 We're here today because Australia, you know, we've run this exact lecture with a few tweaks at several packs is in the past starting in Oh, hey, you might think oh, we're recycling but we are recycling. We talked a lot. We figure none of you know We are and you've never been to packs. This is new to you So I can tell the same jokes that no one will know right But the real reason we wanted to bring this old panel back to you right is that in you know I'm sure you guys play a lot indie video games especially with your PC culture, right in the US We have a lot of indie tabletop RPGs which we love but I am not so sure that those have made it to Australia So we wanted to spread the love of them now We tested this on the tram here the tram was 90% packs people and we're on the tram and we meet this guy He's a super tabletop game. We're talking about Pathfinder. I'm like, all right I'm gonna list for you the names of games We're talking about in this panel if you ever heard of anything and none of them So I think we're in a good place. I think we're in a good place now. We did add something to this panel That's where we're gonna start right here But when we first ran this, at PAX 2008, we ran it right after the Dungeons & Dragons as awesome panel They thought that these two panels would go together No, we kind of shadow over Dungeons & Dragons for an hour And we're gonna shadow over Dungeons & Dragons for an hour But for the first 20 minutes, people in the audience were like clenching their fists, like, how dare these guys All right Right guys, they love D&D so much. If you take a poop on it, they feel like personally offended Like you have insulted this thing I've spent years on But I love D&D. D&D is like a formative part of my life. I played D&D since I was in like third grade D&D, I had characters I took from second ed to third ed, not to fourth ed I went to nerdy summer camp, right? In a nerdy summer camp at dinner, they would list the activities for after dinner And the number one activity was, quote, adventure games, which meant going to picnic tables behind the, whatever it is, cafeteria and play D&D So, and that was second ed So, we want to be very clear, this all comes with love We, I love Dungeons & Dragons, I love everything that it is, and I'm about to take a crap over it and my childhood for the next hour So, let's begin. Role playing games, that's what we're talking about, right? What is a role playing game? Well, Dungeons & Dragons The title of this panel, Beyond Dungeons & Dragons, and we use that term to describe Dungeons & Dragons But we also use that term to describe that What is that really having in common with Dungeons & Dragons? Yeah, there's characters and they have some stats, and that's pretty much it, right? I mean, the story is not different, Cecil goes through his transformation whether you like it or not, I guess unless you stop playing, maybe But there's so many games out there that people call a role playing game, and you look at the whole category of everything that's called a role playing game And these things don't even resemble each other, how do they have the same label? Makes no sense I am playing a role in this game, I'm taking this character, they're going through all the motions But most of the game is this sort of combat game that's kind of separate from the role playing part I mean, you don't watch a movie and there's a thousand random encounters along the way So obviously, we're not talking about this when we talk about Dungeons & Dragons Because really, that is the extent of the role playing in a traditional role playing game Does that love me? The trick here is that no matter what you answer, you are forced to answer yes If you say no, she says, but thou must, and you have to answer again I could say this is some sort of allegory for relationships but What about this? That's role playing, isn't it? It is indeed role playing Kenneth Brown, I was playing the role of Hamlet, but I don't think Shakespeare was rolling dice when he made Hamlet I don't know if Brown was rolling any dice either So we've got a game where there isn't really any role playing We've got role playing where there isn't really a game Now, we know we're talking about that, that is what this panel is about I had hair That is our gaming group, there's a bunch of people there with pajamas Sitting around a table, funny shaped dice, nachos, everything So we're talking about this, but the role playing game covers so many different things That we really need to define the term Because if we don't define the term, it's really easy for us to get way off track in our discussion But even further, we keep using that word game I figure Princess Bride would go well over here We don't even have a good definition of the word game I mean, patty cake's a game Yeah, what kind of game is patty cake though? I mean, is there a winner? Is there a loser? Can you mess up? When one plays patty cake, everyone loses Or is it Roger Rabbit patty cake? I mean, Poker's covered that, Meatgate, we were talking at a convention called Magfest in the US And a woman in the audience took Umbridge with the fact that we wanted to define the term game for the purpose of discussion Because, and I quote, I watch movies with my friends and we consider that a game If you look at the dictionary, that could definitely be a game It's like an amusement or whatever, right? Candyland, I mean, you think Candyland's obviously a game But in Candyland, no one makes any decisions All you do is reveal cards and move the thing, determining, you know, based on what the cards say No one decides anything, there's no decision or anything It's just, play it out and see who wins You can just flip over the whole deck of cards and be like, rim wins Now, too many people, when they want to, as soon as someone starts trying to define They want to make a definition of game They start using that to exclude other kinds of games Or somehow denigrate those other kinds of games Usually, they're trying to make a no-true Scotsman argument Like, you know, people will be like, oh, that's not a sport, that is a sport And what they're trying to say is, I respect that activity, I do not respect that activity Oh, I respect that as a game, yeah, I like that one I don't like that, I don't want to call that a game Because then it's, you know, we're not trying to do that, right? All of these various activities are even, you know, watching movies we don't consider to be a game That doesn't mean we don't think watching movies is a good way to spend your time, right? We're just trying to have a discussion about a particular subset of things that many people call games So we need some sort of word to narrow it in So there's no confusion that we're actually talking about something else Now, the trouble really is the word game It's an ancient word, it's been used for a long time We have a lot of different things I mean, if I hunt pheasants, pheasants, that is also game So Richard Garfield, you may have heard of him He, you know, Magic the Gathering, Android Netrunner, kind of a famous dude in game design He coined the term, and that term is orthogame The book in which he coined this term is what's the characteristics of games That book is like our Bible If any of you are aspiring game designers Go buy Richard Garfield's book, Characteristics of Games, and read it cover to cover It looks like a boring textbook, but it's actually the best book Now, he covers orthogames exclusively The definitions of games we use, we really use three definitions In interactive amusement, a series of interesting decisions Or a competitive test of skill And he decided to make a new word for that An orthogame is a competition between two or more players Using a set of rules and a method of ranking Poker, chess, football Suddenly we have a word and now we know that Pluto is not a game in this context Right, Candyland is not a game Patty Cake is not a game if we're going by orthogame And we just don't want to say orthogame every time, because it's annoying So he coined this term and it's a very useful term But his book very pointedly only covers these kinds of games It doesn't cover role-playing games So he needed a word for these other kinds of games So we want to commit a little bit of hubris And we've tried to coin a term, ideal game So if an orthogame is defined by this He chose ortho because ortho is the prefix for sort of straight He used it to mean a straight or pure or true game And ideal means unique or personal So a series of interesting decisions that produce a personal outcome Dungeons and Dragons does that Mass Effect does that to a degree In fact, notice some of these games recently People play them for the story and then they even let you turn off the game part Because they choose your own adventure stories all anyone actually cares about Yeah, but Final Fantasy wouldn't really work up to this, right? Sure, you