Apathy Games

Share and Share Alike

Almost everything I do is collaborative.  Snooty Drunks is a collaboration between myself and co-host Brian, Apathy Games is a huge collaboration effort between the four of us.  Even all of my games are collaborative (though I’m still trying to figure out why Jeff thinks it’s a myth).  So why is it now that people seem to be taking notice that collaboration and sharing is a good thing.  It’s like someone sat up one day and said, “Oh hey, this Wikipedia thing really seems to be working out we should allow people to collaborate on it.”  But when is it to much?  At what point do begin to collaborate to often and begin to take away from something we could have done better on our own?

Tricks, Traps and Plot Twists

While I do like to collaborate with my players on my games, I don’t tell them everything.  If I laid out the entire story as I wanted to tell it including all the plot twists it would stop being fun.  Obviously some secrecy is needed to continue to make the game interesting, but could I make it better when collaborating with other GM’s?  For the most part I would say no, while I do read many RPG blogs and of course write one myself I don’t find that other GM’s can help me specifically with the story I want to tell or better help my players with the specific problem they are facing.  While they are great for general problems and sharing ideas for the most part I do have to adapt them to put my own spin and fit them into my stories.  That’s not to say that I don’t find them useful and have even borrowed some ideas from other people I just haven’t found anything to specifically help me with any problems I’m having with my players.

Character Secrets

I find the only real collaboration here should be done between the player and the GM.  Even then it should be mostly player led.  The player should be the one that comes up with the secret and begins the idea of the ramifications for anyone knowing the secret.  The GM should then follow suit with setting up the method in which everyone else should find out about it.  After all what’s the point of a secret when no one is going to find out about it?  In the end only a little collaboration should be done between the two if only to minimize the fore knowledge of the events to occur that lead to the other players finding out.

The Big Bad

I’ve never understood sharing the big bad with anyone, most of the time I’ve built to a specific feel of the campaign and it’s hard to communicate to anyone outside of the game.  Outside influence on the idea I’m trying to come up with typically doesn’t help.  I’ve found it best to use my own ideas and run them as I see it.  Third party assistance has typically only muddled my original idea.

What have you found helpful not to share with anyone?  Have you had any success being completely open in your designs?

Running Short Campaigns

As something of a collector of RPGs, I’ve long since run out of time to play everything I want to play.  To compound this problem, I read a lot, and each book I read gives me ideas for new games that would be fun.  The result:  constant disappointment.

My solution is to start running a bunch of short games.  Some may be only one or two sessions.  Others may stretch out for a few months, but that’s it.

The Advantages

Beyond the obvious, the biggest benefit for a short campaign is that I don’t have to prep as much material.  I can focus on creating a single, strong story arc.  I don’t need to explore a whole setting, but can focus on a small part of it and bring it to life.

It’s also easier to find players, I find.  Some people don’t want to commit to a whole campaign, but they can find time for one or two sessions.  In truth, this is part of my cunning plan to make those who aren’t yet convinced about this whole roleplaying thing into full time RPG addicts like myself.

The Disadvantages

I lose depth.  Not only in storytelling, but in verisimilitude and character development.  Most of the games I have ahead of me are Savage Worlds, and I see few characters moving up to the higher ranks.  I may counter this by starting some games at a higher rank, or simply by dishing out more experience.

The other problem is that it usually won’t work.  I’ll start a game with full intention of only running for six weeks, and the next thing I know we’ll have played for two years.  I suppose that’s a problem I can live with, though.

Wrapping Up

I want to know if you’ve managed to run a gaming group like this for any length of time, of if you’ve always ended up settling on a single game.  Maybe you’ve learned some ancient Chinese technique to running several short games.  If so, please let me know in the comments.

Experimentation and Innovation

As a rule, Apathy Games has more ambition than resources.  We always will, because we’re made up of a few people who think big.  As our resources grow, so too does our vision.  We’re at a stage, right now, where everything we do is an experiment.  Tyson J. Hayes, and his ongoing challenge, is one of the more visible experiments.  By doing something difficult and unexpected, he’s being forced to think of games, and blogging,  in a new way each day.

Internally, we’re doing the same thing.  We’ve thrown around some rather absurd game concepts (one of them has Canada sinking into the ocean).  We’re experimenting with art styles, layouts, and paper sizes (would a campaign setting book the size of a deck of cards be practical?).  Just about every aspect of gaming is under consideration.

Not that we’re trying to rock the boat, or conduct change for the sake of change (most of our experiments never even make it out of the thought stages), but because if you don’t try something different, you don’t learn anything.

That’s our lesson for this week, and I suggest applying it to your games immediately.

