This is a continuation from Part 1, where I’m making stats for my mascot character/muse Kurumi in different games. This time around it wound up being a mixture of very appropriate stuff and very strange stuff: D&D4e, Toon, Panty Explosion, and Teenagers From Outer Space.
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My friend Jon is really big on Blue Ocean Strategy, a book and business methodology based around expanding from a saturated market into new territory in new and innovative ways. I’ve been thinking about different ways that RPGs might find a blue ocean (Story Games thread here), and I’ll be bringing Jon on board for a podcast about it in the near future, but right now I want to talk a bit about some tangential stuff that came from the book’s chapter called “Build Execution into Strategy”. This is not as relevant to exploring the potential of blue ocean strategies in RPGs, but very, very relevant to how I’ve been trying (and too often, failing) to sell my friends on trying out different games.
However awesome an idea seems to you, you have to demonstrate its merits to the other people involved. This is common sense, but it’s entirely too easy to get too wrapped up in your own ideas and forget. The book talks about a concept called “Fair Process” at length, and it’s the main focus of this blog post. Fair process aimed at gaining trust within an organization to carry out the kind of radical changes necessary for a blue ocean strategy, but I think the ideas here are applicable to most anything where you’re trying to introduce something new to a group, whether a massive company or a little gaming group. The stakes aren’t as high as for factory workers fearing that the new reorganization will cost them their jobs, but that doesn’t excuse laziness about the presentation.
With Mouse Guard, I basically made the mistake of throwing the rulebook at my friends and saying “This game is awesome! Read it so we can play.” I’m a voracious reader when the mood takes me, and my relationship with RPGs and not a few other things basically starts with sitting down and reading a book as a matter of course, to the point where it’s easy for me to forget that not everyone is like that. I’m sure somewhere there’s a group where everyone would dutifully sit down and read a 320-page book cover-to-cover when someone asks, but I don’t know those guys. Likewise, my verbal presentation of the game was… let’s say muddled and leave it at that. Some people no doubt do fantastic presentations of the games they want to play as a matter of course, but perhaps because of my orientation towards reading I apparently needed it spelled out for me by a book to really get it.
“Fair Process” is the idea that even if the outcome is going to be fair, people will be far more willing to accept it if they see the process leading up to it also fair. A reorganization scheme that will ultimately benefit employees can be met with outright hostility if a company doesn’t communicate what it’s doing. There may be times when you can slide by (as I managed to do with 3:16), but needless to say relying on luck isn’t a winning strategy. The book outlines what it calls the “Three E Principles of Fair Process”, all of which are necessary to create a perception of fair process to get people on board.
Setting aside the marketing jargon stuff, the point is that from here on out I’m going to consciously try to have a much clearer and more deliberate approach to introducing new games to my gaming group.
We have at long last put up a free PDF of the Maid RPG scenarios that didn’t quite make it into the English rulebook. Go to the Resources page of the Maid RPG site, and click on “Five Additional Maid Scenarios” for the 24-page PDF.
In this episode I talk about the referential nature of geek subcultures, and how that affects and can be used by role-playing games. Nerds naturally reference stuff, and use that to communicate better by generating a shared subculture. The question is, how can RPGs take full advantage of that, in both play and design? This is another solo episode, because in some ways I like doing those better, despite the fact that it’s harder to come up with good topics for them.
Yaruki Zero Podcast #8 (42 minutes, 17 seconds)
Show Notes
This podcast uses selections from the song “Click Click” by Grünemusik, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website.
Very awesome caricature of Ewen courtesy of the talented C. Ellis.
I haven’t done a “Role-Play This!” post in ages–about a year!–and I found this one nearly finished while going through my draft posts. I may have to do some more. Anyway, here goes:
What Is It?
My Life as a Teenage Robot is a cartoon that aired on Nickelodeon from 2003 to 2007.
Nora Wakeman, retired pulp heroine and scientific genius, built a robot to protect the town of Tremorton and the world from threats. That is XJ-9, also known as Jenny. She is at once a powerful superheroine and an ordinary, likable teenager, and while she’s equipped to save the world in more ways than you can count, fitting in at school isn’t exactly easy for her.
Why’s It Awesome?
My Life as a Teenage Robot is one of those kids’ cartoons that’s not only for kids. It has this wonderful art deco style, and while it’s light and silly overall, you might be surprised at how sophisticated it can be. The writers have a knack for establishing a villain and then finding an awesome way to completely turn your expectations on their head. It’s hard to give an example of this without spoilers, but even the machine world of Cluster Prime doesn’t turn out to be what you’d assume.
The humor of it really won me over too. There’s an episode where it turns out Tuck (one of Jenny’s close human friends) is afraid to go on a ferris wheel not because he’s afraid of heights, but because he has a fear of wheels. The same episode has a mob of townspeople coming after Jenny, and one of them takes a bite out of his “torch,” which turns out to be cotton candy.
Despite Nickelodeon’s abject failure to make the series available on DVD, it has a strong cult following, as evidenced by how The Teenage Roblog site still posts up new fanart pretty regularly.
Gaming It
If I ever get around to finishing Adventures of the Space Patrol, I’m totally going to make a “Teenaged Robot Superheroine” archetype. Statting up characters like Jenny and her mother in a traditional RPG would require a system with some wiggle room. Tri-Stat or even Risus would let you be vague enough to represent Jenny’s seemingly endless array of weapons and gadgets, and someone who knows the Hero System well enough could probably figure something out with multipowers. Other characters like Dr. Wakeman, Vexus, and Sheldon likewise call for a flexible and cinematic approach.
A game that really captures the feel and storytelling style of the cartoon would have to be a little weirder than that. I’m thinking more of a free-wheeling story game that encourages all the players to inject random gags and contribute to the flow of the story. There is a definite sense that in a given episode there’s a sort of agreed-upon moral or conclusion, and everything works towards that, albeit often in the silliest way the writers can devise.
Of Podcasts
As I alluded to before, I’ve decided to slow down the podcasting a bit, not that I ever had much of a schedule to speak of. I’m slowly setting up a couple more interviews, but I have more than enough other stuff going on at the moment.
However, WalkerP over at The RPG Haven has started up a podcast of his own. The first episode, an interview with Cynthia Celeste Miller (of Spectrum Games), just went online today.
More on Raspberry Heaven
As you might have surmised, I’m gearing up to start playtesting Raspberry Heaven, and having entirely too much fun preparing the materials for it. I printed and cut out two sets of quirk cards, and even made a (flimsy) box for them. There was also a short thread on the game on Story Games, where it was pointed out (not for the first time) that the text doesn’t make it clear enough that the characters are all schoolgirls; I’m working on fixing that now.
I’m also working on scripts for 4-koma comics to put in the book, but I’m not having any luck finding an artist to hire who can actually draw 4-panel comics with screen tone. I may have to look into getting someone from Japan, something I’ve been wanting to figure out how to do anyway.
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