might make some interesting decisions But it's not a personal outcome, right? Final Fantasy VII ends the same way for everyone in this room There's no personal about it whatsoever, right? You might have a personal reaction to it But that can be said for anything, you know? So it doesn't really count So the kinds of games we're talking about For the rest of this lecture are ideal games But even that is just a high level category So I'm going to answer the next question for you And then we're going to proceed Conflict Conflict is the answer to the next two questions What makes a good story? Star Wars seems to be the theme in every pack's keynote ever So I figured we'd go along with that, I assumed and it would be So the whole point of a story like Star Wars Is that there is conflict between these characters That is why we watch it We're not interested as much in the conflict between us and George Lucas Some of you might be, but not everybody You know, the conflicts are internal or external It's like basic literature in 101 action here, right? What drives a good game? Conflict Conflict But it is conflict between the player and the game The player and another player Nobody goes home or goes to their friends And tells about the story of how Billy and Jimmy save that stupid girlfriend from those Whatever No one tells that story The story is, yo Scott, I beat Double Dragon last night Holy shit, what happens at the end? You get credits and that's it I beat Double Dragon Luke beat the Emperor, spoilers I beat Double Dragon You see how the conflict in a sort of an ortho game Like Double Dragon Which isn't even really an ortho game because it's not between two players But it's still more of a game Not too much role playing It's all about you in the real world You beating this thing I got the high score at Space Invaders I beat Rim at a game of Puerto Rico I beat Rim at Magic the Gathering When you play D&D It's my character went and rescued the whatever Suddenly you're inside the story It's the things that matter That personal outcome You don't win Dungeons and Dragons At least in the sense of an ortho game You want to find the conflict in the fantasy Not the conflict of you trying to conquer And improve your skills So if we boil all this down And take all these concepts together This is our proposed definition of a role playing game That we will use for the rest of this panel Because really, why do we play role playing games? Because we're trying to tell cool stories But simultaneously, we're not good storytellers And with all of that combined We're also gamers and we want to play a game So a role playing game Is nothing more than a mechanism of conflict resolution In order to facilitate collaborative storytelling Right, I mean anyone can just sit down And tell a story It's pretty easy even if you're bad at it And good writers can tell stories Because that's what they're good at But me and Rim, we're computer people We can tell stories really well at all But maybe if we get together We can have a lot of fun Coming up with a story together Maybe someone's a good writer Maybe no one is But it's a good time It's like okay I want the guy to go and kill the dragon That would be so awesome So keep this definition in your head For the whole rest of this This is how we're defining the term role playing game Because that is what we're talking about We're not talking about Final Fantasy And I just want to point out Yes, I did photoshop my friends From the D&D group Onto that Star Wars picture I don't think they know that we showed that picture In all these conventions all around the world Except that you were at the last time we did this One of them was It's actually big right there It's the only one Captain Giant had So the whole point of this is That role playing games let us make our own God damn Star Wars So let's talk about some concepts Of role playing games Because we're going to build to Actually taking some examples From existing role playing games You might not have heard of That do the kinds of things we're talking about Role playing game tends to have A game master up at the top I've stolen all this from the Bay of Tapestry We have our PCs over here And we have the world The environment The obstacles Right the conflict that we're resolving here Is the conflict between the player characters Right and the things in the world That aren't necessarily players Deep dark dungeons And horrible monsters And traps of all kinds Are all represented on the right And how is the conflict resolved We have a mechanism of conflict resolution King Harold up there Now wait We're about to crack over D&D We haven't really cracked on it yet D&D does not help us tell good stories D&D is mostly terrible at that And you're all thinking right now But I've told great stories with D&D And so wait We have It wasn't the game that was doing that Because you can't evaluate a role playing game By your experiences alone You can only evaluate it By what is actually written in that book Right A lot of people try and tell me I say D&D's not a role playing game Or it's a bad role playing game And they're like No I just had the greatest D&D session We have this great story going Everything's amazing And I'm like that's all you What part of that did D&D make happen And they can't tell me Right They just come up with some other excuse Listen we can role play Monopoly Good So get off my Atlantic Avenue Post taste Him and I have it I'm playing a crazy guy My character doesn't want money Right Does that make Monopoly a role playing game Because we can role play We can create a good story Around the game of Monopoly That doesn't mean Monopoly is a role playing game You're giving Monopoly credit For the thing that you did All on your own It was you all along Right D&D is the magic feather You don't need D&D to fly You don't You can fly on your own You don't need this weird system That all it really does Is tell you how to move around In the dungeon and stab things So my character before He's confronted through the game master With this world We're going to have some conflict What is my character My character is literally Nothing more than that In Dungeons & Dragons Now you might think I think they're laughing at the fin Up in the corner Now you might think That your character has a lot going on But that is really all that's there And we're not just talking About Dungeons & Dragons Pathfinder Pretty much are Werewolves All these games Are basically mechanically Sort of call like a fool And mostly The same game They're different combat schemes And what is essentially The same role play Right It's like Oh in L5R You can die really easily And use D10s But in D&D Use a D20 It's like It's the same idea though It's all So if I'm going to tell the story Of my character here I'm not going to talk about My strength stat That's not interesting And it turns out That that's the only part Of my character That is character That is story Who he knows What he's done Where he's going Why he fights For what he fights for That's it And that whole character sheet That's it So try to tell me This is a role playing game But what percentage of it Has anything to do with role playing That percent And most of that is a picture Now you've been in this boat before Right there on the relationships You write that Kelvin Blackstaff is your uncle You really love Kelvin Blackstaff don't you This is my go to example You know what we should go with Drist is your cousin That's why We should go with it Ah We'll get to that later So I write down My character sheet In that tidy little space For character background That Kelvin Blackstaff Is my uncle Who doesn't give one shit About that There's no rule in the book That says anything about that If Kelvin Blackstaff is your uncle Then you get plus one And no There's nothing like that Right It's just something you make up In this text area they gave to you And nothing in the book Makes that matter Whatsoever If you're going to make that matter That's something you do on your own Not something D&D makes matter So all of that How much of this does D&D Make matter Well Pretty much Just race That's the biggest stretch I can even make To have anything highlighted on this So Let's talk about Conflict in role-playing games Because the conflict between The characters And the conflict between the players Are both very important So My PC runs into a guy Trying to sell I guess some sort of cat And a guy's got a bowl Stuck on his head Looks more like an artwork Kind of thing Without a big nose This guy might be an astronaut I really want that head bowl The head bowl is really easy Alright So we want the head bowl Now Maybe the guy doesn't want to Give us the head bowl Well What are we going to do here We can buy it from them Now maybe we're going to start Role-playing That's not the game If we just start talking And characters And don't start telling me That