Dracula Dossier 6: Players Gonna Play

I ran The Dracula Dossier on a “weekly” basis for around 11 months. With the various disruptions which seem to plague adult life, that meant a bit over 30 sessions. At the end of the game we had around 100 named GM characters, though I suppose only around a third of those were recurring. Because of the way the game played out, we had a half-dozen factions to keep track of: Dracula’s team, Edom, MI5 and its appendix, The British Office of Political Intelligence, a loose affiliation of independent ancient vampires, and a London-based crime syndicate. The Metropolitan Police also periodically dipped into the players’ awareness, but they turned out to be mostly Hidden Goblins. You may notice that’s four more factions than the game usually calls for. I began the game as I always try to, with a “Session Zero” to establish just what the heck was going to go on in the game, and we may as well begin there too.

Roleplaying games all have a minimum overhead where the players each need to sit down with a rulebook and create their character. The new-fangled “playbook” style character generation has reduced this overhead to a negligible tick-box exercise, but stretching back into the mists of time there was always a session where dice and rulebooks were passed around as players decided whether they’d rolled well enough to play a Ranger, or had to settle for being a Fighter, and whether they’d min/max for a particular kind of adventure competence. I think the least-successful game for this is Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, where everything is completely random: you just get who you get inside the game world, and then the play-group and the GM has to sit back and figure out how to make lemonade from whatever inappropriate garbage was thrown up. When you then look at the way the scenarios are designed, where detailed investigation is usually required and a range of other competences are assumed, it feels like the game sets you up to fail. Plus, the whole time you’re pondering to yourself “why is my Dwarf Troll-slayer hanging out with this Human Rat-catcher?”. So about twenty years ago I started trying to give my games a fighting chance by using that overhead time to influence the group to get a set of characters that might actually be suitable for the game we’re playing. As a player, I’ve pitched this idea repeatedly to various GMs over the years and I’ve been universally rebuffed as it seems to tread on a fundamental axiom of roleplaying games, because if you’re doing this right, it means the players can’t have true creative freedom, they have to play something that suits the table.

My first taste of success was a Victorian-era Buffy game I ran in 2006. The group was recruited online, and while I knew some of the players, it was also my first experience of meeting others. Eden Studio’s Buffy system works around the explicit idea that there is one main character with a cast of supporting characters. The game divides labour up a bit, in that the main character is supposed to be the one anchoring the fighting, while the “white hats” engage in more general melodrama and provide support. That structural requirement means you need to have a conversation about who’s going to play that central character, and in turn that decision strongly suggests limitations on the other characters. If you’re playing a teenage girl as The Slayer, it’s far easier to have a group of teenagers than for her to be the only character under 85, with the rest living in a care home and obsessed with playing Bridge with no interest in the supernatural. Even if you did make some oddball decision like that, the centrality of that Slayer character inherently creates a group identity and purpose. I wanted to enhance that collectivity, so I made a rule that each character had to have two (2) bonds with other characters that were clear, ongoing, and strong. We’re talking: best friends, lovers, partners in a law-firm – the two people you will see all the time just in the course of living life. I didn’t forbid triangles, but I had 6 players and so the issue didn’t come up. In that game, Nick C played the central hero figure, a Revenant. The rest of the characters formed around two loose groups, a Roma family, and the Gentry. The strongest cross-group connection was that Hamish and Liz played star-crossed lovers, but the game’s anchor was the matriarch of the clan played by Jason, who ended up something of a node point. Once you have these specific personal connections, it becomes incredibly easy to draw the whole group into the stories of individual characters. Make life a bit difficult for Nasia’s spinster, and that brings in her brother Hamish, which tugs on Liz’s thief, which pulls on Jason’s matriarch, and so forth.

Most subsequent experiences I’ve had trying this have run into a couple of central difficulties. The first is that sometimes people propose characters who just aren’t really that compatible with the rest of the ideas circulating at the table, and the need to closely tie them in to at least two of those characters sometimes means they just can’t play the character they came to the game with. How much of a problem this is can also depend on how strongly a player will commit to finding a strong connection, which is itself a serious problem. Many players struggle to devise connections between their characters, and then immediately neglect any spurious connection they do find. While I’m happy to take the blame for offering repeatedly poor explanations over the decades, I think there’s something more fundamental in play here, which is that players feel like making connections robs them of agency somehow, and I draw on the worst experience I’ve ever had as a player for this insight. I was invited to play in an epic SF game about exploring a vast alien artefact, and I pitched a character who was a black-market antiquities trader unofficially working for a mega-corporation. Another player then pitched a character as a small-time commodities trader, and I suggested that maybe my character had done theirs some favours in the past to help them get their start. The door on that idea was slammed pretty damned hard, the logic being that if we didn’t have a relationship at the start we could develop one during play, which would be “more fun”. It’s like pretending you’re not in a horror story for the first couple of sessions of Call of Cthulhu – what a waste of time. The idea you could play a character beholden in some way to another player character just seems to create a divide-by-zero error for most players. The third problem is that even with the best intentions, players will often gravitate to easy relationships that are basically inert, whereas the best-designed relationships have implicit future activity. The best relationships tie into the wider and ongoing needs of the characters as individuals. Scion of minor nobility having an affair with a Roma? That’s the right stuff: the noble family can’t approve because marriage is about land, and on her side would mean giving up a way of life entirely. You’d have to be the dullest person in the world not to see the rife dramatic possibilities.

As great as this stuff is for a GM, I think of these kinds of strategies as “player problems”. If your PC does, or doesn’t, have relationships with the others is something you as the player need to work around to get yourself engaged in the game. Whether you create story hooks or possibilities, or are happy to trail along the GM’s idea of a story is a decision you make. But in a game like Night’s Black Agents there are crucial early decisions which are more distinctly a GM-problems. You need to make two fairly major decisions early on – what kind of vampires, and what mode of storytelling? In Dracula Dossier, the first fades a bit in importance, but the second remains. The game presents four main modes that can modify the base game: Dust, Mirror, Stakes, and Burn. Picking between these is a way for the players to signal to the GM just how deep they want to go. That decision should set a baseline for the expected level of betrayal in the game. I think a Stakes game could be pretty much a white-hat/black-hat kind of game, while Mirror could end up so murky any attempt to define good or evil could become impossible.

Whatever frameworks you put in place, the overarching goal of the Session Zero is to establish some common understanding of the game. In several iterations of FATE, that is expressed as explicitly nominating “themes” which can then inform subsequent decisions, in some games, like Ironsworn, that kind of ideological framework is emergent. I am not a fan of trying to create with a group within big ideas like that. I think focusing on specific practical questions is more powerful and more useful. Blades in the Dark presents what I think is probably the best framework for a Session Zero that I’ve encountered, because it forces the play group to pick a specific game identity, then nominate specific and immediately-impactful relationships with the world outside the player character group. I like the Forge-era idea of “kickers”, things which in media res at the start of the game, providing some kind of initial story direction. All in all, a Session Zero presents a powerful opportunity to get a game off to a fast start and provide frameworks and tools that will drive events for the whole course of the game.

I arrived at Session Zero with few preconceptions, and did my best to listen to the players’ thoughts punctuated by questions as required, and afterwards I sent this all-too-brief summary:

Summarising the key things we decided:

• You work for the British Office of Political Intelligence, formed in response to the Communist and Anarchist moral panics of the early 20th century.
• Your organisation has recently been folded into MI5; though it remains intact for the moment, BOPI’s days are clearly numbered and dispersal into the wider organisation is just a matter of time
• You have each had some personal knowledge of Vampires, and this is known to the man who recruited you, Sir Adam.
• You are unclear on whether MI5 has knowledge of Vampires, and if so, whether they’ve got a position on them. I expect uncovering that will be a sizeable plot strand at the beginning of the game.

After flirting with a Mirror-style game, I read the consensus as starting off as a “Dust” type game, and given you’re in an organisation maybe even tending a bit towards “Stakes”. I got the sense that you preferred a lower level of violence than your classic Bourne or Bond outings. I got the sense that somewhere near or a bit less than Burn Notice might work – there will be small isolated fighting, but not city-sprawling mass-damage battles. Michael Bay will not be the director of this movie. At least, not at the start.

Almost immediately though, the game began to run into problems pushing against some things which had seemed obvious to me. For example, in the second session the agents successfully staged a non-lethal attack on a warehouse suspected of storing Conspiracy Assets ™, and once the various guards were bound and unconscious, one character calmly executed every one of them while the others were off gathering information. Not exactly the sort of thing Michael Weston would do, but I definitely understood the logic. What a reasonably competent GM would have done was stopped the game right there and said something like “hey, in the Session Zero we discussed that the game wouldn’t be very violent, so this isn’t in keeping with the aesthetic we discussed”. It’s not a moral judgment, it’s reference back to a kind of contract for the game. Maybe they would have carried on, maybe not – but it would have been explicit as a decision made at a player level. I was instead caught flat footed, and one of the other characters took umbrage at this outrage, leading to many sessions of recrimination. I think there’s a saying about the best-laid plans, and I got wrong-footed in this way by every one of the players at least a couple of times over the next few sessions, though no others so extremely. The view I took was that the players did ultimately need to have complete agency to play as they needed to, but it was also clear that the game was dysfunctional. I was finding it quite stressful to run, a couple of players were pretty obviously disengaged, and there was not much progress however I looked at it.

These unexpected events all derived from a disparate understanding of what “reality” might be, and that was a problem that persisted right up to the last session of the game. Some examples – after being observed by surveillance footage, a couple of characters decided not to bother destroying the computers they found in the command post because it was inconceivable to them that the images wouldn’t already be on a server farm in Moscow. Another character consciously chose not to use any form of cover identity when attending a banquet where they were expecting to meet agents of the organisation they didn’t yet call Edom. Collectively, they decided there was no point doing even basic checks on a couple of enemy agents because they considered it impossible that the enemy agency would be sloppy enough to make that activity even potentially useful. After a few months of this, I felt compelled to have a Session Zero Point One to recalibrate, where one player exasperatedly exclaimed the following truth:

We’re not actually spies, we don’t know how to do this shit.

They were struggling to navigate the field of story possibilities, just as I was struggling to demystify and reinterpret the hints and implications built into the individual Dossier entries. What I’d been perceiving as a freedom for them to playfully explore a complex world was instead merely a bewildering maze where all possibilities looked like a trap. I asked them directly whether they wanted a sandbox or a railway, and while there was some hedging, one player in particular just honestly and plainly said: tell us where the story is, and we’ll do that. In other words, as I painstakingly explained way back in Part 2, the protagonist in a Roleplaying Game is being negated and defeated by PCs who don’t want that story to happen.

Failing in this way was a super-important objective for me, because for the longest time I’ve been banging on in every forum that’ll let me carry my soap-box, that we should be playing like protagonists. I have heard nothing but complaints for decades about railroading games, where player choice is not even illusory, they’re just expected to trudge through a series of events that make loose sense at best. Even I balk at writing yet more words on the topic, and yet given free reign, I totally failed at presiding over an alternative. To an extent, this may be a failure in my part in even understanding what the genre constraints are for a game based around espionage, which is what led me to think in some detail about what Bond actually wants from life in Part 3. Bond doesn’t want anything, he’s a tool being used by M to execute (hahaha) government policy. Yet, the cause of the failure is so obvious in hindsight, and it’s not a failure of my players to be good players. In a Heroic Fantasy ™, there are objectives such as “become lord of a castle”, but what kind of player-facing goal could there be in a spy thriller? “Convert all communist lands to capitalist dystopias”? The frame for all of the espionage fictions I showcased in Part 3 is exactly the negation by the “hero” of a villain’s plans, and the action and pacing of that engagement is driven strongly by that villain. If the players are going to become invested in defeating Dracula, they’d better know he exists and not want whatever he wants. Then, you can begin properly.

Once I let go of the idea of an “Improvisational” campaign, and reverted to the kind of story design that’s everywhere in our hobby for the past 40 years, I think the game went a lot better for everyone. I mapped out everything, and roughly plotted a sequence of events to push them to a conclusion. Looking at how the game had been unfolding so far in light of that second catch-up, I realised that in my summary at the original Session Zero, I’d kind of missed the point of the game: you’re playing Burned Spies versus Vampires. Killing Vampires has got to be a core element in that equation, and so I dialled up Vampiric encounters as high as I could, and that worked great. Taking full control over the story gave me a much better framework to respond to agent actions that I’d previously found a bit baffling. Probably the most satisfying example of that was that early in the game one agent had wanted to write a computer programme to mine NHS data to identify Vampires, something I wasn’t at all sure how to make interesting – a long kill-list of Vampires would generate leads for them to follow, but I felt like there were already plenty of leads left unfollowed so that didn’t seem too fruitful. Once I was scripting the game, I realised it provided a vector for information that Dracula’s minions were multiplying rapidly in London. I literally gave her a graph of estimated vampire numbers versus London population (complete with error bars) to illustrate that a kill-list would be like playing Whack-A-Mole.

In fact, they only actually had one straight-up fight with a serious Vampire in the entire campaign; their first one. Using some of the action-responses from the Conspyramid, I had one of the player characters assigned to a suicide mission to kill one of Dracula’s factors in London. The agents took the mission pretty seriously, procuring serious military equipment for the task, then went in ready to deal death. In the first round I neutralised one agent using mesmeric powers, then casually dropped 10 Aberrance on the next roll to physically hurt the other which just by itself put some fear into the group. The two agents who went in did come out, but between them had spent something like 30 points across their ability pools to manage it and had burned both some assets and some gear to do it. After that, they decided that the only way to get a vampire was if it didn’t even know you were coming until its head was already off.

One area where I think I did well right from the outset was in providing useful summaries to the group of what they knew and what was going on. For each agent and organisation I had a little organisation chart, complete with their status and known information, such as this one of one agent’s personal network:

This is a snapshot of the various clues and loose ends in play at the same time, where per their request I’d also noted a potential avenue of investigation wherever I thought of one.

After a very rocky start, the game wound up with the agents performing a HALO drop on the HMS Prosperine, where Count Dracula had been held by Edom since 1977 as a prisoner used to create the Seward Serum that enabled their super-soldier programme. Far more efficient than having actual Vampires on the payroll, for sure. After some skulking and skirmishing, the game came to an end with them staking a bound and sedated Dracula in his coffin then tossing in a phospherous grenade for good measure. The poor guy never even got a line of dialogue! His lieutenants, led by his Brides, had traced him to England, but the trail went cold after Edom’s house-cleaning in 1977 – the problem of the mole solved. In the past few years they’d decided to simply use numbers to overwhelm the British state, creating Vampire Assigns with abandon; this in turn was feeding power to Dracula, making it harder for Edom to control. Desperate, they were scouring Europe for a replacement for their milking shed, but hadn’t counted on betrayal from within – the agents’ boss, Sir Adam. Seeing instability, he recruited some mavericks to prevent Edom from finding their replacement, and when the time was right, they took out Edom’s central command station and their biggest asset.

My habit as a GM has been to run short-ish games of 6-10 sessions, so undertaking a year-long endeavour like this was a big stretch from my comfort zone, and required a lot of skills I hadn’t really cultivated. In a short game, pushing hard to a resolution, loose ends don’t tend to matter, and if you don’t know the answer to a problem you just try and wrap up the main sequence before anyone notices. You don’t need to worry about significant development or improvement in the characters, and the number of possible places or characters to encounter is finite. A sudden and brutal finale is also something you can always have on the cards, because that’s satisfying in simple stories even if it’s incomplete. Whereas massacring my team of agents when they went to the Black Forest around session 20 to prevent Edom getting hold of an ancient vampire would have felt inconclusive and made everything leading up to it feel a bit pointless. Similarly, if a GMC is going to turn up for one session you don’t really need to be too worried about the detail, whereas if they’re going to be encountered at regular intervals for a year, you need to get things like their presentation and voice right again and again. Events can be persistent, so you need to track them carefully. One of the first people they encountered in the game was a former SIS agent, Willmarsh, who dropped out of the game after 3 or 4 sessions, but 20-odd sessions later when they realised why, they went and found him to get what they needed.

Running this long has also given me reservations now about running Gumshoe over this time-frame. The number of moving parts in the system requires a level of player buy-in that needs to be clear to the players from the outset. The need to manage resources is particularly vexing, and in our experience of the game, didn’t really add much value. I think if you’re in Fear Itself, angsting over your finite resources as the horror closes in is a great thematic match, but that’s not really the basic dynamic in play in spy fictions, especially action-oriented fictions. The question my players asked repeatedly throughout the game was whether we wouldn’t be better ditching Gumshoe in favour of BRP (either Delta Green or original Cthulhu) or even doing a quick hack of Blades in the Dark. Aside from any thoughts on Gumshoe, I am no fan of Basic Roleplay. The percentile system is set up so that its “difficulty” system is very chunky. Every iteration seems to have an even longer and more bizarre set of skills than the last, and it abstracts some things in a way I’ve never been able to make intuitive – Credit, for example. Most importantly, BRP is embedded in a design idea where failure is expected and normal. I don’t think I’ve played this game yet where there wasn’t some road-block where a crucial skill roll just didn’t come off, and there’s little you can do about it. In the latest editions they’ve improved matters a bit with Luck and Pushing, but I think it’s just a bad game. This is what the comments section is for people! As for Apocalypse World or Blades in the Dark – these games are set up around complicating decisions, rather than whether you succeed or fail. Apocalypse World is set up to be reactive and for the world to be a bit fluid, but the essence of investigation games is uncovering certainty. Neither game seems well suited to an idea of techno-oriented storytelling where specific knowledge is prized, over general story actions or motifs. I am a little tempted to run one of my KapCon games using Berlin 1987 and test how they go though. I would say you could run a vampire-spy game with these systems, but a game about painstakingly retrieving the dark facts of the past is just orthogonal to their strengths. As challenging as Gumshoe was for this game, I think it’s probably the right tool for the job.

Running Dracula Dossier has been the most difficult experience I’ve had as GM. There’s almost nothing about the way I did this game I’d do again the same way, starting with where it first went a bit awry in Session Zero. I would probably push back on some of the character concepts, because while they were intriguing in and of themselves, potentially they could have been more spy-like. The relationship web was insubstantial and had no impact on play. I would get a firmer commitment to one or other specific mode. The activities required of the players are complex and multi-faceted in this game, so I’d adopt the idea of telling them what investigative avenues exist – it’s a lot more work though. Beyond that, I would pick one of the capstones from the outset and then spend the time to make sure the individual elements all aligned. But would I actually run this game again? I love the idea of this game just as much as I did when signing up to the Kickstarter. Spies versus Vampires? Hell yes!

Dracula Dossier 5: The Dracula Identity

For anyone somehow joining in Part 5 without having at least hear the elevator-pitch for the game, Dracula Dossier recasts the novel Dracula as an after-action-report from a late-Victorian attempt to recruit the Count as a state agent and its disastrous consequences. Appreciating that all of this is already long and recondite, I have spent some time previously discussing this in detail, and the rest of the post is going to assume you can either read that post or can infer enough context without much help.

Like most people who play Roleplaying Games after finishing schooling, I am not time-rich. I’ve posted elsewhere about how GMs rely on pre-written material, and how that material is often not really that fit for purpose. The gist of those posts is that what many of us do is build a library of unsuitable material that we can raid as we need for components. Early in my D&D-running career, that meant lifting locations, later in my career it meant lifting NPC stat blocks, as even basic stating of high-level NPCs had gotten completely out of hand by the end of 3.5. In The Dracula Dossier, the clever folks over at Pelgrane Press cut out the middle-man in that sequence and just provide a hefty tome of the bits you might need for your game. There are locations, people, certain possible events, some guidance on a potential arrangement of those pieces, and options within all of that for each element as an asset of Dracula, an asset of the spy agency tasked with managing him, or as a red herring of sorts. Not content with providing information for just the present day, the slab of paper covers three main time periods – the Victorian Era, post-war, and the present day. Well worth buying as an aide to all that is the Hawkins Papers, which provides in-game hand-outs for the characters. I really can’t fault the book at all, except that having read it cover-to-cover a few times, and run the game for a year, I’m really not too sure about the significance of a lot of the hints and innuendos dropped in the text, and the way it explains the basic story mechanics doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me either.

Dracula Dossier is very explicitly a tool-set, and it never really purports to be a “scenario” in the way we’re probably used to thinking about it. The way it explains this:

With four separate plot elements (the Conspyramid, Dracula’s Vampyramid, Edom’s pyramid, and the Legacy story beats) potentially responding as the players move forward in search of Dracula, every level of the campaign can be as narratively rich, as murderously Gothic, and as thrillingly suspenseful as you like. Don’t overplan — the goal of the campaign is collaborative, improvised play. But it never hurts to have some idea of what might happen next, even if you’re letting the players decide where it happens, and to whom.

