These sites are primarily intended to serve as reference pages for my current gaming group. Their secondary purpose is to recruit some new players to our group. Any such new players will be strangers to me, to my current group, and most likely to each other. Most gamers i have met are good people, but there are exceptions, so this page lays out some basic rules of interaction for everyone who plays in the game. NONE of this will be a surprise to my current players, so they don't really need to read it. If you're not a current player, i think you'll find all of the specifics of what we expect from the players not just reasonable, but desirable. We play to have fun.
DM, Dungeon Master, Game Guide, Game's Director... There are many names for the person who 'runs the game'. I had coined 'Authoree' as a merge of 'author' and 'referee', but i have seen that it's meaning is not intuitively obvious :-). I will usually go with 'Game Director' on these sites, but might not be 100% consistent with that. I will assume that the reader will understand what i mean regardless of which name i use for thet person in that role.
As the guy running the game, whatever i'm called, i consider my first priority to ensure thet everyone who is playing is having fun. Don't mistake that for "It's my job to make everything easy for the players." Just the opposite. More specifically it's my job to ensure that each player's character will encounter challenges and opportunities which relate to their chosen background, abilities, skills, knowledge, and goals.
Our game sessions occur on Skype. I ensure that only one person speaks at a time, and that each person gets a chance to do so. Up to a point, though. An impassioned speech while role-playing a unit seeking allies is great, but only until it starts getting redundant. I will cut off any player who doesn't understand that he/she has already made their point.
The "Bill & Ted Rule" sums it up: "Be Excellent to One Another." We are all here to have fun.
Did you see that i put this first for the players? That's not an accident. If you have a stick up your butt, that is probably uncomfortable for you but apparently you think the discomfort is worth whatever benefit you are getting from keeping it there. I am saddened by your choice, but now i bid you forever farewell. We don't want people like that in our game.
We play this game to have fun. We take the game problems seriously as our characters, but most of our players are witty, assertive, and playful people. We make jokes among ourselves as the players, and our CHARACTERS do the same in the game. Some of us purposely play our characters with a goal of providing comic relief. If you were watching our group members tackling a problem together, you're more likely to be reminded of "Guardians of the Galaxy" than of some dour, all-business-like group of perfectly disciplined mercenaries. As the Game director, i will sometimes give a player a game benefit just because he/she had their character do something in the game that made the game more fun for everyone else. What i'm trying to convey here is that we don't stay strictly in character at al times, and that when we are some of us are REAL CHARACTERS!
Our current players are already friends with each other. We socialize outside of the game. We know each other's bounds and level of playfulness, and we enjoy kidding around with each other. If you're new, we hope to reach that stage with you as quickly as possible, but if ANY of us are acting in ways that make you uncomfortable and i haven't noticed that and stopped it, you are encouraged to speak up. You can ABSOLUTELY count on above minimum levels of basic human courtesy in MY house and in my game at all times.
Similarly, if a new player starts acting in a manner that *i* consider to be rude, i'm just going to drop them from the game at the first blatant event. I don't think adults should need to get an explicit set of instructions on showing basic courtesy. In 40+ years i have never had to ask someone to leave after we had allowed them to join, but i suppose it could happen. .
Please don't read too much into the assurances i gave in the previous section about 'courtesy'. I know what the word means. I also know that some people mistake their right to impose their limits on others. I won't tolerate anyone being RUDE to any new players, but also we aren't going to change OUR level of comfort to accomodate a killjoy. If a new player brings something that bothers me to my attention, one possible outcome is that we agree that he/she is not a good fit for this group. Again... this has never happened, but i've also never thrown out open invitations like this.
I actively incorporate a range of social issues into the species and cultures in my game worlds. There's every form of oppression and bigotry alive and well in some of the species and cultures that the players encounter. Could you have a game without that stuff? I suppose, but we don't try. Our players don't like that stuff in real life, and their characters don't like that stuff in the game worlds. Our current group characters have already written the 'charter' for themselves to follow as they explore and expand into the world they have recently landed on. It's pretty much: stand up AGAINST evil in all of its forms. You will definitely ENCOUNTER bigotry and far worse in game situations from the NPCs we encounter, but the players themselves don't want to role-play characters that we would think of as complete assholes.
As to gender, my players usually play the same gender identity they have in real life, but not always. My game rules are not explicitly sexist, but there are some gender-specific aspects of my fantasy subsystem that match to how many fantasy mythologies treat that subject. If you are not offended by, for example, Andre Norton's 'Witch World' stories or the more recent 'Wheel of Time' series, each of which have very clearly defined gender-based powers, you're not going to think our fantasy system is offensive either. OTOH, if either of those offend you, you can just leave now.
