Lessons of a Neverending Game

[droog]

Hi, all. In this thread I'd like to write about and analyse my long-running game set in Greg Stafford's Glorantha. It's something I've been thinking through for a while, but it's not easy to write, so I crave your indulgence.

This game has been inextricably linked with a large chunk of my life; I would say easily two hundred and perhaps closer to three hundred sessions over twenty-three years. To say nothing of the prep.

The game began in Perth, Western Australia in 1983 and ran more or less weekly/fortnightly for the next twelve years. After that it went on sporadically for about three or four years, and since 1999, hasn't been better than annually due to my move to the Eastern States. But it's alive – we're going to try it via webcam soon. It started with 3rd ed. RuneQuest rules, but after flirting with using Pendragon, I unilaterally converted it to HeroQuest (then known as Hero Wars) in 2000. That caused some pangs of adjustment but we're back on track again – fingers crossed.

I intend to work through the layers of the Big Model as an organising principle.


SOCIAL CONTEXT
The first thing to note is that our group is partly composed of some guys who are a very long-term and well-knit body of friends. As a group member of twenty-three years standing, I am a Johnny-come-lately. I met these guys around 1982-3 (bringing with me Simon and Dave), and it was me (I think) who suggested the game some time later. Little did I know....

In the beginning, the thrust of the game was heavily determined by me, my brother Dave, Simon, and Tristam. I'll come back to the other three later, but the four of us shared an interest in religion, history and fantasy, and a similar reading background. Together we were an irresistable force in the direction of the game as the exploration and extrapolation of a World. For me, at least, it was an excuse to read about things I was interested in and draw fantasy illustrations like Barry Windsor-Smith's.

Some of us were studying and some working and some unemployed (artists). Those were the people we knew, too, whether they played RPGs or no (and in the early 80s, it didn't seem too weird to be roleplaying).

I don't think that the fact that Perth is the most isolated capital city in the world hurts when you're trying to build a decades-long campaign, by the way. Basically, while things may have improved, there wasn't a lot to do back then. A lot of people would socialise by hanging out at each others' houses and taking drugs – what we did wasn't terribly different.

Because the game took place over so many years, there was a fair amount of change in group personnel. So I've drawn up a rough table of periods:

84-86 Dave, Simon, Tristam, Brett, Adam, Paul
86-89 Dave, Tristam, Brett, Simon, Paul, Ian (Adam, Ross)
89-91 Brett, Tristam, Ian (Simon, Ross)
91-96 Brett, Ian, Allison, Simon, Glenn (Tristam, Colin, Lindsay)
96-04 Brett, Ian, Allison (Simon)
04-now Brett, Ian, Allison, Simon, Colin, Luke

Each of these periods corresponds, at least in my mind, to distinct periods in our lives. The game was and is shaped by our friendships, and perhaps, has shaped them in turn. So I find it difficult to organise all this stuff in my head, because it's massive, and if something's unclear I hope that anybody interested will ask a clarifying question.

A couple of notes on the other original players:

Brett the Powergamer
Brett was from the first a source of trouble. He didn't have the same scholarly interests and showed a distressing inclination to min-max his character. Brett got little social reinforcement for his pains, but he eventually learned to thrive by learning Gloranthan colour and using it to the utmost. In fact, in the end Brett got rewarded for his powergaming, by having leadership thrust upon his character when he was clearly far more powerful than all the others put together. But that took many years, and I'm afraid we bullied Brett socially that whole time until he came closer to our ideal.

Adam the Roleplayer
Adam was, I'm sorry to say, bottom of the social ladder, and his style was epitomised as "characters with no arms". He fit Glenn Blacow's Fourfold stereotype to a piece of string. Obviously, we thought his ideas shallow, pretentious and pointless. But he went off to do puppet theatre overseas and left us behind....

Paul
Paul was so difficult socially (for some understandable reasons that I shan't go into) that it's hard to separate that from his roleplaying, which was often suitably antagonistic and irritating. When he finally snapped the social ties was when he dropped out of the game.

So that was where it all started. Any questions so far?

NEXT: EXPLORING GLORANTHA

[droog]

EXPLORING GLORANTHA

In a recent thread ( [Werewolf] complete the mission! realistically! (GNS ?)), Ron Edwards wrote:

The group as a whole is extremely committed to the cycle of missions, consequences, further missions, with the result that the details and perhaps intrinsic insights of the setting (and its symbols) become more and more apparent and colorful through play.

