When I first started gaming properly which would be about three years ago now it was after studiously avoiding the hobby and all it entailed for many years. The reasons for this were partly to do with the kind of people who played RPGs back then but mostly to do with my own inability to change those people’s attitudes. As someone who’s always enjoyed writing and to a lesser degree performance the idea of being a GM has an obvious appeal. Particularly at the more story based end of the spectrum.

Obviously the hobby in any format only began to really take shape about 30 years ago. It was a revolution which in the shape of cultural phenomena is only just starting to happen. People have started making noises about the death of this hobby. But I don’t believe we’re looking at death. I think we’re looking at a rennaissance. Obviously the second wave is not going to be as revolutionary as the first wave but to people on the inside it could seem a little like the hobby is being corrupted or eroded.

I think I have managed to get in at the beginning of this second wave although it was underway by the time I stepped in. My first group had evolved a gaming practice I have now adopted which is significantly different from the practice of those in the first wave. The kinds of games second wavers play or prefer to play are different to the favoured scenarios of wave one. It amounts to a small but significant change in the overall hobby. It’s going to mean growth but it also means that the old hardcore are going to be unhappy.

I’ve noticed that there are certain mental habits favoured by more traditional gamers which actually lock down or impede this process of change. It involves ways of looking at games, ways of solving problems, ways of treating PCs and NPCs. None of these habits are necessarily wrong so much as they are unhelpful. They exist on both sides of the GM/Player divide. It is only by bringing new people into the games further along the road that the habits are exposed. It is my hope that they can be changed because ultimately I think many older gamers’ frustration with the limitations of the hobby are actually caused by these habits.

This weekend past I’ve seen a distinct clash between old school and new school approaches in the campaign I’m running. It’s a hard thing to arbitrate when you can understand both sides of the argument and still think that one side is definitively in the wrong.

So in hope of clarifying the situation a little I’d like to outline those habits of thought I’ve noted in older gamers that I don’t think are helpful to the evolution of gaming as a hobby or, indeed, in the development of the campaigns they crop up in.

1) Players vs. GM - Back in the early days of D&D there was some legitimacy to a campaign carried out as a pitched battle between the players and the GM (or DM as it was). It’s my personal opinion, and the opinion of just about anyone who has an opinion on these things, that the GM/DM role should be taken by someone impartial. Essentially the level of danger should therefore be dictated by the setting. I try to adhere to this rule strictly and choose only to play games and run games where someone behaving reasonably probably won’t die, or at least will get plenty of warning before they do die.

I think if it is to be otherwise players are to be warned beforehand that sudden death is applicable. Sudden death is a story device and as such should be used to flavour not to punish. On which note…

2) ‘Got The T-Shirt’ Play - I am eternally grateful to GM Gaming Alex and GM Gaming Mike in particular for keeping me clear of this habit in my time gaming. It kind of grows out of habit 1 and is typified by assuming that no NPC can be trusted, that villains are there because how can heroes be heroes if there are no villains and a general assumption that questioning the game universe is a pointless thing to do at best. This manifests in GMs as the ‘of course it was a clue… a blatant clue’ syndrome in which GMs carefully hint at things the players then carefully ignore. Generally this is discussed as a malaise of the hobby and something one can do nothing about.

If this is the case someone should put it on a memo to myself and Mrs. Monkey who are perfectly in tune when it comes to her testing the limits of the game universe I’m running. The fact other players seem to think they have the right to accuse her of being irrelevant or a troublemaker for this behaviour irritates me intensely. Not least because the story never feels more alive than when it is a negotiation between players and GM as to the most satisfying story overall. If players are content to sit back and let stuff happen then no development can really take place. For the players who are exemplifying this laziness to then have a go at the players who are racing ahead into new realms is totally unacceptable.

