Tales from my Head

Sickness!

2009-07-07T20:59:07Z

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.

Pendragon Hack ideas

2009-06-30T04:18:30Z

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?

Visuals -> Design

2009-06-22T19:34:16Z

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 -- Actual Play

2009-06-07T00:46:06Z

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.

Our group consisted of Aaron, Roger, and Thomas. Thomas came late, but I’m going to tell the story as if he was there the whole time, because it makes the narrative smoother. Aaron bought up points in Vulcan and Pluto, making a character that was stealthy and well-equipped with gadgetry. Roger made a beautiful killer, focusing on Mars and Mercury. Having two specialties each meant that they were very poorly represented in their other categories. Thomas specialized in Vulcan, and was moderately competent at everything else.

Thus far, everything had proceeded as I – and presumably Wick – had expected. The characters were competent and dangerous, and the team was well-rounded. Then things went a little… awry.
The next stage of the game is Planning. Spies in movies and novels are always well-prepared and seemingly able to deal with any complication. WoM simulates that by putting planning the mission – including the complications – into the hands of the players, rather than the GM (called Operations). Every detail the players add adds one “mission point” which can be used to enhance their regular stats or activate special abilities.

When the PCs are in a challenging situation, which the game calls “risks”, they roll a number of dice equal to the appropriate stat (Mars for killin’, Vulcan for setting explosives or hacking, etc.) and compare their total roll to a chart which determines who gets narrative rights for the outcome. Low rolls give Operations full rights, and high rolls give full rights to the player. In between, narrative rights are subject to a “veto”, or a modifier, by the other party. A player might narrate themselves grabbing their enemy and beating him up, but Operations can say “but he’s still conscious” or “and then another enemy agent steps into the room with a gun”.

Special abilities basically allow the character who has the highest value in a given stat to automatically succeed in one risk of the appropriate type, except for Saturn, which can give another player a re-roll.

So, planning is where things went off the rails a bit. Operations (me) give the PCs one simple objective. Mine was “There is a mole in the North Korean embassy in London, and you have to extract the mole.” I left the details of who the mole was and why the mole needed extraction intentionally vague.

So, the players decided that since the PRK doesn’t actually have an embassy in London, this would be a new embassy, just opened up as the PRK was making overtures of peace to the world. And the mole? Kim Jong-il’s eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, bitter for being passed over by his father. All that was fine, until the PCs decided that they would be disguised as body doubles for Kim Jong-il, complete with the small stature and portly shape. In fact, they decided, they would be CLONES of the Glorious Leader, although genetically modified as part of Korea’s super-soldier program; their genetics had been stolen or tampered with, however, and rather than being loyal to nation and party, they were working for the unnamed (presumably NATO-backed) intel organization that was helping Kim Jong-nam defect.

They explained how there would be too many protesters at the airport in London, so the younger Kim would be brought in by train, through the Chunnel from France. Then, while on the train, they would locate him, bring him to the back of the train, load him into their spy car, drop out the back of the train once it had surfaced on the English side, and drive the car into the back of a transport disguised as a double-decker bus.

All good. So I asked them what the complications they expected were. Well, of course, the threat of Jong-nam escaping with Korea’s missile secrets and cloning project details was not only a risk to the PRK, but to the whole “Axis of Evil”! So the Iranians had put agents onto the train as well to prevent any such defections. Oh my. Oh, and the REAL Kim Jong-il was also on the train!

Once the mission details were set, they divvied up their mission points. The intent seems to be that players will tend to give extra points to PCs that they think will be called upon a lot (more points to the Hitman in a violent session) but the guys shared them more-or-less equally. Mission points allow a character to be competent in any area, even if it isn’t their speciality, so everyone gets to be a cool spy, even when they are out of their element. As time passes, though, things get harder for the PCs. There are three different “keep the pressure on” rules, and I used the simplest one, which was that every 20 minutes or real-time, each PC would lose one mission point.

Things started off smoothly; the guards on the French side of the Chunnel were not allowing the spies to load their vehicle onto the train. Obviously, since they all looked like Jong-il, the PCs had to be careful not to be seen together. So they split up, Roger (called Smiley Kimmy, now) convincing the guard to let them on with an excellent full-narrative-rights Mercury roll. Aaron (aka Silent Kimmy) slipped silently onto the cargo container of the train – using Pluto – and unloaded one of the cars already on-board. He failed with a veto, so I let him unload the car, but I put an Iranian agent in the back seat with a garrotte!

Deciding to run with the growing campiness, I put my Iranian spies in white linen suits with bald heads and obviously sinister “vizier beards”. Aaron then used his veto to ensure that his flabby Kim Jong-il jowls blocked the wire from his throat, allowing him to fight back! He then rolled an excellent Vulcan test, using the automatic seats of the car to trap the Iranian, and then slipped quietly out of the car.

Once on board, the team began deploying their assets. They used Pluto to sneak around, but not without some complication. Thomas (playing Big Kimmy, having decided that his character was designed for TV appearances, and was thus much taller than the real Glorious Leader) got caught in a hallway by an Iranian, and barely managed to sneak into a room to get out of sight… but my veto made it so that it was the room of a French reporter on the train to try and get a few pics of the famed dictator’s family.

Big Kimmy then sprung his trap, attacking the Iranian, but not successfully enough to prevent me from having the spy pull a scimitar (“where was he hiding that?” was the chorus from the players; I reminded them that it was their idea to be espionage-themed clones of a tubby 5’2” dictator) and counter-attack, driving Big Kimmy into the reporter’s room. The reporter gleefully took pictures and started emailing them to his editor (does the Chunnel have wifi? I assumed it must). Big Kimmy rolled a powerful Mars, and dropped the white-suited spy.

Meanwhile, Smiley Kimmy asked a concierge for a tour of the train. The bewildered employee took the spy around the train, showing him all the passenger cars and the control room… where he saw Big Kimmy scrapping with an Iranian via the CCTV.

