I’m going to be running some games at Dreamation in February, and I just got my schedule. Here it is:

• Saturday at 9am I’ll be running “The Dragon Slayer”, a playtest session of Becoming.
• Saturday at 8pm I’ll be running “Cynners and Saints”, a scenario for Jeremy Keller’s Technoir.
• Sunday at 10am I’ll be running “The Long Road Home”, a second playtest session of Becoming.

I hope to see you all there!

Below is a rough draft of some of the introductory material for Becoming. I got inspired and wrote this tonight, and I thought I’d share.

What Is This Thing?
Becoming starts with a question: what does it mean to be a hero? A hero is someone who saves lives, protects others, and fights those who would do them harm. A hero stands up for what she believes in, suffers through great hardship, and wins the day no matter the cost. But what is the cost?

Being a hero is not easy. It requires pain and sacrifice; it comes at a steep cost. The hero often has to give up the things she holds most dear, the very things she is fighting to protect. When the hero comes back from her quest, she comes back changed. She has faced hardship and torment that her friends and family cannot imagine, and she is no longer the same person she once was. She is more, but also less. She is an outcast, and she cannot truly go home again.

That’s what Becoming is: it’s the story of the hero facing adversity and overcoming it at a steep cost. Sometimes it’s a story of triumph over impossible odds. Sometimes it’s the story of a fall from grace. It can be an exciting adventure or a heartbreaking tragedy; often it’s a little of both.

But Becoming is also a game. It’s a framework of rules that helps you tell these stories, your stories. It’s meant to be exciting and tragic, but it’s also meant to be fun. You may see the hero lose everything she has, but you’ll have a good time doing it.

It’s a special kind of game: a story game. During play you’ll each contribute to a shared narrative, building the characters and the world in turns, showing each other your own vision of the story and meeting in the middle to create something that is more than the sum of its parts.

Be not afraid, hero.

What Do I Need?
To play a game of Becoming, you’ll need a few things. First, you’ll need this book. This book contains all of the rules you need to play the game, as well as the Quests that you’ll use to help you tell the story.

You’ll need several six-sided dice in four different colors. You’ll need nine of one color (for the Hero) and five of each of three other, different colors (for the Chorus).

You’ll need tokens for the Chorus in three different colors. Each member of the Chorus needs twenty tokens in a single color. Poker chips work well for this purpose, as do glass beads. In a pinch, you could even use three different denominations of pocket change.

You’ll need some index cards, probably about ten or fifteen of them. If you don’t have any, you can use scraps of paper. You have paper, right?

You’ll need friends, three of them to be precise. Becoming is a game for four players exactly. If you don’t have friends you might find some at your local gaming store, supermarket, or homeless shelter.

Finally, you’ll need some pencils or other writing implements.

What Do All These Crazy Words Mean?
Becoming uses some mechanics that you may find unfamiliar, and certainly some of the terminology is unusual. Luckily, I’ve decided to provide a list of terms and their in-game definitions. Some of the words are weird, but it’s really not a hard game to learn to play.

The Hero: the protagonist of the story. The Hero is the one who goes on a journey, defeats evil, protects his loved ones, and saves the day. He’s also the one who has to sacrifice everything important to him in order to succeed.

Words of Virtue: a list of nine words, specific to the Quest being played, that provide inspiration for coming up with the Hero’s Virtues.

Virtues: a Hero starts with three Virtues. These are things that are important to the Hero, things he draws strength from. They are used to overcome challenges, but they can also be sacrificed or lost.

Flaws: when the Hero loses challenges, Flaws are introduced. Flaws represent the Hero’s weaknesses, his vices, or direct manifestations of Fear, Pain, or Doubt.

Quest: a collection of scenes to be played out in order, creating a cohesive story in which the Hero is the main character.

The Chorus: these three players provide opposition and temptation for the Hero. They frame scenes, present challenges, and offer bargains. There are three members of the Chorus: Fear, Pain, and Doubt.

