Why I Like Blue Moon

It seems I'm late for everything. My friends have learned not to trust anything I say about when I'll show up. My professors have been remarkably accommodating of my tendency to grin sheepishly and say "At least it's only three days late this time." Slip me some scotch and put on Human Traffic, and you'll get to hear me bitch at considerable length about how I got into the rave scene about seven years too late and four years too old.

So it goes with Blue Moon. By the time I found out about it, it had been out of print since 2007, leading to jacked up prices on what core sets were still available. On the up side, the supplemental decks are going for a song (six bucks a go on Meeplemart), and the game can be played with just these expansions and the rules, so The Hunger can be at least partially satisfied.

Blue Moon was created by Reiner Knizia, who I can't mentally name without adding an apostrophe like Flapjack's Captain K'nuckles. K'nizia is the Frank Zappa of game design, which is to say, ridiculously prolific - in an industry where every gamer wants to be a designer, he has over 500 published games - and massively influential - He's pretty much the face of the German school of game design, and his games reflect that school's obsession with simple rules and complex strategy.

Blue Moon's an excellent example of both. The game is played with 30-card decks representing various crazy fantasy races (mercifully none of the Tolkien assortment pack - I'll take bright red golem/natives and caterpillar people over orks'n'elves any day) trying to win fights and thus seduce the three fickle dragons that rule their world. To do this, you play a character card, declare whether the ensuing fight is to be fought based on the Fire or Earth stats and draw new cards. Your opponent plays another character (or combination of a character and a support or booster card - Boosters only affect a particular character, supports affect all the characters you play that fight) to equal or exceed your value in the chosen element. If they do, you have to play a new character and support cards to equal or exceed them. This back-and-forth continues until one player can't or won't equal the current active total, whereupon they admit defeat, the other side moves one or more dragons to their side (or from the loser's side to neutral), all the cards in play are discarded, and the loser starts a new fight. This continues until one player has all three dragons and would win another, or until one player runs out of cards, in which case the player with any dragons (or, failing that, any cards) wins.

There's some interesting conflict and tough choices to be had just using this simple arrangement. If you have a character with a mediocre Earth and strong Fire, do you play it to continue the current Earth-based fight, or retreat and save it for later? Do you keep the level of the fight relatively low, allowing both you and your opponent to toss out small fry characters and wear each other down, or do you escalate and hope to overcome on sheer shock and awe (particularly worrisome if you don't have the resources to keep the escalated fight going another round)? Another point to add to this hand-wringing: If the winner has played six or more cards, they attract an extra dragon, so it's wise to give up a hopeless conflict before it reaches that level. Of course, what qualifies as a "hopeless conflict" can vary from turn to turn as you draw new cards and have to new options to weigh, particularly as many of the character, booster and support cards have their own rules text to change up the basic game.

Considering this last, it's amazing that the various decks are balanced as well as they are, a state of affairs I'll credit to Knizia's  PhD in Mathematics. What's more, each deck has a significantly different feel, from the basic game's Hoax and Vulca representing a relatively straightforward "Boost myself/Fuck you over" dichotomy to the birdlike Flit's incredibly irritating reusable cards, to the amazonian Mimix and Oompa-Loompa-esque Khind's ability to twin up and form gangs respectively, which look similar on paper but which play completely differently, to the Pillar's giant fuck-off caterpillars that eat cards from the opponent's hand.  It's the kind of balanced equality you'd expect from an extremely well-made fighting game, and like those, it takes a fair bit of practice to really use your favoured ass-kickers to their greatest effect.

But wait, say you, the reading audience - isn't the game extremely out of print? How can you have significant experience with even one deck, much less the encyclopedic knowledge that you claim? Well, one of those wonderful Internet obsessives has taken it upon himself to create an AI simulator for the entire game. While it does kind of get up my pantleg that it always loads with you as the Hoax fighting the Vulca, that's a minor complaint - It looks good, it plays well, and all the interface questions I've had thus far are covered by the accompanying FAQ. Fair warning: the AI is very, very good - Download the rules and rely heavily on the Assist menu option until you get into the rhythm of the game, or you'll get your ass handed to you early and often.

Why I Like Orpheus, or: I should just rename the damn blog "Why I Like"

The logo was bullshit, though.

