Chad Inside
Feb. 5th, 2004 10:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotnik2004"This is boring. We don't know any Chad." —Andy Travis, WKRP in Cincinnati
Since many of you don't know Chad—![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chadu, that is—or care about the cutting edge of RPG design, I will spice up the following post with quotes from the classic Chad & Buffy episode of WKRP in Cincinnati. I also promise to mention Raistlin, Jack Chick, and githyanki.
We played Chad's new game, Dead Inside, to considerable acclaim last night. I must admit to some trepidation going in. The concept—Dead Inside, the game where you're a soulless husk!—did not really grab me, but I do like Chad, and I like his Pyramid columns and his Unknown Armies writing a lot, so I was curious to try it. (This raises an interesting question: how much love do you owe a game whose designer you've never met but who is on your LJ friends list? It's like Cory Doctorow said about new technologies that create awkward social situations.) But the situation turns out to be not so awkward after all, because I was very pleasantly surprised by Dead Inside. It's a really good, solid game. It may not be the game for me, but Chad's definitely got something here.
Now I'll torment Chad, who is a little needy when it comes to feedback, by talking about something else for a while.
Buffy: "I put poison in the brandy."
Johnny: "That's very medieval of you."
At the Forge they sometimes talk about "fantasy heartbreakers," which are a whole class of homemade and indie RPGs that exist for the sole reason of "fixing" Dungeons & Dragons. Some guy, you see, plays D&D for like a hundred years in his Mom's basement. At some point it dawns on him that D&D is a busted wreck of a system, and so he jury-rigs a couple of fixes to it—generally a new magic system, a more specialized skill list, and a race of sexy cat people. Then he emerges from the basement triumphant. "Hey! I made my own game! I are a genius!" Only to find that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other pale-skinned guys, each emerging from their own Mom's basement with exactly the same game.
They're called "heartbreakers" because they're not really bad, they're just disappointing. It's a shame that creative people invest all this energy into reinventing the wheel, fixing one or two aspects of D&D without questioning any of the game's basic assumptions (dungeon crawls, kill and loot, Scottish dwarves, poncy elves) or seeing the whole universe of other possible games and genres and systems.
Tangent: One thing that's really fascinating to me is how exactly the same features show up in heartbreaker after heartbreaker after heartbreaker. The thread that first got me hooked on the Forge had nothing to do with GNS or all that contentious theory stuff. It was this one here, where Ron & Co. tracked, like geek archaeologists, the origins of the wasted, scary-looking "kinda undead guy" race which appeared in virtually every fantasy heartbreaker from the mid-to-late 1980s. (Raistlin and the Githyanki, neither of whom are actually undead, ended up the two most likely suspects.)
Bailey: "I'm waiting for Johnny."
Venus: "Is he coming over here?"
Bailey: "No."
Venus: "Okay..."
Bailey: "Do you like Bogart?"
Venus: "Humphrey? Oh, yeah."
Bailey: "He's dead now."
So here it is the 21st century and we have Dead Inside, the game where you're a human piece of apathy! A whole game, in other words, about "kinda undead guys." And what I thought on first hearing about it, uncharitably I admit, was: Chad's made a Wraith heartbreaker. Or maybe a generic World of Darkness heartbreaker. Which is weird, since the man who gave the world the Suicide Kings (yoinked for my UA game), the Kung-Fu Crucible (The Prisoner meets Enter the Dragon), and Psi Psi West (Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Ectoplasm) is not "trapped in his basement," creativity-wise. After all the great and goofy campaign ideas in his Pyramid column, the premise for DI seemed kind of bland to be Chad's magnum opus.