Our game universe has species which have no gender roles at all, rigidly fixed gender roles, multiple genders, people who can switch between genders, people with no gender at all, and other variations on those themes, and my players know those things. One of my male players would always choose to play a female elf if he was going to play an elf, because he knows who runs those societies in Mind Adventures. Where it's applicable, characters are expected to use every advantage they have to attain their goals, including their attractiveness. Our games sessions are definitely NOT rated X, but they sometimes stray into R territory. If things get too saucy as we are playing out some part of the story, i use the 1940's film technique and fade to black. We're not prudes by ANY definition, just the opposite, but our stories are more like the writings of Isaac Asimov than Danielle Steele when it comes to matters of sex and romance. They are sometimes part of the story, but the 'action' happens 'off-screen'.
I think there's an optimum size for a gaming group, but also i think that number is a function of the number of the players who actively participate more than they just sit and listen to what everyone else does. If you've always wanted to have some special interest of yours matter to a game, tell me about it. We have the traditional 'classes/professions/trades/whatever-you-call-them' that you'll find in most games, but those are more for ease in creating the NPCs than part of defining the player's characters. Players have had characters whose primary focus was on being a chef, or a rock star. Often i can find a way to incorporate a player's personal interest as a meaningful part of attaining some group goal. Not always, but i am fairly creative and i will put extra effort into that if the idea seems to me would be fun for ALL the players. The 'rock star' adventure surely was :-).
I'm not interested in having any rules lawyers in the game. We are ROLE Playing. If you care more about 'winning' than playing, you won't fit here. Players are allowed to bring up new things and discuss ruling i make. If you don't understand why i'm disallowing something, or why i ruled the way i did you can ASK, but don't always expect an answer. I'm fine with helping players better understand the things that their characters would know, but often in a specific scenario their characters don't know what does or what doesn't work in the game universe, or why something they think should work doesn't work. Answering that question is a key part of the game, and if i respond to that kind of question in any way i'm telling the players SOMETHING they don't know. There's a difference between "That will never work" and "You're not doing it correctly". If you get the former answer you know to stop trying. As often as not, the character does not know WHY something fails and in the real world there is no one to ask, so i don't answer such questions in the game world either. Bottom line is that you trust i'm 'being fair' or you don't.
Our players are not obsessed with kicking ass. Well, maybe a few. Most of our sessions are spent solving other kinds of problems. Usually those solutions require input from and successful actions performed by multiple players. On the other hand, much of the effort i've put into the G.U.T.S. application has been focused on creating a very detailed melee combat simulator. We use it at times.
The one constant i have heard all along is that my players want a real challenge. They explicitly do NOT want to play games where they will prevail no matter what they do. While the definition of winning is harder to pin down in a role playing game than in chess, most people understand that if the dragon dies, you have won. Unless - as is possible in our game - you ARE the dragon.
Our characters encounter challenges for which i have not bothered to come up with the 'correct solution'. Sometimes they don't solve them. And often on the path to solving them, some of their characters die. That's the game we want.
We pay attention to detail, but not to the point of monotony. In my real life i have spent hours of time in an MMORPG mining for metals and other materials. I find that boring, but there's no other option in that game to get that material for free but to put in the time farming. In our games, once we have derived a PROCESS to accomplish things like that within the game one time, we take it as established from that time on that the players can do that task with some defined range of risk for a defined range of reward. If they want to play out any subsequent similar operation explicitly we do so. If that has gotten tediously repetitive, they tell me how many times they would do that task and we roll for what they gained from doing that task and any bad side effects that may have happened. This keeps things moving along and avoids forcing the players to actively play out things that have become uninteresting but still need to be managed as part of the game.
On the subject of monotony, the game is supposed to be a group activity. When a situation directly involves all the characters whose players are in attendance that session, we will play that situation out in as much detail as the players want, and for as long as they want. But if an action in the game will involve only a subset of the present players, i will move it along rapidly. Any action that only a single player wants to do is almost always reduced to at most a few dice rolls, and resolved in a minute or so.
Co-operative play is always rewarded in our games. Finding ways to combine the individual capabilities of the players to accomplish even more than any of them can do alone almost always pays dividends. Forming alliances with NPCs can bring great benefits, or treachery.
I allow a lot of flexibility in how a player chooses to play their characters. While we are generally 'law-abiding good guys', we will sometimes have some characters that are less above board. However, if a player chooses to play someone who will cheat or steal from others, i do not let them take advantage of the fact that the other players are forced to accept among them someone they cannot trust. To allow the player to play that character, i find a way to make the group accept that person's presence, but i ALSO find a way to ensure that the shady character can NOT exploit that.
That's not to say a character cannot become a threat to the other characters as part of the game. Sometimes we may come upon a situation where an enemy has 'taken control' of one of our group members and ordered her/him to sabotage or harm us. In that case their 'treachery' becomes part of the story, and i encourage the player to be as devious as they can and get away with whatever damage they can do before they get found out and stopped.
