Vanderbilt and the Yeggman. Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder.

Description of freeform

2014-02-14T17:33:31Z

I've written a blog post describing what 'freeform' usually means in the UK, mostly for people from elsewhere who might be expecting it to mean something rather different: http://blog.ukg.co.uk/uk-freeform/

Thoughts and comments welcomed!

Blog: Rainbow Towers

2014-01-13T11:26:40Z

New blog post up about a dexterity game idea: Rainbow Towers!
http://blog.ukg.co.uk/dexterity-game-idea-rainbow-towers/

Murder mystery playtest: interested?

2014-01-06T16:19:34Z

We're testing a new murder mystery game in London (at a centralish pub yet to be confirmed) on the afternoon of Sunday 26th January: would you like to come along?

It's called A Speakeasy Slaughter and is set in 1920s Chicago, with gangsters, showbiz, Prohibition and all that kind of stuff:

"Welcome to Fat Stan’s top secret underground speakeasy in Chicago.

It’s been a busy night. One of Stan’s pals, Scabface, was shot down by a masked assailant in front of everybody during the interval.

The doorkeeper swears that nobody came in or out of the only exit for the last hour, so the killer must still be in here. Is it something to do with the gang wars that have been flaring up all over the city, or is showbusiness the motive?

And more importantly: will the killer strike again?"

And here are some links to blurb PDFs with more details:

If you'd like to give it a go, or are intrigued but cautious and want to learn more, please do comment below or drop me a line (mo at freeformgames dot com). We want ideally a mix of experienced people and newcomers, so everyone's very welcome.

Very small games: a trend

2014-01-06T15:59:36Z

Bruno Faidutti calls it 'Japanese minimalism'. What would you call it? New blog post: http://blog.ukg.co.uk/japanese-minimalism/

Blog: bravery

2013-12-28T12:09:07Z

New blog post! About a simple dice mechanism for variable outcomes of bravery options. http://blog.ukg.co.uk/bravery-outcomes/

Blog post: board game redesign

2013-12-17T10:06:05Z

I did another blog post! – this one about a competition to design a new boardgame using the components of an old one. Here: http://blog.ukg.co.uk/redesign/

Mass effect

2013-12-16T18:13:47Z

One of the things I love about English is the quirks of its structure which native speakers aren't consciously aware of, but which bedevil learners. An example is the way it handles mass and count nouns. Maybe you got taught this sort of thing at school, but I never did: so here it is now, some actually useful grammar.

A count noun is the usual kind of noun, which has a singular and a plural form, like 'table': a table, two tables, lots of tables.

A mass noun doesn't have singular and plural form, because the thing it describes isn't quantized into discrete elements. So eg. 'cement': a little bit of cement, two kilograms of cement, lots of cement; but not: one cement, two cements, lots of cements. There is no such word as 'cements'.

Other mass nouns are usually substances, like cement (water, flour, sugar, metal…) or abstracts (cycling, traffic, heat, mathematics… you can't have two kilograms of these, of course, but they're still mass nouns).

Some of them can actually be pluralized (eg. rain is generally a mass noun but one can also talk about 'the rains') but with a different meaning then attached: it doesn't detract from the general mass-noun behaviour. There's also awkward things like 'chicken': when talking about the meat it's a mass noun, but when talking about the animal (or about a set of food orders) it's a count noun.

Mass nouns are not peculiar to English, of course, they exist in lots of languages. But in English there's the curious phenomenon of what might be called faux-mass nouns: ie. count nouns which disguise themselves as mass nouns by appearing not to have different singular and plural forms. An example is 'sheep': you can have one sheep, two sheep, lots of sheep: but not a little bit of sheep, two kilograms of sheep. Awkwardest of all are those which fall into this category and also into the one above, like 'fish': you can have one fish, two fish, lots of fish, but also a little bit of fish, two kilograms of fish.

Any other strange behaviours of noun pluralization come to mind? And those of you who have grammatical understanding of other languages, I'd be interested to learn how it works with those.

Poll, and blog post – Consequences round-up

2013-12-12T09:37:33Z

I've posted to my new games-related-stuff blog! – it's a round-up of what I played/ran at Consequences, the recent larp con that ran down in Hampshire. It was great!
http://blog.ukg.co.uk/gothic-consequences-21-24-november-2013/

And while I've got your attention (or not), a quick poll just to find out who's still here:

View Poll: #1947713

Games blog

2013-12-08T11:04:14Z

Gosh, it's been a while since I posted here, sorry about that. Rather hectic and in places stressful few months have left me little time for reflection. (And other such excuses.)

