Hello, my owl friends! Coming to you a day late because I didn’t want anyone to think I was April Foolin’! It’s been an interesting month here; I’ve been scattered all over the place on a few different projects. One of those stretches where I struggle to feel like I’m making notable progress on anything, because I’m taking tiny baby steps on so many things.

One thing that is available now, though, is the next Dollhouse Drama playset pack! This month’s expansion is Teen Time, containing playsets of 90s mall comedy, prom queen drama, and summer camp slasher horror! Definitely check that out to add some fun new dimensions to your Dollhouse Drama games!

Project Updates

Leaving Avalon

So, Leaving Avalon – my Descended from the Queen game about returning from Narnia (legally distinct) and maybe going back as an adult – has actually been text complete for a while now, and it’s really just been waiting on me to do layout for it. But I wasn’t feeling the layout vibe, so I kept putting it off, but I do have a goal of getting this game out the door fairly soon, so I started poking around to see what I wanted to do with the game’s visual identity.

Being DftQ, it’s obviously a card game, but I’ve found that I just do not have the will to do more card layout right now. Perhaps in the future! But at the moment, opening up a card shaped file makes me want to cry a little bit, so I’m doing the workaround version and laying out the prompts with directions to use a standard deck of poker cards, each prompt linked to each card’s suit and rank. Getting past that little block meant I was actually able to make progress on it!

Layout has never been my strong suit, and likely never will be, but I do my best! Until I can afford to hire graphic designers to do this, I’ve been making do with what I can do – it’s functional and easily legible, if nothing else (which is more than some games can say!).

Dollhouse Drama

In addition to the ongoing project of writing up the remaining playset packs (I’m about 6 months ahead! I’m writing the ones now that will come out in October), I’ve also decided to whip up a couple of entirely optional rules variants, which I’ll package up like the playset packs and sell for a couple bucks, for people to add some fun new angles to the game if they’re into those angles. 

One is really kind of body horror, it’s a little Sid from Toy Story, getting into things like swapping body parts and the way kids can be really hard on their toys (a LOT of my dolls had permanent marker tattoos and terrible haircuts, etc.). I didn’t get into it in the base game because I wasn’t sure it fit tonally, but I do think it’s fun to include as an option, even if it’s not intrinsic to the game itself.

The other is getting into things like action figure features, doll gimmicks like a talking pull-string, other things that play a bit more into the features of the doll itself, when the doll isn’t just a blank canvas for clothing with hip and shoulder articulation only. This is another one that depends on the tone you want to lean into, if you want to really embrace that the characters are toys or not. But I have generally found it really fun when people do lean into that, so I think this is a fun way to make that a more active process.

Revisiting Old Zines

One of the many things I’ve been poking at this month has been looking over some of my little zine games – which I generally acknowledge are pretty barebones, even incomplete in places, which is why they’re free zines – and thinking about the possibility to flesh some of them out into more robust, complete games. Although this option has really always been on the table for me, it hasn’t – until very recently – been an appealing one.

There’s two candidates I almost accidentally stumbled on in my body of work, thinking about them and then thinking “I wish I had given this more time and attention, to make it something really solid” rather than the little flights of fancy they are. But it turns out, there’s actually nothing stopping me from giving them more time and attention later if I want to (except for the natural finite limits of my free time, but you know, that goes for everything). 

The first is actually some of my oldest published RPG work, one of the little mini-games from the Only One Bed fanfic game zine. Those ones are really tiny, it’s a small zine that has 12 mini-games in it, but I keep thinking about one of them in particular, and a bunch of different ways it could be fleshed out into its own standalone game. The other is one of the two games from Femme Noir, specifically the first game, Desperate. I think there’s something really tantalizing in it that I’m really just scratching the surface of, but I’m not sure what it is, and I want to dig deeper until I find it.

All that said, it feels really silly to put “completed” projects back onto my active list, and since I don’t have a clear plan for either of them right now, I’m letting this sit on the backburner until something a bit more solid comes to mind. 

