Comments & observations about short games

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

I've been working on a couple of games for a little while now, playing a few here and there too, and have some observations that I'd like to see refuted, or at least commented.

The fewer things there are on your character sheet, the easier it is to get started, but the harder it is to make a long-term character. InSpectres is a lot of fun, for instance, but I can't make a character I want to play twice.

I submit that depth of character matters, even to us N players. Maybe this is the S in me speaking, but I want to have a reasonable idea about what makes my guy exceptional, and I want to be able to go through a refining phase during play where I tweak him to a fun state, and then I want to move him from apprentice to journeyman to master to a dignified and relevant demise.

There's got to be a model for this. My current design experiment, Under the Bed, uses cards with personality traits, and while it's a good time, it generates only one session at a time. There's not enough character to come back to. That's fine for this game, but I'm about to start another, longer-term game with some fellow Forgers and I want to figure out how to think about this.

So, in summary, my question is: how does one design chargen to:
- start characters with an acceptable level of efficacy
- start characters with enough depth that they're interesting to play at the beginning
- encourage texture as the character grows so sHe gets more interesting to play, not just better at what sHe does.

The last one there is probably a bigger issue than just chargen, but chargen is at least a big part of it.[/i]

[M. J. Young]

It's a good question, Nikola, although I expect that the moderators will move us to Theory.

The answer I've heard from a number of narrativist players is that the campaign is not a particularly narrativist form. People usually have one really good story in their lives, and that's the one you want to tell. Narrativist games become anthologies, not epics.

I'm not entirely happy with that idea, but there it is.

In Multiverser, your character is as complex as you allow, because he is you; but then, it's not really a narrativist game. It does offer a number of essential issues which players can address. Over the long term, there are questions such as what would you do if you knew that death was not the end, and if you could become anything are there any limits which define "being human" in your mind; but these aren't forced on you, and a lot of players ignore them. Some players create their own issues, like whether they will use magic, and on what terms. Sometimes worlds offer moral and ethical difficulties which players may engage if they wish. Overall, though, such play is vanilla narrativism--people engage in it because they want to, and the game tries to stay out of their way. There's nothing that drives the players into narrativist play.

Thus you have these two main approaches. On the one hand, you have games in which characters are designed around the issue at hand, and once that issue is resolved their stories are over. On the other hand, you have characters designed to interact with the world without any particular connection to any issues, and you either get premise or you don't. The latter type doesn't always get involved in any premise at all; the former is spent after the one question is answered.

The alternative solution (I think Sorcerer does this) is to include ways of introducing new questions into the life of your character. That's tricky. If done poorly it can be like discovering in the middle of the season that the star of a TV show lives with his mother who is dying of cancer, but it's never been mentioned in the first dozen episodes. How can something be truly important to the character but never mentioned before now? There are ways to do it, but it's difficult.

Most really dynamic narrativist games rely strongly on character-based premise, which is very solid and almost impossible to miss. Setting- and situation-based premise is much more ammenable to campaign play, but much less certain to engage the players.

--M. J. Young

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

[And here we are, in Theory!]

So, OK, we have:

1: Stories that need characters.

and

2: Characters that need a story.

Here's how I think they can be hybridized (because that's what I want).

I had a character once named Jaeger Viggenssen. He had a little bit o' Hamlet and a chunk of Aragorn and a touch of Arthur, and a Beowulf cherry. I wrote his character sketch as a bunch of exerpts from an epic poem from his people about how his uncle killed his dad, the King, and took his mom and the throne, and how his mom gave him to her servant, who ran away with him and hid him in a peasant house until he was old enough to retake the throne.

Then a big lapse in time, and then he found the treasures of his kingdom: a horn that terrified enemies and strengthened allies, a sword that could cleave steel (naturally, he had to reforge it), and a jeweled brooch that fogged the minds of those who would deceive him and told him their thoughts.

And then another big lapse, and then he destroyed his uncle's army, killed his uncle, and made the land healthy again.

Then another big lapse in time, and then there was a dragon, and the dragon killed Jaeger, but he passed the treasures on to a young boy who had come along with him.

OK, so we have a bunch of stuff that Joseph Campbell loved, but the stuff in the middle, that's what you play, and that's the part where Jaeger meets (and requires help from) the other PCs, who each have their own epic agenda. One guy's Robin Hood, another is Baba Yaga, and someone else is the rightful king of the neighboring kingdom, once enemies, but now united against Jaeger's uncle. Everyone's story had huge epic sweep, everyone gets to be protagonist, and you have a reason to hang with each other. Never is there doubt in the players' minds that they will regain their kingdoms, free the peasants, and bless a fey child, but how they do it is what happens in the space of the game. Do the kingdoms unite as some sort of commonwealth? Does the witch wind up blessing Robin's baby? Does Robin convince the kings to set up some sort of representative government? ...and elipsis...

