Teaching Role-Playing Games, Part 2: The Game Plan

Robin Laws has appropriately called the tabletop role-playing game a “hidden art” because its heart and soul are only revealed through the dynamic experience at the table. It was evident to me from the start that the core of my unit on TTRPGs had to involve a sequence of classroom sessions dedicated to intensive actual play.

Of course, this poses a problem for the classroom. Most TTRPGs are designed for intimate groups. For me, a GM and a party of five players seems like a overfull house, and I can’t imagine running one of those early Dungeons and Dragons modules: I’m looking at Against the Giants where the introduction suggests a party of nine players as ideal (and an average experience level of nine). For the purposes of this teaching unit, I need all the students to be actively immersed, and that means dividing them up into small groups, each of which will run their respectively chosen games simultaneously.

So here’s what I did. I selected a group of 12 tabletop role-playing games for the students to choose from. I put the games on a Google slide presentation with a piece of art (usually a cover) and the game’s “elevator pitch.” All are games I admire, but it’s a diverse set. Some are GM-less, some are traditional high fantasy fare, some are comic, and others are dead serious. You can view the slide show here. Here are the titles:

• The Quiet Year by Avery Adler
• Follow by Ben Robbins
• Sorcerer by Ron Edwards
• My Life with Master by Paul Czege
• Legendary Lives by Joe Williams and Kathleen Williams
• Swords and Wizardry by Matt Finch
• Lady Blackbird by John Harper
• Shooting the Moon by Emily Care Boss
• Inspectres by Jared Sorenson
• Puppetland by John Scott Tynes
• The Pool by James V. West
• The Princes’ Kingdom by Clinton R. Nixon

In class, I presented the lineup quickly, with just a few comments. For example, I let them know that Ron Edwards’ Sorcerer means it when it says it is an intense role-playing game. I told them that Puppetland is very fun, but that it requires some committed improvisation from its players. I mentioned the genre of each, and noted that The Pool and Follow are incredibly flexible in allowing the players to choose a setting.

I shared the link to the Google slides and told the students to mull things over for a couple days. Then, at the start of class two days later, I had each student write down their top three choices on a 3x5 card, after which I sifted through the desires to organize them into games they were interested in playing. When I figured out the groups, I determined which chosen games were neither freely available nor covered under a creative commons license, and I contacted those creators to let them know what my plans were and to ask if I could make the rules available to students on my school’s secured classroom management platform.

Some notable developments: Two groups in separate sections chose Sorcerer. Two other groups chose Legendary Lives. The Quiet Year was the most popular choice. I’m most excited to see the end product of one of my sections where I will have the following four games in action: Follow, The Quiet Year, Swords and Wizardry, and Legendary Lives. Those actual play reports should allow for some probing examination with two GM-less games on display alongside a D&D reskin and a dazzling fantasy heartbreaker.

Virtually none of my students have played a tabletop role-playing game, so, to give them a sense of what the activity looks like, I had them watch a short clip from “D and Diesel” on Youtube. This is a segment where Vin Diesel joins some of the members of Critical Role to play through a brief scenario. I told students in advance that the video was a slick production that would not match our own upcoming experiences. But it did allow me to illustrate the kinds of conversations that can occur and to walk through the respective roles of the GM and the players in the TTRPG enterprise.

This coming week (shortened due to Winter Break) will be devoted to intensive preparation. Students will read the rulebooks, gather supplies, copy character sheets, create quick reference lists, and acquaint themselves with game mechanics. By Friday, they will be into world building and character creation so that they can hit the ground running at the start of next week, which will be completely devoted to game play.

On my end, I will be active in class, working between the groups to troubleshoot, to help clarify, and to demonstrate the game systems. I’ll also be flagging parts of the games which I suspect will challenge them.

I will also be preparing them for the analytical task to follow the week of game play. For that, I’m going to have a discussion of Robin Laws’ “The Hidden Art: Slouching towards a Critical Framework for RPGs,” and I’ll also introduce them to an assignment that requires them to deliver some actual play reports to the class (in both written and oral form).

So that’s the setup. I’ll be back with Part 3 of this series detailing what happened in the classroom.

Teaching Role-Playing Games, Part 1: The Justification

I’ve taken the plunge and have started teaching a unit on tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) as part of my AP English Language and Composition class. My initial plan was to do my trial run at the end of the year following the AP exams in May. But due to some shifts in the college counselling calendar, I had to do some reshuffling in my class.

The end result is that my TTRPG unit is now a fully legit unit being taught in the heart of the course. This alteration in my plans is completely fortuitous. It means that the TTRPG is being treated as a fully fledged, artful medium in its own right . . . which is exactly how it should be.

