"Welcome to my new fantasy game! You do not get to know the rules."

 You've heard of Eisen's Vow, yeah? 

No?

Okay, that's not unusual. It's only been called that for a while, although it's an idea as old as D&D itself. Over in his book The Elusive Shift (and on his blog, Playing at the World), Jon Peterson defines Eisen's Vow as --

the position that player enjoyment of the game is diminished by understanding how the referee resolves system events.

There's history behind this idea; in the interest of not re-hashing the wheel, you can also go listen to this here episode of the Roleplay Rescue podcast, where host Che Webster discusses it in detail and has a neat accent. 

But anyway. The basic notion is that if the players don't know the rules, and you -the GM- handle all of that on your end, then the players are interacting with the world and not the game mechanics. This, as I mentioned previously, hopes to front-load immersion. 

When I first read about it in the book, and again when I listened to Che's podcast episode, I was all, like, "Yyyyyyyeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh I dunno." Players -of which I am sometimes one- like knowing the rules to a certain point, so they know what risks they can and can't take. That's fair; that's just being smart.

But.

You can argue that players can still learn what risks they can and can't take even if they don't know the rules, and they learn those limitations the same way they learn anything in life: 

Through experience.

Plus, I'd rather my players poke around at the world because they can, not because they are told they can. I'd rather the risks and rewards in, say, fighting a handful of kobolds be present and evident by the information that I can give them, and that their characters grow in ability through lived, rather than tallied, experience. 

And that's what Rovainne wants to be: a play experience. It wants to come alive at the table, to be a thing that the players sink into and enjoy.

And! Plus! Also! There's another advantage to this play style: in the absence of to-hit modifiers, armor classes, target numbers, feats, skill levels and such, creativity and description become paramount. Can your party defeat these kobolds? Maybe. Probably. How? What are your tactics? No no no, not "what are you going to do to get +2 to hit them", I said what are you going to do? Do you just wade in? Do some of you flank them out? Are you dumber than a kobold? What about the one with the spear? 

The argument can be made that you can have a game that focuses on those same tactical considerations even if you have modifiers codified for every abstraction, and you know what? You can.

But you don't gotta. You can have a rich play experience that hinges on not having tactical modifiers and instead pretending that you're a knight and a scoundrel and a wizard's apprentice and a witch who have to get across this clearing in the woods, and there are some lizard-dog-things that say "No way", so what do you do about it?

Obviously, this requires a lot of trust between the players and the GM. That's why I intend to play this  with an established group who I trust will trust me. 

So the rules I'm using will be invisible to the players. But what rules am I using? 

...that would be telling. But I'll tell you what they're not, and I can tell you that they're not those rules because I considered all of the below but ultimately decided that they didn't fit what Rovainne wants to be:

• AD&D 2nd Edition or Rules Cyclopedia - despite being my favorite iterations of Brand Name D&D, as I've already stated, Rovainne doesn't want to be D&D.
• Castles & Crusades, 13th Age, Labyrinth Lord, OD&D and its clones - despite being other great ways to play D&D, well...they're...still D&D. With all the D&D expectations that I'd just end up chucking out anyway.
• GURPS, D6 Fantasy, HERO FREd, Savage Worlds - despite being some generic systems that I liked, Rovainne resisted being those games because they just wouldn't easily bend to what Rovainne wants to be. They could, eventually, but...it seemed like a lot of work, and the temptation was there to go down pathways that could lead away from the pure experience of what the setting wants to be, and risks me turning it into something else just because it seems like a good idea at the time.
• Dungeon World - too much to cut out, again. Though I did consider a basic PbtA 6-/7-9/10+ target spread and interpretation, but I had the feeling that it wouldn't give me the right feel that I wanted. I co-opted some of the ideas, though...
• Fate Core/Condensed/Accelerated - despite being one of my favorite ways to tell stories and such, some of my players balked at the odds of rolling 4dF, and I just really don't want to argue about that. 
• Cortex Prime - yeah, no, I ain't doin' that much work. Screw that. Nice game, but noooooo.

