 Hello So how many people are here for a panel about things you play in your Xbox or PC? Okay, you can you guys can go Everybody else must have your folks I did I Know All right, so my name is Luke I make games Adam saved recently one of our procedures award To tax his credit they gave us this panel before they do about that award Packs like this before we were cool They're all So we're gonna talk to you about modernizing fans are these my So right so an RPG my RPGs we mean Dungeons and Dragons because There's only I mean there's Dungeons and Dragons and then I mean Heather and there's other editions of Dungeons and Dragons Right, right I forgot about that because I'm too old-school. I mean actually I'm gonna be played in the dragons He GMed it for me Make up some games right now So in order to take you on our journey. Oh my who's crying it's okay I promise So in order to take you on our journey from To the future I think to the future we need to start in the past. Oh By the way, is anyone need ASL there is We've also given him permission to go off script so if you want to know like sports scores or something So right so we're gonna do a little bit of history of the hobby foam and then We're gonna talk a little bit about our own takes on the hobby and Fancy our bees and we're gonna talk a little bit about concepts Involved in modern RPGs and modern fancy RPGs, and then we're gonna All right, so Our hobby is rooted in fantasy is undeniable and it's a brand of fantasy. Yes Somebody figured out it's not a skyrim So So our hobby is also rude in being snarky jerks So anyway, so our hobby guy is It's for like there's really two branches that come together in the seventy-two seven three seventy four to create the world In which you now live And one of them is a pulp fantasy fiction the creators of Dungeons and Dragons love this shit I'm only passionate Also, I guess I would like to just point out that we are not going to talk about the wargame aspect because It's just we've only got an hour. We've only got an hour, right? And this is also not a history lesson Hey, you want to like? Yeah, this isn't a history lesson. This is us setting up the information that we need to talk about other stuff Like if we're gonna talk about modern modernizing we need to know where we're starting from so we're skipping over huge important things I will plug this awesome book playing at the world if you want to know more of this stuff It's fantastic. It'll take you forever to read, but it's worth it, but we're just gonna give you like John Peterson so yeah, if you would like it an academic and beautiful history of a hobby playing at the role My John Peterson is worth your time. It's one of the best books ever And we're just gonna skip over high points right so the things that we want to talk about so anyway, so But so this is where we started But most of many I mean, I don't know what's the same of many probably have a red Some are all of these yeah as a as a sort of personal aside Like I hadn't read any of the appendix and stuff until maybe two years ago And it's it's great So if there's anyone who thinks that the D&D even the earliest versions of D&D are Original creations of any kind read any of these books like it's all stolen like crazy Yeah, and it it sets up the hobby in an interesting way because there's a lot of especially as RPGs developed There are a lot of people they're like oh you stole this from that game Are you stole this from that movie or TV show? But there's no beginning to that like it's been happening forever. There's a lot of Chronicleization so these books will have some drastically different takes on like The usage of the word orc for example and there are so many things that were orcs And we end up boiling down into one of those and that's the interesting starting point that we start from a huge swath and Each game kind of picks out things from that if if you haven't read it And you want to see how to do a perfect game with chaotic evil PCs read anything with Google in it An asshole like crazy, and it's so fun Anyway, so but But it's been 40 years You know most of all these fellows are dead most of these books are out of frame So I Just I love this though I can't help but think this is deliberate that this is Peter Jackson referring to Rankin and Bass But look at the dark mirror that Peter Jackson is looking through I mean look at how much more sinister our card conception of fantasy is Then the kind of innocent children's book feel of the Rankin and Bass cartoon Yeah, just blows my mind so Sorry Even though our fantasy is has these roots We are constantly turning through them constantly reassessing them like so That is the original stick-on cover for the white box for D&D that Gary and Dave slapped on the wood-grain box and And send out everybody this is the latest piece of D&D next promo art like it's you have a you know a hastily sketch pen and ink of a wizard blasting some sort of proglotite And and then this I mean this Museum piece But you know, it's just the emotional level and honestly in the darkness of it are just You know are just wildly different thing things have changed The curious thing that I find here is that the piece on the right the D&D next piece Somehow they're trying to make that like a hopeful thing like he's gonna kill that dragon and I look at it Yeah So D&D next is of course kind of like a current that runs through this because if we're talking about modernizing RPGs Talking about modernizing D&D to some degree and of course wizards is doing that as well So we're not gonna like tell them what they should do. That's not our our thing, but we're on the same path where they're doing the same things dealing with the same Developments that we are and it's interesting to see so yeah, so So So the gore series by John Norman a court I so I recently talked to John Peterson who's the current scholar on the history of the hobby the author of that book and He told me that there's growing evidence that you know more and more stuff is coming out of the woodwork that Gary was a huge fan of the gore series by John Norman So So and so just to dwell on this a moment. I Unfortunately do a technical difficulty. I don't have access to my notes, but The quote that I was gonna read you This has the narrator of I think the third book This is a cover of the second book is a narrative third book to tarol cabinet Who has been transported from his land into this fantasy world? Describing to the slave girl why she loves to be dominated by men What and it's not the taste of the whip. It's the sheer domination by a man It's the minimum and there are you know But but so pardon me for a moment, whoa All right, so thanks, so Allow me to not use To look at the cover of the John Norman book Where you have the aloof tarol cabinet in the background the you know dark Swar the foreign figure threatening the woman and the supple can't You know and chained women in the foreground. I mean, it's a very masculine very powerful But I mean he doesn't look like he cares And the woman is it's completely sexualized like her her hindquarters are lifted You know It's also not physically possible No, so but I did something to consider that this had An influence on early D&D not that Gary and David were assholes and believe this I mean there are lots of women who are very influential players and play testers Early on yeah, but let's look at Brienne like I chose these two inches Are these three