Life after The Forge

If you are a story gamer and have been sleeping under a rock or something for a number of years, this may come as a surprise: the old HQ for indie RPGs The Forge closed down yesterday, 1 June 2012. Although it was always the plan to close it down after it had served its purpose, it still feels weird to me.

When I moved to the UK ten years ago, I was pretty disillusioned by roleplaying. I was so fed up with prepared and pre-written stories and scenarios that were the norm back then, and I simply couldn’t understand why gaming was so unsatisfactory and no-fun for me. I gave away or threw out most of my roleplaying games books, and thought that I had maybe just grown out of it. Bear in mind that I discovered roleplaying games in 1986, when I was 23 years old, so it was never a teenage thing for me.

Things changed, and I remember it like this: after a while I began trawling the internet for alternative games. I eventually came across a game called Dust Devils, which I bought as a PDF and read, I think with my jaw dangling in amazement. This was different, alright, to everything I had encountered so far, but I also couldn’t understand it. At that time I was deeply convinced that a roleplaying game is run by a game master, who has pre-planned “a story” in which the players get to act to a greater or lesser extent.

Via Dust Devils I arrived at The Forge some time in 2004, and started reading the articles there. Ron Edward’s System Does Matter simply blew my mind, and I quickly ordered his game Sorcerer, which is still my favorite game today. Now I understood why my gaming was unhappy gaming – I was looking for something else (without a clue what that was or how to communicate it) than the people I was playing with, and this clash made our gaming sessions wildly dysfunctional and painful.

I thank The Forge and all the marvellous people and discussions there for saving my gaming life.

Burden and Hunch

The two other parts of the belief system in Probable Cause are Burden and Hunch.

Burden

Nick Nolte as the cop in 48 Hours.

Burden is something in your character’s life that is a burden or a stress factor, or even a personal goal. For extra tension, make up a Burden that’s perpendicular to the ongoing case. This could be a beginning separation with your spouse, who gets what and what about the kids etc. It could be a deep and overwhelming debt problem, a career thing, illness or dependency on drugs, or something form the character’s past coming back to haunt her. Playing towards your Burden earns you a Destiny point reward, and should your character reach a point where her Burden is “solved” it earns another Destiny point reward.
Burden should include a statement, an action and a target.

“I might be broke, but I’m not selling the house to get money for my alimony payments to my ex-wife. There’s gotta be another way.”
“I can’t go back home after what Mary did – I end up in bars every night and pick up women. Any woman will do, I just don’t want to see Mary again.”

Make it possible for you to show in play how your character is reacting to or trying to deal with her Burden – it earns Destiny points.

Also, make sure you choose a Burden you want to be challenged, because the GM will do that, all the time, during the game.
When a Burden has been overcome, take some time to stop and think. You can either retire the character from play and create a new one, or write up a new Burden. Your choice.

Hunch

Hunch is your character’s habit or usual reaction. From The Wire, it’s Bunk’s pinstripe suit, his cigar or his chasing tail. Or McNulty’s quarter of Jamieson in his pocket. From The Killing, it’s Sarah Lund’s sweater, her sensing of a crime scene, or her inability to connect with other people. From Twin Peaks, it’s agent Cooper recording every detail of his working day for Diane, his obsession with coffee and doughnuts and pie. It’s Andy breaking into tears when he sees a dead body. All these small, quirky details about a character adds dept and hopefully interest. Feel free to come of with weird stuff you don’t even know the explanation to yet. Perhaps your character’s gun has a pink grip. Or she has a tattoo on her belly that says “HANK”. Or she always wears leather pants on Fridays. Or can never get the fax machine to send.

Playing out you character’s hunch earns you a point of destiny. You are even rewarded when you decide to go against your character’s hunch if it makes a situation more difficult. This way you can enable your character to be more efficient in the fiction, when you need it or think it’s dramatically appropriate, all depending on how you choose to play the character at any given moment.

Credo: To serve and protect

In Probable Cause, what I have called Credo, Burden and Hunch are in a way the engine room of a player character. This is where it all happens, and where actions on behalf of you character in the game interacts with the game system’s Destiny points. In short, as a player you will want to earn Destiny because Destiny gives you more impact on the game’s fiction, and that’s handy in dramatic or dangerous situations. You earn Destiny by acting on and playing to your character’s Credo, Burden or Hunch. You even earn Destiny when you play against your Burden or Hunch to make things even harden for your character. In game mechanic terms Destiny allows you to reroll dice, add dice to a roll or add your character’s Human Nature as extra dice to a roll.

Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle in the unmissable The French Connection.