Well, DI did not break my heart. It's too good for that. It is about being dead inside, and regaining your soul. And that sounds like it could be bleak as hell, except that the place you go looking for your soul is this crazed Toontown version of the Tibetan afterlife. The setting is emphatically not bleak or angst-ridden or cliched in the least. It is messed up, but that's no criticism. A lot of the work of the game and the body of the text (you get your money's worth: it's a big-ass PDF) goes into describing this demented technicolor dreamland where you buy cotton candy powerups with memories of old girlfriends from guys with duck feet, and watery tarts send you on quests to deliver goblins in envelopes, and monkeys want you to collect round loaves of bread. Yes, kids, this is the Pilgrim's Progress meets the Tibetan Book of the Dead meets Carl Jung meets Monkeybone RPG you've been waiting for.
Whether you really dig DI or not will depend on how the setting grabs you. Of course you can customize it, but it's so big and strange you might not know where to start. I was impressed by the setting, even awe-struck, but not in the end infatuated. Still, never again will I make the mistake of thinking Chad would produce something lacking in imagination or audacity.
Buffy: "Johnny... I'm in TURMOIL!"
Johnny: "Big news."
So DI is not a heartbreaker, but it can be seen as a answer to the big World of Darkness canard. Because White Wolf has this whole stable of games about being, well, dead inside. And they are allegedly "storytelling" games that explore the psyche of tortured souls and dwindling humanity and, as Vincent Baker memorably put it, "a monster I am lest a monster I wankety wank wank." But when you actually play them, the White Wolf games are really about Celerity 3! and Kewl Power 17! and he who has the most sourcebooks gets to roll the biggest damn handful of purple d10s!
Dead Inside actually does what the WoD games once promised they were going to do: tells a story about your soul and saving it, if you're lucky and noble and true. I think it's probably the first game I've ever played where the whole point of play is being nice. Is it really possible that this is the first game built around that premise? There are lots of games that penalize you for being evil—but a game that actually instructs you to be good? I can't think of any others. (Wow. Jack Chick was right!) And I have to tell you, sitting around with a couple of gamer buddy dudes talking about how to be a better person felt weird and intimate and transgressive.
Buffy: "Now I can sense, I mean can really sense, like you know, that you have become more prosperous, and (looking around Jennifer's apartment) I think slightly effeminate."
Now, the key to getting the most out of DI would be to set up situations where it is genuinely hard to do good. Playing last night, because I usually knew what the "right" course of action was, I sometimes felt like I was just pretending to wrestle with myself. Somebody more into character-driven, actor-stance roleplay than I might get more out of this. (I'm all about the author-stance—I always think about what the story needs before I worry about what my guy would do.) Oh yeah, speaking of stance: DI has a neat mechanic where, after you invoke your virtues or your vices, the GM asks you why you did what you did. And your answer matters in game terms. It's hard to get across how novel this is and how strange it feels. Long-term serious play of DI would get deeply touchy-feely, I think. It's potentially very powerful, and DI may be cited in years to come for introducing a big new idea into the hobby. (It actually offers an answer to a postkrustukles made long ago that I kind of unfairly shot down.)
In the end, I don't think I'm going to be playing a lot of Dead Inside. It fills a big, decade-old hole in the gaming world, but it's not a hole that I personally had all that much interest in. But I do respect Chad immensely for doing it, and I respect it as an achievement in gaming. And oh, how I wish for an alternate universe, in which Dead Inside had been released back in 1991 with fanfare and great production values, and Atomic Sock Monkey took the place of White Wolf, and "storytelling" games really were about storytelling, and Chad got lots of fangirl nookie, and the World of Chad was now a mighty empire of sourcebooks, splatbooks, and LARPs.
Now then, speaking of Atomic Sock Monkey production values: Chad, what is the deal with the artwork in Monkey Ninja Pirate Robot? If you don't want to hire somebody to help you draw curved lines, don't you know there's software that can do it for you?
