Consuming is Creating or Why am I reading Game Books I'm not really gonna play

I have a giant pile of RPG books in my home. I'm sure I don't has as many as some, but I tend not to buy everything a game system puts out. I'll have a sourcebook here or there if it interests me, but for the most part I really just like buying the main book and seeing how they deal with introducing the world, the mechanics, all the kind of fun stuff. I do this because reading what other people are doing is perhaps the best way to actually get past any blocks that I'm having.

This has been said a million times before, and it will probably be said a million times afterwards but this is me saying this right now. If you're currently having problems with something in your game, stop and go out and play other games, read other games, cut the pages out of other games and eat them. Whatever you really need to do to help your head get through that problem, because otherwise you're going to beat your head in wondering why you can't figure something out.

Case in point for me, I've been bouncing that Being Human game in my head for a while now an how things were going to work out hasn't come together yet. There have been a few hit or miss things but nothing really helped pushed that dynamic between that drive the be human, and the desire to be the monster. I knew that I wanted a Wyrd, a breaking point that made you break the things you cared about but got stronger for it. I just didn't know how you were going to get towards that Wyrd, and a lot of other things. Just wasn't coming so I stopped worrying about it and started just reading other stuff.

I read Matt McFarland and Michelle Lyons-McFarland's curse the darkness, I read Ryan Macklin's Mythender, I reread Joe Mcdaldno's Monsterhearts, and I read Elizabeth Shoemaker-Sempat's They Became Flesh. These games all kind of helped form some ideas in regards to what I wanted to do. Now did I take the mechanics there and go "I'm going to use this!" No, I didn't. However, just some concepts and ideas that might work when modified for Being Human (because that's a better working title than Worst Enemy).

To be even more specific, I read They Became Flesh and enjoyed the idea of locking dice. Now I threw out the double mechanic because there's not a finite amount of dice in Being Human, you'll roll ... something (see, haven't figured out everything yet) something but any 1s that show up are going to be the things that get locked into your Wyrd. That doesn't mean you can't use them, but it's a physical representation of how close you are to going over that edge and pushing yourself closer to that edge of being a Monster.  Of course the thought process was a lot more like this.

"Okay, so doubles lock?"
"No, that doesn't make sense, maybe just 1s then."
"Yeah, that makes the tension exist without the finite amount of dice, every time you roll there's a chance that you will get closer to your Wyrd without guaranteeing it."
"Okay, what makes up a roll, damned if I know but I think that works better."
"Yeah, got to have that space for failure and 'Aw shit!'"

But you get my point, this comes from pulling in all this extraly awesome creative works and letting them rattle around in my skull for a while.

Just another little piece of straw on the back of the "You need to consume to create" camel.

Let's talk about - Making Pregens for you Convention Game

This is something that's kind have been buzzing around my head since Origins.  It was a whole bunch of things, but basically it led to this kind of thought.

How do you split your genders when it comes to making pregens for your con game/adventure module?

If you'll notice, when we did Critical!: Go Westerly, which is available for the low price of five bucks, Geoff made sure that there were 4 women and 4 men.  Ultimate we ended with 5 women and 4 men, because of a quick of licensing that didn't pan out we had already created one character and included her anyway because her origin story is pretty funny, which ... kind is an anomaly when it comes to pre-generated characters.  I just went through some of the "free" stuff that was nominated for an Ennie and saw that when they had a chance to do a 50/50 split the adventure modules ... didn't do it at all.  There was usually just one woman character and the rest were all dudes.

This leads me back to Origins where there was a game that Geoff was running.  He was running the introduction campaign with a table of 8, which is the maximum that the game will go.  That means that there were 4 characters that were men and 4 characters that were women.  One of the players noticed this, and the first thing out of this mouth was, "Why are there so many women characters?"

Geoff replied, "Well, half of the population is made up of women.  So, half of the population of the characters are women too.  It only makes sense."

To which the player scoffed, "Not in gaming it isn't."

Which is of course, patently bullshit.  You didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to notice that there were a wide variety of people, all of whom where there for gaming in some form or another.

We talked about it later at Big Bar on 2 with Amanda Valentine, who played in the intro game the day before this all happened, and she commented that she had instinctively picked up one of the female characters, and then a second one and stood there contemplating her options before she realized that there were two other characters she could pick from.  I believe, and she can correct me if I'm wrong here, she said that "One is usually all I get, two female characters is usually decadent."

Having two options is considered to be decadent.  Think about that statement for a moment, and then realize the fundamental absurdity of it.  I know if I have a stack of pregens put in front of me, I'm probably going to have more than two choices.

I leave this to you know, fellow game designer people.  If you're going to make a set of pregens for a game, a sourcebook, a campaign, or whatever.  Let's at least try to start making sure that we provide some equality here.  It's not that hard really, just make your characters and then sit back and look at them and count how many of each gender you have.  If it's not a 50/50 split then you should probably fix that.

Just saying.

