#game reflections

Link: https://johnharper.itch.io/lasers-feelings

Right, I’m not explaining Lasers & Feelings. I’m sure everyone knows it - one page sci-fi TTRPG. Really I just want to share a little story about it. Yesterday was Father’s Day in the UK, and we spent the day at the in-laws. My spouse suggested I run them through a one-shot TTRPG, since they have never played one and hear us talk about them. So we spent just a little over an hour playing Lasers & Feelings with my spouse, their mum and dad, and their aunt.

A couple of observations:

1. Going through character creation, my spouse went first, so we could demonstrate how it worked. My mother-in-law digested the process easily, and when we moved onto my father-in-law for the second character, she was explaining what he needed to do straight away, with perfect accuracy.

2. My father-in-law had no idea what was going on, and hadn’t really wanted to play as he doesn’t like games. But he created his character as a dangerous explorer, and when I asked for a name he didn’t miss a fucking beat, and just yelled out “JOCK ANDREWS!” It was immediate, literally about half a second. There couldn’t have been any conscious cognition, it just emerged fully formed. Jock had a Scottish accent for some reason. I love everything about it. [Edit: Someone kindly pointed out that Jock can be used as a derogatory term, which isn't great. This guy absolutely loves Scotland so it wouldn't have been intentional but still... maybe I don't love everything about it.]

(Side note, he doesn’t like games because his brothers used to bully him whenever they played games as kids. When we referred to this as trauma once, he said “no it’s not trauma, it’s just that when I think about playing games all those memories come flooding back.” It’s possibly my favourite thing anyone has ever said.)

3. No surprise, but the system is fantastic for this kind of scenario. They pick one number to represent their character, and even this required a couple of explanations. It’s probably the maximum crunch you want, and can handle. They roll between 1 and 3 dice, and need to roll either low or high, it’s super easy for them to understand.

4. Playing with absolute rookies who bring zero baggage from D&D or video games is brilliant. Their only reference point for the activity is storytelling as kids, so this is how they engaged with it. They had no hang ups about what they could and couldn’t do, they weren’t trying to game the system to keep their characters safe, they happily shared suggestions with each other for actions, and based their decisions on both what made sense for their characters and what seemed most fun. It was such a breath of fresh air.

Link: https://blackarmada.itch.io/wreck-this-deck

As I posted recently, I started playing Wreck This Deck again, a game I originally pledged to on Backerkit in Jun 2023, and received and started playing in December that year.

It's a solo journaling game where you play as a deck runner, someone who can capture demons in a deck of playing cards, and uses them to carry out rituals and hexes to make your way in a dystopian world. The key pitch here is that you actually use a real deck of cards, and capturing demons requires physically defacing those cards. At the time I had just gotten big into bullet journaling, so our house was overflowing with washi tape, different types of pens, stickers, etc. Getting all crafty with a deck of cards for a TTRPG was just too enticing. And it works great! Just look at some of the cards from my deck:

On the top left is Flauros, whose capture involved cutting the card into a triangle and burning the edges (I eventually stuck it to another card so it wouldn't keep falling out of the deck.) The cards on the right are the jokers, and they're marked with a specific symbol, which protects my runner from some of the forces at work.

The card with the corners ripped off is Beezlebub, and each time it's drawn, you add another black fly to it - once it is full, he will escape. I actually scratched the card up and rubbed it with turmeric to get the staining. To his right is Astaroth, on which I've written the names of everyone who has wrong me. Honestly, this covered characters in the game and bled over into real life as well… it was very cathartic.

You may notice that the ace of spades doesn't match the other cards. That's because it was the first demon I caught, Pazuzu, and I actually lost the card a couple of days after. I'd used him in a ritual to protect my runner in a mission they were going on - I was writing a thinly veiled metaphor for spending the holidays with family, in a very difficult situation. I took the card itself with me, partially just being silly and playing into the game, and partially for actual comfort.

But somehow I legit lost the card, despite it never leaving my pocket that I'm aware of. I reflected this in the narrative of the game, and just had a deck that was a card short. Recently though, when I started playing again, I drew a series of cards that I could really only interpret as telling me I should recapture Pazuzu. So I grabbed a card from another deck. This card is black plastic with gold foil, so it really stands out against the rest of the deck. And I captured him again. He seems to be sticking around this time.

