Indie Game Reading Club
Indulgent 2016 Retrospective and Looking Forward

This was a pretty good year for the Indie Game Reading Club. Readership is up, engagement has been mostly good. I set up a website – a placeholder, really, for the domain name, for whatever I do with it down the road. Which is possibly, or probably, nothing more than what I’m doing now.

To brainstorm about this post, I went to January 2016 and started going forward. I’ve written a lot this year, good grief.

Games Played

Edge of the Empire/Force and Destiny mashup. Failed because I forgot once again how much I hate working with FFG’s system.

Mutant Genlab Alpha: Nice game, I looove Mutant: Year Zero but this is not that. Enough stuff bugged me that it wasn’t hard to walk away from. But it was a very amusing one-shot at Rincon, as well.

Burning Wheel: Three times! Ran once, played twice. Played once, when a buddy ran his Mechwarrior hack, played again at BigBadCon with Gary Montgomery​​ and Andi Carrison​​, and once when I overprepped and then ran a completely meh session at Dreamation for Ralph Mazza​​, Bret Gillan​​, Carly Knight​​, Keith Stetson​​ and a fourth guy whose name I can’t spell so Plus won’t autocomplete it for me. With the release of the BW Codex this year, I’m feeling drawn to it again.

Mutant Year Zero: Ran a table of it at Dreamation. Fun, not awesome but fun. Great, great table of people. Who was there? Uh… Brand Robins​​, Misha B​​, Carly Knight​​, M. P. O’Sullivan​​ and Mikael Andersson​​. Marvelous table. I feel like I squandered it.

Sagas of the Icelanders: It is good every single fucking time. Ran it twice as a convention one-shot, in fact. It needs/deserves to be a campaign someday.

The One Ring: My biggest and most successful campaign. I love it. I want to return to the Darkening of Mirkwood campaign in 2017. It’ll probably be one of my “17 sessions of two different games” goal.

Urban Shadows: Ran a very short campaign of this for my wife and another couple. Deeply disappointed that we couldn’t keep it moving. Life just keeps on keeping on.

No Thank You, Evil!: Two sessions for my daughter and wife. It’s been fun both times. I got to use the Story Cards supplement the second time and it was terrific. Highest marks.

The Sprawl: Pretty okay. Delivers exactly what it says it will, no more and no less. You want to run a cyberpunk caper? Play The Sprawl. The end.

Seco Creek Vigilance Committee: One-shot freeform by Keith Stetson​​. One of the few one-shot freeforms I can honestly say I want to play again.

Mars 244: The Liberation of Sisyphus: This is Rachel E.S. Walton​​’s superhack of Montsegur 1244, and it was such a pleasure and such a great table. My BigBadCon facilitation is probably the best freeform experience of my life so far.

Soth: Really fun session at BigBadCon, but it’s in a weird space in that it’s a…2-shot, maybe? I feel like it needs either two sessions or a 6-hour slot to get through the whole thing. You could maybe kick it in the ass and push through in four hours, but IMO it would feel rushed.

Zombie World: test-run at Rincon with Mark Diaz Truman​​. It’s promising! It was a good one-shot.

Primetime Adventures: run by the inestimable Jason Corley​​. Amazingly fun experience. I wish I had more faith that my home group could maintain tone and focus because I’d really like to run it at home at some point.

Headspace: It’s got some problems but fundamentally I do like it and so do my players. Not in a great head space (!) to run it right now but it might come back to the table at some point.

3:16 Fury Road: homebrew hack of 3:16 that’s not as catastrophic as other 3:16 convention games I’ve played (also with MadJay Brown​​) but just kind of dumb.

Meridian: cold first run of Christian Griffen​​’s newest freeform storygame. I’d totally bust this out at a convention again.

Undying: not a good game for me or our group. I’m sure it’s marvelous with the right people though.

EDIT I knew I’d forgotten some!

Superhuman is maybe the most compact, yet complete, little freeform I’ve ever experienced. Played at a strong table, could have easily gone on for several more hours. One sheet of paper!

Sorcerer finally, via Judd Karlman​’s Dictionary of Mu cryptobarsoomian planetary romance weirdness setting. Put me in the mood to try straight Sorcerer at some point.

I’m sure I’m forgetting other con games as well.

Conventions Attended

Dreamation 2016, one of the BEEEEG indie gatherings and it was my first time there. I loved it, I wish I could just live at that con all year long. And, alas, I can’t go this year.

