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Back from the Tour

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The CPG crew just wrapped up a couple crazy weeks of demoing Catalyst. Game stores across Washington and Oregon housed the "Cascadia militia" for an evening and let us sell our role-playing game. The public response was wonderful. Thanks to everyone who listened to our pitches and rolled some dice. We're always psyched to see people genuinely happy while playing Catalyst.

We'll probably do another tour soon and hit the places we missed last time (Bellingham, Olympia, Redmond, Vancouver). We've still got a second demo at Meeples Games on the 22nd. If you missed the first round, swing by. And if we missed your favorite game store, let us know. We'll go anywhere we can get an audience.

In the meantime, we're wrapping up the Catalyst stuff from the KS campaign, We just published "Fourth World", a backer-sponsored campaign set in Northern Arizona. Flagstaff is an amazing town and lends itself to an RPG shockingly well. Between the glorious terrain, railroads, Anasazi ruins, and Skydome (the best dueling arena), "Fourth World" takes full advantage of the high desert haven. Two more campaigns are being worked on now. Our conspiracy-influenced "Shadow Parliament" is going through playtesting and will likely be done within the month.

The player app is nearly ready for completion. I realize it's been on the precipice of completion for a while. Basically, when we didn't make our KS stretch goal to hire a developer, we made the decision to continue to make a complete app. This meant we have a part-time developer making a fleshed out, extremely robust and helpful app, instead of a bare-bones version.

Our next game, Drink!, should be ready for crowdfunding support by the end of summer. If you enjoy tasty beverages and want to help us playtest, contact CPG through Twitter, Facebook, or in the comments.

That's it, aside from a secret announcement pending some legal stuff. Thanks for the love Cascadia and beyond. 

--Alex

Becoming a Team

We humans get lonely. We crave intellectual exchanges like conversation and debate; as well as primal sensory experiences like passionate sex, warm embraces, or a gentle caress from someone who cares. We’re a social species. Sure, there are outliers, but hermits are a small fraction of humanity. People need each other to function and strive towards higher goals. So why is getting a group of RPG characters to work together the hardest part of a campaign?

Let’s set the scene: the four players’ characters are in a tavern. They’ve never worked together, maybe never even seen one another. Suddenly, a messenger steps in; bleeding to death. He warns of a grave threat nearby and then collapses. Maybe one or two characters sally forth to fight, but the others are a bit too self-interested to risk their lives. The GM prods them to go. They do for the sake of the story, but it’s totally out of character. Immediately, the most important relationships in the game are poorly constructed. Every subsequent interaction is flawed by this foundation. Your players won’t really notice what’s wrong either, since they’ll be fulfilling the social interaction on a personal level but not their characters’ level.

How do we fix this? The way I see it, there are two solutions: force the players to band together under duress or establish the party’s backstory.  The former is easier for new players, but the latter lends more storytelling depth.

Situations requiring the players to work together aren’t hard to come up with. Any violent scenario with immediate threats has the players’ characters acting in concert to pacify the aggressors. Bear in mind, they need to stay together once safety is returned. In a recent playtest, I had the players escaping from a prison. The entire first session centered on this goal and they had no reason to abandon each other before leaving the grounds (strength in numbers after all). In doing so, the characters learned about each other, their strengths and weaknesses, how they complimented each other, and what quirks made them endearing as people. They organically developed friendships from fleeing the facility. Abandoning each other at the next town didn’t make sense: they’re the only people they can trust.

The goal is to have characters stick together for the duration of the campaign. Having that bond established as part of character creation gives players reasons to act with each other that would not easily happen otherwise. Have players discuss how they know each other and why they are working together. If someone is a mentor, they act with pride or shame when their counterpart succeeds or fails. The mentee is forced to try and prove their worth when it might not otherwise be advisable. Having characters indebted to each other gives opportunities to pay off life debts or call in favors. These previous connections don’t have to be fancy. Having characters who stick together because of stuff like old school loyalties lets players make callbacks to previous events outside of the campaign, adding depth and fun storytelling moments.

The goal of role playing is to live vicariously in a fictional world through a different personality lens. Taking the existing social structure of the room’s people and transposing it into the game world does the experience a disservice. Make them like each other all over again. Approach friendships from a different angle or completely ignore your real life bonds. Don’t always save Slim because he’s your boyfriend; save him because he is kindest soul your character has met in this dark world.

--Alex

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More Demos

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The CPG crew is doing a tour of duty all around Cascadia. Come check out Catalyst demos at these game stores:

Come join the forces of humanity and play a couple sessions of our role-playing game, We'll outfit any new recruits with some Catalyst swag if they purchase a copy on site.

If you can't make it to one of these but want to fight some demons with us, shoot our scheduler an email. We can repeat a location or travel further if there is demand. The goal is to get this apocalypse survival guide in everyone's hands, after all.

(Past demo sites below. Thanks for the love.)