The Fifth World Design Diary

The Progression of Animist Sin

2010-02-26T23:42:00.003-05:00

In the playtests I ran leading up to and at Dreamation, I found a consistent problem with setting up the situation. We started to get something really good after an hour or two, but I want to get to that from the start, not a few hours in. So, creating a strong situation from the start has become a big concern for me.

Dogs in the Vineyard does this very well with a set town creation system that the GM uses. The system takes Mormon theology as a given: problems always begin with pride, which manifests as injustice, which leads to sin, which manifests as demonic attacks, which leads to false doctrine, which manifests as corrupt religious practices and heresy, which leads to false priesthood, which manifests as sorcery, which leads to hate and murder. You pick the particulars of a pride, the injustice that follows, and so on, following the chain down until you have a pregnant situation for the Dogs to walk into.

While at Dreamation, my mind started spinning around this idea. In Dogs, the GM does this before the game to set up the town, but what if we did this at the table, as a collaborative exercise? We start with one player, and ask them who's pride in the town sets things off. Next player to the left then tells us the injustice that leads to, and so on, until we have a situation ready to burst.

When I mentioned this to Giuli, she said it's a bad idea, because the Dogs come into town and try to figure all this out. Dogs is about coming into town as a stranger and unraveling its secrets. It's probably best for that game that it stay a GM exercise before the game starts.

But The Fifth World isn't about strangers, and animists have their own progression like this. And fortunately for me, it's a progression that works backwards. When a problem besets an animist group, whether bad storms or sickness or bad hunting, they don't chalk it up to chance. A more-than-human world seems densely populated with active persons pursuing various agendas. Nothing "just happens." Everything happens because someone did it. If sickness falls on the people, it happens because someone sent the sickness to them. Misfortune comes from angry people, and people become angry because of insults, offenses, trespasses, injuries or failed obligations.

This could work as a means of generating starting situation. The first player has to come up with a problem the people face; she says, "They're getting sick." Great! Next player: who sent the sickness? "Deer." Great! Do we stop there? Maybe that's all we need—we play a game that revolves around our investigation and our entreaties to Deer, as we try to figure out who offended Deer and how. Maybe we keep going. Why did deer send the sickness? "Deer agreed to give up 10 for our sake; but one hunter took an 11th deer in secret, and hoarded the meat for himself." Awesome. Next player: what does Deer demand in recompense? "The first 10 were given; the 11th was murder. Deer demands the murderer's life in return." Maybe we stop there—and we play out what we do next. Do we give up the hunter? Do we find some other way?

I might use this; I might just as well not. But it seems like no matter what, it could be an interesting exercise in animist thinking for the animists in the audience to work out what the progression of animist sin looks like. I'd love to hear your suggestions!

My Three Insights

2010-02-09T22:59:00.005-05:00

Back in December, Vincent Baker wrote a post on his blog, claiming that every RPG says three things simultaneously:

First, you're saying something about the subject matter or genre of your game: something you think about adventure fiction, or swords & sorcery, or transhumanist sf, or whatever. Second, you're saying something about roleplaying as a practice, taking a position on how real people should collaborate under these circumstances. Third, you're sying something about real live human nature.

What does The Fifth World say?

Subject matter: Ecotopian fiction seems like so neglected a genre that simply defending its viability as a genre seems like a statement worth making. If I consider my genre science fiction more generally—and I suppose that I could—my assertion here would largely agree with what Kim Stanley Robinson wrote in the introduction of Future Primitive, or the kind of science fiction that Ursula LeGuin has written, or what Michael Green said of Afterculture; namely, that we desperately need a hopeful vision of a viable future.

Roleplaying as a practice: I have said a good bit on this blog about storyjamming. Storyjamming emphasizes that jamming element, a continuous, fluid exchange of story. You need just enough rules to weave everyone's contributions into a seamless whole, but not so much that they start to call attention to themselves. The rules in an RPG need to knock you out of your head and interrupt your story, so that you can participate in the moment and help us track down our story, together. They also need to stay simple and elegant, but fit together to create emergent experiences. What people take away from your game will come from whatever emerges from that—whether you planned it or not.

Real live human nature: A healthy life as a human requires a strong sense of place. That doesn't need to mean we never leave; it just means we eventually come home. We have obligations to the places that give us life, and when we neglect those obligations, the land starts to die, and we start to die with it. But we also make the world a better, more beautiful place—if we can balance our ambitions and our obligations.

Building Towards an Endgame

2010-02-09T14:11:00.003-05:00

At the beginning of the game, you declare your goal, and tell us about the obstacles in your way. When you work towards your goal, you cast coins. Heads advance your goal, so you take some coins away. Tails mean you encounter a setback, some complication that puts a new obstacle in your way, so you put another coin on the stack. While you can get lucky, this system alone doesn't get you anywhere. You have as much a chance to get heads as tails, so you could sit there forever, the stack of coins fluctuating but never reaching zero.

In the episode of Storyjammers that Mike & I published yesterday, I made the claim that you really want your mechanics to do one of two things:

Bring the story closer to its conclusion.
Introduce a new twist or complication, or, move the story further from its conclusion.

This fits in nicely if you want to drive a story arc by the rules available at any given moment. At the start, you'll have as many setbacks as successes; later on, you introduce rules that can bias play towards success, so only then will you make any real progress. That gives us some satisfying twists, but as we get to the end of the story, we start to get that satisfying rhythm of tying up more threads than we start up.

I have two ideas on rules that might do that, but I'd like some input about them.

Helping. Other characters help you by casting their coins when you cast yours, but instead of counting heads and tails normally, the tails cast by people who help you don't do anything, while each head they cast cancels out one of your tails. Basically, this would mean that helping means more that you watch out for a character's mistakes than really push the agenda forward yourself. Does this really fit? Or should people helping just magnify the effect: all the heads count as successes, and all the tails count as setbacks, so you might get closer to your goal, but you'll have more complications, too? Or (this occurs to me as I write), you count up the sum of all the heads cast, but only the largest number of tails cast by any one person?
Setbacks. Keep track of how many of the coins on a goal came from setbacks—perhaps by keeping them in a separate pile. You can use each one once to cancel out a setback. So, the more setbacks you suffered early on, the fewer you suffer now—like learning from your mistakes.

Information Beats

2010-02-08T22:30:00.002-05:00

Recently, Robin D. Laws has written about information beats. Reading it gives me the sense of some profound new way of understanding and designing games just on the tip of my tongue. Jason Corley's recent thread on Story Games in defense of the much-maligned "giant, detailed setting" books, seems deeply tied into this. Both, in effect, ask us to see an RPG in terms of pacing and controlling the flow of information. I think they have something there, and I'd really love to see what happens as game designers start thinking of mechanics that really handle questions, reveals and pipes.

This all led me to an idea for the Fifth World; a subtle change, but one that, I think, could make all the difference. Right now, at the beginning of the game, you declare a goal you want to pursue. You place that goal on the map, and then you tell us about the obstacles you face. For each obstacle, you put a coin on the goal. Then, when you set a scene in pursuit of your goal, you cast some coins. Heads reduce the number of coins on the goal, tails put more on. You win when you have removed all the coins on the goal.

The change I have in mind really just involves changing some names; like, instead of "goal," you have a question. Heads don't give you successes, they give you answers; you take one coin away from the stack. Tails don't give you setbacks, they give you more questions; you put another coin on the stack. It doesn't change the mechanic at all, but it feels like a significant shift in the tone. One I feel pretty good about.

Storyjammers

2010-02-05T20:56:00.002-05:00

I started a podcast with my brother, called Storyjammers. In the grand tradition of podcasting, our first episode kind of sucks, but I think we've started the upward trend of improvement even with the second episode. You can let me know if you agree on Monday when that episode drops. Even so, I think the first episode will still give you a good idea of the kind of angle we take on gaming. In our discussion of why we play, we go through GNS, Sockets, drama therapy and escapism. Our next episode talks about mechanics and what purpose they serve in the game, and the third one features my rant against games with GM's. So, if that kind of thing interests you, you might want to subscribe. I'll still post notes on how developing the Fifth World goes over here, though naturally, I might post some of that on the podcast, too.

The Fifth World Movies: Avatar

2010-01-03T09:53:00.002-05:00

I actually feel very ambivalent about Avatar, so I hesitate to call this an "endorsement." But it sparked some good discussions with the people I went to see it with, which certainly counts for something. Moreover, the points that bother me about Avatar have some significant connections to The Fifth World.

Visually, the movie awes. It even has its moments as a story. I especially liked the part where Neytiri calls Jake a baby. The montage of the outsider learning Na'vi traditions hit the high notes for me, including the language, and even tracking. The intelligent root system—ethernet cords in animals' hair notwithstanding—presents an only slightly more magical version of the mycorrhizal networks that really do knit Earth's continents into enormous organisms (even though the movie's presentation seems to suggest that Earth has nothing like this).

I also liked that the genocide has no real stand-out villains. Even the colonel acts as he does because he has gotten hurt before. He wants to protect his people, and his inability to do so makes him increasingly paranoid. He becomes more and more violent not because of any moral failing, but because of the impact of living in the system he does. The businessman in charge of the whole operation cares about the bottom line; the scientists care, but their arrogance and their need to cast everything in their own terms constantly gets in their way. The genocide doesn't happen because of a villain; he happens because of the systemic problems and relationships between these different people, pushing them forward towards an end that none of them, on their own, particularly wants. Just like real life.

That said, I can hardly deny the deeply disturbing, racist undertones in the movie—once again, the condescending conceit that native people need a big, strong white male to come save them, right down to the "Indian Princess" story. Will Heaven summed this up much better in The Telegraph. Annalee Newitz puts it quite well on io9:

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color—their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

I went to see the film with these things in mind. I probably wouldn't have gone on my own because of this, but my brother wanted to see it, and I hadn't passed such absolute judgment based simply on the report of others that I would refuse to see it myself.

First, might it sometimes take a European to fend off other Europeans? After all, consider the depths of sociopathic depravity we see from the humans in Avatar (which only dimly mirrors the sociopathic depravity of Europeans who invaded the Americas, Africa and Australia). They do more than simply "displace" people, they rip them from a rootedness in a particular place that affects them in ways not unlike a collective frontal lobotomy. That takes a kind of bloody-mindedness, a ruthlessness and cruelty—or at the very least, a kind of devastating ignorance—that no healthy person can really understand. To know what they'll do, you might need someone as damaged as they to think in such, frankly, psychotic terms.

Second, it seems to me that Jake Sully's rise to Na'vi savior came from precisely what Neytiri said of him at the start: he acts like a baby. He stumbles about, knowing nothing. He heard the story of Toruk Makto, but he lacks a real feel for it. Most of us have heard the story of Moses, but we wouldn't try parting a sea. Someone else, having heard the story only once, might not know better; and if it worked, well then! Seen in this light, Jake Sully becomes the hero—both when entering Na'vi society, and when becoming the "great white savior"—precisely because of his ignorance, and his willingness to admit his ignorance. He does something amazing not because he is amazing, but because he doesn't know better, so he tries.

I don't think these perspectives absolve Avatar of its faults. I don't see much ground for taking these as authorial intent. They provide what seems to me like the most generous reading possible, and even then, I have to wonder to what degree these serve simply as the rationalizations of another white guy?

I think I liked Avatar most not for the film itself, but for the discussions it sparked—discussions of race, identity, cultural appropriation, imperialism, privilege and white guilt. The Fifth World raises these questions, too. I hope to handle them somewhat more honestly, though.

Cool Ideas

2009-12-19T18:19:00.002-05:00

In my last post, Willem suggested something really cool. In Dogs in the Vineyard, you create towns ripe with moral quandaries for the Dogs to judge (and thus, suck them into one moral dilemma after another). You do this by using a step-by-step template that plays along with the Christian view of sin: all sin begins with Pride, Pride leads to Injustice, etc. For each step, you introduce the problem. So, what Pride lies at the root of this problem? What Injustice did it lead to? And so on.

You have an animist equivalent: all problems begin with unmet obligations. Unmet obligations lead to people feeling taken advantage of. People feeling taken advantage of leads to withdrawing their help. Withdrawing help leads to mutual resentment, and mutual resentment might lead to violence. So, for example, some hunters take 21 deer, when they agreed to only take 20. The deer feel taken advantage of, so they withdraw their help. The people go hungry, so they begin to resent the deer. How long will this go before the humans and the deer start escalating their resentment to violence?

The poem offers a really good framework for this, too. What obligation has someone failed to meet? An obligation between persons? Between families? Between villages? Between peoples (as in the preceding example, between the human people and the deer people)? Then, just like Dogs, we escalate: how does the other group feel taken advantage of? What help do they withdraw? We can do this around the table, so we all have a hand in escalating the situation.

Now, I think players only have so much patience for "set up" time, so I think this option might mean eliminating the cycles by which we'd previously created characters from places. But we could introduce characters quickly, who we flesh out in play, and they get to unravel this whole mess. Just like Dogs, you've escalated past the point where simple measures would solve the problem. You've got mutual resentment and all kinds of unrecognized obligations. How do you fix that situation?

I also looked at John Harper's Lady Blackbird again recently. My brother ran Spirit of the Season last week, and it has me really excited about FATE. It reminded me of how simple and fun the game played. Lady Blackbird seems even faster and simpler. It made me wonder about simply designing The Fifth World as a simplified FATE game. I've heard good things about Chronica Feudalis lately, too, and it does much the same thing. That idea especially appealed; perhaps, instead of my misunderstanding of the term "roleplaying poem," I could follow John Harper's lead, and simply design a single-page, front and back, beautifully laid-out game.

And yet, I ultimately came back around to the ideas I'd started with, with coins for power and players pursuing their ambitions. I share these as unequivocally cool ideas—but I think this will work better. I told myself years ago that I'd know I finally had a good system when I stopped bouncing around all the time, and when the ideas I came up with started to focus on details instead of the most basic elements of gameplay. Dare I hope that I've finally reached that point?

Putting Debt in the Fruitful Void

2009-11-28T22:26:00.003-05:00

A lot of Story Games got started with disaffected World of Darkness players. They loved what the "Storyteller" games promised: games about story and character, and all those things. But they didn't really get that. The Storyteller System just provided another game about combat. That disappointment led to some of the first indie games, which began with ideas like "system matters," that stressed designing a game to fulfill a goal.

In that context, the idea that Ron Edwards and Vincent Baker started working towards back in 2005 seemed revolutionary: the Fruitful Void. Ron Edwards said, "Without such 'fruitful voids,' perhaps envisioned as what you get when you show a person seven of the eight corners of a cube, a rules-set is no fun. It's just a full cube; you can look at it, pick it up, mess with it, and nothing happens except it stays a cube." Vincent Baker said, "There's a trick to designing games, which I'm trying to tell. Ron says it's to leave the eighth corner of the cube unmade. I say it's to make a whirlwind."

In short, what you leave out matters just as much as what you put in. Most often, people use Dogs in the Vineyard as the example, I think in part because it does provide an excellent example, and probably in part just because Vincent used it in his post. You'll note that Dogs doesn't have any kind of "Judgment" or "Faith" mechanic. Yet, everything in the game—town creation, stakes, raising and seeing, escalation, fallout—it all points towards that. The game centers on judgment and faith. It doesn't need to address them directly—in fact, it makes the game more strongly focused by not addressing them directly, because everything else in the game already pushes you in that direction.

Yesterday, I worried about what role debt should play in the game, now that it no longer makes sense as a mechanic. Willem Larsen commented, stressing the importance of debt, and saying, "I would rather play archipelago-style and just presence the debt relationship in my story through setting."

I started to wonder how I could point players in that direction without preaching or mechanics—because, without something pointing them in that direction, what would make it come up more often than anything else?

And then I remembered the Fruitful Void.

The Fruitful Void of the Fifth World, the undefined center, should deal with Debt and Obligation.

I talked to Giuli about this earlier, and realized that I had to make the challenges harder, so that you need help. I thought of a new twist: you don't get to reduce obstacles by how many heads you get, but by how many heads you get over the obstacle. So, if you want to try to earn an Achievement with six coins on it, and you get seven heads, you can take one coin off the top. That would make it very hard to get started on an Achievement, but each success makes the next success easier. You might get the final, winning blow by yourself, but you'll know that in the beginning, you needed help.

I thought about a mechanic about people you owe, like if you help someone, they owe you, so you can force them to help you at some point later on. But I hate rules that force you to do something. In fact, I wonder now if this works better by leaving it undefined: if you get a reputation for not helping others in return, maybe they won't help you, which will make it awfully hard to earn the Achievements you want. Just like cooperation in the real world.

I don't know if this whirlwind has really built up enough force, though. Do you have any ideas of how other ideas could push play towards debt and obligation? I'd love to hear them!

Rethinking Debt

2009-11-28T13:41:00.002-05:00

Since introducing the concept of Debt, it has gotten a very mixed reception. I think the narrative economy works, but I don't know if it really works to think of it as Debt.

At first, I enjoyed challenging the conventional notions of debt, and moving players more towards a feral conception of debt—as something ambivalent, rather than negative, as something that creates relationships and obligations and thus ties the world together, rather than simply a burden. But I haven't gotten that reaction; more often, I've simply gotten confusion.

With Debt and Trouble, the economy had a nice balance: causing trouble got you into more debt, and you could reduce your debt by solving troubles. It worked nicely. Trying to Achieve something, though, makes that pool look less like debt, and more like strength, ability—I keep coming back to the oft-abused "mana" as the best term, in its original Maori sense, as "impact-ful," or efficacious.

I've often thought about representing strength in games, and I think I've put my best ideas into the Fifth World already, even before I started thinking of the economy in this fashion. On the one hand, you have your pool of strength; on the other, you have your "bandwidth," or how much you can pull from that at once. So, you have weight lifters who can tap all their strength at once; you also have endurance athletes who can tap their strength continuously. You also have other kinds of strength, like willpower. You might have an impressive ability to resist a single temptation (high "bandwidth"), but if you've used up your reserves by resisting many different things all day long, you might succumb to something you'd otherwise resist easily. This allows both for the possibility of getting overwhelmed, and getting worn down.

In the Fifth World, you have your pool of coins, and you can use as many coins as you have words in your Name. I like that, because it gives you a lot of complexity with very simple rules.

But it doesn't really have much to do with debt at this point. I see three alternatives here. First, I could abandon the whole idea of Achievements, and go back to debts and obligations, and try to find better ways of fleshing those out. I fear what that might mean for the feel of the game, though. As I said, I didn't change people's conceptions nearly so much as I sowed confusion. Would a game all about debts and obligations make the Fifth World feel like a terrible place to live?

Second, I could scale up. Instead of dying when you pass an arbitrary threshold (which I never felt entirely good about), you die when your Debt surpasses your "Mana" (I don't feel entirely comfortable with that term because of its specificity to a single tradition and how much games, anthropologists and pop culture has abused it, but I'll use it provisionally for the moment for convenience's sake). You reduce your Debt by fulfilling your obligations, and gain Debt when you get the help you need to earn your Achievements. Those Achievements give you more "Mana," and take time away from your obligations. Those details may need more work, but you get the idea: your character has two pools, and you have to worry about the balance between them.

I worry that this makes the game too complex. In his design notes, included as an appendix in Ganakagok, Bill White talks about earlier versions of the game that had complex mechanics for determining what the people needed, meant to urge players to do things like go hunting, or acquire other provisions. That complexity didn't help the game. The current game relies on a tarot deck that originally came out of that problem, but the game now doesn't really deal with that kind of resource management. Instead, it creates the space for mythopoiec roleplaying. I worry that doubling the complexity of the game like this could have the same impact on the Fifth World, as the early resource management mini-game had on Ganakagok.

Third, I could let go of the whole concept of Debt. Yes, it plays a crucial role in tribal life, but does the Fifth World really want to get into the details of day-to-day tribal life, or does it want to present bioregional epics? Does it want to provide a taste of bioregional animism, does it want to excite you with visions of the future? To quote Michael Green in Afterculture, "It's about opening up a whole new category of solutions, about finding another way of being: evolved, simpler, deeper, even more elegant. Even more cool. Even very cool."

Maybe I can afford to let go of the notion of Debt in the game itself. An obsession with realism all too often leads to clunky, difficult games. The Fifth World doesn't necessarily aim to realistically simulate day-to-day life in the feral future, it aims to excite us today with visions of the kind of future we could have. So, the game should focus on that kind of story. Dropping debt doesn't imply that it doesn't matter to the people of the Fifth World, it just means that it doesn't relate to the bioregional epics that this game tells.

I often worry that I worry too much, that I analyze until I paralyze myself, that I spend so much time thinking about these problems that I never get around to sitting down and solving them. Then I worry that I haven't thought it through enough. In this case, does Debt represent something so important that I can't abandon it? Or has it become more a distraction than a goal, and so, something that I really need to leave behind? I don't know; I've gotten too close to it to really tell. What do you think?

Trouble or Obstacles?

2009-11-27T23:33:00.003-05:00

I started thinking tonight about the wider implications of my "Causing Trouble" idea. I think it works well as a mechanic, but what does it say about the Fifth World? It seems to present the world as a place filled with trouble, trouble that our heroes must go out and answer. That can work, but it certainly doesn't jive with the pseudo-utopian feel I want to convey. It seems to lead me straight into the trap I've feared most: designing a game that inadvertently undermines the point of the setting.

It seems to me that the twist that separates a utopian setting from a gritty one might ultimately come down to something as simple as whether your characters reactively face problems that someone else created, or whether your characters proactively pursue ambitions that they themselves have set.

The rest needn't change that much. Achievements count more, based on how many Obstacles you put in your way. For each coin, you narrate one more obstacle you face, and you can reduce those obstacles just like you might have faced Trouble before: invoke your Name, cast your coins, and reduce by one for each one that comes up heads.

This would also make for characters with lists of achievements of varying strengths, which reminds me somewhat of Gifts in Ganakagok. Those Achievements should replace Memories, in that case, and their value tells you how many coins you can re-cast when you invoke it.

I started thinking about the ways you might use this, and the versatility made me feel good about the idea. For example:

Achievement: Slay the ogre! Six obstacles:
1. In one bitter winter, my desperate uncle ate his child, my cousin.
2. He became an ogre, a cannibal addicted to human flesh.
3. Human flesh gives him supernatural strength.
4. When they discovered his crime, the family tried to kill him.
5. He got away.
6. He has lived on his own ever since.
Achievement: Marry the beautiful maiden. Five obstacles:
1. Her father hates me.
2. Her mother doesn't mind me, but she won't stand up to her husband for me.
3. She loves me, but I can't bear to make her choose between me and her father.
4. Her father discovered our secret love, and forbade me from seeing her anymore.
5. Now, her father has started trying to arrange a marriage for her to someone else!
Achievement: Restore the irradiated lake. Five obstacles:
1. In ancient days, our ancestors created light from glowing rods.
2. You cannot see the magic fire in those rods, but it burns forever, and it boils the skin away with a magical disease.
3. Our ancestors knew how to start those fires, but not how to put them out.
4. In desperation, they sank those rods in the lake.
5. Their magic fire continues to burn, though, and it has turned the lake and everything around it into poison.

I think these three quick examples show some of the strengths of this idea. Firstly, it can cover everything from a good old-fashioned monster-slaying quest, to a romance story, to trying to restore an irradiated lake. Secondly, the obstacles can provide so much more context and depth to these challenges.

I can also see different ways of apportioning the value of such achievements. Perhaps you want to get a new Name from it, or perhaps some special effect. Set aside one point for the Name, and one point for the effect. If you had a five-point Achievement, you could turn it into a three-point Achievement, with a Name and an effect.

You could also have an overall "Prestige" score, totaling all of your Achievements and Names. Age should count somehow, as well. I don't know what I might want to do with this yet—perhaps nothing at all. The idea of competing for Prestige occurred to me—you could even give extra Prestige for helping others gain their Achievements, which would make the optimal strategy one of cooperation—but even then, I think that might undermine the tone of the game.

The idea of "Prestige" did remind me of Flow in FreeMarket. I despise transhumanism passionately, but despite that, I can't help but notice that the more basic premise of a utopian setting pushes me into a space somehow both similar and opposite to that game. In FreeMarket, "Flow" essentially means prestige—what the more technologically-intoxicated call things like "social capital." You use Flow to create things, which in turn gives you more Flow. The similarity makes me think I've hit upon something. Despite our almost totally opposite settings, we both face the basic question of how to tell stories in a more-or-less utopian future, and that might ultimately come down to something as simple as whether your characters reactively face problems that someone else created, or whether your characters proactively pursue ambitions that they themselves have set.

In Media Res

2009-11-21T14:22:00.004-05:00

A thread started on Story Games about starting games in media res, or, "in the middle of things." This has particular interest for me, because I've tried to design the Fifth World to tell bioregional epics. The Wikipedia entry on "epic poetry" provides a list of criteria you'll find, more or less, in any discussion of what an epic means. I have my praepositio and invocation at the beginning. Like John Milton in Paradise Lost who turned the Greek Muse into the Christian Holy Spirit, I use the invocation to ground the epic by identifying the muse as the Spirit of the Place. The use of epithets requires a little more thought, but at present, I think having to invoke your name to start using the mechanics helps bring that element in. I'll admit, I still don't have a good idea on how to bring in more enumeratio. But for the moment, I have the problem of starting in media res more in mind.

From the playtests so far, I feel confident that the basic approach to story structure does work. Fluency play means introducing each rules element, one at a time. As an extension of that, you can control the pacing of the story by introducing rules elements in a deliberate order. I definitely need to tweak that order, but I feel confident now in the basic premise. Specifically, we consistently found that the coin-flipping mechanics came up too late in play. Many of the ritual phrases and so forth refer to that implicitly by costing coins, but without the coins in use early on, you have little idea of what kind of price you pay.

What if the very first scene had you confronting Trouble and flipping coins? You could begin in media res. Later, when we introduce the Memory mechanics, you can use those to establish how we got to this point. This would introduce the coin-flipping mechanics at the very beginning, and add the other ritual phrases later on.

I think this would definitely change the tone of the stories, too. It would make the stories fundamentally about confronting Trouble. I think I like that emphasis, since it also gives more room for players to cooperate. The current framework sometimes allows for the game to end in some clever consensus, which works especially well when characters end up with what they wanted, but not in the way they expected to get it. This approach, though, does seem to give gameplay an essentially player-versus-player quality. I think beginning in media res, with Trouble mechanics, would make gameplay essentially cooperative, about our heroes working together to solve the Trouble facing their people. I think that dynamic could work very well. I'll need to whip up a version of the poem that does that, and see how it plays.

Wrap It Up

2009-11-20T08:00:00.000-05:00

In improv theater, knowing when and how to end a scene often poses a problem. Often, a show has an emcee who solves this problem by simply deciding when a scene ends. In traditional RPGs, GM's control all aspects of pacing: they frame every scene and determine when every scene ends. Collaborative storytelling means liberating players from GM's and GM's from their obligations—and that means exploring other ways of figuring out when a scene ends.

This came up in playtesting. We had some scenes that had a hard time finding their focus, and as a result, would ramble on for far too long. We need some way to signal when to wrap it up.

In literature, every scene has a specific purpose, and the scene ends when it has fulfilled that purpose. In a story game, though, we may not know a scene's purpose until we've finished playing it, so how can we know when it has fulfilled that purpose? More importantly, how can we know in that moment, that a scene has finished, with all the other things we have to keep in mind in play?

I've decided to take a page from a Norwegian game called "Until We Sink," which itself seems to follow the model of most plays. In "Until We Sink," a scene ends when two characters have left. This means that one character can't arbitrarily end the scene prematurely, but by the same token, one character can't keep the scene going, either. When the first person leaves, it probably signals to the others that this scene should end soon, sending that "wrap it up" message to everyone playing. As with so many other parts of the game, I'll have a ritual phrase to indicate this, which should help to give it some additional weight.

Rules Are Made To Be Broken

2009-11-19T08:00:00.001-05:00

I try to keep this blog in E-Prime, so writing that title pains me. Yet, that old slogan fits my topic today too perfectly to pass up. It seems to me that one of the primary functions of a rule in any RPG lies in the opportunity to break it. Who can break it, and when, becomes one of the primary means of defining a character.

I considered adding an idea to the playtests at GASPcon, but decided to try the simpler version without it first. I considered making several cards, allowing each player to choose one for his or her character. Each would announce a particular character trait, and with it, a specific rule that the trait allowed the character to break. So, for instance:

Ungrateful. You can have 12 Debt before you die, instead of just 10.
Contrary. Using the ritual phrase, "I have never heard of such a thing" costs you no Debt.
Wistful. Choose a Memory. You can use it twice in this game.
Famous. You have a bonus Name.

I don't know if it would fit into the poem, and part of me worries about including a list like this. On the other hand, it offers so much more room for people to define unique characters that I keep coming back to the idea.

When combined with an idea like Trouble, it presents even more opportunities. For instance, you could incur one more Debt to attach one of these to a Trouble. So, you take on four Debt. You take three coins of Trouble, and put them on a new Trouble called "Wandering Mercenary," with "Famous" attached to it. The person who eliminates that Trouble becomes "Famous," so he can gain another Name because of that victory.

I don't know if this idea will work, but it seems to open up enough opportunities to warrant playing around with it to see where it might go.

Causing Trouble

2009-11-18T08:00:00.000-05:00

Consistently, the playtests so far have revealed a dearth of situation. People complain that they don't know where to take their characters. I included a step in character creation where, after you introduce your character, we go around the table, and each person tells you something that you want from their character, that their character won't give you. I thought this might provide some good opening tension—even if it might wind up pointing play into a player-versus-player mode—but that just didn't happen.

So, I find myself going back to an older idea, and finding a better place for it now than it had when I first conceived of it.

Right now, you start with some amount of Debt, based on your age. This reflects what the Land and the People have provided to you over your life. Older characters have lots of Debt; younger characters, much less. You use your Debt to accomplish things, so young characters may need to get more Debt. Thematically, it seems to make perfect sense that you'd get more Debt by causing Trouble. So, you can take as many coins of Debt as you like, if you put an equal number of coins into Trouble. Older characters, with plenty of Debt already, could get rid of their Debt by settling Trouble. Which also happens to present precisely the dynamic I'd like to see: older characters cleaning up the messes that younger characters start.

