Social Procedures in Practice: A report

Not long ago I wrote up a codified version of my social procedures. In addition to posting them to this blog, I shared them with my players. I have run two sessions since then, during which I have taken care to call out these procedures as I use them and make clear how I am interpreting them in play. This is meant both to help my players better understand the game, and to enforce upon myself a kind of rigour in testing them out in this more defined form.

In the latest session, one PC managed to activate every single social mechanic. So here's how that went:

GM Anxiety and the West Marches

It should be no secret to anyone who's been following what I do lately that I think of GMing as craft. What I mean by that is enough for its own blog post (and also a podcast).

A lot of the talk about the social dynamics of GMing focus on power imbalances, and the outsized influence and control a GM can exert. I agree to an extent, but for reasons that also lie outside the scope of this post, I believe that this imbalance is not as necessarily or intrinsically problematic as some would contend. I also think it can make for a very rich game, and affords qualities of play that cannot be readily achieved through more balanced distributions of narrative control. Again, though, that's another post.

There is also a flipside to the social power arguments that I find absent, or at least underexplored, which is the vulnerability and social pressure attached to GMing. Admittedly, more balanced power dynamics offset this. However, proceeding from the assumption that assymmetry can be desirable, I find a more robust engagement with the subject lacking. These matter have become pronounced of late in my experiences running my home game, which has recently transitioned to a West Marches-style format. In this post I'm going to identify what I consider some significant blind spots in the ways we tend to talk about running this kind of game, especially when it comes to its experiential dimensions. Moving forward, I'll be devoting some thought to how I've been managing these issues in my campaign of late.

Social Procedures

I've been running OSE a bunch lately and decided it might be helpful for my players if there's a codified version of the way I run social encounters for them to consult.* Since I wrote them up anyway, I thought I'd share them here. Link immediately below, brief design notes after the jump.

Click here to see the document!

Text to Table episode 2: Nate Lumpkin -- Statting Gods and Dating Goblins

The second episode of my podcast is online! Go listen to it!

Click the picture to listen to it!

My guest for this episode is Nate Lumpkin, from Swamp of Monsters. His blog has been one of my favourites since the heyday of G+ and I'm super excited whenever a new post shows up in my feed. Nate is talented writer with a good mind for D&D, and it was really fun to get to speak to him about his campaign.

I faced a number of technical issues putting this one together, a couple of which were my fault but most of which really lie with the platform, Anchor. These are reflected in the nearly month-long gap between episodes, and in the audio quality of the interview itself. It's alright if you want to get something out quick and don't care to edit, but neither of those things describe me and I found it to be really hostile to work with. I haven't made any firm decisions yet but am exploring alternative hosting services, cause damn. 

Anyway, enjoy the conversation. I liked having it and I think there's some really interesting material in there.

Background Music in Online Games: The Sequel

A lot us are doing a lot more online gaming these days. For the last year, I've been living an hour's drive my from my nearest friend, and two or more hours from the vast majority of people I've traditionally gamed with in person. So I've been online for a while now. This isn't my first time moving my gaming online - it also happened the year I was living in France for the 2014-15 school year - and of course there's been the occasional online game on G+ (R.I.P.) and Discord. All this to say I have quite a bit of experience with these things.

Through all that experience, one problem that remains fucking intractable is that of piping in background music. This has never been especially hard to do in person; I open up my laptop and pull up a song or video. But for some reason, while simulating every other aspect of a TTRPG session is getting increasingly easy and convenient, music remains a singular challenge. I more or less solved the issue in 2015. The advice in that post still works, more or less. I checked yesterday, and while it's a bit dated and some links might need updating, if you squint a little the instructions will do now what they did then.

So why am I writing this post? Well, the computational landscape has changed significantly since 2015. I no longer use Skype, because I find it intolerable, and Hangouts has been slowly torn to pieces and will finally be laid to rest in June. There are other options for online gaming, and they are very good options, but music remains a problem. In this post I'm going to break down what it takes to get music right in an online gaming session, and I'm going to provide an overview of every conferencing tool of which I am aware. As you'll see, while many of these are okay, or at least workable, most solutions available now are unnecessarily kludgy, awkward to coordinate with players, and/or rely on bad or dying software. The other point of this post is to lay out the problem clearly, in the hopes that someone equiped with that information might have a better solution.

New podcast: Text to Table

I've started a podcast!

You can listen to the first episode here!

What's it about?

Text to Table is a series of interviews about RPGs, focusing on GMing as craft. It understands the act of taking RPG texts and bringing them to life in games as a task that is complex, skillful, expressive, and challenging. I speak with GMs about their experiences with various RPG products and topics, in order to get a better sense of how they bridge that seemingly endless gap between the thing on the page (or in your head) and the fantastical chaos of play.

This first episode features David Wilkie / Anxiety Wizard as we talk about Troika, its colourful archetypes, and the wide-open campaign affordances of its rules and setting.

I hope you enjoy. Feel free to shoot me any questions/comments/feedback here or by email at alexichalk@gmail.com. If you enjoy, please share, as I'm not on RPG twitter and therefore somewhat limited in my ability to reach listeners. Also please let me know if there's a topic you'd like to see addressed, or if you have insights you might be interested in sharing on the show yourself!

Graded success for roll-under d20

This is a sort of half-baked add-on inspired by Call of Cthulhu 7e's graded difficulty system for roll-under d100 resolution. It assumes 3d6-based ability generation a la BX, and uses the same modifier scale, albeit towards a different end.