A Moment of Doubt, The Second Session

I had this Moment of Doubt: "Maybe I should just abandon the Stone, Steel, and Steam project altogether. Or put it back on the back burner for another 5-10 years. I've learned and grown a lot as a gamer and as a person in the process of making it, so it hasn't been a waste of time, but maybe I've got what I needed to out of this and it's time to move on."

Part of this, I know, is a sort of post-partum depression. I had the same thing back in March 2010. You have all this energy and momentum and caffeine trying to get the draft out on deadline and then this big rush that it's finally done and then...nothing. A couple of people say, 'that sounds interesting.' And the Big Thing that was the Center of your Whole Life for the past few months is gone, and there's always going to be some depression with that until you find something to replace it with.

And I think I put a lot of that surplus energy, emotion, and momentum into Dave's Exalted campaign and not my own Stone, Steel, and Steam campaign. Because with Exalted I'm in my comfort zone, it's familiar, I'm competent, and I'm teaching it to others. And since SSS and Exalted are on alternate weeks, but Exalted generates a lot more chatter between games, it's easier to keep up enthusiasm for that game than my own. Plus, Dave's GMing, which means it's not as much work for me.

Anyway, I'm not abandoning SSS - at least not yet. We'll give it a few more weeks to work through the depression and the kinks, and then decide. Or, alternatively, SSS is about setting, and the system has been the biggest headache for both me and the players, both to create and to use. I've been giving some thought to making SSS an alternate setting for an existing system. This might still be the depression talking, so haven't committed to anything yet, but definitely looking into it.

(In addition to moments of depression and doubt, I am occasionally subject to delusions of grandeur, storming the gates of GenCon, etc. So part of the reason I built a system was just to learn how to make a system, part was to make sure it was philosophically consistent with my overall design goals and ideals, and part of the reason was to make it my own intellectual property in the event of ever going public. So now I need to decide if I want to look seriously into 'open-source' mechanics and keep the public option open, or, if it's just going to remain a garage game for me and my friends, then I could totally rip off a non-free system and no one would ever know or care.)

I really meant to be documenting the actual play of the second session. I should be both GMing and taking notes about what's going well and what's going poorly in the game. And I didn't really do that. Let's just say that last night's session didn't 'pop.' Aside from developer post-partum, there's been a bunch of other real-life stuff - job stuff, house stuff, car stuff, baby stuff - that really put me off my game.

Stone, Steel, and Steam Now on Facebook

To better connect with my current and prospective players, I've started a Facebook page for Stone, Steel, and Steam. I also designed a crappy logo at two in the morning because I couldn't sleep because of a frustrating conversation about subgenres of Japanese classical drama. Illustration in general is important, but getting a non-sucky logo is a pretty high priority. However, it is a logo, and we do have one.

The First Campaign: The Story So Far

Last night was not the very first playtest of Stone, Steel, and Steam in the same way that the Wright brothers weren't the first people to fly. They were preceded and inspired by the work and designs of Swedenborg and DaVinci and others. The very first playtest of what was to eventually become SSS was around Christmas of 2007 with a group of excellent alpha players who could freeform it and wail on their mind guitars with the best. Other stunted playtests ran in early 2008 and the first bumbling one-shot of the 'completed' game was in March of 2010. But last night represents the first true campaign. I've got a dedicated troupe lined up to run about six adventures to see how this baby runs under extended stress. I've also received word of playtests happening in other parts of the world - I look forward to their feedback and analysis as well.

Forming the Party
I got Stephanie, my then-fiancée-now-wife, and her friend Sarah into tabletop role-playing shortly after I moved to Texas in March 2010. We ran a D6 Star Wars, Second Edition game for the first few months, then after a brief hiatus (pfft, engaged people have this whole thing about marriages and honeymoons) we lost two of our players and gained a few more. From August to December we ran two alternating Pathfinder campaigns - Stephanie running her first campaign with the classic Dragonlance setting and me running the system for the first time with a bastardization of WotC's d20 Modern - Urban Arcana setting. This is important because we've all had time to get used to one another's quirks as players and gamemasters, which reduces the variables and gives us a clearer picture of how the game really works per se instead of figuring out what's my problem and what's the game's problem.