So the rules are none of those, and they're not a lot of other systems, either. They'll be my secret. Don't ask. 

Now...you've probably noticed that I keep talking about "what Rovainne wants to be". That's a whole topic unto itself, and I'm looking forward to discussing it with you and telling you what it means and how it intersects with my jacked-up creative process, which is one of the original themes of this blog...

...but not right now. You've already had enough to read. Come back later. 

Gee, I Guess I'd Better Mention The Game I've Been Running For 10 Weeks Now.

I don't know why I haven't posted about my bi-weekly D6 Space game.

It's not like the game's not fun; to the contrary, it's a bucket of fun. In fact, it's the place where I'm putting to use a lot of the stuff I've been talking about here, what with all the transcendant, GM-as-conduit-for-whatever-he-does RPG action that this blog is about.

So let me talk about it.

It's the game I mention on this thread at The RPG Site; it's also the one I talked about doing at my Friendly Local Games Store in this post from 2 Nov. 2006, only using D6 instead of d20. By all accounts it's been successful (i.e. the players are having fun), I've been having a blast with it, and one of the dudes has decided to run a D6 Fantasy game, he likesthe system so well. Aces.

I really am doing very little prep for it, and I really am stealing liberally from other sources. Just last night, I named a star system "Wiedlin" after Jane Wiedlin from The Go-Go's; there's an NPC named Nik Kershaw who is the captain of a ship called the Human Racing; The PCs' ship is named "Clear Air Turbulence", after the ship in Iain M. Banks' novel Consider Phlebas (the ship apparently is named after a jazz-fusion album, so it has a larcenous pedigree already); I have a plan to name a ship, somewhere, after a Missing Persons album.

I have turned a pair of hastily-described, inconsequential NPCs into major parts of the narrative, suddenly, and in the middle of play (Mary and Celeste Anglota, sexy twin starship thieves). I have spontaneously described the contents of a star system, thrown game stats together out of thin air, stuck in subtle clues to other adventures based on ideas long since conceived but never used, cribbed names from a list, rolled up NPC personailities on the spot...

...it's amazing how much solid, fun gaming we've done based on almost no preparation at all.

The key: vibe. I have an idea of what kind of game, setting, mood, feel, etc I want. I watch my players interact with it, and in some cases just improvise based on my backlog of influences and concepts.

Apart from having a simple goal for each session, a few notions of obstacles and a notebook in which to write down the crap I come up with...that's it.

That's how I run my game. And I forget to bring the same notebook most of the time.

It's a creative joy. I'm making stuff up, they're making stuff up, we meet in the middle and asses get kicked. Robots, Imperial Space Centurions, neon-lit space stations, a luxury liner defended by a colony of giant bugs and the pheromone that makes them angry, sanitary nanobots used as a weapon...

...my D6 Space game ROCKS.

PROJECT: MURLYND

I had an idea today. It came in part from reading an old Dragon, in part from looking at Tunnels & Trolls 7th Edition and in part from the weather (warm, breezy weather acts like a creative battery for me; science has not yet determined the process by which this occurs). I've got a lot to say about it, but I'll cut to the chase.

PROJECT: MURLYND (its working title) is a 30-day attempt at creating a FRPG campaign setting. The idea is to sketch out a campaign setting in broad strokes, and to add some bit of work (whatever it is) every day for a month. Therefore, it's as much about creativity as it is about dedication.

I'm easily distractible and lazy, so the idea of giving myself a 30-day project like this is scary and exciting at the same time. I want to get myself used to, you know, working on something consistently, so PROJECT: MURLYND is a way to do that.

Some of you old school guys and gals out there might remember Dragon #71, which featured an article entitled "Greyhawk's World" by Gary Gygax himself. The article detailed a quartet of "quasi-deities" from the author's campaign, and one of them was this guy:


Yup. That's Clint Eastwood all right. Well, it's Murlynd, and he was into the American Old West, despite being an AD&D character. He had a pair of pistols and a horse and a dancing broadsword.

In an AD&D game.

