The Dog Blog

Vanguard: the Jump Drive

2011-10-31T08:38:00.000-04:00

I thought about coming up with some nifty name for it, but really, jump drive is a simple, accurate name that won't overnerd anyone who worries about a space adventure game being too techy.

The jump drive allows instant movement between two places, much like the FTL drive on BSG, but with a few lightweight, easy limitations.

1) Gravity mucks up the drive. The closer you are to a big mass like a planet, the shorter the jump. Once you're within about a hundredth of a gravity, it won't work at all. You need regular rocket-style engines to operate close to a planet. When gravity drops low enough, your jumps go from the AU scale to the LY scale.

2) It takes a while to charge up. If you jump into trouble, you can't just hit the button and jump back out. It takes a few minutes to charge up the capacitor banks.

3) Plotting a course can be tricky when you jump farther than your instruments can see. Charting a new route probably requires shorter jumps and some tedious work.

From a gaming perspective, I think it's kind of friendly. The GM can technobabble the exact formula and draw maps that measure distance in jumps instead of km or AU or whatever. "Mars is two jumps away. Jupiter is 3 jumps from Mars." A D&D style gamist GM can create "encounters" along jump points where the ship drops in and needs to recharge and get its bearings. Pirates attack! A sandbox GM can create some detection and pursuit rules -- assuming a jump creates crazy electromagnetic radiation, hostile ships within a few light minutes might be able to detect your jump and jump after you before you can recharge.

It feels vaguely like age of sail to me as well. You have the void between worlds where nothing happens and you probably don't encounter any ships, and then you have star systems which feel more like the Caribbean with battles near the islands. Pirates camp out along established routes and watch for the flash of a jump, then swoop in.

Dirty Secrets is Pretty Cool

2009-04-30T11:49:00.001-04:00

Last night I played Dirty Secrets with Brennan Taylor and a guy from the NERDNYC boards named Gil. Dunno his last name. Sorry Gil.

I'll cut right to the chase. This game makes detective stories. Really good ones. I thought at the end, huh, someone could make a novel out of that.

I played this with Seth and Paul C and a few others back when it was in playtest. At Forge Midwest, maybe, in 2006? I recall being a little bored at times in a group of maybe 5 players. With that number, there's down time for a few people every turn, no way to contribute. It may purely be a matter of my ADD attention span, but I had trouble.

With three people, everyone's involved every turn, so of course I recommend it with three.

One other possible bug--and let me stress that this game is really fun--is that setup doesn't immediately hook me. I think there might be a way to play it where you don't have to do as much front loading of information. The passing around of cards is cool, but the demographics on them didn't seem to matter much in play.

I'll be thinking about it some more. It's a fun game, and I agree with Brennan wholeheartedly that it doesn't get enough attention.

What gaming cons really need

2009-01-02T09:05:00.001-05:00

Doggie Day Care.

creative progress

2008-10-22T04:44:00.003-04:00

Here's all the things that I pretend to be working on at any given time:

Edits to the revision of Primetime Adventures. That's on hold until my editor has room in his schedule. Same with the art. In both cases, it looks like that'll pick up at the end of October.

Galactic. Yeah, it's still around. Doyce Testerman is editing it. Here's the cool thing: to edit it effectively, he decided to play it some more and see how his group responds to stuff. I remember liking that game. It'd be cool to see it finished.

Music. I might have an actual composition job lined up. I've only just started with that. Several other miscellaneous tracks in various states of completion.

Writing. I have this novel that's off and on. Been thinking about getting a laptop other than the eee pc so I can write anywhere. The eee is just too small for me. It's a typo every other word.

Other games. Just notes right now. I'm less interested in the micro premise games than I am in big setting premise games like TSOY. More about that in a follow up.

a new edition

2008-09-14T17:24:00.002-04:00

I think I'm officially out of books now. Primetime Adventures is in the middle of a light overhaul. Call it the 50,000-mile tune up.

Trying to make a few things easier to find, updating some of the TV info, and adding in some material to help groups get a show together more quickly.

music for games

2008-08-22T12:42:00.002-04:00

I started composing some game music.

Take a look, and take a listen: http://www.dog-eared-designs.com/music.html

I have more music to load up when I have a moment. More!

making games again

2008-07-06T09:21:00.002-04:00

I have a new job now. It's cool. It leaves me sane when I get home. I don't lie awake at night wondering if there was something I forgot to do. I can do other things in my spare time. One of those things is a project that's about to go up for sale on IPR.

The other is, y'know, making games. I'm back working on one.

Galactic, as a game concept, kinda got away from me. I took so much feedback that I was left with something I didn't recognize any more. And aside from Doyce & co who loved it, I got a lot of "we played it for fifteen seconds and disliked it so much that we just gave up."

Maybe part of that is the crowd who are stepping up to try it--and that's a genuine concern, as I'm not out to make a twin to Primetime Adventures. But I kinda feel that way about the game, too.

This game, the way I see it, is more of a medium-weight game, like TSOY or FATE. Or maybe like what Luke is doing with Mouse Guard. I want the game I wanted when I was 11-15, when all I had was Star Frontiers or Traveller or Space Master. I don't want "here's three paragraphs on the setting" or "here's your character's two scores." I don't want 70 pages of skills and character traits either.

Honestly I thought for a long time about whether TSOY would work for what I wanted to do. And I even brought it up with Clinton. He was of course more than happy to support whatever I wanted to do, but I ended up with a long enough list of changes that I figured I might as well start from scratch.

So here's what I want, and fuck if I'm going to do that bloated Power 19.

A set of character abilities that bear at least some resemblance to ye old games of yore. Not stat+skill (because oh god no) but not arsty game nouveau like "roll your Discount plus your Rage against my Shoe Size."
Characters with healthy background info that matters. Where are you from, what baggage do you carry from your past, etc.
a play experience that is lightly focused. The characters have an overarching mission, but it'll sorta be like the Elder Scrolls games, or Mass Effect, where you can do lots of stuff on the side.
Lightweight GM burden. That's probably the kicker. Good info on how to tell a story. Because I didn't know what to do when I was 15, and I had not yet played any "brain damaging" games. Hell, I'm not sure I know what to do now.

So that's kinda what I'm up to. I'm gonna post about progress as I go.

been down so long

2008-01-27T08:57:00.000-05:00

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

2006-05-04T12:30:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-20T08:57:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-16T11:04:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-12T19:25:00.000-04:00

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

2006-03-30T22:02:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-30T08:18:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-25T10:40:00.000-05:00

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!

you may move about the game design freely.

2006-03-23T09:30:00.000-05:00

Turbulence passed. Oh, I love how the love and hate battle each other for my attention.

Last night John H emailed me a comment about something in the game, and I swear there was an audible click in my brain, and a mole of ideas came roaring out.

Now I'm writin' like a sumbitch this morning, and it is awesome. Once again, I can't wait until FM to get this puppy rocking and rolling.

a fragment

2006-03-22T08:24:00.000-05:00

Back when Galactic was called something else, back before I was distracted by Primetime Adventures, I had an idea that I just remembered now that I think is kinda cool.

What you could do was bank success levels to add to an appropriate conflict in the future. Like say you needed a 6 to succeed in repairing the ship. You get an 8 and bank 2 in 'ship repairs.'

Maybe later in the adventure someone's flying the ship and is about to get pulverized, and you say, 'hey, I fixed that broken stabilizer really well, so you should be able to pull some serious gees,' and you add that +2 to the other player's roll.

Maybe I'll find a use for it someday.

looka me not stealin'

2006-03-21T22:59:00.000-05:00

I dunno why people would ever read this blog. It's just post after post of me changing my mind.

Ever seen that movie My Favorite Year? There's a scene toward the end when King Kaiser thinks he's in the wrong costume and is totally freaking out and the costume lady is like "every week it's the same goddamn thing."

I was like, yes, using these stats will solve all my problems.

No. They just created new problems. So I did what I oughta have done in the first place and just figured out how to address the problem I came across initially, and goddamn I think I did it.

So enjoy the diagram that now applies to naught. It was still pretty cool to make it.

Oh, and here's a wandering topic, but so I decided to uninstall Skype because it works like crap on my computer, but get this: for reasons I won't get into, we pay a flat fee for unlimited long distance, so there's no reason I can't just call people the old fashioned way. Who wouldn't want a call from me? I'm positively fucking delightful, goddamnit.

looka me stealin'!

2006-03-21T10:11:00.000-05:00

So I thought, let's give the 'borrowed' stats thingy a try and see what I need. With the 4 stats in Dogs, there's six possible categories of thingies you can do. V uses 4 main ones: talking, physical, fighting and shooting. Here's what I want:

Talking
Physical
Fighting
Technical stuff, like repairs and defeating security
Flying spaceships and driving vehicles
Maybe paramedic healingy stuff

I looked at the Dogs stats, and they kinda work for what I'm thinking. V put a lot of work into 'em, so why do too much reinventing? I'm categorizing them like this:

Moxie: External. Courage, spirit, force of personality, aggression.
Resolve: Internal. Willpower, Self-Discipline, Focus, Tenacity.
Physique: Body. Coordination, fitness, muscle, health.
Wits: Mind. Quick thinking, savvy, alertness.

Then I made myself a neat little diagram like so to connect the stats:

Cool, huh? I'm not totally sure about the internal ones. It makes pretty good sense to me that you'd need coordination and quick thinking while driving a vehicle or riding a beast. And probably it makes sense to have a real sense of vigor and discipline when trying to keep someone from dying.

I don't have any need to distinguish one kind of fighting from another in this game. It's not as much of a hairy statement as it is in Dogs. And I think, though I can't be sure, that V's reasoning behind Acuity + Will is that old West kind of "stand still and aim carefully" shooting, which doesn't apply well to space fantasy. I reversed fighting and physical action because I figured things like running and sneaking require more discipline than aggression.

And I'm pretty happy with the slot for 'solving.' Makes sense to me that that sort of stuff is a combo of inspiration and perspiration.

Any thoughts?

Assuming I keep following this tack, everything else in the game will pretty much stay the same. I think archetypes will be replaced by something similar to Cover in Sorcerer, where you get an extra die or a re-roll or something.

copycatophobia

2006-03-20T16:05:00.000-05:00

I think that with all the radical ideas floating around the DIY crowd, I've become a little wary of using ideas that already done been used.

Today I stumbled upon a problem with Galactic's archetypes that would so totally be solveable if I just used a stat system like Dogs does. But OH NO GOOD HEAVENS I COULD NEVER USE THAT IT WOULD TOTALLY BE COPYING.

Uh, yeah, whatever self.

Everybody needs to incorporate the stuff in PTA that I didn't totally steal from someone else's game (there actually are a couple things) into their upcoming designs, and I'll feel much better.

I still have to send Vincent one of my pinkies. He's letting me choose which one (because narrativism is about hard choices).

Edit: Can I just mention that coming up with stats is way fun? It's really pretty thought provoking. Do I want to handle all kinds of fighting as one stat combo? Should deception be different than other kinds of talking? Way cool and ponderous and stuff.

oh edits, you bastards, you

2006-03-18T20:20:00.000-05:00

I'm feeling feisty and snarky, but instead I will channel that snark into a non-snarky post.

Well, how about instead I bitch about my computer and how it cries when I run my newly installed InDesign CS2? I mean, I never wanted to type OMGWTF so badly. This computer has plenty of RAM and a meaty processor. What up? I think maybe it's the video card, but WTF do I know about computers?

Anyway, so I have a week off from school (it's so weird, still, that I'm back in school) and I think it's going to be mostly a mad scramble to get ready for FM. I gotta make sure I have game props and scenarios and characters and rules that can be understood by human beings. Today I printed out all the sections and made little notes and pen marks. I find it easier to edit printed stuff than on-screen stuff. Anyone else feel that way?

I'm also in the process of getting a big-ass print run done for PTA. Except damnit I ran out of books to sell in the meantime, and they want me to mail a fucking check and I didn't have checks printed for DED so I had to fucking order them, and now that's going to add another goddamn week to the goddamn print turnaround, and I'm impatient for 'em!

But it'll be very cool when it's finally done. John's cover deserves a wicked print job, I think.

rebelling against the rebels

2006-03-14T12:45:00.000-05:00

I think that in order to get the kind of game play I want in Galactic, I'm gonna have to step down off my no-prep soapbox and take a new stance. That, ladies and gentlemen, is easy prep.

Some stuff, really, is just better if it's done without people having to sit and wait, even if it only takes 15 minutes. I think I can get it so that it's that little.

How it'll work, I think, is you play a chapter, and then you set up the next one. Everyone decides what this and that world are like and the players name the conflicts they're stepping into.

