Tag: roleplaying games

The power of asking

Over at Department V, Smiorgan writes about Everway’s three methods to decide a conflict: Karma, drama and llama.

Smiorgan discusses the issue of who decides what the plot should be (in order to rule in accordance with drama), and how randomness (fortune) can introduce something new and unpredictable.

I mostly want to talk about the latter here. It’s a ubiquitous way to keep the game unpredictable: Pick up some dice and let fate decide what happens. An observation I make is that this is very often restricted to determining “can I do X”, which is in itself only one of the interesting things one needs to decide during a roleplaying game, but that’s a topic for another day. What I want to talk about here is an alternative approach to introducing unpredictability – one which I am increasingly favouring in my game design.

Here I am going to refer to the method as asking. More broadly, it is about giving away decision-making power to someone else. You see, your decisions as GM (or a player, for that matter) may be based on drama or karma or something else entirely, but to you they can seem predictable. You have perhaps already thought about what the needs of the story are, or what the demands of the fictional situation are, so making that decision can seem predictable to you.

So an obvious way to get the sense of unpredictability for as many people as possible is to spread those decisions around. I’m not talking about discussion and consensus; in many ways that feels like the most predictable method of all for resolving things. I’m talking about varying who makes the decisions.

In a traditional GM-and-players game, you get this a bit. The GM takes decisions about the NPCs, the world, and often some conflict resolution. so they provide a sense of unpredictability to the other players. And it’s often remarked by GMs how the players’ surprising actions make the game exciting and unpredictable. But it’s clear that the GM has much broader scope for making decisions, and it is they who provide the chief source of unpredictability outside of the dice: the question is not “what will happen”, but “what will the GM decide”.

What I’m increasingly finding is that having all the players involved in those GM decisions, by making individual calls, creates a fantastic sense of unpredictability for everyone. No one person has their hand on the tiller, so the boat goes where it will.

I’ve called it asking, because a very straightforward way to make it happen is by asking questions to another player. Instead of it being either the dice or the GM who decides what happens next, it’s another person whose mind you can’t read. And even the person you ask, moments ago, didn’t know what the question would be or that they would be answering it.

Similarly though, rotating roles (as seen in Microscope and Lovecraftesque, for example) ensures that the story isn’t moving in a straight line. Each person guides it a bit, and no one person could have forseen where it would go. In effect, here, it’s the system doing the asking, but instead of always asking the same person, it’s a different person every time.

It’s important to emphasise this is about one person deciding. If you turn to group discussion for this, you quickly find that you’re relying on negotiation, social dynamics and (often) a rather turgid laying out of the reasons for and against each course of action. This is far from unpredictable.

This is also the method that lies behind improv-based approaches to GMless roleplaying. Each person leaps forward and inserts their ideas into the story higgledy piggledy, like having a jam session. But what improv approaches tend to leave space for a small number of people (maybe just one) to dominate the game, subtly or not-so-subtly steering things so that they are not so much a product of the group as the product of an organising committee. This is why games like Lovecraftesque and Microscope impose a no-discussion rule, forcing every player to contribute to the flow of the game.

So there you go – karma, drama, llama and banana, I guess.

Lovecraftesque update

For those who have been following this project, we’ve just been through another round of playtesting (some internal, some external) using updated rules.

This was a bit of an odd playtest in a way. The rules updates we had made had their intended effect, the game seemed much improved, and overall we seem pretty much bang on in terms of realising our design goals while keeping the game fun to play. But we had two pieces of fairly broad-brush negative feedback which shook our faith a little and made us re-evaluate where we were. The bottom line is that after some soul-searching we concluded that we should not panic over two bits of feedback, when most of our feedback is so positive – but this feedback nevertheless led us to make some further changes.

The big one was that the game was too complex. Of course, as an indie/story game-style game, it is a *lot* less complex than your average traditional RPG. At the same time, it is probably significantly above average complexity compared to its peers. More importantly, after reviewing the game we concluded that there were elements of complexity that could be removed quite easily, without changing the play experience. A no brainer, really.

