Roll Some Dice

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, an...

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 m...

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. Thes...

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...

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!

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...

(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'...

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.)

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. ...

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.

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 pla...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 l...

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.

(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. Somet...