* Added a third character, and it wasn’t as disruptive as I had feared. Now we have a Wizard, an Aware and a brand new Tainted. Adding him has expanded the setting even more and it’s right on the edge of Too Much. I think it’ll be time to start pulling the threads together a little tighter.
* I prepped four Threats in advance, and it was a useful exercise. I had sketched out five because I thought it’d be interesting to have one of every Threat flavor, but one of them just didn’t grab me. It was Passion, but it related to a single NPC and I came up empty on a countdown clock. I know I don’t need to clock every Threat, but nothing else really jumped out at me about it so I put that away. For now.
Thinking about custom Threat moves for the next session. I think they’d be fun to sketch out, at the very least.
* The interaction between the Start of Session move and Threat prep was actually really fruitful this time. Rather than spinning wildly out of control, the rumors fed right back into the events and the relationship map. So that was interesting. I’m curious to see what episode 3 looks like.
* Man is it a relief to run an easy game. And really, Urban Shadows is as easy to run as any other PbtA game. There are only a couple things that make it hard, and that has to do with suddenly adding new NPCs and dreaming up debts on the spot.
* We spent a good bit of time within the Court of the Moon, one of the four fae courts that kind of run/own Dark Phoenix. Totally bonkers within the court, very stream-of-consciousness and weird. Animal-headed people, Alice in Wonderland style insanity.
* Probably the one place that PbtA games can sometimes leave me feeling exhausted is in how moves snowball. I already tend, as a GM when I run more traditional games, to run from crisis to crisis and leave literally no downtime at all. And man is that easy to do with the snowballing. I’ve got a couple character carrying harm and they’re gonna need to work to get some downtime. Which I suppose is by design.
* Lots of advancing tonight! I think everyone got one regular Advance, and the Wizard got her first Corruption advance as well. She took uh…I’m trying to remember…oh right, the true name direct damage thing. Not quite straight murder but it can dispense of individual NPCs with ease. I’m mixed on that move, to be honest, although it is fun to watch the Corruption ratchet up so fast. Probably by the fourth session she’ll get more circumspect about Corruption.
Otherwise, yeah, game ran fine. I’m not feeling inspired to do a blow-by-blow of events for this one. No standout scenes but it’s great, in retrospect, how eager and willing everyone is to throw out great ideas for MC moves. Hell, they practically run it themselves.
I think I’m going to see more interesting developments come out of the third turn’s Start of Session moves, and how they fit with my Threat prep.
The helper sheet is missing one of the five Threat types.
Three Threats feels thin.
That is all.
Actually I wish the faction moves, MC moves, threat moves, agenda, principles and names were all on a single sheet of paper. I mean practically speaking, who doesn’t draw big relationship maps for this kind of game?
A conversation I had recently with some of my players about running Cartel at some point reminded me of my most notable transformation throughout a lifetime of roleplaying.
The conversation basically went like this (and also took place online, in sidebar, with a couple folks):
Them: “I really don’t want to play Cartel.”
Me: “Oh really? I thought it looked like good drama.”
Them, pick one:
• “God it looks tacky. This is real crime, you know.”
• “I hate drugs, the drug war, kids on drugs, all of it.”
• “Nope.”
At least two of these people have watched and enjoyed Breaking Bad, Narcos, other movies related to the cartels. One of them is a reader of Mexican narcofiction like The Black Minutes.
To be fair, the other half of my world is all-in. It’ll get to a table sooner or later but this explains why it’s been so frigging hard to set it up. But this whole thing reminded me of the topic of credibility in RPGs, and my relationship to that topic.
It cuts across a lot of different ideas, so hold on tight. If you’re not good at reading the OP and all the comments, this might not be the right thread for you.
The Way-Back Machine
There was a stretch, basically from when I started in 1980 until the mid-90s, where RPGs were explicitly and exclusively escapist fun for me. In my experience, any and all efforts to treat them as anything more than that were universally terrible and borderline dangerous. Minds Eye Theater LARP was the worst offender, with make-believe power and domination structures bleeding hard into the real world without any formal intervention by facilitators.
I’d also seen efforts to earnestly treat roleplaying as a form of psychodrama as well, either formally via design intent or informally as an exercise by ambitious GMs. Those were universally terrible and borderline dangerous in my experience. The goal was to address and possibly even resolve deep-psych stuff via the “safety” of an RPG: phobias, trauma, interpersonal problems. What can I say? It was the wild west, nobody knew better, the promise was powerful.
