Ready, Fire, Aim!

Seiyuu is currently in pieces. I’ve ripped out the old conflict resolution system (yes, the “bingo” system), and I’m looking at retooling most of the individual components of the game, to make sure they do what I want them to do and integrate properly with one another. I made a decent number of notes going into GenCon, but I haven’t allowed myself to work through them yet. I expect that to change a little bit once I get through some reading I’ve currently got on my plate - in the next week or two. The playtest at GenCon was a mess, but a mess that’s convinced me I’m slowly but surely moving in the right direction.

Once that’s happened, I think Lenny and I will start a very limited playtest - possibly just the two of us, possibly one or two others who can commit to a regular Skype call and have the expertise and interest required. No, please don’t ask me - it’s way too early for that, and I promise there will come a time for open, external playtest where anyone who wants to will be able to test. The idea behind such a playtest is to create a stable core of elements (participants, a show, and the necessary support structures) in order to test and retest the various resolution systems and endgame mechanics, until at least all of the pieces are there. Getting them to all working together is the step after that.

I really think the game is going in the direction that I want it to, but it’s a slow process. Slow for two reasons: first, I haven’t been devoting a lot of active effort to it, and second, because I find I’m still learning a lot about designing and game theory as I go. I incorporate each new revelation as it comes to me, but that’s a lot of two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back progress.

I’m hoping to write a “State of the Game” post about once a month, just as a progress report on the design.

I haven’t been watching a lot of anime recently, which is a problem I intend on correcting soon. However, I have started two new shows:

Record of Lodoss War (TV series): I understand people get upset about the continuity problems between the OAVs and the TV series, but it’s been long enough since I watched the OAVs that I’ve forgotten all the details that might have confused me. I’ve watched the first seven eps so far, and I’m enjoying it. It’s always been very D&D, and given that I’m slowly reading my way through 4E, it makes the show that much more fun.

Cardcaptor Sakura: I’ve loved most of the Clamp animated series I’ve watched - Chobits and Angelic Layer in particular, X (TV) not so much - but Sakura is what really put them on the map. The characters and premise are delightful, all the more so by deliberately commenting on the magical girl genre via the character of Tomoyo. (I’ve grabbed two quotes from her for the magical girl section in Seiyuu.) Kero is also ridiculously cute, especially with an Osaka accent. Watching the series in Japanese with subtitles puts me in mind of rewatching shows I own in that way, to give the original seiyuu a listen and to immerse myself that much more in the language I really should redevote myself to learning. Sakura will be a long haul - 70 episodes - but I want to watch it before diving into the recent Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicles and XXXholic.

In anime-related news, I’m watching the last season of Avatar, now that it’s all been broadcast, and I have Batman: Gotham Knight, the Batman franchise’s answer to The Animatrix, in from Netflix.

It took us a little while to get back in the groove, but once we did, things ticked over nicely. Shane commented on how there was enough to engage with, in terms of what was going on. That made me happy, as I had planned little more than a handful of bangs. (For a trad game, Reign has required very little planning on my part, for how we’re playing it.) He also commented how his character had gone from a nice, unambitious guy to a scheming bastard, out of necessity. I liked hearing that as well, not so much from a sense of GM power imposed upon player’s character, as seeing the distorting effects of power and circumstance upon character, in the sense of a Shakespearean history. The fact that there was general consensus on the balance between reacting to new circumstances and carrying out plans regarding old circumstance also made me happy. It was a satisfying session.

This after a second session which was mostly us wrangling over the system and getting it to do what we felt it should. I realize I haven’t posted about that session. It’s not that it was painful - although it was - it’s that I needed the intervening time to process what we came up with.

From a mechanical standpoint, we got the game to work by doing the following:

1) Removing the 10-die cap on rolls. Yes, this allows for guaranteed matches, but the whiff factor, even on die pools in the 7-10 range, was aggravating before.

2) Streamlining and connecting character action to company changes. At the end of any scene where a character was trying to temporarily improve a company quality, using the methods suggested in the book, that player would roll the stat+skill combination that was most relevant to the action performed, regardless of other rolls made during the scene, and the widest set was used, usually against some sort of defense roll on my part. We modified the bonuses and penalties chart from the book, which only vaguely connects character action with temporary changes to companies, making it like skill buys: 1 success for a +1 on the next company roll using that quality, 1 success for an Expert Die on the next roll, and 5 for a Master Die.

