The Happy Writer

Way back in the mists of time (2006 actually) I wrote a pithy series of writing tutorials aimed at getting a chunk of writing just... you know... done. Hang the quality, hang the need for editing, hang everything, just get it done.

The series was, of course, occasioned by the advent of that year's Nanowrimo. People seemed, continue to seem, to view the production of 50k words of novel something of a burden and a trial. For myself it's only a burden and a trial if my other life commitments physically prevent me from partaking. The actual production of 50k words is a matter of sitting down and opening the floodgates until they're all finished. This year I had a bit of a sudden sprint to the finish slapping down 15k last Sunday to fall panting and exhausted at the finish line with something like a reasonable rough draft. I had another book to proof and put the final touches on, events to host and a regular life to live around this. Probably why I found it quite such a trial.

The point is that I at no point found the actual writing difficult. As I get older getting through the writing is the least difficult part in the production of work. I see questions from aspiring writers on Q&A sites like this asking which bell and whistle laden "writer's word processor" to use to keep track of what's going on. I use notepad. Just me and the words, baby, locked in a continual stream.

The use of notepad to draft a novel is, in some ways, the most hardcore possible way to write with a keyboard, or indeed in any way. You see a sheet of paper can only be so large, a dedicated word processor document quickly becomes unwieldy, with a text editor you just keep on writing, until you're done. No muss, no fuss. If you never find yourself in a position where you're not "in the groove" then any faffing around with notes and formatting and saving chapter files and so on and so forth is just time wasted.

Yet, curiously, in all the world I seem to be alone in this. I do not know of one other writer in the world who can just turn it on and write. Possibly my father, he always kept impeccable office hours and wrote everything in LocoScript which is quite a lot like a text editor. He never discussed how he wrote with us, he just did.

Now, unless I'm some kind of superhuman mutant I can't see why it would be that I can discipline myself to write "on tap" and no one else could. If  I were going to look for obvious differences between me and almost every other living person who considers themselves to be some kind of writer I can see a few that may contribute:

• Absence of illusions. I'm not doing what I'm doing to woo big publishers or to make the Times Bestseller List. I'm doing it because it's what I do.
• Sense of fun. Because I have no illusions the business of writing stories and story games has become a fun hobby, I know of no other hobbyist writers, all writers I have ever encountered are limbering up for an encounter with the big leagues that likely will never come.
• Lack of social pressure or cultural targets. Because I am purely in this to have a bit of fun I am not constrained to squash novels into a commercially viable length, or to worry about whether the thing I'm writing fits under a generic banner in a massive bookstore. I don't need to think about whether there's too much emotional content in an action story, or too much action in a love story. I tell the story the way I think it should be told and hang everyone else's opinion.

To summarise, I just don't actually care about the concerns others may have about whether my stuff "works". Hell if I could, should I put my mind to it, breeze through over half a million words in a year and still live a completely other life that has nothing to do with writing then it's not really much of a loss if something doesn't come off the way I planned. This year alone I've written two role playing systems and a novel.

One of the role playing systems is typeset and ready to roll Monday of next week in time for Christmas. The potential number of productions I could roll out next year is mind-boggling. I am creatively fecund, prolific and master of my own destiny thanks to POD services.

From a typesetting point of view, production of the role playing systems has proven so challenging that the idea of publishing a novel now seems like something I would undertake in a weekend. For me personally, the act of writing and producing works of fiction this way has been so immensely rewarding and personally satisfying I can't imagine having done things any other way.

If I have one complaint it is the common one that the world has not, thus far, seen fit to shower me with sufficient personal largesse for my efforts to dedicate my life to these projects full time. On the other hand, how many people discover the same things through the bitterly frustrating and unfair process of the traditional publishing markets? How many people are left twisted and broken in the ruins of their dreams and ambitions because they can't just let it go? Hey I haven't gained a bank balance that could buy me my own personal island, but I don't hate the thought of warming up the word processor (or notepad) and bashing out a couple of thousand words either.

If you are a writer, look at what you do and ask. Am I having fun? Is this really what I wanted? Am I pleasing myself or some impossible commercial dream state? What do I really want to get out of writing? How many people need to engage with my work before I am happy?

You may find that the answers to those questions lead you down a different path to the one you imagined. One with far fewer riches and launch parties but one with a great deal of personal achievement and a pleasant feeling of stability unattainable by many other methods.

...And Let That Be The End Of The Matter!

 This Dice vs. Cards thing is now irritating me. Not because everyone keeps saying how much they wuv their dice and would marry them if they were not polyhedral lumps of plastic; although that is slightly creepy.

No, what's getting me is that people say that Cards = Dice and therefore Cards !> Dice. In the Core Book we went into some detail about why this was not the case but now I think about it we probably didn't get to the heart of the matter. All the things we say are true, cards are more versatile and excellent mnemonically to keep system in people's heads instead of forcing them to bookmark rules and charts or refer to their super secret GM Screen to remember what numeric value on what chart means what.

But this doesn't cut to the very greatest thing about cards, i.e. they save you time.

I have not run a session that ran longer than three and a half hours in at least a year. At the same time, no one leaves these sessions feeling short changed. This is not a usual state of affairs in the hobby of RP. Of course I did my hahasoamusing little experiment write up in yesterday's entry. Although intended to be sarcastic it does have a serious point behind it. My session plans have gone from being good for two to three weeks worth of play, doing four and a half hour's worth at a time, coming away from every session feeling we should have done more, to cramming a good deal of plot and action into three to four hours with space for a tea break in the middle. Where did all this time come from?

Some might reason that I had simply become a more efficient Host. Well, possibly, but I know some cracking Hosts who have been in the game far longer than I have who still have a problem keeping in the limits of a good six hour run.

