Roleplaying games can represent stuff about real life that you don’t necessarily stop to think about. I’ll write about one here, the difference between how Call of Cthulhu and Burning Wheel handle skills, and what those differences say about human capabilities. And why it matters quite a lot to me, personally. Continue reading
Ever since Magic Origins was announced, Wizards has been clear about the set not being the end, but the beginning. Its even in the name. There are some quite splashy things in the set that set it apart from other sets, but there’s also some little subtler things that show a small change of direction.
About a month ago I managed to get into Jason Morningstar‘s Archipelago game “Love in the Time of Khavarner“. I really liked the setting and the style the game worked and began immediately to think how I could hack it. Jason himself said that it is not as simple as it seems. And after working on a game I have to admit he was right.
Without going into details about what is needed for an Archipelago game I must admit that I used the two existing games Love in the Time of Seið and Love in the Time of Khavarner as the starting point. I did not have high ambitions about a truly original masterpiece but an idea about a game I really wanted to take part in. Continue reading
Not only that, you should be playing many games. Playing one game or a limited set of games will not enable anyone to come up with something truly great. Sure, you can make clones of the games you are playing, but creativity isn’t magical. It requires something to build on. Creativity is about finding new ways to combine things you already know. Therefore, the more you know, the better. To acquire this knowledge, play games.
On the other hand, if for some inexplicable reason you had to choose one, choose Magic: the Gathering.
After a computer failure and six months when I just didn’t remember it Redemund’s Guild’s (first) Fiasco playset is ready to be released. This playset was written to capture the feeling of lecherous parties of ancient Rome as depicted in tv-series such as Rome and Spartacus.
We were lucky enough to get a great feedback on this and as it happens the group actually wrote about their gaming session. You can check it HERE.
So here you go. Fata Capuam: DOWNLOAD (pdf)
The contest is open again. The announcement spurred a lot of ideas, but its going to be an uphill battle.
One of the favorite things my gaming group brings up are the “Legacy Tokens” that allow the players to take part in the narrative “legacies” of the gaming world. I stole this idea from a (fan-made?) addition to old Deadlands but it still has evolved from those beginnings. In the following I will high-light how we have used those chips to give the players major power to reshape the narrative.
I stumbled on an internet forum to a thread about Indiana Jones type roleplaying, and noticed that Hollow Earth Expedition is a very popular choice. For the life of me, I cannot understand why. OK, there are good things in it, but more on those later. The first thing I always do when I try to decide if a new RPG system is worth my while, is to begin reading on character creation. After about five minutes of reading it I notice the first warning sign. Attributes and Skills are first bought on one-to-one basis, but later they get a scaling cost. This is a classic White Wolf mistake. Perhaps it has been around before WW, but if it is, I have no idea where that idiocy sprang from.
I steel myself and venture further into the mechanics. Then I notice: six attributes that start from zero, and you add 15 points to them, but there must be at least 1 in all of them. Why not say: “every attribute starts at 1 and you add 9 points into them”, because that’s what it really means!? OK, a rookie design mistake (again)… Let’s see what it looks like when the system is played with optimization in mind.
Derived attributes have way more mentions on Dexterity, Body and Intelligence than on any other attributes. Strength and Willpower get mentioned once each. It is obvious that low character intelligence almost never gets any real hindrance in games, it is “just” roleplaying stuff, so I decide to “dump” it. I toyed with the system for a while, and the “ideal” character is: Body 5, Dexterity 5, Strength 1, Charisma 1, Intelligence 2 and Willpower 1. Of course Dexterity is related to shooting at things, like in almost every game. So now my guy has the maximum “hit points”, maximum shootyness, maximum defense, good initiative score and sometimes even notices stuff happening. Otherwise it is very lackluster, but who cares about those other types of thingies anyway?!
Obviously that is not the most ideal character, there never is, and definitely not very enjoyable to play. It is just so easily maximized to most of the things that happen in RPGs, outside of player-GM narrative (i.e. within the mechanics of the game). Note that I could, if I wanted to, start this guy with 5 points in Diplomacy and Investigation each, for example, and rock pretty well in those departments too.
To clarify, I am most definitely a role-player, not roll-player, but this kind of thoughtlessness in character creation mechanics just makes me mad, and makes me not want to play your game. At least not under your rules, that is.
I promised to write something positive about this so here goes. Setting is innovative and exciting, as is the dice-mechanic. This setting would be great with some other RPG system, and if polished, or rather reconstructed from basics up, the dice mechanic could be really cool.
I was supposed to write something for the new year. A short retrospective on last year and something about this year, but that’ll have to wait, because I need to think through what I want to say before I can go into that.
Instead, this. I’ve been playing some Angry Birds Transformers lately, and there’s something that bugs me.
Long ago, I got myself acquainted with Heavy Gear 2nd edition RPG. I liked the basis of the system, but the more I read it, the more I found some of the usual offenders of RPG systems of the time. Agility as a god-stat, Combat Sense skill 2 is mandatory unless you like to do nothing in many of the combat rounds, movement calculations need to be done beforehand by whipping out a calculator to do some fraction counting, and the overall fiddliness of the system made me dump it. But before I had the chance to do that, I fell in love with its seamless integration of the vehicle rules, and the damage system. SilCore as a whole stuck to my mind as a diamond in the rough; probably salvageable, but not without a heck of a lot of brainy type work.
I don’t really know why exactly I decided to give Silhouette Core another look after all these years, I guess I was bored or something, but I broke it into tiny pieces and put it back together. High attribute modifiers apparently are one of the things that have offended people playing it. I’d say the contrary: too much low attribute modifiers is the reason it doesn’t work well. Or rather, the radical contrast between them. This is a dice-system feature and nothing much can be done about it, if one wants to preserve the original game engine. The problems may be alleviated by handing out the essential bits free for everyone.
When I had put it back together, I reverse-engineered to see how it compares with the original, and I saw that the characters made through my method were somewhere between “cinematic PCs” and “cinematic major NPCs”. But that’s the way I like my games pretty much always. I do not want to sit moping in my chair due to an unfortunate Initiative roll, not even bothering to watch as other players get to do all kinds of cool shit.
So in my mind Combat Sense, along with Agility are the main offenders. Combat Sense and ranged defense had to be separated from the skills, so I made derived attributes out of those. In SilCore there are a whole lot of pretty much redundant attributes, so I decided to begin my work by cutting those. I ended up with four attributes, so that all of them would be used in determining Defense and Combat Sense. Alertness + Body for Defense and Intelligence + Spirit for Combat Sense.
I worked on simplifying skills, movement stuff, overall action economy, injuries, you name it. I even added some stuff that I felt was missing, like different close combat maneuvers, which are completely absent from SilCore. I ended up with a 23 page skeleton of a system that goes best for modern-equivalent settings or sci-fi when put some meat on its bones (I never thought that SilCore would be a good fit for fantasy or horror genre).
Anyways, here it is available (with permission from Dream Pod 9). I you have any suggestions, praises, comments, or you would just like to let me know how I have ruined the game, please leave a comment! ;)
Edit – Made a better character sheet.
Edit 2 – Made a change to the damage system.