Then between times the GM whips up NPCs and their relationships, and that ain't really a lot of work, but sometimes it needs a wee bit of incubation time, rather than a forced exorcism while everyone's waiting.

Now I'm off to work on encumbrance rules for my Under the Bed supplement.

a brief history of time spent on gaming

2006-03-09T08:23:00.000-05:00

My gaming history is terribly thin. I was thinking about it yesterday, and it sunk in just how little gaming I've tallied up over the years. Check it out.

October, 1981. We're at Ridgedale, and I'm waiting outside a toy store while my mom is in picking out a present in secret. Someone I know from school, Talion Kubu was his name, comes out of the store and asks me if I ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons. I'm like, no, and he says, oh, it's cool, and so on.

6 Nov, 1981. It's my eleventh birthday. Guess what I get? The Basic Set, the old one with the Erol Otus cover. I make no sense of what I'm supposed to do. Can't the DM have a character? Why not? I don't actually play it for maybe another two years. One of my friends, Chris Dorn, has some stuff, and we sorta figure some stuff out, but it's more along the lines of roll the d20 and just kind of make stuff up based on the result.

1983. Maybe my birthday: I can't remember. I get Star Frontiers, and it explains a little better how to play. I'm in Boy Scouts (yes, hilarious) and get a couple guys from there to play that. I think this game is awesome, at least in concept. Then I pick up the Knight Hawks rules, and it requires characters to have incredibly high skill levels in order to crew spaceships! Totally lame! Aside from packaged adventures, though, I have no idea what to do as GM. I have no story-making guidance, and I'm frustrated. We play maybe six or seven times total, plus a little bit of D&D.

1984. I move to Seattle. My next door neighbor, Craig, has game stuff, like Gamma World, which I had never heard of, but it's just the two of us, and he doesn't play seriously at all when I try to DM D&D. He picks up the James Bond game, and he, Mike Sokoloski and I play that a bit, like maybe a half dozen times. I recall a time when we spent an entire evening at Craig's trying to make AD&D characters that didn't suck. I forever will hate random generation. Even if you think you made it work. I don't care. Get it away from me.

1985. Craig moves to Portland for a while to live with his dad, and now it's Mike and Forrest and I. Forrest played a ton of D&D before he moved to Seattle and has notebooks of information about his elf with his specially made magic sword and all that shit. I'm like, wow, people actually play more often than once a month. I'm totally envious. He's all into that dreary Moorcock crap, and I want to play the serious D&D that he's all filled up on. We do a whole lot of making characters for games, he, Mike and I, but we don't play much. No 'campaign' lasts for more than one or two adventures. We try a bunch of things, like Rolemaster, Spacemaster, Palladium, Twilight 2000, Villains and Vigilantes...

1988. Mike moves away to Maryland, and that's pretty much it for gaming for me for a long while.

1990. I briefly play some Top Secret SI with Craig, and some Cyberpunk.

1992. I sit in on a homebrew game at Games and Gizmos in Bellevue WA. The GM decides a whole bunch of things about my character without me getting any say in it. The game is very problem-solving oriented, and I'm totally unimpressed. I don't go back.

1994. I'm out in Pullman, at WSU, and I meet Chris Brown and some other guys, and we play some Star Wars d6, which is kind of fun, but we only play a couple times.

1996-1997. I'm in Denmark, and it turns out my roommate is into gaming. I play a handful of times with him and his friends.

1999. I discover a yahoo group in Seattle for gamers, and I meet Johnzo and a bunch of other people, and I actually start gaming at least once a week, for maybe the first time ever in my life. We play Deadlands, Earthdawn(!), Call of Cthulhu, and the new D&D, although I don't stick with D&D very long.

2001-2002. I GM a year-long bi-weekly game that will eventually inspire me to write Galactic. Of the four original players, three move out of the state within three months.

2002. Somewhere around this time Johnzo, Jeff (who is now Kerri) and I come up with this idea to start our own game company and make games and supplements. It's also around the time that Clinton posts on that forum about the Forge, and there I am learning about why so many games have been disappointing for me. I start thinking about making Galactic, and it has about 10 different names.

Somewhere in here I join Forrest and his brother in law to play some D&D, but I don't have much fun doing it.

2002-2003. I join Clinton and James and Dan and play Sorcerer, The Riddle of Steel, Trollbabe and some other cool games. I miss Firefly, and it makes the game I'm working on look more and more like TV. Eventually I drop the whole space game thing and just make it about TV. At this point there's stuff like "Next Week On" and spotlight episodes, but the conflict resolution rules are clunky. They're actually kinda like a broken version of the Dogs rules.

2003. I meet my main man John Harper. Clinton, because he is a big loser, moves away. I hate him forever. Remnants of that group form up with a bunch of other gamers in Seattle, and someone christens it "Universal Gamer Assembly X." There's John, Wilhelm, Johnzo, Alan and people you've probably never heard of. There's so many of us that we do two games at the same time, every Thursday. It's without question the summit of my gaming goodness.

2004. I get married and move to the gaming desert that is Milwaukee, but shortly after I move, I debut Primetime Adventures at Gencon, and I get a really lucky break: Ron and Vincent play it, together, and they both like it.

Later 2004. I join a D&D group and try to sway them to games I like. It fails miserably, so in the middle of 2005 I bail.

2006. Trying to hold out for Forge Midwest.

It'd be pretty hard to try and figure out when I bought all the games I've never played, like Mekton, Cyberpunk 2020, Alternity, Fading Suns, Blue Planet, various d20 things, Star Trek (the FASA one)...

Seriously, though, I gotta move to NYC, somewhere in MA, NC, or back to Seattle, before it's too late.

Galactic self playtesting

2006-03-07T08:12:00.000-05:00

I thought of some things this morning while making the coffee.

Right now conflicts don't allow for the death of the character until the finale. At the same time, there's this sort of thermometer thing where the director can spend points to unlock the progress of the Scourge. Keith has something like that for his apocalypse thingy, but at each stage, the GM picks a creepy thing that happens.

So imagine this idea. I don't have the file open, so I can't remember the exact wording of each stage, so squint a little.

Stage 1 (cost 10 Hazard): First signs of the Scourge. Free conflict dice for one Scourge-related encounter. Once per chapter for each player, the director can pay 3 Hazard to make consequences one step worse for one supporting character.

Stage 2 (cost 15 Hazard): clear evidence of the Scourge. It/they are out and about. Once per chapter for each player, the director can pay 7 Hazard to make consequences two steps worse for one supporting character.

Stage 3 (cost 20 Hazard): The Scourge are on their way to Caliban. Once per chapter for each player, the director can pay 10 Hazard to put a main character's life at risk in a conflict.

It also reminds me a bit of With Great Power, where power and stakes kinda shift around via decks of cards. Anyway, it needs a little tweaking, but I think the concept might be cool, adding some good tension.

trusting in the vision

2006-03-03T08:02:00.000-05:00

I ran into this more with Primetime than with this new game. I'd describe how something in the game worked, and I'd get knitted eyebrows or raised eyebrows or some kind of unflattering eyebrow position, accompanied by an equally unflattering vocal response.

What was encouraging then, and what's encouraging now, is that my reaction wasn't anywhere near 'oh, maybe I need to fix that.' Instead it was either 'I must not be explaining it well,' or 'these foolish mortals just need to play it and see.'

I love believing in what I'm creating. I love the thought that oh, it will indeed rock if I can only explain. You people with your wine-dark science may tell me that there's every possibility that it will in fact not rock.

But I don't believe that. I have my vision. Right now I'm the John Locke of game design.

arenas POST OMEGA

2006-03-01T22:47:00.000-05:00

here's another possibility,

Spose there's a set list of kinds of things you can do in play. Dogs has, I think, basically four. In Galactic, let's suppose there's more than that, like maybe this list:

Fighting
Operating Spaceships
Talking
Being Sneaky
Fixing Things
Using Computers
Driving Vehicles and riding beasties
Knowing Stuff
Running Around and Being Athletic

So let's say then that each archetype has a specific set of, let's call 'em commandments, regarding each thingy.

For the diplomat archetype:

Fighting: only in a duel
Operating Spaceships: no
Talking: all kinds
Being Sneaky: only misdirection
Fixing Things: no
Using Computers: only to find information
Driving Vehicles and riding beasties: only for pomp and stuff.
Knowing Stuff: about who's who and places and politics and the like
Running Around and Being Athletic: no

For the Explorer archetype:

Fighting: only when hunting and stalking
Operating Spaceships: no
Talking: only to trade
Being Sneaky: only in wilderness
Fixing Things: only small things
Using Computers: no
Driving Vehicles and riding beasties: yes
Knowing Stuff: about worlds and creatures
Running Around and Being Athletic: yes

For the Warrior Archetype:

Fighting: yes
Operating Spaceships: only defenses
Talking: only to give orders
Being Sneaky: only to ambush
Fixing Things: only weapons
Using Computers: only for tactics
Driving Vehicles and riding beasties: only military vehicles
Knowing Stuff: about tactics
Running Around and Being Athletic: only in a fight

And so on. That's potential for some pretty good guidelines. I might even be comfortable with a 'director has final say' approach if the text is at least pretty solid. With this approach, as with my original idea, there's a little bit of overlap among the archetypes, so that both the warrior and the diplomat would know what to do in a duel, whereas the scoundrel would be at a loss, but both the scoundrel and the warrior would be good at sneaking up and knifing a foe. And of course the explorer and the diplomat would be good at knowing things about a place.

Wouldn't be too hard to tinker with the lists and make them pretty smooth, I don't think.

WTF

2006-03-01T08:42:00.000-05:00

How the hell did I get signed up for this?

Clearly someone out there misunderstands me.

arenas followup

2006-03-01T08:24:00.000-05:00

Here's a follow-up to the post below, just because I got sidetracked on some dopey blather. Again, I blame Vincent. With his fancy rules. And his beard!

Let's say the rules say (and they do) that for each archetype, there's a kinda vague description of what you can do with each one. There's no "this one is for talking, this one is for fighting."

Suppose there's a conflict.

Suppose you (the player) say, "in the conflict, my character is going to talk this NPC out of arresting this other NPC," and I (the director) respond with the counter, "the NPC is going to become angry with you and have you arrested as well."

Since the rules are kind of vague, neither of us can go, "oh, of course it must be X archetype."

What happens if the buck stops with you (player)?

What happens if the buck stops with me (director)?

arenas

2006-02-28T21:12:00.000-05:00

That goddamn Vincent always gets me second guessing my design. And he makes those posts specticially with that goal in mind. I know it.

The stats, as he calls 'em, in Galactic, are kinda fast and loose like you'd find in TSOY. You can provoke a conflict and say it's using a particular archetype and justify why via a description. There's no "if you're doing X action, it must be Y archetype."

I'm wondering if that impairs the impairment rules. If Y archetype is reduced, you just have to describe things is a slightly different way and just use Z archetype instead.

The arenas are more style focused than topic focused. If you're "just talking," it could be Diplomat, Scoundrel or Warrior, depending on the specific nuances of the scene. It's a lot like HeroQuest, except goddamnit the GM doesn't get to rule what is and isn't usable. That's no go.

So what's the alternative? If the player gets to rule, you kinda have the same problem. That means the game has to specifically say what's usable when. But I'd have to scrap the current setup and rebuild, I think, if that were the case.

I'm just thinking as I write, and I remember originally I tried to base the archetypes off of things that I thought a cool space adventuring type might do.

Fight, like with weapons or fists or whatever.
Fly spaceships and use the various spaceship abilities.
Sneak and do sneaking-related things.
Talk, with various sub-talking categories.
Drive vehicles.
Repair stuff.
Operate computers.

So with, say, Astronaut, you'd be able to do #2 absolutely, but you'd have limited ability with #6 and #7. Who decides if what you're doing is within the limits? Not so good.

So what's another option? I could totally steal from Dogs and use an altered trait-pairing thing, with more appropriate traits for the setting, like maybe "wits" for perception and reactions, and "savvy" to understand complex things, so Wits + Savvy is to fly a ship. But goddamn Dogs for everything stealable in it. I'm trying to make a new game here. Just now I threw my copy of Dogs on the floor and stepped on it a couple times, but it got Emmett all riled up so I had to stop and pet him and calm him down. Someday Vincent's gonna get an anonymous envelope containing a copy of Dogs with a big shoeprint on it and a post-it that just says "Damn you" on it. And they'll eventually call me down to the station to answer some questions because that'd just be a little too creepy, and there'd be like restraining orders and stuff and it'd just be all totally fucked, and shit I'd probably start smoking again because of the stress.

