31
Episode 63: Playing by the rules vs playing by feel
5 Comments · Posted by Timo in Normal Episodes, Podcasts
Hosts: John Kelly, Todd, Timo, Lexx, Scott
In which we discuss our facial hair. Scott is big in China and loves the North. Lexx doesn’t know geography. Todd went to a wedding. JohnKelly is moving. Scott and his gravy-tas. JohnKelly is balding ugly. Timo has been doing martial arts (badly) as long as JohnKelly has been alive. Speaking of gravy, rape, White Fence Farm, Gale Street Inn and gumming the bones. (3:20)
Main Topic: playing by the rules vs playing by feel (11:10)
First edition AD&D was very narrow (12:55)
JohnKelly’s theater as an example. (14:30)
Cars and motorcycles (15:50)
Autership of games: (18:00)
AD&D First ed in historical perspective (19:45)
How do you know you’re playing as intended: the Forge, Dust Devils and Ron Edwards (21:00)
The intent of L5R (22:30)
When the designers stated goal isn’t reflected in the mechanics (23:30)
Trust in the author (24:45)
Tweaking a game you’re very familiar with. (28:12)
Creative agenda and how dissonance makes people want to homebrew (29:50)
JP says: you don’t have to switch games because you want to explore. (31:05)
Consumption is creative (33:20)
What do you do when you pick up a game? (35:30)
JohnKelly: is a waste of skin and has nothing to say about Alpha Omega (35:55)
Scott: Character development and stories. More specifically, buzzwords. (38:30)
Lexx: Setting above all. (40:20)
World creation can very different between games (My life with master is ok, In a wicked age is not) (42:45)
Timo: The rules and what they are trying to do. Fluff comes from play. (45:40)
Rules shouldn’t try to be too “real.” Lexx disagrees. (47:25)
Todd: Can this game actualise my idea (can I make Elle Woods?) (48:15)
Finding the right game in which to run a game (50:15)
Fudging the rules to keep the story going (54:20)
Unhallowed metropolis: the rules are burdensome (56:15)
Fluff to disguise the mechanics (57:45)
Different types of zombies (58:45)
Rants (1:00:35)
JohnKelly: Wil Wheaton please pimp us out.
Todd: 30,000 feet, and no one’s worried?
Timo: Meatmarket the game.
Lexx: RPGA has taught me how to love gaming again.
Scott: Dark Sun almost made me buy
Once again, JohnKelly really isn’t funny. This time he admitted it (1:09:25)
You have been listening to The Jank Cast, copyright 2010 under the creative commons license. You can find out more about us at jankcast.com. All the music in the show is from the song, “Jank is a Dork Word” written and recorded by Todd and is used with his permission. You can send comments and feedback to feedback@jankcast.com Again, we are sponsored by Chicagoland Games, and this is JOHNKELLY reminding you to support your local gaming store. Now go out and roll some dice.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
No tags
25
Episode 62: Secrets in Gaming
2 Comments · Posted by The Jank Cast in Normal Episodes, Podcasts
Episode 62: Secrets in Gaming
Hosts: Timo, Scott, Majdi, Megan
I think Timo is trying to tone down the creepy. . . instead he’s creepier.
Megan’s Show
How did they end up talking about being naked in public bathrooms?
God there is a lot of poop talk. . .
Main Topic: Secrets in gaming
Don’t listen to the Walking Eye
Mist + Fire = Smoke
Steal away Jordan
BASH!
Unhallowed Metropolis
Rants
Scott: PSA: Fuck Me Ray Bradbury
Majdi: The L or EL
Megan: Playing someone else’s character
Timo: Theory from the Closet
You have been listening to The Jank Cast, copyright 2010 under the creative commons license. You can find out more about us at jankcast.com. All the music in the show is from the song, “Jank is a Dork Word” written and recorded by Todd and is used with his permission. You can send comments and feedback to feedback@jankcast.com Again, we are sponsored by Chicagoland Games, and this is JOHNKELLY reminding you to support your local gaming store. Now go out and roll some dice.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
No tags
When I GM’d BASH, I decided to give my players a sort of “works cited” page, that included the movies and comic books I was drawing on for inspiration (The Dark Knight, Ex Machina, Watchmen, and the new Batwoman run being prime examples).
As I run Dust Devils right now, it’s occurring to me that I probably should have done the same thing.
I think the main inspirations are Once Upon a Time in the West, from which I got the whole fight over a farm thing; Unforgiven, from which I got the gunfighters at the end of their career thing; Death Rides a Horse, from which I’m pulling some of the relationships from; and Keoma, from which I’m getting the whole big man quietly rules a town thing.
Visually, I’m drawing on the western ptotographs of Ansel Adams and Craig Varjabedian. If the game can feel how those photos look, then I’ve done my job.