Obviously, his player, and Gygax, liked this crazy notion enough to not only allow it in the game but to publish it in Dragon as Greyhawk material. In other words, they thought it was cool so they went with it.

That my friends, is where I'm taking my major inspiration: if it's cool, put it in the campaign setting. To hell with over-thinking; nuts to fiddly-bits. Just come up with a wide framework, like girders in a building. Fill in the details later.

And add something every day, for 30 days.

It will start off with the really broad stuff -- how many kingdoms or areas, their names and general (very general) flavors, gods worshipped, and so on. Then it'll move on to some somewhat more specific things like a few notes on this Mongolian-esque nomad tribe or that hidden city. It'll end with a map, which won't even be all that detailed, because when I try to do it the other way I get frustrated for some reason.

Taking a page from Peter Spahn's Chronicles of Amherth, it'll include a series of drag-and-drop ideas not associated with any location or culture -- kind of a grab-bag of adventure fodder.

The project has a few rules:

1. Keep it broad!
Every entry just needs enough info in it to inspire detal later on, NOT to dictate it. Population distribution and stuff like that is cool, but it's cooler to know that the South Plains are inhabited by megalithic monsters and prehistoric mammals the size of SUVs.

2. Add something every day!
This is about focus more than anything. It's about actually doing it and having something to show at the end.

3. Use of found elements is allowed!
In other words: license to steal. As long as I put my own spin on it, or use it to shape something else, or at least think it's cool...then it's cool. Got a copy of Keep on the Borderlands? Put that mofo in there. Cool picture on Jeff Rients' blog? Snatch. Want Abe Vigoda and Pat Benatar to be deities? Yea, baby, you're making gravy without the lumps!

4. Don't get obsessed!
Seriously. It's just a gameworld. C'mon, it's got Pat Benatar in it!

Well...let's see how this works.

Shelzar it is!

The city has been chosen. Furthermore, when we couldn't decide between D6 and Stories System, we rolled a die.

D6 it is. Excellent! I loves me that system, by gum.

What's it gonna be about? *shrug* Hell if I know. I know her character is gonna be runaway nobility who joined the Thieves' Guild (or its local equivalent), and after reading this page right here, I got an idea involving a popular pit-fighter, the potion he secretly imbibes before going into a bout, and a plan to get him to throw a fight without him knowing about it. Heh heh heh.

Come to think, I might not read too much out of the Shelzar book, just in case -- to give myself some wiggle room. In other words, use the book more as inspiration than a kind of weird-ass gospel.

Welp! It's a start.

Sara Invades Noodle Country

NOTE: The following is cross-posted from a thread on The RPG Site.

The other night, my 2-and-a-half-year-old hauled out her Playskool Little People Farm Set, some Playskool Little People, and a blanket. (The blanket goes on the floor under the farm house.) I was then invited to play farm.

Upon joining, I found that I was having more fun than she was.

I started riffing on everything I could think of, giving the different figures names, personalities, voices, goals, running jokes...you name it. A Little People princess in a pink dress became Sarah, The Princess of Pink, and she had such a fascination with noodles (and the consumption thereof) that a room in the farmhouse playest was soon designated as Noodle Country for the sole purpose of giving her someplace to invade; on the other hand, Wally Mart, a mustachioed Weeble in a baker's hat, tried unsuccessfully to sell The Five-Dollar Kangaroo to Chuck the Prince of Cars ("Hey, how-a you eh-doing? 'Ey, Chuck, you wanna buy kan-a-ge-roo? 'E's a verra, verra nice-a kan-a-ge-roo, see, he got-a nice-a bow, ehhh...? He's a-just five-a dollers...!")

Twenty, thirty minutes of me talking to myself, while Lily kind of moved little guys around and tried to keep up with Daddy's wild, wild little world of Sleepy Wizards and lackadaisical, obsessive royalty.

That tapped into a creative part of me that I had kind of...I dunno, tried to control as a Serious Adult Gamer. I let go of the constraints of, you know, sense, and just started creating characters, places and situations without any worries about demographics and themes and mapping and pacing.

The best part is, she still thinks "Noodle Country" is funny. And she's right.