Hmm... I just dunno... and goddamn I have to read a crapload of Paradise Lost right now and can't devote any more time.

setting, part 2

2006-02-21T08:43:00.000-05:00

So here's how I think it's gonna work. Thank jeebus for IM, and John "Montana" Harper for helping me out.

Right now my world creation is too heavy and clunky, but the goal is to have a dice roll give everyone a kick start. Roll the resource dice, and everyone assigns some things. Here we decide some basics, like is the atmosphere breathable, is the gravity high or low, etc.

Then it gets interesting: for the environment, we do some HeroQuest and PTA style brainstorming, with individuals writing down some concepts, like maybe I'll write "smelly herd animals" and "fierce windstorms" and maybe you'll write "sheer cliffs" and "burrowing predators."

In play, only the supporting players (which are kind of like the guys on the E-W points when you play polaris) can invoke setting stuff. I think what setting does is force re-rolls, and the player who invokes can decide who has to make the re-roll. If the conflict is kind of uneven, you can step in and have some burrowing predator jump out and chew on the winning side. Because why not? You could also force a re-roll to give a crap roll a better chance. You roll a bunch of ones, but Dude, you're like John Carter in the low martian gravity, so re-roll two of those ones!

There's a limited pool of setting invocations available, though. So every goddamn scene you can't have an Ewok or something show up and throw spears.

But yeah, I think that'd be cool.

invoking setting

2006-02-20T13:17:00.000-05:00

A lot of games have rules for the effects of environment. I can definitely see the potential for adding a cool "what's it like to be there" layer by doing so, but it often seems caught up in task resolution (like, hey, it's raining, so roll to see if you slip and fall"), and/or it ends up stealing away the appropriate focus in a conflict (e.g. it's now about the rain and not the bad guys), and/or it's a lot of arbitrary GM stuff.

In a game like PTA, that's all just stuff you add in during the narration, but doing so removes some sense of tension, I think, from what could be really dramatic.

What I've been thinking about for Galactic is some added "invoking the setting" rules that are bastard children of the intimacy/desperation/sincerity dice in MLwM. The purpose is to give some extra meaning to the shared creation of setting for each adventure. Suppose you end up with swampy terrain and stinging bugs. And what if sometimes the director, and sometimes the player, could apply them as dice in conflict?

In MLwM, it's totally up to the GM, but I don't like that solution so much. I want an agreed-upon rule in play that says when you can reach for a die and when I can. That would be cool. Maybe it'd be like you have to do certain things in play, sort of like gaining decks of cards in WGP by losing conflicts.

Shouldn't be super complex, though. Just something that sits on the table as a cool little color bonus.

Thoughts?

some galactic color thoughts

2006-02-17T15:24:00.000-05:00

I had this thought brewin' about conflict and the ability of the director to provide adversity.

I was thinking, what if there was something like budget, but what you bought was not level of adversity but magnitude of stakes? Think something like the stakes scale in Trollbabe, per conflict. So I can direct adversity right at your character for free, but if I want the stakes to involve a handful of people your character knows? That costs me. If I want to have the stakes involve a whole community? That costs a lot.

Now what gets really interesting for me is what the game would already be saying, color-wise, if that were the case. Even moreso if it cost more to relate stakes based on level of relationship.

It doesn't mean the game can't ask questions, not by any means, but it'd already be making some interesting assumptions if it cost the director more points to focus on the character's mom than on a ship full of strangers.

I dunno what out of that I'll incorporate in the end, but it's kinda interesting.

because I want to be like the cool kids

2006-02-08T20:28:00.000-05:00

Galactic: the power 19
1) What is your game about?
Epic-level galaxy-spanning adventure, where the players confront risk and sacrifice in terms of human welfare. Will you risk the lives of your crew, or the fate of this world? Do you think you need to?

2.) What do the characters do?
They travel the galaxy attempting to amass resources with which to fight off the Scourge.

3.) What do the players (including the GM if there is one) do?
Players: Create a ship captain, a “main” character, who travels to worlds, gets in the middle of big conflicts, and makes tough choices. Then create major crewmembers for each captain who either oppose or support various decisions made by the main character. Provide elements of crisis to help the director when it’s another player’s turn.
Directors: Provide the adversity, create and portray NPCs.

4.) How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
The setting is a post-apocalyptic galaxy in crisis. Like the tribes and cryptic alliances of Gamma World, Galactic presents a setting where everyone is out for themselves, but in this case there’s a looming enemy that can crush them as individuals.

5.) How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about?
Character creation is in two parts: Main characters have a pair of issue-like traits that the other players can use as flags in play. Supporting characters are meant to put pressure on the main characters and make decisions even harder. So when creating both, you have to look for interesting conflicts that may arise between them.

6.) What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward?
Galactic rewards players for putting their characters in jeopardy, for placing them in conflicts where they stand a great chance of losing.

7.) How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game?
If you “strategize” too much and try to set up conflicts where you make it through unscathed, you won’t gain resources. As a player, you constantly have to balance the idea of what you might gain, resource-wise, with what you stand to lose, story-wise.

8.) How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?
Each player is responsible for the portrayal of a main character and multiple supporting characters. Decision making and “what my guy would do” stops with that player. Likewise, the director is responsible for the portrayal of NPCs. Players will provide the director with NPC concepts and motivations during play, but the buck stops with the director as to what action the NPC actually takes. As with PTA, narration will change during conflict.

9.) What does your game do to command the players' attention, engagement, and participation?
Play happens in turns, with each turn focused on a specific main character. When it’s not your turn, you’re taking part in that character’s adventure on a supporting level, helping to create the crisis and NPCs and so on. Everything that happens in play has the input of all players.

10.) What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?
Conflict happens when the player or director narrates action that the other doesn’t like. In other words, when you narrate something I’m opposed to, we have conflict. Stakes must include two outcomes that progress the action, rather than halt it. Your opposition can’t simply be “no.” It must be “no, instead…”

11.) How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?
Conflict gives a the active player – the one whose turn it is — many different resources to bring to bear, and they all have a certain kind of risk associated with them. You can avoid loss by causing minor crewmembers to suffer. You can force re-rolls by involving larger factions, which may cause suffering among the local population. And you may feel pressure to make unscrupulous choices in order to keep supporting characters on your side. Supporting players can roll for or against the active player, depending on how their supporting character feels.

12.) Do characters in your game advance? If so, how?
Some advancement is possible, but it’s fairly minimal.

13.) How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
Improving the character means that the player has ignored other situations that may have benefitted from that resource. That makes its own statement.

14.) What sort of effect do you want your game to produce for the players?
It’d be cool if it provoked some discussion on the value of human life, in terms of individuals and the species as a whole. And of course the conflict itself should be edge-of-seat dice-rolling fun.

15.) What areas of your game receive extra attention and color? Why?
Oh, umm... I'm actually trying really hard not to push the color too much. This is my attempt at providing just enough setting, and enough of the right kind of setting. It may be the hardest thing I'm doing.

16.) Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Why?
I'm pretty excited about the relationship between the characters and the map. I dunno how well it'll work, but I think it'd be cool to have a game where the characters change the landscape and you can see its effects in terms of game resources.

17.) Where does your game take the players that other games can’t, don’t, or won’t?
There's some eps of the West Wing that I really like, where the president is agonizing over the decision of whether or not to send troops in someplace, knowing that it's really likely some will be killed. I think this game can take players to that place in a potentially complex, not-black-and-white way.

18.) What are your publishing goals for your game?
To get it done someday. To actually playtest it someday.

19.) Who is your target audience?
People who have found various sci fi games too thick, or too klunky, or too unstructured. Fans of the new Battlestar Galactica. People who liked the relationships between the crew on Firefly. People who think The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the bunch. People who aren't really so much into the science.

prep theory

2006-02-08T15:51:00.000-05:00

If you're like me, and you know you're going to be playing a certain game coming up in the next 4-5 days, you spend time thinking about the game, even if it's not that old-school hard-core GM-prep stuff.

So couple that with this new trend in making games self-sufficient or in dividing up the labor.

What can you give players to think about in between that's productive without being a burden?

I think that's my new plan for Galactic. A few people who have played say that the setup is kinda long. It's fun, they say (and I would smite them if they said otherwise), but it takes time.

So the plan is to have the players --all the players-- think about some stuff in between, like some cool conflict situations, or some personalities and stuff. It's no more than what you'd do if you were practicing your guitar on your own before hanging out with the band.

conflict examples are hard

2006-02-05T09:56:00.000-05:00

So for Galactic, I have a series of conflict examples in the text (two are rewritten, two more to go), and I think they do a good job of describing how to apply various things on your sheet in different situations.

But man, what they don't do is say how doing it is cool. Like remember when someone told you about The Riddle of Steel, and they probably said, "dude, when it matters you can use your spiritual attributes," and you were maybe, oh, that sounds kind of cool, but then when you actually played and had all that in-game fiction behind you and it was time to throw down, and then it was more like, "fuck yeah, 6 extra dice!"

That's hard to convey in an example. I can't just say, "the characters are in their ship and they get attacked," because which supporting character cares enough to roll that d10? How do the conviction or disquiet apply? What makes this no-name conflict worth killing off crew for? I mean, that's the whole crux of the game.

So basically, yeah, this is just me whining about how I have a lot to do, and it's hard work.

Plus I have homework to do. Why couldn't I finish my degree in my 20s like everyone else?

Cadence

2006-02-04T12:52:00.000-05:00

This is something that happens in a whole lotta games, and I think maybe moreso in those "say yes or roll" kind of games. In fact, Polaris (fucking Ben and his goddamn Polaris) has the thing built in. Maybe Universalis with its interruptions and stuff, too.

It's the whole idea of "how much can I say at a time, and at what scale?" In just about every game that ever was, there's only official info at the conflict level. But what about prior to conflict? You know how it goes: you say a little increment of stuff, and then you wait for the GM or someone with that hat on to respond with info.

It fascinates me how that back-and-forth cadence develops in play. How do we know how much we should say? As "gamers," are we trained to creep up on the actions of our characters, inching forward, waiting for the GM to slam a response down on us? Does it differ between games? See, if you've played Polaris, you know what I mean by built in (fucking Ben and his goddamn Polaris). But it's not so built into PTA or Dogs or D&D or TSOY or Sorcerer. When we play those games, we have to fumble around a little bit and figure out how much is the right amount to say, because I think we like being able to pause more than we like being interrupted. It's more satisfying for me, anyway, to give you the chance to object, than to spew out a whole big chunk and have you go, "whoa, wait, that first thing, hold on, let's back up to that. That first thing is a conflict."

It honestly has me a little curious about those who haven't played a role-playing game before. Imagine them picking up a copy of your game and trying to play it with their friends. How would they know how much to say at a time, or how broad to make their statements? I wonder how that tends to work itself out.

how ideas are born

2006-02-02T17:28:00.000-05:00

So John and I are emailing back and forth, and we're talking about recognizing props and sometimes being distracted by them, which I started based on a comment over on Fair Game.

And John says:

It's the same issue as the guns on Firefly. Yes, it's distracting. Yes, I wish they could create all-custom guns with the perfect style that were not real-world replicas. Is the show about any of that? No.However, that stuff does matter if it's done really badly. The Shield would be pretty silly if everyone carried scimitars and wooden shields and flew around with jetpacks. You have to at least *try* to treat the props well.

And I say:

I dunno, man. I think I would probably watch a cop show with scimitars AND jetpacks. I mean, come on.

And John says:

Oh, I would too. I'm gonna search TiVo for such a show tonight. But it would still be silly.

And then I say:

It should be an animated show by the guy who did powerpuff girls and clone wars.

And then John says:

Yes. Yes it should. Here's my character:
Yusef McCallan, Scimitar JetCop
Issue: Belonging (Identity). Yusef wants to fit in on the all-Persian JetCop squad without losing his half-Irish heritage.
Story Arc: 2 1 2 2 3
Traits:
- Somethin' Ain't Right (Yusef has a nose for weird/bad things, and is
always getting tangled up in one. Good for a cop. Bad for peace of mind.)
- Speed Freak (In an effort to be accepted, Yusef is the fastest flier in
the squad. Not the safest.)
- Sparky Hassan (Local barkeep and informant. Sparky's is the only place
that serves Guinness within 2000 miles.)
Personal Set: Sparky's Joint

thor hammers it out

2006-02-02T12:25:00.000-05:00

Have you been to the Well of Urd?

Thor has some good stuff over there he's talking about.

I think getting into my character's skin is fun at times, but if I am constantly experiencing my character's life during play, I can't simultaneously appreciate his story.

More and more I'm losing my interest in "being the character." I dunno if it's my crap attention span or what, but I like the bird's-eye view so much better.

epic conventions

2006-01-30T16:38:00.000-05:00

As part of my endless quest to get that degree, I'm taking a class on Milton this semester. It's way cool. I hadn't read him last time around, and I really dig his stuff.

