The MULRAH Tournament for Best Free GM-less Story/Role-Playing Game

Through an objective scoring system that aggregates ratings and awards and followed by multiple rounds actual playtesting, the MULRAH Tournament addresses some of the shortcomings of other award systems for role-playing and story games:

• Design awards like Game Chef and the now defunct Ronnies give out awards for game concepts usually without the judges or even the designers themselves having played any of the games.
• Mainstream awards go to the opposite extreme, acting simply as popularity contests between well-publicized and therefore the most played games such that lesser known–and frequently better–games are overlooked.
• The Indie RPG Awards have the system that MULRAH holds in the highest esteem, picking winners based on the playtest-weighted opinions of game designers. However, like most other awards, they are given on an annual basis, so, while we get a snapshot of the best games of that particular year, we never get a comparison of games across years.
• Though they include games from all years, rating systems like those on RPG.net and GeekDo suffer from the lack of comparative analysis. Many contributors proclaim their favorite games as “the best” without the context of having played a lot games.

The MULRAH Tournament’s trial run will focus solely on free, GM-less role-playing and story games. We took nominations, scored the games using MULRAH Scoring Sheet, and now have eight games that will face off in the tournament.

Quarter Finals

Each game will be played once; four will advance.

1. Bacchanal (Endgame)
2. The Shab-al-Hiri Roach (Endgame)
3. Schizonauts (Casa Bella, December 2009)
4. Coming of Age (Casa Bella, December 2009)
5. Sea Dracula (Casa Bella, November 2009): It got old after an hour, but what an hour it was!
6. Capes Lite (Casa Bella, November 2009): Trial version too incomplete for more than just a half hour or so of play.
   
7. Shooting the Moon (Casa Bella, December 2009)
8. Executive Decision (Casa Bella, December 2009)

The last two games (in italics) are “Players’ Choice” games that other gaming groups should feel free to replace if they want to run their own version of the tournament. Other games to consider would be Contenders, Drowning & Falling, Mexican Standoff, and Tier II unpublished games.

Ron Edwards Is Right: System Does Matter

In my last post, I proclaimed that, despite Ron Edwards’ argument that “System Does Matter,” an indie role-playing game (RPG) could nonetheless be generic.

I was wrong.

It helps to define “indie,” because in one sense of the word, the argument from my previous post still stands, but in the sense that I had intended, it was way off base. The most commonly accepted definition of an indie RPG is simply an RPG owned by its creator. In this regard, sure, an indie RPG can be generic, with PDQ, FATE, and my own MULRAH standing as examples.

However, my last post was really discussing Forge-inspired indie games which favor conflict resolution over task resolution and increase narrative control by players, among other innovations. Ironically, neither PDQ nor FATE, the two games most influencing MULRAH, embrace either of these trends. While “Style Points” in PDQ# and Fate Points in FATE create some element of meta-game in which players control the story more than they might in a traditional game, both remain quite solidly in the realm of task-oriented, GM-driven games.

In his essay “Simulationism: The Right to Dream,” Edwards hesitantly argues that rules-lite systems are actually Simulationist, even though they claim to be “story-oriented.” In other words, the minimalist rules leftover from paring down traditional games do not necessarily lead to quality, theme-driven, collaborative story-telling. Based on our playtests of MULRAH, which started as a simple mash-up of PDQ and FATE, I’m inclined to agree. Even with MULRAH’s rules for player-created content, Edwards’ estimations that, in rules-lite games, “playing the character as conceived is the first priority” and that players do not contribute to “outcomes and final-resolutions” are both correct.

Furthermore, simply flipping a switch from “task” to “conflict” resolution and adding in a mechanism for player narrative control do not lead to Narrativist play. What kind of conflicts will the game handle? Over what elements of the story will players have narrative control? Specificity around these answers, including how the game mechanics themselves will support them, build a game that is both playable and meaningful. While it may be possible for a game to act as a guide to the players on how to construct the rules to tell the stories they want to tell, such a game would be far from MULRAH’s “rules-lite” one-sheet effort. More effective is simply to find some free or cheap indie games that have already made the choices and have been play-tested for you.

That said, MULRAH’s inspirations, PDQ and FATE, have led to some of the most highly-rated games in the RPG community: FATE’s Spirit of the Century is the #2 rated game overall on RPG.net, while PDQ’s Truth & Justice, Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, and the Zorcerer of Zo are all in the top 7%. For players coming from the confines of games focused purely on system (GURPS, HERO), the “rules-lite” nature of FATE and PDQ provides a refreshing change of focus, as proven by the rave reviews promoting these games’ lavish settings, exciting characters, or both. However, for players seeking truly collaborative story-telling or grappling with narrative themes, someone else’s detailed setting or awesome character concepts will be ultimately unsatisfying.

The most “generic” Forge-inspired games that I know of are the Pool, Universalis, and Primetime Adventures, but even these games are more specific in their design than most “generic” games want to be. I’ll likely discuss them in a separate post, but, for now, let’s just say we’re playing these instead of MULRAH, no offense to me.

Can an Indie RPG Be Generic?

In his essay “System Does Matter,” indie role-playing game (RPG) theorist and designer Ron Edwards argues that GMs waste precious time tweaking various game systems to meet the needs of their players instead of using a system that works for them out of the box. This essay served as a revelation for GMs trying to impose second-by-second combat simulation upon players more interested in dramatic story-telling, and it coincided with a vast proliferation of $15 digest-sized indie RPGs, each featuring a different set of rules for a specific setting or theme.

While some of the variations between indie games probably do improve the chances of achieving the game’s stated goals, many of the differences are meaningless. Do you roll one die or many dice? Do you add the results or pick the best one? Are you describing your characters with cliches, traits, qualities, or catch phrases? Are there modifiers and target numbers or is every roll opposed? Do you call those little counters that represent some meta-game economy “bennies” or “points”?

Many of these indie games are quite similar in the areas that actually matter. The table below summarizes these key shifts.*

Prevalent Shifts in Indie RPGs

Aspect of Game	Traditional	Indie
Resolution of	Tasks	Conflicts
Authorship by	GM, Pre-Game	Players, In-Game
Session Content	Combat, Physical Detail	Character Development, Moral Choices
Character Creation	Quantitative	Descriptive

If the best parts of indie RPGs are all basically the same from game to game, it seems to waste more of the GM’s time to expect her to learn a different system for every theme/setting/goal. The old days of just tweaking a few (or even many) rules in D&D or GURPS to up the “pulp” feeling or adding in a couple elements to enhance the “horror” of a game seem a far cry from the growing shelf of small press rulebooks in the indie GM’s library. Why not use one simple system that collects the common elements of indie RPGs, and then add a couple key tweaks to establish the thematic atmosphere so important to indie games?

While a number of free generic systems exist, not even the most cutting edge ones manage to fully incorporate all the above trends. That’s the idea behind MULRAH, a new indie RPG that you can download for free from my Other Explorations page. MULRAH collects and synthesizes the best innovations from free generic games like FATE, PDQ, and Active Exploits and then adds the indie elements they are missing, like conflict resolution and player narrative control.

* See the Mighty Atom for a more comprehensive list of innovations that I found well after writing this post.