This has led to a number of changes:

  • Progress through the parts of the game is now driven by scenes played rather than clues revealed, which seems simpler and more intuitive.
  • We’ve ditched the idea of separate reprisals scenes (and the reprisals track), and merged reprisals into our card system.
  • We’ve ditched the decreasing narrative distance rules and, again, merged them into the card system. By default you can only introduce rationally explicable clues throughout the game.
  • The revamped cards allow you to introduce a thematic element (e.g. a cult) and enable thematically appropriate rationality-breaking clues or reprisals (e.g. the cult threaten or attack you).
  • We’ve simplified the journey into darkness so you can pretty much choose whatever role you like on each step rather than having to switch back and forth between roles.

The gameplay is more-or-less unchanged, but the burden of explaining the rules has been significantly reduced. The cost is that the cards are much more important – we need to playtest that before we’re sure if they work the way we want them to.

The other issue we picked up was around tone. The default tone of the game is very much slow-building, brooding horror, with a protagonist who is at the mercy of events and probably doomed to meet an unpleasant end. But there’s nothing to stop the game from being a bit more heroic in feel. You could even run it for laughs, deliberately parodying the style. We’ve introduced a stage where this choice is explicitly discussed. This is less because we think these other options will be chosen, and more to make sure that whatever choice is made, everyone has explicitly agreed to it. We think this will reduce the risk of divergence of styles causing grief in play.

We’ve also hit the start button on a couple of art pieces (we’ll only commission the rest if/when the kickstarter is successful) and some sample layout options (again, we’ll pay for the book to be laid out if we get the funds). Discussing ideas with our artist and layer-outerer (?) has really got us excited, and we saw some early sketches this weekend which look really awesome. We’re beginning to talk to printers and flesh out our ideas for kickstarter reward levels and stretch goals for the kickstarter. We’re still a little ways off launching the campaign, but it’s beginning to come together.

Watch this space.

Lovecraftesque – actual play report

Actual Play report of Lovecraftesque

As played at Seven Hills in April 2015

Players: Josh, Fergus and Ric

[In the setup we agree the basic parameters for the game, in open discussion – the only time that discussion is permitted.] We decided to set the game in the Himalayas. Off the back of that, we decided to make our Witness an explorer. We wanted a classic Lovecraftian game, so we decided on 1890s for the era. His reason for being in the Himalayas seemed pretty obvious, so we just needed a personality trait (we went for arrogant) and a source of strength (we decided he was driven by the need to prove himself to an explorer’s club back in London). Finally, we needed a name (this always seems to come last!) and we decide on Sir Arthur Worthington.

[Fergus had an idea for a starting clue, so we started the first scene with him as Narrator, Ric as Witness.] We began with Sir Arthur, already high in the Himalayas, trudging through thick snow with a retinue of sherpas carrying his equipment and supplies. A blizzard blows in, and Sir Arthur can barely see past the end of his nose. [Fergus comments: Already the power of having a Watcher was beginning to show as Josh brought the hostility of the environment to life, describing numbing extremities and the suffocating thin air.] Sir Arthur follows what little he can see of the path, to a large, blocky building of black stone, clinging to the edge of a precipice. He has lost the sherpas, and it’s only getting colder, so with trepidation Sir Arthur goes inside. Within he finds a dark room lit by yak fat candles, and filled with saffron-robed monks. The walls are carved with scenes of monsters. One of the monks greets him silently as he enters, and beckons him to follow. The monk leads him to what can best be described as an audience chamber, where a saffron-robed boy is waiting on a dais, backed by more carvings of strange demonic monsters. The boy explains that they have been expecting him, that there is a prophecy that foretold the coming of “Siratha”. He will save the world from a great evil. [This was the first clue.] Baffled, Sir Arthur agrees to the monk’s suggestion that he should rest now, and goes to sleep on a simple bed within the monastery.

[The next scene is Ric’s to narrate, with me (Josh) playing Sir Arthur.] Sir Arthur wakes up to find the monastery empty. Nobody seems to be around – the monks are gone. Wondering if he has dreamed the whole thing, or lost his mind, he wanders through the monastery, trying to retrace his steps to the exit. En route, he stops to look at those carvings he saw before. He stares in disbelief as he recognises a perfect likeness of his own face amongst the carvings on the wall. [Second clue.] Although Sir Arthur has barely exchanged words with anyone, we have discovered more about him from his inner reflections.

