Roll Some Dice

Contest: The Game Crafter RPG Challenge

2012-02-04T22:28:00.000-08:00

Man, this is exactly the kind of awesome design contest for which I absolutely do not have the time.

The Game Crafter is pleased to announce the RPG Challenge! We want you to design a role-playing game in the form of a board or card game. It doesn’t matter whether you build a dungeon crawler like Descent, or more of a story telling game like Betrayal at House on the Hill, or a funny little card game like Munchkin; all that matters is that it takes the form of a role-playing game. It also doesn’t matter whether your game requires a game master, or if the adventure is random, or if there are predefined adventures.

I've used The Game Crafter in the past for Honeymoon: The Game, a little something I made for my wife to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. (It turns our New Zealand honeymoon into a game, using our honeymoon photos as cards.) But I've always wanted to take advantage of what the site has to offer on a grander scale -- a full-on boardgame or card game or something.

So this would seem to be a good opportunity, except for this, and also this. Sure, the contest deadline isn't until April 15th, and yes, I have half-formed ideas that would be viable candidates, but seriously -- I do not have the time.

But maybe you do! So go check it out and design something. A potential grand prize is taking over the site's GenCon booth for half a day! That's pretty sweet.

OrcCon 2012: Events!

2012-01-27T01:12:00.000-08:00

Right up front: I haven't posted in a while because it's all been FATE stuff lately. So there. Moving on!

OrcCon's coming up next month -- specifically, February 17th through 20th -- and I'm going to be running some pretty cool games.

First up on Friday at 2:00 is Dungeoncrew -- my D&D-ish hack of the very excellent Supercrew. Of course, Supercrew's so elegantly rules-light already that there isn't a ton of hacking to be done. In fact, here's the entire hack right here:

When rolling for Abilities, substitute the following table for the one in the book.
Race: You're a nonhuman adventurer. Pick a race.
Skill: An important, real-world skill you've picked up, like sneaking, fast-talking, or healing.
Equipment: Mundane gear of some kind, such as a sword, a set of lockpicks, or a suit of armor.
Item: A magic item, such as a ring of wizardry, a flying carpet, or a soul-stealing sword.
Attribute: An adjective describing a notable physical or mental feature, such as big, fast, or smart.
Magic: Pick a type of magic, such as pyromancy, necromancy, or divination.

That's it!

I'm going to go a Danger Patrol route with this, and I also want to find a use for my DungeonMorph Dice. Whatever happens, it'll be a lot of fun. (Right now this is scheduled in the wrong time slot, but hopefully that'll get sorted out before this weekend.)

I'm also running two sessions of Dungeon World as part of our weekend-long Living Dungeon World campaign. We describe it thusly:

A world of fantastic adventure awaits - a world of monsters and heroes, gods and demons, swords and sorcery, Good and Evil.

This is your world.

This is DUNGEON WORLD.

LIVING DUNGEON WORLD is a weekend-long series of connected heroic-fantasy games with persistent characters in a persistent world. Play as many or as few games as you like. New to DUNGEON WORLD? No problem! More info here.

Five GMs, nine sessions, one ongoing story! Start out as a virtual nobody on Friday and fight for your life all weekend until Sunday night rolls around and you're a multiverse-saving badass -- just like the prophecies foretold! Or simply drop in for a session to see what Dungeon World's all about -- just like the prophecies failed to anticipate!

As far as we know, this is the first time anyone's done this sort of organized-play event with Dungeon World, so we want to make it as cool as we can. But it's not going to be cool in the least without cool players, so come on out to OrcCon and give it a whirl. Sessions are Friday at 2:00 pm (this one's the all-Villager-playbook game) and 8:00 pm, Saturday at 2:00 pm, and Sunday at 2:00 pm and 8:00 pm.

Stage One: Objective Completed

2011-12-18T11:33:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Walton finally (and I say "finally" with all due respect) got around to the last batch of Stage One entries and had nothing but good things to say about Half of Everything Is Luck. Things like:

"This game is straight-up terrific."
"Mike knocked this one out of the park."
"[One particular thing in the game] is hilarious."
"[Smells like Pierce Brosnan.]"

Anyway, modesty forbids me from any more self-aggrandizement, but you can read the whole thing here.

Upshot is, Half of Everything Is Luck "definitely gets an invitation" (oops, one more nugget of self-aggrandizement!), so yay me, yay the game, and so on. Thanks Jonathan!

Stage One: Addendum

2011-11-15T10:41:00.001-08:00

I have to say I'm pretty blown away by the response to Half of Everything Is Luck. My last post on it had a whopping six viewers. That's the equivalent of everyone who follows this blog reading it once! It's pretty gratifying when you can reach 100% of your audience.

Anyway, I've made a couple post-deadline improvements to the game based on feedback from one person, and I figured I'd post 'em here for anyone who's interested. And really, even if only half of the people who read that last post are interested, that's still three people -- enough to play a multiplayer game of Goldeneye! The mind reels.

So here they are.

Ammo
Instead of spending Rounds and tracking Ammo Reserves, every weapon has a row of check boxes and a set of coins (pennies, nickels, or dimes). The boxes represent its Clip. Every time you roll a 1 on a Shoot die (regardless of whether it's “kept,” if Aiming), check a box. When the last box is checked, the Clip is empty, and you need to Reload.

A Weapon's coins represent the Ammo for it you're currently carrying. When you Reload that weapon, clear its Clip boxes and spend one of its coins. When you spend its last coin, you're out of Ammo. Ammo Boxes have two coins, while dead Guards and Crates have only one. You can only have a limited number of each type of coin at a time, as shown below.

PP7: □ □ / 3 pennies
AF7: □ / 4 nickels
Sniper Rifle: □ □ □ / 2 dimes

You start the game with one penny and no nickels or dimes. If you get one or more coins for a Weapon you don't have, you get the Weapon instead (and no coins).

Guards
Every map segment has a minimum number of Guards it must have: 4 for Drop Point, 6 for Roadway, and 8 for Dam. If the dice give you less than that, roll a number of additional dice equal to the difference, right on the page. This time, though, reset 4s to 1s, 5s to 2s, and 6s to 3s – in other words, every die is a Guard.
For example, if you've only rolled three Guards on Roadway instead of the minimum of six, roll another 3d6. Let's say those dice come up 1, 4, and 6. That gives you two more Level 1 Guards and a Level 3 Guard.

There you go. Play in good health.

Stage One: Half of Everything Is Luck

2011-11-06T02:05:00.000-08:00

After doing some grueling research tonight -- plugging the N64 back in and playing Goldeneye 007 to refresh my memory -- my entry for Stage One, Half of Everything Is Luck, is done.

I agonized for some time over the name, and nearly settled on one of several really bad puns, but playing the Facility reminded me of the dialogue at the end between Bond and Trevelyan (which the movie ripped off word for word, BTW). "Half of everything is luck" seems like a pretty accurate summation of this game.

I've seen people posting about the layout they've done for their entries, and my reaction has been, "Man, layout? For reals? I'm just trying to squeeze everything on the page here." So it's not pretty, and it's not fancy, and it's probably wordier and crunchier than most submissions, but I'm willing to bet it's one of the only one-person games made for this thing, so that's something, anyway. Honestly, it never even occurred to me to make it anything but a solo game, given the source material. That means giving the opposing forces (many, many guards) behavioral scripts, which ate up its fair share of space and brainpower.

Playing the Dam again was an interesting experience, that's for sure. There's so much I just remembered wrong. For example, why did I think there were two modes of movement, roughly equivalent to walking and running? Uh-uh. It's all just walking. Fast walking, sure, but walking nonetheless. And why did I think there was some PP7 ammo in there somewhere? And why did I think there was more than one sniper rifle? Most of these tricks of my memory were fixed in the final game, but some of them -- like the sniper rifle thing -- weren't, for the sake of gameplay. It's just better, IMO, if all guards in towers have sniper rifles. Makes things a little more interesting.

I'd also misnamed two of the weapons. AK-47? PPK? What was I thinking? No -- AF7 and PP7. Duh!

I'm rambling here. Practically speaking, it's an hour later than it really is right now, so that's my excuse. Anyway, check out the game, give it a whirl, and tell me what you think.

Stage One: Goldeneye

2011-11-03T09:10:00.000-07:00

Well, hello blog! Yikes, it's been over a month. I hate when that happens.

Anyway, Jonathan Walton -- Master Chef of Game Chef for the past few years -- has a game design contest going right now that's captured my attention and imagination. The challenge: Make an "analog" version of the first stage or level of a video game. The whole thing has to fit on one sheet of paper, front and back, and the deadline's this Sunday, the 6th.

The first thing I thought of was Goldeneye N64, because some part of my brain is constantly thinking about Goldeneye, so that's what I'm doing. Goldeneye's first "level" -- or map, anyway -- is Arkhangelsk Dam, a rather straight-up Point-A-to-Point-B mission, which makes it pretty well-suited for this kind of thing.

Don't just stand there!

I'm representing the map itself with three sheets of college-ruled notebook paper, corresponding to the Drop Point, the Tunnel, and the Dam itself. These are pretty major abstractions of the actual map, of course, but obviously a good deal of abstraction is necessary to make this thing work at all. On each sheet, the player -- it's a solo game -- rolls 8d6. Wherever the dice land, that's where a thing is. The numbers on the dice tell you what those things are, whether guards or crates or whatever.

Movement and distance are measured in lines on the page, and your goal is to get from the "bottom" of the first sheet of paper to the "top" of the third. Time is measured in ticks, and the difficulty level you choose (Agent, Secret Agent, or 00 Agent) determines how many ticks you get. Everything you do in the game costs one or more ticks. Run out of ticks and you fail your mission.

Of course, you can also just get shot and die. Difficulty level also limits how many hits you can take. At Agent you're a virtual tank; at 00 Agent, a paper tiger. You take hits when you're within a guard's range and roll poorly (although even rolling poorly can kill a guard), so if you charge in there AK a-blazin', you're going get shot up real good, much like in the source material. Your best bet is to aim and shoot 'em from a distance with a silenced weapon before they're aware of you.

Along the way, there's the possibility of one or more secondary objectives to accomplish, like hacking into the installation's mainframe with your rad 14.4k modem. This costs ticks, like everything else, and if you try to do it where a guard can see you, you will be shot unto death.

It all looks playable, faithful, and even fun to me, which is great, but meeting the space requirement is proving to be nearly impossible. With some severe margins and small type, right now it all fits onto two pages (or one page front and back, if you will) with about two lines to spare -- but part of the contest also involves including guidelines for playing through Stage Two. That means the Facility.

For England, James. And, y'know, revenge.

The Facility is awesome, maybe the best map and/or level in the game, but it's also a little complex (no pun intended) to describe in two lines of text. I'd do the Facility in four pages, I think: Hallways, Pipes, Labs, Plant. You need a key (found on one of the guards) to get from Hallways to Pipes and from Labs to Plant. There's a secondary objective here, too: making contact with Dr. Doak, who's either in the Pipes or the Labs. In the interest of simplicity, I'd forgo worrying about civilian casualties.

So there's that, in a nutshell. I'm going to have to decide pretty soon whether I want to be eligible to win the contest -- possibly getting the game published in a short-run small-press thing, which would be super-cool -- or just create a game I like. If the latter, then I don't have to worry about space restrictions. If the former, then... I'm going to have to find a way to either outline the Facility in a couple lines (the above description is not enough, IMO), or edit what I have even more to make room.

Either way, when I'm done, I'll put the PDF online.

Gateway 2011: Belated Wrap-Up

2011-09-25T23:00:00.000-07:00

All right, so... what, three weeks after the fact? But still, Gateway this year was a good time, so I want to make sure I get around to telling the Internet about it. It was just jam-packed with great games.

Friday 2:00
I may make a Friday-afternoon Dangers & Dragons game a Strategicon tradition. It's a great way to kick off the con, and it requires literally no prep outside of remembering to pack my laminated character sheets 'n stuff. This time we had Brian Allred, Andrew Linstrom, Morgan Ellis, and Megan McDonald matching wits with two Lizard Queens (one good, one bad), a reanimated paladin, and a dracolich, among other calamities. Good times.

Friday 8:00
Nothing! Kinda merciful, in a way. It gave me a chance to prep for Saturday's By The Gods! game, which... was a bit more time-consuming than expected. And eat. And sleep, but not nearly enough of that.

Saturday 9:00
Hamish Cameron and his kick-ass game of Dungeon World. I was determined to get into this game, because I'd only played Dungeon World once before and felt I desperately needed another look at it in action before running it the next day. Also, I just wanted to play it again because it was a lot of fun when Colin ran it at Gamex. On both counts, the game delivered. I played a bard, which was way more effective than you probably think it would've been. Part of that was down to the fact that I put myself at the center of the story as the Spider Queen's ex-lover from centuries before. I'd left her when she started to get way too into spiders, but promised to return one day... to kill her. So ol' Daelwyn the elven bard had a pretty personal investment in things.

The bard has some great starting Moves. One of them, Well Traveled, only got used once (and kinda could only be used once), but it set the stage for a lot of what came later in a very cool way, including Chalt the almost-drider and an enchanted sword I'd left behind to aid in the future killing of evil spidery ex-lovers.

The monstrous Spider Queen herself was the highlight, though. Instead of the standard set of compound eyes, she had a thousand thousand faces instead of eyes. And each of those faces had a thousand thousand smaller faces for eyes. And it was just faces all the way down. So... pretty creepy, really, especially when she kissed me with all those eye-faces and melded my lute into my arm. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a Hard Move.

Saturday 2:00
Last year, I wrote a partial sword-and-sorcery hack of Icons called Sigils. What with one thing and another, that hack mutated and evolved and twisted into something fairly distant from Icons called By The Gods!

So. This was the first playtest of By The Gods!, and it was really great in the sense that it revealed a bunch of fundamental flaws with the system that were apparently invisible without seeing it in action. However, by the same token, it was also terribly frustrating. It became pretty clear pretty soon where the problems lay, and I knew I could probably fix it given 30 minutes or so, but I didn't want to stop everything and do that in the middle of a convention game. If it were just, like, a bunch of my friends from San Diego or Torrance or something, I probably would've, but it felt weird to ask people to have that kind of patience in a convention setting. So we soldiered on, and I patched things as best I could, and we rushed to an epic ending that ultimately felt fairly empty and unearned (to me, anyway). People gave some useful feedback, though, for which I was/am grateful.

Let's see if I can remember all the playtesters off the top of my head three weeks after the fact: Denys Mordred, Alex Slizza, Morgan Ellis, Vernon Lingley... uh... well, four out of six ain't bad.

(As an addendum, By The Gods! got its second playtest today, also in a convention-ish-type setting, and it went much, much better. This is mostly because I took another hard look at it not as an Icons descendant, but as its own game, and in the process ended up changing a lot of fundamental things about it. The dice mechanic, for one -- used to be d6-d6, now it uses the same dice mechanic (more or less) from Tales of the Glass Slipper, an RPG.net Game Fu entry of mine from a couple years ago. I'd always liked the dice mechanic and thought it full of promise, and the players today seemed to really get into it as well, so it looks like we're on the right track. In fact, today's playtest succeeded on nearly every level, but then again it's pretty significantly different in many ways from the Gateway version, so that's not a big surprise. One thing's for sure: It bears pretty much no resemblance to Icons now.)

Saturday 8:00
I was psyched to check out Hollowpoint, the new RPG of bad people doing bad things for bad reasons from the VSCA, the folks who brought you (and me) Diaspora not too long ago. And we had a pretty stellar group for it: Hamish as GM, and me, Chris Czerniak, Sam Carter, and my longtime convention companion Morgan Ellis as players.

Still, something wasn't quite right. It took a while to put our collective finger on it. Part of it was a disconnect between what we'd been told the game was -- "Jason Statham, the RPG!" -- and what it ended up being, which was more like "Jason Statham in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels the RPG!" We didn't feel like hypercompetent badasses. Rather, we felt pretty competent in one or two areas, and rather inept at everything else. I mean, Morgan was pinned down in an office cubicle and riddled by machine guns. That doesn't seem especially badass. Although, to be fair, he also survived, because the mechanics pretty much said he had to, so I guess that was pretty badass. It just wasn't logical at all, even by Stathamesque standards..

Another part of the problem was that none of us really figured out how to use the pool of team dice until fairly close to the end of the game (and following two PC deaths/replacements). Once we did, we could see how we could've worked the system for our advantage. Which seemed weird, honestly -- it felt like an exploit, but it's apparently how it's supposed to be run, so... I dunno. I'm chalking it up to a miscommunication born largely of an unfamiliarity with the rules. I'd like to try it again and see how it shakes out.

Then I went back to the room and prepped for Dungeon World until, like, 3:30 am. Oof.

Sunday 9:00
So needless to say, I was a little tired for Dungeon World, but at least I was prepared. Fortunately, Hamish was one of the players (campaigning subtly but strongly to replace Morgan as my longtime convention companion), so I could bounce rulesy-type stuff off of him when I had to. Turns out I didn't have to very much, so that was good.

As you may know, reader, I like hacking indie games for D&D. Of course, Dungeon World is already that, so I thought I'd try using it to run a classic AD&D module: "Dwellers of the Forbidden City." I'd owned it for a while (I went through an old-module hunting frenzy on eBay last year) but never actually read it. I picked it to run based primarily on its name and its probable cachet among fans of the Old School. Turns out it was a good pick. It's a fantastic sandbox of a module, a bit comparable to "Keep on the Borderlands" but more intense. There's plenty of adventure fodder there for several future one-shots, should it come to that (and it may!). If you're a fan of that kind of thing but don't know "Dwellers," check it out.

In addition to Hamish, my players were Sam Carter, Megan McDonald, and Caoimhe Snow. Hamish was arguably the focus, though, as a cleric of Lunderal, God of Suffering (which may explain why his name sounds like a prescription medication -- seriously, as your doctor about Lunderal and see what he says). He was a total masochist who death-wrestled his way into being chief of the local mongrelman community, and was later killed under some falling temple-related debris and sent back to the Prime Material, barely alive and sans eyes. His eyes are now two never-healing pits that are a constant source of agony, just the way he likes it. Hamish is determined to play him again. Fair enough, says I.

We used highlighted stats for XP, but I also had them mark XP whenever they roleplayed to their bonds. (In Hamish's game the day before, BTW, he awarded XP for monsters, like, five or 10 at a time, which seemed kinda crazy to me, but I wasn't going to complain, because hey, 3rd level.) I'd like to figure out a way to give out XP for treasure, to really harken back to the old-school style, but I need to give it a little more thought to come up with something I like.

In the interest of time, I cut the final encounter a little short, but we still managed to get an animated temple, a Thing From Beyond, and dark ritual in there, so it was all good. I'm really digging the mechanics and everything else DW brings to the table. I just wish I had more opportunities to play and/or run it. (More on that later.)

Sunday 2:00
Andy and I had been talking for weeks about his new Lady Blackbird hack, Lady Silver Age Avengers Bird. (Apparently, he doesn't have this online yet that I can see, which is a pity, but we'll fix that soon enough.) I played Captain America in as to-the-hilt a manner as possible, and had a great time.

Back at Hyphen-Con, when Andy ran Operation: Blackbird, I was a bit modest and reticent when it came to traits and tags and XP, but not this time, man. I worked it. I was rolling in XP most of the time. The awesome thing about Lady Blackbird's system is that doing so doesn't break anything. It just encourages you to play in character as much as possible.

Andy introduced some cool mechanical bits to enforce the Silver Age genre a little more, like regaining personal dice by monologuing, flashing back, or voicing an unnecessary thought bubble. The game definitely had the right Silver Age feel, and I'd totally play this again. It makes me want to finish that Lady Blackmoor hack I started.

Sunday 8:00Colin's Bulldogs! game. I already recapped this one here.

Sunday Late
The Bulldogs! game got out an hour early, so I was all set to just go home, but then Colin walked by and asked if I was going to swing by BarCon, so I was like, "Yeah, I'll see you up there." Ten minutes to say hi and g'bye and I'd be out. So I went up there.

An hour later, I left. What kept me so long? Mostly Colin's crazy idea to do a persistent "living" DW campaign at OrcCon. The idea is this: We get enough DW GMs to run a game every slot, then we connect all those games into a single shared setting. After every session, we confab and figure out what's changed in the world as a result of the players' actions, and that informs the session's worth of games. And so on throughout the weekend. We'd do all the games in the same room, and have a bulletin board or something to track stuff like who has a bounty on their head and who's had an epic poem written about them and all kinds of other stuff. And there'd be some sort of fame that'd also be tracked on that board -- everyone would be able to see how renowned everyone else is. "When you enter a new city, roll+Renown." That sort of thing.

It'd be super-complicated, especially the way I see it being done (i.e., in a super-complicated manner), and we'd need probably two or three more GMs, IMO, but if it can be pulled off, it'd be pretty awesome. I did voice a concern to Colin, though, that if it worked it'd be so cool that we'd want to do it every time, which would mean I'd never run anything but DW for the forseeable future.

"I'm thinking that's what I'm going to be doing anyway," he answered. Can't argue with that.

Best game of the con?
Tough one. I really had a great time with the DW games and Lady Silver Age Aaengers Bird. Not really fair to have a three-way tie, but I'm not sure I can choose, even with three weeks' distance.

Worst game of the con?
Oh, By The Gods!, without question. I mean, it was a valuable playtest, as I said, but in this case "valuable" didn't translate to "fun." If I'd run it with the rules I used today, though, it would've been a blast. Mark my words.

Regardless, some great gaming overall. Already looking forward to OrcCon, crazy living DW campaign or no.

On a somewhat related note, Nerdly Beach Party was this weekend; I missed it, as I always do. I'm just not into camping or long drives enough to get in on that. But I'm regretting that this weekend, because Colin and Hamish apparently flooded that thing with DW games. Looking forward to hearing their after-con reports.

Flash Game Design Challenge: Nerdball

2011-09-22T21:57:00.000-07:00

Wow! Has it been well over a month since I posted something here? That's crazy. Sorry about that, folks. Ironically, I've been doing plenty -- I just haven't been talking about it. Have to change that.

So last Friday, Ryan Macklin announced a "flash" game design challenge, in the style of Chuck Wendig's regular flash fiction challenges on Terrible Minds. Write a playable game in 500 words or less! I like it.

The deadline's tomorrow (Friday the 23rd). I immediately had the impulse to do something for it, but I had no idea what and didn't really end up giving it much thought until yesterday.

See, earlier this week, UC Irvine reclaimed the Guinness world record title of Largest Dodgeball Game, with 4,488 players. (I'm a UCI alum, so you can suck it, previous record-holder Rochester Institute of Technology. You don't even get a link!) I was out at dinner last night and saw a UCI student wearing a T-shirt from the event, and something clicked.

The result is this: Nerdball. Players take on the roles (at least initially) of some junior-high nerds forced to play dodgeball in PE class. The opposing team is composed largely, if not wholly, of jocks, cool kids, bullies, and other classmates who make the nerds' lives fairly miserable. Over the course of the game, as your nerd colleagues are picked off one by one, you'll reveal your history with your nemesis, a bully on the other team. You may even end up playing a bully -- in fact, it may shake out that all the players but one end up playing bullies before the game's over. I'd even call it the ideal end to the game to have your fellow players turn on you and, in game terms, pelt you into submission with dodgeballs.

I really like the ingredients for this one, largely because one involved a dice mechanic, and I always enjoy engaging that sort of limitation. Chalk this up as another in a line of recent contest-derived games (with Action City! and Globe Records) that seem playable enough, but at which I'd probably be terrible.

But I'm sure you'd be great at it! Play and enjoy, and if it seems a little sparse, remember -- 500 words. Me culpa.

Game Chef: Winners Announced!

2011-08-07T16:38:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to the winners of this year's Game Chef! They are:

All's Well That Ends As You Like It, by Jennifer Hardy and Matthew Mazurek
Forsooth!, by Sam Liberty and Kevin Spak

("Sam Liberty" is pretty obviously a superhero's mundane secret identity, right?)

Master Chef Jonathan Walton and Professor Walton had some great feedback on Globe Records -- much appreciated! Looking forward to next year, and somehow having more time to do it.

Game Chef: Finals!

2011-08-02T21:57:00.000-07:00

Hey, Globe Records made the finals for Game Chef 2011! And there are only six of us (out of 66), which is kinda crazy.

The other five finalists are:

Daughters of Exile by Steve Darlington
Your Father wishes you to marry. You wish to decide for yourself. Cut a path between duty, love and rebellion.
All’s Well That Ends as You Like It
by Jennifer Hardy & Matthew Mazurek
Dueling, wooing, vows kept or forsworn, drunkenness, thievery, costumes, identical twins, rightful rulers, virtuous innocents, ghosts, and much more.
Forsooth! by Sam Liberty & Kevin Spak
Players each control a small cast of characters to improvise a play of Shakespearean scope without a GM or storyteller.

A Midsummer Night’s Scheme
by Nat Barmore (woodelf) w/ Caitlin Doran
Exiled faeries compete to prank mortals they care for, in order to regain favor at the Summer Court.
The Lost Years by Matthew Nielsen
A Game of Shakespeare and time travel. Characters cast out of the Bard’s plays must choose between their mission and their personal desires.

Congrats to my fellow finalists! It's an honor to be counted among you. I look forward to one of you being declared the winner at GenCon!

Game Chef: Peer Review!

2011-07-29T02:39:00.000-07:00

So! Part of Game Chef this year is a peer-review process, which I like. Everyone's assigned four games to read and comment on, and then recommend one of them to advance on to the next stage, which I believe is just straight-up judging, judged by judges.

I'm going to do my peer reviewing here so I can have it all in one place and not worry about being long-winded, in case it goes that way. I'm also going to try to segment my reviews in terms of how well each game addresses the theme (Shakespeare) and makes use of the ingredients (Daughter, Forsworn, Exile, Nature), as well as things I like and things about which I am not sure. Wish me luck in sticking to this plan! There will be many parentheticals, apparently!

A Midsummer Night's Scheme
Nat Barmore (with help from Caitlin Doran, whose idea it was in the first place)

What do I like? I like that this seems to be (or could be) a secondary side play happening concurrently with Midsummer Night's Dream. Nat (perhaps assisted by Caitlin!) gives a good overview of how he (or she -- could be a Natalie) sees faeries in this context, which makes for some useful roleplaying advice for the players. The faerie abilities are distinct from one another and cover just about anything I could think of a faerie doing in this context, which is good. I appreciate how what the players are doing and what the characters are doing are very similar, in that everyone's playing a game with a definite win condition. The stakes are obviously higher for the characters, but whatever -- I like the unity between in-character and out-of-character mindsets.

What am I not sure about? For what we're doing in this game, it seems awfully crunchy. You have your six stats, and Nature, and your mortal connection, which strikes me as a lot for a game about pranking faeries. I'm not sure how much better one faerie is than another in terms of, say, shapechanging should be all that important here. I'd think other factors, ones more relevant to the story or the faeries' personalities or emotions, would be more significant here. The dice mechanics look solid, but again, they seem a little involved for what's going on. And look, I like mechanics more than the next guy. I'm just saying that here, for me it's a bit of a disconnect. This also feels like the kind of game where narrative control should be shared more with the players. Instead of the SG framing every scene and (apparently) completely controlling everything in a rather traditional-GM way, it might be nice to let, say, players frame scenes, at the very least.

Is the theme well-addressed? For sure -- it's all pretty much out of a single play, but that play's also one of the most famous in Shakespeare's catalog.

