Mainstream friendly, small games for compilated publication

[Eero Tuovinen]

If you were publishing a mainstream book for bookstores about roleplaying, with the intent to inspire further exploration of the subject, would you have some particular games that you'd like to include in such a book? The foremost requirements would be immediate appeal outside nerd culture, rewarding play with only a modicum of preparation and shortness.

Introductory books are something of a tradition in the Finnish rpg hobby (I can myself name around four published ones during the last 15 years, which is almost 30% of the number of published games during the same period), so I've been iddly thinking of writing one myself now and then. Especially after the last two weren't so good. The immediate intent of my book would probably be to enchant and appeal to imaginative, social people with the things I love in roleplaying (as opposed to directing the bulk of the content to rpg experts or just having shallow reviews of recent games, as the last two books did), so the book would have actual play and preparing for it as a fairly large theme. I'd also definitely want to make the spectrum of content include everything from the long-term to short term, including actual games that can be played by the audience of the book. Several of those, in fact, so as to make the book a bounteous source of possibilities.

I'm not investigating this idea as a fully serious project yet, but I am generally curious: are there already any games that would fit perfectly for my purposes? I have some trouble thinking of suitable picks myself. Here's what I think of some possibilities to give a sense of where I'm moving on this:

• A game in the breadth of Dust Devils (first edition) or My Life with Master wouldn't be too long of an appendix for a full-size book, but I find neither of those fully adequate to match the vision I have here: they both have genres that have no immediate appeal (DD less so, certainly), while the rules are in places perhaps more quirky or have less GM support than would be preferable in a book for non-roleplayers. Also, even assuming that something along these lines would be the main offering, I'd still like something else, too, that skipped the arduous setting-to-character-to-situation thing and allowed rewarding play to start in under fifteen minutes.
• Something with no setting or situation, like the Pool, doesn't seem right to me; it depends too much on pre-learned creative agenda and fails to seem fun in isolation.
• Thinking of obvious one or two page roleplaying games, while there are a lot of games that seem fun to me, none of the ones I can think of seem immediately fun to somebody who can't appreciate the mechanical nuances involved in each. For example, Mexican Standoff is really interesting as a storytelling experiment involving cash, but it doesn't capture the primal joy of roleplaying inside.

Ideally I'd have something a bit whimsical, like talking animals, in this kind of book... Nighttime Animals Save the World would be fine in many ways, except that I'm not fully convinced of its robustness. Any other ideas? I can totally design my own games, but I'm also not opposed to licensing something from others if they have something perfect for this kind of thing. Any ideas would be appreciated, as context if nothing else.

[Peter Nordstrand]

Hi,

One Can Have Her

Cheers

[Noclue]

Faery's Tale comes to mind.

[Blankshield]

1001 Nights.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Ah, 1001 Nights I know. It's an excellent suggestion along these lines: compact and simple to learn, with an understandable premise.

I know not Faery's Tale and One Can Have Her personal-wise, but I'll keep them in mind. Perhaps I should get both just to see what they do.

[matthijs]

You might want to consider Until we Sink, by Magnus Jakobsson. It's not too long; it's pretty much "pick up and play"; it has a genre most people will understand; it's not complex; it provides engaging play; it has great replay value.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Eero,

I don't think there exists a single role-playing game that's written outside of the role-playing context. The variety we see arises from the degree of explanation that the writer thought was necessary within that context. Even the ones which purport to have been written for a larger audience are, I think, only successful in creating a self-image among a sub-group of the members of the hobby.

Therefore dropping any game as currently written or presented into a product like you're talking about seems, to me, like a recipe for failure. I think any existing game would have to be turned into a different thing in many ways - almost a new book or piece entirely. And I really don't think any kind of "what is role-playing" babble as we've seen in dozens of games will be even close to the right content. So my overall response to your query is, "this does not compute." It seems to me that you are asking a fool's question, destined for disaster. The first question is, what sort of experience of learning to play are we talking about?

The imaginary content is not the concern at all. There are dozens of games as procedures which I think would work very well for your purpose, many of which I've tagged as such in my reviews and actual play accounts. Dust Devils is right up there near the top of the list, at least in the States. Considering that the fantasy-loving, horror-loving, sex-drama-loving, history-loving reading and film audience is enormous (and by "fantasy" I do not mean dragons-elves pablum), I think that most of the change in content seen in recent independent RPGs is actually getting back into the mainstream from our specialized, derived, and pastiche-of-pastiche ghetto.

