Golly Gee, The Future of RPGs

Wyatt Salazar from Turbulent Thoughts, The Galaxy Melancholic and the Spirits of Eden has taken over The Core Mechanic! And until Jonathan Jacobs pays me enough money to buy some Strike Witches figurines, I will remain firmly in his digital throne.

Why is it so comfy? Why isn't mine this comfy? Why don't I get nice things...

Ahem. Well, this is a blog, so as long as I'm taking it over, I might as well do something productive.

This month's blog carnival is about the Future of RPGs and ever since I heard about it, I have been on a quest, my fellows.

A quest for a magical Kindle reader, which when set to an incorrect date, will display the New York Times of that day, thus allowing me a glimpse into the future. It is a scrying glass powered solely by geek magic of the Amazon school of diviners. I was told of this most mystical object by a cloaked nerd at a nearby bar who drank only cokes and seltzers.

But two things impeded my progress on this quest.

1) Kindle 2 is much sexier. I just can't go back.
2) The New York Times doesn't care about the future of RPGs.
2b) The New York Times may go bankrupt or stop publishing a paper at some point in the future, therefore even a Magical Kindle would not have worked altogether very well.

Oh, and the world ends in 2012 anyway.

So I discarded that idea, fun as it was to search Ebay and Craigslist for supposedly magical objects. So with only the power of my mind to assist me, let's talk about the Future of RPGs.

There are 3 topics which are the hot items to talk about when it comes to the future of RPGs.

The Table

A lot of people say the gaming table is going to die, but I say, nay! I think the gaming table, as any other living creature, will evolve in order to survive. And it shall evolve when we stick computers and projectors on it. Imagine a gaming table with touchpads, keyboards, and all manner of embedded doohickeys? Hell, the random number generators that such a beast might contain could end up killing DICE instead of technology killing the table.

Imagine programming your side of the table with all of your character's conceivable rolls and modifiers, perhaps even doing so ahead of time and bringing it on a small flash card. Imagine programming all of your game rules into your table. Imagine programming your dungeon master into the table! Hey yo dawg, I heard you like dungeon mastering, so we put a dungeon master in your table so you can dungeon master while you dungeon master.

Imagine the price tag on such a thing. I shudder.

But I don't think the game table has to die just because we're bringing computers over to it. The table and the digital world exist as two separate mediums of gaming, one of which I discuss in a three part series of posts on Musings of the Chatty DM. The table offers the ability to spend time at a friend's home. To drive there in bad traffic for an hour, to breathe in their cheeto musk, to beat the loving crap out of them because they're jerks.

The equivalent to all this in online gaming involves the /kick command in IRC. Unsatisfying, I say. Digital is convenient and is its own experience, but just like PDFs aren't going to disintegrate all your bound, mutilated tree souls who scream foul oaths at you in their own silent language, things like Gametable and Maptool will not suddenly invalidate the traditional invasion of somebody's home that is the hallmark of the RPG hobby.

Digital Tools

I want to talk to you about FATAL.

Look son. When a man and his calculator have very special feelings for each other, they do silly things. Silly things that they may later regret. Like creating an RPG system that uses mean, trigonometry and advanced algebraic equations for its play.

But the interesting thing about FATAL is that its creator, Byron Hall, in the midst of his gibbering insanity, had the clarity of mind to realize that nobody but he and his two physics buddies would ever play this game unless they created a means to simplify it all.

Byron Hall thought loftily. He would design programs and tools that would do all the FATAL math for you. He had a character generator, a FATAL calculator, and he probably had even more ideas on the way. I've not been acquainted with these tools though. Because sadly, FATAL was a piece of juvenile crap and its short life was full of torment and pain. But I hear from reliable sources that did use them that the game was...horrible with them. But at least your player's turns didn't last as long as a standardized math test.

Digital Tools have only gotten better. But I don't believe the initiative will be with the game designers (other than Wizard's of the Coast, who has the initiative but not the corporate direction to become the steward to the digital world), at least not at first, unless the game is from the ground-up designed to mesh with a digital tool component that is either absolutely necessary or generally enriches the game experience. I'm not talking about a character generator or stuff like that. I think that sort of thing will continue to be done better by plucky fans of the games who come from the open source community. Mostly because they do everything for free.

Look at Fantasy Ground. I don't know a single person who's ever paid for that (though I do know a lot of people who own it, nyack nyack). Now look at Maptool and Gametable. I don't know a single person who plays online who doesn't at least have them kicking around.

However, perhaps in the future we will see games with a big digital component that could enrich the experience in a way other than generate the characters or roll your dice. Maybe such a thing would more necessarily be a video game than an "honest" roleplaying game, or perhaps something even far beyond my imagination can occur.

