Tales · from · my · Head

A list of things in the ol' idea bucket lately:

1) The Strain by GdT and Chuck Hogan, and it's horrible, creepy, unsexy (and thus sexy-as-hell) vampires and their shades of SARS, AIDS, and Influenza-inspired spread and the response thereto;
2) Pandemic, the most excellent (and now Origins-award-winning) cooperative boardgame about the out-of-control spread of 4 presumably horrible diseases and the dedicated scientists and specialists beating them back;
3) This damned head-cold I've had that has basically cleared up except for the lingering cough and related gobs of delightful phlegm;
4) The report of the second H1N1-related death in Alberta.

So! Here's a design doc for Centre for Disease Control: The RPG!

What is this game about?
-Playing the research scientists, doctors, and field agents who are set to task developing a cure for a rapidly mutating and deadly infection -- or into maintaining quarantine if no cure is to be found; think Outbreak.

How does it do that?
-Mechanics required: research, viral spread and mutation, quarantine, administration of the cure, media/government/etc. meddling (a good outbreak story -- like most disaster stories -- always has someone who wants to keep it a secret to prevent panic/buoy a political career).

What behaviours does it reward?
-This one is tricky. The game mechanics will probably revolve on a series of challenge->response scenes (eg: Challenge: The regional government won't allow quarantine because it's tourist season and they will lose millions; response: the players must try to outwit the regional government by appealing to the national government, the media, or by enforcing quarantine in some other way). Some sort of mechanism will need to be in place to help generate these challenges, and give the players the resources to combat them. With Great Powerstyle story arc? Geiger Counter-style challenge resource?

So, chew away at it! Let's see what we can brainstorm.

So, a while back I started running the most recent edition of Pendragon, trying to crunch through the gigantic campaign. I have a group of people who dig on Arthurian legend, so it seemed like a good fit.

We ran into a few problems, however:

1) So many skills! And a lot of them never get used;
2) Not everyone digs intense property/estates/family management, but it's probably really beneficial to know who your character is related to and how well-off your estates are. Maybe it isn't that important, but it certainly seem that way;
3) Greatly not impressed by the mass combat system.

So, I'm thinking of trying to hack in into something a little simpler, while maintaining the parts we did like, namely the Character Traits and Passions.

So, here's my basic idea:
1) Get rid over everything except the Traits and Passions, and just make players roll those when appropriate, instead of using them to modify skills. That means that the scene will be about "Justice" or "Piety" or whatever, rather than those things just influencing "Sword";
2) Get the players who really dig the family-tree plotting to do up the whole works for everyone, letting the less-interested players off the hook;
3) Reduce the complex wealth/property management system to something easier, maybe the outcome of a single die; the characters' estates will be described based on their Traits (so a Pious one might have a cathedral, a Worldly one a renowned inn).

My other idea is to use a rules set more like Houses of the Blooded, but with a little more GM control, to ensure that the big expensive hardback campaign book stays relevant. That's got duels and family trees and estates and the like. Maybe hack in the Traits from Pendragon.

Anyone have any other suggestions?

One of the things my girlfriend and I spend a lot of time talking about is where we get inspirations for our stories. What little elements of life inspire ideas, and then what mutations those ideas go through before they can be used.

So, last night I was thinking about using visuals to inspire an entire setting. I'm sure most of you have done this: you dream up one really cool image, either a place, a character, or an event, and then you build an entire setting -- and sometimes a narrative or game or both -- to create a place for that image to fit. And sometimes by the time you're done, the image has changed slightly, but hopefully for the better.

Here's what I've been looking at: in a lot of video games lately, characters have cool dangly props -- scarves, capes, long hair -- that move in interesting ways as the character navigates the environment. This is partly to show off the games' physics, but also it adds a sense of motion an movement, even when the character is static. Similarly, the "dungeonpunk" design aesthetic that many modern fantasy RPG artists have embraced involves lots of little hanging bits, be they amulets, scroll tubes, scarves (again) or other animated accessories. Wayne Reynolds and Steve Prescott spring particularly to my mind.

So, I started thinking "wouldn't it be cool if in my setting, everyone had lots of cool flowing layers and carried little gadgets and scroll tubes on their belts? What could a setting have that would cause that?"

What I came up with was a world where some particularly aggressive tree similar to the walking palm has overrun the world. The trees, possibly with malicious intent, are constantly shifting and crawling across the land, making any large-scale cultivation or civilization basically impossible. Instead, you have city-states that are walled off and protected from the trees, and adventurers that move between them. The adventurers all possess copies of a magical map that shows the few safe points in the world; the maps are artifacts of some past time, so they are a limited commodity. Since they need the maps at a moments notice, and must always carry them, they all have cool scroll tubes on their belts.

To make the setting one notch more hostile, I decided that the weather was also incredibly unpredictable, so you have storms and sudden temperature swings throughout. As anyone who does a lot of outdoor activities will tell you, layering is essential to keep dry and adjust to temperature, so all the heroes also wear multiple capes, cloaks, wraps, and the like. As an added benefit, the layers can be used to break the outline of the human form, and thus add to natural camouflage.