Are the ingredients well-used? Nature, Forsworn, and Exile are all there. The whole game sorta revolves around your faerie's relationship with Nature (fighting against it or going with it), "forswearing" is a stakes-raising option (albeit one that seems a little easy to exploit), and Exile is the result of losing the Faerie Sovereigns' game.

Overall: I could see playing this. It's a little undefined around the edges, and that forswearing thing needs more attention, but given more than 10 days' work I'm sure these wouldn't be a problem.

Genesis Undone

Jim Ryan

What do I like? I like that picking my Role and Nature makes me think of Doctor Who, like I'm making a Time Lord. "Trust me, I'm the Savant!" It fits the whole epic nature of coming up with the First Race and the First City (which I kinda can't imagine being anything but a city floating in space, for some reason). I like the way players help define each others' characters, and the way character creation mandates some intra-party conflict.

What am I not sure about? I wish more of the character creation process were dealt with in picking a Role and a Nature. There's potential there, but Role and Nature seem to have no mechanical effect. I'm also not sure why revealing one's Nature should matter at all. For one thing, it seems like something I oughtta be roleplaying all along. If I'm the Bully, then I'm going to Bully. It should be fairly obvious what I am. Nowhere in the game does it seem to be a goal for the players to guess one another's Nature, but for some reason when my Nature's revealed (via a mechanic that doesn't seem to interface in any other way with Role or Nature), I'm at a disadvantage? I don't get it. As it is, it feels very tacked-on to me -- the fiction doesn't adequately explain why "whomever sees your Nature knows your weakness." Likewise, whether or not you've chosen to forswear the First Sin -- something that's pretty central to the backstory of the First Race and the First City -- simply doesn't matter, in the grand scheme of things. It reminds me of alignment in 4E D&D, except that it really seems like it ought to be much more significant here. Surely one's stance on the thing that should be as central to one's identity as Role or Nature. If anything, it's your stance on the First Sin that should be the thing you hide. That's your real weakness.

A few things about structure: For a game this short, the set-up strikes me as awfully long. While most of chargen is pretty focused, I think the last step, "Discuss," leaves too much up to chance. I wish "what they mean to each other" were more than backstory and window-dressing. There's a lot of players collectively making important decisions, like what the First Race, Sin, and City are, with little in the way of guidance from the text. Conversely, proscribing what each of the five Acts should contain feels very forced. I'd rather see mechanical incentives to have things proceed in one way or another than just being told what I should be doing. It puts too much in the hands of the players to figure everything out.

Is the theme well-addressed? Apart from the Acts and Soliloquies, I don't get much of a Shakespearean vibe off of this.

Are the ingredients well-used? Nature, Forsworn, and Exile are used to varying degrees. Nature is most important, "forswearing" the First Sin is pure color, and Exile is something that's happened before the game begins.

Overall: There are a lot of interesting ideas here, but I think it needs more work before it'd feel playable.

The Lost Years

Matthew Nielsen

What do I like? There's a lot. I love the premise, especially how it lampshades time-travel concerns by providing a good reason for keeping the PCs in the dark. Faeries as far-future time-traveling humans is bizarre, but Matthew manages to make it seem strangely logical. Making use of Shakespeare's "apocrypha" is a great idea, too. Turning Comedy, Tragedy, and History into character stats is a stroke of genius. The dice mechanic is familiar, but it's also simple and intuitive, so I have no objections. Being able to spend style points to edit minor details (anything that hasn't been nailed down) and then act in character to regain those points is a great idea.

What am I not sure about? I feel like the role of the antagonists, including who they are and what they do, is much more obvious to the author than it is to me. There's advice in the last page or so, but I'm not immediately filled with ideas. Even a few examples of possible plots against Shakespeare would help a lot, or some examples of "events that could change Shakespeare's perspective on the world."

Is the theme well-addressed? You're obscure or non-existent or alternate-universe Shakespeare characters in Elizabethan England trying to save your creator's life at the behest of a bunch of faeries. Yeah, there's a lot of Shakespeare in there.

Are the ingredients well-used? Nothing's explicit, but I can pick them out. The faeries hang out in natural environments like forests. The PCs are all exiled from their native plays, and forsworn to protect Shakespeare. They're all well-integrated.

Overall: Given a group of players, I'd give this a shot just as soon as I thought of a decent plot against Shakespeare. Great job.

An Improbable Fiction

Ashley Griffiths, John Keyworth, & Barbara Croker

What do I like? I like the incorporation of the sonnets. Of the games I've read that directly invoke Shakespeare, this is the only one that doesn't rely solely on the plays. The Dramatic Elements and cards are a great way to get the story going and get everyone on the same page without a lot of kibitzing among the players. I like putting a token into each other player's bag, thus influencing their temperament down the line.

What am I not sure about? I'll be honest: Much of this game is either confusing or awkward to me. The process of picking a sonnet for your character is nice and flavorful, but it also seems like it might take forever. There are portions that could definitely be edited for clarity. For example, each player has his own bag of 10 tokens, but the wording in the paragraph explaining how to determine one's starting temperament seems to imply that everyone's drawing tokens out of the same bag. (Not that it really matters, if the tokens are to be replenished between each draw -- although I think it'd be more interesting if they weren't.) When I put a token into someone else's bag, does it come from my own bag or from somewhere else? And I've read the section on Acts a few times now, but I'm still not sure how it's supposed to work. All I know is that it feels too confining to me, especially when it says that I "should be playing towards a grand ending" in the last act. It seems to me that this could be tied in better with the Dramatic Elements cards somehow.

Is the theme well-addressed? Oh yeah. Your character is a sonnet, for God's sake.

Are the ingredients well-used? All four ingredients appear as Dramatic Elements, although if you don't draw them, they won't feature in your game. Arguably, your sonnet could be your "nature," if you choose to see it that way.

Overall: I don't entirely get it, but I also recognize that I'm not the target demographic. It'd hang together well for gamers of a more theatrical bent.

Game Chef: Yeah, Finished.

2011-07-24T22:20:00.001-07:00

All right. For those who want to check out Globe Records, it's available online.

Oh -- I want to stress again that I am not a graphic artist. Please excuse the... graphic art.

Game Chef: Finished?

2011-07-24T11:51:00.000-07:00

Thanks to an hour or so of downtime in the Sails Pavilion at Comic-Con yesterday, I was able to finish Globe Records this morning. I think. I'm not going to post it just yet. The Game Chef deadline isn't until tomorrow morning, so I'm going to let it sit for the day and take a look at it sometime tonight. We'll see if it still seems "finished" then.

I'm pretty pleased with it, though, plus I have about 500 words to spare, so that's pretty good. I guess I can consider that buffer to be filled by the words on the character sheets, though, just to be fair. Somehow, I managed to make those 2,500 words 15 pages long.

Incidentally, I wrote this game using LibreOffice, which is by no means a viable replacement for Microsoft Word. LibreOffice isn't so much a word processor as a word platformer. Just about everything I did in it felt like a challenge. Boo.

Anyway. Back to Comic-Con for one last day!

Game Chef: Gettin' There

2011-07-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

Seriously, this is the worst game-designing time of the year. Even with nothing else hanging over my head, Comic-Con always takes it out of me. Then there's FATE Kerberos demanding my attention, along with a few other non-game-related commitments. Look, I realize these are first-world geek problems, but still. Bear with me.

Anyway, one good thing about Comic-Con colliding with Game Chef is that standing in line for panels gives me a chance to take notes (by hand, with a pencil, on paper -- barbaric!) on this here game of mine. I'm pretty confident I can get it put together tomorrow and sent out Sunday night sometime. The mechanics have been tightened up, streamlined, and re-focused on creating good stories. In my early enthusiasm for a game in progress, I find I often have a hard time separating "fun and meaningful mechanics" from just "fun and random mechanics," but today the distinctions became clearer, and I think it shows in the design. Maybe there's something about being surrounded by people dressed in Venture Brothers costumes -- I can't say.

So I thought I'd post a little something to prove that, yes, progress is being made. Keeping in mind that I'm not a graphic designer-type person at all, here's the game's '90s-looking logo:

And here's the character sheet for ~~Richard III~~ Rick Rose, CEO of Globe Records, who may or may not have inherited the position from his brother under, uh, "questionable circumstances."

Some new things there, if you've been reading my last couple posts. A big circle! Only one Nature! A card suit! What could it all mean? Well, I think it's pretty easy to work out, but that's what the game's text is for. So far I have a solid... 293 words, give or take. Even after I start copy-pasting stuff in from my notes, I'm pretty confident that I won't come especially close to 3,000 words. It's a pretty straightforward game.

(But that's what everyone thinks of their games, right?)

Oh, weird thing to mention: Today (Saturday the 23rd) at noon, I'm going to be on a panel on game design -- at least, I hope it's on game design, or something else I can easily fake my way through -- at Gam3r-Con, a small but ambitious game convention that's running parallel to Comic-Con. If you're around, come check it out. Let's discover what I might have to say together, shall we?

Game Chef: Hmm... Needs More People

2011-07-20T02:28:00.000-07:00

Hey, I think I might actually finish this thing. It's essentially done: All the characters have all their bits (with, like, one or two exceptions), the un-playtested rules look solid and fun, I have 12 soap-opera storylines broken down into their three stages of development... it's surprising how far it's come.

But one thing I've noticed is that even with six characters, it feels a little sparsely populated for a soap. These are all primary cast; they need some supporting cast, too. So each character now has three Supporting Cast. One's already filled in, but the other two are left blank for the player to define during play. You don't even have to fill them both in if you don't want to.

I'm not entirely sure what mechanical purpose they'd serve, but I'm inclined to treat them just like Vows, Natures, and Modes. Each starts rated at 1, and etc. Instead of picking one Vow, one Nature, and one Mode, you'd pick one entry from each category. Sometimes that Supporting Cast will be relevant; often they won't.

For example, Dane Prince's initial Supporting Cast is his band, Sea of Troubles (comprised of Simon Catling, Hugh Rebeck, and James Soundpost, three musicians from Romeo and Juliet). When they're helping the situation -- say, if they're trying to impress a producer at a gig -- Dane's player can use them to draw a card. When they're a problem -- say, if he's trying to impress a producer at an industry party, and they're being idiots -- his player can choose to fail the contest in exchange for increasing their rating by one.

Which reminds me: There needs to be a good way to get those ratings down. I'm thinking you can burn points to draw additional cards at a 1:1 ratio. But none of these things (whatever they're called) can be lowered below one. That all seems reasonable. You'll burn them when you're desperate. And then maybe you can regain one point in one of them during a commercial break. Sure, let's do that.

See, this is what my game-design notes look like -- me talking to myself.

Game Chef: Globe Records

2011-07-18T21:35:00.000-07:00

So! My idea for this year's Game Chef is a bunch of characters from Shakespeare's plays thrown together in the milieu of a hip record label (Globe Records) in the early '90s. Here are some of my notes (posted earlier on The Forge, in case you saw them there).

We have:

Rick, head of the label: A schemer to the core, Rick didn’t get where he is today without pissing a few people off. His office is at the top of the label’s towering office building in LA. He has a wife (name pending), but is having an affair with Lady MC, the label’s biggest recording artist and Othello’s sister.
Lady MC, talent: A hip-hop star having an affair with Rick and, by extension, manipulating Globe Records. Specifically, she’s trying to ensure that she isn’t shown up by Juliet. But she doesn’t want the label to drop her altogether -- as long as she’s with Globe, Lady can control her career.
Juliet, talent: A rising star on her second marriage. She married her first husband (Othello’s brother Romeo) when she was just a teenager, and his death shortly thereafter sent her into a tailspin. Othello was there to catch her. At first she was grateful; these days, she can’t help feeling like being with him might be holding her back.
Othello, recording engineer: Handsome, kind, strong -- that guy. Afraid his wife Juliet is cheating on him. Talented singer-songwriter, but he’s seen what being in the spotlight has done to her and doesn’t want any part of that. He’s plays acoustic guitar at coffee houses to sparse but appreciative patrons.
Portia, record producer: Woman trying to make it in a man’s world. Power suit, shoulder pads, the whole nine yards. Nursing a crush on Othello, and trying to convince him to sign with her as a recording artist. Also, she’s Rick’s daughter, though he doesn’t show her favoritism. They... don’t have a great relationship.
Dane Prince, talent: Moody lead singer of Sea of Troubles, a grunge band signed with Globe. Attracted to Juliet, but has a bad history where relationships are concerned. Othello’s best friend.

Mechanics:
Everyone has Vows, Natures, and Modes. Vows are motivations -- things you’re forsworn to do. Natures are beliefs and personality traits -- things that make you you. Modes are how you feel at any given time; everyone has three to choose from (unique to the character). Natures and Modes are pre-set for each character; each character’s Vows are defined before play by the player.

These things have ratings, starting at 1. When you do something, you pick a Vow, Nature, and Mode appropriate to the situation. Combine their ratings, and draw that many cards, less any cards already in hand (so if you have a card in hand and the total of your ratings is three, you only draw two cards). Each player in a conflict (usually only two) plays a single card. High card wins narration rights. The players swap the cards they played. The swapped card you receive stays in your hand; discard the rest.

Vows, Natures, and Modes are potentially problematic. Every time you make one of those create a problem for you -- something like an automatic “I lose, because I’m so Angry” -- instead of playing a card, increase the rating of the Vow, Nature, or Mode by 1. You don’t get the other player’s card; it’s discarded instead.

I’d like for the suit to matter somehow, but I’m not sure how just yet. Maybe assign a suit to each Mode, and if the suit of the card you play matches your Mode you trump? Sure, why not.

Take a standard deck of playing cards and remove the face cards (Jacks, Queens, Kings). The remaining cards -- A through 9 in four suits -- are used by the players during play for all that card-drawing jazz. The face cards are used to randomly determine the storylines for the episode. Each episode has three storylines, each in one of three different stages of resolution when play begins. The further along the storyline, the more people it involves. A new storyline involves only two characters, an ongoing storyline involves three, and a concluding storyline involves four. (There can be overlap between these groups.) The first player draws a face card to determine the new storyline for their character, then picks one other player to be involved. That player decides how the two characters are involved in the storyline, then draws a card for their ongoing storyline and picks two other players. Each of those players decides how one of the other three characters is involved. A player who hasn’t drawn a storyline card does so for their concluding storyline, and chooses three other players to share it with them, and each of those players decides how one other character is involved.

Every player writes down a Vow for each storyline they have. This must be a statement using the phrase “I must” or “I can’t” that relates to the storyline and includes one other character in it. For example, Othello’s player draws Amnesia for his new storyline, and chooses to involve Dane in it. Dane’s player decides that Othello partially lost his memory as a result of a car accident, but right before that he caught Dane with Juliet. Now, he doesn’t remember it. Dane’s helping him cover and recover out of guilt. Othello’s player writes down “I must regain my memory.” Dane’s player writes “I can’t let Othello know about Juliet and me.”

An episode has four commercial breaks. In between these, each player takes a turn framing a scene relevant to one of their storylines. After one commercial break, a new storyline becomes ongoing. After three commercial breaks, an ongoing storyline becomes concluding. After two commercial breaks, a concluding storyline ends; draw a new storyline and dovetail it into that one. So each of the 12 storylines needs a breakdown of where they are at each stage. That should be... okay. Manageable, anyway.

The game ends when the episode ends.

---

I may need to rework the pacing of the storylines and the three stages of development, but other than that I really think the mechanical end of things is pretty solid. It's partially inspired by an idea I had a while ago for escalating aspects in FATE.

I've started to do the storyline breakdowns (about halfway done there -- I need a few more ideas for soap opera tropes) and the characters. Three of each trait -- Vow, Nature, and Mode -- seems about right. I mean, it's possible that a character may not be involved in three storylines, in which case they'd only have two Vows, but I'm going to set Natures and Modes at three each. The Natures are turning out to be statements or beliefs more than personality traits, which really makes each character distinctive. I like that. And the Modes look like they'll be fun to come up with. Othello's, for example, are Protective, Compassionate, and Shirtless.

Having the specifics of the storylines determined by a mix of random card-drawing and the players themselves should help keep the word count low. If I can just find the time to do this thing over the next week (questionable), I think I'll have something pretty fun and workable on my hands.

Not married to that name, but... it's good enough for now. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears.

Game Chef 2011: A Game Designer Is You!

2011-07-05T21:39:00.000-07:00

Game Chef 2011 starts July 15th! Stay alert! Trust no one! Keep your dice handy!

The timing on this is awesome, because it ends the Monday after Comic-Con. So there'll be a good chance I won't finish on time, but at least it'll give me something to talk about at Gam3rCon.

Dangers & Dragons: Download It!

2011-06-29T17:35:00.000-07:00

After much delay, brought on by nothing in particular, my D&D-ish hack of Danger Patrol is finally available for download. You'll need Danger Patrol to play, though; I converted everything I wanted to convert, but I didn't go through the effort of rewriting the whole thing, so the zip file doesn't have, for example, a list of Threat Moves, which is something you're going to want to have.

Also, on the advice of counsel, it's now called Dangers & Dragons. Let the word go forth!

Sigils and Traveller

2011-06-13T01:39:00.000-07:00

As I've enthused elsewhere on the Internet, I recently picked up the original three Traveller LBBs at my FLGS for six bucks inclusive, and it's been a real psionic blast from the past. I have a lot of nostalgia for Traveller, but in all honest I don't think I ever actually played it. I didn't have a lot of people to play with back in 1980 or whatever, and my little group in elementary school was mostly about D&D and Tunnels & Trolls, with Top Secret added sometime in junior high. By then, I think Traveller was mostly forgotten, although we did squeeze in a little Star Frontiers, so it's not like sci-fi or space opera was totally unappealing to us. (How could it be? We're the Star Wars generation, man.)

At any rate, the thing I do remember doing with Traveller was rolling up characters. Like the AD&D DMG, those Traveller books weren't written for my demographic -- but unlike Gygax's work, Traveller's text was almost as hard as its sci-fi: dry and didactic. Gygax loved fancy words, and my vocabulary expanded quite a bit with AD&D, but Traveller's more... impersonal. Like, "Let's just get through this so you can play." The charm is in the content, not the presentation.

So as I rolled up characters the other night -- some of whom, yes, died in chargen, but nobody ever said exploring with the Scouts was going to be easy -- I recalled a recent couple threads on RPG.net about doing a fantasy version of Traveller. This, of course, is right up my alley. So I looked around, found Adventurer and Mercator, and found that they had things pretty well in hand. But it also occurred to me that in terms of the thing I love so much about Traveller -- the random chargen -- Sigils is, like, 80% there. It's all about the random chargen. Instead of doing another fantasy Traveller, I'm Travellering up Sigils.

Looking at what I have now, I'm keeping the Cultures, but I'm divorcing them from the Backgrounds. It used to be that the only way to have a Background as, say, a Sorcerer was to come from the Decadent South. No more. Now the Backgrounds are in six categories -- Authority, Commerce, Crime, Learning, War, and Wild -- each of which contains four Backgrounds. Three of these can be chosen at will; the fourth has a pre-requisite, like a stat minimum or previous Backgrounds. (This is analogous to how Traveller keeps certain skills requiring advanced training behind a wall of elitism.) Each category also requires a 2d6 roll to access it. If you don't beat the target number, you can't get in, but you can roll for something else. If you don't beat the target number on that roll, well... I'll get to that in a bit.

Your Culture affects your chances of opening these categories. If you're from the Frozen North, for example, it's a lot easier for you to go into War than Learning, just as it's easier for someone from a Great City to go into Commerce instead of the Wild. It's not that you can't have those Backgrounds -- it's just that it doesn't come easily to you, and you may not find the opportunity in life to become a scholar or a shaman or get into a guild or what have you.

Assuming you beat the category's target number, you choose the Background, but you roll 1d6 for the Specialty it gives you, just as in Traveller. (Hey, it ain't broke.) Different Backgrounds within the same category are thematically related, but give you different odds for getting a particular Specialty. For example, if you want a fighter-type who's very focused on weapon skills, go for Soldier over Mercenary. Soldiers are more focused on that sort of thing, whereas the wandering life of a Mercenary gives you a potentially broader skillset. Almost all the Backgrounds only dole out Specialties, but some can give you a Resource, such as a Wealth Level or a Contact Level. The "elite" Background in each category almost always does this, sometimes two such Resources at a time.

All of this occurs in five phases; each phase you roll for a Background (or roll for a second, if you don't get the first, or...), and give yourself an aspect. If you succeed at your first-choice category, the aspect is a Quality -- a favorable aspect. If you fail to enter that category, you get a Challenge instead, or an aspect that is almost totally "negative" in nature: a weakness, a personal failing, an enemy, or the like. Both Qualities and Challenges can be invoked and compelled. They only differ in terms of the Challenge's enforced unfavorable flavor. Of course, you don't have to go a full five phases -- you can leave a couple aspect slots blank, and fill them in later, but that also means you start with fewer Specialties and Resources. Why on Yrth would you do that, you ask?

As alluded to earlier, probably the most famous bit of old-school Traveller chargen was the possibility of dying during it. I'm not going quite that far, but I'm keeping the vibe. Death-by-chargen isn't just cruel -- it serves a purpose. In Traveller, two things discourage you from going a full eight terms and racking up a ton of skills and other benefits: age-dependent stat degradations, which get worse the older you get, and the risk of dying during a term of service. I'm not so concerned about age. Sword-and-sorcery characters are old or young as the story demands. If you roll up a guy with a low Strength and Coordination, feel free to say he's old -- or weak and clumsy. Whatever. No, there has to be an analogue for dying, a potential consequence for constantly testing your luck in the world and starting out with a more experienced character, and that analogue is Servitude.

If you fail two Background checks in a single phase, you end up in Servitude for that phase. You're captured by slavers, or arrested on charges real or falsified, or forced into indentured service, or overthrown by your social inferiors and made to work the mines. You figure it out.

Being in Servitude sucks. You roll for your Specialty, just as you would with any other Background, but odds are good -- one in two -- that you won't like the result. Sure, there's a chance your enslavement could make you stronger or slightly more worldly, but it's just as likely that you'll emerge from it penniless and broken. In fact, you could end up so broken that you aren't fit for a life of adventure, in which case you roll up a new guy. That's right. You aren't dead, per se, but you wish you were.

What are the odds of this happening? Pretty low. First, you have to fail two Background checks, then you have a one-in-six chance of getting a -1 to your Willpower. If your Willpower is reduced to zero, you've lost your ambition, hope, thirst for vengeance, or whatever it is that drives you. You have to keep ending up in Servitude (getting out requires a roll, as opposed to rolling to get in) and keep rolling that result. All that considered, this probably will not happen to your character.

But it could.

I've only rolled up a few characters using this method, but right off the bat the results indicate much more in terms of backstory and personality than the old method did. I'm very pleased with it. Yeah, it's a little more rolling, but it's also much more interesting, so that's a fair trade-off in my mind. When I have it in better shape, I'll update the PDF and post it. I've gotten some interest in it lately, so I know at least a few people out there will care about that.

Gamex 2011 Wrap-Up

2011-06-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

(This covers the non-FATE games, which was almost all of them; for FATE coverage, see Spirit of the Blank.)

A week late -- typical! -- but here's the stink from last weekend at Gamex.

Friday Afternoon

I'd been hearing a bit here and there about Vicious Crucible, one of (apparently) a couple new games from Josh Roby and Ryan Macklin, so when I saw it on the schedule I knew I'd be signing up for it. I knew nothing of the system, other than it sounded like it was intended to drive a number of specific scenarios, or at least use them as introductions to various mechanical add-ons the like. The scenario we played was The Vicious Crucible of Verdigris Valley, and essentially involved a long-simmering dust-up between European-style imperialists and native barbarian-types in a fantasy-medievalish world. (There was magic, and some monstrous things, but those things were mostly there to exacerbate the political situation.) I played a half-breed scout who'd been ostracized from the barbarian-types by her own grandfather (another PC) and forced to seek some sort of community with the invaders. I chose to style myself as a "double breed." It's all about spin.

Every character has an Arc, with three thingies listed under it: The first encourages you to follow that arc with a mechanical incentive, the second encourages you to make a sort of character-defining decision (again with a mechanical payoff), and the third gives you a way out of the Arc altogether by finding your way into a new one. At least, that's how it looked from my perspective. I got Heat (the game's currency) for trying to fit in somewhere, could spend Heat and unlock a new character ability to irrevocably reject a place or people as my home, and could move on to a new Arc by deciding that I'd found my home and wasn't an outsider anymore.

If you've played just about any indie game from the past five or ten years, the mechanics of Vicious Crucible will not be difficult to grasp. (I mean this in the most complimentary way possible.) Dice-wise, it reminds me a bit of both Dogs in the Vineyard and ORE. Every round you roll three dice, one for each of three of your Elements. These can be from d4s to d8s. If the Element is helpful, it gives you a d8. If it's a hindrance, it gives you a d4, and every d4 you roll gets you a point of Heat. Otherwise, it's a d6. Low roller goes first and narrates an action, and high roller goes last. Whoever goes last essentially has the last word. In essence, there's no rolling for success or failure -- it's all about getting to be the last one to narrate.

(Why ORE? I dunno. I guess because the roll tells you both who did "well" within the context of the game and gives you an initiative order.)

I had fun, and found the system straightforward and easy to grasp. The Arc mechanic more or less forces you to get in character to earn Heat, which is a good thing, although some Arcs generated Heat more easily than others. (One character got Heat whenever he blamed someone for his brother's death; another, when she acted suspicious of the native-types. In comparison, my trying-to-fit-in bit was often a bit harder to reasonably pull off.) I like the way the dice mechanic creates beats organically.

Friday Night

A couple friends came over to my hotel room and we played our second session of "The Keep on the Borderlands" using Dark Dungeons, the unfortunately named but otherwise-excellent D&D Rules Cyclopedia clone. I highly recommend Dark Dungeons for all your Rules Cyclopedia-replacing needs, not just because it's inexpensive and well-executed, but because it further sticks it to Jack Chick, Santorum-style.

Anyway, a while ago a friend of mine said he'd like to try D&D, and that he could probably get a group together of like-minded tabletop RPG virgins. I jumped at the opportunity, as any sane gamer would, and a few months later we had our first session. Initially I'd planned to use the D&D 4E Essentials line, but after a while I decided that even that level of complexity might be a little too much, despite my players' extensive experience with MMOs and computer games born of D&D's influence. I don't know if I was right about that, but I've been having a God-damned ball running KotB, so no regrets here.

Anyway, in the first session, I ginned up some excuse for them to head off to the Caves of Chaos and fight some kobolds, which they did -- a little combat to satisfy the "kill them and take their stuff" vibe of old-school D&D -- but the second session was all about investigation and talking, with very little in the way of combat. To my surprise and delight, they preferred the second session, which is very cool. In general, they like doing anything that they couldn't do in a computer game, including doing stupid things and getting beaten down for it. They quickly picked up on the fact that anything can happen in a tabletop RPG, and they've been going with it. One of them compared it to a game of Scott Aukerman-style Would You Rather?, and in a lot of respects, he's right -- at least, when it comes to old-school gaming. The more questions they ask, the more they know about their environment. Unlike Scott Aukerman, though, I'm not going to screw them over for failing to correctly pixel-bitch their way to a solution.

After we wrapped up at about 11:30, I took them over to the Sheraton so they could get a glimpse of the convention's late-night goings-on. It's just a whole new world to them. Good times, and well worth missing that Friday night slot at Gamex to do.

Saturday Morning

Morgan's DFRPG game! Read about it here!

