RPGaDay 2016 #7 What Aspect of Roleplaying Has Had the Biggest Impact on You?

At long last, a question I can answer.

I think the biggest impact of gaming on my life is that it has forced me to be social. I am an introvert by nature. Even via the internet, it takes some effort to put myself out there.

But it is also important to note that no one is an island. When looking for a job, one of the things  they tell you to do is "network." The process of dating and romance is all about putting yourself out there.

Gaming helps me be social in a couple of ways. First of all, games don't pay themselves. If I'm going to play any of the games on my shelf, I'm going to have to find other people to play them with. Secondly, games make great icebreakers. Once you're at the table, conversation comes very naturally. And if you run out of things to talk about or the topic gets awkward, you can simply direct everyone's attention to the game.

So that's how an introverted guy like me has a decent sized network of friends and a very lovely wife. And so can you!

Making Time For Friendship

When I initially designed Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road, one of my concerns was making sure that the character creation process was quick and painless. If a video game isn't entertaining for the first 10-15 minutes, you're not going to want to play through the 10-20 hours of content it provides. Same basic principle. If this is my first time sitting down to play an RPG, a character creation process that can take hours had better be worth it. But in my desire to streamline that process, I recently realized that I may have done a disservice to one of the game's primary themes.


You see, as part of the character creation process, I instruct the player to simply write down the other characters in the group as their starting Friends List. Simple and easy, right? But it doesn't really answer the question of why those people are on that list. Not just "Why are you traveling together?" but "Why are you all friends?"

One thing that some tables do is hold a "Session 0" for their campaigns, detailing everything that is needed before Session 1 (the first session of the adventure) can begin. In a heavier system, this session might be taken up with character creation. Each player deciding on their character's niche in the party and building toward that. It can also involve the Narrator detailing the world that the characters will adventure in and players deciding the backstory for their characters.

If an AiO Narrator were to run a Session 0 for their campaign, I think the primary activity would be working out the relationships between all of the characters. Who helped who where and how. I'm sort of picturing the first third or so of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz being Session 0, detailing how the characters met and how they all wound up on each other's Friends List with Session 1 beginning with their arrival in the Emerald City and the Wizard ordering the party to kill the Wicked Witch of the West.

Maybe if I do a revised edition of the game, I'll work something out to give this a bit more structure and make it more of a mini-game.

I get by with a little help from my friends

The Oz Point system was one of the first and last things that I came up with. First in that I knew that I would need something like it, but last in taking final form.

I knew that I would have to come up with a certain level of bribery to encourage players to "keep it Ozzy." Not enough people are familiar with the Oz stories in any particular depth to simply trust that they will figure it out. Also, part of my target market is the typical Oz fan, not just the typical gamer. While this portion of my target audience may have the encyclopedic knowledge of Oz, they might not have the gaming acumen to pull it off.

Then I had to face the question of exactly what is Ozzy roleplay? That would only be answered once I answered the question: What is the theme of your game? It took some thought, but the theme of the Adventures in Oz roleplaying game is the same as the theme of the classic Oz stories: "Exploring Oz with your friends."

Think about it for a moment. Every Oz story has new places to visit and people to meet. And friends abound. It's not just the friends that you adventure with, but also the friends you make along the way. So Ozzy roleplay is about adventuring with friends and making friends.

The idea of having a specific Friends List did not come from MySpace, but from another thought experiment RPG I designed (and may eventually publish. Maybe). It was based around the idea that action movie characters become more badass when they are fighting for something they care about. So a character in that system featured a list of "Story Hooks," or things that the character cared about and was willing to fight for.

You earn Oz Points by helping your existing friends or by making new friends and adding them to your Friends List. You spend them to gain a bonus to die rolls or to call on a friend on your list for aid.

It wasn't until after I had this designed that I realized how Ozzy it really was. One of the most irritating moments in the Oz series, for me anyway, came from "Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz". Dorothy, the Wizard and company had been running from several dangers, from the vegetable Mangaboos, the Wooden Gargoyles, and man-eating bears in the Valley of Vo, to the dragonettes. Finally, they reach a dead end in a cave. The only way out is to go back through all the stuff that they've spent the story thus far running away from. Finally, Dorothy remembers that her friend Ozma checks in on her regularly and will take her to the Emerald City if she gives the signal at the right time.

As a reader, I found this quite jarring. They could have bypassed any number of the dangers they faced whenever they wanted to. They spent several days in the Glass City of the Mangaboos awaiting execution. Any one of those days could have been used to wish them all to safety in the Emerald City!

If this were a session of the Adventures in Oz RPG, it makes much more sense. The Narrator has thrown the party a situation that they have decided that they cannot handle on their own, so Dorothy's player spends an Oz Point to call on her friend Ozma (a friend she made in the last adventure "Ozma of Oz") to get her out of this one.

I did not design the system with that scenario in mind, but I was pleasantly surprised that what I designed fit the situation so perfectly.