Category Archives: Ropecon

Aki’s New Year’s Resolutions

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I think New Year’s resolutions are a pretty stupid idea. Humans are weirdly programmed. Generally its enough to talk about something we want to do. People who share their goals don’t reach them as often as people who don’t. You get some of the sensation of accomplishment simply from talking about it and for most people that’s enough. Actual accomplishments require actual work and that’s hard. Today’s culture is much more about instant gratification than hard work.

Although that’s clearly a generilization, you should not – under any circumstances – make New Year’s Resolutions.

With that in mind, here are mine.

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Kagematsu – Where seduction is more tactical than D&D4

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Kagematsu is a game about shame, honour and love. It tells of a wandering ronin who ends up in a Japanese village in 1572, during the Sengoku era. All the men are at war, and only children, elders and women are left. The village is hard to defend. Everyone is afraid that the village will be devastated by an outside threat. It’s the women’s job to persuade the ronin to stay and defend the village.

Kagematsu, the lone male character, has to be played by a woman. That’s a rule. The rest of the players can be women or men, but I’ve played twice, and both times they’ve been male. Both games rank among my best roleplaying experiences.

The game focuses on seduction. The women characters have two active stats, Innocence and Charm, with seven points divided among them in any way. The women are after shows of affection (called Affections, in short) from Kagematsu: a stolen glance, a kind word, an introduction, a kiss, and so on. Some Affections you can only get by Innocence (a confession of love), some by Charm (a roll in the hay), and some by either one. If you succeed at the task with a single roll of dice, you lower your Fear. That’s the third and final stat, and the only use for it is in the end, when Kagematsu fights against the total Fear score of the women.

So you want to lower your Fear by succeeding at the die roll. If the woman’s player rolls more than Kagematsu’s, she lowers her fear score.

However.

You also want to gain Kagematsu’s love. But there’s no die roll for that. Instead, Kagematsu’s player makes a subjective evaluation on the scene, and decides whether your character receives Love or Pity. Love makes your subsequent rolls a tad easier, and Kagematsu uses the power of his most loved woman to fight the final battle. Pity, on the other hand, only has a psychological effect: it’s a different thing entirely to decide between a) giving a Love point or not giving any point at all and b) giving a Love point or a Pity point.

So as the woman’s player, you need to plan your way to Kagematsu’s favour. Probably your plan goes haywire. It seems so simple: first you make a good first impression, and then slowly get acquainted and gain his favour. But you can only try gaining each Affection once. What if you fail at making a good first impression? What if all your easier tasks fail, and it seems to you that Kagematsu hates you? How can you then get him to both touch you and love you for it? (It’s possible to gain extra dice by getting desperate. Desperations are a neat little mechanic which I won’t get into here. Basically they improve your chances at die rolls at the very real risk of gaining pity.)

It’s insanely challenging and gratifying! After the second game, one of the players uttered that the game is way more tactical than D&D4. In some games, waiting for your own turn while the others are playing can be a bit tedious, but here it’s not. You have to pay attention to what’s happening between the other women and Kagematsu, and what Kagematsu might be like, and what your next approach is going to be like.

And that’s only part of the fun. The theme and the unusual setup are sure to be provocative. I’m sure each player has her or his own thoughts about stuff, and they’re sure to differ from game to game. At my first game, this July at Ropecon, I thought a lot about representing female characters. When a woman explicitly evaluates how you play, at least I reflected intensely about how I portray women at roleplaying games on the one hand, and how I should play them on the other. Some of the game’s mechanics also emphasise the reversed gender roles: the women’s players don’t ever get to say how Kagematsu enters the scene, for example. It might not sound like much in theory, but if you’re as active at the gaming table as I am, it packs a nice psychological punch by forcing you to accept a more passive – in traditional terms, a feminine – role

The second time we played, I put a lot of my younger self to the woman I played. I made her an innocent, well-disciplined but shy 17-year old who tried to gain favour by gaining sympathy. She made a good impression on Kagematsu, who seemed to be a lot more sympathetic to her than to other characters; but in the end, Kagematsu who was quite old, couldn’t commit himself to someone much younger, to someone who reminded him of his past. It was heartbreaking! And a lot more personal, too.

