Welcome! If you’re new to this newsletter, my plan is to, every month or so, send out some reflections on games I have run and played, aspects of game design I’m thinking about, and assorted topics related to tabletop roleplaying games.
Let’s begin!
Played: Checkpoint Midnight
Thanks to MC extraordinaire Jim Crocker, I’m getting the opportunity now to play my game of supernatural operatives in Cold War Vienna, Checkpoint Midnight.
Highlights: After running many, many hours of this game, it’s rewarding to jump in as a player. I’m playing Kate Fairweather, a British aristocratic airwoman of the ATA, who was shot down flying a spy mission and woke up in a derelict lab in East Germany, covered in scars that sometimes now glow with cold fire. I’m using the Unburied playbook, which tells the story of a soldier plucked back from the jaws of death, and the Host role, where you’ve brought along a mysterious passenger from the great beyond. Kate has come to Vienna tracking down leads on what exactly happened to her and how she can thwart a terrible prophecy from unfolding.
Jim has given us some great, pulpy missions (steal a magical swordcane from an MI6 higher-up, infiltrate a bigger-on-the-inside den of rumormongers, uncover the truth behind the ominous “Device” under construction in the city, etc.) and it’s been fun letting Kate clash and collaborate with the other PCs: a femme fatale Shadow, a chess-playing Automaton, and a scheming Weaponsmith.
Musings: This is a Quarterly campaign, so we’ve already played one “season” and started a second. In the pause between seasons, I made a few adjustments based on player feedback. I was evaluating and adjusting exactly how character advancement should work in the game. One key change: instead of marking one of the game’s advancement tracks on a miss, PCs now mark that track on a 10+ hit. The track has also been renamed from “Heat” to “Notoriety.” Players felt, rightly, that the Great Powers should get more interested in the operatives as they notch successes, rather than as they roll misses.
This made a lot of sense to me, and illustrated why “XP on a miss” only fits in some systems. In Masks, it’s totally plausible that teen supers who are still learning and growing “mark Potential” on a miss. But adult supernatural operatives, like the PCs of Checkpoint Midnight, get more entangled with the Great Powers as they gain a reputation for effectiveness.
Final thoughts: I’m glad to have the chance to play my game, and keep refining it based on feedback from enthused players and MCs.
Ran: Escape from Dino Island
I ran a two-shot of Escape from Dino Island, by Sam Roberts and Sam Tung, set in the Gauntlet Comics setting.
Highlights: This was a great pair of games! We had a Doctor and Soldier working for an unscrupulous organization, a Kid who’d somehow tagged along on their research mission, and a Survivor who’d been on the island for years. This being Gauntlet Comics, the Doctor and Soldier worked for the LexCorp-like Optimax Industries, and the kid was a wizard school dropout from Hedgewick Academy. Overall, it worked well fitting Dino Island into an unexplored corner of an existing setting. The comic book conceit really justified going all-out with the dinosaurs we saw, including a terrifying, fire-breathing Tyrannosaurus Rex!
If you’re curious, you can watch the sessions here on the Cloven Pine Games Youtube channel.
Musings: The mechanics of the game are tightly written, with a set of Safety Moves that PCs can trigger when they find a second to catch their breath (Lay of the Land, Scavenge, etc.), and a set of Peril Moves for dealing with immediate danger (Run! Hide! Fight! etc.). The Peril Moves are exciting, but only the Safety Moves hook into a core game mechanic, the stories PCs tell (see more on stories below).
A few Peril Moves carry assumptions about what sort of peril you’re facing. What happens when you use “Look Over There!” on a non-dinosaur threat like a group of enemy soldiers? The 7–9 result assumes you’re dealing with dinosaurs, saying “the dinosaur notices you.” As DM (Dino Master), I made the call that yes, the soldiers were distracted, but an angry pteranodon turned up right at that time to menace the Doctor. I’d be curious to know how other Dino Masters handle that sort of situation.
Final thoughts: Escape from Dino Island is an extremely nifty game, and great to have at the ready for impromptu one-shots.
Design Discussion: Story Prompts
I want to talk about story prompts in RPGs. I’m thinking of those moments when a game pauses other mechanics, moves away from the usual flow of GM–player conversation, and asks a player to simply tell a story.
