General format for my game.

So to get an idea of what I want to accomplish, I have decided to outline what each participant in the game will be doing. There will be the traditional roles of GM and players, but I plan to redraw the lines between them.

GM responsibilities will be different in my game. The GM will introduce the situations that will start play. These basically are the adventure hooks. It gets the party started, and will include a few NPCs, a little bit about their relationships, and an event that starts play. As play continues and a plot developes, the GM will be responsible for creating adversity, adding complications leading to tough decisions, and escalating the situation. The GM will play the roles of any NPCs and will arbitrate the rules as a referee.

The GM's responsibilities will specifically not be creating a plot. The GM will not lead the story forward. The GM will not give play any meaning. That is for the players to do.

The players will be responsible for taking the initial scenario and developing it into a story. They will be responsible for creating most of the world, including scenes and at least the bare bones of many NPCs. The payers will be responsible for adding clues that lead the story forward, and that ultimately give coherence and meaning to the story. They will also play the protagonists in the story.

The players will specifically not play NPCs, even ones that they have created. Anything about NPCs that is not specifically spelled out already is fair game for alteration by anyone, either GM or players can add to or refine NPCs, but only GMs play NPCs.

So GM responsibilities are create the Situation, play NPCs including the opposition in any conflict, create adversity, add complications, escalate the situation, force players to make tough decisions, and lightly arbitrate the rules.

The player's responsibilities are to play their characters, define facts about the world that advance the story, and create coherency in the story by connecting those facts in a meaningful way.

In this way, good stories are guaranteed because an interesting stage is set, protagonists and antagonists are played with meaningful opposition, complications and escalations are used to create adversity and force tough decisions, and a series of interesting facts and events are strung together in a coherent way to create stories with real meaning, without restricting any choices by the players.

I think that it's a good start.

Thoughts about Old School, and gaming assumptions.

What makes 0e different from later games isn’t the rules themselves, it’s how they’re used.

I ran into this statement in a little document entitled A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming by Matthew Finch, the author of Swords and Wizardry. It is a very interesting statement. It implies that a single set of rules could be used in entirely different ways to produce entirely different game results. I like it. It opens up the possibility of using many different rule sets to play my preferred play style. It flies in the face of many assertions by many well known RPG theorists, most obviously Ron Edwards in his essay System Does Matter. I decided that it would be fun to play with this idea a little. Maybe how you play the game is as important as what game rules you use.

Just as the players have no right to depend upon a rule in the book, the referee has no right, ever, to tell the player what a character decides to do. That’s the player’s decision (unless there’s a charm spell going).

This statement, also in A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming, seems like a pretty straight forward assertion, and gets at a fundamental assumption in tabletop RPGs of almost all types, from the old school to the new school. Not the part about players' rights to rules, but the part about narrative license to elements in the game. Since the beginning of RPGs, the assumption was that there was one GM in control of everything in the world/game besides the player characters, and multiple players who were in charge their own character, and the narrative territories were pretty strictly separated. Players were only allowed to call the shots for their characters, and the GM called the shots for everything besides the players' characters. What would happen if the border between GM and player was moved? Many Indie games have done this, giving players a very minor role in creating the world, and giving GMs the means to encourage character behavior in ways that were just shy of compelling the players to play their characters certain ways. The divide was still in relatively the same place for these games as the more traditional ones, but the rules encouraged little forays across the border by each side. The forays were encouraged, but each side mostly lived where they always had. I started to think about what it would be like for the players and GMs to become immigrants to the others' homes. Why was only one person ever given control of the world? Why not have many people? I wanted a game that explored this.

Game designers, over the years, decided that the game should focus on the fighting and the more cinematic moments of the game, with less time “wasted” on the exploration and investigation side of things.

So this is an interesting statement, again from A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming. I like exploration. The problem with it is that it often requires significant pre-game prep by the GM, as the usual assumption is that the GM creates the scenario and the players explore his scenario by asking questions. The GM doles out the data on "his" world as the players "explore" it. The GM remains the final arbiter of everything but character intentions. There has to be another way to explore and investigate without the heavy prep and responsibility by the GM that basically buys him unilateral and seemingly dictatorial narrative rights. Even if the dictatorship is benevolent, the GM is still doling out the world to the players as he sees fit. Not exactly collaborative or empowering. I want an explorative and investigative game, hold the dictatorship please.

It’s more like a story with dice: the players describe their actions, the referee describes the results, and the story of the characters, epic or disastrous, grows out of the combined efforts of referee and players. The referee will be just as surprised by the results as the players are.

Now this I almost completely agree with, but I think that we can alter the part about the border between the players' and the GM's jurisdictions. A story, with dice, that grows out of the combined efforts of GM and players with surprising results for all. That sounds like a good game. Can we make a game that allows players the ability to influence large volumes of world content that will also surprise the players and create suspense and a feeling of empowerment without losing the feeling of a world that is alive and separate from them? I think so. Movies create suspense all the time, even when you always know that the good guys win in the end. This suspense is usually achieved by delaying answering the question of what it will cost the characters to succeed. Many authors report the feeling that their characters and their worlds are alive and separate from them, despite having sole and complete narrative rights to the story. Can we create a game that allows significant narrative rights to the players, while at the same time allowing for complications and adversity that is real enough to create a sense of accomplishment when they are overcome, and hence allowing it to remain a game? I think so.

My goal will be to create a role playing game that redraws the border between players and GM in an effort to create a more collaborative game, reduce preparation necessary, guarantee the emergence of meaning to the story created, while retaining the aspects of challenge, exploration, and wide open freedom of choice. I will chop up several readily available free games to create a Frankenstein's monster of a game that will be refined into a cohesive game.

It begins.

Hello All!

I plan to write a tabletop RPG. I will start by setting design goals. then I will flesh out some ideas for mechanics. Then I will use Wave to get some help to tidy it up and get a good draft. Finally, playtesting should hammer out the dings and dents.

Stay tuned, as this is likely to take a while.