Brainstorming in Multiple Areas

The other thing where I’m making lots of small progress comes down to me doing a lot of brainstorming for some games that have just been notes until now, as I try to see what I can get to a playtestable prototype, or at least a more solid idea in my mind. In the notes stage, things are really amorphous, and while I generally have a very clear idea of the experience I want to create, the actual particulars of how to get there are basically a big blob. I’ll actually get into this more in the next section, because I want to talk about what this brainstorming has all been ABOUT, but I’ve got a lot of fresh pages of notes on a handful of different games… but not a lot to actually show for it just yet. 

Other Thoughts

Reducing Player Choice – Friction for Fun

Sometimes I get caught on one particular idea, and I end up fiddling with it across multiple games, multiple drafts, multiple prototypes, etc. Lately the idea that I keep coming back to is where and by how much I can reduce player choice while still making something that feels like a game, where players have meaningfully different experiences that aren’t entirely subject to randomness.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t new territory for me – several of my games, including most famously The Price of Coal, restrict one of the most fundamental areas of player choice that people think about: character creation. There is no character creation in it; the game comes with a pre-made set of 12 characters you have to choose from. You can adjust them a bit because there’s a step to determine who else they have relationships with, but the individuals themselves are the same every time you play.

For that game, this was done for a fairly straightforward set of reasons. The first is to ensure that any given session of the game has a basic level of gender and racial diversity that is true to real life. The second is because providing characters is a really straightforward way to deliver a LOT of historical information indirectly, by filling in a lot of assumptions that then don’t need to be explained elsewhere. If you leave people to make their own characters in a historical game, you have to find some way of guiding what does and doesn’t “work” within the game’s world, what is and isn’t “historical” or “realistic”. Thirdly, on a purely practical level, it reduces how long character set-up takes, in what is fairly solidly a 4-hour experience. There’s just less opportunity for decision paralysis when I have taken a lot of decisions out of your hands. In any case, this restriction of choice on my part is to simplify the play experience, to make things go as smoothly as possible.

But what I’ve been playing with lately is kind of the opposite – I want to restrict your choices in ways that create very intentional points of friction, in order to cultivate a particular play experience. In the indie game design space we talk a lot about player agency being really important, and of course, it is, so I keep feeling kind of like a supervillain when I say “yeah, but what if I take away a little bit of that freedom.” Especially with the caveat of “what if I do that to make you sad on purpose” because of course the games where I’m really looking at this are more in the tragic-historical vein again.

Part of the challenge here, to me, is making players aware that there is something they cannot do. It’s one thing to build something into the assumptions of the game such that they never miss it, or aren’t aware of the friction. That’s elegant! It’s often good to do that (depending on your design goals)! But in some of these particular cases – games about social restraints, games about people in hard positions where they can’t act freely, etc – I actually really want to call your attention to the thing you can’t do, because in the world of the game, your character is aware of it as something they can’t do, and they feel the friction of that, so I want you to as well. In a particular game parlance, I’m creating an intentional sense of bleed between character and player.

The other part of what differentiates this from other stuff I’ve done is that, in most games, every choice precludes other choices. When I choose my character’s class or playbook or abilities, that generally means that I’m NOT choosing something else. Playing the Beacon means I’m not playing the Transformed. Playing a barbarian means I’m not playing a rogue. But the benefit of closing myself off to all those cool rogue features is getting all the cool barbarian features. It’s the choice of “I would rather do this than that” and we generally accept the trade-offs.

Where I’m choosing to play with fire is giving you no good choices, or sometimes no choice at all. So I’ll go over a little bit here about how I’m thinking about applying this to two different games (and maybe a third).

So, the first one where this thought came to me is Rather Die Than Doubt, a game that has mostly existed as bullet point notes for the past year, but which I keep inching closer and closer to doing something with. This is a 3-player game inspired by Arthurian romance, where the characters play as Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere. So this is already a premise constrained by a lot of courtly rules about what each of these three people can and cannot do and say, because of their gender and role and relationship to each other. This is just intrinsic to the setting. 

