It's been a very long time since I played in the world of Glorantha but, like Tekumel, it's another of roleplaying's famously detailed subcreations, and the way you present that so as to hook players is not by giving them the anthropology textbook or even the tourist's guide, but by immersing them in what it's like to live in that world.
The mistake there lies in telling, not showing. Bad writing is the cause of the rot in the case of much bigger IPs than Glorantha. Star Trek, Star Wars, and Marvel, for instance. Wokeness often gets blamed, but that's not the problem. Star Trek always espoused a liberal humanist ideology. The difference was that the writers used to know that if you want to embed ideas in a story, you have to explore those ideas through drama, not lecture the audience while trying to distract them with characters who talk like they're in a high school comedy. Author David R. Low explains all about that here.
In this RPG-a-minute episode of Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice (about 27 minutes in) Roger and Michael propose a Traveler-style SF concept:
"There is a starship at planet A, you have to get it to planet Z. You are being hired to do this. You're being paid a basic stipend, and fuel and maintenance or whatever, but any money you can make along the way, that's fine, you can keep it."
It's Wagon Train to the stars – and why not? Or you could set it aboard a sea-going vessel in ancient, medieval or early modern times. Or make it about delivering a truck cross-country in a campaign modelled on Damnation Alley. There’s plenty of scope for developing picaresque adventures of the week as you go.
But that’s only half the potential. A good story arises in the tension between what you want to do and what you’re allowed to do. Consider how many Star Trek episodes are built around solving a problem in spite of the Prime Directive. So I’d suggest presenting the player-characters with their contractual terms of employment:
INTERSTELLAR
DELIVERY CONTRACT
Base Compensation: 50,000 credits upon successful delivery
Time-Performance Clause:
On-time bonus
(delivery within 365-400 standard days): Additional 25,000 credits
Early delivery bonus
(under 365 days): 100 credits per day early, capped at 10,000 credits
Late penalties:
Days 401-500: Lose 200 credits per day from base pay
Days 501-600: Lose 500 credits per day
Days 600-700: Contract void, crew liable for ship's full value
Day 700+: The ship is deemed stolen and arrest warrants will be
issued for all crew, who will be liable for the ship’s full value plus
damages of up to 100x that
Fuel and Consumables Accountability:
Crew receives fuel allowance calculated at 120% of direct route
requirements
Excess fuel costs deducted from final payment
Documented emergency detours exempt from fuel penalties
Permitted Commerce Provisions:
Crew may conduct trade using up to 30% of cargo capacity
Passenger transport permitted in designated quarters only
All commerce profits belong to pilot
Ship modifications for commerce prohibited without written approval
Route Deviation Clause:
Minor deviations (adding less than 30 days) permitted without
penalty
Must log all stops with legitimate commercial/maintenance
justification
Employer reserves right to audit ship's navigation logs
Performance Bond:
Crew posts 10,000 credit bond, returned upon successful delivery
Bond forfeited if ship arrives with unreported damage or illegal
modifications
Maintenance Requirements:
Designated captain responsible for routine maintenance costs
Major repairs (over 5,000 credits) reimbursable if properly
documented
Ship must pass inspection upon delivery or crew liable for repair
costs
Any new crew member or passenger who travels outside
the star system in which they came aboard is required to be a signatory to
these articles and will be treated as a crew member for all legal purposes. It
is the responsibility of the designated captain or their appointed
representative among the ship’s company to ensure this is done, or risk a
financial penalty to be determined by the courts.
This legal framework makes significant detours financially painful while still allowing the characters flexibility for interesting adventures along the established trade routes.
Now let’s consider the possible loopholes. That’s where things could get interesting – if the characters think of them:
The Maintenance Gambit: They could claim extensive "preventive maintenance" is needed at conveniently profitable trade hubs. Who's to say the ship doesn't need a full diagnostic after passing through that nebula? Maintenance stops are explicitly allowed, and if they befriend/bribe the right mechanics to provide documentation.
The 400-Day Sweet Spot: They lose the 25,000 credit time bonus if they take over 400 days, but penalties are only 200 credits/day after that. So days 401-425 cost them just 200 credits each against the time bonus they've already lost. If they can make more than 200 credits profit per day on those stops, they’re ahead.
Creative Fuel Accounting: "Documented emergency detours" are exempt from fuel penalties. Pirates spotted on scanners? Better take the long way around. Stellar phenomena? Navigation hazard. Build up a file of sensor logs showing various "threats" that necessitated course changes.
The Passenger Shuffle: "Designated quarters only" – but what if passengers are willing to pay premium rates to hot-bunk or squeeze extra people in? The contract doesn't specify maximum passenger density, just which quarters they can use.
The Cargo Hustle: That's 30% of cargo capacity, not 30% of cargo value. They could fill it with incredibly dense, high-value items. Also, who's measuring? Is it by volume? Mass? If they claim some cargo areas are "inaccessible due to maintenance," does that reduce the total capacity and therefore increase their effective percentage?
The Reimbursable Repair Scheme: Major repairs over 5,000 credits are reimbursable. What if they have a "catastrophic failure" requiring expensive repairs at a station where they just happen to have excellent trade connections? Or where the repair shop owner owes them a favour and inflates the invoice?
The Navigation Log Edit: "Employer reserves right to audit" – but that's not automatic. They might not bother if the ship arrives in decent condition. And navigation logs can be tricky things: cosmic radiation, system glitches, all sorts of unfortunate data corruption...
The real beauty is combining these. Take 399 days for the journey (just under the penalty), claim you rushed to make it on time despite multiple "emergency detours" and "critical maintenance", arrive with documentation for everything, and walk away with base pay plus bonus plus a year's worth of side profits.
