RPGaDay: Part 3 (Days 15-21)

I'm even behind in my catch up, where I had intended to do seven days each post until the end of the month. So, back to the RPGaDay treadmill. Maybe one post this morning, and another to finish everything off tonight.

15. Door
A few years ago, I developed a system for analysing and considering roleplaying games. I called it my "Vector Theory", and it has basically informed all my game designs ever since. The whole idea here is that a story moves in a linear path, sometimes straight, sometimes curving based on pre-existing elements in the setting. Sharp corners occur when game mechanisms come into play, with different types of mechanisms influencing the story path in diferent ways.

Another analogous way to look at this might be a series of dungeon corridors. If you follow the story, you follow the corridor. Occasionally you'll see a door. It might lead to another corridor, following the story in a new direction, or it might lead to a room where a variety of choices need to be made (reflected by other doors on other walls of the room). Under this analysis, there are certain doors that I've seen many times that are more problematic than beneficial, these might be described as locked doors at the end of a passage. The story goes somewhere, and suddeny there is a choke point where the characters need a key to move onward... such a key might come in the form of a specific skill, a piece of knowledge, or some other advantage that could have been gained at another point in the story. If the characters have the "key" the door poses no obstacle, but if they don't then they simply have to stop here and turn around. It's the kind of obstacle I've seen in many investigation scenarios, and certainly one of the things that frustrates me about them. If I include locked doors in my game, I always make sure there are ways around them, or alternative ways to get through them.

16. Dream
One of my regular muses in game design has been my dreams. Sometimes after reading or playing a series of other games (notably after conventions), I'll have a dream about a particular game that doesn't yet exist. If I get the chance, I'll write out the basics of the game, or as much as I can remember. Many times I've looked through these notes and wondered where the mechanisms have come from, or if they truly are uniquely inspired, and sometimes I can quickly see how those dream ideas are a subconscious amalgam of the games I'd recently been reading or playing.

A few of these ideas have seen further development and completion as published games, many more languish in journals and notebooks.

17. One
One. Hmm...

One player... games for a lone player have been a goal for many desigers over the years. My attempt in that regard has been entitled "Apocalypse Diaries", and it has seen a few revisions over the years, but has never really satisfied me to the point where I'm ready to release it to the wider world. Throughout its development, the game has fed its ideas into my other projects, and in a symbiotic cycle it has been fed ideas from those other games.

In the time I've been working on this project, a few other designers have released their interpretations of single player RPGs, to varying degrees of success...we've also seen increased quality in computer RPGs, which may seen their next dramatic evolution with Cyberpunk 2077. I still think the idea of an iterative single player pen-and-paper RPG is plausible, but no-one has quite cracked it. I'd be interested to see examples where my opinion here is wrong.

Maybe once I've dealt with a few other

18. Plenty
In the past two decades, the amount of RPGs to see publication has been certainly been plentiful. There have been some good reasons for this including the ease of access presented by Print-On-Demand services, PDF online stores, and crowdfunding models. But there has also been an improvement in the understanding of how the hobby of roleplaying games works, designers have begun to understand the various reasons why and how people play and have begun to design products accordingly. This has meant that the variety of rolepaying games, and the fringe element products (overlapping wit categories boardgames, LARP, computer games, and parlour activities), has expanded too.

I may complain about too many products to get my own voice heard amidst the cacophonous marketplace; but on the whole, having a plenotful range of options to choose from has to be good for the hobby.

19. Scary
I haven't played many scary games. Certainly nothing that really made me scared for myself or effectively put me into the head of scared characters. I know there are plenty of games out there that claim to do exactly this, but in each case where I've had the opportunity to try something like this, it just hasn't performed according to its claims.

Dread is a good example of a game that people claim works for scary scenarios, and while it does effectively bring tension to the mechanisms of play, it's something different to a good scare. Don't even talk to me about Cthulhu.

The closest I've had to a good scary game was basically systemless, and was more a factor of the other players and a good GM. In that case everyone got into the mood, and fed off one another's paranoia and narrative. It worked best because no rules got in the way.

20. Noble
The first thing that comes to mind here is the recent day's postings about a Code of Ethics for RPG designers in Australia. It's a goal with noble intentions, it has its heart in the right place; but I have the unnerving feeling that it's going to be abandoned before it gets very far.

21. Vast
I was going to write something similar for "Vast" as what I wrote for "Plenty". But I'll go a different direction here.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with games that have an open scope. I mentioned on a previous post that a lot of better games have a narrow focus, and you get a tailored play experience that matches a pre-concieved set of expectations... but I like there to be some part of the narrative or game that allows for explration in a vast widerness of potential.

I really need to get around to a space opera game...