Bits and Pieces

First off, a new character posted: Iris McPherson, another crazy street person, this one with an alien fixation.

Next, I noticed on some forums out there that people were a little disappointed that I haven’t dealt with the magic system yet. There’s a reason for that: it’s not done. We have, in fact, just received the first third of it – Supernatural Stunts. After that, we still need Spellcasting and Artifacts. Don’t worry; these will get extensive coverage as we test them.

Also, there have been some questions about release date. Now, I’m not privy to the discussions at Evil Hat, and I don’t make any decisions for them, so all I can tell you is what they’ve told me. There is no release date yet. Evil Hat is very committed to an extensive playtest to make sure the game is as good as it can be when it’s released. That’s going to take time, not because the game is bad, but because testing takes time. Might it be out by GenCon? I dunno. If I had to guess, I’d say that was pretty optimistic.

Finally, there have been some discussions where rules are reversed engineered from the characters I’ve posted. That’s cool, and some are pretty close to what we’ve been given. Keep in mind, though, that this is a very early stage of alpha testing. Things are going to change. What things? I don’t know, but they’re going to change.

Just sayin’.

A Rag-Tag Bunch of Misfits

So, I’ve mentioned my playtesters several times, but I haven’t told you about them.

Well, I don’t want to violate their privacy, so all you’re gonna get is their names and a  rundown of our general demographics.

Including me, there are nine people in this playtest: Chris, Sandy, Kieran, Penny, Vicky, Clint, Tom, Fera, and me. Four women, five men. Age ranges from mid-teens to mid-forties. There are members who have been gaming for just about three decades, and one member for whom this is the first RPG experience. Three people in the group run games on a regular basis.

And they’re all creative, energetic, and excited about the game.

Now, I sort of act as front-man for the group, but everyone reading this (and my official playtest reports to Evil Hat) needs to keep in mind that I’m not doing this alone. I couldn’t. Even if I tried, the results would be no where near as good without this dedicated group of gamers.

So, thanks, guys. You make this possible. You deserve the credit. Feel free to introduce yourselves through the comments, if you like. Feel free not to, if you don’t.

I’m just happy we get to play together.

Playtest Update

Just want to let you folks know the status of things, and our plans for the playtest over the next couple of weeks.

First, a couple of days ago, Evil Hat sent us two background chapters on the Dresdenverse. One is a Who’s Who of characters from the books, and the other is sort of a monster chapter – info on the types of bad guys that might come up.  I’ve distributed those to my playtesters, and we’re currently reading through them. They were written by Chad Underkoffler, who also used to write for Unknown Armies, so I know they’re going to be solid stuff.

Second, just tonight, Evil Hat sent us the chapter on supernatural stunts. There’s still the chapter on spellcasting and the one on artifacts to come, but this really puts us in a good position to start seeing how the magic works in the game.

Now, my plans.

Next week, I’m running a couple of sessions using only the mundane characters that have been created. It’s just a test of the conflict system – not a full game. So, I’m going to try to run one physical, one mental, and one social conflict in each session. If possible, we’ll rerun one or two of them, to see what effect different choices make.

A week or two after that, we’re going to get together and create supernatural characters, using the new rules.

Once that’s done, we’re actually going to run a couple of games – maybe two or three session arcs, seeing how the whole thing fits together. That’s the part I’m really looking forward to.

So, that’s what you can expect to see about the DFRPG over the next little while.

Oh, and I’ll continue posting characters as I receive them from my playtesters. I know it’s tough to wait, but it can be even tougher to get them to send them to me.

Character Creation

About ten days ago, the fine folks at Evil Hat provided us with a big chunk of rules for the game. Enough, in fact, to run character creation, as long as we stuck to mundane types.

Why just mundane? Two reasons. One, they’re still working on the section for supernatural characters. Two, they want mundane characters to be viable in the system.

Yeah. They want to make it as good a game choice to play Murphy as it is to play Harry.  They’ve got an interesting balance mechanic for this that seems, right now, to work fairly well. It has to do with paying for Stunts with Refresh Rate.