Paradise Lost is probably the ultimate English epic, and naturally we discussed briefly the epic conventions. It got me thinking about how once I'd intended Galactic to be an epic, and I suppose I still do, but I didn't really consciously think about it while writing a lot of the stuff.

Yet a lot of epic conventions are pretty easy to spot in the text (except maybe calling upon the Muse, unless you want to say that it's your fellow players or something). I suppose I'm pretty indoctrinated as far as the elements of epic are concerned. Read enough of them, and they just kinda get in there and stick.

And who wants space adventure that isn't epic anyway? I mean, come on.

we interrupt this blog again...

2006-01-25T20:03:00.000-05:00

I'm officially an uncle!

As of 1:11 am HST January 25, Tanner Wilson McConnell entered the world. 8lbs, 3oz, and 21 inches. Missed sharing a birthday with his grandma by a little over an hour.

Hooray!

we interrupt this blog...

2006-01-25T14:12:00.000-05:00

...for a proud spouse moment.

Everything I do is not as cool or important as this.

more on passiony tinkering stuff

2006-01-20T11:40:00.000-05:00

So when you're playing a supporting character (sc), each chapter you get three opportunities to jump into a conflict and throw down on one side or another. When you do, you can roll a d6, a d8 or a d10 based on how badly you want to kick ass.

If you're successful at helping (i.e. your die ends up removing an opposing die), you get a benefit of some kind. That's more likely to happen the bigger the die you roll; however, the die type also determines the effects of impairment if your die craps out: d6, you can't use your sc next turn. d8, you can't use your sc for the rest of the chapter. d10, your sc is removed from the game.

In the creaty part, the player of each main character writes down some "emotional keys," which are issuey hot topics, like Love, Justice, Freedom, Trust, etc. When you make a supporting character for that main character, you pick two of those and give the sc a stance on them, e.g. "Love is worth dying for." These are your own personal guidelines for when you'd be likely to roll a d10 in a conflict. Since there's gonna be consequences for the sc, you need to do your part and play up the drama appropriately when you're joining in.

But I'm wondering... will this clash a bit with disquiet and/or conviction?

occupied territory

2006-01-20T05:20:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while I think about making a cool fantasy game, which maybe includes "what I'd do with D&D" and all that other kind of thinking. I list all the stuff I'd want in there, and how I'd want it to work, and what kind of play I'd like to see, and the same thing keeps happening.

It looks totally like The Shadow of Yesterday.

Clinton, you bastard.

political scale stuff

2006-01-17T11:04:00.000-05:00

Yes, this is the blog of someone with ADD. New posts every 30 minutes. It's a wonder I ever finished Primetime Adventures.

So I've been thinking about making the political scale game work more fluidly with the character scale one, and of course the last thing I think of is always the easiest solution.

I'd like on the character scale for the main guy to have relationships and connections with multiple agencies, not just one particular governmental body. It's more exciting and provides opportunity to emulate various elements of movies and books and TV and stuff. That way you can be a total freelancer, allied to no one group, but trying eventually to get them to cooperate.

If you've read the previous drafts of da rulez, I have dice of various sizes representing resources on the map, and your goal is to gain control of them in the service of your main faction.

My fix is no, don't do that. Easy, huh?

What you do instead is build some story into it and provide a teeny bit of bookkeeping. Teeny, I tell you.

You can start out on the job for a faction of any kind. When you enter a sector and get ready for an adventure, you can say "I want this adventure to be in their service," or you can say, "I want this adventure to involve a new faction." Everyone else gets to come up with what that faction is, based at least partially on your flags.

If you succeed in the chapter, you gain the resources of the sector, and they look the same as any resources under your control, except for color. So your 2d4 in one sector is because you helped out the Jawbone Corporation, and your 1d6 in another is because you saved a colony from pirates. Better yet, that 1d6 is either the colonists, because you helped them fight the pirates, or the pirates, because you helped them beat up the colonists.

Depending on what you do in each sector, you affect the endgame and probably some stuff on your sheet. Help the pirates and gain something that you wouldn't get from the colonists, and vice versa.

And I think this will help solve the problem of how to get two captains to work together. Now you're just doing what you want, not what some larger force commands. You could both be working for the same group from time to time.

Wait, did I say above that this was the simple solution? I don't think I've thought of that yet.

slidey scales of passion testing

2006-01-15T15:14:00.000-05:00

I have an idea that'll make Dev all happy, because it'll let him write in stuff spontaneously, or maybe semi-spontaneously. It's kind of a resurrection of a previous idea.

Here's how it works. Maybe. Tomorrow maybe I'll have a better idea, but I like this.

When you make your dude, you write down some things that you want the dude's story to address. Maybe it's done all brainstormy, and there's probably a sweet spot regarding how specific it should be. So maybe you write down some stuff that looks like this...

upholding the law
value of the individual
being honest

... and so on. You need a few. They have no specific outlook, no scores attached. This is just a set of flags, if I remember Chris' term right. You need a number proportional to the number of other players.

Okay, so after you do that, the rest of us use those bullets when we make up supporting characters. You want stuff to be about upholding the law? I make a supporting character who's a totally uptight goody two shoes. You want stuff to be about being honest? Someone else makes a supporting character who's a complete con artist.

Then in play, we -- not you, we -- have these slidey scales on our sheets, that say something like +d10, +d8, +d6, +d4, 0 -d4, -d6, etc, showing what that character's attitude is toward your character. If I'm all about obeying the law, and you get in a conflict that's all about crime, I protest. If you do it anyway, now I'm at -d4, and I can roll it against you in a future conflict if I want. Each turn, I can bump that attitude marker in either direction. Now I totally want to be able to roll dice when you're in a conflict, because I'll either gain fortune or get impaired dice back for my main character. That means sitting at neutral is boring, and when I have some co-GM input, I'll do what I can to help bring those passions/principles into the situation.

Here's another twist: when the scale is at the far negative end, the main character's player can set stakes that remove that supporting character from the game, to be replaced at the beginning of the next chapter. When the scale is at the far positive end, the director can set stakes that remove the supporting character from the game.

Factions will work the same way, except they'll provide a different kind of benefit. I just don't know what that is yet.

And as play goes on and you get bored with things, you can create new ones for new supporting characters and factions to pick at.

sales data

2006-01-12T12:38:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to do this all week, and Vincent's post finally reminded me to do it.

Click here for a chart of 2005 online sales.

In the middle of June I ran out of first ed books, and I didn't sell again until GenCon, which isn't factored into the chart.

Also, the chart offers more evidence that it's good to have a pdf version available. PDF sales are rocking my world. Wish I'd released it a lot sooner.

2005 online book sales: 367
PDF sales: 25
Gencon 2005 sales: 78

Total books sold, to date (i.e. as of Jan 12), including Gencon 2004 pre-release books: 639
Total pdf sold, to date: 42

testing passions

2006-01-12T09:39:00.000-05:00

You know how nar play has been referred to as "passionate characters having their passions tested?"

Here's how supporting characters are gonna help do that, hopefully...

John is playing a main character who's complex. All the main characters are, right? But we want to fish around and find three or four hot buttons. Let's say one of them is a struggle to do the right thing, to maintain faith in others, etc.

So I make my supporting character, and that's the hot button I pick. I make a supporting character who pushes that button all the time. My supporting character is a soulless, self-serving asshole. I'm Jayne to his Mal, basically.

In a conflict, I have supporting dice I can roll for or against John, kinda like with fan mail except in Galactic it has a face on it. He knows what my guy's all about, and you bet I'll remind him. John gets to figure out how important it is to his guy to maintain integrity. Maybe he can call in a favor, or maybe he can appeal to one of the other supporting characters.

I also have a personal stake in it. If my main character is suffering a penalty from a previous conflict, I can reduce or remove the penalty by using those supporting dice.

playerful gaming

2006-01-07T22:48:00.000-05:00

Vincent's latest post has me thinking about cool ways to apply that to games. It'd need to be a subtle thing for me, so I can slowly work it past my stupid gamer baggage.

Like imagine a bribery system. Say John, Meredith and I are playing, and we each pick a powerful emotional concept that appeals to us. Maybe I take Justice, and John takes Peace, and Meredith takes Anger.

Then we get a pool of dice, like maybe of various kinds.

What makes sense for those three.... let's say it's a game about being police. John's playing his detective, and he's trying to interrogate a suspect.

I say, "dude, I'll give you 1d6 if you play it by the book and don't pull any dirty tricks."

Meredith says, "no, get angry with him and do something intimidating and rough, and I'll give you 1d8."

And we only have so many dice, so I have to decide if I'd be willing to up the ante and offer John a d10. How much does this situation grab me?

Truth be told, this is a more formalized version of supporting characters in Galactic (and it reminds me a bit of Universalis, too). It'd work just fine for that game as long as the supporting characters embody a concept like the above. So Petty Officer Wu might be built around the concept of kindness, so whenever you do something kind, I'll help you out, but when you do something cruel, I just might roll for the opposition instead.

It'd really rock if the game had the right stuff in place so that the qualities I can offer bonus dice for really push and pull at character concepts that are important to both you and me.

It's different, though, than having direct authority over a character's internal workings. Different than Meredith saying, "oh, I decree that the dude is definitely angry." But not completely different. It's more of a baby step, at least for me.

talk to me baby

2006-01-07T12:28:00.000-05:00

Call and tell me about your ~~character~~ game.

I'm on skype as "itsmrwilson."

swinging toward excitement

2006-01-05T10:46:00.000-05:00

I dunno about you guys, but while I'm making the thing, I seriously go back and forth from "yeah, this'll be awesome" to "Fuck, this isn't working at all."

Right now I'm heading back toward awesome after a prolonged malaise, and hooray for that. I'm back to, "yeah, I want to play this thing I'm making." I think it just might end up being what I want it to be, and I'm asking a whole lot of it.

If I could just find people to playtest the damn thing...

abuse of power on the grand scale

2006-01-04T16:01:00.000-05:00

You ever have one of those, oh yeah, I was gonna have that in my game" moments way down the line? Years ago, even before what is now Galactic was proto-PTA, I had this idea of there being Sorcerer Demon-esque factions that the characters could call on for support, but it'd lead to problems down the line.

So what I'm thinking is that, like in Sorcerer, these factions have wants and needs, translated into what larger thing they're after, and what darker consequences can result in their influence over a location. When you call upon a faction, you run a greater and greater risk of the location's future becoming bleaker.

My goal, I think -- and here's where those of you at home can help out -- is to provide some general 1- or 2-word descriptors that the players can choose from when creating their factions.

The question is, what are those descriptors? I could do stuff like "greed," "paranoia" and stuff, but that seems maybe too bland. Or I could provide a set list of governing types and list their negative sides, but that might be a little too heavy handed. Like maybe you don't agree with me that unregulated capitalism is bad, and therefore my game will annoy you, and it's only a small part of the game's premise.

Any suggestions or ideas? I'm in kind of a cloud about it.

in my dreams

2006-01-04T14:20:00.000-05:00

In my dreams there'd be a live support group for people working on games. We sit in a circle and take turns talking about stuff we're just not getting right, stuff we want to convey but we just can't figure out.

I can't do it on the Web. What happens is I try to explain what I'm not figuring out, but I end up spending more of the thread explaining what it is that I'm trying to do than getting any useful feedback. I'm like, stop talking about cattle; it was a metaphor*. And stuff like that.

So we all need to meet weekly, face to face. Start budgeting for it.

*any similarity to an existing thread is purely coincidental.

narrativism and risk

2006-01-03T09:36:00.000-05:00

I was reading a very cool thread on RPGnet about PTA, and one commenter mentioned that while he thinks the game is very well done, it doesn't have enough "game" qualities.

If you substitute "gamist facilitating" for "game," we're all good. But I was thinking about how a lot of games are about risking stuff, and interestingly enough, in PTA you don't specifically put something on the line for a conflict. It's all group consensus. If I want to do something heinous, I don't risk losing humanity. If I want a connection involved, I don't risk that character's death.

Why does conflict still produce such consistently positive thematic results among the players? Does the "dogpile" structure of narration replace the humanity stuff in Sorcerer?

I'm going to go off on a tangent now, so bear with me. While thinking of the above, and about some conflict ideas for my game in development, I saw a connection between Sorcerer and Trollbabe that I hadn't before, at least not in a nice simple way, and it relates to the whole risk thing.