Silent Kimmy used Vulcan to rig up some explosives on the younger Kim’s car in the cargo compartment, so that if anything went wrong, they could blow open the car doors and rescue him. Success, but my veto introduced another Iranian agent, who used some kind of gadget to steal the detonation frequency of the explosive, and then ran off into the train. Silent Kimmy gave chase.

Smiley Kimmy distracted the train staff from the security feed (using Mercury) and then ran back to the passenger cars to help Big Kimmy deal with the now-dead Iranian. Big Kimmy used Saturn to terrify the reporter into giving up his laptop (we decided that since Saturn is for leadership, that intimidation would fall into that category rather than Mercury, which tends to be more subtle). They picked the dead enemy agent up and carried him, Weekend and Bernie’s-style, back to the cargo compartment. They rolled Pluto to keep it subtle… and my veto introduced a lone porter.

Smiley Kimmy hit the porter with Mercury, and rolled fairly well, but I was still able to use my veto to declare that the porter was not truly a rail employee, but a PRK plant! And recognizing that tow Kim Jong-ils in one place – especially toting a dead Iranian – was a bad sign! And he ran for help. Smiley Kimmy easily dispatched the poor guy with Mars, though. They hid both bodies in the trunks of cars.

Meanwhile, Silent Kimmy had lost track of the Iranian agent, but tapped into the train’s CCTV network with Vulcan to locate their passenger compartment. He then used Vulcan to remotely lock all the doors of the compartment and notify security (there’s security on this crazy train?), but my veto allowed the Iranians to escape through a window, crawling on top of the train (yes, in the Chunnel. By this point we had all completely given in to the campy-monster in each of us).

It was at this point that I decided to spring the game’s Trust mechanic on the players. WoM simulates the tension and distrust of the spy genre by giving players bonus “trust dice” to actions that specifically betray another character. Because I hadn’t explained that to the group beforehand, I just gave some of them “secret orders”. Silent Kimmy was informed by email that Big Kimmy might still be loyal to the PRK, and Smiley Kimmy was told that Silent Kimmy might well be working for the Iranians! On the note I just put “get +1 die when acting against that character”. Technically, the game allows the PCs to get trust dice from betraying Operations as well, but I didn’t want to add too much complication.

Smiley, now distrusting Silent, unloaded all of Silent’s explosives gear from the back of the spy car, using everything to set up an explosion to blow the doors off the back of the cargo container, out of which they could escape.

With everything in place, the team started to move. And move against each other! Big and Silent took up positions at the back of the train, getting ready to blow the doors and escape. Smiley Kimmy went to the first-class car and told the leader of the security detail that he was the real Kim Jong-il, but that there was an impostor at the back of the train, ready to try and assassinate him! An excellent Mercury roll gave him success, and the guards all ran off, except for the personal bodyguards of the real Jong-il and Jong-nam.

The guards reached the back, and Silent used his Pluto special ability to disappear. The special abilities hadn’t been used much, but mission points were running low, so the players wanted to use them if they got the chance. Big rolled Pluto, and ducked in and out of cars avoiding the PRK troops, but my veto allowed me to re-introduce the Iranian agents, who came in shouting and looking to kill everyone! Silent was prepared, though, and he used Vulcan to blow up the explosive he had on Jong-nam’s car, removing most of the hostiles from the equation.

Meanwhile, Smiley walked, bold as brass, up to the Kims and their bodyguards, and unloaded an amazing Mars roll, gunning down all the bodyguards, blasting open the windows of the train, and grabbing the younger Kim, pretending to take him hostage – keep in mind that Smiley looks just like Kim Jong-il, but with much nicer teeth. He then used Mercury to convince the Glorious Leader that he was, in fact, kidnapping the man’s son, and Roger narrated a great scene where the younger Kim, sobbing, told his father that he only wanted him to be proud. Kim Jong-il, his hair and jowls, fluttering in the wind of the ruined train, resigned himself to his son’s capture… for now. They fled to the back of the train.

Big got the spy car running, and Smiley blew the doors. I got narrative rights (one of the few times all session), so I said that the explosion blasted the spy car out of the back of the train. Roger used his veto in an amusing way, to actually harm the team, by saying that the crash blew out the tires of the spy car, forcing it to stay on the rails (yes, the car’s rims were just the right distance to sit on the rails).

Feeling invincible, Big jammed the wheel and gas of the car, keeping it moving along the track and opened the top, standing in the driver’s seat and holding out his hand to Jung-nam. A roll of Vulcan (for leadership and inspiration) got the defector into the spy car, and then the other spies jumped in without trouble.

I took over for the epilogue, stating that after the train had gotten a sufficient distance, Smiley shot a track-switch lever, allowing the spy car to turn off onto another track, and meet up with the double-decker spy bus.

The end?

So, overall, I really liked the mechanics, pacing, and structure of WoM. We ran into a few snags (we weren’t sure at first if PCs could earn more mission points mid-mission. A re-reading of the section makes it pretty clear that they can’t), but for the most part we didn’t have any trouble figuring out what was going on. Mission points as a resource were hoarded at first, and it wasn’t until they started disappearing behind the ticking clock that the players really started using them. There doesn’t seem to be a skill to cover general athleticism (jumping, climbing, etc), although that’s dealt with largely due to the fact that athletic feats are usually a mean, rather than an ends, and will generally fall into either Mars or Pluto.

I don’t know if anyone expected the game to be utterly insane and camp. Just from reading the game, I had no idea it could even be played that way. Up until the PCs were a team of cloned Kim Jong-ils, anything could’ve gone. After that, it was fight the current or run with it, and run we did.

There isn’t really any provision for campaign play. There’s no real way for the characters to change or advance, so you would have PCs filling the same roles in tale after tale. Still, with some time to prep, the group could easily come up with some other form of play-reward, like status or personal goals for characters to pursue. Personal goals would be very interesting, because players would therefore always be keen to find ways to tie their personal goals into the mission planning.

Overall, it took us about 3 hours to play; 1 hour for character creation and planning, and 2 to actually play.

I call this a win for SGC! Next week, Lady Blackbird!