Orpheus is neat in a couple of ways. First off, the setting was one of those simple concepts that breeds a whole host of possible adventures and ideas: A cryogenics company¹ discovers that their resuscitated clients have been having out-of-body experiences and, crazier yet, have been interacting with ghosts. Developing the technology to enhance this effect, they make it more or less reliable (it works best with people who've had multiple near-death experiences and thus have "loose souls") and set about resolving the issues of the recently-deceased for cold hard cash². Or, as the game's elevator pitch sums up, "the kid from The Sixth Sense opens a Ghostbusting business".

There's more to it, of course, the usual mysteries and oddities of the world - there are rival ghost-resolution firms, a street drug called pigment³ lets users see and even interact with ghosts, nobody has met a ghost more than about five years old, ghostly activity is definitely on the rise, and you often run into spectres who've turned Full Monster and seem to have a hivemind going - which segues into the other cool thing about Orpheus. Most games try to play down whatever metaplot they might have- there's all this stuff, and maybe something is gonna change, or maybe not, no pressure There are two very good reasons for this, one financial and one creative. The financial is that having an end in mind sets a limit on the number of sourcebooks you can produce, which in turn limits the amount of money you can make on a particular line. The creative is that most gamers are going to create their own game using bits and pieces of the given setting, so you want sourcebooks that present them with options rather than a didactic now-this-happens arrangement, because those sell better. Okay, so they're both financial reasons.

Orpheus says phooey to all that. There are six books in the line⁴ and that's all you get. Each book pushes the plot forward with some Big Fucking Thing that happens, increases the power level, introduces new threats and stuff, and reveals some more secrets. And after the sixth book, you're done, finito, that's it, go do something else. The authors love using a movie metaphor for this - Starts with a premise, twist, rising action, twist, climax, - all that screenwriting stuff. And on the page, it works pretty well overall, although I'm still reading through the metaplot as a whole. This may well be the first RPG line that was planned from the beginning with a specific end in mind - not just the end of the GM's particular plot , but an actual end to the line as a whole.

This is ballsy⁵ and I like it. It was, I think, Robin Laws who pointed out that your average gamer is going to have a relatively tiny amount of time to play in - Even assuming a perfect every-weekend-for-a-year game, you're still looking at maybe 150-odd hours of actual play time, to say nothing of chargen, rules disputes, freak-outs, holidays, nerd drama, booze runs, etc etc et fucking c. In most RPGs, you can easily own entire books that will never even see partial use. A game that you only have to have six books to run, ever - One hardcover corebook, five softcover supplements - seems a welcome alternative, and players only need⁶ the first half of the first one.What's more, the lack of formal material meshes well with the setting - it's our world, but with ghosts. You can come up with plots just by grabbing a newspaper and plugging in restless dead.

Of course, for all its coolness, it's still an OWoD game. It has splats which divide up the ghosties into a set of predetermined types (which is good for the 'scientific paranormal' element of the setting, but come on, seriously?). It has mechanics for fucking everything, including the always-irritating "one power per level, always the same power" thing which makes the ghosts even less individual. There's even an attempt to tie the game back into the Wraith: the Oblivion metaplot⁷ which I admit I find endearing in a let's-not-lose-touch-after-graduation way (Also, WtO's drab, oppressive, bureaucratic netherworld that everyone hated? They blew it up. With nuclear fucking bombs. Talk about blurring the line between "cool" and "paint-eater retarded"). If I were to run it - and as enthralled as I am by the setting, I don't think I can run a game with this kind of time commitment in my current uncertain-future situation - I'd probably adapt it to FATE or some similarly freewheeling system. But the very fact that I am tempted to run it at all says a lot. Come on, who doesn't want to be ghostly Ghostbusters?