Try new voices.  Unique characters.  Different environments.  Play with background music, or outside.  Use gestures to represent things.  Last week we used MapTool just to try it out.  It was neat, if a bit complicated, and we learned that you lose some of face to face experience, but also gain some ease of play.

Our goal, and our recommendation, is to try at least one new experiment every session.  It doesn’t have to be big, but even the small things can improve your game.  And then share your experiences with us.  Have you tried anything recently that either succeeded or failed?  Let us know in the comments.

How Valve Spins a Story

Recently the Internet has exploded about the Portal update. It got me thinking about how to keep a crowd interested in the gaming you’re creating. Valve is well known for their minimalistic story and refined style of play making for extremely enjoyable games. So what lessons can we take to our tabletop games?

Refine, Refine, Refine

I bought Orange Box when it came out and played Portal and Team Fortress 2 much like everyone else. While Portal was touted as the end all, be all, single player experience, but I found myself constantly coming back to TF2. Valve has been steadily releasing patches and class updates for the game refining the game since it came out. They’ve tweaked the classes gave them new styles of play and have kept their audience engaged in their game. As GMs we always want to tweak our games here and there. While this temptation should be allowed every once in a while pick your battles carefully. Make little changes at first and then play them out; then see where it takes you.

Go Big, just don’t tell anyone about it

One of the most intriguing things about the new Portal teaser is how quickly the fans begin to speculate. How quickly they craft the story around what they are seeing. The rumors build and build into a cascade of excitement. Use this to your advantage. Come up with an idea and tease at it in the background. Try not to give away more then you have to and let the players piece it together. If they are completely off base, run with it. It might turn into a grander tale then what you were looking to tell anyway.

Keep them Guessing

In recent play testing for our game I had a player that kept asking tons of questions about what was going on each bit more elaborate then the next. I played my cards close to my chest (we’ve seen this done before in previous testing) and let her go wild. The results were quite hysterical (they typically are). Valve does this by not answering questions about the story they are telling; it draws people in. Carefully keep your players on their toes and keep them guessing.

Who do you look to for story style inspiration?

Side Note: The Team Fortress 2 community is hilarious.  As show in this hilarious Spy & Pyro video.

How to Keep your Campaign Personal

We can offer you all the tools in the world, but are they worth it if the game isn’t engaging? How do you make sure that your game has a personal touch and speaks to all of your players?

Don’t Plan Ahead

Focus instead on the here and now. What are the important tasks that need to be accomplished in a given session in order to drive the story forward? Now that you have that what would be the most fun way to get there? Come up with a couple of loose ideas and leave it there. Your players will chose what interests them and you’ll come up with the details from there.

Focus on the Players

If you allow them your players will always tell a more interesting story then you ever will. Paul related to me that one of his players, during play testing for our game, came up with far more interesting ideas for how things we done then we ever did. So we changed the game. By focusing on the players and allowing them to participate in the story-living we created a better campaign.

Tell Interesting Stories

While a bit of a duh it is important to make sure that all of your players are engaged. If you are focused on them and letting them the story as well this should be simple. If they need prodding check their character background, likely they’ll have a plethora of stories that can be pulled and extrapolated on. Another approach is having your players write some in-character fiction. Pull some of the characters they came up with and flesh them out as NPCs. This will keep everything nicely tied into the story as well as keeping it personal to the player.

What have you done to keep your campaigns more personal and relevant?

Establishing Tone in Your Games

This is a subject I approach with trepidation. Tone is an important aspect to my games and my game mastering style, and I’ve been told that it’s something I do well. But I’ve never had a set of rules or guidelines that I use to create tone. Instead, it’s a natural inclination that paints everything I do.

But I will try to advise you anyway. Perhaps together, we can generate some habits that will help you see the way I do.

What is Tone?

In visual art, tone is a color. In music it’s a single note. In literature, it’s a particular mood of a piece. The similar theme to these is that tone is unifying and emotional. In the case of an RPG, the literature sense is the closest. The tone of your game is the pervasive emotional sense of the game. It comes through in the themes you choose, in the description you use, in the enemies, adventures, and plots. Imagine you’re looking through your game through colored sunglasses. Every aspect of your game would be painted with a particular tone.

Above All, Feel It

This is my secret, if I have one. I let myself feel whatever feelings I’m trying to convey when I’m designing an adventure or campaign. Then I try to make things match what I’m feeling.

I do this at the table too. When I’m playing an NPC, and especially when I’m describing things, I try to feel the tone I wish to convey.

I’m not going to call this a magic bullet though. There are many things I’ve done and learned over the years to help me hone this skill.

