Internet Web Help

Hamlet’s Hit Points sold out, at both IPR and Adventure Retail. In fact you could argue that it sold out plus, as additional copies were pulled from elsewhere to feed the second signing.

Skulduggery came within a few copies of selling out.

You sure couldn’t tell that the US economy is stuck in the throes of a particularly nasty job downturn by looking at the activity level at the Gen Con exhibit hall. Pelgrane had a record year by a huge margin. Others did similarly well.

Every year seems to get crazier. I certainly have less time to trawl the hall for the new cool thing, or to engage in friendly chat with colleagues during exhibit hall hours. Those who want to get their new cool thing into my hands must now go out of their way to make sure that happens.

Yep, gaming must be dying all right. Same as it’s ever been.

I’d like to thank the Evil Hat crew for presenting me with the Dresden Files RPG. Why, I remember when Evil Hat was but a single digest-sized indie RPG with a killer concept, delivered on bended knee by a fresh-faced, green-haired young whippersnapper (gashing open his bended knee in the process.) Now, thanks to the ambition and wherewithal of Fred Hicks and the stalwart legion he has gathered around him, it is the mammoth two-volume gorgeousness that will surely put my suitcase over American Airlines’ weight limit. Huge kudos, one and all. I credit the aforementioned blood ritual.

Gen Con, as always, presents a chance to bask in a collective love of gaming. You can lose track of that when our engagement with one another is filtered through the inherent negativity bias of Internet discourse. Gen Con always leaves me grateful for the fellowship of colleagues, friends, and gaming acquaintances. And most of all, the game fans and geek culturati who make my work and career possible. Thanks to all the readers of this blog who popped by to say hi. I’ll use this four-day hit of positive energy to propel me through many tough days of writing and designing until next year rolls around. Gen Con is creative fuel to get stored for the winter.

Till next time. Here’s hoping we all make our tight connections…

In my mind, Saturday was going to be a day of mostly being at the Pelgrane stand and/or booth. In reality it was a day of my mostly not being there, as I got pulled away to meetings, event times extended, and so on. Apologies if you came by and couldn’t find me. In my mind, Sunday is going to be a day of mostly…

The last few copies of Hamlet’s Hit Points reserved for the signing slipped inexorably away during that event. If you rush to the IPR booth immediately when the hall opens you might get the last two signed copies. There may also be a few still at the Adventure Retail (Atlas/SJ Games/Cthulhu Corner) complex.

The Pathfinder fiction panel went well. More about that next week, when I’ll tell you a bit about the novel I’m writing for the fine folks at Paizo.

I’ve had little chance to check out the new hotness, except for cases where folks take the initiative and thrust their fine products into my hands. And what fine products they are:

Ren Faire, by Michelle Nephew (Atlas Games) uses the transparent sleeve cards you’ll remember form Gloom to create a geek-culture card game fusion of Cranium and paper dolls. Assemble outfits for your Renaissance Faire visitor, slowly accumulating your outfit of pseudo-Medieval garb. To earn your costume pieces, you have to get up and perform.

Rumors that Michelle’s follow-up, Measure the Sphinx!, will be ready for next year’s show may be completely invented.

Tim C. Koppang’s Mars Colony, found at the Design Matters booth, is a tiny package of great ambition. In this two player game, the attempts of a colonial governor to right the many crises besetting a troubled Martian settlement provide a framework for the participants’ feelings about government and personal failure. The game brings the author’s interior life to the game table in a way few others have attempted.

And finally, there’s that indie-cutting edge game from those scrappy authority-defiers at Margaret Weis productions, Smallville. Yes, major mass media entertainment property meets vanguard storymaking at the intersection of lovely production values. Like many others I find this obscuring of the boundaries between the mainstream and the underground bracingly exciting. The essential peg of its game play is the relationship map. Cleverly the graphic design leaves these maps as hand-scrawled items you could actually create on the fly, resisting the urge to pretty them up, robbing them of their accessibility. Congratulations to Cam Banks, Josh Roby and team.

Gotta run! See you in the hall!

Trade at the Pelgrane stand has been brisk. Trail of Cthulhu has proven itself to be an evergreen title. The Esoterrorists, original pioneer of the GUMSHOE line, continues to surprise us by picking up a steady stream of new buyers. The new game for the show, Skulduggery, has been enthusiastically received as a pitch but has been lagging behind other titles when it comes time to the forking over of cash. I’m hoping that since it’s a new thing the folks nodding their heads as we describe its betray-o-rific fun will return to pick it up during their final buying frenzies.

Graham Walmsley products have also been moving steadily. He’s produced a special run in chapbook-format of his notoriously bleak, Purist style Trail of Cthulhu scenarios, usually available from Pelgrane only in PDF. Each one is uniquely spattered with a disturbing, hardened liquid. (Okay, it’s nail polish.) Also passing into many hands has been his drawing room mystery digest-format game, A Taste For Murder. You have to love the premise: halfway through the game, the players decide whose portrayal has been the most obnoxious. That player’s character is then murdered; for the second half she plays the detective who arrives on the scene to identify the killer.

