[Edit: Traduction française disponible chez ptgptb.]
A big challenge in role-playing games is that they are usually read several times in greatly differing circumstances. In this section I focus on their ease of use at the game table. I’m not talking about system choices and mechanics, but strictly about how well the book supports game play.
3. Use in Play
At the game table, the reader will be trying to find specific information quickly, particularly rules information.
[Edit: Traduction française disponible chez ptgptb.]
Naturally, a single mistake probably won’t do it unless it’s ginormous and egregious, but a few too many and I’ll move on to the next game on my long wish list.
2. Readability
A big challenge in role-playing games is that they are usually read several times in greatly differing circumstances.
The leisurely reading you do on the bus when you just received your book from a Kickstarter campaign.
The selective reading you do to familiarize yourself with the setting and make a character for next Friday’s meeting with your gaming group.
The studious reading your friend is doing to prep for that same game as game-master.
The frantic reading in the middle of a game session to locate a particular piece of information or interpret a rule.
I know first-hand how difficult it can be to address all these needs; for example, a book may be perfectly well organized to present the setting information in an orderly fashion, but make it a nightmare to retrieve in a hurry at the game table. Today, I want to examine the ease of reading proper, all the kinds of reading we do when we are not actually playing.
I’m a gaming junkie, especially where it comes to role-playing games. I’ve been gaming for decades, I have played or run at least 177 RPGs as of this writing, not counting different editions, playtests, or homebrews, and my shelves are overflowing with more I have yet to play. All this to say, I want to love your game. But it’s amazing how many published games still turn me right off because of mistakes that could be avoided with moderate effort, and sometimes even quite easily.
Not that that writing games is that easy, I know! There will be competing objectives, budget and schedule considerations, and so forth. But there are also some elements that can be incorporated in the planning, and hurdles that are make-or-break. In our cottage industry of devoted hobbyists, some mistakes are being made over and over. Even free games can be ruined so thoroughly by some of these mistakes that they lose the chance for a good review, which can’t be why you’re putting them out there!
One big challenge for game publishers is that there are several ways to approach the reader or, if you want, several opportunities to lose a gamer, so let’s look at them separately.
What makes a good horror RPG? Rather, what has made a good horror RPG?
Was it atmosphere? Something about the mechanics? Hammer Horror soundtrack? Creepy GM? Haunted playspace? […]
I posted my answer there but it go so long, I realized I should turn it into a blog post! This also gives me a chance to provide links.
I’m not a fan of horror in general because it rarely reaches me. In movies in particular, it usually pairs violence and gore with repetition and cliche. For me, well-done horror is something like Identity (2003) or even some of the better X Files episodes: a lot of atmosphere, and threats that are not just about brutality and death.
Atmosphere: I’ve been in a few successful horror role-playing games, and many unsuccessful ones. The best I played was a campaign based on Clint Krause’s Roanoke game (Clint Krause Games 2006, out of print). My husband Edmund was the game-master and ran it at our local game club; we had a large ensemble cast that could change from week to week based on attendance, and a group of players known for their banter and kibitzing (including me), so horror was a challenge. Edmund payed a lot of attention to atmosphere. He talked to us beforehand about the genre, and asked us to play only if we were willing to get in the spirit, not goof around; the mood of the game was described as Brotherhood of the Wolf meets Lost. He had a soundtrack, sound effects, props, low lighting, etc. I posted detailed actual play reports on RPG.net, where you can get a better sense of how the game felt.
Tension, Transparency, and Temptation: It’s useful to have some sort of mechanic to keep track of and ratchet up the suspense. Examples include the Humanity/Taint/Corruption tracks in a number of horror games, which generally apply to individual characters; or the countdown clocks in Apocalypse World (lumpley games 2010). It’s most effective if the players see their fate coming incrementally closer, and if they have an incentive to court danger. Roanoke uses the Doom pool, which allows players to gain a maximum success on a die roll at the cost of adding one Doom point to the pool that will determine the endgame phase of the campaign: Heroic Escape, Tragic Escape, Heroic Death, or Terrible Death.
Threats: Successful threats may vary from person to person. If you’re not familiar with the “passions” as used in Unknown Armies (Atlas Games, any edition), you should go take a look, I think they provide a good model. Basically, every character’s personality in UA is defined by three passions: a rage passion (what will unfailingly get under their skin); a noble passion (even a monster may love animals); and a fear passion, which is codified into five categories (violence, helplessness, isolation, the Unnatural, and the Self.) Reading about the types of fears can help a GM think of more varied threats, and identify ones more likely to get a response from the characters and players at the table. In Roanoke, each player has to pick a fear as one of their character’s traits, so they’re directly telling the GM how to draw them in.