Embark! continues

2009-06-01T15:08:50Z

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.

Embark! The Sandpoint Chronicles

2009-05-25T17:37:30Z

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.

What I did was started by reading West Marches, which is something I recommend to all gamemasters of any stripe and any system. I read about what works and what doesn't in big, open, questy, player-driven, sandbox games. Then, I went to my FLGS.

I originally went to the store looking for a book full of encounter tables to give me a jumping-off point for making my own. Sadly, 4e has done away with the idea of the "random encounter" as something that's part and parcel of the core system. I say "sadly", despite having NEVER used a random encounter table before, because they always gave a really great sense of the ecology of an area, and they would've been damned useful to me -this time-.

I was unable to find such a product, but I did find Paizo Press's Gamemastery products, which include a lot of adventure paths, and some really snazzy map sets. So I bought the map set for Adventure Path 1: Rise of the Runelords. This contains the map of Paizo's "Pathfinder Chronicles" world, as well as a variety of smaller maps of towns, cities, and specific dungeon locations. These maps include one which details the town of Sandpoint and another of its immediate environs. Perfect.

I traced the Sandpoint environs map onto a piece of graph paper and set to work dividing it into zones, like Robbins did in West Marches. I then assigned each zone a "target level", sticking between 1 and 10 at this point, and a few sample monsters/enemies for that zone.

Knowing that I wanted some variance in the danger level of a zone, but some overall consistency, I decided that each encounter in a zone would have a target number of experience points based on a d4 x a multiplier. This would generate an "experience budget", similar to that described in the 4e DMG, which would then be spent on a random selection of monsters from the list.

The tables look like this:

Encounter Table

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

Obviously, this table continues, but this gives a general sense of what I was doing. When someone is traveling through the Ravenroost zone, every quarter-day of travel will result in a roll on the table. First, a roll is made in the leftmost column. A 01-50 on a percentile means the PC has encountered nothing. A 51-56 means they've encountered Bandits. Even though I wanted the game to be dangerous, the realities of a solo adventurer in a D&D game, and the possibility that I might have more or less players in any given session is why I went with the experience budget that scales with the number of PCs. So if I have one player, I roll a d4 and multiply by 40, and that's my budget for the encounter. I then roll on the bandit sub-table to spend my budget. If I can't afford what I roll, then I just go down the list until I find something I can afford. Any extra XP are lost.

Creating these tables taught me certain things about my environments, and forced me to make certain choices. You can see by this bandit table, for example, that human bandits will be more common that halfling, because whenever you drop down the list to something cheaper, the first entry is human. I also "discovered" that kobolds use drakes as guard/attack animals, elves use wolves, dwarves ride dire boards, and hobgoblins have trained shadowhunter bats.

Two things besides simple monster selection control the danger of a zone: the multiplier of the experience budget (x25 is the lowest, and x200 the highest), and the percentage chance of a hostile encounter. The automatic assumption in Embark! is that the "PC" races default to friendly, or at least neutral, and even if "monster" races default to hostile, they will choose their engagements carefully. So, even if the table says there's a handful of hobgoblins hiding in the woods, the PCs might never know about the "encounter" if the hobs decide to keep to cover and avoid an engagement with a clearly superior force. That said, Ravenroost is a fairly safe zone (50% chance of no encounter at all, x40 being the normal multiplier) whereas Shank's Wood is a dangerous one (only 20% chance of no encounter, 50% chance of running into hobgoblins, and x70 being the normal multiplier).

So, now I had the places the PCs would be wandering through, but I needed someplace for them to go. Many of the zones on the map I was using had evocatively named sites already on them. Why was The Old Light (a lighthouse tower) in ruins? Who lived in Foxglove Manor on the foreboding Bleaklow Moor? Why did Habe's Sanitorium sit at the base of the mesa called the Ashen Rise? Starting with those, and making up a few of my own (such as the Ghostly City of Ealford, deep in the Tickwood), I started making "dungeons", in the sense of locations for my PCs to set out toward for loot and glory.

I statted up these "special sites" as follows:

Name
Level; Knowledge check to know about
Zone:
Treasure:
Hook:
Defenders:
Leads:

The name was, of course, the name of the site. Level is the target level. Normally, the special sites are a few levels higher than the zone they are in. Treasure I generated with another Paizo product: item cards. I bought the starter treasure deck, and I just shuffle it and pull a card at random. The best thing about these cards is that the illustration and card text mean that each item has a lot of character built right into it, and you can adapt that into your setting. So if I pulled a breastplate with a leaf emblem on it, I could tie that leaf emblem into my setting. I then cross-referenced the type of treasure with the level of the dungeon and picked treasure appropriately. Hooks I generated with a completely unrelated product, oracle-style. I have long loved the game Once Upon a Time and use the cards whenever I can. To get a hook, I pull three or more cards from the OUaT deck, consider the zone and the treasure, and write a little story or legend about the site. Based on what I've written, I stock the dungeon with defenders. Leads are other locations that the dungeon has clues to. It makes me think about other dungeons, where the PCs might go next, and how the region is tied together (like where else might that leaf emblem be found?). Sometimes the "leads" are just "deeper dungeons". The kobolds' lair goes down a few floors and caps out around level 4 or 5, but where does that caved-in tunnel go, and why is it carved with images of spiders?

So, at the start of the game, my PC or PCs will be in Sandpoint and be able to collect rumours and information about some special sites. They will then head out into the world, learning about the zones as they go, and returning to Sandpoint to rest and recover. I won't be pulling any punches, so if the players decide they want to check out The Pit on Devil's Platter right away, then that's on their heads, not mine.

I also won't be giving the players a map. I have several (the printed one that I bought and the traced one with my zone notes on it), but if they want one, they can draw their own, based on what they see and do during play (another West Marches innovation).

Experience Points, part II

2009-05-05T19:12:29Z

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.)

