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?