So we have lots of room for campaign, where sometimes the PCs are doing stuff just so they can pay back debts of honor to each other, but where there are certain goals that everyone has to reach. We don't know when we'll reach them (possibly never), but the game is written so "We know that the fairies, to whome Baba can speak, know where Jaeger's brooch is hidden, so we have to journey to Blue Cairn to talk to them about it..." and there you have several weeks of story, during which you pick up clues that have to do with the rest of the characters' plots.

Lumpley feels that this is artificial, but I think it's just a good way to keep in mind, as a group, what the characters are after, and therefore why they're doing what they're doing.

A lot of this rests in character creation, I think. I'm asking for a whole tacklebox of hooks from each player, I realize, but I think it helps you figure out who you're playing much better than "DX 12" does.

[lumpley]

(Disclosure: Nikola and I are friends in real life.)

I what now?  Artificial?  I don't think I do...

I'm big into create-in-play, not create-up-front, but it's because I'd rather have the contributions of my fellow players, because together we're much more creative and fun than I am by myself.  Planning out bits of my characters' future isn't artificial, it's just harder and not as share-y.  

With the right Systemic support, I could get into it for sure, but it seems to me that that kind of thing is most often a crutch for when you don't have the right Systemic support.  We can't count on the game to make our characters epic, so we'd better exercise serious oversight...

-Vincent

[dewey]

I know that it's going to sound stupid at first sight, but What is character generation?

Is it assigning attributes?
Is it creating a sort of pre-story for the character?
If the characters' pre-story is woven together by the players and the GM, is it chargen or play itself?
Anyway, what's the thing after chargen called? Play? Actual play?

Since your main question was (is)

So ... how does one design chargen to ... encourage texture as the character grows so sHe gets more interesting to play, not just better at what sHe does.

it wouldn't hurt to decide on what chargen means.

The questions is important because, if I understood properly, lumpley said that he prefers character defining during play to character defining before play. So, in other words, for him chargen is more in-game than pre-game.
And this kind of in-game character defining (or refining) really takes emphasis off of "traditional" chargen.

(This theoretic rpg stuff is still so strange for me, I can only hope I was coherent.)

[Bill Cook]

So, in summary, my question is: how does one design chargen to:
- start characters with an acceptable level of efficacy
- start characters with enough depth that they're interesting to play at the beginning
- encourage texture as the character grows so sHe gets more interesting to play, not just better at what sHe does.

The last one there is probably a bigger issue than just chargen, but chargen is at least a big part of it.

If you want to play a character's entire life, you need to have challenges appropriate to each seven year phase, or what have you. I think a D&D style levels model will fail you. I'm reading that you want to hit certain milestones in a character's story, with even development throughtout. And you expect a focus beyond his next escalation of power.

So you want a life path. My instinct would be to earmark material for development and to paint an arc of breaking in, becoming established, seminal work, last great efforts and passing the torch. Should these highlights be defined during play? Beforehand? Picked from a list? Improvized? It depends on the type of play you're trying to support.

Regarding your concerns over Sim/Nar distinctions and the value of lean vs. prosaic character sheets, I just want to encourage you to freely apply these concepts to realize your vision for play.

With the right Systemic support, I could get into it for sure, but it seems to me that that kind of thing is most often a crutch for when you don't have the right Systemic support.

Do you mean pick lists?

[lumpley]

Do you mean pick lists?

No.

What I mean is, the rules make planning the character's milestones a) easy, b) necessary, c) fun, and d) meaningful.  That's the right Systemic support.  Pick lists in particular may or may not be part of it, whatever.

Contrast with, say, Ars Magica: if I'm playing Ars Magica and I plan a character's milestones, it's not because the game's rules support me in doing so.  They don't.  Instead, it's probably because I don't trust the game's rules to respect my character's ambitions and preserve the group's interest in my character.  It's me trying to get something out of the game that its design doesn't provide.  Hence, a crutch for when I don't have Systemic support.

Nikola, if I'm wandering away from the point of your thread, like punch me or something.

-Vincent

[Mike Holmes]

Nikola,

Have you seen Hero Quest? Would something like that be what you're looking for? It seems to cover your points well, to me.

Mike

[M. J. Young]

I know that it's going to sound stupid at first sight, but What is character generation?....