D&D says Make up your own rules I can make your own rules And write on the last page Of the Monopoly instruction manual That doesn't mean anything Alright So If my character Is just that character she And I'm confronted with this What does the game Try to tell me to do Well If all I have is a hammer Then a bunch of people Are going to end up dead Everything highlighted in red Only Applies to Killing people With swords and hammers And magic There are other parts here They're also used in combat But they can Theoretically be used For non-combat In a few situations That red stuff Just fun I mean Your rope skill Can be used to kill people But also To get over a trap That's not killing anyone So basically The game is giving me All these great tools If I want to fight With these guys And kill them And smash that ball It's going to be way fun We're going to get to use All these fun stuff In the D&D book Like oh my god I get to kill someone Look at all these I'm rolling tons of dice I'm using all this stuff On my character sheet And a bunch of people die I got a ball now from my head But if I want to talk to the guy Maybe I roll a diplomacy check One line on the whole sheet How satisfying is that? I roll one dice He gives you the ball on the head Roll one dice He doesn't give you the ball on the head And if we just Roll play it out Which a lot of GMs are like Oh just roll play it out And see where it goes And what do we need Any of this page for We could just not Play this game And just roll play it out And more importantly That moves the context up It's not just character versus character It ends up being player versus player You've all been in this boat The guy has a three charisma And yet somehow He's always getting everything He wants all the time Because in the real world He has charisma Right Your real world charisma Matters when the game Doesn't make it not matter Right Your real world intelligence And solving puzzles Matters when the game Doesn't make your low intelligence In the game matter So there's a field of Game theory called Mechanism Design And it's the idea That the rules of the game Influence the behavior That players take within the game So think about the mechanism Design of Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition It basically gets you to Play World of Warcraft On a table with a bunch of dice So the only way around this The only way to get past This situation Is to put some rails in place The Game Master Will just say Yes, just start talking With you Just smooth over the part That you're interested in So that the game Can just continue Either by letting you Kill them Or by letting your role Get out The game doesn't let you Within the rules itself Freely explore the interactions In an interesting way If you try to go and You know, do your own thing Make up your own rules You know, go where the GM Doesn't want you to go Not kill things Right The game gets all messed up The GM doesn't have anything Prepared Oh my God What are we going to do Some highly skilled GM Can make something up But the game Didn't help him with that Even helped him with that Yeah, and if you're in that Why do you think there's So many panels Of all these comments About how to be a great Game master You might not even Meet a game master at all And the game would be amazing Every single time You put it on the table Because the game did it Some genius game designer Came up with it Not some part Piss ass D&D game designer Piss ass Yeah, whatever Piss ass That's it I try to be nicer So what about When a player Or a player's character Wants to fight With another player's character We're going left In this dungeon The old man The old man in town Said always go to the west And left is westish And that is crazy My character refuses To go that way The crazy old man Are always right I refuse What are you going to do about it I'm going left So now what Do we let our PCs fight While dungeons and dragons Like games Suck at that Player versus player fighting One is really uninteresting Two doubly uninteresting For the people not involved Three has no interesting Consequences Unless you kill The other person And of course You kill the other person You have this Horrible metagame consequence People get upset IRL Right They don't want to Make a new character They work They've been spending Investing so much time In this game And now you've ruined The whole thing with your fight And who would really kill Someone because They wanted to go left To the other person And go right Would you kill Someone over that Even if you were evil Even if you were like Freaking chaotic evil Would you do that That's really What you're going to do Now I don't know Now simultaneously Because there's No system around This interaction Role of versus diplomacy That's also Really boring Or again Use our real world Charisma to convince The person To go one way or the other It also gives Players an easy out It gives a player Who wants to be obstinate My character wouldn't do And now what You're not going to do it My character wouldn't do Now what you're going to do Now the Game Master Has to take you on The full Out of Dungeon Master Express Yeah, whether you choose To go left or right You'll be like Okay, you go left And you end up In the same room How about that Okay Don't you feel stupid The reason the term Railroading Is probably the most Commonly used word Other than the Is, at, and I guess chips In a forum For Game Masters Maybe critical What if the players Disagree with the Game Master Straight up The Game Master Sets up the dungeon And we want to Go be pirates Well, D&D The solution is Game Master is law And you may not Disagree with him at all Yeah, the porclas Fell behind you You're trapped in there You know it You wet it So what do we do here There's no mechanism In D&D For the players To assert will Over the Dungeon Master There's no way for me To roll dice and say Yeah, hell it likes that It shows up Yeah, he's my uncle Right, he lives here No, he doesn't live here He's not showing up GM says That's what happens So what do we do In this situation When the players Disagree with the Game Masters Direction They want to explore A part of the game That the Game Master Won't let them go Well, a dragon Is a possible way And the railroad Just keeps on each other What if there's no Game Master Oh my God Now what do we do Is a game like that What if there's no Game Master And me and Scott Disagree For going left or right What do we do Hell, fist fight Yeah, now we can't Even have a Game Master To railroad us into the same room Or say You're both going left Or you're both going right Or to somehow Settle this decision It's just me Versus him In the real world Arguing And that's where The Dungeon Master Now, many of you might be thinking That you love Dungeons & Dragons And I love it too But our whole point here Is that you should really think about If your goal Is to collaboratively With your friends Play a game That causes you to tell a story What kind of story Are you trying to tell? Right, now I've met people Who love D&D And I say What do you love about it? It's like they love Going to Dungeons And having combat And shooting monsters And all that stuff And to that I say Well, D&D is the perfect game for you You want to go in there And kill monsters With some average damage Which slash Or attack Or you know His magic spell Is going to make that happen And then having a tank And a healer And all that World of Warcraft stuff If you like figuring that out On paper Play D&D All you want In fact, it's an even better game You can play Descent Or I've never played Descent Where you build a little dungeon It's even better at that, right? And it has the same Role-playing framework As Dungeons & Dragons Yeah, nothing If you want to play And if you want Little kids to play Get here on Quest Same thing Just don't tell them About the secret Attack until you open a door So you effectively Don't have to roll the dice Yeah, we'll move on beyond that So really What it comes down to Is that Dungeons & Dragons Exists in a continuum Of role-playing games And we made this handy chart At the top there Is the authoritative game One person is telling a story At the bottom, collaborative A bunch of people are telling a story And they all have equal input Games fall On different parts That continue them On the left to right Game versus role-playing How mechanic heavy Is the role-playing game Is there mechanisms for conflict Resolution that is social? Do you roll a bunch of dice For an argument Or are games like that? Or is it purely role-playing? Is it a game where There is basically no game at all Except maybe you flip a coin? You mean your high school Drama club? Basically And it turns out that stuff Exists all over Not just role-playing games I mean, Mario is basically Just a single person Maybe two people playing a game Jane Austen One person telling a story Playing a role