Filed under Tabletop Games …

Jan 08 2012
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Actual Play, design, RPGs, Tabletop Games

Preschool Pathfinder

My kid loves games. None too surprising, of course, and when I say that she loves games — she’s three — I really mean that she loves opening the boxes and hammering around with the stuff inside. Unfolding maps, stacking pieces, punching out chits, all the sorts of things that aren’t really playing the game that nonetheless involve or facilitate playing with the game.

Fighting the goblins.

Conceptually, Madeleine certainly understands a lot of things, even if they’re not exactly the rules of a given game. For instance, we recently played Ticket To Ride and she was upset that when my wife played the pieces to claim a route, the color of the trains on the route didn’t match the color of the route itself. Of course, she didn’t know the rules themselves, but she made her own associations among the game components in her mind.

Anyway, I had ordered the Pathfinder Beginner Box because I wanted to take a look at the boxed loot and see firsthand how successful it was as an introductory piece of material. When it arrived, Madeleine, being no stranger to the appearance of games and other boxed goodies, assumed that this was another something for her. She pushed her stepstool over to the kitchen island where I was unboxing the whole thing and jumped right into playing with the pieces. She put together some of the figures on the stands and was already familiar with dice. I don’t know how, exactly, we started actually playing, but when we did, she took right away to the interaction between the players, even though it was only the two of us.

In fact, she liked it so much, she talked about what she had done afterward, and even asked to play again when she woke today and wanted to play again after we got back from the zoo.

The reward for any good dungeon delve is a pile of loot.

Of course, we weren’t playing Pathfinder as its rules define it, but I described a few situations, she told me she wanted to fight the whatevers, and then she rolled the dice. The cause-and-effect sequence took form. Over the course of our play, I observed the following things:

  • I started with the standard exchange of RPG interactions, but then I modified the sequence to fit her interests and attention span. That is, we didn’t really both with AC or movement rates or missed attacks or even hit points, we just rolled dice and knocked over figures. It was the interaction with the pieces and me that held her interest.
  • I varied my tone of voice and the pacing of my descriptions, to which she reacted as cues. She knew that she needed to “hurry up!” while she was fighting, because of the tension of the encounter with the monster. At various points, she jumped up and down, raised her hands in victory cheers, and even placed the new monsters from the observed flow of prior turns. Today, we added background music, but I don’t know if that had any effect on the experience for her.
  • She picked up parlance very quickly, knowing that she was rolling for “damage” and identifying individual monsters. She liked fighting the dragon and the goblins; she didn’t like fighting the spider or the “goop” (ooze).
  • She immediately mapped the relationships of the character types to the prompts for their actions. That is, she knew the fighter fought and the wizard cast spells. After a few turns, when I asked her, “What sort of spell do you want to cast?” I didn’t give her any list or context, and she replied, “Pink.” So I described the wizard’s spell in terms of a pink ray. The next time it came to the wizard’s turn, she replied, “Blue,” “red,” “green,” etc., and every spell effect became shaped like a “ball” that the wizard cast. The fighter always closed to a melee piece placement and the wizard always maintained distance.
  • Importantly, the extrinsic motivator of treasure didn’t supersede the intrinsic motivator of playing the game itself, or at least manipulating the pieces. I placed glass beads at various points on the map and described them as giant diamonds. After she defeated the monster guardians, Madeleine would pick up the character token and the glass bead (as if the character were carrying the treasure) and move them over in front of her. Then she’d move to the next glass bead on the map. At the end of the game, I encouraged her to take the glass beads into her room and keep them as her treasure, where she can see them and count them.

Civilization's victory over the fiendishness of monster-kind.

The result was certainly more toy than game, but the interaction had the key elements of a true game. The only thing missing was meaningful choice, in that there were no real consequences to actions and that Madeleine’s choice for both of her characters was either fighting or casting a spell based on which character we were talking about. Still, she chose which treasure next to pursue and which square on the grid she wanted to occupy to fight the monster, so the rudiments of game play as opposed to toy play were there. Toy play is also consistent to the way her age group participates in expressive activity, so it was encouraging to see that expectation and her formative steps into development beyond those boundaries.