images really very very deliberately? And so Brienne is in the same position as trial cabinet in these In these images she is the one who is aloof and in this case disgusted by Jamie But protective of him in this case she is ennobled. She's powerful Though even though she doesn't like that the person that she's come to protect even though he's trying to sexualize her She is telling him of a new way a new order, and I just think it's really indicative of Where we've come in our perception again of fantasy in the hobby Yeah, the thing to take away I think is that the fantasy RPGs have since their earliest inception been a product of the pop cultural Space that they exist in there's no game or whether it's a tabletop game board game a computer game There's no game that exists independent of that cultural space both for the positive and negative Of the of the space that they're coming from And just a final note that Michael Morcox basically said about John Norman's books like maybe people shouldn't read these Anyway, so to back up a little bit We need to I think we need to address now some core points about what comprises the earth text So I feel like I talked to her Okay, so these are the three original books Monsters and treasure The four or what is it an underworld? I forget the first word something in the world Underworld and wilderness and men and magic and these comprise the the earth text of D&D They're not really a complete game in and of themselves. They reference chain mail for key procedures chain mail being God gags is earlier tabletop war game, and they let's see the Overworld stuff actually references another game published by Abel on Hill. Yeah. Yeah, you couldn't you couldn't play D&D without buying a different board game by another company Think about that for a second like There's no way that a company now would release a game and say okay. Here's 80% of the game, but if you want to play it go by monopoly So yeah, these books contain more or less all you need to play D&D they are Unclear on several points like even the things that they try to explain You have to kind of fill it in from later editions and kind of guess like oh That's probably what they intended but the actual wording you can pick it apart endlessly. It's not clear We don't know what some of these things were intended to be and this is actually really unfortunate thing in our hobby We don't have like video footage of some of these earlier D&D games Like we don't know how the game was played we have stories that are passed down But everybody's recollection is always going to be their recollection like they're going to remember things differently than they happened So we don't have like absolute ideas have this play, but we have a text Let's see what key points we want to talk about here. So, right, but so despite the problematic nature of these three books they They do present us with the very core of our modern world They present us right hit points over plastic and throws a done end of hobby This is a game we're all playing right now. If not spells who's not leaving me right now, right? Right now who's not making a saving throw against this panel right now So I mean So obviously there's there is more to need in this I mean there are other tropes here that the innovations that they presented levels and experience points persistence of character are some huge ones The right it hasn't had a particular repeal your magic system What else would No Doesn't say the total lack of skill system Indicates what the game is about just by looking at the character sheet I mean, there's no question if your characters are going to need to be good at basket weaving because No one cares. That's not about what the game is about So the tools that the D&D gave you in its initial form were literally the tools that the designers felt that you needed to play the Game the rest of the rules were on the GM just to make up as they went along an interesting thing to note There's that though that does include like a social mechanism in the reaction role like people like say, oh, it's all fighting But you can get an awesome reaction roll modifier like that that is the path to success Prisma is totally not the dump stat So what's also really interesting is Despite how thin the character sheet is and how sketchy the rules were and what they're offering the idea was So powerful and so compelling it just swept the whole hobby off in speed It was the magic moment of its day. That's capital and magic Right, but then then that's it right then we've all done we're done right. Yeah, this is the D&D everybody's playing right, right? Yeah, yeah Right and these guys make dungeon role. That was the next fancy game to come out, right? Right, you know, or maybe 2003 some other game with two books This game with vampires in it. Yeah, baby. Yeah, right. So he's done. Well, so as it turns out As I said, the idea was so powerful that it you know We left a crater in the hobby and people immediately not 30 years later Not 10 years later immediately saw the potential for it and other shit that it should be viewing so So sure in sorcery was According to John Peterson if I remember correctly was first out of the gate for the as a D&D Fixer Which is interesting because D&D had at that point like hundreds of copies in circulation. Maybe that's not 1977 It was started. Oh, this is three years later. It was it was it was in blow up mode. Okay. Um It was the first year and a half. I think where they were like, right? Yeah, the first year and a half they had like hundreds of copies yeah, so the really the really funny Story about children in sorcery is that when it came out everyone was like, yeah, I realize and there are all these reviews Like this is the most realistic role-playing game ever finally no more D&D We're gonna play children in sorcery and then you know months later. These guys are right in because they Instead of posting on forums, they communicate into each other through zines and newsletters. They write the newsletters Yeah, like a little contrite like it's it's unplayable Horrible. Flame Wars occurred at a glacier's pace Like, well, no, you wrong six months later. No, you The best part is they still existed like you read some of the early reviews of D&D and they're scathing from war gamers who are like I haven't played this but it's terrible And all of us have gotten those reviews too like this is going to kill gaming forever It destroys wargaming so right and a children in sorcery not the only normally entered into the race so 1978 RuneQuest, Steve Perrin, Ross Tranny, and Greg Stafford kind of behind the scenes his great eminence there Right and so 1978 here we fixed it finally we have skills level us advancement No more advanced in magic. We get spell point magic, and we have this really cool setting. Yeah, also ducks, and Duckman Something about the length of here is that it more so than D&D is kind of vaguely Imply cesspool of pop culture stuff has a very clear idea of what it is and some Probably not entirely unprecedented but relatively unique ideas. Yes setting as a selling point for a game This is this is sort of where that started where you're buying in as much for the Fictional space you're gonna hit the duck hunt exactly you're buying in as much for the fictional space as for the rules Yeah, it's fine Gary and a both in their own settings for D&D But they chose to leave them out in order to make the game more accessible