Snarf Zagyg
Notorious Liquefactionist
I'm taking a break from writing my second post about dice mechanics to have a little refresher- this will be a bit of an appertif, much like a bracing Cynar Spritz before a meal.
1. Prelude. The Cognitive Dissonance of Diceless Games.
The problem with life is that either you know what you want and you never get it, or you get what you want and then you don't know what you want.
The year was 1991. The clothes were flannel. The sounds you heard were the screams and lamentations of the hair metal bands in their death throes as Nirvana's Nevermind occupied the cultural zeitgeist. We didn't realize that we'd need to start numbering Gulf Wars. The Simpsons was still in its first decade and showing all the good stuff. And on the shelves of the local bookstores was a beguiling tome- Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game.
I say beguiling because it entranced me. I had been a life-long Zelazny fan, and while I had read and loved all of his books, Lord of Light and the Amber Chronicles were easily two of the most influential sources I had used for my games in the past. So when I saw that someone had finally published an Amber RPG, I bought it without any further thought. It had been years since I had been both that surprised by seeing something in the store, and that excited. As soon as I got home, I began eagerly devouring the pages.
...and .... I was confused. I admit that in my excitement of seeing and purchasing the book, I was caught up in the AMBER and hadn't paid much attention to the ... diceless. And back then, although I had ran countless systems and played in even more, I literally couldn't fathom what this game was trying to tell me. A roleplaying game .... without dice? How does that even? This was long before I was interested in thinking about the design or theory of games, or learning about the history. I just wanted to run this game, and I just couldn't wrap my head around it! With the benefit of hindsight, I realize now that the difficulty I was having is that the game was essentially explaining back to me how to use many of the methods I was already using, but I was so accustomed to calling for dice rolls that it took me a long time to even attempt to run the game- both because I had to convince myself I could run it, and I had to convince my players to try it.
While I didn't end up playing A
RPG as my go-to game, the lessons I learned while running it proved invaluable for my later games, especially when running rules-lite or FKR style games. But all of this serves as a prelude to ....
2. The Card Game Explosion, Jonathan Tweet, and Everway.
Fool me once, shame on you. But teach a man to fool me and I'll be fooled for the rest of my life.
Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. Then again, you might be looking around and notice that M:TG is being demoed at Origins in 1993, and the next thing you know some company called Wizards is making money hand over fist while the RPG industry is going in the commode.
It is truly difficult to explain how quickly the world changed in the hobby from 1993 to 1995 due to the explosion of Magic. The card game was first demonstrated in July 1993- by 1995 WoTC was a 250 employee company and a juggernaut in the industry, dwarfing established RPG companies. During this expansion, they began purchasing RPG companies, including the rights of Ars Magica. But more importantly, the released their first RPG, by designer Jonathan Tweet.
Brief aside- Tweet is one of those RPG designers that keeps popping up in history, and definitely deserves respect. Among other milestones, he (with others) designed Ars Magica, Over the Edge, D&D 3e, and 13th Age. Personally, I find it fascinating because Tweet is one of the designers that pops up both when you think about some of the most influential games in terms of the indie RPG movement (Over the Edge) as well as mainstream games (D&D 3e, and Ars Magica's system was the prototype for White Wolf's Storyteller).
It's 1995. Wizards is the new kid on the block, and they are riding high, flush with all the card money. And for their first foray into the RPG market, they release .... Everway. Now, I was to start by saying that I am here not to bury Everway but to celebrate it. But still ... Wizards decided to release, as their first RPG, a game that looked at other unsuccessful RPGs and said, "Hold my beer. We're going weirder. And diceless." Oh, and they were so certain of the success of their first game that they overprinted the first run.
To briefly describe the issues, I will quote the incomparable Shannon Applecline:
Then in 1995 Wizards released Jonathan Tweet's Everway, an entirely innovative RPG design. It introduced a visual randomizer, the Tarot-like Vision cards, which were used to determine the results of character actions. They meant that the gamemaster had a tremendous free hand, and the result was nearly as freeform as 1991's Amber Diceless Roleplaying, by Phage Press. It was another step in the branch of storytelling games, which placed story first, before game or character. However, the freeform system required a very good gamemaster, and not everyone was a Jonathan Tweet or a John Tynes (who had been running playtests for the Wizards crew).