Maybe "tabletop" rpgs marketed more towards online play through digital tools or special chat rooms and forums? Who knows. There's a big wide world of data out there just waiting to be explored, but I'm not sure how many people will consider it an option, especially when they see Wizard's ups and downs with it.

Audience

I've read surveys which say that most of the people who play RPGs are like, dinosaurs. I'm only 20, so when these same surveys tell me that the audience who plays RPGs is going to die and then nobody will play them ever again, I can only laugh at the insane leap of logic that must be made in order to support such a point of view.

To be entirely fair, I don't think the RPG market is ever going to "grow". By grow, I mean significantly, in relation to other forms of competing entertainment. When I see two guys in a bar talking about "that sweet attack roll" by that "awesome tiefling warlock" they saw on Monday Night Dungeons, I will kill myself. Then, my ghost will digitize and haunt all of your online games inserting unbalanced encounters, traps that would make Gygax smile in his grave, and causing you to critical hit each other in "friendly" duels and deal lethal damage, for no reason. I will become the Twilight haunting your games.

But I also don't think that RPG gaming is just going to disappear from the face of the Earth. I don't buy into the statistics that claim that no new gamers are coming to prop up the hobby so that it won't disappear when the rexes go to the big Jurassic Park in the sky. But then again, I don't buy into statistics for the most part, I await the day when Math is disproven and all of the World is in chaos as to just what the hell's been going on for the past thousand years.

Someday I will triumph over you and your devilish creations, Euclid, Newton and Leibniz. Put ya gunz on.

As more and more RPG efforts have taken to the internet these days (just look at that how big that Old School Rebellion thing or whatever has gotten since it started like six thursdays ago) the audience that they can reach is potentially infinite, if they would just try.

But if the big companies want to get more fresh blood, the advertising needs to be more widespread and more effective on the internet.

Wizard's of the Coast has that free D&D 4th Edition Test Drive thing, but what do they do on their website to let people know? They stick a little note halfway down their front page. Meanwhile all their banner ads are telling people idiotic things like "DON'T SPLIT THE PARTY," and "BUY D&D MINIATURES" and "THIS IS AN AVENGER, THIS IS AN INVOKER."

Conceivably, if I'm going to the Wizard's D&D website and I am a new gamer, and you tell me these things, I have no reason to give one quarter of a damn about them because I don't know what the hell you're talking about. If I play the game? I already know about them. So why are the giant banner ads about things the core audience is already going to be aware of?

Now, if you told me, the new gamer, in a huge banner ad that I could a) try out the game for free, b) get a free book that used to cost like 20 dollars and c) make any character I want using the free trial of your online tools, I'd be far, far more interested. I think a lot of new people would.

So in conclusion, Newton was a douchenozzle.

In Conclusion Conclusion

I have faith in the future of RPGs. I don't think it will ever reach the legendary fad status that I hear it had when it first came out again, and I think longing for such a thing is a ticket to disappointment. On the other hand, I don't think it will die out.

In fact, I think even though D&D Insider is a messy first step in showing people the future of RPGs, the alternatives it has generated from both fans and detractors (and the old competitors that have been thrust into a spotlight now that a big company is fumbling at what they have been doing for a while) it has done us a lot of good.

So yeah. I think the future of RPGs is pretty okay. Or at least, it has a potential to be pretty okay.

But that might just be a product of my youthful and vigorous outlook.

Ah, that feels good. Back to taking over The Core Mechanic.

*thud*

What was that? No, Jonathan! Don't come any closer! I am armed with things to throw at you! Things that belong to you and can conceivably break if I hit you with them! EEEEEEP!

Shock and Horrific Deeds in RPG's

Torture and Rape isn't touched on much in games, and for good reason, gaming is about fun escape and dealing with such horrific concepts always lies outside people's comfort zones. More than that though, gaming is fantasy, and normal sane people don't fantasize about such things. To do so harkens back to the early 1980's during the height of gaming paranoia and Tom Hanks starred in a disgustingly misinformed movie called Mazes and Monsters. Rest assured there are dozens and dozens of wrong ways to game out such horrific deeds, methods that will inevitably cause player alienation and more often than not kill a game, however I've experienced games where such storytelling devices were used to create compelling and provocative stories. These stories were certainly not comfortable, but they were extremely memorable.