This post and those that follow will give you an overview of my approach, and I’ll provide some updates detailing the actual play experiences of my students.

At the start, shout outs go to a number of designers who are helping in ways large and small. Ron Edwards has been instrumental in shaping my own thoughts about this medium, and some one-on-one consulting sessions have provided some key guidance. Ron has a background as an educator, so he’s ideally suited to help bridge the teacher / game designer divide.

Thanks are also in order for Emily Care Boss, Ben Robbins, Avery Alder, Jared Sorenson, Ron Edwards (again!), Clinton Nixon, Matthew Finch, Joe Williams, Kathleen Williams, and James V. West who have been generous (unwitting or not) in sharing their creations with my students. In the case of games under copyright restrictions, I asked the designers for specific permission to share the rules with my students through a secured server. Other designers have already made their rules available either through Creative Commons licensing or through “pay what you want” offerings. So I’ve been able to give my students this opportunity with the good conscience that I am operating securely within good copyright practice.

The question for today’s post:

Why are you doing this and how do you justify taking up weeks of class (and an AP course, no less!) to play tabletop role-playing games?

In the grand scheme, TTRPGs hit on a number of key educational objectives, and they do so in ways that are uniquely powerful and effective.

• They spark what I would call active creativity, as both players and game masters (GMs) must work hard together to bring a story into being. When you are reading a story or a novel, one is sparked to understand the narrative that has been stitched together by the author, and such literature requires considerable imaginative work. But with TTRPGs, the fiction doesn’t even exist without the committed involvement of players and GMs to bring it into being.
• They involve collaboration and communication. The driving engine of TTRPGs is a complex, nuanced conversation taking place around the table. The medium requires engagement all around, and it demands that the participants carefully listen and respond in order to propel the story further.
• It involves critical thinking of a high order. Each play session worth its salt requires the players to work through problems, puzzles, and dilemmas of various sorts. And in most cases, there are multiple possible solutions. The open-ended nature of the games, encourages players to be inventive and to consider outside-the-box solutions that are both effective and unique.

Even with these flags in place, however, there is the issue of curriculum and content to face. To put this as a question, How do TTRPGs even belong in an English class, which should be devoted to literature and written texts?

To move towards an answer, I started my unit by having the students read “Introduction: Ergodic Literature” by Espen Aarseth. That was a challenging piece for my students to chew on, but I was able to make headway by continually grounding the discussion in specific texts. The basic argument is that there is a type of literature—not a genre per se, but a kind of modality—that requires efforts which go beyond the direct understanding or reading of a text. This is what he means by ergodic literature.

A workbook would be one easily grasped example of an ergodic text: To “read” a math workbook (or at least to do so correctly) you are not simply going scan the pages with your eyes and flip pages from front to back. No—you are going to have out a pencil and start writing in the book or perhaps on a separate sheet of paper. Moreover, I might see you flipping about the book, perhaps to compare your answers to an answer key in another section of the book. Or maybe you are going to flip between a problem you are working out on one page and a relevant explanation that appeared a few pages earlier.

I made a point in class that you can often tell if someone was dealing with an ergodic text by simply watching them. Someone reading a novel—even a challenging one—would likely read the book in a linear fashion. You’d see their eyes moving left to right, top to bottom, and then flipping a page, and this process would repeat until the book was finished. With an ergodic text, however, you would probably see the person working in a different fashion—flipping pages, moving backwards and forwards, perhaps writing or doing other forms of manipulation, etc. In other words, there would be additional activities involved that moved beyond the cerebral effort to understand the text.

The other key concept employed by Aarseth is the cybertext. Cybertexts do not necessarily involve computers, but they do involve some type of machine function as a component of their operation. A great example of a non-digital cybertext would be the I Ching, where one employs some type of random number generation as a component of consulting the text. One goes to the I Ching with a question, and then starts to flip coins or to manipulate yarrow sticks in order to come up with the appropriate section of the text to read. Today, one can use a computer to generate the number, but in all cases, there is some type of random-number-generating machine involved.

Another great example of a cybertext is Raymond Queneau’s 100,000 Billion Poems. Queneau writes 10 sonnets, but he does so in such a way that the lines are interchangeable. For example, you can put the first line of the third sonnet together with the second line of the eighth sonnet and then put those lines together with the third line of the first sonnet, and so on. If you want to see how this all looks and operates in hard copy form, go to this youtube video. If you work out the math, you will discover that Queneau’s 10 sonnets end up generating one hundred thousand billion sonnets! This is a poem generating machine that is practically inexhaustible—at least it is inexhaustible for human readers.

