I want to write about genres, but I've encountered a problem with writing about the genre of story games. This doesn't refer to story games which include all role-playing games and other games. I'm referring to a style of game that is usually talked about in threads like, "Story game-ifying (insert name of RPG here)."

This definitely points to the existence of a genre. The threads are based on how different The Forge's style of rules are from the traditional ways of building RPGs. What they fail to get is that the experience is different because the players and GM are treated differently. Yes, the rules matter, but it's not just the rules. It appears in the how-to-run and how-to-play advice that accompanies the rules. Sometimes there are rules governing the creation of the setting. Instead of leaving it up to a GM, story games give that power of creation to everyone.

What makes this so difficult to write about is that these threads usually don't mention games in them, only rules from games. Of course, if you're familiar with enough story games, you can probably guess which game they took inspiration from, but those are only guesses.

Of course, there are other threads which call for lists of games that possess a certain rule, such as lists of GM-less games, but counting games from those threads assumes that all story games are gm-less, which is far from true. As I mentioned in my previous post, that sort of turns the concept of genre on its head anyways.

I'll have to think about this to determine what, if any, method could be used to build my research sample.

John Geary's knowledge of military tactics and protocols are from before he went into suspended animation 100 years ago during a battle against the corporate Syndicate. In the meantime, he has become a legend, and he has to struggle with the differences between expectations and reality. He's thrust into the command role, taking control of a fleet of 200 ships, and each book covers two related adventures as they try to make their way back home from behind enemy lines.

The Lost Fleet is about commanding hundreds of ships and all of the politics and morale involved in that. It’s a good series, but Jack Campbell starts with the bar set a little too low, emphasizing pure quantity and removing any tactical maneuvers. It’s sort of like the first couple of times people play Storm of the Armadas, where the battles turn into a joust, so I suppose it's natural.

Like Storm of the Armadas, it simplifies things by starting both sides with essentially the same technologies. This series also reminded me that human beings can’t react fast enough to aim and fire weapons over the sorts of distances and speeds that are common in space warfare.

More than any other story I’ve read, The Lost Fleet emphasizes the delays between giving orders and having them executed. Quite often the characters actually take naps between engagements. Jack Campbell is the first sci-fi writer I've read that does this. What he doesn't do is explore the resulting PTSD, although that would make for a very different story.

My friend Rob Paterson has analyzed and created a breakdown of good storytelling here. Since games often incorporate stories, I'd like to show how it applies to good game design, and how even better characters can come from it. Let's look at Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard (DitV).

DitV is a very structured tabletop role-playing game about holy justice-bringers in the wild west. It's based loosely upon the Mormon religion, exaggerating the violence.The characters travel from town to town, rooting out and fighting heretics and demons. Effectively, DitV is a story about establishing and maintaining order (#8 on Reiss' list). This is the level that Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) operates at, too, although I suspect that D&D is more accumulating something (called "12. Saving" on Reiss' list) than creating order.

The thing that differentiates DitV from D&D is that,in DitV, the plot isn't the core question around which the story revolves. There's a struggle between ethics, as shown by the code of conduct developed by the players, and morality, as shown by the individual character. Is it okay to root out evil? To what degree will you punish sinners? The story is actually about self-actualization. The difficulty of creating a game around self-actualization is that it needs a certain amount of flexibility.

Premade scenarios, like those created for D&D, assume that characters have had certain encounters and those encounters resulted in certain conclusions (such as victory, or at least survival). DitV seeks to allow characters, and, by extension, their players, to explore those self-actualization questions without assuming any particular answer. In return, the gamemaster's job is to create scenarios that respond to and challenge the previous answers that each player character came up with.

Yes, this is all possible in D&D, but DitV focuses upon this morality/ethical struggle. The twist is that the code of conduct in DitV, the ethics, were designed collectively by the players and rewarded by the rules, while moral codes are handled individually and punished by the rules. Add onto this the usual individual desires and subplots. Because the story is about self-actualization, a good gamemaster can use those to artificially conflate desires with sin. After all, desires are individual, and DitV punishes individuality.

This layered approach to generating a meaningful story is a good one, but I wouldn't want to make it any more complex than this. Additional layers would just make it confusing.

The local library where I’m volunteering has hired someone to run a board game design event. No, not me, but a designer that I respect for his ability to teach game design. I signed up for it, only to find out I was the only one to do so. That discovery inspired me to start a one-man crusade to promote the event.

Because the event isn't a competition, I plan on designing a game around what I refer to as the Carnival of Shadows (or Carnival for short). The Carnival will eventually be several small games based around the same fictional community. That community has the power to make their shadows come alive and move independently for a night. I wanted to remove the stigma of shadows and associate them with parties and fun. I plan on designing the first minigame at this event. I don’t know if it’s going to work or not, but we’ll find out!

I just got the most recent version of Storm of the Armadas back from my editor. Besides the usual raft of minor changes, he suggested that I do a major revision of the rules, maintaining that they're poorly organized. I can see his point, too. So...back to work. The game will need at least one more round of revision and editing. I hate that these delays are piling up, but I do believe that the game is getting noticeably better each time.