Next time, though, I’m not backing off the TPK.

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Sep 22 2011
10 Comments
design, RPGs, Tabletop Games, video games

Gameplay: Proactive and Reactive

I have long maintained that Vampire is a proactive game, as opposed to a reactive game. In a reactive game, the GM pits the players against a specific situation. The old man comes to the tavern, gives the PCs a map, and off they go to plumb its depths. In a proactive game, however, the players’ characters have their own goals, and much of the game tale revolves around their seeking to accomplish their agenda. Certainly, there’s room (and some would argue necessity) for a Storyteller to interject defining thematic moments and events, but much of the play is directed by the wiles of the character. It’s reasonable, in Vampire, to say, “The Prince wants to know who strangled his ghouls during the Michaelmas riots? I don’t care. My Brujah union delegate would rather continue undermining the Ventrue power-grab happening at Tammany Hall.”

That’s a great recipe for creativity, especially for those troupes that understand that gameplay is a shared creative experience. When the players and the Storyteller work together to create a compelling chronicle, the results are engaging for both sides of the ST screen.

In practice, though, I’ve observed that sometimes a player needs a bit of a “push” in order to start forming an agenda for her character. Many games tout a wholly open-ended experience. “You can do whatever you want!” seems like a great pitch, but in reality, it often confounds the player with the paradox of choice. If I can really do anything I want, how do I narrow down my options to refine my character concept?

(The other side of the paradox of choice, of course, is the illusion of choice. I still have a dismissive opinion of Aion, for example, because I watched one of their web videos that told me I could do whatever I wanted in the world and then promptly couched my opportunity in the terms of the DPS-Tank-Healer paradigm used by every other MMO. And you can’t change any of the world through your actions, so provided your definition of “do whatever you want!” is do what you can already do in every other game and have none of it result in anything of significance, well, you’re golden.)

Gaining control of an abstracted resource — becoming Prince or Primogen or acquiring Influence in Vampire — is a game objective that becomes more valuable as the context of the game and story develops.

This is where I think the roles of the clans has been one of Vampire’s greatest assets. This past weekend at the Grand Masquerade, my table at the Antediluvian dinner spoke a bit about this very concept. The clans are like social classes: They help define what I’ll be doing in the game, but they’re defined by the Kindred who constitute them, not their role in a gamist party dynamic. They’re families, not occupations. I can play them to type or against type and always use them as a sort of template, but I never have to be defined by the template. They’re character shorthand, and I can play my entire unlife as a clan member in the terms they present, or I can individualize and characterize beyond them if I choose.

Compare this to, say, the first edition of Wraith, which didn’t provide a role or concept for characters to adopt. It did so very broadly: You can belong to the Hierarchy, Renegades, or Heretics, but those are purely social constructs and more setting elements than direct objectives. When Rich Dansky did his revision work for the second edition of Wraith, he turned up the importance of the guilds, which provided a much-needed sense of direction for the players. It helped define what the game was about. It provided and extremely important context and a statement of the game’s essential experience.

Big score is an easily understood reactive model, since the players are in direct competition. Each reacts to the other's degree of success by trying to trump it.

In the transition to video games, this is still a critical piece of gameplay. In many games, it’s absent because the player’s role is wholly defined. You don’t need a guild or clan in Words With Friends, for example, because that’s not what the game’s about. The choice is moot in World of Warcraft, by comparison. Whether Alliance or Horde, you can still be a warlock or rogue and you’re only picking avatar options as a subset of team. WoW defines the gameplay experience by class, however, and likewise doesn’t allow actions to affect the world, which makes the essential experience how you’re killing the monsters, not whether you’re killing the monsters or to what end. WoW and Words with Friends and D&D are reactive — here’s what you’re going to do. Here are your letters or your quest, now hop to it! It’s a directed gameplay in which the essential experience is immediately available to the player, and “figuring out the world” isn’t part of the loop.

When you play Vampire, though, “figuring out the world” is part of the game, as is figuring out how to leave your character’s signature mark on it. It’s a good dovetail of gameplay and setting, since there’s a lot the player doesn’t know at the beginning of a chronicle and horror as a genre thrives on the unknown.