Another key aspect of cybertexts is that they involve feedback loops. The reader of a cybertext is also an operator who provides key inputs for the “machine” to process. The machine, in turn provides an output, which the reader must then process. And, in many cases, this reader will take this information and use it to construct a new input which is subsequently fed into the machine.

The argument, then, is this: One productive way of viewing TTRPGs is to see them as examples of ergodic fiction. Moreover, in most cases, they are works that involve cybertextual elements.

Let me break this down and clarify.

The term ergodic is being borrowed from the fields of math and physics, but when Aarseth appropriates the word he is mainly interested in the word because of its Greek roots. Ergon means “work” and “hodos” means path. Thinking about a TTRPG as a “work path” is both appropriate and evocative.

To begin, I like the idea that these are games where a vital part of the fun and importance lies in the work or effort being invested by the players and GM. If someone at the table becomes passive, the game (along with the fiction and the experience) immediately suffers as a result. This is not simply a theoretical idea: When a player disengages with a TTRPG, the effect is immediately palpable at the table.

And TTRPGs provide the players with paths and crossroads to traverse. The trailheads of some of those paths might be given in advance, but it is up to the people around the table to continue with the exploration and at points to blaze their own trails. Aasarth usefully talks about the idea of the labyrinth in terms of ergodic texts and appropriately differentiates between linear labyrinths (such as the meditative paths that one sometimes finds on the floors of gothic churches) and mazes, where the paths fork and which might allow for multiple solutions.

The cybertextual nature of TTRPGs is almost too obvious to need comment. In a typical game of this sort, players are involved in a complex network of feedback loops that connect players with each other and (if there is one) with the GM. Moreover, the games frequently involve additional feedback loops that involve inputs and outputs involving the rulebook, dice rolls, chart consultations, etc.

On the day following our discussion of “Introduction: Ergodic Literature,” I had my students read Ron Edwards’ “System Does Matter.” This led to a discussion about the different types of game objectives, with the useful terms gamist, simulationist, and narrativist being key.  And I also had them consider how a game’s mechanics and system components are crucial in determining whether or not the game is going to be successful in achieving its goal.

Here again, I used concrete examples to aid in the discussion . . . but I was immediately struck by how the students (high school juniors) were often completely unfamiliar with analog games of almost any stripe. I initially started by using chess and backgammon as two games that are communicating very different messages, and that the mechanics are vital to what they are trying to accomplish. Random polling showed that only about half of my students had played chess (though over three quarters had at least an inkling of how the game worked and what it was about), and almost none knew about the game of backgammon! So after my first period, I substituted Monopoly for the backgammon example.

With this discussion of games, I had the students think about how the games’ win conditions, core meaning, and mechanics were intimately connected. Monopoly is a game about rapacious real estate development: You win by building your property empire and bankrupting your opponents. And, while there are some decisions to be made, a large component of the game involves chance through the use of dice. For the most part, in Monopoly, if you are lucky and you follow the urges of greed acquisitiveness, you are going to do fine.

Chess, by contrast, is a game of battle tactics where, apart from the initial assigning of black and white sides, chance plays no role. The world of Chess is gained through strategic positioning and keen wit.

The class has almost no TTRPG experience. I teach 4 sections of the course, and in some of those sections, no student has played a TTRPG, while in others, one or two have a flitting experience with Dungeons & Dragons. Nonetheless, I was able to use “System Does Matter” to introduce them to some basic TTRPG components (character statistics, resolution mechanics, etc.) and to show how, as with chess and monopoly, those systems will reinforce the goals that the games are trying to achieve and the stories they are trying to tell.

That should give you a basic sense of how I got the ship launched. Next time, I will move into the core of the unit which will involve the students dividing into groups, each of which will the play a selected TTRPG over the course of a week in my course.

I feel like I’m heading into largely uncharted waters with this unit. I’m not sure how many high schools teach the TTRPG as an important medium in its own right. So I’m keen for resources and reactions to this endeavor. Should you have any comments or suggestions, please share them.

Sorcerer and Sword: The Sodden Lands of Snia Mer, Session Two

Click here to see the actual play video of session two of my “Sodden Lands of Snia Mer” campaign.

A few comments:

I often consider myself a “slow burn” type—I’m a GM who enjoys the gradual build-ups. But I often worry how this will come across to my players, who might be interested in a more pulse-pounding pacing. As I was editing this video, there are some signs of payoff to my slow burn approach:

The start of the session involves the two sorcerers meeting up on the destroyed village of Tainu. After some Q and A, the two settle in for the night, but Nagimo wakes up to find that his NPC companion has gone missing, and he makes a search, which leads him to his hireling Skintu and a discovery that there is some strange presence on the island. There is plenty of mystery that is mounting here, but it is a slowly rising arc. If you are looking for an actual play session to be the same as a rapid fire, Hollywood movie, you will be disappointed.