In Sorcerer, when you risk humanity, it's because usually you really want to win a conflict, so you do it in an inhumane way and get cool demon powers to boost your roll. You risk the character's future. In Trollbabe, you risk the well-being of another person. So what you're doing, in a sense, is changing the stakes of that conflict in order to get a better chance of succeeding. You're also providing the second half, or a good piece of it, of the formula for Vincent's thematic statement.

(Risking Trollbabe's friend in order to do X)(leads to Y)

or

(Using demon powers in order to do X)(does or does not lead to one's undoing)

Maybe this is like the diagram that John made over on his blog recently, where some people are like, well, duh, but this way of thinking about it has sort of revealed to me how the nar-supporting stuff in my game-in-dev needs to work. Some of it already does that, but I need to give the other parts a quick tune-up.

But here's a follow-up question: how different would Sorcerer and Trollbabe be if you didn't risk humanity loss or the death of companions? What if that just happened automatically? What if you would just say, "my new troll friend dies; gimme the reroll."

2006-01-01T18:07:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year

from Dog-eared Designs

naming of names: the definitive word

2005-12-30T10:13:00.000-05:00

So, here's the thing about the demand for naming names. It comes down to it being people I don't like. Dickhead behavior = me no like. I'm happy to tell people, as Brand and Chris talk about, that I don't share their creative agendas. I'm less ready to tell someone, "hey, I don't like you much" in person, and I sure as hell am not enough of an asshole to publicly announce it.

And what if I did? What if it was Chris (it isn't)? What if I said, I don't like Chris? How are you going to convince me that I actually do like him? You can't, any more than you could convince me that I do actually like mayonnaise. I don't need to justify my dislike of him. I can just say that he says stuff that rubs me wrong. Again, I do actually like Chris. I met him and he's cool and we have even broken bread together.

As I'm sure Chris is aware, that dude in my post below really really doesn't like Chris, for real, and there's not a lot any of us can do about that, and I can't speak for Chris personally, but I bet he doesn't really care. Where that guy is fucking up is not by disliking him; it's by associating Chris with some Forge hive-mind concept, taking everything Chris posts about "broken wheels" and whatever to be part of some larger conspiracy that Chris somehow represents. He also fucks up by making an effort to mockingly undermine everything Chris posts on various blogs, as if he's fighting some larger menace. I don't do that with regards to the people I don't like, because it's really just self-evident jackass behavior.

It's really none of your business who I like and dislike, who I do or don't think is a dickhead on various threads and blogs. What is your business is reminding people that the people do not equal the ideas, that no one person (or even three or four or five) is the face of any public interest.

People want to criticize the ideas behind the games, that's cool with me. They want to say that the Forge are a bunch of assholes because someone was once snarky on a thread, that's just plain stupid, and I'll call them on that, and you should too.

Otherwise, I grow weary of this topic, and want no more discussion here. You're welcome to discuss on your own blogs. But I want to move on.

doing the work for me

2005-12-29T21:37:00.000-05:00

Check this exchange out if you haven't already.

There's a lot of interesting stuff going on there. I dunno where to begin.

self hate scoring

2005-12-29T10:16:00.000-05:00

Just because Matt told me what for in the previous comments, I'll put this in a new post.

Score yourself for the comments in the thread below as follows...

Posting in support of what I wrote: +3 points
Posting in opposition of what I wrote: +2 points
Choosing not to comment at all: +1 point (everybody gets to play!)
Posting anonymously: -3 points
Giving me a good and thoughtful reason why my comment about a minority of dickheads mattered: +5 points
Having the same name as me: +1 point
Making a cool comment about sim play: +3 points
Sharing my snark about games needing to please everyone: +2 points
Comparing your personal discomfort over my not naming names to the continuing oppression of women: -10 points

PDF = GOOD

2005-12-28T16:56:00.000-05:00

On Dec 6 I made the PTA PDF available for sale, and behold, for it is good.

So far PDF sales are a third of my total sales, and it doesn't look like I'm losing any book sales because of the pdf. But December is a good month for business, and I got some excellent coverage, so maybe they woulda bought the book if that was the only thing available, but maybe not.

Looks like it'll be somewhere around 430 books sold overall in 2005, but I'm not totally sure on that. I also am a little behind in the bookkeeping, so I dunno what my net will be.

that EnWorld thread. It's really a matter of self-hate

2005-12-23T17:30:00.000-05:00

I was reading this thread that Chris linked to on his blog, over at EnWorld. And it made me think three things:

Judd has qualified for sainthood.
Mike Mearls is a very cool, smart-thinking, level-headed guy, and I would buy things at his bake sale if he ever had one.
Many gamers just don't have room for any more self criticism, which is what they would have to bear if they admitted that they just didn't understand the stuff at the Forge.

Mostly I'm thinking about the third thing. I'm not saying everyone who disagrees with Forge theory is wrong, or that there aren't scarecrow-like dickheads who post on the forums there, or that some of that theory isn't frustrating in how it's morphed over the last couple years. I'm saying that too many people are so full of self hate that they can't allow any room to accept that they don't quite understand something. It's like the abusive father who fucks up and finds a way to blame the wife or kids. Projection, I think, might be the term. I forget.

Anyway, so it boils down to it's not me not getting it, it's a flaw in the theory itself, and therefore the Forge sucks. And that's really too bad, if only because it means a lot of people hate themselves way too much. I'm going to draft Emily and Meg as the GenCon Hug Patrol next year. And they'll do it because they're goddamn hippies and would probably do it anyway.

Oh, and I guess there was some other funny stuff in that thread, like the claim that you have to have detailed starship fuel rules to accomodate the bean counter in your play group. Sort of like how we have to play football using tennis rackets to accomodate the tennis fans.

I don't like "story now"

2005-12-22T12:18:00.000-05:00

There's been talk of what to call this thing we do, and there's been talk of what's a story. Coincidentally, both things have happened recently at casa de la Clinton.

A story, man, all a story is is some stuff that happened. I'm not saying it's a good story, but it is a story. Railroaded GM fiat heavy-my-guy bad-actor roleplaying is still story. If your characters are walking through the goddamn woods and the GM is rolling for random encounters and you end up fighting a fucking zebra, that's still a story. Story is not limited to all that moral lines stuff that I and many other people like.

Unless narrativism can be that, then narrativism oughtn't be given the specific title "story now." Because when in roleplaying isn't there some kind of story going on?

Plus I think the phrase sounds like in kindergarten when you'd sit in a circle and have the teacher read to you from a book. "Okay, kids, story now!"

actual play

2005-12-21T17:20:00.000-05:00

Just a quick note: I played me some Unisystem on Sunday. It probably goes without saying, but the Unisystem does not meet my gaming needs.

designing for my own needs

2005-12-21T11:33:00.000-05:00

Somewhere in the middle of January I'm getting tested for ADD. I dunno if I have it, but I think I display some of the symptoms, especially inattention. Did anyone ever take those aptitude tests in grade school? Where you get measured in various abilities on a percentile basis? I tested really well in many categories, but when it came to reading comprehension, my scores plummeted. In light of ADD, it makes some sense.

Anyway, my point in posting was in terms of game design and how my approach, both in organization and presentation, is heavily influenced by the trouble I have with some games out there.

Some game books, especially those without heavy visual cues, are hard for me to read. I can't get through Polaris, despite multiple attempts, and I don't think I've read through the entirety of Dogs in the Vineyard. Probably many other people have no problem with them (and really I think Polaris is beautiful looking), but all I see in either case is a big sargasso of text. My eyes don't know where to lock on. Compare that to the newest TSOY, which I can whip through with no problem. Or Burning Wheel, which I can do just fine, though BW is a little intimidating with its sheer volume of information.

I think what it is for me is that the latter two layouts go heavy on the contrast. They're similar in approach to the "for Dummies" books, which I just love, simply because I can actually read them. I can find stuff quickly, and I can find my place again if my attention wanders, like it has about 20 35 times since I started writing this post.

I decided, before I became aware of the possibility that I might have ADD, that I wanted Galactic to look like a "for Dummies" book in its presentation, with big fat bold subheads, lots of white space, and plenty of bullet lists and quick summaries. So it's making me wonder: is my possible disorder an advantage here, in that despite how it's keeping me from writing the game very quickly, it's making me present it all uber-organized? Or am I going to overcompensate and create something that's annoyingly hand-holdy?

theory in design: adversity

2005-12-07T16:25:00.000-05:00

I keep trying to write theory posts, but I find theory posts so often boring and academic, and I start to hesitate, in the fear that I might be boring myself with my own writing.

But here's me taking a third stab at a post about some game features or lack thereof that concern me greatly...

Ginormously Important Thing #2: Proportional Adversity

Hardly anything drives me crazy as GM the way inappropriate adversity does, especially in a game where conflict results can reduce your effectiveness as a player. D&D really tries, and I give 'em credit for it. Every sim game made in the 90s included heaps of sample characters, with suggestions on appropriate levels of ability, combined with the advice that a GM must give players the appropriate knowledge of what they're getting into. Trollbabe and Dogs have the "bail" option, though Dogs still allows the possibility that your character could die from fallout in the very first conflict (and I'm not content with the "then it's just not your character's story" explanation I saw once on the Forge). Nothing drives me crazy like "whoops, this conflict is kicking your character's ass, and I didn't intend for that to happen, and now you're hosed."

See, and when I'm GM, I want to be able to throw everything I'm allowed to at the players without worrying whether or not I've crossed the line. I don't know how to do that very well with games like Sorcerer, say. I'm sure that many veteran GMs just have a feel for it, but to be honest, my play experience (not GMing, total play) in all of the 90s amounts to maybe a dozen afternoons or evenings. It's just not intuitive for me.

If you own Primetime Adventures, you can now nod and go, "ohhhh, so that's why there's Budget." As producer, you don't get unlimited opposition. You get a set amount, and you have to decide when to use it.

This is kind of a two-parter, which really clicks in terms of how this adversity affects your ability as a player after the conflict. You have on the one hand how hard you as GM should make a conflict, given the stakes, but then you also have the possibility of affecting future conflicts, and in almost all games, that effect is negative. So you have to think, okay, the stakes are hot, and I'm going to pour on the difficulty, but what if this player decides the stakes are totally worth it and uses up all her oomph on this conflict and then suffers a major dice penalty as a result, and her ability to affect the game via her character is crippled? I can think of some unsatisfying moments on the player side that resulted from this kind of situation.

In Galactic, you can in fact suffer dice penalties in a conflict, much like you can in, say, TSOY. I'm hoping to counter that via a few things: 1) a limit to how much and how often the GM can pour on adversity, 2) the opportunity for the player to occasionally avoid penalties via some moral dilemma stuff, and 3) a game mechanic wherein you have to risk loss in order to succeed on a larger scale.

gaming anew

2005-12-05T09:33:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, for the first time since moving here, I finally managed to spend a day hanging with Matt McElroy and Monica Valentinelli and a couple of their friends. It looks as though I might be hanging with them and trying out all kinds of games, but we didn't get much done in that regard yesterday other than to mention a whole bunch that we'd like to play. Mostly it was just chattin' and huddling together for warmth against the onslaught of conservatism here. Hooray! Allies!

There's a reasonable chance the Big Senowski is gonna make the trip up every so often to join us for some CoS set in the world of Ravenloft, which I think would be extra cool. Keith and I passed the "road trip test" just fine (he and I share a special private Arby's memory, baby), so I know I'd dig hanging with him more often.

I know that Matt in particular is a big LARP fan, and I'm not at all, so I'm interested to see where we overlap as far as preferences in gaming go. I've had some really bad and dysfunctional LARPish immersivey experiences (like almost where I get this eye twitch when people say the word), so I'm really looking forward to talking with socially functional people about it.

But check out our potential list: it includes Primetime Adventures, Burning Wheel, and Dogs. I think they want to do some Unisystem and some WW stuff too. I kinda want not to do any WW stuff because of PIMP, but I haven't brought that up yet, since they seem to be big WW fans. Now that I've spent a few hours with them I can probably clear the air on that.

Anyway, I'm pretty excited about it!

theory in design: making your participation meaningful

2005-12-03T15:31:00.000-05:00

I don't want to talk about theory as theory. I want to talk about how I want my games to play, and how maybe I can get them to happen like that.

Ginormously important thing #1:
When it's my turn to do something in play, it absolutely has to have some kind of meaningful impact on the fiction.

Get what I'm saying? When it's my turn, I don't want a chance to do one thing that's pass/fail, and then fail, and then have to wait another two minutes before I can try again. Because that's unbelievably disappointing. That's where so-called "rules-light" games fail the most for me. Even D&D has trouble, because you can put all that time and effort into this 5-foot step, an attack of opportunity, a cool feat, and oh, you miss. And then you wait until the next time around.

It's not even just that. I've run into this problem with Sorcerer and Dogs: conflicts that resolve with me right back at square one. It can happen, probably, with Primetime Adventures.