The game sold very few copies, and by December of 1995 Wizards exited the RPG market, selling off the rights to other games they acquired (like Ars Magica). And we never heard of that company in the RPG space again. Ahem.
3. Why Care About Everway At All?
You have to be careful, because if you spend a lot of time with stories, you start to believe that life is just stories, and it’s not.
If you've read enough of my posts, you know that I have certain themes that I return to. Greyhawk. Bards as the source of all evil in the multiverse. The indisputable truth that Nickelback writes better lyrics than Bob Dylan- that might be a deep cut, but this is how I remind you. But one that I tend to return to is that history doesn't always repeat, but it usually rhymes. And the debates and the arguments and innovations we have today about RPGs are, if not identical to the ones in the past, are awfully familiar. For that reason, I think it's important to look back and to celebrate Everway, which is one of the many innovative (and mostly forgotten) games that litter the past.
What is Everway? Well, let's start by looking at the review in Dragon Magazine #224 by Rick Swan!*
...Everway is so far out of the mainstream, it's barely recognizable as an RPG. For starters, it has no dice. It has no tables or charts. A deck of cards directs the flow of the game. Monster bashing, treasure hunting, dungeon crawling bye-bye; Everway is pure narrative. We've seen these elements before: the Amber game pioneered diceless role-playing, White Wolf's Vampire: the Masquerade game championed storytelling over combat encounters, and TSR's 1988 BULLWINKLE AND ROCKY game used cards to help players improvise adventures. But they've never been integrated so faultlessly or presented so imaginatively. Everway will have veteran players and critics (like me, who tend to overreact to anything off the beaten path that's even halfway well-done) doing handsprings. Novices, however, should proceed with caution. This is hazardous territory.
...In my regular AD&D sessions, I never use dice or charts, nor do I allow my players to use them. The same goes at my convention appearances- no dice at my tables. In 10 years, I've yet to have a single player abandon ship. Everway codifies the freeform style favored by me and (I suspect) thousands of other referees. It makes for a brisk game, and Everway, to its credit, plays at blinding speed. But to an unprecedented extent, the success of an Everway adventure depends on the improvisational skills of the referee, his ability to come up with interesting plot twists, characters, and scenic details on the spur of the moment. And players must respond in kind, relying on their imaginations instead of die-rolls to forge their characters' destinies. I've spent many a painful afternoon watching would-be referees struggle to stage elementary AD&D encounters and exasperated novices trying to translate lists of numbers into three-dimensional personalities. It isn't easy, even with detailed rules and funny-sided dice to use as crutches
*Bonus fun fact- also in this issue? A review of Birthright!
I bolded the part that I thought was most interesting. One of the continuing issues with different games is the question of whether or not there is a focus on second-order design- in other words, the designer has direct control over the rules and manual and the dice and structural elements of the game that allow the game to be played, but the actual gameplay is never within the designer's control. For some this is a bug, and there are games that attempt to constrain second-order design by layering on repeated actual play examples within the game and rules and laws for the players and GMs to follow so that there is, in fact, a way to say that you're "playing it wrong," in the same way that one might remark that you are violating the rules of Monopoly. Conversely, there are other games that are notoriously so loose with second-order design, like AD&D, that you can both have tables of optimizers and tables of freeform players rightly say that they are playing the same game.
Everway remains a fascinating experiment- perhaps not quite as remarkable as Over the Edge in 1992, but remarkable in that a lightly-codified storygame with no dice was released as a major roleplaying game- in 1995. Perhaps there wasn't specifically novel about any particular aspect of the game- after all, Amber predated it in terms of diceless RPGs (and the concepts of diceless RPGs goes back much much farther). Many of the freeform concepts were used in Over the Edge, and those concepts were also explored earlier. But everything has an antecedent - that doesn't mean it isn't innovative! And Everway was an amazing game which, unfortunately, often gets forgotten when people discuss foundational and important games in the history of the hobby.
I should also mention that there was a new edition, and that Jonathan Tweet had a post here announcing it and discussing the history in more detail. I recommend reading it!
