I know that I have written on several occasions about my ongoing engagement with the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game (L5R); I’ve played in each of its iterations save the most recent translation into D&D rules, I’ve run games or helped to run games in most of them, and I’ve done some scholarly and semiformal work on at least a couple. It shouldn’t be a surprise to learn, then, that I’ve been recently engaged in yet another L5R game: Sapphire Ambassadors.
The game in question this time as it appeared on my screen when I set out to write this.
Sapphire Ambassadors has its origins in an earlier game in a campaign–a series of linked individual games taking place in the same overall narrative milieu–and had been intended to be a fun diversion from the main line of that campaign, a useful side-game to help flesh out the specific vision of the world in which the game’s story occurs. In the event, it became the concluding game of the campaign, some personal factors on the part of the specific milieu’s originator having led to the dissolution of that campaign’s main narrative line. It was something of a sadness; I’d done a lot of writing for the game before the decision to close out the campaign came down, and the originator is a long-time friend and colleague whose personal life is of some interest and concern.
Another game master–centralized narrator and referee–and I decided to press ahead with the game, anyway, allowing players who’d participated in the earlier games in the campaign one last chance to tell their characters’ stories and bring some closure to narrative threads that had been drawn out in those games. We also welcomed new players–we always do–and we tried out a few new mechanics to help enrich matters despite the looming end of the game-world.
In all, I feel the game to have been a success. I’m not pleased to see the campaign end, of course; I enjoyed playing in it when I could play in it, and I enjoyed running games in it when I have done that. I’ve learned a lot about how to do the latter, certainly, and how to design events for forum-based iterations of games. (I’ve got some work in progress that goes into some of that business, so I won’t go into great detail here. Later, I promise.) And I will be taking some of the ideas that I feel–and that players tell me–worked well into the campaign I am working on even now (see this and this for more information). How well it’ll continue to work, I don’t know. How long I can keep it going, I also don’t know. But, as Sapphire Ambassadors and its campaign wind down, I am reminded of why I do it.
Telling stories with my friends is fun.
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I noted in my previous post to this webspace that I am working on a Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) roleplaying game (RPG) campaign. Development continues on it, as might be imagined; I work on money-making jobs, after all, which take up time, and generating materials requires its own efforts and does not always go quickly. I expected as much, certainly, as I undertook to work on it. What I did not so much expect, however, was running into how much I have lost in the years since I last thought to do this kind of thing. I am running into…gaps in my knowledge, but I remember knowing a lot, and the…gaps are frustrating.
There’s a lot to work with… Image is from the Atlas of Rokugan, used here for commentary.
Admittedly, I’ve noted this kind of thing before, about having been able to immerse myself in things that I can no longer, given the different demands upon my time and attention and the many, many rewards that associate therewith. And I am not saying I would trade what I have to gain back what I had. It’s not like I actually sold it away, anyway; it’s less produce vended at the stand than fields that have been left alone, and while there are still fruits growing from that untended soil, there are a lot of weeds that have gotten in the way, and trees that promise yet better have sprung up amid the once-plowed rows.
A large part of what I’m having to do, therefore, is refamiliarize myself with the way things once were. It’s complicated somewhat by the advance of time; resources that once were available no longer are, and the resources that remain rely in large part upon what is now gone. It’s something similar to some of what I faced as a medievalist, really, and which others encounter in other places; we know there was stuff, because we have other commentaries on that stuff, but we do not have the stuff itself. So we have to reconstruct what we can, how we can.
I’m fortunate, though, that the game is as it is. For one, I’m moving a fair bit ahead of a particular point in the game’s canon, and avowedly doing so in a way that avoids a major, climactic event. It makes sense, therefore, that what comes after would also be different. That is, I am largely freed from constraints of the existing narrative–but I still need to address what happens with the major players in the game’s canon up to the point of departure. Were I playing in the game, I’d have questions about it; I have to expect that my players, for whom I am making the setting, would have similar questions.