But then, leap to half way through the video—to the part carrying the subtitle “Demon Contact.” The other sorcerer, Balder, has joined Nagimo to get to the bottom of what lured Skintu onto the island in the middle of the night, and this leads to a decision to attempt a Contact ritual. The ritual succeeds (at the price of Humanity loss), and there is a suitably creepy exchange between the sorcerers and a “Sentinel Demon” named Asmund.

I notice a number of things clicking in the scene. When the demon calls his refrain, “Come closer,” there is some genuine, unsettled laughter around the table: All of us realized that this was a scene that was dripping with consequence, but we also didn’t know exactly where the fiction was going to break, so this resulted in some pregnant, high-level suspense. The scene also had some duration, and the nervous energy was sustained for the length. This energy wouldn’t have been possible without the slow build. Nor would it have been possible if I had scripted a narrative in advance. Part of what made it all work was the perceived sense that the outcome depended on what the sorcerers were deciding (and upon the outcome of some key dice rolls).

The sorcerers ultimately acceded to caution and opted not to push a confrontation with the demon. I think some GMs might have been disappointed with that direction, but I was delighted. The fact that they didn’t force a conflict with Asmund means that there is a powerful chord of mystery and tension playing in the background. Of course, I would have been happy to play along with other decisions as well, but I’m relishing the rich suspense created by that unresolved encounter.

At the close of the session, the sorcerers run across a hybrid monstrosity—a combination crocodile and bear—and you’ll see us working through the combat mechanics. It was an exciting encounter, though I’m also working hard to keep faithful to the mechanics. Here again, some might fault me for slowing down the pace to get the rules right. But for the fans of the slow burn, there are continued payoffs, such as one roll where Nagimo and the “Beardile” monstrosity match their highest three dice, so Nagimo finally gets a victory on his fourth highest die.

Due to schedules, we skipped this past Friday, but session three is lined up for this week. The sorcerers are landing at the garrison of Muskcross Grange, and it’s quite possible that at least one of the kickers will be resolved. Nagimo has heard that one of his tribe is working at the garrison for the enemy, and he is determined to find out what’s up with that apparent act of double-cross. Will he discover the truth behind his friend? And if so, where will that lead him? I don’t know, but I’m eager to find out.

Putting the Gaming Irons in the Fire in 2020

January is the month when, like its titular god, we look forward and look back.

2019 was an active year on the gaming table. A few highlights:

• I rolled out a playtest of Becoming Beowulf, my original classroom game about Anglo-Saxon culture. The game relies on resource management, strategizing, and roleplaying, and, while it had a few glitches (which I’m working out), it was quite successful.
• I played many new games, largely due to the Gauntlet, an online gaming community.
• The gaming club I sponsor at school has kicked it into high gear. Free moments during the school day saw an army of kids in my classroom relaxing, socializing, and playing games.
• I led a presentation titled “Beyond Gamification” at the FCIS (Florida Council of Independent Schools) annual convention. That talk discussed ways of hacking and designing games for the school environment, and it used numerous examples of specific games that I have modified and created.
• Our Legendary Lives group completed an amazing 18-session campaign. That was an immensely satisfying and thought provoking experience. The game is a so-called “Fantasy Heartbreaker,” and it remains a rich, complex game. The major weak spot in the rulebook is a lack of awareness of how to turn the game into a campaign, but Ross, our GM, was brave in facing the challenge, and in the process, he showed me much about GM strategies that have impacted my own approach.
• I remained active on Ron Edwards’ Adept Play website. My sense is that twitter remains one of the go-to places for gamers to discuss the hobby. Despite years of tinkering with twitter, I’ve come to the conclusion that that “short form” format is not conducive to the kind of probing, non-posturing discussions I most enjoy. Adept Play is a place which fulfills many of my needs for provocative, informed discussion of games.

So what’s up for 2020?

I’m still going to be active on the Gauntlet, but I’ve decided that the long form is where it’s at with rpgs. So I’m working on building some groups which might be willing to carry a game forward without setting a specific number of sessions at the outset.

Currently, I’ve started a Sorcerer and Sword campaign which has some legs: It’s set in a world where vast areas are swamp land, and the two players came up with kickers and pasts that opened the way to some compelling scenario building. That game has also sparked a renewed interest in the kind of no-holds-barred sword and sorcery genre that enthralled me in high school. I’m now reading Wagner’s Kane stories, and I plan to continue to delve into the literature and to bring that spirit to my games.

