Storium, experimenting for new media

www.Storium.com

Well I missed the KSer for this but found their site through someones post. I thought it looked interesting and for $40 a year I felt I could try it and see how it goes.

Well, its great. Which is quite surprising.

I sent an email out to a wide group of people as I didn't expect a big take up, and I was right. I had to follow that up with some high pressure selling to a few people, but in the end I have 8 players, which is great if possibly a couple too many.  I think the ideal figure is 6, but an extra 2 doesnt seem to be too hard to handle so far.

So part of the reason I wanted to use Storium was to use my 'world' - Sarmarkand, as a background. This was going to be great as it allowed me to use a lot of pre-generated stuff and it would hopefully generate new content that I could use.  Another advantage is that I would give them an intro bunch of information and then feed them more details as we went along. This would allow me to judge how good the stuff was, plus cast an external eye over it in case there were problems.

So the first act, first scene is all the players waking up on an airship after an event that killed most of the rest of the ships complement, and then working out what to do. They had tasks to re-inflate the balloon, repair the ship, defeat some shadow spiders etc etc.

So far we are upto scene 3 and from feedback it seems most people are really enjoying it. In particular they are enjoying the non-face to face element, the time to think, and the freedom of the narrative process that Storium uses.

My greatest satisfaction comes from getting my girlfriend to play, and enjoy herself. She is a total-non-gamer, but the points I stated above, plus my most persuasive performance, got her into the game and really enjoying the creative writing element it allows her. I have had to guide her over the mechanical process of the game, but the narrative aspects of the story writing have been all hers.  I keep telling her it is NOT a game, but a story.

There are some issues with the system however, it is after all only a gamma version. There need to be a few extra options included in the game. One I think it really needs is story events (obstacles) triggered by players who have narrative control of the end of a scene.  In our game we have agreed to do this by allowing the players to put an aside comment in [text] brackets. This will be a suggestion to the Narrator, who can then elect to insert extra obstacles, or guides the opening or direction of the next scene.

You also have to be sure to set your players expectations properly, this is NOT a game.  At the beginning I put out a lot of asset pickups for the players because I come from a crunchy mechanistic reward based back ground. So seeing all that loot some of the rpg players grabbed some quickly, where-as, in retrospect some of it wasn't needed, and some of the players needed to adjust their attitude.

I have been trying to drum into everyone that they should always be "adding, enhancing, extending the moves already made". Take your time, don't try to solve the obstacle all at once by doing a big dump of cards, allow everyone to participate. This seems to be getting through now.

If you have people who have been reluctant to try a roleplaying game I totally recommend you try to convince them to use Storium. Take your time, guide them, but let them find their own story and they will probably get into it.

Following is an extract of Scene 2, which I thought was pretty good.

Nieve (Ambrose01) moved • Yesterday at 10:23 AM

SHADOW SPIDERSShadow Spiders

MAGIC WORDSMagic Words

Nieve, still smarting at being ridiculed by his fellow Mage, decides to help the others by casting a powerful spell with an aura that burns away the Darkness and Shadows and all things that dwell within. The engine room resounds with alien squealing as Dark Things shrivel within the powerful magical light. Dark charred corpses litter the floor and Nieve is smug with the knowledge that he did this all by himself.
Then realisation, he did NOT kill them all as spidery shadows come crawling out of hidden places.
Nieve exclaims, “ Spiders! Fuck I hate spiders! Eek!”

Nieve picked up the card   Fear of Spiders

Nieve picked up the card   Pistol

Pierre (AliJH) moved • Yesterday at 11:01 AM

SHADOW SPIDERSShadow Spiders

QUITE INVENTIVEQuite Inventive

CANISTER OFBLAUGASCanister of BlauGas

Thinking quickly Pierre drops the lantern and uses the aftermath of Nieve’s spellcasting to dart forward and retrieve a canister of blaugas. “I’ve just the thing he mutters” as he fishes out a small handheld pump he keeps about his person for ship maintenance and jerry rigs it to draw from the canister. Smiling to himself with grim satisfaction he lights a piece of wooden debris from the lantern to act as ignition and attacks the nearest spiders, surely setting everything in sight alight could only cause delight.

