Transneptune

RPGs are great.  They allow for all sorts of collaborative fiction with all sorts of people playing all sorts of characters. Never in a stage production could I be cast as a … well, as any of the characters I ever play.

But hold on, “all sorts” of fiction?  There’s one in particular that has never worked in my experience, and that is the Murder Mystery.  It’s incredibly hard to make a murder mystery work in an RPG.  If you go the Agatha Christie route, you need to come up with an outlandish murder scenario, an oddball cast of suspects, and then have the players roll well on their perception rolls to spot key details.  If you go the Colin Dexter route, you need to make a dense web of relations between a group of reasonably normal people, and have the players suss out a motive by exploring the whole social web.

Either way, you run into a problem of affordances: you know how, in a video game, some doors just are flat panels with no handles?  You know that you can’t open them, because they lack a handle and its affordances.  In an RPG, affordances are even more obvious, generally: the GM, in describing things, gives you the set of things you might need to know, or to twiddle, or to play with.  They can throw red herrings in there, but that just ameliorates the problem—fundamentally, they’ve still taken a number of things and raised them from the background.  A part of a mystery is often identifying what information to take out of the background.

Finally, mysteries are troublesome because of their intrinsically solitary method of solving—the information that solves the mystery can come from many sources, but the moment of eureka comes from one mind, and one mind alone.  One person synthesizes the information and then Knows How It Happened.  Who wants to play Dr. Watson to some other player’s Holmes?  To have everything explained, because either they as a player couldn’t put it together, or they as a player didn’t get enough information to put it together because they did not roll well enough on perception rolls?  Not I.

So, if you’ve run a successful murer mystery tabletop RPG, please, tell me how.

Tags: affordances, bad games, mysteries by kit
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Sadly, this post is not about a game in which you play ancient tomes or cheap paperbacks. Though I have played an ex-book in a game before. No, this is just a quick observation that my FLGS has fewer RPGs than the nearest Borders, though of course a similarly DnD-heavy selection. But, curiously, both have the Mouse Guard RPG.

Tags: borders, dnd, flgs, mouse guard by kit
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John over at The Mighty Atom has some good advice.  Reproduced here:

Connected: The character has relationships (positive and negative) with other significant characters in the situation.

Committed: The character has a stake in the outcome of the situation, and will stay to see it through.

Capable: The character has the capacity to affect change in the situation by taking decisive action.

Conflicted: The character has beliefs and goals that are in conflict. They must make choices about which are more important, and which must be abandoned or changed.

Also, Gregor Hutton has some great advice in 3:16:

PLAY, DON’T WORK
Play is fun, so embrace the kill-happy machismo [this particular point is specific to the game. –Kit] and play with it. It’s not work, right? You shouldn’t be stressing over this.

LIVE THE MOMENT
Each moment might be your character’s last, so don’t try and plan ahead. Events and dice rolls will throw you a curveball all the time. You’ll find that the bigger picture will take care of itself in play.

BE A TEAM PLAYER
Listen to your other players at least as much as you speak. Do share your ideas but learn to enjoy the contributions of others too.

DON’T TRY TO BE TOO CLEVER
If you spend all your time trying to be clever or bring in more twists and turns it’ll just be tiring. Instead, just go with the intuitive and obvious answers that pop into your head. Simple is best.

BE DIRECT
Trying to be subtle can be confusing, and trying to make a convoluted plan worse. Be straight to the heart of the matter.

BE OPEN
Be open minded and honest about how you feel. That’s the way.

Tags: rpg character creation by kit
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In that sense, you suggest that gaming, in fact, pops up everywhere. There’s a lot of stigmatism around the idea that you might sit at home alone playing a computer game—or blogging—or that you might go out to an internet café and play a game with your friends, as if there’s something socially wrong with you; but if you go down to the pub for a game of pool, that’s the height of sociability. That’s the right kind of gaming. So only specific types of games are stigmatized, and only specific types of play have been rewarded.

—BLDGBLOG interview with Jim Rossignol

So. It’s fairly well-reported that every culture has its approved mind-altering substances and its disapproved ones.  Anywhere you are, there’ll be at least alcohol, and quite possibly a plethora of local flora (and sometimes fauna) capable of putting one quite out of one’s senses.  And some of them are OK, and some of them are not, depending what culture you’re in. [Read more →]

Tags: cultural observations, performance, rpgs by kit
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So, for all those who had Elfstar accounts, and all those who might want them (bear in mind, it’s still Alpha — I hope to have an initial Beta released by the end of the month), you can sign up here.  I’ll approve the accounts as fast as I can.

Tags: coding projects, elfstar, rpgs by kit
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