Diversity, Discussion and Dice

I'm still on the high that I felt when this day was over. The organisation and running of this event was only possible because of the help and support of my wonderful friends and fellow roleplayers. I was surprised at the interest in the diversity day when it was first suggest as a concept. I had several people say to me that an attempt to address several issues in one day was really welcome as a lot of cons have an hour long slot for diversity in gaming as a catch all. Thankfully we had some fantastic entertaining speakers and participants who contributed thoughtfully and brought a lot to the discussion.

We had 6 talks throughout the day in two rooms:

Dealing with triggers while gaming which I ran as a workshop on the meaning of triggering different safety techniques which were currently used and how they could be improved. There was a nice turnout and enough people to split the group into 4 so that we could examine techniques in more depth. (There was a singing class taking place in the background so sometimes I'd make a point and hear some inspiring music well up behind me - I would recommend that to all nervous public speakers!)

At the same time in the other room Graham Walmsley ran a talk and discussion on Other histories: Positve perspectives on Queerness and Women

In the second slot Joanna Piancastelli ran a talk on how to play characters which are different from yourself both sensitively and well.

Anita Murray ran a talk called Playing with Sex, looking at the positive aspects of sex in role playing. There was also a very interesting facilitated discussion that arose from this which covered bleed, consent and whether roleplayed sex could be romantic.

In the final slot Helen Gould ran a talk and discussion called Leaving the West which was about looking at different ways to set roleplaying games and play characters outside a Western setting with a particular focus on Africa.

Karolina Soltys ran a talk on sensitive and realistic portrayal of mental health issues in roleplaying which then became an interesting discussion on bleed and whether games could be designed which portrayed mental health in an accurate way.

After that we had a gaming session with Stiainín Jackson running her game Court Whispers, Karolina running a hack of the game A family affair involving one of the characters having mental health issues and Richard Williams running B x B by Jake Richmond and Heather Aplington.

Some of the transcripts of the talks and a write up of the triggers workshop can be found here: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-I8NCTgeqBbd0FlcnJfVHBhRkE&usp=sharing

It was a good day. There was a lot of enthusiasm and willingness to learn from each other. I hope that this can eventually be an annual thing and that next year we'll be back bigger and better!

Tips for new GMs - of which I am one

It feels like a massive leap to be sitting (metaphorically or literally) on the other side of the table. Not only do you have to come up with a scenario and make it entertaining but you have to deal with the fact that your players are going to do the exact opposite to what you want and expect them to do and then frantically scramble round for a way to get the adventure back on course without railroading your players (virtually impossible).

An initial tip would be to start with something like Monsterhearts. You will need to introduce elements and ensure everyone feels confident enough to participate but if you are running a one shot you can basically give your players free reign.

The wonderful +Tom Pleasant  taught me about the concept of the 5 room dungeon which is a great way to create a short scenario. The idea is you have a beginning point and an end point that you are working towards (although if your players do something amazing that would make a fantastic end point that’s fine too.) The dungeon doesn’t have to be a literal dungeon. To take a typical fantasy setting a 5 room dungeon might look like this.

Except, spot the problem?  To achieve the ending you have to ensure that the characters take the right steps in the right order and that’s not likely. The only way you could run this scenario would be to guide them from event to event and not let them do anything else.

So a better way to write the scenario would be:

Now we have several different paths to several different endings and potentially a more interesting game that gives the characters options. You will still need to be prepared for players to deviate from the paths you have chosen but it will be likely you have covered most eventualities. The important part is to ensure the events that need to occur, occur. In this example you could probably start the story from the characters witnessing the dragon act, possibly replacing 1 with 2a if you wanted to start in medias res.

The scenario I was writing was one player, one GM which I think is a good way to start if you’re feeling nervous, especially if your player is someone who will give you feedback on what worked and what didn’t work afterwards. Also playing the same scenario with different people is a great way of exploring where players are likely to want to go. Another suggestion of Tom’s was to look at things you’ve recently watched or read, take a scene from them that stood out and then incorporate them, maybe with slight changes, into the game. I was writing a Cthulhu Dark scenario and my inspirations were:

A scene from a recent Dr Who.

A scene from Jessica Jones

A concept from a recent LARP I played.

A scene from Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Once I had mashed them together and altered them to fit the game I don’t think any of them were recognisable. The game took about an hour and a half (including character creation which I want to experiment with and swapping in and out of coffee shops because they kept closing.) I’m not sure if it’ll get longer or shorter as I get more competent. Probably less waffly and with less of an info dump at the start. Once I’ve found a few more playtesters and run the game a few more times I will write about my experience with it and the dynamics of running the scenario with different characters. When you have one PC who they are and how they interact with the scenario matters a lot.