But those are still just plot-based exploits. More interesting still is if the contract includes ethics clauses that could constrain the characters’ ability to turn a profit. As a real-world example, some Shell negotiators in the 1990s were setting up business links in the former Soviet Union. They met with officials who proposed a scheme that would divert funds provided by the state. The officials would become rich and Shell would get a kickback. The latter had to explain that they were bound by ethical standards that didn’t permit that kind of skulduggery. Presumably the ex-Soviet officials found another company to deal with, became oligarchs, and later bought football teams or palaces on the Black Sea, but the point is the Shell guys’ hands were tied by their own company's ethical protocols. Something similar in the spaceship contract terms could pay story dividends later.
Scriptwriting is increasingly about hitting a formula, perhaps because writers and studio/network execs attend the same courses that say X must happen on page Y, and so forth. And today's scriptwriters only have a very limited toolbox of tropes, it seems. Since Alien, every SF/horror movie must have a maladjusted group of squabbling malcontents. That made sense in Alien, where the ship had a commercial crew on a boring long-haul mission, a crew whose dysfunctional dynamic was exposed by the loss of the senior officers who held them together. It makes less sense if the crew is supposed to be a squad of elite marines, or a hand-picked team of top scientists.
Likewise in war movies. Everything today's scriptwriters know of war, they picked up from watching Vietnam movies. That was an unpopular, hopeless conflict fought by draftees who often didn’t want to be there, so naturally the movies written by veterans often feature disenchanted, unruly, squabbling soldiers. But it makes no sense to apply the same dynamic to the troops at Dunkirk or advancing after D-Day – except that's the only way the writers have learned to imagine war.
Star Trek's famous "lack of conflict" is often mocked as naïve, not least by its current writers, but in fact it's the same dynamic as professional astronauts describe. They don't muck about the way George Clooney's character is shown doing in Gravity, nor snit at each other like rivals in a high school movie. When I worked in game development I used to encourage a team attitude where everyone is pulling together to face the common challenges. I called it "bridge of the Enterprise" culture, the very paradigm of grown-up, ego-free cooperation. It’s getting hard to remember now, but that’s what Star Trek once stood for.
Star Trek: TOS didn't lack for character conflict, of course. Not an episode passed without McCoy and Spock having a grumble about something. But I suspect what the producers of Star Trek: Discovery mean by conflict is to have characters constantly at loggerheads like the crew of the Prometheus. Presumably they’d interpret “bridge of the Enterprise” culture nowadays as all about recriminations, secret passions, grudges and shouting matches. But if the show is to make any kind of sense that could never happen; those characters wouldn't get into Starfleet in the first place.
More to the point (because credibility in SF and fantasy is so often taken to be a foolish goal) writing high school moodiness into all the scenes is the story equivalent of putting lens flare on everything. There are other ways to inject tension into a plot, other varieties of conflict than person to person, and other tones of conflict than the shout-n-sulk.
I don't want to get sidetracked into talking about The Rings of Power (which I haven't seen, nor the Peter Jackson movies either) but from the criticism it seems it's making exactly the same mistakes as those other shows and movies. Writers who only have a very limited range of character- and story-tropes not only know nothing but how to write "piss and vinegar" characters, they even think that's somehow innovative.
I'll leave the sign-off to Ursula K Le Guin. This is from her essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie", which is mostly about the jarring language used by bad writers, though that's part and parcel of the same problem:
"Tolkien writes a plain, clear English. Its outstanding virtue
its flexibility, its variety. It ranges easily from the commonplace to the stately, and can slide into metrical poetry, as in the Tom Bombadil episode, without the careless reader's even noticing. Tolkien's vocabulary is not striking; he has no ichor; everything is direct, concrete, and simple.
Now the kind of writing I am attacking [...] is also written in a plain and apparently direct prose. Does that make it equal to Tolkien's? Alas, no. It is a fake plainness. It is not really simple, but flat. It is not really clear, but inexact. Its directness is specious. Its sensory cues—extremely important in imaginative writing—are vague and generalized; the rocks, the wind, the trees are not there, are not felt; the scenery is cardboard, or plastic. The tone as a whole is profoundly inappropriate to the subject."
Looking back from a quarter century on, it's hard to believe I cared that much. I'd just seen Star Trek Generations and I decided to tell Rick Berman what was wrong with it. Audacious, you might think. Pompous, even. But I stand by what I said then. If they didn't want constructive criticism, they could have written a better script. If any reader of Mirabilis has a bone to pick with me about mistakes in the story, I'll listen.
And I was aiming to help. They wanted to write a story of tragic sacrifice, but all they'd done was describe a high-stakes gamble that didn't pan out. The climax wasn't "a far, far better thing"; it was just "oops!" The letter went on:
"Mr Zimmerman is right. Heroic figures like Kirk and Spock have so often been seen to take extreme life-threatening risks that the only way to have them die in a way that works in narrative terms is when they are faced with certain death. When Spock died in The Wrath of Khan he knew in advance that his action would be fatal. But that wasn't the case with Kirk's death. Scrambling about on the collapsing bridge is the kind of thing he's done hundreds of times before. He knew he was taking a risk, but at no point did we actually get to see him make that crucial decision to sacrifice himself. In real life you could say that this turned out to be the one time his luck ran out, but the rules of real life aren't after all the rules of fiction.
"In this sense I believe Kirk's death was wasted. Obviously it is time to move on with the Trek movies now, but when a character like Kirk has been built up to such a genuinely mythic level the way he leaves life should be on a par with the way he's lived it -- full of sound and fury, and signifying a very great deal.
"This touches on a secondary problem I think you could have with subsequent Trek movies. You have a large cast there, and the awkward subplot with Data showed that it is not so easy to give time to every character and still maintain the narrative momentum demanded by a feature film. People aren't going to come into the theatres every two years to see the latest developments in an outer-space soap, and the more cerebral and complex character-based issues for which the TV series is justly famous are too subtle to carry an action movie. The best Trek films haven't just been TV episodes on a bigger screen, but stories with a big canvas and big ideas to fit.
