Chatty’s PaxEast Highlights: 3 days of Fun Among Friends
Yes, this site is run by insane people, but IT WORKS!
Mere days after the conclusion of the second PaxEast gathering of gaming geeks, I still struggle to reinsert myself in that pre-formed vessel that we call “normal life” (for a given value of normal).
As you may know, Dave and I obtained Media (and Speaker) passes for the event so why not meet the requirements of “talking about the show” by writing about the highlights of the time I spent there?
Thursday night:
After a day-long ride from frigid, stormy Montreal we made our way to the Intercontinental Hotel in South Boston. I had organized an evening of board game in the hotel lobby and, like last year, it was an instant hit.
Here are some of the games I played or recognized:
I ended the night talking to Tavis Allison (long time RPG Freelancer and blogger at of The Mule Abides) where we remade the RPG world from both ends of the Old/New school spectrum. The night was a blast and I already knew I’d spend too little time sleeping.
Friday: Convention Center, Keynote, Q&A and Showroom
The Premise was just plain gigantic and perfect. The Boston Convention Center is light years beyond the one we were last year. I wished there were nearer food outlets, but we made do.
The keynote, by game designer Jane MacGonigal was one of those life changing mind-rewiring events. My mind is abuzz with new game ideas that have real-life, practical applications.
We even broke a world record playing a 5000 players game of massive multi-player thumb wrestling , that was surreal… and plaguetastic!
The following Q & A with Mike and Jerry was icing on the cake, with a roomful of geeks sending waves of admiration, adoration and shameless gushing (and empty calories) towards our Maitre’d.
I mean, what the hell is Irn Bru?
PM: I don’t care if it’s all downhill from here, this was beyond awesome.
We walked the floors of the convention center after and realized just how immense it really was. And there was stuff to do everywhere. As it will likely grow from year to year, PaxEast will be one of those monster events you will never tame, experiencing only a tiny slice of it at every year, much like Gen Con.
I also made a quick tour of the exhibit floor with Yan and PM and we all agreed that it was way better than last year. Yes, there were some very long lines, but we managed to see some very cool stuff.
Friday: Return of the “Be your own Hero” (e)book
During my visit of the expo all, I made my way to the thin slice reserved for indie game developers and met with Neil from Australia-based Tin Man Games. They showed us their iOS-based Adventure gamebook applications. I hope to get a copy in the next few weeks and put up a review but suffice it to say that the 10 year old boy in me was filled with nostalgia and wonder at the sight of that beautiful game.
Highlights:
- Each game has roughly 8 times the number of entries than the 1980′s UK books pioneered by Steve Jackson (no, not that one) and Ian Livingston
- The game has an integrated character sheet that tracks stats, equipment and knowledge acquired.
- Built-in dice roller.
- Gorgeous artwork and a huge game world and accompanying ever updating gazetteer.
Plans are in place to port the game to Android and possibly the PC in the near future.
Friday: It all makes Sense Steve!
I teamed up with Dave and we interviewed Steve Jackson (yes, that one) and Phil Reed about the upcoming releases for SJ Games. Two things stood out for us:
- Ogre Boxed set: A large box set with map tiles, 3D double-sided Ogres and superstructures. The increase in size of the Hex map and the beautiful art of the playing pieces made me want to own yet another version of that game.
- Axe Cop Munchkin…
(Record scratching sound….)
Yes you read that right, Axe Cop, where a cop kills bad guys with his axe and a flute cop gets turned into a gun dinosaur and Unibaby has a horn that makes him super smart and evil Santa turns into…
Yet this addition to the increasingly out of control line of games now makes EVERYTHING make perfect sense… A Dutch accented level 6 Ninja Psionic Thief with a +4 Chainsword and a Cape of Invincibility? Perfectly logical.
This is a refreshing take on a franchise I found was getting a little on the stale side.
Friday: Panel
You can follow the story of it just here (and even listen to it). Suffice it to say that we went from nervous, to terrified, to engrossed, to relieved, to satisfied. 
Friday: Fiasco!
I will never again try to describe a full Fiasco game but here’s the elevator pitch.
“A lesbian couple of Russian Spies decide to wreck vengeance on the small scientific community of McMurdoch Antarctica. They plan to poison everyone with a secret drug that turns people into zombies after death. As the infection spreads, the sole spy survivor leaves on board a Russian trawler, leaving undead ex-lovers and collaborators behind. The station, then the whole world, falls to a Zombie Apocalypse. She dies in the “loving” embrace of her zombified ex-girlfriend, on the front lines of a loosing war to save the fatherland”
I LOVE this game beyond belief. I was officially dubbed the “Craziest player ever” when I had my character say, while standing beside a 55 gallon barrel of urine : “time to remove that catheter Dr. Johnson”
Saturday: RPG day!
Saturday was all about RPGs… I played about 9 hours of them!
Dave ran us through his homebrewed hack of Mage the Ascension using the Leverage ruleset. It was awesome to play modern time reality-bending wizards with such a clean set of simple, yet rich rules. We invaded a tacky run down casino held by a Frank Sinatresque Vampire and brought the whole thing down (as well as one player’s clothes).
Dave (Playing our patron): Nice job…. Hey, what happened to your pants?
End Credits.
Made of win if you ask me.
Mike Shea (of Sly Flourish fame) ran us through a hyper rapid Gamma World adventure where we made characters (I was Le Grey Pupa, Cockroach Giant) and had 4 combat encounters in less than 2 hours. Quite a feat and quite an enjoyable game. I’m slowly warming up to Gamma World. I’m not quite sold but I could be after a few more games with GMs as awesome as Mike was.
My last RPG of the day was a Mouse Guard game with some Twitter friends I made over the last year. The game was my classic “Beavers and Bandit” adventure and it was beyond fun.
My highlight:
During an argument between the PCs and members of the city’s organized crime who wanted them to butt out of their business, I had scripted a Feint argument. I had to go for the throat of the opposing team…
Crimelord (to ex-con mouse Guard): So, your mom still lives around here ya know? She’s doin’ real good, in fact Moe over there just had tea with her last week, such a sweet lady huh Moe? Nice to know she’s still so healthy for an old broad like her…
Player (eyes and nostrils flaring): You did NOT just go there!
WIN!
The whole game was awesome but this exchange is why I GM!
Sunday: Gifts and goodbyes
On Sunday, after a stupidly short night (thanks to spring time and a late late Magic the Gathering game), I did a rapid last tour of the exhibit hall, bought gifts for my family:
- Stone Age for Alex
- Ascension for Nico
- A Skele-Pirate vs Skele-Ninja T-shirt for Rory
- Dixit 2 Extension for Rory
I then said my goodbyes to the awesome people I met and those I had seen again for a few short days. I already look forward to seeing them again in a few short months.
I left Pax with the certitude I’d be there next year. Better prepared… ready for even more fun.
A special thanks
I got to meet some very special fans this year. It was the first time that people stepped up to me and shared, in their own words, their appreciation for my work. While I have not yet mastered the way to gracefully accept praise, especially from shy people, please know that I was truly touched. Your nice words and courage strengthened my resolve to continue doing such cools things in our little corner of geekdom.
For those who could not quite work up the courage, I noticed some of you, know that there’s always next year or Gen Con, I’ll be happy to spend a few minutes talking to you.
Thanks again! All of you.
Mouseburning It: Hacking a Skill System, Small Press Style
After a year or so playing various small press games such as Mouse Guard, Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World and Leverage, I’ve come with a standard approach to task resolution that borrows heavily from them. While I’ve been using it with D&D, I think it applies to most classic RPGs based on “roll and hit target to succeed” mechanics, including all d20 variants.
Here are its core elements and how they are integrated:
Uncertainty
A task’s outcome must be uncertain. If it can be achieved by off-camera retries, I leave the dice alone. All those perception and search checks? Dropped them unless I create a challenge structured around just that, with multiple outcomes and possibilities for conflict.
Where’s that damn tiara? I swear I saw the thief slip it in his pouch! Come on Halfling, fess up or suffer a flying body search on that wall.
Significant Stakes
If the outcome for a task is uncertain, I ask myself “are the stakes behind it sufficient to build a dramatic scene around it? Will players care if they fail or miss?” If not, I accede to the player’s request and move on.