Saturday Afternoon

I've had a couple near-misses with Dungeon Crawl Classics, Goodman Games' table-filled, retro-fueled take on 3.5 D&D, so I was resolved to finally check it out. I'd been to a couple other mini-cons -- one at DiceHouse, the other Hyphen-Con -- where Joe Goodman had been either running it at the neighboring table or inexplicably not running it and playing boardgames instead. It was only a matter of time before I weaseled my way into a seat at his table, and Gamex was that time.

Here's what I like about DCC. There are lots of tables for things -- critical hits, fumbles, spellcasting, etc. Just about every class seems to have its own little subsystems or rules exceptions. Characters are relatively fragile. Magic is unpredictable. These things are all likely to turn off the majority of gamers I know. They'd turn me off, too, on a bad day, but last weekend had no bad days, so there.

What I'm getting at is that DCC revels in clunky, piecemeal, un-unified mechanics that seem as if they were written by a dozen designers over the course of a decade. But, like, that's the point. Later, I'll talk about Dungeon World, and its goal to replicate an old-school feel using new-school mechanics and sensibilities. Having just run a D&D module originally published during the Carter administration the night before, I feel confident in saying that DCC nails the old-school thing not by cleverly re-imagining it, which DW does, but by embracing it, warts and all. In fact, I think it might embrace the warts the most.

This takes balls, if you ask me. There's a definite learning curve to this game. Playing a thief won't really give you an idea of what it's like to play a wizard. In fact, playing a cleric won't do that, either, because they cast spells differently. The open playtest goes online June 7th, I believe. Check it out, and if you still have SAN left, it's probably the (a) game for you.

Saturday Night

I ran my D&D hack of Danger Patrol, currently called Dungeon Patrol -- but is Dangers & Dragons better? I dunno. Anyway, this was a lot of fun, and I had a great table of players. I knew them all, in fact! I'd say this is a disturbing trend in my convention games, but the truth is I like all of these people who keep showing up, so I can't complain.

I'd never run or played Danger Patrol, and half my players had never played it, so we were on pretty even footing. Let me tell you something about Danger Patrol, and Dungeon Patrol by extension: It is embarrassingly easy to run. It actually wrecked me for the FATE game I ran the next morning. "Stats? Seriously? Ugh. Can't we just roll some dice and I'll make some stuff up?"

I know John Harper's working on a Gamma playtest edition of Danger Patrol, and from what I've seen so far it looks pretty different from the Beta. I'm not sure I like it better, to be honest, especially when the Beta-based Dungeon Patrol worked so well. The Gamma uses all d6s, but the mix of die types feels a little more D&D-ish to me, so no matter what John ends up doing I doubt I'll change my hack to follow suit.

The only real problem we had was that, with six players, it was hard to keep threats threatening. They could easily dish out 20 hits between them in a round, so I routinely tried to have multiple threats on the table all the time. I managed to split the party, too, which helped as well. But that's not really a "problem," per se -- it's just something to keep in mind. With two or three PCs? Sure, major threats will have 12-15 hits. With six? Double that. And add a few points of Resistance.

The Culture and Class cards have been tweaked and I'm in the process of putting it all online for people to check out. I've gotten a few requests for it, so that's kinda neat, right? I'm also bringing it to GenCon, so if you're interested, find me there and we can get a pick-up game going.

Sunday Morning

Agents of F.A.T.E. Read about my/our triumphs here.

Sunday Afternoon

I played a boardgame! Well, I played Descent. Still, I did something in the boardgame ballroom besides walk through it to get to the dealer room. The allotted timeslot for the game was four hours; after five and a half hours, we called it quits. They all laughed at me when I said the last game of Descent I'd played had lasted for seven hours. Who's laughing now, chumps? We could've easily played for another hour and a half, but I had dinner to eat and a game to get to.

Sunday Night

I'd not-so-subtly hinted to Colin Jessup that I really, really wanted him to run Dungeon World at Gamex so I could finally play it, and he was kind enough to oblige. Not like it was a big hardship for him or anything. He clearly had a blast, as did we all. I played a paladin named Cassius. A beholder disintegrated my shield (but not my arm) right before I jabbed my longsword up through his jaw and central eye. EPIC.

Back at Hyphen-Con, Colin had told me that DW was the game that finally scratched his old-school itch. It was the game he'd been waiting for that'd give him that kind of experience without having to slog through outdated mechanics and design. Afterward, he asked me if it felt old-school to me, and my response was a very noncommittal, "...Sure? I guess?" I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but after giving it some thought later -- and having recent experiences with both KotB and DCC for comparison -- I had to say "No."

I like Apocalypse World (though I've only read it), and I really enjoyed and will buy DW. Part of that is Colin being an awesome GM, as always, but part of it's just the game itself. The authors have done a great job adapting AW's style and mechanics to the genre while making little tweaks that nod suggestively in the direction of D&D. (Unfortunately, the D&D they're nodding at seems to be 3.5, not AD&D or BECMI, but whatever.) I love the class-based damage and replacing AW's stats with D&D's Standard Six. Colin did his level best to old-school it up with that beholder and those umber hulks and all, but ultimately, it's a game driven by a very contemporary design sensibility, and that really came through in my play experience.

I think the core of what I'm talking about is very simple. There's no Would You Rather? in DW. Like so many modern games (games I play and love!), there's a fair bit of player narrative control. (Even when I fail to Spout Lore, for example, I get to make up the false Lore I've spouted. Contrast this with the MC making my Int roll for me and telling me what I know.) That alone feels so utterly contrary to old-school gaming to me that I find it difficult to get past it. Players are constantly adding to the fiction out-of-character, or fleshing out the setting, or what have you. There's nothing wrong with this, and I like it just fine. It's just that it robs the DM (or MC, here) of their duty as Gatekeeper of Information. There wasn't really the same sense of discovery I see in my newbie D&D players when I tell them what a kobold looks like, or what's at the bottom of the pit they just stumbled upon, or pass them a cryptic rumor at the tavern. It's not that you can't do any of this in DW, but the players are empowered by the system to do this themselves, and taking that away from them would be a dick move, IMO.

So! I liked DW a lot. I'll buy it, run it, play it. I'm sold. I just won't be running it for my KotB guys.

All in all, a great weekend of gaming, especially when I write it all out in a lengthy blog post like that. GenCon's only two months away....

EPILOGUE: Here's a fun fact. This was the first Strategicon since OrcCon of last year that I didn't run Leftovers.

Dungeon Patrol at Gamex 2011

2011-05-26T00:11:00.000-07:00

This year's Gamex is in a couple days up in LA, and I'm running a hack of a game I've never run or played in its original form: Danger Patrol. My version's all D&D'ed up, because that's what I tend to like to do with cool little indie games like that.

The Styles and Roles of Danger Patrol map so easily to D&D tropes as Cultures and Classes that it was tough to resist hacking it, despite my lack of first-hand experience with the game. So here are a few Culture/Class combinations, along with a list of the "heroic" actions normally attributed to the various Classes.

Class Actions
Orc/Fighter
Easterner/Magic-User
Halfling/Cleric

If all goes well Saturday night, I'll post the whole hack online. (Personally, I think it's going to go pretty well. These things usually do.)

Contest: Winter Sports Blood-Bowlification

2011-04-25T01:51:00.000-07:00

Over at Gamish Designer, Jonathan Lavallee's hosting a game design contest that's caught my eye. The challenge is to essentially make an role-playing, card, or board game out of a Winter Olympics sport in the style of Blood Bowl.

And sure, maybe I'm taking the easy way out with Die-Athlon, but I think I have a solid concept, so I'm running with it. It's basically a three-man team biathlon, but instead of shooting at targets, you're shooting at die-athletes on the other teams. Ultimately, the goal is to be the first team to have someone cover a certain distance -- say, 20 km -- but wounding an enemy die-athlete slows them down, and killing them... well, that really slows them down. Every round, you have a choice between Skiing and Shooting; one earns you meters, while the other is shooting guys.

Anyway, it's obviously in a rough state so far, and I may go with something else entirely -- who wouldn't love a blood-soaked version of curling? -- but the deadline isn't until September, so there's plenty of time to work all that out.

Which is just as well, since I have a full plate in the meantime. Namely, the Daring Comics Adventure Game is about to consume a lot of my time. But I'll go into that in a future post soon!

What Up, March!

2011-03-31T23:20:00.000-07:00

Hey there, March. I'd hate to let you go by without posting in you at least once, so I'm going to do that now, in this, your final hour.

First off -- I'm horribly ill! I know this isn't gaming related; I'm just mentioning it in case I ramble a lot.

The worst part about being as sick as I am -- severe sinusitis, pinkeye(s), a variety of body aches (including pretty bad earaches) -- is that this weekend is Hyphen-Con VII in San Diego. Hyphen-Con is the little invite-only mini-con we put together every year. It started out as 15 or so of us and four games (two in each of two time slots), and now it looks like it could conceivably be five games in each of two time slots, plus a second day of boardgames. Back then, we played at Andy's old house; now, we play at Andy's office. So we've come a long way.

But! You see where I'm going with this sickness thing. I'm doing everything I can to get better, but today's been the first day all week when I could just rest all day, thanks to my wife's mom being here to look after Ben. It's a little tough to get your bed rest when you're responsible for a rambunctious toddler. I'm sure --

Wow, my ears really do hurt.

-- I'm sure if I'd been able to rest more during the week, I wouldn't be so bad right now, but oh well. That's being a parent for you. More specifically, that's being a parent for me.

Complicating the Hyphen-Con thing further is the fact that I'm supposed to run a game: "The Pillage of Hommlet," a take on the ol' classic T1 using a hack of Smallville. Sorry, Cortex+ Drama (as opposed to Cortex+ Action, the Cortex variant that powers Leverage). I would really like to run this game, and I'd really like to play in any of the other seven or nine games that'll be run.

It looks like five of those games are also hacks of other systems, like Lady Blackbird and FATE. We are a hack-happy bunch.

So wish me luck with that, because I really want to be able to drive down to San Diego tomorrow. With the way I feel right now, though... man, I dunno. Hopefully one more day will get me back to some semblance of health. It'll mean missing out on the All Hyphen's Eve gaming, which I always look forward to, but c'mon. Priorities.

In other news, that project I was to start working on in March about which I was going to write more on Spirit of the Blank? Two alterations to that plan: One, it hasn't started yet (although a contract has been signed), and two, I'll be writing about it here, not there. That's right: It was going to be a FATE game, but now it's not. That's fine by me, man. I do not mind the break.

The company in question is Daring Entertainment, who you may know from their very cool War of the Dead campaign for Savage Worlds, or the Autumn Arbor campaign setting for M&M Superlink. I'm not sure I should say what it is I'll be working on just yet, just in case Lee Szczepanik et al. want to keep that under wraps for whatever reason, but if you click on that link, it's one of the products listed there.

OrcCon 2011 Post-Mortem

2011-02-27T22:03:00.000-08:00

I'm way late on this, I know, but here it is, a rundown of my OrcCon this year. On the whole, a great time -- I had fun in every game, which, y'know, you'd think would be the baseline experience, but it's not always a guarantee.

FRIDAY:
2:00 PM: Tomb of Horrors (Fiasco)
I'd been champing at the bit to play this since I saw it posted, and I'd even bugged Hamish (the GM) about it a couple times. Unfortunately, it filled up in pre-reg before I could get to it, so I resolved to show up early on Friday to secure myself a spot. Even more unfortunately, Friday at 12:30 I discovered that it'd been canceled, on account of Hamish having some sort of work or school emergency. So... ack. There was nothing else at 2:00 I was really dying to get into, and none of the boardgame stuff interested me, so I went back to my hotel room and slept for three hours. That was pretty awesome -- possibly as awesome as the game would've been. It was rumored that Hamish would run it later in the weekend, but I knew what that meant: He'd run it sometime when I couldn't play it.

8:00 PM: The Battle of Wal-Mart (Leftovers)
I blogged about this from the con. The premise was solid, but that's all I had -- a premise. However, it quickly became a very player-driven sandboxy thing, and the players definitely drove it. In terms of contrast between expectation and result, this was probably my favorite game of the con.

SATURDAY:
9:00 AM: Smallship Troopers (Smallville)
This was the only game I'd registered for in advance. Hamish was to run this as well, but luckily Josh Robern was able to step in to do it for him. If you somehow don't know who Josh is, he was the co-lead designer (along with Cam Banks) of Smallville, so we were in good hands. I'd played in three other Smallville games he'd run -- one a playtest, one a demo (essentially), and one set in the Star Wars universe -- and enjoyed them all. It's a really great game. I was initially going to run my D&D Smallville hack (Hommlet) Saturday night, but swapped it out for FATE Kerberos when I realized there was just no way I'd have time to get it sorted out.

Anyway! Starship Troopers. I think that's all I really need to say to communicate what this game was. I played Dizzy, or rather Dizzy's clone, which put me in a love triangle with teeth-delivery device Carmen Ibanez (played by Chris -- what other character would he play?) and thick-skulled Johnny Rico (played by Morgan, my longtime FATE companion). Neil Patrick Harris, Clancy Brown, and that buck-toothed fiddle-playing farmboy rounded out the cast, but c'mon. This is Smallville. The real story is the love triangle. So... that happened, and it was a lot of fun. While I did start off separated from the rest of the PCs, much like in the JediVille game at Gateway last year, my character wasn't all focused on working against them, which was kind of a problem for me last time. (With, I'll grant you, hilarious consequences.) I seduced Rico, killed some bugs, and took my top off. Good times.

2:00 PM: A World of Hurt (Mage: The Sorcerer's Crusade)
Chris ran this, and I signed up for it right before playing it. He also ran the only other Mage game I've ever played, and that ended being a long-running disagreement between what I wanted my character to be able to do and what everyone else insisted he could do. But that was a Technocracy game, while this was a straight-up Mage game, so I knew I wouldn't run into that problem here. Turns out I did. The pre-gen I picked was pitched as a sort of Michaelangelo type, so I was thinking I'd be like a Trump artist from Amber. Y'know, paint a place, then step into the painting and be in that place, and so on. But as I looked through the lists of Rotes for the Matter, Space, and Time Arcana, it became pretty clear that limiting myself that much would seriously gimp my character and probably lead to more of that back-and-forth that had kinda marred that other game for me. So I threw all that out the window, gave myself five dots in Matter, and was Doctor Manhattan. Pretty much anything I could think of that I wanted to do with matter -- transmute, create, destroy, alter, etc. -- I could do, so I did that plenty, without being too vulgar about it. And it was fun! So yeah, I'd play Mage again. I just need to change my mindset. Mage mages are generalists, not specialists, and I keep wanting to specialize.

8:00 PM: A Penny Dreadful for Your Thoughts (The Kerberos Club: FATE Edition)
Since this was a FATE game, I'll write about it on Spirit of the Blank.

SUNDAY:
9:00 AM: The Price of Freedom (Dragon Age)
This was an impulse sign-up. I own but have never played the Dragon Age RPG, and I've always been curious about how it plays. (This is where conventions shine, for me.) So I signed up for it. Then Hamish wandered in and found the brief run-down of the system I gave him interesting enough to sit down and play. I'll just come out and say it: By all rights, this should've been a terrible game. The GM seemed to have no sense of story outside of what the computer game had already done, so when we'd try to cling onto something as character motivation, it was either ignored or eliminated. I know this makes me sound like a dick, but it's the absolute truth.

Case in point: I'm playing a City Elf. Early on, we're attacked by some goons, and when we interrogate one of them, he says they were sent by Lord Vaughn (spelling uncertain). I'm told that this guy broke up an Elf wedding by kidnapping the bride and bridesmaids. ("Or the groom and groomsmen -- it depends on whether you play a male or a female." We cannot escape this computer game I've never played and know nothing about even for the space of four hours.) At the time, I didn't kill him because it would've made things worse politically for my people. But now the Elves have been freed from their bondage, which means there's no good reason not to kill this bastard. "All right," says I, "then let's go kill this guy." Because this is the story, right? I mean... it's like a blinking neon sign. And the name of the game -- "The Price of Freedom." Eternal vigilance! That's the price! We gotta watch out for these guys! Strong character motivation! Let's go!

So we have a rather pointless fight with an undead thing that explodes out of a jar, and as it fades away into nothing it drops a bag. This is weird enough, but then we open the bag and we find... a shield. Damn, that's a big bag. What was this undead spirit-thing doing with a shield? Also in the bag: two rings that increase the rate at which magic points (or whatever) recover. Now instead of getting one back every 15 minutes, our two mages (two rings, two mages!) get back a magic point every round. So... any semblance of resource management or game balance for them is now gone. Excellent!

(On the plus side, As soon as that undead thing dropped a bag with a shield and two rings in it, something in my head clicked. I pretended it was an elaborate parody, and I just wasn't in on the joke. Like if I ran a Goldeneye-themed game for someone who'd never played Goldeneye.)

Anyway, we track the badguy down to a brothel in town. He's behind a locked door. Okay -- we're ready. Arrows nocked, spells readied, swords unsheathed. Because as soon as this door opens, it is on. One of our rogues picks the lock, and...

It's a bedroom. He's in bed with a prostitute. She gets up and runs out. I shout "ROLL INITATIVE!" The guy faints. That's the big confrontation.

Hrm. So after a brief discussion, we tie him up and drop him off at City Elf Town, where my fellow City Elves will surely mete out some sort of justice. Out of my hands!

So if that's not the story, then... where's the story? There's our original mission of escorting a diplomat-type around so he can deliver the news about the Elves being freed. It just really seemed like this escort gig was a red herring for a sweet revenge plot, but man, maybe it really is just that straightforward. Maybe something cool will happen to us on the road. Fair enough, right? Give the guy a chance.

On the road, we're ambushed by 15 dwarves. These dwarves suck. To their 3d8 attack roll, they add +1. They need a 20 to hit me. You see the problem there, right? In the meantime, I'm adding +8 to my roll using my bow, and I hit them on like a 12. And they don't go down in one hit -- they go down in two or three. So it's just a grind, a straight grind for no good reason other than for us to come face to face with some dwarves. Halfway through this fight one of the players has to go, with 30 minutes left in the time slot. I say, "Look, we're going to beat these guys. Right? And we're going to beat them without expending any resources. So let's just say we beat 'em and move on." We do that, and come upon some town that looks like it's overrun by Darkspawn, which are bad things, apparently. There are six Darkspawn! "Well... let's not go to that town," we wisely decide. "We're here to proclaim Elvish freedom; I seriously doubt a bunch of demon-things care much about that."

So we go around them, and montage through every other town we're supposed to visit, and then five minutes later... it's over. It just ends. Then the GM admits that all he'd really planned for us to do was go around the continent and have a bunch of minor random encounters.

Of course, I had a bad feeling about this game from the get-go, when we got our characters. They were just spreadsheets, with a lot of numbers and terminology and no explanation for what anything meant. and that's it: no background, motivation, description, nothing. Even the names were left asexual, he said, so we weren't pinned down to one gender or another. (Although my name was Alana; it would've been a little silly not to be a female character with that name.) He had us introduce our characters, but what's to introduce? I said, "My name's Alana. I'm a City Elf Warrior. I have 60 hit points." What is there to say? These characters were total ciphers -- numbers on a page.

So how the Hell was this fun? We lucked out with a great group of players, and the combat system was a lot of fun. The game could use a non-combat skill resolution mechanic that's as fun as the combat mechanic, but still, it was a blast. Plus I have this story now! And Hamish brought it with his Dalish Elf Kelten, who we started calling Kelten X. He was this militant advocate for Elvish rights and the violent overthrow of a system that'd kept us Elves down for so long. But, y'know, he was also a PC, so he was on this escort mission with us. (As was an Apostate, which is, like, an illegal, criminal spellcaster or something. But... PC, so come on along!)

But look, I'm not such a great GM. I wasn't entirely happy with either of the FATE Kerberos games I ran at this con. My premise and hook were pretty solid, and I had a good ending, but I had a lot of trouble with the middle. I made some bad mistakes, no doubt. However, at least I had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This game had none of those things. It wasn't a story -- it was a map. We had fun in spite of what the GM had planned, not because of it. I think the GM's plan for the game was to sit around and talk about the computer game for four hours. Seriously. And yes, you'd expect people familiar with the computer game to want to play the RPG, but simply rehashing the events of the computer game is not the same as trying to tell a new story with a group of real live strangers.

2:00 PM: FATE Kerberos again.

Games I Wish I'd Played:

Operation: Blackbird, Andy's '60s-spy hack of Lady Blackbird. It looked awesome. He ran two sessions opposite my FATE Kerberos games, so... yeah.
Albert's Og game. Much anticipated by the indie-gamer-types who'd played Og the last time he'd run it (which was what, like, two years ago?), it once again got stellar reviews.
Either of the games Morgan ran: The Last Airbender: Romance of the Four Kingdoms or Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll, both using DFRPG.
Hamish's Fiasco of Horrors, which he ran Sunday at 2:00. Bah.
James Ritter's Mouse Guard game. He ran it Saturday morning, but the lure of Smallship Troopers was just too strong. I want to play Mouse Guard as written sometime.

By the time I got home, I was totally exhausted. But a great time, all told.

Leftovers: The Battle of OrcCon

2011-02-19T03:41:00.000-08:00

So tonight (technically last night, I guess) at OrcCon I ran a Leftovers scenario called "The Battle of Wal-Mart." It was the first time I'd looked at Leftovers since last September, and it was an odd experience to explain to a new group of players... and occasionally have to remember how something worked, or actually look up something in the rules.

What's more, for the first week of event pre-reg, nobody'd signed up for it. I've been running Leftovers at every Strategicon convention for the past year, and that's never happened -- it's always filled up in pre-reg. I was all prepared to not run it at all. I mean, if no one signs up, what else can I do, right? I had so much to do with FATE Kerberos that I hadn't given any thought to it beyond the premise (the PCs find an intact Wal-Mart -- go!), so not running it was starting to seem pretty good. I started to look at other games scheduled in that slot, and there were some attractive options. Mona Lisa Overville? Sign me up.

Then, the unthinkable: A few days before the end of pre-reg, one person signed up for it. One. That meant I had to prepare something in the unlikely event that another player or two signed up. I was always facing that eventuality anyway, but now it was more certain. Yet still I held out hope that I would get out of it somehow or other, and continued to not prepare anything.

When I got to the con today, my lone player -- loyal Nicholas Butler, the first Leftovers fan who didn't know me before playing the game at OrcCon last year -- was on the sheet, but the other four spots were blank. "Awesome," said I. And took a nap.

A few hours later, at 5:00, three more players had signed up.

So I walked back to my hotel (in the rain!) and tried to figure out what "The Battle of Wal-Mart" would be, exactly. All I knew was that the players would find the Wal-Mart, then they'd have to defend it against... someone. Other people like them -- opportunist PC-types who just want what's in there? Or crazy Grafters who want the PCs first and the goods later? I settled on the latter, and then... that was it. I trusted that I and my players would be able to flesh out the rest.

But would that occupy four hours? Well... I reasoned that there'd also be an explanation of the setting, sorting out character creation (with only one copy of the rules rather than the customary four I usually bring to these things), and explaining the mechanics of the game. And what I'd forgotten is that all of that is definitely part of the game. Chargen is a mini-game all its own, and figuring out a character's Grafts, Tools, and Bonds is -- from my perspective, watching players go through the process -- fun. There's usually a lot of laughter and lateral thinking, a lot of "Would this work?" and crazy character concepts that catch me by surprise.

By the end of all that, an hour and a half had passed, but it never felt like wasted time, and nobody was bored. I think part of the reason for that is that figuring out your Bonds is a social experience. You need to introduce yourself, learn everyone else's name, and think about how you want to relate to that person. In other words, it works as intended: The players inject all kinds of interesting background and personality both into their own characters and their colleagues'. When we were done and ready to start playing, it felt like something we'd collectively built to, rather than having the "Finally!" feeling it so easily could have.

So that was very satisfying.

After that, running the game was a breeze. I think the time away did me some good, actually -- I could look at it with fresh eyes and adjudicate stuff on the fly pretty easily. I may have even been more permissive as a GM, too. My main criterion for saying yes was "Is the player enthusiastic about this?" And whaddya know, when you say "Yes!" to enthusiastic players, they get more enthusiastic. This seems obvious, but it's important. And, y'know, saying "Yes!" doesn't have to mean "You get everything you want!" -- rather, it's just "Sure, give it a shot!" Just be on their side and be enthusiastic along with them. Odds are if they think it's cool, it'll be cool.

(Now, I have a bad tendency of saying "Try anything you want!" and then following that up with "What? No! Don't be ridiculous!" And I still shoot stuff down that's just beyond reasonable, but I try not to be as harsh as all that. Half the time I find there's a disconnect between what the player's suggesting and how I'm interpreting it. Once we get on the same page, I'm usually on board.)

Anyway. It was a very player-driven game. You turn a bunch of post-apoc survivors loose in a Wal-Mart, and they'll find things to do. Hell, they spent time looking for new clothes. And when the time came for kicking ass, well, they kicked ass. Most gratifying of all, perhaps, was the fact that it was an uphill battle. One PC was killed; another came to the brink of death, pulled back thanks to a quick Graft, then ran headlong to the brink again. The whole plot came down to a single conflict -- "Keep the Grafters out of the Wal-Mart" -- but the pacing was pretty brisk and it felt like everyone was engaged the entire time.

So what's the point of all this? I came in secretly hoping not to have to run this game, and ended up glad for the opportunity to spend time with a great group of players and their infectious enthusiasm. (Thanks guys!) It was also a powerful lesson in trusting myself as a GM -- and a designer.

Goals for 2011

2011-01-31T22:15:00.000-08:00

One post for January! In before the lock!

It may not be of any great interest to anyone else, but I thought it might be a good idea to lay out what I intend to accomplish this year in terms of game design. This isn't going to be a comprehensive list, of course -- other stuff may/will come up, with any luck -- but here's what I have in my head right now.

Make Leftovers happen already. Leftovers has suffered from a pretty egregious lack of focus over the past several months. I'd planned to have it in print last May... then last September... then last month... and here we are, with pretty much no progress having been made on it for quite a while. When I'm reminded of that, I think, "Yikes." And I feel pretty awful about it, to be honest, but that's not really helping anything. So I want to put this one to bed already.

(On a related note, I'm running a Leftovers game called "The Battle of Wal-Mart" at OrcCon this year. Come check it out!)

Finish FATE Kerberos. This is a foregone conclusion, but I'm putting it here for the sake of completeness. My playtesters are great, I make progress on it on pretty much a daily basis, and the feedback I'm getting from friends and playtesters has improved things greatly. There's still a lot of work to do, but man, are we ever getting there.

Go on to... um... the next thing. I have another project lined up after Kerberos, but I don't think I can talk about it yet or who it's with. (I'll give you a hint, though: I'll post more about it later on Spirit of the Blank, not here.) But I'm very excited about it. That's set to start in March.

Contribute to Sean Patrick Fannon's Omniverse project. Sean's one of the brains behind DriveThruRPG, and he has this kinda crazy plan to bring a bunch of game designers and writers to work on several connected games and settings all under the umbrella of something called the Omniverse. I may end up doing a FATE thing, or a Savage Worlds thing, or something with Sean's Icons-derived ICONic system -- or it may give me the opportunity to develop [CLASSIFIED] into a complete game, which would honestly be my preference, because it still interests me. We'll see where that goes, but I'm betting it'll be somewhere cool.