Further refinements to the idea were that the trees, the storms, and other elements of the hostile environment are all gods or spirits in an animistic sense, and are actively hostile to humans for any number of reasons. Humans have found safety by using the bodies of dead gods to build their cities on: major hills and rises, and sometimes lakes, are all remnants of other gods that have died. The maps that the heroes carry, I figured, show the relative distance between different dead gods, and the hostile gods don't mess with the dead gods out of either respect or fear. The gods thing also mean that the characters might carry amulets and charms which may be able to drive away hostile forces.

So, I have no game (if it's a game), I have no story (if it's a narrative form), but I have a setting that serves my visual desire of characters who wear layers of dangly bits.

Anyone else have a similar example to share?

Wilderness of Mirrors, subtitled “A Better Spy-Playing Game”, is a roleplaying game by John Wick (7th Sea, Houses of the Blooded). Since spies are easy to drum up interest for, WoM was the chosen game for our first meeting of the new Story Games Calgary club.

Character creation for WoM is quick and simple. Character have 5 stats, each with a “codename” and a general description, which covers a broad area of espionage-type abilities. The stats are:
Saturn, Team Leader;
Mars, the Hitman;
Mercury, the Faceman;
Vulcan, the Fixer; and
Pluto, the Shade.

The game favours specialized characters over generalists, making it so that the higher ranks of a given stat are cheaper than the lower ones; once you get started on a given tree, it’s easier to climb higher. What that means is that it’s best if there’s some communication between players during character generation, to ensure that someone is specializing in each stat.

( Read more... )

So, prep on Embark! has provided a few interesting logistical challenges for a prep-hater like me.

Making up encounter tables is fairly easy, but then I realized that any given encounter might surprise me with its composition. When I run an adventure out of my head or the book, I generally prepare index cards with the necessary stats (initiative, hit points, attacks) for the PCs to beat them up, in case it comes to that. With encounter tables, I don't know what the PCs might encounter in any given encounter, so that means I have to do up index cards for -every- critter on my tables. So that's been taking some time. I've given a bit of thought to tracking down those printable perforated index cards, and then doing up the monster cards on the computer. It would be a fair bit quicker, and the end result would be more legible.

The other thing I've been doing is mapping and stocking dungeons. Since the "dungeons" of Embark! are actual in-game places -- kobold dens, bandit forts, haunted houses, it's been interesting trying to stock rooms with encounters. Think, for example, about a fancy country house in a pseudo-medieval setting. The lord and lady of the manor could be found anywhere, from the kitchens to the stables to away on business. The men-at-arms are going to be spread about the grounds, training, eating, on watch, hunting with the lord. The servants are the only people who will regularly be seen in the same place every day, but even they won't be in the scullery all night, necessarily.

So, for me, I have, at the very least, to do a double-stock: a day dungeon and a night dungeon, depending on when my PCs decide to poke around. Other things, I just have to leave to "plot magic"; for example, the wererat rogue who recently took over leadership of the biggest group of bandits in the Ravenroost will ALWAYS be found in his secret shrine, no matter when the PCs arrive, since it's dramatically appropriate for them to find him there. If they ask any of the bandits, however, or spy before running in, swords-swinging, then they will know that he leads raids, walks the walls, and has been carving himself a lute. This gives the illusion that he does other things, but still allows the dramatic reveal of a wererat in the midst of an unholy ritual, rather than a cagey bandit carving a gourd.

OK, a brief hiatus from my (admittedly rather dull) review of the concepts behind experience point systems.

Let's talk about what I'm actually doing these days, game-wise.

So, our group is a bit crippled lately. Two of the guys are in shows (damned actors) and one just moved away, leaving us with a fairly small pool of reliable regulars. So, we have turned to the idea of one-on-one gaming to get our nerd-fix.

I came up with two ideas. The first was a solo game of Vampire: the Requiem in a made-up city of crime and blood called Nova City that was a cross between vampire private eye shows (Angel, Forever Knight), Raymond Chandler novels, and the gorier of Clive Barker's works. I'll detail that in a future post.

The second is called Embark! The Sandpoint Chronicles. At least it is in my head. It's a sandbox-style D&D 4e game, centering around a small coastal town called -- you guessed it -- Sandpoint.
( keep reading )

Ravenroost
Mountain
Level 1
00-50	Nothing
51-56	Bandits - 1d4x40xp per PC
	01-05	1 Gnome Arcanist	150xp
	06-10	1 Doppelganger Sneak	150xp
	11-15	1 Human Guard	150xp
	16-23	1 Human Bandit	125xp
	24-30	1 Halfling Thief	125xp
	31-37	1 Gnome Skulk	125xp
	38-44	4 Human Rabble	124xp
	45-51	4 Halfling Stouts	124xp
	52-58	1 Halfling Slinger	100xp
	59-65	3 Human Rabble	93xp
	66-72	3 Halfling Stouts	93xp
	73-79	2 Human Rabble	62xp
	80-86	2 Halfling Stouts	62xp
	87-93	1Human Rabble	31xp
	94-00	1 Halfling Stout	31xp

( keep reading )

1) Level-Based Systems

LB games are those in which after players have completed certain objectives as determined by the game or by the gamemaster (GM), their characters are assigned a specific number of XP, on a rated or ad hoc basis. After a character accumulates a sufficient of points -- as determined by the game -- that character "levels up", allowing access to new, usually more powerful abilities, or improvements to existing abilities.