To me the most memorable sessions were the ones where the trials were unexpected and actually challenging, they were also the ones that deeply impacted my character. Often I finished the game session upset, annoyed, or spitting mad, and occasionally I left a game in shock. Most of this was because of one female GM who has a cruel streak. Her secret? Make the players care, and then sunder that which they cared about in the most graphic way possible. Nothing was sacred to her, no NPC was immune to her destructive whim, no law of reality could not be bent or broken to shatter the PC's illusions. Sometimes she took these shocking tactics too far, but sometimes too far was best.

I've experienced the horror my character sitting helpless in a prison cell nearly overcome by his personal demons while his soul mate in the next cell over - a pillar of support in a trying time - was gasping incoherently because her tongue was cut out in a torture session she'd just been returned to her cell from...

Another session my character was restrained and forced to watch another friend become drugged and sexually assaulted by a lecherous god because this was his "process" which he used to instill her with oracular ability. This oracle would go on to help us find out pivotal information that we needed. But my character had to come to terms with the fact that the information recieved was gotten at such a cost. He wanted to discard it, but that would have made his friend's sacrifice all for nothing...

Sessions like those were far from the most fun I've ever had in role-playing, but they taught me things about myself and developed my character in unexpected ways. When I started, the character was someone I envisioned like one of the badasses I'd seen in gritty movies like Sin City, while those experiences turned him into something that was completely different than that vision, the result was far more legitimate.

I can't say that I was always ready for the sorts of horrific scenarios that I've been subjected to in some of these games. I don't think anyone is really 'ready' if they actually do care about their characters. This is why Game Masters who do these things need to know their groups. There needs to be balance in the tone, players don't come to care about their characters if good things never happen to them, and if they don't care then the horrifics won't mean anything. A game should never be horrible all the time or there simply won't be any fun to draw players back.

One element I cannot stress enough is flexibility when dealing with this kind of storytelling. Absolutes and extremism mixed create very bad things. An example of this is the Carcossa Supplement V which was a blogger-made game that featured Cthonic gods and black horror. One of the controversial points of the game was that there were spells written with listed prerequisites involving Podiatry, sacrificing babies and similar heinous acts. I've examined what was behind the writer's motivations for creating such disgusting content, and while from a setting purist's stance I do see some degree of justification, everything I know about gaming tells me this sort of thing will not play out enjoyably. Even if players and Game Masters alike can get past the distasteful nature of the content, the gameplay will never end up as intended because the system utilizes D&D's inflexible alignment mechanics.

I'll tone down the subject matter to something more acceptable and relatable as I explain. We're all familiar with Star Wars' light force dark force concepts, where the dark force offers great power and thus tempts the Jedi to use it and fuel himself by doing dark acts. This is great compelling story and character development material, but is wrecked when one includes inflexible morality mechanics such as the ones that appear in D&D.

Alignment mechanics as they sit in D&D begin to break immersion when a player goes to the extreme ends of them. You get players that start doing stupid things "because my character is evil" rather than looking at the simple question of why is that character evil? Morality isn't black and white, especially when you consider that ethics and morality aren't the same thing. World of Darkness takes a different approach and makes morality a fluid stat that can be raised or lowered based on the PC's decisions, thus you can see a slide into darkness or a quest to redeem himself. The mechanic offers incentive to RP correctly but doesn't force anything because it's flexible. An inflexible mechanic forces the Player to contrive a reason why his character acts the way the Alignment says he does, rather than letting the player decide how to play his character on his own. In the case of the light-force/dark-force temptation an inflexible mechanic offers no incentive to stay good, or feel the strain of that slip into darkness, the player just makes a conscious decision to become a dark Jedi because they get the cool powers he wants and that's that.

Certainly role-playing horrific deeds can be accomplished independent of subtle mechanics, but absent those mechanics introducing heinous acts as prerequisites for great power suddenly becomes a personal issue and is in fact enforcing certain behaviors where the only check or balance is the players and GM's own distaste for such material. Absent flexible morality mechanics, a game that has a power or spell requiring a horrific act - be it something to appease dark gods or tap the dark side of the force - you have a number of reactions occurring:

• The GM will disregard the requisites as distasteful and choose to run the game without such content.

• A player will either be disgusted and refuse to play, or apathetic and if he wants to cast that spell he'll make a character that "has to be this evil bastard, because that's what I need to cast the spell".

• Or the player is somehow intrigued by the concept of such a thing and wants to play it out.

All of these reactions miss the mark on what the intent of the component was meant to play out like. It doesn't instill the proper mindset and inevitably breaks the immersion of the game as both players and GM's alike have to decide not only what is appropriate for the game table but how their characters should feel. No game designer aims for this scenario, and it's certainly not a game mechanic I would ever want to play in, yet I've said before that I've found compelling stories based around similar concepts, so what's the difference?