"Mumon said, 'Do not shoot another's bow, do not ride another's horse, do not criticize another's work.' My suggestions are meant as constructive ones and I hope they don't give the impression that the movie as a whole wasn't good. It's just that I think it could have been great."
I even went so far as to enclose a five-page treatment for a follow-on Trek movie, in which the bad guys were the Yu, a neotic offshoot of humanity in the far future. Earth is now known as Terra, feared throughout the galaxy as the nerve centre of a ruthless empire. I described our time-travelling heroes' first glimpse of what was once their homeworld:
"Terra is not the blue jewel that it was in their own time, but a sinister shadow against the heavens, mustard yellow with pollution and crisscrossed by myriad lights marking out vast continent-spanning metropolises. A grim testament to the Yu's implacable totalitarian society."
A year and a half later, Star Trek First Contact came out. This time I realized the futility of firing off a letter about the flaws in the story. It would have had to be a much longer letter anyway. But there was one bit in the movie that got my seal of approval... No blue jewel, this.
The film director Brian De Palma once gave a vivid description of how resonance works in storytelling. He likened different elements of the story to charged rods. When they get to just the right separation – CRACK! – you get a spark that illuminates the narrative. Too far apart and the discharge doesn’t happen. Too near and you get a closed circuit that never charges up in the first place.
One of the best uses of resonance in games is in Grim Fandango. The 1930s style of the setting allows a pseudo-Art Deco motif in the office block where the hero works, which is the headquarters of the Department of Death. Real-world Art Deco was influenced by Egyptian art, making it an excellent metaphor for the afterlife which is the setting of the game. In Grim Fandango, that Art Deco style comes with a spin, though, in that the decorative images used are not Egyptian but Aztec – which pulls us back to the origins of the Day of the Dead festival in pre-Columbian myth.
The 1930s trope also works well with Grim Fandango’s noirish private-eye slant and the slightly shabby elegance familiar to anyone who has ever visited a Mexican town like Morelia or Oaxaca. The game begins in the city of El Marrow, which looks like a sleepy burg that time has passed by. Indeed, this impression is accentuated by styling the world of the living, which the hero briefly visits, on Richard Hamilton's brashly colourful Pop Art paintings of the 1950s. (Life is to afterlife as the urban USA is to rural Mexico? That's resonance.)
Resonance can be used with varying degrees of subtlety. The least overt involves repeated images that defy instant critical analysis and so work on a very deep level. Examples of this kind of resonance – which we may call motifs – are hats in Miller's Crossing, water and the lack of it in Chinatown, and the use of discordant sounds and background noise in Touch of Evil.
More obvious are symbols that visually express the subtext. Hitchcock's thrillers often embody a sense of inevitability or danger by using shadows that seem to form a web or the bars of a cage. Orson Welles' Touch of Evil is set on the border between the USA and Mexico, and the story concerns a moral border: the grey area between the two lead characters, played by Welles and Charlton Heston. Those are more overt forms of resonance because they operate at the mind's liminal threshold.
Least subtle of all is resonance that simply swipes its whole scenario from another story or from the real world. I haven’t seen the new Picard series and know nothing about it apart from the screenshot that suggests Jean-Luc is now hanging out with Elrond. But a review mentioned that it deals with the refugees displaced by the destruction of the planet Romulus (what is it with Star Trek writers and blowing up planets?) and the notion that a less progressive administration at Starfleet is shirking their responsibility to help them.
Now, I have no quarrel with Star Trek being political. It always was; that was the whole point of it. The question here is whether it’s the kind of Roddenberrian allegorical scenario that fires us up with interesting ideas about timeless philosophical or political issues, or whether you’ll watch it and say, “Oh, so it’s a story about Trump.” The former is one of Mr De Palma’s lightning flashes: it’s alive! The latter fizzles out, its energy draining away in worthy obviousness.
I’m not sure if I’ll ever find out. There’s way too much TV these days to keep track of, and after seven seasons of TNG and Grabthar knows how many movies I don’t really feel the need for yet more Picard. But if you liked the show and can convince me it’s not from Western Union – well, okay then. Make it so.
What would a lawful good society look like? I’ve heard a couple of discussions about that recently and, although I think the Dungeons & Dragons alignment system is even more trite and unhelpful than the typical glossy-magazine-quiz psychometrics test (eg Myers-Briggs), it did set me thinking.
We know what lawful means. Laws, like rules in a game, ensure a level playing field for all citizens, free of individual whim or fashion. As for good – well, we could take that to simply be the opposite of everything that a Midwestern American senator believes (here's one) but let’s just say that it means an attempt to ensure that everybody has an equal right to happiness once all citizens’ basic needs are met.
What would such a society look like? The most obvious answer is the Federation. Decades of relentless libertarian ideology in the media – the supposed evil conspiracies of government, the fascism of the state, the ‘I aim to misbehave’ and ‘No one wants to be civilized’ mantras – has meant that it’s common now to take a cynical view of the Federation. ‘People just wouldn’t accept a utopia,’ insists the Randian, ‘because we all want more for ourselves than for other people.’
Well, you’d have been pitied for taking that view back in the ‘60s, and it tells us plenty about the speaker and nothing about the human race as a whole, so let’s just take as a given that the people in our lawful good state enjoy living there, enthusiastically support the principles of the society, and aren’t all eager to rush over the border into the Klingon Empire.
The snag is, the Federation is a post-scarcity society, well on its way to becoming the Culture. Most fantasy worlds tend to be more on the medieval side, and unless you assume the place is awash with magic (in which case your game might as well be set in the 23rd century) there will be shortages, famines, plagues, and all the other ills that bedevil humans when we’re not actively bedevilling ourselves.
