Creating Diversity At a Grass Roots Level

So I have a bit of a dream that has been with me for a while. If you hang around this hobby long enough you notice something. More than being dominated by males, it is dominated by males of European descent. In many cases, northern European. The fantasies and the myths of those cultures dominate gaming, especially fantasy gaming the way they dominate fantasy in general.

So it has occurred to me that as we encourage our daughters (and trans daughters) to follow the path of science and math, that we might do something similar with gaming, yet moving beyond gender to include diversity at all levels.

Lots of People Play Games

But the discussion and design are still dominated by a certain class of human being. I cannot change who I am (nor would I), but it occurred to me that not only can the hobby and art of pen n paper role playing be kept alive but it can thrive with a wider audience. So how do we do that?

• Reaching Kids at the Middle and High School levels. 
• Reach out to parents and kids and teachers to show them how role playing can be a good thing
• Get established game designers to create settings for a wide variety of cultures and audiences. 
• Low and no cost gaming materials, free to play rules and scenarios, and donations of used or new materials. 
• Work with current diversity movements and organizations
• Offer Internships to diversity candidates at game design companies. 

The Inherent Violence of the RPG

RPGs generally involve violence. They always have. One might call them male power fantasy, but however we define it, there is no doubt its an active and often violent game. I would argue that they should be this as violence in our games, far from leading to more violence may very well lead to less violence. In fact, the games could focus on overcoming violence and finding ways to resolve conflicts in other ways. We can keep a certain level of conflict as a way to teach non violence. It is not impossible to do if we do it right.

I am hoping that 2016 will be the year I can get this off the ground.  If you have thoughts I would love o hear them.

Blackheart is next (Pom & Par)

For Pommels & Paradoxes, I am working next on the Blackheart Condotierre class. I did some work on the weapons and armor lists as well. I have to remember that this is not a 300 page mega book, but a slim homage OSR cool game. So looking to keep it brief.

How Important is Experience, really? (Reprint from BRPCentral Blog)

Experience is pretty essential for life, right? We experience things and (hopefully) learn from our triumphs and mistakes. It works the same way in role playing games because you are a person (or robot) and people (and robots) grow through learning. Even if that learning takes place at the business end of a blaster. I mean, who doesn't watch Solo and Greedo and think "Yep, I am gonna shoot foist EVERY TIME!".  I suspect that comes out of he grading system found in many war games. (Again, don't know that for sure.)
I liked the experience system in d100 games, starting with Runequest when I played that. At the time I was playing though, experience was a big deal. As gaming has progressed, experience seems to be less and less relevant as campaigns become shorter and shorter or gaming becomes a series of one shots. This is not a bad thing, but can call into question time spent on designing the experience system of a game (or blogging about it... maybe).
I still think an easy to follow but meaningful experience system is important, as is a system that allows for the creation of characters at a certain power level. So in essence you need 3 experience systems.

1. Traditional medium to long term experience system that helps characters develop over time.
2. A faster system that gives the feeling of change over a short number (2-4) of sessions
3. A Jump Start system tied to character generation that lets you create an experienced character of a certain power level. 

Keeping number three in mind I am considering using a Life Path style character generation and having extended life events for higher power levels. Unlike a class based system you just can't pick a level and go.

Charismatic Personality Appearance Disorder

This is reprinted from my blog over at BRP Central.

No statistic has been as ill defined from the very beginning of role playing as the Charisma stat. I think this is true for most games. In some ways I imagine it derived from "leadership" scores that many units or generals have in table top war games. I do not know this for sure of course, but I surmise this was the case. No one seemed to use it correctly and at least early on among the games I played it lacked real emphasis in design. When I began playing Runequest and found that the role playing stat had been replaced with an appearance stat and now I could role play however I wanted, I was quite pleased. It held a great deal of appeal to me. To say that many years later when I noted CHA creeping into d100 games, I was a bit baffled.Why was this happening? Why were designers making this choice for a stat no one cared about before anyway. Was it the sudden use in d20 games, which revived CHA as a meaningful stat?

Despite my confusion, I was forced to reconsider some kind of stat that encompassed an element of personality and decided that personality was just what I was looking for. 

In Q21, PER / Personality is an important stat. It is a measure of force of personality and presence of the character. How the character chooses to use this depends on what skills that they choose.Those skills are listed under Communication skills. But what about appearance? 

On the one hand no one can help the face they are born with and we have to make the most of it. Often a strong personality overcomes societal preferences, but is there something useful in having an actual appearance stat? I do not want to put in a stat to just have one and I want to not be on the fence about it.Right now Q21 does not have any appearance stat and I am not inclined to add it in, even though I have a great deal of nostalgia for it. 

(Q21 / D100) Blogging and Posting at BRP Central

So I am blogging and posting over at BRP Central now. The people seem very friendly and really helpful. I look forward to getting great feedback.

Progress on all fronts

So I am making progress on all designs now, with Pommls, EODL, and Skaaerune - Q21 at the top of the list. In fact, since many games will share features as far as system, progress on one game gives progress on others. I also have design concepts in place for system agnostic settings. So, a few updates...

Pommels & Paradoxes

Worked on the Adept condotierre class. The Condotierre Classes are the level 1-3 base classes that upon the character going to 4th level, open up options for the Legendary classes. Each base class leads to two possible Legend classes. The Adept is the basic religious class, though do not think of it like a cleric as much as it is a religious visionary and community medicine man.

Skaerune / Runed Worlds / Q21

I have the design document a bit more fleshed out. I feel like want to work on the Soul Magic / Divine Magic aspects a little more before reorganizing it and putting it out for public display. Also, head back from the folks at BRP Central. So that was cool. Worked on the basic char gen portion of Runed Worlds as I wanted to get a handle on the language of it with regard to Space Opera, Sci Fantasy.

Empire of the Dragon Lotus (Wind & Stone Destiny system)

Really feel the granularity issue is fixed with regard to successes and auto successes In regard to conflict, I have also begun adding a layer of narrative system with breaking conflicts down into One Against One, One Against Many, and Gang Warfare (group on group) with slightly different mechanics for each.

So Gear UP! These games are getting to be real.

Salt Island (Skaerune) & Oops

Let me get the boo boo out of the way first.

A Time For Wizards. This rpg will focus solely on magic characters in a fantasy (apocalypse) setting. The temptation is to allow in certain kinds of god magic and allow priests, but I want to break some tropes. So I am resisting those urges.  This game is all about wizards.

Salt Island. I have decided the default area for Skaerune (Q21 system, d100 game). I have a few vague ideas but certainly it will be flush with Rakshasa politics and First City magical relics.

Also I have not really thought about if I am going to spell it Raksasha, Rakshasha, or Raksasha yet. I am going with the latter for the moment.

~SMH