Author: devadmin

This is the first and, to date, only full RPG with me as the primary author… though I’m hesitant to really call this ‘my creation’. I wrote all the words, except for the index of events in the back, but it’s Stan Sakai’s world and I just play there.

The way I got this job was, I’d done an internship for Fantagraphics comics when I was in college. In lieu of pay, I got a slew of books, including some nice Usagi Yojimbo collections. I was simply floored by what Sakai had done – creating something so intense, so dramatic, so pure… with bunnies and kitties. And samurai. Huh.

When I found out Mark Arsenault had the rights to do the game, I told him I wanted to write it. Well, that’s how I remember it anyhow. Mark might use the word ‘begged’ but I won’t quibble. I just had this feeling that being a huge Usagi fan would add some pep and spirit to the game translation. I think it did.

From a design perspective, I approached this game with several goals. One was to make fights work like they did in the comic, but at the same time have it be survivable for characters. The second was to have meaningful combat options. In a game set in feudal Japan, you know deadly force is going to be all over the place, all the time, so the fight mechanics have to work, and be fun, and keep your interest for a long time. In too many games, players optimize their characters for one sort of attack or maneuver, maybe with another as a fallback. If they’re successful, they win a lot… but it gets boring, because they win by doing the same thing over and over. In Usagi, I started with Rock, Paper, Scissors and translated them into combat maneuvers. They became Total Attack, Cautious Attack and Total Defense. Three basic moves is simple (and I also wanted this to be a simple game – an unstated goal was ‘the first game my kids could play’) but their interactions create complex outcomes… and you can’t afford to become predictable, because every move is vulnerable to another.

It worked out pretty well. The desire for meaningful combat choices has carried on throughout all my design work since, too.

Just as John Tynes approached me and said “I’ve got this game idea that needs mechanics” and we made Unknown Armies, so too did Dennis Detwiller approach me and say the same thing forGODLIKE. Only his concept was “gritty, really gritty, low powered superheroes in World War II. With extra grit.”

So I read what he had and sent many emails and came up with a set of rules I liked. I playtested them a little (with John Tynes, through pure chaos) and realized they just wouldn’t work at all. Those rules turned into Meatbot Massacre, which you may now wish to download for free.

Thinking back, I had another rules-set that never even made it to getting tested… it was, I believe, my way way way old idea for rules for a L5R RPG, back when there was just the card game. Dennis didn’t like those much, either. Were those before or after the ‘semiotomatic’ nascent MBM pitch? I can’t even remember. My memory is not very good.

Third time was the charm. I was working on a lot of World of Darkness stuff at the time, and as this was the old Storyteller engine, I was trying to figure out exactly what the difference was between raising the Target Number and requiring more Successes. “Wouldn’t it be neat,” I asked myself, “if there was a consistent reason for it to be one or the other? That would give you two different types of success from your roll.” That idea was sort of in the back of my head, and floating elsewhere in the broth was a notion about a dice pool system that worked by assembling sets instead of aiming for target numbers. Eventually those two ideas collided. “Hm… if your target number was not an external abstraction from the Game Moderator, but rather produced by all the other numbers that came up in your roll, you’d get two axes of success – one from how many of the dice turned up in the set, and one from how high the number on the dice is. You could unpack a lot more information from just one roll.” It seemed like a good idea, and it wound up working much better than I’d even hoped. I called it the One Roll Engine (or ORE for short) and it was the pleasant surprise of working on GODLIKE.

The unpleasant surprise was the company that published the game.

I just typed up something pretty bitter about them, but I’ve erased it. No real point in raising the bitterness quotient of the internet by one whole billionth. GODLIKE is currently in the hands of ARC DREAM publishing, a penniless itinerant game company with big dreams to release a game called WILD TALENTS some day.

I was not really involved in WILD TALENTS. By that point, money was tight… I don’t remember exactly what was going on, but ‘money was tight’ is always a credible guess about my motivations at various career junctures. Anyhow, I had loads of White Wolf projects in the hopper and, while the ORE was something I loved, I did not have the time to play Rules Rabbi pro bono. Besides, I wasn’t sure it was even a good idea.

WILD TALENTS was pretty much designed by committee through fan input on ARC DREAM’s web site and mailing lists. One big lesson from Unknown Armies is that the game isn’t always what the designer thinks it is. Sometimes it becomes what the fans think it is, and that may even be a good thing. I was very curious to see what the ORE would turn into if Dennis and company could take the best ideas of the loving fans and harmonize them. It’ll either be sublime or a freaking mess. Either way, I’m curious.