Maybe it is a combination of elements, fair enough. But here's one thing I know for a fact. Rolling a dice isn't just more time-consuming compared to drawing a card, it has the potential to introduce a finger-pause in the action that threatens to deep-six your session. Now, I have noticed that this is certainly not the case when properly playing your game of choice on a tabletop. Board games and the like seem to take a throw of the dice in their stride, it's part of the fun, and I have enjoyed exactly that fun on more than one occasion myself.

No, where dice are the kiss of death is in the sofa-lounge scenario. There's something quite luxurious about loafing about on a sofa engaged in RP something that gets players into a rhythm and even seems to put them in something of a trance. Nothing shatters that concentration like everyone craning forward to see a dice roll. Now, if you were to display dice rolls on a television screen or similar so they were big enough to be read without people craning forward to see them then that might mitigate the problem; but why employ technology when a playing card is usually clear enough to be seen by someone just holding it aloft?

This is where I think the time gains are made. There is some time at the beginning of a session where people are settling into the game. In a way the game takes a while for everyone involved to become fully engaged in it. I believe that in the past when people have rolled a dice it almost jogs them out of the game. Having a tea break also has a similar effect but that happens maybe once in a session, dice rolling is supposed to be a more frequent event.

Now I come to think about it I remember when I used to run Over The Edge by the book, with dice pools and what have you, we used to swerve rolls wherever possible. In fact the habit of being a dice dodger was one that infected all the games I played (not necessarily Hosted, just partook of) before starting in on No Dice. Now I come to think about it I can remember a lot of times the Host of the game, and sometimes that was me, made a Host Fiat decision before allowing the rhythm to be upset by a randomiser check. Randomiser checks which were supposed to be common became a last resort.

Some gamers still wear the "we hardly ever roll dice" thing as a narrative badge of honour. I always felt it made the whole thing less fun if you were afraid of trusting the vagaries of chance. If you stick to the unforgiving mistress that is chance the story is likely to be a lot more dramatic for the players than it is if you are the Host who enforces most of the rules but is basically on the player's side. Choices become important. In a fudged game choices are not really choices, they're just scenery on the mystery tour which really only has one destination and outcome.

Host Fiat in such cases is evil. It should be used to decide whether a proposed player plan even has a chance of succeeding; it's not intended to replace the element of chance altogether. The problem is that when your arbitration mechanism is destructively intrusive it encourages destructively simple Host arbitration. The most effective arbitrary Hosts are the ones who sustain a healthy distance between themselves and the players, although I always find this overcooks the player experience, the game becomes one of [Insert Host Name Here]'s games which are unique and untouchable.

Unless it can be systemised and is approachable it needs work. At least, in my world it does. For these reasons:

• discourages "fluffy Host syndrome"
• encourages randomiser use
• preserves fictive state
• shortens game length
• while increasing game quality

I say cards are indeed > dice. And that's all I have to say on the topic ever.

The Bloody End (of my NSHO).

Doing It For The Fans

 Long time, no blog, for reasons already expounded.

A mail from Matt today prompted me to reconsider the logic of the statement that content producers in various media love to gushingly proclaim: "We're doing this for the fans!"

Matt's mail addressed a perceived problem with the No Dice Core Book that people didn't like the introduction in length or content and it was putting people off the system. Maybe, maybe not. In my experience people are really good at making excuses for not doing this or that. We call people sheep because they resist and reject and reject and resist before, in some cases, running hell for leather towards some mediocre artefact because everyone else is doing it.

Digression! For example the number of moany twunts I've seen complaining that "Cards are not all that different from dice". Here's a simple experiment that proves the utter arsetwattery of such moans:

1) Sit on a sofa holding a D6.
2) Without leaning forward, to the side, employing the aid of any flat surface such as a table or the cover of your favourite "My Little Munchkin" Annual roll the dice to produce a satisfactory result.
3) Notice this is, at least, inconvenient.
4) Repeat the process, except this time hold a shuffled pack of cards in the hand of your choice. Draw rather than roll.
5) Now repeat with dice, but time how long it takes to roll the dice and read off the result.
6) Now repeat with cards and time how long it takes to make and read a draw.
7) Multiply the amount of time from 5 by 50. You will probably end up with an amount of time somewhere in the region of 20 minutes.
8) Multiply the amount of time from 6 by 50. You will probably end up with an amount of time somewhere in the region of 5 minutes.
9) Note how much time you save using a pack of cards.
10) Stop pretending that dice are the convenient randomiser of choice STFU and go away.

It certainly doesn't help that for everything on the good side of mediocre up there is 1000x as much stuff that slides off the grotesque hunchback of the distribution curve and leaves quality produce, or the stuff with potential, drowning in a sump of crap.

People have very strong filters for novelty, it's only necessity that pushes them beyond that. If I was a keen role player of the old school I would be put off No Dice because of its novelty. It's only because I find most role playing system books utterly unreadable, mired in pointless and restrictive micromangement details, filled with equations and charts that make most current role playing "statistics and probability for fun". People I role play with read the systems in order to hack them into something that requires far less effort. Those people are the kinds of people who will decide quite quickly that they've bought enough core books and they're going to do their own thing.

Many of these guys run the one system they could be bothered to finish reading through in pared down form, or just stick to homebrew, or homebrew something LIKE some system they skim read once but a hell of a lot lighter.

But I didn't get involved in No Dice to reach the other people, the people who play by the book, the people who are put off by the mere concept of reappraising their hobby. I believe that we wrote it for newbies and those who love role play as a form of narrative entertainment somehow sullied by arbitrary numeric systems that impede the development of plot.

We wrote No Dice for our friends. All the people who "get" No Dice are fans of it. All the people who just feel slightly nauseous reading the Introduction to the Core Book are not. So of course I'm "doing it for the fans". Who in their right mind would do it for the non-fans? Try and please a bunch of people who really couldn't care less if you died in a ditch? Who would do that?

