Wabi-Sabi

Probably one of the most neglected elements of storycraft is that of theme.  People love to talk about characters, settings and plots, but they often neglect to discuss or decide what a story is really about, or what it's really driving at.  I'm guilty of this too: Why worry about what a story is about when I'm in love with characters or a particular setting element?  But even so, I've found that themes serve as a strong foundation for a game, helping to shape my characters, my plots and my sessions.

If I had to pick a single, driving theme for Cherry Blossom Rain, it would be that of wabi-sabi.  The sentiment is similar to the Western concepts of "Seize the day!" or "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die," but decidedly less uninhibited or optimistic.  Wabi-sabi is noticing a wrinkle on a beautiful, young woman's face and seeing a hint of the grandmother she is to become.  It's watching the autumn leaves fall from a tree.  It's noting the ding on your favorite sword and finding that it has more character now.

Part of wabi-sabi is noting the effect time has on things.  Cherry Blossom Rain has a deep background: The legendary blades aren't just magical, but they have stories.  The clans and this war was already in motion.  Many games treat the history of a setting as a sort of eternity: The good king has always ruled the righteous kingdom, the evil empire has always threatened the freedom of the world, orcs have always rampaged at the borders.  If there is history, it happened thousands of years go.  In Cherry Blossom Rain, it happened yesterday, and it's still in motion.  The players find themselves not in an eternally unchanging world, but in a world that was the result of heaps and heaps of small changes over time, and that's changing still, changing around them and changing with them whether they want it or not.

But the main thing most people take away from wabi-sabi is the concept of fleeting beauty, the knowledge that you might have seen something beautiful, something worth cherishing, and now it is forever gone.  I've tried to steep my game with this notion: My game is not an endless parade of samey duels, but distinct moments that the players will never be able to get back.  First, wild adventures through the sinister Kamurocho and a unique opportunity to serve tea to their enemies and get to know them better.  Then, a moment of camaraderie in a hot springs.  Now, they stand on the precipice of war, frantically sharing their last moments with the ones they love, struggling to preserve what they have, knowing that tomorrow it'll all be gone.  I've complained before that my game has slowed to a glacial pace, and it's not because the players have nothing to do, but because they're doing so much.  Part of this, I think, comes from their growing awareness of the how fleeting the moment is.  They're grabbing onto these last few days and holding on tight, because tomorrow their beloved NPCs won't be there.  They might not be there.  Raoul in particular feels this keenly, as he sees himself as the most likely to die on Sword Mountain. Even the name "Cherry Blossom Rain" speaks to the concept of wabi-sabi, because I'm explicitly trying to evoke the image of cherry blossoms falling from trees, a moment of beauty caught just as it ends.

I really can't think of a better medium to show the principle of wabi-sabi than in a role-playing game.  A picture freezes the moment forever.  A recording or a video can be played over and over again.  But nobody will ever have a chance to play Cherry Blossom Rain again, not this way, not with these people, not this story.  It's behind us and done, a stream of fleeting moments, enjoyed and now cherished, but forever gone.  I find this the most poignant element of role-playing: My art is an art that's lost as soon as its shown.  No matter how wonderful a session, future generations will never have a chance to marvel at it the way they might marvel at one of Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings.  In that, a session's beauty is even greater precisely because of its fragility, the very essence of wabi-sabi.

Games I play: Houses of the Blooded

Ages ago, Erik Moll complained that this "Monday Night Group" didn't want to play Houses of the Blooded while he very much wanted to run it.  Setting aside a discussion about the very contentious social model that resulted in that situation, I suggested that he run it on his own and simply invite the people he wanted to the game, as he had more than enough cred to cobble together an all-star team.

He took me up on that and I must say I was flattered when he invited me to join, and so I've been playing Houses of the Blooded for... what is it, nearly a year now?

