Why Go Through This Crowdfunding?

I think that it is interesting, every now and again to look back at what I’ve backed. And there are a number of games out there. But the interest is often tied to how my gaming tastes have changed. What did I back on Kickstarter when I started in 2014 and what am I backing now.

It provides an interesting opportunity to see that growth. Normally, you get a game and it leaves and there is no way to track it. I could go through Amazon, CoolStuffInc, and Miniature Market Purchases, but a lot of those are more recent. Kickstarter and now Gamefound give you a history of what you’ve backed over that longer period of time.

Plus Jesse from Quackalope went through his backing history, shorter, but larger than mine, with Devon from Devon Talks Tabletop. He had something like 225 games to go through and that’s almost a five hour video. I should have known that mine would take longer than it did. I thought probably two hours would be enough, it is not.

The Drink

Last nights drink was a Negroni. Back to a classic for me. I really like the flavor and it is a good summer drink. With how large I made it, I wish I’d started streaming and sipping on it sooner, but the flavor is always good. It’s also a nice mixed drink to make because it’s a 1 to 1 to 1 ratio with gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari.

Upcoming Streams

So, clearly I have some more to talk about here with Kickstarter and Gamefound. My hope is that it’ll be about an hour and a half to finish up with no thunderstorms. So that is going to be on Monday at 8:30. Then on Wednesday, I plan on playing some more Paper Dungeons. Like I said, I want to get through that campaign. While I am working on an idea for a bigger game in the roll and write campaign space, you can see my Designer Diary here, I want to finish off the one that I already have.

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My first suggestion would be a game by Fantasy Flight, Legacy of Dragonholt. This game has you create your own characters, but then with your character, which you could probably create five character in under an hour, you take them through various scenarios and adventures. by reading passages in a book and taking turns making decisions. What I like about this game is that it is inclusive, both in the NPC relationships, but also in the fact that it isn’t a dark and gritty game, so you could play it with younger children and have them make decisions for their own character easily as well. You’re not getting the gory or graphic descriptions of death, and in fact, it can be fairly hard at times to actually kill a goblin instead of just knocking them out. But it’s a fun game, and while parts are fairly linear, if you go into it expecting to have goofy fun, you can definitely succeed.

Next, Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger. Now, you could just get the book, but the game is actually a ton of fun. Especially if you take turns reading the text, and making decisions as a group, but whomever is going to read next has the final say on the decision being made. This game is much faster to get up and running then Legacy of Dragonholt, but that’s because you are a generic investigator. So it loses the individuality of your characters as you are all playing the same person. That makes this game easy to solo play, and you can solo play Legacy of Dragonholt as well, but because you have characters with skills, you can miss out on some skills and paths just with playing my yourself.

Finally, there is a series of books, these are again more solo play focused books, though you can pass them around and let people take turns making decisions. The books, put out by Van Ryder Games, are graphic novels where you are creating your own character and have skills, it changes depending on the book, but you can play through a lot of different scenarios, with one scenario per book. You could take on a case with Sherlock Holmes, travel to Japan, or take on a Werewolf. With these being graphic novels, you might think that they would, like the other two, be solid options for kids or maybe even focused more so that way. I would say that these are the least kid friendly of any of the games, and while I’d strongly consider the other two with kids, from what I know about the graphic novels, I wouldn’t recommend these until they are older teenagers, but that will depend upon the kid.

There are certainly more options out there as well in the Choose Your Own adventure style of game. A game like Near and Far gives you that opportunity in a heavier board game. Most dungeon crawl style games put you in the roll of a certain class of character and you can get into the role playing aspect of that. However, with both Near and Far, and a dungeon crawl, it is going to have that longer set-up time than any of the games mentioned here, with the exception of Legacy of Dragonholt, but that, even, is only before the first game.

What I like about these games is that they are more accessible to get people into role playing than jumping straight into something like Dungeons and Dragons. Especially with Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger, people remember those books and how goofy those are, and because of the nostalgia they are going to be more apt to jump into playing that game.

