I still hadn’t read all the rules, but I got the basics. I got Fate Points, I got the tree, and I knew what the characters were about.  I mostly got Aspects.   A character in FATE 3.0, which Dresedn Files is based on, is made of four basic parts: Skills, Powers and Stunts, a Stress Track, and Aspect.  Skills are what you think they are — they’re what you roll on to do stuff.  Powers and stunts are special things your character can do.   In terms of D&D Skill are like skills, as well as your ability to attack.  Powers and stunts are like class abilities: turning undead, or casting spells.   Aspects are like feats, feats you can name. Sort of.

The lone person in the room was sitting at my table. I talked to him a bit, he had FUDGE dice already, and a copy of the game.  ”This is my Dresden game this weekend,” he said. “They were all sold out, but I had a friend give me her ticket.”  He brandished it happily.  He was from Columbus, which was good — I’d set the game there, and was worried no one at the table would get those pieces. Still, the nerves in my stomach roiled a bit, he had more experience with this game than I had.  You could say I had the aspect Sressed-Out Improviser.

A few more people showed up, and I gave folks a few minutes to settle out. A couple of other people hung around, looking for another game, and wound up leaving. I had four of six people, so I passed out characters.  Someone from Michigan actually took my Storytelling Were-Wolverine (this was her high concept, the thing she is.  Harry Dresden himself is Wizard Private-Eye).  It’s also one of her aspects.

Aspects define your character, the good and the bad.  A good aspect is a double edged sword, which allows you to do something, but can also compel you to do something.  The Were-Wolverine has the aspect Scent of a Story.  What does that mean? The player could tap it to add to her ability to track by scent.  It could be used to improver her Investigation score to help her find out something that might be newsworthy (or that she thinks might be, anyway).  It could be used by the GM to compel her to look into a story.

It costs fate points to use your aspects like this, and you get fate points for compels. It’s an incentive to have aspects which can be creatively used for and against you.  It’s a game mechanic that gives incentive to making interesting characters, and thinking imaginatively.

We got into a combat, avoiding some Zombies by directly attacking the cultists doing the drumming. Most of my campaign was cribbed from the books — I didn’t want to venture far from the source material, I saw this almost as a demo of the system and what it could do as much as it was a fun role-playing event. Two more people showed up, one who had mismanaged his tickets, and another who was trying to find a Dresden game and failing.  I let them join, probably outside of con policy, but I really wanted all the characters in play.

They were reading their aspects, which are fairly broad statements, and the short two-three sentence stories I gave them to justify them, and taking them interesting places.  They asked me questions about their characters’ situations and personality (not just their stats) and I responded with how I saw it — it was up to them to breath some life into it.  I was surprised and thrilled that they did.

“Okay, that guy now has an aspect on him,” I said, not sure I was doing this right. “Say… knocked down.”

“Sweet!” says another of them. “I’m going to use that to kick him.”

“Wait,” says another of the players. “How does that work?” I explained briefly to him how players can manipulate the environment via stunts, and others via maneuvers to place aspects on them, that can then be used.  ”And this is something that’s beneficial for us to do?”  Vigorous nodding around the table, and he nodded once, and got a look in his eye.

Later, playing his character to a T, he placed the completely useless Iron Balls in His Pants aspect on a Toad Demon (I told you I didn’t stray far from the books, right?), thinking he was a fairy.  His character, Coyote’s Catspaw didn’t really understand where his power came from or what was going on.  He’s an Emissary of Power, Coyote’s power in particular, but is totally a pawn being kept in the dark.  I don’t know why, that didn’t seem important yet.

We didn’t use a lot of scene aspects or compels, and I was loose on making them pay for tags.  They needed the Fate points in the end to make use of the aspects on the badguy, in order to both beat him — and to avoid being beaten too soundly by him.

This is true to the Dresden Files universe: they took a beating, but still won.  They won not by overpowering the enemy, but out maneuvering him.  The game mechanics supported that style, and it works well.  I had a great time doing this, and look forward to playing Dresden again.

But I don’t like it, and when I do get the players to interact with the world through their characters, everyone has more fun.  It’s the thing they remember when they talk about the campaign later. Few people remember battles — although they may remember the loot.  The battles where we still talk about them is when some interesting interpersonal or inter-character conflict happened.

A good villain will do this, if the players are invested. This requires threatening something they care about. Early in the game, that’s just them, which is why so many video games have betrayal/revenge plots.  (Not that they are all equally successful.)  Since we’re not making a video game, though, we have more options (perhaps video games could do this too, though.  The Sims does.)

