Guest Post: The not-too-distant future!

Today, guest blogger Chris of Dreadnoughts and Dragons takes us back to the future with this look at 1980s classic Cyberpunk and its vision of the dark dystopian future of, er ...

... 2013.

One of the greatest problems with roleplaying games in general is that they over-engineer solutions to problems that don't really exist, and ignore problems that would actually make life a little better. Of course, in the real world the exact opposite is true: technology advances fastest in areas where there is greatest consumer demand.

If you want an illustration of just how this can date a game, look no further than Cyberpunk: The Roleplaying Game of the Dark Future. Unfortunately, this dark 'future' is the world of 2013, as envisaged by Mike Pondsmith in 1988. I picked up the first edition of this game for £1, and found myself back in the world before the Internet. Imagine the bastard RPG lovechild of William Gibson and Don Johnson, then add more hair spray. How dark is 2013? Well, apart from being perpetually set at night (this is cyberpunk, duh) it's your basic corporate police state/impoverished street gang dystopia. 

The 'cyber' side comes in the form of a worldwide network which you literally have to plug yourself into (to help out players who have never used a computer that didn't require a cassette tape, there are detailed sections explaining what a modem does). 

The 'punk' aspect are the party-loving, tech-fixated gang members. The character creation guide states that your motive is to wear the coolest clothes and visit the coolest clubs. One of the nine classes available to play is Rockstar. The willpower stat is called Cool. Everyone uses a nickname ('handle') to sound as cool as your idol, Johnny Silverhand.

But the technology... oh, the technology is glorious. Behold this little gem.

Fax. This is the letter-writing mode of the future.

Thank fuck the game was wrong on that score.

It's not the only glaring anachronism. In a world where the first NPC you meet (an uninteresting hacker girl called Alt) has a “gold-plated cyberarm with hidden compartment”, mobiles are still giant bricks the size of walkie-talkies.

In fact, it's worth noting where Cyberpunk gets it right, and where it gets it wrong:

Right:

• Internet! 
• Europe is great apart from Spain and Greece, who are broke 
• 24/7 news coverage has turned the media into crazed lunatics 
• People love technology 
• Everyone wants a gold-plated cyberarm with hidden compartment.

Wrong:

• No cyborg implants are in general use, let alone gold ones with sneaky compartments 
• No gangs of mullet-sporting rock musicians roam the mean streets of America like they're the fucking Sharks and Jets 
• Phones are not bricks 
• People use the internet for things other than corporate espionage, like looking at pictures of cats 
• Newspapers are not printed out by fax on street corners 
• Fax is not the letter-writing mode of the future, cat pictures are 
• Nobody wants a modem or fax machine planted in their skull 
• Phones are not the size of bricks 
• Hovercars don't exist 
• You can't melt people's brains with your 133t haxxor fax skillz 
• A phone or a laptop is not more expensive than a motorbike. 

 Anachronisms aside, Cyperpunk is surprisingly easy to pick up and play: you can generate a character very accurately in a few minutes. Part of this is because it removes any real say in your character's background; you have to pick from one of nine classes (including Rockerboys, Solos, Cops and Corporates), each with a single special skill. You're then encouraged to generate your life history, with one event per year after 16, roll for your sweet sense of style, even roll to see who you care about. 

This is all very, very easy indeed to get moving: I generated a full character in under 10 minutes, who ended up a 'silly fluffhead' rockerboy addicted to drugs and with a mental health problem, who dresses in battle armour and spiked heels, has a kid sister who looks up to him, and a pet cassette tape that he loves more than anything else in the world.

While it can appear simple, there's more than enough detail to go on. The three books (my edition also has the Friday Night Firefight expansion) come to a whole 150 pages, but have detailed corporate biographies, walkthroughs of games, and even encounter generators for anyone who wants to surprise their players with chance run-ins with celebrities, gangs (the 'Bradi Bunch' is mentioned as a particularly vicious band of miscreants) or corporate secret police.

Overall, Cyberpunk is silly, simple and hopelessly outdated. It's pretty much a defining game for the 1980s.

---

Chris also points out that to send a fax you type it into a computer, which sends it to a local post office, which then prints it out and delivers it to the recipient; also, adding call-waiting and autodial to your phone costs $2600.