But where do we make the setting and premise and mechanics really sing together? Where do we create that really nice ludic harmony to make the players feel that constraint? Because one of the things I had already been considering for this game was character playsheets with a certain amount of hidden information, another layer I’m considering adding is some notes about things the character absolutely cannot say. If I spell out, for each given scene prompt “these are the things you ARE allowed to say” and maybe even go so far as “these are the things you are NOT allowed to say but can allude to circumspectly” and “these are the things you can’t say and can’t even hint at”, it immediately puts those forbidden notes at the forefront of your mind. 

If I don’t spell out the restraint, I think there’s some players who would kind of naturally pick up the vibe of it anyway and avoid those topics or statements, and that’s fine. I also think if I don’t spell it out, some players would never think of them to begin with and wouldn’t know that there was an electric rail there and would miss out on so much. So I think this possibility of calling attention to the forbidden thing and then letting you go from there has some juicy narrative potential.

The second game where I’m thinking about this is Pax Deorum, which is the tragic historical game about the Vestal Virgins of Ancient Rome, and their likely role as political scapegoats for unrest in the city. This is, again, another one where some constraints come baked into the premise and the setting – when all the players sign on to play a game about the Vestal Virgins, there are likely some immediate assumptions they can safely make about what they can and cannot do, you know?

But this is also a game with a lot of historical information to impart in as efficient a manner as I can. It’s one where people will come in with a few very strongly preconceived notions and then a whole lot of blanks to be filled in. I mean, I have also come into it with a lot of blanks to be filled in, but I can’t exactly assign someone a curriculum of required reading derived from my research before they play my game (as tempting as that may be sometimes).

It’s also one where I’m drawing more inspiration than usual from a kind of board game-y feeling, where there’s a map of the city with various clocks (thank you AW and Blades) representing issues in the city and among the people, which the player characters have to help manage until they can’t anymore (and inevitably they can’t, or else this isn’t a terribly interesting game). I won’t go into all the detail, but what I’d like to have is a setup where each character has a different set of actions she can take on her turn to manage the clocks, based on her experience as a Vestal, her family connections before she became one, natural affinities, etc. But I don’t want it to feel like a playbook choice, at least in that moment, so the list is randomly given to you at the start of the game.

So let’s imagine we have eight clocks spread throughout the city. Player A has a list of actions that lets her manage clocks 1, 2, and 3. Player B has a list of actions to manage clocks 2, 4, and 6. Player C has a list that lets her manage 3, 5, and 7. No one can manage clock 8, that’s subject to the whims of the fates. 2 and 3 are more easily spread between the pairs of players who can manage those. But everyone has at least one clock that they’re the only person who can do anything about it. Now, you know, imagine that instead of “clock 1” it’s labeled “grain shortage” or “rising plebeian sentiment” or “gallic invaders”. Being able to help manage the people’s fears about that problem tells me something about the character who can do it.

And here’s a further rub: every action gets crossed off after you take it. You can do everything on your list ONCE, and no more. Now you have to weigh when to use it, when it’s going to be most effective (and since the filling of the clocks is random, maybe you can’t do anything useful at all). And let’s further imagine that you don’t know what actions your fellow players have remaining. Maybe at the start of the game, no one knows that no one can manage clock 8. I’m still very shaky on how I want to implement all this, but I am terribly interested in it, and I am hoping to have a playtestable version (at least by myself, even if everyone else would think it was gibberish) ready soon.

The possible third game where I’m looking at it through this lens of really restrictive choices is The Diplomacy of Queens, which – much like the other two – is a historical game about a group of people operating under a strong system of social restraints. This one, I’m a little less clear on what I want to do with it, but one of the keys of the game is that the player characters, as noblewomen, do not have the kind of direct power their husbands and fathers have. They have influence, they have sway over what’s going on, but they do not have directly applicable power over events (the events of the game being the negotiations and signing of a peace treaty between their respective states). 