It’s also interesting to note there that the reactive games mentioned above are industry leaders in their comparative segments. By comparison, Vampire has always represented itself as an alternative to the mainstream type of game in its medium — and it maintained an impressive second-place position based on that variant in the essential tabletop roleplaying game experience.

In contrast, casual and social games thrive on reactive designs, because by not forcing the player to make those decisions, they can get directly into the objective-driven play. Play a round, take your turn, have a ten-minute session and you’re done until you choose to return. It’s the play transaction that partially defines the success of the model.

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Jul 09 2011
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design, RPGs, Tabletop Games, video games

Managing Power of Effect via Parameters

One of the things I’ve been working on recently is powers with multiple parameters. I’ve said before that there’s no such thing in a game as “too powerful” but that the concept instead reflected “doesn’t cost enough of the game resource.” As an expansion of that idea, I’m looking at powers that have multiple parameters defining them.

"I spend one mana point and instantly cause global apocalypse" probably needs some mitigating parameters.

Let’s say you have a power called Touch of Death. To invoke it, you pay X resource and the target dies. Pretty straightforward, right? In most cases, X would be a pretty high number, since the resolution is so simple and severe. Assuming you’re talking about a conflict-resolution game, being able to trump the conflict resolution is a very potent ability.

So, assuming we want to keep the Touch of Death power, how can we make it “not overpowered” in terms of resource expenditure? By applying parameters.

Propagating the power affects the value of X. Look at, for example, the multiplayer aspect of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Everyone effectively has Touch of Death. It’s a single button press. Using it appropriately is the core of game play — kill the other Templars. It costs nothing to perform, but the many other parameters, such as proximity, approach, visibility, and counteraction assume the traditional cost associated with resource expenditure. It “costs” nothing to make an assassination, but I have to manipulate the other events of the game to facilitate the action. Thus time and environment control are the resources.

“Casting time,” whether in the form of cooldown, ramp-up, or some more exotic method can mitigate the resource cost. If Touch of Death takes three seconds to activate, it’s at a disadvantage if used toe-to-toe against a quicker-acting power.

Distance is another frequently employed parameter. Touch of Death implies that I have to touch my target, putting myself in his vicinity and thus exposing myself to capabilities he may have (especially if the implementation times of those other powers are less than that of Touch of Death). My intended target may neutralize me before I’m close enough to employ the Touch of Death.

Any number of other parameters may affect the cost and perceived potency of a power. These may be setting elements, as many tabletop RPGs use (like blood points in Vampire or spell components in fantasy games). They may be mechanical impositions — the rules of board and card games or the interactive systems of video games. It’s not just what a power does that defines it, it’s how the player must interact with the game experience to invoke that power that affects its balance, cost, and significance on play.

Complexities like these are one of the reasons game design is such an iterative and observational discipline. A designer needs to watch and adjust all of these different parameters so they create the experience the game intends to communicate, and that requires both playtest and an eye toward which specific parameter tweak(s) can generate the best results.

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May 13 2011
20 Comments
design, gaming, RPGs, Tabletop Games, video games, WIP, Writing

Up and Movin’

So, I’ve been wondering what to do with this blog again, as I do about every year and a half or so. My post frequency has fallen off a bit of late, because I had directed so much attention on working on (and blogging for) the 20th Anniversary Edition of Vampire. My work there is done now, and Eddy’s taken over the management and development of it. That will maybe let me get back in here and bang around with blogging more than once a week.

It's a prison.

I’ve also left White Wolf/ CCP again and have taken a position with Ubisoft that will be moving my family and I to France. The projects are under heavy NDA, so I can’t talk about them here or even say what they are, but I’m glad to be working on them. (I know, I hate the “Oooh, it’s under NDA” non-remark remark, but I don’t make the rules.)

For a while I was talking about the intersection of tabletop gaming with digital gaming, and I’m sure I’ll continue to have some amount of that sort of outwardly facing contemplation. With the conclusion of my Vampire work, I’m able to turn more attention back to my Pagan Lands setting work, which has received some good feedback over its course. I’ve also got a little darling game project that’s a sort of dinner-murder-mystery about Queen Victoria trying to raise Prince Albert from the dead that may see the light of day. And, of course, fiction writing, for the two or three projects that occupy my hobbyist’s attention in bursts. Maybe some more mixed music sets when I find the time. Probably change the general look of things here.