Writing it down Whose life is it anyway? Is it kind of a game? But it's mostly kind of prescripted Doesn't really matter who wins It's more role-playing And Dungeons and Dragons Really just fits right about there Mostly a game Mostly one person telling you What the story is You're unfolding the story How many of you have played A Dungeons and Dragons game Where the pivotal plot point Is gonna be You're investigating some mystery So you roll gather information If you succeed The Game Master tells you A couple more paragraphs And stuff If you fail Nothing happens You roll again And then he tells you The two paragraphs he's done He's prepared it And he's gonna tell it to you I'll take 20 on that check Alright, now I'll tell you The two paragraphs I wrote down That I was just waiting to tell you So think about more specifically Not just what kind of story You're trying to tell But where in this continuum Do you want it to be? Do you want it to get together With a bunch of friends And make a Star Wars happen Just kind of out of the blue Like let's see what ideas stick You gotta go to the way bottom right Do you have a vision of a story And you want to have your friends Help you make that vision happen Do you have a story That you've already written And you just want other people To read it back to you After rolling a bunch of dice Do you want to sit alone In your dark dungeon Just, you know, enjoying a story That's someone else Much smarter than you wrote And you have no friends? I don't know what fantasy Book would be good here Or I could make a joke About that fantasy book right now I don't know Did they know Prince of Nothing? No one here knows a prince of nothing No, okay Alright, let's get in the Interesting part We're gonna actually take you Through a ton of games That you've probably never heard of And probably aren't available In your country Internet exists, people Internet Alright, the shipping is gonna be the same As the markup at the game store So So we're gonna start with the game Called Inspector Now, I'm hoping many of you Have seen an old movie You might have heard of it It's called Ghostbusters It's a big New York movie I don't know So it's the people that are from there This is a role-playing system That makes Ghostbusters happen Right, you can't use You know, people like to brag About D&D They try to like hit every hammer With it, you know We can use this for any kind of story And you see, remember In the D20 days it was big D20 modern D20 Star Wars We can use the same set of rules For every kind of story No, you can't Alright, inspectors will only tell That story of a company of people Running a business Where they work together To solve supernatural disturbances If you do not want to tell A story about that This game will not do that It does only one thing And one thing only The really interesting mechanic About this game That I want to highlight There's the character sheet And there's actually not that much on it It's mostly flavor text They actually put the rules Of the game on the character sheet They had so much leftover space So here's the deal If I'm a player And I want to do something I roll some dice You know, athletics Whatever Yeah, it's always going to fall Into one of those four skills Academics, athletics, technology Or contact, right? So if you wanted to, say Beat up someone on the street Who wasn't giving you information Right? Because they definitely saw it But they're walking away And they deserve a beating You're going to use athletics For that, right? So I roll my dice If I roll really well I narrate what happens And that's 10 That's the story now By rolling well by succeeding I get control of the story For a little while And if you fail at the roll The GM gets control of the story For a little while And he is against you And yeah And everything in between Right? So if you roll moderately well It's like, okay You get to tell the story But the GM gets to slip in A negative aspect Or if you roll poorly It's like the GM tells the story But the player gets to slip in One positive aspect So if I'm researching The microfiche in the library To find out if The picture of the guy Who we think did the murder Looks the same 20 years ago And 50 years ago If I roll a six I narrate exactly what I found What did you find? So it turns out That we keep finding this guy's picture Going all the way back To 300 years ago What does the guy look like? Tell me about it Ah, he's got a really long nose No, wait, so he's actually bald Okay He's got kind of some spell going on Yeah He's holding a microphone You better watch out for that game It's a dangerous guy Now let's say I roll a one Ah Oh, you rolled a one I rolled a one You rolled a microfiche Yeah, I rolled a one Oh, while you were looking At the microfiche, right? You heard some noises Around the corner In the back of the library Ah And then you went to investigate them Look, I don't need his permission To make him go investigate I'm telling the story He failed, right? You went around this corner To investigate The door closed behind you And now something is Grabbing your neck Oh, no Now we can continue And get, you know Going to the next roll Right? Because there's a new conflict Now the conflict is no longer The conflict of Finding the thing In the microfiche in the library It's not the conflict of him Versus the monster In the back of the library So instead of the mechanical Mechanic Mechanical mechanic Going back and forth The currency of the game Being hit points Damage per round All that stuff In D&D like games The currency is Who has control over the narrative And the mechanics of the game Just let you pass That currency around So like you have a candle Or else the candle could talk And roll the dice So you guess the candle The other cool thing This game does Is it has a shared space There's a character sheet For your home base How many of you played a game Where you have a home base You've got like These cool magic items You've got your butler Or whatever You role-play stuff out In your treehouse The treehouse is a character here There's rules for Hey, do we have a Sama Flange in the treehouse? I don't know, do we have a Sama Flange? Let's roll a check And find out We do need to have one So suddenly You don't have to worry About this minutia of Do you have 108 gold pieces And 15 electron pieces In your stash You abstract that And roll dice Do we have the thing We need for the plot Right now? Or not? In fact we do We always do We don't Primetime Adventures Okay, so Primetime Adventures Like Inspectors Is a game that tells One and only one story One kind of story It makes a TV series Any sort of serial TV series So it can actually cover A wide variety of genres If you want to do Lost the role-playing game Perfect, Game of Thrones Perfect Bucky, The Vampire Slayer You can use this For a lot of anime games If you want it to be Like a cowboy view-up situation Perfect, right? The mechanic We want to point out here This is actually a card-based Game you play with A deck of playing cards Is the screen presence Right? You basically You must play nine sessions Of this game for it to work Right? And what you do is At the very beginning When you make the characters You determine your presence Per episode Right? And if you think about You know TV series It's like, yeah There's a lot of characters And some episodes Focus on one of them Like Simpsons Right? It's like This is a Moses-like episode He's just all over this episode He's trying to get with Marge Remember that one? Yeah So Moe has a really High screen presence He goes to Moe's bar once And that's it really Maybe he gets a prank call From Bar So his screen presence That episode is going to be One or two Right? And the screen presence The higher it is During that session The more power you have To exert your influence On how the conflicts are resolved So more of the scenes In the game Are going to want to Involve you Other characters You take turns When a character has a scene They're going to want to Get you involved in that scene So you can exert your influence And help them You know get Whatever they want In that scene Whatever Have more cards Basically available Because the number is How many cards you get And such So you're going to be In more scenes There will be more screen presence Now remember We're not good at Writing or telling stories Right? But there's a certain Math involved In setting those screen Presence numbers Right? And the people who Made this game They are good writers They are good storytellers That math happens to Coincide with Having really good Pacing Having really good Evenly distributed Character focus Just by following the rules You will tell a good story Right? You're not At least not going to get Those parts wrong The pacing will be good And the character focus You know being shared Equally will be good You're going to mess up Something else Think about the