Roll Some Dice

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 .

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.

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,

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

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)!

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.

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 .

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 p

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 P

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

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 , to

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

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!

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 prin

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!

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

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 An

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.

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 heartbr

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

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