07.08.11
Posted in Anima Prime, Game Design, My Games at 7:00 am by Christian
There was a thread recently on Story Games about “formalistic” games. If you’re not following this stuff, basically, formalistic design refers to RPG resolution systems that are abstract from the moment-to-moment fiction. Think Primetime Adventures, In a Wicked Age (mostly), Contenders, and others, where what you narrate doesn’t directly play (mechanically) into how it turns out.
The opposite of formalism, then, is the “fiction first” principle. The most prominent recent example of this is Apocalypse World, where what you narrate directly impacts the resolution (Vincent also likes to talk about Dogs, where the narration determines the type of fallout at stake for each raise). Many traditional systems do this, too, though they are often vague about it and put the onus on the GM rather than having structured approaches (which can be perfectly functional).
When you look at my published games–Beast Hunters and Anima Prime–you’ll see that I’ve been wrestling with this issue for a long time. In fact, Beast Hunters was the result of discussions at the Forge about how to approach what Vincent more recently called the Moment of Judgment in challenge-focused games. If you’re unfamiliar with Beast Hunters, maneuvers in conflicts work like this: the player narrates a maneuver, the GM offers a certain level of success, and the player can take that level or roll the dice instead. This means that the player has a reason to care about their narration for every single maneuver, and if they try to gloss it over (“I attack him again”), the system will remind them of this, through the lower offer they’ll get from the GM. In other words, it’s a fiction-first system, though a judgment-based one rather than a branching one like Apocalypse World. It actually takes the way in which many people play traditional games–with the players trying to come up with creative solutions in the hope that the GM will modify their die roll or let them overcome the challenge at hand without dice rolls at all–and systematizes it, makes it reliable and fully functional.
Anima Prime’s resolution system was somewhat based on Beast Hunter’s in that you also use maneuvers to build up currency that you then use to strike. However, early on in the design, I realized that the different focus of the game required that judgment aspect to go away. Anima Prime is a lighthearted, more casual game, where Beast Hunters is intense and demanding (and can be exhausting). So in Anima Prime, the narration does not change the number of dice you roll (and there is no GM offer). This makes it an intrinsically formalistic system, which is a much more fundamental change than you would assume from looking at all the similarities between the mechanics. Everything else is now colored by the fact that your narration is dissociated from the dice.
That troubled me a little, and I tried several solutions to tie the narration at least somewhat to the resolution. One thing that’s still in the game is the ability of players to give each other a gift die for maneuvers if they liked the narration. I figured that this would work like fan mail in Primetime Adventures. However, this is a limited resource, and players tend to be timid with it. But if it wasn’t a limited resource (or came from a central pool rather than out of players’ own Action Pools), it would be given so freely as to make it meaningless. So, the gift dice are there for people to use, but they’re not enough nor are they very reliable.
The second piece I introduced is the ability of the GM to award Awesome Tokens for great narration. These are also awarded if a player rolls 5 or more successes on a roll, but if the GM already awarded one, the player doesn’t get a second one. This latter part is important because it takes a lot of the pressure of judgment off the GM. They can award the token or not, and the player could still get it (or not). The award is therefore meaningful and nice to get, but it’s not fundamental or too unbalancing. Someone who never earns GM-given tokens still gets some through rolls and won’t be too uneffective (as opposed to someone who always gets low offers in Beast Hunters).
Finally, there’s the concept of goals. The GM can create fictional as well as mechanically effective goals in the fiction, on their own iniative or prompted by the players. In either case, they are based on what’s been established during play (both in what’s possible and in the difficulty the GM assigns to the goal). This means that players who pay attention to the fiction or narrate interesting bits into the fiction have a lever to turn those into mechanically important pieces. I believe that goals are the heart and soul of the whole system, and I hope I made that clear enough in the game that they are used in every single conflict.
Now: all three of these mechanics that tie fiction to resolution remain optional. This was very important to me to ensure that the game remains lighthearted and casual. I envision people playing Anima Prime at the end of a hard day or week, players who have jobs and families, and who might not always be at their highest energy or attention level. The way the game is structured ensures that it still runs smoothly even if not all of the players are investing a lot into playing it (as opposed to Beast Hunters, which grinds to an ugly halt). And the players who have a lot of energy and creativity can jump in as hard as they want, going for bonus dice and Awesome Tokens with every single maneuver, and establishing cool fiction and meaningful and effective goals left and right.
