Last day of GenCon… and all I can really think is “thank god.”

RPG: Coldsteel Warriors

I basically signed up to play with a good friend from college who successfully Kickstarted his own pen & paper RPG system. Unfortunately, I was the only one of the five people who signed up to the event to show, so we shot the shit instead. He ended up giving me a copy of the game rules to take a look at, which I shall before plugging the game itself more than I am right now.

I guess I should mention that the setting is in the Iron Age of comics, so everything is basically Watchmen minus the actual Watchmen. And everything is d10s, so it sorta feels like Arkham Horror with the success dice mechanic.

Panel: Evening with RA Salvatore

To be completely honest, I really only know RA Salvatore via the Kingdoms of Amalur debacle. I mean, I’m aware of the fact that he wrote the Sephiroth of D&D (before there was a Sephiroth), but I have read a grand total of zero of those books. Maybe I should have before getting a ticket to his panel, but too late for that.

The panel itself was just pure Q&A with himself and about 30 of us. While he talked about a number of things – including some indulgent questions regarding some characters in his books – there were a few parts that stood out to me.

First, while he was making a love letter to the original EverQuest up on the stage, he sort of reiterated one of my prior points regarding long boat rides. Specifically: “we didn’t care about the waiting times because that time was our Facebook before Facebook.” He went on to acknowledge that people are less tolerant of those sort of waits because if they want to talk to people, they’ll just tab out to Facebook.

Contrary to my sage wisdom though, Salvatore lamented that “all the grief is gone” from MMOs. Back during the 38 Studios days, he was in the conference room every day fighting for EverQuest-style penalties and such. He personally attributes that thought process to devs who have a background in customer service (which is where most designers start out at), and them thusly being afraid of complaints on forums. “Corpse runs make for the best stories.” And so on.

After that gaming interlude, he launched on a deeply compeling rant on Unreliable Narrators. I’m not going to recreate the entire conversation, but the topic stemmed from an earlier point on how the rules of English 101 are not at all similar to what’s taught in English 1001. Specifically, how the readers of today parse information is much different from how the readers of 1970 parse, and the readers of 1930, 1830, and so on. The “rules” state that you should never have to write “‘Great job,’ Bob said sarcastically” because you as the author should have made Bob’s sarcasm obvious from his personality, the scene setup, etc. Hell, you shouldn’t even have to specify that Bob was even the one who said the line; it should be clear from the cadence of the dialog.

The trouble is, according to Salvatore, that people nowadays read things in terms of messages boards, e.g. all “dialog” is attributed by default. Plus, without the in-person element, we have a much harder time interpreting sarcasm in text. He stressed that he is not criticizing the generation, he’s just pointing out that if you want to write something that speaks to the audience of today, you have to speak in a way that they can understand.

The problem is that the present environment is pretty hostile to the Unreliable Narrator element. And after some thought, I agree. I don’t quite agree with Salvatore’s ultimate concern that the lack of Unreliable Narrators means that people are slowing becoming incapable of seeing/questioning the world from another person’s perspective, but yeah, the mechanic itself is pretty tough to pull off “correctly” these days. I think the problem is that it ends up feeling like a cheap trick most of the time, an easy way to introduce a twist without needing to foreshadow anything.

Anyway, that as that.