[Next up, I’m the Narrator, Fergus is Witness.] Sir Arthur Worthington makes his way up the mountainside. He has lost his sherpas, and the monks are all gone. He has no supplies. He has little hope, really, but his desire to prove himself drives him on. As he trudges up the path, he spots a small building – a hut – crouching in the snow. Within, he finds a comfortable little home, complete with fireplace, bed, a rather nice desk. This will make a good place to camp for the night. Idly flicking through one of the books he finds on a shelf, he is baffled to see that it is entitled “Ye Journale of A Worthington”. Within are various coded writings, together with the occasional unencoded note such as “Tried it again today without success. Perhaps tomorrow.” [Third Clue.] He tosses the book on the fire, but as it burns, a terrible, fiery symbol appears, crystal clear within the flames. [Fourth Clue, created using a card – “reveal a Clue that has no rational explanation”.]

[Fergus is Narrator next, Ric is Witness. Fergus chooses a Reprisals scene.] Sir Arthur wakes up in the hut. He still has no food, no hope, no ideas. He opens another of the books – unbelievably, it’s the same Journal from before. He opens another – the same. They’re all the same. [This is a re-use of an existing clue, so doesn’t count as the clue for the scene.] Setting out into the snow, he spots a couple of scavenger birds flying in the distance, periodically descending to the ground. Realising that there may be food where those birds are landing, he heads in that direction. When he arrives, he finds one of his sherpas. He has been brutally killed. He appears to have been hit with something – a massive impact – and his face is a mask of terror. Most disturbing of all, his entrails have been torn out and arranged in the pattern of the symbol Sir Arthur saw in the fire. [Again, this is clue re-use.] A trail in the snow reveals where his body was – presumably – dragged to this spot.

[Ric is Narrator, I’m Witness.] Sir Arthur is filled with horror at the sherpa’s fate, but pushes his fear down. He knows he will surely starve if he can’t find food. It is possible – just possible – that the other sherpas are at the end of that trail. So he has little choice: he follows the trail. At the end, he finds a cave in the ice. Inside, he finds a package of perfectly butchered meat, no bones within. [Fifth Clue. This triggers the end of part 1, which means all new Clues from now on must have no rational explanation.] Returning with haste to the hut, and desperately trying not to think about what might have butchered the meat, or what (or who… please say not who) the meat might have come from, he cooks the meat and eats it.

[Ric Narrator, I’m Witness. Another Reprisals scene, this time played with a card.] The next morning, he awakens to find that the hut has been ransacked torn apart. The desk, smashed to matchwood. His remaining equipment, gone. The books, torn to shreds. And over the fireplace, daubed in blood, the symbol from the fire. [Another clue re-use.]

[Me Narrator, Fergus Witness.] Emerging into the snow, Sir Arthur finds that there’s a trail heading away from the hut. Looking at it closely, the trail seems to be made up of countless clawed footprints. No living animal could have made these prints. But a thick fog cloaks the mountainside, and though he hears a terrible, cracking, bubbling noise from deep within the fog, he does not dare to pursue it. [Clue 6.]

[Fergus Narrator, Ric Witness. Once again, a card is played, this time “Change Location”.] Once the fog has cleared, Sir Arthur goes looking for his stuff and spots some of it, scattered down a sheer slope near the hut. Clambering down to retrieve his stuff, he discovers a deep, dark cave.

[Ric Narrator, I’m Witness.] Heading into the cave, Sir Arthur comes upon the monk he met at the beginning of our story. Enigmatic to the last, the waiting monk gestures him to follow deeper into the cave. Sir Arthur follows, and after a time emerges through a carved stone doorway into an underground room, where the saffron-robed boy awaits, this time wearing a golden mask. The boy removes his mask to reveal Sir Arthur’s own face staring back at him. [Clue 7.] Sir Arthur screams the scream of the unhinged.

[I’m Narrator, Ric is Witness.] Sir Arthur is numb with terror, but continues into the depths of the cave. He passes through another arch, carved with the same monsters he saw in the monastery. He finds himself at the top of a deep shaft, with winding stone steps carved into the side, descending deep into the earth. But it is what is carved into the walls that horrifies him: a written history of previous pilgrims to this mountain, horribly reminiscent of dreams that Sir Arthur has had long before his journey to the Himalayas. Or thought he had. Were they dreams? [Clue 8.]

