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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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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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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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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08.11.09
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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07.27.09
Posted in Game Design, Gameplay at 6:41 pm by Christian
Here’s something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. Playing Ribbon Drive just reinforced this. Breaking the Ice might fall into this as well, but Lisa and I have only made characters so far, not yet played it.
As many of you know, I have a strong background in online “freeform” roleplaying. It works based on total character ownership, that is, you get to decide everything about your own character, including how other characters and their actions (including attacks) affect your character. While there’s a lot of difficulty associated with this–namely that conflicts between characters can be quite frustrating–it’s got a focus that I haven’t seen much in tabletop roleplaying, and that’s character interaction.
See, in those games, my fellow players and I would spend hours upon hours with nothing but two or three characters in a scene, bouncing off each other. Over time, the characters develop relationships with each other, and the interactions become more complex. Again, this can lead to frustration when you try to resolve a conflict between those characters and there’s no mechanism in place. But that problem mostly occurs when you play with people you don’t know well and don’t have a shared vision with (which is not uncommon in public freeform fora, where in my most active days you’d find several hundred players in the same place, all somehow interacting with each other’s characters).
Compare and contrast those interaction games with resolution games, where the focus is on resolving actions of or conflicts between characters. Most tabletop roleplaying games are resolution games with a strong focus on the mechanics that resolve tasks or conflicts.
For a long time after my ten-year-plus freeform experience, I longed for resolution games. I wanted things to move forward, actions to be resolved, conflicts to actually play out and end one way or another. I’ve played many awesome games recently where I got just that: a lot of events resolved in a short period of time. Whether it’s In A Wicked Age, D&D 4e, Sorcerer, or Beast Hunters, the game mechanics focus on and promote that sort of resolution play.
Recently, however, I’ve been missing the interaction focus. My mostly-regular group and myself have been playing our second series with Primetime Adventures. PTA is definitely one of my all-time favorite games. The advice in the game, however, is in line with other resolution games: try to have lots of conflicts to resolve. In fact, there’s supposed to be a conflict in every scene.
Our PTA game this time revolves around a family with all of its issues. The father, the main NPC, owns a mining company on a planetoid. The oldest son, Matthew’s character Saul, sides with the miners and promotes labor rights. The youngest son, David’s character Kyle, has a crush on the son of the corporate overlord who wants to control all of the mining activities, and Kyle rebels against his dad as well by signing up with the military. Natalie, my character, is devastated with grief over the death of the oldest Sanduski child, Sarah, who used to hold the family together.
Some of the very best scenes we’ve had have not been about resolving anything. They’ve been about the way these characters interact. We can have a conversation that’s not conflictual at all, but emotionally touching. We can have fights that don’t really get resolved, because it doesn’t matter who wins–it matters what they say to each other and how they feel about it.
That’s not to say that the PTA rules haven’t helped the game. They’ve helped immensely. See, the Screen Presence of a character tells you how many cards they get to draw in a conflict. But more importantly, for us, they indicate which character is in the spotlight for a given session, and which characters should play supporting roles to address the spotlighted character’s Issue. The setup of a TV drama, the connections and edges, all of those mechanics help our game, even when they’re not used for resolution. So PTA supports interaction games very well, as long as you don’t push for conflict all the time.
Ribbon Drive, a game by Joe McDonald that I played at Go Play NW and wrote about here a few posts back, is completely an interaction game. It has no conflict resolution rules. Two characters have a conflict, or a character attempts a task? There is no mechanic in the game to tell you how that turns out. While there are Obstacles that may come up and that characters can overcome with traits, they’re far from a real resolution mechanic. Ribbon Drive is just different. As I said, it’s all about the interaction of the characters. Their traits and their futures, along with the musical inspiration and the crucible of the characters being stuck on a road trip together, are perfect for promoting character interactions. We had a fist fight between two characters in our game, and we had no mechanic to tell us who won. But that didn’t matter; it mattered that they both showed that they had their dad’s anger in them, that they were interacting the same way even though they tried so hard to be different. We just cut the scene in the middle of the fight, then showed them both the next morning with marks on them. Was any conflict resolved? Not really.
Joe calls what Ribbon Drive does “character resolution.” And in the end, that’s true–your characters either embrace the futures that they thought they had when they started on the trip, or they abandon them. Something is resolved. But that resolution does not come from a mechanic (and I think this might be a key difference to Breaking the Ice, but again, I’ll have to play it first). You don’t roll to overcome your grief. You interact. And Ribbon Drive is a prime example of a game that facilitates something I’ve been missing for a while.
You’ll notice how this ties in with my most recent design, Within Our Eyes, if you go back and read those posts about it. Same thing: it’s all about the interaction, not the resolution.
I, for one, hope we’re going to see more interaction games in the future.
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04.25.09
Posted in Game Design, Gameplay at 9:43 am by Christian
(Continuation from the WATO posts below)
A six-sided die has six possible outcomes, each of which has a probability of 1/6. In order to determine the probability of an event, simply add together the probabilities of the outcomes that constitute the event.