So I also really like to cover for RuneQuest it is You know Trending covers the everybody's doomed on cover This is what will happen to your character Why right you got to have a compelling narrative get people involved So right so then jump forward. I mean there's many Steps along this path, but especially many D&D steps D&D pretty much ruled the world despite RuneQuest I mean we stick over tells and trolls just why not The When we arrived at this point here where Mark Ryan Hagan starts to break out of D&D grinds dot taken. It's just Thank you Yeah, you want to talk a little bit about this. Yeah, I mean the vampire is an interesting example I don't have a lot of experience with ours magicka So I'm gonna I'm gonna leave that one to someone else But with with vampire and the subsequent games that came along with it the we start to see this idea of story as a thing that the game isn't about Necessarily the the characters doing stuff. It's about the story that emerges from that You know, there's some mechanisms around role-playing and around the the way that the characters are meant to be a vessel for this this big Epic story that you're telling as a group and while the text focused really heavily on that the rules still weren't Necessarily able to back that up. I mean what you essentially got was a superhero game about Right, I mean the rules definitely tried to aim for emotional content and that certainly the setup of the game with Clans and the look and the feel of it. I mean it was it was groundbreaking in its day But yeah, as Adam mentioned, it doesn't quite hit ours magicka mark scheme before that took on DD directly And it's innovative from the back. You all play wizards and it has a really fantastic magic system true for style play True accelerate your changing characters Yeah, you have multiple characters and instead of those characters being like a herd of people Throw into a dungeon and some of them are going to survive. It's actually people who are going to rotate through and all of them are To some degree yours, right? So but I need to take a step back though in time I mean to talk about 1985 because it's my eye. This is the first Modern RG. This is a proto-modern RPG. This is a game called King Arthur Pendragon by Greg Stafford and this game is Ridiculous it is so tightly designed It is and it is exactly what it says in the team King Arthur Pendragon you play a knight in King Arthur's court You you are involved in the Arthurian mythos. You're at the Arthurian ground zero You you watch you defend dragon dying. There's nothing you can do about it and right that the metagame is more important than the life of your character and he Let's the game take over your character if you wish your night to behave in an unjust manner You have to roll against your justice And if you succeed then you act in a just manner. You don't have a choice. It's mind-blowing it has like a something mechanic a really early like Some kind of call passions where if you really care about something you get to roll for your passion and then get a bonus Or if you fail you get you get a fumble you go mad. Um, it's I It's meticulously well researched. I mean it's beyond the pale like it's a PhD worth of research and It's it's funny the one that a few places where Patrick falls down is it's still reactionary to be me It's still saying hey, this is not You're saying do you do this is how you make it better Which is not the not really the greatest standpoint to be in However, though if you if you are looking for a good place to go back and start and play a very deep You know beautifully designed game with lots of moving parts Pendragon is Is where to go so I feel like we really expect to see a paradigm shift I can also if you look at modern games You can almost always trace the line back to some influence from Pendragon What's your take on the more recent versions of Pendragon just because those people might actually be able to get The current He's a fifth edition and it's wonderful He's kept true to it. The fourth edition he he backed off on being a night in King Arthur's court And that's just dumb So called King Arthur Vendragon and you're just gonna be some dude. Yeah, don't be a merchant in King Arthur's court So Right so then You know sunsets on 1980 on 1991, right? And we are reappeared 10-12 years later. Oh Yeah So in the late 90s, we just gonna skip to that here. Yeah, nobody told us on it. That's cool. So the late 90s I don't know. I haven't dated this one Ron Edwards released this game called sorcerer that's in the lower-hand corner of the the supplement sorcerer and sword and Ron Ron tried to cleave to the very heart of what it meant to be Fantasy and pulp he went back to the original source material and he focuses game on dramatic play and emotional content over Skill systems levels armor class hit point any of that stuff. You start the game as competent The advancement in the game is simply change Not betterment or worse in it So what what made sorcerer so Capable such a powerful experience to play it was that it didn't Cleave to like Luke said the the DD model of you start off a useless pile of crap and Hopefully someday you're gonna be that guy on the parapets fighting the enormous dragon and it's aspirational player You didn't have to spend 20 sessions to get there. It's just here's who you are. Here's what you're capable of It's not about advancement. It's about telling stories about these characters and The mechanisms all speak directly to that goal as opposed to promising them and then giving you D&D mechanics again Right and it's a testament to sorcerers influence that when you look at modern story games and that Elko like independent RPG you and you go back and read sorcery. You're like, what's the big deal? What's that? I don't get it like this looks so like, you know Crazy about this is like, you know, it's like watching citizen came down. You're like, whatever And it is it's a little obtuse a little dry, but the you know, what Ron created there was really important so then there's this thing this game so You don't need to know anything but yeah, let's go to the next slide. Next slide. Wait, what's next slide? Oh, we don't know Wait a minute We're gonna take a good long time So anyway in Burning Wheel what Oblivious to what Ron was doing but around the same time I tried to shift the focus of fantasy to The focus on the players to what their goals were in the scenario to try to move the action forward based You know on in reaction to what they want rather than setting up a an opposition for them and In the form of a dungeon or a world and having them figure out what to do A dungeon or a world I don't know maybe we should go back another slide And and shifting away from in Burning Wheel From the D&D paradigm of exploration to murder to kind of what Jake Norwood does blood opera No, Burning Wheel is is a very technical game. There's it's definitely in the realm of of Rune Quest and Harn Games like that where it's skill based level lists And You know and you just you can hold on that paradigm. It's not a reaction to D&D in any way you should perform Where where a lot of games that came before Burning Wheel had sort of loose models for helping you as a player Get in the head of your character because ostensibly, you know, I think that most people believe that role playing is about Thinking as your character would think what would my character do in this situation? So D&D gave