Another complaint is that utopias are boring because they lack conflict. Would you rather live in New York in the ‘70s and ‘80s or today? (The homicide graph might help you decide.) If you’re relying on the volatility of society to maintain your interest in life, I suggest your priorities might be a bit skewed. There can be plenty of excitement and conflict in even a post-scarcity society. Just for starters, the old story of two men loving the same woman – or man, or any combination thereof – will still apply. You can be fed and clothed and warm and safe, but you can’t have everything you want when some of the things you want are other people.
A pre-modern lawful good society – that is, one where scarcity is still a problem – wouldn’t be feudal. You can’t have serfs because (trust me on this) people who are not free are not happy. I suppose you could make it a kind of benevolent hierarchy, where the lords have a strong sense of noblesse oblige, but you’ve still got some poor buggers toiling ankle-deep in mud and shit while another fellow rides by in a velvet jerkin. I’m really not sure if the typical D&D player would call that ‘good’.
How about the Shire? That’s a little more egalitarian. At least the rich folks live and work alongside the poorer ones. It’s just that they live better and work less. Everyone’s technically free, but if you have to slog your guts out while your employer rides the high hog, said freedom is really an illusion.
Your lawful good state would need a form of socialism. Food would be distributed according to each citizen’s needs. Some citizens would work, others would be needed for administration, soldiering, and so on. In times of hardship, everybody would have to pull together. It’s looking less like the Middle Ages and more like the Roman Republic. The Roman Republic in its theoretical ideal, that is, not its messy reality. Or maybe like post-war Britain as envisaged in a movie like They Came To A City.
I’m not sure if most D&D groups are interested in developing the setting to that extent, though. Do they normally just want the background to look medieval, and the difference between an evil and a good country is simply whether the peasants get raped and tortured at the pleasure of the barons or not? Maybe lawful good means you think God would prefer you to be nice Wenceslas-style: just pick one random peasant to give Christmas gifts to and you qualify for sainthood.
The Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice podcast was one of the places I heard this being chewed over. Myself, having no truck with alignment as a system, I probably wouldn’t start out designing a fantasy game setting on the basis of an abstract ethical stance. Economics and history would have more of a bearing. But it did lead me back to the idea of science fiction utopias. What would happen to the Federation if the replicators broke down? Would the principles of the society hold up now that people have to share? If everyone was like Starfleet personnel, then yes – but aren’t there millions of people in the Federation who only know a life of leisure and abundance? How would they cope? Would they cope?
In putting the whole idea of ‘lawful good’ to the test, you might find out something interesting. It doesn’t make me want to play D&D or use alignment in my games, but I can see it making fertile ground for an SF campaign. That really would be to boldly go.
My friend was angry. A television director, he’d been working on a documentary about an African bishop with a bit of a maverick reputation in the Catholic Church. ‘The Jesuits want to give this guy the sack for laying on hands and casting out devils,’ he grumbled. ‘It smacks of racism to me.’
Normally you don’t come to me for advice on ecumenical matters, but it happened that I knew some senior Jesuits because I’d been working on a scientific project for them. Generally they struck me as sincere people—and they accept evolution and the Big Bang, which puts them at the rational end of the religious spectrum. I tried for a conciliatory note. ‘Did they give any reasons?’
He showed me the interview he’d filmed with a top Jesuit at the Vatican. The chap was all but wringing his hands, perhaps envisaging the headlines if they went so far as to expel an African bishop. ‘The thing is, you can’t just take it on your own authority to say somebody is possessed and to cure them of that. Not even if you’re a bishop. It’s not official doctrine. If he wants to preach that line… He can’t do that and stay in the Church.’
‘OK, I’ll be devil’s advocate here,’ I told my friend. ‘They have a brand. Stuff goes with the brand. You and I think it’s all equally nonsensical, but if somebody won’t get with the official line, I don’t see how he can be one of their clergy.’
That was many years ago, but I was reminded of it recently in an interview that Simon Pegg gave about his work on the script for Star Trek Beyond. (Perhaps that’s the sublime to the ridiculous but, trust me, I’m on a lot firmer ground when it comes to Star Trek.) Paramount were exercised that Disney’s Guardians of the Galaxy had raked in $1.5 billion, while the last Star Trek movie earned a paltry $0.5 billion.
‘Maybe if the next Star Trek could be more like Guardians..?’ spoke up a voice at the big walnut table. And so they turned to Mr Pegg, who plays Scotty, to do a rewrite. His brief was clear:
“Make a Western or a thriller or a heist movie, then populate that with Star Trek characters so it’s more inclusive to an audience that might be a little bit [reluctant].”
Just suppose that you could make a Star Trek movie exactly like Guardians of the Galaxy. Maybe then you’d triple the box office. The only snag: you wouldn’t have your brand anymore. In fact, by chasing somebody else’s brand, you’re pretty much guaranteed not even to equal their success.
Brand integrity matters. But that’s not a message that’s coming across loud and clear these days when the brand in question is prose fiction and the people you’re talking to are publishers. An example: an author I know has had a lot of success with middle grade novels. Usually they run to around fifty-five thousand words, but lately he’s been asked to make them shorter. ‘Twenty, twenty-five thousand max. We’ll make up the page count with layout and lots of pictures.’
‘I can’t get so much of a story into twenty thousand words, though.’
Writers, eh? We’re suckers for giving ourselves work.
‘A lot of the kids find a full-length novel a bit of a struggle,’ said his editor. ‘Just keep it short and sweet.’
We’re seeing a parallel trend in the urge to festoon digital novels with sound effects and moving pictures. And I say this, who write for television and design videogames: anything that can be said as well in prose can be said better in prose. Publishers, if you want to make a movie, do that. Don’t mess up a promising novel because you don’t trust in the brand integrity of your own medium.
