I figure I should post an introduction. My name is Jesse and I'm a professional video game developer living in Long Beach, CA. Despite it being my career I don't actually play a lot of video games (though go play Pentiment or Disco Elysium, they're amazing).
What I do play is a lot of is tabletop role-playing games. I also make them and write about them. My stuff tends to have Gothic and psychological horror themes. I publish them under my personal imprint: Bloodthorn Press.
If you're interested in my work, you can find it here: Bloodthorn Press @ itch.io
I also have a podcast where I interview people with whom I play rpgs: The People I Play With
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Since RPG Trader just opened for business I'm going to take a minute to talk about some of my stuff that doesn't get as much attention as my play treatises.
Haunted dates back to about 2011 when Ron Edwards was still doing "The Ronnies" on The Forge. "The Ronnies" were a game jam like event judged solely by Ron using 2 out of 4 terms he selected for each event. I don't remember all four terms but mine were "whisper" and "murder". Haunted ultimately came in as a "Runner Up" and only didn't place because I over engineered who the police were most suspicious of. I've since removed that element from the game such that including police is entirely optional and even if included they function like any other supporting character.
Fundamentally, the game is a ghost story. It's about a murderer being stalked by the ghost of their victim. One player always plays the murderer and another player always plays the ghost. Everyone else plays any of the other characters whenever it's appropriate. Only the murderer can see and hear the ghost and the ghost can't really interact with anything except through indirect supernatural means. It's a fun dynamic.
It's a GMless game but I've carefully constructed a set of "right of way" rules regarding decision making so nothing ever breaks down into story conferencing. I actually really hate purely collaborative/consensus based rules and have been careful to avoid them here.
Another features that may likely jump out to gearheads upon reading is that the math behind the mechanics is intentionally "broken". If every player simply maximizes their odds of success at every instance of play the dice will rapidly become a death spiral against the murderer and they will be crushed under an avalanche of opposition. This is because I want selfish players to end their games quickly and hopefully never play it again because it's "broken". I'm tired of designing around "the worst player at the table."
The path around the "broken" mechanics is empathy. Treating the characters as real people, with real concerns, and most importantly, capable of change and growth will avoid invoking the death spiral, at least immediately. You see, the murderer still is at a horrible mechanical disadvantage out of the gate and about 90% of games play out like a supernatural episode of Columbo. Even when not directly dog piling the murderer, pressure tends to circle in until the murderer breaks and goes mad, goes to jail, or commits suicide. And that's.... fine. That's one way the game can go and it's fine that it's also the most common.
But it doesn't have to be that way. The game has a kind of restorative justice path mechanically built into the rules. What's really fascinating to me, is how people don't seem to really know how to engage them. They're right there. They're not hard to understand. But they do require treating the characters as real people, with real concerns, and most importantly capable of change and growth.
Haunted has taught me that role-players are WONDERFUL at portraying one note characters and DRAMATIC CONFLICTS! But they seem real bad at reflection and change without some kind of cue card telling them to do so. So, if you want to develop the art of subtle character development without hand rails just keep playing games of Haunted until they stop playing out like supernatural episodes of Columbo.
But in the mean time, supernatural episodes of Columbo are kind of fun.
One thing to note is that Haunted is not really good for single session games. These days I prefer to play it over about 3-5 sessions. Take your time, do some reflecting between sessions. Give the game some room to breathe. It's lovely at a leisurely pace.
So, let's talk about "The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven's Hollow". This game started with me thinking about an RPG that played out like Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Which is to say, each player would effectively get a single turn in which they played out a single panel vignette about their character.
It rapidly evolved to be a bit more than that. You see, it plays like a card game. Each round of play is a bit like this Lenore comic, "Leap Frog" creating a vignette that frequently results in the demise of either one of the PC children or NPC adults. The whole game is just one long Series of Unfortunate Events, if you catch my meaning.