With Amaranth, the players are going to be Heroes of Legend. They’re going to save the world. Yeah. Ho hum. Who cares about saving a world that only exists to be saved?    The character motivation is already there, but the players need the boost.  So what we’re going to do here is to threaten the p layers creations.  Not the GM supplied world they live in, but the one they helped create.

Phil Menard (aka ChattyDM) sparked this idea with his party creation session template. That linked up with some of the Mouseguard RPG bits I was reading, along with the My Life With Master game I’m running on Wave.  In all of these games, part of character creation is writing sentences about your character, and creating relationships with other players and NPCs in the world. The latter almost always means the players create the NPCs to have a relationship with them. Phil even has them create specific places in the world that are their favorites, and tensions with other players.

So I will be creating a similar questionnaire for my Amaranth game.  It’s started, but user feedback is welcome. It’s a wiki so make changes, or comment here your suggestions, I’d appreciate it.

I used to be very much in the simulationist camp, which mean I built a logical world with people and pressures in it, and dumped the characters and/or players into it and let them see what happened.  It’s interesting, but the players always warped the world around them, which frustrated me as a simulationist.  They were part of it, not the point of it, right?  Well, no.

I mean, why does the world exist if not for the story teller, reader or player to enjoy it? Certainly a fleshed out world is more interesting, but much like a play, the only things that need to be right are the things that face the player.  Knowing more is good, as it gives you flavor and feel and intuition to tell more, but it doesn’t all have to be perfect or told.  Video games and taught me this: games like Zelda reflect their game design and mechanics in the world itself.

The world I am creating for this game will be different than those, it is created to be a place for the players to be heroes.  It will enable and challenge them to become heroes, and while it will have a history and (presumably) a future, it exists primarily as a place for the players to be and become awesome.  Just as Hyrule is largely that place for Link, so will Amaranth be for our players.

Hyrule is for a solitary hero, though, and Amaranth needs to be ready for a group.  It needs to reflect the game mechanics for the game we’re playing and our plot needs to allow us to get into Zelda-like cycles and fractals.

Zelda is largely focused on the number three (despite the later game’s use of the number 4), and that’s implicit in the Triforce.  Amaranth has the Tetraganon (which is both a Zelda reference and a play on the number 4).  Why the number 4?  Well, several game mechanic-y reasons.  D&D 3.x is designed around a four-person party.  There are four basic styles of class: fighter, rogue, wizard, and priest.  So Amaranth is divided into fours.

Zelda usually has a regular world, and a shadow world. Much of D&D has a “Shadow Plane”, so Amaranth will have one as well. We can add two more planes, one of spirit and one of material, to mirror the Astral and Ethereal plans from D&D.  This is somewhat important, as we want to enable a full palette of choices from the D&D books, and make sure spells work logically without doing a lot of modification to the rules of the game.

There are four Goddesses/Great Spirits, which represent four virtues (Strength, Courage, Wisdom, and Wit).  Those don’t map directly onto the character classes, but that’s a good thing.  The Kingdom of Amranth is divided into four duchys, the city into four quarters.

Also, standard D&D has 20 levels, so the party should gain a certain number of levels per area, as they work through the whole story, capping out at 20 when they enter the Shadow realm and defeat the final enemy. Or enemies. There might be 4.

Four is a good working point, and gives a feel for how big things will be and what the cycles will be that we’ll use.  I don’t want to go into too much detail, things will change as I move forward on the world design.  But there are guidelines here, and that helps.  I’m documenting it all on our wiki.  A good place to start is with the Amaranth page itself, which uses another bit of influence, the Aesop’s fable of the Amaranth and the Rose, which gives me a bit more theme to work with.

I’ll write more about Amaranth as the design fleshes out some, and as I can write things that aren’t integral to my plot ideas.  That’s not a huge concern, as the cycles and fractals will give the players a feel for the shape and size of the plot, and it’s rhythm.  The next part is how to make the players care about and feel a part of the world.

• Looting required
• Simple system or one people are familiar with
• Generally short attention spans
• Almost certain attendance issues
• Needs some role playing for the GM

To which I need to add one more limitation that I’d forgotten about:

• Fantasy setting

I also said that I found my answers with a Zelda game, specifically Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. Although, I’ll admit Phantom Hourglass also informs my thoughts (but it strongly informs Spirit Tracks, so I guess that’s okay.)  ”Wait,” you say? “I thought you said video games were largely soulless, and you’re going to them for inspiration?  How doest that work?”

Hopefully really well.  Well better than D&D 4e managed it anyway.  It doesn’t fix all of my issues, but it gives me some very strong design guidelines that fit well with a good portion of my limitations.  This is pretty easy to demonstrate.

