The Harping Monkey » Roleplaying

How NOT to Write an AP Post: Canon Puncture

Mick Bradley — Tue, 04 May 2010 14:00:19 +0000

How NOT to Write an AP Post : Canon Puncture.

It’s about time I got back on the HMS Canon Puncture, ain’t it?

The Bard, The Emancipator, and the Girl from Calumet

Mick Bradley — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 15:00:40 +0000

Wherin we continue our discussion of the possibility of playing a Primetime Adventures series based on the following premise:

“a show about a time-traveling William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln zooming across the heartland of America in a stolen ‘67 Mustang with a goth-chick waitress who’s on the run from the Irish mob in Chicago.”

Daniel Perez, Chuck Hedden and I have been flirting with the notion of taking this seriously. Some ideas came up in another thread and this post is here to keep the pitch discussion going, should anyone wish to do so.

FoolsGambit: Band on the Run

Mick Bradley — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:48:49 +0000

In the continuing discussion on Daniel Perez’ blog about playing Vampire, I was reminded of a character I played about 9 years ago that I’m pretty sure I haven’t mentioned much online before. I played in a World of Darkness crossover saga about two mages and a werewolf who form a folk-punk band called ‘FoolsGambit’ and go around playing music and getting into various kinds of supernatural trouble. My character was the werewolf and bass player, and his name was Conor McBride. Conor was a type of werewolf called a Fianna Ragabash, which for those of you who are not into the terminology, means that he was 1. of Irish heritage and 2. was born under the moon-sign of the trickster-fool-shaman archetype. I chose to base Conor upon the appearance of Russell Crowe, and even made him a native Australian of Irish descent.

Conor’s bandmates were Liam MacKenzie, guitarist and singer, played by Shawn Nichols (the guy who ran our long and legendary Changeling saga), and Moriah, the drummer, played by Heather Nichols.

We only got to do a few sessions of this saga because it came about right at the time when the Nichols moved to Cincinnati and for awhile I traveled there to visit and play about once per month but then life began to get in the way, and now all these years have passed and we’ve got this unfinished saga still floating around in our heads. Too bad.

Anyhoo, the discussion on Daniel’s blog brought all this into the front of my mind again, fondly, and I remembered that I have a collection of images that I created back when we were playing, using Poser and some other 3D software I’d gotten my hands on. I actually was pretty deep into doing 3d work for awhile, but in the end I realized that for me, the amount of work it took me to create all those models and textures and skins and scenes was out of proportion to my satisfaction with the results. Still, some pretty decent images were born out of my dalliance with 3d art, and I figured I’d put some of them up here in honor of FoolsGambit, my favorite supernatural punk-rock trio.

Moriah, Drummer

Liam MacKenzie, guitar and vocals

Conor McBride, bass guitar and vocals

Pirate Jenny: Finally!

Mick Bradley — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:33:40 +0000

Pirate Jenny: Finally!

Danielle Lewon has released Kagematsu!

I got mine! Now you go get yours. Then, let’s play.

Check out the nifty cover design:

Nobody Puts Mikey in a Corner!

Mick Bradley — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:03:27 +0000

It has finally happened. After over 20 years of roleplaying with friends, peers, acquaintances, and strangers, I have -for the FIRST time EVER – ofiicially been asked by my friends NOT to participate in an upcoming roleplaying campaign, simply because it is about vampires.

And as you can clearly see below, I am extremely well-qualified for the task:

In all seriousness, I am totally fine with not being in the game, as a cursory reading of the comments here on Daniel’s blog will attest – so nobody get your pants in a twist on my account. But I thought this would be a great opportunity to share the picture and get in a fun dig at my pals, too.

This Was Over Before … Before It Ever Began

Mick Bradley — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:00:57 +0000

… starring Rich Rogers, Chuck Hedden, Arnold Cassell, and Mick Bradley.

