Category Archives: Game Design

World of Dungeons: The Teachings of a Drunken Oneshot

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birkin

We had a Chrismas party a week ago. Instead of board games, I said I could run World of Dungeons. It’s an ultralight hack of Dungeon World which I hadn’t run it before, so we took it on a spin. Because nobody believed that we could play entirely sober, I decided on a full improv session. It degenerated slowly, but inevitably—and undeniably gloriously—into player vs. player mayhem, which surprised me very little. Despite my mistakes as a drunken GM, we had a whole lot of fun, and I learned a few important lessons. These are my notes from the GM’s standpoint. Continue reading →

Thoughts on The Regiment: Ville’s views on X-Ray Down

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This is my view on John Harper and Paul Riddle’s The Regiment, run by Lauri. There’s nothing much I can add to Lauri’s description of the session, so I’ll talk a bit about my impressions of the system. Do keep in mind that even though the version number is 2.5, The Regiment is still a work in progress; beautiful and promising, but flawed. I hope these notes will a) help the designers hone the game, b) make you interested in testing in it, and c) give you a couple of hints while playing it. Continue reading →

Gaming and Happiness

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Once again, I might be full of shit, but what I understand, psychologists studying happiness seem to believe that happiness has to be intrinsic (come from within us) to last. However, right now, most of our society seems to be geared towards getting extrinsic (from outside us) happiness.

This might sound like some New Age garbage, but this wasn’t told to us by the universe (at least not personally), but its a real result of real studies.

So, why am I writing about this in a gaming (sometimes comics) blog?

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My Take on the RopeCon 2014 Scenario Competition

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I’ve shared my general ideas on the subject before, as well as abandoned idea. This is building on that.

You can find the scenario itself under Resources on top of the page, or here: Elämäni supersankarina (in English: MyLifeasaSuperhero – there’s a proofread version coming when I have the chance).

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Using My Draft Piles for Something (Namely Character Creation)

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I try to draft weekly. Since I do this weekly, although I try to unload the dregs to other people (like giving them to new players), I still have plenty of excess cards in my cabinet in my office. Why not use them for something like, say, character creation?

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Getting Cards “Right”

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Back in the day, we had [scryfall]Plague Rats[/scryfall]. That wasn’t a big card. Sure, everyone knew about it and probably everyone who had seen it had thought about using it, because we didn’t have the deckbuilding restrictions we have today. In 40 card deck with – say – 14 Swamps and 26 Rats (these days probably 15 or 16 lands and rest for the Rats), those could be pretty bad for you. We even had one of those decks as a gauntlet deck (a deck your deck has to be able to beat in order to be considered playable) for a while.

Over the years, they tried again. We had [scryfall]Pestilence Rats[/scryfall] which didn’t care only about others with a same name, but all rats. Then there were [scryfall]Relentless Rats[/scryfall] which was closer to the original [scryfall]Plague Rats[/scryfall], but partly by changing the rules on card limits. They are still reportedly pretty hard to get, because they are pretty popular in casual play.

Then, they finally got it right. [scryfall]Pack Rat[/scryfall] wasn’t taken very seriously year and a half ago, but over time they have become a format defining card after Kentaro Yamamoto played them in his Pro Theros monoblack devotion deck to a Top 8 finish over a year after the card first came out. Its actually such a format defining card that its beginning to lose popularity because everyone is expecting them and have weapons at the ready, including moving back to Esper.

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Reaching Tartarus

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As summer draws close our gaming group tends to wander of to different oneshots, random gaming and cabins. As this is inevitable I have decided to wrap up our Wayward Sons game to a satisfying end (or at least that is my plan). As I am constantly trying to create something (might be just because I need to prove myself something) I now have a plan for the possible future.

I think I’ll be running a scifi campaign with a set goal.

The games and campaign I have been running for the past few years have all been linked together. There might have been a background story to begin with but now it has eroded away. Now I’m only taking what I get from the players and evolving their ideas and random thoughts into something I would like to run.

This next phase is a science fiction game. It might even be space opera. But it will still be tied into what we have done. It might not even be that apparent even to my players but I believe they will see the cause and effect of their actions.

REACHING TARTARUS

Reaching Tartarus will be a game about likeminded individual trying to escape the god-like A.I. Omnipresence from the inhabited worlds of our Solar System to the one place their ancestors abandoned a long time ago – Earth.

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Visions of Grandeur

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While struggling with the finishing touches for my Apocalypse World hack I have noticed my mind wondering towards new paths and hacks. I am now even more intrigued by the possibilities of hacking AW than when I started. There is still much to be learned (as I have not yet even played anything besides tremulus) but that really does not stop me from thinking about what could be done.

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Flavor of Magic

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Back at University a teacher of mine used to call UNIX scripts spells. I guess that’s pretty much right. A series of unpronouncable words and strange symbols, which actually do something, but often its hard to see what actually happened and the results can be as incomprehensible for the layman than the commands themselves. Sounds like magic to me.

(I’m not even bringing up Clarke’s third law. Except this much.)

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Self-Criticism

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The Boondock Saints used to be one of my favorite movies. Then I saw the sequel, which was kind of mediocre, but what really ruined the first movie for me, was the attitude of the director on the commentary track. He would critisize other sequels for their lack of understanding of how to do a sequel and he would then go on and do the exact same things in his own movie.

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