In which I explain what sorts of heavily rules-bound play I find generally boring or not worth my time, and why it is so. If you find philosophical investigation boring, skip to the next heading.

But first a few words about roleplaying, as a term. There is roleplaying as a hobby and an activity (and roleplaying games as a small subset of it). Pretending to be someone else, or maybe steering the actions of a fictional character in a fictional world. This is very much the same thing that computer “roleplaying” games are about. Some game being a roleplaying games is a cultural thing: If players think of something as a roleplaying games, than it is. 4e is clearly a roleplaying game, for example. So are the strangest of indie games (but not Universalis). This way of understanding roleplaying is not meaningful when having a conversation with roleplayers or about roleplaying games, because it provides no insight, makes no divisions.

There’s another way roleplaying is talked about. Roleplaying, in this other sense, is something that can be part of playing roleplaying games, but does not need to be. It is often (falsely) contrasted with rollplaying (now I’m feeling dirty), hacking and slashing or perhaps ruleplaying. The common thread seems to be that these are shorthands for activities that happen in games that are not roleplaying games. These distinctions have the potential to be meaningful, as they do separate distinct phenomena, in their crude and unhelpful manner.

This brings us to the culture of discourse among roleplayers. Roleplayers have their jargon, as doubtless do other hobbyists. Many terms have pretty clear meanings, but some are overloaded (that is, have too many distinct meanings) and pretty much unusable. Story and roleplaying are fine examples of this. I won’t talk about story, at least this time. About roleplaying I will.

Roleplaying can mean dialogue spoken in character, immersion (deep or not), random quirks, inter-party banter, dramatic angst, acting, not rolling dice or plenty of other things. People don’t bother defining what they are talking about when they say roleplaying, maybe because they think it is obvious (it is not), or because they don’t know. I doubt most people have the inclination of thinking carefully what words mean, unless prodded to do so. The situation is even more complicated because roleplaying as a word has positive connotations; almost everyone likes to think that they roleplay a lot, as opposed to merely being some foul and barbaric rollplayers.

I want to communicate about roleplaying games; especially about how and why people play, and how they can get better at it. Hence, I need to know what people mean when they say roleplaying. For this reason I try to define what roleplaying is, at least to some extent, when the word gets randomly tossed around. Of course, I like to define it in a way that suits me: Roleplaying (in the narrow sense) is revealing character through play. Revealing to yourself or to others, and revealing character’s personality particularly; beliefs, issues, problems. In play, not when buying a profession (baker) skill in character generation. Your definition may, and is likely to, vary.

… but I had a point to this post, too

A few times in the recent past I’ve used the phrase “but I’d rather be roleplaying”. Usually the context is something like “do you like board games/movies/D&D?” Yes, they are okay, but I’d rather be roleplaying.

As inconsistent as this is of me, I don’t really mean roleplaying in either of the ways outlined above when uttering this phrase. Rather, I mean roleplaying as imagining interesting events and improvising what happens next. I think. Something like that. The fiction is what matters, but creating it is the actual heart of roleplaying, to me. So: The storytelling is what matters.

It is clear that movies and board games do not allow me to meaningfully participate in shared storytelling. In case of board games, the story we might build around the game does not matter, as rules are what matters and what is manipulated.

Railroaded games do not allow meaningful fiction creation, either, as the outcome and the important parts are fixed. Details may vary. This, of course, depends on the degree of railroading, but I am talking of the extreme case here.

Traditional combat systems are an edge case: They create fiction and often allow meaningful input, but they are utterly slow and they often limit the inputs and outputs that get used, even if there is room for more exotic actions. Once miniatures in modern D&D hit the table, interesting fiction does not often happen. There’s just a series of “I swing (or use Utterly Awesome Anime Power), you hit with maybe some description (or Conditions of Great Awesomity are placed on characters that also move around a bit and some enemies take damage), they swing, miss, you swing, …”. Maybe there’s an interesting visual effect every now and then, unless overshadowed by Anime Powerz, but could we get on with the shared storytelling and interacting in the fiction and all the interesting stuff already? Please? Burning Wheel has some of the same problems, but it does tend to create more interesting fiction; it would take lots of practice to make the extended resolution systems fast enough, though.