The Choregus: first among equals, the Choregus is the active member of the Chorus. It is her job to frame the current scene, present the challenge, and decide upon its difficulty. The Choregus is a rotating position; each member of the Chorus will get a chance to play this role. Three, in fact.

The Stasimonos: the members who are not the current Choregus are known as the Stasimonos. While they do not provide direct opposition to the Hero, it is their job to tempt the Hero by offering bargains, aid for a cost. They can also threaten the Hero.

Act: the game is played in three acts, each containing three scenes. Things are relatively easy on the Hero in the first act, but the stakes get higher with each subsequent act.

Scene: there are nine scenes in the game. During a scene, the Choregus uses theme words to help frame the scene, setting it up and describing the situation. Each scene also has a challenge, presented by the Choregus.

Challenge: a conflict of some sort where the outcome is in doubt. The conflict grows out of the framed scene and is informed by it. It need not be a physical conflict; Fear and Doubt are motivators just as powerful as Pain.

Theme Words: a collection of nine words specific to a scene, used as inspiration for the Choregus while framing the current scene.

Challenge Tokens: chips or other small markers that the Choregus uses to indicate how difficult a challenge is to overcome. They can be wagered, lost, and bartered throughout the course of the game.

Bargain: the heart of the challenge mechanic, the Stasimonos offer the Hero aid in exchange for things the Hero holds dear. Nothing is free in Becoming, and all bargains are binding.

Did you know that your chances of winning a game of Pandemic are lower than your chances of hitting the lottery or being gnawed to death by a pack of angry buffalo?

Okay, yes, I made that up; buffalo don’t travel in packs. But it is true that Pandemic is a very hard game, and is weighted against the players in a number of ways. Why, then, do I like it so much? If I lose most of my games (which I do), why do I keep playing? Why do I find it fun?

The answer is simple: your decisions matter. In a game of Pandemic, every decision you make has weight; if you make one boneheaded decision, it could lose the game for you. Even though you’re fighting an uphill battle pretty much the whole way, the fact that every action counts is actually pretty empowering.

I’d argue that this is actually true of any game: the more your decisions matter, the more fun you’re likely to have. I’ve talked about player agency in the past, and this is exactly what I’m talking about when I use those buzzwords. Decisions matter. Choices have weight. Consequences are real.

When you’re designing a game, this is something you should keep in mind. Players want to be able to make decisions about what they’re doing within the confines of the game world, but the ability to make choices alone isn’t enough.

There’s a reason why the term “railroad” is often used pejoratively in this hobby. If thing A leads to thing B leads to thing C and nothig I do can change that or have any impact on the outcome, I’ve lost my ability to affect the way the game plays out. Suddenly I’m just going through the motions, making choices that don’t have any tangible effect on anything. The illusion of choice can mitigate this to some extent but that’s a dangerous tightrope act; if your players start to suspect that their choices don’t matter, their investment in the story starts to evaporate.

A word of warning, though: there’s such a thing as making a particular choice matter too much. Often this goes hand in hand with not explaining the weight of the choice enough.

I’m going to say something that’s probably controversial now: I hate Settlers of Catan. It’s one of my least favorite games to play. Why? Because you make a very important choice at the very beginning of the game, before you’ve gotten a chance to learn what it means, and making the wrong choice can prevent you from making further choices in the game. The last game of Settlers that I played ended for me really before it started: my initial placement was flawed, I never got any resources and, as a result, I never got to do anything interesting. For two hours.

I guess my point is that, if you’re designing a game, make sure that the players have the ability to make decisions that affect how the game turns out. Also make sure they know something about the potential consequences of those choices. If the players don’t know what their choice might effect, they’re effectively throwing a dart blindfolded; that’s just another way to rob them of their agency.

I got this image this morning from Christopher Barley, an amazingly talented illustrator and member of Meetup of Doom. I just wanted to share it with everyone because I had trouble peeling my lower jaw off the floor when I saw it this morning. This image exemplifies the mood of the game in a way that’s difficult to articulate. Kudos to Chris for capturing it so well.