As you know, I've tried for something different with Spione, which hasn't even arrived in its intended first venue yet. Clearly that's not the model you're aiming at anyway, so it doesn't matter here.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

I tried to compose this twice, but simply said is best: Ron has a good point about the context of a game. The idea here would be that the rest of the book would provide necessary context and explanation for what any included games are trying to do. I'd certainly expect that some editorializing would also be needed to make the game text suitably legible for the target audience. Also, more importantly, an intriguing part of the book's content would perhaps be an analytic decomposition of roleplaying text - what roleplayers are really doing and why, and how this is reflected in the games they play. An important point here is that the goal wouldn't be to improve upon what roleplaying is, but rather to just explain and introduce the hobby as what it is, warts and all.

Whether all that is worthy of doing is a separate question - I think that the Finnish rpg culture and mainstream audience are much closer to each other than their American counterparts, so it might be that this kind of introduction to the hobby seems more sensible to me than it does from an American viewpoint. There is an existing interest around here for generic introductory works of this kind, so it's not so much a matter of proselytism and trying to prove that the hobby has value, as is often the case in American discussion.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Eero,

That's a fascinating goal. Given all that contextualizing, though, the games chosen for inclusion could be ... anything. They wouldn't have to be good, they wouldn't have to work necessarily, they wouldn't have to have any sort of accessible content concerns (whatever those would be anyway), or anything else at all.

I'm pretty sure that your goal is a little different. I think I see that you are struggling with two goals for this book: (1) to say this is role-playing, here it is, warts and all; and (2) play it, try it, it's fun! For #1, the game serves to illustrate a contextual point; for #2, the game sells itself as something the reader might like to do.

Your first post was more like #2, and your reply to me is more like #1, which is not a good sign. Writing this is going to be a nightmare if you ping-pong back and forth between the goals. I think you'll have an easier time putting this project together if you can articulate how the two goals are supposed to work together.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

Well, at this point I'm really just trying to figure out what functional mass-communication about roleplaying would be like, at all. The idea of doing a book about it is mostly because it seems that everybody and their brother is doing one here in Finland these days, so it's interesting to think about what could be done better or in a different way. These were my first impressions of what I'd want to have in such a book:

• It'd have to be historical and journalistic, in the sense that it would introduce different real-world play-styles and cultural currents. It would explain the significance of D&D, for example, but also put it in context with the many gaming ways people have separated from it.
• It'd be concrete in the sense that there'd be discussion of the common skills and methods people bring to their games. Ideally, things that are perhaps not well-explained in actual rules texts, like dramatic set-up and resolution, immersion, in-fiction causality, challenge resolution and so on. Reasons, context, typical systemic methods and goals for these, too.
• It would provide some gateway tools for trying, or at least appreciating, roleplaying games via introducing and explaining a couple of rules-sets. Preferably something suitably simple and no-hassle, perhaps in different CAs. The goal would be to give the reader an easy way to try some basically functional roleplaying, so they can have an informed opinion about it later on.
• The text would also tell in a pretty straightforward manner, with examples, about what I myself find interesting in roleplaying, with some examples of how I've gone about it and what I've gained by doing it. An introspective balance sheet on my hobby history, as it were. The idea here would mostly be to keep the material rooted in concrete human concern, as a matter of writing technique.
• The overall goal would be to share a basic knowledge and appreciation of the breadth and variety of roleplaying culture, with perhaps an eye towards facilitating further practical investigation in the form of actual play. A secondary goal, and one that I think flows naturally from the first, is to also be useful for roleplayers themselves: most hobbyists do not have an overall picture of their hobby, after all.

So this was just me thinking about what I, as a roleplayer, would like to see in that kind of an introductory book. Thinking about it from the viewpoint of Ron's (1) and (2), I'd like to think that the way they mesh together is via journalistic integrity: the goal would be to be basically truthful about what the hobby is, but also focus specifically on what I, as the person writing the book, consider the fascinating and functional aspects of it that I practice myself. So I wouldn't discuss things like consumerism, gamer hygiene or roll vs. role; those aren't mandatory for roleplaying and I don't find them interesting myself, not to speak of celebratory.

So yeah, I think that by "warts and all" I mean some kind of facilitation of understanding actual roleplaying culture, which is not necessarily served by dragging in the worst examples of the species as examples. Rather, I imagine that a well-designed, functional and somewhat narrow game would make understanding and appreciating the basic processes easier, without being that misleading about what roleplaying is or does. So I'd rather tell about functional roleplaying than all the ways it can go wrong, even if the latter might be more common in the history of the hobby, as the functional part is the more interesting one. Make sense?

Hmm... Dust Devils has many fine qualities in this regard, I must say. And even if it does require traditional GM skills, perhaps it can still be played by beginners as well with sufficient contextualizing. The western genre is just slightly exotic around here (except among aficionados), so I'd rather put it in some other environment that doesn't make the reader question his genre expertise as the first thing... some kind of crime fiction, perhaps. Or urban fantasy, that's always a good bet. Still, any ideas for other creative agendas or otherwise radically different ways to play?