I feel I am again getting closer and closer to what I actually enjoy in roleplaying; this time, thanks to Jukka Särkijärvi’s Pathfinder game (which was fun enough, but I would rather have been roleplaying). At the moment, I would characterise my sources of enjoyment in roleplaying as follows (I’m pretty sure I’m missing something important still, but this is a work in progress.)

• Fiction I enjoy, which includes swords and sorcery, strange metaphysics, fantasy and scifi that are pretty realistic (by which I mean “close to real world in what is possible” and also internally consistent) but have clearly distinct and separate supernatural or alien parts.
• Structured social interaction with my friends and with interesting people. (All my friends are interesting people. The converse is not true.)
• Shared creation of fiction, which I talked about above. Shared, because everyone can and will add things and nobody has done the creation before play.

A friend has been busy for some time and wanted a bunch of nice roleplaying-related links. Almost all of these links I have shared and starred on Google Reader; but not all of those are included here. There’s a mix of play advice and cultural commentary, as well as some lightweight theory (these are not distinct sets). With no further commentary and in almost reverse chronological order:

http://oldguyrpg.blogspot.com/2009/06/dispelling-myth-sandbox-prep.html

http://bankuei.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/the-stories-we-want-to-see/

http://lotfp.blogspot.com/2009/06/i-hate-fun-one-year-later.html

http://lotfp.blogspot.com/2009/06/i-am-nobody-in-real-life.html

http://leagueofimaginaryheroes.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/support-for-situation-generation/

http://drivingblind.livejournal.com/445875.html

http://buriedwithoutceremony.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/no/

http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2009/05/28/fiction-first/

http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2009/05/25/skill-systems-are-sometimes-a-good-idea/

http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2009/05/its-not-just-about-fun.html

http://philgamer.wordpress.com/2009/05/20/scion-return-of-the-yes-but/

http://rob-donoghue.livejournal.com/335247.html

http://revolution21days.blogspot.com/2009/05/industry-is-irrelevant.html

http://trollsmyth.blogspot.com/2009/05/where-pros-are.html

http://rob-donoghue.livejournal.com/334550.html

http://philgamer.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/character-development-happens-in-game/

In other news, I’ve been running Shadow of the Yesterday, a most fantastic game, in the local university rpg group. Someone’s going to be sacrificed to the serpent god in a session or two and we’ll probably end the game shortly after that. The player base has had few changes, but overall we’ve been doing fine. I’ve done one severe mistake thus far, which is acceptable, but annoying.

Soon I’ll probably start a sci-fi game inspired by Alien(s) and Starcraft. I’ve run a sort of introductory scenario in which a research facility was overrun (one player character probably died, others lived) by aliens / the zerg. Rules set will be modified tSoY, since I’m on a kick and enjoy it. I’ll be back to homebrewing and running or maybe even playing in homebrewed games in some months, likely as not. I don’t read much science fiction, so the setting creation is likely to be fairly co-operative to reduce the number of quite assured cries of implausibility. Also: New player introduced to roleplaying. Maybe it sticks, maybe not; I play with people, not to act as a recruitment officer for the hobby.

I played a game of Pathfinder society (which still used rules of D&D 3,5). Jukka Särkijärvi was the GM. Players were me, Gastogh, Veltzeh and one other person whom I had not met before.

I’ll start with observations on the scenario, local playing style and general anthropology. There’ll be some mild spoilers. For context: I’ve game mastered a fair deal of third edition and played it maybe thrice, but it’s been a while.

I created a first level character (halberdier with some talent in tripping people and making showy entrances). Other characters were a paladin of first level, and a druid and monk of higher level (2 or 3). I entered not knowing anything about the local play culture with regards to, say, optimisation; I just relied on the fact that if you create a third edition character and don’t try anything fancy it will usually work out okay, which it did.

First difference to my usual play was fiddling with all the equipment; not very interesting, IMO. Ready-made packages of standard equipment would be useful and make character generation significantly faster.

