The Seven-Sided Die

In the beginning there were sticks banged on things and voices raised to the sky. It was the earliest music, and it was full of passion and primitive technique.[1. Note that I have no idea what I'm talking about since I'm not a music historian. Just run with the metaphor for the sake of grasping the argument. The exact history of music isn't relevant to the parallel I draw.] I have no doubt that Mozart and Metallica represent vast improvements in musical technique, but it's worth noting that neither drumming nor simple vocal music have been displaced by more "advanced" forms of music.

Roleplaying games are kind of like music in that way. There are a lot (and I mean a lot) of people who see later editions of (A)D&D as natural evolutions of the earlier editions, and then make the logical leap that the "more evolved" version is inherently better. Certainly, the state of the art has advanced and later editions have taken advantage of mechanical innovations that have proved to be good. However, if the incorporation of new techniques was all it took to make a new thing that is better in every way than an older thing, nobody today would listen to jazz given the existence of ska. In the case of music it's blindingly obvious that different genres have different æsthetic appeal regardless of how long ago they were invented.

So what is it that keeps roleplayers from recognising that older games have distinct styles and æsthetic appeals that many people appreciate? I suspect part of it is that the style of play can be, in part, disconnected from the rules system being used to evoke that style. Groups using D&D 4e can certainly use it to play political epics, and fans of AD&D 2nd Edition can use it for simple dungeon-crawling adventures that are little more than a string of tactics-heavy combat encounters. The stereotypical play style of any given system can be embodied using almost any other rules system. I think that this leads a lot of roleplayers to believe that using a more recent set of rules is nothing more significant than upgrading your computer's operating system—you can still play the same games as before, so clearly it is better to use the more advanced system.

To a point, this is true. If White Wolf's Storyteller system nicely supports the particular play style of your existing AD&D 1e campaign, but offers you even more system features that would suit your play style, it certainly makes sense to "upgrade" to Storyteller. I can imagine a group playing the sort of game where making that particular switch would be perfectly sensible, but would anyone argue that the play styles that original Storyteller and AD&D 1e were naturally suited to were identical on the strength of one single group's ability to fit their play style into both systems? Nobody being reasonable would make that argument. In the same way that blues and jazz are similar but distinctly different, so too different roleplaying systems can be similar but have their own distinct "naturally suited" feel and play style.

This thought was inspired by a comment on a Knights & Knaves forum post responding to common arguments against the existence of the old-school revival/renaissance:

You could ask a delta bluesman to start rapping, but wouldn't you rather hear the old guy play the blues?

I'm not really interested in debating the specifics of the original post, only in thinking about the statement that underlies the post and the quote above: The OSR is about continuing to enjoy a particular play style, not about rejecting system innovation outright. It so happens that those old games were "naturally suited" to that play style, and that many games that came later were better at a different sort of play style. But, like jazz and other styles of music continue to develop in parallel with the genres that have "evolved" from them, we can continue to develop new techniques and systems that are good for that old play style in parallel with system and play styles that have evolved from it. Imagine a world in which fans of jazz, baroque, or drum circles were scoffed at and belittled as being merely nostalgic. Crazy, right?

Besides, we all want roleplaying to endure as a hobby. If we insist that only the latest is the greatest, then we're dooming our hobby to be merely a perpetual fad with no meaningful continuity or staying power. Looking around I'm heartened to see that this just isn't happening. There is a lot of diversity, and a lot of people moving around between systems and play styles.

So keep playing and sharing what you like. Try unfamiliar play styles just as you would try listening to unfamiliar genres of music when friends share what they like. You might just discover something you never knew you were looking for, and maybe in the process you'll find that, like taste in music, there's no final reckoning for anyone's roleplaying style.

Via Trollsmyth I discovered the new-this-month gaming blog I Fly By Night. The article on abstract tactics is great: it conveys in concrete terms how you can have meaningful tactical decisions in combat without needing to pin down the location of every combatant on a grid. He points out that real-world tactics have always been abstract due to the inevitable fog of war, and then gives examples of using manœuvers to gain tactical advantage in RPGs with abstract combat systems.

The example manœuvers given are translated into (A)D&D mechanics, but my thought while reading something like this:

Player: "Rats! They're moving before we're ready! I'll rush my shot to get ahead of them, and maybe blunt their attack." i.e. getting inside of the enemy's decision loop - maneuver for disruption. GM: "OK, take a -X, but you'll go before them."

… is just the sort of thing that Tricks in Savage Worlds are good at modelling.

When I ran our first one-shot of Savage Worlds, we had a really hard time coming up with the game-world actions the characters could take that would justify invoking the Trick rules. Next time I run SW, I'll have Clash's post on abstract tactics printed out for my players.