The LB form is older -- and likely more dominant, given that the biggest game in the hobby, Dungeons & Dragons, is a LB system. LB systems often (thought not always) rely on character classes, another gameplay construct wherein a character will have access to a specific package of abilities, which are parceled out over time. Classes are designed to give each character a specific "role" in the character group, and often will have unique access to certain abilities which are key to that role, or to differentiate from other classes which function in a similar role. (NB: the role-mechanic is debated, but is concretely and explicitly part of the design of the fourth edition of D&D.)( keep reading )

Sorry for the long delay. I get busy and fail at blogging. Don't we all.

So, experience points. Anybody who has ever played an RPG is probably familiar with this mechanic, since 90% of them use some form of this mechanic. Basically, experience points (XP) are an abstraction meant to represent character growth and development in a variety of simple ways, and to serve as a shorthand for referring to the relative "power levels" of characters in more tactical games.( keep reading )

So, lately, I've been rattling around ideas regarding the use of flashbacks in games. I like the idea of flashbacks, and having recently seen how they are implemented in 3:16 has made me wonder about other potential uses.

Here's the original thought experiment:

The PCs are aged and experienced adventures, say level 30s with all the glitz and kickin' gear that implies (for convenience sake, I'll use D&D 4E terminology, because I assume most people are at least passingly familiar). They are all on a pilgrimage of some sort together (being as they are epic-level characters, maybe it's literally the road into the afterlife/into the west/into a new universe), and they decide to pass the time by telling stories.

So, then, each player takes a turn setting up a piece of their character's history. They pick a level of play, and set the stage, and then the gamemaster takes over and runs an adventure. The thing is, not everyone else's character was there, so everyone else has to crank out a character at that level (let's say the first story takes place at level 1), unless two characters knew each other back then.

Next session, another PC gets a chance to "tell the story". For convenience's sake, they have to use the next level of play, but, once the stage is set for the flashback, anyone can either make a new character, or introduce one of the characters from the previous session into this one.

So, the starting party (the 30th levels) are A, B, C, and D.

Session 1: A starts telling the others a tale of his first adventure, in the Marsh of Madness. He remembers like it was yesterday. With him were E, F, and G... So the other players stat up E, F, and G, ,the narrating player makes up his own character, A, at level 1, and the Marsh of Madness is played.

Session 2: B says "That was an excellent story. It reminds me of the time I fought the goblin overlord in the Howling Mine. It reminds me of that because I met G right after she left the Marsh of Madness, and helped her recover from that poisoning! So it was me, G, H, and I..." B makes a version of her character at level 2, and someone levels up G. The others make up H and I, two new level 2 characters.

Session 3: C's turn...

And so on.

Eventually, you would see the various tales of the characters and their background cast grow and evolve. You could revisit places, either with the same character or different ones (at level 20, D's party at the time went to the same Marsh of Madness, which was now populated by some kind of potent aberrations, but when they cleared it out, they also founded a village there. By the level 29 adventure, A goes back to wander his old haunts, and finds that there's now a city where he went on his first adventure. Nostalgic tear).

Obviously I've thought about this most in terms of D&D, because the level-based system makes it easy to think of "eras" of play, but there's no reason it wouldn't work with other games just as well (perhaps better). Pendragon springs to mind immediately as one example.

Disclaimer: this is not a review, and it hasn't been proofread in any way. It's just a playthrough report, with some opinions.

Saturday, we went to the FLGS to pick up minis for Aaron's new D&D campaign. We've been having trouble getting more than a few sessions of the Biggest Game in the Hobby going in a campaign, because all of us are story-game bitches who would rather run hand-in-hand through the lilies of narrativism and fluff than sit down and plan a game session. Or else we're just too lazy. But he's going to make a go of it, and the plan is to keep it lighthearted and zany, and I'm down for that.

Anyway, miniatures. Check 'em.

So, while we were there, I saw a copy of 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars sitting the in store's newish "indie" section. It was right next to a copy of Polaris, which I love, so it caught my attention. Flipping it over to the back cover and reading the blurbs there about outer space madness and violence, I pretty much had to bite.

3:16, if you don't know, is an RPG that both exists in and parodies the "space marine" subgenre of sci-fi. The game lists Warhammer 40k, Aliens, and Starship Troopers as inspiration, and so I'm pretty sure you know what I mean. The PCs are tough-as-nails, badass killers with fancy toys, and everything else is a hostile alien that needs to be made into a pile of smouldering goo. Simple.

So, after D&D -- which went really well -- we had some time to kill, so I printed out some character sheets, passed them out, and away we went. I told the guys it would take about 45 minutes (based on my initial read-through. I was close; it took an hour, including character generation).

Character generation was smooth. It would be hard not to be, since you only have two numerical stats in 3:16, and a few "named" traits. The two number traits are "Fighting Ability" and "Non Fighting Ability", or as I like to call them "Killin'" and "Everything Else".

Once we had our group, I rolled up a planet using the handy charts in the book, and gave the team a simple mission brief, and away we went.

