UncleBear Media

Let’s talk about reviews. I write a lot of them. For some reason I’m considered an RPG boffin and people want to know my opinions. Because reviews have been a major source of agita for me lately, I want to talk about reviews in general and my process in particular.

Why I Write Reviews
We’ll start here. I do not write reviews just to get free stuff. I have more roleplaying games than I will ever have time to play. All of the games that I play on a regular basis, I have purchased. If I got a freebie, and I like it enough that I want to run it on a regular basis or play in a long-term campaign (as opposed to a one-shot or con game), I will buy it. That’s just me, and my personal code of ethics; I can’t presume to speak for all reviewers, but I know a bunch who do the same.

The reason I write reviews is because I want to support the hobby. Not the industry; the hobby. New games have the potential to bring in new players, and reinvigorate the interest of veteran players. I want to promote cool stuff and get people to play it. That’s why a lot of recent reviews have taken the form of personal anecdotes. Which leads right to me next point.

The Form of My Reviews
There’s an opinion out there that writing about games you haven’t played extensively, or at all, are completely without merit. If you share this opinion, please notify me so I can add you to the list of people whose products I will no longer write about. That opinion offends me, and here’s why: of all the game stuff out there, both unreviewed stuff I bought and freebies I’ve been sent for consideration, I chose to take the time to read yours. No, I didn’t have time to play it, but I made time to read it. Then I made time to write about it. And say good things about it, because I will no longer write negative reviews (we’ll get to that). Yet after kind words and free publicity, people still have the audacity to tell me I was wrong in the way I wrote the review of their product? Screw you with bells on.

People have also given me crap about what I’ve focused on in reviews of their product. I spent too much time on this (the thing I liked and found interesting) and not enough on that (the thing they want to be the selling point). Well, my review is my opinion. I write about the bits that get me excited and want to play the game. Sometimes that’s weird stuff. Sometimes it has nothing to do with your marketing. I still said nice things about your game. I’m not your paid marketer. I’m always happy to discover that publishers and writers didn’t like my review, because I know I won’t have to bother reviewing their future releases.

The ROLPUNK of Reviewing
It boils down to this: I review stuff that I find fun. If I find that writing the review is a chore, I table it. If I have to mull over what I want to say for too long, or have trouble finding the words, I ditch it. If I’m really excited about something, I want to write about it right away, and often. I love roleplaying games, I love roleplaying, and I want to talk about the cool stuff I discovered while reading your game, and the cool ideas that popped into my head while reading it. That’s my criteria: what in this product got my imagination going, what fiddly bits am I going to carry over into other games, what made me want to play this. I could give a crap about the rules; if I like the setting, I’ll port it to a rules system that works for me. Yeah, I like clever rules, but I’ve never wanted to play a game simply based on a clever dice mechanic. If the game offers good player or gamemaster advice, that gets me hot, too. That means it’s not only fun, it’s useful and worthy of a space on my self already cluttered with more systems, genres and settings than I’ll ever get use out of.

Take what works, leave the rest, and have fun. Your mileage may vary.

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The Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG will forever hold a place in my heart for one significant reason. It goes like this:

• Buffy, you kick ass, so your stats and abilities will reflect that.
• Angel, you’re a vampire, so all that stuff’s on your sheet.
• Giles, you know a lot of stuff, so your numbers will show that.
• Willow, you’re smart and know computers and learn magic, so your stats rock.
• Oz, in addition to being Seth Green you’re also a werewolf. Stats and abilities woo!
• Xander… um, yeah… here’s a huge sack of Hero Points to spend to save yourself. Oh, and here’s an eye patch for when those run out.

It’s the recognition that on television, in movies, in comics, on old time radio shows, in pulp novels, in literature, in every other medium except roleplaying games, all characters within an ensemble are not equal.

Let’s look at the prototypical adventuring party: The Fellowship of the Ring. Merry is not the same level as Aragorn. Merry and Pippin together aren’t the same level as Aragorn. Hell, Merry, Pippin, Sam and Frodo arguably add up to the same level as Aragorn. But in a game, everyone’s the same level. Why? Because it’s fair.

No, it isn’t. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not, and I’ll tell you why.

