Roll Some Dice

So hey, this happened: My Game Chef entry, The Eleventh Hour , is a Finalist . Pretty cool! I was more than a little surprised to discover that, to be honest -- not because I'm not proud of my work, but because seriously, there were 96 other entries this time around. And 15 of them were in Italian! How'm I gonna compete with that? Apparently, the answer is "Somehow." The bell pepper symbolizes games. Anyway, I'm pretty psyched about this turn of events, because it means I've made the Finals three years in a row now, which certainly feels like a feat. I kinda don't really count 2010's Action City , which may be unfair, but the Finals for that year didn't even involve any peer review or any real critical process. Still, I did get positive feedback about it, so I'm not dismissing it altogether. I do not expect to win, nor do I care one way or the other about winning (honestly!). There were a ton of really interesting, innovative entries t...

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 thi...

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...

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...

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 necessa...

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 ...

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 unne...

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...

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 b...

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 ...

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 Break...