So I guess like every other content producer and the rest of the gang I am obviously doing No Dice for the fans. Those people who want to whinge that they would love it more if we just changed the length and content of the introduction to sound like every other Role Playing System ever written can shove it up their anuses. If that is they can fit "it" up there with all the polyhedral dice, pencils, double sided character sheets, hex maps and rule expansions they've retained up there already.

Tortured anal retentive joke over I will mention that one of the projects for 2011 is the Core Book Redux. I've reread the Core Book and I can see a hell of a lot that's just plain wrong with it. However, I did not miss the absence of page after page after page of number crunch combat system.

(More To Follow.)

Missing By A Mile

Recovering from a system bork I found this in my unpublished drafts. It's an article by a much more old-skool games designer than anyone I hang out with.

What I found amusing was the referencing of games designers pandering to rules lawyers. It has to be said that hitherto most successful games companies have made money by doing precisely this. It makes me wonder if we're going about this the right way or if we should be producing another 200 page rules supplement every week like some other games companies.

Oh well, guess we'll never be rich and we'll be considered wrong and foolish; at least we're happy not wasting our lives looking for a definitive decision on that rules quibble.

2010: The Year We Got Busy

I wish that the amusing implication of the post title was anywhere near accurate. No, a more literate version of the semantics is to be inferred.

The plans are afoot for a calendar littered knee deep with exciting and rewarding events. The problem is that none of them are planned. Unplanned events are the absolute worst kind. You know they are going to resolve into the flesh but until you have a time, or a place, or both they torture you with vagueness.

Among the highlights of a full summer programme are: New No Dice events at Nottingham's new game and comic shop where Justin and I are also almost certain to organise a bit of Heroscape. Especially seeing as WotC seem to have released the Scape freeze to produce a D&D themed Underdark expansion set, which looks pretty yummy.

We'll also be wanting to get out and about in the summer time as outdoor No Diceing last summer was a brilliant success. In addition we want to hit three conventions, our friends at Beer and Pretzels, IndieCon (our non-attendance at which was an epic fail for us last year) and GenCon (if there is one). It doesn't stop there: we want to organise our own massive shindig to tie in with the release of Levercastle.

Finally, myself and the Mrs want to slope off for a couple of holidays in amongst all that. And there's the ever present joy of the Belper games weekends!

2010 will be eventful for sure. But will I survive it?

P.S. Check out our new slimline podcast available from the link top right.

Gamer Fatigue?

I find myself wondering about the phenomenon known as "Gamer Fatigue". This is where some person in your gaming community announces that they are "taking a break from RP" and withdraws, mysteriously, into seclusion. To me this seems a bit like "taking a break from Movies" or "taking a break from TV". Gaming, to me, is a form of entertainment, not a chore.

I can understand when people say they're going to "take a break from the gym to concentrate on swimming". I guess I just never really regarded gaming as such an intensive pastime. This points the way to a further set of concepts within gaming I hadn't really thought about before. When I find a television drama, a novel or a computer game compelling it's often on the point of it giving me new ideas or insight into the construction of stories for others. Weirdly this means I often don't like playing in games as I can't really just rip off another Host. Gaming is virgin territory for many gimmicks.

This leads to two further notes. One, that I know other people take their gaming very seriously and look upon the opportunity to play a role as an actual creative enterprise. Some people, myself included, look on their character as a way to interact with the story environment, they are contributing a performance within the rules in order to keep the game going. The other note is that role playing games haven't yet progressed to the point where there is a startling bloom of innovation.

To deal with these points in reverse order. It seems that all the RP that has gone on since D&D has been much after the fashion of people taking pictures of moving objects with early movie cameras. Unlike the former activity, however, because it is not enormously expensive and doesn't have much in the way of toys people have largely ignored this innovation in entertainment (did I mention it also has few military applications). RP's not good for much except as a really cool form of entertainment. The problem is that innovation in the field has been restricted to new methods for number-juggling.

I love RP so much that when my partner didn't want to play I changed the hobby to make it suit her more, now I love it even more myself.

But this is weighty stuff. It also leads back to the former point.

I know a lot of people get "RP Burnout" at present. This is like the reverse of "cinema frustration" in which there are too few movies you want to see out when you fancy a visit to the pictures. RP Burnout is where you've role played so much you just can't take it any more. I think I experienced something similar with console games a while back. I'd just played so many of the damnable things I couldn't play any more or it felt like my brain would fall out. Also console games achieve nothing for the player whereas the benefits of socialisation and group interaction at least give RP a social dimension.

I imagine if you did anything enough then it would lead to a similar situation, if they did release enough movies that you could go all day every day for a month you would probably get sick of going to the movies (in fact at film festivals I believe this is what happens to some). However we roleplay once a week and occasional weekends. At the moment we're doing a little more because we're playtesting new adventures. I'd actually like to adopt a slightly less intensive posture after this testing phase.

But what I'm left with after considering these points is even more clarification of what players want out of the RP experience. I know that Mrs Monkey has been finding some of the experiences very hard of late. I think at the point where you feel guilty because you should have done more is precisely the time that you should start to do more.

I think what I need to get across to people that the RP is an entertainment. Levercastle tends to be treated as such. I think what also needs to happen is not only that the players say what they expect out of the experience but the Host needs to say what he can see happening bearing in mind the characters as presented. If people know what's coming up in a vague sense of the word then they can prepare accordingly.

I think that's actually mentioned in the Core Book but the fine tuning of the concept still seems to be a little off. Ho hum. Back to tinkering.

The Joker In The Pack

No sooner do I lament the complete lack of anything that makes for a substantial post than KA-BLAM! something amazing socks me in the face; almost literally in this case.

When I was compiling the Core Book I tried to include everything I could think of at the time to make a sourcebook for the budding No Dicer. It is inevitable that things should be missed. Almost everything that's coming in the Random Encounters series is intended to be filled with examples of powerful things that you can do with No Dice principles. So in each adventure we're kind of expanding the toolkit of the prospective Host and also giving a concrete example of potential play.