Let's get the bad out of the way by talking about the system, because you never really get to know a system without playing it fairly extensively.  John Wick put together an amazingly elegant core system for Houses of the Blooded.  I have a few small quibbles over the value of various virtues (like Courage) and inevitably there's a discussion of how broad an Aspect can really be, but ultimately these mechanics work.  But where the system completely collapses is the Season Actions.  Weirdly, John Wick took his excellent and well-crafted core system and... tossed it aside for something completely new.  Worse, the chapter is badly edited (recently Jimmy and I had an argument over how Spying on Regions and Conquering Regions actually worked... until we realized we were getting our information from two different sections, mutually contradictory, in the same chapter titled "Conquer." I'm not joking), and the balance is whacky and the situations that it creates are often uninteresting or create samey characters.  For example, Frank plays an unrefined Falcon who, in his words "Has a Strength of 2 and a Cunning of 3, which should be switched, but I like my Season Actions too much." I don't blame him given that Season Actions are experience.  Or the fact that you need all of the resources, so inevitably everyone has the same sorts of terrain and nobody specializes.  It's just a shame that Wick didn't extend the same amount of careful thought that he applied to his Virtue/Aspect/Wager system that he did to his Season Actions.

The game itself, though, has been delightful.  I've played with Erik before, years and years ago, and while his wasn't the worst game I'd played in (by far), I found the game to be tedious, and that he had a tendency to want to maintain a status quo.  I haven't played with him for years, and he's clearly shed that inhibition for change, because this game is dynamic and constantly changing (he didn't bat an eye, for example, when some dice rolls and some suggestions resulted in the death of one of his primary NPCs.  Instead, he pushed it further and used it as fodder for more stories).

What makes the game, though, isn't what Erik does, it's what he doesn't do.  He carefully chose aggressive, strong players that would know what they want, and then he gave us a world and then sat back and let us play in it.  He's not lazy, I should be clear: He's adding elements as quickly as the rest, nor is this a "GMless" game, as he maintains the role as ultimate arbiter, but he allows us to heap on elements, notes them, and then finds ways to add more and more on them until we've created something fascinating out of nothing.  I've seen people try this sort of game before, but I've never seen anyone pull it off as successfully as Erik has.

Let me use last night's session as an example: We did our Season Actions for Winter, and we were missing some rather important players, so Erik didn't want to move forward with some of the bigger events (Like a planned wedding).  So, instead, he asked for suggestions.  I noted that I still had trouble in my Swamp region ("the Hungry Earth"), and so we decided to deal with that Trouble.  The players asked for a description of my lands, which laid before them, and we played out a quick scene in my castle, with players negotiating the price for their assistance (and Erik playing as his own, personal PC, at my request), whereupon we made our way to the Hungry Earth (again, more description from me) and players began to add additional elements to the story with their own rolls, which Erik would take, along with my description, and wove them together into a story about a decietful and beautiful treasure hunter, ancient and terrible artifacts bound up in the secret of my own artifact-blade, and dark, cthulhu-esque monstrosities and a plot by the children of Mahl.

From nothing, we got that.

As with Xavier's game, I find myself marvelling: I don't think I could sit back and trust my players that much.  I'd be too worried that the game would fail.  I couldn't just let go like that... and if I did, I wouldn't be able to adapt so rapidly and smoothly as Erik does.  Better, Erik has really mastered the art of letting you have want, on the one hand, while complicating your life in a way that's interesting without leaving you feeling powerless or screwed.  I've talked before about trust, and here, in this game, Erik definitely has my trust.

I'm playing as Moryandal, a treacherous Serpent from the Valar family (which apparantly suffers under a long-lasting family curse), known for his size and his glowing, haunting white greatsword.  Unlike in Xavier's game, I let a bit more of my dark side show, the parts of me that I really, really enjoy in a game.  So far, I don't think it's damaged the game, but sometimes I worry that I do push the game too much and represent too strong a presence in the game (though Jimmy and Maartje do help guide the game away from my hands).

Games I'm Playing: D&D

I got into gaming because I wanted to play. Unfortunately, most GMs (when they're 11 to 14) sucked, so I ended up grabbing the books and doing it myself, and because I sucked less than everyone else, I became the go-to guy to GM.  At first, I did so with some resentment (everyone else got to have "fun" while I had to do the work) but eventually I began to enjoy the unique beauty of GMing for its own sake.  Then something unique happened: I met other GMs that didn't suck.  Slowly, I found myself unclenching things I hadn't even realized I had held clenched for years, and I began to trust that other GMs could actually be competent... and I gave a few a try.  The next few blog posts will be about those games, and why they're great.

