February Newsletter

Hello my lovely owl friends! I think we’re going to have a short newsletter this month, just for the simple fact that I do not have very much actual news for you! I had planned on attending a convention this past weekend that should have given me some good material to write about – playtests of a couple of my own games, playing a few games I hadn’t played before, etc – but events conspired against me and I couldn’t go after all. Of course, I am still me and I still have some thoughts to put out there, so let’s get into it!

(But quickly, in case you missed it, the last standard Dollhouse Drama playset pack came out this month! All twelve of them are out in the world now, a whole year’s worth! The Dollhouse Anniversary pack has barbie weddings, barbie world tour, and barbie… dungeon crawling? That’s right.)

Project Updates

The Canceled Playtests

I had so hoped to fill this section with reports of the playtests I was going to run this weekend, and thoughts on the changes I was going to make, but it seems those will just have to wait a little longer! It’ll be shorter, but I’ll talk instead about some of the changes I was making in preparation for those playtests and what I was hoping to get out of them.

One of the tests was going to be for Blood of the Covenant (which is available as a playtest kit, in case you missed that!), specifically the Dragon quest. I actually playtested a previous iteration of this game at this same convention two years ago, before I revamped it to be less directly a PbtA game/add more FitD elements. I wasn’t making any specific system changes for this one; I wanted to focus on the quest itself and see if the Dragon quest pulled people in interesting directions or forced moral quandaries on them in the way that I wanted. The work I did here was more in terms of rephrasing or rewording things, trying to strengthen some of the player-facing choices, nothing structural.

The other was for Champions of the Crystal Crown, and the changes here were in two main categories. The first was implementing changes to address feedback that I got from Metatopia – adding a system of harm/injury and recovery, giving the character playbooks personal goals, adding GM structure for threats and gifts/narrative intrusions, etc. The second was giving myself more room to run a full-length session of the game, rather than a truncated hour or so, by writing up the rest of the starter adventure and making notes on the setting and NPCs and things like that.

Back in December I had an interesting brainstorming session with the good people of the Unwritten Earths discord to help figure out what kinds of GM structures would be helpful for CCC, and so some of the updates I made came out of that as well. NDP (of World Wide Wrestling fame) had asked me a question that stuck with me, about the game’s big map of possible scenes – “Where does the specificity live, with the map or with the adventures?” One thing I added was actually a bit of interplay there, where the adventure provides you with a couple of key scenes on the map you can guide players to with threats (“lead” tokens they should address before they can achieve their goal) or gifts (“diamond” tokens that they can aim for to get bonuses or boons for their quest). We threw around the word “forecasting” a lot and I think that helped me verbalize what I was trying to accomplish with the GM structures.  

All of the work for both of those will still be valuable for future playtests, when I’m able to get to them, so it certainly wasn’t wasted time… but if I hadn’t had the deadline of the convention, I don’t know that I would have prioritized these specifically for this month. 

Brainstorming

When I haven’t been working on those two games specifically (or too sick or busy or upset to work on my games at all, as often happened this month), I’ve been doing some general brainstorming on some of my un-started projects to see what I might actually want to start this year. My big braindump document of “not started yet” ideas has been open basically the whole month. There’s very little I can say here that will actually sound productive, but I’ve been turning different ideas over in my mind, trying to think on them from different angles and perspectives, figuring out what the most interesting lens will be for me to look at something through, mixing my metaphors. 

Other Thoughts

Adventures and Playsets

This is actually a topic I’ve had in my notes to cover for a few months, but kept putting off because there was always something more pressing or that I felt more strongly about to write on instead. So now is a great time to get into it! And I’ll say right upfront that I don’t know that I have any really solid answers for you, and might just be raising questions. My sincerest hope is that at the time this comes out, this particular topic will NOT be part of the discourse of the day, but it comes around so frequently that I can’t say for sure that it won’t be. Just know that this is not a response to anything anyone said in January and has been outlined for at least six months.