The actual play is very smooth. The narrative scenes just happen. PCs do whatever they want, and a few NFA rolls help show who's competent and who is not. 3:16 only uses two kinds of dice, d10s and d6s, and it uses them in very intuitive ways. Your skills are all "roll-under", which I know some people find cumbersome, but since turns still proceed from highest to lowest (with some exceptions), rolling high is still good, which means people will tend to understand what's going on.

Combat is the heart of the game, and it shines. It's narrative fluff, with a rewarding mechanic allowing players to reap some crunchy mechanical reward from having big guns without having to keep track of the hit points of every single aggressive alien bug (or in our case hostile animate coral). Everyone rolls against their NFA to move around or change guns, or against their FA to shoot/punch/stab/blow up xeno scum, and earns kills based on the effectiveness of their weapon. Kills work like experience points, so smart use of your killing methods is important.

Win or lose, the player gets to narrate the outcome of their action, and since you almost always take damage or kill multiple aliens, it can be very satisfying. The guys immediatly clicked with the narrative parts of the game and relished pulling other troopers out of craters, dragging hard on cancer sticks, and lobbing grenades like softballs, all while grunting, growling, and grimacing.

The game's most unique mechanic is the "flashback" system, whereby in a pinch, you can either save the day -- or at least your own ass -- through the clever application of a flashback, either a strength or a weakness. In this way, you get to learn about your character's history while keeping your character from untimely death. Using flashbacks is the only way to get access to promotions and demotions, too, so it's a handy mechanic to have. We weren't 100% certain of how it worked when we played the first time, so the guys were a bit gunshy with it, and only ended up using a few weaknesses and no strengths. I got the impression they were holding back their strengths for a tight spot... but the game is short enough that the rainy day never came. So encourage your players to use their strengths! Tell them it's how they get promotions!

Finally, after play comes the upgrade step. Quick, easy, and fun, as players now have enough experience to know where their weaknesses are.

Overall, I enjoyed 3:16, and will definitely play it again. I get the impression from the book that the designer doesn't think it' really meant for pick-up play, but I disagree, and will almost undoubtedly be using this as an aperitif after a longer game, or as a game to play when we've got a few drinks in us. He also says it will take 3-5 hours for a full game session, but we burned through one planet in 1 hour, so unless you do several planets at a sit, I'd be surprised by the 3-5 figure. I will definitely play this game again, and definitely don't regret my purchase.

In my mind, this is pretty close to the perfect balance of "retro-pretentious" (under Jeff Rients' threefold model), which is right up my alley.

-AD.

The issue of prep is one that I never really struggled with in my gaming past. When I first started rolling polyhedrons in 1993, it was enough to have some general baddies and some locations in mind, and then just run with that. If people needed more specifics, then you drew a map on a piece of scrap paper. We were just kids, and playing superheroes in the 90s, so most of our problems were solved by judicious application of firepower anyway.

As I aged and changed systems, the prep issue came more to the forefront. I remember being asked by a group of guys in university what the floorplan of the building they were going to go into looked like, and where the sprinklers were, and things like that. Now, granted, they had just been playing too much Rainbow Six, and we were able to work out our differences, but it was the beginning of a change.

Next up was my first time running Shadowrun. This would've been around late-1999 or early-2000, so whatever edition was current at the time. I was running a pre-published adventure and had done basically zero prep, so how surprised was I when things ground to an utter halt because I didn't know the hardness ratings of building materials or how to apply certain weapon rules when the big climactic battle hit. I hadn't done my homework, and the game suffered because of it.

Enter Dungeons and Dragons, specifically the third edition of that venerable game. I had mostly avoided D&D during my gaming youth due to the bizarre and annoying mechanics involving THAC0 and reducing AC, but due to a shake-up in my gaming group, and a perceived lack of quality alternatives for fantasy RPing (which was in our blood, being that the first Lord of the Rings movie was out), I picked up the D&D3E core books at the Friendly Local Game Store.

And lo, I entered a world I had not been ready for.

I am a pretty slapdash gamemaster. I make things up on the fly, improvise, and I like to have a list of names at hand so I can quickly throw an NPC in the mix and at least they have a name, even if they have nothing else. I like to be able to have the players wander into a room and be confronted with some ancient horror that can be reasoned with or battled or whatever. But D&D... well... it wants you to know what's behind that door before anyone even rolls a listen check.

With 20 levels of play, and an intricate "challenge rating" system, D&D was structured towards a person who would sit down and craft a fine adventure beforehand. My game was giving me homework! I'd have nothing of it, and left the running of D&D to other hands, hands more willing to spend an hour in prep for four at the gaming table. Leave me my slapdash "storytelling" games where I could sit down with a list of names, a list of locations, and a vague idea about spider-like demons from beyond the Fifth Veil that were stealing babies that had the spark of magic to raise them as their own pawns, and then letting the fangs and fur and forces-magic fly. To make your players fight a dragon in D&D, you needed to have the right book, the right dice, and reference a page-long block of stats. To throw a dragon into my games, I would just say "Is 12 dice the right amount of damage? Yeah, seems to be. If I want to make it tougher I'll just bump it to 14 dice".

