What does it taste like?

Another redditor and I whipped up this quick table for determining what something tastes like a couple of days back. After having done a Tavern Name Table and a Food & Drink Table all I need to do is come up with a way to generate innkeepers and tavern patrons and I'll never have an empty tavern again.

What's it taste like?

	Taste (d6)	Intensity (d10)	Sensations (d20)
1	Bitter	Just a hint	Itching
2	Sweet		Spicy
3	Sour		Slimy
4	Salty	Subtle	Metallic
5	Umami		Earthy
6			Smokey
7		Strong	Gamey
8			Dry
9			Fatty/Gristley
10		Overwhelming	Chewy/Tough
11			Crunchy
12			Tingly/Minty
13			Hearty
14			Fermented
15			Rancid
16			Stringy
17			Greasey
18			Yeasty
19			Mushy
20			Gritty & Saccharine

 

Categories: flavour, Food and Drink, reddit, tables

Ninjas & Nerf Swords

I was browsing through /r/rpg and I came across this thread asking for a simple resolution system that uses Nerf weapons instead of dice or some other randomizer. The twist? The mechanic can't be to actually fight with the weapons.

The person asking the question also presented what they wanted in the way of character stats:

I'm thinking of three stats - Magic, Cunning, and Brawn. I'm not sure what the three stats actually do at this point, but I'm thinking characters get to assign a 3, a 2, and a 1 to the three stats, prioritizing however they want to. Then, for each point in their stat, they can throw in something like an aspect of fate. So it looks like this:

Sarkar Dark-Eater Elven Warlock Magic: 3 Summoning, Brain-Eating, Creepy Dark Eyes Cunning: 2 Lying, Insulting Brawn: 1 Gut-Tearing

Being the person that I am, I couldn't resist taking a stab at this challenge. I whipped up this simple game in about 20 minutes.

Ninjas & Nerf Swords

Character Creation

Characters are defined by 3 stats: Magic, Cunning, and Brawn. They have 6 character points to distribute among the 3 stats. For each point they have in a stat they can apply one Aspect related to it. They can tag these Aspects for bonuses during play.

Ex: If a character has 3 Brawn then their Aspects might be Bulging Muscles, Built like a Brick House and Ox-like.

Aspects as Powers

Players may choose to define one or more of their Aspects as powers. If they do so the Aspects may not be tagged as described later in these rules. Instead the player defines the nature of the power. This could be something like raising the dead or being a "totally bad-ass backhanded axe-cleave that beheads any monster". A player may activate each of their powers only once per scene (as defined by the GM).

Resolution

Whenever there is need for resolution the GM decides on the difficulty. Based on the difficulty the GM selects an object to pitch at one of the players. The harder the difficulty the smaller the item and the crappier the pitch can be. The challenging player must hit the thrown object with their Nerf weapon. If a caster is using a Nerf gun place the target farther away from them. Players get a number of attempts to hit the target equal to the relevant stat. An assortment of different sized whiffle balls and stuffed animals would likely be best for this. You may also wish to play outside or in a large space free of things that could be broken.

Tagging Aspects

During any challenge that a player is involved in they may declare one of their Aspects relevant. This is called tagging. When they do so they can alter one thing about the difficulty of the challenge. For example, they may make the target bigger or demand that the GM pitch underhand. Alternatively, they can be granted 1 additional pitch/shot. Once an Aspect has been tagged it may not be tagged again until a new scene (as defined by the GM) has begun.

Character Health

Characters do not have health points. Instead, anytime they would take damage reduce one of their stats by 1. The reduced stat should reflect the kind of damage they took (Magical, Psychic/Emotional/Social, Physical). The player may avoid this damage by pounding back a beer (or some performing an embarrassing task if they are under age). If a stat would be reduced to 0 the character falls unconscious and may be revived by tagging a healing Aspect or a friendly NPC in a subsequent scene. If it falls below 0 the player should be ridiculed and forced to create a new character with a smaller, less fearsome weapon.

GM Challenge Rule

If the majority players believe that one of the GM's rulings is "bogus" they may select a champion to challenge the GM to a duel. The first to score 3 clean hits with a nerf weapon is declared the winner and a new rule is codified into the game. A player may not use a challenge to overturn an existing rule created in this manner.

The Anti-Power Rule

The GM may reduce the effectiveness of a power at any time for a single usage if it would cause narrative problems (such as gut-tearing the BBEG). When the GM does so they must give the affected player a +1 temporary stat bonus. This does not grant an additional Aspect. It is removed at the end of the scene. Players may challenge these rulings on an individual basis by challenging the GM (as above).