My character done and we were slowly starting to play, so I naturally asked what they were playing. Responses were roughly race (if not human), class, ad maybe somethig else. I have very fuzzy conceptions of what the character looked like, except for Veltzeh’s char of whom we had a picture. I did not talk much about my character, either, as it evidently was not the way things were done thereabouts.

The scenario itself worked as follows: The big Pathfinder organisation gives a job and some goals to achieve and then factions give a sidequest each for their members (each character being a member of one faction, I think). There’s also secrecy about the faction goals, which does deter the party hydra phenomenon a bit, but does not create compelling narrative as characters are not allowed to mess with each others’ subgoals, much less fight each other. (The party hydra phenomenon is when all characters act and work as though they were the the heads of a hydra, always having the same goals and wanting the same things.)

My sidequest was to talk to a specific person and do it out of hearing of other PCs (including the elven druid with quite keen hearing, which was conveniently forgotten or ignored in play). I had no idea if I had to actually drive gameplay towards achieving this goal or if I could just loiter along and the prestige award (which one gets for completing faction sidequests) would come for free. Proactivity would have been awfully risky, so I just went along and the prestige award was waiting along the rails. Had I been playing some other (the temptation to write “proper” is strong) roleplaying game, I would have actively reached for the goal and created all sorts of amusing situations, but it did not feel the right thing to do in a D&D game, where the mentality is very much that of players and characters trying to beat the scenario and players guarding their characters from permanent harm.

The scenario was very much a railroad; walk along this path, kill zombies and cultists and priest/priestesses, talk a bit every now and then. The fights were the most interesting part of it all. At the end we destroyed (probably had to destroy) an ages-old artifect, but it had no impact, because we did not see any alteratives. Genre-wise it was D&D fantasy, though the world could easily support sword and sorcery play, too. I don’t think Pathfinder society can, however, due to the inherent limitations of the format.

Jukka (the GM) made a point of describing attacks, hits and misses, for which I respect him. However, they don’t have any further effect on play; not mechanical, not anything else, at least most of the time. The descriptions hence are superfluous, sort of. As a design issue the indie designer Vincent Baker has been thik about something similar: If you can simply say what you are about to do (Attack the zombie) and the roll the dice, hence creating the effect (damaged / falls / miss), the actual details of how the effects come by is extra. It can be skipped. Hence it is very easy to skip. I’d go as far as to say that this is a design flaw in D&D.

All that said, I did enjoy the game and felt relaxed and in a friendly environment. The social dimension and jokes were more important than the game proper, though the game did inform said interaction and gave it structure, as well as killing random potentially awkward silences. There were tactically convenient boxes (one can climb on top of them and use them as cover), priestesses with minion masks that obscured their features and other such amusities (that should be a word if it is not). Jukka, BTW: If negative energy is inherently evil, why are spells using it not so?

I do recommend Pathfinder Society to people who like third edition. From talk at the table I got the impression that the quality and style of the scenarios varies greatly. Great variance between the assumptions of scenarios might make the play less pleasant, as one would have to adjust to fit the given scenario and hope one guesses right. I don’t know if such variance exists. I also don’t know if it bother most players. I just like knowing how I should play in a particular game so as to not be disruptive and to also enjoy the play.

The fairly new blogger zzarchov raises several issues over at Unofficial games; his solutions may not be the best (I tend to prefer less rules-intensive ones) and issues are not relevant to all playing styles, but they are generally worth thinking about. There are free games available at the related website. I haven’t looked at the games yet, mostly due to lack of time and one being in a .exe format and hence requiring WINE to work, given my free operating system.

I wrote a post about using some skills explicitly for setting scenes. The Dane (I think) Morten Greiss responded in his native language; those of us not fluent must resort to butchering it with poor translations, alas. The key points do come through. Morten’s idea is that any skill can be used in starting conflicts, but then the same skill can’t be used to resolve the conflict it started. I think it is pretty excellent an idea. Also, in the comments there’s talk about running freeform and more scripted games using this technique.