What does that mean? It means that the more Stunts (which let you stretch the rules to your advantage in very specific ways) you have, the fewer Fate Points (which let you stretch the rules to your advantage in more general ways) you start each game session with. Mundane Stunts cost less than supernatural Stunts, so mundane characters will tend to have higher Refresh Rates than supernatural ones.

It looks not only workable, but truly inspired. Of course, this is early in the playtest, so things may change.

Anyway.

Character creation works similarly to Spirit of the Century, which you can see here, with some variations to make the system fit the setting a little better. You pick Aspects for different parts of your character’s history, pick Skills, pick Stunts, star in a novel, guest star in other novels, and you’re set.

The character creation of Spirit of the Century was one of the things (one of the many things) about that game that completely blew me away, so it’s nice to see the best parts of it live on in Dresden Files. You do character creation as a group, and you help each other with your characters. Discussion of Aspects, background, good Skill and Stunt choices, and pretty much every other part of the character really helps you zero in on getting the character you want to play.

But the sweetest, most brilliant touch has to be the novels.

Everyone makes up the title of a novel starring their character. Then they write a brief (I restrict it to a single sentence) set-up of the novel. Then they write a brief (again, I impose a limit of a single sentence) account of what their character does in the novel.

Pretty cool so far, right? Just wait.

Now that you’ve done that, you swap novels with each other. You get to guest star in another character’s novel, adding a sentence about how your character helps out in their story. And then you swap again, and guest star in someone else’s novel.

Why do I think that’s so cool? Because of too many games where the characters meet in a bar as strangers and decide to trust each other with their lives. Because of too many games where people hang together because they’re PCs, and no other reason.

Here, characters have a history with at least two other characters. They know each other. They’ve worked together. They have a reason to get together and trust each other.

And it’s just bloody fun. Try it. Check out some of the novels and characters from my Spirit of the Century Pick-Up League site. They rock.

So, we wound up with a nice batch of characters, ranging from crazy street people looked after by faeries to cops in the organized crime unit, from nightclub bouncers to victims of White Court vampire preachers.

Everyone was quite pleased with their character. They’re really looking forward to trying the combat system (we’ve got the bare bones, and that’s the next step), and to creating some supernatural characters (when we get the rules).

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Magical Winnipeg

Okay, so the new Dresden Files RPG has a system in it for converting your hometown into a playable setting for the game. Well, less a system than a structure for brainstorming and relating ideas. It’s quite good. We tried it as a group in our playtest, and managed to turn Winnipeg, Manitoba into a city where we could all see adventures to run and characters to play. I thought it was pretty impressive.

So, here‘s what we came up with.

The Dresden Obsession

Okay, we know I’ve started this blog primarily to talk about the Dresden Files RPG. But why am I so hot about the game? And the books? And even the TV series?

Being obsessively introspective, as well as fascinated by story in general, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought.

On the surface, the series doesn’t seem to do anything really new. Magic in the modern world. C.S. Lewis did that in The Magician’s Nephew. Heinlein did it in Glory Road. Peter Beagle did it in Folk of the Air. But that’s okay. There are no really new ideas anymore; I’m pretty sure the Greeks used them all up by the time Aristotle got around to writing his Poetics. Stories may spring from ideas, but ideas aren’t the real driving force of stories.

Stories run on three engines: plot, character, and theme. Ideas can affect any of those three, and usually do, but it’s the end result that we look for. Pulp stories like Doc Savage are big on plot. Things like Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories are all about character. Theme-driven stories usually get lumped into more literary categories, but Orwell’s 1984 or Animal Farm are good examples.

Okay. So now I’ve defined my terms. Let’s talk about Harry.

Plot:

The plots are decent, if not stellar. They’re no better or worse than the plots in the average mystery novel. If I had to pick a mystery author to compare them to, plot-wise, I’d probably pick Robert B. Parker. Nice twists and turns, a decent number of surprises, no cheats, and it often ends in mayhem. Now, nothing else about the books is really similar to Parker’s writing, but the complexity and solid construction of the plots are about equal.