So, here's the group of players:

Mark

gaming roughly 10 years, GMing most of that time, most experience in D6 Star Wars, Second Edition and Exalted, First Edition, creator of Stone, Steel, and Steam

Stephanie

gaming roughly 8 months, GMing 4 months, most experience with D6 Star Wars, Second Edition and Pathfinder

Sarah

gaming roughly 8 months, most experience with D6 Star Wars, Second Edition and Pathfinder (not present the first night)

Shelley

gaming roughly 4 months, most experience with Pathfinder

David

gaming roughly 4 months plus some brief experimentation with D&D back in high school, most experience with Pathfinder, also gamemaster in training for an Exalted campaign on alternate weeks

I'm married to Stephanie, Stephanie and Sarah are former roommates, and Sarah, Shelley, and Dave all have other extracurricular activities together, so we have several tight and overlapping webs of friendship, loyalty, and communication going on.

Now, the group of characters:

Gregoric

played by David is a Moy scout and wilderness guide with an ax to grind against the Taksan Republic. Employed as irregulars to do reconnaissance and black ops for the Taksan military, his brother and partner got killed in action, and the Republic disavowed all knowledge, responsibility, and compensation.

Nadia

played by Shelley is a Moy spy and con artist whose primary cover is a dancer. She's a widowed mother of two, and her late husband was Gregoric's brother and partner, so she shares his grudge against the Taksans.

Savi

played by Stephanie is a Moy gunsmith and machinist. Something of an oddity, she has largely abandoned the traditional Moy lifestyle to study engineering in Taksan and Granarctia. He cousin was kidnapped and she has come to Iyakul searching for her.

???

Sarah's character has yet to be defined; she was sick the first day.

Early on the group expressed interest in the Moy culture, so we decided to all start playing as a Moy extended family to have a reason to be adventuring together. Dave and Shelley spent a lot of time developing their shared backstory without my input. Stephanie's character I coached her through personally. As an evil GM, I'm already brewing ways to weave these backstories into ongoing world events that will get the PCs in way over their heads.

The First Adventure
I cooked up a quarterly tradition, likely started by Retulian refugees but now popular with the entire area. Every quarter each borough gets together and anyone can get up in turn and call out anyone and challenge them to anything. This has elements of a town festival with pie-eating contests for fun and entertainment, with a dash of freestyle rap battle for prestige and settling of grudges. In the barely-policed Free Territory, it keeps tensions from boiling over by providing a periodic legitimate release. Old man Durgan won't keep his dogs out of my chicken coop - I could go over to his house with a shotgun, or I could just wait until the next festival and publicly humiliate him in a knife-throwing contest in front of the entire neighborhood.

This also was an opportunity for me to casually introduce the players to the system. Nadia got in a dance-off with an Aralean woman and got completely schooled - and we learned how critical successes work. Gregoric showed off his marksmanship and we got a little non-threatening combat practice. It was also the lead-in to the rest of the story - I had the PCs approached after the festival, the NPC was impressed with their performance and wants to offer them a job.

The original plan was to create the characters on January 3 and do the festival in the second half of the evening, but we got sidetracked into chargen for Exalted our alternate campaign, so even though people had done most of their character creation on their own at home before the session started, we still had to do some finishing touches, do the festival, and then we only had a short time for the actual, planned adventure - which was fine, just not according to plan. It was a simple adventure, help smuggle some escaped slaves into the Free Territory, a little sneaking around, a little night combat with Aralean border guards, nothing fancy, and nothing that suffered too much from being a little truncated.

Initial Assessment
The first thing we realized was the character sheet was missing some slots. No space for languages, and languages are kind of a big deal. No space for Gifts, Flaws, and other character information. No distinction between normal and vital weapon damage, no place to jot range and rate. Hey, at least we had a character sheet this time (apologies to my March playtesters). Every time I teach my crew a new system, I harp on the fact that a well-made character sheet is a machine for understanding a game system and using a character effectively. My first-draft character sheet was a flawed machine, but I've got that mostly fixed by now.

Players really like the elemental attributes and the flexibility of the system. They also really like Luck Points, but are still getting their heads around the idea that these pools will refresh every adventure, so they can go ahead and burn them like there's no tomorrow.

Players were troubled by the amount of math involved. It's not a crunchy system with lots of charts and formulae, but pretty much every action involved adding two or three two-digit numbers, and some of my players are a little bit mathematically challenged, so it slows down the action. Still thinking about a fix for this, but a nice dice-roller app would help. Combat was also bogged down by keeping track of who was attacking whom and in what order.