I’ve also started an Over the Edge campaign. Stay tuned for more thoughts about this groundbreaking game from the 90s. I’ve been looking at the most recent 3rd edition which came out in 2019, but I opted to go with the WaRP system and materials of the first two. I’ll let you know more about my reasons for that. This campaign is rather unique in the makeup of its players. My daughter graduated from high school last year, and the gaming group that she participated in has moved to various schools. I volunteered to run a game for her and her friends via video call, and four of them were enthusiastic. We did some character creation yesterday, and we’ll be landing in Al Amarja on the first of February!

I bought a new “gaming laptop” with some Christmas funds, and I’m using it to edit some actual play videos. So I’m hoping to stay active on that front. If you are interested in Sorcerer and Sword or Over the Edge, you will probably see some postings in the coming months with links to my videos.

I’m hoping to present my Beowulf game at the Lausanne learning institute, and I’m also applying for a fellowship grant from FCIS which would assist in my educational gaming initiative. If I get that grant, it might lead to a full-on teacher workshop that would bring in some select game designers to help teachers reflect upon bringing games into the classroom.

Accompanying this presence in the educator arena, I'm going to be making some steps into full-fledged gaming conventions. Next month, for example, I'll be travelling to New Jersey to attend Dreamation 2020.

One last item: I’m moving forward on teaching ttrpgs as a medium of communication and an art form.  In February, I have played a 3-week unit devoted to the topic. The centerpiece of the unit will involve students playing games in small groups and then reporting upon those experiences to the class.

Those are just a few of the gaming irons that I have in the fire. It promises to be a thrilling and satisfying year. I’ll continue to post here to keep you abreast of the developments!

The Sodden Lands of Snia Mer: Session One

We held our first session of “The Sodden Lands of Snia Mer,” which is using Ron Edwards “Sorcerer and Sword” setting for his game Sorcerer. If you want to see the video, click here. I should note that this session comes on the heels of a one-page setting sketch and a 2-hour “Session Zero” where the players created their characters and started to fill in the setting.

Sorcerer is a game that favors small groups: 2-3 players with a GM is, in my mind, the ideal size.  You’ll see me open the session by letting the players know that there was no expectation that they wind up with each other. They had established during character creation that they lived in the same proximity and had an acquaintance with each other. The players also imagined characters that had some experiences in common: Most importantly, both have experienced devastation at the hands of the Ado Empire. But I emphasized that this didn’t need to a “party adventure game.”

At the same time, the characters they created had kickers that were begging for some interweaving. Here, in brief, are the kickers:

• Nagimo, who has a parasite demon of a catfish spirit, hears that a member of his destroyed tribe might be alive and working for the enemy that brought desolation to his people. 
• Balder, who has a very formidable object demon (a gem) fused to his chest, gets a vision of another object demon which could provide him even more formidable powers. 

I won’t provide too many spoilers here, but there was plenty for me to work with as I prepared for the opening session, and I wasn’t holding back on the opportunity to create some points of contact between the kickers.

A few items of note for this particular session:

First, with the demise of Hangouts On-Air, I have been trying to get back into the recording of some actual play. So I used some Christmas gift funds to purchase a modest “gaming computer,” loaded up OBS (a free, open-source video recording program), and learned how to use Microsoft’s Video Editor (which came already provided to me via Microsoft Windows). I’ve had some bumps and blips. My computer apparently has two video cards, which initially confused OBS. And I forgot to hit “Record” during our session zero. But I managed to get everything working for Session One, and I love the fact that I can now take out some distracting interruptions and add some text notes (which I wasn’t able to do when using Hangouts On-Air).

My goal is humble: I’m not looking for a slick, professional video production, but I’d like a video that shows a GM and some players in the trenches and working hard at playing a challenging ttrpg. In this particular project, I’d like the videos to give interested parties a sense of how “Sorcerer and Sword” operates. If it also sparks some discussion of techniques at the table, so much the better. I’m open to suggestions that will help me with this new chapter in putting together some solid actual play material.

For Session One, the spotlight is the kickers. Both players had provided me with the key crisis or concern which was troubling their characters, and instead of putting the kickers in the past, I brought them vividly into the present. So the kickers really get some meat (and intrigue) added to them as we play. The Sorcerer Chart--which helps to spotlight relationships between elements of kickers, price, lore, and past/cover--was a key part of my prep, and the play benefited from attending to those elements. If you decide to play Sorcerer, don't neglect that chart! And I would say that that chart can be adapted and repurposed for other games. It will give you a good way of taking elements provided by your players and weaving them into situations that will propel their characters.