Sarkar Dark-Eater, Elven Warlock

Magic: 3
Cunning: 2
Brawn: 1

Tag Aspects: Creepy Dark Eyes, Lying, Insulting
Power Aspects:

1. Summoning - Summons a 1/1/1 demonic familiar to aid him for the remainder of the scene.
2. Brain-Eating - May consume the brain of a foe to restore 1 point in any stat. May learn one memory from the eaten brain.
3. Gut-Tearing - May designate a single previous attack by either himself or his familiar as "Gut-Tearing". This retroactively kills the target.

Categories: Game Design, Nerf, Ninjas and Nerf Swords, reddit, RPG

Alvaro C. Vargas, Space Grifter

When I’m not busy slacking off from writing blog posts I tend to spend my time as a moderator for a role playing community known as r/RPG. I spent the last couple of weeks making daily updates to something I called the “Play by Poll Experiment” on this community.

The experiment I had for r/RPG was to do something similar to a Quest Thread. A Quest is essentially a text adventure done over a messageboard or forum with one person leading the narrative and the rest arguing and/or voting for the main character to make actions. In my incarnation I created a survey form using Google Docs that contained an update to the story and a number of actions that the character could take. I would then post an update in around 24 hours with a new set of questions and a continuation of the plot based on the votes. I did this for a total of 14 updates with moderate popularity. The full story, sans unsuccessful options, can be read here.

What comes next is a bit of a post-mortem on the play by poll experiment, so you may want to read through the above link before continuing.

On Setting Selection

At the very beginning of the Play by Poll Experiment (hereafter referred to as PbPE) I put up a poll where people could vote on a setting tagline and a few character options. The taglines were a little tongue in cheek with options such as “in space, where nobody can hear you scream” or “in a land of rainbows and unicorns and man-eating giants” and I got a pretty good mix of votes among them. Space came out as the winner, but I couldn’t help but notice that there was a major drop off on interest once people realized their setting choice didn’t win. think the problem here was that I offered too many options and ended up splitting the vote. This ended up with a setting winning a majority when a minority of voters overall selected it. It would be too much work to setup a transferrable vote option to alleviate this, so I think the best option would be to provide fewer choices.

If I were to do this again I wouldn’t allow for more than 3 setting choices or I would go in the other direction with voters selecting multiple elements which get combined into something of my choice.

On Character Creation

The biggest problem with character creation was that I put it on the same poll as the setting selection. This meant that people had to select from options that wouldn’t necessarily fit with the setting they chose. There are two ways I can avoid this happening on a future poll. A) I could have the character creation on a second page with options determined by the setting selection or B) I could do a separate poll after the first had concluded for the character creation. I think B is the better option as it means I don’t have to create a bunch of options that will never be relevant.

I also think that the character creation I offered was too limited in scope. It consisted of selecting a race, sex, and tagline for the character. Unlike with the setting selection, I think voters were happy with the results of this section, but I think it could have been more engaging. The limited scope was partially due to trying to make the options somewhat generic and I think that was a mistake. I also found that as we progressed through the adventure there was call for a random factor. I’ll discuss this more in the next section but it boils down to me needing more things defined about the character in advance.

On Chance and Mechanics

Most of the games of this nature that I have seen before (Quests, for example) didn’t have any element of chance to them. They were mostly just pieces of guided fiction. I really wanted to capture the feeling of a group of people playing an old adventure book together, like Lone Wolf or Fighting Fantasy. This meant that there needed to an element of chance. Voters needed to be able to select from different options and hope that their character would be successful. I could have decided for myself, but I feel that takes something away from the experience.

I tried 3 different randomizers during the course of the game. The first was a simple coin flip. I asked the voters to vote on the result being heads or tails and if they were right they would get a positive reaction from their action. I didn’t really like this so for the next one I tasked voters for choosing a number from 1-3 and the % breakdown of the votes would be the chance of success. This actually worked rather well, although it resulted in rather poor odds. The third try was much the same as the last, but instead of using numbers I asked voters to pick who they thought would win in a fight and provided three options. I think this was more fun, but suffered from the same issues.

If I were to run another game like this I would have the voters select skills or attributes for their protagonist which I would then grant a percentage value. I would then use that percentage on all relevant challenges that came up for the odds of success. This means I don’t have to add a question that breaks immersion of the story and it becomes something related to the character instead of some outside force.

On the Update Schedule

I updated the adventure every 24 hours, give or take a few hours on certain days. I actually didn’t mind the pace, although I felt like I was letting people down when I was busy when the 24 hour mark came along (mostly on weekends). The problem with this pace is that it ended up losing people. Not everyone visits r/RPG on a daily basis, which is easy to forget when you are as involved with the community as I am. This meant I had a steady loss of voters as the adventure progressed because people would lose interest if they missed an update. I think a slower schedule might improve this.