Last night we play tested the Monster Action Thriller "The Creature of Black Lake" and got off to a rocky start. Basically an incident mentioned in the notes that's supposed to just happen resulted in the death of a player's character before the adventure had even started.

This was notable for several reasons but not least because that's really not supposed to happen. I know that people have been keen to discuss the idea of abitrary character death recently but this basically put someone out of the game in the first forty minutes.

Not only that but I experienced an incident of Host meltdown, a brief autopsy of the situation lead to the conclusion that the wires of communication were badly crossed and for a while there it all looked grim. You see, the whole point of No Dice is that it's supposed to help you sidestep these issues and keep going. If an adventure has a serious hole that relies on a certain series of incidents not happening then it's just not working.

A workable suggestion was put forward by Justin who suggested that when you hit the blind alley you as Host rewind the action to just before everything went pear and then re-explained the situation giving the player an out.

Like I say, this is workable but it's not really all that neat. It means that a player could take a one way trip up diarrhea drive and then like the Prince of Persia just rewind and do it again.

It was Sue who hit on the real answer. Which in a discussion that followed broadened out from a specific instance in that adventure to become a general principle that Core Book is sorely missing. Oh well, for the second edition I suppose.

But for those of you who don't want to wait n years for the 2nd ed here's the idea right now. Treasure this one, it's golden:

Creating NPCs is always a problem. 95% of NPCs are just cyphers of course. They are barkeeps, random wandering citizens and other reasonably easy to scope functionaries.

That other 5% are the important ones. Many of these, probably just over half, are villains and again there isn't really a problem with them. It's that last 2% that can leave the Host scratching their head.

These are the "major friendly NPCs". Don't be fooled, just because they're marked "friendly" doesn't mean they're always happy to see the players, it more or less just means they won't just try to kill the players on sight.

In the Core Book I got as far as advising people to avoid "infoblaster" NPCs who just know everything. And I also advised against making NPCs as powerful or more powerful than the player characters who were supposedly their allies.

Aside from that I just recommended a Host create "real" characters using the Player's Guide notes to make a fully rounded and realised character.

In some cases this might be fine. But in reality players don't really spend all that much time talking to NPCs just for fun. So a lot of the Host's fine character creation work goes by the wall.

Besides, once you've stopped the NPCs being more powerful when they're too friendly you've kind of left yourself in a bit of a bind.

The problem is sometimes you want characters to move the plot on. They are supposed to arrive, do something dramatic and then leave the players to deal with the fall out.

So how does one do this without making them villainous or too powerful? After all a constant parade of utter villainy keeps things busking along but really in a story based RP you want other types of encounter.

This was exactly the problem in Creature. I had an NPC who needed to rather aggressively insert himself into the party and provide useful plot information, in a guarded manner, for the remainder of the adventure (or at least until he died). I had written up notes for this character which were pretty light. I wanted to introduce him and then, in the playtest, develop him in some way into a fully realised character.

So when he came in to the action I kept him neutral. The only problem with this is that he was neutrally holding up the party's boat with AK47s. As I quickly discovered this kind of thing can be misinterpreted as open aggression. Funnily enough, had he gone in with open aggression the accidental adventure ruining bloodbath that resulted from my weak characterisation would have been averted. Then, of course, the players would have had to just follow along on rails.

On rails is not a good place for adventures to be.

So I needed to, rather than render the character neutral and hence weak, render him a little bit charming and crazy and hence allow characters to interact with him even though he was, technically, a bad dude.

This is a really exciting dramatic position, the guy's holding you hostage but he's quite willing to have a conversation with you about begonias (or whatever). As a player you feel you might be able to negotiate or something.

At the same time the Host has someone who can nudge the characters back on task if they look like they're about to commit suicide or whatever.

This guy's a great NPC, not too overpowering but not too floppy either. He's not going to interfere unless you need him too. He's a joy to have involved.

And hence was born the Joker.

You see Creature is not alone in needing a character like this. Every role play session could do with having a Joker to interact with the players, nudging, testing, exploring their characters.

The situation where the Joker is a guy who has technically taken the Players as hostages, but in a polite way, is just one possible scenario. Characters who have vast reserves of information they are unwilling to share, characters who offer money, or professional services desired by the players all of these are ideal Joker characters.

The secret is to always lay on the unthreatening manner on thick. This was my vital mistake last night. Neutrality won't cut it if an NPC has some power over the players. The character has to maintain their power over the character while entertaining the player.

I'm not saying that making them will be easy but there is a way to make it easier. Sue loves poker and she quickly put me on to the old poker trope of trying to find the sucker at the table. Essentially when you come up with an adventure design your job is to try to identify the Joker(s) at the table and then make them around their role in the story.

Some stories, Con of the Dead, Revelation Point, don't really need a Joker character. Then we return to the poker trope: if after ten minutes searching for the Joker in the scenario you still can't find them, it's you.

Yes, in some adventures it is the Host himself who takes this gently tormentative role for the players. Horror splatter scenarios are the most likely to feature these.

So from now on when I'm dealing up a new scenario I will be sure to use a deck comprised of 53 cards. The joker's going to become one of the most powerful tools in my arsenal.

NB: That last sentence was a dramatic article closer. You don't need to actually draw a card to know when to make the Joker NPC, you just kind of look for them after you've finished your notes.

Modern Storytelling

I remember once Mike made a comparison between roleplaying and the ancient art of storytelling. He wasn't wrong either. Sure, the details have changed but a lot of what goes on (at least round our way) under the guise of role playing is actually group storytelling. What struck me at the time was that before the widespread adoption of the printing press, before radio, before television, these activities must have gone on. They must have because we still know ancient myths even though they could not be set down and widely distributed (to most people) until some time in the 19th Century.