problems This is already solving I mean like we said The guy with the Ladder charisma At the table Who's talking constantly Bowling everyone over In D&D This game Forces all of you To spread the story around To all the characters No one's being left out At any point It also Forces you Do I want to be big In this episode Or that episode And also Another kind of side With other games Do this better This game forces you To write down Who your nemesis is So if I were A Kelman Blackstaff As my nemesis Then he is guaranteed To be in the story It's part of the rules He is my enemy You can actually Use the rules Because it's written Down in the character She matters Not like D&D Where you write Character background You can't force There's no rule about that It's just a flavor text Down here In all of these games Real text Where there's a rule about it If you have a connection Kelman Blackstaff You can Kelman Blackstaff Shows up in the diner It happens You say it happens It happens It's a rule As long as you have them On your sheet Free market Free market is crazy This is a role playing game That comes in a box Like the old D&D games It looks like a board game The deal with it Is that it plays One kind of game Very specifically Notice the trend here They all play One kind of game So you can play A lot of different things This is set in a space station In a post-scarcity world Imagine a world Where energy We have infinite energy It's basically a cyberspace Cyberpunk utopia Right Where everything is amazing And the only scarcity Is physical room If I die They just reprint me And put my memories back in I'm good to go Right You can't die All you can have Is really social You know currency Like people don't like you Anymore That can be a problem Right So that's sort of a scarcity It's a space station It's tiny Now the whole premise of the game Is predicated on one question So with this world And with all these resources At your disposal What did you do today? That is the promise And let me tell you Watching people play this game It goes into a dark place Really quick Yeah, it's pretty cool Because sometimes you play And people tend to start off wacky I've played games about cannibalism I've played games about dentistry I've played games about Cooking plus cannibalism Food is a very common theme in this game I want to start a bakery And think about this A whole scarcity world In this world If I give you a donut You probably really like me It's like, give you a donut Unless you're gluten tolerant But in this world If I give you a donut You could print a donut anytime In fact, taking the donut It's just pain in the ass If you give someone a gift And they accept it You get like a huge boost In this game Because who the hell wants gifts Right And there's actually differences Between stuff you made by hand And stuff you just printed out And it's like Are you really good at printing Are you really good at making stuff There's all kinds of things So this is a game that actually Makes you really think about The sort of ramifications Of a post-scarcity society And it does it exceedingly well And weird sci-fi comes out of this game The other thing about the game Is you play it with these Multiple decks of cards Every player has a deck of cards And it says right on the box How many of each card are in the deck And you flip them over One at a time To sort of resolve the conflicts It's like, oh, I drew a hazard card Shit Oh, I drew a genetics card Good I needed that Because I'm using my genetic thing On this test This conflict, right And the thing is You know how many are in there You can look in the discard piles You're like, shit I know there's no more greens in the deck The next thing I do It's probably going to fail miserably Right But I need to finish the deck So I can shuffle it again So I can win at something So I can choose Like, oh, I know I'm going to fail here Right Or maybe I'll get people to help in On the next thing I do So I know I don't fail at it So success and failure Are ebb and flow currencies Just like in a lot of good stories The characters are failing and failing and failing And failing and failing And then suddenly they succeed at the end And the bill boat throws Gets the ring And Gollum doesn't eat it Or if they're succeeding and succeeding and succeeding And then the critical plot twist happens Because they ran out of success It makes that ebb and flow happen Every time you play the game Thousand and one nights Yo, dog This game is crazy This is a game where you play characters Who themselves are playing characters In a role-playing game Within the game So You're in a sullen's court Thousand and one nights You're not the sullen The sullen is this You know you talk to the sullen He's not really a character It's just sort of like this Imaginary object in the game That you worry You don't want to make the sullen upset And you also don't want to get Executed or kicked out No, you play a character Like, I was playing the Don Juan The poet, the court poet I'm this pretty boy, lover boy That's the dude I'm playing Yeah, I didn't play in that game But our friend Pete did And he was the eunuch Mustafa bin Mustafa Great name Not racist at all Now the way The way you make characters in this game Is you write down For each sense, the five senses Something about your character He smells of lavender He sees power in others Whatever you want You have to focus everything Based on the senses And for every other character Sitting around the table You write what you envy about them So Mustafa bin Mustafa Envy my virility I envy his physical strength It forces you to have A already existing internal relationship With every other character So when you get to sit down And actually play the game What happens is all of the characters Are sitting in the Sultan's court Talking to each other Doing their thing Just doing their thing So now it's you in the real world And you have a character The character is Mustafa bin Mustafa Whatever Talking to the other characters You role play this out Eventually, during the role playing Somebody will in character say Let me tell you a story About that That character All of the characters in the game Have new characters in that story You might think it's hard to do But it's actually incredibly easy Like once you sit down The book is a tiny book You think how can this tiny book Make this happen? It's never failed to work Even people who are usually Not good at role playing Always get it right They remember every character's name And not just the character That they are's name The character in the second story's name Right? Can't even remember D&D character's names But I can remember these guys' names Except Tristan For a couple of times now You don't even know anything About forgotten realms No, I know about you Talking about forgotten realms All the time This is a big part of my life In my youth The other cool thing about this game So you're playing these characters Playing characters And part of the reason it's easy Is that because you're playing a character A character is always Simpler than you At least I hope it's simpler than you Otherwise you spend way too much time Writing that backstory So as a result You have a very simple focus You have this very simple lens Through which to view The secondary character That that character's playing Coupled with the fact that the character's Playing a character In the context of the selfless court You get into situations where The eunuch wanting to Take the wind out of my sails Starts to tell the story Of Don Juan You know, the epic lover And he assigns himself The role of the epic lover He assigns me the epic lover The role of the eunuch To put me in my place So now you've got a story Where you've got a guy Role playing a eunuch Who is telling a story In which the eunuch Is role playing to Don Juan And then you've got a grimm Playing a Don Juan Who is in that story Role playing the eunuch So I come out of the stage When I'm introduced Herptider I'm the eunuch Big and stupid I sure wish I had balls I insulted him at the second level The book also tells you To eat figs and dates and olives And lounge while playing We did that Because in New York You can get Turkish delivery This game is amazing And I actually just recently Got re-printed Recently re-printed, new edition Yeah Worth every dollar Go Don So Dred Dred is the best So Dred, again Only tells one kind of story The survival horror story Good thing that's a really common story Yeah, maybe everyone wants to play A zombie game A Cthulhu game That's the thing lately Sigourney Weaver alien game Awesome, right Any game where You know, you know You know, you know Which project Anything like that Anything where it's haunted And people are dying, right People are getting killed off Throughout the story Dred is your way to go But they're being killed off One by one Yeah, so you know Whenever you go to see A survival