Then you had the folks, aiming for “high drama,” finding themselves in the deep end of the pool. If the goal is drama, well, you look at dramatic genre fiction for inspiration/emulation. And you end up with rape stories, murdered families, extremes of unpleasant human experience. There’s a lot of terrible genre fiction to pull from and to hide behind.
They’re two different goals and boy do they get easily intertwined: the desire for powerful human drama, and the desire for powerful human experience.
It’s really no wonder, in retrospect, that I – among many, maybe most of my peers – had come to understand RPGs as strictly escapist entertainment.
I remember a late-night BS session at GenCon…96, maybe, with major design and publishing luminaries. I was one of a couple up-and-comers who had gotten the tap on the shoulder. Steve Perrin, IIRC, asked “so is there an audience, you think, for more mainstream settings and topics?” And my answer, from where I was sitting in 1996, had to be “Nope. No way. Every game needs some woo-woo, something escapist, some way to goose the empowerment fantasy.” Everyone in that room shrugged and sighed and drank their beers.
That’s a very common position out in the big world beyond small-press gaming, and if your personal roleplaying experience has mostly been in the small-press scene hopefully you understand that, at least in the abstract.
I’m not sure when that shifted for me, but it did. I wrote this essay for those people as one of my final gestures in The Business: http://www.rpg.net/oracle/essays/beginnerrpgs.html. The copyright is 1999 but an early draft of it was floating around in ’97 or so. 18 years ago? My personal journey has continued from there.
And We’re Back
Bringing this back to the subject of credibility, there’s this confluence of (at least) two different ideas happening. To recap: intensity of drama, intensity of experience. Two different play and design goals even if they look similar. And as long as credibility is a question, I think that’s why RPGs are so easily dismissed as escapist diversions.
Drama is where my personal play needs continue to lie. I think that’s because of my skepticism about roleplaying’s ability to handle personal experience. I mean the psychodrama part. I’ve always been super-iffy about games that poke at grief, trauma, addiction, dysfunction. Edgy/experimental games that burble out of Game Chef (for example) often trigger my skepticism on this front. Mostly I have deep doubts about designers’ ability to handle material with real-world implications.
But my skepticism about designers’ capacity to handle real-world human experience doesn’t make it objective truth! I know (in the abstract) that plenty of folks get that out of their games, and plenty of designers are fruitfully and successfully bringing that to the table.
So I find myself at the crossroads of that stuff with Cartel, surrounded by folks who haven’t gazed at their navel as intently as I do. I’m thinking about the drama; they’re thinking about addiction, celebrating real-world violence, reducing something problematic and terrible to “just a game.” You know, for escapist entertainment.
It’s interesting to me that the roleplaying community at large is often totally okay with other media tackling problematic material but we’re often way-not-okay when an RPG tackles the same material.
I get that, and I think it comes down to a credibility gap at some point: we don’t trust the designer, or the facilitator, or the other people at the table. At some point, we don’t want to take that risk. I’m not persuaded that this is something you can address procedurally, like via an X-card or something. You can’t unring the bell, although you can stop going down a particular line of thought. But if I’m watching a movie about something traumatic and terrible, I (at least) have this trust that the writer and director have worked harder, researched harder, pulled in more experts. If I’m reading a novel or listening to someone’s album, I don’t have to rely on my fellow readers/listeners to approach the material correctly; I’m answerable only to myself.
So why do we watch Breaking Bad and Narco and Scarface but turn our noses up at Cartel?
I propose it comes down to credibility, and this impulse to hold games out at arms’ length as amusing diversions and not creative platforms every bit as legitimate as novels and movies.
Seeing “oh yeah I saw this game in playtest X years ago…” type comments is always a healthy reminder of just where in the small-press gaming food chain I actually am.
I don’t know that I’d necessarily want to change that! I mean, first off, there’s the social and actual capital required to make that happen: the connections that are only possible from either being proximate to the creators (via address or convention attendance) or being a creator. Which, you know, maybe at some point.