you alignment so you could say okay, I'm chaotic neutral So I'm gonna do what I was the most annoying right now Or Or vampire gave you your your demeanor and your your nature and so there there were some tools But they're only loosely connected to the mechanism with Burning Wheel. It's it's the the target in the in the center of the game It's like what do your characters want? How do they approach every problem in their in their life through this this lens of belief Which makes it I think really revelatory for Folks who have been looking for that experience in other games and so to speak to the importance of Making mechanisms in games that reflect the kind of play that you want at the table because Again, not a lot of games prior to Burning Wheel do that But it's obviously really a focus in in this game. So the the belief thing I had that kind of revelation I said I'm playing burning wheel and I made it tell us about your character stage It's a good example this example My character is a great digger we need to dig up a dead body and necromancy it or something Yeah, exactly and I have a belief about uh, the dead must rest In solemn sleep or whatever some something that a great digger would be proud of his job So we need to dig up a thing to necromancy and I'm like, okay, gee I might dig it up And he's like, oh really and I look at my sheet and I wrote down I the dead must sleep and it turned into actually a huge part of our game that my grave digger then fought The necromancer was another player character, etc, etc But like there was this moment where I realized this character exists outside of me And I've created this thing to guide me in playing this character And it's going to reward me for fulfilling it and it's going to sometimes get me into trouble But that trouble is going to be fantastic Excellent. So then so they played a lot of burning wheel and then they need the room game That's disturbingly true actually But uh, we only sold like four things from burning wheel including the burning wheel itself. It's a magic item Do you want to talk about that we've talked about this a lot? Yeah, yeah, I do it better. So, uh Yeah, I mean dungeon world is is very much the the archetypal exploration loot and murder game like it's it's In in short sort of it's the way that we remembered dnd minus the rules You know we we I was playing at the time when we were developing in our spring game of first edition a dnd with A bunch of people who'd never played role-playing games before Which is an awesome combination Don't ever do that But the the the actual play that we're having at the table You know, I I knew all the rules and my players didn't and didn't care about them and they were just telling me Okay, I'm gonna do this you tell me which of these funny dice to roll and then how awesome I am when I'm done rolling Which functionally is how dungeon world works the The players describe their actions the the table as a group decides if those descriptions trigger the mechanisms of the game You roll something happens and you you move on Um and it it hues to the dnd mold It's about You know getting your getting your torches and your swords and going and killing subhumans in the depths of the earth and taking their stuff And uh, it's in a lot of ways. It's an homage In play to those those early dnd models the the kinds of games that we're playing and some of the ways So first of all credit where it's due we're based on a game called apocalypse world by Vincent Baker Which we stole liberally from um And some of the cool things there We really want all of the story if you want to win a bunch of rpg awards Just find a game that everyone already likes merge it with another game everyone already likes and then sell it Yeah So the two things up there The gm toolkit that we provide uh is or well Vincent provided and we copied and updated Um is one of the cool things that has come about out of these games It's giving the gm uh an actual real direct handle on how to run the game There's a lot of games out there that kind of say and then the gm does awesome stuff Do what makes your players have fun, which is totally bullshit advice because how do I know what makes my players have fun? Like that that is an aspiration not a thing I can do Uh, so we tried to provide actual frameworks actual things that the gm does moment to moment and On a higher level and what your goals are and this is how you gm the game Partially because it's a great tool to run the game partially because then you can change it There's lots of games that assume some kind of gming and you have to figure that out And then figure out that you want to do something different whereas we're just going to throw it out there and you're going to do You're going to mess with it. You're going to do what you want Um, and then the other thing is that every role means something every result Either means you succeeded something you succeeded something with trouble or more trouble the gm does to say the trouble Right and in this this kind of mechanism is something we're starting to see a lot more of um in rpg design And and have been for a while. Uh, it's a it's a term that's starting to get uh some momentum It's referred to often as fail forward the idea that as a Players character attempts in action the worst possible thing you can do is say well nothing happens. Want to try again? So You know again, this is something that that is is sort of starting to become part of the dna of modern game design It used to be just a weird indie thing, but there are games like um, like 13th age mentions it specifically So it's it's starting to really take hold and the thing that we Or vintage it is build it in so that uh, failing forward is uh, not just a suggestion of gm advice like this is a thing that good gms do because Don't you want to be a good gm? Why why don't we just build that into the game? So instead it's built into the game when you fail things happen and yeah, you fail forward We probably talked about we talked about this game too much It's all right, so uh All right, so moving on I feel bad that I skipped the 90s. I feel like we should pause a moment and look back So why why didn't we call out like lots of cool fantasy rpgs from 90s? Well Because The 90s was a really weird period in fantasy rpgs where every like everyone was trying to fix dnd including dnd Uh, so this is not complete sci-fi handbook is 1991 that will really set the tone. Um, I mean, you know wizards Picked up dnd in the you know letter half the decade and began to to refine it into it's more modern form more playable form But yeah, it was it was a dark time for the rebel alliance So not that there weren't great rpgs being produced and there were really innovations in the field being done We're just trying to focus this on on the fantasy side of things and fantasy just kind of got weird like I They are putting a new edition of cinemar and I backed it just because like it's this crazy over the top weird thing Yeah, the flying grizzlies of laser eyes. That's yeah I mean which sounds much more awesome than it is like yeah What I want that in my Is actually one really good piece of art in there of a raccoon with a rocket launcher Uh Okay, okay, let's move on. Yeah Do not find that game when you beg and buy and play it because you will write me and be like So so, uh, that's the end of the history lesson. So we want to now uh touch on some of the the concepts that we talked about