The game works wonderfully if the players are excited about doing crazy stunts and actions that could be straight from Final Fantasy cut scenes or movies (like Advent Children), but it doesn’t break if they aren’t. I’m pretty happy with how that turned out.
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04.08.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:30 pm by Christian
Fight for love and vengeance.
Wield megaswords and magic guns.
Battle on top of airships.
Summon powerful eidolons.
Walk between dimensions.
And that’s just the beginning.
Anima Prime is now finally available! It combines narrative freedom in character scenes and combat maneuvers with elemental powers, Soulbound Weapons, and the summoning of Eidolons to allow you to create your own stories and action scenes rivaling those usually seen in video game cut scenes and anime battles. A flexible goal system lets you infuse any fight with meaningful story decision points and unlimited tactical options.
You can buy the game in book or PDF form via the website for $20 or $10, respectively. But here’s the cool thing: because it’s Creative Commons licensed, you can get the entire (circa 55,000 words) game for free from the very same site! The purchasable PDF features a much nicer layout, illustrations, hyperlinks, bookmarks, and an index, not to mention it supports my efforts. 
But other than the index, there’s not a single extra word in the for-sale versions. Also, you can make translations, add-ons, supplements, or whatever and sell those yourself without ever giving me a dime, as long as you use the same license (attribution share-alike, meaning you give me credit and make a plain version of your product available for free).
I’ve set up the PDF sale via PayPal for now; you should get to the download page right after completing the order. If that doesn’t work, let me know and I’ll email it to you within a reasonable amount of time. It’ll be available via other venues in a little while as well.
And since I love you guys, if you buy the book within the next week (until April 15) and forward me the receipt email (just redact any personal information) to chgriffen@berengad.com, I’ll send you the PDF to go along with it. After that? I don’t know yet.
Also, if you’re listed as a playtester, I’ll email you the PDF (nudge me if I overlooked you or may have forgotten your email). If you qualify under the “earn a book” deal, I’ll send you that shortly when I get my first print run.
And here is a peek at the inside of the book:
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06.16.10
Posted in Anima Prime, My Games at 6:00 pm by Christian
I just posted the pre-final text of Anima Prime on the Anima Prime website. It’s pre-final in that there may be a typo or two still in there, and one of the chapters remains unedited. Still, it’s a big step from beta 1.2, the rules are nailed down, and it’s going into the layout phase now.
Here’s an incomplete change log, so you know what to look for if you’ve read the previous version:
- Defense now starts at 2 for PCs, and inflicting a wound requires meeting rather than exceeding the defense. This makes the calculation of multiple wounds much easier (it’s a straight multiple of the defense) while leaving the dice balance the same.
- Added new conditions: Diseased, Hexed and Slowed.
- Changed Blinded to bring a penalty of one die before the roll rather than one success after (it was overpowered).
- Added some powers for the new conditions.
- Changed the way powers affect multiple PCs: instead of it being a function of the power, you now use Mass Effect.
- Upped the usefulness of Restore and Dispel.
- Added new weapon effects, including elemental eaters (gain charge dice when someone uses a specific element against you). Changed some others (Haste is more expensive, for example).
- Changed Disarm: it’s now part of an adversity Maneuver that costs the GM one Awesome Token and brings the disarmed character bonus dice.
- Changed Eidolon Action Pools: no more extra cost for Eidolon actions; summoners can use their own or Eidolon action dice (mix and match) for Eidolon actions; for balance, Eidolon Action Pools are reduced.
- The Ghostfield setting has been expanded a LOT. Two new setting seeds, many factions as inspiration for PCs or NPCs, and other additions.
- There are now many listed examples of effect goals with suggested difficulty ratings to make creating goals on the fly easier.
- Removed the essays (they were heavy-handed and felt like padding), but turned the one on Spontaneous Play into a GM chapter (that one might still need a bit of editing). Also removed the extra example characters. Both of those will be added to the downloads section of the website.
There are probably other ones I’m forgetting. Thanks to the many, many playtesters over the past 2+ years! Your input has made this game that much better.
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06.14.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:18 pm by Christian
Freshly cleansed and, in the case of AnimaPrimeRPG.com and our forums, with a bit of a new look, the Berengad sites have returned. Now free of malware, and much better protected.