Pierre picked up the card   Canister of BlauGas

Nazdeen (Nazdeen) moved • Yesterday at 11:10 AM

SHADOW SPIDERSShadow Spiders

MAGI SPELL POWERSMagi Spell Powers

ELEMENTAL MASTERYElemental mastery

Nieve’s revealing incantation, allows Nazdeen to take in the way forward and the creatures that have claimed it.
Wooden furniture loosened by the crash litters the way but her magical sences sees the resonance within the wood’s structure.
In a quiet singing voice that talks to the wood’s essence, Nazdeen sings to the wood close to the spiders. Next, in an explodsion of small splinters the spiders are enveloped in a cloud of deadly wooden missiles.

Hugo "Icepick" Jenkins (you) moved • Yesterday at 12:58 PM • Edit

NAVIGATE THE CARGODECKNavigate the cargo deck

GIVE ME THE OPENSKIESGive me the open skies

flynnkd (you) won control of the story by completing this challenge with a weak outcome.

Hugo starts down the steep stairway just as the light blasts out, blinding him. He stagers and trips, lurches forward and downward. Suddenly the feeling of naked fire washes over him, his native instincts, primed by memories of his crew burning and dying, he reels away, trips over a pile of loose rope, stagers, falls, crawls and collapses to the deck, lying in the midst of a bunch of somewhat bemused, dog sized, slavering spiders. But he can see the doorway to the engine room ahead. He lifts a shaking hand and heroically points his finger.

The narrator continued the scene • Yesterday at 1:15 PM

CHALLENGESChallenges

FIRE!Fire!

Wooden ships and confined spaces don’t mix with open flames.

Nieve (Ambrose01) moved • Yesterday at 2:24 PM

SHADOW SPIDERSShadow Spiders

MAGI SPELL POWERSMagi Spell Powers

“Screw the ship - those spiders are big as horses!”
Drawing from his inner reserves of magic (—although completely out of courage) Nieve draws a deep deep breath and air is drawn like a gale out of the engine room to deprive the spiders of valuable air to breath and fires to flicker out of existence with no valuable oxygen to sustain them.

……….. hang on. Don’t people need to breath?
When the spell ends air rushes in from the deck.

Nieve picked up the card   Cannister of Abyss Ash

Nazdeen (Nazdeen) moved • Yesterday at 2:43 PM

FIRE!Fire!

STUDENT OF NATUREStudent of Nature

Following up on Nieve’s idea of depriving the fire of air which seemed to have some affect, Nadzeen’s song of magic changes tempo to a breathy whistling. The air rushing back in from the deck forms a whirling barrier around the fire instead of rushing back in to breath new life to the dying flames.

Nazdeen picked up the card   A bag of silver

Nazdeen picked up the card   Bag of exotic spices

Hugo "Icepick" Jenkins (you) moved • Yesterday at 2:49 PM • Edit

FIRE!Fire!

SURVIVALISTSurvivalist

flynnkd (you) won control of the story by completing this challenge with a strong outcome.

The air goes out, the air goes in, the air shakes itself all about. in the mean time Hugo, deprived of air, unable to see clearly, surrounded by fire and slavering dog sized spiders, blacks out and stops worrying about the bomb.

Marziq (Maree) moved • Yesterday at 3:03 PM

SHADOW SPIDERSShadow Spiders

FAST AND FURIOUSFast and furious

Marziq draws her dagger and throws it spinning in the air, clutching with her teeth when it descends, while also drawing her rapier. She grabs a hanging rope which allows her to swing over the top of the closest spiders, safely landing close to Hugo, then lashes out with blades furiously cutting into the shadowy forms. A single drop of spider blood falls on her Crimson lace cuff and leaves no blemish.

