• Socratic Design: What is a Traditional Game?
  A nice little blog entry that runs down a pretty good explanation of what makes an rpg “traditional.” I think I like this.
  (tags: rpgs blog)

Saturday night I finally got to play some Capes. In addition to myself, we were maxed out with four other players: Jake and Joseph, who have each played a couple of times before, Margaret, who’s played once but has had no other prior experience with roleplaying games, and Rob, who was new to Capes.

In preparation for the game I’d printed out the Click and Locks on heavy cardstock and slicked them up with some self-stick laminating sheets. BTW, I recommend OfficeMax over Office Depot. Cutting out the pieces was a pain and I’m not even completely done trimming them, but the result was worth it. I like having semi-permanent modules to play with so that I don’t have to worry about printing up fresh modules every time I play. Of course I could just have people write down their stuff on a sheet of paper like every other roleplaying game on the planet. Even if we did that, a Capes character is still less writing than most of the rpgs out there. I’d rather have the clicks, though. They’re fun!

The first thing I did was to have Rob and Joseph (who volunteered since we didn’t have another person with no Capes experience) play my minidemo so that I could see if it really ran as short as I hoped and what sort of stuff I could expect. It clocked in at about twenty-four minutes rather than the fifteen I was hoping for, but we did have some distractions and I did go into some details that I’ll be leaving out in real demo practice. I was also preparing Rob to play in an actual game, so I covered some stuff that wouldn’t necessarily be needed in a real minidemo.

I was really satisfied. The characters and goals I’d written up went over well, I figured out a couple of tricks to get people invested as early as possible, and play went quite fast. One BIG thing I neglected to do was to point out that though I was running the demo, I wasn’t acting as a GM. I just happened to go first because I could show (not tell) how it was supposed to work.

Once that was done, we moved on to the actual game. Jake and I had prepped characters beforehand, so we helped Rob click and lock one for himself while Marg and Joseph put theirs together. I think Margaret had some trouble coming up with a character concept she was happy with due to her lack of experience with roleplaying games in general and in retrospect I think that the rest of us kinda dropped the ball on helping her prepare for that aspect of play. Happily, the next day she and Jake put together another character for her so that when we play again she’ll have something that she’s had time to think about, something she likes and is interested in playing.

The actual play experience was tons of fun, though a little rough. Everything I’ve heard from the Capes forums indicates that this is very common in a group of people who are new to the game. The lack of a GM to focus everyone in a particular direction combines with the power to freely narrate in any direction and is amplified by an unfamiliarity with the mechanical aspects of the system and a general unfamiliarity with the concepts of the game. The result is that there’s an interval where things are kinda wacky and fractured while everyone is learning not just how the system works but also how to work the system. When you’re familiar with the game, you can start to really get down to business. Oh, and I’m told that it’s always better when people have accrued some resources in the form of Story Tokens and Inspirations and Debt. At that point everybody has the narrative power to really throw their weight into the things that interest them. That’s when it gets really fun.

We ended up dragging out the first scene really long and so nobody felt up to playing a second one, which I thought was really a shame. Our first scene was a fairly typical fight-in-a-city except for some interesting social stuff that Marg introduced and I was going to ask for the next scene to be set at the party that she had her character mention. I think it would have been pretty cool. Hopefully we’ll be able to get several folks from this group together again and start a semi-regular game. It’d be awesome to have a casual sort of environment where a player can miss a session without the rest of the group having to skip the game.

Next Saturday I’m running my minidemos at Dragon’s Lair in Pearl. Hopefully I’ll have plenty of interested people.

• + The Jimi™ Wallet +
  Last year I lost my trifold wallet and replaced it with a very slim creditcard case/moneyclip that I like quite a lot. It’s not a pain to sit on and I can’t shovel useless stuff in there to bulk it up. This looks even cooler.
  (tags: fashion gadgets)

Deirdra told me this story and I really liked it. She says she’s seen it a zillion places around, so I don’t know the appropriate credit. It ties in with some of the mindfulness stuff that I’ve learned in kung fu, and some of the agenda/rewards stuff that I’ve learned in roleplaying theory. It resonates.

An elder Cherokee Native American was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, “A fight is going on inside me. It is a terrible fight, and it is between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, pride, and superiority. The other wolf stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. This same fight is going on inside of you and every other person too.” The children thought about it for a minute and then one child asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The old Cherokee simply replied: “The one I feed.”

• Deep in the Game: Flag Framing
  I’ve been leaning hard away from games that require a lot of preparation, but this method of prep is really interesting. It allows you to pregen motivation and conflict without having to pregen scenario. It looks like a fantastic tool to allow for improv
  (tags: rpg)

So Anna hit me with this music meme thing. I don’t usually get handed this sort of thing, so I’m not really sure what to do with it. I haven’t been listening to a lot of music lately. I no longer have a coworker who blares smoove jazz that I need to drown out, and I have other people in my cube farm that generate background noise so I don’t feel like I’m smothered by silence, so I don’t listen to music at work a lot these days. While driving, I usually listen to NPR.

That’s not to say I’m totally musicless. I bought Fallout Boy’s From Under The Cork Tree and I’m liking it very much. I don’t even remember the last CD I bought before that. Deirdra’s allatime playing The Killers, and that’s good too. While looking for a lost CD for Deir’s yoga class I came across a couple of Nowhere Squares discs and (coincidentally) Anna’s old Shasradio Favs Vol 3 CD and brought them to work today, but haven’t popped them in yet.