Levels are obviously a non-simulationist abstraction, since no-one can reasonably argue that actual personal development works anything like this. There is nobody positing that after you have completed a certain number of arbitrary objectives, you will suddenly gain a broad increase of abilities in all aspects of your life. The strengths of the LB form, however, are gameplay-based.

Characters of a given experience level can be easily compared to one another. If game designers are concerned with "play balance", which is particularly important in tactical games, then they can work to ensure that any level one character will be of equivalent "value" to a given player. To use D&D as an example, it should be the case (although there is some debate on this point) that a level one Fighter should be as useful and appealing to a player as a level one Wizard, all else being disregarded (such as player preference, play style, specific game focus). In tactically-focused games such as D&D, it is often a complaint that character classes are "unbalanced", which is to say less-effective or less-appealing, whether in general, or at specific levels of play.

There is a variant of this form where characters gain levels at different thresholds. In the most-common LB systems, every character with a given amount of XP, ie. 2,000, will be the same level, ie. 2. In these cases, most classes will have the same number of levels, or if there are no classes, then all characters will have access to the same number of levels. This is not always the case, however, since some games, presumably in order to gain more precise control over balance, will balance characters based on their XP totals, rather than their level. That is to say that two characters with 2,000 XP may or may not be assumed to have roughly the same level of power, and further, one character might be level one, and another level two. LB systems that use "point-balance" rather than "level-balance" will create situations where characters are of differing utility at any given moment in time, but with the theory that over time, the characters' total utility will average out, if they receive the same amount of XP. This can also be used to limit the impact of "front-loading" of a character type by causing a front-loaded character to advance more slowly.

To illustrate: imagine we have a game called Knights & Wizards, wherein players can choose between playing knights or wizards (two character classes). We, as the designers, might decide that knights will be substantially more powerful than wizards to start, but don't have much by way of development ahead of them, whereas wizards will improve their arcane might and knowledge with practice and time. The wizards, then, are assigned 20 levels of character advancement, and at each level, wizards grow incrementally more powerful, until reaching their maximum utility at level 20. We decide that we want full campaigns of K&W to run for around twenty sessions, and that 100 XP per session is a nice average reward. If we assume we want the characters to have reached their maximum potential by the end of the campaign, then the wizards' final XP total will be around 2,000. Rather than a complex geometric progression of XP/level ratios, we simply say that every 100 XP, wizards will gain a level.

Now, we know that we will be rewarding each character with about 100 XP at the end of each session, and we want knights to have less advancement than wizards. So we say that knights only have 10 levels, rather than 20, and level up every time they earn 200 XP. Our ultimate goal is to have knights and wizards to feel roughly "equal" in terms of gameplay utility at the end of the game, when they have around 2,000 XP each, but we want knights to be more valuable early in the game. Therefore, we determine what abilities make the character types feel equal at 2,000 XP, and then divide both groups' respective abilities into twenty parcels. Wizards get one parcel per level, so they have a gradual improvement up to level 20. The difference in utility between level 1 and 2 is relatively the same for wizards as the difference between levels 3 and 4. Knights, on the other hand, we want to be "pre-loaded". We therefore decide that knights will start with 5 parcels of abilities (5/20 of their final utility) at level 1, then receive 3 parcels at levels 2 and 3, 2 parcels at levels 4 and 5, and then 1 parcel per level thereafter, until they have reached 10 levels and 20 parcels.

Compare how these play out: there is no value in comparing a level 5 knight and a level 5 wizard. The knight has 1,000 XP, representing about ten sessions of play, and the wizard only has 500. The knight has 15 of his total parcels of ability, and the wizard only has 5 of his. However, if you compare a knight with 1,000 XP (level 5) to a wizard with 1,000 XP (level 10), you can see the concrete gameplay differences. The knight has 15 of his parcels, and the wizard has 10. Three sessions later, at 1,300 XP, the knight is at level 6, and the wizard at level 13, and the gap has narrowed to 16 and 13 parcels, respectively.

Obviously, this example is generic and might not work in actual play; it is merely meant to show how point-balance LB systems work at their most basic.

Another gameplay advantage of levels is simplicity. When a character gains a level and the ability parcels for that level, it's generally a simple process to assign the values and complete the leveling process.

One of the chiefest disadvantages of LB systems is inflexibility. If you are a level 5 fighter, then when you hit the next level, you will be a level 6 fighter. LB games take a variety of steps to combat this, usually by adding options to differentiate each level 6 fighter from the others, but with each additional option, a LB system loses some of its inherent simplicity. Take for example 4th Edition D&D: upon reaching a new level, a player can expect to select new feats, and/or new powers, and/or increase ability scores. Combined with the selection of skills at character generation, this serves to mechanically differentiate two otherwise identical characters. A fighter with high Constitution and a focus on stunning powers plays quite differently from a fighter with high Dexterity that focuses on battlefield mobility. However, the ability of gamemasters and other players to look at the character and know immediately how tactically functional it is is decreased by these decision points.

The other major disadvantage of LB systems is single-axis development (SAD). By "single-axis development", I mean that generally when increasing in levels, a player must choose a specific area in which to improve. Sometimes this selection will be further limited by class restrictions. A fighter will generally only ever become a better fighter, and wizard will only become a better wizard. Neither of them will ever become a competent thief. This compartmentalizes characters even further, and limits player option. It also limits gameplay possibilities, especially at higher levels, as PCs become so entrenched in one form of activity that it is virtually impossible for them to engage in any other form. This is related to the "inorganicness" of LB systems; as noted above, it's simply a gameplay conceit that a PC suddenly "levels up", improving all the aspects that they can improve simultaneously. Unlike real people, PCs in a LB game can only get better at one thing, and they can only do it at one magic moment.

Both inflexibility and SAD are combatted by the option of "multiclassing" or some variant thereof, including non-classed LB systems. In these cases, a player can choose an ability parcel from a different class, or in a non-classed game, the ability parcels gained at a given level are chosen from a broader pool of options, and the same pool is open to all players.

