In The Sorcerer's Soul Ron suggests playing a game of Sorcerer, and then playing a second game, this time among the prior generation of characters, and which results in the situation that was dealt with by the characters in the first game. When I read that suggestion I asked him how it played. And he said he didn't know. That he'd never done it.

Recently, for only the second time ever, I had the experience of playing My Life with Master, as a minion, rather than running it. My wife Danielle ran the game. So in that game there's this scene where I'm wanting the Sincerity die and I'm roleplaying for it. And Danielle says, "If you want the Sincerity die you're going to have to do better than that." So I close my eyes and think for a bit, and then I come back with more passion, and more intensity. And she gives me the die.

What I've realized is that I designed My Life with Master to do that.

Honestly, I don't think I'm a very good player. I tend to create emotionally repressed characters who aren't particularly interesting for other players to watch. Yes, if the GM does everything right with his or her delivery of antagonism to my character, for maybe three sessions, everything, then my character explodes into dramatic protagonism. And it has happened. Once. Usually the GM doesn't do everything right, and my character fizzles, or rather, remains...unaccessed.

I designed My Life with Master to stretch me as a player, to train me where my skills are weak. And as a GM too. The whole group gives me, as GM, a challenge of delivering meaningful antagonism through the concept of Master they create, stretching the range of my creativity.

Bacchanal teaches me to create narrative that holds the interest of the other players using uncommon content. And in current local Acts of Evil playtesting I've realized the game is a crash course for the GM (with a player feedback loop) in creating interesting NPCs.

What I've realized is that I design games, at least in part, from an awareness of my own creative weaknesses and a desire to move through them. And I think then my games are compelling to folks who share my creative desires. Acts of Evil still has me in its clutches (in a way that Nicotine Girls doesn't), because it still has something to teach me.

I think that's what My Life with Master tries to show other designers that I'd be excited to see from them as a consumer: games you designed to challenge the limits you perceive to your own creative and collaborative skills when you play them.

I used to say I created My Life with Master to show other designers the kind of games I'd be excited to see from them as a consumer. Of late I've realized that's only part of the reason, and that myself I didn't even understand what exactly I was trying to "show". And as a result I've started to understand why I've kept designing games.

If you file the serial numbers off of My Life with Master, and then keep filing until all that's left is the underlying framework, you find a social structure for collaboratively creating a story that relies on: shared creation of antagonism, to be managed in play by the GM; conflict resolution, based on a few thematically meaningful character stats that fluctuate with each and every conflict outcome and manage progress toward story closure; and an institutionalized preservation of the protagonism of player character.

Now take a look around. Take some recent games and file them down to the framework, and you find shared creation of antagonism, conflict resolution built from a small knot of thematically relevant character stats that fluctuate with every conflict, etc. You find what's effectively the same architecture of collaboration, transported to new themes.

So, mission accomplished, right? Time to retire.

But damn if I haven't been dug in on Acts of Evil for all I'm worth since early 2005. I spent the better part of a year working on a game called Soul of Man prior to Acts of Evil, and then put it on the shelf after alpha playtesting. But Acts of Evil has had me in its clutches for three fucking years!

Why?

(Enjoy psychoanalyzing me in the comments if you're so inclined. I'll hold off on what I've realized until tomorrow.)

In working on Acts of Evil lately I've found myself thinking a lot about sophomore milestone games. And by "sophomore milestone" I mean the second game a designer produces as a project of the same or larger scale as the effort behind his or her freshman signature game. So Bacchanal, for instance, the second game I put out in print, doesn't satisfy the "same or larger scale" project requirement. And Soul of Man, which received a lot of development and playtesting, was never "produced," because I shelved the project. My sophomore milestone game will be Acts of Evil.

Ben Lehman blogged recently that Bliss Stage is selling slower than Polaris did after release. I can see that it's getting less actual play. I see Nine Worlds not getting much actual play. I see Burning Empires getting less actual play than Burning Wheel. Etc.

We playtested a supers game that Scott Knipe was working on last year. It had some structural similarities to With Great Power, except Scott had pared back on the enrichment scenes in favor of more screen time for the villains. And the result was a less fun game for the players.