General RPG consideration, video game consideration, and just plain design talk have always been fun for me, so I’m sure that’ll remain here, too.

I think the biggest change is that this blog might actually become more personal again. Not personal as in things that I don’t want people to see, but personal in that I may end up showing a more holistic approach to games design than I had previously. A designer doesn’t exist in a vacuum: A designer is the sum of the games he plays, the life he lives, and the external influences on him.

I’m about to have a lot of external influences. I’m moving into a different culture, learning a new language, and still being a parent while continuing to design and play games amid it all. At the very least, I hope to have nifty photos of cool European surroundings. Hopefully you remain interested.

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Mar 10 2011
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design, MMOs, RPGs, Tabletop Games, video games

Playing When You’re Not Playing

I remember when I first started playing Vampire. In particular, I remember a lot about the times in between the times I first started playing Vampire. I recall plotting the things I was going to do in the next session, jumping at shadows while I did my retail job, spooking myself with the idea that there are vampires out there.

This is the hallmark of a good game. When your player enjoys playing so much that he’s thinking about playing even when he’s not playing, you have a winner. “Playing while you’re not playing” isn’t limited to any particular game form — it applies to RPGs, card games, video games, MMOs, any kind of game you can imagine — and that’s why it’s so valuable.

Pushing that forward a bit, the results magnify when multiple people participate in playing while they’re not playing. The game experience becomes a token, a symbol of what brings people together, and it’s a motivation to do it again.

I talk a lot here about relationships, in particular the relationships between gamers. Playing while you’re not playing is amazing fodder for fostering those relationships. Community thrives in downtime. You don’t have to look any further than forums to see this, or to visit any convention and listen to the conversations that are happening away from the actual tables. Whether people are talking in-character (known by a variety of appellations, such as downtime, soft RP, etc.), discussing the rules and how to manipulate them, or simply talking strategy and content, shared experiences are the basis of relationships. And once those relationships are in place, once you know you enjoy them, you want to go back to them — you want to get back into the game to have more good times, and to share more of those fun experiences with the friends who facilitate them. It’s a positive feedback loop.

It’s separate from worldbuilding. In some ways, wordbuilding is playing while you’re not playing, but it’s generally absent the community or relationship aspect. It’s typically a solo endeavor, more of a tool than an end itself. That’s not to knock it — I’ve made a pretty good career out of some amount of worldbuilding — but it doesn’t satisfy the urge for why people play games. But to expand the exercise even further, add players to that worldbuilding. Give those players something to talk about after the game itself, and you’ve hit a very powerful combination. Fun exercise plus compelling environment equals let’s play again soon.

Understanding why people play games and giving them reasons to do it again are central tenets of game design. More on this soon.

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Mar 09 2011
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Actual Play, d&d, RPGs, Tabletop Games

Gaming Helps People Relate to One Another

Brian Campbell found a Salon article about the socializing value of gaming (in particular, tabletop roleplaying games and D&D). It’s good to see one of my pet advocacies — that playing games is marvelous for building relationships — put into practical narrative context.

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Mar 03 2011
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Actual Play, RPGs, Tabletop Games

Departing From the Script

The best tabletop session I ever ran was one that threw me completely for a loop.

Pantaloons are key.

I had maps. I had encounters. We had some bottles of wine at the table and the setting I was running was my Belluna D&D campaign, which is a sort of romanticized Renaissance Italy with plotlines shaded by the Borgias and the Godfather. I had a roughly plotted scenario in which the players were supposed to fight their way onto a guarded ship at the wharf, find the cursed clock that was a actually a bound time elemntal, and track it back to the abandoned church at which the session’s bad guy was holed up.

The players didn’t want any of that.

As players, we got buzzed on the wine. As characters, everyone got loaded, fell into the canals, started a street party, and dragged a parade of partygoers to the docked ship, where the sailors joined the festivities and the PCs crept on board to find the clock clue I had originally scripted them to have to fight to find.