Zelda is a fantasy setting (despite the existence of Trains) with some looting — certainly there are treasure chests and pots to break all around, and they drop health and any of the consumables Link uses.  Perhaps most importantly, it’s a DS game.  That means it’s designed to be eaten in bite-sized chunks, perfect for short attention spans or the time you have to play a portable game.  It also has a structure that’s fairly tried and true, and you can leave it alone for days or weeks, and come back to it, still reasonably certain what has to be done next.

How does all this work, and how does it help for me? Well, the first thing to understand is that Zelda has a cyclical and fractal plot structure.  It’s a huge queue of things to do, each moving you forward from goal to goal, but each bit is basically the same in expression as the last bit.  That might sound boring, and it could be, but it’s also comfortable.  As Girl told me when I started playing Twilight Princess (my second Zelda), “Every dungeon,” she said, “has a map, a big key and a special item.”

She meant more than though, you need the big key to get to the boss, and the special item to defeat him. Defeating him gains you a heart container, upping your maximum health (the only thing Zelda has that’s like a level).  The special item is also often necessary to transit to the next area, and opens up new opportunities of exploration.

Here’s how this works in Spirit Tracks.  Ultimately, you’re quite locked down in this game — you can move fairly freely within a village or dungeon, but you can only move between them by following the tracks that were laid down magically by the spirits.  Opening up these tracks is necessary to continue forward. Each quadrant of the world has a map, each map shows part of the tracks.  Solving a problem gets you to someone who can open up the rest of the map, solving another tells you something about navigating the tracks.  Then you get into the dungeon, which when solved, opens up the last bit of tracks, back to the tower.   The tower is where the next map piece is.

Even more importantly, solving the temples fixes the tower which is your ultimate goal. It cycles through these steps,  at least four times ( I haven’t finished it), until the tower is fixed, and you can get there to defeat the enemy and recover Zelda’s body.

Opening up pieces of the map and getting the special items, creates shortcuts on the map that bypass the navigational challenges you had.  You can go to many of the same places, but now you can do it faster.  The Temples follow a similar design.  A dungeon might have three sections: the left section is open at the beginning, and solving it opens up the right section in a way that allows you to bypass or ignore the left section.

Doing a section of dungeon is a bite sized piece that can be done in a few minutes, and then the game saved.  Sure you go back to the beginning of the dungeon, but now there are parts you no longer have to do.  Right before you get to the boss, a portal opens up to the beginning (and back) you can leave, and shop and do other things and then go face the boss, which takes about as long as dealing with a dungeon section (or faster if you grasp his trick)

Dungeons thus become a microcosm of the whole world.  The special item for the whole world is the map itself in this case.  Completing it gets you access to the end, just like the boomerang or other item gets you to the boss in the dungeon.  These patterns are repeated throughout Zelda.

The other thing that happens with Zelda is that while you often have multiple tasks, but they are arranged in a chain: You  solve the village chief’s riddle so you can get the instructions that get you to the temple so you can fix the tower to get the next map.  Anything else you have as an option to do is a side quest (until it rarely becomes required and part of the main quest chain).  You’ve got one thing to do at any one time, and it’s very much like the thing you did at this point in the last cycle.  Not exactly, but close enough for comfort.

This then needs to inform my game design.  We’ll have areas which need to be “opened up” which have navigational issues which need to be solved.  There’ll be a big dungeon, with killing and loot, but which can be done in pieces, with perhaps more, smaller battles instead of a few large ones.  Special items become magical gear for the party, and hearts become levels they gain as they move through the game.  Having it in chunks like that, means that if someone misses a bit (because they’re out smoking or working), they can come right back and pick up where they left off without a lot of questions about why things are going on.

Sure, my plot may be more involved than a Zelda one, the particular tasks simpler than figuring out which two statues are looking at each other, but the basic idea, that it can be solved in a few minutes (30-60 minute chunks) is important, and hopefully keep everyone entertained.

It doesn’t fully answer my personal goals for role playing — there’s still very little of that in Zelda or any CRPGs. I’ll be answering that over the next couple of posts, however.

A lot of people will tell you that if the group and GM aren’t in sync, or if there’s a player problem then you get rid of the player.  I’ve done this — in high school — but I can’t do it now.  My wives are two of my players; another is Girl’s husband, and still another is their daughter, my GoddessDaughter. I only have two choices: accomodate them, or not play.

I suspect that’s why I’ve been hesitant to game again.  The last time we gamed, playing D&D 4e was pretty awful — for me as a GM and for my players, as well.  It was even more about battles and the looting has become more like shopping, as you have a list of things the players want and you place them there to find when they kill the monster. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, and the combat really doesn’t support the attention span of my group.  Or keep me interested.