Dracula Dossier, p 25

This strongly suggests that as much as this is a tool-shed for the GM, it’s also something that should be driven by the players. They may not ever adopt an “author” stance the way “storygames” do, but the implication here is that the players are navigating these four modes by deciding where to look next. This summary really foregrounds that players “move [the story] forward”. Very explicitly, different play groups through the Dossier will have quite different experiences, and as this text suggests, that doesn’t mean different routes through the same maze, but that fundamental parameters might be different depending on what’s playing well with the table. Does Dracula work for Edom, or Edom for Dracula? This text, this idea of a toolset, really posits that not only does nobody know this, but that it’s not even desirable for you to understand this basic axiom of the game-world at the outset. When I was reading the game materials, this created a pervasive fog over the text where it was hard for me to guess what I might use each part for, and it also made it a little tough for me to immediately bring to mind suitable elements from the piles of building blocks for any given circumstance.

There are a couple of particularly knotty issues that need a design decision from the GM at some point or other, especially when delving into the detailed history of Edom. The cleanest to describe is the hints and allusions dropped throughout the text of a mole-hunt within Edom in the late 1970s. The various entries make reference to this as a watershed moment in the game, but because the intent is to provide the basis for improvisational play, they never provide a compelling option for who the mole is or what they want, or how they were discovered, or who they worked for. The text summarises the concept this way:

What had happened? Did Edom find the mole? Was that Dracula’s only mole? Was the whole operation an excuse to awaken Dracula as an anti-Communist asset, or part of a play by Dracula’s minion in MI6 to redirect suspicion? Did Dracula and MI6 do another deal? Did the CIA deal itself into the game? A midlevel Edom analyst using the workname “Cushing” studied the problem as best he could. He named his 1940 SOE counterpart “Van Sloan,” two cinematic Van Helsings who had hunted Dracula in two generations. “Cushing” added his annotations, but few answers, to the Dracula Dossier. Then he put it back in the files. And he set a trigger for someone else to find.

Dossier, p. 11

This text is evocative, but is it what a GM needs in order to make the idea of a mole meaningful? What are the consequences or significance of the different main options for the mole? If they were Dracula’s only mole, then what? It would mean something like Dracula’s hold over Edom was slight, from that time, meaning that Edom is more likely to be trustworthy? That puts a different probability on other interpretations of Edom-related entities within the game. In a conventional single-throughline game, the text would tell you “The Mole is X, and they worked for Y”, but here that usually-visible Goblin has been carefully obfuscated. Any number of these small decisions that the GM makes could be an isolated pebble rolling down a hill, or the first knock that causes a landslide and it’s not all that obvious which will be which. That’s a deliberate design decision, I think, so that the game can be improvisational, but it also means the game eschews giving clear and direct advice to the GM almost all of the time. Wanting to avoid telling the GM what will happen, it sometimes feels like it avoids even telling them what could happen, or why it might happen, or what it means if it does. What you end up with is a kind of semi-explanation, as if someone who’d been on their phone for most of the campaign were trying to explain it to you over a few beers. Some entries are useable, but some are almost like inspirational listicles, most are somewhere in between. I expect that this design idea will work well for GMs that are good at managing events as they unfold but bereft of inspiration.

Managing events is aided by the “Vampyramid” and “Edom’s Pyramid”, each of which depicts a series of actions that these adversaries will take in response to PC action. The “pyramid” comes from a sense of escalation at each step – from “scout the foe” at the base to “destruction” at the top. The presentation of these is as a series of branching responses – pick an entry point in the Vampyramid, which suggests two follow-up responses, which then rapidly reduce down to just the one peak-response of directly coming to kill the team. Built into each of these entries though, are unstated assumptions about the relationships between the different story elements, and why a particular response has been graphically linked to another is not always that clear to me. Furthermore, a lot of the responses happen entirely in the GM’s imaginary space. Morgue developed a very thorough discussion of the problems inherent in these kinds of GM instructions, including in his own views on a game of cat-and-mouse between humans and a vampire. Take for example “Quid Pro Quo” from the first line of Dracula’s offence:

Dracula calls a meet with a Duke of Edom (most likely Oakes (p. 52), Hound (p. 51), or Elvis (p. 50)) and demands that Edom provide him a full rundown on the Agents. Given the resources of GCHQ and its data-sharing policies with the NSA, this is a pretty complete data dump. If the Agents are quick about it, they may be able to track the Duke back from the meet, or see Dracula’s traces in the terror cell he slaughters as his return favor to Edom.

Dossier, p.18

Almost every word in this dense paragraph builds in implicit assumptions about the level of knowledge each party has of the others, and their relationships. In this text, Dracula is able to draw on Edom’s resources, which definitely implies some parameters around the Mole Hunt. It implies, but does not state, that the player characters might know who specific key leaders are in Edom, and be able to anticipate a meeting they might have with Dracula. It posits a situation where, yes, Dracula works for Edom. It also suggests that Dracula so hates or fears the agents at their very first encounter that it’s worth it to him to expend resources just to identify them. That suggests we only start using this response-tree pretty far into the game, though as they’re always saying on KARTAS, start your story as far in as you can. In my game, I spent probably the first half-dozen sessions a bit mystified about why Dracula would even notice my team, let alone bother to engage them in warfare of any kind. Every response in the Vampyramid just seemed like a non-sequitor inside the fiction, so Dracula seriously stagnated in my game. Maybe I’m just not steeped in enough running this kind of game, but the Edom responses seemed similarly unsatisfying. Take for example “Trail False Lead”

Edom plants a false lead in the Agent’s path , either by leaving evidence for the Agent to find or arranging an “accidental” meeting with an informant who claims to know something about vampires. The lead points away from any active Edom operations — good options include Argentina (p. 225), the Scholomance (p. 219) or the other ports in England (p. 172).The aim here is to get the Agents out of Edom’s way and tie up their resources.

Dossier, p. 21

As any veteran of running mysteries can tell you, though Players Are the Red Herring, so a “False Lead” is gilding the lily at best. This suggestion might not exactly be a classic blocking strategy, but what’s the purpose in derailing their direct engagement with Edom in this way? What are the story goals being accomplished here? Assuming that this is a success, and the GM creates some irrelevant and unconnected “False Lead” scenario in Argentina, it’s not clear to me why the next tier of response is a 180-degree turn, to providing real intelligence:

Edom either allows the Agent to find a tame informant (like the Informant, p. 95, or one of the Legacies) or deliberately lets the Agent get hold of information that reveals something of either Edom or the Conspiracy. The intel is genuine — but Edom can now predict the Agent’s next move, and so can either sic theAgent on a troublesome Conspiracy node or lay a trap. Good targets for this operation on the Conspiracy side include…

Dossier, p. 22

When the text here says “but Edom can now predict”, I suppose the intent is that since I as GM can rarely predict the behaviour of players, whatever they do is what Edom predicted in advance. The game text is essentially asking me to nullify any obfuscation or planning for secrecy that the team might do for their next operation – or does the text here just mean their next operation relating to a specific Edom plan? Does this in turn imply that the team has some idea, any idea at all, what Edom is doing? How could that result from an immediately prior “False Lead”? These little text suggestions are very evocative, but I think if you tried to engage with them literally you’d need to do some fairly careful mental gymnastics to align everything. The idea of escalation, and the kinds of specific actions that Dracula or Edom might take in response are fundamentally sound, but trying to fit them into this pyramid pattern doesn’t seem to me to really add any value, while probably obscuring the way a back-and-forth might work within the fiction. Once I stopped trying to think about these as connected events, and segued up and down the “tiers” without regard to escalation, I found them all a lot more useful. I think the authors would probably applaud this casual disregard of their proposed structures, and I also suspect that if you’ve steeped yourself in running enough of this game to build a toolkit like this one, you can use all those tools in the way they’re presented with great results. Me, I could have done with a bit more help on the why of these things, and luckily I can share a snippet of this with you:

Once the agents have struck against one of Dracula’s minions, he calls a meet with a Duke of Edom, or if he is on poor terms with Edom, a Renfield embedded in GCHQ. He demands they provide him a full rundown on the Agents. Given the resources of GCHQ and its data-sharing policies with the NSA, this is a pretty complete data dump. Dracula may want to use this information to try and recruit the agent (See “Turn His Coat For Him”) or isolate the agent from any remaining espionage contacts they have (See “Burn and Freeze”). If the Agents are already aware of any Edom agent, use that existing knowledge to give them a chance to either see the exchange or learn about it shortly afterwards. If they aren’t aware of any specific Edom assets, have one of their other existing network contacts within the spy establishment reach out to them to alert them to an information request of sensitive information. If they have no intelligence agency assets and don’t know about Edom, use a different response to their actions. Letting them know that Dracula is aware of them creates a sense of anticipation and will heighten their paranoia, paradoxically making any later betrayal (see “Turn Solace”) feel more satisfying. As Hitchcock said, suspense is knowing the bomb is present but not knowing when it will go off. Make sure they know Dracula is the bomb.

Dossier [Earth-2], p. 18

To be fair, the copy brought across from Over There is even more of a wrist-breaker, and capable of stopping a bullet in the right circumstances. Equally in the interests of fairness, game texts directly discussing how games could play at the table is vanishingly rare – almost everyone hides behind some kind of abstraction as if they’re conveying some kind of objective reality unpolluted by the subjectivity of their experiences play-testing the game. This is an area where I think the Powered by the Apocalypse revolution has a system-agnostic advantage over more traditional games. I’m sure there’s a lot of dreck in the overall pool, but then there’s also super-clear advice like this from Cartel:

Focus your story by keeping the characters’ lives on edge, pushing on their secrets and ad- justing the temperature to keep them on their toes. Don’t worry about creating an adventure or plot for them to work through. Push on their weak points, and the inherent chaos of the drug war will keep things exciting.

Cartel, p. 118

Could this advice be more detailed? You bet! Writing the game text which will solve all thinking for the GM at the table is probably not even a desirable goal, but the emphasis here on the actual play experience is enlivening. There’s a sense throughout the text that this game has actually been played, and the tips and tools presented are in response to the collated experience in service of a specific kind of experience at the table. That’s not my experience with the advice in Night’s Black Agents, Dungeons and Dragons, Mage: The Awakening – you get the idea.

At the start of the game, I found these snippets more puzzling than helpful because I had no real context to make any useful decisions because, in keeping with the “improvisational” nature of the game, I hadn’t plotted things out the way I “usually” do. This absence of context was the biggest hurdle. I had no real sense of the fundamental core interests driving the various adversaries: what are Dracula or Edom actively trying to do? Maybe this is a hang-up from my youth devouring Cold War thrillers, but at first glance, there’s no obvious purpose for any of the game’s default adversaries. Does Dracula want to be Prime Minister? Or as in Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, a more direct ruler? Why England? To an extent, his goals in the novel are pretty mundane, he just wants a better life in a new city. Simple, but you can see step-by-step how his activities move him toward that goal. I suppose you could argue that enemies like S.P.E.C.T.R.E. equally don’t have some overarching purpose, but on a novel-by-novel basis, Fleming establishes what this strand of the organisation is attempting, and that provides a meaningful framework for both Bond and his enemies to operate within. The text addresses this idea by providing “capstones” that you can use as a target point for your instance, complete with “Entry Vectors” that explain how the various elements can be purposed to support the capstone. This is what you might think of as the “plot” in a conventional roleplaying scenario or campaign.

The capstones vary in length, but they all describe themselves as coming into play in an explicit way when the agents have reached level 5, out of 6, of Dracula’s Vampyramid. They are presented as assistance for the GM in bringing a grand finish to the game. They all assume broad compliance with the big ideas in play in the rest of the materials, but it seems really unlikely to me that you could get that far into a game and find that all of the capstones are equally appropriate. When you read the text of each, they drop cues that would have been needed or could have left clues for the agents. This text from the first is typical:

The Conspiracy has gone all-in over the last two or three years, activating its tendrils in national imaging directorates, buying expensive private satellite time, and endowing graduate fellowships in Romania’s university archaeology and geology departments. Dracula has impaled the necessary sacrifices, and used his direst necromantic arts, to further direct the hunt for Zalmoxis. With all this data available, the Archaeologist has discovered the original location of the Kogaionon: the Ceahlau Massif, in the eastern Carpathians between Moldavia and Transylvania.

Dossier, p. 293

Dracula’s conspiracy going “all-in” feels like it may leave more to find than “[m]inor, foreshadowing type hints” (p.291). The concern the game designers express is that if they know about it, players might rush their agents to a premature death because they don’t have the understanding and resources to win. Maybe that’s a legitimate concern, but each of the capstones feels like you’ll need to lay substantial groundwork and then you’ll need to understand how each small step is leading toward this specific destination, even if that destination is initially not apparent to the players. Rolling back to my pretty randomly-selected Vampyramid response, if Dracula’s too busy searching for Zalmoxis to do any work for Edom, that puts a specific spin on him asking them for assistance in swatting this annoying group of burned agents. Rather than a mere digestif for the main action of the game, the capstones all feel like they should be used as a structuring principle for everything else that happens. My advice is to pick a capstone, then engineer each other element as it comes up to suit that particular destination.

Another set of organising principles that are strangely absent from this game are the various modes from the core rulebook: Burn, Dust, Mirror, and Stakes. There’s a side-bar that throws out some ideas, explaining that “[i]t’s just a matter of emphasizing the elements and themes that match, and downplaying or hurrying past the occasional infelicities.” (p. 27) With minimal follow-through in any of the detailed element write-ups, the design relies entirely upon the GM to have internalised and comprehensively understood all the detailed implications of the modes, and be able to adapt them on the fly. I would guess though, that the implications of Edom providing Dracula with complete dossiers on the agents would have a slightly different implication in each mode. In a game where they believe in Queen and Country (Stakes), this is a major betrayal, but in a Mirror Mode game where anything other than betrayal is a surprise it wouldn’t even ping on the players’ radar.

This elliptical storytelling places the onus for creating a story squarely where it would sit if this book didn’t even exist: at the table. The GM will need to form their own view on what constitutes their personal version of both espionage and Vampires. The Dracula Dossier can be used to create spy stories that run the full range from a Bond-esque romp around the continent to the tight circle of paranoia in closeted rooms in Smiley’s Circus. Similarly, Dracula or his proxies can be elegant seducers, integrated into the back rooms of posh clubs and sitting on the boards of hedge funds (like real monsters), or they could be semi-savage beasts trying to apply a dark-ages savagery to the problems of the modern state. Providing a suite of tools that adaptable is an incredible feat, but a hidden aspect of this adaptability is that it will provide the most benefit to the GMs who need it least. If your habit as a GM has been to run open sandboxes with infinite player freedom, the elements in this tome will save a vast effort in researching details “just in case”. If you are a GM used to, or expecting to, run a choose-your-own adventure guided by a quartet of adventure paths, I think you will fail.

Any set of tools is really only as useful as the person wielding them, and their understanding of the purposes suitable to those tools. When I pick up a simple pencil, I can produce structural sketches and perspectives that are passably useful but I couldn’t draw a decent rose if you threatened me with grievous harm. That puts me comfortably in the top half of engineers, but what I can produce is like a finger-painting next to some of my former colleagues who had actual talent as opposed to bloody-minded perseverance at trying to develop an essential skill. As a GM, I’m far from objective about my capabilities, but my sense is that I’m skilled enough to recognise a bad scenario when it’s presented to me, but not good enough that I can consistently produce anything of high quality myself. In “creativity” pursuits, as with most other things, you’re as good as your consistent minimum standard. What makes me consistently capable as regards structural sketching is that I have a great understanding of the meaning I’m trying to convey, and what makes me less good as a GM is that I often don’t really understand what’s being sought by the players or what the real significance of a plot point might be. So, like any poor workman, I’m a bit apt to blame the tools. Dracula Dossier is a vast tome, containing dozens of elements over multiple timelines, designed to support campaign play of a game which is itself modular and complex with several different customisable aspects. For all that I love them, some of the games that I’ve loved playing recently like Arcane Crimes Division and Cartel can give a lot more robust support to a game because they’re trying to do one thing very well in a way fully envisaged by their creators.

The way I’d look at a long list of complaints like this is more like a perspective on what you should be using these tools for, rather than a problem with the tools themselves. I don’t want to ruin my big finale in two posts’ time, but this is a game that rewards effort and engagement and won’t thrive in a low-key cruising mode. As I found with TORG, get all the way in, or don’t even bother. This isn’t exactly the advice the game itself gives you, but potentially unless you’re Ken Hite or Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, my suggestion is that this is a game system which is going to deliver palpable rewards for legwork spent in advance of the game. Running this game again, I’d probably just spend a couple of weekends grinding through the entirety of the listed elements drawing out that list of questions and variables and making decisions. I’d take every box in the action-response vectors and sketch what elements might come into play. I’d plot out the entirety of the twinned conspiracies. And then I’d do my damndest to hold all that loosely enough that when the agents begin to smash things, I’m seeing that spark action rather than crying over toys I won’t now get to play with.

The Dracula Dossier is really two separate books that have been conjoined. The majority of the text is an espionage almanac collating hundreds of potentially useful game elements and discussing how they could be used in any Vampire-Spy game. That part of the book is pretty much unimpeachable as a must-have resource if you’re going to run Night’s Black Agents. The second part is the “Dracula” bit, which I struggled to use or gain much benefit from. The capstone of my TORG write-ups was to “play the game you’re playing”, and despite the efforts I went to making that argument for TORG, I don’t think I ever got there for Dracula, which is the topic of Part 6.

Dracula Dossier 4: Night’s Black Agents

The basic architecture of Roleplaying Games is that you inhabit a specific fictional identity within a Shared Imaginary Space, using a game system to mediate the actions of your avatar. The design of this mechanism varies, but in Traditional ™ Roleplaying Games, the usual approach is to create a list of capabilities and assign some kind of points/scale to these capabilities. Then there’s some kind of randomizer affecting a comparison of capability v. difficulty. My first experience with this was the Wilderness Survival Guide for AD&D 1st Ed. In this book, they decided to bolt on a series of non-fighting skills to determine whether a character was proficient at “Animal Handling” – something that before proficiencies was pretty much a fictionalised negotiation between player and DM, also known as “DM Fiat” to the uncharitable and “storytelling” to the more sympathetic. The way this is expressed in WSG is that it’s a capability above and beyond the core capabilities of your character class, but the unintended consequence of having a specific skill and tests for a specific skill is that you create the possibility of fruitless failure. Scenarios started to say things like “on a successful Animal Handling check, some good thing happens and otherwise nothing happens”, whereas previously the game more likely described an in-fiction example of a successful course of action and it was up to the DM to mediate whether the attempt is close enough. In this new “proficiency” paradigm you can run into a brick wall if you don’t have the relevant skill, or equally if you do have it but fail the test. Almost everyone who played AD&D 1st had work-arounds: “sure, technically you don’t have Animal Handling, but you did grow up on a farm, and forests also have plants in them, so it’s reasonable you’d know how to sooth this angry bear”; basically running home to Mama Storytelling when trouble comes a knockin’. Certainly in my late teens I had a couple of players who delighted in trying to “in character” work through the steps to, say, discover gunpowder in my faux-Hellenic game world by incrementally leveraging “reasonable” inferences and actions. Shadowrun tried to mitigate the limitations of selecting only particular skills with their “skill web” which showed what kind of dice penalty you’d end up having to use “repair motorbikes” to “ride a horse” or whatever. I’m okay at ultimate frisbee, which might be useful if I tried field hockey, but is less useful for underwater hockey, so Shadowrun would shift my skill dice down each further increment until they run out. The skills described by a game inherently become a way of structuring and limiting the shape of the fiction being created at the table. There’s no “defuse nuclear bomb” proficiency in AD&D 1st Edition, because there are no nuclear weapons – it’s all a bit less cut-and-dried from there on down, but broadly speaking almost all real medieval skills are missing from WSG‘s proficiency list because the game isn’t about illuminating manuscripts (though, to be strictly fair, the list of proficiencies is much longer than you might guess). Form and function enter a design loop which instantly reveals adjustments to be made when the game actually gets played, and hence the Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide with a panoply of new proficiencies was instantly necessary. One way or another, that skill list either becomes a menu of story possibilities, or you’re starting down the route of “hacking” to make a game that will actually do what you need.

Many game designers of various stripes from 1974 to 2024 are perfectly happy to either ignore the potential, or to accept that sometimes someone will just not have the skill, or fail the roll, and bring the whole endeavour to a grinding halt. In Modern ™ Roleplaying Games, two main strategies emerge for avoiding this: in Apocalypse World [2010] skills are reframed as story events so that success or failure is a choice between two possible stories rather than a dead end in a story about success, and in Gumshoe [2006], which mandates that all information necessary for the story to progress is automatically provided to the players as long as they ask for it. The automatic provision of information provided that the character has a skill relevant to the information and the player remembers to use that skill feels like it should pretty much solve the problem of dead-ending a scenario. You can always progress if you choose to progress, and I suppose there’s a stray loose end there that if you’re not even capable of asking for the information you need, you do still deserve to fail.