In general, this is really good material for anyone running or playing in a game that features combat. A lot of people complain about combat in earlier editions of D&D being boring dice-rolling exercises that amount to nothing more than "hit, hit, miss, hit", but they don't have to be. For all that D&D and other game systems' rules mostly focus on combat, creatively approaching challenges is one of the most important parts of playing a roleplaying game and one which doesn't disappear when combat begins. Thinking in terms of objectives and manœuvers helps to maintain that creative engagement with the world even when the great weight of a complex combat system is bearing down on the game.

In another group's microscope playtest report, the writer linked to The Improv Wiki. For people new to games like microscope, which don't provide many (or any!) explicit scene-resolution mechanics and which encourage taking the author stance, the experience and advice of improv theatre actors is priceless.

In our game of microscope I found myself struggling to set up scenes that could be interesting when it was my turn to do so. When I was entering a scene someone else had set up, I felt a distinct lack of threads I could pull on or buttons I could push to make the scene go. These are just the sorts of things that improv actors practice all the time! After reading just the two articles on Reincorporation and Disrupting a Routine, it was obvious how much a wiki full of tips for effective improv acting could help me get the hang of playing microscope.

Players and game masters new to the Burning Wheel always seem to struggle with Beliefs. The core books don't do enough to emphasise how central Beliefs are to the system, I think, and there isn't enough ink devoted to impressing their importance on the reader or on explaining how to write good Beliefs. It's too easy to miss the point and use of Beliefs.

We had just got to Beliefs in the character burning session yesterday when we ran out of time. I knew better than to leave it entirely until last, so we'd already established two Beliefs in what I would consider draft quality. (Aside, the game has ended up being a one-on-one campaign, which should be interesting. Fewer people to creatively influence the plot, but also fewer people to teach the system to.) We were still struggling with a way to make the character really "pop", though, so when we broke for the day I promised to dig up some of the resources that really helped me gain a deeper understanding of Beliefs. (Clearly I could use the review, too!)

The first place to go for help on Beliefs is the wiki page devoted to it at the Burning Wiki: Belief workshop. That's the distillation of advice people have given on the forums and others have found useful.

That page is a great reference, but it doesn't really convey the breadth and depth of the role of Beliefs in the Burning Wheel. For that, I found some of the original threads to be very enlightening. The best of these starts with a GM presenting his four players' characters' Beliefs and people jumping in with not only advice for how to refine those beliefs, but actual side-by-side examples. Seeing a Belief go from the original, sort of watery version to the final, explosive version really impressed upon me how powerful Beliefs are as a mechanic. Luke Crane (the author) and one of his players (Thor) chime in and give some really useful insights. I find Thor's principle-goal-means technique for creating Beliefs particularly compelling.

This thread highlights how players can use Beliefs to encourage certain kinds of play over others, such as solving conflicts via political dealings rather than frontal assault, or vice-versa. It also has two examples of Beliefs refined from a weak draft to a strong final version, which set off at least one lightbulb for me. It's a short thread too, which makes it a good read.

Finally, and not least, is forumer Paul B's Beliefs Workshop. This really breaks down some of the things that could be packed into a Belief to make it fire on all cylinders, and steps the player through how to build tight Beliefs from them. Like the thread above it emphasises the way players can use their Beliefs as flags for the GM to deliver certain kinds of game play. As-written part of it is setting-specific, but those parts are obvious and you can just substitute (for example) "The New Faith, and its threat to the Old Ways" with the disruption/decay/change element particular to your own campaign.

The emphasis on making Beliefs for what the player cares about rather than what the character "should" care about is really good, since it gets at a core element of what makes the Burning Wheel work: The characters are there to do what the players are interested in seeing happen in the story, not to be a faithfully-simulated person in an alternate reality. The character should be created to best serve the player's story goals.

Story-centric games seem to suffer from a creeping simulationism, especially with new players and GMs (hi!), who get it in their heads that the point is to create a realistic person and play out the logical steps of their life. There are games where that is the point (such as Hârnmaster), but it's not the point of the Burning Wheel. As Paul B says in his Workshop linked above:

When you’re setting up Beliefs, think like your character’s author and not your character himself. Your character probably wants to live a quiet, long, safe life. Tales of quiet, long safe lives are booooooring. Dream up ways to put your own character into hot water, and make sure the GM knows what kinds of hot water interest you.

Have I missed any excellent resources? Share your favourites in the comments!