Musically, we’re rocking Earth, the soundtrack to Red Dead Redemption, and a bunch of Ennio Morricone stuff while we play. I think it’s helping to keep everyone in the right frame of mind.
Either way, the point is that I kind of like this whole “works cited” thing, and I think I’ll keep using it for future games. I’m obviously drawing stuff from SOMEWHERE, so I might as well let the players in on it so we can all be on the same page.
No tags
Episode 61: GenCon 2010
Hosts: JOHNKELLY, Scott, Timo, Lexx, Megan with a special message from Todd
Megan’s First GenCon
Lexx’s Tenth GenCon
Timo’s Seventh GenCon
Lots and lots of mentioning of games/stuff that we played and/or bought at GenCon.
Including: Misspent Youth, Fiasco, HoboCon, Free Market, Iron Tyrants, The Adventure Burner,
PARP: Photo Action Role-Playing
The Embassy Suites
Games On Demand
The Chicken Sandwiches!
Rob Justice was not seen by Megan. What the fuck Rob?
Lexx throws podcasters under the bus.
We realize that Wil Wheaton is more powerful than us.
Felicia Day is awesome.
Todd speaks about GenCon
Rants
Timo: Dice Stealing / Hexatube
Scott: Fiasco & Glomping
JOHNKELLY: the MSG at the Cajin Grill
Megan: I go to GenCon to game
Congrats to Derek!
You have been listening to The Jank Cast, copyright 2010 under the creative commons license. You can find out more about us at jankcast.com. All the music in the show is from the song, “Jank is a Dork Word” written and recorded by Todd and is used with his permission. You can send comments and feedback to feedback@jankcast.com Again, we are sponsored by Chicagoland Games, and this is JOHNKELLY reminding you to support your local gaming store. Now go out and roll some dice.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
No tags
We’re playing Unhallowed Metropolis right now. Rob is the GM. He just said the phrase “beautiful Chinese robot assassin.”
That’s all.
Edit: we have managed to say the phrase “beautiful Chinese robot assassin” (or some variant, like “sexy Chinese robot assassin, beautiful Chinese android assassin,” etc.) about 100 times already and we’ve only been playing for an hour.
No tags
11
Traditional DMing versus “Playing to Find Out What Happens”
2 Comments · Posted by Timo in Articles, Timo's Articles
The following is a striking example of the difference between “traditional” GMing and something coming out of the indie stables. The game is Apocalypse World.
The Colonel is the Hardholder, the guy who runs this little bastion of humanity in the mess that the world has become. it’s a big market built out of the remnants of a Walmart called Hatchet City. The market is a running free-for-all, but the single biggest trade is in drugs and alcohol, as people need some sort of escape. That part of the economy is handled by Brimful and his family, who are something of a power unto themselves. Brimful is an older man with a couple sons, who really believes that the best way to avoid trouble is to not seek it. He’s got a gang to back himself up, as well as a couple wives and a bevy of lovers and his kids.
So the scenes sets up something like this: There was a difference opinion among the Colonel’s bodyguards, as Absinthe (the recently appointed head of security, this crazy chick who came out of the wastes convinced that the voices are telling her to kill monsters. For those who know the game, a Battlebabe) was trying to figure out who among her crew was a spy for the encroaching warlord Ambergrease. To do so, she called the entire bodyguard detail away to one location, to deal with them en masse.
But while that was going down the Colonel took off to go talk to Rosette (another PC, the Skinner) with whom he ended up spending the night. So when Absinthe finally decided to go looking for him, he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Rumour got started that he had been murdered in his sleep, that Ambergrease was coming for them all, that there were spies and assassins everywhere, that he had taken off in the middle of the night leaving Hatchet City to fend for itself… you know, the kind of brouhaha that happens when the leader suddenly goes missing. By the time the Colonel is found, the entire hold is in an uproar.
Eventually Absinthe finds the Colonel just as he’s leaving Rosette’s rooms. As things are starting to calm down, Brimful comes storming over to where The Colonel is standing with his bodyguard detail, backed by his own gang, and starts a diatribe about how Hatchet City wouldn’t be in such a state if the Colonel wasn’t inviting chaos with his behaviour, that the Colonel shouldn’t be running around in the middle of the night without his bodyguards, how he’s running a loose ship, and if he can’t keep “his whore” in line (Rosette had slept with one of Brimful’s lovers Tip the day before, which Brimful was not happy about) then he might not be the right man to run the hardhold.
Calling Rosette a whore was probably a bad move as the Colonel proceeded to beat Brimful to death. Literally beat the old man with his knuckles, while Brimful’s entire entourage just stood there in shock and watched (the Colonel’s player rolled Seize by force and hit, choosing to do terrible harm, suffer little harm and Shock and Dismay his enemies).
