01.20.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:50 am by Christian
RPGNow.com has a bundle of games and supplements (in PDF) from participating publishers worth almost $1,500 for $20! All of the proceeds go to Haiti relief efforts. The list is actually so long, the website fails at the letter C! Beast Hunters is included, as are Full Light, Full Steam, Three Sixteen:Carnage Amonst The Stars, the Serenity RPG, and many other goodies.
Fred Hicks has the complete list.
Also, you can donate $5 or$10 (because really, you’re getting way too good of a deal here) and RPGNow.com will match your donation.
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12.24.09
Posted in Beast Hunters, Game Design, My Games at 7:10 pm by Christian
After reading one of those comments that always make me sad (i.e., “I don’t quite get Beast Hunters just from the text”), I spent a few hours writing up examples and adding them to the revised edition SRD. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, all of the rules of the game are written out in the SRD.
There are now new examples for each step of character creation, as well as for maneuvers, strikes, resource denials and recoveries, and achievements. I’m the first to admit that the absence of examples within the text, as opposed to the one long example of play at the end, wasn’t necessarily the best choice. Hindsight, etc. But adding more examples to the SRD was relatively easy, just time intensive.
I’d be curious to hear if this makes understanding the rules easier for any of you, and what other suggestions you have for things I could add.
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12.23.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:56 pm by Christian
If you only read one gaming blog, it should be–no, not this one, but Chris Chinn’s Deeper in the Game. Among the most insightful people who think and talk about roleplaying, I find Chris to be the one whose thoughts translate the most directly to something I (and I think other people) can use, both in design and in actual play. Chris also provides a voice for issues and people who are generally underrepresented in mainstream RPGs and RPG discussion.
He just posted two things that are really fundamental; check them out:
The Roots of the Big Problems
A Way Out
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11.28.09
Posted in Game Design at 9:48 pm by Christian
There are some video games out there that are trying to push the envelope with regards to using the medium as a storytelling device. Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy) is probably my favorite one of those, and the same developer is currently working on Heavy Rain, which looks very promising. But I think we could do much better than that. If I had millions of dollars in development money, I’d create the following.
Imagine starting up the game for the first time. You begin a New Story. You select two to four genre modules. These are things like horror, noir, sci-fi, crime, drama, and so on. The genres are assigned each to one of the four face buttons of your controller (say, Triangle on your PS4 controller is now assigned the Horror genre). The game opens with your character in his or her apartment. You can create your character’s appearance or have it be randomly generated.
Now, your character has no predetermined abilities; these will only come up in play. If you go straight to the gym, your character will be athletic. If the first thing you do is sit down on the computer, you’ll have some electronics abilities. And so on. But what matters more is that you don’t have a predetermined story yet. You only have your apartment, and other locations (with other characters) are created procedurally only when you visit them.
Here’s the key component of this game: when you want to interact with someone or something, you face it and press one of your face buttons. The button assignments then pick a random result from the genre assigned to them.
What does this mean? It means that if you open a closet with the Horror button, you may find a corpse inside, or a door to a darker dimension. If you pick the action button instead, the closet doors could open to reveal an assortment of weapons. The Noir button is definitely going to give you some voice over, whatever you find. A single push of the button could lead to a no-event or a minor event. A quick double click of the button triggers an important event.
The core system of the game tracks your choices and maps them to certain story structures. If you find a corpse, you can now ask other characters about the deceased or find info on the computer. If you get attacked, you can now find information on the attackers. If you talk to someone, their importance in the game rises, and they are more probably to be introduced by the system in later scenes.
Now, you may wonder how this leads to a story. The trick in the procedures and algorithms is to have certain core things that snap in place and tie things together. If you find several corpses, then at some point the system is going to make a character you’ve encountered the murderer and trigger a final confrontation scene, which includes a flashback showing that character killing the victims. If you’ve found a secret conspiracy, at some point people will come after you, and the system will make a character ultimately responsible and allow you to figure out through research, conversation, or other methods who it is. I’m actually thinking that a few modules would exist that have pretty specific outlines, and that the roles in those outlines are filled by the characters you encounter. Future updates to the game add more events and more story modules, for a greater variety of possible stories.