Role -playing, larping and real life issues

‘I don’t know why they don’t just…’  We’ve all heard it. Perhaps from strangers at the bus stop, perhaps from our friends. Explaining the course of action that someone who’s homeless, or having mental health difficulties or living in poverty should take. Or someone who is experiencing racism or sexism or another form of difficulty or discrimination that the speaker has never experienced. It’s sometimes hard not to think like that, however much you try to avoid it.  After all, there are organisations that offer support, people who can help, medications that can help. And why shouldn’t you shout back at a stranger who’s swearing at you in the street if you're a woman surrounded by people. What’s the worse that can happen?

Lately I’ve been struggling with the idea of whether roleplaying games and larps can be tools for social change, whether they can open up others to the experience of being oppressed or frightened or lost in a world that isn’t always designed for them.

And when I try to design a game I always run into the same problem in my head  ‘well, this is what I would do.’ I know from my own experience of mental illness that it isn’t that simple. Even for someone who is informed about their options (and I am privileged in many ways) the gulf between knowing about them and seeking them out can be so wide that it can be impossible to cross. 

How can I play a homeless person struggling when my instinct is to think of solutions? Because of course, I know how to use the internet and how to access it for free, if the worst came to the worst I have a support network who would help me and I am fundamentally not alone. And if I experienced poverty, real poverty, not student poverty, I would know I could go to the job centre, fill out a form in English and advocate for myself eloquently.

If I was playing a game where I was facing these issues, sure I could pretend, but I wouldn’t come away with any new understanding or experience. So how can I make that happen? I’ve spoken before about Zoe Quinn’s twine game Depression Quest which tries to deal with the issue. You play a depressed man and you have a number of options of things you can do to begin to recover. But options are crossed off and the more depressed you get, the less options are available to you. This is a good illustration of living with depression and not being able to talk about it or get help despite knowing, somewhere in your mind that that’s what you should be doing. I don’t think it goes far enough though. If you choose the best option you can each time the main character can begin to recover. And you know what the best option is. You know because the main character isn’t you and you’re not the one who has to face it.

How can we overcome this in games? Counters? Mechanics? Creating as an immersive experience as possible? Giving out character sheets explaining what the character knows and what they are capable of doing that day? But then they are stuck perpetually, not a human being but someone who has stopped learning and stopped growing.  And the player always knows that after the game or the larp they can get up and walk away.

And I want players to experience for a moment, that fear, that helplessness. I want to understand and I want other people to understand why people make decisions which might seem inadvisable but are the best and only option that person has.

I have heard the suggestion from a couple of people for a larp that would be played like Wraith. Each character would be played by two players - the character themselves and the side of them that has a list of their limitations. They’re frightened so they don’t answer men who catcall them in the street, they are depressed so they really can’t force themselves out the door for work even though they should have left half an hour ago, they can’t speak English so they don’t understand why they are getting benefit sanctions.

This was a lot of words to say I don’t have the answers. I would really appreciate any ideas though. Is role-play just a bad tool for social change or is there a solution? Or am I thinking in black and white? Is role-play an imperfect tool to create social acceptance and understanding and if so how can we improve it? I am really interested in your thoughts.

A reminder that you can sign up to my mailing list here.

Role-play and larping as therapy?

This post is inspired by a conversation about a friend.

I have posted before about things I have achieved through the help of gaming. Fiasco has taught me not to be afraid of confrontation (if not the best way to confront people!). I have played games where I sometimes subconsciously and sometime consciously played characters who had issues that I wanted to work through (although maybe that’s unfair to other people at the table.) I recently had a very cathartic experience at a larp which led me to deal with some resentment I’d been holding onto to 14 years.

In short I am biased. I do believe that exploring these boundaries and pushing your limits, providing you know enough to keep yourself safe can help you move on from past trauma. I am currently designing a game which is literally about moving on and forgiving people who have hurt you.

But I am also going to play devil's advocate. We are not in general trained counsellors. If we open up old pain or raise issues during play that the person hadn't considered sympathy might not be enough to get them grounded again. I talked in a previous post about triggers and trauma and how best to avoid them - now I am writing about seeking them out.

So, if you do decide to do this make sure:

1. You are around people you trust and preferably people who understand what you are doing.
2. You can leave at any time.
3. You know your personal limits, triggers and what is too much for you.
4. There is a safeword for the particular game - whether it’s cut and brake, lines and veils,

the X card or just ‘can we take this in a different direction?’

      5) You debrief afterwards.