They are well-served by the rich setting of the books. You’ve got the normal people of the world, including cops, gangsters, coroners, geeks, students, bartenders, store clerks, and anything else you might want. You’ve got the wizards, three types of vampire, four or five types of werewolf, faeries by the bucketful, many ghosts, demons, fallen angels, and even three holy knights wielding magic swords. Add the spirit world (the “Nevernever,” in the books’ parlance) to Chicago’s rich real geography, and season the whole thing with many contracts, grudges, secret deals, and death curses, and there’s a real wealth of material for the plots.

Jim makes good use of it, too. Ten books in, and the plots are still new and engrossing, with interesting elements added every book, and established elements developed further. It’s one of those series whose stories really reward being read in sequence – it’ll draw you on, book by book, to the end.

Now, that said, they’re standard mystery plots. You know there’s going to be a bad guy, and that your first couple of guesses as to what’s going on and who’s doing it are going to be wrong. That’s okay, though. The plots are serviceable and enjoyable, but they aren’t what I read them for.

Theme:

The themes in the Dresden books are good ones. Deep ones. Universal ones.

What does it mean to be a hero? What does it mean to be human? Does power always corrupt? Do the means justify the ends? What is the nature of family? And always, where do you draw your line?

Lots of other books, movies, comics, and other media deal with all these questions, as well. Why? Because they fascinate us. They help us understand choices people make, both in fiction and in real life. They help us decide about ourselves.

Jim handles these in a very smart manner. Harry, the hero of the books, is constantly faced with the questions, and we get to see him struggle with the decision, and the consequences of his choices. That’s good. But the really good part is that the books have other characters facing the same questions and making different choices. We get to see the path not taken, and we can decide whether or not Harry made the right choice. Or if there is a right choice.

See? Smart.

Still, nothing really new here. Just handled well. Sort of like the plots.

Characters:

The main focus of the books is the wizard Harry Dresden. They’re written in the first person, and he’s our viewpoint character. And he’s pretty great.

Sure, in the beginning of the series, he’s a pretty standard archetype of the smart-mouthed PI, with the mystical ability to level buildings thrown in. But as the series develops, you get to see behind his facade. You begin to understand why he’s a smart-mouth. You understand why he’s working as a PI. You understand why, even though he can level buildings, he tries really hard not to. And the reasons are things we can understand and even, in a way, relate to. You learn that he has a code that he follows, one that even he doesn’t admit to. You know the pain that drives him, and the struggle he endures between what he could be and what he should be.

He also has what is, in my opinion, the single most telling trait of a literary hero: the ability to get back up one more time than he’s knocked down.

In true noire tradition, he regularly gets the crap kicked out of him physically, mentally, and spiritually. And yet, he still finds the strength and the reason to crawl back from the pit and face the bad guy. And win.

In a way, he reminds me of a more powerful, less cynical version of my favourite modern fantasy hero, John Constantine of the Hellblazer comics. He knows what he thinks is right, and he won’t quit until he wins, no matter what they do to him. Because he’s fighting the good fight.

The supporting characters in the book sort of work the same way. When you first meet them, they are typical, if interesting, stereotypes. As their role in the story progresses, they grow and develop, without ever losing what made them interesting in the first place. Murphy, the tough-as-nails female cop shows why she tries so hard, and how hard she works to survive in the world of the Chicago Police Department. Charity Carpenter, who hates Harry, becomes much more real when you understand her love of her husband (he saved her from a dragon, after all) and children, and her fears that Harry is going to get her husband killed. Even Thomas, the whimsical sex vampire, has reasons for his on-again, off-again alliance with Harry that make sense.

In short, Jim did his homework. He fleshed out the characters the way you need them to be fleshed out if you want them to be real to the reader. He starts you off with a quick sketch, then fills in all the backstory you need to make sense of them.