Sure, the resulting story might not always make perfect sense; it will require a certain amount of interpretation on behalf of the player to work through it. But it won’t be worse than any given Metal Gear Solid plot!
What fascinates me about this idea is the pure sandbox aspect combined with a story structure engine. You can make your own Horror Noir story. You can pace it the way you want to. You can decide that right now is the time to be attacked or to find that special clue, while right after your character takes a breather and has an introspective scene.
Is it possible? Maybe. But sadly, I doubt anyone would ever risk much money on such a far-out idea.
Could I or someone else design something like this as a face-to-face RPG, maybe a collaborative GM-less game with the mechanics taking over the procedural parts? Now that’s a far more interesting (and unanswered) question… 
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11.23.09
Posted in Anima Prime, Game Design at 11:19 pm by Christian
I am sooo close to finishing up the text for Anima Prime, finally. The part that’s taken me the longest is the setting. I’ve decided to flesh out Ghostfield to a degree that players will actually have enough variety from which to create their unique characters and stories.
If you know me and my games, you know that I have an affinity for tribal groups. I think tribes get a raw deal in many fantasy settings. Most often, the humans are civilized and urban and the evil monsters — orcs, goblins, and so on — get to be tribal. That’s sucky. On the other hand, I know that “tribes as benevolent keepers of nature” is just as much of a stereotype. So I try to make tribal society an equal alternative to, say, mercantile or feudal society: different, but not inherently better or worse.
One thing you may not know is that I actually base the tribes in my games on Germanic tribes. I think many people see Beast Hunters and think of Native American or maybe African tribes. But my inspiration lies in my own culture’s ancestry (and Angga’s illustration of the riding warrior that I posted before). So here’s the section I wrote for Anima Prime, not yet edited, but good enough to give you an idea of where I’m going with this part of the setting. I’m going for “short but evocative” here.
The Northern Tribes
The northern part of Enendia, spanning about one third of the land that’s free from Kanissian occupation, is ruled by three major tribes. These tribes have a long history of conflict with each other as well as the surrounding areas, and tales of their raiding parties are told to scare small children around Enendia and beyond.
The tribes believe that the Gods live in the clouds, and that we can feel their presence when the wind blows. Thus, when the air is still, the Gods are assumed to be casting their glance elsewhere. This leads the tribes to stop all of their activities when there is no wind, for fear that their Gods would not be able to bless and aid them. They also conduct all important matters out in the open and have a strong distrust of closed buildings, which keep the Gods shut out. Anyone who wants to make dealings with the tribes (and survive) needs to remember never to invite them into any kind of enclosed area, or the tribes will feel that they are being tricked or corrupted.
The tribes have no name for themselves; they simply use “we” when they talk about tribe members, their clan, or whole tribes. Most of them are born into their tribe, but outsiders willing enough to dedicate themselves to a clan or tribe can be accepted through the assent of the community. When tribe members die, they are burned, and their essence rises up with the smoke to join the Gods among the clouds.
Two of the tribes are still nomadic, and both of them tame horses for their warriors, hunters, and scouts. They are the ones who adhere to the old ways, while the third tribe has settled down at the southwestern edge of their territory and established more permanent trade relations with the remainder of Enendia (though all of their tents and buildings are always open in respect of the Gods).
The nomadic tribes have a custom that makes their members—all of them considered warriors—recognizable to anyone who’s heard of them. When a tribal child is ready, which it determines on its own, it undergoes this ritual. The child (or young adult) holds an overripe sunfruit in its hand. The left hand is customary for one of the tribes, while the other tribe uses the right hand. A tribal elder now presses the glowing-hot tip of a knife upon the child’s shoulder and very slowly runs it down the arm while the remainder of the gathered tribe members chant praises to the Gods. The ritual ends when the child either drops or squishes the extremely soft sunfruit, and the length of the scar forever indicates the Gods’ blessing upon the scarred. Only very few tribe members can proudly display a scar that reaches all the way down to the back of their hand, and they are often chosen as leaders of clans within the tribe.
