Settings

I always felt there are two sides to a roleplaying game. We have the mechanics; the rules governing how good your character is at something and the setting; the world your character runs around in. While I find mechanics to be varied and vast in what they do, settings are a different matter.

Having looked through many games I noticed settings can be boxed into three general types: Published, Licensed and Assumed

Published settings are probably the most well known. These are the settings that a given publisher creates. The only way to familiarise yourself with this type is to either read the book, have someone tell you about it or read reviews/articles about the setting. Published settings are often based on genres or a theme. It is fairly easy to compare them to a well known form of media or a particular property but they remain their own thing.

The Published Setting's main advantage is that, provided we'll assume we're only talking about the core book, everyone starts on the same field in terms of knowledge. If you read the book, you will have about the same amount of setting information as anyone sitting right next to you at the gaming table. In addition, as they are supported by the publisher, a community around the setting grows. Players who love it will often seek gaming groups that would play with them. Problems only arise when someone turns up to the game without knowing anything about it. Telling a potential player he needs to go through 200 pages of setting information before playing has a very high chance of scaring him away.

Licensed settings are based on a property. These games start out as something else, whether a book or a television series and are then given rules for people to play in those worlds.

These games don't necessarily require people to read books before playing. It's fairly easy for a Game Master to tell the players what film they should watch before making characters. In about an hour the players will get the feel for the settings without it feeling like doing homework. Unfortunately, these settings are based on series with an existing plot and characters thus they need to somehow deal with them. Either by ignoring them, which can result in losing part of its appeal, or allowing the players to take the role of the main cast, which may lead into the fear of those characters being portrayed incorrectly by others.

Assumed settings build up on knowledge that you already have. It's fairly easy to compare them to something everyone already has some kind of idea about and provide a short list of differences. Many modern games fall into this category. A player assumes everything is just like in the real world but there are monsters around, for example.

These settings are fairly easy to get into if you already know the base idea behind the game. In many cases, you can have the whole game focus on precisely how the setting is different from that base assumption that everyone is familiar with. If you do go that route, you would have to make sure the players won't read how the setting is different from their preconceived notions. The only disadvantage to this kind of setting I can think of is if someone has absolutely no clue what the base idea behind it is like, which I find doubtful.

Assumed settings are my favourite. They don't require people to spend time learning what the setting is like and allow me to jump in straight into the fun of playing. It is not impossible to present Published and Licensed settings as Assumed but it comes with its own problems.

Dungeons and Streetwise

Street Dungeons and Dragons
This sounds to me like a very good idea for promoting a roleplay store

Out of a Comic Book
This is what you should do after having your precious books stolen

Dresden Files RPG to be released for Origins 2010
I always wanted publishing companies to offer a free pdf with the purchase of a book, offering them with a preorder sounds like a step in the right direction

Hobby Bid
A new site for auctioning your stuff. Since it's new there's hardly anything on it but it might grow into something cool... or die under the colossus that is eBay...

GM Ambition and you, Part 1: Smooth Sailing

Alek has spoken about player ambitions which is not to say that that GMs cannot have ambitions too. GMs want their game to succeed and to have fun, just as any player wants their characters to succeed and have fun.

The GM has crafted the scenario or the campaign. He has worked hard to make his game succeed, so if the game goes off-track this may cause the GM to have less fun and be annoyed with his game. To me, roleplaying should be fun for both sides, player and GM alike. So naturally the GM wants his scenario to succeed just as the players want to slay the dragon or whatever.

No game survives contact with the players in my experience. Maybe the players adamantly refuse to: 1. form a group, 2. pick up whatever hook you have planned to get the game running or 3. both at the same time. So what do you do when the players refuse to pick the hook or form the group? You could use force in either case, however that would not only seem unreal but also create a bad atmosphere.

What you could do instead is have the players make their characters so that they are already familiar with one another, you could put them in the same location where the game starts. Put them on the merchant boat that will get attacked by the pirates or in the only military unit that survives the charge against Hill 401. Forming a group is a tricky deal, but so is running a game. It is part of the job of a GM to deal with these problems. Another way to have a group work easier together is arrange for a session of pure character creation. This is especially important in games that are based on heavy character interaction and politics, but don't leave it out in more fantasy or action-based games. You don't want a paladin group of thieves and murders and you don't want a thief in a party of do-gooders. Then again that would make for an interesting game.

As for the hook. Well that is another thing you will have to deal with, so serve it and serve it well. Of course, it varies from group to group, but generally speaking, people react well to strange or exciting things. If your hook makes your group collectively go "Ooooo" then you have them.