I didn’t use two-thirds of what I had written. It was glorious.

I didn’t force the story into its predetermined script. The players saw a portion of the setting that they liked and they ran with it. The GM and the players participated together.

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Feb 06 2011
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design, RPGs, Tabletop Games

Roll One and Die

This guy will either explode you into your component molecules, or he will hide behind the barbarian.

Warhammer Quest used to have an interesting mechanic surrounding its “wandering monster” encounter system. Every turn, the player with the wizard character rolled a die to determine his available Power (the magic resource) for the turn. On a roll of 2-6, the wizard has that much “mana” for the turn. On a 1, however, the wizard has no mana — and a random encounter occurs.

This is pretty consistent with the Warhammer world. That is, when something kind of bad happens, something god-grindingly awful usually piles on top of it. As a pacing mechanic, though, it’s neat game design. It makes for spikes of “SWEET MOTHER OF CRAP WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE,” which is the sort of thrill that makes a game that has randomness as such a central element exciting. It’s way more engaging than rolling poorly in Settlers of Catan — 2 or 12, nothing happens, because nobody bothers building on those number distros unless they have to.

"And then I was, like, 'Wait, my Humanity is FOUR? But this is only the second session of the chronicle!'"

I used to employ on one of these “trouble spots” during convention and demo games of Vampire I’d run at shows. (I always create pre-gens for convention games, since for a demo people won’t have their own, and because the scenario construction for Vampire relies a lot on the types of characters undertaking it. I didn’t want to take the chance of having a political mystery scenario written and have to shoehorn trenchcoat katana mirroshades Kindred Braveheart into it.) I’d dole out characters by whatever method — one of my favorite methods is “give me three adjectives that describe the character you’d like to play” — and then I’d have each player roll a 10-sider for his starting blood pool. And then, to illustrate the potential of the system, I’d have each player spend a blood point at the beginning of the session to reflect the mystic consumption of vitae.

The results were what you’re dreading: Someone inevitably rolled a 1 on that blood poll roll, and upon spending that first blood for the night, awoke into a ravening frenzy. This was a convenient, exciting, in medias res method for illustrating the blood mechanics, the Beast, and frenzy (and probably Humanity and the Masquerade…) all at once. The game got started with a holy-smokes action sequence, but still got to hit the thematic high points of Vampire.

The system I lovingly know as “roll one and die” makes for a fun and thrilling tipping point, but it’s not universally employable. The drawbacks to using it as a common design principle are few, but can be significant.

  • It can’t prevent a character from participating meaningfully. If all the player does once he’s rolled his one is sit there and wait for his next turn, that’s not an engaging design. The Warhammer Quest rule, for instance, lets the wizard character continue to play his turn, whether by using magic items, attacking with a physical weapon, etc. The Vampire example places the character front and center in a dramatic scenario, and gives him a handful of situational escape or conclusion possibilities. Both of their outcomes engender clever thinking and force accountability.
  • To that end, it doesn’t port well to a solo environment. If the only player who has any input suffers the double-whammy of something bad appearing, and the resource to be used against it is absent, well, that’s trouble. (Of course, Warhammer’s propensity for piled-on catastrophe often turned up triple-whammies, in which the players, already beset by monstrous hordes, are ambushed by an EXTRA BONUS monster horde, oh, and the wizard still has no mana to sling into the fray. Good God, loving this game was masochism.)
  • Players are a cowardly, superstitious lot, and the guy who rolls a one — even though he’s the only guy who ever has to roll that die, so it’s bound to happen eventually (one time in every six, actually) — becomes a veritable Jonah when the inevitable finally happens. This isn’t a problem in most cases, but with particularly salty groups, it’s no fun to be That Guy.
  • If “roll one and die” occurs too frequently, it ceases to be exciting and instead becomes tedious. The Vampire example (even in a non-sadistic convention environment) lets a vampire watch as his precious resource (blood) dwindles, but allows him to choose when her replenishes it. Warhammer Quest balances roll one and die with the presence of the other characters, and the options of items and melee.
  • It’s dangerous to rely on this as a balance mechanism. WQ flirted with this, because the wizard is a powerful character class, but in general, a system that depends on randomness to enforce balance is going to face trouble in the long run. Most cases with play out according to the balance, but statistically, what about those poor slobs at the low end and the lucky stiffs at the low and high ends of the probability distributions? “Wizards suck! All they do is cause problems,” and “Wizards rule! Nothing bad ever happens to them and they always have more than enough Power to face the enemy.” You have to be a hardcore fan of randomness to enjoy the highs and lows of this feature type as a character trait.

