This year, I decided to enter into the 200 Word RPG Challenge. This is an awesome contest that forces you to be succinct and creative. My entry was not selected as a finalist this year, but I'm really glad I made something for it. I've seen a lot of the other entries and there are some fantastic (and crazy) ideas in the finalists.

Lots of these games don't use dice to resolve the actions in the game. My own entry uses cards and a trick-taking mechanic similar to bridge. But some games involve burning matches, drinking water, or throwing darts. All in all, the tight constraints in both time and word count make for some cool experiments. You can find out more about the contest here: http://schirduans.com/david/200-word-rpg-challenge-2016

This is my game as submitted for the contest. I'd like to add to it and clarify some things, but maybe that's not in the spirit of the challenge and I should just leave it as is :)

Township
“Beasts, rebels, and raw nature threaten your town. What will you sacrifice to survive?”

Setup:
Place the jacks and kings of a deck in front of you. Shuffle the rest.

“What talents do you bring to your town?”

Spades - Authority, Insight, Leadership
Hearts - Compassion, Connections, Inspiration
Diamonds - Wealth, Negotiation, Wit
Clubs - Labour, Fighting, Hunting

Take your suit’s jack and king, plus 4 cards.

Play:

• Dealer draws 4 cards and decides what Threat they represent
• ​She lays them face down, announcing each suit
• She narrates the Threat. Ex. “The nightly howling drove the miller mad. He ran into the woods.”
• Describe your character’s reaction
• Place a card next to a Threat card of the same suit
• Flip and compare all the cards
• If the Threat is higher, the dealer takes the trick
• If the player wins, they choose:

1. Take the trick and describe how the character helped themselves
2. Give the trick to the town and describe how it is better off

The dealer raises the stakes each round.

Ending:
If the town has fewer tricks than the dealer, it is destroyed. No one survives.
Otherwise, narrate your character’s fate based on their tricks:

Tricks        Ending
0        Ruined/Killed
1        Shamed/Hurt
2+        Rich/Lauded

So, as I mentioned in my post about tabletop games, I've been playing RPGs since I was a kid. This has waxed and waned, but it's certainly been going strong for the last few years. In the last couple of years, I've been trying new things. Despite "D&D" being used as short-hand for the entire medium, they are thousands of different systems to use. The most popular games are ones that follow the trends set by the ubiquitous Dungeons & Dragons. You and your friends play through the stories of heroes in a fantasy world. But there are tons in other genres, from the expected (like space opera), to the prosaic like a game about fire fighters, to totally off-the-wall ideas like a game about playing a living Twinkies on a post-apocalyptic Earth.

But there are many systems that don't use any kind of setting or genre, they only provide a framework in which you play through whatever stories you make up. My favourite of these is Fate Core. Fate was one of the first games I tried outside of D&D and I stuck with it through a few different variations. It was a breath of fresh air to have something that allowed so much freedom. And that's really where Fate shines, it lets you take all kinds of ideas and turn them into a game. Hence, the mish mash of heroes they use on their book cover (the image above).

From this point on, I'm getting into the nitty gritty. If you're not into RPGs, it may not make sense, but I'm putting this here as fair warning :)

The one big innovation in Fate is the aspect system. Aspects are short descriptive phrases that are an attribute of important things in the world (usually characters). So, in a Fate game about cowboys, a player's character might have the aspect "Fastest draw in the county". That is chosen and worded by the player, not selected from a pre-written list. It is true, and it will come up in game.

And that's why aspects are so interesting to me. We all find ways to describe our characters in RPGs, but in Fate, your description becomes a functional part of the character. In many ways, it breaks down the barrier between the narrative of the character and his mechanical actions (fluff and crunch, in RPG gamer terms). Because a player can literally direct the story using their aspects, it entices players to make "meaty" aspects, ones that have external story built in. The above aspect could be changed to "An even faster draw than my father". Now the character is still a quick gunslinger, but he also has a rivalry, either open or concealed, with his father, who was also a renowned gunslinger. Considering each character gets several aspects, it means that they  can have a lot of pull in the story.

However, if you had a whole party of characters constantly pulling the spotlight onto their own personal story (and for the most part, players love nothing more than a little spotlight on their character), you would have a very disjointed narrative. The system limits this in play by using a resource called fate points, and it tries to head this off at the pass (following our Western motif) with collaborative creation.