Yesterday at Meetup of Doom I got a chance to playtest Becoming. It was an extremely productive and educational experience. It was probably the most successful playtest I’ve ever run, and I’d like to share what I learned with you.

Be Flexible, Be Receptive
Becoming came very close to doing exactly what I wanted it to do. My goal was for the game to create a mood of slow attrition for the Hero, a situation where the Hero has to constantly comprimise his values in order to succeed. It did that . . . mostly.

One of the more important things that the playtest pointed out to me was that I wasn’t incentivising the bargaining mechanic enough. There was no reason for the Hero to give up his dice; he could just sit on them for the whole game and win, regardless of what the Chorus did to him. Pretty big flaw, right? Luckily it was easy to fix, and we did so quickly and moved on.

When you’re playtesting, you have to be able to see the warts on your game, the ways it doesn’t quite work or doesn’t quite accomplish what you want it to. You have to be able to hear that when the players say it to you. And you have to be able to fix it and move on if you don’t want to scrap the playtest and try again later (which is an option, albiet not an ideal one).

Solicit feedback from the playtesters if you’re not sure how to fix something. Presumably you got them to play the game because, on some level, you value their opinions. Use that. They may come up with something you never thought of, and it might be totally awesome. Don’t be afraid of that.

Don’t Take Feedback Personally
There should be a caveat in that title: unless it’s good. If your players give you positive feedback on your game, if they love it and say it’s great, feel free to take that personally. You made that thing, you put a little bit of yourself in there; if someone else thinks it’s good, you should feel good about that as a consequence.

The reverse, however, is not true. If someone criticizes some element of your game, it doesn’t mean you suck or even that your game sucks. It just means that it needs a bit of work. No game is perfect, even after playtesting. The goal of playtesting is to get it as close to that mark as you can within whatever confines you’re working with, and the only way to do that is to take feedback for what it is: a way to improve your game. It’s not a personal attack (unless it is, in which case screw that guy, don’t let him playtest your stuff anymore).

Be a Neutral Party
When I playtested Becoming I gave all of the players a cheat sheet with the rules they needed on it, sat back, watched, and answered questions when I was needed. It worked astoundingly well. There was a little explanation required at the beginning but, for the most part, people got it quickly and the game just played. I observed and took notes, clarified rules when necessary, and talked to them about ways to improve the game when they came up.

I’ll admit that this isn’t possible with all games under all circumstances. It worked well with Becoming because it’s a pretty rules-light game without a traditional GM. Games that diverge from either of these will be harder to run this way. You’re not going to want to have each player read five or six pages of rules text before playing and you’re not going to want your GM to read a sixteen page adventure before the game gets started; that’s a fantastic way to shoot your game in the foot.

However, there are a lot of advantages to being a neutral observer rather than a participant when you can pull it off and, if you can’t, it wouldn’t hurt to be as neutral as possible in whatever role you need to fill. Ideally, at some point, you’re going to want someone else to fill that role too, so you’re going to have to think about doing this eventually anyway.

Have Fun
Yes, playtesting is stressful. Yes, you’re going to see your baby criticized and pulled apart. Remember that it’s a game: it’s supposed to be fun. Enjoy it. The more you let yourself enjoy it the more likely the playtesters will enjoy it, and if the playtesters aren’t enjoying it then you’ve got bigger problems. Chances are that there’s at least a little bit of fun to be had in your game though, so capitalize on that and amplify it where possible.

People come up to me all the time and say, “You’re a successful freelance writer. How do you do it?”

That’s not actually true. It’s never happened, and I don’t expect it to happen for a long time, if ever. That said, I can still give advice on being a successful freelance because, well, I am one. I’ve written for Galileo Games multiple times and I’m currently in the middle of multiple projects with Rite Publishing and Evil Hat. I’m not at the point where I can quit my day job, but I can see it from where I’m standing if I squint my eyes real hard an maybe use some binoculars. And a compass. And maybe a native guide. But I do feel like I’ve achieved some measure of success, and I also feel like I have some advice to give on the topic. So, in no particular order:

Live Up to Your Word
Reputation counts for a lot in this industry. If you do well by a client, they’ll pass your name on to other clients and things will snowball. The reverse is also true: if you’re unreliable, slow, or produce shoddy product . . . well, it’s a small industry. People talk. Most of these people know each other, like each other, and look out for each other professionally to some extent or another. If you burn one bridge, the others will catch fire just through sheer proximity.