The goal of the game is to be the last child standing but like all my games that's a bit of misdirection as it's almost impossible to achieve that with any kind of intention or purpose. In fact, the fastest way to lose is by trying to win or rather to win too directly.
You see, "The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven's Hollow", like all my games, is a meditation on crime and punishment. While the children are the subject of the story, they aren't the narrative's true protagonists. That would be The Ravens.
You see once a child player is "eliminated" they take on a new role: A Raven. The children can only be vicious to each other or the adults. There are, after all, extraordinarily horrible children. Ravens, on the other hand, have vast sweeping abilities to shape the flow of the narrative and the outcome of the game. That's why you can't intentionally win a game of Raven's Hollow. No single child has the power to decide that. The collective actions of the Ravens decide that.
Most people know the collective noun for crows is "murder", less know that the collective noun for ravens is "unkindness" or "conspiracy." And that's what The Ravens in this game are: an unkind conspiracy passing judgement on the horrible children.
The way to win a Raven's Hollow game is to get The Ravens on your side. You know, the characters played by the people you just spent the rest of the game trying to eliminate. That's why playing too viciously will just cost you the game faster.
By the way, it's not enough to JUST be the last child standing. You also have face the mob of angry adults who have slowly been catching on that something isn't right with the children of Raven's Hollow. It's a very delicate balance of:
Murdering your fellow children.
Murdering the adults.
Not earning the ire of The Ravens while doing the above.
Only players who can do all three win games of Raven's Hollow. Who can be the most Deniably Horrible Child of Raven's Hollow? The rest get sent to the orphanage.
I swear to God, so much RPG discourse is, âWe should write complex formal procedures for basic human interactions that everyone seems to manage just fine in every other social activity on Earth except this one for some reason.â
Okay, there has been enough confusion about this, I feel the need to clarify.
I'm not talking about in-game character-to-character social resolution procedures. A lot of those are fine. I actually like those in some cases.
I'm talking about stuff that formally manages how the real-world players interact to make sure everyone gets along and plays nice. Real kindergarten stuff.
Since RPG Trader just opened for business I'm going to take a minute to talk about some of my stuff that doesn't get as much attention as my play treatises.
Haunted dates back to about 2011 when Ron Edwards was still doing "The Ronnies" on The Forge. "The Ronnies" were a game jam like event judged solely by Ron using 2 out of 4 terms he selected for each event. I don't remember all four terms but mine were "whisper" and "murder". Haunted ultimately came in as a "Runner Up" and only didn't place because I over engineered who the police were most suspicious of. I've since removed that element from the game such that including police is entirely optional and even if included they function like any other supporting character.
Fundamentally, the game is a ghost story. It's about a murderer being stalked by the ghost of their victim. One player always plays the murderer and another player always plays the ghost. Everyone else plays any of the other characters whenever it's appropriate. Only the murderer can see and hear the ghost and the ghost can't really interact with anything except through indirect supernatural means. It's a fun dynamic.
It's a GMless game but I've carefully constructed a set of "right of way" rules regarding decision making so nothing ever breaks down into story conferencing. I actually really hate purely collaborative/consensus based rules and have been careful to avoid them here.
Another features that may likely jump out to gearheads upon reading is that the math behind the mechanics is intentionally "broken". If every player simply maximizes their odds of success at every instance of play the dice will rapidly become a death spiral against the murderer and they will be crushed under an avalanche of opposition. This is because I want selfish players to end their games quickly and hopefully never play it again because it's "broken". I'm tired of designing around "the worst player at the table."
The path around the "broken" mechanics is empathy. Treating the characters as real people, with real concerns, and most importantly, capable of change and growth will avoid invoking the death spiral, at least immediately. You see, the murderer still is at a horrible mechanical disadvantage out of the gate and about 90% of games play out like a supernatural episode of Columbo. Even when not directly dog piling the murderer, pressure tends to circle in until the murderer breaks and goes mad, goes to jail, or commits suicide. And that's.... fine. That's one way the game can go and it's fine that it's also the most common.