There is a legend among the tribes of The Twice Scarred, a warrior who bore full-length scars of both tribes and who led them to victory in times when all of the tribes were in dire peril. The elders say that one day, The Twice Scarred will return to once again unite the tribes in their darkest days.
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11.05.09
Posted in Gameplay at 10:37 pm by Christian
Just a quick little thought that’s been on my mind. I’ve been going over Jonathan Walton’s gamma draft of Geiger Counter on Google Wave, and the character creation part stuck with me for a while. I think there’s an opportunity in that game and in ones similar to it to make neat characters with just a very simple technique.
See, Geiger Counter asks you to make characters according to archetypes. That fits with the horror movie inspiration. I think that what sets good characters apart from bad characters, in horror flicks and other B-movies, is that there’s something about them that breaks the archetype. So you have enough of a template to immediately recognize the character and know what their part is (which is good for horror movies), but you also get treated to at least some variation from the cliche.
In a game sense, you could quickly make up a character’s personality (or role, or whatever) by picking Type and Break. So you’d have Type: Librarian, Break: Boxing Aficionado. Or Type: Hardened Cop, Break: Crossdresser (sound familiar?). Or Type: Prissy Princess, Break: Grease Monkey.
I think gender and other role reversals provided easy breaks here in the past. Type: Asskicker, Break: Female was popular there for a while (see James Cameron’s work), until it became its own type (Female Asskicker). And then you’ve got to find a new break.
What do you think? Have any favorite type/break combos, new or from movies?
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09.16.09
Posted in Game Design, Gameplay at 4:49 pm by Christian
There’s something I would really love to talk about more (and definitely hear other people’s thoughts about) in regards to roleplaying games, which is how to set up a group of main characters that produce really intense and interesting interactions when you play them with each other. This is more important for interaction games than for resolution games, but really, it can apply to both depending on your focus.
Recently, I talked to Jake about his experience playing Ribbon Drive. His group did not get the same kind of experience out of it that I did and was somewhat underwhelmed. Similarly, we reminisced about our Contenders game way back when, which had great moments for Matt and myself but often left Jake’s and Nick’s characters a bit out in the cold. I’ll come back to these games in a minute.
First, let me start with this thought: the way to make the most out of games where the interaction between the main characters is the focus of the story lies in taboos and tension. Often taboos create tension, but tension can also be the result of strong feelings that are unrelated to taboos. (So maybe I’m mainly talking about tension, with taboos as a subset of origins? Possibly.)
Plenty of dramatic stories revolve around taboos. The characters are faced with them and tempted to break them. Will they? What does it take for them to do it? What’s going to happen if they do? There’s a lot of tension that results from these questions, both externally and within the character’s heads.
Think about your typical adventuring party. You’ve got a bunch of warriors going out to fight monsters or what have you. That’s pretty standard stuff and can be fun in itself. But what if two of the adventurers, who have spouses waiting for them at home, develop a crush on each other during their journey? After all, they’re fighting side by side, they understand each other, they save each other’s lives. A longing develops. The reason this is interesting is because of the taboo of adultery. Not just as an abstract concept, but as something that, if transgressed, will have a powerful impact on the characters involved (including the ones waiting back home). Suddenly the interactions between them are going to be laden with tension. Is either one of them going to decide to make a move or talk about their feelings? Are they going to have little touches and then pull back? What happens if they give in? What happens if they don’t? All the while, they’re each struggling internally with their feelings as well.
