RPGs with a shared narrative mechanic - where players and the GM both come up with interesting people, results, and situations - come with a cost.
They pull focus away from the puzzle elements of the RPG, and that’s my favourite element, so I can’t see myself enjoying shared narration mechanics.
Let’s start with an example:
A quiet shuffling sound echoes around the massive cavern. Your stomach groans from hunger. What do you do?
I wrote this piece about Machine-Learning art a year ago, and set it to self-publish.
Let’s see how much of an idiot I look like!
First off, ‘AI’ doesn’t exist.
Some marketing team took a load of coke, then called their vision ‘Open AI’, because being ‘Open’ is good and being ‘AI’ is impressive.
The reality is neither, and the technical meaning of this technical term remains unchanged, no matter what us unqualified plebs on the side-lines of the real research might tweet, toot, or post.
I’ve decided against having online printing available for BIND.
This may change, but here’s the thinking so far:
Printing means I need to have the book mailed to me, but posting to Serbia means a whole bunch of faff.
Of course, a voice in my head reminds me I could always find a way.
Send the book to a friend, and have them check it.
But setting up a book for printing means an outdated book.
I’m always tinkering with BIND.
I’ve enjoyed Ravenloft more than any other A,D&D setting, and the 3rd Edition expansion gave it a lot more life.
Despite that, a lot of the best themes seem under-used.
Beginnings
Ravenloft began when A,D&D was busy asking ‘what else can we do as an RPG?’, and someone said ‘horror’.
Specifically, ‘Hammer Horror’.
The monsters were 1D4 bats, the plots assumed foetid stupidity from the players (or at least PCs), and the big-bad-enemies all aped classic horror monsters.
Using real-world time in RPGs has worked out great in my last fantasy campaign, so I’m thinking of using it for a Dark Ages: Vampire Campaign.
I want to create a game where every single neonate in the city has a player.
I want to see a dozen players, all with a chatroom online, called ‘Elysium’, shooting the shit, making plans, and ‘DMing’ each other with skulduggery.
The campaign would be set in Belgrade, Hungary, in the year of our Lord 1130.
Belgrade would have a limited number of feeding grounds, prized according to some difficulty number to hunt.
In Vampire: the Masquerade, the first level of the Dominate ability lets the vampire issue a one-word command, which the target instantly obeys.
It might be ‘sit’, ‘stay’, ‘fight’, ‘run’, or any other one-word command.
It’s flexible genius, because it clearly defines what the ability does, but can still allow players to invent all manner of clever things outside of what the spell states.
GMs (or ’the storyteller’ in this case) also have leeway to mess with the vampire.
RPGs have dungeons…well more often those dungeons are caves…no, actually RPG plots often feature caves, which we call ‘dungeons’.
Anyway, these caves look rather strange, because people began drawing them on graph paper, and later they made sure to fit the entire map onto a single square at the top of a page.
RPG caves look very strange, yet disappointingly bland.
But I’ve been thinking…
Depths and Turns
Caverns could present the same kinds of challenges as wilderness survival, but very different in the details.
I’ve rather gone off the notion of ‘collectibles’.
Collectible RPG books are special because they can’t meet the demand.
We can’t all have a copy of those original D&D books, or whatever swanky thing White Wolf brought out with the expensive full-page art.
In this vein, I’ve been making the campaign book - ‘Missions in Maitavale’ - less collectable while I rework it.
All copies are available forever, so anyone can have any version at any time.
It is not a pdf, the pdf file you download simply lets you get the book by printing it.
All monster statblocks have boxes next to them. If a room has ‘4 Goblins’ with ‘5 HP’, then there will be a goblin stat-block with 4 rows of 5 boxes, so the Judge can easily score through the HP as the goblins die, and I encourage them to use a pen.
I’m going to leave space at the bottom of every page for the Judge to take notes.1
And every handout now sits inside the book.
That last one took more hours than it should have.
I had to tell LaTeX to remove the page numbers, then to clear everything to the next right-hand page (meaning ’the next page with an odd number).
But I’d just removed the page numbers, so LaTeX fell over and shat the bed, while screaming something about \hboxes.
Why is it always the same old elves, and hobbits, and +1 swords? Can’t people come up with anything different?
…I hear this every so often, and I wonder if any of these people actually pick up the myriad gonzo-RPGs with novel races (or at least ’novelty races’).
Of course, many have the extra barrier of 40 pages of history of random races - bird-people, lizard-knights, and other first attempts at casting the illusion of a full culture, fit for a gaming world.