Now, I went to high school with computer-loving kids in the 1990s, so obviously I know a lot of Cyberpunk fans, although they mostly came up playing the second edition. Despite all that -- and despite that same edition being one of the games owned by the cousin who set me on the Call of Cthulhu path -- I have never actually played it. Have you? Did you update it or was the retro-futurism part of the appeal for you? Let us know!

Microscope is fun, low-content mode incoming.

It's November again, and for me that means it's National (although I am in a different nation) Novel Writing Month. I've written before about how I find that games and constraints help me do creative stuff, so despite some reservations about the format, I try to do it every year. I made a hell of a mess of it last year. The year before, I wrote The Barest Branch, which I am pleased with in spite of its flaws.

In short, there might be a little bit of a drought here for a while as I focus on that -- but it's only temporary! I will still be posting here and on my other blog, just less frequently.

However, I did get to do some gaming the other day! I went down to a group that organises one-shot games, usually indie games, here in Cambridge. Only a few of us turned out (the group wasn't running on its usual night), so we played us a game of Microscope.

This is a neat collaborative setting-history-creation game in which each player contributes periods, events and scenes according to a set of procedures that distribute different tasks and prompts -- it's got enough freedom that you can do anything you want, but enough structure that it isn't just "you tell a story. OK, now you tell a story." And because the setting is created in a non-linear way, it's super easy to create interesting narrative arcs; if you see something you want explained, you just go back and stick in an earlier explanation. Here's the setting history three of us created in about two hours (although it's not super legible):

(Click to embiggen)

So, yeah, I'm definitely picking that one up. So far so good.

Halloween monsters in D&D: or, stuff that shouldn't work but does.

Right -- it's Halloween tomorrow, so let's talk about monsters.

Now, RPGs are full of monsters, but not all monsters are Halloween monsters. I can't find a good link right now, but Chris Sims has been heard to observe that, say, Dracula is a Halloween monster but Godzilla isn't. Some monsters are "horror" monsters while others aren't.

You can see this principle at work in D&D easily. Some monsters -- owlbears, for example -- are just very dangerous wildlife. Others are stand-ins for various human stereotypes -- orcs as brutish barbarians, hobgoblins as military stormtrooper types. Yet others are much more science-fiction-y and often have a kind of puzzle element to them. I'm trying to think of an example right now, but the only one that comes to mind is beholders and I think that isn't 100% accurate. Anyway, my point is that D&D and similar games mash up lots of different monster types, in ways that probably shouldn't work. 

Let's take the vampire, for instance. Vampires turn up in a lot of media, of course, but when they turn up in horror stories it tends to be personal. There are very few horror stories -- as opposed to paranormal romances or comedies or whatever -- in which a vampire is part of a larger monster-y context. Vampires are individual monsters, or at the very least a little conspiracy of monsters. 

The vampire's horror comes partly from how unnatural it is, partly from the way it transgresses social conventions (which is also why it's sexy), partly from its spooky powers. But in a setting that's completely different from ours, where magical powers are commonplace, a vampire shouldn't be really scary. He's basically a particularly buff stirge in a tailcoat, a wizard with a few extra powers. 

And yet, I think that vampires do tend to work in D&D. I have no problem having them in my game, certainly, although they haven't really come up yet. But my experience of most horror monsters in fantasy games is that they don't work too badly. I think this is to do with the way D&D is usually pretty comfortable genre-hopping. 

I liken this to early Doctor Who -- back in the day each new story was not just the same characters arriving in a new location, but very much the same characters arriving in a different genre. "The Romans" is full of weird farce, "The Gunfighters" is a parody of westerns, but others are horror stories, historical adventures, and more-or-less straight science fiction. My campaign tends to work in discrete episodes -- usually anyway -- so perhaps that's part of it; each sequence is its own thing so each sequence has its own genre elements. 

I'm not sure if that's reflected in published scenarios; obviously, when TSR decided to horror things up they created their own horror-y setting for it. Someone with more knowledge of the history of D&D could tell you. 

On the other hand, this may not be a feature of D&D specifically, since as far as I can tell Frankenstein's-monster-types don't work in D&D at all. The idea of a "flesh golem" just thumps the whole Frankenstein thing. Perhaps it's because the monster's thing is pretty much just where he comes from. He doesn't have any special powers or anything, other than being very tall. His whole thing is that he's unnatural, which kind of means he doesn't work when made part of a type and part of a broader category of constructs. Frankenstein's monster just isn't as versatile as a vampire. 