The characters go through a lot in the game, and I don’t think it’s possible to stick to your initial character concept unless the dice really favour you. In the first game I had really bad luck with the dice and had to get desperate. I took Kagematsu for the Mr. Darcy type and tried lizziebenneting him. I failed miserably and loved it.

If it sounds uncomfortable, weird, and awkward, it can be! Especially the first session felt really weird and awkward. But not once did I feel threatened, or humiliated, or judged. It’s due to the players in part (thank you, Emmi and Laura), but also, I think, to the nature of the game. Kagematsu’s player doesn’t judge your attempt at being charming, but your character’s. They’re not wholly separate, but it becomes quite clear, quite soon that the character’s path isn’t necessarily the one the player wants. It’s a valuable experience to feel both vulnerable and safe at the same time.

RopeCon 2014 Plans

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Yes, I know I’m pretty early, but I do have ideas, so why not share them.

First, talking to different people at RopeCon and somewhat on this blog, I’ve learned two things:

1. Some of the most valued GMs are part of our Guild.

2. There are people out there looking for new games, but are worried about the GMs and other players.

So, I thought we might provide a service to help out those who don’t want to use the classic heuristic of staying away from fantasy games. This might sound very conceited and might actually be just that, but than again, if we are not the best people to do this, I don’t know who is. Well, at least we are arrogant enough to do this (although I haven’t talked to Ville about this yet, and I didn’t tell anyone I’m going to publish this this early).

My basic idea is this: We get a rubber stamp for next year and stamp the games we believe are up to our standards… whatever those standards may be. Probably just base our recommendations on recommendations from people we trust to know what games are good and which GMs are worthy of our stamp.

What we would probably need to do is to make a page of all the games we recommend and explain our reasoning, whether it is based on a recommendation or its there just because we didn’t want to leave out any of our own GMs (I’m big on reporting possible bias). Now, depending on how secret we want this to be, the stamp doesn’t necessarily need the address, although since we definitely are not above self-promotion, it probably will have the link to this blog at least.

But here’s the problem: We don’t really want to piss of any GMs, but stamping their enrollment sheets when they don’t necessarily know what its all about, might leave a sour taste in somebody’s mouth. Then again, if they really go to the link and see what its about, I don’t think very many would mind. Convention organizers of course might, but as we are just trying to bring quality players and games together to heighten their experience, they really shouldn’t. After all, they want repeat customers.

At this point, I’m just throwing this out there, looking for feedback. Feedback from the guild was pretty good, but people I talked to (including Lauri) were drunk at the time…

Ropecon 2013: S/lay w/Me as essence of roleplaying

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I purchased Ron Edwards’ S/lay w/Me a couple of years back. It impressed me instantly, but I was afraid to try it out. After a year of improv classes, I booked two sessions of it to Ropecon (and ran a third ex tempore). I’m glad I did. It’s a very special little gem, a two-player game of sword & sorcery that usually plays in an hour or so. I’ll go so far as to say it’s pretty much the essence of what I enjoy in roleplaying.

One player plays an experienced adventurer, described in a couple of dozen words. He also picks where the adventure takes place and declares something supremely important that he’s after there.

The other player then comes up with ideas, visuals, and people based on what the other player decided. He also creates a Lover and a Monster, who can be the same person or thing.

Then they start playing. It’s very light on mechanics, and although you roll dice, they only affect the final outcome of the game, not the task or conflict at hand. The game is played in “Goes”, which is pretty much another way of saying “turn”, but sounds a little less like a board game. On your Go, you describe things and end your Go by narrating a forward-moving event. Not “I search for the sword”, but “I enter the temple and I go through rooms of varying, vivid colors, until I finally reach a small, crimson chamber. On an altar I find the sword.”

In its most rigid form the narration turns resemble the typical player–GM split: one player says what the adventurer does, and the other says how the world reacts. However, they can and should play the game as loose as they are comfortable with. Rather than following clear rules about what each player can and must say, the players should feel out how far they can go – how much they can about the other players’ “realm”. I’ve often heard said that, for example, it’s not kosher in RPGs for the GM to say what the player characters are feeling; and it’s definitely out of bounds for the player to say how the monsters react.