Game balance does not come from game mechanics.
Game balance comes the gamemaster. Game balance comes from every character having something appropriate to do. It means your wizard gets to do wizard stuff and your ranger gets to do ranger stuff and your slayer gets to do slayer stuff and your xander gets to do xander stuff. Seriously, even if all the characters are the same “level” (I use this term generically to include “built for the same number of points” or whatever the equivalent is in the game of your choice), if you run an adventure that’s thief-skill heavy and the wizard spends the night sitting in the back picking his teeth, it’s unbalanced and, I’ll say it, unfair. If you run a magic-heavy game and the fighter hold action for 47 rounds, it’s unbalanced and unfair. What does level have to do with any of this? Not a blessed thing.

Think about this: why can’t you run a game where one player is Doc Savage and the other players are his aids? Conventional wisdom says you can’t. It’s not right to let one player be a higher level than all the others. Why can’t you play Jack Bauer and another player be Kim, or Chloe (assuming, of course, someone actually wants to be Kim or Chloe)? The standard game design playbook says no way.

Let’s re-define fair. You want to play a hobbit. Okay. You realize that you’ll spend a lot of time screaming and running away, right? Well, denying you the opportunity to play the type of character you want would be unfair, so let’s do it. You over there, you want to play the Ranger-King? You do realize that in every fight you’re going to be the one getting the living crap beat out of him and that you’re going to be putting yourself in harm’s way to protect these other characters that can’t fight, right? That’s the character you want to play, it would be unfair thof me to not allow it. You all picked characters you want, knowing the drawbacks to each, so that’s fair. I’ll be fair and give everyone something to do each session. Fair? Fair.

Equality isn’t a number. Equality is how you treat people, even fictional people.

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In a private email, a reader took me to task over some recent posts. I was accused of subverting “gamist” mechanics with the intention of re-imagining existing systems to fit my “narrativist” agenda. Or something like that. It was heavily laden with jargon and, well, the way they said it made it sound dirty. While I do enjoy it when readers talk dirty to me (well, some of them, anyway), I really don’t like being told how to game. The email went on to tell me that by not playing the game as written, the way the designer intended it to be played, I’m missing out on the “true” experience of the game. Further, I have a “duty” to experience the rules as written before hacking a game up, and my articles encourage making tweaks and adding rules directly out of the box and thus depriving my readers of these “true” experiences.

Okay, I’ll stop with the sarcasti-quotes now.

When I run a game, I owe absolutely no duty to the game designer, the publisher, the store I bought it at, or any other random person. The only duty I owe is to the people seated at my table, and all I owe them is the best game I can possibly run. If that means hacking the game up to make it easier for me to run, so be it. If it means tweaking things to give players different options, speeding up play, removing obstacles, or introducing elements that they enjoy that this particular set of rules lacks, so be it. I bought the game, I own it, I can do whatever I please with it. Period.

If I’m writing a review I absolutely have a duty to the readers to correctly report how the game works. If I’m writing an actual play report, I have a duty to provide an accurate account of how play flows. When I’m writing blog posts, I have a duty to communicate interesting and entertaining ideas that might somehow be useful. I am not, however, putting a gun to anyone’s head and telling them how to play, or endorsing the idea that my ideas are the one true way, or somehow better or more fun than any other way. That would be wrong.

If I have an agenda, it’s to smack down people with agendas. Game as thou want, and be happy.

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Building upon my ramblings on mechanics vs. styles of play, I wanted to look at a different way of classifying game systems. Traditionally, we view mechanics as “lite”, meaning there are few rules, a slim rulebook, and not a lot of fiddly bits, or “crunchy”, meaning a lot of specific rules, big fat rulebooks, and loads of fiddly bits. There are a lot of assumptions about each of these categories, many of them overly generalized, not at all universal, and frequently wrong. What I propose instead is to not look at the quantity of rules, but the ease of use and how difficult it is to tweak them to do what we want. I propose we begin viewing games as adaptive or restrictive.

An adaptive game is one that is very easy to alter to suit, to re-design to get the output you desire. It can be house-ruled, tweaked, and modified with very little effort. A game that provides the formulas for creating new spells, powers, abilities, and gear, for example, would be more adaptive than one where the publisher keeps that information to themselves. A system where you can reverse-engineer would be more adaptive than one where all of that sort of info is hard to fathom and kept proprietary.