3) Making company rolls less frequently and more judiciously. There was some talk of company rolls at the end of the month, but this didn’t work with our game’s timeline. Instead, we tied them to major events in the story. It looks like the final session will culminate in an attempt to frame the Senate as traitors during the coronation, with the House of Thalmir (the PCs’ company) “conquering” the Senate (in a mechanical sense), in order to assure stability for the city of Vigil. Everything up to that point will be setting up or furthering that goal.

4) Mark inadvertantly cheating like crazy. It didn’t guarantee he won every time, and his dice were certainly nicer to him, but it reduced whiff and made for an excellent story. I think the fact he and the others were pulling out all the stops to incorporate all the bonus dice possible overrode any concerns about bad math.

Can Reign work? Absolutely. Can it work as written? Not really. It relies too much upon assumptions regarding what a reader might already know about how to play an RPG. It’s definitely the product of one person’s mind, and it shows. If there was more explicit discussion about how characters and companies interact and less content about martial arts and giant monsters, Reign would be a much stonger game.

Regardless, we all seem to be enjoying our game, and I think we’ll be able to draw all the threads to a satisfactory conclusion in our fourth and final session in two weeks’ time.

2006 was the year I really got back into tabletop gaming. It was the year I played my first indie games and went to my first GenCon. Since then, I’ve played with a lot of awesome gamers (although not as many as Ryan Macklin), and I’ve played a lot of games. However, I’ve realized there are a lot of great folks out there I haven’t had the chance to play a full game with, and there are a lot of games I haven’t gotten the chance to play yet. (Demos don’t count for either.) As such, I’ve put together a list of folks I’d like to game with and another list of (finished) games I’m looking to play. This isn’t to say I don’t want to play with folks I’ve played with before - I sure do! - and there are a lot of games I want to play again (and again and again), but variety is definitely the spice of life - and of gaming.

If you’re on this list and want to game with me, give me a shout and tell me what you’d like to play (and it needn’t be on the list below). I’m starting to get into Skype gaming more, so that’s always a possibility. Another is GenCon - I’m not currently scheduled for anything, and I won’t be, except for some possible playtests (of Seiyuu and others’ games).

If you’re not on this list, tell me who you are and what you’d like to play (again). Thanks!

Gamers (in alpha order)
Vincent Baker
Rob Bohl
Storn A. Cook
Ewen Cluney
Ron Edwards
Ken Hite
Judd Karlman
Jeff Lower
Steven Marsh
Nikki Marsh
Joshua A.C. Newman
Clyde Rhoer
Rich Rogers
Josh Roby
Jared Sorenson
Brennan Taylor
Paul Tevis
John Wick

Games (in alpha order)
Breaking the Ice
Burning Wheel
Capes
Dirty Secrets
Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition
Full Light, Full Steam
Grey Ranks
Houses of the Blooded
Inspectres
Mortal Coil
Mutant City Blues
Princes’ Kingdom
Shock: Social Science Fiction
Sons of Liberty
Steal Away Jordan

Those who know me know I have a love/hate relationship with superheroes, so you can imagine my discomfort with Hancock. If you haven’t seen it yet, I won’t spoil it for you, but suffice to say, the film has a bigger identity crisis than the protagonist. I’ve read about last-minute rewrites and reshoots, and it shows. I want to like this film, and I think the leads perform quite well, given the material they have to wade through, but ultimately it’s a very conflicted film.

Reading about it has made me think of something, though - something to hopefully deal with my own conflicted feelings about the film: I want to run or play a PTA game about superheroes, with one major caveat: no onscreen superpowers. I want a PTA game about the issues of superheroes, where all of the incredible powers stuff happens off camera. I want a game about what happens after the Justice League saves the world and has to go back to their secret identities - or better still, what happens after they come home having been unable to save everyone. I want a game where powers can’t save you from yourself or how you relate to other people.

My question for you is: who’s interested in doing this with me?

For some time now, I’ve really wanted to design a logo for Seiyuu, something I could use as an icon for journal entries, if nothing else. I considered just finding a suitable font and putting together something simple, but yesterday, I took a different approach.

First, I played association games between what the game was about and what the title implied - things that have to do with being a seiyuu. Then I tried to represent what that meant with a simple image. I had a little sketch of a voice actor’s head in front of a microphone, with the word “Seiyuu” traveling between the mic and a picture of a face on a screen (the character being dubbed). Although I liked that, I just don’t have the art skills to realize that vision, and I’m not in a position to pay anyone for such a drawing right now.

