There’s an experiment going on at #rpgtweory about RPG rules about feelings. I have feelings about them. But Ben and I were having a hard time expressing ourselves 140 characters at a time.
My original assertion, with subtleties edited out for brevity, was this:
Never write rules about feelings. Write rules about material needs and the consequences of fulfilling them.
Ben didn’t buy it, and there was more to the idea anyway. Let’s discuss!
(EDIT: I’ve changed the header image that was originally on this post because it was NSFW. For posterity, in case someone is curious, you can find the original image here. Edit: No, Rob. That wasn’t the real image. That was for a completely… different project.)
52:24 long & 50.3 MB big
In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), we talk about a few possible initial scenarios, and decide which one we want to explore first. There’s some good progress here from the absolute slaughter and misery we inflicted on each other in the prior episode.
Joshua’s homework and Rob’s notes during the show
– Joshua tries to let Rob off the hook for being lazy
– Vincent Baker gave us extremely helpful feedback on the forum
– We get more status by talking about Vincent’s input than we do from discussing Paul Beakley’s
– Joshua talks about a whispered Story Games thread between he and Alexandre (board name Kobayashi), who was a soldier in the Yugoslav Wars
– Joshua’s scenario idea is the refugee one
– In LIFELESS, you play…. (around 10:30)
– Simon C’s feedback, which brings up discussion of Vincent’s fiction-first posts
– Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix and Crystal Express
– Requisite references to Dollhouse and Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels
– We settle on the refugee thing, as at least the first “module”
– A mention of (and spoiler for) the film Silent Running
– Emily Care Boss’s Sign in Stranger
– We want to have the game to come with the scenario all set to go, like John Harper’s Lady Blackbird
– Our homework: each of us writes: a setup for the war, 6 characters, a relationship map, and the initiating technology that made it terrible
– No listener homework
– Working title: “Lifeless”
– We mention the comic book/game store we were about to head to in Northampton, MA: Modern Myths
You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:
The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is from the same band and the same album. The song is called Sheena’s Got a Microwave Now, and I chose it because it’s the harrowing story of a love denied and interfered with by an insurmountable gap in technology.
55 seconds long, I don’t care how big
In this non-episode, Robert Bohl and Joshua A.C. Newman explain why they don’t have an episode this week. Suck it.
01:54:51 long & 110.3 MB big
In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), discuss how to pre-bake-in a situation for the game they’re developing. Many hearts were broken, unforgivable things were said, will they still be friends at the end of this arduously long show? Listen in to find out.
Joshua’s homework (Rob didn’t do his).
– We start of being enthusiastic about Idiocracy
– Rob skipped homework, Joshua didn’t
– Discussing input from Vincent Baker, Simon C., and Doc Holaday
– Charles Stross’s Accelerando
– Futurama
– Transhumanauts!
– John Cassaday and Warren Ellis’s Planetary
– My friend Blake, who had an interesting idea for a game
– The movies Cube and Saw
– Montsegur 1244 and carry: a game about war
– Ganakagok
– 100 Bullets
– Exquisite corpse
– Wildly various spider genetalia
– Twenty Bucks
– Psi Run (or, at least, its forum)
– Dogs in the Vineyard
– Mouse Guard RPG
– Do not look Vincent Baker in the eye
– Our homework: Vomit forth creativity on this project
– Listener homework: Give us some scenarios
Rob’s during-the-show notes
You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:
The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is Overlap by Ani DiFranco from the album Out of Range
01:06:30 long & 63.8 MB big
In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), discuss possible structures for a session of play, talk about how to structure technological and interpersonal relationships, and talk a bit about how mechanics might work. Lots of meaty game design here.
– Listener feedback: Paul Beakley, Nathan Wilson, Simon C, Doc Holaday
– The book Starfish by Peter Watts
– Discussion of how many players the game should service
– Initialization, a word to be used a lot in the game
– Drop initialization phase created NPC?
– Primetime Adventures
– Spotlight characters, scene order, and whether scenes are about players or characters
– Are there too many scenes? Can you run out of interesting stuff before you run out of time?
– The roles that PCs play in spotlight characters’ scenes when they’re not spotlight
– The Wire
– Introducing new NPCs and new tech, tying Currents to them
– Talking about the tech web
– Separate relationship maps on each character sheet to reflect different visions of relationships
– What am mechanics?
– Joshua = power, Rob = meaningfulness
– Joshua promises a diagram
– Mind control!
– Personality Anchors, and we argue over it
– Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels
– Rob keeps talking about “spotlight scene” when he means “spotlight episode”
– Anchors and immunity
– Vincent Baker’s thread where he’s asking for critique on Apocalypse World
– What to call the co-GMs?
– Homework: write up what a scene might feel like, which we’re probably going to do on the forum
– No listener homework
Rob’s during-the-show notes
You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:
The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is I Wish I Was a Boy by Angry Red Planet, provided by Podshow’s Podsafe Music Network.
58:55 long & 56.6 MB big
In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), discuss what character creation should be like in the transhumanist science fiction game they’re designing—before your very ears! What are the characters going to do? What are the meta-fictional mechanics going to be like? What will the system potentially care about? We get a lot of substantive design work done here and come up with a nascent mechanic that I know Joshua and I are both very excited about.
– We start with listener feedback: Simon C and Nathan Wilson
– Talking about eschatology
– Rob’s and Joshua’s homework from last episode
– Thor Olavsrud and Terry Hope Romero got shock: to do some interesting things at JiffyCon
– We talk about a possible initializing phase of the game (character creation, only not)
– Joshua’s blog post about memory erasure
– What can you use technology to change in the game?