Let’s look at two systems: Risus, and Spycraft 2.0. Risus is traditionally labeled a “lite” game, as it’s only a few pages long and has only general mechanics. Spycraft 2.0 is built on d20, which is considered to be crunchy, and has a thick rulebook in small type. I would consider both of these game to be highly adaptive. Risus has rules for making up your own cliches, and Spycraft 2.0 is very much a toolkit to be customized to suit the needs of your campaign. One light, one crunchy, but with similar qualities and perceived strengths.

I would also propose that a system with an open license, or at least fan-friendly licenses, is more adaptive than one where the publisher sues fans for sharing unauthorized material. Granted, that has little to do with the mechanics themselves, but could be a consideration.

This is a sliding scale. You cannot declare a game to be adaptive or restrictive in absolute terms; you can rate it from 1 to 10, with up to 5 stars, in shades of gray. Some elements may be more conducive to house rules and tinkering than others.

This scale is also highly subjective. I would say D&D 4e is very restrictive, because I’m not that familiar with the rules enough to know how to adapt it. I could make up stuff for Savage Worlds on the fly, though. Given a few minutes to review the rules, I could built house rules for 3.5, GURPS, or HERO System. These things could be analysed objectively, of course. Criteria could be established, and an International Role Playing Adaptivity Committee could be formed to hand down judgments on what games are to what degree restrictive or adaptive. But that’s not the point. My whole point in pitching this system of classification is to provide a tool for you, the gamemaster, the player, the person who has to use these game mechanics, to assess whether a rules system meets your own personal needs. Can you run this sucker out of the box, and can you chop, soup up, kit-bash or otherwise turbocharge these rules in order to make them do what you want them to do? Is it going to be easy, or is it going to be so much of a righteous pain in the ass that it’s just not worth it. Your game, your criteria, your value judgment. The best rules are the rules that work for you, and you’re the only person qualified to make that decision.

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Opinion: If you want to be a good roleplayer, you need to know how to write, and you need to know how to act. You don’t have to be an absolute master of those disciplines, but you should at least know the fundamentals. You need to know something about how to plot, and how to structure a story. Beginning, middle, end. Foreshadowing. Closure. You need to understand character motivations, identify emotional hooks and proper emotional responses, know what feels right for any particular character to do in any given situation.

Game systems exist only to offer structure, define (and limit) possibilities, enforce genre rules, and provide a means for conflict resolution. That’s a lot. Story and character are not mechanical functions. Yes, games have character sheets that offer up information about the character, but that’s not who the character is, it’s a guideline as best. It doesn’t define their reactions, their hopes, dreams, triumphs, tragedies. That’s all you. A game can provide some guidelines on how to design encounters, even lay out the beats, but it doesn’t provide the emotions that drive the story — love, hate, revenge, honor, greed, all those messy emotions that fire the machinations of villains and the ambitions of heroes.

Story and plot are conscious choices, decisions you make. They may be influenced by dice or other randomized information, but the interpretation of that data is a choice.  The villain doesn’t kidnap the princess because he’s “evil”. He kidnaps the princess because he needs to sacrifice her to a demon in return for power, or because he lusts after the princess. His motivations are power, or sex. He chooses his methodologies because he’s evil, and operates under a different code of ethics and morality. The paladin might lust after the princess too, but that’s a whole other conflict.

It doesn’t matter what books you read on the topics of writing and acting, so long as they work for you and offer up some sort of advice you can use. Listen to DVD commentaries on your favorite films and shows to see why the people involved made the creative choices they did. Watch interviews with actors and directors about their craft. Read interviews with writers. Talk to those sorts of people when you can. Talk to really good gamemasters and roleplayers about the choices they made on story and plot. Developing these skills, as both a gamemaster and a player, will result in a far more rewarding roleplaying experience.