For example, a player seeking a friendly contact in a village might automatically find one if the GM has no particular inspiration that translates to a meaningful stake. But if there’s a possibility that characters make a negative impression with clear consequences that may affect later adventures, then stakes are clear and a roll becomes worthwhile.
Scene Economy
You know how much I value the time I spend around a table with my friends. This means I’m no longer willing to roll to unlock doors and sneak past/fight every mook of an adventure’s area. That’s why I’m a proponent of “Scene Economy”, a self-explanatory term I believe was formally coined in the Burning Empires RPG and a concept firmly entrenched in Mouse Guard‘s adventure design.
In MG, each adventure is roughly made of only 2 scenes built around one (or a few) skill check(s). Each features one core obstacle and likely outcome if failed.
In that sense, whenever a player reacts to an obstacle I’ve placed in their path by explaining what his/her character wants to achieve, I take care of breaking down the players’ intent into a series of tasks to create a scene. Once I have this informal list of tasks, I rapidly discard those that don’t meet my uncertainty and significance principles.
Chatty: Okay, you succeeded up to this point so far, but here is where it gets interesting…
Then, what I look for is the core tasks/skill rolls upon which the scene will pivot. It often boils down to just one skill check, maybe one or two more.
For example, in my Primal/Within D&D 4e campaign, a player wanted his Rogue to find a shop selling a specific magic item in a hostile city. Since they had already successfully sneaked around town earlier in the adventure, I discarded any further stealth checks from the series of task making the scene (as per Burning Wheel’s Let it Ride rule) and boiled the whole thing down to its essence: a Streetwise skill check.
One Lead, Many Helpers
Among my pet peeves about skill checks in RPGs, the one standing out the most is forcing/encouraging everyone in a group to perform the same skill check, regardless of actual competence. The most glaring examples is the Stealth check where everyone ends up being penalized by the weakest link, usually the Plate-mail wearing doofus. In reverse, the “me too” effect often kicks in when everyone in a group decides to tackle the same obstacle, hoping to “roll a 20″, often eclipsing the player for which the challenge was meant for.
Once again borrowing from Mouse Guard/Burning Wheel, I addressed this by asking for a character to take the lead on resolving the next task the group agreed to perform. Once selected, I require the player to describe how the character will go at it.
Role Playing Aside: This description is vital, it is where much of the role playing resides in almost every RPG I’ve played. Just as much as the description of a sword stroke is effective, describing how a PC attempts to overcome a task is a lost or untrained art for many players. This is where the DM absolutely must nudge, inspire and encourage everyone to come up with cool descriptions. Allow players to inspire each other and piggy back on those descriptions.
Once this is done, other players are invited to offer and describe how they will help. In my D&D 4e hack , each helper follow the standard helping rules, however, I allow a large range of skill/ability/power, as long as the player makes a good show describing how help is provided in that way.
My best example was in my recent Dungeon Reality Show post:
Between the first 2 combat encounters, the PCs were standing around a broken statue of Maïwenn’s god. She mused that she, like, totally should do something about it. So we discussed it a bit.
We agreed that this would be a hard Religion check to re-channel the divine energy back into the statue. The others would be helping, Seaendithas would climb on the statue (Thievery), Frank would hand him broken pieces (Athletics) to put back in place and Todd would fuse them back with his Magic Missiles (Arcana).
Cards on the Table
Before dice are picked up by players, I usually adopt one of two approaches, depending on the situation.
In high risk scenes, I share the target number to hit and explain the likely outcomes, both good and bad, of the skill check. I took this from Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World where players are told what’s likely to happen if they fail (although not in full details). That gives them an option to go back and rethink their strategy if they find the risks or likely price of failure too high.
Alternatively, in less risky/intense situations, I might wait to see the result and offer a bargain if a failure is rolled. I give the scene-leader a choice: accept normal failure or succeed in exchange for a minor twist in the scene.
In the above “finding a magic item in a hostile city” example, my player failed, so I gave him a choice, I told him he could either fail to find his object, or buy one that was cursed. I would however not reveal the nature of the curse before he made his choice.
He chose the cursed object… he he he
Awesome Epic Failures
Another big issue I have with skill in classic RPGs is how binary they are. You either succeed or fail and that’s that. It often made rolling skill checks pretty unexciting. I find the problem resides mostly in the finality of the failed check. You fail at your task, now what?
However in the last decade, RPGs were developed that specifically addressed the issue of failure and how to use them to drive stories forward instead of grinding them to a halt. Burning Wheel, I think, pioneered it with the Let it Ride rule and references to avoiding failure dead ends. D&D 4e tried, unsuccessfully in my opinion, with skill challenges but recovered nicely in the Dungeon Master Guide II.
However I discovered the true potential of “fun failures” in games like Mouse Guard, Leverage and Apocalypse World.
For example, Mouse Guard expects GMs to introduce a plot twist/complication whenever characters fails a skill check. In one of its sample missions, the guards are required to bring mail to a far off city during the Spring thaw. If characters fail their challenge to get to the last city safely, they seek refuge for the night in a hollow tree… occupied by a Crow that attempts to steal a mailbag, leading to a conflict.
In Leverage, whenever characters play “1″ on their dice, the GM gains “complications” that he can develop in one-liner assets that antagonistic NPCs can use, whenever the story calls for them, against players in the current or future tasks. This is great practice for on-the-spot creation of minor twists and complications.
In Apocalypse World, task resolution rolls, unless very high, always result in complications in the form of “you get what you want but…” that open the way for GMs to send the game in all kinds of interesting directions… much to player groaning and sighing.
So how do you make failure fun in a classic game like D&D or Pathfinder? It’s simple (and gets easier with time). Whenever failure comes up, the GM comes up with a complication to the plot, a new unforeseen twist to the story/scene/adventure. It can be either be pre-planned (part of the adventure notes under “likely twists”) or entirely improvised based on what makes the most sense to the GM at the time.
Failure can lead to allies revealing themselves as traitors, characters getting wounded in an accident, triggering traps, alerting a nearby patrol, nobles taking insult, young maidens falling in love with PCs at the WORSE possible time… etc. Just look at recent TV shows where characters jump from trouble into worse trouble (The Walking Dead shuffles to mind) and you have good examples of the type of failures you can spring on PCs.
This seems… complicated.
It really isn’t once you’ve tried it a few times:
- Drop an obstacle on players
- Identify the significant, uncertain task(s) to overcome it
- Identify Scene-leader
- Identify helpers
- Let players narrate what they do
- Lay your cards down and explain target number and likely consequences
- Adjust strategy if needed and repeat previous steps if necessary
- Roll dice
- Describe success or add twist to situation.
If at this point of the story, the obstacle is still there and the players are in deeper trouble than before, don’t panic, just apply this secret formula that Vincent Baker conjured exactly for this:
Look at them calmly, smile and ask them “What do you do now?”
I call this system “Mouseburning it”‘. Try it and let me know how that works out for you.
Thank you everyone for reading.
Special thanks go to Luke Crane (Burning Wheel, Mouse Guard), Vincent Baker (Apocalypse World), Rob Donaghue/Fred Hicks and Cam Banks (Leverage) and James Wyatt/Robin Laws (Dungeon Master Guide II)
Image Source: Light Sheep Studios LLC
The Dungeon Reality Show, D&D Essentials Edition, Part 2
Veteran FDL smiles at Frank the Tank's confidence in his D&D skill
See here for part 1 of my recent D&D Essentials game with a group of local Geek media personalities. The game was really amazing, so much so I need 2 posts to relay the awesomeness of it all.
Dramatis Persona (redux)
- Maïwenn Amandil: Elven Warpriestess of Pelor (Caro), picture a Jersey Shore bimbo.
- Frank the Tank (Frank the Tank): Beered up Human Knight with a thing for Maïwenn
- Seaendithas Steelfarmer(Stef) : Halfling Thief who likes bad French puns.
- Todd Darkmagic (Adopted) (FDL): Eladrin Mage getting no recognition for his work saving everyone’s bacon.
Highlight: Say it with Dolce and Tankana
After the first encounter featuring drakes was completed, Frank asked me if he could make a lizard-skin handbag for Maïwenn. That’s when the producer, a fat unshaven halfling with a cigar… pretty much like Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder, stopped the show…
Producer: This is genius stuff kid, you’re a natural!