What if the taboo relates to status/class (most regency stories) or family feuds (Romeo and Juliet)? In our current Primetime Adventures game, David’s character Kyle–the son of an offworld mine owner–has a secret crush on the son of the CEO of the corporation trying to take control over the mining business. There’s plenty of tense interaction to be had between the two, but also between Kyle and his dad, Kyle and his girlfriend, and other characters.
Taboos don’t have to be romantic or sexual in nature, either. They can relate to traditions, gender or class roles, political ethics, and so on. Take a look at Dogs in the Vineyard and its ladder of sin. It’s all about breaking taboos. The tension in the game then results from the main characters being faced with people who were simply human, and how they deal with them.
Back to the games from earlier. In our Ribbon Drive game, we set up a situation in which all of our characters had a great deal of potential tension with each other. Three of us were children from different mothers to the same father, one was the father’s brother, and one was his ex-student (and secret admirer). One of the sons felt abandoned, one never knew his father, and the daughter took care of him in his dying days. Of course we would have tension; our father was a man who had transgressed taboos in many ways (abandoning families, having affairs, etc.) and our characters had different opinions on that. At the same time, we were all family, but we didn’t know what that meant. There were very strong feelings involved all around. Our result? Powerful interactions.
From what Jake said, I didn’t get the feeling that his group set up their road trip participants with enough tension. They all had a reason to be where they were, but their interactions weren’t charged enough either with taboos or with tense emotions. The road trip movies I remember most are those where you have sexual tension and taboos (Y Tu Mama Tambien), family tension (Little Miss Sunshine), and similar potential between the characters that are locked together in the car for a long, long trip. If they all get along or don’t have any taboos between them, the trip will just be pleasant. Which is fine for real life, but boring for stories
In our Contenders game, Matt and my character were linked together via my character’s sister, whom his character was trying to court. That created powerful emotions in my character (rage and jealousy, mostly), which led to plenty of tension and conflicts. We played off each other a lot in that way. But Jake’s and Nick’s characters had no such link to us or each other. We were all boxers, we fought in the ring, but we didn’t have much tension between us other than some competition for the boxing title.
So it seems to me that many games that rely on character interaction as a driving force for the story can be hit or miss because they don’t automatically produce tense and taboo-laden relationships during the setup phase. There’s nothing in Contenders that made Matt and I connect our characters the way we did. Compare this to Dogs in the Vineyard once more, where the town creation mechanics ensure that taboos will be broken and people will be tense toward the Dogs when they ride into town. I think this is one reason why Dogs is such a successful game: it has a strong setup that reliably produces tense character interaction potential.
What do you all think?
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08.26.09
Posted in Beast Hunters, My Games at 8:58 am by Christian
If you speak (and more importantly read) Italian, and you’d like to read the Beast Hunters rules in that beautiful language, you can find a fan-made translation of the System Reference Document over here:
Italian Beast Hunters SRD
Thanks to Alessandro Gianni and Valerio Valenti!
(Also for pointing out that the example in the adversity creation section still has “offensive trait” and “defensive trait” in it, even though that distinction is removed in the 1.5 edition, now that traits can be assigned to either purpose. I’ll fix that in a minute.)
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08.15.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:22 pm by Christian
Some people out there already have made custom character sheets for their Anima Prime games. I know Andy and his group have one for their Transformers-inspired game. Now Tazio Bettin, who is going to do a lot of the illustrations for the game, made one for a con they just had in Italy. Where, as he said it, because the 3-hour slots were too short, they just used 3 slots in a row for their Anima Prime game. So if you’re looking for a better-looking sheet than the crappy one in the beta document, you can get it here.
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08.11.09
Posted in Anima Prime, Game Design, My Games at 9:50 am by Christian
Those of you who have posted reports of your play, please send me the names of your group members, and a contact address, so I can add you to the book’s list of playtesters! Also, you’ll get a copy of the game per the beta promotion (PDF or book, depending on how many sessions you played and posted about), so I need your contact info for that.
Please do this within the next two weeks to be included. If it’s later than that, I’ll still send you your copy of the game, but may not be able to put you in the book.
Thanks!
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