I can't remember how I got into roleplaying games. It happened somehow...the earliest games I remember playing are Top Secret, S.I., and MERP. However, these aren't the games I want to talk about. Instead, I want to mention the diceless gaming I used to do.

Over ten years ago, I used to game with a friend over the phone. We played several different "games" or "campaigns," in which either one of us would referee. Everything was diceless, and there were no stats or numbers anywhere. When he created his character, he just told me what sort of character he wanted to play, and that was it.

The game that really sticks out in my mind is one in which my friend was a bass player in a band. A lot of the game revolved around composing songs, getting gigs, releasing albums, and such. He had to deal with record company folks and the like. There was also some violence...I seem to recall that he got involved in some terrorist organization as well, at some point.

We played over the phone, for hours at a time. Narrative control was shared pretty evenly. But we were playing some pretty hard-core simulationism. I remember filling up notebooks, with notes on all of the band's recordings, shows played, money made, and so on. (Man, this seems really geeky.) Nevertheless, no dice were ever rolled, and mechanics were never specified. I took on the role of all NPCs, and, for resolution, we basically agreed on what seemed reasonable.

I've never had a gaming experience like this since. I guess, for a long time, I didn't think of what we were doing as role-playing at all, because we weren't playing D&D (for example), or some "system." For the longest time, I associated role-playing with some particular system.

Another "game" we would play would involve switching places, with respect to who was the GM at any given time. We would play diceless in this instance as well. But at any point, usually before something "big" would happen, the GM could call a "switch," so that I would now be the player, and he would become the GM. The character would not change. Ex:

Me: Okay, you're walking down a hallway. It's very dark.
Him: I stop for a moment and light a torch.
Me: Everything flares up for a moment as you singe the thick layer of cobwebs that coated the ceiling. The walls are made of rough hewn stone. You notice a few rust-colored stains on the floor.
Him: I pull out my knife, and slowly continue down the hallway. I'm listening intently for any sounds.
Me: Well, as you continue, you come to a wooden door. You think you hear a slight scratching on the other side. Switch.
Him: Okay. What do you do?
Me: I open the door slowly.
Him: Inside, you see an emaciated, naked man, digging a hole in the corner.

Anyone else had any experiences like this? This sort of gaming was extremely fun; I remember it fondly.

I did that dort of gaming constantly in junior high except for the "switch" part. The switch sounds extremely cool. I'd love to try that out.

You know, my wife used to do this exact same thing with a friend in high school...except she and her friend were hangers-on to popular metal bands. They'd talk on the phone, costume up with shared magazines (ie: "I'm wearing the black & red number on page 4"), and basically just role-play different scenarios with themselves and these bands for hours on end...structured and shared fantasizing.

Here on the Forge, we've often talked about an untapped market potential out there for RPGs, that the current simply does not reach the wider audience that would be interested, if only...

I think Luke's experiences and my wife's are a good indication that the market definitely does exist. That there are tons of (potential) role-players out there, who simply wouldn't touch a traditional RPG because of the stigmas and cultural perceptions, and the fact that they're big-ass manuals. AND they don't see what they're doing as role-playing, as even related to RPGs, even though that's exactly what it is.

As a pre-teen I remember doing a ton of "Verbal Adventures", which we tended to model on interactive fiction like Zork more than RPGs. (Somehow every RPG I owned other than Hero system ended up getting shot down by the fundamentalist Christian parents of various friends.)

They were chock full of railroading at first, as you'd expect from what was basically a text adventure played out between two people, but I seem to remember us branching out quite a bit and sharing narration somewhat. I do think that it helped stretch my improvisational muscles quite a bit, as most of the times someone said "Hey, let's play" I had nothing planned. (Doing this on car trips and at the beach I'd steal inspiration from things going on around me, making the experience an odd combination of improvisation and "I Spy".)

Hey Luke,
That Switch concept does sound wicked cool. Have you given any thought to putting together a document with some formalized guidelines for it? I for one would be interested.

Oh, and of course there's the obligatory mentioning of Universalis, which takes the whole "shared fantasy" idea and slaps a well-structured system on top of it. If you're interested in exploring this sort of play with dice and conflict handling, check out Universalis.

That said, I'll point out that Uni doesn't meet the qualifications that Raven (Greyorm) seems to be calling for. Uni is quite structured, and the book is very much a manual.

I agree with the sentiment that there's definitely a market for this sort of thing.