This was, in my mind, an instructive “Session One” of Sorcerer. The players are working to flesh out the nature of their demons, some intriguing NPCs are shifting about in the shadows, there is some good scaffolding work done in terms of the resolution mechanics, and Balder opted to seek out Nagimo (as a result of a vision), so it seems like the two protagonists will be joining forces during r the immediate future.

One item that I feel I nailed well was the handling of failures on rolls. For example, at about the 1:05 mark, you will see Balder using his demon to pick up some potential weak spots in a prison. After a failed Perception, I allowed Balder to draw some conclusions, but that action also triggered some mockery from a couple guards who happened to see Balder doing his surveillance (with the use of a demonic ability). Ozeman, Balder’s demon, has a need to be worshipped and adored, so obviously this mockery (brought about by the failed Perception roll) was a stinging blow that required some type of “saving face” action. That got us into a brief combat. Balder opted not to push things as far as he could, but there might be repercussions down the road, as Ozeman is still, no doubt, resentful, and the guards who have now encountered a Psychic Blast, might be passing on information to others.

Nagimo also failed when trying to hire out a fellow swamp dweller to join him on a bit of spy work. Instead of making this a whiff, I made the “hire” more costly. To achieve his goal of getting Skintu (the NPC) to join him, he had to offer the entire amount of coins provided by a scout named Masho as his payment, and he has also promised that, if successful, his “hireling” will share in the spoils.

Cold Soldier: First Flight

Ron Edwards has been a proponent of a two-player game called Cold Soldier, which was written by Bret Gillian in 2011. It has a tight set of rules, and it has you weighing what you want to accomplish in a local scene against a final endgame which will determine the ultimate fate of the Cold Soldier. The GM plays a Master who is pursuing some type of repellent agenda, and the Player plays a reanimated "Soldier" who is ordered to carry out the Master's wishes.

Below are my reflections on the first flight. For more actual play reports, you should check out Adept Play.

After the opening of Christmas presents, my daughter (home from college) and I sat down to play our first trial run of Cold Soldier. Not your typical holiday fare, but the mulled wine in my glass helped to keep me in the holiday spirit during play.

Given that this was our first stab at Cold Soldier, we were trying to get a feel of the game and the mechanics, and I was especially trying to get a sense of the “logic” behind the rules--to get a sense, for example, of what it means for a card in play to get moved into the Master’s or the Soldier’s hole.

We set the game in the present. I took on the role of the Cold Soldier, who was a military paratrooper killed in combat, but whose death was accidental--the result of a parachute malfunction, which meant that I died at the very moment my boots hit the ground. My weapon became, appropriately, the “Kiss of Vertigo.” The Master was a one-eyed restaurateur who was a weird combination of Plankton from Sponge Bob and Albert Spika from The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. There was some humor in the Master, but it was tempered by an underlying grimness.

Some issues and questions that emerged from our play:

If the Cold Soldier succeeds at the task, there is a narrative benefit for the Master (the GM gets to narrate the outcome), but there is not, at that point, any mechanical payoff or cost for either player. This makes that result different than the other two possibilities: If the Soldier fails at the task, he loses a card from his hole. And resisting the Master’s order also requires discarding a card from the hole. In other words, failure and resistance both require a loss for the Soldier. Oddly, a success can mean no card benefit for the Master, even though the Master had his order successfully carried out.

Consider these two sequence:

Sequence #1: The Cold Soldier starts to pursue the Master’s plan and, off the bat, draws a high card. The Soldier allows the success to stand, so neither Master nor Soldier ultimately gets a card.

Sequence #2: The Cold Soldier starts to pursue the Master’s plan, but draws a low card. So the Soldier activates a memory, gets that card for his hole, and then draws a success, which he allows to stand. So the Soldier ends up with a card in his hole and the Master strikes out card-wise (though he does get to monologue).

We were considering this revision to the game rules:

If the Soldier succeeds in the task, the GM gets to narrate as usual, but the Master also gets to choose a card remaining in play for his hole (an advantage for having his task accomplished), and the Master in turn gives the Soldier a card from his hole (a “reward” from the Master).

This rule revision would give the Soldier an added motive for carrying out the Master’s orders: Not only does he avoid the cost of failure, but he gets a card. However, this revision also might be giving the Soldier a reason to resist or fail, because he doesn’t want to give the Master an opportunity to choose a card in play. So the Soldier might be considering whether it is better to give up a card from his hole, or whether it would be better to retain that hole-card and get another one, but at the expense of allowing the master to choose one of those cards in play.