In S/lay w/Me, the only limits are what you two as players establish. It not only applies to narration rights, but also to the content: since the game is about lovers and monsters, you have to include love and/or sex and violence in the game. One inhabitant of the internet, not well-disposed towards the game, said that the game seems like an awfully contrived attempt at foreplay. (The game’s highly sexual art might have provoked that reaction.)

But it’s not about foreplay (although you probably could use the game for it, but how is that different from any other RPG?). Instead, it feels very special to just play face-to-face with one person, and come to terms about all kinds of things without ever explicitly discussing them. It’s about connection, about jamming – to use Ron Edwards’ music metaphor for roleplaying – about learning cool things about yourself and your friends. It’s sitting together, forgetting everything else but the game, focusing on the fiction you’re creating. It’s like immersing yourself in a Robert E. Howard story, except you tell it together with an interesting person, and if that’s not high praise, I don’t know what is.

Conversation in RPGs – Thoughts spurred by Vincent Baker at Ropecon 2013

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This might be old news to some, self-evident to others. I realised something quite nifty. Maybe it isn’t extraordinary, but it clarified things, and things clicked in my head.

At Ropecon, I listened to Vincent Baker talk about game design. He’s a veteran of the Forge, which to some equals obscurity and “theory jerk” – actually he has referred to himself as such – but to me his theoretical stuff is very lucid and interesting. His thoughts on game theory and especially the terms he uses strike me as relevant. That is, they help me think about roleplaying games, their rules and what’s happening at the gaming table.

One of the things he talked about was the interaction in roleplaying games between 1) people, 2) the physical game components, and 3) the conversation among players. Not “the imaginary space”, mind, but the conversation. What we talk about at the table. In chess, for example, the conversation doesn’t matter. People might talk about the game, but from the standpoint of what chess as a game is about, it doesn’t matter. In roleplaying games, said Baker, the conversation is the thing. And here’s the thing that actually made me think “mind = blown”, and I actually hate that expression, so it’s a big deal to me. I hope I get it even approximately right.

The rules of the roleplaying game are there to modify the conversation we’re having, to ensure that what we’re talking about is relevant to the game.

In Apocalypse World, and other games using the same engine, the rules direct the conversation by asking questions (among other things). For instance, if you try to notice stuff about a charged situation, the roll isn’t a binary situation of pass/fail. Instead, you get to ask stuff: “what’s my best way out of here?”, “what’s my enemy’s true position” and so on. The MC (the fun name for the GM in this game and one that I’m proud to sport) is supposed to invent the answers on the fly – that is, to engage in conversation. (If you fail, the MC brings forth other interesting stuff into the conversation.)

Compare this to the way I’ve run Call of Cthulhu or Unknown Armies (both of which I love, so please refrain from using your internet equivalents of 88mm’s): if you as a player succeed in your roll, I give you a pre-made answer – if you don’t, I’ll move on. I might be wrong, but in a roll like that you kind of roll whether you get access to the GM’s mind and notes. The GM’s task is to withhold stuff and try to covertly run the game in a direction only he knows – a sort of Grey Eminence. (Now, I always wanted to run Unknown Armies in another way, but I didn’t know how ten years ago. There are a lot of ways to run CoC and UA.)

In Apocalypse World, you roll to see which direction the conversation and the game is going. It’s creating stuff together, getting the conversation flowing.

In some respects, Apocalypse World isn’t very far from structured freeform. Sure, AW has dice to randomize stuff, but the main thing is the conversation you’re having among friends. You bring forth stuff and riff on other people’s ideas.

More on Ropecon later.

RopeCon 2013, part Sunday (MustaJumala)

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Ah, Sunday… Breakfast was mediocre again. I guess bacon tastes pretty good, even if it isn’t crisp, but there’s just this idea in the back of your head that it might not be edible, even though it clearly is cooked. I was thinking about going to a lecture, but turns out one of our party wasn’t feeling well for some peculiar reason, so I took over his GMing slot at the last minute (actually about 15 to 20 minutes late, but anyhow). The lecture was shit anyhow, according to Lauri, if we were talking about the same thing.

Again With the Quiet,
or
A Year of Religious Schism

The game I ran was the same game I participated in on Friday, The Quiet Year. This why I questioned the replayability. Yes, many things were very different, but often there were similar patterns, because the cards often take you into the same direction.