For example, if you want to determine the probability of rolling an odd number on a D6, you add the probability of each odd-numbered outcome together. In this case, you have three odd-numbered outcomes (1, 3, 5). Adding their probabilities results in a probability of 1/2 for this event (1/6 + 1/6 + 1/6 = 3/6 or 1/2).
You can also calculate in percent, if you find this to be easier or more meaningful to you. In that case, each outcome of the D6 has a probability of 16.67% (you can figure this out by dividing 100% by 6). Adding three outcomes together results in a probability of 50%. Of course, 50% is equal to 1/2 of 100%, which shows that both ways of expressing probabilities are the same. However, percentages need to be rounded and can therefore lead to slightly false results. Three times 16.67% actually results in 50.01%, but that is only an artifact of the initial rounding to two digits behind the period when dividing 100% by 6.
As another example, you may want to find out your odds of rolling at least a 16 on a D20. Each outcome (i.e., specific number) on the D20 has a probability of 1/20, or 5% (no rounding needed in this case). There are five numbers on the die that are at least 16: 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20. Five times 1/20 equals 5/20 or 1/4. Similarly, five times 5% equals 25% (which is 1/4 of 100%). As a result, you have a chance of 1/4 or 25% of rolling at least a 16 on a D20.
So far, calculating the probability of events has been quite easy. But it gets a little more tricky when we consider multiple dice, something that is a part of most gaming systems.
Multiple Dice Events
Unless you roll two D10 to achieve a percentile outcome, gaming systems usually add the numbers of multiple die rolls together for a sum result. 2D6-based systems are quite prevalent in strategy and role-playing games. The sum of such a roll is the event that we are concerned with in this section. Each possible outcome of such a roll is a combination of the two (or more) dice. The most important point to keep in mind is that an outcome of 1+6 is different from an outcome of 6+1. It matters that the resulting sum of 7 (with 2D6) is achieved in two different ways, depending on whether the first or the second die rolled the 1. Both of these are different outcomes, and each of them adds a possibility to the event of 7.
In order to figure out the amount of possible outcomes, one has to multiply the number of outcomes of each die with the others. For example, 2D6 has 36 possible outcomes, because each die can show 6 different numbers (and 6×6 = 36). We can display this through what I call mapping of the outcomes. In this example, the list of possible outcomes would be mapped out as follows:
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1+1
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2+1
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3+1
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4+1
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5+1
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6+1
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1+2
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2+2
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3+2
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4+2
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5+2
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6+2
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1+3
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2+3
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3+3
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4+3
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5+3
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6+3
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1+4
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2+4
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3+4
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4+4
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5+4
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6+4
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1+5
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2+5
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3+5
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4+5
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5+5
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6+5
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1+6
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2+6
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3+6
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4+6
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5+6
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6+6
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Each of these outcomes has a probability of 1/36.
Now, in order to find out what the probability for a certain event is, we need to figure out how many of the above-listed outcomes produce the event. Rolling a sum of 12 with 2D6, for example, can only be achieved through the outcome 6+6. Therefore, the chance of a sum result of 12 with 2D6 is 1/36, or 2.78%.
An event of a sum of 7, however, is produced by 6 different outcomes: 1+6, 2+5, 3+4, 4+3, 5+2 and 6+1. Therefore, the odds of a result of 7 with 2D6 added together is 6/36, which is the same as 1/6 or 16.67%.
Interestingly, every event higher or lower than 7 has one less outcome associated with it. This means that there are 5 outcomes each that produce a 6 (1+5, 2+4, 3+3, 4+2, 5+1) or an 8 (2+6, 3+5, 4+4, 5+3, 6+2), 4 outcomes each that produce a 5 (1+4, 2+3, 3+2, 4+1) or 9 (3+6, 4+5, 5+4, 6+3), 3 outcomes each that result in a 4 (1+3, 2+2, 3+1) or 10 (4+6, 5+5, 6+4), 2 outcomes each for a sum of 3 (1+2, 2+1) or 11 (5+6, 6+5) and one outcome each for a result of 2 (1+1) or 12 (6+6).
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02.16.09
Posted in Game Design, My Games at 9:37 pm by Christian
I am aiming to create a system for face-to-face play that promotes character interaction and impacts. One that’s not usually concerned with resolving conflicts, but with bringing about interesting scenes in which characters affect and change each other. The mechanics shouldn’t just “jump in” at some point to tell you what happens; they should reinforce the meaning of the actions of the characters and nudge the players toward letting the other players impact their characters.
That’s the basis for Within Our Eyes.
