Fun Tools for Lazy Illustrations

HERE is a pretty cool tool to make illustrations for use in custom character sheet design, or handouts that brings stylistic unity to all of it.

You find an image that is the stylistic template that you want, and then upload the illustration that you want in that style, and the computer composites them.

So for example, I have made some custom character sheets that are for use with killershrike's Pathfinder hack for Fate.

I want an illustration for the character.  The player has supplied me with an image of a viking that he likes, so that is the base image.  I have decided that I want a style that looks like pen and ink on parchment, but I want it a little more modern in technique than medieval, so I will take something from a 19th century illustration.  Thus we have these two images, the character picture, and the style reference.

While I like the painting style of the character image, I am wanting to unify the character portraits for all the players sheets, so the style image gives a good, antiquated look but is still clear.

When we run it through the handy deepart.io processor, we get this outcome...

Looks alright.

Just for fun, let's see how well it handles the images for three other player characters...

So here are the originals images.  We want to make them stylistically the same, so we will upload this set with the style template.

And here it is done.

Just for fun, I want to see what it looks like if we use a couple of old styles, first Byzantine, and then actual medieval.

And just to top it off, here is one based off of a Norse woodcut...

Fun toy!

What Value Fantasy?...

Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.

--J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories

Divination Gamification

There are a huge number of kinds of historic divination methods, some very codified (like Kabalism) and others just astonishingly silly (like divination by belly button, or divination by buttocks).

Anyway, dice and cards were of course long ago used as divination tools, and now are two of the most common randomizers in gaming.  But it occurred to me that casinos use roulette wheels which are a variation on spinners, in conjunction with a carefully laid out table.  While the wheel itself is random, betting on particular combinations of color and number make it also a strategic game.

But I was looking at a long list of divination methods in which a number of objects is dropped and the patterns formed used to make the augury.  So it got me thinking about a way to gamify that.  It seems to me that the way the game is skinned is the really interesting part, as otherwise the way the handful falls is entirely subjective, random, and not particularly interesting.  So the board needs to be something conducive to a story.  As such, it seems that it should be a map of some kind that allows the creation of relative relationships in either space, time, or condition.  For example, it could be the map of a country at war, or intersecting time clocks, or interpersonal relationships of favors, debts, or obligations.

The board determined, the next part is the randomizer, the "divination" or the "fortune" in which dropped stones or dice are cast on the board and their position relative to each other and relative to their space on the board determines the capacity and character of action available.  The cast could be a fortune up front, fortune in the middle, or even fortune at the end mechanic, and it would be interesting to experiment with all three.

I have a vague picture in mind of a board with a host of intersecting rings with nodes, and circles around the rings that represent action, looking something like asymetric crop circles.

Will have to think more on this.

Willing Suspension of Disbelief

I am inclined to be a strong advocate of verisimilitude in art, by which I mean, that good art has to be believable even if it is about super heroes, or dragons.  It vexes me for instance, when people discussing even so trivial a matter as a game world say, "the magic can be whatever we want it to be!" with no care as to what it is about or what it means.  The "magic", is whatever the conceit of the fiction is, whether it has to do with fantasy wizards, or pseudo-science zombie apocalypse, etc.

On the one hand, they are quite right.  As a matter of entertainment, you can do whatever makes you giggle.  And there is nothing wrong with that.  It is just a game after all, and (with rare exceptions) it does not provide you with food to eat, or clothes to keep out the cold, and all your fictions are so many paper leaves that will never love you back.  Games are certainly trivial in that regard.

On the other hand, I keep recalling something about games as art that Jenova Chen (founder of That Game Company) said.  Writing in his grad thesis, he reveals that it was a disturbing fact that as he got older, he found the (video) games he loved so much as a child to be less emotionally satisfying the older he got.  He wanted to find ways to make them more emotionally compelling.  He wanted to deepen the experience to be something that could be satisfying to adults as well.  I would agree.  For me as well, (tabletop) games provided a large part of my social grounding growing up, and I would add, a fair amount of grounding for my intellectual development as well.  I'm not sure that I would have been so interested now in the history of the early twentieth century had I not first discovered Call of Cthulhu, and began to wonder more about the world that these cryptic terrors inhabited, for I had been exclusively steeped in pseudo medievalist fantasy games prior to that.

