been down so long

I sorta remember this blog. Seeing as I don't like using LJ much, and seeing how RPGtalk sorta vanished overnight, and seeing how I can't remember my admin info for wordpress and it just gets clogged with spam anyway, I've been thinking I'd just come back home to this blog after like almost three years.

I was at Dreamation yesterday -- probably going back again this morning in a few-- and several people were asking, "so what's up with Galactic?" and frak if it's not killing me that I've worked hard on it for how many years now and what I have just isn't hitting the fun button for me.

I think I might know why, though, and I'm going to start kicking the game in the pants again to see what I can come up with. Hopefully I'll have some updates here.

consolidation

I'm gonna move all my Galactic and design talkin' over to RPGtalk. You can find me there at www.rpgtalk.net/msw/weblog.

Hope to see you there!

connections part 2

Here's a new idea. It involves some stealing from Sorcerer, and kind of a flip-flop of how Humanity works. I think Sorcerer deserves to be stolen from more often, so here's me doing my part.

Connections, kinda like Demons, have wants. They don't have to be wicked or disturbing, but they'll get in the way when a hero is trying to save the galaxy.

When connections help you out, it potentially creates strain, because when they're helping you, they're not actually doing those things related to their wants. So each time you apply a connection, it might generate strain. If strain is ever X or higher, the connection leaves the game.

If your character does something that addresses the connection's want, it may reduce strain. Since Galactic is pretty tricky about resources, addressing the want must have more to do with inconvenience and potential moral compromise than risk. It wouldn't make sense to risk resources to try and keep other resources, would it? Unless, maybe, the connection is really really cool.

galactic: connections

Previously, the game has worked in such a way that in each chapter there's resources at stake. The Scourge is coming, and your epic hero needs stuff to fight the Scourge off.

It works on two scales: first, it gives your main character a chance for re-rolls in character scale play; second, it gives you dice on the table to roll against the inevitable invasion.

What I've been thinking about is how to color the stuff on the personal scale. It's easy enough to say that those dice are a serious abstraction for the overall resources of the colony, like labor and industry and level of technology and stuff. But what about the personal scale? Initially I thought of it as a relationship with one or more factions involved with that world. But that doesn't totally line up with how epic stories work. Heroes have connections on all kinds of levels. Companions, gangs, fleets, whole worlds.

So naturally I'm looking at Trollbabe, and I'm thinking about how the scale effects work there. In case you're not aware, when the stakes increase, you can take relationships on an equivalent scale. So if a person's well being is the stakes, you can take a relationship that's a person. When teh stakes are a whole village, you can take a village as a relationship.

The thing that doesn't totally map to Galactic quite right is that there's no real benefit to having the aid of a community in Trollbabe vs. having the aid of a single person. They each equal a re-roll attempt, and they each suffer the consequences of the re-roll being botched.

I think in Galactic there need to be some differentiators. If your connection to a whole world is one person, it's different when that person is harmed than when your relationship to a world is the world itself and the world is somehow harmed.

My idea, overall, is that you can call upon the aid of your connection for a re-roll as much as you want in play, but you generate 'strain' in the relationship. At an appropriate point in play, either at the end of a scene or at the end of a chapter, you roll against the strain and determine the negative consequences of relying so much on your connection.

What I'm thinking is that maybe there's different consequences at different scales. A person suffers differently than a world, and the character has to do different things to fix it.

The other thing I'm weighing is the idea in Trollbabe that you have to have a personal-level adventure before you can then do a group-level adventure. I'm not sure how that'd work okay with how I have things now. I could maybe say that if the resources are d4, that's a person, and if it's a d6, that's a group, and so on, but I'm not quite sure how that'd work either.

playtest awakenings

So I played some Galactic at Forge Midwest. And I played a few other games. It had been a while since I got some really good gamin' in, and it brought a lot of things to my attention.

It means I'm gonna make some changes to Galactic. Nothing drastic. Some nips and tucks. It'll look different, but it'll play how I was imagining it.

The most significant thing is that the players need some better input on short-term goals in play. A tight reward cycle, if you will. And it'll provide some nice flagging. Think PTA's 'next week on' meets TSOY's keys meets the muses of Nine Worlds.

Then I have to figure out what the hell to do with the map tiles. They're neat color as they are right now, but the neat color doesn't quite outweigh the hassle yet, at least not to my satisfaction.

Otherwise, there were just some hiccups with not enough adversity, but that's a pretty easy fix, sort of the equivalent of turning the oven up 10 degrees.

game idea

I had an idea for a gamie gamies game when I was walking the dog this morning.

There was this cell phone add on the ground that used the word 'phat,' and I had just watched that new and rad show Black.White. last night. Also, yet another white guy went nuts and shot a bunch of people in Seattle recently. Connected, those three things? Oh, yes.

So my idea is that the game is called 'Phat, the game of white appropriation.' You play a repressed white guy and your goal is to appropriate cool bits of black culture so that you have a way to express yourself instead of becoming overly repressed. If the repression builds up, then it's like a powder keg.

So maybe it'd be something like you move around a board like monopoly or something, and the different squares are like language, fashion, music, etc. and maybe you have challenges to beat in order to try and appropriate the thing. So you appropriate the word 'bling' and that lets you shed a point of repression, maybe. If you fail to appropriate the word, you can't express, so instead you gain it.

But then there's bad events, too, like maybe you draw a card that says 'move to the suburbs where it's much safer' and that earns you like 3 points of repression. Or 'you won't feel safe until you buy that handgun' or something.

Maybe it's like Trivial Pursuit, where you have to get one of each thing. But if you don't get them fast enough, you go nuts.

I dunno. It's probably cooler to think about than to play.

gamers okay, work bad

I got me a scolding for using Internet for non-work purposes. This means my online time has been drastically reduced. I get maybe an hour in the morning and whatever I can spare in the evening in between dinner, homework and other socializin'. I haven't touched my music equipment at all in forever.

I mean, I was already pretty much absent from a lot of online chatter due to school, but now I'll be a rumor of a trace of a wisp on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea.

My latest puzzle in game developness -- currently game is in my good favor -- is the map and weighing 'cool and useful' vs. 'WTF do we do with it in between games?' If you have a dedicated game table, no prob. But what if you eat dinner at that table? I don't want the game to require a digital camera.

Some options include numbering or naming tiles. Or using an actual folding map instead of tiles, but that's lower on the cool factor. Or maybe having a sheet on which you draw a mini version of the map for record keeping, but that sounds like work. What to do... I dunno yet. Suggestions are welcome.

today I love gamers

Sometimes I hate gamers. Today, though? Today I love gamers. I love that I know a circle of very smart and creative people who make really cool games and say and think cool things.

I was just reading through Nine Worlds, and I was thinking, man, this is cool stuff, and then I thought, dude, I know the guy that wrote this, and I'm gonna be hanging out with him in two weeks. Awesome!

I tell you what, waiting for Forge Midwest is like when I was 9 waiting for Xmas. I'm feeling the holiday spirit.

Gamers everywhere, know my love!