The way Gumshoe executes this idea is sold as a very simple system where you have basically two kinds of skills – the ones that let you affect the game world, and the ones that let you understand the game world. Called “general” and “investigative” abilities, these could also be thought of as “limited use” and “perpetual” skills. You spend points from a general skill pool to modify a die-roll, aiming for a target number, but investigative abilities are always available. However, even in the earliest versions of the game, that simple distinction hides sub-categories and alternate uses for both. All the versions of the game I’ve read have the general skills “Health” and “Preparedness”, which actually work a bit differently because external factors mostly cause you to deplete Health, rather than you’re trying to use Health to accomplish a goal. In the Gumshoe SRD and Writer’s Guidelines they make the hair-splitting argument that the ability is still being used to achieve an outcome: don’t die. Preparedness is a form of retrospective continuity alteration, where the character turns out to have previously brought along just the thing they need now. These are conceptually and practically quite different from, say, Athletics, which is a completely straightforward “character interacts with world” die roll familiar from The Wilderness Survival Guide. Some versions of the game explicitly bolt on other categories, and some of those also have subtypes that aren’t apparent from looking at a character sheet. As Gumshoe has iterated, the game systems have tended to proliferate the number of skills, and to introduce more and more ways that a general skill could be used to investigate, and an investigative ability could be used to generate an effect in the diegesis. Later iterations, like Night’s Black Agents, also introduce what amount to tiers within a skill, so if you have more than 8 points allocated to a skill in Agents, you get a special ability. All in all, what’s touted as a simple D6+spend for its core mechanic is actually much more complex. Whether it’s more complex than AD&D 1.5, or Shadowrun is debatable, but I think there’s at least a case to make. I think in effect, there are 8 different categories of skill use:

• Skills where you spend a point from a pool to modify a die roll (Called “General Abilities”, like “Athletics”)
• Skills where you get some specific outcome from having a big enough pool (Also General Abilities, the “cherries” for having 8 points)
• Skills which you use up to affect the game world by creating resources or characters (Also General Abilities, like “Network”)
• Skills which you can expend to ret-con the fiction (Also a general ability, “Preparedness”)
• Two versions of skills that you activate to provide a bonus to another skill (Investigative Abilities, when you “spend” a point, or “Trust” to affect another character’s chances of success)
• Skills that you activate to get information about the game (Also Investigative, used for “free” when you are doing what the scenario needs and “spent” when doing something “extra” – maybe that should count as two versions of skills too.)
• Skills that are expended by the game world acting on the character (Also lumped in with “General Abilities”, like “Health”)

The proliferation of skills is itself a significant complicating factor even if playing the game neglecting all these different de facto skill categories. In Fear Itself, there are 14 general abilities, but in Night’s Black Agents there are 22; the number of investigative skills jumps from 23 to 40. This mirrors the greater complexity of a spy-thriller than a slasher-horror, but aside from anything else, also just makes the ergonomics of understanding your character’s capabilities substantially harder. Whatever situation you find yourself in during a session of Fear Itself, you have 23 different possible avenues to use for investigation, but 40 in Night’s Black Agents. Most of those options in Night’s Black Agents also might have functionality in non-investigative situations. I write a shopping list down if I need to get more than 5 items, so I’m a bit sceptical about the ability of the average player to internalise the full spectrum of their character’s skills when there are those many options. What I’ve found is that rather than the “fiction first” principles of Powered by the Apocalypse, players decide on an effect they desire and then reverse engineer an application of a skill they have to achieve that goal. I’ve been presented with some truly inspired applications of so-called investigative abilities to provide an advantage in the die rolling side of the game, and some absolutely fantastical interpretations of the limits of some investigative abilities when searching for information. I have also seen players sit in dumb silence scanning their list of skills and coming up blank even when the skill they need is sitting there in black-and-white.

The complexity is compounded in Agents by the use of very technocratic skill naming, uneven coverage for each of the abilities, and the somewhat arbitrary allocation between “General” and “Investigative”. If I got asked what “Human Terrain” is once, I got asked it a hundred times across the play-tests and convention runs. This lack of an easy basic understanding of what a skill covers makes it difficult to access the benefits of having the skill. It puts a much higher requirement on the player to internalise the design logic of the skill system, which is an optimistic proposition. As well as this lack of easily understood coverage, sometimes the hand-over between different parts of the game can create barriers even if you do understand the bit you’re trying to use. For example, “Digital Intrusion” gets you into a computer, but what skill do you use once there to understand the information? Why is “Sense Danger” a general ability requiring a die roll while all other abilities telling you something about the world are investigative abilities? The game system addresses these, and other esoteric questions like “why isn’t there a deception skill?” but my practical experience of running this game for new players is that the answers are a bit too abstract, and a bit too technical. You’re free to assume I’ve repeatedly explained them badly, based on my explanations so far. A skill list with no other information, arbitrarily divided up into different lists which are all represented the same way provides very little help for the new player. I think I’ve posted on this before, as a problem not only of design, but game ergonomics. For my convention games I developed a new character sheet based on my understanding of the game:

Unluckily, this sheet is a highly manual creation. Luckily, after Nightmare Town in 2018, the game became manageable at the table without constantly having to answer questions about the basic content of the skill list, or how different parts of the character’s abilities were activated. It still omits a huge swathe of the sophisticated synergetic uses of Investigative and General abilities, plus it radically simplifies combat, but you can at least run the game.

This level of effort in reading and understanding the game system gets you to the table, able to play the game in a basic way, but there’s another aspect of role-playing which quickly starts to become important in campaign play: Character Advancement. In Hamlet’s Hit Points, Robin Laws proposes a dichotomy of Iconic characters who don’t change, versus Dramatic characters who do; in his studies, he also partially maps this onto the idea that Iconic characters affect the world by asserting their identity, while Dramatic characters are changed by the world. Roleplaying is pretty much fixated on some version of the dramatic arc, where the characters are changed by their experiences in the fiction. This basic calculus is so fundamental to roleplaying since those early days that I can only think of a handful of games intended for multiple-session play without some version of this. Spirit of the Century is the only game I’ve ever run without an experience point or growth system of any kind. So, Night’s Black Agents is a roleplaying game, ipso facto, must have experience points. Characters must grow, and change, despite the originating fictions almost exclusively being about Iconic characters.

In AD&D 1st, experience points are pegged to the core activities of the game: murdering things and taking their stuff. There is a diminishing return for killing things though, because while the experience point rewards remain constant, the price to activate the next power upgrade escalates non-linearly. This dynamic prompts a spiral of scope and difficulty as a game wears on. Having climbed those rungs, returning to earlier challenges becomes a subjective as well as objective sign of progress. Killing Orcs used to be hard, but now it’s easy: progress. The reward, of getting better at killing things, also matches the fictional activity prompting the reward: also killing things. In most game though, “experience points” are completely decoupled from the fiction. They come from “milestones” or from certain dice outcomes, and can be spent on whatever the player wants, not anything related to the way they were earned. It is just so in Agents, where experience points are pegged to the completion of “Missions”. Being rewarded for killing, like being rewarded for completing missions, creates a particular paradigm for the fiction that you’re about to showcase in the game. A game of 1st Ed where there’s only intrigue is theoretically possible, but the characters would remain low level. A game of Agents where there are no missions really sounds like a game which has rejected the basic premise of spies taking action against vampires.

Unlike almost every other game on my shelf, Agents has a linear scale for experience expenditure. One experience point means one skill point, and all the skills are treated pretty much the same. Learning everything essential about a field of human knowledge? One point. Getting the potential for a one-pip add to a die roll? One point. The complication is that some skills are refreshed by rest, but some are only refreshed by experience points. Playing the game means juggling the relative importance of all of these different skill uses within a particular scenario, as well as understanding what your burn rate of those expendable skills is versus the reward for completing missions. It’s more than possible that through burning Network or Covers, you end up worse off in terms of your total capabilities (as basically measured by the number of skill pips across the sheet) after a mission than before.

In convention play, part of my role as “Director” is to help the players use their characters up. The cleanest, pithiest line I use is to “drive it like a stolen car”. Even then, however, every session I’ve run for those one-shots has had some characters with core skills remaining under utilised. The number of games here must be starting to get statistically significant: 5/6 runs of Nightmare Town, re-runs of No Choice, Pal, play-tests for Pleasures of the Flesh, the couple of rounds of play-testing and then convention runs for the Dionysian Court trilogy, plus Freeze | Thaw | Broil‘s playtests and convention runs must put my one-shot total at around 20? Could I have briefed them wrong every single time? It’s surely possible, but isn’t it more likely that the uncertainty around when to use a skill means early on people hoard them, and then by the climax they don’t need all the points? Over time, what I’ve noticed is that players regard those General Ability points not as a modifier on a die roll, but a limited number of “will succeed” opportunities. Spend 3 points of a General Ability and you’re “guaranteed” to hit that “typical” target number of 4, right? So don’t use an ability until you know it matters. In campaign play, that dynamic is dialled up a notch, because there’s no surety for the next time you’ll get enough of a break to refresh all the pools.

The basic idea of Gumshoe is repeated everywhere: this is a game about getting information easily so you know what to do. It is intentionally designed to treat information one way and everything else another way, as Laws explains:

GUMSHOE is a modular system, with a twist. Where you can maintain congruence with the existing rules and still emulate the source material, you should do so. However, emulation takes precedence over congruence. The key example here is the way that the game handles abilities completely differently, depending on their relationship to narrative structure. Investigative abilities work one way; general abilities use a completely [different] system.

GUMSHOE Writer’s Guide

That modularity has a cost, that I’ve outlined above. There are a lot of moving parts in this overtly-simple system, and the clear distinction being drawn in the early iterations of the game has been eroded. This complexity is a design decision, trying to emulate the complexity inherent in a Tom Clancy techno-thriller. Where I think this goes awry is in the explanation. I’ve pawed my way through all of the original Gumshoe iterations and all of them focus on pretty first-base explanations of the two varieties of ability, without providing much guidance on what’s going on at the level of systems-interaction. It’s explained this way:

The exact give-and-take surrounding the provision of clues will vary seamlessly based on the situation. … Directors will avoid making core clues available only with the use of obscure abilities. (For that matter, the character creation system as a whole will set up so that the group as a whole will have access to all, or nearly all, of these abilities.)

Night’s Black Agents

What’s “obscure”? This text implicitly acknowledges that some abilities are basically more useful than others, but doesn’t trouble itself to understand which ones. The answer is that the most useful skills, the ones that should be omnipresent, also define the core features of the characters. This is why I began this discussion with The Wilderness Survival Guide, where the proficiencies are very explicitly an add-on for the side-quests, oddball situations, and general non-core activities that might happen in a game about travelling around murdering things. The idea of having to have distinct, additional, skills alongside a set of core capabilities has morphed gradually into the idea that the only way to describe a character is via their skills. You can see this in the most perfectly machined version of D&D – the third:

First edition AD&D is a modular rules system; sub-systems operate independently of one another. No particular effort is made to make PCs and monsters conform to the same scale and list of capabilities. When Gary and company needed a new rule, they thought, “how do I make this work?”

Third edition D&D is an integrated design; all of the rules systems interrelate. When the designers came to each rules subset, they asked themselves, “How do I make this work in a way that’s congruent with the rest of the system?”

GUMSHOE Writer’s Guide

All those oddball subsystems in the first edition, and most of the core functionality of the different classes, gets restructured into a D20+modifier in 3rd Edition. Indeed, almost all games of all genres retain this basic idea that skills are central to the experience even when the core functionality comes from something else – for Spirit of the Century they just had to retain a long skill list complete with complicating stunts when the core thing that works about the game is Aspects. What started out as a solution to a particular problem in wilderness adventures has become the only solution. Potentially the real origin of the problem is Call of Cthulhu, which was the original “integrated” design, but given its explicitly modular design idea, there’s really no reason Agents had to follow this path. Why not have those core skills integral to play, potentially allowing some kind of “opt out” for players intent on rejecting the premise of the game by not having “Tradecraft” as a skill?

The purpose of a system is what it does, and running a year of Night’s Black Agents tells me that for the first decade that I ran this game I understood its most basic functionality. It isn’t a game, as I’d thought, about the murky business of trust and betrayal. It’s a game about stacking bonuses for thrilling action sequences. The game itself is reasonably up-front about this, claiming it

brings the GUMSHOE engine to the spy thriller genre, combining the propulsive paranoia of movies like Ronin and the Bourne Identity with supernatural horror…

Night’s Black Agents, back cover, my emphasis

It is not quite as up-front about this as a game like Feng Shui 2, which discusses any scene without fighting as “connective tissue”, rather than as “core” the way NBA does. The fun part of the game is, by design, not all that musty “who can you trust” malarky, it’s getting your stake into an unbeating heart. But then… if you wanted to run that game, would you pick an iteration of Gumshoe, or would you go for a D20 iteration where the tactical crunch and flexibility is both core and front-and-centre? Retaining the central idea that you shouldn’t put roadblocks in front of information acquisition doesn’t strictly require the rest of the package.

I have had a very solid experience with NBA at the one-shot level, where as both GM and designer I can manipulate every aspect of the game to suit my needs, from the character stats to the skills needed for the scenario, to everything. Using the character sheets I can guide certain decisions, and because I fairly reasonably know what an ideal spend is for each encounter I can assist the players in making good “choices”. In campaign mode though, I found every aspect of that pretty challenging, and I expect the frequent reminiscing about how much easier the game would have been using BRP suggests that the players were also not having the easiest time of it, which was a bit perplexing in that I have never found Call of Cthulhu to be an especially elegant or enjoyable system. I wrote about 10,000 words between in Parts 2 and 3 of this sequence to set up the context for why that might be the case.

In Dungeons and Dragons, there was a classic party structure lurking in the background of most adventure designs – two fighters, one cleric, one magic-user, and a thief. That basic combination of skills represented both coverage of the story demands, and also a fair amount of niche-protection, where there was always the specific moment where the thief would be needed for unlocking something, or a cleric would prevent certain death with a timely divine intervention. In his taxonomy, elaborated in Hamlet’s Hit Points and Beating the Story, and then implemented in game form in Hillfolk, Laws outlines two main fictional protagonist types:

• Iconic characters use their enduring character traits to restore order to a perturbation in the world.
• Dramatic characters vacillate between two behavioural poles as they are affected by a world they can’t change.

This is a very powerful construction for understanding how some fictions work, especially fictions where there is no overt character growth or change. I’ve used this framework a lot, from my thesis on Hammett’s Continental Op, to understanding why I loved The Dark Knight, but absolutely hated The Dark Knight Rises. The Dark Knight Rises opens by resetting Batman to a mere Bruce Wayne, but can’t imagine any kind of life that Bruce Wayne might lead. It spends most of the rest of the movie reacquainting Batman with his Iconic Identity ™, which is basically material we already had a whole movie about not that many movies ago. By treating to treat Batman as a Dramatic Hero, at the expense of key drives in his Iconic Identity, it is neither a great dramatic transformation, nor a powerful reiteration of an Iconic narrative.

This concept translates very well into those classic archetype-based roleplaying games, because what is a “class” but a statement of iconic qualities. In other words, another way of thinking about “niche protection” is that each of these archetypes is an “Iconic Identity”. This idea is so easily understood, and so compelling, that it remains a central design feature of most of the games which were released to replace D&D as “the” game. Even The World of Darkness builds in different key conceptual frameworks for players to adopt, taking the form of “clans” in Vampire, “traditions” in Mage. I’m not really aware of this distinction playing a significant role in the inspiring fictions – is Lestat from Anne Rice or Jean-Claude from Laurel Hamilton a specific “type”? Not in the way Vampires were codified in V:TM. While you can technically build a big variety of characters within each of those – no two Tremere will be identical – by selecting that clan you bring a big range of typical expectations with you. Similarly, Shadowrun might be a purely skill-buy system, but they were careful to include default packages with clear iconic characteristics. There is no question what basic method of interaction a “Street Samurai” has with the corporate dystopia. Other games, frame this tool different ways, so in like Dresden Files it’s a “High Concept”. Call of Cthulhu has its “professions”. This concept doesn’t translate all that well into spies. Although using the archetypal tasks from a heist or a confidence scheme might work at a pinch, it’s weak. For example, observe in the Mission Impossible franchise that the field agents – Ethan, Zhen, Brandt, Ilsa – all have basically the same skill set to different levels of competence. Even the “tech” character of Benji has his unique selling points eroded to be an inferior copy of the rest. What skills are fundamentally different between Bond and Felix Leiter? I guess that depends on pre or post shark. You could frame all of these characters as basically sharing an Iconic Identity, but at that point I think the framework starts to lose utility, because it can’t explain the differences in actions, other than perhaps resorting to “but Ethan’s always the best”. Nor, though, are spies really Dramatic. You could definitely frame their poles as “loyalty” versus “self-preservation”, but few action-spies really dip their toes too deep into that water.

Once you’re out of fictions and into the points-build Night’s Black Agents, differentiating any kind of key iconic characteristics or niche protection becomes a matter of specific and deliberate design by a player. When I was writing the player characters for my three-part trilogy, I described each as “asset handler” or “controller”, but in fact, there are huge skill overlaps between the characters and across the numerous iterations of the game some characters worked perfectly well operating well outside their notional niche. Looking at a selection of 30 to 35 skills possessed by a character out of a total of 70 skills can make discerning their general areas of competence hard, and it can be hard to remember if you do. A frequent occurrence in my campaign was one or other agent engineering themselves into a situation only to realise that, actually, they were the wrong team member to have made the attempt. You never accidentally send the Ranger into the library to do research instead of the Magic-User, but that happened all the time in all iterations of Night’s Black Agents that I’ve run at KapCon and now in campaign. But again, while lacking Iconic characteristics, Night’s Black Agents is inherently very procedural, so while you can do complex character work, that’s not really the point of the “propulsive thriller”.

I think that if you want to have strong and specific niches within your group of agents, the game will allow you to do that, and it might be a very helpful strategy for clearly aligning the agents with the kind of strongly-understood genre frameworks that I discussed in an earlier part of this series. Conversely, if you choose to allow a melange of agent approaches and skills with no clearly defined mission functions, then you need to figure out some other way of designing a story. As with other deep storytelling though, you are going ahead without a guide or a framework and special care will be needed. It might well suit a game more like Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy than Moonraker. If you go that route, the most important thing you can do is have a group ready to commit to that complexity, and be prepared to define and then occupy their own story niche.

[Link to next part]

Dracula Dossier 3: Trust everyone

It was only two or three times a year that an assignment came along requiring his particular abilities. For the rest of the year he had the duties of an easy-going senior civil servant – elastic office hours from around ten to six; lunch, generally in the canteen; evenings spent playing cards in the company of a few close friends, or at Crockford’s; or making love, with rather cold passion, to one of three similarly disposed married women; week-ends playing golf for high stakes at one of the clubs near London.

… On these things he spent all his money and it was his ambition to have as little as possible in his banking account when he was killed, as, when he was depressed he knew he would be, before the statutory age of forty-five.

Spies are instruments of the state, expected to place that loyalty above all other considerations, up to and including, their own survival. They are sent into dangerous places by controllers with imperfect information, who may be prepared to sacrifice them if it seems expedient, and they’re expected to recruit and manage unwitting assets who are even more expendable. The basic relationship is asymmetric, with complete trust and obedience on one side with no corresponding responsibility to ensure wellbeing. Even assuming a spy can trust their organisation, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to trust their team, since the enemy has equally strong drives and capability to infiltrate assets under the same pressures. All of which tells us little about what a spy will do moment-to-moment, other than they’ll certainly do it with the expectation that at any moment they could be betrayed, hence the famous description, “a wilderness of mirrors”. In that prism, you could see the whole genre as a confidence game with guns.

What are the ergonomics of running a roleplaying game where lies and betrayal are an absolutely central aspect of the underlying fiction? What narrative archetypes can players use to inform “good” story or character decisions in a shifting maze of story expectations? If genre forms help establish a common frame of reference for group collaboration, how can we identify which forms are relevant for any specific outing within this chameleonic genre? If the basic story mechanism is deception, how can a player develop enough confidence in their understanding of the shared imagined space to take action? Moreover, if “who can you trust” is the central organising principle, then the central activity is an abstract interpretation of a relationship rather than a specific call to action.