But it doesn't have to be that way. The game has a kind of restorative justice path mechanically built into the rules. What's really fascinating to me, is how people don't seem to really know how to engage them. They're right there. They're not hard to understand. But they do require treating the characters as real people, with real concerns, and most importantly capable of change and growth.
Haunted has taught me that role-players are WONDERFUL at portraying one note characters and DRAMATIC CONFLICTS! But they seem real bad at reflection and change without some kind of cue card telling them to do so. So, if you want to develop the art of subtle character development without hand rails just keep playing games of Haunted until they stop playing out like supernatural episodes of Columbo.
But in the mean time, supernatural episodes of Columbo are kind of fun.
One thing to note is that Haunted is not really good for single session games. These days I prefer to play it over about 3-5 sessions. Take your time, do some reflecting between sessions. Give the game some room to breathe. It's lovely at a leisurely pace.
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From an RPG perspective, I've been struggling for years to explain that "playing a character in a myth" and "treating a mythic world as if it were real" are two fundamentally different things. A part of this frustration is that I want a whole lot more of the former and a whole lot less of the later.
So, I'm sure scholars probably have a more technical definition of "myth" than I'm using. I'm primarily talking about when elements of a story are meant to be received and processed emotionally rather than logically.
For example, we might have a character that wears jade armor and sits on a throne of ruby. Now if your mind starts thinking things like what the implications are for the culture and economy of a society that uses jade for armor and ruby for furniture design then you're thinking in the wrong direction. Same if you start thinking about the actual real world properties of jade and ruby and what you could possibly make with such a large and plentiful supply of it.
No. Just. Stop. Don't do that.
Instead, be *emotional*. What *feelings* does such an image/character invoke you. Disgust at their opulence? Awe at their power? Respect for their commanding presence? Fear? Now have your character react *to that feeling*. What emotion do YOU want your character to reflect back.
In an RPG, your character TOO is a pile of evocative aesthetics in both image and action. Do a thing that will evoke a feeling IN ME as a fellow player at the table. You can't control WHAT feeling I have, but you can do something evocative, "logic" of the situation be damned.
i kinda see what you are getting at, hopefully. i think it's really mostly about being impressionistic, isn't it? my mind immediately drifts to pulp fantasy, to which such "loose" imagery seems to be very important. i personally don't get much from it mostly because i'm not that great at visualizing. i could never really get into howard because of it, for example. would you say this generally applies outside of fantasy roleplaying, though?
Pulp fantasy (and actual mythology) is where you see it at its boldest. But I'm not talking *purely* about visuals it can apply to "entities" whose only "logic" is their symbolic/metaphorical place in the narrative.
You see this a lot in standalone horror novels that don't get caught up in their own "lore." My absolute favorite example of this is "The Library Policeman" by Stephen King. The creature in that book and how it "works" is wholly defined by the scope of the protagonist's personal trauma. It does not "exist" nor has "logic" independent of the protagonist's emotional journey. Sure, it all makes "sense" in that story but trying to tease out the creature as an independent entity with a consequential "existence" simply falls apart.
I would also point to something like Frank Miller's Sin City stories. The characters are BOLD archetypes with no substance behind their evocative presence. Senator Rourk is a complete tautology. He is a Senator because he's rich and powerful and is rich and powerful because he is a Senator. Things happen because Rourk wants them to happen. By what means? What's the power structure propping him up? Who are his allies? Who are enemies? What is the network composing his wealth? These things are not only unanswered, I would suggest they are UNASKED. It simply doesn't matter. Rourk might as well be Zeus.
It is that element of UNASKING, I am focusing on.
This is one of the reasons film franchises begin to lose their luster because later films are often built by asking questions the earlier films not only didn't ask, but were never designed to answer. "Fandom" may be clamoring all the time for "answers" but they're always disappointed when they get them and for good reason. The questions never should have been asked in the first place.