Make the most of GenCon. I'm attending GenCon for the first time this year, thanks to a thoughtful Christmas gift from my wife, and while I want to do plenty of gaming, I'm also keenly aware that it's a prime opportunity to see what else I can get involved in. And meet some people, of course. What was the tag line on that Intel commercial? "Our rock stars aren't like your rock stars?" Many of my rock stars will be at GenCon, and I want them to make sure they know who I am.

(In a good way, of course.)

RPG Solitaire Challenge

2010-12-21T23:07:00.000-08:00

Here's a different kind of RPG design contest from Emily Care Boss:

Starting January 1, 2011, you are invited to to make a role playing game for one person to play on their own. There are several challenges that you can choose among to guide the direction for your game. Each game submitted will get overall feedback, as well as input from the judge who created the challenge.

More info on her blog.

Game Chef 2010: Mission Accomplished!

2010-12-19T17:15:00.000-08:00

A while ago, I exhorted you, dear reader, to help me almost win Game Chef 2010. And with your tireless support, I'm pleased to announced that Action City! did, indeed, almost win. Second place! The most almost-winningest place there is! If you playtested Action City!, thanks for making it happen. You kept the dream of alive and brought us to the very brink of victory.

The top five entries, in order of playtest sessions:

"Never to Die" by James Mullen
"Action City!" by Mike Olson
"Chronicles of Skin" by Sebastian Hickey
"Long Shot" by Nick Wendig
"Deserting Paradise" by Joe Mcdaldno

Congrats to James Mullen and everyone else involved. I'm going to continue to work on Action City! just as soon as March rolls around.

Ronnies 2011

2010-12-18T01:57:00.000-08:00

Hey, another contest!

Ron Edwards is having another Ronnies game-design contest. Past winners include 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars, as well as... some others, I'm sure. The basic set-up is a 24-hour design competition done in a series of elimination rounds. The first round starts January 1st, and ends January 14th or 24 hours after the ninth entry has been received, whichever comes first. Entries have to incorporate two of four keywords (which will be revealed January 1st). Winners get a cool $50 (American!) and feedback/playtesting from Mr. Edwards himself.

I mention this not for my own benefit, but for yours. As much as I'd love to do this, there's just no way I'll have time. However, I definitely encourage you -- yes, you! -- to take advantage of this opportunity. It's not about winning. It's about being forced to stretch yourself creatively and make something that wouldn't have occurred to you otherwise. Limitations breed creativity!

Anyway, check out the link for more info.

Game Chef 2010: Action City!: Special Features

2010-11-13T10:49:00.000-08:00

Based on some productive discussion with the first group of playtesters, I've compiled some errata, clarifications, and other stuff into a document called Action City!: Special Features. Check it out if you have any interest in playtesting; I think it's kinda invaluable for those of you out there who can't read my mind.

Game Chef 2010: Action City! v0.3 Ready for Playtesting (UPDATED)

2010-11-09T11:28:00.000-08:00

Action City! v0.3 is online and ready for playtesting! So if you want to playtest it, download it and do that thing, then tell me about it here, or email me at the link provided in the document.

While this version is a bit longer, it's still only 18 pages including two pages of character sheets, a "Final Thoughts" page, and copious white space. What can I say? It's not a game that requires a lot of rules text.

Here's what's new:

Explicit guidelines for what each of the roles (Hero, Opposition, Friend) is supposed to do in the game
Expanded explanations of what the different difficulty levels mean and how they fit into the narrative
A new type of scene (the Cutscene) for the Opposition and how it's used
What it means to frame a scene
A brief but concrete paragraph on how to select appropriate Methods when rolling
A little more on the Arsenal to further delineate how it works
A bit more on how to use Goons, the Muscle, and the Functionary in play
And not much more!

Winning Game Chef isn't nearly as important to me as getting valuable playtest feedback, so check it out, play a game, and tell me what worked and what didn't. I do not expect to win Game Chef, but I do expect to leave this a better designer than when I started, so any help you could give me in that regard is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

UPDATE: Playtest reports can be (should be, really) submitted at http://gamechef.wordpress.com/2010-playoff-rules.

Game Chef 2010: "Nice Job, Finalist."

2010-11-08T00:53:00.000-08:00

So the word's come down from Game Chef 2010 Master Chef Jonathan Walton's chosen Action City! as a Finalist, which is great news. More importantly, he had some insightful commentary on the game:

Concept: A game about 80s action movies. Explosion-tastic.

Execution: Unlike several other games, which have several single-protagonist stories happening in parallel, this game is explicitly about one character, the hero, with everyone else playing allies or enemies. The explicit division between scenery chewing, talky scenes and action scenes makes good design sense. It’s perhaps a bit strange that both the hero and the other characters have equivalent stats, since the hero in these movies is usually both super-competent and unkillable (i.e. they die hard, but these movie often try to portray them as normal dudes, so perhaps that make sense. Resolution contains an unusual combination of both stat+trait invocation and setting difficulties, though, in this case, it seems as if the acting character sets their own difficulty, taking a bonus or penalty to their roll based on either personal preference or the fictional circumstances (it’s not really clear which). Additionally successes can be banked to help in later conflicts, so the mechanics seem to incentivize making some easy rolls in the beginning, which could be weird if players decide to roll for things that don’t really matter. Failure gives characters conditions that prevent them from selecting the easier options when assigning their own difficulty, which is a pretty smart mechanic. There’s also a Once Upon a Time-like mechanic where the players are incentivized to incorperate specific action movie clichés (“vehicle of convenience”) into the narrative, with any remaining clichés counting as resources for the GM and bad guys in the final conflict. While my concerns about “forced incorporation” mechanics remains, I like the way teamwork between the players might be required to set up some of these situations. The bad guy generation guidelines also look like a ton of fun.

Completeness: feel like the main thing missing from this game is some sense of how pacing and scene distribution is supposed to work, especially when the hero might end up with the crap beaten out of them after just a few scenes. When should we cut from the hero to the various other characters? The hero is supposed to get more spotlight time, right? But how much is “more”? Does the GM frame all the action scenes while the players call for and frame the personal scenes? That seems to be the way it works, but the rules don’t say that explicitly. How do we know when we are reaching the final showdown? Should the GM specifically try to target the friends of the hero, or just allow them to become entangled in the caper?

Cookery: Some of the uses here are a bit of a stretch, but this designer was smart not to let the ingredients been too restricting.

Conclusion: Nice job, Finalist. This game is definitely ready to be played, but needs to keep an eye on a few things, including refining the scene framing guidelines and figuring out how the non-hero characters can become involved in things.

Pretty much everything in the Completeness section is a concern I already have about the game as it now stands, which is kind of a relief. I was a bit worried that I'd missed something vital and game-ruining, so if the worst thing about it is stuff I already knew about, then I feel much better about the next revision.

Speaking of which, here are a few things off the top of my head to hit on:

There isn't necessarily a "GM" here. The critique makes reference to the GM and "the badguys" as if they were separate entities. The Opposition isn't, strictly speaking, the GM, though -- he's a player just like the Hero and the Friends, but with different rules. Like them, he has resources and limits and all that, and completely lacks the arbitrary authority which is so commonly associated with the classic GM role. The Opposition really only controls two things: The actions of the Badguy and other individuals/forces which oppose the Hero, and the framing of Setpieces (more on that below).
Cakewalking has a cost, always. I'd argue against Jonathan's inference that "the mechanics seem to incentivize making some easy rolls in the beginning" -- win or lose, if it's a Cakewalk the Opposition gets a bonus die. Making an obstacle a Cakewalk is essentially saying, "This is so important to me narratively that I'm willing to take my lumps later for the opportunity to advance my Arc/overcome my Hang-Up." If anything, I'd argue that the rules incentivize Close Calls, because they don't offer a reward for success or a penalty for failure apart from whether or not you get to advance your Arc.
Every roll does matter. Jonathan's concerned that the players might "roll for things that don't really matter," but they only break out the dice if the Opposition says so. It's only when the Hero or Friend and the Opposition reach a stalemate that anyone rolls dice, so if the Opposition wants to make everything an uphill battle for them ("No, you don't fix that leaky faucet before heading out to the FBI office! Roll some dice!"), then that's his call. So while the Hero or Friend is in charge of how difficult an obstacle is to overcome, the Opposition is in charge of determining what the obstacles actually are. As long as every scene has at least one roll, I don't foresee any problems there.
The Arsenal doesn't really work like that. Unless I'm misunderstanding the critique, Jonathan's main concern with the above two points is the Arsenal, which lets players set aside a die from a second matched set to use later on. However, since the Arsenal can never have more dice in it than non-Opposition players, there isn't a huge opportunity to, as it were, "game the system" there. Besides, Cakewalking doesn't let you roll more dice -- just more than the Opposition. Your odds of adding a die to the Arsenal are the same no matter what difficulty you set.
Rolls don't really work like that, either. This is perhaps a minor point, but an important one. When Jonathan says, "it seems as if the acting character sets their own difficulty, taking a bonus or penalty to their roll based on either personal preference or the fictional circumstances (it’s not really clear which)," it makes me think I may not have explained the core mechanic well enough. You never get a "bonus or penalty" to a roll -- you just impose a bonus or penalty on the Opposition. That's a distinct difference, to me. The difficulty you set is solely a matter of personal preference, but the narrative needs to bear it out, too. If you're trying to punch out some thugs and decide it'll be a Cakewalk, the narrative should describe you quickly dealing with them and moving on; if you're going to beat them by the Skin of Your Teeth, the narrative needs to describe a more protracted, desperate situation. (I know it's out of genre, but the first example that occurs to me is Aragorn at the end of the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring. He mows through those Uruk-Hai minions like they're nothing, then spends three minutes in a nail-biting slugfest with Lurtz.)
Equivalent stats aren't everything. Even though Heroes and Friends have "equivalent stats," as Jonathan points out, Heroes still have the edge. Heroes can't be compelled to act against their will like a traitorous Friend can. Heroes have longer Arcs, and therefore get to frame more Talking scenes, which means more screen time. And Heroes can't be killed, which seems pretty major to me. That said, it's probably worth thinking about how else Heroes can have a practical advantage without mechanical fiddliness.
Scene framing has rules. I clearly need to be more explicit when it comes to who frames which scenes. Heroes and Friends get to set up their own Talking scenes, but the Opposition gets to frame Setpieces. Maybe it's the "framing" part of that that needs to be better defined, though. I.e., what does it mean to frame a scene? Is it just getting to determine who's there and where it's taking place? Or does that extend to being the one to decide what success and failure actually mean within the context of the scene? All of that needs a better explanation than I could muster when I originally wrote it at three in the morning.

The timing on all of this is pretty good, as it turns out. If Jonathan had stuck to his original timeline, I would've been neck-deep in writing "Operation: Sprechenhaltestelle" and completely unable to switch gears back to game design.

I'll post the revised version here sometime, say, this week. Hopefully I can coerce some suckers -- er, recruit some friends to do some playtesting for me. I may be able to playtest it myself, but given the way my schedule usually goes that's not a guarantee. Besides, blind playtests are the more informative. Stay tuned!

Game Chef 2010: Unofficial Reviews

2010-10-08T21:41:00.000-07:00

So while the esteemed Monsieur Walton has only gotten through 13 of this year's Game Chef entries so far, one Jonathan Lavallee has taken it upon himself to briefly review all 59 of 'em (including his own Over the Wall). Not only that, he's already done it, and it's an interesting read.

I was pleased to discover that Action City! made it into his folder of games he and his group may play one of these days (which, admittedly, contains about two-thirds of all the submissions). Does this bode well for my chances in Game Chef itself? Well, it doesn't bode poorly, I guess, but other than that one pretty obviously has no bearing on the other. To be honest, it was just gratifying to read someone else's thoughts on Action City!, contest or no. Thanks, Jon(athan)!

Game Chef 2010: Action City! Revised

2010-09-28T23:22:00.000-07:00

What with one thing and another, I've revised Action City! for anyone who wants to check out a slightly expanded, much more complete version of the game. You can get it here.

At 14 pages (including a character sheet and a brief explanatory epilogue), it's a wee little slip of a game, but I like it. My only trouble is that I'm not sure I have the narrativist chops to give it the treatment it deserves in play. However, plenty of people do -- people I know, even! -- so hopefully someone out there will give it a shot.

Game Chef 2010: Action City! -- Available for Perusal

2010-09-20T12:31:00.000-07:00

I was going to say "Action City! -- Now Complete!" but I kinda doubt that's true. I put the finishing touches on it at about 4:00 this morning, so I'm sure something important is missing or incomplete. Like, if there's a sentence somewhere in those last few pages that just ends, period be damned, it wouldn't surprise me.

So instead, I'll just say that you can take a look at it here.

Game Chef 2010: Action City!

2010-09-18T02:55:00.000-07:00

I still question whether I'll be able to finish something in time for submission to Game Chef 2010: Sojourner -- I'm pretty busy with, of all things, writing a musical tribute to an old Top Secret module -- but... I'm gonna give it a shot.

So here's what I'm going with: Action City! With an exclamation point!

The goal is to recreate the most Hollywood action movies Hollywood could possibly come up with. Think Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Bad Boys II -- even stuff like Escape From New York or Beverly Hills Cop. We're talking about movies that embrace (or invented) the most cliched of action-movie cliches. The heroes are one-dimensional badasses with a humanizing flaw, accompanied by some friends and/or hangers-on, up against crafty villains and seemingly insurmountable odds. Y'know. That kinda thing. I'm taking my inspiration as much from the movies themselves as I am from convention screenwriting wisdom.

As for how all of that relates to the parameters of the contest:

Journey: I'm interpreting this metaphorically as the character's narrative journey, or story arc, which provides a sub-plot to parallel the main conflict of the story. Every character begins with a pre-existing problem in his or her life to be resolved. The starting point of this arc is determined randomly (I hope), but the resolution -- the endpoint of the sub-plot -- is determined by another player. So if your sub-plot is "Trouble with the Ex," when the story starts you and your ex have something contentious going on, but your resolution could be anything from winning your ex back to just getting on with your life. Progress in your sub-plot is measured on a stress track; the fewer checks in your stress track, the harder the opposition will be.
City: Everything takes place in an urban environment. That's it. Plus... Action City! It's right there in the title!
Edge: An advantageous personal trait, like "Crazy Like A Fox" or "Die Hard" or "I Know Kung Fu." I realize this is going to be the most common interpretation of this ingredient, but it's too perfect to pass up.
Skin: When a character is in a conflict, the player chooses how difficult of a challenge it is. There are three degrees of difficulty: Cakewalk, Close One, or Skin of Your Teeth. (See? Skin.) These difficulty levels are always relative to the character's own odds of success. There's a mechanical incentive to make things harder on yourself: Winning a roll by the Skin of Your Teeth gives you another Edge relevant to the scene.

Some important non-ingredient components:

In addition to a sub-plot, each character also has a Hang-Up -- some personal quirk or challenge that can potentially interfere with his or her life. Though distinct from the sub-plot, the Hang-Up should interface with the sub-plot in some significant way. For example, if your sub-plot were "The Ex" and your Hang-Up were "The Bottle," well... that might give you an indication of why The Ex is The Ex. I'd like to determine these randomly, too, but that might not be practical.
Each session consists of a number of discrete scenes: Talking and Setpieces. Talking scenes deal with either your sub-plot or your Hang-Up. You might use a Talking scene to have a conversation with your ex, or explore your self-destructive fascination with alcohol. Either one would have different mechanical ramifications going forward. Setpieces are for directly tackling the central conflict. Regardless, all scenes involve at least one die roll.
Ah, the dice. Action City! uses d6 pools; you're looking for matches, or sets. Biggest set (i.e., the highest number of matching dice) wins. Ties go to whoever rolled the fewest dice.
There is something like attributes, although I'm not sure what I'll collectively call them (hopefully not "attributes"). These are Action (any sort of physical activity), Brains (planning, foiling security systems), Mouth (talking, lying), and Guts (courage, mettle). Each of these is rated from 2 to 4, and any given roll involves two of them. The rating is how many dice that attribute adds to your pool, so if you have Action 3 and Guts 2, you're rolling 5d6.
Every applicable Edge adds another die to your pool. This is why it's especially good to rack up additional edges by the Skin of Your Teeth.
About those difficulty levels: If it's a Cakewalk, the opposition rolls two fewer dice than you. If it's a Close One, you roll an equal number of dice. If it's by the Skin of Your Teeth, the opposition rolls two more dice than you do. Still trying to figure out a mechanical disincentive for a Cakewalk.
Every player has a role. At the start of the game, everyone rolls 2d6. The high roller is the Hero. If there's a tie for Hero, there are two Heroes -- it's a buddy movie. Everyone else is a Friend of the Hero's. A Friend who rolled doubles for this roll, though, will betray the Hero at some point during the story. The low roller is the Antagonist: half GM, half competitive player. The Antagonist doesn't have to play all the NPCs, but... odds are he'll play more than the other players, since he's the guy actively working against them. Plus, the Antagonist does have a character -- specifically, he's the villain of the story. He also gets to determine when a traitorous Friend will turn on the Hero, though he's mechanically incented to do it later rather than sooner.
In addition to scenes, the game also has a three-act structure (I think; I'm still waffling on this). Each act has at least one Talking scene and one Setpiece.
If your Talking scene relates to your sub-plot and your roll succeeds, you get to check off a box on your sub-plot track. If you fail, you don't -- and in every Setpiece, the Antagonist gets a number of bonus dice ("consumable" dice that can be added to a single roll, one or more at a time, then discarded) per scene equal to the number of unchecked sub-plot boxes at the table. So it's a good idea to deal with those sub-plots.
If your Talking scene is about your Hang-Up and your roll succeeds, you get to use that Hang-Up as an Edge in the next scene. You've overcome it temporarily, or learned something from it, that helps or inspires you later on. If you fail, one of your Edges is unavailable in the next scene. Your Hang-Up has bested you for the time being and is preventing you from operating at peak efficiency.
The more beat-up you are, the harder things are for you. Something like "Health" will measure a character's general physical condition. Every failed defensive roll (for lack of a better term) in a Setpiece means checking one of those three boxes. If one box is checked, your lowest difficulty is Cakewalk. If two boxes are checked, your lowest difficulty is Close One, and if all three are checked, the only way you can overcome a challenge is by the Skin of Your Teeth.
Each game has, say, five Cliches. Preferably, these too would be determined at random at the start of the game. (I'm big on the random thing for this game -- I see it as a pick-up one-shot kinda thing.) Examples include Outrun the Explosion, Crashing Through the Window, and One-Hand Helicopter Hang. Incorporating a Cliche into the action means... uh... something good. For every unused Cliche, the Antagonist gets a bonus die in the last Setpiece. So maybe the good thing they do is denying the Antagonist another advantage.

That's about it, for now. It obviously needs a lot more work -- it's about 80% conjecture at this point -- but it feels like a pretty solid base to me.

Game Chef 2010: Now More Than Ever

2010-09-10T22:37:00.000-07:00

So the ingredients for this year's Game Chef are up:

The Basics
Design and submit a playable draft of a roleplaying game between Sept 11th-19th, preferably inspired by the theme and ingredients listed below.

2010 Theme
Game Chef 2010 is official known as Game Chef: Sojourner, and the theme is Journey. As always, you are free to interpret that however you like.

2010 Ingredients
In addition to the overall theme, pick 3 of these 4 ingredients to design your game around.
• City
• Desert
• Edge
• Skin

First thoughts: City, Edge, and Skin all jump out at me. I'm picturing a very scenario-focused game along the lines of The Mountain Witch or Lady Blackbird about accomplishing something very specific in a city. Probably getting from one place to another safely. More than that, though, I just can't say right now. Hell, something like Escape From New York or The Warriors isn't completely unreasonable.

Second thoughts: Fred Hicks, Ryan Macklin, Willow Palacek, and Josh Roby are all participating, I believe, so... I'll just consider this a learning experience.

Third thoughts: Damn it, why couldn't there be any mechanics-focused ingredients? I mean, I can make a mechanical element called Edge, and possibly Skin, but I'll be honest: I like constraints, especially mechanical ones. They spur more creativity in me than total carte blanche to do whatever I want. Total creative freedom absolutely ruined last year's Game Chef for me.

Fourth Thoughts: I absolutely don't have time for this, but I'm doing it anyway.

Sigils [was: Icons & Sorcery]

2010-09-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

This is a little tardy, but: I've updated and renamed my swords & sorcery hack for Icons. Now it's called Sigils, at the suggestion of someone on RPG.net whose name escapes me. The big change for this version (v0.4) is the addition of rules for summoning and the detailing of three types of spirits, three types of demons, and 12 types of elementals (really, it's just three tiers of the same four elementals, but still).

That was the big piece of the puzzle that was still missing, in my mind, so it's satisfying to have it taken care of for the time being. ("For the time being" because I haven't playtested those rules or anything, and I'm relatively sure I left out something very important somewhere or other.)

Even though I haven't been able to play or run it yet, I can at least say that it's fun to roll up characters, so go check it out and get back to me.

UPDATE: It's since been replaced by Sigils version 0.5, and will soon be replaced again (but look for that in a new post).

Gateway 2010 Wrap-Up

2010-09-06T22:56:00.000-07:00

So! As I expressed elsewhere, this year's Gateway was an unfailingly fun convention. The least-fun game I played in was still a lot of fun, so I have no complaints. Plus, I tied for the win in a game of Dominion, which was notable primarily for how unlikely it was.

I'll go in chronological order (Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon) so I don't leave anything out.

Beyond Thunderbowl (Leftovers): I'd never run anything in the Friday 2:00 slot before, but with the 8:00 slot taken up by a game I didn't want to miss, I didn't have much of a choice. Thankfully, I had a full table -- an overfull table, actually. I advertised four slots and ended up with five players, including Leftovers fan and super-playtester Larry Harala, who's run a five-session Leftovers campaign with his group in Utah that sounds like a lot of fun and about which I'd like to hear more. Of course, since I only see him at these conventions twice a year, there isn't much hanging-out downtime, so... yeah.

Anyway, "Beyond Thunderbowl" starts with the PCs captured by Grafters and forced to fight in a series of gladiatorial games on behalf of their captors. It's sort of how the various Grafter gangs earn prestige and settle disputes. Everyone had a good time (especially me), and it ended the way I'd expected it to: with hundreds of creepers flooding the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and (most of) the PCs barely escaping with their lives. My only reservation was that I feel like I pushed them too much toward that resolution, but as I said at the beginning of the game, "Welcome to the beta test for tomorrow night's Leftovers game." Afterward, Larry (I think) wanted my autograph on one of the ashcan copies of the rules I gave out, and I obliged under protest.

A few situations came up that required some off-the-cuff rulings, including one that's likely to find its way into the published version of the rules because I've encountered it so frequently. I've been referring to it as a Circumstance die. Basically, it's a one-use die that comes about as the result of some player-created advantage. This first arose at Hyphen-Con, when a map was used to gain advantage in a negotiation with some Grafters. The ruling then was to compare the Resourceful roll to the difficulty table, with each difficulty corresponding to a die size (Tricky = d4, Challenging = d6, etc.). The more resourceful you are, the better the map.

In this session, it happened another way: Someone wanted to climb up on the side of the big metal dome in which they were fighting to get an advantage on an opponent by dropping down on them. I had him make an Athletic roll, which produced a die he was able to include in the next round when he made his attack. It worked great. It's basically the Leftovers equivalent of a Maneuver in FATE, except instead of an aspect you get a die. As soon as I figure out a succinct way of explaining it, it's going in the book.

One last development of note: I'd previously been stumped for why anyone would voluntarily take a "negative" Bond with another PC. This led to some thoughts on how I could mechanically encourage that sort of thing, but I didn't like where it was going. Finally, I realized that there's a simple solution: Make it mandatory that each PC not get along with one other PC. Ta-da. Works fine.

The Treasure of Hoth (Smallville): Smallville designer Josh Roby started in on a Star Wars hack for the game about a month ago, and I was damned if I wasn't going to experience it for myself at Gateway. The setting was Hoth in the Old Republic, with a lot of political maneuvering and intrigue (which Josh always does well, and which I never even attempt). I played EX-47, an assassin droid with orders to kill this NPC labor union leader. How did that go for me? Well, we made repeated comparisons to Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda. So... about that well, but without the guilt.

Regardless, I had a good time, and really enjoy the mechanics of this game. It's something I think I'd love hacking to bits (in a good way). Just by changing the characters' Values, you completely change the tone of the game. What I particularly liked about Josh's pre-gens was how the Values were worked into a statement instead of set apart from them -- e.g., "Nothing is more important than my Duty to my Master" instead of "Duty: Nothing is more important than obeying my Master." Not every Value was like this on every character (although all of 'em were for mine), but it really gets me thinking in terms of using Cortex-K for other settings.

I mean, imagine bog-standard fantasy gaming in the vein of D&D using Cortex-K. It'd be a hilarious subversion to plug in the ol' six abilities: I can always rely on my Strength. I've never had much use for Intelligence. Wisdom's better than luck. Etc. That, to me, is very funny.

Smallville is one of those games like Houses of the Blooded that makes me want to use it for dungeon-crawling, just because it's so not made for that -- but can absolutely handle it.

The Doom of Damocles (DFRPG): I talk about this game here, just to keep all the FATE stuff together.

To Steal the Orb of Orwand (Shadow, Sword & Spell): I have to say this up front, just to get it out of the way: I'm increasingly dissatisfied with this book. First of all, many of the mechanical elements feel wonky and poorly thought-out. Much has been made of the game's treatment of skills elsewhere, and even the game's author seems confused about how things should work, but that's such a huge part of the game's mechanics -- really, characters are defined almost exclusively through an extensive skill list -- that it isn't easy to ignore. Second, the way it's written reads like it was translated into another language and back again. The result was that everything we did felt houseruled, like we were banging the game into a usable shape as we went. It's one thing to do that after you have a bunch of experience with a game and feel like you want to tweak it here and there to make it do what you want it to, but this was our first contact with SS&S. We weren't going for a nuanced version of the rules -- we just wanted something playable and reasonable.

None of that, though, could slow down the adventure Andy had prepared, which was a classic S&S tale about stealing a thing from some guy. The setting had a vaguely Middle Eastern or Indian tinge -- f'rinstance, we were breaking into the raja's palace. We had a Cimmerian-type barbarian with us, but I figure he was part of the 13th Warrior Exchange Program.

Two especially funny things happened in this game: I freed a guy from a prison cell in the bowels of the palace who'd been locked up there for decades. His name was Manfred, and we almost completely failed to find a use for him despite dragging him around with us wherever we went. Andy did a great job with him -- he was always asking us quite sensible questions in a quavering old-man voice, like "Shouldn't we be trying to get out of here?" and "Why are you bringing me with you everywhere you go?"

The other funny thing was when one of the players, a 10-year-old kid, said that D&D 4E was "not even a roleplaying game" and "like a boardgame now." If you want to think that about D&D, fine, but hearing it from a fifth-grader was just too much. "Yeah, it's not like it was back in '74, right? Those were the days!" A 10-year-old grognard. Now I've seen everything (until someone comes along with a 9-year-old grognard, I guess).

Castle Ravenloft: Woot! I figured I wouldn't have time to try out this new boardgame, but Scott and the Vegas/Utah contingent busted it out during the dinner break. We thought it'd take an hour... it took almost the entire two-hour dinner break. But that's okay, because it was a lot of fun (and we had pizza delivered in the middle of it, so dinner was taken care of). It's a very well-designed, super stripped-down version of D&D 4E bolted onto a tile-placing boardgame. It also reminds me quite a bit of DragonStrike, which I ran at Gamex this year, in that there are distinct characters with individual abilities and a book of different scenarios using a variable map.

