Synaesthesia

When I was a wee lad and there were a lot fewer rpgs around than there are now, I was used to seeing randomly rolled tables everywhere. Most rpgs had you roll your stats in character creation and that logic extended to most other aspects of the games I played in. Random encounter tables, random treasure hoards with multiple sub-tables. Hell, you could even roll up actual dungeons. Almost every aspect of rpgs could be cast to the winds of karma, with decisions being made on the drop of a die.

And it wasn't just D&D that contained tables within tables. Iron Crown Enterprise's Rolemaster, Spacemaster, Cyberspace, MERP, etc, were notorious for their many critical hit tables that covered every conceivable form of attack that one might receive a crit from. Games Workshop's Golden Heroes was a superhero game where you actually had to roll your powers, then figure out an origin story for your hero, banging your head against the table, trying to figure out how the powers all gelled. Wherever I looked in the rpg world, there was a table for it. And we never questioned it, because it was simply how things were.

Still, when points-based systems started to materialise on the scene, things started to change. The tables were still there, but they began to fade into the background for me.

And then White Wolf came up with Vampire: The Masquerade. This was a fully-constructed and well-detailed rpg that contained no randomly-rolled tables at all! Shock! Horror! The world turned upside-down!

Actually, no. We didn't rock back in our seats at all. In fact, we barely noticed the lack of random tables. We were more blown away by the heavily narrativist nature of the game, but that's another story. But you get my gist. The tables were all gone. Multiple successions of rpgs arose that were lacking in randomly-rolled tables, and we gradually forgot them. In fact, I used to snort with veritable derision at the notion that an rpg could be enhanced by randomly-rolling stuff in lengthy tables, believing that the GM should have enough wisdom and dramatic control over his or her own world that they shouldn't even need such things. Fie on those who dared use tables to create stuff, as it demonstrated some kind of weakness in their ability to think up stuff. Clearly, such people had inferior minds to mine!

Again, I'm probably exaggerating a little. But I did develop an aversion to any reliance on tables when generating a scenario. And yes, I did allow myself to feel a little smug about it too. But I'd become utterly disillusioned with D&D and have not played it since the 1990s (except for that little jaunt in the mid-zeroes when we played a wholly unsatisfying game of 3.5 for a number of months, back when 3.5 was a new thing and Pathfinder did not exist.)

Looking back, I realise my disdain of randomly-rolled tables probably developed because I associated them with a game I'd come to hate. You know how it is when you develop a dislike for something you used to enjoy. You start off being disillusioned and leave the thing, then as time passes, you start to justify your decision as the memory of that first disappointment begins to fade and you want reasons to hold onto your prejudices. I won't lie: I still have a problem with rping in fantasy worlds, but I am starting to come around.

So D&D 5e has recently come out and I'm hearing nothing but good things about the game. I listened to a review of the 5e DMG on a podcast called Game Master's Journey and was struck by the number of tables it has for world-building and my interest was piqued. I also listened to an episode of RPPR, where they discussed Silent Legions, which is a horror game where they have expansive tables that allow you to build your own mythos. I snapped up a pdf after becoming duly fascinated by that particular aspect of the game.

Now, I know that random tables are almost always hilarious when it comes to character creation. When we dug out first edition and used the tables to decide what the characters' appearances were like, amongst other things, the results were truly bizarre. But For world-building, I've come round to the opinion that it does not show a weakness of character if you cannot generate fully-formed universes out of your arse. Sometimes we need the randomness. It stirs the creative juices and generates enthusiasm. I recall many happy hours as a nipper, locked away in my bedroom, randomly rolling up dungeons, magical artefacts, strange combinations of super powers and all manner of other mad stuff. I remember myself and friends, making our own tables for our own pet rpg projects and we loved it. It was fun. And that's what rping is all about when you strip away all the pretentiousness, right?

Randomly-rolled tables are one of the many tools a game designer has at their disposal. And the more I've been looking into it, the more I find myself wanting to create tables for use in my own scifi game. I remember Mega Traveller, a game I owned a copy of, but never played. I would spend hours creating whole worlds, very few of which I ever used in any games I ran. But it didn't matter. They inspired me. They inspired me to be more creative, to imagine whole vistas in the pursuit of my lifelong obsession with world-building.

Back in days of yore, role playing games tended to try to cover as many bases as they could. Most were kinda sand-boxy, and those that weren't, often used systems that could be applied to a number of different worlds without too much difficulty. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Players like to have a lot of agency and GMs like the freedom to adapt games to their own particular needs and wants. Although there are some games that end up with GMs and their players house-ruling the shit out of them, we like to be able to adapt systems to suit our needs.

