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Introducing: The Roles We Play (Patreon)

Published:
2019-09-07 18:00:55
Imported:
2023-02

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Here it is, your first look at the next Big Thing coming your way from Ice Bear, Inc.! It's very tentatively entitled "The Roles We Play" (hereafter RWP unless I someday confirm this as the final title - kinda not loving it, but lemme know what y'all think). 

Minor spoilers below (If you're averse to reading the back cover of the book before you read the inside.)

It's about a group of adult role players in the good ol' Not Too Distant Future (no mutants, though, sorry X-Menketeers). Their DM works at some kind of Science Place, and uses (steals) tech developed by people at his company to enhance the game he's running. In this near future time, miniaturized mental implants do a lot of the basic work of cell phones by interfacing directly with the brain. The app their DM steals connects their implants to his stolen device which enables an ultra-real virtual reality simulator to allow them to actually inhabit their characters' bodies and the world they're playing in. If such particulars matter to you, the game is a transition from their usual fantasy game to a sci-fi/fantasy version, sort of a Starfinder or a SWRPG kind of thing. 

Forewarning, there is veritably no steam in the attached pages, but I think it'll give a small sense of how it might go there. The chapters will transition from character to character, so we'll get to know all of our cast pretty well. The core group consists of one DM and five players, so we'll have considerably more front-loaded "main" characters than we've done before. It's for sure an ambitious project, and but I think I have a lot of cool ideas for it to make it fun in all the right ways, and maybe some of the wrong ones. I'm hoping we'll get to have the fantasy fun of Character Creation with an engaging cast like in TIOS with an action component... I dunno, like my handful of action moments. :)

Anyway, I will also be doing other stuff interspersed as usual. I'm starting on Ch. 3 of RWP, but as soon as I hear back from the monthly commission drawing I wanna pounce right on that. Then I have another idea I've been putting off to do somewhere in the next couple weeks among chapters.

More to come, but for now, here's this. 1.0 is the prologue, and 1.1 is chapter one. Have lovely weekends!

Comments

Anonymous

Hi Ice Bear! I’m reaaally looking forward to this, it’s one of my favourite genres, LitRPG! Keep up the awesome work, you’re one of my favourite authors.

WDB

First of all, as a resident of Chicago's North Side, I would appreciate it if you correctly labelled this series as "dystopian sci-fi", what with the mentions of 62-story high-rises in, like, Wicker Park or Bucktown. Please stop accurately predicting such a blighted, unlivable hellscape. Second, virtual dice rolls? You monster. You MONSTER. Okay, so, "The Roles We Play". I wasn't sure it'd be to my tastes, but it REALLY was. I dug the hell out of it. The prologue was, admittedly, a bit rough for me to get into. Hey, who's got two asterisks and doesn't really like fantasy? *This guy*. I can talk a good game with fantasy tropes, but it just never got its hooks into me growing up. My childhood books weren't the Lord of the Rings trilogy, they were the Thrawn trilogy and the Foundation trilogy. My gaming wasn't D&D, it was d6 Star Wars, the West End Games classic. A whole story set in a fantasy genre, it's a tough slog for me. I like the humor in the prologue, and it was clear from the post that this setting wasn't the whole story, but it didn't super grab me. No failing of the writing (and the fact that I read every word is maybe a testament *to* the writing), but, yeah, not for me. Everything after that killed, though. Love the exploration of party dynamics, both in-game and IRL. It's like the Breakfast Club version of a gaming group, hitting all of the archetypes: the min-maxer, the rules lawyer, the role-player, the hack-and-slasher, the newbie who doesn't really get all of the in-jokes or history. Every gamer type is represented. And yet, they all immediately feel distinct and engaging. Hannah's chapter had me empathizing with a woman who'd belittle a child who looks up to her, and that's after only a dozen or so pages. I can't wait to see how many more of these characters I'll care about by the end of the book. Great job!

