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Exciting Trends

I’ve largely, though not entirely, dropped out of touch with the world of RPG design in the past several years. As the hobby continues to shrink, we’ve seen a lot of consolidation into familiar titles—D&D and White Wolf’s formula—even on specialized game shops, which grow fewer every year, and less shelf space for even the flagship lines outside conventions. Having found a regular group, my incentive to attend the local gamer cons vanished; bad management and shrinking offerings outside the RPGA circuit (Yecch!) meant I went to those cons only because I had no better outlet. So I lost touch with developing trends. It was easy to think, in that isolation, that there was little if anything new under the sun; though I wasn’t prepared to state categorically that there couldn’t be, the possibility passed through my mind more than once.

Happily, that suspicion was incorrect. Small press indie games can never vanish entirely; there will always be innovators driven by love of their art. With a little encouragement from my fellow system geek Dave, I’ve been looking into new titles lately. The hunt for novelty takes one farther afield than it used to, but there is still game to be found if you’re willing to look. Pun regretted.

The new trend is surprisingly uniform, given that it’s coming from so many sources. (Yes, they cross-pollinate. A lot. But they’re also coming from the contrarians and egotists who comprise the indie game press, so uniformity of anything is a surprise.) I thought the new ideas I found in FATE started with FATE, which generated all the press, but no: FATE is merely the most celebrated case employing devices increasingly common in new titles. They can be condensed into three principles:

1.Power over the plot represented by a small pool of points (fate chips, hero chips, plot points). A player can take narrative control by paying a point to the GM. Typically, a player can earn points by suffering the GM’s whim, and players may even pass points to one another if they’re the kind of group that delights in screwing one another over—they pay the point to the screwed PC’s player, who then has extra points to respond in kind.
2.Increasing abstraction of the narrative into a negotiation over what could or should happen: negotiation over what’s at stake with a given skill check, negotiation of outcome when the loser of an extended competition decides to cut his losses, negotiation of what the campaign is to be like and what kinds of characters are to be allowed. A lot of this comes from Burning Wheel, which takes it as the driving principle, but lots of indie games have been quick to pick up the perspective. One of the most interesting features of this trend is the appearance of intrusive questions into PC design: one player asks another a question like “Why did your character dump mine six years ago?” and the other player has to run with the idea, rather than treating each PC as a sacrosanct preserve for its respective player.
3.A return of random elements and a lot more reliance on creating stories on the fly. But where old-school randomness involved endless tables of minutiae and character powers, the new interest in randomness emphasized the injection of a few big plot items. Perhaps story elements are produced from three or four draws from a specialized deck, and the GM has to weave these together—and quickly, while the players fill out their stats. Maybe, as in Dirty Secrets, the murder plot is generated at random, the goal not being to figure it out so much as to encounter and expose it, in noir gumshoe tradition. Perhaps, as in Spirit of the Century, players are encouraged to begin play without knowing all their skills and aspects, choosing them (up to a limit) as the need arises.

All these amount to a strong dispersal of narrative power, mostly from GM to players, but also between players and even from players back to random devices, a direction contrary to the past twenty years in RPGs. The nature of the story isn’t being challenged, but the method of delivering it is, in a big way. Old gamers might be uncomfortable with the novelty; the notion that the GM is in charge and it’s his job to deliver a setting for the players works well, and many of the implications of the new ideas can be taken too far, even laughably far. The guys who put out the Actual People, Actual Play podcast agreed in one post-game analysis, for example, that too much abstraction and negotiation hurt a sense of immersion, that there was too much talk about the game and not enough playing of the game. On the other hand, these movements also reflect the needs and capabilities of old gamers: there’s a growing sense that we’ve been there and done that, and seek to spice the mixture by forcing everyone back on their toes, using each player’s built-up experience to aid the telling of a story rather than packing it away, unused, until he gets back behind the GM screen. At a minimum, the new devices are intriguing and should be tried, even at the risk of a few implosions of excessive self-awareness and lost immersion.

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