The trouble lies, I think, with a reliance on the narrator/GM person to make it all turn out cool. This stuff I'm talking about, I think, is a huge part of the whole "with a good GM" argument. And maybe so, but fuck that. Games gotta stop relying on the players being seasoned veterans. Here's how I'm hoping to make it a must in Galactic, not an I hope.

If you're up to speed on Conflict Resolution, you know about stakes. Usually it's "do I get this or not." Instead, I think it should be "something changes no matter what." So say you're trying to get in and get those documents out of the safe. If you win the conflict, you get the docs and move on. If you lose, your character is captured. Not, "oh, I didn't get the docs, so I'm just sitting here, and now what?"

I describe it in the rules as something like "avoid stakes that block." Don't just keep the opposite side from doing something. Provide a goal of your own. Either you destroy the Death Star, or I destroy Yavin 4. Either you manage to persuade Xor the Pirate to join you, or she laughs disdainfully and throws you into the arena to fight Gurgor beasts -- or she demands that you steal the Abzu Diamond. Either way, your participation has created story, AND you have some additional conflicts lined up.

A New Era

2005-12-02T12:38:00.000-05:00

Today the theory died.

Oh, but it lives on, don't you know? Right here. And like in all our hearts and stuff.

To me, discovering all that RPG theory was like having years and years of the same old candidates to choose from, all promising something new, but always delivering the same crap, but beyond even that, it was me not knowing what I should expect from them, but then there's this whole revolution thing going on, and people are saying, "man, we need more than just raising/lowering taxes. We need a whole new system of government that actually works."

Like all revolutions, it wasn't perfect. There was internal bickering, often a lack of agreement, some uncomfortable authoritarianism, and sometimes some general malaise. But even the bad days in the revolution were better than the old ways.

And it's not like it conquered the world. It's more like it carved out a territory for itself, like establishing this free city that people could come to (Dude, like in the Matrix!*). Clinton has a bicycle shop, Ron sells BDSM equipment, Vincent teaches pilates, and so on. They're these little businesses that get regular customers and friendly service, and if you aren't into BDSM, Ron doesn't fucking care and you're welcome not to buy anything, but don't come in and complain about how he doesn't have a Coke machine out in front, or one of those little twisty-handle candy dispensers.

Me? I opened up a dry cleaners. And I totally have a Coke machine.

So anyway, before the analogy gets any dumber, I really like the theory when it directly applies to something I'm working on. Whenever someone starts talking about it simply as theory, my eyes get all glazed over as if I'd just eaten a big lunch.

And that's what I do here. The applying to working on things, I mean, not the eating lunch.

Although it is noon. Hmm...

* That's just for John.

2005-11-26T15:24:00.000-05:00

I'm relieved that Vincent posted this over at the Forge.

Because I was seriously worried that I was the only one thinking about that stuff.

Galactic: after the Scourge

2005-11-18T11:46:00.000-05:00

This morning while playing Sid Meier's Pirates I was thinking how cool it'd be to have a RPG that effectively handled good sim worldbuilding elements. Your guy goes up in rank, your guy builds a palace, your guy attracts followers, your guy expands his or her fleet...

Galactic only hints at that stuff. But the setting is right for it, minus the looming threat of the Scourge.

So then it hit me. That could be a supplement! Some new stuff added, some old stuff removed. Make it compatible with your "defeat the Scourge" game, and you have the makings of something that might be fun.

Plus I'd probably use some of the ideas from my gangsters game post below, like how long you get to play your character.

campaigning

2005-11-14T20:51:00.000-05:00

There's this nifty thread over at Anyway (I'm too lazy for linkage) where Vincent's talking about long-term vs. short-term play. I spouted some ideas for long-term play in a setting, and I feel like expanding them here. Maybe they'll make up a new game someday.

So you need a setting, or at least the start of one. It'd need to have some solid borders to work within, but then there'd be lots of blank canvas. For this hypothetical game maybe I'd do the 1920s and 30s, if only because I love that era and there ain't jack in terms of good games available for it. So it's a fictional city maybe, but a real timeline. You have a good solid feel for what fits and what doesn't, and if not, the game has some info for you (like what cars are available, what stuff costs, etc.). The players would all create the important details of the city, in maybe a roundabout Universalis kind of way. Who's the mayor? Who's the criminals? What are the neighborhoods and districts? What are the landmarks? What's the tension? Especially that last part. What's going on that the characters can get involved with.

Then you need characters. But the characters don't last. That's the trick. You only get them for a set amount of time. Say for starters it's 3d6 game sessions. If you play weekly, you'll play that character for three months on the average. When your time's up, that character becomes an NPC or leaves the story entirely. Then you create a new character with a connection to the character you just played. Even better, you create a list of connections, maybe three, and whichever one you devote more development to, that's the one you play next.

So say my character is a rookie cop. He's got a girl he's seeing, and he's got a partner on the force, and he's got a brother who's fallen in with the criminal element. I roll 3d6 and get 13. On the 13th game session, I retire him and start playing whichever one of those three I've developed the most. Or whichever one the rest of the group thinks I've developed the most. I fill in whichever traits are missing and then create three connections for this new character. Only one of them, say, can be one of the connections of the previous character. So if I take on the partner, maybe he can have the girl as a connection, because she's been seeing him secretly, or because the original character dies and he's comforting her.

The group also agrees upon a set amount of time for each game session, or else it's specific in the book, like one month. So stuff could happen in between, but time definitely passes in the setting. So after my 13 sessions, it's been over a year in this gangstery world. If you play for a year, at one session per week, that's about 4 years in the setting. If you played for three years, you'd cover all of Prohibition.

Also, the connection between characters has to be important. Maybe it's not which one you developed the most; it's which one can address stuff you left unresolved. Which one can best address the consequences of your previous character's actions.

Damnit, this is all I need. Another distraction from my space adventure game.

Year One

2005-11-04T08:12:00.000-05:00

Here's the last 13 months of book sales for Primetime Adventures. I still don't have the pdf up for sale, so there's no data for that yet. In August 2004 I also sold about 35 spiral bound copies of the game. Total sales ever is 532 or so. Total sales from Oct 1 to Oct 1 is 460.

In the middle of June, I ran out of books for the first printing, and it took me longer than I thought to get new books ready, basically right up until GenCon I was out.

Of that big spike in August, 78 are GenCon sales. Aside from that, my sales have been either online or in person. No retail or mini-con yet. But I think that'll change come the new year.

quick game rule idea

2005-11-01T08:32:00.000-05:00

I dunno where this would go. Probably a future unnamed gamisty space adventure game. I think I need to write a nar, a sim and a gamist space adventure game. I probably won't, but it'd be cool.

Anyway, I was thinking about games with XP accrual. Suppose your total XP (or whatever you want to call it) gives you special benefits at various thresholds, but sometimes you need to spend it to bail your ass out of trouble.

So imagine: you get a point of XP for doing something appropriate in the game (e.g. defeating a monster in D&D). That gives you 5 XP total. At 5, you get a free d6 whenever you're doing a something-or-other. But then you run into trouble, and in order to keep your character going, you have to spend 2 XP. Now you're down to 3, and at that threshold, you get a free d4 whenever you're doing something else.

You could expand that to make really basic "schtick" character classes, or you could have several different XP "paths" for your character, each with its own cool benefits. Or you could even customize your character with a "trademark," and your XP total allows you to do cool trademark things, that extra die applying to a skill or ability you choose when you create the character. If you ever drop to zero, you can change your trademark.

It's kind of like the SA's in TROS, at least a bit, isn't it? Or like TSOY, but in this case your keys are only temporary. It reminds me also of a video game where you get temporary powerups.

Can you believe I'm thinking about gamist stuff? I have been a lot lately. Been playing Star Wars Battlefront and loving it. So why don't I like gamist RPGs? I have some big ideas about that, and I'm gonna follow up later. Seriously, a trilogy of space adventure games: nar, gamist and sim. What would be really wild is to have them all in the same setting.

Or I just might make some simmy underbelly plugins for Galactic. Exploratory details, setting info, more rules for the big picture part of the game.

What else can I add to make this post even more convoluted? I shouldn't go near the computer before 8:00 a.m.

serious printing, not that funny printing

2005-10-31T12:39:00.000-05:00

After some further discussion with Luke "Mad Dog" Crane, I've begun exploring the idea of a PTA print run on an offset press, like we're talking 1000 copies: the big leagues, or at least the less-minor leagues.

I got a quote, and it's a really good deal, so I might have to scrape the cash to do it. I mean a really really good deal.

Oh, and without ever replying to my comments on the third proof, RPI apparently just sent me a fourth. It just showed up all surprise-like a week later. WTF?

how not to get a printing job from me

2005-10-22T10:22:00.000-04:00

Remember the dudes below who sent me two proof copies put together? So the next one they send out has the margins off my a quarter inch. I tell my contact guy this. So he gives me some blah excuse and says "there's a new one coming that will arrive Saturday."

So this morning I find an envelope after coming back from the post office, and in it I find a new proof. And guess what? It looks exactly the same as the last one. The margins are off by a quarter inch. The text is adjusted toward the outside margin, so there's this dopey channel of white space running down the center of the book.

I've had this book printed before, so I know getting the margins adjusted correctly isn't a technical impossibility. Why can't these guys get it right in three tries?

proof of the absurd

2005-10-14T21:16:00.000-04:00

So I'm getting more books printed. I decided to give RPI a try.

Yesterday I get an email that says, among other things, "As you will see the crop marks and register bugs are in the image area."

I'm thinking, wha? The last guys had no problem.

So I get the proof this morning. And here's why the cover didn't fit:

The proof copy they sent was two full sets of the game text bound in one cover.

Dudes, I mean come on. How hard did you have to not pay attention in order to miss that one? Hello, I'd like to speak with Moe and Larry about my proof.

So here I have this unique copy of SUPERPTA. Two games in one. Even though it's the same game. Man, the book is a brick, too. It could kick BW's ass. If I burned it, it would provide adequate heat for hours.

oh, how horrible!

2005-10-12T09:01:00.000-04:00

Here's one person's opinion on why Burning Wheel isn't such a great game:

It's like some big group storytelling session around the fire

OMG NO!!!! Not... storytelling! Not... not around the fire! Damn you, Luke! Damn you to hell!

No, I don't want to link to the thread. I might get hives. Needless to say, it's on RPGnet, and it's page 19 of a thread, with that dumbass flying his bitter gamer flag throughout.

Also, while there's plenty of people there that I like, I love how RPGnet flamewars devolve into the dumbest name calling and petty nonsense:

"Where in my last post did I use the word 'the?" Quit putting words in my mouth!"

"Now you're just saying nonsense."

"No, you are."

"No, you are."

playtesting: more

2005-10-11T07:14:00.000-04:00

Interested in playtesting Galactic? Send me some email that says yes.

My name is Matt. My website is dog-eared-designs.com. Know what I'm saying?

Because baby, I got stuff.

galactic: politics

2005-10-04T09:57:00.000-04:00

Right now mostly what I've been doing is adding enough examples to make my rough rules at least marginally understandable. Examples of characters, conflicts, adventures, NPCs, locations, etc.

But there was this hole, and I was just going to leave it, regarding some of the political stuff. There's rules for how to relate the map to the incursion of the scourge, but what about relationships between the big factions themselves?

Here's my while-drinking-coffee-before-class idea: something kind of like trust in TMW. You can develop trade agreements that give you bonus dice for all sorts of useful things, but they make you vulnerable to attack from the faction you're trading with. Maybe their freighters are hiding attack fighters. You don't know. They're all out to get you, man.

What might make it even tighter is the idea that, like the whole dark fate thing, you might have control of a territory that the other player needs to complete a quest. If the lost shipyards of Zogoorn are in that territory, and they need to go there to get a prototype plasma cannon that was being developed at the time of the Scourge, then that trade agreement is just a front to get you to lower your guard. But maybe they're just being pals. Who knows?

It's a little vague at the moment, but I needed to get it someplace in print before the idea vanished. It sounds cool, but it could be a mess if it doesn't integrate smoothly.

more on stakes

2005-09-29T21:38:00.000-04:00

So over at the Mighty Atom (check my link list, I'm too lazy to html it up), John's talking about stakes, and in that thread, Fred is talking about how stakes ought to have the bad and the good built in.

And damnit, he's right, but not in the sense he's implying, with that whole "mind control" thing, because this whole stakes thing has nothing to do with PC ownership.

It does have everything to do with why you're having a conflict, and whether or not a conflict has enough of a purpose.

Check it out: you know the classic "you're taken prisoner by the crimelord Jobasa and locked in a dungeon."