Storytelling was, if anything, an orally transmitted and propagated cultural phenomenon in its old form. When you could read from a book, or listen to the radio, when you could go to the movies, watch television or play a computer game it looked like the ancient art of storytelling was redundant. It served no purpose. It was just a phase humanity went through before it got a next gen console.

I can't question what Mr. Gygax was thinking about when he invented D&D. It seems pretty obvious on one level. What he has ended up doing is paving the way for storytelling to come back. This is what I love about role playing books. They're not an attempt to replace a group activity involving people interacting. They're a support to that process. All the stories of the World of Darkness are just prologue to the player campaigns.

A weighty heritage for a hobby that has not thus far managed to cast off its geek-laden roots.

It's come to me recently, over and over, that there must have been a real hunger at some level of society for the return of group storytelling because the original roleplaying set up just doesn't seem like a terribly attractive proposition.

RPGs at their inception were games. You could win and you could lose. The roll of the dice was a core component in "beating" the dungeon adventure. Scores were vital. These trappings, the trappings of the competitive pursuit have proven almost impossible for the hobby to cast off so far. There just hasn't been anyone to reshape any part of it into a discrete entertainment experience.

So Justin and I are writing the manual but make no mistake this is something the people we knew were tending towards anyway. There are a few vital ingredients that we have had to bring in from the cold but the core of No Dice is the making available of a group storytelling experience to a culture that neglected and carelessly forgot how to engage in it. Not that I think modern story based role play is much like a storytelling experience of yore but the parts that are the same are vital, community, communication, sharing time as a group.

We were lucky enough at the weekend to have a complete role-play n00b join us for the preview event. I ran a hitherto notorious zombie romp called "Con of the Dead" which relies a little on the participants having some knowledge of SF television. Until now this has never been a problem in the groups I have encountered. Our n00b however, didn't watch any television particularly and so was in danger of missing many of the in-jokes.

The problem of being the Host is that even if people find their minds numb at the end of the day the tendency is to smile and nod and thank you because people realise how much work you must have done and feel that criticising it would be rude. So I asked our n00b how he liked the session and he said all the right things. After the session I asked Sue whether she got the same vibe.

This is the joy of Sue. People will tell her what they think even if it's that they thought my game sucked. Quite the reverse occurred in this case and we may have one more enthusiastic player to join in the fun of the non-Marauders week game. Justin wryly remarked that we'd have to monitor this "Pied Piper" effect closely. We already split off a monthly group to make a weekly one. Now it looks like we may end up splitting off the weekly one to make, er, two weekly groups if we're not careful.

As Justin rightly pointed out the real answer is to get people skilled up to take the No Dice approach out to the world. Then we don't have to keep catering for fresh addicts who want a gaming fix. Not that I mind trying to fill my life with gaming activities and introducing the hobby to new people but there are so many hours in a day, days in a week and so on and so forth.

Tuesday Thoughts

Wow, I thought I'd totally updated at the weekend. How wrong a man can be.

Interesting reader mail in from one of the Doodler's cohorts below, pointing out my shortcomings in estimating the impact of bow-based ranged combat. Archers are plenty quick on the draw if competent, apparently.

Been having a quiet couple of weeks. The high point of the last week was playing Mrs Monkey's Western scenario set in Australia. This was pretty awesome, plenty of Western atmosphere and plenty of opportunities to think over the mechanics of a ranged combat system. This has made me think that ranged combat is a matter of priorities, the actual act of firing a missile would appear to be trivial to anyone given sufficient practice (practice being key because it's even hard to fire a gun if you don't fire guns). So the question is, which part of being involved in ranged combat is non-trivial?

The only answer I can come up with is deciding best how your next "burst" of fire is to be employed. Are you going for the kill? Covering someone else's action? Trying to raise a bit of hell? Defending yourself?

Melee combat seems to be centred on a personal experience, ranged combat is more tactical and uses the environment to support its tactics. The trick to the design of these games seems to be in producing atmosphere and giving people a "feel" for the action hook. This is, of course, precisely what I've been aiming for all along, but sometimes the feeling is somewhat elusive.

Received some feedback concerned that if the players are heroes and heroes find it difficult to die where's the edge of your seat excitement? Where's the risk? In campaign play I have developed a technique of giving players cool toys, if they are not careful toys are removed, thus the hero lives, but the hero's advantage is transient. This seems to provide enough ups and downs.

In a one off the chance of a character dying should be communicated at the outset. If chances are high it would always be best to have something for dead characters to do in the remainder of the game.

Of course I have been sat in on story-based games where people liked to be involved at some level but because of the entertainment value of the actual story they didn't mind just sitting back and watching the action unfold. This is the "front seat/back seat" phenomenon that I've noted in the past where players like to vary their involvement depending upon their mood. If you have such a person in your one-off group you could give them some cannon-fodder, let them partake until bored and then kill them off allowing them to leave the circle or just watch the rest of the game.

Anyway, I'm wandering into a territory of talking about revolutionary ideas and I haven't the time or space to go into all that right now. I'll leave the discussion in "food for thought" mode and wander off. Promise I'll update more promptly next time.

Convenience

Gaming has tradititionally been a double-edged hobby. On the one hand you rarely, if ever, meet a weekend gamer, someone who isn't really into the hobby but just does it a bit. If you and another person share the hobby chances are you'll be able to sit down and have some sort of a basis for conversation.

You want to see an example of a hobby where being into it doesn't guarantee social connection look at music. Even if you manage to get two people who claim to love the same sort of music, or even the same band, you can't guarantee that they'd necessarily have much to say to one another. In the field of music people can like the same thing for entirely separate and even mutually incompatible reasons.

Likewise a lot of the really popular pastimes. I think this could explain why people are so slavishly addicted to watching sports. And what are sports and Monday Morning Quarterbacks but gamers by another stripe?

