A Brief Note on Project: Awakened

By way of RPS, I’ve been introduced to a Project: Awakened, which on the surface looks like one of my top five futuristic dream games. It’s a super-powered affair in which you create a character with any sort of power combo you want from the palette of abilities the developers create. You then go through what sounds like a semi-open world single-player campaign as your custom-tailored, super-powered badass.

The catch being that I don’t think it can possibly work. A single-player campaign that accommodates arbitrary power combinations in a balanced way while still allowing each combination to feel unique? Challenges with multiple paths that feel adequate for the staggering tactical possibilities this game brings to bear? It’s possible … but not with $500,000 via Kickstarter.

Designs I’m following

Here’s some work-in-progress stuff I’ve got on my radar. Things I’m trying to playtest, things I’m taking inspiration from, things I’m providing feedback for, and so forth.

Star World. A young, active design. It’s a space setting (when I finally get around to reviewing my games collection, you’ll notice a theme), aiming to access a space between things like BSG, Star Trek and others where authority, loyalty and honor within a crew or other hierarchy comes up against the problems of not-dying in space as well as solving that and other problems efficiently.

Star Wars World — A really slick looking hack that’s fairly far along and reasonably active. It needs a new name, in my opinion, quite desperately. It also needs not to be the Star Wars of the films in my opinion, but the mechanics don’t enforce the film’s vision–just enough elements of the fiction to give you Mystical Space Fantasy and the basic character archetypes in Star Wars media–not the most specific archetypes in the world, but that’s fine, this hack gives them all a little something. The best part is Death Moves; when you die, you get a new character … but you fire a parting mechanical shot of some sort. Dead Jedi can visit other players as a Force Spirit (even though they have a new character, too) and screw with the game’s fiction.

The Sprawl — I’m actively testing this alpha-build hack out. It’s a Cyberpunk game by way of Gibson. It makes some slick changes to the AW rule-set … and leaves out some tools I’m going to miss like the Playbook specials and whatnot. I’m going to see how it plays, reserving judgment until a few sessions have passed. Then I’m going to go back over my own Cyberpunk hack and see how I feel about the two of them and whether or not their designs can learn from one-another. Sprawl has it’s heart in the right spot, and it is a thoroughly playable Hack with plenty of theme and twist on the AW formula.

There are more, but this is the AW stuff that jumps out at me. I’ll be putting up a page somewhere on here for design stuff once I figure out how I want to organize it. In the mean time, I’ll start throwing little posts like this on the walls when I see something that intrigues me or when I check up on a design I’d forgotten for a while.

Game Design Corner — Donning the GM Hat

I’ve slowly been crawling my way into roleplaying over the past few years or so. So far I’ve tried out White Wolf’s SCION, a homebrew crossover of Fate-system games Diaspora and Dresden Files, and a few small one-shot affairs in various systems. I absolutely loved the player end of things, but I found myself rather eager to try out the Game Master’s chair. You get to simultaneously play, referee and design a game–the latter most happening behind the scenes or on the fly as best suits your group of players. And it is the later most part I am primarily drawn to. I want to pull all of these games I’ve played (and some I haven’t) apart and see what I can do with the pieces. See what kind of story I can reconstruct for my players. Having acquired the Fate-based Dresden Files core-book over Christmas, I was initially setting out to run a game in that system. It was a fairly straightforward plan–set the game in the most basic version of the setting (here and now with the ongoing events of the Dresdenverse in effect) and have a lot of modular material prepared so that I wouldn’t have to keep my player’s too close to the tracks.  However, the more I prepared for the eventuality the more I realized I wasn’t quite ready to run a game for my regular crowd of gaming buddies. I’d need to start smaller, actually test some ideas in the field. So I recruited some of my non-gaming friends I see more frequently to help me muck about with the system and get a feel for the rhythm of things. I suppose it could have gone worse.