So, feel free to discuss the post, or Everway, or, you know ... whatever!
1. Prelude. The Cognitive Dissonance of Diceless Games.
The problem with life is that either you know what you want and you never get it, or you get what you want and then you don't know what you want.
The year was 1991. The clothes were flannel. The sounds you heard were the screams and lamentations of the hair metal bands in their death throes as Nirvana's Nevermind occupied the cultural zeitgeist. We didn't realize that we'd need to start numbering Gulf Wars. The Simpsons was still in its first decade and showing all the good stuff. And on the shelves of the local bookstores was a beguiling tome- Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game.
I say beguiling because it entranced me. I had been a life-long Zelazny fan, and while I had read and loved all of his books, Lord of Light and the Amber Chronicles were easily two of the most influential sources I had used for my games in the past. So when I saw that someone had finally published an Amber RPG, I bought it without any further thought. It had been years since I had been both that surprised by seeing something in the store, and that excited. As soon as I got home, I began eagerly devouring the pages.
...and .... I was confused. I admit that in my excitement of seeing and purchasing the book, I was caught up in the AMBER and hadn't paid much attention to the ... diceless. And back then, although I had ran countless systems and played in even more, I literally couldn't fathom what this game was trying to tell me. A roleplaying game .... without dice? How does that even? This was long before I was interested in thinking about the design or theory of games, or learning about the history. I just wanted to run this game, and I just couldn't wrap my head around it! With the benefit of hindsight, I realize now that the difficulty I was having is that the game was essentially explaining back to me how to use many of the methods I was already using, but I was so accustomed to calling for dice rolls that it took me a long time to even attempt to run the game- both because I had to convince myself I could run it, and I had to convince my players to try it.
While I didn't end up playing A
RPG as my go-to game, the lessons I learned while running it proved invaluable for my later games, especially when running rules-lite or FKR style games. But all of this serves as a prelude to ....2. The Card Game Explosion, Jonathan Tweet, and Everway.
Fool me once, shame on you. But teach a man to fool me and I'll be fooled for the rest of my life.
Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. Then again, you might be looking around and notice that M:TG is being demoed at Origins in 1993, and the next thing you know some company called Wizards is making money hand over fist while the RPG industry is going in the commode.
It is truly difficult to explain how quickly the world changed in the hobby from 1993 to 1995 due to the explosion of Magic. The card game was first demonstrated in July 1993- by 1995 WoTC was a 250 employee company and a juggernaut in the industry, dwarfing established RPG companies. During this expansion, they began purchasing RPG companies, including the rights of Ars Magica. But more importantly, the released their first RPG, by designer Jonathan Tweet.
Brief aside- Tweet is one of those RPG designers that keeps popping up in history, and definitely deserves respect. Among other milestones, he (with others) designed Ars Magica, Over the Edge, D&D 3e, and 13th Age. Personally, I find it fascinating because Tweet is one of the designers that pops up both when you think about some of the most influential games in terms of the indie RPG movement (Over the Edge) as well as mainstream games (D&D 3e, and Ars Magica's system was the prototype for White Wolf's Storyteller).
It's 1995. Wizards is the new kid on the block, and they are riding high, flush with all the card money. And for their first foray into the RPG market, they release .... Everway. Now, I was to start by saying that I am here not to bury Everway but to celebrate it. But still ... Wizards decided to release, as their first RPG, a game that looked at other unsuccessful RPGs and said, "Hold my beer. We're going weirder. And diceless." Oh, and they were so certain of the success of their first game that they overprinted the first run.
To briefly describe the issues, I will quote the incomparable Shannon Applecline:
Then in 1995 Wizards released Jonathan Tweet's Everway, an entirely innovative RPG design. It introduced a visual randomizer, the Tarot-like Vision cards, which were used to determine the results of character actions. They meant that the gamemaster had a tremendous free hand, and the result was nearly as freeform as 1991's Amber Diceless Roleplaying, by Phage Press. It was another step in the branch of storytelling games, which placed story first, before game or character. However, the freeform system required a very good gamemaster, and not everyone was a Jonathan Tweet or a John Tynes (who had been running playtests for the Wizards crew).