Perhaps, then, the reason that vampires work in D&D is that the supervillain aspect is already there? Dracula already has that mastermind aspect, and a castle is not un-dungeon-like, so he works as an adventure-story villain and perhaps brings that horror quality with him. But poor old Frankie, robbed of his subtext, is just a brute, which is OK, but it's not like fantasy games were short on brutes. You could mess around with the Monster to make it tactically interesting, but I don't know what you can do to make it thematically interesting. 

L to R; Mook, nope, sure!, OK, excellent, what? 

Anyway, I don't know. I was just musing on the ways in which you can steal horror, mystery and crime drama elements for D&D games and they somehow work, even divorced from their original context. Broadly speaking, I think it might be a strength of the ripoff pastiche nature of a lot of games; you bring in a particular symbol and players are happy to assume a lot of the things that go with that symbol, even if those things don't make a whole lot of sense given your system or setting. 

Speaking of horror, if you've read this far I should mention that my little Lovecraft-y Viking-y ebook "The Barest Branch" is on sale until the end of Halloween over at Drivethru. It's just £1.25 until the end of the sale. Check it out if that's your kind of thing. 

D&D as street performance, or how to be the world's worst detective

(Update: the previous version of this post misidentified the university where Jennifer studies. My bad!)

The other day, I was walking through the Grafton Centre on my way to buy some shoes, when I met a young woman who handed me this:

So I asked her what it was, and she explained that she's a performing arts student from the University of Falmouth and that she was staging a performance the next day -- one indebted to D&D. I happened not to have a lot going on, so I decided to swing by while out running some errands. 

So, as you can see, her name is Jennifer Herron and the piece is called "Assassination! " It's a "scratch performance," which is to say a piece that isn't yet finished. Basically, it is a little mini-scenario that she runs for whoever happens by.

Character sheets! I played Krivoc, the half orc warrior, following in my traditional belief that the easiest way to encounter a new situation is playing a derpy face-kicker. Each character has an ability that gets activated by dinging a bell on the table, as you can see, together with a couple of sort of narrative personality traits. Sadly, in my enthusiasm to smite a fool I forgot to ding the bell myself.

And there's a map!

You can't go wrong with a map. 

After my own playthrough (found the culprit in the assassination but decided to side with her, framed someone I didn't like for the crime -- turns out a half-bright half-orc is not the person you want solving your crimes) I asked Jennifer why she had decided to use D&D for her project. She told me that she's an avid fan (and a LARPer) and that she thought of D&D as a form of interactive theatre -- her programme is apparently big on interactivity. 

The old "are RPGs art" debate is usually presented as a conflict between traditional D&D types and Storygamers or WoD enthusiasts. I think it is very interesting to see that it isn't like that for at least one D&D fan.

Someone -- possibly Gary Alan Fine? -- said that it was very interesting how gamers were able to switch between different modes of interaction (what would be called "stances" in Big Model Theory) without any warning, and how everyone at the table was able to understand that. For instance, I can go from speaking in character ("you son of a bitch, you sold us out!") to describing my character's actions ("and then I punch him in the chops") to talking about game mechanics ("six damage!") to talking about unrelated stuff ("pass the crisps?"). And although these are four very different kinds of communication, we can flip between them in a way that everyone at the table understands. 

I was thinking about this when Jennifer mentioned the kinds of intense emotional experiences that can happen in gaming. And I absolutely agree that those experiences are important -- but at the same time, I think that if you were to look at my D&D group swapping jokes or trying to puzzle their way through a dungeon room, you wouldn't think that you were looking at people engaging in a form of theatre. And yet, it's undeniable that those moments, when they do happen, do have a theatrical quality to them. So perhaps one of the interesting things about gaming is the way in which it can switch between those moments and other activities without (necessarily, anyway) disrupting any of them (although breaking immersion in live games can be a big problem, I suppose).

I asked Jennifer what the response of passersby had been, and she told me it had been variable -- some people had been responsive, but others had been a little reluctant. I think that getting people to be creative on cue -- even with the kind of prompts and constraints that a game provides -- is pretty challenging, and certainly I would never be able to set out my shingle and just run a little game for people in public. But then that's why I am not going into the performing arts, I suppose. (You may say that teaching is a performance, and it is, but it's not the same at all.)

Apparently the final performance might even involve drafting in other students as NPCs, which I think is a pretty interesting idea -- it would present a very different experience, but a lot of the structure would remain the same. In fact, you could run it for a "party" of audience members.