My mistake was allowing myself to test out Character and City creation first. City creation ran amazingly well. We developed a delightfully mad Dresden-ized version of Chicago in the year 1921. There were plenty of fascinating plot hooks to be had, and I could have easily jumped between and combined them in even a full-length campaign. Character creation also went relatively well. As was to be expected, it took a while and players had some difficulty with Aspects. But I feel like I did a really good job translating their character desires into something workable within the scope of the game system, and in particular, the setting of our little test-run. But now we hit the snag. I spent a lot of time getting players to fit their character concepts into the world and flesh them out to have lots of depth and hook to them individually, but utterly failed to get those characters strongly integrated either with our target city or (more importantly) each other. I was completely at a loss for how to pull the lot of them together in an adventure equally interesting to all. It would have certainly been doable, but I didn’t manage it. I had the foresight to call the session off before running my players through an utter nightmare of incomprehensible blabber and players seemed receptive to my general approach and what little play we did squeeze in before I realized what was about to happen–but I had vastly underestimated the level of detail I needed to adequately respond to brand new players and I now realize it probably would have been easier to improvise around shortcomings in my preparation with a more experienced group of players.

This brings us to plan B. Plan B is a solidly penned one-shot adventure set in my own little version of 1980s Canada with a guiding mythos somewhere in between Lovecraft, Hellboy and Dresden Files. From the little handbook I’ve been writing up:

You are a team of outcast RCMP officers transferred to the political (and geo-political) backwaters of The Force—specifically the Special Observations Corps operating primarily in rural Canada (you’ll be sent to northern Alberta). Your primary job is to investigate oddities from UFO sightings to Yeti attacks, as well as rescuing the occasional hikers from their own idiocy and writing up everything in excruciatingly detailed reports. You are The Force’s ear to the ground–a small, musty patch of ground no one else wants to worry about. Your commander, William Evaline Hekking, is rather laid back about the whole enterprise—resigned to his doomed career and exile from genuine police work and thus not particularly observant about goings on in the department. To make matters worse, you’re living through the 1980s. And of course the Werevolves.

I would be more comfortable running character creation on this one-shot, as I’d have some pre-made templates to speed things along if anyone seemed unable to come up with anything in my imagined time-frame and I’ve solved my biggest hurdle from last time before I’ve even started–there is an in-fiction system for aligning character actions into a single adventure while still allowing characters to exist at otherwise significant cross-purposes. Once I had this premise sorted out and a nice plot layout, I had to get down to picking a rules system. A brief spoiler: this, ultimately, did not end up being my first GM experience.  Back to Plan B.

The obvious choice was going with the now (relatively) familiar Dresden system. I was already borrowing from the mythos after-all. Fate also has a rich tradition of pulpy adventure material via Spirit of the Century. But the skill system wasn’t quite right. That wasn’t how I wanted to describe characters for my campaign setting, or for my players. Further more, the Fate economy that made so much sense to me as a player was an awkward concept for my target play group (and, I’ve heard, for some experienced gamers as well). It’s very much a hit-or-miss system and I wanted something more reliable–and if anything less crunchy. Which started me thinking along lines many rules-light designers have though: instead of developing a particular system of skills and/or attribute that fits my campaign setting, why not have characters described in a more intuitive way that has the bare-minimum attachment to mechanical effect? I recalled the somewhat obnoxiously written but nevertheless eminently useful rules for The Window:

• First the narrator defines some attributes everyone should have, and players assign a competency rank to each (you might have Average Strength, Incredible Intelligence, and Awful Perception or something).
• Next, players list some skills their character has or details about them that imply skills (You might be a Former Marine, and Expert Marine Biologist, and a Somewhat Capable Dance).
• Each of the ranks is then compared to a Ladder much like the ladder in fate. Each rung is associated with a die from Poor (d30) up to Inhuman (d4). This associated die is recorded on the sheet. The end result is a minimalist sheet with a character background, list of five or so attributes, and list of eight or so important skills.
• Rolls are made to be under a target of 6 for most tasks. Someone with d6 ability, listed as the edge of human capabilities such that you are at the cusp of your field, will always succeed at a basic task with no atypical impediments while someone with d30 ability, listed as markedly bad or at least completely without training, would succeed 20% of the time. One in five characters could manage not to fall over the first time they get on a pair of roller skates. This and other thought experiments I tried made the number system make a fair bit of sense … But someone with a d6 ability has an 8.3% chance to lose a chess match to someone with d30 ability. This is a 3.9% for someone with a d4 (inhuman, grandmaster, incredible, godlike) ability.