Again, this ain’t happening. It’s still Drew Baker’s Second Day of Thunder, and it’s still used for commentary.
I’m making my way through things, slowly, certainly, in the moments between tasks. And I am glad to be doing such a thing again; there’s a peace to it that I appreciate and that I often need…
So here I am, writing again about roleplaying games in my own small, nerdy way. I am once again working on putting together a campaign for the Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) Roleplaying game, something I’ve done before. While I’m not (yet?) returning to that particular idea (who knows; it might go that way), the work does afford another opportunity for reflection and consideration.
Now, one of the things that the L5R property made much of, particularly in its earlier incarnations, was the player-driven nature of its storyline. From its origins as a collectible card game, it used player performance to drive the narrative represented in updates and new releases of cards and sets–and, eventually, the roleplaying game through which I was introduced to the property while still enmeshed in the mistake of thinking that I’d be a band director when I grew up. As I’ve played over the years, I’ve done as much as I could to remain abreast of the storyline and its developments, following even when the story reset itself as L5R switched hands. (Though I may be pilloried for it, I think the new version does some things much better than the older one–much better, in a few cases.)
Roleplaying games are, fundamentally, storytelling exercises, collaborative in ways that others aren’t (as Daniel Mackay asserts in The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art), and such things do much to build community and fellowship, as Gary Alan Fine finds in several studies across decades. This is true for L5R perhaps more than other properties, given its explicit orientation. More importantly, though, it encourages motion beyond the “canon” of the game–it has to, really, since without the willingness to move beyond that canon, the players participating have decided limits on what they can be and can do. And while it may be the case that a lot of play-groups look for the gaps in the story that they can fill, it is also the case that cleaving to canon too closely means the surprise of a good story…isn’t.
Consequently, as I thought about setting up my own game, my own campaign, and got started working on it, I decided I’d…move away from things. It’s something of a fanfiction move, I suppose, or it seems to fit with that descriptor–I’ve not done a lot with fanfiction, as such, although I am aware of the (sensible) assertions that much classic Western literature is, itself, fanfiction. (The Arthuriana I study certainly fits the model, Malory having refined works that expanded on Geoffrey of Monmouth as he expanded substantially from Nennius and Gildas–and then add Spenser to the mix!) I’m taking my point of departure from before the climactic events of the “canon” in either older or newer (as of this writing, at least) L5R; the milieu-shaping event simply does not happen.
Yet, anyway.
Nope. Not happening. Image is Drew Baker’s Second Day of Thunder, used here for commentary.
I am, as might be imagined, still in the process of development. I’m still working out how the setting will differ from the “standard” one–as it necessarily will, even before the players get to play in it. I have to know where they start to see where they can go, after all. I don’t know that I’m going to do the kind of thing I did in West of Rokugan, so many years ago; I don’t know if it’ll be needed or advisable. But it’s nice to have this kind of project again–among the many others I get to do.
I‘ve made nothing resembling a secret of the fact that I play tabletop roleplaying games–witness this, this, this, and this for some general examples. Nor yet have I made a secret that much of my involvement in roleplaying games has associated itself with the Legend of the Five Rings roleplaying game (L5R) in its several iterations–as witness this and its antecedents, as well as this and its antecedents, this, this, and doubtless others.
This is what it looks like now. Banner image from the current owner, Fantasy Flight Games, here and used for commentary.
It should be no surprise that, in the years I’ve spent playing L5R that I would spend time running games–and drafting work to help me do so. And, some years ago, when L5R was in its revised third edition (it is in its fifth at the time of this writing), I put together a campaign setting for the game, one I call West of Rokugan. I forget when I started working on it; I recall that I finished it in 2010, and I have learned a lot since that point. (Hell, I’d barely passed my prospectus at that point, and I still thought I’d have the full-time continuing teaching job I had then. Ah, youth!) I had thought that I might be able to move the group I was playing with at the time towards it, but, alas, it never happened.