My feedback to him was that the best indie RPGs are the ones created to be games the designer wants to play. And it was clear he was creating a game he wanted to run. This motive behind a game design project (game-I-want-to-play vs. game-I-want-to-run), I'm thinking, is fundamental to the game that gets produced, and I think it warrants some reflection on the part of the designer.

I think the key social challenge faced by a game that wants to be played is, and has been as long as I've been a gamer: How do you hook the player? The best, most engaging blogs are the ones where the writer manages to be consistently personal and honest, not a manufactured identity. But write your game-I-want-to-run rules text honestly and who do you hook? Answer: a prospective GM.

And then...he or she tries to create some player enthusiasm.

I've heard the lower incidence of actual play for more recent games attributed to an increasing crowding of games for the attention of indie gamers. Back in the 2001-2003 timeframe, indie game designers were so frustrated about unsatisfying play experiences in the 90s, and excited about new possibilities, that what we designed were games we wanted to play. But...having first written the games we want to play, and high then on the endorphins flooding our creativity, do we go on (without thinking about it) to write the games we want to run? Games that carry a fundamental challenge to actual play?

I recently had the opportunity to play a couple of games of Shadows Over Camelot (at Dr. Stidd's birthday party in early November). My best man Tom has been telling me to play the game for probably a year, and now having played it I can see why. It's the rare boardgame that's (mostly) collaborative for the players. You're not playing against them so much as against the game itself. (And Tom knows that when I was heavy into video games in the later '90s it was for collaboration against computer AI.) And it's a very very tight game, very nicely balanced. You quickly get some white swords onto the Round Table, and there are only a couple of siege engines out, and you're thinking it's going to be a rout. But damn if the game doesn't manage to create tension and then maintain it all the way to the end. I liked it a lot.

Well, what I've heard is that at some point in 2004, Days of Wonder decided to move the game's release date to 2005, to give it more playtesting and development time. And damn, if that story is true, after playing it, I'd pay ca$h for a prototype from the game session that drove the decision to delay the game. Just for the opportunity to experience the hitches behind the decision and mentally walk my way through the same design insights that solved them.

So, what's your take-away from these journal entries I've posted, and the cards? Do you fear my design powers because I was thinking about descriptor based characters more than twenty years ago? (What was the first RPG with descriptor-based characters, anyway?) Or do you look at the writing of my 18-year-old self, my mixed use of past and present tense, my awkward grammar, and at my strange choices for the physical descriptors, and find the whole thing less than remarkable?

Actually I'm hoping to make a non-obvious point by having posted it. What did I do with this game design? I left it in a box. Partially complete. Never playtested. Never published. And because I found it lacking in enduring merit? (Not hardly. I've held on to it for more than twenty years.) Or because I lacked passion? In fact I never did anything with it, or designed anything else for more than fifteen years, because I just had too much gamer baggage holding me back. Every descriptor gives you an additive 5% chance of success...good lord! As a gamer I was arrested at 18 and didn't get beyond it until I was almost 34. And I wouldn't even have managed that if I hadn't found a mentor and a community who helped me overcome my baggage.

So my non-obvious point is an exhortation. I wasn't born from whole cloth as the designer of My Life with Master. I was born into it from my own gaming pain and then delivered from my arrested state by mentorship. This game, with its descriptor-based characters, could have been honed to a blisteringly innovative and fun rpg. Or alternately, I could have done nothing further as a designer my whole life. My non-obvious point is that creative excellence needs mentorship...and there isn't enough of it in our hobby.

And sadly, the only other artifact I still have from the game is the cards for generating a character's physical adjectives. The way it worked was you drew three cards, and then chose one grouping of adjectives from each of them. If the resulting list of adjectives had any that were defined as opposites, they cancelled each other out. (So the journal entry is in error. You could end up with fewer than three physical adjectives.) If the list had two of the same adjective, you wrote it into your character as a "Very". And then you chose personality adjectives from a list, filling out your character so you had exactly ten total adjectives.

I remember putting a lot of work into the adjectives, defining opposite pairs, making the various groupings of physical adjectives for the cards, creating the list of personality adjectives, and listing out various "skills" and which adjectives helped and which hindered. Unfortunatly, beyond the cards, that stuff is lost.