Olorin posted his roleplaying history and linked to the other Finnish ones we’ve seen thus far. Further, there’s meta-edition wars! That is, Olorin explaining why all the edition warriors are fucking idiots (there’s bit of depth there).

I might be running a scifi game some time soon. Aesthetic inspiration: Alien(s)-movies and Terran (meaning humans) in Starcraft. The idea is to make most of technology plausible by current standards; that is, works with logic acceptable by modern humans, but may be significantly more effective.

I don’t intend to engage in any sort of science or technology fetishism, but one little thing has the power to shape societies and gameplay alike, so I’m going to worry a bit about it. That one thing is communication.

So, assuming technology that is plausible by modern standards and some way of taking people to other stars and keeping the people mostly alive in the process by some means (such as self-sufficient spaceships or handwavy stasis; more ideas welcome), how might communication work between different solar systems? How fast and how reliable could it be?

I’m somewhat at a loss here, not being a huge scifi reader or fan. On that note, can anyone recommend some scifi literature with suitable tone? (Other media might work, also, but is likely to be less useful to me.)

Bruce posted about situation generation and the difficulties inherent in it, as well as a possible solution for those difficulties. It is a post well worth reading, so I won’t explain the contents of it here.

It reminded me of an idea I had once mentioned to a local friend: Some skills are used in conflicts (mainly to solve them), while others are used to gather information or find something; generally to set a scene. This divide is of course informal and not all skills fit in one category or the other.

What would happen if the divide was made explicit? Some skills are clearly in one category or other, but let us arbitrary divide the borderline cases to the two categories also (dice can be used in the process). Now players whose characters have lots of conflict-level skills will tend to do well once things get nasty, while those with more scene-setting skills can decide which conflicts, and which sorts of conflicts, to get involved in. Utter specialisation is for insects, in this case, and for only marginally functional characters.

There are other effects. Some skills simply can’t be used to set up scenes. If, say, sneaking is such a skill, then it must be used in conflicts. Hide and seek is only the last resort, used when the plan proper goes awry. In similar way, maybe riding can only be used to set scenes. You ride to get around, not to skewer people with a lance.

It does not need to be quite that straightforward. How about a game where fighting can only be used to set scenes, not resolve them? You assault an invading army not to defeat them by fighting but rather to reach their leader; succeed and you do so in a swathe of blood, fail and you are forced to kneel, bound and beaten, when the actual conflict starts. It might take the shape of rousing speech, insults, a touching performance, something arcane, or maybe a contest of riddles. Maybe a contest to have the black-clad evil one see how wrong his deeds are and to turn against his even more evil master.

Conclusion being that drawing an absolute and explicit line between skills that can be only used in conflicts or only used to set up scenes one can alter the gameplay significantly.

Certainly there is more to do. Maybe making this divide is a group process, much like group character creation. “Everyone select two skills that you want to be used in dramatic situations.” Maybe the line is drawn in different places for different characters, hence creating clear niche protection and probably other interesting effects. Might be especially interesting in a PvP environment: Everyone maneuvers to encounter the other in a situation most advantageous to oneself.

There is more still. How are scene-setting skills used? Maybe in the process of free play when someone notices there is an opportunity for their use. Maybe go around the table clockwise, everyone having a scene in order and setting it up with some skill along the way. (Being involved in scenes started by others is smart.)

There’s a game to be designed lurking in these ideas, I think.

Mostly inspired by Donny the DM’s posts, namely this and this, the first of which was shared by Jonathan Jacobs of forthcoming Nevermet press on Google Reader.

Donny somewhat mischaracerises the extremes of sandbox play, also misuses GNS and makes a number of assumptions, but I thought it would be nice to engage his actual point, too.

I hope I am not misrepresenting Donny too severely. By my understanding Donny’s point is, to steal a term from another field, ecumenical. Donny wants to say that old school and 4e play are not that different after all. Donny’s argument is that since ridiculously extreme sandbox play and ridiculously extreme railroading don’t really work, everyone must actually play in the middle ground and hence in pretty similar way.