What did happen was what happens to many roleplaying game groups: the group fell apart. Schedules conflicted, people moved, and somehow, we never did find ourselves in another game. Nor have I been able, in the time since, to get an in-person game going–and the edition of the game has updated twice since, anyway, so the stuff that I’ve got linked above is unlikely to play well with any of the online groups to which I have access.
But I have been thinking about running a game again, and I went back through my files to look at the things that I have done as part of the prep-work for doing so. Looking back over it was…strange; it is the most involved document I’ve compiled other than my dissertation, but it has…issues. Again, I was much younger when I wrote it than I am now, and I’ve learned at least a couple of things since that point.
It’s possible, of course, that I will adapt what I have in the older materials to newer systems. It’s more likely, however, that I will pull some concepts rather than pulling the materials directly. Some things, I remain proud of; others, not so much–but it is good to be reminded, from time to time, of who and what I have been other than in my working life. And it may be that somebody gets some use out of my old efforts; I’d be gratified to learn that it happened.
I have made no secret of my long-running play of tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs). Nor have I made it much of a secret that I am currently playing in an online one, another Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) game, if one using an older rules-set than the current. (It’s still one more familiar to me than the current one; RPGs update, partly to make more money, but games continue despite them.) And, as is common, I have a character in that game, one character whose thoughts and deeds I narrate in reaction to the thoughts and deeds of other players’ narration of their characters and to the overall milieu which has been presented. It is, as Daniel Mackay has described it, extemporaneous, rules-assisted, collaborative storytelling, and I have found it to be great fun across years.
Not quite this automated… Image from Giphy.com.
The game I am playing now has me playing a hunter turning clandestine security operative, and it dovetails with a concept I’ve often turned over in my head, playing L5R. There is a group of purportedly elite guards, and it has long occurred to me that they would be in position to be kingmakers or eliminate rising threats, and it has also occurred to me that their internal affairs analogue would be both present and fearsome. The character I am playing now is working towards becoming such, although that work is not going quite so well as I might like it to. (It’s a common thread with me; I’d like most of my work to be going better.)
The thing is, much about the character is at odds with who I am. There is little clandestine about me; I am open, perhaps too much so, and make little effort to hide. Nor am I so committed to causes as I would need to be to be able to act on their behalf; I am timorous in the main, averse to risk more than desirous of reward. I am certainly not an outdoorsy type, preferring air conditioning and indoor plumbing to open skies and tree-leanin’. (I remain Texan, however.) And I am aware that playing a character is, at best, a fleeting and transitory thing; I know better than to think that my experience in the RPG translates in any way to the real world.
I know that much of the allure of RPGs is escapist. That is, they allow players to inhabit other lives for a time, leaving their own behind. And they are or at least try to be fair, which the real world decidedly does not. And perhaps it is that fairness that I look for as I play, that notion that what happens happens not because the system is set against me, but because my own skills and choices, with some random chance at work, have led to such outcomes. I know I feel forces working upon me that I can hardly name and can worse understand, and I do not think I am alone; the idea that I have some control is a welcome one, time and again, at table or in online simulacra of one.
I have made more than one post speaking to my old nerdy habit of playing tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs), as well as posts regarding my thoughts about designing them. As to the latter, I find myself taking a fair bit of inspiration from Rich Burlew’s The New World series, hosted on Giant in the Playground; I’ve discussed the series elsewhere, as well. In that spirit, then, and working from materials I’ve posted in other places, I offer what appears below.
Seems someone had a blast. Image from Phys.org.
Having noted before that my attempts to develop an RPG worked from sixes, and knowing that one of the things that people tend to do is try to explain the machinations of their observable universe in terms they can understand–usually gods and the like until observational technology allows for other ideas to take firmer hold–it makes sense to me that any RPG milieu in which I might work would offer religious ideas. And since RPGs admit of things that do not necessarily occur in the “real” world, those religious ideas might even have some in-milieu truth to them. That said, I am not necessarily convinced by religious ideologies, myself, and even if I might compose what I call a series of hymns in another webspace, it is not as an act of worship that I do it.