Outside the Pelgrane bailiwick, I’ve been blown away by the positive response to Hamlet’s Hit Points. Signings can be scary for any author, facing the fear of a lonely sit at a desolate table. Instead I was able to inscribe a steady stream of copies and chat with their new owners. This book was by no means a sure thing, and I feel extraordinarily blessed to see it find a receptive audience.

With meetings, interviews and booth duty I’ve had no chance to trawl for the new hotness. Thankfully Gregor Hutton swung by to show me Remember Tomorrow, his new digest format near-future game. Players struggle to achieve conflicting personal goals in a Gibsonesque world of mirror shades and AK-47s.

Gregor also pressed into my hands Hell 4 Leather, Joe Prince’s contribution to the menu-sized game craze pioneered by Jared Sorensen. This glossy, handsomely graphic triple-folded sheet contains an entire game of biker gang mayhem, powered by a tarot card resolution system.

Both Remember Tomorrow and Hell 4 Leather can be located at the Design Matters booth.

For the third time, I ran “If Space Permits”, the comedic space opera scenario set in a decadent far future. I’m now seeing another selling point from a GM’s point of view: thanks to a loose, player-driven structure, the same scenario comes plays out very differently each time it’s run.

The scenario features a group of space traders attempting to corner the market on hallucinogenic jumpwine amid the chaotic bacchanal of an annual vine festival.

With the in-house group, a comedy of disasters ensued, with the final presentation to the Wine Council concluding in a hail of laser fire. When I ran it at Hammercon, crazy side action was the order of the day, and it was revealed that one of the crew members was being stalked by his killer clone. A high degree of player input reflected that group’s indie propensities. This last session was devoted to highly methodical scheming in pursuit of the collective goal.

Skulduggery scenarios throw a lot of balls into the air and encourage the GM to run with the ones the players choose to catch. If you design your own Skulduggery scenario, or use one from the book on groups unfamiliar with it, you’ll be able to run it a bunch of times and still be surprised by events as they unfold each time.

This creates an opportunity for player creative engagement you don’t get with a completely finished character. First, players wanting to tweak their PCs can trade their component cards among one another. (Although in my in-house runs players tended to hold onto what they were dealt. The juxtapositions of elements foster surprising combinations of personality traits. Players then find themselves rationalizing these odd combinations. This connection-making becomes a moment of in-game creativity that invests the player in the character. The elements are not the player’s creation, but the way they fit together is.

Most importantly, this moment of connection-making, this spark of creative exercise, occurs in the moment, during the game session, moments before the story kicks in. That gets the juices flowing for what the becomes a fast-paced, reversal-filled session.

When creativity happens in the moment, in the presence of other players, it creates an energy you don’t get when everyone goes off separately to create something and then brings the idea, fully formed, to the gaming table.

Graham (spencerpine) Walmsley has clearly refreshed all of his pools by combining a “Create Your Own David Cameron Poster” web page and a tagline from the “Yes Wing” scenario.

At this stage I’m always looking for ways to measure the success of the initial session given over to character generation.

This length of time devoted to character creation isn’t a given, of course. Indie-style designs have taught us to focus on a quick process, often because the game is a one-shot. Skulduggery certainly follows that model, giving you a mix and match process that unfolds in a few minutes. It aims to be a) fast, b) give you an immediate creative connection to your character and c) to be fast.

Largely because players bring so many expectations to the space opera genre—they want their ship, their gear, their choice of alien species, and other categories of crunchy bit as well, the space game embraces the more traditional model of the choice-laden, involved generation process.

One might argue, in fact, that it’s better to have either a very short process, taking a few minutes, or a long one, taking an entire session, and not so great to have a process that falls between the two. Half a session of character generation and half of play doesn’t feel like you’re starting quickly, nor does it give you the range of choices that engage you with a more detailed character.

So when speed is no longer your prime consideration, how do you measure the success of your generation process?

As a GM, first of all, you have to realize that the bit that seems like a lot of boring book-flipping may be extremely engaging for the players. This is when they enjoy maximum possibility and range of choice. It’s when inspiration start to flow. Or it might actually be boring book-flipping. It can be hard to tell the two apart.

Clarity is clearly an important measure. If you can smoothly go through the list of steps without getting confused or losing focus, something’s going right.

Having players happily ooh and aah over the various options, whether they be bits of gear or super-powers, is a good sign.

If they’re still thinking out loud about the campaign as they head out the door, that’s a point in your favor.

An oft-overlooked element is the quantity of interaction between players during this phase. Choices the group must make or discuss collectively bring about the shift from a series of people working in parallel to a joint imaginative effort. For example, in space GUMSHOE you pick a ship type from a list of eight with various features and drawbacks. This seems like practical crunchiness at its height, but it also requires the group to agree on what kind of crew they want to be. The choice achieves collaboration by means of a genre cornerstone, the starship.

The group questionnaires as originally envisioned by Greg Stafford and now found in HeroQuest 2 serve a like purpose, though more obviously in the realm of collective narrative control.