There is a number of weaknesses on the argument in addition to misrepresenting railroading. Donny is pretty focused on D&D and it shows. D&D assumes lots of combat. Donny’s argument also assumes lots of combat. Further, not all ways of playing map meaningfully to the railroading-sandbox axis. My normal style of game mastering is story-focused but I don’t plan ahead and hence can’t railroad; there is no point in mapping this to the railroad-sandbox axis. This is not a big problem as one can fabricate a ridiculously extreme version of my style, too, and use argument similar to what Donny used. I will assume that this applies to all possible ways of playing.

The key claim remains: Since all extremes are implausible, all styles of play must be pretty close to each other and fundamentally similar. My perspective is that the claim is too ecumenical, but still has a kernel of truth hidden in it.

First the true part: Certainly, all of roleplaying shares many similarities. Certainly different play traditions have much to learn from each other. I mix and match techniques from old school play and indie games. Philippe, a 4e afficiando if there ever was one, experiments with random encounters. 4e with the focus on encounters has something to teach if one is willing to look carefully, but they really ought to read and play some indie games so as to get a handle of skill challenges, which are a pretty blunt instrument. More importantly: It is possible to enjoy playing in styles that are not one’s favourite, as long as one is willing to approach them with open mind. (Also, having less edition wars would be nice.)

Nevertheless, people play in different ways. I hear some even like railroading and pre-plotted adventures! Hard to accept, but true. The differences are real. Some styles of play demand very much a different perspective for them to be enjoyed. Donny himself illustrates this by the following comments:

As to gathering information. <snip> You either railroad them (just have someone spill their guts as to where you want them to go), or you sandbox them (roll on the random rumor table and they go in the direction the dice tell them to – stomping off blindly indeed :)

No, you do neither of those. You give them the information that they could gather, maybe influenced by dice rolls. Maybe it guides to some interesting adventurous location that you have designed and placed somewhere, but not because you want the player characters to go there, but because you want to present going there as an option. When designing the sandbox, you place a bunch of interesting locations there and create a bunch of interesting random encounters, because you want to know what the players will do to them. In play you don’t guide them around; their characters are an adventurous bunch or so involved in the situation that they will certainly undertake some interesting project or stumble upon something interesting.

That is; instead of director who has a story to tell or encounters to guide the players through, the GM thinks of himself (or herself) as an arbitrator who can’t wait to see what the players do with his sandbox. A different frame of mind. Certainly one can mix and match, for example by creating a sandbox with very strong theme or by creating an adventure with many genuine choices that take it to different directions. Regardless, the extreme but playable cases are pretty far from each other.

As a conclusion I say that those weirdos over there do play in genuinely different way, but once you accept that the difference exists, you just might be able to enjoy their activity, too. Or maybe not. But at the very least you would be likely to learn a bit and get a new experience. Celebrate the difference.

Back when I was just getting fed up with D&D I found an interesting set of variant character classes as designed mostly by one poster called Szatany at WotC’s forums. Luckily, the good folk of Campaign builders’ guild have saved them over at their wiki: http://www.thecbg.org/wiki/index.php?title=Ultimate_Classes

I particularly recommend the barbarian. Adventurer is boring. Don’t start by reading it. The classes are probably for edition 3.5, but that doesn’t really matter. I know next to nothing about Pathfinder, but it is supposed to be backwards compatible.

The classes are notable because they embody what is maybe the greatest strength of 3e: One can take just about any ability in the fiction and come up with an interesting representation for it in the mechanics. (Just be careful with the social stuff.) One implication is that they are pretty good inspiration even if one does not play relevant editions of D&D, as long as one is literate in d20.

I’ll write a post or a few about probabilities that involve rolling dice. Those who know mathematics might be more interested in probability theory.

I will assume that all probability distributions are discrete and integer-valued. Trying to apply what I say here to continuous distributions will cause problems or require thinking.

Probability

Probability measures, or indicates, how certain it is that some event will happen (or has happened, in case of imperfect knowledge). Probability of 1 means that something is certain, while 0 means impossibility. Probability 1/2, or , or 50%, or 0.5 or in Finnish notation 0,5 means that something happens half the time (if the event is repeated).