At the same time, I started tinkering with the ORE myself. I’d had another ORE project in the fire when my relationship with GODLIKE’s first publisher went so far south it needed a sombrero. I continued refining the system on my own, when I didn’t have other work going on. (Sadly, that’s yielded me something like 100,000 words of ‘dinking around’.) The setting for this next iteration of ORE was a fantasy game called REIGN. Maybe some day it’ll be available and people can see some ORE evolution that is, I have to shamefacedly confess, objectively much better than the version in GODLIKE. One way or another, I’d like to get it out there. Partly, I’ll admit, because I’d like a return on the many naïve hours I’ve sunk into it. But also because REIGN is, in my opinion, my best rules design so far.

I didn’t get to work on this main book directly, which is a shame because White Wolf gives you a pay bump for core rule writing. However, while it was being composed, its first couple supplements (Nomads and Rites of the Dragon) were in simultaneous development. I wrote Rites and, to my delight, Justin included qu otes from it in the main book.

The whole V:tM/V:tR transition was just an interesting phenomenon, albeit one with some unreasoning passion on both sides. My impression is that if you played the old game, the new one excises whatever you liked best and whatever you hated most. For instance, extra-movement Celerity is gone, prompting howls of disgust from those who loved doing three or four times as many things as everyone else, and cries of ecstasy from players who hated feeling like they needed to buy up Celerity or resign themselves to never getting any spotlight time. Same thing with the dreaded metaplot, or the free successes of Potence, or the unpronounceable Tzimisce. (Did I spell that right?)

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This is not just the first game line to publish my work, it was also the game that lured me back into playing.

Back in college… wow, what year would this be? 1990? 1991? Anyhow, I was a fresh-faced, nerdly young English major with some buddies in the theater program. One day, one of them (her name was Mary Oettinger) asked if I was doing anything Saturday afternoon, because this friend of hers was playing this game thingie and she thought I might enjoy it.
The game thingie was called “Al Amarja” and the friend was an insurance salesman named Jonathan Tweet.

Previous to that, my hobby gaming experience was D&D from maybe fifth (fourth?) grade until junior high, followed by Car Wars and Star Fleet Battles in high school. Coming to college, I briefly flirted with mainstream, non-geeky entertainments like drinking and losing my virginity, but Tweet got me hooked right back in.

In fact, I’m mentioned in Over the Edge, though not by name. On page 199 of the second edition, Jonathan refers to a player “who feels it’s his duty to create the most powerful character he can get away with.” That’s me or, in any event, was me over a decade ago.
(If you don’t know who your group’s resident powergamer is, it may be you.)

My name is Greg Stolze and I’m a recovering game munchkin. I’ll say this though: I honestly did not know there was any other way to be. This is why I don’t dismiss twinky players today: They may be annoying, but at least they’re enthusiastic. At least they care enough to study the rules and invest some energy in playing. In some cases — mine, I hope — the annoying aspects of the syndrome can be cured.

Tweet cured them by (1) making it understood that no matter how I bent, torqued and perverted the letter of the rules, I was not going to get the better of the GM and (2) by demonstrating that there was a different level of play — the dramatic, separate and dissociated from the tactical. I was an English major, so I got it, though it probably took longer than it should.

Once I had my breakthrough, I started fiddling compulsively with game mechanics, settings, ideas… and I kept bugging Tweet for advice on how to get this stuff in print. To shut me up, he sent me to Blackburn and Nephew and eventually Tynes, and the rest is history.

Here’s an anecdote. One time I mentioned to Tweet that I sometimes felt like a fraud, since I’d exploited my friendship with him to open doors and get work in print. In other words, I felt like I hadn’t fully earned my success. His reply was, “Greg, of all the hundreds of people I’ve met through gaming, you’re the only one who’s successfully used me as a career-builder, even though I didn’t do anything for you I wouldn’t have done for anyone else. Maybe meeting me was a lucky break, but you’ve worked very hard at exploiting it.”

Over the Edge has left some obvious imprints on my own designs, ranging form the do-it-yourself skills in Unknown Armies to the conspiracy themes that show up just about everywhere. (Hey, they work.) It also introduced me to people who would be critical in my future career — notably Robin Laws and John Tynes.

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As I mentioned earlier, this started out as a Daedalus game but, well, time makes fools of us all. If you haven’t played it and think you’d enjoy a game where an action like “my character dives through the plate glass window, kicks the pistol from the gunman’s hand while in midair, and insouciantly rolls to his feet without spilling any of his chicken nuggets” can be taken without any particular penalty, you’d probably like it. It’s by Robin Laws, and the setting is essentially “Every movie ever made in Hong Kong.” It involves time travel, but time travel with the “paradoxes from killing my own grandmother” dialed way down and the “excuses to have ancient demons and kung fu warriors duking it out with cyborgs from the future” pushed to a primary position. It also contains the essay, “The Map is Not Your Friend,” which was very influential in my own design work.