The cards tell a lot though:

1 Hairy 2 Agile, Short 3 Scarred, Sluggish, Hardy	1 Fair 2 Healthy, Malodorous 3 Effeminate, Pugilistic, Agile
1 Underweight 2 Ugly, Hardy 3 Nocturnal, Healthy, Clean	1 Sweaty 2 Anemic, Charismatic 3 Pugilistic, Gnarled, Short
1 Charismatic 2 Tall, Malodorous 3 Old, Overweight, Hairy	1 Hairy 2 Fragrant, Pugilistic 3 Agile, Scarred, Dark
1 Tall 2 Ugly, Healthy 3 Sordid, Agile, Underweight	1 Tall 2 Malodorous, Fleet 3 Elegant, Crippled, Old
1 Clean 2 Masculine, Alcoholic 3 Energetic, Nocturnal, Young	1 Masculine 2 Dark, Overweight 3 Unhealthy, Attractive, Young
1 Elegant 2 Crippled, Muscular 3 Hairy, Alcoholic, Agile	1 Elegant 2 Tall, Sordid 3 Lucky, Overweight, Charismatic
1 Clean 2 Gnarled, Instinctive 3 Effeminate, Sluggish, Fair	1 Energetic 2 Alcoholic, Lucky 3 Crippled, Instinctive, Young
1 Elegant 2 Sweaty, Hairy 3 Ugly, Eidetic, Tall	1 Old 2 Muscular, Nocturnal 3 Eidetic, Effeminate, Clean
1 Pugilistic 2 Fleet, Energetic 3 Fair, Underweight, Elegant	1 Sordid 2 Healthy, Scarred 3 Short, Eidetic, Gnarled
1 Overweight 2 Attractive, Short 3 Muscular, Sweaty, Dark	1 Fair 2 Muscular, Malodorous 3 Fragrant, Clumsy, Young
1 Fragrant 2 Lucky, Unhealthy 3 Masculine, Pugilistic, Sweaty	1 Attractive 2 Tall, Psychic 3 Muscular, Hardy, Scarred
1 Young 2 Attractive, Sluggish 3 Lucky, Underweight, Fair	1 Dark 2 Overweight, Hardy 3 Unhealthy, Fleet, Sweaty
1 Hardy 2 Old, Instinctive 3 Clumsy, Healthy, Pugilistic	1 Fleet 2 Unhealthy, Dark 3 Scarred, Masculine, Energetic
1 Clean 2 Young, Effeminate 3 Psychic, Underweight, Anemic	1 Fragrant 2 Clumsy, Instinctive 3 Sordid, Dark, Crippled
1 Healthy 2 Unhealthy, Charismatic 3 Fragrant, Fleet, Fair	1 Short 2 Clumsy, Healthy 3 Sluggish, Attractive, Old

For ye shall suffer the injuries of capricious dice.

October 1, 1985

Now that we know about the character, we must figure out what he can do and translate it into game mechanics to know how he does it.

I used a twofold solution to this problem. Assuming that a person has a chance to do anything I assigned a base percentage chance for the average character to do certain things. Boxing, fighting, lockpicking, driving, acting...

Assuming that all adjectives are of equal value I gave a list of beneficial and maleficial adjectives for each category of things that characters could do and assigned a base 5% to adjectives in general to be applied positively or negatively depending on where the adjective falls in the list. Being "hefty" may help in boxing and hinder in "swimming".

This gave rise to a new category of abilities. Skills. Assuming that it is possible to get better at "lockpicking" with practice and without gaining new adjectives (which I decided was impossible). Gaining a new adjective would have the effect of making you a better lockpicker and worse at "handstand racing". A skill, I decided, was a gain of 5% in a category for each level of skill.

My final work on my game consisted of deciding upon offense defense rolls based on initiative in the case of competition between people.

I have a long way to go on my game. I have not decided on an environment. I am leaning toward a modern type world with guns and Bernhard Goetz and violence and such.

It was also suggested that I include magic in the game. If I did, I would have a list of magical skills and include beneficial and maleficial adjectives for each to standardize the game around the system previously established.

Look for different game info as it becomes available.

Wherein I describe the method of chargen.

September 30, 1985

As of now, this is the process I took in designing my game:

I asked myself questions. How can a character without number values do anything? Most importantly how do you distinguish characters from each other?