Multiclass systems suffer from the fact that it in a classed system, unless an utterly incredible amount of system tweaking is done, a multiclassed character will be unable to thrive in the same situations as a single-classed character of the same total level. A multiclassed level 3 fighter/level 3 wizard will virtually never be as useful as a level 6 fighter or a level 6 wizard. The flexibilty of being able to act in both roles doesn't make up for the fact that -- due to "encounter scaling", the process by which the challenges faced by PCs increase in difficulty and scope at the same rate as the PCs gain power -- the PC cannot act in either role with sufficient competence to make a meaningful impact on the game situation. Put more simply: the above fighter 3/wizard 3 can't fight level 6 monsters with his sword or with his magic, because neither are powerful enough.

Non-classed LB games are rare, perhaps because they amount to little more than a halfway step to point-buy systems. In a PB game, you use your XP to select upgrades to your character. In a non-classed LB game, you wait until you have reached a specific XP threshold, then select upgrades as specified by the game's mechanic. Not much of a step, then from one to the other.

An Overview of Experience Points, Part I

2009-05-01T19:07:44Z

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.

The Basics

There are two major forms of XP mechanics, and a variety of smaller, rarer forms. The Big Two are Level-Based (LB) and Point-Buy (PB). Both have strengths and weaknesses, and both will be familiar to most RPers. The Big Two and the less-common variants tend to have a few variables in common: XP are normally awarded at the end of a session or significant moment in a game; are given to players by the GM; are based on either rewards specified by the game system, or by the GM on an ad hoc basis; and they allow access to new abilities, or improvement of existing abilities.

Some games have very specific rules about when XP are to be awarded, and for what. This form of rule allows game designers to focus what their game is "about". If XP are only awarded upon defeating monsters, then the players will focus their play efforts on defeating monsters, and GMs will focus their play prep on situations in which monsters are fought, and potentially defeated. By contrast, a game where XP are only rewarded for the successful creation of magical artifacts has, on the face of it, a completely different thrust and focus. Defeating monsters might still be an element of gameplay (if said monsters are guarding necessary components for the creation of said artifacts, for example), but is no longer what players are going to focus on. The exact timing of XP awarding has a vey small, but non-insignifcant impact on play. XP awarded in the middle of a session means that characters are constantly changing during play. This can effect the rhythm of game sessions, and can impact GM planning, since planned events might suddenly be rendered trivial by character improvement.

The delivery of XP is normally handled by the GM. I cannot think of a single example of a game where XP are issued without a GM -- although GMless alternatives for character advancement do exist, they rarely rely on XP, and often translate character activity directly into rewards (such as Burning Wheel), or provide a specific reward at the end of each session of play (such as In a Wicked Age). In addition to the other duties of the office, the arbitration of what is deserving of XP and how many XP are rewarded for different actions is one of the most important GM duties. This capacity allows the GM to fine-tune -- or even completely sidestep -- the designers' intentions for a game. A game which, as written, provdes XP for killing monsters can see its play completely redirected by a GM who rewards players for investigation rather than combat, for example. The impact of this will differ from game-to-game, and will vary depending on the degree of change.

The issue of how many is one of the most common changes I have seen in my games. Many games are designed around the idea of long-term play (long-term as defined as "in excess of twenty sessions of play, each session being roughly three to four hours, with no upper limit, and in which players use the same characters or troupe for the duration; long-term games tend to take at least several months, and often several years to play), and as such the access to advanced abilities is restricted to characters who have received a relatively large amount of XP. My group tends to play short- to medium- length campaigns(short being one to six sessions, and medium being seven to twenty, again with the average session length being three to four hours). As such, if we want access to the higher-end abilities, we need to increase the size of the XP rewards from the default suggested by the games we play. For example, games of World of Darkness tend to award between 3 and 8 XP per session; in a short-term, fast advancement game, we often will award around 10 or 12 XP, and sometimes as many as 20.This adjustment, like the what for adjustments can come from the GM, but it often arises as a reaction to player expectations. Our World of Darkness modification, for example, emerged after a series of sort-term games which left players feeling like they did not see enough advancement before having to "retire" a character.

How XP are used to improve characters is the most substantive variable in games, and is also the one that is least flexible to GM/group modification. It is here that we see the two major "forms" emerge, the aforementioned Level-Based and Point-Buy systems.

Check back for the the next part!

My Brute can beat up your Brute

2009-04-09T16:42:58Z

http://deadlytoque.mybrute.com

The Canterbury Dungeons - or - Let me tell you about the time...

2009-04-07T17:20:56Z

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.

3:16; first play and impressions

2009-04-07T05:05:53Z

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.

Why I shouldn't run D&D

2009-03-31T18:38:58Z

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.

A few thoughts

2009-03-30T21:07:00Z

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?

Mad Money!

2009-03-13T19:42:52Z

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.

A response to an old comment not directed at me

2009-03-11T19:34:38Z

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

There is nothing inherently wrong with random, jumbled-up dungeons that make little sense. How the hobby came to a contrary conclusion is beyond me. A good dungeon has a certain sense of dreamlike irrationality. That's what gives it the inherent danger, the mystique, the edge it has. A descent into a dungeon should involve the PCs symbolically plunging into the collective unconsciousness of the world, a place where nightmares take life and wonders are beheld. I find it unseemly to try to impose a draconian sense of purpose or ecology on such phantasmagorical wonderlands. Sometimes it's okay that the ki-rin in room 23 lives in relative peace with the succubi in room 24.

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.

Games about Things

2009-03-09T20:29:04Z

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.

Out of Service

2009-03-05T17:00:39Z

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.

Games

2009-03-04T22:59:03Z

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

Torment is an optional rule for Vampire: the Requiem. Torment represents a vampire's growing guilt over his actions, and the acknowledgment of the gradual loss of Humanity. It is meant for use in Chronicles where Degeneration is a major theme and focus, and it creates vampires who are moody and often isolated.

Torment is tracked like Willpower, in that it has ten dots and ten boxes (points). Unlike Willpower, however, Torment starts at zero, and tracks upwards.

