So, a thing I’ve seen in a lot in indiegames, and particularly story-focused games, is less emphasis on the build and more emphasis on the portrayals of the characters. Maybe the game isn’t really tactical, so the build isn’t so important for carving out spotlight and success. Maybe the game is meant to be set up and played in a very short time, and builds are just not practical.
As a GM, it’s enormously easier for me to not have to think about and carefully balance, you know, math. That quarter-drow warforged whatever, that amazing bespoke combination of tactical assets that might actually be mechanically broken or at least exploiting synergies…I just can’t.
Or jeez, how about the 10 page backstories? It’s so much work for the players, some are much better at it than others, and then trying to fit it all together and live up to whatever awesomeness is already living in the players’ heads? I don’t know of a single system out there that actually delivers on the promise the player makes to himself and then implicates the GM in when they deliver their novella pre-game.
That’s all on me. All credit to the hardworking GMs who deliver good challenges and fit the backstories together, awesome. I used to! I don’t have the patience, time, or frankly bandwidth to do it any more. My prep time is smaller than it used to be.
So all this leads to what I feel like is one of the Hard Problems of players who are curious about small-press games that aren’t designed for this kind of play. I’ve seen it so so much, particularly at conventions but also at my own table, when someone has come from a siloed play tradition. I want my Night Witch to be psychic! My Ark mutant is the seventh son of a seventh son, destined to rule the Zone when he finds Eden. My round table knight has an ancient fae mecha hidden away inside a rock ring on an island off the shore of Cornwall. I am the only female minotaur in the Degringolade.
I’m sure billions of pixels have been spilled talking about this. And I love the player impulse this comes from! Sometimes! I love it a lot less when I’ve got a player who’s convinced she’s found the critical path through Teh Roolz to Beat The GM.
I don’t “call out” trad players, gross. Does anyone actually do that? This was maybe my cruelest indie joke but I’m totally just playing on outsider fears here. What I have done is take, say, the really gonzo backstories and tried to reframe them: like…it might not actually be true, you know, this thing about being the seventh son of the seventh son. Mecha hidden off Cornwall, eh? Maybe that’s something you’ve heard about but haven’t seen?
I really love the solution in 13th Age that lets you just outright state a true thing about yourself: maybe the best-in-class solution in the tactical trad game space. The Three Facts bit in Godbound looks like it placates the precious-snowflake urge, too, while building up backstory in a guided way. That’s great. (Great recommendation on Godbound, by the way, James Stuart.)
Now, personally, I’m mostly in a creative space where I’m way more interested in interesting portrayals than interesting builds. The past is the past; 99% of anything a player cooks up will never make it to the table, although it may exist for their own pleasure. When I’m a player I’ll pick something vanilla, even given the chance at a snowflake build. When I’m the GM, more interesting portrayals definitely make my job easier.
I wanted to include a link to the Plinkett Test, which is a great little guideline I’ve used at our table: http://www.pcgamer.com/sort-characters-from-cut-outs-with-the-plinkett-test/
I know it’s a link to a video game page but there’s an explanation of the test and a nice graphic.
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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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Q: doesn’t Burning Wheel encourage novella back stories? (He asks, having never played and only read the free content)
Aaron Griffin specifically no.
You write Beliefs and Instincts, and those might maybe imply backstory, but they’re mechanical hooks.
I think playing the only female minotaur is cool, as long as it doesn’t come with a novella-length backstory.
I wouldn’t know what to do with the only female minotaur. Everything would have to revolve around her. She’s inherently an enormous cultural disruption in a game that’s about whether and how the player characters might be cultural disruptions through their actions.
Aaron Griffin There is a lifepath character creation system, which sort of creates a backstory, but it’s more like an outline of how you got to where you are now. You CAN flesh it out if you wish, but it doesn’t really come with details.
The important thing is that, if you wish some backstory detail to impact your current game, you write that as a Belief. Beliefs are what drive play.
To echo Paul’s post, if you want that fae Mecha to come into play, you write a Belief about it.
I’d argue that BW, by its very nature, always produces characters that pass the Plinkett Test.
Reading this reminded me of the joke answer I might have written about: We were playing Marvel Heroic Roleplaying and I was playing Wasp and another player was playing Wolverine. There was some kind of situation where Wolverine was trying to track a villain down but the villain got away or something, so I had Wasp say “Huh, I had heard you were supposed to be pretty good at what you do.” Sick burn on that precious snowflake Wolverine! The player appreciated it as a joke, though. Part of the characterization I was working with during that run of the game was that, as a founding Avenger, Wasp viewed herself as a celebrity A-lister and Wolverine was kind of a hanger-on that she was slumming with. I had a lot of fun playing my take on that character.
Nice, Dan Maruschak ! Always post the joke answer too! 😉
(I didn’t realize the female minotaur thing was meant to be in the context of Paul’s game. Oops!)
Nice mention of 13th Age; I was about to mention it myself! I think it’s a great way of gratifying that desire to have something strikingly unique about a character, but without the massive backstory.
Andy Hauge yeah 13th Age is the game I try to get my Pathfinder obsessed pals to play (without me, I don’t want to run it). I think it’s a solid game with some neat stuff in thete
This is the first time I’ve seen The Plinkett Test defined as such. Nice.
Adam D I’ve been trying to figure out how to track it down for a while, and then lucked into the right search today.
It’s a really good, small thing to file away.
Man I know people that dont pass the plinkett test
I used to run 100-person White Wolf larps. The number of stories I have about this …
To be fair, there are games in which the Plinkett test is irrelevant or inapplicable: Diablo, for example, or certain types of TTRPG.
This reminds me of Wick talking about how Houses of the Blooded came out of D&D doing nothing to help you create characters that were more than chess pieces.
“Hither came Conan the [redacted], [redacted], [redacted], [redacted], [redacted], [redacted], [redacted], with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, [redacted].”
Stras Acimovic I’m always really impressed by those LARPs. Do the game-runners make all the player characters, or do the individual players have input before play begins?
Tore Nielsen Generally the players make the chars, STs tend to make NPCs although at big events (like the official ones) you often get people to play the NPCs for you since you can’t be everywhere at once as an ST.