I’m writing about our recent pitch session for a new rpg series that the Canoneers planned to play using Primetime Adventures.

Ah, Primetime Adventures, affectionately known as PTA. ‘A game of television drama’, it says on the cover. I find that to be joyfully true, and thus PTA has become a fun and rather frequent part of my rpg experience over the past few years. Practically any type of premise, any type of fiction, is possible with this game, as long as it can be framed within the general boundaries of a TV series. You could play a high-school monster hunters series, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You could play a premise like The Office, but make the characters an office full of spies![1] You can play super heroes, sci-fi soldiers, Medieval diplomats, pulp adventurers, school-age emo kids, or an emulation of The Beverly Hillbillies if you want. You could do a show about a time-traveling William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln zooming across the heartland of America in a stolen ’67 Mustang with a goth-chick waitress who’s on the run from the Irish mob in Chicago.[2] In fact you could even play a series about a group of Dark-Age adventurers who go around exploring dungeons, killing whatever monsters they find and stealing all their stuff. As long as it can be framed episodically and the in-play focus is on the characters and their issues, relationships, and QUESTIONS, anything is possible.

With PTA, setting all of these dials is up to everyone in the group, hammered out and determined collaboratively via a pitch session that is supposed to take place before the actual play of the ‘episodes’.

And that, my friends, is both PTA’s shimmering beauty and its potential spiked-pit death trap. In my experience, PTA works magnificently when a proactive, trusting, collaborative group of people gets together to pitch a premise that everyone buys into with gusto. But there’s the rub – everybody has to buy in, and the resulting premise should be fairly clear to everyone. If anyone doesn’t buy in, or has a different notion of what the premise actually is … then once play starts, things often seem to go wonky.

This isn’t just a danger with PTA, to be clear. It happens with other games where collaborative premise creation and/or shared narrative are the norms. Something along these lines seemed to happen in our Lady Blackbird game, too – in my opinion, anyway. And I’ll admit that I’ve heard this sort of complication being put forth as a reason to stick with more conventional “the GM brings most of the premise and commands the narrative” game styles. I get that, and if that’s good for you I’m great with it. For me, even with all the potential pitfalls and in spite of whatever problems I’m bringing up in this post, I remain committed to this type of play because when it works it is utterly wonderful and it works for me with more consistency than any of the alternatives I’ve tried.

So it is of value to me to write about it and try to unpack it a bit when things do go wonky. And the other night, our pitch session went wonky – which is preferable to a game going wonky after four or five sessions of play, but still, even in pitch, it can be frustrating.

First off, we play over Skype. There are inherent pros and cons to that, and I’ll point you to Daniel Perez’ well-written post about this topic for a good rundown of them. But in the end, the bottom line is that I want to play these types of games with this group of guys – and the only way it can work is through the Internet. So, Skype.

But yes, the lack of face-to-face contact complicates a pitch session. Remember, the essential elements (in my opinion) are mutual trust, buy-in and enthusiasm. Not seeing the faces and body language of everyone else can really screw with one’s ability to connect along those pathways. Knowing the people involved, knowing how they think, how they like to play, how you can ask questions in order to get them to clarify something without making them feel stepped on – all this helps mitigate the problem.

But if you don’t know each other well, or don’t have a good understanding of how someone thinks or how they like to play – it can kill the momentum before it even gets going. This can be further complicated when folks involved tends to be really passive and quiet on the Skype call, so you get no hint of what might be going on in their heads.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty much what we had the other night in spades. I for one could not get a read on whether other guys were digging any of the ideas that were being thrown out, or whether an idea was being presented seriously or just as a joke. I’m pretty sure sometimes the other guys were unsure of me, too. So we spent most of the night tossing stuff around, spitballing, and not grabbing onto anything.