and what we think is important to to Being a modern fantasy rpg so So tasks versus conflict resolution so task resolution Is I mean that's what they try to leave them up with For the way you resolve shit in vnv And I guess the best way to describe this, uh, I was playing it the other night really And My co-worker Nicole was guarding the rear During a fight. They were afraid they're going to be ambushed. So the the the combat ends up the front and then They they did attract a wandering monster some hotbell ones It started coming up in the direction that she was guarding from She she heard them. She saw them. She you know, she got the drop on them And uh, you know, she was ready for it. I gave her credit for that So she wants she she wanted to use her charisma. She had uh, you know, maybe a 13 charisma or something So she you know wanted to use that to try to To scare them off. I mean, it's a it's a really powerful mechanic in the game. Anyway, uh, so she says in the game She says, you know run, you know, we're all dead. It's the ogre slayer Uh, referencing something that happened They the party had killed an ogre in the previous session and and they knew the hobgoblins knew about it So it's clever. It was a good boy Um, but so I knew I also knew that these four hobgoblins were really badass They were cutthroat and they were looking for trouble. They were looking for the people who killed the ogre So she rolls and she succeeds So in task resolution It's a it's an interesting decision. She rolls. She succeeds They Are looking for the ogre slayers. So they just charge in and kill her, right? They say, well, that's good that you succeeded, but you succeeded in drawing them toward you Um, it's weird. It's a very strange moment in that game But I had this this moment where I wrestled with it because I had all this baggage from playing modern RPGs Uh, and and I knew what she wanted to do I knew what she intended to do, which was to stare them off or cause them to delay to allow her group to shift its front Uh, and I granted her that because I'm a jerk and I and I couldn't I couldn't you know Just be the the cutthroat GM be like, yeah, you see him drawing them toward you uh, and and so like so That's part of the difference with task cop resolution It we're not talking about, you know a moment moment resolution versus like a scene resolution or something like that You're talking about, uh, divining intent here and uh, and resolving You know Yeah Resolving a scene based on what you want to happen rather than just simply what action that you're taking You know this the sort of classical example is of the the thief trying to pick a lock, right? The the thief's intent is to get into the room in order to open the chest not to pick the lock in and of itself Um Conflict based resolution you can look at that and you can extrapolate a whole bunch of circumstances around it, you know Maybe the the thief fails They'll eventually get what they want, but it's going to take twice as long which means monsters might show up or You know, they they they get it, but there's something bad in the room Like you can you can extrapolate out from that, but if you're using just task based it's like Okay, the only thing that matters is there's a lock you got picks Let's roll until you succeed, right? You have to you have to build systems around that and it tends to create clutch for the game Rather than just looking at the the intent of the player So and this image is from james v west. It's an illustration by him. He designed an rpg called the pool Which had is an early example of a game focused strictly on conflict resolution. He calls it out in the game All right, so moving on so a comprehensive system. This is something that we're That we're always looking for when we're looking at a modern rpg If I go to the complete strategist and open up a game and there's rules for Magic and combat and that's it put it back. All right, I'm not interested Like You want to I was about to discreet. I'll let you make your point. Go ahead. Okay disagree with me so focus rules can be that you can have an awesome game of combat and magic and Those things can be fantastic as long as you know, that's the game you're making if you promise a game of like Intrigue and vast kingdoms at war and then you can be combat and magic I'm kind of screwed because I don't have tools for all those other things So the the focus part on the slide there is the what I think is really important You have the rules for the things that you need to do that game and you cut all the other crap like For early dnd. You don't need skills like that. That isn't a thing that you need You don't need the d20 skill list because that's not the game that you're playing It's worth noting though that early dnd gives players and the gm the the tools that they need to arbitrate those situations anyway because You know the the rule book like basic mold. There's like what 45 50 pages long 60 Half of that is monsters, so you know the the other rules are how to make your guy How to How to make your guy How to kill stuff with your guy how to explore things and then there's there's a few paragraphs where they just say gm here's what you can do To arbitrate everything else like everything's got a one in six. Well, exactly that's part of making a Comprehensive system if you give me magic in combat and you focus me on that thing and then you tell me Other than that you make up odds and it's the example in mold. They is actually a percentile role, but uh, you It's my favorite part of the game People are always like, oh mold bay just tells the gm to do whatever you want mold bay tells the gm assign probabilities to outcomes of events and then roll for them Yeah, which is a great catch-all way to tell the gm like the gm is supposed to judge the fictional situation to be like Well, there's about a 10 chance you're gonna just die 70 chance they're gonna land somewhere halfway down and uh, oh man, I have to do math 20 chance that uh, say you can't do math So The image on the slide is character sheets by john harper for vinson baker's game in a wicked age Which has an extremely focused system But it has a very expansive setting it has a beautiful flowing fantasy setting So it's it's not about focusing the game down to do only one thing. It's just focusing on the system. Oops So, oh, we lost the gift when we lost them This slide is supposed to be really cool. Let's learn. Uh, yeah So procedures, uh, if any of you are familiar with my games, you know that i'm a fan of procedures And I think in the modern rpg there's the field is so cluttered And honestly, we have four years of history behind us. We're doing it You know, no one any favors. We don't Provide players clear procedures playing the game We don't spell it out and teach them how to play the game through the rules text Yep, I agree. Let's move on to that stuff. All right. Yeah, it's well at least we don't have a question So, uh, but player agents did it again cast my snapchat So, um So player agency, this is something like Basically as we've come to enjoy these games more and more we come to really like our characters We get mad when they die. How many people have had a character died recently in a game? I killed some of them yesterday So right so that's a distinct minority in the game It's just not character. That isn't really a part of the story anymore We want to see our characters struggle and overcome You know and