This was very much how it was for us. Using the excellent Borderlands pack (that early RQ stuff set a very high bar), we straight away plunged into mission-based games that revealed the world a bit at a time and started to situate the characters in their surroundings. Brett and Paul were the newcomers to RQ and Glorantha, and as they found we were going to be serious about Culture, certain changes occurred.

An early shift, for example, was Brett's character concept. He wanted an atheist wandering loner. When he discovered that religion was real and important in mechanical terms, his character stopped being a cynical apostate and went back to worshipping Orlanth.

As a bunch of pot-smoking slackers, Glorantha's kooky sense of humour appealed to us all, as did the other, more thoughtful, side that inspired many discussions about belief and existence. I drew lots of maps and pictures.

We all enjoyed testing the mechanics out in various ways, too. Combat was a high point of many games, always exciting and unpredictable. As a group we had a keen interest in understanding the system and applying it as a model to the game world, e.g. I made a SIZ chart including all the players along with typical animals etc. We looked carefully at all new applications, such as new characters, to see what they did. Simon made a game career out of trying new characters out (like, a couple of dozen).

I've always been a bit of a stickler for "You must learn the rules before you can break them!", and I'll go a long way before I'll change rules. Basically we house-ruled the game barely at all (which is why I know that the Fatigue system is really dumb). Luckily, BRP/RQ really is a pretty solid system for what we were doing, though the whiff factor was an issue.

Brett homed in on the most effective weapon in the RQ3 arsenal – the halberd. Lucky for him, I had read Njal's Saga and was biased in favour of the image. But he was later to turn it into an invincible weapon, after he gained an expert knowledge of the enchantment rules.

Tristam and Ian both played non-humans (a morokanth and a duck respectively), which were our most iconic and entertaining characters for many years.

As we went on, I gained confidence as a GM and increasingly added in material of my own. By the late 80s I was running mainly on my own prep. Naturally, the game grew to reflect our personal visions ever more strongly, especially as Chaosium went into a slump around that time and we were thrown back on our own resources. We started doing less mission-based stuff and more stuff generated from the interaction of the setting and the characters' actions.


That's a very broad overview of how we approached our exploration. As before, please raise your hands if there are any questions.

NEXT: TECHNIQUES

[Ricky Donato]

Because the game took place over so many years, there was a fair amount of change in group personnel. So I've drawn up a rough table of periods:

84-86 Dave, Simon, Tristam, Brett, Adam, Paul
86-89 Dave, Tristam, Brett, Simon, Paul, Ian (Adam, Ross)
89-91 Brett, Tristam, Ian (Simon, Ross)
91-96 Brett, Ian, Allison, Simon, Glenn (Tristam, Colin, Lindsay)
96-04 Brett, Ian, Allison (Simon)
04-now Brett, Ian, Allison, Simon, Colin, Luke

Why are some names in parentheses?

[droog]

Why are some names in parentheses?

Those are players who played sporadically during that period. They had a presence, but it was casual or part-time or short-lived.

Also, the names are in rough order of their importance to or influence on the game.

[James_Nostack]

Hi Jeff, it sounds pretty interesting, though unfortunately I don't know much about Glorantha, Rune Quest, Hero Wars, or Hero Quest or any of that stuff--the system and setting are kind of opaque to me.

Can I ask what social stuff permitted your group to "bully" (your words) the power-gamer?  If someone's really bucking for a style of play, and everyone's harshing on him, it seems like that's a potential bummer for everyone involved over the long term.

[droog]

Hi Jeff, it sounds pretty interesting, though unfortunately I don't know much about Glorantha, Rune Quest, Hero Wars, or Hero Quest or any of that stuff--the system and setting are kind of opaque to me.

Can I ask what social stuff permitted your group to "bully" (your words) the power-gamer?  If someone's really bucking for a style of play, and everyone's harshing on him, it seems like that's a potential bummer for everyone involved over the long term.

Tristam, Dave and I were in almost unanimous agreement about the sort of game we wanted. We constantly talked about Brett as a problem, and in one incident, he did not get invited to a game of RQ Vikings Tristam had organised to run (unfortunately, he heard about it and turned up, indignantly taking his place at the table as if daring us to chuck him out). He was forever suffering raised eyebrows, and patient explanations as to why his latest idea 'didn't fit'.