In our game, the Soldier and Master were not previously acquainted: The idea was that the Master was taking advantage of a fresh corpse to be his tool. If we play again, we are thinking it would be preferable to have a pre-existing connection of some sort between the two. This wouldn’t need to be a friendship or family connection, but some acquaintance would have added to the drama during play.

One final note to self (as well as to other players): If you are the Soldier, you should start off play considering the specific stakes available to you the end game. This will give you an added edge and pathos to the memories you recall during play, and it will make the endgame more satisfying. In our game, I was too focused on simply trying to construct a memory using an element from the scene, and I wasn’t thinking ahead to how I could combine these memories into a compelling narrative that would contribute to the stake of the endgame.

On the flip side, if you are the Master, keep your agenda squarely in mind. It helps if you have a solid sense of the repellent goal you are trying to accomplish, and you should use the scenes to build and add layers to this goal through the framing and description of the scenes.

Looking Back...and Forward...to Legendary Lives

It's been a while since my last post, but I've been busy playing games, and there are many irons in the fire. So I'll be getting onto a more regular schedule now that the semester is wrapped up. I begin with a look back at a run of Legendary Lives  that started in the summer. I'm also posting this over at Ron Edward's Adept Press site. If you are interested, head over there, as there will be more discussion and a full video debrief involving the four R's occurring over the coming weeks.

Here's the report:

The Four R’s (Ross, Ron, Rod, and I) played through eighteen sessions of Legendary Lives, completing our run at the start of December. For background, this heroic fantasy rpg is one of the so-called Fantasy Heartbreakers that came out in the 1990s. There are still plenty corners of the game that I would love to explore, and that fact in itself is an indication of how good the game is. We could easily have played on for another eighteen sessions, but schedules and other commitments were weighing on us.  Though the game would richly reward more study, it is fair to say we put Legendary Lives through its paces and are in a good position to offer some measured judgments of its qualities. What follows are some notes I’ve put together in preparation for a debriefing session.

To begin, here are four of the game’s real strengths.

• The rulebook is superb. Many rpg creators would benefit from studying the text of Legendary Lives as an example of clear, cogent writing. When you turn to a random page of the rules, the stylistic craft of Joe Williams and Kathleen Williams jumps out at you. The prose is consistently direct, engaging, and crystalline, without superfluous verbiage. The rules provide abundant concrete examples and advice, but all of this is measured and contained.
• The resolution system shines both in concept and in play. Everything--magic use, combat, skill checks, exercises of abilities, etc.--involve a D100 roll which is then fed through an Action Results Table. The core mechanic is quite easy to get ahold of, and since all these resolutions are part of the same basic system, the players have no problem with it. At the same time, the system is quite nuanced: For resolutions, there are ten different levels of outcome ranging from Catastrophic to Awesome, and this prods the GM to add nuances and shades to the outcome. This results in some thoughtful and engaging roleplaying at the table. From a “history of rpg design” perspective, I’m curious about where Legendary Lives sits in terms of the multilevel resolution system. Are there other games of the era that offer this type of stepped system? 
• The various skills, spells, and abilities are well considered. As we often noted at the table, this is a game that was thoroughly playtested, and the authors have packed the character sheet with abilities and skills that have been well considered and thoughtful. (More on that below.)
• The character creation system is unique and rich. Initially, there seems to be a wild, cartoonish quality to the game. You have over 25 races, each of which has a list of specialties, racial abilities, and religion. You also have numerous tables that give you information about your family background, physical appearance, and lifelines. You then take this abundant information and try to work out a brief character history (including goals) that drives the play forward. The end result still has some fun, cartoonish tinges to it, but what strikes me is how the characters have complexity and vibrancy, which results in some committed play at the table.

Religion and Magic

In game terms, the effects or religion and magic are quite similar. Religious miracles (guidance, fortification, wonders, etc.) and spells carry supernatural effects which are flexibly molded by the players and GM. In fact, miracles have added utility because they are so plastic and because your supply of miracles gets replenished each day (the total number of Miracles being dependent on your character’s Devotion score). Casting spells comes with a cost that gets deducted from the spell score, and this makes the spells more difficult to cast and it limits the number of times you can use them. In the case of both spells and miracles, I like the creative room left for the player. Divination, for example, (which Grrrl used on multiple occasions) can be used to detect events, qualities, or features near and far, and there’s quite a bit you can do with the spell within those types of wide parameters. The system is nicely scalable in terms of the power of the spell: The wider or more forceful the effect, the more a spell costs and the more difficult it becomes to cast.

