Monday, January 8, 2024

Capsule πŸ’Š Games – Part 2: Player Characters

Artist credit: Will Kirkby

Most people would be utterly aghast at the notion of an RPG where you don't get to make your own character. To many folks, they are one and the same synonymous. But why?

Video games don't have any hang-ups about this. Skyrim is cool, partly because you make your own character. But The Witcher is also cool, not even in spite of you playing as Geralt of Rivia, but largely because of it. Nobody has ever been like, "aw man you mean I have to play as Geralt?" No, people are like, "oh hell yes I get to play as Geralt!"

And yet I've seen so many RPG players get bent out of shape merely for having characters randomly rolled instead of personally constructed. I've seen players refuse starting packages like in Electric Bastionland or playbooks like in PbtA games. Which is a real shame! Those games aren't even forcing you to play pre-made characters. They're just trying to suggest details about the world and its inhabitants through character options. That's a really interesting and thoughtful application of design.


A Hero is You

The thing which inspired this entire conversation to begin with was the Kickstarter for RRD's upcoming game Eat the Reich. This game has a very specific premise:

EAT THE REICH is a tabletop roleplaying game in which you, a vampire commando, are coffin-dropped into occupied Paris and must cut a bloody swathe through nazi forces en route to your ultimate goal: drinking all of Adolf Hitler's blood.

Sounds fucking crazy, right? To that end, they made a bold decision:

EAT THE REICH doesn't contain rules for making your own characters - we wanted to focus on making the pregenerated ones as impressive and evocative as possible instead. 

I encourage you to read through the Kickstarter campaign and see their six characters in all their glory. They're something to be proud of. Obviously I could totally come up with my own awesome vampire commando if I wanted to. But... I wouldn't turn down the chance to play as one of these six.

Of course, this isn't actually anything new. TSR's Marvel Super Heroes was the granddaddy superhero RPG, which many consider to still be unsurpassed. While there were indeed rules for randomly creating your own character, the default assumption is that players take control of their favorite heroes from Marvel comics. Most of the adventure scenarios published for this game were also built on that assumption. A whole generation of gamers was more than happy to play as Spider-Man, Wolverine, and the Hulk. Wouldn't you be?


Something Radical

Sometimes we learn best from the things which shock us. That put us outside of our comfort zones. An example I keep coming back to is Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast. It's a really good one. I could not sell my players on it. Not only do you not get to make up your own character, but you share the characters as well. From one episode to the next, different players might trade the same residents back and forth. There may even be occasion for someone to play multiple characters in an episode, taking control of a bunch of guests staying at the B&B.

I think this confuses so many players because they take it for granted that their primary creative input in an RPG is to craft a character all their own. "I get to make this part and add it to our story. The game belongs to the game master, but this part is mine." I think that's a failure of imagination. As a collaborative exercise in creativity, there's a lot more that anyone at the table could contribute than just a race + class combo they rolled up. There are so many unique possibilities to explore if you start from the assumption that everyone at the table can own every part of the game equally.

I'm far from the first person to compare YBB to a traditional stage play. There are important differences to be sure, but I think it's illuminating. If you're an actor taking on Shakespeare, you're assuming a role that's been played by thousands of other actors for centuries. But for the brief length of your performance, you get to own that role. Your Hamlet is different from everyone else's Hamlet. But also, maybe in the next production someone else in your troupe will be Hamlet. Your take on the character does not diminish theirs. It enriches it.

And that's actual theatre! YBB is still an RPG, remember? You make the dialogue, you make the decisions, you make the plot. When you introduce this to a bunch of gamers, they balk at the restrictions. But if you showed this to a theatre troupe, they'd probably be a bit intimidated by the freedom.


More Comparisons

Josh's approach to defining capsule games was through comparison to other related artistic mediums. We can do that, too. Jay has said that YBB began its life as a Lady Blackbird hack, but also that another important influence is LARP. And y'know, LARP is in this weird position where nearly everyone who plays RPGs has heard of it, but very, very few of them know anything about it. A lot of you probably just picture a bunch of people dressed in renfaire costumes beating each other up with foam weapons. Which, sure, that's some of LARP. But that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface.

