Obviously I intended this question to start a lengthy and impenetrable turf war discourse on the bright line between indie and mainstream. Obviously.
So we all know what we’re talking about right? Excellent, we can skip over the unpleasantness.
I have actual answers for this one! Minimum navel-gazing today.
Circles from Burning Wheel, or really any player-facing “take a chance on adding stuff to the world” mechanism. Circles, specifically, oh how I missed that. To those not in the know: it’s basically a stat that lets you add an NPC to the world. Might be useful, might be an enemy, doesn’t matter: if you feel like you need to add an NPC to the game, you make the test. If it fails, the best practice is typically that the NPC shows up anyway, but with a complication. That alchemist you really need to brew up a shapeshifting potion is also an informant for the Cardinal’s secret police. The sympathetic captain of the guard will totes let you through the gate but only after you’ve saved her son from the witch in the woods. Whatever. Enmity Clause ftw.
Another: relationship-making Pre-Play Questions. First I saw it so explicitly spelled out was Apocalypse World. It’s great for games with a good dose of intraparty action, especially backed up with some incentives so you keep reincorporating the stuff you said in the beginning. In Mutant: Year Zero, it generates the Ark’s relationship map and situation, and earns you XPs as you help an NPC, hinder another, and protect your PC “buddy.” I really do miss that process when it’s not available. I think Fate (FATE? (F.A.T.E.?)) has a similar pre-game “what did we do together and what aspect is derived from that experience?” thing. It’s neat. Good tech.
I miss PbtA style Moves when I’ve been playing a lot of PbtA/AWE games. It gets into my head and I shift my mode and method. The surest proof that moves are not skills is to try to treat one as the other in back-to-back games. Very different engagement and use and vibe. But the majority volume of my play isn’t PbtA so missing Moves is a temporary condition only.
I know I’m missing a ton but those are the three that jump to mind.
One more day! Anyone else excited?
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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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1. This is old hat (more than 10 years old), but having some kind of robust conflict resolution mechanic which is NOT based on character abilities can be tremendously helpful.
Sometimes you just wanna know whether your character falling over into the mud could solicit sympathy from the Princess, you know?
You can’t get that kind of thing from a to-hit roll, but in many games it can spice things up and help us move past a disagreement and back to the game.
2. Clarity of Creative Agenda in the game itself. Whether it’s the design of the game rules or just the orientation provided by the text, some games are maddeningly un-self-aware, and refuse to tell you the point of playing the thing. (“You can be anyone you want and do anything you want! Game X allows you to do it all!” That gives you very little help when you’re trying to figure how to make your game better, or which bits to focus on and which bits to leave out.)
Paul Taliesin those are both solid.
And now someone can start a fight about what “tech” even is.
Paul Taliesin, can you give an example(s) of mechanics that do the first (resolution not built on player ability)? I’m sure I’ve been exposed to several, but I’m having a hard time thinking of examples.
Having never played BW: doesn’t Urban Shadows’ Hit The Streets do roughly the same thing as Circles do?
Aaron Griffin it roughly does!
John Bogart: sure. The aforementioned ‘Circles’ ability is one very focused application. ‘Last Breath’, from Dungeon World, is another hyper-focused application (only for when you’re dying). But those are VERY specific.
The ultimate example of a generic application, in my opinion, is the game The Pool. However, conflict resolution systems in many other games, like Primetime Adventures or Otherkind dice do this, as well.
Like anything else in gaming, you can always “come up with a custom move” on the spot (or just pick some dice and roll them), but some games make it interactive, easy, and “fair” (or at least make it feel that way) by giving you a good framework for it.
OMG do not even get me started on the whole “well any game cooooould do X” thing. I could play Chess with my plastic from Axis & Allies, too.
Indeed. Ideas are worth something. Just because you had a good one once doesn’t mean everyone else can at the drop of a hat, nor that you will be able to again the next time.
I love this question so much. I had to stop myself from going on:
plus.google.com – #INDIEGAMEaDAY2016 Day 29: What indie game tech do you most keenly miss when…
When I play games that only have a binary succeed/fail dice roll for resolution, I really really miss games that offer pretty much anything else.