I thought because I had written the game that all the rules would come naturally to me. But it's been a couple months, and I've been relearning Exalted in the meantime in order to train up David as a new GM, plus I had several older conflicting drafts and versions of the rules floating in my head. I really should have spent more time studying and preparing for this playtest just as I would have with a first run of any other new system. I'm sure that as my own (and the players') knowledge and familiarity of the rules increases, future play will go more smoothly, even without implementing changes. This could have had something to do with bogging down combat, too - I may have been confusing which draft of rules were actually in play, and if I'd re-read the manual to refresh my memory, it may turn out the rules I have written are much smoother than the ones I used at the table. Or not. Maybe the rules in to book actually are that clunky and in need of further revision. Main point here is even though I wrote the book, I still need to study it to make sure I'm implementing everything right and be a more fluid and intuitive GM.

My players immediately challenged me with ideas and questions I hadn't anticipated, which is awesome and exactly what this playtest was about. Everyone wanted some kind of weapon or armor not listed in the book, and since I had just overhauled the way the weapon damage and armor rules work weeks before and hadn't really reviewed them since then, I wasn't totally comfortable making up stats for a weapon or armor set I hadn't even imagined three seconds ago. I did make up stats for weapons and armor sets I hadn't even imagined three seconds ago, I just wasn't totally comfortable doing so, and I let my players know, okay, these stats I'm giving you now are temporary and subject to review.

Another thing I realized is that although I say the game can be about intrigue and the setting certainly makes that as a very available as a plot device, I don't really have a mechanism in place for doing it with the dice. One player wanted to know how much dirt she could dig up on our mysterious benefactor before accepting the job - a perfectly legitimate question. And I just froze up - what should I make her roll? I ended up going with Water+Perception, the same as she would roll to notice if someone was sneaking up on her. Even though the skills are designed to have broad applications, detective work is not really the same function as awareness of surroundings. I'm more of a role-player - for most non-combat stuff I like to let the players get their results by talking and being creative, not by rolling any particular skill. This player is a bit more of a 'roll player' and we've butted heads on this topic more than once. "What do I know?" (rolls dice). I went ahead and let her this time because I had no mechanism in place and I panicked, and she did roll really well - she would have been able to count the mysterious benefactor's eyebrow hairs. In retrospect, I should have forced the player to tell me how she intended to find out this information. Are you going to go down to the courthouse and go through records on her finances? Throw money around until someone talks? Sweet-talk her personal assistant? Dangle someone out a third-story window? Use your existing knowledge of local politics? I realized that I didn't put in an 'investigation' skill for a reason. There are lots of social skills that can be applied to an investigation, but there isn't a mechanism for just knowing the dirt on somebody because there shouldn't be. So, a little disappointed that I froze up and handed out a (IMHO) sub-optimal resolution, but now I know better how I want to handle situations like this in the future.

So, initial assessment generally positive but as yet inconclusive. Further study required for accurate appraisal. Focus on improved communication. Anticipate improved performance with increased familiarity. Work on better mathematical tools for players.

Stone, Steel, and Steam Wordle

It might be passe by now, but I still find word clouds enchanting. I've seen it done with political and religious speeches to analyze what they're really talking about. doing it to my own work helps me see if I'm balanced in my emphasis the way I want to be. At first, Taksan stood out even more prominently, until I realized that it was doing double duty as the name of the country and as a demonym. I went through and did find and replace to consolidate all of the demonyms and funky plurals, and it came out more even. The setting stands out above the system terms, which is what I want, and the two most influential nations do get the most mention, which is okay, but I should maybe give a little more attention to the smaller nations.

Posting on The Forge

I recently posted to The Forge about Stone, Steel, and Steam. The Forge is the forum for indie RPG development and game theory, and it is vastly intimidating to post there, because for these people, game theory and design is serious business.

I've lurked the community off and on over the past several years, enough to know that I don't really belong. I feel like a reasonably bright elementary school kid that really likes animals and wants to be a zoologist when I grow up, wandering into a conference of university zoology professors discussing the mitochondrial RNA of annelids. So, when confronted with all these great and important scholars, operating on insufficient sleep and my brain still wrung dry from squeezing out the new draft of SSS on deadline, I couched the post in terms I hoped would let the community know this game addresses Serious Issues and deals with Complex Problems, and made an idiot of myself.

In my post I proclaimed myself a 'Narrativist' and the thread quickly became an argument about how the game elements worked "in terms of 'Story Now' play". Ron Edwards - the Ron Edwards, creator of GNS theory and co-founder of The Forge - entered the fray. It's like I posted up a screenplay and Jared Hess commented on it. I was literally dizzy from my first brush with Wikipedian notability. (Actually, Jared Hess was my Intro to Film TA at BYU, but he wasn't notable at the time, so it doesn't count.)

