing power wasn't anything near what it is today, but they were still potentially dangerous and we didn't have ubiquitous cell phones, or email, the Web, etc. In a way, it had the beginnings of the truly dangerous stuff without a lot of the technology to fight it.

The book wraps up with print-outs of various forms (such as the Incident Report Form  - SBB1C, Sorcery Licence Application, and Reality Excursion Assessment - SSB2) plus a copy of the Official Secrets Act of 1916 and a blank warrant card. The forms aren't intended to be something players are forced to always fill out, at least not without a good reason (having your line manager come and dump a stack of forms on your desk is probably the opening salvo in a round of bureaucratic maneuvering).

I don't typically buy every supplement for game lines unless I really like them, and usually there are a couple that I think are pretty much essential. Vimary Sourcebook for Tribe 8 is one of them, as was Scavenger Sons for Exalted. I tend to be partial to gazetteer-style books over "Look, new whiz-bangs!" books. I'd place the Agent's Handbook somewhere midway between Absolutely Essential and Nice To Have. There's a lot of good information, and the book is well worth the money. But the mileage you get out of it is is going to vary - you could run an Laundry campaign and not use 50% of the book. But the 50% that you do use is going to serve you well.