I've never really been a fan of D&D.  Most gamers grew up with it as their first game and, frankly, I think they view it through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia.  Compared to the other games of my generation AD&D was just out of date and behind the times.  When 3e came out, I gave it a shot and found it much improved, but it still didn't set right with me.  In fact, I never enjoyed a D&D game at all, ever, until I played in a 4e game run by Xavier Wolfs at an open evening.  To my amazement, I wasn't only having fun, but I wanted more.  And so I pestered him for two years to let me into his campaign, and when one of his players finally crossed a line and got kicked out, I got let in.

I haven't been disappointed since.

Xavier is running a D&D game set in a shard world, a world that was once whole, but now shattered into vast mountains of rock floating in a great void.  We fly from shard to shard in skyships, battling evil and trying to save the day and what have you.  I play as an Unaligned (would be Lawful Neutral on the old chart if they hadn't "improved" the game by removing it) Human Fighter named Havard Grey, a Skyguard (sort of a fantasy INTERPOL agent), beloved by Avandra (much to his consternation).  I've played for 3 sessions... which might seem awfully short to make judgment calls and call something "great," but I've ditched games far faster than that, so I feel justified in my knee-jerk assessment.

Xavier's game is not the sort that I would like "on paper."  Essentially, it consists of a string of fight scenes with a sliver of RP in between them to justify moving from one scene to the next.  In principle, I should hate that sort of game, and most of the time, I would, but how Xavier handles it makes all the difference in the world.

First, the fights are never "just fights."  He creates these intricate, free-wheeling battles where every battle is not just a measure of your die rolls, but also a measure of your ability to solve the tactical problem he's laid out before you.  I'm quite a skilled gamemaster, of that fact I've never been shy, but I will tell you this: I can't hold a candle to the ease with which Xavier conjures fascinating tactical scenarios.

That, in and of itself, wouldn't be enough to hold my interest.  I'm a big fan of stories (the more intricate the better), and so simply beating the hell out of stuff, even in an interesting way, won't keep me happy, but Xavier does have a story, and what's terribly unique about him is how he tells it.  In Newton, I saw a D&D DM who would stop in between fights and do what he called "cut scenes," which amounted to him explaining how awesome his NPCs were to the players and monologuing for 15 minutes while they stared at him in rapt fascination (why they found that so fascinating, I never understood).  Xavier is the polar opposite. He doesn't explain anything to you.  He shows you through the battles.

Let me show you what I mean.  In my first battle, I was sent to investigate a minor vampire incursion, only to have my team (of low-level NPCs) nearly wiped and to have my bacon saved by the rest of the party, wherein we discover that there's a major vampiric conspiracy within the city.  In the second and third battle, we discover the vampires nest beneath an inn, and in the final battle, we faced down the head vampire himself and the woman who supposedly loved Raoul's character and defeated them.  Each of these fights had broader implications, particularly the first and the last (the third also resulted in us finding a book of vampiric/elven death-love poetry).  In the first: Why would the skyguard send such an inexperienced team to die?  Was the intel so bad, or did they know they were sending us to die (the implications I've discovered since then is that it was the latter).  In the final battle, we uncover the truth about who was really behind the conspiracy (hint: not the vampire.  He was raised back from the dead by a necromancer) and how Minestra truly felt about Raoul (she had been using him).  Note that Xavier didn't spend thirty minutes outlining this stuff to us: the design of his scenarios, or a few throwaway lines by the NPCs, made these implications patently obvious.  If that Newton DM was "GM as Final Fantasy," Xavier is "GM as Half Life."