Actually, in terms of gameplay, it honestly isn't all that different, apart from a few important points. One, there's no GM. Every player will be responsible for controlling one or more monsters at some point, but since the monsters have such basic scripted attack routines, there's no fudging things to your advantage. Second, the characters can level (only once) using an Arkham Horror-like mechanic that involves trading in XP gained from defeated monsters. Third, each character has a selection of D&D-style powers, and can get more as the game progresses. Fourth, as soon as one character dies for good, the game's over and you lose. Fifth, the tile-placing thing and a very effective mechanic that encourages you to keep moving forward and exploring (placing tiles) instead of just hanging out and taking it easy (which is nearly impossible anyway).

I mean, there's more, but those are the big ones, IMO. Our party ended up victorious, but it was extremely Pyrrhic -- I think all but one of us was dead when Rob's wizard fireballed that room.

Beyond Thunderbowl (Leftovers): Saturday night, I ran Leftovers again. As expected, the previous day's game greatly informed and improved things on the second go-'round, including not making certain things too obvious. The party composition was significantly different -- three pure-human mechanical-types and two Grafted-up ass-kickers -- and I didn't roll nearly as well (Friday afternoon I was routinely rolling in the high teens or low twenties on three or four dice), but the end result was exactly the same: a boiling sea of creepers rising up to throw things into an utter panic and obliterate at least one PC.

For whatever reason, this session involved quite a bit more talking. The PCs managed to convince Blackbeard (the Grafter gangleader for whom they were forced to fight) that the Thunderbowl itself was badly in need of maintenance before it fell apart completely. After some cajoling, he let the three mechanics in there to fix it up, but in the process they set it up for a future sabotage -- which meant a d12 Circumstance die to their later efforts to collapse the metal-grate floor into the seething pit of creepers below, allowing them to come tumbling up out of there and etc. So yeah -- that Circumstance die thing is in.

Dominion: Then we went back to the room and played some Dominion. I suck at that game. Moat it up!

Treachery in the Skies (Swasbucklers of the 7 Skies): I'd been dying to play this for a long time -- since before it came out, really -- and it didn't disappoint. I'd read PDQ# and got a feel for how good it was, but actually experiencing it in action was something else entirely. Chris (the GM) loves games with intrigue, inter-party conflict, and romance, so needless to say that's what this game was all about. I played a Sha Ku Ruqrider -- a sorta primitive island-warrioress type who rides what's essentially a giant parrot -- in love with the first mate of a pirate ship, who was in love with this princess-type who we were "rescuing" from her wedding and taking to safety somewhere. Turns out the pirate captain wanted to sell her to some shady types on Floating Pirate Island to pay back a debt of his, while the sorcerer wanted to deliver her to his master for a ritual sacrifice.

The final conflict of the game, after a number of double-crosses and backstabbings (and frontstabbings, for that matter), was convincing Hamish's first mate (now captain) to choose me over the princess type, and according to the dice, he did. So I'd like to think that I won that one.

Chad Underkoffler says that S7S is his love letter to every bit of swashbuckling entertainment out there, and I'm happy to say it shows. I don't own the book and only got to flip through it a little, but it's well-written (as is Zo) and loaded to the brim with quotations from relevant movies and books. That latter bit was just as fun to read as anything else. I'm picking this up at my first opportunity, then hoping against hope that I get a chance to play or run it.

Vanguard: Rookie Year (FATE Supers): Amply covered here.

Dominion: We played a little more Dominion before heading home, and this time I tied for the win. Boosh.

All in all, a great convention. My thanks to everyone who made it that way. I'm definitely re-inspired to finish off Leftovers and get it up on Lulu by the end of the month. The plan is to finish off those final few chapters (of advice, really) this week and get it into final layout ASAP.

Coming up next week: Game Chef!

Gateway 2010: Beyond Thunderbowl

2010-09-02T18:36:00.000-07:00

Hola amigos -- I know it's been a long time since I rapped at you, but...

Wait, I've already done this bit once, haven't I?

Anyway, this weekend at Gateway I'm running two sessions of Leftovers: Friday at 2:00 pm and Saturday at 8:00 pm. Pre-reg slots are all full, which leaves only two seats per game for day-of participants to sign up.

Here's the blurb:

Captured by Grafters, stranded in an irradiated wasteland, beset by Horrors -- and the only way out may be... the Thunderbowl! Do you have what it takes to make it through intact, or will they send you back to the Trench in a series of small leaky boxes? Leftovers is a roleplaying game of post-apocalyptic survival in a world of Lovecraftian Horrors... one of which is probably you.

The name "Thunderbowl" is ~~ripped off from~~ a loving homage to "the largest table top Blood Bowl league in the western hemisphere," run in part by a good friend of mine up in Vancouver, BC. Those guys love Blood Bowl.

If you're going to be there, come on by and pull up a chair. Actually, go sign up at RPG HQ, then come on by and pull up a chair.

Leftovers: Updated to v1.4.1 -- Already!

2010-06-11T13:37:00.000-07:00

Some quick and small but important revisions to v1.4 more or less force me to update the PDF again. I declare it to be Leftovers v1.4.1 and available for download. (A full list of what's gotten some attention is at the link.)

Here's some more art!

On a related note, I checked out Colin Chapman's Atomic Highway in the ol' FLCS* the other day, and man... well done. It's funny, because, as a post-apoc game, it and Leftovers tread on some common ground, but in terms of tone and content, they're pretty divergent. This is good, because I wouldn't want to be in direct conceptual competition with Atomic Highway. I was surprised to see it on the shelf. The only reason I didn't pick it up right away is that I now have a bunch of store credit elsewhere, so if I'm going to buy a game, it'll be from there. Also, we're moving in a couple weeks, and bringing more stuff into the house would not go down well, let me tell you.

*They sell games, too!

Leftovers: Updated to v1.4

2010-06-06T02:28:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note: The current version of the Leftovers PDF available online has been updated to v1.4. You may notice that v1.3, the version I handed out at Gamex, was skipped altogether; that's because I did some more revising as a result of the playtest there before I'd ever gotten around to uploading v1.3 in the first place.

Anyway, quite a bit's changed; a list of revisions is available at the link above.

Gamex 2010 Wrap-Up

2010-06-05T01:39:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted on Spirit of the Blank.)

So! Gamex was last weekend, and I'm only just now getting around to talking about it. I've had a theoretically busy week. I'll just do this in chronological order, starting with Friday afternoon and ending with Sunday afternoon.

Smallville
This was only the second time I'd played Smallville, thanks to my inability to get a playtest group together since joining the beta back in February. Oh well. Anyway, it's definitely a big improvement over the Cortex I remember from Serenity, which was rather... meh. As befits the superheroic melodrama sub-genre, traditional attributes and skills have been tossed entirely in favor of motivations, relationships, and rule-bending assets. Has there ever been an RPG this mainstream that defined characters with stats like Love, Power, Glory, and Justice? Didn't think so.

My only real issue with the system is surely only a product of having a table full of newcomers for players. Sometimes there was a lot of dithering over exactly what dice to roll. Is this a Justice situation? Would my relationship with Clark be relevant here? Etc. Sometimes a single player's turn could take five minutes with all of this -- or maybe it just seemed like it did. On the whole, though, I look forward to this one coming out (this month, I think). Kudos to Josh et al. for their work on this.

Leftovers
This was the most disturbing game of Leftovers I'd ever run, and probably the most disturbing game of anything I'd experienced in quite a while. Not that that's a bad thing, I guess -- and I guess it's actually a good thing that the game as presented encouraged some disturbing character choices during play. We had a Grafted-up private investigator, a Grafted-up former boxer, a weird little kid with an eyeball on his tongue (this rendering him mute, something he had in common with his no-voice-having player), and a pure human big game hunter. The scenario was pretty much the same as the one I ran at Hyphen-Con, with a twist near the end that led to the aforesaid disturbing behavior.

Nick's ex-boxer character confirmed a suspicion that I've had for a while: High Physical Defense and Vigor are too easy to get. I could not hurt that guy. Same thing happened with Desmond's character Denise Richards at Hyphen-Con. So I'm changing the calculations for that slightly. I'm also thinking about making the character concept -- right now just a flavor-only spot on the character sheet -- mechanically significant somehow, like maybe +2 steps to one roll per scene. Nothing huge.

Marvel SAGA
Say what you like about TSR in the '90s, but this was a fantastic game system. Seriously, I can see now what all the fuss has been about. It's quick, intuitive, and fun, without sacrificing things like tactics or character details. I don't own it, so all I know is what I saw in play, but there's a ton of potential there for a generic game built on the same mechanics but using a regular deck of playing cards. So when I got home Sunday night I wrote a bare-bones version of one that'll probably never see the light of day.

At any rate, I got to the game about an hour late, thanks to that quiet, private hotel room that made me (made me!) oversleep. We started off playing first-string Avengers, then, when they were captured, switched to third-string West-Coast Avengers. I played Captain America and US Agent, and let me tell you, I couldn't wait to rescue Cap already so I could get back to playing him. Before playing US Agent, I hadn't realized just what a bad-ass Cap was, even when shoulder-to-shoulder with Thor and the Hulk. As it should be! US Agent, in contrast, was like... I dunno... Avengers Babies.

Dresden Files RPG
Morgan Ellis -- who has suggested I call him my "hetero FATE mate," although I think "platonic FATE mate" might be more accurate -- ran a bunch of DFRPG games at Gamex, in preparation for the ton more he's running at Origins and GenCon. I'd read bits of the playtest doc, but hadn't played it yet, so it was good to finally check the box on that one. Not surprisingly, the system is very familiar; the only real bit of difference there was the magic sub-system, which, for my character, was pretty hand-wavey and loose. That was fine with me. I got to be effective but non-violent, which was cool. Really curious to see the forthcoming FATE 3.0 corebook, whenever Evil Hat gets around to it.

Icons Superpowered Roleplaying
I had a full table plus five alternates for this. Well, four alternates -- the name "John Wick" was on there, but fortunately that was just a prank of Sam's. Character creation was fun, as expected. I made some quickie little chargen cheat-sheet packets, but still had to spend one-on-one time with each player to finish 'em off. The whole process, with five players, probably took about forty minutes, which isn't bad. One thing I didn't tell them about was bonus powers; I figured that giving the players even more to read and sort through would've delayed things even further. So we got some wacky characters, maybe wackier than we would've otherwise.

My favorite was Brian's. He rolled the Gimmick Origin (so all his stuff comes from devices) and two powers: Life Support and Supersenses. The backstory he spun out of this was that he was an MIA astronaut who'd been drifting through space for decades, running into alien civilizations and modding the Hell out of his spacesuit. The Lost Astronaut! What gets me is how he went from astronaut to crime-fighter, but whatever. It's funny. We played up the astronaut angle to a ridiculous degree. He ran around in slow motion, hit badguys with a golf club, and so on. With a 6 Prowess and 6 Strength, he was no slouch in combat, even without offensive powers.

There were a couple things that stood out about the system. One, it's definitely not FATE. Everyone clear on that? Steve Kenson said it, Fred Hicks said it, but still the misconception persists that Icons is somehow "FATE-based." The only area in which it comes close is aspects, but even those work significantly differently in Icons, so much so that it threw all of us FATE vets for a loop. In brief, Determination can only be spent to tag aspects before a roll, not after -- and even then, it isn't a straight-up +2-per-point thing. Not only that, but if you're making a Determined Effort (the closest thing to the way aspects work in FATE), there's a decent chance the Determination you spent will be wasted. The Determined Effort rules feel like a lot of fiddle for not much tune, if you know what I mean, so they didn't see much use in play.

Also, the players-make-all-rolls thing sounds like a good idea, but in practice it sometimes slowed things down. I'm not going to go into all the details here -- it was just a matter of the RAW not conveniently lining up with actual play.

More problematic, though, was the adventure, Steve Kenson's own Sidereal Schemes of Doctor Zodiac. I wish that weren't true, but unfortunately it is. The scenario is very railroady and rigidly linear, with a dozen rather pushover opponents fought in three groups of four. To give you an idea of how non-challenging they were, Ability Levels in the game range from 1 to 10. Human Ability Levels are between 3 and 6. These NPCs had Ability Levels of 3 or 4 across the board. Remember the Lost Astronaut? Bereft of powers though he was, he could one-shot these guys with relative ease. Admittedly, I did manage to knock him out, along with a few of another character's duplicates, but it was via a rather limited-use attack (a charge from the only superstrong antagonist -- whose Strength, BTW, was only one point higher than the Lost Astronaut's) that couldn't reliably be replicated with any fairness. The final fight was with the titular doctor, who had about two dozen powers for me to manage all at once. Fortunately for me, he still wasn't too much of a challenge for the PCs. In stark defiance of Silver Age conventions, they literally gutted him to death.

My key takeaway: It'll be fine with some house rules. And it'd be great in another genre!

InSpectres: The Venture Brothers
I hesitate to tack a system on there. This was a mostly freeform after-hours Venture Brothers game run by Morgan and featuring whatever BarCon holdovers could stay awake. I played 21 and 24, because I do a frickin' flawless 24 and an occasionally acceptable 21. In a similar vein, Colin Jessup played Hank and Dean. Josh's wife Meghann was Brock, Dan was Rusty, James (Ritter, who bravely admitted that he didn't really know Venture Brothers) was assigned H.E.L.P.eR., Hamish (another guy who didn't know the show, but who has a uniquely suited voice) was Dr. Mrs. The Monarch, and Laura Bishop was Triana (absent Orpheus, which was... odd, but whatever -- it's a game!). People wrote down InSpectres stats under the delusion that they'd matter, and off we went.

There was only the barest shadow of a plot, and it ended up being mostly me, Morgan, Colin, and Meghann tossing around Venture Brothers in-jokes posing as dialogue, but y'know... it was also hilarious. It was about two hours of near-constant laughter around the table, so I declare it a rousing success. Next time, though, I want a system in there somewhere!

DragonStrike
Sunday morning I ran a couple hours of DragonStrike, TSR's super-sweet, super-low-rent boardgame from 1991. Not a lot to report here, other than it was fun and I may run it again at Gateway.

Cthulhu Dice
We passed the lunch hour with a six-man game of Cthulhu Dice, which was a big hit. Later that night, at Red Robin, four of us played some more, with similar results. I expect to get a lot of enjoyment out of my five-buck investment in this goofy little game.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, 3rd Edition
I was totally psyched to get into this game (with only four players, pre-reg was cut off after two) and glad I finally got to try it out. The dice have fascinated me ever since I first saw them last year. And they didn't disappoint in play -- putting a dice pool together was intuitive and fun, and interpreting the results neatly added to the fiction. Everything else, though, was a super-crunchy baffling ordeal.

Well, maybe not that bad. But there's a lot of fiddliness surrounding that elegant dice mechanic that feels all the more fiddly in comparison. The mandate of the design is clear: Never write anything down. That's admirable. I get it. But WFRP's solution is to manage a glut of chits, cards, and tokens seemingly left over from a dozen other high-priced boardgames Fantasy Flight had laying around in the warehouse. For example, every wound you take is a critical card, dealt face-down from a deck. When you have more of those cards than a certain threshold number, flip the top card over, and that's your critical hit. Clever. But is it more fun or convenient than just rolling on a table? That's debatable. Every special ability and spell has a cool-down time tracked in little tokens on its card. Again, a logical and balanced solution, but keeping track of "Did I take one of these off last round?" doesn't add to the fun in play, IMO. I haven't seen that kind of micro-management in a game since Weapons of the Gods, but WFRP leaves that game in the dust in this regard.

So! As always, Strategicon was a good time. I'm already looking forward to Gateway in September.

Leftovers: Setting a New Standard for Disturbing

2010-05-29T00:39:00.000-07:00

Just finished running Leftovers here at Gamex. That was without a doubt the weirdest, most bizarre, and definitely most disturbing game of Leftovers I've seen yet. Samuel Mitchell, you are a bad, bad man.

However, it was also highly successful -- again! So that's encouraging.

And here's some more art, courtesy of artist Stacey Montgomery!

Icons & Sorcery

2010-05-27T09:56:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note here to let people know about Icons & Sorcery (link fixed!), my swords & sorcery hack for Adamant Entertainment's Icons Superpowered Roleplaying. It strays a bit here and there from the way Icons works, but not dramatically so. The idea was to retain the random character generation of Icons, but for a typical Howardian/Lieberesque fantasy setting -- so instead of Origins (Trained, Birthright, Artificial, etc.) there are Cultures (Great City, Decadent South, Frozen North, etc.), and since only shifty sorcerer-types actually have powers, there's a greater emphasis on Specialties, although these two rely heavily on the roll of the dice. "Equipment" in the conventional sense is practically a non-entity for the superheroes and villains in Icons, but not so in Icons & Sorcery. And so on.

Incidentally, I'm running Icons this weekend at Gamex, in case I hadn't already mentioned that. Icons hits the e-market June 1st, with a print edition coming soon after.

Leftovers: Art!

2010-05-14T22:55:00.000-07:00

Development continues apace on Leftovers. Jenny's initial layout looks great, and Tony just sent me some similarly great art. I figured I'd post it here for interested parties to peruse.

Click on it to see it full-sized. From left to right, that's a Fangfist, a Gut-ripper, and a Fly-By-Night.

On a related note, I'm running Leftovers at Gamex on Friday the 28th, so if you're in the area come check it out! Event pre-reg begins tomorrow. Get on it!

[CLASSIFIED]: Simplified

2010-05-04T22:03:00.000-07:00

So in looking over [CLASSIFIED] and thinking about it in terms of this contest, I realized that it's rather... well, needlessly crunchy. There's some nostalgic crunch in there, what with the separation of stats and skills and skill categories, and the way your base rating with a skill is determined by adding two stats together, and the fact that the number of skill points you have available to spend in a given category's skills is dependent on adding another two stats together, and so on.

The simplest solution is to ditch the stats altogether, and just have skill categories (Areas of Concentration, or AoCs -- an obvious nod to Top Secret's Areas of Knowledge) and skills (specialties). The AoCs are Combat, Academics, Technical, Athletics, Subterfuge, and Interaction. Your rating in an AoC is the base rating for every specialty that falls under it, so if you have a 12 in Combat, all of your Combat-related specialties are also rated at 12 by default.

I was a little torn on how to determine what your starting AoC ratings would be, until I fully committed myself to the central, unifying idea of [CLASSIFIED], which is, essentially, "antiquated but relevant." I want things to have a somewhat retro feel, but not to the point of just being derivative or clunky for the sake of it. Likewise, in terms of setting, this applies to the PCs: Former government spooks, spies, and assassins turned loose with the end of the Cold War in the mid-'80s (alternate history!), they're now high-priced "consultants" for a "private security corporation." In other words, they're still doing what they've always done, but now they're doing it for cash instead of duty. They don't really know another way of life, even though the world has ostensibly passed them by. Their ways and worldview are somewhat outdated and out of step with those around them, but they're still frighteningly effective. I want the system to feel the same way: a little passe, in some ways, but still fun and playable.

Anyway, with that in mind, I think I'm taking a page out of Star Frontiers. I want AoC ratings to range as high as 20, and this is a contest based on the use of d10s, so instead of some point-buy thing I'm going with actually rolling dice and determining those ratings randomly -- but with a sliding scale of bonuses to those rolls to forestall feelings of uselessness in a given AoC. I think it'll just be 2d10 six times, arrange to taste.

Then it's eight points to spend on specialties, on a 1:1 basis. Eight's enough to probably max out one or two specialties at 20 at the cost of effectiveness in other areas, which is fine with me. I want these PCs to start out as more than competent; a 20 in Marksmanship or Security Systems is not only acceptable, it's desirable. It may vary a little from this. Maybe it'll be six points, plus another two in a chosen AoC's specialties to represent something along the lines of departmental specificity, like Eliminations or Infiltration. I dunno. Details.

Toughness -- the measure of how easily a character takes major injuries -- used to be based on a couple stats, but now it's (Combat + Athletics)/5, which should make for a practical range of 4 to 6, and a possible range of 3 to 8.

The big honking resolution table stays the same, as does the method of injury determination by hit location and weapon Damage Factor. From a design point of view, the latter is the most genuinely interesting or innovative, or at least unusual, so I'm not dropping that.

As for layout, I have this crazy idea to make the whole thing feel like government documents, with redacted words or sections and slightly crooked, typewritten pages. I don't know how practical that is to do without it getting annoying, but it intrigues me enough to find out.

Hyphen-Con VI Debrief and... So On

2010-04-28T17:41:00.000-07:00

Hola, amigos! I know it's been a while since I rapped at ya, but you wouldn't believe what I've been going through lately. First of all, I lent Ron the Festiva for a beer run last week, but he got pulled over on account of a busted tail light. I'd totally forgotten about it. I'm not even sure I knew about it in the first place, since it's in the rear and I never see it back there. I don't know how it's legal to give a guy a ticket for something he can't even see, but that's the pigs for you. Anyhow, turns out the vehicle registration expired two years ago because I never got around to renewing it during the Christmas rush of '08 when I working at the tree lot, and that plus a few bogus unpaid parking tickets meant they impounded the old girl right then and there. I had fifty bucks' worth of scrap metal in the back seat, too. That's the last time I ever let Ron drive stoned.

No, seriously, none of that happened. I'm just a Jim Anchower fan, that's all.

Last weekend was Hyphen-Con VI (Believe the Hyph!) in San Diego, which was, as always, a good time. I ran Leftovers in the evening slot (6-ish to question mark) for five players, and what with one thing and another the PCs ended up being Denise Richards, Neve Campbell, Steve Irwin, Neil Patrick Harris, and, for some wonderful reason, James Garner. (Desmond unwittingly named his character Denise Richards without realizing who Denise Richards is, then it spun out of/into control from there.) The plot involved raiding a Humanist encampment for guns, ammo, and anything else the PCs could lay their hands on. The action culminated in confusion, blood, and lots of gunfire, so... success!

The combats in the Humanists' compound raised an interesting point: The players would much rather fight Horrors than humans. Why? Because you can't stick a human arm on yourself to heal your injuries, that's why. S'kinda funny. Nothing objectionable or problematic -- it just amuses me.

Another thing that came up: Hudson (playing Steve Irwin, the party's token d12 Human Nature guy) noted that Bonds with Allies don't necessarily have to be positive, and asked why anyone would want to take a Bond with another PC that wasn't. My response was, basically, "because roleplaying!" That's a perfectly cromulant reason, but cromulance without mechanical backing bugs me.

So I was thinking of instituting a slight change: Taking a negative Bond gives you +1 step to that Bond's die. This reinforces the idea of the dysfunction of the post-Horrors world extending even into personal relationships. The benefit of a bigger die is balanced somewhat by the lessened utility of the Bond -- but I guarantee you that if you had a negative Bond with a fellow PC, you'd find ways to use it. Also, I'd guess that those with Grafts would be more likely to take at least one negative Bond; the bigger die size and the lessened utility are actually beneficial there, in a way, because you'd probably just burn it with a Graft-related roll rather than use it as a Bond on its own. That may be a problem, but I'm still mulling it over.

Anyway, it was a good time, and the three new players liked the system, the setting, and their characters (we did chargen at the table), so I don't think I could ask for anything more than that. Hudson stretched the system a bit by taking a pet dog as a Contact, which sort of challenged the whole notion of how Contacts are used (e.g., in general, Contacts don't travel with you anywhere) but also amply demonstrated that the system is flexible enough to handle something like that with ease.

Another great moment for the system was when Hudson (again with that guy!) wanted to use Resourceful to try to lay his hands on a map of the area, which ended up giving him a d4 Map Tool (hey, MapTools!). Anytime he did something that might benefit from having a map, he got to add another d4 to his pool. This came into play most prominently when they were negotiating with Grafter gangleader DJ Beastly to get his support in their assault on the Humanists (which the Grafters might want to do anyway, since they and the Humanists are sort of natural enemies). Steve Irwin threw that map down on the table and said, "Here's a map to the nearest Humanist camp," which let Hudson add a d4 to the party's pool for their Friendly roll. Good stuff -- a nice non-standard use of a Tool. Similarly, Neil Patrick Harris (the party's resident doctor and evil scientist) gave the Grafters a couple home-made smoke grenades to sweeten the deal, which meant another d10 for the pool.

The next day, I met with my layout artist to sort through some outstanding layout and art issues. I've given up on trying to make a finished product available on Lulu.com by Gamex (Memorial Day Weekend). I'd rather we all got to do a good job instead of forcing us all to do a fast one. I have no doubt that Leftovers will be a beautiful, well-designed book. I keep telling people I want the layout to be better than the game itself, so even if the game is poorly received by the public, they'll have to admit that it's at least a good-looking book.

In other news, I'm shifting gears for this Simian Circle d10-based contest. The initial idea I had is simply bigger than a 20-page mini-game, and I want to give it all the room it needs. Plus, I love the dice mechanic, and it's something I'd rather develop independent of any other artificial constraints. So in its place, I think I'll finish up [CLASSIFIED]. It has a lot more potential as an anthology game than Last Resort does (that's the name -- Last Resort), in that it requires virtually no setting for it to be understood by the average gamer. It has a cool resolution mechanic of its own (IMO, anyway) and a bit of retro charm without straying too far into high-crunch territory.

[CLASSIFIED]: Damage Redux

2010-04-12T00:06:00.000-07:00

I've never written anything quite this... uh... math-intensive before. It's not especially math-intensive in play -- there's a table lookup, a d100 roll, and the multiplication of two single-digit numbers -- but figuring out everything on the front end has been a challenge. I knew I had a solid concept with the way I wanted to do damage, but sorting it out so it all makes sense, and works in a way that makes sense to provide results that make sense, has taken a lot of trial, error, and math.

Most of the original idea is still there. On a successful attack, there's a roll for hit location that doubles as a damage roll -- every location has its own damage rating. Multiply that number by the weapon's Damage Factor (DF) to get the total damage dealt. Compare that number to the target's Toughness:

If it's less than his Toughness, he shakes it off. No big deal. This is only likely to happen with run-of-the-mill unarmed attacks. Bullets, knives, clubs, etc. can't be dealt with as easily as fists.
If it's between Toughness +1 and three times Toughness, the target gets a 1st-Degree Injury (1DI). The exact effects of this vary by hit location, but in general these are single-round effects: a penalty to actions (something like -4 skill -- modifiers always affect the skill, and never the roll itself), or dropping whatever that hand was holding, and so on.
Between three times Toughness and five times Toughness, it's a 2nd-Degree Injury (2DI). These are more serious: broken bones, ruptured organs, severe bleeding, and the like. Penalties associated with these injuries are longer-lasting, usually for the length of the scene, if not longer.
More than five times Toughness and it's a 3rd-Degree Injury (3DI). These are debilitating, up to and including death. They're scene-enders for the victim, more or less, but still location-specific. A 3DI to the hand is a lot different than one to the head, but either one's going to ruin your day.

That Toughness score? It's the total of the character's Brawn and Focus. That means it's likely to range between 2 at the minimum and, say, 7 at the maximum. A Toughness of 7 would be remarkably high. You'd pretty much have to devote your entire character to just being "the tough guy" to get that.

Yeah, exactly.

It's important to remember -- I had to keep reminding myself, in fact -- that we're not dealing with anything along the lines of hit points here. All we care about is how the hit location times the DF compares to the target's Toughness score. That's it. Thus, it's not as easy as saying "A shot to the head is almost always going to be worse for you than a shot to the hand." In fact, that's almost an irrelevant consideration.