just get by with the skin of their teeth And games Especially in the last 10 years have really been addressing this through a variety of mechanics And the interesting thing there in dutch enroll we address this now by There are quite a few things that make your character longer lived. We also want to make death be a part of the table. So We say like when you die you make a new character like characters are designed such that New character into a group of higher level ones isn't a big deal like one way to Like all these things are awesome And the focus of action can also mean that you just embrace death and you're like things die We're going to keep on rolling adam plays a lot of dcc Which has the character final you start with a whole bunch of characters just kill off a bunch of them Like they started at zero level the ones who survive are the characters you're going to play right? Yeah, I guess I guess that's the difference right is that some games choose to mitigate the consequences of death They give you an out right so instead of dying you can lose some points from your character You can lose something that's of value to your character and then other games have the threat of of doom and demise Looking over you the whole time But they um They make it so you can you can jump back in if you die that it's it's not so much about any individual character But of the arc of all the characters that you're playing right and uh, so the example for this one is troll made by ron edwards and where this game is distinctly about the player negotiating uh, you know the troll made the role to get what uh, he or she wants all right, uh, so Robin Laws is a is a huge Proponent of drama and narrative and story in games and he designed a gaming break stafford again designer of hand dragon And one of the guys behind a rune quest so a really big influence on uh game design Hero quest Is an evolution of those those designs and but but now focused on uh on descriptive texts on And you know it uses conflict resolution But but the conflict resolution it very explicitly calls out that you do not set difficulty based on how difficult The um the the action but how dramatic the outcome Yeah, you see a little bit of that in um in dogs in the vineyard as well where your character's Abilities aren't determined by how good your character is at them It's how important they are as the player uh to to the character So I might have uh blind as a bat as one of my I do in fact There's one of my traits, but I have a massive pool of dice to use when that trait comes in because that to me helps Make the concept of my character better. I want to be able to have more to say about those scenes right um So I'm going to put story in quotes originally made this slide and that's because story here is partially like the way that We remember things afterwards like some games Explicitly aimed for creating plot and like oh, we're gonna have a rising action falling action, etc some games focused on creating like Loading up a whole bunch of crazy stuff that can happen interesting stuff and then you just play all that out so story isn't always story like we we know the script we're going to go through story is also the um the creation of dramatic stuff that later on won't remember as like a clear narrative Yeah, I'd argue that it's a term that the hobby in general hasn't really figured out Yeah, there's a lot of different ways to interpret what story in a role-playing game is. Yeah. Yeah, all right uh, and one of the other things I think it's important to to point out here at the kind of the end of this arc of like components modern components to modern role-playing games Um, is that you know Gary and company read a lot of books It's not that they didn't go to the movies Ivan Howe was cited as one of the influences on on d.d. It's a 1952 piece starring Richard Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor And it's basically another version of the Robin Hood story But you know we grew up on stuff like Braveheart like you know it Ivan Howe was so innocent compared to this madness And it is and it has affected our designs, you know our designs are darker our designs are warrior But it has also affected our designs into the cinematic influence In that we want to be able to play in two or three hours now like the thought of sitting down for an eight hour game is off the table and You know for that's for a variety of reasons, but one of them is because you know our our story consumption is so cinematic at this point Um, I think we want to recreate those differences. The other interesting thing here is also uh comic books as an influence So gary called out the comic bookification of some mechanics and games because they were getting over the top and crazy But I think that that has become more of an influence and of course we've got tons of comic book based games But the idea of uh, kind of over-the-top heroics and quick action scenes and splash panels I think it was also like cinema infected just the way that we understand gaming and the way that we expect stories to come to us Very remarkable Uh, sorry, uh, all right. So real quick There's there's another modernity. There's another arms of the modernity of Of these games and and we touched on it earlier and And we're gonna touch on it again bad touch on it. So This yeah, this is x8 drums on fire mountain Uh, this probably came out in 85. So well, yeah, well well Jesus did it again. Well Well pen dragon, um This was the other thing this was a competition. I don't know which one you'd rather play Um, and I think safe safe said to me like I can't imagine that Seeing this published today I mean those that is a racist caricature Yeah, the the huge afros and it's crazy because the cut kind of like a crazy mashup of cultures It's ostensibly supposed to be like a tropical island and they just seem to have just thrown all kinds of like Every stereotype the can into it. Yeah And it's not that we're clean from this but yeah I was gonna say like this like I worked I worked in a game store during the the big d20 glut and There's a series and i'm not even gonna Dane to name it but there's a series of of game supplements whose covers are essentially Uh centerfolds from playboy with fairy wings spray painted on them or or Yeah, or or egyptian head dresses or or whatever so this And that that wasn't that long ago like this this kind of thing is sort of exploitative Especially in art in roll games isn't something we've fully managed to escape yet There's there's still some struggling around it for sure, but we are getting better. Um, So this is sila. This is a uh painting by wing reynolds for uh, uh Pathfinder um And she's just awesome. Uh, and she's also for variety reasons, uh, but also just such a fucking relief Not to see a bald white guy in that armor It's an excellent alternative to the space marine So another kind of arm of like the gender thing that's really interesting. There's a game called sagas of the icelanders, uh, which deals with gender in a really interesting way instead of, uh Going with a very like enlightened, uh, you know The black female paladin, which is great It's trying to do these icelandic tales where gender is a real social construct and to engage with that The game instead of pushing it all under the table has, uh, actually some different rules for men and women But instead of those rules being, uh, like the horrible stat modified. Yeah, like I promise. She