So now we have a fourth edition of D&D, which I love in a lot of ways. I like how they have scaled back the detail on all the crap that doesn't matter, and given each character a specific role in the party, so everybody knows from the outset what they are getting into. People complain that it's too MMO-like, but there's a reason MMOs are successful: they simplify thing enough that people don't have to exhaust themselves playing. But... MMOs also turn all the number-crunching and encounter design over to teams of writers and designers who make things work and then let them run on autopilot. MMOs don't need a gamemaster. D&D still does.

And the prep is still there. I love 4E's encounters. I like how they feel balanced and tactical and intense. I love that they almost always end up as close calls with one player making death checks and the others pulling through only because of some lucky rolls. I love them, but I HATE designing them. I hate sitting down for an hour before a game session to come up with a balanced mix of monsters at the appropriate level for my party and then picking out magical gear that the party can use. I suspect the GM tools from D&D Insider would be a huge boon to me, but I've already spent $75 on the corebook set (thank you Amazon) and there's no way I'm paying a subscription fee on top of that.

No way I am spending 1/5 of my time with a game system "preparing". Not when there are lots of perfectly enjoyable games on the market that lend themselves to my style.

I'll happily play in a game of D&D. If you're running it.

So, I've been away for a bit, first on a short trip, and then just... um. Not posting.

So, here's a few things I've had on my mind, game-wise:

1) The Sibling Rivalry. I recently ran what I expected to be a playtest one-shot of Reign (using the mechanics, but not the setting), and it went over so well it looks like it's warping into a proper ongoing game. Awesome! I heart Reign. But, what I did for a hook was what I liked best (yes, BECAUSE I AM AWESOME!): All the PCs are the children of a recently deceased baron in a country that has really fuzzy rules of succession. The king has officially stated that the PCs need to get their ducks in a row and choose a new baron, or he might just give the barony to their neighbour, who has a decent -- if vague -- claim, and really really wants it. Use the one-roll character generation tables to get PCs on the table in a hurry, and then step back and watch the fur fly!

My only regret in using this hook was that I had been saving it (well, not exactly, but something similar) for Pendragon, since my last foray into the game ended a bit disasterously.

2) Pleasing Everybody: You just can't. Thomas and I spitballed a great idea for D&D recently which I have dubbed "Thirty". In Thirty, you play thirty (really? shocking!) sessions of D&D, one for each level of play (in 4E). Each session is one "mega-encounter", wherein three encounters are jammed into one, and take place in crazy and exciting environments. People loved it, but for me, the planning felt like homework. I've got the first 6 or 7 encounters written, but only the first two maps drawn, and I'm having a hard time going back to the well. So the group is happy, but I'm not.

Also, trying to get people to assent to playing Reign, when at least two of the guys are saying "I'm jonesing for D&D" was difficult. "OK, we'll play D&D, but you have to run it" is my normal response, because I just can't handle the prep-time required for a game, and I refuse to run boxed adventures, since I think they cause aneurysms.

3) The Once-a-Monther: Is it feasible to play an ongoing tabletop (as opposed to LARP) game only once a month and still get into your character and really enjoy the world? Or are you very quickly going to just be phoning it in, thus killing the experience for any immersive-style players?

So, I watched the video clips of John Stewart taking Jim Cramer (and by extension, CNBC) to task over their failure to predict (or collusion in?) the stock market disaster, and it made me think about market economics and their uses in games.

Stock market mechanics in board games are fairly popular, not the least reason being that they are easy as hell to write. Watch:

1) Break open a new box of 4-colour poker chips (usually red, blue, black, white).
2) Take 5 chips of each colour and put them in little piles on the table (a pile of 5 red, another of 5 blue, etc.). This is "the market".
3) Grab some pennies or glass beads or dice or whatever to be "money".
4) Put a bowl on the table which will be "the bank".
5) Give each player 10 "monies" and put the rest in the bank.
6) The oldest player goes first, and play proceeds clockwise around the table.
7) On a turn, each player can "buy" or "sell". Each player must take one of these actions if possible.
8) To buy, a player selects a colour of chip, counts the number of chips of that colour in the market, and pays to the bank a number of monies equal to 6 - the number of chips of that colour in the market. If there are 5 chips in the pile, then the cost is 1. If there is only 1 chip in the pile, then it costs 5. Once the monies are paid into the bank, the player takes one chip from that pile, and sets in in front of himself. If he does not have enough monies, then he cannot buy that chip, and must take a different action (either buying a different chip, or selling).
9) To sell, a player selects a chip that he has in front of himself, and counts the number of chips of that colour in the market. He can then take a number of monies equal to 5 - the number of chips of that colour in their original pile, and place his chip back into the market. That is to say, if there are no red chips left in the pile, then you can sell a red chip back to the market for 5 monies. If there are 4 red chips in the market, then you can sell a red chip to the market for 1 money.
10) After each player has had 10 turns, the game is over. Whichever player has the most monies wins.

It's obvious from this simple example that countless variations on gameplay, scoring, and other elements can be introduced to make the game more interesting. In my example, stocks are not worth anything at the end of the game, so the last few turns will be a flurry of careful selling to ensure liquid monies in order to win. In a game where stocks retained value in the endgame, you would have different strategies emerge. In this version, you can't buy from or sell to another player, so that's a variant. Many games of this type have auctions, as well.