We didn't think of it as 'bullying' at the time. Perhaps 'behaviour modification' would be a nicer way to put it. We traded on Brett's willingness to believe himself intellectually inferior.

As to why it wasn't a deal-breaker:

* Brett, Tristam, Paul and Adam were old friends and had roleplayed together since high school.
* Brett, ultimately, was a good bloke and fun to be with.
* Brett altered his behaviour, becoming a Glorantha fanboy. He got with the program. He became, and has remained, the central player of the game, which I find rather interesting as a process in retrospect.

I don't know what to do about the problem of conveying system and setting details in a thread like this. I'll try and address any specific questions if they emerge.

[screen_monkey]

Interesting.  Please tell us more about the evolution of your game.

I'd be very interested in
1) how you explored Glorantha, Gloranthan ideas, and got your players exposed to a lot of the things that there are to learn about Glorantha, and
2) how you dealt with the tactical sim nature of RQ.  You stated that combat was a large part of your game - were you able to transcend the tctical nature of the rules at any point and explore more thespy concepts such as relationships and/or character development?

As you know, Droog, I'm running RQ III at the moment, so your experience is very interesting and relevant to me.

[droog]

Hey, dude. It's been very interesting to see your group get slowly sucked into the vortex of Glorantha. Next you'll be writing runes with candle smoke on tunnel walls like Tristam and I did one afternoon.

How we explored Glorantha
This was something that developed over time. Firstly, there was the published material: in the first couple of years I ran all the scenarios in Borderlands and went on to Pavis and the Big Rubble. What I found was that the setting was unusual enough that every so often we would need to pause for some discussion or explanation. There was a natural progression of learning.

We were all quite easy with tangential discussion – you can be when you've got all the time in the world. Again, the cabal of me, Dave and Tristam was instrumental at the beginning. We were enthusiastic about the potential of the setting, and concerned to keep its spark of originality. We all recognised early on that Gloranthan texts were contradictory on purpose, and we embraced that (it made for more interesting conversations and left space for our own ideas).

Going foward further, we've all shared houses with one another. The Game was a popular topic of conversation as we sat in living rooms around Perth and smoked. Much Gloranthan lore was imparted on leisurely nights. In fact, it's just become clear to me that the period I lived with Brett is the period in which he became the biggest fan in the group.

That's probably not much help to you, because your circumstances are not at all the same. We pretty much got to dream about Glorantha any time we wanted.


How we dealt with the rules
Some of what you ask I'm going to be addressing later under techniques and ephemera. For now, I'll put it this way:

RQ is highly elaborated in two areas: magic and combat. Every other area is underdeveloped in comparison. That means that only magic and combat engage the mechanics in any significant way, and that many situations in the game are dealt with ad hoc.

So I don't think it's so much about transcending the rules as going into areas they don't touch. For example, one memorable, and quite early, session in Pavis was given over to the characters holding a party. Basically a bunch of talking, perhaps with the occasional skill roll or CON roll for drinking. That should sound familiar to a lot of people; it's the 'we never touched the dice' theme of many games. We did lots of that sort of thing.

By about '95 I became dissatisfied with handling things this way. A lot rests on the GM making decisions by fiat, and it was burning me out. It often felt flat to me to play something out and realise that I had pretty much total control of the direction it would take. I can't speak for the others, but I had a sense that they also felt some of this.

So I started playing around with different things, but none of them really stuck. For example, I imported the Traits from Pendragon, but then didn't really use them: they felt stuck-on. We continued to rely on social contract to negotiate the character stuff.

At the same time, after many years combat had become tedious to me, and I found myself starting to avoid it whenever possible. I realised that what I needed was a quicker combat system, and experimented with porting the characters wholesale to Pendragon rules, but again, for some reason it didn't feel adequate to the game.

Eventually I found what I was after in HQ, but I'll go into that later.

[screen_monkey]

Interesting observations - one of the frustrations I have at the moment is that, after Heroquest, RQ seems very tactically based, with little scope for social interaction - this all has to be 'fudged' - without any proper rules support.  So really the only situations where the players are properly empowered to control their destiny is in combat situations.

[droog]

...and so you have lots of combat?