Gaining Torment

Whenever a vampire succeeds on a Degeneration test (that is gains at least one success and does not lose Humanity), he gains Torment points (marked in the boxes). The number of points gained is equal to the difference between the Vampire's current Humanity and the level of the sin. Therefore, a Humanity 5 Kindred commits a planned murder (Humanity threshold 3) he gains 2 Torment points (5-3=2) plus however many success the player rolled on the Degeneration check.

Whenever a vampire reaches 10 Torment points, all the temporary points are lost, and one Torment Dot is gained. Any excess Torment points gained at the same time as a Torment dot increase are lost.

As a vampire commits inhuman acts, his guilt rises up within him, and eventually, it begins to overwhelm all but the most hardened monsters.

Losing Torment

A vampire can lose Torment points through the same methods used to recover Willpower. The same acts that allow a vampire to restore his exhausted mind, also help overcome his growing guilt, whether those acts are to help those around him, or to indulge his baser nature, thus restoring his sense of purpose.

Whenever one of the Kindred acts in accordance with his Virtue, he regains all his Willpower, and an equal number of Torment points are lost. If the vampire has 5 Willpower, but has only spent 3, when he recovers Willpower in this way, he also loses 3 Torment points; if he has spent no Willpower, and thus cannot recover Willpower from indulging his virtue, or if he has already acted in accordance with his virtue in the current session, he may still lose 1 Torment point.

Whenever one of the Kindred follows his Vice, he recovers 1 Willpower and loses 1 Torment point. If his Willpower is full, he still loses 1 Torment point. Note: the Daeva, even though they cannot recover Willpower through this method, may still lose Torment this way.

When a Vampire rests, he loses 1 Torment point automatically, as time soothes all wounds.

A vampire can only lose Torment points once per scene, by any means, although they may lose multiple Torment points at once.

Torment dots can only be lost when the Kindred gains or loses Humanity. An increase in Humanity, representing a re-dedication of the vampire's inner resources to his morality, allows him to lose 1 Torment dot, as well as all accumulated Torment points. A loss of Humanity, representing a sliding away from the morals of the herd allows the guilt to slip away, causing a loss of 1 Torment dot, plus all accumulated Torment points.

Effects of 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.

LJ under threat?

2009-01-08T07:10:10Z

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.

Journal done!

2008-12-30T18:17:10Z

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.

Journal, day 25

2008-12-30T18:13:20Z

Wednesday, 15 October

Flight home is much less exciting than the flight out.

We get to the airport at about 4:00 am, and it's 13 degrees out, and lovely and still. The airport is closed. We aren't the only early arrivals, and we make friends with some Americans and fellow Canadians.

Airport security breaks my Copaxone container, but then we board and fly to Frankfurt, where we easily change planes and fly home.

Our adventure is over. I miss it.

And I can't wait for the next one.

Journal, day 24

2008-12-30T18:10:32Z

INTERLUDE

I totally forgot: we saw an ad for a comic book in Venice called EL CAPITAN VENIZIA, who was a humanoid S. Marco's Lion. Looks cool. We never found an issue, though. Sad.

Martedi, 14 Ottobre

Last day in Florence. Last day in Italy. Wow. No pressure.

So, up bright and early to go a-museuming. We get to the breakfast room, and goddammit, it's full. There's an old-people tour just getting ready to head out. They are using most of the tables, and their bags use most of the lobby, so we have to tiptoe to a table.

Croissants, espresso, and yogurt -- standard hotel breaky fare, and we scoop two 'gurts, two packs of rye bread (like little slices; actually, one is pumpernickel, the other 4-grain, but both dark and wholesome), two packs of cookies, and then off.

We get to Uffizi bright and early, and the queue is short. Once we line up, however, along with about 30 others, we discover that due to a staff meeting, they are not open til 10:45. Not that anyone tells us -- there's a small sign hung up on the door, a full 5 metres from where we are. Lame!

So we re-plan. As we head to the Accademia, we see film trucks parked around the side of the Palazzo Vecchio, which borders the Uffizi. Coincidence? Unlikely.

Arriving at the Accademia, we luck into a pair of line-jumping tickets being sold by a guide who had over-booked her tour. Once we inside, we begin our journey through the art of the 13th Century in Italy, and onward.

We very quickly notice that even so long ago, they same symbols had been used to indicate the saints we had been seeing since we came to Italy: S. Lorenzo (Lawrence) has a huge iron grill, upon which he was roasted; S. Catherine of Alexandria has a crown and carries a spiked wheel; S. Francesco (Francis) wears plain robes and has glowing wounds on his feet and sometimes in his side, and often is seen with birds; S. George has armour and a sword; S. Dominic wears the black-and-white of the order of monks which bear his name; S. Bernard wears white, and often has a big bushy beard; S. Nicholas wears red and carries three bags of gold; S. Z-something has enough bling to drown a rapper; S. John the Baptist looks crazy, and either wears a hair-shirt, a pink robe (especially in Crucifixions and Pietas) or both. And so on.

Once these symbols sink in, I start playing "Guess the Saint". It's tough, because some features will come and go, and colours will change. Also, George is easily mistaken for the Archangel Michael if you can't see the latter's wings.

Erin plays along for a bit, but she tires before I do, so I win by default.

The Accademia then goes right into Michaelangelo in a big way. David is there, along with five or six unfinished sculptures by the Maestro. Michaelangelo's sculpting style is made obvious by these works: he would approach a block of marble, then attack it with his chisel, striking its face like a storm, and when he passed over, there was a sculpture. Rather than roughed-out figures, Michaelangelo's works look like they are human forms emerging fully-formed from the stone.

David is, of course, stunning. The detail is astounding. There's also a computer set up that allows you get close-up images of the hands and face and change the lighting on computer models to really highlight the details. Most impressive to me was the texture of the leather sling. Truly a masterpiece.

The rest of the museum was made up of plaster studies for other works -- the test runs before committing to a sculpture. Much cheaper, but no less beautiful.

Next was a selection of Russian icons, again 13th-Century. The Russian pieces were unremarkable except for one thing: their use of white to highlight the images, a technique we never saw in the Western pieces.