When adding Trouble, you write down something that Troubles the People in a central area, perhaps a sheet of paper in the middle of the play area. You put at least one coin on it. You can put more coins on it, to make that Trouble more troublesome. In play, characters can confront that Trouble. They invoke their Names, which lets them throw coins from their Debt equal to the words in that Name. For each head, they can return that coin, and one coin from the Trouble, to the bowl. So, you can work off your Debt by solving Troubles.

Yet, you can only get more Debt by causing Trouble somewhere else. When you start the game, you get a starting Debt based on your age. I think you should probably introduce some starting Troubles, too, with coins equal to your starting Debt. Since zero Debt makes you ineffective and cut off from the world, you can't really ever solve all the Trouble in the world: you can only solve some Troubles, some of the time, and try to arrange your Troubles in a way you can live with. I think that in itself says something powerful, especially in a pseudo-utopian game.

This has the added benefit of letting players guide the game in a direction they want. Giuli and I have both noticed, with some irritation, that a disproportionate number of our playtests involve cannibals, for instance. It makes sense: they fit so well into the tropes of post-apocalyptic fiction. They violate the positive vision of the future that the Fifth World drives towards, though, and that really gets at the heart of the design problem the game needs to solve. We don't want to lecture people about why the Fifth World won't involve short lifespans, raging cannibals, or high infant mortality, but how do you get people to move past those stereotypes otherwise? A Trouble mechanic allows us to define the problems we face. With it, I can introduce my missing brother, who went hunting and never returned, but instead became a wild man (see the part about "Bigfoot" in this blog entry from April). Or we can add the curse sent upon us by Deer, because someone killed a deer violently.

Conflicts between characters lead us into player-versus-player games. Conflicts left to emerge collaboratively may trend towards stereotypes. But letting people establish Troubles may mean that we can guide a game in a specific direction, with the kinds of conflicts that we at the table find interesting and meaningful.

It also has the added benefit that we can actually play a cooperative, GM-less game. Everyone at the table can work together to eliminate the Trouble.

Ganakagok

2009-11-17T08:00:00.003-05:00

I've taken lessons from Ganakagok already, but only on Saturday did I get to play it. Bill came to GASPcon 10 to run it, and I made a point of getting into his game. I walked away with a book and a card deck; I hope to run it this weekend, and at the next regular GASP Games Day.

Something kind of magical happens in a game of Ganakagok, it seems. Bill's designed the cards so well that you could really believe in their divinatory power. So often, you get just the right card, that you might swear that someone rigged the deck. I think this involves more than just a common Barnum effect, where people naturally interpret a vague, general statement as something eerily specific, though that no doubt plays a part. Rather, Bill's designed the deck so well that the kinds of situations that the Nitu face come up in it regularly. More than just sufficiently ambiguous meanings, these cards have just the right punch and context to really make them matter.

Much of the game revolves around the interpretation of those cards. When we roll dice, we roll to see who will get to interpret the cards, and what consequences will follow from that struggle. That gives the game a definite momentum. Each interpretation builds on the last; the game gains a forward motion as we rush towards its climax.

Bill's called this the "Mythopoietic Edition," and I think he has picked just the right word for it. He's designed a game that really does seem to create myths, consistently and reliably. He calls it "a quasi-Inuit Silmarillion" (referring to the poetic elven mythology that J.R.R. Tolkien invented).

Issues of cultural appropriation do arise out of this, and while I, too, cringed at phrases like, "primitive and icy," overall, I admire how Bill has handled the situation—particularly upon reading his most recent blog entry, where he advised people who have enjoyed the game to donate to the Nunavut Arts and Crafts Association.

While the cards you draw will create a different world with each game, you can never get very far from the stars disappearing from the night sky, and the inevitability of the morning. Though the world you've known differs from one game to the next, that world always comes to an end. Your character stands out as a protagonist because you recognize this earlier than most others. You have your hope for what the change could mean, and your fear for what it might mean. You have the balance of Good and Bad Medicine in the world, amongst the People, and for yourself. Ultimately, this game really digs into how we cope with inevitable disaster. The real world lets you take your pick:—global warming, peak oil, mass extinction, et cetera ad nauseam. In this game, the coming change—the Morning—has definite positive aspects, as well as negative. You almost certainly won't succeed in having more Good Medicine than Bad for the world, the people, and all of your characters. Even one will give you a challenge. So this change will include some amount of tragedy. Yet it doesn't need to mean unmitigated tragedy. As much as this game deals with fear and resistance to change, it also deals with embracing change, and finding hope in it. For that, I think Ganakagok has some pretty powerful, good medicine for us all. It leads you through a myth all about how the world will change, and how we deal with the need to face that reality—pretty much exactly what we all need right about now.

GASPcon Playtests

2009-11-16T15:34:00.003-05:00

GASPcon 10 expanded to three days, adding two RPG slots on Friday. I ran one of the two Fifth World playtests of the convention on Friday night. I wound up with a bit of an "all star" playtest group, including Jenn from the Trapcast, and "Mr. Teapot" Nick Wedig, designer of House of Masks, which won Game Chef last year. Ironically enough, the fourth fellow at the table—the one I didn't know—gave some of the best performances.

We returned to the Point. I must assume the Ferryman met a cruel end, since we now had a tribe living there who thought that the portal to the Underworld there required human sacrifice. They had taken Jossiah the Healer, and wanted to learn his secrets. So their chief assigned a teenager named Hawk Necklace to become his apprentice. My character, Sleepy Watch, had failed to protect Jossiah, so he enlisted Paws, who took the blame for that because of their uncanny physical similarity, to help him rescue Jossiah. Paws lived in exile in the ruins of Oakland. The panthers had returned there, and allowed no one to approach, but Paws had become kin to them.

Paws and Watch received the help of the people just for trying to fight the other tribe off. They even gave them their magical weapons (the last remaining weapons made of metal). Hawk Necklace met them while looking for someone his people could sacrifice in Jossiah's place, and hatched a plan to sneak Paws and Watch in as prisoners. Watch challenged the chief, and managed to kill him. Watch considered the tribe cannibals, so he ate the chief's ear; but, they didn't actually practice cannibalism, so the gruesome scene simply had the effect of frightening them with his apparent madness.

The slaying of their chief put their village into chaos. A new chief arose, concerned primarily with saving his people. He considered a war on the People of Watcher, Paws and Jossiah a task that could give them the purpose they needed. They looked for ancient propane tanks in Oakland, with which to burn the forests there to the ground and send the panthers back into the Underworld.

After slaying the assassins sent after them and learning of this plot, Jossiah enlisted the aid of the whole village in retrieving these tanks from the old tunnels. Watch kept solitary guard against their enemies, now overconfident with pride. When the enemies came, the panthers fell upon them, but Watcher made a sudden movement against one of the attackers, provoking a panther who scarred his face.

In the tunnels, the enemies swarmed the people. Paws stabbed his spear through one of them, and into a propane tank behind him. They all exploded, consuming most of their enemies. Those that remained mistook Paws for Watch, and began to scream, because the boy who had killed their chief could unleash a firestorm with the strike of his spear.

In the end, Paws returned to the village, and Watcher went into self-imposed exile among the panthers. Just as they had both initially desired, they switched places. Their appearance spread a legend about a boy with magical powers and incredible strength, who could even appear in two places at once. Hawk Necklace left his old people and joined a new people, and Jossiah found hope that the next generation might not always seem less wise and less strong than their ancestors.

The second playtest on Sunday afternoon I played with some of the folks responsible for GASPcon. That one I'd have a harder time recapping from a fiction angle. We had a lot of interruptions, and because it involved some of the folks responsible for GASPcon, exhaustion overtook the game and we ended early. But I still got a lot out of this game especially because of Todd. Todd has taken a real interest in the setting, and he's given me a huge number of really great ideas. Possibly more important than anything, with a project like this, you can easily lose your bearings, and you end up with very little sense of the quality of what you've come up with. Todd gave me a much-needed touchstone to gauge where I stand with this.

In previous iterations, at this point in the playtesting, I'd start to re-evaluate the most basic parts of gameplay. Now, not so much. The poem seems to work for getting into play immediately, helping keep the story's progression on track, and setting a different mood for each round by controlling which rules everyone has access to at that moment. I need to work on the progression of those rules, and as I'll write in some upcoming articles here, I've come up with some different rules to try out. But right now, I expect to bring a game to Dreamation that will look a lot like the game I ran this weekend, and right now, that alone feels like a triumph.

Playtest Report #2

2009-11-08T23:15:00.002-05:00

I got to playtest the Fifth World for the first time around a table on Saturday. My brother, Giuli and I played. I felt really good about the story that came out. I played a football star who wanted to live forever; Mike played the Ferryman, the heir of the character I played in the previous playtest; and Giuli played a character inspired by Nausicaä, who wanted to restore the toxic forest growing up out of the ruins of the Waterfront in Homestead. Actually, that location requires some elaboration, actually. A steel mill once sat down there. The Battle of Homestead happened near there, where Pinkerton soldiers attacked striking steel workers. Today, a large shopping complex sits on the site. The appropriation of so much of the world's biomass to build places like that, and the sprawling suburbs around them, have concentrated much of the world's biological wealth in those areas. In the Fifth World, once all that material finally gets to rot, some of the most vibrant forests grow up out of the cellars, washing machines and cars of suburbia. In this case, it sets its roots into soil filled with heavy metals from the old steelworks. I suggested a story of domination: domination of the steel workers, domination of the earth by the steel mill itself, domination through consumerism, and in the Fifth World, a place angry at humans because it has seen so much of humanity's worst qualities. Mike went for the complete opposite story: freedom bought with great sacrifice, like the labor movement bought with in the Battle of Homestead, or the life of the forest bought despite the heavy metals in the soil. Giuli went with that, and her character tied into that story because she wanted to heal the land.

Mike made the Point more of a sacred garden, as opposed to the terrifying otherworld from our last game. In the fountain, an abnormally large oak tree grows, with its roots reaching down into the secret fourth river that flows underground. When my character, the football star, wanted to live forever, the Ferryman told him to swallow an acorn from the tree whole.

Through the various rounds, my football star became more belligerent, since he thought he'd become immortal. He got married to Giuli's character, and the Ferryman told him he could cleanse the forest so important to his new bride by eating the poisoned fruit there. Since he would live forever, he had nothing to fear.

He died, right there.

The elders of my character's village accused Giuli's character of assassinating their star player; she submitted herself to their judgment to keep the villages from going to war. They executed her, and buried her next to my character, in the toxic forest she loved so much.

Next came the rounds with the memories, which worked out perfectly. The action had reached its climax, so now we went back, before, to see why it had all happened. The real climax of the story came later, even though, chronologically, it had happened before. My character remembered his grandfather dying, and telling him a story that I took from Paul Radin's Primitive Man as Philosopher, about a Ho-Chunk boy who wanted to live forever. He died, and grew into a tree—because only trees live forever. That acorn I had eaten before, what the Ferryman promised would give me eternal life? It sprouted. Its roots went deep, deeper than all the other plants, and sucked up more of those heavy metals than any of them could. So, I lived forever—and cleansed the forest.

Giuli asked why her character had to die, too. My character had wanted her admiration; despite all the women who fawned over me, I wanted her to notice me. In her epilogue, we found out why: I had sacrificed my human life to cleanse her forest, so she became a tree, too, so that my sacrifice wouldn't mean spending eternity alone.

The poem's structure paced it out perfectly, even when the other players worried that we'd reached the climax too soon. It created a beautiful, moving, poetic, mythic story really anchored in the land. I felt very good about that.

Like the playtest before, players raised some concerns about not having enough material to start with. I wanted to make character creation a part of play, rather than something that happens before play. I still suspect that I just need to press for stronger desires, but I'll definitely have to keep in mind that it may need some way of generating more pregnant starting situation.

In both games, the mechanics didn't kick in very often. That may also need some more work; or, it might work just fine right now. Who says that the mechanics need to kick in all the time? Maybe "leave them there unless you need them" makes for a perfectly viable strategy.

Another interesting thing to note: in both games, we had three players, and it took just over two hours, making for just over 40 minutes per player (I've measured time per player because I think, with the rounds, that how long a game takes will work as a function of number of players). If that continues to hold, then a game with six players would take four hours—one standard convention slot, precisely. Of course, I'll need to test other size games to see how that ratio holds up. I'll also need a much larger data set to say anything with confidence.

I haven't playtested nearly as much as I would like so far, but I think I can take this to GASPcon without too much worry. I've billed it as a playtest, so nobody should expect a finished game. All the same, the problems don't seem to break it entirely, either, and playtesters have even had fun with it.

Playtest Report #1

2009-11-05T22:21:00.003-05:00

I just finished the first playtest of the new rules, with Dan Maruschak and my wife, Giuli. It had all the roughness you'd expect of a first playtest, but the momentum I'd hoped seemed to work out. The second hour of our two-hour game got into pretty fun stuff; I got to play a hermit, Chiron-like ferryman, alongside a traveling trickster figure and a woman from a tribe beginning to encroach on forbidden, sacred areas. It ended quite satisfactorily, with my ferryman falling prey to one of the trickster's ruses in the Land of the Dead.

So, the momentum of the game seemed to work out well. We had some rough spots getting started, especially establishing motivations and figuring out what people wanted to do. We had some speculation that the game might have a little too much structure right now, and that the game mechanics might undercut the goals in some ways.

I can't say that any of this makes me want to immediately rewrite the game (though Giuli had some really scathing things to say about it after we finished the call). I want to playtest it a few more times to control for some other possible factors, so I can make sure what arose tonight from the game, and what arose from other factors in play. As rough as it seemed in play, I still feel rather optimistic about it all, because I had braced myself for much worse. They call it "playtesting" and not "playing" for a reason, after all!

Web Inspiration

2009-11-04T18:02:00.002-05:00

I hope to relaunch thefifthworld.com on December 21, along with making the first rough draft of the rules available for public playtesting. For the website, I want to set up a wiki/forum/blog site, with those three aspects operating seamlessly with one another. Thing is&mdfash;and I admit to this with some shame, as a professional web designer—I feel completely lost as to the direction to take it. What should it look like? Feel like?

So, I'll ask you. What would you like a Fifth World site to look like? Do you have any examples of sites you like that you think I should take inspiration from? Let me know soon; December 21 only seems far away if you don't have to start blocking out how the work will have to happen to meet it as a deadline!

RIP, Claude Levi-Strauss

2009-11-03T22:06:00.003-05:00

The name "Claude Levi-Strauss" haunted my college years. I majored in anthropology and computer science, and for the former half of my time, it seemed that no matter where I went, the Frenchman's name followed me. You simply cannot talk about anthropology in the later half of the twentieth century without talking about Claude Levi-Strauss. He died on October 31; they buried him earlier today. He would have turned 101 at the end of the month.

I don't always agree with everything he wrote, of course, but Levi-Strauss had an immense impact on our appreciation of native traditions. People like me, who look to those traditions for examples of a human life well-lived, owe a great debt to Levi-Strauss. Like so many, I devoured science fiction in my youth; really, I loved the stories of wise aliens, whether benevolent or horrifying, who nonetheless had mastered that seemingly arcane secret of how to make a living in this world without destroying themselves. Without Levi-Strauss's influence, even before I ever learned his name, I might never have realized that such examples literally surround us, right here on earth.

I finished my rough draft the same day he died, and I cannot deny the influence his life and work had on this project.

Rough Draft Completed - Now Looking for Playtesters!

2009-10-31T23:38:00.002-04:00

I started working on the Fifth World three years ago. Tonight, I finished the rough draft. It has changed immensely over the years and gone through several major revisions, but I have a confidence in this one unlike any previous iteration. I think the final product will have, at the very least, a family resemblance to what I finished tonight. It takes the form of a 154-line, 1,289-word poem, written in heroic couplet, in ten sections. You read the poem as part of play; the poem sets the stage and introduces the rules, one element at a time. I use that to also pace the story and drive an escalation towards climax. Then it ends with a round of epilogues and questions.

I'll introduce it publicly for the first time at GASPcon 10 in twelve days.

Twelve days means I need to get in a LOT of preliminary playtesting. This will require a very vigorous schedule, so I'll need as many playtesters as possible. I do intend to publish once I have a worakble product, so your time will garner the juicy reward of a printed playtesting credit. This version I can run over Skype, so if you want to volunteer, but don't live in western Pennsylvania or don't have a lot of time available, we can probably play online over Skype. I hope to start as early as tomorrow, so if you'd like to join in, please comment on this post.

Storyjamming @3RB

2009-10-26T13:41:00.003-04:00

I presented "Storyjamming" at the Three Rivers Bioneers Conference last week. I ended up interacting a lot with the audience, which worked well for that presentation and the audience I had, but it doesn't work very well for online presentation. So, I recorded again at home from my notes, and made a slidecast with my slides.

Storyjam

View more documents from Jason Godesky.

The Future of Science Fiction

2009-09-23T19:30:00.002-04:00

Clive Thompson wrote an article for Wired (a publication I normally avoid as assiduously as The Economist) on why he says that ""Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas." To the Best of Our Knowledge (which I do listen to) dedicated an episode to exploring that question, talking to Ursula K. LeGuin and George R.R. Martin. I enjoyed that discussion, and it reminded me of Kim Stanley Robinson's stirring and thought-provoking introduction to the anthology of ecotopian fiction he edited, Future Primitive.

"Science fiction is a collection of thought experiments that propose scenarios of the future. All science fiction stories carry within them implicit histories connecting their futures back to our present. They are historical simulations, which start at the present and then state if we do this we will reach here, or if we do that we will reach there. It's a mode of thought that is utopian in its very operating principle, for it assumes that differences in our actions now will lead to real and somewhat predictable consequences later on—which means that what we do now matters. Science fiction is play that helps teach us how to act, like the wrestling of tiger cubs.

"This, at any rate, is the utopian view. Science fiction also expresses the hopes and fears of its writers and readers, who have mostly been inhabitants of the urban industrial nations. Thus science fiction has presented us with countless images of urban industrial futures: Trantors and Metropolises and spaceships, those cities cast loose in space. All these images, endlessly reiterated, have come to form in our imagination a kind of consensus vision of our future. Poets are unacknowledged legislators of the world, and to a very surprising degree what we have been legislating with our poetry is existence in great industrial city-machines, with people as the last organic units in a denatured, metallic, clean, and artificial world.

"We are beginning to understand that this imagined future is impossible to enact, and is an artifact of an earlier moment in history. The megacities currently on Earth today serve not as models for development but as demonstrations of a dysfunctional social order. A whole range of sciences now emphasize how inextricably we are part of a larger biosphere, enmeshed in our world like jellyfish in the sea, taking it in with every breath and every meal. The biosphere is our extended body, and we can no more live without it than we could live without our kidneys or our bones. The old paradigm of the world as a machine is being replaced, in modern science and in the culture at large, by a more accurate and sophisticated paradigm of the world as a vast organism, complexly interpenetrative in ways not previously imagined. The world is not a machine we can use and the replace; it is our extended body. If we try to cut it away we will die.

"And there is no reason why we should want to lever ourselves out of nature into machines, even if we could. Over the millions of years of our evolution, we grew bodies and minds that crave certain kinds of experiences—walking, throwing things, contemplating fire, dancing, sex, talking, spending most of every day outdoors, etc., etc. Only in the last part of our long history have we shifted away from lives that gave us these satisfactions, and the "sublimated" pleasures of industrial existence cannot replace them.

"Worse, industrial existence cannot save us from the coming environmental crisis; indeed, is is part of the problem. In all likelihood we have already overshot our environment's carrying capacity, yet the world population will double before it stabilizes, while many vital resources are already being depleted. At the same time, however, our technological ability is expanding tremendously, as is our understanding of how social institutions affect our problems. We are gaining great powers at the very moment that our destruction of our environment is becoming ruinous. We are in a race to invent and practice a sustainable mode of life before catastrophes strike us.

"So we are in the process of rethinking the future, of inventing a new consensus vision of what it might be. This is happening all across contemporary culture, in a great variety of forms, with names like the environmental movement, green political parties, deep ecology, the land ethic, landscape restoration, sociobiology, sustainable agriculture, ecofeminism, social ecology, bioregionalism, animal liberation, steady-state economics. All these movements contain efforts to reimagine a sustainable human society.

"Science fiction is part of this work. Of course there are many science fiction stories which still invoke the mechanistic world view, using the old futures like tired stage sets. But the science fiction responding to the latest advances in contemporary science is beginning to look different, less "hi tech," more various. All manner of alternative futures are now being imagined, and many of them invoke the wilderness, and moments of our distant past, envisioning futures that from the viewpoint of the industrial model look "primitive." It's not that they advocate a simple return to nature, or a rejection of technology, which given our current situation would be nothing more than another kind of ecologic impossibility. Rather, they attempt to imagine sophisticated new technologies combined with habits saved or reinvented from our deep past, with the notion that prehistoric cultures were critical in making us what we are, and knew things about our relationship to the world that we should not forget. These science fictions reject the inevitability of the machine future, and ask again the old questions, What is the healthiest way to live? What is the most beautiful? Their answers cobble together aspects of the post-modern world and the paleolithic, asserting that we might for very good reasons choose to live in ways that resemble in part the ways of our ancestors and of the primitives that still inhabit corners of our planet. These visions are utopian statements of desire, full og joy and hope and danger, re-opening our notion of the future to a whole range of wild possibilities."

In the episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge I linked to above, Steve Paulson asks George R.R. Martin about the problems besetting science fiction today. He said, "What happened, I think, that social changes of the last fifty years has made the future something that we no longer want to go visit the way we did when I was a kid." I agree, up to a point. I think, on some level, no one really buys the old, urban, industrial "consensus future" that Robinson writes about here—for the same reasons he outlines. I disagree that we no longer want a vision of the future. I think people want a vision like that more than ever. But we want, in the words of artist Michael Green, a vision of "a future that works," not endless repetitions of the same technophilic fantasies. We want to visit a future that puts us back in touch with our humanity and a more-than-human world, not indulging pathetic "transhumanist" fantasies about some pseudo-religious Singularity. We want a future we can believe in and look forward to.

Fluency Play

2009-09-22T18:31:00.003-04:00

Joel Shempert has given Willem Larsen's "Pedagogy of Play" (Parts 2, 3 & 4) a new name: "Fluency Play." I rather like it. He's posted about it both in a thread on Story Games, and in a blog post. He provides a nice summary of what it means, too: "...basically instead of trying to assimilate an entire body of RPG procedures and put them into action from the get-go, you start at the most basic level and work your way up. The aim is to have a game experience with maximum creative flow, where the shared dreamspace is as unbroken as possible. So you only play at the level you're fluent at."

I've posted a good bit about "fluency play" here before, under the old, alliterative name. I like this term, and it does my heart good to see people responding to it, at last. In the thread, In the thread, Hans Otterson noted that it seemed like a way of hacking existing games. I can certainly understand that view. After all, games up until now have generally expected you to learn all the rules at once, sit down, and start playing. If fluency play can happen, it must then happen by hacking existing games to suit it—as Willem & I experimented with Polaris, or as I & Sean Nittner experimented with Mouse Guard. That said, I took Willem's description as a call to designers to design this into their games from the start. The version of The Fifth World that I'll soon start playtesting will have this. Reading the rules will form part of the game itself, and that will add rules, bit by bit. I look forward to playing other games that take this approach, too.

RPG's in the Mainstream

2009-09-17T23:51:00.002-04:00

I listen to a lot of gaming podcasts while at work. Sometimes, I run out, and have nothing to listen to, which can sometimes make for a very long day. I don't know if I'd say that I like Fear the Boot, which seems to stand astride the RPG podcasting world like D&D stands astride the RPG world, but I still listen to them. Very often, they aggravate me, but I generally don't bother saying anything because it really doesn't matter. In episode 163, they talk about how or whether RPG's might ever become "mainstream." I don't know if this topic matters any more than the others, but it provides me a good starting point to make some points that I think do have enough relevance to warrant the time to type them out.

Now, I have a hard time keeping everyone's voices straight sometimes while listening, and I listened to the episode several hours ago, so I hope you'll forgive me if I don't even attempt to attribute these points to one or the other of the hosts, much less get the wording quite right. You can listen to the episode itself for such details. However, the discussion raised some of the expected (snobby) points: that RPG's can't go mainstream because people don't want their entertainment to challenge them intellectually (which thankfully, another host repudiated by pointing out the increasing intellectual sophistication of films, TV shows with years-long plot arcs, and video games of both staggering technical complexity, and philosophical depth—like BioShock's treatment of Rand's Objectivism, or Fallout's ethical issues), and that people don't want entertainment to actively engage them. They want something to entertain them, allowing them to remain passive. Since the hosts addressed the first point in the show itself, I'll leave that point lie. The second one speaks very much to something that I've written a great deal about: the importance of participatory folk art.

I reject wholesale the notion that people want passive entertainment. That said, we have no shortage of people trying to sell passive entertainment, precisely because they can sell it. Before you can sit back and passively consume it, they have to make it: whether "it" takes the form of a movie shown at the theater, a DVD, a CD, music on the radio, a book, a symphony, a play, or any other "medium". That makes the art an object, which someone can sell to you.

If you play your own music with friends, who profits? If you tell stories around a campfire, where does that leave Hollywood studios? We have a culture which sees the world as a collection of objects, and looks for art as objects. It values the ephemera left behind from an artistic performance, but rarely values the performance itself. Least of all we value participatory folk art, the art done without any audience whatsoever, save one's fellow performers. Playing music at home, or jamming story.

And yet, in spite of that, we see participatory folk art nonetheless continue, like the stubborn weed that keeps poking its head heroically through the cement, reminding you that no matter how many times you pave it over, living soil lies underneath, life preceded you here, and it will prosper here long after you've gone. Kids invent freestyle rhymes on street corners, old time players get together to jam for no one but each other, and geeks roleplay.

You hear some people say that the tabletop RPG can't out-compete the computer graphics of an online MMORPG. As one of the Fear the Boot hosts in this episode said, we want visual entertainment. And yet, World of Warcraft has by far the biggest audience of any MMORPG, and it also has some of the worst graphics. Why do people play? Pay attention to what they talk about. Transferring to a different server, where a friend plays. The guild they belong to on this other server. The people they play with on a particular server. They don't play for the graphics, they play because in an increasingly isolated world, they want social connection most of all.

I think people yearn for more active, more social pastimes. So why haven't RPG's gone mainstream? Well, have you ever tried playing D&D? My wife compares it to math homework. RPG's emerged from wargames, among geeks, and that meant they emerged with a very complex mathematical system. We need to face the fact: RPG's appeal to a particular set of not-entirely-normal people. I would even go so far as to say that your traditional RPG has a design that appeals most of all to someone somewhere on the autism spectrum.

I think indie RPG's or story games actually could become mainstream. But, having grown historically out of RPG's, we try to sell them to RPG players. And yet, the very people who would most likely pick up an RPG like D&D have self-selected themselves as the very group that would least respond to a story game. If we sell to them, then yes, we'll always seem like a very small niche. Not to put too fine a point on it, but selling a very social game to a group where many have taken a liking to the activity precisely because it caters to an autistic condition, even if very mild, and the rest of us, to a large extent, mimic that behavior even if we don't have any such problems ourselves, doesn't seem like the best idea.

Many people who get to play a lot more story games than I do have reported how they've had a much easier time finding people happy to try these games among the general populace, than they have among RPG players. This does not surprise. Neither does it surprise me that, for one of these "uninitiated," they respond far better to a game like A Penny for My Thoughts or even Polaris than D&D.

RPG's remain a tiny niche hobby because the traditional RPG simply does not appeal to most people. Most people do not consider math homework fun. I do think RPG's could go mainstream, but not the "traditional RPG" we currently have. I think, one day, story games could compete not just with Monopoly, but with TV shows or films. But that won't happen until indie RPG designers begin to understand that even when that happens, they still won't get much more of the regular RPG market than they already have.

I do plan to take the Fifth World to some gaming conventions when I have it ready. In fact, I'll release the new public beta at GASPcon in November. But my big marketing push doesn't rely on reaching out to the RPG fans who will probably always like my game least of all. I plan to take it to ecovillages, intentional communities, permaculture design courses, nature awareness schools, and people like that. I think they'll enjoy it a whole lot more than RPG players.

The Fifth World Movies: Origin

2009-09-06T18:50:00.002-04:00

Plenty of people have pointed out the thematic and aesthetic similarities between Origin: Spirits of the Past, and another Fifth World-inspiring movie, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, some even going so far as to call it a "rip-off." I think that stretches too far, unless Nausicaä has a monopoly now on all post-apocalyptic ecotopian anime now. In some ways, Nausicaä seems like a much superior film, but I can't help but admire Origin's ambition. It tries to do a lot, and I think it does accomplish it—though it does require you to meet its challenge and really think about its themes. Otherwise, they seem a lot like plot holes.

Origin begins centuries after a civilization-destroying apocalypse, in which a genetic engineering experiment goes out of control. The plants shatter a good part of the moon, and rain down on earth, creating a sentient Forest that can move quickly and violently. While the human survivors begin to rebuild their lives, two characters that awaken from a cryogenic sleep have a harder time adapting to the new life, and seek out ESTOC, a device that will "return everything to normal," (and by "normal," they seem to mean that brief anomaly of civilized life)—by vaporizing all life with volcanic eruptions, and allowing life to start anew.

The protagonist of the story, a boy named Agito, follows in his father's footsteps by becoming "enhanced": tapping into the Forest's power to become a bit of an eco-superhero. You get a few scenes reminiscent of anime like Dragonball Z as Agito shows off his powers, but it comes with a price. Agito's father ended up becoming a tree, losing his personality completely to "the Forest consciousness." In his quest to save his girlfriend (the last of the two characters from the past to awaken), Agito risks using his power to such an extreme that he might follow in his father's footsteps in that, too, but in a matter of days, rather than decades.

