The Joy of Bookkeeping?

Howdy there folks - Pelagius here.

So it strikes me that we role players are never on the same page regarding how much bookkeeping is a good and desirable thing in our various games.

I came to this conclusion the other night when I was running my 4th edition D&D campaign with a bunch of my friends. Since you're reading this, it's probably a safe bet that you've been involved in a D&D game before, so you can probably put the scene together in your head: a bunch of awesomely nerdy people sitting around a table that is inevitably too small to contain all of the character sheets, dice, maps, minis, pens, pencils, snacks, drinks, etc. This type of scene has been a part of almost every single roleplaying game I've been a part of since I first got involved with this glorious thing called gaming nine years ago.

As I looked at the barely contained and certainly unorganized chaos in front of me, it occurred to me that all of us were as happy as pigs wallowing in the mud - surrounded by the paraphernalia that seems to define the games we play and loving every bit of it. Some of my players prefer to keep track of things by using old school printed character sheets and rolling actual dice. Others adopt a more technological approach and use their iPhones or laptops to take care of their character's hit points, healing surges, powers, attack bonuses, etc. The whole scene makes me smile and brings me to a happy warm place.

What struck me was the thought that these players actually like to keep track of all of this stuff.

Some of you are probably thinking, "Well of course I do! Rolling a whole bunch of dice and eeking out bonuses is what it's all about!" Others are probably thinking "That sounds awful! How could you possibly be having fun keeping track of all of that nonsense?"

This highlights a question I've been groping towards expressing for some time now: how much bookkeeping is good and fun in a roleplaying game?

Because I know a wide array of tremendously interesting and wonderfully creative roleplayers, I have run across a plethora of gaming systems. Some of them are so skimpy as to be barely considered "systems" in the first place, and they demand next to nothing in terms of book keeping. Castle Falkenstein comes immediately to mind on this side of the equation. On the other side, however, are those role playing systems that demand scrupulous, exacting, some would say excruciating amounts of detailed bookkeeping in order to play the game - HARP exemplifies this kind of complexity in my mind. Other systems such as New WoD and D&D seem to fall somewhere in the middle.

So I ask you, dear readers, where do you fall on the spectrum of bookkeeping goodness? How much is enough to keep you interested? How much turns you off?

More importantly to my inquisitive nature, why do you feel this way?

That's all I got for now folks, so goodbye and good gaming!

--Pelagius

"Take everything that's not nailed down. If you can pry it up, it's not nailed down properly." - Old Bandit Kingdoms proverb

AggieCon Discounts Through Tuesday, 3/29

Hey everybody. In celebration of our appearance at AggieCon this weekend in College Station, TX, we're putting Die Type System and P.A.N.A.C.H.E. on sale: You can get a hardcopy of Die Type System for just $19.99 (normally $24.99) here, and a hardcopy of P.A.N.A.C.H.E. for just $19.99 (normally $24.99) here. You can get a PDF of Die Type System for just $9.99 (normally $14.99)through this link, and a PDF of P.A.N.A.C.H.E. for just $9.99 (normally $14.99) through this link. The sale lasts until midnight Tuesday evening, so grab it while it's hot!

Four Products, Two Books -- And You Save Money!

We're surfacing again. :-) This time, we've done two interesting things: One, we've repackaged P.A.N.A.C.H.E., our premier system, to include Triple Point, a complete setting designed for that system. So not only can you be a Badass, you can do it in three worlds, joyriding in magnificent spite of the unfeeling forces of the universe that think that, for some esoteric reason, you ought to be dead. Of course you shouldn't be dead--you're a Badass. Look it over and see what you think. (If you already bought P.A.N.A.C.H.E. through Lulu or RPGNow, and haven't yet received an email from us about getting a copy of the updated book, shoot us off a quick email at query@systemicinsanity.com and let us know--we'll send you a free PDF of the new version.)

Two, we're rolling out our second system, Die Type System, complete with a setting of its own called Polyhedra! Die Type System is perhaps best summarized by its slogan: 'PRESS START.' If you've ever wanted to play a tabletop RPG that worked and felt like a video game RPG, this is the system for you, hands down. And if you've ever wanted a setting that truly epitomized the recklessly joyful primary colors of a video game, complete with sharp and frighteningly believable left turns into lands of dread and danger, then Polyhedra is the setting for you, hands down. Have a look for yourself and try the thought on for size.

Both books are for sale as paperbacks for $24.99 here through Lulu, and as PDFs for $14.99 here through RPGNow. Happy gaming!

Goals

I’m a very goal-oriented person.

Present me with a problem, and the first thing my brain does is to identify the goal involved. After all, if I don’t know precisely what my goal is, time and effort spent on the problem stands a good chance of being wasted. So identify the goal, identify the tools you have, and engineer a method of gaining the former using the latter.

And now, I am part of a comapny that designs tabletop roleplaying games. What is my goal?

The answer is both immediate and (ideally) obvious: My goal is to design good games. Of course, this leads to the next, equally immediate and obvious question: What makes a game good? Fun, right? Yeah, the game should be fun - why play it otherwise?

What tools do I have?

I want you to have fun, but I can’t control your GM. I can’t control your fellow players, or your dice. In fact, I ultimately have only two “tools” I can use to maximize the fun you have playing our games. Those are the fluff, flavor, and thematics of the game, and the rules.

Recall, if you will, the movie Dead Poets Society. Specifically, the famous scene where Robin Williams, in his guise as the eccentric teacher, read an essay about graphing artistic value versus technical merit, and trying to maximize the area of the resulting rectangle. I’m sure most of you remember with great fondness his instruction to rip that page out of the book.

Well, I am not a writer of poetry. In fact, I have often been accused of having no soul. And so, in order to design a good game, I walked right into that classroom, plucked that page of the book out of the trashcan, and carefully smoothed out the wrinkles. The essence of that page is page 1 of my hypothetical book on good game design. (Please, hold all booing until the end of the lecture.) The thing is, I really and truly believe that greater art and beauty can be achieved by someone who has mastered the underlying technical details, and I really and truly believe that well-written, quality rules which support and invoke the flavor a game is supposed to have make it a far better game for it.

And so it is that I find myself as the advocate for rules. I don’t support rules for their own sake, of course. What I do support, and in fact insist on, is that every game concept, fluff and mechanic alike, is properly supported by rules. In future blog posts, I plan to go into more detail on how I approach and construct the wonderful chart that Professor Keating hated so much, and how I use it to improve the games we want to sell you.

Emerging From Hibernation

We're back.

Of course, to be painfully honest, most of you never even knew we'd left. We basically went dormant over the last year, drawing from reserves of brown fat and the desire for a deep and dreamless sleep in order to conserve energy and emerge in spring, triumphant, leaner and meaner, and ready to dispense bright young newborn gaming systems into the world. We're at least getting the "emerging" part down pat. We have a whole new web site under construction right now, and there'll be more to see as that comes along.

For now, the red-letter announcement is that we have a thrilling, gripping, boredom-trouncing action-adventure-and-cinema-in-one tabletop RPG system for sale on your very own internet, known as P.A.N.A.C.H.E.: Presenting Another Nefarious Action Cinema Home Experience. You can order a hardcopy or a PDF here from Lulu, or grab the PDF here from DriveThruRPG. We'll have a real, honest-to-God, browse-through-our-store setup as soon as possible--including a new, improved edition of our first system, Die Type. More on that soon. We'll let you know how we're doing adjusting to life back in the sun once our eyes adjust to the living world once again.