I'm usually a huge fan of fantasy/sci-fi logistics, groundedness, biology, etc., but this is also how you get people constantly trying to "solve" vampires by saying "well they drink blood so that means they are scientifically hematophages and there is no problem with them drinking blood of any animal because other hematophages can drink the blood of any animal" and "if it's transmissible by bite that means it's a virus or bacteria that causes a mutation."
No, this was never a legend meant to operate on a 21st century biology, the blood is blood but it's also life, and so on.
Sometimes the answer isn't "it's magic" because the author hasn't thought about it, sometimes the answer is "it's magic" because the author has thought about it.
Exactly. You can pick and choose. In fact, supernatural things become MORE scary when they operate spiritually when everything else operates realistically.
Yup, the world works exactly the way we believe it to, oh except this *thing*. This thing is unbounded by reality. It has uncomfortable existential implications or reaches into questions that have no answers. That's scary.
I swear to God, so much RPG discourse is, âWe should write complex formal procedures for basic human interactions that everyone seems to manage just fine in every other social activity on Earth except this one for some reason.â
My super bitter, uncharitable answer to most of this discourse that I can barely hold myself back from screaming is, "Don't play with illiterate sociopaths."
As GM when I have dealt with problem players who when interacting with a reasonable NPC who acts like a regular person does have the issue of
"this social encounter isn't fair, I want how this works formalized so I can follow a checklist or reduced to a single roll that ignores actual input into the encounter!!!"
the root cause has frequently been that the player comes to TTRPG's for a power fantasy, but their own social ineptitude means they do not understand why physical power doesn't 1:1 translate to social power and are frustrated that a person isn't willing to be immediately agreeable to them based "I swing a sword real good".
(And no matter how well you roll a social skill dice it should not translate to your intense cruelty towards an NPC magically making them like you and want to happily do favors for you otherwise why rp at all)
I'm not talking about social mechanics between characters in the game. I quite like some of those.
I'm talking about formalizing procedures to make sure the real-world players behave themselves and interact nicely with one another.
I swear to God, so much RPG discourse is, âWe should write complex formal procedures for basic human interactions that everyone seems to manage just fine in every other social activity on Earth except this one for some reason.â
My super bitter, uncharitable answer to most of this discourse that I can barely hold myself back from screaming is, "Don't play with illiterate sociopaths."
From an RPG perspective, I've been struggling for years to explain that "playing a character in a myth" and "treating a mythic world as if it were real" are two fundamentally different things. A part of this frustration is that I want a whole lot more of the former and a whole lot less of the later.
So, I'm sure scholars probably have a more technical definition of "myth" than I'm using. I'm primarily talking about when elements of a story are meant to be received and processed emotionally rather than logically.
For example, we might have a character that wears jade armor and sits on a throne of ruby. Now if your mind starts thinking things like what the implications are for the culture and economy of a society that uses jade for armor and ruby for furniture design then you're thinking in the wrong direction. Same if you start thinking about the actual real world properties of jade and ruby and what you could possibly make with such a large and plentiful supply of it.
No. Just. Stop. Don't do that.
Instead, be *emotional*. What *feelings* does such an image/character invoke you. Disgust at their opulence? Awe at their power? Respect for their commanding presence? Fear? Now have your character react *to that feeling*. What emotion do YOU want your character to reflect back.
In an RPG, your character TOO is a pile of evocative aesthetics in both image and action. Do a thing that will evoke a feeling IN ME as a fellow player at the table. You can't control WHAT feeling I have, but you can do something evocative, "logic" of the situation be damned.
i kinda see what you are getting at, hopefully. i think it's really mostly about being impressionistic, isn't it? my mind immediately drifts to pulp fantasy, to which such "loose" imagery seems to be very important. i personally don't get much from it mostly because i'm not that great at visualizing. i could never really get into howard because of it, for example. would you say this generally applies outside of fantasy roleplaying, though?