Ultimately, the film ends with (what I personally felt as) a powerful statement about human kinship with a more-than-human world. But certainly, that takes a unique perspective. Like I said, the film can certainly seem challenging, and what I consider its strengths, to some, seem more like plot holes. As one Amazon reviewer put it, "The problem is, the plot makes no sense: presumably the whole living-in-harmony-with-Forest thing is symbolic of living in harmony with nature. But since the Forest was mutated by humans, wrecked the world, genetically altered the survivors and keeps civilization in a stagnant stranglehold, it's about as unnatural as you can get. And the alleged bad guys just want to switch the world back to its pre-mutant-plant state when man and nature were in balance... meaning that the Designated Anti-Nature Bad Guy is actually the Pro-Nature Good Guy."

This argument rests on an assumption that I'd consider extremely pernicious, but we've all heard it so many times that I think few of us would recognize it. William Cronon certainly would, though. I actually saw someone tweet a link to his 2005 essay, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," just earlier this week. In fact, if by "wilderness," we mean "some place where humans don't have an impact," then no wilderness has existed for thousands of years. But of course, that distinction only makes sense if you first accept that humans have a unique uniqueness in the world. Otherwise, humans belong to "nature," and Origin deals with shifting from an ecology where humans dominate to an ecology where humans participate.

Those themes resonate through The Fifth World, too. Origin does it with really captivating, fluid animation, and some beautiful, haunting music. I often listen to Kokia's "Cyouwa Oto" to "get in the mood" for working on The Fifth World. Like so many others, Origin presents a much harsher future than The Fifth World, but it still presents some very evocative images and sounds, along with resonant themes, that it can still help inspire you with the right tone.

Debt

2009-08-25T23:02:00.005-04:00

So, Bill said something pretty smart yesterday (he does that a lot). He said:

...make the mechanics instantiate setting, so that the rules of the game are the rules of the world. Then players will make sure that character behavior reinforces the intended social dynamics of the "setting." Where did we have the conversation about making the mechanics mirror a gift economy? *Do that*; that's awesome.

I can't find that discussion, either, but it sent me back to some of my old notes. In an earlier version, I tried to break everything into relationships, but that became too much book-keeping. But luckily enough, the very defining characteristic of a gift economy lies in not keeping such records. You don't have a quid pro quo arrangement. You just have your generalized debt.

According to Martín Prechtel, the Mayan word for "human" means "person in debt," as in, indebted to the land and your parents and your community and the other-than-human persons who give up their lives so that you can keep on living. In Soul Hunters, Rane Willerslev talks a great deal about the balance of debt that Yukaghir hunters incur when they go hunting, and the attendant fear that if they become too much in debt, someone may come to collect on that—making them or their families sick, or possibly even dying.

I think the gift economy itself could pull in that tension of trust that Ingold wrote about, that I've referred to before. You have to contribute what you can, and just trust that the rest of the world will do its part and give back to you. Nerve-wracking? Absolutely. Which also makes it great for the kind of tension that a fun game comes from.

Debt in this sense has the nice aspect of forcing you to balance. Too much debt, and you risk losing what you hold dear. But without any debt at all, you lose your connection to the rest of the world, your agency. This could bring the game back around to something played with coins (and I do really appreciate the twist of coins representing debt). Players can stack up adversity from a central pool of coins, and it takes that many encounters to resolve that adversity. Those coins go into a different pool, from which players can reward each other for "selling" their issue, like I'd worked out before...

...except that totally does not work with debt. Why do I have more debt from making you look good? Shouldn't you get debt from that? You owe me for making you look good? I "sell" your issue, and you acknowledge it by ... taking some debt for yourself? It all seems terribly backwards.

I thought about making characters spell out what they fear losing. Maybe you have to put "My life" somewhere on the list (and how much you value your life could say a lot about you: two coins? Five?). If you have that much debt, someone can take that many coins away from you by making you lose something at that level. I like keeping the game very simple to play, so I don't know if that adds up to too much book-keeping again.

More importantly, what does debt do for you? Why would you want debt? I guess I've come back around to the question of the resolution mechanic (argh!).

I don't want randomizers because animists don't consider the world a random place. They consider the world full of persons who respond to our pleas and our requests. I wonder if I've hit upon a fundamental contradiction here. On the one hand, if you build that into mechanics, you strip players of any choices they can make. On the other hand, if you leave it entirely up to the players, then your characters have no impact on what happens. I think I've playtested both extremes, and I didn't like either one.

I feel like I've run around in circles here. I think I need to hear other people's ideas to clear my head here. Sometimes the strangest thing, just a little phrase, unplugs something. It's happened often enough with this project! What do you think of this debt concept? Does it prompt any ideas for you?

Doubts

2009-08-24T22:07:00.003-04:00

I listened to some interviews from GenCon on some podcasts today: Judd Karlman on Theory From the Closet and John Wick on Bear Swarm! They left me doubting what I should do. Do mechanics focused on what you perceive really tell the kind of story the Fifth World should tell, or have I once again so over-thought and over-analyzed the situation that I've gotten tangled up in a bunch of fancy novel ideas, and lost track of what the game needs to do? Maybe I should just look to an existing ruleset like FATE, and focus my efforts on bringing the setting to life in an evocative way—like James Gurney's Dinotopia, or Will Huygen and Rien Poortvliet's Gnomes.

Or do you think this looks more like over-thinking and over-analysis? Maybe I just doubt myself chronically. Maybe I just like to sabotage myself (I think I've seen a bit too much evidence for that one lately, actually). I don't know. I just have a big wad of doubts and confusion tonight. Any ideas?

Latest & Greatest

2009-08-16T21:57:00.002-04:00

I finally have some time to work, and not a moment too soon. I just sent in my registration to run two playtests of the Fifth World at GASPcon X. I actually hope to help really bring a significant indie presence to that con this year, but more on that later. For now, I need to get a set of working rules, so I can get to playtesting! I watched Ten Canoes, and it occurred to me that a post pulling together everything I hope to achieve here might help me focus my efforts.

After reading Nørwegian Style, I took some inspiration from Matthijs Holter's game, Fuck Youth! which introduced me to the idea of reading the rules as part of play. I like that idea. It plays into the "pedagogy of play" idea that Willem & I have spent so much time experimenting with. It also reminds me of oral tradition, where you have a combination of very rigid, conservative structure, along with extemporaneous restyling, because the structure allows, even demands it. Having a recitation involved as part of play, with play taking place in response to the reading, gives you that combination.

So long as we have something we need to read, why not make it beautiful? Why not use that to set the tone? I want to give a new meaning here to the term "roleplaying poem." I also like the idea that Paul Tevis used in A Penny For My Thoughts, making the game rules themselves an in-setting artifact. I imagine the rules written as this poem written either now or perhaps a generation from now, trying to evoke the new world, copied by an order that mimics Dark Age monks who add illuminations, as well as their scholarly commentary in the margins, making it look almost like a medieval Talmud. That could provide a vehicle for presenting the different regions, too; the poem differs slightly in different regions, and this isolated brotherhood sends out the call for their members to collect these regional variations, along with notes from their field work, and send them back to the order's headquarters. I always had the notion of an anthropologist's field notes stuck in the back of my mind, actually; and it seems like it might fit into the idea of showing a setting, like James Gurney's Dinotopia or Will Huygen and Rien Poortvliet's Gnomes.

But that will come later. To start playtesting, I need that poem. How to write it? For local variations, I'd love to make it bleed local poetic traditions, maybe even reflect some of that "rhythm and lilt of the local soundscape, tales for the tongue, tales that want to be told" that David Abram writes about (1997:274), though I have my doubts as to whether I can really rise to that challenge. But hey, I made this open source for a reason—precisely for those parts I knew I couldn't achieve on my own! For the first iteration, I think I'll go classical—as in the classical epics. Open with an appeal to the muse—and just like John Milton turned the muse for Paradise Lost into the Holy Spirit, I'll look to the genius loci for my muse (a touch I really appreciated at the beginning of Terrance Mallick's most recent film, The New World).

If someone of our age wanted to write a great epic, what would they choose expect iambic pentameter, trying to echo the rhythm of Shakespeare? Naturally, I'll need to write it at least in e-prime—and e-primitive, as much as possible.

The poem will start off with the creation story—a quick, poetic overview of how the Fifth World came to pass, and hitting on the major themes. Then, it starts creating characters, around the table (sunwise, or clockwise, though that will vary by region—for instance, the Haudenosaunee dance counter-clockwise), from youngest to oldest. I don't want to talk too much about the rules here, especially since I want to leave that much open to adapt on as I write.

Hmmm, have I set enough restrictions for myself here?

Revisiting a Wicked Age

2009-08-01T22:38:00.003-04:00

I've spent a lot of time lately in my other life, working up to the point where these two finally intersect. It looks like I'll soon get a chance to playtest Microscope with the Myth Weavers (or at least some subset of them), and then, I'll have to start shifting into high-gear again with Fifth World development. But for the moment, I still have a more relaxed RPG schedule (which fits nicely with a more hectic everything-else schedule—as a quick example, I've moved and had minor surgery just in the past week). But I just finished playing two chapters of In a Wicked Age, and it's reminded me of everything I love about this game.

In a Wicked Age more-or-less invented the idea of oracles, something Willem riffed on last year (parts 1 & 2), and now, I have an even deeper appreciation for what he said then. The Three Rivers Oracle needs improvement: it lacks the right balance that Willem talked about.

But not just with the potential for oracles to seed a game with elements of a meaningful story, the game itself drives in a particular direction. Rather than dreaming of a character and then saying what that character would or would not do, we first establish "Best Interests"—the things your character wants—and in play, we explore to discover what kind of person would want those things. Robert E. Howard especially brought a strong streak of that kind of existentialism to sword & sorcery. Think of Conan, and how much the original stories define him in terms of his ambitions, lusts, and desires. In play, you wear each other down over time, driving, typically, towards a thunderous climax. My brother noted early on that In a Wicked Age usually results in myths or folktales.

Perhaps just as important—at least to me—when played right, In a Wicked Age thrives on sensory details and lush description. Between this and the oracles, it focuses play on finding the story. We discover the type of character who would want these things, rather than "make up" a character and then extrapolate her desires. We unravel together how the statements from the oracle weave together, and flesh it out with sensory details that move us towards a common dream. In a Wicked Age still involves a lot of story that we make up, but it has a lot of story for us to discover, too.

We played with the default oracles for once—The Unquiet Past in the first chapter, and The God-Kings of War for the second. We might even play again sometime during the week, simply because everyone wants to know what will happen next. Sometimes it seems with all the oracles available, not many people play the default oracles anymore. I think I could use more In a Wicked Age in my life—but then, I could use more storyjamming in general.

Characters with Personality

2009-07-05T20:47:00.002-04:00

The very first version of The Fifth World, the version we do not speak of, included MBTI types as part of character creation. Now, coming back to the medicine wheel and using Carl Jung's psychological types as the most stripped-down and generic of wise compasses, I can't help but feel like everything old has become new again. I don't know if the game has room for the extra dimensions of the full MBTI, but I've always thought that the emphasis on balancing opposites in Jungian psychology gave it a good ecological tone. Daniel Noel points to Jung as a valuable starting point for an authentic Western shamanism.

In the last version of the game, with the Prisoner's Dilemma, we wound up with a system that left little room for your character to influence it. My brother once despaired how the game left no place for the fearsomeness of his fearsome warlock to effect the outcome. The color beads mechanic offers several different ways to influence that. Now, I wonder about ways to keep track of that with a minimum of bookkeeping.

Jung's compass plots personality against two axes: one representing how you perceive the world (ranging from sensing to intuiting), the other how you make decisions (ranging from thinking to feeling). You'll always dominate in one; perhaps you perceive more than you judge, or vice versa. So your favored mode of perception (or judgment) would dominate. Jung called this your superior function. Then, you have your favored mode on the other axis: your secondary function. Your tertiary function sits on the other end of that same compass, and opposite your superior function, you'll find your inferior function.

So, someone who senses most of all could have thinking as a secondary function. She'd have a little harder time feeling, and a much harder time intuiting. Jung would represent this with a compass tilted slightly off-center, so the superior function points up, and the secondary function rises a little higher than the tertiary function. What an elegantly simple design for a character sheet!

I haven't decided entirely what to do with it, though. I see three possibilities: really, one of two options, and then the possibility of combining them.

Fill your bag with beads according to your functions. So, you get 12 beads colored for your superior function, ten for your secondary, eight for your tertiary, and six for your inferior function.
Add two successes for your superior function. Add one success for your secondary function. Subtract one success for your tertiary function, and subtract two successes for your inferior function.

The first means that most of the time, you'll pull your superior function most, and your inferior function least. The second means that you can always count on your superior function, and you'll always know that your inferior function will pose a challenge. The combination would really emphasize your choice: it would make your superior function very superior, and your inferior function very inferior. I think the combination might push it too far, losing that balance I like so much in Jungian psychology.

The last version had names and deeds that you would add up to make a reputation. Reputation never amounted to much in play, perhaps because counting up names and deeds required so much bookkeeping, but I liked the idea of names having mechanical significance. I still like it. I've taken great inspiration from Unconquered [PDF], Jonathan Walton's excellent hack of Exalted. There, the number of words in your name matches your Essence. I wonder if that could make a useful way of keeping track of something like "level"? Maybe, whenever you pull beads from your bag, you can pull a number equal to the capitalized words in your name?

I've also decided that this version needs to move more of the interesting parts of the game from setup to play. So, this version will have more character and setting creation as part of play, rather than something done before play. I have in mind a mechanic where players can add a story about the place where a scene takes place, perhaps something like the "flashback" mechanic in 3:16. That story would work like free-form traits in some other story games; it could give you more beads to pull, or additional successes. To emphasize the locality of these stories, perhaps you can use them once per story, and once additionally in a scene set in that place. Or, perhaps taking part in a scene set in that place recharges it. Perhaps you write down these stories on your medicine wheel, putting them in one of your four quadrants. Maybe, like the "weaknesses" in 3:16, a story associated with your inferior function has to feature your weakness, failure, or humiliation; maybe it works as something that others use against you, rather than something you use yourself.

We also had a problem finding motivations for characters. A lot of that probably comes from the as-yet largely undetermined setting. With an open source setting, I expect motivations to proliferate as the setting gets filled in more and more. But even so, that problem still reveals a weakness in the system. So one part of character creation that I plan to keep in the "warm-up" phase puts a spin on "see-me." After a brief introduction giving us a very rough outline of your character (since we'll really define these characters in play), we take a round around the table, and each player will put out something that your character wants to get from their character: love, respect, acknowledgment, forgiveness, apology, etc. So right from the beginning, we'll have player characters who all want something from everyone else. That seems like a great way to start the story!

All that, and a final game that only uses pieces you could quickly and easily gather, with things you could already have at home, and play effectively around a campfire.

Yes, I realize this has gotten a bit rambly, but I have a lot of ideas pouring out now, so please excuse the lack of structure here. I'd love to hear what you think.

Roleplaying Poetry

2009-06-30T17:52:00.002-04:00

So, why have I spent my time blogging these ideas, rather than writing rules and playtesting? Well, I have to wait a bit. Willem has gone on a little trip, so the Myth Weavers will have to wait until he gets back before we playtest Ben Robbins' game, Microscope. I want to play The Fifth World's history! When we finish, I'll have the story of how a globalized history fragmented into bioregional histories that we can only speak of in the plural. I'll have lots of good ideas, great scenes, and a breakdown of major periods will pass through.

See, I got Nørwegian Style last week. As I'd hoped, the book has proven full of great ideas to inspire the kind of play I want from The Fifth World. It did leave me with the disappointment of learning that "roleplaying poems" don't actually come in poetic form. They just provide short, intense play. But, I've taken some inspiration from an experimental and somewhat incomplete game called Virtue as well, to consider some other possible meanings of the phrase, "roleplaying poem."

Nørwegian Style had other ideas for me, though. The first game in the anthology, Matthijs Holter's Fuck Youth!, includes reading the rules as part of play. In fact, reading this game moved me all by itself.

That night, I had one of those wonderful, sleepless nights, the kind where you can't sleep because the ideas just keep coming, each one more exciting than the last.

Naturally, not everyone in The Fifth World thinks of the collapse of civilization the same way. I thought of an isolated order of monkish scholars maintaining a library, partly inspired by the monks of the Dark Ages, partly homage to A Canticle for Liebowitz. The book you hold in your hands never breaks character. It presents itself as something like, "The Fifth World, With the Commentary of the Scholars of the Distant Halls." "The Fifth World" here refers to well-known, old poem. I can imagine an introduction that begins says things like this: "It seems that every land has its own version of this poem. We hear of performances lasting hours, or even days, though the text itself cannot possibly last this long. Many scholars, after studying the text and witnessing oral performances, believe the poem provides a framework for storytelling, rather than a text entirely unto itself."

I can layout the book like a Talmud: the poem itself on the inside, with commentary, explaining the rules in simpler language but written like the interpretations of these monks, in the outer margins. Like Holter's game, you read the poem as part of the performance—and here I get to why I've hit a snag in writing the game. It needs a good pedagogy of play and good warm-ups that help tell the creation story. This becomes even more important if you have to set scenes at places you know. Our Microscope game will give me historical periods that every land goes through; that gives a structure to the creation stories, and a structure to developing the places where you set the scenes.

I think reading the poem will help set the tone, create a good flow for the game, and establish a good pedagogy of play all at once. It also makes the book interesting in and of itself. That one I'd keep short, as the most generic version of the poem, kept by the monks. It would end with an invitation, asking his brothers to record the versions of the poem in other lands and send them back to the library for study and preservation. That neatly sets the stage for a series of land-specific books, like, "The Fifth World, as Recited in the Restless Land." It would include the different variations (like bead colors) relevant to that land, but also include notes and illustrations for the brotherhood about life in that land.

A Little Close to Home

2009-06-29T18:26:00.003-04:00

I started a thread on Story Games asking folks what they'd look for in a game about exploration. I got a lot of good suggestions from that thread, but, at the risk of seeming like I just have an interest in patting the backs of people who follow my blog here and comment after yesterday's post thanking Michael Wenman, I really got a great suggestion there from Bill White. He wrote:

I think there was something powerful in The Fifth World's transformation of a modern landscape into a post-urban one. It's like that old Talking Heads song: "Here was a parking lot; now it's all covered with daisies." Make that a part of play: lay out a roadmap of the place you'd like to see transformed and have one output of play be alterations to the modern landscape. Another output of play then becomes integrating these newly defined zones into the post-urban politico-spiritual economy.

I could've jumped out of my chair when I read that. Yes! That totally captured what I wanted from the game. It captured what had excited me so much when I first saw Michael Green's Afterculture, that consideration of a future where the world has become magical—as Michael Green would put it, "cool"—again. A re-enchanted world, a world once again recognizably more-than-human.

So, now I wonder, what if you had to set every scene in a place you knew? Then, you had to tell us what that place looked like 400 years in the future? It seems like it could fit well with a mechanic built for awareness, where you have to spend points to add details to the scene.

I feel pretty excited about this. What do you think?

Back Around the Color Wheel

2009-06-28T19:57:00.002-04:00

Over a year ago, casting about for mechanics, Michael Wenman suggested using two colors of beads, perhaps white for skill and black for difficulty. You place a number of beads into an opaque bag to represent your skill or effort, and the difficulty you face. Then you reach into the bag, pull out a given number of beads, and count up the white ones. If you have enough white beads—"successes"—you succeed. It has a certain resemblance to Jared Sorenson's "Color Wheel" mechanic, as well. It has room for expansion, too: you could, for instance, expand it to four colors associated with the medicine wheel, and now you need to pull enough beads of the correct color.

Since rejecting pretty much all of my work thus far, I've found this idea sticking in my head again. It has a lot of the things that the Prisoner's Dilemma simply didn't. You can represent skill or effort with the number of beads you put in. You can represent the challenge you face in a very clear and direct way; you could use a sort of budget, for instance, to scale up how many beads of different colors you can add to the bag. You can tone difficulty by increasing or decreasing the number of successes you need, and you can tone specific advantages or disadvantages by increasing or decreasing the number of beads you can pull from the bag. In other words, it has lots of knobs you can tune, and that means you have more places where your fearsome warlock can see the story reacting to the fearsomeness of your warlock powers.

I rejected this idea before because it seemed like the same old randomization, telling the same story of a random universe. But now, I think it might fit the game very well, because it doesn't really present a random universe, but an unknown universe. The bag has black and white beads; you hold your success or failure in your hand, in the bag. You just don't know which yet. The tension comes not from an outcome as yet undecided, but an outcome as yet unknown.

But does it fall victim, once again, to setting every story in terms of conflict? I made that contention once, and certainly referring to "successes" does. But do we really have to call them "successes"? Perhaps each bead tells us something we learn. The four directions of the medicine wheel also have four different ways of engaging the world, so maybe those two white beads from the north mean we learned two intellectual things about the situation, and the three black beads from the west mean we learned three physical things about the situation. Maybe each bead demands a detail revealed, and instead of needing three "successes" to "overcome" the "challenge," we really need to know that third intellectual detail about the situation. Cast in those terms, it becomes a mechanic about discovery, rather than conflict. Especially if we actually need to narrate a detail for each bead—that would really seem to promote that descriptive flow I want to create.

Have I just taken the easy way and convinced myself that it works with a bunch of fancy words, or do you think this really works? What do you think of this idea?

A Sensory Experience

2009-06-20T20:11:00.004-04:00

Last night, I got to play the first regular mission in our Mouse Guard campaign with the Myth Weavers. Episode #14 has the recording, and I just posted an adventure log for the session on the campaign page on Obsidian Portal. But none of that will likely tell you just how much fun I had with this game. It's really the most fun I've had playing an RPG in a very, very long time.

It got me thinking about why I enjoyed it so much, and by comparison, why something like my D&D campaign so often falls flat for me. It didn't take long to realize that what I'd enjoyed most in this session came when I really got on a tear describing things. The others said they enjoyed the game, but I didn't hear anyone else describe it with the kind of superlatives I felt. I had a "gamer high" that kept me up for another hour, despite how late it had gotten by the time we ended. And editing the recording for the podcast, it also became clear that only I had really gotten onto a good tear like that. More to the point, I'd gotten on two or three of them. Thinking back, I can remember other games I've enjoyed, and in each one, I can remember at least one point—usually what stands in my memory as the high point—when my description of something suddenly becomes vivid, excited ... fluid.

I hit a flow experience in my description. I don't have to search for words, because I play average. I don't need to struggle to think of what to add to my description. I can see it in my head, and the description comes easily, like running water.

I very often struggle with description. In speech, if not in text, I consider myself halting, hesitant, tongue-tied and thoroughly lacking in eloquence. But not when I get on a good tear. It becomes fluid and effortless. Key to it, I think, lies in that I stop trying to come up with a good description, and instead, I really go there, and I describe what I see. So, the challenge lies not in imagining the scene, but in describing the scene I see.

In April, I wrote about something I cheekily called, "The Storyjammer's Journey." In that series, I described real story as something we pursue, rather than something we make up. In Play Unsafe, Graham Walmsley advises to play average.

Do the obvious thing: the thing that obviously happens next in the story; the thing that you think everyone expects to happen. Paradoxically, that obvious thing may, to everyone else, seem original and brilliant. ... Naturally, not every "obvious" thing you say will be brilliant. Often, what you think is an obvious next step in the story will, indeed, be an obvious step in the story. That's fine. When you respond obviously, 90% of the time, you'll carry the story forward naturally. If you'd tried to be clever, 90% of the time, you'd have thrown the story off course. And, when you're obvious, one time in ten, you’ll be brilliant.
Try to be brilliant and you'll fail. Be obvious and, often, you'll be brilliant. (p. 8)

This has everything to do with finding a story rather than making up a story. I suppose I should have already realized this, that I enjoy stories that we can explore, not stories that we make up. But this has helped me realize something: I enjoy this sensory experience of the story we find most of all in RPG's. I play RPG's for that.

So, this gives me a design goal for The Fifth World: to drive towards and support that rapturous description of the story we find.

The Fifth World Movies: Pathfinder

2009-06-16T18:48:00.002-04:00

I'd thought that discussing movies with hints of The Fifth World's tone, like Nausicaä, would give me enough to post regularly. We see how well that plan worked out!

Well, today, I'd like to talk about a much less well-received movie: 2007's Pathfinder. Rotten Tomatoes gives it just an 11%. I won't really argue the critics there: I won't vouch for the dialogue, or the plot, or the pacing. It seems like a simple gore-fest, and I have no doubt that to the director and most of the audience, it held little more than that.

I even had some gripes beyond that. For instance, one scene has a Norseman calling to his fellows by mimicking a bird call. Peter Charles Hoffer makes some excellent points about this very thing in Sensory Worlds in Early America. To the Europeans, "the woods" seemed dark and scary, home to witches and warlocks. They yearned for the comfort of calls and cries that broke the native pattern, that created a sharp distinction between the "natural" and the "artificial." Meanwhile, why wouldn't natives rely on techniques like "concentric circles"? You simply can't sneak up on a true native in his own home—every bird and animal in the forest has already announced you from miles away.

I'd expect many would feel disappointed at the bizarre aesthetic of these "Norsemen." I can forgive the heavy metal, anachronistically gothic look, though; it plays with perception cleverly, presenting us not what they actually looked like, but instead captures some of how they must have seemed to the Algonquin people they encountered. The shots of the Algonquin village in the beginning provide one of the best visions of what the Fifth World might look like that I've seen on film.

But what makes me give Pathfinder any consideration at all actually has to do with that non-existent plot. Yes, it begins with the classic action film set-up. The protagonist, orphaned protagonist, Ghost, fights against his biological relatives on behalf of the family that took him in, along the way contending with his anachronistic identity issues. But he fails. He fails so completely that the titular Pathfinder must take his place and die violently, instructing Ghost to exchange paths. The Pathfinder dies the violent death that Ghost's violent quest for vengeance sent him towards, and instead becomes pathfinder to the Norsemen. Only then does he manage to succeed; not by his own strength, but by following a Trickster's path, and bringing his enemies to the place where the land defeats them.

In that, Pathfinder traces a very interesting contrast between the Western action hero who succeeds by overpowering his enemies, and the native Trickster hero who succeeds by aligning himself with the land, and then the land defeats his enemies. It shows the grisly, violent end of the Western action hero, and the eventual triumph of the Trickster, nto by his own strength, but by the land's.

Yes, Pathfinder has no shortage of flaws. Despite that, it has something very valuable in it, I think. If you don't mind a violent, gory movie, it might even make watching it worthwhile.

Story Beyond Conflict

2009-05-26T22:34:00.003-04:00

"Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing."

Ursula LeGuin wrote that. It seems fitting to have such a stark revelation come from one of the great grandmothers of ecotopian fiction, and one of the great inspirations for The Fifth World. Who else would you expect it from, right?

I read this in a thread on Story Games from the beginning of the month, a thread I would have missed entirely had Mike Sugarbaker not posted a quick note at the end.

I have fallen prey to this conflation; I've heard "story is conflict," repeated over and over again, like a mantra. At first, I balked at the suggestion, and thought, "Surely, stories can go beyond that," but eventually gave in to the idea. Now, I look at our recent playtests and what I've started calling the game's "immersion problem," and see it all stemming from this basic mis-step.

Of his own game, Jason Morningstar wrote, "Fiasco, which started out as a very conflict-oriented game, evolved into an outcome-oriented game. Once I made this decision the experience of play improved a lot. It allows scenes where you beat a guy to death with a hammer if that's what is required, but also accommodates pretty subtle, introspective color scenes as well. Not relentlessly 'searching for the conflict' feels pretty good." I've felt that problem in The Fifth World, too. We "search for the conflict." Worse, we rush to the conflict, because the rules all deal with how to handle conflict, because they start from that premise that conflict means story. But that has led me astray; it's given me a game that seems, at best, like a tool for planning a story you might one day write, though frankly, it doesn't even seem like a good tool for that.

As I often do, I find wisdom in Jonathan Walton's words. He suggests:

Have interesting stuff happen in freeplay too, instead of just where the mechanics are.
Have the non-conflict stuff have mechanical significance (if there are mechanics).
Have resolution mechanics that don't frame things as inter-player (or player-GM) conflicts.

Right now, I think you could fairly describe The Fifth World as very heavily inspired by Primetime Adventures. This has me thinking of pulling more from Polaris, perhaps even to the extent of cutting out the Prisoner's Dilemma mechanic in favor of negotiations with ritual phrases, a la Polaris, with a map to drive the arc forward, rather than that game's drive towards a tragic end.

I always come up with ideas like this right before a con, too.

Playtest Report

2009-05-26T20:11:00.002-04:00

A one-on-one playtest doesn't reveal as much as a playtest with several players. To boot, Giuli has a hard time throwing herself into a game, and as far as pushing scene and stakes, she plays really gently. That said, a one-on-one game of The Fifth World doesn't exactly feel like "lone wolfing," either, since we don't have that player/GM imbalance.

The printed materials for the lands and the creation story at the beginning did do a lot to establish the tone, I thought. The material itself definitely needs some work, but just doing it that way really helps establish a tone for the game. Giuli said it reminded her of the Haggadah, though I've said before that the Haggadah might have a good claim to the title of world's oldest printed RPG.

This session did teach me that I need to explicitly point out that while the mechanics tell you where you can set the next scene, they say nothing about when the scene should take place, or what they should deal with. You can switch between plotlines, have scenes set in the past or future, etc. Giuli assumed that the story had to progress from one scene to the next, in chronological order, with the same characters. That extra restriction may have contributed to the immersion problem, by making it harder to establish the next logical scene.

The Pedagogy of Playing Mouse Guard

2009-05-22T18:37:00.004-04:00

Edit May 23, 3:18 PM: Made some tweaks to improve the flow. You fill in your cloak color after your Accomplishment, and your Guard Rank as part of your Experience. Also, added some bits of flavor text at the appropriate times in a mouse's life from the book.