When Daedalus went belly up and Feng Shui went to Atlas, I had the job of line developer for a while. It’s the only time I’ve been a line developer, and I learned a lot. One thing I learned is that art direction is kind of neat. Another thing I learned is that being an editor is crappy, crappy, crappy.

I’ll explain.

From the writer’s side of the keyboard, being a line developer looks like all glory. You get to make all the decisions, you write the outlines and tell the writers what you want, at whatever level of detail you wish. If you know exactly what you desire, you give detailed instructions. If you just have a half-baked idea, be vague and let the author worry about deciphering what you mean. You get to decide which ideas are stupid and which are worthy and what direction the line is going to move.

When you actually get in that editor’s chair, it’s another story. For one thing, writers are flakes! Not all of us, obviously, but enough. I myself have never missed a deadline, and I could never understand why this was such a big deal to line developers… until I became one and had creatives casually detonate my schedule. One artist strung me along to the very last minute before bailing on me and didn’t even bother to apologize. Furthermore, while withholding payment or future work look like dire punishments when you’re the writer, they seem pretty impotent to an editor who needs his word count filled today.

I did have some fun, and I did get to work with some very skilled and talented writers. But I also had to work with some who weren’t terribly skilled, and then had the distasteful choice of (1) redoing all their work myself or (2) walking them through an edit, or several edits, in order to get something adequate.

Maybe I’m too much of a softy to be a good editor. I want to be liked. Editors like Justin Achilli and Geoff Grabowski don’t seem to care if anyone likes them or not. They want to get good results, and if they have to give scathing redlines that make you cry, then scathe they shall. It’s a different skill set, I suppose.

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Unknown Armies started when John Tynes approached me with a passel of ideas for a new game about modern occultism. He was inspired by the way H.P. Lovecraft had created a cosmic mythology that was a definite break from what had preceded it, and he had ambitions t o make a similar break from both traditional mythsand the Lovecraft Mythos. He also wanted it to have a goddess who’d been a star in grindhouse porn.

We both just kind of got in the car and put on the gas without having much of a roadmap. That had its effects, good and ill, on the game. Both of us were plopping out ideas, only later trying to herd them all into some mutual coherence.

My bag was, I wanted UA to be a break from what were then the default horror settings — Call of Cthulhu and the World of Darkness. It wasn’t because I hated those games or had contempt for them. Rather, it was a recognition that I wasn’t going to do what they did better than they did it. I needed to find a new route.

I’ll confess that I was a little fed up with the helplessness inherent in both games. In CoC, no matter what you do, the coleopterans eventually inherit the Earth. The time travelers can tell you all about it. It’s done. In the WoD, it’s not quite that predestined, but there are still vast forces about which you know nothing and can do nothing, while they control everything. All the wretchedness of the world was due, not to the mischief and malfeasance of mankind, but to the vampires or evil spirits or werewolves manipulating the government and big business behind the scenes.

(Interestingly, the new version of the World of Darkness has soft-pedaled that “monsters run the show” angle.)

I never really articulated it, but I wanted UA humanity to be big enough to screw things up all on their own. One day my older brother sent me an email (on a totally unrelated matter — I think maybe I helped him convert a file so his word processor could read it?) with the subject line “you did it” and I really liked the phrase. So accusing, yet so promising of agency and accomplishment! It became the motto for Unknown Armies.

John and I both had strong opinions about where UA should go and what it should be, and we meshed remarkably well. Years later, I confessed to Tynes that I felt a little like a parasite. “You were the guy who came up with the central conceits of the Invisible Clergy and the House of Renunciation and TNI and everything,” I said. “Plus, the layout. All I did was build mechanics and fill in a few gaps.”

Tynes looked at me and blinked and said, “You’re kidding, right? I’ve always felt like you did all the heavy lifting — taking a bunch of half-baked ideas and turning them into something that made sense. And I never could have designed the rules.”

There it is. A testament to the creative power of log-rolling. What I learned from UA is that the best creative partnerships are the ones where each of you thinks the other guy is doing 70% of the work, and you’re the lucky Ringo along for the ride.

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In addition to the many companies that have employed me, I also self-published a few books, partially as an experiment, partially out of laziness. If lazy experimentalism sounds appealing (rather than appalling) here are some links.

Scary Face, my short story collection, is now available as a .pdf.

GODWALKER, a novel tied in to the game Unknown Armies.

These People Mean Nothing To Each Other is another distribution experiment, this one in charitable fundraising via hard-boiled fiction.