Now comes the tricky part. I will probably come off like an asshat for singling someone out, but hopefully you’ll read this with grace and understand that I’m not placing blame, I’m simply saying ‘this is where it became most wonky for me’:

I don’t know Arnold very well. I have very little grasp of what Arnold sockets into in play, we have very little experience with which to be able to fill in unspoken gaps or comprehend each others’ shorthand. I know Chuck really well, and I feel like I almost always know where he’s coming from and/or where he’s going, or I know how to achieve clarity with him if I am unsure. I pretty much have the same thing with Rich. But Arnold remains an x-factor. And he is one of the quietest most passive guys I’ve encountered on a Skype call. So getting a read off of him is challenging. Again, this is an issue between us, NOT me saying anything is Arnold’s fault. He doesn’t have that grasp of me yet, either.

From my perspective, it felt like the night was full of a lot of spitballing that didn’t specifically go anywhere, but collectively, it began to add up to a roadmap of what kinds of issues we were eager to explore. Near the end of the night, we started down a path that – from my perspective – was really cooking for Chuck and Rich and I. It took a long time, lots of goofy and wonky ideas went by the wayside, and we also had lots of frustration with trying to get networked together with our online tabletop, MapTool. That is not the point of this, though, except in the sense that it was a contributor to the stink of FAIL that had crept over our efforts.

But in the end, we had a solid premise that 75% of us seemed clearly sold on. It contained aspects of ideas that all four of us had contributed, and it was different enough but still approachable enough to be fun.

The premise, FWIW, is this: In the late 1800′s, we would play members of a clan of Irish Travelers from the Eastern U.S. who go West in pursuit of an older member of the clan who broke away and was now going about the Old West doing some really bad things to various people in various towns – which has resulted in a curse being placed upon our clan. We would be a group of itinerant mummers/performers/actors (like the characters Billy Zane and Dana Delaney played in Tombstone) who would come into a town and perform but also seek out information about our wayward clan member – and even though we’re con artists and grifters, we end up using our shady skills to help people, ultimately in a quest to undo the damage our family member did and thus undo the curse.

So, like Leverage meets The Riches in the Old West. Rather unique, I think, but entirely plausible in terms of history and playability.

Okay, it had flaws, it was not much more than a draft, but it contained elements of the types of issues that we’d been tickling at all night, packaged in a genre and premise that Chuck and I were pretty excited about and Rich seemed to be bought into as well.

But Arnold felt out of the circle. He gave his assent, I recall, but – at least filtered through all the issues I’ve enumerated above – it was a hesitant assent.

Also, possibly, I’m not sure we had Rich as much as I thought we did. I’ll let Rich speak to that rather than doing further guessing.

We ended the evening agreeing to play with that premise – we would start thinking characters and then quickly pull those together at the beginning of the next session, then start the show. That’s where we left it when we finished the call.

The next day, though, as Rich and I traded some emails, Rich presented some good reasons why he wasn’t really sold on anything we’d pitched, including the Old West grifters thing, and in fact he was thinking maybe we should drop the PTA idea and play a different game altogether. I saw his point, and I was also pretty uncertain about whether Arnold was really plugged in, so I ended up agreeing with Rich even though I did – and still do – like the basic premise and I actually hope we take it up again sometime.

So that’s basically where we are. I’m not entirely sure what to make of all this, even after spending a good deal of my afternoon hacking away at writing it down.

I think we need to be intentional about coming up with some ways to communicate with one another more effectively in spite of Skype and in spite of the fact that not all of us know one another very well or understand one anothers’ styles/sockets yet. I think we need to do some sort of trust excercises like we used to do back in my theatre days. I feel fairly confident we can bridge these gaps – and it’s certainly worth it. So I’m hopeful.

Any thoughts or ideas, dear readers?

note: If you’d like to comment on this post, please jump over to the thread on Canon Puncture where I’ve cross-posted this entry. Thanks!

—-

[1] Thanks to Danielle Lewon for sharing this notion – and several other good ones – via Facebook.