[With the 8th Clue, part 2 ends. It could have ended earlier, if the Witness had decided to voluntarily initiate the Journey into Darkness, but he didn’t. Fergus is therefore Narrator for a Force Majeure scene, which proves rather simple.] Sir Arthur stands at the top of the winding steps, and knows he must go no further, his innate determination rising within himself. But then he feels a shove at his back, as the saffron-robed monk pushes him over the edge, and he falls, down into the darkness.

[We now begin the Journey into Darkness. Since I can’t remember each individual step of the Journey, I’ve written it as a single scene, though different parts were narrated by different people.] Sir Arthur comes to at the bottom of the shaft. He lights a torch, and looks around. To his horror, he sees that the carvings that had described his dreams continue even down here. But now they are describing the events of the last few days. [Clue re-use.] There is a further staircase leading down into greater darkness. Sir Arthur follows it, plunging further down into the earth. He is feeling a mix of terror and exaltation now. He feels that this is his destiny. He was born to fulfil this destiny, and the fools at the explorer’s club will regret laughing at him. He finds himself at an altar, where a copy of the Journale of A Worthington sits waiting for him. But now he can understand the coded text. He reads it – it is a ritual, which he begins, chanting wildly. There is a little bowl of flesh. He eats it. A portal opens, and he steps through.

[With the Journey over, we briefly conferred over who should do the Final Horror. As it happens, two of us had an idea, but Fergus said that his was perhaps a little too optimistic an outcome to the story, so I stepped forward to narrate the Final Horror, with Ric as Witness, for all the good it did him.] Sir Arthur emerged onto a cold mountain peak. Before him was a great cauldron of blood. The saffron-robed monk was there, and gestured to the cauldron. Knowing now that his destiny would be fulfilled, Sir Arthur drank from the cauldron, deeply. But now he felt strange. His limbs began to change. His voice was changing, his hands warping into tentacles. He tried to scream, but in place of his voice was a terrible, cracking, bubbling noise. The saffron robed monk places a golden chain about his neck, and leads him down to join the other monstrous creatures, his predecessors on the mountain.

[The Epilogue rotates the roles so that someone not involved in the Final Horror gets to be Narrator. That’s Fergus, so he narrates what becomes of the Final Horror, and Ric gets to narrate the fate of the Witness (in this case, his descendant.] In the Epilogue, Sir Arthur’s son grows up and becomes a geologist. He, too, decides to journey to the Himalayas. We ended with the monster that was Sir Arthur watching, wordlessly, as his son arrived to enact the ritual.

Lovecraftesque: playtest

After half a dozen external playtests and a similar number we ran ourselves, we’ve been beavering away on an updated version of Lovecraftesque. We’re now opening it up for a second round of external playtesting.

What’s the game about? You create your own story of brooding horror in the mould of Lovecraft, but without using any of Lovecraft’s material. It’s a GMless game, in which you spend most of your time as a narrator whose role is to intrigue, torment and terrify the Protagonist. You and the other players create strange clues for the Protagonist to investigate and, ultimately, draw them together into a compelling Final Horror to drive the Protagonist to despair or insanity.

What’s changed since the first playtest?

  • We’ve ripped up the token mechanics. They were clunky, and they were getting in the way of engaging with the game.
  • You’ll receive one or two cards at random at the start of the game, which make each story unique and a little unpredictable.
  • We’ve introduced the “leap to conclusions” rule, which keeps things coherent while leaving everyone plenty of room to influence the story and be surprised by what the other players contribute.
  • We’ve created a teaching guide which makes it quicker and easier to teach the game to new players, and which gives a great summary of Lovecraft’s style and themes for players who aren’t familiar with his work.
  • Plus loads of other, smaller tweaks designed to make the game easier to play or deepen the atmosphere.

If you’d like to take part in the playtest, please leave a comment here or email lovecraftesque at vapourspace dot net and we will send you the playtest files.

Crowdfunding calculator

In the run up to our planned Kickstarter of Lovecraftesque, I’ve been busily crunching numbers to make sure that the whole thing will fly financially. All of our figures have gone into a spreadsheet, where I can easily update the costs as I get better information, and tweak the prices of the rewards to reflect those costs. In turn the spreadsheet works out how much we need to ask for.

