[Quick game review: it took a half-hour, reflected the source material, matched our over-sugerated sensitivities. Had realistic combat, mature thematic storytelling. Insert other lies here.]

I present to you:

NANOSWORDS

Characters: – Blade-knockoff with blood-colored hair (played by Enri) – White-coated dude with ultraviolet hair (played by Dean) – Woman in an evening dress with polka-dotted hair (played by Aara)

I GM’d which was a lot of work. I dutifully asked the players not to tell me the characters’ names so as not to ruin my Suspension Of Disbelief. We found some unused scenery from the wargamers’ table, so we just used fragments of that to set our scenes.

OPENING: The three of them are seeking an Artifact at an Ancient Ruined Temple. They pick up a transponder, which turns on ominously. Then: NINJAS! Enri kills 3 of them by hurling the obviously-about-to-explode-yep-it-explodes transponder at them, while the rest of them are killed by the use of swords and swords. Then Aara finds motorcycles for the team. We rolled an eleven, so that meant there were eleven motorcycles that the three of them would sorta ride in tandem, somehow, yeah.

SCENE: So they’re riding down this apocalyptic highway around this pool of bright green acid when they are assailed by MORE NINJAS! Who are clearly riding bikes and who are completely surrounding htem from behind. The crew begins to fight the mooks.

SCENE: Ninjas are dead. Dean’s bike is sinking into the acid and is stranded; Enri is trying to help him out. When suddenly a boss appears: a man wrapped in black silk. He makes a bold offer: he will allow Enri to save his friend, but only if they duel. Enri accepts, but with Aara dueling in his stead. (Sure.) She quickly rolls doubles after only four or five rolls, by changing her costume: she rips off her evening dress, utterly shocking the bad guy, but this merely reveals Aara’s three-piece suit underneath. And her hair is acid-green. And the bad guy falls in and Dean rides his bike over him to escape.

SCENE: The Man In The Wheelchair, at The Farm, is scheming, because everything is going according to plan.

SCENE: Back at the highway/acid-pool, the crew is trying to dilute the acid pool. Except Aara decides “fuck it” so she lights the pool on fire. The whole pool. But then the Man In The Tricked Out Cyberchair appears on the highway, some distance away, and tells Dean that their trapped now, because he has his cousin (!!) dangling above the acid pool, which is now a flaming acid pool, and he’s going to make him jump by talking at him, and now actually the scene cuts to Man In Chair being on top of that high dangling height too, whispering salty language into the innocent kid’s ear. (Continuity errors? I prefer to call it artistic license.)

But yeah the kid gets thrown in and Dean is like “NOOOO” except – here’s a twist – The Man In The Cyberchair reveals that in fact that this kid wasn’t Dean’s cousin—in fact, it was DEAN who was the cousin after all! Dean is crushed by the weight of this truth. Enri figures out what must have happened: “Your memory has been messed up. Only the power of the nanoswords can do that.”

SCENE: So there’s some VR-style CGI scene and there’s a really, truly, gorgeous idyllic farm that is deep in Dean’s memory and there’s some imagery with water and mothers and stuff. So that’s where they have to go.

SCENE: Except they go to where the farm is, and… Dean was just leading them to the original temple all along. There’s no Farm. It was all an illusion.

SCENE: So now they’re at the ruins, and they’re really disheartened by what has happened. Except I roll on the plot table again and now they’re actually really heartened, and they realize that the Nanoswords Have Always Been Inside Them! Like Swords Swallowers. So they reach deep inside, their throats, and pull out their swords. (Except for Enri, who pulls his swords out of Dean’s throat.) Except I roll on the table again, and the swords dissolve into keys. (Nanokeys??) Aara correctly (?) figures out that she needs a door, and finds a garage door, leading to a garage.

SCENE: Garage. They are in a garage… but a big Truck, with a Face, and this is like the Mammoth Car but repainted, is trying to run them down. It takes a long time for someone for someone to roll doubles so this is like the truck is zooming back and forth, threateningly, past the heroes, like about twelve times. (Gameplay note: I got really tired of saying “ZOOM”.) Then Enri defeated the truck by whistling for the motorcylces (!!) to jump in and sacrifice themseles to destroy the truck. Enri is now in biker garb with bald-colored hair.