Oh, wait. The Luddite card? Really? No—as Seth Godin put it several years ago, we’ve seen all this before:
“Adding video, audio and other extras to books, as in the CD-Rom era, is worse than a distraction. It's a dangerous cul-de-sac that will end in tears.”
Still and all, it’s easy to criticize. A lot of publishers are like polar bears on those shrinking icebergs. You can’t expect them to worry about climate change when they’re not even sure if they can make the jump to the next floe before this one melts. And this is me checking my privilege: I grew up in a home with books; many don’t. I understand that to a lot of people, a doorstop-sized novel doesn’t look like the portal to another world, but a threatening immensity of barbed wire keeping them out. It can be helpful to those readers to give them an easy-in, introducing them via shorter forms to all the rewards of good fiction.
That’s fine. That’s stabilizers on a bike. But what is the future of publishing if editors feel that their goal is not to annoy readers with too much text? Those shorter, simpler books have real value if they are stepping stones to richer works. If they become the end purpose of publishing then we’re in a controlled descent towards the final extinction of the book.
Imagine Yoda had said, ‘Too difficult real Jedi training is. Enough you have done getting the ship out the swamp.’ I know, wrong franchise, but you get the point.
The only way for publishing to thrive, and for more readers to appreciate better books, is if we keep our faith in the brand.
Paul Mason is famous in roleplaying circles as one of the uber-fans involved with Dragonlords and as the editor of the superb if infrequent imazine, in which he treated us to a stellar series of articles and reviews in his inimitably trenchant and thought-provoking style. He was also for many years one of my Tekumel players and has written Outlaws, a great but so far unpublished RPG of the heroes of Liangshan Po, which I used as the basis of my (also unpublished) Heian Japan roleplaying game, Kwaidan.
These days Paul is too busy with his academic career in Japan to do much roleplaying, but the last time he was over in Britain I asked if he wouldn’t mind me running some of his articles as guest posts, and he gave a kind of oblique permission. That is, he looked at me with an expression that was more 'are you serious?' than 'don’t you dare'.
This piece might strike you as very basic stuff if you’re a roleplayer – but hey, I’ve been roleplaying since the mid-70s and I found it useful. Remember that once you reach 10th Dan you go back to wearing a white belt. Nobody should ever think they’re anything but a novice. Take it away, Paul...
In a role-playing game the rules are details: they are the trees from which part of the wood is composed. So let’s consider a different approach to writing rules for role-playing games. Let’s try to look at the wood.
goal
The purpose of this game is to take part in a story. The story isn’t told by anyone, but is built up from the improvised contributions of all the participants. See the sample for an idea of how this works.
how to play
The game creates a story. Participants in the game all play a part in creating the story, by making contributions. The goal of the game is to make it as easy as possible for participants to act or describe their improvised contributions to the game without spoiling the sense of immersion.
participants
There are two basic types of participants in the game. Players are a little like actors. They will usually act the life of a single person: their character. The referee is more like a director. The referee describes sensory information in the story, and may occasionally act other characters in the story, as needed.
action
A participant who contributes to the game by acting does so by saying what their character is trying to do. So in the sample, Fred says: ‘I climb up the gantry to the deck above.’ If you like, when this action is speech, the participant can act the speech by actually speaking as the character. So later in the sample, when Fred says ‘Set it to stun!’ he’s actually saying what his character is saying. In some cases you might need to check which it is, but usually it will be obvious. Two or more participants can thus act the roles of their characters, conducting a conversation which forms part of the story.
Anything which is acted by a participant takes place as described, unless it is challenged by another participant (usually this is the job of the referee, but other players may also challenge if they like). A participant whose action has been challenged must prove that the character could succeed. To do this, they need to use an agreed game mechanic (such as Outlaws Light, presented in imazine #33). An example of a game mechanic is that you must roll 9 or less on two dice to hit with your phaser. Really skilled characters like Worf need an 11 or less. Other Klingons need 7 or less.
Some complex interactions, such as fights, often involve continual implied challenges, and therefore may require a lot of use of mechanics. Other actions, if they seem reasonable given the character and the story, can pass unchallenged.
description
A participant who contributes to the game by describing does so by talking about something accessible to the senses of characters in the game. This is usually the job of the referee, but players may also occasionally describe things connected with their characters. So in the sample, Sam describes what the players can see once they have climbed the gantry, and what they can feel.
Descriptions, like actions, can be challenged. They shouldn’t be contradicted outright, but senses can be mistaken! A player who describes a scene is speaking only for their character, and other players, or the referee, may perceive things differently. Note that the referee is privileged in description: because they speak for ‘everybody’ a player who challenges a referee’s description is simply describing what their own character perceives, and not what anyone else does.
Obviously, not everything needs to be described, and referees should beware of trying to act events in the story in the guise of description! For example, if Sam in the sample goes on to say ‘When you walk on to the transporter pad, there is an explosion’ this is wrong, because the players haven’t yet said that they are acting by walking on to the transporter pad. Remember, you’re not telling a story by crafting it authorially, you’re creating one by inhabiting it.
contributing
There are no fixed rules governing how and when you can contribute to a story, but there are some obvious guidelines that should be followed. The most important is: take your cues from the story. If you act something your character is doing tomorrow, then everyone else’s actions today will have to be done in flashbacks. This will be difficult, and may even cause a contradiction with what you acted about tomorrow. Challenging other player characters, or getting into conflicts with them, is fine, but blocking the story itself is generally bad form.
A typical sequence of contributions will be:
Referee describes the situation facing the player characters, and/or uses a character to act a stimulus.
Players respond by acting their character’s reaction. There’s no fixed order to this, but if a player feels that their character should be able to act first, they always have recourse to a challenge.