Misinformation: A lot of the mood and tension rely on the characters’ imperfect understanding of what is going on. In our Roanoke game, the GM used the Bag o’ Rumours: he wrote little snippets of rumours and had us draw them in secret at the beginning of a game session, as something only that player’s character would know. Some were true, some were false, but most were a little bit of each. They worked very well to sow doubt, provide foreshadowing, and serve as bargaining chips (“I know a secret!”)
Clickable relationship map, Roanoke
Tangled Relationships: A lot of the player buy-in, the spread of uncertainty, and the ratcheting up of suspense comes from or is greatly enhanced by a web of relationships — positive and negative — between the cast of characters. Even if the game is planned as a one-off, I recommend taking the time to establish some allies and antagonists among player characters as well as with primary NPCs.
Boundaries: Because horror gaming relies so much on (A) playing with our darkest fears and (B) shared mood, it’s prudent to have some way of controlling content so that the players will have fun even as the characters are being put through the wringer. In Roanoke we used what we called a Veto card (that was before we had heard the expression “X Card“). Each player got a card they could flash when they felt someone was bringing in elements inappropriate to the setting or the group. It didn’t matter whether it was for mood, story, or personal reasons, it was non-negotiable (although it was okay to ask questions to clarify the scope of the veto.)
For the past few days I’d had what I thought was a bruise on my left forearm. That’s not something unusual, I’m very clumsy on the best of days and these are not the best of days; and right now I bruise extra easily. But then a second similar bruise developed a little above the first, and by the third or fourth day, I woke up feeling another one in my armpit. I knew then those were no bruises and I called my oncologist. Long story short: she had me come in, then sent me to Radiology for ultrasound testing, looking for blood clots. Which were found.
My doctor said the likelihood of a clot migrating to the lungs was low, but all the same she decided to put me on blood thinners. I get five days with self-injections of Lovenox twice daily, followed by up to three months taking two Pradaxa tablets daily.
[Update: The doctor changed her mind about the latter and put me on Warfarin instead because Pradaxa is a recent drug and there is insufficient study data on dosage for my weight range. That means I need to get a blood test on Monday, whoop-de-doo. Also, the name Warfarin has always made me suspect that it’s manufactured by the makers of Frenzon.]
My first thought when I started worrying about the not-actually-bruises was”Oh great, why does it have to be one thing after the other?” But then my next thought was to appreciate that, like mooks in a classic Bruce Lee movie, the boo-boos patiently wait their turn to attack one at a time rather than all at once…
During Cycle 3, I developed an unpleasant abscess which ended up with me at the Emergency Room. Since then I’ve been checked regularly by a surgeon and seen my oncologist a couple of times. The abscess is healing well but my oncologist wanted it to get a chance to finish completely healing so Cycle 4 is a half-treatment: yesterday I received Herceptin and Perjeta, which don’t depress white blood cell counts, so I won’t need to take a WBC booster this cycle and I will continue healing without the two-week interruption I would otherwise face.
Playing Mint Tin Pirates during chemo
This means that a seventh cycle will be tacked on at the end (should be mid-August) to give me Carboplatin and Taxotere and reach a total of six doses each. (See here for the write-up on this cocktail of drugs.) I’m not thrilled about having a seventh session, but it does buy me a little break in the middle of the course of treatment.
Dr. Valentine, Chief Felinotherapist, is on the job
I also received good news of two kinds. First the oncologist examined me and agreed that the tumour was reduced (it can’t be located by touch anymore), which is why she was willing to give me the half-treatment cycle in the first place. Yay! Chemistry is working!
Second, I just got my Medi-Cal benefits card. This takes a huge weight off my shoulders — though sadly, I have developed the reflex of immediately wondering what will go wrong to ruin good news.
First, my deepest condolences to all those affected by the terrible murders at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. There is nothing comparable to the chilling, senseless grief left by such an event.
I woke up early this morning and saw the sad news about yet another damn mass shooting, this time targeting a gay bar on Pride Month. And I also was warned by the CNN headline that called it “terrorism” — I knew somewhere in the article I would discover that the shooter had brown skin and might have read the Quran at some point. Reading the article confirmed this, before any names or details had even been released.
A violent crime motivated by homophobia, and reported with blithely oblivious racism.