But that lead me to consider incorporating some of this imagery into the actual lettering of the word “seiyuu.” Bingo! The “i” becomes a microphone stand, with the “dot” being the actual mic itself, and the “y” becomes a voice actor with arms outstretched, performing into the mic. I have the roughest of rough sketches in front of me now, but no real way to scan it and post it, which is probably good - I can try to mock up something more professional before I post anything. I think I’ll make the figure chibi/super-deformed, with anime hair (wild hairstyle and odd color like blue) and upside-down u’s for eyes (that anime style indicating eyes squeezed shut with a smile). The rest of the lettering would be rounded and three-dimensional - puffed up but not fat - in a bright color (probably red), like the Japanese characters for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya title.

If anyone would like to take a crack at this before I maul this with my limited artistic skills, let me know!

“Every successful job is just the completion of many smaller, simpler tasks.”
-Gunslinger Girl, Episode 2, “Astronomical Observation - Orion”

Last night was the first “developer call” for Seiyuu, and I think it went well. More of the details are here. I think the highlight of the call was getting an “ooo!” out of Lenny when I described the major mechanical method for handling tropes in the game. But before I can really get to that, I need to get some basics out of the way, like a mission statement, a complete breakdown of all the game’s concepts, and a board-game-like breakdown of the procedure of play. Time to get cracking…

Watching: Death Note (DVD 5)
Rewatching: Slayers (Season 1)

Imagine my surprise when I realized this morning that last night’s game of Reign was the first time I’ve GM’d something this year - the first time in almost a year, period. Fortunately, you never forget how to ride a bicycle, and as rusty as my GM skills might have been, I think all my gaming lately made that a lot less noticeable.

I’m really beginning to believe that gaming is like working out: the more I do, the better I get. As such, since I’m now committed to three regular games (and considering a fourth), I feel like I’m “exercising” my gaming muscles enough that I’m actually starting to see results. I think I’m engaging more and better with both the fiction of the game and with the other players at the table, and I’m making stronger choices during play, in terms of rules, character, and drama.

Eric joined us for the first time, and everyone built (or rebuilt) their character using the point-buy system. (The one-roll character creation was very unsatisfying, and I shouldn’t even have let myself be distracted into trying it.) Good distinction and integration among the characters, and we were off to the races.

Making things up on the fly - the situation, descriptions, characters - went OK, but I definitely know what I need to prep for next time: characters, their companies, and bangs. There are several things I want to work on at the gaming table next time:

• Do more aggressive scene-framing (don’t move things along in an adventure-game fashion - edit like a movie and get to the juicy stuff)
• Think of ways to overcome the game’s shortfalls (especially regarding social “combat”)
• Using character skills, spells, and esoteric disciplines as flags
• Do periodic check-ins: Are you having fun? Am I addressing everyone at the table regularly? Am I hitting your flags sufficiently?

All things considered, it was a pretty reasonable start to the game. We’re planning on playing at least two more sessions, then seeing how we feel about continuing. If any of my players read this, please comment on things you noticed - things I did well, areas where I need work, things you’d like to see in future installments.

Oh, yes, and I’ve settled on Uneasy Lies the Head for the name of the game. I might find something better, but the more I think about it, the better this one seems to fit.

As promised, a little bit about what I’m currently playing, as opposed to watching or designing.

Next week should see the official start of my Reign game - official because we’re adding another player and because I should have the whole book read and some solid notes down by next Monday!

In preparation, I’m sharking up a list of links to cool Reign-related stuff, much springing from Greg Stolze’s forums. I’ll be absorbing those along with the currently available free supplements. I’ll also likely have a series of questions for the forum, based on my interpretations of the rules. I’m looking to hack the game as little as possible initially, with some likely indie creep as we go.

We have a general premise: a far-flung outpost of the Empire - the city of Vigil, in the northernmost corner of the Empire map - facing multiple crises brought on by the more-or-less systematic destruction of all royal lines, from the Empress on down.

We have characters: Mark will be playing Brutus sa Thalmir, adopted son of the recently deceased ruler, and Shane will be playing Honor sa Thalmir, the heir apparent. (Eric will be making a character on Monday.) In a Gladiator-style turn, the former ruler wanted Brutus to succeed him, but in this case, the Commodus character doesn’t want the throne and therefore supports his brother’s bid for power. Standing against them and their company (the House of Thalmir), are Dindavaran and Uldish armies, the Provisioners’ Guild, the city senate, an insurgency, and a mysterious cult.