Frank the Tank (both in and out of character): Heh, I know! Right?
Producer: How about we replace toots’ Vicious Mace by the bag, we make it like a Bag of Holding and put a freaking huge Anvil in it?
Maïwenn: Yay, my very own Dolce & Tankana bag!
Frank later made her boots with dead kobolds and he skinned the Black Dragon so Maïwenn could get it to a designer dress maker in a later game.
Ahhh, love.
Caro takes pics of the minis while thinking about her next Ad Spot.
Mechanic/Highlight: Insta-Skill Challenge
Between the first 2 combat encounters, the PCs were standing around a broken statue of Maïwenn’s god. She mused that she, like, totally should do something about it. So we discussed it a bit.
We agreed that this would be a hard Religion check to re-channel the divine energy back into the statue. The others would be helping, Seaendithas would climb on the statue (Thievery), Frank would hand him broken pieces (Athletics) to put back in place and Todd would fuse them back with his Magic Missiles (Arcana).
At the time I decided to just make it a single check (Religion) with everyone helping with their respective skills as outlined above.
Chatty: All right so everyone but Maïwenn need to beat 11 so you can each give her a +2 bonus. Then she’ll get to roll her religion check. If she makes it, the statue is put back together and you all gain a +1d6 to all healing powers for the next encounter, if she fails, well she’ll have disappointed her god a little more…
Caro: Hey, it’s bad enough as it is!
Everyone made it, giving Caro a +6 to her roll.
Which she failed…
Chatty: All right, describe me what Maïwenn is doing just now.
Caro (In character): What? You guys started already? I was still putting makeup!
We all collapsed in laughter.
Taking a page from Burning Wheel’s “Let it Ride” rule, I didn’t allow a retry. The result stood, the test had been a failure and we moved on.
In hindsight what transpired in that improvised encounter is EXACTLY what I consider a Skill Challenge should be. Short and sweet (and totally stolen from Burning Wheel/Mouse Guard). A main character leads the task, other helps with relevant skills and ability, you make one roll. Success = task achieved. Failure = possible complication leading to either the end of the challenge or the next logical step as dictated by the narrative.
In that particular case, I could have extended the challenge by having the statue crumble and bury Maïwenn under blocks of granite, I could have corrupted the statue further or I could have invoked the displeasure of Pelor (with lots of cheap special effects), requiring a special in-game Geas to be achieved before the end of the “‘show”.
I think that’s how I’ll run all my skill challenges from now on. No more X/3, I’ll go with task(or sub-tasks) + help and narrative-adequate complications upon failure(s).
Stef shows us how Beads work: 1) Be Awesome 2) Rinse and Repeat
New Mechanic/Highlight: Beads of Awesomeness
During play, when I noticed just how many cool things players were attempting, I attempted to create a positive feedback loop (I mean, I’ve been going on and on about rewards lately eh?) so I started giving glass beads to players.
I told them they were “Beads of Awesomeness” that could be traded to perform actions that bended the rules in ways that made the narrative/story cooler but without being an obvious game-breaking exploit.
(Read: Don’t be dicks about them)
Rerolls, pushing one’s movement, having an item in hand at the appropriate moment without spending an action, etc.
I heavily encouraged people to use them to take cooler actions… and even rewarded some with additional beads. Here’s the best example.
In the last encounter, the Knight, Thief and Wizard were in serious trouble, being bloodied or dying. The Priestess was standing at the bottom of the map, the dragon was eviscerating the Thief and Wizards in the middle of the map and the Knight was dying at the top of the map.
While dragon is making mincemeat with our squishy PCs, Maiwenn (background) prepares her awesome play
Maïwenn used her first bead to run to the middle of the map, unseen from the dragon (i.e. I gave her a free stealth success) and used her daily to heal the Halfling Thief. She then used a second bead to “accidentally” drop a healing potion from her cleavage into the hands of Todd Darkmagic. Finally, she used an action point to move to Frank the Tank at the top of the map and used her Healing Word on him.
It is safe to assume that she got a standing ovation from the Show’s crew.
So in essence, Beads of Awesomness are like Bennies from Savage Worlds. Players spend them and make a request. The DM takes the request into account and tries to say yes… or counter propose something cool.
This is another permanent addition to my D&D 4e games.
End Credits
In the end, our heroes prevailed. We managed to play out 4 combat encounters and two mini-skill challenges in about 6 hours and we all had a TON of fun. We agreed that this game should become a seasonal event and we shall meet again this spring for the next show!
I think I have rediscovered D&D 4e by bending it to my needs and by playing it with curious, enthusiastic people who brought a fresh wind of possibilities and wonder to the game. I’m looking forward to my next experience with D&D Essentials which I really like so far. The emphasis on At-Will abilities rather than a ton of powers allows players to focus on being creative rather than dependent on their character sheet.
It sure did in our case.
I no longer make promises about my projects on this blog, but I’d love to review the original Dungeon Reality Show PDF and add the new mechanics I discovered. At the very least, I should play it at Cons in the near future.
As usual, if you have comments, questions or suggestions to make the DRS even cooler, I’m all eyes!
(Photos courtesy of Stéphane Vaillancourt and Caroline Cloutier)
The Dungeon Reality Show, D&D Essentials Edition, Part 1
In mid January, I followed up on a wild idea and got 4 local media geeks to join me for a session of D&D Essentials. It turned out to be one of the best D&D games I’ve played, one of those sessions where the stars are aligned and everything just works.
The reasons for that are manifold. The players, mostly newbies to D&D 4e or tabletop RPGs, were all very enthusiastic about the game. The energy level was just right. My design decisions were near-perfect for the event and I likely managed to put all the lessons I learned from my gaming pilgrimage of the last months in practice.
Time for another Play Report, Chatty DM style!
The Setup:
Since most players had gigs with specialized Geek TV shows/channels (and associated websites) , I thought this would be a great occasion to revive my old Dungeon Reality Show shtick and adapt it to the scenario at hand, a level 2 D&D Essentials Adventure called “Sunderpeak Temple” featured at last summer’s D&D Gameday.
The scenario was a dead simple “invade and vanquish” 5 encounters adventure about reclaiming a recently destroyed Temple from the clutches of a Black Dragon and his band of humanoid minions.
If you never read about the Dungeon Reality Show and can’t spare visiting the link above, just know that it’s a silly D&D 4e variant where adventurers are desperate participants in a lethal show featuring NPCs as 3rd rate actors, callous cigar-smoking producers and crafty, tightly-wound Chronomancers.
All participating adventurers are given a “sponsored” magical item created from existing Items and adapted to the pre-generated characters I created for the adventure.
I posted about the item on our Tumblog here.
Success Factor Aside: Giving everyone an item that was 2-4 levels higher than their levels makes players happy to have a “cool toy” right off the bat.
I had another TV Show trick up my sleeve I held in reserve for the first fight… yet, I ended up being so inspired by the game that I came up with several more!
Read on!
Dramatis Persona
- Maïwenn Amandil: Elven Warpriestess of Pelor, sporting the luxuriant Divine Boon known as Pelor’s Spray Tan and Facial
- Played by Caro, who hadn’t played RPGs for at least 8 years
- Frank the Tank: Beeraholic Human Knight equipped with Morshon’s Stout shield
- Played by… Frank the Tank, who had never played a tabletop RPG
- Seaendithas Steelfarmer: Halfling Thief of great skill, wearing Dr Stealth’s Orthopaedic Adventuring Slippers.
- Played by Stef, long time friend who plays RPGs only occasionally
- Todd Darkmagic (Adopted): Eladrin Mage yielding the legendary “Jim Darkmagic Showman’s Staff”
- Played by FDL, a freelance writer and regular radio-TV host and guest.
I’m not going to go for a blow by blow retelling of the game… I’ll focus on it’s main highlights and lessons.
Lesson: Don’t Fake freedom when unnecessary
Another lesson I’ve learned from small press games and one shot scenarios:
Don’t ever try to give the illusion of freedom to players if the adventure you play doesn’t call for it.
The chosen adventure required PCs to investigate a ruined temple and clear it. Thus, I told players that
A) They all knew each other from a previous, disastrous adventure, explaining the whole “being desperate enough to participate in the show”
B) They had already accepted the thin plot the Quest Giver (a Dwarf merchant they were travelling with) gave them .