There’s always a lot of talk about systems and adventures going on in this space. What is a system driven game and what is an adventure driven game, if you follow any RPG blogs or get the pulse on social media, you know what I’m talking about (if you want to resurrect “system matters/doesn’t matter” in my replies, go away, go away, get gone, I will hit you with a broom). I got my start in writing RPG adventures, but also in writing playsets for other games that use such a thing, and I wanted to talk a little about what the difference is and where the line blurs…

…Because my personal take (maybe a hot one!) is that they’re the same damn thing. A good RPG adventure and, for example, a Fiasco playset or a Dialect playset or a Dollhouse Drama playset… are the same in the ways that matter.

If you’re not familiar with the story game side of things, I’ll use those as my examples for what is a “playset” in the parlance of these games. These are games that use their systems to build a specific narrative structure while using playsets to shape the specifics of that experience. Every Fiasco game is about, as the box says, powerful ambition and poor impulse control, or “small-time capers gone disastrously wrong”. The playset you choose will tell you if those capers are directed at suburban drug dealers or gold rush miners or Antarctic scientists. Dialect is always a game about “language and how it dies”, but the playset you choose tells you if your language is a thieves guild’s secret cant, or the teachings of a utopian cult, or the jargon-heavy lingo of a remote space outpost.

Playsets for this type of game tend to give you ingredients for your story: elements of conflict, relationships, and setting that you use in conjunction with the system itself to tune the story in. Fiasco playsets are divided into a few specific categories of lists: Relationships, Needs, Objects, and Locations. Dialect playsets have a series of pointed questions to generate the Aspects of your community, creating the background of play, and then a sequence of two potential paths of conflict to use during play itself.

In any case, you can’t actually play the game WITHOUT a playset. The system gives you breadth, but the playset gives you depth and specificity. I think the same applies to a lot of “adventure-driven” games, in the OSR or otherwise trad gaming space.

My experience with running a LOT of pre-written adventures and writing many myself (that I hope people think are good!) is that a good adventure also provides you with ingredients for your story, the specifics, while the system provides the structures. There’s a lot of bad adventures that are basically railroads. I won’t get into all that, because we all know that nobody really likes a railroad, or at least they don’t like KNOWING that they’re being railroaded. People like choice or the illusion of it, in their games (asterisk here for the small subset of games that invert this expectation, I am broadly generalizing but I know this doesn’t apply to everything).

But a GOOD adventure, one that doesn’t have one set outcome, that doesn’t strip players of their agency or assume they’ll do things they might not, that isn’t a complete script… is elements of conflict, relationships, and setting. It gives you locations and objects that provide flavor and a shared understanding of the world, NPCs that come into play with their own desires or secrets or plans, and tensions or conflicts that can be played on, even if that conflict is as simple as “someone has treasure that someone else wants”.

If I pull up my PDF of one of the best-loved classic adventures of all time, T1: The Village of Hommlet, it doesn’t have a specific story laid out in neat narrative beats. It doesn’t give you a timeline of what events should happen when, regardless of what the players actually DO. There’s rumors and reports about the village, some history that gives background. It gives you a map of locations around the village and people who you might find there, some of whom might naturally be in conflict with each other and with the player characters (sidebar: I always thought the potential rift between the followers of druidism and the followers of St. Cuthbert was an interesting divide here, if you could play long enough to explore it). 

Now, a lot of adventures are more DETAILED than many playsets, but I think a lot of that comes from the expected duration of play – an adventure that can support a multi-session campaign (especially when you think of Hommlet and the Temple of Elemental Evil, where the players are essentially living there while they delve, meeting these NPCs over and over again for months) necessarily has more STUFF in it than a playset that only has to support a single session of play.

My first instinct was to say that the difference between the two IS that difference of scope, but I don’t know that that’s fair – there’s plenty of adventures for trad games that are only meant to cover a single session of play, limited in their locations and NPCs (and I know that as well as anyone, having mostly written that style of adventure when I was doing so!). 

My second thought was that the difference is that the story games I named CAN’T be played without a playset, while you CAN play a trad game without a pre-written adventure… but then I realized it’s that “pre-written” that’s the key. A trad game where the GM is improvising still has an adventure, it’s just an improvised one.