Consume Other Works

Read books. Watch movies. Listen to Music. Most importantly, consume these things at an emotional level. Let yourself feel whatever they’re trying to make you feel. This can be difficult sometimes. I tend to recoil from heavy-handed or obvious attempts to make me feel something, as if I’m being manipulated. Still, try it, and pay attention. If you’re going for a dark and gritty tone and a sense of loneliness, look for the details. A yellowing empty fridge. Clutter on the floor. Creaking wood floors. Large spaces full of things but no people.

Write Short Stories

This is where I learned to convey tone. I went to college for fiction writing. Yeah, I know. That’s cheating. There are many books on this subject that may be of value. Writer’s Digest has some very good ones written by accomplished authors. If you’re interested in more advice on writing books and resources, let me know.

But reading these isn’t good enough. You have to apply that knowledge. Write short stories. Longer works can be fun to write, but short stories (or even poetry, though I personally can’t stand the stuff) force you to be concise. Being able to convey something in a few sentences is a very handy skill at the gaming table. So write these, have people read them, ask for cruel levels of criticism, and edit until you learn what you’re doing. Sadly, this is an art. Doing it well can’t be picked up off a blog (though if you wish to try, check out this list of the top 100 writing blogs).

A Couple Quick Tips

There are a couple of handy tricks that can apply right away that will improve your games.

• Use Smell: Our sense of smell is the most directly linked with emotional states. If you want to convey tone, always consider what the character’s smell.
• Describe like you mean it: This might take some practice, but instead of describing things like an encyclopedia, talk like what you’re saying is important to you. If you want to convey a sense of jubilation, give descriptions like you’re experiencing it, and that everything you see is exciting and awesome! If you’re trying to say something of grave importance, speak like what you’re saying weights heavily on you. This is even more important for pre-written text. Also, don’t forget to look your players in the eye as you speak.
• Don’t break the tone: You don’t have to keep the same tone for a whole campaign, but when you’re in a part of an adventure that has a particular tone, don’t break that tone. Don’t throw in something off the wall. Don’t start cracking jokes. This will only pull your players out of the scene. They may do this on their own, and there isn’t much you can do about that, but don’t encourage them.

That’s about it, really. Most of the work is in your hands. But I hope that you’ve gleaned something useful. If you have any tips, or would like to share your experiences, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Establishing the End Game: Hitting the Abort Button

We’ve all been there; your epic adventure has stalled.  Your players are in love with the game and you could care less.  It’s more than just writer’s block you’re just not feeling it, so what’s a GM to do?

Talk to the Players

Players have an excellent way of revitalizing interest in a campaign.  Ask them what they want out of the adventure and what they are hoping to do.  If your players are anything like mine they’ll have had goals from the get go and would love time to expand upon them and be able to achieve those goals.  This could prove for some good material to move the campaign forward.  With this try to focus more on the characters instead of the overall storyline, it’ll keep the game moving.  Play to your strengths, and keep working on the overall plot you’ll be back on track in no time.

Switch Adventures

During a Planescape game, Paul had three to five adventures running simultaneously.   We would be doing research on one and be tracking a villain from another. While I’m sure it required some juggling on his end as players we could pick the type of adventure we were most interested in.  As he was using prebuilt adventures, he was never at a loss for material. If your current campaign is going nowhere try changing the focus of the campaign for a couple of sessions.  The brief stint away from the main goals may prove to be enough of a refresher that work may begin anew on the main plot.

Give up the Ghost

Sometimes everything you do just proves to be in vain and you need to press the abort button.  Keep in mind a couple of things when ending.

Your players are emotionally invested.  They’ve spent countless hours playing in the game and developing their characters so try to give them some closure.  Try to wrap up as many character plots as you can.

Leave the story open to continue. Just because you’re done running right now doesn’t mean you won’t want to pick up this game in the future.  Try to leave a couple of threads around to pick up later.  Some suggestions may be that the villain they’ve been tracking the entire campaign sets a trap and lays in wait, only for the players to find out that there is another more powerful villain lurking in the shadows.

Give a sense of closure. As you are leaving some threads open you won’t be able to wrap up everything.  However, it is paramount that you give some sense of closure to the current storyline.  Choose a downer or a happily ever after ending but don’t just end it out of hand.

Have you ever had a campaign that you had to abort? How’d you go about it?

All My Games Play the Same

Every game I participate in is connected.

Every game, it doesn’t matter if I’m the one running it, or if I’m just playing in it. All of the worlds and characters are connected on a deeper level. You may be wondering why I would do such a thing. Why would I try to fit all of my worlds together in some sort of cohesive narrative? Simple, I firmly believe in collaboratively telling a story (even if it is a myth).

I Can’t Think of Everything

I’m good at some things but not others, so I need to focus on the parts that I’m good at and slowly build my skills where I’m weak. Using the best of all the GM’s I play under and what I’m coming up with myself makes for some the easiest world building as I’m already borrowing from what’s there. It’s like using a pre-built adventure and modifying it to your taste, except everything your creating is home brewed.