Thus no time was lost on building a premise that wasn’t necessary to our current goals as a gaming group.
Lesson/Highlight: Say Yes and Exploit Details
As the players approached the temple, I offhandedly described bodies of priests and monks strewn about. When Caro asked me if her priest found someone alive she could heal I decided to say yes and find a way to make this cool…
Chatty: Hmmm, sure, there’s a guy standing just over there. He’s really badly injured. If you make a successful difficult heal check you’ll get info on what he saw, if you fail he will die at your hands.
Caro: Gulp…
FDL: Todd will help you.
(Clatter clatter, success)
Chatty: The priest’s eyes open suddenly and he cries “DRAGON!” before falling unconscious.
Good start! Taking a page out of the Apocalypse World playbook, from then on, whenever someone asked me to do something that wasn’t directly covered by the rules, I’d pick a skill and a difficulty, explain what would be gain on a success and what kind of dramatic twist would happen on a failure and asked who was ready to help.
The players liked this a lot.
Highlight: The Knight Does Not Fight to the Music, the Music Fights for the Knight.
During the first combat encounter, Frank the Tank enthusiastically embraced the concept of tabletop RPGs. He kept describing cool moves for his Knight and didn’t bother with realism much. When he activated one of his PC’s Combat Stances, he described that he got a Ghetto Blaster out of his backback, put it on the floor and started going all Technoviking on the baddies.
This was very funny… especially when that was later exploited by Todd Darkmagic (adopted) who created an illusion of another Knight holding a Ghetto Blaster over his head. It was topped off when Frank did a power move to deal lots of damage, describing it as breaking the Blaster over another monster’s head.
I absolutely love it when players create scene elements and then others interact with them. It makes scene so much more lively.
New Mechanic: Advertising for Rewards
Once combat started, I implemented another of my new Dungeon Reality ideas. I had the one at the top of the initiative order (PC or myself for NPC) improvise a short advertisement bit about fictitious products in exchange for a one time bonus during the encounter.
For example, Stef told us about Tylenorc, the pain relief medication of true bad asses. After the laughter died down, I surmised that this message would grant stef’s thief with 5-10 temporary Hit Points for the encounter.
The endeavour was a smashing success, beyond what I expected even! Players jumped on that and even started writing copy during downtime between their turns. Hell, they even started gaming the system and created spots targeted to gain specific bonuses (like doing an anti-aid ad during a fight vs a Black Dragon). Of course, I tried to embrace that…Although, by the end of the evening everyone was running out of juice.
I stopped giving my monsters bonuses early in the game… while I participated in making ad spots, I felt like I was taking away from the players fun and abusing the system by giving my side bonuses when I could just as well play with the numbers like all DMs are allowed to in the spirit of keeping the game fun for all.
Highlight: A Knight and his Beer
Chatty: After combat, you smell something strong, yeast-like coming from the well…
Frank the Tank: BEER! I JUMP in it!
Chatty: All right, the challenge for you will not be how you get in there or how you leave it, that’s boring. Rather I wanna know in what shape you’ll be when you leave it. So you’ll have to roll a hard Athletics check to simulate you drunkenly climbing out at the end of this short rest period.
Frank: okay! Burp!
Chatty: If you succeed, great! You’re out and more or less sober. If you fail, you’ll still get out but I will reserve the right to give you the mother of all “Oh man I HAVE to pee NOW” moment whenever I chose. It will daze until you spend an embarrassing Standard action sighing very noisily… we cool?
Caro: Can my priestess help him climbing out?
Chatty: Sure, what skills does she have?
Caro: Hmmm, Religion?
Chatty: Well…. How about you berate him while he climbs? “Motivating” him to abandon his sinning ways?
Caro and Frank: Yeah!
Caro failed her roll (her first time of many that game, poor her) but in spite of the penalty that gave Frank’s PC, he succeeded.
Frank: As I exit the well, I tell the priestess “Fat loads of help your preaching did dude!”
And so the love story began…
In part 2, I’ll explain the mother of all fun skill challenges (new version) and how the Beads of Awesomeness saved the day.
(Photos courtesy of Stéphane Vaillancourt and Caroline Cloutier)
P.S. Yes, I’m starting to have fun again with 4e… many thanks to all those extra tools I’ve been picking up. Can’t wait to tell you about the rest!
Chatty’s Mailbag: Launching your own RPG
Earlier this week I got an email question that made me ponder the realities of publishing one’s own RPG in this already flooded niche market. Here’s our friend’s question:
Hey Phil, I’m finishing up development of my first RPG system, and plan to publish it on RPGnow.com in a couple month’s time. I have been trying to generate excitement and exposure for what I feel is a unique system, but even through twitter, facebook, emails, and the lot, I don’t feel that the game will be played by many (if few).
(Snipping part about finances because I know nothing about that)
So, my question is, are there any ways you can recommend gaining exposure for my game? I want people to play it, and take it seriously, but I’m just afraid that it’ll slip by as another tactical combat RPG that no one cares about.
I’m really touched that people value my opinion enough to ask me such huge questions. I’m no industry muggle, just a blogger turned freelance writer who made some friends on the RPG circuit. I appreciate the trust, but take my advice with the proverbial grain of salt.
So for that reader and all those thinking about releasing their own RPG one day, here’s what I gathered from hanging out with and playing the games of some successful Indies.
I think that for a new game to burst out on the Indy scene requires very similar ingredients to those that Malcolm Gladwell attributes to highly successful people in his Outliers book.
It starts by the game requiring it to fill a specific set of RPG Needs that are currently in demand while being original enough not to fade out when compared to other games that cater to the same needs. People who play it with you and in demos at conventions need to see what it’s about fast and get what it does better than the other games of its category.
They need to experience it, they don’t need to be TOLD about it.
Secondly, it needs a TON of luck in getting in the hands of the right people at the right time. Luke Crane, (then a relative 20-something unknown designer) overcame his shyness and got his game (Burning Wheel) in the hands of Ken Hite at just the right time and got it named best RPG of the year. You need to seek such lucky breaks through hard work and networking like crazy.
Third, you as a designer need to start to build yourself a fan base to help push your game/brand. You need to get your face out there and shill your game in the best possible way: Get people to play it by demoing it many many many times…Crane, Vincent Baker, Jared Sorenson, all spend countless hours each years at Cons doing nothing but playing demos and hawking their games while answering questions. You need to do that too.
You also need to start mastering the realities of Web 2.0 and make online tools available for your fan base to grow and build itself up around you and your game (both are somewhat indistiguishable early in a successful designer’s career).
That leads me to a related point, you need to spend countless hours interacting with that community to playtest the SHIT out of your game. It needs to be broken beyond belief and rebuilt from the pieces so that the game can stand shoulder to shoulder with the very high quality stuff resting on the shelves of game and PDF stores.
We are in a new age of game design and the bar is set very high. Thus, scout your competition and always strive to tyweak your game to deliver the best experience it was designed to address.
Finally, as a designer, you need to project the mother of all in your face, fearless attitudes. You need that to constantly shamelessly and obsessively hawk your game, be its strongest advocate and staying above the petty insults and recriminations that online trolls and the Indie community itself will fling.
You need to walk to people and put copies of the game in thier hands and tell them, straight to their face… “this game is the Shits, I made it and it fucking rocks, I know because I spent a gazzillion hours playing it and I still have fun playing it”
(Your actual language and millage may vary).
That, I think are the ingredients to making your game a success. It goes beyond slipping PDFs to bloggers (they won’t read it) or hoping to get noticed in the sludge pile that are the online RPG stores.
Creating and tweaking the game, as hard as it was, is, I think, only half the work, countless gamers have done it. Pushing the game in the hands of the gamers it was designed for is where the real work starts.
Your turn now
That was my take on it… anyone wants to chime in? The mic is open!
Chatty Plays: Freemarket Part 3, Ghost’N'Breakin’
This post chronicles the second half of our Freemarket game. You can follow my post on character creation here and my recounting of the first half here. Let’s conclude our David vs Goliath story of stolen sex toys designs, covetous enlightened blanks and subtle revenge.
Quick dramatis personae reminder:
- Jack Knife (Yan): Jack of many trades and Body-Artist.