(This theoretic rpg stuff is still so strange for me, I can only hope I was coherent.)

Very coherent, good question, and good observations on it.

Character generation is the creation of the essentials of that primary tool the character player will use to interact with the world. It may be done prior to interaction with the group and the shared imaginary space, or it may be done as part of the creation of the shared imaginary space.

Nikola, looking at your framework, it's taken me a moment to recognize what I don't like about it.

It isn't that it's not a good story--it's a great story. The problem is, as a player I wind up without choices about the major points. Let me contrast some alternatives.

In Multiverser, I have no idea what I'm going to be or do, ever. I get to a world, I explore, and sooner or later I create objectives or goals for myself. Maybe I'll reach them, maybe I won't, but they're my goals, and I created them after I'd figured out something of what was happening around me. Probably I would never create an epic story quite like yours (although I might).

In Sorcerer, I start with a character in a situation which demands resolution, and I work toward some sort of resolution, eventually reaching a point that might be roughly analogous to one of your major events in your character outline. However, I will choose the form of that point through play, not in advance of play. Once I get there--let's suppose I'm old enough to retake the throne, so I head out to find the treasures of the kingdom, and I indeed succeed in gathering them--I reformulate aspects of my character if I think there's another story to tell about him--which in this case would be the part about defeating the uncle. But I could decide that in seeking the treasures, my character has learned that his uncle is actually a much better king than he would ever be, and so has chosen to keep the treasures and show his uncle respect and support.

What you've done is lock the character into a chain of future events and declared that these will come to pass.

I'm sure I've encountered a story somewhere in which the protagonist set out to become someone or something great, but by the time he got there he recognized that this was not at all what he wanted. In fact, there's a short story about a bet between two men, that one of them would spend twenty years in complete isolation in a room in the other man's house. The terms of the bet were such that if he ever stepped out of the room he lost the bet, but that the other would have to provide food for him, as well as send any books or reading material he requested--he was not to have company or leave the room. A week before the time would have lapsed, the one man realized that he could no longer afford to pay when he inevitably lost in a few days, so he was going to kill the other; but entering the room while the other slept, he found a note on the desk stating that the other did not want the money and so would be stepping out of the room a few hours before the time lapsed to intentionally lose the bet.

The problem your idea poses is that there's no room for the character to develop in a direction that carries him away from that which you've determined for him. In all the major points in his life, everything has been decided. This is wonderful from the perspective that the player knows the character cannot fail; but it seems dreadful from the perspective that the player cannot determine the destiny of the character who was little more than an idea at the beginning of play and may have become someone for whom that destiny is punishment, not reward.

Anyway, those thoughts are completely off the top of my head at this point, so take them with however many grains of salt you wish. I think you could get some great games out of your model, but there are some clear problems with it as well.

--M. J. Young

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

I think a couple other games are good references for this conversation too.

Pendragon is the game for playing "a character's life" and indeed his or her lineage in the context of a known history (for the setting). Amazing.

The Riddle of Steel includes a Destiny score, which some characters have and some don't. It is notable for:

a) can be positive or negative
b) can be fulfilled or not fulfilled
c) can be removed from play without penalty if desired, or can be added to a character in play very easily

Best,
Ron

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Aw, geez, all this good commentary, and I don't have time to reply before I take off for a week! I'll be back on the 8th. Thanks for this great brainfood.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

OK, I can't stay away. I want to write back.

I know that it's going to sound stupid at first sight, but What is character generation?

Is it assigning attributes?
Is it creating a sort of pre-story for the character?
If the characters' pre-story is woven together by the players and the GM, is it chargen or play itself?
Anyway, what's the thing after chargen called? Play? Actual play?

Damn, good question.

OK, here's a stab in the dark: chargen is the part of the game where you define the basic parameters of your character. I don't care if this happens in play or beforehand, but I want to be able to make a big, intricate story about My Guy, and I want it to fit with everyone else's big intricate stories. Doing that together makes a lot of sense; it's how we always did it until people started showing up in my GURPS game with characters all made up, and I think it has to do with the chargen system therein: it takes a long time to make a new character in GURPS. I started out with everyone doing it together, sitting around on the floor, telling stories about themselves, but it took, literally, hours before we could do any real storination.

...that could, of course, be prevented by saying "You have 100 points. Spend a little if you want, take some ads/disads if you want, but everything else, you write in as we go through our intro story." That requires a lot of knowledge of GURPS, but if everyone's on the same page that's OK.