Not to fault the players. They were very patient with the hassle in the beginning and despite the cards pulling them into the same direction as the last group, they kept it interesting. Less fantastical, even with mutant dogs and dwarves living under a mountain kidnapping our kids, but still, less fantastical than the kraken. Again, religion had a major influence on the game. Throughout the year, the animistic and the Christian elements of the community fought over everything, but in the end, the animists slaughtered all the Christians, despite their own inner conflict between their leading figures known simply as the High Shaman and the Ugly Shawoman.

All in all, somewhat less raucous then the Friday game, but no less enjoyable, with a somewhat more coherent plot. Either way is fine and in both games people did seemed to learn during the game that although the community would fight for their survival the best they can, we as players shouldn’t be bothered about their survival, because they’ll just die in the end any how.

The Sealed Deck Challenge,
or
The Big Mess

While I was running the game, my friends had decided to get some booster packs of M14 and play a sealed game. Actually, one of them was sleeping on the lawn in front of the building where all this was happening. Poromagia was selling packs at a discounted price, so why not join them. Buying packs is generally not advisable, but playing limited (draft or sealed) is good value.

Not really knowing anything about possible archetypes in the format, I felt I had a weak pool. I went for a strategy of keeping the opponent at bay with plenty of green blockers on the battlefield and a few white fliers with some enchantments to back them up. Nice, in theory. I just didn’t draw any of the flier in any of the three games I played.

First game was a disaster for me. I had a pretty poor opening hand, with only a [scryfall]Gladecover Scout[/scryfall], some things to throw on it and land. Then things got worse, as I only drew land for the rest of the not very long game. I took out some of the manafixing, which I had left mistakenly, as I dropped my third color late in the process, and went back in.

Now, my opponent was completely manascrewed. He had two plains on the table, which let him slow me down considerably with three [scryfall]Pacifism[/scryfall]s. Still, it might have been slow, but my win was inevitable. Turned out my opponent had messed his mana and didn’t actually have much of it in his deck.

Well, after two disastrous games, the third one seemed to stall. Neither of us really got anywhere. This is the problem with sealed. I didn’t get any very good bombs (some pretty good ones, though), so I couldn’t really finish the game without grinding my opponent down with small steps. He, on the other hand, had a [scryfall]Millstone[/scryfall]. I did manage to win after his patience dried out.

That was the only match I played, as my ride was leaving.

Final Words

I had fun. The real hero of the Con was probably Buried without Ceremony, the company behind both The Quiet Year and MonsterHearts, but I feel I got pretty lucky with the games I played and the people I played with.

Hint: Avoid fantasy games, if you want good roleplay. I went to the Barbarians of Lemuria game only because I knew the GM and have trust in his ablities. Otherwise, just stay away from them.

First Set of Ropecon Pictures

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There are just too many photos to go through with just one sitting. Here is the first patch of images from Ropecon.

RopeCon 2013, part Saturday, ad addendum (MustaJumala)

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Forgot about a random encounter I had in the sauna at the hotel.

This wasn’t a long encounter, but I just met some guy who had just had a lecture on spying in RPGs. The Finnish descriptions can be found here and here. I generally don’t go to these lectures, but maybe I should have. A very interesting topic and from the short discussion I had with him, I think the guy had a very interesting perspective, putting emphasis on the individual and how one copes with the circumstances spies and agents are put in.

Furthermore, when I asked him about the system he’d use for such a game, he recommended Gumshoe with perhaps elements from Stalker. I have played neither of them, but I am sort of familiar with what they are about. Sounds very good, actually. Especially, if you want to play in the style of lets say Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, where the pressures of the job are immense and often get to you.

Maybe someone should do a AW-hack based on this.

RopeCon 2013, part Saturday (MustaJumala)

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I was thinking I’m going to be brief about Saturday, but apparently that was not in the cards. Less pics today, because I just forgot to take them.

Hearty breakfast (read: a lot of calories), although apparently the hotel wasn’t ready for the influx of overweight nerds as much of the food was subpar compared to last year. There were a lot more con-goers at the hotel. Perhaps I’ve now completely corrupted the whole scene with my personal need for a comfortable bed.