I came up with a Switch mechanic that was inspired by “Who’s Line is it Anyway”. The game in particular is a scene starts and someone on the sideline yells “Switch” after one of the characters says a line. They could say it any number of times to find the funniest statement. For example:

P1- So, is that your mother’s car?
P2- Why yes, it is.
P3- Switch.
P2- No, it’s my Aunt Harriet’s.
P3- Switch.
P2- No, it’s my dog’s.
P3- Switch.
P2- What car?

Well, my game started with wanting to get players to start thinking quicker, like brain storming within role playing. We tried a few different ways to make the game work: letting the PC switch with earned tokens, reversing switches and die rolling to determine the number of switches allowed, etc. However, it didn’t really work and the game kinda fell apart. You idea sounds great and I would like to see some guidelines too.

I've also done some off the cuff rpging like you've described over the years. In the past, I often felt the need to create mechanics to accompany it, especially in imitation of pre-existing games. I guess you could call those my own little Heartbreakers.

They were fun, but I wonder if it was really necessary to try to establish things like stats, rolling systems, etc in place. In fact, I've come to really believe that those things may have ended up being counterproductive. Mind you, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a system at all, but I think that, for myself, the emphasis on mechanics was a chimera.

One thing I believe would increase the number of people with experience rpging would be for folks that have really interesting settings, situations, etc in their heads to actually put those things out there first, without worrying about mechanics. Admittedly, that does seem to go a bit against the grain. However, I would point out that a number of activities already exist in the world that people may have experience with that are similar to rpgs.

Take Model U.N., for instance. Or the classic "Who gets into the Bombshelter" scenario that thousands of people have experienced at the highschool or college class level. Or, for that matter, plain old "play pretend" from you kiddie years.

One thing that I can imagine that would be interesting to see would be for publishers, especially genre fiction publishers, to add in "what if?" type scenarios at the end of novels. This seems like a straight forward idea, especially since game companies already publish fiction, either seperate from their game products, or within their game products as color ( WW comes to mind as the big promoter/offender in this category). Strangely, though, I have yet to see much direct crossover in this area.

Just some thoughts,
Robert

ethan_greer wrote: Hey Luke,
That Switch concept does sound wicked cool. Have you given any thought to putting together a document with some formalized guidelines for it? I for one would be interested.

Actually, Luke, the sort of play that you're describing is actually so common, it's almost comical. This happens occassionally - some guy who moved on to playing with systems, RPGs, discusses how they used to play without a system.

The reason you haven't heard more about this is merely because you ended up in the RPG crowd, and not in the "Sims" or freeformer crowds. Put it this way, there may be more people right now playing this way than play RPGs altogether. That is, it might be more common than playing with a system. Nobody's really sure, because play like you describe is actually even less accounted for than RPG play. So you can imagine.

Their ignorance of us is similar. Which is sorta shocking to me (that it's so deep on both sides), but there it is. Check out this thread: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=10202

Should give you an idea of how separated the RPG and "Sim" cultures are.

Perhaps I've lead you home to your long lost tribe, who knows?

Mike

Ah, simming. I guess I have heard of this...I was in my LGS one day and they closed early, because of a Star Trek event. I don't think I ever took things as far as these "simmers" do, and I doubt that I could get into it now.

I was never really introduced to that sort of thing. The gaming experiences I described actually didn't occur until after we had been exposed to RPGs. So, that sort of freeform, diceless gaming we were doing was inspired by RPG systems, but we didn't think of what we were doing as "playing a role-playing game."

Things could have turned out otherwise, I suppose, and I could have been a "simmer." However, I've never been interested in Star Trek or Star Wars, or any of the shows mentioned in the other thread.

Luke Sineath wrote: Things could have turned out otherwise, I suppose, and I could have been a "simmer." However, I've never been interested in Star Trek or Star Wars, or any of the shows mentioned in the other thread.

I've done a good bit of "freeform RP" on Yahoo Groups... a few Buffy games, a couple of different Harry Potter games, an SF game, and various other random bits.

The games I've been in have one or more "moderators" who are responsible for making up any rules, approving characters, and generally keeping order. There's no "system" in the formal paper RPG these-are-the-numbers-that-describe-things sense, but there are rules, and people in charge.

Generally, gameplay proceeds by consensus; if the players who have characters active in a scene agree that something happened, and no moderator steps in to say no, then it happened. One interesting bit in most games I've been in is the self-infliction of negative things -- the moderators generally create an overall plot, but there are often literally dozens of players, and even more characters (pretty much all the ones I've been in allow players to have more than one character)... so players are largely responsible for creating their own subplots, in conjunction with other players. And to do that, players will often set up their own characters for something nasty.