The centrality of this abstract idea of “trust” means that there are huge over-laps with the Caper genre, with heists and robberies but also with the art of the con, and most spies also play Detective more than occasionally. If “trust uncertainty” is the key ingredient in the genre, we could decide to include a huge swathe of “crime” stories in the purview of the Spy story – what is Infernal Affairs if not a film about who can be trusted? Both the original and remake are significantly more interested in information-gathering and clandestine activity than in “solving crime” in a way that Sherlock Holmes would recognise. Similarly, if The Wire doesn’t seem much like other “Police Procedurals”, perhaps that’s because it makes heavy use of Espionage story architecture, especially in the way the institutional Baltimore police have an orthogonal agenda to their agents in the field. While the 2002 movie The Bourne Identity was sufficiently influential that it’s common to talk about “Post-Bourne” espionage, I’m a little unclear what bit of the film has any actual spying in it. What puts it firmly into the canon of modern Espionage fiction is the manifestly untrustworthy framework within which Treadwell operates. Conklin [Chris Cooper] is the disposable asset whose confidence in his superior, Abbott [Brian Cox] turns out to be wildly misplaced, with Bourne merely the inciting factor.

In a roleplaying context, probably the most familiar story trope involving Trust is the unreliability of Mr Johnson in Shadowrun. I haven’t played all that much Shadowrun in the grand scheme of my gaming CV, but one very strong and constant impression I’ve had is that whoever hires you for a clandestine mission against a MegaCorp is usually better off killing you than paying you, since loose ends can always lead back to them. The choice in Shadowrun is either to play along with Mr Johnson until the last possible moment, hoping to double cross him, or to do nothing. Knowing Mr Johnson is likely to betray your team just becomes one more element of mission planning, making yourselves either indispensable or setting up some kind of “insurance”. Beyond the first-base story move of “kill the team rather than pay them” is an entire world of false-flag operations, or operations planed as a diversion from the real team. Within the generally-understood framework of a tactical mission, these potential problems likewise just become additional mission parameters. I’m sure that the most sophisticated GMs create a perfectly murky environment where a shifting perspectives leave only the body count as an objective measure.

One tool we can use to describe this arrangement is the “Shared Imagined Space”, which is about as simple as it sounds. Different game systems use different ways of allocating control between the players at the table for what goes into the SIS, and mostly that means game mechanics to regulate possible actions within fictions. In D&D, if you want to kill something you need to use the game mechanics to see whether your avatar within the game can accomplish the task. We’re used to thinking about the SIS as a literal space – it’s in the name – but a shared understanding of valid storytelling strategies is also a very important part of the construct. The idea that Mr Johnson might decide to kill the team rather than pay them is a possible story event encoded in a shared understanding of the world – at least, after the first time. Identifying “get betrayed” as a central story element though, decoupled from a specific event, means that there is no specific provisional space for this event in the SIS. This means that the player, to a large extent, ends up flying blind and they must trust that the GM will use betrayal in a way that the player will find satisfying. Trust in this light though is very difficult unless you know that player’s tastes very well; there are only a handful of players in the world I know well enough to play in this mode to the uttermost, so unless that Platonic Ideal group gets together, some kind of communication strategy is going to be needed, which I’ll pick up on again at the end of the post.

Once you’re out of that nicely-defined story structure, problems abound. Thinking even more generally than spies, most of the difficult experiences I’ve had at a gaming table come from differing expectations about cause-and-effect within the game, usually on a genre level, which means that the imagined story space which should be shared is instead atomized. The most extreme examples have come from an explicit rejection of the genre frame – adventurers who’re not primarily interested in adventuring was a particular bane of my teenage groups as we began to grow tired of the D&D framework without understanding what a replacement frame would look like. Some of these genre frameworks can be a very delicate balancing act between the archetypal experiences and a pragmatic approach to problem solving. For example, in A Fistful of Dollars, Nameless [Clint Eastwood] inflames the conflict between the Baxters and Rojos, gradually escalating to the point where he can fight Ramón Rojo [Gian Maria Volonté]; faced with this scenario at a roleplaying game, I’ve seen more than one group try to short-circuit the action and go straight to killing the obvious big boss. To keep the game under control and on track you need to carefully think about what Alfred Hitchcock called the “moron logic” of not just doing the obvious sensible thing – phone the police when you see a crime, run away from the serial killer instead of trying to ambush them, just give the crime boss the Macguffin, tear off and instantly confront the big boss, whatever. If your spy game can be Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy or The Living Daylights, it can be difficult for a play-group to factor in a likely vector for betrayal.

This in turn creates problems for the GM in managing their Hidden Goblins. As Morgue elaborated at length, one very good strategy for determining what an NPC should be doing when off screen is to have them execute an agenda built into the game. He discusses Apocalypse World in some depth, where the GM is given relatively specific instructions on what those agendas are, and hence how NPCs can work toward those agendas when offscreen. In espionage games that feels like a tougher challenge than in a dungeon-crawl. For example, in Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy, Smiley is careful to keep his investigation completely off the radar because the obvious move from Karla’s agents is to simply murder him, and he has no real defence against that. Whereas the basic mode Jason Bourne’s operating under is exactly that a cadre of his old colleagues have been sent to kill him and it’s useful that they do because each on represents a step toward Treadwell. There may be no clear and tidy way to provide a general-purpose agenda that makes sense in an espionage context. I leave this as an exercise to the reader.

The corollary of all this is that the more highly formulaic and structured a genre, the easier it is to discuss and usefully replicate; the simplest genre forms are the most easily and satisfactorily reproduced time-and-again. They are the most easily understood, with the fewest number of different available structures and the greatest clarity over who’s doing what and why, especially the unconstrained Hidden Goblins. The Quest provides an unbeatably simple and yet energetic story form, and hence it dominates RPG design to this day. Detective fiction positively leaps into the frame as a genre whose conventions were already well-established 70 years ago when Raymond Chandler outlined a compelling case for their irrelevance in “The Simple Art of Murder”. Many scholar interested in genres as an analytic stance seem to resolve the question down to a specific number of genres with features they have identified from their extensive study. The most famous of these is the singular Hero’s Journey, but I tend to be pretty sceptical about any study of formula fiction which claims any definite number of permutations. These books tend to be riddled with facts twisted to suit theories.

I have come to think that to a large extent instead of thinking about “formulae” as a sequence of story events, we can more usefully think of them as a set of modular components that can be recombined in a lot of different ways. Taking a simple example, the detailed “plot” of a Romantic Comedy might not be easy to guess, because the writer’s job is to constantly look for new ways to represent similar events. Instead of, thinking, say, “part 3 of the story must be the introduction of an alternative to the preferred mate”, you can think about them as having a two-step rhythm of a big step toward love followed by a little step back or sideways. The biggest step back in Bridget Jones’s Diary [2001] is the dastardly Daniel Cleaver [Hugh Grant], the biggest step back in Grosse Pointe Blank [1997] is the assassin Felix [Benny Urquidez] – from the kind of prescriptive Hero’s Journey / Save the Cat formulations these are different, but in terms of a storytelling rhythm they’re pretty similar.

A formula for a spy story could look a lot like

• Detectives: Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy, the Ipcress File, Three Days of the Condor.
• Quest: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Bourne Identity.
• Confidence scheme: Duplicity, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.
• Scavenger hunt: Atomic Blonde, Quantum of Solace.
• Search and destroy: True Lies, Salt, Haywire, Charlie’s Angels [2019].
• Caper / heist: The Kingsmen, Mission Impossible.

I think all of those classifications are debatable, at best, meaning that in some ways, espionage sits at a literary Lagrange point, where it is possible and even usual, for the best practitioners to perfectly balance traditional genre-based story forms with traditional non-genre character interests. It is a genre where we can find the helpless and hapless victim of circumstance, as in the movie Enemy of the State or The Thirty-Nine Steps, which welcomes the visitation of figures from other genres like Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, and which offers a bewildering array of primary protagonists from the semi-satiric James Bond, to the Machiavellian George Smiley and the all-too-human Bernard Samson. Perhaps the most iconic and defining spy of this generation is the reformulated Jason Bourne, whose amnesia allows him to be a hapless and pleasant victim with whom we can identify while simultaneously being a hardened professional killer that would plausibly have the skills he needs to survive. The availability of so many different story structures means that in terms of roleplaying experiences, the “Espionage Genre” can prove something of a mirage, creating as more differences in expectation across a play-group as it does similarities. This is a problem it shares what are effectively other meta-genres, like “Science Fiction”, whatever that is.

This kind of analysis suggests that trying to think about what kind of formulaic structures might be in play does not create much insight into when and how you might be betrayed. As a player, you’d approach each overt story structure with numerous different potential vectors for betrayal. You’re investigating a potential mole, but are you George Smiley [Alec Guinness], whose organisation is fundamentally on their side, or are you Harry Palmer [Michael Caine], whose organisation sees you as bait for a trap and isn’t particularly invested in your survival? Both characters really only work, and their narratives only work, if they’re prepared to buy the premise of the plot- that they’re detectives actually doing the task they’ve ostensibly been assigned. If Harry Palmer started off assuming he was being set up, it’d be a much shorter movie as he booked a train back home and forgot the whole thing. Are you Bond [George Lazenby], playing the long game with Draco [Gabriele Ferzetti] in the hopes he can get you close to Blofeld [Telly Savalas]? Or are you Alec Leamas [Richard Burton], whose whole mission is a false-flag meant to cause a distraction that will protect the real agent in place? Again, the narrative only works if the point of view character believes they’re the protagonist. I’d suggest that it’s a rare player who’d accept that they were set up to fail – it’s too much of a rug-pull, whereas a nice clean betrayal at the drop-off of the MacGuffin is so predictable you can plan for it.

Thinking about “plot” then, requires players who can accept that their characters’ actions may be essentially meaningless, and that’s a tough sell. Probably more fatally, the knowledge that they’re doing X-flavour of subgenre doesn’t really provide them enough information to know when to plan and when to freewheel. Maybe there’s a better way, so let’s reframe some of those options to try and describe who we can trust.

• Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy: We can trust Smiley and his adjunct Peter Guillam, but the premise of the movie is that at least one other of the main characters is unreliable. Smiley here has an unusual function, in that he’s both of the state apparatus, and outside it. If he were truly inside, his loyalty would be as questionable as everyone else’s.
• The Ipcress File: We can trust the unnamed protagonist (Harry in the movie), but he is deliberately set up by his superiors, and basically everyone he meets in the film turns out to either by lying or acting under a misapprehension. Yet, the intentions of his agency are fundamentally good – we can trust that the ends justify the means, even if the means is the end of the protagonist.
• Three Days of the Condor: Joe [Robert Redford] becomes our hero when he accidentally survives basically an inside-job assassination of his colleagues, intended to cover-up double-dealing by members of the CIA. The deep institutional corruption leaves us nobody to trust “on the inside”.
• Mission Impossible: In basically all of the Mission Impossible movies, Ethan [Tom Cruise] is disavowed by the establishment, and ends up finding a traitor who remained on the inside.
• Bourne Series: In each of the films, Bourne is set up by elements within the CIA who’re creating black-bag programmes for their private gain. Certain elements within the CIA could be trusted, inasmuch as they aren’t implicated in the specific crimes that affect Bourne.
• Duplicity: Spies working for corporations turn out to be unwitting double-double-agents. Once again it is the organisation that can’t be trusted, though in this film at least everyone’s obviously in it for themselves, including the spies.
• Bond: Typically in the Bond films, you can trust everyone, basically. The bad guys are pretty much known from the outset, and while M may be various flavours of cantankerous, they’re always basically on the same side as Bond.
• Atomic Blonde: I don’t think there’s a single character in the whole film who is what they appear to be, especially not the eponymous hero.
• True Lies: Like Bond, Harry Tasker [Arnie] has a reliable boss, but unlike Bond, Tasker himself proves to be unreliable. Should boss Trilby [Charlton Heston] trust Harry? Maybe to do the right thing, but in terms of misappropriation of resources, definitely not.
• Salt: Evelyn Salt [Angelina Jolie] is herself not who she appears to be, and her institution is riddled with traitors. Either way you look at her potential set of bosses, both are prepared to use her and discard her if it suits their objectives.
• Haywire: Likewise features a protagonist who’s institution has been corrupted by private interests appropriating the resources of the organisation for their own goals.
• Charlie’s Angels [2019]: Once again, the traitor is within.

Thinking about the core activity, of trust and betrayal, rather than the format of that activity, reduces our field of “what is a spy story” down to a small handful of implementations that provide a much clearer basis for what kinds of precautions are sensible for the characters… I don’t have pithy names for these, but in outline:

• The spy works for a trustworthy agency as their factotum – a Bond, say, or OG Charlie’s Angels, whose main concern is the detailed strategy for Getting The Bad Guy.
• The spy’s organisation is corrupt, but they can at least trust themselves and their immediate team – mostly Ethan Hunt, mostly Bourne, the rebooted Charlie’s Angels.
• The spy can’t trust themselves, because they’re likely operating on bad information – your Alec Leamas, your Harry Palmer; basically your deepest layer of paranoia.

Discarding the idea of a “story formula” in favour of an “action principle” like this implies also discarding a huge swathe of familiar techniques for designing role-playing experiences. I think most game design is still rooted in what amounts to a single-protagonist story, a coherent shared experience for the entire group. The classic example being D&D. In D&D characters are a “class”, where classes are essentially bundles of special abilities. It was generally understood that any given group of adventurers needed to be composed of a variety of skills in order to face all of the likely challenges – you need a Fighter, Magic User, Cleric and Thief, because the balanced adventure will pose certain challenges each faced best by one of those operators. I think conceptually this mostly derived from the idea of “niche protection”. By having different specialties, it allowed different characters to be the single most important hero in the story for one or two moments each story. (This has minimal support in the originating fictions of the heroic quest narrative. In JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, there is minimal functional difference between Legolas, Boromir, Aragorn or Gimli, or between any of the Hobbits. Even Gandalf demonstrates few practical differences from the others; in most senses he is just like an amplified Aragorn. Each has one or two special party tricks that they pull out at very specific moments, no more than that, certainly not the fundamental distinctions implied by the “class” structures.) You encounter something that needs killing – roll out the Fighter. Once that’s mopped up, you roll out your Cleric to patch everyone up. Then you’re at the trapped door and need the Thief to get through. Finally once Magic User identifies the loot. There’s no concept here of parallel or competing narratives – one Mary Sue-type protagonist will do this all just fine. This serial storytelling fits well with the quest structure, of a succession of challenges. In that concept, we can think about the adventuring group as effectively a single character, since only one character is facing the story logic of a challenge at one time. I think you can see the problem with Gandalf in this perspective and why he must be gotten rid of – he is always good at whatever the group is doing at any given moment. Need some fighting done? Gandalf or any of the fighters. Need some rhetoric? Gandalf or the Gimli facet of the group character. Need some wisdom? Gandalf or the Aragorn facet of the group character. And so on. Pick a story archetype for a group and you’ll see the same kind of faceted roles take shape – in a confidence scheme you need the Roper to tag the Mark, you need a Fixer to establish the reality that you want the Mark to experience, and you need an Inside Man to actually win the confidence of the Mark.

If, instead of conceiving a series of challenges in some kind of plot arrangement, we think only about the core activity of truth and lies, there’s no possibility of meaningfully differentiating between different characters on the basis of skill sets or moral inclinations. Everyone is equally open to betrayal, though they may still find different skills have different utility in the shiny plot wrapping for the core activity. Instead, in a spy fiction you’re pondering what level of compromised you can accept. In the uppermost tier of espionage, you’re fundamentally similar to an adventuring party on a quest assigned by your liege, but on the innermost tier, there’s really nothing you can trust. The story design for that uppermost tier can be as simple as any other mission: They go out into the world of espionage. They dig up clues, meet people, exchange secrets and bullets, fall in love and all other kinds of activities: we’re thinking about replicating the kinds of stories they experience, we are thinking about a more-or-less serial adventure, dividing the multi-faceted single character into single-faceted multiple characters. In a typical James Bond adventure, you need one character to fight Odd-job, and another character to bluff Goldfinger, and a third to seduce Pussy Galore. If the characters are disavowed, or otherwise betrayed, and investigating the organisation that housed them, there are more important things to ponder than how they’ll detect the gold smuggling. Now we need to understand what stated objectives the organisation has, versus the unstated real objectives that are in conflict with our characters. There can be any number of these, but the key idea is finding the break-point and figuring a submerged purpose for any overtly on-mission tasks; this is the balancing act Alias strives for in its first season: what does SD-6 do that can look like but not be a CIA operation? The details of a particular mission don’t matter much, because Sidney’s [Julia Garner] symmetric goal is to figure out what she can do that looks like SD-6 activity, while undermining them.

This kind of analysis also tells us why some films aren’t really spy films despite using some of the trappings and iconography. For example, Ronin is a great inspiration for any kind of action-oriented thriller. It has a motley crew, secret orders and objectives, and an element of double agentry. It therefore picks up important aspects of clandestine activity and trust-betrayal. However, in structural terms, the film is a series of semi-botched heists connected via combats. If we use Ronin as a template, we need to be sure that we are not conflating different aspects of the film into the singular descriptor of “Spy”. I think that the “Clandestine” aspect of the film provides colouration, but not the cycle of trust and betrayal is not central to its structure or the narrative that unfolds. At best, it’s a Mr Johnson-type limited betrayal at the end. You could run an RPG or tell a story that essentially followed Ronin point-by-point without necessarily feeling at all like a spy story. Point-by-point, Ronin‘s plot feels similar to lots of non-espionage crime films based around heists and raids, like The Wild Bunch or The Town.

I also think we can see vestigial niche protection deforming the story structure in A Wilderness of Mirrors. The way character creation works is that buying a skill at a low level costs a huge amount, but once you have a skill it becomes incrementally cheaper to become an expert. There are 5 skills in the game, and players are encouraged to pick one each, so that you have one of each type of character. In other words, we have the total capability of a single character explicitly broken down to be split amongst different characters. The players then determine the basic sequence of events necessary for achieving their mission objective, and any savvy group with an eye on the meta-game is going to try and offer up a story sequence that includes on gadget, one clinical assassination, etc, to give each of these characters a moment of spotlight time. Far from creating a situation implied by the game title, this is just another variation on the basic D&D storyline that needs a fight for the fighter, a lock for the thief, and so on. Most espionage-tinged scenarios that I’ve read tend to shade into the same kind of serialised and mission-focused design paradigm that informs the structure of A Wilderness of Mirrors. They are still fundamentally rooted in a kind of quest-adventure, and that’s in part because they are modelling that strand of stories that follow a solo hero solving a problem of defined scope.

This is a general problem for adapting some kinds of stories into roleplaying games. The classic image of detection is a single detective: Holmes, Miss Marple, whomever. Even in police procedurals, there is generally a clear leader of the investigation – when we watch Castle, we’re aware that Beckett is in charge, with various assistants. If we look at a detective story and aim for “niche protection”, we’d have some trouble – the only specialist we can usually identify is the medical examiner, who’s quickly dispensed with in most fictions, and the comic relief or maverick specialist. House tried hard to give each of its core cast a specialisation, but while this sometimes affected the adopted perspectives in the diagnosis debates, they were functionally interchangeable – in real terms, each was simply an expression of one facet of House’s own genius.

Secrecy is key to trust and betrayal. If Mr Johnson publicly hired a group of hardened killers to go in guns-blazing, there’d be no need to kill them at the end to keep the whole thing quiet. In The Spy Story, John G Cawelti and Bruce A Rosenberg identify the key starting point of espionage as Clandestinity, which they argue

begins with a purpose requiring actions that must be kept secret because they transgress conventional, moral or legal boundaries.

The Spy Story, p. 13

They go on to elaborate a fuller version of espionage that differentiates it from the mere criminal conspiracy, but I think that for the purposes of roleplaying games, we may find it more useful to keep this connexion broad. The logical end-point of the spy evolution that they identify is untenable as a roleplaying character:

With entry into the paranoid world of double agentry, the cycle of clandestinity is complete. It is no longer possible for the individual to join with others in the pursuit of a clandestine purpose since all possibility of trust is closed to him. Having begun the cycle as an individual with a purpose that required collaborative secret actions, he becomes once again an individual but is now enmeshed in the net of multiple lies which he must tell to all other persons. The double agent enters a state of moral and personal isolation so complete that there is no way out but death…

The Spy Story, p. 21

This logical end-point of the spy life-cycle is no more practically desirable than the negative logical end-point of a combat fantasy, death. The possibility of complete isolation will benefit an espionage RPG far more as a threat than an actual story outcome.