RinCon 2016, a local convention which continues to surprise me at how good the indie gaming track is there. I really wish there was something better, something similar here in Phoenix. Short drive, though, and I’m happy to make it.

BigBadCon 2016, another marvelous experience. I think of it kind of as the west coast version of the BEEEEG indie gathering at Dreamation. Smaller, tighter but a very focused and serious place to play games.

Shit Stirred

#indiegameaday2016 of course. Duh. Might do it again, might not. Diappointed that it caused problems and bad feelings for some folks, thrilled at the positive content. Very mixed experience and I don’t regret it one bit.

Games Put Out For Review

Just one, Robot Park. I’m very close to putting another one out. My real-American-West game, Misfortune, is stalled until I can come up with a better framing. It wasn’t an awesome year for me for design or hacking or whatever you want to call it.

Games I’m Looking Forward to in 2017

Of course there will probably be a dozen new games that come out that I don’t even know about. But as of right now, on the cusp of the new year and assuming nothing else appears on the horizon, this is what I’m looking forward to.

Space Wurm vs Moonicorn, for starters. We start that one on 1/3/17 and I’m super pumped.

The Clay That Woke, once SWvM wraps.

Apocalypse World 2E. I miss it!

Burning Wheel, hopefully as a player. I want someone else to run this and I’ve got a good candidate.

Wrath of the Autarch. Hopefully it’s not a huge time investment. Sure looks interesting though.

Coriolis, because come on. Space adventure from Fria Ligan, yes please.

Soth. I think it’d be a gas. The time factor is making it an iffy proposition.

Godbound. I keep reading it and I like what I see. I don’t have a lot of luck with OSR stuff (well…I didn’t have luck with Stars Without Number, I should say) but there’s enough different here that maybe it’ll be different this time?

Tales from the Loop: probably because I’m going to like what Fria Ligan has done with it a lot more once I actually read the text. Right now it’s a fanboy backing on Kickstarter.

Epyllion seems like it will inevitably get run at some point. It is just so tight and so good.

The One Ring, just to see if you actually can start a campaign again.

Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine. I want to decode it. It’s a creative challenge.

Noirlandia, probably at a convention.

Parting Thoughts

Oh…I really don’t have any. I’m feeling just kind of scattered here at the end of the year.

I want to play longer runs of things. Exploring new systems is kind of wearing me out; I’m ready to explore the fiction more deeply again.

I really want to nudge my newest player into a more compatible creative space with the rest of us. She’s okay for now, and I think she’ll get there.

My appetite for experimenting with new systems is waning but this may be a cyclical thing. For whatever reason, the slog of learning and teaching and fighting with new games is wearing me out lately.

I would love to finish one of my game designs in a way that other people could actually pay me. I don’t think my IGRC essays are ever going to be a Patreon-type subsidized thing, but someday…someday, maybe.

I’m really looking forward to playing more games with my daughter. She’s just turned 5 and everything is new and exciting and confusing and awesome. So inspiring.

See y’all in 2017.

This week, Sage LaTorra and I take on #INDIEGAMEaDAY2016 for Another Question.

http://www.anotherquestion.com/2016/10/indie/

#INDIEGAMEaDAY2016  
Day 29: What indie game tech do you most keenly miss when you play something more mainstream? And then do you denounce the game in person or do you save it for a social media rant?

Obviously I intended this question to start a lengthy and impenetrable turf war discourse on the bright line between indie and mainstream. Obviously.

So we all know what we’re talking about right? Excellent, we can skip over the unpleasantness.

I have actual answers for this one! Minimum navel-gazing today.

Circles from Burning Wheel, or really any player-facing “take a chance on adding stuff to the world” mechanism. Circles, specifically, oh how I missed that. To those not in the know: it’s basically a stat that lets you add an NPC to the world. Might be useful, might be an enemy, doesn’t matter: if you feel like you need to add an NPC to the game, you make the test. If it fails, the best practice is typically that the NPC shows up anyway, but with a complication. That alchemist you really need to brew up a shapeshifting potion is also an informant for the Cardinal’s secret police. The sympathetic captain of the guard will totes let you through the gate but only after you’ve saved her son from the witch in the woods. Whatever. Enmity Clause ftw.