What do you think? What games, whether tabletop RPGs, boardgames, or video games, use a system like Roll One And Die to good or bad effect?

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Feb 01 2011
2 Comments
design, MMOs, RPGs, Tabletop Games, video games

Diagramming Systems Design

When I was younger, I used to like to draw. I’m not very good at it now, being little more than having a minor and unharvested bit of natural talent, and I rarely draw anymore except when doodling for my daughter, but I really used to get a kick out of it. I used to collect drawing books, all of which had advice for the artist like, “Hold your drawing up to a mirror and you’ll see a place where you might have twisted off.” Being the uncultivated minor natural talent that I was, I didn’t ever want to do any of this because it might have led to improvement, but there’s something to the idea of stepping back from something, looking at it from a different perspective, and seeing what’s actually there.

This is a practice that can work very well for game design, as well. In working on the WoD MMO, I’ve observed a big shift in how I do my systems design. When working on tabletop RPGs, I always built the narrative first, then I built the system, then I retooled the narrative to fit the system. In working on MMO design, the narrative becomes “How will the player use this?” Without a live GM to adjudicate special cases, a game system is inflexible, and the narrative derives from the actual function, not from how a pair of players can collaboratively, mutually craft a dramatic outcome. Systems design in a video game creates immediate results, whereas systems design in a tabletop game creates a situation in which two or more players arrive at a conclusion.

When designing systems, I use bullet points. This lets me focus on the concise function of the systems, and it fits well into tasking and time management software. Using nested bullet points, or visually “diagramming” systems design lets me look critically at each piece of a design, and it also lets me see each component of the design. This, in turn, shows me what the system actually does, rather than what I think it does — it shows me where the design has “twisted off” from the intended result.

Here’s an example. This is just thrown together for the topic at hand, this isn’t a design from the WoD MMO, so put those knives away.

Now, what we see here is a variety of things.

We’re dealing with a power that has a narrative theme of shadow. “Shadow” could be anything — lightning, cosmic dust, slime molds. It’s set dressing, not part of the system design.

The power is front-loaded for combat. It has a higher damage rating than defense rating.

However, the power is also built for the long play, defensively. The damage rating is higher, but the armor lasts longer and I can’t fumble it.

That informs my other systems design. If I’m designing another offensive power, I will either need it to inflict more damage or cost less resources to implement. If it’s otherwise the same as this power, why would I ever choose another, when this one does all that the other does and then some?

Being able to choose what I want on the spot is part of the power’s, well, power. The above two uses mean that the power is flexible. In some cases, you might want to use it for offense, while in other cases, you might employ it defensively. This means that other powers probably do more damage or offer more protection, but don’t offer the choice that this power does.

Creating the environmental object adds even more versatility, and is a little more open ended. Are we in a side-scroller or platforming type game? Then I’ll probably be using this a lot to overcome challenges posed by level design. It may offer me access to power-ups that people without the power can’t access. Is this a tactical game? I’ll probably use this object creation to impede my enemy’s movement, or to grant myself some kind of cover. Is it an action game? I might use this to trap a foe in a “shadow cage.”

This additional dimension of the power is included with the offensive and defensive capabaility. There’s probably another power that lets me create more “shadow platforms,” does it quicker, or costs less. Again, pairing this ability with the offense and defense potential makes this flexible, and thus either more expensive or weaker than the core object-creation power (otherwise, I’d just take this one and always be prepared for multiple eventualities, rather than the less-versatile, same-cost power that only built environmental objects).

So, in diagramming the power, we see not only what it does, but how it relates to the other systems in the game. As well, this makes it easier for us to change individual components of the design instead of having to scrap the whole thing and start over.