I selected A Wilderness of Mirrors as an example of a “spy game” whose structure is actually orthogonal to espionage because of the game structure invoked by the name – a maze of uncertain allegiances that is introduced into the game via Control ordering one of the team to be eliminated. In fact, The Mountain Witch‘s Trust mechanic is an infinitely more flexible and powerful tool for inculcating the aura fear around trust as well as its necessity that mirrors the spy experience. The different Ronin have the incentive of increased effectiveness to trust each other, but that opens them to betrayal – the classic and quintessential characteristic of the spy. As anyone who’s played The Mountain Witch realises, finding and defeating the Witch is trivial compared to navigating the maze of character history and allegiance.

Those familiar with Night’s Black Agents might argue at this point that it does address this design concept in its description of Mirror Mode. I’d agree that Mirror Mode gestures in the right direction, but I think separating it out in this way under-emphasises how important it is for even genre coloration. So let’s take another look at Ronin. I wrote above that I wouldn’t like to use the plot structure of Ronin as the chassis for an espionage story, because its structure is primarily oriented toward the raid. What creates the impression that the film is about espionage is the deception executed by Robert de Niro. He convinces his employers that he’s a gun for hire, when in fact he is an undercover agent whose mission is to arrest Jonathan Pryce. I think you could argue that if the characters are ever correctly certain of who they can trust and how much, they’ve quietly slipped out of the Espionage genre entirely. Ronin clings to the fringes of espionage because of the Mirror Mode concepts it adopts. Ambiguity around trust is essential even it is structurally inadequate by itself.

Keeping the focus on clandestine storytelling and betrayal can help act as a filter for eliminating story elements that are familiar, but tangential. Fighting often appears in spy movies, but it’s actually comparatively rare in novels. I don’t think there’s a single fight in Le Carre’s first dozen novels, and there’s only one in Len Deighton’s 9-book Bernard Samson novel series. Fighting is at least fun, but investigation just as often intrudes in a spy story where it’s not needed. We have been trained by Detective Fiction to think about investigations in terms of solving a puzzle with a defined scope – more to the point, we’re used to getting only partial information that does not require any action until all the information is obtained. In the classic Whodunit, there is a corpse, there are suspects, we sift through the facts to determine who uniquely has the means, the motive and the opportunity to commit the crime. That kind of investigation may have its place, but you can ask yourself “is this clandestine?” and “is this betrayal”? If the answer is no, then why do it? Conversely though, if you iterate on this, you actually square the problem Morgue expresses as a Hidden Goblin. In the basic idea, you have an offscreen Goblin that you push into the SIS to fulfil your game’s agenda; in a game where the basic axiom becomes “you didn’t see what you thought you saw”, even a visible goblin retains a hidden dimension. As a trivial example, in a dungeon, the GM decides a hidden goblin is revealed when the players enter a room where there should be a Goblin – guarding a pie perhaps? They kill the Goblin, and the basic narrative is obvious – now you get the pie? In a spy game though, the Goblin was a plant by an even more Hidden Goblin, who wanted you to have that pie and was prepared to sacrifice a goblin to make that pie seem desirable. Now you can’t trust that the pie really is a pie, and your basis for making decisions (why kill the goblin?) becomes murkier the more layered this deception becomes. Paralysis is the bottom of that slippery slope.

Losing sight of these central tenets makes it more than possible to play games like Night’s Black Agents and Cold City as monster-hunting games with merely an aura of clandestinity. To an extent, these games also self-limit the depths of betrayal available for them; for example, in Night’s Black Agents, Ken Hite says that “If it were up to me, nobody would ever get to play the good vampire ever again in any medium. It is, sadly, not up to me.” (126) However, the idea of a genuinely good Vampire is also the idea of the ultimate double-agent, whose will and energy are steadily being perverted into a force for evil. They become a time-bomb of a character, as as Alfred Hitchcock observed, a time-bomb hidden in a scene does wonders for the tension. The possibility of a good vampire is enough to create a basis for trust, and trust is the basis for betrayal – the central indispensable element of espionage.

I venture though, that most players and most groups are happy enough with espionage as colouration; it’s a much easier proposition at 9:30pm on a Friday than exploring the really intricate situations that I’ve outlined in earlier parts of the post. How much easier is it to conceive of a story like Taken, where we’ve just got a dark impression of historic espionage than the disintegration of identity in Infernal Affairs?

One quite good template for a game that relies on spy infrastructure, but whose primary interest is not spying per se, is Deep Space Nine. It’s got a lot of advantages as a template – it is an ensemble drama, so more closely matches roleplaying games than a single-protagonist story, it segues easily between contained episodes and large plot arcs, and while sprawling, the story never becomes unmanageably complex. Deep Space Nine‘s interest in espionage is expressed from very nearly the opening scene of the first episode. We quickly learn that amongst the core crew are Odo, the shape-shifter who uses his special power to spy on criminals, Kira, the former “freedom fighter” whose activities certainly included the usual array of clandestinity, and Garak, the mysterious Cardassian Tailor who is revealed to be a former star of the Obsidian Order (the Cardassian Intelligence Service). This begins to escalate when the enemy from the Gamma Quadrant is discovered to be shape-shifters who’ve undertaken massive and seamless infiltration of Starfleet. Even more seriously, it is revealed in later seasons that Starfleet too has a clandestine wing, who remain completely secret from their own organisation in order to to enact the necessary infiltration and extra-legal activities that support the edifice of the ultra-moral Starfleet; in effect, “friendly” spies have infiltrated Starfleet, so that even if cannot escape from the corrupting influence of secrecy. Deep Space Nine also made far more extensive use of the so-called “Dark Universe” from the original Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror”, using the doubled identities to give even its most innocuous cast members an opportunity for clandestine infiltration. Deception reaches its zenith in the final season when Gul Dukat disguises himself as a Bajoran in order to seduce Kai Wynn and hence destroy Bajoran society from the inside.

Deep Space Nine could not exist if stripped of Espionage elements, yet they are used in service to another kind of storytelling, they do not exist for their own sake, as it were. I have never heard anyone describe Deep Space Nine as a Spy Story, because the overt emphasis of the show is on the personal drama of the characters, yet Clandestinity and Betrayal are ever-present story elements. It illustrates how versatile and useful story formula can be for adaptation to other storytelling purposes. It is the opposite application than we can see in abundance in the numerous by-the-numbers procedurals whose procedural elements provide only a notional impetus for the characters to exist. Castle, for example, exists purely for the chemistry of the cast, the mysteries are completely nominal – it “counts” as a detective story, because that’s the overt activity that provides a frame for character interplay. Deep Space Nine is the opposite, in that it uses the spy narrative to inform character choice. It completely sublimates the formula into the characters. Formula in Castle is a surface decoration, in Deep Space Nine it is deep and hence nearly invisible structure. Both uses retain character as the central focus, but make use of formula concepts.

We can see the difference between this formula-informing character and formula-dictating character with two examples. Law and Order is the epitome of formula-as-focus storytelling, where the characters exist only as cyphers necessary for the execution of the detective and court-drama. Mission Impossible does the same for the espionage genre. In these narratives, the characters are perfectly replaceable, as the formula is the only point of interest. Perhaps the most interesting example of the absolute supremacy of formula concepts was the mid-show replacement of the cast of Dukes of Hazard, a replacement that was barely noticeable, making not one iota of difference besides changing the names in the script. I assume Soap Operas, for all their so-called Drama, really operate in the same way.

Even novels explicitly within the Espionage canon make use of this distinction, between a frame and a deep structure, between a character and a story focus. We could potentially think about these as the four quadrants of genre storytelling in a quite general way. The Bernard Samson novels by Len Deighton are primarily character studies with “conventional” literary interests whose deep structure is nonetheless formed by the core clandestine activities we’ve been talking about. The majority of the Bond novels could be seen as using the espionage structure as a frame to showcase a particular conception of sexycoolfun masculinity – what could be more of a prophylactically-satiric fantasy than Bond pretending to be a genealogical expert surrounded by nubile youth in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service? Any of Frederick Forsyth’s many novels would show the total suppression of characters as such in favour of story. And so on. The stories that use espionage more as a frame than as a deep structure will tend toward the adventure genre.

What this suggests is that a pre-game discussion to establish a meaningful framework for the Shared Imagined Space is far more important than it might be for some other genres of storytelling. The deeper you’re planning to wade into the waters of institutional untrustworthiness, the riskier it becomes that you take too many steps into the mire that Cawelti and Rosenberg identify of paralysis through a lack of trust. There are tools emerging in the marketplace of ideas to help with exactly this kind of problem: safety tools. The simplest expression of these is the famous “X-Card”, where at their discretion any player can tap out of a specific event in the game. It’s most commonly paired with “Lines and Veils”, which is where players can list things that won’t happen in the game (i.e. ruled out) and things they’re happy to have happen, but offscreen (behind the curtain). I’ve been making some version of these available and discussed them in my home games and especially at cons since a scarring run of The Hand that Feeds where one player just took it way too far out-of-character, and I as GM was caught a bit flat-footed, having played almost all horror games in pretty sheltered and safe environments – even at cons, the Wellington scene is pretty small. The limitation of this design can be the impermeability of these limits once set, while actually some shades of grey are needed for an espionage game. There’s a big difference between “we will never be betrayed by our organisation” at one end of a spectrum and “they will betray us every single time without fail” at the other. Players really want to operate somewhere in the middle “Mr Johnson will pay us sometimes“.

A really nice clear example happened in a recent run of Cartel, where in the “lines” section we put “no child abuse”. One player set up their character as a matriarch with a horde of grandchildren as the dominating factor in their motivations and I, as GM, having pitched the game as one of bad people doing horrible things, could interpret this in a couple of ways. Firstly, is this a way of putting all leverage-able assets for the character behind that protective line? See, Mr GM, I can act with impunity because you can’t hurt me, because we agreed not to hurt children! Or you could interpret as a fear response, “I don’t want to risk the game being able to hurt me, so I’ll put my assets somewhere safe”. Or it could be a constricted view of “abuse”, where that player has a limited subset of suffering for children in mind, and being merely killed by a bunch of drug-dealers is fine. The vibe at the table was pretty much about playing the game as safe as possible, so I didn’t really delve into this question, I just accepted that this player wanted to keep things on the safe side. The point is just that the line came first, and in my previous Cartel experience, nobody’s put children particularly into the fiction because that line, which I always have, generally just makes children a less interesting story element than other kinds of NPC relationships. By putting the children into the game, I think the player was signalling an ambivalence about the line, and would have been interested in fictional moves around, say, having a gun-thug be their substitute teacher one day as a message, even if the “lines” meant no actual harm could be inflicted.

For this reason, I’ve come to really like the construction of the Script Change tools, which explicitly create two tools I love – the “Rewind” button, where permission is created to explicitly ret-con things that have gone awry, and the “Stop Motion” button, where you are happy to proceed but you’re letting everyone know that you’re near your limits. In the game above, putting the children under threat feels reasonably safe, because the player is specifically briefed on how to have a conversation out-of-character about what’s going on. They can play that “rewind” and say “oh no, kids are off limits per line!” or they can play “stop motion” and we carry on ready to pull the plug at any further escalation. That’s a skill to develop for sure. There are a few players I know well, whose intent I would have understood in making that design decision, and they’d have made that decision trusting me to play in a certain way based on previous experience. For espionage though, I wonder if even these are enough, because usually by the time you realise your spy bosses have sent you to die for reasons that only the GM understands, a simple “I didn’t want to be sent to my death” use of the rewind can have such a huge cascade backwards on the meaning of previously-agreed events that it would likely break the fiction.

Sometimes the more you study a topic, the less certain you are about its fundamental axioms and how to make use of them. I haven’t saved the reference, alas, but I read a very interesting paper by a Shakespearean scholar who admitted they could no longer offer any kind of opinion on whether the sonets were good or bad. They’d read them so many times over so many years, argued for this meaning and then realised that actually that meaning was present instead, consumed so much scholarship on the topic, and generally had their own thoughts become totally enmeshed with the material that no objectivity was possible. I’m not quite there with spies, but sometimes it feels close. What’s a spy story? How do we tell one? What are the key features? I’ve made my argument here that the single most-important ingredient is meaningful trust and betrayal, but after trying out most of the spy games on the market up to 2016 or so, having run numerous well-received one-shots at conventions, having run the Dracula Dossier campaign, and having consumed a fair number of books along the way… It’s a good argument, but it’s not the absolute truth. It’s not the absolute truth because lack of trust is corrosive at the table – ask any good player or GM what the most important thing is, and they’ll say Trust, they won’t then follow up with “and Betrayal”. It’s a peculiar kind of Trust in this genre, the Trust to betray in a way that’s going to be satisfying. “I trust you to betray me” is exactly the kind of oxymoron which suggests we need to think about things a different way. I think we’ve established that deserved-trust has a couple of key features. Firstly, it’s knowing what will happen, or how someone will react. “I trust you to catch me” – I know how you’ll act when I fall. Secondly, that you want that specific action or reaction or event. “I trust you to drop me” – I know you’ll drop me, and that I don’t want that. With all that in mind, we need to once again steal a formulation from Morgue and ask who is wanting?

This is a slightly easier question to answer for a GM than for a player, because they interact the most directly with the imaginary space. When the GM makes something happen in the game, it’s because they want it to happen. This might be informed by genre conventions, or the game system, but fundamentally the job of the GM could usefully be renamed as the Chief Wanter. They usually pick the game and they have enormous power over overt and implicit aspects of the game to cause what they want to happen inside the fiction. But for players an ambivalence is often expressed where the “player” wants one thing and the “character” wants another. That dichotomy sits at the heart of the questions of betrayal raised by this post. Failure to properly distinguish between those two wants is often derived using some variation of “meta-gaming”. I, the player, want my character to use a Bastard Sword because I can use it either one handed with a shield or two handed for higher damage, it’s a selection gives me the greatest tactical flexibility, but my character wants to use his father’s long-sword because it’s a family tradition that defines his identity. I, the player, want to grab that electrical lead and shock the Flying Polyps, but my character is a bookish lad about town who doesn’t know to call it a Flying Polyps or that it’s vulnerable to electricity, so he’ll just have to continue uselessly shooting it. I think games predicated on the notion that the player has to suppress all their instincts and perpetually second-guess actions is a failure of a game. It’s like playing chess and trying to pretend you don’t know how Bishops move – a pointless, stupid, waste of time. Even so, however you end up playing these things, there is actually only one entity making that decision: the player. We tie ourselves into these Gordian Knots of recursive “but would a librarian really do that”, when the direct reality is that the only things that the character does are at the instruction of the player, and the character only exists at all to be the player’s avatar in the game world. The “who is wanting” is just always the player, and trying to pretend otherwise is a very “meta” activity.

But there’s a second part to this wanting – the what. I think if you’re playing a game about lies and betrayal, it’s because that’s what you want, and the key to having this work is where we started this post: your character actually wants that too. Bond may not actively be seeking death in Moonraker, but it has become an eventuality that does not perturb him at all. The degree to which Bond wants to live is reflected in his preparations for the inevitability of betrayal. His exercise regime is never described with truly luscious detail, but many preparations are catalogued by the text, as is Bond’s conscious acknowledgment that those preparations may be insufficient. I think to roleplay well, to be a strongly positive presence at the table, you need to be able to fully internalise whatever the game’s requirements are so that what you want is what your character wants is what the game wants. Playing a Call of Cthulhu character who doesn’t believe in the supernatural despite the evidence is playing wrong. Playing a spy who expects to ever experience trust is putting them at odds with the genre. It can be done, but it’s the hard way for sure. The spy player and spy character must align in playing accepting betrayal as inevitable. Shying away from being betrayed is to miss the point.

[Link to next part]

Dracula Dossier 2: Roleplaying Stories

There is a persistent tension in roleplaying games which is usually framed as between freedom and control. This could be called a “railroad” versus a “sandbox”, or some other metaphor. This spectrum applies over several different types of activity within the game, where you may have a lot of freedom in some ways but be completely constrained in others. When all possible axes are fully constrained, the players become observers of a story told by the GM; when there are no constraints at all, probably the experience lacks the kind of coherence that would allow us to identify any narrative shape at all. Cynically, the task of the game designer is to provide the illusion of complete freedom while creating structures and principles that actually make the experience dependable, repeatable, and enjoyable. I think most people reading this [sic] will instinctively feel like they want freedom rather than to be the puppets dancing to amuse an all-powerful Game Master ™. Yet, it is often some kind of restraint which provides the necessary foundation for invention. That’s not my idea, it’s by one of the world’s more famous garden designers:

For wit [i.e. freedom] and judgment [i.e. control] are often at strife,
Though meant each other's aid, like man and wife.
'Tis more to guide, than spur the Muse's steed;
Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed;
The winged courser, like a generous horse,
Shows most true mettle when you check his course.

Constraints can come in a lot of forms, and what they choose to control, and how, becomes crucial for getting the best out of a game. In my experience, it is often the case that the most satisfying stuff at a gaming table was a slight twist on a well-understood story structure. Examples are plentiful, but one of my most satisfying-ever moments in roleplaying was during the Flight of the Hindenburg LARP at KapCon in the before-times.

I was playing Cane Kameron, a Lex Luthor-analogue. The LARP was one where there was not much magic or other weirdness, except of course that a Lex Luthor analogue must have a Superman analogue: Ultraman. Over the course of the evening, I subcontracted out most of my plot objectives to others – that’s how rich people do it, right? Through this web of favours, I obtained some Kryptonite-analogue, but unluckily I was also taken over by some body-snatcher aliens. Their objectives were world domination, and so it was decided that CK’s objectives aligned with theirs: kill Ultraman, the main threat to their rise. As I had victory in my grasp, the death of Ultraman, Spock-analogue turned up and put the kibosh on the whole thing by ridding me of the parasite. Ultraman, restored to full power, immediately tried to arrest me. But, of course, I was “innocent of all wrongdoing” on account of alien mind-control parasites! Fuming impotently, Ultraman was forced to let me go, and I like to think Kameron eventually had his triumph at some later time.

You don’t have to work too hard to see how these different stories all took place within a complete freedom of action, but which couldn’t have existed without those story templates to inform and guide that action. If all I’d known about Ultraman was the paragraph in my character booklet, I wouldn’t have had enough information to devise my plan of dangling a damsel as bait. If Fraser hadn’t brought a deep reverence to Superman’s pure-good ethos, he’d surely have let his emotions take over and burnt Lex Luthor to a crisp with his laser vision. This wasn’t the constraint applied by the “tunnel of fun”, but it was nonetheless palpable and effective. I’ve had plenty of the opposite kind of experience. One that sticks in my mind was a friend’s play-test of their Geeves-and-Worster game. At the time, I’d never read any Wodehouse (I blame my shameful public education), so had only a dim glimmering of the genre in play. I completely misjudged the tone and hence what was appropriate within the fiction. The rules, at an ashcan stage of development, weren’t enough of a constraint, and so I utterly derailed the whole experience. The game was abandoned as a result. However good the design, if it’s not something the players have internalised, you’re going to have a hard time of it.

Few roleplaying games actually devote much time or energy to aligning their design or mechanical principles with the fictional outcome they want. Rather than wasting a lot of your time reiterating failure, I’ve pulled out a couple of snippets that speak directly to a real play experience rather than waffling in vague, general, theoretical, or inferential terms…

With their reliance on stock elements and favorite tropes, it’s not the storylines that separate great action movies from disappointing ones. … Long after you’ve forgotten what your Defense value was and how many shots it took you to activate your favorite schtick, you’ll look back with wild-eyed fondness on the crazy stuff your characters did as they blew up their way to freedom.

Feng Shui 2, p 209

While my attempt to run their demo was a total failure, I admire how explicit they are that FS2 isn’t going to be about telling a story, it’s about setting up and executing memorable fights. It’s entirely possible that my own ingrained habits got directly in my way of having a good time.

Another really on-point bit of game explanation is in EPOCH. I’m potentially a bit biased, but I think the PDF is worth the price just for Dale’s extremely lucid framework for running horror, regardless of whether you then go all-in on buying/printing the cards you need for the game.

In order to strengthen the game’s focus on characters, the first responsibility of an EPOCH GM is to focus on players. Spending excessive time checking notes, rules or descriptions, is likely to detract from this focus and give implicit cues to the players that they are ‘off screen’ and, therefore, free to engage in distracting behaviour.

EPOCH, p 14

Dale sets out precisely what he sees as the task of the players and the GM at each step of the game, and carefully explains how the tightly-controlled game structure, of tension rounds followed by challenge rounds, dovetails with these tasks. My experience at the table having run EPOCH at home games, for freshers at the Oxford RPG club, and at KapCon more than a couple of times, is that it’s a very reliable game.