We ended the game around there, but it was that one act of violence I wanted to highlight. See, in the way that I would usually run a traditional RP I would have invested quite a bit of prep and storyline in Brimful. The likelihood of me allowing him to die in such an abrupt way would be slim to none. I would have manipulated the rules, the dice rolls and the narrative control to make sure that Brimful came out of it alive.
But to GM Apocalypse World one must hold to the three points of the Agenda: Make Apocalypse world seem real, make the characters lives not boring, and play to find out what happens. I do not know ahead of time what is going to happen, and have no real vested interest one way or the other: really, I’m just curious to see what the characters are going to do to handle Brimful. Turns out that the Colonel is going to kill him over an insult.
Did that make his life easier? Hell no. Sure, he made a point about Brimful, But the old man had kids ready to step up and take his place, and a gang that can start making trouble, and a serious amount of clout in the holding itself. So now Brimful’s people have good reason to go running to Ambergrease, or to ally with Dustwich (The Colonel’s former lieutenant who is gunning for his job), or maybe to just take a shot at him themselves. Life just got a little more interesting, and it did it without me forcing the story to turn on my dime: it all follows naturally from what was there before.
To me, this is by far more interesting than whatever I would have come up with myself: interesting not only to the players, but to me, because I simply do not know what will happen until it does.
No tags
Holy crap is this insane. It’s like the entire A-List cast involved owed someone some kind of crazy favor.
Edit: I’m still watching it. It just gets worse. Everything about it is embarrassing. They combine CGI and regular animation in the most hamfisted way possible. It might be the worst thing I’ve ever seen.
I mean, look at this garbage.
Edit: HOLY CRAP! At the wedding scene at the end, it shows people making merry and all, and right at the front of the camera is a seriously old man making out with a seriously young girl. Then they cut back to it again. Thanks jerks. I needed that image.
No tags
The following is a blog post written by Ben, one of our original hosts about the game misspent youth. You can find his blog here.
—–
There will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem this year
I am going to make it through this year if it kills me
At GenCon, I played an amazing new role-playing game, Misspent Youth, by Robert Bohl. For a host of reasons, I can’t imagine something more appropriate to talk about in the first real post on my resurrected blog.
But, I’ve already told you I’m going to talk about me instead. For me, this game was not just an interesting, thought-provoking way to role play while exploring these issues. For the past year and three months, I have worked with oppressed young people. The young men who I serve are all poor, they all have special education needs, have all had friends die in acts of violence (about half of them have seen a friend murdered). They also are all involved in the juvenile justice system.
These are the forgotten members of our society, people who have been dealt the shortest end of the shortest stick since conception, since Jim Crow, since the Middle Passage, since one man (I hate to use sexist language, but it almost certainly was a man in this case) decided to put his boot to another’s throat and keep pushing and pushing until he got what he wanted.
That’s what Misspent Youth forces us to confront, how much of our history and our present are wrapped up in oppression, in maintaining privilege, in making sure people know their place. And, because the game takes place in the future, we also have to confront whether we’ll keep living this way, keep taking everything we can from anyone who can’t defend herself.
But it also reminds us of something else, something so simple and beautiful it takes your breath away: when one person, especially someone young, throws her own little monkey wrench into the machinery of repression. Because, I can tell you from my experience in my job that our society had basically one message for our misspent youth: comply. Don’t think too much, don’t step out of line, listen to your case workers and your teachers and your parents and the cops and do whatever they tell you to. And, whatever you do, never question the authority. If, while reading the last sentence, you have decided that this seems like a recipe for creating broken people who will see nothing for themselves but a life of crime, congratulations on a) not being an idiot and b) not bearing any responsibility for what we euphemistically call the “juvenile justice system.”
I guess after all this ranting, I might tell you a little bit about the game’s mechanics. We chose to fight an authority that was using state-sponsored religion to destroy history, although we could have fought a corporation destroying freedom or some similar option. Then we came up with a variety of character concepts and each chose two. Mine were “needs to be in charge” and “tagalong.”
After you choose your concepts, you choose a means, motive, opportunity, and MO for your character. These were all fairly easy. But then I froze. Because the final thing I was supposed to choose when I created my character was her dysfunction, her deepest secret, the thing that lets her fight the authority but will ultimately destroy her, a quick synopsis of her innocence in all its wonderful, tragic glory.
But the only dysfunction I could come up with was my own. I had been thinking about it all week, because I was almost certain that I was about to lose my job (I did, this morning). I started to tear up. I had talked about the job a bit earlier with my new friends and fellow games, against my better judgment. I guess I was feeling vulnerable.
So I wrote it down: she thinks she can change the world. Because, you see, one of the things you can do is sell out your personal traits if you need to do something desperate to defeat the authority. In essence, if your own skills and convictions betray you, you can start to behave like your oppressor, giving up a bit of yourself you can never get back for short-term success, even if, in the end, the authority is still winning by co-opting your soul. And your dysfunction is always the last thing you sell out, after the authority has consumed every last bit of your own identity.