Which isn't to say that Xavier's games lack role-play, it just tends to be subtle, and it reflects the needs of the player.  Most of the people at the table are more interested in getting to the next fight than in a dynamic and nuanced RP, and so that's what they get.  Whenever I have a scene, of course, I have to describe how my character strolls in, how he scowls, and what he wants... and Xavier reflects that back by stepping up to my RP with RP of his own.  In some scenes, the RP is subtle and quick, a drop of hints, a few clues that there's more going on, enough characterization to get an idea of what's going on, and sometimes it's more intense, wrapping up what's happened and where the story is going next.

But what matters, what's important here, is that Xavier puts everything in the game for a reason.  I often argue that NPCs should not simply be placed into a game for no (or a singular) reason, such as the girl whose sole purpose in life is to fall in love with a PC.  Instead, everything should tie together, and into the grander scheme of things.  Xavier does the same thing, but with fight scenes.  All of them are uniquely interesting, geared towards the players, tied into the current subplot, and tied into the grander arc.

As a gamemaster, Xavier has a few other qualities that I like.  First, he doesn't take his game or himself too seriously.  If I find something amusing and crack a joke about it, he tops my joke with one of his own and the table will burst into laughter (and he'll often bring the jokes into the game, appropriate as it's inspired by the somewhat slapstick One Piece).  I love being able to stop and laugh and spend time with friends, and his game has that in spades.  More importantly, though, Xavier is simply competent.  I find it difficult to explain some of the finer points of proper GMing to people because much of it simply comes with experience, things like knowing what your players want, rolling with the punches, guiding confused players through the rules, knowing when to break the rules or the story for the sake of the game, and so on.  Xavier has this quality.  When I pestered him about what I wanted for my character (for like the third time) he just smiled patiently and made sure I had it (actually, he already had it ready, and was simply too polite to tell me that I was being a nag ^_^).  He helped me choose the right abilities and avoid some of the pitfalls of character creation, and makes the game easy to play even for someone as inexperienced with it as myself.  As a result, I feel like my character is totally awesome, and I owe a lot of that to him.

The group is... interesting, and highlights what people mean by the "Culture of D&D."  For most of the PCs, I have a hard time picturing them as anything other than tokens on a board.  William, playing a half-orc fighter with a specialty in high mobility and pole-arm combat that works surprisingly well with my slow-but-sure tank-tactics.  He plays his character as a little dopey, simple, and straightforward, and I find myself warming to William far more than I expected.  Raoul plays as a human cleric, and though he complains that he doesn't roleplay enough, I can see the ground glowing beneath his feet or the marks of his Astral Seal or the light of his beacon of hope, and I get a sense for his understated wisdom and his leadership qualities.  Rene plays as a  Tiefling Warlock, but I haven't played with him enough to get an idea of what he's like (he just seems to teleport a lot and skulk in a cloak).  Sonder plays as a halfling vampire (who was apparantly a noble) who tends to run into people a lot (his favorite move is weirdly titled "Vampire Slam.").  Finally, Pim plays as a dwarven invoker who... uh... gives me really great bonuses.  That's all I can tell about his character, and that seems to be what Pim wants: to be useful on a mechanical level.  If you pin him down on social traits, he just gets nervous and stares at you, god bless him.

So I don't get much of a sense of who these fellow characters are, outside of Raoul and William (and even there, not much when compared to, say, Cherry Blossom Rain or Jimmy's 7th Sea game), but I can live with that.  What they are is a surprisingly fun and very helpful bunch who combine well with Xavier's understated "show, don't tell" style of storytelling, and they appreciate it too.

I think I could learn a lot from Xavier's approach.  In some ways, it couldn't be more different from how I run games, but in some ways, I can see that we both walk a similar path of "fun first," and "show, don't tell."  He's just managed to do it without being nearly as wordy as I am.  That's what I call "elegant."

GURPS Ultra-Tech: Square Root of Destruction

Pyramid #34: Alternate GURPS includes a fantastic article on converting GURPS Spaceships into a sort of GURPS Vehicles replacement.  Additionally, he added a new set of charts for converting Spaceship's energy weapons from the "cube root based" numbers of standard GURPS with "square root based" numbers, thus increasing the damage of high powered weapons and more closely matching the progression of projectile weapons.