When you pick up a game book, it’s full of paragraphs. When you fire up a video game, the systems are logics, inherent to the play. The rules themselves, though, are concise, distinct, and often dependent statements.

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Jan 24 2011
5 Comments
design, RPGs, Tabletop Games

One More Look at Vampire’s Green Marble Cover

The other day, I said I’d scare up a few more photos of the original green marble cover artifact for Vampire: the Masquerade. They’re better resolution this time, as promised. You guys who came to visit that grainy photo spiked the hell out of my page views, so here’s a little more for you.

Up in the Danger Room, all sorts of relics of the World of Darkness and White Wolf Publishing dwell. Part library, part IT morgue, part game room, and part Federal disaster area, the Danger Room is upstairs, next to the server room. It’s where people run some of the office games (the Elysium meeting room is better for this, to be honest), and it’s where a lot of the uncatalogued White Wolf history lives. There’s a copy of everything we’ve ever printed up there, from some coffee-stained storypath Whimsy Cards to the complete run of World of Darkness titles, old and new. There’s even peripheral stuff — if you look on the left, you can see one of the standees from the Hunter video game. That kind of orange rectangular piece against the bookshelf in the back is an autographed Brom print of Stewart’s. Just above that, a little to the right at the top of the bookshelf are a pair of countertop Rage standees, for the core set and the Wyrm supplement. I also found one of Mark’s notebooks with handwritten sketches for a science fiction game. (It’s not the one that became Exile, sorry.)

There are also several piles of dead computer junk, broken Nerf guns, and various other things in storage.

In the center of the room are a pair of carpenter’s tables, which we hijacked from the building supervisor and turned into gaming tables. There’s a game up here most of the middle weekday nights. Those are also the old meeting room chairs, and I once swiped one of them for my office chair because the chair I had previously used became… somehow broken and on fire. I blame the Sabbat.

It’s called the Danger Room because it’s only partially floored. Walk too far and you’ll fall through the ceiling of the World of Darkness development area on the first floor.

Here’s a better shot of the cover slab I turned up while rummaging last week. Weirdly, that’s my old desk up there, too. I worked on everything from Clanbook: Cappadocian through Revised Edition Vampire through the relaunch and Requiem on that faithful old beast. It’s about six thousand pounds and full of sharp metal flanges. I’m not sure why we kept it, to be honest. Sarah Timbrook had that desk before I did, when she came up from the warehouse to do inventory and eventually international sales. I was 22 when she had that desk, and I was 25 when I inherited it. I’m 37 now.

I remember my then-girlfriend introducing me to Vampire. We were both big Anne Rice enthusiasts, and very much interested in the darker side of things, the beauty and sensuality of danger, and the wonder of the night. Once I took my first step into the World of Darkness — with Mage, ironically, and not Vampire itself — I was hooked. I couldn’t escape… and I didn’t want to. Every shadow hid a lurking Kindred, every early-morning fog hid a Telluric mystery, every visit to Celestial Park was a peek into something beyond the Veil. Two years after being introduced to the game, I packed up my pickup truck with my few belongings and moved to Atlanta to work for the company. Three years after that, Rob Hatch turned Vampire over to me, to work on what ultimately became Exalted. Even though I’ve quit twice, I still can’t escape the powerful allure of the Kindred, and I’m now helping guide them into the realm of MMO computer games, 20 years after Vampire first arrived and 16 years after I first joined the carnival.

(Hey, look, Eddy’s talking about the look back over at his blog, too.)

And here’s the real gem, a side-by-side comparison of the object art and the printed book itself. Notice that the subtitle is different — I think in the first edition, the marble slab had no subtitle on it and it was dropped in during digital layout. Thereafter, for the second edition, the subtitle had its font change and the vinyl graphic applied to the marble plate itself. The color-correction is different on the print copies, too, giving the books a little more of a blue tint.

I feel a little bit like that rose myself, sometimes, a little beaten up and wearing those years with some degree less elegance than I might. But it’s been a wonderful ride with Vampire, and it’s a dazzling look back here on the precipice of two decades. To all the players, readers, and admirers of Vampire, thank you. You’ve made 20 years of serving the Kindred — and here’s to many more! — well worth having.

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