Willem started writing about the Pedagogy of Play (parts 1, 2, 3 & 4), proposing a principle that we should teach games in play, and providing an example with Polaris. We both experimented with this, me at home and on Skype, and him at Gamestorm. Apparently, Willem has a mutual friend with Sean Nittner and Justin Evans, the hosts of one of my favorite podcasts, Narrative Control. Unfortunately, in this particular game of telephone, by the time they got the story, the idea had gotten watered down to simply "icebreakers." Here I enter the story again, because I think I mentioned this episode to Willem first, with my suspicion that the unnamed GM from GameStorm in question meant him. Willem commented on the podcast thread, which led Sean to Willem's articles in the "Pedagogy of Play" series on the College of Mythic Cartography, where Sean commented that he wanted to do this for Mouse Guard. So this convoluted tale in which I played my bit part has worked out very nicely for me; I've mentioned here before how excited I've gotten to play Mouse Guard, and naturally, I'd planned to give it the "Pedagogy of Play" treatment on my own. But thanks to all this, Sean has already done a really good job of it.

Mouse Guard presents an interesting case. In some ways, it already has mechanics with respect to the storyjammer's journey, particularly with the Prologue and Mission Assignment at the beginning, and assigning rewards at the end of the game. As great a framework as that already provides, in between, the GM has a turn, and the players have a turn. In Polaris, we could use rounds of scenes to incrementally increase the complexity of the rules we had in play. With two turns per session, a lot of the pedagogy for Mouse Guard would have to come down to just planning a gradually-escalating session as a GM.

That said, with a little elbow grease and cleverness, we can still find a way to teach a game—even a game as complex as Burning Wheel—in play.

Character Creation

Rather than use the Mouse Territories in David Petersen's comics, I've decided to put things a little closer to home. As an ardent bioregionalist, I value the stories that bind us to a particular land most of all. I want the stories I tell to increase my kinship with my home, and a game like Mouse Guard can really hit that target—you get to tell the secret, heroic epics that go on in your land, just beyond our sight and appreciation. So instead, I've named our campaign, "Tales of the Black Forest." That name, "the Black Forest," summons up images of the Black Forest in Germany and all the fairy tales that come from there (at least it does for me). But it also refers to the old name for Cook Forest, one of the last remaining old growth forests in the eastern United States. Instead of Lockhaven, this Mouse Guard comes from "the Cathedral," in Cook Forest's Forest Cathedral, hidden in a rock curled into the roots of one of the towering, ancient white pines of the forest—which just happens to evoke the image of another white pine, the "Tree of Peace" of the Haudenosaunee who once lived in this land.

But I haven't defined anything else. For the most part, I've left this Black Forest—as far as the mice there care—an empty canvas. I want to kick off our campaign with a session where we'll fill in some of the Black Forest and create characters. Here, a lot of Sean's suggestions fit in really well, which I have blatantly pilfered below.

Mouse Ball. (Derived in part from "Sound Ball"). The real spirit of the game lies in seeing the world from a mouse's perspective, where crabs seem like overwhelming monsters, and moose walk the earth like gods. So, I'll start by saying something that would threaten a mouse—say, "Owls." Then I'll throw the ball. The person who catches it has to repeat what I said, and add something else that would threaten a mouse, like, "Yes, owls, and storms." Then that person throws the ball to someone else, who has to repeat the last threat that person said, and add a new one, like, "Yes, storms, and snakes," and so on. This gets us into the present moment, building on each other's ideas, throws out ideas, and gets us in sync with the spirit of the game.
The Epic Journey. (Taken from Justin Evans' example from the aforementioned episode of Narrative Control). "Send any mouse to the job and it may or may not be done. Ask the Guard to do the task, even death cannot prevent it from completion." The current player picks one of those dangers that we named in Mouse Ball. Each of the other players throw out problems that a guardmouse might encounter on the way to solve that problem. Then, the original player tells the shortest story he can, using all of the problems thrown out, about a guardmouse who solves that problem. Here, the players start getting into the mindset of the Mouse Guard, while working on how to hold the spotlight for a short amount of time, and incorporate the ideas of others.
Forming the Patrol. (Based on "Yes, and"). I'll start this game as the GM, saying, "You'll need to form a patrol." After that, the players will take over, describing what that patrol should include, bit by bit, beginning each statement with "Yes, and." For example, "Yes, and we'll have a surly, bitter patrol leader." "Yes, and we'll have an eager young tenderfoot." Simply repeating "Yes, and" often changes the way people listen, from waiting for their turn to speak, to a mode where they listen for what to incorporate. At the same time, we start building up some ideas of what our patrol will look like.
See Me. At this point, the players get to write something on their character sheets: Name, Age, Home and Fur Color. They get to state those things, and I ask the "Mouse Nature" questions from the book (p. 299). Then we begin a round of "See Me." Each player throws out details of the character they see in their mind from that name, age and fur color. It continues until the original player vetoes a statement by saying, "I don't see it." We do this for each character.
Growing Up. This one could use some more ideas, but I've pulled a lot of this from the "Recruitment" chapter in the book.
1. Hometown. The player describes his character's hometown and parents, and his early life. Check off skills for natural talent and parents' trade, and how they convince people (p. 301), and add two traits (p. 308).
2. The Cathedral. I begin this round by telling them that the Guard recruited them as children, and they went to the Cathedral to train. Tell them: "The paths between our settlements are where the Guard live. They find the open space, the freedom and the danger to be more of a home than the secure doors and stone walls of any town or village." Each player describes the Senior Artisan underjavascript:void(0) whom they apprenticed, and the mentor who trained them. They get to place checks for these skills now (p. 302).
Accomplishment (Taken from Dogs in the Vineyard). Based on the mentor they described, I come up with a 4 ob they need to face with a single, independent test. The player to that player's right describes how he helps, and gives one helping die. Regardless of whether they succeed or fail, they should now write down a Belief and an Instinct. The mentor then presents his apprentice with a cloak. The player needs to tell us the color, and why the mentor chose that color.
Experience. Now, the mice join the Guard. They swear the oath: "We as Guard offer all that we are to protect the sanctity of our species, the freedom of our kin, and the honor of our ancestors. With knowledge, sword, and shield, we do these deeds, never putting a lone mouse above the needs of all, or the desire of self above another. We strive for no less than to serve the greatest good." The player tells us a little about the character's experience in the Guard. The player puts down his Guard Rank, and adds checkmarks for experience, specialty and wises (pp. 302-303). Patrol leaders and guard captains get another trait (p. 308).
Friends. Each player tells about a friend they have (pp. 310-311). I ask a series of questions to establish their Resources and Circles (pp. 306-307).
Enemies. Each player tells me about an enemy they have. I set up a versus test with their enemy.
Suit Up. Characters get gear, one fate point and one persona point.
Group Challenge. (I take this from Sean Nittner credits this to Judd Karlman, Justin Evans, Ken Hite and Ryan Macklin). We play through one full conflict that happens during the patrol's first mission. Each of the players has, by now, gone through an independent test and a versus test, so this just involves choosing actions and playing out the right tests as a consequence.

The Game

Evan Gardner's "Where Are Your Keys?" language fluency game establishes an important principle. If I might sully my lily-white E-Prime for a moment, performance is the only practice. We want games that fulfill prescriptive and diagnostic functions at the same time. We can figure out what level of skill you have by playing, and by playing, we increase your skill level, too. The "Where Are Your Keys?" game works like this, and so does a good Pedagogy of Play for storyjamming. It means you don't use this iterative complexity just for the first time you play; you use it every time you play. As you get better, you spend less time on the less complex levels, and proceed more quickly to the more complex levels. But your skill level doesn't stay at one level or another statically. Skills atrophy, or you might just have an off day.

Introductions. Every player introduces the character of the player on his left as eloquently as he can. As GM, I describe the season and the weather.
Prologue. One player delivers the prologue. If everyone feels satisfied with it, that player can alleviate a condition or recover a point of taxed Nature.
Assignment. I frame a scene where the patrol gets their mission assignment. The players write their goals for the mission.
The GM's Turn. For the first hazard, pick something that the patrol could potentially overcome with a single test; if I want to include a conflict, I should save it for the second hazard, and perhaps even leave it until after the first mission.
The Player's Turn. Hopefully, by this point, the players have seen pretty much what they can do, so they don't have much to learn before they can make their decisions about what they want to accomplish on their turn.
Ending the Session. Now we assign awards as a group; as the rules explicitly state, "Don't vote, decide." We don't use democracy for this, we use consensus.
Questions. Before we break, each player has to give an unanswered question about their character that they want to explore more.

Tangibles

Like Ryan Macklin, I like tangibles gaming. I also have some skill as a graphic designer, and David Petersen makes so much of his art available online through his website, that I plan to really go to town with the idea of conflict cards that some people brought up on the Burning Wheel forums. I've heard complaints before about the complexity of conflicts in Burning Wheel, so I plan to focus my creative energy on that problem, at least for now.

Trying it Out

Now that I've read the book and figured out a "Pedagogy of Play," I hope to make characters sometime soon. Camp Nerdly puts a hole in my schedule, but with luck, I'll have a follow-up report on whether this works out or not in a few weeks.

Fifth World Movies: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

2009-05-17T17:18:00.003-04:00

Early on, when I thought I could skip right ahead to writing the game in full, I included a sidebar about movies that had inspired some part of The Fifth World. I really appreciate when games do this—like at the end of Legend of the Five Rings, or in the sidebar at the beginning of the Eberron Campaign Setting. Sometimes, that can help more than anything to help put you in the right frame of mind and get the right tone for the setting.

Unfortunately, nothing really hits the right tone for The Fifth World. That very vacuum gives me one of my main drives to keep working on this: nowhere do we have a really good vision of an optimistic future that really works. I think that lack of vision has a lot to do with why things have gotten to the point they have in the world. It seems odd, but the right work of fiction might make all the difference. I wonder how different today's world might look if Gene Roddenberry had stuck to Westerns.

So, I found that a simple list of movies won't suffice; The Fifth World just doesn't fit so neatly into an already-defined genre. All the same, I did find a list of movies that shared some themes; with a little explanation and a few caveats, I thought they could really help communicate the tone of The Fifth World. So, rather than sit on this any longer, I'll start posting them here.

I'll start with Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, because of all the movies on the list, this one probably bears the least explanation. It starts with a very similar premise: the survivors after the collapse of civilization. The relationship between the toxic jungle and its insects and humans could fit perfectly into The Fifth World: misunderstanding and tension might abound, but you need each other, and ultimately, you have to find a way to live with one another. Like The Fifth World, Miyazaki's films present problems that you can rarely solve simply through outright confrontation; it poses instead the dilemma of reconciliation. That might sound very soft and simple, but Nausicaä provides a clear example of how exciting such a story can get. Right at the beginning, it provides a scene that gives me one of the best illustrations I have, with Nausicaä and the fox squirrel. Lord Yupa warns her of their vicious streak, and the baby's particular rambunctiousness. But the Princess offers her hand nonetheless, and says, "There's nothing to fear." The fox squirrel bites down, hard. A bit of blood sprays. Nausicaä winces, but otherwise shows no reaction. "See?" she says. "Nothing to fear." Nausicaä's authenticity proves so powerful, so genuine, so radical that the fox squirrel becomes ashamed of what he's done, and begins licking the wound. He remains fiercely loyal to her throughout the rest of the film. That scene inspired me to include mechanics in The Fifth World for changing relationships: a display of unflinching vulnerability, when you know it will hurt you, can Open a relationship up.

Nausicaä examines that theme over and over again. The titular heroine succeeds precisely because of how much she will sacrifice to prove her authenticity to all sides, separated by doubt, suspicion, misunderstanding, and the festering old wounds that spawned all of that. She doesn't became a heroine by overcoming her enemies; she becomes a heroine by restoring relationships, whether between different groups of humans, or ultimately, between humans and the earth from which they'd become estranged.

All that said, I still wouldn't put Nausicaä on a list of Fifth World movies. Its aesthetic goes in a rather different direction. What exactly fuels Nausicaä's glider, much less a Tolmekian airship? And what exactly makes Nausicaä a "princess" anyway? Watching it last night, I told Giuli, "This is the kind of princess I can appreciate: No special treatment, no special rights, and she can't order anyone to do anything. Kind of makes you wonder what makes her a 'princess', doesn't it?"

More importantly, Nausicaä depicts humanity in a far more dire state than The Fifth World. The toxic jungle swallows up one kingdom after another, and many worry whether or not humanity will go extinct under the pressure. The Fifth World supposes that the last collapse goes much along the same line as past collapses, where people settle in to new patterns of living, and quality of life generally improves. Despite the sometimes idyllic life we get to see in the Valley of the Wind, Nausicaä still invokes a lot of the classic post-apocalyptic tone, wherein the loss of civilization leads to a terrible dark age for humanity.

That said, I have yet to see the film that comes as close to The Fifth World in tone as Nausicaä; it comes as close as any film would to getting on a list of "Fifth World Movies" without an asterisk.

Playtest Report

2009-05-16T18:36:00.002-04:00

Just finished the first playtest of the new v0.7.0 rules. Well, "rules" seems a little grandiose—more of an outline of rules, really. But still enough to test the basic concepts.

We (myself, my wife & my brother) wound up with an interesting story, with lots of interesting reversals, and lot more uncertainty about who would open or close than we've gotten before. It still didn't hit nearly the right tone, though. Personally, I think that had a lot to do with the lack of aids: defined land types and templates, oracles, bits of read prose for the creation story, etc. Those things really help establish the feel, and while I hoped that the three of us could pull together an acceptable playtest without those aids, my wife & brother ended up taking the blank space with a shrug, rather than an invitation to get creative. The shrug and "I don't know" feel perpetuated itself, giving us a very mechanic, superficial game. Even so, it yielded a good story with a few interesting moments. I blame it on the lack of aids, but my wife & brother had different interpretations.

My brother didn't like the warm-up games at the beginning, and felt they came across as too much metagaming. I intend those as tone-setting and warming up, but without the aids, they definitely failed at setting the tone, and while I can see what he means about it coming across like a metagame thing, I think this has more to do with the lack of aids. Next time, we'll use aids, and see if that alleviates the problem; if not, my brother might have something.

He also found it frustrating that he had few means of influencing what happens in an encounter. If the other closes, you have no way to get your stakes. We talked about some ways to address those: either an ability to impress someone with your names or deeds, and/or special Powers, an ability from your Home that gives you the ability to alter a specific rule under specific circumstances (inspired by "Specific Strengths" from In a Wicked Age). Both would require spending Will to use.

The Open/Closed paths, and the system for introducing and resolving Trouble, proved quite effective. We had some comments about the Endgame conditions creating too much metagame concern that disrupted immersion, but I'd like to see how that goes with some solid tone-setting aids in place before I write it off.

A Board Gamey New Version

2009-05-04T13:05:00.005-04:00

I finished a quick outline of the v0.7.0 rules last night. I haven't playtested them yet, so I can't say much about them. It does stand out, though, that it seems much more like a board game. Putting the entire game on one map, like one game board, might have a lot to do with that. I don't necessarily think of this as a bad thing, though. Board games, after all, have other properties that I think RPG's could learn from, like well-defined, easy rules, which eliminate the need for a GM or umpire because they eliminate the need for judgment calls, and possibly a wider audience appeal. In the case of The Fifth World, I haven't eliminated judgment calls entirely, I've just made who gets to make the judgment call part of the game itself, something you play for. People who've played earlier versions remember the map most of all, so I've simply made that a bigger part of the game. I think it helps reinforce the bioregional themes, but I'll have more to say once we've had a chance to playtest.

Half-Baked Fate

2009-05-02T23:19:00.002-04:00

I posted this question on the Forge.

I really like the basic idea of Fate and Will. It puts adversity in terms that I really like: something to feel grateful for, a chance to really show what you have, something to embrace now so you can succeed later on, and so on. It also makes the flow of resources through the map an important part of the game. I might end up discarding the terms "Will" and "Fate"; now, it looks like you call it "Will" when you have it, and you call it "Fate" when the land does. Through the game, you free this energy up from the land, use it to move around, and deposit it back into the places you visit. I love that the rules work out like that, since it so nicely mirrors the role of animals in any functional ecology—and reinforces the view, when you finish the game and look back on it, that you've recapitulated the creation story, and taken part in creating the region.

How to implement it in the game presents a somewhat sketchier problem. Basically, we have to deal with the Czege Principle: "creating your own adversity and its resolution is boring." In traditional games, one player (the GM) creates the adversity, and the other players create the resolution. The other players can have a sense of cooperation because one player alienates himself from the rest, and in compensation, gets absolute narrative authority. I don't consider this a particularly healthy solution, but so far, alternatives have not always shaped up very well. One popular approach in indie games simply abandons the idea of players working together, and has players opposing each other as harshly as possible. I've enjoyed games like this, including In a Wicked Age, but I don't think it fits the spirit of tribal cooperation I'd expect from The Fifth World. In principle, the economy of Fate and Will presents a great solution. Players introduce adversity for one another, but not out of malice or opposition; rather, as an opportunity to gain the resources they'll need to succeed in the end.

But, what does one point of Fate get you? A raging, hungry grizzly bear and a mosquito bite both seem like adversity. Wouldn't a nice, cooperative player always try to introduce the weakest adversity possible? How much bang should you get for your Fate buck? Or, how do I make sure that a hungry grizzly and a mosquito bite don't cost the same?

Mouse Guard

2009-04-29T09:02:00.002-04:00

In The Way of the Human Being, Calvin Luther Martin writes about the experience of "the skin of the earth," and uses moving, poetic description to tie together traditional stories, the first-hand experiences of American Indians, folk tales and myths, to reveal a common understanding that so much of what we call our "humanity" has to do simply with the experience of the world in our own bodies. That, far from a simple exercise in anthropomorphism, every animal experiences the world in a way that we might call "human." Yes, differences stand out. But so do the similarities.

For Rane Willerslev, those differences matter as much as the similarities. In his ethnography of the Siberian Yukaghirs, he also writes about the Yukaghir experience with other animals, and strange encounters where hunters go, as Martin might put it, past "the skin of the earth," to a world where elk experience themselves as humans. Willerslev makes his case with phenomenology and philosophy, but comes to much the same conclusion: the relativity of the human experience as less a unique feature of our species, and more the experience of any animal in its own body.

I plan to write a long article on anthropomorphism and animism later this year for a new web magazine called Toby's People, so I don't plan to write it all out here, but suffice to say that, with certain key caveats observed, stories of anthropomorphic animals may mean more than a simple flight of fancy: they mean what an anthropologist might recognize as the difference between an etic perspective and an emic perspective, between the view of an outsider looking in, and someone on the inside describing what he takes part in, lives in, and participates in. Biology excels at the etic perspective; so-called anthropomorphic animal stories try to deal with the emic perspective.

"Somewhere within its borders we unveil the very deepest powers of this aboriginal land, of possessing it in one's blood and brain, as Scott Momaday knew we must. Somewhere we must cross over—to where it possesses us." (Martin, 1999:46)

I enjoy a good RPG. But even more than that, I see in them the potential to regenerate oral tradition, to find stories rather than "make them up," the really important stories that create kinship and tell us something about the land we live in, stories that, once we learn them, give us a new appreciation and a deeper sense of belonging for the land we live in, that help make us more native to our home. Let's face it, a good RPG takes time, not just to play, but to learn, plan and prepare. If I can get that from it, I consider that time quite well spent. And if I don't, I don't know what I've spent that time for.

Which gets me to this: I love Mouse Guard! I haven't gotten to play any Burning Wheel games yet, but this game has a lot of powerful stuff going on: the mouse-world, the prominence of the seasons and the weather, and grand, medieval epics that unfold not in some imaginary fantasy world, but right here, in this land, just out of sight. Most importantly of all, it re-enchants the land we live in, lets us see the magic and adventure of where we live, here and now.

I've started getting together a Mouse Guard game, but it won't happen in the same Mouse Territories as the comics. No, we'll have "The Tales of the Black Forest." Besides the medieval references to Germany's "Black Forest," long ago, people called Cook Forest—one of the few remaining old-growth forests in the eastern United States, and a place that means a lot to me, personally—"the Black Forest."

As it happens, it seems I have a few things to learn from Burning Wheel, too. It turns out that it already beat me to the punch of "cool-down games," including using them to hand out rewards. I can see a really good, three-step process, like the storyjammer's journey, already nascent in the rules.

I haven't even finished reading the book yet, so I may have more to say about all this, but for now, I'll just end by saying that I haven't felt this excited about a game in quite some time. Thank you, Luke Crane!

The Fifth World in Forge Parlance, One More Time

2009-04-20T22:38:00.014-04:00

I've done this exercise a couple times already. The "Big Three" and the extended "Power 19" provide a tool for helping focus a game design. After all the rambling thoughts I've written up lately, from maps to narrative economies to "The Storyjammer's Journey," I've put a lot of ideas into play here. I tried taking a crack at some rules, and found myself overwhelmed by all of it. So I think I need to take a step back, try the Power 19 once again, and see if I can pull all of this in a little tighter.

Concept & Summary

See Emily K. Dresner-Thornber's two-part article, "The Crunchy Bits" (Part 1, Part 2)

Concept

Four hundred years after the fall of civilization, humans thrive in feral tribes, by basing their lives in webs of relationship rather than technical mastery. You play the people who keep those relationships strong.

Summary

Four hundred years after the fall of civilization, humans became feral out of necessity. The old ways no longer worked. They rediscovered magic, tribal life, and became native, deeply rooted in the place they lived. They live in a more-than-human world, defined by their relationships with other persons—whether human or otherwise. They enjoy a more peaceful, healthy, carefree life, but that world of relationships requires constant participation. It requires them to continue the work of creating the world every day. You play those people.

The Big Three

1. What is your game about?

The Fifth World tries to give its players an experience, however brief, of animist life—life in a more-than-human world, defined by relationships with other persons, whether human or otherwise. That means both the wonder of reawakening to a living, vibrant world, and the kinds of challenges faced by someone living in a world defined by relationships.

2. What do the characters do?

Each character belongs to a particular place in a very special way. Characters owe responsibilities to those places, and must work to keep a healthy balance of connections, relationships and resources flowing. The characters live in a dynamic world, one that requires their constant participation to continually renew itself. A hunter helps the land renew itself by taking the right number of animals and no more; a storyteller helps the land renew itself by telling the right stories in the right season; a gardener helps the land renew itself by planting the right plants together at the right time; a shaman helps the land renew itself by performing the proper rites in the correct fashion, and so on.

When things don't go so well, when a hunter takes one too many animals, or a shaman fails to perform an important rite, misfortune may fall upon the people. The players take the role of those characters who step forward to correct those situations, and put the human community back into proper relationship, whatever that may require.

3. What do the players do?

The players hunt story. The story already exists in the landscape; tracing over that, tracking it across the landscape, the players find the story, and in so doing, discover the bond their characters have with one another, and with the land.

That sounds very flighty and high-minded, but the region—the system of places and paths connecting them—establish a setting map, a relationship map and a theme map simultaneously. The story really does already lie in the landscape. The themes recapitulate aspects of the creation story, and the story unfolds with the changing of the places and paths

The Power 19

4. How does your setting reinforce what your game is about?

The Fifth World focuses on the lives of feral human communities living in a post-civilized world. They face challenges left over from civilization, the challenge of negotiating a space for the human community in a more-than-human world, the challenge of keeping the world in a dynamic balance between mutually exclusive pressures and interests, and the regular, inter-personal challenges that arise inside any human community.

But the game also presents a hopeful vision of the future. These communities face challenges, but they also have the skill, strength and wisdom to face those challenges. They live dynamic, vibrant, rich lives, rather than the impoverished desperation more common in the post-apocalyptic genre.

The people of The Fifth World live in such an animist world. They experience the world as an ongoing process, knit together by competing and changing relationships, and thus, something that requires their constant participation. By the same token, as a feral future rather than a prehistoric past, the people of The Fifth World also have the example of what life in a world of objects entails. The distance from that life has allowed them to encode that in myths and legends that try to understand what happened.

5. How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about?

Character creation also means region creation. That alone sets a strong initial tone that these characters belong to a particular place. The game defines characters and places in terms of their relationships. The actual nodes themselves matter much less than the connections that bind them. Character creation also takes an iterative approach of initiations, once every seven years, reinforcing the idea of creation not as a moment in time, but as an ongoing process of shifting webs of relationship.

6. What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary)?

Recognize adversity as an opportunity.
Recognize opposition as a gift.
Play generously.

7. How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game?

Recognize adversity as opportunity. To win, players need Will, which they can only unlock from the land by spending Fate. So, the game rewards players for choosing to face adversity. Adversity frees up the resources the players will need in order to win.

Recognize opposition as a gift. In order to get freed Will, players must act in accordance with another player's theme. That means giving that player the chance to express her theme. So, a character might have a theme of protecting a child. Another player could act in accordance with that by threatening the child—so, giving the player the opportunity to express her theme, by protecting the child from harm. The player with the theme gets to decide if the other player deserves the reward or not, so the game asks players to recognize opposition as a gift, and adversity as an opportunity.

Play generously. Since players can only give freed Will to other players, and can never take Will themselves, the game creates a dilemma that appears again in the core mechanic, based on the Prisoner's Dilemma. In both cases, you have to make the risk to trust the other player, and hope they'll do the same for you. Mathematically, the Prisoner's Dilemma has an optimal solution: "Tit-for-tat," which begins with cooperation, punishes each defection once, and quickly forgives and goes back to cooperation as soon as possible. In both cases, selfishness seems like a good choice in the short term, but as the game goes on, it punishes selfish play, because all the other players know not to trust you, and ultimately, without the trust of the other players, you'll quickly become ineffective. So in the end, the short-term temptations of selfishness only underline the importance of trust and cooperation in the long term.

8. How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?

Players take turns setting scenes. The Genius loci plays all the other characters in the scene, including the landscape, weather, and even chance. Who plays the Genius loci depends on where you set the scene, and who has the strongest relationship with that place. So, narrative authority moves around the table, with creativity in the scene and relationships on the map mixing things up.

9. What does your game do to command the players' attention, engagement, and participation?

Players should play The Fifth World set in their own place, populated by their own possible descendants. Character creation recapitulates the creation myths, from the geological and historical forces that created the land you live in, and stretching out into the future of your place and your descendants. It might focus on how your descendants deal with the consequences of your actions, or simply how they live with the same land you live in now.

Themes give each player the opportunity to weave things she cares about deeply into the story. The "warm up" phase draws players into the story, while the "cool down" phase encourages players to think about the story and its impact afterward.

10. What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?

The resolution mechanic comes from the Prisoner's Dilemma. Everyone involved sets stakes, and chooses to either Open or Close. If everyone Opens, everyone gets their stakes. If everyone Closes, no one gets their stakes. If some people Open and some people Close, the people who Close take advantage of the vulnerability of the people who Open, so they get their stakes, and the people who Open lose their stakes. So, Opening leaves the possibility that everyone will win, but makes you vulnerable; Close guards against someone taking advantage of you, but also limits your chance of succeeding.

11. How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?

The Prisoner's Dilemma puts the player into the same basic dilemma of a traditional animist, as Tim Ingold described in his essay, "From Trust to Domination." Living in a world defined by relationships and trust means living with the tension of possible betrayal. By the same token, as Axelrod describes in The Evolution of Cooperation, the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma explains how and why people trust each other and cooperate.

Since relationships can stand Open, Closed or Uncertain, and that status sets how the Genius loci acts with that person, players can also decide to make short-term detrimental decisions in order to improve relationships. Making yourself vulnerable in a hostile relationship makes the other less hostile, though you must endure the first attack (Open against a Closed relationship, and you'll lose your stakes, but the relationship will shift to Uncertain). By the same token, betraying a trusted friend can shatter that relationship (Close against an Open relationship and you'll get your stakes, but the relationship will shift to Uncertain). So, players can also choose to suffer short-term setbacks in order to open up relationships.

12. Do characters in your game advance? If so, how?

Characters do not advance in The Fifth World, but they do change. In fact, how the characters change—and how the land changes with them—really lies at the heart of the game.

13. How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?

"Advancement" doesn't really exist in the real world. Change does, but "advancement" implies a single, linear scale along which one constantly improves. The world just doesn't fit into such a narrow concept; to become better at one thing, you must necessarily become less good at something else, and the changes we undergo might make us strong in one sense, but at the same time, weak in another. "Advancement" asks entirely the wrong question; we should ask, how does this person change over time?

14. What sort of product or effect do you want your game to produce in or for the players?

After playing The Fifth World, I hope players can appreciate the animist perspective as a viable and worthwhile one. I hope that at least some players will take inspiration from the future The Fifth World depicts, serving for deep ecology and bioregional animists just as Star Trek did for humanists.

15. What areas of your game receive extra attention and color? Why?

Most of us have a preconceived notion of primitive cultures as lacking in cultural refinement, knowledge, medicine, technology, and so forth. Trying to play The Fifth World with this misconception will likely not work out very well. The Fifth World derives a good deal of its content from real-world anthropology and ethnography, so it won't work with the Hobbesian misconceptions most of us harbor about primitive peoples. Dispelling those myths without falling into preaching requires a delicate balance, one that requires a lot of attention. Showing, rather than telling, seems key to this. I'll need to present the cultures of The Fifth World in a non-traditional way; I've taken some inspiration from Willem Larsen's ideas, as well as James Gurney's Dinotopia and Will Huygen and Rien Poortvliet's Gnomes.

16. Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Why?

The "cool" factor. The jungle tribes of Texas that hunt giant beetles to turn their exoskeletons into armor or shields; the biker gangs that turned their hogs in for horses and now hunt elephants across the fields of South Dakota; the tribes exploring the heart of the verdant evergreen forests nestled amidst the razor-sharp peaks of an ice-free Antarctica. That element fires the imagination. It banishes the idea of life beyond civilization as "solitary, nasty, brutish and short," and excites people with the adventure of creating a new, tribal future.

17. Where does your game take the players that other games can't, don't, or won't?

To their own human nature, beyond their domestication. Other games take the stereotypes of primitive life for granted, which means that we keep looking outside ourselves for something to come along and "fix" us. The Fifth World has the audacity to suggest that we don't need fixing at all, that human nature already ennobles us, strengthens us, and unites us with a living world that we don't need to conquer, rule, or even steward. We belong to it—we just need to trust it again to repair that betrayed relationship.

18. What are your publishing goals for your game?

I have some different ideas for publishing The Fifth World. The project began with the concept of a truly open source game—both rules and setting—so the publishing and business plan will have to work in accord with that goal.

