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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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. 🙂
I wanted to share a few thoughts before I got my own first answer out there.
First, we gotta be able to laugh at ourselves, right? I’m 100% certain there are folks who saw the original questions and turned their nose up at it: disrespectful, jerky, gaming is srsbzns. I’m here to say it’s okay to laugh at our scene (“statistically insignificant” is I think what Jason Corley would call it), particularly given the occasional bouts of self-importance that roll through it.
Second: no correct way to read or answer any of these, okay? I worked hard to make them serious and not-serious, and I’ll talk about each question a little for the folks who follow the Indie Game Reading Club but maybe aren’t steeped in the history and culture of our thing.
Third: I know some folks may have axes to grind (see point 1). I can’t do much about those folks. I hereby reject all responsibility for threads that go sour.
Indie gamers can be jerks. Trad gamers can be jerks. The vast majority of folks who play these games and have not declared allegiance to any tribe? They can be jerks too. Gamers can be jerks. They can also be amazing.
Read charitably and laugh at us/them/yourselves.
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1. When were you last deprotagonized? What happened and how did you reassert your agency?
Some background: There’s a reason this is the first question! “Deprotagonized” is an awesomely pretentious term that is, like, the foremost thing I personally think of when I think “indie game” or “story-game” or whatever. My personal take on it is that this is how you feel when the GM tells you what your character is doing. You thought you were the protagonist in your own story, but really you’re just an actor in theirs.
Is that a function of the game’s design or the GM? Sometimes both, yeah? And is it actually objectively “bad?” Oh gosh, who knows. Where it rubs me wrong, personally, is when my expectations aren’t met: I thought I was gonna be the star of my own show, and maybe you didn’t explicitly promise that but you also didn’t tell me you had your own storyline. So we sat down together and we weren’t of one mind as to how the experience would proceed.
“Deprotagonized” has this wonderful veneer of victimization. Sometimes that’s true, sometimes it’s just a mismatch.
MadJay Brown already told a great story of deprotagonization that involved me (3:16 game some poor sap at a con tried running off a contest entry, not even the final published game, and the GM had no idea how to run it other than as His Story). But the one that sticks with me the very most was — wait for it — a D&D game! A friend was deep into 3.5 and we went along with it for a few sessions. He had promised it would run out in 10 sessions, and on the 10th session we had the final showdown.
Well, so, given we knew the advancement scheme and how much time we had, we all worked out our critical upgrade pathways to absolutely maximize our toons for that aforementioned showdown. We arrived strapped.
You’re already saying to yourself “holy shit Paul, you were already playing a tactical boardgame at that point, what the fuck protagonizing were you expecting?!” right? Well, so, he’s actually a pretty even-handed GM, and up to the final showdown I had in fact had some say in where to go and what to do. It was still all aimed at that final showdown, though.
The big battle is described. We are strapped. It is not an interesting tactical challenge. I think my wizard has some kind of … spell, fuck if I can remember, that lets me ask questions from the spirit world? The details are super fuzzy. But I’ve gone to great lengths to maximize that because getting those answers has turned out to be key to concluding this big boss fight.
Well so there’s like…a 5% chance, maybe… baked into the spell (1 in 20) that I’ll get back nonsense answers when I cast the spell. Hey what a surprise, I get a nonsense answer and our efforts to proceed are instantly halted. I think I have some…feat or something, seriously D&D nerds, you don’t need to correct me on the technical details here, that lets me cast that spell again. And what a surprise apparently I roll a 1 in 20 again. It’s behind the GM screen. Who can say.
In this particular tale of woe, what struck me was my own personal take on what “deprotagonized” actually meant in the context of a tactical challenge game like this D&D campaign had shaped up to be. And again, that’s some mix of what’s written in Teh Roolz (tactically oriented advancement) and how the GM chooses to engage with Teh Roolz. But by gosh did I feel burned! I had poured 10 solid weeks of “work” into working out the level-ups, coordinated with other players, really worked the system. And it was for naught. Had nothing to do with storyline or being the protagonist, not really, and everything to do with being misled about how much agency the players might be allowed to have by the GM.
Throughout the growth of indie gaming there’s been a lot of really excellent talk — some acrimonious! — about the power dynamic of traditional roleplaying. “Deprotagonized” has always stood in as code for that talk, for me.
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The list of all the questions is here.
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