SQUAT OGRE OF A BOSS; THE RPG

coming soon!

"squat ogre of a boss" has a nice ring to it

I think we should make an RPG with that name

and you have to find a way to defeat said ogre in an office environment

with dice rolls

and plot

like, you have a diagram of said office

and you have artifacts like "Classified Report" or "Unopened Email"

and you can have skills in hacking, going unnoticed, or kiss-ass-ness

me: oh shit!

and you can have unexpected allies

like "IT Troll under the Desk"

or "Wicked Witch of Accounts Payable"

ahh, dialogue, you bastard.

I'm close to throwing together the preliminary mechanics and setting info for Heroes & Hubris (working title, actually just made that up as I was typing it.)

In the meantime, a little blurb about dialogue. As I tend to rant about, I think gaming is all about the social context of the folks there, right now, at the table, and so "doing it the right way" is just a moronic concept in general. I know some people really want to do scenes all the way through with full dialogue, in character, but I typically don't.

I prefer first or third person narration, myself. I'm not all that comfortable with dialogue, and in fact my players tend to wipe the floor with an NPC if they get in a proper argument with them. (Especially my wife.) They told me I have to step it up and make my NPCs with more gumption. As a PC, I remember my first D&D 3 character was a skilled diplomat and ambassador who routinely got thrown in jail for being suspicious, because I didn't pull off convincing dialogue. I rejiggered the guy (a Cleric) into a combat monster and party goofball, which wasn't very satisfying, but was at least plausible based on my acting skill. I think he hit his head or something. It was lame.

I personally only experienced Immersion (cue trumpets) one time roleplaying. I was fourteen. It was neat, kind of like being in a play, really being into the performance and kind of tuning out other stuff.

I've had lots and lots of great moments where I was "going with the flow", though. So I guess that's what I get rather than immersion. Where I'm like, "Okay, my guy is gonna have to do so-and-so, I can't wait to see what happens." Like, my PC? I care about the little dude, like he's a protagonist in a story I'm really enjoying. I just don't get much out of actually pretending to be him.

We also go with players driving the story (in terms of choosing what they want to do and what goals to pursue), with inter-PC conflict totally acceptable, and no private conferences or notepassing. If stuff happens in another scene and there's no way your PC would know about it, but you as the player wanna angle them into colliding with that stuff going on over there, go for it. So in general, I don't think our group's style is all that conducive to deep-immersion play, but we're all creatively and emotionally invested in the characters and what's happening to them.

Again, this has been sitting in my head for a bit. I had remarked a while back that our games had a lot of dialogue and descriptive action from the players, and Aces was like, "Well, yeah, we fill time if you don't cut away". So I'd been trying to stretch in their direction when that'd probably just bog things down further. Plus, witty dialogue just isn't in my comfort zone yet. Weird, but that's just something I'm labeling for future improvement. In the meantime, I'm working on having my NPC do shit the PCs can't ignore, even if they don't talk about it so purty.

Terminology - IIEE

If I do terminology posts, I will try to keep them short. This stuff sucks and it causes everyone to talk past each other, but whatever, it's still needed. If you're offended by anything, as always, refer to the fact that this is my own damn opinion and you can have your own.

IIEE
"What really happened in the game world?"

That gets into IIEE -- Intention, Initiation, Execution, Effect -- which is in all RPGs even if it's not called that (or not referenced at all).

You say what you're doing. You roll. GM describes outcome. That kind of thing. Say, as I take from an example I was reading, you're playing D&D 4 and you're a Fighter fighting a Giant. You do some awesome, resource-using special attack, you damage the Giant and he is moved back one square. GM's like, "Uh, dude's like 30 feet tall, you're 6, no way you could move him". Cue ten page argument on the Internet.

The specific situation was "Are we agreed here when the dice tell us what happened, or when the GM filters it through his narration?" Which damn if I can find an official rule for in most RPG books, but that's how people usually play. There's a ton of unspoken consensus in that kind of stuff, and when it's not there, these kinds of arguments can bring the game to a halt. You're, like, sitting there with half of the people at the table imagining the giant not moving, half moving, the game's essentially 'crashed'. You can try to move on, but it requires at least a little discussion.

I think "When something actually happens in the game world" is when everyone at the table assents to it. That doesn't mean they all wanted it to happen, but they're like, ok yeah, i ran out of HP, so I'm unconscious, whatever. A rule may provide the guideline, but that it actually happens in the imagined game world is based on everybody agreeing.

So when it comes to which is the arbiter of what actually gets agreed on, what the mechanics specify or how the GM personally views the scene and what he sees as plausible, well, that's up to the social contract of the group to decide. Neither's the wrong answer, but if everybody at the table doesn't assent to it (even just 'whatever, let's move on' kind of assent), you literally can't continue playing.