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Rolpunk (one L, no E) is about pure, stripped down, no BS tabletop gaming. It’s about taking your game back to its bare bones roots: play a character, chuck some dice, period. It’s about not letting other people tell you how to play your games. It’s not about telling other people how to play their games, either; don’t be that fascist. Don’t drink the Kool-Aid, man, not other peoples’ and especially not your own. It’s about having fun, because if you’re not having fun you’ve discovered the only way possible to do it wrong. It’s about embracing the do-it-yourself ethic of the hobby and sharing your stuff, even if it’s just with your own game group. But it’s not about rejecting stuff, dismissing stuff out of hand because of whatever pretentious filters other people have set up to dictate what’s cool and what’s not cool. Screw them. Reject attitudes, not games. It’s about accepting the potential of everything, salvaging what works for you and ignoring the rest. It’s about shaping your own identity as a gamer, about letting your group and your campaign and the rules at your table take their own form based on your creative needs. Don’t be a game sheep.

Read the uncensored version here (NSFW PDF).

The rolpunk manifesto was written by Berin Kinsman of UncleBear.com. Pass it on. This work, including the logos, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

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ROLPUNK with Shakabuku Hyde
For those who don’t follow roleplaying industry gossip, Outlaw Press, aka James Shipman, got caught stealing other peoples’ intellectual property and publishing it as if it were his own material. Most of these ethical lapses seem to be artwork procured from other sources without the artists’ knowledge or permission, but there may be deeper issues. A few sources are saying that the whole “Tunnels & Trolls license” that Outlaw Games has stems from Shipman just publishing T&T material without permission and Flying Buffalo chieftain Rick Loomis, unable to afford a lawsuit, just going along with it to save face. What we know for sure is that James Shipman is a world-class douchebag who preys on people who can’t afford to defend their IP, and does so without remorse.

So here’s what I propose: since this guy has no respect for the law or social convention, I say he needs some Two-Fisted Enlightenment. I’d like to introduce him to my friend The World’s Worst Sock Puppet, Mr. Bag ‘o’ Quarters. I think this guy needs an introduction to other people who have no respect for law or social convention. I think this guy should not only be afraid to go out at night, I think he should be afraid to leave his house in broad daylight. Yes, I am proposing that Jame Shipman, the man who thinks he’s untouchable and can do anything he wants because the people he steals from can’t afford to sue him over his douchebaggery, get his ass kicked. Often. On a daily basis, until he apologizes. Which, given his track record, will be never, thus extending the period of mandatory beatings so that some of us, at least, will get some satisfaction.

For those less violently inclined, I ask that you simple spread the word and stop buying any Outlaw Press products. He’s already been pulled by OneBookShelf and Amazon. His website has been reported to Yahoo, his web host. He’s been reported to eBay, where he continues to try to sell his purloined products under a variety of usernames, and to PayPal. For what it’s worth, Rick Loomis and Ken St. Andre (creator of Tunnels & Trolls) have both stated in multiple places that James Shipman no longer has their permission to see any sort of Tunnels & Trolls products, period. He really has no where to run, and nowhere to hide at this point.

But I still think he needs a boot to the head, to serve as punctuation.

Shakabuku Hyde is the Bodhisattva of Two-Fisted Enlightenment and Op/Ed columnist for UncleBear.com. His guitar hates your mother. His opinions are generally not those of anyone other than himself, and the management does not advocate most of the ideas he entertains.

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ROLPUNK with Shakabuku Hyde
The founders of the RPG Bloggers Network are, for the most part, stepping down. They’re stepping down because they’re tired of taking crap from people who think they’re owed something beyond what they’ve been given. yes, given. Four guys built the RPG Bloggers Network, with their own time and their own money. Joining was a priviledge, not a right, but it was free and open to all with a few guidelines and quality-control measures in place. The network grew fast, and achieved great success. that’s when some folks started feeling that old sense of entitlement, and felt that as members of the network they had rights, and some say in how things were run.

They started whining about “transparency”, and how an “arbitrary” group of people were making “arbitrary” decisions about what posts were appropriate and what blogs got to join. Weh, weh, weh. You know, as if the guys who paid to set up the service and put the sweat equity into running have no say in how it operates, but a bunch of freeloaders who use the service for free should get to call the shots. Not to sound like a Libertarian or an Objectivist or anything, but your logic is severely impeded and you just need to clam up and/or pound sand.