What happens when you stab someone in the head? It's real bad for them, sure. What happens when you stab them in the hand? It's not as bad for them overall, but it's still going to jack up that hand. In mechanical terms, hands should take 2DIs about as frequently as heads do, but the difference is that injury's holistic effect. The head injury has a greater effect on the target's ability to function and even stay on his feet, whereas it's not totally inconceivable that he could completely lose that hand and still be in the fight (albeit distracted by the bloody stump where his hand used to be).

Another issue is that I can't ignore the different threats posed by fists and blunt weapons and those posed by edged weapons and firearms. Keeping in mind the above stuff re: head and hand, being punched in the hand is highly unlikely to be a big deal, but a fist to the face is another story. Even a club to the hand won't be a huge matter -- you can break it, sure, but odds are slim that you'll render it useless forever. However, a .45-caliber round to the hand is going to be pretty devastating as far as that hand's future is concerned. So's an axe blade. You might lose the hand altogether.

There's some cinematic-type consideration here, too. Yeah, sometimes the most mundane and unlikely attacks will totally incapacitate a person, or extraordinary circumstances will intervene when double-barreled death looks like an absolute certainty, but I'm drawing inspiration from movies that aren't exactly sticklers for realism. This is Connery and (God help me) Moore, not Brosnan and Craig. I don't want every tire-iron to the arm to result in a broken limb, nor do I want every head shot to mean instant death for everyone. I want fists and clubs to have the potential to cause serious injury without guaranteeing they will, and I want bullets and blades to tend to be brutal without losing the possibility that they won't be. It's a fine line to walk, I've found.

So blunt and -- for lack of a better word -- "lethal" attacks have different location-specific damage ratings. Same probabilities, same basic table, different associated damage numbers. Likewise, instead of DFs ranging from x1 to x5, as I previously had wanted to do, now they go from x1 to x8, roughly following these guidelines:

x1: Unarmed attacks using the Brawl skill.
x2: Unarmed attacks using the Martial Arts skill.
x2 to x4: Bludgeoning weapons.
x4 to x6: Edged weapons.
x5 to x8: Firearms.

So edged weapons and firearms will always do greater minimum damage than blunt weapons' minimum damage, but a blunt weapon's maximum damage can be equal to or greater than their minimum damage, depending on the hit location.

For example, on the non-lethal hit location table, the head is 8 damage and the hand is 4. You hit someone in the hand with your bare fist and he's likely to shake it off -- his Toughness would have to be 2 or 3 to take an injury from that. However, you punch him in the face, and he'll feel it, because an 8 Toughness is highly unlikely. It'll only be a 1DI, of course, but it's something. Hit him with a crowbar (DF x3), though, and it's another story: 24 damage to the head means a 3DI (i.e., unconsciousness) for anyone with a Toughness below 5, but that 15 damage to the hand is usually going to result in a lesser injury. You might break that hand (a 2DI), but it'll heal.

Compare that to lethal damage. If that attack were with a knife or a pistol, for example, the head would mean 6 damage and the hand would mean 5 -- the difference between the two is much less, because the hand is more vulnerable to these types of attacks. With a pistol, typically DF x6, that's 36 to the head or 30 to the hand. That'll disable the location in question unless your Toughness is 6 or more (you'll still die to the head shot, but at least the hand will still be partially usable).

Yes, it's brutal. I don't have a problem with that.

That's where some resource or other comes in. I've been calling it Cool, but it might be something different. I dunno. Anyway, spend Cool to reduce the DF of an incoming attack. If you can get it down low enough, you can turn a 2DI into a 1DI or even into a "0DI" -- and just shrug it off.

After a bunch of test rolls, I have to say... it works. I'm utterly convinced there's an easier way to do it, mathematically speaking -- surely it isn't really necessary for lethal attacks to have both higher DFs and different damage ratings, for example -- but I'm satisfied with the system as it works now. I may be the only person who'll ever say that about [CLASSIFIED], but that's another issue altogether.

[CLASSIFIED]: The RPG That Came In From the Cold

2010-04-03T22:17:00.000-07:00

So for some reason, fresh on the heels of the relatively rules-light Tales of the Glass Slipper, I've made significant progress on a modern-day espionage game that uses:

Percentile dice.
A big 20x20 table to resolve everything.
Nine stats.
34 skills in five different categories (plus one derived stat!).
Skill points, the exact number of which depends on your stats.
Multiplication.
Hit locations.

Who would play this game? Man, I have no idea. But I am so taken with it right now, I can't even tell you. I'm dying to see it in action.

It's called [CLASSIFIED] -- the name's an homage to Top Secret, but I also think it has a nice ring to it all on its own. Like I said, I can't imagine interest in it would be very high. It's like a Jurassic Park velociraptor: Recreating a dinosaur's an interesting accomplishment and all, and people might be curious about it, but not many are going to want to get too close to it. What do you call a fantasy heartbreaker than isn't a fantasy game? Is it just a heartbreaker at that point?

Regardless, I'm going to post about it anyway, because I'll enjoy it, and that's what this thing's for, right? (Answer: Yes.)

So where to start? Well, I already posted that awesome table the other day -- that's central to all of this. Just about everything in the system comes down to your skill rating (1-20) vs. either an opposing skill or a difficulty rating (also 1-20). For example, trying to punch someone is a skill vs. skill contest; trying to shoot someone is a skill vs. difficulty contest (specifically, a weapon-specific and range-specific difficulty). The percentage chance for you to succeed is X/(X+Y), where X is your skill and Y is the opposing skill or difficulty rating. The nice thing about this is that even with a 20 skill, your odds are never greater than 95%, and that's against a 1 skill -- which is, like, not especially likely. Against a 10, you're still only looking at a 67%, so the min-maxing factor is reduced a bit.

The nine stats are divided into three categories: Physical (Agility, Brawn, Dexterity), Mental (Awareness, Brains, Focus), and Social (Charisma, Empathy, Style). The skills are divided into five categories: Combat, Balance and Coordination, Subterfuge and Infiltration, Interaction and Deceit, and Academics. Characters start with a number of skill points, also divided among those five categories; the amount you have to spend in each category is the sum of the category's two key stats. You also get additional Background skill points equal to Brains + Charisma + Focus to regardless of category. This is stuff you either picked up before you became a spy/assassin/whatever, or learned on your own time since then.

Each skill starts with a base rating equal to the sum of two stats. Advanced skills, like Explosives and Medical, halve this base rating. (I figure this is easier than charging double for them or something.) I've tried to consider both game balance and verisimilitude for each skill's two stats. Usually, every skill within a category will use at least one of that category's two key stats. For example, most of the Combat skills involve Focus, which is all about willpower and discipline, because I think it's interesting to address, in mechanical terms, the guts it takes to wade into combat or pull a trigger. Marksmanship is Awareness (sensory perception) and Focus, Martial Arts is Agility (bodily control and coordination) and Focus, Heavy Melee Weapons is Brawn and Focus, and so on. At character creation, skill points improve skills on a 1:1 basis.

As for combat, damage is the product of two factors: hit location and the weapon's Damage Factor (or DF, because a game like this needs all the acronyms it can get), which ranges from x1 to x5. Most guns would be around a x3 or x4. Unarmed attacks are x1. Melee weapons are x2 to x4; if your Brawn's higher than the weapon's DF, increase it by +1. Each hit location comes with its own damage. Multiply that by the weapon's DF to get the damage dealt by the attack. Believe it or not, there are no hits points. (I know, I'm surprised too.) Injuries come in three degrees: 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. The higher the degree, the worse it is. The degree is determined by your Toughness (Brawn + Focus).

If the total damage is less than your Toughness, you shrug it off -- you're just too much of a badass to be affected by it. If it's more than your Toughness, but less than three times your Toughness, it's a 1st-degree injury. From there up to seven times your Toughness, it's a 2nd-degree injury, and if it's more than that, it's a 3rd-degree injury. If a location already has an injury of a particular degree and you take another to that location of the same or a lesser degree, you take the next-highest degree instead -- so if you already have a 2nd-degree injury to a hand (either one) and you take a 1st-degree injury to that same hit location, that hand now has a 3rd-degree injury. First-degree injuries are relatively minor, and often do nothing more than take up an injury slot -- it might leave a mark, or you might drop your gun, but other than that the main danger is that you can't take another one of those in that location without it getting worse. Second-degree injuries are things like fractures and significant bleeding. Third-degree injuries usually involve whatever's hit being rendered useless. If that's your head, then... well, you get the idea.

That's why you need to be Cool. Cool is a resource spent to adjust an attack's DF. Spend it on your own to increase DF; if you're the target of an attack, spend Cool to reduce the attack's DF. Thus, a punch has potential to do a Houdini-killing amount of damage, and a head shot from a 10-gauge can be reduced to a glancing blow.

How do you earn more Cool? I dunno yet. Put that on the list of to-dos.

You Only Cross-Reference Twice

2010-03-31T16:15:00.000-07:00

OMG, I'm obsessed with this table I made yesterday:

(click on it to see it full-sized)

Attacker's skill is the Y-axis; defender's is the X-axis. Cross-reference attacker's skill with defender's and roll that number or less on d100. Formula is Y/(X+Y) = Target Number. Against someone of equal skill, you're evenly matched. After that, your odds of success are essentially how much "dog" you have in the "fight," as it were. This was inspired by ShanG of RPG.net and his quest for his ideal dice mechanic.

I'm unreasonably enthusiastic about putting this dinosaur to work in a Top Secret-like espionage game. Why not just play Top Secret? Because... I dunno. Because I like this table, that's why.

I mean, I'd like to play Top Secret again, but I honestly think the odds of running this as a playtest of some kind are better than the odds of getting a group together to play a 30-year-old game like Top Secret. That's just the way it goes, usually. Top Secret isn't RC D&D or anything -- it's pretty crunchy, with lots of little calculations to be done and modifiers to be considered. It doesn't have the charm of a rules-light old-school classic like OD&D or T&T. There are arguably better options to serve your espionage gaming needs these days.

(I've thought about doing a retro-clone of Top Secret called Open Secret, but... then I made this table, so....)

So this, then, would be something like an homage, what with the roll-under d100 mechanic and all, but after that they don't have a lot in common. I did an embarrassing amount of work on the rest of this last night in the wee hours. It all came out in a feverish stream of skills and derived stats.

Game-Fu 8: Tales of the Glass Slipper

2010-03-28T21:49:00.000-07:00

Today I finished off my Game-Fu entry, which I ended up calling Tales of the Glass Slipper. The extra week we were given to complete our games resulted in mine being much more complete than I could've imagined last week. There's art! An index! The impression that, at some point in the process, layout was briefly considered! I'd say it looks pretty good, considering it was created using MSWord and MSPaint.

You can take a look at it here, if you've a mind to, but be warned that it's 4+ megs. Must've been all that art. (By comparison, the latest version of Leftovers is less than 1 meg.) Forty pages in the end, including the cover, TOC, and index. That's five times longer than I'd thought it'd be, back in the day. Were we ever so young?

As for the name: The PCs in the game are members of a knightly order called the Order of the Glass Slipper. This organization is charged with something along the lines of "inventory control" for the Fairy World. When fairies run off to the World of Man with a fairy-tale treasure, it's their job to track 'em down and get it back. No pun-name for me this time.

Game-Fu 8: Oh, the Hardships of Game Design

2010-03-27T00:04:00.000-07:00

Well! That additional week to work on this game has resulted in another 15 pages or so -- so far. I'm guessing about 40 pages by the time I'm done. I can't believe I ever thought this would fit on eight pages. Sheesh.

So here's a little interesting game-design moment: I'd decided to use the "Character sheet fits on an index card, front and back" ingredient, specifically because I thought it'd be cool to have one side be the character's mortal self, and the other be the character's fairy self. Besides, there are so few stats to worry about -- Gifts, Curse, Possessions -- that I knew I'd be able to fit everything on there with room to spare.

(I still consider this a huge strength, BTW -- making a character is literally picking four or five Gifts and one Curse from a few lists,)

The way I'd finally settled on tracking damage was with Hardships -- take some damage (in short, points of effect achieved by your opponent in combat) and it turns into a short phrase describing what just happened to you. Yes, they're pretty much just consequences from FATE. You wanna make something of it?

The original plan was to put them in three rows on the index card, in two separate columns on each side: physical and mental on the mortal side, and magical and mental on the fairy side. The lower the row, the worse the Hardship. Every point of damage becomes a Hardship, so being shot for three points of damage means recording three physical Hardships, one on the top row, one in the middle, and one on the bottom.

But that soon became rather impractical. What's a magical Hardship, anyway? The magic rules are pretty all-or-nothing; you spend your effect to determine the bounds of your spell, so there'd never be any left over to deal "damage," really. Plus, none of the different types of magic are directly damaging in the first place. Fairy tales aren't exactly rife with fireballs and magic missiles.

So okay, new plan. I'll have one column to handle all Hardships, but with three spaces on the top row, two in the middle, and one on the bottom, and assign damage limits to each row. Y'know, 1, 2, and 3 damage corresponding to the top, middle, and bottom rows. By filling them all up at once, you could take as many as six points of damage at once without going down, but you'd be really, really messed up.

Then I went to draw that on the index card, and the three spaces on the top row took up, like, three-quarters of the width of the card. So that got nixed for being impractical, in favor of just one space in each of three rows: The top for hits dealing 1 or 2 damage, the middle for 3 or 4 damage, and the bottom for 5 or more damage. If one row is full, go on to the next one.

But... well, really, that's not much different than just saying "You can take three Hardships." Five-damage hits are going to be exceedingly rare, so odds are good that you'll end up taking three 1- or 2-damage hits and filling those spaces sequentially. I worked a couple variations on that, but they all ended up with pretty much the same problem.

Finally, I realized something. The concept is sound, but why lock these Hardships down with pre-defined damage ratings? It's needlessly restrictive both mechanically and narratively. It's also needlessly almost identical to how I treat consequences in FATE, and surely I could put a little distance between us, for once.

So here's where I ended up. You can take up to 5 points of damage in Hardships. When you take damage, write down the Hardship and the amount of damage you took to get it in parentheses next to it. When those numbers exceed five, you're out.

But! I'd been working from the idea that each Hardship your opponent had would mean +1d6 for you, not to exceed +1d6 per row (just to keep the dice pools manageable). Without rows, how does that work? I don't want to do +1d6/Hardship, because again, that'll make dice pools too big. So instead, you get a number of additional d6s in your pool equal to the damage rating of the highest-rated Hardship your opponent has. Yes, this could potentially mean getting +5d6, but the odds of that are low -- and that guy's dead meat anyway, if he's already taken that much damage at once. It's far more likely that you'll take only 2 or 3 damage at once. Plus, typical NPCs will only be able to take a max of 3 damage or so.

So anyway, that's where things are. All that additional material I've written? Fluff that wouldn't even occur to me. I realized I hadn't explained a bunch of central setting conceits, but had left most of them implied. I'm still waist deep in it, but making good progress.

Also, art! I leaned on Andy to draw a few pieces for me, and they're great.

Game-Fu 8: Let It Ride

2010-03-21T22:29:00.000-07:00

So what with one thing and another, the deadline for Game-Fu 8 has been extended by a week. This is doubly disastrous. One, I'll be compelled to work on this for another week, which means I'll be compelled to make it another week better. Two, if I'd managed to turn it in tonight, I would've gotten a +10% bonus. That's huge. Games are scored on a scale of 1-100, so 10% is nothing to sneeze at. My last entry scored an 87 and a 79 -- that would've been a 95.7 and an 86.9! Big difference.

Possibly worse is the fact that one CardinalXimenes (not of Spain, as far as I know) managed to turn his game in before the original deadline, and it's 41 pages long. With art! And maps! And an index! And, y'know, graphic design! I will have none of those things. My as-yet-untitled game (still!) is about 23 pages right now, with maybe seven or eight more to go, if I'm lucky and can manage to rein in my verbosity. I mean, art and graphic design aren't necessarily parameters of the contest, but they sure as hell don't hurt.

Anyway, my hat's off to him. That's damned impressive for two weeks' work. Competition's already fierce.

AFAIK, no one else turned an entry in tonight, so... we're all trailing that guy.

The good news is that I really like what I have. I can't emphasize that "really" enough. Mechanically, it just feels great, and I love the magic system. I just finished the chapter entitled "Fairy-Tale Treasures," so now all there is to do is a bit on running the game (e.g., what an expected evening's game play would be), statting up some adversaries (this is so, so easy...), and maybe doing a brief page of design notes, which in this case would just be a bunch of stuff about fairy tales.

Oh, and naming it.

Game-Fu 8: This Is Where the Magic Happens

2010-03-18T12:59:00.000-07:00

All the attention I've been giving Leftovers lately has put my Game-Fu entry on the back burner, but all that had better change pronto because this thing ends Sunday night. So late last night, some time after uploading the new version of Leftovers and updating the site, I sat down to tackle the one bit of fluff that hadn't been mechanically defined: magic.

I don't see magic as coming up a lot during the course of play, which may sound like a weird thing to say about a game in which the protagonists are fairies. But the expectation is that they'll be spending most of their in-game time in the real world, as mortals without the innate magical ability they normally enjoy in their natural habitat. However, when magic happens -- and there's nothing to say there can't be stories that take place partly or wholly within the Fairy World -- I want it to feel distinct from the stuff they do in the World of Man.

To reiterate how characters are defined, in the mortal world they have a number of blessings, probably three, categorized as either Body or Mind. In the Fairy World, they also have three blessings: The Blessings of the Mind stay the same, representative as they are of who the Fairy is on the inside, but instead of Blessings of the Body they have an equal number of Blessings of Magic. Magic is the realm of direct confrontation in the Fairy World, much as Body is in the mortal world. Fairies don't throw punches -- they throw illusions. They charm minds. They summon dragons.

Each category has five discrete blessings. I was going to make this totally freeform, but you always run the risk of someone picking a blessing like "Awesome!" or "Super-Soldier!" that either doesn't work with the tone of the game or is way too broad. So here are the Blessings of the Body and Mind, with examples of the kinds of things they cover:

Blessings of the Body:

Strong

Physical strength

Nimble

Agility, manual dexterity

Alert

Senses, reaction time

Hardy

Physical resilience, endurance, ability to withstand punishment

Attractive

Pleasing appearance

Blessings of the Mind:

Wise

Intuition, empathy

Well-Spoken

Personal interaction, persuasion

Clever

Intelligence, problem-solving

Brave

Courage, resolve, discipline

Cunning

Trickery, deception

Characters start with either two Body and one Mind, or the reverse. (I'm kind of dying to have an option for random character generation, but I'll cover that later.) When you're trying to do something, roll 3d6 plus 1d6 for each blessing that's relevant to the situation. The GM's the final arbiter on what qualifies as "relevant," but they're pretty self-explanatory.

For example, if your blessings are Strong, Hardy, and Brave, and you're chasing after a fleeing fairy through the mean streets of Fresno, you could reasonably roll 4d6, IMO -- the standard 3d6, plus 1d6 for Hardy. Chases are often as much about endurance as they are about speed. Strong? That's more about breaking things than speed -- sheer speed is the purview of Nimble. Brave? While it does take a certain amount of courage to even visit Fresno, let alone run through its streets, it isn't especially relevant to a chase.

Now, if your blessings were Nimble, Alert, and Cunning, you might be rolling 6d6, since all of those (to me, anyway) are pretty applicable to a chase: Nimble for speed, Alert for noticing which back alley he's ducked down, and Cunning to anticipate and outsmart him.

Anyway, it's a different story for Blessings of Magic. There are five of these as well (Conjure, Glamer, Summon, Shapechange, and Enchant), but what you can do with magic is limited to the blessing(s) you have. If you don't have the Summon blessing, you can't summon things; without Shapechange, you can't turn into a bear. And so on.

Every type of magic works a little differently, but still along the same mechanical principles used in the rest of the game: effort (the total of the kept dice in your pool) and effect (the number of un-kept dice).

Conjure

Create objects out of thin air
Default difficulty: 9
Spend effect to conjure larger, more useful, or more valuable items

1 Effect: Small, useful handheld item of no special worth (+0 dice)
2: Large as a tree (+1d6)
3: Large as a house (+2d6)
4: Large as a castle (+3d6)

Glamer

Create illusions
Spend effect to create larger or more convincing illusions
Default difficulty: Magic Rating for NPC target, or 9 +3/Magic blessing for PC target
Difficulty to see through illusion = 9 +3/effect spent.

1 Effect: Size of a man
2: Size of a tree
3: Size of a house
4: Size of a castle

Shapechange

Change shape
Default difficulty: 6
Spend effect to change into more powerful forms or extend the duration of the change

1 Effect: Size of a man, one additional blessing appropriate to the form
2: Size of a horse, two additional blessings
3: Size of a tree, three additional blessings
4: Size of a dragon, four additional blessings

Summon

Call forth supernatural beings from the aether -- or from, y'know, next door
Default difficulty: 9
Spend effect to summon more powerful beings or extend their stay
Every summoned being has at least one blessing and one curse. Indulging the creature's curse lets the summoner spend Misfortune.

1 Effect: Creature has one blessing, stays for one day
2: Two blessings, one week
3: Three blessings, one month
4: Four blessings, one year

Enchant

Charm, fascinate, implant suggestions
Default difficulty: Magic Rating for NPC target, 9 +3/Magic blessing for PC target
Spend effect to enhance the strength of the enchantment or extend its duration
Record amount of unspent effect. When the target is given an objectionable order, spend an effect to have him do it. Otherwise, he snaps out of it. I.e., you need at least two points of effect to really charm someone: one point to charm him for an hour, and the other to make him do something during that hour. Unobjectionable orders -- anything the target might reasonably do under his own volition -- don't require the enchanter to spend any effect.

1 Effect: One hour
2: One day
3: One week
4: One month

I'm throwing around this phrase "Magic Rating" pretty casually without having mentioned it until now. Basically, I want this to be a players-make-all-rolls game. The opposition has ratings for Body, Mind, and Magic. When you act against an opponent, you're going for the relevant rating -- Body Rating for physical attacks, etc. These range in increments of three from 6 (a very low rating, easily beatable with 3d6) to, say, 18 (not a guarantee even with 5d6). I'll go into this more in the next post.

Note that a default difficulty of 9 is especially easy to obtain considering that you'll be rolling at least 4d6, not including any relevant Mind blessings or Fortune spent on the roll.

Leftovers 1.2 Is Up!

2010-03-17T17:29:00.000-07:00

Well. That was fast.

The new version incorporates some relatively small but important changes, including combat maneuvers, advancement rules, and a way to use Bonds to enforce roleplaying.

It's called the Utah Playtest Edition because Larry & Co. are set to play it this weekend. I imagine by the time Scott and I run it (on separate occasions, even!) in April, we'll be on to the next version. The difference between this one and that one will probably just be fluff -- suggestions for how to style the Trench, how to create an evocative post-apoc version of wherever you are to serve as the Ruins, and so on.

Leftovers: Playtest Debriefing

2010-03-16T01:03:00.000-07:00

Really great playtest yesterday at DiceHouse. Desmond, Brian, and Becky came out, which made for a good-sized group -- I don't think I'd want to run a game of Leftovers for more than, say, four or five players. (Then again, I think most games run best with groups of that size.)

The story involves the PCs being drafted by the Trench Authority on a mission to provide additional security for the Trench. After a number of particularly brutal Horror attacks, the Trench Authority Troopers find themselves short on both the munitions and manpower they need to do their job. The PCs' task: Make contact with a Grafter gang out in the Wasteland and negotiate a contract with them.

This is potentially a suicide mission, since Grafters are crazy cannibals, but the players are smart and think to bring a gift: a tentacle, suitable for Grafting. It was a great idea, but it required a little mechanical improvisation: I made it a Resourceful roll, with the quality of the gift (a one-use Tool) dependent on the roll. As it turns out, they did quite well, and ended up with a d10 Tentacle. I don't know that this deserves its own subsystem, since it's a pretty specific circumstance, but I really liked what we came up with on the fly.

On the way out to the Grafter gang -- which, having forgotten to come up with a name for beforehand, I end up calling the Jets -- the group runs afoul of a Horror known as a gut-ripper, which basically looks like this:

Ahem.

True to form, one of the PCs has a vehicle -- in this case, a beat-up old Hummer -- which she uses as a weapon against the thing. Vehicular combat! What a fortuitous opportunity to use my new vehicular combat rules. They make short work of the gut-ripper, which was kinda disappointing because it's one of the bigger Horrors, but no big deal. They find the Jets in a surviving portion of the LA River Basin (which is just a big stretch of concrete, for those of you not familiar with the Mighty Los Angeles River), and, after dispatching of a Grafter thug sent out to test them (Becky got 'im in his big Horror eye with a slingshot and killed him dead!), meet with DJ Beastly, the gang's chief.

He listens to their spiel and agrees to help (partly thanks to the tentacle they give him) on two conditions. One, the Jets get to keep and/or eat everything they kill. Two, the PCs go kill and bring back a squidhead that's been eluding the gang for some time. The PCs accept, and before long they're bombing down the remains of the 405 headed for the remains of the oil refinery that once graced the city of Carson. These days, the refinery's a ruin, but it's in that ruin that the squidhead lives.

This ended up being quite a fight. By the end of it, we'd done two chases, killed off a PC, and nearly killed another. It was good to see that the squidhead was a real challenge for them; after the gut-ripper, I was afraid he'd go down like a punk. Instead, he crushed Brian's head to a pulp and nearly did the same with Becky. Miraculously, the d4 Strong Becky managed to slip away from the grasp of the d12 Strong squidhead -- it was an awesome bit of luck, and clutch, to boot. One more round and she would've been a goner.

Also awesome: Brian was brought back from the brink of death (or... well, he was dead, technically) with a Lesser Graft. It was his sixth Graft, and he was already Human Nature d6/Horrific Nature d10, so when he rolled those six dice we were all sure he'd lose some Human Nature. Out of all those d6s and d8s, he only had to roll a 4 or above. As it turned out, all his dice came up 2s and 3s! It was pretty funny.

The new Wound/Shock dice rules were great in play, and definitely increased the fun factor. The new way of handling Bonds turned out to be more intuitive and easier to use, plus most of the NPCs they came up with ended up being used on a roll or two. Really pleased with both of those.

I'd had an idea for "combat maneuvers," although that sounds awfully fancy. Basically, if you want to do something in combat besides just kill the opposition, you can trade in a Hit to do it. I think I may have mentioned this before. In any event, it got used quite a bit in play, usually by the players, which tells me that it was intuitive, easy, and fun. So that's in.

I also have an idea for character advancement that I actually like, because it centers completely on Bonds and Grafts instead of Traits.

It looks like Leftovers is a shoo-in for Hyphen-Con, so that'll probably be the next playtest I'll do, unless another opportunity presents itself. I know Larry Harala's running Leftovers for his group this coming weekend, so that'll be another valuable data point to harvest.

In the interest of making use of the Hyphen-Con game, I'm pushing back my target date for a PDF/POD release to the end of April. Still ambitious, but I feel pretty close to getting this finished, so full steam ahead, I say.

Leftovers v1.1 Is Up!

2010-03-13T14:12:00.000-08:00

The latest version of Leftovers is online for your perusal. Some significant changes have been made, including how Wounds and Shocks work and how Bonds are defined, plus more on vehicles and vehicular combat (because it's cropped up in every game so far). Feedback, as always, is appreciated.

Oh, also -- we're playtesting tomorrow afternoon at DiceHouse Games, a most excellent game store in Fullerton, so if you're around, available, and interested, come on by and check it out.