Although this has been helpful to me I would hesitate to recommend pushing your boundaries and introducing your trauma into a game if you don’t have other ways of dealing with it, for example through therapy. My experience have been very positive and I am convinced in the right hands roleplay could be a powerful tool, however, I could also see how it could unearth buried trauma which the player might not know how to handle,

I would be very grateful for any thoughts on this. I am still undecided.

Normal service to resume shortly

Sorry about the brief hiatus. Your regular gaming content will resume shortly:

Some things to look forward to (!):

• My attempt to GM Monsterhearts at London indie meet
• An account of a play test of a game I am designing
• Campaigns and world building
• and the possibility of Changeling the Lost with fairy tales hacked using the Fate

The resolution - Learning to GM part 5

So after all the prep and the panic I finally finished the second part of the two part session of Cthulhu Dark which was my first GMing experience. Warning – some body horror.

So, firstly, I was lucky enough to be a player in a Cthulhu Dark game run by an excellent GM the night before. This was pure coincidence, it happened to be running at London Indiemeet but I didn't know that it would be. I learnt so much from playing it about how to push your players in certain directions while still giving them agency. (I still died horribly at the end of course.)

I planned this game to death and about halfway through I threw away the majority of my plans other than the general idea. It made the game 100% better and 100% more fun for me.

Someone on here suggested when I complained that I didn't look or sound scary enough that the thing to do is talk to your players like they are your best friends and they are in danger. He also suggested looking behind them occasionally while you're talking to create a sense of paranoia. Do this – it works!

I altered the character sheets so that they asked some questions of the players, including why they were there and asked them to invent an NPC they were close to. As a result my characters were:

Junji Ito – Former corrupt police detective in his 60s who used to do favours for the mob. Now working at the museum on Christmas Eve so he didn't see he son who he believed was being hurt by his influence. His NPC was Robin, a quiet cheerful man (who it transpired knew more than he than he appeared to).

Stephen Murphy – Working Christmas Eve because he had no where else to be. Former TFL worker. Once hit his ex wife during a particularly nasty argument and hates himself for it. His NPC was Reggie – a former bus driver, now a cleaner with a drinking problem who steals from the museum.

We also had a curator, Erik Kristiansen – I asked him slightly different questions on the character sheet and this, in addition to where the plot went kept him close to his NPC, Katrine Hansen throughout the game. On his character sheet he described beautifully one of the scariest moments of his life; walking across a frozen lake with Katrine and hearing it crack under his feet. Katrine was Erik's friend but became one of the cult's victims, albeit one who survived. I think, in hindsight, it would have been good to have asked him the question I asked the other PCs about the worst thing he ever did.

It was really helpful to have character secrets and fears that I could play on in the game – this made it so much easier to improvise. (At one point I had Eric having a vision of being trapped under ice in a lake. His roll to escape was OK but not great so when he came back his fingernails were bloody and falling off.)

Some things I did that weren't so great:

• One of the character's didn't care about any of the psychological stuff, although the body horror worked. I don't think there was much that I could have done about that – it was in the character to behave like that, but a few times he left me not knowing how to respond (or have the NPC respond).
• There are only so many times that you can say 'you see a corpse' before it loses it's value.

It was fun though – in a different way from playing. I enjoyed it a lot more once I got rid of my notes and made it up as I went along. I'm not going to GM full time but I will definitely do it again. (I've got a copy of Monsterhearts on order and I'm going to try it out at London Indiemeet.

There were some bits that seemed to work really well (I am going to put in a trigger warning here for self harm – due to the cult's influence there was a lot of it).

• One of the psychological horror things which worked really well, the radios that the characters were carrying got increasingly staticky and the PCs started hearing loved ones talking to them.
• The cult taking over Katrine and making her carve an Ankh in herself was effective, but mainly because of the reaction of Erik who loved her. If he had been indifferent it wouldn't have been as interesting.
• When the characters tried to set fire to the museum the sprinklers turned on (I think it was one of the characters rather than me who first mentioned sprinklers, and I just ran with it!).
• To open the room to where the relic was that held the power a character had to cut themselves quite badly. I expected that one of the characters would do it themselves but Stephen jumped on Junji and cut him.
• I expected the destroying of the relic would be the end but Junji insisted on looking for the cult and ended up going insane while the building collapsed around him.
• Eric had another vision where he had to choose between his life and Katrine's. He choose hers and they both lived and escaped the museum.
• Stephen and Reggie lived and went off to the pub despite Reggie trying to stab Stephen moments before.

So now that's over my next GM project will be Monsterhearts. In the meantime please let me know if you have any topics that you'd like me to blog about.