Marziq (Maree) moved • Yesterday at 3:22 PM

SHADOW SPIDERSShadow Spiders

A FINE SWORDA fine sword

Maree won control of the story by completing this challenge with a strong outcome.

All but one are dead. The one remaining is the biggest and and nastiest. She draws her pistol, aims between its many eyes, and fires the single shot. The recoil of the pistol makes her slip on a pool of Hugo’s blood that seeps slowly across the decks. The spider, seeing her weakness, leaps forward to slay her, only to fall onto her upheld rapier and skewers its body. She sighs, glad she wore crimson today and not white, as blood flows down her sword and over her hand.
At last the way to the Engine Room is open…

Nazdeen (Nazdeen) moved • Yesterday at 3:26 PM

Nadzeen smiles at the decisive actions of Marziq (we need a +/- or like/not-like button to give a player reaction to other character actions ).

Pierre (AliJH) moved • Yesterday at 3:59 PM

THE ENGINE ROOMThe Engine Room

AIRSHIP CREWMANAirship Crewman

Just as Pierre managed to get the lantern relit he hears Marziq’s shot ring out and views the carnage below decks with a new found respect for this human warrior, she is clearly not one to cross, at least not openly.

Stepping his way over BBQ’d spider remains Pierre enters the engine room and gets to work inspecting the engine thankfully it is mostly intact just requiring a tune up here and there.

‘Oi you lot, this will take a little while start looking, there should be a few canisters of liftgas somewhere’

Hugo "Icepick" Jenkins (you) moved • Yesterday at 4:19 PM • Edit

THE ENGINE ROOMThe Engine Room

SURVIVALISTSurvivalist

Hugo awakens to the sight of Marziq tending to his wounds. He flexes his various limbs to check that none are broken, and is re-assured. Marziq finishes wrapping a bandage, stands and helps him rise. He thanks her and surveys the carnage.

“Well it looks like you handled this very well.”

The goblins yells back instructions from the now open engine room. He says, “They are green coloured cannisters, shouldn’t be too hard to spot.”

Al Cal Hol (banjo) moved • Yesterday at 4:47 PM

THE ENGINE ROOMThe Engine Room

KEEN EYESKeen Eyes

Looking over the side of the ship, from the deck, Al notices that, entangled in a cargo net hanging out of a hole in the side of the ship, are some green coloured canisters. Al shouts “What Ho Chaps! Take a look outside that hole in the engine room wall, it might be what you are looking for.”

Nieve (Ambrose01) moved • Yesterday at 8:32 PM

THE ENGINE ROOMThe Engine Room

LEVITATELevitate

Ambrose01 won control of the story by completing this challenge with a strong outcome.

Nieve leans out through the hole in the engine room wall. Clasping the cargo net, it begins to float upwards. Now that it is easy to maneuvor, Nieve begins to load the lift gas and refill the balloon.
Let’s see you do that Nazdeen.
Nieve has self esteem issues.

The narrator ended the scene • Yesterday at 8:52 PM

Experience: crunchy vs smoothy

In the last few years I have shifted ground on the following argument: do you get experience in a role playing game for the time and effort you put into the game and your character, ie how many mobs did I kill. OR. Do I get experience because we want to progress the story and we need to get strong as a group to do so.

So the original argument I had with one of my players some time back was that if he didn't show up for a session why doesn't he get experience.  He didn't feel it was fair that just because he was sick he should be punished (as a player I agree, as a GM at the time I didn't, the hypocrisy runs strong in my veins).  Back then I disagreed with him, I said it was reward for attending, to encourage him to attend. He replied, fine I will show up and give you all the flu I have...

For a long time I had held to the classic D&D style reward system, you kill things and they earn you reward. I even remember playing Petal Throne where to get experience you had to do the killing blow... which lead to some interesting scenes as magic users dived in with daggers...

Then I moved to group based rewards for kills. Then group based rewards for achievements. Then group based rewards for success... etc etc.  And in amongst all that there were variations aplenty.