So what I have now is a gradually developing/degenerating deck, that is incredibly personal to me. I decorated the box as well, and at this point the deck barely fits in it:

At the moment, the deck is always out on my desk, and seems to have become my most used object for stimming. I love making this pile of cards look progressively more worn. Hopefully, I'll still be messing around with this in years to come. Who knows what it will end up looking like.

I probably should discuss the game itself more. The book gives you a list of demons to capture, complete with capture method (from cutting into a triangle and burning, to washing in salt water, to burying in soil), the demon's powers, and complications that may arise from having captured this powerful entity. You're also encouraged to invent your own though, as I did with Pazuzu and Chudo-Yudo. It's been a lot of fun researching demons and other creatures of myth and legend that I can shoehorn into the game.

Capturing demons is only one part of the game though. Much like a tarot deck, there's a table of all 52 cards along with their meanings, like "kindness", "disaster/destruction" and so on. You draw cards in specific spread formations and interpret them, again like tarot. You might use a Path of Action spread to determine what to do next, or a Path of Demons spread to find out which demon to capture next. Again, you're also encouraged to create your own spreads.

Using your demons, you can perform rituals - you select one or two demons, two regular cards, choose a goal, and then shuffle and draw from the remaining deck to determine if you are successful. Because every card has a meaning, this gives you a lot to go on in terms of turning all this into a story for your journal.

You can also perform hexes. But don't do this because it's very dangerous! I'm serious!

I've written in posts about the Citizen Sleeper TTRPG, and Koriko, that I often find I struggle with solo games because they're too prescriptive in some ways and too open in other ways. I end up finding them frustrating, unsure what to do, and feeling a huge burden from the amount of heavy lifting I have to do narratively. Going back to Wreck This Deck, I think this is exactly the balance I want. It's still a journaling game, you write a story, but you're given the barest hints of the world (vaguely cyberpunk, maybe quite near-future), and just a lot of tools to prompt any story that works for you. I never have to perform mental gymnastics to crowbar some new character or other element into a story where it just doesn't fit. This game is always provoking my imagination, and then just letting me get on with it.

Link: https://laurieoconnel.itch.io/lichcraft

My spouse actually picked this up at UKGE this year, while I was buying Out of the Fold and generally geeking out about meeting Kayla Dice. We've played two games now, each GMing one, so this is the rare example of writing my thoughts after playing and not just reading.

Lichcraft is a 2-player game by default (there's options for more players), with one as GM and the other playing as a trans character in a UK where the NHS waiting lists for trans healthcare have reached 300 years long. It's depressingly not that exaggerated. Determined not to let the bigots win, you decide to become a lich, granting yourself immortality and ensuring that you'll live to reach the top of the list. Should be an entertaining first appointment…

It's rules light, with a d6 dice pool system based on 3 stats, and bonuses if you can work in your day job, politics, hobby, or the source of your magic - all of which you pick or roll for at character creation. You have a small health pool, and even a mixed success forces you to drop either health or a stat. There's also a mechanism for regaining those, in which your character must sacrifice something important to them, describing how it helps and why it is a significant loss for them. That part works really well to inject some poignancy in a largely goofy (complementary) game.

Structurally, the player needs three things: the spell, components, and the location to perform the ritual. The GM rolls for three elements of each, generating where it is and what the complications are, and the tables for these are full of delightful prompts for the imagination.

Deathmatch Island is based on the Paragon system, from John Harper's Agon. That game is a story of Greek heroes facing trials from the gods. This one sits somewhere between Battle Royale, Lost, and Squid Game. Players are competitors in a dystopian game show, taking on challenges, earning followers, and ultimately competing in deathmatches to determine one final winner.

I've just recently finished running a season. We had four players, and it took six sessions - which was impressively quick considering our sessions are only 2 hours long. We were using the roll20 module to play, but I also made a basic playkit here: https://www.tumblr.com/modoreadsttrpgs/813964156982198272/deathmatch-island-playkit

Overall, we had a blast. It's a lot of fun, and gives considerable room for players to get into some wild antics. The Paragon system was new to all of us, and it runs very differently to most of the games we've played before. It was really low prep for me, certainly once we were up and running. There was some confusion and awkwardness as everyone got the hang of it, but I'd be delighted to run it again, or join as a player

My thoughts on the game really come down to two points - it's extremely structured, which has pros and cons, and it hands a lot of freedom, but also therefore responsibility, over from the GM to the players.