That’s when I realized I was going about it wrong.

I could adjust how the games played, because, ultimately, I’m in control of what sorts of challenges happen.  It could be any sort of thing, and I could modify it so that it fit the needs of my group, including myself.  That’s when it hit me: every Game Master, Storyteller and Dungeon Master out there is a Game Designer.

They’re a very lucky game designer, actually.  They actually know the players they are designing the game for. They can know exactly what they want, and provide it.  That, of course, got me to thinking about my players, and the frustrations that I had with the last game we played.

I’m not entirely sure who my player contingent will be, since I was asking for more players yesterday.  But for now, we’re talking about my wives Tam and Girl, Girl’s husband Moonwyrm and his girlfriend, and our Goddessdaughter.  Moonwyrm’s girlfriend, K, has a rotating schedule, so she won’t be there very often.  We have a couple of smokers, who take regular breaks — in 4e that often meant several breaks during a single combat.  And then there’s me, who doesn’t really like running combat much, and in crunchy systems like D&D not much at all.  But that’s what we’re stuck with, for now.

Limitations are the source of creativity, though, and these limitations sort of rumbled around in my head.  There’s a big difference form the assignment ‘make a game’ and ‘make a game about bean farming’ (to borrow Brenda Braithwaite’s example.  Even more specific is even better: “make a co-operative race game about bean farming.”  That’s so specific that now ideas are popping into my head, and I just made that up.  So I need to do that same thing with my gaming group.

I need something that can be done in easy chunks, where if someone isn’t there, they won’t be left behind.  I need something that’s not too complicated, and is rated no higher than PG-13, and probably with a G-rated plot, since we have a seven year old with us.  I need something with interesting character and story for me (and truthfully, my players like that too).  There have to be dungeons and loot.  Combats should be short, and we should be able to walk away at any point and come back with a slightly different group a n hour or week or more later and still know what is going on.

That rumbled around in my head, and as I was on vacation, playing Zelda on my DS, these ideas clashed together, and became Amaranth.  I’ll say more about that tomorrow.

D&D was first, with the red box.  We quickly switched to Traveller, because one of our players (the one with the best play space, at the time) was the son of a Southern Baptist minister and spells and demons were not okay, but lasers and aliens somehow were.  We never told Blair’s dad about his Ultima game collection.

My computer was an Apple][c (unlike my friends Commodores), and I didn't really have any games on it -- Temple of Apshai Trilogy, which someone had copied for me and for which I had no books nor idea of how to play.  I had a copy of some baseball game where I always struck out, and I had Bureacracy which was freaking hard and I never beat.  Not that I didn't use it to game, no my AppleWorks MegaTraveller ship building spreadsheet was a thing of legend.

As people went off to school and we followed our separate ways, I played pen and paper games less and less. I never connected with the university's gaming clubs the way my friends did, and anyway, to quote Wolowitz, "I ha[d] a girlfriend!”  She did some BBS games, and we mudded, and I moved over into computer games where I could be more solitary and still play.   I liked CRPGs, even if I claimed it was a misnomer, since you couldn’t play a role.  Perhaps that’s why I liked Daggerfall so much, as it gave me that freedom of expression that I missed from pen and paper games.

I eventually came back to regular gaming, as we built our poly family — most of whom were gamer geeks of one stripe or another. In Charlotte, we had a regular group of 7 or so who played, enough that we could rotate GMs and games around, and try the occasional something different.  We still wound up on D&D more than half the time, which was comfortable for us, and let us do some things.

But I’ve always loved indie games, with a particular love for rules-light storytelling systems that encouraged role playing over the kill-loot-sale cycle.  I think that’s because the latter is easy to get in video games; it’s ultimately the complete draw to games like Torchlight and World of Warcraft, feeding the gambler addiction and the ever increasing stack of wealth and power.

We haven’t gamed regularly — or much at all — in a couple of years. I’m at a point where I’m ready to ask strangers into my messy home just so we can go to far away lands and kill things.  I mean tell stories. Or something.  We’re still pretty tied up to D&D and kill/loot/sale.  That’s our group, and it’s what we do.  There’s space for more, and I’ve been giving some thought about how to help that sort of thing happen.

In fact, if you read this blog and are willing and capable of travelling to Columbus for gaming, I’m up to talking to you about doing this thing.   Somehow that’s less intimidating than going to the D&D meetup — but then I’ve never had good success at finding a group amongst self-culled gaming groups.  I don’t know, but I’m starting to feel desperate to play some pen and paper.  Computer RPGs are so soulless, and even introverts need to get out once in a while.