Roll Some Dice

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 ou...

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...