Participants respond to the actions. This may lead to further description—the referee, or a player, may describe the result of actions.
Out of all these contributions, a sequence of events will soon be evident. This is the story.
Even in your own mind, separate Action from Description. At first it’s tempting to think that your character could do absolutely anything, but soon you find that the limitations are what create drama. Maybe you can’t leap that chasm, maybe you’re not fast enough to outrun the fireball. Maybe the Ferengi saw you pick his pocket. Sometimes you should challenge yourself, not wait for other players to do it.
timing
Time for the characters in the story does not pass at the same rate as it does for the players. At times, it will pass very slowly, if you’re working out something that doesn’t take long, but needs to be explained in detail. At other times, it will pass very quickly, as with a long journey in which nothing much happens. As with most things in the game, time can be skipped over, subject to challenge by any of the other participants.
winning
There are no rules to cover winning. Players can decide on their own ideas of what constitutes winning. However, they may find that other players don’t agree with them. So how do you win? Well, how does a character win in a story?
ending
The game takes place in game sessions. A game session is when the participants get together to play the game. It can end at any time that is convenient for the participants. The end of a game session doesn’t mean the end of a story. The story can continue in the next session. A story only ends when everyone agrees that it’s finished, and you start a new one, or when you stop playing the game entirely!
postscript
Thanks to Dave Morris for providing comments and useful examples based on Star Trek. In writing this, I’ve been particularly inspired by all those games which have started with some vague waffle about how role-playing is like improvisational radio theatre, have followed it with a sample dialogue, without any explanation as to how and why people said what they did, and then plunged straight into tables of character generation. I’m also indebted to my own players, half of whom were complete beginners.
I hoped to have news today of Jamie's latest project, a book about the early years of Games Workshop, but it turns out I have no more info to impart than is already on the crowdfunding page, so instead I'm going to talk about a passage that caught my eye in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian:
"We rested our rifle barrels on the brimstone and we shot nine more on the lava where they ran. It was a stand, what it was. Wagers was laid. The last of them shot was a reckonable part of a mile from the muzzles of the guns and that on a dead run. It was sharp shootin all around and not a misfire in the batch with that queer powder."
These fellows are ordinary NPCs, which in GURPS terms might be 100-point characters. The highest that most of them would be in Guns skill is around 15-16, but we can assume the final shot that Tobin, the narrator, is talking about was made by the company's best sharpshooter. Let's say he has a skill of 22.
"A reckonable part of a mile" -- that's got be at least 1000 yards, which is -16 for range. And the last Indian shot was "on a dead run", and even though a component of that motion would be directly away from the shooter, it's got to be at least another -6.
So far our shooter needs 0 to hit. But he can aim for three rounds, which gives him the Accuracy bonus of the weapon (+3 for a Sharps .59 caplock) and another +2 for the extra rounds spent. Also he can brace the rifle for +1.
With an adjusted skill of 6 the shooter had a 9.3% chance of success (GURPS makes skill rolls on 3d6). I wouldn't take that shot myself. Ammo's too precious. But it was the last of their enemies and everyone's blood was up, so obviously our man decided to go for it.I bet the referee gave him a character point in Guns for that, too, which is pretty much useless at that level and in any case you learn more from failure than from success -- but hey, nobody turns down a CP, am I right?
But that's fiction, or it's gaming. How about real-life skills? I found this assessment of 1911 handguns. Now, those aren't rifles and they are from 60 years (a whole Tech Level) after the events of Blood Meridian, but still Mr Kolesar is getting a spread of 2 inches with his Colt at 50 yards. That would be good enough to ensure a face hit every time, which in GURPS terms is -5 and another -8 for range, so -13 overall. The Colt has Accuracy +2, so with three rounds to aim and holding it in both hands that reduces the penalty to -8. To hit pretty much every time means adjusted skill must be 17, so Mr Kolesar's actual Guns skill in GURPS terms must be at least 25. He's built on more than 100 points, I bet.
Incidentally, Tobin also says they didn't get a single misfire from a batch of black powder they just mixed up Captain Kirk style. They shot sixty-seven of their enemies and not every shooter can have been as good as that eagle-eyed guy who downed the last one, so let's say at least a hundred bullets were fired. This is the mid-nineteenth century and misfires occur on 16+ on 3d6 at Tech Level 5, so you'd expect four or five in every hundred shots. That must have been some magic formula.
Anyway, I recommend Blood Meridian. It's what you'd get if Michel Tournier and Lord Dunsany collaborated on a fabulist Western. And if that doesn't pique your interest, what would?
I watched Star Trek Beyondlast Christmas. It would have been two hours of my life that I’d never get back, but luckily I gave up after twenty-five minutes when it became clear the entire movie was one long videogame cut-scene. All I can say in its defence is that it made Into Darkness seem, in retrospect, not quite so bloody awful.
There was one interesting moment. The Enterprise was attacked by a swarm of little ships. There are spoilers ahoy, by the way, though nothing as dire as actually having to watch the movie itself.
Still here? Okay, those little ships take the Enterprise apart – quickly and completely cut it to ribbons. The shields do nothing to stop them and the phasers seem unable to fire rapid bursts, so that’s that. It would have been more effective if the film makers had done something to set it up. As it was, the scene comes across as the plot development that must happen so that the already-stated theme of the movie (“the major asset of the ship is its crew”) can be slotted into place Ikea-style.
Still, it’s something I’ve wondered about before. Tasked with building a fleet for space combat, would you really build huge battleships? Wouldn’t lots of smaller fighters be more effective?
I’m thinking of Lanchester’s Laws, which establish that when using ranged weapons, the attack strength of a force is proportional to the square of the number of units. Consider two starships against one. Each starship can take two photon torpedo strikes. After one exchange of fire, the solitary vessel is destroyed and the two opponents have lost a quarter of their combined strength.