19. Who is your target audience?

We might reach some traditional gamers and some independent/story gamers, but we'd rather pull in non-gamers. I hope to sell the game to intentional and planned communities as an outlet for collaborative, communal art that could help build social cohesion. We hope to attract people with an interest in anthropology or ecology.

Mike Sugarbaker Explains Storyjamming in 10 Minutes

2009-04-17T18:23:00.001-04:00

Story Games: How to Play Them and Why, by Mike Sugarbaker from Substance on Vimeo.

The Storyjammer's Journey (Index)

2009-04-17T18:13:00.003-04:00

I've written lately about the experience of storyjamming and how it compares to the "rites of passage" outlined by van Gennep, and the "hero's journey" described by Campbell, inspired by Rane Willerslev's Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Since this involved a number of posts, this provides an index for that mini-series.

The Storyjammer's Journey: Introduction
Ritual Phrases: Ritual phrases and their use in games
Separation
- Calling the World: Warm-Up Games, Character Creation & Creation Myths
- Sitting Down to Your Second Game
Liminality
- Immersion & Flow in Storyjam's Liminal Space - "Immersion" as what Csikszentmihalyi called "Flow"
- Hunting Story - Story as something to pursue, rather than make up
- Story in the Landscape - Ideas for practical application
Re-incorporation
- Coming Home - The importance of the final phase, and some thoughts on why we so often neglect it
- Finding Your Way Back - Ideas for practical application

Ritual Phrases

2009-04-17T17:45:00.002-04:00

We encounter ritual phrases all the time, both sacred and secular. Any Catholic recognizes a meaning beyond what the words, "Peace be with you," communicates to the uninitiated. We all rely on ritual phrases when faced with the enormity of death, and the insignificance of anything we can say in such situations. Jews have a codified phrase: "May God comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem." The rest of us goyim often fall back to a more secular ritual phrase, like "I'm sorry for your loss," or with somewhat more religious inflection, "She's in a better place." We don't really mean what we say by these things, at least not fully; we really mean, "I want to offer you some kind of comfort, but I know I can't do much for you." Faced with another's grief, we rely on ritual phrases because they excel at the very thing we need at that moment: they give us something to say when we don't know what to say. That, in itself, says something; it confesses our inability to address the situation before us in the usual manner, instead relying on a vocal gesture towards something less easily defined. We point towards common experience, the context of our shared usage of that phrase, and all the meaning that it has accrued from all the times we've used it before.

As a student of permaculture, and as the kind of bioregionalist who looks for stories and language written in the landscape, I naturally tend to think of ritual phrases like oral swales. A swale stops the flow of water, giving the water time to build up in the soil. Ritual phrases interrupt the flow of regular conversation, building up deeper, underground aquifers of meaning that the swale points us to.

That kind of function not only helps us relate in times of great stress, it also provides an excellent means of moving from one "mode" to another. It won't take long for a church-goer to recognize the ritual phrase that marks the beginning of the service, or the much-awaited ritual phrase marking its end (I joked in my Catholic days that the congregation's concluding ritual phrase, answering, "Thanks be to G-d," had simply gotten some minimal clean up from the Church because they felt that everyone crying, "Thank G-d!" had gotten embarrassing).

Ben Lehman's Polaris uses ritual phrases to great effect. The game plays out largely as a negotiation conducted in a ritual language, giving the whole game a particularly ritualistic tone. Other games have played with this idea to one extent or another, including "Kazekami Kyoko Kills Kublai Khan." Simon C. said of it:

While I'm on the subject, Ritual Phrases! These are so cool! I think they really went a long way towards establishing tone for the game, and formalising the "gameplay" aspect. Each post felt like a concrete "move" in the game, like sliding forward a chess piece or playing a card. The joy of the game was in making a move, and then anticipating the other player's response.

Ritual phrases can establish tone, define the structure of a game, and delineate the social space of the game clearly and explicitly. It can mark the transitions from one phase to the next of the storyjammer's journey. They can serve as prompts when we don't know what else to say—in this case, not because we face the profundity of mortality, but simply because we have to tell a story and feel intimidated, or we just don't have any ideas at the moment.

Finding Your Way Back

2009-04-08T17:45:00.008-04:00

If I'd had a bit more foresight, or done a bit more planning, I'd have saved "Coming Home" until now, to keep the pattern of "Theory, Application, Next phase." But I didn't, so for the re-incorporation phase, I'll have to refer you back to that article for the theory behind it, since I have little new to add to it just eight days later in terms of theory. Today, in keeping with the pattern so far and wrapping up this discussion of "The Storyjammer's Journey," I want to discuss some of the ways in which we might tackle the problem of using those ideas to design an endgame for the Fifth World.

Most groups will stick around to discuss their game after they've finished. In lieu of any real support, players re-incorporate as a matter of social convention. The challenge lies in formalizing that, and making this formalized game relevant to players who might not appreciate the importance of the activity. Like warm-ups, saavy players may recognize immediately what they help achieve, but other players may not appreciate how much they shape a storyjam until they've experienced them firsthand. Besides, it seems like simple good design to weave these elements ever more closely together. You'll recall that we integrated warm-up games into character and setting creation, tasks that the game needs to begin with anyway. By completing those tasks with warm-up games, we can weave them into regular play. So, what tasks do we need to accomplish at the end of a game session anyway, that we could turn into re-incorporation?

Perhaps, first and most obviously, the game could support an "epilogue" round. Like the "previews" from the end of a game of Primetime Adventures—a game which, as Giuli observed, does have some mechanics for a reflective endgame (though admittedly weak), a final round of short scenes without the usual restrictions could allow characters to wrap up any final threads and bring their storylines to a satisfying close.

At the end of the story, the main task we face involves what other games might refer to as "awarding experience." How do we quantify and apply the ways that the game session has changed the setting and the characters? Often, this involves no more than a tally of points, but the very nature of the task seems to invite us to expand it to achieve the task of re-incorporation: bringing us back to ordinary reality, reflecting upon and thus integrating our experience in the story.

Others have noted before that character creation generally takes the action of what happens in a game and condenses it into a much faster process, so looking back at character creation may offer some hints. Initiations can create connections, add new features, and introduce new places. Did a character act strongly in accordance with the theme of another place? Perhaps that justifies shifting a character's home. Or, it might justify establishing a new connection between that place and the character's home.

In an earlier version of the game, I used a "questions" mechanic to establish themes. It broke immersion entirely, yanking players violently out of the game, so I scrapped it. But here, where we want to pull out of the story's liminal space to observe and interpret, it may fit well. Perhaps a series of questions could guide some discussion about the game, by which the group would award appropriate options to change the setting and the characters.

Perhaps we should go back to the land once again—each place could have not only a stanza of poetry to prompt a creation story, and a list of themes to choose from, but a list of questions, as well. Each player can ask one question associated with her home at the end of the game, pertaining to that story; the table answers the question, and that answer decides what kind of change happens.

I have my weakest mechanical ideas on this front, but I see it as largely unexplored territory, so that doesn't intimidate me too much. I'll open it up for discussion: what kinds of mechanics do you see for re-incorporation?

The Story in the Landscape

2009-04-07T20:41:00.007-04:00

I know that I promised yesterday to talk today about some game mechanics that would design for flow (often called "immersion" when experienced in an RPG), but I pulled a dirty trick on you. See, I already did. You might not have noticed it; don't blame yourself; I admit, I did it in a pretty sneaky way. I'll have to spend most of my space today just detailing what I mean.

Whether in the warm-up phase of a one-shot game, or in the first session of a longer-term game, we started off telling the creation story for the places where our story unfolds. David Abram uses the example of the songlines of Australia (1997). Aborigines sing the songlines as they travel, effectively reading them, written in the landscape. The criss-crossing lines weave into each other, creating a woven epic written into the landscape of the continent itself. Individual aborigines bear not only the right, but the responsibility to keep those songs, to walk those paths. Walking/singing those paths where the ancestors walked/sang before them, aborigines blur the line not between a primordial creation and the present, but between ordinary reality and a concurrent Dreaming. They become the ancestors, and they experience creation not as an event long past, but as a process they themselves engage in. Thus, they bear the responsibility to renew their little part of creation constantly (Harvey, 2006).

This viewpoint has no interest in the novelties of "the Age of Exuberance." (Catton, 1982). Instead, it prefers focus, attention, rhythm; it wants to plumb the depths of the world we live in, peel back the layers, and find the magic hidden in the everyday. For our purposes, it means that the story of creation we told at the outset has established the elements—the game centers on the joy of finding the stories, patterns and relationships that our creation story implied, and tracing some of the infinite possible twists on the basic framework—the landscape—we already established.

The strong identification of personality in the landscape, as well as emotion, intellect and imagination in the landscape as well, means that the game can unfold on one map. The map of the setting also provides the character sheet; each character comes from a particular place, and each place resonates with a particular theme. The paths that connect places also mark the relationships between characters, and the relationships between themes. A journey across the landscape means a social journey and an emotional journey as well. The layering of what we would normally divide into "internal" and "external' worlds also helps to create a sense of "magical realism," or "animist realism," a literary tradition that has arisen from the interface of colonial and native literatures.

I laid out the basic mechanics that could bring all of this together in my post from almost a month ago, "A Narrative Game Economy of Making You Look Awesome." To refresh your memory, I took inspiration from the "Banners" that Judd Karlman's 1st Quest, a hack of The Shadow of Yesterday. This can work well as a mechanic to explicitly establish the theme of a place, and thus, the theme for characters from that place. But, I want to take it a step farther. Karlman's Banners allow a character to gain reward when they act in accordance with their theme, or when other characters challenge their theme (thus giving the character the opportunity to act in accordance with it). The Shadow of Yesterday still has a GM, which solves the problem of adjudicating what constitutes acceptably acting in accordance with the theme. I want to take this idea farther: I want themes that only reward you when you give someone else the chance to act in accordance with them. This also helps solve the problem of GM adjudication: the player whose theme you challenge gets to decide if you've really given her that opportunity or not.

We've established these themes as we told the creation stories—place types have a set poem to prompt a creation story, and possible themes to choose from, derived from that poem. A template adds another stanza, and more options for themes to choose from. But by the time the regular game begins, each place has an established theme. Players can challenge those themes when dealing with characters from that place, or in scenes set at that place, or while traveling to or from that place.

And what of those paths, that double as relationships? They have a weight and a status—either Open, Closed, or Uncertain. As a relationship, Closed connections indicate hostility, while Open connections indicate friendship. You can have a relationship with an enemy every bit as intense as your relationship with your lover, which indicates that kind and depth deserve entirely separate scales. Uncertain relationships can go either way; you don't know if you can always trust them, but you might still need them. As a physical path, Closed connections indicate danger, while Open connections indicate safety. Uncertain connections could become dangerous, if a player wants to make them dangerous.

This opens up a consideration in play, because these statuses can change. You can build trust by making yourself vulnerable, or break it by taking advantage of it. In true magical realist fashion, and just as in traditional folk tales and fairy tales, when you break your sister's trust, the path connecting her home and yours becomes flooded out, blocked by landslides, or prowled by hungry predators. You can't open all your connections—some mutually oppose each other, so opening one necessarily means closing another—but you'll need to choose which ones to open and which ones to close. You may decide that based on your own concerns, or you may need to consider how things can flow through the whole region.

But what do you reward players with for hitting on the right themes? What do you measure the weight of a connection with? I first considered calling this your "wildness," or possibly "wilderness," but that term comes with far too much romantic baggage. I long ago came to the conclusion that the most common English words do the best to describe such important concepts—like "family" instead of the much-debated "tribe." In this case, looking at the etymology of the word "wild" proves a valuable exercise in itself. It comes from the same root as the word "will," and in fact, before the vowel shift, sounded just like "willed," as in, "willed land," or "willed animals." "Wild" describes a person with a will of its own—whether a human person, an animal person, or a place person. But like imagination, intellect and emotion, like I wrote about yesterday, will does not come from inside of us; we partake in it, like the air.

In some of the earlier versions of the game, a friend objected to the will mechanic. To him, he said, it suggested an anthropocentric power that belied the relational context of the rest of the game. Instead, I now imagine Will as something that inheres in the landscape, set at the beginning of each game by a budget based on the number of players. At first, each place has some amount of Fate, a resource that the Genius loci can use to introduce complications. Spent Fate becomes available for that player to award when other players challenge her theme. Once awarded, it becomes Will.

Games with no GM notoriously run into the problem of opposition. Either they must oppose each other, breaking down the camaraderie and cooperation that defines one of the RPG's greatest virtues, or it runs into the Czege Principle: "When the same person is the author of both a character's adversity and its resolution, play isn't fun." (Of course, a game with a GM doesn't really solve the problem if we want camaraderie and cooperation, either, since it just unites everyone else at the table against a common enemy, creating some of the questionable dynamics that others have already remarked upon.) We've seen two dynamics for creating conflict in this arrangement that don't rely on either of these problematic solutions:

Closed connections place conflict right into the landscape itself. To change those connections, characters must willingly "lose" encounters and make themselves vulnerable. In other words, the system demands that you accept setbacks at first in order to prevail in the end.
If the players need Will to complete their goals, the only way to open up Will requires players to first use Fate to introduce adversity. In other words, the system demands that you accept setbacks at first in order to prevail in the end.

At Dreamation, Ganakagok reminded me of ideas I'd neglected in designing the Fifth World, centering the game on the challenge of balancing conflicting forces to maintain the world and your relationships, and negotiating mutually exclusive demands from various relationships. The dichotomy of Fate and Will establishes another source of tension: places need a balance of Fate and Will, or bad things happen. Players must balance Fate and Will, which may require them to volunteer to endure adversity. Once again, the system demands that you accept setbacks at first in order to prevail in the end.

This kind of environment gives us the opportunity to define very clear goals for a game.

The Story of a Journey. The story begins in a specific place, and it must go to a specific place. You could expand this to an itinerary, or even a cycle, requiring successive scenes to move from one destination to the next, or to journey from home to a pre-determined place, and back home again. You have very clearly set goals: set a scene in each destination, in sequence. You have clear feedback on your progress, in knowing which places you have set scenes in so far, and which you have not yet visited.

I think this set up allows for other types of games, with equally clear goals and feedback, but I have developed this one most of all. If you have other ideas, I'd love to hear about them in the comments below. In addition to the feedback provided in that particular kind of game, players have feedback from the amount of Will they have gotten, the balance of Fate and Will in the game, and the configuration of Open, Closed and Uncertain connections on the map. With this, we have some potent ingredients to design for flow, so we can start making a game that creates the conditions for immersion to happen.

Abram, D. (1997). The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, New York: Vintage.
Catton, W. (1982). Overshoot: the ecological basis of revolutionary change, Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Harvey, G. (2006). Animism: respecting the living world, New York: Columbia University Press.

Hunting Story

2009-04-07T13:37:00.004-04:00

"Indeed, the ineffability of the air seems akin to the ineffability of awareness itself, and we should not be surprised that many indigenous peoples construe awareness, or 'mind,' not as a power that resides in their heads, but rather as a quality that they themselves are inside of, along with other animals and the plants, the mountains and the clouds." (1997) So writes David Abram in Spell of the Sensuous. The Hebrew word for "soul," ruach, also means "wind," as in Genesis 1:2, "and the ruach of God moved upon the face of the waters." Hebrew does not depict vowels—contrasted with consonants because vowels form simply from sounded breath. Thus, even reading in Hebrew demands interpretation, an active wrestling with the word of the deity like Jacob in Genesis 32; reading the Torah requires an interaction between reader and text, it requires the sounded breath of the reader to bring the text to life, to give it a soul. Our own word "spirit" comes from the Latin spiritus, also meaning "breath." The Latin word for soul, anima, gives us words like animal, animism, and animate, all words that share a common meaning of "bringing to life," but it also meant "breath." Our words like "psychology" derive from the Greek psychê, which meant "mind" or "soul," but also "breath" or "a gust of wind," and it came from the verb psychein, "to breathe" or "to blow." The Greeks themselves used the term pneuma to mean "spirit," a word that today forms the root for words like "pneumatic" because of its other meaning, "air." Obviously, we retain some understanding of mind, soul, spirit, imagination, intellect, whatever we may call it, as an interaction with our ecology, something we breathe in, effectively a kind of sense by which we perceive our environment just as effectively as we do with our eyes, ears or skin.

In Papua New Guinea, E. Richard Sorenson found that in "preconquest consciousness," people navigate the landscape by emotion, rather than abstract direction.

Navigating such affect-space is not at all like barreling down the Beltway to Bethesda or even going to Mars. Feelings mattered, not hours, kilometers, or abstract directions. ... Among these people, feelings about locales were what mattered, and it was feelings that defined them. Arbitrary geographical divisions were devoid of such meaning, so had no relevance to them and were unrecognized. A locale’s name varied according to the numerous affect relations different people had with it. There were no abstract sectionings of space, no geometric projections onto space, no projected boundaries to undo their sense of interdigitation. (Sorenson, 1998)

Closer to home, traditional Haudenosaunee assert a similar sentiment.

From a Haudenosaunee or Mohawk perspective, we notice that minds colonized by these assertions concerning the universality of imagination’s origins and functions are contributing dimensions to larger conceits maintained by anthropocentrically biased cultures. Cultures colonized by these conceits tautologically confirm the interior sources of their intelligence. Minds colonized by such conceits think and conceive of themselves in this grammar of posessive individualism. Onkwehonwe (unassimilated, traditional Haudenosaunee), in contrast, regard any assumption concerning the existence of autonomous, anthropogenic minds to be aberrations that violate the unity, interrelation, and reciprocity between language and psychology, landscape and mind. The ecology of traditional Haudenosaunee territory possesses sentience that is manifest in the consciousness of that territory, and that same consciousness is formalized in and as Haudenosaunee consciousness. Of course, other beings manifest that consciousness in their literature of tracks, chirrups, and loon calls. (Sheridan & Longboat, 2006)

To put it more simply, intelligence, imagination, creativity and emotion do not occur inside a human skull; they happen in the world around us, and we participate in it. This turns our usual understanding of storytelling and creativity on its ear; while we can certainly "make up" stories, having had the experience of discovering a story instead, purely fictional stories immediately reveal themselves, and feel disappointing and uninspiring by comparison. Many writers have remarked upon their experience as an exploration or discovery, describing story as something they find rather than something they invent. In his diary in February 1895, for example, Jules Renard wrote, "The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it." Samuel Butler said, "Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such." E.L. Doctorow said, "Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go." D.H. Lawrence warned, "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale." All of these reflect a persisting understanding, however unconscious, that stories do not originate inside the skull of a single, human author; that they already exist in some form, and the task of the storyteller lies not in creating the story, but in finding it.

This brings us back to "The Storyjammer's Journey." Rane Willerslev describes the experience of traditional Yukaghir hunters in terms that shed light on the origins of the phases identified by van Gennep in rites of passage, and by Campbell in heroic tales (2007). If we accept this native view of story, then the parallel becomes stronger. We don't make up story; we hunt it. The "liminal space" we enter exists in the landscape we explore, in the relationships between us in the jam, and the relationships we have with the landscape. The warm-up games help to strip us of our self-censorship and hesitation, breaking down the impediments we rely upon in our daily lives, so that we can enter this space to hunt story.

In yesterday's post, I wrote about Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "Flow," and how it relates to the RPG player's experience of "immersion." With no single author, I think this perspective bears even more potential for roleplaying and story games than it does for regular storytelling. It also addresses one of the questions I left open yesterday: what "goal" do we pursue in a storyjam? We need to answer that question before we can even begin to design for flow—it will inform how we can more clearly define it, how we can provide clear feedback on our progress, and even what kind of skills it involves and what kind of challenges we face.

This view of story suggests a goal immediately: to hunt story. We can make it as clear and unambiguous as hunting a deer, with feedback just as clear as the tracks you might follow. Tomorrow, I'll get down to some solid game mechanics ideas on how the Fifth World can address the concerns of flow and immersion, using this perspective to inform goals and feedback, in the liminal phase of the storyjam.

Abram, D. (1997). The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, New York: Vintage.
Sheridan, J. & Longboat, R.D., The Haudenosanee imagination and the ecology of the sacred, Space and Culture, 9:4, pp. 365-381
Sorenson, E.R. (1998). Preconquest consciousness, In Helmut Wautischer, Tribal epistemologies: essays in the philosophy of anthropology. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.
Willerslev, R. (2007). Soul hunters: hunting, animism and personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Immersion & Flow in Storyjam's Liminal Space

2009-04-06T10:05:00.004-04:00

In roleplaying game fora, you'll find a great deal of discussion about something called "immersion." Most players seem to agree on a core concept that emphasizes staying in character strongly. The term "virtual reality" often pops up in these discussions, describing immersion in terms of the player's ability to lose his awareness of himself and slip as completely as possible into the character's experience. With regards to story games, "immersion" has become more contentious; some players say that shared narrative authority breaks immersion, because, as a story gamer might put it, moving from an Actor Stance, to an Author Stance or a Director Stance, involves removing one's self from the character. But by the same token, story gamers claim their own kind of immersion—an immersion in the story, rather than their character, which may suggest a crucial, defining difference between a "story game" (concerned with the immersive experience of the story), and a "roleplaying game" (concerned with the immersive experience of playing a role).

Emily Care Boss put it this way:

Immersion is subjective state of mind which each individual has unique requirements in order to enter. What helps me do what I call immersing might absolutely block you from being able to attain what you call immersing. Our experiences of it might also be mutually exclusive. If I could put it into words, what I describe as immersion (in character, game, world or other) might not accurately communicate what my experience is to you, or if it did what I described could be sufficiently different from your experience that you would not acknowledge my experience as immersion. ...
Having said that, my personal suspicion is that there is a shared experience among everyone who speaks about immersion, and the real differences are in what one requires in order to experience that. The differences include system, metagame and social concerns, description of setting, pacing, the whole gamut of what goes into role-playing.

John Wallis describes "mask play" as "a virtual reality: when the player looks around, they see the game-world. They look at other players and see the characters. They look in a mirror and see their character's face. Only by doing this, by shutting out as much of the real world as possible, will the player be able to let their normal personality take a back seat, and allow the personality of their fictional character to take over. I can't describe what that actually means because it doesn't happen often enough to be analyzed, but personal experience makes me think it's worth striving for." (Wallis, 1995) In both of these descriptions, we see immersion described as something mysterious, almost magical. Moyra Turkington puts it in such terms quite explicitly:

There seems to be this perception out there that all immersionists talk about their relationship to character as if it's a magical or mystical process that cannot be explained, and that this leads many of the theorists to get exasperated and decide that immersionists simply are obfuscating because object to the analysis of their play. I disagree with this, and I find it rather dismissive.
There's a reason why so many immersionists express their immersion experiences in mystical terms: the immersion process is in a secular sense, extremely mystical in that the process is enigmatic, obscure, and it often inspires a sense of wonder in the person who experiences it.

I agree, and I find that "mystical" nature itself revealing. The essential experience of mystics carries the name "ecstasy," from the Greek meaning, "to stand beside." Ecstasy involves an altered state of consciousness with intense focus on a single thing, to the exclusion of other stimuli—just like we've already seen so many players define "immersion." One noted psychologist has written a great deal about "the sense of effortless action [many people] feel in moments that stand out as the best in their lives. Athletes refer to it as 'being in the zone,' religious mystics as being in 'ecstasy,' artists and musicians as 'aesthetic rapture.'"

Except the psychologist who wrote that, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, did not have much to say about roleplaying games; he wrote that in an article titled "Finding Flow," for Psychology Today. Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow" unites not just religious ecstasy and artistic rapture, but it also sounds very much like the mystical experience of "immersion" that players discuss, and points, as Emily Care Boss suspected, to a shared experience, despite the subjective means of attaining this altered state of consciousness. In fact, just as it did in Csikszentmihalyi's research, the word "flow" in its normal usage appears frequently when players try to describe "immersion." They talk of "going with the flow"; Csikszentmihalyi heard people describe "flow" experiences similarly, as well as "on the ball" or "in the groove." In the middle of a "flow" experience, we become fully engaged with what we do; other concerns fall away. Csikszentmihalyi cites many examples in which people became unaware of their body or the passage of time.

Others have previously noted the strong parallels between Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow" and "immersion" in games; I would go so far as to say that "immersion" simply means flow in the context of a tabletop game, just as ecstasy means religious flow, and "aesthetic rapture" means artistic flow. I think this also describes the "liminal space" of a storyjam—at least, ideally. Whether we immerse in a character's experience, losing our sense of self for a moment to see the world through the eyes of a fictional person, or we immerse in a story, losing our sense of self for a moment to exist in a shared imagining, at the core of both lies that mystical experience of slipping outside of ourselves to "stand beside" and see the world from a different angle.

Does this definition help us at all, besides giving a name to what others, like Emily Care Boss above, already intuited? I think so. You will notice, too, that in the previous descriptions, players describe "immersion" as something they do not understand, and thus, something they cannot cultivate. Everyone has favored methods of creating "immersion," but no one can agree on what methods work best. Most players resign themselves to the notion that immersion either happens, or it doesn't. They have little control over it. A secret combination of the right time, the right place, and the right people might result in immersion, but duplicating the formula seems absurd. That uncertainty might heighten the thrill of hunting it, but many more players abandon the activity because of it. The really rewarding part of play—the immersion—happens much to infrequently. But the work that Csikszentmihalyi has done with flow has created a set of known techniques to help it along; as my permaculture teacher Larry Santoyo might put it, we can create the conditions for flow, or immersion, to happen.

Flow happens when we have clear goals and clear feedback. Roleplaying and story games alike often create impediments to immersion by design, then, if we accept that immersion simply describes flow in a particular context. They often eschew any clearly stated goal, and rarely provide clear feedback. The idea of setting flow itself as such a goal seems suspicious; we might design towards that as a goal, but we could best achieve that by setting the player towards some other goal that we have clearly defined, that has importance and value, and the player knows she has a chance to achieve. We'll also need to find better ways to provide feedback to players to let them know their progress.

Video game designers have focused on this for some time now. They have recognized that immersion in video games means maintaining flow. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as occurring in a narrow channel where your skills perfectly match the challenges you face (1990:74). If you have skills greater than the challenge, it becomes boring; if you face challenges greater than your skill, it becomes frustrating. But staying in the "flow channel" poses a challenge, since using your skills will increase them, so a steady level of challenge might produce an initial flow experience, but continuing the activity will slip into bordeom as your skills increase. By the same token, increasing the challenge too quickly will make the experience slip out of the flow channel and into frustration. To maintain flow, the game has to keep increasing the challenge in step with increasing skill.

In a recent episode, the College of Mythic Cartography podcast interviewed Evan Gardner about his language fluency game, "Where Are Your Keys?" Derived from the ACTFL levels of proficiency roadmap, the WAYK game has both diagnostic and educational capacities; it indicates how much fluency you have, and then begins instruction at that level. It provides immediate and constant feedback, another condition for flow, that thus allows for the challenge to constantly calibrate to the learner's ability. I find it no coincidence that WAYK teaches fluency—flow—rather than "language acquisition" or "vocabulary building." And in fact, Willem Larsen, inspired by WAYK, has gone on to write about a "learning revolution," that sees all learning in terms of fluency (flow).

So, rather than leaving the "liminal space" of a storyjam up in the air as something mysterious that we might achieve or might not, I think we have clear goals that can create the conditions for an immersive game experience, to allow the storyjam to flow:

The jam needs a clearly-defined goal; something inherently valuable and something the jammers feel they can achieve.
Jammers need frequent, clear feedback on their progress towards that goal.
The level of challenge must constantly gauge the jammers' skill, and adapt to that level.

Moreover, we even have a model to emulate and learn from in Evan Gardner's "Where Are Your Keys?" fluency game. This provides an exciting model for designing games, one that promises a game that, instead of just hoping that immersion might happen, could actually create the conditions to cultivate it. Tomorrow, I'll write about how I can use this to design the Fifth World, by setting clearly-defined goals, providing feedback, and adapting the level of challenge organically to the jammers' skill.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1990. Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper Perennial.
Wallis, J. 1995. Through a mask, darkly: Connecting players and roles. Interactive Fantasy, 3

Sitting Down to Your Second Game

2009-04-05T11:06:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, I wrote about using warm-up games to weave creation myths that would create characters. This gives me a start on how to set up a campaign—but what about your second game? Or third? What do you do when you want to play a long-term game that unfolds over several sessions, and you've already created your map?

Each game session exists in a particular storyjam—so each game has those three phases of the storyjammer's journey. Every time we sit down to a new game session, we come fresh from our ordinary, daily concerns—the traffic on the way, getting the pizza order, the day at work perhaps, whatever we do before the game that defines our ordinary, daily life. We don't come to the table already in story space, so beyond the journey of our characters through the arc of the story, we also have to attend to the journey of our attention and state of mind. Just like good physical exercise, good storyjamming requires some warming up.

Last time, I wrote about using improv theater games to warm up and create characters, but what about your second, third, fourth and fifth games, where you already have characters, but still need some good warm-ups?

At the beginning of the game, a recap of what happened before often helps. Different people remember different parts of the story, so usually the recap comes from everyone throwing out what they remember. Why not turn this activity into a round of "Yes, and"?
For character-driven story, a reminder of what the characters act and look like plays an important role, so using "See Me" at the beginning of each session could prove useful.
Because feral creation stories don't end, but set a pattern for a process we continue throughout our lives, I like the idea of creation stories setting patterns that the game's story retraces in new ways. So, retelling the creation story, at least in part, at the beginning of each session seems to make sense with that. Perhaps "Color/Advance" could work well with a retelling of the creation of the places the characters call home. With different calls for "Color" and "Advance", each telling will emphasize different aspects—just like a traditional storyteller adapts to each audience and context.

Calling the World: Warm-Up Games, Character Creation & Creation Myths

2009-04-02T19:06:00.005-04:00

I read a book some months ago (I wish I could find it now, or at least remember its title) that told two stories of how the world came into being: the creation story in Genesis, and the creation story of the Haudenosaunee. It contrasted the two, and pointed to a crucial divergence between them. In the Jewish story, a perfect, divine being ordered the universe, and on the seventh day he rested. In the Haudenosaunee story, people create the world over time. The creation story in Genesis fits in very well with what Tim Ingold called "the building perspective." First came the model, then a divine being implemented the model, and finished it. It "is"—in fact, just trying to summarize this myth this much in E-Prime proves a revealing exercise. The Haudenosaunee story, on the other hand, complements nicely what Ingold called "the dwelling perspective." No model precedes; instead, the world arises from our interactions and relationships. At no point can we look at it and call it finished. That underlines the important point for the moment: to our literate culture, creation happened; to oral people, creation continues.