Since many of you don't know Chad—
chadu, that is—or care about the cutting edge of RPG design, I will spice up the following post with quotes from the classic Chad & Buffy episode of WKRP in Cincinnati. I also promise to mention Raistlin, Jack Chick, and githyanki.We played Chad's new game, Dead Inside, to considerable acclaim last night. I must admit to some trepidation going in. The concept—Dead Inside, the game where you're a soulless husk!—did not really grab me, but I do like Chad, and I like his Pyramid columns and his Unknown Armies writing a lot, so I was curious to try it. (This raises an interesting question: how much love do you owe a game whose designer you've never met but who is on your LJ friends list? It's like Cory Doctorow said about new technologies that create awkward social situations.) But the situation turns out to be not so awkward after all, because I was very pleasantly surprised by Dead Inside. It's a really good, solid game. It may not be the game for me, but Chad's definitely got something here.
Now I'll torment Chad, who is a little needy when it comes to feedback, by talking about something else for a while.
Buffy: "I put poison in the brandy."
Johnny: "That's very medieval of you."
At the Forge they sometimes talk about "fantasy heartbreakers," which are a whole class of homemade and indie RPGs that exist for the sole reason of "fixing" Dungeons & Dragons. Some guy, you see, plays D&D for like a hundred years in his Mom's basement. At some point it dawns on him that D&D is a busted wreck of a system, and so he jury-rigs a couple of fixes to it—generally a new magic system, a more specialized skill list, and a race of sexy cat people. Then he emerges from the basement triumphant. "Hey! I made my own game! I are a genius!" Only to find that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other pale-skinned guys, each emerging from their own Mom's basement with exactly the same game.
They're called "heartbreakers" because they're not really bad, they're just disappointing. It's a shame that creative people invest all this energy into reinventing the wheel, fixing one or two aspects of D&D without questioning any of the game's basic assumptions (dungeon crawls, kill and loot, Scottish dwarves, poncy elves) or seeing the whole universe of other possible games and genres and systems.
Tangent: One thing that's really fascinating to me is how exactly the same features show up in heartbreaker after heartbreaker after heartbreaker. The thread that first got me hooked on the Forge had nothing to do with GNS or all that contentious theory stuff. It was this one here, where Ron & Co. tracked, like geek archaeologists, the origins of the wasted, scary-looking "kinda undead guy" race which appeared in virtually every fantasy heartbreaker from the mid-to-late 1980s. (Raistlin and the Githyanki, neither of whom are actually undead, ended up the two most likely suspects.)
Bailey: "I'm waiting for Johnny."
Venus: "Is he coming over here?"
Bailey: "No."
Venus: "Okay..."
Bailey: "Do you like Bogart?"
Venus: "Humphrey? Oh, yeah."
Bailey: "He's dead now."
So here it is the 21st century and we have Dead Inside, the game where you're a human piece of apathy! A whole game, in other words, about "kinda undead guys." And what I thought on first hearing about it, uncharitably I admit, was: Chad's made a Wraith heartbreaker. Or maybe a generic World of Darkness heartbreaker. Which is weird, since the man who gave the world the Suicide Kings (yoinked for my UA game), the Kung-Fu Crucible (The Prisoner meets Enter the Dragon), and Psi Psi West (Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Ectoplasm) is not "trapped in his basement," creativity-wise. After all the great and goofy campaign ideas in his Pyramid column, the premise for DI seemed kind of bland to be Chad's magnum opus.
Well, DI did not break my heart. It's too good for that. It is about being dead inside, and regaining your soul. And that sounds like it could be bleak as hell, except that the place you go looking for your soul is this crazed Toontown version of the Tibetan afterlife. The setting is emphatically not bleak or angst-ridden or cliched in the least. It is messed up, but that's no criticism. A lot of the work of the game and the body of the text (you get your money's worth: it's a big-ass PDF) goes into describing this demented technicolor dreamland where you buy cotton candy powerups with memories of old girlfriends from guys with duck feet, and watery tarts send you on quests to deliver goblins in envelopes, and monkeys want you to collect round loaves of bread. Yes, kids, this is the Pilgrim's Progress meets the Tibetan Book of the Dead meets Carl Jung meets Monkeybone RPG you've been waiting for.