The idea of an anti-worship, though, of a religion that abjures the influence of the gods, is an interesting one. (I admit to being inspired in part by an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, as well.) If I follow that idea, then, and the earlier materials I’d glossed, then I would seem to need six gods to steer away from whatever people I might focus upon for the RPG milieu. The Stupid God is one against which I have inveighed at length already in what may someday be a collection of verse I would release for publication. (It might be nice to earn a bit of money in such a way.) Such a god, one that revels in and promulgates folly, would seem to be one to abjure, one to send away from the self and towards opposition. The Angry God, which I have also mentioned in other writing I’ve done, would seem to be another; there are certainly things about which to be angry, and there are benefits to being angry at times, but I’ve had a lot of anger in me for far longer than ought to have been the case, and I have not benefited from it.
Those are only two, though, and I do not know that both should be shunned as such; I have no reservations about condemning the Stupid God, for reasons I hope would be obvious, but, again, there are times anger is merited, and the god of such a thing would be useful to have on hand at such times. What to do with the others is not yet clear to me, but it is good to have some idea of how to proceed, of what slots to fill–and there is always room for things to change and grow.
May the Stupid God not claim too much of that room!
In an earlier post, I make mention of focusing my tabletop roleplaying game (RPG) design efforts on a mechanical system that uses six-sided dice for ease of reference and access. It’s not the only such piece I’ve put together, though; for example, I drafted one on Rich Burlew’s work for another venue, and it is with Burlew’s comments in mind that I proceed. He makes the comment that mechanics and story should interact meaningfully; they should fit together, rather than one being a vehicle for the other or added onto it. Things should make sense together (despite the fact that the broader world does not, not by half). And since narrative requires milieu, and RPGs are narratives, the mechanics need to integrate into the milieu smoothly.
Shiny. Image from AnimatedImages.org.
That notion in mind, and knowing that I mean to use six-sided dice, I started looking for convenient “natural” sixes. Two emerged in short order: cardinal directions and numbers. The former might seem to be counter-intuitive; as typically represented, the cardinal directions are but four: north, south, east, and west. But up and down are also to be considered, making six principal directions and offering six points of reference: north, south, east, west, zenith, and nadir. It’s obvious upon being pointed out, really, but it’s not often pointed out that I’m aware of, so it seemed a useful beginning point.
The numbering takes a bit more explanation. But if I follow the tendency of RPGs to have human or humanoid player characters–“humans in funny suits,” to borrow one turn of phrase that Burlew is not alone in using–then a five-fingered hand suggests itself. I can count six numbers on one such hand: zero to five. If I add another hand, I can reach thirty-five without working through knuckles, as some finger-counting systems do. And that sketches out a base-six numbering system; zero to five on one hand, then back to zero with a finger raised on the other hand. The place-value even begins to situate itself.
Those two sixes, aligning neatly with six-sided dice, have their own implications. Some move in directions that will bear exploring elsewhere. Some, though, admit of more local treatment. For example, the idea of a body-based numbering system that invokes place-value, which I am told by those who study and teach math was quite a development, suggests that the narrative milieu is one that values arithmetic. It’s a strange thing to have emerge, particularly for the work of someone whose degrees are all in English, and not one that I had expected to emerge.
That’s part of the allure of stories, whether read or narrated along with others and the help of dice, that things emerge from them that had not been expected. There is often comfort in the familiar, certainly, and there is nothing wrong in itself in stories following predictable patterns. But there is something special about new and un-thought-of things popping up out of even basic background work that thrills as a writer. I can hope that, in time, such things will also prove to be to players’ delight.
I have made no secret, of course, that I am and have long been involved in roleplaying games, not only the iconic Dungeons & Dragons, but also Legend of the Five Rings and others. It should come as no surprise, then, that I have thought from time to time about putting together a game of my own; it should also not be a surprise that I have acted on such thoughts in the past. Indeed, my second-to-last undergraduate project was an honors thesis in which I did that very thing, though I did not do it at all well. I was not nearly so gifted an undergraduate as I thought I was, and it shows in how clunky and, well, pretentious the work I did then is.