Combat was good enough for us for years. We did plenty of big fighty scenarios, using maps and counters etc. But it seemed like gradually we fought less and less and talked more and more. Then, yes – it was all a bit murky.

Unless you're already bored with fighting, maybe you should just go with it and do lots of combat situations. When you get bored you can switch to HQ 5e.

[screen_monkey]

Combat is fun - but of course, as you know it's also good to have characters who have to make moral decisions that change them, and part of that is building relationships with other people - which takes time.

Our game has taken an odd turn, as you know - I was running them through Borderlands and I had introduced a character called Olend - an Orlanthi rebel who helped them wipe out the Broo of Weis.  He was no fan of Raus, though, and ambushed the players as they were trying to take rafts of food back to Raus Fort from Pavis.

Now this is the interesting bit - Simon, a coder and newcomer to RPG's, who has nonetheless taken to it like a duck to water, was captured by Olend's rebels, and was offered, since he was an Orlanthi initiate, the option of joining them.  After a long discussion (at which point Simon I think realised that this was 'allowed' in the game) he agreed.  In a classic roleplaying experience this would have been the end of the character - he would have been out of the game, since we were playing Borderlands.

However, I decided to swap over as an experiment - as the players gathered for a session in which they had just tracked down the rebels to Horn Gate, I handed out pre-gens and told them they were playing the rebels.  What followed was a very enjoyable couple of sessions, where the players took to their new roles with gusto - and enjoyed defeating their old characters in combat!

Annnyway - I've threadjacked enough.  I'm not sure what I'm trying to say - perhaps that I am experiencing the limitations of a classic sim game like RQ, with its tactical combat focus, but that I am trying to think of creative ways around these limitations.  At the end of the day, though, the sheer scope and breadth of Glorantha allows us to explore lots of different points of view and lots of different ways of living, in a way that a more black and white good and evil world would not.  Ramble ends.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

That was no ramble! That was a great supportive example of what Jeff's posting about.

Let's keep working down through the model with Jeff's game and keep those examples in mind too. If you want, post more about your own game insofar as it relates to any of Jeff's points (similar or contrasting, either way).

Best, Ron

[screen_monkey]

I'd be interested if anyone has any actual experiences trying to run Pendragon Pass, as a sort of bridging game between dramatic games (social interaction, emphasis on relationships) and tactical games (skills focus, combat) in Glorantha.  Droog, what did you find were the shortcomings of Pendragon in trying to run a game in Glorantha for your group?

[droog]

HOW WE DID IT

Creating characters
Of the current six players, only Brett and Ian are playing their original characters, so I'll concentrate on them to begin with.

Character creation in this game was always a process of hashing out how the players' concepts would fit into Glorantha, before beginning the process of generating the characters. We used random stat generation, but modified to produce above-average characters (an absurd ritual!). After you've chosen age, occupation and culture, RQ3 gives very little choice in the list of skills a character ends up with – you are the product of your society and no two ways about it.

(I was greatly enamoured of RQ chargen. It seemed to me right to have characters who fit their place in life and had logical skills. It just meant that everybody chose to be a warrior, of course, but there they were, all the other people of the universe...)

So when Brett said he wanted a barbarian, I suggested an Orlanthi and filled him in on some historical context. He said he wanted somebody without a family, so I produced a tribe that had been wiped out by wolf people. Back and forth between the texts. "I don't want to worship any gods." "Hmmm, only the sorcery people are atheists." "That sounds cool. My character wants to learn sorcery." "Riiight. Now you realise that your culture and sorcery blah blah."

By the time Ian joined the game, the players all had a lot more context. They said "Play a duck, Ian!" and he amiably obliged. Ian's duck is a fabulous example of how a weak character in a deadly game can survive by being liked. I have fudged dice on several occasions, and manipulated the situation on others, to save that little fucker Queng. I think I've only had to do that for Brett once or twice.

Because there's the thing. One reason we avoided combat in latter years of RQ was that we had built up too much investment in these characters. Even with the ridiculous levels Brett had got his character Raven to, it was still possible for him to die in combat. I think that was something we didn't talk about much, but it was there like a dark shadow across Brett's gameplay. There was a lot of stalling going on at times.