BUT: the Man In The Stylish Hoverchair appears, and laughs at their folly! He starts to talk about a hospital where many turtles are being tenuously kept safe, and describes their science. “You see, what you don’t understand, you cannot understand, is turtles – that are the fundamental element of our society. Few people know but these turtles are special. They inhale our Carb-On-Di-Oxide of the air and covert it, through these turtles, into a certain kind of Oxygen…”

Aara blessedly rolls doubles right away, and appears behind the Boss with a bazooka. No more boss, but Aara is now in a one-piece bathing suit and blonde.

BUT: Two twin villains now appear, dressed in black silk like the original villain from the beginning. Speaking in unison, they explain: only the power of a Platinum Blonde will unlock the power of the NANO SWORDS! which they now draw and are awesome. Also there are now ninjas.

Aara kills half of them by bending time via her own nanosword and/or doing a hadoken. Enri kills the over half and actually killed more than enough that he turns the two bosses into undead – it was just that hard a punch or something. Which was cool because there were a lot of 9’s rolled and I decided any 9 that got rolled means Bad Things Happen—that is, I could change the haircolor and costume of any target player or boss!

So the bosses simultaneously where now in white coats and had long white hair (but were undead), and as the heroes failed to roll doubles (but rolled 9’s anyway), one by one their hair became white and their clothing matched that of the villains. Enri called out a grave warning: “The power of the nanoswords! It is corrupting us!”

Also there were more ninjas appearing, cutting off Dean (who must face off against the Bosses) from Enri and Aara, who had the first techno-montage of the game, as they gunned down the ninjas and clearly “Requiem For A Tower” was playing because obviously.

Dean couldn’t roll doubles, so they clearly gloated. One quickly drew a Gun from his side and the other drew a Box With A Kitten In It and well it did not end well for the kitten.

But then Dean rolled doubles so he summoned a Farm House (FROM HIS MEMORIES) to fall upon one of the bosses. The remaining boss cursed aloud, and all these cute puppies starting running from the farmhouse towards he. Said boss just scowled and backhanded them into the horizon. Dean is now totally like looking the same but in black (black hair, black coat).

Dean tried a few more times to take down the last boss. Someone rolled a 9, so the last boss became like two-tone black & white stripes.

SCENE: Back at the temple, they discuss how they took down the last boss off-screen.

Aara: “Who knew he would be allergic to bees?”

They respectfully put the transponder back in it’s rightful place, but as they’re walking away, it beeps and comes back on, and they all jump away from the explosion towards the screen as it explodes, and FREEZE FRAME.

THE END.
NANOSWORDS!

I’m done with RPGs.

Many games apply a mechanical bonus to incentivize the chararacter to some course of action. Sometimes you can get mileage from incentivizing something with negative consequences. (In Dust Devils: you can get 3 more cards for using your Devil, but that means you’re doing something pretty bad.)

I’m toying with some rules where the “bonus” you get for negative behavior isn’t increased effectiveness, but an increased capacity to do (or suffer) harm. This itself provides some angle for effectiveness, perhaps; it’s an implicit threat against anyone attempting to go up against you, and encourages others to fold out of any conflicts. (I’m not yet convinced that it makes sense from a logical / optimal-play perspective. I think so.)

(This might touch on one of my perspectives here; choosing to act harmfully or irresponsibly doesn’t mean you’re more savvy or powerful. It only means that you’re going to cause harm.)

Let me describe the hypothetical mechanical situation in my case: we each are dealt some standard number of cards over some stakes. (Let’s say that we each get 5, and we’re jockeying to avoid blame for some critical business mistake. Standard poker hands apply, best hand would win.) Before we reveal cards, we both have a chance to “raise”: that is, if our personal demons are in play, we can choose to stake some of our own resources (Hit Points / Attributes, basically) on the deal. The other person must meet a raise (and optionally reraise under the same conditions), or must fold and lose. (So, I tap into my Greed and wager 2 of my points. You must do the same or give in to the stakes.) In a slight twist, the winner merely gets back her own resources, while the loser has simply lost them. (Those lost resources go Elsewhere, irrelevant here.)

Thoughts? Do you find you have a rational reason to engage with this mechanic (aside from the fictional draw)? I’m basically seeking fictional-mechanical-coherence.

• The Namesake
• Persepolis
• Homage to Catalonia

What these have in common: vivid detail in vignettes, a wider scope of time (letting events unfold over many years), but also a pattern of not resolving key conflicts and themes along the way. Statements must be made about the themes, but it’s certainly not finished.