doesn't get a minus two To strength. Yeah, she does not get much. She will rip your arms off That uh, they're they're about how society perceives you so like men, uh, if they're challenged if their honor is challenged That triggers the rules and they have to make a role whereas if you challenge a woman's honor in the icelandic sagas That's not a thing in the culture Right and and yet what's so interesting in that is is it looks at capability in a positive light and it challenges the players Which means, you know, and then this is the thing It's we don't have to just say everybody is always the same all the time There are intelligent useful ways to examine the differences between the cultures and between genders, but Again, it's something that's that's still Kind of tacking on in the fantasy space, you know, it's not a given by a long shot So, I mean again, this stuff is still problematic, but where you're like there is progress in the space I mean the fact that wizards put out, you know an open discussion about the gender of the characters You know in upcoming dnd next and then you know how they were portrayed is pretty As opposed to older dnd real looks which actually have a section about how the male pronoun is used because it is The most accepted. I believe is how they phrase it. There's like whatever male pronoun. We don't even need to talk about it That's the Chicago manual style Yeah, well it goes so so anyway, just just real quick. We want to uh Want to take some questions? Yeah. Yeah, we have five minutes. So why don't you why don't you put your mic out? Why don't you put your mic out? No, no, I like for for other safety reasons At Adam, I'm not gonna have to talk. Yeah, my mic my mic is an ideal toxic So so it's also important to address you guys to come up with questions that you know dnd isn't dead In its way and it's you know, it's been resurrected and people like rather than trying to fix it People are you know designers are embracing it And and it's aesthetic and which is a whole new and great thing. Anyway You sir You might know a thing or two about this. What's your question? Great now So my question is this you have presented your History of role-playing games except there is a progressive movement towards some kind of design Abstract, you know, perfect form Would you accept the idea that you're being pressed to change the design role-playing games? Because the fundamental makeup of the people who play those changing Okay, so, uh I don't have a mic anymore. I'll just talk about me. Um, so there's an interesting thing we uh might I do have a mic So there's this interesting, uh, I like to think of the the whole line of modernity thing It's like classic cars like the old things are not broken and busted. They're classic and interesting and there's That's why we have this slide. Um, there's something great about maintaining them. Uh, but there's also Oh, okay. I haven't seen her in person in this slide But we also have new tools uh to do new things like the idea that the first dv that came out discovered all of role-playing Just seems kind of crazy like we've been playing for so long. We're discovering new ways to do things I mean might as well keep on using those to Build new things and go further and also maintain the old things that we love because they're great So and I mean when I designed I designed the people at my table I designed For the players so I think perforce and yes, right if those players are not the same as the players in 1974 And 75 so uh, if I am addressing what they're interested in and you know the way You know the direction of play then Yeah, I am the pressure We're also skewing younger like uh That x8 module was as old as I am like so I didn't play it when it came out. Obviously. I was not quite reading yet So, yeah, we we designed even for who we play with which means that yeah, we are a changing demographic All right, thank you very much. Yeah, all right. Thanks. We're addressing the elephant group first off Second expanding that beyond just the Example of the Icelandic tales how Did you expand more on addressing the equality doesn't equate to the logic? Oh Have something to say about that no Well, yeah, I mean the the thing is it it's it's easy the easiest way out of it is to just say, okay everybody's the same and that Gender and culture or just color right like if if your character The the color of their skin or their their sexual orientation doesn't really matter to the rules And that's that's fine. If the game's not about that, right? I think you you design games to encourage player behavior in a certain way And not every game can address every point as part of its fictional space, you know, there are lots of great games like sagas Monster hearts their games dog. Yeah doggy dog for that that kind of stuff is is what the game is about So I think it's a question of scope The for like for dungeon world, uh, we deliberately have diverse art We include people from different backgrounds genders, etc But nowhere in the book do we talk about Race, there's no place on your character sheet for gender Just about we go to kind of absurd links to not use gender pronouns And for our game, that's the right thing to do because We're not engaging with it And then there are people out there who are making these great games that do engage with that And I think those can also be tricky because to engage with them you have to portray them in some way Which I've had people ask me about saga is how this incredibly sexist game, you know It's got different rules for men and women why are why are you a fan of it? And I think it's because it it's provocative like you need to Present those things to be able to grapple with them. So at burning will does not have a quality In any shape or form and I'm okay with that. Um, it's not it's not designed for that and it has It's certain points. They're basically there are just different roles for men and women. Um So that's okay, uh You know, but I think that when you're designing a game, you know, you can explore these spaces But I think that you need to draw a line and I think we all need to draw this line and Do not exploit or dehumanize A portion of our audience or potential audience ever it went no matter of what type they are And I and I think um I think that kind of exploitation unconscious or just like or rationalized or justified is awful And I think that we need to call each other out on it Anyway All right last, uh lightning round quick Fire So you guys are clearly focused in uh life like skipping the 90s on fantasy RPGs and fantasy history and so forth Um, but a lot of these things seem fairly general in terms of the way they Ways mechanics are relevant to the role playing rights changing Are the things that you think are specific to the fantasy genre with role playing or Are most of these things directions that you just see across role playing as a whole Yeah, I mean this is I wouldn't say this speaks to the role playing as a whole in any respect Uh, we're anytime that you know, you're starting from those roots from those pulpy Working me roots and then you're reacting to them and uh redesigning fixing and I mean you're still in the same space Yeah, I mean it's it's easy for us to talk about because as long as there is a dnd of some kind as long as there's a pathfinder Most I think most people will equate that kind of game with role playing games If you say, you know, this is an rpg They're gonna