To summarise on this point a ‘Got the T-Shirt’ player will begin any given campaign mistrusting everything, fighting the most obvious villain ‘because he is clearly the villain’ and if it turns out that he’s not in any immediate danger he will default to becoming inert and drifting through the game world looking for a free lunch, imaginatively speaking.

It is in such an environment that metagaming flourishes. Asking yourself not: ‘how can my character explore, progress, develop in this story’ but instead ‘how can my character irritate the GM by breaking his scenario’ is the sure sign that you are holding your character back.

3) Mine is not to question why - And I’d just like to reiterate. When the GM puts on his sharp-toothed, black-cloaked hand puppet and points to it saying to the players “this guy’s just walked into the room with an army of ninjas and he looks ready for a ruck” they’re all happy to ruck. Later on having escaped or defeated the ninja army they may pause long enough to work out what the bad guy’s name is and in what nefarious plan he is occupied. Hardly ever do players ask themselves *why* a villain is opposing them. Negotiation is a forgotten tool in the repertoire. The wider plot happens to many players because the forces at work beyond them swing into gear without the players ever really trying to get the drop on them. Trying to prepare yourself with the right information by asking the right questions might seem too much like hard work to some, to many.

GMs are equally guilty of leaving the clues on the table without, perhaps, signposting the available options. Signposting, however, is hard. Asking questions if you think about the situation is easy. Players rarely review. They rarely regroup. They rarely reorganise. If there is a leader then that’s rare too. Hopefully the GM can drop an NPC leader in at crucial points but he shouldn’t really need to.

There’s loads more. I’ll get to further points as they occur to me. I’m having a serious go at these things because I want to game with gamers who can use gaming for more than just dumb entertainment or statistics for fun and profit. Gaming could provide access to the consideration of real issues and real questions of a metaphysical, spiritual, personal and philosophical nature. Personally, I’d prefer to play in those games.

Man, he was someone whose performances I always enjoyed. If I didn’t think I’d enjoy seeing a film he was in I knew he’d still be good in it; and if it was something I was looking forward to then his presence just elevated that project in my estimation see the new Batman flick for details.

And yet both Colin Farrell and Tom Cruise are still alive and working. (I mean alive is just about acceptable but why are they allowed to continue being in movies?)

What’s that all about?

Mr. Ledger, wherever you are, the lack of your presence in future movie production is a significant loss to the artform.

I was happy to find something worth buying whilst looking through the 2nd Hand bins of the local soon-to-be-defunct comics/games shop. (On a complete digression comic book store owners have found specialising in comics has provided a shot in the arm for their business. Hybridising comics and games on a single shop floor seems to irritate everyone and lead to lost revenue. Many hybrid owners can’t see the wood for the trees on this one and hence businesses fail. What I wouldn’t give for a proper games shop in my area. Mind you I only know of two in the whole of London so to see one here at all would be a miracle. And GW outlets don’t count.)

Anyway. The item in question was the suitably beautiful Deliria sourcebook which contains, I imagine, all that exists, aside from a few notes I found on an internet discussion board, about the Deliria RPG.

I would point to the official website here, but the official website doesn’t work. So instead I will point to a comprehensive review that also has a fair amount of discussion underneath including the aforementioned designer’s notes. These notes, coupled with the discussion may well lead one to conclude, should one be a role player that Deliria would be too much of a chore to administrate as an RPG. I imagine the publishers, Laughing Pan, are experiencing constant and comprehensive web difficulties, and probably financial and existence issues, for precisely this reason.

A vague RPG in a beautiful coffee table book smacks of a folly (in the sense of a beautiful but pointless and expensive vanity project). There is much that smacks of folly about the book. Not least the gorgeous but prohibitively colourful version of the character sheets in the book. I am, perhaps not best placed to comment upon how much of a chore a loose system is to run for rules lawyers as I’m not a rules lawyer. I don’t kid myself that this is not just because I can busk most things and therefore tend to. I know that some people prefer a cushion of rules and that’s cool too. It’s also the case that Role Playing as an activity started as a bolt on to table top war gaming and the first people to therefore adopt the hobby were somewhat keen on rules.

