All About the Benjamins (Part 1)

Damn, it's hot again.

Sitting in the bar, in a t-shirt and my phone reads its about 77 degrees and it feels quite a bit hotter. No, Seattle is not Montana but it's still sweat-worthy (town hasn't had rain in more than a month...ugh). I'm sure it will cool down by the Seahawks first home game (a week from Sunday) and I should probably be enjoying it now...but I get thirsty when it's hot and strong drink makes my head swimmy and my spelling messy. Well, messier than normal anyway.

[okay...short interlude while I grab another drinky...hold on...]

All right...all good.

So, quick update before I begin. No apologies this time: my family (wife and child) got back in town Sunday before last after being gone a week-and-a-half and I've spent the time since mainly enjoying the pleasure of their company. Took a long weekend over Labor Day and travelled to Montana to visit the relatives and unwind a bit and did...um...pretty much ZERO writing when I was out there (though the wife and I did manage to power through most of Downton Abbey, season 2, on DVD. Best show I've seen from TV land since, perhaps, Firefly for sheer damn quality: acting, writing, emotion, art direction...good stuff and top notch). Now, well...the wife leaves for Paraguay again on Saturday and I am preparing to once again be a single parent for a week. What with the NFL season breaking into full force on Sunday, you can expect little blogging out of me in the foreseeable future.

Well, maybe. Thing is, it's just been a bitch getting on the internet weekdays the last couple weeks because of my job location. The only place I can hit up to post is a school campus library (don't ask) and it's been mostly closed during the last couple weeks for the school break. Since nights aren't free...well...

All right, like I said I just wanted to do a QUICK update. Now, prior to my family coming home folks might remember me doing a scratch poll asking what folks would like me to work on, writing-wise, while my fam was out of town. The Top 5 requests were fairly surprising to me:

#1 D&D Mine (?!)

#2 Land of Ice

#3 CDF

#4 B/X Space Opera

#5 Clockwork (?!)

[oh, and just by the way...it appears there is a current crowd-funding project going on to raise money for a new Clockworks RPG (note the "s") using the Savage Worlds system for a web-comic by the same name. Personally, the numerology isn't good enough to fight someone over the name, so I will probably rename my cyborg-Boot Hill mash-up. However, I will note that MY Clockwork micro-game was first published (on this blog) 9-8-2009. On the other hand, the webcomic is older (having begun June 2009) though the settings bear little resemblance to each other...whatever]

Well, anyway, I'm sure folks are anxious to know what I spent my 10 free days working on. Right? Sure you are.

None of the above. I wrote a new game.

Even had a chance to playtest it a couple weeks ago. Basically I took a lot of the ideas I've been working with in D&D Mine, wrapped it around a turn-o-the-century (1900, not 2000) setting and added all the old school Lost World tropes found in Verne and Haggard and Doyle, etc. Dinosaurs, people. I don't know why but these days I have an unhealthy obsession with hunting dinosaurs with elephant guns.

The great thing is, using a B/X starting point allowed me to simply adapt X1: The Isle of Dread as a near-perfect introductory adventure.

I say "near perfect" because I grow more and more tired with "generic adventure modules." Not because they aren't useful or well-done but because the systems I've been writing lately all make the player characters (slimly out-lined though they are) more richly detailed...in such a way that they call for tailored adventures specially made for their own particular foibles and extravagances.

For example, our Lost World characters (in the play-test) consisted of a debonair (if debauched and corrupt) Portuguese criminal, a disgraced and exiled Moscovian scientist-professor, and an American ex-pat, Davy Crockett-type living in Panama (these all created by the players...I don't like to play-test with pre-gens as part of the testing involves testing the chargen rules). While it was fairly easy to shoehorn the three together after a little discussion/consensus-building by the time they got to the "mysterious south Pacific island" I was wishing I'd set the whole adventure in the Amazon, preferably with ties to each character's background. It just would have made so much more sense.

As it was, it was still fun and many of the rules worked (though I acknowledge the info I provided to the players was pretty damn scant: "roll this." "roll that." "take damage." etc.). However, there were definitely things that didn't work, especially with regard to motivation and the push-pull dichotomy I intended to set-up with PCs between ethics (Victorian or otherwise) and temptations to be bad. And while players (and designers) of indie-games will say "duh, you need to sculpt a game with those things in mind, not based on a wargame chassis, doofus," I know what I'm aiming for and one-off, premise addressing narrative game design is NOT it.

And after some contemplation, I realized a very fundamental concept of fantasy adventure games which is what I'm more and more becoming interested in and that is...

Wait. Wait. "Fantasy adventure games?"

Yeah. I'm getting tired of "story games" and "role-playing games" (the term...really) and I'm not very good at "war games" due to my somewhat over-competitive nature (my buddy Mike used to tell me 'it's not that you're a sore loser, you're just such a bad winner'). And, of course, the whole boxed-board game-thang of 4th edition really isn't my cup-o-tea.

I want fantasy adventure. No, I'm not being dumb. Try to catch my drift from this point o view: it's not about being an interesting character. It's not. It's about doing interesting things. You can use your imagination to daydream about about being...well, pick your well-cut action hero celebrity of choice. But I can do that withOUT a game. What I can't do is have an imaginary adventure...where the plot is unknown and the ending is unknown and my reaction to events is unknown until they're presented. I want to have a fantastic, imaginary adventure...something outside the normal adventure of average life.