There’s this weird thing about social capital, though, right? Like, the source of my meager supply is mostly in being a late adopter with a good memory. Oh hey, remember Psi Run? 2006? Paul is finally talking about it now. Hey, I nearly forgot about Our Last Best Hope, it’s already been 2 years. Two years! That’s several lifetimes in designer years.
Kickstarter of course has juiced the cycle, and God bless them because that’s awesome. All the little microcommunities that have cropped up too; I too was one of those obnoxious insiders when I was playtesting Mouse Guard and Torchbearer and, hey, what a surprise: I was going to BurningCon and getting way more exposure to the creators.
I mean, jeez, make no mistake: I’m not actually angry or hostile or anything about any of this! Just kind of amused, largely at myself, at the cycle of things. I was basement-deep with FASA and Pinnacle once upon a time as well. And man it was a lot harder back then to actually break in. I roll(ed) my eyes a lot at the gatekeeper talk after those awards this year. I mean really, a lot.
Probably the biggest gatekeeper in my life right now is me, if I’m being honest with myself. I mean heck, I’ve got an ashcan of Cartel here and damned if I can get it to the table with anyone. That’s not especially insider-y; anyone can buy it. And of course I’ve already seen the “when I played this several years ago” comments, those healthy reminders of one’s place in the food chain. But it’s a fact: my life and the lives of those in my circles just don’t allow the sheer volume of play time needed to be able to spend evenings on risky ventures. Like pretending we’re elves in some novel way that maybe isn’t that fun yet.
All this dumb introspection ties back to my long-range thoughts about what I’d do with a Patreon. My ego says I’d like to use it to raise funds for artwork for my own design projects; my super-ego says my niche is to be the guy who helps sell everyone else’s long-tail backstock. Nothing but me says I can’t be both.
My internal gatekeeper says it’s more valued to be someone with insights into the next two years than it is to have Opinions about the last five. Weird, right? I’m sure the vast majority of folks who read the Indie Game Reading Club are more practically interested in what’s already out than what’s coming out.
Just backed it, but it took reading through the whole project for me to buy into what he’s doing.
Wrath is like a best-of collection of key concepts that are both instant turn-ons and turn-offs. So I back it with very mixed feelings.
* Empire builder game: yay!
* FATE based: boo! (Sorry!)
* Episodic play: yay!
* GMless: uhhh…depends! Not my favorite RPG configuration but then again this isn’t exactly an RPG.
* Troupe style play: also depends! Mostly I dislike the experience, but it seems good and necessary given the game’s goals.
I’m hoping to get some hands-on time with this when I see Phil Lewis at the end of October.
Since I’ve got uh…some time on my hands today, I’m finally getting around to formal US prep.
It’s virtually identical to off the shelf Apocalypse World, with Threats (no Fronts). There’s also an overarching theme they call a Storm, which I guess is a super Front. I’ve read that chapter and I can’t make it stick, dunno why not.
One thing that surprised me is that they didn’t actually say how many Threats to cook up, nor how many Threats per Front. I seem to recall that AW recommends…four maybe? As much as I adore postapoc fiction, I don’t know why I haven’t run it a lot more
Anyway,I can’t decide if leaving that out is purposeful or just an oversight. If it’s purposeful, maybe a little discussion about how many Threats is “enough” would have been nice. I mean it’s no big, easily handled. Just surprising.
It’s cute! Very easy, don’t know that it has a ton of replay value. It’s a very solid drinking/family night game though. Missus thinks she’ll get five plays before she’s done. Haven’t added any cards though, and there are two expansions, so she may be right about the basic game.
Quick overview: you are building a tableau of cards that trigger on certain die values. Mostly you want to make as much money as possible, although there are also cards that let you take money from people as well.
You roll dice and earn in any of the cards that tell you they activate. Some score on everyone’s turn, others score only on your own turn, some score only on others’ turns. So you’re trying to nail down a wide spread of numbers, a lot like Catan.
There is kind of a neat evolution in the game, though: one of the first of the four Landmark cards you’re trying to build gives you the ability to roll two dice instead of one. That means the 1 card never fires, and the 2 and 3 get really rare. But then there are higher-value cards, in the 10-12 zone, that rely on you owning those low-number cards. The shift in play from a flat roll to a curve is really neat and interesting. Don’t know that I’ve seen that trick before.
Anyway, totally a filler. Play it with your parents, play it when you’re sick. I like it and I’m glad I have it.
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