Recently (last year or so) I had moved completely away from experience models and numbers and factors unless it was an intrinsic element of the game. I played a Pathfinder game were the GM moved to simply deciding when everyone leveled up based on where we were in the story, and we all did it together.  I adopted this for my latest D&D5e game, where I decide when we level up based on the story and how much I feel we have explored the level we are on, and how much keenness there is amongst my players to move to the next level.

So what has happened? Well I suppose I have moved from very crunchy to soft and smoothy.  In my old age I now see the social aspect of role playing as far more important that the crunchy bit, which is not to say I don't enjoy the crunchy bits because I really do, but in some areas of the game where social enjoyment with your friends is the most important thing, then who the hell cares about rules.

Who the hell wants to sit there for 10 minutes looking through poorly laid out rule books without an index trying to find some rule that only matters once every 6 months.  Yes I can look at my rules lawyer player, but the easier solution is to smoothy it over and move along.  Is everyone smiling... good ruling!

This has slowly been reflected also in the games I am attracted to. Although I love D&D and Savage Worlds because of their nice crunchy feel, I now also long for more narrative style games (Feng Shui2, Hero Quest Glorantha). And I don't mean full narrative style games, or diceless games, I just mean games that have crunch and smoothy all built into the one system. As a GM it frees you up to think more broadly. As a GM I don't have to look at challenge ratings, or estimate difficulty levels to exactness, I can just wing it based on how things seem to be going. And when one of my (crunchy) players actually tries to do something a little smoothy, I can just say, ok done!

And this view of social role playing, as opposed to crunch role playing, which has come to be my preferred model, extends into other areas of the role playing system, challenging some long held beliefs I have had about what is important (in rpg)... and another blog.

GMing styles - Storytellers vs Mechanics

Recently I played in a game where my character, a very cute little goblin skald (PF), was killed outright by a single spell, 180pts of damage when he had 90. It was very sad, and had no memorable or redeeming features. In fact it was pathetic in the sense that he was just dead, and achieved nothing in the scene that was evolving. I was quite disturbed by this, partly because I had become quite attached to the character, and partly because it was in my view a complete waste of my time.

All of this devolves down to the old 'do you kill characters or don't you?'  I fall into the "dont, but" group. I only kill characters if they do something really stupid (deliberately), or if they embrace it, heroically.  I will qualify the stupid option further by saying that it has to be stupid ahead of time, not stupid after the fact in review.

But it is more than that argument, it is also a 'Storytelling' vs 'Mechanics' argument. The storyteller is willing to fudge the game to attain a desired end. The Mechanic runs the system as written, to some extent they are a slave to the dice.

My view, as a player, is that I create an interesting character, I put effort into it to make them amusing and fun. Hours of effort usually.  This goblin took me a coupla days as I had to read a bunch of PF books to construct him and I am not familiar with PF.  After all that effort I expect some sort of respect. I dont expect a slap in the face instant death, "you are a piece of meat on the ground, I dont care how you feel about it, its the dice - they made me do it".

I work on running the character to try to some extent to mix with that effort. I bond with my character to a degree, getting enjoyment out of his heroic efforts and failures. I played him for 4-6 months once a fortnight, and then he dies, splat. Its a minor trauma to me, a real one.

The manner of his death was sad, nothing heroic was involved. He walked over a line and splat he was dead.

Plus it was pathetic. There is nothing memorable about his death other than it was sudden and massive. He will be remembered not for dying whilst achieving something great, but as a martyr to random chance and the game mechanic.

There are choices a GM can make in those situations, you have a range of character powers available to you, so you make a choice to kill or not, you might have a mind control spell you could have used for eg. You as GM make an informed choice at the time about what to do, and that choice is 'storytelling'.

