Roll Some Dice

I'll be running two sessions of Leftovers at OrcCon next month up in Los Angeles (I say "up in" like it isn't only 40 minutes away, but whatever), for anyone who might want to check it out. Here's the blurb for the game: Leftovers : Bell, Book, and Tentacle Suzanne may be young, but even she knows better than to leave the Trench by herself. There's no telling what might find her out there - - could be violence-crazed Grafters, unspeakable Horrors, or worse... the Order of St. Eurosia. Whatever it is, time's running out. This is an open playtest of Leftovers , a roleplaying game of post-apocalyptic survival in a horrific world -- but with a heart. Like I said, two sessions, one Friday the 12th at 8:00 pm, and the other Saturday the 13th at 9:00 am. Each session takes four players, and at this point will probably include character creation. The minigame of "How Horrific am I?" is a pretty important part of the game, so I don't want to cut

Hey, January's almost over! It's already the 25th, which means I have but a few days to get this Discovery game together if I want to submit it for that contest. I'm not especially worried about it, because there's so little to the game to begin with, and most of the big pieces are in place. Sure, combat needs some way to track damage, but that's a detail that can surely be worked out in the next few days. Right? (Disregard for the moment the total lack of playtesting. I know I am.) I've spent some time lately re-reading Agon and Beast Hunters , two games which have definitely had an influence on my thinking for this one, particularly with regards to putting the GM on a budget. In Agon , it's Strife; in Beast Hunters , Adversity. Regardless, the idea is the same: Limit the GM's resources, and, in the process, make him a sort of player too, in active opposition of the others. Each of these games goes about this in its own way, and with varying lev

Hey ho there -- I've been a little FATE-crazy lately , but that doesn't mean that development on other games has stopped. In Leftovers , healing by conventional means isn't easy. It's a lot more reliable to cut something off a defeated Horror and stick it on yourself than to rely on the medical skills of your comrades. And the more Wounds you've taken, the harder it is to heal any of them. For example, if you've only taken 1 Wound, it's relatively simple to take care of it, but if you've taken 5 Wounds -- i.e., you're at death's door -- even healing one of them is a daunting task. Sticking on a Graft, though, auto-heals Wounds. The bigger the Graft, the more Wounds are healed. This is how people end up with Grafts against their will -- simply put, sometimes it's the only way to survive. The question is this: Since Grafts generally replace body parts like arms, legs, and eyes, how many Wounds does it take to actually lose an arm, leg, or

So far we have two stats: Physical Potential and Mental Potential. The dice mechanic is probably going to be something along the lines of 2dX + Function (+ Specialty) vs. a target number. As arguably uninteresting and commonplace (from QUERP to Doctor Who!) as that mechanic is, it's ideal for two reasons. One, it's simple and accessible, especially if we're talking d6s. The premise doesn't really call for complex dice mechanics; instead, something straightforward just feels right for a game about discovery. Two, it meshes seamlessly and intuitively with the potential pools: Spend n potential on a roll and get a function of + n . It makes a lot more immediate sense than, say, adding dice to a pool or fiddling with a roll-under number. Plus, it works well with some other stuff below. Anyway, for the time being, let's make it 2d6. 4dF would work too, as would d6-d6, but I'd rather stick with all-positive results. Depending on how things shake out, 2d8 or even

A friend of mine pointed out this contest running on EN World right now, and I was like, "Look, I have a lot of other game-design-related stuff going on here. If it sparks any interesting ideas in me, I'll think about it." Turns out it did, and now I am. The parameters are really simple and open, which normally wouldn't appeal much to me. There's just a theme -- Discovery -- and a few "sub-themes," plus, of course, a deadline (February 1st). However, as a theme, I really like Discovery, and the brief treatment of it by Wik, the judge/organizer: Discovery. Exploration, the discovery of the unknown, and unraveling mystery. An "Old school" theme of RPGs that sometimes gets overlooked in the modern era of RPGs. Let's bring back that sense of discovery in RPGs! How? Well, that's up to you! The sub-theme that jumped out at me was "Sentient Constructs," which made me think of some alternative uses of "Discovery" bes

After a relatively good night's sleep, it occurred to me that the real problem with the issue in my last post isn't about the number of dice rolled or anything -- it's about how Hits are generated. If you're dealing with high Traits on either side, you need a margin of success of at least 5 or 6 to obtain more than one Hit, and that's where the grind comes in. This is actually a problem with pretty significant ramifications for the system as it pertains to degrees of success. The Hits element works fine as long as the participants aren't evenly matched, but when they are, it suffers from a common problem in RPGs: "Evenly-matched" translates to "consistently comparable rolls." I.e., grind and stagnation. Whatever the solution is, I don't want to create a complicated special case for contests that doesn't apply otherwise. I'm inclined to say that you score one Hit for every two points by which you exceed the opponent's roll

Unbeknownst to me, some of my San Diego gamer friends gave Leftovers its first test-drive tonight! Very cool of them. They brought up a lot of good points and have given me a lot to think about. The biggest issue is this: Contested conflicts, especially at high trait levels, could take a long time. We tested out one where both characters had the same dice pool and it took nine rolls before we got one "hit." If the contest required 3 or 4 hits, it would've taken a very long time. Hmm. Not sure what to do about that. An initial instinct is to say that identical dice on either side of the conflict cancel each other out -- that is, if one guy's rolling d6 + d8 + d10 and the other guy's rolling d8 + d10 + d10, it'd actually be roll of d6 vs. d10. If all dice are identical, just roll Nature. It's certainly simpler, but I'm not sure if it really makes sense, or would actually be fun. Have to give it more thought. Anyone have any ideas on that? Also, I was