Every player brings shades to the table. You only put them on when your character enters the virtual world. When your glasses are on, you should act like a slightly aloof badass (which goes without saying). You can voluntarily take your glasses off, but can only put them back on if you gain (or give) some kind of surprising revelation. Glasses can also come off involuntarily if you get throughly beaten within the Matrix, but in this case they don’t can’t come back unless you unplug and come back in later.

The key effect of the shades is: when your glasses are off, you do not hide your emotions or emotional intent. You can still avoid telling the truth and saying your actual intent, but your confining yourself to some kind of honesty.

So:

Maven: We’ve got 2-min-30 to spare. We can do it. Dingo: We just don’t have time to pick up every stray of the street. The clock’s on, Dammit. Maven: [glasses off] Whose mission are you following, D? I’m sick of you drilling us to follow the line on our runs, without paying attention down here to do. What’s going on in that thick skull of yours? Dingo: [glasses still on] I said, the clock’s on, because a swarm of nuke-squids found our ship 30 minutes ago, and our EMP stack is fried. So get to work. Maven: [glasses back on] Understood.

And also:

Dingo: [glasses off, and also rather bruised, in an interrogation chair] Ugh… Agent Williams: We want to let you go. We will tag you, of course, and trace your thoughts, but not your location. We want to learn just what makes you think. Dingo: I can’t let you get in my head. I’m the damn CO of my group, the only job that matters, and I won’t compromise my group, you bloody little script. I’ll let me mind burn down first.

But also:

Maven: Dingo will have to hang on; we’ve got to run the rest of the op. Tin: [glasses off] You’re doing the same thing as he does. If you want to become CO, you can’t do it by mimicking a human trainwreck like Dingo. Think for yourself. Maven: [glasses off] Really? I’ve heard about your last ship, and I know what happened last time you tried to run an op. Yeah, I knew about it. Tin: You don’t… Maven: ...So you’re the last person I’m going to take that advice from on that note. If you want to help, fine, but otherwise I’m going to follow the lead of someone who kept their group alive for a change. [Tin and Maven both put their glasses back on, exchange a distant glance, and resume crazy matrix stunts]

Anyway, this doesn’t have to be a super-strict direct mechanic; it’s more of a useful improv cue.

• Do the players agree (consense) upon what the conflict is about and that the conflict is what should happen next?
• Or, do the players disagree on what should happen next, and the conflict is what resolves what actually does happen?
• Or, do the players disagree on what should happen next, and one side has priority over what happens / if it becomes a conflict?
• Aren’t there games which assume one of these modes and break when others are used?

(The clarifying example of the third case: you want to accomplish X, and I say there should be a complicated conflict about whether you can do X but you don’t believe that a conflict is necessary. The rules that say that if anyone calls for a conflict, it happens. Therefore, I get precendence here.)

Is this any clearer?

You effect the world and your character in two different ways: direct character action, and control of the wind and windpowers. By mixing up these different possibilities in the gameworld, the game sets up some creative puzzles which are nicely both simple and satisfying.

The graphics are gorgeous (somewhat Zelda/Windwaker-esqe), and the background music nicely fills space but isn’t to pushy or tedious. The game overall nicely delivers the vibe of adventure and wonder. The game is certainly short, but it plays like a nicely balanced “short story”, as video games. The game does very well with the “progressive intuitive tutorial” mode of play, and new powers are gradually introduced, explained, and reincorporated into the existing world. (It’s very neat to get a new power, and immediately think back to the rest of the world, and how to manipulate its old elements in new ways)

Downsides: it’s not extremely challenging or long, and perhaps the pseudo-japan-via-pueblo-via-medieval landscape just seems silly. (My partner certainly though so.) I say it’s worth a quick play.

A: So we find the McGuffin…
B: I don’t think you find the McGuffin now. It’s been taken by now.
A: Okay, let’s roll to see which way things happens.

Let me give something a bit more personalized and thematic.

A: I’m going to hold my own in this fistfight, to show I’m not scared.
B: I think your fear will get the best of you, regardless of whether you win.
A: Let’s roll to see which way it goes.

I think groups/players approach these points-of-conflict in very different ways. Some groups really feed off these disagreements. They drive play towards finding these differences in vision, and trust the system to quickly unify the vision thereafter. The way to play “correctly” is to pursue your own vision.

Other people would rather come to a consensus on points of disagreement, by which I mean: players want to find a potential conflict that would be engaging to all players, regardless of outcome. The way to play “correctly” is to find the kind of vision that is satisfying to all.

