Tragically, it was Stars Without Number. I just noticed that my super-excited “we’re getting ready to play!” thread is still on the first page of story dash games dot com, which is wild.
Jeez, right? So I love all the sandbox stuff Crawford put into SWN. I generated sectors, oh lord so many sectors. I obsessively clicked on the sector generator tool at http://swn.emichron.com/ until I’ve got way more content than I can use. Lots of lonely fun prep time. I figure I’ve got this! The very first RPG I ever personally owned was Traveller, I’ve got so many years of running this kind of game.
And then I can’t make it work. I cannot get the thing up and running to my satisfaction. My players are antsy, I’m frustrated, folks are looking for something to grab onto. And I can’t get it together in a way that is appealing to me and them. Entirely, 100% my fault.
At some point, I lost not only my ability to run a sandbox but my desire to do so. Mind you, I’ve run sandbox-y stuff. But tastes change, some skills sharpen while others rust. Same with my players: they’ve come to prefer a clear fictional arc, and trusting that the things they do define the arc going forward. My local crowd, consciously or otherwise, calibrates everything we ever play against Burning Wheel.
I tried! I really did.
That said, James Stuart recommended Godbound last week, another Sine Nomine jam, and it looks like so much fun. I think Crawford’s just getting better and better, and I’m really liking what looks like his solution to the player-centered sandbox. I mean, power-level-wise, you’re playing Exalted demigods, so that really demands the world revolve around them. Then you’ve also got this thing where you stake out a goal, because demigods don’t just sit around smoking dope and watching Twitch videos. You can’t advance your character without investing your divine energy into your efforts, and one assumes those efforts are directed at your goals. It’s a good looking reward cycle and it’s got all the sandbox tools.
Will it generate stooooory? It will after the fact, of course. Having had some really good luck with “sandplot” (thanks Mark Delsing!) games like The One Ring and Mutant: Year Zero, this might be my sweet spot. Fingers crossed.
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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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At some point, I lost not only my ability to run a sandbox but my desire to do so.
I’m with you. I like to call it my indie brain damage.
Since I started GMing back in 1978 I didn’t feel the need, or desire, for a rules system to mechanically support the story aspect of the game. But if you do need that support, I have to wonder, why are you looking at OSR games for that? As far as I can tell the OSR is is a reaction against the Story-Game direction of the Indie-Revolution. So if you’re looking for games that provide mechanics for story development there’s plenty out there… but probably not in the OSR category. No? Maybe I’m missing something. That wouldn’t be at all surprising. :p
“…because demigods don’t just sit around smoking dope and watching Twitch videos.”
Isn’t that what you do in Scion?
/rimshot
Vb Wyrde oh I wasn’t looking for it. Not at all. That’s not at all what my story is about.
I didn’t really know how I or my players would react until we were into it a ways. At least in 2012, which is I think when we started up SWN, I aspirationally thought I could run any game without bringing preference or baggage along. I couldn’t do that in 2012, nor could my players, but four years later I think we’re better at it.
I have no idea what to say to what the OSR “is” or “isn’t.” TBH I haven’t dug that deeply. I’ve read Brent Newhall’s super-excellent Old School Renaissance Handbook as well as some other intro type stuff. I’ve been through a DCC funnel. I tried to run SWN. I’m gonna try and run Godbound at some point as well. But I have no horse at all in any kind of race to define terms. Games is games, and sometimes those games are not my jam. (Hence tomorrow’s question.)
I didn’t even arrive to the “mechanical support” part. Some of my friends wanted to play a dungeon crawl. I looked at some D&D-like systems. I saw the tables, the pages of rules and my interest dropped like a stone. I ended up playing the dungeon crawl with The Pool
(and i have to say that it worked much better than the last time i used D&D, decades ago…)
Vb Wyrde I just realized you may be reacting to my question and not my answer. It was written in a snobby indie voice, not meant to be taken literally!
I had this exact same experience with SWN!
I think the greatest asset of Godbound, is the pace at which the fiction moves. In other games its easy to get bog down in details and minutia. Where goals are set but don’t see fruition till several sessions down the line. But in Godbound, you’re demi-gods! These goals will be accomplished now, and we’ll move on.
I think at this increased speed it’ll be easier to see what a sandbox game has to offer, as events build on top of each other.
Aaron Berger I am digging the look of advancement as well. XPs are still kind of ehhh but the Dominion point thing is great.
Robert Bohl I’m similar, but I think it has more to do learning there is a different type of player than a different type of game.
The fact that the demigod gets to manage a cult by level 2 makes me excited as well. It’s a great way to bring the players quickly into whatever you have going on in the faction turn.
Aaron Berger oohh that’s interesting. I haven’t even looked at the level progression yet.
SWN’s greatest flaw, like several other OSR games, is its lack of a properly defined XP-generation formula to drive play. Anyone who knows the OSR well knows the classic D&D formula: recover treasure to win XP to make your character better at recovering more treasure. And that is a brilliantly elegant mechanic that provides clear narrative motivation, encourages players to push against obstacles and seek out exciting situations and clearly defines what play is about. And yet repeatedly OSR designs flake out in their own implementations of this established process, leaving XP awards entirely up to GM fiat with at best some benchmarks to aim for.
I really like SWN, I’ve run it often, yet even I can’t really tell how to make all the products of those great sandbox-generation tools into attractive draws for the characters outside of a metatextual consensus that “adventurers go on adventures.” Or what the objective difference is between 100 and 101 XP. I strongly hope that when Kevin Crawford revises SWN next year, he addresses this problem.
E.T. Smith oooh he’s revising? Iiinteresting.
Looking back at my 4-year-old SWN thread on story dash games dot com, Kevin himself said he wasn’t satisfied with his XP schema and that Other Dust might maybe address it. I don’t have that one so I have no idea if he made good.
Oh yeah, the XP rules in SWN were weaselly. No disagreement there.
I don’t know about Other Dust, but Spears of the Dawn and Silent Legions, both post-OD SWN-derived Crawford designs, use the same XP system, in fact the only development of note is language making the subjective nature even more explicit.
:-\
Guess I need to look at my copy of Other Dust.