Anonymous

This is a new genre for me to read, but I'm curious to see what comes next! Keep up the great work!

icebear
>>26604404

Admittedly, I do love me some some fantasy. A friend of mine got me started on The Wheel of Time back in freshman year of high school, and I adore it. It's got a charming simplicity to it, where your good guys tend to be Really Good, your bad guys Really Bad, and maybe the occasional redeemable or irredeemable type for color. You get to root for your team, no holds barred. It's emotionally satisfying. I also used to read a lot of Star Wars (Thrawn trilogy was my first introduction to that as well! kinda went downhill in the years ahead though.), and I've done a lot of gaming in myriad SW systems. I didn't quite do d6, but a bunch of my friends did before they were my friends, so I've heard many a tale. But the d20, the Fantasy Flight versions... veteran. I think part of why I love SW as a gaming system is the incorporation of the fantasy element in a sci-fi world that much more parallels our own, so we get that taste of the mystical and the true good/evil as a contrast to the rest of the cast, who are more like us, flawed and struggling. Han Solo remains one of the best characters in the Western canon. I dig it. Still, for this book to work, I didn't want to hang out in fantasy. For an opener, I thought it would help do some group establishing, show the players as characters playing characters, and show The Norm for them so that when they transition over to the sci-fi focused setting that will occupy the remainder of the book, they'll be doing some learning along with us so I have excuses to address some mechanics without getting wonky. (Not that I'm terrified I'll infringe on copyright here or anything. Hopefully I'm way under Hasbro and Paizo's radar.) But yeah, I want my players to be people, and people just aren't that good/evil. That mindset is part of why I wanted to dive right into Jacob's decision in the prologue, addressing a guy who feels like one his callings is to be this particular sort of performer/entertainer/writer, and feels like he's failed and takes some dubious steps to resolve it. One of the things I like best in a game is hard choices with real consequences, something that fantasy handles rather poorly, I think. Dying for love or honor or the fate of the word isn't a hard choice if your character arc is a straight line from A to B. Anyway, glad it mostly worked for you. I'm still not sure, but I think this series will lend itself to doing shorter installments, so we can do two $3-4 stories in the time we'd normally do one $6-8 story. A little scared to give up the freedom to revise page 2 while I'm writing page 302, but adventures are nothing if not episodic. We'll see.

icebear
>>26604404

Also, sorry to have tarnished your beloved Chi-town! :) I grew up near Keon in NW Indiana, so I've been there many many times and have tons of family and friends who live there, but I don't *know* it as well as I might. Still, I figured I know it better than any other city, so may as well start there. I'll do better, promise!

WDB
>>26604404

Chicago developers are screwing up my neighborhood(s) perfectly well on their own with their Lincoln Yards concepts and their 15-story buildings. They don't need you putting thoughts in their heads, even if it's thematically appropriate for you to try! It's hard to die on the hill of "sci-fi is more realistic than fantasy", but it's probably how I actually feel. There's a tendency towards Big Feels in fantasy, and a theological system that usually codifies good and evil in explicit terms. Sci-fi, especially the grittier, Shadowrun/Cyberpunk-esque system Jacob is working with, just allows for more of an emphasis on morals (and ethics, YES THANK YOU AMANDA) rather than a punishing alignment system. That just feels to me like it encourages more introspection and development. Okay, maybe not for Remy, but who knows what the future might hold? There's a lot of story left. We didn't spend a ton of time in his head, but I thought Jacob was a pretty good exploration (thus far!) of a typical DM failing, where his mindset is I Am Telling A Story For You, instead of We Are Telling A Story Together. (I also thought Keon embodied The Fledgling DM Who Just Gets Bulldozed By Players to a tee. That poor guy! He wants to entertain his friends and they just smell *blood*.) That type of DM, the one who plans everything out and doesn't get why his players can't see things his way, can't appreciate the kind of story he's telling in the way he'd rather they appreciate it, that, uh... it seems like, if taken to extremes, it'd lend itself *pretty well* to the mania an MC erotica story is going to need from *somebody*. Oh, and, man, I feel like that Coda scene is one I am *definitely* going to get more out of later in the book/series. I love that kind of shit!

Anonymous

I thought it was a pretty good intro. Set up the world pretty nicely. I found Jacob and Gladys to be the most interesting characters. Remy wasn't all that interesting but seemed like a person I'd like in real life so I'm partial to him. For the rest of the characters I haven’t seen enough of them to decide whether I like them or not. The setup reminded me of my own experiences with RPGs. I actually have never tried DnD, but I used to do Shadowrun with my friends. I was GM most of the time and I feel those experiences really shaped how I consume stories even today. Good times.