This one’s actually pretty simple: if you say you’re going to do something, do it. If you say you can write 25,000 words by next March, don’t wait around until February 15th and then start writing in a panic. Put in the time, do the work, make sure it’s of a quality you’re proud of, and goddamn try to do it on time. This is not to say that you have to be perfect; mistakes can be caught, deadlines can be extended. But if you’re sincere and you’re earnest and you try like hell to do what you say you will, that goes a long way toward building a good reputation in the industry.

Answer Your Email
It’s amazing how important this is, and how often overlooked. I was told not too long ago that one of the biggest reasons that I got a particular job was that I was the only one who answered my email in a reasonable amount of time. Other people waited weeks or even months to get back and, by that point, the ship had sailed. Now, I’m a compulsive email checker; I know this. Not everybody is; I know this too. But seriously: if you haven’t answered my email within, say, a week of my sending it, my assumption is that you’re not interested in answering it at all. And if I am offering you work, that means you’re not interested in that work. There are plenty of people who are.

Don’t Be a Dick
I thought about calling this one “Be Professional”, but folks in this industry are pretty casual in their correspondence, particularly on social media sites like Twitter of Facebook. And really, the title of this section kind of says everything I need it to. If you are a dick, people won’t want to work with you. Nobody likes to work with someone who is unpleasant or difficult and, like I said before, there are plenty of other people out there looking for work. Don’t burn bridges. Don’t call people names. Don’t yell at people. Don’t be a dick.

Network
I’ve already mentioned how reputation is important, but you know what else is? Making sure that your potential employers know you’re a human being. Go to cons and arrange to meet with them, even if it’s just to sign a book and talk for a few minutes. I cannot possibly understate the utility of social media tools for this. Most of the game designers you want to work with are on Facebook or Google+, and they’re all on Twitter. If you go on these social media sites and say insightful things about game design, you’ll eventually get noticed. If you’re an artist, tweet links to your work; if it’s good, you’ll get noticed.

Remember That You’re Awesome
In the game industry, particularly when it comes to indie games, there is a pervasive “I’m not good enough” mentality. People don’t like to talk about their stuff. Maybe they don’t want to come off as bragging or being cocky, maybe they’re just shy or starstruck or nervous. Get over it. Remember that, if you’ve come up with a game design or some art or whatever, you are awesome. It is worth something, possibly worth money to someone. You have done something that a lot of people can’t or won’t, and the doing makes you awesome. Don’t be afraid to talk about why you’re awesome (though remember not to be a dick, see above). If I’m going to hire you for something, I need a reason to hire you and not someone else who isn’t afraid to show me his stuff and talk about how great it is. Nobody’s going to sell your stuff for you; you have to do it yourself.

Just Goddamn Do It
I talked about this philosophy a little while ago, and it definitely applies here. I know from experience, there’s nothing scarier than starting something that seems big and important. Starting it means you have to do it, and you have to show it to people, and they might not like it, and you might go running away crying, and . . . well, you get the picture. It’s scary, I know. But remember, you’re awesome. The fact that you even want to do it is awesome, and your ideas are worthwhile. And the only way anyone else is going to know that is if you take the plunge and do it. A career (even a side-career) in the game design industry is like a shark: if it stays still, it’ll die. This is way, way more true at the beginning, before it’s gotten off its feet.

And yes, I know I’m mixing my metaphors and I’ve just given a shark feet. Shut up. I’m a game designer, I’m allowed a certain amount of poetic license.

Today Monte Cook posted a short article entitled Mechanics Supporting Story. I clicked on the link immediately. One of the things I love about most indie games is that their mechanics are informed by the story and built around it, and they not only support the story but are often inseparable from it. I was excited to hear what Monte would say about this idea and how it applied to D&D. I thought, “Man, wouldn’t it be great if D&D actually did mechanically support story telling, rather than having it just be the thing that you’re doing when you’re not rolling dice?”