One way to make it rain… Image from Giphy.com.
I still toy with the idea, of course. I enjoy playing, and I can’t play unless I have folks with whom to play. And that means I have to make any game I would design accessible to people, both in terms of ease of rules and in terms of cost to play. Playing tabletop roleplaying games can be quite expensive; the rulebooks that typify them are not usually inexpensive, and even if someone can get years of use out of one, the initial outlay is something of a hurdle. I’ve not got a necessarily robust collection of gaming books, and I’ve spend hundreds or thousands on them over the years; those who have more have doubtlessly spent far, far more.
There are dice to consider, as well. One of the most common accoutrements of roleplaying games, dice can be found in extravagant numbers and styles, and they become foci of lore and jealousy, among others. They also become money-pits. My own experience in buying dice–and mine are loyal and good, though not necessarily fancy, as far as such things go–has been to the tune of hundreds of dollars across my time gaming. Again, I’ve gotten years out of them, and I did pick them up a few at a time, but it’s still an investment to get the dice roleplaying games typically demand.
Part of that cost comes from the fact that roleplaying games typically play with different types of dice, not just the cubical dice most familiar, but other sorts typically rendered as Platonic solids plus ten-sided dice. (There are other versions of such dice available, of course; my daughter picked a set that mimics gaming dungeon paraphernalia, for example.) Though they are more and more common now, they are still at a higher price-point, and they are still less accessible than the plain cubical dice that can be gotten at supermarkets and convenience stores.
It is to help get around that concern of accessibility that, when I designed a gaming system, I made sure to base its mechanics in six-sided dice. They are easily had, easily replaced, and familiar from centuries of use in popular culture. And not only as gambling devices, though that is their most common depiction; I remember elementary school math classes that used them for some basic statistics, for example. As such, when I went to set up a system to bring people in, I did so with six-sided dice at the core.
As I’ve found out in the time since, trying to orient other things around sixes has been more of a challenge. But that’s something I can return to later on…
In a post I recently made to my personal blog, I make reference to some of the teaching and gaming I did as a graduate student. I remember both fondly, at least at this point, and I have done what I can to take the best parts from both into future iterations of my work in the classroom and at the table; I’ve had less success than I might hope, to be sure, but I have still had some success. And some of that success has focused on a single practice that came from the tabletop gaming I administered into some of the teaching I’ve done. It doesn’t always translate into a given class, of course; different courses call for different assignments and different techniques. But that a tool is not universally applicable does not mean it is of no value, and because I think there is some value in the practice–having students overtly commend one another in private reports to the instructor–I think it fitting to spend some time discussing it more formally than my personal blog admits.
Not atypical, this… Image from Wikipedia, which I’d not normally use.
To explain the activity a bit: When I was in graduate school, I ran a large tabletop roleplaying game. Normally, such games will have a referee and four to six players; I was the referee, and I had thirteen to fifteen at my table. It was not always a ruly bunch, to be sure; so large a group in which individuals need longish periods of devoted attention tends to go that way. But we got on more or less well, and the players enjoyed what I gave them (I think; please don’t tell me if I’m wrong). And part of that, I think, was that I gave them encouragement to play well–beyond the intrinsic value of participating meaningfully in an ongoing extemporaneous story. For I had each player vote at the end of each gaming session for the player other than themself who had done the best job of playing at the table that night.
By asking them to do so, I encouraged them to more fully inhabit their character and the narrative milieu in which those characters were enmeshed, and to do so in a way that helped the others at the table. And I encouraged them to attend to the performances and participation of others to reward behavior that, through authentically developing and communally-determined practices, was optimal for the group as a whole. In effect, the players came to agree on community standards for behavior and participation, and they looked for ways and reasons to praise one another, rather than make mock of one another as is common at gaming tables and in too many other places in the world.