So I came across this interesting quote by the scintillating Mr. Aristotle in The Poetics:

"With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible."

He is talking about the use of possibilities and probabilities in fiction (more precisely in drama) mattering in evaluating the quality of the art (and I wondered if Theater History I would ever be useful!).  In other words, dramatically satisfying fiction must be bolted to things that are believable to the human experience.  Another way to look at it, is that the most convincing lies are 9/10 true.  Zombies?  Fine.  Dragons?  OK.  Light speed space ships?  Great.  Verisimilitude must still have people that behave like people are actually known to do when confronted with dead things, gigantic scaly predators, and in a vast, empty expanse inimical to human life.

Mitigating the unlikelihood does not change this rule; it merely means that you have added subjective misunderstandings to the characters, but not to the objective "reality" of the fiction.

It has been years since I read Poetics, and I forgot that I'd read this, but I cannot recommend enough the reading of this book for narrativist minded games because of gems like this.

3+3 Questions for Game Design and Criticism

I found an interesting list of questions by Goethe regarding criticism that I thought was interesting as an addition to Jared Sorensen's three questions for designers.

Goethe's questions for criticism are:

1) What is the artist trying to do?
2) How well is it done?
3) Was it worth doing?

Sorensen's three questions for design are:

1) What is my game about?
2) How does my game do that?
3) What behaviors does my game reward and punish?

I think that both sets of questions are really useful for thinking about side by side when considering games as art.

Games and Art and Myth

I really like Jared Sorensen's three questions for game design.

1) What is my game about?
2) How does my game do that?
3) What behaviors does my game reward and punish?

I keep mulling over aspects for my political build in Fate through the lenses of those three questions. I have changed my mind a number of times, but at this point I am thinking about the aspects that I want to really define the kind of stories that this build is intended to make.  So, I want a sense of history to this... the feeling that the faces and events are part of a much larger tapestry.  I want something that explores the themes of history, and legacy, and sacrifice.

I have not read Greg Stafford's game Pendragon, but I read about him playing with a group that included his son, and every time the characters came in to meet with King Arthur after a quest, they saw him aging and still the throne to his right was empty, and he and the Queen without a child as the land crumbled around them, slouching toward the fatal battle of Camlann.  Over months of play, Stafford's son mostly ignored it until one day, it clicked, and they saw the tragedy of Arthur for the first time.  They went from simply having a good time, to feeling a deeper sympathy for the man that was Arthur.

In Stafford's words: "Roleplaying is a way for humans to interact with our deep, hidden mythological selves.  They are a way to feed our souls."

Notorious designer, John Wick wrote about running his players through the ringer in one supers campaign that he describes in his book Play Dirty,  For 19 months, his villain defeated a dozen different characters.  Only one of them died in the game, but John milked every last drop out of the character builds to make the players quit thinking mechanically and really pause to think about what their characters stood for.  One was a Wolverine style combat monster who wrecked super villains left and right... until John had him go berserk in a crowded public street and the civilians were the collateral damage.  Another masked vigilante had a very prim and proper grandmother who did not approve of the tramp running around beating people up... and died of a heart attack when a villain paralyzed her and unmasked her in front of grandma in a restaurant.  A third very noble hero retired after falling in love with the girl who turned out to secretly be a super villain who he pulverized before unmasking her.  One player spent six weeks (that is game sessions) in prison on a life sentence because he knew too much about the mastermind.  The player never gave up, and when the characters finally sprung him after the murder of the one hero that John killed in game, John asked him what he was going to do, and he described putting the cowl on and the players, who all had each others backs now, went after the BigBad that had given the characters and players so much grief... and they caught him, arrested him, and turned him over to the law with all the evidence.  The players who 19 months before happily played a game about casual mayhem made a sober team decision to choose moral restraint.

Robin D. Laws has often asserted that role playing is the only art in which the author and audience are one and the same.

I find these stories interesting because while they only exist in imagination, I am seeing a closer and closer relationship between games and art, and I have for a long time thought that art inspires us to follow where our head navigates.  I like the idea that the whimsy of games and art can weave together to reveal something to us about ourselves or the world or other people.  It may not all the time, or even most of the time... but what medium of art ever does?  

So I have no idea if I achieve that in what I am designing.  But that is what I want to shoot for, but I like the idea that thoughts in play can make for better thoughts in work.