I do worry that reducing the update frequency might cause the story to move too slowly. I think that updating every other day is probably the slowest you could go with something like this, at least at r/RPG which tends to be faster moving than an ordinary forum. The other thing I noticed is that votes tend to drop off at around 18 hours after the update. This is very much related to the nature of the community as the topic will drop from view rather quickly, meaning people won’t see it. It will be interesting to see how having if having it around an extra day will actually affect the number of votes it gets.

On the Narrative

I had a lot of fun writing a few paragraphs for this every day. I wouldn’t exactly call it writing I am proud of, but it wasn’t so poor that I would be ashamed of it either. I think it was very representative of role playing in that without the context of the back and forth between myself (the GM) and the voters (the player) it wouldn’t be particularly entertaining. The fun really comes from trying to adapt the story to what the voters/players have selected and the fun for the voters comes from seeing how their choices affect the narrative. It doesn’t need the writing to be of high quality, it just needs to be good enough to get the idea across.

Categories: Alvaro C. Vargas, Play by Poll, reddit, retrospective, Storytelling, Vote For Adventure

By Firelight: a campfire storytelling game.

UPDATE: You can read By Firelight: The Campfire Storytelling Game here. This post is about the original conception of the game.

Around two weeks ago I came across someone asking for suggestions for an RPG that they could play around a campfire. A lot of people were recommending games with few rules or dice needed to play, but to me that doesn't seem to capture that special something that telling tales around a campfire has. At the very least it doesn't take advantage of that magic.

This got me thinking. I already knew of one RPG designed for being played while hiking through the wilderness. It’s called Sherpa and it takes advantage of the changing surroundings as you make your way through a trail. I thought why not come up with something that takes advantage of a campfire in that same way? I typed up a reply that featured some quick brainstorming as well as a couple of suggestions. You can read it here if you are curious.

I really liked the quick little set of rules that had formed out of that comment and I’d be lying if I said the positive feedback didn’t encourage me to expand those initial ideas. That is exactly what I did. I took that initial set of ideas and I compiled them into a proper set of rules, changing things as needed.

The most important aspect of the game is that it incorporates the campfire right into the mechanics. It really would have been a shame to not use the fire since it was going to be there in front of the players anyway. I decided to use it in a kind of ritualized manner. Players are given pieces of paper with character traits on them and they are also given a paper cutout that represents their character. Traits are consumable and burned once used. Any harm that comes to their character results in pieces being torn from their cutout and being tossed into the flames. It’s simple, but I think really helps provide an atmosphere for the game.

Another thing I needed to consider and overcome for this game was that playing a game at night are not ideal for most traditional ways of playing RPGs. There probably won’t be a lot of flat and dry surfaces, light will be low, and outdoors there could be rain or wind causing all kinds of problems for things like character sheets. As someone that grew up in the Pacific Northwest I am intimately familiar with these conditions, so I wanted to make things easy on the players.

The first step was to remove character sheets. The character cut out doesn't have anything written on it. There is nothing to read so light is no problem. It is still paper and will be susceptible to wind and rain, but it won't be used unless it needs burning so it can easily be shoved in a pocket or held down by a stone. The same thing goes for the Traits, although they would all have a single thing written down on them.

Randomizers were the second problem. Dice were going to be a pain to use because the numbers could be difficult to read in the dark and without a large flat surface they would bounce all over the place. Cards had a similar issue, only they would also be susceptible to the elements. I thought about how this game would likely be played in the dark by the light of the fire and how burning things as a game mechanic was very ritualistic. I got thinking about playing on ritual and I recalled all of the films I have seen and stories I had read where people voted with black and white stones or had to draw stones to determine their fate. This was something I thought I could use in my game. It reinforced a certain mood and was something that wouldn't have problems with light, wind, or rain. To top it all off, there are plenty of stones available outside at a campground or park. It would be a simple matter to gather up some dark and light stones for a game if nobody thought ahead to bring something to use. I decided to go with drawing stones as a mechanic and used a simple system where black equaled a negative result and white a positive one. Easy to teach and understand, which was perfect for the kind of impromptu setting this game would be for.

I now had all of these ritualistic and borderline spooky game mechanics. I decided to go for broke and make it a horror game. I suppose it could be played in any genre, but ghost stories have a long tradition of being told around a campfire so it really all fit together rather nicely. I wrote the rules with that in mind and added advice for playing the game that kept the art of the campfire ghost story in mind. The only thing left that I really needed was a title that fit the game I had created. I decided to go with By Firelight. I think that the reason I went with that title is pretty self explanatory.

I wanted to capture that feeling of telling creepy stories and turn it into a game and I think I’ve managed to do that. I have posted the draft of By Firelight on Google Docs where anyone can read it. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Categories: By Firelight, Game Design, reddit, RPG