Pulp fantasy (and actual mythology) is where you see it at its boldest. But I'm not talking *purely* about visuals it can apply to "entities" whose only "logic" is their symbolic/metaphorical place in the narrative.
You see this a lot in standalone horror novels that don't get caught up in their own "lore." My absolute favorite example of this is "The Library Policeman" by Stephen King. The creature in that book and how it "works" is wholly defined by the scope of the protagonist's personal trauma. It does not "exist" nor has "logic" independent of the protagonist's emotional journey. Sure, it all makes "sense" in that story but trying to tease out the creature as an independent entity with a consequential "existence" simply falls apart.
I would also point to something like Frank Miller's Sin City stories. The characters are BOLD archetypes with no substance behind their evocative presence. Senator Rourk is a complete tautology. He is a Senator because he's rich and powerful and is rich and powerful because he is a Senator. Things happen because Rourk wants them to happen. By what means? What's the power structure propping him up? Who are his allies? Who are enemies? What is the network composing his wealth? These things are not only unanswered, I would suggest they are UNASKED. It simply doesn't matter. Rourk might as well be Zeus.
It is that element of UNASKING, I am focusing on.
This is one of the reasons film franchises begin to lose their luster because later films are often built by asking questions the earlier films not only didn't ask, but were never designed to answer. "Fandom" may be clamoring all the time for "answers" but they're always disappointed when they get them and for good reason. The questions never should have been asked in the first place.
Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as âproblematicâ in class and our professor was like, âThatâs cool, but âproblematicâ doesnât really mean anything. It means that the thing youâre describing has a problem, and in and of itself thatâs not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else itâs not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like youâre trying to say that this is bad, but you donât want to say âbad.â Is that right?â
So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the âbadâ thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, âIâm uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.â
Once we stopped calling things âproblematicâ and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, âthatâs racistâ or âthatâs misogynisticâ or âew capitalism grossâ out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, âUhhh... Iâm not sure whatâs so bad?â and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.
Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I canât help but think of this professor being like, âGood starting point, now letâs get specific.â I think when we have to commit to saying âthatâs ___â it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever weâre claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes itâs art, and it should be full of problems, because thatâs what art is.
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From an RPG perspective, I've been struggling for years to explain that "playing a character in a myth" and "treating a mythic world as if it were real" are two fundamentally different things. A part of this frustration is that I want a whole lot more of the former and a whole lot less of the later.
So, I'm sure scholars probably have a more technical definition of "myth" than I'm using. I'm primarily talking about when elements of a story are meant to be received and processed emotionally rather than logically.
For example, we might have a character that wears jade armor and sits on a throne of ruby. Now if your mind starts thinking things like what the implications are for the culture and economy of a society that uses jade for armor and ruby for furniture design then you're thinking in the wrong direction. Same if you start thinking about the actual real world properties of jade and ruby and what you could possibly make with such a large and plentiful supply of it.
No. Just. Stop. Don't do that.
Instead, be *emotional*. What *feelings* does such an image/character invoke you. Disgust at their opulence? Awe at their power? Respect for their commanding presence? Fear? Now have your character react *to that feeling*. What emotion do YOU want your character to reflect back.
In an RPG, your character TOO is a pile of evocative aesthetics in both image and action. Do a thing that will evoke a feeling IN ME as a fellow player at the table. You can't control WHAT feeling I have, but you can do something evocative, "logic" of the situation be damned.
This feels like a false dichotomy, and ignores the fact that the feelings inspired are in part dictated and/or strengthened by the "logical" implications underpinning the imagery.
A character who is sitting upon a throne of precious jewels wearing armor made out of decorative stone is a striking image precisely because those things are understood to be highly valuable. But we didn't simply decide they were valuable out of nowhere. Those impressions come in part from the physical properties of the actual materials, which have dictated their history and shaped their perception.