My THIRD thought is that we just call it an “adventure” when it’s for a GM and a “playset” when it’s for a GMless game. But I myself broke that rule, by using “playsets” for Dollhouse Drama which has a GM called the Hostess, and my example in a couple paragraphs also uses playsets for a GMed game. There’s something here where we MIGHT say that an “adventure” has surprises or secrets for the GM that only later get revealed to the players, while a “playset” MIGHT not, but I don’t think that’s a hard and fast rule, and I don’t know that that’s enough to consider them entirely different categories (and I think an over-reliance on surprises and secrets is one sign of a weak adventure).

Because of course, there’s also BAD adventures and – as I was shocked to learn some years ago – BAD playsets that don’t provide interesting ingredients for play. Either they prescribe specific things happening in a railroad-y way, or they don’t introduce conflict that anyone needs to get involved in, or they create a world that’s too flat and dull to care about. (Seriously, many many years ago I had the unfortunate experience of playing a fan-written Fiasco playset that will go unnamed but that I thought was just wretched, no fun at all, and it was eye-opening to discover that that was even possible. I had by that time had many experiences with bad adventures!)

One place where the line started blurring for me was in a handful of PbtA games that I played around the same time. I think it’s a common maxim that PbtA games “don’t have adventures” and I just… don’t know how true that is. My favorite example, Pasion de las Pasiones, a game that is a total delight, has a whole section on using playsets and why one might want to do it that I found pretty compelling! It has a few playsets at the back of the book that provide the background of your telenovela – what central conflict it’s about, some key NPCs and locations, and some likely personal conflicts for your characters specific to it. You could use them for a single session or as the basis for an ongoing campaign of the game. They get everyone on the same page quickly and allow you to jump into actually USING the system.

Is that “an adventure”? Are both of these modules of play basically the same category of thing, shrunk or expanded to the needs of the players? I think so! I’m not going to argue too hard with anyone who says otherwise, in part because I just don’t like arguing much at all, but I think there’s a very real case for them serving the same function in play and requiring the same skills and considerations in writing (and that they can make even the very best systems in the world no fun when they’re bad, so those skills and considerations are IMPORTANT).

Closing Notes

I recently had the pleasure of joining a focused reading group (through The Catherine Project) where about 16 of us independent adult learners are reading Don Quixote together, a few chapters at a time, and meeting to discuss them every week. We’re going to be meeting from late January through April, so we’ve only just started. It’s like a somewhat more dedicated book club, given that we’re doing a really close read (spending over three months on a single book, even a quite large one) and actually seriously discussing the book in-depth rather than using the book as cover for a wine and cheese night (no hate on book clubs that ARE like that, I love that, but it’s not what I wanted right now).

It’s been so enjoyable so far, to be able to have group support for reading really big heavy classics (well, heavy in the physical sense, Quixote is a comedy, but even in paperback, 900 pages add up!) and taking it seriously and getting other people’s perspectives and thinking through it all together; so far it’s exactly what I hoped it would be when I signed up. I feel like a thousand years old when I talk about not having appreciated the educational opportunities I had when I was a bit younger (not even that much younger! I’m only 32!), but it’s true, so I’m glad to have programs like this.

I think a lot about my grandma, who was a piano teacher, who sometimes talked about how much EASIER it was to teach adults than kids – not just for the natural whims of children, but because adults who chose to pay their own hard-earned money and give up their own limited free time to do this were usually doing so because they DIDN’T have the opportunity to when they were younger. They knew they wanted it enough to make those sacrifices. When I briefly took piano lessons myself as an adult, I felt the same, plus an intuition that because I was older and knew myself more, I knew my own learning style better. I just… had learned more and had more experience with learning things and knew HOW to learn, if that makes sense.

All this to say, big ups to adult education, continuing learning, and pursuing self-improvement (in the real way and not the weird gross self-help nonsense way)!

So that’s all I have this month, and we’ll catch you again next month! Thanks for reading!