David Abram and Tim Ingold both discuss the place of songlines in the traditions of Australian aboriginal peoples. As they travel across the landscape, aborigines repeat the songs of the paths they walk. Each journey composes a unique story, recounting the ancient journeys and adventures of ancestors. Yet, traveling in the same places and repeating their tales, the aborigine blurs the lines between himself and his ancestor. In the most real sense imaginable, walking a trail creates the trail; in tracing that pattern, the aborigine shares in part of what made his ancestor, and in a very real sense, becomes that ancestor. The Dreamtime of creation does not happen in the distant past, but concurrently with lived experience; creation did not happen, but people engage in the ongoing process of creation every day. Calvin Luther Martin underlines this with the Yupik and the Dene: they, too, see the ongoing project of creation as the chief occupation of living persons. The Dene specifically put their charge in terms of entropy and beauty; entropy brings everything into decay, so persons must always continue the work of creation, to create beauty.

I find this in nearly every native tradition I take the time to examine, and I suspect that it has less to do with some primitive universality than a perspective uniquely bound to the written word—people not bound by letters to a page that once printed seems to never change (at least along the timeline a human could appreciate) see a world constantly made and remade, and see themselves at the very least as co-creators alongside gods and ancestors, if not the current heroes of an eternally unfolding myth.

I promised I'd move past theory and get to game mechanics, but this lays down an important principle. Fred Hicks has said (and I freely insert myself into his "we's"):

We believe that character creation is not a nuisance you need to "get past" in order to get to play.
We embrace the idea that creating characters is a game in and of itself.
We suggest that character creation is the first (and most important) step in communicating to the GM what the GM must do in order to make the game rock.
We do not believe in character stats that do not directly hook into driving actual play in interesting and vibrant ways.
We never provide a means for creating characters that does not embed them in the story of the game, and does not embed the story of them in the game.

I see a lot of parallels between what Fred Hicks suggests here, and the pattern that so many native peoples have already laid out in their creation stories. Particularly since, to so many of these cultures, nothing defines them more than their relationship to their home.

In this phase of the game, according to the journey I've written about lately, we face the challenge of separation, or the "call to adventure," moving out of the ordinary world and into the liminal space where storyjamming happens. I've experimented with Willem Larsen on warm-ups in storyjamming. We all hesitate and censor ourselves in our daily lives, and while we might need to do that in our ordinary social interactions, nothing can kill a storyjam faster. To effectively jam requires jammers to let their creativity and feelings flow, so that we stop "making up" a story, and instead find the story that already exists between us, and chase it. Via Willem via Lisa Wells, I've learned about the improvisational theater games and techniques of Viola Spolin. In Play Unsafe, Graham Walmsley credits many of his ideas to improvisation teacher and director, Keith Johnstone. Johnstone and Spolin have a great deal in common, and indie RPG players have worked with improv games, theater games, and roleplaying games for a long time. Bringing together some of these approaches from Johnstone, Spolin, Walmsley, and Larsen don't constitute some striking new innovation of mine. But by the same token, while players have recommended these as ways to improve a game, I've never seen a game that wove these things into the game itself before.

I want The Fifth World to create storyjams, and like Fred Hicks, I want character creation to play like a game, and like Willem Larsen, I want warm-up games that teach the game and how to play it and put players in the right mindset to approach the rest of the game, and I want all of that to tell a creation story that doesn't end, but sets a pattern for the rest of the game to explore. (I feel like I just played a fairly exhilarating warm-up game of "Yes, and" just writing that sentence!)

So—how to make a game out of that?

Let's start with the warm-up games we've used, their form, and what they do.

Firing Line. This game has one person on the firing line, and the rest of the group. The group takes turns throwing out random words; the player on the line has to respond with the first word she thinks of. This game breaks down your self-censorship.
One Word at a Time. The players tell a story, each player contributing one word at a time. This one helps get the group working together, and further breaks down self-censorship.
Yes, and! Each player throws out a declaration. Declarations must all begin with "Yes, and...", forcing players to build on each other's ideas without negation. This breaks down self-censorship even further, and trains players to build on each other's ideas without negation.
See Me. After an initial description—perhaps as little as a name—players take turns adding descriptions, until someone says, "I don't see it." This game trains shared imagining.
Color/Advance. Each player takes a turn telling a story. The player on your left tells you when you can advance the plot by saying, "Advance." The player on your right tells you when to fill in more color and description by saying, "Color." This helps each player develop better descriptions, and better pacing.
Counting. The group must count to 20, but no one can say two consecutive numbers, and you can't form any detectable pattern. This trains players to listen to each other—what they say, but also their body language and other non-verbal communication.

Some of these seem easier to apply to a game than others—for instance, Yes, and!, See Me, and Color/Advance all seem easier to include in character creation, whereas a game like Firing Line would almost always stand out as something difficult to tie into the game.

So, true to the bioregional ethos, we want to start with the landscape itself. Perhaps here we can start with a few rounds of Yes, and! describing the landscape and adding features: rivers, streams, terrain, climate, and so on. We wouldn't want to get too specific—places play a different role in the game, that we'll need to define later—but this establishes the general lay of the land. While reading this over, I went back to sectors and zones in permaculture. Perhaps the bulk of this little game should focus on the sectors that most impact the region.

Next, we begin aging the characters, beginning with the oldest character, and stepping through seven-year increments until all the characters reach the present. Each iteration has an initiation. For the initiation, the player gets to set a scene at a place; she gets to add a specific place to the map. To add a place, she must draw it on the map and tell the story of its creation. The game will have to include an oracle and some guidelines with prompts for people who don't have anything specific in mind. I think descriptors, like "cleared by fire," or "poisoned with ancient pharmaceuticals," could apply like templates, adding new features. The combination of the place and any of these "templates" applied would set a starting point for the place's creation story, which the player could expand upon. That creation story would establish an explicitly defined theme for that place. The player will always have a choice of making the place featured in an initiation the character's home. These creation stories may provide an excellent place to apply Color/Advance. This could help short-circuit the problem we saw in playtests, where the initiation scenes went straight to the conflict, often making players wonder why they cared about the stakes. It really got to the heart of the immersion problems I found at Dreamation.

At this point, you'll have characters and a map. Perhaps, like Polaris, the game could use a small ritual to introduce these characters, once they have fully aged? See Me suits that need perfectly. A character's ritual introduction should provide all the preface necessary for a round of See Me.

If this works properly—and it will need some good playtesting to make sure—this could turn character and setting creation into a unified whole, a game unto itself, and a recitation of a myth of ongoing creation that sets the stage perfectly for some feral storyjamming.

Coming Home

2009-04-01T12:31:00.008-04:00

I left off yesterday with the question: where do you find the storyjamming equivalent of re-incorporation and the hero's return? This forms a crucial part of the journey; the separation meets us in the ordinary daily life we inhabit, and then breaks us away from it to enter the liminal space where we participate in the raw power of ambiguity and plenipotential—where "anything is possible." But then, all too often, our stories stop. Instead of an ending that brings us back into the ordinary world, enriched by our experience, we cut the story off right there. Freytag's classic pyramid of dramatic structure seems lopsided against time: we spend nearly all of our time with rising tension, then hit our climax, and fall precipitously towards the end. If a story has a denouement at all, it happens quickly, like an epilogue. Many writers say that falling action has an inherently boring quality. But a meaningful story—a story worth telling—leads you along a journey. What does it say if it picks you up for a ride, shows you incredible things, and then abandons you in an unfamiliar neighborhood at the end of the night?

I think we have trouble with the re-incorporation phase of stories in our tradition because we come from a people who have spent the past 10,000 years homeless and rootless. In his book, Against the Grain, Richard Manning outlines the history of agriculture and its ancient unsustainability. As Derrick Jensen put it, "Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels." The center of Western civilization keeps moving west as the consequences of our actions chase us around the world, and we move west to find some place that we haven't yet turned into lifeless desert. We have told our children for generations now, at an increasing pace, that fortune and opportunity lie not at home, but over the western horizon. It has turned us into rootless wanderers, so our myths and legends honor rootlessness and wandering. Our classic heroes come, like Beowulf, from somewhere else, and when they have solved our problems, like the the classic hero of Western films and books, he rides off into the sunset—into the west.

We romanticize our pathology. Because of our experience of rootlessness, the theme of coming home holds little allure for us. We don't know what it means. I think that goes a long way to explaining why we have allowed this crucial part of our art to atrophy so severely. In a very real way, we've gotten to the very root of rewilding here—how to perform this grand group therapy to heal this wound and reconcile our abused Land and our dysfunctional Family. To become native means to come home. If we knew a good story about how to come home, we could follow it—and come home.

The Fifth World tries to tell a story about coming home from start to finish. Its strong bioregional focus keeps tying the way we live and the stories we tell back into the landscape. I have no excuse to neglect re-incorporation. Warm-up games seem comparatively easy—they move us towards the liminal storyjamming space we want to go. But a good re-incorporation moves us in the opposite direction, back towards our daily lives. In Soul Hunters, Willerslev describes storytelling itself as the re-incorporation of returned Yukaghir hunters. The return to human language re-humanizes them, and putting their experiences into human terms allows them to synthesize what has happened, and bring it back with them into the human community. From this perspective, the entire game seems like an act of re-incorporation; but even if it does work that way, we still have a complete journey sub-set into that re-incorporation, which still requires some re-incorporation of its own.

Willem has suggested a few techniques that provide some excellent starting ground for our explorations. Like warm-up games, you can think of re-incorporation in terms of the "cool-down" needed after exercising your other muscles. Willem also suggested using the ORID debrief method:

Observe. What happened for you? What happened for the group? What critical moments did you experience? What did you learn from success and failure?
Reflect. How did what happened compare with your expectations? With stories you had heard? With your interests? What personal "a ha" moments did you experience? Work group "a ha" moments?
Interpret. What in this applies to your daily life? What defined this experience for you? For the group? What got in the way?
Decide. Do you want to do some things differently in your daily life as a result of this?

As Willem points out, this weaves the story back into our real lives, and brings it home. I think most gaming groups already do something like this, sticking around to discuss their game experience for some time after it has finished. But I also think that most gaming groups could get a lot more from that discussion with a framework like this. Just like we've had to find clever ways to weave warm-up games into the game itself, so that we don't feel like we haven't started the real game yet, or that we can cut this part, it will also take some clever design work to weave this part, too, into the game experience, so that players don't just throw it aside as good advice at best.

This pattern sets some clear design challenges, but I've done a lot of theorizing now. Tomorrow, I'll get down to some game ideas, and what kind of clever, elegant techniques we might come up with to make this work.

The Storyjammer's Journey

2009-04-01T07:25:00.000-04:00

Arnold van Gennep worked as an ethnographer and folklorist at the turn of the last century in France. He gets credit for founding folklore as a field in that country, but most today remember him for his 1909 work, Rites of Passage. In it, van Gennep described three phases to any rite of passage:

Separation. This phase focuses on the end of the participant's old life and identity, sometimes put in terms as extreme as the death of their old self.
Liminality. Separated from the old life but not yet initiated into the new life, the participant enters a delicate liminal state, neither this nor that. This amiguity and plenipotential makes the participant powerful, giving them the power to achieve the initiation required.
Re-incorporation. In the final phase, the participant re-enters normal society in her new life, and relieves recognition and acknowledgment in the new identity.

In The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949), Joseph Campbell introduced what some have called "the hero's journey" or "the monomyth," a basic, archetypal template that, Campbell argues, all heroic tales follow. In the book, Campbell summarizes this template: "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." Campbell identifies three stages in the hero's journey—departure, initiation, and return—and further details many of the various sub-themes and archetypes involved in each (for example, "the call to adventure" and "refusing the call" under departure), which occur often, but not always.

The similarity of Campbell's monomyth to van Gennep's rites of passage does not happen accidentally. Campbell studied van Gennep and relied on his work to describe the stages of the hero's journey, making the story of any hero the story of our own rites of passage. The separation from the old life becomes the hero's call to adventure; the adventures of the hero becomes the experience of liminality; and the re-integration following becomes the hero's return.

In Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs, Rane Willerslev offers a different template for them both. Like Ingold, Willerslev "takes animism seriously," refusing to take the "easy answer" of metaphor or myth, and thus conclude that every traditional person has either lied to us, or has severe psychological problems. Instead, Willerslev looks for the roots of animism in the lived experience of people.

For the Yukaghirs, hunting means seducing an elk to give itself up, and that requires a process of mimicry, entering a liminal state where the hunter becomes not elk, but also not not elk. The difference proves crucial in both directions—a perfectly identical elk would have no power over the prey to kill it, but such an identical performance would also mean a hunter had lost touch with his humanity, and would become lost to elkhood forever.

To perform this dangerous dance, hunters must first isolate themselves from the normal human community. They must expunge the smells of humans, particularly women and children, and the smells of sex. They must also abandon normal human language. Hunters must not speak of killing animals directly, lest the animals overhear; so instead, they must speak a ritualized and indirect hunting language. For the Yukaghirs, speech and scent mark critical identifiers of their humanity, but in order to succeed, hunters must leave those things behind, separating themselves from their humanity.

The liminal space Willerslev describes—a space where every animal perceives itself as human—reminded me a great deal of Calvin Luther Martin's description of the world just past the skin of the earth in Way of the Human Being, which had in turn reminded me strongly of the stories of Faerie in Ireland and other Celtic countries. In this liminal space, profound things happen. Power comes from one's moments spent here. Most basic of all, here the dance of seduction becomes possible, and the Yukaghirs can kill their prey and feed their people.

The return plays an important part as well, precisely because the hunter has no guarantee of it. Willerslev relates the story of the "wild men" who remain lost in that liminal state, the ultimate anti-social creatures, they walk on two legs like people, but grow fur all over them like animals. The description reminded me of stories of Bigfoot, and even moreso, Pat Murphy's short story, "In the Abode of the Snows." Willerslev describes storytelling among hunters as a humanizing activity, precisely this last part of re-integration, giving the hunter a chance to become human again.

So, the hero's journey and the rite of passage, in this light, seem to spring from a much more basic source: the experience of the hunt itself.

Naturally, all of these things reminded me of storyjamming. Willem Larsen introduced the notion of using "warm-up games" used in improvisational theater in his articles for the College of Mythic Cartography, "Warming up and Working with Energy" (I, II). Since then, we've both worked on ways to weave these more tightly into the experience of play itself, rather than leave them so seemingly extraneous. I can personally vouch for the separating experience of these warm-up games. They push me towards a very different frame of mind, separating me from my normal day lucidity, and priming me to not censor myself, to reach for eloquence, and to allow the story to flow through me.

With that separation, I can much more easily see story as something to discover, rather than something that I "make up." The separation of these "warm-ups" moves us into a liminal state, a shared imagining, where we can track, stalk, and seduce the story together in the jam itself.

This, to me, raises an interesting question that I'll return to in tomorrow's post: where do you find the storyjamming equivalent of re-integration?

Not Me, Not Not Me: The Dilemma of Animism as Mimesis

2009-03-31T07:50:00.000-04:00

I lied. I said I hadn't worked on The Fifth World in the past month. But I love the Fifth World so much in part because it fits so nicely with everything else I love and cherish that I can't help but work on it just by doing other things. In this case, reading Rane Willerslev's Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Willerslev has read a lot of Ingold's work, and applied it to an ethnographic work. If Ingold's prose proves too dense for you, Willerslev's ethnography will hit some of the most important points in writing that I found much easier to digest.

It also suggested a dramatic tension to design into the Fifth World. Willerslev makes the argument that we should see animism in light of mimesis. He begins his account with the image of a Siberian Yukaghir hunter coaxing out an elk. He wears skis bound in elk skin, a costume of elk fur and antlers that make him look like an elk. He smells like an elk, he moves like an elk. He doesn't appear perfectly like an elk—in fact, Willerslev emphasizes the importance of the gap between them. The hunter becomes no longer human, but also not not human.

Yes, they live in a world where everyone expects that those who have much will share with those who have little, and yes, animism puts everything in terms of relationship. But a world of sharing and relationship does not mean a world without conflict or drama by any means. Willerslev's account highlights the tensions that those seemingly idyllic elements leave. Hunters take every animal offered to them, but by the same token, they become afraid of their own good luck. When in need, they expect the animals and forests to share with them. But when their own communities prosper, the animals and the forests may demand the same of them. Then, bad luck, disease or other things will kill humans, and the animal masters will take hunters back to repay all the game they provided before.

A hunter can only take an animal willingly, so a hunter focuses on making the animal willing. To the Yukaghir, hunting takes the form of seduction. Hunters must mimic an elk enough to seduce their prey; when the elk comes out, they can kill her. But this involves mortal danger. The hunter may go too far, losing himself to elkhood, and never find his way back to the human world. He may accidentally slip across that line, from seduction to true emotion, and the elk will lead him away forever. Even in their liminal state, not human, but not not human, if the hunter stays away for too long, he may become trapped in that state, one of the hairy "wild men" of the woods (which sound remarkably like legends of "Bigfoot") who became lost and never returned.

Willerslev offers a great many insights into how the Yukaghir live, how to "take animism seriously" (as his last chapter says), and about the common themes in animist belief and phenomenology. But as far as The Fifth World goes, I think this provides a rich angle for the game to explore. Animism as mimesis sets a number of challenges—to shift into a liminal state, to maintain a liminal state as long as you need to, to avoid the excesses and pitfalls that might drag you irrevocably into another world, and in the end, to find your way back to the human world. This provides the basic fodder for fairy tales, myths and legends across time and space. In fact, as I'll discuss in greater length in tomorrow's post, it hits upon the archetypal "Hero's Journey" that Campbell discussed, and the basic structure of rites of passage that van Gennep observed.

Status Update

2009-03-30T16:51:00.003-04:00

I haven't worked much on The Fifth World over the past month. Fans of Anthropik prevailed upon me to assemble a "best of" collection for quick, online publication. But I quickly found that my work doesn't work like that. I never did much real writing. I mostly collected relevant quotes and arranged them in a certain order. I couldn't publish this, even on Lulu; I don't have anything but a collection of "intellectual property" violations!

But I do plan to write longer, better pieces for a monthly e-magazine of local, bioregional rewilding called Toby's People. (As an aside, if you did read Anthropik, and look forward to Toby's People, I've started a Twitter feed for Toby's People already.) Giuli gave me this idea: since each issue has a theme, and a number of different columns on that theme, why not assemble those and put them up on something like Lulu, so you could order a physical copy? And since each year, or volume, has a larger theme, I could produce year-end books that assemble all that year's features. I'll produce all kinds of cheap, easy, online-available books that way, and I can do it while working on other things I have to work on, instead of putting all of them off while I compile a book.

Things like The Fifth World (you started to wonder when I'd get back on topic, didn't you?)

I'll have some updates here on the design blog this week on some of the things I've had rattling around my brain in the hopes of prompting some discussion, and I'll get back to designing and playtesting.

The next public appearance will happen at Camp Nerdly. I registered earlier today, and fully plan to have a playtest-able v0.7 there with me.

A Narrative Game Economy of Making You Look Awesome

2009-03-06T23:04:00.006-05:00

In discussing lessons I'd learned from Ganakagok, the question of the game economy came up. I really like the balance of good and bad medicine in Ganakagok, and thought of something very inspired by Primetime Adventures. The game starts with an amount of fate determined by the number of players. The Genius loci spends fate to introduce obstacles. Spent fate becomes a pool from which players can award one another will, and spent will goes back into fate.

This has a lot to recommend it, including the dynamic of will vs. fate and good medicine vs. bad, and a tested narrative economy (tested by Primetime Adventures). It allows the Genius loci player to complicate the story without breaking the cooperative feel; since you'll need will to complete the game, the only way to free up will involves facing adversity. So you choose to introduce adversity in order to free up will—you make things harder not in an adversarial way, but because facing adversity now offers the only route forward. You choose the harder path on purpose. I find that alone a good enough reason to do it. But it also addresses another issue that one of my close advisors raised: namely, that will in the game seems to reflect a very modern, anthropocentric view of it. This dynamic makes will (and fate) something you find in the region, something you breathe in and breathe out. I could even add something so that when fate runs out, really bad things start to happen, so you need to keep a balance between will and fate—again, like that balance of good medicine and bad medicine I liked so much in Ganakagok.

But, Willem raised an important concern about this. Does Primetime Adventures' fan mail mechanism create a "punishment by rewards"?

In his 1993 book, Punishment by Rewards, [Alfie] Kohn argued that rewards are ways to manipulate student behavior. He cautioned teachers that rewards can be most damaging when the task being rewarded is already intrinsically motivating to the student. A student who is praised every time he or she completes math facts may lose interest in the task, especially if math comes easily for him or her. (Powell & Caseau, 2004, p. 180)

Or, to quote Marshall Burns in a recent post to Cultures of Play, "They're supposed to be reward mechanics, but I don't see the reward. I don't want points for doing dynamic, interesting character stuff. That's fun by itself! What could I possibly gain from points?" A very interesting point; one I didn't really get fully at first, but chewing it over longer, I began to really understand.

That made me start thinking about Keys in The Shadow of Yesterday. If you haven't spent a lot of time with indie games, these provide a means for a character to declare, at creation, what kinds of things he or she wants to advance in. In Dungeons & Dragons, every character has the same Key: they kill monsters to advance. In The Shadow of Yesterday you could advance from killing monsters, or from protecting someone or something, or from acting in a certain manner, etc. Characters get XP when they act in accordance with their Keys. It contains rules for changing keys, so that the game can provide a pacing mechanic for character development through the story—not just characters becoming more powerful, but characters changing through the story.

Which brings me to this morning, listening to the latest episode of The Voice of the Revolution. In the Pravda section, Paul Tevis—I apologize again—I got his name wrong when I met him briefly at Dreamation, too—Ennie-award-winning Paul Fucking Tevis—discussed playing Judd Karlman's hack of The Shadow of Yesterday, 1st Quest. Instead of Keys, 1st Quest uses "Banners." They act like Keys, except that in addition to your character advancing when you act on your Banner, other characters also advance when they act on your Banner. So, your Banner to protect a little girl allows you to advance whenever you protect the little girl, but it also allows my character to advance whenever I threaten that little girl, giving you the opportunity to protect her.

"I'm gonna make you awesome" has a long history in improvisational theater, and Story Game hippies have talked about it for a long time. Most recently, a great thread on Cultures of Play got started discussing this.

Say someone is playing the incredible hulk. The hulk yells, screams, roars, and flexes his muscles. This helps sell that he is very strong and not to be messed with. But it is thin and fragile. Say the hulk punches a car. That's pretty strong. But if the car doesn't react, doesn't break, doesn't move, then the hulk looks weak. I'd say in contrast all his previous muscle flexing now makes him look like an idiot in context to not being able to break the car. On the other hand, if the car exploded into a million pieces, that sells to me waaaaay more than anything the person playing the hulk could have done. The reaction cements the perception being communicated.
I'd much rather the 5 other players in a game try to make me look cool rather than me trying to do so alone. Hell, if the other 5 were making me look cool, I wouldn't have to. They would do a better job and I can focus on making them look cool.
In wrestling, the villain is in charge of making the hero look sympathetic. And the hero is in charge of making the villain look like a threat. This codependent relationship works amazingly. And way better than if the villain was primarily interested in making themselves look like a threat independently.

1st Quest's Banners offer a brilliant mechanic to provide precisely that kind of play, and it suggests a brilliant solution to my own problem of the narrative economy in the Fifth World. An "RP reward" falls into the trap of "punishment by rewards," because good roleplay has intrinsic rewards. But what about selling your character concept—making you look awesome? What if, instead of getting will from the pool of spent fate for "good RP" in general, I can reward you with will whenever you hit my issue? You can never award yourself will; you can only give it to other players, and you give it to them when they sell your pre-established issue, your "Banner."

I really like this idea. I think, taken all together, this solves a lot of problems, and could really come together to make something great. What do you think?

Powell, R.G. & Caseau, D., 2004. Classroom Communication and Diversity. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Creation Stories & Character Creation

2009-02-27T17:38:00.000-05:00

Every tradition includes its creation myth. In literate societies, the perception of the universe as a collection of objects raises the question of where those objects came from. These can offer meaning and become matters of dogmatic devotion, but they really offer little for everyday life, particularly in comparison to the role creation myths play in oral societies. Orality trains people to see the world as a process. That makes creation crucial, because it never ends. Creation becomes the chief occupation of all living things, and creation myths set the patterns that we continue to work out constantly.

I've had this on my mind as I've considered the One Map idea, character and region creation, and the problems with tone and direction that I've noticed with the game. I want the region creation to involve the recounting of the creation story—set that mythic tone right from the start. You should feel the depth of myth and history that gives rise to the region, gives rise to each place, and in the end, gives rise to each character. At the same time, it should emphasize that all of this has come down to your character, and it falls on you to make sure that it will all come down to your children the same way. The creation myth should set the patterns that play explores and recapitulates, and it should leave enough room that you could spend years exploring and recapitulating the various possible combinations.

I think I might use ritual phrases, the way Polaris does. The example of Polaris brings up another point about region and character creation, something that Willem wrote about recently on The College of Mythic Cartography: creation should involve warm-up exercises, and incrementally adding more complex rules (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). I've encountered some serious resistance to warm-up games when billed as such, but I think that warm-up games could sneak in under a different guise as part of the region creation. Maybe "Color/Advance" could play out as you describe your initiations, with the players on your left and right prompting you?

I have these as goals, but I haven't figured out how to accomplish them. If you have any ideas, advice, encouragement or other feedback, please comment!

One Map

2009-02-26T12:35:00.007-05:00

At GASPcon and Dreamation, I used a pre-generated region for the playtests, in order to get into regular play as quickly as possible. I do subscribe to the philosophy of Fred Hicks that character creation should play like a game unto itself, but for the purposes of conventions, sometimes compromises become necessary. Since I had a pre-generated region, I produced a map with all the information printed directly on it, invested some time into making it look nice, and had it printed at FedEx Office (the copier chain formerly known as Kinko's). At both cons, the map seemed like a big hit. It happened at Dreamation, too; plenty of people remarked on how unique and evocative they found the map.

In native cultures, that "native" part plays a big role. E. Richard Sorenson describes the sense of space in "preconquest consciousness", saying, "Geographic sensibility was simply affect relationships thrust out onto surroundings. Such geography was haphazard and rarely uniform. It fluctuated over time, from place-toplace and from individual-to-individual." (Sorenson, 1998)

In indigenous societies such as the Native Americans and also the Australian Aborigines, great importance attaches to the relatedness of a person to a particular named place. Such a person might introduce themselves by saying: "I am from this place, and my father's family comes from these mountains, and my mother's from this river." It is only after describing in some detail their relationship to that place, that land, that they can proceed with the business at hand. In Euro-American society, we are much more likely to introduce ourselves and friends by saying "what they do," their profession, accomplishments, and the like. We don't know where we are "from" very often; even if we own a house somewhere, we might not really be "inhabiting" that place with consciousness, or feel at home and rooted there. The Indo-European tribes have always been nomads, wanderers, emigrants and invaders. They invaded Europe, conquering and dominating the aboriginal civilization known as Old Europe, thousands of years before they set sail for the so-called "New World." It has been aptly said, that as the Euro-American descendants of the European invaders and colonizers begin to understand the true story of what happened, perhaps the time for the real discovery of America has now come. (Metzner, 1999).

That "real discovery of America" lies at the heart of the Fifth World. David Abram (1997) also writes powerfully about the centrality of place in the native sense of self, going so far as to claim that "[t]he local earth is, for them, the very matrix of discursive meaning; to force them from their native ecology (for whatever political or economic purpose) is to render them speechless—or to render their speech meaningless—to dislodge them from the very ground of coherence. It is, quite simply, to force them out of their mind."

Naturally, with sentiments like that, a map of the setting has to play a major part in the Fifth World. But the v0.6.0 game that I ran at Dreamation has other maps, as well. The character sheet really presents a relationship map in disguise (I use the term "relationship map" here in its most generic sense, not in the same sense as, say, Ron Edward's Sorcerer). You have a character built up from relationships, so your character sheet really just shows you one nexus in a relationship map. Putting all the character sheets together, you could draw a single map for the story.

I also took an initial step towards another dimension of the setting map in v0.6.0, an admittedly weak step, but an attempt to define each place as an affect, as Sorenson describes it. Abram (1997), Ingold (2005) and Sheridan & Longboat (2006) all discuss the differing assumptions about where imagination comes from. While we assume that imagination comes solely from the human brain, native cultures experience imagination as an ecological function, something that belongs to a place, and they get to participate in it while at that place. In other words, they do not make up stories; they discover them in the landscape.

I wanted this to become an important part of the Fifth World; by defining places with themes, a story moves across a landscape of not just geographical changes, but changes in tone and emotion. I don't think v0.6.0 accomplished that very well, but the movement across the map could still become a movement through the story. In fact, that kind of mirroring of internal and external seems to strike precisely the magical realist tone the game needs.

Biologically, you don't go too far wrong to call an animal a bit of soil ecology that wraps itself up in a skin so it can go for a walk. And when you die, you go right back to living as soil ecology. So, the setting map has places connected by paths; the relationship map has characters connected by relationships; and then you can have a theme map, with themes connected by transitions. In the modern viewpoint, these all need to have their own maps; people don't map to places, and neither map to themes. In the native viewpoint, people exist as places, which express their theme.

So, why not have everything on one map?

You don't need a character sheet—everything you would have on your character sheet already exists on the map. When your relationship with your sister sours, the path connecting your place to hers becomes difficult—which again, strikes precisely the magical/animist realist tone the game needs. Themes arise from the place, and apply to a character like issues in Primetime Adventures. The issue map could also help generate the story. In a collaborative game, you may not want to throw trouble in the way of other players, but blocked paths and conflicting issues on the map can do that for you.