Market games are fun because they force players to think it terms of risk assessment and resource management. You can spend your resources to acquire something in the short term, only to see that acquisition plummet in value later on. You can choose to hold onto a junk "stock", or you can hope that the low price might induce new buyers, letting your stock regain its previous value. You can try and game the system, or you can try to game your fellow players. Lots of strategies and options there.

So, outside the realm of boardgames about buying and selling, what other applications of markets are there in game design?

Political games spring immediately to mind. One of my political science classes in university was about electoral systems, and we simulated the shifting views of the electorate (and the value of dominating the political centre) with a basic game that allowed players to maneuver their "party" along a shifting bell curve of political opinion, each player trying to maximize their "vote share" based on their best guess of where the electorate would go next. We played that with a handful of tokens and some playing cards.

Even though an electorate might not be a "market" in the obvious sense, it still deals with the element of scarcity and resource management.

In a roleplaying game, there are a wide variety of ways to use markets. The straightfoward one is the impact of the players on the actual in-game market. Many RPGs of the "adventure gaming" school revolve around the acquisition of massive amounts of treasure. So what happens when the characters drag all that money back to a town and start unloading it on the market? Well, if you consider cash to be yet another product, then the basic laws of scarcity apply: the more there is of something, the less it is worth. If the PCs drag a chest full of gold coins into town and started spending them all over the place, pretty quickly everyone has fistfuls of gold, and it's no good for anything. That's inflation in its most basic form.

On the other hand, if the PCs are stingy with their incredible wealth, that can cause problems too. It makes them the target of the unscrupulous elements of society. A problem here is that a lot of RPGs that deal with wealth do so in such a way that the amount of treasure a party gets is a calculated resource (I'm thinking specifically of D&D here). "At each level of play, the party should be getting X treasure, because we've designed the next level of play with that in mind." This means you can't easily get away with stealing the PCs' loot. Unless you give them more than they are expected to have right off the bat. Or, alternately, you front-load them with treasure at a given level, and then they have to "re-acquire" the same treasure through all the rest of encounters at that level. Imagine: your level 6 party hauls in a huge amount of loot in their first level 6 encounter, and goes back to town to celebrate! In their revelries, they end up being robbed of all of the treasure they acquired... except the amount they would have received from a single level 6 encounter. The next few sessions involve them tracking down the thieves and getting their gear back, so that by the time they are level 7, they are back where the designers intended them to be.

Or how about this: money makes people do crazy things. I have had players who feel that their character always needs to be excessively generous. A small child gives them directions, and a few coins here or there are meaningless to PCs, so they tip him a gold piece. In D&D, a gold piece is said to be the equivalent of 10 days' wages for a labourer, so if we think of it in terms of modern cash, and assume an unskilled labourer makes $10/hour x 8 hours a day x 10 days... he just tossed that kid $800. Well, what are the other kids going to think about that? What are the players going to do if they see a gang of teenagers beating up the small child for his cash? Are they going to realize that it was their fault?

A lot of games abstract money a lot more than that. In Reign, there's even a mechanic by which PCs can trade in their wealth for experience points, simulating the fact that Conan never seems to have any money, and no matter how hard Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser try, they always seem to get robbed, or gamble and drink away anything they can hold on to (even to the point where their fabled swords are rarely the same exact weapons story-to-story, since they need constant replacement).

At the abstract level, there's a market amongst players, too. Everyone is jockeying for "fun" or "success", and sometimes these are scarce resources. A good gamemaster -- or game designer -- needs to know how to manage those resources, to ensure that people will want to play their games.

Way back in the dark past of 2005, a gamer named Jeff posted the following on his blog:

I am in utter disagreement with this statement. I have a pretty good sense of suspension of disbelief. I get so wrapped up in my favourite fictions that I still have to shake my head every time I see Alan Tudyk because I think "hey, didn't he die? Oh, wait, that was a movie." So it's not that I can't just "get into the groove" of my interactive fictions... but I have my limits.

I use dungeons when I run fantasy RPGs. I like ancient castles, cities that have sunken into the earth, wizard's towers that defy physics. I love them. But when I populate them, I do so in ways that I like to believe are consistent. In my world, it's never OK for the kirin to be neighbours with the succubus, except when it is.

Which is to say: there doesn't have to be an explicit reason for it, but the gamemaster should know what's going on. I don't even have to say to my players "the succubus saved the kirin's life, and so now it owes her a debt of gratitude", but I should know it, in case they ask.

And maybe that's just the way I approach RPGs. I think of the process as "world-building". One of my favourite things to do with an RPG is keep track of how the PCs influence the world in which they live, and then point to specific events and say "see! That was you! You did that!" It works as a reward reinforcement (when their overthrow of an evil despot leads to a series of popular revolutions in nearby nations) or as a hook for futher stories (when they beat the hell out of an oppressive knight, so his baron sends a squadron of armed men to string up the peasant who contacted the PCs in the first place).

I think it's even more important in fantasy games: because they don't exist in a world that's real, they have to exist in a world that's realistic, which is to say that, inasmuch as the players will explore it, they need to recognize the rules on which it operates. They say that infants, from a very very young age, can recognize the basic principles of kinetics: they can tell that when a ball is rolling, and it goes behind a small obstacle, it should roll out the other side. If it doesn't, then they will be confused, and -- depending on temperament -- will either investigate, or start to cry.

it's not that hard when creating a game world to ask yourself what the implications are of your choices. They don't have to make sense, but they have to be consistent, or you're going to find your players are having their attention broken, and are losing respect for your game.

