Small Press, Big Game

These are the topics Nathan Paoletta has tackled throughout his gaming career, though not necessarily all at once. As a designer, Nathan has not had as long of a career as some, but he has more than made up for the shorter duration by turning out powerful, heady games that people want to play and then keep playing. There are few higher complements that can be awarded to a game designer.

Nathan started his (official) career by publishing the game Timestream in 2005, a game guided by his ultimate list of the rules of time travel. Timestream takes a cinematic approach to time travel where the characters' experiences are more important than keeping track of the changes caused by the characters' actions. This is a burden many players of time travel games are happy to do without.

Like many first games, Timestream had its issues. For instance, the game has what he calls "clever mechanics", but Nathan does not always feel they support the game as well as he would like. He also says that he would do the game differently now as opposed to when he was writing it, but few game designers look back on their first creations and say they wouldn't change a thing.

While Nathan was getting Timestream printed, he made a fateful decision: to enter into Game Chef 2005. Game Chef is a design competition where entrants are asked to put together a game in a very short period of time. These games must incorporate one or more elements such as theme and genre. In Nathan's case, he had the genre: historical and immediately decided to do something in a time period not well-covered by other games. After playing around with an Aztec game, he started thinking about the Vietnam War, a war that both interested him and to which he had a personal connection.

In no time, he had carry. a game about war. carry is a not a traditional war game which involves a lot of tactics and resource management, though combat is a part of the game. Instead, it is a game about the fiction of war that those who have not fought tell so that they can deal with the fighting.

The game involves one squad of mostly pregenerated characters, each of whom have a Burden which they may or may not deal with by the end of the game. While trying to deal with their Burden, they must also face pressure from other players, from fighting, and, of course, from the GM. The squad is the same every time you play, but the Burdens and the pressures the soldiers face change from game to game. It is a game that is heavily and purposefully narrative as it forces people to confront the ways in which noncombatants deal with combat, killing, and violence.

In a lot of ways, the release of carry was a landmark event. Just about everyone who has played the game has fallen in love with it. carry is a game that, in the months after its release, garnered more attention than just about every other small press game to date. Nathan was interviewed by the gaming press, the game was reviewed (favorably) by just about everyone, and Nathan became established as a premier game designer with the chops to design a game that was both an "emotional gut punch," (his words) but also fun to play. In other words, the hype was deserved.

After carry, Nathan did not publish a major game until 2008 saw the release of Annalise: Stories of pain, hunger and redemption. That's not to say he didn't write any games, but they were released as free PDFs. Which is okay, Annalise was worth the wait.

In its purest sense, Annalise is the culmination of one of Nathan's dreams: to write a game about vampires. It also grew out of a frustrating playtest of another designer's game, in which his character, Annalise, was forced to save the world rather than deal with her own brokenness. From this fertile ground, the game Annalise was born.

In short, the game is about characters who are being stalked by a great evil, usually a vampire, who preys on them because they have a Vulnerability of some sort. This Vulnerability opens them up to undue influence from the evil. They also have a Secret which they cannot tell the other players. Throughout the course of play, the vampire becomes more and more a threat and the players become more and more susceptible to falling prey to their Vulnerabilities until eventually they succumb to evil or they are redeemed.

Annalise is great game that deviates from the successful formula Nathan found in carry, but still manages to stand as its own game. The narrative approach is still present to a point, but Annalise features a far less strict tie between mechanics and the game. In Nathan's own words "sometimes the rules just say you talk," an approach some story games have abandoned in the past. Additionally, the game has no GM, instead each player takes turn being the Scene Guide. This takes some getting used to, but it means that all players take part in defining the nature of the evil and deciding whether their character will succumb to it. It also puts more burden on the players to take part in telling the story of the game.

While each game is interesting on its own, what is perhaps most interesting about Nathan's games is that each one is different. Some designers return to a similar moral theme or element time and time again. Nathan, instead, looks for games that challenge him as a designer so that each new work is a reaction to his previous games and to what's popular at the time. They also incorporate what he would like to see happen in the hobby.

It's a tribute to his skills as a designer that he can change direction as often as he does, but it also makes it hard to label his body of work as a whole. If you like Annalise, that doesn't necessarily mean you will like carryand vice versa. They are different games that tackle different design goals. Not that this should discourage you from checking out all of Nathan's work, it's just a fair warning so that you know what to expect. Or what not to.

If Nathan has any themes which run through his games, it's that he likes his rules to be subtle. While he never purposefully tries to be subtle, many of his friends and fans tell him that his games (especially carry and Annalise) have a subtlety that make them interesting to play. Nathan enjoys this praise and always wants to be subtle, even if he's not actively working towards it.

Another thing that is interesting about Nathan is that he is more than just a game designer. He is also a community builder and a publisher. Two years ago, he created a community centered around the Design Matters booth at Gen Con. This booth brings together different designers who all have similar goals into a community where members support one another. It is something of which Nathan is particularly proud and likely has its origins when Nathan was getting advise from established designers as he published Timestream.

Nathan has every reason to be proud. Every year, the Design Matters booth attracts attention for its unorthodox booth layout and the quality of games sold there, including all of Nathan's titles, 3:16, and Empire of Dust among others.

Lastly, Nathan has recently published another designer's work through NDP Design, his imprint. That game, The Dance and the Dawn by Dev Purkayastha is a game of fairy tale princesses looking for mates and uses a chessboard to simulate a waltz. Very interesting and very different, like Nathan's work.

With Nathan Paoletta's work, you have three games which offer three very different play experiences, have three different sets of strengths and weaknesses, and yet all manage to be enjoyable in their own way. While his games may not be mentioned in the Big Three of small press gaming, carry at the least, deserves to be mentioned as one of the top small press entries in the indie/Forge/small press movement. The game is everything a small press game should be: engaging, fun (even though it is serious), and something you want to play again. It is a game everyone should try just to experience a different take on war. And gaming.