In v0.7.0, I think I can work out the whole game on one map. I don't know if any other game could do this, but because of the native perspective that the Fifth World aims to recreate, I might have a chance at it after all. Ambitious? Definitely. But I don't think this particular game will settle for anything less.

Do you have any ideas, advice, encouragement or feedback? I'd love to hear from you—please comment!

Abram, D. (1997). The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, New York: Vintage.
Ingold, T. (2005). The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. New York: Routledge.
Metzner, R. (1995). The place and the story: where ecopsychology and bioregionalism meet, The Trumpeter, 12:3
Sheridan, J. & Longboat, R.D., The Haudenosanee imagination and the ecology of the sacred, Space and Culture, 9:4, pp. 365-381
Sorenson, E.R. (1998). Preconquest consciousness, In Helmut Wautischer, Tribal epistemologies: essays in the philosophy of anthropology. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.

Lessons from Ganakagok

2009-02-25T21:55:00.004-05:00

I haven't played Ganakagok, but I've taken some lessons from it already.

First, seat players in order of character age. That means that the game starts with the young people going out boldly, making mistakes, and generally wreaking havoc, which means that the elders have to step in and fix things. Pure genius, and I plan to just steal that part outright.

Second, the balance of good medicine and bad medicine that drives the game. This one I can't steal outright, but it drives home how the gameplay of the Fifth World has so far failed to really hit the notes it needs to. Gameplay should focus on the tension of living in a world of relationships; different relationships pull you in different, even mutually exclusive, directions. You need to spend a lot of time building up those relationships, because you burn through them when you find yourself in need, and you need to balance out the time, energy, and attention you give to each one.

How to achieve that with simple, elegant rules, well, there you have my present predicament.

I have tossed around the idea of Fate to balance Will; when you spend Will, it goes towards Fate, which goes towards complications. I know that isn't a good answer in itself, but it might give me a start. I don't know. I'd love to hear your ideas!

Dreamation Report

2009-02-22T07:43:00.003-05:00

Dreamation has been great. I got to meet some awesome people, especially Bill White, the designer of Ganakagok. First, I saw the gameplay in my two playtests veer towards grisly cannibalism. Giuli & I even discussed how often the game seems to trend towards things we really have no interest in promoting. In play, the Fifth World always seems to wind up as a typically savage, violent, post-apocalyptic world. Seeing Ganakagok in action, even just a little bit, gave me a glimpse of the alternative. Giuli's report on how her game of Brennan Taylor's How We Came to Live Here sounded like it really produced something powerful, meaningful and mythic from everyone's contributions, too. It all makes me realize just how far the Fifth World has to go. I'll continue the v0.6.0 playtests, but I've already come up with some ideas for v0.7.0, including some Fate mechanics to oppose Will, and possibly eliminating the character sheet entirely, to put everything on the map.

Tweet, Tweet, Tweet

2009-02-12T22:20:00.002-05:00

You may find it odd, given my day job, that it took me so long to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon. Actually, I think of my day job as more of a reason, but be that as it may, I've finally made the jump into Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. I have a Twitter feed for Fifth World updates, and because Twhirl makes it so easy to make updates, I make a lot of them. I make them much more often than I update this page. So, to give this a little life, I've added the Twitter feed to the sidebar. So, check there for all the latest news—or, if you have Twitter too, you can follow me for updates on how the game design goes. I'll still post here with longer form thoughts, and more regularly once I've achieved my goal of "v0.6.0 by 2/14" by Saturday, but for regular status updates, check the Twitter feed.

What's in a Name?

2009-02-11T18:30:00.004-05:00

You would think that I'd have at least a few simple tasks; like names. Just a line on the character sheet and you're done, right? I wish! This is what E. Richard Sorensen wrote about names in "Preconquest Consciousness":

In these preconquest regions of New Guinea names were rarely binding. What one was called varied according to time, place, mood, and setting. Names were improvised, not formally bestowed, and naming (much like local language flexibility) was often a kind of humorous exploratory play. New names could be quickly coined, often whimsically from events and situations, with a new one coming up at any time. One young boy running in a peculiar way was affectionately dubbed ‘Grasshopper' It stuck. Another was called ‘Kaba’ (short for the prized embokaba beetle) because, during an episode of biting-mouthing play, a friend proclaimed his skin was as delicious as that savory beetle’s flesh. One girl was called 'Aidpost’ following her excitement about the first one in the region; another was called ‘Sleepgood’ by a new friend who liked sleeping with her. A boy from a distant hamlet in the south who tagged along when I went north to the new Australian Patrol Post fled into the jungle in crouched, zigzagging panic when an object he believed to be a metal house abruptly growled and moved. His name became ‘Land Rover’

Names were nicknames. They stuck for a while, then a new one came along. Only when the new (Australian) government began insisting that they use the same name for official dealings, especially in the annual census soon instituted, did formal names emerge. Otherwise, individuals responded to whatever name they knew they might be called.

But even this doesn't go quite far enough, because those informal names come and go so easily because they don't act like nouns at all: they're really verbs. As Willem Larsen wrote:

Because animist languages base themselves in movement/activity, you’ll commonly see the world in terms of verbs, and rarely (or not at all, depending on the particular language) in noun-entities. In Mohawk green also means herbs/greenery/grass; it describes a pattern of appearance, not an entity. In Mohawk, one points out a "hunter" by saying "ratorats," literally "he-hunts." Civilized languages innovated the professional class, thus labels like "Hunt-er," "plumb-er," "farm-er," etc. "He-hunts," "he-plumbs," "she-farms," etc. Notice the difference between calling someone an "artist" and saying that "they create art." Many of us can finally let go of civilized conceptions of success once we click into this thinking—"one day, I’ll be an artist/writer/tracker/hunter-gatherer." Do you make art? Do you write? Do you track? Do you hunt and gather? Only that can we honestly describe. "When will I grow up? When will I feel like an adult?" Do you do adult things? Do you do activity associated with "grown-ups"?

One famous Iroquois speaker, whose name we mistranslate as "Cornplanter," would correctly require us to call him in his native language "He-plants-corn." Your ear has probably picked up on all the Native American names that fit this model, and the few that don’t, which we can easily explain as a similar mistranslation.

In playtests, we ran into a problem where all the names led to confusion. In the new versions, names become boons. You have them in the context of relationships--the name your mother calls you, the name you hold in the tribe, the name you have in dreams, and so on. Hopefully, making names mechanically significant, making them speak to the kind of character you make and the relationships that character has, will both put names more in line with that traditional line of thinking, and make it easier to remember all the different ones you might have.

Playtest Report

2009-02-08T22:10:00.002-05:00

Also posted to the Forge's Playtesting forum.

I ran a round of playtests on the previous iteration of the rules last November, which led to some rules changes which required work on an extensive catalog of spirits and boons, so I've gone back to writing for several months. Tonight, I played the first playtest with these new rules.

Players

This is a GM-less game. More specifically, players take turns setting scenes, selecting where scenes take place on a central map. The character with the strongest relationship with the scene becomes the Genius loci, who plays NPC's for the scene. So, we're all equally players here. There was myself, my wife Giuli and my brother Mike who have both played previous iterations, and our friend Bill. Bill is a very traditional, gamist gamer, with a distinct predisposition against indie games in general. I specifically invited him to the table because of his unique perspective, but he came with definite skepticism. This is a subset of a regular D&D group; the remaining members were invited, but could not come. After tonight, all of them have playtested some iteration of the game (Bill was the last to try it).

Characters

I used the new "Quick Start" rules for character creation. Normally, the game involves rounds of initiations in which players build up a map of the region and their own characters simultaneously. The "Quick Start" rules simply give the characters those relationships. Even so, character creation still took over an hour. Admittedly, a good deal was spent on explaining the rules. As in some previous playtests, the repeated question, "To do what?" slowed things down (more on that below).

We played siblings in the same family, all part of the Coyote clan. My character, Father Dreaming Boar, was a shaman with a butterfly familiar, meaning he had ritual power and responsibilities to oversee ancestral rites and put ghosts to rest. My wife's character, Hunting Cat, was something of a generalized hunter. My brother's character, Bishop Angry Muskrat, was a sorcerer with a frog familiar that gave him the ability to transform people into frogs. He closed against his frog familiar in his initiation, meaning that he took advantage of the frog, leaving the frog feeling cheated. This became an important story element later on. Bill's character, Sneaking Elk, focused on his skills as a smith, and his ability to craft iron tools, including his own large iron sword.

Fiction

Scene 1. Giuli set a scene that turned "Groundhog's Day" into an ancestral rite. I tried to learn what messages groundhog had brought us from our ancestors. Giuli played the groundhog and closed, so I misunderstood the message: "take 20 deer," instead of "take 10 deer."

Scene 2. Mike set a scene where he sought frog's counsel. Still angry from how Bishop Angry Muskrat cheated him, frog demanded in payment that he turn my character, Father Dreaming Boar, into a frog.

Scene 3. Bill set a scene wherein all the characters but mine (mine did not make much of a hunter, so I declined the invitation) went hunting for deer. Finding very young deer, they became concerned.

Scene 4. I set the scene at Winter Tahn, where the angry deer spirits have brought pestilence on the family, leading to a showdown between Father Dreaming Boar and Bishop Angry Muskrat. He tries to turn my character into a frog, while I try to have his character run out of town as a sorcerer. I get my stakes, but he fails his, so Bishop Angry Muskrat is driven from tahn.

Scene 5. Giuli sets a scene where a hunting party finds little game, and becomes a discussion about where things went wrong. Sneaking Elk and Hunting Cat decide that Father Dreaming Boar is wrong, since the pestilence continues. They'll take their hunting party out to the swamp to bring Bishop Angry Muskrat back.

Scene 6. Mike sets a scene wherein Bishop Angry Muskrat plots revenge, again seeking frog's advice. Frog demands that Angry Muskrat send a horde of frogs on the people; Angry Muskrat wants a good plan. Frog gets his stakes, but Angry Muskrat loses. So, frog tells him that Sneaking Elk is coming to kill him. Frog tells him to eliminate Sneaking Elk, then murder Father Dreaming Boar.

Scene 7. Bill sets a scene at a ford, where Bishop Angry Muskrat, expecting Sneaking Elk to come to kill him, encounters Sneaking Elk, Hunting Cat, and a party of armed hunters coming to find him. I introduce a dare, wherein a panther attacks Sneaking Elk. It becomes a three-way encounter, with the panther staking to eat Sneaking Elk, Sneaking Elk staking to tame the panther, and Bishop Angry Muskrat staking to turn Sneaking Elk into a frog. Bill and Mike get their stakes, but Giuli fails, so the panther doesn't eat Sneaking Elk; instead, Sneaking Elk tames the panther. But Bishop Angry Muskrat turns Sneaking Elk into a frog. Convinced that he is an evil sorcerer, Hunting Cat and the rest of the hunting party kill him. We rename the ford, "Frog Ford."

Scene 8. I set a scene where I try to pray to my patron saint, Saint Grey Coyote, for guidance. Instead, the ghost of Bishop Angry Muskrat appears. Bill then dares the story relationship with Groundhog to introduce groundhog and have him confess. Groundhog confesses that he bore a message not from the ancestors in general, but from Saint Grey Coyote, specifically. He is disappointed in his children, and he wants to kill us all. The ghost of Angry Muskrat and Father Dreaming Boar plan how they will defeat Saint Grey Coyote.

Scene 9. At Frog Ford, the ghost of Bishop Angry Muskrat draws out Saint Grey Coyote. Sneaking Elk stakes the restoration of his human form; I stake him leaving our family alone; Hunting Cat stakes setting things right between us and the deer. Saint Grey Coyote stakes punishing his children. Saint Grey Coyote fails, but while both I & Bill open, Giuli closes. Meaning that only she gets her stakes. Saint Grey Coyote puts things right between us and the deer, ending the pestilence and our immediate problems, but he remains committed to our destruction, and Sneaking Elk remains trapped in frog shape.

Table Dynamics

A long post-game discussion followed, and the game itself included a great deal of explanation and discussion about the rules. Little color or description; we remained focused quite heavily on the mechanics of play. This I found disappointing, but it may owe more to the nature of our group than the game itself. Our D&D games are similar. Even with the overhead involved, everyone reported having fun with the game, and while none of us considered the game complete, everyone agreed that the basics are tenable. That Bill, specifically, reported having fun with it gave me great reassurance.

Main Points

We had a very fruitful discussion, both during play and after, which yielded many ideas worth considering, but two themes emerged over and over again.

Motivation

In this playtest, as in several others, the question at the beginning of "What am I doing?" proved a big stumbling block. Many playtesters have had a difficult time with the notion that the story is the goal, and the mechanics are tools to create it. In our post-game discussion, we discussed the possibilities for motivating mechanics, including goals tied to relationships that players could choose, with goals set to different scales. For a one-shot, only the story scale matters; for epic and cycle games, larger-scale goals could exist.

Number of Relationships

Since players need to keep track not only of their own relationships, but also (in order to use dares effectively) all other players' relationships, and since the story now has relationships, we quickly ran into overload. Shallow relationships rarely entered play at all. We all agreed that a smaller number of relationships, with a smaller number of boons (perhaps set boons which have specific effects) would be well worth considering.

v0.5.2 Published

2009-02-08T11:32:00.003-05:00

The latest pre-release, beta, playtest rules version has come out. Once again, these remain incomplete, unfinished, untested, et cetera ad nauseum. I hope you enjoy them, but I make no guarantees. I've put them up under the open source principles of "Publish early, publish often" and "many eyes make bugs shallow."

If you try out the rules, I'd love to hear how it went for you. Playtest reports, actual play recordings, all have immense value right now. Please reply below with your experiences, or email me at playtest@thefifthworld.com.

Teaching Storyjamming Games

2009-02-08T11:15:00.005-05:00

Willem Larsen has had a lot of really brilliant things to say about indie game design lately over on the College of Mythic Cartography. I agree with him on a lot of this, so you can expect a lot of this to appear in the final Fifth World product.

And I should add, personally, I find it absolutely thrilling to see a tracker like Willem in the heart of the indie RPG design community. It makes me envious of the population of Portland.

The Land of the Three Rivers

2009-01-20T22:15:00.003-05:00

Just finished retooling the boon trees for the places in the Land of the Three Rivers. I know that doesn't make much sense with the rules currently available, but it's all part of the v0.5.1 I'm trying to get finished this week. Tomorrow, I'll do the demons (things that grow out of the Underworld, i.e., the soil), and on Thursday, I'll do the angels (things that move about in the Overworld, i.e., the atmosphere, including humans). Instead of the four main pillars of their way of life, I've made the Archangels and Archdemons the "Animal Masters," now that I think I understand them a little better. The four big spirits crucial to daily life are now the Four Winds. Not to worry, though, the Four Winds and the Eight Totems still make up the Twelve Apostles.

I'm rather liking this iteration. I have some early design guidelines for crafting boon trees, and it makes designing spirits a whole lot easier. That's really been the hardest part of this--detailing even a useful fraction of the spirits involved in the land. With this, my job gets a lot easier.

Of course, come February, I'll have a whole new task to worry about: getting enough of the Restless Land together to present at Dreamation!

If you haven't found it yet, I've been keeping much more regular updates on Twitter.

Roleplaying & Oral Tradition

2009-01-08T22:08:00.001-05:00

Originally posted at Cultures of Play.

Wow. I listened to the last three episodes of Have Games, Will Travel with escalating glee, to hear Paul talking about so many of the things that really excite me about RPG's. So I resolve to write up a big, long post about these things on CoP tonight, log on, and find my good friend Willem has started an excellent discussion on it already! I have many warm fuzzies right now. Thank you, all of you.

(As an aside, since traditional tellings of Beowulf came up, I actually have to thank Willem for sharing a YouTube clip of Benjamin Bagby's performance. I got the DVD of his whole performance of Beowulf for Christmas, and it's truly something to behold. He's researched the manner of presentation, diction, rhythm, all of it, and recreated the performance of how Beowulf would have been told before it was set down in writing--you get a hint of an indigenous English oral tradition listening to it, and it's just amazing.)

I largely agree with much of what everyone upthread wrote. I rather read Willem and Brand as saying the same thing: we experience in the present, and tell stories about our experience later. Experience + Reflection = Story. And of course, schlafmanko points out the important caveat that listening to a story is, itself, an experience. I know seeing Benjamin Bagby perform Beowulf was an experience for me. I think I agree with Willem--playing out an RPG seems to me more of Malcolm Sheppard's "memories of events we never lived." I can see the idea Brand's other friend seems to get at, speaking of a play written collaboratively, but in a deeper sense, I wonder if they don't say the same thing?

Tim Ingold's book, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill propose some very different ways of viewing the world. In this "dwelling perspective," nothing is ever finished, and everything is always changing. That fundamentally changes the nature of art. Ingold lays out a vision of art, one that complements the ethnographic record of most human cultures, where art is primarily performed, rather than created. Ingold points to the paintings of Austalian Aborigines. "Now like dancing and storytelling, painting, too, is a performance. The movement of painting is congealed in the depiction just as that of the storyteller is congealed in the traces of his gestures in the sand, or that of the dancers in the imprint of their feet upon the earth. But the analogy is between painting, dancing and storytelling, not between paintings, dances and stories. The painter does not, in his picture, seek to portray the actions of ancestral beings ... he seeks to re-enact ancestral activity—to 'go over' it again and again, quite literally in the case of retouching—in the very movement of his work. Thus while painting is an activity, paintings do not depict activity." (p. 128)

The "dwelling perspective" acknowledges the world as a place of constant change. Our usual awe for the Mona Lisa illustrates the opposing "building perspective." We admire the expression of a single creative genius. We admire it as a beautiful object, rather than the remain of a skilled performance. And reality wreaks havoc with our admiration; we fight a hopeless battle against its inevitable deterioration. We consider the Mona Lisa a completed work (well, da Vinci left it unfinished, but no one would try to finish it for him), but time marches on, and the Mona Lisa continues to change despite our consideration of it as in a final state. It has no final state, because the world keeps changing.

So what does that mean about writing a play, or a novel? I think it suggests that we've gotten our view a bit backwards, perhaps. We shouldn't think of a writer producing a book, but a book as what remains from skilled writing. What does Brand's friend mean when he talks about writing a play collaboratively? The best sense I can make of it is an experience, an experience you have together, a skilled performance, and when it's over, you have something left over. Something like a play—a story.

Which brings me to what Paul had to say in episode #32, when he remarked on the ephemeral nature of RPG's. There is a process, but no product. "You do this thing," as Paul said, "and then it's done." How true! Just like dance, or storytelling. Or, really, painting, sculpture or writing. All leaves traces. Our voices echo and fade into the air, the character sheets are left over, but the performance is largely of-the-moment. But all that differentiates that from writing or sculpture is degree. Writing and sculpture are also of-the-moment. They leave traces, too, and while the traces of a sculpture or a play might last longer than our echoes and character sheets, they are ultimately ephemeral, too. They, too, fade in time. All art is performance; what traces are left over afterward are always secondary.

But Paul brought up something else in those episodes that I think bears discussion. He repeated William Goldman's precept, a classic screenwriting cliche, that "story is structure." I can certainly understand where this notion comes from, but it is the ultimate declaration of literate chauvanism. We could look across the American landscape, for instance, and note the many ways in which American life across the country depends on electricity. Can we than declare that all human life depends on the availability of electricity? The conclusion reflects the initial flaw: we didn't look at all human life, we just looked at life inside one country. I would agree that "written stories are structure," but stories, in their raw, unqualified form, are much, much older than mere writing. Mark Willis wrote an excellent summary of the studies into literacy, orality and cognition written by Ong, Goody & Watt, and others. He summarizes:

Goody (1977) explains that writing transforms speech by abstracting its components. Words in written texts are more "thing-like". Their meaning can be looked up in other written texts and do not require direct ratification through interpersonal situations. Written texts enable backward-scanning of thought to make corrections and resolve inconsistencies. This self-analysis or criticism is inhibited by face-to-face communication in oral cultures.

Writing enables both the recording and the dissecting of verbal utterance. Literate cultures have permanent records of past thought which can be compared and questioned skeptically. Such skepticism enables the building and testing of alternative explanations of knowledge. In ancient Greece, the shift from oral to literate thought processes resulted in the "logical, specialized, and cumulative intellectual tradition" of Plato.

In other words, literacy creates structure. The reductionist nature of literacy is laid out in the codification of thought, with meaning formed from a physical, hierarchical structure whereby letters form words, words sentences, sentences paragraphs, and paragraphs longer, more creative works like essays, articles, novels and so on. Literate peoples speak of the "structure" of a piece of writing, and learn from a hierarchical presentation of thought, codified in written symbols. I know it seems like I repeat this quote from Harold Scheub every time I post here, but it bears repeating here. In Story, his analysis of oral storytelling, Scheub writes, "Story is never simply a cause-and-effect organization of events. It is that, necessarily, but that is not the reason for its existence. We have seen that the narrative is not even the first aspect of storytelling that a child learns: patterning is. To stop with an analysis simply of narrative, and thereby to ignore the more critical aspects of storytelling—emotion, rhythm and pattern, trope—is to dwell on only the most obvious and the simplest aspect of the tradition. It is true, narrative is inviting because it can be studied in an almost mechanical way. It is possible, as Propp has demonstrated, to anticipate the organization of events in a story. The reason for the attractiveness of this one aspect of story is that it can be scientifically analyzed, charted, and graphed. But in the end, it tells little about story." (p. 47)

Barton McLean writes in "Symbolic Extension and its Corruption of Music," (Perspectives of New Music, vol. 20, nos. 1-2; 1981), "cultural anthropologists have found that preliterate cultures often do not systematically form thoughts with individual building-block words as we do in the West. The preliterate thought process is largely holistic (as is music), unlike the Western tendency to separate word from thought and alphabet letter from word, forming a hierarchal structure where, as McLuhan says, 'semantically meaningless letters are used to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds.'" Oral thought does not move through structures, the way the literate mind does; it seeks rhythm. It works more like music. It does not expect an artifact to go over and analyze. It tries to keep going without skipping a beat. It approaches communication not as a structure to fill in, but like a jazz band. Unexpected inputs simply become improvisations to riff off of.

Getting back to Scheub, he presents a case that oral stories are not structure. Structure appears, but only as a by-product. It is not the primary concern. He writes, "There are four basic ingredients of story, then—image, linear and cyclical movement, trope—with their function being the evocation and molding of emotions into artistic forms. Other fundamental components of story include emotions, doppelgänger, and palimpsest, with trope interweaving them. The combination of these produces meaning. When a storyteller creates, it is always within at least four contexts, (a) the unique story itself, (b) but also involving other stories in the tradition that shadow the unique performance and that provide it with a networking frame, acting as a kind of doppelgänger, [note: I think this speaks to schlafmanko's point] (c) and including the performer's own history, experiences, and feelings, a palimpsestic arrangement, (d) all within the context of the history, experience, and feelings of the members of the audience, also a palimpsest." (p. 16) According to Scheub, story is, first and foremost, about emotional resonance, just like Paul discussed.

So, do we really face the "heretical notion" that RPG's are about something more than story, or simply more than written story? I think this harkens back to why I love RPG's so much—because of their potential to help us regenerate oral tradition. What Paul thinks of as RPG's going beyond story, I see as RPG's restoring story to its original place.

On a side note, I'd argue that the written story—which I think can be identified with structure—is simply a subspecies of this, not something wholly new. The first written works, which we still consider classics, works like the Illiad or the Odyssey, or coming back to the beginning again, Beowulf, all began as oral tales. They are written only insofar as someone transcribed an oral performance; the writing leaves a trace, ultimately ephemeral, of a performance. One day, all the copies of Beowulf ever published will be gone, and though that one bard's performance lasted millennia longer than his peers, eventually even his last echo will grow quiet. But even a modern novel or screenplay follow the same form. What is a play, if not the trace left from the essentially oral performance of a playwright? He doesn't say it out loud anymore, and no one sits to listen to the original performance, but it is a performance nonetheless, just like a painter or a sculptor, and what remains is simply a trace of it. We can go back over that trace and analyze it, just like we can study an animal track, but it is only what remains after the performance, after the animal has passed.

And I think that starts to bring us around back once again to your original point, Jesse. I agree with Paul that form and genre create a common language for expression. I wrote in November in response to Simon C's experience about high-context language in oral cultures. It relates again to what Scheub notes in the quote above as B. Yes, it can serve as a strait-jacket, like the apples in the still life in your example. That happens when form is followed slavishly. But just as the agreed meaning of words doesn't limit our ability to communicate but expands it, good form, like a healthy oral tradition, provides context for deeper communication. But I think your more immediate point—what you put as, "producing stories whose transcriptional format do not conform to the expectations of other media and whose creation process does not take into account what 'should' happen based on faithfulness to the outcome expectations of pre-existing source material"—reminds me of that difference between reading a story and telling a story. What Paul called "top-down" approach and what he connected to Peter Rogers' "engineers" follows, I think, from reading a written story, and the idea that "story is structure." I think you covered that part quite well. I think my verbosity here tries to gesture towards what Paul called the "bottom-up" approach and what he connected to Peter Rogers' "hippies", following from telling an oral story, one that flows more like music. You jam to it—Willem's notion of the storyjam—you don't approach it as a structure to follow, but as Scheub put it, you see story as an exploration of emotion. It's not that trope has no place in the latter; in fact, Scheub frequently talks about the crucial role trope plays in that. But it becomes a tool for expression, rather than a strait-jacket for it.

So I think, ultimately, I agree very much with what Jesse and Paul have had to say, I just think it needs to be seen in a broader context. When Paul talks about his "heretical notion," I hear in that the clarion call of precisely the thing that fascinates me about RPG's: the regeneration of oral tradition.

News Dump!

2008-11-27T08:21:00.003-05:00

The Fifth World now has its own Twitter account. With a game that lives on a wiki, I've put some thought into forums (including some special play-by-post tools), play-by-Skype tools, podcasts and other alternative means of publishing RPG's, and how we might incorporate other social networking sites. Have any ideas?

Look for "The Fifth World: Jimmy's Haunt" at Dreamation 2009. I'll have the Restless People out by then, v0.4.2 of the rules, and a custom-designed region of Morristown, NJ (where the convention takes place), including the local legend of Phoebe's ghost.

An idea to replace the "Questions" mechanic: Can the story itself have relationships that the players share in common?

Looking for a way to combine Blessings and Curses into one thing.

Starting a playtest campaign at GASP Game Days starting in December. If you live in Pittsburgh, we'd love to have you! This will become the first ever Fifth World campaign, so we'll test how the game works over long-term play.

Which sets a deadline for me to really revamp the character options by December 13. I'll have until December 21st to edit the document and get it all on the wiki after that.

On the Schedule

2008-11-05T21:39:00.002-05:00

Getting the obvious out of the way, Awe Kooda bilaxpak Kuuxshish of the Crow tribe, grandson of a Luo medicine man from Kenya, has become president of the United States. We finally got a shaman in the White House!

I apologize for that interruption, but I've had to deal with my condition lately. Anyway, with the public playtest now begun, the next big date looms on December 21. Then, we'll release:

v. 0.4.2, which will include an expanded, edited and generally smoother version of the rules already presented. I hope to revisit the Land of the Three Rivers, too, with some improvements to the oracle, spirits, blessings and curses available (see last post).

The wiki re-opened. I'll start adding material soon; on December 21, the new skin and functionality will all go live, including

The community site. Forums, blog, etc., and

The podcast. We'll include news, actual play, game advice, and more.

The Big Day

2008-11-03T17:31:00.003-05:00

I have to apologize for the lateness of my posting here. The hotel had a firewall that made it difficult to access the Fifth World, so I had to wait till this evening to upload the latest rules.

We ran the first public playtest at GASPcon 9. We ran the first pre-generated region yet; I hoped to cut the time down by removing the initiation process and jumping straight to the game. Against a stark white background with some professional printing, Dani Kaulakis' art simply arrests you visually. I had the region with the questions and inhabitants printed, high-resolution and full color on a full poster-sized map, along with character sheets printed out with the full relationships and blessings, a text introduction and even a family tree. I think in visual presentation if nothing else, I had nothing to hang my head over.

My estimation that the number of players would determine the length of the game proved true. With six players, we might still have made it all the way through, but when combined with the necessary rules explanations that a setting like this requires, we only got through the end of the second act. We had a strong story emerging, though: the intrigues of a boss and his ambitious younger nephew, a false-flag operation intended to start a war, and even a young child coming to grips with the truth about her sainted ancestor, and her own capacity for evil.

We also learned some things:

Particularly in a convention context, a one-page quick reference guide to the rules could help a lot. The Fifth World departs from the norm for role playing games to such a degree that players can't fill in the gaps with their usual expectations. That can make things difficult.

So far, everyone has agreed that the game has a lot of potential, works well, plays fun, and so on, all of which I've compared to calling a woman "handsome." Nobody's gotten very excited about it, which had me rather disturbed, but I agree with what Mike told me, that excitement about a game has to follow from exciting options for characters and stories. The Land of the Three Rivers already has a few: the Buzzard's Undertakers, the Hinneray's secrets, the Ordo Arcanum, to some degree even the blessings offered by Iron. But the game really offers only a small number of these. In the beta phase, we'll need to focus on designing really interesting and exciting blessings, curses and spirits.

Traditional role playing games sell adventures. Story games typically do not, because they typically involve so much "play now", at-the-table input to create the story that such a thing would not contribute, and in fact would undermine the whole point. The Fifth World won't ever offer packaged "adventures" like these, but it certainly can offer pre-defined regions, which I plan to include in the Land books. Just imagine what you could do with, say, a region based on Centralia.

Version 0.4.1 now sits on the wiki. I wouldn't call it a great text, but it has enough to start playing. So, for the first time in years, The Fifth World exists as a publicly available game worth playing!

Playtest Report

2008-10-30T00:03:00.002-04:00

Just finished up an abbreviated playtest with a new player. We only got through character creation and one act, but he seemed to pick up what the game aimed for rather quickly. It continues to impress me that we keep coming up with really beta playtest issues in our alpha playtest, which reassures me that we've really got the major issues taken care of. The experience has convinced me to use a pre-generated scenario for beta playtesting at conventions, including GASPcon.

