FR Part 1

Furry Roleplay

I am making an RPG for the furfags. No hate, I love you guys, it's just an easy title, and I'm crass enough to use it with love. (Hey, I'm an oldfag, it's like my grandfather complimenting a "nigger", give me a break.)

The hardest part about making this game, will be making an RPG for the community. Anyone can make an RPG that features anthropomorphic creatures- hell any RPG system can be customized to do it! Even just renaming the generic races to be flavored differently, and imagining them as anthropomorphs is good enough! Because the concepts are inside your head, any RPG system, really, can represent furry fiction. However, few of these, aside from Ironclaw and Albedo, have received much attention. (And even they're kinda' forgotten these days)

The main reason for this is because RPGs do not resonate well with the furry community. RPG play is an isolated activity, focused on a close-knit group of friends with very little external interaction, is mostly done indoors, takes a great deal of preparation, consumes a great deal of time, and is a primarily sedentary activity. All of these things are contrary to what furry culture is- light, outgoing, social, emotional, active, and spontaneous. They overlap in that both are deeply creative, but from there the two cultures diverge. Thus, creating a furry RPG means more than simply making a generic RPG about anthropomorphs- we aren't making this game for a subject, we're making it for an audience. As a result, a completely different approach needs to be taken here- a whole new mode of RP needs to be invented for this audience to finally have its game.

1. First off, we don't need to add any demand of creativity. RPGs are already a fundamentally creative medium, and the target audience is fundamentally drawn to creative endeavors. So we're good on the imagination side of things.

2. Next, we need to make the game light. By light, I mean it needs to be something that someone can say "Hey, let's play this" to a bunch of strangers, play for a half hour, and still leave everyone involved feeling happy and satisfied. It needs to be pick-up-and-go, fast, easy, efficient, and have as few points of contact as possible. Setup for a game should take a matter of moments, including chargen, assuming everyone already has an idea of what they want to create. We may want it to have sort of a beer-and-pretzels-game quality to it, something you can still play while slightly buzzed and distracted.

3. Then it needs to be made versatile. You should be able to run the game just as easily in tabletop tactics or Parlour-Play LARP. (I am personally ethically opposed to full-contact LARP. I do not believe there is any safe way to run such a game) That way, people who prefer the deep combat side of things can do their thing, and people who want to go out and party with strangers can do that too.

4. Rules need to be simple enough that the entire rulebook can be memorized after only a session or two of play. The rulebook itself should be presented in a compact, pocket-size reference book format, preferably in hardcover, with a waterproof coating and a zipper to protect the pages. The pages should be made out of something tough, not cheap magazine paper. The spine needs to be able to fold internally like a moleskein notebook. This will make it portable and durable, and look cool.

Part 1: Rules Light

For one thing, a lot of RPGs attempt to describe everything in exact, objective, mechanical terms, as though they are manually simulating a little pocket-reality. This degree of manual simulation on a technical level leads to a vast overburden on the players and game system due to simple complexity and minutiae. This degree of technical processing, usually in the form of baroque mathematics to find results on charts in a large book, is often called "rules-heavy" by the general public, but is referred to as "points of contact" by RPG theorists.

In theory, we distinguish gameplay into two parts: Playing the game and operating the game's system. Playing the game is the creative part, making decisions, describing activities, experiencing the consequences of actions, roleplaying, imagining stuff, etc. Operating the game system is everything you need to do in order to keep playing, such as referencing a rule, rolling a die, checking a chart, noting changes to a character sheet, etc. Each time play is interrupted by operation is a "point of contact". In general, points of contact are a bad thing. Those who promote high points of contact usually do not actually enjoy the points of contact themselves, but their effect on the game. Theoretically, if you have two games that simulate the same subject with the same degree of complexity and depth, but one of them has fewer points of contact, the one with less contact is the better game, as it does the same things more efficiently and allows play to go on uninterrupted for longer. In order to make the game as light and efficient as possible, we need to make an engine (set of rules) with as few points of contact as possible.

One caveat, you can never truly eliminate every point of contact; something must be done to keep the game running. In this regard, I feel we can learn a thing or two from sports and 5th edition D&D. In sports, the points of contact ARE the game. In baseball, hitting the ball is not only where the fun comes from, which is play, but a point of contact which allows the game to operate. 5th edition D&D has done something remarkable; they took many parts of the game which were once slow, tedious, and disruptive points of contact, and made them into low-contact, light, fun, gameplay elements by changing their mechanism into something that is simple and fun in its own right. (IE: Downtime becomes an instantaneous transaction, with the return being the playing of a minigame.) By approaching the necessary points of contact in the game in this manner, we reduce their impact on play, integrating them into play as much as possible, lightening the game, and making the whole experience more enjoyable.