Anyway, the news now is that I've started a blog, at http://blog.ukg.co.uk. It is intended to gather together my ideas and thoughts about games -- those I've designed, played, dreamed about, whatever. It's only about hobby stuff -- not anything related to my work (which is also about games of course, but different sorts of ones). Up till now I've been writing this hobby game stuff here on LJ, but the audience is becoming increasingly limited, and quite a few of the people who still do read this journal aren't really interested in that sort of thing anyway. For those of you who are, I'll post links here when I put something new up there, of course, and I hope you will carry on commenting! The RSS feed is http://blog.ukg.co.uk/feed/, as you might have expected.

To kick it off, I've exported into it from here various past posts about game stuff, mostly about my own designs. This includes your comments on the posts. These were pretty much all public posts anyway -- those that weren't, it was to spare my embarrassment at the half-baked idea rather than for any reasons of privacy -- but if you'd like any or all of your own comments removed or edited, please do say.

Hope to see some of you over there as well as here!

Prologue

2013-09-02T14:53:28Z

I just found a chunk of a YA novel I started writing, several years ago, which I'd forgotten about. I had it mostly planned out, but I never got past the first couple of chapters. As secretrebel (who should know) says, "Writers write", and I didn't and don't and so amn't. But I quite like this prologue, seeing it again:

This is a story about how sometimes you really have no idea about what’s going on underneath. What I mean is, you know how you see a swan on the river, and it looks like it’s gliding along so smoothly and peacefully? But if you could look underneath the water, you’d see all sorts of legs thrashing away like crazy. Just two legs, usually. But what if there was maybe a dozen legs, like some sort of crazy centipede or something – wouldn’t that be weird? Well, that’s what I’m talking about.
Anyway, it starts with my sister going missing. Or, rather, getting captured. Read on!

Speakeasy murder mystery – interest?

2013-07-30T17:23:16Z

Just trying to gauge interest here initially. Would any of you be keen to play in a murder mystery party game with a 1920s Chicago speakeasy/gangster theme, some weekend afternoon in September in central London? (Obviously I appreciate that the exact date will be significant, but I'm just trying here to see if it's potentially a goer or not.) Please comment below, or email me if you'd rather!

It'll be the third playtest, so the game should be in fairly good shape by then. We will be asking for your feedback afterwards, about things that did/didn't work etc.

Do please feel free to mention this possibility to other potentially interested parties, and let me know about them too.

It's pronounced 'fronk-en-steen'

2013-07-16T13:35:52Z

Question for the techies. How useful is Levenshtein distance as an accuracy measure for eg. quiz answers? Or do you know of a more appropriate method for fuzzy search comparison? What I want is for it to give a good guess at rightness if the answer is spelt slightly wrong or has punctuation added, etc.

Hands Up!

2013-07-12T11:31:50Z

I thought about another microgame idea last night. In the vein of Shape Up!, this one has the working title Hands Up!

There are 18 cards, which each carry a symbol: there are two each of [red|blue|green] [circle|square|triangle].

Each card also carries a victory condition, which are all different. Each condition represents a possible combination of six cards as a mix of pairs of colour(s) and shape(s), eg. red red blue blue circle circle, red red square square triangle triangle, etc.

At the start of the game, each player (I reckon 2–4, although it might work for as many as 6) is dealt a face-down card which they keep. This indicates their personal victory condition.

The first player then deals a single hand of 6 cards off the top of the remaining deck. The idea is that this hand is passed around, and on their turn each player has ways to alter its composition. The first player to get the hand such that it matches their personal victory condition, wins the game. The 6 cards must all count: eg. if the hand has a blue triangle, you can count it as one of your required blues, or one of your required triangles, but not both.

So on your turn, what you do on your turn is: you draw a card from the top of the deck and add it to the hand. You then may either discard one of the now 7 cards, or play one of them. In either case that card is put onto the discard pile, leaving 6 in the hand: if those 6 match your victory condition, you declare it and win. When the deck is exhausted, shuffle and recycle the discards.

'Play' a card? Yes, this is the interesting bit: each card also has on it an action, which you enact when you play it. Actions are things like:

exchange your victory card for one of the cards in the hand;
look at another player's victory card;
draw another card imediately, and discard one;
immediately shuffle the discards into the deck;
[etc, ideally 6 different ones]

It seems to me that the main danger is of the game getting a bit tug-of-war-y, with people with very different victory conditions pulling the hand back and forth and neither getting close to victory. So the action cards are going to be very important as ways of allowing a clever player to manipulate vctory.

(Another thing I'm wondering about is whether to not shuffle the discards, but instead just to invert them. In general I don't like games that strongly reward memorizing card sequences. But perhaps this should be an exception, if it gives people another tool to win. (Although a big question mark over how useful a tool it would be, even if you have a terrific memory.))