This style of GMing, Mechanic, which I obviously don't subscribe to, is cold and fatalistic (to me). It says that your character is nothing to me (the GM) other than an object used to manipulate the scene. It is essentially a game where it is US vs the Mechanic. I (the GM) will not go out of my way to save you from random chance, or to ensure you die heroically, to ensure that you have fun in the game. I will methodically enforce the rules and the rolls because that is the way the system works, if you don't like it you may leave.

But thats not true, Mechanics do make choices, you choose what spells are cast, who your npcs attack, what weapons and actions they will perform.  You may consciously select who gets attacked when players have low hit points, you may shift attacks from one player who was close to down and attack another, when the methodical choice (the one the players would make) would be to eliminate that character. I totally agree with that. Thats my game in action.

To me the GM is there to tell a story, not to run a mechanic. The story should be totally adaptable to the actions of the players, to ensure they have fun. You are not a slave to the mechanic or the dice, it is merely another tool you use to manipulate the story.

If you were a true Mechanic you would set the scene, populate it, then stand back and run a script to resolve it.

I see people say they are a hard, old school GMs, 'I don't fudge dice rolls, my players get what the system deals them', when it is obvious they do not.  In subtle ways they adjust the 'system' to try to bend it toward what they want.

What is the problem with saying "I manipulate the mechanic as I see fit"? You do it already in your action choices, in your target choices.  Its a tool, nothing more, available to you to use as you see fit.

You are NOT a slave to the dice.
You should respect my character as you respect me.
Give me some dignity in death please.

RPG System idea, my inspired moment.

I had an inspired idea, well at least it seemed like it at the time, and may yet be.

A roleplaying system where you break the link between the player and the character and make them two resources. So you have a bunch of players, and together they create a bunch of characters, as a group effort. There is no link  between the players and any particular character, the idea being that players can grab a character and run them as they wish when it is their turn.

And they can grab the same character turn after turn. So a tank might be used 4 turns in a row, by four different players, each player running the tank character, doing what they each want to do.

The system would have abilities at levels:

Player abilities: ones that the player has and can use with any character they grab. Most costly
Player linked abilities: as above but linked to a specific character.
Character abilities: abilities only that character can use if currently in play. Least costly.

Characters that are used by a player each gain a Focus point, and Focus will cause exhaustion. So if the players try to use one character too much that character will gain too much focus and will get tired, and suffer.

On the reverse side characters that are not chosen will begin to 'Fade', they fade into the background over time and become npcs and cannot be selected by players.  When this happens the players would have to elevate another NPC, or create a new one and bring them into the game.

It all comes from movies, where you can have a character that is played by several actors, from movie to movie. And from action movies where one character might be in the camera doing lots of stuff whilst others remain in the background and occasionally come into things.

It allows the right character for the right moment to act, repeatedly if need be, but with the danger of becoming exhausted and needing a break.

Gonna work on it.

PIRATES!

I was playing Runequest 6 recently, but its too hard. Not hard as in difficult, although it is a bit, but hard in that its takes a bit of effort and my players just don't want to do that anymore.  I blame this in part on the boardgame resurgence we are going through.  Boardgames have become really good at being fun and quick to pick up, so my players want a role playing game that does the same thing.

So much to my disappointment we have dropped RQ6. As an experiment I ran a D&D5e game with a very simple dungeon crawl, and it went really well. Partly this is because most of my players come from a D&D2-3.5 upbringing, so they picked it up really quick. Its was so much fun that we decided to play a campaign, for which I chose the Freeport environment. I picked Freeport because it was going through Kickstarter at the time, with FATE and Savage Worlds books, but primarily I picked it because it has PIRATES!

PIRATES!

You may or may not have an idea of how powerful an awesome image or simple concept can be. PIRATES is one of the top ten words you can use to create imagery and atmosphere instantly in the mind of another person. Walk upto someone and say PIRATES and there is a good chance they will go ARRGGGHH! Just like that you are both fictionally simpatico, and that is a powerful thing.