To return to role playing, it has never occurred to most gamers to ask why gaming isn't more popular, even though it inspires such passion from those involved. It stands to reason that if someone is so deeply into something that it owns a portion of their life there must be something to generally recommend it.

Well, I think that happens to be true. I don't know many people who wouldn't get a kick out of some form of role playing. Maybe you don't like a violent martial arts spectacular but a visit to a fairy-tale seaside town sounds awesome, maybe you're not really into slasher movies but a police procedural game would suit you down to the ground. I don't think there's any doubt that there's a role playing experience out there for everyone.

So where is everyone?

Well. This is the double edged part about it. As we get older we gamers realise that there is more to life than being relegated to a trestle table in the corner of some draughty town hall or community centre. There's more to the hobby than "stop having fun, it's time to role play" (yeah, I actually still hear this from time to time *sigh*).

Time to a working guy with a couple of week's holiday and a forty hour a week contract is precious. If a game's going to be uncomfortable then it's just not worth the time.

The final tweaks are hitting No Dice, I'm hoping to finish off the text typesetting at the weekend I also want to add in a couple of notes on this. Role playing is being held back because it's such an effort to make it convenient. Traditionally players have had to fit round the game. Hopefully with No Dice we can start to make people see that it should be the other way round.

Time For The Morpheus Act

So I was online today listening to the various RPG podcasts I enjoy and more specifically the stream at Warpig Radio and I was lead hence to Talisman Studios where I picked up a PDF of the basic rules for their Suzerain RPG for the grand price of nothing.

What attracted me to have a look at the site in the first place was the fact that the systems advertised therein use playing cards like a certain other RPG that is coming out in June *ahem*.

It never hurts to check out the competition.

And looking through this PDF it came to me that in many ways people have already seen the potential of the playing card. Hell, I now know of three RPGs that are entirely based around using playing cards as randomisers. As a whole section of the Core Book will explain cards are monumentally better at randomising than dice ever have been or ever will be. Cards rule.

Talisman haven't pushed this. Their site is not plastered with hyperbole about the effectiveness of cards as randomisers. The other systems I've seen didn't make much fuss about it either. It's almost like they're trying to shrug off their rejection of dice. They certainly don't describe themselves as "diceless" and yet they are, dice are not mentioned.

I even like the essential Suzerain mechanic.

But is Suzerain No Dice?

No way.

Which leads to the Morpheus bit.

If No Dice is not playing cards what is it? What is No Dice?

It occurred to me that the No Dice core book is like The Prince, or Hagakure or The Art of War. It's a treatise on dead ends that role-playing has ended up in, and how to get out of them. It's a plea for the hobby to broaden, deepen, to become something more, something new.

That's, in essence, why we're giving the Core Book away as a PDF. How the hell are we going to sell another product if we can't tell people how we feel about the way these games should be played?

The Suzerain rule book had some gorgeous art and a super keen playing card system, which rather shamefacedly takes up a single page of double column print, as if it's ashamed to be accessible. Furthermore the rest of the book is filled with skill charts and vague instructions on building characters with skills to take part in something, something I guess one would learn about in the other Suzerain books.

Suzerain is not No Dice.

No Dice would not do this. And by "this" I mean turn casual drive by readers off by having one neat idea surrounded by a bunch of dry and obscure ones. I also mean hint at some glorious campaign setting through teaser artwork and odd quasi-phlosophical mumblings and then not solidify any of it.

No Dice is more than the sum of its parts, to be sure. Because when I see parts of it in what has gone before I don't recognise any of what I'm so excited about in those places.

That's reassurance of a very real sort.

So what is No Dice?

No Dice cannot be explained, one has to experience it for oneself.

And the Morpheus act ends.

Prologue Time

Well, it's games weekend week. So I currently feel like I'm already living through a prologue to the real business of the week. Leave aside the fact that the weekend brought an absolute avalanche of tasks into view for Mrs Monkey, the Doodler and myself to contend with. We started looking through the Nottingham What's On, moved on to the UK Roleplayers event calendar and ended up with a calendar packed chock full of stuff for us to do.

If half of the plans we're trying to put into operation are going to come off we're going to be heinously busy this year but that's what comes of starting a business with no money. You have to put in some kind of expense and all we've got to spend is time and energy.

The good news is that the website is up and searchable, I'm not handing out the domain name as yet because we haven't got all our tubes connected properly. Believe me once we have full web diversion and all that jazz I'll be ramming it all down your throat. I would tell you the site was searchable, but it's not because I just tried to search Google for it and it's not there.

Not that there's much point in worrying about all this until after the Games Weekend anyway. We won't even be available for comment sequestered in a huge old chapel building in Derbyshire.

Mrs, The Doodler and myself are all putting a lot of eggs and, ha ha, No Dice into this basket. We're hoping it all pays off.

Looking Ahead To Zero Hour

Work to be done on the actual core "No Dice" book is all about the spit and polish now. I'm chewing my way through putting up our first lines of "No Dice" gear in the shop. The Doodler is frantically creating the illustrations for the book. I have to turn my attention to the website.

We're looking at a publishing date for the No Dice Core Book of 1st June 2009. First time in my life I have ever been nervous-excited about publishing a book.

Let's get one thing straight herrs and frauleins, this isn't just a book. I designed a game. And not just a game. An evolution. A revolution. A new type of social experience. I am expecting big things.

So, will I be hugely disappointed if it doesn't fly? I don't think the concept of disappointment does this justice. I will be shocked, surprised, gobsmacked, awestruck.

You see, I'm a writer ghost writing a product that is more the product of every good time I've enjoyed with every close friend I've ever had than it is of my brain in glorious isolation.

I'll be sticking some bells and whistles on it using my own talents, just as the Doodler will draw up associated images to make these words pop. In the end though No Dice is about helping people who never really had much time for ardent dice rolling during a storytelling experience get out those all important creases.

The whole thing is about helping a Host to Host and about turning the intensity dial up on the player's experience. If I'll say one thing for people who've been role playing hitherto it's that they have incredible powers of imagination.

