#03 : A story

Hi Eduardo (and readers)

To be honest I have been lazy, trying to compile the skeleton of rules to support our preliminary idea. We have discussed so much, and I have written so little. Today it won’t be the exception. Or maybe it will… sort of.

Before talking about rules, I want to tell you a particular anecdote. This story is an example of progression and pacing in a story (as a game session) and how the players can change it without acting through the characters or changing the rules. With any luck we, and our readers, can distill something valuable for our games. It’s from a traditional session of Shadowrun. Let’s talk about the game first. 

In short, Shadowrun is game about man, machine and magic in a dystopian retro-future (retro, for our 2016 standards). Is about a gang of free spirit mercenaries oppressed by mega-corporations and magical entities beyond their comprehension. Always a minute too late and always a Nuyen too short.

In my view, the best stories are not those perfect “runs” (missions). The great adventures, usually involve a master plan that goes south at some point: an unexpected turn in the middle of the mission, something that throws your plans out of the window and forces you to improvise. There are plenty of these examples in the Shadowrun franchise, like Shadowrun Returns (video game) or Crossfire (card game). 

With the previous paragraph in mind, let’s talk about this particular story, shall we? 

Our last session of Shadowrun, our third musketeer (a die hard Shadowrun fan) directed SR 5th edition. On this occasion we started with new characters, with no more than 4 hours to play. At the beginning of the story, our Friend and GM expect us to plan the run: get to the company we wanted to enter, try to figure out guard shifts, equipment, contacts, rumors, etc. 

Eduardo and I didn’t feel like wasting our time thinking of an amazing plan as players, so we decided the run should go south for unforeseeable reasons for our characters, as the GM wished and where he wished. Maybe we were betrayed by the Mr. Johnson (the one who gives the mission), maybe it was a bad Intel, a vendetta, an encounter with another team of Shadowruners, etc. It didn’t matter the reason. We wanted to play in a scenario where the characters were in a tough spot, as the setting has shown us it’s the way the best adventures always go.

Our GM was conflicted at the beginning. Probably, because he wanted that we us to try to outsmart the basic barrier (“make a plan: how can you enter an impossibly secured place?”) . He wanted to see us try. But really trying. Because when the players try to overcome an obstacle, the characters come to life, don’t they?

Were we being lazy? No. The point is we didn’t want to succeed in the traditional sense. We didn’t want a milk run (or easy mission), or truly outsmart the GM adventure. For us, the really interesting bit of the adventures was that our plan must fail and we must be in danger. Once in danger, we have many difficult choices to make: try to run for our lives or accomplish the mission at great cost. In the end, we wanted to be caught because it gives to the characters and players a sense of danger, excitement and adventure.

Shadowrun always punches you when you don't expect it. For us, the setting means that things are always more dangerous that what they seem. So, if disaster is inevitable for the characters, and desired by the players… why leave it to a chance of dice? Why prepare a break-in when, as a player, we expect to be caught somehow? And, equally important, why wait for it?

After a few minutes of discussion, we unanimous skipped a whole third of the adventure and jumped right into the action. And Let me tell you, it was the best adventure of Shadowrun I have ever played. The story and the characters were solid and we played the whole adventure in less than 4 hours. A truly flawless diamond.

Did we lose interest in the game because we controlled a situation as players? No! On the contrary: taking a decision, but not being in charge of the outcome, was like unleashing an event you have no control over. Like the genie in the bottle: is in our power to release it, but you cannot put it back. Not being in full control of the outcome was refreshing.

Now, Eduardo (and readers), keep this in mind: the fact that players control certain elements of the game beyond the characters and in par with GM is nothing new, by any stretch of imagination. So, what’s new about this?

Well, we never controlled the story; it wasn’t enforced by any mechanic in the game (we didn't pay any Fate points nor receive more XP). We didn’t gain anything inside the game for putting our characters in danger. We didn’t change the Game Mechanics (spellcasting and hacking are still a pain in the ass in this game!). The concrete effect was, we added speed to the game by reinforcing the core concept of the game. We just lived a great story by changing the classical structure and leaving the core mechanics untouched. 

Taking in consideration this post, I strongly recommend you to try this, neither for XP nor Metagame-Points, but just for fun. To enforce the feeling of the setting: always a minute too late, always a Nuyen too short. Outgunned, outsmarted, but free.

I would love to see this in our next concoction.