I had my character (Grrrl) to explore both miracles and magic. I achieved some notable effects (including a wild triptych of a vision towards the end of our run), though I could have taken even more advantage of these resources. At the same time, there is a danger that the game could take on a zaniness if characters were fully exploiting their miracles to the extent allowed by the rules. Our trio of adventurers kept the miracles in check, and this was in part because our characters took religion with a certain level of gravitas. Had we used our full allotment of miracles, the game could have swerved into a direction which would have made religious powers more mundane and flat.

Epic Play

So much of Legendary Lives is set up to reward the long arch. Consider the following:

The character generation yields delightful complexity that can blossom over time.

The rules subsections involving societies, religion, magic, and plants (!) invite continued exploration.

The world map and descriptions of the different races gives you the chance to develop some intricate social, cultural, and political networks.

The skill advancement system is steady but slow.

Curiously, Legendary Lives received much of its playtesting and popularity by being run in convention settings, which has left parts of the game underdeveloped. In other words, you have a game amply loaded with elements that say “long-term play,” but the rules don’t provide much in the way of advice or aid for campaigns moving into their second wind. My sense is that Ross (our GM) had some good techniques operating behind the curtain to make up for this gap, and I’m looking forward to hearing more from him about how he handled preparation.

One idea that might be worth exploring: Have the players periodically revise the character stories to provide new goals and drives (along with introducing new NPCs and factions to deal with). The GM might even flashforward the game, taking the company to a different region and/or time period.

I sensed that Ross had a load of ideas sizzling on the backburner, and we sometimes fumbled in the triggering of those elements. Part of my problem was the time between sessions (usually one week, but sometimes more): I’m an avid notetaker, but even with those notes, it was challenging to keep the various story strands in mind to spark actions in play. One of my notes to self: I’m going to be more active in the future and will put together postgame reports which will help to keep NPCs, events, and developments in better order (and to keep my memory banks firing more effectively). Ross was superb in keeping things open for the players, allowing them to determine what they wanted to do. I did wonder, however, if we could have telegraphed for him what we were wanting to do to help him with prep between sessions. For example, we let him know that we were inclined to attend the masquerade ball prior to that session, and I imagine that was useful for him in getting notes together. But on some weeks, we could have offered him more in the way of forecasting our upcoming moves--at least providing a sense of what our characters were mulling over in terms of the immediate future.

Combat and Skills

The combat system uses the same core mechanic as everything else in the game. There is a hit location aspect at play, and the head is the most vulnerable spot, which made us worried that fighting would be unforgiving. After the initial combat encounters, it because apparent that Legendary Lives is far more wicked on the Foes than it is the player character heroes. I enjoyed the fights in the game, and Grrrl was quite fun to play both in Wolf and in human forms. I also appreciated, however, that the game encouraged a mix of activities. We had some sessions that were combat oriented, others that were more explorative, and others focused on interpersonal negotiations and relationship building. Legendary Lives supports all those types of play, and its array of skills and abilities supports them all. To illustrate, skills are divided up into 12 ability categories. Four of those--Strength, Stamina, Dexterity, and Agility--involve skills that come in handy during combat. That leaves a robust 8 ability categories which involve skills involving a wide array of pursuits--Business, Repair, Caves, Preach, etc..

Some “skills” are odd (partly because some really aren’t skills at all), though in play we found them to be useful and intriguing. Some examples:

Grrrl had low cunning, and thus was not prone to duplicity, lying, or disguises, and she also was mediocre in the Charm department. This made her Sincerity score low, so when put into situations where she was being truthful, she was usually not perceived as such. The regular Cassandra effect became a strong minor theme.

Sanity has an entire subsystem worked out for it, which caused for some intriguing curveballs in the fiction.

Fate and Memory provide a mechanic for the gamemaster and players to determine whether a possible event becomes an actuality or to determine if knowledge is available.

In Conclusion

When you say that something “holds up well,” there’s a backhanded insult implied. The unstated idea is that the something--whatever it is--shows the marks of age and defunctitude. The something is o.k. if you want a retro experience, but that there’s much better stuff out there.

So I won’t say Legendary Lives “holds up well”: The game is so much better than that. It has always been a rock solid fantasy rpg, and it remains so. The game has much to teach current designers, and my sense is that new games would be better if they took some inspiration from what Legendary Lives does. LL would certainly elevate the writing craft of rpgs. We can debate some of the odd descriptions of races or point out the gaps the game leaves in terms of the long arch. But these small blemishes pale in comparison to all the game has to offer. If I had a chance to play Legendary Lives again, I’d jump at the opportunity. It is a uniquely satisfying and continually rewarding experience.