– A Radio Lab episode called (and about) Memory and Forgetting
– We don’t want the world to crush characters like it does in shock:
– Linus Torvolds
– Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky and Accelerando
– We talk about whether the technological singularity will necessarily be a part of the game
– Lyndon LaRouche
– Waffling on libertarian transhumanism
– The tv show Connecti ons
– Jared Sorensen, of Memento Mori Theatricks, was the first person to suggest to Joshua the idea of non-person-based relationship maps
– The technology web mechanic
– Vincent Baker and his idea about capping things
– Our homework: describe what a session of play would be like
– Listener homework: Tell us about protagonists undergoing change in transhumanist fiction; what are your favorite examples or trends?
Rob’s during-the-show notes from episode two and this one. Also, initializing-phase 2.0 (aka character creation but not).
You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:
The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. For outgoing, rather than music this time, we have a talk by Joshua’s old professor, Slavko Milekic, on the important role touch plays in human nature.
01:00:59 long & 55.9 MB big
In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), discuss what the transhumanist science fiction game they’re designing—before your very ears!—should be about. What is transhumanism about? Where does the design want to focus?
– We start with listener feedback: Simon C, Paul B, and Sven Holmström
– Sufficiently Advanced
– Eclipse Phase
– The Cyborg Handbook
– The Wikipedia article on transhumanism
– Squids do have brains
– 12:00: Aboutness in game design
– I misquote Jared Sorensen’s big three game design questions, reading instead from Nathan Paoletta’s blog
– Dualism
– The Radio Lab episode we’re talking about is either Choice or Who Am I? (or maybe both (I think))
– Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels
– The game is (possibly) about “identity, change, and human nature.”
– 25:00: What we know is in the game so far: a transhumanist game that supports narrativist play that involves character generation during play, wherein you see how your characters survive the technological singularity
– Charles Stross’s Accelerando
– Possibly stealing Ganakagok‘s tarot-like situation generation
– Vincent Baker’s game Rock of Tahamaat, Space Tyrant
– Cards vs. dice and various systems that work differently for different things
– Connections between the characters
– Ben Lehman’s Polaris
– Currents in transhumanist thought from the Wikipedia article
– The Jeepform The Upgrade by Olle Jonsson, Thorbiörn Fritzon, and Tobias Wrigstad
– Homework: Aboutness, and a pass at character creation
– Talk about the show, do reviews
– The Trapcast forum thread I was talking about
– Listener homework: Give us your “aboutness” answer
You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher.
The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Screamin’ Demon Martians Ridin’ Go-Karts in My Head” from the album Saucer to Saturn.
01:05:25 long & 59.9 MB big
This episode is the first in a new endeavor by Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), wherein they create a new roleplaying game before your very ears! Over the course of the next howevermany weeks, for one hour each week, Joshua and Rob are going to design, develop, test, and publish a brand new roleplaying game from start to finish.
In this first episode, we talk about what the show’s about, and decide what game we’re going to design. Linkworthy stuff we mention:
– Joshua’s earlier game, which makes you cry, Under the Bed
– Kurt Vonnegut
– Primetime Adventures
– R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)
– The Penny Arcade series Automata
– Luke Crane’s Burning Sands: Jihad
– John Wick’s Houses of the Blooded
– HBO’s Deadwood and Rome TV series
– The Mob Justice RPG
– Emily Care Boss of Black and Green Games
– George Carlin on “servicing the account”
– The Shockwave Rider
– Guns, Germs, and Steel
– Sons of Liberty
– Neill Blomkamp
– PALEO-FUTURE
– Dogs in the Vineyard
– COINTELPRO
– The Project Orion engine
– Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
– Eclipse Phase
– Charles Stross’s Accelerando and Singularity Sky
– Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon
– The Joss Whedon TV series Dollhouse
– The Cyberpunk RPG
– The question of whether squids have brains, revealed
– The game may take place over the course of the technological singularity
– Bruce Sterling
– An episode of my other podcast where I talk to Ron Edwards about finding who the protagonist is in play
– Ron’s game Spione
– The Blomkamp film District 9
– The Big Three game design question
– Gardner Dozois edited Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future
– GURPS Transhuman Space
The intro and closing music for this episode is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal.
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You can subscribe to the show with this feed url.
Let’s try a little thing!
I just put up the game design studio here at xenoglyph. It’s a forum specifically for real, grown-up critique.
I will be applying the standards of studio group critique in order to support the creation of better games and better artifacts according to the publication objectives of their creators.
The forum will be heavily moderated. I want it to generate solid work, so any socialization that happens will be within the context of the stuff you’re actually creating. If you want to chew the fat, meet me at the bar at Story Games. If you want to actually work on your game, put on your apron and let’s work on your thing.
Read the rules. If you have something you feel could use work and you feel like the rules might help you, then we’d love to see your rules, your text, your page design, your cover. If you feel like you can help, please come help.
I’m an avid follower of development of the HYBRID Tri-Stat RPG. Matthew/C++/C#/CWhat moved the rules over to Blogspot a couple of years ago from Philippe Tromeur’s site, but that’s not news. What is news is that he’s started development of the game all over from scratch.
That is, Matthew/C++/C#/CWhat has deleted the hundreds of rules already in existence and started composing his Magnum Opus, his System of the World, his Philosopher’s Stone, from scratch, one rule at a time.
I hope you’ll enjoy following its development as much as I’ve been.