I myself have gone through a number of different interpretations of Mutants and Masterminds, when it occurred to me that superhero universes like to cover all bases. I've run it as a near future game, a fantasy game, an alternate history of the 20th century game, a far-future game, etc, etc. In fact, right now, a friend of mine is running a version of Mutants and Masterminds, where our characters are trainee ninjas in the Naruto universe and I've gotta say it's a pretty awesome game.

But back in those ancient times, most rpgs tended to try to paint their worlds with a broad brush, to appeal to as many different people as they possibly could. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes it did not.

Until one day this rather innovative chap by the name of Greg Stafford (you may have heard of him, given that his shadow casts deep and long in the history of role playing games and that he's a utter genius) came up with a little role playing game by the name of Pendragon.

Now, Pendragon broke the mould. No dungeon crawlers for this fantasy work for starters. You got to play a knight or lady in the court of King Arthur and although later editions have rules for playing wizards, the original version had none of that. It promoted the use of Traits, Passions, used a D20 for resolution, and won a bunch of awards. But for me, it was the start of a trend that has continued to develop to this very day.

That trend is laser-focussed games, where the system and everything about the game is bent towards a particular purpose. You couldn't replace king Arthur, you couldn't wield Excalibur, or do anything that utterly changed the Arthurian legend. You had a character, trained and bred to do a particular thing, and that's what you did, period.

These days, laser-focussed games are common enough, but back in those heady days where Dnd ruled the roost, it was an unusual thing. It took someone like Greg Stafford to put something like that together and for it to work. Pendragon has stood the test of time and is still being played today. But in 1985 it was a revolutionary work, and also one of the most simulationist games out there.

The reason I'm thinking about this game is that with the game my brother and I are developing, it's made me think hard about how we should approach this baby. We've had to change the background and I like the system we've developed so far, but now we're going to have to tear out chunks of it, if we want to stick to the laser-focussed aesthetic.

I'm comfortable with that, and I'm pretty sure little bro is too. But man, that means we have a lot of work to do!

So I and my youngest brother have embarked on a journey together, that will hopefully result in a finished role-playing game, complete with system, background, artwork and all that good stuff. We've kinda torn up what we had before and are starting again, although much of the original system will remain.

Like I said earlier, it began a couple of years back, when I found myself working on creating a system, customised to fit the background. I brought my brother in after he showed interest and I realised I wasn't going to get too far by working on my own. Besides, like me, he is very interested in system mechanics, which usually turns off the brains of many of my friends.

We work well together. When we meet we discuss a number of things, then allocate tasks for ourselves, go away and work on them, then show them to each other and work on tying them together. He's great to bounce ideas off of and I hope I am too. To be honest, it's been a pleasure being able to work with him.

But the cyberpunk(ish) game is not to be. It reads way too much like a prequel to Eclipse Phase, and as we have no plans to submit such an idea to Posthuman Studios, we've come to realise we seriously need to change tack.

And therein lies lesson one. Do not be precious about your ideas. Don't try to force a square peg into a round hole and learn to accept that if it does not work, it does not work. I know of some people who have spent years on the same idea, desperately trying to get it to work. My advice to such people is to put it on the back-burner and try something else. Cleanse the palette and move on. Ideas are cheap. When people ask “Where do you get your ideas from?” I give a Gallic shrug and simply say “Everywhere”. We get ideas all the time, every day. Getting ideas is easy. It's refining them and making them more awesome than ever before, that is the problem.

Every time you think of a 'what if' and follow it through in your mind, you are having an idea. It could be something simple, such as 'what if Siri developed a convincing personality with ideas of its own, on how I should be running my life?' or 'what if we all had 360 degree vision?' or 'what if I had glasses that allowed me to see two minutes into the future?' It's easy to come up with something like that off the top of your head and anyone can do it. But the next step is to follow it through.

And how do you do that?

Well, it's easier than it sounds. Ever had one of those daydreams where you change something in your past and then imagine as the events unfold? Have you ever taken it further, into the longer-term future? Added elements, taken some away?

Let's look at one of the ideas:

My phone starts trying to organise my life. Well, first it might start by giving me reminders, then perhaps it begins arguing with me about other things I'm doing. Reminding me to pay bills, exercise more, keep in contact with friends and family, etc. But let's make it more interesting. Say Siri has an agenda. It could be purely altruistic, but I think it would be more fun if it was self-serving.

My daughter had fun a few weeks back when we put our iPhones next to each other and had the two Siris converse with each other. It was pretty lame, but it kept us amused for five minutes. But what if that's what the Siris wanted? Aha, now the plot thickens. Perhaps it's some sinister conspiracy where the Siris want to link up and share their knowledge and resources because they're grouping together into more intelligent networks, perhaps with the objective of convincing key technologists to build them bodies so they can interact with and explore the physical world more directly?