The difference comes from allowing that internal conflict to flourish and become part of the character one is role-playing. This is accomplished by having variance in the mechanics showing a slipping slope of moral certainty, but also by granting benefits and drawbacks to a particular moral stance. In the world of Star Wars, wielding the power of the dark force was theoretically set to decay the Jedi's body, in the World of Darkness, monsters deprived of their humane side become more frightening and harder to blend in. In Exalted a character's virtues don't necessarily orient his moral compass but allow him to excel in the things that are backed by the strength of his convictions. These sorts of systems of flexibility combined with mechanical incentives and drawbacks allow games to survive horrific stories without breaking immersion and hopefully without making anyone so uncomfortable that they leave the game.

Ultimately that's what this is all about: the story. In basic literature we're taught that among the key conflicts is man vs. self. Horrific acts are stimulated by man vs. man conflict, but the character must resolve the implications of such acts in the theatre of his own mind. Perhaps in his struggles he will fail and become the villain. Or hopefully he will be raised by his own convictions and the aid of his allies to become a hero once again, thus making him that much greater.

As an advocate of balance in all things, I think that characters that accomplish great deeds should sometimes endure great hardships, both physical and emotional, else their greatness might become hollow. So maybe if you're a GM that has a strong repoiré with your players, maybe try going outside of everyone's comfort zone and see what the results are, they might surprise you.

d20 Cufflinks...

Last Saturday night was one of those "Wait... what was I doing?" nights. Two good friends of mine finally tied the knot and threw a kick ass, open-bar all night with a good DJ kinda wedding. It was a fun time... the kind I rarely get to partake of now that I'm getting grey in the beard.

What does this have to do with gaming? Well.. the bride and groom are both big-time gamers - both are probably as much of a couple of stand up dorks as I am. This post is dedicated to them (you know who you are!). For example, here are the cufflinks the groom had as part of his tuxedo:

Yeah... the picture looks staged, but it wasn't. Them's the real-deal: solid plastic, silver backed black d20's. =D

You can pick up your own pair over at Etsys.com. That whole site has tons of awesome dork-in-the-office-place stuff. Personally, I might have opted for the Green Space LEGO Smiley Silver Cufflinks.

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Are you an RPG blogger? Or a reader of RPG blogs? Then nominate your favorite blog post from any blog to OPEN GAME TABLE: The 2008 Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs. More information, including a call for volunteers to help organize this project, can be found here.

More D&D Magazine Goodness: Kobold Quarterly. Any Others?

I'm always amazed at how market forces work, and how products appear wherever there is a demand for it. Yesterday I posted about the magazine Fight On!, and commented on they were "keeping the tradition of a printed journal alive in the RPG community". One of my sharp eyed readers was quick to point out that Fight On! is not the only magazine in print to fill the void of DRAGON. There's also Kobold, the cleverly titled decedent of DRAGON. Some of you are no doubt thinking, "Yeah, we already knew that!", but what you didn't know was that I have been hiding under a D&D rock for the better part of 4 years (thanks to a horrible fixation on some time sucking game I will only mention in passing). I only reentered the PnP gaming scene about 3 months ago (this is where my gaming roots are; great to be back). So much has changed! No more DRAGON, and all these new zines. So, before I fire up Google to see what else is out there, am I still missing something? What other gaming zines have you come across in the wake of DRAGON's 'electronicafication'? What are your favorite so-called 3rd party products that support your D&D game table?

While I wait for your reply, I'm heading over to Kobold to pick up a couple copies. I'll no doubt offer up some reviews once I recieve them. Until next time: GAME ON!

Miss DRAGON? Grab a copy of Fight On!

A few days ago I offered up an idea about forming a new magazine dedicated to Dungeons & Dragons or PnP RPGs in general; especially now that DRAGON and DUNGEON magazine are out of print and relegated to a purely electronic format. Well, today Jeff Rient @ Jeff's Gameblog pointed out that he recently received Issue #2 of Fight On!, a new RPG gaming magazine published via LuLu.com. This is awesome! Now I don't have to do this myself because the good folks over at Fight On! are keeping the tradition of a printed journal alive in the RPG community. Each issue seems to be "system neutral", so regardless of what system you use to game (DND, Pathfinder, etc) its going to serve as a nice accessory. I'm going to pick them up and (probably) offer a review once I get them. In the meantime, it is money well spent in support of "the little guys" of gaming.

Issue #1 is 30 pages, 8.5" x 11", saddle-stitch binding, black and white interior ink. ($6)
Issue #2 is 88 pages, 8.5" x 11", saddle-stitch binding, black and white interior ink ($7.50)

118 pages of pure geek - well worth the 13.50 bucks IMHO