We have a handful of influences: the anime Berserk, the films Gladiator and 300, the first Black Company book (the only I’ve read so far), and (reimagined) Battlestar Galactica. BSG informs two things: tone (gut-punching emo porn) and premise - specifically, the “end of civilization” vibe that leaves the characters struggling to survive in the face of cataclysm.

However, I’m a bit stuck for a title. Some play on “Vigil” comes to mind, and I’ve been considering Uneasy Lies the Head, since the game will focus on Brutus’ attempt to seize and hold power in the city and re-establish order in the face of the current chaos. I think something drawn from Shakespeare, especially one of the histories, would be very appropriate here, but I’ve just been too lazy to do much trawling. All suggestions and comments welcome.

A few folks have asked me to post about this technique, which I initially only saw as a personal one for playtesting Seiyuu. Now I suspect that a little adaptation might make it work in a lot of other contexts.

When setting up for Seiyuu playtests, I realized I needed to be able to establish common ground with my participants and do so quickly. Playtesting involves a lot of explaining things up-front (rules, expectations, etc.) and answering a lot of questions, so establishing common ground is a must. Seiyuu is all about anime, so a likely way of explaining something might be “Are you familiar with anime X?” and if the answer is yes, then drawing some example or analogy from anime X. If not…I could spend precious minutes describing the necessary underpinings of anime X in order to make my point, possibly spoiling someone on the show, or pick my brain for another example from another show, until I find a common point of reference.

To get around this problem, I created my anime list. I’ve posted this list on this blog before, but there’s also a link on the sidebar (under “Files”) to an Excel spreadsheet version. This spreadsheet as the same list, broken into printer-friendly pages and marked with a series of five boxes in front of each title.

When I sit down to playtest Seiyuu, one of the first things I do is use this spreadsheet. I’ll have it printed out for the occasion, and I’ll record each participant’s name in the box on the upper right of the first page. This links each player by name to a specific number. I tell each player what number they are and hand out pages of the spreadsheet. I will hand out a page to each player, with the instructions that they mark the box corresponding to their number in front of each anime title they’ve seen (or are familiar enough with that they feel comfortable discussing characters, setting, or situations). When someone finishes with a page, they pass it to the next person, until everyone has completed every page. This usually takes several minutes, but it’s worth it for the following reasons:

1) I now have common points of reference with everyone at the table. My list is extensive enough that it almost always means that there’s at least one title that everyone at the table has seen. In the case of less than perfect commonality, it still lets me tailor examples to a specific participant, by consulting their entries on the list. Even if everyone hasn’t seen anime X, if player Y has, I can answer player Y’s question with an example from anime X.

2) By examining the shorter list of anime that everyone (or most everyone) is familiar with, I can begin to see what genres and tropes are most likely to work with this particular group. We tend to watch what we like. So if the table is familiar with Akira, Cowboy Bebop, and Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex, then maybe science fiction should be one of the genres for our show.

3) I can better recommend anime to others. This makes for good pre- or post-game chatter, rather than as an aid to playtesting, but it’s always fun, and it can help to establish better bonds between me and the participants.

Here’s how I think I’d adapt this technique to other games and situations:

1) If you’re trying to decide on a game or a premise, make a list for yourself of influential media (your personal top tens) or media you’ve been experiencing recently (what you’ve been reading/hearing/viewing). Pass that list around and see who else is familiar with or enthusiastic about entries on your list. I think this could be used for choosing a game (if you’ve all been watching westerns lately, maybe Dogs in the Vineyard or Dust Devils would be appropriate) or for defining the premise in a more generic game (if you’ve all been watching BSG and the new Doctor Who, maybe emo gut-punching time travel would make for a good Primetime Adventures premise).

2) One you’ve settled on a game, have everyone bring in one thing they’d like to see influence the game - a book, a CD, a movie. Pass them around, loan them out, watch them during those weeks when the whole group can’t make it.

I know this technique works for me, at least for playtesting Seiyuu. I suspect it would work well in a broader context, but I’d love to read feedback about how this or something like it has or hasn’t worked for you.

 …and I’ve just realized I’m not doing this with my Reign game. Must fix that.