The quirks in this system can be avoided through properly deciding WHEN to roll (a chess match between Bobby Fisher and a man who has never played is not an appropriate time to roll in the first place). The fact that is uses quire a wide array of dice is more problematic–which of course doesn’t prevent the system from being converted at a glance to a percentile system or using multiple dice to simulate the results. I would have gone with this system. It is basically just a way of adding dice to storytelling–capable of both roll-intensive games that rely on the provided information and free-form experiences more like Fiasco and Microscope. It even makes cutting out the GM a relatively simple exercise for experiences role-players. But I have a mission here. I’m not just trying to role-play with some friends who normally wouldn’t think to try these things. I want to get a feel for running a game in a way applicable to as many systems as possible. I wanted something a little closer to Fate’s amount of crunchiness, something with a Fate-economy style quirk that puts some oomph into the mechanics themselves and creates a sort of meta-game that both supports and adds to the roleplaying. I’

After some digging, I discovered the Mistborn Adventure Game, by Crafty Games. The first thing I noticed was that it has a dice pool system, something I’ve been wary of approaching after my experience with Scion. Fortunately, any rolled pool is limited to ten dice (extras become “nudges” that can be spent to improve success or ameliorate failure). The second thing I noticed was that it had a weird dice pool system that checked for the highest-valued set of two or more dice (a pair of 4s and a triplet of 4s both give a result of 4). 6s don’t count–they are also used as the aforementioned “nudges,” and difficulties are set from 1 to 5 for a given task. It’s a good number, that allows you to gage a challenge as quickly as you might rate a song in your music collection–all the minor circumstances that aren’t important enough to bump the difficulty a whole rank (running on slippery ground) simply remove dice from the pool. After some number crunching I decided the system wasn’t awful–it wasn’t the lovely curves I’m used to from Fate and my on-paper ideas involving 3d20 or similar rolls. That’s when things started to get good.

The Mistborn Trilogy on which the game is based has some major obstacles for a table-top game–namely that the titular magic users are rare and far more powerful than your typical human (or even atypical Mistings with access to one of the 8 (spoilers: 16) superpowers possessed by Mistborn. It also has magical abilities that enhance broad categories of ability (such as “burning” pewter which enhances everything from balance to strength to pain tolerance to healing). MAGs solution to this is to go with a simple Attribute system. Characters assign either Strong, Average (for heroes) or Weak ability to their Powers (magical whizz-bang), Attributes (Physique, Charm, Wits), and Standing (Resources, Influence, Spirit). A character who decides to be a Mistborn (Strong powers) gets fewer points toward their political standing in the world and their raw efficacy outside of the supernatural.

This is an awfully scant approach for a system with a crunchy dice mechanic. Which is where Traits and the game’s setting come into their own. Traits are a lot like Fate’s aspects–they are words, phrases, physical features, or personal items that define the character in some way and/or offer mechanical benefit. For example, the trait Agile Tumbler would assist a player in performing acrobatic maneuvers. Unlike Fate, using these traits (or having them used against you by the GM) doesn’t require any fancy exchange of Fate Points. You add dice to your pool or lose them (or, your opponents lose dice and gain them respectively … whichever makes more sense for the circumstance).Those with weakers powers get more of the traits.

Ultimately, this was still a lot of work. I love the system and I have a still growing little handbook that will eventually give rise to a campaign, but as a new GM with no experience I was left fearing another experience like the one I had with Dresden. So this Plan B sits on the back-burner, an idea waiting for an opportunity. It’s not quite there, but I could get it into testable shape by dedicating a Saturday to the labor.