THe problem for people who were more story-oriented was that the market didn’t instantly respond with the other end of the scale (which for all practical purposes would probably be FUDGE). Hence Role Playing became a pastime restricted by its own history. It doesn’t help that roleplaying is tricky and time consuming. Bad sessions can have long lasting repercussions; basically you really have to love role playing to do it at all.

Ironically this makes RPGs with heavy rulesets the easiest to enforce fairly. People become attached to their characters and to allow any fudged variable to harm them can cause upset if not handled diplomatically. The lighter the rule system becomes the further out of the comfort zone you wander.

A specific solution to this is for designers of fudgier games to point out (continually) that combat is not the point of their game. Emphasis has continually been encouraged into a story telling mode with some arbitration from a random element. The only problem with this is that almost anything can be modelled with random elements arbitrated by dice and sometimes people have been known to try.

This, in fact, was the basic elegance of FUDGE. It didn’t attempt anything of the sort. You just rolled your fudge dice and stuff happened (or didn’t happen).

So what of all this talk of crunchiness versus vagueness. Well, I find that the most rules-obsessed person in the world can modify their opinion if they have the lack of rules explained to them rationally. I think this is actually a reasonable defence mechanism. Maths-based rules are a ponderous but confusion-free means of ensuring clear and accurate communication. If a designer can facilitate a reasonably clear communication protocol without so much dice rolling then it is worthy. Indeed FUDGE wears its extensive playtesting and rules hammering on its sleeve, this is a major contributor to its continued status as the most popular, least crunchy game available. Over The Edge is also a serious contender here.

Even so some established gamers are still worried by a lack of crunch and the less well explained something is the less it becomes non-crunchy and the more it becomes just “flaky”. Hence the major criticisms I read online of Deliria and its support materials. I’ve only just started reading the support materials myself and I have to say that many of the criticisms are well founded in the sense that the materials don’t leave you with many concrete things to hold onto. As a writer I can cooperate with “vague but evocative” very well, a stimulus for ideas is always welcome. If you just want to run the game, however it can be far more frustrating. Deliria’s sourcebook makes OTE look like D&D 3.5 it’s all colour and no line.

Personally I walked into this with my eyes open. Even flicking through in the games shop I could just feel the flake, but when flake looks so nice I can get behind it. Not that I’m shallow and image obsessed, hey, fudge is hardly the most beautiful product on earth, but in a compendium of ideas it’s a bonus.

And there’s the rub. I forked out for Deliria because a) it was 2nd Hand and hence cheap and b) I figured even if it was terrible as an RPG it might give me some ideas for scenarios in other systems or for proper stories. So I was in a bit of a win-win situation with this one.

So I took it home, leafed through it, and then thought it might help to survey the reviews online to see how it all worked out and here we are. Well, nearly.

You see what I found fascinating was that the author of the role playing game came into the discussion board armed with a full riposte to the review (instigated at the reviewer’s request) not in a spirit of defence but rather one of clarification. He addressed the issues raised by the review and tried to explain his thinking about why he’d made the system the way he had.

The write ups which form about 6000 words odd of prose were so interesting that I copied them into a file for later reference. That was when it struck me: if these thoughts really did clarify what the hell was up with this crazy game anyhow then why wasn’t it in the book?

I can’t help feeling bad that the thing got such a roasting because I can understand why someone who really wants an organised framework for oral storytelling would not want their protocol confused with combat modifiers and relics of role playing history. On the other hand for those who are interested in trying to use the system it seems a bit much to have to locate key details about what the author intended by reading an internet message board.

Even in an unkind world so much effort, aesthetic sense and passion should not be brought down by lax playtesting and/or sensible system proofing. However our world is an unkind one and all that work can fall for precisely those reasons.