So you try to get out. So what's at stake? "Do you get out?"

No.

Lame.

Because what happens if you fail? You're just back where you started, right? So do you just try again, but narrate your attempt a little differently? I said lame. That conflict only provides an interesting outcome if you succeed. Otherwise the story doesn't move.

Here's a better way to say what's at stake: "Do you get out, or do the guards catch you and decide to feed you to the bug beasts?"

Now no matter how the conflict turns out, the story has moved in a direction. Something interesting if it's good, something interesting if it's bad.

Try it at home with your own conflicts, and see an improvement in less than two weeks or your money back.

In Galactic, I think what you'll do is split the stakes. The player says "this is my goal," and the GM says "this is what you risk." The other players at the table can mediate things and kibbitz about it.

playtesting

2005-09-26T10:22:00.000-04:00

I think I have enough now for at least some stage 1 playtesting. I dunno what the stages are, but calling it "stage 1" sounds cool and astronauty and stuff.

I'll have to talk to Clinton (AKA "Scooter Boy") about maybe getting a playtest forum on the Forge, and then the rocking and rolling (or *gulp* total ass sucking) can commence.

Galactic: finale

2005-09-21T09:55:00.000-04:00

Okay, yesterday while at work I finally figured out how to do the finale.

So there's this map, right? You move your ship around and have adventures in different places, trying to win those sectors over, so to speak.

Those sectors have resources represented by dice. In the roleplaying part, those dice help you replenish your ship's crew between chapters. Crew are like Goblins from Great Ork Gods. You don't lose dice; instead a crewmember takes the bullet for you.

As you play, you'll be spending Fortune, which gives you all sorts of good stuff. The director keeps track of the accumulated spent Fortune, and when it reaches certain amounts (50, 100, etc.) the director can trigger cool events (cf. The Horror Revealed from MLwM) that relate to the Scourge. These events happen in normal chapter play. Your character encounters a Scourge ship! They find a lost Scourge base! Whatever.

Once the accumulated spent fortune (ASF? No. Never mind.) reaches, say, 200, the finale starts happening, and the map becomes a kind of game board. Between chapters, the director starts placing dice on various sectors to represent the Scourge finally making their play against humankind. You use the sector dice as traits, as the colonists or whoever they are fight back against the Scourge invasion.

So the players, when they feel like they're ready (there's actually requirements, but after that it's just having the nerve) can declare a final chapter for their characters. This chapter is the character saying "we have to take out the flagship with a commando mission" or whatever the player thinks would be cool. The success or failure of each character determines the endgame results.

Cool, huh? Now I gotta go write it up in da rulez.

ownership

2005-09-19T10:12:00.000-04:00

"You must unlearn what you have learned."

The biggest, most annoying element of gamer baggage for me right now is the idea of total character ownership. "You can't say how my character feels!" You know, that sort of thing.

I've noticed that in various discussion threads about Primetime Adventures, this idea of "ownership safety" starts to creep in, but really, the narrator ultimately gets to fucking decide what happens to you, and that's end of story. Yeah, sure, you can speak up, but get over it if you don't get your way. You'll get the narration next time. Non gamers immediately get it. "Seasoned" gamers struggle.

It's weird how it's so ingrained in me, even after having written Primetime Adventures. I realized that Galactic is pretty traditional in that sense. I mean, I'm not really interested in making the game as cutting edge as possible, but conceivably you could play it where you take turns playing the same character, right? That would make it more like an epic story. But man, I really don't want that, and it's bizarre how much I don't. Sometimes the baggage wins the conflict, I guess.

imminent draft

2005-09-18T10:59:00.000-04:00

So I've just about got something that could be used for playtest. That's cool, huh? I need a few bits about what you're supposed to do in one or two spots (little but important things), but I might just drop in 'maybe' rules to cover for the time being, so I can get it played and get some feedback.

I don't have any 'designer notes' in there, and I'm wondering if I should or not. I kind of want to have it evaluated without any help.

Anyway, I gotta make up some map tiles, and then I think I'll start setting up a playtest plan. Hooray!

Galactic: Worlds in Crisis

2005-09-14T08:15:00.000-04:00

If you've been following along at home, there's the characters and the galaxy as 'big picture.'

Now we have to figure out what happens when you actually go into one of those sectors. What's the actual adventure?

This step, as I'm imagining it, is a combo of Sorcerer's Soul/Trollbabe/Dogs and Universalis (and maybe Polaris). That is to say, there's an existing crisis already in progress, and the players at the table cooperatively figure out what it is.

What the book will do at this point is list a bunch of generic conflict/crisis types, based possibly on a model like this, or maybe a space opera variant of the seven plot types: "human vs. human, human vs. nature, human vs. alien, etc."

Let's say the active player gets to decide what the basic conflict type is, and the director interprets it via the map tile + dice info. For example, you as active player say "it's human vs. alien," and the tile dice are 1d4 and 1d6. So I as director could decide, it's some colonists abusing primitive aliens, or it's a human outpost being harassed by alien marauders. Or who knows what.

Everything that comes afterward in creation of the chapter setting is to support the conflict identified above.

Now, it'd be super easy to make it like Dogs/Trollbabe/Sorcerer, and simply say, "okay, now it's prep time for the GM." But I think that workload can be divided up among the players so there's no break or time-out, or at least no more than 10-15 minutes. Maybe everyone contributes three ideas, and the director must choose at least one from each person.

Edit: Yes, Legends of Alyria is clearly my stealing ground. Thanks for the tip, Ron. Everyone who's interested, go check out this section for hints of what it's gonna look like. That's exactly what I'm after.

So then when all that's figured out, you play the chapter, probably via some variant of scenes. Once you accumulate enough fortune, you can pay to close out the chapter and gain the dice for use in the finale.

more on building the setting

2005-09-13T08:31:00.000-04:00

Okay, so imagine the galaxy map -- in my expensive dreams -- is a set of tiles that you assemble like universal puzzle pieces (i.e. they interlock) to form a staggered square grid. Like Duel of Ages but with 3-inch tiles. Each tile, just like in Stranger Things, has some cool descriptive quality, like "The Noxin Cluster" or "the Reprah Nebula," and you take turns putting them in place. So many tiles per player.

Then everyone, including the director, gets a number of little cardboard chits (or a la Empire Builder, they're mini poker chips with stickers on them), and they say 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 1d10. The players mostly get 1d4s and 1d6s, and the director gets a couple 1d8s and 1d10s. These chits represent both the risk and reward for a sector, and the players take turns laying them down in sectors. Each sector has to have at least one, but you'll have more chits than that. When you're done, the map would kind of look like this. Except probably much bigger. Maybe 5-6 tiles per ship captain.

The different kinds of dice + the sector name will be the foundation for the adventure that happens in that sector. Low dice mean minor resources or limited access to technology. High dice mean the opposite. So a sector that's 3d4 means maybe a heavily populated planet full of primitive aliens. 1d4 might mean a fledgling colony with no factories or anything. 1d6 might mean a small space station or a mining operation. And so on.

The dice translate to a Hazard rating for the director, which is sort of like extra budget in PTA.

I was originally thinking of having the adventure prep requiring homework on the director's part, a la Sorcerer, but now I think it can be done on the fly, with the responsibility divvied up and the information above used as a guideline and constraint.

creating your world by rolling on tables

2005-09-09T21:22:00.000-04:00

There's two books here near me that are making for weird influences at the moment:

One is GURPS Traveller: First In.
The other is the Director's Guide for 2300.

They both have interesting -- and to me, entertaining -- rules for creating solar systems. Yes, I really own them both.

Honestly, I love that stuff. I could easily stop typing and spend an hour making up worlds and placing them in orbits, figuring out their surface temperatures and gravities and all that cool shit.

Too bad it has such little impact on play, and too bad it's an activity that only involves one person in the group.

Yeah, I'm really thinking about taking that stuff and making it relevant and shared. Maybe not specifically creating the planets, but something about the setting. I think that would be absolutely fucking cool.

That's the part in the GID (Game in Development) that I sorta can see how it works, but it's really hazy in spots. If I can figure it out, that'll be it. All I'll need to do is type like a madman.

caught up

2005-09-07T11:03:00.000-04:00

As of this morning, I'm almost caught up with the mailing. I don't mind doing my own fulfillment (especially when I avoid a hefty fee), but the pre-orders were kind of an all-at-once deal.

It's odd. The weights of the books tend to vary a lot, so that one book will cost me $6.40 to ship overseas, and another will only cost $5.60. In the end, I suppose the less expensive books are a bonus 'handling' fee.

For this month, I'm expecting sales to be kind of quiet. Sales immediately plummeted after the pre-orders. It'll take some using of the books that are out there to drum up that second-hand interest. I think I'm close to market saturation via the Forge, so I'll need to find some new markets to tap.

And Galactic, remember that? I'm still making some progress. I think I might have a playtest alpha very soon. Basically what I need to do is stop fidgeting and just go, 'here, try this.'

I'm also considering a carrot model for playtesting, where if you play it and post a fair amount of feedback, I'll give you a discount on purchase of the final product.

River Tam Sessions

2005-08-28T22:29:00.000-04:00

Has everyone seen these?

R. Tam, Session 1

R. Tam, Session 22

R. Tam, Session 416, Second Excerpt

PTA: Preorders

2005-08-26T12:22:00.000-04:00

With school around the corner, I made it easy on myself and loaded up the site with new buy buttons and updated game info.

That means you can now go over there and transfer money to me, which will result in me shipping your copy of the game out on September 1.

Unless I get an obscene number of pre-orders, in which case I'll ship 'em as soon as I have books to ship.

galactic: more political stuff

2005-08-25T08:36:00.000-04:00

One of my initial goals was to have cool stuff happen on a political scale, so you would see who's in control of what sectors, who might decide to ally themselves with whom, and so on.

I think I have an idea of how to do it, but it's still a little vague. And it gives me a reason to have a map.

So suppose there's a map. Yay! And maybe it's one of those staggered-square thingies, and each square is a sector, maybe 50 parsecs to a side. Each sector will have certain ratings for resources, and doing well on the 'adventure' in that sector gives the resources to whichever faction you were doing the adventure for. So when you're done, you put down a marker that shows which faction is benefitting from that sector.

And with this approach the resource value = the difficulty for that sector. When you're in a conflict, the GM/Director gets extra dice based on how valuable the sector is. Because really, they'd have one guard on a worthless rock, but a whole garrison where there's a uranium mine.

Then in play, there'd be some things at work similar to what Paul has done in MLwM (and his new game!). You know how in MLwM when Self Loathing is greater than Love+Reason, you get The Horror Revealed? Something like that. Like, say, if the most powerful faction's resources equal the sum of two other factions, it will declare war on one of them.

Meanwhile, I think, the Director slowly accumulates power for the Scourge, and you can do some more MLwM-inspired stuff, like say at a score of 6, you have first contact with the Scourge, and maybe 25 means you go into endgame or something.

What might be fun is to steal the map tiles thing from Stranger Things, and allow the players to build the map by taking turns placing tiles that say things like "the Snarg Nebula" and "The Ryll Cluster" and "the lost shipyards of Zagg" and so on. The Director can plan ahead as to what the crisis is in each sector, modifying as appropriate for the resource value.

One thing that's worrying me just a bit is that the cool nar character drama might get lost a bit in all the boardgaminess.

All right, that's enough bloggin'. I need to get back to the source file!

back to work

2005-08-24T10:12:00.000-04:00

September 1 is my due date for having the new PTA up for sale. I'd like to see if I can't also get the pdf done and available at the same time, but knowing me, that's probably nuts.

I think I've established my own trend of selling for slightly less at Gencon. I think of it as a 'thanks for making the trip,' and also a benefit for all my friends at the booth who were planning on getting a copy. On the site, I'm going to sell for $17, with $3.50 S&H in North America, and probably something like $5-6 everywhere else. I have to figure out how much int'l shipping is going to cost me with this bigger book. The pdf, when it's done, will be $12.

As for games in development, man, the people who released the new Tunnels and Trolls have the coolest packaging ever. These 7x10 or so hinged tin boxes, with booklets, maps, counters, dice, etc. I want very badly to do something like that for Galactic. The old-school cardboard boxes are expensive to do, but these guys just glue labels on, and I bet it's way cheaper. Imagine the box if it were black metal or something.

Where the heck do you get something like that? Are metal products even made in the US anymore? Would I have to order from China or someplace else overseas?

gencon results

2005-08-23T09:32:00.000-04:00

So first let me tell you about the morning of day 2.

I'm on my way into the exhibit hall and run into Meg, the delightful spouse of V. So we end up finding a way in way on the far side of the hall, which puts us right next to the autograph area, and I say, 'holy crap, look, it's Ron Glass.' And there he is, down at the end, just kind of chillin' out.