I was disappointed. If you haven’t read the article, go do so. It won’t take long; it’s only a couple of paragraphs long.

Why was I disappointed? Because Monte wasn’t talking about mechanics that support story; he was talking about racial bonuses. He was talking about dwarves that get a +2 to damage with axes, or gnomes that get a +1 to hit against kobolds, or bards that . . . get a +1 to being dapper in fancy clothes. Or something. Yes, these things do offer some mechanical support to concepts found within the established fiction of D&D. But do they support story? Not really.

Let’s take the example of dwarves getting a +2 to damage with axes. This is supporting the concept of “dwarves use axes”, which is a concept that I know is near and dear to all of our grognardian little hearts. Great, so my dwarf uses an axe and gets the bonus. Where’s the story? The story — the only story so far — is that I have a dwarf who uses axes like 99% of the other dwarves in his hold. Not very interesting, is it? I’d argue that this kind of mechanic actually runs counter to supporting story; it discourages making characters with interesting and unique concepts, like dwarven wizards or rogues, because if you take one of those classes you’re not getting the full benefit of your race. It may not be punishment per se, but it skirts awfully close to that territory. Beyond that, though, the fact that my character uses an axe or a sword or a ship’s anchor is an expression of who my character is, but it doesn’t tell me anything about his motivations or his story arc. It does virtually nothing to mechanically support any story I have in mind, unless that story is, “I like to hit things with an axe.”

Now let’s look at that second one: gnomes and their bonus against kobolds. That one’s a little better because at least it implies some sort of emotion. Gnomes hate kobolds. Great. Do all gnomes hate kobolds? Even the ones who have never met a kobold? Even the ones raised by kobolds? Again, we’re discouraging alternate character concepts by rewarding the stereotype, to say nothing of the fact that we’re basically mechanizing racism.

My point is this: if you want to support story, support story. Don’t hand out some stereotypical racial bonuses and call it a day; that’s a half-measure at best. Give the players tools with which to express their characters, with which to tell their stories. Give them ways to take hold of the narrative and steer it in directions they think are interesting and fun. Let’s not forget that the DM is not the only storyteller at the table.

I was listening to an episode of the Giant Bombcast and they started talking about D&D and other tabletop RPGs. One of the people being interviewed mentioned that, in his current game, people tended to avoid combat because they felt that combat removed a lot of their agency within the world.

It’s an interesting idea, and it made me think about player agency and its relationship to the rules of a game. In D&D you can have quite a bit of player agency during role-playing scenes. This is dependent in a large way on the DM and his or her personal style of running the game, but in general you get to choose what you say, where you go, what you do. Occasionally you’ll have to make a skill check to see if the guard believes your lie or if the count is swayed by your honeyed words, but more than a few DMs will grant bonuses or even hand-wave these rolls for good role-playing. You have a lot of control over the narrative and over your character’s personal role within that narrative.

When combat starts, the dice start playing a much bigger role in the game. Success and failure become a lot more important, and this does tend to reduce player agency. You can say that you run up to the orc and stab it through the gut but if the dice don’t say that’s true, it’s not true. You can say you jump up into the air, grab the chandelier, and swing to the other side of the room, but botch your Acrobatics check and that simply won’t happen.

There are two issues at work here, I think. The first is that, the more the dice are involved, the less control you have as a player over narrative flow. You can describe your actions as much as you want but the dice are the final arbiter of what you’re capable of, and they can be fickle. To be fair, this is the case in most role-playing games: you describe what you want to happen, but the dice might disagree. Some games, though, give you a way to buy out of an unfortunate roll.

Fate, for example, has much the same sort of resolution mechanic that D&D does: you describe what you want, you make the roll, and if you’re successful it happens. The difference is that, in Fate, if you fail the roll you can invoke a few aspects to buy back your narrative control. You get to decide how important that particular part of the story is to you and, if it’s important, you can make it happen regardless of what the dice say. D&D doesn’t really have a mechanic to mitigate failed rolls, so the loss of narrative control is that much more potent.