Breaking the Rules of Game Design ... because I wanna

There's a couple of in-jokes around making RPGs. The first is, don't make a Fantasy RPG. Why? Because you're going to have to deal with the Juggernaut that is D&D (or as other people might put it, Pathfinder). Well, broke that rule with Critical! because I think Critical! does something the other two don't, which is be funny.

I've got my Indie Beef Games going, which I just think are a fun thing to name a series of games, so why do I want to think of a new game that I want to do?

Inspiration, perhaps. Maybe a fit of self destruction, which is ironic considering the game. I don't know. But I now want to break unofficial rule number two of making RPGs. I'm going to make a Vampire RPG.

Why? I think I kind of reached an epiphany about why I'm not a huge fan of the WW series of games. There's some great writing in it, some really good idea but I think the idea kinda gets lost in there somewhere. You pick up the books, and you get this great feeling that you're going to be dealing with the fact that you're playing people who are dealing with this monster within them and trying to latch on to some semblance of humanity before they're consumed by the animal within them.

I love that idea, I really do.

Then you get the list of cool powers that you can do, and look at all the invisible, super strength, jumping, flying, mind control, yippee awesome powers you get. Okay, it's written in a more sedate manner than that, but that's kinda what stick with me when I read those book. "Here is our thesis ... look at our shiny toys!" and it becomes about big power players, and large gigantic arcs, and city spanning plots!

This is cool. As I get older I start to understand what people like in games rather than just hating the game because I don't get something out of it. My problem is that ... I really like that thesis. I just don't like the path they took.

So I want to make a Vampire game. A Monster game really, you can be a werewolf, or a ghost, or a whatever but it's going to be something not human. It's now, and you're not running about looking at people like they're some kind of treat, or obstacle but as something you're striving to be. The biggest problem is you, you are your own worst enemy and the more you push towards the other side the more you're going to mess up your own life.

It isn't a beast that you become, but a broken down shell of a thing. It's not the horror of the destroyer, but the horror of nothingness.

Now, I don't have a die mechanic, I really don't have how things are set up yet but what I really want to do is this.

You have a Wyrd. A good a working title as any. If you're a Vampire it might be, "I will eventually kill and eat those that love me." If you're a Ghost it could be, "I push people away, for their own good." I werewolf might have, "I can't stay, I just can't."

Everytime you use a supernatural ability, you get closer to having your Wyrd take effect. Once you cross that threshold, you have a moment in the game where you deal with the effects of that. To whatever detail you want to use, but you will kill someone who loves you, you will push someone away, you'll leave and go somewhere else because you *have* to.

That is what I think would make for a fun Vampire game.

I'll keep you posted, but apparently I just decided that my working title is going to be Worst Enemies. Very working title.

BLARGH! ARGH! or why Sid Meier such a fucking racist

I have just committed one of the huge cardinal sins of dealing with racism. I have called someone a racist, rather than their actions. However, I think I can be fucking justified with doing it this one time. Why? Well, Sid Meier -- of Civilizations fame -- came up with a game in 1995 called Colonization. That's right, it was a game where you played one of four European Nations who crossed the Atlantic and began a wholesale genocide to colonize and civilize the 'new' lands they found. When I first found it, I was a little taken aback considering that part of the game play, depending on your nation of choice, involved subjugating or eliminating the First Nations that were 'inconveniently placed' on the map. Seriously, the English would send missionaries to convert people. The French would 'negotiate' and 'befriend' the various tribes so that they could use them as soldiers when fighting off the homeland. The Spanish would just kill everything in sight and the Dutch would just steal trade for better resources and more access to the land.

I used to bring it up as something that was a pretty big black eye as far as the gaming community was concerned. I used to also use it as a marker of what was going on 16 years ago in that naive hope that maybe, just maybe we had progressed a little further than that.

Well, the past is come back today and it's upgraded! That's right, in 2008 they re-release Colonization as Sid Meier's Civ 4 - Colonization! Better graphics, better game play, and whole giant metric fucktonnes (which are of course bigger than imperial fucktonnes) of strategically racist fun for the whole family. Don't believe me? Check out the trailer. I'll wait.

whistles

Yeah. Look at these great white people coming in and building their great and powerful forts! Look at the lone 'savage' scouting the Europeans big and powerful walls with trepidation. Look at the theft and lies trading that is going on there! Isn't it great! Look at more important white folks who are busy 'building a country' and fighting for their independence.

Giant, steaming pile of shit.

This is why I feel I can safely say that Sid Meier is a fucking racist. Not only did he make one really racist game, but he then remade the same fucking game! The exact same fucking game!

BLARGH! ARGH!

Am I the only one who sees anything wrong with this?

Reviews and stuff

Okay, since bribery clearly isn't working I'm going to do something I probably shouldn't do. I'm going to start giving reviews in order to get reviews. If you want me to review something (I still owe people reviews of the 24 hr RPG) let me know and I'll do one here and post it up on drivethru and IPR.

If not? I'll just start picking things at random.

MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Surely nothing could go wrong with this idea.