One final thing to add in, there are games like Fiasco and Dreamchaser. These games are much more of the classic RPG. Fiasco doesn’t have a game master, so that is nice, while Dreamchaser does. Both of them, however, the character creation is really important and part of the game creation as well, so you feel like you’re playing more so immediately as compared to just something like Dungeons and Dragons where your character might not directly tie into the main plot of the game. These games can end up having a longer total time commitment though as compared to some of the other games, though Fiasco does focus itself down pretty well. These games also require a much heavier involvement in role playing.

When you get that RPG itch, what games will you be looking to fill that need? Have you had any experience with any of these games and preferences with them?

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Let’s start out with a bit of the negative. This can be delving too far into the concept that they like to pull into RPG’s from Improv of “Yes – And”. Quickly, “Yes – And” is the concept in improv that you let things roll. When someone throws out an idea, you roll with it and there is no such thing as a bad idea. Now, this is a bit oversimplification of the concept, but it often gets pulled into RPG’s. In theory, this seems like a good idea, it allows for creativity in your game, but there’s an issue with it. And it’s an issue with balance in the game. I’ve seen the concept of “Yes – And” exploited for some people who are too afraid to run their own game for fear of stepping on someones fun, and eventually you are no longer playing an RPG, or if it’s a podcast, it’s really hard to listen to.

So, how do you balance that out so that your game doesn’t go off the rails?

Firstly, I think that ‘Yes – And” is something that you can use in bits and pieces, it just won’t work every time. Or if you want to go to a point where you are really playing a game that is focused on that, pick a rules light game and is meant to be silly or absurd. A game like Fiasco is a good example of a game where it can be as absurd as possible as things fall apart and while there are dice, they are used exceedingly sparingly, to vaguely shape the story.

Next is a reframing of how we talk about improv in RPG’s. There isn’t a one to one correlation in my mind between the two. In stand-up improv (which is what I’m referring to when I say improv here), it’s about content generation and you start with the vaguest of concepts, often a place and a situation, that come up on the fly. That isn’t how most RPG’s work. Again, there are rules light ones like Fiasco or Dreamchaser that are much more about on the fly content generation, but when you have someone running a game who has put time into it, a lot of the improv has to change into something that is a bit more focused. One of the best examples I can give of this is a spoiler for a recent film, so let’s go back a little bit further. In Princess Bride, Billy Crystal, playing Miracle Max, improvises most of his lines. And they are hilarious as you can see below.

However, one thing to note about how Billy Crystal does with his improvised lines is that he is always moving the scene forward. I get wanting to be the funny person in the game you are playing, but ask yourself, is it moving the scene forward, does it make sense in the scene? While Crystal is doing improv, he’s also acting, and that balance is important often for a fun game for everyone. So before you start generating content with your improv, ask yourself if this is the right game and table for that.

Finally, for DM’s, “Yes – And” can work sometimes, but there are other phrases that work as well. These are “Yes – But” and “No – But”. I’ll try and explain these decently well so that you get the concepts that I have in my head.

Yes – And – An anything goes policy and a free flowing policy for playing RPG’s. Works in systems that are very light on rules and rolls but instead focus on collaborative storytelling. You also see that in board games like Winter Tale, Gloom, and Once Upon a Time.

Yes – But – This is probably the most common one that I do. The example that I’d give for this is someone wanting to jump down on top of a monster with their sword. Can they do that, absolutely. Will they take damage from the fall, absolutely. This is something that the character would know in the game, so I’ll tell them the consequences of their action before they do it. Even if it isn’t directly damage based, there are other things that can come from it. You kill all the goblins in the middle of town because that was the best plan you could come up with, or the safest one, that’s cool, you’ve thought it through, but don’t expect the towns folk to love you. They’ll respect you and keep and wary on you, but love you, probably not.