Just because you hate writing rules does not mean that other people will not appreciate them being written. If you find it easier to jot down a few random thoughts, give them to a pedantic friend and then clarify what you meant in response to questions then that is what you must do. Rules don’t have to be prescriptive they can also be definitive, that is saying what the idea of the rule is and why it exists. If someone has a reason to ignore such a rule then they can because they understand why it exists in the first place.

I know that before organising a Deliria circle of my own I will almost certainly have to read not only the sourcebook thoroughly but also acquaint myself with the rules supplement from the Net. It’s a lesson I hope to take to heart when writing my own systems.

For those of you feeling that I have rather been neglecting the writing side of my mission statement in the past few weeks I hold my hands up. This isn’t direct advice on writing. The only thing I would say is that writing a role playing scenario acquaints one with the idea of notes for a novel more than adequately. Attempting to clarify rules is the most effective schooling for the ancient art of story signposting. The greatest thing of all is that clarifying a rule is a task both reader and critic can agree on.

If your story is about the evils of cheese in Western Society and you mis-signpost someone may mistake your story as being about the evils of wellington boots and not even twig that their mistaken impression came about due to poor signposting. This leaves you with an inappropriate criticism of the wellington boot motif and if the reviewer has not seen the cheese thing then you may be somewhat mystified as to whether the reviewer was even reviewing the same story. If, on the other hand, you have written a rule about how fast a character recovers “life” after losing an amount of it in combat these issues are less likely to arise. Even if a reviewer does not understand the rule you and they both know what it is the rule is supposed to achieve even if it doesn’t yet achieve it properly.

It has long been my mission to entice more players into the gaming fold. Having inducted Mrs Monkey and Scott into the murky world of dice rolling and experience gathering I have been looking out for systems which attempt to break away from the old “roll for initiative” model. Here we run into a classic Catch 22. All RPGs were originally written by gamers, even D&D which derived from classic wargames. So all the RPGs written by gamers who wanted to change the focus from beating things into the ground to something else only had the previous models of RPG to make their new RPgs from.

This wouldn’t have been such a problem except I’ve started to detect that RPGs generally spend most of their time providing the players with advice about how to create characters and GMs with advice about settings and NPCs and the like. All this is necessary information but there is one key piece of information that, although addressed here and there is never tied down for the GM. What I’ve found is that what the players do depends very much on what you *tell* them to do and *how* you tell them to do it.

Only when the nightmare session raised its head did I think about this. Many experienced gamers assume that the given aim of any RPG is to give them an excuse to wander around hitting things or engaging in other macho activities such as breaking and entering, intimidation, sneaking about in disguise and generally busking it with little or no research. Unless you as the GM suggest it or your players understand how to go about researching (or indeed attempting any other freeform approach to problem solving) they won’t. They’ll behave like gamers always do and at root that involves hitting things and hunting down the phat lewt.

This is why it was important to the author of Deliria that people understood that this was seldom if ever a system about either hitting things or collecting phat lewt for its own sake.

My regular although rarely programmed NeverWhere game has nailed this lack of combat by making the game’s central token the favour. Everyone is out for favours from everyone else. Neverwhere is, to all intents and purposes, a Deliria campaign of sorts. Storytelling is more important than anything else. This is awesome but it kind of happened by accident.

So to, eventually summarise:

1) If you’re going to write a game let harss people at it before you publish. Retrospective written explanation is fine up to a point but really all that clarification would have looked better in the original document not as an afterthought
2) Objectives in role playing could be seen as the next innovation. Role Playing games where there are other means of “scoring” than reaming in endless experience points, specialist items and phat lewt will make players think in a different manner about how they achieve the goals you’ve set them.
3) Be careful how you put things to players. I made the mistake of telling them to “look into” something without providing the caveat that “look into” did not necessarily mean “interfere with” and now we all have to live with the fallout.

I realise this has been a trademark monster entry but there’s a hell of a lot going off in my head regards this role playing business at present.