The concept of genres has many definitions, but I prefer this one:

A genre is a repeatable but open pattern of communication which is shaped by a combination of expectations held by many people and which may be catered to by others. A communication may simultaneously conform to many genres or different types of genres, such as thematic or functional.

Unfortunately, I can come up with genres that threaten even that definition. The term board games, for instance, is spoken of as a genre, but there's a difference. Board games are dominated by one material characteristic, the board. That differentiates them from card games, war games, and even role-playing games.

Is there such a thing as a material genre, or is this just another example of a functional genre? I've always assumed that a functional genre referred to the rules, but if pictures are interpretable as rhetoric (I'm using the academic interpretation of that word, not the common understanding), then it reasons that a board would be even easier to interpret as such.

I find running Apocalypse World (AW) to not be very fun. For a long time I puzzled over this, pointing out several flaws in the system, but the reality is, I miss rolling dice.

It doesn't matter if the rules use dice, cards, or something else, I like being responsible for not knowing what will happen next. I like feel of whatever the system uses to randomly determine outcomes for that moment before using them. Anticipation is a delicious feeling. Associating it with a tactile sensation only serves to heighten it. Accompany it with the rattling of the dice, or the sound of cards as they slide against each other, and I'm in heaven. Then, when the dice are rolled, or the cards are played, that anticipation instantly transforms into some other emotion, be it joy, sorrow or anger, as the results are determined.

It's that rush that fuels the gamist-style of play. Some games, such as poker, try to extend the anticipation. Poker even adds in chips to expand upon the audible element. Poker isn't a story game, but it is used as a resolution method in various games, such as Deadlands. This makes me wonder about four things:

1. Are games that use poker gamist, or at least hybrid?

2. Why don't more gamist RPGs use anticipation better?

3. How can I implement this into Metropole Luxury Coffin?

4. How does this random idea affect my dissertation?

EDIT: ...or not? I can't find a single gamist game that uses this anticipation/resolution combo. Now, I haven't gone over every game of the genre, but when you look at most of them you realize two things: the genre isn't that big and it isn't as well developed other genres, including narrativism.

This post is just to keep you up to date on where I am on my various projects:

Storm of the Armadas: revising the game after my last playtest

RPG: I've decided to avoid the heroes saving the universe concept, but I'm still deciding which of my other games to edit

Dissertation: Exploring the changing definition of the narrativist genre

In response to my previous post about the question if I should publish a role-playing game (RPG) first, the answer was a resounding yes. But there were additional details about what sort of game would work. It seems that these days people want big stories that let them escape their lives. Stories like Guardians of the Galaxy or Star Wars: Rogue One, which is understandable since our news media is filled with stories of Trump. Yes, the trend predates the Trump phenomenon, but you get the point.

Can I write a RPG about a big story? The market is full of big story RPGs. Perhaps the most recent and best of them is Apocalypse World (AW). I've played AW and several variants of it, and even own a few that I haven't played.

I don't like AW's conflict resolution rules because it promotes constant fighting. This type of play was the hallmark of Dungeons & Dragons. It's not that I find constant fighting abhorrent, it's just that I've gotten bored by it. The reason why I collect games that are Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) is because of how they integrate different secondary rules, such as factions, into the story, and the fantastic suggestions on how to run a game.

Back to the movies. You may have also noticed another thing held in common between the two movies I mentioned, the genre of space opera. PbtA games assign characters special powers, and some of these powers are flat-out weird. I'm surprised that no one else has thought to create a PbtA space opera game. Perhaps they have, and I just haven't heard of it.

So, the next question, should I create a PbtA space opera game, or create a new edition of Metropole Luxury Coffin (MLC)? An earlier edition of MLC is available for free at 1km1kt, but the new version will be more comedic.

I tend to watch a lot of Youtube videos. I'm subscribed to several Youtube channels. Of particular interest to me are those channels that demonstrate scientific experiments. One of them, Thunderf00t, is especially good at doing this. He constantly challenges other videos and the scientific claims they make, demonstrating why they're wrong through critical thinking, logic, experiments, measurements and math. This is how science works, through the constant challenging and revising of ideas. I don't agree with every claim he makes, especially ones about technology, because technology is always improving, but his channel is a good one to subscribe to.

Unfortunately, as soon as he starts talking about anything that's not scientific, all that reasoning goes out the window. He especially hates feminists and Anita Sarkeesian in particular. I don't agree with everything Anita says, either, but Thunderf00t's arguments aren't really arguments at all because they incorporate several of the logic errors he fights against with his science-related videos. There are better critiques of Anita Sarkeesian's work. You only need to do a web search for "critiques feminist frequency" to find them. Some of them even show where she gets things right, because critiques are not always negative.

And that's what I like about a well written, spoken or demonstrated critique, that it doesn't necessarily have to refute the original claim. In fact, a critique can support certain claims by showing how they are repeatable (another part of the scientific method) or can hold up under interrogation from another direction.

I once read, and I forget where I read this, that ideas should hold up on their own merits, not because of who said them. A good idea could come from a very disreputable source. Bad ideas come from otherwise reputable people. I know that life only offers us a certain amount of time, and reputation plays a big role in judging the source of ideas, but feel that sometimes reputation plays too big of a role. No one should be above questioning.