horror story Like, you stick with alien I think you might spray them, right It always has the same Pattern to the storytelling, right Everything's kind of chill Something scary is going on Tension builds Tension builds Someone dies Tension levels off Tension builds again Tension builds again And it was just a cat And the tension builds again Oh, yep, someone got eaten Yep, yep, yep You just keep going like that Until usually there's One end or zero people left And then the end, right So Dred Does exactly that game And only that game How does it do it? With a Jenga tower No dice No dice No card Think about it A Jenga tower Tension builds Tension builds Tension builds It falls down So Scott, I want to kick in the door I hear that girl screaming On the other side Alright, give me two pulls Whatever You kick in the door What's in there? I find the girl And I rescue her And we board it up behind me Okay You want to act The zombies are now bashing on The door that you walled up Alright, I try to fortify the door With the stuff from the fireplace You're going to need three pulls There's not much in that fireplace Now look at this Jenga Now if you play Jenga Over time It gets more And more Rik and tension Is building And building and building In the beginning of the game I pull out a shotgun And kill all the zombies I see And it's easy Yeah, it's like, oh Yeah, I kill the zombie I just get killed again In the end of the game It's like, start the car One pull And I'm looking at this thing Like If I choose not to pull I fail At what I wanted to do Right, so for example It's like, oh You're not going to pull To start the car No, okay Car doesn't start Zombies are now surrounding the car You're trapped inside Now what? Yeah, not to look I'm so good for him Yeah, you should say Yeah, it's the next time I ask you to pull If you knock it over And this is a clue I don't think finger Is worth everything I know Your character dies In the most horrific Same appropriate way possible And then you get a snack Because everyone else is going to keep playing Yup It happens No, at the same time You can look at that tower Look at the GM square in the face And smash it Yeah, I mean you look at this thing It's so wobbly And I ask you for two pulls You know you can't make the two pulls Right, and you know It's just going to get worse Yeah, now zombies are piled up On the car so high The suspension breaks It's like If you smash it You succeed In the most glorious way possible Come up And then die In the most horrific Same appropriate way possible That's the whole game I mean there's a character creation Which is like a questionnaire system Where the GM basically writes questions And you answer them And those answers are your character And the GM can sort of make leading questions Like, oh You know what happened to your lover Last season, right So you can make up all this stuff About a lover And you sort of open But you're also restricted You can come up with some clever ways Of doing unexpected things But it's mostly the Jenga Tower Best game So shock Oh snap Social science fiction It's actually a new shock It's shock human contact Also very good So this game Has a lot of crazy stuff going on For one, you play two characters At all times On the front side of your paper You're playing your character On the back side You're playing any of the character To your rights Remember we talked about games with no GM This is one of those games Well it's not that there's no GM It's those five players There's five GMs There is no single GM Right, you go around in a circle You're the enemy of the person to your right And the person to your left Is your enemy And you're you You still interact with the other people So you don't want to just restrict it To three players But it's mostly you And the people next to you Right, but everyone Is the GM of one thing And one thing only So when we played I decided the game should have space pirates So I was the GM I owned space pirates So in the course of the game There's a question Like hey How many space pirates are there in that sector? Oh, there's about a million That's totally space pirate land That's their home base My issue The issue that I was the game master of Was gender politics It's that kind of game The social science The way the game starts You come up with a list of five issues And everything centers on those issues You make the world And then play in it And there's rules for that Also, you set up The kinds of conflicts That can happen In our game All conflict No matter what it was Had to be framed as Either a space battle Or sex And this worked Like every time there was a conflict So basically you would get to your turn You would probably have a conflict With someone else to your left or right Somewhere around, right? And that conflict You would narrate Get to this story You had to resolve that conflict With sex or space battles Somehow So look at this idea Suddenly we've got a game Where it's either this epic Millions of people dying Planets being destroyed Or a very intimate two people And they're dealing with it Like right in there All on the bridge It was the most flash gory What was that situation You were like It was like a space senator or something Yeah, I was some evil space senator And I was trying to do some evil bullshit I barely remember what I was doing Right, and then like People were like sleeping With the space senator To get into the government To manipulate it And people were also like Shooting at the space senator's house With their freaking capital ships Do you have a mascot In comics in Australia? Okay, if you're not Yeah, if you're not reading Mouse guard, that's a problem You should This role-playing game Makes the mouse guard comic Just happen in your living room I know it'll probably cost you Like ten dollars more Than it costs me to get a mouse guard But I'm sure you can get it Digitally maybe For the same price Comixology or something Read mouse guard Holy shit This game just makes The mouse guard comic happen So easily and so quickly That gets almost amazing Right, and the key mechanic In this game Is that it's a turn taking game Not in the same way The other ones are turn taking It's GM turn, player turn GM turn, player turn And starts with the GM's turn So when the GM's turn The GM throws stuff At that mouse Right, it's like Oh, little mouse Now it is time for you To deal with the badger Oh yes, the badger is chasing you What will you do? Oh, you survived barely But you lost your sword When you stabbed the badger Now what will you do? As it rains It makes everything muddy Yes, you are tiny mice Mud is a big problem A big problem Well, you escaped Down to the beach Where there is no mud But there are crabs That's what we do About the crabs That's what we do About the crabs Oh, you cut off their ice top Oh, you managed to escape Okay, that's all I can think of now I'm the GM It is now your turn, mice What will you do? During my turn You little mice Earned some number of clicks Based on your role playing Your role playing well enough You can earn more clicks And the thing is checks, actually It is checks Checks You earn checks I wasn't going to correct you on stage Whatever You can use the checks During the mice turn To do stuff So it's like, okay, mice It's your turn Would you get three checks? What do you do to three checks, mice? Okay, one You're going to get a new sword Yeah, you left that one in the badger Yeah, so I thought Two, what else? Oh, some shoes Yeah, you're going to go buy shoes To deal with, you know, the mud That's going to happen again And three Oh, you're going to heal that wound You got from the crab fight Yeah Oh, is it my turn again? Oh, you're on the mice beach resort And it's high tide Oh, what now, mice? That's pretty much how the game goes Now, look at this economy You play D&D You have the situation again Where someone's rolling a whole bunch of dice Because they're louder than everyone else You have to earn the right to roll the dice in this game As a result, every time you roll dice It fucking matters In D&D, I roll D20 a thousand times And maybe the average of all those rolls Causes an impact on the game Maybe one of those rolls would be super big And have everyone at the table going Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit Right? But every single roll in this game Is those shit Especially when you only get like two or three And you earn the check And you're going to make a roll for it It's like, okay I earned the right to roll the dice To try to get shoes I didn't get the shoes I don't get the check back When we played D&D I would just like literally fall asleep During combat I was like, oh, I played pacifist My character runs away and hides Until it's over and I fall asleep And no one was really paying attention When it wasn't their turn But I think something You were in that boat too In this game When someone's like I'm going