Author: Robert Bohl

Thanks for the thoughts, Gauntlet cast.

I’m almost caught up!

Originally shared by Robert Bohl

While listening to The Gauntlet podcast this morning, I realized what one of my preferences is in RPGs. Now, to see if I can successfully put it into words.

I love games that make you take the whole group into account. That draw your attention to aspects of other characters you’re not responsible for. Games that forefront the fact that the game is about entertaining and appreciating one another. A quick list:

* Though I haven’t yet played it, on the aforementioned Gauntlet episode, Richard Rogers was talking about playing Quinn Murphy’s Five Fires, the game about hip-hop culture. In this game, you have a secret that only your best friend, another protagonist character, knows. Sounds amazing and I can’t wait to try it.

* Primetime Adventures (by Matt Wilson) is my personal primordial experience of this. The whole game is powered by fan mail, a resource allocated by appreciation for others’ input.

* Meguey Baker’s Psi•Run integrates answering questions about the amnesiacs’ lost lives with those questions being answered, often, by the other protagonists’ players. This is also the pacing mechanic for the game.

* Speaking of pacing mechanics, Epidiah Ravachol’s Swords without Master kinda combines PTA‘s fanmail with Psi•Run‘s pacing stuff, and adds in a layer of incentive for “make up cool and evocative shit.” When someone does something you love, you write it down, and doing that and reincorporating those things later paces the game.

* Joshua A.C. Newman’s shock:social science fiction is intrinsically about this, too. Not only do you play a character who’s entangled with characters portrayed by the people to either side of you, but everyone else playing has a serious power to affect the outcome of any conflicts.

(I’m sure there are examples I’m forgetting.)

This thread is also shot all throughout my games. It’s all over the place in Misspent Youth: all conflicts are group conflicts, most scenes are presumed to have all the YOs in them, most of the time when you win you’re winning on someone else’s traits, and at the start of every episode, you make up something about the friendship between your and another’s characters. (It’s there in my other shit, too, but this is long enough already.)

Further, I feel like this is a relatively rare thing for games to address. It seems to me that the vast majority of games are very happy with people more-or-less siloing into their own spaces. Maybe I’m wrong about that, though.

Hey guys, I want to thank you for making this show. I’ve been letting episodes stack up for the past several months, while my attention has been on news. Now, thankfully, I have this wonderful, massive pile of episodes to drive through. It’s great for distracting me from stuff I don’t want to think about, as well as giving me all the usual awesome things this show gives me. It’s a nice, big, warm blanket I can hide under.

Thanks.