Anyway, it seems I've massively misunderstood some of the terms of GNS theory. I came across it sometime earlier in the decade, before I was seriously considering design. I know that the theory has moved on to a new version. I'm not sure if I fully understood the old version and the community moved forward and I didn't, or if I never understood the old theory at all. Either way, the terms are now stuck in my head and I have a working theory that uses the same terms, but all wrong by indie community standards.

I'm an amateur, but I'm not indie. And while the humanities major part of me does care about the layers and levels of philosophical constructs that make up role-playing games, the greater part of me would rather shut up and play. I challenge the conventions of the genre: the elves, the dwarves, the classes, the levels; but I'm not interested in questioning the conventions of the medium: the gamemaster, the dice, and the character sheets. Like Stone, Steel, and Steam, I don't fit into a convenient category.

SSS Version 0.10.12 Release

Finally, and just in time for the holidays, too:

Stone, Steel, and Steam Beta Version 0.10.12

Changes from version 0.10.2

• Bigger (and, arguably, better) nation descriptions
• Revised combat system - easier, faster, deadlier.
• More and better examples and explanations.
• Character sheet.
• In-world systems of measurement.
• Disclaimer.

(here's the February draft for comparison)

Self-Criticism
For the past couple weeks I've really been pushing myself to meet my arbitrary, self-imposed deadline. If there's one thing I learned from school, it's better to turn in something imperfect on time than to create something perfect and late. There are several parts I know are clunky, perhaps even clunkier than the February version. The expanded nation descriptions are all over the map, uneven, disorganized, and inconsistent. The February version was a little dry, a little terse, but at least it was fairly polished. So, that's the big thing to work on, but my deadline has arrived and my brain is wring dry for the moment. I hope the more detailed descriptions give players a better sense of the scope and wonder of the world.

The increased length - not just the nation descriptions, but the whole thing is 65% longer - makes it look like big walls of text. Before, illustrations would have been nice. Now, they're almost necessary to break up the bulk.

The "Example of Combat" was pretty much a blow-by-blow simulation of the revised combat system. In it, one PC (which we met in the "Example of Character Creation") faces off against two warriors. The PC is city oriented and alone, the two NPCs are serious fighters, and the PC nearly dies. On the one hand, it does show pretty well what happens when one city boy gets in a fight with two barbarians, but I think it sends the wrong message, that Stone, Steel, and Steam is dangerous and my character needs to be on all-out defense all the time, which is not true, it was just a disadvantageous scenario. In future editions, the example of combat will be a bit more heroically scripted or at least more evenly matched.

I felt like I was restarting this after a long break, approaching it with fresh eyes. And that's partially true, I did leave it to cool. I actually had fairly presentable June and October drafts that corrected the things I was kicking myself about in February.

I only pimped the February version for a couple of weeks. I didn't get a word of feedback until earlier this month. This time, at least, I have a group lined up for a four-session playtest to see how it holds up under sustained abuse.

By the way, I recently reinstalled my OS and lost all my RPG community links. I've recovered some from memory, but if you know of any forums to promote and get feedback for this, I'd be grateful for links.

Version 0.10.12 Coming December 15

Since moving to San Antonio in March, I've been blessed with a couple of eager and dedicated game groups. I've run a Star Wars campaign and a couple of Exalted one-shots - my early loves that are perhaps the strongest influences on my design. And I've been running a Pathfinder campaign and playing in another which, while fun, have reminded me of how much the d20 system irritates me. All this and the fact that I'll be moving back to Japan in March has reminded me how little time left I have to get Stone, Steel, and Steam proofread and tested while I still have access to unlimited native English speakers.

Ever since the February release of version 0.10.2, I've poked gingerly at my drafts, changing some things that were apparent to me even without feedback to make a more stable but never released version 0.10.6. with the current Pathfinder campaigns drawing to a close, our group has announced its willingness to run a two-month playtest of SSS alongside an Exalted campaign wherein I'll be grooming my successor. With that determination in mind, I've been ramping up a new draft with more details and examples, and I've set for myself an artificial and arbitrary deadline, which helps get my but in the chair and the words flowing through my keyboard. Version 0.10.12 will be ready by December 15 and will go into extended playtest in January.

Feedback

One of the persistent laments of the past seven months has been the lack of feedback on the first Beta draft of the game. I posted to that effect on a holiday wishlist on my personal blog, and it's already generated more criticism and feedback. The conversation is happening now at http://community.livejournal.com/holiday_wishes/1692739.html