RPGaDay 2019: Part 1

I've been meaning to get to this, but it just hasn't happened. Life has been too busy...but here goes, the first seven.

I'm going to approach these prompts from the direction of my game design work with Vulpinoid Studios...

1. First

Like most game designers, my first attempts were modifications of the systems I loved to play. I hacked, I cobbled together bits and pieces from different systems, and I threw away the bits I didn't like. I thought they were awesome, but they were probaby awful. They were basically a shiny mix of dazzling surface, with no decent solid core. 

The first game I designed from scratch was called Platinum Storm, it was also the first game I sold copies of at conventions. It ran off a percentile system, becase I thought they were great at the time. It was based on a pseudo-Japanese Empire, because I loved samurai and ninja. Of course, as a typical white guy in the early 1990s, most of my understanding of Japanese culture came from elusive anime and late night movies, so it was full of as many bad tropes an insenstivities as a White Wolf game. It's heart was in the right place, but it didn't qute do what I hoped it would. Years later the term "heartbreaker" might be used to describe it. I never revisited it, because Legend of the Five Rings scratched that itch far better than my attempts had.

2. Unique

Every game I try to produce is different and unique. I'm not one for writing adventures for other systems, and I rarely linger in one place long enough to produce a variety of sourcebooks and player material to flesh out a product line. I do respect the designers who do work in this way, and I can see that a lot of participants in the hobby look for this when considering a new game line, but I feel like the games of Vulpinoid Studios are like pieces of art, and I want to explore numerous unique ideas rather than focusing on the same subject matter.

This means I keep moving, keep trying to bring new influences nto what I do, keep trying to learn new things. Not sure if this is a good thing.

3. Engage

Engaging the mind, and the participants in a communal narrative is the greatest advantage roleplaying games have over other forms of entertainment in my opinion. Getting people to engage with the story in a meaningful way has always been my primary goal as a game master and game designer. Numerous people have written over the years that there are different ways a player can engage with the story, and they have also written about the ways different players are more comfortable with different engagement forms. There's not really a lot of point rehashing those points here, except to point out that different games engage in different ways, and any game that claim to do equally engage everyone is lying.

The methods of engagement are one of the areas I've been trying to experiment with over the years, but I know that I have my own engagement prejudices here. I like to explore ethical and moral dilemmas in my gaming, I like to do more than just sit back and roll dice, and I often get frustrated when I encounter a game that doesn't let it's players engage at this level.

       

4. Share

Sharing is an inherent part of the hobby, at the table, and beyond the table.

There's a school of gaming where the Dungeon Master (or appropriate ajudicator in the game) controls pretty much everything... they roll dice behind a screen, and don't share these in case they might disrupt the carefully planned story. There are players who think that this is the only way an RPG can be played, and that anything else isn't real gaming. I even ran games like this at one stage, maybe 25 years ago, or more. I thought it was the only way to run a game. Then I started to go to conventions and become exposed to other methods of play. Learning other options, and incoporating those ideas into my own game enhanced my games. I shared my learning with other gamers at conventions when I ran my own sessions. Together the community of gamers in Sydney, in the 1990s, was doing amazing things, and I might not have been a big part of it, but I'd like to think that my shared contributions did something.

In the decades since then, the rise of the internet saw sharing of ideas across the world. The same innovation I saw in Sydney at the end of the last century was now seen as innovative across the world, those who had a bit of social capital in the RPG-sphere gained further notoriety and reputation by recycling ideas that had been shared to them. Many of us had seen these ideas before, many of us had shared these ideas across the ether, many of us had moved on to new fields of gaming development and evolution. In recent months, it's actually been nice to see that a few of the people who have claimed ideas as their own have seen karma bring them down. Perhaps we might get more innovation happening soon. 

I've kind of rambled here... sorry about that.

5. Space

I haven't properly written a "space opera" game yet, not that I can remember anyway. But it is something that I've been meaning to get to eventually. I think this has just been due to the fact that I've not found the right themes that I wanted characters and players to explore in a setting like this. I could easily adapt ideas from a fantasy setting to something science fiction, but that feels like a bit of a cop out. I'd rather try to explore ideas that require a space environment, perhaps aiming toward stories in the vein of "Valerian and the City of 1000 Planets" or "Fïrefly". Valerian would be an interesting choice because I haven't seen an RPG for it, Firefly might be a choice because the existing RPG is basically a vanilla game engine with a shiny facade glued onto it. 

I might get to that space game eventually, but I don't see it happeing any time soon. Too much non-game work I'm trying to balance at the moment, and when it does come to my game design, I've already got heaps on my plate to last me a while.    

6. Ancient

I just write that I haven't done a "Space" game, and now I can write that I haven't really done an "Ancient" game either. I am working on a project called Amenti, it's a project I was thinking about a couple of years ago, but it has reared it's head again in recent weeks. 

The idea of Amenti involves a scroll that is gradually unrolled at one end, as the players move along a spirit river from the physical world to the final confrontation and judgement at the hands of the Egyptian gods. The back end of the scroll rolls up again, as the hordes of Anubis chase the characters and prepare to devour the unworthy. It's a game idea that I've been expecting someone else to claim... but that hasn't happened yet, so I'd better start moving quickly.      

7. Familiar

One of my ongoing projects that has morphed through a few iterations is called "Familiar". It's about the spirit animals that catalyse the magical potential in mortals. It's currently sitting in a holding pattern while I deal with a few other ideas. There are plenty of ideas I've had for this over the years (some can be found here). This is one of those games that I want to get right, but getting something right doesn't mean getting it done. 

Hopefully I'll complete an iteration of the project soon, maye next year.