(I've always likes the hand-passing mechanism of Space Beans, which I expect is used in loads of other games too. Here it's not so much used as an out-think-the-next-player dealy, though; more as a way to deal with there being so few cards.)

Any thoughts, at this early stage?

Gamecamp

2013-05-20T14:28:50Z

On Saturday I was at Gamecamp 6, which I thought a few people here might be interested in.

(I seem to have degenerated to LJing solely about games just lately. Sorry about that… although in my defence, they are occupying almost all my work and leisure time at the moment.)

Anyway, so Gamecamp is an unconference, which is like a conference (in that it consists of people with related interests getting together to talk about stuff) but rather than having a predefined agenda, it organizes itself as it goes along without any hierarchy of authority. Any attender can announce and deliver a session on any subject they feel like.

This was my first time attending such a thing, and tbh I didn't quite know what to expect, but it seemed to work pretty well. There was a big piece of wall divided into a grid of rooms vs (half-hour) timeslots, and people just stuck up index cards onto it with what they wanted to do. I guess it would be a bit disheartening if you announced something and then no-one came along for it, but as it turned out all the slots I joined in on (and the one I organized) had plenty enough people.

Actually to say 'the one I organized' is aggrandizing it a bit. The theme of this year's Gamecamp was "Show and Tell, or Run What You Brung. Bring along a game you’ve made, a prototype you’ve got in testing or a work you have in progress, and be ready to show it off and talk about it." Not really knowing what was going to happen, I took along some copies of Shape Up! (as mentioned in this LJ passim), bagged a room slot, and found some people to test it on. Which was cool, although tbh not much different to what I've done at the regular London boardgame playtest group. Next time I'll be more ambitious!

Anyway, so what else did I do? I playtested a game about catching RFID-based electronic fireflies against the clock, from pabadesigns, which was lots of fun but very prone to cheating through over-excitement. I suggested the fireflies should deliver a mild electric shock if you tried to move them illegally. I think Polly was strongly tempted…

I went to a discussion about location-based techniques in mobile games (ie. the phone senses whereabouts you are located, and the game changes accordingly in some way), which was quite practical: basically various people discussing examples of games where it worked well or badly, and their own experiences (most were developers) of the various technical options available. The general tenor of dissatisfaction confirmed me in my mind about not using location-basing in the pervasive games I'm working on, but instead using QR codes and the like to check-in.

That and a couple of slots taken up by talking to friends and to business contacts took me to lunch, when I met up with the esteemed floralaetifica. Which was nice! We pretty much stuck together for most of the rest of the day.

Next up was one about the use of Twine in interactive fiction. I know very little about interactive fiction, and nothing at all about Twine, but there wasn't much else that seemed good in that slot, and I figured I'd learn something. And I did, as it turned into mostly a discussion about in-game narrative techniques in general; different kinds of reveal, player/reader frustration, the implicit contract. Much food for thought.

After that quite sedentary phase though I needed something different, so went to the room that was being used by the Haberdashery Collective. They do what are perhaps best described as grown-up kids' games, like Hide and Seek sometimes do. I think some of them are known to some of you? Anyway, we played some fun fairly-physical games and woke up a bit.

Next was my Shape Up! test slot, which went well and confirmed my good feelings about the game's current state. There's just one thing I want to try (a variation in the scoring, which'll make it easier to see how to score, but more difficult to actually do so) if only to dismiss it from my mind. We shall see.

Then was a discussion about Storynexus. I was in the unusual situation of knowing more about it than most of the other people in the room, having got as far as created a test world and played around with the techniques – although an actual game design idea has withered on the vine thanks to lack of time for me and the other participants. So I didn't learn a lot at that one, but it's still nice to hear about other people's experiences.

We took a tea break here, and then went back to the Haberdashery for more ar$ing about. And that was the end of the show! Pretty much everyone retired to the nearby pub for more chat, but I had to head off after a pint to meet up with TheHattedOne for an Esperanza! design session. (Of which more soon.)

Anyway, so overall it was good fun and I'd recommend it if you have a general interest in games. I would say most of the people there were mostly about computer games of one kind or another, although there were also plenty focusing on board/card games, pervasive games, and interactive fiction. Hardly anyone (or maybe not anyone at all) whose primary interest was in role-playing games (or related things like larp and freeform), though. Which surprised me a bit.

I've been aware of Gamecamp for a few years and tended to think it wasn't for me. Even this year I was a bit doubtful. But actually it was a good fit, as I've got such a variety of game stuff on these days. I even managed to find someone to have a very useful convo with about the educational software business I'm trying to get off the ground. And the mood is not at all intimidating, you're not compelled or even socially-pressured into doing or saying anything. Although one of the mottos is 'there is no audience', in practice I would guess about half the people there didn't 'lead' anything but just listened to stuff and chipped in where they felt appropriate.Which is cool.