The thing I’ve been toying with in general so far is really mutable currencies – you can convert a really huge amount of influence into a tiny amount of power, but is that worth it? Or is it better used as influence, without consequences, but with the risk that you only partially get what you want out of the situation? If you do a favor for someone who DOES have power, how certain are you that they’re going to do what you want in exchange? There’s also a layer here involving each of the characters’ husbands, who aren’t player characters, but are essentially forces in the narrative that you can either work with or work around.

It’s tricky, but I’ve really been having fun figuring out what I want to do with this, rotating it all in my mind. Every so often a particular theme in a design space just really grabs my attention, and right now it’s this really heavy mechanical enforcement of limitations.

Playing Someone Who Sucks

I mentioned this briefly in the last newsletter, how I had gone into a convention game – albeit one mostly with friends or at least acquaintances who I had played with before – with a real impish urge to play someone who sucked. Luckily, it was a murder mystery game where we decided upon the murderer at the start of the session, and I quickly volunteered to play the murderer.

There’s an important clarification to be made though, when it comes to “playing someone who sucks”. The trick is making a character who is satisfyingly awful in-character, but who doesn’t make things un-fun for the other players. Part of a lot of good narratives is seeing someone who sucks get their comeuppance. In a lot of traditional games, that role is played by the GM, playing a villain, and all the other players take on the roles of heroes. But in GMless games – or even non-GMless ones – it can be really easy to accidentally create a narrative void where something like that would fit, but no one wants to do it.

This is when it’s great to play someone who sucks. It isn’t necessarily a villain, either! The anti-hero who reluctantly works with the group gets a lot of flack for being an edgy loner, but when done well, and with the intent of actually bridging a narrative arc with them, that edgy loner being gradually folded into the rest of the group as a loved and valued teammate can be the most satisfying story you get out of your whole game. The process of seeing someone who sucks become someone who doesn’t suck is a really engaging story format.

In my case with this game, I knew it was going to be fun to roleplay as someone greedy or vindictive or thoughtless, the type of character who would murder this rich old man for his money, and that with a little care, we could create a session where it’d also be really fun for everyone else to watch this character get what was coming to her. And being able to say, straightforwardly, at the very start of play, “I want to play someone who sucks, where we’re all really rooting for her to get caught”, makes it easy to get everyone onboard for that.

To be clear, I really like playing good characters. I play paladins a lot, or mischievous urchins with hearts of gold, or honest heroes trying to do their best in the world. I find that really satisfying, and I understand why – for the most part – a lot of games are built with the idea that everyone wants to do this too. There’s that post that always goes around like blah blah the power fantasy of gaming is being able to be powerful enough to do real good, etc etc., you know the one probably. 

But also, I’ve played a lot of roleplaying games in my time. I’ve been doing this with varying regularity since I was 12 years old, and I’m 31 now. Even when there’s a few key archetypes I tend to go back to, I think if I didn’t introduce my bits of novelty here and there I’d have gotten bored of this a long, long time ago. So once in a while, playing someone who sucks feels really refreshing.

Closing Notes

So, I mentioned last month that I had started reading Moby Dick, and sure enough, I finished it this month, and it was devastating and beautiful and really harrowing in the way that I think a lot of good literature is. Don’t think that I’m looking down on escapist fun, I love me some escapist fun, but there’s a real difference in the pleasure I get from that and the pleasure I get from such good fiction that I feel like I’ve witnessed some horrible new truth about the human soul.

I normally try to space out books that I think are going to be really upsetting in that way, but I did accidentally pick up another one right after I finished Moby Dick. The next book I read was Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, which was fantastic (although I think I still prefer The Name of the Rose) but also not exactly a cheerful read, and in parts is even more upsetting than MD.

So with those under my belt, I needed to pull out the big guns of comfort-reading and revisit some of my teen favorites that have stayed with me into adulthood, Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books. It’s all about balance!

So I think that’s all I’ve got for this month! Talk to you again soon!