Berin Kinsman, the founder of this site, has been talking to financial backers about buying up the network and running it as a business. Some other folks are talking about running it as a democracy, or a non-profit organization. I have no idea who’s going to win, who’s going to end up taking over, but I’ll tell you what i’d like to see. I would like to see the whole damned thing collapse in on itself. I want to see if fall apart just so people will realize how hard it was for four guys to create it and run it, and to appreciate what a miracle it really was. I know, that’s going to put out a lot of nice people who did nothing wrong, and did express gratitude, and will be put out. Yeah, well.

Rather than an agregater, I think the next-generation RPGBN (or its replacement, when it falls on the heads of the commie-hippie commune that I expect will actually end up taking over) is something more along the lines of Slashdot, Metafilter, or FARK. Nobody’s posts get on their atuomatically. Someone has to submit them. Submitting your own stuff is bad form, so you submit your buddy’s stuff. Then other members comment and vote on the quality of the content, so it either makes the front page or gets banished for being crap. That’s about as fair a democractic process as you can get. Of course, some folks will hate it because it’s not the entitlement program the original RPGBN is.. was… is… is the site still up? Whatever. The point is, no one owes anyone anything, especially internet traffic to your blog, so whatever it is you think you want, you’re going to have to work for it.

Shakabuku Hyde is the Bodhisattva of Two-fisted Enlightenment, as well as the Op/Ed editor and ROLPUNK blogger for UncleBear.com. His comments probably reflect the opinions of no one else on earth but himself, but we’re not going to argue with him.

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Rolpunk (one L, no E) is about pure, stripped down, no BS tabletop gaming. It’s about taking your game back to its bare bones roots: play a character, chuck some dice, period. It’s about not letting other people tell you how to play your games. It’s not about telling other people how to play their games, either; don’t be that fascist. Don’t drink the Kool-Aid, man, not other peoples’ and especially not your own. It’s about having fun, because if you’re not having fun you’ve discovered the only way possible to do it wrong. It’s about embracing the do-it-yourself ethic of the hobby and sharing your stuff, even if it’s just with your own game group. But it’s not about rejecting stuff, dismissing stuff out of hand because of whatever pretentious filters other people have set up to dictate what’s cool and what’s not cool. Screw them. Reject attitudes, not games. It’s about accepting the potential of everything, salvaging what works for you and ignoring the rest. It’s about shaping your own identity as a gamer, about letting your group and your campaign and the rules at your table take their own form based on your creative needs. Don’t be a game sheep.

Read the uncensored version here (NSFW PDF).

This was written by Berin Kinsman of UncleBear.com. Pass it on. This work, including the logos, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

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This is a rerun. It was originally posted on August 27, 2007.

I used to be a geek, before most geek things went mainstream. Now geek is everywhere. Everyone owns computers and gadgets. I know lawyers into anime, doctors in graphic novels, cops who play massive multiplayer games, and stockbrokers who play D&D. The weird stuff isn’t fringe any more. The stuff I like isn’t that unusual any more. If geek is everywhere, then who really qualifies a geek?

Some have suggested that it’s not a state of fandom or enthusiasm toward a thing that makes one a geek, it’s the slavish devotion to the thing that goes far above and beyond that of a normal hobbyist. By that logic, you can be a quilting geek, a power tool geek, or a fashion geek. I don’t buy it. I just think that’s an obsessive/compulsive disorder. With the internet making everything accessible to everyone, nothing is really obscure or fringe any more, and sizeable groups of fans can be gathered together on any topic. Geek is dead. It’s a post-geek world.

Even if you disagree and say I’m still a geek, I no longer conform to to habits and behaviors of traditional geeks. If the phrase “jump the shark” can be applied to things that have permanently and fundamentally strayed from their original premise, then in my Post-Geek life I’ve Jumped the Dire Shark.

The other thing that places me firmly into a post-geek life is that I’m no longer on the cutting edge of the things I used to be geeky about. I hardly ever see first-run movies and rarely even catch DVDs when they’re first released. I don’t buy single-issue comics, and wait months or even years for trade paperback collections. There are few books that I read upon release. Most of the games I play are long out of print. The good stuff will be as good tomorrow as it is today, and time will sort the fads from the classics. I coined the phrase Long Tail Fandom to describe this phenomena.

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