But it might not be that simple. Maybe the effectiveness of shields goes up non-linearly with the energy put into them. Maybe you can’t build a warp drive or an antimatter containment field smaller than a certain size. We know that the Enterprise’s phasers can cut through a planet’s crust – at least, I think I remember seeing that in one episode. It’s hard to imagine a few hundred TIE fighters pulling that off.
Apparently at the end of the movie the Enterprise gets rebuilt. But why? Having seen that one big vessel is no match for a swarm of smaller ships, does it make sense to revert to the old pattern? That’s reinforcing failure. On the other hand, the scriptwriters will have a hand-wavy plan for getting around it so that sequels can timidly go where Star Wars has gone so many times before.
The author Conn Iggulden (who incidentally has written about the creative benefits of role-playing, but that’s a detail) was talking recently about the effects being able to buy genetic upgrades for your children.
I'd be happy allowing parents to buy mutations: say, height, to pass on forever. All would benefit in the end.
http://t.co/aAmoieeweV
Let’s not oversimplify. (I’ll get this out of the way first.) Genes don’t code for attributes directly, they code for structure. And the genome is a big mess of software patches going back millions of years, so typically it’s not easy to point to one gene and say it does X and X only. Even so, my family has some genetic kinks I’d like ironed out. Migraines. Sinus trouble. Short sight. Wonky knees. If it doesn’t mean turning into the Brundlefly, I’d pay for some changes there.
Some people have reacted by saying, “Oh great. So the rich will buy genes that give them a competitive advantage.” And my first thought was, sure, all genes that are worth keeping must give you a competitive advantage. Actually getting in there and tweaking them could get us out of a saddle point on Mount Improbable. So – other than the qubit-melting complexity of the entire interdependent H. sap genetic program – where’s the harm?
But on second thoughts, consider the Klingons. They’ll fight at the drop of a pin, and prehistoric Klingons must have been even worse. In the course of ordinary evolution, presumably a mutation arose that made early Klingons slightly less aggressive. Thus a family of brothers and sisters with that trait cooperated and thrived. And so the gene spread to other families within the village, then the tribe, then the entire Klingon race.
The point is that the cooperative trait I’m describing is an advantage in situations which allow a win-win solution – that is, where everybody does better by cooperating than by competing. Reverting to the real world and guessing now: maybe conditions in the Ice Age were so perilous that the human race had to become less selfish in order to survive. Thus we modern humans are able to understand a concept like pooling our resources via taxation in order to create a more comfortable society than we could enjoy if we were all living like backwoods survivalists.
But what if you were a Klingon buying a trait rather than having it sprung on your bloodline by mutation? Now there isn’t much point in buying the cooperation gene. (Yeah, yeah – see oversimplification disclaimer above). Little Worf is going to do much better in life if you make him more grasping and combative. Screw those jerks who’d share a fish they caught, right?
A common misunderstanding of Richard Dawkins’s selfish gene concept is that it must imply a selfish organism. How can we have altruism? Simple. If the world doesn’t consist solely of zero-sum games, the problems the genes are trying to solve will sometimes throw up cooperative solutions and hence social animals. Sadly, in the case of humanity, we could add: just social enough for the circumstances of a hunter-gather community of a few hundred individuals. Yet we are a species so in thrall to amour-propre that most of us would opt for being higher status than our neighbour even if that meant dragging everybody’s living standards down including our own.
And that’s the best we’ve got from evolution, which can chug on trying to find a joined-up solution. Biohacking is a whole other environment, one that doesn’t have to see problems in aggregate. There, you start by wanting your son to be a couple of inches taller than the other fellow, and next thing you know it’s the towers of San Gimignano all over again.
Long-time readers of this blog will know that I’m an evangelist for the post-human future. We’re not going to inherit the cosmos with monkey brains, and once Humanity 2.0 is out there among the stars, the old primates can grow their hair long again – and spiny, and blue, and luminous, or whatever they like. But in the meantime, let’s try not to allow rivalrous gene wars to pull us off into a future of futile hardwired fashion accessories.
Anthony Horowitz was on today's Guardian blog asking, "Do we still need publishers?" If you happen to follow any of the blogs that are proliferating like tribbles in the bow wave of the self-publishing explosion, you probably felt your heart sink a little at that news. But, unlike the vast majority of those, Horowitz's piece is actually worth reading.
Partly that may be because he's a proper writer, with multiple successes to his credit including Alex Rider, the Power of Five, Foyle's War and - if your memory goes back that far - even a few episodes of Robin of Sherwood. (Actually, forget those - he was just starting out, and had the impossible task of measuring up to the legendary Richard Carpenter. But the other stuff more than makes up for it.)
And, instead of just asserting a position and backing it up with hectoring bloggadocio, Horowitz considers the various possible futures of publishing and leaves us with some interesting questions. Thus, where many self-pub bloggers come across like doorstepping Jehovah's Witnesses, he's bringing the persona of an intelligent dinner party guest. Anyway, I urge you to pop over to the Guardian website and read the piece for yourself. Regular FL readers may be particularly interested in what he has to say about digital books:
"I'd love to write a murder mystery where you could actually tap on a bit of dialogue you mistrusted and discover that the character was telling a lie. Where the reader actually had to become a detective and where the last chapter, the reveal, had to be earned. Or how about a book with different points of view, where you could choose which of the characters became the narrator?"
The second of those ideas certainly did well for Ellery Queen eighty years ago, incidentally, so why not now?
I have my own story about self-publishing. I ran into a well-known author who wrote a very successful novel. It came out almost twenty years ago, but even so I'll bet you've heard of it. He saw me with an iPad and asked, "Do you think these ebooks and things will catch on?" It turned out that he still owned the digital rights in his novel, as those hadn't entered the picture back in the early '90s. The publishers wanted to do a Kindle edition and were offering him 25% of net receipts.