Another aspect of this is that effects on a PC are generally up to the player of that PC. I can say, for example, "Harry takes a punch at Malfoy," if I'm playing Harry, but it's up to Malfoy's player whether or not I hit, and what the effects of that blow are. This can, of course, result in the old "I hit you! No you didn't!"... but it's self-limiting to a great extent. Players who won't let anything bad happen to their characters find that no one else wants to play with them. Players who insist on narrating what happens to other people's characters are generally banned by the moderators.

Usually the game is based on a TV show, movie, or book. In most games, people have the option of playing "canon" characters or "made-ups". Some groups stick to canon better than others, some moderators are better than others, and there are munchkins of sorts... It has its own problems, and its own terminology around those problems... which I'm still getting familiar with, myself. But there are lots of people doing it.

--Travis

I'm sort of surprised this thread is still going.

When I was seven years old, I saw Dungeons and Dragons at the Emporium (now bought, I think by Macy's) in the SF Bay Area in California. I knew my dad liked Science Fiction so I bought it for him for Christmas. He didn't do much with it, so I figured out how it worked and GMed my first game for my family. This was 1976 or very early '77.

My dad made a character named Boromir Jr., my mom made a character named Galadriel, and my sister made a character named Goldberry. My mother and sister hung back doing nothing. My dad's character charged boldly forward into every conflict.

I killed his ass dead with some goblins in the second or third room.

He made another character named Gimli, a dwarf. I killed him too. Then he made some other character and I killed him.

Then my family wouldn't play with me any more, so I had to go play with some friends instead.

My earlierst RP experiences were on the playground in grade school. We played an advanced form of "let's pretend", in which one of us was the GM and the other the player. Later on we would graduate to D&D and some Palladium games, TMNT and Heroes Unlimited, Robotech, etc.

One of the first and best games I ever played in was one of the first I didn't GM for. My friend Dwayne ran it, and I played, over the course of nearly an entire school year.

My character? Little Bo Peep. My flock of sheep had vanished into the bid dark scary forest, and I had to go and find them. I had my shepherd's crook and a cloak.

As it turned out, each of the sheep (once I found them) had mysteriously been granted magical powers. One sheep was telepathic (I used this one to communicate with the rest of them). One was endowed with herculean strength. One could fly. One breathed fire. Etc. Each sheep I found increased my range of available "tools" with which to continue the adventure.

Somewhere along the way I ended up on a spacecraft (apparently the sheep had been abducted by aliens), wearing a spacesuit and carrying a sentient bioluminescent blob in my pocket. Naturally the spacecraft was outfitted with a holodeck analog, in this case a device called the Mannikin Maker. It allowed me to create an android to my specifications, and then generated a virtual environment within which to duel my creation. Looking back, it actually makes sense- it was a combat training simulator that could be tailored for use by any sentient species, no matter what morphology they possessed.

Anyway, the great majority of the game took place in this simulated world, with me trying to escape and the mannikin hunting me. Since I didn't know how to turn the thing off, I couldn't disengage it until I had defeated the thing. Eventually I saved it's life, and it gave up trying to kill me. We escaped together and made it to the alien headquarters, where with the help of the sheep and the blob, we managed to activate the self destruct and steal another ship to return home with.

We had no rules, no dice, and the playground landscape was our only medium. And I've never played a more enjoyable game since.

(apologies to those who have already heard this story, I'm pretty sure I posted it once a while back)

Hmm, 1987, just finishing my teaching degree. Borrowed the Basic D&D set at the library (yes, Danish libraries stocked RPGs then and still do, but only big mainstream games). I was 26.

I was into board games and had no idea what I was about to do. Read the rules and asked my wife if she would like to play. We made a basic character and played the introduction scenario by the book. Her character died quickly after meeting a carrion crawler(?).

We both thought "hey, this is kind of...cool". Next week I found a game shop and bought what seemed to be the coolest game they had, Call of Cthulhu 4th edition. Read it, asked my wife...you know the drill.

We played the small scenario Paper Chase from the rule book, and it was an awesome experience for both of us, and we quickly began to introduce friends and eventually mine and her students to RP games. It's no big deal, but it still makes me smile when I think about it :)

Per

Some of these posts reminded me - I forgot to mention exquisite corpse play:
http://www.corpse.org/
www.exquisitecorpse.com/

More round robin storytelling, but often have RPG elements.

Mike