- Paul Demetrios (PM): OCD Investigator, think “Monk”.
- Coleco (Franky): Recycler and builder, “the old fashion way”.
- Flint (Mike): Decked out Enlightened Interface Fetishist. Think Cyber-Jesus
Challenge 3: I’ll Know What I Want When I See It.
Mike: I want Flint to infiltrate the Grindstone Cowboys compound, do some snooping around to find where stuff is, find the guy he doesn’t remember and get his Interface!
Chatty: Yeah, you’re familiar enough with the way the Station works that you suspect your memory was altered since yesterday. That’s a good challenge. After that you guys will do something about the stolen toy’s designs?
Franky: Exactly!
(Total Transparency: I’m taking significant artistic liberties with the actual dialogues. I tell an accurate true story but I will fictionalize the details… because I can, he he he)
A note on team challenges and the task resolution system I alluded to in the last post. In order to initiate a challenge, a character is better served by having the proper skill or one Geneline tags fit with what they wish to achieve. In our case, Flint had the Ghosting skill (Stealth + Thievery) while the others had Genelines tags that could help. For example, Paul’s “Investigative” and Jack’s “Creative”.
Pixel-bitching aside: Yes, that means that there’s going to be some sort of “tag” whoring going on at the table… at least, I expect some because it’s part of what I consider part of the “entertaining your GM’ experience.
Chatty: So are you joining this challenge or not?
Player X: I don’t know… I don’t see anything relevant…
Chatty: Oh come on, you aren’t allowed to be boring, entertain me! (/Aside)
Thus, Flint and Paul infiltrated the HQ (the game suggests to always handwave the “getting there/getting in” parts of ghosting challenges and focus on the actual jobs). The other PCs monitored things remotely, ready to jump in if things became violent.
It’s also worth mentioning that generating NPCs in this game is wonderful. You either assign stats on the fly or follow a fast series of card draws from the GM’s deck to generate Genelines, Experience, Interface and Technology (always relevant to the challenge at hand). You then assign a Flow score, name the character and you have a NPC to keep for the rest of the campaign.
Anyhoo, with a series of awesome hands (and a crappy one on my side) the players aced the challenge yet again…
Chatty: Okay you found the guy you were looking for and tailed him to a “blind” corner of the HQ, now tell me how Flint’s going to rip a piece of interface from him!
Mike: Hmmm, how ’bout it’s a brain chip with a very particular design?
Chatty: Cool, so you knock the guy senseless and rip it out of his skull! Good job, next challenge!
Challenge 5: Buggy Forbidden Pleasures
Franky: We want to hack the Cowboy’s protected systems to corrupt the design of the sex toy they stole.
Chatty: That’s going to be a great finish to end the game, let me generate the security expert of the system. He’ll represent the HQ’s overall security, the systems counter measures and the protective layers of software between you and the designs.
(i.e. mechanically that just means the NPC’s stats, the game makes no true difference between stats/tools/setting when representing opposition)
Once again, the players won by a large margin. I drew badly again (there are times like this). Just so I don’t sound more like a broken record, here’ s an example of how narration and the mini card game interacted.
While Coleco was busy hacking the system, Flint was sneaking in the compound, looking for places where he could weaken security and cause diversions.At one point he met a burly guard and Mike (Flint’s player) drew point scoring cards, which usually translated in successful mini-scenes. Looking over Mike’s character sheet I saw that his Geneline is “The One” and has a whole cult thing going, so…
Chatty (As the guard): It’s…. YOU! I can’t believe it!
Mike: Huh?
Chatty: The guard shows you he wears a pendant of the cult of the New Order.
Mike: Awesome! Can I ask his help?
Chatty: Fire away!
And thus Mike sent the guard to pull a general alarm, emptying the MRCZ’s huge compound while the rest of the party finished their job. At the end of the challenge, Frank decided to change just one tag of his original design to make it slightly less interesting than his own revised one and not overly awaken suspicion. This also gave them enough “victory points” left to spend on full Flow rebates, putting everyone well over 30 each and scoring them a piece of “data”, the game’s other currency (data can be analyzed, gifted, injected as memories, etc).
And so I give you:
The Toy: Ephemeral, Inconvenient, Pleasurable
Yeah, my players are still shy about the game’s possibility. In a world where death is a minor inconvenience at best (often only making you miss your next appointment), I would have LOVED to see “explosive” or “infected” as a tag instead of “inconvenient”.
And thus was our game completed. We managed to play 1 challenge per player which is an average session and the game lasted about 3-4 hours which factored in some book digging and general goofing around.
Are we to be Freemers?
I’ll let the players chime in if they feel like it, but based on the feedback I got, my players were willing (and some even eager) to keep playing next month. I really would like to see how the game evolves over a few session.
More specific feedback:
PM thought the game played out a LOT better than his expectations. While initially confused about the skills and actual “mission” of the game, the relative smoothness at which everything meshed together delivered a very satisfying experience for him. He got to act out mini-scenes as an hyper-focused OCD character and we all enjoyed it.
Franky was blown away at the sheer madness of the adventure hooks and the fast pace of the game. He NEVER expected that I would choose his “Sex Toy” memory to drive a session, much less have it generate hours of fun and mirth. He did have some trouble “getting” the mechanics of the game from how scoring worked to how each experience could be used. His was a good example where what a player thinks a skill should do, and what the designers decided it would, can clash.
Yan liked the mechanics of the game. He was intrigued by it and I saw his tactician’s brain engage into furious activity a few times, confirming that he grokked the game fine. He did mention that he felt the setting was far too constrained for what the game’s engine could achieve. In that he felt he could tweak the skill list and general assumptions a bit and make this into a full blown “British Sci Fi” game capable of emulating the stories of Vernor Vinge and Peter Hamilton.
(I think it would take more work as the game system is a lot more interconnected than what they experienced so far… but I consider it a good sign when Yan’s dormant designer genes wake up)
Mike didn’t offer direct feedback, but he’s become my “mine canary” to detect a game’s “frustration pocket”. I saw his steam level rise when he played bad hands over several challenges. That’s why I’m happy that the last 2 challenges that featured him on the front line turned out nice and that he got his spotlight time. He does seem to have some trouble finding ideas and ways to create a narrative with the game’s mechanics… but I think that’s a challenge of story-driven game themselves and I know he’ll warm up to it…
Hell, he did blow us away during our Fiasco game.
And me? I love the game. I’d totally play a 2-4 session mini-campaign like we did with Apocalypse World before moving on to either Burning Wheel, Leverage or possibly that new game I’m working on.
Props:
- The game is one sweet piece of play tested integrated clockwork engine with a simple yet rock solid setting
- The pace is perfect and answers my current needs as a time-pressed gamer.
- The ways you can screw with players even when they “win” is sublime and I can’t wait to turn the “evil” dial a few notches.
(Slight) Cons:
- The rule book’s landscape format and layout, took the “easier to learn, harder to reference” approach that makes for more page flipping hunting for Flow costs and the like (Index is very solid though, I need to tab the book with posts it)
- I’m still unsure about a few things about running challenges (like using bugs, and what to do when running out of options when you have no bugs) but one or two sessions more and I feel I could run the game at cons without any problems.
I hope you enjoyed this little series. Don’t hesitate to ask questions! I’ll do what I can and I’m sure the designers aren’t too far.
Chatty Play’s: Freemarket Part 2, The Steam Stallion
We finally got to play the Freemarket characters that we made a few weeks ago. The game was supposed to be a 1 session demo as we have been doing during our Pilgrimage of new games these last few months.
Well, the session turned out a LOT better than most of us expected given how alien some aspect of the game appeared to us before playing it. Chances are this may become a short campaign instead of a one-shot.
Let’s dive in.
Dramatis Persona:
Jack Knife (Yan): Multi-Talented Body-Artist. Experienced creative printer, ephemerist and interface designer (hard/software Implants) who’s been around the station a few times.
Paul Demetrios (PM): OCD Investigator. Hacker and Thin-slicer that NEVER lets something go unsolved (unless made to forget it, an apparently common occurrence).
Coleco (Franky): An Old-World Tools Replicator. A cultivation and recycling expert, can create tech pieces of unparallel beauty with discarded scrap.