The important thing here is to have fun yourself, especially if you are the GM. If you come to the game with little passion about running the game and you seem tired and bored, this will spread to your group very quickly, so whatever you do, make it fun and interesting. Isn't that why you are playing?

Player Ambition and You, Part 1

Ok, so I know I said I'd be doing Grease Monkey Workshop posts to start with, and this particular issue is much more player/plot focused, but tends to be in the forefront of my mind, both when I play and when I GM.

Though the subject of this post is "Player" ambition, in reality it is the Character's ambitions we're talking about. Any character worth roleplaying as is likely to have goals, and I've seen few characters who were not immediately rejected who simply didn't have them (in some settings, even "To live in peace" can be acceptable, if all hell is breaking loose around you). So the question is then, how do you, the player, go about accomplishing them?

Not to be too overeager to stratify everything about this hobby, but I frequently find myself dividing players into two categories; proactive and reactive. Certainly, there is some overlap here; some players prefer to be proactive about getting to interact with pet NPC's, or seeking out a particular situation they'd like to endure. Others don't really have a preference, and will take whatever the GM throws at them. This is an appropriate application of the concept, but isn't quite what I'm talking about.

The hallmark of a proactive player is that they make opportunities for their Characters. They won't just ask the GM for this or for that; they'll have their characters actually go out into the world and make it happen. They will organize, they will plan, they will amass details for your setting. They will build bureaucracies, build industries, and build social networks. In some cases, if your player is confident enough (and you are permissible enough), they can be relied upon to actually create much of this background detail themselves without needing to follow your lead.

You may have heard the term "sandbox" in reference to a game format before. This is where the proactive player thrives. It is worldbuilding at its best.

Then there's the reactive player. This type of player likes missions, they like adventuring parties, and they like having mentors or superiors to tell them what to do. This isn't due to some deep-seated need for subordinance; it is simply because they prefer to react to the world being portrayed around them. That is what being a hero is all about, right? Responding to danger, saving the day.

Do you know any players who are clearly "proactive" or clearly "reactive"? Share your thoughts, and in the next installment of this series, we will explore some of the ramifications of this paradigm, and techniques we can use to bring out the proactiveness of your players (or, tone it down a little, Mr. Kicks Down All Doors)!

Show Me The Awesome

It really is true that a Game Master should from time to time change the position where he sits at the table and become a Player. Doing so allows for a change of perspective and you might notice a few things about the dynamics of the game that aren't obvious when you are a Game Master.

I noticed this when after two years of running games I decided to play games. After several gruesome moments of contemplation everything became clear. You see, when I was running a game, I had this idea for a story and all the possible things that would happen. I imagined how Non-Player Characters would act and what the Players would do in various situations. Yet there were times when I just couldn't understand why someone would take this sort of action rather than some other one. Don't get me wrong, I don't have a specific plot in mind nor do I prohibit Players from taking the course of action that they want to take... but there were moments where I just couldn't understand why this and not that... that's when I started playing.

Here's an example: in an Exalted game, I'm playing a Lunar who really doesn't like slavery so when he ends up on an island where he finds out there's a whole nation run by other Lunars who enslave people, he is not happy. Now I picture him going to the palace of the Wolfman-in-charge and telling him his name, what he stand for, what will be the result of his actions and that he, as the ruler, is free to try and stop him. After which point he would show off the speed with which he can run and hide in plain sight. Only to become a shadowy menace that can't be found but whose actions are not only known but seen all around them.

Then Alek tells me it is not the best course of action. That it would be far better to infiltrate the court and destroy their infrastructure from within while inspiring the populace to rebel against their slave masters. As usual, Alek is most certainly right. It is a better course of action and it is more reasonable... so why don't I like it? The answer is simple...

Going to the Big Bad Guy, telling him he sucks and that this is the face that will take him down and then make a run for it is Awesome. Then I imagine the story would revolve around inspiring the slaves to rebel and giving them a helping hand all while evading capture (and imagining how frustrated the Big Bad Guy must be)... and I find that incredibly awesome...

That's when it hit me. Looking at the campaign from the Game Master perspective, I tried to allow all Players to have a chance to shine and make sure it all fits in into the big picture. When playing, all I am looking at is the immediate story of my character and the group. Making wild things and showing off your speciality is very enjoyable. So now when the players go with something I didn't really expect, I do not question in my mind their reasons for taking this course of action, I just accept that Players want to be awesome :)