Over the Edge: too many words

My formative RPGs were Traveller and Call of Cthulhu. While Traveller now has a vast background, at the time when I first started playing (in 1981) it didn't.

Both games are mainly character creation and rules, and in Traveller's case I learned about the Third Imperium from snippets here and there from the adventures, supplements and the Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society.

So it never really felt like learning lots of background. It was just stuff that I learned as I was going along, and it was never hard work.

(Call of Cthulhu obviously uses real history, mixed with the monstrous. There's a small amount of backstory regarding the war with the elder things and shoggoths, but that's in Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness rather than the rulebook.)

And the other contemporary games of the time (the early 1980s) were mostly the same. AD&D was just rules. Tunnels and Trolls, and GURPS, likewise. I never played RuneQuest or Empire of the Petal Throne, the two background-heavy RPGs of the time. 

Somewhere along the way (I guess in the mid 1980s with the arrival of Skyrealms of Jorune and MERP) increasingly detailed backgrounds became vogue. I remember in the 1990s remarking that I didn't like reading RPGs because they had too many words.

On reflection, it wasn't that they had too many words. After all, I still read novels.

But I really didn't want to have to learn another set of complex rules that didn't really change how the games are played. As far as I could see, there really wasn't that much difference in terms of the Chaosium system, the Traveller system or the AD&D system. They were all rules that just governed whether you succeeded at doing something, and one was pretty much like another.

At the time, I was also heading towards simpler systems. I realised that most dice rolls in RPGs were just answering a yes/no question, and I ended up running my games with players rolling two dice to see what happens. At the time, this was a bit weird. Now I run Fate Accelerated, which has a little more structure, but not much.

I also didn't want to have to learn a complicated new background - not when I could have just as satisfying games set in worlds I already knew.

I guess I don't have the temperament for system or background mastery.

Twenty years later

Twenty years later, my views on RPGs haven't changed.

I know this because I recently bought Over the Edge (OtE) and various supplements from Bundle of Holding. I had high expectations because OtE has a great reputation, but I'm afraid I found it full of words.

OtE rules: surprisingly complicated

Character generation was okay, although more fiddly than I was expecting. The simplicity that I recall from the reviews at the time (3 traits and a secret) is complicated with fiddly rules for hit points and optional rules for experience dice.

The rules were also more complex than I expected. The rules for most things are fairly simple - roll some dice to beat a target number, where both the target number and the dice you roll vary (but not by much). But combat, inevitably, takes up several pages and contains range tables and special cases that, for me, do not appeal at all.

Background: blah blah blah

Then we hit the background, and goodness that's a pile of text I will never, ever read. There are descriptions of people, factions, places and more. There are maps, and room-by-room descriptions of some key locations. Some of these are annoying - such as the room-by-room description of a hotel. I know what a hotel looks like - what I really need to know is why this one is different.

(It's this kind of thinking that lead me to create Tales of Terror, which is nothing but story ideas.)

I know a lot of people like this sort of stuff - and it leads to system/setting mastery which is a draw for some. But for me, mastery is in simplicity - what is the least I have to do to run a compelling game session. I'm all for being prepared, I can improvise most things as long as I know the key points. But that's all I really want - the key points. Unfortunately I found the key points buried in OtE.

To be clear, I don't mind learning background. But I want to do it as I'm doing something else (enjoying a novel, watching a movie, reading or playing a scenario), not as an infodump.

Sandbox

For me, OtE also suffers for not being clear as to what the PCs are up to. I suspect it's a product of it's time (and was also a problem with Traveller and, to a degree, Call of Cthulhu) so I think this is only something I'm noticing from 2017. I suspect that most of my games these days are convention one-shots means that I'm looking for more direction here than OtE was ever going to provide.

To be fair, OtE does have a go, by encouraging players to give their characters reasons for being on Al Amarja (OtE's fictional Mediterranean island). But that's something that needs to be done as a group, and for me I'd rather the game was narrower in scope and gave player characters a defined role.

So overall

So there we go. Over the Edge has too many words for me, but I accept that I'm a bit unusual in that department.

Maybe one day I will play it, but I'm unlikely ever to run it.

Addicted to World of Tanks Blitz

I have just uninstalled World of Tanks Blitz (WoTB). Again.

My brother introduced me to WoTB a couple of years ago and I’ve been playing it on and off ever since. I find it ever so addictive, and what happens is that I install it, play it a lot (and become quite grumpy when I do), and then uninstall it to break the habit.

And then, a couple of months later, I reinstall it again...

So I was extremely interested to listen to Adam Alter's Irresistible, which talks about behavioural addiction of various forms, including computer games.

Alter defines addiction as something you enjoy doing in the short term, that undermines your well-being in the long term — but that you do compulsively anyway. (It seems that most of us have a behavioural addition of some sort.)

Six ingredients

Alter says that: "Behavioral addiction consists of six ingredients: compelling goals that are just beyond reach; irresistible and unpredictable positive feedback; a sense of incremental progress and improvement; tasks that become slowly more difficult over time; unresolved tensions that demand resolution; and strong social connections."

I know I find computer games addictive. I always have. (For example, last time I uninstalled WoTB I found myself playing Star Realms over and over on my tablet.) But WoTB seems particularly insidious - and that may be because it includes all of Alter’s six ingredients..

For example:

• Compelling goals that are just out of reach: Grinding to get the next tank, playing in events, trying to complete missions.
• Irresistable and unpredictable positive feedback: the various medals, achieving mastery in a tank (which compares your performance against everyone else’s).
• A sense of incremental progress and improvement: the slow rise in win rate, learning maps and player behaviour, learning each tank’s strengths and weaknesses.
• Tasks that become slowly more difficult over time: Climbing levels is easy to begin with, but takes longer and longer as you climb the tiers.
• Unresolved tensions that demand resolution: I must complete that last mission, I've lost three games in a row, just one more before I quit.
• Strong social connections: Platoons, clans, team chat, in-game friends.

A rare mastery for me

So WoTB is designed to be completely compelling, and I’ve been suckered. (My wife is less enthralled, to say the least.)

I think there’s an additional factor to addiction - and that’s appeal. For example, despite being highly addictive, I’ve never smoked. It’s never appealed. WoTB, on the other hand, is all about something that’s fascinated me since childhood: tanks, and WW2 tanks at that.

Undermining my long-term wellbeing

I’ve already mentioned that WoTB can make me grumpy, but there are other things it does to undermine my long-term wellbeing.

Playing WoTB means I spend even longer on the computer than usual and can interfere with my sleep (especially when I was playing it on the tablet - I now won’t play it after 9pm). It also stops me from doing more positive things, such as writing or playing boardgames.

At least I’ve stopped playing it on my tablet - that gave me headaches and tense shoulders as well...

Making it harder

Alter’s advice to overcome a compulsion is to make it harder to get to the thing that’s addictive. I thought that by moving it from the tablet to the PC would help that, but it turns out that I just spend more time on the PC instead. (Worse, I find the PC controls much easier than the tablet…)

I’ve tried using a kitchen timer (or my phone) to limit my games and avoid the "just one more game!" syndrome. That only works occasionally, and the best solution is to completely uninstall WoTB, but that means not playing it at all - and I like playing WoTB.

So I haven’t figured out a good way of managing my time while it’s installed. The best thing is to uninstall it, which is what I’ve done.

But I have no doubt I will install it again at some point...

Further reading

Click here to read a New York Times article on Irresistible.

And here’s an extract from Wired.

And relatedly, a piece by Google’s “design ethicist”.