[2] This was predominantly my idea and I HONESTLY like it – so sue me. The guys apparently thought I was joking or crazy. But seriously – if you’re out there thinking Shakespeare, Lincoln, and a goth-chick in a ’67 Mustang would be a cool PTA show, let me know because I’m game if we can make it work schedule-wise and tech-wise.

A Question of Character

Mick Bradley — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:09:27 +0000

Here’s my creative approach to externalizing something I’ve really come to embrace as a roleplayer and fiction writer, from wise words courtesy of the one-and-only Judd Karlman:

I’m experimenting with a lot of different kinds of creative expression these days – possibly a few too many. I think eventually I’ll try to settle into focusing on a handful of approaches, once I discover what I enjoy and what I seem to be able to do with at least a little competence. Until then, I’ll continue to try all kinds of stuff.

It does seem, though, that this thing where I sketch/write something in pencil or pen and then scan it and use Photoshop to mash it up with a splash of painted colors (also scanned) seems to be a frontrunner for my favorite technique of the moment. This is the third one I’ve shared, and I’ve already done a couple more that I’ll share later. I enjoy playing around with this kind of thing. It enables me to create something tactile but also bring it into the digital realm in its own unique way.

[Lady Blackbird]: It’s Not Over til the Old Guy Gets His Questions Answered

Mick Bradley — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 09:57:05 +0000

I’ve been asked to post about the end of our Lady Blackbird rpg series. this is up on Canon Puncture already, but ought to be here too, I think…

You’ll want to read these two other posts first, for context. Which means three very long posts altogether, just to unpack a wonky ending to a wonderful game.

AP Report from Daniel
AP Report from Rich

It’s been really difficult to unpack this situation in my head and then express it honestly while also avoiding pettiness and selfishness. I have not been able to do it via an AP report, as Daniel and Rich have done. I couldn’t even begin to try to express the ending of the session from Naomi’s (my character’s) POV. Besides, I think the two overviews of what happened in the fiction really cover it well, so I’ve got nothing of value to add to that, in Naomi’s voice or otherwise.

I was very unhappy with the last ten minutes of the session and I spared no passion in saying so to everyone at the end of the game – but I was too worked up at the time to give a good accounting of WHY I was so unhappy. And I owe that accounting to my friends Daniel and Arnold, because I yelled and cussed and ranted at them.

How do I maturely and helpfully express what kicked me in the junk? I think I’ve hit upon a good way to manage it without further whining and ranting. Here goes:

First, I believe players should have agency over their characters’ choices. I imagine anyone who knows me is aware of that – but it is still important to this issue and so I’m saying it up front. Player characters should HAVE choices, and players should be able to author those choices into the fiction and have them stick. I’m not saying the player gets to decide outcomes/results/consequences, but to choose what her character intends or desires to do in the first place, that’s sacred to me.

If a player decides that his character thinks the other protagonists are a bunch of destructive, violent, unprincipled yahoos without conscience – or another player decides HIS character is not appreciated by his deluded best buddy for the sacrifice he’s just made on his friend’s behalf – and therefore both characters choose to turn their backs on the other protagonists and walk away, well, I strongly believe those choices should be worked into the fiction.

So I’m not about to come out and declare that either Arnold or Daniel misused their agency – they didn’t. Choosing to exit stage left is a viable choice, at any point in the ongoing fiction. I don’t get to trump that and I don’t get to whine about it. So, I can’t point to their choices as the source of my dissatisfaction.

I’ve wrangled for days over how to authentically express myself without resorting to blaming their choices. It eluded me, until I was doing some free-writing in my art journal and the following quote – which happens to be one of my favorites from Judd Karlman – flowed out of my pen: “Good characters aren’t based around a statement; they’re based around a question.”