And once we’re all over the current nasty cold in our house, it’s back to those other things we were supposed to finish.
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05.22.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:04 pm by Christian
Somehow all of the sites on our Dreamhost account, including this one and AnimaPrimeRPG.com, were hacked. Each PHP file had malicious code inserted. I’ve reinstalled WordPress and scrubbed other pages, but I’ve also taken most things down for now (I did all this over my Droid and will look into it more when I can sit down at my PC).
I’m probably going to leave the Anima Prime Drupal site down and just put up a very simple one-pager in its stead. That’ll be in a couple of days, when I’m releasing the pre-final text of the game.
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04.11.10
Posted in Game Design at 4:53 pm by Christian
Recently, I made a mini-RPG for Aidan (my 6-year-old son). I figure I’ll write down the process, not as a “this is how you have to do it,” but as a “this is how I do it” kind of thing. After all, there’s lots of different approaches to designing games. And since I talked at GameStorm about how I start from a freeform place and add to that, this might help to show what I meant by that.
Aidan is a big Mario fan–Super Mario, Mario Kart, and so on. He also got interested in my Anima Prime manuscript, which, with a low-quality printout of the cover that caught his attention, is lying around in a notebook on our desks these days. He asked what it was, I told him it was a game, and he wanted to play. So we decided to make a related Mario game instead.
He was mostly interested in fighting Bowser and other opponents as Mario, so that’s what the game would be about. As I said, I start from a freeform place, so we could have just talked about it. But I wanted to add a die mechanic to add some unpredictability and, later, opportunities for gaming choices. It was based on Anima Prime: you roll a number of dice, and every die showing a 3 or above counts as a success. Mario always rolls 4 dice, we decided together, while opponents roll dice depending on how powerful they are. Whoever reaches 10 successes first wins the fight. Mario always starts.
Obviously, the odds are stacked in Mario’s favor (in what we would call Super Mario Prime). But that’s good; it’s a kids’ game, and they should win far more often than not. Also, there’s no negating successes; I hate “games” like Hi-Ho-Cheerioh in which you can lose your whole progress, which can make them take forever.
Speaking of: at this point, we didn’t have a game, we had an activity (according to my definitions). After all, there was no element of choice. Each side rolled dice in turn without an opportunity for decisions that could impact the outcome.
So I added to that a coin mechanic: Mario’s player has 3 coins. He can trade one in to reroll dice that didn’t earn successes. Given that now we have viable choices to make, the design moved into the “game” category in my head. I later added other characters who could use their coins in different ways, whether to gain additional guaranteed successes (even above 4 with one roll), make the enemy reroll their successes, or something else. This gives mechanical diversity among characters (like Luigi and Princess Peach) that makes playing the game more fun in the long run, because Aidan could now discover different strategies within the same basic framework.
I also added a rule that he would only gain new coins when he lost a fight. Aidan immediately said: “Oh, so losing is actually fun because you get your coins back!” Exactly. Again, given that this is a kids game, it’s all about avoiding frustrations and making all aspects of it fun (whereas in a grownup game, making an option less fun can raise the intensity and promote investment in the choices within the game).
Still, it wasn’t a roleplaying game because the fiction didn’t matter. Well, to Aidan it did; he insisted that we draw Mario and the opponent for each battle, then cross out pieces we attacked and hit each round, and he had fun with it. But to me, the difference between the greater category of games and the smaller one of RPGs (or story games or whatever) is that the fiction has the ability to, at least sometimes, impact the mechanics. I didn’t get to the point of officially creating the rule that would turn this into an RPG, but there are several options:
- Allowing a very cool maneuver description to earn extra successes or outright defeat the opponent
- Letting him “dodge” successes from the opposition if he can tell me how Mario would not be too susceptible to a specific attack
- Handing out a bonus coin at the beginning of a battle if fictionally, Mario had an advantage over the opponent
There are more, of course, but you see the common thread here: they all require judgment on part of the player of the opposition. That’s why I don’t think you can have a completely adversarial game that’s also an RPG according to my definition; competition and fair judgment, while working sometimes, will often lead to frustration. Not always, but often enough that I don’t think it’s fun, for me, to try and balance those things while I’m playing. I want all my play motivations to align, not oppose each other.
So there you go. A very basic game that Aidan greatly enjoyed, and which produced many battle drawings full of scribbled-out opponents.
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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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