Should you be disgusted at this character's opulence and wastefulness, that feeling is almost certainly coming from a subconscious understanding of how these materials normally work.
Seeing armor made out of a mostly cosmetic material (we are ignoring the multiple types of Jade here) only suggests opulence because it is a material which normally does not function effectively as armor.
Seeing a chair made not of the typical wood or steel, but instead ruby suggests power because such a chair would typically require the sitter to have access to either great wealth, political capital, or some other measure of power which allowed them to obtain the presumably expensive and large quantity of ruby required to make the chair in the first place.
I feel like for this to be true, you need to treat imagery as though it exists in a vacuum. Which doesn't quite sit right with me.
I'm not suggesting that feelings occur in a vacuum. Of course, whatever reaction you have is informed by your understanding of the world. What I'm saying is that you don't have to interrogate, articulate, leverage or otherwise "dig into" the underlying reasons. You can just react from the gut.
Nor does your reaction have to be constrained or informed by the "implied reality" of whatever it is you are reacting to. If you're reading beyond the feelings invoked by surface aesthetics of the situation (and the basic shared understanding of the world like, like gravity) into "Well, given X, I should do Y or I probably can't do Z"
You can react to "rich guy" without digging into "Well, given such a large mineral rich environment, he'd probably have need for a labor force capable of.... blah blah blah..... implying that there's probably a strong presence of..... blah blah blah.... so he's probably got a deficit of...."
From an RPG perspective, I've been struggling for years to explain that "playing a character in a myth" and "treating a mythic world as if it were real" are two fundamentally different things. A part of this frustration is that I want a whole lot more of the former and a whole lot less of the later.
So, I'm sure scholars probably have a more technical definition of "myth" than I'm using. I'm primarily talking about when elements of a story are meant to be received and processed emotionally rather than logically.
For example, we might have a character that wears jade armor and sits on a throne of ruby. Now if your mind starts thinking things like what the implications are for the culture and economy of a society that uses jade for armor and ruby for furniture design then you're thinking in the wrong direction. Same if you start thinking about the actual real world properties of jade and ruby and what you could possibly make with such a large and plentiful supply of it.
No. Just. Stop. Don't do that.
Instead, be *emotional*. What *feelings* does such an image/character invoke you. Disgust at their opulence? Awe at their power? Respect for their commanding presence? Fear? Now have your character react *to that feeling*. What emotion do YOU want your character to reflect back.
In an RPG, your character TOO is a pile of evocative aesthetics in both image and action. Do a thing that will evoke a feeling IN ME as a fellow player at the table. You can't control WHAT feeling I have, but you can do something evocative, "logic" of the situation be damned.
From an RPG perspective, I've been struggling for years to explain that "playing a character in a myth" and "treating a mythic world as if it were real" are two fundamentally different things. A part of this frustration is that I want a whole lot more of the former and a whole lot less of the later.
Tea and I talk about Ex Tenebris a derivative of Brindlewood Bay. A chunk of what we talk about is what the GM does and doesnât have to work with when thereâs no fixed solution to a mystery.
I was talking about this with a friend but a really interesting cultural shift over the last ohhhhhh ten years maybe is that many people in fandoms view themselves as stakeholders and not audience members. Because of that, they think that the fandom should be running things, or at least have an acknowledged say in how something is run. And every reminder that they are not in control, no matter how small, bothers them.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Tea and I talk about Ex Tenebris a derivative of Brindlewood Bay. A chunk of what we talk about is what the GM does and doesnât have to work with when thereâs no fixed solution to a mystery.
My hottest commerce take is that we need a crowdfunding site that does not allow you to offer the project itself as a "reward". That makes it clear that you are funding a project, not pre-ordering a product.
If a crowd funded project is not allowed to fail without threats of legal action then it was never about funding the project. It's just a store.
We need a real crowdfunding site divorced from the assumption of purchase.