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting take on the D&D experience -- and interesting in particular how closely a D&D art project resembles, well, a game of D&D. Although I think you might not be getting the full experience without a party of characters with differing agendas.

You can learn more about the development of the project by checking out Jennifer's YouTube channel here. 

I don't want to spam people with promotional links, but I will just mention that my little Lovecraft-y, Viking-y, horribly-depressing-y novella "The Barest Branch" is now on sale for a mere £1.25 at Drivethru as part of their Halloween sale. Sale ends October 31st, at which point it goes up to about £2, so ... still pretty cheap.

Next up, I'm going to talk about using "horror" monsters as D&D monsters, and why I think it works even though it absolutely shouldn't. 

Trip report: SELWG

This past Sunday, pal Chris (of new steampunk fiction blog Dreadnaughts and Dragons) and I went to the annual SELWG wargames show at Crystal Palace National Sports Centre in London. And it was pretty good!

I got some stuff -- nothing too exciting if you're not me, I guess. I'm mainly on this SAGA kick right now, and I got some Conquest Games Norman knights, discount Foundry Vikings (£8 for 10 figures, which is pretty good, especially for Foundry) and a Norman church from Timeline Miniatures, which is going to be a little 11th-c church for my Anglo-Saxon setting. No double-arch windows, but it'll do. With its later medieval crenellated top, it will also be the village church in my Strange Aeons games. I will be doing a more detailed blog on building and painting this. And I can use the last of my Renedra gravestones to give it a little detachable cemetery.

I also picked up a few bargains at the Bring and Buy, including this:

Compendium for £5? Well, all right. 

And from another trader, I picked up a copy of the Havok starter set for £1. I only became aware of this game recently -- it was a little game with plastic figures and stat cards and stuff, and it was one of those early attempts (1996, I think?) to do a totally-integrated game, where each figure comes with the rules for it. Mainly I got it out of curiosity, and for the robots! It has big stompy robots.

They are pretty stompy!

And of course there were games to see and participate in. 

Deal Wargames Society presented this Vietnam game in (I think) 15mm. I think my favourite thing about it was the little touches, from black-suited CIA agents stopping a car to villagers working in rice paddies. There were also some nice aircraft models, giving the game a multi-level appeal.

I really liked this rocket launch from Loughton Strike Force's "Hill 112" Normandy 1944 game.

Peter Pig were running a demo game (PBI, I think?). The thing I really liked about it was that the roads, ground colours and even some of the small terrain features like walls and haystacks were painted or mounted on the inside of this collapsing table. The trees and buildings were then added separately. If you look at the middle, you can see that it's hinged, sort of like a wallpapering table if the folding edge were the long edge. I thought that was a pretty cool idea. 

Southend Wargames Club did this "Talavera, but not as we know it" battle set in 1709. I really liked the fields, roads, and hills, which I felt were really lifelike. The makers informed me that they had actually chosen the terrain based on what was known to be planted in the fields around Talavera. That's more effort than I want to go to, but just varying the crops and patterns certainly makes the ground look very natural. 

GLC wargames club put on this Siege of Madrid game, featuring lots of MDF terrain -- the lightness of this material means nice tall buildings at a reasonable cost, and it really works well for an era like this one, where you have rendered walls and tall buildings. The added banners give it period flavour. I liked the command vignette, complete with Soviet military advisers. 

More MDF terrain on display in this participation tourney game of Crossed Lances. A big ring for the melee, lists, stands, archery butts ... it was pretty complete. We played a game of this. We also got to play in a chariot-racing game hosted by Crawley Wargames Club. Like all good participation games, there were hats: 

Chris models the latest in auriga fashions.

On the starting line. 

Chris at the end of turn one. 

Me, halfway through the last lap. 

     This was a great little participation game, with much reckless driving, breathless anticipation of cards turning over and applause when a young player took the victory and was rewarded with a free figure. 

I also picked up some free 15 mm sci-fi models from the Ground Zero Games stand, and Chris very generously gave me his. They will go into the 15 mm sci-fi pile, which is very definitely a project for next year, after the Vikings and the Normans and the 1/72 Romans and maybe some more Cthulhu stuff and then there will be the Reaper kickstarter arriving and and and ... 

