When I wrote the Weaving Worlds post I was right on I believe all the technicalities. But I couldn’t see the wood for the trees without putting it down clearly. What storygames are is quite simple and can be boiled down to one single point.
We should be able to make games that improve on Free-Form
I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.
- Martin Luther King
This is the first Forward Thinking project I consider genuinely easy. What would I do for a safety net if I ruled the world? Simple. Single Payer Healthcare Free at Point of Delivery plus Guaranteed Income. And then look for anyone who slipped between the cracks or didn’t get the help they needed and fix that.
Sounds utopian? Possibly it is. The NHS is quite simply much more cost efficient than almost any other healthcare model out there with the possible exception of Japan. Its main problems stem from having two thirds the per capita funding of France or Germany and less per capita government funding than the US healthcare model; I’ve been into this in more detail on my blog previously. And trials of Citizen’s Income/Negative Income Tax such as Mincome (Canada) and BigNam (Namibia) have generally been spectacularly successful in terms of outcome to the recipients.
In my penultimate post in this series I mentioned Ron Edwards and the Forge. The Forge closed down in 2005, having done its job (and Ron Edwards ensuring that he was controversial by talking about bad games giving people brain damage) – and most of the community there moved to Story-Games. And they’ve been producing interesting enough games that they are worth the final post in this series. Story Games tend to have seven aspects; three which are common in the Forge-ist narrative RPGs of my previous article and almost ubiquitous in the Story-Games wave, and four that are almost distinguishing features of what are often referred to as Story Games.
The three that are common in the Forge-ist RPGs are:
And the four that are almost distinguishing marks of this wave are:
I’m also going to mention four games in this category (or three and one hybrid toolkit game) and why they are awesome to illustrate this wave of games:
(Game Design is Mind Control was the title of a talk given by Luke Crane; one of the best things on the internet about game design this side of Mark Rosewater’s blog on Magic the Gathering).
Where I left things last time was with D&D and White Wolf largely dominating the market. There were good games being produced – but the market was being dominated by the two major game systems. And people were noticing that the so-called Storyteller system didn’t really bring anything to help you tell stories or make them more intense, or even help you really get into character – which wasn’t a good thing for something that was supposedly a roleplaying game. Something needed fixing. And (arguably) something was.
Like a number of my blog essays, this is a response to a Forward Thinking prompt – this one on the subject of cruelty. I also might entirely be heading off in the wrong direction here. (The blog title comes from the opening to the musical Chess).
I started out thinking of the topic of cruelty by doing the obvious – a websearch to see what people had said. Although the Psychology Today column was interesting nothing I turned up whether vanilla or kinky had much to say on why people are cruel. And searching for cruelty’s very close cousin, teasing, produced even less useful results (and a lot more kink). But I don’t think you can get to grips with cruelty without understanding teasing. I think I have an answer – but this is only what I can come up with.
Cruelty and teasing are both about security. Continue reading
Where we left my history of the trends in RPGs last time we were in the 1980s and looking at toolbox games such as GURPS that were (in theory) able to handle anything. In theory. In practice the running joke is that it doesn’t matter which setting you’re playing GURPS in, it feels like GURPS.
The 1990s were a completely different decade as far as roleplaying games go, and dominated almost entirely by two companies. TSR, makers of D&D, and the new kids on the block, White Wolf Publishing, makers of Vampire the Masquerade and other related games. By the end of the 1990s, TSR lay dead from a self-inflicted wound, and White Wolf were taken over a handful of years later despite at one point (with very favourable circumstances) outselling TSR. In both cases these grievous wounds were, in my opinion, a consequence of their publishing model – and Wizards of the Coast, who bought the bankrupt TSR (and I’ll deal with D&D 3e in this post), would echo White Wolf’s self-inflicted wound with D&D 4e.
There were good games, improvements on what came before or innovations being published in the 1990s; Over the Edge, Everway, Feng Shui (what better name for an action movie RPG than the art of furniture arrangement?), and FUDGE (we’ll come back to a game based on it next time) to name the first few that spring to mind. There were also dozens of Fantasy Heartbreakers; D&D derivatives that made one or two major innovations but were basically houseruled D&D.
But really the story of 90s and early 00s roleplaying is dominated by D&D (both TSR and Wizards of the Coast), White Wolf, and their business models and how they all ultimately lead to major self-inflicted wounds on the parent company.
TSR and AD&D 2e
White Wolf, Vampire: the Masquerade, and the rest of the World of Darkness
Wizards of the Coast and D&D 3e
To talk about the purpose of public education is to imply that public education has only one purpose – and that is to oversimplify matters drastically. Major purposes of public education include in no particular order:
