March Newsletter

Hello, my lovely owl friends! It’s finally March, which means that I am finally able to emerge from my winter hibernation and start acting like a person again, rather than a very sad, strange bear. I live too far north for March to really resemble “spring” in the traditional sense of the word (certainly no flowers here yet) but the days are longer and the air is warmer and that counts for a lot. The other day I found myself looking forward to hearing robins outside my window at absurd hours once again (so remind me of this, if I complain about being woken up by robins later in the summer).

I have one shiny new thing to show you before we get into other topics – the first Dollhouse Drama expansion module! Action Faction is here to bring action figure features, vehicles, and combat to your Dollhouse Drama games, and it has three new playsets to show off those new rules! Check it out on itchio or DTRPG!

Project Updates

Greatness

So, Greatness is one of the projects I had identified at the start of the year as being a possible candidate for me to work on and get a playtestable draft ready, and I think I’m about at that point with it. I’ve talked about this one before, but for new readers, this is one about two great rival artists – with wildly different approaches to their art – whose obsession with creating their masterwork and beating each other ruins their lives and the lives of those around them.

I had a couple pages of notes on this already, but nothing actually concrete, just ideas and musings. I was able to talk it over with some folks enough to convince me that I have enough to start really putting this together. Even just showing those notes to other people was kind of a new step for me (I am usually quite protective of a new idea UNTIL I have something more concrete to show).

As nice as it would be to have something playtestable soon, now that I’ve… decided to do that, I know myself, and I’m still keeping the goal of having it testable by November (for Metatopia). If I get something ready sooner, that’s great, but if not, I won’t beat myself up over it.

Moving Out of the Girl Group House

The other thing I was able to make solid new progress on was the zine game that I want to release later this year, Moving Out of the Girl Group House. For those following along, this is about the disbanding of a pop girl group who all lived in a big house together, and the division of objects and the shared memories linked to them, using the objects themselves to tell the story of the group’s brief time together. 

I did some prototype testing, just solo at my dining room table, to get a better grasp on my concept of how things would move around in relation to the scene prompts and the anachronistic story of it, and that was really helpful, as it usually is. I think I’m at a point where I understand the play loop enough to actually… start writing the scene prompts, and putting together the random tables of items that you can tie to those scenes.

Like I said, this one is really just a zine, so not a huge project that’ll take tons of time; I am aiming to have that out in the second half of the year most likely.

Before the Season Ends

And in the background of all my other work, I’m still putting together additional events and NPCs to be able to run a playtest campaign of Before the Season Ends (Regency debutante friendship game, exploring London, trying new things, making new friends, and maybe finding love along the way). The initial playtest kit came with one event and I think 10-12 NPCs that you could meet and track reputations with and learn rumors about. 

Each new event that I’ve added (I am aiming for 8 before I run this campaign) also has new NPCs, and once I hit about 50 NPCs, I will cut it off and stop adding new ones, so that you can fill out the events with recurring characters who your players want to see again. 50 named NPCs is like… a lot. And they all have their own relationships to each other and their own personal dramas that the player characters can meddle with and problems to solve.

So I ended up making more spreadsheets about it. I already had one to keep track of which names I have and haven’t used, and I had started one to keep track of which tags I was using for those NPCs (tags are used to quickly indicate an NPC’s marital status, class, interests, etc.) which I fleshed out a bit more. Then I added another to keep track of “family groups” within that, because you can’t always rely on last names (a married woman is not keeping her last name in this setting! Aunts and nieces might not share a last name! Grandparents and grandchildren might not share a last name!).

I feel like I always resist spreadsheets (because it seems like “work” and not “fun”), but then they end up being really useful so I cave in and use them anyway. In this case, it’s necessary to make sure I have a solid balance of different types of people for you to meet (the city is not entirely populated with 20-something men and 50-something women, as it happens), that those people have a variety of interests which drive a variety of events (I’ve spoken before about finding it uninteresting to just do a different ball every week), and that those people relate to each other in interesting ways (the social scene the player characters are walking into existed before them and will continue after them).

On the one hand, this feels like a lot of infrastructure to bake into the game itself – why can’t I just let GMs make up their own NPCs and events and do none of it myself? Well, the short answer is that as a GM, I like having that infrastructure already there. If I want to ignore it, I can! If you want to play Before the Season Ends but you don’t like the NPCs I come up with, you can make your own! But it’s easier and faster for me to get a game to the table if I don’t HAVE to do that work myself. And since I DO have to playtest a campaign, I would have to do it for myself anyway – so I might as well polish it up and include it in the game and make it useful to others, if I can.

I’m also trying out balancing something in the events that I hadn’t really thought about when I was just running it as a one-shot, but have to if I am going to run multiple events in a row as a “season” – events that have a really prescriptive invite list and ones that basically anyone can show up to. Let’s say one week you go to the Midsummer Fair – basically anyone can show up to that. It’s a public event, people might have a wide variety of reasons for wanting to go, as the GM it’s not hard for me to include any NPC that the players might want to engage with. But then next week, you get invited to the Colonel’s dinner party that he is hosting with the express intent of letting his young militia officers meet marriageable young women. Very different situation in terms of who might or might not be there, in a way that I think will change how players approach the event.

Other Thoughts

A Lord of the Rings Thought Experiment

I think I mentioned in the last newsletter, or maybe the one before, that I’ve been reading The Lord of the Rings as my latest bedtime reading (I always read for 20-30 minutes or so before bed, one of the best parts of my day). I always loved the movies, of course, but I had bounced off of the books themselves when I was younger and never really tried again. I’m glad I did, because reading a chapter a night is maybe the best way to read LOTR and I’ve been just loving it. I know this is shocking, but it turns out one of the greatest fantasy novels of all time really is that good.

But I’ve had a running joke, back to when I read The Hobbit last year, about the massive failures of every game that one might say is “like Lord of the Rings” to actually be anything like Lord of the Rings. When I say things like “incredible that no one has done this yet, not even one game,” I think I’m super funny, I swear. But also… I’m not wrong. There’s loads of LOTR-inspired RPGs (including the single largest RPG entity in the medium), including a number of official licensed One Ring/Middle Earth games, and I think not one of them actually captures the feeling and tone and emotional energy of reading The Lord of the Rings.

And then I started to think something funny. “What if I made a LOTR game?” What if? A harmless what if! A joke, perhaps, but also… what if it wasn’t a joke? What if I took it seriously? Whether or not I ever actually do it, I really wanted to sit down and think about how I would approach making a Lord of the Rings RPG. If I had all these complaints about the failures of other games, what would I do differently from them? What was I finding in the books that I was missing in the games?

I think this kind of thought experiment exercise is helpful to me, as a designer, because it’s always good to practice being intentional in your design choices. I think I’m pretty good at that generally, but I also don’t think that often about direct adaptation of something from another medium (although some of the ideas I had last year about adapting classic public domain works… let’s not go there for now). And also it’s just fun to play around with design possibilities, whether or not something comes of them.

For one thing, I had to sort out if I wanted to make a Lord of the Rings game (hewing closely to an existing story) or a Middle Earth game (opening up a wider possibility space using the setting but not the specifics). I had to sort out if my own types of design preferences (GMless, diceless, etc) would make sense for what I was trying to do. I had to really look closely at what I was finding in that source material that I felt others were overlooking. I had to re-familiarize myself with what was out there already. These are mostly steps I might take for any new game project, regardless. Hell, I was doing some of that this month with Greatness – figuring out what I considered to be a non-negotiable part of the concept vs what was changeable or mutable, looking at other games covering similar mechanical or thematic terrain, etc.

For all I kept telling myself it was just a thought exercise, I wasn’t really convincing myself. If I can be candid, there’s a part of me that really wants to do this. There’s no shortage of LOTR-inspired games out there, but none of them are mine. It’s like how, when I was working on a vampire game, I had to keep reminding myself that, even though there’s a LOT of vampire games out there, that didn’t make my idea worthless (I put that idea into the trunk of shelved projects for entirely unrelated reasons!). 

So if you see me quietly adding something to my project list that looks suspiciously like an epic fantasy game, despite me saying for several years now that my interest in epic fantasy was waning or entirely gone, don’t call me out on it! It’s fine! Everything is fine!

(As a postscript on this, I think the closest I’d get to what I want, in terms of games that exist and that I already know about, would be Fall of Magic, though that skews more Le Guin than Tolkien, in my experience)

Player Counts

This is just a little silly one, a quick topic that struck me the other day, but here goes: I don’t know how I didn’t realize this before, but I think I have a favorite player count for RPGs. I’ve only been making RPGs for like, 8 years, so, you know, it’s not like I’m too quick on the uptake here.

I think my favorite player count is five – whether that’s five players in a GMless game, or a GM-type world player with four individual character players. I think five is great. It’s an odd number, so you get an intrinsic imbalance. It’s enough people to keep things moving and to let people in and out of the spotlight readily, but not so many that things get unmanageable or overwhelming.

Sincerely, I wish I could tell you I had come to this conclusion through some great process of introspection and really thinking hard about my many years of play experience, but that’s not what happened at all. What happened was a series of silly little scribbles in my notebook. One thing I do a lot when I’m trying to figure out the flow of play for a game, or the way player interactions work, or how the spotlight gets parceled out – is I’ll draw a little scribble diagram in my notebook. A “table” (see: a circle) with “players” (see: dots) around it. Then I can add whatever labels or arrows or tallies that I need as I run through the game in my mind.

So I was flipping through some of my old notebooks looking for something else, and also my current notebook while I was working on Greatness (and also some brainstorming for The Squire’s Sword, we’ll get to that next month maybe). And I noticed that nearly every time I made one of those diagrams for a game, I had drawn five players at the table, without even thinking about it. Sometimes there were 3, or 4, or 6, especially later in the design process where I was trying to see if I’d need to make any adjustments for different player counts. But I always started with five, and then adjusted up or down from there.

I don’t really have any grand conclusion to draw here; it’s mostly just funny to realize this assumption I’d been designing towards without really thinking consciously about it (especially given my earlier pride in making intentional design choices!). Of course a typical gaming table has five people, like of course the sky is blue (except when it doesn’t or isn’t). And I’m probably not going to stop doing it, because five players is a great number!

Closing Notes

So one of the highlights of February for me was the Winter Olympics. I love the Olympics, always have. I get really sappy about it, just this big international display of peace and unity and sportsmanship and goodwill. I cry during the Opening Ceremonies (when I tell you I WEPT at the Paris Olympics when they rang the bell at Notre Dame, I’m tearing up again just writing this), I get terribly invested in the athletes’ narratives, and of course I obsess over a sport I knew nothing about two weeks before.

This year I found myself thinking a lot about the nature of enmity vs rivalry (maybe everything this month just goes back to Greatness for me, it’s the game on the brain). The athletes at the Olympics are rivals, but they aren’t generally enemies. Our representative countries may be enemies, but as people, we rarely, if ever, are. And I was thinking about this in the context of an interesting book I read last month, Is Peace Possible by Kathleen Lonsdale, a dedicated Quaker pacifist.

The question asked by the title is one I found immediately compelling, as I have generally considered “anti-war” to be the cornerstone of all my other political and moral beliefs (and in fact, it’s one of the things I pinpointed as a key to the aforementioned LOTR game, everything circles back around this month). But to be seriously anti-war generates a lot of questions that are sometimes hard to answer, sometimes reducing me to “I don’t have an answer for that, but I know we can do better” (as a sidebar, getting better at saying “I don’t have an answer for that” when I really don’t has been a healthy process for me).

Is peace possible? I still don’t have an answer for that besides “I hope so”.