Along with a smattering of later works -- religious in character -- that was it for Accademia.

While there, we ended up chatting to an older English fellow wearing a Thor's Hammer on a necklace, whose fascination was with the painting of historical weaponry. He told us that weapons, since they were meant to be used -- and roughly! -- would often break and be repaired or modified in the field -- an Italian in Germany who needed a new hilt would get a German replacement, creating a hybrid of styles -- therefore looking at surviving period weapons is often misleading.

Painters, on the other hand, would tend to use original pieces in their studies, therefore a painted mace or sword is much more likely to resemble the weapons made in the artist's homeland at the time of the painting than an actual weapon of that time that has survived to present day.

He regaled us for several minutes on the nature of his studies, until his wife found him and dragged him away from his lecture.

He also recommended "Flashman", a series of historical novels.

After that, we went back to the now-open Uffizi, to eat our purloined lunch as we stood in line. The line moved fairly quickly, and we were in before an hour was up.

The first few rooms of the Uffizi are more altar-pieces from the 13th-Century, and I fall back into "Guess the Saint", much to Erin's chagrin.

As we move room-to-room, the art matures and the styles broaden, and before long we are awash in the Renaissance which Florence helped spawn. Raphael is there, and Michaelangelo, and Titian, and Botticelli. Such names and such incredible works. We have to start to pick up our pace near the end, so everything after 1500 or so we do at a brisk walk, stopping only to study particularly unique or exquisite works. We begin to block out Madonnas and Pietas. The last few rooms include Caravaggios, and I wish we'd had more time for them. His love of shadow and gore make him very modern in his appeal.

Lesson learned: Raphael , Botticelli, and Titian loved women. Many of the Renaissance masters painted beautifully, but these three managed a carnality that few others even attempted. Even in their non-nude, non-sexual images, these men captured a sexual energy that adds a lot of power to their work, especially when seen up close.

With two hours to spare, we hit the Palazzo Pitti, the Medici's sprawling manor. Our ticket covers three exhibits: the Palatine Galleries/Royal Apartments (the galleries are on display in the apartments), the Modern Art Gallery -- covering Italian artists post-1700 or so, and the special exhibit on Dutch and Flemish influence on the Florentine Renaissance. We do them all at a brisk pace.

Of note: the opulence of the Medici home. The Duke's chambers have THREE waiting rooms: commoners waited in one room, "regular" nobles in another, and royalty in a third. Also, how a master's work will jump out at you. We would enter a room with fifty paintings, all lovely, and immediately our eyes would fix on the Raphael.

The "modern" art is impressive, but its limitation to around Italy, and its timeline of mostly pre-19th century (and the emergence of "truly" Modern Art) limit its appeal. Some lovely landscapes, but without the vibrancy of van Gogh, Picasso, or even Monet.

The Flemish stuff was good, especially as it was curated in such a way as to compare it to works of Florentine painters inspired by -- or copying directly from -- the Flemish innovators, whose sombre religious surroundings led them to create darker, more restrained, but technically incredible work.

Counting our remaining Euros, we budget out supper, then walk back to the hotel to lighten our load. We pick up dessert along the way: some kind of Tuscan date-cake. We drop off cameras and souvenirs, then out for supper.

We eat an excellent minestrone, a decent pasta with meat sauce, and a salad of arugala , olives, and four unique and excellent cheeses. We discuss how Tuscan recipes tend to be simply assembled, but from incredible and varied ingredients.

Over espressos, we sing along to the Elton John and Beatles songs on the restaurant's speakers and reminisce.

We walk back to the hotel and say "ciao" to all of our favorite -- and now familiar -- Florentine buildings: the Palazzo Vecchio, the Neptune in Piazza della Signoria, the Duomo.

In the hotel, we taste our dolce: it is most excellent, as expected.

Our flight is very early, so we are going to try to stay awake, to better sleep on the plane.

This is going to be interesting.

Journal, day 23

2008-12-30T17:22:38Z

Lunedi, 13 Ottobre

Today, things do not go as planned.

We get up earlyish to find the breakfast room packed full. Crap. We wait, snag a table, and munch quickly, then off to the Pitti. Why not Uffizi or Accadamia, you ask? Well, Gentle Reader, Florentine museums are often closed on Mondays, so we figure we'll hit some "smaller" museums, and plan to pack Tuesday.

Only Pitti's closed, too. See, Pitti isn't closed EVERY Monday, so no warning was issued. It's basically closed every other Monday except when the horseradish is in season, unless it's truffle season, but only when the pig statue in the Mercato Nuovo can see his shadow by the light of a candle held in the teeth of a seventh son, unless the son was born in Tuscany, in which case you flip a coin and on tails go out for a pint.

So that's out.

A quick survey shows our Monday options greatly reduced and our Tuesday looking tighter.

We go to the History of Science Museum and see the history of the telescope. Awesome! Two of Galileo's own telescopes are on display, along with really informative articles and video presentations on the development of lenses and the physics of optics. Cool stuff. Erin and I both leave brimming with movie and story ideas.

Then to the Mercato Nuovo to polish the piggie's nose, then we visit a variety of churches to see a variety of incredible works of art, including one church run by real monks, and another where we see Donatello's grave. Hrm. Michaelangelo in S. Croce, Raphael in the Pantheon, now Donatello! We're only missing one Ninja Turtle grave! But I think Leonardo is buried in France. Well, it's on the list. Seeing churches and walking is the bulk of the rest of our day, and though lovely, non are particularly stunning in the face of what we've seen in the last few weeks.

Dinner is at the same restaurant, Gusto Leo, despite some more comparison shopping.

Back to the hotel. Big day tomorrow!