Peaky

2013-05-01T14:28:45Z

Last weekend I went to my fourth Peaky freeform-writing workshop, and had an excellent time.

It was a bit more relaxed than usual, because instead of aiming to get a game completed by Saturday night in order to playtest on the Sunday, as is standard, I pitched the idea of a group that just researched, tested and developed some character-creation workshopping techniques that might be useful in freeforms. Enough other people were keen, so that's what we did: and, as it turned out, some of the stuff we came up with was strong enough that we actually were able to give people a playtestable game experience on the Sunday after all. So that was already a win all round, as far as I was concerned.

We started off by doing various bits of thinking around techniques used in Hillfolk, The Shab al-Hiri Roach, When the Dark Is Gone, etc – various tabletop RPGs that include character creation mechanisms which drive interaction and rapidly establish inter-character relationships. We even tried the Ball of Yarn technique, which we varied up by simultaneously using four different-coloured balls of wool to represent different types of statement or relationship – this was very pretty and worked fine for the five of us, but not sure it would have been practical with the 12 or so players we were aiming for. Along the way we accidentally created a Hillfolk variant set among the crew of a Star-Trek like space voyage. (No doubt someone's already done that, as part of the Kickstarter add-ons, but anyway we felt it worked pretty well.)

So the version we ended up carrying forward for the playtest was our own concoction, which doesn't yet have a name but can be thought of as the lots-of-coloured-cards system. Imagine a table with five sets of different-coloured cards on it. The blue cards each have written on them a role: your concrete role within the game. The red ones each have a character archetype. The greens have a personality trait. The orange ones have an emotional goal. And the yellows, which are folded over, each have a secret. The roles and secrets are of course specific to a particular game background, but the others are fairly generic and can be ported from game to game without needing much changing. The idea is that each player in turn approaches the table and picks up one of the cards. They continue, taking turns, until each has taken one card of each colour. Each player may pick colours in any order – ie. you could pick your role first, or your secret first, etc. So by the end of the process you might have chosen role = science officer, archetype = mentor/advisor, personality trait = pessimistic, emotional goal = get revenge, secret = strong affiliation (the concealed back of which says: you are a member of an extremist group of some kind, your choice what). This forms the skeleton of the character that you will play.

So once everyone's done that, we sit them all down around a table and get them in turn to choose a name and introduce themselves in a couple of sentences – conveying their role and also (either by role-playing or indication) an idea of their archetype and personality trait."I'm Fredericks, the science officer – I'm always ready to give the captain advice and guidance, although sometimes she finds what I have to say a bit gloomy". That gives everyone an idea of who they all are and what their basic functional interrelationships are.

The next step is to give everyone four glass beads. We then ask each of them to answer a question about another character. They must choose a different other character to answer about for each question, and, as they do so, pass them a bead. The idea of that is that people will tend to roughly even out the bead distribution if they can see someone hasn't had any yet, it's an incentive to even out the web. The questions are things like: what was your first impression of X when you met them? What do you envy, or admire, about Y? and so on. So everyone in turn answers the first question, then everyone in a different sequence answers the second question, and so on. They have freedom to invent stuff here, as long as the target player agrees it: differences can be settled by negotiation. (In the playtest we used four transparent beads, but we're thinking in some scenarios it might be better to use two white and two black – and thus force the player to make two of their answers/statements to be positive, two negative.)

And once that's done, we did one more announcement about the immediate background to the game start, and explained how the black box would work (a semi-out-of-game area which people could use to stage flashbacks, expound internal monologues, etc), and timed in.

So, that's all a bit of a rush through it, which probably leaves much unclear. We'll do a proper detailed writeup at some point, because it's a system we'd like other people to be able to use. And do ask questions below!

Anyway, the scenario we used at Peaky wasn't anything to do with science officers but was at a present-day normal-world pre-wedding dinner. The wedding was due the following day: the hag do had been the weekend before, in Blackpool. At which, some rather awkward things had taken place, which had cast certain aspects of the wedding (like: was it actually going to go ahead?) into question. Time to play: What Happened in Blackpool! (Ooh, that page has a photo of the coloured cards. Excellent.) Apart from that, we didn't write anything: no plots, no character backgrounds, no NPCs, nothing. The players would do all that!

So it turned out all the setup as discussed above took about an hour, then we had 45 mins of so of play, and 20 mins or so of debrief afterwards. This was not a Nordic-style 'exploring the feelings engendered in you by the game' debrief (although we should probably build in allowance for that, particularly for scenarios that are less light-hearted than this one): it was the players (who were all fellow-designers) telling us what they liked and didn't like about the game, etc. Fortunately they mostly liked it. The main issue was the physical one that the cards were too small and in some cases on too dark a paper to be easily read across the table. During the questions phase, players had to keep peering and asking to remind themselves of who people were and what they were like. Fortunately it should be pretty easy to fix that.