I think that’s very true. Furthermore, I think that characters working through their questions and making meaningful choices in the course of that effort are the essence of what – to me – makes for interesting fiction in rpgs. I am specifically using the word “fiction” instead of “story” because I don’t want to get this caught up in a loop of arguing what makes good story in a roleplaying game and/or whether creating ‘a good story’ ought to be the conscious focus of the players at the table. I don’t care.

I care about addressing questions. I care about being entertained, surprised, shocked, and elated in the process of my friends and me collaborating to address the questions posed in the game’s premise, the questions posed by the characters’ issues, and the questions raised in play through the ongoing fiction.

And that is the core of why I was upset at the “ending” of our Lady Blackbird series. To put it simply, way too many of the questions that I was socketed into were left unanswered.

For example, here are the questions posed by the game’s premise, pulled right from the text:

How will Lady Blackbird and the others escape the Hand of Sorrow?
What dangers lie in their path?
Will they be able to find the secret lair of the Pirate King Uriah Flint?
If they do, will Flint accept Lady Blackbird as his bride?
By the time they get there, will she want him to?

I’m not suggesting a play group MUST follow the path suggested in the premise. It is entirely possible – and fine – if questions come up in play and become more interesting than the original premise, and following those threads takes things off in a different direction. But in my opinion, that’s not what we had here. Until the last ten minutes of play the original questions were still the driving force of our overall fiction. (A couple of minor differences, sure. As of the scene in the tavern between Naomi, the Lady, and Vance we were no longer wondering if the Lady would become Flint’s BRIDE – but I’d venture to say it was still immensely important to address whether or not Flint would be her ally, as the Lady suggested, or if he’d turn on her, reject her, or even possibly hold her as a hostage and sell her back to her family and/or Count Carlowe?

So, in my opinion the overall through line suggested in the premise had only been solidified and made more dramatic by the other questions that arose in play. Rich has suggested in his report that maybe he was dancing on the edge of railroading, but he was wrong – the objective progress of our fiction was very strongly aimed at finding Flint, discovering what he’d do in reaction to reuniting with Lady Blackbird, and seeing what The Lady would choose to do in return – and by extension what the other protagonists would choose in that ultimate moment as well.

Those questions were not answered.

And then there are the questions posed by character issues (from the sheet & born out of our play):

Vance
- Will his secret longing for the Lady be revealed or abandoned?
- Will he choose to complete his job, deliver the Lady, then walk away, or will love trump pride?

I think these are separate questions and that answering the first one does not resolve the second one – it only makes it more interesting. We got the answer to the first question. The second question was not answered.

Lady Blackbird
- Is she in love with Vance?
- If she is, will that trump her ultimate choice regarding Flint?
- What’s she really up to? Is she merely trying to dodge an arranged marriage while still determined to win back her place among the nobles, or is there something more to her quest to get to Flint?
- Does she really think the pirate king will be her loyal ally and protector? Or does she have something more up her sleeve?
- Is she in love with Naomi?
- Is she actually just a manipulative minx with dark secrets and darker motives, as Arkham has suggested? Are Naomi and Vance being fooled?

In my opinion, none of these questions were answered. And by the way, a couple of them were raised in the first place by Arkham and Snargle.

I originally planned to actually write down every question that I could think of relative to our series, and then point out how many of them were left unaddressed or unanswered. I now realize that is overkill. Suffice to say that there are many other questions about the characters and the fiction that were important to me – several questions about Naomi, about Briarea, and, in fact, about Arkham and Snargle, too. Interesting, important, relevant questions that came into the game, floated around, and ultimately got left unaddressed. Really, though, the most relevant ones are mentioned above and pretty much all required an ultimate confrontation with Uriah Flint ON STAGE, tipping all the dominoes, pushing the buttons, forcing choices that would address the big questions.

But the game ended before we ever got to Flint, before the important dominoes ever got tipped, before the really important choices were made.