Journal, day 22

2008-11-16T18:42:43Z

Domenica, 12 Ottobre

Train day. We pack up, grab food, then off to the station. We are going to Florence, but it takes us three trains to get there. First, Venezia-S. Lucia (the station in Venice Proper) to Venezia-Mestre, which services the inland suburbs of Venice, where all the commuting workers and normal people live. Then from Mestre on the Napoli-Centrale train, 3 hours to Fiorenze-Rifredi, one of many Florence stations. Then an hour-long wait for a commuter train from Rifredi to Fiorenze-S. Maria Nuovella, the main station. We get on our first train around 8:30, and off our last one at about 1:35. At least two of those hours are spent waiting, but one of them was due to excess caution on our past, getting to the station early.

Once in Florence, we check into our hotel, and go in search of food. All we had on the train were apples pilfered from breakfast, and a Parmesan-and-crackers thing bought from a vending machine at Rifredi. Seriously, Parmesan cheese in a vending machine. Not grated, but fresh. Italians love their cheese.

We wanter up and down the nearby streets, and find a place that sells pizza by weight, so we get that and some pineapple juice. It is good.

It's Sunday, so pretty well everything is closed. Well, about half of everything. Museums are open, but close early, so we decide to use this as our wandering day.

We see lots of little shops, many selling high-end leather, gold, and silver. Antiques and replicas of famous pieces of art are also common.

In addition to replicas there is a thriving counterfeit market. Big signs warn against it, and periodically, groups of young men, usually of African or Middle Eastern appearance, come running down a street with a plastic bag full of fake Louis Vuittons, with a police car driving slowly behind.

We manage to find a few places to look at. We really take our time exploring the public art in Florence, particularly the sculptures in Piazza della Signioria. We try to watch a street-performing mime who has the crowd in hysterics, but the crowd is too thick and we can't see. I get some great photos of the art.

Then we go exporing for the legendary Vivano gelato, rumoured to be the best ice cream in the world! We find it, and it does not disappoint. We split a €3.20 cup with blackberry, pear-caramel, and chocolate-orange. They are all excellent. Perfect texture and thickness. No oiliness. Flavours so pure you can feel the texture of the pear and the blackberry seeds. They clearly just mix plain gelato and whatever flavour they want in equal measure.

We find our way back to Signioria, thinking it's a good base for our next step, and we stumble across an art exhibit in Palazzo Vecchio of a 1:1000 scale Florence! It seems to be part of some kind of anniversary celebration, but it's hard to tell. I take more Duomo pictures (mini-Duomo this time) because I am sick in the head.

We cross the Ponte Vecchio and wander along the Arno until we come to a ruined tower, standing by itself. I will later discover that this is one lonely piece of Florence's demolished city wall. There's a path behind it that leads up to Piazzale de Michaelangelo. We climb almost to the top -- we've seen the Piazzale before, and we want to avoid the crowds -- and watch the sunset. More Duomo pics -- again, head-sick -- plus some nice shots of the sunset and the near-full moon.

On the way back to the hotel, we stumble on a random nighttime parade. We can't quite figure out what it's for, but after the band and the tumblers go by, a group of people in chef's hats with banners march along. Some kind of chef's guild parade? We'll never know.

We stroll through Piazza della Reppublica and people-watch, then go food-hunting.

Rare luck lands us in the cheapest restaurant in Florence, or so it seems, and we share a pesto gnocchi and a turkey salad with avocado -- it's Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend!

Then back to the hotel for sleep. Woo!

Journal, day 21

2008-11-16T18:27:49Z

Sabbato, 11 Ottobre

Up early again for some re-shoots, then back to the hotel to stow the video camera. When we are doing the re-shoots, some locals are setting up a little market that spans the campos between two nearby churches.

Italy is jam-packed with churches. In Canada, we think of more than one church per thousand people to be a lot. Here the ratio is more like one church to every 2-300. The reason, of course, being that once upon a time, every single pew in every single church was full on a Sunday morning. Until quite recently, Europe was basically entirely Christian, and not too long before that, entirely Catholic, so the churches were an utter necessity.

Once the camera thing is worked out, we head to S. Marco cathedral, speaking of churches. Inside no pictures allowed, so you'll just have to look them up. The ceiling is entirely gold mosaic. The whole thing. It's a smallish cathedral, smaller than S. Pietro by a long measure, and even smaller than S. Maria del Fiore in Florence.

But still a cathedral. And the gold isn't just hanging there drably: it's made into intricate icons in styles ranging from Byzantine to Renaissance. Amazing.

There's some other artwork, but the ceiling is the focus, and it's all that really stuck in my head. There was a group of people singing, not a choir. Looked like a funeral, maybe. They really worked the space well, though.

We shuffle out (it was PACKED) and plan our next move. Across S. Marco and around Dosurduro districy to see S. Pantalon, which also, apparently, has a lovely ceiling. But it's closed.

So we wander aimlessly for a bit and stumble into a little pizza joint where we get a HUGE pizza as big as our table for a really reasonable price. €13, about $21, for so much food we can't finish it, and a small Nestea, which we share.

Consulting the map, I realize that we are within spitting distance of the hotel, so we trundle back, deposit our pizza leftovers in the mini-fridge, and back into town.

We do another circle past S. Marco, looking for interesting shops to look at, then it's getting on to the time S. Pantalon is to be open, so we finish the loop that way.

The celing of S. Pantalon is STUNNING. It's illustionistic, meaning the meaning extends on canvass out of the frame, and the image also gives the impression that the walls keep rising into the painting. Early 3-D glasses. The painting is a swarm of figures, writhing or flying, some carrying others.

It is meant to depict the martyrdom and ascension to Heaven of S. Pantalon, but it's hard to figure out the images without a guide.

I buy a postcard after some slight language barrier issues with an old priest, but we both laugh about the misunderstandings, so it's all OK. No pictures allwed here, either, which is really too bad, because the postcard does NOT do it justice.

We do ANOTHER loop into S. Marco, via the area of our hotel (honestly, it's easier than going back the way we came; gives you a sense of just how tiny Venice is), and then hang out in and around S. Marco until the sun goes down, getting lots of good night photos.

On the way back, we stop at a small bakery and get some pistachio cakes (called Pane del Doge/Duke's bread) and eat them with the leftover pizza for supper. Hooray!