Of course it is necessary in any story worth its salt that the heroes get hosed down at some point, that they suffer a setback, that they discover life is not as easy as they once thought. It is only through this process that they grow in a way the reader believes in the growth. It is in this process that the kernel of the story exists, without it stories are just daydreams, in excessively punishing situations the story becomes a hard work of drudgery like the business of actually living and the pleasure of hearing the story is drastically reduced.

This balance between testing a hero, allowing a hero to become an egotistic daydream and punishing a hero too harshly for minor misdemeanours is reflected in the GMs (Game Moderator) role in any given RPG. It is the trickiest balance to pull off in writing when you are solely responsible for the story. When others are involved the process becomes exponentially more difficult. As the GM you may provide opportunities but you may not dictate how a player character utilises those opportunities.

I think the problem is compounded when a player’s metagaming paranoia takes over from common sense and opportunities for plot advancement are squandered as readily as those opportunities for growth.

In fact any given RPG session is likely to swerve between states of complication and states of conflict. In the former PCs bargain with the GM to overcome obstacles in the way of their objective. In the latter PCs react to story events in a manner which defines their character and either utilises or squanders their potential.

The problem is that if a session seems to be nothing but wading through complications and then fluffing every conceivable opportunity to advance the character by maybe not even being able to grasp the central conflict then you’re up for one hard session. It’s hard for the GM to watch the players bungle into danger and its frustrating for the players to feel like they’re fighting smoke up to their hips in treacle. Sessions like that are inevitable but they’re no fun. At the end of such a session morale is likely to be set quite low and everyone is annoyed.

As far as the GM is concerned the players wasted all their opportunities and spent long periods arguing about minutiae as the epic story sailed by unnoticed. As far as the players are concerned the GM is a sadist and they were out of their depth and got unfairly dealt a harsh hand. If they’d wanted to feel useless and unwanted they would have just talked to a relative, they were role playing to feel like they had some control.

These things can spiral. A good group of players can recover given an appropriately fair GM but sometimes the entire group can teeter on the brink.

So what’s to be done?

The GM has to be harsh but fair. If the players walk through a land of egotistic excess where no mountain is too high, no monster too tough and no maiden unwooable then the whole thing becomes an entirely different chore. If the heroes can’t seem to catch any but the most minor of breaks then it seems like a pointless cruelty to even be playing. So as GM you have to be cnadyman and slave driver in good measure. Still doesn’t mean the nightmare session isn’t going to come along.

It’s accidental, the GM thought this session was all about x and the players decide that it’s all about Y. GM figured players would do this and players actually do that. This is the joy of the freedom to riff that RPGs provide.

The important thing is to make the pain pay. Personally I like to do a little inbetweener for players to tell them what happened in the dead time inbetween one adventure and the next. These “character briefings” are an attempt to re-orientate the players and to get them thinking along similar lines to the ones I did when I came up with the scenario. Even given this belt and braces approach everyone gets hosed from time to time. For me having tried my best to point the players in the right direction and then having them all go in several unhelpful directions before falling over in smoking piles of ruin tells me I have become as complacent as perhaps the players were.

This was certainly the case last Saturday when the major centre of the adventure went unexamined as players picked over the minutiae of the minor complications I’d set up for them to overcome with aplomb once they’d got a handle on the situation.

As they never got a handle on the situation they got trounced and deus ex machina had to lend a hand in sorting out the Gordian riddle. At the end of the session the players had spent their time running around chasing their own tails and the story had kind of happened in the background without their help. This is depressing for everyone. No actual story got told there was just a bunch of pointless running around followed by some tedious exposition.

I’m going to try to make the proof of this pudding in the inbetween. After all heroes who get drubbed in fiction only seem to learn the value of adversity when they are licking their wounds after the fact. I’m not sure how this will work out but hopefully it will make the players more determined to prevail next time. Maybe the powers that be will now be able to take into account their limitations and allow them room to grow into their new powers.