And no more. That’s important, too. He knows when to leave it alone.

So, good, solid characters. Maybe nothing really groundbreaking, but well-realized, likeable or hateable, and understandable.

Conclusion:

So, decent plots, decent themes, better-than-average characters. How does that add up to my addiction to the series?

Lemme ask you this: when was the last time you read a book where the author did everything well, and some things superbly?

I don’t know about you, but I usually find myself overlooking certain flaws because of strengths in other areas. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser books have decent plots, decent characters, but rehash the same theme of honour and masculinity in every book, usually with long conversations between Spenser and Susan. Still good books. David Eddings’s Belgariad series had a moderately interesting theme, very rich characters, but only enough plot to get you from one character moment to the next. Pretty much all of Heinlein’s stories had grand, expansive themes, rollicking plots, and characters so flat you could slide them under a door. Same thing with Asimov.

So along comes a series with no real weaknesses, and one telling strength. Of course I like it.

And there’s another reason, that has more to do with writing style than story. They’re quick reads. I blast through one of them in a day or so, without stealing time away from work or other responsibilities. Sure, I like the dense stuff, too, but I like it when a book takes me by the hand and says, “Sit down. Relax. No pressure. Here’s a fun story that’ll take no effort. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

And I do.

What’s goin’ on here?

So. I’ve started a blog. I guess.

See, I managed to get my gaming group in on the early alpha playtest of the Dresden Files RPG, by the folks at Evil Hat Productions. They do good games over there; check ’em out if you haven’t. It uses their FATE system, which they also used in Spirit of the Century, which is probably the smoothest, coolest, most true-to-the-source pulp game I have ever seen.

Lemme back up a bit.

The Dresden Files are a series of modern fantasy novels by Jim Butcher. They deal with Harry Dresden, a Chicago wizard who advertises in the yellow pages. Hilarity ensues. They’re fun books; Jim has really struck a balance between an updated noire detective story and an urban fantasy world worthy of Charles de Lint or Emma Bull. There are currently nine books in the series, with a tenth due out in April of this year. If the idea of a modern Phillip Marlowe battling the forces of darkness appeals to you at all, I say pick ’em up.

The novels also spawned a TV series that lasted a season. It wasn’t without its charm, but it wasn’t as well done as the books.

Anyway, I found out that the rpg license for the series had been bought by a little company called Evil Hat Productions. This worried me. Licensed properties are always kind of shaky in the rpg world, and I had never heard of Evil Hat prior to this. But they also advertised this cool pulp game called Spirit of the Century, so I decided to buy it and see what kind of chops they had.

Wow.

Blew me away. Completely.

After a single reading of the Spirit of the Century rules, I went from worried to ecstatic. These guys knew their stuff. Their thinking about game design, about what made for fun mechanics, about how mechanics fueled story, all of it: rock solid. Much of it even brilliant. Some of it revolutionary.

So, when I ran into Fred Hicks and Leonard Balsera at GenCon this year (Aaah, who am I kidding? I deliberately went looking for them!) and begged them to tell me when Dresden Files would be released, they took pity on me and told me to contact them later about playtesting.

Now, I’ve done playtesting before. I’ve even written and sold a fair amount of game material for D&D and Unknown Armies. So I leaped at the chance, and they decided that they would like input from me and my game group.

There’s a bit of a catch, though: instead of a Non-Disclosure Agreement, I had to sign a Disclosure Pledge, saying that I would talk about the game, and some of the stuff I see, in public, on the web, etc. They want me (and all the other early alpha playtesters) to talk about our experiences with the playtest, so that people start to see the way the game is shaping up and get excited.

And there’s some neat stuff to get excited about, lemme tell you.

So, over the next few weeks and months, I’m going to talk about the playtest here. Keep an eye out for some tidbits that have come out of our experiences, and for some general comments about the game and the process.

I’m not going to post the playtest documents, of course; they don’t belong to me and they’re not finished.

But there’s still some neat stuff I can show you.

Stay tuned.