2.1 Adventures in Going Big or Going Home
or
… well, I’ve got nothing

Saturday morning, I took part in a Barbarians of Lemuria game. Its a Sword and Sorcery game in the spirit of Howard and other pulp fantasy writers. You get your share of strange monsters and rascist stereotypes of native people. Both were prominent.

I had some experience with the game from last year. At first, I was going to play a character with some magic and go against the stereotypical warrior. Then I saw the other players making similar characters, so I started from scratch (which doesn’t take long) and made a warrior. Not stereotypical, necessarily, but someone who can do damage with his mighty axe.

The game itself is not very deep. You hit things and you do your best to make it seem cool, so there’s a lot of leaps into huge monsters, chopping off heads, using the environment to your benefit and stuff like that.

Now, I had a secondary goal. I had promised to take part in the Live Bloodbowl tournament. So, I needed to get out of this game on time. Thankfully, the GM had managed to wrangle himself a spot on the game run by D. Vincent Baker, so he had a time limit as well.

I didn’t manage to kill myself in the game, but it wasn’t for the lack of trying. I did leap at the face of a giant sea serpent while seasick, then to the top of its head after it had thrown me down, threw an axe at a native, thereby losing my only weapon (although I did kill him against the odds), and later on I tried to get eaten by a giant worm/snail monster. Admittedly, I did let the red shirts take some of the risks, because if I die, I die like man, in combat, not like a red shirt, in a trap.

2.2 There’s an Actual Ball?
or
The Awkward Sight of Shirtless Nerds

Lauri has some pictures of this, so maybe I’ll edit this later on to add them. We’ll see.

There wasn’t any mention of this on the RopeCon website, but we had knowledge of this beforehand, so we had assembled a team. The team did have a few last minute additions, because of scheduling, but we had a team of four dwarves and a kraken disguised cleverly as our ogre reinforcement.

The other teams were our nemeses, the orcs, the undead and two different hobbit teams. For a single elimination tournament, five is obviously a very inconvenient number of teams. I guess we sort of got the bye for the first round… I don’t know. I couldn’t really follow what was happening. I do know we lost our only game to the orcs (who had… some insider help), but I personally got a moral victory by achieving more takedowns than being on the receiving end, so no problems there. Although, we dwarves don’t know when to quit, so wait until next year, Joonas. We’re not quite through yet.

All in all, too much waiting around. Some players were very good, like the Cute Hobbit (anyone there knows who I’m talking about) seemed to always read the situation very well and anticipate what the opponents would do. Wasn’t enough though. Generally, not really a spectator sport, although we made some attempts of being a more of a spectacle. On the other hand, there’s only so much you can do with a bunch of shirtless, overweight nerds.

Life of a Vorthos
or
Nice Idea, But Not Really For Me

As defined by Mark Rosewater, Vorthos is the kind of player who is mostly interested in the flavor. Keep this in mind. I am not such a player, which you should also keep in mind.

I went to a demo of a game called Serpent’s Tongue. Their preferred web address seems to be www.BecomeMagi.com. Its an interesting idea and I bet there are lots of players out there who think this would make a great game. I’m just not one of them, being more on the Spikey (out there to prove something) end of the spectrum (I probably shouldn’t call it a spectrum, but you get what I mean).

The basic idea is that you have spellbook. Actually more literally than in most games. You insert spells into the book and cast them from there. This involves both verbalizing and in some cases hand motions. This is where they lose me. If verbalizing and the motions had actual in-game meaning, instead of being a simple exercise in reading the cards correctly, I might have enjoyed it more.

The demo put its emphasis on the flavor, so the game mechanics didn’t shine that much. From what I saw, its a game of adversarial reasoning, in other words trying to outthink your opponent by being able to predict how he or she will play the game. I can’t say the tools for this are really there, because I saw so little of the game itself, but I suppose they are.

I don’t think the emphasis on flavor is a mistake. If the game is about that, why go elsewhere?

Again, this is not a game for me, but if flavor is your thing, you shouldn’t let my stance deter you from buying it. Also, I’m not sure they want it publicized, so I won’t put the code here, but they did have a special price for con-goers. If you want the code (which is eligible until August 4th of 2013), contact me. I’ll see what I can do.