to roll some dice Everyone kind of stands up Like, oh, we should roll some dice They stand there And everyone watches silently While you prepare to roll a new dice Big deal Big deal The burning wheel Is anyone here I'm just curious Have you heard of the burning wheel? Oh, no, okay 9-0 This is the game It's the game We have a little bit of time Short story time So many of you Have probably had that sort of The feminine mystique But it's the gamer mystique That you're playing D&D With your friends Not having a good time At that point Because combat's in a six hour And you don't really Have an input in the combat And you know that guy Right? There's always that guy Who tries to make his own His hack on D&D Or he makes his own roll Guys, I fixed D&D 30s instead of D20s Yeah, he never fixes it Never fixes it And if you go to a game In convention, especially smaller Game in conventions Those guys have tables everywhere They're trying to grab you Come play my game Come play my game please You gotta avoid those people Like grim death So I was at this convention In New Jersey called Like UberCon I went by myself And I'm walking around One of those guys grabbed me And the next thing I know I'm sitting at his table Ready for some misery And the game was actually Really cool I've never seen anything Like it before So I was playing D&D Under the philosophy of Yeah, all games are the same Bullshit is D&D I gotta play something Right? I'm not gonna play One of those weird hacks These weirdos made Everyone knows D&D We're sticking with it So I come back You gotta come to this con If that weird guy's there again We're gonna play his game Yeah, listen I don't trust any weird guy's game It probably is awful I think the only game to play Is for you to make fun of me later So we go back We play this game You know, I have a note You don't knock it If you haven't tried it Policy It's like I haven't tried Australia I didn't form an opinion on it That was ominous So we also grab our friend Pete Who played Mustafa been Mustafa And we all go back This is before he was Mustafa Been Mustafa, by the way So we get there And we're ready to play this game And the guy, Lou Crane Who made this game Hances three character sheets And goes away And says I'm gonna go to the bathroom I'll be right back And you play So, wait We're looking at our character sheets Do you have a picture of the character sheet? I don't have a picture of the character sheet Okay, so at the top Of the burning wheel character sheet The first thing In the character sheet is beliefs And instincts Three of each And it's pretty much says On my character sheet You are the human thief You need to get money Or else the mafia boss Is gonna chop off your feet I think it was arms Doesn't matter Hands, something He was gonna chop something off And I didn't want that to happen I'm reading the album Because that's what I do On that count I'm one of those people I love nothing more than This is for four hours Role playing high-eleven Court bullshit So I'm reading the album Sheets like That dwarf's family abandoned that sword And they will not get it back Ever Your uncle, blah, blah, blah, blah And I look at P Who hasn't even looked at his character sheet Who's the dwarf? And I'm like You don't deserve that sword We don't know the rules of this game All we read is the little belief section On the character sheet We don't know how to play this game We don't even know what kind of dykes we need So he looks at me He looks at his character sheet And goes Looks back at me And says Your father betrayed my father This starts getting pretty heated And Luke Crane We realize he's back So we stop We're like Okay, we're ready to start And he says Oh, proceed The game tricked us into role-playing Just from the character sheet Oh, and by the way That shit isn't just like flavor takes There's rules about that stuff There are so many things We don't have time to get into Every aspect of Burning Wheel Burning Wheel is like It's a big book, right? Most of these other games We've told you about Except maybe Mouse Garden Which is sort of Burning Wheel based Are little tiny books, right? Like little tiny mice Yeah, Burning Wheel is a big book About half of it is just the character Like life pads and things For making characters But it's still big You need to be hardcore To learn all the roles of Burning Wheel I don't even know all the roles Of Burning Wheel, right? But you can play With just pages one through 75 And ignore the rest So here we're going to go through A bunch of the kind of core Mechanics of this game That are interesting And that you might find in lightning Yeah, and the other reason We use this game Is because it's the one We're most familiar with This is the one we play Every other week And also because A lot of these mechanics That are in Burning Wheel It's sort of a collection Of all the good things From all the indie RPGs Just talking about indie RPGs Like the thousands of them But this one really grabs Like sort of like the best Of out of everything So item number one Traits You play the D&D game When you write down My character is 6.8 His eyes, he's an elf His eyes are, I guess, purple With gold flecks I guess that's the popular Of eye color Does that ever matter? No, it never matters You can make it matter In the sort of, you know Make up your own rules way But there's nothing in the book That makes that matter So in this game You can say Your character's hair It doesn't mean anything By the trait hairy Which costs a point Your character is hairy He exemplifies hairy If it ever matters In the game Hairy is now a mechanic for him So you write hairy On your character sheet Anything in your character sheet Matters in the game So you're sitting there And it's like You want to make a disguise As a gorilla And I'm like It says hairy in my character sheet I want an advantage die And the GM is like Yeah, you're hairy There's a plus one To disguise skill tests On, because you're hairy So suddenly You're forced You don't have that many points To spend on this stuff Suddenly, instead of Right now, all this craft Like Uncle Kelvin Blackstep You write down The parts of your character That matter the most It's too easy to make A smorgasbord character In D&D That you don't write out This big long history You just put in The important bits And everything else Will get filled in As you play What matters more Than my character's Spat or that is hairy And I have to decide And whichever one I pick That's going to be In the game It's on my character sheet It can also come to bite you It'll be like Oh, the boat's getting a little You know Get a little water in that boat And Ram, you're kind of fat Oh, you're running out of food And Ram, you're kind of fat Just get back to my uncle Kelvin Blackstep In this game You can spend 15 resource points And Kelvin Blackstep This great, powerful wizard Is your god damn uncle It matters He's a wizard You can roll dice To make him appear You go to the game as you say Kelvin Blackstep Is and happens to be at this end He has to let you roll dice To make that happen Yeah, it might be really hard To make that succeed But the more points you put into it During character creation The easier it'll be Now, here's where you can see Where this game is going They cost 15 points For Kelvin Blackstep The great wizard to be my uncle 14 points for him To also hate me Oh, yeah, he's definitely At this end Shit It's really easy to make him Show up at the end One point easier, but It's cheaper to bring people in That hate you than like you But simultaneously It's not that much cheaper Because people who hate you Are just as interesting As people who like you Failure and success Are equally interesting How many of you When you tell the story Of a D&D game you played You tell the story Where you fucked up And the town got exploded Yeah, friggin' natural 20 You chop the dragon's head off Not an exciting story, right? Natural one Is something horrible happened That's the story that you tell, right? And Burning Wheel Makes that happen every time Because like Mouse Guard Every role matters And D&D You want to climb over The town wall to sneak in, right? Alright, I roll my D20 You roll your climb test Okay, you succeed or fail If you succeed You get into the town By climbing over the wall If you fail Alright, you fail Maybe this falling damage Maybe In this game If you fail Failure matters Failure scars your character If you get stabbed with a sword You might never walk again Right There are two rules That make this happen Rule number one Is any failed role has a consequence If it wasn't a consequence You should've just said yes It's called say yes Or roll the dice If a character wants to do something Climb over the wall The GM either says yes You climb over the wall Continue, right? Or roll the dice We're gonna find out And if you succeed You succeed And if you fail Oh, do you fail Something