No – But – Out of all of these, I would use this one the most sparingly, at least until you are familiar with your group. The reason being, you want people to have fun, so you don’t accidentally want to shut them down by shooting down their ideas. The concept behind, “No – But” for me is that the player wants to do something that isn’t feasible in the game. For example, knock over a castle onto the evil king that is inside. Something like that, sorry, you cannot do that. Sure, you could eventually, but you don’t have the time or resources to do so, and if I let you do it now, it might break something later in the game, or become your go-to move. But, once you tell me you want to do that, I now can tell you about the loose tiles that make the roof and how you can use a grappling hook or something and pull down a punch of tiles on top of the guards on the top of the wall. The reason that I’m saying this one is trickier is that you need to understand what your players want to do and what they like. So you want to avoid shutting them down, but when you know your players better, you can get an idea of what they want to do, and bring in similar things for them.

So with that, you can create a game that doesn’t go off the rails but also still gives the players agency to add to the story and do cool things.

What I hope I did was show a little bit of difference between a pure improv sort of game and how you can pull some of the improv techniques into your game in places. The reason that I wrote this isn’t to say that games that are in systems with more mechanics, such as D&D and Star Wars RPG shouldn’t use improv, but as players and as the GM/DM, know how to balance it out in the game. Especially if you are making it into a podcast or adding in new players and don’t fully  know the group. And I will say that players who do have an improv background, you often can generate better dialog and crazier ideas on the fly. Just make sure that you are progressing the story while you do so, and everyone at the table, listening online, or watching will love you for it.

What are your thoughts on improv and RPG’s? How well do they mesh together?

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As Peder mentioned, this con is growing, and it felt even more established this year. And since I was familiar with the con this time, I found myself a lot less intimidated by the prospect of playing new RPGs with strangers than I was during our first year. Overall, I had a great time, and really enjoyed getting to try out some great new systems! Here are a few of my highlights:

Highlight #1: Trying out the Cypher System. I loved all of the new systems we got the chance to try (and it was a

treat to play in sessions run by the system creators themselves–thanks again, Colin and Pete!), but my favorite new system this year was Cypher. You can either play in the cyberpunky vampire/werewolf/magi/alien/technozombie-inhabited setting Peder mentioned in his AcadeCon post, or in a far-future setting that takes place after eight versions of Earth have risen and fallen, with you as a denizen of the ninth. Both are the sort of settings that kick my imagination into overdrive, and it’s so much fun to explore worlds like that and envision the kind of stories that could happen in them. I’m hoping we’ll be able to add the system components to our collection and run a game based on it soon!

Highlight #2: Seeing friends from last year. It was so much fun seeing some the great people we’d met last year, and getting to know them a bit better. Con friendships are great that way — when you see each other the next time around, it’s pretty easy to just kind of pick up where you left off. It was great having a few people we knew we could grab for a random board game session or hang-out time, and it was so much fun to hear about what they’ve been up to with their own websites and podcasts. Who knows…maybe we’ll even convince a few of them to guest-post for us in the future!

Highlight #3: Taking things slower this time. As we’ve mentioned, we planned a really full schedule for ourselves during our first AcadeCon stint, and ended up running ourselves pretty ragged by Sunday. This year, we were older and wiser; we limited ourselves to just a couple of scheduled events per day, and left plenty of open time that we could fill up later or leave open as we chose. This made for a much more relaxing time, which let us really enjoy the events we did choose to partake in.

Highlight #4: Checking out new places. Last year, we did a little bit of exploring in the downtown area, and this year, we got to discover even more. We had a ton of fun trying the beer and hanging out with some con friends at Warped Wing brewery, and got the chance to stop at the Destihl restaurant and brewery on the way home as well (it wouldn’t be one of our trips without a couple of brewery stops!). It was nice to feel more familiar with the area as a whole, and great to get the chance to check out some new spots as well.

It was another successful year at AcadeCon, and I’m glad we were able to go again! I’m once again feeling inspired to try out even more new systems, and to see how we can integrate the new ones we played into our current gaming groups. Expect more content on that front in the future!

