Roll!

So I talk about a ‘Mythic Africa’ and it is all light and hope and air. Birds are chirping.  Is that a rainbow I see?

But the reality is this: Africa is a continent. A large continent.  Thousands of cultures have thrived, vanished and brought themselves into the present time. That’s a lot of myth.  How to tackle that?  I could be researching for the rest of my life to build a comprehensive world out of all that is there.  I could bury myself in history, culture , and myth.

It’s taken a lot of thinking, but I finally have an approach.  Here’s a list of things I’m not going to do:

Myth, Not History. The first thing I need to do is to give myself the freedom to build a truly mythological place with no clear binds to history.  I would rather build something that inspires someone to learn real history than to build a game around history.  I think that games that deal with alternative cultures typically feel forced to glom on to history, and have to suffer because of it.  Let’s face it: history does not always make for great games.  And I want great games.  So we are borrowing from cultures across times and place and putting them in a configuration that suits my creations.

Tell the story of one culture at a time. Honestly, I am fascinated by the Zulus (pre-colonial, not doing a Zulu War game!), so I’m just going to start there.  The players are zulu-inspired warriors and/or shamen, dealing with outside tribes. I can build out the games to let players tell these specific stories and then, I can do another culture nearby.  I can link these cultures and myths together, and over time, create the place I want.  Creating it all at once equals suicide.

Embrace my personal values. Hey, I definitely know that only men could become warriors in the Zulu military structure, but you know what? In my zulu-esque world, women can be warriors too.  This is definitely spinning off of building a world that is not beholden to the real world, but it is also serving the larger picture of…

Authenticity is a Trap. This is a summation of everything above.  In thinking about this, I find that following this unwritten law that says when you do an alt-culture game you have to be authentic or your game is lesser for it.  I actually tend to think the opposite is true. D&D? Not authentic Europe. Also, it is a pretty playable and fun game.  Harnmaster? Quite realistic. IMO, not nearly as playable or fun.   Authenticity is a trap because it also forces you to do things that are not actually game design. I am definitely researching, but I know there is a limit where I am going start building and stop researching.  To be truly authenticate is to delay the game and extend  the not-game.  I want to avoid that if at all possible.

Past Experiments. I mentioned earlier that I’ve had past experiments with building alt-cultures.  Ghosts of Five Nations is a setting I built based on Iroquois mythology. I am definitely inspired by my research but what I like best is that I feel one can envision what it be like to play in this setting.  You know who you are.  You know the rules of the world. You have the ground floor for absorbing specifics and detail regarding the world.

As always, talk to me.

I was told that people would be interested to hear my thoughts on building a fantasy game based on African myth.  I rarely need an excuse to start writing about whatever, so that little bit of encourage is all I needed to start jotting my initial thoughts down.  I guess I have to start with motivations.

Why do I want to build an African-themed RPG?

Two reasons. First, as an african-american seeing a game that has more than token of representations of people like me has value; it would be a game that I would feel welcome to play.  More importantly, it would welcome others to play.  I think that gamers individually are very welcoming and accepting, especially if you know the language (I am hyper-fluent in geek if you were wondering), but our games aren’t very welcoming at all.  Sure there was that guy in that one book x amount of years ago, and then there was that time , blahblah…but let’s stop looking for the exceptions and call the pattern. If you were new to this hobby and you weren’t in the target demographic, would it seem welcoming to you?  I mean I play and I still don’t feel welcome to this industry at times.  Numbers have grown over the years, enough that they are easily observable whenever I go to a con, but I think we could do better. Well, I guess I could do better. I want to share the game with a wider group of people and to me that means I have to do something about it.

The second reason is less lofty.  RPGs need more culture.  I mean we really need to pull from different sources to make fundamentally different games.  And not asa palette swap from the games we have been playing, but to build a game from the ground up that starts at a different placce then is typical.  Can we make a game with a different set of cultural assumptions and make it good?  I dunno, honestly.  But I think I’d like to try and I have some ideas.

With motivations out of the way, I guess what I’d like to look at is methods.  I work on a basic set of assumptions when it comes to setting design:

Evocative > History. Faithful adherence to cultural norms and myths creates believable, boring worlds. Yes, boring.  Especially when you delve into cultures that don’t normally get any attention, you worry about making it interesting and exciting above all else.  Evocative and “exotic” settings can thrive; Historic and “exotic” settings collect dust.

All we care about is people. Our games involve telling stories, and all good stories involve people.  When building our setting and our history, we have to always tell the story of people.  We have to tell the story of who are people were, who they are, and most importantly, what people our players will be.  A setting that can’t tell a potential purchaser who the person can be and quickly is a setting that fails to garner notice.

Make Culture Normal. Something I find irritating and damage is when a developer/designer does go outside of the box of fantasy norms and makes excessive notice of the fact that they have gone outside the box.  But you don’t get points just for being different; you have to do the hard work of getting it so that I don’t notice that I am doing something totally “exotic”, without making the experience bland.  The game needs to treat its subject culture honestly and more importantly, normal. The more you go, “ooh, this is different!” the more you are breaking the ties to the game world.

So these are my initial spillings.  Please let me know what you’re thinking. Do you agree/disagree?  Have you tried something like this already?  What was it like?

I have a confession, and this seems like as good a place as any to make it. I am a great big hypocrite. You see, I’ve always been mildly annoyed when someone claims that it’s cheap, unfair, or sinful to create a 4E D&D character in the Character Builder. You don’t really know that character, they say. You don’t really own that character unless you make him/her/it with a pencil, notebook, and a lapful of dice. Dude, you aren’t really living. Well, I’ve always thought that was just… um… moronic.

Look, it seems wrongheaded to deny myself such a powerful tool that will manage all the math and guts (hey, my prom theme!) while I figure out what this guy looks like, sounds like, sings like. And when I did try to whip up an Essentials character by hand and elbow grease (this was before they had snuck into the current Character Builder), I got absolutely every number wrong. Oh sure, you can claim it’s because I’m a stupid idiot who can’t add two numbers together, and I wouldn’t disagree.

So my position is, use the tool you got. And now I’m thinking that’s just about the dirtiest sentence I’ve ever typed. Anyway, if you have something like the Character Builder, you’d be a fool not to use it. And yet… and yet…

There’s the official Wizards of the Coast Gamma World Interactive character sheet, which does all the math, and figures out all the numbers, and rolls out all the features and abilities scores and every other bloody thing, and… I hate it. It feels so antiseptic. It feels so wrong.

I’m such a hypocrite.

Part of all the talk about skills in RPGs in the last week has made me mentally categorize a few skill systems that I’ve played with lately. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, just the three I’ve run into lately.

Binary

Roll to try and beat a target number. Either succeed or fail. This tends to be how many D&D skill checks are handled.

Gradiated

Roll to try and beat a target baseline difficulty, with the amount succeeding or failing determining how successful the action is (i.e. critical success, success, failure, critical failure.) This is frequently done in D&D writeups on the positive side (i.e. DC 15 gets you this, DC 20 gets you this and this, etc.)

Multidimensional

Roll and try to beat a difficulty, at the same time, some other factor determines another dimension, like if there are any complications that arise from success or failure. This is the Cortex Plus way of doing things (and it forms a very central part of the game, not just a sub-system.)