Whether you really dig DI or not will depend on how the setting grabs you. Of course you can customize it, but it's so big and strange you might not know where to start. I was impressed by the setting, even awe-struck, but not in the end infatuated. Still, never again will I make the mistake of thinking Chad would produce something lacking in imagination or audacity.
Buffy: "Johnny... I'm in TURMOIL!"
Johnny: "Big news."
So DI is not a heartbreaker, but it can be seen as a answer to the big World of Darkness canard. Because White Wolf has this whole stable of games about being, well, dead inside. And they are allegedly "storytelling" games that explore the psyche of tortured souls and dwindling humanity and, as Vincent Baker memorably put it, "a monster I am lest a monster I wankety wank wank." But when you actually play them, the White Wolf games are really about Celerity 3! and Kewl Power 17! and he who has the most sourcebooks gets to roll the biggest damn handful of purple d10s!
Dead Inside actually does what the WoD games once promised they were going to do: tells a story about your soul and saving it, if you're lucky and noble and true. I think it's probably the first game I've ever played where the whole point of play is being nice. Is it really possible that this is the first game built around that premise? There are lots of games that penalize you for being evil—but a game that actually instructs you to be good? I can't think of any others. (Wow. Jack Chick was right!) And I have to tell you, sitting around with a couple of gamer buddy dudes talking about how to be a better person felt weird and intimate and transgressive.
Buffy: "Now I can sense, I mean can really sense, like you know, that you have become more prosperous, and (looking around Jennifer's apartment) I think slightly effeminate."
Now, the key to getting the most out of DI would be to set up situations where it is genuinely hard to do good. Playing last night, because I usually knew what the "right" course of action was, I sometimes felt like I was just pretending to wrestle with myself. Somebody more into character-driven, actor-stance roleplay than I might get more out of this. (I'm all about the author-stance—I always think about what the story needs before I worry about what my guy would do.) Oh yeah, speaking of stance: DI has a neat mechanic where, after you invoke your virtues or your vices, the GM asks you why you did what you did. And your answer matters in game terms. It's hard to get across how novel this is and how strange it feels. Long-term serious play of DI would get deeply touchy-feely, I think. It's potentially very powerful, and DI may be cited in years to come for introducing a big new idea into the hobby. (It actually offers an answer to a post
krustukles made long ago that I kind of unfairly shot down.)In the end, I don't think I'm going to be playing a lot of Dead Inside. It fills a big, decade-old hole in the gaming world, but it's not a hole that I personally had all that much interest in. But I do respect Chad immensely for doing it, and I respect it as an achievement in gaming. And oh, how I wish for an alternate universe, in which Dead Inside had been released back in 1991 with fanfare and great production values, and Atomic Sock Monkey took the place of White Wolf, and "storytelling" games really were about storytelling, and Chad got lots of fangirl nookie, and the World of Chad was now a mighty empire of sourcebooks, splatbooks, and LARPs.
Now then, speaking of Atomic Sock Monkey production values: Chad, what is the deal with the artwork in Monkey Ninja Pirate Robot? If you don't want to hire somebody to help you draw curved lines, don't you know there's software that can do it for you?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-02-05 07:33 am (UTC)But the concepts and imagery and the actual play were really quite entertaining. It was tough to really dig deep into the psyche of a pre-gen character but the game requires you to do that.
The greatest danger of the game, especially for an inferior GM, would be to get the players to actually do that soul-searching, and not have them simply doing the "good" think to tick off checks on their Virtue list (which made me think a bit of playing Ultima IV back in the day, giving gold to the beggars left and right to earn more Compassion points). That's the part I wish weren't so system-ized but I think it would take a god among GMs to make it work without a structured system and still seem fair to all players.
