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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He just posted two things that are really fundamental; check them out:

The Roots of the Big Problems
A Way Out

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…

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.

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?