Flint (Mike): An Enlightened Interface Fetishist. Illuminated by the sayings of the Prophet of the New Order, he seeks perfection through Interface!
Welcome Home Bros!
The game strongly encourages the GM to introduce the setting by describing the PCs new digs. As a Tier 1 MRCZ (an archaic acronym from the Station’s construction era, pronounced “Mercy”), the characters get an upgrade from capsule pods and communal areas. They get to share living and working areas with another Tier one MRCZ in a wagon-sized cargo container.
The game also urges the GM to create tension right off the bat by making the other MRCZ into something completely different (and possibly at cross-purposes) from the players’ own. That why I made the neighbours into a small Krishna revivalist cult using their songs and millennial manipulation techniques to create a second coming of whatever they thought Krishnas were supposed to be about.
I didn’t have to do anything else… Jack Knife was already sick and tired of the endless droning chant and dove for the matter printer on their half of the pod.
Challenge 1: What’s that Smell?
Chatty: So what’s your goal here?
Yan: Jack wants to create a soundproof partition.
Chatty (Thinking aloud) : Hmmm, is it enough of a stake to make it into a challenge? Hells yeah! You’re all broke Flow wise (the Station’s influence-based commodity) and I want to drive you nuts with this shtick! Let’s do this.
Freemarket’s task resolution system is called a Challenge. You only do them when players (or key NPCs) want to bring about change to anything on the Station and there’s someone at the table opposed to that change.
In our case, all the players chipped in some Flow to create a bitchin’ flexible soundproof partition out of the dog-sized matter printer. This was a team challenge, with all players playing against me. I represented the flaws in the badly maintained printer and some hidden viruses left by playfully malicious ex-occupants of the cargo pod.
Challenges are performed by having players play a narrative-splashed card-scoring mini-game using the decks packed with the game (explaining, in part, its 60$ price tag). Going into the details of this mechanic would derail the whole post away from its purpose, but suffice it to say that once we grokked it, everything became a fast-paced, engrossing risks-vs-benefits scoring race against the opposing team.
In our case, I brought the printing challenge to an end by conceding a Minor success to the PCs. After describing how everyone got the printer to work semi-correctly, I explained to Yan that their margin of victory was so slim that all they could do was impose one of three tags to the freshly printed partition… I’d get to set the other two.
I also indicated that nobody’s Flow would be reimbursed, sending some players into negatives and putting them in danger of being voted off the Station.
(You read that right, Freemarket has some Reality TV elements. The actions of all MRCZ are, usually, public and subjected to going viral, becoming trends or subject of intense scrutiny.)
Chatty: So what tag are you…
Yan: SOUNDPROOF!
Chatty: So, that leaves two… lets make them…. Smelly (all players groaned) and… Inflammable!
Aside two: I made a mistake here. I forgot that all pieces of technology built in the game must have one tag corresponding to one of the 14 “skills”… I’ll fix it here. The partition stats are thus:
NullNoise MRCZ pod partition, Tags: Ghosting (that’s Stealth), Soundproof, Smelly.
Interlude 1: Family Memories Pileup!
While hilarious, that last challenge didn’t really create a lot of hooks to start the adventure, so I dug in my Memory Mashup notes (the process I described at the end of my last post) to pull a few hooks to get things started.
Chatty: Franky, Coleco’s brother Miro, who you thought was somewhere else in the Solar System just pinged your PC. He needs your help with some piece of old tech he ‘found”.
Franky: What the hell? He’s on the station? Let him come…I guess.
Turns out Miro had a piece of ancient motherboard that he wanted the players to hack and extract data in it. When the players realized how much Flow it would cost them to do that, they all balked! They all had low balances, some only barely above zero by having friended (yes, like in Facebook) most of the MRCZ’s members.
Seeing that they would likely have to postpone this task, I dug back into my pile of Mashed Memories (I had 3 more) and pulled the next one. It ended up being a boring dead end (It was too vague and had no fun leads) so I picked the next one.
Miro: Yeah so, I don’t know if it’s any help, but have you guys heard about the Grindstone Cowboys MRCZ yet? They apparently got their hands on a new “Sex Toy” design and have started mass producing them. They’re going to gift them all to a 2nd Gen dude named Korg who makes wild experiments with Blanks (i.e. Printed, artificial humans).
Mike: Hey, Korg is Flint’s creator!
Franky: WTF!?! I made that toy yesterday and it was supposed to be discretely delivered to a member of the Ambassador MRCZ. I wanna ping her!
Chatty: She says she never got it and she’s about to “frown” you for reneging on a contract.
Franky: What’s frowning?
Chatty: Oh, a frownie is a formal token of disapproval…it’s worth -3 Flow.
Franky: Crap no, I’m at 1!
See that? That was all done with the players long/short term memories. It took me about 10 minutes before the game to come up with these hooks. So awesome.
So what the players decided to do was to handcraft the Ambassador a new, better toy. In order to generate the needed flow to undertake this endeavour, Coleco gave his Retro-Phasor gun to his brother (everyone knew he was a no good, two timer… but hey). Thus Coleco gained an instant 10 Flow.
Yup, you gain Flow in Freemarket by friending people, gifting them stuff, filling contractual obligations and winning team challenges by a large margin (the central computer, in its programmed socially-driven benevolence, rewards cooperation). Flow is then used to start all challenges (or survive challenges against you) and to petition the Central Computer for a MRCZ tier upgrade.
The other players exchanged more friendship requests among themselves and braced for the challenge.
Challenge 2: Are Those Brass Keys or Are You Just Happy to See Me?
Chatty: Okay, what’s your goal?
Franky: We want to create a better, sleeker sex toy for the Ambassador. Something made of Clockworks and Brass!
Others: Yeah!
Chatty: A Steampunk Dildo huh?
After we recovered from generalized hilarity, we agreed it was a good challenge. By then, everyone had huge stupid grins. The game’s mission was accomplished, Freemarket had been adopted.
The challenge pitted everyone in the party, helping Franky hand craft his “masterpiece” by merging together (i.e. Recycling) two different pieces of tech, namely pieces of the busted matter printer and knick-knacks of dumb material strewn here and there in the pod.
My side of the challenge represented the material’s low grade, distraction caused by the partition’s smell and the challenge of achieving Franky’s vision with so few good parts. They won the challenge by a landslide, each scoring a lot of Flow.
Chatty: Well done gang, you now get to give it three tags, one of which must be one of the 14 skills. I’d saw that a sex toy is definitively “ephemera”.
(Sniggers)
And I give you:
The Steam Stallion Mk I, Tags: Ephemera, Filling, Orgasmic.
Yes, we’re a bunch of 13 year olds… sigh.
Interlude 2: Plowing and Plotting
Coleco gifted the toy to the soon to be very happy Ambassador. Bolstered by all that Flow, the group set out to plan their next move on those thieving Grindstone Cowboys.
At that point, I had noticed that Mike had had a very unlucky card streak so far and had been, more or less, the only player yet to have some spotlight time. So I nudged the group so he got involved in the next scene’s planning. Oddly enough, according to his recent memories, he had a very good reason to visit the Grindstone Cowboys… He wanted to obtain someone’s interface. Except he couldn’t quite exactly remember which one… and on whom.
Did I tell you I really like this game?
Up next, Ghosting and Breaking challenges within the Grand HQ of the Tier 6 Grindstone Cowboys MRCZ!
Chatty Plays: Freemarket Part 1, Character Generation
Last August, Luke Crane (of Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard fame) and Jared Sorensen (creator of Action Castle and its siblings) launched Freemarket, a Science Fiction roleplaying game.
I had the privilege to play a 4 hour demo game with Luke (thanks to Gnome Stew‘s DNAPhil who invited me) and the game blew my mind away. I was dumbstruck by the originality of the game and its sheer scale as an engine for trans-human Sci-Fi stories… Even though the action is entirely confined within a lone space station.
I finally got a chance to play it with my friends about 3 weeks ago and I’ve been wracking my brain to find a way to convey my impressions of the game without falling all over the details of the game.
Then I decided to dive in and share how our character creation session went. But first, context!
The implied Setting
Freemarket follows the adventures and tribulations of members of a MRCZ (pronounced Mercy) who strive to bring change and new trends on board a Space Station parked at a Lagrange point between Saturn and Titan, one of it’s moons carved out and turned into one ginormous solid-state data storage vault.