The game sold very few copies, and by December of 1995 Wizards exited the RPG market, selling off the rights to other games they acquired (like Ars Magica). And we never heard of that company in the RPG space again. Ahem.
3. Why Care About Everway At All?
You have to be careful, because if you spend a lot of time with stories, you start to believe that life is just stories, and it’s not.
If you've read enough of my posts, you know that I have certain themes that I return to. Greyhawk. Bards as the source of all evil in the multiverse. The indisputable truth that Nickelback writes better lyrics than Bob Dylan- that might be a deep cut, but this is how I remind you. But one that I tend to return to is that history doesn't always repeat, but it usually rhymes. And the debates and the arguments and innovations we have today about RPGs are, if not identical to the ones in the past, are awfully familiar. For that reason, I think it's important to look back and to celebrate Everway, which is one of the many innovative (and mostly forgotten) games that litter the past.
What is Everway? Well, let's start by looking at the review in Dragon Magazine #224 by Rick Swan!*
...Everway is so far out of the mainstream, it's barely recognizable as an RPG. For starters, it has no dice. It has no tables or charts. A deck of cards directs the flow of the game. Monster bashing, treasure hunting, dungeon crawling bye-bye; Everway is pure narrative. We've seen these elements before: the Amber game pioneered diceless role-playing, White Wolf's Vampire: the Masquerade game championed storytelling over combat encounters, and TSR's 1988 BULLWINKLE AND ROCKY game used cards to help players improvise adventures. But they've never been integrated so faultlessly or presented so imaginatively. Everway will have veteran players and critics (like me, who tend to overreact to anything off the beaten path that's even halfway well-done) doing handsprings. Novices, however, should proceed with caution. This is hazardous territory.
...In my regular AD&D sessions, I never use dice or charts, nor do I allow my players to use them. The same goes at my convention appearances- no dice at my tables. In 10 years, I've yet to have a single player abandon ship. Everway codifies the freeform style favored by me and (I suspect) thousands of other referees. It makes for a brisk game, and Everway, to its credit, plays at blinding speed. But to an unprecedented extent, the success of an Everway adventure depends on the improvisational skills of the referee, his ability to come up with interesting plot twists, characters, and scenic details on the spur of the moment. And players must respond in kind, relying on their imaginations instead of die-rolls to forge their characters' destinies. I've spent many a painful afternoon watching would-be referees struggle to stage elementary AD&D encounters and exasperated novices trying to translate lists of numbers into three-dimensional personalities. It isn't easy, even with detailed rules and funny-sided dice to use as crutches
*Bonus fun fact- also in this issue? A review of Birthright!
I bolded the part that I thought was most interesting. One of the continuing issues with different games is the question of whether or not there is a focus on second-order design- in other words, the designer has direct control over the rules and manual and the dice and structural elements of the game that allow the game to be played, but the actual gameplay is never within the designer's control. For some this is a bug, and there are games that attempt to constrain second-order design by layering on repeated actual play examples within the game and rules and laws for the players and GMs to follow so that there is, in fact, a way to say that you're "playing it wrong," in the same way that one might remark that you are violating the rules of Monopoly. Conversely, there are other games that are notoriously so loose with second-order design, like AD&D, that you can both have tables of optimizers and tables of freeform players rightly say that they are playing the same game.
Everway remains a fascinating experiment- perhaps not quite as remarkable as Over the Edge in 1992, but remarkable in that a lightly-codified storygame with no dice was released as a major roleplaying game- in 1995. Perhaps there wasn't specifically novel about any particular aspect of the game- after all, Amber predated it in terms of diceless RPGs (and the concepts of diceless RPGs goes back much much farther). Many of the freeform concepts were used in Over the Edge, and those concepts were also explored earlier. But everything has an antecedent - that doesn't mean it isn't innovative! And Everway was an amazing game which, unfortunately, often gets forgotten when people discuss foundational and important games in the history of the hobby.
I should also mention that there was a new edition, and that Jonathan Tweet had a post here announcing it and discussing the history in more detail. I recommend reading it!
So, feel free to discuss the post, or Everway, or, you know ... whatever!