Overall a very interesting melding of ideas. I think the sequel I suspect Chad is planning dealing with Sensitives would be more my cup of tea, but this one is definitely worth checking out.
Well done.
Date: 2004-02-05 08:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-05 08:46 am (UTC)Definitely look into Dead Inside if any of what I've said intrigues you. Encourage innovative DIY RPG publishing!
Re:
Date: 2004-02-05 10:57 am (UTC)Whoa.
First off: thanks. This review rocks on toast, and makes me feel like I did okay.
I'd like to post this at www.20by20room.com and also point to it at The Forge, but I wanted to make sure it was cool with Chad first, since I do needle him a bit (gently, I hope!) in the review.
Go for it! We all deserve a little needling now and then.
Just let me know the preferred URL and attribution you want, so I can get my WebMaestron to update the ASMP site.
Okay, to some specific points:
WKRP
You are a scholar and a gennlemun.
Now I'll torment Chad, who is a little needy when it comes to feedback, by talking about something else for a while.
Bastard's got my number. Heh.
fantasy heartbreakers
Thank you for this description; it really helped clear up the point. While I lurk sporadically at the Forge, sometimes I get glassy-eyed at the terminology. I already have one full of litcrit jargon, game mechanics, and telecom abbreviations & acronyms, so sometimes it's hard to fit another lexicon on the mental shelf. (And I had an interesting experience at EveCon re: just this thing.)
And what I thought on first hearing about it, uncharitably I admit, was: Chad's made a Wraith heartbreaker. Or maybe a generic World of Darkness heartbreaker.
Full disclosure: I played 1 session of Vampire 1/e back in college. The only other Storyteller/White Wolf games I've played for more than one session (and less than six) were the Lion Rampant version of Ars Magica and Adventure! (and I was only the GM in the latter).
The setting is emphatically not bleak or angst-ridden or cliched in the least. It is messed up, but that's no criticism. A lot of the work of the game and the body of the text (you get your money's worth: it's a big-ass PDF) goes into describing this demented technicolor dreamland where you buy cotton candy powerups with memories of old girlfriends from guys with duck feet, and watery tarts send you on quests to deliver goblins in envelopes, and monkeys want you to collect round loaves of bread. Yes, kids, this is the Pilgrim's Progress meets the Tibetan Book of the Dead meets Carl Jung meets Monkeybone RPG you've been waiting for.
I need to boil this one down as a blurb, mang. Still haven't seen Monkeybone yet, though. It's on the Netflix Queue.
I think it's probably the first game I've ever played where the whole point of play is being nice. Is it really possible that this is the first game built around that premise? [...] And I have to tell you, sitting around with a couple of gamer buddy dudes talking about how to be a better person felt weird and intimate and transgressive.
Cool. That was, in many regards, the point, and a design goal.
Now, the key to getting the most out of DI would be to set up situations where it is genuinely hard to do good.
Agreed. I think that's gonna be my design consideration for the scenarios in the first for-sale supplement, aka Sekrit Projekt C, aka Cold, Hard World.
[...]Chad got lots of fangirl nookie [...]
Man, I would have loved that nookie back in '91. Today, I think the Wife (
Now then, speaking of Atomic Sock Monkey production values: Chad, what is the deal with the artwork in Monkey Ninja Pirate Robot? If you don't want to hire somebody to help you draw curved lines, don't you know there's software that can do it for you?
Sure, but I kind of wanted it to look that way. Just a gut instinct, following a whim. "I dood it myself."
If I ever want to put out a classy print version into the distribution channel, I'll most certainly get someone with better art skills than myself to make everything purty.
Thanks again, man. I'm blown away, and deeply appreciative of this post.
CU
<lj user=chadu> vs. the WoD, best of three falls
Date: 2004-02-05 09:10 am (UTC)Weird thing is, the way you're describing the DI mechanics and mood is the way I've always run the World of Darkness. To take the primary example, in Changeling I took away the idea of Glamour as generic "power points" and made the players really earn their Glamour according to their emotional paradigm.