Credo

Credo is what your character believes about law and order and justice, and is going to do about it. These are ethical, moral, ideological statements or stances, filters your character perceives the world through. The Credo should relate to the character’s job as a cop or to justice and law and order in general. It’s what the character believes is the point of being a cop or how justice should work. Describe your character’s Credo as a sentence as seen from the character’s own point of view. It is also a good idea to write a character’s belief based on what game setup you have agreed upon. If your game is going to be about corruption in the force or among politicians, write it into your Credo if you care about it. If it’s about slave trade or people trafficking, likewise. Do not think of a character’s Credo as something isolated, it’s a comment on what is going on in your game. And it can change depending on what’s going on in your game.

In the Wire, Omar only targets drug dealers, never civilians. That could be written into his Credo. A good Credo should make it possible for other participants to know when a character is following his Credo, or indeed not doing it. Credo should drive what the character wants to do in your game, it’s a statement of belief that guides your actions, as the dictionary says. Include a goal in your Credo if you like.

Examples: The law should be upheld without breaking it. The law is there to protect the criminal – better to get at him before the law does. You have the right to remain silent until I tell you to talk. You are guilty until proven innocent. Everyone is equal before the law and everyone deserves a fair process. I am the law.

Probable Cause: Destiny

Holy red herring, is it February already? Gaming has been slow for me since I finished my game Crossroads, intended for Fastaval over Easter. If you are going to Fastaval, please consider running or at least playing Crossroads, you won’t be disappointed. If you run the game at the convention, I’ll give you a copy as a thank you. Everyone else will have to buy one, but thankfully it’s very cheap.

Destiny: the little extra with the big punch

Similiarly, I haven’t been working much on my Probable Cause police game, besides watching a bunch of William Friedkin movies, but that’s given me some energy to pick it up again.

William Petersen as the cop in Friedkin's underrated 80s movie To Live and Die in L.A.

The inspiration for how the game works is still Mouse Guard RPG, but it’s becoming more and more its own entity. I have morphed Mouse Guard’s Fate and Persona into what I’m calling Destiny. Below I’m referring to “Credo, Hunch and Burden”, which I will explain more about in the next post. Basically they are my variations of Belief and Instinct.

Destiny points allow you to re-roll 6s as new dice and add any successes to the total. They can also be used to add a die to a roll per point spent. You can use Destiny to trigger Human Nature and add your Human Nature rank as dice to any roll except Circles or Resources, albeit risking Human Nature to be lowered momentarily.
You get Destiny points when playing your character’s Credo, Hunch and Burden. There are several ways to get these important rewards, which are all handed out after a completed game session of a GM’s and players’ turn.
Destiny point can be tracked by simply noting them down on the characters sheet, or you can use tokens like poker chips or similar. Stacking them in front of you gives the group a good view of who has many Destiny points to spend at any given moment.

Using Destiny after a die roll

Reroll any sixes from a roll by spending a point of Destiny, and add any extra successes to your roll.

Using Destiny before a die roll

Add +1D per spent Destiny point before a roll (up to +3D).
Add Human Nature rank as extra dice by spending a point of Destiny.

There are many different ways of earning Destiny points, and you can use as many as you like. Destiny points help make your player character extra special and with larger than life impact on the fiction, if necessary. Destiny Points are handed out after mutual agreement among the players at the end of a play session, after both the Chair’s and players’ turns.

Get Destiny points:

1. Act on your Credo
2. Play towards your Burden
3. Play your Hunch
4. Eradicate your Burden (create new one before next GM turn)
5. Play against your Hunch to make things difficult
6. Roleplay your character

Play-by-post: the slow option

It’s Sunday morning and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue is on the stereo. In the last couple of weeks I have been re-visiting “forum play”, or play-by-post, roleplaying. I have played in many games in the past, but they often run dry because especially the tempo in play-by-post is excruciatingly slow. Judd Karlman posted some thoughts on forum play, and it was indeed Judd’s ideas to play a 1-on-1 forum game of Burning Empires that rekindled my interest.

Thing is, I don’t know any other gamers near me that are interested in investing the energy and time it takes to play Burning Empires, and I even think it’s worse today than when the game was published in 2006. These days it’s all no-prep instant pickup games that engage people. I think that’s sad, and I hope the gaming equivalent of slow food will become popular again.

The only way I will get to play Burning Empires will be play-by-post. I’ve run a BE game on a forum before with three other players. We made it through world burning and halfway through the first maneuvre and then one of the players bailed. It was slow. Very slow. On the other hand I played a couple of big BE firefights with none other than Iron Empires/Burning Empires artist Chris Moeller on a forum, and that worked very well indeed.

That’s why Londoner John Anderson and I have started a 1-on-1 Burning Empires game on Obsidian Portal, a website dedicated to forum play. Now, Burning Empires is not really designed for 1-on-1 play, so we’ll possibly have to tweak it a little to make each side more GM-like.

Forum play is the slow option, but sometimes it’s the only option.