Wow, a month and a half without a single post. You'd think I was a busy dad or something…

I had been planning to follow up the Edge of Empire campaign of last year with a new, Savage Worlds–based megadungeon crawl in the new year, but those plans evaporated as my gamin'-thinkin' energy and my family's collective time resources were tapped out. Apparently I have little to think about gaming and even less to say about it when I'm not actively GMing or prepping to GM, which is interesting to know.

Which implies, yes, that I'm preparing to run a game again. We've been playing in Fimmtiu's Planescape game (with 2nd edition rules, no less—did I mention I hate *D&D spellcasting?), but one of our three players' schedule just got wacky and will take a while to return to a semblance of reasonable. The current plots in play mean that continuing without her would be awkward, so I've stepped up and offered to run an interim Burning Wheel game.

Coincidentally, Fimmtiu borrowed my BW core books at the end of the last Planescape session, so he'll be reasonably informed when it comes to creating his character. In the meantime, though, I don't have a copy of the rules handy and I'm going off of the bits I can recall, a good (I hope) grasp of the rather unusual first principles of Burning Wheel, and osmotic GMing knowledge gained from reading through some inspiring BW threads and blogs. Which reminds me that I had a particular inspiration for writing this post…

I'm loving the insights that Steven Jarvis wrote about in his 30 Days of Burning Wheel posts. You have to click "next" at the bottom of each post and click past some non-BW posts, but they're the majority so that's not so bad. If by the time I get to the end I don't encounter a summary post that I can add on here, I might just index them all so that they're together somewhere, for my own benefit.

I got nothing to say in particular about the Burning Wheel at the moment, since Steven is doing so well in those old posts. (My initial thoughts upon first reading of the Hub and Spokes are over here, though.) I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of character and world burning this weekend.

Edit: I collected together Steven Jarvis' posts on the Burning Wheel, since his blog's tag search is broken past a certain date. They eventually do peter out, but his thoughts on Beliefs are good reading:

• and so it begins…
• the books
• character burning session
• characters vs. players
• pre character burning
• It’s the Beliefs, Stupid!
• DO SOMETHING! Those Beliefs are there for a reason!
• Fight!ing and Killing

Ever since reading Lois McMaster Bujold's series revolving around Miles Vorkosigan I've wanted to play or run an RPG in that setting. It's brilliant space opera without the usual drags of a huge cast, ungraspably-complicated political networks, or soap-opera plotlines.

The level of tech varies from swords and ageing energy weapons in the backwoods of some planets to cryo-suspension medical technology and cloning in the more advanced polities. The habitable systems are connected in a wormhole network, and have a lot of within-system and substantial inter-system traffic. The political entities range from feudal to democratic to capitalist anarchy, with subgroups and independent mercenaries in between and among them.

The wide range of tech, political situations, and scales of travel offers a diversity that is rare in a setting and makes it really appealing. As Bujold designed it so that "I can have my swords 'n' spaceships in a way that makes both historical and economic sense."[1. L. M. Bujold, "Putting It Together: Life, the Vorkosiverse, and Everything", The Vorkosigan Companion. Apart from pithy quotes, there are some great notes to be taken about the themes and character arcs that shaped the books and the setting.]

To properly run a game in the Nexus I'd have to re-read the not-insubstantial series, but I wondered what I could find online. For the sake of sharing I've collected the resources I could find together here.

(It should go without saying that the following links contain major spoilers for the books.)

• A timeline of the Vorkosigan books.
• The Vorkosigan Saga article at Wikipedia has a lot of general information on the universe. Subordinate articles have more:
  • The systems of Barrayar, Komarr, Beta Colony, Cetaganda, Escobar, Jackson's Whole, Sergyar, Athos, and other planets mentioned in the series
  • Barrayar's Time of Isolation
• A fan-made map of Barrayar
• Five preview chapters of the soon-to-be-published Vorkosigan Companion, which I think I'd get if I ran this setting
• "The Mountains of Mourning", a short Miles Vorkosigan story online at Baen Books
• A collection of Miles Vorkosigan fanfiction, which might be useful for pilfering people/places/plot ideas
• a map of the known Wormhole Nexus, with system descriptions
  • people and places of Barrayar, at the same site
• Bujold's answers to fan questions in 2000
• chapters one through nine (of 21) of Komarr
• a forum thread about an imminent GURPS Vorkosigan book. I'll have to keep an eye out for its release.

Unsurprisingly, my recent interest in the multi-genre rules of Savage Worlds had a hand in inspiring this rekindled interest in playing in this setting, though I have to thank icedrake @ LJ for getting me thinking about sci-fi settings earlier this evening. The ease of mixing "swords 'n' spaceships" that Savage Worlds offers would make it a good fit.