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1. Technically, I guess they'd be a suspended-animation company, seeing as their process doesn't involve freezing people alive or bilking the terminally ill out of their savings. Well, okay, they do have the right to invest your finances until you come back, but the point is that the process works - you actually will come back, probably.
2. The game never outright states that they hassle James Randi first, but come on, wouldn't you?
3. That name rings hollow to my ear for slang, and the alternative - Black Heroin - is way too easy to confuse with actual black tar heroin. If/when I ever run the damn game, I'd probably just call it dye - short, cute pun, keeps the whole coloration thing (which continues with a ghost subtype called hues - pigment users come back as hues, who are a lot more vulnerable to monsterization).
4. Well, there are six official books. Some mad bastard made a 135-page fan sourcebook for the game, even going so far as to copy the design of the official books. There's a half-formed thought here about the limited run of the game encouraging people to create material rather than wait for the Man to provide the final word. Of course, the flipside of this is that once the run is concluded, that interest and the accompanying material vanish into thin ether - the Project Flatline site that created the fanbook is gone, and a google search for "Orpheus RPG fan site" returns bupkis.
5. And they know it, and they never shut up about it. The air of self-congratulation around this admittedly really good idea is part of what makes Orpheus, the last of the Old World of Darkness games, a microcosm of the whole OWoD, along with the metaplot which ends in a gigantic fucking apocalypse, the gothick trappings (occasionally juxtaposed hilariously with heavy-duty military hardware), the insistence on both "roleplaying" and minutely defining said roleplaying in both text and mechanics, and the writing that gets tiresome after a chapter or so. Oh, and of course there are fucking LARP rules.
6. Or should that be "only get to use"? The great D&D3 sin of arming every player with a million mechanical options for their character still irks me, but that's a post for another day.
7. Wraith is gonna get its own W.I.L. one of these days, but it deserves its rep as a game that's interesting but a pain in the ass to play. Another thing Orpheus gets right is that ghosts should be haunting our world, not off in their own not-quite-an-afterlife doing baffling and alien things for a hierarchy nobody living knows anything about. And hey, I mentioned Wraith without bringing up my all-time favourite "terrible idea" supplement, Charnel Houses of Eur- dammit!

Rules have meaning

Looking over that digression about my personal hack of the ORE rules, it struck me that this is what I mean by the expressive language unique to games. Specifically, that last note about whether or not Will points could be cashed in to cure sanity damage. By including such a rule, I'm making a statement about the way the world - and moreover the human mind - work within the confines of the fictitious world I'm creating. And, of course, by doing so I'm making a statement about either a) how the real world works (In RPG theory terms, this would be the simulationist model) or b) the way the world works in the stories I want to tell with the system. An RPG system is designed to tell a certain kind of story, by design or omission.

By including the rule, I declare that the human mind can recover from trauma through sheer force of will. And, by not including the rule, I declare the opposite: No matter how strong your personality, once you're broken you are very likely to remain broken. Choosing which interpretation best suits the story I'm looking to tell involves both what I think is true in real life, and what I think is best for the story and the enjoyment of the player. When I eventually decided to drop the rule, that decision reflects both my beliefs about real people (that there are a lot of forceful people walking around carrying psychological burdens) and how I want the stories of my Player Characters to play out (I want them to be those forceful people, traumatized and without easy solutions).

Now, from a purely mechanical point of view, "Will" and "Sanity" are merely game resources, and whether or not they are inter-exchangeable is a soulless question. This is where we get malarkey like the belief that a game's rules cannot be art, because they're simply mathematical interplays which may bear "meaningful" labels. In RPGs, this can be counter-argued by the point that in-game values are a guide to imagination, and have as much meaning as the players apply to them. But even in games which lack the collaborative storytelling element, rules carry meaning. In chess. the rules and their interplay posit that pawns are intrinsically less valuable than other pieces - but losing too many of them will limit your options. One could, if they wanted, spin this into a "moral" about not cavalierly sacrificing apparently useless followers to advance one's larger schemes. An anti-games-as-artist (Man, I need a catchier name for that) might claim that this is a reach, but it can be derived from the rules as written and played, involving no greater leap than any given interpretation of Waiting for Godot. Tetris, a profoundly abstract game, presents "completeness" as a nebulous goal and "incompleteness" as something to be desperately avoided. In this, it speaks to a human belief so deeply held and intuitive that articulation in a traditional manner would be pointless. Whether that accounts for the game's constant popularity is anyone's guess.

The laws of a nation, the rules of its real games, are a narrative out of order, a belief system describing how the world should work according to thousands of authors, self-contradictory at times and starkly clear on a few basic points. The rules of a game, likewise, reflect the world the author hopes to create, if only for the purposes of illustrative fiction.