The other issue is that failure is often boring in D&D. In some games you get to describe how you fail to perform your action. This means that, even though you didn’t get exactly what you wanted, you still get to push the narrative in a specific direction. In D&D, failure often means that nothing happens. Fail your to-hit roll? Oh, you missed the orc; move on. Fail your Arcana check? Oh, you don’t know anything important. Many DMs probably house-rule this away, and doing so is pretty easy. I can’t help but think that interesting options for failure should be a part of the game to begin with, though.

So what do you think? Do you feel a loss of narrative control in combat (or any other time when dice are a major component of the game)? Is that important to you? How would you like to see it change?

I’m not going to be blacking out my site today. I’m not doing so because I don’t believe that doing so will make any kind of difference. This is not just because I have a small audience (though that’s certainly part of it). I think that sites like Wikipedia blacking out is a commendable sacrifice on their part but, ultimately, I don’t think it does anything either.

The reason for this is that I don’t believe the people with decision-making power care that this is happening, if they even notice at all. I understand that people want to do something about SOPA, but I’m not sure that blacking out your site is actually going to affect change, no matter how big your site is. And I’m certainly sure that changing your Facebook or Twitter avatar will not affect change.

So what am I doing? I’m going to voice my opinion. I won’t black out this site, but this will be the only post going up today. The point of this post is simple: SOPA is wrong. It’s an enormous overreaction to something that it doesn’t even have a prayer of stopping, and it’s likely that it’ll cause more problems than it fixes. If you’re so inclined, I’d encourage you to contact a representative of government and share your opinion with them.

At Metatopia I heard a quote that I can’t get out of my head. I’m unsure who to attribute the quote to (it could be Ken Hite, Fred Hicks, Rob Donoghue, Brennan Taylor, Joshua A.C. Newman, or any number of smart people; I just don’t remember), but the quote itself strikes me as a set of words for a game designer to live by.

“If you want your game to be about something, you need mechanics supporting that thing.”

The corrolary of this is: If you do not mechanically support a thing, your game is not about that thing. You can say it is and you can support it with your fiction, but the grim truth is that, if you do not incent players to do the things you want them to do in your game, they may never do those things.

When it came time to design mechanics for Becoming, this quote was rattling around in my head the whole time. I knew what I wanted my game to be about. I wanted Becoming to be about what it costs to be a hero, not just in terms of the adversity that the hero must overcome but what he or she must give up to overcome it. The game is, at its core, about heroic sacrifice. At least, that’s what I wanted it to be about; I needed to make sure the mechanics said that too.

Becoming has a dice-based resolution mechanic where the Hero rolls dice to try to overcome a static difficulty set by a member of the Chorus (roughly analagous to a GM, at least a little bit). More dice equals higher chance of victory, and failure means that the Hero must pay a cost of some sort. I knew this much, but it wasn’t enough. The mechanic was sound, but it didn’t encourage sacrifice; it was a simple pass-fail mechanic that required sacrifice as a result of failure, but it wasn’t enough. In order for the Hero’s sacrifice to be meaningful in this game, it had to be a choice.

That’s where the bargaining mechanic came from. The Chorus is made up of three players, and there’s a very good reason for that. While only one player at a time may place a challenge in front of the Hero, the other members are not without purpose during that scene. In most cases the Hero will be outgunned, or at least daunted, by the difficulty of the challenge in front of him or her. Success is going to be a slim possibility.

That’s where the rest of the Chorus come in. The Hero can bargain with the other two members of the Chorus, giving up pieces of him/herself in order to gain aid from them. This aid comes in the form of additional dice for the most part, but it costs the Hero some of his/her own dice that are not currently being used (the Hero can’t bring all of his/her dice to bear on a single challenge). In most cases the Hero has the ability to pull off a victory, but it will come at a cost. The interesting bits come when the Hero has to weigh the cost of victory against the cost of failure, and decide which is the lesser evil.