It’s at this point in my journey, on the verge of giving up on my newly-minted game as a viable option for my first run as a GM, that I encountered Apocalypse World. I had heard of the game before, but only in terms of the crazy stories it produced among some of my gaming friends. The system itself, other than the occasional answered question in the middle of a wacky story, was still fairly mysterious to me. On a whim, I bought the thing and fell in love with the system. Spoilers: Apocalypse World is also not the first game that I ultimately ran. But I still ought to write about the game now that I’ve played Apocalypse World, played the Teen Paranormal Drama hack of it called Monster-Hearts, and run a one-shot of a Star Wars hack of it that ought not be called Star Wars World. All three experiences have had a major impact on the way I think about game design and role playing games in particular.

But that deserves it’s own discussion. For my next post, I’ll skip my discovery of the more experimental side of tabletop RPGs and cut straight to Danger Patrol–the first game I ran as a formal, scheduled event.

Happy New Years, Also a Temporary Message for Google+

There’s been a substantial gap in my recent posts due to school, but I intend to post a few reviews here over the next couple of weeks. I’ll be learning how to play Dota 2, digesting six months of Roleplaying Games in blog form, and discussing game design.

That’s always the plan, though, isn’t it? We’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, Happy New Year. May 2013 bring you many games.

~Gwath

P.S. A temporary message to the folks at Google+. I would very much like to have my name (Gwathdring) accepted. I recently set up an account and supposedly proving ownership of accounts to which your name is attached is helpful in smoothing the name acceptance process. To that end, here is a link to my Google+ account.

I don’t know how much of your service is automated, but if you scroll down to the bottom of this page, you’ll find the name Gwathdring associated with this blog and it is in the signature of every post. I’ve also directed you to my profile on Rock Paper Shotgun.

You can only expect so much “established” identity from individuals who do not have large social networks in the first place. I do not have a very large social network and thus can only substantiate my identity so far. I’ve gone by Gwathdring for a number of years and I have done so in public spaces on the Internet. Gwathdring is not a made up character I pretend to be, but I name I go by in many communities across the web. I’m not using it to hide anything or make myself difficult to find. Quite simply, I’m most interested in being found by the people who know me as Gwathdring; I have other ways to communicate with people who know me by other names and there really isn’t much overlap in those communities. According to the literal wording of your policy, this should be perfectly sufficient. If your policy is mis-worded, and this isn’t good enough for you because it is not my full legal name and there is no documentation associated with it, than I’m simply not interested in your web service.

While I’m posting things from this week’s Sunday Papers:

If there is a reason that people find my games to be memorable, it is that they have grace. Just a little bit. It’s why people are moved by The Fabulous Screech or inspired by The Infinite Ocean. Alphaland is all about a moment of grace, and it is the central theme of Arcadia, too. And if there is a way out of the Museum of Broken Memories, it is through grace.

Even Traitor, my most mechanics-heavy game, works primarily because it remembers that revolutions, as ugly and inelegant as they are, are deeply related to grace, because grace is itself a revolution against the meaninglessness of the world.

This isn’t how we’re supposed to talk about game design, and I’m sure someone is going to come along in a moment to tell me I’m pompous and pretentious. Seriousness is frightening, after all, when it’s not used to confirm the simplistic cynicism that fuels the adolescent egos that make up so much of the internet.

–Jonas Kyratzes (<— go ahead and read the rest)

I appreciate the sincerity of it. I particularly appreciate the assertion that allowing emotional seriousness to enter into the discussion does not make one pretentious simply because others choose to read less emotional content into the medium of games.

Whether or not grace is the word for everyone, surely most gamers can recognize the feeling of transcendence and attachment in their favorite games and can appreciate a design style that puts that genre of sensations above bullet-point features or the much-touted “fun.” In particular, I think this is a nice antidote to the idea I’ve encountered often in gaming forums–that story doesn’t matter or shouldn’t be the focus of a game.  But grace can live almost entirely in the tone and narrative of a game such as Bastion rather than in the mechanics of play. If we value grace, then, we cannot dismiss gaming narratives as tacked-on remnants of older mediums.