Another: relationship-making Pre-Play Questions. First I saw it so explicitly spelled out was Apocalypse World. It’s great for games with a good dose of intraparty action, especially backed up with some incentives so you keep reincorporating the stuff you said in the beginning. In Mutant: Year Zero, it generates the Ark’s relationship map and situation, and earns you XPs as you help an NPC, hinder another, and protect your PC “buddy.” I really do miss that process when it’s not available. I think Fate (FATE? (F.A.T.E.?)) has a similar pre-game “what did we do together and what aspect is derived from that experience?” thing. It’s neat. Good tech.

I miss PbtA style Moves when I’ve been playing a lot of PbtA/AWE games. It gets into my head and I shift my mode and method. The surest proof that moves are not skills is to try to treat one as the other in back-to-back games. Very different engagement and use and vibe. But the majority volume of my play isn’t PbtA so missing Moves is a temporary condition only.

I know I’m missing a ton but those are the three that jump to mind.

One more day! Anyone else excited?

#INDIEGAMEaDAY2016  
Day 27: What’s the very best playtest-stage game your friends probably haven’t heard of yet? How long ago did you play it and how much better was it than the current version?

Okay, I freely admit this: one of my favorite things about small press gaming culture is the accessibility to the designers. I say this coming from the world of trad publishing, which typically constrains the supply of access so as to juice demand for it. Meet at a convention, maybe find your way onto a playtest list, maybe get to a first-name basis with a line developer, maybe get invited to an afterparty…ridiculous. Fake celebrity exists so writers can be underpaid, full stop.

I totally get that indie access is imperfect. I get that there are still gatekeepers and hoops and social skills and, yes, luck involved. I promise you it’s better than the alternative. It’s better for the fans, it’s better for the creators.

Haven’t really done that much playtesting in/for indieland, tbqh. It’s so very easy to burn out playtesters, and I don’t do it too often. Once or twice a year, maybe? I’ll also confess that it can kind of tire out my players to be relentlessly charitable with an early design just so the thing is playable for longer than 15 minute stretches. It’s work to do it well.

The “earlier edition was better” business is nonsense in my experience, although I’ve gotten whiffs of it here and there and it always strikes me as some annoying insider signaling behavior. The gamer version of “the live acoustic version someone recorded on their phone in a coffee house is so much better.” Games get better with each iteration; I can’t imagine one getting worse. Maybe an interesting but unnecessary subsystem gets cut?

Of the stuff we’ve playtested, the one I’m most excited to see developed further is Jason Morningstar’s STASI AW hack. It was pretty early in his experimenting with AW, but the outline of the game I think could be really terrific. I do love me some paranoid political bureaudrama.

#INDIEGAMEaDAY2016  
Day 26: When you interrogate the nature of heroism in your game, do you prefer to directly or indirectly invoke Lacanianism?

I am legit astonished that anyone’s tried to answer this in good faith, but Abstract Machine has: https://plus.google.com/u/0/118086788142088483650/posts/2BdesMAGXuh

It’s a private share, hope you can read it. It’s bonkers and proof that I am so dumb. (About some things.)

When I woke up and freshened up on today’s question, I had this tiny pit of dread in my stomach. What on earth? It’s my question! What am I dreading? And then, sipping my coffee with Honey Nut Cheerios leftover milk poured into it, I had an amazing flashback.

This is totally personal stuff, feel free to just bounce on this thread if you’re not feeling that.

So my flashback. It’s senior AP English and we’re doing student-written tests of books we’re reading. My bestie and I get it into our idiot teenage smart-kid heads that it’d be fucking hilarious to write an impossibly tough test. We did actual research: it was The Brothers Karamazov, so there were lots of resources available several orders more involved than Cliff’s Notes. We wrote and delivered, straight-faced, a 400-level lit crit essay test to our senior class.

I’m not sure what our endgame was, actually. I mean we had to turn something in and the students were obligated to do the test, no matter what. Were were, what, going to rip our masks off and laugh hysterically? No idea. It didn’t end well, with even the best-natured students (all acutely concerned about their AP performance because that shit is college credits and there’s real money on the line) whipped into a fury at us.

Total, epic failure at all levels. We absorbed a semester of hazing from the other students with the teacher’s tacit approval. I still grit my teeth at the memory.

I did end up with a healthy skepticism for pseudointellectualism. I mean I’m all for doing the homework, using technically specific terminology, thinking and overthinking and trying to pull in semi-related fields for additional context. Brains are awesome, smarts are sexy, etc. Pseudointellectualism is a horrible social signaling game played out in the realm of show-offy conversations (online debates these days).