One playtester suggested an interesting way to lengthen the game, which was to, after the initial session of play proper, add an interlude during which players went back to the table and were asked two further questions about each other. This would help tie down things that had been improvised, spread good plot ideas around the table, refocus objectives, and other useful outcomes. Then you have another, shorter play session.

This proposed interlude, and the initial questions session, have an interesting status, it seemed to me. Not time-in in the sense of being fully in character, they were also not time-out in the sense of talking about your character in the third person. Instead they were what one of the team called 'time-ish' – somewhere inbetween. Of course this is commonplace in tabletop games, which generally are time-ish for most of their unfolding, and fairly common in larps, where things like meals and sleeping are often time-ish, but it's very unusual in freeforms which usually transition sharply from one state to the other.

Right, so, I've babbled on enough now. Suffice to say the whole thing felt very positive and creatively energizing: and that's not even talking about the two games that I helped playtest for other people, which were both great fun. Onward and upward!

Economics of microgames

2013-04-25T18:06:17Z

I took Shape Up! to the Playtest meeting again last weekend, and got lots of very positive feedback (some on BGG…)

This is the point where for a 'normal' game (like Fishy Business) I would be thinking about trying to get it published. However being a microgame, I'm not sure that is really practical. I don't think established games publishers are going to be interested, because basically it's impossible to make any money out of publishing and selling such a small and cheap thing. This article by Michael Mindes, who knows a thing or two about making money from games and otherwise, explains the problems.

(There is of course the option of self-publishing, but really I'm too busy to take on all the work required in sorting out manufacture, finding distribution, marketing and selling.)

T suggested coming up with two further microgames each using 18 cards, so they could all be printed and packed together as a set ina conventional pack-of-cards-sized box. That is quite appealing as a designer (particualrly as Shape Up! only took three months from initial conception to reach this point) but I'm still not sure a publisher would really be keen.

So I guess I might end up just giving it away as a print-and-play PDF. Which would still be very cool if lots of people did so, but it does seem a bit of a shame when the properly-printed cards are so nice to look at and handle.

Anyway, this is all very much first-world problems; the main thing is that people have been playing Shape Up! and liking it! Which makes me very happy.

When the Dark is Gone

2013-04-16T11:27:17Z

I spent last week mostly playing and running games, in the company of some excellent people, and it was great! Most of them were of the prepless and/or GMless style that I've been increasingly interested in in recent years. I'll probably spew out some more thoughts here about the others shortly, but I wanted to pick up on When the Dark is Gone first, as I think it's especially interesting.

Here's the game's blurb:

"Imagine the children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. They visited a magical land, fought battles alongside talking animals and centaurs and won a war against a powerful and evil enemy. Then they returned home, no-one would believe them and they were back to war time rations and maths homework.
What does that feel like?
How do you live with the memories of what you saw?
How did Edmund deal with the fact that Aslan was tortured and killed for him? How did Susan and Lucy deal with watching Aslan die, even knowing he was later resurrected?
Did Edmund drown his sorrows in alcohol and drugs, did Lucy vent her repressed rage by being violent towards her loving husband?
Did they end up in therapy?
The players in this game are all Clients in a real-world, modern day setting undergoing group therapy. They all have serious psychological disorders which are damaging them and those closest to them. Everyone has come to the therapy session as a final attempt to get their lives back on track."

First I should declare that When the Dark is Gone was written by frax, who is a friend. But I don't think she's on LJ any more, so I don't need to be kind about it for that reason :-) You can download it as a PDF, free, from here on the Black Armada site.

It's prepless – the game background and characters are entirely devised by the players, during the first hour or so of the session. It's not GMless – the GM provides guidance during this development phase, and plays the role of the Therapist during the remainder of the session. But it's a very different kind of GMing to the usual.

Traditional GMing is, I think, strongly performative and to an extent controlling. You create a gameworld and unveil it for the players to explore; or in less trad games (like my own Haunted House) you pick up on their ideas and shape them into a whole. Either way, you have a special responsibility for, and 'ownership' of, the session. I've done stacks and stacks of GMing down the years, and I relish this aspect, and enjoy the challenge of providing and shaping entertainment for players. It's rewarding in its own right, and also affirming of my capabilities.

