The Dragon's Talon

This is a response to a blog post on Gamasutra by a man named Steve Mallory, a designer I know through the ‘net who makes some good points about narrative design; read the original post here…

True authorial control… Now there is a scary phrase to use in front of your producer…

True authorial control is taking your player and asking them what they want to do today, rather than telling them what they are allowed to do.  Is that wise? (continue reading…)

Recently, I was lucky enough to win a Google Wave invitation through a contest aimed at getting Dungeon Masters running D&D 4e games over Google Wave, pitching a game called ‘The Breath of Heroes’.  The idea is not a new one, I had already seen an article on Gameplaywright called Playing on a Wave about using Google Wave for games using the Gumshoe system, but I always find that I can get my head around things more easily by getting hands-on with them; I suspect it is a result of my engineering degree.

One of my other ideas about the Wave system was that games companies end up with a fair number of living ‘bible’ documents (story bibles, art bibles, game bibles, style guides, the GDD)  and the collaborative real-time nature of Google Wave, together with the playback option, might make it easier for teams to work concurrently on these documents without endlessly stepping on each other’s toes.  After the acclimatisation phase, which would probably be about as damaging to productivity as the day Microsoft added solitaire to Windows, I wondered if it might usher in a new era of interactive working.

Well, I have been experimenting for a few days and I have to say that I am optimistic, but still unsure of the whole thing.  I have been toying with it in short bursts, having injured myself during the week, but I can see some potential there.  In the coming weeks, I hope to gain more insight and report on my successes and failures.  Until then, back on the painkillers.

For those of you on Wave, I am available at elaquine@googlewave.com and open to any advice or tips you may have.

Join me next time for Part 2

Last week, we continued learning about archaic speech. It was another very patronising lesson, but you just keep coming back…

This week, we will learn a little about insults, so let’s put a nice safe break in. Only continue reading if you are sure that you want to…

(continue reading…)

Last week, we started learning about archaic speech. It was a very patronising lesson, but you seem to have come back…

Today, we will learn about oaths and curses. We will touch on religion, some slightly vulgar words and imagery that might border on violence involving sexual acts and anatomical impossibilities.

(continue reading…)

Inspired by my post about playing female characters online, I got thinking about gender roles in RPGs. I don’t believe in women’s things and men’s things, but there is a tendency for people to drift toward certain stereotypes. You probably don’t think about it when you are actually playing a game, but CRPGs do give us stereotypes. Arch-mages are men with beards, clerics are dour men and dwarves if they are NPCs and women if they are PCs. Fighters are men or else women trying to prove themselves better than men, rogues are slimy men or halflings who think they are cassanova.

I played a woman in some MMOs and people used to give me stuff, both in my guild and in pick-up groups. It was never overtly ‘have this because you are a girl’, but I saw so many examples of ‘I don’t really need this, so you might as well have it’ when I was playing a female character and never saw it with male ones. Do people think that a female rogue is more in danger of having substandard equipment?

Playing Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights, the original storyline has two love interests; one is male and one is female. The female interest seemed very much an equal, but very emotional (especially for a paladin) and conflicted. The male interest was stoic and protective, resolute in spite of his troubled past.

I suppose you play to your market. Given the things I have done, the evils to my gender, while working on a game for girls, I cannot really hold it against them. When your market is projected to be mostly men and boys, you play up the wish fulfilment. When (like World of Warcraft) you reach close to equal numbers, you make sure that the genders both get some heroes and heroines.

So you want to try some archaic speech in your roleplaying, be it MMOs or tabletop games? I will try to offer some help over the course of this series of articles which might help.

First of all, ask yourself if it is really a good idea. If you are playing a barbarian, you only really need to yell ‘Krom!’ a few times. On the other hand, done well with a character who justifies it, it can be a great idea. Think of Shakespeare; Romeo spoke in couplets, Hamlet too, but they had style and class. Dogberry, in contrast, was not the ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ type.

(continue reading…)

I am a man. I can’t say that I have ever really wanted to change that. It is not like I have ever gone out in women’s clothing, I have only ever passed myself off as a woman once online, but… people look at me funny when I say that I often play women in games and I am not talking Tomb Raider or Bloodrayne.

My initial reason for this was simply ugly male models in MMOs. Oh, and the fact that I experimented in the bazaar in Everquest and noticed that my female toon tended to make more money than my male one.

I never really ‘played’ a female character in Everquest, so it was D&D Online where I first toyed with joining the distaff side. The male elves looked kind of indistinct and naff, like wiry old men rather than long-lived graceful creatures. The female ones looked a little bit busty, but I put that down to Lara Croft syndrome.

For the first three levels or so, all was fine. Even my female guild-mates accepted me as a female character, but it never got strange. As the guild started to fall apart, I ended up with pick-up groups. Oh dear… Misogynists and idiots abound in any MMORPG, but they seem attracted to pick-up groups. I think anyone playing a female toon who didn’t take off their armour and dance was assumed to be a real woman, to the point where even my protestations were assumed to be playing hard-to-get. In the end, that was what killed the game for me.

But why? Why do people assume that men never play women, even to the point of flirting and inappropriate emotes? Roleplaying is all about being something you’re not, right? I mean, I am not an elf or any good at spoting and disarming potentially-dealy traps either, but people can cope with that particular issue.

I suppose the issue is that people expect you to stick to those truths that you can manage. In D&D stats, we are all level 0 commoners or maybe (in certain cases) level 1 experts with lots of ranks in profession and craft. (some of us could stat ourselves in systems like Shadowrun, but that is another article) Since they offer multiple races in most games, people won’t ever assume that an elf is played by a 120 year-old perpetually-young aesthete, but gender… gender is inviolate…

Why?

There is an E-Zine called Roleplaying Tips Weekly that I read, which I recommend to anyone who runs a tabletop game, and the latest edition has a great article on treasure siphons.

The idea is one that I am quite fond of;it gives the players a reason to care about the world and detracts very little. I will not go too far into it, as I recommend reading it, but the idea can boil down to ‘here is the chance to get 10% extra treasure that you much give away’ – rebuilding orphanages, paying off the rogue’s gambling debts, raising the dowry to offload your ditzy cleric to a nobleman…

You can find the E-Zine at http://www.roleplayingtips.com (link opens in a new window), but the E-mail version tends to be about a week ahead of the website, so try http://www.roleplayingtips.com/readissue.php?number=434 on Friday or so.