WDB
>>26635429

"I was GM most of the time and I feel those experiences really shaped how I consume stories even today." That's interesting, and I wonder if it's something that'll affect how different readers respond to RWP. Like, I was a gamer when I was younger, but always a player. I knew people like Jacob, but I *was* people like Hannah, Keon, Remy, Toni, etc. (Probably too often Toni.) Is that going to make me more apt to invest in the players, while a former-GM is more likely to respond to Jacob's character? Above and beyond that, I'm curious how former-GMs might gravitate towards story elements versus how former-players might gravitate towards different story elements. GMs have to have a top-down view of the story their telling, seeing the scope of it while always sweating the details. Players have to conceive of and fully engage with one character. The GM responds to the characters, moving them along a path. The players apply what the GM tells them to their isolated view of the world/story. Like, The GM cares about *the story*, while a player cares about *their character*. Top-down versus bottom-up. Huh. Real interested in how people's RPG experiences might color how they process RWP.

Anonymous
>>26635429

Hmmm… I was a GM but I wasn’t a GM *like Jacob*. I was pretty mediocre at coming up with interesting story concepts from scratch. My style was to ask the players for suggestions and I could take a vague idea then turn it into an expansive adventure. I liked to think of it as the players giving me little story seeds that I would grow into giant story trees. Anyway my experience was pretty limited since I only ever played with one group and we didn’t play a variety of games. Mostly just Shadowrun. I won’t presume that my experience is representative of RPG players in general, but I can talk about how acting as GM changed my perspective You see my friends and I are pretty competitive players by nature. When we play, we play to win. If the game was Magic the Gathering, we were net-decking. If the game was Street Fighter, we were playing top tier characters. If the game was Diablo 2 our builds were all min-maxed to hell and back. So when it comes to roleplaying games, our natural instinct was to find ways to exploit the rules to our advantage. To this day when we play Path of Exile we have our character builds all planned out before we even start and we are constantly trying to optimize our characters. This was a problem when we tried tabletop roleplaying because, left to our own devices, we would all find the most optimized character builds and never play anything else. None of us had ever really cared about the lore aspect of other games we played in the past so we ended up just having the same games over and over again. When I was assigned the GM role, I realized that my main responsibility was to “enforce roleplaying”. I didn’t bar my players from running optimized characters, but I did force them to come up with plausible character backstories, personalities and motivations for every build they made. Later, during the game itself, I would continue to “enforce roleplaying” by constantly reminding my players to make choices that make sense for their character’s motivations, based on information available to their characters. Basically it was up to me to keep the story on-track and admonish players when they tried to make “meta” decisions that make no sense for their character. This got us out of our rut and we actually managed to have a lot of fun games together. Through these experiences I became kinda good at tracking which characters have access to which information, what their personal goals are and how knowing or not knowing about info would likely affect their decision-making. Nowadays I still do it instinctively even when I’m not GM anymore. I am pretty quick to catch plot holes and “out of character” moments. Also I don’t tend to pick a character I like and root for that character to “win”. Of course there are still characters I like purely because I think they’re cool or likable, but I also tend to like “interesting” characters that influence the story in unique ways. I think that these are all direct influences from my GM experiences.

WDB
>>26635429

I was right, it *is* interesting to hear how people's RPG experiences impact their enjoyment of RWP specifically and stories in general. Thanks for sharing!

icebear
>>26635429

Very interesting. My friends and I played a lot like that for a while back in the day, the min-maxing. At the time, we usually had 2-3 players, and the DM supplemented with friendly NPCs in the party that he'd RP and we'd control in battle. One day, we look down and go "why the hell do the NPCs have 10 points of AC, attack and damage on us?" And the DM explains, "well, the book gives formulas [in this obscure not-at-all-intended-as-he-enacted-it place] to make items that give more boosts, duh." We weren't quite the types to research builds online, but it definitely pushed us in a direction of getting as creative as possible with what we had in front of us. Eventually, I started playing with other folks who looked at me like "wtf is wrong with you, why would you do that," and since then when I'm playing, I've gravitated more towards self-imposing the kinds of mandates you put on your players, asking myself what choices make sense for the background I've written. More recently, I've been DMing for my cousin and some of his kids (age 11-18, so a big adjustment in the kinds of campaigns I run, lemme tell ya). They're all pretty green, and will agonize over how to optimize their characters, and I just tell them to do whatever they think makes sense for what they're playing and not sweat it, and lo and behold, it all works out fine. After all, that's what they balance monsters for, and it's easy to style my enemy NPCs to follow suit. And gradually they've worried less about the ideal mechanics and more about just playing a perspective. Like you say, min-maxing makes total sense for video games, where the whole point (of many, at least) is to kill crap fast. It's why I love me my tabletop RPGs, though, as a chance for joint story-telling, and arms races with the DM are always a losing prospect.