There’s always imperfections you can find though. I’ve only read through Feng Shui 2 once, but I don’t think its interpretation of what makes a compelling action film matches mine. The chase scenes in Live and Let Die are more spectacular and better shot than anything in Goldfinger, but it’s the latter which makes all the “best Bond” lists, while Live and Let Die is justly relegated to a problematic forgetability. Die Hard is regarded as the best of that series, while the far more spectacular Die Hard 4.0 was widely derided for set-pieces such as destroying a helicopter with a car. Spectacle so disconnected from reality it becomes farce is not something you’ll have trouble finding examples of. Similarly, EPOCH doesn’t have a lot of advice for soothing the feelings of those who find its inbuilt popularity contest stressful or hard to engage with. Implicitly being told that you’re roleplaying your character in a boring way is the obverse of voting for which character was the most interesting. There’ve been one or two sensitive players over the years who’ve left the table a bit bruised, feeling like failures because they just weren’t seen as entertaining by the rest of the table. With a decade plus of experience running the game, that’s something I might advocate for in a second edition.

Something else I hadn’t appreciated when Dale was first play-testing EPOCH was that a lot of stories would happen primarily in the flashbacks. Some scenarios require a lot of time in the Tension Phases, but some are relatively nominal and so the time gets filled with characters’ backstories. There are no rules about what can or can’t happen in a flashback, so I’ve seen some utter drivel, such as this one guy who had an obsession with squirrels, but I’ve also seen some complex multi-player overlapping arcs such as a pair of players who decided their characters were immortals who’d been rivals over all of human history and one-upped each other in each cycle. That didn’t exactly give those players agency inside the present-tense lockbox they were trying to survive, but it was entertaining.

What both Feng Shui 2 and EPOCH share, to some extent, is that if you’re designing the experience properly is that concerns about “what is the story” are rendered a little moot by the rigor of the game’s structure, by the formal requirements of moving from the story-telling bits to the crunchy bits, before taking a little break and doing it again. Story is something that exists just to ensure there’s a bit of variety. I expect most of us older folk played an awful lot of Dungeons and Dragons that was in this mode, of a brief bit of in-character banter with a shopkeeper or sassy cleric in between probing the depths in search of treasure, but even way back in 1974 the advice for the DM was aware that there was more to it than that:

There must always be something desirable to gain, something important to lose, and the chance of having either happen. Furthermore, there must be some purpose to it all. There must be some backdrop against which adventures are carried out, and no matter how tenuous the strands, some web which connects the evil and good, the opposing powers, the rival states and various peoples. … players then have a dual purpose to their play, for not only will their player characters and henchmen gain levels of experience, but their actions have meaning above and beyond that of personal aggrandizement.

Dungeon Master’s Guide, p 112

I think your modern hippie indie gamers would describe these as “stakes”, and in the context of Alexander Pope, we could also describe these as restraints intended to direct our creative energy in order to get the most sophisticated end result. If we’ve framed our Heroic Fantasy desires as the destruction of a key artefact that gives power to the Dark Lord, and our fear as that object being recovered by his servants, that tells us that a trip to visit Tom Bombadil and his wife isn’t really relevant and should rightly be cut from all future adaptations of the tale, to pick an example at random. That’s a constraint, limiting what wacky invention we might inject into the thing. It’s a soft constraint, admittedly. In Feng Shui the stakes are hoping is to control Chi sites and hence control the flow of time, versus fear of the malfeasance of the people who already control those sites. This inherently suggests a kind of quest structure, of negating an Evil Lord. In EPOCH the hope is to defeat the horror, but more realistically, to die last.

I could be wrong, but a casual survey of my gaming back-catalogue suggests that by far the majority of roleplaying game scenarios are focused around negating evil. They’re narratives of preventing a bad thing from happening, with no real positive or aspirational counterpoint. In The Fires of Ra the goal is preventing Mobius from developing a WMD, it’s about preventing the invader from developing a further advantage rather than even rolling back the progress he’s already made conquering Africa. In the Paths of the Damned for WFRP, the objective is to prevent (in the nick of time) the forces of Chaos from unleashing their powers directly on a vulnerable human world. Each of the four Deadlands: Reloaded plotpoint campaigns are about obviating some strategic play by a Reckoner. Few are more upfront about this, however, than the Dresden Files RPG:

GMs should create scenarios tailored to the player characters, entangling them in the NPCs’ motivations and machinations from the very start. It’s about putting the PCs directly in the way of NPCs getting what they want, then letting the PCs decide what to do about that.

Dresden Files, p 340

The best we can hope for then, is usually that the baddie of the scenario wants something that the players don’t want, and they don’t want it enough that it’s worth going to a lot of hassle to prevent. And the reason they don’t want it to come to pass is something that I think almost all scenarios regard as self-evident: because it’s the plan of a baddie! Even the text above doesn’t spell out this last bit, except to imply that without that crucial element there wouldn’t even be a story. What’s really clear about all of this is that whether or not the player characters have their own goals, it’s the non-player characters who are setting the story agenda – it is the NPC motivations that set the frame of reference, it’s their actions that must be negated, and at the conclusion of the scenario the restoration of a pre-scenario status quo is all that can be achieved. This design philosophy wraps us all the way back to the start of this post – if the impetus for narrative is from the elements controlled by the GM, and the framing of the story is about negation of the NPC agenda, then control versus freedom is really just whether you play the game you’ve signed up to play.

Once you’re outside Trad Gaming ™, this space opens up. Fiasco for example, is based on the players picking goals for their characters that are going to turn out to be beyond their capabilities, and hilarity ensues. I think you could frame Cartel in a similar way – your goal isn’t to annihilate law enforcement to bring about the end of Mexico’s ability to function as a society, it’s to carve out enough of the subterranean world of the cartels to live in security. Similarly, Blades in the Dark, for all that you play basically bad people, is actually aspirational, because you’re performing crimes to establish your crew as important people, not just negating the evil intended by others. Nonetheless, it’s not hard to see this NPC-centric framing as an unnecessary flaw in any number of published scenarios. For example, Al Qadim’s Caravans box places the PCs as merchants travelling the sands, but the goal the scenario gives you is restoring a kidnapped lover, not “build a trading empire”. With only a marginal bit of work, the same events could occur but reframed as favours for favourable trading positions, bringing the scenario back into line with the aspirations Gygax expressed that both positive and negative things should be possible as a result of any action in the game.

The ingrained habitual thinking of the trad game designer means that whatever their aspirations about character-driven play, as the Dresden Files RPG surely expresses each time Aspects are discussed (disagreeing with itself often), are rendered moot by the formal structure of the story. That leaves you searching for advice on how to do this well, rather than questioning whether it’s something you should be doing at all. I think the player advice in Fear Itself is probably still the most on-point for this:

Although it makes perfect sense for your characters to freak out and become paralyzed by fear, this is not very interesting … instead make interesting choices and then find a way to make them [seem] realistic. An interesting choice is one that keeps your character moving forward and doing things.

Fear Itself, p 61

While parts of this text verge on aggressively frustrated, it’s all basically good ideas that can’t do more than gloss over the basic function of the player character as an obstacle for the NPCs’ stories. How about, rather than advising players on how to fake playing as protagonists, we reframe the whole problem as a player one. Why should the GM have to come up with the story at all? Simply, because that would place an impossibly complex improvisational burden on someone already doing a lot of the other tasks. If Dale’s prescriptions on how to comport yourself as a GM are correct, and if you’ve ever played in one of his games you know they are, then they’re already busy enough without spontaneously devising a perfectly adapted multi-part narrative. Unless, of course, everyone’s fully conversant with the curbs and constraints as required by Pope, such that we don’t need to fear a random Tom Bombadil being lobbed into the melange.

The best GMs and/or most skilled groups find ways to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of control and freedom, of preplanning and spontaneity. I’ve played in two very compelling games that managed it, though both had their stresses at the time. The first game I played where the players were genuinely in the narrative driving seat was Lace and Steel. The premise was that we were members of a nobleman’s household attached to his eldest daughter for her first season at Court. I played a fallen woman, recruited as a bodyguard in disguise. Though Esmeralda had goals, and I pursued them, the main action was driven by another character. Lady Kirkbolton was the head of our little mission, and she decided to entangle a particular minor noble as her next husband alongside ensuring a successful match for her ward. We played for around 2 years with a quite rigorous weekly schedule, covering approximately one game day per session. The game worked because each of the four players had their own small-scale agenda, providing some relatively easily grasped small action that could be undertaken in a session or two. I began to build a life of crime, using my access to nobles’ houses during the coming-out balls to case future nighttime incursions. In a lot of ways it was four separate games, conjoined from time to time with our notional purpose, for example, spending three weeks of real time planning the ball we’d host to showcase our ward.

Where this game worked well, we were operating within narrative frameworks that were common and well understood. The way the romances played out was specific and particular, but with broadly understood arcs and step-changes that I think would be familiar to most people. The attention to world detail, and to a very complex set of relationships still boggles my mind. The commitment of each player to their character, and to the fully immersive play were things I’ve never experienced again. Truly, a life-changing game. Where the game didn’t work so well were areas at the edge of genre fog, for example, near the end of the game my character fell completely into the power of her main antagonist. Capture in swashbuckling fantasy is always a prelude to escape, with a reward of some new ally or insight, but when the dice came down to brass-tacks in the final showdown, in the do-or-die moment, they said “die” and the GM overruled them. It’s always been the prerogative of the GM to do this in a traditional game, but it didn’t fit within my sensibilities or preferences. Our constraint, of player character as protagonist, reached its breaking point, because there’s nothing less empowering than literal death.

The disconnection of narrative expectations and desires, a more than slight twist, is frequently a problem, and more frequently in games with high player agency. Where a GM has carefully scripted a narrative for the players to walk through, the design is coherence and consistent by default. Where 6 different people are all negotiating via proxies of various sorts, chaos is bound to happen from time to time. The Forge provided us with a lot of new terminology to articulate some of the strategies and techniques, terms like “creative agenda” enfolding older terms like “dramatist”; but I think that if the most fundamental parameters of the genre aren’t internalised by all participants, it doesn’t really matter what words you use to describe the wreckage. For example, I played very briefly in an Apocalypse World game where we elected to play an extended family as the core. I played one half of twins, a Brainer with a cybernetic enhancement. After a few sessions, the GM threw a Bang: Cybernetics was perceived as cursed by some of our allies, and there was a demand to get rid of them for peace. The Hardholder and my Brainer got into it, and eventually the gauntlet was thrown down and I relinquished my asset. The other player and I were in complete accord on the way the narrative had to go down, but it absolutely broke the understanding of what should happen in roleplaying game for two of the other players, and it turned out to be the first of a handful of such different perceptions that doomed the whole thing. Looking back at Robin Laws’ fantastic advice to players from Fear Itself, where’s the advice on “the other players understand the genre differently”? Like water to a fish, I think there are innumerable factors that are invisible until suddenly you find yourself crossing a fresh/salt divide and drowning.

Freedom and control are constantly in balance in any roleplaying game, and what allows you to balance those for the best median experience is something like an understanding of narrative convention. Understanding genre, understanding typical genre ploys, understanding plot possibilities, grasping the emotional valence of each scene type, and ultimately choosing between options that “fit” with the shared imagination of the rest of the group, will give you the best chance of a game working. I think a lot of players and GMs don’t want to confront that discussion directly. Even assuming I do want that, I certainly don’t usually have the wherewithal to hit the pause button as I feel a game skidding out of its lane and discuss with the group how to keep it in the rails. Often, I’m not even aware something was a problem until later, and even then diagnosing what could have happened instead can be frankly, beyond my skills. It’s much more reliable to delegate that genre-defining authority to a Game Master, backed up by a thick tome of precedent, and refereeing a predefined experience. That just derisks the whole endeavour. Once you’re off that track, bushwacking, there’s pitfalls aplenty, and that’s going to be the subject of Part 4.

Books

• Balsera, Leonard, et al. The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game Volume 1, Your Story. Evil Hat : Diamond [distributor], 2013.
• Elvy, Dale, et al. EPOCH: Experimental Paradigm of Cinematic Horror. Imaginary Empire, 2012.
• Gygax, Gary. Dungeon Masters Guide. Rev. ed, TSR , 1979.
• Laws, Robin D. Feng Shui 2: Action Movie Roleplaying. Atlas Games, 2015.
• Swan, Rick. Caravans. TSR, 1994.

Dracula Dossier 1: Misreading Dracula

The novel Dracula stands in its own shadow, its specific characteristics eroded and challenged by the sequels, spin-offs, re-imaginings, not to mention the natural dilution of time-since-last-read. Even when I have the text in front of me, not a common occurrence, the epistolary nature of the presentation makes every bit of the narration potentially unreliable and open to interpretation, especially since its highly stylised and mannered. When I first read it as a tween, I had to go back and re-read the last couple of chapters to even understand whether Dracula had been defeated and how. More vivid to me, in that era, was the description of “Vampires” from The Monster Manual,

The most dreaded of the Chaotic Evil Undead is the nigh-prowling Vampire. These creatures must rest in a coffin or similar receptacle during the hours of sunlight unless far beneath the surface of the ground…

If a vampire scores a hit upon an opponent, its powerful blow causes 5-10 points of damage, and its powerful negative force drains 2 life energy levels from the victim, complete with corresponding losses in hit dice…

Gygax, Gary. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual: Special Reference Work. 4th ed, TSR Hobbies Inc., 1979.

Across the gulf of 30 years, the entirety of this description is wrong. Is Dracula “chaotic evil”? It seems to me as if he plans very meticulously, seeking to with within a legal framework and engaging servants in a complex web of obligations. Is his literal touch deadly? Little in the novel suggests this. There’s doubtless an interesting historiographic study connecting the early canon of literary vampires with this perspective on them. If I struggled as a youth to understand Dracula, I can’t help but think that was part of a wider diffusion and recreation experienced by the big dogs of any culture – just what can we say with any certainty about Mr Sherlock Holmes? Is he the tortured addict of Elementary, or the sociopathic semi-deity of the Gatiss/Moffat Sherlock, or the playful showman of Ritchie’s two films? My obviously naive reading of the stories as a youth made me think Holmes was a bit egotistical, but basically a mortal man writ a bit larger in Watson’s obviously propagandistic accounts.

Dracula’s many forms started to multiply a century ago, debatably starting with Murnau’s film. For all that the lawsuit by the Stoker estate against Nosferatu was successful, I personally find it a little hard to draw a straight line from Dracula to Graf Orlock, but I can discern a connection. Those points of difference, such as the hideous visage and categorical negation of sunlight, can be understood using Bloom’s famous Anxiety of Influence as extended by Umberto Eco. Bloom’s contention was that authors are always engaged in a process of rewriting their predecessors in an attempt to make their own work into the dominant and most compelling version of an idea. Eco develops this idea by saying that if one author appears to be influence by another, it may also be because both are influenced by some other, more remote, shared precursor. When we see Orlock alongside Dracula, we can discern both an attempt by Murnau to rewrite Dracula, and a shared heritage in the folk culture of Eastern Europe. Perhaps in renaming the monster, as many have renamed Frankenstein’s Monster, Murnau was trying to rewrite not Dracula-as-such, but Vampires-in-general, and he certainly succeeded in that Dracula became susceptible to sunlight to an extent far beyond that of the novel in subsequent retellings of the original source. Once again though, when I was a tween and already well-familiar with the fatality of sunlight, this was a point of confusion for me. I, like many people, probably continued to un-read the text, having internalised something different and difficult to change.

This suggests that part of the power of Dracula, Holmes, and other ill-controlled figures of our culture is not really in the careful reiteration of a specific iteration or narrative. Dracula is, like Holmes, more like a semiotic cue, a placeholder exuding a certain kind of story “vibe” and bringing with him certain associations subject to modification in any specific reiteration. Dracula is a vampire, vampires may or may not be affected by sunlight, may or may not subsist solely on blood, may have transformational powers or remain static in form. Dracula-based media may reiterate Stoker’s plot, or he could fight Sherlock Holmes (or fight alongside him), or he could have brides, or fight Buffy, or any number of things. Dracula can’t quite be all monsters to all plots, but within certain broad parameters he’s available for you to use as you see fit. Stock figures like Dracula, or Holmes, are no longer merely figures from Literature ™, they have become mythological, part of Eco’s shared cultural resource against which all creatives push in order to become the version of the idea.

Mythology isn’t something that was easily dealt with by the strictures and frameworks of the Literary Establishment when I was last reading this stuff seriously. Close text readings intended to deconstruct dense literary reference and probe the workings of intricate textual mechanics don’t necessarily do you a whole lot of good when you try and survey an entire field of endeavour. Luckily, we’re not here to discuss all of Vampire lore, but just to provide the basis for this statement:

Even if you read Dracula, you can’t read Dracula.

Just reading the book isn’t enough to clear away the cruft of previous misreadings, opposed readings, or the weight of cultural reconstruction that the novel has gone through. The best case when hoping for some kind of return to purity of understanding is to be like the apocryphal tale of Charlie Chaplin coming 3rd in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest: that you get pretty close. The mere text of a book cannot erase or even seriously redirect the inertia of our cultural inheritance. A better best-case that may actually be achievable, is to follow Murnau’s footsteps and reinterpret and re-inscribe the text into a new form that’s got the juice, the special something, to (momentarily?) push its way to the front and become an influential misreading.

This is where we get to Dracula Unredacted, the ostensible source text for the Dracula Dossier campaign.

Bram Stoker’s classic tale of horror is not a novel – it’s an after-action report describing an attempt to recruit a vampire as a spy.

Operation Edom redacted the text, concealed vital materail and key players, ad released it as fiction – as disinformation. The original, unredacted document they locked away in MI6’s most secret vault.

Three generations of analysts – in 1940, in 1977, and in the present day – annotated the text, tracing the secret history of Count Dracula through the 20th century.

Now, that unredacted document is in your hands. The key to the Count’s fiendish plans. The ultimate revelation.

DRACULA UNREDACTED. Read it and become a target.

When I first read this pitch, as part of the Kickstarter campaign for the books, I had the Fry-reaction:

But when the book arrived, I found myself unaccountably struggling to actually read the text. The biggest and most obvious problem was that I felt like I already understood as much about the narrative as I needed to, and have not until this very moment, ever felt like just rereading Dracula whether redacted or not as a pure entertainment. It’s a style of writing that’s not really in keeping with my modern tastes, it’s pretty slow-moving by my silly modern standards of pacing, and frankly, none of the characters really comes alive for me or sticks in the imagination. Reading it then, is a kind of work, but what’s that work comprise? You’re reading, really, to find the bits that are being unredacted, and for the purpose of playing an elaborate game of spot-the-difference, where those differences are supposed to mean something to you. My last (second) read through of the novel was about 15 years ago when someone published each entry on the day it was dated, which is itself a great conceit. But it doesn’t leave me with a sufficiently detailed knowledge of the text to undertake a close reading and begin to piece together the new pieces of the puzzle into a spy narrative that will take place 100+ years after the depicted events.

The annotations that accompany the text are mostly evocative without providing any initial or obvious impetus for investigation. Picking an example at random (I have a digital D476), here’s one annotation:

The Hungarian’s letters from his grandfather may confirm this, but he went to ground in Budapest last year and has yet to reappear. He warned me that there’d be bloodletting among the Dukes.

Dracula Unredacted, p323

A Hungarian in Budapest? Let me book my flights straight away, you’d have to be some kind of idiot not to be able to chase that lead to ground! The relevant passage in the book lists the powers of Dracula, which are extensive, so presumably the intent here is to now chase down this Hungarian so you can read his Grandfather’s letters. They didn’t manage to link up all the cross-referencing in any of the physical media, but they did put out a .PDF which leads you to the section in the Director’s Handbook where this guy is written up. While that write-up mentions the letters, it doesn’t really show how they might either illuminate or refute the relevant passages in the book, because for reasons we’ll get further into in part 4, the game text is intent on providing only frameworks, not actual content. The upshot of that as far as (mis)reading Dracula Unredacted, is that it’s all weak sauce, and the text I did read, and the annotations I noticed, didn’t shift the dial of my understanding of the character or his environment by any detectable amount.

The text itself then, demands a peculiar kind of player and GM – game participants prepared to meticulously and carefully comb through the revised text looking for emendations/alterations and annotations, after which they will extract those fragments and painstakingly recreate the background inferred. You’d find all mentions of “Dukes” across the annotations, and try to figure out who they were and how they relate to “Dracula”, bearing in mind that there are four different eras of annotations, and that the game will actually occur a century after the events of the novel. Once enough has been assembled, you somehow piece together who “a hungarian” might be, and then the game jets off to Budapest. This isn’t so much reading, as a serious close-textual analysis, and I don’t doubt that if you actually undertook that, there would remain ample scope for drawing the wrong inferences all over the place, but at least there’d be a solid textual basis for saying “actually, Dracula can cross the Thames at locks, and lower down there it’s tidal”. This isn’t a game of roleplaying, it’s one of pure literary detection.