I very much prefer working with fractions as they are exact and, in my opinion, more intuitive, but many people like percents. To convert a fraction into percents simply multiply it by hundred and add the %-sign.

An important axiom of probability is that something always happens. The sum of probabilities of all the specific outcomes is 1. By this I mean that if, say, a die is rolled than it gives one and exactly one result. It doesn’t land sideways. It is not hit by a meteor or eaten by a dog.

Symmetry

Especially when playing around with dice symmetry plays an important role. Symmetric events have the same probability.

I will assume that all dice are fair; in practice they are not and it doesn’t matter. An n-sided die has n symmetric results. All of them hence have the same probability. Something must always happen, so the sum of the probabilities is 1. It follows that for an n-sided die the probability of getting any result from the set is 1/n, while the probability of getting any other integer is zero.

Notation

Since writing probability all the time gets boring, I’ll use a shorthand: , which means the probability that event happens is p. For example: and .

or, and, not

Some rules for performing calculations with probabilities are in order. First, a definition: Events are independent when knowing something about one of them gives no knowledge about the others. Dice rolls are, as far as this post is concerned, independent: I roll a d12 and get a 1. This tells me nothing about what the next result will be when I roll that d12.

Take two independent events A and B. Now . For example: The probability of rolling 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 (that is: not 6) with a six-sider is 5/6. If we roll two d6s, what is probability of both of them giving a result less than six? Since separate rolls are independent events, this probability is 5/6 times 5/6, which equals 25/36. This rule applies to any finite number of rolls. As long as they are independent, and means multiplication. The independence is not there for show only: Suppose I roll a singe d4. What is the probability of that die giving result of both 1 and 4 at the same time? Obviously, since a given die only gives one result per roll, the event is impossible and hence has probability zero. Careless use of the “and is multiplication”-rule would give 1/4 times 1/4 equals 1/16, which would be wrong.

Multiplying fractions, in case it is not clear: Supposing a, b, c and d are real numbers, b and d are not zero, then .

Take any event. Now . This is a direct consequence of something always happening. Example: The probability of rolling 6 with a d6 is 1/6, from which it follows that the probability of not rolling a 6, which is the probability of rolling something else than 6, is . Now we have the tools for solving one problems with some history: Roll 4d6. Should you bet on rolling at least one 6? The goal here is to determine . Using the law of not this problem is the same as determining the probability of none of the dice showing 6, which is same as all of them giving a result from the set . We already know this probability for a single die: It is 5/6. Since separate rolls are made, the events are independent, and hence by the law of and we can simply multiply 5/6 four times, which means raising it to the fourth power: , which is slightly less than half. By the principle of not we get that the probability of getting at least one 6 is slightly more than half and should be betted on. By symbols the calculation goes as follows: , which is greater than 648/1296 = 1/2.

Take two events A and B. The probability of at least one of them happening, by which I mean P(A or B), equals the sum of their probabilities minus the probability of A and B both happening; otherwise  the “and” would be counted twice. So, for any events A and B, . An important special case: A single d12 is rolled. What is ?. Since rolling 7 and 9 are clearly distinct events, the probability of both happening with single die roll is 0 (since they never happen at the same time). Hence Another useful application: Roll 2d6. What is the probability that at least one of them shows a 6? This can be formulated in another way: What is the probability of first die showing a 6 or the second die showing a 6? Here the events are independent since two dice are cast. Hence, .

More to come?

If someone finds this useful, please say so. I do not know how good I am at expository text like this and I really don’t know the skill level of my audience, if any. A topic I might handle in the future, if anyone is interested, is how to calculate the distribution of a sum of two arbitrary distributions.

I managed to land a quite demanding job, so frequent updates are somewhat unlikely, at least for some time. I’ll need to do some adjusting.

I’m on Facebook. The user interface is very, very bad. Few questions:

Can I add my shared Google reader entries to my profile? What about my blog posts, their titles or something similar? Stumbled things?

Also, if I happen to know you, feel free to add me as a friend. If we have had a discussions via blogs or other means it is quite sufficient for me adding you as a friend.