The Station is home to 80 000 nigh immortal, cyber-wearing, telepaths who thrive on access to instant Data and a strange mix of status, influence and power called “flow”.
The parallels to current social media is evident, that’s why I once described it as “What if Humanity and Facebook merged and caused the Singularity?”
Apart from that (and a few more details about the Sapient computer running the whole place), the setting is left undefined, open for players and GM (called users and superuser respectively) to build a different one with each campaign.
Founding The Fixers MRCZ
Like many recent RPGs, character generation is a group activity that supposedly takes about 2 hours. We ended up spending more than 3 hours, getting confused and hung up on some elements and being challenged with a few sprees of analysis paralysis to the tune of “gee man, I don’t know what the game is about so I don’t know what I should create”.
Aside: That’s where I see what mastering the rules of a game can be very useful for a GM. Luke breezed us through it in less than 2 hours by pushing us at just the right places and not sweating that we didn’t get everything perfect… just “right enough”. The lessons I learn from the guy never cease.
Character generation is done by following very well described steps. It is one of those supremely clever combinations of setting creation, party cohesion and character background building. Here’s the rundown and what my players (Yan, Mike, Franky and PM) chose.
Clade and Generation
While nominally the “job” of the PC it’s actually the character’s concept in a short phrase. Players choose it first to help them conceptualize what they want to play. Generations represents how remote each character was from the original settlers of the stations (that’s about 40-45 years old now): Seconds (kids of originals), Thirds (kids of seconds), Blanks (Artificial humans with implanted memories) and Immigrants(Born off Station). The group ended up with:
- Mike: Blank, Hardware Interface Fetishist
- Yan: Second Gen, Body Artist
- Franky: Immigrant, Old Tools Replicator
- PM: Blank, OCD Investigator
Geneline
Up next came the character’s genelines which are names representing what “genetic family” you ail from and 3 “tags” that defined your genetic background. Tags are adjectives that qualify the inherent potential of your character like “flexible” or “Lightning Quick Reflexes”. They have a direct impact in the game as any character can invoke thematically adequate tags as the driving ability of a challenge. The book provides example Genelines with pre-selected sets of three tags each, but players are encouraged to design their own.
Our MRCZ:
- Mike, “The One”: Obsessive, Wired, Religious
- Yan, “Michaelangelo”: Creative, Serene, Sure Handed
- Franky,”Dell Amico”: Merciless, Technical, Old World
- PM, “Monk”: Investigative, Obsessive, Chameleon
Experience
Each character has experience in a few fields which represents the game’s skills used in the card-based challenge system (more in part 2). The game has 14 such skills, ranging from Breaking (destroying objects and structures or hacking into software), Ghosting (Stealth, stealing, tracking), Mobbing (Creation and installation of Interface) to Wetwork (Temporarily killing).
Aside: Yeah, dead people get re-printed and lose memories, depending on how completely”deathed” they were.
This is one of the places where the game explodes in story possibilities. The players can do SO much with these 14 skills it’s unbelievable and they can only bring about changes in the setting and story by playing challenges with those skills.
For example, they could use Ghosting to track a sneaky, discrete courrier they heard about. Then, they could play a Wetwork challenge to discreetly wipe him out and grab that ancient computer disk it transported. They could then use breaking to find and extract Data from the disc. That data would then be Thin Sliced (another skill) to give the Data specific meaning within the setting. That Data could then be flooded (another skill) in someone’s brain by stealing one of the target’s memory (yet another challenge). Finally the players turn that stolen memory into a song (using the Ephemera skill) and blare it across the station to create a new Meme.
That would be a pretty typical Freemarket session. This is pure Peter Hamilton, Wiliam Gibson and Vernor Vinge Sci Fi stuff.
Our crew chose a mix of experience that gave them a pretty badass rep. Their choices told me that they wanted to create cybernetic/software implants and tech, repair and create tech with tools, create art, investigate interesting data and do some killing on the side.
I think my gang wants to be a futuristic A-Team. I’m cool with that.
Interface and Technology
Each character has several pieces of Interface (Implants, both hardware or software) and technology, pieces of equipment that help characters in various ways in challenges. Interface are involved in error correction, helping circumvent failures during challenges while technologies can support (or replace) the experience used in a challenge.
Players can select them from the book, but they are also encouraged to create their own by making up snazzy techy names and adding three tags to each that identify what skill they are related too, what their function and so on. This is another great occasion to have the players define the setting by introducing trademarks and designer names to some of the tech they used.
Here’s a few from the group:
Interfaces:
- Morphological Retina: Breaking, Ocular, Duplicating (Used by PM’s investigator)
- Swiss Army Hand: Recycling, Old World, Technical (Used by Franky’s Old Tool Replicator)
- TAC 10 006: Wetwork, Neural, Reflex Booster (Used by Yan’s Body Artist)
- Optic-BF (i.e. Brain Fryer): Wetwork, Optical, Scambler (Used by Mike’s Fetishist)
Technology:
- Light Katar: Wetwork, Sword, Plasma
- Adaptive Perfume: Flood/Bleeding, Chemical Scent, Adaptative
- Mech’s Bench: Recycling, Mechanical, Old World
- Monofilament Garrote Nail Jewel: Wetwork, Close Range, Stealth
You can see that my players are expecting to fight a lot… I shall try not to disappoint them.
Memories
The last part of character creation is the creation of long term and short term memories. This is the aspect of the game that made my head explode. Players are required to create 2 long term memories (one life changing, the other from childhood/creation) and 1 short term one (form the day before). Each memory is a sentence made up of three out of five imposed elements: person, place, object, MRCZ or action.
The sheer genius of this is that the GM then uses those to create his adventure by mix and mashing them up (more or less eliminating prep time). But the game takes an all new level when you realize that since the technology exists to steal, inject, influence and blend memories of all station residents, including the PCs, there’s really no way to know how real each memory is, if it’s your own or who the hell put it there!
So let me conclude this post with my PC’s memories:
OCD Investigator (PM)
Long Term:
I was fired from the Operators MRCZ because I wouldn’t stop investigating the theft of the Micro Nova Missile Schematics
I created the buzz around the popularity of the KIS3 MRCZ by discovering the band’s emerging music style.
Short Term:
Yesterday, an anonymous passerby told me that my memories about one current investigation had been replaced.
Old Tool Replicator (Franky)
Long Term:
Miro, my brother, involved me in a failed old tech transaction and forced me to flee and go into hiding on Freemarket
I found specs for a FTL starship on an old computer I was recycling
Short Term:
Yesterday, I built a sexual-tool for Serina of the Ambassadors MRCZ
Body Artist (Yan)
Long Term:
I printed Shanon Apple, an extremely popular Blank that is part of the Kis3 MRCZ
I created a revolutionary, very efficient Blank design that I hid in a old relic satellite
Short Term
A negotiation session with the Arachne Textile MRCZ went badly as members of Gunz4Hirez stormed in and deathed almost everyone before getting gunned down themselves.
Hardare Interface Fetishist
Long Term
Korg, the 1st generation creator who printed me incorporated numerous interfaces as an experiment but ended up rejecting me, horrified with what he created.
I found an ancient brain chip interface containing the Prophet’s proselytizing of the Coming of the New Order.
Short Term
Yesterday, I pinged a member of the Grindstone Cowboys MRCZ and found an Interface I MUST possess.
What now
So now all I have to do for the next game (tomorrow) is to create 4 plot hooks (one per player) by mixing and mashing all those memories by, for example, picking the name in one memory with the place of another and adding an object from a third one. Then present it to the players and see how they’ll react.
I just can’t wait to see how it’ll turn out. Expect a play report!
Carrot Design, Part 2: D&D 4e’s Classic Rewards
In part 1, of this series, I tackled what I thought were the main challenges of writing articles for D&D 4e in gaming magazines. I surmised that there were opportunities to write successful articles by targeting areas of the game that you found lacking in things you’d like to see in your own games, i.e. design for your own needs.
Over the last months, while discussing with various game writers and designers, I concluded that the best way to achieve my goal of writing great 4e material was to create mechanics associated with specific rewards that would encourage their use during play.