Maybe it's what you cite about the WoD in your review, the presence of "resisted" or "bad" stats in WoD games (Humanity, Banality, Rage, Pathos, Paradox) where the price of power is failing in that effort to "be good." Ideally. But you know how this works in WoD games: you can spend Rage to kick Wyrm-ass, and a high Paradox means you've been slinging l33t haxx0r katana fireballz.
You're right that the World of Darkness has always tried very hard to make you think about your character through introducing game mechanics for emotions, but that these mechanics end up making the process of emotional investigation hopelessly reductive. I guess in my Changeling game I was just a kick-ass GM. :)
By the way, I guess it goes without saying that I heartily endorse the use of random WKRP quotes in such a manner.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-05 09:28 am (UTC)I suspect your games are the exception to this trend/perception.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-05 09:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-05 10:34 am (UTC)As God as my witness, I though Heartbreakers could fly.
Date: 2004-02-09 03:47 am (UTC)One of my co-workers (not the Knight Templar) about a year ago, after learning that I had played D&D when I was younger and that I had programmed computers when I was less younger, proceeded to tell me his raison d'etre.
He was developing a computer game. Yes, a real heartbreaker!
Although I ignored just about everything he was explaining to me, (it was very overwhelming for me; his rapid speech, my apathy) I had a feeling he was really on to something.
At the time, I thought to myself, "I can't believe nobody's ever thought of this before. My co-worker is wicked smart! Ohh, this is gonna be big, he's gonna change the gaming world forever...etc..."
I knew not then of the heartbreaker phenomenon. As for my co-worker, maybe he did, and maybe he didn't. Next time I see him, I'm gonna tactfully ask him whatever happened to the game he was developing
Tangent : This is boring, I don't know any Raman.
All this makes me wonder about the basement creative process. Around 1900, the Indian Physicist C.V. Raman was playing with light a lot. He made many discoveries, only to find out some other scientist [not in India] had beat him to it by many years. I think the major factor for him being out of the loop was his geographical seclusion from the rest of the world's scientists. Sure, there were research papers, but they possibly arrived by boat, once a year, who knows? Raman was in a sense, working in a basement.
From what I've read about him, it seems that Raman was a guy who was totally into discovering things for himself, and that most of the time he probably laughed, "You mean that I just spent the last 3 months in my lab coming up with something they've been teaching undergrads for 30 years in Vienna? That's too much! What the hell, let's go for lunch, Vindaloo's on me!"
This tangent is still boring, what's yer point?
I think it's really entertaining that people are continually re-inventing the wheel in their basements. Sure, there all loads of "think tanks" all over the world where people share ideas for a common goal and make greater collective strides as a result, but how/why does someone decide they're gonna stay in their basement, especially if they know about the think tanks?
P.S. Raman was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics around 1915 for discovering the Raman Effect.
As God as my witness, I though Heartbreakers could fly.
Date: 2004-02-09 06:31 pm (UTC)I think it's really entertaining that people are continually re-inventing the wheel in their basements. Sure, there all loads of "think tanks" all over the world where people share ideas for a common goal and make greater collective strides as a result, but how/why does someone decide they're gonna stay in their basement, especially if they know about the think tanks?
Yeah, it is entertaining. Your example is interesting - I don't know anything about Raman, but I think you could argue that 1900-1915 is pretty much the last period when it could have been possible in either science or social science for somebody to make a real paradigm-shifting discovery without leaving the basement, so to speak. The late nineteenth century is the era of the professionalization of science and the forcing out of the amateurs - my work on the Archives of Useless Research focused on this turning point. After 1910 or so the degree of specialization is so great that it's really hard to imagine somebody outside the scientific community coming up with something really significant.
The field of role-playing game design, of course, is not quite so developed as particle physics.
...YET!