There’s a game that consists of nothing but evocative story prompts: For The Queen, which helps you create a complex picture of a Queen, her entourage, and their journey with a deck of prompts like “What brings out the Queen’s kindness?” and “What brings out the Queen’s cruelty?” The game is a great on-ramp for roleplaying, and has inspired a bunch of Descended from the Queen games. (My own contribution, For This Ungrateful City, lets you tell a story about superheroes tasked with defending a City that may not deserve it, with some questions adapted closely from For The Queen, e.g. “What brings out the City’s cruelty?” and some more particular to the setting e.g. “What aren’t you telling anyone about the origins of your powers? Why?”)
You can weave these prompts into other games. Swords Without Master has the Rogues’ Phase, where players challenge/empower each other by ceremonially handing over dice and saying “Show us how you dethrone the Obsidian Emperor” or the like. The cool part is that game’s other phases involve more dice rolling and uncertainty, but in this phase you have wide latitude to describe your character’s prowess and the world’s reactions, as long as it fits the prompt you’ve been given. The game specifies that, during this phase, your duty is “to highlight what you love about the other players’ rogues.”
Then there’s stories you tell in-character. The cozy mystery/cosmic horror game Brindlewood Bay has a version of this, where you can tell stories of your player character’s past or present to avoid the consequences of a bad roll (though once you run out of stories, you become more vulnerable). And, as referenced above, Escape from Dino Island makes the "stories you tell” a crucial aspect of the playbooks. The Doctor, for instance, can tell a story of “Why you became a doctor” or “A time you were terrified” or “A nearly fatal mistake.” Players are incentivized to tell these stories because their character’s fate in the epilogue is partly determined by how many stories they tell. But of course it’s also simply fun to build up your character’s backstory this way.
How to make use of story prompts in running and designing games? I think something many GMs already do is, at the end of a one-shot, turning things over to players with a prompt for an epilogue. “So what do we see as you hightail it off the train? What do you think life looks like for Regina now that she’s claimed her prize?” Some games (including Escape from Dino Island!) have specific epilogue prompts to make sure players get this sort of space to wrap up their character’s stories.
As I mentioned last week, I’ve co-created a game with a plethora of story prompts: Back Again from the Broken Land, in which small adventurers make their way back from a calamitous war, telling stories of their journey and their hometown. The story prompts here are meant to draw out what people like best about fantasy epics, both the big-scale moments and the quieter stretches where companions share a meal. Stories serve a mechanical purpose, allowing you to clear the Burdens you bear and have a brighter homecoming.
Some examples invite players to tell a story of…
What you planted in the Broken Land
The service you paid for with a song from home (and the verse you omitted)
The person waiting at home you most hope hasn’t forgotten you
If the type of overall story your game wants to tell involves characters sharing stories about their hopes, fears, and burdens, it can be wonderful to build these prompts right into your game.
What’s the best story prompt you’ve ever seen in a game? Or what’s something from outside the gaming world that sounds like it should be a story prompt? Share in the comments, and perhaps I’ll highlight some answers next time around.
Elsewhere
—It was my birthday last week! Leah got me a great present that involved Cloven Pine fans sending in their favorite moves from my games. Check out the thread below to see the moves people chose:
—I’m thrilled to announce that my stretch goal, The Restless, was unlocked during the Kickstarter for Urban Shadows Second Edition! The campaign wrapped up with nearly $200,000, thanks to 3,775 backers. I’m very pleased to be contributing a playbook to the revised version of this game of dark, political urban fantasy.
—Many thanks, also, to the players who joined in to play The Great Soul Train Robbery with me at Doxacon and at RPGAllianceCon. We told great stories of Hell-bent Desperados, including a very memorable Gambler who was left as an animate skeleton after losing his flesh and soul in a wager with the Devil.
—Finally: If you’re intrigued by Back Again from the Broken Land, David Morrison is running an online series in December that is now open for any players to sign up. Learn more here, and may the perils of your journey still leave you time to share a meal with companions.
I’ll be back in touch next month with more games played, games run, and design discussion. Till then: may you notch inspiring successes, tell moving stories, and escape from any dinosaurs you encounter.
Gamefully Yours,
Alexi
This was very interesting. I'm curious if you're going to be tracking how often players now roll their low stats. Outside of having the fiction match the mechanics, one of the obvious reasons to have XP on a failure is to incentive rolling low stats, when they already have an incentive to roll high stats. Personally, I've never bought this. Failure averse players aren't usually mollified by XP and players who are excited to see what those 6-s bring don't care about it either. But now we have a natural experiment, I'd love to see if it affects player behavior at all.