That's the thing. Role Playing, as it stands, is hard. You have to be so in to what you're doing to make it fly sometimes, and when it's good it's great. Still, it would help if everyone had a chance to enjoy the peculiar specialness of the role playing experience.

No Dice is designed to reduce some of the brainwork that is currently de rigeur for GMs and Players. Playing No Dice should allow the hobby to become more accessible.

Yup, No Dice is a heady brew, to be sure.

The last closed Beta of the various systems is starting a week on Friday when the long-adored Games Weekend is due to commence. I have all manner of escapades planned for that event from the crunchiest to the lightest. We shall see how they all go over.

The current archetypes that need to be written, illustrated and then added to the catalogue are the aforementioned Martial Arts game, a cop game and a fairy tale game. I'm also rolling out something experimental to see how it plays.

Following that, it comes to me that the only thing that should really be done to fill the intervening time is to open the Betas up for a sort of "Final Run" leading up to the big launch. Actually now I come to think about it a launch *event* might even be appropriate... Hmmm.

Changing gears between creating and marketing, even when that means a bunch of RP events, is kind of bizarre. What I'm keen to avoid is huge costs in printing etc. when we've got no money coming in. Anything I spend now has to be recouped by donations and so on later. To date I've spent precisely no money on getting this ready to go. I was hoping to continue in that trend.

As that's probably not going to be possible (and I realise a few quid on ink and paper for character sheets and other stationery hardly breaks the bank) I guess it's time to draw attention to the "donate" link over on the right there. 'Nuff said.

Expect to see the website spring to some kind of life in fairly short order. I'll restrict specific discussion of any participatory events people may or may not be interested in news of to that forum.

What's Wrong With D&D?

So, the main text of No Dice Core is finished. It's all polish from here on in, yay! During the joyful task of editing I note that I have made a whiney comment about the most popular role playing game in history Dungeons & Dragons. It wasn't really relevant to what I was talking about so I took it out.

I wanted to start this post by explaining that I wasn't anti-D&D per se. Then I realised that actually I would rather bathe in a soup of cow pats and urine jelly cubes before playing a session of D&D. So I guess that does make me anti-D&D.

I am very careful in the introduction to No Dice to state that were it not for Gary Gygax and his dungeon crawling classic No Dice would probably not exist. No Dice disagrees with a combat heavy, quasi-board game approach to Role Playing, just because it was first doesn't make it right every time for every person.

I find it a bit strange that all RPGs to date have been somewhat infected by the D&D way of doing things. White Wolf tried to step away from the model but even they seem to have an obsession with numbers and dice that seems to hamper their rich, detailed worlds.

Also, my colleague the Doodler noted that although Storyteller games offer a huge wealth of setting detail the advice on how to actually role play is somewhat thin on the ground.

I wasn't entirely sure what I would put into the No Dice corebook when I first started thinking about it a year ago. What it has ended up being is a compendium advice on how to roleplay without dice. And actually not just without dice but without many of the trappings of "traditional" RP. The dice, in fact, is so emblematic of Role Playing that's why it became the target of this game's prohibition.

So, what's wrong with D&D? Nothing, if you like that sort of thing, but all those people who do are well catered for. I just wanted to cater for some new people, that's all.

Love In An RPG

Despite the fact that your average RPG will be rife with jaunty skull splitting and base quests for filthy lucre the topic of affairs of the heart never really presents itself to go with the power fantasies and the fortune fantasies.

I don't anticipate that No Dice will be much different. Part of the core book, the seemingly interminable and yet incredibly useful part, is a guide for players and Hosts to the roles present in various dramatic situations. I'm using an off the shelf taxonomy of these situations and several of them deal with the topic of love.

It isn't entirely impossible that a Role Playing character could get involved in some sort of affair but it is extremely unlikely. Although No Dice does away with the need to be described entirely in terms of how effective you are at turning people's insides into outsides it's still not an effective tool for role playing a burgeoning romance.

I think the central problems inherent in the role playing of a romantic affair are two fold. Firstly you only have two choices of partner as a player, a non-player (and hence the GM) or another player.

If your entire group is made up of members of the same sex this could be awkward. However it's not inconceivable that a determined group could grit their teeth and try to rise above it.

Enter problem the second. It is nigh on impossible to role play a romance in a room with three or four other people sitting around like lemons. Part of the joy of role playing is that it's immersive and nothing un-immerses you like trying to ignore the mercenary, the thief and the hacker waiting for their turn in the spotlight whilst you exchange sweet nothings with your imaginary partner.

So I don't think No Dice will be the game to buck this trend. Given the circumstances this might not be such a bad thing.

So what is this "No Dice" thing anyhow?

The very first thing the No Dice project is going to produce, sometime soon, is a Core Rulebook for a very different kind of roleplaying game. Traditionally RPGs have been the domain of a set lucky few.

I name those who role play as "lucky" because I believe that it has the potential to be the most fun of any activity human beings can engage in. Ever since I cracked this system it's been my aim to open the hobby up, to coax in a few more players and deliver a new kind of experience.

I want everyone who *could* be interested in role playing to start role playing. I want to introduce new avenues for old players and new worlds for new players. I'm not saying No Dice isn't going to be an ambitious project. No Dice is the first project I have ever started that I think is, in its own small way, important.

We live in a world of MMORPGs, of video entertainment on demand, of Facebook. Our communities are online and the advantages that gives a citizen of this world in opportunities to be culturally diverse and to understand other people, places and lifestyles are immense.

For all that, though, sometimes you just need to sit down, with a regular person in a room and chill out. Sure, you can play boardgames, you can engage in witty banter, you can hunker down to an enormous Dungeons & Dragons hack-a-thon, there are always options. I am adding another option, and I hope it will become a popular one.