I think I still have mine, wilted little thing though it is, although who knows for how long. I have clung to it over the past year, even as it has dragged me across our ransacked urban frontier, littered with broken lives and the bodies of children.
Maybe someone will give me the chance to sell it out. Maybe I’ll take it. I’ve seen too many good people do too many horrible things to think that I’m above much of anything at this point.
But maybe I’ll hang on, just a bit more, fight one more fight before I slide into all the creature comforts you can enjoy once you’ve given everything else away to the authority.
I don’t know. But I do know that I want to thank Rob Bohl for helping me think these thoughts, and my fellow gamers for taking this journey with me.
And I want to thank the guys I’ve worked for over the past few years, for putting up with me, for opening up my eyes, for listening to me and letting me in, even though they had no reason to trust a young white guy with no idea how to help anybody.
If I have any shred of my dysfunction left, hopefully I will honor that trust by taking my finger and sticking it in the authority’s eye every time I get the chance. If enough people embrace that message, maybe we won’t have to worry so much about our own misspent youth.
No tags
10
Interview Episode 7: Julia Ellingboe
No comments · Posted by Timo in Interview Episodes, Podcasts
Hosted by Timo
Through the vagaries of the interwebs, Julia Ellingboe found our episode about Race and our mention of her game, Steal Away Jordan. We invited her to share her intention and opinion about the game in that context, which allowed me to also pick her brain on other topics related to her games and her design. I mistakenly note that our episode on Race was episode 57, it’s actually episode 59.
Slave Narratives: Book of the Night Women, Octavia Butler, Frederick Douglas, Slave No More, Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember (1:20)
Stories of slavery as heroic stories (3:50)
Slavery outside of the default setting (4:30)
Vak: American slavery in particular as a problem (5:00)
Played as a folk tale (6:35)
Mechanic: Goals are secret from the GM, shared between players (07:25)
Graham Walmsley runs a great Steal Away Jordan game (09:45)
Three white dudes and me, Uncle Ruckus and playing the spiteful character (11:40)
Impression as a player rather than the Storyteller (14:20)
Designed for fun, not guilt. Making players uncomfortable as entertainment, comparison to Bachannal (15:00)
Making the owners real (16:20)
The game is not really about race, its more about ownership (18:05)
Scott’s question: Where did you grow up, how did that affect the design? (18:50)
Playing Steal Away Jordan: Being a black woman among (mostly) white men (20:00)
Lines and Veils (22:30)
Fastaval: The Journey and walking away from a game (23:40)
Wanting to understand the experience, versus recoiling from it (26:50)
What a difference a river makes (28:55)
Historical perspective: parrallel to 2nd and 3rd wave feminism (31:00)
Different things that could be gotten from the game, what sort of games do people play (32:25)
Nervous laughter and playing nice (35:00)
The saddest steal away jordan ever, and playing sad games (37:00)
How Julia got in to gaming (38:50)
Having non-gamer kids (39:50)
Malice: the love of frightening dolls (40:45)
Non-slasher horror films: The Omen, Psycho, Fallen, Lost Souls (42:25)
Tales of the Fisherman’s Wife and measuring up to past success (45:35)
Two major themes: Folk Tales and Card Games (47:30)
Cards versus Dice (50:35)
What to do with Tam Lim playtesting at Intercon Massachusetts, Dreamation and Fastaval (51:50)
Dead Inside (53:30)
The Massachusetts Game Collective (54:30)
The joy of game writing (56:30)
Why go independent? (57:30)
The library of Congress as a Resource: American History (59:15)
Announcements: Have fun at Gencon, thanks for playing Steal Away Jordan (01:00:00)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
No tags
So Gencon is over. I didn’t make the whole thing because I’m buried under a metric ton of work which is sucking my will to live, but the con was, nonetheless, a blast. I played:
1) My Life With Master. Master (in this case, Mistress) won. Hardcore.
2) Misspent Youth, which was FANTASTIC. Expect more reviewing of it in the future.
3) Zombie Cinema, in which Timo and I both bit it spectacularly and satisfyingly.
4) Zombie Dice and Cthulu Dice. Both fun.
5) Something else… I swear. It will come to me.
Swag round up:
1) Labyrinths and Lycanthropes. Looks like a fun dungeon crawler.
2) Kagematsu. How pretty is this game?
3) Remember Tomorrow. If Gregor Hutton’s name on it, I’m sure it’s sweet.
4) Montsegur 1244. Right up my alley. Burning heretics. Sold.
5) Annalise. I mostly got this for my ladyfriend’s sister whose name is Annalise. It looks pretty sweet, having said that.
6) Apocalypse World, which is sweet looking. This is our next campaign.
Please click all above links. Anyone? What did you play and pick up?
No tags