The Players Love It

My players love having the chance to rub elbows with their previous incarnations, and love that their characters are still in the world adventuring. It helps create a more living world that’s evolving and changing as the games progress. It also allows them to see the results of their actions. Completing one campaign where they save a village can result in another campaign starting (with different characters) from that village remembering the previous characters as heroes of the story.

To allow every game to be connected allows me to quickly and easily craft together world history and back story for my campaigns; it also allows me to do crazy things with the worlds that may not be normally possible. It’s fueled almost every campaign I’ve run for the last five years and only continues to grow the more work I put into it.

Have you tried to connect two campaigns? How successful where you?

Building your Campaign with a Television Structure

When I set out to build a campaign, I work in large story arcs first. I try to get a vague sense of what I want to happen, where it will begin and end, what tone and themes I’m going to explore, and throw in anything I think would be cool. What I don’t do is structure the whole thing.

Campaign as a Series

Instead, I work much like a television show would, particularly modern science fiction like Farscape, Battlestar Galactica, or one of the best examples, Babylon 5. In a show like this, while there is an overall story to the series, it’s clearly broken up into seasons. Each season has it’s own story arc.

Adventure Seasons

And so I break my overall campaign into several arcs, and then concentrate on each arc individually, giving it its own defining conflict, characters, and thematic elements. At this point, individual adventure ideas tend to form. I tend to let them bounce around in my head for a while, building connections with each other.

That’s one of my secrets to success. Don’t solidify things until you get to them. Allow them to grow and entwine with other ideas over time.

Episodic Adventures

It’s at this point that I start the campaign. When there’s enough content that I have a sense of the overall story, but it’s vague enough to still be malleable.

This is where we come back to the television structure. Now each adventure functions like an episode, again with it’s own beginning, middle, and end. So, at this point I have three story arcs going on. The series arc, the season arc, and the episode arc.

When designing the episode arc, the first thing I come up with is some new experience for the players. Maybe it’s a car chase. Maybe it’s an act of espionage. Whatever it is, I try to mix up the play experiences. Then I build the episode’s story. But whatever the story is, it must also establish an important element for the season arc. It could be a character, a conflict, and plot twist. Whatever that element is, it moves the story forward and ties each of the episodes together and establishes the world and story as contiguous.

My weakness

I do have one problem, a trap you should avoid falling into. I tend to make each episode feel complete at the end. It’s my tendency to like things feeling tied together and finished. But I know I could keep my campaign more exciting, and the players wanting more, if I always ended at a dramatic point, with the future more uncertain.

I’m thinking of looking to the same shows I mentioned above for inspiration on this, but since I have an abundant resource of readers at my disposal, I’m also asking you for ideas. Please give me your advice or experience in the comments.

Introducing a New Player: Be Well Prepared

The level of preparation for any given session varies. Sometimes you show up late, or forget your character sheet. Sometimes the adventure isn’t fleshed out. Maybe you haven’t considered what to do about food. These things happen, and to a certain extent are expected. But not today.

When you’re introducing a new player, you want it to look like everyone is on the ball. You want the game to run smoothly. It may be a lie, but you want the newcomer to think that all sessions are as awesome as this one. Let them find out the horrible truth once they’re already addicted. As such, whether as a player or as the Gamemaster, make sure you are prepared.

• Flesh out the adventure. As gamemaster, you’ll be busy trying to make the game fun for the new player. You want to have the adventure completely ready to go, so you don’t have to waste time on it mid-session, and so that it’s easier to modify on the fly, if the need arises.
• Know who is going to explain the game. It might be the gamemaster, but it could well be a player who is good at this sort of thing, or the player that invited the newcomer. Whoever it is should take some time before the session to consider and possibly practice explaining the game, so they aren’t fumbling around when the time comes to perform.
• Have extra dice. Either the gamemaster or a player should have a full set of dice and other gaming gear for the newcomer to use. Pencils, paper, character sheets, miniatures or tokens–make sure you have all of it.
• Show up on time. As a gamemaster, get in contact with all of your players and ask that they make an extra effort to arrive on time. You want them around for the pre-game conversation, and you don’t want the other players or yourself to start the session frustrated. If you are a player, your duty here is simple: be to the session on time, have all of your things (it’s best to keep them all in one place), and be ready to contribute whatever is needed.
• Have a food plan. You want the new player to be excited to come back. Make sure you have a plan for snacks, drinks, and meals. The gamemaster doesn’t have to provide all of this, and in fact it’s best if the players split responsibilities. But don’t require anything of the newcomer this first session. It nothing else, free food has a magical effect, and may win you a convert all on it’s own.

What other kinds of preparation should be done before a session?