"Email me the book," I said. "I'll turn it into a Kindle file this week and you can have 99% of net."
"Isn't that like vanity publishing?" he worried. It isn't, in fact. Vanity publishing is where somebody runs off a limited print run and makes money by selling the books at a high price to you and your friends. But his point was that self-publishing still carries a stigma - and, of course, there'd be no publicity.
He should have done it. The book is already famous, and everyone knows he's a proper writer. But instead he went and signed with his print publishers, who must have been aching from the strain of holding back their Cheshire Cat grins as they walked him to the door. Ah, so foolish - but so many authors are still a bit befuddled by the digital age. Annoying, too. That one percent would have paid for me and Jamie to write a dozen books!
Following on from the Brymstone town map, here is the introductory spiel for one of the player-characters in the Brymstone campaign. I just handed each player a background and let them work it up from there. Don't always do it that way - in fact, at no other time - but this was an experiment. The player in question was Ian Marsh, of Dragonlords and White Dwarf fame, who now runs Fighting 15s. The character was inspired by Vina's fate in "The Menagerie" - what if you got put back together by beings that didn't understand all the mortal components? I explored the theme again in my Knightmare novel,Labyrinths of Fear. (I don't think there was even a single labyrinth in it, but the title came from marketing. Surprising they'd know a word that long, actually.)
I did two versions of the character intro. One was all Robin of Sherwood, the other a bit weirder. Can't remember now which I gave to Ian, so here are both:
Meeting Anath
When you were young, you made a mistake that changed the whole course of your life. You killed a man.
The reasons do not matter now. Only the fact that you were once a fifteen-year-old boy with a bloodied sickle in his hands, standing over the body of a freeman. Your parents had died years before, and you had nothing to hold you to the village to wait for such justice as the lord would dispense. You stole a horse - second heinous crime - and fled to the wildwood, to become an outlaw. A wolf's-head. You have killed many times since then.
You thoughts stray back to that distant time. A long-ago night in another world, through which a terrified youngster rode from his pursuers. You pulled the horse about, trying to get it to leap a narrow crevasse above a stream. Snorting, it threw you. You plummetted down into darkness -
- you have been wandering for a long time in a lightless wood. Your hands grope blindly around the stunted boles of dead trees. A faint glimmer of starlight reaches your eyes, but as you make for it a tall figure steps across your path. You have a burnt stump of wood in your hand. You cannot breathe as the figure approaches with silent tread. A gleam as he smiles - a faint, ironic smile that does nothing to reassure you. He strikes his knuckles together hard, and a spark flies from them. It touches your torch, which bursts alight. You look up to thank the man, but he has gone. The torch burns brightly, giving you a hot red light with which to see your way from the wood. You make for an open field, feeling the heat of the burning torch on your face.
You woke then from the dream which has recurred so often since. Someone was standing over you in the darkness. Through all that long night you stirred fitfully, gripped by a fever, rising momentarily into consciousness and then sinking back into delerium. As dawn broke, the figure who had attended you throughout your ordeal laid his cold hand on your shoulder. "Sleep now," said he, "for I would have no ill befall thee."
You slept through much of the day following, wondering half in sleep about the strange man who had rescued you. He had brought you to a rough cave beside a river, a place which stank of herbs and earth. You rose to walk about the small cave, but found that your legs shook with weakness. You slumped back on your pallet of logs and stretched hide, waking again at sunset to find the tall man there again. He wore green, and his white hair, gathered by a silver circlet, touched his shoulders. He beckoned you to follow him to the mouth of the bower, pushing back a net of creepers. A pack of wolves waited in the gathering dusk for their master, crouched low and watchful.
"Thou art healed." The tall man turned to you, holding out a longbow and quiver for you to take. "I am Anath. Tonight we hunt together, my son."
You took the bow from his hand. His smile was like an icicle in winter sunlight.
Waxing poetical It was at the turn of the year that you stood, overshadowed by trees stiff with hoarfrost, waiting for three lords baleful with ire to speak. A green-garbed lord leaned forward on his throne of oak:
"Hearken to us, you who share the mortals' breath, who choose to walk upon the earth broken by plough, to drink the water plundered from ancient wells." It was in the cold moonlight that you waited, caught in a web-tangle of wooded shadows, listening to three lords solemn with portent. One spoke to you from his root-twined seige: "Year has piled upon year since Kernac worked his magic. The Shapeless One has long been fettered, yet now men have forgotten those chains that are to break." The third lord sat in silence while the winter wind stirred his grey cloak. A bittern boomed as the moon escaped from cloud. He then said: "Surrender to sleep, you mortal's son. Already the winter has stolen you from the old world, licked your flesh with its barbed tongue, filled your lungs with its cold laughter. Awaken with the reborn land, go into the east. Join battle with the ancient foe, the skulking one, the stealer of gifts most precious and true."
With sweeping cloaks all three rose to stand in starlight. Faces of ashen grey stared from under elfin hoods. All spoke together: "The days on middle-earth for all are numbered; he who may should wrest renown, steal from Fate his fame; that is a hero's sweetest solace, his best memorial when he has departed from the world."
You wake up in a wooded bower. The forest around you is ablaze with the colour and sounds and scents of a glorious spring morning. The words of the poem linger in your mind like the fragments of a dream, but you can remember nothing else that happened since you rode into the wood. That must have been months ago, for it was close to midwinter then!
Of the two versions, I have a feeling I used the second one to start with because it dropped in that hint about the Shapeless One, who was the campaign's Big Bad, a shapechanger called the Brollachan. Well, I say he (it?) was the BB, but actually he only catalyzed the existing tensions that were building up between those loyal to the local lord and the freemen of the town. It was a riot - literally.
.jpg)
.jpg)