It also highlights something that makes getting into AAA games rather difficult for me. So many of them seem to be designed from two ends–the artistic side and the acronym side–that eventually meet in the middle somewhere. “It will be an FPS that has [specific features] that tells the tale of [what-have-you] in the land of [some place].” This is not necessarily the wrong way to design a game, but it often lends itself to asynchronous experiences where the story being told doesn’t match up with the buttons being pressed. This is especially disenchanting when both pieces feel incredibly well designed yet conflict with one-another.

All that said, I have to quibble: “But authors don’t spend all day talking about verbs and adjectives [...] .”

Many do, in my experience. In particular the one’s seeking this grace Kryatzes speaks of. I agree with the general sentiment about how the games industry is more rigid and robotic and feature-oriented than other creative industries, but I think grace usually requires a good deal of mechanical effort and “engineering” as Kryatzes called it. There are always artists who run on raw inspiration, but those who run on honed craft are no less likely to have this quality of grace in their work.

But that’s just a quibble. Go read it if you haven’t followed the link already. It’s an elegantly written idea, if nothing else; and I think quite a bit else.

Edit: Seems there wasn’t meant to be a dichotomy set up between the engineering and the artistry of games in this article. Which is a tad confusing, as it certainly reads like there is supposed to be one. But we have it from the horse’s mouth and so I formally retract my quibbling and replace it with mild confusion.

What’s in a Game: Gamasutra on Fun

As I am attempting to enter the discussion about establishing a gaming lexicon, this recent link from the Sunday Papers over on Rock Paper Shotgun seems appropriate. This Gamasutra article tackles game-related discussions of “fun” and the language of those discussions.

It’s a bit of a mess from a writer’s standpoint, but it establishes a number of important ideas in the name of clarifying game-related discussions and provides some rather useful links for myself and anyone interested in the subject. Some of the stuff I’ve found through this article is going to make an appearance further down the line, I should think, though probably not in the impending second part of my mechanics piece.

If an android cries in a thunderstorm

A Blade Runner Review

Note: There are several versions of this film and the following are my impressions of the Final Cut.

Blade Runner was quite different from what I expected; I expected a cat-and-mouse game or a mystery-action-thriller set in a grim future. What I found was more of a character piece or a surreal tone drama. This wasn’t wholly a bad thing and I was pleasantly surprised by how much world building replaced my imagined action but I was unpleasantly surprised by how little of anything else was to be found.

What’s in a Game: Defining Mechanics

I tend not to intend jargon when I talk about media. This can cause problems as it does not prevent me from using jargon. Matters get especially odd when I’m talking about games. Much of the time I’ve spent discussing various aspects of video gaming over on the RockPaperShotgun forums has been spent ferreting out confusions over language. Most recently, a discussion about whether or not video games were getting less intelligent over the years changed into a discussion centered on disagreements of terms like “mechanical depth,” “skill cap,” and a few others. I was a major player in getting the discussion stuck  on the terms rather than the ideas they were supposed to help outline.

Before I return there to try and fix some of my mistakes and help more productive posters keep the discussion interesting, I wanted to figure out just what on Earth our jargon is and how I can either use or subvert it in the least confusing manner possible. Let’s start with the basics.

Guys … cross the streams. Cross them now.

Ghost Stories, a cooperative game for 1-4 players, taking about an hour.

Designed by Antoine Bauza,

Published by Asmodee and Repos Production in 2008.

Ghost Stories is a cooperative game about desperately fighting horrifying and angry spirits. A lot of reviews of Ghost Stories start by explaining that the game is extremely difficult and expounding upon why this is a Very Good Thing. I don’t disagree on either count, but I would phrase things differently: Ghost Stories is a difficult game to win, but it is at its best on a knife’s edge. The true joy of the game is the struggle, and Ghost Stories has made finding struggle a relatively easy.