I think I’m talking about an actual binary difference, and not a soft scale. When your mind is asserting some fictional vision, is it successful if the rules let it pass, or if the group accepts it? (If you fall into some other category here, I’d be curious to hear about it.)

This comes up in play when I fall flat on certain games. I’m specifically thinking Dust Devils, which I love, but sometimes the game clicks for me and sometimes it doesn’t. One reason for this may be that the text calls for the former case (each player pursuing their stakes) while I tend towards a consensus-driven mode of play (while my skill in other modes of play is underdeveloped).

(EDIT: See also my older post on “Game Modes”, another look at how we interface with our decision-making process in games.)

“I’m a Watchdog, 5d10.” Here we have a player who has been using all their experience-bonuses towards building up a single trait, which in just about universally applicable. (As opposed to what seems to be the expected behavior, to have a diversity of traits with different meanings attached.) Why: Because the player is seeking their character’s goals, and seeking effective means of getting those goals. This is a plainly legal move; it does not distort the fiction.

”...and I wave my skillet at them for emphasis! 1d6.” Someone has some cooking gear listed on their character sheet, for some reason – maybe they’re care deeply about being the camp’s cook – and they’re shoving it into their narration here, probably along with some other traits. They may have been going down their list, looking for dice to add. Why: They’re pursuing their character’s goals, and that extra die will give them some extra effectiveness. They look for a bonus, find it, then justify it.

“I’m from Back East, 3d4.” Scenario 1: I’ve consciously built a social trait like this so I can use it to get Social Fallout, because that kind of fallout is basically safe and can generate new traits and experience. Why: I want to establish more means of achieving my character’s goals.

Scenario 2: I want to see some trouble. This is a “bad trait” in some ways, and I’m willing to push it in because I want to see what happens when I get into mechanical trouble.

“Wow, I can’t believe you did that! I don’t want to escalate now… I may have dice still, but I’ll fold.” Scenario 1: Socially rewarding a very strong Raise by the other party. Scenario 2: shortening a long scene, or recognizing that a scene has run its fictional course.

Scenario 3: I’m making a fictional choice here, where my value of one fictional fact (the stakes) is worth less to me than another (the value of not escalating further / fighting on).

“Of course I’ll escalate. I still want to win.” Scenario 1: I’m seeking a win, and I want to raise more dice. “Escalation” requires taking a single action with more dangerous fallout attached for the foe, but I can avoid doing lasting harm if I’m careful with the use of dice.

Scenario 2: Fictional choice: value of the stakes is more than the value of the cost of escalating.

Possible Conclusions

So what’s the order in which a player is evaluating their choices? What model are they using for judging an outcome? Some possibilities.

(1) Effectiveness. I want the stakes, I seek legal and effective means, and once I pick them I justify them within the fiction.

(2) Blind fiction. I want the stakes, I consider my fictional options (roughly: “what my character would do”), pick the legal move that matches my fictional sense, and watch the mechanically derived outcome.

(3) Weighted fiction. I want the stakes, I consider my fictional options, I use mechanical knowledge to adjust my fictional sense of things (i.e. if I would reasonably talk (1d4) or fight (1d8), my character should intuitively feel more assured of victory in the latter case).

(4) Alternative fictional goal. I want some fictional goal other than the stakes. (Like: displaying some character arc, creating dramatic tension, building up some aesthetics). I pick a legal choice in pursuit of the fictional goal, justify it in terms of the stakes the character wants. I watch the derived outcome, but I’m more invested in my own goal.

(5) Meta goal. I want some mechanical goal other than the stakes. (Like: getting XP or fallout.) I pick choices on a mechanical basis that will give me what I want, and make sure to justify these choices in the fiction and how to they work with the stakes my character is wanting. I watch the derived outcome, but I’m more invested in my own goal. (EDIT: In the comments, Tommi suggested social goals as a subset of meta goals. Social goals are another great example.)

What I’m Trying To Say Here

How do you decide what you should be doing? What’s important and meaningful? Differences here lead to breakdown in gameplay. DitV is a game which often runs to ground (in my experience) when players are just seeking the stakes, but that’s not playing fundamentally wrong, because the rules are clear in that you should attempt to achieve the stakes. So “how to play” is some other subtle balance that I have a hard time communicating. At best, I can figure out whether someone intuitively gets / has absorbed how to work with the DitV ruleset, or determine if someone just cannot mesh with that.