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Highlight #1: Running a one-shot for the second time. This w\game that went in a completely absurd and amazing direction when I ran it for the first time last year, and it was fun to see how things turned out differently running it a second time. It was also interesting because I had one player who is around my age in the group, and then three other players who are probably closer to my parents’ age than mine. So it was interesting to be teaching Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition to someone who really knew how to play 2nd Edition.

Highlight #2: My Pride, PrejuDICE, and Zombies game. This was another game that I ran, and it was a blast; I had two people who were huge Jane Austen fans in the group, and getting to run them through the absurd scenario that is Pride, Prejudice and Zombies was great. We also had two people who weren’t as familiar with the original story, and that was a lot of fun as well, as I got to tell some of the story from the movie (and book, but I’ve just seen the movie). We had Jane, Lizzy, and Kitty Bennett and Charles Bingley as player characters. I also tried a very cinematic version of combat, since they were fighting through a zombie horde; it took a little bit for a few of the players to really get into it, but it is fun to get these absurd scenes and to have a single player describing it, and using other characters to help fight off zombies. The game is a bit short, and the big battle was a bit too easy, but everyone had a ton of fun.

Highlight #3: Hanging out with friends is a huge part of the con. Getting to talk for a long while with Amanda, whom we met last year and who played in the game I mentioned in Highlight #1, and later playing Five Tribes with her and one of her friends was a ton of fun. We also had a great time hanging out with our friend Tom Cantwell (he’s given suggestions for our Eating Nerdy series) at Warped Wing Brewery, having him as a player in the Pride, PrejuDICE, and Zombies group, and then playing Machi Koro with him after that. Last year, we knew a few people through Twitter, but didn’t meet them in person until the con, and this year we met and hung out with even more new people. AcadeCon is great because it’s still growing, so you tend to run into some of the same people, and that’s a lot of fun.

Highlight #4: Playing three new systems, two of them with the game creator. We got to play Axon Punk Overdrive (think Cowboy Bebop and cyberpunk) and managed to get a cure for a disease without killing any guards. That was a ton of fun, and we got to build our own characters for that. I picked up the manual for that game system, and we may be featuring a guest post from him soon–stay tuned! We also got to play Dreamchaser with Pete. It’s an interesting game in which the players build a story collectively, using the dreams of your characters as plot points. We were trying to capture a fairy, and I played as an eccentric uncle character.

Highlight #5: We got to play in some really interesting worlds. Axon Punk Overdrive was a fun world to live in, and the creator had clearly put a ton of effort into creating something that was really immersive. But the one that took the cake was playing a game using the Cypher system. We played as vampires, werewolves, and magi who were fending off techno-zombies, aliens, and a cult. It was a super cool, dark world in which humans had been killed off and the whole earth was generally in perpetual daylight, except for the city we were in. We were playing a raiding team that had to solve how an artifact caused a demon to be released in our town. Kristen and I are thinking of getting the components for that system so we can run a game of that ourselves. It’s fantastical and awesome, and with Cypher, the scenarios are always in the future. Throughout the course of gameplay, you find  items called cyphers, which are always tech items that have a one-time use for your character. You can only hold so many, but they allow you to do awesome actions. Another feature of the system is that the players are the only ones who roll dice, so the GM can focus more on the story and less on the mechanics, as they’re mainly just setting difficulty levels and framing the story.

Overall, the con was a blast. For people who want to play different RPG’s and learn new systems, I’m always going to recommend that they attend AcadeCon. This year, we did a really good job of balancing out how much we did, resting, and enjoying our time there. Many thanks to everyone who made it awesome, especially The RPG Academy.

Some exciting things with that. I’m running a Dungeons and Dragons version of Pride, PrejuDICE, and Zombies and a game I ran last time.

We’re getting to try out Dreamchaser, Axon Punk, and Cypher System.

Keep track of likely a number of tweets and pictures on @TheScando on Twitter and maybe some on @Kefka73.