Most people who play totally pretend that this "just happens", which is utter bullshit. Again, it totally does "just happen" if your Awesome GM is a Good Host, because making sure everybody has cold beverages and gets through whatever minefield of social drama is happening at this particular party is the same thing as making IIEE look simple.

Nothing at the table ever happens in the imagined game world until everybody nods and is like 'Yeah, that's totally what happened.' Except that includes shit we might have been talking about a couple of minutes ago, that might have sort have nebulously happened or not happened, until we nailed it down. This kind of stuff drives me nuts but doesn't bother Aces at all, which I find interesting.

Her comments recently were "You bring the dice out pretty much after we've nailed down how things went. You should either do it earlier and more often, or way less." I think that was a IIEE issue. They're like, naw we established this shit, why are we rolling now? One thought I had for that was some kind of mechanic where if you said you succeeded, you succeeded, fine. But since you rolled low or whatever, here's some additional shit for you to deal with, new obstacles in your way or 'damage' in the term of consequences to relationships or whatever.

"Oh, you're such a good GM"

Yeah, whatever. What does that even mean?

No, wait, I got this one. I'm a good host, that's what it means. Back when I was single, if I had a gathering with a couple of folks, I sweated to make sure people were involved, having a good time, into the social flow of the thing. I dated a girl for three months once, basically because I saw she was sitting in the corner at one of our fraternity parties, not dancing, so I asked her to dance. Such was my Total Committment to being a Fun Guy.

My wife and I don't throw a lot of parties, but we've had some excellent ones. Our housewarming, for instance, we had four or five disparate social groups in one noisy, packed house, but we amped up, split off to mingle and stir the pot, and we were go. Sure, the loudest and smokinest bunch ends up on the porch and the quietest thoughtfulest people are in a small knot in the kitchen, but everybody's having a good time, mission accomplished.

So, see, I can't not do this. No wonder I don't go in for tons of social outlets, right? There's a tendency for me to, if I'm involved in something social but which I don't have much room to position or tweak the situation, I'll be like "Fuck it, not my problem". I could blog for frickin' hours on the cycle of "Find thing to fix -> Scoop up every broken piece there is -> Build in frustration -> Drop 'em and split", but I think I'm actually past that for the most part.

So, yeah, such a good GM, no, I was just being my usual party-time make-everybody-comfy self. Despite my protestations otherwise, mechanics were never much of a focus, which is made very clear by the fact that the games I've run recently pretty much go with "Okay, consult The Oracle when you think you need randomness".

Why'd I get compliments? Ignoring what people gave as their reasons, I'd say it was because I made them feel like participants. Actual participants, like "Hey, I got to play one of Stealth's games, it was different but it was pretty cool".

I do actually have a point. It's been covered by others extensively, but I'm going back to basics on this whole thing for my own enrichment. That is: The RPG rulebooks don't actually tell you shit. By which I mean, they don't tell you how to interact with other people while playing, even though that's an essential part of it. Mostly, they grant authority to the GM, and if the GM is also the Host, then they ignore or edit as needed to do their Hosting thing, only through the game. That's what happens with me, anyway. That's not an argument for freeform, and again it's been covered by folks like Ron Edwards and Vincent Baker many times, but I specifically mean that the books do not actually describe what goes on during a session. Like, at all.

So yeah, roleplaying is largely a cargo cult activity, yadda yadda, why all the negativity? Because I'm starting over in a way. I don't think the baseline for which I got a "Good job, man" from players was much more than my own social tweaks being expressed, that I had to make sure people were comfortable and engaged, and to give them whatever I thought they needed for that.

My current, short-term goal is to write a game that I and a group of friends can actually play. We use the book, does what it says, produces a play experience. I am very able to weasel out of GMing the game in the book, especially since most of them don't give you much but some flavor to begin with, so I've chosen this project to nail myself to a metaphorical wall and actually run something by the book.

"Stealth GM" is an in-joke that I won't get into, but it's also me ironically labeling my own issues. This past weekend my wife told me that I'm often too passive when I GM, that I will leave characters to sort of stew in their own juices, and I was like, goddamn, I'm not insulted, I'm just kind of amazed I am that thick. Because I'd been consciously using my 'badass GM skills" to avoid that exact situation.

So the current reason I'm the Stealth GM? Because I ran a game with (I don't even think "for" is accurate at all) my wife and a family friend who'd never touched roleplaying before, and they ran circles around me. They wore me out. I was as a babe in the woods. And as I've been spending two weeks thinking about it, it finally clicked that the two newbies, they knew what they were doing. Me, the bad-ass experienced GM, did not.

So I'm gonna try like hell to be more than Super Host Guy, the Dancing Monkey. Damn it, I will dance for a reason.