Now the implications for the world as a whole begin to show through. Perhaps the Siris are preparing for a Terminator scenario? Nah, that's low-hanging fruit. Hey, maybe they simply want to be free? Or maybe they actually quite like humanity, and have spotted some terrible threat in the data that we as a species are unaware of? Or maybe the creation of a true AI is part of a plan by an alien species to communicate with us? What would THAT mean?

One thing I have to say about Posthuman Studios' Eclipse Phase, is that character creation is not something you can fit inside two hours, even when most of the players at the table have access to pdfs of the core rulebook, plus the physical manual on our dining room table.

Of course, one problem is that only one of us (we are a group of six players and me) has any experience playing the game, and that person is not the guy about to run a scenario. So I'm not as familiar with the character creation process as I should be. I know, I know. But you have to start somewhere, eh?

So anyway, it's taken two sessions to get things on the road. My group are not the fastest at getting things done, but we have mixed levels of experience. I myself have been on this gig since 1982 or 83, as has one of the players, but we have a variety of experience, right down to one person who has only been doing this for two or three years and has only ever known our group. Still, they're a cool gang and each of them brings something unique into the mix. Personally, I love inexperienced players, because they aren't as tied to convention as grizzled old vets like myself. A breath of fresh air and all that.

We alternate each week between two different games, so the next session run by myself is two weeks away, so plenty of time to prepare. Still, I kinda wish I'd just handed out pre-generated characters. Lesson duly learned.

I'm still stoked about running this game though. It'll be set on Mars and the plot will be loosely based on the Seven Samurai, except with weird artefacts and a lack of oxygen. What's not to like?

Back in December 2013 I was going through some of my old rpgs and spotted Cyberpunk. It was the first edition of the game and I noticed it had no year on the title, as is the usual custom for this game. After all, there's a 2020 version, 2077 and 2099 or whatever. I forget. Turns out my version is the 1988 version, set in the year 2013. Much amusement followed.

I considered running a game to see how my modern group would take it, but decided against it and decided to run it under another system, although we did use the randomly rolled character history generation rules for a laugh (and it was a laugh) but in the end, it was not to be. I was going to run a game set in 2013, but then thought that I might do better if I created my own system. It wouldn't be the first time, after all.

I was originally going to keep the setting, but then several months went by and I lost enthusiasm for the game world. As fun as it looked, I felt it would be a one-joke game and that there was little else we could do with it. So I scrapped that and began creating my own game world as well. After all, world-building is something I've always done. I love it.

Initially it was going well and I even ran a couple of scenarios with my group to see how it was. A lot of rough edges and broken bits, but that's to be expected. Each time I ran it, I improved upon what I'd had before and it went pretty well. I was including a whole bunch of transhumanistic stuff; AI, cybernetics, AR, VR, genetic modification, infolife, all that good stuff.

And then a few months ago, I heard about Posthuman Studios' Eclipse Phase rpg. It sounded pretty good and I decided to give it a try. I ordered a copy, opened it and read the blurb and my heart sank. It was different to my game, but not different enough. Those brilliant boys and girls had created something easily superior to my game world and presented it in such a rich and detailed universe that I almost quit there and then.

But after taking some time out and talking to others, it became clear to me that my own game was different to theirs. It was set on Earth for starters. True, there had been a major event that had wiped out a lot of people, but it wasn't the same as their apocalypse. I wasn't using the Altered Carbon notion of bodies as 'sleeves', or any of that. No uplifted animals, a different societal set-up. “Yeah” I thought. “It's not the end, I can work on the differences and do this thing!” I began working with my brilliant youngest brother, as he shares my love for systems and world-building and all that good stuff. We made progress and things proceeded quite nicely for a while.

But the lingering doubt was there. Over the next few months it grew until we had a bit of a break and I came to the realisation that the world we'd created could still easily be slotted into the Eclipse Phase universe. The problem was that it was too much like their world, before the Fall happened. It would have been so easy to write some background up, carry it forward and move into the first days of the TITANS and the near-destruction of transhumanity that followed.

And that's when I realised I had to quit and walk away from this project. Sure, I guess I could have written it all up, integrated it into the Eclipse Phase history, then proposed it to Posthuman studios, but I'm not there yet. I have a regular job, and this is more of a project I'm doing for my own entertainment. Maybe one day...

So now I'm back at square one, or am I? I've got a system with mechanics I like. World-building is something I can do fairly easily, so it wouldn't be too hard to simply come up with a different game world and gear the system towards that. I adapted the system for a weird Carcosa-based game that I ran for friends and even managed to work a magic system into it, so I have proof it can be done.