We're both kind of starstruck and 'what should we do? Should we go talk to him?' and in a very unlike-me manner, I walk over and say 'Ron Glass, you're awesome, can I shake your hand?' and he's extraordinarily gracious and just like he is on the Firefly DVD interviewss if you've seen them.

And he asks, so what are you here for, and I'm holding a stack of my books to take to the booth, and I say, oh, I'm here for this, and I explain about the Forge a bit, and then I say, 'man, you and your show inspired me to write this. Would you like to have one?' And I gave him a copy of Primetime Adventures.

So maybe five minutes later he said 'damn fans and their crap' and threw it away, who knows, but briefly he held it in his hands, and was that ever cool.

So anyway, last year at the show, I sold 32 copies. This year it was 78, and I'm feeling fantastic about it.

After subtracting per-book printing costs, food, hotel, alchohol, gas money and booth. I have a net GenCon profit of over $200.

Next year I'm considering the idea of staying at a less expensive hotel and driving and parking near the show. I bet it'd cost less. The hotel was the biggest expense I had. I have to find a way to make it affordable for Meredith to come along, because it'd be awesome for her to meet all my cool Gencon friends.

gencon diary

2005-08-19T08:08:00.000-04:00

So it's the early morning of day two, and I'm up despite the lack of dog to walk.

But let's back up a bit to day zero...

Met up with Keith at noon or so in the northern part of Chi-town, and we headed east. East, I tell you! There we found many cars. And also Arbys. Rolled into town around 4:15, got room key, dropped off books, checked out booth and scored a craptastic dinner at Buca de Beppos, also known as fine Italian food for suburban white people. Here Andy K shared with those at our table the results of the indie-rpg awards. Ha ha, you'll have to wait. After that it was a hop over to Jillians for the underwhelming Diana Jones awards, which Vincent outrageously did not win. But hey, free beer.

Day one was hopping at the booth. Lemme just tell you this: I sold one copy less on day one than I sold the entire four days last year. It's awesome. Everyone is giving the book much praise. Played demos of Polaris, Capes, TSOY and Infinite Armies. Dinner with Vincent and family, Chris 'Bankuei' Chin, Gordon Landis, Drew Baker (for whom I felt a really startling need to look after while he sat next to me; I'm like, 'how's your food? Do you know what to order? Everything okay?'), some Erics and Joshua 'Ninja Monkey J.' Then some off-the-map TSOY with mister Uke himself, which as you might expect was rad.

I want to buy pretty much everything on our booth's shelves that I don't already own. Man, the Forge stuff looks unbelievably good.

at gencon

2005-08-16T06:21:00.000-04:00

Here's what's at the top of my list of concerns right now:

I really need to remember to watch Battlestar Galactica on Friday at the con. Anyone else into that show, or is it just me? I'll watch it alone if I have to.

Yeah, there's my priorities for you. Some people need oxygen. I needs some BSG.

galactic: summary and playtesting

2005-08-10T08:39:00.000-04:00

Andy K was askin’ me about status and possible playtesting in the future. Here’s the whole game summary, with finished and unfinished parts noted.

The Whole Point
The Scourge is out there. You know this somehow. You and your crew have taken it upon yourselves to undergo a quest among the stars to find the allies and artifacts you need in order to save the human race.

As reference, imagine a Trollbabe adventure, and ‘the stakes’ are whether you can get a given ally or artifact to aid you. Instead of scale, you have the inherent value of the thing you're after, which is related to how far you are from the homeworld, kind of like Donjon Level.

Characters
Each character is the captain of his or her own ship. Everyone gets to play both a main character and a supporting character for each other main character. So you'd be Captain Jones as well as Chief Engineer Guerrero and First Officer Mbangwa.

Characters are represented by archetypes, gear, and principles.

Archetypes are like character classes, kind of: Warrior, Diplomat, etc. If you have Warrior at 3d6, then whenever you do anything conceivably warrior-like, you can roll 3d6.

Gear adds d4s to your dice roll whenever your gear applies. It's useful, but it's not as important as character ability. You assign gear to specific archetypes, so you could have a big rifle that's +2d4 when you use Warrior and +1d4 when you use Explorer. Or maybe you have an expensive suit that's +1d4 to Diplomat. You create. You assign.

Principles are kind of like spiritual attributes (because every game needs those) but they're written out like BW's beliefs. So you'd have "Aliens can't be trusted" at d8 or "Never leave a friend behind" at d10. Principles allow you to swap out an archetype die with whatever die the principle is. So if you're doing diplomacy with Aliens and you have Diplomacy 2d6, you could use that d8 instead of one of the d6s.

Fortune
This is a mix of XP and karma. You can spend it to refresh traits that have been reduced or to do a few other things. I'm pleased with this idea I came up with that's kind of like Dogs: you have to be in conflicts where you don't easily win in order to gain Fortune. If you get your ass kicked, you'll probably gain fortune. If you win without a scratch, you won't get any.

Ships and Crew
Ships are just modifiers to character ability, like gear, except they're d12s. Really impressive. Not usable as often as gear, but packing a punch. Unfortunately, when you're using ships, probably the opposition is too.

Crew is kind of like goblins in Great Ork Gods. If you want to avoid losing a die in a conflict, you can check off a box of Crew. Ensign Smith gets mauled by the beast instead of you. That sort of thing.

Your supporting character is only represented in a limited fashion. I haven't finalized it yet, but it's a lot like spending fan mail to get one card/die in Primetime Adventures. So when I'm Captain Ohta and you're playing Chief of Security Al Farran, it'd be something like you roll one die and you swap it out with the highest die of mine that you can beat.

Conflict
Conflict is kind of like Risk. We each roll our dice and line them up, highest to lowest. Then we compare and remove dice that compare lower than the other's.

Stuff I don't know for sure yet
I think that for the opposing dice rolls I'm going to do something like a mix of Dogs/TSOY and Primetime Adventures. Opponents will have traits of their own, but you can beef them up with a GM resource. I think the GM gets it whenever a player spends Fortune.

Endgame will have to do with the outcome of each chapter, chapter being a quest for a specific item or ally. The director (GM) has a running total that works kind of like a thermometer, sort of like how endgame works in MLwM, except the conclusion/epilogue is a conflict, not an absolute. If you have like 5 destiny points to my 7 Doom points, or whatever, that doesn't decide the ending. Instead we have a kickass space battle or something similar.

Game Limitations
I was thinking about Bankuei's recent post about what games ought to be like, and this one, I think, will score highly in some and low in others. For example, it's not set up to be easily playable to conclusion in one sitting. You could have an enjoyable chapter, but probably not endgame, even if you tweak a few dials.

Fallen by the Wayside
Remember I had that whole political ramifications thing? I think I'm just going to let that melt into the stakes for each chapter. It now seems chore-like to me, and at counter purposes to a fast, exciting game.

some jibber jabber

2005-08-09T09:18:00.000-04:00

So my dude at the printer says I'll see the books probably on Thursday. Cool.

So that's basically done. I want to prepare a few demo protagonist sheets for at the con, but the game doesn't really need much in the way of prep, and I want to use that as a selling point.

And how cool it is that the game is basically off my plate? I need to update my website and maybe get the whole bookshelf thing going for the eventual pdf, but otherwise, man, it's done.

So now what? Yesterday at work I was scribbling and doodling and wrote up what I imagined the Galactic character sheet would look like, and it looks kind of 'done.' I'm like, huh, I guess I don't have all that much left, concept-wise. I'm gonna keep some of the remaining stuff simple, a la MLwM and TSOY's transcendency.

What else? Speaking of TSOY, I had a cool idea at work yesterday (it's slow there) about something cool and supportive I could do for the Solar System. I'm notorious at starting these side projects and not finishing them, so I'm not gonna say what it is until I get a certain amount done.

open for business

2005-08-02T22:32:00.000-04:00

I opened a cafepress store so as to hook myself up with some fashionable booth attire for GenCon.

But don't let that stop you from looking extra snazzy as well.

Maybe when I'm in the mood I'll add more merchandise. Clinton probably wants some o' that "intimate apparel" for his fine self.

PTA - that's a wrap

2005-08-01T08:28:00.000-04:00

In about ten minutes, I'm gonna head out to the printer with a CD full of primetime goodness. I'll have me some nifty little books in less than a week.

It clocks in at 106 pages of game content with 4 more pages up front with title and contents and stuff. Almost half again as big as the previous version.

If I'd given myself a little more time, I'd have put in some ads, like for Polaris, which is the bees knees. Now I can wait until this runs out and also put in a 'coming soon!' for Stranger Things.

travellactic

2005-07-31T09:23:00.000-04:00

warning: this is one of those think-while-I-type posts, so I wander around like a drunk pigeon.

Having been playing Savage Worlds recently, and having been thinking about Galactic, I'm now back and forth about the scales of play space and play time for whatever the game ends up being.

To be quite honest, I still really do enjoy the fruits of a rpg that's been played for more than a handful of sessions. But those of you who've been part of UGAX know that it's really nice to play a game for a handful of sessions and move on. In fact, I think probably 99 percent of this blog's visitors are short-termers.

I think I could put in a sort of 'chapter dial' that allows you to set the pace of events and eventual endgame, but I also suspect that the game would be better if it were designed closer to one notch on the dial. I don't think it'd support a six-month campaign and a six-session campaign equally well.

And here's the follow-up question, assuming that the above is true: if the game were designed for the six-month model, would it be fun to play for only a handful of times? Would it be fun to play without reaching endgame?

How could I make that work? Here's me brainstorming as the coffee kicks in.

Suppose you play to the conclusion of a chapter each time you play. Maybe a chapter is what takes up the handful of sessions. Your character wants something important, in the vein of epic odysseys, like the allegiance of Crown Prince Karl (played of course by Karl from SGA), and that's what the chapter resolves. At the conclusion of the chapter, plenty of neat stuff happens that makes you satisfied that you played the game, but it also has you jazzed to pick up where you left off, maybe after Dude runs a short game of Rifts.

The neat stuff would be things like shifting political boundaries, as in various squares on the map changing ownership in part because of what you did.

And fuck if I know how to do all this yet, but it sounds cool to me.

'my traveller' part 2: worlds

2005-07-30T12:25:00.000-04:00

Another thing that I'd want is an easy tool for creating worlds that allows for nice little bits of 'science' in there.

Nothing that says "you must do X." Instead it'd be a kind of flowchart of likely paired planetary characteristics. So if you want a planet with a lot of UV radiation (like you want everyone to have to wear goggles or something) then you'd find the box that says 'radiation' and see what's connected to it, like 'weak magnetic field' or 'type F star.' Those would each have their own linked boxes, so if you wanted a type F star, the chart would tell you 'probably a longer local year, as planet life zone would be further out from star.' If you chose 'low magnetic field,' then the box might say 'less planetary metal,' which would lead to 'lighter gravity' and so on.

It would be a take-it-or-leave-it tool, only serving the purpose of fueling creativity and adding interesting color, rather than requiring tedious rolling and looking up math and stuff. Though if you want some math, there might be a sidebar or something.

maps, or 'my traveller'

2005-07-30T11:55:00.000-04:00

I was sorta thinking about V's thread on an Ars Magica inspired game. Sometimes I want to do a kind of "Traveller done my way" game. Galactic isn't too far from that, though to make it more Travellerish it'd have to be a bit less epic, more open-ended.

Start with the standard sector map. Instead of 1 hex = 1 parsec, do something like 1 hex = 50 parsecs. Use my underspace drive, so it's kind of like crossing an ocean. For each sector, maybe it takes a week to cross. On the map, you'd mark sectors with dots to denote settlements, or significant population density. The setting would assume that earthlike worlds (i.e. habitable ones) would be pretty rare in terms of percentages, but you can travel fast enough that there's plenty within reach. That means a sector with a dot is both a)habitable world and b) that world is populated.

Since sectors are really big (50 x 50 x 50 pc is like 5 million cubic light years), there's probably some habitable worlds that have been overlooked, or ones that aren't as nice and which were passed over. Good hideouts for bad guys, etc. Also opportunity for exploration and stuff.

With that sector size, it'd take you just over 9 months to travel from Earth to the Crab Nebula.

If it were an actual published product, I'd maybe do a 24*36 map with staggered squares (as an homage to Shadow Wars), a scattering of marked systems, a gazetteer, and plenty of room for the would-be GM to fill in additional systems and details.

It might be a kinda fun Savage Worlds setting, actually. Savageller? Travage Worlds?

Now that PTA^2 is done bein' all writ and stuff, I have some time to daydream about this sort of thing. It's nice.