Game-Fu 8: Refining

2010-03-12T10:00:00.000-08:00

So it took me far too long to notice that my math was, to put it kindly, off. As much as I like a default target number of 7, because 7's such an iconic number in fairy tales, it doesn't really, y'know, work. Since that's the average of 2d6, rolling the baseline 3d6 pretty much guarantees at least one point of effect every time. That's too easy, especially if a character's defense is +3 per relevant blessing. The attacker is doing damage far too often, which makes combat a little too brutal for my liking.

One interesting thing about this mechanic is that even upping that number by a couple points can have a dramatic effect on the results. After all, it's not just that you're trying to beat, say, a 9 -- it's that you're trying to beat it with dice to spare. Nine's probably as high as I'd want to go. Higher than that, and succeeding at the default difficulty with no applicable blessings means having to roll 10 on 2d6, and that's unnecessarily hard. No, 9 is good. Someone without any advantages can still pull it off, but even one relevant blessing is likely to put you over the top (10.5 average on 3d6 vs. 14 average on 4d6).

This is made even more interesting by the Fortune/Misfortune mechanic. Do you really want a point of effect if the only way you can get it is by racking up a point of Misfortune? Are you willing to have less of an effect if it means nabbing a point of Fortune? I'm eager to see the choices players make in play.

Upping the default target number also has an effect on how defenses are calculated. I'm vacillating on static defenses vs. variable defenses, but the former's easier, so I'm going with that for now. Physical defense is 9 +3/Body blessing, and Mental defense is 9 +3/Mind blessing. If I limit blessings to a total of three, that should keep things from getting too far out of hand.

That brings me to damage. (Well, not necessarily, but I was going to get here somehow, so it may as well be via an inaccurate segue.) In keeping with the non-numeric character sheet -- seriously, so far your character is a collection of adjectives -- damage is measured in hardships. There are two basic categories of these, physical (gained from damage in physical conflicts) and psychological (from social/mental conflicts), on two separate but convergent tracks. Here, it'll be easier to show than tell:

For every point of damage taken, fill in a blank with a single word that describes what's just happened to you. Start on the top row and work your way down. For example, if someone hits you with a knife for one point of damage, fill in the first physical blank with something like "Scratched" or "Cut." If you'd been hit for two points instead, you'd fill in the first two blanks, with the second blank representing a more severe result. It's the same with psychological "damage," such as that dealt through intimidation, fright, or even negotiation.

You'll notice that the two tracks converge on the bottom row. The separate tracks only go so far -- once you're damaged badly enough, it doesn't matter what finishes you off. If that bottom blank's already filled and you have to take another hardship, you're done for. That may mean you're dead, or unconscious, or cowering, or fleeing, or whatever. It's highly dependent on the situation. It's also not exactly an original idea, so I'm sure people out there are used to it already.

What do these hardships mean? Anyone attacking you can use them as blessings, but only one per row. E.g., if a Strong guy's attacking you with his big meaty fists, and you have a hardship of Bruised, he gets to roll 5d6 against you: the standard 3d6, plus 1d6 for being Strong, plus 1d6 for your hardship. If you had two hardships on the same row, he'd still only get a total of 1d6 from them, but if you had, say, two physical hardships and one psychological hardship, or two psychological and one physical, or two of each, he'd get 2d6.

Anyway, how do you recover from these things? The top row goes away at the end of the scene. The middle row has to be "healed" with a roll -- the difficulty's, say, 12. One point of effect moves it up a row; two points removes it entirely.

As for the bottom row, that's another story. Those hardships never go away until the end of the story, barring something truly extraordinary (like Queen Mab magicking it away). It doesn't just go away, though -- it gets translated into another curse. Curses are, as far as I can tell, always mental, so the new curse would have to be, too. Again, the exact nature of this new curse would be dependent on the hardship that spawned it.

Apart from magic and a situational modifiers, I think that's about it for the mechanics. Nice and simple. Such a departure from Leftovers. Not that Leftovers is a mechanically complex game, but it's a damn sight more complex than... this game. Whatever it's called.

Game-Fu 8: Mechanics

2010-03-10T03:17:00.000-08:00

Here are some rough notes on the mechanics. This includes the following ingredients:

Roll-and-keep dice pools, where the un-kept dice still matter somehow.
Character sheet fits on an index card (front and back).
Karma system -- a character's actions can reward/penalize them later.

(The other two ingredients -- the Genre Blender and the Driving Force -- are setting/premise elements, not mechanical ones.)

So then.

Roll-and-keep-and-count -- total of kept dice is effort, number of unused dice is effect. Default pool of 3d6 vs. default target number of 7.

For example, if your target number is 7, and your 3d6 roll is 4, 3, and 2, you can keep the 4 and 3 to count toward your effort (i.e., to meet the target number), while the single unused die would mean an effect of 1.
Tasks take X effect to complete. Points of effect in combat is just damage.
For every 6 in your effect pool, you get a point of Fortune. Spend Fortune to add an additional d6 to a roll (1d6/point spent). You can also receive Fortune by acting in accordance with the story's moral in a way that's disadvantageous to you (see below).
For every 1 in your effect pool, you get a point of Misfortune. If you have more Misfortune than Fortune, instead of rolling 3d6, roll 2d6. Misfortune can be lost by acting in accordance with your curse.

Characters have blessings (good qualities) and a curse -- a moral failing. These are one-word adjectival descriptors. Blessings are things like Strong, Clever, Well-Spoken, Nimble, Keen-Eyed, and so forth. Curses are usually adjectival versions of the cardinal sins -- Vain, Greedy, Gluttonous, etc. -- but can also be things like Uncharitable or Paranoid.

Blessings add dice to the pool if applicable to the situation -- 1d6 each.
Acting in accordance with your curse lets you lose Misfortune -- one point per scene in which you succumb to your curse in a way that's significant to your situation and/or the story. For example, if you're Vain, you won't lose Misfortune for fixing your hair in a mirror, but you would if you spent an hour preening instead of surveiling.

Blessings and curses are wholly player-defined, but we're going to need some examples. Especially for Magic.

Magic's a bit different, in that if you don't have a blessing for the thing you want to do, you can't do it. For example, if your Magic blessings are Shapechange and Conjure, you can't Glamer.

Blessings are divided into categories: Body and Mind for humans (or fairies in human form), and Magic and Mind for fairies. Body covers everything physical, like strength, endurance, hardiness, manual dexterity, and agility, while Mind qualities are related to intelligence, perception, empathy, persuasiveness, and so on. Magic is more nebulous, but it can cover anything within the purview of your Magic blessings. We're pretty loose when it comes to this.

Whether in human or fairy form, a fairy always has the same Mind blessings -- which means that they'll have the same number of Body and Magic blessings. Is that a problem? Upon reflection... no. In the real world, Body is the realm of direct confrontation. Magic would be the same in the fairy world.

A character's defense against physical attacks is 7 + three times the number of his Body blessings. That becomes the target number for attacks against the character. For example, a character with two Body blessings -- say, Strong and Nimble -- would have a physical defense of 13.
Ditto mental defense and magic defense.
Armor or its equivalent gobbles effect dice.
Not sure exactly how damage will work, but... it'll work, I can promise you that.

There may be something about "death" just meaning that you revert to your fairy form -- sort of a last resort granted by the Fairy Queen. In practical terms, it's another chance to play your character as their "normal" self. But I dunno.

Every story has a moral, chosen by the GM before the game begins. Fairy tale morals usually boil down to "Don't be stupid, inattentive, or cruel." The game will include four or five Perrault-style morals-in-verse (but not actual Perrault morals, because they're a little cutesy and overly specific), although GMs can certainly make up their own. Every moral should include, or at least strongly imply, two basic modes of behavior: "correct" and "incorrect." For example, a moral like "It's better to suffer than to do wrong" says that nothing justifies the incorrect behavior of wrongdoing -- it's better to do the right thing, even if that means suffering. Acting "correctly," according to the moral, can earn a player Fortune, while engaging in "incorrect" behavior can earn Misfortune. Both of these are at the GM's discretion.
The character sheet is an index card, with the PC's human version on one side and the fairy version on the other. When the PC crosses over, flip the card over to the appropriate side.

Game-Fu 8: Premise

2010-03-08T15:19:00.000-08:00

As much as Fairy Tale + Espionage intrigues me, I think I'm going with a sort of fairy tale-influenced cross between "The Lost Room," "Warehouse 13," and... I dunno... "G vs. E," maybe. "Warehouse 13" is admittedly not great TV, but as a premise for an RPG, it's fantastic. "The Lost Room" was interesting, even if I liked the setting more than the actual plot, and the first season of "G vs. E" (as opposed to "Good vs. Evil," as it later became) was, as we all know, absolutely bad-ass.

So here's a rough outline of the premise:

There's a fairytale world, and the real world. They exist side-by-side as alternate dimensions. There used to be a lot of travel between the two worlds, with fairies meddling in the affairs of humans and humans wandering accidentally into the fairytale world on the way to their grandmother's house. At some point, the Fairy Queen decided that all of this contact was bad for fairykind, so she established a barrier between the two worlds to prevent cross-contamination. Most humans couldn't find their way across anyway. Fairies still could, but doing so was grounds for severe punishment. Even so, the barrier has a dramatic effect on fairies crossing over: It turns them human.
Fairy tales are true stories, or at least have a kernel of truth. Centuries of these stories being told over and over has imbued them, and the fairy world, with increasing magical power. Certain artifacts from these stories that are still around are saturated in this power -- in the world of man. In the fairy world, they're just ordinary objects: a red cap, a silver pitcher, a pair of boots, a key, a book, and so on. Take them to the world of man, though, and they're suddenly supernaturally powerful. That key makes any door open onto a secret room in Bluebeard's castle. That red cap? Whoever wears it can find any location without getting lost. Dr. Knowall's ABC Book contains any piece of information that's currently known by a living person. And so on.
The fairy world is still accessible from the world of man, and vice-versa, through certain points of commonality -- rings of mushrooms, stone circles, strange doors, dead-end alleyways, etc. These paths are all but unknown to mankind, but fairies know of them. Each of these paths only works once per year.
Perhaps because it's forbidden, more than a few fairies are drawn to the world of man, even though it means being human while they're there. To compensate for their lack of magic there, they're often known to take a fairytale souvenir with them. Consequently, they frequently become highly successful, thanks to the power of the souvenir.
Naturally, this doesn't sit well with Queen Mab. These fairies are to be tracked down and punished, and their souvenirs confiscated. That's where the PCs come in: They're agents of the queen, tasked with going to the world of man (on official business), recovering these souvenirs, and capturing the rogue fairies.
Most of the action takes place in the world of man, but it's conceivable that stuff can happen in the fairy world, too.

Game-Fu 8: Initial Thoughts

2010-03-05T19:30:00.000-08:00

So the ingredients have now been posted for this more recent Game-Fu contest, and I'm already inspired by some vague ideas. As before, there's a list of System Constraints (mechanics, more or less) and a Genre Blender (pick two and puree), plus a couple that are new, as far as I know: a MacGuffin, or a PC's raison d'etre in the game, and a collection of Miscellanea, only one of which really appeals to me. And unlike last time... no image requirement. Fine with me. I lost a few points for not using my images creatively enough with Leftovers (even though the judge in question acknowledged that the images were meant to be inspirational only, and their layout within the document wasn't supposed to figure into the score -- not that I'm bitter).

It looks like regardless of what I end up doing, there are a few ingredients that I'll definitely use. One of the System Constraints is a dice mechanic I suggested -- a roll-and-keep dice pool, where the un-kept dice are mechanically significant -- so that's in, and one of the Miscellanea is a character sheet that's simple enough to fit on one or both sides of an index card, so that's in, too. That means I only need three more ingredients. But one of those has to be the Genre Blender, so really, it's only two ingredients. Another System Constraint that's, essentially, "no XP," so that's another easy one to throw into the mix, and yet another that's a karma system in which a character's actions come back to bite/kiss their ass somewhere down the line. So, potentially, I'm done with picking ingredients. That was easy.

However, there are some other character-generation ingredients that still interest me: round-robin chargen, "colors as a meaningful requirement for character," and chargen as a series of multiple-choice questions. Not all of those easily fit every genre, though, so I'm not 100% on them. (The karma thing doesn't fit every genre, either, but it fits enough that I think I can safely assume I'll use it.)

As for the core of this whole process, the Genre Blender, here are my initial thoughts:

A Goonies-style adventure game where the PCs are all kids (junior high, tops) tackling challenges and mysteries unknown to or far from adult authority. (Pulp Adventure/Modern Occult)
Another game with child PCs, but this time it's about kids who have each come into possession of a seemingly mundane object that's actually a displaced artifact of some kind from the fairy world. The kids have all struck a deal with the fairies: They can keep and use their whatsits if they help the fairies track down the remaining missing artifacts, all of which appear to be ordinary objects in our world. This one could make neat use of the index-card character sheet: the "real world" version of the character is on one side, and the Fairy World version's on the other. (Fairy Tale/Modern Occult)
Two words: fairy spies. (Espionage/Fairy Tale)

New Game-Fu Contest and More

2010-03-02T02:26:00.000-08:00

First: A new Game-Fu contest begins on RPG.net on March 5th. The stakes couldn't be smaller -- three strangers on the Internet passing judgment on your game! -- but the point is to give yourself a deadline to produce a game you'd never thought of before. If that appeals to you, as it does to me, check it out.

Second: I'd gotten a little stuck on A Wizard Did It -- my working title for that "Discovery"-themed game I started to write for an EN World contest -- when it came to combat. Literally everything else quickly spun out of the original idea of a predominantly blank character sheet and PCs as newborn magical constructs, but when it came to combat I was left scratching my head. I didn't want to introduce anything as bland as hit points, or simple "wound boxes," or anything else that didn't stem directly from potential, functions, and specialties.

However! I think I've sorted that out.

Constructs that take damage accumulate Breakage dice. Once a construct has more than three Breakage dice, it's Broken -- i.e., taken out of play. Could be the equivalent of "dead," but it doesn't have to be. (It could be "Lose your highest function and any attendant specialties, then clear your Breakage dice." That'd be rough, but it beats dying... right?) When the damaged construct engages in an unopposed test or a conflict, add its Breakage dice to the 2d6 the GM (or opponent) would normally roll, then keep the best two dice.

But! Instead of taking one or more Breakage dice as damage, you can instead roll those dice and give the GM the resulting number of Mystery points (which the GM uses to fuel the opposition). So let's say you take a Breakage die, and you just take it. But then you take a second Breakage die, and you decide you don't want to get that close to being Broken -- so instead of taking the damage, you roll 2d6 (because it's your second Breakage die) and get a 9. The GM then gets 9 Mystery. The good news is you still only have one Breakage die. The bad news is that things will be tougher for you in the future.

Third: Was there a third thing? I'll try to think of something.

Oh, right! Leftovers is inching ever closer to publication (if you can call selling something on Lulu.com "publication" -- and I do!). I'm starting to think seriously about art and layout; Lulu has a 7" x 9" landscape format that I really dig. My friend Tony suggested it, actually, and I took to it right away. The plan is to get a first edition out by the end of the month.

That's pretty ambitious, but I think we can pull it off. I do have a fair bit of writing ahead of me, though... and there's that other Game-Fu contest I mentioned earlier... but what the hell, let's be ambitious.

Very Belated OrcCon 2010 Wrap-Up

2010-02-22T18:12:00.000-08:00

OrcCon was the weekend before last, so I apologize for just now getting around to this. However, it's not for lack of enthusiasm -- the playtests of Leftovers went very well, and I'm psyched to get more going soon. I came back from the con with some great feedback and ideas that'll make the next version a better game. I also gave away four ashcan copies of the current version of the rules, and have received assurances that total strangers will playtest it in distant lands (like Utah!) and report back with their findings.

The basic plot was this: One or more of the PCs has a younger relative named Suzanne, who uncharacteristically doesn't show up for dinner one evening in the Trench. Asking around reveals that she headed out into the Ruins by herself to find "something cool" and prove that she's old enough to be on her own. She's mischievous and cocky, so this comes as a disappointment but not a surprise. Of course, anything outside the Trench is so dangerous that nobody should go anywhere alone, but she doesn't quite get that. So the PCs saddle up and go out there to find her before it's too late (literally and figuratively).

While poking around the Ruins, they encounter a thousand-claw. During the fight (or shortly thereafter), four Grafted-up guys show up and either help kill the Horror (Friday night's game) or just start hacking its many limbs off (Saturday morning's game). What with one thing and another, the PCs learn that they're initiates of the Order of St. Eurosia, a weird religious cult who think that Graftliness is next to godliness. In addition to being crazy, they're also known as enthusiastic proselytizers. So when they freely admit that they have seen a little girl matching Suzanne's description and, in fact, she's back at their church awaiting some sort of ceremony, the PCs get extra-worried.

The loony Eurosians are happy to take the PCs to their church -- which, since we're in Downtown LA, is in the remains of the Disney Concert Hall -- and aren't threatened in the least by their presence. For one, the church is full of initiates and a few higher-ups, and four outsiders aren't going to be a threat. Two, they take the PCs in through the obvious, dangerous entrance (instead of the hidden, safe entrance): a darkened parking garage crawling with creepers (imagine a sentient tumbleweed made of tentacles that wants to eat you). The initiates, being more or less totally insane (as has been mentioned), walk willingly into the parking garage, confident that God will either protect them, if He has more for them to do in this world, or "call them home," as it were, via his heavenly agents. They call them heavenly agents; we call them Horrors.

One big scary creeper fight later, the PCs manage to escape deeper into the parking garage while their guides end up, uh, "nearer to Thee" (though in both games, one PC was wounded nigh unto death by the things). Our heroes find themselves in the foyer of Disney Concert Hall, and can hear deep, throbbing music coming from the auditorium itself. Inside, they find a bunch of initiates singing tuneless hymns, accompanied by the hall's formerly awesome pipe organ. Onstage is a shocking sight: Two priests stand over a young girl strapped onto a makeshift altar. One holds her arm out, while the other raises a meat cleaver as if to chop it off. On the floor beside them are a few other "prospective members," bound but not gagged, awaiting their turn. Behind the altar, intoning twisted scripture from a large tome, is the bishop, a barely human muckity-muck whose lower half has been replaced by what appears to be the body of a giant slug of some kind. Behind him, chained to a wall at the back of the stage, is a Horror, commonly called a hookface, either dead or unconscious.

Oh -- and the girl on the altar is Suzanne.

It's immediately clear what's going on: They're going to chop off Suzanne's arm and replace it with part of a Horror. Probably something from that hookface, by the looks of it.

Naturally, a hell breaks loose as the PCs attack. The methods varied between the two groups, but the aims and results were basically the same. Partway through the fight, the hookface awakens, tears itself free of its chains as if they were made of balsa wood, and rampages rather indiscriminately through the assembled. See, they only had a short window of opportunity to hack it to pieces before it woke up, after which... well, that thing that happened.

The Friday night group ended up being almost all pure humans, with one exception. That was interesting and unexpected, though not statistically improbable. It meant that, on the whole, they were very well-equipped, and the thought of Suzanne receiving a Graft against her will seemed a little more repugnant. The Saturday morning group was the opposite: two d6 Human Nature/d10 Horrific Nature types, one d8/d8, and one pure human.

The latter group was seriously effective in combat, thanks to their Grafts. Where the Friday group had a bit of trouble taking down that thousand-claw (even going so far as running over it with a semi), the Saturday morning group nearly one-shotted it, thanks to one character's high Violent Trait (d12) and combat-applicable Tool (a weaponized stripper pole) and Graft (a toad-like tongue, often used to wield the pole). Still, the Friday group was more effective at range, which was important.

One character in each group ended up getting a large vehicle as a tool (a semi Friday night, and a Coast Guard dump-truck Saturday morning), and that vehicle ended up being mechanically useful exactly once for each of them. However, in narrative terms, they were very useful: They gave the PCs the assumed ability to get to the Ruins in a hurry, plus the ability to haul pretty much anything they wanted.

Character creation was quick enough, and we definitely weren't short of time, despite an investigation scene, a talky scene, and three combats. And they weren't wimpy combats, either -- even the Saturday group was worried in that last combat against the initiates, priests, bishop, and hookface. Well, I mean, who wouldn't be? They were outnumbered five to one by the initiates alone. Every combat scene felt like it had real risk. The one character who never had anything to worry about (the stripper-fu fighter) was also maximized for combat (d12 Violent, 17 PD, 8 Vigor), so I didn't really have a problem with it. I mean, if that's the one thing your character can do well, they should be able to do it well.

Friday night, I forgot to include all the mental attacks I'd wanted (every time you see a Horror...), so that meant that the Saturday group got it in spades. I regret not integrating those vehicles into the narrative more, but after a while there just wasn't a place for them. I didn't want to tell them "Hey guys, don't take those big vehicles!" because I wanted them to just make characters with as little input from me as possible.

Probably the most successful element, though, was popping dice. It was just fun in play, and the players really seemed to enjoy it.

A few changes I'm making to the manuscript as a result of the playtests:

Spend a Hit in combat to do something other than cause a Wound. We had a player want to shoot the cleaver out of the priest's hand, and off-the-cuff I said he could either do damage or disarm the guy. It's a real no-muss, no-fuss solution to "combat maneuvers." If you want to disarm the guy, knock him down, or grab him, spend a Hit -- or spend 3 Hits to do all three.
Wounds and Shocks proved to be problematic as written. Not because they didn't work, but because they were kinda... dull. Plus, when it came right down to it, I really didn't want to impose steps backward. Instead, Wounds and Shocks will be assigned a die type, just like everything else. When you attack someone with a Wound or Shock, include that die in your pool. So instead of Wounds and Shocks making you less effective, they make your opponents more effective. It's a little more heroic that way, too.
Bonds need to be reworked to be a little more open. The current implementation is pretty clearly an artifact of the Game-Fu contest that spawned this thing in the first place, and there's no need to keep it as-is. Bonds will be split into Allies (PCs) and Contacts (NPCs), with a series of rather generic phrases instead of the trust/distrust/etc. thing I have now. Plug the Ally's or Contact's name into the blank, assigned a die type, and you're done. For example, "Sharky can't be trusted" or "Cooper has my back." It makes them easier to use in play, and is reflective of how the players were phrasing their Bonds anyway, when they used them.

All in all, a successful couple of playtests. I want to do another one soon at Dicehouse, probably on a weekend; I'll post here about it when I know more.

Thanks again to all my playtesters! And to Larry Harala, who didn't show up for the Saturday game, but has taken a copy of the rules home and will be playtesting it out in Utah to atone for his disgraceful absence!

Leftovers Playtest Last Night

2010-02-08T14:52:00.000-08:00

So last night my ol' gaming group and me (plus one) did a brief playtest of Leftovers via Skype and Google Wave. This included character creation, which ended up taking way, way longer than I'd hoped -- but I chalk that up to having to mediate everything through our Internet interfaces. I wanted it to take 30 minutes; it ended up being more like two hours.

This would be bad news for OrcCon this weekend, at which I intend to include chargen in each of the two 4-hour sessions, but I've made a character sheet that I think should sort out most of the confusion in advance. I know part of the problem was people rating their Traits, then later on finding out that, for example, if you don't rate your Violent Trait at all, you'll be terrible (and dead) in a fight. Personally, that's a feature, not a bug, but I don't want people getting screwed over by their lack of familiarity with the system. The character sheet has the formulae for the four derived stats (Physical and Mental Defense, Vigor, and Spirit) right there, along with a list of the 18 Traits and what kind of dice you get to spread between them at character creation.

As for the playtest itself, it went pretty well, although I made a pretty egregious mistake of putting them up against three really tough Horrors right off the bat, which led to a really grindy combat that I'd rather avoid in the future. But hey, I was pretty much making it all up as I went along, so I'm going to take the lesson and leave the rest.

The PCs were:
Lebowitz, "a 'former' smuggler of goods" with an acid-spraying duct of some kind, a tentacle foot, and a few other Grafts (Human Nature d6/Horrific Nature d10)
Chrissy, a rather literal combat monster with wings, a claw hand, and a tail (d6/d10)
Tretch, a mechanica-oriented guy with a "hand of worms" and a compound eye (d8/d8)
Chuck "Phat" Loot, a material opportunist with a fin behind one ear that improves hearing (d6/d10)
Beckers, a pure-strain human scientist (d12/d4)

The story begins in the Trench, when Chuck is approached by a wealthy scrounger named Rinaldo. It seems Rinaldo's found a topographic map in the Ruins that, he says, clearly shows the location of an underground military base -- the fabled Bunker. Unfortunately, it's rather distant, and the journey would be prohibitively dangerous. But he knows that Chuck owns a former news helicopter (thanks to Chuck's high Human Nature and d12 Resourceful), so he wants to "bring him in on the deal," as it were. The reward? Finding the Bunker means safety, security, and all the comforts of the pre-apoc world. Or most of them, anyway.

So Chuck rounds up the PCs, starting with Chrissy (with whom he has a loyalty Bond -- although ironically, Chrissy has a betrayal Bond with Chuck) and Tretch, the best pilot he knows. Those two bring in Lebowitz and Beckers. The next day they all say goodbye to the Trench forever and head out over the Wasteland.

An hour or so into their flight, though, the Action News Chopper is attacked by three Fly-By-Nights, aka Flying Vs. And they were tough. Really tough. One would've been enough. But what with one thing and another, Chrissy leaps out of the helicopter to fight them in the air, Beckers falls out the open door when a Flying V yanks on one of the helicopter's runners, Lebowitz is nearly stabbed to death (5 Wounds!) by a Flying V's barbed prehensile tail, and Tretch pulls a nose dive to cut one of the things neatly in half with the helicopter's rotor blades.

That last event means that the windshield's covered in thick, dark blood, making visibility impossible and turning that nose dive into a much more dangerous proposition than intended. He manages to land the thing, but not without significant damage. While he repairs he, a few of the others set out to find that downed Flying V so Lebowitz doesn't, y'know, die. It isn't hard to find on the flat, cracked plain: two huge black triangles lying in pools of blood. They graft the wings onto Lebowitz and the tail onto Chrissy -- who already had a tail, but wants a new one, apparently, which means convincing Beckers to cut off the existing tail with a sword -- and each of them ends up more Horrific (and less Human) as a result.

(Oh, and more significantly, Rinaldo is killed in the crash -- Tretch's player failed his Pilot roll to land safely, so I made Rinaldo a casualty of his failure. Nobody else can make heads or tails of Rinaldo's map.)

Some time after their return, while Tretch continues to repair the helicopter, Chuck hears an odd noise wafting across the overcast plain: a car engine, and an especially well-tuned one at that. This can only mean trouble, so Chrissy and Lebowitz fly up to get a better view. In the distance, they see two Jeeps and a small military transport following the long gash the helicopter left in the plain when Tretch more or less landed it. There's nowhere to hide but the helicopter, so everyone chooses to meet these strangers head-on in a dramatic pose.

When the vehicles arrive, armed and uniformed soldiers pour out, taking up positions around the PCs. One or two PCs figure out that they're Humanists, a hard-line pro-human faction that often kills anyone with even a single Graft on sight. A commander of some kind steps forward and says, "Anyone of you that's human, you'd better step forward now. Wouldn't want you getting shot."

And that's where we left things. If we continue, I honestly don't know where it'll go from there, since everyone but Beckers should probably be cut down without hesitation.