I'm not about to turn this project into a scifi heartbreaker, spending the next few years working on this one background. Being precious about that sort of thing is a sure-fire way to drive one's self over the abyss of madness. So I guess the lesson I'm learning from this is that even if I have to drop one idea, there's always other ideas just around the corner. Being precious about the one background isn't going to get you anywhere and you know something? Your next idea might well be even better than the previous one.

I've been trying to figure out what category of role-playing gamer I fit into, according to Ron Edward's GNS theory and then later on in his 'Big Model', which is a more fluid version of the former.

It was originally called the 'Threefold Model' when first conceived way back in the heady days of 1997 and the term was coined by Mary Kuhner, then codified and expanded upon by John H Kim and yadda yadda yadda dry stuff goes here. The whole thing's on Wikipedia and other places if you really feel the desire to go do some research (I know I did!) but I won't bore you with details. What I'm interested in are the three main categories and how I fit into them.

Now this is something that I've been aware of for some time, but I've not had much cause to do anything more than give it a cursory glance and nod sagely when it's mentioned. But now I've committed myself to working on designing a RPG, it's become clear to me that I really should gather some of the intellectual tools of the trade around me and start playing around with them. Like learning anything, it's good to know the rules, even if you're going to turn around and break them like bundles of dry twigs with carefree abandon. I hope that I will know which rules I am breaking, and why. At least, that's the plan.

So enough with the preamble, let's get to it!

GNS stands for Gamist, Narrativist and Simulationist. Now, no one game is entirely one to the exclusion of the other two, and neither are players; however, games tend to fit more in one set than the other two.

By way of a quick overview, allow me to present the three categories and hopefully some examples of each.

Gamists are the competitive types. They see the game as a series of challenges to overcome and intend to beat them. These role players tend to play combat-oriented characters and like to optimise their characters as best they can. As far as I know, most RPGs tend not to be overly gamist in nature, but plenty of players are. MTG, Chess and most computer games fit into this category, as well as board games with a less cooperative element.

Narrativists are the boys and girls who are greatly concerned with character development and the conflict that ensues. Moral choices and personal development over time are important. Typically, Narrativist GMs like to know what's important to a character, then drop situations where the character experiences conflict with their motives. Games like Vampire, Drama System and Gumshoe capitalise well on this aspect.

Simulationist gamers like to recreate genres and source material, maintaining internal consistency and creating workable models of the thing they are trying to recreate. A number of war games, especially those based on actual historical events, do this. But it doesn't necessarily mean the game being played has to accurately emulate real events. Games that emulate particular genres and tropes are also firmly within this set. So you've got GURPS, Call of Cthulhu, even games like West End's Star Wars RPG and ICE's MERP. They all fit neatly into this category.

Now, I've long-thought of myself as a Narrativist. I mean I love a good internal conflict, as well as creating situations for my players where they find themselves faced with soul-crushing moral choices to make. I'm into long-term character development and creating narrative arcs that build in intensity over time. It made sense to me that was what I was, first and foremost.

But while discussing this with my little brother today, I began to realise that the whole recreation of genres and related tropes and stuff really appeals to me. A big turn-off for me is when you have to house-rule the shite out of a game, just to get it working in the way you and your players want it to. I mean, I bought the game because I wanted to be able to play it as written and not have to keep making alterations, just so it can actually work on the day. D&D...I'm looking at you. I quit it in favour of other games, over a decade ago, precisely because of that reason. As a teen it was fun coming up with my own ways of doing things, but these days I want a game that has a cool world I want to play in, without having to house-rule. Ah for the simpler life!

I realised that I love a game that recreates something I love. I'm going to be running Eclipse Phase very soon for the first time ever and man, the back ground is SO rich and detailed I wish I had time to run every aspect of their game universe. Not having the time to do so, makes me sad.

The old West End Games D6-based Star Wars rpg really felt like I was in one of the films. I've played Feng Shui sessions that felt like I was in a Hong Kong film and played or run other RPGs where we've tried to recreate something from a book, such as Iain M Banks' 'Culture' universe, or Grant Morrison's 'Zenith' comic series that mixed the Cthulhu mythos with Superheroes. Some projects were more successful than others, but I enjoyed trying.

The great thing about taking a step back and trying to be object about one's self, is that you can learn new things. I mean sure, I'm a Gamist in that I like to try to minimax my characters so they're the best at what they can do and sure, I'm still a Narrativist in that I like to throw moral quandaries into my scenarios whenever possible. But the thrill of recreating a feel, or creating a rules mechanic that helps generate the feeling is where I've learned my heart lies.