I had been critical of role-playing games (because of their quantitativeness) for quite some time. The above two questions had been floating around in my mind for some time also. One day while pondering over them I decided to put forth the thought necessary to turn my concept into a game. Much time was spent thinking after that.

My first major breakthrough was the concept of adjectives. Each character would have a number of adjectives which described him in 2 categories: physical, and personality.

I still did not know how to generate random adjectives or how to use a list of adjectives to determine how well a character could do something.

I quickly decided against rolling dice to consult a table of adjectives. Too random, I like to determine what my character is going to be like, by myself.

My solution was a deck of cards; almost unheard of in modern RPGs. When generating a character the player draws 3 cards from the deck, one at a time. He will have 3 choices printed on each card. Each choice will consist of from 1 to 3 adjectives. Giving the character from 3 to 9 physical adjectives.

Personality adjectives will be generated by the player selecting them from a list, the player can select only as many as 10 minus the number of physical adjectives he has.

I was still trying to figure out how to use the adjectives to determine a character's success at something. I added a third category to the description of the characters and came up with a tentative solution to my problem of how characters could be assessed with a chance of success. Continued tomorrow.

As an 18-year-old in my first semester of college I was tasked by my freshman comp professor with keeping a journal. And when my thoughts turned to game design in mid-September, the journal captured them. A year or so previous I'd designed a fantasy heartbreaker with funky character races, randomly generated attributes, exotic character classes, and elaborate formulas for derived scores. But as you shall see, despite a context of juvenile frustrations, by the time I was keeping this journal my design thinking had evolved quite a bit.

September 28, 1985

You may not know much about role-playing games so a brief background is in order. Most role-playing games have you create a person on paper called a character. Each character has different ratings for their characteristics (strength, constitution, dexterity...). The ratings are generated randomly through the use of dice.

In the ideal sense, the player of the game acts out the part of the character and responds to external stimuli provided by the game referee.

In practice, this is seldom the case. Players cut down each other's characters for having too low of strength scores. Immature players treat the game as tactical, rather than intellectual, and seldom create and portray a personality for their character. If a character dies in play the response of the player is "oh, well, I'll have to roll up a new guy"; often a player hopes for the death of the character because he rolled low on the ability scores.

I admit that playing a character that has low scores may not be much fun but the problem might not originate from the player. The game system may be at fault. There are 2 types of role playing systems on the market: class based systems and skill based systems.

Class based systems usually have the player roll random statistics and limit his profession by restricting him on the basis of his statistics to certain professions that he meets the criteria for.

Skill based systems assign either an arbitrary or random number of points to the character. The player can divide these points up between his abilities and/or skills and get more points by taking disadvantages.

In my opinion, these types of games inhibit role-playing by being quantitative, that is dealing with numbers.

Tomorrow I will give an alternative.

Wherein I lay out my simulationist foundation for the design.

September 29, 1985

Real life is not quantitative, not even from an evaluative point of view. It is ridiculous to assume a boxer will win a fight just because he can bench press more than the other guy.

Real life is qualitative. If a boxer is strong, fast, and ugly you can assume he will mutilate a tall, lean, sensitive boxer. This is not to say that a boxer who wins 25 fights doesn't have a better chance against a guy who won 2; that is experience and not a measure of strength, constitution or dexterity. Rather it indicates a proficiency with a skill.

As far as I know, the role-playing industry does not have a qualitative game on the market. Thus I have decided to write one.

A qualitative game would reflect modern life. Measurable appropriate factors would be included: large caliber bullets tend to do more damage, having gone over Niagara Falls in a barrell 9 times gives you a better chance to succeed at number 10.

Irrelevant unmeasurable arbitrary factors would be left out. There is no fine line distinction between categories of strength (or any attribute for that matter). A common evaluation of an individual would either indicate that he is strong, weak, or normal. Sure you could compare two big guys and pick one that is stronger but chances are that it wouldn't be based on how strong the guy is but on the fact that he looks meaner, heavier, faster etc...

In logic you can make a value statement or an evaluative statement. You can say that John is a good boy, or that John is a good Boy Scout. The first statement is an opinion and is neither true or false, the second is true or false based on certain criteria established by the Boy Scouts of America. In a qualitative game you would have to assume that evaluative statements about the character were being made, and that he is indeed hefty, short, strong or ugly.

Next: How to establish a way to distinguish non-quantitative characters from each other.