Anywhat, sure, generate characters in play, sure. I don't want that to preclude coming up with cool character concepts on my own, but I think everyone could integrate a lot better if everything was written down with everyone there.

Since your main question was (is)

So ... how does one design chargen to ... encourage texture as the character grows so sHe gets more interesting to play, not just better at what sHe does.

it wouldn't hurt to decide on what chargen means.

The questions is important because, if I understood properly, lumpley said that he prefers character defining during play to character defining before play. So, in other words, for him chargen is more in-game than pre-game.
And this kind of in-game character defining (or refining) really takes emphasis off of "traditional" chargen.

Well, only sorta. It doesn't guarantee any sort of coherent story, but it guarantees (barring player disputes) coherency between characters.

OK, so let's assume a couple of features of a chargen system:

• You can have a basic idea for someone you want to play but don't write anything down before you sit down at the hammock to play with everyone else.

• You can say "Here are several critical moments in my character's life." This is probably the part you were thinking up beforehand. They have to mesh with everyone else's ideas. "...and then I kill all the orcs" conflicts with the orc player saying "...and I saved the orc people!"

• Anything that you predict for the future of your character can be bailed on. "Screw this. My uncle kills me and saves the people from my spoiled, bratty ass" is perfectly acceptable.

• With all the players' frameworks in place, you figure out how you get from one milestone to the next, adding features to the characters as they're needed (perhaps as an XP system, used to pace the travel along the story arc.

Oh, the Jaeger story isn't a great story. It's a Great Story. It's a bunch of hero stuff stuck together. Any Swede, Saxon, Frank, or Celt would recognize it, even if sHe couldn't put hir finger on it. This is probably substantially more difficult with a less standard-issue tale.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Nikola,

Have you seen Hero Quest? Would something like that be what you're looking for? It seems to cover your points well, to me.

Mike

I know of a computer game by that name and a crap Games Workshop/Milton Bradley game, as well. I assume you're not talking about these. Do you have a reference?

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Do you mean pick lists?

No.

What I mean is, the rules make planning the character's milestones a) easy, b) necessary, c) fun, and d) meaningful.  That's the right Systemic support.  Pick lists in particular may or may not be part of it, whatever.

Yeah, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Not a tacked-on "sometimes the GM will make something important happen" kind of thing, but where you're, say, at your most efficacious when you're working toward your milestones.

Seriously, I don't have a problem with changing milestones in play. The point is to have a direction for the character to go at all times. As usual, Lord of the Rings is a good example: the characters all know what they have to do, and then they go do it. There are lots of unexpected turns but  they know where they start and where they end up. Sam and Frodo know that they have to throw the Ring into Mount Doom (but don't know about Gollum), Aragorn knows that he has to lead an army against Sauron (but doesn't know that he'll have to become king), Merry and Pippin know that they have to help Sam and Frodo (but don't know that they have to become warriors to do it).

Contrast with, say, Ars Magica: if I'm playing Ars Magica and I plan a character's milestones, it's not because the game's rules support me in doing so.  They don't.  Instead, it's probably because I don't trust the game's rules to respect my character's ambitions and preserve the group's interest in my character.  It's me trying to get something out of the game that its design doesn't provide.  Hence, a crutch for when I don't have Systemic support.

Well, all rules are crutches for the natural lack of total consensus in a Narrative game. Having house rules for story structure just means that that's how you play it.

So, to more completely address the whole post (most of this has been concerned with just the last item on my list), how about this:

• As the players (including you) learn more about your character, you write more and more down on your sheet. There has to be enough of this in the first session that you want to come back to play hir more. This is all backstory that you're discovering and carries with it the difficulty of flashbacks. This can probably be in the realm of Traits, a la Dogs.

• Rarely, like every 5 sessions, your character will have a breakthrough and learn to ride a wulligump, get stronger, gain the power to cloud mens' minds. This is in-play, current development of the character.

• The character's Destiny might be in abstract terms: "I will regain the treasures of my kingdom" could mean a million things. What they are, you work out as you go. When you see an opportunity to regain a treasure of your kingdom you get juice from enacting your destiny.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Pendragon is the game for playing "a character's life" and indeed his or her lineage in the context of a known history (for the setting). Amazing.

The Riddle of Steel includes a Destiny score, which some characters have and some don't. It is notable for:

a) can be positive or negative
b) can be fulfilled or not fulfilled
c) can be removed from play without penalty if desired, or can be added to a character in play very easily

I've got both of these games but can't get around the gobs of Other Stuff in them to distill out these ideas. Looks like I have some airplane reading to do.