I tend to do academic reading (making my own annotations, pulling relevant ideas into a journal, jotting down connections as they occur to me) at approximately 0.75 pages per minute. This level of rigour suggests a couple of read-throughs, and there are 254 numbered annotations in the text so assume you need at least a couple of minutes for each of those to begin creating your further annotations to inform the game itself. That’s a time investment of around 30 hours to assimilate this material in preparation for actually doing something. All of my grown-ass-adult games play for around 3 hours in an evening, so this is 10 sessions’ worth of time commitment to just get the ball rolling. So, obviously, once I wasn’t thrilled by the re-read, I pulled the plug on all of that, and Dracula Unredacted became a theoretical background element of the game. Which is to say, I rejected the premise of the real game, which is not a roleplaying game but a literary jigsaw puzzle where many pieces are missing or provide only contingent information to start with.

There’s a famous aphorism along the lines of “print the legend”, which is an exhortation to lean into the entertaining aspects and forget the tricky, pesky, elements that are mundane or that don’t support the heroic dimensions of the whatever. Detectives, especially literary ones, are quite the opposite, revelling in the reconstruction of details. The legend is where you start before carefully peeling back the layers, travelling back up the precession of simulacra, to arrive at the unvarnished and uncaring truth. We are being called on by this novel to discard the Nosferatu inference of ugliness and sunlight-vulnerability, to forget the endless returns of Christopher Lee in order to accept that Dracula can die, we need to shed our associations with “chaotic” evil, and then we need to begin to re-layer this new version of Dracula, a canny state-actor looking to hoodwink the British Government for personal gain with the (un)witting assistance of a whole state bureaucracy (Edom), and where we read about Dracula’s powers described specifically we need to apply our lens of scepticism appropriate to an in-fiction after-action report. Can the Dracula we’ll fight in this game turn to mist, or not? After all our work, our task remains the same, fundamentally, as it was when we hadn’t bothered to do anything: play to find out.

[Link to next part sponsored by Ardens Ludere]

Books

• Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence; a Theory of Poetry. Oxford University Press, 1973.
• Eco, Umberto. On Literature. Random House, 2006.
• Estleman, Loren D. Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula. Online-Ausg, Titan Books, 2012. Open WorldCat, http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=1764557.
• Klaver, Christian. Sherlock Holmes & Count Dracula. First Titan edition, Titan Books, 2021.
• Stoker, Bram, et al. Dracula Unredacted. Pelgrane Press, 2015.

Media

• Elementary. Hill of Beans Productions, Timberman-Beverly Productions, CBS Television Studios, 2012.
• Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie Des Grauens. Directed by F. W. Murnau, Jofa-Atelier Berlin-Johannisthal, Prana-Film GmbH, 1922.
• Sherlock. Hartswood Films, BBC Wales, Masterpiece Theatre, 2010.
• Sherlock Holmes. Directed by Guy Ritchie, Warner Bros., Village Roadshow Pictures, Silver Pictures, 2009.

Prelude to Dracula

I expect if you’ve found yourself at the first part my musing on running The Dracula Dossier, you know pretty much what you’re going to get. There’s no getting around some pretty fundamental parameters here – firstly, and most obviously, this is not a quick read. Inasmuch as I usually exercise some restraint, and think occasionally of some long-enduring reader, you can forget any such considerations here. This one is for me, and if another person on the planet has the patience to get through this, well, they may just be my evil (good?) clone or a time-travelling future incarnation of my own self. Secondly, as should already be apparent here, the route here isn’t going to be a straight line. There may not be anything quite as twisty as interpreting authorship through sport, but some of the theoretical waters we’ll tread are deep and monsters live below. Thirdly, there’s some pretty stern castigation in here for a GM whose reach exceeded his grasp; a little collateral damage is to be expected. Lastly, saved for pride of place, this series of posts is a continuation of writing and thinking over more than a decade, and I’m going to try and drop some links into the deep past, but if you’re not familiar with at least the broad strokes of my roleplaying theoretical interests, a lot of this is going to approach utter gibberish, assuming that wouldn’t be a fair characterisation even if you had suffered previously. With that in mind, here’s an outline of what you’re in for.

In Part 1 (coming April 15th), I’m going to do a little light misinterpretation to think of Dracula in the same kind of mythical space that we usually associate with Olympus. I’m going to somewhat speciously claim the epistolary format for the novel creates gaps in meaning and continuity that make it difficult to actually understand what’s really going on and then without any real basis infer that lack of overt plot clarity is a critical ingredient in the longevity of the character, far outstripping any kind of real familiarity the mass public might have with the actual text. I’m going to wrap up my opening section by admitting the whole argument is a fraud perpetrated on the basis that not only has nobody actually read the novel, but that fixing this ignorance is the real purpose of The Dracula Dossier, with any connection to roleplaying as a mere afterthought.

Since I end Part 1 questioning the validity of “roleplaying game designer” as a job title on Hite’s resume (we pseudo-British have CVs, because we really wanted to be pseudo-Romans instead), in Part 2 (coming April 19th). I allow myself some pretty fruitless musing on what a roleplaying game even is. This is a section where you’d better feel pretty comfortable with all kinds of Forgisms, and have read at least a selection of my previous writing on how to play like a protagonist. I’m going to link the kind of literary inquiry that made up the “content” of Part 1 with deprotagonisation (not a real word) in roleplaying games. This’s going to retread some big topics from my Brindlewood Bay posts, but I expect you to slog through in detail just in case there’s an odd stray new thought.

Since the greatest creators steal liberally, I’m once again going to pitilessly raid Morgue’s store of hidden goblins for Part 3 (coming April 26th), because we’re talking about spies and the basic problem of the genre: you can’t trust the people giving you the mission. I’m going to slightly casually dismiss the artistic validity of all but a handful of carefully chosen spy fictions: carefully chosen to support my emerging thesis that the thing we need most in roleplaying games is a safe word, but that we can’t live with the power that would give us. Since I don’t know more about the world of BDSM than I learned from the almost-romance on CSI between Grissom and Lady Heather, I’m going to overly-hastily wrap the part up by re-litigating the peccadillo of whether there is such a thing as out-of-character.

At around 15000 words in, we’ll finally get to Night’s Black Agents, and this is where it starts to get really brutal. I’m coming out swinging against “trad” games, skill-lists, clues, and experience points. The biggest target of all though, is going to be player choice and free will. By the end of Part 4 (coming May 3rd), you’ll be ready to burn the whole thing to the ground and piss on the ashes of your Gumshoe horde. I’m going to paint this as a chain of design failures originating in AD&D, and then I’m going to turn my ire on the Robin Laws’ Iconic/Dramatic dichotomy. I’m going to feel a bit sad that BubbleGumShoe got burnt up in the fire, but it’s for the best.

Part 6 of the sequence is going to reveal that any thoughts on Running Dracula as a spy is a misdirect, since he didn’t appear in my version of the game, but I’m going to try and explain all the problems with that in Part 5 (coming May 10th). I’m going to explain how the story in Dracula Dossier is nonsensical, making the argument that you’re better off with the classic no-thought railroad than this junk. I’m going to cast aspersions on the book’s understanding of genre, such that it delivers neither spies nor, actually, vampires.

I only needed 5 parts for Brindlewood Bay, but in Part 6 (coming May 17th) I’m going to Monday-morning Quarterback a year of my own life to think about how this could have been a good game and gone well, including asking the question on everyone’s mind: couldn’t this have just been an Apocalypse World hack, like all other good roleplaying games?

Part 7 (coming May 24th) will bring the sequence to an end, reflecting on whether there was any point in writing all this down. We’re going to take a hard handbrake 180 degree turn on the whole whiny nature of the posts up to this point to argue that the people who propose alternatives to clue-chains and reconstructing GM characters’ stories have fundamentally gotten the wrong idea about how to correctly roleplay.

Will there be an epilogue, of apologies, of stray thoughts I somehow couldn’t fit into this excess, and responses to the well-deserved criticism of my intellectually bankrupt exercise in self-flagellation (with collateral)? You can bet $1 there will be – but that part isn’t written yet, so we’ll find out together.

Hamish specifically asked that I provide forward-looking links as each part went up so he could read this on his phone and I’ve worked hard to pitch every section in my best clickbait stylings, just to give him that extra bit of incentive. Go on: click click click.

KapCon: A Personal View

In the recent past we had the return of KapCon to this “post pandemic” world, and as I’m in contention for being the longest-attending player, I thought I’d offer some thoughts about what KapCon has been to me. The intent here isn’t exactly to produce a realistic and detailed history and I suppose if someone wanted to fact-check some claims and produce something a bit more rigorous I’d endorse that.

I’m not absolutely sure whether my first KapCon was ’95 or ’96, but I’m reasonably confident it was ’95. I was a gormless and socially awkward teen, and I am almost positive that I first heard about KapCon from George Sadlier, who I knew slightly via the pre-internet message boards on Fido.net. Fido.net was a bit like the internet, except that it was small enough that it was possible to have a human conversation with someone. The small tendril of Fido.net with which I interacted included people from all around the country, but the way I remember it, the Wellington contingent were the most active. At the point I joined Fido.net, I’d played quite a bit of D&D, and virtually everything else was just rumours and books whose covers I’d seen in the second-hand bookstores where a tween with no cash goes to buy their roleplaying games. I’d played a handful of sessions of Shadowrun, 1st edition with other online friends. I was very interested at the time in Game Mechanics, and I think I’d seen FUDGE, and an outline document on GDS that might as well have been in Arabic.

KapCon was hosted in those days at the Museum Hotel in Wellington and the entry fee was an eye watering amount to a kid – I seem to recall it was around $60, or 12 weeks of pocket money. A princely sum, which luckily I think my parents paid in the end because I’m not sure I actually had that much money available at the time. I’d just purchased Lord of Chaos, by Robert Jordan as a Trade format paperback a few days before and that took my spare cash. Or, it could have been the next year and I’m conflating events from 2/3 of my life ago – there’s probably a way for one of those earlier organisers to check. The venue was awful, even to a kid. It was very very loud, and I remember a distinct demographic of under-socialised geeks who weren’t entirely sure this wasn’t a competition of some sort. It was also some kind of organisational SNAFU, because they were chronically short of GMs. So short of GMs that I (a 14 (or 15?) year old kid nobody there had ever met in meat-space) got a ride back to my house and retrieved some RPGA-approved AD&D 1st Edition tournament scenarios that I had previously acquired so that I could DM them at the con that day. I spent at least one of the rounds painstakingly copying game statistics from the module onto hastily-printed (on a dot matrix!) 1st ed character sheets so that I could run it. You can imagine my incoherent and crotchety old-man ravings on the soft landing that is “Adventure Squad” for the youth today!

The only GM I remember from those first couple of years was George, because I sort of knew him already. The only games I can “remember” playing were D&D in a few different flavours, and Shadowrun. I think I may have played Battletech, but maybe the huge models just made an impression on me. The Shadowrun sticks in my mind because in those days the convention was supported financially by the RPGA, and there was a prize awarded for the best player in each session, which I won in that session. I don’t remember exactly how this prize was decided, but I think there was a STV-type voting system between the players, with the GM counting double – something like that, unless it was, as most old-school games really are, GM Fiat ™ with a diaphanous haze of system obscuring the truth. In my venerable 1st Ed Tournament scenarios, there was a far more elaborate marking regime which I diligently used – damned if I can remember any specific answers now though. That prize was $50, so because my parents paid the entry fee, I came out of KapCon with both new experiences and actual net monetary value gain, albeit in the form of a voucher.

I think it was ’97 when the con shifted venues from the Museum Hotel to the Willis Street “Hotel and Convention Centre”. By this time a couple of my school gaming friends were also in attendance, though that group was experiencing a little fragmentation. I remember the Willis Hotel being a supremely uncomfortable gaming environment; maybe there were more games, but the place felt crowded and hot. I remember having to literally shout in one game just to be heard. They were once again short of GMs, and so George asked me what I felt comfortable running and in response to my response he sent me a Shadowrun 2nd Ed scenario. I realised when I got to the con that while the characters had names and details, they didn’t seem to have game stats, so I hurriedly spent the time between sessions trying to quickly bodge 6 playable characters together with the minimum intervention of intervention in the archetypes from the book. This was my first encounter with some of the giants of the scene, who’re still around to some extent – I definitely met the Giltrap sisters, Idiot, and Dan L’Estrange. The big names amongst the GMs have largely otherwise escaped my recollection, but the definitive star of that KapCon was one Baz Clarke, then somewhat differently styled. There was a huge buzz around the way he’d played every round and made it his own. At the time, I associated most of these people with the (in)famous Wellington by Night game, something just a bit beyond my 16-year-old-brain’s comprehension.

Running Time after Time for a group of experienced adult players has stuck in my memory as somewhat akin to running ahead one of the bulls down those twisty Spanish streets, hoping they’d follow and not gore you too badly as they passed by. I’d never encountered a group so capable of taking hold of a scenario and driving their own agendas. The railroad was absolutely totalled by the end, as they thought of all kinds of avenues for action that the scenario writers hadn’t anticipated and refused to engage in simple ways with the ones they had thought of. It’d be easy to think of that with hindsight as a failure in game mastery, but I have had it as a kind of talisman in my mind of what an active and engaged playgroup can do to elevate a game. It’s the first time I think I encountered roleplaying where the GM wasn’t in fact the star of the show.

There’s no true line of “facts” in play here, but I think there are a few aspects worth dwelling on for a moment. I don’t know how it felt to the grown-ups in the room, but to me, KapCon felt and acted like a manifestation of a larger and more active community. I sensed a hidden landscape of social connections loosely tied by this player who’d also been in that other GM’s game. It seemed like an active market for recruiting players, and after the ’96 con I player briefly in a complete stranger’s D&D game before the logistics of a family made that impossible. Just in really simplistic terms, it was a place where a completely unknown quantity (me) felt pretty welcomed. The games I ran were almost certainly the kind of thing that a quarter-century later I’d look down on with utter disdain, but I remember no negative feedback of any kind from those early years.

KapCon ’98 was at the Victoria University Students’ Association. The shortage of GMs was once again dire, so there were a few veterans who ended up spontaneously running “on demand” games for all 6 sessions. The games were sorted out on a giant whiteboard where you could see things filling in real time. The hot property was George’s Voyager, a sci-fi game not derived from the new Star Trek show. This KapCon was a bit of a turning point in my career as a GM, because it was where I first ran face-first into the problem of how to actually write a game. The Orb of Kythianos was a 20th-level AD&D 2nd adventure that I felt confident to offer because surely everyone at the convention was familiar with the premier roleplaying game of the age? I’d play-tested the game with my home group, and all the nuts-and-bolts seemed to go okay. A decade+ later, when Luke and I were properly acquainted, he, in his always-kidding style, confessed that was the worst game he’d ever played at KapCon. I remember it that way too. The system mastery needed to play or DM a high-level game just wasn’t present, and when I looked over those notes when doing a massive clean-out when I bought my house a couple of years ago, I could see that the ideas in play were basically incoherent. The game also ran over-time, but at least it went better than when I tried to run it at Buckets of Dice later that year, where not only was it equally much of a slog, but it ran over time on their 4 hour sessions. Slow to learn! Having my TORG game fail to attract enough players to run that year was, in hindsight, merciful.

This KapCon was where I started to really discern the currents of popularity, and the differences in skill level amongst the GMs – not just myself. I mentioned that Voyager was popular, and there were a few other games in high demand, but my TORG offering wasn’t the only “prepped and ready” game to fail to run in the same rounds as Martijn was running his Xth number of improvised D&D outings in a row. I started to notice differences in GMing style, and in particular I noticed that some of the high-demand GMs weren’t that great at voices (a speciality of mine), or funny (am I funny?), or telling stories of ultra-high complexity (darn)… but their games ran on time, and they were good at actively distributing spotlight time. They had a set of skills I’ve called “Game Management”, ever since.

I think the con must have been growing substantially in this period, because KapCon ’99 was at the club rooms for the Netball Club in Hataitai, and I remember that as being even more outrageously packed and loud. I don’t absolutely remember if I ran anything, but I don’t think I did. I remember playing Castle Falkenstein, which was the last time I ever role-played with Richard Dagger. Maybe it was the venue, as loud, and close, but I remember retreating from active participation at the table. It seemed like maybe that vibe of competing to shine had gone too far, but I left the round 6 D&D game I’d played having basically not spoken. I felt utterly desolated by the experience, and decided I couldn’t be bothered anymore. The only thing that sticks in my mind as a kernel of future good times was that this was the first time I encountered Deadlands. I didn’t get to play it, but one of the convention prizes was a life-sized standee of Brom, one of the named villains of the thing, and I’d paged through a rulebook. It’d be a long time before I got on that train.

There’s no way to check, but my sense of that time was that the community had fractured a bit too. I think Fido.Net’s volume of traffic had dropped below viability, and the big Wellington by Night game which had seemed from the outside like a community-builder had fallen into in-fighting and I heard many tales of bitter recrimination. I also lived in Christchurch by now, and KapCon is a Wellington activity.

In 2004, give-or-take, I moved back to Wellington. The scene at that time was organised through an online Bulletin Board, with a healthy second longer-form community pulsing away on LiveJournal. The whole landscape of who’s who had changed a lot, so it never felt like coming back so much as going somewhere new, hopefully somewhere better. This is about when my own blogging started, so in theory I could do the academic thing and fact-check everything from here-on-out, but I’m too lazy.

By this time there was more public-facing activity than when I was a kid. There were lots of open events that could be attended by anyone who was interested, there wasn’t the same “by invitation” feel once you were beyond KapCon. There was a big LARP in May, and CONfusion in August. Not too long into this period Dale kicked off his Fright Night mini-convention. Somewhere in here the new Big Names on the scene, Luke, Nasia, and James Plunket, founded WARGS, a regular meet-up. It was easier than ever, easier than now, to meet other gamers, talk about what was interesting to us, and get actual play-time with people.

At my first KapCon back, 2005, I just played games. I don’t have any specific memories of what I played, or with whom, except that I remember Susan Harper’s pitch for her Faerie game, that I didn’t get to play – the pitch was based around a solid riff on David Bowie. KapCon by now had also introduced having a big LARP in the evening. I didn’t play in whatever LARP they had in 2005, but I did in 2006. The LARP was something of a universal experience, since it catered for around half of the whole convention. The other semi-universal experience of KapCon was the after-party at Norm’s. That was how I met Morgue, perhaps Wellington’s most famous gamer (he’s been on the radio, don’t you know?). I’d heard of him, and the “Alien”-themed games he’d run, and we’d conversed over the internet. Morgue was on the leading edge of the kind of gaming that was emerging to replace the pure mission-based stuff that had been the mainstay of the hobby for, what, 35 years at that point. It was a movement I’d spectacularly failed to understand in those first few years, to the point of publicly calling out Steve Hickey’s best-GM prize as a reward for cheating, since he didn’t have to actually prep the game, just turn up and let the players do the work. We’ve reconciled since.

The after-party at Norm’s house is, I think, the central key to understanding the KapCon experience in this period. It was “unofficial”, but almost everyone would go, and there was a tradition at the con. Each person had to tell “their favourite KapCon moment”, and “their favourite Jon Ball moment”. There’s a kind of intimate expectation in that construction, that not only would everyone there be interesting enough for everyone to hear, but that we’d all encountered one Jon Ball and had something memorable to say about it. I had actually had a Jon Ball experience, so even Johnny-come-lately newkidontheblock didn’t need to feel left out. It was a party that started late, and went later, with a hot-tub and I definitely remember going home more than a bit tipsy, not only on alcohol, but on the giddy experience of having taken outrageous positions on things and having lively debates about it all.

I struggled mightily with running convention games in this period. I tried a lot of different genres and styles trying to figure out how to do this stuff well. I think I ran almost universally bad games, cringe-inducingly bad games, with all the thought in the wrong places. I would often have just a kernel of an idea that might work as a centrepiece, but no real idea of what the story around it might be or what kinds of characters might work. I spent a lot of time staring at a blank page, scratching down ideas, and generally there’s not that much to show for it at this stage. It was writing up a semi-successful, by which I mean, not outright disastrous, game Spirit of the Tentacle, which started to get me out of that hole. The Scenario Design Contest prompted me to actually confront the weaknesses in my games, and think in advance about how to fix them.