In the No Dice Core Rule book I'm going to try to convey an approach to gaming that, while it is not new, has never really been written down. If we were going to get intellectual about this I would say that No Dice is an RPG that is also a philosophy regarding RPGs.

None of this is meant to be an intellectual burden so we'll leave it at that.

If I were you I might *not* be thinking: just who the hell are you to be telling me how to Role Play? If you are, wow, aggressive! Even if I didn't have anger management issues though I might wonder where all this new stuff is coming from.

I've read a bunch of role playing manuals. I love role playing manuals, particularly the ones that describe worlds and settings and characters; rules-heavy ones not so much, as you shall learn. I would rather read such a manual than any other type of book. Once I have read and taken in the manuals I tend to file them away, forget most of the rules and wonder whether anyone wants to play a game with that setting.

Not that things were always this way.

When I was getting towards nine years of age in the early eighties Dungeons & Dragons was just starting to show up on the radar as a hobby in the UK. Through various means I got hold of the rule books and the old style polyhedral dice which you had to colour in with a white crayon. I also looked at other systems like the old Middle Earth Role Playing game, Paranoia and minor paperback roleplaying games like Maelstrom and Monster Horrorshow.

If you asked me now about the rules to any of these games I wouldn't actually be able to tell you much. The Monster Horrorshow used a mechanic called "The Absolutely Anything Table" which, well, you can probably guess what it did.

Back then I was desperate to play one of these games but I couldn't find a group. Whenever I did find a group all they wanted to do was roll dice and move pieces around on maps. That wasn't the type of experience I wanted. I wanted to be a participant in a story. I wanted to play a role.

I know what you're thinking, and I did. I studied acting, I went to acting school but I didn't just do acting because at heart I wasn't an actor. I studied Drama & Education which teaches you a lot about improvisation and rolling with the punches. My study there wasn't meant to prepare me to teach drama or to educate actors. It was all about how to present a narrative illusion, techniques to help normal people engage in this kind of play for their entertainment.

And it didn't stop there.

I actually went to college to study media and made a few films but I'm not a film maker either. I've written novels, and will write more, but I'm not strictly speaking a novelist. I've designed out computer games (I am a programmer by day) but I don't want to make a computer game.

I am a role player, a story teller, someone who wanted to share a fiction game with the world. Those friends of mine who enjoy this pursuit number among them some people who would take an opportunity to role play like this before considering any other way of spending time.

Some of these friends have helped me enormously in the development of this very game. One of them is my wonderful partner, a woman who wouldn't play Dungeons & Dragons unless you paid her a hefty sum. She is the one that proved to me Role Playing as a hobby could have a broader appeal than it currently does. So in a way this book is kind of her fault.

I need to also thank Justin and John who have played a bunch of No Dice. In its earlier days I also played some much clunkier versions (back when there were some dice) with Mike, Nick, Kath, Owen, Dave, Kenton, Clive and a bunch of others. Special mentions go to JC; whose game weekends gave me a first crop of willing testers; and super story-based GM Alex who, while he has never partaken in early No Dice, has a healthy disrespect for crunch getting in the way of a role playing session (even so the lengths of his games are legendary but only because of their epic sweep).

These happy few would rather role play than watch a movie, they would rather role play than go out to a restaurant, or bungee jump, or engage in any other activity or distraction. These folk will roll a dice and play a board game but will freely admit they'd rather be role playing, with an emphasis on the "role".

The game me and my closest friends have been looking for has fewer rules than most other games. It helps the players play their character in situations as diverse as fighting, to finding the dirt on a politician, to having tea with the Queen. It introduces people to strange worlds filled with compelling detail. It would be a game that would be a head on collision between the imagination required to read a book and the freedom of thought allowed in a great movie. The world didn't have that kind of game exactly, many near misses but the cigar has gone unclaimed. So I'm taking my shot at inventing one.

Not to say I haven't played in exactly the kinds of game I enjoy taking part in but such games have never been formalised. Usually a story game is another kind of game that has been altered or "hacked" to make it rules lite. We all turn up, clutching our dice bags and we play the game the way we want to play it. Everyone rolls their dice a few times though, in supplication to the gods of role playing who demand such things.

No Dice is the product of a history in love with role playing, movies, acting, writing and, most of all, great stories. I hope you enjoy trying to tune in to No Dice and wish you exciting and engaging adventures with your players. So keep an eye on this blog and watch as a new Role Playing paradigm materialises before your eyes.

Quickly...

Okay, so now I'm here and with "Donate" buttons and filthy lucre generating advertisements all over the shop I am itching to just get on with the business of telling you about the No Dice project. I haven't got much time this evening but I'll just put a few words down so that you can get the hang.

No Dice is a new RPG. More than that. It's a new *TYPE* of RPG. It's come about as a result of my own love of the hobby, of my fellow player's love for story based RPGs and our struggle to find something new that maximises the fun and minimises the dull. No Dice is the distillation of all our experiments.

I'm just revising the core rulebook for the system and once that's done I'm going to make up an edition and publish it through Lulu who have long been my self-publishing company of choice. I had a look at Amazon's Createspace and considered jumping ship but... well, Lulu is just plain better. It really is.

The Core Book for No Dice will be free to download, it will cost to have a printed copy but only paper and ink costs, no royalty, or if there is a royalty it will be donated to a charity of my choosing.

The core project will be entirely supported through donations, not that I need much, I can do this work for love and I fully intend to, but I can work for longer if I have more money in the bank.

Future No Dice spin offs, well, I will be charging for them. Real money. But that's because they're extras, sweat from my brow and all that. There will be some No Dice freebies but that's mostly because I want to produce No Dice rules for systems based on defunct TV shows that I don't have any IP rights to. They will be entirely free, I really am doing those for love.

So now you know the plan. You should be able to see it come together in the next few weeks as I begin to publish my core rulebook excerpts. So stick around if you love RPGs because this promises to be something very different.