The trials of GMing - Part 4

The end is near

So I'm writing the final session of my game. I have a really good idea of how it will start and I'm really excited about the way it will wrap up, it's the in between parts that I'm struggling with. 

I was given the suggestion that you give the PCs 3 clues and that should lead them where you want them to go – which I am trying to do. I definitely don't want to  railroad them as much this time as I did last time where I was practically telling them “You have to go this way” by the end (especially as I have one PC who is a loose cannon who just wants to survive - entirely reasonable of course but sometimes you need the player to go down the secret passage!). Unfortunately, so far what I've written amounts to an information dump from NPCs and I want to do it better than that.

But dammit these are things that the PCs absolutely need to know.

I've tried getting the NPCs to give half the information and leave clues for the other half. I will just have to stay calm and keep my mouth shut if they go the wrong way and hope that they turn round eventually. I just don't want them to get bored.

This is really difficult!

Learning to GM - Part 3

The game is on

So with much trepidation (just ask anyone who's known me for the last week.) I GMed my first game on Wednesday.

It was a Cthulhu Dark game set in the Conway Museum, a dilapidated mansion that was once grand but fell into disrepair. There were few visitors to the museum as Charles Conway tended to open the museum erratically (including in the middle of the night) and chased people away if he didn't like the sense of them. There have been even fewer visitors a week ago since Charles sold a lot of the items of value, scraped the rest and filled the museum with new and strange artefacts.

The game began at 8pm as the night security guards were beginning work. Snow was settling around the Museum. And maybe the lights are flickering a bit. But it was just for one night.

The first thing I realised was how supportive the roleplaying community is. I posted on Facebook that I was a bit nervous and got lots of replies telling me that it would be fine.

I think, for a first attempt it went OK (I'm defining OK as I didn't get flustered and give up in the first 5 minutes). About half way through I started to enjoy it.

The issue I have, which I should've realised was that 'no plan survives contact with your players.' There were three bits I regret I missed out, two because the players didn't do anything to trigger it and one because I completely forgot. (I think juggling 3 maps, 3 character sheets and a notebook didn't help.)

I also had the idea that the players would sweep the museum and not find anything too creepy the first time and then it would gradually get scarier, but they looked a bit bored so I quickly moved onto the scary bits which made for a shorter game (actually that was lucky because one of my players had to leave quite early).

I forgot to have a lines and veils talk at the start and then during a particularly gruesome scene had to say 'ugh, you guys are OK with this, right?'

I had to write a text on the train home so I could remember which NPCs were dead, which were alive but horribly injured and how and which were OK. I nearly sent it to my sister.

I don't think I used enough tension – at one point I was describing “this horrible thing, and then this horrible thing and then this horrible thing”

I didn't play up the NPCs enough. The one that featured in the game most, featured because the character she was most attached to was concerned about her. I need to sort that out for the next game.

At the end I was railroading the players a bit because I was worried that no one was going to find the one important thing that they needed to find. There was a book in a secret passage and I was trying every tactic I could to get at least one of my players to pick it up and read it! (“It's drawing you towards it” “You hear your adult son calling your name and it seems to be coming from that direction”)

The players wanted to play the second session and final of the game next week which I will take as a positive (although the guy who actually said it is far too nice to have requested I don't put him through another 3 hours of boredom!)

One of the players, the one who was helping me with this in the first place, said he would give me some feedback which will be really useful.

No one went completely insane which is good because it wasn't time to go insane. Later maybe.

I think the take away is (and I know how hypocritical I sound) if you want to try out GMing find some friends you trust not to laugh at you and just do it. If I know you IRL I'm very happy to play in your first game and I promise I will make it as easy for you as possible because I know how stressful the whole thing is.

That is not dead which can eternal lie

Learning to GM – part 2

See this post for part 1 of my lack of GMing experience.

I've written the first session and my game is this Wednesday. I am taking deep, calming breaths.

I don't think I've been this uptight since I had to teach a class for the first time. At least I've already humiliated myself in front of every one of my players on various occasions so in theory being self conscious won't be a problem.

In theory.

These are the things I have learnt so far in the process – to be updated once I've actually GMed a game:

• My mind is actually quite warped – I was just finishing some details and I think I scared myself a bit.
• Then again, there is not much that doesn't scare the hell out of me.
• Apart from, I have been practising my scary voice – it's not very scary.
• So grateful that I had help with this – I can't imagine I would've even known how to start on my own.
• I hope that I get to pay that forward someday (is that a bit corny?).
• Making maps is actually quite fun.

OK – I am going to calm down and finish preparing. Please feel free to post any GMing tips. Or, even better, send Vodka.