I want to belabour this point, that KapCon felt like an appendage to a wider gaming environment. It was also an advertised experience – I’ve got the flyers to prove that. I think I was pulled back in by Mike Foster, who remains one of the most in-demand GMs two decades later, but there were numerous vectors for entry, each with its own intrinsic value. At the con itself there was a sense of shared experience through the LARP and Norman’s house-party, and while admitting my games were terrible I’d like to see that also as implying a low-ish barrier to participation. Even though I’d never run a good game at KapCon, I still got players willing to turn up and do their best. There was a palpable buzz before and after these conventions, so much so, that it was reasonably common for people to request re-runs of popular games they’d missed on one or other online platform. For that to happen, you really need three ingredients – firstly, you need public information about the games before the convention, so you can get sign-ups and let people know what you’re offering. Public calls for play-tests, and reportage on those play-tests builds numbers for the con, and makes it easier for people to enjoy what they’re expecting to get once they’re there. Secondly, you need the games to be good, which you get by… playtesting. Lastly, you need somewhere afterwards to discuss what you played and what you missed playing. In this light, KapCon itself is more-or-less one third of the experience.

This isn’t to say there weren’t problems and imperfections. I am deeply ashamed to admit that I turned up to a few Sunday mornings with no real remaining capacity to participate in a useful way. I was far from alone, no-shows after a very late night were common; in hindsight, those people were at least honest about whether they’d add value at the table, perhaps even moreso since an absent player is often less of a drain on energy than a non-participating one. The LARP also pulled a lot of energy out of Round 3, so KapCon felt at times like it had shrunk from 6 rounds when I was a youth to three rounds (first and second rounds day 1, round 2 day 2), since the clean-up also seemed to take a lot longer at the new (better) venue of Wellington High. Somewhere around 30 I realised I needed to sleep, and I started consciously doing only 5 rounds out of the possible “7” and making sure I got to bed as early as practical each night. There was also the intractable problem of the sub-convention held by the RPGA within KapCon. It was vexing that people would turn up, sign up unwittingly for their alternately-timed con, then be locked out of the rest of the experience.

Around 2008/9 I think the energy started to ebb a little. Facebook began killing all other forums for social engagement online, and the LARP community began to create their own spaces. When Chimera launched in 2008 using Diatribe instead of NZRaG, I think a decent amount of chat went with it. There was no crystal moment of change that I’m aware of, but when I left to live in the UK at the end of 2014, I felt like the scene had become atomised. I think all the people I’ve been in regular games with since 2010 or so were personal introductions, rather than online or convention meets, or open invitations. That probably reflects a stage of life thing as much as a community thing, but at that time, I don’t think there was a hub I could have engaged with had I wanted to.

Around this time, KapCon replaced the RPGA sub-con with the Games on Demand sub-con. The idea is sort of appealing – instead of just playing the specific games scheduled a month or so in advance, just decide on the spur of the moment what you wanted. Well, provided someone else had spontaneously decided to offer what you were going to demand in that round. I participated as a “facilitator” a couple of times, but didn’t enjoy the pitching/selecting process, or there not even being enough GMs leaving you to “demand” from yourself. The year I ran In Spaaace for 10 players as the last GM who hadn’t whisked off a fanbase was the last year I volunteered to GM there, and I’ve only been back as a player a couple of times, once to literally demand Hamish run me his James Bond ashcan. It turns out that Games on Demand people are a bit sad about you actually demanding games, but will acquiesce with grace under that pressure. I guess I’m not that sold, but the good news is that I don’t have to be.

My holiday in the UK was pretty much gaming-free, so I can’t really speak to their scene much. I went to DragonMeet a few times, for the panels, went to a couple of Indie-game meet-ups which were universally terrible, and then I wombled back into Day 2 of KapCon 2017 to find that it was pretty much the last thing standing. CONfusion? Dead. Fright Night? Dead. NZRaG? Dead. SDC? Well, I’ll always be the last and most winner. The LARP scene seemed to be largely invitation-based LARPs; I don’t think Chimera was even alive, but to be fair, I haven’t actually checked so it could have been.

KapCon has been run by basically the same people wearing different hats since those halcyon days of 2004 – that’s a long time, and I think the con is aging with them. When I started going, I felt like I was perhaps 4/5 years off the average age, under it. When I came back from the UK I felt like I was perhaps 4/5 years off the average age, over it. I would love to do a longitudinal study on this, but I’m guessing that if you took into account facilitating in Games on Demand, that the same dozen or so GMs would, over time, account for half of all games ever offered. That’s a lot of dedication, and it pays off in lots of little ways. The worst game I’ve played since I’ve been back from the UK would probably have been a top-5 game when I started this experience. The timetable is more-or-less filled with games before the con begins, so there isn’t quite this frantic on-the-day search. Games almost always run to time too, which has its benefits.

I don’t think it’s the responsibility of the convention organisers to rebuild a community hub and convention calendar, to restore the blogging culture that was a central part of building buzz, or resurrect a host of other things that used to be. I also don’t know that its exactly their job to read the tea leaves and figure out the future. The recently-founded KiwiRPG represents one possible future, where KapCon can act as a conduit for their products, providing both games and “new hotness” to pull in new players. I think they could all learn from Dale Elvy’s example on this front. When he launched EPOCH, he roped in other GMs so that there was always a game available during a convention. He advertised that all everywhere his light touches, but isn’t a social media guru. He repeated that effort this year for Arcane Crimes Division. Another method of rebuilding a shared experience would be something Hamish Cameron’s done at least twice now: run continuous-world games, (he’s previously buried this in games on demand, and this year when it was more obvious went up a bit late to get any traction). Is there an appetite for panels? It’s been tried without luck, so I don’t think so. Maybe a live recording of one of the local actual-play podcasts? I’m not sure what the advantage would be to the podcast – why not just record that at home? Is the higher average standard of games a problem – do we need things to be worse so the barrier to entry is lower? What if we got that dozen longstanding GMs together to ensure genre/style coverage? There’s lots of ways you could go on these topics.

KapCon 2024 was almost another missed con for me. I was so busy in the second half of 2023 that my head was spinning. But, Dale had asked me to participate in his grand launch of his new game, and I believe quite strongly in this game, so I ran my somewhat-unready scenario for Arcane Crimes Division, which committed me to coming. Once I was coming, to make up the numbers on the timetable I finally succumbed to the siren lure of phoning a game in and ran zero-prep Cartel. That might need its own post, but for the purposes of a personal history of KapCon, it was the first game I ran that I was happy with since 2010’s A World of Possibilities, so the second game overall.

Having had a break for the past few years in the “during covid” years we have reached a Lagrange point in the momentum. It’s a good moment to reflect on where the con has been, to maybe think about what we’d like it to be in the future. And then volunteer to make it happen.

Films of 2023

It’s becoming a trend that each year I feel like I’ve watched fewer new movies. Thanks to Letterboxd, I can verify this impression with total numbers, distribution of ratings, viewing numbers by week, or a number of other interesting statistics.

• 2018 – 146
• 2019 – 157
• 2020 – 162
• 2021 – 181
• 2022 – 144
• 2023 – 151

Which sort of implies this year is pretty typical in terms of total numbers, but the number of new-to-me films is way down this year – 73, compared to 110 in 2021. It’s been a year where new film hasn’t grabbed my imagination for whatever reason. I’ve seen just 44 films released in 2023, compared to 64 films released in 2022. There’s some bleed, of course, where I watched some 2022 releases this year. Given I saw something like 40 movies at NZIFF this year, that really points to a nadir of cinema-going in 2023. Looking ahead to 2024, I’m also not super-excited by much on the release slate except for Dune 2.

In 2023 I stopped avidly rating movies, partly because when I looked back at the hot-take ratings I’d given in 2022 and into the first part of 2023 there was a disconnection between what I’d rated and how I interacted with it. When I first watched Bullet Train last year, I gave it 3.5, but I’ve watched it twice more with relish, but I rated Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at 4 walking out of the screening without it having impinged on my consciousness again. The main disadvantage of this comes now, where I don’t have a quick and easy list of 5-star movies to pick for my annual summary.

This year was also a poor year for cinema in that the number of 1-star films I watched at least some of was higher. I don’t tend to track films that I don’t finish, because I always think that until the credits roll they could always still pull something out of the ether to get good-enough overall. I think it was Hitchcock who said something like if your opening is intriguing and you stick the landing, it doesn’t matter too much what goes on in between. I didn’t finish Knock at the Cabin, Assassin Club, 65, and probably a few others that I don’t now recall. But I did manage to slog my way through a couple of absolute stinkers for which I’ll now provide due warning…

The Bad

Leave the World Behind [$-, Sam Esmail]

A family go on holiday to a remote AirBnB mansion, and while they’re there some kind of invasion or attack disables the whole of the USA. The characters dimly experience the periphery of this total collapse from their seclusion. This is a thriller with no action, it’s a character study where we never see below the surface, its a social commentary with no society, a mystery without a solution. It is pure simulacra, and has absolutely no value or interest. I am angry this movie exists.

I Like Movies [$950, Chandler Levack]

This bildungsroman is about a young wannabe film director and their final year of high school. Watch and enjoy as this narcissist methodically abuses and alienates everyone who ever expresses any kind of friendliness to him. I think the point I knew there was not going to be a redeeming feature of the film is where the little sociopath tells his best friend from grade school that he’s a “starter friend” and at college he’s going to find his “real friends”. I deeply regret staying to the end of this film – 15 minutes should have been enough to warn me that there was nothing to like here.

My Name is Alfred Hitchcock [$63k, Mark Cousins]

I think it’s fair to describe me as a Hitchcock fan. He’s leading my most-watched Directors stakes on Letterboxd, and I spent many happy hours at the BFI watching archive interviews and retrospectives. Even if I don’t love a lot of his films, he had a very well developed and highly articulated understanding of what cinema was in his time. Mark Cousins took this wealth of deep thought and decided to write a pseudo-autobiography going through his filmography and explaining it, but while Cousins reputation as a scholar is solid, I couldn’t recognise any of Hitchcock’s wit or imagination in this script. Nor could I recognise the callous monster who savagely manipulated his stars to get the performance he wanted. This is a first-base grab-bag of loosely connected ideas haphazardly thrown together with a grating voice-over. This is a film about Hitchcock which will tell you absolutely nothing about either his process or the oeuvre that resulted. It’s not going to explain Hitchcock as a person either, and it’s going to gloss over perhaps his most powerful skill: self-promotion. Hitchcock was perhaps the greatest early advocate for the power of branding, and he cultivated a persona designed every bit as much as his films.

This film is so utterly wrong on every level, so unbelievably stupid and pointless, my heart-rate has literally jumped 20 bpm writing this summary of something I saw nearly 6 months ago.

The Good

Kill Bok-soon [$-, Byon Sun-hyun]

Gil Bok-soon is an assassin who’s reached the peak of her profession, but has lost the enjoyment in her work that drove her early career. She’s trying to work out how to deconstruct a lifetime of lies and repression to connect with her daughter. But her employer just won’t let her go, because maybe he’s hopelessly, unrequitedly, in love with her. The story architecture here will be familiar from other underworld films like John Wick or The Villainess, and this film delivers action set pieces as good as anything else out there right now.

I think what tipped this over into 5-star territory for me was the delicate balancing of potential moods and emotions that kept it from becoming either sentimental or cynical. It was a film that trusted its audience to do a certain amount of inference, but then again, did provide enough cues that you’re never in danger of losing sight of the scenario. It also had a really sly sense of humour; for example, in the opening sequence, Bok-soon is fighting her Yakuza analogue, who’s clearly a skilled swordsman with the ego to match. Mid way through the fight, Bok-soon realises she’s going to lose the fair fight she engineered, so she un-engineers the fairness. It’s not laugh-out-loud, but it’s playful.

If you’ve enjoyed any of the recent slew of assassin films, I think you’ll find something to love in here.

Polite Society [$2.6M, Nida Manzoor]

Teenager Ria [Priya Kansara] dreams of becoming a stunt woman, and saving her sister Lena [Ritu Arya] from a marriage to a doctor that Ria suspects doesn’t love Lena.

This is a difficult one to discuss without spoilers because this is a film that will keep you guessing for its entire runtime. The switching between tones and genres was a drawback for some reviewers who felt wrong-footed rather than delighted at new revelations, but it worked very well for me. Suffice to say that the leads are charming, the technical craft on display is solid, and the slightly-warped perspective of this film is delightful.

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves [$208M, John Fancis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein]

Edgin [Chris Pine] leads a rag-tag group of adventurers in an attempt to pull off a heist, while winning back the love of his daughter.

With a budget of something like $150M and a box-office take of less than $300M, this is unlikely to get the sequels that I’d personally be keen to see. I think it failed on the grand stage for the reasons I liked it – it did a little hand-holding, but basically dived right into a complex mythology with obscure rules, in an unfamiliar setting. It then also didn’t really respect the underlying IP, because there’s no way you could replicate this film using any edition of the game it’s nominally based on. It was funny, it was fresh, it cracked on at a good pace to ensure there was no dull moment. It’s a great movie.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse [$690M, Joaqium dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson]

The return of Miles Morales to the big screen! I don’t suppose you really need me to recap this, so let me skip straight to refuting the complaints.

The biggest complaint I had from sceptics was that this is half a movie, with Beyond the Spider-Verse still to come. I think though, that if we don’t get a second half, this still tells three parallel and complete stories. Firstly, Miles deciding that heroism means never giving in, despite the odds. Secondly, Gwen Stacey realising that she needs to be her own person and included in that package is disappointing people you love. Thirdly, Spot becoming the villain he needs to be. Am I keen to see what happens next: yes! Am I dissatisfied with what I have so far? Not at all.

The Fires of Ra, Epilogue: Some of the people, Some of the time

When I write these things, I generally assume they’re too long and recondite for anyone to actually read – it’s a point of pride. Alas, this time out, at least two people read at least the last part, because a link was posted on an online discussion forum by someone, and then someone else had the absolute temerity to disagree with my central thesis. In case TLDR: roleplaying games require player skills that can be identified and taught. The riposte, however, was both pithy and deadly:

Isn’t the core activity of roleplaying games pretending to be someone you aren’t, who is somewhere you can’t go, doing things you’re not able?

Paraphrasing someone on the internet

I must now recant the entire series of posts – almost. It’s absurdly easy to think of examples of this, and they’ve been well debated as a general idea, so this may be familiar ground. The classic example is combat in games, which has no relationship with real-life combat (or so I’m assured, I have no real-life combat experience). The first time I became acutely aware of this fact was about 30 years ago, where G and I were playing fantasy beat cops in an homage to Terry Pratchett’s Guards, Guards. We wanted some information from a powerful person who didn’t want to give it to us, and a battle of wits was proposed: Chess. Unluckily for the uber-powerful Cleric with 18 Wisdom and 20 Intelligence was being played by the DM whose chess skills were good, versus the low-level average-statline avatar of someone actually pretty decent at it. Score one for undeserving player characters. The most hotly disputed version of this is the all-important interpersonal interaction, where, in particular, dumb teenage boys who lack the most basic tact, diplomacy, or effective guile, try and find the right way to persuade anyone of anything (in the game? out the game? either way…). A Charisma die roll is your only chance of advancing that narrative, at least, based on myself as a teenager. You’re playing an investigator, why do you need to do any investigating, isn’t that the basic function of the character?

I think we probably lose some interest in this whole concept when we move away from topics where there is any kind of objective metric for success or failure. If a character loses a fight because the player forgot they had a shield bonus, I think it’s easy to feel sympathetic. The most extreme version of a non-success event is a PC persuading a GMC to pick between two equal alternatives. In this completely impossible and synthetic edge case, would we have any kind of emotional response? Probably not. A lot of stories are essentially like that, where the possibilities branch out in numerous but essentially equal routes to nowhere in particular. Do we pick Quest A, or Quest B? The reason it’s impossible is because there’s always something that’s going to resonate more with a particular playgroup as story participants. Maybe on paper the quests are equal, but if one goes through the Water Kingdom, which is beloved of the specific play group, while the other goes through the marginally-less-enjoyable Fire Kingdom, that subjectivity still gives a flavour of success or failure to the ability to affect that decision. This is basically the kind of decision-making in Fall of Magic, and I can think of no other game that does this with such purity. In an investigative game, that might be whether you interview Suspect A or B first. But, what if you don’t even realise that there are suspects, or that you have to interview them? That’s where some basic genre knowledge is necessary, even if you’re going to end up relying on that Charisma die roll, or Gumshoe ability spend, rather than any competence on your part.

For TORG, there existed a real possibility that even with the player briefing, the players (generic players, not my carefully selected super players) wouldn’t understand what that legitimate field of next steps looked like. To decide between the Water Kingdom and the Fire Kingdom, you need to know those two options exist, and to make any meaningful decision about which might better suit your temperament, you need to know a bit about both kingdoms and yourself. I ameliorated that risk with what basically amount to coaching cues – cutting scenes of planning or exposition, forcing quick decisions, prompting ability uses, and so on. I relied on the system and the designers to have sufficiently balanced the encounters to be tough but winnable – if they’d undercooked or overcooked all the game mechanical stuff for the villains, the game wouldn’t have worked as well, but they got that all correct, so minimal cheating was needed on my part to keep things exciting. I haven’t tested this theory, but I expect if we did another game, their ability to identify valid routes through the scenario would be better and require less gentle shunting from me to keep them on the tracks. If you as a player have no idea what possible actions even look like, then it’s going to be tough for you to have a good time at the game.

Some games work around this limitation by having a very strong formal structure. EPOCH is largely bullet proof in my experience, while Wicked Lies and Alibis, whose structure is strong but just a little more flexible, can often take players a couple of rounds of accusations to really grok, and does (rarely) fail entirely for some players. At KapCon, I usually run two games within the 3 hours – the first is sometimes a bit flat, while the second has never yet been anything other than a riot. Fiasco 1st Edition takes a different approach, eschewing structure in favour of direct coaching cues for the players. In particular “Needs” are a strong cue for the kinds of story opportunities that the player should be pushing toward. The most effective coaching cues though, are the “Moves” from Apocalypse World, because they constrain and define the legitimate story possibilities within the game. My experience with the original game is well documented elsewhere, but in more structured but still slightly unfamiliar genres, such as Cartel, you have but to look at your character sheet to see spelled out all the options. If you’re ever unsure, lost, or stuck, you just look and decide, hey, I’m La Rata, so I’m not sure what to do, I’m going to “Chismosa” and just betray someone. Obviously you need to make some decisions about this, but is that basic story manoeuvrer going to be obvious to someone playing a crime drama using BRP? Doubtful, very doubtful. In theory, every game’s character sheet is an index to the kinds of thing you should be looking to do, but the way “moves” are structured and presented is very powerful. I have yet to see it “in the wild”, but my sense is that Dale’s new game Arcane Crimes Division will be similarly strong at delivering a very specific genre experience with few risks of being derailed or becoming lost in possibilities. It’s a very sharp design for replicating the buddy cop genre within a fantasy setting.

I think more sophisticated the players’ command of the story possibilities and the game mechanics generates a corresponding possibility of sophisticated experiences. Sophisticated doesn’t always mean better, but if you have a sophisticated understanding of the game it creates more possibilities. The Fires of Ra is a simple basically linear story the way I ran it. Playing it with a group already familiar with the genre, setting, and game mechanics, would have created the possibility of doing a smidgeon more in the time I had available. In fact though, I selected The Fires of Ra not because it’s a terrific story – which it is – but because it’s conceptually the simplest of the campaigns I’ve kickstarted. I don’t think I would have been able to condense When Cosms Collide, for example, because there’s just too much assumed world knowledge, multiple well-developed factions from different worlds, and the action traverses different cosms. I’d possibly give it a go with this group now, but I’m not sure I wouldn’t have to cut too much to really get the essential experience across in a day.

Turning at last to “Investigation”, there’s an obvious objective result: did we solve the mystery? There’s just a certain amount of fact-collecting that’s essential, and a certain effort in reconstituting the real situation from those fragments. But I think the point from my challenger is well taken – for example, in Monster of the Week, you go to a place where there’s a crime and you “Investigate”, so there’s no need to think in detail about what form that investigation might take, just roll 7+ and you’ll learn something. In Fear Itself, the closest Gumshoe analogue, you need to look at the skill list and pick a specific strategy. The classic dilemma is whether you’re going to “intimidate” or “reassure” the interviewee, because many scenarios will give you information for one or other, not both, as written. When we were running mysteries in AD&D 2nd, there were no specifically-investigative abilities, so you’d be completely relying on your own ability to describe the right detailed investigative approach to the scene of the crime, with the less strict GMs perhaps allowing an “Int” check to give you a hint. At some point on that transition from simplicity to complexity there’s a real diminishing return on the resulting sophistication of the narrative. I used to think Gumshoe had it about right, but a year of Night’s Black Agents has me revising my opinion toward simplicity.

Choosing whether you’re going to need to just roll “investigate”, or meticulously describe the forensic techniques is itself a design decision with no wrong answer. But if you’re going down that latter route as designer and GM, I think it behoves you to recognise the likely widening gap between the player and character’s skill level. Make sure they’re not going to continually be beaten at chess to the detriment of the game’s intent.