That’s why I decided to review D&D 4e’s current rewards, both those hard coded into the game’s mechanics as well as those less tangibly supported. I’ll attempt to describe each and explore variants and opportunities for each.
Lets start with D&D’s classics
Experience Points (XPs)
They’ve been around for 35+ years. They are the game’s milestone for character progress across editions. They’ve also, up until the last edition, been a resource that you either had to protect (level-drain) or spend (create magic items).
In 4e, experience points play only one role for players. They measure a character’s progress to reach the next level of experience. As written (Dungeon Master Guide p120), XPs are given out for beating encounters such as defeating monsters, overcoming traps, solving encounter puzzles and succeeding at skill challenges .
You also get XPs for completing quests, which I’ll cover later.
It can be argued that 4e’s XPs are not rewards but rather a score-keeping tool to mark a party’s progress till it beats enough encounters to hit the next powering up milestone, arbitrarily defined as “every 10 or so”. In fact, I think XPs are now far more useful as an encounter design currency for DMs than a tangible reward for players.
XPs become direct rewards when given out for things beyond encounters. For instance, a group could use a variant where noticeably good plays net the whole party additional XPs at the end of game sessions.
For example, at the end of a session, a DM could ask each player to nominate some of the evening’s “Moments of Awesome”, like a critical attack that came at just the right time or a player having made a really hard choice in line with his beliefs but against his best interests. The DM would then award XPs to the whole party worth the equivalent of a Minor Quest (or more) for each such “Moments”.
So there’s some potential there.
Quests
Quests are one such form of XP rewards given for completing specific, often story-related objectives in an adventure. They can be important, plot-defining quests (major) or side-quests that must be sought out during the adventure (minor).
As I’ve seen them used in the game so far, quests are among my least favourite rewards. While in essence they speed up play progression by cutting down by about 10-20% the number of encounters to overcome before levelling up, they don’t provide an actual alternative to the “beat up/out skill/figure out ” encounter paradigm of the game.
But they could be so much more…
For example, in a recent article, I suggested dungeon environments where competing NPC factions had differing agendas playing against PC goals and interests. Each faction’s agenda would get a corresponding “prevent X from happening” quest worth the sum total of XPs used in building the encounters related to the agenda (plus maybe a 20% or so story bonus).
As PCs beat encounters, they’d collect XPs, taken out from the Quest’s pool. However, should the party succeed in thwarting an agenda in whatever way, they would receive all remaining XPs from the associated quest in one shot.
Thus, killing monsters and overcoming skill challenges, still a core element of the gaming experience could also be supplemented by lateral or large scale thinking/planning.
At the very least, I think Quests could easily be worth up to five times more XPs without breaking anything. They have such untapped design space around them, it’s worth exploring.
Levels and Powers
I believe that this, along with treasures, is where the most significant rewards of D&D lies. In an old blog post I can’t find anymore, Monte Cook mentioned that one of the attraction of D&D over it’s contemporaries (mostly point buy systems and Dice pool games at the time) was that players looked forward to those distinct packages of powers and abilities represented by a new level.
Levelling up is a reward because the player gets a choice, and that makes it something to look forward to when making your PC more powerful. In editions previous to D&D 3.5, that choice was limited to “Do I take another level or do I multi-class”. D&D 3.5 introduced level swapping in its later splatbooks, allowing to exchange class features upon reaching a new level. 4e pushed it further, replacing all pre-set class abilities with pick-n-choose powers.
Since current powers, in both D&D 4e and its Essentials sub-brand, heavily favour combat. the available choice feeds into the XP loop which then feeds into catering for Power Gamers and Butt Kickers which leads to getting new powers and so on… Therefore someone aiming at encouraging/balancing gameplay toward other motivators like Storytelling, Exploration or Acting should think about creating new powers. à
However, given the aforementioned feedback loop, that should not be done in a vacuum. The designer/DM should consider handing out discrete chunks of XPs to reward whatever tasks the new powers were designed to accomplish.
Action Points
Action Points reward players who push past D&D 4e’s “5 minute work day” reflex. They are however granted only once every two encounters (as defined by a challenge that nets XPs) and no PC can spend more than once per fight. This is likely to avoid players hoarding them and unleashing them all on the last boss. They are great rewards for players that get their kicks out of well executed, efficient plans.
However, I believe that Action Points also have a largely untapped potential as rewards for players who favour things other than efficiently dealing with encounters. Provided you don’t change the “use only once a fight” mechanic, you could award more Action Points to reward other cool Player/PC actions in the game: Great in-character retorts, playing to a PC’s weakness, achieving non-quest character-established plot goals are just a few ideas.
Of course, If you start using Action Points like that, you need to provide new opportunities to spend those points. Think about interesting, bonuses, temporary boons, ways to change the outcome of a roll or even add new elements to the the setting. Seek things that would encourage character to do the exact things that scored them Action Points in the first place, that’s how positive feedback loops are maintained.
This barely scratches the surface of great design opportunities just there.
Treasures
The quintessential D&D reward represents half of the “Kill & Loot” ethos that some associate with the game. Treasure has always been roughly categorized as monetary,in various levels of portability or magic, from quasi-mundane potions to world shattering artifacts.
The role of monetary treasure has shifted over the years, starting as what determined the amount of XPs a character would win, progressing to paying for living expenses and training fees to level up. In 4e, it ended up being split between magical gear and money you could use to manufacture and purchase Magical Items you wanted but didn’t find during adventuring.
Creating new magic treasures is a relatively easy undertaking, there’s so many published examples to use as guides and models but I’m not a huge fan of them.
The Dungeon Master Guide 2 offers interesting alternative treasures called boons, things like divine favours, grandmaster training and legendary secrets. They all grant new powers except presented in the context of potentially strong story elements like cults, Grand religions, hermit NPCs and long lost secrets.
Given the very limited number of examples shown in the book and lack of new ones elsewhere, boons are also a very rich area one should explore to expand gameplay. By strongly tying those boons to elements of the setting and the story, you will directly address what storytelling and exploration-seeking players are looking for.
To that extent, artifacts are very similar types of treasure, transcending their roles as mere magic items to become as much a part of the stories they shape, an extension of the wills of the PC holding them and interactive plot elements with its own agendas. They too make excellent rewards for a would be designer/homebrewing DM (and would warrent their own post).
Select your brush and start painting
I’m halfway through my planned list, having only covered what I defined as D&D’s classic, tangible gameplay rewards. I’ve already identified many areas where design space is wide open for DIY Dungeon Masters and Writers. Time to crack knuckles and get to it!
In the next post. I plan to cover the tangible rewards, those not directly supported by 4e’s rules.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. I turn 38 tomorrow (Jan 12th), yay!
Chatty’s New Lair, V2.0
I’ve just spent a lot of the last few days shopping for new office furniture and building it with the help of my buddy PM. Since I’m now fully self-employed and work 95% of my time at home, I decided to blow a bundle of (tax deductible) cash and refurbish my old office so I’d have the perfect lair to hatch my evil 2011 plans.
I’ve spent many hours cleaning, building, sorting, throwing trash out, fighting wires, tie-wrapping and what not. Now I’m exhausted but too damn excited to go to bed yet… so I decided to share some pics of what my new abode looks like (click images to embiggify).
It started with a simple, glass desk that takes 1/2 the space of my old “L-shaped” press-wood monstrosity.
My new desk... with a tamed snarl of wires.
Then since I’m stuck with the house’s electrical box on the wall to my left, I improvised to recuperate the dead space.
Complete with Jared Von Hindman originals!
Then I built one of those friends-in-a-box from Ikea, name of Billy and filled him in on my latest projects and blog subjects…
That Gnome sure isn't as happy as in the initial 4e commercials huh?
Then, I really needed to find a place to store all those dice, minis and dungeon tiles. Ikea once again rescued me!
A cascade of geekiness in cheap red metal called Helmer
Of course, an at-home office would not be complete without a Kids’ art corner. Witness the talent of 7 y.o. Rory, the house’s graphic artist.
That's our family up right, with age labels...
Finally, I (well, my wife Alex) added a white shelf over the monitors and I nerdified the whole place with some of my favourites toys…
...including an autographed pic of a certain net famous actress
Now I’m ready to take on a CRAPTON of new challenges.
Bring ‘em!
Happy belated New Year.