LARPs are played at conventions and festivals as big organized events over hours or days. They're also played in smaller, private settings you set up with your friends. Sometimes they're played solo, on the bus on the way to work. A genre I find illustrative is the "parlor larp." If you can picture a murder mystery dinner party event, that's one familiar example. But if you're curious what more there could be, here's a list of some publicly available LARPs to take a look at. 

So in the absence of what we traditionally think of as "crunch," what do you find when you crack open a LARP you download off the internet? Oftentimes, it's a pre-contained scenario. It may have setup conditions, narration, guidelines on play, creative prompts, and very often, pre-made characters.

We can come at this from another tradition. I myself have talked a lot before about Model United Nations and other convention-based FKR simulations. I find it very funny how often I'll talk to an RPG person and they're totally fascinated by the weirdness of the famous Braunstein experiment, and how they'd like to imagine trying such a bizarre and rare thing. And I'm like, dude. Literally tens of thousands of people play Braunsteins every year. Most major universities in the United States have a competitive "Braunstein club." A huge chunk of those host a yearly weekend-long Braunstein convention with a variety of simulations set up!

Having hosted many MUN simulations myself, I'm well-versed in the art of "writing" a Braunstein game. While there are many approaches to this, the standard in MUN is that all players are assigned a character. And this is sincerely like the most exciting thing about the game. You sign up to play in a Cold War sim and then everyone eagerly awaits to find out who gets to play as Kennedy or Khruschev or de Gaulle. Or like, you're in a Game of Thrones committee and you get to be a lord from one of the Great Houses of Westeros, or maybe one of the members of the Small Council. One time my team attended a conference that had a simulation of the committee of Batman villains. We sent two of our members, who were assigned the Riddler and Hugo Strange. Can you even imagine how fucking stoked you'd be to get the Riddler?

A MUN scenario contains some background information on the topic and important questions to prompt research, but the bulk of your player guide is just the character dossiers. Some simulations will give you a whole personality and set of goals, but I was more interested in trying to offer a list of assets, liabilities, and personal background information.


Back to RPGs

D&D has always been orbiting this idea. Roleplaying games are all about accepting a prompt and then doing your best to fulfill its potential. That's all character classes are, when you think about it. It's actually very rare to play an RPG where you truly make your character from scratch. The cunning rogue and the mighty paladin are both archetypes with a ton of tropes built into them, a ton of assumptions about who you are, what kind of person you're playing as. When you choose to play as a rogue, you're also accepting a lot of character details handed to you by the designers.

But of course, people have pushed against this for ages. Pushed against alignment restrictions, pushed against flavor features, pushed for more and more customization. More archetypes, more backgrounds, more something. Which isn't wrong, necessarily. It's expanded the game a lot. But maybe it's also a symptom of trying to make D&D the "one size fits all" game, where anything is possible.

There's something compelling about a game that has exactly 6 character archetypes that it's interested in offering. In many stories, the principal characters are themselves a microcosm of their world. There's a very real sense that Deckard Cain is the world of Bladerunner, that Conan is the Hyborian Age, that Barbie is Barbieland. I think a lot of RPGs would benefit from being a bit more particular in their vision.

I'll confess: out of all the cappy traits identified in part 1 of this series, this is probably the one I'm the least interested in, personally. I've been cooking up a capsule for a few years now and it hits almost every cappy quality except for this one. Maybe that's just because of what I can sell my players on, though. I just know that I do still really love the experience of making your own character, coming up with your little guy, maybe drawing a picture too.

But I still wanted to begin my series with this post for a few reasons. One is that this topic is what inspired us to give a name to "capsule games" to begin with. But another is for that thing I said earlier: you need to be shocked out of your comfort zone. The RPG industry needs to break from its sacred formulas. If there's any trait of capsule game design which shows their unexplored potential the best, it would be this one.

Go to Part 3


-Dwiz

5 comments:

  1. Another excellent post full of good observations.

    Along these lines, I think of other early examples of capsule games (to use your term) with fixed characters. TSR's 1984 game The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game, by Dave Cook, was basically about playing the characters from the films. The published modules were run-throughs of the films, "scene" by "scene," with character sheets for the characters just as they were in the films. One player plays Indie, one plays his current girlfriend, one plays Short Stop, etc. There were also games like Avalon Hill's James Bond 007 RPG, by G.C. Klug, just before (1983) where you were expected to make your own "00" agent but the modules, published in slim boxed sets with lots of player handouts, were reenactments of the films, with all the non-Bond NPCs represented. You had your own "00," a fixed "character class."