Paragon's structure

Without explaining the entire process of playing the game, basically players select the next point of interest they wish to visit, the GM presents the situation, the players explain their approach, GM rolls, players roll, then in reverse order of results (i.e., lowest score to highest) each player narrates the outcome. That's for a basic point of interest, but there are specific procedures for the battle royale phase of each island.

Playing with a group whose primary experience is trad games, 90% of it D&D, this is a very different experience. In some ways it feels more like playing a board game. No one needs to figure out where they should go next or who to talk to. It removes a lot of the clumsy portions where anxiety about the theoretically infinite possibility space of a trad game can cause paralysis within the group. With players that are used to video games, there was a definite level of comfort and enjoyment from knowing you're not 'playing it wrong' because all you're being asked to do is pick a point on the map.

On the other hand, it could also feel too much like a board game if you're not careful. Being my first time running the game, I found myself wrapped up in the procedures at times, and forgetting to add flavour and make it feel like we're telling a story. Same goes for the players - these are people who, when I run trad games, I very consciously add moments and even mechanics to force more roleplay and remind them that they're playing characters rather than steering empty avatars through a puzzle box. So here, collectively we could very easily slip into ticking all the boxes and not having much fun. We didn't, but I was always worried about the risk.

One big positive though, is that so much structure really helps with time management. This was the closest we've ever gotten to finishing a game in the number of sessions I thought it would take, where normally you can double my estimation.

Authorial responsibility

The flip side of this is that all the guardrails on the structure stand in opposition to, or more accurately open the space for, a huge amount of narrative freedom for the players. This is the real magic of the system I think.

When each player gets their alloted time to narrate the events surrounding their character, they already know the outcome of all the rolls. There's no "can I do this?" because they already know if they passed or failed, and they have the freedom to narrate that in whatever ridiculis, goofy, dramatic, or violent way they feel like.

It was a bit of a barrier for them to get over too. Getting comfortable with how much they could describe about the world, the NPCs, and definitely the other PCs, took some time. Also, late in sessions, or if a player was more distracted, there was an underlying vibe of 'well, the roll is done so nothing I say here really matters' and I didn't always get the best out of them. It's a bit of a catch-22, because removing any mechanical pressure around narrating your actions is what gives players the freedom, but it also reduces the tension.

When it gets going though, it really sings. The players had a lot of fun for long stretches where I, as the GM, was barely doing any work. Once they were used to doing it, I could see such a difference in the same players who would normally resist any sense of narrative control in a game of D&D.

Other thoughts

An assembly of other thoughts from my first campaign:

- The Roll20 module is great in every way, except the rolling which is clunky, confusing, and didn't always seem to add up correctly

- It's super low-prep, certainly once you're past the first session or two - the dynamics of the island and the competition can change so drastically within an hour of play that you really can't prep

- I'm not quite sure why it felt worse than most other games I've played, but I really had to flick back and forth in the book a lot, from the islands to the cast to the resolution procedure to exactly how trust and support work etc

- I was worried that the rolling would take too long per person, and initially tried to get them to just do their rolls simultaneously, but they absolutely rejected that, and seemed to enjoy talking through building their dice pools step-by-step

- The team leader mechanic is really fun - they all vied for the position but then all equally hated holding it and being responsible for group decisions

We ended with 3 of 4 players choosing to break the game (gold star for that one player, I was so happy), so they couldn't work together until the turncoat was killed later in the final stages. Only one competitor made it out, and with minimal damage done to Deathmatch Island. We left it wide open for a New Game+ return, and I'd be excited to run it when the time comes. I've also pitched the game to another group.

auston and willy seemed invisible tonight and its pissing me off because where are they? why is only 1/3 of the three headed monster living up to their part. its infuriating

We had a night away in the van this weekend, and I used some of the time for final prep on a short campaign of Deathmatch Island that I started running last night. First impressions are very positive - we quickly got into the action and the system is working well to create some fun moments and strong characters.

I'll look forward to writing some reflections after the campaign is done. This group almost exclusively plays 5e, and for Deathmatch Island you're picking nodes on a map, doing one roll per person, and then narrating the scene by taking turns. It's such a different structure and I wasn't sure if they would take to it, but they did and enjoyed themselves.