But GMing in When the Dark is Gone is almost enirely egoless. At the end of the game the players were saying how they'd enjoyed themselves, and I said that I'd also enjoyed GMing it. One player said words to the effect of "you didn't have to do anything, you just watched us get on with it!" and at first I was a bit taken aback by this. (Because I felt that I'd actually done some useful stuff.) But I quickly realized that actually this was (inadvertent ;-) praise – for that player at least, I had made my GMing role invisible. In the same way as a real therapist seeks to avoid their clients transferring emotions onto them, the WtDiG GM should (I think) seek to avoid their contribution to the session being recognizably influential.

The other quite unusual thing about WtDiG is that, once the creation phase is done, the session takes place entirely in character, as it becomes a de facto live-action game. Even for the GM, all one's interventions and reactions must be in character as the Therapist. There are no rules calls, no out-of-character questions, no saying of "My character deos so-and-so" or even "I do so-and-so", etc: just straight improvised in-character speech and action. We took a couple of comfort breaks, but the players seemed (afaics) to stay in character through those as well. This might sound difficult, but I think actually once we'd started it was easier to stay in character rather than to break the atmosphere.

I won't talk about the details of the session and of the world that the players generated, etc, because that's all proper to them rather than to me. (If they'd like to, of course, that's great.) One change I made (after discussion with frax beforehand) was: the rules suggest asking the players at the beginning of the session to say if there's any material they would rather not have occur in the game. I instead circulated them beforehand asking them to tell em any such material privately. I then turned those responses into a list, added some things of my own, and scrambled them. It's a small change, but I think worthwhile so that people don't have to talk in front of the group about what they're not comfortable with.

When I first read through the WtDiG document, I was struck by what a terrifically interesting idea it was, but I wasn't at all sure if it would 'work' as a game – or even if it actually was a 'game' at all. frax's design notes are worth reading – she specifically intended it to bring out emotional responses in players, and to maintain full immersion by avoiding the need for conflict resolution. I thought this was tremendously conceptually ambitious and well worth trying, but (to be honest) right up to the start of the session I was trepidatious about how it would go in real life. Particularly because the game doesn't allow for the usual sorts of GMing fixes that you can use to wrestle a struggling game session back onto the rails. I was, frankly, nervous about my lack of control.

Well, I needn't have been, because the session went really well (from my pov, although the players will have their own opinions of course), and everyone got into it quickly and smoothly. The one GMing tool I had – that of asking questions – I used minimally and (hopefully) in more or less the right places. One of the things frax stresses is not to dive in too soon if things look bogged-down, but to wait and give players every chance to find their own way out. This was difficult! But I think the experience was quite salutary. I'm going to take some lessons back from it to my GMing of more normal kinds of game. I don't always have to be so hands-on controlling of the flow; players can be trusted more than I sometimes do.

Anyway, I found it a really enlightening and thought-provoking experience, as well as an entertaining and enjoyable one. So I would recommend anyone who likes the sounds of the idea to give it a go. And hopefully this post will be another little helper in raising the profile of When the Dark is Gone, which I think deserves to be brought to greater attention.

Edited to add: I should have said something about timing. It was pretty much an hour for the prep phase, two hours for the therapy session, iirc.

Quiz feedback

2013-03-21T21:31:01Z

Just realized I never fed back about the recent quiz that many of you were so kind as to help me with. It went pretty well -- overall, the team scores were (50, 75.5, 78.5, 81, 82, 84, 84, 85.5, 85.5, 90) out of 102, so apart from one outlier they all scored capably. And the team that won deserved to.

The horses round turned out to be quite a good leveller, in that although all teams did fairly OK at it (scores from 4 to 8.5/10), the eventual winners only did mediocrely: their only weakish round. I'll have to try and work out why that was…

The Where and what? table round was a bit of a surprise to me, as all 10 teams scored at least 18/20. After the response on here I'd been wondering that it might be too difficult, but no. I guess either (a) having a team of 6–8 pretty much guarantees that someone will have that area of knowledge covered, or (b) having an hour or so to brew over the answers is immensely valuable. Or maybe (c) having physical printouts in front of you to pass around and scribble on, which I guess most of you didn't have, is immensely valuable?

The connection round I reordered the questions a bit so it wasn't quite so obvious from the first two, but it still was pretty obvious: one team got the connection after just one answer (!), four more after two, and three more after three. Still, as that's the last round of the night, it's no bad thing having it fairly high-scoring, to let people leave pleased with themselves.

The bloke who I've been alternating with can't do it any more, so I've go to do the next one again, in May. Gah! Hopefully we'll find someone else who can alternate with me from then: I really don't want to get stuck with doing it every time.

Anyway, thanks again for all your help; I think I'm slowly starting to get the hang of how to set these things.

Things that have interested me lately

2013-03-02T17:39:42Z

And maybe they will you, too? Let's see:

Victorian Blood Book – extraordinary decoupage project, made in 1854. You really have to view the slideshow to get the full majesty and oddity of it all. Not many people's idea of a wedding present for one's daughter.