Not that there ISN'T adventure...perils and intrigue and romance and whatnot...in daily life. There is (it really is a matter of perspective)...but still, you can't fly through space or fight trolls or wear a six-shooter on your hip in daily life (at least, you probably shouldn't). The fantastic experience, coupled with the (melodramatic perhaps) adventure is what I'm looking for.

And shit...I got distracted by DNC highlights and now my computer's almost out of juice and I haven't even gotten to the tagline. (*sigh*)

To be continued...

Adventure, Exploration, and Action

I love adventure and exploration fiction.

Which is probably not all that surprising since anyone who plays RPGs are drawn to the much the same kind of escapist fantasy (pulp or otherwise) as that to which I'm drawn.

But can simple exploration work in an RPG?

What got me thinking about this? Well Raggi's most recent post over at LotFP, for one thing. The fact that my wife and I spent several hours watching 17 straight episodes of Lost's most recent season yesterday for a second.

[yes, it should come as no surprise I'm a big fan of this show...I'd seen every episode previously, but it's been so damn long, I figured I'd better "refresh" before the final season started airing on Tuesday. Yeah, I have my own theories regarding the show, including the Jacob conflict (feels pretty obvious to me this is the Old Testament Jacob-Esau showdown and Richard is a Roman Legionnaire or an incarnation of the god Anubis, but hey I'm sure we'll all find out this season, right?]

I'm drawn to this particular genre of "weird adventure" like a moth to a flame...it's part of the reason I enjoy Jules Verne and other types of mystery-solving-through-movement.

Now Lost may not be a fantastic example of this due to the prevalence of action/violence, but let's look at Disney's Atlantis: the Lost Empire, a film I absolutely loved. Here, the main character has not a single action/violent bone in his body, and while there IS a fight sequence at the end of the film, it feels very secondary compared to the rest of the movie. At least to me. The fun is not in the action sequences so much as uncovering the weirdness and exploring this subterranean/underwater kingdom.

Of course, Atlantis didn't do very well at the box office, so maybe I'm different from some folks.

I'm not a huge action fan...yes, I did go see Ninja Assassin, but I've seen only a single Steven Seagal film and precious view of the usual trite "action" flicks. Most straight action films bore the shit out of me. But then I love a movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark. Is this because Indiana Jones is a "thinking man's action hero?" No. Is it because the action is so well choreographed by the film makers. Not really...I mean the couple gun fights or fist fights that occur are interesting in context, but there are few close-ups of the action...and much of the time Harry Ford is getting the crap kicked out of him.

I think that besides the compelling story of the film, there is something about this character's exploration of far off lands and ancient mysteries that is downright compelling to watch. Certainly in Lost, I am as much interested in figuring out "what's going on" as in seeing "what's going to happen next." Hell, that's the same thing that is so compelling (to me) about Lovecraft's stories. Precious little action, but they certainly pique the curiosity to "find out more."

This is very different from the post-apocalyptic fiction I've been blogging about the last week or so. In PA, no one really cares about "what's going on" only about "what happens next." After all, the past has this huge demarcation line called The Cataclysm or The Apocalypse, and it's a line no one can really cross...or cares to cross. That grim struggle for survival and community re-building is too all important to worry about. I'm reading Dies the Fire (about halfway through) and no one's too worried what Alien Space Bats are responsible for the Change...just how to deal with it. Same with the dragons in Reign of Fire or who-fired-first in The Day After. I haven't yet seen The Road, but my understanding is no one even bothers to explain what cataclysmic disaster has wrecked the world.

But in non-post-holocaust exploration fiction, what happens next isn't nearly as interesting as what happened before or what's going on...in fact "what happens next" is often a piece of the puzzle being unraveled...some part of the mystery being solved, the secret being revealed. Combat, if it occurs, is generally secondary to everything else, and most often a resolution to an adventure cannot be met through violence alone.

Look at the climactic scenes of any Indiana Jones film...or Mysterious Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Or At the Mountains of Madness. Seldom, if ever, does the story end in a melee between the hero and the antagonist (which is the usual ending of most ANY action film). Characters can have adventures withOUT getting blood on their hands. Certainly I feel that my own travels around the world have been "mini-adventures" and I've never once got into a fight anywhere!

D&D is not set up to be this kind of game, and that's fine with me...I don't see it as doing "exploration adventure" so much. Hollow Earth Expedition on the other hand COULD be this kind of game, but it's a little too action-pulp oriented (in addition to being a bit mechanical-clunk heavy), a little too Doc Savage to be "action-free." Or rather, one could use it in such a way but it's not economically designed for this type of game...it's designed to shoot dinosaurs and beat up nazis.

The original question...can simple exploration-adventure work in an RPG...remains. I think it can, but it's not for everyone. I'm not sure how you can make it a game "worth playing," not because people don't like exploration and unraveling mysteries (they do), but because people like to get this "fix" through different mediums...cinema, literature, real travel and research. Can one make a "game" that embraces this genre and interests people in playing it? Maybe...call it a Traveller game that doesn't take place in space.

; )