Roll Some Dice

I'm way late on this, I know, but here it is, a rundown of my OrcCon this year. On the whole, a great time -- I had fun in every game, which, y'know, you'd think would be the baseline experience, but it's not always a guarantee. FRIDAY: 2:00 PM: Tomb of Horrors ( Fiasco ) I'd been champing at the bit to play this since I saw it posted, and I'd even bugged Hamish (the GM) about it a couple times. Unfortunately, it filled up in pre-reg before I could get to it, so I resolved to show up early on Friday to secure myself a spot. Even more unfortunately, Friday at 12:30 I discovered that it'd been canceled, on account of Hamish having some sort of work or school emergency. So... ack. There was nothing else at 2:00 I was really dying to get into, and none of the boardgame stuff interested me, so I went back to my hotel room and slept for three hours. That was pretty awesome -- possibly as awesome as the game would've been. It was rumored that Hamish would...

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. ...

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! 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!

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!

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...

Well. That was fast. The new version incorporates some relatively small but important changes, including combat maneuvers, advancement rules, and a way to use Bonds to enforce roleplaying. It's called the Utah Playtest Edition because Larry & Co. are set to play it this weekend. I imagine by the time Scott and I run it (on separate occasions, even!) in April, we'll be on to the next version. The difference between this one and that one will probably just be fluff -- suggestions for how to style the Trench, how to create an evocative post-apoc version of wherever you are to serve as the Ruins, and so on.

Really great playtest yesterday at DiceHouse. Desmond, Brian, and Becky came out, which made for a good-sized group -- I don't think I'd want to run a game of Leftovers for more than, say, four or five players. (Then again, I think most games run best with groups of that size.) The story involves the PCs being drafted by the Trench Authority on a mission to provide additional security for the Trench. After a number of particularly brutal Horror attacks, the Trench Authority Troopers find themselves short on both the munitions and manpower they need to do their job. The PCs' task: Make contact with a Grafter gang out in the Wasteland and negotiate a contract with them. This is potentially a suicide mission, since Grafters are crazy cannibals, but the players are smart and think to bring a gift: a tentacle, suitable for Grafting. It was a great idea, but it required a little mechanical improvisation: I  made it a Resourceful roll, with the quality of the gift (a one-use ...

The latest version of Leftovers is online for your perusal. Some significant changes have been made, including how Wounds and Shocks work and how Bonds are defined, plus more on vehicles and vehicular combat (because it's cropped up in every game so far). Feedback, as always, is appreciated. Oh, also -- we're playtesting tomorrow afternoon at DiceHouse Games , a most excellent game store in Fullerton, so if you're around, available, and interested, come on by and check it out.

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...

OrcCon was the weekend before last, so I apologize for just now getting around to this. However, it's not for lack of enthusiasm -- the playtests of Leftovers went very well, and I'm psyched to get more going soon. I came back from the con with some great feedback and ideas that'll make the next version a better game. I also gave away four ashcan copies of the current version of the rules, and have received assurances that total strangers will playtest it in distant lands (like Utah!) and report back with their findings. The basic plot was this: One or more of the PCs has a younger relative named Suzanne, who uncharacteristically doesn't show up for dinner one evening in the Trench. Asking around reveals that she headed out into the Ruins by herself to find "something cool" and prove that she's old enough to be on her own. She's mischievous and cocky, so this comes as a disappointment but not a surprise. Of course, anything outside the Trench is so ...

So last night my ol' gaming group and me (plus one) did a brief playtest of Leftovers via Skype and Google Wave. This included character creation, which ended up taking way, way longer than I'd hoped -- but I chalk that up to having to mediate everything through our Internet interfaces. I wanted it to take 30 minutes; it ended up being more like two hours. This would be bad news for OrcCon this weekend, at which I intend to include chargen in each of the two 4-hour sessions, but I've made a character sheet that I think should sort out most of the confusion in advance. I know part of the problem was people rating their Traits, then later on finding out that, for example, if you don't rate your Violent Trait at all, you'll be terrible (and dead) in a fight. Personally, that's a feature, not a bug, but I don't want people getting screwed over by their lack of familiarity with the system. The character sheet has the formulae for the four derived stats (Physic...

I'll be running two sessions of Leftovers at OrcCon next month up in Los Angeles (I say "up in" like it isn't only 40 minutes away, but whatever), for anyone who might want to check it out. Here's the blurb for the game: Leftovers : Bell, Book, and Tentacle Suzanne may be young, but even she knows better than to leave the Trench by herself. There's no telling what might find her out there - - could be violence-crazed Grafters, unspeakable Horrors, or worse... the Order of St. Eurosia. Whatever it is, time's running out. This is an open playtest of Leftovers , a roleplaying game of post-apocalyptic survival in a horrific world -- but with a heart. Like I said, two sessions, one Friday the 12th at 8:00 pm, and the other Saturday the 13th at 9:00 am. Each session takes four players, and at this point will probably include character creation. The minigame of "How Horrific am I?" is a pretty important part of the game, so I don't want to cut ...

Hey ho there -- I've been a little FATE-crazy lately , but that doesn't mean that development on other games has stopped. In Leftovers , healing by conventional means isn't easy. It's a lot more reliable to cut something off a defeated Horror and stick it on yourself than to rely on the medical skills of your comrades. And the more Wounds you've taken, the harder it is to heal any of them. For example, if you've only taken 1 Wound, it's relatively simple to take care of it, but if you've taken 5 Wounds -- i.e., you're at death's door -- even healing one of them is a daunting task. Sticking on a Graft, though, auto-heals Wounds. The bigger the Graft, the more Wounds are healed. This is how people end up with Grafts against their will -- simply put, sometimes it's the only way to survive. The question is this: Since Grafts generally replace body parts like arms, legs, and eyes, how many Wounds does it take to actually lose an arm, leg, or...

After a relatively good night's sleep, it occurred to me that the real problem with the issue in my last post isn't about the number of dice rolled or anything -- it's about how Hits are generated. If you're dealing with high Traits on either side, you need a margin of success of at least 5 or 6 to obtain more than one Hit, and that's where the grind comes in. This is actually a problem with pretty significant ramifications for the system as it pertains to degrees of success. The Hits element works fine as long as the participants aren't evenly matched, but when they are, it suffers from a common problem in RPGs: "Evenly-matched" translates to "consistently comparable rolls." I.e., grind and stagnation. Whatever the solution is, I don't want to create a complicated special case for contests that doesn't apply otherwise. I'm inclined to say that you score one Hit for every two points by which you exceed the opponent's roll...