Your Paintings – this BBC site has gathered together all 200-and-odd thousand oil paintings in UK public hands, across 2000-and-odd collections. Fantastic browsing material. See also: Google Art Project, if you didn't already know about that. Amazing high-res images.

Duke's first MOOC – I'm interested in MOOCs as a social phenomenon (and as a sometimes handy way to learn stuff, of course), so this analysis was rather interesting. More detailed report here. An attempt to aggregate data about MOOC completion rates here.

The Jane Austen Word List – simple but genius. Writer wants to use Austen-period-authentic language. So she creates a custom dictionary for her word processor, drawn from the Austen corpus. So it flags up whenever she tries to use a word that's not found in the source material. Here is an interesting list of some of the words thus picked up, some of which I certainly wouldn't have guessed were out of period.

Republished (A)D&D modules – PDFs, cheap. Lots of nostalgia value looking through them: how we used to play when we were kids. Not much to say to a modern role-playing sensibility, but hey ho. For me the most interesting parts are the histories of how each module came to be, and what was going on behind the scenes at TSR, etc: written by Shannon Appelcline. The linked page, for example, reveals that Queen of the Demonweb Pits was developed and published expressly against Gary Gygax's wishes.

Horses for courses

2013-01-27T17:06:02Z

This is just an ordinary quiz round, themed to reflect the topical interest in Tesco's burgers. (Well, it was topical a few days ago when I wrote the questions. No doubt it'll be completely forgotten by the time I actually run the quiz in a few weeks' time…)

View Poll: #1892815

I've filled it in myself with the correct answers, so if you have a look after you've submitted yours, you can see how many you got right. (I'm thinking this is a fairly easy round at the moment.) As usual, please do say if any seem unfair, wrong, too tough, don't make sense, etc!

Quiz: top ten dogs

2013-01-25T09:16:10Z

This is another test round for the quiz I'm running next month. T will be at an evening class, so I'll be by myself (gulp). So this is the Top Ten round, which gives me a bit of a breather. The teams have to write down what they think are the top ten items in [category]. The previous couple of quizzes we did Greatest Britons and Biggest Towns in Suffolk. This time I'm thinking 'dogs'.

"Which were the ten most popular breeds of dog registered at the (UK) Kennel Club during 2011? You don’t have to get them in the right order, or guess what the numbers are: just say which ten breeds you think were the most popular."

Teams get five minutes to write down their ten answers. You can't write more than ten. If you'd like to write your ten guesses in a comment, I'll give the right answer in another post.

The thing to bear in mind of course is that the Kennel Club is not fully representative of British dog ownership (to put it mildly). 'Street' dogs are likely to be somewhat undercounted. I'm not sure whether to warn the teams of this explicitly, or to let them realize it for themselves: what do you think?

Are there any problems with the question, do you reckon? (Apart from: some people don't like dogs.)

What I do

2013-01-20T12:55:22Z

I make games for people to play and have fun with each other. Sometimes in the games people pretend to be other, more interesting, people. Sometimes they pretend to kill each other.

What do you do, using only the thousand commonest words? http://splasho.com/upgoer5/

(HT to vicarage, bibliogirl et al.)

Larp and freeform

2013-01-06T16:54:43Z

(Warning: this will probably not be of interest if you're not a gamer. In fact even if you are, it still might easily not be :-)

A couple of months ago, I played in a larp – the first time I'd done that for quite a few years. It was the weekend before Consequences, at which I played a load of freeforms: and that got me thinking about the differences between larp and freeform.

If you're thinking at this point "eh what? isn't a freeform just a specialized subtype of larp?" then I hear you. It certainly started off like that. But I feel that evolution over the last 20 years or so has meant that freeform, or at least what we in the UK mostly think of as freeform – the kind of thing that gets run at Consequences – has become effectively a different style of game¹.

Now obviously there are going to be heaps of exceptions and grey areas, but it seems to me that the two are characterized by:

Larp	Freeform
Player usually creates their own character	Invariably prewritten characters
GMs often play characters, including whole-game NPCs	GMs rarely play characters, and even rarelier do they NPC for the whole game
Player usually defines own goals and objectives, and relationships with other characters	Character goals, objectives and relationships are predefined
GMs intervene and respond actively during the game, like in a tabletop	GMs intervene and act as little as possible
Player ~~improvisation~~ invention of personal background material is welcome	Such ~~improvisation~~ invention may risk 'breaking' the game
The general story of the game is open and may take many paths, the GMs supervising it flexibly	The general story of the game is limited to a preconsidered set of possible outcomes, which depend on player groups' relative success/failure; or to just one inevitable outcome
Complex plotlines evolve only slowly, if at all: short-term plotlines are generally pretty simple	Plotlines are typically complex, deep and thoughtful, even in very short games
Often campaigns	Usually one-offs

So when I started doing freeforms, it struck me how extremely elegant and clever they were as a game form, compared with the fuzzy, messy and often unsatisfying nature of larps. It seemed to me that the ultimate freeform design was like an exquisitely-crafted mechanism, where the plots, character motivations, and incidents were all designed in at the start, and once set in motion the players would experience it all unfolding around them like a glorious web through which they could dance. And these days, lots of them do actually reach that level, thanks to the skill at plotting and balancing that game-writers have developed.