I realize we had to end the series that night, and we were under the gun to get it done. It was an extremely tall order in the best of circumstances. I realize there are real-life issues that impact upon some of the fiction choices we make. I also realize that we’re dealing with an apparent issue where Rich, Chuck and I thought things were one way, and Daniel and Arnold thought they were another way. If we all open up about that and work through it, we might learn a lot of things, I dunno.

But in terms of Daniel and Arnold’s assertion that the game had a satisfying and viable ending – I can’t agree. Too many questions unanswered. Important questions, play-driving questions.

Now, all that upset me and disappointed me and frustrated me, yes. This was one of my favorite games of all time, and it was epic and intense and funny and revealing and exhausting. And then two players made a choice – a viable choice well within their rights – to have their characters walk away from the group. Fine. But due to circumstances of timing, character skill, and emotional resonance, in my opinion that choice effectively ended the game – or at the very least that choice severed my connection to the fiction enough to force me to concede an ending. And Daniel and Arnold, the two players who made that choice, have described that they feel the ending they brought about was a good one, a satisfying one.

No way, dudes, sorry. It was a satisfying ending for your characters, perhaps – but not for the other characters, and not for the three other players.

Too many unanswered questions.

So that’s that.

*** Oh, I have an epilogue about “epilogues”. When the last scene was over, and Chuck and I started grumbling, the way that Daniel and Arnold suggested we handle our unanswered questions was to each narrate an epilogue telling what happens to our characters after the parting of ways played out at the end. Daniel includes his epilogue in his AP report, and Arnold did a similar one where Snargle went back to find Javert and Javert shot him.

I think Daniel and Arnold were totally sincere in offering that as a good idea – but here’s why I was so upset about that:

Put simply, if I wanted to narrate that sort of stuff, I’d write a story. I’m in this to be surprised and entertained by the questions, choices, and spontaneity of things as they happen in play. Especially when the play in question is the climactic domino-tipping confrontation that everything has been leading toward. So for future reference, I will never choose to narrate something that would be more interesting to play, even – and especially – under the circumstances we had going.

Rob Donoghue: Considering the Medium

Mick Bradley — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 01:52:09 +0000

Rob’s got several juicy ideas to share here. I’ll quote the one that hit me deepest.

In other media, you may become invested in the characters, but in RPGs, the characters may become invested in you (or at least your character). The creation of a reality that looks back on the actor is huge, and it's often dismissed as mere sleight of hand since these people and places are not real, but I would counter that the fact that they are fiction does not rob this of its power. Most creative media rests on the idea that we may be powerfully and truly moved by fiction, and I see no reason to carve out an exemption here.

via Rob Donoghue: Considering the Medium.

That’s certainly why I keep turning to RPGs. They’re the only place I get the kind of reflective impact I crave. All I would add to that is that for me, it also matters a great deal that the act is extroverted and collaborative, so that there’s a whole slew of reflective potency weaving and surging around that moves everyone in ways that an introverted creative act can’t match.

John Harper: The Four Cs of Character

Mick Bradley — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:00:18 +0000

John Harper shares something that is so elegant and simple that it will likely become my new yardstick for measuring the characters I play, the situations I introduce as a GM, and the things upon which I focus during game/setting creation (including VAM and Scarlet Masque). In terms of my preferred style of play, I’d say that it doesn’t matter one little bit what sort of cool setting, premise, theme or concept that you come up with unless you’ve got these four items firmly intact:

What makes a fit character for (a roleplaying) game? The Four Cs.

Connected: The character has relationships (positive and negative) with other significant characters in the situation.

Committed: The character has a stake in the outcome of the situation, and will stay to see it through.

Capable: The character has the capacity to affect change in the situation by taking decisive action.

Conflicted: The character has beliefs and goals that are in conflict. They must make choices about which are more important, and which must be abandoned or changed.

via John Harper @ The Mighty Atom.

And of course I submit Lady Blackbird as an excellent example of this in practice. I’d rather play a 12-page game that sets up the Four Cs perfectly than play a 300-page game that doesn’t.