Playtest Report

2008-10-25T01:28:00.004-04:00

Since the first playtest, I've spent a month rewriting a lot of rules, and writing up the first complete catalog of spirits, blessings and curses. We just finished the second alpha playtest. Consensus opinions:

Flowed much easier with rules changes
Feel came through much more

Questions (rather than riddles) helped unify the story thematically, despite a narrative split this time that divided us into two parallel storylines. The main points to come up in post-game discussion included presenting questions earlier in the game so they can provide a better focus (great idea—thanks, Brett!), and some discussion about whether a particular blessing worked. I can't tell you how proud I feel that at the end of our second playtest, we can already dive into something as nitty-gritty as the balance of a particular blessing! I consider that beta playtest material. It reminds me of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: you never run out of things to worry about, but the things you get to worry about says how well off you've gotten. Discussing particular blessings means we've gotten farther than I would've guessed. Hey, maybe I've got something here after all, huh?

Mad Man

2008-10-23T07:52:00.001-04:00

Life in the Land of the Three Rivers

2008-10-19T22:58:00.005-04:00

I think I've got something good after ruminating on Philosophy vs. Feel. Here's the latest version I'm working on for the "fluff" of the first land I'll be fleshing out, my own homeland, the Land of the Three Rivers (the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Upper Ohio River valleys). Tell me what you think, especially the Yinzers in the audience!

Making a Living

Agriculture has never worked particularly well on the Allegheny Plateau, and the heavy metals and acidity put into the soil by the Steel Giants did not make it any easier. For that reason, the gardens of the Seven Nations and the Union never penetrated south. Instead, the People of the Three Rivers rely on cattle to convert the vegetation of the land into food they can eat. Without agriculture to feed them directly, the cattle have become semi-feral, living in small herds of 20 or so animals and ranging freely. The People move with the herds, and intervene where they can to help defend them from predators. Herders divide out shifts to watch over the herd, but sometimes predators get through anyway. The People rely on the cattle for meat and dairy. Milking feral cows requires an immense amount of trust; the milkers have very personal relationships with their cows, and even then, the process involves a good deal of risk. Because of this, the People treasure the milk. They never "waste" it by drinking it directly; instead, they generally make cheeses with it.

This cornerstone of life shapes much of how the People live. They break in feral horses to use to better herd the cattle, as well as packs of semi-feral dogs. These dogs have interbred with the wolf-like eastern coyote and live in their own mixed packs of feral dogs, coydogs, and coyotes. But families of the People keep "alliances" with particular packs of these dogs; they may enter the family's camps freely and share food. In return, the dogs often help the People herd cattle and hunt deer.

Deer hunting provides the other main source of protein in the People's diet. Because deer hunting plays as important a role in their lives as their cattle, the hunters' ethos pervades their communities. When hunting deer with a bow and arrow, there comes a crucial moment when the deer and the hunter recognize one another. This evolved in conjunction with wolves, giving predator and prey a chance to collect themselves before the final chase. In this "conversation of death," a deer may stand his ground, and the wolves will back down; or, a sick, old, injured deer may stand and run away, the very thing that would ensure his death. The hunters of the People recognize this language, and the subtle body language whereby a deer starts to turn and give chase, offering the perfect shot for the hunter's bow. The People do not see any sport or violence in their hunting; they see, instead, a profound relationship that they share with the sacred Deer who gives its life for the People. Shamanic rites, performed by the Fathers, mediate this intense relationship.

The People set regular fires in areas and harvest small saplings for wood, practices which produce huge, old growth trees with a cathedral-like canopy and a wide, open understory perfect for both cattle and deer. In these forests, mostly women, but also children and the eldery of both genders, will gather wild plants, roots, nuts and berries. The People rely on these for both food and medicine.

Kinship & Settlement Patterns

Both the deer and the cattle require the People to stay on the move, so they live in small, nomadic families. These nomads do not wander aimlessly; they travel in a regular seasonal cycle, following the herds from one place to the next.

The family generally consists of an extended family, back to a common grandfather. The People trace their lineage through their fathers, so these families relate to each other as fathers, sons and brothers, with their wives and children. The People see the world as a single, complex family; all trace their lines, ultimately, to Grandfather Sky, the Overworld, and Grandmother Earth, the Underworld. But they also favor their closest relations; so, two brothers will side together against a cousin, two cousins will side together against a fellow clansperson, two clanspeople will side together against someone from a different clan, two men from the People will side together against outsiders, and so on. The People cite Papa Peter and Mother Mary as the common ancestor of them all, making them more closely related to one another than to outsiders. These fierce, nested loyalties allow the People to quickly muster a strong defense (as the Union and the Seven Nations often discover when they attempt to invade the land), but it also fosters a good deal of internal unrest.

The clans illustrate that the People do not consider species boundaries to carry much weight at all, and animals, plants, stones, places, weather and so on all relate to the People more closely than humans from another land.

The People typically live in a kind of tipi that they call a "haus" (pronounced "hahs"). They make encampments with several hauses clustered together. When deer become scarce or the cattle begin to move too far away, they pack up their hauses and, with the help of the horses, move on to a new encampment.

Social Organization

No authority higher than the family itself exists among the People. Each family follows the annual circuit as a sovereign and independent body, subject only to its own will. Customs and traditions unite the families, of course, as well as bonds of relationship, but what the families do together they negotiate, rather than obey.
Within the family, respect rather than authority generally reigns. Each individual has an enormous amount of autonomy, but certain persons within the community have earned respect and tend to hold greater influence over the group. These include:

The Grandfather, whose relationships generally define the family as a unit.

Elders. Even if not a Grandfather precisely, the People honor the experience of elders. These will typically include the grandmother, and perhaps siblings of the grandfather and grandmother.

The Boss. Not every family has a Boss, but if it does, he generally will hold a great deal of influence over his own family. A family with more than one Boss often splits from the rivalry. A Boss who also becomes a Grandfather holds an enormous amount of power.

The Father. Not every family has a Father, but if it does, he acts as the spiritual leader of the family. Families without a Father seek out those that do for ceremonies, healing and guidance. Some Families have two Fathers, and may allow a family with none to adopt one as their own. Like a Boss, a Father who also becomes a Grandfather consolidates a great deal of power.

Storytellers. Most families will have a storyteller. The People look to storytellers as keepers and sharers of wisdom, and value the teaching of their stories. This gives them considerable influence in the family; a well-timed and well-told story can change the entire debate.

Skilled persons. The People have a very meritocratic nature. Persons who prove themselves talented or skilled earn the influence and power that goes along with that. In questions about game, even Fathers, Bosses and Grandfathers will defer to the judgment of a proven hunter, however young.

Decision making in families comes from consensus, so one cannot order these roles by descending order of power. The decision the family will reach will depend as much on the nature of the question at hand, the specific arguments made, and the immediate context as the position of the people involved.

Bosses

The People have a "Big Man" tradition that stretches back to the days of the Steel Giants, particularly the Great Boss Andy, who left many long-lasting gifts and feasting halls that still bear his ancient name, "Carnegie." The Bosses do not wield any kind of explicit authority; they cannot simply make commands and expect anyone to carry them out. Instead, they accumulate a great deal of social capital by giving generously, collecting on debts all at once to throw enormous feasts that no one else could arrange, and using such occasions to compete with other Bosses and impress their people, in order to collect still more social capital. Other Bosses focus on military success in leading raids against their enemies, and maintain their power by keeping the loyalty of strong warriors with gifts and feasts. In a post-monetary world where reciprocity has become the new economy, Bosses have become the new entrepreneurs. Though the nature of the game has changed somewhat, they remain as cut-throat in their pursuits as the entrepreneurs of the Steel Giants. Competition between rival Bosses often becomes fierce, and often violent.

Religion

The People of the Three Rivers call their religion Catholicism, but it varies greatly from the Roman Catholicism of their ancestors. The main religious figures, called Fathers (even when female), wear a black ribbon around their neck, with a white stripe painted in the front. They also wear a stole, a purple cloth worn around the neck as a badge of office. Fathers act as faith healers, spiritual leaders, ceremonial leaders and prophets in their communities. People become a Father by gaining a familiar spirit. This usually involves great personal trauma, most classically the Fathers' Disease, a deep malaise which will either drive a person to suicide, or attract the pity of a spirit who will heal the afflicted, and in so doing become a familiar spirit. This often afflicts those called to become Fathers, though sometimes youths undergo Holy Rites to become Fathers. Fathers enhance their ties to their allied spirits through the use of costumes and magical items. When Fathers appear, besides their collar and stole, they also wear an assemblage of animal parts, and go about painted in various mysterious symbols.

Ceremonies often involve trance dancing that can last all night long. The People long ago lost the ability to make accordions, which significantly changed the sound of traditional polkas. Played on drums, with gourds and the occasional guitar, the same beat takes on a percussive quality much like techno music. Fathers dance frantically to these songs all night long, until they slip into an ecstatic trance to enter the Dreaming.

Fathers also use water soaked with tobacco and certain psilocybin mushrooms to enter the Dreaming, but consider these inferior means of entry. Weak or inexperienced Fathers may have to call on plant allies like these; likewise, a Father who finds his strength sapped or faces a very difficult task might call on such allies; but for the most part, the people expect a Father to find his own way into the Dreaming, without demanding sacrifices from sacred plants.

Communion plays an important part in the religion of the Three Rivers. The people believe that everyone must have a guardian spirit, sometimes called a patron saint or a guardian angel. Without such a guardian, people do not have the strength to live through life. At age seven, in an initiation ceremony called First Communion, children spend several days alone, fasting, as a kind of cosmic dare: the child vows to remain there until a spirit takes pity on him and adopts him to become his guardian, or starves to death. After their First Communion, faithful people go on Communion later in life to seek boons from their guardian.

As their origin myth makes clear, the philosophy of the People of the Three Rivers emphasizes the mediation between conflicting extremes. They understand disease and misfortune as the product of excess in one direction or another. The rituals and practices of their religion focus on restoring balance and striking a middle way between extremes.

Communication

Spoken Language

The Pittsburgh English accent, or "Pittsburgese," may not have actually existed before people began referring to it. More an amalgamation of regional elements from Appalachian and Midwestern dialects, its reference in local media helped to create an in-group identity, and it thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy. With the fall of the Steel Giants, the need for such an in-group identity only became stronger, and the use of Pittsburghese became more pronounced.

The structure of Pittsburghese also underwent a major shift. As the People learned how to hunt and track, how to follow the cattle herds, and how to live off the wild plants, it became necessary for them to understand the personalities all of these things could take. The names for these things became verbs unto themselves. For example, the People came to use the term "deer" not as a noun describing a kind of animal, but as a verb that meant to behave or present oneself as a deer does. With this linguistic shift came a philosophical shift that emphasized patterns of movement and relationship, rather than objectivity. This proved crucial to the People's ability to hunt, track, and live alongside the herds of semi-feral cattle, or the packs of semi-feral dogs. Elders who have used this language throughout their lives eventually come to understand this as illustrating a personhood common to us all; humans, deer, cattle, horses and dogs differ not in their essential personhood, but in their patterns of movement and relationship. So a dog simply means a person dogging; a horse, a person horsing; a human, a person humanning. The Fathers say that when they shift their shape, they simply go dogging for a while, or hawking, or trouting. While shapeshifting seems like an impossible fantasy in the English of the Steel Giants, it makes perfect sense in the Pittsburghese of the People of the Three Rivers.

Body Language

But spoken language in total has become less central to the People of the Three Rivers. Growing up in close, personal contact with a steady, core group of people has made body language extremely potent. In fact, among one's oldest relations, the People can read each other's facial micro-expressions and subtle body cues so expertly that they can rarely lie to one another. They use these intuitively, by close awareness and long-standing relationship rather than a conscious understanding of the cues they read and a deliberate reasoning of their elements. Even among less related people, body language allows for the quick communication of emotional state and intent. This often proves absolutely essential on the hunt, allowing a party to move with almost superhuman coordination, exhibiting what an untrained, outside observer might mistake for something just shy of telepathy.

This makes spoken language something the People can use more sparingly. They see "small talk" as a key indicator that someone feels particularly nervous, and probably intends to hide some kind of deceit to do harm. The People do not trust someone who makes small talk.

Animal Communication

This body language also lies at the heart of the People's ability to speak with animals. Most everyone learns basic calls, howls and dances of the most common animals in the Land of the Three Rivers, and has some ability to both understand their meaning and to mimic them. They consider this the same as learning their own spoken language. And in fact, the People claim to have extended conversations with birds and animals, and that they learned a significant portion of their own spoken language from such sources. They also learn to read the body language of other animals, telling them their emotional state and intent as clearly as with other human persons. Hunters in particular consider this an absolutely essential skill.

Names

At their Christening, children of the people receive a clan name from the Father performing the ceremony. The people have meticulously preserved these names from ancient times, names like Jack, Joe, Terry, Art, Peter, Franco, Roberto, Chuck, Ben and Bill for boys; Mary, Jessica, Sophie, Rachel, Annie, Nellie, Ally-kwippa, Willa, Gertrude and Elizabeth for girls. Clan names apply to ceremonies and rituals. In everyday use, informal nicknames prevail. After a child's First Communion, these nicknames almost always incorporate that person's guardian spirit; so, for instance, a boy with a jackrabbit guardian known for his quickness might have a name like, "Jackrabbit Quick." Fathers and Bosses always have that title in address, so if the same boy became a Father, people would call him "Father Jackrabbit Quick"; if he became a Boss, "Boss Jackrabbit Quick."

Philosophy vs. Feel

2008-10-03T17:45:00.003-04:00

Our playtest from two weeks ago produced a coherent story, which impressed me enough on its own, but as far as a finished game, it fell short of the goal. Yes, it produced a coherent story, but it produced the wrong kind of story. Firstly, very little felt distinctly western Pennsylvanian about it; the Fifth World aims to produce a very bioregional game, and with this one set in the Land of the Three Rivers, that distinctive western Pennsylvania culture should bleed through. Secondly, as my brother keenly points out, it told a fairly typically Native American story. Specifically, the Native Americans we know today; if people have survived into the Fifth World, that happened only because we managed to work out a new Native American. Europeans have imagined themselves as the heirs of a dying Indian cultural world for centuries now, and I have a good deal to say about that, cultural appropriation, and how all of that applies to the Fifth World, but for now, I think I can safely sum up that living like an invasive species doesn't have much of a future left in it. At the very least, the Fifth World says so. The game should talk about the descendants of us, today, who have become native to the place they live. Such people wouldn't consciously espouse the so-called "neo-animist" principles of David Abram or Graham Harvey. Even if shaped by the world around them and funneled into those patterns, they wouldn't espouse them consciously. They would consider themselves good Christians, or good Muslims, or good Buddhists. The symbols and names of religious traditions persevere even after the entire substance of the beliefs have reversed themselves (compare the modern American Christian's preoccupation with gay marriage and the rich with Jesus' own teachings in the Gospels; yet, despite contradicting everything their god stood for and died for, they still call themselves Christians and say they follow Jesus—that distance makes the jump to animism seem small by comparison).

Did Gary Gygax set out to write a game that expressed Platonic and Cartesian assumptions of ontology and epistemology? Of course not! He did so, but only because he had no other philosophical assumptions to start from. He wanted to make a fun game about heroes having adventures; the philosophy in it came not from careful consideration, but from the lack of consideration. The Fifth World should present a fun game about heroes having adventures, but it should come from a different philosophical foundation. It took me a lot of time and effort to really understand that foundation, and because of that, it seems like the game revolves around that right now. It will take even more time and effort to move past that, and to take all of that for granted—just like Gygax took Plato and Descartes for granted.

This week, I've worked on a second pass on the Land of the Three Rivers, now a pastoralist society somewhat like the Saami, with Big Men called Bosses that evoke steel mill bosses, union bosses, and philanthropic robber barons like Andrew Carnegie, and shamans called Fathers that evoke the ancient traditions of the Roman Catholic Church. I listened to Stephen Vincent Benét's "By the Waters of Babylon" today, and while I could hardly disagree more with the "moral" of the story, I did enjoy the prose. I picked up Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias today as well, an anthology of ecotopian fiction edited by Kim Stanley Robinson. And not a moment too soon; with luck, this will help me break out of the deep theoretical mindset I've needed with the project so far, and get back to the higher level where players should operate, the level of "cool." I think we have a solid mechanic at its base. Now comes the hard part: using that to evoke a new vision of the world. As Michael Green put it in Afterculture:

America has always been a land of destiny. We have always looking forward to a rosy future, first by westward expansion, then via Tom Swift and his Electric Things, But the realities of ill-conceived ideals have finally caught up to us. The West was bought by genocide, Tom Swift left us with nuclear dumps and ozone holes. There are still official candidates for the Cool Tomorrow. There's the Bill Gates's Virtual World where everyone's on-line, and your home says hello—but no one's particularly interested except LCD manufacturers. Star Trek had the hum for a while, but cyberpunk science seems more plausible now. Becoming a dot com millionaire and retiring at 25 would be admirable, but behind every shining Epcot City the rain forests are burning, and we all smell the smoke.

The truth is that for the first time we are bereft of a positive vision of where we are going. This is particularly evident among kids. Their future is either Road Warrior post-apocalypse, or Blade Runner mid-apocalypse. All the futuristic computer games are elaborations of these scenarios, heavy metal worlds where civilization has crumbling into something weird and violent (but more exciting than now).

The AFTERCULTURE is an attempt to transmute this folklore of the future into something deep and rich and convincingly real. If we are to pull a compelling future out of environmental theory and recycling paradigms, we are going to have to clothe the sacred in the romantic. The Afterculture is part of an ongoing work to shape a new mythology by sources as diverse as Thoreau and Conan and Dances with Wolves and Iron John. The Afterculture is not "against" the problems of our times, and its not about "band-aid solutions" to the grim jam we find ourselves in. It's about opening up a whole new category of solutions, about finding another way of being: evolved, simpler, deeper, even more elegant. Even more cool. Even very cool.

Afterculture provided much of the original inspiration for The Fifth World, and it shares the same aspirations. But you don't get that from preaching, you get that from an alluring vision of the future, a world that's fun, a world that's cool, "even very cool."

Droppin' Names

2008-09-26T17:00:00.005-04:00

I listen to a lot of gaming podcasts, including All Games Considered. I also live in Pittsburgh, and have the kind of passionate commitment to the place that only a zealous bioregionalist can. So when episode 86 dropped, complete with the bad-mouthing of the Burgh, I had to step in, and did, as the comments at the above link testify. But I certainly didn't expect Mark to remember the Fifth World's brief flirtation with publicity almost a year ago, thanks to Mick Bradley, which got us some notice on the now-defunct Gamer: The Podcasting, IDDfOS, and the Round Table. In the latest episode, if you queue up to 57:26, Mark reads my clever comeback in defense of the Burgh, and mentions the Fifth World. He even included a link in the notes. Thank you!

Unfortunately, the wiki has almost nothing in it at the moment, since I've spent all my available time and energy working on the alpha and making sure I have everything ready for the beta, which begins on November 1. But to anyone who got here via AGC, first, welcome; second, I must beg your patience. The Fifth World will eventually take the form of an open source game, both rules and setting, centered on the wiki. But I first need to put together a decent initial offering, something worth your time as a player, and possibly your time as a game designer, author, poet, artist, singer, or other artist. And there I find myself at present. That means very little in the wiki, and very little in general that I can really show for all my efforts. Thank you for your interest, and I hope you'll still have some in November when I'll have something to show for it! For now, this blog has most of what I can really show the world about the project.

Playtest Report

2008-09-20T23:10:00.002-04:00

Just concluded the first real alpha playtest. We had four players, and the story quickly turned around my character, the ghost of a seven-year-old boy who died on his first vision quest after his baptism in the Mad Valley, so this insane little ghost boy tried to drive the other characters insane, ultimately killed two of them, and in the end managed to destroy the village. A bit of a downer, but a clear moral about the impact of pharmaceuticals in the environment even four hundred years from now (which created the Mad Valley that created my crazy ghost kid).

Overall, it got a pretty positive response. Rough, yes, as you'd expect of an alpha playrest, but we mostly focused on details, rather than the core mechanics of the game. I could hardly ask for better results! A clear story structure asserted itself even without a central GM or preparation, so that seems to go well. What did come up in our post-game discussion:

We'll try next time having more of the character decided outside of initiations, possibly even allowing for characters to be half-created before the game starts.

The beads and strings turned out to cause a big headache. Next time, we'll try a combination of a paper character sheet and poker chips.

Does the game rely too much on interpretation? Does that make it too much of a burden to play? I think that poses the main question for the playtests as we go forward. Tonight, it worked out just fine, but we'll need a lot more testing before I'd feel comfortable giving a solid answer to that question.

We've found two more local playtesters, and I'll experiment this week with MapTool to see if it might provide a useful platform for an online playtest, since I have a far longer list of playtesters who could play online over Skype.

Introducing the Fifth World in Forge Parlance, Revised

2008-09-17T18:44:00.006-04:00

I tried this before, but we've done a lot of thinking and a lot of work since then, so as I go back to tighten the screws through the alpha playtest process, it seems worthwhile to go back again and clarify what the game really focuses on.

Concept: The Fifth World paints a picture of an optimistic, feral future, where humans once again live in an animist world of relationships based on the challenge to make yourself vulnerable and trust.

Synopsis: A world based on trust can get pretty scary. You can trust and make yourself vulnerable, but you have to hope that the Other—whether human or other-than-human—will reciprocate that trust, and not take advantage of you. Relationships build up from repeated encounters like that, and in The Fifth World, those relationships tell you everything you need to know about a person. Stories that matter, the kinds of stories that The Fifth World tells, come from a spirit of place, and follow relationships just like those

The Big Three

What is your game about? Trust. Ingold (1994) describes the domesticated world as based on domestication, and the animist world as one based on trust, but that doesn't mean some shiny, happy utopia. Trusting means putting yourself at risk. It means making yourself vulnerable and putting yourself into a position where the Other can take advantage of you—and sometimes, they will. Relationships build up from repeated encounters like that. The animist world consists entirely of those relationships. A game, like a world, built around trust means the tension of deciding whether or not to make yourself vulnerable, while trying to guess what the Other will do.
What do the characters do? In The Fifth World, only relationships matter. Nothing else even exists. Characters must tend to the various relationships that define them. Some relationships require more energy. Some will demand things that might damage other relationships. So characters must carefully choose which relationships to nurture and which to neglect, and how to budget their time and effort.
What do the players do? The players alternate between playing the roles of their individual characters and that of the Genius loci, or spirit of the place, who fills in all the NPC's. Players receive rewards in the three different acts for introducing story elements, layering images, or resolving story elements, which drives all players towards the collaborative weaving of a coherent story.

The Power 19

How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about? The Fifth World happens after the collapse of civilization; that turning to the new world reinforces the regular cycles of nature, like the turning of seasons or years. By the same token, the feral humans of The Fifth World live amongst the legacies of a world that lived without a focus on trust or relationship. The world has mostly healed itself, though. Like extant animists, the feral humans of The Fifth World experience creation as an ongoing process, the world as a process they must renew each day. Thus, the setting underlines the dynamics of trust and relationship that the game centers on.
How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about? Characters go through a series of initiations. These initiations build up the relationships that define a character, by putting them into an encounter where they must choose to trust or not. These initiations at the same time build up a map of the region where the story takes place, rooting the character and the story in a definite spirit of place.
What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary)? The basic mechanic of the game derives from the Prisoner's Dilemma. Axelrod (1984) argues that the Prisoner's Dilemma can help explain the evolution of cooperative behavior. In computer simulations, "tit-for-tat" almost always emerges, ultimately, as the winning strategy, thanks to characteristics like its "niceness" (it opens with trusting), vengeance (it retaliates when defected against) and forgiveness (it only retaliates once). So the basic mechanic should push players in that direction, with cooperation ultimately emerging as the most stable behavior.
On a larger level, the scene economy breaks the story into three acts: in the first act, players receive rewards for introducing new story elements; in the second, for layering those elements on each other; and in the third, for bringing those elements to resolution. These should help drive these relationships and encounters towards a coherent story, relying on Scheub's (1998) concept of a story as a rhythmic layering of images.
How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game? In individual encounters, player set stakes in the form of "Hopes" and "Fears." Trusting will allow a character to achieve his or her Hope, but makes him or her vulnerable to his or her Fear. By not trusting, a character can gain immunity to his or her Fear, but at the cost of his or her Hope. Mutual trust rewards both characters with their Hopes, but defecting allows a character to gain his or her Hope while inflicting the other character's Fear on him or her. So, defecting can give a character a short-term advantage. However, characters can only build up their relationships—their measure of long-term viability—in encounters of mutual trust.
At the level of the scene economy, simple beads provide the incentive for driving the story forward. Players need those beads for gifting and to build relationships.
How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game? By relationship. Every scene happens at one of the places on the map created along with the characters. Whoever had the strongest relationship with that place plays the GM for that scene, or in this game, the Genius loci (spirit of the place).
What does your game do to command the players' attention, engagement, and participation? (i.e. What does the game do to make them care?) The game intends for the place to hit close to home—places where the players live or have lived, or places that they love. The spirit of place carries with it an animist belief that stories come not from a purely human imagination, but from the land itself, and that humans simply partake in that imagination. Thus, the stories of those places the players live and love today continue to assert themselves even four centuries from now. So The Fifth World has an immediacy, rhyming with the stories of your own life and your own world, about the world your descendants might enjoy living on the same land.
What are the resolution mechanics of your game like? Tense. An encounter puts two players in doubt, trying to guess what the other might do. Between choosing to trust or not and revealing that choice, players can enter a gifting cycle, offering beads. A player can accept those beads at the cost of flipping his or her choice to "trust," which could leave the gifting player with the opportunity for an encounter of mutual trust, or just provide the opening needed to exploit. Counter-gifting allows players to escalate gifts. This also provides a narrative tool for the back-and-forth of the encounter. Then, the players reveal their choices, and interpret what happened with their Hopes and Fears.
How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about? The Prisoner's Dilemma challenges players with precisely the dilemma of living in a world based on trust.
Do characters in your game advance? If so, how? Characters can advance by gaining more relationships, with more beads in those relationships, more blessings attached to those relationships, and more beads in their will pool. But this doesn't offer a clear-cut advancement, either, since relationships bring responsibilities and expectations with them, as well. It would seem more accurate to say that characters' lives become more complicated, or perhaps deeper, rather than simply advancing.
How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about? Advancement occurs as a matter of relationship, rather than individual traits or attributes. It comes from many encounters of mutual trust. But "advancement" doesn't mean accumulated power, so much as deeper relationships and a life more deeply rooted in relationships with place and the persons who live there.
What sort of product or effect do you want your game to produce in or for the players? After playing The Fifth World, I hope players can appreciate the animist perspective as a viable and worthwhile one. I hope that at least some players will take inspiration from the future The Fifth World depicts, serving for deep ecology and bioregional animists just as Star Trek did for humanists.
What areas of your game receive extra attention and color? Why? Most of us have a preconceived notion of primitive cultures as lacking in cultural refinement, knowledge, medicine, technology, and so forth. Trying to play The Fifth World with this misconception will lead to disaster. The Fifth World derives a good deal of its content from real-world anthropology and ethnography, so it won't work with the Hobbesian misconceptions most of us harbor about primitive peoples. Dispelling those myths without falling into preaching requires a delicate balance, one that requires a lot of attention.
Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Why? The "cool" factor. The jungle tribes of Texas that hunt giant beetles to turn their exoskeletons into armor or shields; the biker gangs that turned their hogs in for horses and now hunt elephants across the fields of South Dakota; the tribes exploring the heart of the verdant evergreen forests nestled amidst the razor-sharp peaks of an ice-free Antarctica. That element fires the imagination. It banishes the idea of life beyond civilization as "solitary, nasty, brutish and short," and excites people with the adventure of creating a new, tribal future.
Where does your game take the players that other games can't, don't, or won't? To their own human nature, beyond their domestication. Other games take the stereotypes of primitive life for granted, which means that we keep looking outside ourselves for something to come along and "fix" us. The Fifth World has the audacity to suggest that we don't need fixing at all, that human nature already ennobles us, strengthens us, and unites us with a living world that we don't need to conquer, rule, or even steward. We belong to it—we just need to trust it again to repair that betrayed relationship.
What are your publishing goals for your game? Make it an open-source game, using an online wiki. We'll publish some books, mainly as a convenience for players at the table, particularly a series of books focusing on individual lands (since the game's bioregional focus requires some significant changes for each land). I'd like to publish the rules as a podcast and as a CD. But ultimately, the game will primarily exist online, in wiki format, as an open source game where players can help improve the rules, and the stories they play become "official canon" for the world. I think that should make The Fifth World the first truly massively-multiplayer online roleplaying game!
Who is your target audience? We might reach some traditional gamers and some independent/story gamers, but we'd rather pull in non-gamers. I hope to sell the game to intentional and planned communities as an outlet for collaborative, communal art that could help build social cohesion. We hope to attract people with an interest in anthropology or ecology.

Axelrod, R. (1984). The evolution of cooperation. New York: Basic Books.
Ingold, T. (1994). From trust to domination: an alternative history of human-animal relations. In Animals and human society: changing perspectives, eds. A Manning and J Serpell. London: Routledge, pp 1-22.
Scheub, H. (1998). Story. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

White Smoke!

2008-09-11T21:41:00.005-04:00

Giuli and I just ran the first alpha playtest. In the first playtest, you want to look for some very gross things, like, do the mechanics basically work? Can you get through a game? Does it have any promise whatsoever of genuine fun? Doubts persisted right up to the moment we started playing, and we have good news: it works!

With just two players, you can't expect much, and with neither of us investing much into the story, it fell a little flat. But even over such hurdles as that, the game pushed us towards a rather pointed tragedy, wherein my character had to live the rest of his life in the wilderness, alone, in order to pay for the debt of our son. And that came just from a first playtest and a minimum of investment in the story. Giuli described the mechanics as straightforward and simple, though I can see that we'll need to focus on guidelines for setting good stakes.

All in all, I feel very good right now. The Fifth World v. 0.3.1 basically works. Now, we can start putting her through the paces!