But all this has taken freeform further away from mainstream larp. When we² rerun freeforms that we first ran more than a decade or so ago, we pretty much have to double the amount of plot in the game, if it's to go to the full length of time. The reason being that in the first instance, players were still thinking partly like larpers, and cheerfully ~~improvised~~ invented their own material to explore and fill out the rather sketchy game environment: now, they don't expect to have to do that, and may complain if shortage of plot requires them to make their own entertainment.

What struck me in particular about the larp that I played in November is that it was pregen, so we did have character background to digest, like for a freeform. But there was only one page of it, for a 24-hour game. By contrast, one of the freeforms I played at Consequences had eight pages of background, for a 4-hour game³. And my character in that game had eight defined goals, and 18 defined character relationships: the larp character had none of either.

I hasten to add that both were terrific games which I enjoyed hugely: I'm not saying one approach is better than the other, or anything like that. It's just that this contrast brought home to me how much the forms have diverged.

So one thing I'm thinking about for this year is how to bring back a bit of larp-style spontaneity and unpredictability into my freeform designs. In particular, to hand over some control to the players: to let them have more creative input into their characters' thoughts, feelings and intentions.

Now this ventures into potentially risky territory: what if the players come up with stuff that breaks the game, or makes it not work out how I intended? That's exactly what I want to stop thinking like. I want to trust players more, and treat the game as a joint venture in which they and the GMs are all involved together.

So expect some posts here with my thoughts about how to open my freeform design out a bit. I'm sure a lot of people will find the idea pretty repellent or feel that it defeats the point of what makes freeform freeform. And they may well be right, but I think it'll be interesting to try some things out.

I'm very keen to hear your thoughts on any of the above, of course! Particularly where you think I've got it wrong :-0)

Edited to change improvisation to invention – see discussion below as to why.

1 As huggyrei pointed out the other day, other people use 'freeform' to mean other things, some of which are much more like larp. But bear with me for now, I'm particularly talking about the Consequnces-style thing which I myself have mostly written and played in recent years.
2 This is 'we' = The Epic Experience, as against a general 'we'. YMMV.
3 This is not picked as an extreme example: it's not at all an unusual amount of material.

Quiz round!

2013-01-03T15:09:18Z

We've got another London Road Community quiz coming up! – and as usual I'm asking you lot to be the hapless victims who test the hardness of the various questions. Thank you in advance!

So this is the connection round. As before, there's a connection between the ten answers (which are supposed to be fairly easy); and the earlier in the round you spot the connection, the more points you get.

(Ooh, the poll creator page has all changed. Let's hope this still works…)

View Poll: Connection round

I'm particularly interested this time to know if there were any questions you didn't get at first, but were able to fill in once you'd got the connection. And, of course, if there are any that are too hard, too easy, ambiguous, wrong etc…

Step into

2012-12-28T17:46:39Z

I was sorting out some old files the other day and I came across a game I wrote back in the summer of 1995 (and had completely forgotten about). It's essentially a larp, but set indoors and for just six players, with pregen characters. The working title was (the dreadful) 'Cannes-tasia' – the characters are movie people at the Cannes Film Festival who've been asked to join a mysterious potential funder aboard his yacht in the harbour. Shortly after they board, the yacht breaks adrift…

At the time, based on the other kinds of games that I knew about, I described it in my notes as "in the middle ground between larp and tabletop RPG, drawing on elements of the ‘dinner party’ murder mystery game and the Cthulhu-Blood-Brothers-style one-off experience".

Looking at it now, it seems like I had accidentally invented 'parlor larp' avant le nom. (I'd only ever done boffer larp at that stage, and didn't realize there was any other kind.) If only I'd actually ever run this game, who knows what glory might have been mine.

What I find interesting is that I was (evidently) already clear in my mind that this was quite a different thing from a small freeform. I'd run several freeforms by that point, so I knew what they were like, and knew that this was not the same sort of beast. This interests me because I've been thinking just recently about the differences between freeform and larp, and the spaces between. (I have a post brewing… be warned!)

Maybe I ought to run the Cannes game some time, for nostalgia value if nothing else. But I'll have to think of a better title first!