Each player gets a few fate points at the start of each session. They can use them to power an aspect to do something for them. If we go with the previous example of "An even faster draw than my father", we can see that this would help the character in a duel by giving him a bonus to his Shooting roll. But it could also be useful if he needed a contact in town. The player could invent one that knew his character's father and pay a fate point for it. Now, if the player is out of fate points, his ability to pivot the story around his character is gone. But, and here is another lovely bit of design from Evil Hat, if the GM uses an aspect to complicate life for the character, he gives him a fate point. For our gunslinger, this could come in the form of a band of outlaws looking to prove themselves but killing the prodigy in front of the whole town. It rewards the player for coming up with an interesting aspect to hang a story on, and as a GM, I love anything that gives me more direct hooks to the player. It prevents me from calling story and conflict down from the blue.

Now, before the game even starts, there is the collaborative creation. Your first session of Fate begins with the GM and all the players sitting down and coming up with the key parts of your game together. That includes both the characters and some starting locations or stories. This is such a great part of the game. When it goes well, you all feel connected and driven to play through the story that was created. The GM and the other players don't have to worry about the game getting derailed to follow one character's quest to see his sick grandma -- That quest, if it is important, will spring from that initial creation session. The creation is structured according to a process in the book so that each character has already met and interacted with a few of the others, they share common ground, and they even have some aspects that are inspired by these backstory crossovers.

After creating the characters and the setting together, the fun of the game is in watching it all play out. The system is fairly light in terms of tactical decisions and it uses a lot of abstraction in conflicts to make them go by simply.  This means that you can usually get to the heart of the story quickly and see how it all pans out.

Now, Fate isn't a perfect game. It certainly has drawbacks compared to some of the other systems I've played in. It doesn't handle long-running campaigns as well as something like Pathfinder or 13th Age. That's because there is little mechanical change from the early game to the late game. Character's capabilities can increase, both by getting higher bonuses and by getting wholly new skills, but it'll still feel much the same in terms of gameplay. Also, it requires creative buy-in and a desire to see a unique story play out. If you want a story and setting ready-made for you and your group, there are better games for that.

And, that core concept that I just gushed over (aspects), may not be what you want as a player or a GM. But as a writer who loves games, and who loves when mechanics are story are inextricably linked, I think it is amazing. I suppose it's no surprise that a game that rewards creatively worded phrases is a hit with a writer. I suppose if there was a game that let you draw for bonus points most artists would dig it as well. I will say that if you feel like seeing how a particular kind of story will play out (and you really are interested in the story), there are few better games for it.

For those who want to hear more about this, I'm going to write a post on how to get the most out of that collaborative creations in a little while. For a different kind of game that I also really enjoy, look for an upcoming post on 13th Age.

Of all the different interests I'll be talking about on the blog, this is the one that is the hardest to introduce. Most people don't know what it is, but a lot of the readers of a gaming blog will. I'm going to err on the side of caution for now.

I'm tempted to launch into a history lesson on where Dungeons & Dragons came from and where it is now. Maybe even a discussion of all the things that fall under the umbrella of "tabletop role-playing game". But those are probably all posts on their own. I'll jump right to the big points and let you pick it up as we go.

For the uninitiated, tabletop RPGs are co-operative games where you play through a story in the role of a fictional character. There are rules that determine how challenges are overcome and how the world reacts to the characters. You also can't win or lose. If you threw improv theatre together with an in-depth board game, you might get the right idea.

If you're already familiar with all that, then you probably think RPGs are great. There are very few people I know that have actually played an RPG and don't enjoy it. The spontaneous creation of story mixed with exciting adventures and codified character building certainly sucked me in early. It may have also had something to do with my dad teaching me to play when I was young and impressionable. Either way, I was hooked from a young age and have been playing these games off and on since then.

I'll be posting my thoughts on new RPGs that come out, lessons learned from my own games, and maybe some home-brew creations as well. Plus, I'll point the way to some of the great RPG sites and podcasts that are out there. I tend to like learning new systems and I'm not one to dig in and choose an absolute favourite. I will say that the FATE System from Evil Hat has been a front-runner for a little while though.