I thought it would be nice to do the same with GURPS Ultra-Tech, but I quickly ran into the problem.  Exactly where are the cube roots in GURPS, so we can extract them and replace them with square-root based damage numbers?  It doesn't seem to be the value of the energy in joules, nor can you derive it directly from the damage itself because the numbers in the Pyramid article do a funny thing: Below a certain threshold, they actually get smaller than the cube-root numbers, which suggests we're looking at the fractions of some value (the cube root of a fraction is larger than the square root of a fraction).  After some experimenting, I found that the mass of the weapon seemed to be most important factor: (60 weapon mass in tons)^(1/3) = dDam 1 in dice (to derive dDam2, double the equivalent value of dDam1).  For example, a 10MJ weapons system is a single system on a +5 ship (making it about 1.5 tons), we'd expect a standard dDam1 value of 4 dice (8 dice with dDam2), and that's just what we see.  If we replace the cube root function with a square root function, we expect to have a dDam1 value of 9.5, and we see we have 9d+2 (and 20 dice with dDam2).  If you go below 100 KJ (that is, below 0.015 tons), you'd expect to find your square-lasers become weaker than your cube lasers, and they do just that.

The numbers aren't perfect, but if you account for rounding, they do match up pretty nicely to the actual numbers in the table, nicely enough for our purposes.

However, we already have both charts.  We don't need the math behind it for spaceships.  No, we need to know the math for the beam weapons in Ultratech, so we can make our Laser Rifles more competitive with Storm Carbines, right?  However, these weapons are more complex.  We have a difference between the mass of the weapon (the stock, the barrel, the grip) and the power cell (the only source of energy), the number of shots that the weapon can fire, the RoF and so on.  So I pulled open the book, a spreadsheet and my trusty calculator and started to see if I could find a relationship between any of these and the damage value.

To my surprise, the only thing that seemed to matter across the board was the weight of the weapon (not, as I expected, the cell. I mean, you'd think the stock has nothing to do with how much damage a laser rifle can kick out, but apparently the stats in Ultra Tech assume a minimum amount of gun necessary to fire the shot), the TL of the weapon, and the nature of the beam being fired.  It seems to work thus:

Take the cube root of the weight of the weapon in pounds, and multiply this by a value based on the TL and the type of beam fired (We'll call this the "Beam Factor").

The Laser Beam Factor:
-TL 9 Lasers: 1.5
-TL10+ Lasers (of any kind): 3

The Blaster Beam Factor: 3

The Pulsar Beam Factor: 6

the Plasma Beam Factor:
-TL 10 Plasma: 5
-TL 11 Plasma/Fusion: 7

The Graviton Beam Factor: 1.5

The Force Beam Factor: 4

The Disintegrator Factor: 60

The Ghost Particle Factor: 6

This will derive the value of every ultra-tech beam weapon (accounting for some rounding) for every weapon but the following:
-Several Rainbow Weapons (the Rainbow Dinosaur Laser seems to be in error, but the Rainbow Strike Laser won't work with this formula)
-The Graser Rifle (probably an error and meant to be 6)
-Most "Particle" Cannons, including the Blaster Cannon, the Pulsar Cannon, the Plasma Cannon and the Fusion Cannon
-Force Cannons

-The small-scale disintegrators, which have no logic that I can fathom (perhaps they're made up numbers to suit genre, rather than based on any consistent formula).

I think it's highly likely that at least some of the numbers that don't fit are either erroneous or arbitrarily changed to match some sci-fi trope, but I expect the majority of my mismatches are the result of me not actually having the numbers right in front of me.  There's probably some subtle factor that I'm missing, one that doesn't show up at low levels but becomes more important with larger weapons, especially with particle/anti-particle/plasma cannons, explaining the discrepancies.  Also, there's some judicious rounding going on, and some numbers fit better than others, which also suggests to me that I'm missing some factors... but the above seems to work 90% of the time, which means that it's probably close enough for our purposes until GURPS Vehicles comes out.