I went back to bed for several hours, knowing that today would suck.
When I got up for real, I checked the news outlets for details. By then we had a name, Omar Mateen, and selfies for the shooter, some background, and a body count revised horribly upwards.
We learned that Omar Mateen had worked as a licensed security guard and a guard in a juvenile detention center, had a concealed carry permit, and had obtained his assault weapon and handgun legally. But he also had a history of domestic violence — what a great idea to allow him to own firearms!
And a few hours later yet, the media have come up with their narrative: they’re biting hard into the Islamic terrorism meme because Mateen, twenty minutes into his hostage-taking and shooting spree, called 911 to claim his actions were in the name of ISIS/ISIL. Now they’re pulling on tenuous threads to weave a better connection, ignoring the massive amount of information we have that report him as a man with a fixation for wielding authority through force, the kind of man who wants to become a police officer for the wrong reasons and fails, the kind of man who uses domestic violence and destroys his marriage then becomes angry and resentful, a man who got agitated and angry just for seeing two men kiss on television.
But no, let’s confidently talk about connections to Islamic terrorism and not about the painfully ordinary tale of toxic masculinity, homophobia, and ridiculously lax gun laws. And let’s do it in a racist way, because terrorism can only be performed by brown people called Omar, not by white men from Indiana called James.
My friend Dorene’s mother just turned 100 this week, and there was a big celebration yesterday. After much hesitation I decided not to go and expose myself to so many people’s germs while undergoing chemo, but I did manage to contribute. When preparing the party Dorene wanted to give away mementos or party favours; I came up with the idea of a card deck using some of the many photos of Primetta, the centenarian, for the face cards. Primetta happens to be a fierce card player.
In addition to the family photos I used the Open-source software Scribus for the layout, card graphics from Openclipart for the pip cards, the ornate border snagged from one of the vintage photos to create a frame, and DriveThruCards for the card printing. DriveThruCards was fantastic; not only do they offer tutorials and templates for Scribus and InDesign, but their support is is helpful and friendly. (Shout-out to Brian!)
I had help from Dorene for photo selection, and most importantly from my husband Edmund for photo correction and resizing so I could just drop them in the layout without having to do all the contrast and colour adjustments. As usual with cards printed via DriveThruCards, the cards are pleasant to use and the deck shuffles well. Dorene ended up ordering 90 copies of the deck so she would have enough for the guests and for Primetta to give away to her friends at card games. [Edit: Primetta loved it! Big success. 🙂 ]
Here is what the cards look like. As mentioned in the image that shows Primetta’s mini-biography, she had quite an adventurous youth — she was in Italy when it entered World War II!
Last night my husband and friends voted in the California primary in what was dubbed this year “Super Tuesday IV” of the U.S. presidential election, then we watched the returns with friends. (I don’t get to vote but my naturalization process should be complete in time to vote in the November elections.)
Early in the evening I started seeing acrimonious posts on social media between friends who supported Bernie Sanders and friends who supported Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination. Some are saying “It’s over, Mr. Sanders, get behind the presumptive nominee;” which really means “STFU Bernie supporters, support my candidate.” The latter answer with “Our candidate said he was in until the national convention in July, he’s not going to fold now,” which really means “No you STFU, I’ll support who I want to.”
I understand both sides and they both have good points, but I find the bickering infuriating. Besides, the votes and in the candidates have announced their decisions — social media rants are not going to change that. So I’m going to tell you what to do too, and it involves reaching out to your candidate instead of antagonizing your friends. Continue reading “How to tell the candidates what to do”→
We’ve heard about a number of prodigiously insulting marketing decisions at the intersection of merchandising, pop culture and genre fiction, such as the disappearance of Black Widow from lines of Avengers merchandise and Rey from Star Wars: The Force Awakens merchandise. It’s been made clear that boys are the target market for toys. But do you ever wonder if it’s not also a deliberate ploy to manipulate supply and demand for price gouging?
We just learned that to mark the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek series, CBS has licensed toy company Mattel to produce a line of Barbie-style dolls based on Lieutenant Uhura, Captain Kirk, and Commander Spock. I immediately checked on Amazon, because I want Lt. Uhura on my desk! But I discovered that she’s unavailable, even though the other two can be purchased just fine for $34.99 each.
What gives?
But Amazon went on to offer me other lopsided-deals on memorabilia Barbie-like dolls. How about Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman figures based on the recent movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice? Hey, good news: all three are available. And priced at…
This is the third of a three-part 
The Reef 