think dnd. Um, obviously there's yeah, there's tons more stuff. Uh, that isn't fantasy And yeah, we only had an hour, right But yeah, we expressly wanted to focus on fantasy I mean and fantasy like the typical story of like kind of power leveling and zero to hero and and like Yeah, starting in the muck and rising above and fighting a dragon. I mean, that's that's fancy like science fiction role playing and like, uh It's just completely different. Um, you're just dealing with different aesthetics Not only the aesthetics, but just you know issues of time and identity and space like the like You just have to use different mechanics to get at that stuff too Um, anyway, all right one one more. Keep going. So we're gonna go to like until they kick us out You just answered my question with the sci-fi rpg We're I think we're awesome No one knows, uh, you talked about uh games like old dnd They don't have rules for basically leaving. What have you and that's a About like there's no mechanics for it Uh counter-example effort is dogs in the vineyard is about making moral decisions and you can tell because there's no rules about it Like that's the part of the players divide us thoughts on the difference there I think it's it's as telling leaving a rule out and explaining the space around it as it is Making it a fictional mechanic, you know, if you say these are things that we're not making a mechanic for like Like you say making moral choices like dogs would lose its teeth I'm not intended if If they were to say, okay When you come to a moral decision roll a die on a one to three you do a good thing on a five or six You do a bad thing on a four. You're gonna make it up yourself You know, so leaving a mechanic out is the same as creating it as long as you're doing it thoughtfully And dnd isn't actually really super about combat like combat. Uh, if you look at the rules in Mote you are way better off avoiding combat Like the fact that combat is there is to provide that fruitful void that you don't want to get your ass kicked All role-playing games involve moral decisions All of them every role-playing game involves making moral decisions including the indie especially the indie Uh the uh and dogs in the vineyard and games like it I mean we pointed to some of Vincent's other designs up here, but not dogs in civics. It's not a fantasy game uh, but You know dogs focuses on on putting your character in a place where they're going to have to make difficult decisions But they don't have a morality stat or or anything along those lines They still shoot big guns and stat people with big knives, but but they're uh, you know, in far more morally complex situations usually The venture Still All right, I Recently joined a new group. They're all into playing Dungeons and Dragons, but they don't actually want to play Dungeons and Dragons They want to play something more like burning wheel, but instead of playing burning wheel They just mod Dungeons and Dragons and Dungeon Dungeon world is 25 dollars I have those games and I've wanted to play those games But how do I get them to play those games because they just clutch Dungeons and Dragons and say no, this is what works for us This is what's familiar. This is what we grew up playing I don't know make your own game To some degree hacking Dungeons and Dragons is a way to do that like our texts are awesome games I think they're fantastic, but there are also things you can learn from and you can start Making what you want like that's one of the awesome things about RPGs is you don't have to buy somebody else's Go away finish rules. I think we have some good ideas. I think that and you've read them apparently you probably think they're All right, like they're It's a sharing of ideas and if you can use those things in a way that's uh more comfortable to your players That's awesome. Yeah, there's there's some psycho analysis involved, right? Like you're gonna sit down with your players They're like, why do you like dd? What about it is is fun for you? And can we look for a game that does that but also does these other things that I want to do Torchfeder is 35 dollars Oh, we're underselling luke. We're making a goal. It was like this ridiculous Like that I'm more an observation that I wanted to comment on it's totally anecdotal But a lot of more traditional designs Things I found that on the uh task versus conflict thing the less central a event is to What the game's about The more it tends to drift towards conflict and wake up past like talking to people in most editions of the ad or murder in many white world titles Um Interesting. Uh, I don't know that I agree Uh, I mean, I think you're talking. I think you're conflating tasks a common resolution with abstraction versus a detailed procedure um, so right the more The more you get away from the central concept of of a game that often In order to kind of draw a boundary there'll be there might be some mechanic that's simply abstract a process In pentagon for example when you manage your manner, uh, you don't play out every day of managing your manner. There's an abstraction Involved, uh, I mean in burning wheel. There's a you know abstraction is built into the game where you if you feel like You just want to quickly resolve something. There's an abstraction mechanic. Yeah abstraction of a Situation doesn't necessarily mean that it's it's taking away from the core concept of the game There's a game called a cold city Where you resolve an entire scene with a single role So the characters might talk then might fight there might be A chase and then at the end you look at the way you've narrowed it roll some dice and that's it You've abstracted the entire scene So I think it really depends on the the goal of the of the game of the text Right is like how much do you want to focus on any given thing? And how much detail do you want moment to moment versus expanding? And you can still zoom way out and be doing a task resolution so we can be uh looking at like managing your manner Uh, I forget the rules for pentagon unfortunately, but it could be a very task oriented system Where like it's going to tell you how many do a skill? Yeah, well, and it's going to tell you the whole that it's made of you being like factual outcomes of that It's going to be like yes, you keep you know people are fed etc etc or it could be you uh the more conflict style you um Get you manage your Uh manner what I was thinking about uh as well as you can't you your manner is Prosperine or something like that which isn't the level of abstraction It's whether we're looking at your intent and just kind of jump into this like did you manage your uh Manor to what you set out to versus did you uh manage or what? Man fuck it up. Did you do it right or did you fuck it up and yeah, it's binary, right? It's very binary. Um, and you know burning wheel can get very zoomed in but And very niche on a particular like you know starting a fire or basket weaving sometimes bad Sometimes making a basket bring was really important. Um, but it is an ever ever task resolution that game There's no task resolution in burning wheel. Yeah, like we we had a conflict to start a fire And it wasn't about like are you capable of starting the fire? It's like does the uh, Yeah, you burn yourself to do it fast enough. Uh, they ended up having to burn their holy book because that was the only way All right, thanks. Uh, any other questions? All right. Thank you very much