So, if you want to bring the Square Root of Destruction into the hands of your players, you need only take the square root of the mass of a weapon, and then multiply it by the Beam Factor above to derive the new and improved damage.  Expect pistols to remain about where they are, rifles to see a small improvement, and semi-portables and heavy weapons to see a huge increase.

760

I know I haven't been around much.  I've felt strangely about my blog for the past while now.  I keep meaning to get back, to write some thoughts down, but like many things, it gets put off, alas.

Fortunately, I do have something to share with you today: 760 AD, our latest addition to History Lesson.

I chose 760 because it was exactly 1000 years before 1760, thus the eldest elders in my 1760 game would be from there, forming a nice frame on my game.  I also chose it out of perversion, because I knew nothing about it and I honestly expected to find little, thus testing my premise of "In history, there's always something interesting." It proved half-right.

The problem with 760 and, indeed, most of the dark ages is that you find yourself relying mostly on archaeology and legends, rather than a lot of hard fact.  Is Roland real?  When did he live?  How old was Charlemagne?  We know they did three field rotations around this period, more or less, but people aren't recording much.  What they do record is a chaotic mess of wars, tribes, treachery and collapse.  Honestly, it reminded me a great deal of modern day Africa: Lots of petty warlords, occasional moments of prosperity and happiness followed swiftly by anarchy, civil war, rape and pillaging and disease.  This is not a pleasant time to live.

So, in some ways, it proved hard to find any details, and when I did find details, I was blown away by how many nitty gritty details there were.  England, for example, lacks any terribly important countries or organizations, and while it's fun to talk about the different kingdoms of England, your mind begins to break as you realize you're only talking about the kingdoms of one racial group, and that those kingdoms often have multiple "kings" and sub-fragments no larger than city-states, and then reading about how they go through three kings in a decade.  Crazy.

I'm not complaining, though.  I liked it, and found it enlightening.  I'm a little less motivated to game in this era than I am in 1410... but only a little.  What I enjoyed the most about it is that it really opened my eyes to what the birth of Europe really looked like, and finally taught me a great deal about the Dark Ages.  And, naturally, I started giggling like mad when my random dart-board choice of 760 landed me right at the end of the Merovingian Dynasty and right before the rise of the Paladins, and the earliest date of Beowulf.  So, it seems, if people are at least recording history, it's true: Any period has interesting shit going down.

Anyway, you can check it out for yourself.

Historical Gaming

The inestimable Kenneth Hite has an interview wherein he discusses how to research for a historical game, and the benefits of such game.  I find he puts into words many of my own thoughts.  So if you're interested in historical gaming, or just history in general, you can listen to it here.

History Lesson: 1410

I've resolved to get somewhere with my Viennese Vampire game, so I picked up History Lesson again.  Rather than going back at a predictable 50 year pace, I just grabbed a year, in this case 1410, primarily because Europa Universalis begins in 1399, and I was curious about the context (but still wanted to keep it near that 50-year mark).

I'm always saying that the amazing, eye-opening thing about History Lesson is how completely it proves my belief that if you pick a time-period, awesome things are going on.  People are falling in love, crazy battles are going on, there's intrigue and betrayal and murder and a surprising amount of culture, and 1410 didn't fail to live up to my expectations!  The worst part is all the stuff I didn't have time to get into (this stuff takes too long as it is)!  Do you know how much crazy stuff is going on in Eastern Europe, around Sigismund's conquests, or the Queen of Bosnia, Elizabeth, and her daughter Mary (it's kinda before this time, but it's still awesome, with Louis, the Duke of Orleans marrying Mary via Proxy, and Sigismund, the Holy Roman Emperor, invading and forcing her to marry him instead and thus securing his domain), or a deeper discussion of the fall of the Monastic State of the Teutonic Knights and the Peace of Thorns, or anything regarding Byzantium!  For that matter, I don't touch on anything outside of Europe, and this is the era of Zhang He and Tamarlane!

*sigh*

You know, whenever I'm finished with one of these projects, I always want to run a game in that era.  Perhaps I should.  Do you suppose people would want to play any of the characters listed there?

But anyway, enough talking: Take a look for yourself.