bad happens When you fail It might not be immediate But something bad will happen For every failed role There will be a consequence And then usually Another role to deal With the consequence, right? Rule number two Let it ride Right? DnD, I take 10 I take 20 Let it ride is like No, you failed to climb over the wall You may not try to climb over the wall again Unless it's a completely different circumstance Right? Like you got a rope Or you It's now daytime in the town Someone's helping you Never again The Game Master Continuing to roll Make you roll stealthy Until you eventually fail And you can do the thing He's been planning to do all along Right, it's like You succeeded in your stealthy You are now stealthy Until the situation Changes pretty significantly You're just hit period Now we're only about five minutes left So we're going to move a little more quickly Three more really interesting mechanics One, currency, buying stuff That's a stat I roll that just like everything else Do I want to buy a sword? Well roll some dice Yes, I know I have a sword Nope, I couldn't afford it Advancement Oh, you couldn't afford it By the way You now have less money You're taxed Oh, yeah, I spent all my money on it Yeah, there are consequences To failing to buy something too Advancement You advance by failing It's just like Final Fantasy III Or Ultima IV If you want to get good and sword You've got to fail at rolling sword a bunch of times And then sword gets better You have to fail at sword To make sword get better Just like the real world of practicing There's actually practicing rules all the time Three, there is a really interesting combat system That's really crunchy And it has this thing where you Simultaneously script three actions That you reveal one by one Yeah, I, you know, I slash And then I only slash And then I step back And then I guard Yeah, well I scripted Run away, run away, run away, run away Whatever we did Yeah There is an equally crunchy system For social conflict I scripted a point, then a rebuttal Then an incite I did incite, incite, dismiss Your mom's a whore Your mom's a duck Get out of here So suddenly That's a really powerful attack If there's that guy with the bolt stuck on his head We want to talk about it We roll literally the same number of dice As if we want to kill the guy And there's also tons and tons of skills To help with that arguing, right? My favorite of which is Ugly Truth, best skill in the game But there's also Persuasion, oratory Course, persuasion, and Stentorious rhetoric Stentorious persuasion Stentorious platforms Stentorious ones are off of the dwarves Mostly Burning Wheel is the be-all-end-all Of everything we're talking about right here King Arthur Pendragon Is the exact opposite of Burning Wheel In every possible way And is just as good It basically simulates King Arthur's reign The book on the left Has the rules of the game The book on the right Has every year from Before King Arthur was born Until way past the end And you just go page by page Nice simulator Does your king survive to adulthood? A railroad is just built in If you're vengeful And you want to forgive someone You might not be allowed to You just can't The game's just a rail Of Arthurian legends And notice some of these Go together, right? If you're more forgiving You're less vengeful And vice versa But how about the one If you're more pious You're less worldly You might want both of those But you can't Lady Blackbird Is the same game every time You have a set of characters With setback stories You have a setting It faces the ship from Firefly This is Firefly's Star Wars The game You start with these characters It's always the exact same situation And you play it out And it always ends somewhere Crazy different Every time you play it Also skyscrapers If you want it It's set in the steampunk world Where a planet exploded And there's all these floating Islands And you use airships To get around The mechanic that's interesting Is the Hey, this is just like That time we did that thing So if you're in the middle Of a situation And you notice guys You turn to the friend with you And you say, yo Escaping from these pirates This is totally just like That time we had to get away From your mom's pirates Yeah, the skyscrapers So the The characters' backstories Are so simple And they're given to you You don't make anything You don't make a character at all During the game You add to the character You enrich the character In the course of play Which is great Because there's no preparation Like other RPGs You just sit down Boom, play Three out of four times I've played this It turned into a romantic comedy And in one of them Everybody died Dogs in the vineyard Your role play Is Mormons In the middle of nowhere And really You're not actually Mormons It's some other Fictional religious Really religious kind of sect Going on But the main mechanic In this game Is the bidding You bid higher On every conflict And it's like How badly do you Want to win this So you bid it up Sort of like in poker It's like I'll raise I'll raise I'll fold I'll take calls So we're arguing And then we bid We'll gunfight And then he wants to escalate To like murdering my whole family Maybe at this point I'd back down Right, so the conflicts That are a bigger deal End up being a bigger deal And the ones that are less Of a deal No one raises And you move on quickly Actual Dungeons and Dragons No, it's a new Dungeons and Dragons If you play old Dungeons and Dragons It is nothing like New Dungeons and Dragons If I had to say The primary now The thing that matters the most In old Dungeons and Dragons It's the map Right, we're talking About BCMI Dungeons and Dragons You know the Moldvane and Menser ones As someone on the Internet And that Dungeons and Dragons Right, it's a lot more Like playing Nethack With paper You draw the map As you reveal it Your torch lasts for three rounds Your torch went out Take the map away From the players Because they can't see Right, that's old D&D Right, it's not So much a role playing game You know It's definitely not A combat game But it's definitely Not a combat game You avoid fighting Like the plague You get hardly No experience for fighting You get all the experience For treasure Right You want to get in Get the treasure And get out So there's a new game Which is kick-started By the same people And the same group That made Bury Real Called Torchbearer Which is bringing back That it doesn't have the map Instead it has inventory Tetris like XCOM Right But it is that same Dungeon Crawl Of the old D&D Of going Get the treasure And get out I'm holding a sword And a lantern You want to pick up the treasure Yeah I put down the sword And pick up the treasure Alright, now there's A bunch of cobbles I put down the treasure And the lantern And used two-handed swords Coals are running away With the treasure It's old D&D But they minimized the mapping To let you focus on All that other stuff Action Castle Here's the deal We got it really quick This is our last game We're two minutes old We're so unprofessional We're basically out of time Right here This is a game It's like an old text adventure And we played this At our first packs No way We lined everyone up In the room And one by one You play your role You were in a small cottage Yeah, let's do three turns Alright Welcome to Action Castle Poor chance You're in a small cottage There's a fishing pole here Exits are out Your turn I'm sorry I don't understand what Your turn I don't see everything to kill Your turn I'm sorry You can't go left You get the idea Right? The person running the game This is a text adventure There's a video Scouting right in this Four game in Tycho At the Q&A I actually rated them At a packs East Q&A And was just like Welcome to Action Castle Your turn I don't know what to do Game didn't know what to do Your turn You have a hundred people Taking turns playing The same character One guy's like Kill self Game over At one point Some of the guys was like Steve Jackson was in line And the guy in front of them Is like Reset game It's like Reset game Steve Jackson's like Load game He's like Back to that line At one point A guy was like Save game It's like waving You have two save games remaining I'm afraid we have to wrap this up So If you enjoy Any of those board games Any of these tabletop games And you want to try them Email us We have some business cards We can give We don't have enough for everyone Find us around the con And we will totally We are not doing anything For the rest of packs That is on our schedule We will totally answer the questions We're probably going to be In tabletop For the next two days And we'll be in Melbourne For the next week So that's that Thank you all It's not written in the U.S. I'm sure they're going to pay for that It's going to happen all the time now I'm not giving it on my cards That's what you guys think about fate It's alright I am