#02 : THE STARTING POINT OF THE SYSTEM

Marcelo and I have been discussing via Skype, looking for a starting point. And by that, I mean the possibility of thinking a way for a game system to be not only interesting, but also open enough so it can host characters that won't be able to coexist otherwise.

I'll begin this post with my motivation behind this thing we are creating, and I'll tell you all about characters coexisting later on. Ready? Go.

I was talking with some good old gamers in the RPG community via Facebook and one of them reminded me an old urban myth. It's about an RPG game based on "Sandman", where you start with an blank page, and you fill it with your character as you play along. The idea of having a blank page and make the system fully customizable got stuck in my head. And it became the main goal to reach during this process. But how can we do it?

If we want a character sheet to be fully customizable, we can't have a list of attributes or abilities. The game must be able to absorb and use the information and commonsense we all have regarding our navigational points in the world, meaning: we all know that going to the gym doesn't make you a specialist martial artist, and we all know that reading philosophy doesn't make you a medical doctor. So why do we need to specify this in our character sheets? Is it because of a fear from the Narrator about the players tricking the system?

So first problem: many rules exist because they assume we won't use commonsense in the game and/or the Narrator and the players are in opposite sides of the adventure. The old "I'm the Master and I can kill all of you! Muahaha!" a-la Dexter's Lab RPG episode.

We believe a game session must be a situation of common aid and conjoint narrative interaction. Not a fight between somebody telling the story and players struggling to survive the most random traps you can imagine. Aaand... maybe that's our heritage after eleven years of AD&D.

Second problem (and here comes what I said at the beginning): Marcelo raised a pretty good question: "How could Gandalf and Bilbo be the characters of two players in the game, in the first session?". A super-mage and a random halfling meet and go on an adventure. How can a system guarantee both players have the same opportunity of having fun and surviving? This is a question also targeted indirectly towards the MIN/MAX players (a.k.a. Munchkins), who look for every loophole in the system to "win" the game. Which also relates to the first problem I told you about.

As we can see, this two things are more or less interconnected. But there's still a third element: randomness. So let's play a game of detectives with some traditional rules. We have dices. And we have abilities and attributes. I'll be the best detective, ok? Let's imagine I'm Sherlock Fucking Holmes, ok? Imagine the system is "ability + atribute + 1d10" and if I roll a 10 I can dice again. GO: Sherlock is smoking his beloved pipe while watching a horrible scene, where a woman was stabbed in the back. No footprints, no signs of fighting. I decide to roll for investigation. I get a 10, then another 10, then another 10, then an 8. I get a total dice roll of 58. How is it possible that Sherlock Fucking Holmes doesn't solve the whole mystery with a natural 58 on a dice roll? The whole game should be solved. It's over. The Narrator should just tell me who the bad guy is and thank you for playing. Why not? What's the use of the dice if there's always a limit to its action, but uses a non-limited system?

These are not groundbreaking questions. These are things we have all thought for ourselves. So in the next post we'll be talking about the different options we are working in to solve this problems, and the new problems that arise from our particular answers.

Hint: we believe there's no need for dices nor character sheets.

#01 : WELCOME TO OUR OPEN GAME DEVELOPMENT

Hi Eduardo (and readers),

For those of you who join us today, allow me to present. My name is Marcelo. I play role playing games since 96'. That's a lot of time for a single hobby, right? Well it is, and for the looks of it, apparently is not enough.

In all this years of gaming and telling stories with you and our third musketeer (who doesn't have the time to participate in this project) I've had a blast. Although, I have one big regret: We started developing a game some year ago, and we still haven't finished it. What is worse is that our design process has sparked so many fantastic ideas that is harder and harder to keep focused on a single project.

But we learned a valuable lesson. Every process of designing or improving our storytelling skills is similar to separate and enrich the substance like a distillery. So, the purpose of this blog is to share our process in developing these rules, by making them public.

An that's is how our little brewery is born. At the moment the recipe for that great RPG we want to develop still eludes us. But this blog is not about the finest RPG you can drink. Is about the process of distilling rules and great stories. I'm sure that after many trials an errors we will finally create a game we can enjoy and share. Let's do this.

For all of the readers out there, I heartily welcome you to our dice distillery. It's not big and provable does not have much to offer yet.  But the the recipes and the refinement process will remain here for you to discover and support.

So, enjoy. The first round is on the house.