So, I guess that's to say this: it's OK for kirin and succubi to be neighbours, so long as it's consistent. One kirin living next to a succubus needs to be explained. If kirin always live next to succubi, then what you have is a rule of your game world, and it will be the violation of that rule that causes confusion.

One of the things I've been obsessed with over the last year or two -- pretty well ever since I embarked on my project of learning as much about making games as I can -- is the idea that you can make games that are about something, that is, games where you play the theme, or games that are just to be played, where the theme is just an overlay on the pieces -- as much a memory aid as anything else. Both types can be fun, depending on how enjoyable the process is for the player

Games of the former type include any game where a particular rule is meant to reflect or simulate some kind of activity. The activity is usually abstracted to its basic form, andthen a game rule is developed around it. The boardgame Fury of Dracula has the majority of the players chasing the titular vampire around Europe. Dracula is traveling in secret, but he leaves a trail, represented by face-down location cards. If a hunter can stumble across Dracula's trail, then the location card is revealed, and you know where to start looking. In a sense, this tracking mechanic is what the game is all about, and it's cleverly designed to feel like an abstraction of actually traveling place-to-place and looking for clues. Speaking of which, the classic Clue has some elements of this as well, in that you are trying to solve a mystery, and everyone present has some information, and you are trying to perfect your information.

Games of the latter type include any game where the rules are just systems for calculating points and then have rules laid on top of them. Monopoly is a classic example. Look at how many times it's been re-branded. Since you can change the properties and the money into anything and the game retains its essence, it's not really a game "about" real estate; it's a roll-and-move and "exchange these tokens for those tokens" game with a real estate paintjob. Similarly with such Euro standards as Puerto Rico or Carcassone. There's nothing about the play of these games that is specifically about building up an overseas colony or constructing a city, but that overlay gives a tangibility and depth to the gameplay mechanics. It's easier to remember -- and say -- that you are "buying a corn plantation" than "exchanging these tokens for a tile that gives me the yellow blocks".

Obviously, many games have elements of both processes. Roleplaying games in particular tend to have both pre-themed elements, wherein the mechanic was designed to represent the theme, and post-themed elements, where the theme was overlaid on the mechanic. Also, since RPGs more than any type of game lend themselves to house-ruling, they often will develop pre-themed elements over time, as players tweak the rules to give a game-feel that they believe represents the experience they are trying to get. Compare games like Burning Wheel, which has heavy mechanics for character creation, showing each stage in the character's education and life thus far, to games like Dungeons & Dragons, wherein characters just show up with stats, and background is all left to colour.

So, what to take away from this?

If you are trying to design a game that is fun, you don't need to worry about theme. You can, certainly. Burning Wheel is no more or less fun than D&D, but each has its own virtue. If you come up with a great mechanic for a boardgame, you can just write up the mechanic, and then find some kind of fun theme and lay that on top. Consider how many games out there contain variants of "move your token, roll a die, compare it to either a fixed number or an opponent's die result, collect points", and yet are ostensibly about pirates, hospitals, or zombies. Just make sure the mechanic is fun and keeps gameplay moving. Play Carcassone and think about what you are doing: you're putting down tiles, and sometimes flagging them as your own with little wooden men... and you're having fun (if you can play Carcassone and not have fun, you need to consider that maybe you don't like games). Once you have a fun mechanic, consider what sorts of things it kinda looks like. Are you creating lines of tokens across a board? Maybe you have a game about trade routes or train lines. Do you make measured risks in search of big gains? Maybe you have a stock market game. Or a game about ghost-busting! Try to keep it original. There are enough pirate and zombie games on the market. Don't be afraid to re-theme your game in mid-development. From what I've read, this happens a lot.

If you are trying, on the other hand, to design a game that is about something, then what you need to do is figure out what you want to say about that thing. Even though I used Monopoly as an example of a post-themed game, it was originally designed to show the depressing, soul-destroying horrors of capitalism (I'd say it succeeded, at least in the "depressing, soul-destroying horror" part). Once you have an idea -- "this is a game about chasing Dracula across Europe" -- you abstract that to it's barest elements, and then start adding game mechanics to represent the parts of that experience that you find the most compelling, and then you stop when it stops being fun.

You can mix-and-match themes or mechanics, too, until you find a good fit, but you should strive to do one thing really well, rather than several things in a mediocre way.

Either way, fun ought to be your goal, whether you start from a mechanic or from a theme. Playtest your idea with people and see if it clicks with them. Then if they have complaints, address them, and playtest more.

Transit is inherently scary.

No, really, bear with me. I mean beyond the crying babies, the odd-smelling guy, the crowding, and the occasional crazy screaming person (bonus for Europeans: the aggressive busker with the accordion!), cabs, buses, and trains -- especially trains -- have a lot of natural fear value.

They are ostensibly public places, but they are public places where you can't just move away from someone who is disturbing or strange. On the street, if someone is shouting to themselves about the worms behind their eyes, you can cross to the other side of the street. If someone smells bad, most of the time, the wind will pick that smell up and carry it away. On transit... well... there is no escape.