To apply that idea to classroom practice took a bit of doing. For one, it only works well in group settings, and I tend to shy away from group assignments when I can. My experience, as both student and teacher, has been that one or two group members will do all of the work, while the others coast by on the labors of the diligent. (A rant threatens to emerge; it may do so later.) However, much of the teaching I have done has been of classes that have institutional mandates for group projects (the public speaking class at DeVry was one such; the technical writing class at Oklahoma State University was another).
In the latter, particularly, I had some success with having students report on their group’s and individual group members’ progress in the assigned projects; I made it part of assignment guidelines, requiring them to submit progress reports as daily assignments, so that there was extrinsic motivation to address the tasks. (Most of the students in that course were in another writing class only reluctantly; the extrinsic motivation was needed.) But I noted with some annoyance that, while I would see participation and submission from several group members, I would not see accurate assessment of those participants who weren’t; a few noted to me that they were reluctant to “throw [another student] under the bus,” even when the group’s work as a whole suffered because of such a student.
I understand the impulse, to be certain. I’m not along in having heard that “snitches get stitches and wind up in ditches,” or other words to that effect, and I was not immune to the shame of being a tattle-tale. And, at one level, I was content to let students undercut themselves; if they did not care more about the work and their reward for it, I saw no reason I ought to do so. But, as one of the students who was exploited by group work, I hated the idea of such exploitation continuing even when students had a mechanism to prevent it (part of the students’ grades came from the mutual assessment, so they could have excluded non-participating group members).
When, instead of asking students to identify the group members who had done least, I asked them to identify those who had done most, I saw a much better response rate from them. Additionally, I received much more detailed feedback on student performance from the other students’ perspectives, which was of great help. Some of that did run to specific notes about other students’ non-compliance with the standards of their groups, which also helped me to make the adjustments I needed to make as I oversaw the groups’ work. In essence, it worked in more or less the same way with my students as it had with my players, for which reason I commend the practice to use in other classes.
It is not universally applicable, of course. Not all classes require or admit of group projects, at least not conveniently. And there are courses that operate under stricter institutional mandates, obliging specific assignment sequences and lecture topics. But where it can be deployed, the practice of having students cite and justify each other’s excellence is a useful one.
To continue on from earlier work (here, here, here, here, here, and here), I will do more to round out the assignment sequence expected of the students in ENGL 112: Composition and develop the assignment students in the class are asked to do for their seventh week: a finalized commentary paper. I continue to hope that, despite the errors that are in any work, what I do will help my students and others to better understand what they are asked to do and so help them do it better.
Keep on doing it. Image from tenor.com.
For the exercise, students are asked to revise their work from the previous week as needed and to add to it the remaining bulk of their papers, bringing their commentaries to a full five pages (1500 to 1750 words) plus title page and references list. To complete it, I began by opening the document I’d made for last week’s exercise and saving it again as a new file for the final. (Keeping the earlier version separate allows for more radical revision in some circumstances.) Looking over it again, as it had been a few days since I had last done, so, I noted that I still had not settled on a thesis because I was still puzzling through my issue. I noted also that I had addressed appropriation but not appreciation; it was to the latter that I set myself.
I picked up writing where I had left off, moving directly into drafting as I thought through the issue and angle I had set for myself in the earlier work. As I drafted, too, I was able to determine a thesis, which I inserted into the usual place for such statements in first-year composition papers–the end of the introductory paragraph–before ensuring that connection to it sufficed throughout the rest of the text. I also made sure I offered the kind of conclusion to the paper–not filling out the repetitive “tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, and tell ’em what you told ’em” model, but moving ahead from the thesis–I want to see from my students and, indeed, from most of the writing I read.
The content made ready, I reviewed my document for style and mechanics. After making the adjustments that needed making, I put the document into an accessible format, which I present here: G. Elliott Sample Commentary Final. I hope it will help others.
Elliott RWI 