The weeks where I feel the most alienated from the so-called “gaming community,” though, is when I’m faced with the very worst game of “Would You Rather?” And that’s when my choice is pseudointellectualism or anti-intellectualism.

I have no patience at all for the folks who just flat reject or deride the hard work that many of us obviously derive value from. And I guess here’s the rub: each time I try to write a sentence along the lines of “I also have no patience for the folks trying to score points with big words” I pause just a bit. Just a bit. So I guess that tips the scale ever-so-slightly for me, doesn’t it?

Anyway, I guess Lacan was a philosopher? I read the name in extreme passing at some point and it lodged itself in my head alongside bildungsroman and Campbellian and Diderot. Potentially useful ammo for a future show-offy online conversation.

I could do the research, I guess. I’m not being anti-intellectual, here! I’m confessing that I repeated my can’t-pass high school essay test joke without any sense of the endgame.

Don’t ever let anyone in gaming make you feel dumb about gaming. Not some indie asshole like me, not some trad blogger with Very Strong Opinions, not anyone with a partisan bone to pick.

#INDIEGAMEaDAY2016  
Day 25: Do you like your scene framing hard, harder, or hardest? What’s the very hardest you’ve had your scene framed?

Not a ton to say today and I’m single-dadding it so not much time either.

Super short version: I think scene framing is a really smart technique depending on the game and players, it means different things for different games, and it’s not a universal best practice for all games everywhere.

NB I’m not at all surprised, reading some other folks’ posts today, that there’s a range of understanding of what this even is. You need to buy into the idea that narrative situations matter and can have urgency. I would not, personally, treat a dungeon problem description as “scene framing” of any kind — no scene, no frame, different paradigm. So, to me, trying to fit all gaming into that technique is to treat the technique as so vague as to be useless. Lots of functional roleplaying has nothing to do with scenes or framing.

I tend to do a mix of lightly framed scenes (mostly me, as GM, editorializing about what I feel like are the important things to focus on in the scene) and minute-to-minute coverage at home. More aggressive framing (more urgency and context) in one-shots and at conventions because we need to get shit done and fast. Nothing bugs me more as a player than sitting down and fucking around with irrelevant and uninteresting content.

Anyway, yay scene framing! Sometimes!

I’ll have more time tomorrow. Sorry for the short one today.

EDIT: Vincent Baker of course has crazy-smart stuff to say about the problems surrounding scene framing. Read him, he’s always provocative and interesting: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+VincentBaker/posts/hreaAFy1GE8

#INDIEGAMEaDAY2016  
Day 24: What was the very saddest thing you wrote on an index card?

A blast from the past! One of the original self-referential self-mocking indie questions (hence the shitty “art” I put together for the hashtag). Was the sad index card meme from the Andy Kitkowski days of story dash games dot com? I honestly don’t remember.

My gut reaction to the question had been “none, not my jam” but that’s so not true. Thinking through the games where I have used index cards (as opposed to, say, a big relationship map, my preferred table presentation tool), though, I realized that a) it usually means I’m playing something freeform-y and b) that means mad bleed.

So many speculations! But it’s true: If I’m playing something without meaningful random inputs or manipulable economies or a system I can leverage, I go straight to the sad.

I played Ross Cowman’s Life on Mars at RinCon last year, which involves index cards for your character notes. You move around a token to represent various settings your astronaut is in during a trip to Mars, and then halfway you shift to Mars itself, and a whole new set of prompts. And sure enough, without any external prompting beyond a name, my mission captain was a mother slowly unraveling the further she got from her child. I worked my way into an emotional state very much like I started to feel stuck in NYC during Sandy, only extrapolated.

Similar thing happened with Montsegur 1244, although there’s no need for an index card because your character is already on a card. Absent any kind of “resolution system,” went straight to the sad again. And I could totally feel the wavefront of it happening once again in Rachel E.S. Walton’s Mars 244 game at Dreamation this year.

What’s going on?

This didn’t happen with Fall of Magic, which I feel like was more about fantastical journeys than emotional journeys (ie Life on Mars). So it’s not a 100% sure thing.

Hm…Durance, my characters are almost uniformly tragic. Sometimes bleedy. Less often because there’s a veneer of brutality that’s just not in me, and lets me distance myself from the character a bit.

Anyway, interesting phenomenon. I’ll think about it some more.