And of course, most of the time, the only "security" on transit is the driver. Which is a bit of a problem, because, of course drivers don't want to put their lives on the line for some stranger, and nor should they! They aren't trained law enforcement professionals, they aren't even security guards. They are just regular folks with the appropriate class of licence. And sometimes, maybe it's the driver that's the problem...

OK, so application to games: there aren't a lot of games about public transit other than the multitude of train-empire building games. Ticket to Ride, for example, is ostensibly about building train routes across the world. But that's just the use of train as a theme. Other than giving a consistency to the gameplay, there's nothing inherently "train-y" about it. Same with any of the more "hardcore" train-building games.

Games like Grand Theft Auto have taxi minigames, where you can pick up passengers and deliver them around town for cash. This is fun, but it doesn't tie into the game's "story" in any non-superficial way, so it probably doesn't go as far as it could. Now, there are some GTA missions where you have to pretend to be someone's driver in order to kidnap them for nefarious purposes... now we are getting a little closer to "transit as gameplay element".

So, best fit: probably an RPG. Running an RPG is always a good chance to try and give the characters a scare -- or at least a dramatic place to fight. Historical/fantasy settings can potentially have taxis within large cities, or even some kind of magical train between cities. Taxis are always good opportunities to take the characters places they don't want to be. Chatty cabbies are also good ways to "seed" plot information to players. As traisn go... well... everyone likes a good train heist, and trapping the PCs on a train with an undefeatable foe means they get to run towards the back of the train for the inevitable de-coupling of cars. Especially if the bridge is out! Also, maybe the stinky guy, or the ranting crazy person are plague carriers, or know something that other people do not... great for a supernatural horror game. These tricks work just as well in stories in various formats, as well: think of the subway fight in Hellboy, for example, or many of the Underground scenes in Neverwhere in its many formats. Oh, or the bomb on the train in Die Hard with a Vengeance.

New game ideas? Well, maybe a boardgame based around the idea of a closed train with... something -- let's say a monster of some sort -- pursuing the players through a subway train. The board is 5 cars long, and the train is assumed to be speeding along the track towards the inevitable end of the line. The characters are all on the front car, and they are trying to get to the back car to leap from the train before it crashes. Meanwhile, they have to deal with panicking passengers (creating obstacles), and the ever-nearing presence of the monster.

Maybe this has been done (and if so, I'd like to play it) but a simple board or card game about taxis, collecting fares and trying to keep ahead of the competition despite mechanical failures, traffic, or whatever else could also be fun.

Transit might be scary, but it's scary because it's a tight space where you have to put a lot of trust in the people around you. For that same reason, it can be a great source to mine for ideas for games and stories.

So, I am leaning towards making this less a short-story blog and more of a games blog. I spend a lot of my time thinking about games, and working on a few pet projects with an eye toward potential publication.

So, what I'm going to try to do is once or twice a week post here with some observations about the world and ideas as to how those things can be used as games, or in games, or else observations about games and what I might want to do with the knowledge.

Here's the first bit: a bit of a rules tweak I brewed up a while back for Vampire: the Requiem.

TORMENT

Whenever a vampire is about to act in such a way that will potentially cause a Degeneration check, have the player roll their current Torment rating (dots). If the player gets more successes than the Humanity threshold of the sin, he is Tormented, and may not take that action. He simply cannot kill his prey, or commit the triggering act of violence or destruction. The vampire is overcome with guilt and the memory of his former life, and must find a way to circumvent the action.

If a player chooses, he may spend a point of Willpower to take the offending action anyway, but if he does, he Kindred takes a penalty equal to his Torment rating to all actions until an act of contrition is made, or until a Torment dot is gained or lost. Let "act of contrition" be interpreted as generously as possible, as appropriate for you Chronicle. Spending Vitae and Willpower to Embrace a feeding victim, for example, should earn the player the benefit of this system,

Gameplay Notes

Keep in mind that Torment can potentially affect any Kindred, no matter how base. Even vampires who have degenerated to near-bestiality over the years can still find themselves suddenly overwhelmed by guilt and memories of their lost life.

Players might want to roleplay their characters' reactions to being Tormented. Encourage this. A scene where a vampire smashes mirrors, near-frenzies, and then breaks into sobs complete with tears of blood makes for a dramatic sight, and can really break up all the politicking and hunger frenzies. Feel free to award an experience point to any player who makes a Torment scene into a memorable moment in the game.

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5124184/the-russian-bear-slashes-a-social-network

Looks like there's an outside chance of LJ disappearing. That said:

http://ljbackup.yamnet.co.uk/

That's an LJ download/backup tool.

So it's taken me this long to finally get my whole travel journal online, but there it all is.

Day one is here.

In the meantime, I have all-but-finished my novel -- I'm just working on the ending; and I've written another of my Christmas stories for Erin.

There's a New Year coming up, so I'm starting to consider my life in 2008, and figure out what I liked and what I would do differently. Always an odd consideration.

Anyway, now that the journal-hurdle is leapt, I will start to try and post stories here a little more often.

Happy Holidays, and I hope to write for you soon!

-AD.