Anyway, having gone to the effort of creating it, it seemed like other people might find it useful. If you give it basic information about your crowdfunding campaign (like reward levels, costs and so on), it will work out your reward levels for you.

I’ve included instructions on how to use it (at the top and in comments on the relevant cells). In brief: fill in the yellow bits and then read off the information in the green bits.

Crowdfunding calculator

Crowdfunding calculator

Lovecraftesque update

So, as you might have noticed from my earlier post about playtesting, the first round of Lovecraftesque playtesting is over. We picked up a lot of issues – a few quite major, most not so. We’ve moved quickly to make some changes and additions to tackle the former, in order to get some rapid feedback from some playtests we’ve already got lined up. So: here is a summary of some top-level issues we encountered and what we’re doing about them, with the caveat that this is only a first cut and we reserve the right to have a total rethink in the coming weeks.

1. Not Lovecraftian enough.

Man, this was a real disappointment to hear. The structure of the Lovecraftian tale is clearly in our game, but in terms of realising the alien, uncaring universe of Lovecraft – we didn’t do so well. Admittedly, this was most visible in groups who were not familiar with Lovecraft, but even some experienced players found that just following the rules wasn’t enough to make the game feel like Lovecraft. (Although one group said it was about as Lovecraftian as most Call of Cthulhu, which is either a backhanded compliment or damning with faint praise… but better than we’d feared.)

The main change we’ve made is to provide a style guide to Lovecraft, covering the themes, paraphernalia and language used by Lovecraft. This is supported by other changes which I’ll describe in a moment. It remains to be seen whether knowing the themes and having them at the forefront of one’s mind will be enough to make the game feel like Lovecraft – we should know pretty quickly after the next few playtest reports come in.

We’re also thinking about introducing a requirement to choose a theme for the story, from a list we’ll provide. But that’s something we need to think about over a slightly longer time period – it hasn’t gone into the game yet.

2. Hard to teach, hard to learn

This was also a bit of a disappointment, if I’m honest. I have to explain complicated concepts for a living, so I thought I’d do pretty well at this. I think most of my playtesters managed ok at learning the game. Those that didn’t, were new to indie-style games, which may account for the problem. The teaching of the game, however, seems to have been more laborious than it needs to be.

We’ve created a teaching guide to tackle the latter problem. It’s pretty clear that, since this is a game that has a number of stages that work quite differently to each other, the best way to do this is to teach the game as you play it, not attempt to explain it all at once. That’s what we’ve done – create a guide which you read out at key junctures to explain the key concepts (at the start) and how the basic procedures differ as the game evolves (when the changes happen). The guide also includes a potted summary of the Lovecraft style guide, so that it isn’t just the facilitator who benefits from that. The whole thing would take about 15-20 minutes to read out if you literally just monologued it, but it’s broken into chunks, so hopefully the job of teaching is a bit less strenuous.

We’re going to have to think about whether the rules are just too complicated, or the rules guide not structured in the right way. That’s something we’ll get to in a later iteration.

3. The Final Horror

Quite a few groups found that it was a real challenge to weave together all the clues they had seeded through the story into a single compelling Final Horror. They ended up either ignoring some clues, or laboriously explaining through exposition how they fit in, or having a lengthy discussion as a group which obviously breaks the tension.

We’ve introduced a new rule to address this. In the new version, after every scene there’s a pause in which everyone individually writes down what they think is going on. Obviously nobody really knows – but the rules say you have to leap to a conclusion. The idea is that you’ll then use that premature conclusion to guide what you narrate in the next scene. Since the other players will surprise you, your ideas will change every scene – but because nobody is just firing off ideas into the void, the story will be a bit more coherent. More importantly, when the Final Horror comes, nobody is starting from a blank slate.

Other stuff

These weren’t the only issues our playtest uncovered! But they’re the biggest – we think the rest will be relatively easy to crack. We’ll be going over these, and thinking more broadly (and maybe more deeply) about the game’s overall design, over the next few weeks, with a view to commencing a fresh playtest on a completely revised version of the game.

