It’s going to start September 1, but to get your creative juices flowing, here’s the official Indie Game Reading Club’s list of questions to ponder.
Obviously this is needed because the #RPGaDAY list is so freighted with assumptions about RPGs that mostly it’s incomprehensible if you’re not in that scene any more.
1. When were you last deprotagonized? What happened and how did you reassert your agency?
2. What game created your most elaborate relationship map? How much of it did you actually use?
3. What’s your favorite behavioral incentive?
4. What’s your favorite perverse behavioral incentive?
5. Would you say rolling dice to have sex is hot, dirty, deprotagonizing, or all the above?
6. How many PbtA games do you own, and which one best captures its most clichéd genre tropes?
7. When did you last spend more time setting up a situation and talking about the situation after than actually playing in that situation?
8. What was your most awesome fight online about what does and does not constitute a story-game?
9. When was the last time an indie game made you feel guilty about your race, gender, or sexual identity? Were you more or less woke after you played it?
10. When did you most recently refuse to play a trad game because the central facilitation role was granted too much creative authority?
11. Best unwanted fictional input generated by procedural uncertainty?
12. Best story about waiting for players in a GMless game to finally get to the point in a scene they’ve called for but obviously had no idea why they wanted it in the first place?
13. What’s the most you’ve spent on a Kickstarter game relative to the amount of play it received?
14. What’s the most play-disruptive discovery you’ve made when you insist on playing by the actual printed rules?
15. When was the last time you unironically used the word “diegetic?”
16. GMs: abusers, control freaks or both? Best story explaining why this is so.
17. Do you buy your legal-sized paper by the ream or by the case? Do you ever try to reuse your playbooks or just start fresh every time?
18. What’s your best story about a precious snowflake character some trad player brought to the table because it was “clever?” How did you call them out?
19. What kind of shit-fit did you throw the last time someone tried to schedule your convention game in a ballroom like you’re playing fucking Pathfinder or something?
20. What’s your best story about falling all over yourself trying to rescue a bunch of awesome fiction that just got invalidated after making a fortune-at-the-end roll like some commoner?
21. What was the last OSR game you tried to play, but quit because you realized there’s literally no mechanical support for a storyline at all?
22. How many friendships have you terminated because they confessed they kind of like to play Fate games sometimes? It’s okay. Fate players have to hear the truth.
23. Tell your most scandalous story about getting X-carded.
24. What was the very saddest thing you wrote on an index card?
25. Do you like your scene framing hard, harder, or hardest? What’s the very hardest you’ve had your scene framed?
26. When you interrogate the nature of heroism in your game, do you prefer to directly or indirectly invoke Lacanianism?
27. What’s the very best playtest-stage game your friends probably haven’t heard of yet? How long ago did you play it and how much better was it than the current version?
28. What’s the most interesting period of obscure and unrelatable history you’d like to see a game set in? How would you do it?
29. What indie game tech do you most keenly miss when you play something more mainstream? And then do you denounce the game in person or do you save it for a social media rant?
30. What is your fondest memory of a game you thought was fun before you knew better?
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Published by Paul Beakley
I founded the Indie Game Reading Club in 2010. I've written and developed RPGs since the mid-90s, now I mostly talk about playing them.
View all posts by Paul Beakley
Finally one of these that I actually want to do.
10. Like, er’y day. 🙂
In proper indie fashion, I’m going to include a lot of explanatory text, sidenotes and justifications.
I suppose the other way would be to explain nothing and let my answers eeeemmmeerrrrrgggggguh.
Paul Beakley
1. What is the questionnaire about?
2. How do the questions do this?
3. How do the questions encourage/reward this?
Also, if there is a gap that the questions don’t cover, are the questions nonetheless pointing to the gap?
Also also, will the questions create bleed? Are we going to need a set of warmup and cooldown questions?
Adam D save those for 2017.
You are the Jonathan fucking Swift of my immediate electronic social environs.
“In proper indie fashion, I’m going to include a lot of explanatory text, sidenotes and justifications.”
Or, just put it out there with no explanation and in ten years run a Kickstarter to re-issue the original questions with commentary.
Imma start a debrief G+ community where people can go for support after the harrowing experience of answering the questions.
My answers, in true Indie Fashion, are all going to be veiled insults about my friends, masquerading as theoretical stipulations.
Oh, and my other aim is to get people to respond to every single post with:
“This may be the most pretentious thing I’ve ever seen on the internet.”
I believe in me. I was born to do this.
Brand Robins I’ve got your back.
It’s going to be glorious.
Ooh, bonus rule: all the questions have to be answered in the form of a game, and each game must contain at least one bizarre and unconventional prop and/or mechanic (a map, a pile of custom tokens, a deck of custom cards)?
I am sad that none of these questions provide a platform for me to showcase my elaborate game journaling scheme. For God’s sake my journal is from Europe – that should count for something.
Adam D fucking hell man, mechanical systems are so 2006. What the fuck is this, Dogs in the Vineyard and pushing dice forward to represent moves in the fiction?
It’s 2016 goddamnit, and Indie=Freeform.
Or AW, which we all know is just Freeform with some dice for some random fucking reason. Everyone knows that, except the one guy who made that AW hack that is no good and everyone makes fun of behind his back.
You know who I mean. That guy.
Speaking of which, lets have our weekly hangout and make fun of him some more.
I’m writing all my answers on index cards, which I’ll subsequently set aflame in a special bowl and/or chalice while being sad.
I won’t be posting them on the internet, but I’ll still be using hashtags.
I look forward to punting on most of these.
Mikael Andersson is properly artisinal.
The only way he could be more indie is if he wrote all his answers in Danish.
garbage language for garbage people
Now to look up old jargon like “pervy” so I can remember WTF it means.
Indie games: where self-deprecation is the game.
Adam Day it’s harder than it looked, I think, to write these in a totally serious and totally not-serious way.
I invite participants to answer them however they want! Cannot wait to see what happens. 🙂
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