Those Flying Vs, as I said, were extremely tough. A PD of 15 and a Vigor of 5 meant that they had to roll at least a 20 to deal a single Wound, which happened... not often. They could Rattle them plenty, but a disheartening number of those were 18s or 19s. So close! Later, I realized we forgot to include Bond dice when we should've, which definitely would've made a difference. Still, Lebowitz managed to nail one of them with a 25 on a Violent roll, so that was pretty impressive.

All in all, it was a valuable session, if a brief one. Looking forward to OrcCon when I can test it again!

EN World Contest: Deadline? What Deadline?

2010-02-01T01:03:00.000-08:00

So I didn't end up submitting this game by the contest's deadline. I just got too preoccupied with FATE stuff right smack-dab in the middle of the contest and didn't get around to it. Frankly, though, whatever. I've made enough progress that I'm going to see it through regardless. It strikes me as a great game for cons. The rules couldn't be much lighter, and the way the mechanics encourage -- nay, require a make-it-up-as-you-go approach seems ideally suited for a con one-shot.

Once I'm done with it, I'll either put it on a wiki of some kind or get a rudimentary PDF put together for download.

Leftovers at OrcCon

2010-01-29T13:29:00.000-08:00

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 that out. (Bonus: I don't have to make pregens!)

Event pre-registration starts tomorrow the 30th, so if you're in the LA area and not planning on going to OrcCon, well, you should, because it's a good con. Check out the scheduled games on the website if you don't believe me. There's always a good mix of mainstream games like D&D or Storyteller and indie titles like Dogs in the Vineyard and Burning Empires (and FATE!).

UPDATE: Pre-reg opened at noon; both sessions filled up by 1:00. So yay for me having four friends going to the con!

EN World Contest: Down to Business

2010-01-25T13:33:00.000-08:00

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 levels of detail. Agon budgets Strife based on the number of players and how many objectives they'll need to overcome (usually three). Spending Strife is pretty cut-and-dry, starting from a baseline of 2d6 for zero Strife, and bumping up each die a step for each point spent (i.e., 2d6, 1d6 1d8, 2d8, etc.). And that's the only thing you're really tracking -- the strength of the opposition, handled in one abstract roll. Keep in mind, though, that in Agon, beating the opposition isn't enough. You also want to beat everyone else at the table. That's the real point of the game. The GM's mostly there to give them reasons to fight for the spotlight.

Beast Hunters is designed as a two-player game -- player and GM -- so concerns about number of players and all that stuff from Agon just aren't an issue. Instead, the player tells the GM how many Adversity points he has to work with, based solely on how challenging he wants the game to be. Moreover, spending Adversity is a much more involved process for the GM, involving minutiae like initiative and rather specific combat abilities (at least, "specific" in comparison with Agon). It's interesting to me how these two games execute the same basic idea in such contrasting ways.

I find it unlikely that I'm going to implement some radically different method for this as-yet untitled Discovery game (although in my head I call it A Wizard Did It). Indeed, something akin to Agon looks like the way to go, for two reasons. One, the simplicity of spending points on a single "stat" meshes well with the way PCs are fleshed out. The more detailed I make the opposition, the more detailed I probably have to make the PCs, and I want to avoid that at all costs. Two, it just makes sense to budget points based on the number of players involved.

However, I also want a slider to control the length or difficulty of the game (e.g., 10 Mystery/player for a short game, 15 Mystery/player for a standard game, and 20 Mystery/player for a longer or more-challenging game). If each player starts with 10 potential split between Physical and Mental, the GM generally needs to start with a bit more Mystery than that, because he'll potentially (ha!) be spending it not just on antagonists, but on establishing, altering, or deleting player-generated details as well. Of course, not everything the PCs encounter will be their equal, but you get the idea.

As for the rest of the setting, well, I really want to leave that up to the GM and players, although it'd probably be a good idea to have a random-generation method of some kind to get things going in a hurry (hey, something else Agon does!). That's good, because I loves me some tables and randomly generated nonsense, so I should enjoy putting that together.

A Cure for Seventeen Stab Wounds in the Back

2010-01-16T00:42:00.000-08:00

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 eye? I mean, if you haven't had one of those things cut off, ripped off, or gouged out, does it make sense to, say, cut off a hand just so you can justify a Graft and heal a couple Wounds?

So as I see it, there's a choice between two options. One is logical but requires bookkeeping, and the other is less logical but simpler.

Track individual hits. A 2-Wound hit justifies a Minor Graft, a 3-Wound hit justifies a Lesser Graft, and a 4-Wound hit qualifies you for a Greater Graft.

This makes sense, but keeping track of how many Wounds each hit did is a potential hassle. Also, it might suck if you've been hit for 1 Wound five times. Healing with Medical might prove fatal.

Don't worry about how damaging any single successful attack, and just treat Wounds taken as a slush-fund to "pay" for Grafts, using the same 2/3/4 cost structure as above.

This makes less sense -- if you've just taken a few 1-Wound hits, it's hard to believe one was just a scratch while another meant losing an eye, even though they each only dealt 1 Wound -- but it doesn't require tracking anything except your total Wounds, which you're doing anyway.

I lean toward the second, just because it's faster and not so fiddly, but I can't deny how intuitive and internally consistent the first option is. It just makes sense. But at the end of the day, Leftovers is much less about sense and reality than about having fun, so the quicker, more-fun option should win out. If that means retroactively interpreting your 5 Wounds as having lost both your arms sometime during the fight, then go ahead and do that. The bigger point, I guess, is that you need to have taken at least 4 Wounds to justify something like that. Surely that much verisimilitude can live side-by-side with loosey-goosey fun.

More on This Discovery Idea

2010-01-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

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 2d10 might be better. We'll cross that bridge if we come to it.

So then -- the new stuff.

In addition to the potentials, we have two other resource pools: Duty and Discovery.

When you fail a roll and a die matches the current total of your relevant potential (Physical or Mental), you gain a point of Duty. Spend Duty to add 1d6 to a roll. Conceptually, a temporary setback merely girds your resolve to see your mission through. What are the ramifications of this mechanic?

If you let potential accumulate too high, you're not going to earn any Duty. You're encouraged to define functions and specialties on a regular basis.
It's possible to be rewarded for failing a roll, but it isn't an automatic thing.
You're encouraged to take a chance on a task that's likely to result in failure.
If you're out of potential but have a few points of Duty, it's possible to attempt tasks for which you don't have a relevant function and still have a decent chance of success. You're powering through on sheer willpower and determination.

When you succeed on a roll and a die matches the current total of your relevant potential, you gain a point of Discovery. Discovery isn't spent on die rolls. Instead, it's a meta-currency that players bid to help define the gameworld. Players can use it to declare, distort, or deny details. (See? Alliteration, cause unknown.) Each of these uses of Discovery requires a minimum bid. Unless you bid at least that much Discovery, you can't add or change a detail.

Declare: Add a detail to the world. Example: Goblins respect shows of strength.

Minimum Bid: 1 Discovery

Distort: Change a pre-existing detail. Example: Change "Goblins respect shows of strength" to "Goblins respect cunning above all else."

Minimum Bid: 2 Discovery

Deny: Eliminate a pre-existing detail. Example: Remove the "Goblins respect cunning above all else" detail from the game altogether.

Minimum Bid: 3 Discovery

When you want to declare a detail, bid at least 1 Discovery. Go clockwise around the table, and follow the usual bidding process used in auctions. Whoever has the winning bid gets to declare the detail. That player marks off that many Discovery points, writes the detail on an index card, and puts it in the middle of the table. That detail is now a part of the gameworld.

Distorting or denying a detail works the same basic way, but with a higher initial bid: 2 Discovery to distort or 3 Discovery to deny. The winner of a distort auction gets to alter the detail in question, but not beyond all recognition. For example, "Goblins respect strength" could become "Goblins respect cunning" or "Ogres respect strength," but not "There are three moons." The winner of a deny auction gets to remove the detail in question -- just take the index card off the table, and it's gone. The winner of either of these auctions also has the option to keep the detail as-is.

If the detail is successfully distorted or denied, the player who first declared the detail receives 2 Discovery (if distorted) or 3 Discovery (if denied). Messing with someone else's details lets you refine the world to your liking, but it also empowers them to declare, distort, or deny further details -- maybe (probably) even yours.

So what are the ramifications of this mechanic?

Tying this into successful rolls means that you're rewarded for using your best functions and specialties. That's okay -- if you're doing that, you're acting in accordance with your purpose. That's what you're supposed to be doing anyway.
Again, you don't want to let potential just build up, because if it goes too high you'll never gain Discovery. However, neither do you want to use it all up. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but neither am I going to worry about it. It does encourage you to turn successful rolls into failures when using your other potential, though, and that seems good.

All this "detail" stuff is intended to directly address the theme of Discovery, in that nobody (not even the GM!) can be sure of what's actually around the next bend in the road.

Speaking of the GM: The GM's part of this process, too. He has an analogous resource pool called Mystery. The GM can bid Mystery to distort or deny a detail declared by a player, just like a player would bid Discovery. However, the GM never has to bid anything to declare a detail. In essence, just about everything the GM says is "declaring a detail," so we don't want to bog down the natural GMing process with a bunch of unnecessary mechanics.

That said, the GM can explicitly declare a detail by writing it on an index card and slapping it down with the others. There's no bidding process for that, but what it does is make that detail susceptible to distortion and denial. Why would the GM do such a thing? If that detail is distorted or denied, the GM receives 2 or 3 Mystery, exactly like a player would receive Discovery.

The GM doesn't just use Mystery for this detail business; it's also a pacing mechanic for the opposition the players face. More on that later.

EN World Contest: First Thoughts

2010-01-05T16:17:00.000-08:00

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" besides, y'know, hacking your way through a jungle or sailing uncharted seas. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- it's just that I don't really see the need to come up with a whole new system for it. And if I'm going to make a game centered around Discovery, with a capital D, then I want the mechanics to strongly support -- and focus on -- that theme. I've also had a weird desire lately to make a game that's intended to do one thing and one thing only, that has a very tight, narrow purpose, like My Life With Master or ~~Don't Rest Your Head~~ Maid. Something that couldn't handle a different kind of game without significant alteration. I'm not sure why I want to do that, but there's definitely an attraction there.

That led me to this idea: A wizard has created a bunch of constructs, because that's what he does. Then he disappears for reasons unknown. In his absence, the constructs "wake up." They know nothing about themselves or each other -- their own abilities and purpose are a mystery to them. The only thing they know is that they have to find their master.

Characters would start off consisting of only a few components, called potentials, and then "evolve" abilities over time as they realize those potentials. Right now the potentials are Physical Potential and Mental Potential, although there's certainly room for a third.

Potentials represent pools of points to spend on failed rolls (the dice mechanic is up in the air right now, but there will definitely be dice). Doing so lets the player define a function -- something the construct was intended to do, or relating to its purpose. A function is a permanent bonus to relevant tasks; the bonus is commensurate with however much potential was spent to create it in the first place. It's a sort of retroactive skill purchase -- like "Oh, I succeeded at this -- I must be meant to do it."

Example: Glosk is attempting to decipher a scroll written in an ancient language (a Mental task). He fails his roll, but spends X Mental Potential to succeed instead. This lets him define an appropriate function -- say, Linguistics, but it could just as easily be Ancient Languages -- at a bonus of +X. The next time he deals with a language, he'll get the benefit of his Linguistics function.

Spending potential on a failed roll that's already gotten a bonus from a function lets the player define a specialty within that function. The specialty, like the function, must be relevant to the situation, but more narrowly focused. Again, if you're able to do it (by spending potential), then it must be because it's part of your purpose.

Example: Glosk finds himself in the middle of a negotiation between some hostile goblins and his companions, and accurate translation is essential. He rolls the dice, applies the bonus from his Linguistics function, and... fails anyway. So he spends another Y points of Mental Potential to succeed and defines a Linguistics specialty: Goblinese. The next time he needs to translate, speak, or read Goblinese, he'll apply the +X bonus from his Linguistics function and the +Y bonus from his Goblinese specialty. Note that if Glosk hadn't applied his Linguistics function, he could've defined another function, such as Diplomacy, instead of a specialty.

It's also possible to unlock hidden potential by voluntarily failing a roll. That is, the roll succeeds, but you choose to fail. When you do this, you gain a point in a potential that's isn't relevant to your current task. You're failing because this sort of thing is not what you're intended to do -- it's outside your purpose, and that's why you've failed. Your potential clearly lies in another area.

Example: Unfortunately, things with the goblins don't end up going so well, and Glosk finds himself locked in desperate combat. Forced to fight, he takes a swing at a goblin -- and hits! However, Glosk's player is so dedicated to making Glosk a mental powerhouse that he chooses to miss instead. That gets him a point of Mental Potential he can spend later.

An important part of this is making failure interesting and significant. If you defy the dice and say you can't read that scroll after all, whatever's on it just became that much more important.

Like I said, I'm not sure what the dice mechanic will be, but I'm digging what I've got here. I also want to include a system for letting players add details to the world -- possibly only for each other, instead of for themselves.

Ah! The Real Problem

2010-01-03T15:49:00.000-08:00

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. You could call that margin of success divided by two, but people hate division, so I'm trying to avoid that particular operation wherever possible.

The only problem with this is that while it might work well for closely matched participants, it might be a little much if the two sides are a little more... uh... differently abled, as it were. But hey, this isn't for combat, so maybe it isn't a problem to be able to "one-shot" the opposition if you're in a chase or a negotiation.

Regardless, I'd keep the stress track for things like chases; there's no reason for that to change. The only problem is with the Hits, and the danger that they might not, as they say, keep on coming.

Leftovers' First Playtest

2010-01-02T23:50:00.000-08:00

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 excited to see a complete Leftovers PC for the first time -- Andy's Grey Smith:

Grey Smith
Human Nature: d10
Horrific Nature: d6
1 Minor Graft: a red eye on the back of his neck (d6)
Traits -

Stealthy (d12)
Deceptive (d10)
Combative (d8)
Resourceful (d8)
Driver (d6)
Horrors (d6)
Athletic (d6)
Strong (d4)
Perceptive (d4)
Intimidating (d4)
Resolute (d4)
Educated (d4)

Bonds -

I trust Jimbo because he fixed my car (d6)
I distrust Dr. Ido because she's too perfect (d8)
I'm loyal to Dr. Ido because I know she can fix me up (d10)
I'd betray DJ Beastly for his nice gear (d6)

Tools -

Lockpicks (d8)
Pistol (d6)

Physical Defense - 11
Mental Defense - 7
Vigor - 3
Spirit - 2

I Love Tables

2009-12-31T19:35:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been way into tables. I'm not sure why. I used to love Rolemaster, almost specifically for its weapons tables. I dunno -- I really appreciate games where you can just look at the dice and know everything you need at a glance, but tables still have some weird allure for me. I wrote (and have used) a random adventure generator for Legends of Anglerre, Leftovers' random Horror generation tables are one of my favorite things in the game, S.O.S. relies heavily on a table for all task and conflict resolution, and so on.

Anyway, in keeping with that, here's the main table -- the effect table, or whatever I'll end up calling it -- from my in-progress Simian Circle contest entry. I'm not claiming it's totally original (it unintentionally shares some points of commonality with ZeFRS, BASH, and FASERIP, apparently -- not that there's anything wrong with that), and there's certainly more to the mechanics than just this, but I am totally in love with this table right now.

Happy New Year!

Tasks: Hits and Flops

2009-12-31T14:10:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the end of 2009! Hope everyone's looking forward to 2010. I'm pretty jazzed about it, because I'm going to put out at least two games next year. I let myself down in 2009 by not making meaningful progress on Twists of Fate, and I don't plan to repeat that in the new year. 2010 will see the release of Leftovers and... something else -- if not Twists of Fate, then one of the other projects I've been working on, like the S.O.S. (Sorta Old-School) RPG. That one's been going on behind the scenes for months now. However, I'm really digging this other game I'm doing for Simian Circle's d10 contest, so maybe that will take precedence. I dunno. S.O.S. is about three-quarters done, barring playtesting, so it's hard to say. I also have a few board and card games in development, which is a little surprising in light of the fact that I hardly ever play board or card games. The point is, stuff is happening, and that's cool.

In the meantime, let's crack on with Leftovers.

Tasks

Struggle against opposition is a commonplace occurrence in the life of a survivor, but there are plenty of times when nothing’s actively working against you. We’re talking about things like climbing a wall, jumping over a gap in the floor, searching a ruined garage for a functioning car battery, fashioning a spear out of a crowbar and a broomstick, and so on. These are called tasks (as opposed to conflicts, which involve two or more active participants in opposition to one another).

Tasks come in various categories of difficulty:

Trivial: Don’t even bother rolling for something this simple. Examples: Jumping a few feet, changing a tire, reviving someone who’s been knocked out, knowing where Cleveland is (or was).
Tricky: Most people can do this. Examples: Jumping down 10 feet without hurting yourself, changing a car’s oil, bandaging a wound, finding north.
Challenging: This may require some training or talent. Examples: Jumping from rooftop to rooftop over a narrow alley, replacing a muffler, performing CPR, interpreting a topographical map.
Demanding: Those without training probably won’t know where to begin. Examples: Jumping a 15-foot chasm, rebuilding an engine, setting a broken bone, navigating by the stars.
Severe: Only experts or trained professionals can pull this off with any reliability. Examples: Jumping a 20-foot chasm, building an engine from parts of several different engines, performing surgery, navigating by the stars on a cloudy night.
Extreme: Even the best of the best will break a sweat. Examples: Parkour-ing your way up a five-story building, turning a junkyard full of scrap into a viable armored car, transplanting a limb or internal organ, navigating blind.

The difficulty of a given task is measured by its Target, which is the minimum number that must be rolled for the task to succeed.

Hits and Flops
Sometimes, it’s not enough to know whether you succeeded or failed – you want to know how well you succeeded or how disastrously you failed. For that, we have Hits and Flops.

First, success. Take half the task’s Target, rounded down, and divide the amount by which you made the roll (that is, your margin of success) by that number. That’s how many Hits you’ve scored. (Drop any remainders.) The more Hits, the better you’ve done. For every Hit, the GM should have something extra-good happen, like one step forward on the next relevant Trait roll. But it can be something a lot fuzzier too, if it fits the situation.

For example:

Jim rolls a whopping 26 on his Friendly roll to find an arms dealer in the Trench. The difficulty was Challenging (Target 13), so his margin of success is 13; divided by 6, that’s 2 Hits. The GM decides that not only does he find a survivor who knows Armando the Snake, the guy is also Armando’s brother, Rodolfo the Snake – and he likes Jim so much he’ll introduce them right away!

And failure. If your roll isn’t at least half the Target, rounded down, you’ve Flopped. Something awful has happened – or is going to happen. Two steps back on the next relevant Trait roll is an easy way to handle it, or it could be less well-defined complication.

For example:
While scrounging for food, Ben Flops his Resourceful roll. As a result, he finds several unlabeled aluminum cans, stacked together, out in the open. What’s in them? Are they safe to eat, or is this some sort of trap set by cannibal Grafters?

Hits can also be used to determine how quickly a character accomplishes a task. Something complicated like building a watchtower might be a Challenging task requiring 4 Hits to complete. The better the rolls, the faster those Hits will accumulate.

Leftovers: The Basics

2009-12-30T12:00:00.000-08:00

In the post-apocalyptic world of Leftovers, there are two primary forms of life: humans and Horrors. And it's not always easy to tell them apart.

Not many humans are left -- no one knows how many, and there's no good way to find out. The Elder Horrors, the monstrously huge things that slithered across the world, devoured most of Mankind, but a portion escaped their notice, usually because they weren't worth noticing. These are the player characters. Despite how few humans are left, the scarcity of resources, harsh living conditions, and ever-present Horrors haven't done wonders for their sense of unity. There are gangs and factions, authorities and criminals, killers and thieves. Some fight to keep the insanity at bay, and some go insane right along with it.

The Horrors are creatures undreamed of by Man except during the deepest throes of madness. Or something. There seems to be a near-infinite variety of the things, but all of them are terrifying creatures of death and destruction. They stayed behind to claim the table scraps of humanity after the Elder Horrors moved on.

Leftovers doesn't take place anywhere in particular, but wherever you choose to set your game there are a few geographic features in common. First, there's the Trench, a miles-long cleft riven in the Earth during the conflict that's become home to the closest thing to civilization anyone knows. The Trench Authority provides law, order, and security, but rules with an iron fist. Still, an iron fist is better than a tentacle, right? Outside the Trench are the ruined remains of a nearby city (the Ruins) and the blasted-out, dried-up Wasteland as far as the eye can see. Somewhere out there, so the rumors go, there's the Bunker, an ultra-secure post-apocalyptic Utopia with electricity, running water, plenty of food and guns, and a total absence of Horrors.

Characters are defined primarily by their Natures and Traits.

There are two Natures: Human and Horrific. The more Human you are, the less Horrific you are, and vice-versa. Everybody’s at least a little bit Horrific, but the Horrors are completely in-Human. Humans can completely lose their Human Nature, too, if they sink low enough.

There are 18 Traits, so we’re not going to list them all here. Traits represent skills, affinities, professions, interests, and so on. A character might be good at fighting, or scientifically minded, or sneaky, or whatever. When you want to do something, you’ll be using a Trait.

There are three other elements of a character that, unlike Natures and Traits, are situational, in that you won’t always be including them for every roll of the dice. These are Bonds, Tools, and Grafts.

Bonds are a character’s emotional ties to other people – specifically, they’re ties to other characters. These come in four basic varieties: trust, distrust, loyalty, and betrayal. The higher your Human Nature, the stronger your Bonds. As your Human Nature slips, so do your connections to other people.

Tools are items that help characters accomplish tasks, from a set of lockpicks to a length of rope to a socket wrench to a .38 Special. Usually, a Tool can only be used with a specific Trait. The higher your Human Nature, the more Tools you can own. As your Human Nature slips, so does your attachment to worldly possessions.

Grafts are body parts from Horrors that have been transplanted onto a character’s body. These come in three varieties: Greater, Lesser, and Minor. Greater Grafts are things like giant bat wings, or two writhing tentacles in place of a character’s arms. Lesser Grafts are less severe, such as a tail or a single replaced limb, and Minor Grafts are much smaller: a Horrific (or third) eye, a claw hand, or a sharp-toothed mouth in a surprising new location. They also make people tougher and more survivable -- big pluses in the post-apocalyptic landscape -- and confer amazing recuperative powers when first transplanted. Many a life has been saved, or at least prolonged, by the timely application of a Graft.

Each of these five components is rated in die size, usually from d4 to d12. We’ll refer to these as your Trait die, your Nature die, your Bond die, and so on. Whenever you want to do something that requires a roll, you’ll roll one Trait die and one Nature die, add the results together to get your total, and compare that with a target number, or Target, to see if you succeeded or failed. If a Bond, Tool, or Graft is relevant, you’ll roll one or more of those, too.

For example, if you’re trying to fix a car and you have an ace set of tools, you’ll roll your Mechanical die, your Human die, and your Tool die. If you’re trying to steal Jim’s car and your Bond with Jim is “I’d betray Jim for a nice set of wheels,” you’d roll Mechanical, Human Nature, and your Bond with Jim.

Sometimes the rules refer to steps with regard to dice, like "+2 steps" or "-1 step." Sometimes, a move up to the next highest die is called a "step forward"; a move down to the next lowest die, a "step back." For example, if you’re rolling a d6, +1 step would mean rolling a d8 instead; +2 steps (or "two steps forward") would bump that d6 up to a d10, and -1 step (or "one step back") would make it a d4. Dice can’t be raised higher than d12 or lower than d4, unless stated otherwise.

Those are the basics of the game.

What Is Leftovers?

2009-12-29T02:15:00.000-08:00

So what is this game, anyway? The core of the setting came from the contest's requirement to mash together at least two disparate genres selected from a discrete list. I wanted to do a post-apoc game anyway (for some reason), so I went with that, and then the "Mythos" genre -- if it can be called that -- appealed to me. I figured some version of Cthulhu awakening was as good a cause as any for a civilization-destroying apocalypse, and not something I recall having seen before.

But the third genre is what really makes Leftovers sing, if you ask me: Punk. As in cyberpunk, steampunk, etc. Specifically, the contest defined this as a mix of body modification and grey morality. What better way, thought I, to incorporate the punk aesthetic into a post-Mythos-ocalyptic world than by having survivors replace parts of themselves with parts of the otherwordly, Lovecraftian horrors that still roam the Earth? That element really crystallized the game for me.

Here's how I summarized it for some friends, and it's still as good an explanation as any (barring, perhaps, the intro fiction in the PDF):

The basic premise is that the "apoc" in post-apoc was caused by a mass invasion of otherworldly Lovecraftian Horrors. The big Horrors ate up most of humanity, then, satiated, departed through the underwater gates through which they'd come. But they left behind many thousands of survivors scattered all over the Earth -- the crumbs left over from their meal, essentially -- along with thousands of smaller Horrors who stuck around to claim the table scraps.

It's been discovered that grafting parts of these Horrors to yourself confers some of the Horrors' powers, such as supernatural strength or toughness. Doing so also heals any injury [or it can, at any rate] -- as long as the patient is even barely alive, a graft will bring him back in a hurry -- so for many survivors in the post-apoc landscape, grafts have been a grim necessity if they want to stay alive. It's amazingly easy to transplant these grafts, almost alarmingly so. Stick a severed tentacle to the stump of your severed arm, and it'll do most of the work on its own. They almost seem eager, in fact.

However, grafts come at a hefty cost (besides hunting down Horrors for harvest, that is): The more you have, the less human you are. The game has two main stats, Human Nature and Horrific Nature. As one goes up, the other goes down. If your Human Nature goes down to zero, you're officially one of them. But some people are cool with toeing the line. They just want the power, or they're out of their minds, or they think the Horrors are the next evolutionary step, or all three. A lot of those people are at least as dangerous as the Horrors themselves, but there are those who manage to balance Horrific power and sanity. While the old world economy is a thing of the past, there's a thriving trade in Horror parts.

The player characters are a band of survivors trying to make their way through this Horror-stricken wasteland. They might fight against the Horrors or roving gangs of cannibals, or harvest Horror parts for fun and profit, or whatever. You get the idea.

So that's the deal.

The other ingredients I chose, besides those from the Genre Blender, were "Character creation does not allow characters to have access to all attributes" and "Must include an emotional connection mechanic binding characters together." The first made sense because in a grim world of perilous survival, it isn't easy to be a generalist -- there aren't many people left who'd be willing to teach you auto repair or knife-fighting or wilderness survival or any other skill that might give them an edge over their neighbors. The second made sense because it also doesn't pay to be a loner. There isn't much humanity left, and what little remains won't be alive for long unless they stick together. I like the seeming paradox there, and the fine line people would probably walk between helping others and ensuring their own survival.

That reminds me: I just saw a great movie on IFC that illustrates exactly that latter point. It's an old Ray Milland film called Panic in Year Zero! (exclamation point included!), and it's soaked in 1962 Cold War paranoia. The movie pretty much begins with Los Angeles being nuked by unknown enemies, and recounts one family's attempt to survive in the immediate aftermath. It's a bit on the campy side at times (from a 21st-century perspective, anyway), the characters are pretty two-dimensional, and the music is kinda awesome in its ridiculousness, but it's worth checking out if you're a fan of the post-apoc genre. In fact, could it be the first post-apoc film? (No, TCM's Robert Osborne says that honor goes to 1951's Five. Let's just say for the sake of argument you don't include Things To Come in that category, although maybe you should. It's kinda post-post-apoc, though.)

Next time: The Basics.