I'm not actually even using Pirates much in the Freeport game, most of the adventuring is in, around or under Freeport itself. But by saying PIRATES my players automatically enter into a powerful, mostly unified, imaginary world where they all understand the background of the stereotype I am suggesting to them. You grab their imaginations, then you drag them into your world, and between what they see and what you see you create something new.

And that isnt the point of this post, just the intro to something wonderful that I feel deserves exposure, which is this: https://www.patreon.com/creation?hid=399858

This awesome map has inspired an amazing number of ideas and imaginings and adventures and enthusiasm. And the enthusiasm is the most important part of what it has done. My mind has been buzzing for nearly a week now with thoughts about what I can do with this map. It is so good that I am supporting his Patreon, mostly because he is expanding the map and I want him to do so. The first expansion is already out.

For my game I have altered the map a bit. The city in to top right is now Freeport, which strangely fits nicely. Freeport has a volcano sitting behind it also. So then I shifted a few other things around to fit together, like a mission to an old abandoned coalmine has now become the Horrosmoke Mines and will result in the release of a powerful earthquake that will open up that shaft down into the lava.

The ruined towers over the long stairwell down are now an adventure that the players can undertake. The Hobgoblin Mines are a bit deeper to allow Freeport to have sewers and to do the Yuan-ti stories, but they resulted in a story arc about foreign slavers, and the Hobgoblin King selling his own people to the Slavers.

There is SOOO much potential in this map I am having difficulty writing it all down, I suspect I am forgetting things because they are just popping into my head and overwriting the last one.

I love this!  Its is this type of thing that gets me going.  My Freeport game is now so full of stuff that it would take 3 years to play it all. I'm gonna have to try to cut back some of it. And I haven't even started looking at the bottom half of the map.

Imagery is EVERYTHING! We are visual creatures mostly.  To aid in that I bought a 55" TV and stuck it down the end of my gaming table, but thats for another post.

Get rid of the random in treasure

A few years back I ran a fairly long campaign of Savage Worlds set in ancient egypt. There were some specific needs at various times so I started designing treasure rewards rather than randomly drawing something from a table.  I even went to the extent of doing up a table program in Inspiration Pad to assist with generating treasure, it got quite extensive.  One of the things I decided to add into the tables was an option to allow players to pick a treasure item of their own, so randomly, every now and then the tables would throw up "Mark's treasure" etc.  To speed this along I got the players to do up a list of the 5 treasure items they would like to get, the promise of factoring this into the tables resulting in EVERYONE doing it.

Now this was the important thing to notice... all my players submitted 5 treasures they wanted (within some parameters of cost value). This means they thought about it, they read the rules and investigated it and they made up a list that they submitted to me... OMG, I have discovered the most amazing thing of all role playing time... enthusiastic players.

I have never forgotten that fact, and generally now I try to insert the same option into my games when they fit the criteria.  Plus I have been thinking about it lately, along with a number of other things, whilst I prepare to start a brand new D&D5e campaign set in Freeport.  Why not just take it a step further and get the players involved in what the treasure actually is as they find it. Not only will it give treasures that they want, that will be relevant to what they are doing, and that will remove the burden from me other than as an oversight function.

So for the new game I am simply going to specify an amount, a number of items, and the type of treasure.  So they may find a treasure worth 10,000gp, there will be a minimum of 2 items (meaning nothing over 5K) and a maximum of 5 (so no huge sacks of CLW potions). The players will have to work out who is going to get a pick, how much they will get and what it is they want.  As they are all loot whores I am expecting them to really enjoy themselves.  Any gp unspent will become literal gps.

So initially they will be getting +1 weapons and +1 armours and some simple but useful wands and things, essential stuff that doesn't cost a lot. Once they all have this they will start expanding their world views, treasure wise.  It will be interesting listening to everyone's rationalising as to what is the best thing to buy.

On top of that I can always throw in some specific item or some random items, plus I intend to add on things to the items they give themselves that they didn't account for, muhahahaha. Some extra effects that may or may not be beneficial or controllable.