    People complain about Dragonlance's "railroading" (for different reasons) but games like the Indiana Jones game are a major and forgotten context in which we have to understand Dragonlance. TSR published Tracy Hickman's DL1, Dragons of Despair, the first DL module, also in 1984. And it says, "Players may wish to use PCs from the DRAGONLANCE story, detailed on character cards at the beginning of this module. It is generally an advantage for players to use these characters rather than bring their own into the campaign." This is just like the Indiana Jones game that they published at the same time. The simultaneously released DL modules made the characters of DL modules even more into capsule characters, like Marvel superheroes or Indiana Jones.

    In 1985, TSR published the first Conan RPG (again by Dave Cook), in which players take the roles of Conan and his pals.

    This was all part of a mid-'80s trend of RPG encapsulation, if you like. Capsule games have low replay value and each module is a selling item, so designers have a motive to publish them. In theory, you might buy something new for each time you play. Toolkit games, by contrast, are one-time purchases that can be replayed forever.

    Even though one hears a LOT of griping about how Dragonlance is supposed to have ruined D&D, there's important earlier history: pregenerated characters were a NORM in earlier TSR modules, complete with given names. They were expected to be used in tournament settings but were available for home use, too. The original Tomb of Horrors used at Origins 1 in Baltimore, 1975, had pregenerated characters... Again, the idea is a one-shot product. If this was normal, why does Dragonlance get flak for its pregens? It's probably partly that these ones had full personalities and backstories (with romances, eww grown-up stuff!) that players were expected to play, and the modules were written with these specific character roles in mind. But DL is a great example of an early encapsulated game supplement.

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    1. My experience as a 13-year-old (other than paging through the *Q Manual* a lot) was being really confused about the scenes from *Octopussy* laid out in the module, which as far as I could tell had no connecting tissue between them (they were in the movie! they had to be there!) in the text.

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  2. Once we push back this far, it's easier to see that Character Class is at the roots of character encapsulation. If the choices are fighting man, cleric, and magic-user, there are only so many archetypes available, mostly interchangeable within their classes. As with your previous post, we can see a scale of "encapsulation"--or, in this case, something more like a scale of predetermined characterization--when it comes to PC roles.

    I'm sorry for this long comment, but you'd probably be interested in the bizarre flop of an RPG from Pacesetter Games in 1985, called Sandman: Map of Halaal. It billed itself as a breakthrough that you could just open and play, no character creation required: the definition of a capsule game. It also took place literally on a railroad. One of the most distinct early "capsule games."

    Anyway, I find it interesting to notice early examples of this right beside TSR's Marvel game from 1984, which you mentioned. It seems like 1984 was the year that TSR invested a lot into what we might now call "capsule characters" for its published games. Games for people who want to emulate specific mass-media fictions right down to their favorite characters. Game designers would sell a lot of products to an audience thirsting for curated experiences with little prep.

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    1. Obviously you're much better versed in the history of these things than I am (as usual) but I have this impression that the mostly-forgotten capsule games of the 80s and 90s contain some "flaws" that I don't see in the modern resurgence of these trends. For example, the idea of recreating the plot of a known story scene-by-scene is a very blunt and unsophisticated approach to adapting a movie into an RPG, so it doesn't surprise me that it got flak. Contrast this with how the Labyrinth RPG and the Dark Crystal RPG approach the same task and I think they've figured out a much smarter way of translating to a different medium. One which doesn't compromise on some of the unique strengths of RPGs in the name of fidelity to the source material. Likewise, games like Labyrinth and YBB counterintuitively manage to EXCEL at replayability compared to mainstream D&D campaigns books and Pathfinder adventure paths. They figured out what exactly makes something dull when replayed and how to avoid that, which the TSR capsule games didn't seem as concerned with (perhaps because, as you said, they were instead hoping you'd just buy the next capsule, then the next, then the next...).

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    2. Dwiz, I don't have any experience with the Labyrinth or Dark Crystal RPGs, but I believe you. If they excel at replayability, that's a big gain for this kind of prepared game. I wonder what they do that's different... I look forward to your next insights and promise not to write such a long comment next time!

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