To start, imagine a lush and warm-to-hot region called Andeia, a mix of Mediterranean and South American, with enough affluence to allow characters to focus on each other using the four venues: Passion, Violence, Intrigue, and Ritual. Characters have a couple of Venue Traits, each associated with one of the venues, and a Reward Trait given to them by other players. The players create several locales with one or more of the four venues available (e.g., the local temple is associated with Ritual, but the high priest’s back room with Intrigue). Both characters and locales are described with a few details about their dominant color, shape, scent, sound, and feel to allow players to imagine them in a sensual way–but vague enough that they don’t have to be tied down to anything or spend hours creating things.
When you play characters in a scene, each player uses a deck of cards. They may start out with some cards in their hand as well (more on that later). Now, whenever a character acts toward another character according to one of the available venues, the player puts down a card (random draw or from their hand) at that venue either face up or down. Face up cards add to the intensity of the interaction. For example:
A: “Serrin’s eyes linger on hers for longer than usual.” Puts a card face-down at his side of Passion.
B: “She smiles and brushes her fingers over his arm as they talk.” Puts a card face-up at her side of Passion.
Or
A: “She narrows her eyes and says, ‘Move before I make you.’” Puts a card face-up at her side of Violence.
B: “He shakes his head slightly. ‘I strongly suggest you reconsider. Artias is not who you think he is.’” Puts a card face-up at his side of Intrigue.
The idea here is that the flow of the scene is undisturbed; in fact, the cards actually serve to reinforce the action by making a statement about its nature and intensity. Players get bonus cards at a specific venue by playing out associated Venue Traits.
At the end of the scene, players can do one of two things: fold up their cards at a venue and not impact the other character for a gain in hand cards (i.e., future control over scenes), or try and impact the other character. Impacts are based on two things: highest face card and highest sum of number cards. So both characters could end up impacting each other, or one impacts the second one more strongly.
Impacts include gaining future advantages, inflicting handicaps, changing the other character’s traits (or even replacing a Venue Trait with a Reward Trait), and ultimately even dooming or destroying the other character. Hand cards, which are also earned by playing out Reward Traits, can also be spent on adding venues to a scene, removing handicaps, and so on.
I’m almost done writing up the first playtest document. Hopefully this will work out as planned.
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08.17.08
Posted in Game Design, My Games at 4:57 pm by Christian
There are certain things I really like about a few games. Just for fun, I took the liberty of stealing them and forcing them all together into one distilled core. Here’s the fruit of that effort It’s a complete ripoff of Agon, Dogs in the Vineyard, In A Wicked Age, and Sorcerer. There’s also a PDF with one page of rules and two pages of examples.
If you don’t know those games, the system below probably will be a bit more difficult to understand…
Levels of Intensity
Pick one to use for an action. Which one you do is up to you and how invested your character is. You can up your intensity based on the declaration of others, but you can’t lower it once it’s declared. The levels are:
Calm D6 Invested D8 Passionate D10 Fanatical D12
Traits
Pick a trait to roll along with the intensity die. Main characters have three traits, one at D10 and two at D8. Examples: Smooth Talker D10, Gladiator D8, Love for Jila D8. Minor characters have 2 traits at D6.
Actions
Everyone says who they’re acting against and then rolls at the same time and compares highest single die. Highest number goes first (second die breaks ties). The defender can pick up one or both of their rolled dice to defend against the action. Dice used for defense can’t be used for offense anymore, so picking up both dice means forfeiting the action. Defense dice can be rerolled against any following attacks that round. A successful attack (i.e., one with a die showing a higher number than the defense’s highest-rolled die) causes an impact.
Impact
The successful attacker chooses an impact up to the rating of the action, effective immediately. The rating is determined by adding the highest actual single die result of the attacker to the intensity die maximum of the defender (i.e., the highest he could have rolled: 6 for calm, 8 for invested, 10 for passionate, 12 for fanatical). The defender can negotiate not suffering the impact in exchange for a fictional behavior or event.
Any Tax a trait (one step down in die size; ends after 5-minute rest period after the scene)
12 Gain 1 advantage point (AP) against the defender (used for special effects; see below)
14 Damage a trait (one step down in size until healed) – must be the one defender just used
16 Wound (all trait dice treated as one step lower; needs healing)
20 Fatal. Total control over the fate of the character: death, mutilation, incapacitation, etc. – this impact can be “held” until end of scene and used as negotiation material (see example 3)
Special Effects
Spend AP for the following effects with the character you have AP against. AP last until they are used up.
1 AP Reroll one defense die.
2 AP Count your own highest-rolled die as maximum value for impact purposes only.
3 AP Add four points to your defense after your roll.
4 AP Add four points to your highest roll after you roll for attack and impact purposes.
Healing
Characters need prolonged care and/or overnight rest to heal damage or wounds. One of these can be healed at a time. It needs to make sense in the fiction to do this, and you can’t do it more than once a day. Whenever a healing moment is requested by any player, all of the characters get to heal one impact. If a major character does not have a wound or damage, however, that character earns one (if opponent heals damage) or two (if opponent heals wound) advantage points against all of the healing characters with whom she was in conflict since the last healing, whether or not she was the one who inflicted the damage or wound.
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