One thing we can readily eliminate is randomizer engagement, commonly referred to as "the dice" even if the game doesn't use dice. Every time a player engages a randomizer (Dice, spinners, cards, etc.) to determine an outcome, is a point of contact, however small. By removing randomizers completely, we remove the vast majority of points of contact in the engine. Luckily, today, in the year 2015, we have about 30 years of history of people experimenting in "diceless" game design, which we can lean on as a foundation in what does and does not work, from which we may build something new, and advance the medium further.

We know that flat diceless operation, (For example, in Amber Diceless) though functional, is not desirable, as it is considered anticlimactic and promotes excessive consideration over ones every move.

We also know that randomization can be replaced by resource management with an abstract currency, (As in Marvel Universe) though dependence on this system actually results in an amplification of points of contact, as people "manage their money" to get the best "bang for their buck" in everything they do.

We know that replacing contest checks (where one character is acting against another) with a game, (Like in the earlier editions of Mind's Eye Theatre) can actually diminish interest, if the interaction is considered ridiculous, childish, or otherwise undesirable or out of place. (For example, when MET was applied to Vampire the Masquerade, we had ancient vampire lords locked in a bloody power struggle for the fate of humanity... Playing rock-paper-scisors to determine if they killed each other. Most people found this to be, for lack of any better way of saying it, "fucking retarded".)

Finally, we also know that we can make diceless play more exciting and less predictable by introducing the opportunity to interject before results are determined from an action. (This can be seen in many games, including ARGUMENT! RPG and even in a primitive form in Amber Diceless) This allows the results of an action to be changed as characters correct what they are duing as a reaction to percieved results. Going to lose a fight because your "hand-to-hand" skill isn't as good as your opponent's? Pull a knife if your "short blades" skill is higher! If your opponent can't think of a way to react, you'll probably actually win!

For this game, I plan to use a system I developed for the finished, but content-less and mostly unplayed homebrew Mass Effect Diceless RPG I was working on. Basically, gameplay is flat diceless with the opportunity to interject tied to a currency. In other words, you spend currency in order to adjust your actions in the middle of an event before the consequences are determined.

Example from MEDRPG: You decide to run across a field. An opponent spends a point to take a shot at you while you're running through the open. Your perception is higher than his stealth, so you are informed that someone is taking aim. You may then decide to spend points to adjust your movement to evade the shot. The opponent's perception is not as good as your agility, so they do not have an opportunity to react. Unfortunately, their accuracy does exceed your agility, and the shot hits you before you reach your destination. Had their perception been higher, they would have been able to adjust their aim, which would cost more points than your reaction to their action. Every time a character reacts to a reaction, it costs more points than the reaction preceding it.

One thing that is key to diceless games, however, is player ignorance. The player cannot be allowed to know the exact values of their opposition. In the absence of player ignorance, play becomes completely crushed under the weight of the player doing only that which will absolutely work, the consequence being the impossibility of failure. I believe this is mainly due to all other diceless games trying to simulate the subject in objective terms, as though it were still based on probabilities. My solution would be to eliminate precise objective representations, and replace them with relative and subjective representations, which will be easier to keep secret, because indirectly revealing them will not mean much. Absolute secrecy will nolonger be a necessity, allowing for a certain degree of information to slip to the players without destabilizing play. This is where this engine diverges from MEDRPG; we are no longer examining the environment in detailed, technical, objective terms, the granularity is being reduced to the point where it is more like comparing glasses of water based on how full they are.

So, instead of comparing numbers, we will be comparing a general description of quality or effectiveness, separated into a standardized tier of degrees. For example, characters may exhibit varying degrees of skill with small firearms, and that skill may be described in the same terms as their skill in swimming, but the two skills are not necessarily being graded in the same standard. Just because your swimming skill exceeds a man's small firearms skill does not mean you can outswim his bullets! In this way, play becomes more subjective, with things being described in relative, rather than objective, terms, with interpretation playing a role in gameplay. This would allow the game to represent everything from "hard science fiction" to "Loony Toons" accurately and faithfully, because the interpretation of the information, not the engine itself, changes with the subject matter.