In the more trad space, I did index cards instead of an r-map for our run through The One Ring. Worked better because of all the travel and the mostly outward-focused situation. I’d do up little tent cards for every PC and NPC, along with cards that say INJURED and SCARED and MISERABLE, so I could slap those in front of a player. On the backs of the NPC tent cards I’ll add little GM notes. Nothing per se sad on any of them.

Richard Rogers made a good point that online play is probably going to bring the end of this technique. Pour one out for the sad index cards.

#INDIEGAMEaDAY2016
Day 23: Tell your most scandalous story about getting X-carded.

I have a good one!

I first read about the X-Card when John Stavropoulos​​ started really talking it up. I want to say 2010ish? I’m not going to bother fact-checking that; it was, I think, at some point after he’d gotten the main idea of it down and it was starting to take off, particularly in indieland.

Me: super skeptical. Super. It felt like it violated a lot of social contract stuff and creative agency at the table, but I mostly kept that to myself. Snarked about it in gchat with friends, mostly.

BurningCon EDIT 2013, the one where luke crane​​ expanded the event to a larger circle of Notables: John Harper, Jason Morningstar​​, Vincent Baker​​. And with what felt like the monolithic presence of Jason and Vincent’s fans, the X-Card came along as well. Well alrighty then, let’s give this thing a shot, see how it actually feels at the table.

The first time I sat at a table with an actual X-Card was a game of Fiasco, facilitated by Kristin Firth​​.Uh let’s see… James Stuart​​ and Anthony Hersey​​ and one more person whose name escapes me was at the table; Kristin was fighting a stomach thing so she was there to facilitate. I had never played Fiasco and didn’t really understand how it worked or what its best practices were. I was there to learn! I think it was shortly after Fiasco had shown up on Tabletop and it was yuuuuge.

The playset is some summer slasher setup. We go through all the character stuff; I end up with this obnoxious dudebro half of a pair of twins. I’m already thinking ahead that twins weirdness and slasher stories surely must fit together! I kind of am gunning to be the slasher. Again, I don’t really understand Fiasco yet so I have no idea if that’s cool or not.

So we play a while, spooling out scenes. I really have my hooks into the dudebro, really fun. No idea how the tilt works or the dice economy either, which is distracting and I can’t get a straight answer out of the folks who actually know the game. Which kind of sets up what I think felt like a waaaay-more confrontational vibe than I was intending.

At some point, in a scene with my character’s hapless, innocent twin, I decide to really ratchet up my character’s abusiveness. So, in character, I say something like “Oh come on you reeetard.”

Kristin jumped on that instantly, despite obvious physical discomfort. She’s all “NOPE, nuh-uh, we’re not going there.” Taps the card.

Oh I was steamed.

I remained steamed for months. How dare she censor my creative input!

I debriefed with John about my X-Card experience a few weeks after the convention. The dude is endlessly patient with me, god bless him. I lay out my case, he listens a lot, and indicates that I’ve said nothing new and that the X-Card is an extremely practical tool in his and others’ experience.

A year goes by. It’s still on my mind.

At BigBadCon EDIT 2014, Jason Morningstar​​ invites me to a private table of Night Witches. After talking through setup and playbooks and the super-high-gloss overview, he puts an X-Card in the middle of the table. Inside I’m instantly oh here we go again.

I gotta say: it’s Jason’s speech that moved me. I became a 100% convert the moment he concluded his explanation, which included a bit of editorializing around the actual recommended text as presented at http://tinyurl.com/x-card-rpg .

We never actually used the card, but now I finally had a firm grasp of how it worked. Like a lot of other folks have said, the talk is probably more important than the card.

Armed with his explanation and context, I explained it to my local crew. It shows up at their request when I ran an Urban Shadows game as a couples’ date night thing.

The last time I saw it used was at my Sagas of the Icelanders table at Dreamation this year. Someone suggested something another player didn’t like, we tapped out, rewound a bit, it was all good. It was low-key, blameless, smooth.

The big shift for me was realizing that my creative input does not matter. It’s not special or unique. It literally doesn’t matter what reasons there may be behind someone X-Carding. That’s why you don’t talk about it. I may not like when it’s used to redirect an idea I had. And yet I’m 100% okay when Try Another Way gets used in Archipelago. It’s not like I have a limited reservoir of ideas. And thinking that any given idea is so valuable and precious as to deflect disagreement?

I think gaming could stand a lot more humility.

I’m a fan of the X-Card.