We don't track levels the same way most other game systems do, but we have our own methods to allow characters to improve their knowledge and skills just like any other role playing system. Assuming a player started a character in our first session and then played that character until now, even if that character gained only our equivalent of one 'level' a year, that character would now be over level 40.
I can't manage a game with characters of that power level, so at some point - when a player's character can do pretty much anything it would choose to do - high-leveled characters retire from active play. They may pop up again at my discretion to give aid to the active characters, but they will no longer accompany players on adventures, where they would just end up solving every issue the group encounters with the snap of their fingers. Having a character reach the status where i declare to the player that i don't think i can give that character a challenge without 'cheating' is as close to 'winning' as a player can get in a role playing game. In that sense, all of my players have 'won' this game multiple times.
I think the 'bowling team' analogy works well, though maybe that's an anachronism and the analogy will be lost on younger folk. Oh well, i'm going to go with it.
When people sign up for a bowling team, there's an expectation they will be there every week for the duration of whatever length of weekly games the team has signed up to compete in. The games are at a fixed time and duration each week, so advance planning is not an issue. The players on the team count on everyone showing up each week at that time and participating as part of the team because if anyone does not show that hampers the team's ability to compete, or can even disqualify them from that week's session if the authorities so rule. That's where the analogy falls down, though. THIS 'authority' isn't going to penalize the people who do show because someone didn't, but their absence does affect that session.
So, if you're going to be part of the group, you have to be ready to consider our game sessions your TOP priority recreational activity during the time we play, or don't ask to join. Work is work. I have infinite patience and understanding for anyone whose job can call on her/him at the time we play. I've been there, and i know you can't control that. Family emergencies happen, too. I get all that. But you don't actually have to attend your cousin's best friend's daughter's 3rd grade play to be a good person. If i see that you always seem to have something more important to do, i will just thank you for whatever you HAD contributed up to that point and write you out. OR, if you have something that's going to keep you busy for a few months but you'd like to continue playing, just let me know the specifics and we'll work it out. The game goes on forever. I can understand why someone would want to do something else they enjoy for a bit. But fair is fair to us, too. Our play style is based on LONG TERM participation and commitment.
Because i make every player count to the story, a person who misses ANY session can have a SERIOUS effect on the story's progression and the ability of the players to meet their game goals. Someone who has direct access to items or information to which the other players do not have any other way to access needs to be at the session where their access or information becomes the key element, and there's no way to be sure when that will come. IMO it is a disservice to everyone else to not make participation a priority. I respect those for whom their gaming is a low priority, but i don't want that person in our group.
When people can't be here, let me know that as soon in advance as possible.
We have a 'solution' for how to deal with absent player's characters that helps minimize the problem of their absence for the other players. When a player doesn't show, their character(s) become 'flea-bitten'. It's not meant to be literal. It means that they have become very passive and unassertive. They are available to perform any tasks they would normally perform, but only if explicitly requested by another player. They will perform tasks at their normal skill level, but will not gain any training or other direct personal benefits from doing so. Generally speaking booty distribution during that session will skip them. The character does not speak up or offer any insights, or otherwise behave with the personality they player normally gives them. As the referee, i will act for that character ONLY if it would cost a player character their life because the missing player was not there to act. Any other penalty the group suffers in the story because the person is not there to play their character is now the way that part of the story played out. People DO get distracted, after all, even heroes and evil geniuses. To the extent that a player isn't there to play her/his character, that character just turned out to be REALLY easy to distract for a while.
And then there's the darker side of this. Every so often there's a random dice roll to decide who dies. Some action taken, or not taken, by the group at that time leads to a situation where someone is just going to die and there's nothing else to be done about that. I normally select the victim for that kind of death completely at random with an equal chance for every character to be the unlucky one, but if that occurs when one or more players are out that week for ANY reason, the choice of who is going to be the victim is limited to the characters played by a missing player. One core game rule i always use is: "This game is for the people who show up to play"
These are the standards we expect for a player. If you thought, "Well DUH!" that's great. If you think any of this is unreasonable, then we aren't a fit.
The rest of this subsite explains the game mechanics, but you don't need to worry too much about memorizing any of it. The current group already knows how we roll, as it were :-). We'll help any new players get up to speed.
Look over the Mind Adventures subsite to get a feel for the 'universe' in which our adventures are set, the types of characters available to play, how magic and technology work, and that sort of thing.
We play on Sunday evenings from 7PM tp 10PM EST, using a Skype group chat. If all this aligns with your interest and availability you can email me to discuss it. I'll send you my phone number if that seems appropriate and we can move to voice chat.