Overall, I didn't do too badly. My painting score took a pretty nasty hit, but nothing I can't fix in a couple of weeks. I bought things I wanted, but other than the Havok box, which was a one-quid impulse buy, I don't think I bought anything I won't use or at least read. I even had a few pounds left at the end to put back in my conscience-free go-ape-shit-at-conventions tin. 

Fallout: New Vegas and the Closing of the West

Today's post is another one in which I look at a video game and imagine a deeper cultural significance that may not exist. Mostly I do these over on my history blog (scroll down for the Skyrim stuff), but today I don't have even the most tangential history connection, so I'm just going to talk about Fallout: New Vegas and how a thing I found frustrating about the game might actually be one of its big themes.

I got my Xbox late in the console's life, so I only finished Fallout: New Vegas a few weeks ago. I had put off concluding it for a long time -- I started playing it in 2013, got to a certain point and then moved on to play other games. One of the reasons for this was that I found that the game's main storyline wasn't really what I enjoyed about it. 

The thing that I like about games like Fallout 3 and this one -- about this type of RPG in general, I guess -- is the exploration aspect. I like choosing a blank sector of the map and just saying "well, let's see what's over here." I like running into weird people and their weird problems. I like the hints, not at a wider story, but at the thousands of individual stories taking place everywhere in the world. 

And as the game progresses, there's less and less of that. The areas you visit have been cleared of baddies. Problems have been solved (at least in my case, because I tend to play a goody-two-shoes character in games), territory conquered, threats defeated. And finally there's nothing for it but to make your way to the climactic showdown at Hoover Dam, knowing that this means you have to say goodbye to the Wasteland. 

And I found that really frustrating and disappointing, even though I was pleased to see how it all ended. I popped in Fallout 3 (which I had also never finished) almost immediately to get back that that wandering-the-wasteland feeling. And then I began to think: this is a Western, right?

Today's activities will include: rootin', tootin', six-gun shootin'.

I borrow my summary of the core theme of the Western from Kenneth Hite, who phrased it thus (I paraphrase): 

Civilisation can only be defended from barbarism by the gun. Whoever takes up the gun is a barbarian.

And it's true -- many of the classic Westerns focus on this theme: a lone outsider or outcast who defends settled people from an external threat but then finds out that he can't exist in the society he's defended. Sometimes he dies, sometimes he rides on, and sometimes (The Magnificent Seven) it's a bit of both.

Ah, the forces of order. 

So was the disappointment and frustration I felt with the end of New Vegas actually how you're supposed to feel as a lone gunslinger when you finally take down the bad guy, only to realise that a bad-guy-free world has no place for your brand of rootless, .44-calibre problem solving? I loved the Wasteland, and I wanted to protect the people in it. But protecting the people killed the Wasteland, the Wasteland where anything could happen, where a man could wander as he liked with nothing but his trusty suit of power armour and heavy machine gun. I mean, Stetson and six-shooter. 

Now, obviously, my version of this experience is coloured by the fact that I sided with flawed, corrupt, bungling democracy, and that I routinely chose the nicey-nice option when available. I might feel different leaving behind a wasteland that I had terrorised and plundered, I guess. Or rather, I would feel the same way, but it would hardly be an iconic Western. 

I guess the thing I wonder is whether this "end of the frontier" phenomenon is something that the designers intended? Or is it just that if you populate a landscape with six-guns and sarsaparilla Western themes will just appear in the players' heads through the process of association? Is it just that the genre is so well-established? I expect I'll feel the same thing as I near the end of Fallout 3, and that won't have anything to do with its fundamental conflict of nostalgia vs bricolage. 

Does this extend to other genres? Can I get people to think about society's relationship to technology just by putting neon all over everything and giving everyone ill-advised haircuts?

I dunno. But from a game-running perspective I think it's an interesting question. 

Do you recognise this miniature?

The other day, I painted one of the first miniatures I ever owned. Technically, in fact, I think it might have been a miniature my brother owned. When we were kids, the game stores in our hometown sold miniatures individually. They took them out of the packaging and put them in a display case, and you just asked for the one you wanted. Which means that I don't know where a lot of these figures came from, especially since the ones with integral bases have since been rebased.

Anyway, the figure is a female fighter, armed with a sword, a bow and a quiver of arrows. I like her faux-classical armour, which puts me in mind of early RuneQuest. I decided to echo Wonder Woman in the colour scheme, although I gave her light brown hair.

So do any of you guys know where this model comes from? I got it sometime in the mid-1980s and it's more of a 25 mm size.