Roll Some Dice

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!

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

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 c

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.

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 betwee

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

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.

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!

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&#

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. S

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 bro

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 .

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'd been ostrac