And if it was a challenge for Raven, it was a massacre for the rest of the characters (we lost a few, mainly belonging to Colin and Simon). To make it worse for me, Gloranthan monsters scale all the way up to god level and it's not always easy to get the level right. Fudging was a way of life.

Add to that the fact that I was finding RQ combat highly tedious after all this time, and that I wanted some mechanics to handle other situations, and everything pointed to a new system. That was Hero Wars in 2000, but it was such a diametrical shift in game design that it went down poorly. But I pressed on, because damn if I was going to run one more three-hour combat. And I knew there was something to this HW thing, because I'd played a game with some newbies and we'd had a blast.

Converting the characters was a contentious issue. It was made all the more difficult by the fact that I was by then living 3000 km away, and by a new edition in 2003. We played about half a dozen experimental sessions across several years, and the characters practically got redrafted every time. It was a gigantic leap across designs; from RQ's complex and interrelated character sheet to HW's seemingly formless lists of abilities. And it was evident only to me – and hazily at that – that this was more than a change in resolution mechanics and that a whole new approach was needed.

Only Allison and Luke are playing characters generated completely under HQ rules, neither of which have yet been played enough to tell much about. We still followed the basic conversation about the character before doing the numbers, but I'm just more relaxed about it these days.

Special mention for Simon: he's my oldest friend and I let him play anything he likes, because they're always just strong and silent. He's currently playing a 45-foot giant (even that had to be converted to HQ but Simon doesn't ask questions).

Me as GM
Reviewing Ron's recent ideas about leadership roles, I'd say that my major role as GM in the group was as its creative director. I was the one with the growing library of Gloranthan information, the one who had final authority on matters of setting and colour, and the one who drew the character portraits.

I was a bit of a zealot for the BRP system in the early years – I wouldn't hear of it being other than perfect. Mostly we debated each and every rule interpretation, but ultimately decisions came down to me, and I remember some tedious arguments as well as some ugly ones. Paul once stormed out of the house after a heated quarrel about whether he could have his crossbow strung out of combat (he wanted to bushwhack somebody).

I think it all held together because we all had good will, compatible wants, and friendship outside the game. We probably reached a golden point of trust and harmony about '92/93, when I had pretty much carte blanche over scene creation and sequence of events, and we were mostly ignoring the rules. Combat had become set pieces against weaker foes for the most part.

What we got out of it
I'll always remember a conversation with his mother that Brett related to me. It was supposed to say something about his mother, but said something else about Brett.

"Why do you play these games?"
"Because you can't have a sword in real life."
"Yes, you can."
"But you can't..." [you fill in the blank]

We were all first-class dreamers back then. Some of us wanted to understand the mindset of premodern people, and some of us just wanted to be able to use a sword.

There were two people (Dave and Brett) who 'powergamed', which is to say 'paid close attention to character development on a mechanical level'. In both their cases, it was because they had a character they wanted and they weren't yet there, but also for survival, as they tended to be the front line. Tristam would raise skills like Singing while the other two were working on their weapons. We enjoyed working with that system, and working out how fast each character could run, the SIZ of my cat etc etc. Does the system work if we do this? Hmm, how about this?

(I found RQ a very satisfying system. At the time I thought it was highly 'logical' and 'realistic', which is to say that I approved of its modelling of reality and thought its outcomes reasonable.)

Along with this was the growing – I hardly know what to call it – fascination? obsession? with the setting of Glorantha. Talking about it, as related to the characters or not, in game or out, came close to being an end in its own right (during the early '90s we were scheduling 'bull sessions' for talking about the game). And the unholy brew of system and setting – how they interacted, what one meant for the other, what was cause and what effect – that was an inexhaustible topic.

(I loved Glorantha as a setting. I still admire Greg Stafford's imaginative touch with myth and legend – Cults of Prax was a very important text in my roleplaying career.)

The discussions flowed back into the game as an increased ease with the symbols of the world, and a greater solidity to the characters.

That's an overview of our techniques. Once again, it's a huge topic that I've simplified and schematised to some degree, and I'm sure to have missed something important. Any questions?

[James_Nostack]

Jeff, what was "at stake" in any one of the adventures in this game?  I mean, for the real people as players in the game.  I realize there were about a zillion iterations of people & characters over twenty-some years, but if you could pick one era where everyone seemed to be grooving at once... What was "up for grabs" in the fiction, what was up for you as a GM, and what was up for the players?