Lovecraftesque – playtest now open

The first draft of the Lovecraftesque rules is now complete, and we’re looking for playtesters to try it out.

A reminder: The game is all about creating your own story of brooding horror in the mould of Lovecraft, but without using any of Lovecraft’s material. It’s a GMless game, in which you spend most of your time as a narrator whose role is to intrigue, torment and terrify the Protagonist. You and the other players create strange clues for the Protagonist to investigate and, ultimately, draw them together into a compelling Final Horror to drive the Protagonist to despair or insanity.

The game takes about 3-4 hours, and requires 2-5 people to play.

If you would like to playtest the game, leave a comment here or email me at lovecraftesque at vapourspace dot net. We’re looking for feedback by Saturday 14th March – if you can’t play before then we’d still love to hear from you, but we’ll be moving forward with the next stage of the project after that.

Admiral Frax adds “I’d really value hearing from people who don’t know any Lovecraft.  The game should be set up so it is equally enjoyable with or without knowledge and I’d really like to know if that holds true.” Good point.

Lovecraftesque – who watches the watchers?

Since the last post we’ve been hard at work nailing down the few remaining details of Lovecraftesque that weren’t already nailed down. We’ve conducted an informal playtest that went well (though we didn’t have time in the end to try out the Journey into Darkness or Final Horror, which are two parts of the game I’m excited to see in action). And I’ve been beavering away turning our notes into a proper set of instructions so other people can playtest the game too. Plus we asked people on our G+ feeds who would do good art for this game, which yielded some really excellent suggestions. It’s been a busy week.

Anyway, a bit more detail about the game is in order. One of the things that’s unusual about the game is that there’s (normally) only one Protagonist. This mirrors Lovecraft’s fiction, but there’s also a very good reason for it – it creates a sense of isolation and helplessness that just isn’t there when you have a party of competent people supporting each other. A consequence of this is that at any given time only one person is playing the Protagonist, which created some interesting design challenges for us. These design challenges have created an aspect of the game I’m really keen on – the Watchers.

We toyed with having a completely shared approach to GMing, like (say) Fiasco, but we wanted to provide a bit more structure to help players to know who is responsible for driving the story forward, when it’s ok to contribute, and so forth. So we’ve kept the traditional GM role in the form of the Narrator (albeit rotating amongst the group) but supplemented it with the Watchers. The Watchers are able to intervene in the current scene by spending tokens to introduce fixed effects – most commonly clues, but also other things, like suddenly turning an investigation scene into a reprisals scene. Just as important, they are allowed and encouraged to elaborate on the Narrator’s description of the environment and NPCs.

This produces a powerful sense of atmosphere, in which every aspect of the scene is dripping with vague unpleasantness and tiny details the Narrator added for colour become amplified.

Narrator: “There’s a clock on the wall”

Watcher 1: “It has a loud, intrusive tick-tock noise”

Watcher 2: “The ticking is incessant. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. You find it hard to sleep.”

This mechanism is placed right at the centre of things during the Journey into Darkness – more on that later.

Each of the roles (Narrator, Protagonist, Watcher) is summarised on a cue card.
Each of the roles (Narrator, Protagonist, Watcher) is summarised on a cue card.

Introducing Lovecraftesque

[Edited to add: Lovecraftesque was successfully kickstarted in 2015 and you can now buy it here]

Admiral Frax and I have been working on a new story game. It is a game of cosmic horror in an uncaring universe, for 2 or more players. It is called Lovecraftesque.

What’s different about this game?

  • This GMful game will see each of the players contribute clues which build up to a cosmic horror of your own devising. You won’t encounter Cthulhu, deep ones, mi-go or any of Lovecraft’s creations, but something fresh that feels like it came straight out of a Lovecraft story.
  • You spend most of your time as a narrator whose role is to torment and frighten the protagonist of your tale. There’s no party of investigators, and the protagonist may be more interested in running away than uncovering what’s going on.
  • The game owes a heavy debt to Graham Walmsley’s Stealing Cthulhu – it codifies and mechanises the ideas in that book, creating a story along Lovecraftian lines while leaving you flexibility to deviate from the formula when you need to.

Here’s a little teaser of the game structure – more on the way.

Screenshot 2015-01-03 11.35.37